Dairy productivity priority for Thompson

Farmer groups should set productivity as the industry priority and push to be more involved in Dairy Australia's planning, while also striving for a new level of transparency and integrity in advocacy.
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, September 20)  A lawmaker said Filipinos need to be made more aware of how to prepare and respond to calamities.

Speaking to CNN Philippines On the Record Thursday, Senator Richard Gordon said in the case of Typhoon Ompong, he had foreseen that people who live in the Cordilleras would be the hardest hit.

"In the mountains, landslides ang kalaban. Ang sabi ko nga...ang kalaban natin [I said we would be up against] wind and water and ground collapsing. And that's what happened," added Gordon, who is also chairman of the Philippine National Red Cross.

Ompong hit Luzon over the weekend, and Benguet was among the provinces hardest hit by the storm.

In the mining town of Itogon, landslides buried miners who sought refuge in bunkhouses.

The incident spurred President Rodrigo Duterte to once again voice his opposition to mining, and the Environment Department to stop small-scale mining in Cordillera.

Gordon added, poverty was also a contributing factor to high casualty rates during calamities.

"Poverty is an absence of choice... Bumubulwak ang populasyon natin. Habang bumubulwak, dun na lang sa pinakamalapit sa kabuhayan ang pupuntahan nila. Kung wala, talagang titira sila halimbawa dito sa Manila, diyan sa may Baseco area. Pag tinamaan yan...marami na kaming sinabi diyan pag tinamaan yan ng storm surge, e maraming mamamatay diyan," he said.

[Translation: Poverty is an absence of choice... Our population is boobing. With this boom, people will choose to live near where they can earn a living. If there isn't one, they will live, like here in Manila, in the Baseco area. If that area gets hit by a storm surge, a lot of people will die there.]

He was referring to the sprawling shantytown at the compound of the Bataan Shipping and Engineering Company (Baseco) near the Port Area in Manila.

To avoid disasters, Gordon said, authorities not only have identify which places are safe for people to stay in, but also create opportunities for them.

Oxfam Philippines Country Director Lot Felizco also said poor people are most affected during calamities, and that evacuations are complex decisions.

"If we put ourselves in the shoes of families who are also not certain where they will be evacuated to, how they will be housed, what provisions there will be, how long they will be away  it's a decision they weigh against just staying there looking after whatever little property they have, and saying 'dito na lang kami kasi andito yung ari-arian namin, yung bahay namin, hindi naman namin alam kung saan kami dadalhin," she said. [we will stay here because our property and our house is here, we don't know where we will be brought].'"

A lot of effort also has to be put into gaining people's trust, Felizco said.

Gordon, however, said people should also learn what dangers can happen in the communities they live in and what measures should be taken when calamities happen.

Michael Vincent Mercado, communications coordinator of the Center for Disaster Preparedness, said they constantly consult with communities about such issues.

"Sa mga community partners namin, yun talaga yung main na tinuturo namin, kung paano maguusap-usap yung mga tao sa community at magdecide ano yung signal kung ganito nang klase ng bagyo ang paparating sa atin," he said.

[Translation: We teach our community partners how to coordinate and decide what to do and what signals to give when they these kinds of storms are coming.]

Gordon said Filipinos should predict, plan, prepare, practice for times of disaster

"You have to stop this cycle of disaster and poverty. Put the science with the people who are supposed to be handling local government, put the science dun sa NDRRMC (National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Council), and make sure you organize the people," he said.

Felizco added preparedness doesn't just happen before a calamity happens.

"It's really making sure na people have the means to be able to survive a disaster and recover," she said.

Help must be given to farmers

Gordon said aid must be extended to farmers affected by the storm.

It could be hard to plant, he said, if farmers' primary concern after a calamity was shelter and the safety of their families. This, he said, is something that should be addressed immediately.

"Right now, padating na yung roofs. We brought in about 7,000 roofs  we wanted 30,000 bubong right away. Pero kung meron kang nakatindig na apat na poste, ilagay mo na muna yan. Saka na na natin ayusin ng husto para may titirhan," he said

[Translation: Roofs are arriving right now. We brought in about 7,000  we wanted 30,000 roofs right away but if you have four posts ready, just put it up and we can fix it even further later on.]

Godon said 95 percent of corn in Cagayan were damaged by the typhoon.

Felizco said three hundred thousand farming families were affected by Typhoon Ompong and there is an urgent need to assist them.

"They lost their harvest now means they do not have the means to sustain their families and they do not have the means for the next cropping season," she said.

"Unless someone is able to provide services, manguutang yan [they will borrow money]. So, it's a cycle of falling into a trap of deepening poverty," Felizco said.

Farmers have immediate as well as long-term needs that must be addressed, she added.

Watch the full episode here.
The judicial retirement age will be lifted in NSW from 72 to 75 and pension rules tightened under a plan expected to deliver budget savings and keep existing talent on the bench.

Attorney-General Mark Speakman said on Thursday a bill would be introduced within weeks in State Parliament to lift the retirement age for judges and magistrates by three years.

The judicial retirement age will be raised in NSW from 72 to 75. Credit:Michelle Mossop

The new maximum retirement age will apply to existing judicial officers but changes to the pension  which is given to judges but not magistrates  will only apply to new judges.

Mr Speakman said the changes reflected "social trends towards people living and working longer" and would "expand the talent pool for appointments by making the judiciary a more attractive career option for lawyers with appropriate experience and dedication to serving the community".
Melbourne has become one of the fastest-growing cities in the developed world, racing away from the rest of Australia and doubling the rate of growth of most cities in advanced economies.

At 2.7 per cent last year, the city is growing at a rate usually associated with rapidly-expanding cities in China and South America - putting pressure on infrastructure and creating a political minefield for the Victorian and federal governments.

The city's surge past 5 million people has fuelled productivity-sapping transport and road bottlenecks in the CBD, frustrating commuters and hopeful homeowners struggling to get into the market.

Melbourne is one of the fastest growing cities in the developed world, according to population experts. Credit:Josh Robenstone

New figures released by the Australian Bureau of Statistics on Thursday show Melbourne grew by more than 2.5 per cent annually between 2011 and 2017 compared to 1.8 per cent for Sydney.
Police inspect a black car in the car park of Monash University's Caulfield campus.

Police have descended on a Melbourne university campus after a stolen vehicle was dumped in the car park following a high-speed chase through the south-eastern suburbs.

There was a heavy police presence at Monash University on Thursday morning, as police swarmed through the Caulfield campus.

Police at Monash University's Caulfield campus

A Monash student told The Age that police said a girl had stolen a car, dumped it in the university car park and was hiding somewhere on the campus. They were sweeping the area.
Police are investigating a spate of 'copy-cat' fruit tampering cases across the state after at least two Victorian primary school children discovered needles in their fruit.

Victoria Police confirmed in a statement on Thursday that it was probing multiple cases of fruit sabotage in the wake of the strawberry contamination crisis.

It comes after two Victorian primary school children discovered needles in their fruit on Thursday.

In one incident, a primary-school aged child at Oakleigh Grammar peeled a banana and found a needle inside.
Leaving the station they headed to a well-known dumping ground for stolen vehicles, looking for what Vallas describes as dodgy cars and dodgy characters. It didnt take long. As they drove past a green Mazda 6, Vallas saw the passenger eyeball us. They agreed he looked shifty and did a U-turn to pull in behind. As the police approached, the sedan moved off - another sign the occupants wanted to avoid the patrol. A quick check on the radio showed the female owner was no cleanskin. The sedan came to a roundabout and did a 180-degree turn, which only increased suspicion. They were going around in circles doing anti-surveillance, says Hall. When they pulled them over in Grace Avenue it was 3.30pm - school pick-up time. The driver jumped from the car and approached. She was overly nice, Vallas remembers. After all, no one is keen to be pulled over by police, who are never going announce you have just won the lottery.

Both police thought she was trying to keep them away from the car because she had something - or someone - to hide. Hall asked why she hadnt waited in the car. She said she wanted a smoke but didnt want to light up in the car. I looked and saw the male passenger was sitting in the vehicle smoking. It was another little sign they were up to no good. Vallas went to the passenger, Adrian Turra, 26, and asked if had been in trouble with the police. Adrian Turra pulled a homemade gun on two police officers. Nah mate, was the response. A quick check from the police car showed Turra was lying - he had an extensive criminal record. Knowing this was not likely to end well, the passenger decided to, in the police vernacular, flee on foot.

As the Valour Award citation says: Without warning, the male passenger jumped from the vehicle and produced a handgun, which he pointed at both officers, before running away in a westerly direction along Grace Avenue. Here the pair's recollections vary slightly. Vallas remembers Turra turning around - he had jumped from the car and was pointing a handgun at Mark. He then ran off waving the gun behind him like Harry Potters wand. Hall says he didnt immediately realise the man was armed. It was when he took off that I saw the gun. It wasnt pointed directly at me but it registered what it was. He says the fight-or-flight instinct immediately kicked in: I just think training and instinct took over. And so the chase was on. This was more than instinct, because instinct is all about survival. They could have let him go because by now they knew his identity. They could have left the arrest to the heavily-armed Special Operations Group, but that would have meant leaving a gunman roaming suburban streets. And so they gave chase even though they knew it placed their lives in danger.

Assistant Commissioner Bob Hill said: The members showed great courage by placing themselves in harms way to confront an armed offender who was an extreme risk to the community. Mark took the lead while Andrew, who says he is built for comfort, came from a fair way back as he was still sitting in the police car. They were further hindered when Turra charged through traffic in busy Stud Road. I still cant believe he wasnt bowled over, says Vallas. (What he didnt know was the Karma Bus was warming up down the road, but more of that later.) Assistant Commissioner Robert Hill declares patrol police Vallas and Hall are true heroes. Credit:Paul Jeffers This gave Turra a break on his pursuers. Both were calling for him to stop and drop his weapon. I was screaming into the radio for backup, I wanted everyone from the Air Wing to the Water Police, says Vallas.

The gunman jumped a fence and tried to open doors, eventually disappearing into a garage, while Vallas ran around to try and cut off his escape. Turra then emerged from the garage, ran out of a driveway and back along Stud Road. It was then the desperate offender decided he had a better option than trying to outrun two police - a carjacking at gunpoint. We were still yelling at him to drop the gun as he ran to a brown BMW that was slowed by traffic. It was like it was in slow motion. We were yelling Keep driving. Then he started to try and pull the driver out of the car, but he couldnt, Vallas recalls. According to Hall: When he threatened driver with the firearm we were so close he didnt have time. He would have known we would have reached him by the time he was in the drivers seat. Turra was running out of options, and breath. He was pretty gassed out, says Hall. The choices were surrender or fight. He chose the wrong one. He stopped running, started walking, stumbled on the gutter and turned around with his gun pointed to the ground.

Although he was facing two police yelling at him to surrender and with their guns drawn, he raised his firearm with both hands to point at his pursuers. But this was not the OK Corral in Tombstone, Arizona, but a busy suburban street in Dandenong. (Although both occurred on Wednesday, October 26, shortly after 3pm - just 135 years apart.) There was no time to talk, take cover or work out another plan. Both police aimed at the body and were about to fire when they saw a postie on a motorbike emerge from a driveway behind the gunman, right in the shooting zone. If they missed their target they could have hit the innocent bystander. Both police moved to change their angles, with Hall dropping to his knees as they yelled at the gunman to drop his weapon. I had to change my line and I ducked to lower my profile, says Hall. Both police fired, hitting Turra in the body. The chase lasted 105 seconds and covered 495.5 metres.

We gave him very chance, says Vallas. In fact the police asked him: Why didnt you listen? But as he had just been shot twice, he wasnt interested in joining the discussion. Vallas said the incident exploded out of nothing. Ive been shot at overseas, but you can anticipate that. This was in Melbourne at school pickup time. It is a graphic example of modern policing, where a recent flood of illegal firearms has resulted in more street criminals carrying guns. For Vallas and Hall there was the immediate trauma of the shooting and the residual sense of unease when passing the area of the incident. Now when they pull up a suspect, they know what can happen if it all goes wrong. The wounded crook was taken to hospital and has since recovered. He pleaded guilty to attempted armed robbery, assaulting police and carrying a prohibited weapon and was sentenced to six years with a minimum of three years, nine months.
Victorian private schools are the big winners of the Morrison government's new school funding deal, and are set to receive an extra $1.49 billion over the next decade, more than any other state.

The federal government announced on Thursday that it would pump an additional $4.6 billion into Australian non-government schools between now and 2029, in an attempt to end the funding wars and make peace with the disgruntled Catholic sector ahead of the federal election.

Under the plan, each Victorian independent and Catholic school student will receive about 23 per cent more additional funding, on average, than their NSW counterparts.

The lucrative outcome follows intense lobbying by Victorias Catholic education sector, the most vocal critics of the original Gonski 2.0 school funding plan.
A woman has been charged after she allegedly stole 18 suitcases from baggage carousels at Melbourne Airport over almost a year.

The woman was arrested over the theft of 18 items of luggage from carousels at Melbourne airport. Credit:Patrick Cummins

A 51-year-old woman was arrested on Thursday morning after detectives and federal police raided her home in Kings Park.

Police allege the woman stole 18 suitcases from domestic carousels at Melbourne Airport between October 6 last year and September 5.
By all accounts, Stokes did not agitate for any leadership change and counselled against making Dutton the prime minister. But Stokes was a realist. In one phone conversation with Turnbull, he told the-then prime minister that everyone was against him  including Murdoch. Not least, he pointed out that 35 Liberals had just voted for a change of leader. Several people aware of these conversations say Stokes relayed a comment from Murdoch: Malcolm has got to go. Those five words are the subject of dispute because the exact quote can only be known to Stokes and Murdoch. Even so, the overall message was not in doubt. Of course Murdoch believed Turnbulls time was up. Who on earth would be shocked by this? This was a time of relentless attack on Turnbull from parts of News Corp  not least from the commentators on Sky News when the channels sharp daytime journalism gave way to endless night-time bluster. Malcolm Turnbull waves goodbye at the end of his final press conference as prime minister, with granddaughter Alice and grandson Jack. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen This was just one factor in the events surrounding the leadership spill. The media was absolutely part of the story. The view expressed by Murdoch, conveyed to Turnbull, was news worth reporting this week by Joe Aston of The Australian Financial Review and Andrew Probyn of the ABC.

The furious reaction from News Corp to these reports is only worth a smile. The company that claimed to have decided a British election in 1992  Its The Sun Wot Won It  now takes offence at the idea it wielded its influence in Australia in 2018. The attempt at a rebuttal in The Australian on Thursday was laughable. Stokes rejects ABC: I didnt plot to oust PM, said the headline. Probyn never claimed such a plot. He reported the opposite: that Stokes had a high regard for Turnbull. Loading There are three key points to make about the argument over the medias role in the spill, starting with the fact that News Corp is not the clone army its critics make out. It has plenty of shrewd, fair journalists. Whatever Murdoch thought and said, the companys best commentators wrote as they saw fit. (I write this as a former political correspondent at The Australian.) A second point is that News Corp was not alone in reporting the failures of the government and the threat to its leader. Fairfax Media and others reported this as well  including a report that Dutton was set to strike on the Monday of the final week.

The third point is that Turnbull was fair game for critical media coverage. He not only suffered from the schemes of his rivals but from his own political blunders as well. Even so, Turnbull had to contend with media commentators who sought to wield political influence  to become participants in the challenge. Is it such an outrage to look at the role they played? Like the plotters for Dutton who do not like being called plotters, or the bullies who want to avoid being named as bullies, the media players hate being written about as players. Loading They can look a bit like snowflakes at times. The agitation for change by Peta Credlin, Andrew Bolt and Paul Murray at News is part of the story of the spill. So is the hectoring from Alan Jones and Ray Hadley at 2GB, controlled by Fairfax. So is the influence of Murdoch.

None of this means the media dictated the outcome, only that it played a part. The splintering of the Liberal Party base has been apparent for years. The crisis within the party was fundamental to the failure of Abbott during 2015, just as it was a factor in the failure of Turnbull three years later. Media commentators reflected and magnified the Liberal divisions all at once. The conservative voices in the media got the spill they wanted, if not the prime minister they preferred. What is astounding is the way these voices outside Parliament wielded such influence. Liberal MPs became convinced these experts spoke for 'the base' and could not be ignored. Unsure about where to stand, some MPs outsourced their decisions to the media experts. The next election will show whether the experts in a TV studio in North Ryde or a radio studio in Pyrmont really know where the base can be found. The part played by Murdoch in this leadership spill will be disputed for years. But it is no conspiracy to report on the way Turnbull dealt with the nations most powerful media mogul at the very moment his government came crashing down.
Europes leaders have delivered a humiliating blow to the UKs plan for a frictionless, business-friendly Brexit, declaring that Prime Minister Theresa Mays so-called Chequers blueprint will not work.

The news lands Brexit  and Mays leadership and government - in fresh peril, though May was defiant on Thursday that her deal was still the only one on the table, and the EUs hard line was just a negotiating tactic.

French president Emmanuel Macron laid the blame squarely at the foot of Britains leading Brexiters, whom he called liars who had predicted easy solutions [then] left the day after so as not to have to deal with it.

It was an apparent reference to former foreign secretary Boris Johnson and former Brexit secretary David Davis, who both quit over Brexit negotiations.
London: For years, people in and around London suspected that a deranged sadist was behind hundreds of cat mutilations, the grisly evidence strewn around their streets and yards.

But after a three-year investigation, police revealed on Thursday that the likely culprits behind these inhuman acts were, in fact, inhuman: foxes.

Focused on Croydon, a community south of central London where the disturbing finds were most common, the investigation included post-mortem examinations of cat carcasses found in the area, and involved animal welfare groups and veterinarians.

A fox, pictured in a domestic back garden in south west London last year, are a common sight across London. Credit:AP

In the end, detectives concluded that the cats were not killed by humans, at least not intentionally, but were more likely hit by cars and trucks, and later scavenged by other wildlife. Foxes are a common sight in London, bold enough to trot down sidewalks and through parks, particularly after dark, and even when people are nearby; by one count, the city is home to 10,000 of them.
"The President should feel vulnerable because he is vulnerable - to those that fight him daily on implementing his agenda," Stephen Bannon, a former chief White House strategist, wrote in a text message. "The Woodward book is the typed up meeting notes from 'The Committee to Save America,'" he added, referring dismissively to a loose alliance of advisers who saw themselves as protecting the country from Trump. "The anonymous op-ed is the declaration of an administrative coup by the Republican establishment.'" In some respects, Trump has maintained a sanguine outlook. Former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort last week became the latest former member of the president's inner circle to agree to cooperate with federal prosecutors. But Trump has been uncharacteristically calm about the plea deal for Manafort, who he had praised only a month ago for refusing to "break" under pressure from special counsel Robert Mueller. Asked if he was worried about Manafort's cooperation agreement, Trump told reporters on Wednesday, "No, I'm not . . . I believe that he will tell the truth. And if he tells the truth, no problem."

Trump has been similarly restrained this week as Judge Brett Kavanaugh, his pick for the Supreme Court, fights to save his nomination amid an accusation of sexual assault, which Kavanaugh denies. Trump has publicly defended Kavanaugh, though he has refrained from attacking the judge's accuser, Christine Blasey Ford. White House officials, who began this week reeling from the assault allegation, said by midweek that they have concluded Kavanaugh would likely still win confirmation, especially given Ford's reluctance to testify at a public Senate Judiciary Committee hearing scheduled by Republicans for next Monday. 'He wants a consigliere, not an attorney-general' Nonetheless, Trump's screed against Sessions underscored the President's sense of anger and betrayal from his attorney general, who, despite executing much of the President's hard-line law-and-order agenda, has never been able to recover from what Trump views as an unforgivable sin: his recusal from the Russia investigation for a conflict of interest, which ultimately led to Mueller's appointment. Trump told Hill.TV that he appointed Sessions out of blind loyalty, a decision he now regrets. Sessions' aggressive and controversial immigration actions  including emphasising "zero tolerance" for those who come to the country illegally and defending the administration policy of separating families - have been cheered by Trump allies. But the President even criticised his attorney general on this front, in a striking expression of his deep dissatisfaction.

"I'm not happy at the border, I'm not happy with numerous things, not just this," Trump said, referring to the Russia probe. The President's attack on Sessions raised concern in the law enforcement community, and also prompted reactions ranging from exasperation to outright dismay among Trump's allies. "Trump doesn't just blur the lines, he flat out tries to eradicate those lines," said Joyce Vance, a former US attorney in Alabama during the Obama administration. "He wants a consigliere, not an attorney general. On the one hand, it's a pitiful thing to watch, but it's also deadly serious, because the attorney-general does not protect the president. The attorney-general protects the American people. And the fact that we have a president who doesn't understand that is alarming." A former White House official was similarly disturbed. "It is a complete disgrace the way that Trump is acting like a schoolyard bully against Sessions," the official said, requesting anonymity to share a critical opinion. In the interview, Trump belittled Sessions, who he has previously nicknamed "Mr Magoo" and, according to Woodward's book, dismissed as "mentally retarded."

"He went through the nominating process and he did very poorly," Trump said of Sessions' Senate confirmation hearing. "He was giving very confusing answers, answers that should have been easily answered. And that was a rough time for him, and he won by one vote, I believe. You know, he won by just one vote." Loading Trump went on to question Sessions' self-recusal from the Russia investigation. "He said, 'I recuse myself, I recuse myself,'" Trump told Hill.TV. "And now it turned out he didn't have to recuse himself. Actually, the FBI reported shortly thereafter any reason for him to recuse himself. And it's very sad what happened." It was not clear what Trump meant. Career Justice Department ethics officials had told Sessions he had to step aside from any campaign-related investigations because he had been a top campaign surrogate and met with the Russian ambassador.

FBI officials would not have been among those providing advice. Then FBI Director James Comey said at a congressional hearing that he was aware of non-public information that he believed would force the attorney general to step aside before Sessions did so, though he declined to specify what those facts were. After taking yet another public tongue-lashing from the President, Sessions gave a speech on Wednesday to law enforcement officials in Waukegan, Illinois, in which he effusively praised Trump. "Under his strong leadership, we are respecting police again and enforcing our laws," Sessions said, according to his prepared remarks, which a DOJ spokesman said he delivered. "Based on my experience meeting with officers like you across the country, I believe that morale has already improved under President Trump. I can feel the difference." Even as Sessions was dutifully showering compliments upon his boss, Trump was unwilling to throw him a lifeline. "I'm disappointed in the attorney general for many reasons," Trump told reporters before leaving for North Carolina. "You understand that."
Helping You Enjoy The Drive: AUTO LAB RADIO LIVE Saturday September 22, 2018 7-9 AM







Auto Lab Talk Radio on New York City's WNYM Radio AM 970 and Streamed Worldwide On TheAutoChannel.Com

This Weeks Show: Broadcast Date: September 22, 2018

Car Question or Concern? Automotive Career Opportunity, Call Toll Free 888-692-7234 To Speak With An Expert











Auto Lab is a 28 year old interactive automotive-focused New York City radio call-in show hosted by Professor Harold Wolchok. Featuring an in-studio panel of experienced hands-on automotive experts sharing accurate, honest, practical and street-smart car repair, automotive career opportunities and vehicle and repair buying advice.

Auto Lab is also about the automotive industry, its history, and its culture, presenting the ideas and advice of leading college faculty, authors, and automotive practitioners in a relaxed, conversational interactive format.

Listeners can find the past 20 years of archived Auto Lab shows as simulcast on The Auto Channel.

Auto Lab Page includes Audio-on-Demand Archives, Auto Programs at Community College Database, Guests Pictures

This Weeks Show: September 22, 2018

IN STUDIO PANEL: Real World Auto Experts, Educators, Technicians, Shop Owners, Insurance Experts, Lawyers Will Answer Your Automotive Questions: Repairs, Second Opinions, Regular Maintenance, How To's, Safety, Used and New Car Buying, Insurance, Ombudsmen Suggestions

Harold Bendell - Major Auto

Fred Bordoff - Bronx Community College's Automotive Technology Department-CUNY

Tim Cacace - Master Mechanix

David Goldsmith - Urban Classics

Jerry Pastore - D & J Diagnostics

Johanna Pastore - D & J Diagnostics

Michael Porcelli - Automobile Services

Nicholas Prague - MTA

Auto Lab Interviews: Featuring Auto Safety News, New Car Reviews, Technology and Latest Auto World Information That Will Effect You!

Robert Sinclair AAA Northeast

"DRIVERS RELY TOO HEAVILY ON NEW VEHICLE SAFETY TECHNOLOGIES

Russ Rader,Senior Vice President Insurance Institute for Highway Safety

REDESIGNED HYUNDAI SANTA FE IS A TOP SAFETY PICK

Michael Porcelli

THE SOCIETY OF AUTOMOTIVE ENGINEERS

John Russell Senior Correspondents

BUICK ENVISION

Jeremy P. Goddard, Director

THE SOCIETY FOR AUTOMOTIVE ENGINEERS DETROIT
His Royal Highness, The Earl of Wessex, At Jaguar Land Rover New Jersey Headquarters

His Royal Highness, The Earl of Wessex, joined employees at Jaguar Land Rover North America today at the official building dedication ceremony of its new state-of-the-art North American Headquarters in Mahwah, New Jersey.

(MAHWAH, NJ)  September 20, 2018  His Royal Highness, The Earl of Wessex, joined employees at Jaguar Land Rover North America today at the official building dedication ceremony of its new state-of-the-art North American Headquarters in Mahwah, New Jersey.

The Earl joined employees to unveil a special plaque and commemorate the official opening of the new headquarters. Prior to the dedication ceremony, HRH met with various employees who had served time in the United States Armed Forces, as well as employees who spearhead charity efforts within the community. The Earl also took a brief tour of the new 30,000 sq. ft. product research, training and development center.

We are honored to have His Royal Highness The Earl of Wessex join us for the official building dedication ceremony of our all new Jaguar Land Rover North American headquarters, said Joe Eberhardt, President & CEO, Jaguar Land Rover North America. Our new facility provides our employees a workplace that fosters teamwork, collaboration and efficiency, all which are essential to supporting the rapid growth of Jaguar Land Rover in North America.

Situated on a 12 acre campus, the new 144,000 sq. ft. facility represents an investment of over $30 million by Jaguar Land Rover. In addition to the new 30,000 sq. ft. product research, training and development center, the facility features a showroom with the latest Jaguar and Land Rover models, 47 electric vehicle chargers, 78 conference rooms and meeting spaces, 498 workstations and over 85 indoor and outdoor wireless access points to allow for a more collaborative workspace and open environment. In an effort to be more sustainable and source from local vendors, all catering in the building is provided by Dartcor Food Services, a local New Jersey farm-to-table food service vendor, all coffee is sourced from a New Jersey coffee roaster, and all paper products in the building are eco-friendly and recyclable.

Jaguar Land Rover North America has nearly 400 employees based in Mahwah, NJ and an additional 40 employees based in Mississauga, Canada. The company has a total of 232 retail facilities across North America.
Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi and Google Join Forces on Next-Generation Infotainment

- World's leading automotive Alliance signs a global multiyear agreement to partner with Google to equip Renault, Nissan and Mitsubishi vehicles with intelligent infotainment systems

- The Alliance will utilize Android, world's most popular operating system, to offer customers a new array of services including Google Maps, the Google Assistant and the Google Play Store

- These services will be combined with Alliance Intelligent Cloud based remote software upgrades and vehicle diagnostics

TOKYO, Sep, 19 2018 - Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi and Google today announced a technology partnership to embed the Android operating system in vehicles sold by the world's leading automotive alliance, providing intelligent infotainment and customer focused-applications across multiple models and brands, scheduled to start in 2021.

Under the technology partnership, vehicles sold by the Alliance members in many markets will utilize Android, the world's most popular operating system, and will provide turn-by-turn navigation with Google Maps, access to a rich ecosystem of automotive apps on the Google Play Store and have the ability to answer calls and texts, control media, find information, and manage vehicle functions with voice using the built in Google Assistant.

The Alliance, whose member companies last year sold 10.6 million vehicles in 200 markets, will integrate Google applications and services into infotainment and cloud-based systems to enhance the experience for customers of Renault, Nissan and Mitsubishi Motors brands. While a range of Alliance vehicles will share the Android platform, each brand will have flexibility to create a unique customer interface and specific features on top of the common Android platform.

The infotainment partnership forms part of Alliance moves to equip more vehicles with connectivity and cloud-based services as part of its Alliance 2022 mid-term plan. Today's announcement, coinciding with the first anniversary of the mid-term plan, symbolizes the Alliance focus on next-generation technology. Under the plan, Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi is targeting increased sales of more than 14 million units a year by the end of 2022.

The plan also involves the launch of 12 new zero-emission electric vehicles, new autonomous-driving technologies and the ongoing rollout of the Alliance Intelligent Cloud.

The Alliance Intelligent Cloud will provide next-generation infotainment systems with secure connectivity by offering a platform to integrate data management, infotainment systems and to facilitate over-the-air upgrades and remote diagnostics in Alliance member-company vehicles.

By combining the latest technologies from the Alliance and Google, the Alliance member companies' vehicles will have one of the most intelligent infotainment systems in the market.

Drivers and passengers will be able to leverage Google and Android's capabilities to access an ecosystem that includes thousands of existing applications and an ever-expanding array of new apps. This integration, combined with the broad knowledge and a vibrant community of developers, will enable easy in-vehicle access to popular applications. The system will also be compatible with devices running other operating systems, such as Apple iOS.

Hadi Zablit, Senior Vice President of Business Development at Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi, said, "Our partnership with Google will offer owners of our vehicles rich user experiences that are currently available only outside the vehicle or, to a limited extent, by connecting an Android device to supported vehicles. We are building powerful connected and seamless on-board / off-board experiences into our vehicles in addition to the features of Google applications and services that many users are accustomed to, including Google Maps, the Google Assistant and the Google Play Store."

Kal Mos, Global Vice President of Alliance Connected Vehicles at Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi, added, "With the integration of the Android platform into our infotainment systems, we are adding a new level of intelligence to our connected vehicles. In the future, the Google Assistant, which employs Google's leading AI technology, can become the main way customers interact with their vehicles, hands-free. With Google Maps and the Google Assistant embedded in Alliance infotainment systems, our customers will have some of the most advanced AI based applications at their fingertips. And with in-vehicle access to the Google Play Store, our customers will enjoy an open and secure ecosystem of Android apps engineered for vehicles."

Hiroshi Lockheimer, Senior Vice President of Platforms & Ecosystems at Google, said, "Google and Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi share a common vision of delivering an intelligent, safe and seamless in-car experience with apps and services that are familiar, upgradable and connected. We're thrilled to partner with Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi to bring the Google Assistant, Google Maps, and other popular apps via the Play Store and Android to drivers and passengers around the world."

About Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi

Groupe Renault, Nissan Motor and Mitsubishi Motors represent the world's largest automotive alliance. It is the longest-lasting and most productive cross-cultural partnership in the auto industry. Together, the partners sold more than 10.6 million vehicles in nearly 200 countries in 2017. The member companies are focused on collaboration and maximizing synergies to boost competitiveness. They have strategic collaborations with other automotive groups, including Germany's Daimler and China's Dongfeng. This strategic alliance is the industry leader in zero-emission vehicles and is developing the latest advanced technologies, with plans to offer autonomous drive, connectivity features and services on a wide range of affordable vehicles.

About Mitsubishi Motors Mitsubishi Motors Corporation is a global automobile company based in Tokyo, Japan, which has a competitive edge in SUVs and pickup trucks, electric and plug-in hybrid electric vehicles. Since the Mitsubishi group produced its first car more than a century ago, we have demonstrated an ambitious and often disruptive approach, developing new vehicle genres and pioneering cutting-edge technologies. Deeply rooted in Mitsubishi Motors' DNA, our brand strategy will appeal to ambitious drivers, willing to challenge conventional wisdom and ready to embrace change. Consistent with this mindset, Mitsubishi Motors introduced its new brand strategy in 2017, expressed in its "Drive your Ambition" tagline - a combination of personal drive and forward attitude, and a reflection of the constant dialogue between the brand and its customers. Today Mitsubishi Motors is committed to continuous investment in innovative new technologies, attractive design and product development, bringing exciting and authentic new vehicles to customers around the world.
Representative Anna Eshoo. Photo: Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call,Inc.

California Representative Anna Eshoo was the first lawmaker who met with Christine Blasey Ford about her sexual assault allegations against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. She met with Ford on July 20, months before Fords letter or identity would become known to the public.

In an interview with the Washington Post, Eshoo shared details of that first meeting, saying that her conversation with Ford was the first time the two had ever met. Eshoo described Ford as terrified, and that during the 90 minutes they talked Eshoo became convinced of her credibility.

It was more than obvious to me that she bore the scars of what she had been subjected to, Eshoo told the Post. She doesnt have a political bone in her body. And she obviously was really terrified about what could become of her and her family.

Eshoo also expressed her support for Ford, who declined to testify at a public hearing about the allegations until the FBI has completed an investigation into her claims. The request has so far been denied, and Ford was given a deadline of September 21 to decide if she will testify.

At the end of the meeting, I told her that I believed her, she added. In telling her story, you know, there were details to it, and I believed her.

Eshoo told the Post that her office respected Fords desire to remain anonymous, and worked hard to protect her identity. She said that both she and Ford decided to share the letter with Senator Dianne Feinstein. Eshoo also declined to criticize Senator Feinstein for the subsequent leak of information.

I dont know what took place in the intervening weeks, Eshoo said. But I can say that I think that once there was a leak, that my constituents fears were being confirmed. And it is an enormous act of courage understanding the risks that would come her way, she decided to tell her story and not have others mischaracterize it.

In the time since her identity has been revealed, Christine Blasey Ford has faced scrutiny from high-ranking lawmakers, personal attacks from conservatives, and was sent death threats that forced her to move out of her family out of home and hire private security.
Maryland shooting. Photo: Matt Button/TNS via Getty Images

On Thursday morning, a woman opened fire at a Rite Aid support facility in Harford County, Maryland, killing three people and injuring three others, before fatally shooting herself. While details around the tragedy are still emerging, heres everything we know about the Maryland shooting so far:

Who was the shooter?

On Thursday afternoon, Sheriff Jeffrey Gahler revealed the shooting suspect to be 26-year-old Snochia Moseley, a temporary employee at the Rite Aid facility. Per a law enforcement official who spoke to CNN, the shooter once worked as a security guard at the facility.

At a news conference earlier in the day, Gahler said that the gun found on the scene belonged to the suspect, and that she had purchased it legally.

Suspect in todays shooting has been identified as Snochia Moseley, age 26 from Baltimore County.  Harford Sheriff (@Harford_Sheriff) September 20, 2018

How many people were injured?

Per officials, the shooter opened fire around 9 a.m. ET, and within five minutes of receiving an alert, deputies were on the scene. At time of publication, three people have died and three others were injured; the suspect, too, died at a nearby hospital after shooting herself.

As of now, Gahler said that authorities are not revealing the identities of the victims, as their families are still being notified.

Do we know the suspects motives?

Officials have not yet identified a motive. As previously noted, though, a source close to the investigation said the suspect was disgruntled.

Have any politicians responded?

In a series of tweets throughout the day, Maryland Governor Larry Hogan proclaimed that hes closely monitoring the horrific shooting, and declared that the state stands ready to offer any support.

Our prayers are with all those impacted, including our first responders, he tweeted.

We are closely monitoring the horrific shooting in Aberdeen. Our prayers are with all those impacted, including our first responders. The State stands ready to offer any support. https://t.co/fzugpo8C1Z  Governor Larry Hogan (@GovLarryHogan) September 20, 2018

We are wholeheartedly grateful to the first responders who were at the scene in five minutes, and all medical and law enforcement personnel who are helping in the aftermath of this tragic shooting.  Governor Larry Hogan (@GovLarryHogan) September 20, 2018
Becky Beaton, 19822018. Photo: Becky Beaton

Theres too much blood to really see anything, the doctor said. Its probably BV. My sister Becky was lying on a clinic table with a speculum inside her. It was September of 2015.

Shortly before all this, shed called me: Somethings wrong. Im spotting a lot. I told her that was happening to me sometimes too. We were getting older; she was 33, I was 32. It didnt seem unusual to have changes in your cycle by now.

No, she said. Im spotting, like, a lot.

After every STI test came back negative, the doctor with the speculum prescribed antibiotics. For about a month Becky took these, waiting for the symptoms to clear. They did not. Instead, the bleeding and the pain increased  cramps and shooting pains, the blood heavy and clotted, its odor metallic and rotten, like an open wound. Finally, one more doctor looked and saw a large, visible lesion on her cervix. It had not grown there since yesterday. He sent her for a biopsy immediately, though he didnt need one to know what he was looking at.

Theres so much blood here, she recounted him saying in alarm. How could anyone have missed this?

But they had.

Becky was diagnosed with stage IIB cervical cancer in late November 2015. Her first fear was that people would think that she had neglected to get check-ups and Pap smears  this cancer was supposed to be detectable via those methods. But she had gotten them every year like she was supposed to. My sister was extremely invested in her health and fitness. She never seemed to get sick.

Becky went through her first round of radiation and chemo that winter. Everyone close to her believed that she would beat it, that she was young and strong and had a will to live so robust that thats exactly what she would do: live. We got to know the hospital very well  the waiting rooms, the doctors offices, the old magazines, the posters on the wall, the coffee, the parking lots. We read all the pamphlets and websites about dealing with cancer and the after-effects of chemo and radiation. We sat with Becky while she waited to go into the radiation room again and again for treatment that would kill the cancer but destroy the female organs around it, as if cancer could have spite. She bore it bravely. She had no choice.

Its worth mentioning that a year before her diagnosis, in 2014, Becky had a Pap and an ultrasound under the care of her family doctor, after an abnormal Pap smear. This doctor considered both a waste of time, and said she was fine. In 2015 that doctors medical license was suspended. Becky was never able to find out why. She tried to access the records of her 2014 ultrasound after her diagnosis, and they would not release them to her, and never would. There was no accountability, just a door that shut in her face.

In the late spring of 2016, her treatment had ended. The scans were clear. We exhaled, even as we memorized statistics about recurrence. The odds were good that we could have maybe two, maybe five, maybe seven years before the cancer showed itself again. And who knew what advancements might come by then?

Becky in 2017. Photo: Ryan Murphy

Instead, that summer, Becky felt a pain in her left leg.

Does this leg look swollen? she would ask. It did: At first it was hard to tell, but you could compare one knee and the other and see a clear difference. Later, the same was true for her ankles. Eventually one leg grew to twice the size of the other.

A few months later she was able to see her chart. Of that visit, someone had written: Rebecca continues to be paranoid.

But the swelling could have been caused by a number of things. We all hoped it was just a temporary side effect of the radiation, inflammation that would go down after a while. Becky ran through all the possibilities in her mind a million times. But she could not ignore what her body was telling her.

Back in a doctors office in mid-July, she laid out everything she was feeling, and everything she knew. Becky had a kinesiology degree. She never went to an appointment unprepared. She wrote everything down, she asked lots of questions.

That day, she met with a radiologist. She was not due for a scan, and she was not given one. Instead, she received the vague assurance that they were going to keep an eye on her. The doctor said there was nothing suspicious, and her regular oncologists refused to see her because they deemed it unnecessary. A few months later she was able to see her chart. Of that visit, someone had written: Rebecca continues to be paranoid.

Its a small note. But it is stuck into the memory of her treatment like a wedge that wont allow a gap to close. This was not from a doctor who tossed her aside, but one who was invested in her care, had been there through her initial radiation. Theres a whiff of old female hysteria to it, with more than a hint of dismissal. Becky was scared, and perhaps that was the main takeaway that day. But she was also right.

Four weeks later, the pain was so severe we rushed her to the hospital, where she got an emergency CT scan. Her boyfriend Ryan remembers hoping that the problem was a blood clot, as if anyone would hope for that. But the pain and swelling was coming from a lymph node now so inflamed it was cutting off the circulation to that leg. Soon, it was confirmed: The cancer had metastasized.

Becky would live for only 20 more months after this. If youve never seen someone die from cancer up close, how can I possibly put it into words? I dont know. The pain she endured broke everyone who witnessed it, because we were all so helpless. The indignities she suffered were countless and cruel. It is hard to think of it, and impossible to not think about it. Images of our sister from that time wake me up at night and suck the air out of my lungs because they come unbidden and vivid, like theyre happening all over again.

Becky and the author in 2012. Photo: Scott Campbell

My sister was always the most beautiful and effervescent person in whatever room she was in, but cancer had spindled her body down to nothing. A touch on her leg was agony. The organs around the cancer became obstructed and began to fail. One of us might sit at the edge of her bed holding her hand while she screamed in unbearable pain and another one of us went running down the hall for a nurse or a doctor, anyone, anyone. A tumor grew out of the side of her neck. She was small to begin with, and by the end, her topography was only the sharp relief of small bones under sunken skin.

All that we could ever offer in the face of any of this was love, and that couldnt fix it.

Cancer stole so much from her. Her past, because her life would be overshadowed by the way it ended. Her present, because for the two and a half years she had it, there was never a moments peace, nor comfort. Most of all, her future, which she will never get. The career she had in mind. The work left unfinished.

On Christmas Day in 2017, Ryan gave her a ring. In the spring of 2018, we brought her wedding dresses to try on because she had been wishing for a wedding. She wept at the sight of her emaciated form in the mirror, at the beautiful garments that hung dismally off of her. All that we could ever offer in the face of any of this was love, and that couldnt fix it. She never got married.

I dont want people to talk like Im already gone, she said in April 2018, shortly after her 36th birthday, which everyone understood would be her last. We threw her a small party, with cake and hats, hoping it would hit the right note and make her happy instead of sad. Im still here fighting, she said. A short while later she fell into a coma from which she never woke up. It lasted 11 days. She died on May 14, 2018.

The Beaton sisters circa 1991. Photo: Marion Beaton

In our sister Becky, we buried a spirit that had never given up. It was the same spirit that used to light up every room she ever entered, even more than the beautiful girl did. She wanted to live.

If Becky had lived, she wanted to switch careers and become an advocate for cancer patients. She would have been great at it. There was never anyone as organized as she was when it came to understanding her treatment options, preparing questions for her doctors, and navigating the multiple specialists in multiple disciplines in multiple cities. Since she cant do that, I am here now as a poor substitute to share her message: You know your body. You know when something is wrong. Trust yourself. We are all afraid of falling through the cracks. And we ought to be, because it happens.

Becky was well educated and healthy. She was also Canadian, which means she was able to access the opinions of different doctors and take on treatment without the financial strain that often crushes those without access to such services in the U.S. And even then, she was financially devastated after years of treatment and no work.

It is wrong that we were four sisters, and now we are three.

The energy she had to spend advocating and fighting for her own cause, when she was already so sick and on so many powerful drugs, juggling endless appointments and deciphering myriad treatment options, the effort she made trying to be heard, was more than anyone should be asked to take on. She learned to be her own best advocate, but the time it took to learn that came at the highest price: time.

Becky had many good doctors. She had incredible, caring nurses. These are people we cannot thank enough. But how often do I think of the ones who turned her away, who didnt believe her? How crucial were those months of missed treatments, how much could be different now? I dont know the answer. But I believe, in my heart, that it did not have to turn out the way it did.

The Beaton sisters circa 1989. Photo: Marion Beaton

We just passed the four-month anniversary of her death. It was a loss we all saw coming, but grief exploded through us anyway. It is a powerful, relentless thing. It is wrong to wake up in a world where she no longer exists. It is wrong to watch our mother bend over her grave, our father talk about her in the past tense. It is wrong that we were four sisters, and now we are three. Her death is a hole in our bodies because a piece of us is gone. We are sad, heartbroken, and angry that she is gone  yes, angry too, because there was more that could have been done, and because we are not alone.

In the wake of Beckys death, I opened up to social media about her, and received countless stories from people and loved ones of those who suffered needlessly when they went to the doctor and were not taken seriously. Years spent in pain written off as nothing. Glaring problems completely overlooked, especially in the bodies of women. Becky was a woman, but she was also white, cisgender, and without disabilities. How much more is this problem a fact of life for non-binary people, trans people, people of color, people with disabilities? Its humbling to hear from so many with stories of their own, and distressing to consider the stories we havent heard yet.

But what good are stories like these, if nothing is done about them? If no one is held accountable? I wish that I could go back in time to those appointments where they dismissed her pain and storm them with a righteous fury, but I cant, and shes gone, and in the clinic next door there might be someone else being gaslit into thinking their physical pain is all in their head.

Becky wanted to help change things if she survived. The best we can do now is to tell her story, and hope it makes a difference. Hope that the narratives pile up until they cant be ignored anymore. Becky wanted to make a difference. She did not want anyone to go through what she went through, ever again.
Ongoing FEMA has closed some of its Disaster Recovery Centers (DRC), established last month to assist residents and businesses whose property was damaged by Tropical Storm Ida. However, face-to-face assistance is still available. Residents can find their nearest DRC online at fema.gov/drc,...
3 Students Hit by Lightning Strike in Chicago

Three middle school students in Chicago have been hospitalized after getting hit by lightning in the neighborhood of Round Lake Heights while standing at a school bus stop.

The lightning strike took place on the morning of Thursday, Sept. 20, at around 7:20 a.m. near Lotus and Ottawa Drives.

The children were rushed to Condell Medical Center in Libertyville; one of them is in serious condition while the two others are in stable condition, reported WGN-TV.

The students were all responsive when emergency workers arrived at the scene and none of the injuries are believed to be life-threatening, a school official told the Chicago Tribune.

There were approximately nine students at that particular bus stop, and there was a lightning strike near the vicinity of where they were standing, said Alex Barbour, assistant superintendent of Lake Villa Community Consolidated School District 41.

There is no evidence that it hit the tree they were standing beneathsuch as cracked limbs or cracked tree trunk.

Carrington Monk is one of 3 girls who her mom says were knocked unconscious after lightning struck a tree they were standing under in Round Lake Hts. The 13-year-old will be OK but will be kept in Hosp. overnight for observation. @cbschicago #RoundLakeHeights #RoundLake pic.twitter.com/ZhANnM1vSj  Mike Puccinelli (@MPuccinelliCBS2) September 20, 2018

Shelter From Rain

The students were likely under the tree near the bus stop to seek shelter from the rain.

A witness told ABC 7 that she heard the strike and then saw a girl lying on the ground.

We heard the lightning strikeWe saw kids running across the street for shelter under the tree there was a girl lying on the ground, said Adriana Argueta.

Round Lake Fire Department Deputy Chief Joe Krueger said that most of the children at the bus stop ran away after the strike.

A number of students fled the scene right after the strike, he said, adding, they ran home and got transported to school by other methods.

Officials are working to contact all of the students who were there when the strike hit to make sure no one else was injured.

The mother of one of the victims, 13-year-old Carrington Monk, told CBS that her daughter was knocked unconscious but would be okay. Monk will be in the hospital overnight.

Lightning Strikes

Lightning strikes have the potential to be deadly, according to the National Weather Service.

There are five ways lightning strikes people, the agency said: a direct strike, a side flash, ground current, conduction, and streamers.

A direct strike is when a person is struck directly by lightning, which usually happens in open areas. A side flash occurs when lightning strikes a taller object near the victim and a portion of the current jumps to the victim. Most often, side flash victims have taken shelter under a tree to avoid rain or hail, the service stated.

Ground currents are when lightning strikes an object such as a tree and most of the energy travels outward in and along the ground surface. Conduction is when lightning travels in wires or other metal surfaces. Streamers develop when lightning moves downward and a portion branches off from the leader.

According to the NWS, lightning strikes the United States about 25 million times, killing an average of 47 people, and injuring hundreds more each year.

From NTD.tv
Air Force Pilots Eject From Plane Moments Before it Crashed in Texas

An Air Force trainer plane crashed near a mall in San Antonio, Texas on Sept. 18, as two crew members safely ejected.

No civilian casualties were reported and a property damage assessment is underway. Flying training has been suspended, pending an investigation.

A student pilot and instructor of the Wing T-6A Texan II aircraft were captured on video around 4 p.m. local time on Sept. 18, as they parachuted to safety.

The Air Education and Training Command (AETC), which oversees the operations of the Joint Base San Antonio-Randolph (JBSA), issued a media release immediately following the incident.

The crew ejected and is safe with minor injuries reported at the site. Both were transported to the Joint Base San Antonio-Randolph Medical Clinic for evaluation, the AETC stated. There were no civilian casualties, and the extent of damage to property has not been assessed.

The 12th Flying Training Wing commander, Col. Mark Robinson, ordered flying training operations to be suspended in the wake of the accident, and will evaluate its resumption over the coming hours.

Members from the bases fire and safety units from the 12th Flying Training Wing responded to the incident alongside and local responders, the announcement said.

Brandi Williams, a caretaker at the San Antonio Polo Club, told KSAT12 that she saw the two men eject from the plane just before she heard a loud explosion. Williams said the plane didnt burst into flames, but seemed to come down easy, according to the report.

The T-6A Texan II was indefinitely grounded earlier this year due to concerns about hypoxia and unexplained physiological events, KSAT12 reported, citing Military.com.

Use of that plane model was reportedly later reinstated.
The logo of Amazon is seen at the company's logistics centre in Boves, France, August 8, 2018. (Pascal Rossignol/Reuters)

Amazons Use of Merchant Data Under Eu Microscope

European Union regulators are checking whether U.S. online retailer Amazon is using merchants data in a way that stifles competition, Europes antitrust chief said on Sept. 19.

The comments by European Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager come as the worlds largest online retailer faces calls for more regulatory intervention and even its potential break-up because of its sheer size.

Vestager said the issue was about a company hosting merchants on its site and at the same time competing with those same retailers by using their data for its own sales.

We are gathering information on the issue and we have sent quite a number of questionnaires to market participants in order to understand this issue in full, Vestager told a news conference.

These are very early days and we havent formally opened a case. We are trying to make sure that we get the full picture.

Seattle-based Amazon declined to comment. Half of all items sold on its site globally come from small- and medium-sized businesses. Last year, third-party sellers in Britain sold more than 2.3 billion pounds ($3.03 billion) worth of products outside the country while in Germany, they sold 2.1 billion euros ($2.45 billion) outside of Germany.

Vestager has the power to fine companies up to 10 percent of their global turnover for breaching EU antitrust rules.

By Foo Yun Chee
Jogger Stabbed to Death in Apparent Random Attack in Washington DC

Police have reportedly made an arrest in the case of a woman that was stabbed to death while jogging just a few miles from the White House.

The suspect, who has not been identified, was arrested on the night of Wednesday, Sept. 19, according to NBC.

Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser and Police Chief Peter Newsham are reportedly scheduled to appear at a news conference on Thursday morning to give an update on the case.

Wendy Karina Martinez, 35, stumbled into a Chinese restaurant in Washingtons Logan Circle on the night of Tuesday, Sept. 18, suffering from multiple stab wounds to the neck, police said.

There were customers in the carry-out at the time, said Chief Peter Newsham of the Metropolitan Police Department.

She collapsed, they tried to provide medical assistance to her, Newsham said. Unfortunately she was taken to a local hospital, where she was pronounced dead.

Martinez tried to warn people inside the restaurant about her attacker, witnesses said, but the suspect had already fled the scene, according to ABC.

A single assailant stabbed her, Newsham said, adding that it is more likely a random act than anything else, but were going to look at all possibilities.

Its horrible to see something like this happen in the city, he said, adding that the area is considered to be a very safe neighborhood.

Martinezs family told ABC that she worked for a local software company and was an avid runner.

Just last week Martinez and her fiance, Daniel Hincapie, were engaged to be married.

We are deeply saddened by this senseless tragedy. Wendy Karina Martinez was the light of our lives, her mother, Cora Martinez, wrote in a statement, according to ABC. Not only was she an avid runner, but she was a devout Christian, a wonderful friend, and a driven professional. Everything you hope that a daughter and a friend could be.

Help us identify the person responsible for the murder of Wendy Martinez. She was stabbed to death last night in the 1400 block of 11th St, NW. Click the link for additional details and video. https://t.co/Ybce195sqs Have info? Call 202-727-9099/Text 50411 pic.twitter.com/9LjLavquPZ  DC Police Department (@DCPoliceDept) September 19, 2018

FiscalNote, where Martinez worked as chief of staff, tweeted its condolences on Wednesday.

The entire FiscalNote family is shocked and deeply saddened to learn that Wendy Martinez, our Chief of Staff, was killed last night, the company wrote. Wendy was an invaluable member of our team and a vibrant member of the community. Our thoughts and prayers are with Wendys family and friends.

The entire FiscalNote family is shocked and deeply saddened to learn that Wendy Martinez, our Chief of Staff, was killed last night. Wendy was an invaluable member of our team and a vibrant member of the community. Our thoughts and prayers are with Wendys family and friends.  FiscalNote (@FiscalNote) September 19, 2018

The Metropolitan Police Department released surveillance footage of a suspect that showed a man wearing a long-sleeved mustard-colored shirt, flip flops, and white socks.

Police are offering up to $25,000 for information leading to an arrest.

We ask that you respect our privacy as we grieve the passing of her beautiful soul and inform her friends and family of this terrible news, the victims mother said in her statement, ABC reported. We also want to encourage the community to please contact the police with any information that may lead to finding justice for Wendy.
Brooklyn Diocese to Pay $27.5 Million in Record Sex Abuse Settlement

Four men who were sexually abused as children by a former religious teacher at a Roman Catholic church reached a $27.5 million settlement with the Diocese of Brooklyn, the latest update in a wide-reaching scandal that has shaken houses of prayer across the nation.

The deal reached on Sept. 18 is broadly believed to be one of the largest individual settlement cases ever in relation to minors abused within the Catholic Church. Each one of the four victims will receive a historic $6.875 million.

According to court documents, Angelo Serrano, 67, repeatedly abused the four victims during his time teaching at the St. Lucy-St. Patricks Church in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn. Serrano was arrested in 2009 for sexually abusing one of the victims, then aged 10. In 2011, he pleaded guilty to first-degree sexual conduct charges and currently is serving a 15-year sentence.

These were boys who were abused in second grade through sixth grade, for years for some of them, said Ben Rubinowitz, one of the lawyers for the victims. The egregious nature of the conduct is the reason that the church paid what they did.

Adriana Rodriguez, a spokesperson for the Brooklyn diocese, confirmed with The Epoch Times that the settlement had been reached, adding that they had highly contested the dioceses role in the abuse case, claiming that Serrano was a volunteer worker at a local parish; he was not clergy or an employee of the Diocese or parish.

Rodriguez said the diocese had already settled the lawsuits brought by the four claimants many years ago at Serranos private apartment.

The Diocese endeavored to reach this settlement in a way that compensates Mr. Serranos victims and respects their privacy, Rodriguez said via email on Sept. 19. We hope this is another step forward in the healing process for these claimants.

At the time, the pastors at the churchRev. Stephen P. Lynch and Rev. Frank Shannonboth witnessed the inappropriate abuse but failed to stop it, according to court documents. Later a Brooklyn Judge ruled in favor of the victims, citing the church officials complicity.

The record is clear that Lynch and Shannon had knowledge that, for years, Serrano often had several boys, including plaintiff, sleepover at his apartment, Justice Loren Baily-Schiffman of Kings County Supreme Court wrote in a 2017 order, according to the New York Times. In fact, both Lynch and Shannon testified that they visited Serrano on numerous occasions when young boys were present.

The largest individual settlement reached previously in relation to abuse in the Catholic Church was in 2007, when two victims of a lay music minister in the Rockville Centre diocese took in about $5.73 million each. The settlement totaled $11.45 million, according to BishopAccountability.org, a database tracker of clergy sexual abuse cases.

As of June 2017, a total of 414 victims had applied for settlements through the independent Reconciliation Compensation Program in Brooklyn, according to the Associated Press. The program allows survivors of sexual abuse by priests or deacons of the diocese to seek financial compensation.

Burgeoning Calls

Weeks ago, New York Attorney General Barbara Underwood subpoenaed all eight of the states Catholic diocesesincluding the Brooklyn diocesefor documents of sex-abuse allegations as part of a wide-reaching investigation into the abuse.

Underwood wrote in a statement announcing the investigation that victims in New York deserve to be heard as welland we are going to do everything in our power to bring them the justice they deserve.

In a Sept. 6 statement, the Brooklyn diocese said they had received the subpoena and is in the process of reviewing it.

At least seven states across the country have started investigating such claims, or have laid the groundwork for similar inquiries, spurred on in part by Pennsylvanias horrific grand jury report released publicly in August.

The jury report accused over 300 predator priests in Pennsylvania of sexual abuse and identified more than 1,000 child victims.

The report detailed how church administrators dissuaded victims from reporting the abuse to authorities, while also pressuring police to terminate any investigations. Church officials would also conduct their own biased investigations without reporting the crimes to proper authorities.

The Boston Globe first sparked scrutiny into clerical sexual abuse in 2002 when they wrote 600 stories exposing the churchs coverup, chronicled in the award-winning movie Spotlight. The papers reporting made national headlines at the time, which led to some church officials resigning.

Watch Next:

The Dark Origins of Pedophile Rings in the US

An alleged Soviet spy operation used children as honey pots in the West, to lure politicians and business leaders into committing crimes so they could be blackmailed
Ontario Premier Doug Ford speaks in question period in the legislature at Queen's Park in Toronto on Sept. 17, 2018. (The Canadian Press/Nathan Denette)

Canada in Brief, Sept. 20-26

Ontario wins stay on ruling that struck down council-cutting plan

The Ontario government has won a stay of a court ruling that upended its plan to cut Toronto city council in the middle of a municipal election campaign. That means city staff can immediately focus their efforts on planning for an election using 25 wards and abandon the 47-ward model that was revived by the lower courts decision.

The province had argued the stay was necessary to eliminate uncertainty surrounding the Oct. 22 vote and allow the city to move forward with its preparations.

An Ontario judge last week found that the provinces Bill 5, which reduced Toronto city council to 25 seats from 47, violated freedom of expression rights for candidates and voters.

Premier Doug Ford contested the ruling and invoked a constitutional provision known as the notwithstanding clause to reintroduce the legislation.

Muskrat Falls public inquiry begins in Labrador

Indigenous leaders testifying at the Muskrat Falls inquiry that began in Happy Valley-Goose Bay on Sept. 17 shared their historical connection to the Churchill River, where the massive Labrador dam will eventually harness power.

The independent inquiry will examine how the $12.7 billion hydroelectric project was approved and executed, and why it was exempt from oversight from the Public Utilities Board.

Indigenous leaders also plan to testify later in the inquiry about their concerns over the potential threat of methylmercury poisoning in local wild food sources downstream.

Scheer welcomes floor-crossing MP to Conservative caucus

Tory leader Andrew Scheer officially ushered Leona Alleslev into the Conservative fold on Sept. 19, telling his weekly caucus meeting he is proud to welcome the former Liberal MP, who crossed the floor on Sept. 17.

Scheer said Alleslev is experienced, accomplished, principled, and courageous.

Alleslev claimed her concerns about the Liberal governments handling of crucial files such as the economy and trade were met with silence.

Scheer also touted Richard Martels recent byelection victory for the Conservatives in Quebec.

He said Martel showed the party will be a strong voice for the province in the 2019 federal election.

Traffic scarecrow used in bid to prevent speeding in BC city

The RCMP is borrowing an idea from the United Kingdom by using a cut-out of a police officer to try and slow down traffic in Coquitlam, B.C.

The Mounties have dubbed the life-sized figure Constable Scarecrow, which will be used on roads in the community in a pilot project for the next two months. The metal poster cut-out shows a police officer in a bright yellow RCMP jacket holding up a laser speed-reader.

Sgt. Quentin Frewing said in a news release that its a low-cost, good-humoured way to improve the police presence that might also make people think twice about speeding.

With files from The Canadian Press
Carolinas Worn Out by Hurricane Florence and Long Aftermath

WILMINGTON, N.C.Hurricane Florence is still wearing out the Carolinas, where residents have endured an agonizing week of violent winds, torrential rain, widespread flooding, power outages, and death.

Frustration and sheer exhaustion are building as thousands of people wait to go home seven days after the storm began battering the coast. Florence is blamed for at least 37 deaths, including those of two women who drowned when a sheriffs van taking them to a mental health facility was swept off a road.

Im just ready for this to be over, to be honest, said Evan Jones, a college student who evacuated from Wilmington and doesnt know when he will get back. Im trying to get it all out of my head.

With the remnants of Florence finally out to sea and skies bright over rivers still swelling with muddy water, President Donald Trump visited the disaster zone, riding through soggy neighborhoods and helping pass out warm meals at a church in the hard-hit coastal town of New Bern.

Hows the house? Trump asked one person. You take care of yourself.

People Trying to Cope

There wasnt any presidential fanfare 120 miles away in Fayetteville. There, Roberta and Joseph Keithley had been sleeping on cots set up in a school classroom since Friday. They still didnt know if their home was ruined.

Its getting a little frustrating, but you have to deal with it and roll with the punches, said Roberta Keithley, 73. Its just another hurdle to get over in life.

To the south, daybreak brought a return of floodwaters to Nichols, South Carolina, which also was inundated by Hurricane Matthew two years ago. The flooding from Florence had subsided, only to get worse again.

Mayor Lawson Battle said that as far as he knew, everyone in the town of about 360 people evacuated as the water first started to invade the town on Monday. But Battle just couldnt think about that anymore.

Im focusing on this disaster at hand, he said. I dont have time to think. Im just so tired.

Access improved to Wilmington, a North Carolina port city of 120,000 that was cut off for days by high water. But officials said they dont know when evacuees would be able to return home, and it may be next week before conditions improve drastically since the Cape Fear River isnt expected to crest at the city until Monday, Sept. 24, or Tuesday, Sept. 25.

Understand: There is a lot of water inland, and it is continuing to make its way downstream, County Manager Chris Coudreit said.

Nearly 3 feet of rain fell in places, and dozens of cities had more than 10 inches of rain. Roads remained dangerous, and some were still being closed as swollen rivers emptied toward the ocean.

North Carolina officials said some 7,800 people remained in shelters, down from about 10,000 on Monday despite Gov. Roy Coopers plea to stay put.

In Lumberton, where the Lumber River still covered parts of town, water was deep enough that vehicles passing by on streets sent wakes into partially submerged homes, businesses, and a church.

Some of those who left shelters may have been headed toward the coast on U.S. 421, where a long line of cars, utility crews, and trucks loaded with generators sat in a jam.

About 161,000 homes and businesses were still without electricity in North Carolina, more than a quarter of them in the county where Wilmington is located.

Two of the Deaths

The deaths, which have occurred in three states, include those of two women who were being taken to a mental health facility when the van they were riding in was engulfed by floodwaters from the Little Pee Dee River in South Carolina, authorities said.

Horry County Sheriffs Department spokeswoman Brooke Holden said two deputies in the van tried to get the victims out but couldnt. Rescue teams plucked the deputies from the top of the vehicle. They were placed on leave pending an investigation.

Sheriff Phillip Thompson said he does not believe the women were in restraints like those sometimes used on psychiatric patients.

It wasnt clear why the women were being moved in the aftermath of a killer hurricane, and Justin Bamberg, a lawyer who has represented the families of several people injured or killed by law officers, said he was perplexed by the decision.

If that road is in an area where it is a flood risk, and waters were rising, why were they driving on that road anyway? said Bamberg, a state lawmaker.

At least 24 of the victims died in vehicles, and most were in accidents linked to flooding.

Farmers Beginning to Count Losses

North Carolinas farmers, meanwhile, are beginning to count up their losses.

The Tobacco Growers Association of North Carolina estimated up to 125 million pounds of tobacco leaf could be damaged by flooding, winds, and power outages, an amount that could translate to as much as $350 million in lost farm revenue.

Association CEO Graham Boyd said about 40 percent of the crop was still in the field when the storm hit. North Carolina is the nations top producer of tobacco.

The flooding has killed an estimated 3.4 million chickens and 5,500 hogs, authorities said. Farmers are also concerned about cotton, sweet potatoes, peanuts, and corn, but swamped roads and fields have made it difficult to assess the damage.

The risk of environmental damage from Florence mounted, too, as human and animal waste was washed into the floodwaters.

More than 5 million gallons of partially treated sewage spilled into the Cape Fear River after power went out at a treatment plant, officials said, and the earthen dam at a pond holding hog waste was breached, spilling its contents.

From NTD.tv
Josh Hawley Responds After Claire McCaskill Says Shell Vote No on Brett Kavanaugh

Josh Hawley has responded after Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) announced shell vote against Brett Kavanaugh in his nomination for the Supreme Court.

Hawley said in an interview on Hugh Hewitts radio show on Sept. 19, that people are very, very upset by what they see as an ambush on Kavanaugh, referring to how the sexual assault allegation against the judge didnt emerge until after the public hearings were over, reported Politico.

Noting that McCaskill also opposed Trumps first Supreme Court nominee, Neil Gorsuch, Hawley added: Nobody is surprised. Claire McCaskill is now 0 for 6 on Supreme Court nominees since she started running for the Senate 12 long years ago.

She has sided with Chuck Schumer every single timefor liberals and against Missouri, he said.

President Donald Trump won Missouri in the 2016 presidential election and McCaskill faces a tough challenge in November in her bid for re-election from Hawley, a former law clerk for Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts.

The race has been tight the entire year, with neither contender getting a lead of more than four points in a single poll, according to RealClearPolitics. Recent polls have Hawley slightly in the lead, by less than a full percentage point.

No surprise here. @clairecmc always comes home to the party line in the end. Now 0-6 on Supreme Court nominees. Hasnt heard a thing voters told her. Just another Washington liberal. https://t.co/vbdrmAfYnY  Josh Hawley (@HawleyMO) September 19, 2018

I will vote no on Judge Kavanaugh. pic.twitter.com/AeNC6clHbq  Claire McCaskill (@clairecmc) September 19, 2018

Echoing a number of commentators, Jessie Jane Duff, a retired U.S. Marine and now a senior fellow for the London Center for Policy Research, said that McCaskill wont get re-elected if she votes against Kavanaugh.

If Claire wont vote yes to Confirm Kavanaugh, Missouri wont vote for Claire in November, Duff said via Twitter.

McCaskill Announces Opposition

McCaskill said in a statement on Wednesday, Sept. 19 that her decision rested on Kavanaughs thinking on several key issues, principally so-called dark money.

He has revealed his bias against limits on campaign donations which places him completely out of the mainstream of this nation, she said.

He wrote, And I have heard very few people say that limits on contributions to candidates are unconstitutional although I for one tend to think those limits have some constitutional problems. Judge Kavanaugh will give free rein to anonymous donors and foreign governments through their citizens to spend money to interfere and influence our elections with so-called issue ads.

McCaskill said the sexual assault allegation against Kavanaugh is troubling but declared: My decision is not based on these allegations.

McCaskill is the first of six undecided Senate Democrats to announce a decision.

The others are Doug Jones of Alabama, Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota, Joe Manchin of West Virginia, Joe Donnelly of Indiana, and Jon Tester of Montana, according to Politico.

Kavanaugh could still be confirmed even if all Democrats oppose him and he receives support from 50 of the 51 Senate Republicans.

From NTD.tv
Constitution Day: The Bill of Rights and the Warren Court

Part 4 of 5 on understanding the Bill of Rights

In honor of U.S. Constitution Day, on Sept. 17, we present a five-part series on the Bill of Rights. It reveals how the first 10 amendments to the Constitution guarantee freedom of speech, religion, and the press, and, in so many other ways, limit the power of the federal government and secure the rights of individuals.

Until the 1960s, the 14th amendment required states to provide due process and equal protection of the laws to all citizens, but states didnt have to abide by all of the restrictions on governmental action set forth in the Bill of Rights.

Those restrictions applied only to the federal government. There was some overlap, but in terms of restrictions on governmental action, states were regulated by the 14th amendment, which was said to have an independent potency.

Criminal defendants in state courts, for instance, were entitled only to that fundamental fairness essential to the very concept of justice. Their rights were very limited, compared to those given to defendants in federal criminal cases. State defendants could be required to testify against themselves. They didnt have the right to an attorney or to a speedy trial as we now understand those terms. They were entitled only to those rights implicit in the concept of ordered liberty.

In other words, if we could imagine a just system that didnt provide a particular right (such a jury trial, appointed counsel, or confrontation of opposing witnesses), the state wasnt compelled to provide that right to a criminal defendant. Federal defendants, who fell under the Bill of Rights, were given these protections, but the overwhelming majority of criminal cases took place in state court. They still do.

The 60s brought a big change in American criminal laws. The Supreme Court, under Chief Justice Earl Warren, read the 14th Amendment in a new manner. Instead of looking for fundamental rights implicit in the concept of ordered liberty, the court moved to incorporation of provisions contained in the Bill of Rights.

By moving to this approach, the Supreme Court led what has been called a revolution in American criminal procedure and provided all of the following rights to state criminal defendants: the freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures and the exclusionary rule; the prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment; the right to assistance of counsel; the privilege against self-incrimination; the right to confront opposing witnesses; the right to remain silent or have an attorney present for questioning; the right to a speedy trial; the right to compel defense witnesses to appear at trial; the right to a jury trial; and protection against double jeopardy.

None of those rights were constitutionally required in 1960, but they all were by 1970. In 1972, the death penalty was declared unconstitutional as it was then applied, and, in 1973, states were prohibited from outlawing abortions.

The dynamics of this dramatic period for the Supreme Court must be placed into context. State criminal laws had been established by the political process. In other words, the situation as it was before these Supreme Court cases reflected the will of the majority of persons living in any given state. The reformsand the resulting growth of the federal governmentdidnt take place because most people wanted reform. Reforms were enacted only because a majority of the nine justices wanted reforms.

Since most of the issues decided by the Supreme Court were held to be required by the Constitution, state political action couldnt change the law back to where it had been prior to Supreme Court action. As to the death penalty, however, the Courts 1972 decision left open the possibility of applying it in a constitutional manner. By 1979, 35 states had acted to reinstate the death penalty, effectively overruling the Supreme Court. They likely would have overturned court decisions on other matters had that been possible.

In 1968, Richard Nixon campaigned for president by, in part, running against the activist Supreme Court. He won, but the growth of the federal government didnt slow down. From 1960 to today, the number of federal employees rose from about 2.4 million to about 20 million. While federal spending 100 years ago was about 3 percent of gross domestic product, its close to 25 percent today. The past few years have seen even greater federal expansion into education with Common Core, and into health care with Obamacare.

With this growth has come many of the concerns that so bothered Americas forefathers. Today, we see federal officials infringing more and more upon religion, punishing speech, taking away guns, and violating privacy without warrants by listening in on our conversations. Moreover, there are international institutions such as the International Criminal Court that arent yet direct threats to Americans, but may one day become threats.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellows poem reported Paul Revere riding at midnight, shouting, The British are coming. Regardless of whether that really happened, the colonists were facing a threat to their freedom and property from an enemy that wasor that had beenin charge of the government. Today, the threat is no less real. The continued growth of the federal government and of international institutions is a huge threat to the sovereignty of a free people. Moreover, as governmental power grows, so does the threat of governmental corruption.

Daniel Webster said, God grants liberty only to those who love it, and are always ready to guard and defend it.

The Bill of Rights is the promise of the United States to defend liberty. That is why President John F. Kennedy called the Bill of Rights the guardian of our security as well as our liberty.

Ronald J. Rychlak is the Jamie L. Whitten chair in law and government at the University of Mississippi. He is the author of several books, including Hitler, the War, and the Pope, Disinformation (co-authored with Ion Mihai Pacepa), and The Persecution and Genocide of Christians in the Middle East (co-edited with Jane Adolphe).

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) next to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) during a news conference on President Trump's first 100 days in Washington on April 28, 2017. (Reuters/Yuri Gripas)

Democrat Letter Raises Serious Constitutional Concernsand Some Serious Questions

Commentary

On Sept. 18, the four Democratic members of the Gang of Eight sent what can only be described as a highly unusual and inflammatory letter that was addressed to the Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, and FBI Director Christopher Wray.

The Gang of Eight (Go8) is made up of the leaders of the Republican and Democratic parties from both the House and Senate, along with the chairpersons and ranking minority members of the House and Senate Intelligence committees. House and Senate members holding the following positions are automatically members of the Go8:

Chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on IntelligenceDevin Nunes (R-Calif.)

Minority Leader of the House Permanent Select Committee on IntelligenceAdam Schiff (D-Calif.)

Chairman of the Senate Select Committee on IntelligenceRichard Burr (R-N.C.)

Minority Leader of the Senate Select Committee on IntelligenceMark Warner (D-Va.)

Majority Leader of the SenateMitch McConnell (R-Ky.)

Minority Leader of the SenateChuck Schumer (D-N.Y.)

Speaker of the HousePaul Ryan (R-Wisc.)

Minority Leader of the HouseNancy Pelosi (D-Calif.)

These individuals are briefed on classified intelligence matters by the executive branch and are responsible for congressional oversight of all intelligence agencies. They are the checks and balances for the intelligence aspect of our government. Anything intelligence-related must be shown to this committee. In theory, if there is a covert U.S. government operation, these members know of it and have approved it. It is a very powerful committee.

The letter in question came from Pelosi, Schumer, Schiff, and Warner.

The least surprising aspect of the letter is that Pelosi and her fellow Democrats dont want the FBI and Justice Department (DOJ) (or anyone) to comply with President Donald Trumps declassification order for documents and text messages related to the Russia investigations. The declassification of the requested documents is near-certain to demolish the Trump-Russia collusion narrative that has been so carefully crafted.

Before proceeding further, a few points of clarification.

The executive and legislative branches are co-equal branches of government. One isnt subordinate to the other.

The DOJ and the FBI are part of the executive branchunder the authority of President Trump.

The DOJ and the FBI are subordinate to the president.

The president has issued a presidential ordernot a request.

The president has the constitutional power to declassify documents.

Trump has plenary (absolute) authority in this matter.

The Go8 doesnt represent a fourth branch of government.

Theres a lot in the letter, but lets start with the closing sentence.

Your agencies review, and any communication with the White House on the substance of the material, should not proceed further until you have briefed the Gang of Eight in person.

Should not proceed furtherthe Go8 cant circumvent a presidential order that has been issued to executive branch officials, who are subordinate to the president.

While congressional members are responsible for various oversight issues, they cant issue an order to officials within the executive branchespecially one that seeks to circumvent a presidential order.

Washington lawyer Will Chamberlain noted the following in a video statement:

President Trump has ordered his subordinates to declassify certain information relating to the Russia investigation. He has plenary declassification authority as the president of the United States. The FBI and the DOJ are subordinate to him. Congress does not get to order Executive Branch officials to defy a presidentthats actually a constitutional crisis.

The demand by the Go8 congressional Democrats is a written attempt to assume power not rightly granted by our Constitution. Such an attempt shouldnt be tolerated. Unfortunately, at this juncture, there has been no such outrage about the letter.

Who Is You?

Following the letters release, the Conservative Treehouse sent out a tweet, asking a very simple question:

Who is YOU?'

This is an excellent question and pertains to several odd references made throughout the letter that highlight previously unknown verbal assurances provided by one or more of the parties being addressed.

Keep in mind that the letter has been formally addressed to all three of the previously mentioned individualsCoats, Rosenstein, and Wray. The first occurrence happens at the end of the first paragraph:

Any decision by your offices to share this material with the President or his lawyers will violate longstanding Department of Justice policies, as well as assurances you have provided to us.

What assurances were provided? To whom were they made? And who made them?

The answer to the final question would appear to be simpleall three parties being addressed: Coats, Rosenstein, and Wray.

However, that answerperhaps applicable for this particular passageappears to be incorrect for later sections.

At certain points, the focus of those being addressed subtly shiftsseemingly from one person to another:

On June 5, 2018, we first wrote to Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein and Director Wray to express deep concern that the President and his legal team sought to abuse the Presidents power to interfere with the Special Counsels ongoing investigation and undermine the Department of Justice and Federal Bureau of Investigations lawful and appropriate activities.

On June 27, 2018, we wrote again to memorialize the verbal assurance you provided us that DOJ and FBI would not provide the White House or any of the Presidents attorneys with access to sensitive information briefed to a small group of designated Members.

Again, as noted by the Conservative Treehouse wrote in a tweet, who, exactly, is you?

The sensitive information briefed to a small group of designated members is a bit easier to understand. The small group is, of course, the Go8. We also know who did the briefings between August and September 2016: former CIA Director John Brennan.

From his congressional testimony on May 23, 2017, Brennan said:

Through the so-called Gang of Eight process, we kept Congress apprised of these issues as we identified them. Again, in consultation with the White House, I personally briefed the full details of our understanding of Russian attempts to interfere in the election to congressional leadership.

Specifically, Senators Harry Reid, Mitch McConnell, Dianne Feinstein, and Richard Burr, and to Representatives Paul Ryan, Nancy Pelosi, Devin Nunes, and Adam Schiff between 11th August and 6th September [2016], I provided the same briefing to each of the Gang of Eight members.

A question needs to be asked: Why did Brennan brief each Go8 member separatelyand over a span of three weeks? Perhaps it was nothing more than scheduling conflicts, but Brennan appears to go out of his way to note that he provided the same briefing to each member.

If this was so, why would there be a particular concern over this information being given to the White House or any of the presidents attorneys. It seems an odd point to be demanding privacy assurances nearly two years later.

As long as all the information transmitted by Brennan was the same for each Go8 member.

Meanwhile, those being addressed by the letter continue to shift:

On July 12, 2018, we also wrote to Director Coats to express alarm that this information was being made more broadly available within the Congress, in direct contravention of your assurances. In this letter, we noted that during our meetings with all of you on these sensitive matters, we discussed at great length the importance of protecting sources and methods and ongoing investigations. As you recall, all of the meetings attendees agreed that the information discussed was among the most sensitive type of information and should be protected accordingly.

Notice what was actually said, and who was addressed. First, comes an indirect reference to DNI Coats; We also wrote to Director Coats. Then, the shift back to a direct address: in direct contravention of your assurances.

This could be understood as a shift back to all three individuals.

But then comes the distinction: during our meetings with all of you. And then back to as you recall. Who is you?

My money is on Rosenstein. But Wray appears to be a near-equal candidate. Either is possible.

Watch Next:

Secretive FBI Unit Played Crucial Role in the Trump-Russia Investigation

Here we take a look at the FBIs Eurasian Organized Crime Unit, and how unverified opposition research was used to impact a presidential election.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
Democrats Attempt to Block Trumps Order to Declassify Russia-Probe Documents

Four top Democratic lawmakers are demanding that no Russia-probe documents be released in compliance with President Donald Trumps order until the director of national intelligence and the heads of the FBI and the Justice Department meet with the Gang of Eight.

In a letter sent one day after Trump ordered the declassifications, Sens. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Mark Warner (D-Va.), and Reps. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) and Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) also called Sept. 18 on the three agencies to cease the declassification review process and halt all communications with the White House related to the presidents order until meeting in person with the Gang of Eight.

Trump ordered Director of National Intelligence Daniel Coats on Sept. 17 to declassify specific pages of the secret court warrant application to surveil former Trump campaign volunteer Carter Page, FBI interviews related to the application, and text messages related to the Russia probe sent by James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Peter Strzok, Lisa Page, and Bruce Ohr.

Trump specified that the documents be declassified immediately. The Democrats move could at best delay the process, since Trump holds the ultimate authority to declassify documents.

The Democrats argue that the White House shouldnt be given access to the documents because the Russia investigation is still ongoing and may implicate the President himself or those around him. According to the letter, the Democrats had sought to restrict the presidents access to information at least three times since June.

At the requested meeting, Pelosi, Schumer, Schiff, and Warner demand to know how much the White House will get to see as part of the review process, the White House staff who are involved, what information the agencies propose to redact, how they plan to protect sources and methods, and if there is a plan to mitigate harm that may result from the release of the documents.

The action he has taken, to direct your agencies to selectively disclose classified information that he believes he can manipulate publicly, to undermine the legitimacy and credibility of the Special Counsels investigation, is a brazen abuse of power, the Democrats letter states.

Spokespeople from the Justice Department (DOJ) and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) told The Epoch Times that those agencies are cooperating with the FBI to comply with Trumps order.

When the President issues such an order, it triggers a declassification review process that is conducted by various agencies within the intelligence community, in conjunction with the White House counsel, to seek to ensure the safety of Americas national security interests, according to a DOJ spokesperson, who declined to comment on the Democrats request for a meeting.

As requested by the White House, the ODNI is working expeditiously with our interagency partners to conduct a declassification review of the documents the President has identified for declassification, ODNI spokesperson Kellie Wade said.

The FBI declined to comment on the declassification process and the Democrats request. Spokespeople for two of the Gang of Eights Republican members, Rep. Devin Nunes of California and Sen. Richard Burr of North Carolina, declined to comment.

The documents Trump ordered to be released focus on the key players in the FBIs counterintelligence investigation of the Trump campaign, which started in July 2016. The roots and methods of that investigation have faced intense criticism because of its reliance on an opposition research dossier funded by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee and the intense anti-Trump bias expressed by Lisa Page and Strzok, among others.

Trump told Hill TV in an exclusive interview on Sept. 18 that exposing the FBIs scheme would be a crowning achievement of his presidency.

I hope to be able to call this, along with tax cuts and regulation and all the things Ive done  in its own way, this might be the most important thing because this was corrupt, Trump said.

They know this is one of the great scandals in the history of our country because basically what they did is, they used Carter Page, who nobody even knew, who I feel very badly for, I think hes been treated very badly, the president added. They used Carter Page as a foil in order to surveil a candidate for the presidency of the United States.

The White House didnt respond to a request for comment. Spokespeople for Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.) and Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), the other two Republicans on the Gang of Eight, also didnt respond to a request for comment.

Trump said that he hadnt read the material he ordered to be declassified, but that he believes they will expose that the probe of his campaign was a hoax, beyond a witch hunt.

The president was specifically concerned with the secret court judges who approved the warrant to spy on Carter Page. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court approved the initial application to surveil Page in October 2016. The court then approved three renewals in three-month increments.

One of the things Im disappointed in is that the judges in FISA didnt, dont seem to have done anything about it. Im very disappointed in that, Trump said. Now, I may be wrong because, maybe as we sit here and talk, maybe theyre well into it. We just dont know that because I purposely have not chosen to get involved.

Trump noted that many people had asked him to declassify the documents, but said he waited to see where it was all going.

All I want to do is be transparent, he said. I hope to be able put this up as one of my crowning achievements that I was able to  expose something that is truly a cancer in our country.
An African elephant is seen walking in the film Walking Thunder. (Screenshot/Walking Thunder)

Documentary Captures the Magic and Majesty of the African Elephant

Cyril Christo and Marie Wilkinsons sweeping new documentary film Walking Thunder: Ode to the African Elephant takes viewers on a journey across Africa of more than 15 years in the making.

The couple, two award-winning photographers, focus their story on the elephant. However, they also pay tribute to other endangered species, such as the rhino, lion, cheetah, wild dog, the giraffeeven the whole of the natural world.

The film grapples with the historic bond between humans and wildlife and how that relationship is changing, with unique and beautiful animals being widely slaughtered for their parts to sell on the black market, habitat destruction, and falling biodiversity.

However, ancient traditional groups who live in harmony with nature can still be found.

Although we never intended to make a film we were always concerned about the indigenous voice, Christo told The Epoch Times. We need to listen to them.

Christo and Wilkinsons son Lysander narrates the film, and we explore the African continent with him, beginning through the innocent eyes of a child.

When Lysander was born, we had the opportunity to combine the raw power and beauty and some of the harsh realities of the place where humanity was born, with the sense of awe and wonder incarnate in a little boy, as he took his first steps and uttered his first words in Africa, said Christo.

The boy repeatedly shows his vast knowledge of the African wildlife and shares simple words of wisdom that he learned in the midst of his adventurous young life.

Ive grown to see a real bond between people and elephants. The world needs its elephants, and so do we, he says.

Interspersed throughout the vivid footage of the wild animals and humans the family encounters are the haunting black and white photos Lysanders parents have taken over the years, many of which were published in their 2009 book Walking Thunder: In the Footsteps of the African Elephant.

The family meets with many indigenous groups who live symbiotically with other living beings and show gratitude for everything theyve received from the natural world.

The whole time we were going back to East and Southern Africa with Lysander to see the herds, to ask people what was going on with the elephants, why did they matter to them? said Christo.

We were researching how people live in Africa, through story, myth, and marveled at our fellow beings.

The stories shared by these people about the thunderous elephants are wondrous. They save a family member. They dig to find water during droughts. They pull down branches and eat the leaves, leaving the rest for humans to gather and use as firewood.

The animals show the world how things should be, says a woman in the film.

However, other African people share that they knew someone who died from an elephant attack. They are still wild animals that can be dangerous and must be given respect and space.

But the common concern is that the elephants are disappearing.

If we cannot save the elephant, what on earth can we save? said Christo. Entire ecosystems are at stake. Millions of millennia of the life force on earth could vanish in our lifetime.

The wisdom of these indigenous stories is especially powerful following recent news of an unprecedented level of poaching found in 2018 in Botswana by the organization Elephants Without Borders.

Only nine carcasses were discovered during the conservation groups last survey in 2014. But this year, nearly 90 carcasses have been found so far, with all of their tusks removed, and the group was only halfway through the study, according to CNN.

Approximately 20,000 elephants are slaughtered each year in Africa for their ivory tusks, according to WWF, and Botswana has the largest elephant population on the continent.

All this threatens the magical beauty we see in Walking Thunder, and viewers cant help but share in the mourning for this threatened and dwindling wildlife.

What is at stake, and this is something Lysander hints at at the end of the film, is experience itself, said Christo to The Epoch Times. What will children have to look forward to, if adults of 2050 have to explain that elephants, frogs, polar bears, whales, coral reefs, rainforests are no more?

The film is an official selection for screening at the 10th annual Santa Fe Independent Film Festival from Oct. 17 through 21. For more information, visit Christo and Wilkinsons website.
Economic Message Vital for Republicans Hold on Congress, Experts Say

GOP still faces the risk of losing their grip on House, despite booming economy, low unemployment

WASHINGTONThe state of the economy plays a crucial role in driving electoral outcomes. However, it remains to be seen whether Republicans can hone their midterm message enough to turn the currently booming economy into a political victory this fall, according to political analysts.

Economic growth climbed above 4 percent in the second quarter, while the unemployment rate sits at 3.9 percent, near its lowest level in 18 years. U.S. job openings have surged to record-high levels and wages are finally starting to rise.

Even with all the good economic headlines, public polls, as well as historical data, suggest that Republicans are likely to lose ground, particularly in the House.

In Novembers midterms, all 435 House seats and 35 Senate seats will be up for election. To gain control, the Democrats need to grab 23 seats in the House and two seats in the Senate.

The RealClearPolitics generic ballot shows Democrats at 49 percent with an 8.5 percent lead over Republicans at 40.5 percent.

I dont think that there is a blue wave. I think that has been hyped by the media, said former Rep. Bob Livingston (R-La.).

He believes the economy is the paramount issue that will determine the outcome of the elections.

He recalls the famous motto, Its the Economy, Stupid coined by James Carville, who was Bill Clintons campaign strategist leading up the 1992 presidential election. It was one of the three formulations used during the campaign that helped then-Arkansas Gov. Clinton to defeat incumbent Republican President George H.W. Bush in 1992.

His point was that the economy trumps all other issues, said Livingston. If the economy feels good, then people will vote their wallets.

In fact, the polls have not looked good for Republicans. And it is possible for Republicans to narrowly lose control of the House.

However, he still thinks that a good economy, low unemployment, and the success of the stock market should help Republicans overcome the current disadvantage in the polls.

I continue to be optimistic or at least hopeful that Republicans will hold on to control of the House, he said.

If they do a good job of selling what they have done over the last two years, I think theyll be fine.

Voters typically reward the party in power for good economic results. There are exceptions to this rule, particularly if voters are concerned about other factors like wars or scandals.

The 1966 election is one of the standard examples. Democratic President Lyndon Johnsons party suffered a big loss despite a good economy, said John Gizzi, chief political columnist of Newsmax.

In 1966, the economy was doing well in the United States. But, at the same time, there was violence on campuses and an increasingly unpopular war in Vietnam, he said. The Republicans played on this and gained.

Democrats lost 47 seats in the House and three seats in the Senate in the 1966 midterms.

History Is Working Against the Republicans

Historical data also suggests that the presidents party almost always loses seats in the midterms. In the 21 midterm elections since 1934, the presidents party has lost ground in one or both chambers in all but three elections, according to Ford OConnell, a political analyst and Republican strategist.

History is working against the Republicans, despite the great economic numbers, he said, adding that the single biggest factor in a midterm election is the party that controls the White House.

The average loss for the incumbent party in the House in a midterm election is usually about 25 to 27 and the average losses in the Senate is typically four, according to OConnell.

Its a historic phenomenon that seems to repeat itself almost every time, said Livingston. And the reason is that the president comes in on a high road of euphoria. But then, for one reason or another, the American people decide that they are less enamored of the president.

Livingston believes theres a very strong possibility that it could happen again this year.

Impeachment

Novembers midterms will also determine the next two years of Trumps presidency. The result will influence his economic and regulatory policies, as well as the possibility of his impeachment.

The latest polls suggest that the Republicans are likely to lose control of the House and may barely keep the Senate.

This election is going to be about impeachment or no impeachment, the presidents attorney, Rudy Giuliani, said in August at an event in New Hampshire.

The House voted against two impeachment efforts brought last winter by Rep. Al Green (D-Texas).

According to OConnell, Republican voters are complacent and the party needs to find a solution to the enthusiasm gap problem.

The economy is going good, but the economy is not going to be enough for Republicans, he said. They have to remind voters of the consequences of giving power back to Democrats.

A recent Fox News poll shows that 76 percent of Clinton voters are certain that they will vote this fall, while only 67 percent of Trump voters say that they will vote. Those numbers have to mirror one another if the Republicans want to hold the House and make gains in the Senate, OConnell said.

Otherwise, Democrats will impeach Trump and launch investigations to the point that the entire government may come to a grinding halt, he warns.
Elizabeth Smart Says Captor Being Released Poses Danger to the Public

Elizabeth Smart, the Utah woman whose kidnapping as a 14-year-old drew national attention to the issue of crimes against children, said in an interview that the release of one of her kidnappers on Wednesday, Sept. 19, posed a danger to the public.

Smart was taken at knifepoint in 2002 from the bed she shared with her sister. A passerby spotted her nine months later when she was walking down the street with her two captors, a homeless street preacher and his wife, and called police.

One of Smarts captors, Brian David Mitchell, was sentenced to life in imprison.

His wife Wanda Barzee, 72, was released on Wednesday after serving 15 years in prison for kidnapping and unlawfully transporting a minor.

Barzee had been scheduled to be in prison until 2024 but was released after prison officials recalculated her sentence to account for time already served before going to state prison.

Concern for Public

I do believe shes still a danger  I am very concerned for the community, for the public, as much as I am for myself, Smart, now 30, said in an interview with CBS This Morning that aired on Tuesday and Wednesday.

Barzee was released at 8 a.m. MDT, according to news media reports.

A lawyer for Barzee, Scott Williams, said in a statement that it was unfair and counterproductive to label Barzee as dangerous.

There is no reliable evidence to support speculation that Ms. Barzee presently poses a threat of any kind to the community in which she resides, or any particular person, Williams said.

He said Barzee cannot contact the Smart family or Mitchell.

Supervision for Five Years

Greg Johnson, administrative coordinator for the Utah Board of Pardons and Parole, said she will be supervised by U.S. Probation and Pretrial Services for five years.

In the interview, Smart described Barzee, who she said would encourage Mitchell to rape her, as evil and twisted. She characterized an apology letter Barzee wrote years ago as part of a plea deal as insincere.

Despite her concerns, Smart said she had forgiven her captor and moved on. She is married with two children and expecting a third, and has become an advocate for preventing the sexual abuse and exploitation of children.

From NTD.tv
EU Leaders Keep up Pressure on May to Take Brexit Deal

SALZBURG, AustriaEU leaders lined up to tell Theresa May she needs to give guarantees on the Irish border before they will grant her the Brexit deal the prime minister wants to avoid Britain crashing out of the bloc.

Arriving for a second day of summitry in Austria, Mays European Union peers rammed home their message on her plea for them to ease up on a backstop plan dealing with the border between the British province of Northern Ireland and EU member state Ireland.

The backstop would keep Northern Ireland under EU economic oversight if London and Brussels cannot agree a trade pact to keep UK-EU borders open, an idea that May and a small party in the province that props up her minority government oppose.

We have very clear principles regarding the integrity of the single market and regarding precisely the Irish border, French President Emmanuel Macron told reporters at the summit in Salzburg on Thursday Sept. 20. We need a UK proposal precisely preserving this backstop in the framework of a withdrawal agreement.

Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar had his own early morning meeting with May, after she had asked the summit over dinner the previous night not to ask her effectively to divide the United Kingdom. But Varadkar warned that Dublin was gearing up for the talks to collapse without a deal if London refuses to budge.

Were ready for that eventuality, should it occur. But I think we need to double our efforts over the next couple of weeks to make sure that we have a deal, he said.

Leaders had listened politely to May for a few minutes around the summit dinner table, laid in the Salzburg theater used in the finale of the The Sound of Music film. EU chief executive Jean-Claude Juncker said: It was interesting, it was polite, it was not aggressive.

She is doing her job.

After dining on Wiener Schnitzel and wrangling for four hours over Europes migrant problem, May was given the floor and tried to win over her 27 peers by asking them what they would do if they were asked to agree a legal separation of their countries.

She maintains that the backstop would divide Northern Ireland from the rest of the United Kingdom in terms of customs after Brexit day in March.

Maintaining a united front that refuses to let May bypass the talks run by EU negotiator Michel Barnier, the 27 leaders did not respond to her. They will discuss the issue among themselves over lunch on Thursday, setting what Barnier hopes can be a path to a final deal in two months.

Get the deal done

I believe that I have put forward serious and workable proposals, May told the summit, according to a senior British government source. We will of course not agree on every detail, but I hope that you will respond in kind.

The onus is now on all of us to get this deal done.

For now, however, May faces criticism of her soft Brexit approach at her Conservative Party conference in 10 days and there as little sign of either side giving way.

One of her party allies called her Chequers proposal for a close trade relationship with the EU that would ease the problem of the Irish border delusional and dead as a dodo.

At this stage, its a standstill. There is no progress, Lithuanian President Dalia Grybauskaite told Reuters.

A senior EU diplomat said May seemed to be edging toward compromise, offering new proposals on how to avoid differing economic regulations disrupting trade and speaking of a middle way.

With barely six months until Britain leaves the EU, there is pressure on both sides as any failure to strike a deal to tie up legal loose ends brings the risk of serious disruption. You can hear very clearly the clock ticking in the room, said the diplomat. And thats starting to have a psychological effect.

EU officials again said Britain had to move its own position over how to avoid erecting border posts on the Irish border, which will become Britains only land frontier with the EU, as well as on future economic cooperation after Brexit day.

A government source suggested Britain would come up with other proposals on Northern Ireland in due course, but May has so far been reluctant to move from her Chequers plan, hashed out at her official country home in July.
TOPSHOT - Refugees and migrants massed onto an inflatable boat reach Mytilene, northern island of Lesbos, after crossing the Aegean sea from Turkey on February 17, 2016. / AFP / ARIS MESSINIS (Photo credit should read ARIS MESSINIS/AFP/Getty Images)

EU Must End Migration Blame Game: Tusk

SALZBURG, AustriaThe European Union must end the blame game on migration and instead focus on working more with foreign countries and further strengthening its border to bring down arrivals, the chairman of the blocs leaders said.

The 28 EU leaders are meeting in the Austrian city of Salzburg to tackle migration, an issue that has badly damaged their unity in recent years.

They will seek more ways of reducing immigration and, right before chairing the talks, European Council President Donald Tusk said progress had been made since the 2015 peak in Mediterranean arrivals. Fewer than 100,000 migrants have reached Europe without necessary documentation this year.

Instead of taking political advantage of the situation, we should focus on what works  We can no longer be divided into those who want to solve the problem of illegal migrant flows and those who want to use it for political gain, Tusk said.

More than a million refugees and migrants arrived from the Middle East and Africa in 2015, stretching public services and leading to a rise in anti-immigrant parties challenging liberal democracies around the EU.

The EU has since struck deals with countries from Turkey to Lebanon to Libya, offering them money and aid in exchange for keeping a tighter lid on migration to Europe. It has also fortified its borders and made it harder to win asylum.

The leaders will discuss a plan to raise the number of guards at the EUs border agency Frontex to 10,000. It faces some opposition from member states such as Italy that fear an EU body would be able to overrule them on their own borders.

Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz, a backer of the proposal, hoped it could be agreed by the end of the year.

As far as sovereignty is concerned one can be very much flexible and we can also make changes  to the Commission proposal, Kurz said.

But in some countries there is also the concern that more Frontex could also lead to more registration and it could therefore become harder to wave migrants through, he said of practice for which frontline states like Italy and Greece have often been criticised by others in the EU.

While the EU states sitting on the Mediterranean have felt overrun and left by their EU peers to cope on their own, the wealthier countries like Germany and the Netherlands  where many of the arriving people want to go  complain people still reach their soil without being stopped and identified properly on first arriving in the EU.

This is another migration-related issue that has divided the bloc, though the most bruising row has long been around the ex-communist countries on the EUs eastern flank refusing to host any of the new arrivals to ease the burden on others.

Eyes on Africa

The EU is also courting Egypt for a migration deal. Tusk said the EU would hold a summit with the Arab League in Egypt in February. German Chancellor Angela Merkel said in Salzburg that Africa was the EUs key relationship.

The summit also looking at the blocs recent idea to set up regional disembarkation platforms around the Mediterranean to get people off rescue boats and then distribute them around.

But the EUs old problems around how to share out refugees and migrants inside the bloc have prevented that plan from being filled with much substance since it was first agreed last June.

Italy, which has only recently been overtaken by Spain as the main gateway to Europe from the east and the south this year, has also shut its ports to rescue ships  including those of the EUs Sophia naval mission  for as long other EU states fail to agree a permanent redistribution key.

There is no northern African country that is willing or ready to take European responsibility, the blocs top diplomat, Federica Mogherini, said. But this doesnt mean that north African countries would not be ready to cooperate with us.

The EU has already put in place one agreement with Libya, where it has offered money, equipment and training for the Tripoli border guard to help them prevent people embarking on the often deadly journey to Europe.

The accord has been criticised by human rights groups as violating the international humanitarian law and aggravating the suffering of people who are already distressed. But the EUs political priority is clear and it has defended the deal.

Despite a steep drop in immigration numbers since 2015, political aftershocks are still reverberating with member states at loggerheads over how to distribute new arrivals and share the burden of integrating migrants already in the EU.

Italys firebrand far-right interior minister, Matteo Salvini, has excoriated the EU over its disarray on migration.

A majority of Europeans support taking in refugees  people who flee for their lives from wars and persecutionalthough many disapprove of how the EU has handled a record influx that has also included many labour migrants and uncontrolled arrivals, according to a new survey. [nL8N1W53B6]

The Pew Research Centre report highlights how the EU now struggles with a political crisis over migration, rather than a massive migration crisis as such.
Family Outraged After Women Die Trapped in Flooded Van Driven by Deputies

The families of the two women who died trapped in a flooded van driven by sheriffs deputies are outraged over what happened.

The deceased were identified as Wendy Newton, 45, and Nicolette Green, 43.

The Horry County Sheriffs Office was driving the women to a mental health facility in South Carolina on Tuesday night, Sept. 18, when the van was overcome with floodwaters near U.S. Highway 76 and Pee Dee Island Road in Marion County.

The deputies in the front of the van said they were able to climb on the roof and wait for a rescue but were unable to reach the women.

Sheriff Phillip Thompson told WPDE that, contrary to some early reports, the women were not shackled. He said the deputies, Stephen Flood and Joshua Bishop, drove around barricades on the flooded road, and authorities are trying to figure out why. The deputies have been placed on administrative leave.

Answering a question as to why the women were moved amid Hurricane Florence, Thompson said it was protocol. We get an order to transport to a facility, thats what we do, Thompson said, reported the Myrtle Beach Sun News.

Family Speaks Out

Family members said they were shocked by the deaths and didnt understand how they happened.

I was in absolute shock, Rose Hershberger, 19, a daughter of Green, told NBC.

I was confused as to why someone would, or the police officers would drive down a road that was in an area that was known for flooding. If they saw the waterthey have their own, you know, turn around, dont drown. They have that everywhere.

Family outraged after women die in flooded van driven by South Carolina deputies https://t.co/B8npf8u0a2  Cindy (@Cindy63306167) September 20, 2018

Hershberger said that her mother was diagnosed with schizophrenia three years ago and took medication for the condition; a new therapist who Green visited on Sept. 18, determined she needed to be committed to a mental institution.

She said her mother was a trusting person who was betrayed by the deputies.

A statement sent by the Green family, including her other living child, to WLTX, added: We want those who are responsible to be held accountable. These women were not inmates or criminals. They were women who voluntarily sought help. They trusted the hospitals and the Sheriff Deputies with their lives and that trust was abused. We want answers.

From NTD.tv
Floodwaters Inundate Lake at NC Power Plant, Raising Alarm

WILMINGTON, N.C.Duke Energy activated a high-level emergency alert at a retired coal-fired power plant in North Carolina as floodwaters from the nearby Cape Fear River overtopped an earthen dike at the facility and inundated a large lake.

Duke spokeswoman Paige Sheehan said on Sept. 20, that the dam containing Sutton Lake appears stable and they are monitoring the situation with helicopters and drones to react to what she called an evolving situation. Company employees notified state regulators overnight that the plant was at the highest level of alert under its emergency action plan.

The 1,100-acre reservoir is a former cooling pond at the L.V. Sutton Power Station in Wilmington and is adjacent to three large coal-ash dumps. The coal-fired plant was retired in 2013 and replaced with a new generating station that runs off of natural gas.

A landfill that was under construction at the site ruptured over the weekend, spilling enough material to fill 180 dump trucks. Coal ash contains such toxic heavy metals as arsenic and mercury.

Sheehan said the company did not believe any coal ash is at risk of spilling from the site amid the current flooding, as work continues to clean up the earlier spill. The site has received more than 30 inches of rainfall as a result of former Hurricane Florence, with the Cape Fear River expected to crest on Sept. 22.

Aerial photographs show widespread devastation to farms and industrial sites across wide swaths of eastern North Carolina, with tell-tale trails of rainbow-colored sheen indicating potential contamination visible on top of the black floodwaters.

However, conditions remain so bad more than five days after Florence made landfall that the N.C. Department of Environmental Quality said its inspectors have been unable to visit the hardest-hit areas or collect samples of the floodwater for lab testing. The agencys regional office in Fayetteville had 1 foot of water inside, while other locations were without electricity.

DEQ is waiting for travel conditions to improve  before we can safely inspect the damage reported by farmers to the hog lagoons, said Megan Thorpe, spokeswoman for the state environmental agency. Personally, our staff are facing damage to their homes and those who evacuated are trying to get back. Many staff are helping their colleagues with cleanup.

State inspectors were able to make it to Sutton on Sept. 18, and to collect samples from the area around the breached coal-ash landfill. Sutton Lake is now used for public recreation, including fishing and boating.

Duke Energy said on Sept. 19, that water samples collected by its employees and tested at the companys own lab showed no evidence of a coal ash impact to Sutton Lake or the Cape Fear River.

Thorpe said state environmental regulators were waiting on the results of their own testing before determining whether there were any violations of clean-water-quality rules.

Despite Dukes claims of no evidence of environmental harm to Sutton Lake, the companys own lab results show chemicals contained in coal ash were detected in wetlands immediately adjacent to the shoreline. An accompanying map shows the sample Duke employees tested from Sutton Lake was collected from the opposite side of the reservoir.

Dukes handling of its ash waste has faced intense scrutiny since a drainage pipe collapsed under a waste pit at an old plant in Eden in 2014, triggering a massive spill that coated 70 miles of the Dan River in gray sludge. The utility later agreed to plead guilty to nine Clean Water Act violations and pay $102 million in fines and restitution for illegally discharging pollution from ash dumps at five North Carolina power plants. It plans to close all its ash dumps by 2029.

At a different power plant near Goldsboro, three old coal-ash dumps capped with soil were inundated by the Neuse River. Duke said they had no indication those dumps at the H.F. Lee Power Plant were leaking ash into the river.

Staff from the Waterkeeper Alliance, an environmental advocacy group, visited the site by boat on Sept. 19, and took photographs and collected samples of gray-colored sludge and water that they said was washing off into the floodwaters. The group said the samples would be analyzed by a private lab to determine whether the gray muck contained coal ash.

State officials said they also have received reports that the earthen dam at one hog lagoon in Duplin County had breached over the weekend, spilling feces and urine. According to figures released on Sept. 19, four other lagoons had some structural damage, 17 had been flooded by nearby rivers and 21 were so full they overflowed. Large mounds of manure are also typically stored at poultry farms.

About 3.4 million chickens and turkeys and 5,500 hogs have been killed in flooding from Florence as rising North Carolina rivers swamped dozens of farm buildings where the animals were being raised for market, according to state officials.

An environmental threat is also posed by human waste as low-lying municipal sewage plants flood. On Sunday, the Cape Fear Public Utility Authority reported that more than 5 million gallons of partially treated sewage had spilled into the Cape Fear River after power failed at its treatment plant.
Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland speaks to the media as she arrives at the Office of the United States Trade Representative in Washington on Sept. 11. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)

Freeland Resumes NAFTA Talks in Washington as Congress Grows Restless

Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland is back in Washingtonand back in search of a way to bridge the divide thats keeping Canada out of a new North American free trade pact.

Freeland flew back to the U.S. capital Sept. 18 as a prominent congressional ally of President Donald Trump made it clear that American lawmakers are growing weary of what they see as Canadian intransigence.

House of Representatives majority whip Steve Scalise (R-La.) is warning of growing frustration on Capitol Hill with what he calls Canadas negotiating tactics.

Trade observers say that while many in Congress want Canada to be part of a three-way trade deal, they may not be willing to sacrifice an agreement in principle between Mexico and the United States negotiated earlier this year.

That deal is widely seen to require congressional approval before Dec. 1 in order to survive the arrival of an incoming Mexican government whose supporters have mixed feelings about the deal.

Canada, meanwhile, has been pushing back against deadlines declared by the Trump administrationfirst the end of August, then the end of September.

While we would all like to see Canada remain part of this three-country coalition, there is not an unlimited amount of time for it to be part of this new agreement, Scalise said in a statement.

Mexico negotiated in good faith and in a timely manner, and if Canada does not co-operate in the negotiations, Congress will have no choice but to consider options about how best to move forward and stand up for American workers.

Freeland said Canada has been negotiating in good faith throughout the process, which is about to enter its 14th month.

From the outset of these modernization negotiations, Canada has been extremely co-operative, she said on Sept. 18. Canada is very good at negotiating trade deals. Canada is very good at finding creative compromises. We have been extremely engaged.

Negotiators have been working extremely hard and are committed to doing the necessary work to reach an agreement, she addedbut they arent about to settle for just any agreement.

Its my duty to stand up for the national interest and I will always do that.

Trump, for his part, sounded a familiar note, accusing Canada of having long taken advantage of the United States even as he sang the praises of his countrys northern neighbour.

We love Canada. We love it, he told a news conference. Love the people of Canada, but they are in a position that is not a good position for Canada. They cannot continue to charge us 300 percent tariff on dairy products, and thats what theyre doing.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has vowed to protect Canadas so-called supply management system for dairy and poultry products against U.S. demands for greater access by its farmers to Canadas dairy market. Sources say Canada has offered some limited concessions on access while also ring-fencing the system itself.

Supply management has been a big issue in the provincial election campaign in Quebec, home to about half of Canadas dairy farms. Quebec Liberal Leader Philippe Couillard has warned there will be serious political consequences if there is any further dismantling of the protections for dairy farmers through NAFTA negotiations.

That has some trade watchers suspicious that Ottawa may be trying to get past Oct. 1, which is election day in Quebec, as well as a congressional deadline.

From The Canadian Press
Ghana's President Nana Akufo-Addo (C) speaks to Chinese leader Xi Jinping (not pictured) during their meeting at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on Sept. 1, 2018. (Nicolas Asfouri/AFP/Getty Images)

Ghana Officials Question Chinas Ambitions in Bauxite Mining Plan

Ghana is a country rich in natural resources, including crude oil, gold, diamonds, and minerals such as manganese and bauxite, and Chinaone of the West African countrys biggest investorshas set its sights on those valuable products.

The investments are part of Beijings ambitious development project known as One Belt, One Road (OBOR, also known as Belt and Road), announced in 2013 as a plan to build up trade routes linking China, Southeast Asia, Africa, Europe, and Latin America.

While Beijing has claimed that the initiative is a bid to enhance regional connectivity, many observers say that what China really intends to achieve with OBOR is a grab for dominance in global affairs through a Beijing-centered trading network.

In July, Ghanas Parliament approved a Master Project Support Agreement (MPSA) between Ghana and Chinas state-run Sinohydro Corporation, according to Ghana Web. Under the agreement, Sinohydro will provide $2 billion of infrastructure projects, including roads, bridges, hospitals, and housing, in exchange for rights to mine Ghanas refined bauxite deposits in the Atewa and Nyinahin Forest Reservesanother mineral-rich forest in the Ashanti region of Ghana.

The Atewa Forest, about 26,000 hectares (about 64,250 acres) in size, is considered a crown jewel of Ghanas biodiversity, as the forest holds over 100 species of plants, 230 species of birds, and at least 50 species of mammals. The forest, which is the source of three major rivers in the region, also provides drinking water to more than a million residents in Accra.

Bauxite is a clay rock that can be refined to produce aluminum. Bauxite isnt economical to mine in the United States, because it uses so much electricity, which is relatively costly in the United States. Thus, considerable alumina production has moved abroad.

Kojo Yankah, the founder of the African University College of Communicationslocated in Ghanas capital of Accraand a former minister under former Ghanaian President Jerry John Rawlings, recently spoke of his concern that the Atewa Forest could soon be lost to China.

It is not just the land. There will be a time when Im sure there will be police guards in the area, no Ghanaian should enter there because it doesnt belong to us. It is happening in other African countries, thats where my concern is, Yankah said in a keynote speech at an annual public relations event held in Accra, according to a Sept. 19 report by news site Ghana Web.

I have no problem with a government that wants money. My problem is with what youre exchanging the money with, Yankah said, expressing worries that the Atewa Forest could be exploited.

The Chinese regime explicitly states that a major goal for OBOR is investment and control of foreign mineral deposits, which will power the growth of different Chinese industries. For example, China has controlled cobalt mines in Congo that are being used to make electric car batteries. New energy vehicles (NEVs) are among the 10 tech sectors that Beijing has targeted for development, as part of the regimes plans to turn China into a high-tech manufacturing hub.

According to statistics provided by Chinas Ministry of Natural Resources, in the first half of 2017, Chinese companies signed 17 acquisition deals of foreign mines with a total value of over $10 billion. Many of Chinas OBOR projects have come under scrutiny for saddling developing countries with heavy debt.

Chinas most recent infrastructure and mining deal in Ghana has generated strong opposition among Ghanaian officials, academics, and local residents.

Potential environmental damage remains the primary concern. A Sept. 19 editorial published by Ghana Web called on current Ghana president Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo to review the history of Sinohydro, the companys mining plan, and how it plans to manage mine tailings, the ore waste of mines. If not, the article warned, Sinohydro is going to leave our land naked after they are done shipping our bauxite.

At the Atwima Mponua District, where the Nyinahin Forest is located, local leaders and residents complained that even though mining in the area would begin soon, they hadnt yet signed a memorandum of understanding on their socio-economic demands to ensure that their communities would benefit from the mining, according to a Aug. 29 article on environment news site ENA Ghana.

Some farmers also complained that cocoa trees had been cut down without prior notice, according to ENA Ghana. They demanded compensation because the trees were their only source of livelihood.

Debt Stress

Some Ghanaian officials have pointed out that the agreement with Chinas Sinohydro is, in fact, a loan in disguise.

Cassiel Ato Forson, a spokesperson for National Democratic Congress (NDC), currently the minority political party in Ghanas parliament, presented several arguments to show that the MPSA is a loan, according to a Sept. 11 article by Ghana news website Pulse. Forson noted that among the terms of the agreement is that the Ghana government is mandated to open an escrow account, and has to make sure the account has enough balance to settle debt service and repayment when due.

On Aug. 24, Reuters reported that the NDC had requested that the International Monetary Fund (IMF) review the MPSA to see if the deal will add to Ghanas debt burden.

Ghana is already sitting on a mountain of debt. Ghana Web, citing statistics from Bank of Ghana, reported that the countrys debt stood at about 154.2 billion cedis (about $32.3 billion) as of May 2018, which amounted to 63.8 percent of Ghanas GDP (gross domestic product).

IMF has recently warned of countries that are at risk of debt distress, with Ghana among a list of African nations where China holds the majority of its external debt, according to Reuters.

What could make the debt situation in Ghana direr is the fact that the $2 billion agreement is part of an overall $19 billion loan facility, according to multiple Ghana media reports. Part of the loan will be used to build a 4,000 km (about 2,485 mile) railway connecting several Ghanaian towns such as Sunyani, Techiman, and Kumasi.
Hero Neighbors Use Backhoe to Keep Roof From Blowing Away in Storm Ali

Resourceful neighbors in the Irish town of Galway used a backhoe excavator to keep the roof of a bed & breakfast from getting blown away in the ferocious winds of Storm Ali and potentially causing injuries along a busy street.

A man identified only by his first name Diego (@diamoarr) shared the video filmed by his sister @cilladiamond on Sept. 19 that shows JCB operator Graham Heanue maneuvering the backhoe into place as the roof of Renvyles Castle House B&B heaves and buckles in the heavy winds.

Neighbours to the rescue, managed to prevent the roof from blowing off and onto a busy street where it would have surely caused accidents and injuries, Diego captioned the post.

Diego said that a local man Liam Diamond came up with the unconventional idea fearing for the safety of people walking along the busy street out front.

Quick thinking from Liam Diamond to get local plant hire Graham Heanue to pin it down. Busy street out the front during the school run so were glad to be able to prevent an accident, said Diego.

Would take the government 3 months to ok that decision, joked one commenter on Twitter.

The video shows the roof lifting up and appearing as if it might blow off in high winds as Storm Ali buffeted Ireland and Britain on Sept. 19.

Footage then shows Heanue extending the mechanical arm of the excavator and placing its bucket on top of the building, holding the buckling roof in place.

Respect to everyone involved. Great stuff lads, said a Twitter commenter.

Storm Ali Wreaks Havoc

In earlier reporting, a woman died after being blown off a cliff in County Galway, Irish police confirmed.

The woman was in her 50s died after a caravan she was in was swept off the cliff in the west of Ireland on Sept. 19.

Irish police told PA, At approximately 7:45 a.m., a report was received that a caravan had blown off the cliff. A search was carried out at the scene on the beach and after a short time the body of a female in her 50s was recovered.

The woman is understood to have been a tourist who was staying at a campsite.

The incident comes as Ireland feels the brunt of Storm Ali, with winds of up to 90 mph across the country and parts of England and Scotland.

Around 200,000 homes and businesses have been left without power, according to the BBC, with an amber warning on Sept. 19 for people in Northern Ireland, Scotland, and northern England to be prepared.

The Met Office issued a yellow severe weather warning on Sept. 20, in effect until the late evening hours of Thursday.

The office cautioned that spray and flooding on roads could extend journey times, and that people should expect interruption to power supplies and other services.

Flooding of a few homes and business is likely, the Met Office also said.

UK Met Office chief meteorologist Laura Paterson said in a statement, The strongest winds will gradually ease from the west through this afternoon as Storm Ali moves quickly off north-eastward, reaching the Norwegian Sea this evening.

Through Thursday another area of low pressure will develop and approach the UK from the southwest, bringing rain and second spell of strong winds later on Thursday.

In Scotland, the Forth Road Bridge has been closed, Traffic Scotland said, with Scotland, northern Wales, and northern England set to face winds of up to 60 mph.

Rail operators shut the Highland mainline in Scotland after a freight train was derailed in the high winds.

The unsettled weather is due to remain for the rest of the week, according to the Met Office, but is expected to improve early next week.

Storm Ali is the first storm to be named by the Met Office this season.

The Epoch Times reporter John Smithies contributed to this report.
Liberal Democratic Party President Shinzo Abe receives applause from the LDP lawmakers shortly after his name was called as the winner of the ruling party presidential elections at its headquarters in Tokyo, on Sept. 20, 2018. (Koji Sasahara/AP)

Japans Abe Re-Elected as Party Head, to Stay on as PM

TOKYOJapanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was re-elected as head of his ruling Liberal Democratic Party in a landslide on Sept. 20, paving the way for up to three more years as the nations leader and a push toward a constitutional revision.

The decisive victory may embolden Abe to pursue his long-sought amendment to Japans U.S.-drafted pacifist constitution, although the hurdles remain high and doing so would carry political risks.

Its time to tackle a constitutional revision, Abe said in a victory speech.

Abe said hes determined to use his last term to pursue his policy goals to sum up Japans postwar diplomacy to ensure peace in the country.

Lets work together to make a new Japan, he said.

Abe, who has been prime minister since December 2012, has cemented control of his party and is poised to become Japans longest-serving leader in August 2021.

He has several policy challenges, including dealing with Japans aging and declining population, a royal succession in the spring, and a consumption tax hike to 10 percent he has already delayed twice.

Amid international effort to denuclearize North Korea, Abe seeks to meet with Kim Jong Un to resolve their disputes, including the decades-old problem of Japanese citizens abducted to the North. He faces Chinas increasingly assertive activity in the region, and intensifying trade friction with the U.S. that could shake his friendly relations with President Donald Trump.

Abe said he will meet with Trump next week in New York, where they attend the annual U.N. assembly, to discuss bilateral trade and the roles Japan and America should play in establishing global trade rules.

Abe renewed his commitment on Sept. 20, to push for a revision to the U.S.-drafted 1947 constitution, a decades-old pledge of the Liberal Democratic Party since its foundation in 1955 and a goal that none of Abes predecessors has been able to achieve.

Many conservatives see the constitution as a humiliation imposed on Japan following its World War II defeat. Among them was Abes grandfather, Nobusuke Kishi, who served as prime minister 1957-1960. Kishi was imprisoned as a suspected war criminal during the U.S. occupation.

Constitutional revision is divisive and its unclear whether Abe could get enough votes for passage.

For the public, the constitution is a lesser concern than issues such as pay, education, and the high cost of child care, surveys show.

If a revision is rejected in a national referendum, Abe would likely have to step down.

Its a goal that would be difficult to achieve, Abe told a news conference later on Sept. 20. Well have to walk on a thorny path.

Abe and his party want to rush a revision while their ruling coalition still holds a two-thirds supermajority in both housesa requirement to propose a revision. The next parliamentary election is due next summer.

Abe seeks to submit a draft constitution revision to a parliamentary session later this year. He is proposing to add a clause to Article 9, which bans the use of force in settling international disputes, to explicitly permit the existence of Japans military, now called the Self-Defense Force.

Abe has survived a series of scandals, including cronyism allegations against him and his wife. Despite attacks from opposition parties and criticism in the media, he has seen his support ratings bounce back to about 40 percent, considered high for a Japanese leader after nearly six years in office.

An extended term for Abe is generally seen as good news for stability and continuity.

A stable government under a strong leader is good for the economy and diplomacy, and Prime Minister Abe has established a rather significant presence in diplomacy, said Yu Uchiyama, a University of Tokyo politics professor.

But his long and strong leadership has caused a lack of political competitiveness, Uchiyama said.

The biggest concern about Japanese politics is how to restore competition in politics and reactivate democracy, Uchiyama said.

In the leadership vote on Sept. 20, Abe handily defeated his sole challenger, Shigeru Ishiba, a former defense minister. Abe won 553, or about 70 percent, of 807 votes.

Abe took 80 percent of parliamentarian votes, while support from regional rank-and-file party members was at 55 percent, though it fell within projections.

Experts see the margin of victory in regional member votes as a more accurate indicator of general public sentiment than the parliamentarian votes. Abes softer showing there means he will have to be more mindful of voices coming from outside parliament.

Abes dominance has been bolstered by the strengthening of the Prime Ministers Office, allowing him and his party executives to monopolize decisions over policies and personnel affairs, experts say. The system has accommodated Abes long reign, as many lawmakers are primarily interested in getting Abe and other senior lawmakers backing in elections.
Former head of the Catholic Church in Hong Kong, Cardinal Joseph Zen, 86, attends a news conference in Hong Kong on Feb. 9, 2018. (Bobby Yip/Reuters)

Hong Kong Cardinal Calls for Top Vatican Diplomat to Resign Over China Dealings

HONG KONGA Hong Kong cardinal who has spearheaded opposition to the Vaticans rapprochement with China has called for the Popes secretary of state to step down, saying any deal with Beijing on the appointment of bishops would amount to a betrayal of the Catholic faith.

Cardinal Joseph Zen, the most senior Catholic cleric on Chinese soil, said he believed the two sides were making a secret deal, although he acknowledged he had no connection with the Vatican and was completely in the dark.

Theyre giving the flock into the mouths of the wolves. Its an incredible betrayal, he said.

The Vatican and China have been in advanced talks this year to forge what would be a historic breakthrough and precursor to a resumption in diplomatic relations after 70 years, with Secretary of State Pietro Parolin among the chief negotiators. Zen described Parolin, the highest-ranking diplomat in the Vatican, as someone who despises heroes of faith.

He should resign, Zen told Reuters on Sept. 20 at his home on a wooded hillside on Hong Kong island.

Zen, meanwhile, stopped short of calling on Pope Francis to step down, saying: I would not come out to fight the Holy Father, that is my bottom line.

The Vatican didnt immediately respond to a request for comment on Zens remarks.

At a time when the Vatican is also under pressure for purportedly covering up a sex-abuse scandal in the United States, with one archbishop even calling for the Pope to resign, Zen suggested this China deal would further add to the churchs vulnerability.

The consequences will be tragic and long lasting, not only for the church in China, but for the whole church because it damages the credibility.

The Vatican may send a delegation to China before the end of this month. They could reach an agreement on the appointment of bishops at the meeting, a Chinese state-run newspaper reported earlier this week.

Thats has been a point of contention, as the state-sanctioned, Communist Party-supervised Catholic Patriotic Association appoints Party-controlled bishops. Meanwhile, millions of Catholics belonging to underground churches that swear loyalty to the Vatican are routinely persecuted and harassed by the Chinese regime.

The potential deal has divided communities of Catholics across China, some of whom fear greater suppression if the Vatican cedes greater control to Beijing.

Pope Francis has rejected criticism that the Holy See may be selling out Catholics to Beijings communist authorities.

Zen says he believes any deal with atheist China would deal a significant blow to Pope Francis credibility.

Its a complete surrender. Its a betrayal (of our faith). I have no other words, said Zen.

By James Pomfret & Anne Marie Roantree
The Supreme Court of Canada in Ottawa in a file photo. The legal services industry is slowly adapting to technological change. (The Canadian Press/Sean Kilpatrick)

Legal Tech Starting to Disrupt Stubborn Industry in Canada

Biggest improvements come from basic technologies

Legal services may be one of the last industries to be disrupted by technology, but the momentum is picking up.

While cutting-edge technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) improve efficiency in reading documents, the greater change is coming from relatively basic technology that handles the routine tasks involved in managing workflow, handling documents, and even digitizing information.

Attitudes are slow to change in an industry dominated by partnerships, but the pressure from clients is building, as is the desire from lawyers themselves to improve their services.

Legal tech looks to be following along the path of fintech, albeit at a slower pace.

For a decade now, Mitchell Kowalski has been unhappy about how law is being practised. He said it is still being practised like it was 1975.

The visiting professor of legal innovation at the University of Calgary is a recognized leader in Torontos burgeoning legal tech ecosystem, and has written two books on revolutionizing the legal services industry.

Theres been little impetus within the industry to cause change, and its only really been since the financial crisis, which has forced clients to think differently about how much money they want to spend on legal, Kowalski said in an interview.

Legal services has been slow to adopt technology to bring efficiencies and provide a better customer experience. Individual clients dont use legal services as frequently as they use financial services. And as corporate clients gradually adopt more technology, they start to expect as much from their lawyers.

Mat Goldstein, co-founder of legal tech company Dealmaker and practising Bay Street lawyer, draws the distinction between the advice and execution parts of legal services. Lawyers are good at delivering advice, but basic technology can greatly improve the execution of the services.

Your customers dont care what technology youre using; your customers care youre solving a problem, Goldstein said in an interview.

In the case of Willful, an online estate planning startup, it is using technology to provide a better experience, much like what fintech has brought to financial services.

When we were talking to potential investors, we would explain it as, You know, were like the Wealthsimple of estate planning, said Kevin Oulds, Willfuls founder and CEO, in an interview.

He also points out that over 56 percent of Canadian adults dont have a will and that it comes down to cost and convenience. While fintech firms provide specific functions offered by the big banks at a fraction of the cost, Oulds company does the same for estate planning.

For the majority of Canadians, they dont need to be paying $1,200 to a law firm where they have a fairly basic estate, he said.

Willful is coming up to its one-year anniversary and has created almost 2,000 legal documents to date, operating in just Ontario and Alberta.

Time is Now

According to Goldstein, a lot of legal tech companies are started by lawyers who have gotten frustrated by manual processes involved in the day-to-day work, believing there must be a better way.

Law firms have gradually been feeling more pressure, but its not like the industry is undergoing wholesale change yet. Its not quite the type of perceived threat that fintech startups posed for the big banks a few years ago.

But there has never been a better time to be an entrepreneur given the availability of technology, funding, and community support systems from business accelerators, advisers, and other like-minded entrepreneurs.

All the tools are suddenly available to solve process issues in the practice of law that were seeing solved every day in the broader market, Goldstein said. Theres a desire to improve the process, the technology is available, and were now in a generation where people are going to put those things together.

Toronto is a legal tech hotbed. Kowalski has set up a group that meets once a month called the Legal Innovators Roundtable. Its an important part of the Toronto legal tech ecosystem that keeps the innovation conversation going and attracts local and international lawyers. In addition, Ryerson University has the Legal Innovation Zone (LIZ), the first legal tech incubator focusing on building better legal services solutions.

Structural Challenges

Traditional attitudes within law firms will take time to change. The legal services industry is one that makes most of its money on hourly billing.

If your business model is based on more people billing more time, its hard to understand why you would invest in a product that lets you do the same amount of work with less people and less time, because that equals less revenue for you, Kowalski said.

Kowalski explains that because law firms are partnerships, they dont invest for the long term like a corporation would. In this respect, legal tech lags fintech, with the big banks being further along the curve of adapting to technological change. This adapting includes venture capital investments, partnerships with fintech firms, and the creation of in-house innovation teams.

Every dime that gets spent on anything in a law firm is something that comes out of a law firm partners pocket, so they dont invest for the long term, he said, adding that its harder for these partnerships to think beyond one year.

There are some exceptions, like Dentons, the worlds largest law firm, which has set up a fund that invests in legal tech.

Kowalski, who has numerous speaking engagements, said lawyers always ask him how long they have before they need to get some technology in place.

What theyre really asking me is: How long do I have to put this off? he said.



Changing peoples behaviour is very hard, and changing lawyers behaviour in particular is uniquely hard, Goldstein said.

Legal is moving to a more interactive and collaborative service, which is enabled through technology. Corporate clients should be better able to see how a deal is progressing, what costs have been incurred, and what remains to be done. Individual clients want more control over cost and greater convenience. This is a major change from law firms just coming back with the end product and a hefty bill.

Legal, compared to a lot of other areas,  has had less disruption, Oulds said. Theres so much innovation and opportunity that can make these processes better.

One consistent belief is that lawyers arent going away. Also, they should be able to focus more attention on providing advice. Experienced lawyers will still have to scope out the problem and determine the solutions.

I think in many ways the legal tech space sector will grow in ways that will resemble fintech, Goldstein said. I certainly think the practice of law five years from now looks very different.

Follow Rahul on Twitter @RV_ETBiz
Man Accused of Killing Parents and Shooting at Ex-Wife Dies After Police Shootout

A police manhunt has come to an end in Pennsylvania as a 59-year-old man wanted by police for trying to kill his ex-wife and murdering his elderly parents is dead.

The manhunt is over, the suspect is dead, said Chester County District Attorney Tom Hogan of the deceased Bruce Rogal, who was pursued by police throughout the night following the Sept. 19 shooting.

He led police on a chase. State police were then joined by SWAT team members, Hogan told reporters at a press conference at around 2:30 a.m. Thursday, according to ABC.

Hogan published a statement on Facebook, saying, There is no ongoing threat in Chester County. All law enforcement personnel involved are unhurt. It is a tragedy that the defendant killed his elderly parents. All of the first responders did a tremendous job under enormous pressure.

Bruce Rogal is dead. There is no ongoing threat in Chester County. All law enforcement personnel involved are unhurt.  Posted by Thomas Hogan on Wednesday, September 19, 2018

Hogan told reporters that Rogal receiving the divorce order was apparently what had set him off.

Rogal first went to the home of his estranged wife and fired a weapon at her six times. She was in the driveway at the time, attending to her car.

He then went to the Bellingham Retirement Community in Westchester, where his parents resided. He shot 89-year-old William Rogal and 87-year-old Nancy Rogal, before fleeing the scene and going on the run.

Pennsylvania State Police Trooper James Spencer said police pursued Rogal throughout the night, both on the ground and in the air.

Staff at the nursing home where Rogal allegedly shot his parents were locked down for hours as emergency response crews attended to the scene, NBC reported, and roadblocks were set up that stretched for miles.

Spencer said Rogal eventually drove into the neighborhood where Rogals ex-wife lives and rammed his vehicle into her house.

After he crashed into the house, a gunfire exchange happened with the pursuing troopers that were already on scene following him, Spencer said, ABC reported.

A radio call obtained by ABC reportedly said, They exchanged gunfire. They say hes armed with a rifle. There are helicopters above saying that the doors are still closed on the vehicle.

Spencer told reporters Rogal had posed a threat.

Already killed two people, heightened security. It is an active investigation, but we did exchange gunfire with him, Spencer said.

First aid was administered at the scene, Spencer said, but he did not reveal Rogals cause of death.

Rogals ex-wife was unharmed.
Maryland Rite Aid Warehouse Shooting: 3 Dead, Suspect Reportedly a Woman

Maryland officials said that three people were shot and killed at a Rite Aid distribution warehouse on Sept. 20.

The Harford County Sheriffs Office tweeted, Deputies were dispatched to the reported shooting at 9:09 a.m. It added: We can confirm there was a shooting in the area of Spesutia Road and Perryman Road. Multiple victims. The situation is still fluid.

NBC News reported that the suspect is a woman, and NBCs Pete Williams said the suspect is down. Her identity was not disclosed.

BREAKING: Maryland shooting suspect is a woman, and she is down, and the shooting incident at a Rite Aid facility is over, multiple law enforcement sources tell @PeteWilliamsNBC. pic.twitter.com/sppxjN2Vwu  MSNBC (@MSNBC) September 20, 2018

People are being asked to avoid the area outside of Perryman, located 30 miles northeast of Baltimore, the Baltimore Sun reported.

Zenith Freight Lines, TruAire, the Clorox Company, and Maines Paper & Food Service are also located at the same business park where the Rite Aid distribution center is located.

A law enforcement official also told Fox News that the suspect may have been a woman. The incident is no longer an active shooter situation as of 11:30 a.m. local time.

However, the FBI deemed it active shooter situation, The Associated Press reported.

We are closely monitoring the horrific shooting in Aberdeen. Our prayers are with all those impacted, including our first responders. The state stands ready to offer any support, Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan said on Twitter.

Church Creek Elementary School was also placed on a modified lockdown due to the shooting, the Sun reported.

The FBI and the ATF said they were responding to the shooting.

What I understand is the location is secure, said Rite Aid spokeswoman Susan Henderson to CNN. The distribution center is where products are received and processed for delivery, she added. The shooting happened adjacent to the primary building.

I, of course, thought it was far off or, thats like down the road or something, right? Colleen Hendrickson, who lives nearby, told CNN. No, its right outside. Its right on the doorstep.

Its really just usually very calm, and this is the most chaotic Ive ever seen it, she added. Its very scary when its just right there on your doorstep because you can see a billion news reports about shooters, about emergency instances, and it still doesnt make it real to you.

Other details about the shooting are not clear. This story will be updated later.
File photo: U.S. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, on Dec 7, 2016 at the Capitol in Washington, DC. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)

Mattis Dismisses Reports He May Be Leaving Trump Administration

WASHINGTONU.S. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis on Sept. 19 flatly dismissed reports suggesting he may be leaving President Donald Trumps administration in the coming months, saying flatly: I wouldnt take it seriously at all.

How many times have we been through this, now, just since Ive been here? It will die down soon, and the people who started the rumor will be allowed to write the next rumor, too, Mattis told reporters at the Pentagon.

Just the way the town is, he added. Keep a sense of humor about it.

The remarks were the most direct by Mattis to date about intensifying rumors about his future as Trump approaches the half-way mark of his four-year term amid speculation about changes to his cabinet after upcoming November mid-term elections.

Mattis has become a focus in media stories in recent weeks about the Trump administration, particularly after the release of a book this month by Watergate reporter Bob Woodward that portrayed Mattis privately disparaging Trump to associates.

Mattis strongly denied making any such remarks. Trump on Sept. 5 said he defense chief would remain in his job, adding: Hell stay right there. Were very happy with him. Were having a lot of victories.

A New York Times report on Sept. 15 said Trump had soured on his defense secretary, weary of unfavorable comparisons to Mattis as the adult in the room.

It also noted this years arrival in the White House of Mira Ricardel, who now has the powerful post of deputy national security adviser and who current and former officials tell Reuters is believed to dislike Mattis.

Western officials privately extol Mattis, whose standing among NATO allies has risen as they become increasingly bewildered by Trumps policies on trade and Iran and disoriented by his outreach to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Inside-the-Beltway Journalism

Mattis has a dim view of journalism about inside-the-beltway politics in Washington, using the word fiction to describe Woodwards book and similar reporting about closed-door conversations among U.S. national security leaders.

Asked about the recent reports speculating about his departure, Mattis said: Its like most of those kinds of things in this town.

Somebody cooks up a headline. They then call to a normally chatty class of people. They find a couple of other things to put in. They add the rumors Next thing you know, youve got a story, he said.

Still, Mattis is not political by nature, and previously made no secret of the fact that he was not looking to become secretary of defenseor even return to Washingtonwhen Trump was elected.

The retired Marine general had stepped down from the military in 2013 and taken a job at Stanford University. He told his Senate confirmation hearing last year he was enjoying a full life west of the Rockies when the call came about the position.

After answering questions about his future, Mattis was asked whether he never considered life after the Pentagon. Mattis joked: Of course I dont think about leaving.

I love it here, he said with a smile. Im thinking about retiring right here. Ill get a little place here down on the Potomac.

By Phil Stewart
More Possible Victims of California Surgeon Grant Robicheaux Found

Investigators have found three more possible victims of California surgeon Grant Robicheaux and his girlfriend after they were charged with drugging and raping one intoxicated woman, and attempting to rape another.

Michelle Van Der Linden, a spokeswoman for the Orange County district attorneys office, told The Associated Press that numerous people have called prosecutors since the initial charges against Robicheaux, 38, and Cerissa Laura Riley, 31, were announced on Tuesday, Sept. 18.

Processing the calls, investigators identified three more possible victims.

District Attorney Tony Rackauckas said the investigation of further victims includes examining thousands of videos and images on Robicheauxs phone.

Some videos show women who appear to be highly intoxicated beyond the ability to consent or resist, and theyre barely responsive to the defendants sexual advances, Rackauckas said.

He noted that the involvement of a woman in the alleged crimes is significant.

The second defendant, being a female, is key, Rackauckas said. A woman purporting to be his girlfriend clearly played a significant role in disarming the victims, making them feel comfortable and safe.

Alleged Crimes in 2016

Robicheaux and Riley have been charged in two 2016 incidents: allegedly getting one woman drunk and raping her on April 10, 2016, and trying to do the same thing to another woman on Oct. 2, 2016. The second woman woke up and screamed for help. A neighbor heard her and called the police.

The first woman went to the police the day after getting raped and underwent a forensic exam. She had been told she was going to a boat party but Robicheaux and Riley took her to their apartment.

An investigation by the police led to a search warrant, which police executed in January of this year and found two illegally owned assault rifles and four other firearms.

When the charges were announced, officials said there may be hundreds of other victims, noting that the defendants often traveled together to various festivals and locations since 2015, including the Burning Man festival, the Dirtybird Campout festival, and landmarks near Page, Arizona.

Law enforcement seeking potential additional victims of Grant Robicheaux and Cerissa Riley, who are accused of sexually assaulting two women by use of drugs in Newport Beach. Please call 714-347-8794 if you have additional information https://t.co/xXNu2tonv8 @NewportBeachPD pic.twitter.com/sp927r9rtz  Orange County District Attorney Tony Rackauckas (@OCDATony) September 18, 2018

Besides being a surgeon, Robicheaux is well-known for appearing on the Bravo television show Online Dating Rituals of the American Male.

Defense attorneys said the suspects deny the claims. Theyre scheduled to be arraigned on Oct. 25.

Anyone who believes they have been a victim or have information related to possible crimes committed by the couple is asked to call Supervising Investigator Eric Wiseman at 714-347-8794

From NTD.tv
Houses sit in floodwater caused by Hurricane Florence on the outskirts of Lumberton, N.C., on Sept. 17, 2018. (Jason Miczek/Reuters)

More Than 53,000 Carolinas Customers Without Power After Florence

More than 53,600 U.S. homes and businesses, mostly in North Carolina and South Carolina, were still without power on Sept. 19, after Hurricane Florence hit the North Carolina coast last week, power companies said.

That was down from a peak of 1.9 million customers that lost power during the storm.

Duke Energy Corp, the biggest utility in the area, said power had been restored to 1.6 million customers out of nearly 1.7 million customers who experienced an outage during the storm.

The company said it expects to restore power to most customers by Sept. 26.

Florence, which made landfall on Sept. 14, as a Category 1 hurricane before it was downgraded, has already killed at least 36 people, including 27 in North Carolina and eight in South Carolina.

Rivers and waterways, swollen after Florences historic deluge, rose dangerously across the Carolinas, closing roads, inundating communities, hindering rescue and repair efforts and preventing evacuees from returning home.
Pentagon: 13,000 Department of Defense Personnel in Florence Response

The Air Force general who commands NORAD says approximately 13,000 Defense Dept. personnel have been working on the federal response to the hurricane that came ashore in North Carolina days ago and continues to cause havoc in the Southeast.

Gen. Terrence OShaughnessy praised the military response, saying it is working seamlessly with FEMA, as well as state and local efforts. However, he expressed concern about flooding that could continue to claim lives and destroy property over the next few days.

OShaughnessy singled out the U.S. Coast Guard for praise as leading the search and rescue effort. But, he also said North and South Carolina have been using their helicopters and rescue teams effectively.

He said the Defense Departments high water vehicles have been used to rescue hundreds of residents, and said they are probably the most used asset in the post-hurricane rescue effort.
Law enforcement and emergency personnel gather outside the office of District Judge Daniel Shimshock's office in Masontown, Pa., on Sept. 19, 2018. (Mike Jones/Washington/AP)

Police Kill Gunman Who Shot 4 in Pennsylvania Court Lobby

A gunman opened fire outside a crowded Pennsylvania courtroom, shooting at police and others before an officer fired multiple shots at him, killing him.

Fayette County District Attorney Richard Bower said on Sept. 19, that a German Township police officer shot and killed the gunman after he entered the lobby in Masontown with a handgun drawn and opened fire injuring four people. Bower declined to name the gunman, saying only that he was due in court on charges related to a recent domestic violence incident.

Bower said Masontown police Sgt. R. Scott Miller first encountered the gunman and was injured when he exchanged gunfire with the shooter. When Miller took cover, Bower said the gunman proceeded to fire shots injuring two men and one woman.

In this case, as is so often the case, the German Township police officer ran toward the danger, not away. He protected over 30 to 40 people from injury or death, Bower said.

These police officers and these emergency management people risk their lives every day  and today they all were a shining light to our community, he added.

Bower declined to say whether any of the civilian victims were related to the domestic violence allegations. He said the gunman was facing charges of strangulation, aggravated assault, terroristic threats and simple assault. He said there was a protection of abuse order against the gunman in the strangulation case.

A Fayette County 911 center supervisor confirmed the three civilian victims were taken to the Ruby Memorial Hospital in Morgantown, West Virginia, for treatment. Amy Johns, public affairs director at the hospital, said on Sept. 19, they had received a 47-year-old male, 35-year-old male and 39-year-old female from the shooting and all were in fair condition as of about 5:45 p.m.

Masontown Mayor Toni Petrus was at the hospital on Sept. 19, checking on Sgt. Miller. She said he was in good condition and was being treated for non-life-threatening injuries.

State Police troop commander Lt. Steven C. Dowlin said that even though the shooting happened near the office of District Judge Daniel Shimshock, neither he nor his staff appeared to be the intended target of the shooter.

Dowlin said the judge, assistant district attorneys, lawyers, police officers and others were in the courtroom near the lobby when shots were fired.

Joyce Royster was in the courtroom at the building on Sept. 19. She told WTAE there were dozens of people inside the courtroom when the shooting started just outside. She said people fled the courtroom as the shooter started to move inside and took shelter in offices and other courtrooms.

Dowlin said this is the second mass shooting that state police have responded to in Fayette County this year. He said troopers stopped a young individual at a Uniontown High School from carrying out a shooting.

Its becoming way too common, he said.

By Claudio Lauer
Policemen and a group of migrants stand on the platform at the Swedish end of the bridge between Sweden and Denmark in Malmo, Sweden, on Nov. 12, 2015. (Stig-Ake Jonsson/AFP/Getty Images)

Report Slamming Swedens Border Controls Allegedly Suppressed for Fear of Influencing Elections

STOCKHOLMSweden has among the worst border controls in Europe, according to a reportshared with a newspaperthat may have been suppressed to prevent the findings from influencing recent Swedish elections.

Last year, EU inspectors visited Sweden, interviewed border police officers and compiled a report that is still classified, but was shared with reporters from the Kvallsposten newspaper. The report, Evaluation of Sweden in the Field of Management of the External Borders, levels brutal criticism against Swedish border control, Kvallsposten reports.

Swedish controls are undermanned, the staff is poorly trained, and their working methods inappropriate, increasing the risk of returning jihadist extremists who are Swedish citizens or have permanent residency slipping through undetected, according to the report.

One source who spoke to Kvallsposten and was formerly employed by the border police, confirmed these findings.

The report shows what we already know: This is a two-bit operation, the source said.

After an unprecedented influx of refugees and migrants in 2015, the extremely generous Swedish policy changed almost overnight, and border controls were implemented.

Sweden, like most European countries, is part of the Schengen Agreement, which means that people usually move freely between member states without border checks. But the border checks were mostly for show, according to Kvallspostens source.

No Real Border Control

There is no real border control, that is, no database checks. Only ID checks, the source said.

Border-control agents in the south of Sweden, which is the access point for most migrants who try to get into the country from the rest of Europe, told Kvallsposten that they think the EU border control agency Frontex should help Sweden secure its borders. The agency could act as it did with crisis-stricken Greece, which is a main destination for migrants smuggled across the Mediterranean from the Middle East and Africa into Europe.

Apart from them not being able to protect society, the southern border control sources also said that some asylum-seekers are being wrongfully detained because the staff isnt properly trained.

Compounding matters, several police officers told Kvallsposten that the police management had commented internally that the report was too sensitive and would be kept under wraps until after the elections. Migration, crime, and border control were all big election issues.

Liselott Strom, head of the border control unit of the Stockholm police, denied to Kvallsposten that she had said that the report was to be suppressed and that the final report is still pending. Minister for Justice and Home Affairs Morgan Johansson has been informed of the preliminary findings but hasnt yet commented, according to the Ministry of Justice.

Johan Westerholm, an investigative journalist with deep connections within the ruling Social Democratic Party, commented on the report in an article on his site Ledarsidorna.se. He wrote that the weakening of border controls goes back farther than the current government, but said he holds Johansson responsible for much of the dismantling of Swedish border security.

The Minister for Justice has a long history of not wanting to keep Swedens borders safe, including not wanting to work with the rest of Europe in the fight against terrorism, Westerholm wrote. Since 2010, when Johansson became chairman of the Justice Committee, the tempo and the interest for these issues were lowered radically.  All initiatives to sharpen legislation were rejected.

Westerholm finds it strange that none of the other partiesincluding the Sweden Democrats, whose No. 1 issue is limiting migrationhave reacted to the lax policies.

Whats happening should be regarded, by extension, as a quiet revolution, destabilizing Swedish society, he wrote. A quiet revolution carried out in tacit agreement.
San Jose Airport was selected to test new perimeter intrusion detection and deterrence technologies. (Map data @2018 Google)

San Jose Airport Selected to Test New Intrusion Detection Technologies

Mineta San Jose International Airport is one of two airports selected to test new perimeter intrusion detection and deterrence technologies, Reps. Zoe Lofgren (D-San Jose), and Eric Swalwell (D-Castro Valley), announced Sept. 19.

The Transportation Security Administration selected the San Jose airport along with Miami International Airport based on an assessment of sites across the country.

The initiative is part of H.R. 1625, the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2018, which allocated up to $10 million for equipment testing as a result of a provision by Swalwell included in the bill.

Since my time on the Homeland Security Committee during my first term, Ive known that we absolutely must update our thinking about how we protect airports to keep America safer, Swalwell said in a statement.

Recently, San Jose International Airport has been the site of various security breaches most notably in April 2014 when a Santa Clara boy traveled to Hawaii in the wheel well of a plane.

Then, in August 2014, serial stowaway Marilyn Hartman was able to fly from San Jose to Los Angeles without a boarding pass.

As the TSA tests perimeter equipment and technology, it will consider a wide range of technologies including installing, testing, and analyzing video cameras, analytics software, laser, fence, and unattended ground sensors, and radar, microwave, and passive Infra-Red sensors, among others.

By Nuria Marquez
Snochia Moseley IDd as Maryland Rite Aid Warehouse Shooting Suspect: Reports

Snochia Moseley was identified as the suspect in the mass shooting that left three people dead on Sept. 20 at a Rite Aid distribution warehouse in Maryland.

NBC News, citing local officials, reported that Moseley, 26, was the shooter. Moseley, a temporary employee from Baltimore, shot herself in the head after the shooting.

Officials said that she came to work as usual at 8 a.m. local time and began shooting around one hour later, the report said.

She turned the gun on herself after killing three. Posted by Daily Mail on Thursday, September 20, 2018

Investigators are now looking for a motive. Harford County Sheriff Jeffrey R. Gahler said that it was not her first day at work, and he added that its not clear how well Moseley knew her victims.

Two of the victims died on the scene, and one person died later at the hospital, NBC reported.

The Harford County Sheriffs Office tweeted, Deputies were dispatched to the reported shooting at 9:09 a.m. It added: We can confirm there was a shooting in the area of Spesutia Road and Perryman Road. Multiple victims. The situation is still fluid.

Zenith Freight Lines, TruAire, the Clorox Company, and Maines Paper & Food Service are also located at the same business park where the Rite Aid distribution center is located.

A law enforcement official also told Fox News that the suspect may have been a woman. The incident is no longer an active shooter situation as of 11:30 a.m. local time.

The distribution center is where products are received and processed for delivery, said Rite Aid spokeswoman Susan Henderson to CNN. The shooting happened adjacent to the primary building.

Locals Stunned

I, of course, thought it was far off or, thats like down the road or something, right? Colleen Hendrickson, who lives nearby, told CNN. No, its right outside. Its right on the doorstep.

Its really just usually very calm, and this is the most chaotic Ive ever seen it, she added. Its very scary when its just right there on your doorstep because you can see a billion news reports about shooters, about emergency instances, and it still doesnt make it real to you.

Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan commented on the incident.

We are closely monitoring the horrific shooting in Aberdeen. Our prayers are with all those impacted, including our first responders. The State stands ready to offer any support, Hogan tweeted.

Aberdeen and Perryman are located about 30 miles northeast of Baltimore.

Agents from the Baltimore offices of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) and the FBI also responded, the agencies said.

The shooting occurred a day after a man shot and wounded four people, including a police officer, at a Pennsylvania court building before he was killed by police, according to Pennsylvania State Police.

Reuters contributed to this report
Strawberries Spook Australia Into Raising Jail Terms for Food Tampering

SYDNEYAustralia on Sept.20 increased the jail term to 15 years for anyone convicted of contaminating foodstuffs as a scare over needles found in strawberries and other fruits gripped the country.

Police are investigating more than 100 reports of sewing needles found in strawberries, which have forced farmers to dump fruit as demand plummets, and cast a shadow over an industry worth A$160 million ($116 million).

Australias parliament passed legislation on Sept.20 to increase the maximum prison term to 15 years from 10 years for anyone convicted of tampering with food, in line with offences such as financing terrorism.

It also criminalized hoax claims, making them punishable by up to 10 years in prison.

Thats how seriously I take this, Prime Minister Scott Morrison told reporters in Royalla, a rural town 35 km (21 miles) south of the capital Canberra.

The legislation was rushed through in less than day as lawmakers try to repair public trust in the strawberry industry.

Politicians across the political divide spent much of the day promoting the industry, with Morrison promising to cook a strawberry curry.

Strawberry farmers have welcomed the action, saying they faced financial ruin if demand did not recover quickly.

Consumers remained wary, forcing retailers in Australia and New Zealand to pull strawberries from store shelves.

Australia supermarket giant Woolworths said on Thursday it had also withdrawn sewing needles from its shelves nationally.

Weve taken the precautionary step of temporarily removing sewing needles from sale in our stores. The safety of our customers is our top priority, a Woolworths spokeswoman said in an emailed statement.

($1 = 1.3782 Australian dollars)

By Colin Packham
Suspect Arrested in Stabbing Death of Woman in Washington DC

Police have released surveillance camera footage of a suspect who allegedly stabbed and killed a female jogger in Washington D.C.s Logan Circle.

Wendy Martinez, 35, was stabbed several times on Sept. 18, reported Fox5. On Sept. 20, a person was taken into custody in connection with the murder.

Martinez was jogging in Logan Circle at around 8 p.m. when a man stabbed her in the neck. She stumbled away from the person and went inside a nearby restaurant, and the Fox5 report said that she tried to alert other customers to her attackers location.

We write to share the very sad news of the tragic death of Wendy Karina Martinez (CLAS'2012), who was attacked last night in Logan Circle. Our thoughts and prayers are with Wendy and her family and friends at this terribly difficult time https://t.co/hHDU4AdbYB pic.twitter.com/fic8Ispla8  Georgetown CLAS (@GeorgetownCLAS) September 19, 2018

The jogger was rushed to a hospital, where she was later pronounced dead.

Police said that they dont believe she knew her attacker, and the knife that was allegedly used in the murder was found by investigators.

It is more likely a random act than anything else, but were going to look at all possibilities, Police Chief Peter Newsham said, Fox News reported. He said that people in the restaurant did the best they could to say the womans life.

I was scared. I saw her fall down, and then I see a hole in her neck from the stab wound. My customers were screaming, and there was blood all over her face and neck, said the manager of the restaurant to NBC Washington.

I saw her fall down, and then I see a hole in her neck from the stab wound. My customers were screaming, and there was blood all over her face and neck, he told The Washington Times.

Newsham said officials did not yet have a motive in the case, saying that it is unsettling and that the attack is likely random.

He also said that such incidents sometimes happen in large cities, WTOP reported.

Recently Engaged

Her family said that she and her boyfriend got engaged just one week prior to her death.

Wendy Karina Martinez was the light of our lives. Not only was she an avid runner, but she was a devout Christian, a wonderful friend, and a driven professional. Everything you hope that a daughter and a friend could be, her family said on Sept. 19, NBC Washington reported. She was also excited to be planning her upcoming wedding to her fiance, Daniel Hincapie. They were engaged just last week.

Simply put, Wendy was fearfully and wonderfully made! Now we know she has found the one whom her soul loved. (Song of Solomon 3:4), the statement added.

She was the chief of staff for the firm FiscalNote.

The entire FiscalNote family is shocked and deeply saddened to learn that Wendy Martinez, our Chief of Staff, was killed last night, the company said on Sept. 19. Wendy was an invaluable member of our team and a vibrant member of the community. Our thoughts and prayers are with Wendys family and friends.

A woman who jogs in the area was shocked by the brazen attack.

As a runner, its pretty terrifying. Youd think running on lit streets, you would be safe, but thats mind-boggling, one woman said.
The Insurance Policy

Why the FBI does not want to reveal its sources and methods in the Trump investigation

Commentary

Ever since the release of FBI text messages revealing the existence of an insurance policy, the term has been the subject of wide speculation.

Some have said that the insurance policy was the FISA spy warrant used to monitor Trump campaign adviser Carter Pageand, by extension, other members of the Trump campaign. This interpretation is too narrow and fails to capture the underlying meaning of the text.

The Insurance Policy was the actual process of establishing the TrumpRussia collusion narrative.

The so-called Steele dossier, which was paid for by Hillary Clintons presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee, served as the foundation for the Russia narrative.

The intelligence community, led by CIA Director John Brennan and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, used the Dossier as a launching pad for creating their Intelligence Community Assessment.

This report, which was presented to Obama in December 2016, despite NSA Director Mike Rogers having only moderate confidence in the assessment, became one of the core pieces of the narrative that Russia interfered with the 2016 elections.

Through intelligence community leaks, and in collusion with willing reporters, the narrative that Russia helped Trump win the elections was aggressively pushed throughout 2017.

However, with the declassification order given by President Donald Trump last Monday, we are expected to learn significantly more about the creation of the Insurance Policy soon.

A lot of people think the Insurance Policy was getting a FISA warrant on Carter Page, Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) told Fox News Laura Ingraham in a Sept. 17 interview. We actually believe it was more explicit than that.

We believe it was actually that the Insurance Policy was specifically what they did that still is redacted that the President has said that hes going to declassify, he said.

Was Papadopoulos the Target of a FISA Warrant?

I have long thought it is probable that media reports in the BBC and The Guardian of two failed FISA application attempts made in June and July 2016 were accurate.

Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) adds credibility to the idea that there were FISA applications in the summer of 2016, as evidenced by information he requested regarding those potential applications in a June 28, 2017 letter:

Media reports along with the FISCs 2016 annual report provide reason to believe that, in the course of these investigations, the FBI and Justice Department submitted proposed FISA applications that the FISC preliminarily evaluated and stated it would reject. The FBI and Justice Department would then modify and resubmit them.

The 2016 FISC Report  states that in 2016 the FISC denied nine applications or certifications, and denied in part or modified 365 orders.

Ive also thought those FISA applications may have targeted Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos, who became the subject of a series of unusual encounters in early 2016

This would explain why there is no mention of Papadopoulos anywhere in the Steele Dossier, unlike Carter Page, Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort, personal lawyer Michael Cohen, former National Security Advisor Gen. Michael Flynn and campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, who are all listed in the Steele Dossier.

This also explains why the FBI didnt bother to interview Papadopoulos until Jan. 27, 2017.

Carter Page Surveillance

We know for a fact that Trump campaign adviser Carter Page was targeted in a FISA application.

Page was not an agent of a foreign powerhe was simply a convenient FISA warrant target.

The segments specified for redaction by the President within the June 2017 FISA renewal on Carter Page are pages 10-12 and 17-34. Page 10 begins on page 301 of the combined FISA documents. The assertion is made that the FBI believes the Russian Governments efforts to influence the 2016 presidential election were being coordinated with Page.

Page, who has resolutely denied these claims, continues to remain a free man and has had no charges filed against him.

Its almost certain that whatever redacted reasoning was used by the FBI in making their assertions will appear obviously false in light of current information.

Additionally, this redacted section may highlight Pages assistance in the Evgeny Buryakov Casea case in which Page provided assistance to the FBIin a fashion that is somewhat less than forthcoming.

The second set of redacted pages continues to refer to Page, but the focus shifts to the Steele Dossier along with the use of circular reporting.

Its entirely possible other sources will be revealed. Sources such as scholar Stefan Halper, who was used by the FBI as a planted spy. Halpers contact with Page began on July 11, 2016, just four days after Pages July 2016 Moscow trip.

Halper stayed in contact with Page for the next fourteen months. Halpers interactions with Page abruptly ended exactly as the final FISA Warrant on Page expired.

Should Halpers name not appear in the unredacted pages of the FISA renewal, he will certainly be present in the underlying FBI reports of interviews prepared in connection with all Carter Page FISA applications, which were also ordered for declassification by Trump.

Nunes has repeatedly noted the exclusion of exculpatory information regarding Page. This probably relates to Pages role in the Buryakov Case. We will likely see that the information put forth is only a partial representation of what the FBI actually knew.

A document not on the presidential declassification list that should be is Carter Pages March 2, 2016, FBI Interview. This interview took place when Page was meeting with attorneys at the Southern District of New York on the Buryakov Case. It likely presents Page in a different light than the manner in which the FBI presented Page to the FISA Court.

One other important point to bear in mind. The FISA cited for declassification is the third and final renewal from June 2017. The information put forth will likely prove to be a repetitious rehash of misinformation the FBI repeatedly presented before the FISA Court for nine monthsdespite knowing that much of it was materially inaccurate, comprised of oppositional research, and funded by the DNC and Clinton campaign.

Secrecy

There are many reasons why the Intelligence Community doesnt want the redactions made publicand why they are so protective of Sources & Methods.

The Steele Dossier will be shown as the primary evidence used throughout the FISA. It was the Source despite its near-exclusive reliance on unverified second- and third-hand accounts. The Methods used to establish the Russia narrative will be made apparent.

We are already seeing reports that the FBI & DOJ are reluctant to completely remove all redactions as ordered. A submission of initial documents will almost certainly contain proposed redactions on the part of the agencies.

Although this effort will ultimately fail, it should come as no great surprise. Exposure of the Insurance Policy, along with its Sources and Methods, is something the FBI has been desperate to avoid.

Jeff Carlson is a CFA Charterholder. He worked for 20 years as an analyst and portfolio manager in the high-yield bond market. He runs the website TheMarketsWork.com

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
The Moment a Woman Gives Her Baby Away to Complete Stranger at Russian Airport

Russian investigators said two women were facing human trafficking charges after a young mother gave away her newborn baby to a complete stranger that she met online.

Representatives of the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation released video of the child transfer, which took place at an airport in the city of Omsk, according to local media reports. Security cameras captured the moment the little baby was given away.

The 25-year-old mother can be seen in the video holding the baby, who is wrapped in a bright pink blanket. She is accompanied by an unidentified woman carrying a red or pink bag. The companion at one point makes contact with a stranger she had met on the Internet, according to Russian news site MKRU, a junior high school teacher from St. Petersburg, while the mother walks over to the side.

Video footage shows the three women standing together, the mother cradling her infant.

The young mother holds the baby close to her face for a final heart-wrenching moment, before handing it over to the teacher.

Moments later the young mother and her companion turn to leave, while the teacher walks through the gate entrance, carrying the pink bag in one hand, and the baby in the other.

The video was published by the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation. According to local reports, the Committee said that what motivated the young mother to give up her child was supposed inability to support the child financially. Shed replied to an online announcement posted by a couple seeking to a adopt a baby, the Committee said.

The teacher was reportedly able to take the child back to St. Petersburg using false documents.

The Western-Siberian Investigation Department said it had completed an investigation, which resulted in the two women being charged.

The case has been forwarded to court for examination, local reports said.
Theft Charges Dismissed Against Woman Who Took Daughters iPhone

Charges against a Michigan mother who took her daughters iPhone away as punishment were dismissed on Tuesday, Sept. 18.

Jodie May of Grandville said she took the phone away from her 15-year-old daughter after the girl got into trouble at school.

I was just being a mom, a concerned parent and disciplining my daughter, May told WOOD-TV.

Ex-Husband Alleges Theft

Thats when Mays ex-husband got involved. He said he owned the phone and claimed what May did was a crime of theft.

May was arrested by deputies with the Ottawa County Sheriffs Office in May and faced a misdemeanor charge of larceny, which could have landed her up to 93 days in prison if convicted. Prosecutors added another similar charge just before the trial was set to start on Sept. 18, which effectively doubled the time she could have spent in jail.

Just minutes later, though, Ottawa County Assistant Prosecutor Sarah Matwiejczyk told Ottawa County District Judge Judy Mulder that they had new information. They had learned that the ex-husband didnt own the phone, the daughter did.

The mother defendant being the mother of the minor child, I believe that changes the case significantly, the assistant prosecutor said. Therefore were requesting that the charges be dismissed.

Case will be dismissed, thank you, said the judge, reported KNDO.

Matwiejczyk refused to talk to the press after the conclusion.

Mom arrested, charged for taking phone away from daughter. Today in court, there was a last-minute decision to drop the case: https://t.co/49AqzTElKk pic.twitter.com/fYSQ3ATIAc  WOOD TV8 (@WOODTV) September 18, 2018

"I think it's ridiculous," the mom said. "I can't believe I had to be put through it, my daughter had to be put through it, my family. I'm very surprised, but I'm very happy with the outcome."https://t.co/2ht5tY0UDZ  News 4, WIVB-TV (@news4buffalo) September 20, 2018

Theft charges dismissed against mom who took teen daughter's phone as punishment https://t.co/Xa7lI4T9YM pic.twitter.com/6TaVPox7aa  NBC4 Columbus (@nbc4i) September 19, 2018

Mother Surprised

May said what happened is ridiculous.

I think its ridiculous, the mom said. I cant believe I had to be put through it, my daughter had to be put through it, my family. Im very surprised, but Im very happy with the outcome.

Her lawyer, Jennifer Kuiper-Weise, added that the case illustrated problems in the court system.

The case was authorized on a probable-cause basis, and unfortunately at times there are misdemeanor cases that are not thoroughly vetted, she said. Unfortunately Miss May was a victim of that.

From NTD.tv

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Tourists leave after a tour on a canal in Venice on April 7, 2017. (Miguel Medina/AFP/Getty Images)

Tourists in Venice May Not Be Allowed to Sit Down Under New Rules

Authorities in Venice, Italy, are considering banning people from being able to sit or lie on the ground in the latest attempt to restrict unruly tourists in the city.

Mayor Luigi Brugnaro made the suggestion, saying that people breaking the rule could be fined between 50 and 500 euros.

It joins a long list of finable activities in the popular tourist destination, including for drunken behavior, dipping your toes in the canals, and snacking while walking down the street.

The new proposal could be voted on by the local council in October, but some resident groups are opposed to it.

There is such a long list of things that are forbidden in Venice there is nothing left that you can do, said Marco Gasparinetti, who leads the residents group Gruppo Aprile 25, according to the Guardian. They would need to hire an extra 5,000 officers to properly enforce everything.

Every summer there are officers who patrol the citys tourist areas to enforce the rules. Many tourists are unaware that there are special eating areas away from central hotspots especially for the purpose of sitting down and eating.

Other things the so-called angels of decorum are on the lookout for are bare-chested people, people feeding pigeons, or those who gather in groups on bridges.

Tourists are a contentious issue for Venice, with over 30 million people visiting every year. In previous years, posters have been plastered on walls reading, Tourists Go Away!!! You Are Destroying This Area.

Cruise Ships Also Affected

Many tourists arrive in Venice by cruise ship, which also has been a source of tension with locals because the ships currently pass by St. Marks Square and dock in the city.

Locals say the enormous ships are damaging the historical buildings in the city and polluting the waters.

In 2016, protesters took to the water to protest against cruise ships, using gondolas and small boats to prevent cruise ships from passing through the lagoon.

Late in 2017, Transport Minister Graziano Delrio announced that by the year 2021 these large ships will not be allowed to pass through the city.

Instead, they will have to dock in Marghera, an industrial town in the center of the Veneto region, with factories visibly belching smoke into the air.

Some have argued that Venices economy is almost entirely based on tourism, so restricting tourists in these ways will harm the city.

However, the moves follow a warning from the United Nations that unless Venice cleaned up its act it would be placed on UNESCOs list of endangered heritage sites.

In 2015, UNESCO officials said that the capacity of the city, the number of its inhabitants and the number of tourists is out of balance and causing significant damage.

Brugnaro previously said in a statement, We want it to be clear to UNESCO and the whole world that we have a solution.

This takes into account all the jobs created by the cruise industry, which we absolutely couldnt afford to lose, and we can start to work seriously on planning cruises.
Trump Administration Leaning Against Extending New START Arms Treaty

Moscow's new weapons violate New START, INF treaties, undermine arms control

Trump administration officials have expressed doubts that the 2010 New START arms-control treaty will be extended, because of concerns about Moscows failure to comply with that agreement as well as several other arms treaties.

The Pentagon, meanwhile, is moving ahead with designing a new ground-based missile to counter Russias illegal cruise missiles, which were built in violation of the 1987 Intermediate-range Nuclear Force (INF) Treaty.

Russias new strategic weapons, announced in February, are a factor in whether the United States will seek to extend New START, Andrea Thompson, undersecretary of state for arms control and international security, told a Senate hearing on Sept. 18.

No decisions been made at this time, she told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. All options are on the table.

Among the options being considered are: withdrawing from New START; re-negotiating inspection and verification provisions as part of treaty extension; or adopting a more limited and simple agreement, similar to the 2002 Moscow Treaty, that calls for significant reductions in strategic offensive arms.

Among issues to consider will be Russias decision to manufacture compliance issues regarding U.S. weapons, and the uncertainty of whether Russias recently announced strategic nuclear weapons will be held accountable under the treaty, Thompson explained in her prepared testimony.

In response to U.S. questioning of Russian treaty violations, Moscow has responded with disinformation and false counter-charges of U.S. noncompliance.

Russias response to each of these situations is to employ its standard playbook of distraction, misinformation, and counter-accusations, Thompson said.

David Trachtenberg, deputy undersecretary of defense for policy, also said the extension of New START is uncertain.

Any decision on extending the treaty will, and should be, based on a realistic assessment of whether the New START treaty remains in our national security interests, in light of overall Russian arms control behavior, Trachtenberg testified.

Trachtenberg said the arms treaty, which expires in 2021, provides for on-site inspections and monitoring that are useful and beneficial.

However, he added: That said, what I find particularly troubling is the overall nature of Russian arms-control behavior and what the Russians seem to be doing in terms of selectively complying with various provisions of treaties, and selectively non-complying with others when they feel its not in their interest.

While Moscow and Washington reached the reduced arms levels of 1,550 deployed nuclear warheads in February, Russia has launched a large-scale nuclear modernization that includes new missiles and submarines in addition to new revolutionary arms. Meanwhile, the United States is investing more than $1.2 trillion over the next 30 years to modernize its aging nuclear forces, including new ground-based missiles, new missile submarines, and a new bomber.

Russian President Vladimir Putin in February disclosed several new strategic weapons systems that violate New START. They include nuclear-armed hypersonic cruise missiles, a long-range nuclear-powered missile, and an underwater drone submarine capable of delivering a massive, multi-megaton nuclear warhead.

Under New START, Russia is obligated to notify the United States that the new weapons are under development and will be counted under the treaty.

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) asked Thompson whether the announced new Russian weapons are covered under New START.

They would count as strategic weapons, she said, noting that the Russians havent made any notification about the new weapons.

Thompson also said the new strategic weapons under development by Russia havent been discussed in U.S.Russian arms talks; she couldnt say if the U.S. side had asked the Russians about the New START-accountable weapons.

Rubio said that Putins speech describing new strategic weapons should have triggered someone in charge of arms control to question the Russians about them and, if thats true, you need to notify that [because] that violates START.

Senator, were taking action on it. We havent done it through the formal New START process with our counterparts, Thompson said.

Rubio commended Thompson for recognizing the need to determine whether Russias new arms are covered under New START before any decision is made on extending the treaty.

These new kinds of strategic arms could be destabilizing, so the United States must directly raise its concerns about these emerging systems with the Russian Federation at every opportunity, if it truly hasnt done so already, Rubio told the Washington Free Beacon.

Republicans and Democrats on the committee appeared divided over whether to extend New START.

Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.) suggested that abandoning New START in 2021 could prompt the Pentagon to seek a larger and more expensive nuclear force, while Sen. James Risch (R-Idaho) said he opposed the New START treaty when it was ratified by the Senate in 2010 and noted the difficulty of dealing with the Russians on any arms accords.

Trying to negotiate with people who are not negotiating in good faith is a problem, Risch said.

Risch opposed New START because, he said, I dont have any confidence that [the Russians] are negotiating in good faith.

Theyre serial cheaters. Theyre serial liars and you have to look at the other things they are doing in the world to judge what kind of a mind these people have as far as whether theyre acting in good faith, he said.

Thompson said in addition to the INF violations and potential New START violations, Moscow violated a ban on the use of chemical weapons in conducting the assassination attempt against a Russian defector and his daughter in England.

Moscow also is tacitly supporting Syrian President Bashar al-Assads use of chemical weapons attacks in Syria, she noted.

Trachtenberg said New START was concluded with the idea of building better relations with Russia. Since then, ties have deteriorated and we must be clear-eyed about the threats we face, he said.

In addition to INF and New START issues, Russia also isnt adhering to the Conventional Armed Forces in Europe Treaty, the Budapest Memorandum on security assurances, the Helsinki Accords, and the Presidential Nuclear Initiatives on tactical nuclear arms, he said.

Moscow also is violating the Open Skies Treaty while selectively implementing the Vienna Document on exchanges of military information, Trachtenberg said.

Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) said: Out of four agreementsNew START, the INF Treaty, the Open Skies Treaty, and the Chemical Weapons Conventionwe have significant problems with Russian compliance of three of them.

On the INF violation, Moscow is in material breach of the accord for deploying significant numbers of a new, intermediate-range, ground-launched cruise missiles called the SSC-8. Thompson said the Trump administration has used diplomatic, military, and economic steps to pressure Russia to return to INF compliance.

Under recent legislation, the Pentagon is conducting INF treaty-compliant research into a new ground-based missile that if completed, would be noncompliant with INF, she said.

This system is designed to be a direct counter to Russia, and the United States has made it clear that we will cease pursuing its development if Russia returns to compliance with the treaty, Thompson said.

Two Russian defense contractors involved in the SSC-8 missile, Novator Design Bureau and Titan Central Design Bureau, were sanctioned in September.

The lack of any meaningful steps by Russia to return to compliance diminishes our hope that Russia has any interest in preserving the INF Treaty, despite Moscows public statements to the contrary, Thompson noted.

Bill Gertz is senior editor of the Washington Free Beacon. Prior to joining the Beacon, he was a national security reporter, editor, and columnist for 27 years at the Washington Times. He is the author of seven books, four of which were national bestsellers. His most recent book was iWar: War and Peace in the Information Age.

This article was first published in the Washington Free Beacon.
Trump Defends Kavanaugh as Accuser Faces Deadline to Testify

President Donald Trump defended Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh on Sept. 19 as key Republican lawmakers signaled a deadline for Kavanaughs accuser to decide whether she will testify.

Christine Ford, a psychology professor from California, accused Kavanaugh of sexually assaulting her at a party 36 years ago, when both were teenagers, an allegation the judge vehemently denies. Fords accusation was leaked to the media days before the Senate Judiciary Committee was set to recommend Kavanaugh for confirmation by the full Senate.

Judiciary Chairman Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) set a deadline for the morning of Sept. 21 for Ford to decide if she will testify. Fords lawyer had previously stated that the accuser is willing to share her story with the committee, but later reverted to demanding that the FBI conduct an investigation before any hearing takes place.

In response to the demand for an FBI probe, Grassley explained that the allegation isnt within the bureaus jurisdiction since it isnt a federal crime. The committee cant order the bureau to conduct an investigation, the chairman added.

The Constitution assigns the Senate, and only the Senate, with the task of advising the president on his nominee and consenting to the nomination if the circumstances merit, Grassley wrote. We have no power to commandeer an Executive Branch agency into conducting our due diligence.

The FBI said that it isnt investigating Fords allegation.

In the meantime, Kavanaugh stood by his willingness to testify before the committee. The judge says he never treated anyone in the manner that Ford described and that he never attended the party where the alleged assault took place.

Speaking to reporters at the White House, Trump stood by his nominee and hoped Ford would agree to testify.

Look, if she shows up and makes a credible showing, that will be very interesting and well have to make a decision, Trump said. But I can only say this: Hes such an outstanding manvery hard for me to imagine that anything happened.

If she shows up, that would be wonderful. If she doesnt show up, that would be unfortunate, Trump added, referring to the committee testimony.

Fords lawyer, Debra Katz, explained in a letter to Grassley that her client had been harassed and received death threats after coming forward publicly with the accusation. Katz argued that facing the committee on national television side-by-side with Kavanaugh would force Ford to relive this traumatic and harrowing incident.

Grassley replied to clarify that the committee had offered Ford multiple dates to testify and gave her the opportunity to opt for a private hearing.

You have stated repeatedly that Dr. Ford wants to tell her story. I sincerely hope that Dr. Ford will accept my invitation to do so, either privately or publicly, on Monday, Grassley wrote. In the meantime, my staff would still welcome the opportunity to speak with Dr. Ford at a time and place convenient to her.

Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) who had previously called to delay Kavanaughs confirmation to hear from Ford, told Fox News that he would push the nomination forward if the accuser refused to testify on Sept. 24.

I now implore Dr. Ford to accept the invitation for Monday, in a public or private setting. The committee should hear her voice, Flake wrote on Twitter.

When Dr. Ford came forward, I said that her voice should be heard and asked the Judiciary Committee to delay its vote on Judge Kavanaugh. It did so. I now implore Dr. Ford to accept the invitation for Monday, in a public or private setting. The committee should hear her voice.  Jeff Flake (@JeffFlake) September 19, 2018

Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) echoed Flakes call.

Republicans extended a hand in good faith. If we dont hear from both sides on Monday, lets vote, Corker tweeted.

Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), another member of the judiciary committee, accused Democrats of using the allegations as an opportune political move, rather than following the committee process for investigating accusations.

No matter the outcome, Democrats should be held responsible for circumventing the very process that protects people like Dr. Ford. Their decision to reveal this allegation at the most politically damaging moment reeks of opportunism, Hatch wrote on Twitter.

Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), a key swing vote, said that shes confused by Fords refusal to testify.

Much to my surprise, it now appears that shes turning down all [of her] options, even though her attorney said earlier this week that she would come testify, Collins told WVOM, a local radio station in Maine. I just dont understand why the hearing shouldnt go forward.

The confirmation saga swirls in Washington just weeks away from the Nov. 6 midterm elections, during which Republicans are looking to hold on to their majorities in the House and Senate. Trump said on Sept. 18 that the Supreme Court is key to his winning the presidency.

The Supreme Court is one of the main reasons I got elected President, Trump wrote on Twitter. I hope Republican Voters, and others, are watching, and studying, the Democrats Playbook.

The Supreme Court is one of the main reasons I got elected President. I hope Republican Voters, and others, are watching, and studying, the Democrats Playbook.  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 19, 2018

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) doubts the need to investigate Fords allegation, noting that the accuser couldnt specify a date or location for the alleged assault. The call for the FBI probe is not about finding the truth, but delaying the process till after the midterm elections, Graham wrote on Twitter.

It is imperative the Judiciary committee move forward on the Kavanaugh nomination and a committee vote be taken ASAP, Graham added.

Democrats have said the White House can order a more detailed FBI investigation, such as what occurred during the 1991 confirmation process for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, who was accused of sexual harassment. Republicans have said the FBI would be doing nothing more than what committee staffers could achieve by interviewing Kavanaugh and Ford.

Committee Republicans have planned for only Kavanaugh and Ford to testify, but Democrats want other witnesses, too.

Sen. Doug Jones (D-Ala.) said Mark Judge, Kavanaughs high school friend, should be subpoenaed if he refuses to testify. Ford has said Judge witnessed the alleged assault. In a letter to the committee on Sept. 18, Judges lawyer said Judge didnt recall the incident and didnt wish to testify.

Separately, a former classmate of Kavanaughs denied attending the party where the assault allegedly occurred. Patrick Smyth sent a letter to Grassley and ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California, saying, in addition, that he wasnt aware of any improper conduct by Kavanaugh, a classmate at Georgetown Preparatory School, according to CNN, which obtained a copy of the letter.

A spokesman for the police department in Montgomery County, Maryland, site of the alleged incident, said it has no investigation ongoing.

Reuters contributed to this report.
Trump Travels to North, South Carolina to See Florence-Damaged Areas

President Donald Trump traveled to North and South Carolina on Sept. 19 to see the worst of the damage by Hurricane Florence in the worst-hit states.

He also wanted a full overview from state and local officials in both states, White House press secretary Sarah Sanders told reporters on Air Force One. He wanted to make sure he met with the people in those areas.

Traveling with him were the four U.S. senators from North and South Carolina, Office of Management and Budget Director and former South Carolina Rep. Mick Mulvaney, and Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen.

They stopped first at the Marine Corps Air Station in Cherry Point, North Carolina, where Trump received a briefing from state and local officials.

As of Sept. 19, 27 were reported dead in North Carolina, more than 10,000 people remained in shelters, and more than 200,000 customers were without power across the state, according to state officials.

Four days earlier, Trump had issued a disaster declaration for the state that freed up federal aid to supplement state and local resources.

The money will be a lot, but its going to come as fast as you need it, he said at the briefing. Were going to take care of everybody.

While Florence has passed, the danger from it hasnt. North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper warned that rivers in the state were continuing to rise and causing severe flooding. As of Sept. 18, there were 1,050 roads closed due to flooding and debris. He advised people to stay off the flooded roads, even ones with only a few inches of water on them, and to not drive at all if possible, because a road could be swept away in a matter of minutes.

Our state took a gut punch, he said at the briefing. We have farmers who have lost significantly their crops. A lot of businesses are down. And, of course, people have lost their homes.

Looking to the future, he promised the state would rebuild the smart and strong way, but asked for help cutting red tape to make that happen.

Small Business Administrator Linda McMahon told state and local leaders that the SBA was making low-interest loans available to business and homeowners, and urged people to start filling out applications on SBA.gov as soon as possible. The loans are available to residents in 31 North Carolina counties and three South Carolina counties, according to the website.

After the briefing, Trump stopped in New Bern, North Carolina, a city of about 30,000 that took a major punch from the hurricane. He joined Cooper in passing out food packages outside a local church, then toured a neighborhood that had been hit hard by the storm.

A man who had a beached yacht in his backyard told Trump that his insurance company wouldnt pay for the damage to his house, and Trump promised to get the name of the insurance company.

After talking to more residents in New Bern, Trump traveled almost 15o miles southwest to Conway, South Carolina, a city of almost 24,000 that has seen record flood levels that surpassed levels from Hurricane Matthew in 2016.

As of Sept. 18, eight deaths have been reported in the state.

The National Weather Service issued a flood warning for the Waccamaw River in Conway, which was already at 13.5 feet above flood level on Sept. 19, and was expected to rise by 1.5 feet a day starting Sept. 20.

And you havent really been hit yet, by comparison to whats coming, Trump told officials at the Horry County Emergency Operations Center in Conway. This is real emergency stuff at the highest level.  We will be there for South Carolina. Were going to be there for this disaster.

Two days before his visit, Trump signed a disaster declaration that unlocked federal aid to the state.

Trump was joined by U.S. Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and Tim Scott (R-S.C.), Rep. Tom Rice (R-S.C.), several state senators, and Gov. Henry McMaster.

McMaster joked that if someone were looking for water or rain, youve come to the right place.

Hurricane Florence came in and stayed  left record amounts of rain, he said. So our problem has not been with the wind and the rain hitting us, but with the rain that is still here.

And we have not only the record amounts that have dropped on South Carolina, particularly in this third of the state, but we have the water coming down from North Carolina, because we have three watersheds, three river sheds: the Waccamaw, the Pee Dee, and the Lynches River. Those watersheds all coming to where we are.

He said he was confident the state would build our way out of what he called possibly the worst disaster to hit in its history, with the cooperation of Team South Carolina and Trump.

President Donald Trumpone in a million. South Carolina loves you, he told Trump. The cooperation, and the assistance, and the encouragement, and the confidence [the volunteers have] given to our people, to the federal establishment, and what we call Team South Carolina, is beyond compare.

Both states have received significant federal assistance. The United States Army Corps of Engineers sent 136 engineers to install generators, FEMA had 1,000 workers on the ground to provide shelter and food to evacuees, and the Coast Guard sent 3,000 people and 87 aircraft for rescue missions.

According to the White House, almost 20,000 federal employees were deployed to states affected by Hurricane Florence.
Natarajan Subramanian, an auditor for the Government Accountability Office, was recorded in an undercover video admitting to being a communist and attempting to sabotage the Trump administration. (Courtesy of Project Veritas)

US Government Auditor, a Communist, Describes His Explicitly Prohibited Activities

An auditor for the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) told an undercover reporter that he regularly breaks rules and engages in prohibited activities, by using his work hours to perform tasks for the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).

When youre at work, can you do DSA stuff too? Like when youre actually in the office? the reporter for Project Veritas asked.

Can is a weird question, right? the auditor, Natarajan Subramanian, replied. I would get fired if they knew that I was. And I do. I do it on my phone.

Project Veritas managed to infiltrate the DC Chapter of the DSA and secretly filmed some of its members. Veritas released a video expose on Subramanian on Sept. 20.

GAOs managing director of Public Affairs, Chuck Young, told The Epoch Times via email, We are aware of the video and investigating the serious issues it raises, and we have also communicated with the GAO Inspector General.

A part of the legislative branch, GAO is the highest auditing agency in the federal government.

Young said he couldnt comment on Subramanians employment status due to privacy laws, but said Subramanian has been removed from any ongoing GAO work and cut off from access to GAO equipment.

We have a rigorous quality control process with many reviewers that prevents one person from biasing our final reports, Young said. But we will also examine his work product as part of our investigation.

Subramanian didnt respond to a request for comment.

Pervasive

While DSA openly promotes socialism, Subramanian placed himself on the most extreme end of the far-left group.

We have a bunch of just communists, no prefix, and thats basically me, he said. We have some folks who are Trotskyists or Leninists.

He said a fair number of DSA people are federal employees.

Some of them are, like, full time on political campaigns right now. So like when those end theyre kind of up in the air and some like legislative, some policy people, its kind of all over the place, he said.

You see people from various agencies, usually Executive Branch, he said on another occasion.

One DSA operative even has access to sensitive defense information, Subramanian said.

I have a friend who works as a contractor for DoD [Department of Defense], and he has TS [Top Secret] clearance and hes very active in DSA, he said.

The person works on Syria on war planning stuff, he said.

He doesnt like it, hes trying to get out.

In a Sept. 18 video, Project Veritas showed State Department analyst Stuart Karaffa describing how he works for DSA on taxpayer time. The State Department said its looking into the matter.

Incessant

GAO Auditing Standards (pdf) stipulate that government information, resources, and positions are to be used for official purposes and prohibits their use inappropriately for the auditors personal gain or in a manner contrary to law or detrimental to the legitimate interests of the audited entity or the audit organization.

That means no use of federal time for partisan political activities, Stephen Klein, civil rights attorney with Statecraft law firm, told Project Veritas. Klein is a legal counsel to Veritas.

Subramanian was keenly aware of his transgressions.

Technically, everything Im doing with DSA is stuff that I am not supposed to be doing for work, he said.

What do you mean? the reporter asked.

Its explicitly prohibited, he said. If they found out, I could get in trouble, basically.

He also acknowledged he broke the rules regularly.

Thats what my attitude is, like, I break rules every day, at any point I can get fired for stuff that I do with DSA, he said.

One one occasion, he described spending nearly the whole workday on DSA activities.

I was like, Im in the clear, no one knows I spent six hours yesterday doing social media for DSA, he said.

Concealed

Subramanian provided false or misleading information on his annual disclosure forms required by GAO.

I was purposefully a little bit vague about what kind of organization [DSA] is, he said.

Im like, its a community organization, we do this, we do that. I wasnt like, Its a socialist organization and we want to, you know, destroy capitalists.

Subramanian provided the forms to Project Veritas, though its not clear whether he knew who the recipient was.

In one of the forms, he described DSA as a Social welfare organization and his role as Internal organization, related to DC area residents healthcare, housing, labor rights.

Actually, DSA routinely electioneers for socialist candidates for various offices.

Subramanian put on the form that he works for the DSA 0-10 hours a week.

When asked, he said he works for DSA probably like 20 hours, 10-20 hours a week.

I dont know, it depends on the week, he said. But like, I was doing stuff for DSA at work today.

He seemed to consider the forms a protection of sorts.

When they get on my [expletive] about it three years from now and they actually realize what Ive been doing this whole time, Ill be like, Ive been filing these disclosures every year like you wanted, he said.

However, the forms may work against him. A law against lying to the federal government states, in part:

Whoever  makes or uses any false writing or document knowing the same to contain any materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent statement or entry  shall be fined under this title, imprisoned not more than 5 years  or both.

Subramanian appeared oblivious that his DSA activities may lead to such a liability.

I would be violating GAO policy, I dont think it would be a federal statute, he said. It would be fireable though. Because all political activity is automatically outlawed.

Subramanian said hes selective about who he informs about his DSA activities.

Everyone in my office whos close to me now, not only knows that Im a socialist, knows that Im in DSA, he said.

On the other hand, management does not know. You have to be strategic about things like this, he said.

He said people he worked with in the past and people in his union know.

Theyre actually, like, big fans, he said.

Subramanian is listed as the Analyst Unit vice president for membership at the GAO Employees Organization, an affiliate of the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers union.

The GAO Employees Organization didnt respond to a request for comment.

DSA Strategy

Subramanian appeared to refer to a method of resistance to the administration of President Donald Trump.

If youre in Executive Branch agency, you can slowball things to a degree that its, like, ineffective, he said. And maybe you get in trouble and maybe you get fired or you resign or whatever, but, like, you slowed them down for a certain period of time.

This approach aligns with details provided by another DSA member, Allison Hrabar, a paralegal at the Justice Department antitrust division.

Theres a lot of talk at work about, like, how we can resist from the inside, and theres a lot of, kind of like, push back, she told an undercover reporter in a Veritas video released Sept. 19. She also gave examples.

The Justice Department stated its looking into the matter.

Subramanian also described a strategy of maintaining control over candidates endorsed by DSA.

We aim to endorse only people who are DSA members. Sometimes we endorse people who arent, you know? Like the national organization endorsed [Sen.] Bernie [Sanders, (I-Vt.)].

Bernies not technically a DSA member or whatever. But like, its very good to do that because we want to have a certain level of, like, discipline over the candidate, he said.

We want to be able to say, look, we made your campaign, we elected you, you have to listen to us.

More Deep State Exposes

Veritas has released three videos as part of its Deep State Unmasked series starting Sept. 18. Veritas President James OKeefe described the Deep State as holdovers from the previous administration that attempt to undermine the current one.

He promised more to come, alluding to further revelations of misuse of government resources.

What happens when Deep State actors inside these agencies are targeting private citizens while on the job? he asked. Well, then a real constitutional crisis brews.

Update: The article was updated with additional comments from Chuck Young, managing director for Public Affairs at the Government Accountability Office.
A participant at the Seccon 2016 hackers competition uses a laptop computer in Tokyo, on January 28, 2017. (Tomohiro Ohsumi/Getty Images)

US Pentagon Outlines New Strategy to Counter China, Russia Cyber Threats

The U.S. Department of Defense has outlined a new cyberspace strategy for countering threats from China and Russia, emphasizing a proactive and all-out approach to defense, according to a newly released document.

The document addresses how the Pentagon plans to counter challenges in cyberspace: persistent campaigns that pose a long-term strategic risk to the nation, as well as to our allies and partners. Released on Sept. 18, the document is a detailed response to the National Defense Strategy released in January that identified China and Russia as the central challenge to U.S. prosperity and security. It replaces a previous cyber strategy released in 2015.

Those challenges include cyber attacks that arent in the traditional concept of armed conflict, such as economic espionage and threats to critical infrastructure, which are areas considered vital to the country such as the water supply, power grid, and transportation systems.

China is eroding U.S. military overmatch and the nations economic vitality by persistently exfiltrating sensitive information from U.S. public and private sector institutions, the document indicates, noting that China isnt just threatening the United States military prowess, but also intellectual property thats vital to its economy.

In order to combat these challenges, the Defense Department said it would engage in day-to-day competition to preserve U.S. military advantages and to defend U.S. interests, meaning it would disrupt or halt malicious cyber activity at its source, including activity that falls below the level of armed conflict.

In military terms, below the level of armed conflict is a competitive relationship that hasnt escalated to the point of armed conflict, but where one party will seek to prevent a competitors gains or take action to maintain a strategic position.

The United States cannot afford inaction: Our values, economic competitiveness, and military edge are exposed to threats that grow more dangerous every day, the document states. Therefore, the Defense Department will be ready to deploy the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, and defense contractors.

The Defense Departments new commitment to fighting cyber threats beyond traditional warfare coincides with Chinas increased cyber attacks on the United States and its allies for economic benefit.

In April, security firm FireEye discovered that state-backed Chinese hackers had increased attacks on U.S. companies in order to obtain information related to bid prices, contracts, and acquisitionsallowing Chinese firms to gain business advantages.

In August, tech firm Recorded Future released a report detailing how hackers affiliated with Chinas prestigious Tsinghua University spied on international entities to help Beijing gain intelligence during early trade negotiations with the United States this year. Business deals with countries under Beijings One Belt, One Road initiative, whereby the Chinese regime builds infrastructure projects across Asia, Africa, Europe, and Latin America, also were scrutinized.


Virginia Tornado Cracks Open Tree, Releases 70,000 Bees

One of the multiple tornadoes that touched down in and around Richmond, Virginia on Monday, Sept. 17 cracked open a tree that held 70,000 bees.

The tornadoes caused extensive damage in the area, leaving a number of buildings damaged, at least one person injured, and one person dead.

The tree holding the bees fell across Towana Road near the University of Richmond campus.

Staff members responded to remove the tree and found tens of thousands of bees.

University of Richmond employees rescue 70K bees after tornado downs tree https://t.co/MeqmKOmL0W via @NBC12 #SpiderPride  UR Media & PR (@URNews2Use) September 19, 2018

The tree was cracked open, and it was a catastrophic situation for the bee colony inside, which I estimate was about 70,000 bees based on the amount of honeycomb, Kirstin Berben, laboratories manager in the biology department and one of the overseers of the universitys beekeeping program, said in a university article.

Berben and some colleagues collected bee suits and got to work.

We started picking up the comb and transferring clusters of bees into a large storage bin, Berben explained. There was a large cluster that seemed to include the queen, so we focused on that.

She ultimately took the bees to her house, which is about six miles from the campus.

She noted that bees try to return to their original home if relocated too close to it, so she wanted to move them off-campus for the time being.

Part 2  Drone footage taken in the area of Hull Street Road/Speeks Drive today pic.twitter.com/6zVuSMHxYM  Lt. Jason Elmore (@CFEMSPIO) September 18, 2018

Building Collapse

The Old Dominion Floor Co. experienced a building collapse from the tornado, killing one and leaving another injured. It was the first fatality from a tornado in 20 years in the area.

Drone footage from local authorities showed extensive damage to the building.

National Weather Service surveys confirmed nine tornadoes total, including the EF-2 that hit Old Dominion, which had a maximum wind speed of 125 miles per hour, reported the Richmond Times-Dispatch.

AT 11: A heartbroken family speaks out after their loved one was killed in a tornado on Monday. Hear how they're remembering the life of Ronnie Bishop on @8NEWS pic.twitter.com/V75OHq5uZr  Aaron Thomas (@Aaron8News) September 19, 2018

The deceased was later identified as Ronnie Bishop, 60.

The outbreak of tornadoes, which is unusual for Virginia, was caused by Hurricane Florence, meteorologists said.

According to WTVR, The energy generated east of the tropic depression put us in the path of moderate wind shear. The shear, along with high humidity, spread strong storms that produced tornadoes and torrential afternoon rain.

From NTD.tv
STAMFORD  Removing the dam didnt create a buzz. Neither did redirecting the river or reshaping the land to form a flood plain.

But the fountain that will start shooting streams of water Thursday in Mill River Park is likely to ignite some excitement.

Its because, after nine years of construction on the citys central park  a concept that dates back a century  the fountain will be something people can see from Washington Boulevard, the biggest vantage point.

That side of the park has looked like a construction site  mounds of dirt surrounded by a chain-link fence  until it was cleared last month.

For the longest time, people coming down Washington Boulevard couldnt see the part of the park thats completed, said Dudley Williams, president and CEO of the Mill River Park Collaborative, the nonprofit working with the city on a major renovation of the once-blighted park. We hope the fountain will be a sign of a new era.

The fountain will get a lot of ooohs and aaahs, said Nia Rhodes Jackson, director of visitor experience for the collaborative. She anticipates it will draw more people to the quietly rippling Mill River, swimming with fish and visited by snowy egrets  an interaction of people and nature in the heart of the city, Rhodes Jackson said.

Where else in a large city can you go into the central district and see rabbits and turtles and red-tailed hawks, meadows and native plantings, butterflies and all kinds of birds? she said. You can see half-a-dozen species of fish just steps from Broad Street.

To view the fish, you have to walk along one of the park paths to the natural stone slabs placed on the river bank. Water jets from the fountain, however, will be visible even to the speediest motorist wheeling down Washington Boulevard.

We hope it will get people out of their cars, Williams said.

The fountain, designed by Delta Fountains of Jacksonville, Fla., the company that designed the Sept. 11 memorial fountains in lower Manhattan and at the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., has 52 nozzles, said James Turner, vice president of design for the company.

Half are pop jets that shoot water in short bursts or sustained streams about 6 feet high, Turner said. The other half are arching jets that throw water about 20 feet from the edge of the perimeter toward the center.

Each nozzle has its own controlled, color-changing LED.

A variety of light shows have been programmed so far, for special occasions such as pink for breast cancer awareness and red, white and blue for Fourth of July celebrations, Turner said.

The staff of the collaborative has been trained to operate the lights, he said. The fountain can operate for many hours a day, all week long, he said.

Its a circulating system, Turner said. The water is captured and filtered and chemically treated. Its not supposed to pool  it drains back to the trench. Pumps pull it from the trench and pump back to the nozzles.

The 10,000-square-foot oval, measuring 134 feet by 92 feet, is top-tier in terms of scale, Turner said.

The fountain, which will convert to an ice rink each winter, was funded by a $5 million donation from the Steven & Alexandra Cohen Foundation. The gift also covers the cost of a splash pad under construction at the park playground, set to open next year, and skate rentals and lessons for children who otherwise would not have an opportunity to enjoy the sport.

The ice rink, which can accommodate 150 recreational skaters, is set to open Nov. 17, Williams said.

In the meantime, his staff has to tackle the learning curve of programming the fountain, Williams said. The goal is to have the jets streaming from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. each day, he said.

Thats our plan, he said.

We want people to have a chance to view it at night with all the colored lights, Rhodes Jackson said.

A sound system, set to be installed next year, will allow the staff to set the water jets to music, she said. It also will provide music for skating.

The Steven & Alexandra Cohen Skating Center and Fountain is the latest addition to Mill River, a city park. The nonprofit collaborative is contracted to run programs, oversee the renovation, and raise money for the park. The parks master plan estimates the renovation will cost $60 million and encompass 28 acres of greenway along the river from Stamford Harbor to Bridge Street.

The collaborative has reported that it has raised $22 million in private donations and $6 million in grants for the renovation. The city provides a third of the parks annual operating budget, about $640,000, and the collaborative receives 50 percent of the incremental tax increases that result when the value of properties surrounding the park are enhanced by development or renovations.

In most cities, you hear stories about green space disappearing, Williams said. We have a story of green space being created.

Many U.S. cities work with nonprofit collaboratives or conservancies to build and operate urban parks, Rhodes Jackson said. It started with New Yorks Central Park in the 1980s, she said.

That showed that, to get the kind of care and attention you have to put into these places, the public and private sectors have to work together, she said.

acarella@stamfordadvocate.com; 203-964-2296.
Midnight had passed, and Alex Azar was still in a coat and tie as he looked at a computer monitor inside the Department of Health and Human Services emergency-operations hub. It was a room built for managing responses to hurricanes and disease outbreaks, but the HHS secretary was instead scrambling to deal with a disaster instigated by his own boss - a "zero tolerance" immigration policy that led thousands of children to be separated from their parents.

Azar was not consulted on the zero-tolerance policy before it was announced in early May, according to people familiar with the events, even though his department is responsible for housing migrant children who are on their own.

In the months since the late June night when the secretary was trying to help figure out who had been separated, HHS has managed to return more than 2,000 to their parents. That still leaves over 200 youngsters in government-contracted shelters - at risk of becoming orphans as federal workers, civil rights lawyers and aid activists help scour remote villages of Central America for mothers and fathers deported back home.

The reunification efforts have overshadowed the other work of the department that Azar arrived to lead in January with a four-point agenda - including a promise to lower drug prices - and a role as frontman for the Trump administration's strategy of shifting health-care policies to the right through executive actions.

The migrant crisis also has put on the line his carefully cultivated reputation as an orderly, competent executive who understands how to make government work. With the midterm elections fast approaching and public outrage over the policy an animating issue, Azar also risks drawing the wrath of Trump, who has publicly humiliated other top officials when he thinks they are hurting his standing.

As the crisis escalated and the secretary became its public face before Congress and on cable TV, Azar adhered to the administration's talking points, betraying no hint that he had been caught unaware by zero tolerance. Such loyalty reflects the priority Azar has long placed on nurturing relationships, whether the recent one with Trump or with conservative legal luminaries who have long been his mentors, including the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, for whom he clerked, and Justice Clarence Thomas, whom he considers a second father.

Those close to Azar say he has worked hard to stay in the president's good graces from the start.

He "did a tremendous amount of thinking during the confirmation process about what it would take to be a successful secretary," said Ladd Wiley, a former HHS colleague who has remained close to him over the years. "He knew that, to be successful internally . . . you have to be successful externally - Congress, the press, the White House."

Azar said in an interview in the spring that he and the president talked at least three times a week.

So far, "he's done well in his meetings at the Oval Office," said a senior White House official who has known Azar since before he joined the administration. "Some people fall apart. He has a command of the subject matter. He's calm . . . The president is clearly to those around him not frustrated with Alex."

Azar, 51, also brought from the outset an insider's working knowledge of HHS, after six years in senior positions in the government's largest domestic agency during George W. Bush's presidency. In activating the emergency hub to begin reuniting families, Azar was reaching back to the grim days after the 9/11 terrorism and anthrax attacks, when he served as HHS general counsel. Azar, who went on to rise to deputy secretary, oversaw the conversion of the sixth-floor conference room into a public health command center for future disasters.

In June, its new mission required officials first to figure out which of nearly 12,000 migrant children in the department's custody had come with their parents and been taken from them by border agents.

The database that tracks the children did not have that information.

Chris Meekins, chief of staff for the department's refugee office, said Azar told officials: "I want a manual review of every single record so there is no question."

That was just the first step in reuniting families. They still had no clue where the parents were in the nation's labyrinth of immigration jails - and in hundreds of cases still don't.

This is not the first crisis Azar has been involved in - in fact, his years in government have been punctuated by them.

And his view of government, his ideological leanings formed early.

Growing up mainly in Salisbury on Maryland's Eastern Shore, where his father was an orthopedic surgeon and his mother would become a surgical nurse, conversation at home was so apolitical, he said, that he did not know his parents' party affiliations. Still, by third grade he had his own subscription to Conservative Digest.

At Dartmouth College, he was a New Hampshire co-chair for former Delaware governor Pete DuPont's 1988 presidential campaign and "drove him all over the state," Azar recalled in the interview. His candidate was more libertarian than other Republicans in the primary and favored ending welfare payments unless recipients got jobs - a heretical idea then that is now in vogue in the Trump administration.

When Azar went on to Yale Law School, he quickly joined the Federalist Society - which was "both an intellectual association and almost . . . a solidarity group since they were a minority" on the liberal campus," said Akhil Amir, a young faculty member at the time. Amir supervised a major paper Azar wrote on the Fourth Amendment on search and seizure that was in the originalist tradition - "exactly the sort of thing Justice Scalia would have loved," Amir said.

Azar attended summer lawn parties that Ted Olson, a leading Republican attorney, held for conservative young lawyers and law students. And he met Kenneth Starr when the then-U. S. solicitor general came to campus for a talk. "I sat with Alex at dinner and said to myself, 'This young man from Salisbury, Maryland, is going to go places,'" Starr remembers. They stayed in touch.

Azar came to Washington in 1992 to clerk for Scalia. He also grew close to Thomas and remains one of a tiny nucleus of "adopted clerks" with whom the justice still holds monthly lunches.

From the clerkship, Starr hired his protege into his law firm. When Starr took over as independent counsel for the Whitewater investigation in 1994, Azar was the first lawyer he hired as an assistant independent counsel.

In 2000 Azar joined a crowd of other well-connected Republican attorneys in Florida to wage Bush's legal fight over a recount for the presidential election. After their victory, he was part of the transition team, screening potential senior White House staff and Cabinet members.

Azar was then picked by incoming HHS Secretary Tommy Thompson as general counsel, overseeing the department's hundreds of lawyers, though he had no expertise in health-care law. Azar had been recommended by Leonard Leo, the head of the Federalist Society. After a look at his resume and one phone conversation, Wiley said, "We knew immediately that Alex was the guy." Thompson quickly agreed that Azar was what he wanted in his general counsel: a sharp intellect, prodigious work ethic and open to unorthodox ideas.

The week that Azar was confirmed, President Bush announced a ban on research involving newly created strains of stem cells - a controversial policy that captured much of the nation's attention. A month later, Azar stood in the outer office of the secretary's suite and watched on a small television as a second jetliner flew into the World Trade Center.

With the nation's planes grounded, Thompson turned to Azar. "I knew that I needed to get a plane into the air . . . to carry 100,000 masks and 100,000 gloves from a secret medical depot to New York City," Thompson recalled. The two men and another department lawyer talked of declaring a national health emergency, but no HHS regulation allowed that. Azar came up with a way within an hour.

"He was willing to take the legal risk," said a former colleague - who, like many of two dozen people interviewed for this story, spoke on the condition of anonymity to share private interactions and insights.

Crisis followed crisis. Envelopes with anthrax spores began turning up in postal centers, congressional offices, news organizations. Drugmaker Bayer held the main supply of the antibiotic Cipro, and Thompson wanted 100 million pills for the federal stockpile.

"Alex figured out how I could legally negotiate a lower price," said Thompson, who threatened to buy generic alternatives if the company did not cut its price by nearly half. Many Republicans criticized the maneuver. To this day, Azar defends it, saying in the interview it was "a bona fide commercial-transaction procurement," though he has always opposed direct price negotiations with manufacturers for medicines that older Americans buy through Medicare's Part D.

Azar shepherded a rule restricting the ability of brand-name manufacturers to get repeated patent extensions to ward off competition; the idea is now part of a blueprint Trump issued a few months ago for lowering drug prices.

Former Utah Gov. Mike Leavitt, Bush's second HHS secretary, promoted Azar to deputy secretary - the department's top manager, with oversight of new regulations.

"I laid out for Alex the things I personally wanted to approve," Leavitt said, "and delegated to him everything else."

The Trump administration first turned to Azar for help early last year, making trips to Washington to "educate some policy folks at the White House" about HHS, according to a Republican who spoke with him about the behind-the-scenes visits.

Azar was not Trump's first pick to run the department. That distinction went to former Georgia congressman Tom Price, who resigned a year ago under investigation for taking expensive charter planes for official travel.

Price's downfall opened the door for Azar, who was living in Indianapolis, where he had recently left a top job at the pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly after he was not selected to replace the outgoing CEO.

He was offered a promotion in the company, he said, "but it didn't involve doing what I like to do, which is running organizations and big complex problems and having me accountable for the results.

"I bet on myself and left."

In Indiana, Azar made connections with local and statewide Republican leaders. He was encouraged to run for the Senate but never did. And he grew close to Vice President Mike Pence, when he was a congressman and governor. According to John Hammond, an Indiana Republican National Committee member, "Alex was one of a handful of people Pence would consult on a regular basis." Pence played "a big role" in recommending him to Trump, according to the Republican, who knew of Azar's 2017 White House visits.

Since returning to HHS, Azar said, he has felt like Rip van Winkle. He still knew many of the people at the department. Other friends and former colleagues now held prominent White House roles.

He has brought in four lieutenants from the private sector and placed one in charge of each of his four priorities, which he announced in January at his Senate confirmation. They include easing the nation's opioid epidemic, changing how health care is paid for and making individual insurance less expensive by weakening the Affordable Care Act.

The fourth, lowering drug prices, flows from a promise Trump made during his campaign - and is tied to the central criticism of Azar's selection to run HHS: He is the first secretary to emerge from the pharmaceutical industry, having led Lilly's largest division as the drugmaker drove steep price increases in popular medicines. He has insisted he knows from the inside what it would take to rein in prices.

He praises the president often and speaks of his own vision for change as bold - even radical. Trump, Azar tells his staff, "does not want us here to play small ball. We're here to play big ball." Since the White House drug blueprint appeared in May, HHS has let Medicare managed-care plans start negotiating drug prices for cancer therapies and other medicines that doctors administer. Azar has said drugmakers should have to include prices in television ads - a possibility the department is exploring, along with a long-disputed idea of importing less-expensive drugs from other countries under limited circumstances.

Through the summer's din over migrant children, Azar has continued to give speeches on his priorities as well as his overarching preference for the private sector and states' powers over federal programs.

The buildup of separated children in the custody of HHS's Office of Refugee Resettlement started a few months before Azar became secretary. But the department was slow to recognize it for what it was, according to government officials and immigration and refugee advocates who were on monthly conference calls with ORR staff.

The staff was noticing an influx but had seen similar ones in recent years, as conditions in home countries deteriorated. Inside ORR, the main concern was expanding bed capacity at its network of private shelters and other facilities - not finding out why more children were arriving.

A Public Health Service commander named Jonathan White, a social worker, was in charge of ORR's unaccompanied-children program until mid-March. In July, he testified in the Senate that he had cautioned that children could be damaged psychologically if removed from their parents - and that he and colleagues repeatedly were told there was no administration policy of separation. One government official familiar with the events said White's warnings did not reach Azar's level.

By April, shelters' social workers had been hearing children say they had been pried from parents. Late that month, ORR asked the Department of Homeland Security for help in finding parents in immigration custody - and was asked to produce a list of the children's names, the government official said. It numbered roughly 700. ORR staff sent it to Homeland Security without consulting the secretary's office, the official said.

In late June, two days after Trump had ended zero tolerance and four days before U.S. District Court Judge Dana Sabraw gave the administration a 30-day deadline, Azar created a process to reunite families. He activated the command center, put White in charge, mustered 230 staff from across HHS and hired 100 extra caseworkers.

"We know our mission, we know our tack and we are executing on it," Azar declared at a news briefing a week after he had read files late into the night.

At last count, 211 children were still in HHS's custody, six of them four years old or younger.
Theres a popular type of eatery in the British Isles that is pretty rare in the USA. Its a place where you can get sweets, sandwiches, sometimes soup, maybe a salad, coffee if you must, and most importantly tea.

At a tearoom you can get a light meal, an afternoon pick-me-up of tea and sweets, a simple early supper, or maybe breakfast. It occupies a place somewhere between a luncheonette and a bakery cafe. The menu is limited, the tea selection vast, and the sweets home-baked.

An ad for the Birsay Bay Tearoom on the Scottish island of Orkney said it best: Serving light lunches, delicious homebakes, and a range of coffees and specialty teas.

We visited three on a recent trip to Scotland that were delightful stops for a travelers light lunch, as well as scrumptious scones and pastries. In Glasgow, the first was in the style of Charles Rennie MacIntosh; the second was in the darling tourist town of Pitlochry; and the third was on board the elegant former Royal Yacht Britannia, now docked in Edinburgh.

Glasgow native MacIntosh was an influential architect, designer and artist who blended the art nouveau and Japanese styles with complete originality. Glasgow is filled with his work, including the art school, which tragically was destroyed by fire this summer, just a few months before the completion of a total renovation. MacIntosh not only designed buildings, but their interiors and furniture as well.

The Willow Tea Rooms is a recreation of his original design on Sauchiehall Street. The current tearoom  dominated by his signature oak, tall-backed chairs  also incorporates his stained glass designs and distinctive graphics. From the second floor, it overlooks the pedestrian mall on Buchanan Street. The third-floor Chinese Room, painted in a vibrant blue, has low-backed geometric seating.

The menu at the Willow includes categories for soups, light bites  like oat cakes or scrambled eggs  and Scottish dishes like my finnan haddie (smoked haddock) fishcakes or Marshas avocado toast with Lapsang Souchong tea-smoked salmon. You could also order a salad, sandwich, or toastie (grilled sandwich).

There were, of course, scones: plain or fruit with jam and either butter or clotted cream. Tempting Treats included the Willows famous meringue: a generous pillow, crisp on the outside and melting within, offered with either cream or fresh berries. Victoria sponge (cake), clootie dumpling with custard, and lemon drizzle cake were a few more of the traditional desserts on offer.

With an entire page of tea offerings, it was the most extensive menu of any of the tearooms we visited. The tea service was simple but complete, with a pot of tea, a jug of hot water to dilute if needed, a strainer with its resting cup, and a warm cup and saucer. The clientele was mostly locals with a scattering of fellow tourists.

Hetties tearoom in Pitlochry, a charming resort and tourist town between Inverness and Edinburgh, was our next experience. The tea service, picked from their long list of custom blended teas, included a small minute glass for precisely measuring the steeping time as the sand ran through.

Sandwiches, salads, and baked potatoes were the categories for the main course. Choose your fillings and condiments from the list of options, then consider a soup or pick a pastry. Grilled brie and cranberry on a baguette was for Marsha while I went for the chicken and avocado sandwich. The cakes and scones looked delicious, but we were too far along on our well-fed trip to have dessert at lunch.

Queen Elizabeth and the rest of the royal family greatly enjoyed their voyages around the empire on the royal yacht Britannia. The 412-foot ship, rendered obsolete by jet travel, now lives on as a popular attraction docked in the Firth of Forth. The Royal Deck Tea Room, a bright and airy space with enthralling views of the busy harbor and ever-changing sky, occupies the space where the royals would have relaxed at sea.

Here you can live out your royal fantasy over a delicious meal. We went all out for the Cream Tea Special: tea or coffee, a sandwich, scone or slice of cake and a glass of Champagne. A lunch splurge.

This time the teapot and creamer were silver and the napkins embossed with the yachts crest. The sandwiches, from the brief menu, were beautifully presented.

Chicken salad with cured bacon and horseradish was my pick. Marsha had Ayrshire honey-roasted ham with tomato. Our classic desserts were Victoria Sponge, a favorite of Queen Victoria, and Dundee fruit cake, a Scottish favorite from the 19th century. The Champagne was delightful, but later, while touring the boat, we wondered if we might have a little lie-down in one of the tastefully appointed royal suites.

Tearooms are a simple yet elegant option for a light meal or snack. Im now on the lookout to see if I can find some this side of the pond.

Frank Whitman can be reached at NotBreadAloneFW@gmail.com.
Bird watchers got a surprise this week when they spotted a rare Roseate Spoonbill in Connecticut.

The pink bird (that gets its hue from eating small crustaceans like shrimp) is usually found in the marshes of South America, along the coast of Central America and in the southern United Statesnot in the northeast.

But this summer one was spotted living in Maine for a couple weeks, and one birder claims it's the same one seen this week near the mouth of the Housatonic River in Stratford on Sept. 14 and then in the marsh at Connecticut Audubon's Milford Point Coastal Center on Sept. 19. The bird was first identified by Paul Raccuia, who spotted it in Stratford and notified the Connecticut Audubon Society.

"[They] will occasionally travel up the Atlantic Coast as far as southern New Jersey, but seeing a Spoonbill in Connecticut and Maine (where it was also recently recorded as a state record) was unheard of before this summer," according to a release from the Connecticut Audubon Society.

More News Osprey rescue in Conn. has unhappy ending

Former Connecticut resident Louis Bevier told the Connecticut Audubon Society that the bird has a small hole in its bill that matches one on the bird spotted in Maine.

"Here's the part that blew my mind," Connecticut Audubon Society Director of Communications, Tom Andersen said. "It's a big world  what are the odds?"

"This year for some unknown reason there seems to be more of them moving north than usualalthough I don't know how many. It might be related to some poor feeding conditions in their normal range," Andersen said.

Andersen said the Roseate Spoonbill could hang out in Connecticut for a few more weeks if it can find enough food in the shallow tidewater. The bird is characterized by a spoon-shaped bill which they use to capture food in shallow water.

This is the third time a new species of bird has been spotted around here this summer. A Little Egret was seen on a jetty in Stonington for a couple of weeks in August into September, and a Black-billed Whistling Duck was spotted on the Connecticut River in Essex, also in August. Both first state records.
WESTPORT  A rise in absences and parents concern for the safety of Coleytown Middle School students amid ongoing mold issues prompted Westports superintendent to close the school on Thursday and Friday of this week.

The number of absent students exceeded 50, which is double the typical rate, and the nurses office handled dozens of students who complained of various health complaints today, Westport Superintendent Colleen Palmer wrote in an email to Coleytown Middle School families around 2 p.m. Tuesday.

In an abundance of caution and to reassure our families and staff that this school continues to be a safe environment, Coleytown Middle School will be closed Thursday, Sept. 20, and Friday, Sept. 21 after the scheduled school holiday of Wednesday, Sept. 19, Palmer wrote, noting that further assessment of the school environment would be conducted over the break.

Westport Weston Health District Director Mark Cooper said he didnt recommend or see the need for Coleytown to be closed for the rest of the week.

We didnt recommend that, we didnt really see the need to do it, said Cooper.

Cooper also feels some of the steps taken to limit the amount of mold in the school could be leading to certain student and teacher ailments.

The schools taking all the appropriate steps to do the things they need to do to prevent mold growth, but as a consequence, theyre doing things that could contribute to some of the symptoms students are experiencing, Cooper said.

For example, in order to reduce Coleytown humidity levels and thus prevent mold growth the school has set up large dehumidifiers that blow dry air into the building. The dry air causes some students to have a dry throat or scratchy eyes as can occur in the winter when the air is dry, Cooper said. He also noted some of the classrooms have had to keep their windows shut to prevent fumes of diesel, which powers the dehumidifiers, from seeping into the classroom. The closed windows cause still air and similar symptoms to dry air, Cooper said.

When kids get together at the start of a new school season theres usually an uptick of colds and cold-like symptoms, Cooper added.

Mold, an ongoing issue at Coleytown Middle School, was first identified at the school in August 2016, at which point school officials estimated the work would be complete by the end of the calendar year. Over the summer, a failure of the schools air circulation coupled with hot and humid weather caused mold to resurface at the school and led to more than half the school needing remediation, which was completed just days before the first day of school on Aug. 28, Palmer said.

The night before Palmer announced Coleytowns closure for Thursday and Friday, more than a dozen Coleytown parents spoke at the Sept. 17 Board of Education (BOE) meeting and reprimanded school administrators for the alleged poor handling of the schools ongoing mold issue.

Were not in Flint, Michigan. We work very hard to live in this town. Its exhausting and so terrifying that we send our kids to school and worry about them getting shot, and now its air quality, and who knows what the long-term effects of that are going to be?, resident and Coleytown parent Penelope Hoblyn told the Westport Board of Education (BOE) at its meeting Monday night.

Many parents were spurred to attend the BOEs Sept. 17 meeting in part, because Coleytown was evacuated for a half hour early that morning due to a failure in one of the dehumidification machines, which contributed to a decrease in relative humidity at the school from 85 percent over the summer to 50 to 60 percent humidity in the three weeks since school started and use $600 worth of diesel gas a day.

On Friday, Sept. 14, part of the dehumidification outside of the 8th-grade wing at Coleytown failed and caused a burning mechanical odor to spread throughout the building, Palmer said. The following Monday morning, several staff members reported shortness of breath and dizziness, and the building was evacuated for a half hour between 9:30 a.m. and 10 a.m. in order for fire department officials to check for potentiation carbon monoxide contamination, Palmer said.

Fire officials found no carbon monoxide contamination, but nine staff members and one student were evaluated by Emergency Medical Service staff.

The symptoms people were reporting were not consistent with mold, so the best information we have right now is that its related to the mold, but unfortunately, its a mechanical failure that probably brought some fumes into the school, Palmer said.

The reported number of sick student at Coleytown is actually lower in the first three weeks of this school year compared to the last three, Suzanne Levasseur, Supervisor of Health Services for Westport schools, told the BOE at the Sept. 17 meeting, the night before absences at the school doubled.

Monday, Sept. 17 was an outlier, however, Levasseur said, noting, We did end up seeing a lot of students today with symptoms that you would not associate with mold, including headache, nausea, and dizziness. Many students get sick when they return to school and this time of year is difficult for students with allergies, Levasseur said.

Expenditures through the fiscal year 2018 were approximately $704,000 and the total cost of remediation efforts will cross the $1 million thresholds, Westport schools Chief Financial Officer Elio Longo said at the Aug. 27 BOE meeting.

Its important to know that in testing of the mold, the type of mold found was almost exclusively of the more common, harmless type and there was extremely limited evidence of what was perceived to be the more concerning black mold, Palmer said.

Until we can get out of this cycle, this fall cycle of moisture and rain, we continue to contend with this throughout the district. It will not be unusual for our schools, for any other school in this region, to have periodic small little outgrowths of mold that could occur, Palmer said.

Despite Palmers assurances, parents expressed said they feared the mold at Coleytown may be causing adverse health reactions for their students. Katie Hill said her eldest son, an 8th grader at the school, is prone to headaches, sore throat, and other symptoms that she previously rode off as seasonal allergies but now fears may be a reaction to mold in the school.

Hes not the kind of kid that goes into the nurse, he just plods through. How many other kids are like that? Im not sure the numbers of kids going to see the nurse at Coley versus Bedford is really telling the whole story, Hill said.

Resident Sean Cross also said he fears the mold at Coleytown may be adversely affecting his daughter, a student at CMS. My daughter is never sick, just runs through walls to do anything, and today it completely took her down and she had a real hard time breathing and it scared her.

svaughan@hearstmediact.com; 203-842-2638; @SophieCVaughan1
Tennessee's community colleges are probably the furthest along in implementing guided pathways reforms of any community college system in the nation, a new study by Columbia University concludes.

All 13 Tennessee community colleges are reforming their programs, policies, and processes to better help students choose, enter, navigate, and complete programs in fields of interest to them and to ensure that these programs prepare students to advance in the labor market and pursue further education at the bachelor's level and beyond, the study by Columbia's Community College Research Center said.

Further, by implementing Tennessee completion practices that reflect the guided pathways model across multiple areas of the student experience simultaneously, the colleges are strengthening support for students throughout their entire college pathway, the Columbia researchers said.

The report on the study's findings, Building Guided Pathways to Community College Student Success: Promising Practices and Early Evidence From Tennessee, was funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and released last week. Housed at Teachers College, Columbia University's prestigious graduate school of education, the Community College Research Center has been the nation's leader in community college research and reform for more than 20 years.

Tennessee has received much-deserved attention for encouraging more students to enroll in college through its Tennessee Promise and more recent Tennessee Reconnect programs, said Davis Jenkins, senior research scholar at CCRC. This report examines the less-well-known but equally important efforts the Tennessee community colleges have made to ensure that students who enter college complete their programs in a timely and affordable fashion.

The study provides insight into how each of the 13 community colleges are operationalizing the completion practices in their own contexts.

The researchers discuss how far along the colleges are in implementing the completion practices in each of four major areas of guided pathways reforms:

Mapping pathways to student end goals. The colleges are helping students understand their college and career options and plan how they will achieve their goals. The colleges are beginning with the end in mind  starting with students' goals for careers and further education  and backward mapping educational paths to those goals.

Helping students choose and enter a program pathway. To help students make informed program choices and develop completion plans, the colleges are redesigning their new student intake processes to facilitate career and academic exploration and emphasize early educational planning. The colleges are also working to integrate contextualized academic support into program gateway courses so that students can complete those courses in their first year and proceed with more specialized coursework in their field of interest.

Keeping students on path. The colleges are redesigning their advising systems so that student progress monitoring occurs more proactively and systematically and that student supports are strategically deployed to address students' individual needs.

Ensuring that students are learning. The colleges are seeking to ensure that their programs provide students with rich learning experiences that prepare them for their post-community college pursuits.

Dr. Heidi Leming, TBR's vice chancellor for student success, said the new report affirms the fantastic work that our community colleges have done to implement effective reforms that lead to greater student success, including guiding students to the appropriate courses and providing the support they need to complete gateway courses.

Dr. Randy Schulte, TBR vice chancellor for academic affairs, said CCRC has been a valued collaborator with TBR's Completion Agenda for the past eight years, providing consultation, data analytics and on-site professional assistance in support of the great strides taken in student success throughout the College System of Tennessee.

The guided pathways and other completion initiatives analyzed in the report have been, in large part, developed, piloted and scaled up by the College System. Those initiatives include requiring students who are undecided about a specific major to at least select one of nine broad focus areas  such as Education, Health Professions, Arts, Business, and Applied Technology  that guide them to the correct courses in that academic pathway. Research shows that students who select an appropriate program of study are much more likely to graduate, and choosing a direction of interest at first can be refined toward a more specific program as they advance, without losing credit.

Other completion practices implemented by the community colleges include enrolling students with lower ACT scores into co-requisite courses so that they complete their entry-level math and English courses early in their college careers, and integrating high-impact teaching practices so that students can earn at least nine credit hours within their program of study during the first year.

By implementing multiple complementary reforms concurrently, the colleges have been able to impact many parts of the student experience and support students throughout their pathway through college. This contrasts with the piecemeal, fragmented way that community colleges often approach reforms intended to improve student outcomes, the Columbia researchers concluded.

The report includes preliminary evidence that the reforms being implemented by the Tennessee colleges are producing impressive improvements in student momentum during their first year, which research suggests is a strong leading indicator of higher completion rates in the longer term. CCRC will continue its research partnership with TBR and Tennessee community colleges to see if these gains are sustained and do indeed lead to improved completion rates over time and narrowing of attainment gaps among student groups, Mr. Jenkins said.

In addition to Mr. Jenkins, CCRC researchers Amy E. Brown, John Fink, Hana Lahr and Takeshi Yanagiura authored the report.

The full report is available here: https://ccrc.tc.columbia.edu/publications/building-guided-pathways-community-college-student-success.html
Few presidents have been more different than Jimmy Carter and Donald Trump. One confessed in a Playboy interview that he had "looked on a lot of women with lust" and "committed adultery in my heart many times." The other paid more than a quarter-million dollars in 2016 to hush up separate extramarital liaisons with a Playboy model and a porn actress.

Yet the men do share an unusual and little-remarked-upon trait: their proclivity for personalizing foreign policy.

Whether with allies or with adversaries such as North Korea, Russia and China, Trump has upended traditional notions of the president's role in diplomacy. "To a degree not seen in earlier presidents, Trump seems to define his progress chiefly in whether he likes foreign leaders he meets - and they him," the Los Angeles Times observed last year.

Diplomatic personalization manifested itself differently under Carter, who relied on forging connections to foster trust. But for both presidents, personalized diplomacy carried the same high stakes and risks. Personal presidential involvement in any foreign policy issue engages domestic political actors, focuses public opinion and shifts news coverage from diplomatic to political.

Nowhere was that more evident than in Carter's signature achievement, the Camp David Accords, which turned 40 this week. Carter's role in forging the agreement served as an extreme example of presidential personalization of foreign policy. As he discovered, bringing presidential prestige to bear on the negotiations granted greater credibility to American positions. But because the presidency is fundamentally a political office, Carter had a low tolerance for failure. Avoiding the appearance of failure risked becoming more important than achieving success.

The 1978 Camp David Summit represents the most extraordinary diplomatic sprint in presidential history. In a move either risky or reckless (or both), Carter invited Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat to the mountaintop retreat for an open-ended summit. It ended up lasting 13 days.

Carter's immersion in details was total. In the compound's billiards room, he spread out a 15-by-22-foot map of the Sinai Peninsula and, on his knees, examined "every wadi and oasis in the region." He shuttled back and forth between the leaders' separate cabins, personally revising a text that went through 23 drafts. On two separate occasions, Carter pleaded with Sadat and Begin to continue negotiating by appealing to them on the basis of their personal relationship with him.

Carter's effort stemmed from his supreme belief in his own powers of persuasion. Carter "always felt in foreign affairs that if he could only get his adversaries into the room with him, he could win them over," observed James Fallows, his chief speechwriter from 1977 to 1979. "Carter's faith was in himself, and in the impression he would create." In Trump's parlance, Carter saw himself as a deal-maker.

But the accords, although a massive achievement - the first-ever agreement between Israel and an Arab antagonist - provided only a framework, so the work didn't end at Camp David. One part laid out terms for an Egypt-Israel peace treaty, pending further negotiations. The other part consisted of various steps meant to lead to autonomy for the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

The summit gave way to a grinding process in which subordinates negotiated the finer points. This was dangerous for Carter, because those subordinates lacked the prestige he brought to the negotiations, but his own political fate had become intertwined with the outcome. "Win or lose, you are identified with this effort," Press Secretary Jody Powell warned him.

Carter had hoped a full peace treaty would be concluded within days - in time to give Democrats a boost in the 1978 midterm elections. Instead, it took six months. That November, Democrats lost 15 House seats and three Senate seats. Carter's own approval ratings barely rose.

The peace process, with which the administration hoped to showcase the president's strength and dealmaking skills, hung around Carter's neck like an albatross. The lack of a final treaty tapped into an emerging narrative: Carter was a nice man, but he lacked the resolve to be effective.

Negotiations between Egypt and Israel limped through early 1979. By March, national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski recalled, it had become evident that "unless Carter again injected himself personally and made another major effort," there was no hope for an Egypt-Israel treaty.

So Carter made a last-minute dash to the Middle East to conclude the details in face-to-face talks with Begin and Sadat. It again carried risks. "Failure in personal presidential diplomacy," Secretary of State Cyrus Vance fretted, "could have sapped the administration's political strength" in other areas.

By the end of the six-day trip, Carter managed to secure Begin and Sadat's agreement on a peace treaty, which was signed at the White House on March 26, 1979. Despite periodic strains, the treaty has held for 39 years.

But post-treaty negotiations on the other half of the accords - autonomy for Palestinians - proceeded without presidential involvement. Aware that the Arab-Israeli dispute had become politically toxic, the White House named a special envoy, Robert Strauss, to act as a "political shield" to deflect controversy from Carter. Those talks ultimately fell apart.

The Camp David Accords remain polarizing. Many scholars initially lauded the achievement of Egypt-Israel peace, which followed four major wars in 30 years, and the acknowledgment that Israel would need to dismantle some settlements and trade land for peace. Recent historians have been less kind. They contend that the accords undermined hopes for a comprehensive regional settlement, offered a pretext for Israel to tighten its grip on the West Bank and have prevented Palestinians from establishing a state.

Yet aside from the accords' regional impact, Carter's personalized brand of diplomacy left its own legacy. His extraordinary involvement played a critical role in nudging Egypt and Israel toward a deal, but it left a vacuum when he withdrew from negotiations. Failure wasn't an option for Carter in Egypt-Israel talks. But with the president remote from subsequent Palestinian discussions, the failure of Carter's subordinates to reach a deal left no political bruises.

The result is that it's difficult for the United States to be taken seriously in Middle East peacemaking without the president's direct intervention, further politicizing an issue already fraught with domestic political implications. For instance, the Oslo Accords, which were signed 25 years ago last week, came together after months of Norwegian-mediated negotiations between Israeli and Palestinian officials - and with little American involvement. Yet Oslo, in which Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization granted each other mutual recognition and led to the establishment of the Palestinian Authority, didn't become official until Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat famously shook hands on the White House lawn in front of a beaming Bill Clinton. Those accords crumbled in 2000 - but only after Clinton again had entered into high-profile direct negotiations with Israeli and Palestinian leaders in a futile effort to resuscitate the peace process.

Presidential leadership in foreign policy is imperative, but it must be used judiciously. The prestige of the office imbues presidents' words with unparalleled authority. After all, there's no one else to escalate to.

But presidential involvement also attracts domestic actors - interest groups, Congress and especially the media - that can further politicize foreign policy. Consider how little attention was garnered by the August cancellation of what would have been Secretary of State Mike Pompeo's fourth trip to Pyongyang. Predictably, perhaps, Pompeo's relative success in bringing back quiet, glamour-less diplomacy to the State Department has received relatively little notice.

Compare that with the hype surrounding Trump's June meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in Singapore, where Time magazine said that "the stakes [were] dizzyingly high." Despite Trump's belief that he is a consummate dealmaker, presidents usually have little leverage in face-to-face talks. Just as presidents risk their own prestige when they stump personally for candidates at home - recall Trump's campaigning for Roy Moore's ill-fated candidacy - so does direct presidential involvement in international diplomacy jeopardize their political capital.

For now, Trump is focused on his legal challenges and the looming midterm elections. But if he feels further stymied at home, he may turn to foreign policy, where presidential power is less constrained. If Trump continues to favor personal diplomacy, as he did with Kim, in the hope that success will reflect well on him, he will be gambling that foreign policy victories can outweigh domestic woes in voters' minds.

If, on the other hand, Trump uses Pompeo as a firewall against potential criticism, he may limit political exposure if relations falter. But he'll also have to share any credit due in the event of a breakthrough.

And if one thing is clear 20 months into this presidency, it's that Trump wants to be the center of attention, come what may.

- - -

Strieff is the author of "Jimmy Carter and the Middle East: The Politics of Presidential Diplomacy."
Anderson Healthcare is pleased to announce plans to expand access to medical services in the Metro East communities. The expansion involves development of a 10 acre parcel of land on Goshen Road in Edwardsville across from the YMCA Goshen Center. The planning objectives are to create a medical office campus within the Town Center development for the benefit of the surrounding community as well as future developments within in the limits of the I-55 Corridor planning area. The medical campus will be walkable for future residents in the Town Center and neighboring residential proposed districts.

The medical complex will be known as Anderson Goshen Campus and will begin with a one story building that will house an ambulatory surgical treatment center and a pediatric specialty clinic to be located on the southwest corner of the site.
(CNN)  The European Union's top political representative issued a stark Brexit warning on Wednesday: Time is running out and there are still huge hurdles to conquer before a divorce agreement can be reached with the United Kingdom.

EU leaders and UK Prime Minister Theresa May had warm words for each other ahead of an informal EU leaders' summit in Salzburg, Austria. But the remarks by Donald Tusk, President of the European Council, exposed the deep chasm that remains between the two sides on certain key sticking points such as the Irish border.

In a brief statement in Salzburg on Wednesday, Tusk said that while proposals hashed out by May and her Cabinet at her Chequers country retreat are a "positive evolution," the issues surrounding the Irish border and economic cooperation need to be "reworked and further negotiated."

If a deal can't be reached, Britain risks crashing out of the EU at the end of March next year in a messy fashion. The Bank of England has warned that house prices would crash, businesses fret over chaos at the Channel ports and airlines worry that the agreements that keep planes in the air across Europe would fall away.

But for a deal to be concluded, each side must find a way of avoiding the necessity to rebuild border posts between Northern Ireland, which will leave the EU with the rest of the UK, and the Republic of Ireland, which will remain in the EU. The removal of border infrastructure was a key part of the Good Friday Agreement that brought peace to Northern Ireland after years of sectarian strife.

Tusk warned that the clock is ticking. Under the terms of Article 50, the mechanism by which member states can leave the EU, the UK must leave the bloc by March 29 next year.

"Today there is perhaps more hope, but there is surely less and less time," Tusk said. "Therefore, every day that is left, we must use for talks."

On Tuesday the EU's chief Brexit negotiator, Michel Barnier, suggested that he was preparing to propose a new "backstop" proposal on the Irish border, attempting to "de-dramatize" discussions about what happens with Northern Ireland if Britain and the EU fail to reach an agreement on a future relationship.

May addressed her soon-to-be former European colleagues at a dinner Wednesday night at the Felsenreitschule theater, where she pushed back against Barnier's proposals.

In an op-ed in German's Die Welt newspaper ahead of her arrival on Wednesday, May said that any proposals for the border on the island of Ireland between Northern Ireland and the Irish republic could not be allowed to split Northern Ireland off from the rest of the United Kingdom.

"Neither side can demand the unacceptable of the other, such as an external customs border between different parts of the United Kingdom  which no other country would accept if they were in the same situation  or the UK seeking the rights of EU membership without the obligations," she wrote.

On Thursday the rest of the leaders, without May, will meet again. But nothing official will come out of the two days in Salzburg, as it is an informal meeting. The real deals will come in October during the first formal EU leaders meeting.

On Wednesday, Tusk announced a special Brexit summit in November, when he hopes a deal will be "finalized."

The timetable has been set, but the route to the destination is still to be determined.

This story was first published on CNN.com "Brexit talks are running out of time, top EU official warns"
Enrico Fermi and James Watson  geniuses who explored the power of the atom and the building blocks of life  were voted the top scientists in state history by participants in the Illinois Top 200 project.

Working at the University of Chicago, Fermi led construction of the worlds first nuclear reactor. He went on to play a vital role in the Manhattan Project, which built the first atomic bomb. These achievements came after he had already won a Nobel prize for other research.

Watson, who grew up in Illinois, was part of the team that figured out the shape of DNA molecules, which carry the genetic code for all living organisms. The discovery has been called a turning point in understanding life. He, too, received a Nobel.

The top five also includes R. Buckminster Fuller, an architect and theorist who taught at Southern Illinois University; Percy Lavon Julian, who pioneered large-scale synthesis of medicines from plants; and Andrew Moyer, a key figure in discovering how to produce penicillin in large amounts.

Top 200 blue gold small

The Top 200 project lets Illinoisans vote every two weeks on the states most inspiring leaders, greatest inventions, top businesses and much more. By the states bicentennial on Dec. 3, voters will have chosen 10 favorites in 20 different categories  the Illinois Top 200.

Voting in the next category, top athletes, is underway at www.IllinoisTop200.com. The nominees include Michael Jordan, Ken Norton, Bonnie Blair, Dick Butkus and Jim Thome.

Here are the top 10 Illinois scientists chosen in online voting:

Enrico Fermi  Fermi left Italy for the United States in 1939. He developed the worlds first nuclear reactor, played a key role in the Manhattan Project, and continued doing important research at the University of Chicago for years.

James Watson Watson and his partners discovered that DNA molecules were shaped like two snakes twisting around each other. Understanding this double helix yielded ground-breaking insights into the genetic code

R. Buckminster Fuller  Fuller is most famous for developing the geodesic dome, including a huge version at the 1967 worlds fair in Montreal. He was awarded 28 U.S. patents and received the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Percy Lavon Julian  Working in the Chicago area, Julian developed large-scale synthesis of substances like cortisone and progesterone. He was the first African-American chemist inducted into the National Academy of Sciences.

Andrew Moyer  When Moyer and other scientists at a Peoria agriculture lab studied penicillin, they found a strong new strain and learned how to make it grow. Suddenly large amounts were available, just in time for World War II.

Leon Lederman  A Nobel Prize-winner for research on neutrinos, Lederman was the longtime director of the Fermi National Acceleration Laboratory in Batavia. He founded the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy.

John Bardeen  Bardeen, a professor for almost 40 years at the University of Illinois, is the only person to win the Nobel Prize in Physics twice: first for helping invent the transistor, then for research into superconductivity.

Nick Holonyak  Born in Zeigler and educated at the University of Illinois, Holonyak invented the first diode that produced light in the visible spectrum, paving the way for LED lights. He is in the National Inventors Hall of Fame.

Allene Jeanes  Working in Peoria, Jeanes discovered a way to produce dextran, which could temporarily replace lost blood. Her team also discovered xanthan gum, an ingredient in everything from ice cream to toothpaste.

Francine Patterson Patterson is an animal psychologist known for teaching sign language to a gorilla named Koko. She is president of The Gorilla Foundation and has written several books about her work with Koko.

The nominees who did not make the top 10 were Marvin Camras, a pioneer in audio recording; aviation pioneer Octave Chanute; nuclear physicist Arthur Compton; code expert William Friedman; astronomer George Hale; mathematician Olive Hazlett; cancer researcher Charles Huggins; physicist Robert Millikan; chemist Lewis Sarett; and Clyde Tombaugh, the astronomer who discovered Pluto.

The Illinois Top 200 is a joint initiative of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum, The (Springfield) State Journal-Register and the Illinois Bicentennial Commission.

Future categories include trailblazing women, unforgettable moments and leaders. Everyone is invited to suggest possible nominees in each category by using the hashtag #ILtop200 on social media.

The presidential library and museum uses a combination of rigorous scholarship and high-tech showmanship to immerse visitors in Lincolns life and times. Visitors can see ghosts come to life on stage, watch TV coverage of the 1860 Presidential election, roam through the Lincoln White House, experience booming cannons in a Civil War battle and come face to face with priceless original Lincoln artifacts.

The library holds an unparalleled collection of Lincoln books, documents, photographs, artifacts and art, as well as some 12 million items pertaining to all aspects of Illinois history.

For more information, visit www.PresidentLincoln.illinois.gov. You can follow the ALPLM on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

ABOUT ILLINOIS BICENTENNIAL

On Dec. 3, 1818, Illinois became the 21st state in the union. The Illinois Bicentennial is a yearlong celebration of what has been BORN, BUILT & GROWN in the state and a reminder of why we are #IllinoisProud. Citizens are encouraged to participate in the celebration by visiting www.illinois200.com and using the hashtag #IllinoisProud. Partners and event and project managers planning activities in 2018 can apply to become an official part of Illinois Bicentennial by visiting the PARTICIPATE page at www.illinois200.com.
EDWARDSVILLE  Madison County will have two prints of a famous Abraham Lincoln portrait with the unveiling ceremony 10 a.m. Oct. 3 at the Madison County Criminal Justice Center.

The presentation is a continuation of the bicentennial project coordinated by the Illinois Judges Association, the Illinois State Bar Association, the Illinois Bar Foundation and the Illinois State Historical Society. Their goal is to place one Alexander Hesler photograph of Lincoln in a courthouse in each county in honor of the bicentennial.

An anonymous donor wanted Madison County to have a second photograph for its Criminal Justice Center in addition to the one on display in the Madison County Courthouse lobby.

This has been a fabulous project, said Circuit Judge Barb Crowder, who spearheaded the countys efforts to obtain the prints.

The first portrait for Madison County was placed in May in the older, main courthouse. As more money became available, Crowder and other judges decided to obtain a second print for the Criminal Justice Center.

I thought, What a great idea, said Crowder, adding that arranging for the portraits become a hobby that she pursued during her lunch hours. She is retiring in November.

I thought it was a perfect opportunity to mark the bicentennial, Crowder said.

What many people dont know is that Lincoln was also a judge. In those days, if a judge was not available, lawyers could select a judge from among the colleagues, she said.

She said the Illinois Historical Society has a glass plate of the portrait, from which prints can be made. They keep it in a vault, but the society did not have the funds to distribute the portraits.

The photograph was taken on June 3, 1860, by Alexander Hesler, a well-known photographer of the time. Lincoln had been nominated to run for president, and Hesler traveled to Springfield to take the picture. Showing Lincoln before he grew a beard, this photograph is considered to be one of the best taken of Lincoln, and was reportedly his favorite.

Hesler was a famous photographer at the time and remains well known among people with an interest in photography and history. His works hang in museums like the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

We are so pleased to be able to receive this historic photograph for the Criminal Justice Center as Abraham Lincoln was well-known for his defense work in criminal cases, noted Judge Richard Tognarelli, Presiding Judge of the Criminal Division.

Lincoln has a strong connection to Madison County as he spoke here in 1858 and visited here on more than one occasion. It is truly fitting that both of our courthouses are able to display this likeness as we celebrate Lincoln the lawyer and the President, stated Chief Judge David Hylla.

The public is invited to attend the Oct. 3 ceremony and to view the famous photograph.

Reach reporter Sanford Schmidt at 618-208-6449.
EDWARDSVILLE  Officials with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services announced today that the federal government will release $1 billion to states across the nation to combat the opioid crisis.

After a meeting between government officials and local addiction treatment specialists at Addiction Treatment Strategies in Edwardsville, HHS Assistant Secretary Elinore McCance-Katz, who heads the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMSA), said Illinois will receive $29 million to help address the opioid crisis.

We know it is going to take more than money to address the problems in communities, she said. We do not have enough clinicians, peers and preventionists to help.

Because of that SAMSA has also invested to place addiction treatment teams and prevention teams into states to assist in addressing the problems in local communities.

These teams are available locally to train prevention providers and provide community support and by doing this we hope to increase access to the services people desperately need to recover from opioid use disorder, McCance-Katz said.

Individual states create and deliver a plan to SAMSA and the agency works with local communities to ensure that states are providing evidence-based treatment programs and to make sure that medication-assisted treatment is available to individuals with opioid addictions.

When the state gives us a plan we look at it and continue to work with the states in an ongoing way to make sure that the services are being provided, McCance-Katz said.

This is the type of oversight of the program that congressmen Mike Bost, R-Murphysboro, and Rodney Davis, R-Taylorville, say is necessary to combat the opioid epidemic.

Bost said it is important for federal administration officials to hear from those working on the front line of the opioid epidemic.

Just last year we put a package together for the opioid epidemic and we need to know where it is going, how it is helping or if it is falling short, Bost said. If it is falling short then we need to figure out where we go from there. We have to hear from not only the families that are affected, but also the experts that have to deal with it on the front lines.

Davis said the purpose of the meeting was to inform local treatment specialists of what the federal government has to offer.

The roundtable meeting today was to ensure that the local folks understand whats coming from the federal government so they can utilize those resources to the best of their abilities to help those who need it most, Davis said.

U.S. Surgeon General Jerome Adams said President Donald Trumps administration, Congress and state governments are leaning into the epidemic in an unprecedented way.

But it is really important that everyone understands that everyone can play a role in preventing opioid abuse, Adams said.

Adams encouraged everyone to visit the U.S. Surgeon Generals website, www.surgeongeneral.gov, where people can find tips on what can be done by individuals to prevent opioid abuse.

HHS Deputy Secretary Eric Hargan said the opioid epidemic, which several years ago was primarily a problem in the rural Midwest, is now a nationwide problem.

We are now facing the third year in a row of lowering the life expectancy in this country because of the opioid epidemic, Hargan said. Meetings like the one we had today are important because we have to find out what works and what doesnt in prevention and treatment. When we find solutions we have to be able to reach out to communities and teach each other. We have to create policies that are going to be able to turn the curve on this issue that is tearing the country apart.
Each week on Segue, Southern Illinois University Edwardsvilles premier radio show that outlines the ideas and issues on campus and beyond, co-host SIUE Chancellor Randy Pembrook, PhD, interviews one of the supportive administrators that help make SIUE great for its more than 13,200 students.

This episode will air at 9 a.m. on Sunday, Sept. 23, on WSIE 88.7 FM The Sound.

On this weeks episode, Pembrook welcomes Tim Schoenecker, PhD, School of Business dean. Although Schoeneckers appointment to the position was made effective July 1, the SIU Board of Trustees approved the decision on Sept. 13. He served as interim dean since May 2016 and had served as the Schools associate dean for four years.

Schoenecker earned a PhD in strategic management from Purdue University. During his 25-year career at SIUE, his primary teaching responsibilities were in strategic management and entrepreneurship. His research interests include corporate governance and top management teams. His work has been published in scholarly journals such as Strategic Management Journal, IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management, Organization Science, and Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice. He has done consulting work for small, not-for-profit organizations, as well as large, multinational publicly traded firms.

Congratulations again on becoming the School of Business dean, since you had been interim dean twice during your time at SIUE. I hope youre as pleased as we are! Pembrook says. Tell us a little about the School of Business.

Im absolutely thrilled about it, Schoenecker replies. We have two undergraduate degree programs - our bachelor of science in accountancy and our bachelor of science in business administration degree.

Within that second program, we have nine different specializations ranging from entrepreneurship and economics to information systems and marketing. Those specializations are equivalent to what might be majors in many different universities.

Currently, the School of Business serves approximately 1,100 undergraduates majoring in one of those specialized programs and another 300 minoring in business.

At the graduate level, we have four different programs. Our MBA program is our largest, but we also have specialized graduate degree programs in accounting, marketing research, and computer management and information systems, Schoenecker says.

Approximately 200 graduate students are currently taking coursework offered by the School of Business this semester.

Many students think of business as a great degree to help them launch a career, Pembrook says. Can you tell our listeners about the job market for graduates with business degrees?

The market is really good, Schoenecker explains. Like most job markets, there is a cyclical nature to it, but currently, it is looking up. In particular, jobs in accounting and information systems, those students usually graduate with jobs or with multiple job offers.

In the other degree areas, there is a great deal of demand, as well. We talked to some of the financial service firms in the St. Louis area, and there is a huge demand for students that are ready to sit for the Certified Financial Planning certification. Right now, its a great time to be a business student!

Schoenecker, in close partnership with faculty and staff, has contributed to the Schools growth and celebrated its accounting and business programs 2017 reaccreditation by the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB), a hallmark of excellence earned by less than five percent of the worlds business schools.

Thats one of our potential students markers of quality, Schoenecker says. We went through the reaccreditation process 18 months ago, and we put together a self-study report where we detailed student accomplishments, faculty qualifications, impact of our facultys research work, student engagement in community activities, and things of that nature.

Then, that report was reviewed by a visit team, which consists of two deans from other accredited business schools and two directors of accounting programs who came, visited campus and spent time on a mini-audit. They talked to our students, faculty and administration, and looked at our programs to see if we measured up.

This accreditation perfectly complemented the School of Business other esteemed endorsement. For the 11th consecutive year, the School was named an outstanding business school by The Princeton Review. The Best 294 Business Schools: 2017 Edition by The Princeton Review recommends the School as one of the best institutions in the U.S. from which students can earn an MBA.

Each serve as a nice bookend for one another, Schoenecker says. One is an internally focused audit that helps us know if were doing the right things, and the other is an external validation that asks our students about their experience. For us, weve come through well on both.

I love to talk about SIUEs relationship to the community, Pembrook says. One of the units in your School, the Small Business Development Center, is a great example of a resource that helps the community.

The Illinois Metro East Small Business Development Center (SBDC) provides confidential, no-cost counseling services to entrepreneurs and existing business owners. Conducted by trained counselors, these sessions may include discussion and review of business plans, financing options, government assistance programs, marketing, management and other topics of concern to its clients.

To hear more of Pembrook and Schoeneckers conversation, which includes more on the topics of cybersecurity, study abroad opportunities and innovative business competitions, tune in to this weeks episode of Segue at 9 a.m. on WSIE 88.7 FM The Sound.

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By Madelaine Deardeuff, SIUE Marketing and Communications
2 hours ago

With high-profile backers, EV startup Rivian goes public

SILVER SPRING, Md. (AP)  Shares in Rivian Automotive are set to trade publicly Wednesday, and the world should get a better idea of just how hot investors are for the electric vehicle market. Rivian, the EV startup backed by Amazon and Ford, raised at least $10.5 billion in its public offering to help it ramp up production of its trucks, vans and SUVs.

Read Article
CSKA came back into contention in the second half when Vlasic crossed for Fedor Chalov to score in the 49th. CSKA twice thought it had equalized in the latter stages but one effort was ruled out for offside and the other for a foul in the buildup.
Its interesting to note that when you look at the Loop and the East Loop, theres no new supply coming into the market in the next 24 months, Gagliardi said. Theres really an opportunity to grow rents during that time. Its an area thats had significant inherent demand, and will continue to have that.
In the search for the next wave of tech talent, Chicago companies, from small startups to big banks, are competing with Silicon Valley giants like Google and Facebook that have been part of students daily lives for a decade or more. To make potential recruits more aware of their companies and the opportunities they offer, employers woo students with grandiose gestures like all-expense-paid trips to their offices in big cities or small treats like coffee and doughnuts on the way to class.
Hard seltzers fit into the work hard, play hard mentality of many young professionals, said Casey ONeill, a member of the innovation team at Boston Beer that developed Truly Spiked & Sparkling, the first hard seltzer to hit the Chicago market. ONeill said she came up with the idea for Truly about two years ago when she went out for drinks with friends after a workout. There werent any good options for a light and refreshing gluten-free drink that wasnt either too sweet or too alcoholic, ONeill said.
Similar laws have led to battles in other states as well. Critics of such laws say that not-for-profit hospitals operate like money-making businesses and should have to pay their fair share of taxes. Hospitals, meanwhile, have argued that they have charitable missions and they need the exemptions to provide the best care possible.
Body of slain Thai student returns home from Seattle

PATHUM THANI: The body of the 25-year-old Thai woman killed by her Thai roommate in their apartment room in Seattle, in the United States, has been flown back to Thailand for funeral rites in her home province.

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By Bangkok Post

Thursday 20 September 2018, 02:44PM

Bereaved father Pawawin Leenavarat, former deputy mayor of Thanyaburi municipality in Pathum Thani, sobs as he touches the coffin containing the body his youngest daughter Kornkamol Nong Am after it arrived at Suvarnabhumi airport from Seattle yesterday night (Sept 19). Photo: Pongpat Wongyala

The coffin bearing Kornkamol Nong Am Leenavarat, a post-graduate student in law, arrived at Suvarnabhumi airport in Samut Prakan province around 10pm yesterday (Sept 19).

Her father Pawawin Leenavarat, a former deputy mayor of Thanyaburi municipality, in Pathum Thani province, and other family members were at the airport to receive her body, which arrived on Korean Air flight KE651. The body was taken by Thanyaburi Hospital ambulance to Wat Naboon in Thanyaburi district for funeral rites, from 7pm today (Sept 20) until next Wednesday (Sept 26). The cremation will be next Thursday (Sept 27).

Ms Kornkalmol, 25, and her roommate Thiti-on Chotchuangsap, 32, were found dead inside a University District apartment near the University of Washington, in Seatle, on the morning of Sept 4.

Ms Kornkamol had several stab wounds. Thiti-on died from a single stab wound to the chest. The two women died on Saturday, Sept 1.

The King County Medical Examiners Office in Seattle later ruled that it was homicide. Thiti-on stabbed Ms Kornkamol to death and then fatally stabbed herself.

A grieving Mr Pawawin said Thiti-orn used to visit his daughter Ms Karkamol at his home in Pathum Thani after Nong Am returned from the USA.

He then knew that she was his daughters roommate and they studied together.

Since her death, his family had heard nothing from Thiti-ons family. He never thought they would be so black-hearted and remain out of touch.

He had never thought of taking any legal action against the family, but they should have come to talk with his family, Mr Pawawin said.

As the body of his daughter had now arrived home, he could hold funeral rites so that her soul would go to heaven.

Kritsada Leenavarat, Thanyaburi Mayor and uncle of Ms Kornkamol, said the US autopsy found that Ms Kornkamol was murdered. He also said that Thiti-ons family had made no effort to contact them.

Read original story here.
Critics rubbish Thaksin talks call

BANGKOK: Former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatras message calling for a dialogue between political foes is only an attempt to grab media attention and retain his support base, as his hope for a reconciliation with the regime has now been dashed, a government source said.

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By Bangkok Post

Thursday 20 September 2018, 09:42AM

Thaksin in Dubai. He knows full well that the NCPO will not accept a deal for reconciliation or to let him off the hook in court cases. Photo: thaksinofficial / Facebook

The source said Thaksins Facebook message on Tuesday (Sept 18) could be construed as nothing more but a bid to draw attention to himself as well as his younger sister ex-premier Yingluck Shinawatra.

As the general election, tentatively set for Feb 24, approaches, more pictures of the exiled siblings are expected to appear on social media, the source said.

This is a way to ensure they are not forgotten by the people and maintain contact with their loyal supporters without any actual request for reconciliation dialogue with the regime, the source said.

This has been Thaksins style for the past 12 years. He knows full well that the NCPO will not accept a deal for reconciliation or to let him off the hook in court cases. Thats impossible.

No amnesty has ever been given to those convicted of graft and anyone in power will not dare to sit down for talks with Thaksin on the matter, the source said.

In a Facebook message marking the 12th anniversary of the Sept 19 military coup that toppled his government, Thaksin said it would be in the national interest if old foes entered into a dialogue with each other.

The exiled former leader looked back over the turbulent period, which also saw his sister toppled, and asked whether Thailand was really better off with regards to education, health care and the economy. He accused a small fraction of benefiting from the power shifts.

In the past 12 years, there had been two coups, toppling two prime ministers who were siblings and the most popular prime ministers in Thai political history, Thaksin wrote.

He concluded by saying that he forgave those who have wronged him.

But Democrat Party deputy leader Nipit Intarasombat said that while Thaksin posted that he forgave his political foes who did him wrong, the following day he tweeted a message taking a swipe at Deputy Prime Minister Prawit Wongsuwon.

Mr Nipit referred to Gen Prawits comments in response to Thaksins Facebook post.

Gen Prawit questioned who had actually caused turmoil in the country during the past 12 years and brushed aside Thaksins call for dialogue, saying Thaksin should clear his name first.

In response, Thaksin tweeted yesterday (Sept 19): The look and the tone were so stern and scary, not as sweet and soft as when asking for an army chief post.

This runs counter to his call for reconciliation, Mr Nipit said. He said he forgave, but later the claws came out, the Democrat deputy leader said.

Sukhum Nualsakul, a political analyst, said Thaksins message was a bid to maintain voter support for the Pheu Thai Party.

Thaksin, who is widely believed to be the partys de facto leader, intended to tell voters to vote for Pheu Thai if they still support him, Mr Sukhum noted.

I think he wants amnesty, so he came out and called for a dialogue. People may sympathise with him and think he only wants to forgive and forget, rather than resorting to violence, Mr Sukhum said.

Titipol Phakdeewanich, dean of Ubon Ratchathani Universitys political science faculty, said that Thaksins message is a signal that Pheu Thai is ready to accept any political deal.

Mr Titipol believed that Thaksin is wise enough to avoid calling for an amnesty because this would be met with strong resistance. The deal may only be intended to allow Pheu Thai to survive until after the general election and an elected government is formed.

Thaksins latest move is not meant to drum up public support because his supporters feel he was just forced to go elsewhere. He still keeps in touch with local people through former MPs, Mr Titipol said.

A Pheu Thai source said that Thaksin often used this tactic when he is pushed to call for a dialogue, even though the other side had not yet given any signal to accept the proposal.

Thaksin fled the country in 2008 before the Supreme Court's Criminal Division for Holders of Political Positions sentenced him to two years for the 2003 purchase of state-owned land by his then-wife Khunying Potjaman na Pombejra.

Read original story here.
Mai Khao beach declared not safe after Chinese tourist in coma post-rescue

PHUKET: The Chief of the Mai Khao Tambon Administration Organisation (OrBorTor), Sarawut Srisakukam, has declared Mai Khao Beach not safe for swimming after a Chinese tourist was pulled form the water unconscious yesterday (Sept 19).

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By The Phuket News

Thursday 20 September 2018, 12:39PM

Rescue workers from Mai Khao OrBorTor attended the scene yesterday (Sept 19). Photo: Mai Khao OrBorTor rescue workers

UPDATE: The man, 56-year-old Chinese-born American is now on life support. See update story here.

Mr Sarawut told The Phuket News this morning, I have not yet received any updates on the tourists condition. I am looking it that.

The tourist, a young Chinese man, was pulled form the water just after midday yesterday (Sept 19).

The tourist was swimming in front of a hotel about halfway along the beach, near the Pru Jampa Lake area, Mr Sarawut explained, adding that the tourist entered the water where red no swimming flags were posted.

Mai Khao OrBorTor rescue workers attended the scene. They administered CPR on the beach before rushing the man to Thalang Hospital, he added.

Mr Sarawut explained that there are only four lifeguards on Mai Khao Beach  Phukets longest beach at just over 10km long.

Mai Kho OrBorTor hired the lifeguards directly, after LP Laikhum discontinued providing lifeguards, he added.

In November last year, LP Laikhum Managing Director Dr Nutpol Sirisawang flamed the Phuket Provincial Administration Organisation (PPAO, or OrBorJor) for not providing the equipment needed as per their agreement under the contract provided. (See story here.)

Meanwhile, Mr Sarawut said that red flags have been posted along Mai Khao Beach today (Sept 20).

Mai Khao Beach is not safe right now. The rip currents and the strong waves are too dangerous. We have posted red flags on the beach where we can, he said.

I have also asked hotels in the area to warn their own guests about the dangers of entering the water at this time, he added.
Phuket surf drowning victim on life support

PHUKET: The chief of the Tha Chatchai Police has confirmed that the man pulled from the surf unconscious at Mai Khao Beach yesterday remains comatose and now depends on life support.

tourismmarineSafety

By The Phuket News

Thursday 20 September 2018, 05:17PM

Rescue workers attend to the man on the beach yesterday (Sept 19). Photo: Mai Khao OrBorTor rescue workers

The man* is a Chinese-born American, and was rescued by a foreigner at the beach, Tha Chatchai Police Chief Col Prawit Suttiruangarun explained to The Phuket News this afternoon (Sept 20).

He is an American citizen, but his birth place is China, Col Prawit said.

The man arrived in Phuket with a 32-year-old female companion, and checked in at his hotel near Mai Khao Beach on Sept 15, he added.

The incident happened at 11:30 am yesterday. He was found floating in the water where red flags had been posted, he said. (See initial report here.)

There were no lifeguards on duty along that part of the beach, Col Prawit noted.

He is now at Bangkok Hospital Phuket. He remains comatose and is on life support in the ICU. His blood pressure is better, but his brain had gone without oxygen for too long, Col Prawit explained.

Now we are waiting for his relatives to make a decision, he added.

* The man's name withheld at the family's request.
Probe into pilfered fund for disabled

NATIONWIDE: Labour Minister Adul Sangsingkeo is looking into alleged irregularities in the spending of state funds granted to an employment promotion program for people with disabilities that caused losses of up to B1.5 billion a year.

corruptioncrime

By Bangkok Post

Thursday 20 September 2018, 08:54AM

The purpose of the Persons with Disabilities Empowerment Act is to help disabled people find meaningful jobs, but it is being embezzled at an eye-watering rate. Photo: Courtesy of Microsoft

The minister said he had been alerted to the alleged abuse of the scheme. It was launched in 2009 to promote career opportunities for the disabled.

He said he has assigned the deputy permanent secretary for labour to lead a panel. It has 15 days to wrap up its work.

The probe was launched after a network that fights to protect the rights of disabled people lodged a complaint with the National Human Rights Commission over alleged violations of the Persons with Disabilities Empowerment Act.

According to the network, the fund was supposed to have been used to organise job training. However, more money was allegedly disbursed than there were people who attended.

It suspected some peoples identities had been falsely used to apply for the training without their knowledge.

The networks chairman, Prida Limnonthakun, said this had cost the state up to B1.5bn a year.

The network has also asked the Department of Special Investigation to probe the matter and requested a witness protection program be established for whistleblowers.

There are less than 50 complainants because most disabled people are afraid to come forward, and they are not fully aware of their rights, Mr Prida said.

Citing an initial check, he said the scandal appeared to involve a number of state officials.

The law states that every company must hire at least one disabled person for every 100 workers.

If any firm is unable to do this, it must make a financial contribution to the fund to help develop the quality of life of people living with physical or mental handicaps.

Alternatively, the firms can give help in other ways, such as by providing job training or setting up disabled-friendly facilities.

This year, 14,623 companies have each contributed B109,500 to the fund on average, Gen Adul said.

But he insisted the Labour Ministry had no role in managing the fund.

According to the network, there are about 1 million disabled people in Thailand, 65,000 of whom have expressed an interest in finding work and had their names registered with the government for job training programs.

About 25,000 of them were recruited by companies, Mr Prida said.

The network said mafia figures had managed to infiltrate the programs and drawn sums of money from such schemes without participating in the training.

Anantaporn Kanjanarat, the social development and human security minister, said earlier he doubted the irregularities could be attributed to graft as the people hired to conduct the training were mostly private individuals.

Gen Anantaporn said the Labour Ministry oversees the occupational training but the private sector had been contracted to organise it.

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The Holiday Inn Chicago Mart Plaza trained management and staff before the strike began so that everyone would be ready to do jobs they dont normally do, said Tina Beverly, human resources director, who herself has stripped and made beds. Thanks to everyones efforts, plus temporary workers, housekeeping and room service continued to be offered and reservations have been unaffected. About 35 of the hotel's 210 employees participated in the strike, she said.
Royal Thai Navy leads marine rescue exercise in Phuket

PHUKET: The Royal Thai Navy Third Area Command yesterday (Sept 19) led a marine rescue exercise and tabletop exercises which were also participated in by officials from the Phuket Provincial Office of the Department of Disaster Prevention and Mitigation (DDPM-Phuket), Phuket Marine Office and other officials at Chalong Pier.



By The Phuket News

Thursday 20 September 2018, 10:47AM

The marine rescue exercise was led by the Royal Thai Navy Third Area Command. Photo: Royal Thai Navy

The marine rescue exercise was led by the Royal Thai Navy Third Area Command. Photo: Royal Thai Navy

The marine rescue exercise was led by the Royal Thai Navy Third Area Command. Photo: Royal Thai Navy

The marine rescue exercise was led by the Royal Thai Navy Third Area Command. Photo: Royal Thai Navy

The marine rescue exercise was led by the Royal Thai Navy Third Area Command. Photo: Royal Thai Navy

Phuket Governor Norraphat Plodthong was also in attendance.

DDPM-Phuket Chief Prapan Kanprasang said, The marine rescue exercise simulated the recovery of people involved in boat accidents in Phuket.

First the tourists had to be rescued from the sea and then the DDPM-Phuket coordinated with rescue teams and hospitals to provide first aid and transfer patients to hospital, he said.

Governor Norraphat added, This exercise was aimed at improving the work of officials involved in assisting tourists. This will increase the expertise of government officials and be the foundation for tourists safety in the future.
Thai and Malaysian anti-corruption commissions meet in Phuket

PHUKET: The National Anti-Corruption Commission (NACC) and its Malaysian counterpart, the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission, gathered in Phuket yesterday at the start of a two-day event titled The 4th Working Group Meeting between MACC and NACC.

corruptionpolitics

By The Phuket News

Thursday 20 September 2018, 04:03PM

In attendance at the opening of the event yesterday were NACC president Pol Gen Watcharapol Prasarnrajkit, Phuket Governor Narraphat Plodtong, a deputy anti-corruption commission (NACC) Sakchai Metineepisalku, and Director of MACC Intelligence Dato Sri Ahmad Khusairi Bin Yahaya along with members of both the NACC and MACC. Photo: PR Dept

The event was organised by the NACC Office Area 9, which has the province of Songkhla, Phatthalung, Trang, Satun, Yala and Narathiwat under its jurisdiction, and the Office of Foreign Affairs and is being held Sept 19-20 at the Duangjitt Resort and Spa in Kathu.

In attendance at the opening of the event yesterday were NACC president Pol Gen Watcharapol Prasarnrajkit, Phuket Governor Narraphat Plodtong, a deputy anti-corruption commission (NACC) Sakchai Metineepisalku, and Director of MACC Intelligence Dato Sri Ahmad Khusairi Bin Yahaya along with members of both the NACC and MACC.

The objective of the event is to reinforce the relationship between the NACC and MACC especially in the lower-south Thailand area, and reinforce the cooperation between two countries in anti-corruption initiatives.

It is also a good opportunity for the NACC and MACC to exchange information about each others operation and to establish a formal channel for people to report cases of corruption of government officers in specific areas.

Gen Watcharapol said that the board of the NACC assigned the NACC Office Area 9 to be the organiser of the meeting so they could discuss in detail problems they have encountered in that area and so that resolutions could be made in preventing corruption quickly and concretely.

Nowadays corruption not only affects Thailand or another one country, it is a worldwide problem which affects society, the economy and the stability of the nation, he said.
SoDak 16 Volleyball: Arlington, Hamlin advance to state; Florence-Henry denied

Arlington (Class B) and Hamlin (Class A) each secured state-tournament berths and Florence-Henrys bid for its first-ever trip to state came up short in SoDak 16 state-qualifying high school volleyball matches on Tuesday.
MUMBAI, INDIAIts not easy running an airline in India these days. Customers are flying more but demanding rock-bottom fares. Costs are going up thanks to surging oil prices and a plunging rupee. Major airports are bursting at the seams. Cows and other animals sometimes wander onto the runways.

And then there are the self-inflicted wounds, like what happened Thursday, when Jet Airways pilots failed to properly pressurize the cabin on Flight 697 from Mumbai to Jaipur.

The blunder left dozens of the 166 passengers and five crew members gasping for air and bleeding from the nose and ears until the flight managed to return to Mumbai, about 45 minutes after takeoff.

It was big negligence on the part of the pilot, said Darshak Hathi, a frequent flyer who posted a cellphone video of the terrifying trip. Compounding the original problem, he said, the oxygen masks came down but there was no oxygen in them. Hathi said he was still feeling deafness in his ears. (A Jet spokeswoman has disputed Hathis account, insisting that the masks were working.)

The problems, which were widely shared on social media, are unlikely to burnish the image of the troubled airline.

Once the crown jewel of Indias private carriers, Jet is now facing a severe cash crunch. It is desperately trying to cut costs and sell its frequent-flyer program and other assets just to keep paying crew salaries and other bills. Morale has plunged, and tax authorities visited the companys offices Wednesday as part of an investigation into allegations of financial irregularities.

Jet Airways has a liquidity crisis, said Ansuman Deb, an aviation analyst at ICICI Securities. It needs some money, right now.

Jet has said it is addressing its broader financial issues. Regarding the cabin pressure incident, the airline pointed Thursday to a statement it posted on Twitter in which it acknowledged what happened, apologized for the inconvenience caused to its guests and said an investigation has begun.

Indias Civil Aviation Ministry said it had ordered its own inquiry into the events Thursday as well as a broader, industrywide review of airline safety.

Jet is only one of several Indian carriers that have had major safety issues this year. This spring, regulators forced IndiGo, a low-cost carrier that has become the countrys biggest and most profitable airline, and GoAir, another low-cost carrier, to ground some of their Airbus A320neo planes after problems with engines manufactured by Pratt & Whitney contributed to in-flight engine failures at the airlines.

IndiGo also had to deal with the fallout of a video showing employees dragging an angry customer across the tarmac, an incident reminiscent of the Chicago security officers who violently removed Dr. David Dao from an overbooked United Airlines flight last year. Like United, IndiGo was slow to publicly apologize for its actions. IndiGo also fired the employee who shot the video of the abuse while allowing others involved to keep their jobs.

But the biggest problems facing Indias airline industry are financial ones. A sharp increase in oil prices over the past year to around $80 a barrel, combined with an 11 per cent drop in the value of the Indian rupee against the dollar, have dealt a double whammy to expenses.

At the same time, the carriers are adding planes in a bid to attract millions of new flyers, many of whom are trying to decide between ponying up for a plane ticket or taking a cheaper, slower option like a bus or train. The result has been a brutal price war: Just this week, AirAsia India, a joint venture between a Malaysian airline and one of Indias biggest conglomerates, announced a sale with one-way fares as low as 500 rupees, or about $7.

The countrys state-owned flagship carrier, Air India, is functionally bankrupt, kept alive only through periodic infusions of government cash. An attempt to sell a majority stake in the airline a few months ago drew no bids because potential buyers were concerned that the government would force the winner to retain Air Indias bloated staff and money-losing routes, and absorb much of the airlines accumulated $8 billion in debt. Now the airline is having trouble paying its employees and maintaining its planes as it waits for the next tranche of bailout money.

Harsh Vardhan, chairman of Starair Consulting and former chief executive of Vayudoot, a now-defunct regional airline, compared the current state of Indias airline industry to an unending marathon.

They cannot truncate operations. They cannot increase the prices because the moment one reduces price, they risk being out of the market, he said. If the situation continues for the next 12 to 18 months, airlines could go bust.

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There are growing calls for stronger homebuyer protections in the wake of a second major condo cancellation at the Vaughan Metropolitan Centre, this time affecting buyers of 1,633 units in the sold-out Icona buildings that were launched between January and March last year.

The project by the Gupta Group at Highway 7 and Edgeley Blvd. was supposed to include the tallest condo in Vaughan at 55 storeys. But this week, the developer sent cancellation letters dated Sept. 14, citing circumstances beyond our control that make the project unfinanceable.

Gupta Group did not respond immediately to a call and email to its offices Wednesday afternoon from the Toronto Star. A communications representative for the company emailed a statement saying the purchasers deposits had been returned after years of hard work (and) considerable financial investment.

We have refunded purchaser deposits in full and without delay, the statement said.

But that did little to appease angry, disappointed buyers in the project, who told the Star they had only recently paid the last instalments on their deposits.

Its not fair, said Patricia DeBartolo, who invested in a $530,000, three-bedroom condo for her daughters to live in while attending school and starting their careers in Toronto.

If (the Gupta Group) cant get the financing or they want to turn around and sell it for more money we cant stop them. But its not correct that theyve had our money for a year, an interest-free loan to use it as they want, she said.

The Bradford woman, who works in Vaughan, said she bought a condo in February 2017, in part because it made financial sense to own it given high Toronto rents and the Iconas proximity to a new TTC station.

At that time it was perfect. Now youd never get that and I certainly wouldnt go and spend $700,000 for a condo, which is what theyre going for at those sizes, said DeBartolo.

The cancellation comes about six months after Liberty Developments cancelled the Cosmos condos along the same stretch of Highway 7. About half the buyers in that three-tower project of about 1,000 units are asking a court to cancel their purchase agreements so they can sue the developer for the lost appreciation on their purchases during the two years in which Liberty held their deposits.

Lawyer Ted Charney, who is representing the Cosmos buyers, said he was swamped with emails from Icona purchasers on Wednesday. He said the province and building industry regulator Tarion need to do more for buyers when developers kill projects for vague or undisclosed reasons.

Tarion is supposed to protect consumers. So far as we know it has done nothing about the last cancelled project (Cosmos). Nor has the provincial government or Premier (Doug) Ford. Therefore it should come as no surprise that in todays condominium market projects will continue to be cancelled for lack of satisfactory financing, he said.

Icona Developments Inc. has not disclosed to purchasers how it went about meeting its contractual obligations to make all reasonably commercial efforts to secure satisfactory financing, added Charney.

Buyer Drita Jakupovski borrowed against her home to invest in the Icona condo. By the time her son, who is still in high school, is ready to own a home it wont be affordable, she said.

There have been 11 residential project cancellations representing about 4,000 units since early 2017, according to Shaun Hildebrand, president of Urbanation, a market research company. He thinks the Toronto area could potentially see more, but nothing on the scale of Icona and Cosmos.

Many of the projects that appeared to be candidates for cancellation a few months ago have now started work on their sites, so the list has been pared down quite a lot, he said.

The City of Vaughan had not been formally notified about the Icona cancellation, said a statement attributed to Mayor Maurizio Bevilacqua.

To have heard about it through the media is extremely unfortunate, and we are now looking into the matter, it said. This is disappointing and a poor way to do business in our city.

In another statement, the City of Vaughan said it shares the buyers frustration and disappointment, but that consumer protection is the provinces jurisdiction.

City council sent a formal written request to the ministry of government and consumer services in May 2018, asking for a review of the legislation governing the marketing, presale and cancellation of pre-construction condominium projects. We hope the new provincial administration will take action on our request shortly, it said.

Meantime, DeBartolo said its small investors like her who are feeding the economy.

We just get victimized, she said. Its not like Im a high roller and Ive got thousands of dollars in the bank.

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The plan was to use the net proceeds of the sale to pay down debt, according to its prospectus. The company, which reported $2.6 billion in sales over the 53 weeks that ended June 30, has $1.3 billion in outstanding debt, resulting in part from a series of acquisitions. Zekelman has acquired six pipe and tube manufacturers since 2006 and is considering additional acquisitions, it said in its prospectus.
Online U.S. real estate giant Zillow has struck a listings deal with a second Canadian company, but has not yet announced a launch date for posting those properties on Zillow.com.

The company, which has indicated before that it would be launching Canadian listings later this year, would only say that they will be featured on Zillow.com soon.

Right at Home Realty, a Toronto-based brokerage with about 1,800 listings, will provide a direct feed of its listings when Zillow launches in Canada, the company announced Thursday.

The two have been talking since about June, said Right at Home chair and CEO Ron Peddicord. That is when Century 21 Canada announced it had struck a similar agreement with Zillow to provide its 26,300 national listings to the site.

Were partnering with them for a Canadian launch. This isnt about putting Canadian listings in the U.S., he said.

It is unclear whether the Canadian listings will include the sold prices that the Toronto Real Estate Board (TREB) is in the process of releasing to its members, because the rules and the format of the new Toronto listings, including sold and other sales history data, are still being worked out, he said.

Zillows announcement on Thursday said that the Canadian listings on its site will include a description of the property, photos and contact information for the listing agent, as well as a link to the brokerage.

Right at Homes 4,100 realtors will benefit from the exposure on Zillow.com, which claims to receive more than 100 million visits from non-U.S. users each year, chiefly from Canada, Britain, Germany, Mexico and China.

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Zillow is proud to partner with Right at Home Realty and offer this widely respected Canadian brand free advertising for their listings on one of the most visited real estate sites in the world, said Errol Samuelson, Zillow group chief industry development officer in a press release.

Share your thoughts

Zillow is not a real estate sales company. It sells ads and when a consumer clicks on a property, a real estate agents advertisement will appear on that page.

The U.S. is the top foreign travel destination for Canadians. It will take time for Zillow to build a presence here but the brand is already familiar to many Canadian real estate browsers, said Peddicord.

Zillow has such a penetration in the U.S. that any Canadian that has ever looked for real estate in the U.S. has used Zillow, he said.

We view it as a digital aged version of what used to be the Saturday real estate section, said Peddicord. Agents have struggled outside of the Multiple Listings Service with what marketing tools do I have to get further exposure to my listings.

The shrinkage of print advertising has been filled in part, he said, by online marketplaces such as Kijiji.

That gap in the U.S. has been filled by Zillow, he said. A Canada-wide expansion for Zillow would be significant, said Peddicord.

Size-wise its adding a market that is the equivalent to the size in population of California which is a pretty decent move, he said.

Seattle-based Zillow Group operates a series of apps and websites, including Trulia.com. The Canadian listings will be concentrated on Zillow.com to begin with, said a company spokesperson.
EDMONTONA 24-year-old man is facing multiple charges in connection with a random stabbing at the South Campus LRT station early Tuesday morning that sent another man to hospital.

Mario Bigchild, 24, has been remanded and faces charges including attempted murder, aggravated assault, robbery and assault and disarmament of a peace officer.

Police responded just before 8 a.m. Tuesday to a chaotic scene at the LRT station, near the University of Alberta, where a 19-year-old was stabbed during the early morning commuter rush. Eyewitnesses report the man slumping to the ground and bystanders jumping in to help.

On Tuesday, Acting Staff Sgt. Neil Thompson told reporters that the suspect then fled the scene on foot and that they did not know the motive yet.

At this time, it appears the assault at the LRT was random, unprovoked from what we can tell. We are still investigating to see what, if any, the motive might have been, Thompson said.

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Twenty-four-year-old man in custody after random stabbing at South Campus LRT station

Police were still responding to the stabbing when they got a call about a robbery at a convenience store in the area of 57 Ave. and 111 St., where a man had allegedly entered the business, assaulted an employee and stolen merchandise.

The man then left the business and approached a 2017 Cadillac XTS in the parking lot, demanding the female driver take him away from the scene.

When she refused, police said the man jumped into her vehicle on the passenger side and grabbed her. She was able to break free and get out of her car.

Police said he then took off in the car, heading southbound on 111 St.

EMS responded and treated the male employee at the scene for minor injuries. Police said the car owner was not injured.

Through the vehicles OnStar navigation system, police were able to locate the vehicle.

We were able to co-ordinate with the OnStar people a GPS track of the vehicle. We located it at a west-end location (179 St. and 106 A Ave.). Members from West Division assisted as well as the K-9 Unit, Thompson told reporters on Tuesday.

Following a brief altercation with the police, the suspect ran  but headed straight toward the EPS canine unit who apprehended him.

Police said the 19-year-old injured male remains in hospital at this time.

In the release, EPS thanked the citizens who stepped in to assist the 19-year-old during and immediately after the attack.

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EDMONTONAn Alberta company behind a line of online learning materials has apologized after a quiz it created asked students to identify a positive effect of residential schools.

A spokesperson for the Barrhead-based Alberta Distance Learning Centre said the quiz was created and approved several years ago  but it ended up in a St. Paul school this week, where a picture of the question was snapped by a students family member and started making rounds on social media on Wednesday.

The quiz, which was in use at the St. Paul Alternate Education Centre, northeast of Edmonton, asks students to select a positive effect of residential schools from a list of provided options.

The four possible answers were: children were away from home; children learned to read; children were taught manners; and children became civilized.

David Garbutt, the learning centres superintendent, told StarMetro on Thursday that he wanted to apologize for making the content available.

That content never should have been in that document in the first place, he said.

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New federal holiday will honour residential school survivors

Garbutt said the question dates back to 2010, when the course was developed and then made available for teachers to download online and use in class. Since then, the course has been updated, but Garbutt couldnt confirm whether the new version includes the question. He believes its possible a teacher who had an old version gave the question to a student.

He said teachers who download the course can pick and choose content for learning outcomes they want to achieve.

Im not sure who developed it (at the learning centre) or why they developed it, he said. But we take responsibility for that.

Garbutt couldnt comment on how many times the course material had been downloaded from its website or how many classrooms the content may have reached. He said this was the first he had heard about the question and based on that, didnt think it had been that widespread.

It was old material that hadnt been reviewed, should have been reviewed, never should have been developed in the first place, and the list goes on, Garbutt said. He added the learning centre has a group of teachers, proofreaders and editors who review course material regularly.

Garbutt said the answer key had the answer to the question as: children learned to read.

My personal view is there is no correct answer. Its simply an offensive question.

Minister of Education David Eggen said Thursday that he would be looking into the incident, saying in a statement he was appalled to see such hurtful and offensive material given to an Alberta student.

I want to sincerely apologize to this student, their family, and anyone else who may have been exposed to this insensitive resource, he said. There is no excuse for it  and there is no place for it in our schools.

Eggen has instructed Alberta Education to look into the material used by the learning centre to make sure it is discontinued immediately. The deputy minister will be speaking with every school in the province to ensure no more students are exposed to this type of material, he said.

Eggen said hell be speaking personally to the student affected by the hateful material and will be apologizing. Eggen plans to invite them to a roundtable conversation on Indigenous education hes holding next week.

The problem of painting residential schools in a positive light is pervasive in society, says Miranda Jimmy, co-founder of Reconciliation in Solidarity Edmonton, a group that supports reconciliation initiatives.

I have conversations every day with people who say, Yeah, but it was a good thing. At least they got educated, at least theyre normal people now and not savages, said Jimmy.

This is a common narrative that continues today and so if our education system is not challenging it, I dont know what we can do to fix it.

Jimmy said cases like this can leave people who arent subjected to it every day blinded to the fact that racism still exists.

The province needs more Indigenous people involved in the education system to help develop curriculum that promotes Indigenous views, she said.

The more Indigenous people have those roles, the more variety of perspectives. (They) can be challenging these pervasive historical narratives that have existed.

Jimmy pointed out that the Blue Quills Indian Residential School operated close to St. Paul beginning in the 1930s. It still stands today and was one of the largest residential schools that operated in Alberta. Students there faced beatings, harsh labour and strict rules.

The effect on the community is still prevalent, she said.

Glen Brodziak, division superintendent for the St. Paul Education Regional Division, said giving the question to students was also a mistake.

I take responsibility for what happened here and we are wrong, he said during an interview.

We will be reaching out to our four Nations and we will also be putting a message out explaining how this occurred, but also acknowledging our part in it and I am sorry for this.

Residential schools in Canada were a network of institutions that began in the 1800s, with the last school closing in 1996. Over that period, an estimated 150,000 Indigenous children were taken from their families and placed in the schools, where they were often forbidden to speak their own languages and were abused.

Brodziak said there are students in his schools who are second-, third- and fourth-generation survivors of residential schools and he said its their story to tell, not the schools. The division Brodziak handles covers about a 45-minute radius in all directions from St. Paul and has students from four surrounding First Nations.

We take responsibility for it, that we should be checking out our resources and checking out whats in front of our students, said Brodziak.

Because students direct their own learning at the school, Brodziak said he didnt know how many students would have seen the test. The course material for the Social Studies 20-4 course includes the questionnaire, but Brodziak couldnt say how long the course has been used in the school or how many students may have taken, or are currently taking, the course.

Grade 9 through Grade 12 students attend the school and have access to the ADLC-approved course material, although Brodziak said sometimes they take younger students. He said teachers are in the classrooms to help students navigate the self-directed course material if they need it.

Brodziak said the distance learning centre has been a good partner overall.

According to the centres website, the course focuses on Canadas development as a nation and our role in the global community. Topics include Canadas First Nations, the development of modern-day Canada, and Canadas cultural diversity.

He said the school has reached out to the students family since it found out about the question.

My role as a school superintendent, but really almost more importantly as a Canadian, I acknowledge that this is wrong. I cant imagine what residential schools were like.

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Fahrenheit 11/9 director Michael Moore, a proud American feeling Trumped by political misfortune, is lamenting his lack of dual citizenship with Canada when I meet him during the recent Toronto International Film Festival.

My grandfather was Canadian, the moviemaker from Flint, Mich., says by way of a greeting, as he works through a series of press interviews in a hotel lobby restaurant.

Why cant I get some kind of papers? As a back-up! Can we get a campaign going in this country to fight on my behalf? They dont have to give me a passport. Just give me some kind of thing where I dont have to do a Handmaids Tale run into this country!

He admits his desire to be at one with Canada isnt entirely motivated by his intense dislike of U.S. President Donald J. Trump, whose unlikely rise to power is examined and excoriated in Fahrenheit 11/9, the inflammatory new Moore documentary that opens wide Friday.

Seems Moore, 64, has long been jealous about our chocolate bars  especially Coffee Crisp, which he cant obtain stateside.

Man, what can we do to get Coffee Crisp in the United States? What is wrong with us that we dont have that yet? Somethings wrong with that. You also invented the Kit Kat. When we would go to Canada to visit the relatives, they had these Kit Kats. You have made contributions to the world!

(Nerd alert: Kit Kat bars were invented in the U.K., not Canada, if Wikipedia is to be believed.)

Read more:

Review | Fahrenheit 11/9 lets Trump-era WTF? give way to hope

In the more than 20 years Ive been interviewing Moore, hes always expressed a fondness for Canada and Canadians. His knowledge of this countrys people, history and politics is better than that of any other American Ive ever met.

And on this occasion, he seems genuinely embarrassed about his own country, which has lost considerable international prestige under the shock-a-minute rule of Trump, a reality TV star who became president largely by accident  and also because 100 million Americans chose not to vote, a lamentable fact Moore underlines in his doc. The central message of Fahrenheit 11/9 is warning people about the dangers of complacency.

Moore still loves the U.S., especially his home state. For this interview, he sports a baseball cap from Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore, a nature preserve on Lake Michigan that bills itself as Americas Most Beautiful Place.

But hes dismayed by how few of his fellow Americans seem to realize what Trump is really up to, which is to turn back the clock on social advances of the past 50 years.

Everybody is distracted by Trumps outrageous tweets or vainly hoping the ongoing investigation into Russia collusion in the 2016 presidential election, led by special counsel Robert Mueller, will lead to Trump being impeached  and that isnt going to happen, says Moore, who was among the few public figures on the political left who correctly predicted Trump would defeat Hillary Clinton and become president.

Moore calls Trump the master distractor and he almost seems to admire how the man gets away with saying and doing so many outrageous things. Trump is constantly spinning falsehoods but its always from the point of view his own version of reality.

Hes always telling you the truth, Moore asserts. When he says what hes going to do, he is telling you this is what hes going to do. Nobody wants to hear it. They just say, Oh, hes crazy! And then we lose all that time to figure out how to fight him, because weve spent time laughing at him, just saying hes crazy, or expecting the special prosecutors going to haul him out of there. Not going to happen!

As an example of his diabolical methods, Moore points to the ongoing allegation that Trump had an affair with porn star Stormy Daniels. It came as neither a surprise nor an embarrassment for a president who knows no shame.

I think he leaked the Stormy Daniels story. Because he knows his base: 64 percent of white men voted for him. What do you think they think when they hear he got to have sex with a porn star? He knows how beautiful that is for him. Any American journalist in New York will tell you that hes a master leaker. He loves leaking stuff about himself and about other people. Hes played the press for a long time in New York, played them really well.

I ask Moore if he thinks Americans will get tired of getting played by Trump.

Yeah, at some point they will. One of the good things about us is we eventually come around. The problem is we are slow learners. Look at all these little things you guys (Canadians) do first. Whether its gay marriage or marijuana or whatever ... we will follow you. Eventually. But its got to be frustrating to look at it from afar, and to see how long it takes us.

He has timed the wide release of Fahrenheit 11/9 so that it might have the maximum impact on voters prior to this falls midterm elections stateside. He hopes the Democrats gain enough electoral ground on Trump and his Republicans to stop some of the more right-wing legislation being planned, such as a repeal of the Roe v. Wade abortion rights ruling.

But the Democrats really need to focus on the 2020 presidential election, Moore says, and to find a candidate who can defeat Trump.

I think a lot of people came out to vote for Trump because he was different. And Hillary was not different. She was the same old thing, Moore says.

The Democrats are going to have to run a beloved American who is going to inspire them to get out and vote, if theyre going to win.

Maybe the Democrats should seriously go for a showbiz personality, to fight fire with fire?

Yeah, why not? Whats wrong with that? Why dont the Democrats think that way? Its so funny: Republicans spend all this energy mocking and criticizing Democrats for being Hollywood elitists, but the Republicans run celebrities all the time  Reagan, Trump and Gopher (Fred Grandy) from The Love Boat, who became a congressman from Iowa. The Democrats say, Oh, no, we want someone thoughtful and somebody who is part of the system. Great! Run Joe Biden. See what happens.

Moore is being serious, and hes seriously concerned about his country. If things dont go his way soon, I may have to send him a case of Coffee Crisp as a consolation prize.

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Lola Bulajic was nowhere near born yet when New Kids on the Block ruled the airwaves. But an innate shoppers instinct made her pluck an NKOTB T-shirt out of a pile of dross. She somehow knew the 90s heartthrobs could be spun into gold again.

Precocious, yes, but some things are in the blood. This Hamilton Grade 2 student was born into a vintage dynasty. At the tender age of 7, she has launched her own curated kids store, @LolasVintageKids.

Dolled up in full-on throwback finery from her own line for our photo shoot, she appears just slightly out of time and place. I usually only wear all vintage for photo day, Lola says.

Another anachronism in our informal age, Lola has her business protocol down pat. Looking me square in the eye, firm of handshake, she enquires politely, Am I the youngest person youve ever interviewed?

Next weekend, Sept. 29 and 30, Lola will have her own kiosk at Toronto Vintage Clothing Show tucked inside her parents stall. This makes her the youngest seller at the biannual event, which has been running since 2013. The 120 vendors this season make it the biggest vintage gathering in town. It is wildly anticipated by aficionados, who line up and storm the doors at the opening bell.

Lolas parents are Nik and Connie Bulajic, who the rest of the year can be found at Vintage Soul Geek, on King St. E. in downtown Hamilton, which they opened in 2015. The expansive but chockablock space, in an 1860s building, is what Nik calls a mom and pop shop, no employees, long hours.

The family trio is always on the hunt for fresh stock, but they have an unusually large storehouse of multi-era goods already squirreled away, the result of generations of vintage hounds. Connies mother, Penny Colwell, is the vintage jewellery guru; she does the accessories merchandising at the shop. Nik estimates maybe five per cent of her vast treasure trove is currently on display, ranging from Victorian cameos to Deco through modern collectors items.

But what Nik calls jokingly a generational sickness started with Connies grandmother, who kept her own 50s wardrobe and items passed down to her. That makes Lola a fourth-generation vintage princess.

It is also the 50s that most rocks Connies bobby socks, but you can find goodies from the late 1800s through the 1990s. Note that this last era is super-hot with kids on the vintage scene these days, a dot that Lola herself connected with NKOTB (netting the junior tycoon a cool $22!).

Yes, says Nik, that means 80 years of collecting stored in the basement of our shop, backroom; three bedrooms in our house; the basement of our house; and Connies childhood room in Brantford.

The idea to start Lolas Vintage came this past summer vacation, a way to teach the youngster about money, and make hanging out at the shop a learning experience. Her area is located in a corner of her parents shop.

Right now, a nifty pair of 90s Versace pants fit for a logo-conscious teen hang on Lolas racks, alongside a neon green character sweater from the 80s, and a 60s blue velvet A-line style infants frock finished with lace sleeves. A Little House on the Prairie style mini-floral dress is waiting for a fashion-forward pre-teen to pick up on the rejuvenated Laura Ingalls look.

But then some special pieces went up on the web, and Lola suddenly had a more international following. Her first Instagram sale, a vintage leather jacket, went to a diminutive influencer in Southern California. Then there was a 70s boys suit destined for a wedding.

And dont worry about Lola freewheeling alone on the web: My Mom works with me picking the items and taking pictures to post, says Lola. Sales are safely filtered through her folks as well.

For the vintage show, in her area look for a wide variety of sizing and a focus on 50s wear, jackets and capes. And loads of vintage jeans, including one very special pair embroidered with ET on the back!

Pulling quick changes of clothes out of a vintage white suitcase, Lola negotiates heels like a pintsized stylist pro. Indeed, she and Connie found a box of retro heels in tiny sizesfrom patent Ferragamo flats (Lolas personal faves), to little white bowed heels that have that hip-nurse vibe that is hot right now, to a pair of brown hush-puppy heels that add a bang-on 70s splash to her 70s green patterned polyester number with cap shoulders, a nip in at the waist and a fashionable below-the-knee hemline.

She has been really into accessories lately, says Connie, as Lola fishes out a little round wicker bag on a cord to tuck into the crook of her arm and set off a red polka-dot dress with a white bow at the neck.

A sense of theatre is a necessary part of the vintage calling. And indeed, Vintage Soul Geek has also attracted Hollywood types. Costume directors, to be more specific. Many 60s-era pieces for the film The Shape of Water were found here, says Nik, who is the designated promoter. If Connie is the vintage queen, Lola probably gets her showmanship from Dad Nik.

Lola is also great on the market, says Nik. Shes like a sniffer dog. I showed her the feel of the silk shirts we were looking for, and sent her down the racks.

After all, knowing fabric is the heart of vintage trade. So is pricing, and both Lola and Soul Geek goods are deliberately priced, says Nik, about 10 per cent below competition.

But vintage is ultimately less about trends, than about one persons personal style. Says Nik, Everything in here is the personal taste of my wife. Lola perks her head up, from fishing around in her accessories suitcase for the photo shoot. And your daughter! she adds.

Indeed, Lola came up with the slogan for her new shop: Adorable and affordable. The next step will be honing an instinct for what will sell, when. An important quality when you have so much stock to pull from. Connie is a curator, says her husband. She knows what people are ready for, and what to put away until they are ready.

The family continues to shop everywhere, says Connie. That includes a recent trip to Serbia where they had to beg to get to a hidden box of 60s dresses and an upcoming trip to Owen Sound (pssst, you heard it here first).

But we dont go to the big picking warehouses, where you have to wear a gas mask, says Connie. We only select pieces in the best shape, and I wash everything by hand myself at home, I do all the repairs, sew on the buttons.

As a family-focused business, sometimes they go the extra mile to find the backstory. When Nik pulled a First World War medal out of a stash of jewellery, he started Googling. Pretty soon, he found a descendant of the soldier, who had posted a request for info on ancestry.com. When Nik sent her the medal of her forbearer, he was rewarded with a thank-you photo of the original owner, then only aged 18, wearing the medal in full uniform. Vintage is a business with a human touch, Nik says. These clothes, he says, tell stories.

As to Lolas story, just what is she going to do with all the dough rolling in? Education fund, say her parents in unison. But when they go on to tell Lola that one day all this  arms sweeping around the store  will be hers, she shakes her head.

Im going to run a restaurant, she says. I like cooking, too.

At 7, she has time to try on a few careers yet.

For more info go to Torontovintageclothingshow.ca. The show runs September 29th and 30th at the Queen Elizabeth Building at Exhibition Place. Tickets are $12.
The former editor at the New York Review of Books says he stands by his decision to publish a controversial essay by former CBC radio host Jian Ghomeshi.

In a piece published Thursday in the Dutch magazine Vrij Nederland, Ian Buruma drew parallels between his case and Ghomeshis, saying its ironic that he has now been convicted on social media, but not in court.

On Wednesday, a spokesperson for the Review of Books confirmed to the Star that Buruma had left his job amid sharp criticism for publishing Ghomeshis essay, titled Reflections from a Hashtag. Critics said the piece, in which Ghomeshi stopped short of admitting any physical abuse and did not explicitly apologize, lacked context and was poorly fact-checked.

I have now myself been convicted on Twitter, without any due process, Buruma told the Dutch magazine.

It is rather ironic: as editor of The New York Review of Books I published a theme issue about #MeToo-offenders who had not been convicted in a court of law but by social media. And now I myself am publicly pilloried.

Buruma says he was not fired from the prestigious literary magazine, but felt forced to resign after it became clear that university publishers who advertise in the Review of Books were threatening a boycott.

Ghomeshi was acquitted of sexually assaulting three women in March 2016, following a high-profile criminal trial.

A lengthy Star investigation eventually outlined allegations from 15 women.

In May 2016, a further charge of sexual assault against him was withdrawn after Ghomeshi apologized to former CBC colleague Kathryn Borel for sexually inappropriate behaviour in the office, and signed a peace bond.

Read more:

Editor of the New York Review of Books is out amid outrage over Ghomeshis #MeToo essay

Ive become a hashtag: Jian Ghomeshi writes on sex assault accusations in essay for U.S. magazine

Jian Ghomeshi acquitted on basis of inconsistencies and deception

The Review of Books billed the more than 3,500-word essay as Jian Ghomeshi on Jian Ghomeshi, under the header The Fall of Men as part of a package or stories on the magazines Oct. 11 cover.

Buruma drew further criticism for his responses about the essay in a combative interview with Slate.com. In the interview, he told Slate he felt #MeToo can have undesirable consequences, and said he was unconcerned by the exact nature of Ghomeshis alleged behaviour.

The Review of Books on Wednesday added a note to the online version of Ghomeshis essay. The note recognized the criticisms against the magazine and clarified details about the allegations against Ghomeshi.

The following article, which has provoked much criticism, should have included acknowledgment of the serious nature and number of allegations that had been made against the writer, the note reads.

Substantial space will be devoted to letters responding to this article in the next issue.

Buruma told the Dutch magazine he didnt gauge the forces of the #MeToo movement.

I still stand behind my decision to publish, Buruma, 66, said. I expected that there would (be) intense reactions, but I hoped that it would open a discussion about what to do with people who behaved badly, but who were acquitted in a court of law.

With files from May Warren and the Canadian Press

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ST. JOHNS, N.L.Governor General Julie Payette is inviting people in St. Johns to join her on a hike of the Signal Hill National Historic Site today during her first official visit to Newfoundland and Labrador.

The public is asked to meet at the Signal Hill Visitor Information Centre at 3:15 p.m. for the hike, which will last roughly an hour and 15 minutes.

Signal Hill overlooks the provinces capital city and was the site of St. Johns harbour defences from the 17th century to the Second World War.

Payette is also expected to meet with Newfoundland and Labrador Premier Dwight Ball today, and will be invested as honorary chief commissioner of the Canadian Coast Guard.

On Friday, shes expected to visit Happy Valley-Goose Bay and North West River in Labrador.
Humber College is getting a new pay-what-you-can soup bar meant to feed hungry students while helping eliminate food waste in the city.

My theory is the empty stomach is an empty mind, said Jagger Gordon, executive chef at Feed It Forward, a community food program. If we can fill those stomachs they can make brighter new possibilities for our future. If we can address (student hunger) and give them their meals, then they can just focus on their scholastics.

The not-for-profit program, which rescues food from food terminals, restaurants, supermarkets and bakeries, has teamed with Humber College and its IGNITE Student Union on the Soup Bar, a 6,000-square-foot free soup and stew bar at 205 Humber College Blvd. in Etobicoke.

Starting on Tuesday, the soup bar will be open from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. Tuesday and Thursday and offer students the option of paying what they can, or eating for free if thats all they can afford.

Gordon said all the food on offer will be made by his team from rescued food, including food and food byproducts from the college.

This is another way of showing how food thats destined for landfills can be put into nutritious and balanced meals and give it back to people who are living with food insecurities, said Gordon, founder of Feed It Forward.

The initiative follows a pay-what-you-can grocery store opened in June on Dundas St. W., near Runnymede Rd by Feed It Forward, whose list of suppliers include Whole Foods Market, FreshCo., Cobs Bread and Freds Bread.

Unlike the Feed It Forward grocery store, Gordon said there will be no limit to how much students can take, and urged students to eat until your bellys full.

Gordon said he was gobsmacked to learn how many children and students were struggling to make it to their next meal, prompting him to begin looking further into students and food insecurity.

A 2016 report by Meal Exchange, a national charitable organization, found 39 per cent of Canadian post-secondary students are food insecure, with students surveyed saying the cost of food, tuition fees and housing costs were the most common contributors to their situation.

Monica Khosla, president of IGNITE Student Union, said demand among students for initiatives like Feed it Forwards is growing.

Theres a really big need for it, especially since a lot of things these days are going to waste or too expensive, Khosla said. With our initiative specifically, were tackling both of those issues.

Khosla said its too early to tell how many students the Soup Bar will feed daily, but she said the school initially aimed to feed 900 students per day.
Calling the housing crisis afflicting his communities desperate, with families doubling up in small houses and people sleeping on floors, Nishnawbe Aski Nation Grand Chief Alvin Fiddler is in Toronto this week to oversee the launch of a partnership between his communities and Ryerson University.

You are seeing the worst of the worst, he said of the scarcity of homes, substandard living conditions and overcrowding issues that are plaguing 49 Nishnawbe Aski Nation (NAN) communities across northern Ontario. I would say we are in a desperate situation.

The collaboration between NAN and Ryersons Together Design Lab seeks to develop a comprehensive housing strategy that will include input from community members themselves about how to best address the crisis.

The federal governments 10-year, $40-billion housing strategy recognizes Indigenous communities as one of the groups facing the biggest housing problems, but Fiddler said governments develop strategies for First Nations housing with little to no consultation from the communities themselves.

Teams of researchers from Ryerson will conduct several consultations with NAN residents to hear about their needs and develop a plan that reflects their own innovative ideas on how the issues can be best addressed  especially when it comes to allocating funding.

Fiddler said many of the existing challenges are based on geographic complexities, as 32 of the 49 communities are located in remote and isolated areas, making it hard to access building resources.

Based on 2016 census data, there are nearly 30,000 people living in Nishnawbe Aski Nation communities, with about five people on average living in each household (the national average is 2.4), and 49 per cent of housing there is in need of major repair (compared to a national average of seven per cent).

On-reserve housing is not subject to provincial or federal building codes or fire safety standards, said Fiddler. In addition to safety concerns, these conditions often lead to respiratory illnesses and other diseases for the residents, he said.

A Toronto Star investigation last year discovered many homes in Indigenous communities were burning and killing people due to lack of basic building or fire code requirements.

It doesnt make sense for any of us to be living in that type of environment, said Fiddler.

We always go to these meetings in Ottawa and Toronto and talk about this housing crisis, but in terms of action, you dont see much.

Together Design Lab director Shelagh McCartney led a recent pilot study into the ongoing housing crisis in Indigenous communities, and the assembly of chiefs in the Nishnawbe Aski Nation communities passed a resolution to expand the pilot into a full strategy.

She will now be leading her team of researchers on this three-year project, and said the collaboration will allow for a redefining of measures used to create policies for better housing options in Indigenous communities.

There is no one solution to the housing crisis, she said, noting the overcrowding issue brings about social implications with far-reaching effects like family stress and mental health.

If you truly want to fix this housing crisis, you need to be developing metrics and policies that address it on the ground.

William Olscamp, a spokesperson for Indigenous Services Canada, said the department supports the Ryerson-NAN initiative.

The government of Canada is committed to closing the unacceptable housing gap for Indigenous people, and invested $139 million over three years to support construction, renovation and capacity-development in Ontario First Nations housing alone.

As well, the department is currently working with the Ontario Chiefs Committee on Innovative Housing to support the development of a regional housing strategy which will inform a national housing strategy co-developed by the Assembly of First Nations, Indigenous partners and the Government of Canada.
Candidates for Toronto city council are being asked to pledge their commitment to the preservation and creation of more affordable housing, in the run-up to the October election.

The pledge has been backed by 55 associations and agencies invested in helping renters and marginalized people, including Parkdale Community Legal Services, Sistering, Parkdale Activity-Recreation Centre, Advocacy Centre for Tenants Ontario (ACTO), Aboriginal Legal Services and the Federation of Metro Tenants Associations.

Included in the proposed steps or goals: No more homeless deaths, financial stability for Toronto Community Housing, make affordable housing truly affordable, ensure new residential development includes everyone (and) mobilize Torontos resources to build more affordable housing.

Candidates are also being asked to commit to making permanently affordable housing part of the core mandate of city real-estate agency CreateTO, fast-track planning and permit approvals to expand housing stock, and apply an affordable housing lens to all planning. The pledge was emailed to all candidates on Wednesday and signatures will be posted online at TOHousingPledge.ca.

Kenn Hale, the director of legal services for ACTO, said the aim is to get solid commitments to practical solutions for problems that have been discussed at city council, in one form or another, for years.

This election really is going to be about what the future of Toronto is and Toronto it seems is going to continue to grow and we have to make sure we are welcoming to people from all income levels, Hale said. This is the time when the people of Toronto get a choice about who is going to manage that change.

Housing is already an election issue. Mayor John Tory and mayoral candidate Jennifer Keesmaat have both pledged to boost affordable rental housing stock, promising to create 40,000 new units in 12 years and 100,000 over 10, respectively.

The city currently defines affordable as at or below average market rent. In 2018, a one-bedroom unit costs on average about $1,202 a month for purpose-built rentals and not condos, according to the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation.

In Ontario, landlords can only raise the rent on occupied units an amount set by the province each year. Once vacant, landlords can charge whatever they want.

There is a fear the current government will move to roll back legislation, around rent controls for occupied units despite Premier Doug Ford stating he would not, said Rob Field, president of the Graydon Hall Tenants Association.

Im currently paying $1,350 for a two-bedroom apartment. The going rate for a new tenant is $1,700. Now it is becoming unaffordable, said Field, who rents near Don Mills Rd. and Hwy. 401.

The association wants a review of the process for above-the-guideline increases, which allows landlords to apply to recoup costs for significant improvements or repair work.

Ford rocked city hall in late July announcing a midelection cut from 47 seats to 25 in the name of efficiency. A Superior Court judge ruled the legislation downsizing council unconstitutional, but an appeal courts decision Wednesday to put on hold, pending appeal, that ruling means it appears likely a 25-ward election will proceed, and candidates signed up to run in that scenario will be eligible to sign the pledge.

Uncertainty lingers, however, because there is still the possibility of further legal challenges, plus the question of whether the city clerk will be able to hold any fair, legal election on Oct. 22.

With files from Jennifer Pagliaro and David Rider

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Workers picket in front of hotels around the city of Chicago. As of Sept. 24, 2018, workers at 17 downtown hotels remained on strike.

(Chicago Tribune)
Resident versus developer is a familiar fight in Toronto, and its one that a group of neighbours on Springmount Ave. find themselves in  repeatedly.

Under the banner Springmount Collective, residents are taking on a developers plan to demolish their rental homes and build luxury row houses on this block in the St. Clair Ave. W. and Oakwood Ave. area.

They won their first fight at the Committee of Adjustment last fall, and then earlier this year came out on top in a second round in front of the Toronto Local Appeal Body.

Now theyre facing their third battle: another appeal by the developer who has challenged the initial ruling based on legal technicalities. A new hearing is slated for next month.

Its important that people understand anybody can fight these things, said resident Andrew Tay. You use the tools you have available, and if you need help, then you find those people that can help you.

Just watching all of (this) unfold, you get the sense of how important pluralism is because youve got all of these different views and experiences, added Ali Garrison, who spoke to the Star along with other collective members Andrew Manson and Edwige Jean-Pierre about their ongoing battle.

How did the collective get rolling?

Ali Garrison: That first year we looked into starting a co-op. We talked to our MPP, our city councillor, even to our MP about some different options to create a co-op. What ended up happening was we didnt feel that any of us could afford the initial downpayment for the shares to create that. Once we couldnt ... figure out how to create a co-op, then we went into defence mode.

What did that entail?

Andrew Manson: Because wed already had some meetings together, we talked and got a sense of where we all were, it was then easy to organize again with a slightly different focus.

How does the collective work?

AG: Its flexible, and I really appreciate that. Thats one of the things I think must frustrate a lot of citizen groups. Like how can we keep up this fight for this many years with no reinforcements and the same people always leading.

AM: And were totally unpaid, doing hundreds of hours of research, detailed strategizing.

What was the first Committee of Adjustment meeting like?

AM: It was stressful. It was a big deal.

AG: And none of us knew what the hell we were doing.

AM: It was like trial by fire. We had two weeks to canvass and get everybody to write letters and sign petitions ... 25 of us showed up. That really sent a message to the developers.

You won. Then what happened?

AM: We suspected they were going to appeal (to the Toronto Local Appeal Body, which replaced the Ontario Municipal Board) ... When I got the notice about the appeal (last Dec. 1) I was like, oh, crap. Committee of Adjustment is a more informal process whereas TLAB is so much more formal; its semi legalistic. People who dont have lawyers, they usually lose, right?

Andrew Tay: The process is still quite daunting. TLAB actually states theyre committed to a faster timeline (compared to the OMB), which maybe for smaller projects makes sense. For a situation like this, I dont think (a shorter lead time to a hearing is) really fair to citizens and residents. A lot of other neighbourhood and residents associations in their fights have complained about this problem because theres not enough time  especially when you consider the developers already have a head start.

AM: They already have all their money. They already have all their experts lined up.

How did you prepare for the hearing?

AT: The only reason why we figured this stuff out was by reading a whole lot of stuff really fast and acting really fast  over Christmas break. Dec. 27 was the second evidence submission deadline. They submit like 400 pages of evidence and we have to counteract it. So it took 10 days over Christmas break to put it together.

AM: We didnt do much for Christmas. I was talking to him (gesturing towards Tay) on the phone Christmas Day.

Edwige Jean-Pierre: I thought it was unreasonable.

What happened at the hearing?

AM: It was a long day.

EJP: They presented their side for (what seemed like) at least six hours, Id say. We only got an hour-and-a-half at the most, for the cross-examination on our side and for the participants to speak ... I hate to say it but its like the rich versus poor.

Were there legal costs involved? How did you pay?

AM: We hired a paralegal to help ... but no one knows your issue as well as you. We all contributed ... out of pocket.

Did you ever feel like throwing in the towel?

AT: In individual moments. Theres always a moment where its just like, ugh.

AM: Considering were not being paid to do this. Its not just two days off for another hearing, its also the massive amounts of time to prepare all this stuff, and to have to do it again.

What keeps you motivated?

AG: We kind of keep encouraging each other. Having a cohesion is really helpful because there can be that solidarity in the face of a common enemy.

EJP: Also the (rental) vacancy rate in Toronto. If we happen to move out, these places are still in good enough shape that other people can live (in them).

AG: These arent dilapidated, falling-apart homes. They are beautiful.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
A taxi driver fled the scene after crashing into a building Thursday morning near Adelaide St. E and Church St., Toronto police said.

The cab collided with another vehicle before crashing into a store just after 5:20 a.m. He then fled the scene on foot. The other driver fled as well, according to police.

Police said there were no injuries.

The investigation is ongoing and they are looking for the owners of the vehicles.
A woman has sustained non-life threatening injuries after she was slashed in the torso, according to Toronto Police.

She was taken to hospital after paramedics were called to the scene at 10:44 p.m. on Wednesday near Sherbourne and Howard Streets.

Police describe the suspect as female, black, heavy build, long hair extensions with red tips and wearing pink fluffy sandals.

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LOS ANGELES  On the morning of his first day of school, when he was 7, Abiy Ahmed heard his mother whispering into his ears.

Youre unique, my son, he recalled her saying. You will end up in the palace. So when you go to school, bear in mind that one day youll be someone which will serve the nation.

With that preposterous prophesy for a boy growing up in a house without electricity in a tiny Ethiopian village, she kissed him on his head and sent him on his way.

Abiy, now 42, not only ended up in the prime ministers palace, he has also become the most closely watched leader in Africa: a man who says he wants to change his country from the inside out  and fast.

After taking office in March, he officially ended two decades of hostilities with Ethiopias longtime rival and neighbour, Eritrea. Beyond that, he started loosening a tightly controlled state-run economy, pledged multiparty elections in a country long known for jailing dissidents, and began wooing the governments most strident critics: members of the Ethiopian diaspora, who have long organized insurgencies from afar. Leaders of a previously outlawed opposition group returned to the capital last Saturday.

The task is enormous. Ethiopia is Africas second most populous nation, with more than 100 million people, in a part of the continent where world powers are scrambling for influence.

So are the risks: millions of disaffected youth, widespread poverty, a violent struggle over resources among Ethiopias competing ethnic groups, and a range of detractors from inside and outside the government who are either threatened by too much change  or angry that it is not enough.

Abiys changes are a major departure for Ethiopia, which has long relied on a government model that resembles Chinas, emphasizing state-led economic growth and a suppression of political dissent.

But Abiy knows his country is overwhelmingly young, with a median age of 18 and a thirst for economic and political freedom.

Closing the door is the worst approach, he told The New York Times in Los Angeles in between bridge-building meetings with Ethiopians living in the United States.

Many of Abiys promises remain just that. He has yet to lift restrictions on civil society, and it is unclear how multiparty elections can be held, as he has promised, in a country where the governing coalition and its allies have sweeping control over almost all institutions  and hold every seat in Parliament.

Rep. Karen Bass, D-Calif., who met with Abiy in late August, lauded his changes but warned of the risks of soaring demands.

He has delivered, but if life doesnt change for everyone, people get impatient, she said. People have unrealistic expectations.

More than just changing the way Ethiopia is run, Abiy says he wants to change the way Ethiopians see themselves.

Build bridges, break down walls, is a constant refrain in his speeches, urging Ethiopians to step across religious and ethnic fault lines to view one another as compatriots, instead of rivals.

We just blame each other, he said in the interview, barely concealing his distress. We just hate each other. He calls it group thinking.

The difficulty is on stark display. Inter-ethnic violence, mostly over land, has left nearly 1 million people displaced from their homes.

Abiy embodies Ethiopias mixture. His father was Muslim and Oromo. It is the nations largest ethnic group, but has long been marginalized. His mother was Amharic and Orthodox Christian, and she converted to Islam when she married.

Abiy became a Protestant. He speaks of the ideals of love, forgiveness and reconciliation.

Its not political language. Its religious language, observed Ephraim Isaac, an Ethiopian religious studies scholar who met with Abiy shortly after he took office.

Politically, Abiy is a consummate insider. He joined the army at age 13 and went on to create the government cybersecurity agency in a country with a tight leash on the internet. He also joined the governing coalition that overthrew military rule in 1991 and has run Ethiopia ever since. His party, the Oromo Peoples Democratic Front, has played something of an internal opposition role within the coalition.

Rather than hiding his mothers whispers, he says he advertised them.

One day Ill be your boss, he recalls saying to senior officials, even when he was a midlevel government functionary.

Then, last year, protests by young Oromos, fed up with a government dominated by smaller, more powerful ethnic groups, nearly brought the government to its knees. The former prime minister, Hailemariam Desalegn, resigned. Abiy, an Oromo, was elevated to the post, in large part because he was seen as having the best chance to cool the protests and hold the country together.

Immediately, he apologized for the killings of protesters by government forces. He lifted the ban on opposition groups and pardoned one of his countrys most high-profile political prisoners.

Peace with Eritrea was a priority. He asked those who had contact with Eritrea  one of the most diplomatically isolated countries in the world  to reach out on his behalf. He wanted to talk.

Abiy said help came from many foreign leaders, including the de facto leader of the United Arab Emirates, Crown Prince Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed, who enjoys great influence in Asmara, the Eritrean capital.

Abiy said one of the biggest priorities for the crown prince was peace between Ethiopia and Eritrea and he was careful to add that he had also spoken to several African leaders.

The breakthrough in the standoff came from Abiys side. In early June, he agreed to hand over a disputed border town to Eritrea, a sticking point for 20 years.

The next month, the two countries officially declared an end to their war. By mid-July, the longtime Eritrean president, Isaias Afwerki, visited Ethiopia for the first time in two decades. In a gesture of goodwill, Abiy gave him a camel, Eritreas national animal. In September, border crossing points reopened, paving the way for trade.

Abiy faces entrenched resistance at home  in the security services and the political parties that have long held power. But he came to the United States to remove a longtime thorn in the side of Ethiopias leaders: its exiles.

The chaos, the crisis, the conflict in the nation, somehow, it is related to the diaspora, he said. That negative energy operates in destroying our country.

To win over dissidents abroad, he is appealing to their homesickness.

Around 23,000 Ethiopians abroad were effectively barred from coming home because of their political activities. Abiy lifted those restrictions.

In a sign of that new openness, he said that Ethiopians abroad  thousands of whom had not set foot in the country in years for fear of arrest  would be able to come home visa free for the Ethiopian new year.

The diaspora, most of them, they live here physically but their soul is there. Virtually day and night they are in Ethiopia, he said. They never expect to come to Ethiopia, to be invited to Ethiopia.
Premier Doug Fords victory in cutting the size of Torontos city council left incumbents resigned to signing up against one another Thursday, and other candidates abandoning the race entirely.

Registrations by Councillors Paula Fletcher and John Campbell created at least two new matchups, with Fletcher facing off against longtime friend and ally Mary Fragedakis in Ward 14 Toronto-Danforth, and Campbell up against fellow first-term councillor Stephen Holyday in Ward 2 Etobicoke Centre.

By the end of the first of two days to register, there were just under 400 candidates for councillor and school boards signed up, including those who had previously signed up under a 25-ward system. That compares to 509 candidates who were registered in the 47-ward election.

Chris Moise, a gay Black school trustee who was one of the people behind a court challenge of the council cut, arrived before 1 p.m. to sign up for re-election to the Toronto District School Board.

The current school board trustee for Ward 14 Toronto Centre-Rosedale had been campaigning for a council seat, registered to run in a 47-ward race for one of the new downtown wards containing the Gay Village. But he wont run against friend and mentor Kristyn Wong-Tam, the incumbent in the area covered by the new Toronto Centre ward in a 25-seat election. Wong-Tam signed up just before the office closed on Thursday.

Before he arrived at city hall on Thursday, Moise was out canvassing with Wong-Tam, holding signs with her face printed on them and encouraging others to vote for her. Recognized as one of the people fighting Ford in court, Moise said hes been getting a lot of sympathy messages.

Read more:

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Bill 5: The winners, the losers and the in-betweeners

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Im sad, but Im not dead, he told the Star. I just have to keep going.

I still have a lot to contribute and a lot of things are happening at the school board now that needs continued attention and support around youth equity.

Moise said he has yet to reflect on his own feelings about what happened  an emotional roller-coaster of winning in court on Sept. 10 with Fords Bill 5 struck down, only to have that decision suspended Wednesday by the Ontario Court of Appeal. While further legal challenges are expected, it is now almost certain the Oct. 22 election will be run with 25 wards.

This whole election, for me, is just a farce, he said.

Meanwhile, Jennifer Hollett, who had signed up to run in another open downtown race under the 47-ward system and who also challenged the cut in court, said she too will withdraw her candidacy and support Wong-Tam and Moise.

If I knew this was going to be a 25-ward race, I would not have entered it, Hollett said, adding her campaign slogan since Fords government interfered in the race has been One day at a time.

Hollett said she doesnt want to run against allies like Wong-Tam or Councillor Joe Cressy.

The whole day-to-day mantra continues. I will continue my work in the tech, news and government space, said the former Twitter Canada executive, who quit that job to run in a 47-ward race.

Hollett says she was proud to fight against Fords council cut, and that it didnt have to happen ... it doesnt mean its right or best for Toronto or the province.

Incumbents who had yet to sign up in a 25-ward race walked into the elections office on the main floor of city hall on Thursday to re-file their paperwork after nominations reopened at 8:30 a.m. Nominations close at 4:30 p.m. on Friday.

Cressy, who registered to run in Ward 10 Spadina-Fort York, called Ford a narcissist.

The number one question at the door is, So, who is my councillor? What ward am I in? So, instead of having conversations that the city deserves about affordable housing, transit, the safety of our streets, were actually spending most of our time giving a geography lesson around the new maps and what the boundaries are for peoples wards, he said.

I think that demonstrates just further that when you change the rules in the middle of the election, not only do you impact the candidates, but you impact the tenor of the debate, because suddenly there is no discussion of city issues. All we are talking about is Doug Ford.

Cressy noted his will be the most populated ward in Canada, with a projected 155,000 people living within the expanded boundaries by 2026. The average ward population size with 47 wards was targeted to be 61,000 people. With 25 wards it will be 110,000.

Close friend and neighbouring Councillor Mike Layton echoed concerns of being able to adequately serve residents.

Its a very different job than being an MPP or an MP, he said. Now you have three municipal wards that account for 42 per cent of all development files in the city in Toronto ... Just think about how limited the public engagement will be for those three wards because of the amount of evening work thats being put on them in order to facilitate that kind of engagement.

We will do the very best we can, but we must continue to fight for Toronto to be treated fairly by the province.

Campbell agreed the workload will be substantial, including keeping an eye on agencies like the Toronto Transit Commission and the Toronto Parking Authority.

Those remaining councillors, theyre going to be in meetings all the time. I dont know when theyre going to have time to help constituents, he said. Im up to the task. Im willing to do the work, but its going to make running the city a lot more problematic.

Where incumbents are running

Ward 1 Etobicoke North: Vincent Crisanti and Michael Ford

Ward 2 Etobicoke Centre: Stephen Holyday and John Campbell

Ward 3 Etobicoke-Lakeshore: Mark Grimes

Ward 4 Parkdale-High Park: Gord Perks

Ward 5 York South-Weston: Frank Di Giorgio and Frances Nunziata

Ward 6 York Centre: Maria Augimeri and James Pasternak

Ward 7 Humber River-Black Creek: Giorgio Mammoliti and Anthony Perruzza

Ward 8 Eglinton-Lawrence: Christin Carmichael Greb

Ward 9 Davenport: Ana Bailao and Cesar Palacio

Ward 10 Spadina-Fort York: Joe Cressy

Ward 11 University-Rosedale: Mike Layton

Ward 12 Toronto-St. Pauls: Josh Matlow and Joe Mihevc

Ward 13 Toronto Centre: Kristyn Wong-Tam and *Lucy Troisi

Ward 14 Toronto-Danforth: Paula Fletcher and Mary Fragedakis

Ward 15 Don Valley West: Jon Burnside and Jaye Robinson

Ward 16 Don Valley East: Denzil Minnan-Wong

Ward 17 Don Valley North: **Shelley Carroll

Ward 18 Willowdale: John Filion

Ward 19 Beaches-East York: none

Ward 20 Scarborough Southwest: Gary Crawford and Michelle Holland

Ward 21 Scarborough Centre: Michael Thompson

Ward 22 Scarborough-Agincourt: Jim Karygiannis and Norm Kelly

Ward 23 Scarborough North: none

Ward 24 Scarborough-Guildwood: Paul Ainslie

Ward 25 Scarborough-Rouge Park: Neethan Shan

* Troisi had not registered by the close of nominations Thursday, but said she intends to

** Shelley Carroll resigned from city council this spring to run for an MPP seat in provincial election, but was unsuccessful.

With files from Francine Kopun, David Rider and Samantha Beattie

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President Donald Trump had a suggestion for how Spain could deal with Europes migration crisis during a recent meeting with Foreign minister Josep Borrell, according to reports in the Spanish media.

The idea was simple: Build a wall across the Sahara.

El Pais and Europa Press reported this week that Borrell recalled Trumps suggestion during a luncheon in Madrid on Tuesday. The Spanish Embassy in Washington did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but the Spanish Foreign Ministry told Britains Guardian newspaper that the accounts of Borrells comments were accurate.

According to those accounts, Borrell told his audience that Trump had compared the situation in northern Africa and the Mediterranean to that along the U.S. border with Mexico. During his campaign, Trump had promised to build a wall along the southern border with Mexico and force the Mexican government to pay for it.

Borrell said that he did not support a wall along the border between the United States and Mexico and that Spanish diplomats had told Trump that the situation was considerably different in scale anyway. Trump disagreed, according to Borrells recollection, adding that the Sahara border cant be bigger than our border with Mexico.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Though estimates vary, U.S. Customs and Border Protection says that the border between the United States and Mexico is roughly 1,900 miles long. Most estimates for the Sahara put it at about 3,000 miles long from east to west.

A wall across the Sahara would probably also involve building through several sovereign nations. The desert spreads over parts of 11 countries: Algeria, Chad, Egypt, Eritrea, Libya, Mali, Mauritania, Morocco, Niger, Sudan and Tunisia.

It was unclear from the Spanish media whether Trump was speaking in jest when he made the purported comments. Borrell had accompanied Spains King Felipe VI and Queen Letizia to the White House in June.

Spain has seen rising numbers of migrants and refugees arrive on its shores in recent months, the result of a crackdown on a central Mediterranean route between Libya and Italy. According to the International Organization for Migration, more that 33,000 people have arrived in Spain via the western Mediterranean in 2018  three times as many as in the same period last year.

The left-wing government of Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, in power since June, has attempted to welcome the new arrivals  accepting migrant rescue boats such as the MV Aquarius after Italy rejected them.

Borrell, who was president of the European Parliament between 2004 and 2007, has been critical of anti-immigration sentiment in Europe. Everybody in Europe is being affected by this virus, fears of immigration, he told The Washington Post during the June visit to the United States. This is not the case of Spain.

His comments at the luncheon this week appear to affirm, however, that migration and identity are the most important issues facing the continent.

European societies are not structured to absorb more than a certain percentage of migrants, especially if they are Muslims, he said, according to El Pais.

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SEOUL, KOREA, REPUBLIC OFA beaming South Korean President Moon Jae-in, freshly returned home Thursday from a whirlwind three-day summit with Kim Jong Un, said the North Korean leader wants the U.S. Secretary of State to visit Pyongyang soon for nuclear talks, and also hopes for a quick followup to his June summit with President Donald Trump.

Only hours after standing with Kim on the peak of a volcano thats at the heart of Kim dynasty propaganda, Moon told reporters in Seoul that he will be carrying a private message from Kim to Trump about the nuclear standoff when he meets the U.S. president in New York next week on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly session.

Both Trump, who has repeatedly spoken of his good relationship with Kim, and the North Korean leader have expressed a desire to follow up on the June meeting in Singapore that was meant to settle an impasse that seemed to be edging toward war last year. But there are worries among observers about whether Kim is as committed to denuclearization as he claims.

Moon faces increasing pressure from Washington to find a path forward in efforts to get Kim to completely  and unilaterally  abandon his nuclear arsenal, which is thought to be closing in on the ability to accurately target any part of the continental United States.

There are things that the United States wants us to convey to North Korea, and on the other side there are also things that North Korea wants us to convey to the United States, Moon said at a press centre in Seoul where reporters had watched parts of his summit with Kim on video huge screens that occasionally showed live streams from Pyongyang. I will faithfully serve that role when I meet President Trump to facilitate dialogue between North Korea and the United States.

Moon, who set up the Singapore summit and is eager for another to happen, also told reporters that hell convey to Trump his and Kims desire to get a declaration on ending the Korean War by the end of this year. The war still technically continues because it ended in 1953 with a ceasefire, not a peace treaty. An end-of-war declaration would be the first step toward an eventual formal peace treaty, but the United States is wary about signing off on something that could result in Kim pushing for the removal of U.S. troops stationed in South Korea to deter the North.

Read more:

Korean leaders meet for third summit for tough talks on peace

Kim Jong Un agrees to dismantle main nuke if U.S. takes steps too

Earlier Thursday, Kim and Moon took to the road for the final day of their summit, hiking to the peak of Mount Paektu, which is considered sacred in the North, their hands clasped and raised in a pose of triumph. Their trip to the mountain on the North Korean-Chinese border, and the striking photo-op that will resonate in both Koreas, followed the announcement of wide-ranging agreements on Wednesday that they trumpeted as a major step toward peace.

However, their premier accord on the issue that most worries the world  the Norths pursuit of nuclear-tipped missiles  contained a big condition: Kim stated that he would permanently dismantle North Koreas main nuclear facility only if the United States takes unspecified corresponding measures.

Chairman Kim Jong Un has again and again affirmed his commitment to denuclearization, Moon said after returning to Seoul. He expressed his wish to finish a complete denuclearization as soon as possible and focus on economic development.

Moon said North Koreas agreement to allow international experts to observe a permanent dismantling of a missile engine test site and launch pad was the same thing as a commitment to verifiably and irreversibly demolish those facilities.

Moon says such steps, combined with North Koreas unilateral but unverified dismantling of a nuclear testing ground earlier this year, would prevent the North from advancing its weaponry through further nuclear and missile tests. Experts say the destruction of the missile engine test site and launch pad wouldnt represent a material step in the denuclearization of North Korea, which declared its nuclear force complete last year and has designed its most powerful missiles to be fired from vehicles.

Moon also said that Kim hoped to visit Seoul soon.

I wish there would be an opportunity for my fellow citizens to see Chairman Kim Jong Un for themselves and hear him talking about the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula, peace and prosperity with his own voice, the South Korean president said.

Earlier in the day, the leaders smiled broadly as they posed at the summit of Paektu, their wives grinning at their sides, a brilliant blue sky and the deep crater lake that tops the volcano in the background. They also toured the shores of the lake, where Moon and his wife filled bottles with its water and a South Korean pop singer delivered for the leaders a rendition of a beloved Korean folk song, Arirang, which is used in both Koreas as an unofficial anthem for peace.

The mountain is important to the Kim family, members of which are referred to as sharing the Paektu bloodline, and the volcano is emblazoned on North Koreas national emblem and lends its name to everything from rockets to power stations.

Many South Koreans also feel drawn to the volcano, which, according to Korean mythology, was the birthplace of Dangun, the founder of the first ancient Korean kingdom, and has long been considered one of the most beautiful places on the peninsula. Not everyone was pleased, though. About 100 anti-North Korea protesters rallied in central Seoul to express anger about the summit and displayed slogans that read, No to SK-NK summit that benefits Kim Jong Un.

The leaders are basking in the glow of the joint statement they signed Wednesday. Compared to the vague language of their two earlier summits, Kim and Moon seem to have agreed on an ambitious program meant to tackle soaring tensions that caused many to fear war last year as the North tested a string of increasingly powerful weapons.

Both leaders also vowed to work together to try to host the Summer Olympics in 2032.

But while containing several tantalizing offers, their joint statement appeared to fall short of the major steps many in Washington have been looking for  such as a commitment by Kim to provide a list of North Koreas nuclear facilities, a solid step-by-step timeline for closing them down, or an agreement to allow international inspectors to assess progress or discover violations.

It also was unclear what corresponding steps North Korea wants from the U.S. to dismantle its nuclear site.

The question now is whether it will be enough for Trump to pick up where Moon has left off. Trump told reporters Wednesday that the outcome of the summit was very good news and that were making tremendous progress with North Korea. He didnt indicate in his brief remarks whether the U.S. would be willing to take further steps to encourage North Korean action on denuclearization.

According to a statement signed by the countries defence chiefs, the two Koreas agreed to establish buffer zones along their land and sea borders to reduce military tensions and prevent accidental clashes. They also agreed to withdraw 11 guard posts from the Demilitarized Zone by December and to establish a no-fly zone above the military demarcation line that bisects the two Koreas that will apply to planes, helicopters and drones.

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NAGA, PHILIPPINESA massive landslide buried dozens of homes near a central Philippine mountain Thursday, killing at least 21 people and sending rescuers scrambling to find survivors after some sent text messages pleading for help.

The slide surged down on about 30 houses in two rural villages after daybreak in Naga city in Cebu province, city police chief Roderick Gonzales said by telephone as he helped supervise the search and rescue. Seven injured villagers were rescued from the huge mound of earth and debris.

Some victims managed to send messages after the landslide hit, Gonzales said, adding that elderly women and a child were among the dead.

Naga city Mayor Kristine Vanessa Chiong said at least 64 people remained missing.

Were really hoping we can still recover them alive, she said.

The landslide hit while several northern Philippine provinces are still dealing with deaths and widespread damage wrought by Typhoon Mangkhut, which pummeled the agricultural region Saturday and left at least 88 people dead and more than 60 missing. A massive search is still underway for dozens of people feared dead after landslides in the gold-mining town of Itogon in the north.

Cebu province was not directly hit by Mangkhut but the massive typhoon intensified monsoon rains across a large part of the archipelago, including the central region where Naga city lies about 570 kilometres (355 miles) southeast of Manila.

Rescuers were treading carefully in small groups on the unstable ground to avoid further casualties.

Were running out of time. The ground in the area is still vibrating. Were striking a balance between intensifying our rescue efforts and ensuring the safety of our rescuers, Naga city Councillor Carmelino Cruz said by phone.

Cristita Villarba, a 53-year-old resident, said her husband and son were preparing to leave for work when the ground shook and they were overwhelmed by a roar.

It was like an earthquake and there was this thundering, loud banging sound. All of us ran out, Villarba said, adding that she, her husband and three children were shocked but unhurt.

Outside, she saw the house of her older brother, Lauro, and his family buried in the landslide.

Many of our neighbours were crying and screaming for help. Some wanted to help those who got hit but there was too much earth covering the houses, including my brothers, she said.

Nearly 20 people lived in her brothers home, mostly his family and grandchildren, she said.

Villarba said she had felt sorry a few days earlier for the landslide victims in the countrys north.

I had no idea we would be the next, she said.

Elsewhere in the landslide-hit community, a father and his young daughter were found dead in each others embrace in a house, volunteer rescuer Vic Santillan said.

Its not clear what set off the landslide, but some residents blamed limestone quarries, which they suspect may have caused cracks in the mountainside facing their villages. Villarba said a light rain stopped when the landslide hit and there was no rain on Wednesday.

The nearest quarry was abandoned about a year ago, but another government-authorized quarry is still being operated not far away, and villagers also profit from the limestone business, said Angeline Templo, an assistant to the mayor.

The Philippines is one of the worlds most disaster-prone countries. It is lashed by about 20 storms each year and is located in the Pacific Ring of Fire that is vulnerable to earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. Poverty has forced many to live on or near volcanoes, steep mountains and storm-vulnerable coasts, often leading to disasters.
WILMINGTON, N.C.Hurricane Florence is still wearing out the Carolinas, where residents have endured an agonizing week of violent winds, torrential rain, widespread flooding, power outages and death.

Frustration and sheer exhaustion are building as thousands of people wait to go home seven days after the storm began battering the coast. Florence is blamed for at least 37 deaths, including those of two women who drowned when a sheriffs van taking them to a mental-health facility was swept off a road.

Im just ready for this to be over, to be honest said Evan Jones, a college student who evacuated from Wilmington and doesnt know when he will get back. Im trying to get it all out of my head.

With the remnants of Florence finally out to sea and skies bright over rivers still swelling with muddy water, U.S. President Donald Trump visited the disaster zone, riding through soggy neighbourhoods and helping pass out warm meals at a church.

America grieves with you and our hearts break for you. God bless you, Trump said during a briefing in Havelock, N.C.

There wasnt any presidential fanfare 190 kilometres away in Fayetteville. There, Roberta and Joseph Keithley had been sleeping on cots set up in a school classroom since Friday. They still didnt know if their home was ruined.

Its getting a little frustrating, but you have to deal with it and roll with the punches, said Roberta Keithley, 73. Its just another hurdle to get over in life.

To the south, daybreak brought a return of floodwaters to Nichols, S.C., which also was inundated by Hurricane Matthew two years ago. The flooding from Florence had subsided, only to get worse again.

Mayor Lawson Battle said that as far as he knew, everyone in the town of about 360 people evacuated as the water first started to invade town Monday. But Battle just couldnt think about that anymore.

Im focusing on this disaster at hand, he said. I dont have time to think. Im just so tired.

Ferry service for the public has resumed for several coastal routes in North Carolina. Meanwhile, Interstate 95 was closed anew because bridges crossing the Great Pee Dee River flooded, said officials in South Carolina.

Access improved to Wilmington, a North Carolina port city of 120,000 that was cut off for days by high water. But officials said they dont know when evacuees would be able to return home, and it may be next week before conditions improve drastically since the Cape Fear River isnt expected to crest at the city until Monday or Tuesday.

Understand: There is a lot of water inland, and it is continuing to make its way downstream, county manager Chris Coudreit said.

Nearly a metre of rain fell in places, and dozens of cities had more than 25 centimetres of rain. Roads remained dangerous, and some were still being closed as swollen rivers emptied toward the ocean.

North Carolina officials said some 7,800 people remained in shelters, down from about 10,000 on Monday despite Gov. Roy Coopers plea to stay put.

In Lumberton, where the Lumber River still covered parts of town, water was deep enough that vehicles passing by on streets sent wakes into partially submerged homes, businesses and a church.

Some of those who left shelters may have been headed toward the coast on U.S. 421, where a long line of cars, utility crews and trucks loaded with generators sat in a jam.

About 120,000 homes and businesses were still without electricity in North Carolina, about 20 per cent in the county where Wilmington is located. There, more than 25,000 remain in the dark.

The deaths, which have occurred in three states, include those of two women who were being taken to a mental-health facility when the van they were riding in was engulfed by floodwaters from the Little Pee Dee River in South Carolina, authorities said.

Horry County Sheriffs Department spokeswoman Brooke Holden said two deputies in the van tried to get the victims out but couldnt. Rescue teams plucked the deputies from the top of the vehicle. They were placed on leave pending an investigation.

Sheriff Phillip Thompson said he does not believe the women were in restraints like those sometimes used on psychiatric patients.

It wasnt clear why the women were being moved in the aftermath of a killer hurricane, and Justin Bamberg, a lawyer who has represented the families of several people injured or killed by law officers, said he was perplexed by the decision.

If that road is in an area where it is a flood risk, and waters were rising, why were they driving on that road anyway? said Bamberg, a state lawmaker.

At least 24 of the victims died in vehicles, and most were in accidents linked to flooding.

North Carolinas farmers, meanwhile, are beginning to count up their losses.

The Tobacco Growers Association of North Carolina estimated up to 57 million kilograms of tobacco leaf could be damaged by flooding, winds and power outages, an amount that could translate to as much as $350 million (US) in lost farm revenue.

Association CEO Graham Boyd said about 40 per cent of the crop was still in the field when the storm hit. North Carolina is the nations top producer of tobacco.

The flooding has killed an estimated 3.4 million chickens and 5,500 hogs, authorities said. Farmers are also concerned about cotton, sweet potatoes, peanuts and corn, but swamped roads and fields have made it difficult to assess the damage.

The risk of environmental damage from Florence mounted, too, as human and animal waste was washed into the floodwaters.

More than 18 million litres of partially treated sewage spilled into the Cape Fear River after power went out at a treatment plant, officials said, and the earthen dam at a pond holding hog waste was breached, spilling its contents.

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WASHINGTONRepublicans say theyre forging ahead in their drive to push Brett Kavanaughs Supreme Court nomination through the Senate, even as the woman accusing him of a decades-old sexual attack is threatening to boycott a committee hearing and suggesting shes not being treated with fairness and respect.

A lawyer for a woman accusing Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of sex assault decades ago says shed be willing to testify to the Senate Judiciary Committee next week if they can agree to terms that are fair and which ensure her safety.

The email from an attorney for Christine Blasey Ford to committee aides also says that holding the session on Monday isnt possible. Panel chairman Chuck Grassley and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell have said Monday would be her chance to testify.

Fords lawyers have said shes received death threats.

Ford has said she wants the FBI to investigate her claim that Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her at a high school party in the 1980s.

Lawyer Debra Katz writes that Fords strong preference remains a full investigation before she testifies.

With Kavanaughs confirmation dangling in the balance, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee said his panel still planned a Monday morning hearing that Kavanaugh and Christine Blasey Ford were invited to attend. Senator Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, has told Fords attorneys that the panel was giving the California psychology professor until 10 a.m. Friday to submit a biography and a prepared statement if she intends to testify.

Kavanaugh, currently a judge on the powerful District of Columbia Circuit Court of Appeals, has denied the charges.

Democrats have leapt to Fords defence, with Washington state Sen. Patty Murray saying Thursday that Republicans should be ashamed for pushing forward without a fair investigation. That echoed Democrats effort to broaden the nomination fight into a referendum on whether women who allege abuse are taken seriously by men  a theme that could echo in this Novembers elections for control of Congress.

If you have been assaulted or harassed by a powerful Republican man, you better not talk about it or youre going to pay a price, Murray said.

Through her attorneys, Ford left her attendance in doubt. And despite Grassleys schedule, it remained unclear if that hearing would occur without her, as a drama that has riveted Washington since emerging a week ago was injected with a fresh burst of election-season suspense.

Ford lawyer Lisa Banks said in a statement late Wednesday that Ford would co-operate with a thorough, non-partisan probe. After indicating earlier this week that she would appear before lawmakers, Ford wants other witnesses  not just Ford and Kavanaugh  to participate and wants the FBI to reopen its background check of Kavanaugh. Those demands have been backed by Democrats but dismissed by top Republicans.

Banks reiterated that Ford has had to leave her home because of threats to her familys safety and said, Fairness and respect for her situation dictate that she should have time to deal with this.

Meanwhile, small groups of demonstrators gathered in Senate office buildings Thursday to protest Republicans handling of Fords claim. Around 100 people marched to Grassleys office for a sit-in, some with fists raised.

We believe Anita Hill! We believe Christine Ford! the demonstrators chanted. Hill is the law professor who during the Senates 1991 consideration of Clarence Thomas Supreme Court nomination accused him of sexual harassment.

President Donald Trump and Senate Republicans have been emphatic that an FBI renewal of its background checks on Kavanaugh wont happen, saying an investigation by committee staff  which Democrats are boycotting  is sufficient.

Republican leaders trying to keep GOP senators behind Kavanaugh are offering Ford a chance to describe her allegation, either in a hearing room before television cameras or in private. Republicans have largely stood by Kavanaughs denials.

Trump told reporters Wednesday, He is such an outstanding man. Very hard for me to imagine that anything happened.

That remark was noteworthy because most Republicans have handled the question of Fords credibility more gingerly. They say they want to give Ford, now a professor at Palo Alto University, every chance to tell her story.

Democrats are casting Republicans as strong-arming a wronged woman, their eyes on a #MeToo movement that has caught fire and exploded the careers of dozens of male titans.

Republicans are trying to bully her into a rigged hearing, No. 2 Senate Democratic leader Dick Durbin of Illinois tweeted about Ford.

Ford has contended that at a house party in the 1980s, a drunken Kavanaugh tried undressing her and stifling her cries on a bed before she fled.

Republicans are resisting all Democratic efforts to slow and perhaps block what once seemed a smooth path to confirmation that would promote the conservative appeals court judge by the Oct. 1 opening of the Supreme Courts new term. A substantial delay could push confirmation past the November elections, when Democrats have a shot at winning Senate control, plus allow more time for unforeseen problems to pop up.

There were signs the GOPs strategy of planning a nationally televised hearing yet also offering Ford the option to testify privately was keeping possible Republican defections in check. The party controls the Senate 51-49 and the Judiciary panel by 11-10, so it cannot afford GOP no votes.

Moderate GOP Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, whos had her share of clashes with Trump, said she hoped Ford would reconsider a decision not to testify and its not fair to Judge Kavanaugh if she refuses. Otherwise, there are these very serious allegations hanging over the head of a nominee who has emphatically denied them, she said on radio WVOM in Bangor.

Going further, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said Democrats demands for an FBI investigation were a ploy to delay a confirmation vote. It is imperative the Judiciary Committee move forward on the Kavanaugh nomination and a committee vote be taken as soon as possible, the committee member said in a statement.
(CNN)  A 7-year-old girl is in critical condition at a New Delhi hospital after undergoing surgery for injuries she suffered while being raped with a metal water pipe, officials said Wednesday.

Her mother was by her bedside after the girl underwent hours of surgery. The exact type of pipe used in the assault is unclear.

A 21-year-old has been arrested in connection with the rape, which occurred in the district of Shahdara in the northeastern part of the city, said Meghna Yadav, a deputy commissioner with the Delhi Police.

Yadav could not provide further details, she said. But Swati Maliwal, chairwoman of the Delhi Commission for Women, said the girl was in extreme pain after the attack.

"We are working out her rehabilitation plan," she told CNN. "It is very unfortunate that these rape cases are not ending in Delhi. Police resources continue to be extremely low in Delhi."

In a series of tweets, Maliwal provided additional details of the attack, saying the girl, who comes from a poor family, had been lured to a park in Seemapuri, where the perpetrator assaulted her. She was bleeding "incessantly" after the attack, Maliwal tweeted.

"Cannot describe the pain the little girl was experiencing. Already malnourished, she has a long struggle ahead," she added. "We are going to support her in her legal fight to ensure death penalty to her culprits. Will file compensation application & shall make all efforts to rehabilitate her."

India's scourge of rape

A string of attacks on girls in the last year have sparked outrage in India. The latest rape conjures memories of a December 2012 attack that put India's rape crisis under a spotlight.

In that incident, six males boarded a private bus, grabbed a 23-year-old woman, incapacitated a man with whom she had gone to the movies and proceeded to take turns raping the woman while beating her with an iron rod. She died of organ failure after being transported to Singapore for further treatment.

Four men were sentenced to hang, one committed suicide in prison in 2013 and a juvenile attacker was sentenced to three years in juvenile detention.

More recently, the rape and murder of an 8-year-old Muslim girl stoked furor and religious tensions after police found the girl's body in a forest in the isolated Himalayan district of Kathua. She had been kidnapped while grazing horses January 12.

The girl was drugged, gang raped and strangled before her body was dumped in the forest five days later, police said. Three police officers and a former government official were among the eight Hindu men arrested in the attack.

Police in May announced they had arrested a primary suspect in the gang rape and burning death of a 16-year-old girl in northeastern state of Jharkhand. The man arrested was one of 20 accused in the attack.

A village council ordered the men to do situps and pay a 50,000-rupee ($750) fine, enraging the accused rapists, who then assaulted the victim's parents and set their house on fire, killing the girl inside, said Ashok Ram, the officer in charge of the local police station.

Weeks later, a man raped a 17-year-old in her relative's home in Jharkhand state before setting her ablaze and fleeing, police said.

A rape every 13.5 minutes

In another shocking case, an 11-year-old girl in Chennai was drugged and gang-raped in July by 17 men, ranging in age from their 20s to their 60s, who worked in the building where she lived, according to police.

Other recent alleged victims include a 15-year-old in Bihar state who told police in July she was repeatedly raped by a principal, two teachers and 16 boys over the course of six months, and a 17-year-old girl who in April accused an Uttar Pradesh legislator of participating in her gang rape over the course of nine days in June 2017.

In the latter case, the girl's father was fatally assaulted the day after she attempted to set herself on fire in front of the home of an Uttar Pradesh official. Passersby stopped her.

In April, India introduced a temporary law that makes raping a minor or participating in a gang rape punishable by death. But Maliwal said on Twitter it had yet to be implemented in Delhi.

According to the National Crime Records Bureau, there were 39,000 rapes in India in 2016 -- a rate of roughly one rape every 13.5 minutes. The total marked a 12 percent spike over the previous year.

This story was first published on CNN.com, "Rape of 7-year-old in India marks the latest in series of attacks on girls."
For over 19 years the CAA has hosted its Preview Breakfast, an annual forecast of the apartment industry to provide owners and managers with valuable information on market trends for the upcoming year. Join industry peers for a review of owner perspectives on city, suburban and affordable rental housing markets, as well as other expert observations including how the economy in general, and multi-family markets in particular, performed in 2018-and an outlook for 2019.
After Court of Appeal grants stay on 25-seat council plan, Mayor Tory says we need to get past this, Sept. 19

Though Doug Ford has apparently won his legal battle over the size of Toronto council, his judgment and behaviour in this case are still appalling. Having already announced that if the court ruled against him he would simply override it with Bill 31 containing the notwithstanding clause, what Ford said in effect was, I will respect a court decision only if I like it. Thats not respect for the rule of law.

Furthermore, Fords love for the people clearly does not extend to voters in Toronto, since forcing a change to the number of wards and their boundaries in the middle of our election has thrown the democratic process into chaos.

Norm Beach, Toronto

Fords claim that there is gridlock and chaos in Toronto city council was given as justification for unilaterally imposing a reduction in the size of council from 47 to 25 members. Most of us in Toronto know that the gridlock and chaos was caused by Rob and Doug Ford and their supporters.

Now that Ford has become premier he has discovered he can push through his non-progressive agenda over the wishes of council  and, indeed, over the wishes of most Torontonians. In reducing the size of council he can be sure there will be a greater proportion of his supporters at city hall to carry out his wishes..

The best way the citizens of Toronto can fight having Doug Ford running our city is vote in councillors who do not support Fords agenda. I hope the Star will print a list of all the councillors running for re-election showing whether they voted to oppose or not to oppose Bill 5.

David Playter Lamb, Toronto

When I first learned years ago as a relatively new immigrant that municipalities, even very large ones like Toronto, are creatures of the province, I was surprised but not unduly concerned as I thought that common sense would insist that large cities be taken seriously in their own right. What a wake-up call we have had!

Premier Ford can legally do whatever he likes to disrupt or even take over our city. The Canadian Constitution is badly out of date, reflecting the predominantly rural society of the past. Its up to us to get the Constitution changed. It will happen eventually. We will demand it.

Helen Riley, Toronto

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When we think of places where homeless people hang out during the day, our thoughts likely turn to park benches and downtown sidewalks.

But the reality is that our public libraries, especially those in hard-pressed neighbourhoods in Toronto, have become the place to go for growing numbers of homeless men and women seeking refugee from the heat, cold, snow and rain  or the hard life on the streets.

Indeed, many Toronto Public Library branches have seen a steady increase in recent years in the number of homeless people using their facilities. At some downtown Toronto branches, librarians interact with as many homeless people as do workers at homeless shelters.

Its obvious why: libraries are warm, safe, dont cost anything to enter, offer free computers and internet, and you can stay for hours as long as youre not creating a disturbance.

Now, in a move that responds to the rise in homeless people using their branches, the Toronto Public Library has hired its first full-time social worker to deal with homelessness.

Its a bold move that signals the importance the Toronto library is placing on offering programs for the homeless and in training its entire staff to deal better with the needs of the homeless, such as helping them to find emergency shelter, food banks and clothing. If successful, it should be copied by big-city libraries across Canada.

The social worker will also help raise awareness among local branch librarians on how to deal respectfully with vulnerable people who may suffer from mental health issues and addiction, as well as homelessness.

We are trying to be proactive, says Aly Velji, manager of adult literacy services for the Toronto Public Library. We have a lot of vulnerable clients who use our spaces and so we are looking how to better serve their needs,

The issue of how libraries respond to homeless people gained widespread attention during the Toronto International Film Festival with the showing of The Public, a film by Emilio Estevez that covers a two-day period when homeless patrons occupy the main Cincinnati library during a severe winter cold snap.

Estevez spoke last week at a special screening of the film hosted by the Toronto Library Foundation, which raises millions of dollars for the library system each year through its generous donors.

That same day, Ryan Dowd, the executive director of a homeless shelter in the Chicago area who has written a book, The Librarians Guide to Homeless, conducted a training session for Toronto library employees on how to how to work with homeless patrons.

Dowds training focuses on using empathy to address issues such as body odour, those who sleep in the library and on how to interact with people with mental illnesses. His training is designed to help librarians enforce rules, but with respect.

Although hiring a social worker dedicated to the homeless is unique, helping the homeless isnt new for the Toronto library or other libraries across the country.

In Toronto, a Bookmobile Shelter Outreach program, which visits family shelters, has engaged with close to 500 shelter residents in the past three years. The library has also embedded librarians in agencies serving vulnerable or marginalized persons across the city, such as the Toronto South and Toronto East detention centres.

Also, starting this fall, a librarian will serve two city-run homeless shelters. Vickery Bowles, the Toronto chief librarian, says the move is aimed at shifting librarians out of their traditional role in library buildings and directly into communities where they work alongside social agency staff.

Such moves may upset nonhomeless patrons who are disturbed when they see the homeless lingering in their local branch. But the Toronto library is taking the right step in trying to deal with the issues facing the vulnerable people who pass through their doors every day.

More library systems should follow in Torontos footsteps and look at ways to help their homeless patrons, such as offering special programs and raising employee awareness of how take an empathetic approach to homeless people in their branches.

As Estevez said during his appearance at the Toronto Reference Library, Weve got to do something. Weve got to try.
OTTAWAThe Liberal government will not impose privacy rules or oversight on federal political parties, rejecting a key recommendation from an all-party committee in the wake of the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica scandal.

The decision means federal political parties can continue to collect, store and use the personal information of Canadian citizens without limitations, laws or independent oversight.

Because theyre specifically exempted from federal privacy laws, parties are also not required to report if theyve been hacked or suffered a data breach involving sensitive information about Canadians.

The Star has learned the government will not accept a recommendation  endorsed by MPs from the three major parties on Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics Committee  to develop a set of privacy rules for political parties or bring them under existing laws.

Instead, under the Liberals electoral rule changes, parties will simply have to post a privacy policy online. Bill C-76 does not allow for any independent oversight, however, to ensure parties are actually following their policies.

If the government decides to ignore the recommendations from an all-party committee on protecting the privacy rights of Canadians, I find that very disturbing, said Charlie Angus, the New Democratic vice chair of the committee.

I also think it would mean that this Liberal government is playing with fire. This study on the privacy rights of Canadians and data happened at the time of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, which shows us the power of operators to undermine the democratic processes in countries around the world.

In exempting political parties from privacy laws, Canada is largely an outlier. The United Kingdom, New Zealand, and much of the European Union subjects parties to privacy rules.

University of Victoria professor Colin Bennett said so long as political parties are not required to implement strong privacy safeguards, theres a serious risk that Canadians personal information could be exposed.

The political parties have not done a great deal in (creating safeguards), Bennett, whose research focuses on the social implications of information technology, told the Star in an interview Tuesday.

And particularly troubling in my view is when voter management systems are shared with a whole range of different workers and volunteers at the time of a campaign, (those people) have very little privacy or security training.

On Monday, federal Privacy Commissioner Daniel Therrien  along with his counterparts at the provincial and territorial levels  issued a joint statement saying its clearly unacceptable that political parties are exempt from privacy laws.

The privacy watchdogs collectively called on all levels of government to put some form of restrictions on parties data operations  an increasingly crucial aspect of electioneering in Canadian politics.

The joint statement mirrored a recommendation of the Ethics, Privacy and Access to Information Committees June 2018 report on the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica scandal, where 600,000 Canadians had their personal information improperly harvested and used for political analysis.

The government has not yet tabled an official response to the committees report. But a spokesperson for Democratic Institutions Minister Karina Gould suggested requiring a privacy policy was as far as the government was willing to go at this time.

We are following the committees conclusions by ensuring that political parties have publicly available privacy policies, while allowing them to continue to engage Canadians in a fair, democratic process, wrote Nicky Cayer in a statement to the Star on Monday.

We will continue to work with Parliament on how to best strengthen the protection of Canadians privacy and the integrity of our democratic institutions.

In a follow-up statement, Goulds office said Parliament should study the potential for a privacy regime thoroughly.

Bennett said he believes the major parties are colluding on the issue and would push back against any effort to put rules around their ability to collect and use voters personal information. One of the benefits of clear rules, Bennett said, would be a level playing field among political rivals.

Politicians have got it into their head that they can win elections by having better data than the opposition, (and) its producing a bit of a race to the bottom, Bennett said.

And that needs to stop.

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OTTAWAThe federal government has vowed to eliminate unnecessary single-use plastics from its own operations and recycle at least three-quarters of its remaining plastic by 2030, commitments that environmental groups welcomed as a first step toward the tougher regulations they seek.

Environment Minister Catherine McKenna announced the moves Thursday on the sidelines of a meeting in Halifax with her G7 counterparts.

Were going to eliminate unnecessary single-use plastics throughout government operations. So this includes straws, cutlery, packaging, cups, bottles, McKenna told reporters Thursday.

Ottawa is also pledging to recycle at least 75 per cent of the plastic used by the federal government by 2030, she said.

Eric Campbell, McKennas director of communications, said the moves are just one step the government is taking as it looks at ways to reduce plastics that enter waterways and oceans and damage the environment. Earlier this year, Ottawa also moved to ban plastic microbeads found in consumer products like bath gels.

We need to show leadership and we need to mind our own house and get our own house in order, Campbell said.

Ashley Wallis, water and plastics manager with Environmental Defence, said she hopes Thursdays announcement is a sign that Ottawa will push for stricter regulations when it unveils its signature plastic waste strategy, which is expected this fall. Wallis said she would like to see mandatory recycling targets for the private sector, as well as regulations on how much plastic can be used in certain products.

Its great to see leadership from the federal government in terms of what they can act on quickly, she said, adding that eliminating single-use plastics and slashing plastic waste are the easiest things they could do.

James Gunvaldsen Klaassen, a lawyer with Ecojustice, an environmental activist umbrella group, agreed that Thursdays commitments are a positive step. But he said Ecojustice has been calling on Ottawa to add plastics to a list of priority substances under the Canadian Environmental Protection Act. That would require the federal government to conduct toxicity reviews for plastics and increase the likelihood of stricter regulations, Gunvaldsen Klaassen said.

There is evidence that it is definitely causing harm to the environment and killing wildlife, he said.

Roughly 4.8 to 12.7 million tonnes of plastic is dumped into the worlds oceans every year, according to the United Nations Environment Assembly.

With files from The Canadian Press

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Lose some, win some.

By rights (not to be confused with the Charter of Rights), Doug Fords government should have been jubilant Wednesday: After a stinging defeat last week, when a court ruled that Ontarios municipal meddling in midcampaign was unconstitutional, it won a last-minute reprieve from the Court of Appeal suspending that verdict.

Now, for better or for worse, Ford will have his way. Which is precisely how our legal system is supposed to work  not with panicked invocations of the constitutions notwithstanding clause, or intemperate denunciations of judicial independence, but through reasoned arguments in court appeals.

Far from exulting in triumph, Fords Tories were quietly breathing a collective sigh of relief. And trying desperately to put this political debacle behind them.

On the day of the court ruling, the premier jetted to Washington for a whirlwind visit to show himself getting busy, belatedly, with more pressing priorities  NAFTA clauses, not notwithstanding clauses. Attorney General Caroline Mulroney skipped the legislatures question period to attend events in her GTA riding, notwithstanding her ministrys big day.

Why revert to damage control despite winning in court? To minimize the awkwardness of a government that managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of a victorious verdict  by wasting political capital on a grubby grudge match with the downtown NDP councillors at city hall whom Ford cites as his motivation for meddling.

Never mind that the premier so recklessly interfered in a municipal election at the last moment. Bad enough that he raised the stakes by courting a confrontation with the courts. No matter that he could have recovered from last weeks setback by merely waiting for todays Court of Appeal ruling.

Instead, the premier jumped the gun, escalating to DEFCON 1 and pressing the nuclear button. He invoked the Charters notwithstanding clause for the first time ever in Ontario, not for an existential crisis, but for the mundane matter of city councils seating plan  forever lowering the political bar.

Wednesdays verdict brought vindication, but Ford vitiated that victory by declaring  in advance  that it mattered not what the courts decided. His willingness to suspend the fundamental protections of the Charter of Rights revealed a lack of confidence in the rightness of his own arguments.

Now, the premier has had second thoughts. Embarrassed by public protests, condemned by the lawmakers who midwifed the Charter (Bill Davis, Roy McMurtry, Roy Romanow and Jean Chretien), contradicted by other consequential Tories (Brian Mulroney, Peter Mackay), Ford made an offer he assumed the appeal judges couldnt refuse:

If the government got its way, it would no longer overrule the judiciary; but if the judges objected, the government would override them. Heads we win, tails you lose.

A no-lose strategy. But for the premier, a Pyrrhic victory.

The appeal court judges noted they were unswayed by any hint of a quid pro quo: It plays no part in our decision.

If the verdict was a vindication on constitutionality, there was precious little validation of the premiers own judgment: His unilateral move to redraw Torontos electoral boundaries disrupted the campaigns that were already underway, the judges noted. The decision of the Legislature to change (the rules) during the campaign was unexpected and perhaps alarming.

While the judges sympathized with candidates who had the rug (or more precisely, their wards) pulled out from under them, their task was not to decide if it is unfair but whether it is constitutional. And on that point, they concluded the original verdict was a stretch, and suspended it until further notice.

Which happens all the time, for that is in the nature of our justice system: Verdicts go one way, appeals go another way, and a suspension (stay) allows both sides to argue their case again another day. But our rookie premier, rather than merely relitigating, opted for relegating the Charter to irrelevancy.

The takeaway for Ontarians is that the premier boasts of his willingness to take away their rights on a moments notice, in midnight sittings, while they sleep. People who werent paying attention may now watch closely; those who gave his government the benefit of the doubt are now on notice; voters who assumed Fords cabinet would keep the premier in check should now check more closely.

Will our lawmakers learn lessons from this fiasco? The premiers honeymoon has been eclipsed by his darkest hour. He escalated an ephemeral question of municipal seat size into an existential matter for his fledgling government, flouting the fundamental protections of the Charter on a whim.

What once seemed unfathomable is now unforgettable.

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Premier Doug Ford is snubbing a German counterpart, refusing to sign a friendship agreement with the state of Baden-Wurttemberg negotiated by Kathleen Wynnes Liberal government before its defeat in the June 7 election.

The German leader is coming to Toronto with a delegation that includes WPD AG, the renewable energy company with operations in 18 countries and whose controversial White Pines wind turbine project in Prince Edward County was nearing completion when cancelled by Fords government this summer.

White Pines, approved despite concerns from local residents and environmental activists for its impact on the Little Brown Bat and Blandings Turtle populations, has estimated its loss at $100 million for the project, which was downsized to nine turbines from 28.

Fords office said Wednesday the meeting was cancelled due to a scheduling conflict.

But a source told the Star that the new premier would have only agreed to the meeting if the White Pines dispute  which has already sparked the ire of Germanys ambassador to Canada  was not discussed.

The insider said the Germans could not agree to that condition.

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Baden-Wurttemberg Minister-President Winfried Kretschmann is a member of Germanys Green party and flew into Toronto from San Francisco Wednesday night with 100 delegates on a trade mission for a meeting at the Evergreen Brick Works on Thursday. He could not be reached for comment.

The friendship agreement was to include working together on renewable energy  which the Ford government has cooled by axing 758 fledgling green energy projects, in addition to White Pines, saying the power contracted by the previous Liberal administration would drive up electricity bills and is no longer needed.

Ontario Energy Minister Greg Rickford dubbed the projects unnecessary and expensive and promised the cancellations would result in net savings of $790 million for ratepayers, given that the government is passing legislation to prevent retaliatory lawsuits.

Germanys ambassador to Canada has suggested the scrapping of White Pines, which was slated to begin supplying electricity to the grid this fall, undermines Fords mantra that Ontario is open for business.

Ive been involved in numerous activities where we say, Come to Canada, this is a very good place to do business, Sabine Sparwasser told the Stars Jennifer Wells in July.

Were trying to enhance direct investment, and in that context it is not good news if you have a case where a project by a German company that has been here for the last 10 years, and a project thats close to completion  is in the process of being suddenly, unilaterally cancelled and basically dismantled.

With files from Robert Benzie

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The Ontario government has changed the rules to give profit-making, big box daycare operators more access to public funds, raising concerns among advocates that quality will suffer.

NDP child care critic Doly Begum raised the issue in the legislature on Wednesday, saying studies show non-profit daycare offers higher standards of care and better wages for workers. This is why child-care advocates have urged the province to expand not-for-profit, child-care spaces.

We know the biggest issue in the child-care sector is the lack of affordable, high-quality, safe child-care spaces, said the Scarborough Southwest MPP.

By removing the for-profit threshold, this government is opening the doors to large-chain providers.

Begum also said the governments move to cut $23 million in subsidies for low-income families is making child care less affordable for those who need it.

The previous Liberal government had planned to spend more than $3.5 billion over five years to create 100,000 new spots in licensed child care. At that time, advocates successfully lobbied for rules that would limit the amount of funds available to for-profit daycares  including those run by so-called big-box child-care businesses.

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But in August, the new Progressive Conservative government quietly removed that cap, known as the for-profit threshold.

Decades of research has found that non-profit or public child care is typically of higher quality than corporate-run centres  largely because the focus on profits impacts levels of care, staffing and standards.

Currently, about one-quarter of licenced child-care spots in Ontario are in the for-profit sector.

On Wednesday, Education Minister Lisa Thompson said the government has been listening to parents and working with groups across Ontario and, in our mandate, we wanted to be fair to parents across Ontario and give them more choice.

With regard to corporate-run child-care, she said we have every confidence in people who are caring for our children and the reality check is this is in response to all of Ontario ... The nanny state of the previous administration was proven not to work. Were listening to parents across Ontario.

But Carolyn Ferns with the Ontario Coalition for Better Child Care warned the removal of the for-profit threshold is a sign the Ford government is just throwing up its hands and letting the market rip.

Its a very risky decision, she said in an interview. We know there are big corporate players that want to open and expand in Ontario. And they dont expand in a way that meets parents needs best, they do it in a way that is most profitable for them.

So that little rural area that doesnt have child care  thats not where they want to open.

As far as addressing parent choice, Ferns noted the province just completed a major consultation on child care with town halls across Ontario.

The threshold was one of the things that was put in place to address concerns about protecting the province from big corporate players and if (the government) is going to reverse course without a public consultation, thats a big deal, she said.

The for-profit threshold didnt discriminate against existing so-called mom and pop daycares, Ferns noted.

This is about how we are going to grow a good system for Ontarians. And prioritizing public and non-profit was a good way to go, she said.

If there are places with no non-profit child care, municipalities, the region and the province need to plan to make it happen, Ferns said.

There is high-quality, non-profit child care in lots of small towns and regions in Ontario, including nine programs in Huron-Bruce, the ministers riding. Those programs are there and they need support, she added.

During the election campaign, Doug Ford said a Progressive Conservative government would create a tax credit to cover up to 75 per cent of parents child-care costs, up to a $6,750 per child maximum. That has yet to happen.

In the legislature, Thompson said she invites any member of the opposition to come out to my riding  out of the bubble of Toronto  and see how parents need choice. We cannot allow a continuation of parents to have to drive 25 kilometres out of their way (for child care) just to turn around to get to work 40 kilometres from there. Its not efficient, its not effective, and its not good for Ontario families.

Thompson can say the government is helping rural Ontario, Begum countered, but it doesnt answer the question, Why arent we having non-profit child-care spaces in rural Ontario? Why dont we expand on that, and create more spaces?

Smaller, for-profit centres are also worried that theyll be overtaken by large-chain corporations, she said.

Choice is fine but quality is also important, Begum said. We have to take care of our children with quality child-care spaces. We have to take care of our workers.

Laure Monsebraaten is a Toronto-based reporter covering social justice. Follow her on Twitter: @lmonseb
Its fade to black for Ontarios Green Energy Act, passed by the previous Liberal government in 2009 to promote wind and solar power but blamed by critics for pushing electricity bills higher with juicy incentives for producers.

Premier Doug Fords Progressive Conservatives introduced legislation Thursday to make good on an election promise to repeal the landmark bill that made Ontario a leader in green energy and guarantee that the province will no longer force wind turbines or solar farms on unwilling communities.

This is giving respect to rural municipalities, said Infrastructure Minister Monte McNaughton.

But neither he nor Energy Minister Greg Rickford would pledge to protect communities from other energy plants such as nuclear or natural gas, while opposition parties warned the new bill sounds a death knell for clean energy projects in Ontario as the industry surges elsewhere.

Theyre abandoning renewable energy, said New Democrat MPP Peter Tabuns, his partys energy critic.

They seem to be very happy with nuclear and gas, ignoring the huge cost pressures in those two areas and ignoring the fact that renewable energy costs are dropping dramatically around the world.

Rickford called the Green Energy Act a symbol of the failed energy policy of the pastwith no regard to impacts on peoples bills because of sweetheart deals given to producers to kick-start the industry.

He said wind and solar power added $3.75 billion in costs to the electricity system last year with one-quarter of it wasted because the province produces more more power than it needs.

The repeal bill would also amend other legislation to allow the government to halt approvals for energy projects where the demand for electricity has not been demonstrated, Rickford said, evading questions on which projects this could impact.

Green Leader Mike Schreiner said the bill is largely symbolic given that Rickford in July axed 758 renewable energy projects that had received initial approvals, making Thursdays move the final nail in the coffin for the Green Energy Act.

Unfortunately, whats happened in Ontario is the Liberals bought in to renewable energy when the costs were really high and now the Conservatives are getting out of it when the costs are really low, said Schreiner, the MPP for Guelph.

I dont know of any investment strategy that says buy high and sell low. Thats exactly what this government is doing.

Rickford said Ontarios energy sources are now sufficient to meet demand but that planning will continue to make sure there is enough supply in the future.

Predicting demand is notoriously difficult. Before the deep global recession hit in 2008 and 2009, the need for electricity was expected to soar. Electricity projects have long lead times, making it difficult for planners to turn on a dime.

At the same time, with the North American auto industry in jeopardy as the economy crashed, then-premier Dalton McGuinty led the push for renewable power with the Green Energy Act, hoping to foster a new clean energy industry in the province to cut pollution and mitigate climate change.

Interim Liberal Leader John Fraser said the Ford governments repeal of the act is short-sighted.

The Green Energy Act created tens of thousands of jobs in that industry, to where the worlds goingthis will cost Ontarians jobs.

The Ontario Real Estate Association applauded the repeal, saying it means homeowners wont have to get mandatory home energy audits before selling their houses.

That created a risk a low score would cost homeowners, particularly seniors, thousands of dollarswith little or no discernable benefit to the environment, said association president Tim Hudak, a former Ontario Progressive Conservative leader.

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Finance Minister Vic Fedeli is promising to serve a dose of reality about red ink on Ontarios books in a breakfast speech Friday, warning some of it may not make you feel well.

His remarks to the Economic Club of Canada come almost three months after Premier Doug Fords Progressive Conservatives took power following nearly 15 years of Liberal government.

Fedeli will touch on the accounting spat between the previous Kathleen Wynne administration and Auditor General Bonnie Lysyk over how pension assets are booked and how costs of the Liberals $40-billion fair hydro plan  which the Conservatives have kept in place  are treated.

Those are the main issues, the treasurer told reporters Thursday.

Opposition parties said Fedeli will use the occasion to lay the groundwork for steep cuts to government programs and services given Fords election promise to cut $6 billion in spending.

Ford signalled earlier this week that Ontarians will be floored by the revelations in an independent audit into the books led by former B.C. premier Gordon Campbell.

Campbell worked with respected forensic accountant Al Rosen and Michael Horgan, a former deputy finance minister for the federal government, to examine the state of Ontarios finances.

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Lysyk disagreed with bureaucrats and Wynnes Liberals over whether $11 billion in government co-sponsored pension plans can be counted toward the bottom line.

Although she and her predecessors booked the holdings in the Ontario Public Service Employees Union Pension Plan and the Ontario Teachers Pension Plan as an asset starting in 2002  when Tory Ernie Eves was premier  she changed her mind two years ago.

A panel of independent experts led by the chair the Canadian Actuarial Standards Oversight Council concluded last year the fiscal watchdog was wrong.

Still, Lysyks U-turn is worth $5 billion on the annual bottom line, so the deficit for this year would be $11.7 billion instead of the Liberals projected $6.7 billion from the March 28 budget.

Fedeli is expected table a revised spending plan in the fall economic statement, likely in November.

NDP Leader Andrea Horwath warned the accounting change will be an excuse or a piece of evidence that theyll hold up to say that more cuts have to occur.

Nothing is safe in Ontario. This government is intent on dragging our province from bad to worse, said Horwath.

Whether its the cuts that theyve already made to mental health funding (or)  the cuts that theyve made to school repairs, theyre already cutting, she said.

Interim Liberal Leader John Fraser said the Tories are squandering a strong economy that they inherited from the previous Grit government.

Tomorrow will all be about a context for cuts  thats their agenda, he said, noted that in the lead-up to the June 7 campaign the Tories used the Liberals accounting projections not Lysyks.

Green Leader Mike Schreiner, whose party did use the auditor generals accounting in its campaign documents, said the Tories are looking for an excuse for running larger deficits than anyone would anticipate for them.

Schreiner said the new government is doubling down on the Liberal hydro plan, which subsidizes ratepayers electricity bills at great expense to the treasury.

Lysyk has criticized the accounting in the scheme that uses borrowed money to reduce rates by 25 per cent.

But Energy Minister Greg Rickford is building upon the Liberal plan to further cut rates by an additional 12 per cent.

In her pre-election report last spring, the auditor general calculated the deficit forecast for next year is $12.2 billion  not the $6.6 billion former Liberal finance minister Charles Sousa predicted  and for 2020-21 its $12.5 billion, not $6.5 billion.

Robert Benzie is the Star's Queen's Park bureau chief and a reporter covering Ontario politics. Follow him on Twitter: @robertbenzie

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VANCOUVERThe advocate for seniors in British Columbia says a quarter of people living in long-term care homes are receiving antipsychotic medication without a supporting diagnosis.

Isobel Mackenzie says unlike other provinces, B.C. has failed to deal with inappropriate use of the drugs even though figures show the elderly residents have lower rates of psychiatric and mood disorders compared with their counterparts elsewhere in the country.

She says that while long-term care residents in B.C. have slightly higher rates of dementia, their rates of moderate to severe dementia are lower so their use of antipsychotics is troubling.

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Mackenzie says that in the last five years, B.C. has managed to reduce use of antipsychotics by 22 per cent for undiagnosed seniors but it hasnt made any gains in the last year.

She says Alberta, Manitoba and Ontario have all done better in decreasing misuse of the drugs and its time for B.C. to take more action.

A report by the Canadian Institute for Health Information says residents of long-term care homes in B.C. appear to be healthier than the national average, with lower rates of depression, arthritis and heart and circulatory disease.

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1) Amy and Clodagh Lawless of The Dearborn are tapping into their Irish heritage by bringing a taste of The Galway International Oyster & Seafood Festival stateside at the Third Annual Oyster Festival. Pair $1 East and West Coast oysters with a pint of Guinness, served in an engravable souvenir glass. Try your luck at winning a pair of tickets to the Rugby Weekend Tripleheader at Soldier Field featuring Ireland vs. Italy. 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. Friday through Sunday. 145 N. Dearborn St., 312-384-1242, thedearborntavern.com
Home economics is a lost discipline. The middle-school schedule dense with tech and math and language arts has little room for the pragmatic arts.



The attentive scholar may learn to calculate area, decode a poem and locate Mozambique. Not to whisk lemon vinaigrette.



Surely the multimedia student will be admirably prepared for his multitasking future. And perhaps poorly prepared to prepare lunch. One day he may look up from his screen, scan an array of ancient artifacts  the skillet, the measuring spoon and the spatula  and wonder how they work.



In an effort to spare the smart set such frustration, I spent a week at school, explaining how to operate the kitchen. I chose a short list of recipes, crostini to mousse. Plus lemon vinaigrette.



I've been relying on the same vinaigrette since middle school, and it hasn't failed me yet. It's the sort of bedrock basic that can carry you through the single salad, the family meal or the sumptuous dinner party. With only six ingredients and one bowl.



I passed along swift juicing and deft emulsifying techniques. And yet, found I had a lot to learn. For instance: When seated at a table of students  all adolescent, many male  do not hand each a large, sharp knife.



I think we all acquired new skills, especially me.



Lemon Vinaigrette



Prep: 10 minutes

Makes: 3/4 cup, enough to dress a salad for 6-8



Ingredients:

1 lemon

1 teaspoon Dijon mustard

1 teaspoon sugar

1/2 teaspoon coarse salt

6 tablespoons olive oil

2 tablespoons snipped chives



Juice:

Squeeze lemon. Measure out 3 tablespoons juice.



Stir:

Measure juice, mustard, sugar and salt into a small bowl.



Emulsify:

Slowly drizzle in oil, whisking constantly.



Chill:

Stir in chives. Cover and chill.



Provenance:

Adapted from Perla Meyers' "The Seasonal Kitchen."



Leah Eskin is a Tribune Newspapers special contributor. Email her at leahreskin@aol.com.
EDWARDSVILLE  Four of five people originally charged after an Aug. 26 shooting on West 19th Street in Alton were indicted by a Madison County Grand Jury Thursday.

Markell Taylor, 18, and Jordan T. Jackson, 20, both of the North St. Louis County area, were indicted on two counts of first degree murder, Class M felonies; two counts of attempted first degree murder, both Class X felonies; two counts of aggravated battery with a firearm, both Class X felonies; and one count of aggravated unlawful use of weapons, a Class 4 felony.

Jackson was also indicted on a single count of unlawful possession of weapons by a felon, a Class 2 felony.

Kiondo Jones, and Daelin Hampton, both 19 and of St. Louis, were indicted on one count of aggravated unlawful use of weapons, a Class 4 felony.

Taylor and Jackson are accused of shooting 23-year-old Keron W. Hickman multiple times. Two others were shot during the incident, and survived.

Alton police, Madison County sheriffs deputies and first responders were called to the 100 block of West 19th Street just after 2 a.m. for the report of shots fired and at multiple people with gunshot wounds.

According to the indictments, Jones and Hampton allegedly carried loaded handguns in their vehicle.

In other indictments handed down Thursday:

 An amended indictment was handed down against Brayant E. West, 46, of the 1100 block of East Seventh Street, Alton, for aggravated domestic battery, a Class 2 felony; and domestic battery (fourth subsequent offense), a Class 3 felony. According to the indictment on Feb. 28 he allegedly attempted to strangle a family or household member, and that he picked that person up and threw them to the ground. He also had prior domestic battery convictions from St. Clair and Madison counties.

 Michael A Proffer, 20, of the 1100 block of Lee Avenue, Cottage Hills, was indicted on a single count of unlawful failure to register as a sex offender, a Class 3 felony.

 Cassandra J. Hamilton, 52, of the 1100 block of Washington Avenue, Alton, was indicted for obstructing justice, a Class 4 felony. According to court documents on Aug. 28 she provided false information to a detective about her son.

Reach reporter Scott Cousins at 618-208-6447.
BETHALTO  In a time of crisis, a Bethalto group is seeking donations to be hand delivered to North Carolina victims in light of recent havoc of the countrys southeastern coast.

Hurricane Florence has roughly subsided, and with the aftermath of the storm leaving many devastated, Bethalto Church of God member David Thomason is rallying support to aid in the recovery process.

Search and rescues occur there first, but when that work is done the need is still strong, said Thomason. When the storm first hits, help goes to the big cities. We mainly go to smaller communities that get left out. There are a lot of things they need that they dont currently have.

Over the next week, Thomason and volunteers are asking for donations, primarily: hygienic items, such as soap, toothpaste, shampoo and toilet paper; beverages, including plenty of water and Gatorade; and cleaning supplies, to help repair houses impacted by the natural disaster.

Monetary donations are also accepted and can be delivered or mailed to the church. Checks can be made out to: Bethalto Church of God, 800 E. Bethalto Blvd., Bethalto, IL, 62010.

No clothes please, that will come later, added Thomason.

Donations can be dropped off at Alton fires Station 1 entryway, and Bethalto and Wood River fire departments until Tuesday, Sept. 25 during regular hours, before the Bethalto crew leaves Illinois Wednesday morning at 5 a.m.

Thomason hopes to fill a pickup truck, an attached trailer and a moving truck with donations before the day-long drive to LaGrange, North Carolina, an Inner Banks town of less than 3,000 people. Community Hope Center in Cottage Hills, where Thomason volunteers some of his time, is providing the truck along with some donations.

Usually we are situated near a church, but they are all destroyed, said Thomason. It will be a little rougher than last year.

He said Thursday that a North Carolina team is currently getting a small church hall ready, as the Riverbend volunteers prepare to bring their own bedding. The crew of about 20 to 30 people plans to return home Monday.

Once on site, crews set up tents and tables, and organize donated materials. Those in need are then encouraged to come to visit volunteers as they hand out various items. The crew will also travel to different pockets of the region to hand-deliver goods to people unable to seek help for themselves.

Bethalto volunteers will have a hand in the undertaking.

Crews from as far as Washington state and Florida come to help, said Thomason.

The crew will not only supply essential goods while volunteering, but is partnering with the Men and Women of Action Organization to help recover impacted houses.

We will go in and strip houses, especially for people without insurance, said Thomason. The organization specializes in construction and disaster relief and assists the Bethalto crew, mostly free of charge.

We go in as a team, said Thomason. Then another team from a different church comes in after us. Theyre so thankful to have people keep coming back.

The Bethalto crews efforts began in May 2011, after a tornado ripped through neighborhoods of Joplin, Missouri. Thomason also said volunteers worked in a suburb of Houston last year after Hurricane Harvey triggered mass flooding.

God puts it on our heart to do this stuff, he said.

Though Hurricane Florence has been downgraded to a tropical depression, after hitting the Carolinas as a slow-moving, Category 1 hurricane last week, it has left behind inches of rain water in some places, forced winds and hazardous conditions. Flooding has hit the coastal region the hardest, leaving thousands without power, and displaced.

This kind of work is hard, but is very rewarding knowing you can help, said Thomason. When one guy found out we were from Illinois, he just reached out and hugged me. We have never had anyone turn down a prayer.

For more information, call Thomason at 618-670-3394.
EDWARDSVILLE  A $750,000 loan to East Alton to help spur redevelopment of Eastgate Plaza was overwhelmingly approved at Wednesdays Madison County Board meeting, after some debate over the proper role of government and the loan program.

The village had asked for a loan under the federal Urban Development Action Grant program for the build-out of several retail outlets at Eastgate Plaza.

Board Member David Michael, R-Highland, objected to using UDAG funds for economic development. While they can be used for that purpose, in Madison County the money generally goes toward infrastructure or public safety projects.

The loan is for $750,000 at 4 percent interest, and would be paid over 10 years. He said while the loan is to the village, the money would then go to the owners to install interior improvements to suit the needs of new tenants. Under the loan program, the developer pays back the village, with interest, and the village repays the county.

The shopping center was recently purchased by a group including Todd Kennedy and his wife, Julia Kennedy, the owners of Julias Banquet Center, one of the plazas tenants.

One of the first shopping centers in the area, it had brought a large number of people and tax revenue to the village, before falling on hard times. There are now three tenants: Julias, Dollar General and the AMC Showplace 6 theater.

Kennedy had previously told the Madison County Board Grants Committee that there are several new tenants who have signed letters of intent to occupy stores in Eastgate, or who are very close to signing. He said probable tenants include a major chain grocer, which would serve as the centers anchor store.

Kennedy also told the committee a large fitness center, a well-known hardware store, a video gaming center, a coffee shop and an insurance agent are also in the mix. He also said a luxury storage facility behind Julias is also planned. The facility would house large items, such as motor homes and trailers.

After Michael voiced his objections, a number of board members spoke in support of the loan, including several who said they understood Michaels point, but that this situation was different.

It appears Ive lost the argument, Michael said at the end of the discussion, reiterating his point that it was not the role of government to prop up individual businesses.

Michael was the only no vote.

In other business, the board voted to spend $30,000 in support of the St. Louis Regional Chamber.

There had been a great deal of debate over paying $30,000 or a lesser amount for membership in the organization.

The Grants Committee had been considering several memberships in regional economic development agencies. It has been noted that the Regional Chamber has been more supportive of some other regional development groups.

It was noted that there could be several levels of support, including $10,000 or $15,000. The board eventually voted 20-3 in favor of the membership, with Jack Minner, D-Edwardsville; Mike Parkinson, D-Granite City; and Dalton Gray, R-Troy, voting no. Several board members were absent, including James Dodd, D-Alton; Ann Gorman, D-Edwardsville; Tom McRae, R-Bethalto; and Elizabeth Dalton, D-Collinsville.

In other business, the board:

 Approved a resolution allowing Madison County Community Development to submit a grant application for the 2019 low-income home energy assistance program. The federal portion of the grant would be $809,535, and the state portion $1.6 million.

 Approved a $58,500 contract with Kone Inc., of Olivette, Missouri, for emergency repairs to the prisoner elevator at the Madison County Courthouse.

 Approved an emergency appropriation of $11,751 for a federal grant from the Office of Justice Programs, Office for Victims of Crime, for the Madison County States Attorney to provide victims advocacy services.

Reach reporter Scott Cousins at 618-208-6447.
WILMINGTON, North Carolina  Altons former Can Man Charley Moyer now can claim surviving Hurricane Florence unscathed as another adventure in his 73 years on Earth.

We are going to get him a T-shirt that says, I survived Hurricane Florence, said Pat Lowery, a former Alton and Bethalto resident, who now lives a block from the Intracoastal Waterway in Wilmington  and less than 10 minutes from Moyers studio apartment in an assisted living facility.

Yesterday, he was proud of himself that he got through it, Lowery said Thursday. Charley did fine, at the beginning he was really, really scared but later seemed more comfortable. I told him, If you are afraid, push the (panic) button. He got through it fine. He knew help was just a push of a button away.

Lowery said Florence was her eighth hurricane, not all being in North Carolina. Lowery and her husband Roger did not evacuate.

Prior to the storm hitting the area, Pat Lowerys daughter Pam, a counselor, talked with Moyer to ease his concerns. We kept assuring Charley that weve been through this, you will have food, you will have water. A plus was that the pounding winds hit windows on the opposite side of the building from his apartment.

Lowery said the couples house no longer can facilitate Moyers physical needs, so it was better for him to remain at his home.

He was in a safer house that was built to be sturdy and there were a lot of workers who stayed through the hurricane, she said. He got three hot meals a day. They had a generator that provided electricity for the common areas; they were only out of electricity for three days in the remainder of the building.

She said some staff members stayed at the facility because they were safer than if they had been at home.

More Information Charley Moyer Born with cerebral palsy, Charley Moyer has logged more than one lifetime's worth of adversities, changes and adjustments. Moyer's ever-changing life started with his single mother Agnes Kevilus naming him Charles John and putting him up for adoption shortly after his birth on May 1, 1945 in Chicago. The late William and Pauline Moyer subsequently adopted the boy and changed his name to Joseph. The Moyers, who also adopted four other boys, dropped him off at the former Illinois Asylum for Feeble-Minded Children in Lincoln, Illinois, when he was 2.5 years old and never returned for him. The facility later was renamed Lincoln State School and Colony, then Lincoln Developmental Center. It closed in 2002. Moyer lived at the school until he was 23, when he relocated to a foster home in Alton in 1968. He lived at the home for eight years before moving out to live on his own. For years, independent Moyer refused to apply for Social Security disability benefits, but when he finally did so, he discovered the four brothers that the Moyers had adopted, and they subsequently found out about him. Then, State Rep. Dan Beiser (D-Alton) had helped Moyer obtain a copy of his adoption records, then located the Moyers' marriage certificate. The Moyer sons first reunited in 2009, and have visited and kept in contact since then. Besides the physical challenges in collecting aluminum cans, nonverbal Moyer encountered other difficulties but was undeterred. He was beaten, hit by a car and fell and was injured in his quest for cans. Thieves also stole his cans from the collection spots. See More Collapse

People kept checking on him, Lowery said. They took their jobs and responsibilities very seriously.

The Lowerys bought Moyer some battery-powered nightlights for his apartment. The only thing nobody had there was TV in their rooms, she said, so the residents mingled in the areas with electricity from the generator. He fortunately was able to charge up his power chair for mobility, she said.

Lowery said the property is on a hill and in no danger of the flooding that is devastating parts of North Carolina.

Moyer  who also went by the names of Charley Kevilus and Joey Moyer  for decades had scoured streets and sidewalks of mainly Upper Alton for aluminum cans to trade for cash under his business, Joeys Can Co., thereby earning the nickname, Can Man.

The Lowerys got to know Moyer through Dale Neudecker, Moyers longtime caretaker, now of Godfrey. The couple opened their home to Moyer in December 2016.

He stayed with the Lowerys until the summer of 2017 before moving to the assisted living facility that provides the independence he always has craved, but with support.

Pat Lowery is a retired speech therapist; Roger Lowery is a retired professor of political science and department chairman at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, and grew up in Roxana.

The couple also fared well during Hurricane Florence, particularly since they wisely had a whole-house generator installed a few years ago that kept their lights, freezer and refrigerator operating. They alternated between using the electricity and turning it off to conserve, not knowing when Duke Energy Corp., would restore power.

After six days without Duke electricity, the power came back on at the couples home at about 11 a.m. Thursday, shortly before a Telegraph reporter called Lowery.

We never lost phone service, she said. It rained for five days straight, but because of the cloud cover, it never got above 80 degrees.

Many old oak and pine trees fell near their home during Florence, which hit nearby Wrightsville Beach on Sept. 14, shortly after being downgraded to a Category 1 storm. While the downed trees blocked nearby streets, preventing them from visiting Charley for some time, the couples home was undamaged from falling trees because of the wind direction.

Fortunately, Florence came ashore during low tide and her accompanying rushes of water went back to sea. There was very little storm surge in our area, she said. Our ground is high, right on the Intracoastal Waterway. Our water has a place to flow. For that reason, she does not expect their neighborhood to flood in Florences aftermath.

Reach Linda N. Weller at 618-208-6450 or on Twitter @Linda_Weller
Illinois College is the recipient of a nearly $300,000 grant designed to enhance and improve education in science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

The funding comes from the National Science Foundation through the Improving Undergraduate STEM Education program. The grant provides funding to implement methods for teaching and learning STEM subjects.

Illinois Colleges program is a response to the national effort by the National Science Foundation to address the need for qualified candidates to fill jobs in STEM, which the U.S. Commerce Department predicts will continue to grow at a significantly higher rate than other jobs.

Provost Catharine OConnell said Illinois Colleges involvement with this program demonstrates its commitment to position students for success in these growing fields.

Illinois College offers excellent STEM coursework. This grant will provide students with additional support to overcome challenges, persist and achieve academic success in STEM courses, OConnell said. Ultimately, we expect that due to grant activities, more students will pursue majors in STEM fields and graduate with degrees that will lead to successful careers.

IC faculty members in science and math will train their top students to provide supplemental instruction in foundational STEM courses that many students, particularly first-year students, find challenging. The goal is to keep these difficult classes from taking students away from majoring in STEM fields. The peer instructors, along with students taking STEM courses, will learn techniques for transferring learning from one context to another and for developing self-efficacy.

Chemistry professor Clayton Spencer and psychology professor Elizabeth Rellinger will lead the project. The grant will continue for three years, and research results will be used to evaluate and further develop best practices for academic support and student learning.
GODFREY  English Professor Kamau Njoroge is Lewis and Clark Community Colleges 2018 Emerson Electric Excellence in Teaching Award recipient.

Kamau possesses the type of courage to engage deeply with the complex field of forces in the classroom with humility and integrity, said L&C Faculty Member Wayne Politsch. With passion and precision, he creates a space for learning for each student. With rigor and spirit, he moves the learner to higher levels of thinking, questioning and writing. Our conversations over the years taught me more about teaching and learning than conversations with anyone else.

After attending a workshop facilitated by the Center for Critical Thinking at Sonoma State University, Kamau, Politsch and L&C Philosophy Professor Gerald Mozur developed and taught a professional development course to Lewis and Clark instructors on teaching for critical thinking.

In my estimation, there is no one on this campus who is more learned about education and pedagogy than Kamau, Mozur said. He is a genuine student of the field and applies in his classroom all that he has learned. His students recognize and respect his command of his subject matter and know they are in good hands in his classes. A dedicated and humble teacher of liberal arts. The Emerson award is well-deserved.

Each year, the Emerson Electric Excellence in Teaching Awards recognize more than 100 educators in the St. Louis metropolitan area  from kindergarten teachers to college professors  who are examples of excellence in their field. This is the 25th year Lewis and Clark has participated in the recognition program.

It is very important to Kamau that his students understand that writing is a process, and it is with practice that writing evolves, said Dean of Transfer Programs Jill Lane.

In his classroom, students participate in a collaborative approach to learning, during which everyone contributes to the learning experience.

I strive to see the potential in each student, to help them to build their academic self-confidence and to challenge them to become better writers while maintaining an honest and open relationship with them, Njoroge said. My goal is to help my students improve their cognitive skills, sometimes at the expense of my own free time and obligations.

Njoroge earned his Bachelor of Arts in English and Economics from Principia College, his Master of Arts in English from Southern Illinois University Carbondale, and his Doctorate in English Education from Washington University.

It is very satisfying to see students grappling with a new concept and watching them as they begin to understand it and put that concept into practical use as they become more confident writers, Njoroge said. Through problem-posing, we learn writing is an essential skill that, like many others, can be improved with practice and by mastering some basic principles. Most students find that their approach to other courses is changed and improved after the class has ended.

Njoroge was inspired to become a teacher by one of his instructors at Principia College, Norman Anderson.

Dr. Anderson had a deep understanding of how the human condition is expressed in literature and really made it come alive for me, Njoroge said. Learning from him made me want to teach others as he taught me.

He began his career at L&C in 1992 while finishing his graduate studies at Washington University and became a full-time instructor in 1994. He now relishes the opportunity to be both a mentor and educator for Lewis and Clark students.

I am grateful that each semester, one or more of my students approach me to discuss a problem in school or in their lives in general, Njoroge said. I encourage my students to not react negatively to their mistakes, but to celebrate them. Once we make mistakes we can accept them and do better the next time. If my students ask a question I dont have an answer for, I simply tell them the truth  that I dont know but that I will research it. To admit a mistake is a sign of strength rather than of weakness. We cannot do that without humility.

Seeing students take advantage of L&Cs 2+2 Communications program also makes him happy.

Starting their education at L&C not only cuts the cost of their degree but also allows them to transition into college life, to acquire basic learning skills and to mature as adult learners, Njoroge said.

He volunteers as a Bible educator each week in the community and serves as an elder in the Central Congregation of Jehovahs Witnesses in Alton.

I want to continue to learn from my students and to learn more about myself, Njoroge said. It is my goal in life to develop qualities that will make me a whole person. These qualities are not easy to master for there are many and sometimes they might require a lifetime to cultivate; however, with diligence and Gods help, it can be done. In the last few years, I have been working to hone the qualities of approachability, compassion and humility. I think these qualities will help me not only in my career, but also in my Bible education work in the community.
WOOD RIVER  Police Chief Brad Wells told a group of dozens of landlords Tuesday night that police will be issuing ordinance violation warnings to tenants occupying houses they enter on police business.

The new plan would allow people who work in the Housing and Zoning Department to enter the homes to inspect, he said.

Wells said the landlord and/or tenant will have seven days after the warning to correct the problem, such as insects, trash and poor sanitation. If an electrical code or plumbing violation is spotted, the tenant should notify the landlord, he said.

City Attorney Rene Bassett-Butler said that, so far, enforcing the property codes was entirely up to the building and zoning staff members, but now the police department has come into play for the first time.

Building Inspector Steve Russell agreed with Bassett-Butler that the police involvement will go a long way toward making Wood River a better place to live.

I have a very powerful ally now, Russell said. He wants compliance; the police want compliance, Bassett-Butler said. The ordinance allows the police department to be in the middle. Wood River is going to be a nice place to live, she said.

We are not trying to be heavy-handed. We are trying to work with you, Wells told the group. He said that, if the landlord is having problems with a tenant, chances are, the police are also having problems with them.

At the same meeting, two Madison County judges also gave the landlords information about the process of collecting back rent and evicting people who refuse to pay.

Chief Judge Dave Hylla said there is a self-help center in the law library of the Madison County Courthouse, where people can visit if they want to handle eviction case on their own. However, he said, they might want to consider hiring a lawyer because the cases can become complex. Neither the staff at the self-help center, nor the judges can give legal advice, he said.

As far as evictions, Associate Judge Clarence Harrison told members of the group that the law is set up to protect the tenants, as well as provide justice to the landlords.

He said the process is very complex, and the docket for evictions is crowded. He said he may have dozens of trials twice a week. The landlords complained about the time it takes to evict a tenant who owes the money, but Harrison said it is not practical to speed up the process because the law does not allow for immediate eviction in the same sense that people today understand the term.

Many of the laws were written in the time of Lincoln, when immediate meant the time it takes for a horse to get to a place, he said.

The process involves a variety of notices, and if a case comes to trial, and the landlord gets a positive ruling, he will give tenants two to three weeks to leave. It is not practical to force people to simply leave and leave all their belongings, he said.

Harrison also advised landlords to file claims for damages to their properties after they get a ruling on eviction. He said the process of getting a judgment on property damage is more involved.

Bassett-Butler said the law protects tenants from being left homeless overnight. It is a matter of due process, she said.

We understand your frustration. It is a matter of balancing and protecting rights. Not everybody walks out of the courthouse happy, Hylla said.

Wells said Wood River is planning to institute a new housing code enforcement program similar to the one now in effect in Alton. A team in Alton headed by former lieutenant and chief of detectives Gary Cramner is devoting additional manpower to hold landlords and tenants accountable.

Wells referred to the program as crime-free housing, an idea that is spreading. The city will be taking a closer look at property management companies that manage properties for out-of-town owners who purchase cheap houses at tax sales.

We will tell them we have certain expectations. If you dont want to meet those expectations, dont buy houses off the tax roles, he said.

Belleville has a crime free housing ordinance, which went into effect in 2013. In that city, all owners, landlords and/or managing gents that were previously registered with the City were sent a letter including information on upcoming Crime Free Housing Seminars, a Rental Property Registration Form, a Criminal Search Verification Form, and a Crime Free Rental Agreement Addendum.

Reach reporter Sanford Schmidt at 618-208-6449.
To ease my conscience a tad, I use whole grain flour when making breakfast muffins. But no fear, these muffins wont taste like health food if you choose white whole wheat flour. Made from a variety of wheat that has a milder, less nutty flavor than regular whole wheat flour, white whole wheat flour has all the goodness without the heaviness. It is my preference when baking sweets, and is available from Gold Medal and King Arthur Flour in the supermarket aisle or online. I keep it in the freezer to prolong its shelf life.
Mustafa Ciftci | Anadolu Agency (Getty Images)

The MacMurray College Humanities and Performing Arts Series, Life of the Mind and Spirit, will feature University of Illinois Springfield associate professor of political science Ali Nizamuddin to discuss perceptions and realities about Islam.

He will speak at 7 p.m. Monday in Thoresen Recital Hall. The event is free and open to the public.
A variety of wares, including antiques and collectibles, are now available at a West State Street shop.

The Rabbit Hole opened Tuesday at 303 W. State St., across from the Morgan County Courthouse.

Jacksonville native and Rabbit Hole owner Jackie Branscum returned to her hometown a little more than a year ago after being gone for 40 years.

I worked as a manager of retail stores for about 30 years and then opened my own resale shop in Tennessee and ran it for about 10 years, she said. Then I decided to return home to Jacksonville and open another resale store here.

Branscum likes having her business in downtown Jacksonville.

I wanted to be part of the downtown business community and help revitalize the downtown square and area, she said.

At The Rabbit Hole, Branscum carries such things as antique furniture, galvanized tin decorations, baskets, glassware and costume and fine jewelry.

Branscum said she enjoys searching for items to sell in her store.

I enjoy meeting people and finding out what types of items they are looking for, so I can cater to them, she said. I love going to estate sales, auctions, yard sales and storage unit auctions to buy treasures. You never know what youll find at those sales, or what youll find at my store. I will be adding new merchandise weekly to keep things fresh.

Branscum said she plans to have a Facebook page for The Rabbit Hole set up within a few weeks.

I will have larger sale items posted on Facebook that wont fit in the store, she said.

The Rabbit Hole is open from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday.

Greg Olson can be reached at 217-245-6121, ext. 1224, or on Twitter @JCNews_Greg.
Fast-food chain Wendys is investigating the termination of an autistic employee in Jacksonville who was told he was making guests uncomfortable.

David Rain III, 18, of Jacksonville has been diagnosed as having Aspergers syndrome, a condition on the higher-functioning end of the autism spectrum. He began working at Wendys in May with a recommendation from the Hope Institute in Springfield.

Wendys was an employer identified as being friendly and understanding toward those with disabilities, said David Rain IIIs father, David Rain Jr.

But David Rain III was fired this week.

When David Rain Jr. spoke with a member of the stores management about why his son was fired, he was taken aback by the answer, he said.

I said, You fired my son. You guys are supposed to work with people like that, David Rain Jr. said. She said, Well, we have two others that came from the Hope (Institute), but he makes our guests uncomfortable. That set off a real anger to me. It was the wrong (thing) to say.

David Rain III said he enjoyed his job and, aside from a small issue here and there, got along well with his co-workers.

When he was fired, he was told his performance was lacking, he said.

They basically said I wasnt doing that well, David Rain III said.

David Rain Jr. said he got an entirely different story.

Some of the things that make some of our guests uncomfortable are things that someone with Aspergers might do, David Rain Jr. said. Erratic movements, maybe they saw that. They said something about him pacing, thats Aspergers  Hes a good kid, hes just different.

Royce Simpson, divisional vice president for Pattman LLC, the owner and operator of Wendys, responded via email to a reporters request for comment.

All of our team members are very important to us, Simpson said. We are investigating this matter and will take appropriate actions.

The Illinois Human Rights Act and the Americans with Disabilities Act prevent Illinois employers from terminating an individual because of his or her disability. David Rain Jr. said he hasnt pursued litigation with Wendys but also hasnt dismissed the possibility.

Even if Wendys offered David Rain III his job back, his father wouldnt allow him to go back to work there, David Rain Jr. said. What he hopes happens now is that Wendys does its part to educate its workforce and ensure that something like this doesnt happen to others.

To me, they need to be educated and the customers need to educated so they understand, David Rain Jr. said. I told them, Do you ever talk to these customers and explain whats going on? Explain to them who this guy is and what his condition is? How can you help him if you dont even understand yourself?

Nick Draper can be reached at 217-245-6121, ext. 1223, or on Twitter @nick_draper.
Protecting critical infrastructure is a national security imperative.

We have denied state-backed companies from the Middle East from buying our ports, including in Newark, New Jersey. We have taken actions against companies from China and Russia that are run by former members of their military, as they tried to embed themselves in our domestic telecoms and software security industries. Yet we have been severely lacking in our efforts thus far to secure our commuter rail systems, which are equally important to our critical infrastructure.

You cant underestimate the importance of commuter rail to the United States. On any given day, more than 15 million Americans ride a passenger rail vehicle on their way to work, traveling between cities or for pleasure. Its the lifeblood of many major cities, which are out-sized engines to our countrys growth  benefiting workers, businesses and the economy.

The United States has begun upgrading old commuter rail systems and trains with next generation technology, which is both smarter and more connected. While this will surely increase efficiency and safety of commuter rail, it also presents new potential challenges in protecting the integrity of the system from the threats of the digital age  intentional disruption of day-to-day operations, spying and/or deliberate acts of terrorism.

Given this, you would think that commuter rail would get the same attention and treatment as our port, telecom and technology infrastructure  with smart investments, a watchful eye on suppliers and a strong consideration of security. This is not the case, and it should be worrying for everyone.

In the last few years, four of Americas largest cities  Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles and Philadelphia  procured new trains for their commuter rail systems. And all of them awarded a Chinese state-owned company with an opaque ownership structure to supply the rail cars. The company, CRRC, has never delivered on a project of this scale in the United States but underbid the nearest competitor by 25 percent to 50 percent  which is easy to do if you have the financial backing of the Chinese government and a desire to embed your products, which have a lifecycle of 30 to 40 years, into the U.S. rail system.

This should give everybody pause. Its understandable that transit authorities are focused on financial costs with taxpayer dollars at stake and budgets tight.

However, little to no scrutiny was given to the security risks in choosing a supplier that is owned by the government of a nation that has a well-known history of hacking and digital spying / espionage against Western targets, has been steadily investing in critical infrastructure in other countries to increase its geopolitical leverage, and is increasingly flexing its muscles and asserting itself against the United States.

By producing our smart and more connected rail cars, this allows CRRC and its government backers intimate knowledge of all the ins, outs and backdoors of not just the trains but also the entire commuter rail system. We would also be dependent on them to support this infrastructure during the entire lifecycle. The potential national security costs could be huge if their state backers decide to go rogue.

This is not a far-fetched scenario. Christopher Wray, director of the FBI, recently commented, I think China  in many ways represents the broadest, most challenging, most significant threat we face as a country.  Theirs is a long-term game thats focused on just about every industry, every quarter of society in many ways.

No wonder certain members of Congress, citing the potential threats from China and its moves to establish its position in the U.S. rail industry, are putting forward legislation to thwart certain countries from investing and being important players in our critical infrastructure.

For example, as states consider future rail projects, it would be wise for the decision-makers in the state to give this issue the serious consideration it deserves. Our commuter rail system is vital to our people, businesses and economy  and we need to take all precautions to ensure it is secure, especially as it enters the digital age, like we do for other key areas of our critical infrastructure.

Picking a supplier that does not present the possibility of ulterior motives is an obvious and important start.

David A. Norcross previously ran for U.S. Senate in 1976 and served as chairman of the New Jersey Republican State Committee. He wrote this for InsideSources.com.
Cairo InternationalBank Limited (CIB) is a bank that has been operating in Uganda since September1995, and regulated by the Bank of Uganda, offering a full range of bankingservices including; deposit taking, lending, treasury and trade financeservices.
The Finance and Administration Assistant willfacilitate the planning and implementation, monitoring and reporting of projectactivities directly with beneficiaries and other stakeholders. This includestechnical backstopping and other support to beneficiary individuals, producerorganisations and associations and other stakeholders like local CBOs/NGOs andprivate sector players, who are working with project beneficiaries
The Associate Human Resources Officer will beresponsible for supporting a fully integrated and regulatory-compliant clientservices team as well as providing advice to managers and staff encompassingsub-functional specialties as appropriate, in relation to such as financialmanagement, human resources planning, staffing aspects of budget for theirservice lines, policy, recruitment and placement, administration ofentitlements, and staff development and career support and in ensuring thathigh client satisfaction is met and accountabilities are strengthened in linewith the terms of reference of the Human Resources and Talent Management Unit.
The first Reeling festival opened in April 1981. At the time, Webb says, the only filmmakers dealing with queer themes were experimental filmmakers such as Barbara Hammer (Superdyke, The Great Goddess) and Kenneth Anger (Scorpio Rising, and author of the notorious Hollywood Babylon). Wed show their work at Chicago Filmmakers but we didnt frame it as gay or lesbian. Then Webb wondered: Does the gay/lesbian community even know about these movies?
Action for HealthUganda (A4HU) is a youth empowerment organization dedicated to mainstream youngpeoples engagement in socio-economic development and promoting Sexual andReproductive Health and rights (SRHR). A4HU was registered in October 2017 as anew entity to take over the operations of DSW (Deutsche StiftungWeltbevoelkerung) in Uganda. For the past 18 years DSW has supported theimplementation of a portfolio of projects to improve sexual and reproductivehealth of young people in Uganda.
The adage that failures can teach many lessons seems quite...
Caste conflicts have been rearing its ugly head in Telangana for the last few days, drawing national attention. After the honour-killing case in which a dalit youth, Pranay Kumar, was murdered in front of his pregnant wife in Nalgonda district, came another similar incident in Hyderabad. A newly-wed couple was attacked with a machete by the girl's father, prompting outrage from citizens.

In the Nalgonda incident, too, the youth was killed allegedly at the behest of the girl's father. Pranay belonged to a scheduled caste, while his wife Amrita belonged to an upper caste.

Both the incidents have sent shock waves across the state even as questions are being raised as to whether the attacker in Hyderabad had taken inspiration from the previous case; there also, the father is the main accused.

Madhavi, who belongs to a backward caste, and Sandeep, from an SC community, married a few days ago. According to local police officials, Manohar, the girl's father, was in an inebriated state when he forced his daughter and son-in-law to meet him at a shopping area in the city. As soon as he spotted them, he approached a coconut vendor, stole a machete and attacked his daughter, severely injuring her. Sandeep also sustained minor injuries.

According to the latest medical bulletin issued by Yashoda Hospital, where Madhavi is admitted, she continues to be on ventilator support due to severe blood loss. The doctors also informed that, with great difficulty, they could save her arm, which was deeply cut in the attack.

Talking to the media, Sandeep's mother said that Madhavis father had come to her house the previous day, and assured them that he was not as cruel as Maruti Rao (the main accused in the Nalgonda case).

Sandeep works in a local restaurant as a waiter. Manohar does odd jobs to earn a living, according to the police officials.

Although Manohar was arrested from a relative's house, a new debate has begun on whether it was a caste-based attack or not. Police said the attack had nothing to do with caste, and the attacker was angry with his daughter for going against him and marrying without his knowledge.

This attack has nothing to do with the boys caste. This man cannot even feed himself if he does not work for a day. His son-in-laws financial conditions are much better. He was very drunk and angry with his daughter when he committed the crime, informed Venkateshwar Rao, SHO, SR Nagar Police Station.

According to the investigating officials, the accused was an alcoholic who created nuisance regularly at home. According to him, he was enraged that his wife and son also supported his daughter in her marriage to Sandeep.

However, not everyone seems to be convinced with the motive revealed by the police.

It is an attack on a lower caste. He [Manohar] was dead against his daughter marrying a lower caste guy. Otherwise, what is the reason for him to commit such a crime, said Raju, who is from the same colony in Borabanda where Manohar resides. He, along with a few others from their colony, was seen outside the Yashoda hospital.

Meanwhile, the two incidents have moved the civil society, which has been voicing its concerns online and offline. Rallies and candlelight marches were held in some parts of the city, while many expressed disgust and helplessness on caste fanaticism through their posts on social media.
Several passengers on a Jet Airways flight from Mumbai to Jaipur on Thursday suffered nasal and ear bleeding after cabin pressure inside the aircraft dropped, a senior official said. The Boeing 737 aircraft returned to Mumbai safely.

"During climb, the crew forgot to select bleed switch due to which cabin pressurisation could not be maintained. As a result, oxygen masks got deployed," the official at aviation regulator DGCA said. In an initial statement, Jet Airways said it regretted the incident. According to some reports, the crew have been taken off duty pending inquiry.

Following the air-turn back of Jet Airways flight 9W 697 of 20th September, 2018, 144 of the 166 guests of the original flight traveled to Jaipur via an alternative flight of the airline, while 17 of them wished to travel at another point in time, said the airline.

Screenshot of Satish Nair's tweet

A Jet Airways spokesperson said five guests who were referred to a hospital for additional medical check-up accompanied by the Jet Airways' Care team have been released, post medical examination. The airline will continue to offer necessary medical care and attention to the guests concerned as required, he said.

Panic situation due to technical fault in @jetairways 9W 0697 going from Mumbai to Jaipur. Flt return back to Mumbai after 45 mts. All passengers are safe including me. pic.twitter.com/lnOaFbcaps  Darshak Hathi (@DarshakHathi) September 20, 2018

The spokesperson also said that the airline is extending full cooperation to the DGCA for the ongoing investigation of the event.

Some of the people who claimed to be on board Jet Airways flight 9W 697 took to Twitter to describe their experience, with many being critical of Jet Airways for not providing information and assistance after the flight landed.

One Twitter user, Darshak Hathi, claimed to be on the Jet Airways flight and uploaded a video of the oxygen masks being deployed. He added the aircraft, which took off by 5.50am, returned in 45 minutes. Another passenger, Satish Nair, claimed after the cabin pressure dropped, there were no staff to help and no instructions given when the oxygen masks deployed. Nair wrote passengers' safety was completely ignored.

Another Twitter user,Melissa Tixeira, posted a video of the purported aircraft after it landed. The video shows an airline employee asking that video recording not be done.

(With PTI inputs)
Despite chemistry between Moore and Watanabe that could at best be called cordial, Hosokawa's wooing of Roxane feels moderately more credible than the attraction sparked between Gen and Carmen. Between all these dalliances, tender heart-to-hearts and dewy-eyed musical interludes, it's easy to forget that the roomy, attractively appointed embassy, full of private corners and crannies for lovers to nestle in, is actually under siege. Indeed, were it not for some heavily underlined dramatic foreshadowing at the outset  "It's opera, so in the end everyone dies," Roxane merrily observes  the eventual drastic downturn of the situation might even come as a shock.
Amid political slugfest over Rafale jet deal, the deputy chief of Indian Air Force, on Thursday afternoon, flew the fighter jet manufactured for India. Air Marshal Raghunath Nambiar flew from the front cockpit at the Istres air base in France, and the sortie lasted over an hour. This is a testbed for which Dassault, the manufacturer of Rafale, has made all the India specific software and system enhancements, according to officials privy to the development.

A six-member IAF team is already at the Dassault manufacturing unit, where Rafale jets for India are under production. Delivery schedule of 36 Rafale jets is 67 months and the first aircraft will reach IAF by mid-2019 and the rest over the next 30 months.

Last week, Air Marshal R. Nambiar made a statement that what is being alleged does not match with facts at all, and the government has saved nearly 40 per cent of money compared to previous MMRCA (Medium Multi-Role Combat Aircraft) deal. His remarks drew flak from opposition Congress.

India-specific enhancements will include air-to-air weapons like METEOR, a beyond-visual-range missile with ranges more than 150km; MICA-RF, a beyond-visual-range missile with ranges more than 80km, and MICA-IR, a close combat missile with ranges more than 60km. It also includes air-ground weapons like SCALP missiles with range in excess of 300km.

According to an IAF official, the induction of METEOR and SCALP missiles will provide a significant capability edge to the force over Indias adversaries on both eastern and western fronts.

The cost of the deal includes basic cost of an aircraft, infrastructure and training, India-specific enhancement accessories, and performance-based logistics. Apart from basic cost and expenditure on infrastructure and training, IAF is closely eyeing the performance-based logistics. As per the performance-based logistics agreement, aircraft manufacturer will ensure a minimum 75 per cent of the fleet will always be available for operations.

Meanwhile, the Congress launched a fresh attack on Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman after former chief of the state-run Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL) T.R. Raju claimed to have contacted Sitharaman over HAL's capability to manufacture Rafale jets. The opposition party demanded resignation of Sitharaman accusing her of lying over HAL's capabilities.

Later in the day, official sources came out in defence of Sitharaman by saying Raju is factually incorrect. Sources said that Raju was the member of the Contract Negotiations Committee of the ministry of defence and there were many areas of disagreement between Dassult Aviation and HAL.

"HAL, in its letter dated 11/10/2012, addressed to MoD, brought out these disagreements pertaining to the work share between them. Subsequently, in July 2014, HAL in its another communication to the ministry highlighted one major unresolved issue regarding responsibility sharing between Dassult and HAL for license manufacture of aircraft."

Further, the man-hours required for manufacture of various components of the aircraft in HAL was also a point of disagreement between them. There is therefore a contradiction in the claims attributed to ex-CMD of HAL," an official explained, while adding that since the workshare between Dassault and HAL was never agreed upon, the statement claiming lower life cycle cost is completely presumptive and due to all these reasons, the proposal of 126 MMRCA could not be progressed further.
The Trump administration on Wednesday praised India for its significant counter-terrorism actions and said Pakistan-based militant groups continued their terror attacks in the country.

In its annual Country Report on Terrorism document, as mandated by Congress, the State Department said the Indian leadership expressed resolve to prevent terrorist attacks domestically and to bring to justice the perpetrators of terrorism, in cooperation with the US and other like-minded countries.

The parts of India seriously impacted by terrorism in 2017 included Jammu and Kashmir, the northeast Indian states, and parts of central India in which Maoists remain active, the Country Report on Terrorism said.

"India continued to experience attacks, including by Pakistan-based terrorist organisations as well as tribal and Maoist insurgents. Indian authorities blamed Pakistan for cross-border attacks in the state of Jammu and Kashmir," the Country Report on Terrorism said.

India, the report said, continued to apply sustained pressure to detect, disrupt and degrade terror operations within its borders.

Over the course of 2017, India sought to deepen counter-terrorism cooperation and information sharing with the US, including through the first-ever Designations Dialogue held in Delhi in December, it said.

In the same year, India and the US pledged to strengthen cooperation against terrorist threats from groups such as Al-Qaeda, ISIS, Jaish-e-Mohammad, Lashkar-e-Taiba and the D-Company, it said.

During a June 2017 summit, President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Narendra Modi directed officials to establish a new mechanism for cooperation on terrorist designations.

The Country Report on Terrorism further said the Indian government closely monitored the domestic threat from transnational terrorist groups like ISIS and Al-Qaeda.

The State Department praised India for its significant counter-terrorism actions.

Citing an example of a significant counter-terrorism law enforcement action by India, it said the police arrested Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB) leader Mohammad Idris from a hideout in Kolkata on March 8.

Idris was allegedly involved in the July 2016 Holey Artisan Bakery attack in Bangladesh capital Dhaka.
An Indian-origin family of four in the UK had a lucky escape when their house was targeted in an "unprovoked" arson attack which the police is treating as a hate crime.

Mayur Karlekar, called as Mac Karlekar, and his wife Ritu and two young children were asleep in their home late on Saturday night when they were woken up by their neighbours, who had called in the fire brigade to tackle a huge blaze outside their home in south-east London's Borkwood Park area of Orpington.

"The Metropolitan Police is investigating this as a hate crime. It is being dealt with as a case of arson and criminal damage. No arrests have been made so far," a Metropolitan Police spokesperson said on Wednesday.

CCTV images from the area reportedly show a group of four-five youths, dressed in hoodies, attempting to start a fire on the hedges outside the Karlekars' home.

"We all were sleeping and were luckily woken up by neighbours on time. Though most of the damage was done to the hedges leaving the house now exposed, my son's bedroom was just saved  he was sleeping in it at the time of the incident," said Karlekar, a digital consultant who move to the UK from Mumbai in the late 1990s.

"We are glad it was stopped on time but the damage to our neighbourhood, our society, to our home has been done, irrecoverably. We have not caused any trouble to anyone and have only helped others in all our lifetime. I was special police myself doing voluntary unpaid work. This act happening to us was a complete shock," said the 43-year-old, who has been appealing for information to bring the suspects to justice across various social media channels.

Karlekar, originally from Dombivali in Thane district of Maharashtra, said he wanted to ensure no other families in the neighbourhood become victims of a similar hate crime.

"Hope this kind of arson attack does not happen to any family as it happened on ours unprovoked. If you know anyone or seen any video floating around on social media of dares, please help stop it. Be safe, be vigilant," he said in his appeal.

Images posted on social media reveal huge flames and extensive damage to the outside of the property in the residential suburb in the borough of Bromley in London. Karlekar has expressed his unhappiness with the nearly 32-hour delay in the Met Police starting their investigation into the case.

"This is the second incident in this area, the first one being a robbery, but we feel more may have happened or are going unreported. We want those people to come out and raise their voice too," he said.

British police describe hate crimes as those perceived as motivated by hostility or prejudice based on a personal characteristic and monitor it under five strands  race or ethnicity; religion or beliefs; sexual orientation; disability; or transgender identity.

According to official figures released earlier this year, incidents of hate crime had registered a spike in the immediate aftermath of the Brexit referendum in 2016. There were 80,393 offences in 2016-17, compared with 62,518 in 2015-16, the largest increase since the UK Home Office began recording these figures in 2011-12.
As proof of its generous reception of strangers, the entrance to 6018North has been made even friendlier than usual. The red carpet that extends from the sidewalk to the front door is there as always and the lawn chairs (inscribed people tend to sit where there are places to sit) have doubled. New is Alberto Aguilars jazzy banner, which wraps around the front fence shouting iiiiiiin to those on the outside and fluxxxxx to those on the inside because, well, getting through the gate is only the beginning. The veranda has been prettied up by Tom Burtonwood and Maryam Taghavi, who hung up an enormous acrylic design  based on the stone rosettes encircling the front door  that colors the porch in yellow and blue swirls when the sun shines through. Their fun house mirror archway, mounted right above the doorway, gives pause: there you were, here you are, and doesnt it all look so strange?
Deposed Pakistan prime minister Nawaz Sharif, his daughter and son-in-law were brought to their home turf, Lahore, in a special plane after their release from prison in Islamabad Wednesday evening, hours after the Islamabad High Court suspended their sentences in a major corruption case that jeopardised their political career.

A large number of Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) party supporters, including women workers, gathered outside the Haj Terminal to welcome them.

Subsequently, the Sharif family was escorted to their Jati Umra residence located in the outskirts of Lahore.

While they were being escorted, the party supporters showered Sharif's car with rose petals and chanted

slogans "dekho dekho kon aya, sher aya, sher aya (see who has come, a lion has come)".

Some of the supporters also kissed his car saying, "You are innocent, we love you."

A large number of PML-N workers were also present at Jati Umra to greet the the former prime minister, his daughter Maryam Nawaz and son-in-law Mohammad Safdar.

The road leading to Jati Umra was lit up as workers queued up there to receive their leaders.

"I have come here soon after I heard the release of my leader (Sharif) from the Adiala jail. I am very happy to have him among us," Hasan Ali, a PML-N worker, said.

He said no corruption charge has been proved against his leader and he was put behind the bar to give Imran Khan an "open field" to form the government.

The PML-N workers distributed sweets and also offered thanks giving prayer at Jati Umra.

"We will continue celebrating the release of our leader for coming days," PML-N leader Imran Nazir said.

PML-N president Shahbaz Sharif said the court's decision has vindicated his elder brother. "Today truth prevailed and my brother has been vindicated," he added.
New Delhi, Sep 20 (PTI) Finance Minister Arun Jaitley Thursday accused Congress President Rahul Gandhi of spreading falsehood in connection with Rafale deal, and waiving loans given to 15 industrial houses.

In a facebook post titled: Falsehood of a 'Clown Prince', Jaitley said in mature democracies those who rely on falsehood are considered unfit for public life.

"You lied on the Rafale deal, you lied on the NPAs. Your temperament to concoct facts raises a legitimate question  do people whose natural preference is falsehood deserve to be a part of the public discourse.

"Public discourse is a serious activity. It is not a laughter challenge. It cannot be reduced to a hug, a wink or repetition of falsehood. The worlds largest democracy must seriously introspect whether public discourse should be allowed to be polluted by the falsehood of a 'Clown Prince'," the minister said. PTI JD CS BAL

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Islamabad, Sep 20 (PTI) Saudi Arabia will be the third "strategic partner" of the USD 50 billion China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), a senior Pakistani minister announced Thursday, soon after Prime Minister Imran Khan returned from his first foreign trip to the cash-rich kingdom.

The China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) is the flagship project of the multi-billion dollar Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), a pet project of Chinese President Xi Jinping aimed at enhancing Beijing's influence around the world through China-funded infrastructure projects.

Addressing a press conference here on Khan's two-day visit to Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates (UAE), Minister of Information Fawad Chaudhry said that Pakistan's main interest lies in cooperation with Saudi Arabia on matters of trade and security.

Pakistan has invited Riyadh to join the CPEC as the third "strategic partner", The News quoted him as saying.

Saudi Finance and Energy Ministers will visit Pakistan in the first week of October, Chaudhry said.

He said the projects that Saudi Arabia would be investing in the CPEC will be smoothed out during the Saudi delegation's visit.

China has rejected accusations that its financial backing for the CPEC was a "debt trap" that could compromise cash-strapped Pakistan's sovereignty.

The CPEC is the fastest-moving and flagship part of President Xi's global Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).

The CPEC aims to construct and upgrade the transportation network, energy projects, a deep-water port at Gwadar and special economic zones to eventually support Pakistan's industrial development as a manufacturing hub by 2030.

Chaudhry said Prime Minister Khan has assured Riyadh that Pakistan will stand with Saudi Arabia.

"We have also assured the Saudi leadership that we will continue to provide security to their country and provide strategic support wherever needed," he said on the close defence partnership between the close allies.

He also said that a high-level coordination committee has has been constituted [to look into matters of trade and commerce] and it has the complete backing of Saudi King Salman bin Abdul Aziz Al-Saud and Prime Minister Khan. PTI AKJ AKJ
New Delhi, Sep 20 (PTI) The Delhi High Court on Thursday constituted a committee headed by its Registrar General to deal with the problems faced by lawyers and litigants in entering the building housing National Company Law Tribunal(NCLT) and National Company Law Appellate Tribuna(NCLAT).

Besides the high court registrar general, the committee will comprise two members each nominated by the Bar associations of NCLT and NCLAT, one nominee each from the ministries of Corporate Affairs, Home Affairs and Urban Development and the CISF. The registrar generals of the two tribunals will also be part of the panel.

A bench of Chief Justice Rajendra Menon and Justice V K Rao asked the panel to deliberate on the issues of entry in CGO Complex where the two tribunals are situated, vehicle parking, identity card and space.

The bench was hearing the pleas by NCLT and NCLAT bar associations raising the issues of their entry inside the building and parking of cars inside the CGO Complex.

The lawyers said they along with litigants have to struggle daily to get an entry into the premises.

The bench also asked the panel to discuss on the possibility of shifting the two tribunals to another location to solve the the problems, including space.

The committee has been asked to file a report before the court in four weeks.

Regarding an interim measure, the court asked the panel to examine the issue of identity cards and entry of lawyers' cars in CGO complex and file an interim report in two weeks.

Senior advocate A S Chandiok, representing NCLT Bar Association, highlighted the deficient facilities in the tribunals including insufficient space and inconvenience in accessing the court rooms.

He said it was difficult for the parties to access the tribunals and by the time, they manage to enter the court rooms, the matter gets over.

As of now, to secure an entry in the tribunals' building, lawyers and litigants are required to get a daily pass issued from one of the counters there.

Central government standing counsel Bharathi Raju submitted that the government was considering allocating an additional space of 10,000 square ft to the NCLAT by relocating the Special Fraud Investigation Office which is situated in the same building.

She said the issue of entry of vehicles and persons inside the CGO complex was a matter of security as it houses several sensitive government departments.

She said lawyers can get easy entry inside NCLAT by applying for an identity card issued by the Ministry of Home Affairs and it would be valid for a year.

The CISF also expressed reservations on grounds of security.

The Ministry of Home Affairs controls the entry of vehicles and persons inside the CGO complex.

The high court had earlier directed the Centre's counsel to filed a status report regarding the action they proposed to take and address the issues indicated by the registrars of the tribunals in their status reports. PTI SKV HMP RT
Mumbai, Sep 20 (PTI) "Manmarziyaan" has landed in fresh controversy over the deletion of three smoking-related scenes with director Anurag Kashyap expressing a strong displeasure over the move, implying that he was not consulted about the decision.

The scenes in question had upset a certain section of the Sikh community and Kashyap, who is out of the country, had on Wednesday issued a "genuine" apology to those who were hurt genuinely.

The makers had apparently approached the censor board to chop off the alleged objectionable scenes from the film, starring Taapsee Pannu, Abhishek Bachchan and Vicky Kaushal.

Kashyap vented out his anger against the move on Twitter, calling out Eros International, who are the presenters of the film.

"Before my tweet is taken down - Congratulations. Here by all problems of Punjab are solved and Sikh youth have been saved . Happy to be back in LaLa land again. Next time you are threatened by a film please call Kishore Lulla directly... Eros knows how to solve matters in minutes," he tweeted.

The director had posted Lulla's number in an earlier tweet but it was deleted as it was found in violation with Twitter's privacy policy.

In a statement, Eros, without addressing Kashyap's grievances, said Colour Yellow Productions, run by director Aanand L Rai, was the creative producer.

"Colour Yellow is the creative producer on 'Manmarziyaan'. We have the deepest respect for all communities and it is our intention to maintain neutrality and never intentionally hurt or disrespect any religion or community.

"We have the greatest respect for the law of the land and follow and implement all guidance of the Censor Board which is the supreme authority for film content in the country," Eros said in its statement.

"Manmarziyaan" producers deleted three scenes from the film after members of the Sikh community objected to a scene where Abhishek Bachchan's character, a Sikh in the movie, is shown smoking after removing his turban.

The producers approached the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC) regarding the deletion of the scenes.

According to a censor copy, the three deleted scenes include a 29-second smoking sequence of Abhishek, a minute long scene featuring Taapsee Pannu and Abhishek entering a gurudwara and an 11-second scene where Taapsee is shown smoking.

Taapsee also took to Twitter and lashed out at the move.

"I am sure this edit will assure that no Sikh will ever Smoke and no woman will ever think about ANYONE else while getting married in a Gurudwara. THIS surely will make Waheguru proud and assures that MY religion is the purest,most righteous and peaceful ! #Proud" Taapsee tweeted. PTI JUR KKP RDS

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London, Sep 20 (PTI) "True Detective" helmer Cary Fukunaga has been announced as the replacement of Danny Boyle for the upcoming James Bond movie.

The news was shared by producers in a statement posted on Twitter, saying that the 41-year-old filmmaker, best known for directing films such as "Jane Eyre" and "Beasts of No Nation", will start shooting for the project in March next year with a release date of February 14, 2020.

"We are delighted to be working with Cary. His versatility and innovation make him an excellent choice for our next James Bond adventure," said Michael G. Wilson and Barbara Broccoli in the statement.

Boyle had last month dropped out of the project, which will mark Daniel Craig's last outing as the famed British spy, over creative difference with the producers. He was supposed to start shooting in December.

The director had boarded the project along with his "Trainspotting" co-writer, John Hodge, but they both have now exited it.

Last week, screenwriters Neal Purvis and Robert Wade, who have co-written six James Bond films from "The World Is Not Enough" to "Spectre", were hired to write a new script for the film.

Fukunaga's name comes as a surprise to many as he was not even in contention for the coveted job. Directors like Christopher McQuarrie, Denis Villenueve, Yann Demange and David Mackenzie were leading the race for the director's chair.

Fukunaga is best known for helming the first season of HBO's crime series "True Detective", for which he rightfully won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Directing for a Drama Series in 2014.

His most recent project is Netflix series "Maniac", which is set to premiere on Thursday on the streaming giant's platform. PTI RB RB BK

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Mumbai, Sep 20 (PTI) Mahesh Bhatt is set to return to direction with "Sadak 2", after a hiatus of 19 years, his daughter, actor Alia Bhatt said Thursday.

Alia, who is also part of the cast of the film, which is a sequel to Bhatt's 1991 film, made the announcement on her father's 70th birthday.

"On your 70th birthday you have given me the greatest present I could ask and dream for. Your are directing me! 'Sadak 2' is a dream come true...

"What I thought will never be possible you have made possible. Thank you daddy from the bottom of my heart, soul and bones. This will be a journey of discovery..." the "Raazi" star wrote on Twitter.

This is the first time Bhatt will direct the actor.

Pooja Bhatt and Sanjay Dutt, the original leads, also star in the film, along with new entrant Aditya Roy Kapur.

Bhatt's production house Vishesh Films confirmed the news on the microblogging site.

"27 years ago, a love story won your hearts. A timeless tale. The next chapter begins... @MaheshNBhatts #Sadak2 in cinemas 25th March 2020!" the post read.

Pooja welcomed Bhatt back to direction and thanked him for "the gift of 'Sadak 2' and the privilege of being directed by you".

This will be the actor's first film in almost two decades. She was last seen in 2001's "Everybody Says I'm Fine!". Pooja debuted in 1990 with Bhatt's "Daddy" and followed it up with films such as "Dil Hai Ki Manta Nahin", "Phir Teri Kahani Yaad Aayee" and "Sir", among others.

Sanjay said he was proud to embark on this journey with the director again.

"Thank you for giving me #Sadak bhatt saab. Wish you a very Happy Birthday," he tweeted.

Sanjay and Alia are also working in "Kalank".

The original film was the story of a taxi driver (Sanjay) trying to rescue the woman he loves (Pooja) from a brothel. It also featured Sadashiv Amrapurkar as Maharani, brothel's owner and Soni Razdan.

"Sadak 2" is slated to release on March 25, 2020. PTI RDS

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Caroline, or Change: Its the end of 1963, and America is changing. Caroline Thibodeaux is a mother and a maid, working for the Gellman family, and she struggles in her relationship with the young, grieving boy who lives in the house she cleans. Presented by Firebrand Theatre and TimeLine Theatre through Oct. 28 at the Den Theatre, 1331 N. Milwaukee Ave.; 773-697-3830 and www.firebrandtheatre.org
New Delhi, Sep 20 (PTI) Following are the top foreign stories at 1700 hours:





FGN21 IMRAN-MODI-LD LETTER

Imran Khan writes to Modi; seeks to re-start bilateral talks

Islamabad: Pakistan's new Prime Minister Imran Khan has written a letter to his Indian counterpart Narendra Modi, the Foreign Office said here Thursday, seeking to re-start the bilateral talks on key issues "challenging the relationship" including on terrorism and Kashmir



FGN22 PAK-SHARIF-APPEAL

Pak anti-graft body to challenge release of Sharif, daughter and son-in-law in Supreme Court

Islamabad: Pakistan's anti-graft body Thursday decided to challenge in the Supreme Court the suspension of the jail sentences of former prime minister Nawaz Sharif, his daughter and son-in-law in a corruption case, according to a media report.



FGN20 ROMANIA-LD NAIDU

Naidu invites Romaninan businesses to invest in India

Bucharest: Vice President Venkaiah Naidu on Thursday addressed business leaders in Romania and urged them to take advantage of the economic reforms in India by making investments.



FGN18 US-GANESHA-AD

Republican party in US apologises to Hindus after ad featuring Lord Ganesha 'offends' community

Houston: The ruling Republican party in the US has apologised to the Hindus after a newspaper advertisement featuring Lord Ganesha to woo the minority community voters in Texas ended up "offending" them. By Seema Hakhu Kachru.



FGN17 US-NKOREA-LD POMPEO

US ready to negotiate with N Korea to transform relations: Pompeo

Washington: Secretary of State Mike Pompeo Thursday said America is ready to restart negotiations with Pyongyang, with the aim of denuclearising North Korea by 2021. By Lalit K Jha.



FGN11 US-PAK-TERROR

Pak-based terror outfits JeM, LeT pose regional threat in subcontinent: US

Washington: The US has said the Jaish-e-Mohammed and Lashkar-e-Taiba militant groups continue to pose a regional threat and that Pakistan did not adequately address America's concerns on terrorism in 2017. By Lalit K Jha.



FGN10 US-INDIA-TERROR

US praises India for its significant counter-terrorism actions

Washington: The US has praised India for its significant counter-terrorism actions and said Pakistan-based terror groups continued their terror attacks in the country.By Lalit K Jha.



FGN3 US-KAVANAUGH-REPUBLICANS

Republicans refuse to delay Kavanaugh Monday hearing, set Friday deadline for Ford to respond

Washington: The Republican majority leadership in the US Senate Thursday refused the postponement of the scheduled Monday hearing of Judge Brett Kavanaugh, who is facing sexual assault allegations, and set a Friday deadline for Christine Blasey Ford to respond.By Lalit K Jha.



FGN2 TERORIST ATTACKS- ASIA

59% of all terrorist attacks in 2017 in 5 Asian countries: Report

Washington: Almost 59 per cent of all terrorist attacks in 2017 took place in five Asian countries, including India and Pakistan, a US report said Thursday. By Lalit K Jha.



FGN14 JAPAN-3RDLD ABE

Japan's Abe re-elected as party head, to stay on as PM

Tokyo: Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was re-elected as head of his ruling Liberal Democratic Party in a landslide Thursday, paving the way for up to three more years as the nation's leader. (AP)



FGN12 2NDLD NAJIB

Malaysia ex-PM faces barrage of charges over USD 681 mn bank balance

Kuala Lumpur: Malaysia's ex-leader Najib Razak arrived in court Thursday to face a barrage of charges relating to USD 681 million of state funds that allegedly ended up in his personal bank account (AFP)

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New Delhi, Sep 20 (PTI) Following are the top foreign stories at 2000 hours:



FGN21 IMRAN-MODI-LD LETTER

Imran Khan writes to Modi; seeks to re-start bilateral talks

Islamabad: Pakistan's new Prime Minister Imran Khan has written a letter to his Indian counterpart Narendra Modi, the Foreign Office said here Thursday, seeking to re-start the bilateral talks on key issues "challenging the relationship" including on terrorism and Kashmir



FGN22 PAK-SHARIF-APPEAL

Pak anti-graft body to challenge release of Sharif, daughter and son-in-law in Supreme Court

Islamabad: Pakistan's anti-graft body Thursday decided to challenge in the Supreme Court the suspension of the jail sentences of former prime minister Nawaz Sharif, his daughter and son-in-law in a corruption case, according to a media report.



FGN27 PAK-SHARIF-IMRAN

Sharif will 'expose' Imran Khan government: PML-N

Lahore: Nawaz Sharif, who was released from jail after a court suspended his sentence in a corruption case, will "expose" the Imran Khan government and launch a drive against rigging in the general elections, the ousted Pakistan prime minister's party said on Thursday. By M Zulqernain.





FGN24 PAK-SAUDI-CPEC

Pakistan invites Saudi Arabia to be 3rd partner in CPEC

Islamabad:Saudi Arabia will be the third "strategic partner" of the USD 50 billion China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), a senior Pakistani minister announced Thursday, soon after Prime Minister Imran Khan returned from his first foreign trip to the cash-rich kingdom.





FGN29 UN-INDIA-POVERTY

About 271 million people in India moved out of poverty between 2005-16: Report

United Nations: Over 270 million people in India moved out of poverty in the decade since 2005-06 and the poverty rate in the country nearly halved over the 10-year period, a promising sign that poverty is being tackled globally, according to latest estimates released Thursday. By Yoshita Singh





FGN20 ROMANIA-LD NAIDU

Naidu invites Romaninan businesses to invest in India

Bucharest: Vice President Venkaiah Naidu on Thursday addressed business leaders in Romania and urged them to take advantage of the economic reforms in India by making investments.





FGN18 US-GANESHA-AD

Republican party in US apologises to Hindus after ad featuring Lord Ganesha 'offends' community

Houston: The ruling Republican party in the US has apologised to the Hindus after a newspaper advertisement featuring Lord Ganesha to woo the minority community voters in Texas ended up "offending" them. By Seema Hakhu Kachru.





FGN17 US-NKOREA-LD POMPEO

US ready to negotiate with N Korea to transform relations: Pompeo

Washington: Secretary of State Mike Pompeo Thursday said America is ready to restart negotiations with Pyongyang, with the aim of denuclearising North Korea by 2021. By Lalit K Jha.





FGN11 US-PAK-TERROR

Pak-based terror outfits JeM, LeT pose regional threat in subcontinent: US

Washington: The US has said the Jaish-e-Mohammed and Lashkar-e-Taiba militant groups continue to pose a regional threat and that Pakistan did not adequately address America's concerns on terrorism in 2017. By Lalit K Jha.





FGN10 US-INDIA-TERROR

US praises India for its significant counter-terrorism actions

Washington: The US has praised India for its significant counter-terrorism actions and said Pakistan-based terror groups continued their terror attacks in the country.By Lalit K Jha.





FGN3 US-KAVANAUGH-REPUBLICANS

Republicans refuse to delay Kavanaugh Monday hearing, set Friday deadline for Ford to respond

Washington: The Republican majority leadership in the US Senate Thursday refused the postponement of the scheduled Monday hearing of Judge Brett Kavanaugh, who is facing sexual assault allegations, and set a Friday deadline for Christine Blasey Ford to respond.By Lalit K Jha.





FGN2 TERORIST ATTACKS- ASIA

59% of all terrorist attacks in 2017 in 5 Asian countries: Report

Washington: Almost 59 per cent of all terrorist attacks in 2017 took place in five Asian countries, including India and Pakistan, a US report said Thursday. By Lalit K Jha.





FGN14 JAPAN-3RDLD ABE

Japan's Abe re-elected as party head, to stay on as PM

Tokyo: Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was re-elected as head of his ruling Liberal Democratic Party in a landslide Thursday, paving the way for up to three more years as the nation's leader. (AP)





FGN12 2NDLD NAJIB

Malaysia ex-PM faces barrage of charges over USD 681 mn bank balance

Kuala Lumpur: Malaysia's ex-leader Najib Razak arrived in court Thursday to face a barrage of charges relating to USD 681 million of state funds that allegedly ended up in his personal bank account (AFP)

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Washington, Sep 20 (AFP) An unidentified assailant opened fire Thursday at a warehouse complex north of the US city of Baltimore, killing and wounding multiple people, authorities said.

A lone suspect was in critical condition at a local hospital, according to Harford County sheriff Jeffrey Gahler. Police would not confirm reports the shooter was a woman.

"I can confirm multiple wounded and multiple fatalities," Gahler said. (AFP) SCY

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Washington, Sep 20 (AFP) An unidentified assailant opened fire Thursday at a warehouse complex north of the US city of Baltimore, killing and wounding multiple people, authorities said.

A lone suspect was in critical condition at a local hospital, according to Harford County sheriff Jeffrey Gahler.

Police would not confirm reports that the shooter was a woman, but revealed that the suspect had not been shot by police.

"I can confirm multiple wounded and multiple fatalities," Gahler said.

US media reported that three people were killed and two others wounded in the incident, which erupted around 9:00 am (1300 GMT) at a distribution centre for the Rite Aid drugstore chain.

Gahler said the assailant apparently was armed with a single handgun "and no shots fired by any officers responding to the scene."

"We do not believe there is an additional threat anywhere to the Harford County community," he said.

Deadly shootings are common in the United States, where the right to bear arms is protected by the US constitution.

Attacks by women are extremely rare, however, accounting for less than five percent of the total, according to studies.

Thursday's attack came five months after an Iran-born female animal rights activist gunned down three people before killing herself at YouTube's California headquarters.

Maryland made grim headlines around the world in June when five employees of Capital-Gazette newspapers died after a gunman stormed their Annapolis office.

The man police say is responsible had harassed the newspapers' employees for years over an article about criminal stalking charges against him, the Baltimore Sun reported. (AFP) SCY

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Pyongyang, Sep 20 (AP) The two Korean leaders took to the road for the final day of their summit Thursday, heading to a beautiful volcano considered sacred in the North and used in its propaganda to legitimize the Kims' three generations of rule. Their trip followed a day of wide-ranging agreements they trumpeted as a major step toward peace on the Korean Peninsula.

However, their premier accord on the issue most fascinating and worrisome  the North's pursuit of nuclear-tipped missiles that can accurately strike the U.S. mainland  contained a big condition: Kim Jong Un stated he would permanently dismantle North Korea's main nuclear complex only if the United States takes unspecified corresponding measures.

Kim and South Korean President Moon Jae-in flew separately to an airport near Mount Paektu on Thursday morning where they met up and drove to the mountain on the North Korean-Chinese border. Members of the Kim family are referred to as sharing the "Paektu Bloodline." The volcano topped with a deep crater lake is also emblazoned on the national emblem and lends its name to everything from rockets to power stations.

Moon plans to return to South Korea later Thursday, but the leaders are still basking in the glow of the joint statement they settled Wednesday. Compared to the vague language of their two earlier summits, Kim and Moon seem to have agreed on an ambitious program meant to tackle soaring tensions last year that had many fearing war as the North tested a string of increasingly powerful weapons.

Kim promised to accept international inspectors to monitor the closing of a key missile test site and launch pad and to visit Seoul soon, and both leaders vowed to work together to try to host the Summer Olympics in 2032.

But while containing several tantalizing offers, their joint statement appeared to fall short of the major steps many in Washington have been looking for  such as a commitment by Kim to provide a list of North Korea's nuclear facilities, a solid step-by-step timeline for closing them down, or an agreement to allow international inspectors to assess progress or discover violations.

It also was unclear what "corresponding steps" North Korea wants from the U.S. to dismantle its nuclear site.

The question is whether it will be enough for President Donald Trump to pick up where Moon has left off. Trump told reporters Wednesday that the outcome of the summit was "very good news" and that "we're making tremendous progress" with North Korea. He didn't indicate in his brief remarks whether the U.S. would be willing to take further steps to encourage North Korean action on denuclearization.

Declaring they had made a major step toward peace, Moon and Kim stood side by side Wednesday as they announced their agreement.

"We have agreed to make the Korean Peninsula a land of peace that is free from nuclear weapons and nuclear threat," Kim said. "The road to our future will not always be smooth and we may face challenges and trials we can't anticipate. But we aren't afraid of headwinds because our strength will grow as we overcome each trial based on the strength of our nation."

Moon urged unity for all Koreans in a speech he gave Wednesday night to the crowd gathered for North Korea's signature mass games. "We have lived together for 5,000 years and lived in separation for 70 years. I now propose that we completely eliminate the hostility of the past 70 years and take a big step forward in peace so that we can become one again."

Historians say the 5,000-year timeline of Korean history is a groundless claim that became part of South Korea's official narrative after being inserted in school textbooks during the rule of former dictator Chun Doo-hwan.

This week's summit comes as Moon is under increasing pressure from Washington to find a path forward in efforts to get Kim to completely  and unilaterally  abandon his nuclear arsenal.

Trump has maintained that he and Kim have a solid relationship, and both leaders have expressed interest in a follow-up summit to their meeting in June in Singapore. North Korea has been demanding a declaration formally ending the Korean War, which was stopped in 1953 by a cease-fire, but neither leader mentioned it Wednesday as they read the joint statement.

In the meantime, however, Moon and Kim made concrete moves of their own to reduce tensions on their border.

According to a statement signed by the countries' defense chiefs, the two Koreas agreed to establish buffer zones along their land and sea borders to reduce military tensions and prevent accidental clashes. They also agreed to withdraw 11 guard posts from the Demilitarized Zone by December and to establish a no-fly zone above the military demarcation line that bisects the two Koreas that will apply to planes, helicopters and drones.

Though not directly linked to security, the leaders' announcement that they would seek a joint Summer Olympics was a significant move in terms of easing tensions and building trust. It also flows from the North's decision to participate in the Pyeongchang Winter Games in February, which was regarded as a success for both sides. (AP) CPS
Tokyo, Sep 20 (AFP) Prime Minister Shinzo Abe won re-election as leader of his ruling party Thursday, setting him on course to become Japan's longest-serving premier and realise his dream of reforming the constitution.

The 63-year-old conservative secured 553 votes from lawmakers and party members against 254 won by former defence minister Shigeru Ishiba in a two-horse race for leader of the Liberal Democratic Party. (AFP) CPS
Pune (Maha), Sep 20 (PTI) Two minor girls were allegedly raped by a man and a 17-year-old boy here on Sunday and one of them died of injuries inflicted during the assault days later, a police official said Thursday.

The two girls, both around 12 years' old and residents of the same locality, went to a temple near their home in Hinjawadi area Sunday afternoon, he said.

The two accused, who also lived in the same locality, lured the girls by offering them chocolates. They then took the girls to an isolated area where they allegedly raped them, the official at Hinjawadi Police Station said.

The accused threatened the girls with dire consequences if they revealed the incident to anyone, he said.

The victims did not inform about the incident to their parents. However, one of them complained of pain and weakness following which her parents rushed her to a hospital, where doctors found out that she was traumatised, he said.

The doctors then informed the police, who approached the girl's family in the hospital on Tuesday, but the victim was not in a condition to speak, the official said.

Her family members told police that one more girl from their neighbourhood was with her on Sunday.

"When we approached the other girl, she narrated the entire incident," the official said.

Based on her statement, a case was registered against the two accused, one of whom has been identified as Ganesh Nikam (22), he said.

Meanwhile, the girl who was undergoing treatment at the government hospital here slipped into coma and succumbed to injuries Wednesday night, he said.

"We are waiting for the postmortem report to ascertain the exact cause of the death and accordingly, relevant sections will be added in the case," he said.

The police have arrested Nikam and detained the boy accused in the case, the official said.

Nikam will be produced in a court Thursday and the minor boy will be produced before the Juvenile Justice Board, he said.

The accused have been booked under IPC sections 376 (rape) and 363 (kidnapping), and relevant provisions of the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act, he added. PTI SPK GK DV

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Mumbai, Sep 20 (PTI) The Shiv Sena Thursday welcomed the Centre's ordinance banning instant triple talaq and asked the government to take a similar route for the construction of Ram temple at Ayodhya in Uttar Pradesh.

The government should take steps to fulfil "at least one promise" made to Hindus of the country, keeping their sentiments in mind, the Uddhav Thackeray-led party said.

The Union Cabinet Wednesday approved an ordinance to ban the practice of instant triple talaq. Law Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad said there was a "compelling necessity" to bring the ordinance as instances of 'talaq-e-biddat' continued unabated despite the Supreme Court striking it down.

"The government has ensured dawn of freedom in the lives of Muslim women by making triple talaq an offence. Now, it should also ensure rise of the sun of sentiments of Hindus by bugling construction of the Ram temple in Ayodhya," the Sena said in the editorial of party mouthpiece 'Saamana'.

"Bring an ordinance on Ram temple and fulfil at least one promise made to Hindus," said the party, which is an ally of the BJP at the Centre and in Maharashtra.

It noted that promises of bringing uniform civil code, repealing Article 370, that gives special status to Jammu and Kashmir, and construction of the Ram temple could not be fulfilled earlier due to compulsions of running a coalition.

"But now you (the BJP) have governments with complete majority at the Centre as well as in Uttar Pradesh. Why the exile of Lord Ram is still not over then?" it asked.

Noting that the contentious Ram temple-Babri mosque land dispute is pending before court, the Sena said let the judiciary take a call on the matter when it wants to, but the government should find a solution to the issue of sentiments of Hindus.

It welcomed the ordinance on triple talaq, but wondered how much acceptability the move would find among those Muslims who are "blinded by religion" and are hardliners.

"But the married Muslim (women), who are helpless on religious grounds, would get a protection cover through the ordinance and they will be freed from the ill practice," the Marathi daily claimed.

Without naming any party or government, it alleged that no honest efforts were made in India in the past to free Muslim women from such medieval ill practices due to vote bank politics.

"So, the steps taken by the government in this context are really good, but it should not stop there only. The construction of Ram temple in Ayodhya was also promised by those who are claiming credit for banning triple talaq.

"That promise (of the temple) is still unfulfilled...Now the temple should also be constructed (by bringing an ordinance)," the party added. PTI ENM GK RCJ
Kohima, Sep 20 (PTI) The Nagaland Legislative Assembly on Thursday unanimously adopted a resolution on integration of the contiguous Naga inhabited areas for all Nagas to live under one administrative umbrella.

MLAs of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party-Nationalist Democratic Progressive Party (NDPP) coalition and opposition Naga People's Front (NPF) voted for the resolution moved by chief minister Neiphiu Rio by raising their hands.

It is the sixth such resolution adopted by the assembly. The House had earlier passed such resolutions in 1964, 1970, 1994, 2003 and 2015.

Adopting the resolution, the House placed on record its deep appreciation for the invaluable sacrifices made by the Nagas over the past several decades in their efforts for honourable, acceptable, inclusive and expeditious settlement of the 'Indo-Naga' political issue.

The House appealed to all sections of Nagas to continuously sustain and strengthen unity and peacefully participate in the ongoing negotiations so that the aforesaid settlement becomes inclusive.

It also appealed to the Naga political groups that walked away from the negotiating table to return for an expeditious settlement.

The House expressed its gratitude to all parties to the negotiations, especially the government of India under the leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, for inking the Framework Agreement on August 3, 2015, and also for the written agreement on November 17, 2017 with the Naga National Political Groups (NNPG).

In his opening remarks, Rio said this is the first initiative of the newly reconstituted Joint Legislators Forum on Indo-Naga Political Issue of the assembly under the chairmanship of Speaker Vikho-o Yhoshu.

Earlier, participating in the discussion before the adoption of the resolution, the members of the House, including Leader of Opposition T R Zeliang, and Ministers Tongpang Ozukum, Temjen Imna Along, were of the opinion that mere adoption of resolution in the assembly will not be the solution.

They were of the view that the Joint Legislators Forum, which would include the two MPs of the state, should be divided into smaller groups and made to approach the different NNPGs, civil societies and NGOs to raise a common voice to impress upon the government to find an early solution to the vexed issue.

Earlier, the assembly passed the Nagaland Goods and Services Tax (Amendment) Bill, 2018, by voice vote without any deliberations. It was introduced in the House by Rio on Tuesday.

The House was later adjourned sine die by the speaker. PTI NBS RG DIV

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Dungarpur (Rajasthan), Sep 20 (PTI) In a no-hold-barred attack on Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Congress president Rahul Gandhi Thursday said people are now heard saying that the countrys "watchman is a thief.

The remark at a public meeting provoked immediate condemnation by the BJP with Union minister Smriti Irani telling reporters it showed that the Congress leader has no respect for the prime ministers post.

Gandhi was referring to the Prime Ministers silence on the Rafale fighter aircraft deal with France and the Modi governments failure to bring fugitive businessman Vijay Mallya to book.

Modi had said he did not want to become the countrys prime minister, but its chowkidar (watchman), Gandhi recalled.

He added now it is heard on the streets that the countrys chowkidar is a thief. Galli galli me shor hai, desh ka chowkidar chor hai, he said in Hindi at a rally in tribal dominated Sagwara of Udaipur district.

Assembly elections will be held in Rajasthan later this year.

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A: I will say the thing that most surprised me was how prolific she was. She just produced so much work in a relatively short life and she was so incredibly well-read. She wasnt just a genius as a playwright, she was a hardcore intellectual. I didnt really have a sense of that. The other piece was being in her papers and letters; seeing her vulnerability and her places of insecurity was profound. We think of these figures so often  these great figures in history  in sort of iconic ways and she was very real, very vulnerable. She had a lot of self-doubt. And I was so moved by that, because it really is an example of we all have to go through that in order to do the work that were called to do in this life.
New Delhi, Sep 20 (PTI) BJP president Amit Shah on Thursday expressed the hope that the movement for building Ram temple in Ayodhya will result in "victory for culture", saying people's sentiments always win in democracy.

His remarks at a book release event came as Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS) chief Mohan Bhagwat reiterated his call for constructing the temple at the earliest, saying "justice" needed to be given to society quickly.

Shah described the Ram Janambhoomi movement as the biggest agitation in India since independence, touching all sections of the society.

He said he would not speak much on the issue due to the timing- an apparent reference to the ongoing Supreme Court hearings on the matter.

People's agitation had been going since the temple was demolished in Ayodhya over six centuries ago, and it will continue till the victory for culture is achieved, he said.

"People's sentiments always win in democracy, and I have faith that this agitation will go in a similar direction," he said.

Making a reference to decades-old movement in support of temple at what Hindus believe to be the birth place of Lord Ram, Bhagwat said denying truth and justice, and promoting untruth and injustice causes violence.

People's devotion that existed for centuries was ignored, he said, adding it amounted to inviting trouble.

Bhagwat had yesterday pitched for building the temple at the earliest.

He had said that construction of a temple will end one of the reasons for discord between communities in the societies.

"We have to give justice quickly. It should not be delayed. The society is supreme," he said today.

Speaking at the release of two Hindi books- Ayodhya ka chashmadeed (Eyewitness to Ayodhya) and Yuddh me Ayodhya (Ayodhya in war)- written by Hemant Sharma, a senior journalist, Home Minister Rajnath Singh said it would be satisfying if followers of all religions would work together for building a grand Ram temple.

On the last day of a three-day RSS conclave, Bhagwat had yesterday strongly pitched for construction of a Ram temple "at the earliest", asserting that it will end tension between Hindus and Muslims.

He had also sought to address the unease of minorities, especially Muslims, with parts of a book, Bunch of Thoughts, written by the organisation's second chief M S Golwalkar.

Many of Gowalkar's statements had a context of time and circumstances, he had said.

"His enduring thoughts are in Guruji's Vision and Mission, from which all the remarks with temporary context have been removed. And Sangh is not dogmatic organisation. As time changes and so do out thoughts," he had said. PIT KR JTR RT
(Eds: Adds temple visit in para beginning, Ahead of the rally...)

Dungarpur (Rajasthan), Sep 20 (PTI) In a no-holds-barred attack on Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Congress president Rahul Gandhi Thursday said people are now heard saying the countrys watchman is a thief.

Gandhis remark at a public meeting provoked a strong reaction from the BJP with Union minister Smriti Irani calling him the clown prince who had no respect for the prime ministers post.

Rahul Gandhi was referring to the prime ministers silence on the Rafale fighter aircraft deal with France and the Modi governments failure to bring fugitive businessman Vijay Mallya to book.

He said he had asked questions on this in Parliament but got no reply, and took a jibe at Modis past assertions on tackling corruption.

Modi had said he did not want to become the countrys prime minister, but its chowkidar (watchman), Gandhi recalled.

He added now it is heard on the streets that the countrys chowkidar is a thief.

Galli galli mein shor hai, Hindustan ka chowkidar chor hai, he said in Hindi at a rally in tribal-dominated Sagwara.

He said this is what the people in Rajasthan and elsewhere in the country felt.

Assembly elections will be held in the state later this year, shortly ahead of the Lok Sabha elections in 2019.

Gandhi said people are disappointed with the Bharatiya Janata Party governments at the Centre and in Rajasthan and the Congress is now set to win.

Neither the prime minister and the chief minister, nor their money can stop the change of government in Rajasthan, he said.

Ahead of the rally, the Congress chief offered prayers at the nearby Gayatri Shaktipeeth temple.

Referring to a recent row, Gandhi claimed Finance Minister Arun Jaitley had admitted that Vijay Mallya met him before leaving the country.

The finance minister allowed Vijay Mallya who defrauded banks to tune of Rs 9,000 crore to leave the country but the prime minister did not break his silence, he said.

Mentioning Modis monthly radio talk, he said the prime minister speaks his mann ki baat in all his speeches but the Congress wants to hear what the people say.

The Congress chief said the promise to provide employment to two crore youths every year and the Make In India campaign had failed as phones, shoes and clothes carried the Made In China tag.

Gandhi claimed only 450 youths get employment in the country each day while China created jobs for 50,000 people every 24 hours.

He alleged an amount of Rs 2,30,000 crore has been written off as bad loan to 15 or 20 big industrialists, but the government has not helped debt-ridden farmers.

We will make the people of the state secure and focus on providing employment. We want mobile phones with Made in Rajasthan tag, he said.

Gandhi tried to allay speculation over rifts in the state unit of the party by referring to a motorcycle ride that Rajasthan Congress chief Sachin Pilot and former chief minister Ashok Gehlot took together.

The Congress is yet to announce its CM candidate in Rajasthan, unlike the BJP which has said Chief Minister Vasundhara Raje will be nominated again.

The Congress president assured that party workers will decide on the candidates in the coming election.

I can guarantee you that this time not a single parachute candidate will be able to get the ticket. If any such candidate comes, I will cut the rope, he said.

He also asked senior Congress leader Avinash Pandey to find women faces to represent the party.

Gandhi suggested that the BJP was using money from the state exchequer on its campaign meetings.

You should know that the posters that you see of the prime minister and the chief minister were made with your money, he said.

He said the demonitisation of high-currency bank notes and the Goods and Services Tax (GST), which he called the Gabbar Singh Tax, broke the back of common people and the small businessman.

We had proposed a one country, one tax system but the prime minister levied a multiple-layer tax system. The Congress government will change it to a single-layer tax system, if voted to power, he said.

Gandhi accused the Modi government of shelving the Rs 2,000 crore Ratlam-Banswara-Dungarpur rail line plan announced by the previous UPA government, while announcing a bullet train project worth Rs 1 lakh crore.

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Muzaffarnagar (UP), Sep 20 (PTI) A woman suffered severe burns after her husband threw acid on her following a quarrel in this western Uttar Pradesh district, police said Thursday.

According to the police, accused Bablu Kumar (30), a resident of Faloda village in the Purkazi police station area, has been on the run since the incident Wednesday evening.

Purkazi police station SHO Vijay Singh said a case has been registered based on a complaint filed by the woman's mother and a hunt is on for the accused.

The woman was admitted to the district hospital.

After the incident, a group of women activists staged a protest and demanded immediate arrest of the accused. PTI CORR SMN
New Delhi, Sep 20 (PTI) Central government employees can fly to Jammu and Kashmir, Northeast region and the Andaman and Nicobar Islands while availing leave travel concession (LTC) allowance for two more years till September 2020, according to an official order issued Thursday.

The employees get reimbursement of tickets for to and fro journey, besides paid leaves, when they avail LTC allowance.

They are also allowed to travel in any private airline to these places, the order issued by the Personnel Ministry said.

The Centre had in September 2014 relaxed the LTC rules to allow government staff to travel by air to Northeast region, Jammu and Kashmir and the Andaman and Nicobar Islands.

The relaxation is being extended time to time. It was last extended for two years in 2016.

The scheme allowing government servants to travel by air to Northeast region, J-K and the Andaman and Nicobar Islands is extended for a further period of two years, till September 25, 2018, the ministry said.

The facility of air journey to non-entitled government staff is also extended for the same period.

There are about 48.41 lakh central government employees.

The Personnel Ministry has also warned employees against misuse of LTC rules.

"Efforts should be made by the government servants to book the air tickets at the cheapest fare possible. All the ministries or departments are advised to bring it to the notice of all their employees that any misuse of LTC will be viewed seriously and the employees will be liable for appropriate action under the rules," it said.

In order to keep a check on any kind of misuse of LTC, all departments are advised to randomly get some air tickets, submitted by the officials, verified from the airlines concerned with regard to the actual cost of air travel vis-a-vis the cost indicated on the air tickets submitted by the officials, said the Personnel Ministry's order, issued to secretaries of all central government departments. PTI AKV SMN
New Delhi, Sep 20 (PTI) The Jawaharlal Nehru University on Thursday accused the students union of "creating disturbance by disrupting security checks" in the aftermath of the alleged violence between members of the Left and the RSS-affiliated Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP).

The JNUSU, however, alleged that the administration was making "unsubstantiated allegations" and sought immediate retraction of "circulars which ban democratic expressions".

Violence broke out on the JNU campus after a united front of Left student groups Sunday won all four central panel posts in the students union (JNUSU) elections defeating the ABVP, students wing of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), by considerable margins.

While the Left members alleged that ABVP members randomly attacked students, with a former student being "almost lynched" and the new JNUSU president N Sai Balaji being beaten up, the ABVP claimed its activists were attacked by Left supporters and three were injured on Monday.

Following the incidents, the administration had banned protests and gatherings and the campus was made out of bounds for outsiders and mediapersons. Even students of the varsity had to show ID cards to enter hostels and the eateries were closed.

"JNU administration has received reports that the newly elected office bearers of JNUSU or their alleged supporters have been creating disturbance either by disrupting the necessary security checking by wardens or have been disrupting the routine official work of the officer staff or administrative officers of the hostels," the JNU registrar said in a statement.

While it would be appreciated that JNUSU office bearers help the security staff by being vigilant about the miscreants who may intend to cause disturbance, but they must also realise that obstructing varsity officials or its security from doing their duty is not only against the rules, it also damages the ethos which guide the stakeholders of this institution to live in harmony and peace, it said.

"JNU administration advises and appeals to every section of the university to abide by the ethos and principles and rules and regulations. No violations of the rules will be allowed and individuals responsible in causing any disturbance and discomfort to others will be held accountable," the registrar said.

In response, the JNUSU said the administration should have initiated a dialogue with them.

"However, you have instead chosen to make unsubstantiated allegations and statements which erode the trust of the student community upon the JNU administration in the restoration of normal democratic functioning," it said.

The students union said the various security checks are "inimical to the restoration of JNU's democratic ethos".

The JNUSU claimed the students are being harassed by the wardens and security personnel in the name of security.

They said many hostels have conducted general body meetings in a democratic manner and expressed the hope "their mandates are respected".

The JNUSU is also against the "wanton raids" that are taking place across JNU, they said.

The students union demanded an end to checks and security measures and withdrawal of circulars with immediate effect, besides a meeting with the administration at the earliest.

On Saturday, groups clashed ahead of the counting, which was suspended after election authorities cited "forcible entry" and "attempts to snatch away ballot boxes".

Six FIRs have been registered on the basis of cross complaints in connection with the alleged incidents of violence on the JNU campus. PTI SLB RT

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New Delhi, Sep 20 (PTI) A court here has sought response from the Delhi Police on an application filed by the AAP's Tughlakabad MLA, Sahi Ram Pahalwan, against a fine imposed on him for assaulting a youth in September 2016.

Additional Sessions Judge (ASJ) Arun Bhardwaj issued a notice to the Delhi Police on the appeal filed by the politician against an order of a magisterial court here and directed it to file the response by September 28.

The ASJ also stayed the directions passed by the magisterial court, asking Pahalwan to pay the fine, till the MLA's application is decided.

Pahalwan had approached the sessions court against the September 6 order of the magisterial court.

The magisterial court had not awarded any jail term to the AAP politician as "an opportunity to reform" himself.

It had directed Pahalwan and co-convicts Subhash and Lalit to pay a fine of Rs two lakh each.

The magisterial court had also awarded a compensation of Rs 1.50 lakh to the victim.

Relying on the testimony of the complainant, Yogender Bidhuri, it had held Pahalwan guilty on August 1.

The court had convicted all the three accused for the offence punishable under sections 324 (voluntarily causing hurt by sharp object), 341 (wrongfully restrain) and 34 (common intention) of Indian Penal Code.

The offence carried a maximum of three years jail term.

The accused had denied the allegations levelled against them, saying that they were falsely implicated in the case.

They had claimed that they had not beaten the complainant Yogender Bidhuri and that they were not even present at the spot at the time of the alleged incident.

The complainant had earlier told the Delhi Police that a cemented road was being constructed in a lane outside his house in Tekhand. He had alleged that the MLA had "threatened" the supervisor who was observing the construction to stop work on the intervening night of September 18 and 19, 2016.

Bidhuri had claimed that he called the MLA and tried to know why he was opposing the construction of the road after which the legislator "threatened" him with "dire consequences".

He had alleged that he had gone to get medicines with a relative when the MLA along with his accomplices allegedly beat him up. PTI UK GVS
New Delhi, Sep 20 (PTI) The Supreme Court Thursday held that default sentences cannot be directed to run concurrently, as it may defeat the very objective of the punishment.

A bench of Justices A M Sapre and U U Lalit said, "If imposition of fine and prescription of mandatory minimum is designed to achieve a specific purpose, the very objective will get defeated if the default sentences were directed to run concurrently."

The top court's verdict came on a plea filed by Maharashtra resident Sharad Hiru Kolambe, challenging a Bombay High Court order passed in December 2013, which upheld his conviction under various offences including MCOCA.

Kolambe was charged under provisions of the Maharashtra Control of Organised Crime Act (MCOCA), 1999 and under Sections 364A (kidnapping for ransom), 395 (dacoity), 397 (robbery, or dacoity, with attempt to cause death or grievous hurt) and 387 (putting person in fear of death or of grievous hurt, in order to commit extortion) of the India Penal Code.

He was never released after arrest, during the trial as well as during the pendency of the appeal and thus completed 14 years of actual sentence awarded to him.

Senior Advocate Colin Gonsalves, appearing for Kolambe, had contended that the cumulative fine imposed upon Kolambe under various counts of punishment was over Rs 15 lakh and the default sentence in case of non-payment was cumulatively 10 years.

He submitted that it was impossible for Kolambe to deposit the fine due to the financial condition of the family.

"For a person whose family was reduced to a state of starvation, it was impossible to deposit payment of fine as directed. Resultantly, the appellant would have to suffer default sentence of 10 years," said Gonslaves.

He said that though the substantive sentence stood remitted and the appellant was directed to be released on completion of 14 years of actual sentence, he would still be inside till he completes 24 years.

The court in its 20-page verdict penned down by Justice Lalit said that if default sentences awarded in respect of imposition of fine in connection with two or more offences, are directed to run concurrently, then there would not be any occasion for the convicts to deposit the fine in respect of the further offences.

"It would effectively mean imposition of one single or combined sentence of fine. Such an exercise would render the very idea of imposition of fine with a deterrent stipulation while awarding sentence in default of payment of fine to be meaningless," said the bench.

The court highlighted the Sections 31 and 427 of the CrPC, which confers the power on court to direct running of sentences concurrently.

"In the circumstances, we reject the submission regarding concurrent running of default sentences, as in our considered view default sentences, inter se, cannot be directed to run concurrently," the bench said.

However, the court even while rejecting the submissions, considered Kolambe's financial condition and reduced the default sentence to three years and four months out of which three years have already been served by him. PTI LLP MNL ABA SJK RKS SA
Hyderabad, Sep 20 (PTI) The ruling Telangana Rashtra Samiti had no role in getting separate statehood for the region, senior Congress leader Ghulam Nabi Azad claimed here Thursday.

"TRS had no role. It was totally the Congress party, the legislators of the Congress party from Telangana, members of Parliament from Telangana, the party organisation from Telangana who are solely responsible," he told reporters.

The Congress working committee endorsed the recommendation made by the party functionaries from Telangana and the then Manmohan Singh government made the law for formation of separate Telangana, he said.

"We did not make the law or made the state of Telangana on the recommendation of TRS," he said.

The Congress MPs from Telangana, though they were in the ruling party, had staged protests in support of separate statehood even inside Parliament, he said.

Azad, who was a union Minister in the previous UPA government and incharge of Congress affairs in undivided Andhra Pradesh for long, said he did not even consult the TRS during the consultations as the separate state was being formed.

The party MPs and other leaders from Seemandhra (the successor state of Andhra Pradesh) left it to the Congress high command during consultations and they were taken aback when the party actually decided to divide the state, he said.

Indicating that the TRS walked away with the credit for formation of the state, Azad said it is like a farmer sowing seeds, watering the crop and using fertilisers for it to grow and someone else harvesting the crop.

Azad also alleged that the TRS "cheated" the people on the promise of providing 12 per cent reservation for Muslims.

"On reservation, TRS knew that 12 per cent would be rejected. Because, when Congress promised five per cent in 2004... when (YS) Rajasekhar ji (Reddy) became chief minister, he gave five per cent. But, court dismissed it," he said.

However, the then Congress government saw to it that four per cent reservation was given as per a "procedure," he said.

"So, the chief minister (K Chandrasekhar Rao) knew. Court has dismissed five per cent and they will not accept 12 per cent. That's why, intentionally, he knew that court will dismiss it, but still he did it to deceive (people)," he said.

Describing the BJP-led government at the Centre and TRS government in Telangana as "first cousins", he alleged that both made tall promises on employment generation but failed.

He said the TRS supported the NDA government on various issues, including demonetisation, election of President and Vice President, he said.

Azad described the Asaduddin Owaisi-led AIMIM party as a "sarkari party" which is always friendly with the government.

Asked about Congress attacking the TRS for its "family rule" though the latter has accused Congress of being dynastic, Azad said Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi were not appointed by parents which is the case with TRS. PTI SJR RS BN RCJ
Jammu, Sep 20 (PTI) Asserting that Article 35A of the Constitution is "region and religion neutral", National Conference (NC) Thursday accused BJP of unleashing misinformation campaign over the provision which guarantees special rights and privileges to the residents of Jammu and Kashmir.

"The adversaries of Article 35A were now frustrated over their disinformation campaign on this constitutional proviso, which has backfired, NC provincial president Devender Singh Rana said addressing workers at Bani in Kathua district.

Rana condemned what he called the lowest depths of the BJP in misleading public opinion and said the laws concerning the rights of the people were being twisted with a sinister objective of weakening the special status of Jammu and Kashmir in the Indian union.

"The Article 35A relates to rights, identity and dignity of the people of Jammu and Kashmir. The Article is region and religion neutral, he said.

Rana said the Article 35A is anything but not anti national, as it forms important ingredient of the Constitution of India.

In fact, this Article endorses the wisdom of Maharaja Hari Singh, the last Dogra ruler of the state, and his far-sight which is reflected in the presidential order of 1954.

Cautioning against ulterior motives of the BJP to do away with Article 35A, Rana said a duty has cast upon all the people of the state, especially Dogras of Jammu region, irrespective of caste, creed and religion to stand and save this proviso in order to avert outsiders domination.

The chances of non-state subjects making their way to Jammu are more serious because of its proximity to other parts of the country and conclusiveness in terms of security scenario, culture, topography and terrain, he said and hoped that the self-proclaimed champions of the Jammu cause will not ignore this reality.PTI TAS RCJ

RCJ
Shimla, Sep 20 (PTI) The Congress on Thursday demanded a detailed probe into the death of Kartik Thakur, a pilot in the Air Force, who belonged to Lahla village in Mandi district of Himachal Pradesh.

In a statement issued here, Himachal Pradesh Congress president Sukhvinder Singh Sukhu urged Chief Minister Jai Ram Thakur to write to Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh requesting him to order a high-level inquiry into the pilot's death.

Kartik (23) was posted at Hyderabad and had gone to Kolkata for training where he died in an accident, an official had earlier said.

He became a pilot three years ago after clearing his Combined Defence Services (CDS) examination, Sukhu said, adding that the people here want to know the exact cause of his death. PTI DJI SNE

SNE
In hip-hop culture, African-American officers are frequently presented as worse than white ones. As the lyrics of the seminal group NWA put it: "Don't let it be a black and a white one/ 'Cause they'll slam ya down to the street top/ Black police showing out for the white cop." Some new social science research suggests that African-American officers are at least as likely as white officers to shoot an unarmed black man. James Forman Jr.'s Pulitzer Prize-winning book, "Locking Up Our Own," contains the best history of black cops, and the lesson he draws is that African-Americans should become police officers because it's a decently paying job with good benefits. But, in Forman's telling, we should not expect African-American officers to treat black people any differently than white officers do. There's something about the blue that colors over the black.
Srinagar, Sep 20 (PTI) An encounter broke out between the security forces and militants in the forest area of Bandipora district, Jammu and Kashmir Thursday, police said.

No casualties have been reported in the incident, an official said. Following information about presence of militants, security personnel launched a cordon and search operation in the forests of Sumlar area in the district, he said.

The search operation turned into an encounter after militants opened fire at positions of the security forces, an official said. PTI MIJ IND

IND
New Delhi, Sep 20 (PTI) The Delhi government has ordered suspension of two teachers, a mid-day meal in-charge and the transfer of a principal and vice-principal of a school in Mukherjee Nagar after several irregularities were found during a surprise inspection.

Sanjay Goel, director of Directorate of Education (DoE), conducted a surprise inspection at the Government Boys Senior Secondary School in Mukherjee Nagar on Wednesday.

"Absent principal and vice-principal, dusty computer labs, watery mid-day meal curries, uncooked rice and dirty school campus were some of the irregularities found during the inspection. I have ordered suspension of two teachers and the mid-day meal in-charge. The principal and vice-principal of the school have been transferred," Goel said.

"It is not understood how during school hours both principal and vice-principal left the school in total chaos without any information to the staff," he said.

Goel was later told that the principal and vice-principal were at the Delhi Commission for Protection of Child Rights (DCPCR) for a hearing. PTI GJS GJS IND

IND
Surat: Congress leader Dhiru Gajera quits party

Ahmedabad, Sep 20 (PTI) Senior Congress leader from

Surat, Dhiru Gajera, resigned from the party on Thursday

accusing it of ignoring him.

Gajera, a former BJP MLA, had contested the 2017

Assembly election from Varachha constituency in Surat city on

the Congress ticket, but lost to the BJP's Kumar Kanani.

He had left the BJP in 2007 and joined the Congress.

"There are many reasons to leave Congress. One is that

I was being ignored. Another is that neither workers nor

people are with Congress anymore. I was inactive for the last

six months and finally made up my mind to quit," he told

reporters.

The Congress never "accepted" him, he said.

"The whole world knows about my past association with

the BJP. Today, people are with BJP. If I were to join any

party, it will only be BJP," he said when asked about his

future plans. PTI PJT PD

KRK KRK
New Delhi, Sep 20 (PTI) Congress-affiliated NSUI Thursday escalated attack against newly elected DUSU president Ankiv Baisoya of the ABVP, demanding cancellation of his election for allegedly submitting a "fake" degree for admission.

On their part, Delhi University officials said they will hold a meeting to decide action in the matter.

The National Students' Association Of India also demanded an apology from BJP president Amit Shah and RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat for "cheating" the university administration and students.

The party also demanded their candidate Sunny Chill, to be declared as the students' union president and also repolling on ballot paper.

"The admission of the ABVP Candidate Ankiv Baisoya should be cancelled from the DU on ground of forgery. All those who were involved in fake admission racket be arrested including the university administration, the candidate himself for cheating the varsity and all those from the ABVP who backed the candidate," the NSUI said.

The NSUI members claimed that the university from where Baisoya did his graduation only has post-graduate courses and has Tamil as a compulsory language, adding they were sure Baisoya "could not even write his name in Tamil".

The Department of Buddhist Studies, where Baisoya is studying, has said it will hold a meeting on Monday to discuss about the allegations and order enquiry into the matter.

Meanwhile, the ABVP accused NSUI's Rocky Tuseed, a former DUSU president, of misappropriation of the union's funds to the tune of Rs 10 lakh, a charge denied by the Congress-backed students' union. PTI SLB CK
Southern Water has been labelled the country's worst water provider for customer gripes for the sixth successive year, despite reducing written complaints by a fifth.

It received more than 20,000 more calls from customers to resolve problems - known as 'unwanted contacts' - compared to last year, the latest report by industry watchdog the Consumer Council for Water shows.

The results mean that it has been asked to provide the watchdog with quarterly reports highlighting what action it is taking to reduce complaints for the third successive year.

A water watchdog's annual report on the most complained about suppliers has been released: how does yours fare?

Bristol Water and Surrey-based SES Water have also been asked to provide reports following the trio's 'relatively poor performance' over the last year.

Bristol Water reported a 37 per cent increase in unwanted contacts from customers to resolve problems and a 52 per cent surge in written complaints, while SES Water reported a 21 per cent rise in unwanted contacts.

The watchdog's London and South East chair, Sir Tony Redmond, told the Hastings Observer that there were signs Southern Water was heading in the right direction, 'but we have not seen enough progress'.

'There will be no let-up in the pressure from us until the company gets more into line with the rest of the industry.'

More than 2.1 million customers in England and Wales made calls to their water and sewerage supplier asking to resolve problems - how does yours stack up?

Simon Oates, chief customer officer at Southern Water, said: 'We still have a long way to go to meet the standards our customers rightly expect but the changes we've introduced this year are driving down complaints, we are more proactively managing customers' accounts and resolving more problems for customers the first time they call us.'

After Southern and SES, Thames Water received the third-most number of unwanted contacts per 10,000 properties.

Overall the number of complaints fell by 17%, but four suppliers received more than last year. Bristol Water has been put on a watchlist after it received nearly 52% more complaints in 2018.

The regulator said the company reported more than 25 per cent above the industry average for complaints and unwanted contacts and that it would be 'closely monitoring' its performance this year.

Kelly Macfarlane, Thames Water customer experience director, said: 'We're pleased that complaints are down but we're very clear we have a lot more work to do to provide the service our customers expect.'

Nine out of 21 suppliers reported an increase in calls asking to resolve problems, and four received more written complaints

Thames was followed by Welsh firm Dwr Cymru, who saw a nearly nine per cent rise in the volume of calls it received.

Yorkshire Water rounded out the bottom five, despite reducing both its number of unwanted contacts and written complaints.

Anglian Water was named the industry's best performer after receiving the smallest number of calls to resolve problems and achieving a 26 per cent fall in written complaints.

Bournemouth Water manged to cut written complaints by 40 per cent.

CCWater's annual report showed households made more than 2.1million calls to resolve problems last year.

Nine out of 21 water companies in England and Wales reported an increase in calls from customers to resolve problems, while four companies reported an increase in written complaints.

Although the number of complaints to the industry as a whole fell by almost 17 per cent, there was a 10 per cent rise in the number relating to water supply as some companies struggled with the disruption caused by the sudden thaw following March's Beast from the East.

More than 200,000 customers were left without running water amid complaints about poor communication and delays in support from suppliers.

Disputes about billing and charges accounted for 53 per cent of written complaints despite a 22 per cent reduction compared with the year before, while supply issues made up 22 per cent and sewerage accounted for 11.5 per cent.

Fewer household customers turned to CCWater for help resolving a dispute in 2017/18, with the watchdog handling 6,815 complaints from household customers  down 13 per cent.

Tony Smith, CCWater chief executive, said: 'The frustration felt by thousands of customers after March's cold weather disruption to supplies should have reminded the industry that it cannot afford to be complacent.

'Some water companies still have a lot to learn when it comes to communicating effectively with their customers and ensuring that when something goes wrong they put it right quickly and with the minimum of fuss.'

Michael Roberts, chief executive of trade association Water UK, said: 'It's pleasing to see a fall in complaints this year despite the impact of the Beast from the East and the dry summer.

'The figures published today continue a downward trend in both metrics, with complaints and unwanted calls falling by almost 70 per cent over the last decade.

'Despite customer satisfaction levels of around 90 per cent, we know there is more to do.'

Ben Newby, Bristol Water's customer services director, said: 'I am very disappointed that so many customers felt the need to contact us in the past year and that we have moved from being among the better performers in the industry.

'We will now review the full detail of the CCWater report and the recommendations it makes, and will provide quarterly reports addressing the issues highlighted.'
(CNN)  Polish President Andrzej Duda urged U.S. President Donald Trump on Tuesday during a joint news conference to deploy more U.S. troops and military equipment to Poland, even suggesting the U.S. establish a permanent military base and name it "Fort Trump."

"I invite you to post more American military troops in Poland," Duda said, calling a U.S. presence a "guarantor of security."

Duda suggested building a permanent U.S. base in Poland and said he would name it "Fort Trump."

"I firmly believe that this is possible," Duda said, saying it would be both in U.S. and Polish interests.

Trump said he is considering Poland's request to establish a permanent U.S. base in that country, but added that Poland "would pay the United States."

Trump said Duda had offered the U.S. more than $2 billion to set up a base in Poland.

"He would pay the United States, meaning Poland would be paying billions of dollars for a base," Trump said. "We're looking at that more and more from the standpoint of defending really wealthy countries."

"The President offered us much more than $2 billion," Trump said.

This story was first published on CNN.com, "'Fort Trump'? Polish President urges US to consider opening base."
The story lines here are engrossing, and Gaillard packs a lot into each chapter. He declares in the preface: I hope to offer a sense of how it felt. Fair enough. Still, I found it difficult to absorb all 687 pages chronologically. Its just as enjoyable to scan the index, as you would an encyclopedia, for a topic of interest, such as the unionization efforts of Cesar Chavez, the controversial cover of Time magazine Is God Dead? or the anti-war efforts of Dr. Benjamin Spock and Muhammad Ali. Along the way, youre sure to discover serendipitous stories that will delight or depress you.
To help celebrate Zagato's 100 year anniversary in 2019, Aston Martin will again collaborate with the Italian design house to create two high-value exclusive models.

Some 58 years after the brands first teamed-up, they've committed to making a DB4 GT Zagato Continuation based on the 1960s original and an all-new modern DBS GT Zagato - a rebodied version of Aston's recently-launched DBS Superleggera.

Just 19 of each will be made. And there's one huge proviso if you're interested - you have to buy them as a pair for a combined 7.2million.

The 7.2m two-car garage: Aston Martin and Zagato have teamed up to create a new DBZ Collection that includes a DB4GT Continuation model to look like this '60s original

The second model in the collection - of which 19 examples of each car will be made - is a rebodied version of the all-new Aston Martin DBS Superleggera. It won't be delivered to customers until 2020 and this is the only hint of what it will look like

The DB4 GT Zagato Continuation, which is only allowed to be driven on track, will be a like-for-like remake of the original model that first competed in 1958.

Much of the parts manufacturing and assembly will strictly follow classic techniques, but Aston Martin will also employ modern technology to speed-up the build process.

For instance, the body panels will be hand-beaten like they would have been half a century ago, but they will be digitally scanned during the process to ensure they perfectly fit over the tubular chassis.

Like the 1960s model, it will use a 3.67-litre straight six engine producing 240bhp. The fact just 19 are being made is also in-line with the 1960 original, though four 'Sanction II' cars were later built in 1988.

It will be the responsibility of the British brand's classic Works team to piece the continuation car together - that means it will be built at the same Newport Pagnell plant the original DB4 GT was assembled.

The DB4 GT Zagato Continuation will be built for track-use only

It will be hand-crafted at Aston Martins Works classics facility in Newport Pagnell - the same factory where the original DB4GT was made

Like the 1960s original, it will use a 3.67-litre straight six engine producing 240bhp

As for the DBS GT Zagato, that will be constructed at Aston Martin's headquarters in Gaydon.

Very few details of the modified DBS Superleggera have been revealed and Aston has released a single drawing of what it will look like.

As is tradition for any Zagato model, an enormous grille dominates the front end and the double-bubble roof from the donor car remains, though with a 'fresh interpretation', according to the firm.

Under the bonnet will be the same 5.2-litre bi-turbo V12 engine, which packs 715bhp, a 0-to-62mph sprint time of 3.4 seconds and a top speed of 211mph.

The DBS GT Zagato will be based on the stunning new Aston Martin DBS Superleggera, using the same 5.2-litre bi-turbo V12 engine

In Superleggera guise, it develops 715bhp, has a 0-62mph sprint time of 3.4 seconds and a top speed of 211mph. If the Zagato bodywork is lighter, some of these figures may be improved

Even if a customer prefers one to the other, they have no choice but to own them both, as the requirement is that they come as a package deal called the DBZ Centenary Collection.

And it's far from a buy-one-get-one-free offer.

The pairing will cost 6million before taxes - so ringing in at 7.2million for UK customers. That's some mark-up when you consider the DBS Superleggera the modern Zagato is based on costs 225,000.

What drives the astronomical cost is the exclusivity of both machines, though mainly the Continuation car.

Point in case is the sale of one of the original 19 DB4 GT Zagatos that sold earlier this year to become one of the most expensive British cars of all time.

Chassis '2VEV' - one of four from the 1960 batch commissioned for racing - was bought at the Bonhams Goodwood Festival of Speed auction for 10.1m in July.

Aston Martin Works already has a DB4GT Continuation project, so has experience of recreating the wonderful classic

Here's what the final DB4 GT Zagato Continuation models will look like when they're delivered to customers in 2019 - one year before the DBS GT Zagato is ready for collection

Not only will buyers be forced to find space for two machines, they also won't get them delivered at the same time.

Aston Martin Works will have all 19 Continuation models completed by the end of 2019, while the rebodied DBS GT Zagato won't be done until 2020.

Speaking about the collection, Aston Martin chief executive Andy Palmer said: 'The partnership between Aston Martin and Zagato is one of the most fruitful and enduring in the automotive world.

'With Zagato celebrating its centenary next year, what better way to celebrate this landmark - and the long-standing bond between our two great companies - than creating these 19 pairs of cars.

'As an engineer I would always say my favourite Aston Martin is the next one, but I have to say Im struggling to think of a finer two-car garage than this.'
Unilever vehemently denies that its proposals to move its HQ from London to Rotterdam are anything to do with Brexit.

The rationale from Unilever House is that it merely needs to simplify its unwieldy Anglo-Dutch structure, and the majority of its shares are held through the Netherlands side  so move along, no Brexit rows here please.

However, given the timing and the fact that chief executive Paul Polman has been a critic of Brexit, it is inevitable the link will be made.

Alison McGovern, the MP for Wirral South, whose constituency includes Unilevers historic Port Sunlight base, explicitly blames Brexit.

Tough call: Unilever chief executive Paul Polman has been a critic of Brexit although the firm denies that its proposals to move to Rotterdam have anything to do with it

Pro-Leave financier Peter Hargreaves argues the contrary, waving aside the idea that the consumer goods giant will be in the vanguard of a corporate Brexodus as wishful thinking by Remainers.

Virtually any big corporate decision right now is bound to be viewed through the prism of Brexit  it is an inescapable subtext. And while it may not have been the main motivation for the move, the Leave vote wont have helped sway its decision in favour of this country.

Unilevers commitment to Britain in terms of jobs and investment is unaffected for the time being.

It employs 7,300 people in the UK, more than double the number in the Netherlands, and is basing beauty and home care, two of its fastest-growing divisions in this country, with a pledge to continue to spend 1billion annually here for the next five years.

A company like Unilever takes its responsibilities far too seriously to turn its back on a major market in a hasty or ill-considered way.

But it is legitimate to harbour doubts as to whether, in a post-Brexit world and with a centre of gravity that has moved to Holland, this level of commitment to the UK will continue over the longer term.

If Brexit is one undercurrent beneath Unilevers move, then the threat of takeover is another.

Again the company denies it is seeking a safer haven in the Netherlands, where the regime is seen as being more protective against corporate predators, but it could hardly be blamed if that were the case following an unwanted bid from US giant Kraft Heinz last year.

The laissez-faire attitude towards takeovers in this country leaves some of our best-loved companies dangerously exposed. Unilever, quite reasonably, does not want to be the next Cadbury.

The main consequence if Unilever goes fully Dutch is that its shares will no longer be allowed in the FTSE 100, which would affect millions of savers via their pension schemes.

That would be a great shame because it is exactly the sort of investment many small shareholders seek out.

It offers a combination of good returns  1,000 invested when Paul Polman took over in 2009 would now be worth around 2,770  along with genuine social responsibility.

Unilever lobbied FTSE Russell, the company that compiles and oversees the Footsie indexes, to be allowed to stay in, but was told it would no longer meet the rules if it is not incorporated here.

This is a bizarre outcome. The FTSE 100 is graced by a string of companies with virtually no heritage or operations in the UK, including Chilean mining group Antofagasta, Middle Eastern hospitals group NMC Health, Greek bottling business Coca-Cola HG and global commodities giant Glencore. They are allowed in the FTSE 100 nonetheless because they are incorporated in this country even if it is little more than a brass plate.

Yet Unilever will be slung out of the FTSE 100 regardless of its long history, its deep roots, its thousands of employees and an army of shareholders who want to invest in it as a Footsie stock.

The panel overseeing Footsie admissions should think again and ask themselves what purpose the expulsion of Unilever could possibly serve.

Seventies style

John Neill, the chairman of car components group Unipart, warned earlier this year that a no-deal Brexit was the worst threat to motor manufacturing in this country since the rampant trades union strife of the 1970s.

Since then, Jaguar Land Rovers chief executive Ralf Speth has also issued warnings and put some employees on a three- day week.

BMW is planning to shut its Mini plant for a month after the UKs official departure to minimise disruption, and industry body the SMMT says there will be 5billion of tariffs.

Brexiteer MPs accuse motor industry leaders of scaremongering, but are their insights really superior to those of a seasoned industrialist like Neill, whose views are based on 50 years of experience?
Serial chairman Peter Long has quit his job at Royal Mail after presiding over one of the biggest shareholder revolts in British corporate history.

The 66-year-old stepped down as chairman with immediate effect yesterday after finally conceding he had too many jobs.

A married father of three, Long is also executive chairman of struggling estate agent Countrywide, has a senior role at travel agent Tui, and until July was chairman of Spanish theme park operator Parques Reunidos.

Royal Mail chairman Peter Long has quit his job at Royal Mail after presiding over one of the biggest shareholder revolts in British corporate history

His ability to do so many jobs was brought into question over the summer when more than 70 per cent of Royal Mail shareholders voted against executive pay at the privatised postal service.

More than a third of shareholder votes were also cast against Longs re-election as chairman.

The humiliation came after Royal Mail handed its new German chief executive Rico Back, 64, a pay package worth up to 2.7million a year on top of a 6million golden hello. Departing chief Moya Greene, 64, was given a 2.6million golden goodbye.

But while Long appears to have paid the price for the row, his successor as chairman, Les Owen, was on the Royal Mail pay committee that signed off the controversial pay deals.

Despite calls for change at Royal Mail, Longs resignation came as a surprise.

The company said: This year, his commitments have increased substantially, as he moved from non-executive to executive chairman at Countrywide.

That commitment will remain in place for the foreseeable future.

On that basis, Peter has reviewed his board appointments and concluded it is no longer possible for him to remain executive chairman of Countrywide and non-executive chairman of Royal Mail.

Long said: It is with a heavy heart that I step down from the Royal Mail board. I have taken great pride in what has been achieved by the group.

Orna Ni-Chionna, senior independent director and chairman of the remuneration committee whose botched pay plans sparked the shareholder revolt, said: We understand why he has chosen to step down at this time and we wish him all the best.

The appointment of Owen, 69, is likely to raise eyebrows given his role in the row.

The former Axa Sun Life boss also chaired the pensions committee during Royal Mails lengthy battle with unions over retirement pots.

He has been on the Royal Mail board since 2010, meaning he is close to the nine years the corporate governance code says non-executive directors should serve without further justification.

Long himself now faces a battle to rescue estate agent Countrywide, which has been forced to tap investors for 140million to avoid collapsing under its debts.

He suffered a second humiliation on bosses pay at the business  whose brands include Bairstow Eves, John D Wood, Faron Sutaria and Abbotts  having to back down on plans to hand himself and other top bosses up to 20million in shares between them, amid threat of a major shareholder revolt.

Royal Mail said: Less deep knowledge of our business means he is very well-placed to be our chairman. At present the board envisages Les remaining as chair for 12-18 months, which will give us plenty of time to refresh skills on the board and line up Less successor.
Tainted beancounter KPMG has admitted failing to properly audit the books of banking firm BNY Mellon Group.

The accountant and its partner Richard Hinton did not ensure BNYs records of relationships with clients were up to scratch, according to regulators.

KPMG and Hinton will now face a disciplinary tribunal and a fine from the Financial Reporting Council (FRC) watchdog.

KPMG and its partner Richard Hinton did not ensure BNYs records of relationships with clients were up to scratch, according to regulators

It is a fresh blow for KPMG after a string of scandals, and growing calls for the so-called big four accountants to be broken up.

The industry has been attacked for its complacency and cosy relationship with clients following the collapse of outsourcing behemoth Carillion earlier this year.

KPMG and fellow auditors PwC, Deloitte and EY worked with Carillion in the run-up to its failure and failed to spot problems.

Meanwhile, the FRC is facing fierce criticism for doing too little to keep the accountants in line.

The watchdog, stuffed with former partners from the big four, has sparked anger in the past for letting firms off the hook.

Chiefs notoriously cleared KPMG for giving toxic bank HBOS a clean bill of health before the financial crisis.

It was bought by Lloyds in a disastrous 2008 takeover which dragged both banks to the brink of collapse before taxpayers rescued them in a 20.3billion bailout.

The FRC is now subject to a Government-backed review to determine if it is fit for purpose.

It has issued a flurry of rulings over the past few months, including a 3.2m fine against KPMG for missing overstated revenues at claims firm Quindell, which is now being investigated for fraud.

KPMGs global revenues hit a record 20billion in the last financial year, while UK partners were paid 519,000 each.

KPMG said the case relates to work done in 2011. It added: No client of either The Bank of New York Mellon (International) Limited or the London branch suffered actual financial or other loss. We have cooperated fully.

A fine will be decided by an independent tribunal.
A bidding war has erupted for Horlicks after it was put up for sale by owner Glaxosmithkline.

Some of the worlds biggest consumer goods giants  including Coca-Cola, Nestle and Unilever  this week tabled offers for the malt drinks maker which dates back to 1873.

Glaxo chief executive Emma Walmsley put Horlicks and other nutrition brands up for sale in March to fund its 9billion buyout of a joint venture with Novartis.

Targetted: Some of the worlds biggest consumer goods giants  including Coca-Cola, Nestle and Unilever  this week tabled offers for the malt drinks maker Horlicks

It is thought the business  whose sales are mainly in India where Horlicks is a national favourite  could fetch 3billion. A deal is expected before the end of the year.

Private equity giant KKR is also thought to be in the running and has brought in the former chairman of Glaxos India arm to advise it.

Glaxo chief executive Emma Walmsley put Horlicks and other nutrition brands up for sale in March

A swoop by Coca Cola would come just weeks after the US giants 4billion deal to buy British coffee chain Costa, to reduce its reliance on fizzy drinks.

Ronan Stafford, lead analyst at Globaldata Consumer, added: India loves Horlicks, particularly as a breakfast drink for children and gaining access to this market would be a big win for Coca-Cola.

The group hasnt invested in [hot drinks] heavily in the past but the Costa acquisition shows this is about to change.

Horlicks would help Coca-Cola diversify its brand portfolio at a time when it needs to invest in healthier brands.

Horlicks, made from wheat, milk and malted barley, it is sold in powdered form and given to children at the start of the day, to give them an energy boost.

It was invented in 1873 by Victorian businessmen William and James Horlick, and first aimed at infants but was soon given to servicemen during the first and second world wars and later to athletes during the 1948 London Olympics.

It was brought to India by Indian soldiers who fought alongside the British in the First World War.

The brand has evolved to include breakfast cereals, biscuits and instant noodles and has expanded into product lines including Junior Horlicks, Womens Horlicks and Mothers Horlicks.

And with India positioned to become one of the worlds five biggest economies, the market is seen as a lucrative opportunity.

Nestle, the worlds biggest packaged food company, is said to have several times told Glaxo privately that it is interested in buying Horlicks. But it is likely to face competition.

Fraser McKevitt, the head of retail and consumer insight at Kantar Worldpanel, said As the 3billion reported price tag would suggest, Coke sees a huge potential in Horlicks, both domestically and internationally.

While it may be a world away from the fizzy drinks which made it famous, Coca-Cola might find that Horlicks is a very shrewd target.

GSK, which is being advised by Morgan Stanley and Greenhill, declined to comment.
A full-blown probe into the 14billion tie-up of Sainsburys and Asda has been launched after fears were raised over stores that overlap in hundreds of local areas.

The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) said the deal raised sufficient concerns to warrant investigating the impact on prices, choice and customer service.

Sainsburys and Asda, the UKs second and third largest supermarkets, are proposing to join forces in a deal that has pledged to lower prices while putting the squeeze on larger suppliers.

The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) said the Sainsbury's -Asda tie-up raised 'sufficient concerns' to warrant a full investigation

The watchdog said: The deal raises sufficient concerns to be referred for a more in-depth review.

'The companies stores overlap in hundreds of local areas, where shoppers could face higher prices or a worse quality of service.

Some responses to the CMAs initial inquiry into the merger warned the deal would reduce the quality of products, lower supply chain standards and in some cases force suppliers to go bust.

The CMA said it would also look into concerns relating to buyer power over suppliers.

Mike Cherry, chairman of the Federation of Small Businesses, welcomed the move.

It is vital that the executives at the very top can explain how the merger can take place without giving the merged chain increased buyer power over suppliers which would negatively impact the smaller firms in their supply chains, he said.

We would hope that this will be able to produce cast-iron guarantees that there will be a positive relationship with small suppliers.
Another major investor in Unilever is preparing to vote against the plot to axe its UK HQ amid a growing backlash.

Fund managers at Standard Life Aberdeen (SLA) are understood to have serious concerns about the Marmite makers plans to abandon Britain for a sole legal base in the Netherlands.

And some of SLAs biggest funds are expected to vote against the deal as they believe it will hurt their customers.

Fund managers at Standard Life Aberdeen are understood to have serious concerns about the Unilever's plans to abandon Britain for a sole legal base in the Netherlands

It is a fresh blow for Unilever boss Paul Polman, who faces opposition from some of the Citys biggest names including Aviva Investors, Columbia Threadneedle and M&G.

David Cumming, chief investment officer at Aviva, last night told Sky News he expects Unilever to lose the vote.

Unilever wants to axe a British headquarters that dates from Victorian times and base itself solely in Rotterdam.

But the plan has triggered major concerns among British investors who fear they could be forced to pay higher taxes under Dutch law.

Many foreign shareholders currently pay a 15 per cent withholding tax on dividends, which would sting UK investors.

The Dutch government has pledged to scrap this but faces a backlash from voters. Bosses at Unilever say it has found a loophole to pay British shareholders even if the authorities U-turn, but many doubt they will be safe for ever.

The company will also be kicked out of the blue-chip FTSE 100 if the scheme goes ahead, meaning many funds which are only allowed to own stocks in the index will be forced to sell at any price.

Alison McGovern, MP for Wirral South which includes Unilevers registered UK office at Port Sunlight, said: Anyone who works in manufacturing in Merseyside  Unilevers historic home  will rightly be alarmed by this.

How many more businesses will we find out are struggling or leaving the UK before we end the Brexit chaos?

SLA, a top-ten shareholder with a Unilever stake of around 1.4 per cent, is expected to allow individual fund managers to vote in different ways based on what they think will be best for their clients.

Some of its funds would have to sell up if the UK headquarters is axed, while others would be unaffected.

Unilever investors who own its London-listed shares will be asked to vote next month, and the firm must get 75 per cent support for the plan to go ahead.
The two-year battle for Sky will reach a climax this weekend in a high-stakes showdown between 21st Century Fox and Comcast.

The two bidders will fight it out in a secret auction tomorrow night as they seek to win control of the broadcasting giant in one of the longest takeover battles in British history.

Universal Studios owner Comcast and Rupert Murdochs Fox will make sealed, cash-only bids for Sky to decide the fate of the company.

Auctioned: Sky is home to hit shows including Game of Thrones

The decision by the UK Takeover Panel to host a winner-takes-all auction for Sky  home to hit shows including Game of Thrones  is highly unusual.

It is only the fifth time a takeover has been settled in this way since 2002 when the rules were changed.

If Murdoch wins, Sky will eventually be owned by Disney, which has agreed to buy Fox for 54billion.

In an email to employees, Jeremy Darroch, chief executive of Sky, said: This will most likely mark the end of a process that we have managed for almost two years.

Whatever the outcome, the prospects ahead of us are exciting.

The tussle for Sky is part of a bigger battle as traditional broadcasters struggle to keep pace with the growth of streaming giants Netflix and Amazon.

Comcast has tabled the biggest offer to date, at 26billion, and has backing from Skys bid committee.

Comcast has tabled the biggest offer to date, at 26billion

Fox has so far offered 24billion as it seeks to buy the 61 per cent of Sky it does not already own. But neither has declared these bids their best-and-final, triggering the auction under City takeover rules.

Fox already has a 39 per cent stake in Sky but wants to take full control of the broadcaster after a failed attempt in 2011 when Murdochs News Corp was embroiled in a phone-hacking scandal at the News of The World newspaper.

Foxs second attempt to grab Sky has dragged on since December 2016 when its takeover plans were blocked by regulators.

Its offer, which valued Sky at 18.5billion, was gatecrashed by Comcast earlier this year, just as the Government was ready to give the deal the green light.

Fox is bidding for Sky with the financial backing of Disney, which in June agreed a separate deal to buy TV and film assets from Fox, including its existing Sky stake.

Fox is bidding for Sky with the financial backing of Disney

The Takeover Panel said Fox and Comcast will have three opportunities each to make an offer in the auction, after which an announcement will take place. However, it could end with both parties offering the same price. It will then be down to Skys directors to decide the winner.

Analysts were left guessing last night as to who will win. Paolo Pescatore, a technology and media analyst, said: Comcast seems to be in pole position, but its not a slam-dunk. Theres so much to play for and expect both companies to open up the war chest. This represents a great opportunity to own a prized asset which will prove to be a worthy long-term investment.

Laith Khalaf, senior analyst at Hargreaves Lansdown, said: Shareholders will be delighted at how this has all played out, having seen the share price double since just before the original offer was made by Fox almost two years ago. Either way, its a pretty happy ending for Sky shareholders given the tremendous rise in the value of their investment.

British hedge fund manager Crispin Odey, whose firm is a shareholder in Sky, has said it should be valued at at least 18 a share, compared with Foxs current offer of 14 per share and Comcasts offer of 14.75.

We still have the ability at the end of it to say No, you still havent bid enough, he said.

Sky shares were worth 1580p last night.
Royal Mail is facing a backlash over its new chairman, given his role approving disgraceful pay packets for top bosses.

Les Owen was on the pay committee that signed off a golden hello worth almost 6million for new chief executive Rico Back, 64, who will run the company while he is living in Zurich.

The committee also handed a golden goodbye worth up to 2.7m to outgoing Moya Greene, also 64.

Golden hello: Royal Mail's new chief executive Rico Back, 64, will receive almost 6m

The deals triggered a 70 per cent shareholder revolt, one of the largest rebellions in UK corporate history, in July.

But despite the row, Owen, 69, was promoted to chairman this week after Peter Long, 66, stepped down to focus on other commitments.

His appointment was overseen by Orna Ni-Chionna, the senior independent director at Royal Mail who is also chairman of the pay committee that Owen sat on.

Cliff Weight, from shareholder group Sharesoc, said: Shareholders would welcome a fresh perspective from a chairman who was not involved in setting the disgraceful remuneration. The pay deals at Royal Mail are being scrutinised by MPs.

A Royal Mail spokesman said Owen would be independent-minded and it was listening to shareholders, He added: We also strongly believe that we did the right thing. The payments were based on contracts.
Electric swoop

French oil and gas giant Total has snapped up French electric car charging network G2mobility, giving it control of around 10,000 charging points amid rising demand for electric cars.

Stores takeover

Poundland is taking over 20 former Poundworld stores, creating 400 jobs. Poundworld collapsed in June, resulting in the closure of all 335 shops and the loss of 5,000 jobs.

Poundworld collapsed in June, resulting in the closure of all 335 shops

Risky UK

Billionaire trader Howard Marks, 72, has said the UK is too risky to invest in due to Brexit. The American founder of Oaktree Capital Management, who made his fortune by snapping up cheap assets in economic downturns, said there could be huge market swings if Britain leaves without a deal.

Jumping jacks

Hundreds of shoppers queued up as Tescos first new Jacks discount stores opened in Chatteris, Cambridgeshire, and Immingham, Lincolnshire.

Iceland first

Craft brewer Brewdog has opened its first bar in Iceland, and saw sales soar 55 per cent to 78million in the six months to June 30.

Egypt buy

Oil and gas explorer Soco International is buying Egyptian rival Merlon for 190million, as it looks to build its business in the country.

Second place

Wall Street titan Goldman Sachs has overtaken Citigroup as the worlds second-largest investment bank. JP Morgan is in top spot.

Well chuffed

North Sea focused Jersey Oil and Gas is very excited about prospects of its Verbier well, set to be drilled this year.

Pubs bonanza

Sales at pub chain City Pub Group rose 24 per cent to 20million in the 26 weeks to July 1 after opening nine pubs. It swung to a 931,857 profit from a 78,186 loss.

Finance role

Retirement firm Saga has poached insurance executive James Quin, 49, as its finance chief. He is the chief financial officer at Zurich Insurance Group.

Pension boost

More workers are saving for retirement following auto-enrolment. The Pensions Regulator said 84 per cent save into a workplace pension, up from 77 per cent.
One thing that I would really like my trolls to do is try to bring people out of their safe zone in their cars and go exploring nature a little bit, he told the Tribune in June. Because when you explore such a beautiful forest as the Morton Arboretum, then obviously you will understand that it's worth protecting it and saving it.
A charity set up by the founder of Unilever and run by bigwigs with strong ties to the company could be crucial in its decision to ditch Britain.

The Leverhulme Trust was launched with an endowment from William Lever when he died in 1925, and is one of Unilevers biggest British shareholders with a stake of almost 6 per cent worth 2.8billion.

This means the trust will play a key role in determining whether Unilevers British headquarters is axed in a vote next month.

HQ move: A string of high-profile shareholders have already warned against Unilevers plans

A string of high-profile shareholders have already warned against Unilevers plans to base itself solely in the Netherlands amid a growing City backlash.

But the trust, whose directors include Unilever chief executive Paul Polman, the driving force behind plans to ditch the UK headquarters, is widely expected to back the move. It sets the scene for a knife-edge vote by Unilever investors next month.

The charity, which gives out grants for vital academic research, is likely to face accusations of a conflict of interest over its long-standing ties to Unilever and financial dependence on the company.

One City insider said: You could question their impartiality, because the Leverhulme Trust is only going to vote one way.

Theres no doubt they have the right to vote legally, but its fair to ask if they should do so on ethical grounds.

The trust has to recruit most of its board members from Unilever as part of the conditions under which it was set up. Nine of its 11-strong board are current or former top Unilever staff including Polman, his predecessor Patrick Cescau and former chairman and chief executive Niall FitzGerald.

Of the remaining two board members, lawyer Christopher Saul was senior partner at Slaughter and May and acted for Unilever throughout his career. It is understood Polman, paid more than 10million last year, will play no part in the decision on how to vote.

The Leverhulme Trust earned 84 per cent of its income, or 83.4million, from dividends it was paid by Unilever in 2017, meaning that if the move to the Netherlands impacts upon Unilevers profits, the good causes it supports may suffer.

So far major shareholders including Columbia Threadneedle, Lindsell Train, Aviva Investors and M&G Investments have raised concerns over the relocation plan.

Another household name, Standard Life Aberdeen, is expected to let its individual fund managers make up their own minds on the issue, with many expected to oppose the relocation. The trust declined to comment last night.

Unilever shares rose 1.4 per cent, or 58p, to 4202.5p.
Satellite business Inmarsat has struck a deal with Japans Panasonic to provide in-flight broadband for commercial airlines.

Panasonic will use Inmarsats satellite signal to connect devices to the internet while Inmarsat will offer Panasonics services to its commercial airline customers.

Broadband is available on 32 per cent of aircraft but is patchy and firms want to get a grip on the market that could be worth 97billion.

Deal: Panasonic will use Inmarsats satellite signal to connect devices to the internet

Analysts say 85 per cent of passengers want to connect online while flying.
Credit reference agency Equifax has been fined 500,000 over its failure to protect the personal information of 15million people in the UK.

Equifax had been warned by the American government that its systems had a 'critical vulnerability' but failed to act and was hacked within months by cyber attackers who stole the personal information of 146million customers worldwide.

Big companies which failed to keep customers safe would be hit hard, said the head of the Information Commissioner's Office, which led the probe.

Equifax had been warned by the US government that its systems had a 'critical vulnerability'

In the summer of 2017, cyber attackers in the US stole information which included bank details, names, addresses and even passwords.

Information Commissioner, Elizabeth Denham, said: 'Equifax showed a serious disregard for customers and the personal information entrusted to them.

'Multinational data companies like Equifax must understand what personal data they hold  and take robust steps to protect it.'

Measures to protect personal information were 'inadequate and ineffective', the investigation found.


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As Tesco launches a new discount store in a bid to take its fight for budget shoppers to the German bargain brands, we compare the shop's prices to find out how they match up to their more established rivals.

Britain's biggest retailer will open its first two Jack's stores on Thursday in Chatteris, Cambridgeshire, and Immingham, North East Lincolnshire.

The new brand is being widely hailed as a challenger to Aldi and fellow discount store Lidl, which have eaten into the market share of Britain's so called 'big four' supermarkets.

Like the German duo, Jack's stores will have lower operating costs than Tesco outlets due to their smaller range of products and simplified design.

Tesco boss Dave Lewis said the prices will be 'the cheapest in town' at each location.

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Tesco has launched its new discount store format called Jack's as it attempts to take the fight to German discounters Aldi and Lidl

The store will also have special buy bins, similar to those seen in Aldi and Lidl, which will be called 'when they're gone, they're gone' bins

Britain's biggest retailer will open its first two Jack's stores on Thursday in Chatteris, Cambridgeshire (pictured), and Immingham, North East Lincolnshire

Tesco said that eight out of 10 Jack's food and drink products will be 'grown, reared or made' in Britain and stores will stock an own brand range, also branded Jack's

Up to 15 stores will open over the next year, with five existing Tesco properties being repurposed and the remainder being new outlets

The vast majority of Jack's products will be own brand, as Tesco looks to take the fight to budget behemoths Lidl and Aldi

Tesco chief executive Dave Lewis denied that the British-made emphasis at Jack's has anything to do with Brexit, adding that it's 'what customers want' and the plan was formulated pre-Brexit

Jack's versus the rest: How does the new budget store compare with Lidl, Aldi and the other big supermarkets? Tesco has unveiled its new Jack's discount store in Chatteris, Cambridgeshire. Here is how a selection of the shelf ticket prices compare with those at the Chatteris branch of Aldi, less than a mile away (cheapest price in green): Milk Jack's British semi-skimmed milk, 4 pints - 1.09 Aldi Cowbelle semi-skimmed milk, 4 pints - 1.09 Tesco British semi-skimmed milk, 4 pints - 1.09 Asda British semi-skimmed milk, 4 pints - 1.09 Sainsbury's British semi-skimmed milk, 4 pints - 1.10 Lidl British semi-skimmed milk, 4 pints - 1.09 Cereal Jack's Cornflakes Cereal, 500g - 55p Aldi Harvest Morn Cornflakes, 500g - 72p Tesco Cornflakes, 500g - 55p Asda Smart-Price Cornflakes, 500g - 45p Sainsbury's Basics Cornflakes, 500g - 45p Lidl Crownfield Cornflakes, 500g - 72p Pasta Jack's Spaghetti, 500g - 45p Aldi Cucina Italian Spaghetti, 500g - 39p Tesco Quick Cook Spaghetti, 500g - 50p Asda Spaghetti, 500g - 45p Sainsbury's own-brand Spaghetti - 55p Lidl Baresi Spaghetti, 500g - 45p Tea Jack's 80 Tea Bags - 85p Aldi Diplomat Gold Label 80 Tea Bags - 1.09 Tesco 80 Tea Bags - 1.10 Asda Everyday 80 Tea Bags - 1.00 Sainsbury's Taste The Difference 80 Tea Bags - 2.00 Lidl Knightsbridge Gold Blend 80 Tea Bags - 1.09 Bread Jack's British Medium White Sliced Bread - 45p Aldi Village Bakery Sliced Medium White - 49p Tesco Medium White Sliced Bread - 55p Asda Baker's Selection White Medium Bread - 55p Sainsbury's Soft Medium White Sliced Bread - 55p Lidl Rowan Hill Bakery Soft Sliced Bread - 49p Baked Beans Jack's Baked Beans in Tomato Sauce, 4x 420g - 94p Aldi Corale Premium Baked Beans, 4x 425g - 98p Tesco Baked Beans in Tomato Sauce, 4x420g - 1 Asda Baked Beans in Tomato Sauce, 4x420g - 98p Sainsbury's Baked Beans, 4x420g - 1.00 Lidl Baked Beans in Tomato Sauce, 4x420g - 1.00 Turkey Breast Mince Jack's 2% fat, 500g - 3.35 Aldi - N/A Tesco 2% fat 500g - 4.00 Asda 2% fat 500g - 3.29 Sainsbury's 2% fat, 500g - 4.00 Lidl 2% fat, 500g - 3.19 Cox apples Jack's six pack - 77p Tesco six pack - 1.60 Sainsbury's six pack - 1.80 Morrisons six pack - 1.50 Advertisement

Up to 15 stores will open over the next year, with five existing Tesco properties being repurposed and the remainder being new outlets.

Most products will be Jack's own brand and the chain, which is named after Tesco founder Jack Cohen, will have 2,600 lines.

Chief executive Dave Lewis, speaking in Chatteris, said: 'Jack Cohen championed value for customers and changed the face of British shopping.

'He's an inspiration for all of us and that same spirit still drives Tesco now.

'It's fitting that today, we mark the beginning of Tesco's celebration of 100 Years of Great Value by launching a new brand, and stores bearing his name: Jack's.'

It comes after the UK's so called Big Four supermarkets - Tesco, Asda, Sainsbury's and Morrisons - have taken a hammering at the hands of Lidl and Aldi.

The German duo have eaten up their market share by offering products at knock down prices.

Tesco is Britain's grocery market leader with a share of 27.4 per cent, while Aldi and Lidl have increased their combined share to 13.1 per cent, according to the Kantar Worldpanel data.

Tesco said that eight out of 10 Jack's food and drink products will be 'grown, reared or made' in Britain and stores will stock an own brand range, also branded Jack's.

It will operate a 'low-cost business model' designed to keep costs low and prices down.

The launch of Jack's is part of Tesco's centenary celebrations which will see the business mark 100 years in 2019.

Jack Cohen founded Tesco 99 years ago in 1919.

The company appears to have gone to extreme lengths to keep the name a secret.

It is believed to have first registered the trademark in Sri Lanka in June 2017  which one lawyer said would make it 'much harder' to find.

Jack's will offer named brand items along with hundreds of own-brand products, with baked beans costing just 29p a tin

Tesco hope that Jack's will take on German duo Aldi and Lidl, which have eaten up their market share by offering products at knock down prices

Tesco chief executive Dave Lewis is pictured posing at a checkout till at the new Jack's store in Chatteris, Cambridgeshire

That added to the protection when it finally registered in the UK last December and the EU in April using an obscure subsidiary known as PTLL.

But a delay in the EU application process appears to have led to a slip-up over dates.

Sarah Redmond, trademark director at Fox Williams, said: 'Their logo is still open to objections for another month so further oppositions could be filed against this application.'

More than 15 complaints have already been registered in both the UK and the EU against the name and, separately, the brand's red logo.

Lawyers said anyone who thinks the new logo is similar to their own has until October 17 to file a complaint at the EU's Intellectual Property Office.

It means the discount chain will be trading for four weeks during which the legal position over its trademark will be wide open to new complaints  which one trademark source described as 'absolute madness'.

The launch of Jack's is part of Tesco's centenary celebrations which will see the business mark 100 years in 2019. Jack Cohen founded Tesco 99 years ago in 1919

The store will look to offer less choice for smaller prices, as shoppers increasingly favour convenience stores rather than the large-format supermarkets
Orla Kiely was a victim of her own success. The Irish designer was known as the 'Queen of prints' thanks to her distinctive blocky 1970s-style patterns which are now instantly recognisable.

The flower-like graphic she created in the 1990s became the company logo and featured on almost every product she made, most iconically on the line of laminated handbags which propelled her to fame.

Her prints and patterns also made their way on to womenswear, with the Orla Kiely clothing line worn by everyone from Alexa Chung to Kirsten Dunst  though it was the royals who were her most fervent champions.

Although Orla Kiely's prints are a royal favourite (pictured left Carole Middleton and right Kate Middleton) they had become 'licensed too widely' meaning the graphic prints were on everything from 300 dresses to 2 hand towels

In fact, her prints became so recognisable that she is currently being celebrated at a dedicated exhibition  Orla Kiely: A Life In Pattern  at London's Fashion and Textile Museum.

But those signature flowers have also been her undoing.

You know the feeling of turning up to a party and someone else is wearing the same dress as you?

For a while you didn't need to be at a party to find an Orla Kiely print  you'd match your friend's kettle, or the car in their driveway.

Because Orla licensed her print too widely, it started to appear on everything from 30 blinds to 7.49 coasters and 2 hand towels.

Those graphic prints were everywhere on everything, and women simply didn't want the same prints on their biscuit tins and their blouses. It even appeared on the back of buses and a Citroen DS3.

Alexa Chung (right) and Sarah Jessica Parker (left) were also fans of the distinctive blocky patterns. Kiely started her fashion brand in 1995 with her husband and almost every product made had the flower-like graphic company logo on it

And since the prints never changed, you'd also never want or need to replace that biscuit tin, or those blinds or towels.

The pity is that her clothes were beautiful, mainly thoughtfully cut dresses and shirts in pretty feminine prints. But they were too expensive for what they were  300 for a black smock dress was typical  when you know you could buy a cushion bearing the same print for a fraction of that.

Her partnerships with brands such as Halfords and Clarks (understandable, of course, for a struggling company looking for revenue) only diluted the brand further.

The value of anything in fashion comes from its uniqueness.

No matter how beautiful something is, if everyone has it, it becomes a uniform and we don't want it  and Orla Kiely has learned this lesson the hard way.

The other problem was that the brand just didn't move with the times. Having made her name with that signature print, Orla seemed unable or unwilling to try something new  which meant it never opened up to a new generation of shoppers.

The prints could be found everywhere on everything, and women simply didn't want the same prints on their biscuit tins and their blouses

Orla licensed her print too widely, with the blocky 1970s designs featuring on 30 blinds to 7.49 coasters and 2 hand towels

That meant that it came  rightly or wrongly  to represent a generation that are now the wrong side of cool. Many now associate it with their mums, aunts and grandparents; lovingly, but not in a way that drives sales.

Even the Duchess of Cambridge and the 'Kate effect'  she's been spotted in the label's clothes more than once in the past 12 months  couldn't save the brand.

In the world of fast fashion shoppers want something new, something different, something that changes dramatically each season and that's not Orla Kiely's thing.

She is undoubtedly one of the greatest print designers in the world. What a shame she just couldn't move with the times.

Orla Kiely retail empire collapses: 8m fashion brand - worn by Kate Middleton and Alexa Chung - ceases trading leaving workers 'in tears' as they are led out of shops

By Josh White

Designer brand Orla Kiely  often worn by the Duchess of Cambridge and sister Pippa  shocked the fashion world yesterday when it announced it had ceased trading.

Workers said they were escorted out of the building earlier this week just moments after being told by boss Orla Kiely, 55, that they were losing their jobs.

Its stores  on the King's Road and in Seven Dials, London, and in Kildare, Ireland  have closed.

Irish designer Orla Kiely (pictured) set up her business in 1995 with her husband and at its height the company turned over 8million

A small selection of accessories and homeware will continue to be sold through department stores Debenhams and John Lewis.

Set up in 1995 with her husband Dermott, the Dublin-born designer's brand is best known for its vintage 1970s-inspired prints. At its height it turned over more than 8million.

Besides Kate and Pippa and their mother Carole, famous faces such as model Alexa Chung and actresses Keira Knightley and Sarah Jessica Parker have worn the brand's clothes.

Ironically, the designer is currently the subject of an exhibition  Orla Kiely: A Life In Pattern  at the capital's Fashion and Textile Museum which ends on Sunday.

But the demise of her business is only the latest in a string of major blows to Britain's retail sector.

Clothing, bags and kitchen items could be found with Orla Kiely's signature floral inspired prints. The stores in London and Kildare in Ireland have now closed

Department store group House of Fraser went into administration in August, and Toys R Us and electronics retailer Maplin also collapsed earlier in the year.

A source said: 'It wasn't sent out in an official email or anything but was spread through word of mouth.

'Around lunchtime we were all called together where [Kiely] told us we were all out of a job.

'We're paid on the 27th of each month and we were told the company can't pay us for the past three weeks and we'd have to try and file for redundancy. Some people just burst straight into tears.

'Chief designers just grabbed their bags and walked straight out without saying anything. We were then escorted out of the building.

'None of us saw this coming. They closed off the website the other week and said there was an issue with the payment gateway.

'But they must have known what was going on  we feel like we've been done over. Now I'm struggling to find the money to pay the rent. People were just crying in the pub. It's devastating.'

A message on the company's website read: 'Kiely Rowan Plc, the retail and wholesale fashion business of Orla Kiely, has ceased trading as of Monday 17 September 2018. This means our retail stores in London and Kildare and our online business have been closed.

'We apologise for any inconvenience caused. Orla Kiely's Home and Design licensing business will not be impacted, and its selection of accessories and homewares will continue to be sold through its distribution partners.

'Thank you for embracing our brand and designs throughout the years and for your ongoing support. Orla, Dermott and the team.'

Yesterday, a call to its head office in south London went unanswered.

Irish media quoted the directors of the holding company blaming 'various challenges that have faced the company over the past few years, both in the UK and abroad'.

According to documents filed with Companies House, turnover in the year to March last year increased from 7.2million to 8.3million. It noted that retail 'remained steady' and that directors planned to expand in the US.

However, the files also indicate the firm may have been struggling, as it was operating with a heavy debt burden running into the millions. Bank loans and overdrafts were approaching 3million and it owed trade creditors nearly 2.5million.
Passengers are routinely being failed by a chaotic rail industry, a damning official report concludes today.

Bosses, ministers and regulators are all blamed for the thousands of cancellations and delays that followed the release of a new timetable in May.

The rail watchdog's report said the debacle highlighted systemic weaknesses, poor leadership and a lack of accountability.

'It was unclear who was responsible for what,' it said. 'Nobody took charge. The present industry arrangements do not support clarity of decision making.'

A rail watchdog report that looked into the change of train timetables in May has slammed bosses, ministers and regulators saying 'it was unclear who was responsible for what' (stock picture)

The interim report into the timetable fiasco will heap pressure on Chris Grayling, who today launches yet another review into the railways, admitting they are 'no longer fit for today's challenges'.

The Transport Secretary has been criticised repeatedly for refusing to accept any blame for the chaos. Instead he has pointed the finger at train operators and Network Rail, which oversees infrastructure.

In July he confessed to MPs that he was 'not a specialist in rail matters'. The report was commissioned by Mr Grayling from Stephen Glaister, chairman of the Office of Rail and Road (ORR).

Billed as the biggest ever, the timetable shake-up involved changing almost half of services to improve reliability.

But passengers endured weeks of disruption and thousands of delays and cancellations. The report reveals the hardest hit were commuters across northern England. More than 300 services on the northern network were cancelled every weekday.

In the South, 470 scheduled trains were cancelled every day by Thameslink and Great Northern services. Both are run by Govia. Operators were forced to introduce emergency timetables and services are slowly returning to normal. In the Lake District, all trains were cancelled after the line was temporarily shut down.

Transport Secretary Chris Grayling (pictured) has been criticised for refusing to accept any blame for the chaos and in July said he was 'not a specialist in rail matters'

According to the report, passengers endured 'inconvenience, financial and emotional cost over a period of several weeks'.

Professor Glaister said: 'The May 2018 timetable was meant to offer more services and reliability, but in reality it led to major disruption for passengers.

'Central to the issues were that good intentions and over-optimism within the rail industry about its ability to recover missed deadlines left no time to uncover and fix problems.

'When problems arose, timetable planners were stretched and train operators were ill-equipped to help passengers.'

The report said the Department for Transport and the ORR should bear some responsibility for failing to properly question assurances from the industry.

Peter Vicary-Smith, chief executive of the consumer group Which?, said: 'The last 12 months have exposed the serious lack of leadership in the industry. But passengers are sick of finger pointing and simply want to be able to rely on their train service.'

Andy McDonald, Labour's transport spokesman, said: 'Rail passengers don't need another review from the Tories to tell them that rail is broken.

'Another review is meaningless in a year of rocketing fares, failing franchises and timetabling chaos. Another review lets Chris Grayling off the hook. The railways need a Labour government which will deliver public ownership.'

Anthony Smith, of the independent watchdog Transport Focus, said passengers would cringe when they read the report.

The Department for Transport said that passenger journeys have almost doubled from 735million in 1994/5 to 1.73billion in 2016/17 (stock picture)

Passengers endured weeks of disruption and thousands of delays and cancellations. The report reveals the hardest hit were commuters across northern England

The Department for Transport insisted privatisation had 'reversed the decline the railways saw under British Rail'.

It added that passenger journeys have almost doubled from 735million in 1994/5 to 1.73billion in 2016/17. But it admitted that the industry had not kept pace with the growth as the disruption in May showed.

Mr Grayling has commissioned a rail review from Keith Williams, a former boss of British Airways and deputy chairman of John Lewis. He has been asked to carry out a 'root and branch' investigation into the industry, from fares to the relationship between operators and Network Rail.

Mr Grayling said the aim was to deliver 'the railway we need for the 21st century'.

'Privatisation has delivered huge benefits for passengers on Britain's railways  doubling passenger journeys and bringing in billions of private investment,' he added.

'But it is clear that the structure we inherited is no longer fit to meet today's challenges and cope with increasing customer demand.'

Andrew Haines, Network Rail's chief executive, said: 'I'd like to add my sincerest apologies to passengers for letting them down with May's timetable troubles.'

Patrick Verwer, chief executive of Govia, also apologised, saying that he welcomed the preliminary investigation into the 'industry-wide issues'.
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The U.S. is in the middle of a steep and sustained increase in sexually transmitted diseases.



So how are public health officials responding?



In northwest Oregon's Clackamas County, health officials have decided to ask anyone who comes in with an STD who their sexual partners are and then track those partners down.



That job falls to two women: registered nurse Mary Horman and disease intervention specialist Liz Baca. They do most of the work over the phone, telling people they've had a partner (no name is revealed) who has tested positive for gonorrhea, HIV, chlamydia or syphilis.



It's a difficult conversation. And many people can't be reached via phone. So about once a week, Horman and Baca jump into a car and start knocking on doors.



"It can definitely be scary at times," Baca said, "especially those rural areas where you're really relying on the GPS to get you there, and sometimes there are roads that lead you to nowhere." So far, they haven't gotten lost.



Plenty of residents in the county's outskirts own firearms, Baca said, and are comfortable displaying them if they feel they need to protect their property.



"I always try to make myself visible and not be fidgety," she said. Her goal is to approach with as much warmth as possible, saying, "'I have a nurse with me.' Or, 'My name is Liz, and I work for Clackamas County.'"



The women travel as a pair and never enter a home, she said. And they always carry a cellphone to keep the home office informed of their whereabouts.



On the afternoon I caught up with them, Horman and Baca already had been challenged by a dog and had to leave a trailer park empty-handed. They had the right location, but didn't know which door to knock on. And they couldn't just ask around, because neighbors might guess why the health department is tracking someone down, and that would be a breach of medical privacy.



They next called on a 64-year-old laborer, whom we're identifying only as Larry for those same privacy reasons. He agreed to talk with them, in hopes of warning other people about the substantial risks of syphilis.



Baca and Horman explained how some diseases, like syphilis, are "reportable" meaning that as soon as Larry was diagnosed, the doctor had to inform the county, which is why they were at his door.



Larry told them he's already had penicillin delivered intravenously and is healing fine.



The conversation got tougher as Baca tried to understand the extent of Larry's infection by showing him graphic pictures of sores and rashes.



"So, another symptom of secondary syphilis is the loss of hair," she explained. "So, you suddenly lose some hair. You're thinking, 'What's going on?' In a couple of weeks, it resolves. And you're still infected. So do you recall any of these symptoms?"



"I do," Larry said, smiling. "And I would probably say that the lesion, I think you called it, I think occurred it was probably about 10 years ago."



That means Larry was living with syphilis for at least a decade without knowing it.



Many people who have syphilis are asymptomatic meaning they are carriers of the bacteria but show no obvious symptoms. And that makes the infection tougher to fight.



Also, the fact that the disease was, for a time, nearly eradicated in much of the United States, means some younger doctors don't readily recognize the symptoms and signs.



Larry said that he used to have sex with multiple partners he found on Craigslist, but he can't remember any names.



After such a long time, it's too late to track down those people, Baca recalled, crestfallen. Still, she insisted, her time wasn't wasted.



"Being out in the field, you find individuals and you get that public health intervention that is crucial," she said.



David Harvey, the executive director of the National Coalition of STD Directors, echoed that the efforts of fieldworkers like Baca and Horman are vital.



"Disease intervention specialists are doing heroic work," he said. "They're helping to navigate and get people into care."



Twenty years ago, Harvey said, there were as many as 4,000 disease intervention specialists like Baca in the U.S. Now, because of public health costs, the number is down to about 1,400.



Baca said she'll continue the work, prioritizing high-risk populations like men who have sex with men and pregnant women.



The public health officer for Clackamas County, Dr. Sarah Present, said syphilis in newborns can cause serious neurological complications and even death.



"We have now multiple cases of congenital syphilis in our county just in this year," Present noted, "whereas that had been fairly unheard of for at least the last decade, if not more."



Partly because of that surge in syphilis among babies, Clackamas now dedicates more resources to aggressively tracking down partners and encouraging testing, Present said even if those notifications might lead to family strife.



"We do our absolute best to have the 1/8first person diagnosed3/8 talk to their partners for us," said Present. "We don't want to have to be the bad guys. However, we can be a partner for people who have the infections and help them figure out the best way to control the spread of the disease further."



A study released by Clackamas County earlier this summer shows rates of syphilis have increased 1,300 percent over eight years in part, because the numbers involved used to be so small.



"Within the last year, we have seen our numbers dramatically increase to the point I'm quite concerned about it," Present said.



And Clackamas is no outlier. A new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that over the past several years, the number of gonorrhea cases has increased 67 percent, and syphilis cases are up 76 percent.



The director of the CDC's national center for STDs, Dr. Jonathan Mermin, said the nation is sliding backward.



"It is evident the systems that identify, treat and ultimately prevent STDs are strained to the near-breaking point," he said.



Scientists say there are many reasons for the national increase from the rise in antibiotic-resistant bacteria, to the ease of finding anonymous sex in an era of cellphone hook-up apps.



Public health departments in the United States have substantial power. In their effort to prevent the spread of disease, they are allowed to inspect, treat and quarantine anyone even without consent. That power originates in English common law, which finds the rights of an individual can be limited for the common good.



The most famous example is perhaps the Long Island, N.Y., cook, Mary Mallon, better known as "Typhoid Mary." She was an asymptomatic carrier and transmitter of typhoid in the early 1900s, and was forcibly isolated for years by New York public health officials.



Nobody's advocating such draconian measures now, especially for sexually transmitted diseases. But public health departments can exercise significant power over certain infectious diseases (such as drug-resistant tuberculosis) that are more broadly contagious because they are airborne.



Clackamas County and the two other counties that make up the Portland metro area have received substantial state and federal grants to help pay for extra public health outreach.



They are taking several steps to stop the transmission of STDs like strengthening prevention activities, enhancing screening, testing high-risk populations and educating the public. The counties also try to better support people who test positive; expand investigations; and unite community leaders on this important issue.



As Baca and Horman visited with Larry on his front porch, the man thought back to when he first realized he was very sick. Once he found out why his health was failing, he said, he started to take the infection seriously. "Because, really truly, for me," he said, "it was going to be a matter of life and death."



Getting the chance to save lives is why Baca and Horman do this work, they said, even if it's uncomfortable sometimes.



A few minutes later, the women climbed back into the car they'd left parked in a spot where getting away would be easy just in case Larry wasn't so accommodating. They checked their map and the next name on their list.



"There are those areas where you're entering a property and there's no one in sight," Baca said, "and dogs can be scary. You have to run very fast if you see them."



This story is part of a partnership that includes Oregon Public Broadcasting, NPR and Kaiser Health News.
Square, Inc. provides payment and point-of-sale solutions in the United States and internationally. The company's commerce ecosystem includes point-of-sale software and hardware that enables sellers to turn mobile and computing devices into payment and point-of-sale solutions. It offers hardware products, including Magstripe reader, which enables swiped transactions of magnetic stripe cards; Contactless and chip reader that accepts EMV chip cards and Near Field Communication payments; Chip card reader, which accepts EMV chip cards and enables swiped transactions of magnetic stripe cards; Square Stand, which enables an iPad to be used as a payment terminal or full point of sale solution; and Square Register that combines its hardware, point-of-sale software, and payments technology, as well as managed payments solutions. The company also provides Square Point of Sale software; Cash App, which provides access to the financial system, allowing customers to electronically send, store, and spend money; Caviar, a food ordering platform for restaurants to offer food ordering, pickup and delivery, to their customers; and Square Capital that facilitates loans to sellers based on real-time payment and point-of-sale data. Square, Inc. was founded in 2009 and is headquartered in San Francisco, California.

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The following companies are subsidiares of The Travelers Companies: 10762962 Canada Inc., 350 Market Street LLC, 8527512 Canada Inc., Aetna Life and Casualty Co, American Equity Insurance Company, American Equity Specialty Insurance Company, Aprilgrange Limited, Arch Street North LLC, Auto Hartford Investments LLC, Bayhill Restaurant II Associates, Camperdown Corporation, Constitution State Services LLC, Discover Property & Casualty Insurance Company, Discover Specialty Insurance Company, F&G UK Underwriters Limited, Farmington Casualty Company, Fidelity and Guaranty Insurance Company, Fidelity and Guaranty Insurance Underwriters Inc., First Floridian Auto and Home Insurance Company, Gulf Underwriters Insurance Company, IHP Capital Partners Fund VIII L.P., Northbrook Holdings Inc., Northfield Insurance Company, Northland Casualty Company, Northland Insurance Company, Phoenix UK Investments LLC, SPC Insurance Agency Inc., Select Insurance Company, Simply Business Holdings Inc., Simply Business Inc., St. Paul Fire and Marine Insurance Company, St. Paul Guardian Insurance Company, St. Paul Mercury Insurance Company, St. Paul Protective Insurance Company, St. Paul Surplus Lines Insurance Company, Standard Fire Properties LLC, Standard Fire UK Investments LLC, TCI Global Services Inc., TPC Investments Inc., TPC U.K. Investments LLC, The Automobile Insurance Company of Hartford Connecticut, The Charter Oak Fire Insurance Company, The Dominion of Canada General Insurance Company, The Family Business Institute LLC, The Phoenix Insurance Company, The St. Paul Companies Inc., The Standard Fire Insurance Company, The Travelers Casualty Company, The Travelers Home and Marine Insurance Company, The Travelers Indemnity Company, The Travelers Indemnity Company of America, The Travelers Indemnity Company of Connecticut, The Travelers Lloyds Insurance Company, TravCo Insurance Company, Travelers (Bermuda) Limited, Travelers Brazil Acquisition LLC, Travelers Brazil Holding LLC, Travelers Casualty Company of Connecticut, Travelers Casualty Insurance Company of America, Travelers Casualty UK Investments LLC, Travelers Casualty and Surety Company, Travelers Casualty and Surety Company of America, Travelers Casualty and Surety Company of Europe Limited, Travelers Commercial Casualty Company, Travelers Commercial Insurance Company, Travelers Constitution State Insurance Company, Travelers Distribution Alliance Inc., Travelers Excess and Surplus Lines Company, Travelers Global Inc., Travelers Indemnity U.K. Investments LLC, Travelers Insurance Company Limited, Travelers Insurance Company of Canada, Travelers Insurance Designated Activity Company, Travelers Insurance Group Holdings Inc., Travelers Lloyds of Texas Insurance Company, Travelers London Limited, Travelers MGA Inc., Travelers Management Limited, Travelers Marine LLC, Travelers Participacoes em Seguros Brasil S.A., Travelers Personal Insurance Company, Travelers Personal Security Insurance Company, Travelers Property Casualty Company of America, Travelers Property Casualty Corp., Travelers Property Casualty Insurance Company, Travelers Seguros Brasil S.A., Travelers Syndicate Management Limited, Travelers Texas MGA Inc., Travelers Underwriting Agency Limited, Ultramar Travel Management, United States Fidelity and Guaranty Company, Xbridge Limited, Zensurance Brokers Inc., and Zensurance Inc..
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..
The Toronto-Dominion Bank, together with its subsidiaries, provides various personal and commercial banking products and services in Canada and the United States. It operates through three segments: Canadian Retail, U.S. Retail, and Wholesale Banking. The company offers personal deposits, such as chequing, savings, and investment products; financing, investment, cash management, international trade, and day-to-day banking services to businesses; and financing options to customers at point of sale for automotive and recreational vehicle purchases through auto dealer network. It also provides credit cards; real estate secured lending; auto finance; consumer lending; point-of-sale payment solutions for large and small businesses; wealth and asset management products, private banking, investment advisory, and trust services to retail and institutional clients; and property and casualty insurance, as well as life and health insurance products. The company also provides capital markets, and corporate and investment banking services, including underwriting and distribution of new debt and equity issues; advice on strategic acquisitions and divestitures; and trading, funding, and investment services to companies, governments, and institutions. It offers its products and services under the TD Bank and America's Most Convenient Bank brand names. The company operates through a network of 1,085 branches, 3,440 automated teller machines, and 1,223 stores, as well as offers telephone, digital, and mobile banking services. The Toronto-Dominion Bank was founded in 1855 and is headquartered in Toronto, Canada.

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The book we are planning is what Steven and I hope will be an honest and loving portrait of my mentor and friend, Kurdewan explained in an email. A true insiders look at Bills life, his work, his vision, his values and his legacy. Bill was a teacher, and we want to try to pass along his lessons in the way that he would have wanted.
Troy

Workers were still putting the finishing touches Thursday morning on an entranceway, but that didn't stop St. Peter's Health Partners from celebrating the completion of its $105 million Troy Masters Facilities Plan to modernize health care at Samaritan and St. Mary's Hospitals.

Physicians, nurses and other staff gathered outside the new main entrance of Samaritan Hospital on a sunny late summer day for speeches and to pay tribute to the late Heinrich Medicus, a Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute physics professor whose $10 million gift gave the fundraising campaign a major boost.

"Heinrich knew he wouldn't be here for the opening, but he knew the building would be here," said Norman Dascher, retired Samaritan hospital president. "I'm sure all of you will keep his name forever special."

Dascher recalled the work that hospitals perform, from the care Samaritan staff provided following the Berlin propane truck disaster that killed 10 people in 1962, to the hospitals and staff that remained behind to care for victims as flood waters rose this week in the Carolinas in the wake of Hurricane Florence.

The new five-story patient pavilion is named in honor of Medicus, while a new cancer center at St. Mary's Hospital was named in honor of his late wife Hildegard.

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Other projects included a four-story parking garage, moving the Samaritan Hospital School of Nursing to St. Mary's, a new women's imaging center also at St. Mary's, a new emergency department at Samaritan, and new intensive care, progressive care and medical/surgical units at Samaritan.

On Thursday night, a special reception was planned to thank contributors.
As negotiations on an updated North American trade pact continued to intensify this week in Washington D.C., Quebec's top delegate to New York said he is confident the talks will successfully result in a trilateral agreement.

"The (U.S.) team led by Wilbur Ross, and Robert Lighthizer and Larry Kudlow is a very competent team. They know their stuff. They're not new kids on the block," Jean-Claude Lauzon, the Quebec delegate general, said. "You heard the president say 'we want a good deal, we want a fair deal, and we want a deal that will make America better and great again...That's what he's trying to do. And we do exactly the same thing."

Mexico and the U.S. late last month came to a tentative agreement on a bilateral trade deal largely focused on bringing workers in the auto industry back to the United States. President Donald J. Trump has said he would be willing to move forward on the deal with Mexico and leave Canada out of the new North American Free Trade Agreement  something many organizations and industry leaders have strongly opposed.

"There is an unprecedented volume of goods flowing between the three countries and significant integration of operations, which makes a trilateral agreement an imperative," the National Association of Manufacturers said in a statement. "Such an agreement secures the jobs of our manufacturing workers and strengthens the critical U.S.Canada trading relationship."

Albany, Schenectady and Troy produced over $4 billion in export goods in 2016, and over 51,000 New Yorkers were employed by Canadian-owned firms, according to the International Trade Administration.

Data from the ITA also showed that nationally, U.S. jobs supported by exports increased dramatically from 1.2 million jobs in 2006, up to 10.7 million in 2016.

"There have been some discussions, and you've seen that in the media: 'Well, there could be NAFTA with Mexico and Canada will be left out'" Lauzon said. "Well, what does that do to the business model between the two largest trade partners in the world?"

According to a 2016 report published by the major Canadian bank Desjardins, which details trade between the U.S. and Quebec, New York imported over 37 percent more goods from Quebec that the next closest U.S. state  Texas.

"Of the 50 American states, the one that carries the most weight in terms of the value of Quebec exports is the state of New York," the report stated.

New York State sends nearly 20 percent of its total exports to Canada, and exports just from New York to Canada make up nearly a full percent of all U.S. exports, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

Uncertainty has loomed throughout the NAFTA negotiation process as Canadian officials have made clear their commitment to two major provisions regarding dairy and a dispute resolution mechanism.

Trump has bemoaned Canada's protected dairy market, which has a government-set import quota that keeps market supply and prices stable.

U.S. dairy producers are seeking access to the Canadian market, where dairy farmers are adamantly opposed to U.S. producers pushing products into the market at lower prices, Lauzon said.

"Canada will not make major concessions on dairy, for sure. Canada will not make major concessions on chapter 19, absolutely not," Lauzon said. "And Prime Minister Trudeau said it day one."

Chapter 19 refers to a provision in the original NAFTA agreement that allows countries the ability to challenge another nation's tariff decisions in front of an expert panel. This dispute resolution mechanism was designed to leave decisions up to an impartial arbiter, rather than nations themselves.

Opponents of chapter 19, however, say it infringes on national sovereignty and weakens a country's ability to levy its own tariffs.

Both sides have been hesitant to relent.

On the U.S. side, Trump's fiery approach resulted in a beneficial deal with Mexico  something Lighthizer is aiming to do as he negotiates this week with Canadian foreign minister Chrystia Freeland.

Some of the new provisions in the U.S.-Mexico deal include requiring that car companies manufacture 75 percent of an automobile's total worth in North America, up from 62.5 percent. Additionally, 40 to 45 percent of a vehicle must be made by workers earning at least $16 an hour a provision meant to directly benefit the U.S. and, ostensibly, Canada.

"If you were to look at a train that is currently running in the subway system in New York City that is manufactured by Bombardier," Lauzon said, referring to the Montreal-based transportation company, "you're going to have a very hard time defining whether it's a Canadian product or an American product."

After well over two decades since its implementation, supply chains for companies in all three NAFTA nations are jointly linked, Lauzon said. This means that during manufacturing and assembly, a single product could cross national borders several times.

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"Because of our two countries' nearly $700 billion trading relationship, our economies are inextricably linked, and our manufacturing workers depend on a strong deal that keeps us all growing and prospering for generations to come," the NAM statement read.

President Trump has described NAFTA as "the worst trade deal ever" because, he said, it sent jobs south to Mexico, where companies sought cheap labor. Evidence, though, suggests automation is to blame for job losses the manufacturing and automotive sectors have seen in recent decades, and private sector companies have almost universally supported the trade pact.

"Madame Freeland said: 'you know, there will be ups and downs, there will be fireworks. We will slam the door. We will be mad at each other, and at the end of the day, we'll come up with a solution,'" Lauzon said.

U.S. negotiators have Oct. 1 set as the date to have a new deal done, before Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador's new presidential administration assumes power in Mexico, and before Quebec holds elections for its national assembly.

Although negotiations could extend past Oct. 1, Lauzon said he does not see the coming election affecting negotiations in any way.

"Quebec is free trade, it's part of our DNA," he said. "So, whoever wins the election is a free-trader. That is very very clear, so I don't see any issue there."

Canada and Mexico remain the United States' chief trading partners, and in 2017 bought one fifth of all U.S. manufactured goods  more than the next 10 U.S. trading partners combined, according to NAM data.

Lauzon never mentioned Trump's name, and cautiously suggested that Canadian negotiators were less than aware of the Trump administration's endgoal with NAFTA discussions.

"Initially, we thought we were in a modernization process with NAFTA," Lauzon said. "We are in a re-negotiation process with NAFTA."

Trump, following the G7 summit in early June, described Trudeau as "very dishonest and weak" and inflamed tensions between the two neighbors.

With much of the rest of the world like Europe, Asia and South America experiencing varying levels of disarray, Lauzon said he hopes any political tensions in North America will ease and a less uncertain investment landscape will return.

"North America is one of the maybe one or two areas in the world that has predictability, stability, and is also a democracy and a society of law," Lauzon said. "So that is to your advantage as Americans and to our advantage as Canadians, to make sure we do not allow any harm to this reality."

"My personal hope," he said, "is that reason will prevail, at the end of the day."
Once I was assigned to cover a brouhaha at the Kinsey Institute for sex research. A controversial director had agreed to leave quietly in return for a monetary consideration and the universitys promise not to comment on the dust-up. But one researcher was willing to tell me the facultys side of the story  late at night in the library stacks marked: Asian Languages. That scene-setter gave readers a picture of what was at stake.
Did you see Cardi B at the Times Union Center last October? Or, going way back, Lil Wayne when he played the Washington Ave. Armory over a decade ago?

If you were at either of those shows you've attended an event promoted and marketed by Greg Kornegay, the 45-year-old Latham resident who spent the better part of this decade booking and promoting concerts in Queens and western Massachusetts, before using A Little Booking Agency to bring shows to the Capital Region.

Kornegay started out as a local promoter, working with booking agencies to help turn out audiences for shows, such as that aforementioned Lil Wayne gig. Roughly five years ago, Kornegay decided to expand from promotions to booking and out of that, A Little Booking Agency arose.

"I got more serious in this market about two years ago," Kornegay said. "I wanted to be home a little more."

Changing his primary focus from a major media market like New York City to Albany required a change in approach. In the city, just the sheer volume of people and venues make it easier to book an artist and get an eager audience. When booking shows in the 518, Kornegay focuses on a specific audience.

"My main audience is high school and college students," he said. "The Capital District has so many colleges with not a lot to do. If I give them a show at the right ticket price, they'll turn out. If you take the colleges out it's a totally different market.

"We do really well with the younger market," Kornegay continued. "I try to make everything affordable. We don't make a lot, but we can do a lot of shows and make a little bit each time."

To plan out potential shows, Kornegay and the team of local photographers, videographers, promo experts and street team at A Little Booking Agency run polls on social media to see what up-and-coming artists are resonating with that demographic.

"We try, we all try to sit down and talk and do polls," he explained. "We see who everybody is talking about, see who's trending and find realistic artists (cost-wise) and work with them."

That's how Kornegay booked ascendant talents like Rich the Kid and Saweetie for a concert last May. It also led him to book Juice Wrld, the 19-year-old rap phenom whose single "Lucid Dreams" hit No. 3 on the Billboard charts this summer, for a Sept. 29 appearance at the Palace.

If you go If you go Juice Wrld with Lil TJay and Johnny 2 Phones And special guests DJ Static, DJ Siroc, DJ Unruly, DJ Complete and DJ Ken3tic When: 8 p.m., Saturday Where: Palace Theatre, 19 Clinton Ave., Albany Tickets: $37.50-$75.50 For more info: palacealbany.org or alittlebookingagency.com See More Collapse

The Juice Wrld show was a particularly troublesome booking experience for A Little Booking Agenct. In his words, "it just became a mistake." Originally, he had wanted to book a concert with Juice Wrld, Lil Baby and Gunna for the Times Union Center. Due to scheduling conflicts, all three artists are due for separate shows.

After that headache came another: an abrupt change in venue. Juice Wrld was scheduled to take place at the Empire Plaza Convention Center. But after issues arose, A Little Booking Agency had to scramble for a new location three weeks before the scheduled date. The concert was finally relocated to the Palace Theatre.

Kornegay has found easy partners in the Palace, Albany Convention Center and Times Union Center. But generally speaking, it's easier for him to book an artist than it is to secure a venue. He attributes that logistical hurdle to an antiquated notion of hip-hop and its audience.

"When it comes to the older generation, their view of hip-hop is dated, like it's 1990. It's not a bunch of 'hood kids,'" Kornegay said. "My daughter goes to Shaker High. It's a bunch of suburban kids listening to hip-hop.

"The top 10 songs on Billboard are hip-hop," he continued. "Other markets, they're dying to bring hip-hop artists there. Look at what's the trend, why not bring them in? Secure the venue and make sure 10 people don't interfere with the 10,000 that will come and enjoy it."

Jim Shahen Jr. is a frequent contributor to the Times Union.
Albany

In the 10 months since Al Franken resigned from the U.S. Senate, a surprising number of Democrats have pinned blame for his downfall on Kirsten Gillibrand.

New York's junior senator was among the first Democratic politicians to call on Franken to step aside amid allegations of sexual impropriety, and her recommendation carried unusual weight. Gillibrand was a Franken friend who made her national reputation battling sexual assault in the military

Franken's bad behavior notwithstanding, some on the left branded Gillibrand an opportunist, and their anger has endured.

Last month, the Huffington Post reported that many big Democratic donors, including mega-contributor George Soros, have crossed Gillibrand off the list of 2020 presidential candidates they are willing to support. The donors believe Franken was pressured to resign too soon for too little.

Rank-and-file Democrats echo the sentiment. When I was on radio station WAMC's Roundtable last week, a quick mention of a Gillibrand presidential run led to several responses like this one:

"Let's not forget Kirsten Gillibrand acted as a political opportunist and an unwitting tool of right-wing dirty tricks in ousting Al Franken from the Senate," listener Steven Sinkoff wrote in an email. "Permanent asterisk by her name."

The Franken-as-martyr narrative intensified as the Senate Judiciary Committee questioned Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh earlier this month. Many Democrats fondly remember Franken's aggressive grilling of Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch during his nomination process and rued that the Minnesotan wasn't around to question Kavanaugh with the same force.

The hearing, of course, happened before the sexual-assault allegation that threatens to derail Kavanaugh's nomination became public.

Now that the allegation is known, consider this: Had Franken not resigned, he would have been one of the men charged with questioning Kavanaugh's accuser, assuming that hearings on the charge, tentatively scheduled for Monday, indeed happen.

Would a Franken role in the hearing have been awkward for Democrats?

For sure.

Would it have led to reasonable charges of Democratic hypocrisy?

Absolutely.

Beyond the terrible optics, it would have been difficult for Democrats to argue that the charge against Kavanaugh means he is unfit while ignoring accusations against Franken. That alone would seem to vindicate Gillibrand's call that Franken resign.

"We should demand the highest standards, not the lowest, from our leaders," she said then.

I contacted Sinkoff, who lives in Massachusetts, to ask if the Kavanaugh accusation had softened his view of Gillibrand's decision. It hadn't.

"I still think Kirsten Gillibrand's behavior was demagoguery under the umbrella and disguise of the #MeToo movement," Sinkoff said, while also stressing that the accusation against Kavanaugh is not comparable to those Franken faced.

That's true. Franken was accused of nothing as serious as attempted rape.

But his defenders tend to downplay the gravity of the charges against him. The accusations include more than that infamous photo of Franken pretending to grab Leeann Tweeden's breasts during a USO tour. Seven other women accused Franken of groping them or otherwise acting inappropriately.

Lindsey Menz, for example, said Franken "put his hand full-fledged on my rear" and "wrapped (it) tightly around my butt cheek" while he and she posed for a photo at the Minnesota State Fair.

More Information Contact columnist Chris Churchill at 518-454-5442 or email cchurchill@timesunion.com See More Collapse

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Franken was a senator, not a comedian, at the time. He violated both Menz and the dignity of his office.

Gillibrand wasn't available Wednesday for an interview, but she has been asked repeatedly about the treatment of Franken and the resulting backlash. It came up again during a recent appearance on radio station WNYC.

"I believed those women and wanted to say what I thought," Gillibrand told host Brian Lehrer. "He was entitled to due process, but he wasn't entitled to my silence."

Not all the criticism is from the left. Chele Farley, the Republican candidate running against Gillibrand, on Wednesday accused her opponent of "selective outrage" driven by "political expedience."

Farley noted that Gillibrand, who lives outside Troy, has weighed in against Kavanaugh but has failed to join Gov. Andrew Cuomo and other Democrats calling for the resignation of embattled Cohoes Mayor Shawn Morse, accused of domestic violence.

"She's selective, shall we say, with her complaints," Farley said. "She's willing to throw anyone under the bus if it fits her political agenda."

Gillibrand faced similar charges when, in 2017, she said Bill Clinton should have resigned during the Monica Lewinsky scandal  though she had campaigned with Bill and Hillary Clinton just a year earlier.

Eyebrows also shot up when, in a February interview on "60 Minutes," Gillibrand blamed the "lens of upstate New York" for conservative positions she once held on immigration and gun control.

But none of that means Gillibrand was wrong about Franken and his awful behavior. In the end, the blame for his fall should belong to just one person.

A guy named Al Franken.

cchurchill@timesunion.com  518-454-5442  @chris_churchill
No one can accuse President Donald J. Trump of not looking on the bright side.

On Wednesday, Trump toured the the North Carolina coast to see firsthand the destruction wreaked by Hurricane Florence, which the president called a "tough hurricane, one of the wettest we've ever seen from the standpoint of water."

Trump was particularly struck by a storm-tossed yacht that smashed into a New Bern home and lodged against the house's deck.

ALSO: Tavern refuses to host campaign event with Trump Jr., Guilfoyle

Trump looked at the yacht, asking, "Is this your boat?" The owner said no.

Trump replied, "at least you got a nice boat out of the deal."

Speaking to reporters, Trump said the owner told him his insurance company didn't want to pay for the damage to his home. "We're going to find out," he said. "We're going to find out the name of the insurance company."

"I think it's incredible what we're seeing," the president added. "This boat just came here. They don't know whose boat that is," he said. "What's the law? Maybe it becomes theirs."

Hey, if no one claims it, finders keepers, right?

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---

Read Mike Moffitt's latest stories and send him news tips at mmoffitt@sfchronicle.com.

Start receiving breaking news emails on wildfires, civil emergencies, riots, national breaking news, Amber Alerts, weather emergencies, and other critical events with the SFGATE breaking news email. Click here to make sure you get the news.
One person was injured after a Drug Enforcement Agency plane with three onboard for a training mission crashed Wednesday afternoon in west Houston near Sugar Land, according to Fort Bend County Sheriff Troy Nehls.

The single-engine Cessna plane was supposed to land at Sugar Land Regional Airport around 3 p.m., but instead crashed into a power line before reportedly hitting two cars, according to Federal Aviation Administration spokesman Lynn Lunsford.

The pilot also reported engine problems before the crash, Lunsford said. The National Transportation Safety Board is the lead investigator on the crash, but FAA will also assist with the investigation.

The plane clipped power lines and struck several cars when it plunged onto Voss Road, west of Highway 6. The Fort Bend County Sheriff's Office tweeted the plane was leaking fuel, but didn't catch fire.

'Imagine you're just driving down Voss Road in Fort Bend County and all the sudden an aircraft strikes your vehicle," said Nehls. "That would be enough to put me in cardiac arrest. We are very fortunate that this was not much more catastrophic than what it was.

A DEA spokesman said the plane had a mechanical problem and the pilot tried to land on the road. The injured passenger  who was not identified  was taken to a hospital and later released.

The plane caused significant damage to one of the vehicles, officials said.

Oniel Kurup posted on Facebook about the incident, writing a plane crashed into his Tesla and shared pictures of the accident.

"Want to let all my friends and family know that Aarav and I are completely fine.. GOD and this CAR truly saved us today," Kurup wrote on Wednesday. "Not a scratch on us. No one believed me when I called them to let them know a plane crashed into me. Tesla, people thought It was a prank call."

AT THE SAME TIME: Plane crashes into pond at Fort Bend County airport

Nehls commended the pilot for bringing the plane onto the street, rather than in the neighborhood.

Alfredo Aviles, who lives nearby, said he saw the plane coming down moments before it crashed.

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"I was in my backyard taking my dogs out. Next thing you know, I heard the plane coming down, but it sounded weird. It didn't sound like a normal plane coming down. I looked up and I saw the last two seconds of it coming down," Aviles said. "Next thing you know, I hear a loud boom and tires screeching. I was freaking out."

FATAL CRASH: La Porte plane crash victims identified as father and son

The neighborhood nearby lost power as a result of the downed lines and CenterPoint Energy crews are on scene working to restore electricity.

Dhuha Bazzaz, a resident of the area said neighbors described the sound as lightning. "It's a horrible thing. It landed during school time, the are kids around," Bazzaz said. "People are out of their home at that time. It's rush-hour."

Another plane crashed into a ditch at the Houston Southwest Airport in Arcola, according to Fort Bend County Sheriff's Office. The pilot was the only person on the small plane and did not sustain injuries.
ALBANY - An Albany County jury is deciding the fate of a former college student charged in an undercover police sting with trying to arrange sex with a 13-year-old girl and her "stepfather" in 2016 in a Colonie hotel room.

Dante Camacho, 23, of Albany, is charged with attempted second-degree rape and attempted second-degree criminal sex act, the legal term for sodomy.

The jury of nine women and three men began deliberations about 1:30 p.m. Wednesday following jury instructions from Albany County Judge Peter Lynch.

Camacho's family occupied the front seat of a courtroom bench during closing arguments. Officers from the State Police investigation, which included Colonie police, were also in court.

Police arrested Camacho, a New Jersey native and at the time a student at the College of Saint Rose, on Nov. 11, 2016, at the Radisson hotel on Wolf Road.

Camacho, who was carrying condoms, drove to the hotel to meet the would-be girl and her supposed stepfather  an undercover cop.

After he entered the hotel room, Camacho sat on the bed, Assistant District Attorney Jennifer McCanney said in her summation.

She said the man in the room told Camacho the girl was in the shower, to which Camacho replied, "Oh, great!"

Camacho was arrested.

"He was going there to have sex with a 13-year-old child," McCanney told the jury.

On Monday and Tuesday, Camacho testified in his own defense, saying he nearly left the hotel room but knocked and went inside. Had there been an actual 13-year-old inside being abused and he did not stop it, he testified, he would not be able to live with himself.

Camacho said he believed it he was engaged in "role playing" and that he never intended to have sex with a 13-year-old. He said he believed the man was offering a "threesome" with himself and an adult girlfriend.

In one text message, Camacho told the undercover officer, "You're into role-playing. I'm in," his attorney, Cheryl Coleman, told the jury in her closing argument.

The undercover officer never mentioned role-playing to Camacho. The officer also mentioned to Camacho twice that the girl was 13.

Coleman told jurors her client was young and naive and confused.

"Kings and governors, senators and presidents have been stupid, foolish, for sex. They have been gullible. They have thought not with their brain," Coleman said. "On what planet does the DA get to infer that Dante is smarter?"

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Coleman said: "Maybe you think that (Camacho) should have realized what's going on. Maybe you think anybody would know. But is it shocking ... is it inconceivable that a college kid would be stupid and naive and not use good judgment in seeing things that other people might think are obvious?"

Testimony showed that the sequence of events that led to Camacho's arrest began Oct. 24, 2016, when Camacho said he wanted to get revenge on his live-in girlfriend, whom he believed had cheated on him.

Camacho logged onto craigslist.com and went into the casual encounters section. He spotted an ad that said: "Older and younger looking for fun in Albany area. Stepfather here and we're into some strange things so please do not judge. Contact me only if you are real."

Camacho wrote back: "Hey there. The stranger the better. I don't judge. I love everything taboo. What things you have in mind? I'm Dante by the way."

The undercover cop, in turn, told Camacho: "Me and my 13-year-old stepdaughter are looking for a third to join our party. Must be (drug and disease) free. No judgment here. Hit me back if interested."

Camacho and the undercover cop, who went by the name "Chad," moved their conversation to text messages where their language turned profane. Camacho testified the language was "locker room talk."

They eventually agreed to meet Nov. 11, 2016, at the hotel.

The judge sent the jury home at 4:30 p.m. and deliberations will resume at 9 a.m. Thursday.
Albany

Former East Greenbush school superintendent Angela Nagle's life was "turned upside down," when, after a difficult pregnancy and the birth of premature twins, school board members began shunning her and let her go in 2016, after more than a decade of success with the district, her lawyer Ryan Finn said.

Now, Nagle is suing the district in federal court, seeking $3.9 million for lost wages and benefits as well as unspecified damages for pain and suffering.

She alleges that school board members discriminated against her based on her sex and her pregnancy. Since her contract as superintendent was not renewed in 2016, shes been on dozens of interviews but has found no employment, and is now seeking mental health assistance, Finn said Wednesday during opening arguments in the lawsuit before Magistrate Judge Andrew Baxter in New Yorks Northern District Court.

Shes blackballed, Finn told jurors. The reality is, as it stands right now, her career is over.

School district defense lawyers, though, say they will present a different view which calls into question Nagles account of why the district let her go.

The plaintiffs credibility will be central to this case. It will be challenged, said Malcolm OHara, who is representing the district.

The fact that she was not offered a new contract is not in and of itself discrimination, added OHara, who is with the Bartlett, Pontiff firm of Glens Falls.

The trial is expected to run for at least two weeks.

Under questioning by Finn, who is with the Jones, Hacker, Murphy law firm in Troy, Nagle painted a picture of a driven school administrator who made a steady upward climb: from an associate degree at Hudson Valley Community College to a bachelor's at Siena College and then graduate work at the College of St. Rose and University at Albany.

She eventually earned a Ph.D.  all the while working as a teacher then an administrator in local school districts. She started as a physical education teacher in the Bethlehem district and spent time in other schools until she was coaxed to join East Greenbush in 2003.

By 2008 she was named superintendent, which she described as a capstone goal

More for you Ex-East Greenbush school leader sues

I was very ambitious. I was very driven, said Nagle, who grew up in Colonie and is a Shaker High School graduate.

At East Greenbush, according to the testimony, Nagle was credited with pulling the district out of a longstanding slump that emerged under prior leaders.

During her tenure, several schools came off of a state watch list for poor performance, and the districts ranking in a local business magazine skyrocketed. Budgets, which had barely been passed by voters in prior years, were being approved with ease. The number of grievances filed by the teachers union had dropped sharply.

Nagles status, though, changed in the summer of 2014, when she disclosed she was pregnant with twins and was expecting a difficult birth.

She had initially kept quiet about her condition. I had had several miscarriages, she said. For all of those reasons we were hoping for the best but I just wanted to wait a little bit longer.

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By that fall, she told board members that she might need more time off than expected due to difficulties with her pregnancy. Things began to unravel at that point, with some board members questioning whether she should stay on. Comments were made. Well dont you just want to stay home with your kids?  she said, adding I loved to work.

Nagle Complaint by rkarlin on Scribd

She started maternity leave in December 2014  earlier than expected and a month later her twins were born prematurely. In November, she had asked about her contract renewal but was told the timing just isnt right.

Superintendents and school boards typically start talking about contract renewals at least a year to 18 months before their current agreements expire. Nagles ran through June 2016.

She came back to work in March 2015, once the babies -- a boy and girl -- were out of the intensive care unit. While staffers expressed empathy and support, Nagle said she was getting the cold shoulder from board members.

The apparent rejection prompted her to file a complaint in May 2015 with the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. The Commission said it couldn't determine if federal law was violated by said Nagle could go ahead and sue.

Her relationship with then-School Board President Shay Harrison, had become just about non-existent. From regular meetings and talks with him, he was suddenly unavailable, said Nagle.

He was always busy, she said. Eventually, He said I no longer feel like I should be talking to you. You should call your attorney.

Harrison and other board members are expected to be called as witnesses during the trial. The testimony is scheduled to resume on Thursday.

rkarlin@timesunion.com 518 454 5758 @RickKarlinTU
Albany

Dante Camacho claimed he was "role-playing" the day he drove to a Colonie hotel to meet a 13-year-old girl.

The only person playing a role was the undercover cop pretending to be the girl's stepfather and who caught Camacho in a police sting.

On Thursday, an Albany County jury determined a new role for Camacho: convicted sex offender.

The former College of Saint Rose student faces up to 4 years in prison after the jury of nine women and three men found him guilty of attempted second-degree rape and attempted second-degree criminal sex act, the legal term for sodomy.

Jurors began deliberations Wednesday and delivered the verdict shortly after returning to court Thursday.

The jury appeared to be unmoved by Camacho's characterization of the 2016 case. He spent Monday and Tuesday testifying in his own defense.

Camacho, 23, painted the child sex sting case as one big misunderstanding involving "locker room talk"  the term future President Donald Trump used during the 2016 campaign to describe a 2005 "Access Hollywood" recording of Trump boasting about grabbing women's genitals.

Testimony showed Camacho and the undercover officer both used graphic and X-rated language while discussing the description of the girl and possible scenarios. Camacho said it was "locker room talk."

"At no point in time did I think that was a 13-year-old," Camacho testified. He said a photo of the would-be girl that he received from the undercover officer "easily" looked like a person who was at least 18.

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Camacho testified as his family sat in the front row of the third-floor courtroom of County Judge Peter Lynch.

Camacho repeatedly testified he thought it was a "role-playing situation" and that he was interested in having a "threesome" with adults.

But Assistant District Attorney Jennifer McCanney developed a different picture of Camacho.

Camacho bought condoms for the encounter, a receipt for which was found on him. At one point, Camacho told the undercover officer, "I would love to get some one-on-one with (the girl). Yeah man, that sounds awesome."

A spokeswoman for Saint Rose said Camacho last attended the school during the fall 2017 semester.
A North Greenbush man pleaded guilty to three felonies on Thursday in connection with a drug-fueled stretch of robberies.

Charlie P. Hardt, 26, pleaded guilty in Rensselaer County Court to three felony counts of robbery.
Marina City, which was largely funded with union money, was initially marketed to union workers and others in the middle class. In contrast, by virtue of its design, prices and secluded location, Lake Point Tower has always attracted a more affluent crowd. Celebrities like Ryne Sandberg and Sammy Sosa have lived there. The tower, which now houses about 1,600 people in its 857 condominiums, some of which are combined units, went condo in 1988. (Studios start at $350,000 and the multi-unit apartments have sold for $2 million and up, according to property manager Mitchell Rose.)
Honda owners may be at greater risk to have their car targeted by thieves in New York, according to a new report released Tuesday.

The National Insurance Crime Bureau has released its annual results on the nation's most often stolen cars, including break-out rankings for each state.
ALBANY  Four out of six of the so-called "turncoat" Senate Democrats toppled in this month's primary election have yet to concede in their respective races.

Former IDC Sens. Jeff Klein, Jesse Hamilton, Tony Avella and David Valesky have not called to congratulate their opponents, prompting speculation that they may be considering third party bids in the general election, since each has the endorsement of the Independence Party line.

The Independent Democratic Conference, an eight-member group of breakaway Democrats that held a power sharing majority with the Senate Republicans since 2011, was disbanded in April as part of a Democratic reunification plan orchestrated by Gov. Andrew Cuomo.

Six former IDC members were casualties of insurgent, progressive campaigns that seized on Democratic voters' increased awareness  and growing distaste  for the coalition in light of the Trump administration's attacks on liberal policies.

Grassroots groups rallying to elect "true Democrats," such as NO IDC NY and True Blue NY, sprang up and gained traction in the final stretch leading up to the primary. The anti-IDC movement was boosted, in part, by the stunning victory of 28-year-old Democratic Socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in Queens in June's congressional primary, which shattered perceptions about the power of incumbency and establishment politics.

Klein, the Bronx-based Democratic powerhouse, who founded and led the IDC for seven years, was perhaps the most surprising upset of the Sept. 13 election. He was defeated by Alessandra Biaggi, who formerly worked for Cuomo and presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.

A campaign spokesman for Biaggi confirmed that the two have "exchanged calls, but have not spoken."

A late-night message Klein left for Biaggi on primary night was apparently unintelligible.

Long-time Democratic strategist Hank Sheinkopf said he did not think Klein would stay in the race, and rumors have swirled that Klein may be eyeing a judgeship. Sheinkopf attributed the former senator's silence to the shock at last Thursday's outcome.

"Look, it's a tough loss for him. He's been a senator for 15 years, and before that he was in the Assembly ... and he was pilloried for somewhat being connected to Trump," Sheinkopf said.

Hamilton, in Brooklyn, has similarly not spoken to his victorious opponent Zellnor Myrie, a campaign spokeswoman has confirmed.

Former New York City Comptroller John Liu, who toppled Avella in Queens with 52.67 percent of the vote, had previously worked with the senator in the New York City Council and challenged Avella for his seat in 2014.

The two men have never had a great relationship, and Avella ignores him when they find themselves at the same event, Liu said.

"Look, four years ago, when it was clear on NY1 [that he won], I called him at 10 o' clock. I would have clearly taken his call. I was hoping for a call, but wasn't holding my breath," he said.

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Before the primary, Avella told a Chinese-language media outlet that he didn't intend to campaign on the Independence Party line if he lost.

In Syracuse, the match-up between Sen. David Valesky and Rachel May is apparently still contested. May, who drew 8,013 votes compared to Valesky's 7,407, is holding out on declaring victory until all the absentee ballots are counted on Sept. 20.

Monica Klein, partner at Seneca Strategies, who consulted on many of the IDC challengers' races, said that the former IDC members are likely still processing the loss.

"Sometimes when you cut the head off the chicken, the body doesn't realize it's dead for a few minutes," she said.

Historically, holding a legislative seat  a rare elected position that does not carry term-limits was seen as a job guarantee. Now that guarantee is over, according to Sheinkopf.

"I don't think they know what to do. The very mere fact that that many incumbents can get wacked in one day, in a place where incumbency is the rule," he said, "it's a shock."

A seventh longtime Democratic incumbent, Sen. Martin Dilan, lost to 27-year-old Democratic Socialist activist Julia Salazar in Brooklyn. Dilan, who was was elected to seat in 2002, publicly congratulated his opponent, praising Salazar's courage in the face of a slew of negative stories calling into question details of her biography.

"Ms. Salazar has shown great resolve throughout the campaign and I applaud her tenacity, especially when the world seemed to challenge her. That courage is not typical. It will no doubt come in handy in Albany," Dilan said in a statement.
Washington

President Donald Trump on Wednesday bluntly questioned the allegation that Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh sexually assaulted a fellow high school student over 30 years ago, and Republicans warned the accuser that the window was closing to tell her story before a confirmation vote.

Trump's skepticism, the most explicit challenge top Republicans have so far mounted to Christine Blasey Ford's credibility, came as GOP Senate leaders tried to firm up support for Kavanaugh. A potentially climactic Judiciary Committee showdown is scheduled for next Monday with both Ford and Kavanaugh invited, but her attendance is uncertain, casting doubt on whether the hearing will be held at all.

Ford has said she wants the FBI to investigate her allegation before she will testify. Democrats support that, but Trump and Senate Republicans have been emphatic that it won't happen.

Leaving the White House to survey flood damage in North Carolina, Trump conceded that "we'll have to make a decision" if Ford's account proves convincing. Despite that glimmer of hesitancy, which few other Republicans have shown publicly, the president stood firmly behind the 53-year-old Kavanaugh.

"I can only say this: He is such an outstanding man. Very hard for me to imagine that anything happened," Trump said.

The Republicans are resisting all Democratic efforts to slow and perhaps block what once seemed a smooth path to confirmation that would promote the conservative appeals court judge by the Oct. 1 opening of the Supreme Court's new term. Kavanaugh's glide to approval was interrupted last weekend when word of Ford's allegation became public, but GOP senators are showing no signs of slowing their drive to confirm him as quickly as possible.

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Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, wrote to Ford's attorneys that the hearing was still scheduled for Monday morning, and he pointedly said she must submit her written statement by 10 a.m. Friday "if she intends to testify" that day.

One key Democrat, Missouri Sen. Claire McCaskill, announced Wednesday she will vote against Kavanaugh, depriving Trump's nominee of a possible swing vote.

McCaskill called the sexual assault allegations against Kavanaugh troubling, but said she based her decision on the judge's views on issues like presidential power and "dark money" in campaigns. She's the first of five undecided Senate Democrats in competitive re-election races to come out against Kavanaugh.

The struggle between the two parties over the Kavanaugh allegation illustrates how they are trying to navigate a political climate in which the #MeToo movement of outing sexual abusers has galvanized many female voters.
Those who were in the race months ago and challenged incumbent Mayor Emanuel showed guts. Theyre the good cheddar. You might not agree with them, but they showed they cared enough about Chicago to challenge the dragon. People like Lori Lightfoot, Paul Vallas, Garry McCarthy and so on.
Hurricane Florence has drenched eastern North Carolina with more than 30 inches of rain, an all-time record for the state. Last year, Hurricane Harvey stalled over Houston and dumped more than 60 inches of rain, an all-time record for the whole country. Also last year, Hurricane Maria ravaged the island of Puerto Rico and caused, according to an independent study, nearly 3,000 deaths.

Welcome to the new normal.

Tropical cyclones are nothing new, of course. But climate scientists say that global warming should make such storms wetter, slower and more intense  which is exactly what seems to be happening. And if we fail to act, these kinds of devastating weather events will likely become even more frequent and more severe.

Climate change is a global phenomenon. Authorities in the Philippines are still trying to assess the damage and death toll from Super Typhoon Mangkhut, a rare Category 5-equivalent storm that struck the archipelago on Saturday with sustained winds of 165 miles per hour. Mangkhut went on to batter Hong Kong, and now, as it weakens, is plowing across southern China.

Every human being on the planet has a stake in what governments do to limit and adapt to climate change, including those who, like President Trump, prefer to believe global warming is some kind of hoax. I doubt the citizens of Wilmington, North Carolina  a lovely resort town that Monday was turned into an island by widespread flooding  feel there is anything illusory about the hardship they're going through.

As I noted last month, scientists are now cautiously making the first serious attempts to gauge the impact of climate change on specific weather events such as storms, monsoons, droughts and heat waves.

The most ambitious attempt to quantify the link between climate and weather  a blue-chip international consortium called World Weather Attribution  has not yet made an attempt to estimate any possible effect global warming may have had on Florence or Mangkhut. But another group of researchers, the Climate Extremes Modeling Group at the Stony Brook University School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences, estimated Sept. 12 that Florence would produce 50 percent more rainfall than if human-induced global warming had not occurred.

You don't have to be a scientist to understand why that makes sense. We know from direct measurement that the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has increased by more than 40 percent since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, when humans started burning fossil fuels on a large scale. We know from direct observation that carbon dioxide traps heat. We know from direct measurement that both atmospheric and ocean temperatures have been rising sharply. We know from direct measurement that warmer water takes up more space than cooler water, which is the main reason why ocean levels are rising.

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We know that warmer water is more easily evaporated, which means there is more moisture available to fuel a storm like Florence or Harvey  and to be released by such storms as rainfall.

At the very least, we should be trying to reduce carbon emissions and keep global warming to a manageable level. With the landmark Paris Agreement, the nations of the world agreed to try. But Trump foolishly pulled the United States  the world's second-biggest emitter of carbon dioxide, behind only China  out of the deal.

The administration has already proposed weakening restrictions on carbon emissions from automobiles and coal-fired power plants. And last week, there were reports that the administration also wants to loosen rules governing the release of methane, which traps even more heat than carbon dioxide.

Another news item from earlier this month should be instructive: A cargo ship is presently making the journey from Vladivostok, on Russia's Pacific coast, to the German port of Bremerhaven via the Arctic Ocean, rather than taking the usual southern route through the Suez Canal and the Strait of Gibraltar. Until now, the northern route has always been impassible because it was blocked by polar ice. But because of climate change, a lot of the ice has melted.

Climate change is no longer theoretical. It is real, it is all around us, and it is going to get much worse.
Thurles man Dr Jim O'Shea had a very special evening at The Source Library this week when he launched, not just one, but two books.

A fine gathering attended a very informal sociable evening as Professor Willie Nolan, who hails from the same Gortnahoe Glengoole parish as the author, launched the books and gave an insightful commentary on the novel I'll Meet you at the Roundy O - an autobiographical account of childhood for the author, although the names and places mentioned have been changed. Still, the characters, events and locations featured in the book are instantly recognisable to those in the know and provide a humorous trip down memory lane for all those in 'the gang'.

Dr Jim's second book - Understanding and Healing the Hurts of Childhood stems from his work as a counsellor  a profession embarked upon having retired as Principal of Our Lady's Secondary School in Templemore. The book looks at how childhood largely dictates how our adulthood will be and examines the important question of attachment between a child and their caregiver. The book suggests that if the bond is broken, for whatever reason, the negative consequences will be seen in adulthood. But, the publication also discusses how to heal the associated distresses.

Dr Jim was surrounded by his family and many friends in the lovely setting of The Source Library where host Mary Guinan was on hand to offer a welcome. She spoke of the relationship Dr Jim has with the library going back over 30 years and said that whatever he sets out to do, he gives it his everything.

Dr Jim, a former teacher in the CBS Secondary School in Thurles, told of how this first foray into self publishing allowed him to have greater control of the content of his books  he has a number of other books to his name also. He was especially pleased to see his family, neighbours, counselling colleagues, and set dancing friends in attendance as well as many former classmates and, former teaching colleagues and pupils. He had a special welcome for Mr Christy Shortt, who taught Jim in 5th and 6th class, and his wife Marie. Christy, he said, gave him a great love of Irish and he modelled his own teaching methods on those of Christy  the best compliment he could possibly give him, he said.

Professor Willie Nolan spoke at length about the parish of Gortnahoe and Glengoole and suggested that Jim O'Shea is up there with the best of Slieveardagh writers including Charles J Kickham and de Vere Hunt.I'll Meet You at the Roundy O is a compellingly accurate account, he said, and is rather akin to looking at a faded photograph of yourself. The book is an unusual one, he added, but a very well crafted and presented story which is well worth a read.

Dr Jim explained that he had wanted to write an account of his youthful days, and did so many years ago. However, he had been unhappy with it and left it in the attic of his home for many years, before revisiting and eventually burning it. He then sat down and began to write it again and from the pages jumped I'll Meet You at the Roundy O - a book he is very happy with and delighted to be bringing to fruition.

The books are available locally and are well worth a read.

Congratulations to Dr Jim on a unique achievement  two books launched in one evening.
Deloitte is calling on ambitious Tipperary companies to apply for the 2019 Best Managed Companies Awards, in association with Bank of Ireland.

The awards programme showcases the success of indigenous companies and acknowledges the contribution they make to the Irish economy. The network of Best Managed Companies developed over the last decade now comprises 137 companies representing 26 of the 32 counties, employing over 46,000 people and delivering 2.4bn in export sales, all of which represent excellence in management abilities and practices across all the key functions of their business.

Tipperary winners

Last year, two Tipperary companies, Clancy Construction and Surecom Network Solutions, were among the winners.

This year, given the increasing importance indigenous companies will play against the backdrop of a strong domestic economy, coupled with considerable change in international markets, the programme will be looking for companies which are preparing to scale in innovative and strategic ways.

Commenting, Anya Cummins, Partner, Deloitte said:

With the economy stronger than at any point in the last decade, its time to focus on making it sustainable. Critical to this will be the growth of indigenous companies who will remain the work horses of the economy. These companies must be encouraged and supported so they can continue to grow and scale, ultimately creating more jobs in the economy.

We have been working with some of these companies for over 10 years through the Best Managed Companies programme and its clear the ambition and commitment to prosper and become leaders in their industries on a global level is present in Ireland. We are looking for similarly ambitious companies to apply for this years awards and get the support and recognition that the programme offers.

Andrew Graham, Director, Bank of Ireland Corporate Banking said:

Were delighted to support the Best Managed Companies programme again this year, and to mentor some of the fastest growing and successful Irish companies. Our involvement last year with the initiative was an extremely fulfilling experience and we are proud to be involved again this year. Bank of Ireland works with indigenous and ambitious companies across the country, and so the issues and challenges they face are familiar to us. We look forward to bringing this experience to the table as mentors to this years entrants and to assisting them to scale and compete on an international stage.

The Best Managed Companies judging panel considers companies from every perspective, critiquing management performance and practices under the four pillars of strategy, capability, commitment, and financials. They also evaluate companies and their performance in relation to their peers, and the industries that they are operating in, to determine management success.

For further information and details of how to enter the awards, visit www.deloittebestmanaged.ie.

The closing date for entries is Friday 28 September 2018. Companies that are successful at the end of this process will be announced in March 2019.
[September 19, 2018] Harvest Properties Recapitalizes Constitution Square in the Heart of Berkeley

Harvest Properties and joint-venture partner, Independencia Asset Management LLC ("IAM"), have completed the acquisition and recapitalization of a mixed-use property located in the heart of Downtown Berkeley, California, for an undisclosed amount. Known as Constitution Square, the property is a three-story, 36,000 square foot building located at 2168 Shattuck Avenue directly adjacent to the Downtown Berkeley BART Station and its newly renovated BART Plaza. Since 2015, Harvest and previous partner, The Roxborough Group, completed over $1.5 million in capital improvements, including lobby and elevator cab renovations, a roof replacement and upgrades to the HVAC and security systems. The partnership also completed creative office space improvements and upgraded the building's retail suites, yielding a highly improved, modern work environment which ultimately resulted in increasing occupancy from 54 percent to 100 percent today. "From the outset of our partnership, Roxborough shared our vision to revitalize Constitution Square from top to bottom and transform it into a stabilized, institutional quality property," said Kathryn Collins, Partner at Harvest Properties. "Following that successful partnership, we are equally excited to forge ahead with a new partner and opportunity to own this asset over the long term. We remain very optimistic about the Downtown Berkeley market and its prospects for continued growth and believe we will be able to leverage our knowledge of the asset and strong tenant relationships to create additional value in this next phase of ownership," added Collins. Marc Perrin, Managing Partner at Roxborough, stated, "Our significant efforts resulted in the exceptional transformation of a once dated and dilapidated traditional office building to a vibrant and modern creative office space and we are very pleased to have worked closely with Harvest to achieve this resul in such a supply constrained San Francisco Bay Area submarket."



This investment represents Harvest's third office acquisition in Downtown Berkeley and its first venture with Independencia. "Independencia is thrilled to embark upon this new partnership with Harvest through the purchase of Constitution Square, our second commercial investment in the Bay Area and the first deployment of our newly formed core location fund. We believe it provides an attractive opportunity to access a robust and growing market in an area with significant barriers to entry and strong demand drivers," Chief Operating Officer, Felipe Figueroa, said. Adam Lasoff, Seth Siegel and Steve Hermann at Cushman & Wakefield represented Harvest and Roxborough on the transaction.

About Harvest Properties Harvest Properties is a vertically-integrated, full-service commercial real estate investment firm that specializes in the acquisition, reposition, entitlement, development, management and financing of commercial property, primarily through joint-venture investments in Northern California. Over the last decade, Harvest has become an established leader in the marketplace by generating attractive returns for its financial partners, providing creative solutions and outstanding service. Harvest Properties' portfolio comprises approximately ten million square feet of office, industrial, R&D and retail properties in the San Francisco Bay Area. For more information, please visit www.harvestproperties.com. About The Roxborough Group The Roxborough Group is a private real estate investment firm founded in 2013. Headquartered in San Francisco, California, the firm has a broad mandate to invest in all real estate asset classes, both directly and with operating partners. Roxborough focuses on opportunistic, value-add and transitional real estate assets, high-yielding real estate debt, real estate-related operating businesses, as well as high quality, lower risk and longer duration real estate investments. For more information, please visit www.theroxboroughgroup.com. About Independencia Asset Management LLC - IAM IAM is a real estate private equity firm headquartered in Miami with an additional office in Boston. Since incorporating in US in 2004, IAM has invested in more than 18 million square feet of core-plus and value-add office, retail and industrial assets in 18 states with ten different local operating partners. This investment is part of IAM's newly established investment vehicle, "Fondo de Inversion Independencia Core US I", which is a publicly traded fund listed on the Chilean stock exchange. IAM's parent company, founded in Santiago in 1990, currently manages the largest real estate investment fund in Chile and is considered the country's industry leader in terms of size and fund yields. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180919005902/en/

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[September 19, 2018] Brink Asset Global Blockchain Korea Meetup to be held soon

SEOUL, South Korea, Sept. 18, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- On September 21 to 22, 2018, the "Global Blockchain Korea Meetup" hosted by Brink Asset will be held in Seoul, South Korea, KOLs from the domestic and foreign venture capital institutions, blockchain entrepreneurs and many industry experts at home and abroad will attend the conference. Nearly 200 elites from various industries will gather to create a new business model. This event will attract the attention of global blockchain practitioners. Grace Fan, the CEO of Brink Asset and the organizer of the conference, said: "Currently, the blockchain industry is still in a disorderly and chaotic stage, with the lack of guidance on trends and direction in the market. Many companies are fighting alone. Brink Asset, as a one-stop investment bank for digital assets in the field of blockchain across the globe and has organized this conference with the aim of creating a blockchai n project with outstanding service. Based on the idea of linking and communication, we hope to strengthen mutual contact, deepen the understanding, enhance the friendship, promote the cooperation between high-quality project parties and professional investment agencies, and to work together and provide a win-win solution for all parties involved."



In 2018, a large number of entrepreneurs and capitals from around the world flooded into the blockchain industry,competing at full speed. Many projects showed a state of "fast-lived and fast-dead". The industry is inseparable from the correct guidance. Brink Asset is committed to building a future blockchain ecosystem, adhering to the spirit of sharing with the core value of building on others. Brink Asset will assemble the team's existing resources of regulatory agencies, investment institutions, public relations and extensive developers, and provide overall landing guidance and integration of market resources for blockchain entrepreneurs. The event will be divided into two days. The first day is the media day and a number of blockchain media will conduct in-depth interviews with the participating project parties and investment institutions. The 22nd is scheduled as a formal meeting with a road show, a discussion panel, and a live lottery. In addition, there will be a dinner party hosted by Brink Asset for the guests after the meeting, which will provide the projects with more opportunities to communicate with investors.

Brink Asset global blockchain Korea meetup will also receive full coverage from many well-known blockchain media in Korea. The meeting is going to be wonderful and the spark of ideas is bound to provide a feast for the blockchain entrepreneurs. View original content to download multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/brink-asset-global-blockchain-korea-meetup-to-be-held-soon-300715851.html SOURCE Brink Asset

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4. The prosecution's last witness, Jose Torres, said he had a clear view of McDonald being shot. Torres was driving on Pulaski Road when he spotted McDonald walking down the middle of the street, look toward officers shouting commands at him and then collapse to the street as shots rang out. The motorist wasnt sure how many bullets were fired, but it was enough to upset me. I said, Why the f are they still shooting him when he was on the ground? Torres testified. Torres son, Xavier, who was in the car with him, gave similar testimony earlier in the week.
[September 19, 2018] Wecash Named One of the Top 50 Chinese Global Brands by Facebook and KPMG

BEIJING, Sept. 20, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Wecash, a fintech company that specializes in financial products powered by smart phones, was named one of the 2018 Top 50 Chinese Global Brands by Facebook and KPMG. Wecash was featured in the list alongside other industry leaders such as Tencent, Ant Financial, Huawei and Xiaomi. The ranking was based on over 2,000 surveys completed by consumers aged between 18 and 55 in eight markets outside of China. The surveys comprehensively evaluated the brand awareness, relevance, and reputation of Chinese companies in major global markets, as well as their brand influence based on Facebook data. "Wecash is honored to be rcognized as the Top 50 Chinese Global Brands," said James Chan, CEO of Wecash Asia Pacific. "This recognition is a testament to the hard work of our global team to bring access to financial services to the underserved using advanced technology." The 2018 Top 50 Chinese Global Brands follows other recent recognitions such as being named to KPMG's list of the 50 Leading Global Fintech Innovators for four successive years from 2014 to 2017, as well as CB Insights' 2017 Fintech 250 list in 2017.



To date, Wecash has collaborated with more than 50 financial institutions, completing transactions for more than 40 million users in China, Brazil, and in numerous countries in the Asia Pacific region. About Wecash

Wecash is a global fintech company that leverages the power of artificial intelligence, big data, and mobile technology to provide financial services to millions of underserved users. Wecash helps to connect financial institutions and users using advanced machine-learning technology. For more information, see www.wecashgroup.com. View original content to download multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/wecash-named-one-of-the-top-50-chinese-global-brands-by-facebook-and-kpmg-300715855.html SOURCE Wecash Technology Co., Ltd.

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[September 20, 2018] Europe's elder boom and baby bust: Leaders seek innovation to improve retirement security

Europe's rising longevity and falling birthrates are pressuring its retirement systems like never before, as its elderly populations grow relative to its working-age populations. By 2050, nearly one in three Europeans will be over the age of 65, a trend that promises to strain the finances of retirees and their families, as well as the societies in which they live. "Longer life is a gift, but it creates real and profound implications for pension schemes and retirement plans that help people live dignified lives as they grow older," said Professor David Blake of the Pensions Institute at Cass Business School in the United Kingdom. "Making sure people's retirement income is both adequate and lasts a lifetime are two of the great challenges of our time." To tackle such issues, Professor Blake created and hosts the annual International Longevity Risk and Capital Markets Solutions Conference, referred to this year as "Longevity 14." This year's conference, the leading gathering on longevity issues for pension, insurance, capital market, actuarial and academic professionals, as well as policymakers, takes place on September 20-21 in Amsterdam. Leading figures will discuss longevity risk as well as the responses needed by pension funds and insurance companies to manage that risk. Other subjects include intergenerational risk-sharing, and the latest trends in mortality. One key topic: What explains higher mortality rates in recent years, and why are longevity improvements coming at a slower pace than in the recent past? Amsterdam is an apt location for Longevity 14. The Netherlands has the highest income replacement rate (retirement income as a portion of pre-retirement earnings) among the world's developed countries (101 percent, OECD 2016), a level greater than Germany (50.5 percent), Japan (40 percent), the United States (49.1 percent), and the U.K. (29 percent). But even the Dutch system is considering major reforms because of the relentless wave of demographic changes that have seen its ctizens live longer and its birthrate fall measurably. Many nations are considering shifting more responsibility for retirement away from pension funds and corporations and toward individuals, notably with defined contribution plans.



Amy Kessler, senior vice president and head of Prudential Financial, Inc.'s (PFI) longevity risk transfer business, and a key speaker at the conference, will discuss how nations, including the Netherlands, can support people to save, invest and secure lifetime income, even in retirement systems where individuals are primarily responsible for their own risk. Kessler will discuss how understanding human behavior leads to program design that improves retirement decisions and outcomes. In addition, she will demonstrate that lifetime income solutions can be flexible enough to address an individual retiree's needs, and prudent enough for insurers and regulators to be confident in their risk profile and management. "We can create retirement security. It takes time and discipline, but we can do it. For every person we help to achieve financial wellness and a secure retirement, we will dramatically improve the last thirty years of their lives," says Kessler. "There are best practices we can leverage from work done all around the world to improve the retirement security of real people."

Since 2005, the International Longevity Risk and Capital Markets Solutions Conferences, organized by the Pensions Institute at Cass Business School, have been the major international events bringing together leading industry and academic representatives, as well as policymakers, to discuss longevity risk, as well as the market and government responses necessary for managing that risk. Since 2011, PFI has sponsored this conference series. The company's research and thought leadership from this event is widely read among actuaries, insurers, academics and finance professionals. About Prudential Financial, Inc. Prudential Financial, Inc. (PFI), headquartered in the United States (NYSE: PRU), is a financial services leader with more than $1 trillion in assets under management as of June 30, 2018, and has operations in the United States, Asia, Europe, and Latin America. The company's diverse and talented employees are committed to helping individual and institutional customers grow and protect their wealth through a variety of products and services, including life insurance, annuities, retirement-related services, mutual funds and investment management. Prudential Financial, Inc. of the United States is not affiliated with Prudential plc, a company headquartered in the United Kingdom. 1008829-00001-00 PFI does not provide legal, regulatory, or accounting advice. An institution and its advisors should seek legal, regulatory, investment and/or accounting advice regarding the legal, regulatory, investment and/or accounting implications of any of the strategies described herein. This document does not constitute an offer or an agreement, or a solicitation of an offer or an agreement, to enter into any transaction (including for the provision of any services). Insurance and reinsurance products are issued by subsidiaries of PFI and neither PFI nor any of its subsidiaries is authorized to write longevity reinsurance within the European Economic Area. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180919005021/en/

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Kaiam Intros Ultra-Low Loss Flattop Mach-Zehnder Athermal AWG (MZ-AAWG) to Address 5G Fronthaul Requirements

Kaiam, a leading manufacturer of advanced PLC device solutions and optical transceivers for HDC applications, today announced availability of an ultra-low loss Mach-Zehnder Athermal AWG (MZ-AAWG) to address industrial temperature 5G fronthaul requirements. This family of devices offers a flat passband with ultra-low loss using the on-chip combination of Mach-Zehnder and AAWG technology.

The MZ-AAWG combination allows AWG technology to achieve a flat passband with almost zero loss. This is accomplished by synchronizing the Mach-Zehnder with the AAWG and provides the benefits of low loss comparable to the peak of a Gaussian AAWG, but over a much wider passband with industrial temperature performance from -40C to +85C.

Kaiam is the first company to offer this patented design in production volumes, with deliveries currently undeway to worldwide rollouts of 5G solutions.







The low-loss and good isolation characteristics of MZ-AAWG over a wide specification passband make it the candidate of choice for industrial temperature applications in terrestrial mobile fronthaul deployments. The same technology can be used in a cyclical manner addressing different ITU bands/channel plans for upstream and downstream traffic.

About Kaiam Corporation

Headquartered in Newark, California, with large-scale manufacturing in Livingston, Scotland, Kaiam is a leading manufacturer of optical transceivers for hyperscale data centers. Founded in 2009 by leading technologists from the optical networking industry, the team has a record of delivering breakthrough products that change the rules of the marketplace. Current products include 100Gb/s LightScale optical transceivers optimized for data centers and a range of planar lightwave circuits (PLCs). For more information, visit www.kaiam.com and follow on Twitter (News - Alert) at: @KaiamCorp.

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[September 20, 2018] Contentive, Published by Accountancy Age: Top UK Accountancy Firms Hit Record 15bn Fee Income in 2018

LONDON, September 20, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- The top UK accountancy firms hit a record 15.2bn in total UK fee income in the last financial year, according to figures released by Accountancy Age The Accountancy Age Top 50+50 2018 ranking, published today, revealed that fee income generated by the Top 50+50 firms was up 1bn on last year's figures and 2.1bn up on 2016. The ranking, compiled from data submitted by the top firms in the UK, demonstrated widespread growth in the industry, with 90 out of the 100 firms posting an increase in revenue in the past 12 months. Retaining its place at the top of the table, PwC recorded total UK fee income of 3.6bn, followed by Deloitte on 3.4bn, EY on 2.4bn and KPMG on 2.2bn. However, Deloitte registered the strongest growth at 11.18% up on last year's fee income, compared to 5% for PwC, 9.2% for EY and 3.8% for KPMG. The ranking also highlighted a shake-up among the Top 20 firms, with Menzies falling one place to 21 on the 2018 list and FRP Advisory posting impressive growth of 30.26% to leap to 18, up from 21 in 2017. Elsewhere, UHY Hacker Young recorded a decline of -10.5% to fall from 15 to 19. Raffingers capitalised on strong growth of 33% to rise to 80 in this year's ranking, up 5 places from 2017. But it was Taylorcocks that made the biggest gains in the table, up 10 places to 65 with 13m in feeincome.



UK accountancy firms have also invested in talent in the past 12 months with the number of partners across the Top 20 firms rising to 5131, up from 5078 in 2017. Emma Smith, managing editor of Accountancy Age, said: "This year's Top 50+50 ranking demonstrates that accountancy firms are thriving in the face of uncertainty, with the majority of practices navigating compliance, technological and Brexit challenges to make gains on 2017. As we await further political and economic uncertainty in the coming months, I'm confident that we'll see UK accountancy firms adapt and respond to ensure continuing growth in 2019."

Accountancy firms responding to this year's Top 50+50 survey appeared confident about the future outlook. When asked by Accountancy Age whether they expected partnership profits to increase or decrease in the next year, 75% of firms said they would expect an increase, 22% said they would remain the same, while only 3% said they would fall. When looking at professional staff, 79% said that they would expect headcount to rise, 20% said it would remain the same, and just 1% of firms said that they would expect it to decrease. Smith added: "These results are extremely positive. UK accountancy firms are expecting to further invest in people over the next year, signalling that the accountancy industry is ready to seize upcoming opportunities, generate profit increases, and secure new business opportunities." View the full Top 50+50 2018 ranking. About Contentive At Contentive we are reinventing B2B media and events, committed to connecting buyers and sellers in B2B markets globally. Our people, technology-led approach and commitment to innovation sets us apart. Staying up-to-date in a fast-changing industry is a major challenge for professional executives. Contentive develops smart ways to curate and create content that cuts through the noise and captures the attention of busy executives to help them succeed in their roles. In turn, Contentive offers content marketing solutions to suppliers that want to influence these communities; a cost-effective, reliable, scalable source of qualified leads. Our current communities are in Fintech, Digital Marketing, HR and Finance, where Contentive has firmly established a reputation for building the most engaged communities, appreciated by professionals and suppliers alike. Founded in 2012, Contentive now has around 80 employees across London and New York and continues to grow. We are backed by the Blenheim Chalcot group, leading technology investors with annual sales of over 300M. For further information, please visit: http://www.contentive.com

For further enquiries, please contact Emma.Smith@contentive.com

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[September 20, 2018] Less Than Half of Parents with College-Bound Students Report They Have Completed the FAFSA

Forty six percent of parents with college-bound students report that they have completed the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA)1, according to a survey commissioned by Discover Student Loans. The survey also showed that nearly a quarter (22 percent) of students currently in college or recently graduated said they don't know what the FAFSA is. Why parents and students chose not to complete the FAFSA The beliefs that they would not qualify or didn't need federal aid were the primary reasons both parents and students chose not to complete the FAFSA. 50 percent of parents with students currently in school or recently graduated said they didn't fill it out because they felt they wouldn't qualify for federal aid. When this segment of students were asked, 35 percent reported not filling it out because they felt they wouldn't qualify.

42 percent of students in college or recently graduated didn't fill it out because they felt they didn't need federal aid. Regional differences exist Views on the ability to qualify and whether or not survey respondents need financial aid varied geographically. In the South, 62 percent of parents of current or recently graduated students did not apply for the FAFSA because they didn't believe they would qualify versus 38 percent in the West. Sixty-seven percent of current or recently graduated students from the Northeast said they didn't fill out the FAFSA because they didn't need to apply for federal aid versus 25 percent in the West. "Filling out the FAFSA is a critical step in the college financing process since schools use it to determine eligibility for federal, state and institutional aid, including grants and scholarships," said Nicole Straub, vice president for Discover Student Loans. "The FAFSA becomes available October 1 and families should plan to fill it out every year a student is in school, even if they feel they won't qualify or don't need the aid, becaue most people will be eligible for some aid."



According to the National Center for Education Statistics, about 72 percent of undergraduate students received some form of financial aid, which includes grants, federal student loans, and work-study.2 Who is actually filling out the FAFSA?

The survey responses show that parents and students aren't taking the opportunity to fill out the FAFSA together. Less than a quarter of parents with college-bound teens responded saying they filled out the FAFSA with their child.

43 percent of parents with students in college or recently graduated reported that they or another parent filled out the FAFSA themselves. "It's important for parents and students to communicate early and often about paying for college, and the FAFSA should be a part of those conversations," said Straub. "If families work together to fill out the FAFSA, review their award letters and create a plan to pay for college, it can minimize any surprises and help everyone understand their future financial responsibilities." Discover Student Loans offers tools and resources to help parents and students understand the college financing process. Discover Student Loans provides private student loans and is not affiliated with the FAFSA or federal financial aid. For more information about Discover Student Loans, please visit www.discover.com/student-loans. 1 FAFSA is a registered service mark of the U.S. Department of Education.

2 https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2018/2018466.pdf About the Survey The Discover Student Loans national online survey of 2,015 students, former students and parents in the United States was conducted between April 26 - May 7, 2018. Four similar surveys were administered among specific target audiences, by Research Now, an independent survey research firm. Target (News - Alert) audiences included Parents of "College Bound" Students (age 16-18); Parents of Current and Former (Recently-graduated, age 18-24); Current and Former (Recently-graduated, age 18-24) Students. The margin of sampling error was +/-3 percentage points with a 95 percent level of confidence. About Discover Discover Financial Services (NYSE: DFS) is a direct banking and payment services company with one of the most recognized brands in U.S. financial services. Since its inception in 1986, the company has become one of the largest card issuers in the United States. The company issues the Discover card, America's cash rewards pioneer, and offers private student loans, personal loans, home equity loans, checking and savings accounts and certificates of deposit through its direct banking business. It operates the Discover Global Network comprised of Discover Network, with millions of merchant and cash access locations; PULSE, one of the nation's leading ATM/debit networks; and Diners Club International, a global payments network with acceptance in 190 countries and territories. For more information, visit www.discover.com/company. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180920005157/en/

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[September 20, 2018] E-commerce Technology RevLifter Wins 'Best Use of Data' at CJ You Awards

LONDON, September 20, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- RevLifter, an AI-powered voucher code solution, has been lauded for its use of data at a prestigious affiliate marketing award ceremony in Santa Barbara, California. The company claimed Best Use of Data at the CJ You Awards, part of the CJU conference, for its work with global shoe brand Clarks, fending off competition from PC brand Dell to win one of the most coveted prizes on the night. The awards recognize advertisers, publishers and agencies who have demonstrated an "innovative use" of the affiliate channel over the past year. Some of the winners from 2018 include Barnes & Noble, Walgreens, PayPal and Hotels.com. RevLifter works by utilizing data from a customer's live basket to assess their value in the eyes of a merchant. That information is cross referenced with the merchant's own goals - like the customers they want to convert and the roducts they want to highlight - and a layer of insight from machine learning to deliver a personalized incentive to the user.



Its tools are allowing brands of all backgrounds to capture new customers, reward high spending ones, incentivize those in specific territories, secure full-price sales and much more. Simon Bird, co-founder of RevLifter, said: "To even get nominated for such a prestigious award ceremony for our work with a US client was amazing. To head out to Santa Barbara and come back with the award - it repays the faith we had in our technology and our hard work."

RevLifter's has drawn plenty of critical acclaim over the last couple of months, having also been nominated for Best Use of Data, Best Performance Marketing Campaign (APAC) and Best Performance Marketing Technology at the International Performance Marketing Awards, which takes place in October. The technology was highly commended as an 'Industry Disruptor' at the UK Performance Marketing Awards following a successful launch, a lucrative funding round and a swathe of new client wins. About RevLifter RevLifter is an e-commerce technology that enables retailers to deliver personalised incentives to customers that are in the market to buy. The company was founded in 2017 by Simon Bird (former MD, Savoo) and Ryan Kliszat (former MD, docdata) and is available to advertisers via their affiliate network. CONTACT: Product enquiries: hello@revlifter.com

Press enquiries: pr@revlifter.com

Website: http://www.revlifter.com

+44(0)203-432-2313

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[September 20, 2018] Ant Financial Launches Ant Financial Technology Brand with Full Suite of Technology Products and Services to Support Growth of Financial Institutions

Ant Financial Services Group ("Ant Financial" or "the Company") today announced that the Company would open up a full suite of technology products and services under a new brand, Ant Financial Technology, to support the growth of financial institutions by improving user experience and lowering costs. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180920005319/en/ Ant Financial launches Ant Financial Technology, a new brand supporting the growth of financial institutions, at ATEC 2018 in Hangzhou, China. (Photo: Business Wire) Announcing the launch of the Ant Financial Technology brand at the 2018 Ant Technology Exploration Conference (ATEC) in Hangzhou, Xi HU, Deputy CTO of Ant Financial said, "Since our establishment in 2014, Ant Financial has focused on developing cutting edge technologies to enable inclusive finance. We are pleased that our technology products and services have already been used to improve efficiency and lower costs at approximately 200 financial institutions, including more than 100 banks, over 60 insurance companies, and more than 40 asset management firms and security brokers. Going forward, we will offer a full suite of technology products and services to power the growth of our financial institution partners and help them extend their services to more individuals." Under the new brand, Ant Financial's technology products and services consist of five product portfolios, namely large-scale financial transaction technologies, financial security technologies, financial intelligence technologies, next-generation interaction technologies and blockchain applications. These technologies have withstood the tests of some of the world's mot extreme use cases. For example, in the large-scale financial transaction portfolio, Alipay, Ant Financial's mobile payment and lifestyle platform, was comfortably able to process a record breaking 256,000 payment transactions per second at the peak of the 2017 Singles' Day Shopping Festival.



Ant Financial's technology solutions for financial institutions enable the delivery of services - from payments to wealth management - efficiently and at scale, and the Company's institutional partners have realized concrete gains from implementing these solutions. For example, by implementing two of Ant Financial's large-scale financial transaction technologies - SOFAStack (Scalable Open Financial Architecture), Ant's financial grade distributed framework, and OceanBase, its financial distributed database - PICC Health Insurance increased its policy processing speed by a few thousand times, reduced daily reporting processing time from 4 hours to 6 minutes and shortened new product launch time by 80%. In addition, Bank of Nanjing also leveraged SOFAStack and OceanBase to expand its loan underwriting capacity to comfortably process one million loans per day, with an average processing speed of less than one second. Wenkai ZHOU, Vice President, Bank of Nanjing commented, "The rapid development of financial technology has had a profound impact on the traditional financial industry. To overcome some of the growth challenges of our business, we partnered with Ant Financial to build a distributed digital finance platform. This significantly enhanced our ability to underwrite loans and led us to expand our partnership in a number of other areas."

Financial institutions have increasingly recognized the ability of Ant Financial's technology products and services to streamline operations. In June 2018, Ant Financial announced that it would share a full suite of AI capabilities with asset management companies to increase operational efficiency and reduce costs. In May 2018, banks including Huaxia Bank, China Everbright Bank, Shanghai Pudong Development Bank, China CITIC Bank, and Bank of Tianjin signed strategic cooperation agreements with Ant Financial to support the digital transformation of these banks. Ant Technology Exploration Conference (ATEC) is an annual flagship event that Ant Financial initiated in 2017. The conference brings together global partners and technology experts to explore frontier technologies and innovative ways of using technology to create positive impacts for society. The 2018 ATEC, which is being held in Hangzhou, will feature technology experts from leading financial institutions such as China Construction Bank, Citibank and China Everbright Bank. About Ant Financial Ant Financial Services Group is dedicated to using technology to bring the world equal opportunities. Our technologies, including blockchain, artificial intelligence, security, Internet of Things and computing, empower us and our ecosystem partners to serve the unbanked and underbanked, bringing more secure, transparent, cost-effective and inclusive financial services to individuals and SMEs worldwide. Ant Financial has formed international partnerships with global strategic partners to serve local users in those markets, and we serve Chinese travelers overseas by connecting Alipay with online and offline merchants in popular destinations. By the end of March 2018, together with its global JV partners, Ant Financial served 870 million users worldwide. Brands under Ant Financial Services Group include Alipay, Ant Fortune, Zhima Credit, MYbank and Ant Financial Cloud. For more information on Ant Financial, please visit our website at www.antfin.com or follow us on Twitter (News - Alert) @AntFinancial. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180920005319/en/

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[September 20, 2018] Bioinformatics Market, 2023 - Blockchain Technology and Cloud Computing / Integration of Machine Learning and AI in Healthcare

DUBLIN, Sept. 20, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- The "Bioinformatics Market by Product & Service, Applications, & Sectors - Global Forecast to 2023" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering. The global bioinformatics market is projected to reach USD 13.50 billion in 2023 from USD 7.73 billion in 2018, at CAGR of 14.5% Growing demand for nucleic acid and protein sequencing and the rising applications of bioinformatics in drug discovery, clinical diagnostics, and personalized medicine are key factors supporting the growth of this market. On the other hand, a lack of well-defined standards and common formats for data integration may limit market growth to a certain extent. In this report, the market has been classified based on product & service, applications, sectors, and region. Based on product and service, the bioinformatics market is segmented into knowledge management tools, bioinformatics platforms, and bioinformatics services. In 2018, the knowledge management tools segment is expected to account for the largest share of the market. The bioinformatics platforms segment is projected to grow at the highest rate during the forecast period. This high growth is attributed to an increase in the use of bioinformatics platforms in drug discovery and development. On the basis of applications, the global bioinformatics market is divided into genomics, chemoinformatics and drug design, proteomics, transcriptomics, and metabolomics. In 2018, the genomics segment is expected to account for the largest share of the global bioinformatics market due to the increasing applications of genomics in personalized and preventive medicine. On the basis of sector, the global bioinformatics market is divided into medical biotechnology, academics, animal biotechnology, agricultural biotechnology, environmental biotechnology, and forensic biotechnology. In 2018, the medical biotechnology segment is expected to account for the largest share of the global bioinformatics market. The rising adoption of bioinformatics tools in pharma and clinical applications is driving market growth. In 2018, North America is expected to account for the largest share of the bioinformatics market. The large share of North America is attributed to the continued funding from the government and private sectors for life sciences research. One of the major factors restraining market growth is te lack of well-defined standards and common formats for data integration. Most of the research institutes have their own exclusive identifiers, indexing schemes, and data formats. As data models change frequently, the data integration process becomes difficult. This may limit the growth of the market to a certain extent



Key Topics Covered:

1 Introduction





2 Research Methodology



3 Executive Summary



4 Premium Insights



4.1 Bioinformatics: Market Overview

4.2 Asia Pacific Bioinformatics Market, By Products and Services and Bioinformatics Platforms (2018)

4.3 Bioinformatics Market, By Application

4.4 Bioinformatics Market, By Sector

4.5 Geographical Snapshot of the Bioinformatics Market



5 Market Overview



5.1 Introduction

5.2 Market Dynamics

5.2.1 Drivers

5.2.1.1 Growing Demand for Nucleic Acid and Protein Sequencing Due to Reduction in Sequencing Cost and Technological Advancement

5.2.1.2 Initiatives From Government and Private Organizations

5.2.1.3 Growing Applications of Bioinformatics

5.2.1.3.1 Proteomics and Drug Discovery

5.2.1.3.2 Clinical Diagnostics and Personalized Medicine

5.2.1.4 Number of Collaborations Between Companies and Research Institutes

5.2.2 Restraints

5.2.2.1 Lack of Well-Defined Standards and Common Data Formats for Integration of Data

5.2.2.2 Lack of User-Friendly Tools at Cheaper Prices

5.2.3 Opportunities

5.2.3.1 Blockchain Technology and Cloud Computing

5.2.3.2 Integration of Machine Learning and AI in Healthcare

5.2.3.3 It Giants Investing in the Development of Bioinformatics Solutions

5.2.4 Challenges

5.2.4.1 Management of Large Volumes of Data

5.2.4.2 Lack of Interoperability and Multiplatform Capabilities

5.2.4.3 Growing Competition From In-House Development and Publicly Available Tools

5.2.4.4 Shortage of Skilled Bioinformatics Professionals



6 Bioinformatics Market, By Products and Services



6.1 Introduction

6.2 Knowledge Management Tools

6.2.1 Generalized Knowledge Management Tools

6.2.2 Specialized Knowledge Management Tools

6.3 Bioinformatics Platforms

6.3.1 Data Analysis Platforms

6.3.2 Structural & Functional Analysis Platforms

6.3.3 Other Bioinformatics Platforms

6.4 Bioinformatics Services

6.4.1 Data Analysis Services

6.4.2 Database Management Services

6.4.3 Other Bioinformatics Services



7 Bioinformatics Market, By Application



7.1 Introduction

7.2 Genomics

7.3 Chemoinformatics & Drug Design

7.4 Proteomics

7.5 Transcriptomics

7.6 Metabolomics

7.7 Other Bioinformatics Applications



8 Bioinformatics Market, By Sector



8.1 Introduction

8.2 Medical Biotechnology

8.2.1 Drug Discovery & Development

8.2.2 Clinical Diagnostics and Personalized Medicine

8.2.3 Reproductive Health

8.3 Academics

8.4 Animal Biotechnology

8.5 Agricultural Biotechnology

8.6 Environmental Biotechnology

8.7 Forensic Biotechnology

8.8 Others



9 Bioinformatics Market, By Region



9.1 Introduction

9.2 North America

9.2.1 US

9.2.2 Canada

9.3 Europe

9.3.1 Germany

9.3.2 UK

9.3.3 France

9.3.4 RoE

9.4 Asia Pacific

9.4.1 China

9.4.2 Japan

9.4.3 India

9.4.4 Rest of Asia Pacific (RoAPAC)

9.5 Rest of the World



10 Competitive Landscape



10.1 Market Overview

10.2 Market Ranking Analysis, 2017

10.3 Competitive Situation and Trends

10.3.1 Product Launches

10.3.2 Expansions

10.3.3 Partnership, Collaboration, and Agreement

10.3.4 Acquisition

10.3.5 Other Developments



11 Company Profiles

Thermo Fisher Scientific

Illumina Inc

Agilent Technologies

QIAGEN

Beijing Genomics Institute (BGI)

Wuxi NextCODE

Eurofins Scientific

Waters Corporation

Sophia Genetics

Partek

DNASTAR

Wuxi Nextcode

Biomax Informatics AG

Perkinelmer, Inc. For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/nbxwpk/bioinformatics?w=5 Media Contact: Laura Wood, Senior Manager

press@researchandmarkets.com



For E.S.T Office Hours Call +1-917-300-0470

For U.S./CAN Toll Free Call +1-800-526-8630

For GMT Office Hours Call +353-1-416-8900



U.S. Fax: 646-607-1907

Fax (outside U.S.): +353-1-481-1716 View original content:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/bioinformatics-market-2023---blockchain-technology-and-cloud-computing--integration-of-machine-learning-and-ai-in-healthcare-300716010.html SOURCE Research and Markets

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[September 20, 2018] Innovation Pharmaceuticals Provides Corporate Update Highlighting Upcoming Milestones and Events

BEVERLY, Mass., Sept. 20, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Innovation Pharmaceuticals (OTCQB:IPIX) (the Company), a clinical stage biopharmaceutical company, is pleased to provide a corporate update on upcoming milestones and events across its clinical pipeline of first-in-class drug candidates, Brilacidin, Prurisol and Kevetrin.

Our clinical assets are both highly promising and well-diversified, said Arthur P. Bertolino, MD, PhD, MBA, President and Chief Medical Officer at Innovation Pharmaceuticals. Near-term strategic clinical priorities remain: to work closely with the FDA and other regulatory authorities to align on the remaining development plan necessary for Brilacidin in Oral Mucositis; to analyze the Prurisol Phase 2b data in Psoriasis; and, as additional funding becomes available, to commence work on new product formulations1) an oral pill for Kevetrin in Ovarian Cancer; 2) an oral pill for Brilacidin in IBD; and a topical application for Brilacidin in Atopic Dermatitis and Acne. The Companys pipeline is as mature as it has ever been, noted Leo Ehrlich, Chief Executive Officer of Innovation Pharmaceuticals. We have made substantial clinical progress with what we have accomplished to date, and remain committed to translating this into shareholder value. With partnering discussions ongoing, as well as active efforts underway to secure additional sources of capital, the prospects of our loyal shareholders are of paramount concern and front-of-mind as we strive to execute on these opportunities. We will continue to work tirelessly on their behalf as we advance the development of our clinical drug candidates. Upcoming Milestones and Events Brilacidin for Oral Mucositis In coming weeks, the Company plans to submit a request for an End-of-Phase 2 meeting with the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to discuss appropriate next steps in the development of Brilacidin for the treatment of Oral Mucositis (OM), which has already been granted Fast Track designation. A Breakthrough Therapy Designation application is currently under review with the FDA. OM represents a large unmet medical need and is estimated to be a $1 billion market opportunity. The Company plans to focus its efforts on the advancement of Brilacidin oral rinse for the prevention and control of severe Oral Mucositis (SOM) (WHO Grade =3) in Head and Neck Cancer (HNC) patients receiving the most aggressive regimen of chemoradiation, with chemotherapy administered in high concentration (80-100 mg/m2), approximately every 21 days (q3wk), as clear efficacy and good toleration were seen in treating this patient population. Brilacidin for Inflammatory Bowel Disease Building on the successfully completed Proof-of-Concept (PoC) trial in treating distal colitis, the Company will be preparing a pre-Investigational New Drg submission (pre-IND) to the FDA to discuss Brilacidins ongoing clinical development for the treatment of IBD. Additional efforts are planned to develop an oral formulation of Brilacidin so that the drug can be administered more uniformly in the GI tract toward treating more extensive forms of IBD, such as Ulcerative Colitis and Crohns Disease.

Proof-of-Concept (PoC) trial in treating distal colitis, the Company will be preparing a pre-Investigational New Drg submission (pre-IND) to the FDA to discuss Brilacidins ongoing clinical development for the treatment of IBD. Additional efforts are planned to develop an oral formulation of Brilacidin so that the drug can be administered more uniformly in the GI tract toward treating more extensive forms of IBD, such as Ulcerative Colitis and Crohns Disease. On November 13, 2018, the Company will present Brilacidin for Inflammatory Bowel Disease at the inaugural IBD Innovate conference, at the invitation of the Crohns & Colitis Foundation which will be hosting the event at the New York Academy of Medicine in New York, NY. The scientific postertitled Brilacidin for Inflammatory Bowel Disease: A Novel, Non-Corticosteroid, Non-Biologic Drug Candidate in Clinical Developmentto be presented at the conference will be available in the Events and Presentations section of the Company website on the day of the presentation.



Prurisol for Ps oriasis A top priority of the Company remains to unblind and analyze topline results from its completed Phase 2b trial ( see NCT02949388 ) of oral Prurisol for the treatment of Moderate-to-Severe Chronic Plaque Psoriasis. Enrolling up to 199 patients, and based upon the protocol for 12 weeks of Prurisol treatment and an additional patient follow-up for 4 weeks, the study builds on a prior successfully completed Phase 2 trial of oral Prurisol in mild-to-moderate chronic plaque psoriasis. A novel Psoriasis drug, particularly one that is oral, safe and effective, which could expand patient and physician choices for treatment, likely would command significant market value. Kevetrin for Ovarian Cancer

Next steps, building on our successful completed Phase 2a study in Ovarian Cancer, are planned to focus on completion of toxicology studies necessary for the oral formulation of Kevetrin and to prepare an appropriate oral dosage form to further evaluate the drug candidates clinical benefits and safety. Alerts

Sign-up for Innovation Pharmaceuticals email alerts is available at:

http://www.ipharminc.com/email-alerts/ About Innovation Pharmaceuticals

Innovation Pharmaceuticals Inc. (IPIX) is a clinical stage biopharmaceutical company developing a world-class portfolio of innovative therapies addressing multiple areas of unmet medical need, including inflammatory diseases, cancer, infectious disease, and dermatologic diseases. Brilacidin, a versatile compound with broad therapeutic potential, is in a new chemical class called defensin-mimetics. A Phase 2 trial of Brilacidin as an oral rinse for the prevention of Severe Oral Mucositis (SOM) in patients with Head and Neck Cancer, met its primary and secondary endpoints, including reducing the incidence of SOM. Positive results were also observed in a Phase 2 Proof-of-Concept trial treating patients locally with Brilacidin for Ulcerative Proctitis/Ulcerative Proctosigmoiditis. A Phase 2b trial of Brilacidin showed a single intravenous dose of the drug delivered comparable outcomes to a seven-day dosing regimen of the FDA-approved blockbuster daptomycin in treating Acute Bacterial Skin and Skin Structure Infections. Kevetrin is a novel anti-cancer drug shown to modulate p53, often referred to as the Guardian Angel Gene due to its crucial role in controlling cell mutations, and has successfully completed a Phase 2 trial in ovarian cancer. Prurisol, an oral psoriasis drug candidate acting through immune modulation and PRINS reduction, has now completed a Phase 2b trial and is awaiting statistical analysis. More information is available on the Company website at www.IPharmInc.com . Forward-Looking Statements: This press release contains forward-looking statements made pursuant to the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 including statements concerning projected timelines for the initiation and completion of clinical trials, our future drug development plans, other statements regarding future product developments, including with respect to specific indications, and any other statements which are other than statements of historical fact. These statements involve risks, uncertainties and assumptions that could cause the Companys actual results and experience to differ materially from anticipated results and expectations expressed in these forward-looking statements. The Company has in some cases identified forward-looking statements by using words such as anticipates, believes, hopes, estimates, looks, expects, plans, intends, goal, potential, may, suggest, and similar expressions. Among other factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed in forward-looking statements are the Companys need for, and the availability of, substantial capital in the future to fund its operations and research and development; including the amount and timing of the sale of shares of common stock to Aspire Capital; the fact that the Companys compounds may not successfully complete pre-clinical or clinical testing, or be granted regulatory approval to be sold and marketed in the United States or elsewhere. A more complete description of these risk factors is included in the Companys filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. You should not place undue reliance on any forward-looking statements. The Company undertakes no obligation to release publicly the results of any revisions to any such forward-looking statements that may be made to reflect events or circumstances after the date of this press release or to reflect the occurrence of unanticipated events, except as required by applicable law or regulation. INVESTOR AND MEDIA CONTACT

Innovation Pharmaceuticals Inc.

Leo Ehrlich

info@ipharminc.com

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[September 20, 2018] New York Web Design Company, Lounge Lizard, discusses 6 Things Google wants you to do for a Faster Website

NEW YORK, Sept. 20, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Lounge Lizard is globally recognized as a top New York Web Design Company within the web design and development industry. Lounge Lizard's brandtenders are creative, tech-savvy, and passionate in developing innovative strategies that drive conversion for both startup and established clients of all industries, making them the "best of breed since 1998." When Google talks, people listen; or at least they should if they want to ensure they are maximizing the opportunity for online success. Google has spoken, quite frequently, about the importance of speed as it relates to customer satisfaction and the overall user experience. That is something you should be aware of not only to stay in Google's good graces but also to provide a great experience for your customers. Today New York web design company, Lounge Lizard, discusses 6 things Google wants you to do for a faster website. Increase server response time. First things first, look to increase your server response time to speed up your website. According to Google the server response time should always be below 200ms. If you aren't clocking that speed, then you need to figure out what is holding you back. Another important thing to remember is that your site will be used by older devices including older generation mobile devices and desktops hampered by slow internet speeds. So, while 200ms is a great starting point, reducing server response time even more will ensure that all customers enjoy a fast site load. Use compression. Compression is an extremely valuable tool for any website because when you reduce (compress) the size of content then it increases page rendering speed along with shotening download time and data usage. Google recommends that you Gzip all content that is compressible. It is also important to audit your site carefully and simply remove all unnecessary site resources and data. Many sites suffer from bloat simply because they haven't taken the time to trim the fat which not only allows a better focus on the meat but also increases site speed, specially when combined with compression. Utilize browser caching. The more trips needed between the client and server means the slower a site loads along with costing clients more data. By using a browser caching policy, you can allow the client to reuse responses from the past rather than taking another trip. The policy should clearly define if a resource can be cached, who can cache it, how long it will remain cached, and how it can be revalidated when the policy expires. Optimize all images. This is something everyone should be doing, and yet many don't. Images are typically the biggest data hog on any website and optimization is an easy way to reduce file size, decrease bloat, and increase load speeds without sacrificing the visual image. For sites that utilize numerous images, taking the time to perform a more in-depth optimization including using vector formats, removing metadata, enhancing img tags, or leveraging CSS3 to replace images when applicable. Never use landing page redirects. Page redirects slow down the overall site experience, especially on mobile devices because each redirect adds and extra request-response action which must travel roundtrip. This delays the site from rendering quickly. In some cases, it can trigger additional roundtrips for DNS lookup, TCP, and TLS interaction. Google recommends a maximum of one redirect from a URL to the final landing page along with sites being designed using a responsive model. Improve CSS delivery. Google recommends that you inline small CSS directly into the HTML document to remove small external CSS resources. This is important because pages need to process CSS before they render. When the CSS is bloated or overloaded then it can take multiple roundtrips to the server before the page can begin to render.



Lounge Lizard New York Web Design Company is an award-winning, high-end design boutique specializing in website and mobile app development, UX/UI, branding, and marketing. Lounge Lizard excels in creating the ultimate brand strategy, fully loaded with expertly crafted visuals that work together to increase sales and effectively communicate a client's unique personality. Media Contact: Ken Braun, Lounge Lizard, 631-581-1000, ken.braun@loungelizard.com

View original content:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/new-york-web-design-company-lounge-lizard-discusses-6-things-google-wants-you-to-do-for-a-faster-website-300714601.html SOURCE Lounge Lizard

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In the interview, Fritz also hailed progress on the untangling of the rail bottleneck at 75th Street. Under a publicly and privately funded plan to ease rail congestion on the South Side, railroad and government officials plan to build a flyover bridge so freight tracks can go up and over another set of tracks near 75th Street and Western Avenue at whats known as the Forest Hill Junction.
[September 20, 2018] The Convergence of IoT, Artificial Intelligence and Blockchain Reshapes the Industrial Future at IoT Solutions World Congress 2018

BARCELONA, Spain, September 20, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- IoT Solutions World Congress (http://www.iotsworldcongress.com), the event on innovations in the industrial Internet of Things (IoT) and the digital transformation of different economic sectors, will take place from October 16 to 18 in Barcelona (Spain). Organised by Fira de Barcelona and the IIC (Industrial Internet Consortium), it will comprise a congress, an exhibition area and will exhibit testbeds of new applications. The show will confirm the mass implementation of IoT across a range of industries and will also present the convergence of this technology with artificial intelligence and blockchain. (Logo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/659718/Fira_Barcelona_Logo.jpg )

(Photo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/746175/Fira_de_Barcelona_IOT.jpg )

300 exhibitors, includingIT companies, software platform developers, hardware manufacturers, security firms, telecommunications operators, service operators and industrial automation companies will participate in the exhibition area. The list of exhibitors includes ABB, Deloitte, Google Cloud, Huawei, Intel, Microsoft, New Alchemy, SAS, Telit, Vodafone, Wipro, Crypto Quantique, Dassault Systemes, Fiware, Hitachi, Kaspersky, Libelium, Orange, PTC, relayr, Rigado, Software AG, Telefonica, Thingstream, Uptake, Verizon and Zyfr.



In addition, IoTSWC 2018 will open the testbeds area presenting a dozen IoT applications developed by leading companies. Visitors will be able to see, for example, a smart residential door capable of opening upon the owner's arrival and transforming a garage into a giant mailbox for online shopping deliveries, a fully sensorised fire engine, and a smart platform to control water quality and help saving Beluga whales in Alaska. As for the Congress, it will gather together more than 250 experts to discuss the impact of IoT solutions on different environments. The sessions will revolve around nine thematic axes: connected transport, manufacture of goods, healthcare, energy and supplies, construction and infrastructure, facilitating technologies, blockchain and artificial intelligence, the latter two with their own forums.

The list of speakers includes Jeff Merrit, manager of IoT and connected devices at the World Economic Forum, Gloria Zaionz, emerging technology guru, Fabian Simmer, director de digitisation at SEAT, Seb Chakraborty, CTO Centrica Hive Limited/British Gas, Tomi Teikko, Director de Empathic Building Teito, Christopher Bailey, Director of Innovation & Architecture Matson, and Hajime Sugiyama, IIoT Evangelist, Factory Automation Systems Group Overseas Strategic Planning Mitsubishi Electric Corporation. A new feature this year will be the organisation of several workshops to take a closer look at aspects of IoT technology approved by the IIC (https://www.iiconsortium.org) and the holding of a meeting of female managers who lead the international IoT ecosystem.

SOURCE Fira de Barcelona

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[September 20, 2018] GTIS Partners Grabs Top Spots in Prestigious GRESB Sustainability Ranking

GTIS Partners LP ("GTIS"), a real assets investment firm headquartered in New York City, with offices in Sao Paulo, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Atlanta, Paris and Munich, today announced that the GTIS Brazil Real Estate Fund ("GTIS Brazil Real Estate Fund I") has been recognized as 2018's most sustainable private equity real estate investment fund in South America by the Global Real Estate Sustainability Benchmark (GRESB). This is the fourth year running the fund has clinched the top ranking. GTIS Brazil Real Estate Funds II and III took second- and third-place honors, respectively, matching the funds' 2017 survey rankings. "Our across-the-board top-place rankings are a testament to the day-in, day-out efforts of the entire GTIS Brazil team, who've incorporated environmental, social and governance principles into their investment and management practices," said Josh Pristaw, Senior Managing Director, Head of Capital Markets and Co-head of Brazil at GTIS Partners. "What we're most proud of is that in 'doing well while doing good,' we're generating value for our clients and other stakeholders while creating tangible benefits for the environment and society as a whole." Pristaw noted that GTIS is continually looking to build on its ESG efforts and has put into place detailed plans to focus specifically on the areas of building assessments, data management, and tenant engagement. "We are very honored by this recognition," said Joao Teixeira, Senior Managing Director and Co-Head of the Brazil Office at GTIS Partners. "Commitment to the principles of ESG is part of who we are as an organization. It helps provide a roadmap for the betterment of our local communities, no matter where we operate." In an ongoing effort to meet and exceed global ESG standards, GTIS created a sustainability committee, which ensures best practices are utilized at real estate projects owned by the funds. The committee meets quarterly and comprises senior GTIS professioals focused on Brazil acquisitions, asset management, legal, operations, and capital markets functions. The firm has also incorporated ESG into its annual employee evaluation process for all offices since 2016.



GTIS Partners has been actively investing in Brazil real estate since 2005, making it one of the first to recognize the potential of the country's real estate markets. As one of the largest foreign real estate investors in Brazil, it has invested more than R$5 billion of investor equity commitments for its Brazil platform. Last month, GTIS Partners announced its expansion into infrastructure investment in Brazil, and the simultaneous hire of Eduardo Klepacz, formerly CEO of Cubico Brazil, one of the country's largest renewable energy generators, to head GTIS' new Sao Paulo-based infrastructure investment team.

"We view the expansion into renewable energy generation as another strong commitment on behalf of GTIS to ESG. We look forward to one day supplying our real estate projects and our real estate tenants with low cost, renewable energy," said Klepacz. Added Dan Winters, GRESB's Head of the Americas: "GTIS Partners continues to outperform its peers and has once again received the top three rankings in South America in the GRESB 2018 results. With seven consecutive years of benchmarking their ESG performance, GTIS has proven to be an industry leader making outstanding progress with its sustainability programs, and continues to set the bar higher for the sector." Turning to the U.S., GTIS Partners has for the first time submitted the GRESB survey for its U.S. Property Income Fund ("USPIP"), a vehicle that targets sustainable, long-term dividends with modest leverage. USPIP has been active in the multifamily space, with recent acquisitions of Class A multifamily projects in Dallas and Orlando. About GRESB GRESB is an industry-driven organization committed to assessing the sustainability performance of real estate portfolios (public, private and direct) around the world. Their dynamic benchmark is used by institutional investors to engage with their investments with the aim to improve the sustainability performance of their investment portfolio and the global property sector at large. GRESB covers about $18 trillion of institutional capital and 903 property companies and funds across the globe. The GRESB survey is widely recognized as the most rigorous standard for measuring the sustainability performance of real estate companies and funds, and GRESB participation has become standard practice for most of the world's fund managers and listed property companies. For more information, please refer to www.GRESB.com. About GTIS Partners GTIS Partners is a global real assets investment firm headquartered in New York with offices in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Atlanta, Sao Paulo, Brazil, Paris, France and Munich, Germany. GTIS Partners was founded in 2005 and is managed by President Tom Shapiro and Senior Managing Directors Josh Pristaw, Rob Vahradian, Tom Feldstein, Joao Teixeira, and Amy Boyle. GTIS Partners has 95 employees and approximately $4.7 billion of gross assets under management. The firm pursues opportunistic real asset investments through direct equity investment and lending activities. To date, the firm has committed capital to residential, retail, industrial, office, hotel and mixed-use projects in the U.S. and Brazil, and is among the largest real estate private equity companies in Brazil. For more information, please visit www.gtispartners.com. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180920005542/en/

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[September 20, 2018] Holler Law Firm Powers National Business Expansion with Virtustream Enterprise Cloud

Virtustream, the enterprise-class cloud company and a Dell (News - Alert) Technologies business, today announced that Holler Law Firm, a rapidly growing law practice that performs real estate transactions for large, multi-state banks, has successfully migrated its formerly on-premises business process management system, Resware, to the Virtustream Enterprise Cloud. As demand for their services tripled over the past two years, Holler Law Firm faced new challenges scaling their IT operations to keep pace with growth in a way that is secure and compliant with financial and real estate industry regulations. Core parts of their workflow - including performing transactions on a moment's notice, last second changes to documents, and minimum-year storage requirements - were essential areas of support needed from their cloud provider. After evaluating a variety of options, Holler Law Firm selected Virtustream Enterprise Cloud not only for its long track record of delivering mission-critical systems for large brands but also because it is the only solution that provides the ability to scale quickly and securely with full disaster recovery capabilities and instant access to all documents that are updated in real-time. As a result of the migration, decisions around growing the firm's business, which is projected to triple again in the next three years, can now focus on innovation rather than overcoming maintenance challenges and resource constraints. "Virtustream completely modernized our infrastructure by providing a fully-managed service that gives us quick and secure access to our critical systems," said George Holler, principal and founder of Holler Law Firm. "We needed the ability to open additional offices across the country with seamless system integration. At the same time, one of the most important factors in selecting Vitustream was their disaster recovery capabilities. With our systems and data being fully replicated in two, tier-three data centers accessible from anywhere, we can keep pace with the needs of our enterprise-level customers."



As the company continues to expand, cloud scalability is a key differentiator supporting the firm's breakout growth. With Virtustream Enterprise Cloud, Holler Law Firm now has the flexibility to quickly and securely scale its operations from its Connecticut headquarters to its offices all over the country, while enjoying the benefits of true consumption-based billing. Virtustream's built-in data backup and disaster recovery ensures that as the business grows, its most sensitive data will remain seamlessly protected, too. "Working with top-performing organizations like Holler Law Firm to provide the infrastructure necessary to support their rapid business growth is one of our core strengths at Virtustream," said Todd McNabb, SVP, Global Sales, Virtustream. "Migrating, deploying and managing data in the cloud is simply more efficient when working with an experienced partner."

About Holler Law Firm Holler Law Firm is a multi-state law practice that helps title companies close transactions in "attorney" states. Licensed in Connecticut, Georgia, Massachusetts, New York, North Carolina, South Carolina, and West Virginia, the firm provides compliance assistance and fulfillment support to a broad range of title insurers and title agencies. An industry leader in attorney signings, title opinions and disbursement services, Holler Law Firm services over two billion dollars-worth of residential and commercial real estate closings per year, including refinance, purchase and sale and REO transactions. About Virtustream Virtustream, a Dell Technologies business, is the enterprise-class cloud service and software provider trusted by enterprises worldwide to migrate and run their mission-critical applications in the cloud. For enterprises, service providers and government agencies, Virtustream's xStream management platform and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) meet the security, compliance, performance, efficiency and consumption-based billing requirements of complex production applications in the cloud - whether private, public or hybrid. To learn more about Virtustream, click on the following links: Virtustream Enterprise Cloud

Virtustream Federal Cloud

Virtustream Storage Cloud

Virtustream Managed Services View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180920005477/en/

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[September 20, 2018]

CRITICALSTART Achieves SOC 2 Type II Compliance Certification

PLANO, Texas, Sept. 20, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- CRITICALSTART, a leading provider of cybersecurity solutions, today announced it has achieved the Service Organization Control (SOC) 2 Type II compliance certification, confirming the company's commitment to security best practices based on the standards defined by the American Institute of Certified Professional Accountants (AICPA).

CyberGuard Compliance, an independent, third-party auditing firm, verified CRITICALSTART's process and controls met the Trust Services Criteria for security, availability, processing integrity, confidentiality and privacy. As part of the Type II certification, CyberGuard Compliance tested both the design and operational effectiveness of CRITICALSTART's controls and processes. This certification solidifies the compay's resolve to provide its customers with industry-leading controls and processes to protect the confidentiality and privacy of their data.







A trusted cybersecurity partner to hundreds of mid-size and enterprise customers across a variety of industries, CRITICALSTART offers a powerful combination of professional services, strategic product fulfillment, and "Zero Trust" Managed Detection & Response (MDR) services to help customers achieve a mature security posture that meets their specific needs.

"As a cybersecurity company, we understand how important it is to have clear controls, processes and policies for protecting customer data and the systems that process it for our MDR services," said Rob Davis, CEO at CRITICALSTART. "This certification assures our prospective and existing customers that we use a rigorous, multi-faceted approach to securing their critical business assets."

About CRITICALSTART

CRITICALSTART is the fastest-growing cybersecurity integrator in North America. Our mission is simple: protect your brand and reduce business risk. We help organizations of all sizes determine their security readiness condition using our proven framework, the Defendable Network. CRITICALSTART provides managed security services, incident response, professional services, and product fulfillment. Visit www.criticalstart.com for more information.

View original content to download multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/criticalstart-achieves-soc-2-type-ii-compliance-certification-300716139.html

SOURCE CRITICALSTART
[September 20, 2018] Energy, Utility, and Industrial Leaders Appointed to New Dragos Advisory Board

Dragos, Inc., the industry's trusted leader in industrial threat detection and response, today announced the formation and appointments to its advisory board. The board includes distinguished and accomplished professionals from a range of disciplines, including the industrial sector, business strategy and operations, product marketing and strategic communications, and utility and energy communities. These individuals will serve as advisors and advocates of Dragos and provide strategic analysis and direction to the Dragos executive and management teams. "Our advisors each have unique expertise that brings immense value to Dragos," said Dragos CEO and Co-Founder Robert M. Lee. "Adding these advisors is not only an additional validation of our mission and approach, but also an amazing resource to our team as we rapidly expand." Additionally, each advisor will serve as a strategic partner in the development and success of Dragos' short-term and long-term goals and will provide professional expertise and guidance within their respective fields to help navigate and mitigate potential risks, discover opportunities, and define benchmarks for continued success and organizational growth. Members of the Dragos advisory board include: Marty Edwards - Director of Strategic Initiatives at the International Society of Automation (ISA), the current Managing Director of the Automation Federation, and former Director of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security's Industrial Control Systems Cyber Emegency Response Team (ICS-CERT)



Ambika Gadre - Founder and principal consultant at Xplicable LLC and former leader at Bracket Computing, IronPort, and Cisco's (News - Alert) Network Security division Dr. Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall - Senior Fellow at Harvard Kennedy School of Government's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, current advisor to the U.S. national laboratories and innovative energy investment funds, and former Deputy Secretary of the U.S. Department of Energy

Philip Jones - President of Phil Jones Consulting and former Commissioner of the Washington Utilities and Transportation Commission (WUTC) Tom Gillis - Senior Vice President and General Manager of the Network and Security Business Unit at VMware, former CEO of Bracket Computing, and former vice president and general manager of the Security Technology Group at Cisco Systems Doug Donzelli - Founder and CEO of Apprion and current Managing Director at MarketBridge (News - Alert) Venture Partners "Dragos has put together an unmatched group of industrial cybersecurity professionals," said Edwards. "I am eager to work with them from an advisory perspective and look forward to assisting them in addressing the needs and challenges of industrial asset owners and operators in the face of ever-increasing threats against these critical operational technologies." Dr. Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall added, "Cyber adversaries are targeting the industrial control systems that are vital to the energy sector, creating critical vulnerabilities for companies and governments in the United States and around the world. Dragos' experienced leadership team has innovated an effective capability that can rapidly diagnose this growing threat, reduce incident response time, and build resilience." About Dragos Dragos applies expert human intelligence and threat behavior analytics to redefine industrial control system (ICS) cybersecurity. Its industry-first, ICS cybersecurity ecosystem provides industrial security practitioners with unprecedented situational awareness over their environments, with comprehensive threat intelligence, detection, and response capabilities. Dragos' solutions include: the Dragos Platform, software providing ICS-specific asset discovery, threat detection, and investigation capabilities; Dragos Threat Operations Center, providing ICS threat hunting, incident response services, and ICS cybersecurity training; and Dragos ICS WorldView, providing global, ICS-specific threat intelligence in the form of weekly reports and critical alerts upon discovery. Headquartered in metropolitan Washington DC, Dragos' team of ICS cybersecurity experts are practitioners who've lived the problems the industry faces, hailing from across the U.S. Intelligence Community to private sector industrial companies. For more information, please visit dragos.com. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180920005564/en/

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[September 20, 2018] Principal Launches Principal Milestones, New Financial Wellness Program

Nearly half of Americans say their financial situation stresses them out1, and they don't know where to get help or where to start. In response to this research and feedback from participants, Principal Financial Group is expanding its financial wellness resources with iGrad's Enrich financial wellness platform. The new Principal Milestones helps participants access comprehensive financial education resources all in one place. The platform addresses student loans, will and legal document preparation powered by ARAG, Health Savings Accounts, budgeting and more. There's something for everyone, no matter their life stage or financial priorities, and everything is designed to help people live their best lives and work toward a better financial future. Seven in 10 Americans postpone making financial decisions, with less than one-third saying they feel comfortable with the amount of knowledge they have about managing finances, according to findings released in April from a research project by Principal and renowned behavioral economist Dan Goldstein. In fact, the behavioral research revealed that confidence is a bigger driver of financial decision-making than income, and people who spend even a little bit of time learning about financial planning are 75 percent more likely to be confident in their financial future. Enrich goes beyond investment and benefits planning to provide the foundational information and insights needed to help consumers improve financial literacy and sustain it over time. An in-depth online assessment helps evaluate an individual's strengths and challenges and then delivers information more personalized to help employees minimize financial stress and reach their goals, such as spending less than they earn, saving for emergencies and planning for the future. "The decision to further expand our financial wellness offering with Enrich was easy when the research so clearly ties confidence to postponing financial decisions," said Joleen Workman, vice president of customer care at Principal. "We selected the Enrich financial wellness platform in large part because of its expansive set of content and tools, and the customization available, which makes each person's experience more personalized and relevant." Enrich supports employees at all life stages, from providing strategies to help pay off student loans, planning for a child's college education, budgeting and health savings accounts. The platform will integrate seamlessly with Principal's existing resources. "The continued commitment by Principal to financial wellness education is a great benefit to itsparticipants, advisors and plan sponsors," said iGrad President and CEO Rob LaBreche. "As their research reveals, improving financial knowledge increases confidence and leads to more proactive and informed financial decisions."



Workman added, "We want to help our client's participants with their broader financial health, but understand there's a sensitivity around sharing data. That's why we have decided not to share participant-level or plan data with Enrich. We will allow the participant to choose what, if any, information to share as they access the resources." Principal has been a leader in making available holistic financial services and support for many years, including Principal Retire SecureSM (1-on-1 workplace education meetings from a retirement professional), a broad range of webinars with live chat, resources for advisors and plan sponsors, and the Retirement Wellness Planner, which allows users to link any external account information and adjust for their household situation, Workman said. Principal Milestones is the latest evolution of this commitment - and it comes at no additional cost to participants or plans.

"When we asked what participants wanted to know more about, they told us. And that's why we started with will and legal document preparation services through ARAG," continued Workman. "It's quite a shock when you hear that nearly 75 percent of Americans don't have a will2, but how could they with competing financial priorities?" "We're committed, we listen, and we believe these resources will help not only retirement plan participants, but also support the advisors and plan sponsors who are looking for tools and resources to help support these kinds of conversations," she said. About iGrad (Enrich)

iGrad, a technology-driven financial wellness education company based in San Diego, offers two award-winning white-label platforms: iGrad and Enrich. Enrich is used by more than 300 companies nationwide to provide personalized, interactive and adaptive financial wellness education and action plans to employees and customers. Designed around a proprietary behavioral algorithm, Enrich personalizes financial information for each person's situation and needs. It also offers tools, quizzes, videos, articles and a library of multimedia content. The company's platform for higher education, also called iGrad, is established at more than 600 colleges and universities, empowering students to make wise financial decisions and easing their financial stress. iGrad is a three-time winner of Education Program of the Year (The Institute for Financial Literacy), Best Product award for three years running (University Business Magazine), as well as the Outstanding Consumer Information Award (AFCPE). Enrich.org and iGrad.com. About ARAG

Three months after the will and legal document prep services with Principal launched, nearly 4,000 individuals have set up their accounts and created a total of 4,700 documents. ARAG is a global provider of legal insurance. It connects people with affordable, professional legal help. The company has an international premium base of $2 billion and protects 17.5 million families worldwide. ARAG's North American headquarters are based in Des Moines, Iowa. The company is proud to receive significant national recognition for customer service excellence, most recently being named a BenchmarkPortal (News - Alert) Top Contact Center-Small Centers Category. About Principal

Principal helps people and companies around the world build, protect and advance their financial well-being through retirement, insurance and asset management solutions that fit their lives. Our employees are passionate about helping clients of all income and portfolio sizes achieve their goals - offering innovative ideas, investment expertise and real-life solutions to make financial progress possible. To find out more, visit us at principal.com. Principal, Principal and symbol design and Principal Financial Group are trademarks and service marks of Principal Financial Services, Inc., a member of the Principal Financial Group. The value-added resources provided through ARAG Services, LLC (ARAG) and iGrad, Inc. (Enrich) are not a part of any insurance products and plan administrative services provided through Principal Life Insurance Co. or affiliated with any company of the Principal Financial Group. All resources may be changed or canceled at any time. The use of resources provided by ARAG Services, LLC or Enrich should not be considered a substitute for consultation with an attorney or advisor. Principal is not responsible for any loss, injury, claim, liability, or damages related to the use of the ARAG Will & Legal Document Center or Enrich resources. Please remember that the ARAG legal documents are accurate and useful in many situations. Whether or not the document is right for you and your situation depends on your circumstances. If you want specific advice regarding your situation, consult an attorney. Information is intended to be educational in nature and is not intended to be taken as a recommendation. Enrich and ARAG Services, LLC are not an affiliate of any company of the Principal Financial Group. Insurance products and plan administrative services provided through Principal Life Insurance Co. Securities offered through Principal Securities, Inc., 800-547-7754, member SIPC and/or independent broker-dealers. Principal Life, and Principal Securities are members of the Principal Financial Group, Des Moines, Iowa 50392. 1 Principal, Retirement Readiness Participant Survey, January 2017 2 How Legal and Financial Issues Impact Employee Wellness. Russell Research for ARAG. February 2017 View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180920005565/en/

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[September 20, 2018] Preferred Trust Company Becomes the First Custodian to Custody Digital Gold

LAS VEGAS, Sept. 20, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Preferred Trust Company announces today that they will be the first custodian to custody blockchain digital gold offered by DGGold that is powered by the VaultChain Gold platform and vaulted with the Royal Canadian Mint. DGGold will be offered through Dillon Gage and is scheduled to launch on October 1, 2018. This next generation solution for investing in physical gold reduces the cost of acquisition of a gold investment due to no fabrication or annual storage fees. Instead of investing in bars of gold, clients simply invest in physical gold which is audited and maintained by a cryptographically secure blockchain database to independently verify their ownership of gold. "Our clients open self-directed IRAs to diversify their retirement portfolio with collateralized investments in mind. Unlike, a gold Exchange-Traded Fund (ETF), DGGold is an investment in physical gold owned by the IRA, whose holdings are stored on a bailor-bailee basis with the Royal Canadian Mint and deliverable at th request of the IRA owner upon distribution," states Chris Trembly, Director of Operations of Preferred Trust Company.



Gold purity standards required by the Internal Revenue Service as an allowable IRA investment is 99.95%. The DGGold purity standard is 99.99%. "As one of the world's largest precious metals wholesale firms and leading technology innovators in the industry, Dillon Gage is proud to work with Preferred Trust Company to introduce DGGold to the self-directed IRA community," states Terry Hanlon, President of Dillon Gage. About Preferred Trust Company

Preferred Trust Company is a state-regulated trust company governed and examined by the Financial Institution Division of Nevada. For over a decade, the firm has provided clients with regulatory compliant custodial services throughout the United States. Preferred Trust Company performs the duties of an independent retirement custodian, and, as such, does not provide investment advice, sell investments or offer any tax or legal advice. Potential clients are advised to perform their own due diligence in choosing an attorney, tax advisor, or any investment opportunity. Visit www.preferredtrustcompany.com or email info@ptcemail.com for more information.

Contact: Izzy Irizarry

Preferred Trust Company

Phone: 702.921.5147

Fax: 702.921.5158

iirizarry@i-managementgroup.com View original content to download multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/preferred-trust-company-becomes-the-first-custodian-to-custody-digital-gold-300716202.html SOURCE Preferred Trust Company

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IAT Insurance Group Receives Regulatory Approvals for Acquisition of IFIC Surety Group, Inc.

IAT Insurance Group (IAT), a leading provider of specialty property and casualty products, announced today that the company has received regulatory approvals for its acquisition of IFIC Surety Group, Inc. The final closing of the acquisition is anticipated on September 28, 2018.

IFIC consists of International Fidelity Insurance Company and its subsidiary Allegheny Casualty Insurance Company. The group has almost 200 employees, over $150 million in gross written premium, is the largest privately held surety company, and is the eighth largest surety writer in the United States.

About IAT Insurance

IAT Insurance Group is a privately owned, specialty insurance company providing property and casualty products for businesses and individuals. IAT goes to market thrugh six business units - Commercial Transportation, Specialty, Programs, Inland Marine, Excess Casualty Mid-Market, and Assumed Reinsurance. The IAT Insurance Group companies are rated A- Excellent by A.M. Best. Connect with IAT Insurance Group on LinkedIn and Facebook, and learn more about the company at www.iatinsurancegroup.com.







View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180920005611/en/
[September 20, 2018] The Apache Software Foundation Welcomes Tencent as its Newest Sponsor at the Platinum Level

Wakefield, MA, Sept. 20, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), the all-volunteer developers, stewards, and incubators of more than 350 Open Source projects and initiatives, announced today sponsorship by Tencent at the Platinum level. Tencent is the first company from China to become a Platinum Sponsor of the ASF. Numerous individuals employed by Tencent are active contributors to several Apache projects, including Hadoop, HBase, Hive, MXNet (incubating), Parquet, and Spark. "We are pleased to welcome Tencent, whose generosity, along with that of our other sponsors, offsets our day-to-day operating costs," said ASF Chairman Phil Steitz. "Sponsoring the ASF helps us successfully shepherd more than 300 projects and their communities, mentor dozens of open source innovations in the Apache Incubator, deepen community outreach, and furthers our mission of providing software for the public good 'The Apache Way'." "We are very proud to join Apache family, as the first Platinum level sponsor from China, after a long time contributing on Open Source projects, include: Hadoop, HBase, Spark, etc.," said Huixing Wang, VP at Tencent Cloud. "Sponsoring ASF is an evidence that Tencent will encourage more talented engineers to join Open Source contributions and innovations, and we firmly believe that Open Source technology can make the world better." Tencent joins the following ASF Sponsors: Platinum Cloudera, Comcast, Facebook, Google, LeaseWeb, Microsoft, Oath, and Pineapple Fund;

Gold Anonymous, ARM, Bloomberg, Hortonworks, Huawei, IBM, Indeed, ODPi, Pivotal;

Silver Aetna, Alibaba Cloud Computing, Budget Direct, Capital One, Cerner, Private Internet Access, Red Hat, Target, Union Investment;

Bronze Airport Rentals, The Best VPN, The Blog Starter, Bookmakers, Cash Store, Casino Bonus, Casino2k, Cloudsoft, Emerio, HostChecka.com, HostingAdvice.com, HostPapa Web Hosting, The Linux Foundation, Mobile Slots, SCAMS.info, Site Builder Report, Talend, Twitter, Web Hosting Secret Revealed;

Platinum Targeted DLA Pipser, Microsoft, Oath OSU Open Source Labs, Sonatype;







Silver Targeted Amazon Web Services, Hotwax Systems, Rackspace;

Bronze Targeted Assembla, Bintray, Education Networks of America, Google, Hopsie, No-IP, PagerDuty, Peregrine Computer Consultants Corporation, Sonic.net, SURFnet, Virtru. To Sponsor the ASF, visit http://apache.org/foundation/sponsorship.html

About Tencent and Tencent Cloud

Tencent uses technology to enrich the lives of Internet users. Our social products Weixin and QQ link our users to a rich digital content catalogue including games, video, music and books. Our proprietary targeting technology helps advertisers reach out to hundreds of millions of consumers in China. Our infrastructure services including payment, security, cloud and artificial intelligence create differentiated offerings and support our partners business growth. Tencent invests heavily in people and innovation, enabling us to evolve with the Internet.Tencent was founded in Shenzhen, China, in 1998. Shares of Tencent (00700.HK) are traded on the Main Board of the Stock Exchange of Hong Kong. https://www.tencent.com/ As the subsidiary of Tencent focused on developing cloud computing and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, Tencent Cloud offers leading technological products and services and customized industry-specific solutions in the fields of cloud computing, big data, artificial intelligence to government agencies, corporations and individual developers around the world. About The Apache Software Foundation (ASF)

Established in 1999, the all-volunteer Foundation oversees more than 350 leading Open Source projects, including Apache HTTP Server --the world's most popular Web server software. Through the ASF's meritocratic process known as "The Apache Way," more than 700 individual Members and 6,600 Committers successfully collaborate to develop freely available enterprise-grade software, benefiting billions of users worldwide: thousands of software solutions are distributed under the Apache License; and the community actively participates in ASF mailing lists, mentoring initiatives, and ApacheCon, the Foundation's official user conference, trainings, and expo. The ASF is a US 501(c)(3) charitable organization, funded by individual donations and corporate sponsors including Aetna, Alibaba Cloud Computing, Anonymous, ARM, Bloomberg, Budget Direct, Capital One, Cerner, Cloudera, Comcast, Facebook, Google, Hortonworks, Huawei, IBM, Indeed, Inspur, LeaseWeb, Microsoft, Oath, ODPi, Pineapple Fund, Pivotal, Private Internet Access, Red Hat, Target, and Union Investment. For more information, visit http://www.apache.org/ and https://twitter.com/TheASF  The Apache Software Foundation. "Apache", "Apache HTTP Server", and "ApacheCon" are registered trademarks or trademarks of the Apache Software Foundation in the United States and/or other countries. All other brands and trademarks are the property of their respective owners. # # # Sally Khudairi Vice President The Apache Software Foundation +1 617 921 8656 press@apache.org

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[September 20, 2018] Karen M. Hardwick Named New Senior Vice President and General Counsel of WGL Holdings, Inc. and Washington Gas

WGL Holdings, Inc. (WGL) is pleased to announce that Karen Hardwick is joining WGL Holdings, Inc. and Washington Gas as Senior Vice President and General Counsel. She will be responsible for managing and directing the company's legal strategy and supervising the attorney staff and the corporate secretary. Ms. Hardwick will begin her role on October 15, 2018. "Karen is going to be an excellent addition to our leadership team and we are pleased to welcome her to our WGL family," said Adrian Chapman, President and CEO of WGL Holdings, Inc. and Washington Gas. "She brings a wealth of experience in the public, private and nonprofit sectors and has been a seasoned leader across a variety of roles. Karen has earned a stellar reputation in the legal community for her collaborative manner, outstanding judgment, strategic planning and being a formidable advocate for her clients." Hardwick succeeds Leslie T. Thornton, who has served as Senior Vice President, General Counsel and Corporate Secretary since 2011. Thornton will serve as Senior Vice President and Transition Counsel until her retirement at the end of November. Prior to joining WGL, Ms. Hardwick served as General Counsel for the University of the District of Columbia (UDC), where she helped lead the ongoing transformation of the university, including serving as advisor on the president's cabinet, rebuilding the legal operations to enhance service delivery, and directing and managing outside counsel in high stakes litigation. In addition, Ms. Hardwick managed the university's corporate governance, labor and employment counseling and ligation, and legal affairs involving faculty and student matters. "I'm excited about joining WGL and working with such a talented leadership team. I look forward to supporting WGL's work as part of the AltaGas family of companies as we continue to thrive in the Washington, D.C., region," said Hardwick. "Throughout my career as a general counsel and litigator, my rock solid commitment to my clients has been to bring high energy and laser focus to delivering legal advice shaped with analytical rigor, informed by savvy strategy, and tailored to achieve business imperatives. WGL has an award-winning and well-respected legal team and I look forward to leading that team as we continue to support the company's mission." Before her role a UDC, Ms. Hardwick served as general counsel for Annapolis, Maryland, a municipal corporation. As a member of the city's mayoral cabinet, she resolved substantive and parliamentary challenges in corporate governance and introduced an innovative program to integrate risk management analysis for all major capital projects. She also worked as General Counsel and Executive Vice President of the Anacostia Waterfront Corporation, leading the legal negotiation of public and private real estate development projects near the Washington Nationals' Stadium and the Wharf at the Southwest Waterfront.



During her 18 years at Hogan & Hartson LLP (now Hogan Lovells LLP), Ms. Hardwick rose through the ranks from associate to equity partner, managing commercial litigation matters and complex investigations for technology companies, regulated utilities, commercial real estate developers and insurers. Ms. Hardwick is active in the community through volunteerism and contributing her time and management skills to several non-profits that support a variety of charitable causes. Since 2006, she has served as Vice President of the Washington Children's Foundation, and served in high ranking Board roles for organizations including the National Capital Revitalization Corporation, the District of Columbia Chamber of Commerce, Leadership Greater Washington and the National Black Child Development Institute.

Ms. Hardwick has received recognition for her leadership in the legal and business communities, including earning the Community Service Award from the District of Columbia Building Industry Association and being named the Business Leader of the Year by the District of Columbia Chamber of Commerce. Ms. Hardwick is a graduate of the University of Virginia, where she received a Bachelor of Science Engineering, and earned a law degree from Harvard Law School. Hardwick inherits a WGL legal team that was recently named Legal Department of the Year by National Law Journal. The department was recognized for its overall excellence, diversity and outside counsel management. "Since 2011, Leslie Thornton has done a tremendous job leading our legal strategy and building our legal team into one of the best in-house teams in the country. She also was instrumental in guiding WGL through the rigorous regulatory process surrounding our recent merger with AltaGas," said Chapman. "We are grateful for Leslie's many contributions to WGL, her profession and the broader community. We wish her only the best as she retires from WGL." About WGL and Washington Gas The WGL family of companies-Washington Gas, WGL Energy, WGL Midstream and Hampshire Gas-are now indirect, wholly-owned subsidiaries of AltaGas Ltd [TSX:ALA]. WGL is headquartered in Washington, D.C., and is a leading source for clean, efficient and diverse energy solutions. With activities and assets across the U.S., WGL provides options for natural gas, electricity, green power and energy services, including generation, storage, transportation, distribution, supply and efficiency. Our calling as a company is to make energy surprisingly easy for our employees, our community and all our customers. Whether you are a homeowner or renter, small business or multinational corporation, state and local or federal agency, WGL is here to provide Energy Answers. Ask Us. For more information, visit us at www.wgl.com and @wglanswers. WGL's regulated natural gas utility, Washington Gas, provides safe, reliable natural gas service to more than 1.1 million customers in the District of Columbia, Maryland and Virginia. The company has been providing energy to residential, commercial and industrial customers for 170 years. Visit us at www.washingtongas.com and follow us on Twitter (News - Alert) @washingtongas. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180920005504/en/

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Around that time, Chicago police Sgt. Michael Bazarek had just left a downtown seminar and was looking for a cup of coffee when he saw a man walking down Wentworth, waving wildly and scaring people off the sidewalk. He was acting out. He was not hurting anyone, but he was in a very threatening manner ... talking at the sky, talking at the sidewalk and frightening people.
[September 20, 2018] UnitedHealthcare Invests $9 Million to Help Improve Quality of Care and Patient Services at 21 Golden Valley Health Center Locations in the Central Valley

UnitedHealthcare has invested $9 million to help enhance the quality of care and patient services at 21 health centers operated by Golden Valley Health Centers in Merced, Stanislaus and San Joaquin counties. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180920005090/en/ Dr. Eduardo Villarama performs a podiatry exam for one of his patients at Golden Valley Health Centers in Merced. A remodeling and expansion project underway will improve the quality of care and patient services at 21 Golden Valley Health Center locations in the Central Valley funded, in part, by UnitedHealthcare's $9 million investment (Photo: John Miller Photography). UnitedHealthcare purchased $9 million in tax-exempt revenue bonds, working together with other funding partners, to combine resources to fund new health center construction and renovate existing clinics. "We appreciate UnitedHealthcare's investment in supporting the building of new health care centers and improvements to existing clinics throughout the Central Valley," said Tony Weber, CEO, Golden Valley Health Centers. "These investments, combined with the support from other partners, will help improve access to care and services for individuals and families throughout the communities served by Golden Valley Health Centers." UnitedHealthcare's investment is part of multiple projects that Golden Valley Health Centers will implement withthe support of multiple funding partners to help expand and enhance patient care at the following community clinics:



Merced County: Merced Northview in Merced; Stefani Health Center in Atwater; Merced Suites in Merced; South Merced Admin in Merced; Los Banos Medical in Los Banos; Los Banos Dental in Los Banos; and LeGrand Dental in LeGrand. Stanislaus County: Turlock Colorado in Turlock; Florida Suites in Modesto; Patterson Medical/Dental in Patterson; Newman Medical/Dental in Newman; Planada Medical/Dental in Planada; Ceres East Dental/Medical in Ceres; Hanshaw Dental in Modesto; Empire Dental in Empire; and Corner of Hope in Modesto.

San Joaquin County: Manteca's second clinic, which will include services such as dental, behavioral health and health education. "UnitedHealthcare is committed to supporting organizations that work to ensure Californians have access to quality care, particularly those providing care in underserved areas," said Rob Falkenberg, CEO and president of UnitedHealthcare of California. "By investing in Golden Valley Health Centers we can help enhance their clinics, services and quality of care that will benefit many families and patients in the region for years to come." UnitedHealthcare provided the $9 million in funding through its California Health Care Investment Program, which supports health care organizations that provide services to underserved, low-income and underinsured communities throughout the Golden State. The investment program provides California health care entities access to capital rates that are highly competitive with those of conventional financing. Since 2007, the California Health Care Investment Program has provided more than $400 million in total capital to 56 health care organizations in California. About UnitedHealthcare

UnitedHealthcare is dedicated to helping people live healthier lives and making the health system work better for everyone by simplifying the health care experience, meeting consumer health and wellness needs, and sustaining trusted relationships with care providers. In the United States, UnitedHealthcare offers the full spectrum of health benefit programs for individuals, employers, and Medicare and Medicaid beneficiaries, and contracts directly with more than 1.2 million physicians and care professionals, and 6,500 hospitals and other care facilities nationwide. The company also provides health benefits and delivers care to people through owned and operated health care facilities in South America. UnitedHealthcare is one of the businesses of UnitedHealth Group (NYSE: UNH), a diversified health care company. For more information, visit UnitedHealthcare at www.uhc.com or follow @UHC on Twitter (News - Alert) . Click here to subscribe to Mobile Alerts for UnitedHealth Group. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180920005090/en/

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[September 20, 2018] Higher Education Embraces Digital Transformation With Box

Box (News - Alert) , Inc. (NYSE:BOX) today announced that leading universities, including California State University, Bakersfield, Duke University, Georgia Tech, LSU, University of Louisville, and University of Nebraska have selected Box's cloud content management platform for campus-wide deployments. These higher education institutions are starting the new school year by modernizing IT strategies, driving digital transformation projects, and powering student, faculty, and administrative staff productivity with Box. "Security, data governance, and protection of our most critical content was the upmost priority when looking to implement a unified cloud content management platform for our 36,000 students, faculty, and staff," said John Borne, Deputy CIO and Executive Director for Information Security and Risk at LSU. "Box is the cloud service we selected to meet our university community's needs." "We are thrilled to partner with the world's leading colleges and universities to power the future of collaboration for education and research," said Andrew Keating, Managing Director of Education at Box. "These universities are modernizing their IT environments to improve productivity and streamline real-time access to information for more effective research, teaching, and learning. By utilizing Box with best-of-breed cloud services, universities can digitize their administrative processes and enable modern ways of working for their faculty and students." This back-to-school season more universities than ever before are driving digital transformation through campus-wide, cloud content management deployments. With continued momentum in higher education, these new and expanded customers join countless others like Indiana University, University of Michigan, and Penn State, who are leveraging Box's cloud content management platform. These universities represent a wide variety of use cases: California State University, Bakersfield levrages Box as a campus-wide tool to centralize content management and meet security and compliance standards.

Duke University has made Box available across the university to power internal and external collaboration, ensuring HIPAA compliance for sensitive data.

Georgia Tech will utilize Box KeySafe for encryption key management, ensuring enhanced data security, privacy, and control, which is critical for protecting the university's research involving sensitive data.

LSU chose Box Governance for retention management and protection of critical content.

University of Louisville expanded on their Box deployment, implementing Box Governance to bolster security, compliance and data protection for their most important information.

University of Nebraska standardized with Box for cloud content management for all its campuses.



Box for Education launched in 2015 and offers qualified non-profit education customers Box enterprise licensing and unlimited storage for all their students, faculty, and staff. It has helped colleges and universities of all sizes to: Deploy wall-to-wall to their entire campus community, giving all students, faculty, and staff the power to collaborate seamlessly within their campuses and beyond;

Reduce costs and reallocate funds through the retirement of legacy on premises hardware;

Eliminate ongoing maintenance and operational burdens of running in-house file sharing services;

Support the move of sensitive data to the cloud, leveraging security and compliance offerings like Box Governance for data retention, legal holds, and content classification; and

Collaborate with their peers at the hundreds of universities deploying Box. To learn more about Box for Education, please visit https://www.box.com/industries/education.

About Box Box (NYSE:BOX) is the cloud content management company that empowers enterprises to revolutionize how they work by securely connecting their people, information and applications. Founded in 2005, Box powers more than 87,000 businesses globally and 69 percent of the Fortune 500, including AstraZeneca, General Electric, P&G, and The GAP. Box is headquartered in Redwood City, CA (News - Alert) , with offices across the United States, Europe and Asia. To learn more about Box, visit http://www.box.com/. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180920005226/en/

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[September 20, 2018] Tradewind Adds ScotiaMocatta Alum to Executive Team to Power European Expansion

Tradewind Markets Inc., a technology platform for digitizing the trading, settlement and ownership of precious metals is pleased to announce and welcome Steve Lowe to the executive team today. Steve will be responsible for the build out and leadership of Tradewind's European operations. With 30 years of industry experience, Steve helped build ScotiaMocatta, one of the world's top bullion dealers in precious and base metals. Steve served on the board and was vice chairman of The London Bullion Market Association. "Steve has overseen many trading and financing transactions for the world's largest refiners, producers and investors of precious metals. His experience will be invaluable to the Tradewind team." Said Mike Haughton, co-founder of Tradewind. "By combining Steve's experience, credibility and relationships with a global network of industry leaders, Steve will be able to make an immediate impact to the expansion of the business. Based in London, Steve will be expanding Tradewind's presence in Europe, while building strategic partnerships across banks, brokers, custodians, refinrs, producers, and investors in his new role. Additionally, Steve will be liaising between the Tradewind team and partners and clients with a focus on improving and adapting TWM's product functionality, allowing the firm to drive more value for participants.



Steve Lowe said, "There is a lot of hype around blockchain. Over my time spent talking to Tradewind, as well as their customers, it is apparent they were focused on uncovering real solutions to tangible issues in the industry." Steve went on to say, "I believe we possess a unique combination of partners, expertise and direction to drive valuable solutions at a time the industry is in need of innovation." Tradewind is backed by industry leaders in the precious metals and electronic trading sectors, including: IEX (News - Alert) Group, an innovative stock exchange; Sprott Inc., a global alternative asset manager; and, Goldcorp Inc., the world's fourth largest gold producer.

About Tradewind Tradewind Markets Inc., is a technology platform for digitizing the trading, settlement, and ownership of precious metals. The Tradewind solution combines the world-class exchange technology of IEX, the fair, simple and transparent stock exchange with a blockchain application tailored for precious metals. Tradewind was formed in 2015 and is managed by a team of professionals with extensive experience in electronic trading, gold investment management, market operations and blockchain technology. For more information please visit https://tradewindmarkets.com/. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180920005638/en/

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[September 20, 2018] Ameriflex Announces Integration Partnership With Employee Navigator

As a new Open Enrollment Season dawns and plan administrators across the U.S. begin gearing up for annual benefits-election periods, a big-time partnership between one of the country's largest independent administrators of consumer-driven health benefits and a leading provider of HR and compliance software promises to simplify the lives of hundreds of HR professionals. Ameriflex, recognized as one of the nation's largest independent administrators of consumer-driven health plans, including Health Savings Accounts and Flexible Spending Accounts, will be partnering with Employee Navigator in an effort to streamline the management of employee benefits for people across the nation. The partnership offers plan administrators the simplicity of seamless data transfer from Employee Navigator's benefits-admin software with Ameriflex's unparalleled accuracy and security on its CDH and COBRA self-service platforms. Ameiflex President and COO, Bart McCollum, says he hopes the partnership provides some much-needed tranquility to plan administrators during what is often their busiest and most stressful time of the year. "They are already working so hard this time of year, having to enter employee data into multiple systems is the last thing they should be worrying about, and with this partnership, hundreds of plan administrators and HR professionals no longer will," says McCollum. "This partnership aligns perfectly with our goal of providing a frictionless experience for all of our broker and employer clients."



The two companies have been working on the partnership for months and have now fully-integrated their platforms in time for the 2019 Open Enrollment Season. "Ameriflex has a proven track record of delivering great service to their customers," says George Reese, CEO of Employee Navigator. "We're excited to work with them to deliver a seamless integration to our customers." About Ameriflex

Ameriflex is recognized as one of the nation's largest independent administrators of consumer-driven health plans. Built organically, Ameriflex continues to reinvest in smart, integrated user tools and technologies, best-in-class service, and advocacy efforts - all geared toward reducing healthcare costs and providing frictionless service and unparalleled tranquility to the brokers and clients with whom we work. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180920005673/en/

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[September 20, 2018] Crypto Hedge Fund Ikigai Bolsters Team with New Executive Hires

Ikigai Asset Management, the long/short multi-strategy cryptoasset hedge fund launched by former Point72 Portfolio Manager, Travis Kling, announced today the addition of three new executive hires. Christina Martin, of Plutos Capital Group, has joined as Partner. Daniel Heller of BitLumens and Oliver Zahn of Google (News - Alert) have joined as Advisors. "We've seen significant traction with sophisticated investors on what we're building at Ikigai and have an imminent need to continue to build out our deep bench of experts," notes Ikigai Co-Founder and CIO, Travis Kling. "We're thrilled to add seasoned industry veterans with diverse backgrounds to the Ikigai team." Joining Ikigai as Advisor, Daniel Heller currently serves as the CFO of BitLumens, a decentralized, blockchain-based micro power-grid that distributes solar power devices in areas without a power-grid and connects them to the blockchain. For two decades prior, Heller was the Director of Financial Stability and Oversight at Swiss National Bank. Heller also served as Executive Director at the IMF. Heller received his Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Bern. Heller comments, "I've focused on the impact of blockchain technology in the financial sector for the last several years of my career and have seen firsthand the need for creation of, and acess to, a more sophisticated digital currency investment vehicle."



Also joining Ikigai's Advisory team, Oliver Zahn is currently Head of Data Science at Google. Previously, Zahn was Chief Data Scientist at Impossible Foods where he spearheaded data science efforts to create the Impossible Burger. Prior to that, Zahn was the Executive Director of UC Berkeley's Cosmology department, where he worked alongside two recent Nobel (News - Alert) laureates and employed data science techniques to first discover Gravitational Lensing. Zahn's doctoral work at Harvard University was in Theoretical and Computational Astrophysics. Zahn stated, "I look forward to helping Ikigai architect and implement a world-class data science environment to drive thoughtful investment in a technology that is making the world a better place." Joining Ikigai as Partner, Christina Martin is leading Institutional Investor Relations. Martin's deep capital markets experience prior to Ikigai includes: Director of Plutos Capital investment bank, EVP of Institutional FX Trading at Odeon Capital, CEO of Backstage Artist Lounge Touring, VP of STW Fixed Income Management, Associate in Structured Products at Charles Schwab, VP of McCormack Advisors statistical arbitrage hedge fund, and elected Trustee of the University of Colorado's $1 billion Foundation & Endowment, allocating significantly to alternative assets. Martin notes, "there is a clear need in the marketplace for institutional investors to have a trusted, experienced, sophisticated fiduciary through which to gain exposure to this new asset class. Ikigai stands ready as that solution."

Martin joins Timothy Lewis, Anthony Emtman and Travis Kling on the Executive Leadership team at Ikigai. About Ikigai Ikigai is a long/short multistrat Cryptoasset hedge fund. We seek to generate superior risk-adjusted returns through the execution of venture-stage pre-ICO investments and both systematic and fundamental liquid hedge fund strategies. As a Cryptoasset management firm, we are investing at the intersection of what we are good at, what we like to do, and what the world needs for the purpose of ethically delivering superior risk-adjusted returns. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180920005672/en/

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[September 20, 2018] Banks Award $100K Grant to Help Fund Construction of Homeless Shelter

One Hopeful Place takes a slightly different approach to tackling homelessness in Florida's Okaloosa County. Executive Director Nathan Monk said that the 20-bed homeless shelter, which opened in 2016, seeks homeless individuals where they are, oftentimes in homeless encampments. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180920005681/en/ One Hopeful Place received a $100,000 Affordable Housing Program grant from BancorpSouth Bank and FHLB Dallas to help build a homeless shelter in Okaloosa County, Florida. (Photo: Business Wire) "It's important for us to go out into the community and build relationships with them," said Mr. Monk. "A lot of the people we serve are on their third, fourth and fifth chances and they seem to respond well to our holistic approach to their recovery." In 2015, BancorpSouth Bank and the Federal Home Loan Bank of Dallas (FHLB Dallas) awarded a $100,000 Affordable Housing Program (AHP) grant to Community Solutions, which helped fund the first phase of construction of the facility, which also provides employment, continuing education and housing skills. Bank and project representatives gathered yesterday for a check presentation to celebrate the grant. "Food, shelter and safety are people's most basic needs," said Ron Moliterno, BancorpSouth's president of ommunity affairs in Destin, Florida. "We're proud to help provide those needs to our community's vulnerable residents in partnership with FHLB Dallas."



FHLB Dallas annually returns 10 percent of its profits in the form of AHP grants to the communities served by its member institutions such as BancorpSouth Bank. AHP grants fund a variety of projects, including home rehabilitation and modifications for low-income, elderly and special-needs residents; down payment and closing cost assistance for qualified first-time homebuyers; and the construction of low-income, multifamily rental communities and single-family homes. "The AHP was created for our members to address their communities' affordable housing needs," said Greg Hettrick, FHLB Dallas first vice president and director of Community Investment. "Our partnership with BancorpSouth Bank is the foundation upon which those solutions are built."

In 2017, FHLB Dallas awarded $7 million in grants to 19 affordable housing projects. The grants will help create 1,108 new or rehabilitated housing units. Since the inception of the AHP in 1990, FHLB Dallas has awarded more than $261 million in AHP and AHP-funded grants to assist more than 48,500 families. Mr. Monk said that construction of One Hopeful Place would have been difficult without the AHP grant. "The AHP is tremendously important for communities to thrive," said Mr. Monk. "Finding funding for projects such as this one can be difficult and it's amazing that FHLB Dallas and BancorpSouth came together to support our mission." FHLB Dallas is making $14.4 million available through our member institutions in support of affordable housing. AHP funds recipients for 2018 will be announced in October. About BancorpSouth Bank BancorpSouth Bank (NYSE: BXS) is headquartered in Tupelo, Mississippi, with approximately $17 billion in assets. BancorpSouth operates approximately 280 full-service branch locations as well as additional mortgage, insurance and loan production offices in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Tennessee and Texas, including an insurance location in Illinois. BancorpSouth is committed to a culture of respect, diversity and inclusion in both its workplace and communities. To learn more, visit our Community Commitment page at www.bancorpsouth.com. Follow us on Facebook (News - Alert) and Twitter (@MyBXS); or connect with us through LinkedIn. About the Federal Home Loan Bank of Dallas The Federal Home Loan Bank of Dallas is one of 11 district banks in the FHLBank System created by Congress in 1932. FHLB Dallas, with total assets of $75.9 billion as of June 30, 2018, is a member-owned cooperative that supports housing and community investment by providing competitively priced loans and other credit products to approximately 825 members and associated institutions in Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, New Mexico and Texas. For more information, visit fhlb.com. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180920005681/en/

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[September 20, 2018] SUMO Heavy's Retail Consumer Survey Reveals Shoppers Have Mixed Views On Social Commerce

NEW YORK, Sept. 20, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Digital commerce consulting firm SUMO Heavy today released its 2018 Social Commerce Revisited report which explores the impact of social media on consumer behavior and how emerging social features like messaging chatbots can better serve brands and retailers. The study polled consumers across the country and aims to identify how people interact with different social channels and technology during their online shopping journey. The survey revisits questions posed in SUMO Heavy's 2016 Social Commerce Survey and compares the results to the realities of social commerce behavior and adoption in 2018. While overall social media use remains high among consumers, concerns related to security, privacy, and legitimacy plague social commerce, a method of shopping directly through a social media platform like Instagram's "Shoppable Tags." Interactions with messaging chatbots remain low in number, but they have been received positively by consumers. Familiarity with conversational commerce, or shopping through chatbots on messaging apps remains low, though use was expected to increase. The survey, conducted in May 2018, includes responses from 1,046 U.S. consumers ages 18 and over. 53 percent of respondents identify as women and 47 percent identify as men. According to the urvey:



Social media's influence is on the rise. 58% of respondents said social media influences their purchasing decisions today, compared to 45% in 2016.

58% of respondents said social media influences their purchasing decisions today, compared to 45% in 2016. Social commerce transactions have stalled. Despite the recent hype around social commerce, 82% of consumers have yet to transact using social buy buttons or other forms of social commerce.



Despite the recent hype around social commerce, 82% of consumers have yet to transact using social buy buttons or other forms of social commerce. Consumer awareness is high but so are concerns. 80% of shoppers are familiar with social commerce, but security and privacy concerns keep them from transacting.

80% of shoppers are familiar with social commerce, but security and privacy concerns keep them from transacting. Chatbots are gaining favor as a trusted resource. 72% of people who have used chatbots find them to be helpful and informative. Better yet, 74% of shoppers are now open to making a purchase through a chatbot, compared to 55% in 2016. "It's no surprise that social media use is as high as ever. Checking and updating these platforms has become a daily routine for the average consumer," says Bart Mroz, Co-founder and CEO of SUMO Heavy. "But ethical concerns regarding privacy and user data have made consumers skeptical when it comes to making transactions via social channels or chatbots. The niche audience of consumers who have had positive experiences, however, signals a future increase in adoption as they become more aware of the benefits of social media shopping and conversational commerce." Data from the new survey suggests that brands and retailers must continue to leverage social media channels in new ways to market and sell to their customers. While most shoppers have yet to transact directly through these channels, businesses should look to invest in the future of social media shopping and emerging social technology as overall consumer sentiment evolves from neutral to positive in the coming years.

To access the full report, please visit: www.socialcommercerevisited.com About SUMO Heavy SUMO Heavy Industries is a digital commerce consulting firm founded in 2010 by Bart Mroz and Bob Brodie, with offices in New York City and Philadelphia. The SUMO team is comprised of experienced strategists, consultants, designers, and developers who work together to help build successful brands and create online retail solutions with proven results. For more information, please visit: www.sumoheavy.com View original content:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/sumo-heavys-retail-consumer-survey-reveals-shoppers-have-mixed-views-on-social-commerce-300716292.html SOURCE SUMO Heavy

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[September 20, 2018] A.M. Best Revises Outlooks to Positive for SSQ Life Insurance Company, Inc.

A.M. Best has revised the outlooks to positive from stable and affirmed the Financial Strength Rating of A- (Excellent) and the Long-Term Issuer Credit Rating of "a-" of SSQ Life Insurance Company, Inc. (SSQ) (Quebec, Canada) The ratings reflect SSQ's balance sheet strength, which A.M. Best categorizes as strong, as well as its strong operating performance, neutral business profile and appropriate enterprise risk management. SSQ is primarily involved in group insurance and holds significant market share within the Quebec province. The company's majority shareholder, Fonds de solidarite FTQ, the largest developmental capital network within Quebec, holds a 71% direct ownership stake and provided capital in 2012 to assist with SSQ's acquisition of AXA Life of Canada. SSQ continues to prioritize expanding outside of Quebec with some success over the long-term. The positive outlooks reflect SSQ's improved risk-adjusted capitalization coupled with a trend of decreasing financial leverage due to significant capital growth and pay down of debt. The company's risk-adjusted capitalization, as measured by Best's Capital Adequacy Ratio (BCAR), has improved notably in the previous several years due to the growth in capital. In addition, the company reported a very favorable regulatory solvency ratio during 2018 under AMF's new capital regime CARLI (capital adequacy requirements for life insurers), which took effect in Quebec on Jan. 1, 2018. SSQ also continues to produce strong operating performance year-over-year, often with low double-digit returns on equity. Despite some volatilityin earnings by line, group insurance continues to generate favorable earnings on growing business volume. The company's investment and retirement division also has emerged as an earnings producer in the previous two years due to successful implementation of profitability enhancements.



A.M. Best believes that SSQ will continue to maintain or improve its overall balance sheet strength over time, but also will continue to have difficulty expanding outside its home province of Quebec due to intense competition from larger more established entities. This press release relates to Credit Ratings that have been published on A.M. Best's website. For all rating information relating to the release and pertinent disclosures, including details of the office responsible for issuing each of the individual ratings referenced in this release, please see A.M. Best's Recent Rating Activity web page. For additional information regarding the use and limitations of Credit Rating opinions, please view Understanding Best's Credit Ratings. For information on the proper media use of Best's Credit Ratings and A.M. Best press releases, please view Guide for Media - Proper Use of Best's Credit Ratings and A.M. Best Rating Action Press Releases.

A.M. Best is a global rating agency and information provider with a unique focus on the insurance industry. Visit www.ambest.com for more information. Copyright  2018 by A.M. Best Rating Services, Inc. and/or its affiliates. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180920005826/en/

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[September 20, 2018] W. R. Berkley Corporation to Announce Third Quarter 2018 Earnings on October 23, 2018

W. R. Berkley Corporation (NYSE:WRB) will release its third quarter 2018 earnings after the market closes on Tuesday, October 23, 2018. A copy of the earnings release will be available on the Company's website at www.wrberkley.com. The Company has scheduled its quarterly conference call with analysts and investors to discuss its earnings and other information on Tuesday, Octobr 23, 2018 at 5:00 p.m. eastern time. A live audio webcast of the conference call may be accessed via the Company's website at www.wrberkley.com. Please log on at least ten minutes early to register and download and install any necessary software. A replay of the webcast will be available on the Company's website approximately two hours after the end of the call.



Founded in 1967, W. R. Berkley Corporation is an insurance holding company that is among the largest commercial lines writers in the United States and operates worldwide in two segments of the property casualty insurance business: Insurance and Reinsurance.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180920005813/en/

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The most seriously injured suffered multiple gunshot wounds to his upper body, back and abdomen. Another was grazed to his body and the other shot in his extremities. All are expected to survive after being taken to Presence St. Francis Hospital in Evanston in good to critical condition. One of the victims was taken there by a Chicago ambulance, said Chicago Fire Dept. spokesman Larry Merritt.
[September 20, 2018] Howe Successfully Passes the Baton to USA Federal and State Congressional and Law Enforcement Apparatus, as well as Major Media Outlets, SubscriberWise Announces

David Howe, America's Child Identity Guardian and President of SubscriberWise, the nation's largest issuing CRA for communications and the leading protector of children victimized by identity fraud, announced today the exchange of what he believes is the most comprehensive proof of state and federal car-rental UDAAPs (Unfair, Deceptive, Abusive Acts or Practices) to the United States of America federal and state law enforcement agencies, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Florida Attorney General, Pam Bondi's Office including Consumer Protection Director Victoria Butler. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180920005979/en/ SubscriberWise founder and America's child identity guardian David Howe, holding two public records each containing sworn testimony which has been provided to USA Congress, law enforcement, and media confirming profound consumer UDAAPs. (Photo: Business Wire) Related: After years of consumer complaints, state accuses rental car firm of deceptive practices -- https://www.tampabay.com/florida-politics/buzz/2018/08/30/after-years-of-consumer-complaints-state-sues-rental-car-giant-for-deceptive-fees/ In addition, the mountain of evidence, along with two public records each containing sworn testimony with remarkably contradictory statements and exhibits, have been provided to staff members of the Honorable United States Senator Sherrod Brown, including colleagues from Honorable Senator Brown's Office who work for the Federal Trade Commission ( FTC (News - Alert) ) and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). Other United States Senators' staff members, including the Honorable Elizabeth Warren, the Honorable Bill Nelson, and the Honorable Charles Schumer, have been alerted to what Howe insists are the relentless abuses perpetrated against United States Citizens, as well as our sisters and brothers who visit our beloved and law-loving nation from around the world. "MISSION ACCOMPLISHED," proclaimed David Howe, SubscriberWise founder, FICO Professor, and Identity Guardian for babies, for girls, and for boys. "Yes, we now and finally no longer have mere allegations of predatory behavior including even criminal intent and corruption. Instead, we have two powerful and unimpeachable public records, each containing sworn testimony -- including from the same witness involved in the scheme -- that I firmly believe reveal in the most remarkable terms a sophisticated cover-up hat evolved into a grand-story with patently false testimony and exhibits.



SEE: https://www.elliott.org/blog/enterprise-determines-damaged-rental/ ('Damage Evaluator' and notice the photo with the clear disclaimer regarding 'Bumper Scrapes'; compare to sworn manager testimony taken under-oath during photographic-exhibit cross-examination that proves consumer financial harm) "And it's all now on the public record under the bright light of day - so obviously and so undeniably contrary to the industry marketing and proclamations that otherwise deceive the public into reducing caution when renting a vehicle and driving off the lot. It's a wholly unfair and abusive system that ensures self-implication when innocent consumers mistakenly rely - through marketing and advertising that work precisely as intended - on the expectation of the 'good faith and fair dealing covenant'; a standard and best-practice only ethical and honest companies engage and strive for with zeal.

"It's true," Howe confirmed. "The publicly trumpeted 'damage' protocols are now proved disgraced in the most obvious manner one could imagine. In fact, I believe only a review of the testimony can fully reveal the incredible violations of FTC and CFPB rules and regulations, as well as a myriad of state and federal consumer violations that would make even an infant's head spin because of the abuse and injustice so shamefully evident on the permanent public records. "So today, as I officially and finally pass the baton and move on from this incredibly harmful and horrifically painful life-event, I want to express the most sincere gratitude a human being can muster for all those who have aided and assisted me in bringing this harmful behavior to light," continued Howe. "And, of course, it's not possible for me to adequately thank each and every person. It's not possible for me to thank each and every agency who came to side with truth and justice. For me, each is an 'army of allies' and I remain profoundly grateful. "But, in particular, there is one agency and one individual that indeed do deserve extraordinary thanks and recognition," Howe insisted. "There is one agency that I must single-out for a loud and clear recognition that otherwise allowed a temporarily fallen-victim to get back on his feet and raise his head high and proud for the world to know and see. That agency is the Lee County Port Authority Police Department at the SW FL Fort Myers International Airport. And that individual is a dedicated and professional law-enforcement officer who delivered the most significant contribution to truth and justice in terms of exposing the facts and details associated with this financial rental scandal relentlessly exacted against the public 'en masse'. "Yes, it's simply a fact that without the incredibly comprehensive and thorough independent investigation report, including sworn witness statements from the same individual who I feel eagerly and brazenly neglected the facts in sworn testimony in a United States of America Court of Law and in the presence of the Honorable Archie B. Hayward Jr. in Lee County, Florida, there could be no possibility of exposing this extreme bad act and cover-up. "I believe without the officer's demonstrated due-diligence and unwavering commitment to the details and the facts from other actors involved -- who also directly and indirectly contradicted the fantasy and fiction so desperately concocted under-oath in Judge Hayward's courtroom -- there could be no possibility of exposing this extreme bad act and cover-up," added Howe. "And, let the record reflect now and forever, the same must be stated regarding the extraordinary investigative facts so powerfully exposed by the high-definition photos that the officer thoughtfully included in his remarkable work of art that so profoundly and so unequivocally impeached the scheme that was presented under-oath nearly two years later in the Lee County Justice Center in the 20th Judicial Circuit, Honorable Archie B. Hayward Jr. SEE: https://southfloridatrial.foxrothschild.com/tag/florida-spoliation-of-evidence/ (court testimony proves manager conveniently failed to safeguard video that was used to implicate - even after recorded audio proving video was viewed. Both police and victim made repeated demands to view video to no avail. Manager testified to court having no awareness of otherwise common-sense duty to preserve evidence.) "Yes, let the record again reflect the baton is passed," Howe affirmed. "Law enforcement, Congress, major media, and - most importantly, the USA public and our neighbors from around the world, can now and forever know the truth. The sad, harmful, and frightening truth about the very real financial harms that await the renting public because of an industry operating in the disgraceful and conspicuous absence of uniform and predictable standards. "As for whom I consider the criminal predators, for them no amount of justification, no amount of marketing, no amount of spin, no amount of human effort will ever hide or conceal the unethical and harmful deeds they level with zeal, shame, and disgust against honest and innocent renters past, present and future," Howe concluded. The two permanent public records available to ALL under Florida's broad 'Sunshine Law' (http://myfloridalegal.com/pages.nsf/Main/DC0B20B7DC22B7418525791B006A54E4) : Lee County Port Authority Police (Case No. 2016000055203 Lee County Clerk of the Court (Case No. 18-SC-001768) About SubscriberWise SubscriberWise launched as the first issuing consumer reporting agency exclusively for the cable industry in 2006. The company filed extensive documentation and end-user agreements to access TransUnion's consumer database. In 2009, SubscriberWise and TransUnion announced a joint marketing agreement for the benefit of America's cable operators (http://newsroom.transunion.com/transunion-and-subscriberwise-announce-joint-marketing-agreement). Today SubscriberWise is a risk management preferred-solutions provider for the National Cable Television Cooperative. SubscriberWise contributions to the communications industry are quantified in the billions of dollars annually. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180920005979/en/

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[September 20, 2018] Michael Broadfoot: Early Warning Press Release

Financial figures expressed in Canadian dollars CALGARY, Sept. 20, 2018 /CNW/ - Michael Broadfoot announces that he has sold, through an automatic securities disposition plan ("ASDP"), an aggregate of 803,500 common shares ("Shares") in the capital of Solium Capital Inc. ("Solium") between February 1, 2018 and September 18, 2018 at an average price of $11.30 per Share for total gross proceeds of $9,082,167. Together with other sales of Shares, and taking into account acquisitions from the exercise of stock options, there has been a net decrease in Mr. Broadfoot's beneficial holdings in the amount of 1,654,514 Shares since the date of his last early warning report of November 15, 2010. This represents an aggregate disposition of 2.9% of the total number of issued and outstanding Shares. As at November 15, 2010, Mr. Broadfoot held 7,745,200 Shares, being approximately 18.82% of the total issued and outstandig Shares. Mr. Broadfoot currently holds 6,081,186 Shares and 9,500 vested stock options, being approximately 10.8% of the total issued and outstanding Shares. In addition, Mr. Broadfoot holds stock options to acquire an additional 9,500 Shares and holds 3,897 restricted share units that have not yet vested (and which will not vest within the next 60 days).



Mr. Broadfoot previously announced the adoption of the ASDP plan on December 27, 2017 in order to facilitate the sale of up to 2,400,000 Shares on the open market over a period of up to two years. In accordance with Canadian securities legislation, sales of Shares under the ASDP are being effected by an independent securities broker in accordance with the trading parameters, price and volume limits and other instructions set out at the time the ASDP was adopted. Mr. Broadfoot is not able to exercise any further discretion or influence over how dispositions occur under his ASDP, and the broker administering his ASDP is not permitted to consult with him regarding any such dispositions. Mr. Broadfoot retired from his position as the Executive Chairman of Solium in May of 2017, although he continues as the Chair of the Board of Directors of Solium. He is selling a portion of his Shares in order to support his family's philanthropy program and to support capital requirements in other family owned ventures. Up to an additional 1,596,500 Shares may be sold pursuant to Mr. Broadfoot's current ASDP, which expires in January 2020. Depending on market and other conditions, Mr. Broadfoot may take such additional actions in respect of his holdings in the future as he deems appropriate in light of the then existing circumstances.

Solium's head office is located at: Suite 1500, 600  3rd Avenue SW, Calgary, Alberta T2P 0G5. SOURCE Solium Capital Inc.

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According to a Bloomberg report today, Samsung is preparing to decelerate its memory chip production for 2019 in anticipation of a decline in demand. The South Korean manufacturer's move is a double-edged sword as it can either help maintain NAND flash and dynamic random access memory (DRAM) prices or further drive up prices.

(Image credit: Samsung)

At the beginning of this year, Samsung's optimism had it believe that the bit growth for DRAM and NAND would rise 20 percent and 40 percent, respectively in 2018. Bit growth is a term used inside the industry to refer to the amount of memory produced. It's an important metric for measuring demand and allows manufacturers to plan their production.

Samsung's latest forecast looks pretty grim as the company expects DRAM bit growth to rise less than 20 percent and that of NAND to increase 30 percent. So, the logical step for Samsung would be to slow down memory chip production to limit supply, which could result in consequences for consumers. Bloomberg analyst Anthea Lai believes Samsung would prefer a situation where supply is tight and prices are high, rather than gaining more market share and running the risk of lower prices.

Samsung is currently the world's leading NAND and DRAM manufacturer. The company produces memory chips for smartphones, computers and many other devices. Samsung does not only produce memory chips for its own arsenal of devices, but also sells to other competing smartphone manufacturers. So, it's not hard to see why Samsung takes such great care of its semiconductor business. As a matter of fact, it's easily the most lucrative activity for the South Korean manufacturer. Samsung's chip division alone raked in $31.4 billion in operating income last year, helping drive the company's earnings record to new heights.

So, how does this affect the average consumer? Well, if Samsung decides to go through with its decision to reduce production, chances are that memory prices will continue to stay high in 2019.
Another family from Puerto Rico, Manuel Torres Marquez and Dinah Kortright Roig, spent time in Chicago in the initial months after Maria but has since returned to their San Juan home. The couple returned in December, but it wasnt until recently that they were able to make repairs to their family room, which was damaged by the hurricanes strong winds and rain. It took so long to get the repairs done because of a backlog of materials and a shortage of workers, Kortright Roig said.
Kansas House candidate Paul Davis subject of new attack for his 'history with strip clubs' A Republican super PAC is hitting Democratic congressional candidate Paul Davis with a new attack ad in Kansas' 2nd congressional district that details his apparent "strong obsession" with strip clubs.

Whilst g-strings and big booty ladies in need of tips brings happy thoughts to the mind of most TKC Readers . . . This local political dude confronts a challenge on his history with strip clubs. Checkit:
KANSAS CITY, MO. (KCTV) -- Jessep Carter, the half-brother of Kylr Yust, died this week inside the Jackson County Detention Center, online court records state. Carter was charged with second-degree arson this summer. He was accused of igniting a structure fire at 5901 Manchester Ave.
The Independence Police Department is asking for help to locate two people for questioning in connection with a home invasion. Dennis "DJ" Brock, 24, and Anthony Brock, 39, have both been named persons of interest in this cast. Police said the incident happened in an apartment in the 200 block of S.
UPDATE: Missouri GOP calls McCaskill's opposition to Kavanaugh 'slap in the face' to Missourians WASHINGTON D.C. (KCTV) -- U.S. Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-MO) says she will oppose Judge Brett Kavanaugh's nomination to the Supreme Court. She said concerns over campaign finance was the primary reason for her choice. Full statement: "I have been thorough in examining Judge Kavanaugh's record.

Lesser newsies are still saving their columns and opinions on this topic while our blog community is much more busy debating the topic in real time.A worthwhile missive on the sitch overall:The latest as
This is a car company built from scratch after the completion of a complicated business plan with a bunch of SWOT analysis, market research, and competition assessment. Welcome, VinFast.

Who can actually give birth to a new car company? The process can be jump-started with innovative technology ( think Tesla or Rimac), or created from scratch by a really, really massive company like Hyundai or Lexus . In this case, I am writing about the birth of the first car company from Vietnam, ever. Called VinFast, the first Vietnamese automotive producer may sound like a joke at first. It is anything but. Behind it is the largest Vietnamese private conglomerate Vingroup JS. It is backed by automotive minds from the depths of the American and European car industry, its foundation is German technology, and its soul is Italian design. If you ever thought that money couldnt buy a car company, think again, because I think VinFast is the definition of money making/buying a car company.

I am thinking of using the word "disruptive" for VinFasts bold plan, but Im not quite sure yet...

What is VinFast?

With a vision of becoming the leading vehicle manufacturer in Southeast Asia, VinFast is the first Vietnamese car company and is led by James DeLuca, Former Vice President of Manufacturing at General Motors.

The company has R&D and production facilities in Vietnam, yet most of the technology used for the cars VinFast plans to produce were found elsewhere. The company partnered with Siemens, Bosch, Magna International, Pininfarina, and BMW, among others.

Interestingly enough, the VinFast name doesnt actually have anything to do with velocity. Instead, the Vin part stands for Vietnam, while the FAST part is a sort of an acronym. In Vietnamese, FAST stands for F (Phong Cach) - style, A (An Toan) - safety, S (Sang tao) - innovation, T (Tien Phong) - pioneer.

With the reveal of two new cars - an SUV and a Sedan - at the upcoming 2018 Paris Motor Show, VinFast will officially enter the car market and introduce itself to the world.

Who owns VinFast?

Owned by a Vietnamese conglomerate Vingroup JS, VinFast basically became a subsidiary of a massive company that specializes in real estate, amusement parks, and retail.

Along with James DeLuca, leading the company is Vo Quang Hue, Deputy CEO of Vingroup.

Apparently, he was the one who sealed the deal with many international companies and, effectively, enabled the creation of the all-new car brand.

In an interview with Vietnamese The Leader, Hue said:

"I am a master in mechanics after graduating from a university in Germany. I am interested in the automobile engine and always dream of doing something for the domestic automobile industry. Therefore, when I knew that Vuong [Vingroup founder] made investment, I decided to join".

VinFasts Cooperation With BMW

The most striking fact about VinFast is actually its partnership with BMW for the production of their first car.

It seems that Vo Quang Hue made a great impression on BMW executives as, after he revealed the VinFast plan to them, they agreed to sell licenses for building some of the cars with BMW technology.

I find this really curious as I dont really remember BMW selling its tech to outsiders who are ready to produce hundreds of thousands of vehicles per year ever before. However, it wasnt all that simple. VinFast engineers will have their hands full in order to meet more stringent regulations. After all, VinFast will not use the latest BMW technology, but the tech from outgoing BMW vehicles -the F10 (5 Series) and the F15 (X5).

Facilities

As with any car manufacturer, VinFast had to create numerous facilities in order to be able to produce cars.

The company invested heavily in a new plant in the town of Hai Phong. Apparently, the plant itself will cost $1.5 billion.

That is not all, though. Earlier this year, VinFast took over a Chevrolet dealer network (they will import and sell Chevrolets in Vietnam) and a Daewoo-GM plant in the city of Hanoi. The company plans to adapt the plant for the production of its own vehicles too. Add to this a dedicated research center, and you have yourself a car company.

Who Is Behind The Company? Some Big Names From The Car Industry?

Well, President of Vingroup is the richest man in Vietnam (Pham Nhat Vuong with an estimated net worth of $6.8 billion), second in command of Vingroup but the first in command of VinFast is Vo Quang Hue (that guy who went to seal the deal with BMW). Apart from them, we have some known names from the industry as well.

James DeLuca, Former Vice President of Manufacturing in GM, and now effectively working as CEO for VinFast. Actually, he said a few words about VinFast - "We have the resources, scalability, and commitment to become a significant new player in the global automotive industry."

Designer David Lyon who helped in designing the first CTS, Escalade, Yukon, and Hummer H3, among others.

Shaun Calvert, an engineer who made a career in GM finally becoming Director of Manufacturing Systems and Support before leaving for VinFast.

Roy Flecknell, Global and Regional Automotive Product & Portfolio Planning and Program Management Leader who baked his skills working for GM for 22 years.

Kevin Fisher, Head of Vehicle Engineering, formerly associated with Magna and Tata.

Obviously, this is a team with decades of automotive experience that is perfectly suited to lead an all-new car company.

VinFast Cars At The 2018 Paris Motor Show

The Vietnamese company prepared two new cars for their introduction at the 2018 Paris Motor Show.

Not only are they the cars that will launch the company, but they are, apparently, the first products from Vietnam to ever be exhibited at the Paris Motor Show.

Nevertheless, according to information from AutoCar in the U.K., VinFast cars - a sedan and an SUV - are actually based on top of the previous generation BMW 5 Series (F10) and BMW X5 (F15).

We do not know anything about the names as VinFast actually markets both of them only as a Sedan and an SUV. We will probably know more during and after the Paris Motor Show.

Design

Interestingly enough, VinFast outsourced the design for the vehicles to several design houses from Italy.

I did find out that the company has collaborated, on some level, with Zagato, Ital Design, Pininfarina, Torino Design, and others.

All of the companys proposed 20 design sketches in total. After that part of the work was done, VinFast reached out to Vietnamese people, 62,000 responded, and they picked the best among the 20 design sketches. They chose a Pininfarina design for both cars.

Obviously, the cars do follow the shapes set forth by BMW platforms. The Sedan is a classic three-box car with a long bonnet and long wheelbase, while the SUV actually reminds me a bit of the new Santa Fe. But it probably has a nicely tucked X5 F15 underneath.

David Lyon, Director of Design at VinFast, had a few words to say about the design of its new vehicles:

The strong, distinguishable design, enhanced by elegant lines and refined details, gives our cars several distinctive highlights. First and foremost, these emanate around the V logo in the grille which references the country of Vietnam, as well as the Vingroup and VinFast brands. He added, in conjunction with Pininfarina, we have carefully sculptured each body line to express the natural beauty of Vietnam and the warm-hearted and dynamic characteristics of its people through a modern and world-class design language.

Now, the contest was apparently won by ItalDesign studio, but VinFast continued cooperation with Pininfarina instead. Details about the whole process are rather sparse, so Ill leave it at that.

As for the looks, I think that the cars dont look shabby at all. Just fine. Even alluring.

Development Process

Technical Development and Engineering werent done in-house. Instead, VinFast outreached to Magna International and signed the company on a process of development which actually was shrunken down to only 11 months.

Having tech from BMW definitely helped with cutting down the time needed for development, but the elimination of the clay modeling stage was the crucial step.

I can only imagine that the car is basically 3D modeled and then approved for further development and production.

Although VinFast did buy the licenses for the production of cars based on top of BMW platforms, it still has to develop appropriate features to make the car compliant with the market and regulations of today. After all, the F10 and the F15 arent exactly young.

Head of Vehicle Engineering, Kevin Fisher, reported that VinFast made some extensive modifications to the structure and then improved pedestrian and side-impact protection. With these changes, the cars, apparently, comply with the regulations all around the world and offer exceptional safety standards.

Propulsion

Of course, the engines powering the VinFast Sedan and the VinFast SUV are from BMW as well.

VinFast bought licences for production and installation of BMW's famed 2.0-liter, N20 engine.

Yet, BMW did not sell VinFast its Valvetronic head license. Engines in VinFast cars wont have Valvetronic tech at all. VinFast probably developed its own solution and saved a bit of cash.

Nevertheless, the engines for VinFasts cars will come in two states of tune. One will deliver 175 horsepower and the other 227 horsepower. This isnt what youd call enormous power output, but no one could have actually expected a 3.0-liter, TwinPower, Turbo inside. Maybe sometime in the future. The engine is linked with an eight-speed ZF automatic transmission. Both cars, the Sedan and the SUV, will be available as RWD or AWD.

VinFast officials reported:

"VinFast products will share a number of characteristics and values: Vietnam, Style, Safety, Innovation, and Pioneering. Its cars will meet international standards and customer expectations in terms of premium design, quality, dynamics, in-car features, and ownership experience."

Future Cars

Development of the two new cars based on top of BMW platforms is only the tip of the iceberg.

City Car

VinFast actually has many other projects in the pipeline as well.

And one of the most promising ones is the development of a city car based on top of the Opel/Vauxhall Karl/Viva platform.

The company will build the car in restyled form, but still under license. The entry-level version will sport a 1.0-liter engine with the other one actually getting a 1.4-liter engine and the option for the automatic transmission. Interestingly enough, sketches for the car are already on the VinFast webpage, and I wouldnt be surprised if the people of Vietnam choose the design for this one too.

Electric Car

Apart from the small city car, VinFast will produce an electric vehicle as well.

Back in March 2018, German independent engineering service provider EDAG published an article disclosing their partnership with VinFast.

EDAG became the company responsible for the complete development of the first electric vehicle for the Vietnamese market. Of course, the car is basically being developed for VinFast (full name is VinFast Manufacturing and Trading Company Limited) to complement the new companys lineup.

"We are proud that VinFast has chosen to appoint us as the overall engineering partner to work on their trendsetting electric vehicle project," stated Cosimo De Carlo, CEO of the EDAG Group. "Our all-round skills in vehicle and production plant devel-opment coupled with our expertise in the fields of eMobility, car IT and elec-trics/electronics inspired the confidence of our customer VinFast.

VinFast E-Scooter

Considering that Vietnam is a land of scooters and motorcycles, the development of the new VinFast e-Scooter is only expected.

While the company is clearly focused on building cars, the plant in Hai Phong will actually have a dedicated production line for electric scooters with a capacity to build up to 1 million e-Scooters per year. This is huge, as is the Vietnamese market for cheap affordable transportation. Scooters will basically be produced next to cars in VinFast facilities.

Other Vehicles

Apart from vehicles for commercial purposes, VinFast facilities will be able to produce numerous specialty vehicles including a bus thats currently being developed in conjunction with German Siemens. Ambulances, police cars, taxis? I am sure VinFast will be able to do it all.

Conclusion

The birth of the first Vietnamese car company marks a major shift for the whole Southeast Asia market.

This is a region with a population of almost 650 million. As VinFast wants to be the leading car manufacturer there, it is safe to assume that it will try to sell its products throughout the region. It is not only by chance that by 2025 their facilities will be able to churn out up to 500,000 vehicles per year. Add to this 1 million scooters, and you have yourself a formidable car company with the capacity to meet the demand of a huge market.
This Regional Gender Action Plan (RGAP) presents the broad approach that the Africa Region of the WBG will take to address gender inequality FY18-22.

The RGAP is not intended to be an additional administrative burden for Bank staff, but rather to serve as a focal point, so that all teams across the Africa region of the World Bank Group (WBG) are all pulling in the same direction with our approach to addressing gender issues. The ultimate objective is to advance development for both men and women through operations grounded in robust evidence and informed country dialogue.

This RGAP replaces the previous RGAP for FY13-17 and is especially timely given the launch of a new WBG gender strategy in FY16, the recent shift in how the WBG identifies country level priorities with the introduction of Systematic Country Diagnostics (SCDs), and the change in the system that the Bank uses for monitoring gender integration in Bank operations. The new RGAP is also timely given the recent release of the Global GBV Task Force Report and associated Action Plan for Implementation, outlining recommendations to strengthen institutional tools, systems, and processes to prevent and mitigate the risks of sexual exploitation and abuse and other forms of gender-based violence in Bank-supported projects.

This RGAP starts from a discussion of five-well established priority thematic areas (section 2). While these areas provide a clear operational focus, there are emerging issues in the region for which there is a need to further strengthen the knowledge base. Section 3 discusses these frontier issues and how developing evidence can help lead to effective and scalable interventions. Section 4 provides the channels for implementing the plan and section 5 provides key indicators to monitor progress.

The five thematic areas that have been identified as encompassing the most pressing gender issues in sub-Saharan Africa are:

Reproductive health and demographics; Gender gaps in schooling and issues around adolescence; Gender gaps in agricultural productivity; Gender gaps in entrepreneurship and access to jobs; and Gender constraints related to fragility, conflict, and violence.

Frontier issues, where efforts will be focused on developing emerging evidence to fill knowledge gaps, include: social norms around manhood and the importance of engaging men in projects to gain their support and to influence key norms and behaviors; occupational segregation by sex and the factors that may allow women to cross-over into more highly remunerated and profitable sectors that have traditionally been dominated by men; the importance of non-cognitive skills for womens ability to overcome the greater constraints they face as entrepreneurs and farmers; womens unequal roles in unpaid/domestic work and the impacts on productivity, timeuse, and other outcomes of providing family care; and the effectiveness of interventions to address psychosocial health issues, such as the negative side effects of experiencing rape and other forms of gender-based violence.

The channels of actions through which the RGAP will be implemented include: integrating gender in country level strategic documents (SCDs, CPFs) and policy dialogue; integrating gender into WBG operations; and research/research-uptake to fill critical gender-related knowledge gaps and to ensure that new research influences policies and interventions. A guiding principle of this RGAP is that there should be a coherent and strategic approach to gender that starts with the analysis presented in the SCD, which then feeds into the overall country strategy outlined in the Country Partnership Framework (CPF), which in turn identifies the key areas where gender-informed interventions are called for in individual Bank-funded operations. At each of these stages, the Banks work will be continuously refined based on emerging evidence generated by impact evaluations, lessons learnt during operations, and other research from inside and outside the WBG.

Theme 3: Gender Gaps in Agricultural Productivity

Improving agricultural productivity is critical for the achievement of the WBGs twin goals in sub-Saharan Africa: the agriculture sector employs the majority of the regions workers, including the poorest, accounts for 30-40 percent of GDP, and makes a vital contribution to household food security. However, research shows that women farmers face a series of constraints that make them much less productive than their male counterparts.

The World Banks Leveling the Field report (World Bank and ONE, 2014) finds that gender gaps in agricultural productivity range from 24 percent in Ethiopia to 66 percent in Niger. These gender gaps are underpinned not only by womens lower access to productive inputs (land, labor, fertilizer, improved seeds, and agricultural information), but also by their lower returns to these inputs. This has important implications for how we address the gender gap: for example, giving women in Southern Nigeria equal access to productive inputs would allow them to be just as productive as men, while this would not be sufficient in Northern Nigeria, where women receive lower returns to these inputs. Womens lower returns are likely driven by social norms, market failures, and institutional constraints. For example, in many countries agricultural extension services are aimed at men, so their design may not sufficiently consider the needs of women farmers. Women also usually tend to bear a greater burden for domestic tasks, which may impede their ability to supervise farm labor, leading to lower returns from that labor. Indeed, evidence shows that, compared to men, women in Malawi, Niger, southern Nigeria, and Uganda, suffer a larger reduction in their productivity with each additional child in the household.

Female-headed households face a specific set of constraints. These households tend to be smaller, so they have less labor to draw upon for farm work. They may also have less access to certain productive assets, especially land, as women often access such assets through male household members. Access to land is critical. Research indicates that weaker land tenure security is associated with lower levels of productive investments in land (Goldstein and Udry, 2008), and that interventions to strengthen land tenure security have stronger impacts on womens than mens productive investments (Ali et al, 2014).

Women farmers also have less access to export markets. This is significant as these crops are more profitable. For example, in Malawi growing tobacco, an export crop, is associated with a 71 percent increase in annual net income from crop activities per hectare of land. Yet tobacco is grown on only 3 percent of women-managed plots, compared to 10 percent of men-managed plots. Kilic et al (2015) find that womens lower involvement in cash crop farming (tobacco and cotton) drives the gender gap in agricultural productivity in Malawi.

Within the World Banks regional portfolio, efforts to close gender gaps in agricultural productivity will address womens access and returns to productive inputs. In some cases, specific component or sub-components will be designed for and targeted at women, while in other cases non-gender specific projects will be designed with womens and mens different needs in mind, to ensure that all participants are able to benefit to the greatest extent possible. For example, attention will be paid to womens different time use patterns. Beyond productivity, there will also be a focus on the role of agriculture (and womens specific role within agriculture) in ensuring improved household nutrition.

Theme 4: Gender Gaps in Entrepreneurship and Jobs

Compared to other regions, women in sub-Saharan Africa are very active in the labor force, especially as entrepreneurs: sub-Saharan Africa is the only region where women make up the majority of those who are selfemployed (World Bank, 2013) and the only region where the percentage of women who are self-employed is higher than the percentage of women in wage work.

However, women often move into entrepreneurship simply because there are too few opportunities for them in wage employment. As entrepreneurs, women face multiple constraints, resulting in lower sales, profits, value added, and number of employees, compared to businesses owned by men. For example, in sub-Saharan Africa, almost half of informal firms with no paid employees are owned by women, compared to only 20 percent of those with six or more employees (World Bank Enterprise Surveys, informal module); Bardasi et al (2011) find that the average sales of women-owned firms are 13 percent lower than those of male-owned firms, even after accounting for the sector of operation; and Hallward-Driemeier (2013) finds that African firms owned by women achieve 6 percent lower value-added compared to those owned by men.

The constraints to womens entrepreneurship include: contextual factors (legal discrimination, social norms); endowments (education/skills, confidence, capital/assets, networks/information); and individual, household, and community preferences (allocation of household resources, risk preferences, time use). These constraints influence womens strategic choices, such as which sectors to enter and whether to formalize their businesses, and these choices in turn contribute to their poorer business outcomes. For example, women are less likely to operate businesses in more profitable sectors such as transport, manufacturing, and construction, and are more likely to be in less profitable sectors, such as commerce and hospitality. Women tend to divert a higher proportion of their capital to household expenses and invest less in their businesses (Fafchamps et al., 2014). While these expenses, such as school fees, are also important investments to break the intergenerational cycle of poverty, they also impede the growth potential of womens businesses. Women are less likely to formalize their businesses, reducing their options for accessing finance. Finally, women are also less likely to adopt advanced business practices.

Wage employment is limited for both men and women in sub-Saharan Africa, but even more so for women. For example, across the region, around 13 percent of men are non-agricultural wage workers, compared to around 5 percent of women. Additionally, women tend to work in lower paying and less secure jobs and are more likely than men to be unpaid workers and to work in the informal sector. For example, almost 20 percent of women in Sub-Saharan Africa are unpaid workers, compared to around 15 percent of men, while the World Development Indicators suggest that Sub-Saharan African countries have an average of 63 percent of women in vulnerable employment, compared to 54 percent of men. The constraints to womens access to better jobs include their lower level of education and skills, occupational sex segregation, and womens greater share of various domestic responsibilities, such as child care and caring responsibilities for elderly, sick, and disabled family members, and fetching water or fuel. Underpinning many of these constraints are social norms.

Within the WBGs regional portfolio, efforts to improve business outcomes and access to jobs for women include support to help women overcome constraints related to their access to capital, skills, markets, and social norms. Activities to address capital constraints include cash grants and alternatives to traditional collateral for business loans. Activities to address skills constraints include vocational skills training, business incubators for women and alternatives to traditional management training, such as non-cognitive skills training. Activities to address womens access to markets include support to help women move up the value chain in agribusiness. Activities to address social norms include support to women to enter more profitable sectors that are traditionally dominated by men and the provision of child care, elder care, or other domestic caring services and improvements in water and transport infrastructure to counter womens greater burden for domestic tasks.
The Nigeria chapter of the New Faces New Voices (NFNV), an initiative of the Graca Machel Trust, in partnership with the United Parcel Service, the US-headquartered global logistics company, has commenced the implementation of the second of NFNV Nigerias Raising Voices for Cross Border Traders in West Africa project.

The implementation began with a two-day regional roundtable with stakeholders on women cross-border trade in Dakar, Senegal last week. The stakeholders forum brought together key players in women cross border trade from across West Africa and ended with the formation of the West African Cross-border Women Traders Association, aimed at formalizing and institutionalizing cross-border trade in the sub region.

What this project wants to achieve with the growing numbers of players in cross border trade after the successful completion of the first phase is to: first establish a WCBT association with policy and legal framework to guide its activities and have a strong body and voice, says Aishatu Debola Aminu, while welcoming delegates at the roundtable.

Two, develop a high level advocacy tool for presentation to the ECOWAS Heads of States and Governments on the need to formally mainstream women cross border traders (WBCT) into the economies of the sub-region. We want to continue to advocate for seats at the ECOWAS ministerial meetings and other meetings where discussions and are taken that affect us.

New Faces New Voices Nigeria had in 2014 successfully implemented the first phase of the Raising Voices for Women Cross Border Traders in West Africa Project with the support of UK Department for International Developments Supporting West Africas Regional Integration Program (SWARIP) implemented across five ECOWAS member states of Nigeria, Ghana and Liberia.

Aminu said whereas the first phase of the project focused mainly on Anglophone West Africa the second phase will be focusing largely on francophone West Africa adding that although women played a particularly significant role in cross border trade (CBT) in West Africa, they were facing a lot of challenges to do with access to finance and security because they were yet to be formally integrated into the process.

While proving a strategy and policy framework for the proposed women cross border trade association in West Africa, John Odubele, a leadership consultant said the world had become a global village hence the increased levels of competition in the business world, and thus the need for women cross border traders in West Africa to become organized into an association, to be able to effectively deal with the competition.

Alibaba and Amazon are threatening your business; you have to rise to the challenge of technology. As a network of formal and informal women cross border traders, your association should be able to mobilise members at the grassroots; be self-sustaining with the ability capacitate membership and self-fund programs, said Odubele.

Moreover, DS Paradang, retired comptroller-general of Nigeria Immigration Service (NIS), in his paper on the legal framework for WBCT association said: The conception of border has been changing due to the impact of globalization; globalisation and particularly information technology has been massively affecting all spheres of human endeavors, particularly trade. However, countries still retain laws to ensure sovereignty defence and build their economies for the welfare of their citizens.

While giving an overview of the NFNV-WCBT project, Korkor Cudjue, women rights programme manager at the Graca Machel Trust said: Building networks requires a foundation of self-sustainability. Mama Machels vision is One is too small a number to achieve greatness. To achieve this we need to build a movement  we need advocates who will be messengers to women who are not here.

Cudjoe, therefore said under the NFNV-WBCT project, NFNV would be helping clusters of women cross border traders who work across different products to add value to their products adding that each cluster of women working on a specific product will be mentored by an individual woman with expertise on the particular product.

During the first year of the project, we will identify viable products and markets to produce and market; we will then pilot a train-the-trainer model for 30 women who will subsequently train and mentor women cross border traders over a period of 9 months. We will then replicate the model in two other countries of the region during the second year and then conduct a Pan African expo to strengthen trade linkages and access new markets.

Speaking on the role of women in CBT in attaining economic growth, Appiah Adomako of CUTS International, a global nonprofit focused on consumer protection, trade and development said: Women informal cross border traders make an important contribution to economic growth and government revenues. But by ignoring womens informal trading activities, African countries are neglecting a significant proportion of their trade.

Adomako thus called for immediate priority to be giving for improving conditions at borders and the treatment of cross-borders traders at border posts which he said will have a significant impact on the livelihoods of a substantial number of women cross border traders and the households who depend on the income from generated by WCBT in the course of their trade.

There is need to provide and implement policy frameworks by which traders can become increasingly organized and backed up by support services that improve access to information, facilitate access to credit, and ensure better representation of traders interests. There is need to bridge information gaps for the benefits to formalization of trade especially for women cross border traders and not only to be seen as revenue loss sector by the governments, he added.

Binta Ibrahim, the coordinator of NFNV in north central Nigeria while providing an evaluation for WBCT in West Africa said agencies monitoring informal cross-border trade (ICBT) in the region were focused mainly on goods passing through unofficial trade routes adding that there was a very minimal investment in data collection for ICBT in the ECOWAS region.

There is very minimal investment in the collection of ICBT in the ECOWAS region except for Ghana and Liberia. ICBT data is collected through various methods: border observation or monitoring, tracking and stock taking techniques. Therefore, we need to find a way to gather data to monitor relevant information towards achieving our objective, she said.

Ibrahim as such urged for the need to ensure information was collected on informal cross border trade with all people-level variables disaggregated by gender in order to capture women and men ICBTs contribution to economic development and to inform policymakers about the activities and challenges of this subsector.

Khadi Cisse, a successful Senegalese cross border trader said members of her network were initially trading in Europe and America before they realised it was more profitable trading across Africa. She however decried the challenges to do with insecurity associated with travels across Africa including lack of access to finance, lack of marketing skills, sexual harassment and intimidation by security officials at border posts.

While also sharing her story on CBT, Mamyna Gueye, a member of FDS, a network of young female entrepreneurs in Senegal said they were facing serious challenges to do with transporting their goods across land borders, including poor road network which means unnecessary delay as well as sexual harassment by customs and police officials at border posts across the sub-region.

The highpoint of the 2-day roundtable was the composition of a caretaker committee for the newly founded West African Cross-border Women Traders Association whose French acronym is AFOACT. The regional CBT association is to be led by the Nigeria country director of NFNV, Aishatu Debola Aminu, as caretaker president.

This article was produced by African Newspage  a digital newspaper for development reporting. View the original article on their website.
This past Friday, lots of people came out to recognize Mark Burrows (second from right), for his work to make Transylvania County a better place.

Described as an advocate for the citizen, with a tireless commitment to the community, Mark Burrows closed a 30-year chapter of service to Transylvania County residents at a reception at Brevard Brewing Company on Friday.

Surrounded by people who expressed their gratitude, Burrows never stopped shaking hands, and receiving the affection of old and new acquaintances, all characters in a history of a person who came to Transylvania County with his wife, Betsy, in 1990, and has seen it through growth and difficulty.

"What I'll miss most is the engagement with people," Burrows said in an interview earlier that week. "I enjoy being able to facilitate conversations and connect people and ideas."

Burrows was born in Iowa and grew up in Merritt Island, Fla. After graduating high school, he worked as a ranger at Philmont Scout Ranch in New Mexico.

He got his undergraduate degree in economics at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, where he met Betsy during the spring semester of their freshmen year.

She was an English major, who later got her master's at UNC Chapel Hill, while he got his master's in environmental management at Duke University's School of Forestry program, now called the Nicholas School of Environment.

Eventually, Burrows landed the position as Transylvania County's first planning director, and Betsy began teaching at Brevard High School.

At the time, Burrows said there was no planning office, but there was an "influx" of people coming to the community.

"The county was experiencing growth, so there was a real need for planning, and in '92, I was asked to take the lead in consolidating the City of Brevard's building permits department and the county's building permits department," Burrows said.

In 1996, Burrows became the planning and economic development director, and from there he oversaw The Transylvania Partnership, now the Transylvania Economic Alliance, implemented three economic strategic plans that helped the county to recover from the closure of three large manufacturing plants during 2002 and then the 2008 recession, and recruited countless new businesses to the county and assisted in the growth of already existing businesses.

"I've had time to reflect on this a lot, and there has been a lot of change, and at the same time the place has stayed small, robust, and a charming community," Burrows said. "What we've seen is the addition of DuPont State Forest, Gorges State Park and most recently Headwaters State Forest. I mean, that's amazing when you think of the component of the environment and recreation. And a lot of what we were working at bringing in 10 years ago supported the recreation industry, like SylvanSport and Carmichael Training, and then there is Brevard College, with the development of its wilderness program."

Then, Burrows said, there were the hard times.

"The most difficult time for me was when we were transitioning away from a manufacturing-based comm-unity up until about 2002, when we lost up to 2,200 manufacturing jobs as a result of the closure of DuPont, Ecusta and the Coats plant all in the same year," Burrows said. "What's amazing is that this community did rebound in reestablishing without that base manufacturing."

There were people who were forced into retirement and weren't able to benefit, but the "overall health" of the county had gotten better by 2005.

However, the recession of 2007 and 2008 came, he said.

"Our county did so well in the mid-2000s because a lot of people at DuPont and Ecusta were shift workers. On their off shift they were doing construction on the side," Burrows said. "So, when those plants shut down, a lot of people started into the construction industry full time, and with new residential construction, retirees, resorts and residential, that was an industry that took off. And then it collapsed entirely with the Great Recession, and that's when we saw more people hurting, but now we are 10 years past that, and this is a very vibrant community right now."

In retrospect, trying to help people who were impacted by the plant closures find new sources of income, whether it be through retirement or retraining at Blue Ridge Community College, was difficult.

"I just felt the enormous weight of these people who were hurting because of the loss of jobs," Burrows said. "Then the rug was pulled out from under them again with the recession, when a large number of homes went into foreclosure."

Still, Burrows found resources and connected people who were wanting to help.

"In 2002, a group of retired individuals literally came into my office and asked how they can help," he said.

From there, Burrows created the award-winning Senior Resource Network, a local volunteer network organization consisting of senior executives, managers and professionals who provide consulting and advisory services.

"It was very cool to have these 60 people in a network, who, if we had a business that needed expertise in marketing, or an expertise in financial accounting, we had a depth of volunteers that could help the county, and ultimately help businesses that were here," Burrows said.

Another major achievement is the 2025 Comprehensive Plan, a 30-month effort "involving the management of staff, 40 volunteer advocates and over a dozen unique communication initiatives" that resulted in a long-range guide for making development and policy decisions in the county.

The plan won the 2018 American Planning Association Award of Merit in the small jurisdiction category and the 2018 N.C. Marvin Collins Planning Award in the Outstanding Planning Award in the small community category.

In light of a multitude of projects and organizations, including the application and administering of nearly $5.4 million in grants from public and private sources and the leveraging of $400,000 through grant money to get Blue Ridge Community College's building of technology built, Burrows said he's most proud of his family.

Betsy now teaches at Brevard College. Their son, John, and daughter, Brooke, grew up in Brevard.

John graduated in 2010 as a Morehead Cain Scholar, went to UNC-Chapel Hill and ended up going to Duke University into the same graduate program Burrows himself completed.

John works for the National Outdoor Leadership School in Lander, Wyo.

Brooke graduated a year after John and studied at Columbia University in New York City, and then spent two years in Armenia with the Peace Corps.

She returned to Brevard and completed a nine-month program with AmeriCorps, working for Bart Renner in the Cooperative Extension in Transylvania County while contributing several articles to The Transylvania Times on the French Broad River.

Having studied in Germany and India, she is now enrolled in a doctorate program at the University of Massachusetts, studying social psychology, with an emphasis on the psychology of peace and violence.

"What's really incredible to me is we have this community with a school system of phenomenal teachers who made a difference for Brooke and John, and it continues to support education and growth of our youth here," Burrows said.

A project Burrows started and said he and Betsy will continue to work on is Project Empathy, a program started to "promote greater community dialogue."

"It's been something I've really enjoyed working on, considering the things that are happening in the nation with the racial incidents, and some of the things we've seen here locally in working with the NAACP and tying that in also with a living wage group and, again, tying that in workforce housing," Burrows said. "Those are the things that I have really been able to spend more time on, for several years, with the change from planning and economic to planning and community development."

Burrows, who is now on vacation in Wind Rivers, Wyo, celebrating this transitional period, said he doesn't know what's next.

"I'm not one who can just sit around," Burrows said. "If I had a dream it would be to try to replicate the skill sets I have in working with people in terms of creating new opportunities, but, really, it's to be determined."

On Burrows

The following comments were collected about Burrows.

During a recent meeting, Transylvania County Commissioner Mike Hawkins said of Burrows: "I don't think over the past 25 years that there has been anyone involved in the county more than Mark Burrows has. You name it, he's worked on it, and he's worked on it with energy and without asking for credit. "He's led a planning department in a county in which it's sometimes hard to operate a planning department. There are challenges. And he's worked really well with a number of different planning boards that sometimes had different perspectives.

"He's always in that work. He's always placed the importance of citizen input and participation at the top of the list. He's been a tremendous planning leader.

"He's also worked in areas that I call community development, things like transportation planning, housing, utilities infrastructure, grant acquisitions, and a lot more. He's always been a great advocate for Transylvania County and a champion for the community in the true sense, and by that I mean he's always tried in the work he's been doing to bring people together to build bridges, rather than to create division."

Susan Threlkel: "I can't remember a time when I was not working with Mark. Through the years I have experienced his commitment to community and his care and concern for the people who live here. As part of a celebration event we burned the mortgage for the Arts Council building together, we've participated in VISION, where he created an amazing fountain for the courthouse lawn on Arts Day. "We served on the Community Task Force for Focus 2020 and, most recently, on the Empathy Project Committee. Always goal-oriented, organized and dedicated, Mark, to me, is a perfect example of the type of individual you want in a responsible government position. I have a great appreciation for the skills and talents he has shared with both nonprofits and in his job of furthering economic and community development in Transylvania County. Mark has served us well and, personally, my life has been enriched through knowing him. I can't wait to see what he does next."

Joy Fields, planner for the county's Planning and Community Development Department: "I worked for Mark two-and-a-half years. Throughout that time, I found Mark to be a very thoughtful and kind boss who worked tirelessly to make Transylvania County a better place."

Kalen K. Lawson, the department's program support assistant: "I am grateful to have worked with Mark for almost three years. His leadership created a very respectful and productive environment. He always strove to make Transylvania County a better place for all of its citizens, and the impact of his efforts can be seen throughout county. Mark is one of the most genuine and kind people I've had the pleasure to know."

Former Commissioner Ray Miller: "I worked with Mark for eight years from 1999 to 2006. During that time the local economy was impacted by the closure of our major industrial plants - Ecusta, Dupont and Coats American. Mark worked diligently to find solutions for the local economy. His positive attitude, ability to work with people, groups and organizations helped bring the county through difficult times. It was a pleasure to work with him. I wish him the best in his future endeavors."

Of his many leadership positions, Burrows also served as vice chair of the Asheville Regional Housing Consortium since 1993.

Former Consortium councilman and chair Brownie Newman: "I feel fortunate that Mark served on the Home Consortium during the time that I was chair. Mark had served on the Consortium prior to my time there.

Burrows and his wife, Betsy.

"His experience and insights were very helpful to me and the whole organization. Mark did a great job advocating for Transylvania County, while at the same time promoting a cooperative, regional approach. Mark and I sat through a lot of long meetings together.

"His thoughtful input and good humor contributed to better decision making, better relationships between local governments and organizations, and led to the implementation of projects that have improved the lives of thousands of people and families in Western North Carolina. Thank you, Mark."
Vietnam veteran Mike Kuhne explains the significance of the POW/MIA Missing Man Table to young visitors at the WNC Military History Museum. (Courtesy photo)

The United States' National POW/MIA Recognition Day will be observed across the nation on Friday, Sept. 21.

Transylvania County residents are encouraged to take time to honor and remember the sacrifices and service of those Americans who were prisoners of war (POW) and those who are still missing in action (MIA), and their families.

According to the Congressional Research Service, 725 Americans were POWs during the Vietnam War (1961-1973). Of that group, 661 returned to U.S. military control and 64 died while prisoners of war. In military actions since that time, another 37 Americans have been interned and all but one have been released. More than 142,000 Americans have been POWs since WWI, more than 17,000 of whom died while imprisoned.

As of Aug. 29, 2018, 1,594 Americans are still MIA, 38 of whom are North Carolinians.

The POW/MIA Flag

The POW/MIA flag flies below the American flag at the Transylvania County courthouse. It was created in 1972 for the National League of Families of American Prisoners and Missing in Southeast Asia and was recognized by Congress as "the symbol of our Americans still prisoner, missing and unaccounted for." The flag features a silhouette of a POW in front of a watch tower and a strand of barbed wire. The flag bears the motto: "You are not Forgotten."

The Missing Man Table

The National League of POW/MIA Families is also responsible for the creation of the Missing Man Table, also known as the Fallen Comrades Table, which has become part of dining services for all branches of the military. Every aspect of the table setting holds significance for the families of prisoners of war and those missing in action. The table is often displayed in American Legion and VFW dining rooms.

Transylvania County resident Ray Alcorn was a POW in North Vietnam for seven years. Upon their release, Ray Alcorn, front row, center seat, and his fellow POWs cheered as their plane crossed the South Vietnam coastline.

The Missing Man Table is on display at the WNC Military History Museum as 21 E. Main St. in Brevard, with an explanation of the significance of such items as a pinch of salt, a slice of lemon, a burning candle, a red rose, a yellow ribbon and an upturned glass.

Museum curator Emmett Casciato encourages the public to visit this exhibit on Sept. 21 for an explanation of the table's design. The museum is open on Sept. 21 from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.

This is an opportunity to pay tribute to our country's prisoners of war and missing in action, and to the families who suffer the uncertainty of the fate of their loved ones. Let them know they are not forgotten.

(In cooperation with writer Michel Robertson and the WNC Military History Museum, The Transylvania Times will publish an article featuring Vietnam veteran and POW Dave Grant as part of their Vietnam Veterans series.)
Attending the awards ceremony were, left to right, Dr. Bryan Abernathy, principal of BHS, Lt. Col. Charles Megown, MCJROTC instructor, and Sharon Jenkins, regent of DAR chapter.

On Friday, Sept. 14, the JROTC cadets from Rosman and Brevard high schools assembled in the auditorium of the WNC Military History Museum. The 44 cadets were called to order by their commander, Hali Chapman, who then presented Lt. Col. Charles Megown. In addition to addressing the cadets, Megown introduced Sharon Jenkins, Regent of the Waightstill Avery Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution.

Jenkins recognized the Daughters who were present and informed the cadets that she was going to have two surprises for them.

Before getting to the surprises, Jenkins told the audien...
Not all faculty leaders were sold on selecting Freeman in this way, according to a transcript of the board meeting obtained by the Tribune. Michael Haji-Sheikh, an engineering professor and vocal critic of university administration, said he thought board members were not being truthful about how they looked for a new president. He also said that not subjecting Freeman to the competition of a search could undermine her.
AmiciMusic, the award-winning chamber music organization based in Asheville, will make its debut in the Brevard area with an exciting vocal show called Songs Of Passion that will feature soprano Simone Vigilante, tenor John Kaneklides and pianist/artistic director Daniel Weiser.

They will perform arias and duets from the worlds of opera, operetta and musical theater, including music by Puccini, Verdi, Lehar, Jerome Kern, Gilbert and Sullivan, and Andrew Lloyd Webber.

Vigilante is an Asheville resident who has sung many times with the Asheville Lyric Opera and across the country...
The International Air Transport Association (IATA) urged governments across Central America to work with industry to maximize the benefits that aviation can bring to the region.

The International Air Transport Association (IATA) urged governments across Central America to work with industry to maximize the benefits that aviation can bring to the region.

Aviation supports over 859,000 jobs and makes a $17.9 billion contribution in gross value added to the combined GDP of the seven Central American countries, said Peter Cerda, IATAs Regional Vice President, The Americas.

Speaking at Aviation Day Central America, organized by IATA, the Airline Association of Costa Rica (ALA), and the Latin American and Caribbean Air Transport Association (ALTA), Cerda said, The contribution of aviation is not divided equally. Some countries in the region are having greater success unlocking aviations benefits to support economic and social development.

In Panama, for example, 14% of GDP and 238,000 jobs are supported by air transport and foreign arrivals, while in Belize, aviation supports fully 33% of the countrys GDP. By contrast, in Guatemala, just 1% of GDP is supported by air transport, while in Honduras, the figure is 3%.

To help drive the benefits of aviation connectivity to new heights, countries should:

Align their aviation regulatory framework with global best practices

Ensure competitive costs and efficient administration in airports through open communication with the industry

Ensure transparency and participation of the industry in infrastructure planning and development across Central America

Unfortunately, there are too many examples where this formula is not being followed. In Guatemala, airlines face potential tax penalties owing to the tax authoritys non-recognition of the use of globally-accepted cost allocation formulas to calculate the taxable amount corresponding to the airlines operations in Guatemala. IATA and other stakeholders are now working with the government and the industry to resolve this issue to ensure Guatemala follows globally-accepted best practices and principles related to taxation of aviation.

Even in countries where governments understand the importance of aviation as a catalyst for growth, there are opportunities to do more. In Panama, a court awarded more than $1 million in damages in a cargo claim brought against an airline. This far exceeds the liability limits for cargo claims contained within the Montreal Convention, to which Panama has fully acceded. IATA has intervened in the case, which is currently on appeal.

Countries also need to prepare to accommodate an additional 421 million passengers across the Latin American region by 2036. Within Central America, San Jose (Costa Rica) and Tegucigalpa (Honduras), need new airports, while Panama Tocumen requires a third runway as well as much-needed airspace modernization that the government is undertaking. In El Salvador, the terminal at San Salvador also requires expansion, Cerda said.

Owing to its geographic location, Central America is well-positioned to increase the economic gains that aviation can deliver. The recipe for success is not complicated but it requires all stakeholders working together in partnership. We see differing approaches to how governments approach aviation. This presents an opportunity to learn from the true success stories in the region, said Cerda.

Learn more about the benefits of Aviation in Central America

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Ford initially refused an invitation to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Monday without the promise of an FBI investigation, something Durbin on Thursday welcomed. Now shes reopened the door, the New York Times is reporting, to testify if shes guaranteed some security. Shes reportedly received threats against her life since making the allegations.


Search News Archive : Fast Travel News Promotion Via Search, Social Media + Email Follow Us On : DUBAI TO HOST THE MIDDLE EASTS LARGEST HOSPITALITY TECHNOLOGY EXHIBITION AND CONFERENCE HITEC DUBAI 2018 BACKED BY DTCM Industry: Technology

Dubai's Department of Tourism and Commerce Marketing (DTCM) will be the destination partner for HITEC Dubai 2018 - the worlds largest hospitality Technology Exhibition and Conference brand



(TRAVPR.COM) UAE - September 19th, 2018 - Dubai's Department of Tourism and Commerce Marketing (DTCM) will be the destination partner for HITEC Dubai 2018 - the worlds largest hospitality Technology Exhibition and Conference brand. Co-produced by Hospitality Financial and Technology Professionals (HFTP) and Naseba, the two-day trade show will be held on December 5 and 6, 2018 at the Madinat Jumeirah Dubai. The annual business-to-business (B2B) exhibition will give Middle East buyers, currently worth over USD 75 billion, access to the worlds leading technology solution providers and experts in the hospitality sector.



Frank Wolfe CAE, CEO of HFTP, said: Dubai has an image of doing things big, bigger and biggest. Dubai has emerged as one of the fastest growing smart cities in the world. With such visionary leaders Dubai will soon become the smartest city of the world. With Expo2020 and such a huge influx of tourist, hospitality industry will take the centerstage in positioning Dubai as the smartest city. HITEC Dubai gives an opportunity for regional hospitality buyers to introduce latest technologies into their organizations.



According to recent industry reports, Dubai attracted $21.66 billion worth of foreign direct investment in high-end technology transfers in three years. This consequently earned the emirate the top rank globally in 2018 in the share of FDI in technology transfers like artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics.



HITEC Dubai will feature three key areas including exhibition, technology theaters and a high-power conference. Naveen Bharadwaj, Production Director of Naseba and HITEC Dubai, stressed, Middle East continues to make huge investments in the hospitality industry given mega events such as Dubai Expo 2020 and the increase in tourists. A large portion of this is being spent on technology products and services that optimize internal processes, enhance guest experience and increase profitability. HITEC Dubai will address the needs of the industry by introducing top level regional stakeholders with leading technology providers from across the world. We are glad that DTCM is endorsing the show again.



HITEC Dubais Advisory Council Chairperson Laurent A. Voivenel, Senior Vice President, Operations and Development for the Middle East, Africa and India for Swiss-Belhotel International, said, Over the last decade technology has led to drastic transformation in the hospitality sector globally as well as regionally which has boosted competitiveness and efficiency while creating new opportunities. Digitalisation and Artificial Intelligence is continuously giving greater choice in every aspect of travel turning customers into DIY travellers who plan, manage and book travel online. HITEC Dubai will the perfect platform to see what lies ahead how the latest innovations and technological advancements are changing our industry.



For more information or to register for HITEC Dubai 2018

visit https://www.hitec-dubai.com/

Call Amir Abdin on +971 44 55 7920 or Rouf Hyder Beigh +971 44 55 79 32



ABOUT HFTP



Hospitality Financial and Technology Professionals (HFTP) is a global non-profit hospitality association, headquartered in Austin, Texas, USA, that uniquely understands the industrys problems. HFTP has members and stakeholders across the globe. HFTP assists its members in finding solutions to industry problems more efficiently than any organization via its expert networks, research, conferences such as HITEC and certification programs. HFTP also owns the worlds only hospitality specific search engine, PineappleSearch.com. HFTP is recognized as the spokes group for the finance and technology segment of the hospitality industry.



ABOUT NASEBA



Naseba offers global business facilitation services. The company creates growth opportunities by bringing together people, partners and ideas. It helps clients raise capital, enter new markets, secure partners, close sales and educate workforces. Nasebas goal is to create opportunity and add economic value at every stage of its clients journey. It does this through three key areas: investor services, commercial services and leadership services. Since inception in 2002, Naseba has facilitated deals totalling billions of dollars for its clients. The company has connected over 100,000 global executives through more than 1,000 proprietary business platforms and is an expert in growth markets.



For media contact:



Hina Bakht

Managing Director

EVOPS Marketing & PR

Mob: 00971 50 6975146

Tel: 00971 4 566 7355

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California will be the first state to ban the sale and manufacture of new fur products.

Under the legislation, signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom, it will be illegal to manufacture, sell or donate new fur products. The law applies to clothing, shoes, handbags and other items that contain fur. It goes into effect Jan. 1, 2023.

The law  known as AB 44  exempts leather, cowhide and shearling, as well as used fur and taxidermy products. Fur products used for religious purposes or by a Native American tribe are also exempt, as is fur taken legally with a hunting license. There is a penalty up to $1,000 for violations.

While the ban has been praised by animal rights groups, the Fur Information Council has threatened to sue, reports USA Today.

California's fur legislation was one of several bills Newsom signed designed to prevent cruelty to animals. One banned the use of wild animals like elephants and bears in circuses, another protected horses from slaughter, and another prohibits trapping, hunting or killing bobcats.

California is a leader when it comes to animal welfare and today that leadership includes banning the sale of fur, said Newsom in a news release. But we are doing more than that. We are making a statement to the world that beautiful wild animals like bears and tigers have no place on trapeze wires or jumping through flames.

Following city-wide bans

Animal rights groups hold an anti-fur demonstration urging shoppers to stop buying fur-related products in Beverly Hills, California. Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images

Before the statewide ban, several cities in California had similar laws already in place.

San Francisco was the largest U.S. city to ban coats, gloves, keychains and anything else covered or decorated in fur. City supervisors voted unanimously in 2018 to ban the sale of fur. Although the ban went into effect Jan. 1, 2019, retailers have until Jan. 1, 2020 to sell the rest of their inventory.

The legislation states that, "the sale of fur products in San Francisco is inconsistent with the Citys ethos of treating all living beings, humans and animals alike, with kindness."

Two other California cities, West Hollywood and Berkeley, had already banned fur sales. A third, Los Angeles, introduced similar legislation that goes into effect in 2021, making it illegal to sell, manufacture or trade fur clothing and accessories such as coats, handbags and key chains within the city limits, reports The Los Angeles Times. There are several exemptions including used furs, taxidermy and pelts from animals that were taken legally with a hunting license.

Both sides weigh in

The Humane Society says that more communities are expected to follow California's lead. Gallinago_media/Shutterstock

Not surprisingly, animal rights activists were ecstatic with the vote.

"The signing of AB 44 underscores the point that todays consumers simply dont want wild animals to suffer extreme pain and fear for the sake of fashion," said Kitty Block, president and CEO of The Humane Society of the United States and president of Humane Society International, in a press release. "More cities, states and countries are expected to follow Californias lead, and the few brands and retailers that still sell fur will no doubt take a closer look at innovative alternatives that dont involve animal cruelty."

Not everyone, however, was thrilled with the ban.

The ban is part of a "radical vegan agenda using fur as the first step to other bans on what we wear and eat," spokesman Keith Kaplan of the fur information council said in a prior statement, according to NBC News. He said fake fur is not a renewable or sustainable option.

Worldwide changes

Globally, more than a dozen European countries, including the United Kingdom, Austria, Norway and the Netherlands have also passed laws to restrict the fur trade, according to the Humane Society of the United States.

Many retailers are also ending fur sales. In mid-October, Macys announced it will phase out fur from all its stores  including Bloomingdales  by the end of 2020. The stores will also close all fur vaults and salons. Other fashion brands such as Prada, Gucci, Michael Kors and Burberry have taken similar steps in recent years.

Over the past two years, we have been closely following consumer and brand trends, listening to our customers and researching alternatives to fur," said Jeff Gennette, chairman and chief executive officer of Macys, Inc. "Weve listened to our colleagues ... and we have met regularly on this topic with the Humane Society of the United States and other NGOs. Macys private brands are already fur free so expanding this practice across all Macys, Inc. is the natural next step."
Complaints of sexual harassment have rocked the longtime speakers political and government organizations, putting him on the defensive after years of setting the agenda. Madigan has called for independent reviews, and he has ousted top aides and operatives, including top deputy Tim Mapes. He has also faced criticism from within his party about his handling of the complaints and writes there will be a zero-tolerance policy for any kind of harassment.
editorial@tribune.com

Tribune News Service

Chandigarh, September 19

The legal controversy has deepened over the CBIs refusal to probe a case in which former Himachal Chief Minister Virbhadra Singhs relative Akansh Sen was crushed to death under the wheels of a BMW car in Sector 9.

As the case came up for resumed hearing, Justice Rajan Gupta asked UT senior standing counsel RS Rai and counsel Gautam Dutt whether the notification for the probe was issued in terms of the relevant Act and by the competent authority. Faced with the situation, Rai prayed for another opportunity to seek instructions.

Taking note of his prayer, Justice Gupta adjourned the hearing to September 27 after recording submissions by Rai and CBI Special Prosecutor Sukhdeep S Sandhu that they would bring relevant files on the next date of hearing for perusal by the court.

Justice Gupta had earlier asserted that it was not clear whether the order, dated May 25, passed by the Home Secretary for a CBI probe was in consonance with the law. The Bench, on the previous date of hearing, was told that prayer of the UT Administration for handing over the investigation to the CBI stood turned down. Taking note of the assertion, Justice Gupta had questioned the Home Secretarys order for a CBI probe.

Justice Gupta wanted to know whether the procedure had been followed. The CBI was also asked to elaborate on the reasons behind its refusal.

An FIR in the matter was registered on February 9 last year for attempt to murder and another offence under Sections 307 and 34 of the IPC at the Sector 3 police station. The development took place on a petition filed by Ramanjit Kaur against the UT Administration and other respondents.

The mother of one of the accused, through counsel Pawan Kumar, was seeking issuance of directions to the UT Administration for referring the matter to the CBI for an investigation. It was alleged that the petitioner and her family were being harassed in the name of investigation.

Victim Akansh was allegedly hit and dragged under the wheels of the BMW in Sector 9. Following the incident, the police had slapped murder charges against two accused  Balraj Singh and Harmehtab Singh.

Referring to the events as narrated in the FIR, one of the accused had earlier claimed in his anticipatory bail plea that the victim, along with another person, visited the house of Deep Sidhu early morning to enquire about a friend, Shera.

They were apprehending that Shera and Harmehtab Singh were together in the house. It was then that Balraj Singh got into his car with Harmehtab Singh sitting on the passenger side and drove the car over the victim.
editorial@tribune.com

Mohali, September 19

The Mohali police made the biggest gold seizure till date at the international airport here today. A father-son duo landed here with gold and silver jewellery worth Rs 6 crore. They arrived on a flight from Hyderabad and have been identified as Dhanraj Meenawala and Rajesh Meenawala.

The airport SHO, Inspector HS Bal, said, The duo claimed that they were carrying the gold for displaying it in exhibitions. However, the police had secret information about the gold and nabbed them as soon as they landed at the airport. They started their journey from Mumbai, stopped at Hyderabad and then came to Chandigarh.

Flier caught with Rs60-lakh gold

A 46-year-old Ludhiana resident was caught carrying 1.90 kg of gold worth around Rs 60 lakh at the airport on Wednesday. Kulwinder Singh, a daily wager, was a first-time flier and had returned from Dubai. The gold was hidden in an electric iron for which moulds had been made in the device. Customs officials said he was a carrier and recorded his statement.  TNS
editorial@tribune.com

Tribune News Service

Panchkula, September 19

A protest against the Panchkula police for a delay in nabbing the murder accused landed the victims kin in trouble as the police booked them for blocking the Zirakpur-Shimla highway.

The Sector 5 police have registered a case against the family of Vikas Gautam, a Class XI student of Government Model Senior Secondary School, Sector 7, who was murdered outside the school, as well as residents of Rally village in Sector 12 for blocking the Zirakpur-Shimla highway on Tuesday.

The case has been registered against them under Sections 148, 149, 186, 283 and 341 of the IPC and 8A of the National Highways Act.

The family of the victim, Vikas, and hundreds of residents of the village had blocked the highway by placing the body on it, causing inconvenience to commuters for nearly an hour. The protesters were demanding the arrest of the accused. The police had a tough time in convincing the protesters that the accused had been arrested and would be punished as per law after a proper investigation. The protesters later lifted the dharna after the police showed them the photographs of the two accused arrested by them.

Meanwhile, the two minor accused in the murder case of Vikas Gautam, a Class XI student, have been sent to judicial custody by the juvenile court.
ROBINSINGH@TRIBUNE.COM

Two minor generational differences have emerged in the Pakistan army in the past five years, one on threat salience and another on dealing with India.

Nevertheless, a growing number, estimated by some students (officers) to be as many as 60 per cent, have begun to view Pakistan-focused militant groups as a more significant threat than India that must be addressed as a priority in short term.

The single bright spot in a dismal litany of conspiratorial conjecture was thought by some students to be a subtle change in recent thinking about the centrality of the military threat posed by India compared to growing internal security threats from the plethora of extremist groups in Pakistan. The 2009-10 student perceived a generational divide on this issue, with the senior officers and DS having a clear anti-India bias and younger officers being the complete opposite. This attitude was even more prevalent among the small numbers of Pakistan Air Force and Pakistan Navy students at the Staff College. Junior and mid-grade Army officers, particularly those who had served in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), tended to view terrorism as a much more immediate threat to Pakistan than India.

The student thought the senior officers were clinging to India as a major threat to Pakistan because an admission to the contrary would render their entire career irrelevant. I dont know why we hate them so much. We like their music, their movies and our two languages are nearly the same. He said others in the class also thought it was time to move on.

The 2013-14 student thought a majority of his classmates arrived at the Staff College desiring a better bilateral relationship with India, but that the Staff College narrative was all against it. The most likely explanation for the divergent views is that the younger officers have typically served longer and more frequent tours of duty in the FATA and Swat Valley than the senior officers. Pakistani students in the more recent courses can truly be said to have spent their entire military career directly confronting these groups. The traditional view that India is inexorably destined to be Pakistans implacable enemy also appears to be moderating, a viewpoint that was occasionally echoed privately by officers who have served with Indian officers in international peacekeeping operations.

Several students perceived the attitude expressed by most of the Pakistani students about India as manifested in paranoia. The 1995 student observed that whenever his classmates talked about India, it sounded like memorized propagandaperhaps as a way to reinforce long-held attitudes. There was just no questioning of it, although none of them had any direct knowledge of India.

One student commented that his classmates seemed to have a chip on their shoulder about their neighbour, as if they had been born and bred believing India was their enemy. This visceral and reflexive hatred seemed like a part of their identity as a Pakistani, and a ready excuse to rationalise their national failures.

Attitudes about India became even more antagonistic after 9/11. Many Pakistani students interpreted Indian activities on the LoC and international border as preparation for another major war. On December 13, a terrorist attack on the Indian Parliament was attributed by India to Lashkare-Taiba, with Pakistans support.

The 2008-09 student said nearly every student at the Staff College subscribed to the notion that India had never accepted Pakistan as an independent state. The 2011-12 student viewed India establishing consulates or other facilities in Afghanistan as a measure to destabilise Balochistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.

In the last decade of the study, a new wrinkle appeared in the Pakistani perception. This involved a perceived Indian challenge to the agreed distribution of the waters of the Indus River tributaries, an issue long considered settled in perpetuity by the 1960 Indus River Treaty. One commandant, openly predicted that the next war with India would be over water. Because all major rivers in Pakistan have their origin in India, and as water becomes scarce in the future due to climate change, India will attempt to exploit its geographical advantage by denying Pakistan its rights under the 1960 treaty.

The Pak Army Staff & Command College experience

While the study is now several years old, its author points out that its findings and conclusions remain relevant and timely. The Pakistan Armys attitudes and values have changed very little in the 37 years of this study, he writes, and there is no reason to expect they will change appreciably in the future, and certainly not in the next decade. Although it contained no classified information, it was based primarily on interviews with the US Army Foreign Area Officers (FAOs) that attended the Pakistan Army Command and Staff College in Quetta between 1977 and 2014. The study examines the experience of the US Army Foreign Area Officers (FAOs) who have attended the Pakistan Army Command and Staff College in Quetta, the capital of Baluchistan province. These are the only US personnel ever to have had sustained interactions over an extended period of time with three distinct groups of Pakistan Army officers: senior officers (brigadier and major general), senior mid-level (lieutenant colonel and colonel), and junior mid-level (captain and major). The studys purpose was to examine the attitude and values of the Pakistan Army officer corps over a 37-year period, from 1977 to 2014, determine if they had changed over time, and identify the drivers of that change. Col Smith retired from government service in May 2012.
shalender@tribune.com

New Delhi, September 19

In a disturbing instance, the Delhi Commission for Women (DCW) has rescued a 50-year-old woman who was held captive in her house in Rohini by her brother for the past two years. The woman was found in a very moving state, starved and living on terrace with piles of her own excreta around.

The condition of the woman was pathetic. She has been starved to the extent that presently she has been reduced to bones. The terrace contained piles of the excreta of the woman. She was kept on open terrace which had no room or toilets, said the DCW in a statement.

A team of DCW mobile helpline counsellors reached the spot where the house owners refused entry to the team. The DCW team then contacted police and spoke to the SHO who allotted police officials for the task. However, despite several requests by the rescue team the owners refused to open the gate. Rescue officials had to enter the house from the roof of the neighbour and found the woman on the terrace.

Another brother of the rescued woman informed that his sister is not mentally sound and used to live in her parental house with her mother. It is learnt that after the death of her mother, the woman was living with her younger brother who did not take care of her properly and she was treated in an inhumane manner by his family.

The woman confirmed that she was given a piece of bread only in four days for the past two years, and no one has been allowed to visit her by her brother.

An FIR has been registered in the matter at Rohini Sector-7 Police Station and she was later admitted to Ambedkar Hospital.

DCW chairperson Swati Maliwal, who, along with member Kiran Negi, met the woman in the hospital, demanded that the accused brother and his wife should be immediately arrested and taken to task.  TNS
gspannu7@gmail.com

Houston, September 20

The ruling Republican party in the US has apologised to the Hindus after a newspaper advertisement featuring Lord Ganesha to woo the minority community voters in Texas ended up offending them.

The advert, on the occasion of the Ganesh Chaturthi festival, included the imagery of Lord Ganesha with the text, Would you worship a donkey or an elephant? The choice is yours.

The elephant is the party symbol of the Republicans while Democrats have donkey as their partys symbol.

The Indian-American community described the political advertisement of the Grand Old Party in an Indian-American newspaper as offensive for featuring Lord Ganesha.

The partys county unit, Fort Bend County Republican Party which published the ad, apologised and clarified that it was not meant to disparage Hindu customs or traditions in any way.

The ad, with arrows pointing to the body parts of Lord Ganesha, listed out qualities such as  A BIG HEAD, TO THINK OUT OF THE BOX, BIG EYES TO LOOK BEYOND WHAT YOU SEE, LARGE EARS TO LISTEN TO OTHERS ATTENTIVELY, LARGE STOMACH, TO PEACEFULLY DIGEST ALL THE GOOD AND BAD IN LIFE among others.

An advocacy group, the Hindu-American Foundation (HAF) of Houston, called on the Fort Bend County Republican Party to apologise for the advert about the celebration of the Ganesh Chaturthi festival.  PTI
gspannu7@gmail.com

Sonepat, September 20

In an atmosphere of anger and gloom, a huge gathering Thursday bid a tearful adieu to BSF jawan Narender Singh, who was brutally killed by Pakistani troopers along the international border (IB) near Jammu.

The mortal remains of BSF Head Constable Narender Singh were cremated with full state honours at his native Thana Kalan village in Haryanas Sonepat district.

Slogans of Bharat Mata ki Jai, Narender Singh Amar Rahe rung in the air as the body, wrapped in Tricolour, reached the village in the morning.

Several villagers chanted slogans against Pakistan. Family members and locals demanded that Pakistan should be taught a lesson for the barbaric .

Pakistani troops had slit the throat of a BSF jawan after fatally shooting him along the international border (IB) near Jammu on Tuesday, according to reports.

The 52-year-old BSF jawan is survived by two sons and his wife. The funeral pyre was lit by his elder son Mohit.

We are proud of our father for laying down his life for the nation. His death should be avenged, said a teary-eyed Mohit.

Not everyone gets a chance to be draped in the Tricolour...But we just cannot keep feeling proud. We will feel proud again, when another death takes place. We demand action against Pakistan, he said.

He also demanded that the concerned authorities provide whatever help the family needs. Other family members also appealed to the Centre to act tough against Pakistan.

Several prominent persons inlcuding Haryana minister Krishan Bedi, Congress leader Randeep Singh Surjewala and senior officials of BSF were also among the mourners.  PTI
gspannu7@gmail.com

Tribune News Service

Faridabad, September 19

Faridabad police have identified all four accused and nabbed three of them two days after they had allegedly gang-raped a 21-year-old woman in Ballabhgarh while she was on her way to a market along with a friend.

Addressing the media, Amitabh Singh Dhillon, Commissioner of Police, Faridabad, said though equipped with all details they were not sharing it as an identification parade was awaited.

The victim is confident that she will be able to identify the accused, so we have sort permission for identification parade and thus upheld their particulars. Once she identifies them it will be our strongest evidence and then we will quickly file charge sheet and try our best to get a fast-tracked trial so that justice is delivered in time and they are punished, said Dhillon.

The victim in her statement claimed that she was on her way to market with a male acquaintance on his bike when it broke down and they approached for help.

They allegedly pinned down her friend and dragged her to bushes and took turns in raping her.

The investigation revealed that the four accused had even indulged in brawl before committing gang-rape.

We are very close to nabbing the fourth accused. The SIT got evidence analysed and roped in a digital forensics team for technical analysis. As a result of all this, we have been able to arrest three of the four accused, he added.
If approved by the City Council, the zoning change for the parcel at the busy intersection of Foster Avenue and Northwest Highway could pave the way for the construction of the 75-unit building with up to 30 units for tenants with Chicago Housing Authority vouchers to subsidize their rent.
ROBINSINGH@TRIBUNE.COM

Sunit Dhawan

Tribune News Service

Rohtak, September 19

Nearly a month after a dhobi-Muslim youth was arrested for killing a she-calf at Titoli village, the panchayat has barred the youth from entering the village for life.

The panchayat, held in the Hindu-dominated village last evening, also barred Muslim residents (around 800) from offering prayers at any public place in the village and keeping beard, besides choosing only Hindu names for their children.

It also resolved to take over the land being used as a graveyard and give the Muslim villagers another piece of land to bury their dead.

Muslims have been living in the village before Independence. We have all been living harmoniously. Muslims in the village have Hindu names, said Suresh, a village nambardar. He claimed that certain Muslim families had been misled by a maulavi who had come to the village a few years ago and tried to create a divide.

We have resolved that no person  Hindu or Muslim  would be allowed to create a communal divide, Suresh asserted.

Rajbir, a leader of the Rajak (dhobi-Muslim) community in Titoli village, said the decisions at the panchayat were acceptable to them as they wanted to live peacefully. He said he had also donated Rs 11,000 for a cow-shed on behalf of his community.

Another Titoli resident, Mahender Singh (Khan), who lives at Rohtak presently, however, said the Muslims had no option but to accept the panchayats decisions.

Deputy Commissioner Dr Yash Garg maintained that there was no report of any communal tension or resentment among the members of any community residing in the village. Still, if any such unconstitutional diktat has been passed by the panchayat, we will look into the matter and take appropriate action, he stated.
ROBINSINGH@TRIBUNE.COM

Tribune News Service

Jammu/New Delhi, Sept 19

The Border Action Team (BAT) of Pakistan Rangers slit the throat of a BSF jawan in a first-of-its-kind act of brutality against Indian forces along the International Border yesterday.

Head Constable Narender Singhs body was found around 5.20 pm near the zero line in Ramgarh sector of Samba along the IB, hours after he was abducted. He was part of a Border Security Force team on domination patrol ahead of the fence when it was ambushed by BAT members.

Following the unprecedented incident, the security forces have issued a high alert across the

192-km IB manned by the BSF and 740-km LoC secured by the Army.

Sources said the jawans throat was slit and his eye gouged out by the Rangers. The body bore two bullet injuries. His body had multiple knife wounds and bullet injures and his weapon is missing, said a source. The BSF remained tight-lipped.

Sources said the body could be retrieved only after over six hours as the Pakistan side did not respond to the calls to maintain the sanctity of the frontier and ensure that the BSF search parties were not fired upon.

The brutal incident is reminiscent of similar attacks in the past along the LoC.

Narender Singh (50) belonged to 176 Battalion. He hailed from Kala village of Sonepat, Haryana, and is survived by wife Santosh Devi (45) and sons Mohit and Ankit.

The killing came a day after Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh inaugurated two smart fencing pilot projects under the Comprehensive Integrated Border Management System with an aim to secure borders. He had termed it a historic moment for the country.

The incident occurred around 10.40 am yesterday when Pakistan Rangers opened fire on the BSF team ahead of the fence.

BSF troops took position and retaliated but a jawan was hit by a bullet. Our side is undulating, marshy with thick sarkanda (elephant grass) growth. It made the immediate locating of the injured jawan difficult. The situation was brought under control by the BSF and his body was ultimately recovered late evening, the BSF said last night.
ROBINSINGH@TRIBUNE.COM

Tribune News Service

Srinagar, September 19

After several rounds of deliberations, the Congress today announced to contest the municipal elections in Jammu and Kashmir.

Urging the government to ensure security of candidates, state party chief GA Mir questioned the National Conference and Peoples Democratic Partys decision to boycott the polls, saying they were purposely leaving the field open for the BJP.

We will come forward with full force in the Urban Local Bodies (ULB) elections to keep the communal forces at bay. We dont want to give them an open field and let them occupy the democratic institutions in small towns.

The announcement came a day after Mir consulted the party high command. The BJP was the only party that had so far decided to take part in the polls. Mir said the Congress could review its decision if the government failed to provide a conducive atmosphere for polls.

The EC has refused to provide security to any candidate and the Governor has said foolproof arrangements are in place but there is nothing on ground as of now. We will monitor the security situation they (govt) have to make the atmosphere conducive and fulfil promises made to people We will take part with certain conditions, he said. Mir said the NC and PDP had kept the field open for communal forces.

Those who took the boycott route in my heart for a minute there was a doubt that there may be some pre-decided under-carpet game Field is being kept open for the BJP and the RSS. Secular forces were made only for this day to keep communal forces at bay.
rchopra@tribunemail.com

Satya Prakash

Tribune News Service

New Delhi, September 20

The Supreme Court on Thursday allowed Dilbag Singh to continue as the acting Director General of Police (DGP) of Jammu and Kashmir.

The new regular appointment of the DGP is to be made within five weeks.

However, the top court asked the Union Public Service Commission (UPSC) to send a panel of police officers to Jammu and Kashmir in five weeks for appointment of a regular DGP.

Advocate Prashant Bhushan alleged that it was a contempt of the court order as the procedure prescribed by the court for appointment of the DGP had been violated by the state.

The Jammu and Kashmir government had approached the Supreme Court to explain the reason behind appointing an interim DGP without consulting the UPSC as mandated by the apex court in July this year, officials said.

The state government had recently removed SP Vaid as police chief and appointed Director General of Prisons Dilbag Singh as the interim head of the force contrary to the guidelines of the Supreme Court, which had ruled in July that there would be no ad hoc arrangement for the post of police chief in the states.
gspannu7@gmail.com

Our Correspondent

Sagwara (Rajasthan), September 20

In a direct attack on Prime Minister Narendra Modi who called himself as nations chowkidar, Congress president Rahul Gandhi on Thursday took a dig at him saying a slogan is now popular everywhere as gali gali mein shor hai, desh ka chowkidar chor hai.

After becoming prime minister, Modiji told the nation that he is just a chowkidar to take care of every citizen, but all his moves to eradicate black money by demonetisation, imposing GST as Gabbar Singh Tax on small and medium traders, waiving off Rs 12 lakh crores NPA of banks caused by 15 big business tycoons, and allowing Vijay Mallya to flee the country have established that Modiji is no more a chowkidar, he said.

Gandhi, who arrived at Bhikha Bhai College Ground here, about 46 km away from Dungarpur district, was addressing a gathering of tribal people ahead of assembly polls in Rajasthan.

Asking public if a constable would allow a thief to run away from police station, and if the SHO would spare the constable, Gandhi said, But prime minister is on mute mode and not speaking a word on Finance Minister Arun Jaitley who enabled Vijay Mallya to leave the country.

Jaitley met Mallya in Parliament, it is what Jaitley himself confessed, I am not saying this...Nirav Modi, Lalit Modi, different slabs of GST, farmers crop loan waiver scheme issues and Rafale scam are some of the glaring corruption cases on which nations chowikdar is just not caring, he said.

Echoes are coming from everywhere. Now public in Rajasthan too is sloganeering: Gali gali mein shor hai, desh ka chowkidar chor hai, he said.

He, however, assured if the Congress government was voted to power at Centre, GSTs five slabs would be merged into one slab with minimum tax regime.

Recalling a picture of Sachin Pilot driving a bike on which Ashok Gehlot was sitting on the back seat in Karauli on September 11, Gandhi said, I got confident that now Congress party will not only unitedly contest the assembly polls in Rajasthan, but win it to form the next government.

This friendship between two Sachin & Pilot has emerged in view of publics pains and sorrow which they are facing in the Raje government. This cause has enabled the unity of the Congress leaders. Hence both of them came together on the bike to address your woes, Gandhi said.

Taking a jibe at PM, Gandhi said, PM used to do Man Ki Baat but Congress would do and follow janta ki baat if voted to power in Rajasthan in upcoming polls.

Gandhi asked the party leaders to select the deserving women candidates from tribal belt of Udaipur division for the next polls. He, however, said the opportunities would be open to youth who dedicate their services in the party for next five years.
ROBINSINGH@TRIBUNE.COM

Pradeep Sharma

Tribune News Service

Chandigarh, September 19

A faux pas by Haryanas Home Department on the retirement of DGP BS Sandhu today left the Manohar Lal Khattar government red-faced.

While the state governments case for grant of extension to DGP Sandhu is pending with the Centre, a letter today by the states Home Department that he would be retired on September 30 created confusion in the administrative circles.

Governor of Haryana is pleased to retire BS Sandhu from government service with effect from September 30 on attaining the age of superannuation, a communication said.

In a damage control exercise, the government termed the communication as a routine matter, claiming that it would be withdrawn.

The state government had recently sought a seven-month extension for Sandhu apparently in line with the Supreme Court directions regarding a two-year tenure irrespective of the date of superannuation for DGPs. Sandhu was appointed to the post on April 27, 2017.

Official sources said it was for the Appointments Committee of the Cabinet (ACC) of the Centre to take a final call. The ACC had recently granted three-month extension in service to Maharashtra DGP DD Padsalgikar and Punjab Police chief Suresh Arora after relaxing Section 16 (1) of the All India Service (Death-Cum-Retirement Benefits) Rules.

The Haryana Governments intention to retain Sandhu had been demonstrated by the fact that it had sought his extension even as it was yet to send a panel (list of suitable candidates) for the next DGP to the UPSC as per the SCs July 3 ruling. Under the SC order, states were free to appoint as police chief any one of the three most suitable candidates chosen by the UPSC from the state panel to be sent three months prior to the retirement of the current DGP.

Officials said the state government would be content with a three-month extension to Sandhu as this would it give ample time to seek clarifications from the SC and prepare the panel for the next DGP.
ROBINSINGH@TRIBUNE.COM

Smita Sharma

Tribune News Service

New Delhi, September 19

India and Pakistan are in discussions through their respective missions and ministries for a possible meeting between the two foreign ministers.

Official sources on both sides have confirmed that a formal proposal is on the table for Sushma Swaraj and Shah Mehmood Qureshi to meet separately along the sidelines of the SAARC (South Asian Association of Regional Cooperation) Council of Foreign Ministers meeting in New York.

The SAARC meeting, an annual event along the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly session, is slated for September 27.

No decision has been taken so far. We are engaged in the matter, said Dr Mohammad Faisal, spokesperson for the Pakistan Ministry of Foreign Affairs, today.

The possibility of a separate bilateral engagement a day prior to the SAARC meeting between Swaraj and new Pakistan Foreign Minister in the Imran Khan cabinet is being looked into, say sources. Both sides are in touch. It is a work in progress. Though nothing has been scheduled yet, said a senior official. The meeting could help break the deadlock on the SAARC summit which Pakistan is to host, but an India-led boycott continues since the Uri terror strikes of 2016. Qureshi is currently travelling with Imran Khan on the Pakistani PMs maiden overseas visit to Saudi Arabia.

An Indian government source said, We cannot prejudge what our position will be if and when the two Foreign Ministers meet. But dialogue cannot go along with acts of terror.
amansharma@tribunemail.com

Smita Sharma

Tribune News Service

New Delhi, September 19

The Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) has confirmed that Sushma Swaraj will hold a meeting with her Pakistani counterpart Shah Mehmood Qureshi in New York next week.

The development was first reported by The Tribune. The two leaders will represent their countries at the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) and also participate in the SAARC council of ministers meeting to be held on September 27 along the sidelines. "I can confirm that on the request of Pakistani side, a meeting between External Affairs Minister and Pak Foreign minister will take place on the sidelines of the UNGA at a mutually convenient date and time," said MEA spokesperson Raveesh Kumar.

While the permanent missions of India and Pakistan to UN in New York are finalising schedule and agenda of talks, sources suggest the ministers could hold talks a day prior to the SAARC meeting.

However, the Indian government insists that this is not start of a structured dialogue and neither is there any change in its stated position that "talks on terror can happen, but talks and terror cannot go together".

"I must distinguish between a meeting and a dialogue. This should not be confused with resumption of any dialogue. This is a meeting based on a request which we have got from the Pakistani side. This does not indicate any change in policy as far as our stand on terrorism and cross border terrorism is concerned," underlined Raveesh Kumar.

This meeting follows a letter written by Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan in response to congratulatory letter penned to him after his oath taking ceremony by PM Narendra Modi. The letter dated September 14 was handed over by Pakistani envoy Sohail Mahmood to MEA on 17th. The same day Pakistan's foreign minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi also sent a letter for Sushma Swaraj. Endorsing the sentiment shared by PM Modi of a need for 'constructive engagement,' Imran Khan in his letter wrote, "Pakistan and India have an undeniably challenging relationship. We, however, owe it to our peoples, especially the future generations, to peacefully resolve all outstanding issues, including the Jammu & Kashmir dispute, to bridge differences and achieve a mutually beneficial outcome. Siachen and Sir Creek also need close attention to move towards resolution."

Khan in his letter proposed a meeting between the two foreign ministers along UNGA sidelines to 'explore the way forward', including possibility of the SAARC summit to be held in Islamabad. "The summit will offer and opportunity for you to visit Pakistan and for us to re-start the dialogue process," added the Pak PM.

"PM has responded to PM Modi, in a positive spirit, reciprocating his sentiments. Let's talk and resolve all issues. We await formal response from India," said Pak Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesperson Mohammad Faisal earlier today.

However, India, in its response, maintained that along with other SAARC members it feels that the regional atmosphere is not conducive to hold a summit meeting. India led boycott of SAARC summit continues since the Uri terror strikes of 2016.

While the agenda of meeting is under discussion, India is expected to raise concerns on terrorism and cross-border infiltration and Pakistan is likely to raise the K bogey in talks. The issue of Kartarpur Sahib corridor opening will be taken up by Swaraj in her meeting with Qureshi, confirmed MEA.
ROBINSINGH@TRIBUNE.COM

Mukesh Ranjan

Tribune News Service

New Delhi, September 19

Citing compelling necessity, the Union Cabinet today approved an ordinance signed by the President later in the day  making the practice of instant triple talaq a cognisable offence with a provision of a three-year jail term for the husband.

Law and Justice Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad said the Congress reluctance to support the Bill in the Rajya Sabha had forced the government to look for an alternative route.

He insisted that the decision was taken under compelling necessity as the practice continued unabated even after the Supreme Court annulled it last year and directed the government to bring about a legal framework to deal with the issue.

Prasad accused the Congress of not cooperating in the passage of the Muslim Women Protection of Rights on Marriage Bill because of vote-bank politics. It is unfortunate that despite being led by a woman, the Congress has not been forthcoming to support the law, which is aimed at giving equality and gender justice to Muslim women, he said. He also urged BSP leader Mayawati and TMC leader Mamata Banerjee to help in the passage of the Bill pending in the RS, where the government lacks numbers. The LS has already passed the Bill.

Prasad said he had met senior Congress leader Anand Sharma, who said he would get back after talking to the party leadership, but there had been no response.

Under the proposed ordinance, instant triple talaq would be illegal and void.

Allaying fears about the possible misuse of the proposed law, the minister said the government had included certain safeguards such as adding a provision of bail for the accused before trial. These amendments were cleared by the Cabinet on August 29.

While the proposed law makes it a non-bailable offence, an accused can approach a magistrate even before trial to seek bail. In a non-bailable offence, bail cannot be granted by the police at the police station itself. Sources later said the magistrate would ensure that bail was granted only after the husband agreed to grant compensation to the wife as provided in the Bill and the same would be decided by the magistrate.

Compelling necessity: Law minister

There was an overpowering urgency and a compelling necessity to bring the ordinance as the practice continued unabated despite the SC order last yearRavi Shankar Prasad, Law Minister

Provisions for three-yr jail, bail
rchopra@tribunemail.com

New Delhi, September 20

The Supreme Court on Thursday reserved its verdict on a plea by historian Romila Thapar and others seeking the immediate release of five rights activists in connection with the Koregaon-Bhima violence case and an SIT probe into their arrest.

A bench headed by Chief Justice Dipak Misra reserved the judgment after counsel for both parties, including senior advocates Abhishek Manu Singhvi, Harish Salve and Additional Solicitor General Tushar Mehta, concluded their submissions.

The bench, also comprising Justices AM Khaniwlkar and DY Chandrachud, asked Maharashtra Police to file their case diary pertaining to the ongoing investigation in the case by September 24. It also asked the parties to file their written submissions by then.

The five activists--Varavara Rao, Arun Ferreira, Vernon Gonsalves, Sudha Bharadwaj and Gautam Navlakha--are under arrest at their respective homes since August 29.

The plea by Romila Thapar and economists Prabhat Patnaik and Devaki Jain, sociology professor Satish Deshpande and human rights lawyer Maja Daruwala has sought an independent probe into the arrests and the immediate release of the five activists. PTI
Burge himself never was charged directly in any of the torture allegations, though he was fired from the Chicago Police Department in 1993. Years later, in 2010, he was convicted of lying about his conduct and sentenced to prison. He was released in 2014 and returned to his waterfront home south of Tampa.
monicakchauhan@gmail.com

Tribune News Service

Kochi/Chandigarh, September 20

A new administrator was on Thursday appointed from Mumbai, instead of Father Mathew Kokkandum, whom Bishop Franco Mulakkal had assigned responsibilities before "stepping aside temporarily" as Bishop of the Jalandhar Diocese.

Bishop Franco Mulakkal, who was questioned by Kerala police for the second day over rape charges by a nun, has been temporarily relieved of his pastoral responsibilities by Pope Francis, the Catholic Bishop Conference of India (CBCI) said Thursday.

Agnelo Rufino Gracias, Titular Bishop of Molicunza and Auxiliary Bishop emeritus of Bombay, would take over as the Bishop of Jalandhar Diocese.

Meanwhile, the SIT of the Kerala Police probing the case of alleged rape of a nun by the bishop questioned him for the second day on Thursday for eight hours even as the state police chief said a decision on Franco Mulakkal's arrest could be taken in a day or two.

The bishop was asked to be present again tomorrow.

Hours after Mulakkal, accused of repeated rape and sexual assault, appeared before the Special Investigation Team for interrogation, the state's DGP Loknath Behera said the investigating officer will decide on whether to arrest him once the examination got over.

"After examining him only a decision will be taken. Investigating team is examining him. Let us wait. A decision will be definitely taken today or tomorrow after the interrogation," Behera told reporters in Thiruvananthapuram earlier in the day.

He said the investigating officer was free to take a call on the issue.

When asked whether Mulakkal can be arrested before September 25, the day his anticipatory bail plea will come up for hearing in the high court, the top police officer said, "I think, legally there is no problem. There is no such law (that bars arrest during pendency of bail plea). That we will discuss with the legal team."

Citing convention, legal experts had said the priest is unlikely to be arrested before September 25.

Mulakkal, the bishop of the Jalandhar diocese of the Missionaries of Jesus, the congregation to which the alleged victim also belongs, was grilled by the SIT headed by DySP K Subhash for seven hours Wednesday. He was asked to appear before it again today.

The bishop joined the probe at around 11 am at the crime branch office, where some members of All India Youth Federation, the students front of the CPI, held a protest demanding his arrest. They had also staged a protest Wednesday.

Some people also burnt an effigy of Mulakkal.

The nun has accused the senior Catholic priest of sexually assaulting her repeatedly between 2014 and 2016, allegations denied by the clergyman who has pleaded innocence.

Meanwhile, the protest by various Catholic reform organisations and a group of nuns seeking Mulakkal's arrest entered its 13th day Thursday.

The agitation at Kochi's Vanchi Square is a spontaneous expression of outrage by these groups over the alleged assault of the nun.

A protesting nun said they were all waiting for the news of the arrest of the bishop so a strong message goes out to those who abuse women. With PTI inputs
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Vibha Sharma

Tribune News Service

New Delhi, September 19

A day after Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) chief Mohan Bhagwat said there can be no Hindu rashtra without Muslims, he Wednesday pushed for the saffron groups most-favoured poll agendathe Ram Templesaying that a grand temple at Ayodhya should be made as soon as possible.

Bhagwat, today on the last day of the three-day RSS conclave Bhavishya Ka BharatAn RSS Perspective, touched upon various issues while replying to audience questions, was categorical that the RSS wants a grand Ram Temple should be constructed at Ayodhya.

It should have happened by now (the construction of Ram Temple at Ayodhya). If this happens it would resolve many issues, including differences between Hindus and Muslims. It is the question of faith of crores of Hindus, he said.

Bhagwat also said the Hinduvta outfit was not against inter-caste marriage and it was an issue of compatibility between a man and woman.

Answering wide-ranging questions on issues like inter-caste marriages, education as well as the caste system, Bhagwat also said if there is a census on inter-caste marriages, the maximum cases will be those from the Sangh.

On the last day of the three-day mega outreach conclave by the Hindutva outfit, the RSS chief also said India needs a new education policy.

Bhagwat also pitched for protection of cows but disapproved of going against law in the name of such vigilantism.

The Sangh head said, We have to reject the double-speak as there is no talk of violence by cow smugglers. He was replying to questions on cow vigilantism and mob lynching.

It is a crime to take law in ones own hands, Bhagwat said on cow vigilantism and asserted there should be stringent punishment in such cases. The question came in the backdrop of instances of alleged lynching by cow vigilantes in several states.  With PTI
amansharma@tribunemail.com

Tribune News Service

Lucknow, September 20

Crashing the Congress hopes of a tie-up with the BSP in the three states going to elections, BSP president Mayawati on Thursday announced her partys alliance with the Janata Congress led by Ajit Jogi in Chhattisgarh.

Sharing this information with a TV channel in Lucknow, the BSP president made it clear that her party would contest 35 seats in Chhattisgarh while the Janata Congress would fight on 55 seats.

She also stated that in case the alliance won the election in Chhattisgarh, Ajit Jogi would be the Chief Minister.

The BSP announcement comes as a major jolt to the Congress which had been expecting an alliance with the BSP in Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan.
editorial@tribune.com

Tribune News Service

Chandigarh, September 20

Chief Minister Capt Amarinder Singh assured former Afghan President Hamid Karzai of greater strategic support and cooperation for the war-torn nation, an official press release said here today.

Karzai thanked the Chief Minister for inviting him to the Kisan Mela being held at PAU. Afghanistan and Punjab shared close cultural ties and could benefit through mutual cooperation and exchange of technical knowhow in the fields of agriculture and horticulture, he said.

The visiting dignitary called for further cementing the traditional bonds of peace and brotherhood between Afghanistan and India, particularly Punjab. The Chief Minister said since Afghanistan and India shared warm and friendly historical relations, Punjab would be happy to provide all possible assistance in the development of Afghanistan.

Karzai interacted with Afghan students at Punjab Agricultural University (PAU), Ludhiana, where he was the guest of honour at the Kisan Mela. He thanked the university authorities and the faculty for helping the students.

Later, he paid obeisance at the Golden Temple. SGPC chief secretary Dr Roop Singh honoured him with a replica of the shrine, a shawl and a siropa. Talking to mediapersons, he said the situation was tough for Sikhs in Afghanistan and they had no alternative but to migrate.
editorial@tribune.com

GS Paul

Tribune News Service

Amritsar, September 19

A 22-year-old US-based woman landed in Amritsar to meet her Facebook friend. Whitney Harris, a gym trainer in Maryland, came in contact with Pulkit, 21, a Class XII student from Amritsar, online and decided to meet him.

Meanwhile, one of her uncles, Erin Reynolds Harris, posted a missing information about her on his Facebook page, saying  my niece went missing.she left a letter saying she was going to meet someone in Amritsar that she met online. We are obviously very concerned that this is actually part of a human trafficking ring.

The post caught the attention of Jeevan Jyot, a resident of Amritsar, who managed to track her. I got to know that the woman landed at the Amritsar airport around 7 am. She was accompanied by Pulkit who received her from New Delhi, she said.

In another twist, a church pastor, Pastor Samson, and Elder Dr Parkash Masih were also there and insisted upon taking the custody of the woman till her parents reached Amritsar. I was reluctant but the pastor informed me that he is known to her parents and was in constant touch with them. He also made me talk to her parents, Jeevan said.

Leaving nothing to chance, she brought the matter to the notice of Deputy Commissioner KS Sangha and Police Commissioner SS Srivastava.

The district administration swung into action and sent a team led by Assistant Commissioner (grievances), Alka, to the residence of Dr Masih.

We found her to be in safe custody. During counselling, she revealed that she came here willingly and would like to go back as her parents from the US would arrive. She also made video calls to her parents back home to convey about her well-being, Alka said, adding, The woman said she had left a note with her parents and avoided discussing it with them before leaving as she feared that they would not allow her to go.

Meanwhile, Dr Masih said she was a member of Seventh-day Adventist Church with their US wing. We came to know about her only through our church members in the US and traced her. I have spoken to her parents. Probably, her brother would come here in two to three days to take her back, he said.

Pulkits father, Brij Mohan, said they were looking forward to meet her parents or brother. So far, there are no set future plans from our side. We will go by what her parents want. She is welcome to our home if she feels comfortable, he said.
amansharma@tribunemail.com

Ravi S.Singh

Tribune News Service

New Delhi, September 20

DAV College, Jalandhar, on Thursday won the 14th National Youth Parliamentary Competition, 2017-18, which was organised by the Ministry for Parliamentary Affairs.

It won the Parliamentary Shield and Trophy, a national component of the competition. DAV College enacted a short sitting of Youth Parliament ( mock Parliament) during the event.

A full fledged drill on parliamentary proceedings including No-Confidence Motion was played out by the schools students on the occasion.

As many as 74 institutions competed for the top award.

Besides, Central University of Punjab, Bhatinda, Rajiv Gandhi National University of law, Patiala, were among 14 universities/colleges which were awarded merit trophies for standing first in their respective groups.

University of Jammu, and Shaheed Bhagat Singh College, New Delhi, were other institutes awarded under the Merit trophies.

The competition started in 1997-98 and under Youth Parliament Scheme of the Ministry. The scheme aims at acquainting the young generation with the practice and procedures of Parliament, techniques of discussion and debate, besides developing leadership qualities.

Addressing the students, Minister of State for Parliamentary Affairs Arjun Meghwal gave important nuances of manners and etiquettes of members and conduct of business in the Parliament, quoting from actual instances of important parliamentary debates, including that of former Prime Minister Atal Bihar Vajpayee.
amansharma@tribunemail.com

Smita Sharma

Tribune News Service

New Delhi, September 20

Amid a political row over the Kartarpur Sahib corridor opening issue, India has announced that it will raise the matter formally with Pakistan once again next week.

The issue will be flagged by India when External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj travels to New York for UNGA (United Nations General Assembly). Swaraj will hold a meeting with her Pakistani counterpart Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi along the UNGA sidelines, announced India today. MEA spokesperson Raveesh Kumar clarified that no formal proposal for opening up of the nearly 4-km long corridor revered by Sikh pilgrims has been received from Islamabad.

"Even now, we have not received any official communication that the Pakistani government is willing to consider this matter. EAM will, therefore, raise this issue in her meeting with the Pakistani Foreign Minister on the sidelines of UNGA," said Raveesh Kumar.

India also underlined that despite several requests, including during late PM Vajpayee's Lahore visit in 1999, to consider a visa free visit to the Kartarpur Sahib Gurudwara, the shrine is still not a part of the list under the 1974 Protocol. The Protocol lists out the religious shrines between India and Pakistan to facilitate visits of pilgrims from each side. Subsequently the matter was raised between 2004 and 2005 by former PM Manmohan Singh, former Punjab CM Prakash Singh Badal and at the Foreign Secretary level talks.

"In 2005, Pakistan agreed to allow visit to three shrines with visas, including to Kartarpur but did not include it in Protocol. In 2008, the then EAM (External Affairs Minister) raised the issue of Kartarpur Sahib corridor with the then Pakistani Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi. However, there has not been any official response from Pakistani side since then," said Raveesh Kumar.

Incidentally, Qureshi is now back in the Imran Khan government as the Pakistani Foreign Minister.

The matter snowballed into a fresh controversy following visit of Punjab Minister Navjot Sidhu to Islamabad for Imran Khan's swearing in ceremony and his interaction with Pak Army chief Bajwa reportedly on the matter. Since then political parties have traded charges in the state while trying to stake claim as the credible interlocutor on the matter. Sidhu as well as Union Food Processing Minister Harsimrat Badal wrote letters to Swaraj on the matter.
gspannu7@gmail.com

Berlin, September 20

A decision to give a new government job to Germanys domestic intelligence chief, who was removed from that post after appearing to downplay recent far-right protests, is causing discontent in Chancellor Angela Merkels coalition.

Hans-Georg Maassen was removed as head of the BfV intelligence agency after Merkels center-left coalition partners, the Social Democrats, demanded his departure.

But conservative Interior Minister Horst Seehofer is making him a deputy minister, technically a promotion.

Social Democrat leader Andrea Nahles now faces criticism within her party for agreeing.

Nahles said Thursday she understands the annoyance and also thinks Seehofers insistence on keeping Maassen is wrong, but stands by her decision.

She made clear she wasnt prepared to sacrifice the fractious six-month-old coalition over the question.

Party leaders will discuss the issue Monday.  AP
rajivbhatia82@gmail.com

SEOUL, September 20

North Korea's Kim Jong Un wants a second summit with U.S. President Donald Trump soon to hasten denuclearisation, but a key goal is declaring an end this year to the 1950-53 Korean War, the South's President Moon Jae-in said on Thursday.

Moon said he and Kim spent most of a three-day summit discussing how to break an impasse and restart nuclear talks between Pyongyang and Washington, which are at odds over which should come first, denuclearisation or ending the war.

Kim, who recently proposed another summit with Trump after their unprecedented June talks in Singapore, said the North was willing to "permanently dismantle" key missile facilities in the presence of outside experts, and the Yongbyon main nuclear complex, if the U.S. took corresponding action.

The joint statement from the summit stipulates his commitment to a "verifiable, irreversible dismantlement" of the nuclear programmes, and ending the war would be a first U.S.

reciprocal step, Moon said.

"Chairman Kim expressed his wish that he wanted to complete denuclearisation quickly and focus on economic development," Moon told a news conference in Seoul, shortly after returning from the summit with Kim in Pyongyang.

"He hoped a second summit with Trump would take place in the near future, in order to move the denuclearisation process along quickly."

Moon said Kim was also open to inspection of a nuclear test site in the northwest town of Punggye-ri, which he called the North's sole existing facility for underground detonations.

While Pyongyang has stopped nuclear and missile tests this year, it failed to keep its pledge to allow international inspections of its dismantling of the Punggye-ri site in May, stirring criticism that the move could be reversed.

Representatives of the White House and the U.S. State Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

But U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said on Wednesday he had invited the North's foreign minister to meet in New York next week and other Pyongyang officials to Vienna for talks with nuclear envoy Stephen Biegun.

ENDING WAR

Kim pledged to work toward the "complete denuclearisation of the Korean peninsula" during two meetings with Moon and his encounter with Trump, but follow-up negotiations on how to implement the vague commitments have since faltered.

Washington calls for concrete action, such as a full disclosure of North Korea's nuclear and missile facilities, before satisfying Pyongyang's key demands, including an official end to the war and the easing of international sanctions.

The war ended in an armistice, rather than a peace treaty, meaning U.S.-led United Nations forces, including South Korea, are technically still at war with the North.

But there have been concerns in South Korea and the United States that ending the war would ultimately prompt China and Russia, if not North Korea, to demand that the United Nations Command (UNC), which overlaps with U.S. forces in South Korea, be disbanded and leave.

Seoul aims to jointly announce with the United States an end to the war within this year, a measure Moon said he would discuss with Trump when they meet next week at the United Nations General Assembly in New York.

An end-of-war declaration would not affect the presence of U.S. troops and the UNC in the South, Moon said, adding that Kim shared his view.

"It would be a political declaration that would mark a starting point for peace negotiations," Moon said.

"A peace treaty would be sealed, as well as normalisation of North Korea-U.S. relations, after the North achieves complete denuclearisation."- Reuters
vermaajay1968@gmail.com

Kuala Lumpur, September 19

Malaysias toppled leader Najib Razak was arrested on Wednesday and will be charged over allegations that $628 million linked to state investment fund 1MDB ended up in his personal bank accounts, officials said.

Allegations that Najib and his cronies looted huge sums from the investment vehicle were a major factor in the shock defeat of his long-ruling coalition in elections in May, at the hands of a reformist alliance headed by Mahathir Mohamad.

Mahathir, 93, in his second stint as premier after coming out of retirement to take on his ex-protege Najib, has reopened probes into 1MDB that were shut down by the former government, and vowed to bring Najib to justice.

Since losing power, Najib has already been arrested and hit with seven charges related to claims he pocketed some $10 million from a former unit of 1MDB. However his arrest Wednesday was more significant as it related to a central allegation in the long-running scandal-that huge sums from the fund flowed into his bank accounts before a hotly contested election in 2013.

The Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission said in a statement that it had detained Najib as part of its investigations into the fund and the entry of 2.6 billion ringgit ($ 628 million) into his personal account. Najib will appear in court Thursday afternoon where he faces several charges related to abuse of power, the anti-corruption commission said.  AFP
The Tribune asked Preckwinkle about the staff turnover in June 2017, when she announced she would run for her third and final term as County Board president. She noted that some of her former chiefs of staff had gone on to successful careers elsewhere. Those include Kurt Summers, the city treasurer, and Kim Foxx, the states attorney.
gspannu7@gmail.com

Washington, September 20

An unidentified assailant opened fire Thursday at a warehouse complex north of the US city of Baltimore, killing and wounding multiple people, authorities said.

A lone suspect was in critical condition at a local hospital, according to Harford County sheriff Jeffrey Gahler. Police would not confirm reports if the shooter was a woman.

I can confirm multiple wounded and multiple fatalities, Gahler said.  AFP
vermaajay1968@gmail.com

Seoul, September 19

North Koreas Kim Jong Un agreed to make a historic visit to Seoul soon and close a missile testing site in front of international inspectors at a summit with the Souths President Moon Jae-in in Pyongyang on Wednesday.

Progress on the key issue of the Norths nuclear arsenal was limited, but the two signed a document to strengthen ties between the two halves of the divided peninsula. The agreement carries the peoples fresh hope and the peoples strong, flaming desire for reunification, Kim said.

His trip to Seoul would be the first by a Northern leader since the end of the 1950-53 Korean War, when hostilities ceased with an armistice rather than a peace treaty, leaving them technically in a state of war.

Moon added that the visit could happen this year and would be a monumental milestone in inter-Korean relations.

In their agreement, the North also agreed to permanently close a missile engine testing site and launch facility in Tongchang-ri in the presence of experts from relevant nations.

Moon, who brokered Kims historic summit with US President Donald Trump in Singapore in June, had hoped to bring fresh momentum to stalled talks between his hosts and Washington. Whether that would happen remained unclear.

In Singapore Kim declared his backing for denuclearisation of the peninsula but no details were agreed. Washington and Pyongyang have since sparred over what that means and how it will be achieved.

Trump welcomed Wednesdays declaration, tweeting that Kim had agreed to allow nuclear inspections, subject to final negotiations and adding: Very exciting! But experts were sceptical.

The North-whose ballistic missile programme is banned under UN Security Council resolutions-has carried out several long-range rocket launches from the site, also known as Sohae, but has also used many other locations including Pyongyang airport.

Satellite pictures in August suggested workers were already dismantling an engine test stand at Sohae.

Moon also said the North could close its Yongbyon nuclear plant if Washington takes corresponding measures-a significant caveat.

Wednesdays declaration came 13 years to the day after the North committed at the Six Party Talks to abandoning all nuclear weapons and existing nuclear programmes.

But the two Koreas have been pressing ahead with their own rapprochement, with Kim looking to secure economic cooperation from the far wealthier South, and Moon trying to reduce the risk of a US-North Korean conflict that would devastate his country.

Before returning home on Thursday, Seoul said, Moon will travel to Mount Paektu, the spiritual birthplace of the Korean nation on the Chinese-North Korean border.  AFP

Moon will update Trump next week at un summit

Kims latest promises come days before Moon meets Trump in New York on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly next week. Seoul officials hope Moon will be able to convince Trump to restart nuclear talks with Pyongyang

Though North has unilaterally stopped nuclear and missile tests, it did not allow international inspections of the dismantling its only known nuclear test site in May, drawing criticism that its action was for show and could be easily reversed

As a next step, North will allow experts from concerned countries to watch the closure of its missile engine testing site and launch pad in the northwestern town of Dongchang-ri, according to a joint statement signed by Moon and Kim

Growing bonhomie
ROBINSINGH@TRIBUNE.COM

Fasihur Rehman Khan

Islamabad, September 19

After a series of political and legal setbacks since his ouster from power in July 2017, former Premier Nawaz Sharif and his political heir Maryam Nawaz had the first sigh of relief as they came out of jail on bail on Wednesday night.

Legal experts and lawyers, however, foresee a long battle for the former premier as two more corruption references are being heard in the accountability court, and it might take several weeks or months before the cases are finally decided, and may involve due appeals process.

Sharifs party, the PML-N, is, meanwhile, planning a grand welcome for its leader but may be delayed by two-three days on account of Ashura Muharram days of mourning which fall on Thursday-Friday and observed by Muslims across the world.

Sharif, his daughter and son-in-law came out of the Rawalpindi Adiyala Jail amid cheers by party workers and were flown to Lahore in a special plane. National Assembly Opposition Leader Shahbaz Sharif received them on the jail premises and accompanied them thereafter.

Earlier during the day, the Islamabad High Court suspended the jail sentences of Sharif, his daughter Maryam Nawaz and son-in-law Capt Safdar in the Avenfield corruption case.

Sharif was sentenced to 10 years in jail, his daughter seven years and son-in-law one year by the accountability court on July 6 on charges of owning assets beyond means, concealment of facts etc.

The sentences would remain suspended until final decision in the case, the judgment said. For the reasons to be recorded later, the petitions of Nawaz Sharif, Maryam Nawaz and Mohammad Safdar are allowed, read the short order by Justice Athar Minallah who headed the two-member Bench. The court will now fix dates for hearing of the appeals against the accountability court verdict in the case.

Sharif was dismissed as the Premier by the countrys supreme court on July 27, 2017, in Panama Papers case. Sharif and his daughter courted arrest at the Lahore airport on July 13 as they returned from London where they had gone to enquire about the health of Begum Kulsoom Nawaz, wife of Nawaz Sharif. Begum Kulsoom passed away last week. The PTI-led government released the trio on parole for five days that ended on Monday.

Pakistani Information Minister Fawad Chaudhry said: The Sharif family has still not revealed the source of their wealth, which is worth billions. This verdict has been given on procedural basis. Once the matter moves forward, I am sure justice will find its way.

Saeed to move court to retrieve frozen assets

Lahore: Mumbai attack mastermind Hafiz Saeed plans to launch the next phase of legal battle to retrieve assets of the Jamaat-ud-Dawa (JuD) and its subsidiary Falah-i-Insaniyat Foundation (FIF) after Pakistans supreme court allowed the two outfits to continue their activities in the country, the JuDs spokesman said on Wednesday. The government had frozen bank accounts of both organisations.  PTI
vermaajay1968@gmail.com

Washington, September 19

President Donald Trump on Wednesday said it would be unfortunate if the woman who has accused his Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of sexual assault did not testify before a U.S. Senate committee, as he stepped up his defense of the conservative federal appeals court judge.

Trump answered questions about Kavanaugh, whose nomination is now in jeopardy in the Senate, as he left the White House to visit hurricane-stricken areas in North Carolina and South Carolina.

The Senate Judiciary Committee, which oversees Supreme Court nominations, has scheduled a hearing for Monday and invited both Ford and Kavanaugh to testify. Fords lawyers said on Tuesday she would not appear before the Senate until after the FBI investigates the allegations. Officials have said the FBI is not looking into the matter.

Look, if she shows up and makes a credible showing, that will be very interesting and well have to make a decision. But I can only say this: hes such an outstanding man, very hard for me to imagine that anything happened, Trump told reporters.

I really want to see her, Trump said. Democrats, already opposed to Kavanaugh, have sought an FBI investigation, a request Republicans rebuffed.  Reuters
Seven-year-old Zairion Alexander is being called a hero after he saved his relatives from a fire which destroyed 95 per cent of their Moriah home.

The fire occurred shortly after 11 p.m. on Monday.

Six people are now homeless after their single-storey home was destroyed.
I think the groups will be split. We already know SEIU, probably the most powerful labor union in the city, is backing Toni, and Im sure that some of the progressive groups  particularly those that came to being during the Bernie Sanders campaign  will be backing Garcia, Moore said. So it will be interesting. I dont think either one of those two candidates will have a corner on the progressive market.
The first snow of the winter will reach Kabul any day now, and the death rate will start to climb: mostly children, at first, but it will not really be the cold that kills them.

The cold will only finish the work that malnutrition began months or years agobut the other cause of their deaths will be a different kind of freeze.
Mid October - I would recommend loops or one ways in two regions, but you will need to decide which ones.

Options:

1: Sydney for say two nights, then Blue Mountains for an overnight, then on to Canberra for two nights, then Jervis for a night and back to Sydney for your final night (maybe add a night to Sydney and/or Canberra)

2: Fly to Sunshine Coast (an hour north of Brisbane) hire a car, have a couple of nights in Noosa Heads or Noosaville, then drive to Hervey Bay, do a day trip to Fraser Island and a day trip to Lady Elliot Island, with three nights in HB all up, then either back to the Sunshine Coast Airport or down to Brisbane for a couple of nights, possibly via the Blackall Range Tourist Drive for a night.

3: Melbourne, Great Ocean Road, back via Ballarat and Grampians.

4: Melbourne, GOR, Robe, Adelaide, Kangaroo Island, depart from Adelaide to next destination.

Cheers.
Yes, 15 nights is doable if you work it out this way:

1 and 2 Noosa

3 and 4 Hervey Bay for a Fraser Island Tour

5 Yeppoon

6 Mackay

7 and 8 Townsville with day trip to Magnetic Island

9 Cairns stopping at Mission Beach along the way

10 drive Atherton Tablelands and end in Port Douglas

11 and 12 Port Douglas

13 and 14 Cape Trib.

15 Cairns

Your other option would be to add a couple of nights on to Noosa region and then return to Brisbane and fly to Cairns or Townsville skippping the long mostly boring drive from HB to Townsville (the drive from Townsville to Cairns is also boring but it depends on whether you want to see Maggie.

Keep in mind you cant swim at the beach north of Hervey Bay at this time of year due to deadlynstingers in the water so IMO doing the drive is a bit of a waste of your time. In Cairns, the tour operators will give you stinger suits for the reef.

Re camper van: it is doable, but you will want an air conditioner and to pay for powere sites otherwise you will melt.

Cheers.

Edited: 3 years ago
For starters put more days into the Margaret River region.

Does your 10 days include at least 1 night in Perth/ Fremantle or is it 10 days for the road trip?

It is easy to spend 3 nights Albany, 2 nights Denmark, 2 nights Pemberton and 3 nights Dunsborough.

Theres lots to see and do at each of those places with some good day trips.

Just for an example-

In Albany do a day trip to Porongorup NP along with all the many sightseeing opportunities such as Two Peoples bay and Torndirrup NP

Denmark- enjoy a leisurely day at Greens Pool and the Scotsdale Rd scenic drive.

Have a leisurely lunch and look at art galleries.

Pemberton- have walks hrough the Karri forests and a 4WD tour to wilderness areas.

Dunsborough- enjoy the many attractions of the region:

Much depends on your interests of course as to how many days you spend in each area.

Remember that the attractions are not in the towns but the surrounding areas so you need time to explore.

If you want to include Esperance you would cut back a day in each of those towns to then leave 2 full days in Esperance plus 1 night for the return to Perth staying somewhere like Hyden so as to break the 8 hour drive.

Edited: 3 years ago
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First time trip to Vietnam as a family of Mum Dad son who will be 15 and daughter of 11

Planning at this stage to fly into Ho Chi Minh and stay maybe four nights and take in city sights plus Mekong Delta then fly to Danang and spend 4 nights Hoi An/Hue as dont want a flop and drop beachfront at this stage then fly to Hanoi for 5 nights and take in 2 night Halong Bay cruise and overnight train thru to Sapa then fly to Thailand.

Questions.... do we have it right going south to north as thought finishing with a bang in Halong Bay would be great

Should we book internal flights beforehand and just wing it or are we best to book before we leave

Anything glaring we should go see

Should we wing it on accomodation or pre book?

Then will fly to Thailand for Elephant Hills and Koh Samui for flop and drop 
Hi everyone,

I am planning a trip for five people to Japan for mid to late November this year. Thanks to all of the great advice here, the planning has gone well except for the last night of our two week trip. Some of us have their heart set on seeing Koyasan, and I don't know if I can make that work. We would go to Koyasan from Osaka (which seems okay) but the problem is that we would stay overnight in Koyasan and fly from Haneda airport that day at 4pm.

I have tried really hard to get people to where they want to go, but is this even possible? I have checked trains, taxis and even flights to see what the best combination might be, and I don't have a clear answer. Any experience/tips/advice would be greatly appreciated.

Victoria
Hello fellow travellers and Japan experts,

we are going on a three months wordtrip with our at the time 1 and 3.5 year old kids. Fortunately we are going to spend one month in Japan as first time visitors. We have put together an itinerary now, which still leaves us with a few questions. Maybe you can help. :-)

First of all, here comes the itinerary:

-> Flying into Tokyo

10 days Tokyo (incl. daytrip to Disneyland and Matsumoto Castle)

2 nights Hakone

4 nights Kyoto

8 nights Shikoku (spent in Takamatsu, Ida Valley, Matsuyama...)

3 nights Hiroshima (incl. daytrip to Miyajima Island)

4 nights Osaka (stop at Himeji Castle on way to Osaka, daytrips to Nara Park and Koyasan)

-> Flying out of Osaka

And here come the questions:

Kyoto / Shrines

Visiting temples and shrines is certainly on the agenda, but we are not that crazy about these sort of sights, so we wouldn't want to do that many of them. We have also read that many temples are only accessible through stairs and longer walks. Is that true? And is there more to do and see in Kyoto but temples?

Shikoku

Whats the best way to get around? Train again or hire car? Is there a quiet place (maybe in Iya Valley) where you can simply stay, relax and enjoy nature without getting to bored and while keeping two kids happy?

We would love to do the bike trip Shimanami Kaido, but we would need kids seats for the bikes. Are those available? I don't think we could do the entire trip with two kids. What options are there to do maybe a daytrip of 20 km. How do you get to the starting point and back to the hotel?

We would love to visit one of the old onsen on Shikoku. Is it possible to enter with kids or is it rather for adults?

Koyasan

Again: Is it possible / recommendable to stay over night with two small children or better to head back to Osaka for the night?

Any nice things that we have missed in our plan so far? Any great kid- and adult-friendly place that we should add to our list?

Thank you so much for your help!

Barbara
Guzman, the longtime leader of the Sinaloa drug cartel, was captured in Mexico in 2014 and three years later extradited to New York, where he is preparing to go on trial this fall on drug trafficking and murder charges. The federal indictment against Guzman also seeks the forfeiture of more than $14 billion in drug proceeds and other illicit profits.
RENSSELAER COUNTY, N.Y.- The New York State Department of Transportation recently announced it will auction land in Rensselaer County.

The auction is part of the States Surplus Property Program, which is aimed at returning properties no longer needed to the hands of local citizens who can potentially develop the land to the betterment of the local economy.

Map 37-D, Parcel 57, is located along the north side of New York State Route 43 on the west side of its intersection with U.S. Route 4 (North Greenbush Road) in the town of North Greenbush. The parcel is irregular in shape, landlocked, and consists of approximately 0.654 acres. It will be the bidders responsibility to obtain legal access to the parcel. The state does not guarantee access.

Map 86-D & 87- D, Parcels 78 & 79, to be sold together as one offering, are located on the west side New York State Route 9J (South Street) in the city of Rensselaer. The property is roughly rectangular in shape and consists of approximately 0.295 acres.

Officials said the land was originally acquired by the state for highway improvements and that the parcels are no longer needed for transportation purposes and will be available for purchase by public auction.

The public voice auction will be held on Thursday, Oct. 11, in the New York State Department of Transportation building at 50 Wolf Road, Albany, New York 12232. Registration will begin at 10 a.m. in the first floor conference rooms B & C. The auction is open to the public.

It is recommended that prospective bidders research local municipal zoning requirements before placing bids.

Prospective bidders may obtain more information about the auction and State DOT land for sale, including the upset price (starting bid) and complete auction rules, by contacting Elizabeth Canam at (518) 458-9518, or online at www.dot.ny.gov/r1surplus.
TROY, N.Y.- The Media Alliance Center in North Central Troy recently found out they received a $250,000 grant to create the NATURE Lab Urban Environmental Education Center.

Governor Andrew Cuomo recently announced that Environmental Justice grants totaling $2 million have been awarded to four organizations for Urban Environmental Education Centers in New York City, Yonkers, Albany, and Troy, NY. The grants are from the States Environmental Protection fund and will support community-based efforts to educate urban residents about environmental issues.

We will continue to invest in environmental education in New Yorks underserved communities as we work to help inform and inspire residents, Cuomo said in a news release. New York is dedicated to furthering our environmental investments and initiatives that protect all New Yorkers, creating a cleaner and greener future for all.

These grants will fund community-based programs focused on educating New Yorkers about how to protect the environment and improve the health of their communities, added Lieutenant Governor Kathy Hochul in the release. This funding will provide New Yorkers with the opportunity to learn about environmental issues and help promote a sustainable clean energy future. In New York we are advancing aggressive energy goals to reduce carbon emissions and raise awareness about climate change to secure a cleaner and greener environment for generations to come.

Administered by the State Department of Environmental Conservation with funds from New Yorks Environmental Protection Fund, the grants were awarded to:

Media Alliance, Inc., Troy, NY  $250,000 to create the NATURE Lab Urban Environmental Education Center, a critical resource for the North Troy Art, Technology and Urban Research in Ecology Program.

Radix Ecological Sustainability Center, Albany, NY  $422,410 to expand the current educational facilities at the Radix Center by constructing an Ecological Justice Literacy Classroom.

Groundwork Hudson Valley, Yonkers, NY  $577,589 to upgrade the Science Barge to include aquaponics, water sanitization, wildlife observation, and outdoor classrooms.

WE ACT for Environmental Justice, New York, NY  $750,000 to develop an Urban Environmental Education Center that will provide free education programming for northern Manhattan residents.

This support to build an urban environmental education center offers an extraordinary opportunity to a long-neglected, ecologically devastated community with incredible human and natural resources. Environmental justice has been a long time coming to North Central Troy. This grant plants a seed-we know change is going to come, said Media Alliance Executive Director Steve Pierce in the release.

The Urban Environmental Education Center grants were announced in Governor Cuomos 2017 State of the State address. In 2017, $1 million was made available to fund education centers that would explore a broad range of topics such as urban ecology, environmental justice challenges, green technology, and urban environmental sustainability. An additional $1 million was made available in 2017 in response to the numerous proposals received during the application period.

Supporting community-based efforts to inform communities about environmental quality and environmental justice is essential, and Im proud of New Yorks sustained efforts to provide environmental education. Through historic investments in the Environmental Protection Fund, Governor Cuomo is introducing innovative Environmental Justice efforts in communities across the state, DEC Commissioner Basil Seggos said in the release. The Education Center grants announced today will provide new opportunities for New Yorkers in our cities to learn about environmental challenges, sustainability, and more, while supporting the work of community organizations as they promote environmental equity in their neighborhoods.

For more information on the Environmental Justice Grants Program, visit the DEC website at www.dec.ny.gov/public/333.html or contact the DEC Office of Environmental Justice at 518-402-8556.
TROY, N.Y.- A 48-year-old Watervliet man was sentenced to four years in state prison for drug sales, according to Rensselaer County District Attorney Joel Abelove.

Abelove said, Timothy Walton, was sentenced to four years state incarceration followed by two years post-release supervision after recently entering a guilty plea to one count of Attempted Criminal Sale of a Controlled Substance in the Third Degree, a class C felony, on August 27, 2018.

Officials said Walton was indicted on six felony counts for three separate drug transactions in the City of Troy.

Abelove said at the time of these drug sales, Walton was on five years probation for a felony Driving While Intoxicated conviction out of Albany County.

Officials said Walton also had a 2008 felony conviction in Washington County for Attempted Burglary in the Second Degree, where he was sentenced to five years of state incarceration.

My office will continue to seek state prison sentences for repeat felons who deal drugs on our streets. I will not tolerate those who peddle such poison in our community, said Abelove in a news release.
- Hilarious Kenyans registered their complaints of Chinese foreigners taking their jobs

- They were busted at a residential apartment in South C estate believed to be operating as a brothel

- Authorities said the 12 suspects would be deported back to their country of origin soonest

- Prostitution is an illegal business in Kenya although its is commonly practiced

Attention of Kenyans seems to have been shifted from Uhuru's 'punitive' tax proposals to the arrest of 12 Chinese foreigners engaging in prostitution in Nairobi's South C estate.

The Immigration officers with the help of crime busters from the Directorate of Criminal Investigations pounced on the suspects early on the morning of Wednesday, September 19, at two residential apartments in the estate.

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READ ALSO: 'Obado in, KDF out': picha ya mandazi mapya sokoni yasisimua Wakenya

READ ALSO: China protests Kenyas crackdown on ilegal immigrants, foreign workers

Following the raid, social media was abuzz, with Kenyans poking fun at the situation.

A witty social media used named Bravin strongly condemned the manner in which Chinese nationals are taking over 'jobs' meant for Kenyans.

READ ALSO: Government issues number to report illegal immigrants in Kenya

READ ALSO: Police arrest Chinese illegally packaging fake herbal tea at construction site in Nyeri

One Bishop of Hope suggested they should not be deported but instead a heavy tax introduced on their services to pay Chinese debts.

Perhaps its time Kenyan gets serious in admission of foreigners into the country, expressed Junior Mwaleh.

READ ALSO: Racist Chinese national who called Kenyans 'filthy monkeys' to be deported

READ ALSO: Uproar as Chinese national who called Uhuru monkey is deported

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Mom's Blog with Chef Rachel: My Hospital Bag | Tuko Lifestyle

Source: Tuko
- The government said the governor is breachin the law by taking over water services

- It said water services are a strict mandate of the Water Services Regulatory Board

- Revenue, government said, has been lost owing to Wa Iria's interfering with Muwasco

- A petition was received by DPP and EACC seeking removal of the governor from office over interfering with affairs of water companie

- The Murang'a governor has been in the headlines battling to wrestle control of water services bodies from government bodies

- He has rallied members of the county against paying their monthly water bills thus paralysing revenue collection

The government has warned Murang'a Governor Mwangi wa Iria to stop interfering with management and running of water companies in the county.

Water Services Regulatory Board (WARB) Chief Executive Officer Robert Gakubia told Wa Iria that his move to take over water companies in Murang'a was illegal.

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READ ALSO: 'Obado in, KDF out': picha ya mandazi mapya sokoni yasisimua Wakenya

A petition has been received by DPP and EACC seeking removal of Wa Iria from office. Photo: Governor Wa Iria.

Source: UGC

READ ALSO: Muranga governor in hot water after leading raid on countys water company

In a letter dated Wednesday, September 19, Gakubia claimed the county boss had ordered for parallel and illegal water connections in the county resulting to loss of revenue by bodies mandated to offer the service.

"Your office has interfered with the proper running of water service infrastructure which is still owned by Tana Water Services Board and managed by the four companies of Murang'a, Murang'a South, Kahuti and Gatamathi," read the letter in part.

READ ALSO: List of MPs who have vowed to reject Uhurus proposed 8% levy on fuel

TUKO.co.ke understands there is bad blood between the governor and the management of Murang'a Water and Sanitation Company (Muwasco) among other water companies.

Wa Iria reportedly sacked Muwasco Chairman Peter Munga and replaced him with Joseph Kimura, a development that later led to protests.

On Monday, August 27, the governor stormed Muwasco offices flanked by unknown people who vandalised and assaulted the company's employees.

"Your office has recruited a cohort of unknown persons to tamper with the pipelines and connect customers haphazardly to the public infrastructure leading to water loss, theft public infrastructure damage, revenue loss and general public disorder in management of water services in your county," CEO Gakubia further wrote.

A cohort allied to Murang'a County Governor Mwangi wa Iria allegedly stormed Muwasco and vandalised its property. Photo: TUKO.co.ke

Source: Original

READ ALSO: Raila Junior blasts NASA MPs for supporting Uhuru's proposal to reduce VAT charge on fuel

The government also cautioned Wa Iria aganist rallying members of the public against paying for water services. Gakubia warned the supply of free water was not sustainable.

"Your office has hired a public address system where you advise citizens not pay for water and to connect themselves to the public water service systems using your cohort without due regard to the water companies that run these assets for the benefit of the people of Murang'a," stated the water management body CEO.

A cohort allied to Murang'a County Governor Mwangi wa Iria allegedly stormed Muwasco and vandalised its property. Photo: TUKO.co.ke

Source: Original

Water resources, the letter stated, are lawful possessions of Water Services Regulatory Board and they should be run and managed as per the guidelines set by the Board.

The running and management of the yet to be devolved water sector, has since seen a resident of the county write to the EACC seeking disciplinary action against the governor.

Wa Iria has also found himself in trouble for disregarding a court order barring him from interfering with the running of Muwasco.

A cohort allied to Murang'a County Governor Mwangi wa Iria allegedly stormed Muwasco and vandalised its property. Photo: TUKO.co.ke

Source: Original

He has also gone ahead to recruit a parallel team of plumbers which is reconnecting water supply to customers following disconnection by Muwasco staff over failure to pay monthly bills.

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.

Teresiah Wambui Story: The Struggles of a Kenyan Woman With Beards - Kenya Untold Stories | Tuko TV.

Source: Breaking News
- The governor walked in an interview with a luxury watch which stunned Kenyans

- The watch, a Swedish Hublot , is worth more than KSh 500,000

- Kenyans, including show host Jeff Koinange could not help but gush over the expensive accessory

Kenyans were left to ponder on their own problems as Nairobi governor Mike Sonko stepped out in one of the most expensive watches.

The governor appeared in Jeff Koinange Live on Wednesday, September 19 where he sought to clear the air on recent scandals he unmasked including the rot within the Pumwani Maternity hospital.

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READ ALSO: 'Obado in, KDF out': picha ya mandazi mapya sokoni yasisimua Wakenya

READ ALSO: House where 12 Chinese were arrested engaging in prostitution belongs to ex-presidential candidate Abduba Dida

However, even before the interview kicked off, the governor was already turning heads in the studio, particularly because of one piece of accessory he wore for the interview.

Kenyans awed by Nairobi governor Mike Sonko's swanky KSh 600,000 Swedish luxury watch

Source: Facebook

READ ALSO: Mother-in-law casts Ras, Tina share romantic photos and fans think they should just get married

Show host Jeff Koinange was among the first people to note the governor was rocking a Hublot Swiss luxury watch valued at around KSh 600,000.

READ ALSO: Kibakis hot grandson Sean Andrews stars in Kenyas biggest theater show

Typically, Kenyans took to comment on the watch with some funny responses which were in line with the current financial state of the country which has everyone worried.

Some noted the value of the watch was so outrageous it could actually go some way in solving the problems of the average Kenyan who is still struggling to come to terms with the new tax rates on the most basic of items.

A quick spot check by TUKO.co.ke established that a Hublot watch is one of the more exquisite kind across the world , known to be associated with big names such as renown celebrity Kylie Jenner.

Despite the heavy price tag on the watch, it is also not the costliest Kenyans have ever seen as renown politicians have developed a knack of coming to Jeff Koinange interviews with designer merchandise.

COTU boss Francis Atwoli was also making headlines after one of his interviews with Jeff after he boldly bragged about owning a watch worth a staggering KSh 5 million.

For President Uhuru Kenyatta, he also has a few collector's items in terms of watches which are estimated to be worth KSh 13 million.

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Kenya News: Mike Sonko Exposes Pumwani Hospital | Tuko TV:

Source: Tuko.co.ke
- The baby was murdered alongside the mother who was strangled and stabbed eight times

- An autopsy report revealed the foetus was killed by a knife stab on mother's abdomen

- Sharon Otieno was seven-month pregnant at the time of her killing

- Obado recorded a statement regarding her murder and admitted he had an affair with her

- Owing to the new development, detectives are planning to interrogate the governor again

- Obado's wife is also expected to answer some questions after it emerged she exchanged texts with Sharon

A paternity test by the government has proven that Migori Governor Zachary Okoth Obado was the biological father of the late Rongo University student Sharon Otieno's baby who was stabbed to death alongside the mother.

The new development consequently put the governor back at the centre of the investigations into the brutal murder of Sharon and her baby.

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READ ALSO: 'Obado in, KDF out': picha ya mandazi mapya sokoni yasisimua Wakenya

Migori Governor Zachary Obado was subjected to a DNA test following murder Sharon Otieno. DCI boss George Kinoti said test results were key in guiding investigations. Photo: CheckPregnancy.

Source: UGC

READ ALSO: Migori Governor Okoth Obado grilled over murder of university student linked to him

TUKO.co.ke on Thursday, September 20, learnt the Directorate of Criminal Investigations (DCI) detectives were planning to grill Obado once again over the cold-blood murder of the 26-year-old lady whom the governor had an illicit affair with and impregnated.

The detectives, Daily Nation reported, would also interrogate Obado's wife, Hellen, after it emerged she exchanged some provocative text messages with Sharon a few days before the seven-month pregnant woman was found dead.

Hellen Obado, Migori Governor Okoth Obado's wife, had been summoned by the Directorate of Criminal Investigations on Wednesday, September 18, to record statement but the interrogation was postponed.

Source: UGC

READ ALSO: DCI confirms mysterious man who gained access to Governor Obado's PA in cell is KDF officer

Hellen had been summoned to record statement, a week after Obado gave his side of the story, but the interrogation, which was to take place at the DCI headquarters on Kiambu Road, Nairobi, on Wednesday, September 19, was postponed.

TUKO.co.ke gathered the DCI pushed forward the Obado's wife's questioning after fresh details and new leads emerged amid the ongoing probe.

The detectives were also looking at Hellen's brother, Naftali Odie, as yet another person of interest in the homicide which shook the nation.

READ ALSO: Man posing as KDF officer gains access to Governor Obado's PA in police cell

Obado recorded a statement at the Kisumu DCI offices on September 11.

The governor admitted he had an affair with the deceased lady but denied he had anything to do with her kidnapping and death.

Sharon's body was found dumped in Kodera Forest, Homa Bay County, on September 5.

She had been kidnapped together with Nation Media Group reporter, Barack Oduor, a day earlier.

READ ALSO: Governor Obado was reckless not to use protection, impregnate Rongo University student - Sonko

An autopsy report released on Friday, September 8, revealed Sharon was stabbed eight times on her neck, back and abdomen.

Obado's personal assistant, Michael Oyamo, and former Member of County Assembly (MCA) Lawrence Mula were arrested in connection with the murder.

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Kenyans Angry Over High Fuel Prices - On Tuko TV

Source: Kenya Breaking News Today
- Both NASA and Jubilee Party MPs agreed to support Uhuru on the push for new taxes

- Junior tried to persuade his dad, Raila, to get out of the way and allow the MPs decide on their own

- The MPs are expected to endorse or reject Uhuru's proposed 8% VAT on fuel on Thursday

- Junior had also disagreed with the Opposition lawmakers on decision to back Uhuru on the fuel tax

Raila Junior, son of Opposition leader Raila Amollo Odinga, has sharply differed with his father on the proposed 8% Value Added Tax (VAT) on petroleum products, arguing it would make life difficult for the majority of Kenyans.

Junior approached his father and aired his views with the hope that the old man would stop trying to influence how the National Super Alliance (NASA) coalition MPs would vote when the revised tax Bill returns to the floor of the House.

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READ ALSO: Raila Junior blasts NASA MPs for supporting Uhuru's proposal to reduce VAT charge on fuel

Raila Junior differed with his father and NASA MPs for endorsing President Uhuru' Kenyatta's proposed 8% Value Added Tax (VAT) on petroleum products. Photo: Raila Junior/Twitter.

Source: Twitter

READ ALSO: 'Obado in, KDF out': picha ya mandazi mapya sokoni yasisimua Wakenya

In a Twitter post seen by TUKO.co.ke on Thursday, September 20, the day MPs were set to make their final decision of the revised Finance Bill 2018 in which President Uhuru Kenyatta proposed a raft of changes, Junior begged to differ with his dad.

"I have given Raila Odinga my views against the 8% rise in VAT and expressed reasoning for MPs to vote independently," he tweeted under the hash-tag Kenyansfirst

READ ALSO: Raila Odinga leads NASA MPs in supporting Uhurus stand on fuel tax

Junior had poked holes into the statement issued by NASA MPs, led by his father, Amani National Congress (ANC) party leader Musalia Mudavadi and Wiper party boss Kalonzo Musyoka, and the conditional support for Uhuru's recommendations on the Finance Bill 2018.

"Unfortunately as a Kenyan citizen, I am unconvinced by the statement put out by NASA on the VAT on fuel. None of the conditions theyve put up are measurable and even if they were they are nowhere near closing the deficit on the debt," read part of Junior's protest tweet on Tuesday, September 18.

READ ALSO: Ex-Lugari MP Cyrus Jirongo arrested over KSh 20 million debt

He also called on the lawmakers from across the political divide to return the original Bill which suspended implementation of the 16% VAT on fuel by two years.

"I call for my MP Okoth Ken to reject and reject the Bill," he said.

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Kenyans Angry Over High Fuel Prices - On Tuko TV

Source: Tuko.co.ke
- Opposition leader Victoire Ingabire was pardoned by Kagame on Saturday, September 15

- She had served 8 years of her 15 years jail term over sedition, treason and genocide ideology

- She was jailed when she wanted to vie for the presidency after her return from exile

Rwanda President Paul Kagame has sounded a stern warning to Opposition politician Victoire Ingabire telling her she risks being jailed again if she will not respect the government.

Kagame said the politician should not misinterpret the presidential pardon to mean he had given in to foreign pressure for her release.

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READ ALSO: 'Obado in, KDF out': picha ya mandazi mapya sokoni yasisimua Wakenya

Rwanda President Paul Kagame has sounded a stern warning to the Opposition politician Victoire Ingabire telling her she risks being jailed. Photo: Twitter / Paul Kagame

Source: Twitter

READ ALSO: Obado's bodyguard joins growing list of suspects in police custody over murder of governor's ex-lover

Speaking during swearing-in of the 80-member Fourth Parliament on Wednesday, September 19, Kagame said the pardon was one of the ways of accommodating criminals into the society just like rehabilitation.

Just recently when we pardoned many people, including the so-called politicians who are more popular outside the country than they are here, it was in the same spirit. It is not the first time we have done this," said Kagame.

Then you see people saying I did not ask for mercy, they released us because of pressure. Pressure here? If you continue believing that, dont be shocked if you go back to jail, he added.

Victoire Ingabire was released on Saturday, September 15, after spending 8 years in jail. Photo: UGC

Source: UGC

READ ALSO: Raila Junior lectures father on 8% fuel tax, urges him to let MPs vote independently

Kagame said if Ingabire wanted proof that her release was not out of pressure but right thinking, then she risked going back to prison or finding herself wandering outside the country.

The politician who was released on Saturday, September 15, said she did not plead for mercy to be pardoned for crimes she did not commit but instead the government gave in to pressure from foreigners.

READ ALSO: Bobi Wine's brother arrested at airport

Before her release, she had served eight years of her 15-years jail sentence for sedition, treason and genocide ideology.

The Opposition leader was arrested in 2010 soon after she returned from exile in Netherlands seeking to contest for the presidency.

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Kenya News: Mike Sonko Exposes Pumwani Hospital | Tuko TV

Source: Tuko Kenya
Abe has survived a series of scandals, including cronyism allegations against him and his wife. Despite attacks from opposition parties and criticism in the media, he has seen his support ratings bounce back to about 40 percent, considered high for a Japanese leader after nearly six years in office.
- Bobi Wine returns home after three-week stay in the US for treatment

- The Ugandan government had banned media houses from covering his homecoming

- Heavy deployment of police was witnessed at Entebbe Airport ahead of his return

- The celebrity MP's brother was also arrested ahead of the homecoming

It was a moment for selfies and hugs at the Jomo Kenyatta International Airport, Nairobi, when airport staff and other waiting passengers spotted troubled Ugandan MP Bobi Wine walk a waiting room.

Photos and videos captured the rare moment of love and admiration Kenyan people have for the tortured musician turned politician as he booked a connecting flight to Entebbe, Uganda.

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READ ALSO: 'Obado in, KDF out': picha ya mandazi mapya sokoni yasisimua Wakenya

READ ALSO: Uganda government bans live coverage of MP Bobi Wine's return from the US

Born Robert Kyagulanyi, the father of four is expected to land in his home country Thursday, September 20, after a three-week stay in the US where he was hospitalised following his near death beating by the ruthless Ugandan police.

But it seemed Wine was near yet far from his country.

Heavy deployment of police officers was witnessed along Entebbe road and neighbouring areas ahead of the Freedom hit maker's return in the afternoon.

The Yoweri Museveni's government had on Wednesday, September 19, announced it would arrest members of the public save for the immediate relatives, who would dare turn out to receive the Kyadondo East MP at the airport.

In a new turn of events and despite the assurance, the police arrested the legislator's elder brother Eddie Yawe while on his way to the airport.

Pressure from the international community has been mounting on Museveni's administration for violating Wine's rights, but the government has remained defiant.

READ ALSO: Tortured Bobi Wine overcomes pain to send sweet birthday message to heroic wife

The Ugandan government also banned media houses from airing live coverage of the homecoming, though a spot check by TUKO.co.ke, showed NTV Uganda was covering it.

Whichever way you look at it, the stage is set for another tug of war between the Opposition followers and the government-leaning soldiers.

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Kenyans demand for the release of Bobi Wine | Tuko TV

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- Kidero was picked up from his home in Muthaiga by EACC sleuths

- He was taken to the EACC headquarters for interrogation over alleged graft

- The ex-county chief had been accused of conspiring with former county finance boss to swindle taxpayers' money

Former Nairobi County governor, Evans Kidero, has been re-arrested.

Kidero was arrested by the Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission (EACC) detectives on the morning of Thursday, September 20, over graft-related allegations.

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READ ALSO: 'Obado in, KDF out': picha ya mandazi mapya sokoni yasisimua Wakenya

Former Nairobi Governor Evans Kidero was on the morning of Thursday, September 20, re-arrested at his home in Muthaiga in Nairobi. Photo: TUKO.

Source: Original

READ ALSO: There is now enough evidence to arrest Kidero for swindling Mumias sugar company - MP Washiali

Reports reaching TUKO.co.ke indicated the EACC detectives pitched tent at the home of the ex-governor in Muthaiga, Nairobi, from as early as 2 am.

The former county chief was eventually arrested and taken to the Integrity Centre for questioning.

READ ALSO: Video emerges of ex-governor Kidero warning Nairobians of criminal gangs under Sonko leadership

Kidero and several other former Nairobi County officials were first arrested on August 8, 2018, in connection with economic crimes committed during their tenures.

The charges were brought against the ex-governor and the former county employees by the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP), Noordin Haji.

READ ALSO: Sonko Rescue Team now robbing innocent Nairobians?

According to the charge sheet, Kidero was accused of conspiring with former City Hall finance boss Maurice Ochieng Okere to swindle KSh 213 million.

The suspects were alleged to have committed the offense between 2014 and 2017.

Appearing at the Milimani anti-corruption court alongside Okere on August 9, Kidero pleaded not guilty to charges relating to abuse of office and loss of KSh 213 million.

He was released on bail.

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Kenyans Angry Over High Fuel Prices - On Tuko TV

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- The police indicated it would launch a crackdown on vehicles with illegally modified parts

- Vehicles with LED lights, modified exhaust systems, those with bull bars and loud music will be targeted in the crackdown

- The Traffic Act stipulates vehicles need to have two headlights with either white or yellow rays

- Motorcyclists would also be required to have their front lights on when riding during the day

The police have warned motorists against illegal modifications on their cars blamed for inconveniencing other road users, saying a crackdown is underway to tame the illegalities.

The law enforcers specifically raised concern on the increased cases of motorists using vehicles with modified exhaust systems, horns, Light Emitting Diode (LED) lamps and hidden number plates.

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READ ALSO: 'Obado in, KDF out': picha ya mandazi mapya sokoni yasisimua Wakenya

The police stated owners who have fitted their unauthorised vehicles with bull bars would not be spared in the crackdown. Photo: Victor Matara/UGC

Source: UGC

READ ALSO: 27 traffic offences Kenyans will soon start paying instant fines for from October 2018

In a tweet seen by TUKO.co.ke, on Thursday, September 20, Kenya Police Service (KPS) warned it would punish both public service and private motorists who have illegally fitted lights in a manner that is inconveniencing other road users.

" In the past, National Transport and Safety Authority sensitised motorists against illegal modifications like mounting of bull bars on unauthorised vehicles, use of high powered LED lights, loud music and modified exhaust systems. All these modifications and others not listed here are unlawful," read the tweet by KPS.

READ ALSO: Bobi Wine touches down at JKIA enroute to Uganda

The police cautioned motorists and the general public all the stated unlawful modifications would be dealt with as provided for in CAP 403 Traffic Act which highlights what offences would be penalised.

According to part 23 of the Traffic Act and sub-rule of the law, every motor vehicle must be equipped with two lamps at the front of the vehicle, one on each side which should be lit at night.

READ ALSO: Kenyans descend on Raila after he supported Uhurus new tax proposals

The law directs that the rays of the lamps should be either white or yellow.

"Lamps required shall be equipped with a means of eliminating any dazzling effect produced by such lamps. Such elimination shall in every case leave sufficient light to illuminate clearly the road ahead for at least 25 metres," reads part of the sub-rule.

According to the law, no motor vehicle shall be equipped with more than one swiveling light.

It also directs that no spot-light or swiveling light shall be used as an alternative for head-lights, unless for the purposes of completing a journey in situation where the former lights are damaged.

"The swiveling light should not be installed in such a manner as to impede the vision of, or cause annoyance to, any user of the road," stated the law.

In light of the police warning, motorcycle operators would be also on the spot because the law indicates they need to have their front lights on during daylight hours.

READ ALSO: House where 12 Chinese were arrested engaging in prostitution belongs to ex-presidential candidate Abduba Dida

The move by the police was ignited by concerned Kenyans who decried the disregard of the law by a section of drivers especially matatu crew.

"I have consistently campaigned against modified exhaust systems and add-on LED lamps. The former is pure noise pollution and nuisance to the public while the latter blinds oncoming motorists, leading to a crash," said Fred Ndaga, a concerned road user.

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Breaking News Kenya: Angry Kenyan Sends Message to President Uhuru Kenyatta | Tuko TV:

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- KeMU is selling its property on Koinange Street where it has one of its campuses

- The university used the asset as a security for a loan owed to Co-operative Bank of Kenya

- KeMU owes the lender KSh 1.7 billion which it was not able to pay on time

- The university has also been struggling to pay its staff, suppliers and even the taxman

- Commission for University Education gave KeMU and other universities a year to put their financial issues in order

Kenya Methodist University (KeMU) has put up for sale some of its most valuable properties in a desperate move to avoid an imminent shutdown owing to its financial woes.

The university has invited interested parties to submit their bids for two of its properties in Nairobi city and Nakuru town.

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READ ALSO: Matiang'i takes tough action and closes two Kenyan universities

Kenya Methodist University is selling two of its properties in a bid to raise cash to settle debts, pay staff and creditors even as CUE warns of closure over institution's financial woes. Photo: KeMU.

Source: UGC

READ ALSO: Matiang'i set to close three universities after getting report from regulator

The tender notice seen by TUKO.co.ke on Thursday, September 20, indicated KeMU was selling a five-storey building on Koinange Street, Nairobi, which was used as collateral for a KSh 1.7 billion loan owed to Co-operative Bank, and an 0.875 acre plot in Nakuru town.

According to the notice, the bids were to be deposited into a tender box provided on the 1st Floor of the Administration Block at the university's main campus in Meru County before 11am on Thursday, September 27, 2018.

READ ALSO: Anxiety as popular government university faces closure after being declared bankrupt

The university had in March 2018 sought the approval of Co-operative Bank, its biggest lender, to sell the properties as it struggled to reorganise its finances and operations.

The university was in January 2018 given a one year notice by the Commission for University Education (CUE), the country's higher education sector regulator, to put its house in order, failure to which its license would be revoked.

READ ALSO: Matiang'i orders for complete closure of Presbyterian University of East Africa

Other private institutions facing closure for similar predicaments are Catholic University of Eastern Africa (CUEA) and Presbyterian University of East Africa (PUEA).

The CUE had directed the Kenya Universities and Colleges Central Placement Service (KUCCPS), formerly Joint Admission Board (JAB), not to admit any more students to the mentioned institutions mainly due to their persistent cash problems.

As was earlier reported by TUKO.co.ke, KUCCPS dropped cluster points for admission of students into the university to a minimum of 48.

The decision saw a significant number of learners enroll in public universities, thus triggering a fierce competition for customers among the private universities which mostly target grade C (plus) students.

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How street Women In Kenya Deal With Periods - On Tuko TV

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- Bobi Wine was arrested immediately he landed at the Entebe International Airport

- The MP was isolated from the rest of the passengers by police who were waiting for him

- He was bared from accessing the Immigration section of the airport and later taken to an undisclosed location

- His brother was earlier arrested while on his way to receive the MP

Ugandan Opposition Member of Parliament (MP) Robert Kyagulanyi popularly known as Bobi Wine has been arrested moments after landing at the Entebe International Airport from the United States.

The MP was reported to have been isolated from the rest of the passengers by police who were waiting for him at the airport.

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READ ALSO: Bobi Wine's brother arrested at airport

MP Bobi Wine arrested moments after touching dowi in Uganda from treatment in US

Source: Twitter

READ ALSO: Police threaten to arrest Ugandans planning to welcome politician Bobi Wine at the airport

A report by the BBC indicated the police also bared him from accessing the Immigration section of the airport as they whisked him away.

Ugandan Opposition MP Bobi Wine is arrested and forced into army vehicle as soon as he lands at Entebbe airport after returning home from medical treatment in US, Geoffrey York of The Globe and Mail tweeted.

The Ugandan police, however, refuted the allegations they had arrested the politician claiming they were only escorting him.

READ ALSO: Uganda government bans live coverage of MP Bobi Wine's return from the US

"Nobody has arrested Bobi Wine, we are simply escorting him," said Uganda's IGP Okoth Ochola

Further reports indicated crowds were gathering outside Kasangati police station where the Kyadondo East MP was being tightly guarded in a police vehicle.

Prior reports by TUKO.co.ke indicated the MP landed at the Jomo Kenyatta International Airport (JKIA) in Nairobi on Thursday, September 20, before leaving for Entebbe aboard a Kenya Airways connecting flight.

READ ALSO: Bobi Wine freed on bail to be flown to London for treatment

It was also reported his brother, Eddie Yawe, was arrested by Uganda police while on his way to the airport to receive him.

Police had initially warned only family members would be allowed at the airport to receive the MP.

They also threatened to arrest anyone planning a procession from the airport and cautioned media houses against live coverage of Wine's return.

READ ALSO: Bobi Wine rearrested shortly after Museveni drops charges against him

The celebrity MP left for the U.S. to seek medical treatment in a dramatic fashion as the State attempted to stop his departure.

He was earlier arrested and charged with treason on claims that he took part in the stoning of President Yoweri Musevenis convoy during an election campaign.

Wine was detained at a military prison, a move which drew strong reactions from Ugandan citizens who took to the streets to protest.

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Kenyans demand for the release of Bobi Wine | Tuko TV

Source: Tuko Breaking News
- Jirongo spent the second night in police cells on Wednesday, September 19, after he failed to raise KSh 5 million cash bail

- He was arrested and later produced in court for failing to pay KSh 25 million debt owed to Brian Yongo

- His accuser claimed Jirongo had agreed to pay KSh 5 million by October 15, 2015 then follow up with installments

Ex-presidential candidate and former Lugari MP Cyrus Jirongo has walked to freedom after managing to secure his release from the police custody where he had been held since Tuesday, September 18.

Jirongo spent the second night in a cell after he failed to raise KSh 5 million cash bail and an additional bond and surety of the same amount.

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READ ALSO: Troubled former presidential candidate Cyrus Jirongo unable to raise KSh 5 million cash bail

Jirongo was arrested on Tuesday, September 18, and produced at Milimani Law Courts for failing to settle KSh 20 million debt. Photo: TUKO.co.ke.

Source: Original

READ ALSO: Ex-Lugari MP Cyrus Jirongo arrested over KSh 20 million debt

On the afternoon of Thursday, September 20, defense lawyers successfully fought for the release of the former Lugari MP after Devolution Cabinet Secretary Eugene Wamalwa deposited his sleek Mercedes Benz as surety.

The former KANU youth wing leader also managed to pay the KSh 5 million cash bail as had been directed by the Milimani Law Court despite pleadings to have the bail reduced.

Jirongo was arrested on Tuesday, September 18, and produced at Miliman for failing to settle KSh 25 million debt which he owes businessman Brian Yongo who wanted him him jailed.

READ ALSO: Court issues arrest warrant against ex-presidential candidate Cyrus Jirongo over KSh 25m debt

During the hearing, the court was told the politician had initially agreed to pay KSh 5 million by October 15, 2015 then follow up with installments of KSh 5 million and the final installment within 60 days as part of the debt.

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Kenya News: Ex-Nairobi Governor Evans Kidero Arraigned in Court Over Corruption Charges| Tuko TV

Source: Tuko
- Parliament turned chaotic on Thursday as MPs shouted for zero tax on fuel

- Duale and Mbadi found it hard marshaling support for President Uhuru's tax proposal

- President Kenyatta had proposed 8% tax on fuel which is a drop from 16% currently being implemented

- A section of MPs chanted for zero tax as they protested against Mbadi

A section of MPs on Thursday, September 20, shouted down National Assembly Minority Leader John Mbadi when he stood and supported the proposed 8% fuel tax.

TUKO.co.ke understands the legislators involved in the protest were drawn from across the divide and pushed for zero tax on fuel.

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READ ALSO: More pain for Kenyans as Uhuru revises upwards internet, mobile money transaction charges

A section MPs chanted for zero tax as they protested against minority leader John Mbadi. Photo UGC

Source: UGC

READ ALSO: Uhuru wants MPs to lower 16% fuel levy by half amid cries from Kenyans

This emerged during a House session when the MPs voted for the Finance Bill 2018 which President Uhuru Kenyatta tossed back to Parliament for further discussion.

"Mbadi must go! Mbadi must go!" the MPs shouted

READ ALSO: 190 Jubilee MPs attended State House meeting and Uhuru seems to have won them over

Previously, Parliament had sought to have the the 16% VAT on fuel currently being implemented by Treasury to be stalled until 2020.

Uhuru however did not sign the bill and later proposed the tax be reduced to 8% and requested Parliament to give the proposal a nod.

During the shouting march, Majority Leader Aden Duale and Mbadi faced a hard time marshaling support for Uhuru's proposal.

READ ALSO: Uhurus rejection of Financial Bill is win for those of us who remained sober - Moses Kuria

This came hot on the heels of a meeting between Jubilee and ODM MPs who respectively agreed to vote for the proposal.

The Finance Bill 2018 is set to see mobile phone transaction excise duty shoot up from 10% to 20%, Excise duty on bank transactions increase from 12% to 20% and cost of internet data services go up by a whopping 15% among other biting changes.

The document also targets to tax 1.5% of employees' salaries which will go to financing Uhuru's plan to provide housing.

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Kenya Latest News: The Sad State of Pumwani Hospital | Tuko TV

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- Wine had been traveling with spy chief Pamela Komuntale who was dressed like a civilian

- Komuntale accompanied the MP throughout his journey from US unbeknownst to him

- Wine passed through Nairobi's JKIA before proceeding to Entebbe in Uganda

- The Opposition MP arrived at Entebbe airport and was arrested shortly after landing

- Tight security was maintained in Kampala and Wine's home village

- On Tuesday, September 19, Uganda government banned live coverage of his homecoming

- Uganda government warned anybody participating in the procession could be arrested

- The politician was flown to US for medical attention after he was allegedly tortured by the police

- The MP was accused alongside other people of stoning Museveni's motorcade

Fresh details have emerged indicating that embattled Uganda MP for Kyadondo East, Robert Kyagulanyi alias Bobi Wine, was secretly escorted by a counter-terrorism officer from United States.

Wine, who has since been arrested and taken to unidentified location, was escorted by spy chief Pamela Komuntale.

READ ALSO: Bobi Wine freed on bail to be flown to London for treatment

Pamela Komuntale, smartly dressed in civilian was spotted paying a keen eye on the ongoing of the MP throughout his journey from US. Photo: Twitter / Joel Wako

Source: UGC

READ ALSO: Bobi Wine touches down at JKIA enroute to Uganda

Komuntale, smartly dressed like a civilian, was spotted paying a keen eye on the ongoing around the MP throughout his journey from US.

Wine landed in Entebbe airport in Uganda two hours after he left Jomo Kenyatta International Airport, Nairobi on Thurdsay, September 20.

Amid tight security in Kampala, the musician turned politician was arrested and taken to a unidentified location by Uganda police.

READ ALSO: Bobi Wine's brother arrested at airport

President Yoweri Museveni's government had on Wednesday, September 19, announced it would arrest members of the public save for the immediate relatives, who would dare turn out to receive the Kyadondo East MP at the airport.

In a new turn of events and despite the assurance, the police arrested the legislator's elder brother, Eddie Yawe, while on his way to the airport.

Bobi Wine at JKIA, Nairobi enroute Entebbe, Uganda. Photo: UGC

Source: Twitter

READ ALSO: Police threaten to arrest Ugandans planning to welcome politician Bobi Wine at the airport

Pressure from the international community has been mounting on Museveni's administration for violating Wine's rights, but the government has remained defiant.

The Ugandan government also banned media houses from airing live coverage of the homecoming, though a spot check by TUKO.co.ke, showed NTV Uganda was covering it.

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Kenyans demand for the release of Bobi Wine | Tuko TV

Source: Tuko.co.ke
- Magufuli had previously advised Tanzanian couples to stop using contraceptives saying the country needed more people

- International organisations promoting family planning were likewise barred from advertising on TV

- Magufuli claimed women who used contraceptives were lazy and did not want to work hard to feed a large family

Days after Tanzania's President John Magufuli received criticism from legislators and women's rights groups for advising couples against using family planning, the State has banned adverts of the same on TV.

TUKO.co.ke learnt the Tanzanian government on Wednesday, September 19, wrote to organisations carrying out family planning activities within the country asking them to recall advertising spots in local media.

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READ ALSO: Uhuru warns PSVs against overcharging customers as NASA, Jubilee endorse 8% fuel tax

Magufuli had advised Tanzanian couples to stop using contraceptive methods, saying the country needed more people.

Source: Facebook

READ ALSO: ODM statement supporting Uhuru's proposal on 8% fuel levy doesn't represent NASA - Moses Wetang'ula

In the letter seen by TUKO.co.ke, the Ministry of Health ordered FHI and USIAD to stop airing and publishing their content both on TV and radio with immediate effect.

"The ministry intends to revise the contents of all your ongoing radio and TV spots for family planning, thus I request you to stop with immediate effect airing and publishing any family planning contents on any media channels until further notice," read the letter.

The ministry, however, acknowledged the role played by the organisations in supporting family planning activities in the country.

READ ALSO: Kenyans descend on Raila for supporting Uhurus new tax proposals

Magufuli had on Tuesday, September 11, advised Tanzanian couples to stop using contraceptive , saying the country needed more people.

According to the much feared president who has two children, women who used contraceptives were lazy and did not want to work hard to feed a large family.

"Those going for family planning are lazy...they are afraid they will not be able to feed their children," said Magufuli.

READ ALSO: Uhuru rejects Finance Bill 2018, 16% fuel levy here to stay

The sentiments were criticised by legislators saying they were not consistent with national policy and that the country's health insurance scheme only accommodates a maximum of four children per family.

Speaker Job Ndugai said the president's comments were advisory and did not represent a governmental position.

Many Tanzanians pointed out a woman's right to choose a method of contraception and have access to family planning information is enshrined in the Maputo Protocol, an African charter on women rights.

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Kenyans Angry Over High Fuel Prices - On Tuko TV

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Rogal first went to the house where his ex-wife was in the driveway changing her car's oil, shot at her and missed. He then drove to a retirement center in East Goshen where he shot and killed his parents, William and Nancy Rogal, who were both in their late 80s.
Inooro TV and radio stations which operate under the giant Royal Media Services stable could be forced to re-organise their business following an imminent mass exodus of top journalists.

At least eight reporters and news anchors have tendered their resignations and are keen to join a rival media house associated with the flamboyant Kirinyaga Woman Representative, Purity Wangui Ngirici.

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READ ALSO: Stand-off as Kirinyaga Woman Rep is turned away with gifts at childrens home

Monica Kagoni, Macharia Gachuru and Njambi wa Njau have left Inooro TV.

Source: Facebook

READ ALSO: Kirinyaga Woman Rep's brother caught up in sale of contraband sugar

The new Mt Kenya TV which recently hit the airwaves albeit without news segments, will have a sister radio station.

Reliable inside sources told TUKO.co.ke on the evening of Thursday, September 20, the politician was keen to assemble a strong team of news reporters and producers as the new station finds its footing in the already crowded local media field.

Purity managed to rope in celebrated figures Macharia Gachuru, Monica Kagoni, Njambi wa Njau, Robert Kimani and Jedidah Njue from Inooro TV.

READ ALSO: Citizen TV Swahili anchor Swaleh exits station amid claims of receiving bribes from politicians

At Inooro Radio, things are not any different as Ephraim Maina, Jeff Munga and Kihara wa Gathua are set to leave.

Until their resignations, Macharia and Kagoni were the news anchors besides doubling as political and health features reporters respectively.

Jedidah will join Mt Kenya TV as the head of camera unit given her experience at Citizen TV where she was the only one covering investigative stories.

The aforementioned journalists have, however, kept their transition under wraps.

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ALSO WATCH: Former Hapa Kule actress revealing the rot that is the Kenyan film industry: On TUKO TV

Source: Tuko
- Speaker Justin Muturi did not preside over the vote on President Uhuru Kenyatta's memorandum

- Narok Women Representative Soipan Tuya presided over the heated voting session

- MPs opposed to Uhuru's proposal disputed the final outcome which endorsed the new tax since the House had failed to attain two thirds majority required

- Muturi acknowledged there was a serious anomaly in the National Assembly because servers indicated 352 legislators had clocked in yet maximum number of MPs is 349

There was drama and 'miraculous' happenings in the National Assembly during the voting on new tax proposals in the Finance Bill 2018.

Besides the heated confrontations between MPs supporting the Bill and legislators opposing President Uhuru Kenyatta's proposals, National Assembly Speaker Justin Muturi was stunned to establish there was an extra quartet of MPs in the House.

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READ ALSO: Parliament technically passes Uhuru's tax proposals in Finance Bill 2018 after failing to attain quorum

National Assembly Speaker Justin Muturi was shocked to realise four extra MPs had found their way in the legislative house ahead of the vote. Photo: Daily Nation

Source: UGC

READ ALSO: More pain for Kenyans as Uhuru revises upwards internet, mobile money transaction charges

Despite there being a lack of two thirds majority of 233 MPs required for any vote to pass, Muturi wondered how the House servers indicated there were 352 members against the maximum 349.

"I was surprised to see on the screens that there were 352 Members of Parliament in this House. Our total number is 349 MPs. Who were the other people?" he posed.

The heated debate that surrounded among other tax proposals the 8% Value Added Tax on petroleum products was presided over by Narok Women Representative Soipan Tuya who was overwhelmed with the push and pull in the House.

Mbita MP Millie Odhiambo who opposed the nex tax proposals said there were anomalies that had affected the voting and quorum and called for nullification of position. Photo: UGC.

Source: Facebook

READ ALSO: Kenya Methodist University puts up property for sale as it faces closure

Mbita MP Millie Odhiambo who openly declared she opposed the president's proposal complained to Muturi that some of her counterparts had been in the House before the vote but left immediately the poll began bringing confusion on how the quorum would be determined.

"We have unanimously voted against these proposals in solidarity with Kenyans. However, there was confusion on the numbers of members present before, during and after the vote is conflicting," she said.

Some Kenyans wondered how there were contradicting numbers in the National Assembly comparing the situation to the country's General Election usually characterised by vote rigging.

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Breaking News Kenya: Angry Kenyan Sends Message to President Uhuru Kenyatta | Tuko TV:

Source: Tuko
- Betty called it quits at KTN in July 2018 after nine years at the Mombasa Road based station

- She did not reveal her next move and kept her fans guessing

- The lass received a warm welcome from some of K24 news anchors as she reported to her new work station

Hot Kenyan TV girl Betty Mutei Kyallo recently disappointed thousands of her fans after quitting her job at KTN where she had been working for the past nine years.

The lass did not reveal where she was heading, something that left her fans at crossroads.

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READ ALSO: TV girl Betty Kyalo ready to make a screen comeback through K24

READ ALSO: Never seen before old photos of TV girl Betty Kyallo as a video vixen emerge

However, TUKO.co.ke unmasked one of the clearest hints that she was expected to make a grand comeback to TV through the Kenyatta family-owned TV station, K24.

This came to light after comedian Jalang'o shared a photo of himself with his co-host Alex Mwakideu and Betty, followed by a caption that clearly revealed the lass' next home.

" Re-union. If you know you know", the comedian captioned the photo.

READ ALSO: Betty Kyallo promises to say hi to ex-lover Hassan Joho on first show in Mombasa

Well, true to Jalang'o's hint, Betty confirmed her new home is K24 on Thursday, September 20, by sharing photos of some of the station's news anchors welcoming her to their team.

''Such nice people. Eric Njoka, Anjlee Gadhvi and Mwanaisha Chidzuga #Newbeginnings #Reunion,'' she captioned one of the photos.

READ ALSO: KTN's Betty Kyalo opens up on why she broke up with Hassan Joho

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ALSO WATCH: Former Hapa Kule actress revealing the rot that is the Kenyan film industry: On TUKO TV

Source: Tuko News
- The pioneer genge rapper is officially the new creative brand ambassador for Safaricom

Veteran rapper Nonini has inked a lucrative deal with telecommunications powerhouse Safaricom to become their Creative Brand Ambassador.

Nonini on Thursday, September 20, sealed the six-month deal and will see the company use his heavy musical talents including his voice and content.

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Genge star Nonini lands mega deal with Safaricom as brand ambassador

Source: Original

READ ALSO: Kirinyaga Woman Rep Wangui wa Ngirici raids Royal Media Service top journalists

Speaking on the lucrative deal, Nonini, born Hubert Mbuku Nakitare, expressed his excitement at representing the company on another level.

I appreciate this chance to work with Safaricom and also look forward to learning more about the work Safaricom Foundation does. I am very passionate about Corporate Social Responsibility, and as part of the partnership,I hope to participate in as many activities as I can, he said.

Safaricom's Acting Director Charles Kare welcomed the partnership with the veteran artist, saying Nonini , who runs a the Colour Kwa Face Foundation which advocates for the rights of people living with albinism, was the perfect fit for their short term goals.

Veteran rapper Nonini has inked a lucrative deal with telecommunications powerhouse a Safaricom to become their Creative Brand Ambassador.

Source: Original

READ ALSO: TV girl Betty Kyallo receives warm welcome at new work place and TUKO.co.ke has all the photos

We settled on this partnership with Nonini because he is a pioneer of new-age Kenyan music popularly known as Genge, is passionate about artistes rights through his involvement with PRISK and other organisations that fight for artistes rights.

" His passion for helping those in need goes in line with our brand spirit of Twaweza and we look forward to working with him on various project, Kare said.

Part of the lucrative deal will entail Nonini educating his fellow artistes on monetising their songs and creative endeavors.

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 Latest News: The Sad State of Pumwani Hospital | Tuko TV:

Source: Tuko
Kenyan's have expressed displeasure on how MPs conducted House business on Thursday, September 20.

The MPs were engaged in a fiery shouting match where a section of them were heard chanting slogans against House Leaders Aden Duale and John Mbadi

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READ ALSO: Ghost MPs show up in Parliament during Finance Bill voting

215 MPs turned up to vote on the memorandum against the required minimum of 233 members that would have translated to two - thirds of all the 349.Photo: UGC

Source: Twitter

READ ALSO: Wabunge 'hewa' wahudhuria kikao bungeni na kushiriki katika upigaji kura

This emerged during a House session when the lawmakers voted for the controversial Finance Bill 2018.

Results of the poll indicated MPs supporting the bill had trounced the voting.

READ ALSO: Kenyans left disappointed following MP's heated drama in Parliament over Uhuru's tax proposals

However, claims emerged that the voting exercises was not transparent as the voting system indicated there were 352 members in the House while the National Assembly has a maximum of 349 MPs.

TUKO.co.ke understands there were hardly 233 MPs, the required quorum for any voting to take place.

Here are comments from social media users expressing their displeasure on how the lawmakers conducted the voting process.

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The Sad State of Pumwani Hospital | Tuko TV

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- MV Nyerere was carrying over 100 passengers during the unfortunate incident in Lake Victoria

- Rescue efforts led by Tanzanian army managed to save 32 people and retrieve five bodies

- The incident was confirmed by the Tanzanian government which called for calm

Several people are feared death with countless others nursing injuries after a Tanzanian ferry, MV Nyerere, carrying hundreds of Tanzanians capsised in Lake Victoria.

The ferry, which was plying between Bugorara and Ukala islands in Tanzania, sunk on the afternoon of Thursday, September 20.

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READ ALSO: President Kagame pardons jailed female Rwandan opposition leader

MV Nyerere capsised at 2pm in the afternoon. Photo: MillardAyo

Source: UGC

READ ALSO: Uganda MP Bobi Wine's bodyguard charged with treason

The incident was confirmed by the Tanzanian government through a statement issued by Tanzania Electrical, Mechanical and Electronics Services Agency (TEMESA) and seen by TUKO.co.ke.

The government also urged Tanzanians to stay calm and be patient as rescue mission continues.

A search and rescue operation led by the country's army and citizens was launched following the tragedy.

READ ALSO: Kenyan musicians release tribute song to murdered Rongo University student Sharon Otieno

Tanzanian government confirmed the incident. Photo: The African Voice/Twitter

Source: UGC

READ ALSO: Legendary Tanzanian star Mr Nice receives rousing reception after relocating to Uganda

Reports from the scene indicated 32 victims were rescued from the waters.

Five bodies were also retrieved barely an hour after the incident that left the entire East Africa in sorrow.

Unconfirmed reports from Tanzania intimated MV Nyerere was carrying between 400 and 500 people.

Do you have a hot story or scandal you would like us to publish, please reach us through news@tuko.co.ke or WhatsApp: 0732482690 and Telegram: Tuko news

ALSO WATCH : Heavy rains rock Nairobi city | TUKO TV

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Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh reacts as he testifies after questioning before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Capitol Hill in Washington. (Alex Brandon / AP)
If a roadmap for what is to be an energy transition to mitigate climate change is not carefu
A pair of Republican male lawmakers sought to fend off criticism Thursday for tone-deaf comments related to the sexual-assault allegation against Judge Brett Kavanaugh, President Donald Trump's embattled nominee for the Supreme Court.



Sen. Dean Heller, R-Nevada, reportedly characterized the allegation of the three-decade-old assault made by a professor in California as a "hiccup" and predicted that Kavanaugh would soon win Senate confirmation.



Meanwhile, Rep. Ralph Norman, R-South Carolina, opened an election debate Thursday in Rock Hill by joking that he almost had to miss it because of drama involving the Supreme Court.



"Did you hear about this?" Norman said, according to local media reports. "Ruth Bader Ginsburg came out saying she was groped by Abraham Lincoln."



Heller made his remarks during a conference call arranged by the Nevada Republican Party on Wednesday night in advance of Trump's planned visit to the state Thursday, according to an account by the Nevada Independent.



"I'm really grateful for the White House, for the effort of President Trump and what he has done, and the excitement that we have," Heller reportedly said. "We got a little hiccup here with the Kavanaugh nomination. We'll get through this and we'll get off to the races."



Heller's comments were sharply criticized by Rep. Jacky Rosen, D-Nevada, who is challenging Heller for his Senate seat in November.



"Unbelievable: Senator Heller just dismissed a credible sexual assault allegation as a 'hiccup' - and predicted Kavanaugh will still be confirmed soon," Rosen wrote on Twitter.



Heller's office issued a statement early Thursday afternoon in which he said he was referring to the actions of Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee, who have been accused by Republicans of not cooperating.



"No, I do not believe sexual assault allegations of any kind are a hiccup," Heller said in the statement. "I was referring to how poorly the Democrats have handled this process and the fact that the Democrats have not worked with the Judiciary Committee Chairman in good faith."
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The Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine endorsed the procedure developed by the Ecology and Natural Resources Ministry of Ukraine over implementation of state water quality monitoring, which will begin to operate from January 1, 2019.

"We finally introduce in Ukraine exactly the same approaches towards the surface water quality monitoring that operate in the European Union. This means that we will bring an end to the situation when several bodies monitored the same indicators while others were not assessed at all and when different bodies performed measurements using different units and the national monitoring program did not give a clear picture of the condition of water resources," Ukrainian Ecology and Natural Resources Minister Ostap Semerak said, the Ministrys press service reports.

He noted that new monitoring system would allow making an impartial estimate of the condition of Ukrainian water resources and approve effective management strategy.

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Ukraines Kyiv is promising and open to business and investments.

Mayor of Kyiv Vitali Klitschko said this at the 10th International Trade Day conference in the German city of Aachen.

"Today, Kyiv, as never before, is prepared and open to cooperation. Kyiv is promising for investments," Klitschko said.

He noted that 60% of all foreign investments into Ukrainian economy come to the capital, as transparent management mechanisms are introduced in the city, and the mayor acts personally as a "guarantor" for investors.

Klitschko assured that Kyiv is a reliable partner and a promising market for business and investment.

He stressed that one of the priority directions for Ukraine is the development of relations with Germany, which supports the European aspirations of Ukraine and is one of the main foreign economic partners of Ukraine.

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Deputy Foreign Minister of Ukraine Sergiy Kyslytsya discussed with a delegation of Estonian MPs headed by Chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Riigikogu (Parliament of Estonia) Marko Mihkelson the priority tasks of cooperation within the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE).

"The parties highly praised the level of cooperation between Ukraine and Estonia within the framework of international organizations, including the UN, the Council of Europe and the OSCE, as well as their interparliamentary structures. The interlocutors also discussed the priority tasks of cooperation within the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE)," the Foreign Ministry of Ukraine reported.

Kyslytsya expressed gratitude to Estonia for its strong political support for the sovereignty and territorial integrity of our state, and most importantly  for the significant practical assistance and implementation of a number of humanitarian projects for Ukrainian citizens.

Mihkelson, in turn, spoke about the visits by the Estonian delegation to the territories adjacent to the contact line in eastern Ukraine, and noted that he had the opportunity to personally make sure that Russian aggression continued.

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The Foreign Ministry of Ukraine expresses deep concern over significant health condition deterioration of Ukrainian citizen Asan Chapukh, who has been illegally detained on politically motivated charges in the occupied Crimea, and who has announced a hunger strike.

This is stated in the comment by the Foreign Ministry of Ukraine regarding unlawful actions of Russia in relation to Ukrainian citizen Asan Chapukh.

The rejection of the Russian occupation administration to provide medical assistance to Asan Chapukh is another example of tortures. We express the resolute protest over actions of the Russian occupation regime that continues to strengthen repressions and ignores its obligations of an occupying state, the report reads.

"We demand from the Kremlin regime to release immediately Asan Chapukh and over 70 citizens of Ukraine, who are prosecuted on politically motivated charges on the territory of Russia and on the occupied territory of Crimea," the Foreign Ministry stated.

Ukraine called on the international community to strengthen the political and diplomatic and sanction pressure on the aggressor state with the aim to release the citizens of Ukraine illegally detained by Russia.

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Hungary will consider the possible expulsion of its consul from the town of Berehove in Ukraine's Zakarpattia region due to a video with the issuing of Hungarian passports to Ukrainian citizens as an "unfriendly and risky move" by Ukraine, which will not remain unanswered.

Hungarian Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade Peter Szijjarto said this to journalists in Budapest on Thursday, according to the website of the Hungarian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade.

"Such a step would place relations between the two countries in another dimension and would not remain unanswered, but the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade has received no official indication of this nature," Szijjarto said.

He noted that a video recorded with a hidden camera at the Hungarian Consulate General in Berehove would be exploited in the Ukrainian election campaign, using anti-Hungarian sentiment in an attempt to win votes.

According to Szijjarto, the video recording was most probably made and leaked to order.

He added that the citizenship oath recorded in the video "conforms to all regulations," and accordingly the fact that the Ukrainian foreign minister objected to it can only be explained with "domestic policy reasons and the upcoming election."

"Dual nationality is everyday practice within the EU, and accordingly the Ukrainian objections do not indicate that Kyiv is serious about European integration and joining NATO," he said.

He said that the condemnation of the issuing of Hungarian passports by the Ukrainian authorities was an attempt to intimidate Transcarpathian Hungarians and added that the Hungarian government would not allow the Ukrainian administration "to further worsen the situation of Transcarpathian Hungarians."

On September 20, Ukrinform published a video showing how Hungarian passports are issued to citizens of Ukraine at the Hungarian Consulate in Berehove, Zakarpattia region. The procedure was accompanied by a glass of champagne in honor of receiving a second citizenship and instructions for Ukrainians to conceal the fact of obtaining Hungarian citizenship from the Ukrainian authorities.

Subsequently, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Pavlo Klimkin promised to meet with his Hungarian counterpart on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly and talk with him about the issuance of Hungarian passports to citizens of Ukraine in Zakarpattia region. The foreign minister also hinted that the Hungarian consul in Berehove could be expelled from Ukraine.

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Emanuel has been widely praised for accomplishments in many parts of his job. The financial books are closer to being balanced, and downtown Chicago gleams, even if the neighborhoods are in disrepair. But despite his many talents and determination, the crime issue has proved beyond his capacity to fix, and those who want to succeed him must prove theyve got ideas that might work.
Ukraine plans to create a naval base on the Sea of Azov before the end of the year.

Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko has said it is necessary to build up a powerful defense of the Ukrainian part of the water area and the coast of the Sea of Azov in the near future.

"Stepping up the defense of the Ukrainian part of the water area and the coast of the Azov Sea will be put on the agenda in the near future," Poroshenko said in his annual State of the Nation Address in parliament on September 20, an UNIAN correspondent reports.

Read alsoUkraine to send nearly 300 special forces troops to Azov, Black Seas  Chief border guard

As UNIAN reported earlier, Ukraine plans to create a naval base on the Sea of Azov before the end of the year. "This [the creation of the base] will create conditions for repelling Russian aggression in that region," the Ukrainian government said on its Facebook page.

As earlier reported, Russian border guards in the second half of April began stopping and inspecting foreign vessels navigating to/from Ukrainian ports. The State Border Service notes that Ukraine has been a hostage to the situation since 2004, namely, under the Agreement on Cooperation between Ukraine and the Russian Federation in the Sea of Azov and the Kerch Strait, which defines the Azov Sea as a sea of internal use of the two states. Thus, both Russian and Ukrainian border guards are entitled to inspect vessels, which, in their opinion, cause suspicion.

Secretary of the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine Oleksandr Turchynov stated that the military and political leadership of the Russian Federation regards the Azov-Black Sea region as an important springboard for further expansion.

In addition, Poroshenko earlier said he expected to see support of international partners in tightening pressure on the Russian Federation to lift the Russian blockade in the Sea of Azov.
Poroshenko also promised to prevent the lifting of the sanctions against Russia.

Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko has said the Russian authorities will seek ways in January to weaken sanctions imposed on them.

Read alsoEU's decision to prolong sanctions over actions against Ukraine comes into effect

"The ruble is weakening even amid growing prices of crude oil. The Russian authorities were forced to raise the retirement age. They had to increase VAT. This is the cost of aggression," he said in the Verkhovna Rada, noting the fact that Russia is so aggressively fighting against the sanctions means they are working, the Novoe Vremya weekly reported.

Russia puts considerable efforts into the support of left- and right-wing radical movements in Europe and meddles in elections to weaken the sanctions or have them lifted, the Ukrainian president said.

Poroshenko also promised to prevent the lifting of the sanctions against Russia.
In his speech, the president touched upon many subjects related to Ukraine's domestic and foreign policy.

Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko has delivered the State of the Nation Address in the Verkhovna Rada, Ukraine's parliament.

In his speech, the president touched upon many subjects related to Ukraine's domestic and foreign policy.

Firstly, Poroshenko wants to delete from the Constitution the clause allowing the stationing of the Black Sea Fleet in Crimea. The president says he is confident that Crimea will be returned to Ukraine. At the same time, Crimea will be returned together with compensation for the damage caused by Russia, the president said.

Read alsoPoroshenko says Russia to try to weaken sanctions in January

"After we retake Crimea, the Russian base will no longer be stationed in Sevastopol!" Poroshenko said.

"Russia's attack began with the annexation of Crimea, and it must end with its return coupled with compensation for the damage caused and effective guarantees that such aggression will never happen again. We are fighting for this in international courts, and I am sure we will win the same way we have defeated Gazprom in Stockholm," the president said.

Secondly, the president wants to build up the defense of the Ukrainian part of the Azov Sea in the near future. It is worth to be noting provocations by Russian border guards have been taking place in the Sea of Azov since the second half of April.

In addition, Poroshenko announced the launch of the production of high-precision missile armaments.

According to the president, high-precision ammunition is to be developed for the newest artillery systems, armored vehicles and other military hardware.

At the same time, the president admitted that most Ukrainians had not yet felt any improvement.

"Of course, this has triggered a domino effect for the whole economy... entailed a deep social crisis. We have survived and resumed growth. However, most Ukrainians have not yet felt the improvement in well-being, and the standard of living is recovering slowly and unevenly across regions and social and age groups," Poroshenko said.
Poroshenko says he does not know when they may take a decision on the Tomos and when it may be brought to Kyiv.

Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko has said the process of granting the Tomos on autocephaly to the Ukrainian Orthodox Church is on the homestretch.

"The Exarchs of the Ecumenical Patriarch have informally told me that the process of granting autocephaly to Ukraine is on the homestretch. I want to separately emphasize I do not know when they may take a decision on the Tomos and when it may be brought to Kyiv. But I'm sure that we have spun the wheel of this history so that no one would definitely turn it back," the president said.

Read alsoPoroshenko on autocephaly for church: Work started with first meeting with Patriarch Bartholomew

As UNIAN reported earlier, President Poroshenko on April 17 convened leaders of parliamentary factions and stated that he would appeal to the Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew with a request to proclaim the independence of the Ukrainian local church.

Hierarchs on September 2 held meetings (Synaxis) of the Hierarchy of the Ecumenical Throne Constantinople in Istanbul, Turkey, to consider the question whether the Church of Constantinople is authorized, without the consent of other churches, to grant autonomy, or autocephaly, to a church that has requested it.

Following the meetings, the answer was positive: "Yes, the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople is authorized to grant autocephaly without any consent [from other churches]," the Ukrainian news outlet Hromadske said.

Poroshenko on September 17 met with two envoys, Exarchs of the Ecumenical Patriarchate in Ukraine Bishop Ilarion of Edmonton and the Western Eparchy of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC) in Canada and Archbishop Daniel of Pamphylia and the Western Eparchy of the UOC in the United States of America dispatched to prepare for establishing a Ukrainian church that is ecclesiastically independent from the Russian Orthodox Church.
The president says such a law will not affect civil society, the media and is not a violation of the freedom of speech.

Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko has backed the idea of drafting a bill on the registration of Russian agents of influence.

"I support the idea of a bill on the registration of agents of influence from the aggressor state  the Russian Federation," Poroshenko said in his annual State of the Nation Address in parliament on September 20, an UNIAN correspondent reported.

Read alsoParliament votes for change in Constitution on Ukraine's path to EU, NATO

In his words, there is still a "network of Russian agents in Ukraine that take the media under control, multiply independent public organizations  they are in fact independent, but they are independent of Ukraine and are controlled by the Kremlin and are spreading anti-Ukrainian, anti-European and anti-American sentiments."

He says such a law will not affect civil society, the media and is not a violation of the freedom of speech.

As UNIAN reported, on September 17, Chairman of the People's Front parliamentary faction, Member of Parliament Maksym Burbak said the faction proposes drafting and passing a bill on the registration of foreign agents, which should neutralize the Kremlin's influence on elections in Ukraine.
Klimkin told reporters that he would be meeting Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade Peter Szijjarto next week in New York City on the sidelines of the session of the United Nations General Assembly.

Hungary's Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade Peter Szijjarto says his government regards it as an unfriendly and risky move that Ukraine is thinking about expelling the Hungarian Consul in Berehove over reportedly the secret issue of Hungarian passports to Ukrainian citizens.

"Such a step would place relations between the two countries in another dimension and would not remain unanswered, but the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade has received no official indication of this nature," Hungary's Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade quoted Szijjarto as saying at a press event in Budapest on September 20.

"Following the measures that are discriminatory to the Transcarpathian Hungarians and various attempts to intimidate them, the series of attacks against us has now shifted to another level," he said.

"Hungary is continuously monitoring developments and it is possible that further measures to slow Ukraine's integration may also be required in future," he stated, adding that there will be "plenty to talk about" with relation to the situation at next week's session of the United Nations General Assembly in New York City.

On Wednesday, September 19, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Pavlo Klimkin did not exclude the possible expulsion of the Hungarian Consul in Berehove, after a secret recording of Ukrainian citizens taking an oath of Hungarian citizenship at the Hungarian Consulate in Berehove was uploaded to YouTube.

Read alsoHungary's consulate reportedly issues Hungarian passports to Ukrainians (Video)

Klimkin told reporters that he would be meeting Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade Peter Szijjarto next week in New York on the sidelines of the session of the United Nations General Assembly and would be showing him the video recorded at the Hungarian Consulate in Berehove, which in his opinion is genuine.

"I will be telling Szijjarto that the Consul has no business in Transcarpathia and would do better to hand out Hungarian passports to Hungarians in Budapest," the Ukrainian Foreign Minister said, indicating that the agenda of his meeting with his Hungarian counterpart will be "extremely busy."

Szijjarto accused the Ukrainian side of attempts to intimidate Transcarpathian Hungarians.

"The government will not allow the Ukrainian administration to further worsen the situation of Transcarpathian Hungarians, and condemns the attempts to intimidate them in the strongest possible terms," Szijjarto said.

Szijjarto said it was a "particularly unfriendly" act that a video recorded with a hidden camera at the Hungarian Consulate-General in Berehove were exploited in the Ukrainian election campaign, using anti-Hungarian sentiment in an attempt to win votes. According to the minister, the recording were most probably made and leaked to order. He added that the citizenship oath recorded in the video conforms to all regulations, and accordingly the fact that the Ukrainian Foreign Minister objected to it can only be explained with domestic policy reasons and the upcoming election.

"Dual nationality is everyday practice within the EU, and accordingly the Ukrainian objections do not indicate that Kyiv is serious about European integration and joining NATO," the minister said. "Ukraine must also respect its international obligations, in addition to which it must also accept the fact that the 150 thousand strong Hungarian minority living in Ukraine still has rights, even if Ukraine is attempting to weaken those," he added.
The resolution provides for the dismissal of CEC members due to the end of their term of office.

The Verkhovna Rada, Ukraine's parliament, has adopted Resolution No. 4789-d on dismissal of 13 members of the Central Election Commission (CEC).

The document was backed by 278 MPs of 358 MPs registered in the session hall, an UNIAN correspondent reported on September 20.

Read alsoUkraine's parliament increases number of CEC members to 17 people

The resolution provides for the dismissal of the CEC members, namely Tamara Astakhova, Yuriy Danylevskyi, Ihor Zhydenko, Tetiana Lukash, Andriy Magera, Oleksandr Osadchuk, Mykhailo Okhendovskyi, Bronislav Raykovskyi, Zhanna Usenko-Chorna, Oleksandr Chupakhin, Yulia Shvets, Oleksandr Shelestov, and Valeriy Sheludko due to the end of their term of office.

The resolution comes into force from the date of its adoption.

As UNIAN reported earlier, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko on February 5 introduced in parliament 14 candidates for appointment to the post of CEC members.

However, lawmakers could not agree on voting for the appointment of new CEC members. Noteworthy, seven-year term of office of 13 people out of 15 CEC members has long expired.

In accordance with paragraph 21 of Part 1 of Article 85 of the Constitution of Ukraine, the Verkhovna Rada appoints and dismisses CEC members on the proposal of the president. Therefore, the parliament should elect 13 out of 14 candidates for the posts of CEC members.

On July 5, the Verkhovna Rada refused to consider the decision to renew the CEC, as a number of factions said their candidacies were not taken into account, or the majority of candidates to the CEC are under the influence of the presidential administration.

Ukrainian lawmakers on September 18 passed a draft law on increasing the number of members of the Central Election Commission from 15 to 17 people. The bill was voted immediately in the first reading and was backed by 236 MPs.

The MPs said the draft law had been passed in violation of Verkhovna Rada regulations, since there should be a period of time for submitting alternative bills. The document can be challenged in the Constitutional Court of Ukraine, and then the results of the presidential and parliamentary elections can be called into question.

Petro Poroshenko enacted a law to increase the number of members of the Central Election Commission from 15 to 17 people on September 20.
In general, work on the issue has been under way for three years.

Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko says the dialogue about a local Orthodox church in Ukraine and the provision of the Tomos on autocephaly started with his meeting with Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew after Easter this year.

"The work on the Tomos started with my first meeting with His All-Holiness Ecumenical Patriarch. My advisers and my assistants from the very first weeks, in spite of a very difficult situation in Ukraine, a very difficult situation on the frontline. I believed and I started working on the strategy of obtaining the independence of the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church, on the creation of an independent Church," Poroshenko said in an interview to the First Western TV Channel during a working visit to Lviv region, the president's press service reports.

"Why is it so important? Ukrainian statehood, Ukrainian state cannot be independent if it has a church guided from abroad as one of its components, one of the pillars of the existence of the statehood," he said.

Read alsoMoscow Patriarchate warns about inevitable split of society after Ukrainian church granted autocephaly

According to the president, it was agreed at that meeting that several conditions must be met, particularly the support of the parliament regarding the president's appeal. "This is the position of secular authorities, and I thank all the Members of Parliament, everyone who voted in support of the president's appeal," he said.

Poroshenko recalled that some of the lawmakers did not support the vote. "As you know, only one political force created obstacles  they did not just refuse to vote, but tried to arrange a fight inside the parliament ... And I thank the parliamentarians, because I was at that time in the hall, that we did not take the bait," he said.

"But I emphasize that after receiving the Tomos, we will not allow any provocations... We will have freedom of belief. Everyone will walk his own way to God. And we will not allow shedding a single drop of blood, because only faith and prayer will create the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church," the president said.

Read alsoPoroshenko meets with Orthodox envoys dispatched for independent church preparations (Video)

He also recalled there was an appeal to the Ukrainian hierarchs. "And in 27 years of our independence, there has never been a case when the signatures of all hierarchs were present under the same document, except for the part of the Moscow Patriarchate. And it was a miracle. It could not happen without God's help. And they have not just signed the document, but since April they have carried out absolutely pro-Ukrainian, absolutely transparent work to help in the creation of the Ukrainian Church," he emphasized.

Poroshenko also noted that the Ecumenical Patriarch had appointed the Exarchs of the Patriarchate "who have already begun work on the final line of giving Ukraine the Tomos."

"But I have never disclosed the date or said that the Tomos is already in our pocket. I continue to insist that the Tomos requires prayer from each of you. Sincere prayer to God. Because it will not happen without God's help. And it requires our struggle for the creation of the church," the president noted.

"And once again I want to emphasize that the Ukrainian church should be separated from the state. I stand firm on this. Let alone the foreign state. And the Ukrainian church will not be guided by Moscow - the capital of the aggressor country. We will not allow this," he said, noting that "this is why the decision to appoint the Exarchs by His All-Holiness caused such panic."
Children who were taken to the health resort in the town of Skadovsk in early September are to return to the village today.

Residents of villages in Ukraine's Kherson region bordering occupied Crimea complain of a cough and a rash after recent acid leaks in the north of Crimea.

Doctors have visited people in the villages, while those who have complaints and want to be examined are bussed to Kherson regional hospital, the TSN Ranok TV program reported.

Read alsoCrimea residents still suffer from chemical leaks, report death of animals

The villagers are examined by otolaryngologists, dermatologists and pulmonologists. People complain mostly of burning in the throat and a rash on the skin. They are convinced they still feel the consequences of the August chemical emissions at the Crimean Titan plant on the Russian-occupied peninsula. However, mobile laboratories taking air samples have not recorded excess of harmful substances in the last two weeks.

Children who were taken to the health resort in the town of Skadovsk in early September are to return to the village today.
According to intelligence reports, one enemy troop was killed and another three were wounded.

Russia's hybrid military forces mounted 24 attacks on Ukrainian army positions in Donbas in the past 24 hours, with one Ukrainian soldier reported as wounded in action (WIA).

"One Ukrainian soldier was wounded in the past day. According to intelligence reports, one occupier was killed and another three were wounded," the press center of Ukraine's Joint Forces Operation (JFO) said in an update on Facebook as of 07:00 Kyiv time on September 20, 2018.

Read alsoJFO: Ukraine reports 2 KIA's, 1 WIA in Donbas in past day

Russian occupation forces opened aimed fire from grenade launchers, heavy machine guns and small arms to attack the defenders of the towns of Svitlodarsk and Maryinka, and the villages of Krymske, Novotoshkivske, Troyitske, Luhanske, Pisky, Nevelske, Novomykhailivka, Berezove, Pavlopil, Hnutove, Vodiane, Lebedynske, and Shyrokyne.

The enemy also resorted to 82mm mortars to shell the Ukrainian positions near Krymske, Lebedynske and Vodiane. In addition, the Ukrainian fortified position near Krymske came under fire from a 120mm mortar. Moreover, a Ukrainian position near Luhanske was attacked with the use of an anti-tank missile system.

"Since Thursday midnight, Russian-led forces have mounted two attacks on the Ukrainian positions near the villages of Krymske and Chermalyk, using grenade launchers, heavy machine guns and small arms. There have been no casualties among Ukrainian troops since the start of the day," reads the report.
Globalization has both enriched and impoverished  and also further divided  America. Those whose muscular labor could be outsourced abroad to less expensive, less regulated countries were liable to lose their jobs or find their wages slashed. They were written off as losers. Americans whose professional expertise profited from vast new world markets became even richer and preened as winners.
U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said he had invited North Korea's foreign minister to meet in New York next week.

The United States said it was ready to resume talks with North Korea after Pyongyang pledged on Wednesday to dismantle its key missile facilities and suggested it would close its main Yongbyon nuclear complex if Washington took unspecified actions.

U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said he had invited North Korea's foreign minister to meet in New York next week, with the aim of completing its denuclearization by January 2021, after a Pyongyang summit between the leaders of the two Koreas, as reported by Reuters.

Read alsoNorth Korea's Kim to allow international inspections in bid to revive nuclear talks  media

The United States appeared eager to seize on commitments by North Korean leader Kim Jong Un at his talks with South Korean President Moon Jae-in even as critics said the steps did little to put Pyongyang on a course for irreversible denuclearization.

North Korea will allow experts from "concerned countries" to watch the closure of its missile engine testing site and launch pad at Tongchang-ri, Moon said at a joint news conference with Kim after their meeting in the North Korean capital.

North Korea will also take additional steps such as closing its main Yongbyon nuclear complex if the United States undertook unspecified reciprocal measures, Moon added.

The sudden revival of diplomacy followed weeks of doubts in U.S. President Donald Trump's administration's about whether North Korea was willing to negotiate in good faith after a June summit between Trump and Kim yielded few tangible results.

The January 2021 completion date was the most specific deadline set in what is expected to be a long process of trying to get the North to end its nuclear program, which may threaten U.S. allies South Korea and Japan as well as the U.S. homeland.

In addition to inviting North Korean Foreign Minister Ri Yong Ho to meet when both are in New York next week for the annual U.N. General Assembly gathering of world leaders, Pompeo said Washington invited Pyongyang's representatives to meet the U.S. special representative for North Korea, Stephen Biegun, in Vienna at the "earliest opportunity."

China, North Korea's most important economic backer and diplomatic ally, said it warmly welcomed the agreement reached in Pyongyang and strongly supported it.

"We absolutely cannot let this hard to come by opportunity for peace slip away once again," the Chinese government's top diplomat, State Councillor Wang Yi, said in a statement.
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CHISINAU (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 21st September, 2018) Moldovan President Igor Dodon expressed hope on Thursday that the first Moldovan-Russian Economic Forum (MREF) would lead to the signing of investment agreements worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

The forum was officially opened in the Moldovan capital Chisinau on Thursday and will last until Saturday.

"I expect that the forum will result in the signing of agreements on the investment of tens and hundreds of millions of Dollars in the Republic of Moldova in the near future. We already have concrete projects - in agriculture, industry, tourism and social sector - that will be announced during the forum," Dodon said at the forum's opening.

He also said that he hoped to open the Russian market to the Moldovan producers, adding that he was interested in investments from Russia as well. According to Dodon, cooperation with Russia could bring around 400 to 500 million dollars in direct investments per year.

According to the forum's organizers, over 500 people will take part in the event that will give them an opportunity to discuss the prospects for development of cooperation in various fields of the two countries' economy. The MREF is set to become an annual event, with the next forum expected to be held in Moscow.
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The Iraqi delegation led by Alaa K. Alyasri, the acting director general of Iraq's Oil Marketing Company SOMO and the country's governor for the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), will take part in the meeting of the OPEC-Non-OPEC Joint Ministerial Monitoring Committee (JMMC) in Algeria on Sunday, Iraqi Oil Ministry spokesman Asim Jihad told Sputnik on Thursday.

MOSCOW (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 20th September, 2018) The Iraqi delegation led by Alaa K. Alyasri, the acting director general of Iraq's Oil Marketing Company SOMO and the country's governor for the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), will take part in the meeting of the OPEC-Non-OPEC Joint Ministerial Monitoring Committee (JMMC) in Algeria on Sunday, Iraqi Oil Ministry spokesman Asim Jihad told Sputnik on Thursday.

On Sunday, September 23, Algiers will host a meeting of the JMMC, bringing together ministers from Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, Kuwait, Algeria, the United Arab Emirates, Russia and Oman. The meeting will focus on the current situation on the global oil market, as well as on the countries' compliance with their commitments under the Vienna deal and their future cooperation.

"[At the meeting Iraq will be represented by] a delegation led by SOMO director general, Iraq's governor for OPEC, Alaa K. Alyasri, there also will be a representative of the [Iraqi Oil] Ministry. The situation on the [oil] market will be discussed, after which decisions will be taken," Jihad said.

In 2016, OPEC and several non-OPEC oil producers agreed to cut output by a total of 1.8 million barrels per day in an effort to stabilize global oil prices. The agreement, which came into effect in 2017, has been extended twice since then and will remain in force until the end of 2018. Iraq was initially seeking exemption from the deal due to the need to drive up output in the wake of its war with the Islamic State (IS, terrorist group outlawed in Russia), but has in the end complied with the cuts deal.
Spain is not interested in building more terminals for liquefied natural gas (LNG) as the existing infrastructure is enough, Marcelino Oreja, the CEO of Enagas, Spain's national gas grid operator, told Sputnik on Thursday.

BARCELONA (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 20th September, 2018) Spain is not interested in building more terminals for liquefied natural gas (LNG) as the existing infrastructure is enough, Marcelino Oreja, the CEO of Enagas, Spain's national gas grid operator, told Sputnik on Thursday.

In July, US President Donald Trump said he had secured commitment from the EU countries to build up to 11 LNG terminals to support US exports.

"No, we will not do more terminals, I can assure you, we have enough terminals," Oreja said on the sidelines of the Gastech conference in Barcelona, asked if Spain was considering building more LNG terminals in order to process US imports.

Enagas CEO also pointed out that the only way Washington could make the European Union increase its imports of LNG from the United States was to set a more competitive price.

"It's a matter of price. We have a very big market, LNG is very competitive. In Spain, we receive gas from 11 different origins, so anyone wanting to sell LNG needs to set a price," the Spanish executive said.

Oreja said the next Gastech conference to be held in Houston in September 2019 could be more US-oriented due to a large number of US participants.

"Of course, Houston is going to be a more American-oriented Gastech, I suppose, but it's very difficult to predict [the picture]," he said.

The European Commission's press release in August listed three terminals, two in Spain and one in Greece, as under construction. Six terminals, in Croatia, Cyprus, Greece, Ireland, Poland and Sweden, were listed additionally as future key infrastructure projects.
An imminent environmental disaster is in the making in famous ski-resort of Gulmarg where the Indian Air Force is planning to set-up a radar system in the protected wildlife sanctuary area, apart from constructing a helipad in the forest area, on around 14 hectare land.

ISLAMABAD, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 20th Sep, 2018 ) :An imminent environmental disaster is in the making in famous ski-resort of Gulmarg where the Indian Air Force is planning to set-up a radar system in the protected wildlife sanctuary area, apart from constructing a helipad in the forest area, on around 14 hectare land.

According to Kashmir Media Service, a Srinagar-based English daily Greater Kashmir quoting official documents, it accessed, reported that the radar named 'air defence sensor and weaponry' is proposed for construction in the protected area of Gulmarg wildlife sanctuary and for this, at least 1.18 hectare land is proposed to be notified from the protected area network and 12.35 hectare from the territorial forest division (Jhelum Valley division) of Baramulla district in northern Kashmir.

The daily maintained that estimated at Rs300 crore, the 'mountain radar project' is part of the India's 'national defence modernization' plan aimed to enhance air defence capability in the mountainous terrain of northern and eastern areas.

A communication by the IAF to the administration of occupied Kashmir said that the project was required for better radar visibility inside Azad Jammu and Kashmir and Pakistan. It said that there was no service available in the region to track the aerial activity in the AJK region.

Officials who spoke to Greater Kashmir on the condition of anonymity said that three sites had been analyzed to assess suitability for deployment of the new generation mountain radar. These include Mount Apharwat, Raj Rifles and Botapathri.

Meanwhile, environmentalists have said that the project could be disastrous for the ecosystems of the region. They stated that these fragile ecosystems, if disturbed, take hundreds of years to recover and the disasters such as flashfloods, water shortage and climate change are some of the serious impacts of disturbing these ecosystems." They said that the project, if implemented, can be an "environmental disaster" for Gulmarg.

"The project will have huge ecological and socio-economic impacts for the region. First, it will destroy the pristine natural environment of Apharwat Mountain, which harbours a rich biodiversity," said an environmentalist, who wished not to be named.

Subalpine and alpine ecosystems in Gulmarg are among the most important ecosystems of Jammu and Kashmir, dominated by alpine meadows, rocks and glaciers, high-altitude lakes and the sub-alpine scrub.

"These ecosystems are critical for water recharge, keeping intact the glaciers and are rich in biodiversity especially the rare medicinal plants and the unique mountain fauna," the environmentalist said.
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DUBAI, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News / WAM - 20th Sep, 2018) Brand Dubai, the creative arm of the Government of Dubai Media Office, organised a brainstorming session to explore innovative new initiatives and projects to beautify the emirate. A number of young artists and entrepreneurs participated in the session.

Through this session, Brand Dubai aims to expand community participation and find the best ways to use the areas designated for the projects. Project locations were selected after considering many criteria, including the historic, economic, social and tourism value of the locations and their importance for Dubais residents and visitors.

Director General of the Government of Dubai Media Office Mona Al Marri said that the session is part of the Offices efforts to engage with the community to generate ideas and insights for beautification projects and initiatives in Dubai. These public art projects, which highlight Dubais commitment to innovation, will bring together leading artists both from the UAE and across the world.

"The initiative launched by His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, the Vice President, Prime Minister and Ruler of Dubai, to transform Dubai into an open-air museum was widely welcomed by Dubais community. Over the past four years, we have continued to receive positive messages from the community.

This response encouraged us to expand our engagement with artists and community leaders so that we can enrich our projects with new ideas," said Al Marri.

The GDMO Director General further said that Proudly from Dubai, an initiative of Brand Dubai, aims to create a network of homegrown entrepreneurs who started their businesses in Dubai and achieved success in the emirate. They are important stakeholders in our plans, and we believe it is important to engage with them and tap into their ideas, she added.

Director of Brand Dubai Nehal Badri explained that the brainstorming session also explored ways to support entrepreneurs, which is the Primary objective of Proudly from Dubai. She said the session discussed ideas to promote their ventures as part of Dubais larger success story.

The discussions also covered new art projects and installations that Brand Dubai will implement as part of its efforts to transform Dubai into an open air museum that showcases Dubais past, present and future, said Badri.

During the session, the participants shared many innovative ideas and suggestions based on the objectives of the art projects. Brand Dubai will evaluate the ideas and proposals to select exceptional ones that can be viably implemented.
The "Parents Conference," organised by the Ministry of Education, began today, under the theme, "Partners in our Journey."

ABU DHABI, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News / WAM - 19th Sep, 2018) The "Parents Conference," organised by the Ministry of Education, began today, under the theme, "Partners in our Journey."

The conference, which is being held for the first time at the Khalifa University in Abu Dhabi, will witness the participation of leading experts, educators, parents, academic leaders and specialists, to discuss key academic topics and strengthen the role of parents in advancing the UAEs education system.

The launch was attended by Sheikh Nahyan bin Mubarak Al Nahyan, Minister for Tolerance, Hussain bin Ibrahim Al Hammadi, Minister of Education, and Jameela Al Muheiri, Minister of State for Public Education.

The conference will focus on highlighting the role of parents in supporting the education process, the needs of Emirati schools, and the combined efforts to achieve the countrys vision of creating future generations who are globally competitive.

The conference also aims to highlight the role of parents in achieving the academic indicators of the National Agenda, as well as to raise awareness about the importance of their support for the education development plans of Emirati schools, and their contributions to building a stable family and social system.

Sheikh Nahyan said that the UAEs education system aims, with determination and resolve, to prepare the countrys future generations for productive and rich lives, by making them capable, with a sound mind and body, and equipped with enthusiasm and initiative. It is also a system that primarily aims to ensure that future generations are equipped with morals, are capable of preserving the communitys heritage and traditions, are committed to building on the UAEs successes and promoting the values of hard work, development, tolerance and peace, he added.

"We all have one aim and one vision, a promising academic vision, to prove to you that this conference is for you, and to achieve your visions, aspirations and goals. Because you are key partners to our academic journey," Al Hammadi said.

He added that there are many ongoing challenges, and developing the education system is necessary for keeping pace with these challenges, in line with the vision of the wise leadership.

"The UAE is now competitive, which is well known, and we aim to create future generations who possess the latest skills and can achieve leading results for Emirati schools. We want our students to compete with their peers from around the world and take the lead and be exceptional. In the age of globalisation, artificial intelligence, innovation, the internet and the knowledge-based economy, there is no space for complacency or regression. We must hedge our bets on our youth and students to actively engage in the future with their exceptional abilities, skills. Science and knowledge will remain the key factors to continuing our countrys development and advancement and maintaining its international pioneering," he stated.

He explained that in line with the progress of the education sector, it is necessary to achieve integration and create a joint vision, as there is no way for the education process to succeed in the absence of parents.
VIENNA, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News / WAM - 20th Sep, 2018) The UAE has re-affirmed its commitment to develop its national nuclear programme to the highest standards of safety, security, non-proliferation and transparency.

Addressing the 62nd session of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) General Conference here, Ambassador Hamad Alkaabi, UAE Permanent Representative to the IAEA, commended the international agency's central role in supporting its Member States in their pursuit, development and sustainment of peaceful uses of nuclear energy and applications.

"The IAEA has a central role in supporting its Member States in their pursuit, development and sustainment of peaceful uses of nuclear energy and applications. My delegation commends the Agencys strong direction in providing technical support and providing a platform for international cooperation, as well as its relentless efforts in ensuring non-proliferation," he said.

The ambassador noted that the UAE is of the view that nuclear power as a clean source of energy is an important factor to meet growing energy demand and to achieve sustainable development goals.

Last October, UAE hosted the 4th International Ministerial Conference on Nuclear Power in the 21st Century, in Abu Dhabi. The conference was successful in highlighting challenges and prospects of nuclear power, and its essential role in mitigating climate change.

Alkaabi noted that the UAE is currently in the commissioning phase of its nuclear power programme, with construction of the first Unit at Barakah NPP now completed.

"Unit 2 is following closely at 93% completion; Unit 3 at 84% and Unit 4 at more than 75%. Barakah NPP construction and commissioning process is conducted in accordance with IAEAs guidance and international best practices , ensuring that Barakah NPP reflects the highest standards of operational safety, security, transparency and non-proliferation.

"In line with the UAE policy and commitments to develop the national nuclear programme to the highest standards of safety, security, non-proliferation and transparency, my country hosted 10 major IAEA peer review missions to date., most recently pre-OSART and INIR phase 3 missions . UAE encourages member states with existing or future plans for nuclear power to benefit from IAEA peer review missions."

The IAEAs Technical Cooperation Programme is an important channel for assistance to Member States, the ambassador added.

"UAE has received significant support through the TC Programme which supported the nuclear infrastructure development and capacity building required for nuclear power and applications including in sectors such as health, agriculture, and the environment. The IAEA has trained more than 5000 participants in various fields in the UAE in the past 10 years. It is important that the TC program receives the required support and funding to facilitate assistance to member states, which is at the core of the IAEA mandate.

"The UAE places utmost importance on maintaining the highest standards of nuclear safety. My country has subscribed to all international conventions in this area, and participates actively in the review process of both the Convention on Nuclear Safety, as well as the Joint Convention on the Safety of Spent Fuel Management and on the Safety of Radioactive Waste Management. The UAE most recently submitted its Third National Report to the Sixth Review Meeting of the Contracting Parties to the Joint Convention. My delegation notes here that Iran is the only country with significant nuclear activities that has yet to join the Convention on Nuclear Safety. We encourage Iran to join this important international instrument at an early date."

The ambassador underlined the UAE's support for IAEA efforts in the area of nuclear security. "My country supports the work of the IAEA through national actions and international cooperation. We look forward to the forthcoming International Conference on Nuclear Security. UAE supports the CPPNM and encourages member states to join and ratify this important instrument.

"Regarding IAEA verification measures, we are of the view that the Additional Protocol to the Comprehensive Safeguards Agreement is an important instrument to compliment the IAEA safeguards system. We welcome the progress reflected in the increased number of signed and ratified additional protocols. We encourage the Agency to continue its open dialogue with member states on strengthening the efficiency and effectiveness of the safeguards system."

On the agreement with Iran the ambassador said, "In relationship to the JCPOA concluded with Iran, my country, like many, has hoped that such Agreement would address long held nuclear concerns and moderate Irans regional behavior. Unfortunately, this was not the case. We call on Iran to build further confidence in the peaceful nature of its nuclear activities and to refrain from the actions that continue to threaten the peace and stability of the region."

On the issue of the establishment of a middle East nuclear weapons and other WMD free zone, Alkaabi said the UAE "hopes that the current NPT Review Cycle will achieve significant steps towards implementing the agreed Action Plan of 2010, and the convening of the Conference on the Middle East Nuclear Weapon and WMD Free Zone with the participation of all countries in the region without delay."

He reiterated that the UAE is keen to continue collaboration with the IAEA and its Member States in promoting the responsible peaceful use of nuclear energy and applications, as well as the IAEAs goals of ensuring and strengthening nuclear safety, security and safeguards.

"My delegation is grateful to Director-General Yukiya Amano and the Secretariat for the outstanding support and continuous cooperation with my country," the ambassador concluded.
The Republicans want to hold a hearing on this matter. Kavanaugh says hes willing to testify. Fords attorneys said Thursday that she is prepared to testify next week. They said its her preference that a full investigation take place before her testimony. Assuming the White House deploys the FBI, the agency should be able to complete its task in time. If it takes a bit longer, so be it. The goal is for senators to possess all available evidence about what happened that night, and then cast their votes for or against Kavanaugh.
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Home Secretary of the United Kingdom (UK) the RT Hon Sajid Javed MP has reaffirmed the UK and Pakistan's strength in partnership as part of his 2-day visit to the country.

LONDON, (APP - UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 20th Sep, 2018 ) :Home Secretary of the United Kingdom (UK) the RT Hon Sajid Javed MP has reaffirmed the UK and Pakistan's strength in partnership as part of his 2-day visit to the country.

A statement issued by UK government here said that Sajid Javid also stressed the importance of the historic and unique relationship as he ended his first official visit to the Pakistan the other day.

In the first visit to Pakistan by a UK minister since the Pakistani elections, Sajid Javid met with new Prime Minister Imran Khan, the statement added.

He also met with other government ministers including the Foreign Minister and the Minister for the Interior and discussed cooperation to tackle organised crime, terrorism and corruption.

During the visit, the government announced a new UK-Pakistan partnership on accountability to tackle illicit finance  a priority for the new Pakistani government.

The partnership includes 500,000 support to Pakistan to enable them to pursue money launderers and to recover assets.

UK Home Secretary, Sajid Javid whose parents were born in Pakistan, also had the opportunity to visit a girls' school in Islamabad to see how UK government funding has helped support educational programmes in the country.

Over 9.5 million children in Primary schools  including 4.6 million girls  have benefited from UK sponsored programmes since 2011, the statement added.

He also attended a Forced Marriage round table hosted by the High Commission and attended by operational partners.

The visit of UK Home Secretary to Pakistan concluded with a tour of Iqbal tomb in Lahore and the Badshahi Mosque with Punjab Governor Chaudhry Muhammad Sarwar where they discussed continued partnership in the province on security, health and education.

Speaking after the visit to Pakistan, Javid said "Pakistan has a special place in my heart and our two countries have a historic bond underpinned by the strong links between our people".

"It is vital that our deep and enduring relationship continues and we cooperate further to tackle the shared threats we face",I discussed this on my visit and made clear Britain is committed to Pakistan's long-term stability and prosperity".
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As many as 85 processions of 9th Moharam-ul-Haram would be taken out in Bahawalpur division including seven of category-A and category-B each and 71 processions of category C. This was told by Regional Police Officer Bahawalpur Muhammad Faisal Rana while talking to APP.

BAHAWALPUR, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 20th Sep, 2018 ) :As many as 85 processions of 9th Moharam-ul-Haram would be taken out in Bahawalpur division including seven of category-A and category-B each and 71 processions of category C. This was told by Regional Police Officer Bahawalpur Muhammad Faisal Rana while talking to APP. He further told that 158 Majalis would also be held today of which eight have been put into category-A, ten in category-B and 140 Majalis of category-C. He said that 5508 police officers and personnel have been deployed for the security of these processions and Majalis. He said that highly sensitive processions and Majalis of category-A are being monitored through CCTV cameras. He further told that the four-tier security plan has been put into place at processions and Majalis.

He told that routes of processions have been technically swept and snipers of police and Elite Force have been deployed at terraces and roofs around the sites of processions and Majalis. Special parking plan has also been made for the participants of processions and Majalis.

He further stated that instructions have been issued to take strict action against hate mongering elements. He said that role of peace committees, trade unions, civil society and media is pivotal in keeping peace during Moharam-ul-Haram. He urged the media to exhibit responsibility and avoid releasing any news without confirmation.
MIRPUR (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 19th Sep, 2018 ) , Sept. 19 (APP)::Leader of the Kashmir delegation from AJK and Director Programs of Kashmir Institute of International Relations NGO (KIIR), Altaf Hussain Wani has said that Kashmir is paradise on earth which is washed in blood by the Indian occupying forces every day through their repeated acts of state terrorism and violence.

Altaf Hussain Wani made these remarks while addressing the 39th session of United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva late Tuesday.

Delivering his statement under Agenda item 4 on behalf of World Muslim Congress, the Kashmir delegation leader underlined that the voices of the innocent people in the Occupied Jammu Kashmir state were being suppressed through bullets and pellets. Indian Army's large-scale deployment has led to atrocities against the people of Jammu and Kashmir. Indian soldiers have been found involved in killing of unarmed civilian protesters during public funerals, use of excessive force and use of munitions of riot control beyond the established international standards, said a message received here Wednesday.

"This is documented in detail in the first ever report of the office of the High Commissioner on Kashmir, released on 14 June 2018", Wani pointed out.

Referring to the report, Altaf Hussain Wani said that the report has established that the right to self-determination of people of Jammu and Kashmir is protected under international law. "The report asked this Council to establish a Commission of Inquiry to investigate past and ongoing human rights violations perpetuated by Indian occupation forces", Wani added.

"Mr. President, In any responsible democracy, such a damning report would have initiated a debate on improving the state's human rights record. But the Government of India not only rejected it but intensified military operations against a popular and peaceful movement, killing 35 Kashmiris after 14 June, the day UN report was released. It was expected this Council will hold a special session to discuss the OHCHR report, but unfortunately I have to say the civilized world has sewed its lips on the violations in Indian occupied Jammu and Kashmir and allowed India to continue its state barbarism. "Against all odds, the people of Indian occupied Jammu and Kashmir continue to pin high hopes on this august forum to come to their rescue", Wani said. He emphasized upon the Council to end silence and join OHCHR to investigate rights violations in Indian occupied Jammu and Kashmir.
Chief of the Naval Staff, Admiral Zafar Mahmood Abbasi is on an official visit to USA to attend 23rd International Seapower Symposium-2018 being held from 18-23 Sep 18

ISLAMABAD, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 20th Sep, 2018 ) Chief of the Naval Staff, Admiral Zafar Mahmood Abbasi is on an official visit to USA to attend 23rd International Seapower Symposium-2018 being held from 18-23 Sep 18. During the visit, the Naval Chief met Congresswoman Sheila Jackson, Acting Asia Pacific (DoD Policy), Mr Randall Shriver, President Center for New American Security, Mr Richard Fontaine, Vice President Heritage, Dr. James Jay Carafano and CEO Atlantic Council, Mr. Fredrick Kempe in separate meetings.

During the meetings, matters of mutual interest including bilateral defence ties and security environment in Indian Ocean Region were discussed. The Naval Chief highlighted that Pakistan and US shared common perspective of having stable, secure and peaceful maritime environment to support global economy. Overall Pakistans commitment and performance in fight against terrorism and particularly Pakistan Navys efforts for maintaining regional peace and security were also highlighted. The Admiral reiterated the need for enhancing global efforts to effectively confront the trans-national challenges and threats in the maritime domain. US dignitaries appreciated the role and contribution of Pakistan for maintaining peace and stability in the maritime domain.

Interactions and round table discussions with prominent US Think Tanks and academia were also held. During the discussion, while underscoring the challenges to Indian Ocean security, the Admiral elaborated Pakistans initiative of Regional Maritime Security Patrol (RMSP) which is solely aimed to shoulder international obligations towards safe and secure maritime environment in the region. Earlier, Admiral Zafar Mahmood Abbasi also met Ambassador of Pakistan to US, H.E Ali Jehangir Siddiqui. A media interaction with Pakistani and international media personnel was also held. During the interaction, the Naval Chief highlighted Pakistans Maritime Perspective with special focus on PN contributions to regional maritime security and opportunities offered by CPEC to the region. The Admiral briefed that Gwadar is purely a commercial harbour and so far no foreign warship has entered Gwadar Port. Admiral Zafar Mahmood Abbasi also mentioned that as an ardent supporter of regional peace and collaborative maritime security, Pakistan Navy has planned to conduct Multinational Naval Exercise AMAN-19 wherein around 50 countries are expected to join hands for a common resolve of Together for Peace.
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Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan has written a letter to Indian Prime Minister Narenda Modi and urged New Delhi to resume bilateral dialogue, local media reported on Thursday

MULTAN, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 20th Sep, 2018 ) :District administration has established a control room at Deputy Commissioner Office to monitor security arrangements of different processions.

Deputy Commissioner Mudassar Riaz Malik on Thursday visited the control room and also inspected security cover.

He informed that 97 cameras had been installed at 58 different sites and routes of different processions.

Similarly, mobile cameras have also been linked with monitoring room, said the Deputy Commissioner adding that the processions and majalis are being monitored.
ISLAMABAD, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 19th Sep, 2018 ) :Supreme Court on Wednesday sought report from the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) within 15 days, in connection with the 2,700 property acquired by Pakistanis in the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

A three-judge bench headed by Chief Justice Mian Saqib Nisar passed the directions while hearing the suo motu case on assets owned by Pakistani nationals in foreign countries.

During the course of proceedings, Director General FIA Bashir Memon apprised the bench regarding property in the UAE and asked for a month's time to submit a full report.

Attorney General, informed the court that the United Kingdom and Pakistan had launched a partnership which aimed to track corruption and restart the bilateral transfer of prisoners. He further informed that 44 hawala/hundi businessmen had been arrested and raids were being conducted in Karachi, Lahore, Faisalabad, Multan and various other cities.

The Chief Justice remarked that according to Section 183 of Article 4 of the Constitution, we must take action against money launderers in the public interest.

The top judge instructed AG to submit progress report regarding measures taken to curb smuggling money through the hawala/hundi system.

Meanwhile, addressing the Governor State Bank of Pakistan (SBP) Tariq Bajwa, Justice Nisar said, "We have high hopes from you but we are not receiving the desired results. You will have to present us with a solution."To this Bajwa said, the government was legislating and amending old laws, adding that declarations signed with foreign governments would facilitate in bringing back stolen money from abroad.

According to an information, "Pakistanis have property worth Rs1,000 billion in the UAE a task force can be used to summon all these property holders if the government desires to do so," said Justice Nisar.
Rejecting the proposed National Assembly's Committee on Election rigging, Senators on Wednesday demanded the constitution of a broad based, independent and empowered Parliamentary Commission to probe the alleged rigging in the recent general elections.

ISLAMABAD, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 19th Sep, 2018 ) :Rejecting the proposed National Assembly's Committee on Election rigging, Senators on Wednesday demanded the constitution of a broad based, independent and empowered Parliamentary Commission to probe the alleged rigging in the recent general elections.

Speaking in the Senate, Senator Javed Abbasi expressed reservation over the constitution of NA committee to probe election rigging, he said Senate had demanded the constitution of a Parliamentary Commission to probe the alleged rigging.

Rehman Malik said an identical Senate committee to probe alleged election rigging has already submitted a comprehensive report. The proposed NA committee to probe election rigging should start their workings from where Senate committee had left probe.

He said Pakistan Peoples Party does not want to discard the elections but only want to probe the irregularities.

Lt Gen (Retd) Abdul Qayyum said the probe commission should be authorized to frame its own Terms of References (ToRs) and it should be made fully empowered.

Kulsoom Parveen criticized the interim government for not ensuring transparency in recent general elections. Senator Muhammad Akram demanded re-elections in Balochistan as according to him rigging was reported from all Constituencies of the province.

Mir Kabeer Ahmed Muhammad Shahi criticized the government for what he said artificial austerity measures. Senators should be included in the Parliamentary Commission on equal basis.
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Afghanistan hopes that the Moscow format meeting on the Afghan settlement will be held until the end of the year, but considers quality rather than speed a top priority, deputy presidential special envoy for the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) Mohammed Ibrahim Tamil told Sputnik.

KABUL (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 20th September, 2018) Afghanistan hopes that the Moscow format meeting on the Afghan settlement will be held until the end of the year, but considers quality rather than speed a top priority, deputy presidential special envoy for the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) Mohammed Ibrahim Tamil told Sputnik.

"We hope so, but it is better to hold this meeting more qualitative than faster," Tamil said, when asked whether Kabul expected the Moscow meeting to take place in 2018.
China does not interfere in internal affairs of other sovereign states, Foreign Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang said on Wednesday in response to US President Donald Trump's statements accusing China of attempts to influence the US election through trade tariffs.

BEIJING (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 19th September, 2018) China does not interfere in internal affairs of other sovereign states, Foreign Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang said on Wednesday in response to US President Donald Trump's statements accusing China of attempts to influence the US election through trade tariffs.

Trump said in a statement on Tuesday that China is trying to influence US elections by imposing tariffs that hurt members of his political base, including farmers, ranchers and industrial workers.

"People familiar with China's foreign policy know that China adheres to the principle of non-interference in the internal affairs of other states. We do not want others to interfere in our policy, and do not interfere in the internal affairs of others," Geng said at a briefing.

On Monday, Trump said the United States would impose fresh 10-percent tariffs on $200 billion of Chinese goods starting on September 24. On January 1, the tariffs are expected to rise to 25 percent.

China hit back at the United States with $60 billion of new tariffs, which will also enter into force on September 24.

China-US trade tensions escalated in March after Trump announced import tariffs on steel and aluminum. Since, Washington and Beijing have imposed several rounds of tit-for-tat tariffs, with bilateral trade consultations so far failing to halt the mounting trade war.
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A drought remote monitoring system developed by Chinese researchers has been handed over for service in Mongolia, with a transfer agreement signed.

BEIJING, (APP - UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 20th Sep, 2018 ) :A drought remote monitoring system developed by Chinese researchers has been handed over for service in Mongolia, with a transfer agreement signed.

The drought observation system, known as DroughtWatch-Mongolia, aims to provide real-time and wide-range drought information for disaster prevention and mitigation departments in Mongolia.

The DroughtWatch-Mongolia system covers multiple zones and provides multi-index reports. It overcomes inaccurately describing the occurrence and situation of drought by a single index, according to a source from its developer, the Institute of Aerospace Information Research with the Chinese academy of Sciences.

Before the transfer held Monday, Chinese researchers have conducted rounds of ground monitoring experiments with Mongolian specialists. And the accuracy and monitoring capabilities of DroughtWatch-Mongolia have met the operational requirements after four years of testing.

The DroughtWatch is a global multi-satellite, multi-scale drought monitoring system and has been in service continuously for more than 20 years. It has become the ideal mechanism for drought monitoring recommended by theUN Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific.
Since the late 1990s, its been on the Environmental Protection Agencys watchlist of chronic polluters. General Iron has been the subject of EPA crackdowns three times in the last decade and a half. The latest came in July, when the agency cited General Iron for failing to contain lung-damaging particulate matter within the companys property. The EPA also accused the company of failing to reduce emissions of chemicals and heavy metals linked to birth defects and cancer.
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The German government's approval of arms sales to Saudi Arabia will hinder peace settlement of the conflict in Yemen and trigger continuation of the ongoing war on the Arabian peninsula, Alexander Neu, the Die Linke party spokesman in the Bundestag Defense Committee, told Sputnik on Thursday.

MOSCOW (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 21st September, 2018) The German government's approval of arms sales to Saudi Arabia will hinder peace settlement of the conflict in Yemen and trigger continuation of the ongoing war on the Arabian peninsula, Alexander Neu, the Die Linke party spokesman in the Bundestag Defense Committee, told Sputnik on Thursday.

On Wednesday German Economy Minister Peter Altmeier approved arms sales to Saudi Arabia following previous vows by the ruling coalition to stop arms supplies to the countries involved in the Yemen conflict.

"By continuing to deliver weapons to Saudi Arabia, the German government is prolonging the war and preventing a political solution to the Yemen conflict. In favor of German geopolitical ambitions in the Near and middle East and the German arms industry, human lives are sacrificed in Yemen," Neu said.

According to the lawmaker arms deliveries would cause more destruction in Yemen and more deaths and injuries.

"Another consequence will be more refugees - even if only a few will make it to Europe. In the misery of the Yemenis, the Federal Government is complicit [via] arms deliveries," Neu added.

Neu noted that the German government "produces" masses of refugees by enabling wars, even if not by sending soldiers overseas, but, as in the case of Yemen, through arms exports.

"The federal government is thus involved in the destabilization of the Middle East, whereas the same government sheds crocodile tears about the miserable state of this region at every opportunity," the lawmaker stressed.

Neu stressed that all relevant export permits must be revoked and arms deliveries stopped immediately.

Yemen has been engulfed in an armed conflict between the government forces and the Houthi rebels for several years. The Saudi-led coalition of mostly Persian Gulf nations has been carrying out airstrikes against the Houthis at Hadi's request since March 2015.
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The establishment of a demilitarized zone in the Syrian province of Idlib will not be a roadblock for humanitarian efforts in the region, Bulent Yildirim, president of the IHH Humanitarian Relief Foundation, a Turkish NGO, told Sputnik on Thursday.

MOSCOW (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 20th September, 2018) The establishment of a demilitarized zone in the Syrian province of Idlib will not be a roadblock for humanitarian efforts in the region, Bulent Yildirim, president of the IHH Humanitarian Relief Foundation, a Turkish NGO, told Sputnik on Thursday.

On Monday, Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan agreed to create a demilitarized zone along the contact line of the armed opposition and government troops in Idlib by October 15. Additionally, the defense ministers of the two countries signed a memorandum on stabilizing the situation in the province's de-escalation zone. The decision was made amid rumors about an impending Syrian government offensive in the province.

"We continue to sustain shelter, food, health services, and education in all the regions which could not get enough aid, such as tent cities, camps as well as other areas that receive IDPs [internally displaced persons]. We do not think that establishment of demilitarized zones will constitute an obstacle for humanitarian relief provision," Yildirim said.

He stated that the NGO was in contact with both Turkish and Russian authorities concerning provision of humanitarian aid.

Yildirim also noted that aid workers should be supported by all sides of the Syrian conflict to prevent a humanitarian catastrophe.

"To prevent a humanitarian crisis in conflict zones the work of the humanitarian aid agencies should be allowed. The security of the humanitarian workers should be sustained according to the UN reports. All the related parties should help for the works of humanitarian agencies," Yildirim said.

He added that to improve the humanitarian situation in Syria, security must also be restored outside of Idlib.

"Of course, the precondition for the recovery of the humanitarian situation is not only related with Idlib but also related with making all the Syrian cities into secure places," Yildirim said.

The Syrian civil war has been raging for over seven years, with government forces fighting numerous terror groups and opposition factions. Turkey alongside Iran and Russia are guarantors of the ceasefire in Syria.
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DUSHANBE (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 21st September, 2018) A court in Iraq has sentenced nine Tajik women to 20 years in prison for their involvement in a radical Islamic group, an official at Tajikistan's State Committee for National Security told Sputnik on Thursday.

"These women were convicted by an Iraq court of being members of the banned Islamic State terror organization [outlawed in Russia] and cohabiting with IS militants," the official with the Tajik security and intelligence agency said.

Many of the jailed women have underage children, who are living in a Baghdad orphanage, the official said. He added the kids will be brought to Tajikistan if their mothers consent.

Four of the convicted women are known to Tajik authorities and are wanted at home for being "mercenaries." According to the official, they left for Iraq with their husbands in 2015 and 2016 and joined the IS.
The Norwegian Prime Minister Erna Solberg said on Thursday that Russia could launch cyberattacks against the country during the upcoming NATO Trident Juncture-2018 military exercises.

MURMANSK (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 20th September, 2018) The Norwegian Prime Minister Erna Solberg said on Thursday that Russia could launch cyberattacks against the country during the upcoming NATO Trident Juncture-2018 military exercises.

Norway will hold the exercises between October 25 and November 7, with a total of around 40,000 troops from 31 countries participating in the event.

"We have to take into account the fact that Russia or any other country may want to test us, using fake news and cyberattacks during the autumn NATO exercises," Solberg said as quoted by the NTB news agency.

She added that the country's armed forces and Police Security Service were ready for hybrid actions and called on the citizens to be wary of possible cyberthreats.

In recent years, Russia has been repeatedly accused of carrying out cyberattacks against other countries, including the United States, France, the United Kingdom and Germany, attempting, in particular, to influence the results of elections. Moscow refuted all such claims, calling them unfounded.
Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Belarusian counterpart Alexander Lukashenko will discuss the Eurasian integration and international issues on Friday in Russia's Black Sea resort city of Sochi, the Kremlin press service said on Thursday.

MOSCOW (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 20th September, 2018) Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Belarusian counterpart Alexander Lukashenko will discuss the Eurasian integration and international issues on Friday in Russia's Black Sea resort city of Sochi, the Kremlin press service said on Thursday.

In August, the Belarusian president's press service said that Lukashenko was set to meet with Putin on September 21.

"On September 21, President Vladimir Putin will meet with President of the Republic of Belarus Alexander Lukashenko in Sochi, who will be in Russia on a working visit. During the talks, the key issues of bilateral relations, prospects for promotion of Eurasian integration, as well as current international problems will be discussed," the Kremlin said.

Moreover, the meeting will be devoted to agricultural issues as well as trade and financial cooperation, according to the Belarusian president's press service

Russia and Belarus are long-term partners, both serving as members of the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU) alongside Armenia, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. EAEU encourages regional economic integration through the free movement of goods, services, and people within the union.
Russian upper house speaker Valentina Matviyenko said on Thursday that the desire to leave the Council of Europe was intensifying in Russia.

ST PETERSBURG (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 20th September, 2018) Russian upper house speaker Valentina Matviyenko said on Thursday that the desire to leave the Council of Europe was intensifying in Russia.

"[Thoughts] of leaving the Council of Europe are reaching their boiling point, I say this sincerely. If the Council of Europe accepts this, if it does not value the participation of the Russian Federation, then so be it. Further delaying the pause is meaningless. We have been negotiating for four years, and everything is at a dead point," Matviyenko said during talks with the president of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE), Liliane Maury Pasquier.

Relations between Moscow and the Council of Europe deteriorated after PACE deprived the Russian delegation of its voting rights in the wake of Crimea's reunification with Russia in 2014, which has not been recognized by the West.

On September 11, Russian State Duma international affairs committee chairman Leonid Slutsky said Russia could return to PACE and send an application with the delegation list in January 2019 if the organization amended its regulations to repeal sanctions on national delegations.
The Russian Defense Ministry refutes speculations about the Identification Friend or Foe (IFF) system's failure being a reason behind the crash of Il-20 jet in Syria, ministry spokesman Maj. Gen. Igor Konashenkov said on Tuesday.

MOSCOW (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 20th September, 2018) The Russian Defense Ministry refutes speculations about the Identification Friend or Foe (IFF) system's failure being a reason behind the crash of Il-20 jet in Syria, ministry spokesman Maj. Gen. Igor Konashenkov said on Tuesday.

"All assumptions made by pseudo experts regarding a failure of the Identification Friend or Foe system allegedly being the cause of the Il-20 crash are simply amateurish fantasies," Konashenkov told reporters.

The spokesman stressed that each state had its own IFF system, and Russia had never installed identification software on military equipment exported abroad.

"The Identification Friend or Foe system used by the Russian Federation unites aircraft and air defense systems only owned by Russia. There have never been any precedents of transferring such a system together with Russian identification codes to another state, it is generally impossible," Konashenkov said.
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The Russian Foreign Ministry is closely working with the United States on withdrawal of refugees from the Syrian Rukban camp to the territory controlled by the Syrian government, Nikolai Burtsev, a representative of the Russian Foreign Ministry, said at a meeting of interdepartmental headquarters of Russia and Syria on the return of refugees.

MOSCOW (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 20th September, 2018) The Russian Foreign Ministry is closely working with the United States on withdrawal of refugees from the Syrian Rukban camp to the territory controlled by the Syrian government, Nikolai Burtsev, a representative of the Russian Foreign Ministry, said at a meeting of interdepartmental headquarters of Russia and Syria on the return of refugees.

"The US side proposes to resolve the problem of Rukban through the evacuation of refugees in the territory controlled by the Syrian government. Details of the possible operation have not been coordinated yet. We will continue to work closely with the United States to resolve this issue," Burtsev said.

According to Burtsev, preparations are also underway for providing access to UN humanitarian convoys from the territory controlled by the Syrian government, which informed the Russian embassy in Damascus about agreement to authorize the convoy's passage.

"The Jordanians link the final solution to the camp problem with the opening of the Nasib border crossing on the Syrian border and providing full freedom for the mass return of Syrian refugees. The Jordanian side calls for starting with providing [camp] residents with all kinds of humanitarian assistance from the Syrian side," the representative added.

The Rukban refugee camp is located in Syria's At Tanf district (Homs province) near the Jordanian border, next to a US military base where Syrian opposition forces are being trained. The situation in the camp has long been critical due to US troops resisting attempts to deliver humanitarian aid to the refugees, and the presence of Islamic State (IS, banned in Russia) militants in the area.
Russian Foreign Ministry is closely working with the United States on withdrawal of refugees from the Syrian Rukban camp to the territory controlled by the Syrian government, Nikolai Burtsev, a representative of the Russian Foreign Ministry, said at a meeting of interdepartmental headquarters of Russia and Syria on the return of refugees.

MOSCOW (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 20th September, 2018) The Russian Foreign Ministry is closely working with the United States on withdrawal of refugees from the Syrian Rukban camp to the territory controlled by the Syrian government, Nikolai Burtsev, a representative of the Russian Foreign Ministry, said at a meeting of interdepartmental headquarters of Russia and Syria on the return of refugees.

"The US side proposes to resolve the problem of Rukban through the evacuation of refugees in the territory controlled by the Syrian government. Details of the possible operation have not been coordinated yet. We will continue to work closely with the United States to resolve this issue," Burtsev said.

According to Burtsev, preparations are also underway for providing access to UN humanitarian convoys from the territory controlled by the Syrian government, which informed the Russian embassy in Damascus about agreement to authorize the convoy's passage.

"The Jordanians link the final solution to the camp problem with the opening of the Nasib border crossing on the Syrian border and providing full freedom for the mass return of Syrian refugees. The Jordanian side calls for starting with providing [camp] residents with all kinds of humanitarian assistance from the Syrian side," the representative added.

The Rukban refugee camp is located in Syria's At Tanf district (Homs province) near the Jordanian border, next to a US military base where Syrian opposition forces are being trained.

The situation in the camp has long been critical due to US troops resisting attempts to deliver humanitarian aid to the refugees, and the presence of Islamic State (IS, banned in Russia) militants in the area.

Burtsev added that the Russian Foreign Ministry has focused on negotiations with the leadership of countries hosting the biggest number Syrian refugees Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan for return to their homeland.

"Russian diplomatic institutions and missions continue to work actively to mobilize international efforts to facilitate the return of Syrian refugees to their homeland. The work is focused is on collaboration with the leadership of the countries hosting the largest number of refugees Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan," the diplomat said.

According to him, representatives of the Russian embassy in Beirut have learned from the Lebanese leadership about a decision to form the Lebanese part of the operational headquarters for relocation of refugees to Syria, which will include representatives of the government, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Interior Ministry and the Ministry of Defense.

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 international community has taken efforts to settle the conflict by conducting political settlement talks in Geneva and reconciliation negotiations in Astana.
MOSCOW (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 21st September, 2018) Two Russian Tu-160 strategic bombers have conducted scheduled flights over neutral waters of the Arctic Ocean, the Russian Defense Ministry said late on Thursday.

"Two strategic Tu-160 bombers carried out a planned flight over the neutral waters of the basins of the Barents, Norwegian and Northern seas.

Aviation support for the long-range aircraft was provided by the crews of MiG-31 fighters," the statement read.

The flight's duration was more than 14 hours, according to the ministry.

"At separate stages of the route, Russian aircraft were shadowed by Eurofighter Typhoon and F-16 fighters of the Royal Air Force," the ministry noted.

The flights of the Russian planes are carried out in full compliance with the international law without violating any third country's airspace, according to the ministry.
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The Syrian Arab Red Crescent (SARC) delivered on Thursday 17 trucks with humanitarian cargo to the Syrian province of Daraa, the charity organization said on its Twitter blog.

DAMASCUS (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 20th September, 2018) The Syrian Arab Red Crescent (SARC) delivered on Thursday 17 trucks with humanitarian cargo to the Syrian province of Daraa, the charity organization said on its Twitter blog.

"#Breaking: @SYRedCrescent dispatched a #humanitarian #aid convoy (17 trucks) loaded with 3500 food parcels and 3500 flour bags provided by @WFP, headed to Eastern Rural of #Daraa, #Syria," the SARC wrote in a tweet.

In late July, the Syrian Army concluded an operation to liberate the province of Daraa from terrorists, with the neighboring provinces of As-Suwayda and Quneitra also being controlled by the Syrian government forces.

The majority of cities and settlements as well as the entire region bordering Jordan with Israel-occupied Golan Heights fell under the control of the Syrian army without fighting.

Thanks to the Russian servicemen's diplomatic efforts the militants of illegal armed groups in Syria laid down their arms, received amnesty and defected to the Syrian forces. Radical militants who rejected the truce were transported to the province of Idlib along with their family members.
Taliban representatives are ready to participate in the Moscow format meeting on Afghanistan, discussions are underway regarding the details of the upcoming talks, Russian Foreign Ministry's Second Asian Department Director Zamir Kabulov told Sputnik.

MOSCOW (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 19th September, 2018) Taliban representatives are ready to participate in the Moscow format meeting on Afghanistan, discussions are underway regarding the details of the upcoming talks, Russian Foreign Ministry's Second Asian Department Director Zamir Kabulov told Sputnik.

"No, they did not," Kabulov said, when asked whether the Taliban representatives changed their mind and refused to partake in the meeting.

The official noted that the Thursday talks with Kabul's delegation would address the details related to holding the Moscow format meeting on Afghanistan.

"Details related to holding the Moscow format meeting, postponed at the request of the Afghan side, will be discussed," Kabulov said.
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Iran's permanent mission to the United Nations sent a letter to the UN Security Council and secretary-general asking them to condemn Israeli threats and supervise its nuclear program, local media reported on Thursday.

MOSCOW (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 20th September, 2018) Iran's permanent mission to the United Nations sent a letter to the UN Security Council and secretary-general asking them to condemn Israeli threats and supervise its nuclear program, local media reported on Thursday.

Speaking at the renaming ceremony of the Negev Nuclear Research Center in the Israeli city of Dimona in late August, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that "whoever threatens us with our demise puts himself in similar danger."

Iran perceived Netanyahu's words as "a serious threat to international security and peace" and called on the international community to take a strong stand against this statement.

Tehran urged the United Nations to make Israel sign the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons and place the Israeli nuclear program under supervision of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the Tasnim news agency reported.

Netanyahu said in late April that Israel had obtained "secret files" which as he said proved that Iran ran a secret program to build nuclear weapons. Tehran responded by calling Netanyahu an "infamous liar."
At least 58 people were killed during a weekend of ethnic violence in Ethiopia's capital, an Amnesty International researcher told AFP on Wednesday, citing a figure more than double the government estimate of 23 dead.

Addis Ababa,(APP - UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 19th Sep, 2018 ) :At least 58 people were killed during a weekend of ethnic violence in Ethiopia's capital, an Amnesty International researcher told AFP on Wednesday, citing a figure more than double the government estimate of 23 dead.

Another source involved in the investigation, who saw and counted the corpses, told AFP a total of 65 people had been killed, mostly in the city's western suburbs.

"The 65 cases are from Burayu, Ashewa Meda, Kolfe and Kirkos," said the source on condition of anonymity, referring to three western areas and one in the centre.

The victims were either stabbed or died after being beaten with sticks and rocks. None had been shot and the toll does not include five alleged looters killed by police on Monday.

Fisseha Tekle, a Nairobi-based researcher with Amnesty International, said he had compiled a similar tally of 58 dead.

Residents told Amnesty International they saw "eight dead bodies on Friday, 21 on Saturday, on Sunday they saw about 11 people and on Monday the number of dead bodies they've seen were 18," Fisseha said.

Government spokesmen could not immediately be reached for comment.

The violence began last week in the run-up to Saturday's return of the once-bannedOromo Liberation Front, a rebel group that returned to Ethiopia following political reforms introducedby Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed.
The tragedy with Russia's Il-20 military aircraft shot down in Syria will require additional investigations and explanations from Israel, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said Thursday.

ST. PETERSBURG (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 20th September, 2018) The tragedy with Russia's Il-20 military aircraft shot down in Syria will require additional investigations and explanations from Israel, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said Thursday.

The Russian Defense Ministry said contact with Russia's Il-20 returning to the Hmeimim airbase was lost late on September 17. The ministry said that around that time four Israeli F-16 fighters attacked Syrian targets in Latakia. It said that Israeli pilots put the Russian aircraft under the attack of Syria's air defenses, and the Il-20 was shot down by an S-200 missile. Fifteen Russian servicemen were killed.

The Defense Ministry said Israeli aircraft deliberately created a dangerous situation in Latakia.

Israel had not warned the command of the Russian group of troops in Syria about the planned operation in the area. The Russian military said it regards Israel's provocative actions as hostile and reserves the right to a proper response.

"The tragedy that took place on September 17 will require additional investigations and explanations from the Israeli side, and I am confident that they will follow in the very near future," Zakharova said at a briefing.

"For my part, I believe that the Israeli pilots, as a result of whose actions a threat was created and the Russian aircraft was destroyed, acted at least unprofessionally," she said.
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WASHINGTON (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 21st September, 2018) US President Donald Trump, who will chair a UN Security Council meeting next week on Iran and other nations with weapons of mass destruction (WMD), would consider accepting an Iranian invitation for a bilateral meeting with President Hassan Rouhani, US Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley said in a briefing on Thursday.

"Certainly, if Rouhani requested a meeting, that would be for the president to decide whether he wants to do that," Haley told reporters.

Haley explained that the agenda for Wednesday's meeting, which was originally intended to focus on Iran's involvement in a number of global hot spots, has since been broadened to focus on multiple WMD nations such as Iran, North Korea and Syria.

Trump will host the UN Security Council on Wednesday, during a week of meetings marking 73rd session of the United Nations General Assembly. The session begins on Tuesday and runs for nine days.
UK Brexit Secretary Dominic Raab has urged the Labour party to clarify its stance on the withdrawal from the European Union and noted that the government will not hold a second referendum on the issue after the Labour party pledged to vote against Brexit agreement, the Sky News media outlet reported on Wednesday.

MOSCOW (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 19th September, 2018) UK Brexit Secretary Dominic Raab has urged the Labour party to clarify its stance on the withdrawal from the European Union and noted that the government will not hold a second referendum on the issue after the Labour party pledged to vote against Brexit agreement, the Sky news media outlet reported on Wednesday.

"I am writing to you to seek urgent clarification on Labour's Brexit policy, following development over the weekend which suggest your party is moving towards a position of suspending Article 50 and delaying Brexit to hold a second referendum ... The government has made clear that we will not hold a second referendum," Raab's letter to Shadow Brexit Secretary Keir Starmer, obtained by the media outlet, read.

UK Shadow Foreign Secretary Emily Thornberry of the Labour party said Friday that the party would vote against the Brexit deal when it would be proposed by the Conservative government.
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Michael Spurr, the chief executive of the UK Prison and Probation Service, will resign in spring 2019, the UK Justice Ministry said in a press release on Thursday, just a week after a strike of prison officers in England and Wales.

LONDON (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 20th September, 2018) Michael Spurr, the chief executive of the UK Prison and Probation Service, will resign in spring 2019, the UK Justice Ministry said in a press release on Thursday, just a week after a strike of prison officers in England and Wales.

On Friday, 5,000 jail staff in England and Wales held a protest action organized by the UK Prison Officers Association to draw the attention of the country's authorities to such issues as overcrowding, high level of violence and poor safety in prisons. The UK government sought a restraining order against the holding of the mass action, which eventually took place and lasted for a few hours.

"Michael Spurr will be leaving his role as Chief Executive of Her Majesty's Prison and Probation Service at the end of March 2019, after 35 years in the service and nearly 9 years leading it," the press release said.

The formal procedure to choose Spurr's successor will begin in October, the UK Justice Ministry added.

Following the election of the successor, Spurr is expected to work in a team that will manage the transfer of competence to the new chief executive.
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MOSCOW (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 20th September, 2018) The United Nations does not plan to interfere in the process of talks between the United States and North Korea with any parallel initiatives, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said.

"There is a central issue which is the negotiation between the US and North Korea ... We are ready to support [the talks], we believe that the two parties need to define how the verification of denuclearization is to be established, it's a complex issue. Based on what the two parties will agree, we are ready to do our role. What we are not going to do is to interfere in the negotiations or to come with parallel initiatives that might complicate things," Guterres said in a Wednesday interview with the CNN broadcaster, when asked if he was aware of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un's invitation for international observers to monitor the dismantling of the country's nuclear weapons sites.

Guterres added UN observers had not yet been invited to participate in this process.

Pyongyang and Washington have for years faced confrontation over the North Korean nuclear weapons program and the US military buildup on the Korean Peninsula.

However, the relations between the two states have seen a rapprochement recently. In June, US President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un held a landmark summit in Singapore. During the high-level talks, North Korea expressed its commitment to abandon its nuclear weapons program, while the United States pledged to provide security guarantees to Pyongyang.

On Wednesday, UK State Secretary Mike Pompeo said Washington was ready to immediately engage in talks to transform its bilateral relations with Pyongyang.
The United Nations is preparing to send a humanitarian convoy to the Syrian provinces of Daraa, Quneitra and Suwayda from Jordan, Russia's National Defense Control Center head Col. Gen. Mikhail Mizintsev said on Thursday.

MOSCOW (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 20th September, 2018) The United Nations is preparing to send a humanitarian convoy to the Syrian provinces of Daraa, Quneitra and Suwayda from Jordan, Russia's National Defense Control Center head Col. Gen. Mikhail Mizintsev said on Thursday.

"International humanitarian organizations continue working to create decent living conditions for the local population. The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs [OCHA] jointly with the Jordanian side is currently preparing to send a big humanitarian convoy from Jordan to Syria about 600 vehicles carrying food and medicines," Mizintsev said at a meeting of interdepartmental headquarters of Russia and Syria on the return of refugees.

According to Mizintsev, the leadership of Lebanon is also intensifying efforts to return Syrian citizens to their homeland.

Syria has been torn by civil war since 2011, with the government fighting numerous opposition groups and terrorist organizations. Russia is assisting the country in returning to peaceful life, being a guarantor of the ceasefire regime and having announced in late July the creation of a refugee center in Syria that will receive, relocate and accommodate civilians returning home.

More than 5.6 million people have fled Syria and over 6.6 million have been internally displaced since the start of the conflict in Syria in 2011, the United Nations said.
A strong cold front will sweep in from the northwest, passing over our area late at night and early Friday morning, bringing with it an abrupt turnaround in temperatures and humidity. A cool, dry Canadian-source high pressure will follow, with winds shifting to the northeast. Highest temperatures Friday will probably occur early in the day, with readings likely in the 60s areawide during the afternoon.
Published: September 13, 2018

UT Joins Jed Campus to Support Student Mental Health

The University of Tampa is launching a four-year partnership with The Jed Foundation (JED), a leading nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting emotional health and preventing suicide among young adults. By becoming a JED Campus, UT hopes to prevent the two leading causes of death in young adults  unintentional injuries, including those caused by prescription drug overdoses or alcohol poisoning, and suicide.



We are committed to helping our students work toward their potential. We also recognize that mental health needs are directly related to academic success, as students need to be well in order to do well, said Gina Firth, UTs associate dean of wellness. Our partnership with JED comes at a very important time when mental health and substance abuse issues are increasing on a national level. We want to make sure we are providing all of the necessary support for our students well-being.



As a member of the program, UT will work to assess and enhance the policies, programming, services and outreach aimed at supporting students emotional well-being and preventing suicide and substance abuse. The multi-year strategic collaboration not only assesses and enhances the work that is already being done, but helps create positive, lasting, systemic change in the campus community. JED Campus provides UT with a framework for supporting student mental health, as well as assessment tools, feedback reports and ongoing technical assistance from the JED Campus team of clinicians.



UT is the first JED Campus in Florida. Other JED Campuses include Elon University, Davidson College, Boston University, Princeton University and Michigan State University.



According to the National College Health Assessment, more than half of college students experienced "overwhelming anxiety" at some point in the past year, 32 percent reported feeling "so depressed that it was difficult to function" and 8 percent reported seriously considering suicide.



The JED Campus process utilizes the Healthy Minds Study assessment that will survey UTs approximately 9,200 students on things like their mental health status, resiliency and coping strategies, as well as the campus culture and climate. In addition, the study will include questions to identify the climate for diversity and inclusion.



Given that emotional well-being is central to student success, JEDs approach emphasizes that students mental health must be a campus-wide responsibility involving departments and stakeholders across campus. As a JED Campus, UT has created an interdisciplinary team consisting of senior administration, faculty, students, student affairs professionals, Campus Safety and others to work on campus-wide strategies.



This fall, UT will conduct the Healthy Minds Study with the entire student population to gather data on different areas, such as resiliency and coping patterns, mental health status and help-seeking behavior. In addition, a self-study will be conducted to gather UT-specific information, which will be gathered together in a comprehensive report by JED Campus to guide the strategic planning.



We have many excellent programs and offerings at UT, but this will give us the opportunity to do a deep dive to see what is working and what we may need to add to support our student needs, Firth said.



Advisers from JED will visit UT to meet with students, faculty and staff, and will assist with strategic planning and implementation. At the end of the program, the initial assessments will be performed again to assess and measure change.



The college years are the age when many mental health issues first manifest, and it can be a time of significant stress and pressure, said John MacPhee, executive director of JED. We believe that the implementation of a campus-wide approach to mental health will lead to safer, healthier communities, and likely greater student retention.


Rubber will be flying and engines revving when the Late Model Truck Series takes to The Bullring at Las Vegas Motor Speedway on Saturday night, Sept. 22, 2018.

The series  which has a long history in short track racing in the southwest  is set for a 35-lap feature at the 3/8-mile Las Vegas oval as part of Pack the Track Night presented by K&N Air Filters. The trucks feature is one of 10 races scheduled at The Bullring on Richmond Gear Weekend Warrior Night for the regional series.

Gary Wyatt and I look forward to this weekends Pack the Track Night at The Bullring, said series organizer Michael Riefler, a longtime Bullring competitor. Were excited to be back in Vegas for another great night of racing as we show fans what these trucks can do. Its going to be a blast!

The race winner and runner-up will receive $200 Richmond Gear product bonuses in addition to the payouts, and the top five finishers will take home The Racers Rewards Contingency Connection coupon books with up to $3,000 in race product coupons. Gates open at 5 p.m. PT, and racing starts at 7.

LMTS drivers also can choose to participate in three practices on Friday night  at 7, 8 and 9:20  and those sessions are free and open to the public. Saturdays action also includes a pair of six-lap LMTS heat races prior to opening ceremonies.

The LMTS will compete at everything from 1/4-mile short tracks to 1/2-mile ovals, as well as 1.7-mile and 2.1-mile road courses this season. After Saturday, the series moves on to The Speedway at Willow Springs International Raceway in Rosamond, Calif., on Oct. 13, and then travels to Havasu 95 Speedway in Lake Havasu City, Ariz., on Nov. 10.

The regions truck racing lineage dates back to the Speed Truck Series that originated in 1997 under the American Speed Association (ASA). MechanixWear gloves and Go Fast! energy drinks sponsored the class throughout the years, and the trucks raced at up to 10 different tracks in California, Arizona and Nevada before the ASA disbanded in 2013.

The series trucks will feature a full-tube chassis, a 330-horsepower sealed V-8 spec engine and two-speed direct-drive transmission, with a clutch pedal dump valve, coupled to an aluminum quick-change rear end. The trucks sport replica fiberglass bodies of the Chevrolet S-10, Chevrolet Colorado, Dodge Dakota, Ford Ranger and Toyota Tacoma.

Series partners include the On Wheels Now online radio show  the longest-running motorsports radio show in Las Vegas  Melling Performance Racing, The Bomber Nation, KO Mechanical Services, Garys Trailer Repair, Nevada Pic-A-Part, The Racers Rewards Contingency Connection, Richmond Gear and ReliableBanner.com.
Downtown Denpasar, Bali

Colorful movie billboards on Denpasar street, Bali

Beach near Ende, Flores island

Beach, Ende, Flores island

Ende, Flores island

Fish trap near Flores island

Flores boy with manta ray

Girls on ship near Timor

Harbor near Kupang

Local kids, Ende, Flores island

Local people on Flores island

Makasar sailboat near Sumbawa

Market kids, Ende, Flores island

Palm climber, Flores island

Street scene, Ende, Flores island

Lombok gathering

Lombok girl

People at market, Lombok island

Young mother on Lombok island

A mother leads her young daughter by the hand across a levy that spans a stream inland from Tanah Lot

Bali beach and boathouses

Bali rice tending

Bali rice tending

Bali rural road

Balinese children at their favorite swimming hole

Balinese dance

Balinese dancer performing a Hindu story

Balinese fisherman in traditional sailing vessel drags a line off the coast of Bali

Balinese procession

Balinese woman on her way to market with a large load of pottery

Balinese woman taking a swordfish to market

Close-up of pretty Balinese dancer at Kuta Beach

Colorful costume worn by a dancer performing a traditional dance at Kuta Beach

Hawkers and vendors are aggressive at the look-out over Lake Batur, the lake is in the large crater of volcano Mount Batur

Tanah Lot Temple, Bali

Tilling the mud to plant rice on Bali

Traditional Balinese dance at Kuta Beach

Traditional sailing vessel off the coast of Bali

Vendor and baskets on a sidestreet at Kuta Beach, Bali

Bali street market near Kuta Beach

Balinese market on Jalan Legian

Balinese woman carrying not one but two swordfishes on her head to a market near Kuta one morning

Balinese women at a street market

Market activity, Kuta Beach, Bali

Various fruit and vegetables for sale at a Balinese street market

Indonesia is a sovereign state in Southeast Asia, between the Indian and Pacific oceans. It is the world's largest island country, with more than thirteen thousand islands, the 14th largest by land area and the 7th largest in combined sea and land area. It is the world's 4th most populous country as well as the most populous Muslim-majority country. Java, the world's most populous island, contains more than half of the country's population.The capital of Indonesia is Jakarta, which is the second most populous urban area in the world. The country shares land borders with Papua New Guinea, East Timor, and the eastern part of Malaysia. Other neighbouring countries include Singapore, Vietnam, the Philippines, Australia, Palau, and India's Andaman and Nicobar Islands.These beautiful pictures were taken by Canadian traveler Blake Smith that captured everyday life of Indonesia when he made a trip from Timor to Java in 1975.
Until a decade ago, the indigenous minority Suoy villagers in Trapaing Chour Commune eked out a living by working their paddies and practicing rotational farming in the forests among the foothills of Phnom Aural, Cambodias highest mountain.

The Suoy relied on ancestral community land that the government reserved for them within Phnom Aural Wildlife Sanctuary, located in Kampong Speu Provinces Aural District in southwestern Cambodia.

In 2009, however, the estimated 1,300-member Suoy community - the last of its kind in the country - was dealt a sudden blow when the government granted HLH Agriculture Company Ltd. a 10,000-hectare economic land concession that covered swathes of the sanctuary and, according to villagers, some 2,000 hectares of community land.

The villagers were offered no compensation and many have since struggled to cope with the resulting loss of livelihoods; some have protested in vain for years to reclaim the land.

In the run-up to the recent national elections, the villagers briefly gained hope when local officials of the long-ruling Cambodian Peoples Party (CPP) promised to resolve the dispute if they supported the party at the polls.

Election promises

They said that after elections the land dispute would be solved, according to Tuon Seoun, 55, who lost access to 20 hectares of communal land after the company arrived and has had to sell all his cattle to survive.

Prum Sothy, who lives in a part of Trapaing Chour where some 3,000 mostly Khmer farmers lost land to another company a decade ago, said similar promises were made there.

Commune and district authorities met with villagers and told them to vote for CPP and then there will be solutions, said Prum Sothy, who lost 10 hectares of mango, durian and orange trees when Phnom Penh Sugar Company of tycoon and CPP senator Ly Yong Phat was granted a 9,000-hectare concession.

Now, more than a month after the elections - which the CPP won amid widespread international condemnation over the lack of a free and fair vote - the villagers are wondering if officials will follow through on their promises.

I went to meet them [on August 4] and they said they would solve it after a new government was formed, Tuon Seoun said.

He showed a VOA reporter a recent WhatsApp message from Kampong Speu Provincial Governor Vy Samnang which said: Dont worry, we will redouble our work to help you since all people voted to support CPP.

If there is no solution I will hold more protests, said Tuon Seoun, who has organized many public protests at both provincial offices and national level authorities over the years.

Prum Sothy, who represents a group of affected farmers, had little hope that the election promises would turn into action, adding, Its lies and more lies.

These promises are not genuine

Vann Sophat, a land rights coordinator at the Cambodian Center for Human Rights, said CPP officials across the country often promise local communities resolutions to the land disputes ahead of the polls.

We received information from communities that there were pledges (ahead of recent elections) to solve their land disputes. Land disputes are an issue that politicians can keep as a hostage.

But it seems these promises are not genuine, he said, adding that disputes are rarely resolved as they are often complicated and resolutions require high-level government support and cooperation from the businessmen involved.

Large-scale land grabs by politically well-connected local and international companies have become rampant in Cambodia since the early 2000s, often causing deforestation and heavy social impacts on countless rural communities, most of which rely on subsistence agriculture and local natural resources.

According to documentation by local human rights group Licadho, some 2.14 million hectares of land - or around 12 percent of Cambodias total geographical area - has been given to companies in 275 land concessions.

Rights groups have long complained that Prime Minister Hun Sens government fails to protect or compensate affected communities in line with Cambodian laws, nor does it publicly disclose to whom and how land concessions are granted.

Hun Sens government never attempted to restore a land tenure registration system that was destroyed by the Khmer Rouge regime.

Hun Sen regrets unpopular land grabs

Resistance by local communities and activists against land grabs has been building for many years. The issue was seen by many observers as contributing to a sharp drop in the CPPs popularity in the 2013 national elections when the party narrowly avoided defeat to the Cambodian National Rescue Party (CNRP) in a disputed poll result.

The CNRP has promised voters that it would address land disputes and related issues such as rule of law and government corruption.

In Trapaing Chour, former CNRP Deputy Commune Chief Vorn Lang said he believed his party did well in the 2017 Commune Elections because of local discontent over unresolved land disputes.

CPP Commune Chief Touch Nem acknowledged the disputes had dented his partys popularity, though he insisted that affected villagers could find alternative income as laborers for the sugar and cassava companies that seized their lands.

Ahead of this years election, the CPP government banned the CNRP, arrested its leader Kem Sokha, and launched a crackdown on independent media and civil society. CPP officials at local and national levels sought to persuade voters to turn up and support the party through a mix of promises and threats.

With its main challenger banned, the CPP won all 125 National Assembly seats in the July 29 vote. After a government was formed, authorities released Kem Sokha on Sept. 10. A well-known land rights activist, Tep Vanny, was also released recently along with several other political prisoners.

CPP spokesman Sok Eysan told VOA Khmer that the party knows land disputes are affecting its popularity, but he claimed it has solved hundreds of thousands of land disputes, causing the number of disputes to go down.

Prime Minister Hun Sen, in rare, extensive remarks on the issue published recently by VOA, said he regretted not tackling the issue earlier.

My regret is the lateness of land reform. And solving land disputes. [W]e should have given land titles to the people more speedily, but we delayed for 10 years giving land titles to the people, he told American filmmaker Robert H. Lieberman in an interview for the 2016 documentary 'Angkor Awakens.

VOA obtained the raw, unaired footage from the filmmaker.

In 2012, Hun Sen publicly set a moratorium on new land concessions and announced a land-titling program in his own name run by students who were to resolve land disputes. But rights groups like Licadho said that in practice new land grabs continue and old disputes remain unresolved.

Well-connected company

In Trapaing Chour, CPP Commune Chief Touch Nem said authorities would find solutions for affected villagers. We will help them as promised [before the polls] but I dont know when the land dispute will be solved; it depends on the higher officials from the Ministry of Land Management, he said.

If the history of government responses are anything to go by, the prospects for solutions to the disputes in Trapaing Chour remain slim, in particular, because HLH Agriculture Company Ltd. is reportedly connected to the highest levels of government.

According to London-based natural resource watchdog Global Witness, Prime Minister Hun Sens younger sister Hun Seng Ny is linked to the company. She reportedly visited in 2010 and 2012 to meet with local officials and villagers, according to media reports at the time which cited rights group Licadho, but no resolution or compensation has been offered to the villagers.

Those affected by the land grab life will likely continue to struggle to make ends meet.

This was my land, said villager Nhoung Chhum, 45, while gesturing to part of HLHs vast plantation.

Since he lost it, he said, his eight-member family has fallen into poverty, forcing him and his oldest son to take up work as day laborers for the company or as migrant workers in Thailand. His three daughters went to work at a garment factory on the outskirts of Phnom Penh, while another two children are still in school.

Nhoung Chhum has bitterly accepted the paltry $7.50 in daily wages that the company pays him to tend to the cassava crop growing where he and his fellow Suoy villagers once farmed.

If I dont work as day laborer how can I support my life? It is miserable a situation because I lost my land to the company, he said
Cambodia has offered its congratulations to the Korean nations after they agreed to a historic deal that would allow international nuclear inspectors to observe the dismantling of facilities key to Pyongyangs nuclear program.

Kim Jong Un, the North Korean leader, said on Wednesday that he had agreed to let international inspectors observe the process.

South Koreas President Moon Jae-in said at a joint press conference that the move heralded the end of a long state of war on the Korean peninsula.

A second round of inter-Korea talks wrapped up on Wednesday with the signing of the September Pyongyang Declaration and a comprehensive military agreement.

The latter document outlined several steps to ease military tensions.

The joint announcement on Wednesday marked the end of scheduled talks between the two states.

Phay Siphan, Cambodian government spokesman, said Phnom Penh, welcomed the successful conclusion of the meeting.

Cambodia believes that the dialogue between the two countries is the foundation of ensuring and establishing the confidence and trust as well as the support of many partners. Peace is the foundation and its also the desire of all human kind, which Cambodia highly values and consistently practices, he said.

Cambodia is a signatory to the treaty and international convention as well as regional convention in opposing the production, usage, storage, and trafficking of nuclear weapons, chemical weapons and relevant weapons, he added.

Chheang Vannarith, a regional analyst, said he was optimistic that the talks had improved the security situation in the region.

It was positive and strategic trust has been improved. Cambodia has been advocating for a peaceful and nuclear-free Korean peninsular.

Kim Jong-un agreed during the talks to permanently dismantle missile test facilities at Dongchang-ri under the observation of international inspectors. He also expressed an intent to dismantle the Yongbyon nuclear test site, although that would be contingent on the United States taking corresponding actions.
Chinese President Xi Jinping and his wife Peng Liyuan on Wednesday visited Cambodian King Norodom Sihamoni and Queen Mother Norodom Monineath Sihanouk, according to Chinese state media.

Xi wished the royal family well and told them China had a special relationship with Cambodia characterized by deep historical connections, Xinhua reported.

Cambodia and China established diplomatic ties some 60 years ago, cultivated in large part by the late King Norodom Sihanouk.

Applauding the Cambodian royals contribution to bilateral relations, Xi said Chinas friendship with the Cambodian royal family was strong.

He called for more interactions between the Chinese leadership and the royal family as well as people-to-people interactions like close relatives.

Xi also congratulated Cambodia on a successful election and said the countries would work together to grow the friendship in the future.

King Sihamoni and Queen Mother Monineath told Xi they were grateful for Chinas long-lasting support of Cambodia, according to Xinhua.

Lao Mong Hay, a veteran political analyst, said the meeting may be unprecedented.

I have never seen a visit like this before, he said.  The visit will relate to the strengthening of the monarchys power in Cambodia.

Chheang Vannarith, a regional analyst, said the diplomatic gesture reasserts traditional friendship as well as strong Chinas support of the new government in Phnom Penh.
Prime Minister Hun Sen has rejected criticism of his governments legitimacy and speculation that Cambodias seat at the United Nations could be suspended over the countrys move to one-party politics.

During a meeting with factory workers in Kampong Speu province on Wednesday, he said that Cambodia was sovereign and independent and would not bow to international pressure over its rights record.

Cambodia is a sovereign state ... please do not be confused. I want to stress that Cambodia will hold commune elections in 2022 and a national election in 2023, he said, adding that the international community should not wait for the resurrection of the dead, a reference to the banned opposition Cambodia National Rescue Party.

The CNRP was outlawed in November and its leader, Kem Sokha, jailed on treason charges, ahead of the general election in July, prompting sharp criticism from the international community.

I do not bow down to anyone, Hun Sen continued. If we agree, we work together. If we dont agree, leave. Suspend us. It does not make any sense to keep talking.

The speech came after several CNRP members now living overseas suggested that Cambodia could be suspended from UN membership.

Lao Mong Hay, an independent political analyst, said the remarks were a defense mechanism of the prime minister, adding that the government should seek a dialogue with the international community.

The first embarrassment is when one country, one government, does is not representative, he said.

Last week, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet told the UN that the decline in civil and political rights in Cambodia posed an economic and social threat to the countrys development.

The European Parliament on Thursday voted in favor of a resolution calling for political freedoms in Cambodia and further sanctions against Hun Sens government if the charges against Sokha, who was recently released and placed under house arrest, were not dropped.
The Cambodian parliament on Wednesday officially swore in some 38 newly elected lawmakers after they resigned from the Senate in order to maintain their government positions.

Heng Samrin, the National Assembly president, signed a letter authorizing their membership of the legislature.

The 38 ruling Cambodian Peoples Party members represent 15 constituencies in Battambang, Kampong Cham, Kampong Chhnang, Kampong Speu, Kampong Thom, Kandal, Phnom Penh, Prey Veng, Pursat, Preah Sihanouk, Takeo, Kep, Oddar Meanchey and Tbong Khmum provinces.

The decision came after Prime Minister Hun Sen on September 6 ordered lawmakers who held other government positions to resign from their non-parliamentary posts.

Since 1993, Cambodia has held six general elections, but this is the first time since the UN-administered 1993 election that the Cambodian parliament has hosted only one party.

The CPP won all 125 seats in the National Assembly in July after it oversaw the banning of the countrys main opposition party, the Cambodia National Rescue Party, and the jailing of its leader, Kem Sokha.
U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has welcomed the "important commitments" made by North Korean leader Kim Jong Un at a summit with his South Korean counterpart this week. North Korea announced it would disassemble the complex if the United States takes "corresponding measures" under a comprehensive agreement reached by the leaders of the two rival Koreas.
European Union leaders have gathered in Salzburg, Austria, for an informal discussion of key issues, including the terms of Britain's withdrawal from the bloc. Britain's conservative government has lost a majority and with it the mandate for a so-called "hard Brexit," in which Britain would leave the EU's single market and customs union. It is now seeking a compromise. VOA's Zlatica Hoke reports.
Aurora police Special Operations investigators noticed an illegally-parked vehicle around 5:45 p.m. Sept. 11 in the 100 block of Woodlawn Avenue, police said. When officers approached the car to talk to the two occupants, Cesar A. Matias, 24, leaned down in the back seat before quickly jumping out of the car, according to police.
Britain's Foreign Minister Jeremy Hunt tweeted Thursday that Myanmar officials should be held responsible for their country's Rohingya crisis before the International Criminal Court.

Hunt's comments, referring to Myanmar as Burma, came after he met Thursday with embattled Myanmar leader Aung San Suu Kyi in a high-profile state visit to the country.

The visit followed Tuesday's release of a United Nations report that criticized Suu Kyi's handling of the crisis. The report details why several Myanmar generals should be prosecuted for genocide against the Rohingya minority, war crimes, and crimes against humanity.

It also accuses military leaders of extrajudicial killings, rape, and razing Rohingya villages in Rakhine, from which more than 700,000 Rohingya were forced to flee to neighboring Bangladesh.



Hunt arrived in Yangon Wednesday for a two-day visit. He said he planned to meet with military and civilian leaders. He met in the capital of Naypyidaw with Aung San Suu Kyi and said she would look into crisis-related issues that were discussed, including two Reuters journalists who were sentenced to 7-year prison terms earlier this month.

Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo were convicted on September 3 of violating a colonial-era law on state secrets in a landmark case that was viewed as a test of progress toward democracy in Myanmar.



Hunt also met early Thursday with local Muslims in northern Rakhine state, where he "mainly observed the planned repatriation process," Rakhine State Minister U Chan Tha told VOA.



On Wednesday, U.N. advisor on the Prevention of Genocide Adama Dieng told reporters in New York Myanmar "may constitute certainly a threat to international peace and security."



"We have seen such mass exodus of people from Myanmar to Bangladesh," said Dieng, "and this is still, in fact, continuing ... which means, although the level of violence is now less, I would say [it is more] intense than before."



Dieng urged U.N. member states who have not ratified the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide to do so at the 70th anniversary of the convention on December 9.
Muslim and Christian clerics and leaders of all major denominations in Cameroon have jointly accused Cameroonians in the diaspora of funding the crisis that has rocked the English-speaking regions of the country for two years.

The clerics are asking both the military and armed groups to drop their guns and stop the killings, looting and burning of property. But the government says only the armed separatists should give up their guns.

Cheikh Oumarou Mallam, president of the Islamic superior council of Cameroon, said that as peace builders, Christians and Muslims should not be indifferent to the carnage devastating the central African country's western regions.

Addressing Christians and Muslims gathered at the Yaounde headquarters of the Episcopal Conference of Cameroon Bishops, Mallam said the council he leads decided to make a joint declaration with Christians because everyone in Cameroon's two English-speaking regions has been affected by the crisis.



The Rev. Gustav Ebai, a spokesman for the Council of Protestant Churches of Cameroon (CEPCA), read the declaration in which clerics accused Cameroonians living outside of their country of fueling the crisis:



"We call on the diaspora to stop the hate speech communication that promotes violence, suspicion and fear among the people of Cameroon," the statement said. "We call on the diaspora to participate in the political process of Cameroon using democratic and nonviolent means. We call on the diaspora to respect the sacredness of human life and children's rights to education. They should put an end to the trivialization of human dignity and the hostage takings of schools. We call on those who finance the activities of armed groups to stop this dirty work that aims at destroying the natural fabric of Cameroon."



The declaration was issued by the Episcopal conference of Cameroon's Roman Catholic bishops, the Council of Protestant Churches and the Islamic superior council of Cameroon, which brings together all mosques and churches except pentecostal denominations. It calls on all political parties and civil society to center their activities on bringing peace to troubled regions.



The group also calls on both armed separatists and the military to lay down their weapons and stop indiscriminate killings, kidnappings, looting and burning of public property, and allow children to go to school.

Government's response



Cameroon's communication minister and government spokesman Issa Tchiroma praised the initiative, saying any effort to bring peace is welcome. But he said the government cannot respect calls to withdraw troops deployed to protect the population from groups the government labels as terrorists.

Tchiroma said no regular army in the world surrenders arms when fighting an enemy.

"In a law-abiding nation like our country, it is unacceptable to ask the government to put our regular army at the same level with terrorists," he said. "It is unbearable, unacceptable."

Forty percent of Cameroonians  close to 24 million  are Christian, 20 percent are Muslim. The rest hold indigenous beliefs.



Religious tolerance in Cameroon has been the norm since 2002, when religious-based violence by the extremist group Boko Haram hit the country's northern border. To further promote tolerance, several churches and mosques sponsored interfaith gatherings to jointly preach against Boko Haram ideology.



But the crisis began in 2016, when teachers and lawyers advocated against the overuse of French in the bilingual country. In October 2017, separatists declared what they called a new English-speaking republic in Cameroon called Ambazonia. The government waged a war on them.



Most of the separatist leaders escaped to other countries. Forty-seven of them, including Ayuk Tabe, who proclaimed himself Ambazonia's president, were caught in Nigeria and extradited to Cameroon.



Nearly 400 people have been killed, at least 70 schools torched and 200,000 residents displaced since October 2017.
A Turkish celebrity chef with restaurants all over the world is coming under attack after he posted videos on social media of Venezuelan President Nicola Maduro feasting at his Istanbul restaurant amid claims that people in Venezuela are going hungry because of an ongoing economic crisis.

Dozens of Venezuelans protested outside chef Nusret Gokce's Miami restaurant on Wednesday, even after the videos were deleted Tuesday from Instagram. Protesters, some draped in the Venezuelan flag, chanted and sang the Venezuelan national anthem, trying to deter diners from entering the upscale steakhouse in Miami's Brickell financial district.

Others so overwhelmed the restaurant's Yelp online review site with negative comments that the comments section was taken offline for an undetermined amount of time.

One video showed Gokce, also known as "Salt Bae," carving meat for the president and his wife, Cilia Flores, at the Nusr-Et restaurant in Istanbul, where each cut of meat can cost hundreds of dollars.

Another showed Maduro puffing on a cigar from a box bearing his name.

Florida Sen. Marco Rubio slammed the chef Tuesday.

"I don't know who this weirdo #Saltbae is, but the guy he is so proud to host is not the President of #Venezuela. He is actually the overweight dictator of a nation where 30% of the people eat only once a day & infants are suffering from malnutrition," Rubio tweeted Tuesday.

Opposition leader Julio Borges, who lives in exile in Colombia, tweeted: "While Venezuelans suffer and die of hunger, Nicolas Maduro and Cilia Flores have a good time in one of the most expensive restaurants in the world, all with money stolen from the Venezuelan people."

But Maduro remained unrepentant for the extravagant outing. After returning home to Caracas, he said, "I send greetings from here to our friend Nusret. Comrade, soon I'll return to Istanbul so we can see one another again. Thanks for the gifts."

The once-wealthy oil-producing nation has been in an economic crisis for the past five years. The turmoil has left many Venezuelans struggling to find food and medicine and forced masses of people to flee to other South American countries.

According to the United Nations, more than 2 million Venezuelans have fled since 2014.

A Meganalisis poll published in the Miami Herald last month found more than 30 percent of Venezuelans say they only ate one meal a day. Nearly the same number report eating "nothing or close to nothing" at least one day a week. A staggering 78 percent said they had trouble finding enough food.
The Chinese government will potentially block foreign current affairs content from being shown in the country, according to draft regulations from its National Radio and Television Administration.

The regulations, obtained Thursday by Reuters, will clamp down on what kinds of shows may be aired on domestic television stations or online video platforms. Current affairs shows were singled out as being barred from the country.

Also forbidden by the draft regulations were foreign content that contains violence, terrorism, incitement to crime, endangerment of social stability or material deemed harmful to national sentiment.

The regulations also target film and animation.

The Chinese government is in the midst of a push to restrict online content. Earlier this month, it banned the website of the Australian Broadcasting Company, telling the public news organization that China's internet was fully open.

"They're very sensitive, particularly to foreign content and of course independent-minded domestic Chinese content that's going to reach a mass audience, whether it's online or on television,"said Sarah Cook, a research analyst with censorship watchdog Freedom House.

China is known for the depth and reach of its censorship operations. Thousands of websites have been blocked in the country, inspiring the phrase the Great Firewall of China. Foreign journalists are routinely detained for their reporting, and virtually all domestic media capable of reaching a mass audience is tightly regulated.

In recent years, censorship has expanded past shaping political narratives into trying to mesh merge socialist values with national culture.

"All of this gotten a stronger push by President Xi Jinping in terms of socialist core values, socialism in China's characteristics in the new era. There's generally been an effort to really bring the party back in and to clamp down on various forms of content," Cook said.
An ambitious plan for a European Union Border and Coast Guard force was unveiled at a special meeting of the European Council in Austria this week.

European Commission officials have told VOA that they want the project approved before European elections next May, in which immigration is expected to be a central issue.

The project is being pushed by the EU's current rotating president, Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz, who used the summit to criticize southern European countries for failing to fully register immigrants entering through their borders. He said that EU officials who didn't work directly for any state might be less susceptible to "distractions."

While officials meeting in Austria doubt that the border force plan will go into effect with the speed and reach suggested by the European Commission, a senior Spanish diplomat says that EU leaders "have to give the impression of advancing on immigration control and that some steps will be taken towards creating of a joint border force as long as it's flexible and complimentary to member states."

Long-standing suggestions for a joint border force have gained urgency recently as differences on dealing with the ongoing influx of immigrants threatens to divide the EU and generate support for populist and nationalist politicians running on anti-immigrant planks.

Spanish foreign minister Josep Borrell said this week that the future of European integration rests on developing a joint policy on immigration. Forming a border force to give teeth to the EU's understaffed and underfunded border control agency would further the goal, according to European Commission president Jean Claude Junker.

He has asked for $1.5 billion to be budgeted over the next two years to reinforce Europe's main border control agency FRONTEX with a standing force of 10,000 guards capable of responding to new emergencies.

Based in the Polish capital Warsaw, FRONTEX has until now operated as a coordinating and information exchange mechanism between European security services. Its capacity to engage in prolonged field operations is limited by its dependence on voluntary contributions from individual government.

Junker has warned of growing migration pressures from Africa, which, he said, could soon hold 25 percent of the planet's population. EU analysts also fear a new flood of refugees from Syria as the Assad regime threatens an offensive against the last major rebel stronghold bordering Turkey.

"I want a standing corps of 10,000 in place by 2020 ready to support the over 100,000 national border guards in their difficult tasks. We need to establish a genuine, efficient EU border guard  in the true sense of the word. For this to happen, we also need equipment. We need more planes, more vessels, more vehicles," Junker recently told the European parliament.

A legislative proposal issued on Sept. 12 by the European Commission projects an eventual budget of $15 billion over seven years beginning in 2021, to establish a network of surveillance centers, frontier check points as well as permanent sea, air and land patrols which would be armed and equipped with latest technology.

The plan contemplates "dynamic" border protection by which the EU force would be deployed and moved around "hot spots" as requested by member states, as well as exercising a degree of "executive powers" in responding to emergencies "autonomously."

The force would also be tasked with the removal of migrants who do not qualify for EU protection under existing international treaties, according to the European Commission briefing presented at this week's summit.

Some EU governments such as Italy have been seeking the creation of "regional platforms" in third countries for returning migrants.

Officials tell VOA that while setting up such facilities is not contemplated as a border force mission, the return of immigrants to countries outside Europe is the type of task which an EU unit might perform more effectively than single governments.

Pressures for a border force follow a series of immigration crises over the past year which have seriously tested European unity. In his speech before the European parliament last week, Junker referred to an episode in which Italy defied the EU by refusing entry to a ship ferrying African migrants.

He blamed the incident on a lack of mutual "solidarity" which could have been resolved with a common coast guard to direct the ship.

Spain expelled 166 African migrants who forced their way through border fences with Morocco over the protests by EU officials while Austria and Hungary have similarly engaged in unilateral expulsions and closed their borders in defiance of the EU Shengen treaty.

Distrust of Europe's ability to police frontiers was also a factor in Britain's decision to "Brexit" from the EU through a referendum two years ago.

An EU immigration expert working in Spain's foreign ministry has told the VOA that creation of an EU Border and Coast Guard will probably gain support in a series of meetings between interior and justice ministers over the next few months.

But the proposal put forward by Junker is likely to undergo major changes before it goes up for a vote before the European parliament, according to the source.

A summit between EU, Arab and African governments to further cooperation on immigration is being held in February according to European Commissions' high representative for foreign affairs and security, Federica Mogherini.

An EU force composed of security units from different member states is already operating in the Sahel region of northern Africa.
When Behnoush Babzani turned 35, she threw a party. She also used her birthday to ask friends to donate to a cause she cares about deeply: helping people who need bone marrow transplants.

She herself received a bone marrow transplant from her brother.

Its not that my body was making cancerous cells, it was that my body was making no cells, she said. So think about the boy in the bubble. I had to be isolated. I didnt have an immune system to protect me.

Using a new feature on Facebook, Babzani in a few clicks posted a photo of herself in a hospital gown when she was receiving treatment and she asked her friends to help raise $350.

WATCH: Facebook's Birthday Fundraiser Feature Brings Smiles to Charitable Causes

New way to raise money for causes

Facebook has always been a convenient way to send birthday wishes to friends. Now users have started taking advantage of a new feature introduced a year ago by the popular social networking site to turn birthday wishes into donations to help a favorite cause.

Its turned into a huge success for charities. In its first year, Facebooks birthday fundraiser feature raised more than $300 million for charities around the world. With a new revenue source, some charities are rethinking some of their standard fundraising activities.

The success of the Facebook birthday feature comes as social media users have begun to question how internet services connecting friends and family around the world have also become a mechanism for some to spread hate or influence foreign elections.

Networks used to spread hate

Along with Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, Sheryl Sandberg, Facebooks chief operating officer, testified in the U.S. Senate recently about steps the company has taken to identify and remove posts that violate the companys terms of service.

We were too slow to spot this, and too slow to act. That is on us, Sandberg told the Senate committee.

Yet, the birthday fundraiser feature shows the power of using social media for good, says Facebook spokeswoman, Roya Winner.

It gives people who are celebrating a birthday, a chance to turn that day into something thats bigger than themselves, she said.

Some of the biggest recipients have been St. Jude, the childrens hospital, the Alzheimers Association, the American Cancer Society, No Kid Hungry, which focuses on child hunger in the U.S., and the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.

In the days that followed, Behnoush surpassed her goal, raising more than $1,700. Her social network became an army pulling together to do good.

Rescuing sea lions

Two weeks before his 65th birthday, Stan Jensen, retired from working in sales at a Silicon Valley firm, received a message from Facebook asking if he wanted to mark the occasion of his birthday by dedicating the day to a cause. He did.

He turned to 1,400 Facebook friends to help raise money for the Marine Mammal Center in Northern California, where he volunteers once a week helping injured sea lions.

He raised $2,300.

It surpassed my wildest dreams, he said, and he let his friends know they made a difference.

Youve bought a ton of fish, he told them. You are feeding all the animals we have on site for several days.

His birthday is coming up again, and the sea lions are always hungry. Hes perfecting his pitch: I know Im special to you, but Id like just the cost of a Starbucks coffee. Just $5. Please.
Twice in less than a year, the federal government has lost track of nearly 1,500 migrant children after placing them in the homes of sponsors across the country, federal officials have acknowledged.

The Health and Human Services Department recently told Senate staffers that case managers could not find 1,488 children after they made follow-up calls to check on their safety from April through June. That number represents about 13 percent of all unaccompanied children the administration moved out of shelters and foster homes during that time.

The agency first disclosed that it had lost track of 1,475 children late last year, as it came under fire at a Senate hearing in April. Lawmakers had asked HHS officials how they had strengthened child protection policies since it came to light that the agency previously had rolled back safeguards meant to keep Central American children from ending up in the hands of human traffickers.

The fact that HHS, which placed these unaccompanied minors with sponsors, doesn't know the whereabouts of nearly 1,500 of them is very troubling, Republican Sen. Rob Portman of Ohio, the panels chair, said Wednesday. Many of these kids are vulnerable to trafficking and abuse, and to not take responsibility for their safety is unacceptable.

HHS spokeswoman Caitlin Oakley disputed the notion that the children were lost.

Their sponsors, who are usually parents or family members and in all cases have been vetted for criminality and ability to provide for them, simply did not respond or could not be reached when this voluntary call was made, she said in a statement.

Since October 2014, the federal government has placed more than 150,000 unaccompanied minors with parents or other adult sponsors who are expected to care for the children and help them attend school while they seek legal status in immigration court.

On Tuesday, members of a Senate subcommittee introduced bipartisan legislation aimed at requiring the agency to take responsibility for the care of migrant children, even when they are no longer in its custody.

An Associated Press investigation found in 2016 that more than two dozen unaccompanied children had been sent to homes where they were sexually assaulted, starved or forced to work for little or no pay. At the time, many adult sponsors didn't undergo thorough background checks, government officials rarely visited homes and in some cases had no idea that sponsors had taken in several unrelated children, a possible sign of human trafficking.

Since then, HHS has boosted outreach to at-risk children deemed to need extra protection, and last year offered post-placement services to about one-third of unaccompanied minors, according to the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.

But advocates say it is hard to know how many minors may be in dangerous conditions, in part because some disappear before social workers can follow up with them and never show up in court.

From April to June, HHS called 11,254 children the agency had placed with sponsors, and found 25 of the children had run away, and 1,488 could not be located, according to the data provided to the subcommittee.

Portman began investigating after a case in his home state of Ohio in which eight Guatemalan teens were placed with human traffickers and forced to work on egg farms under threats of death. Six people have been convicted and sentenced to federal prison for their participation in the trafficking scheme that began in 2013.

The legislation comes as the Trump administration faces litigation over its family separation policy at the U.S.-Mexican border, which while it was in effect sent hundreds more children into the HHS system of shelters and foster care. Some of those children since have been reunited with their families, while others have been placed with sponsors.

Oakley did not respond to questions regarding whether any of the children who the agency lost track of had been separated from their families before they were sent to live with sponsors.

The legislation is aimed at ensuring HHS does more to prevent abuse, runs background checks before placing children with sponsors, and notifies state governments before sending children to those states, the bill's sponsors said.

The already challenging reality migrant children face is being made even more difficult and, too often, more dangerous, said the panels top Democrat, Sen. Tom Carper of Delaware. This simply doesnt have to be the case and, as this legislation demonstrates, the solutions dont have to be partisan.
Hurricane Florence continued to punish North and South Carolina Thursday a week after it churned over parts of the U.S. eastern seaboard with historically heavy rains and sweeping winds.



About 10,000 frustrated and exhausted people remain in shelters as forecasters predict flooding from swollen rivers will worsen in the two states over the next several days.

The National Weather Service said some major waterways in the Carolinas and Virginia are far above flood stage and are expected to rise for days before they crest.



"People in flood prone areas or near waterways need to remain alert as rivers crest and stay above their banks in coming days," North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper said in a written statement. "Stay alert and stay safe."



Florence, which killed at least 36 people, dumped up to 91 centimeters of rain on parts of North Carolina, where many areas remain cut off by flooding. Access to the North Carolina port city of Wilmington, which was completely cut off by high water for days, has improved, but officials said they didn't know when evacuees would be able to return home.



The storm knocked out power to more than 2.1 million people in the southeastern U.S. and about 120,000 homes and businesses were still without power Thursday in North Carolina, utility companies said.

As floodwaters keep rising, so too are concerns over environmental and health dangers created by contaminated water. The state Department of Environmental Quality said flooding has caused several dozen hog waste lagoons in North Carolina to overflow, releasing contaminants into waterways.



North Carolina's hog industry, among the nation's largest, absorbed its biggest hit from floodwaters in nearly two decades, industry officials said.

North Carolina authorities said 5,500 hogs and nearly 3.5 million chickens were killed by the flooding, which could have damaged up to 57 million kilograms of tobacco worth as much as $350 million.



President Donald Trump declared parts of the Carolinas disaster areas last week, freeing up federal funds for recovery efforts.



Trump got a first-hand view of recovery efforts during a visit to the two states on Wednesday, when he said "the money will be a lot, but it's gonna come as fast as you need it."
Family members and rights groups are calling for the release of Eritreas former finance minister, Berhane Abrehe, who was arrested on Monday days after publishing a two-volume book critical of the government.

Four security agents detained Berhane, a 74-year-old veteran of Eritreas war for independence, while he was walking with his son in the capital, Asmara, according to Solomon Habtom, a nephew.

It was abduction, Solomon told VOA, speaking from the U.S. People who saw it witnessed that its an unfortunate tragedy, but this is the true nature of the government. Isaias has security agents who do that, and this is a continuation of his practice, he said, referring to President Isaias Afwerki, who has ruled the country since it broke away from Ethiopia in 1991.

Berhane hasnt been charged with anything, nor has the government made any statements regarding his arrest.

The arrest drew condemnation from human rights organizations. We ask the Eritrean government to release Berhane Abrehe unconditionally and immediately and also his wife, Almaz Habtemariam, Fisseha Tekle, a Horn of Africa researcher at Amnesty International, told VOA.

Almaz was previously arrested for helping her son leave the country without a required exit visa and has been in prison for more than a year, according to a family member and Amnesty.

Book: President rules like 'tornado'

The two-part book, Hagerey Eritrea, or My Country Eritrea, includes sharp criticisms of the government and calls for reforms in the country. Berhane takes direct aim at Isaias, saying he rules the country like a tornado, flip-flops on issues and is perceived to suffer from schizophrenia.

The writings have caused a stir among the Eritrean diaspora. Passages have circulated online, and paperbacks have been shipped in the U.S. and Canada and distributed at launch events, including one in Washington.

In a recorded message posted to YouTube earlier this month, Berhane demanded a public showdown with the president. I am calling on you to debate me in front of the people of Eritrea on national television, he said, speaking in Tigrigna. I hope you will accept my invitation for debate and respond. Our debating points will focus on past and future plans of political, economic, cultural and social issues of the country.

Such provocations are virtually unheard of in the tightly controlled country, and Berhanes arrest didnt come as a surprise.

Everybody was expecting [he] was going to be arrested because that was the trend in Eritrea, Fisseha said, adding that the arrest is horrible because it is an old man being held incommunicado, and no one knows where he is right now.

Berhane studied economics and engineering in Illinois, but he returned to Eritrea to join the struggle for independence in 1975. He had been removed from his ministerial post in 2012. He now joins a long list of former government officials, sometimes known as the G15, who have been imprisoned in Eritrea since 2001.

It is a very sad story for the family and also for the country, Fisseha said. Remember, September marks the 17th year since members of G15 have been arrested in Eritrea. No one has heard about them for the last 17 years. No one knows their final state, so he is going to join his compatriots there.

The arrest has also left some wondering about the prospects of reform in Eritrea following a historic peace deal with Ethiopia and other regional rapprochements.

Its not only about Berhane. Berhane is a symbol, Solomon said. We are happy for the peace process between Eritrea and Ethiopia, but we also want to see the end of this kind of dictatorship in the country.
A Hong Kong cardinal who has spearheaded opposition to the Vatican's rapprochement with China called on Thursday for the Pope's secretary of state to step down, saying any deal with Beijing would amount to a betrayal of the Catholic faith.



The Vatican and China have been in advanced talks this year to forge what would be an historic breakthrough and precursor to a resumption in diplomatic relations after 70 years, with Secretary of State Pietro Parolin among the chief negotiators.



The Vatican may send a delegation to China before the end of this month. If the meeting goes well, the two could reach an agreement on the appointment of bishops, a Chinese state-run newspaper reported earlier this week.



Cardinal Joseph Zen, the most senior Catholic cleric on Chinese soil, said he believed the two sides were making a "secret deal", although he acknowledged he had no connection with the Vatican and was "completely in the dark".

"They're giving the flock into the mouths of the wolves.



It's an incredible betrayal," he said.



He described Parolin, the highest ranking diplomat in the Vatican, as someone who despised heroes of faith.



"He should resign," Zen told Reuters at his home on a wooded hillside on Hong Kong island.



"I don't think he has faith. He is just a good diplomat in a very secular, mundane meaning."



Zen, who at times knocked his knuckles on the table to make a point, stopped short of calling on Pope Francis to step down, saying: "I would not come out to fight the Holy Father, that is my bottom line."



The Vatican did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Zen's remarks.



At a time when the Vatican is also under pressure for purportedly covering up a sex abuse scandal in the United States, with one archbishop even calling for the Pope to resign , Zen suggested this China deal would further add to the Church's vulnerability.



"The consequences will be tragic and long lasting, not only for the church in China but for the whole church because it damages the credibility. Maybe that's why they might keep the agreement secret."



China's roughly 12 million Catholics are split between an underground Church that swears loyalty to the Vatican, and the state-supervised Catholic Patriotic Association.



The potential deal has divided communities of Catholics across China, some of whom fear greater suppression should the Vatican cede greater control to Beijing, but others want to see rapprochement.



Zen said he believed only half the underground church in China would accept a deal and was concerned how the remainder might react.



"I'm afraid they may do something irrational, they may make rebellion," said 86-year-old Zen, a former bishop of Hong Kong and the most outspoken critic of the Pope's China strategy.



Pope Francis has rejected criticism that the Holy See may be selling out Catholics to Beijing's communist government.



Zen said he believed any deal with atheist China would deal a significant blow to Pope Francis' credibility.



"It's a complete surrender. It's a betrayal (of our faith).



I have no other words, said Zen.
The plan revision aldermen will vote on is part of the first phase of the development. It includes changes to the southern end and a portion of the western end of the main building. The proposal consists of creating smaller units with storefronts facing both New York Street and the existing parking lot. In addition, the storefront facade in the corner of the main building is being updated.
The leaders of North and South Korea Wednesday hailed a series of agreements they said were aimed at turning the Koreas into a land of peace without nuclear weapons and nuclear threats. North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and South Koreas Moon Jae-in Wednesday issued the pledge at a summit in the Norths capital, Pyongyang.

WATCH: Steve Miller's video report



The announcement prompted U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to invite North Korean Foreign Minister Ri Yong Ho to meet in New York next week, where both are scheduled to attend the United Nations General Assembly.

Pompeo said the United States is ready to engage in talks with North Korea immediately, with the aim of completing Pyongyangs denuclearization by the end of President Donald Trumps first term.

Kims decision to dismantle its key missile site at Dongchang-ri in the presence of international observers is what Pompeo said prompted his decision to make the invitation.

US prepared to engage

On the basis of these important commitments, the United States is prepared to engage immediately in negotiations to transform U.S.-DPRK relations, Pompeo said in a statement.

We, as the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, think that it will be able to accelerate denuclearization and bring peace on the Korean Peninsula through the U.N. General Assembly next week, said ministry Special Representative for Korean Peninsula Peace and Security Affairs Lee Do-hoon, who added that the development may lead to a second summit between the United States and North Korea.

While this (the outcome of the third inter-Korean summit) may look small ... our role is to hand over (the conversation) to the U.S., Lee said.

Pyongyang drew an enthusiastic response from Trump, who tweeted the news coming out of the third inter-Korean summit, saying it was very exciting! even though some analysts point out that specific details remain absent and a path to denuclearization is not clear.

What are corresponding measures?

In addition to pledging to dismantle the Dongchang-ri missile test site, the Pyongyang Declaration put forward that the North expressed its willingness to continue to take additional measures, such as the permanent dismantlement of the nuclear facilities in Yongbyon, as the United States takes corresponding measures in accordance with the spirit of the June 12 US-DPRK Joint Statement.

Even though it was not specified in the agreement signed Wednesday between Moon and Kim, the Sejong Institutes Woo Jung-yeop assumes North Korea means theyre looking for a declaration from Washington to formally end the Korean War.

So it is apparent that North Korea is willing to exchange [a] declaration to end the war [in exchange for] the demolition of the Yongbyong facility, said Woo.

The Council of Foreign Relations Scott Snyder said an end-of-war declaration in exchange for a declaration of North Korean assets appears to be under consideration.

But, he said the critical factor for that formula to work is to ensure that all parties realize those declarations are simply aspirations designed to achieve an objective and they are expressions of seriousness of intent to achieve objectives.

Ajou University professor Kim Heung-kyu notes a balance of trust needs to be established between each party, otherwise its difficult to proceed with negotiations.

However, North Korea may not be satisfied with a declaration-for-declaration formula, because North Korea is fully aware of the time constraint and the changing political situation in the United States.

He said this is leading Kim Jong Un to become more ambitious to achieve more.

Second Trump-Kim summit?

Moon said North Korean leader Kim Jong Un wants to hold a second summit with President Trump to hasten the process of denuclearizing the Korean peninsula.

He revealed Kims wishes Thursday in Seoul, after his return from his visit to Pyongyang.

Moon will travel to New York next week for the United Nations General Assembly, where he will meet with Trump, Sept. 24. The South Korean leader said Wednesday he looked forward to North Korea and the United States resuming their dialogue soon, based on the achievements of this Pyongyang summit.

Harry Kazianis, director of defense studies at the Center for the National Interest, believes the possibility of a second Trump-Kim summit is 100 percent, adding it could also be a trilateral summit with Moon, or even a quadrilateral meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping, because Moon hasnt revealed everything regarding Kims plans to denuclearize.

I think [Moon] understands that he needs to hold some things close to the chest to be able to bring to Donald Trump, maybe additional concessions. ... Maybe Kim Jong Un made some other proposals that we dont know about today, and that makes sense, said Kazianis.

Lee Ju-hyun contributed to this report.
Lawyers for the woman accusing Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of sexually assaulting her 36 years ago say she wants to testify before a Senate panel next week, but only if her safety is ensured.

Attorney Debra Katz said her client, Christine Blasey Ford, has gotten death threats and she and her family have been forced out of their California home.

But according to U.S. media reports, Katz said in an email to the Senate Judiciary Committee that Ford still wished to testify, "provided that we can agree on terms that are fair and which ensure her safety."

Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, an Iowa Republican, has scheduled a hearing for Monday for both Ford and Kavanaugh to appear in public to tell their stories.

'Not possible'

But Katz wrote that "Monday's date is not possible and the committee's insistence that it occur then is arbitrary in any event."

Katz said Ford's "strong preference" is that "a full investigation" be completed before she testifies. She had earlier called for the FBI to probe the charges against Kavanaugh.

Late Thursday, the White House released a letter from Kavanaugh to Grassley in which he said he wanted to tell his side in a Monday hearing.

"I will be there. I continue to want a hearing as soon as possible so that I can clear my name," he wrote.

Media reports said Kavanaugh had also received what law enforcement officials said were credible death threats.

Kavanaugh is President Donald Trump's choice to fill the vacancy on the U.S. Supreme Court created by the retirement of Justice Anthony Kennedy.

Post interview

His approval by the Judiciary Committee and the Republican-majority Senate appeared to be an almost certainty until The Washington Post published its interview with Ford, who is now a California psychology professor.

She alleged a "stumbling drunk" 17-year-old Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her at a Maryland house party in 1982 when both were in high school.

She said Kavanaugh pinned her to a bed and groped her, putting his hand over her mouth when she tried to scream. Ford said she feared Kavanaugh might inadvertently kill her before she managed to escape.

Kavanaugh has adamantly denied the charges, saying he had never done any such thing to Ford or any other woman.

A number of women who said they knew and worked with Kavanaugh throughout his legal career said he had been respectful and fair in dealing with them.

Trump expressed support for Kavanaugh, saying "it's very hard for me to imagine" that Kavanaugh sexually assaulted Ford. But he said he wanted her to testify, saying, "I really want to see her, to see what she has to say," and that if it took the Senate a little longer to confirm Kavanaugh, so be it.

Republican lawmakers are trying to win Senate confirmation for Kavanaugh ahead of the court's start of a new term on Oct. 1 or, if not by then, ahead of the Nov. 6 nationwide congressional elections, to show Republican voters they have made good on campaign promises to place conservative judges like Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court.
Dogged by a sexual assault accusation, U.S. Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh presents a political minefield for vulnerable Republican and Democratic senators seeking re-election in November, according to analysts in key states where the battle for control of the Senate will be decided.



The electoral risks appear magnified as the Senate Judiciary Committee awaits possible testimony by Kavanaugh accuser Christine Blasey Ford about an alleged incident in the 1980s, and as senators weigh in along increasingly partisan lines.



News reports quote Nevada Republican Senator Dean Heller describing the accusation against Kavanaugh as "a little hiccup" and predicting that Republicans, who have a 51-49 Senate majority, will "get through this."



"This [firestorm surrounding Kavanaugh] absolutely could hurt Heller," said the chairman of University of Nevada's political science department, Eric Herzik. "How Republicans handle this could blow back on Heller. Where he's most vulnerable is with female voters."

Widely regarded as the Senate's most endangered Republican incumbent, Heller is in a dead heat with his Democratic challenger, Representative Jacky Rosen, according to recent polls.



Vulnerable Democrats are no less exposed, including Missouri's Claire McCaskill, who on Wednesday announced her opposition to Kavanaugh, President Donald Trump's second Supreme Court nominee.



"She [McCaskill] is in a very tight, razor-thin race in a state Trump carried by 20 points in the last election," University of Missouri political scientist Marvin Overby said. "She was being pushed to do one thing [oppose Kavanaugh] by her base in the Democratic Party, but she is in a position where she needs to pick up some independent voters, maybe even some Republicans, and many of them are in favor of Kavanaugh's confirmation."



Polls show McCaskill tied with her Republican challenger, Missouri Attorney General Josh Hawley. McCaskill has a history of benefiting from headlines about sexual assault. In 2012, she won re-election handily after her opponent, Republican Todd Akin, said women rarely get pregnant in cases of "legitimate rape."

Falling in line with their respective political parties on Kavanaugh puts both Heller and McCaskill at risk with voting groups in their states that neither can ignore.



"If Heller is seen as helping railroad this [nominee] in any way, that could hurt him with female voters," Herzik said. "Democrats are hoping to get a boost from female voters, from Latinos, and from organized labor. If Democrats get a high turnout from those key groups [in Nevada], then Heller is endangered. Republicans know it."



By contrast, McCaskill could be imperiled if Missouri's social conservatives mobilize to defend their long-sought goal of attaining a conservative Supreme Court majority.



"McCaskill believes that issue [sexual misconduct] doesn't resonate very well with the voters she needs to pick up in the more conservative rural parts of the state," Overby said. "She has to be careful that she keeps the [Democratic] base motivated, but not in a way that turns off those additional voters she needs to win. A relatively small group of voters could swing this election."

In both races, challengers are savaging the incumbents' positions on Kavanaugh.



In Nevada, Rosen tweeted: "Unbelievable: Senator Heller just dismissed a credible sexual assault allegation as a "hiccup"  and predicted Kavanaugh will still be confirmed soon."



"No surprise here. @clairecmc always comes home to the party line in the end," Hawley tweeted. "Hasn't heard a thing voters told her. Just another Washington liberal."

Both political parties are investing heavily in the Nevada and Missouri races.



"Democrats cannot gain control of the Senate without flipping the Heller seat," Herzik said.



Overby noted that McCaskill is but one of several Democratic senators running for re-election in a Republican-leaning state in a year when Democrats are defending three times as many seats as Republicans.



"The Democrats are facing an uphill struggle [to win a majority in] the Senate. If McCaskill goes down, that makes it a harder slog," he said.
South Korean President Moon Jae-in checked a bit item off his bucket list Thursday: Climbing Mount Paektu in North Korea with its leader Kim Jong Un.

After the two leaders pledged new steps aimed at salvaging nuclear talks Wednesday, Moon and Kim decided to use the final day of their three-day summit to go up the symbolic mountain on the Chinese border together.

Moon is known for his love of mountain climbing and has trekked in the Himalayas at least twice.

The president has long stated that visiting Mount Paektu, which can also be spelled Baekdu in the South and is known as Changbai in China, was a long unfulfilled dream.

Many people in the South would go to Mount Paektu from the China side, but I decided not to, pledging myself that I would go stepping on our soil, Moon told Kim after reaching the peak of the mountain. But time flew so fast, and I thought my wish may not come true, but it did today.

As Moon arrived at an airport near the mountain, some 1,000 North Koreans greeted him, waving flowers and chanting Motherland! Unification!

Moon and Kim took a cable car together to Heaven Lake, a caldera at the top of the mountain, and walked around the area with their wives and officials from both sides.

Pictures showed Moon and Kim smiling and posing with their wives, and Moon filling a bottle with water from the lake.

The Chinese envy us because they cant go down to the lake from their side but we can, Kim said. We should write another chapter of history between the North and the South by reflecting our new history on this Heaven Lake.

Some senior South Korean officials accompanying Moon suggested inviting Kim and his wife to Mount Halla, the highest mountain and a scenic tourist resort in the South.

There is our old saying that we greet the sun at Paektu, and greet the unification at Halla, Kims wife, Ri Sol Ju, said.

Kim said Wednesday he will visit Seoul in the near future, in what would be the first trip to the southern capital by a North Korean leader.

Sacred mountain of revolution

As the highest peak on the Korean Peninsula, about 2,750 meters (9,000 feet), Mount Paektu is the mythical origin of the Korean people, featured in South Koreas national anthem and various North Korean propaganda.

An active volcano, the mountain is dotted with secret camps and historical sites from Koreas guerrilla war against the occupying Japanese in the 1930-40s, in which Kims grandfather, Kim Il Sung, played a leading role.

North Korea says Kims grandfather and father, Kim Jong Il, were born at Mount Paektu, a centerpiece of the Norths idolization and propaganda campaign to highlight the sacred bloodline of the ruling Kim family.

A copy of an article of the Norths official newspaper Rodong Sinmun dated Dec. 26, 1980, calls Mount Paektu a sacred mountain of revolution spearheaded by Kim Il Sung in the flames of the arduous 20-year anti-Japan struggle.

State media and ideological indoctrination was setting the stage for Kim Jong Ils power succession that took place in 1980, said Michael Madden, a North Korea leadership expert at the Stimson Centres 38 North in Washington.

Key visits to mountain

Kim Jong Un, too, has visited the mountain around major developments in North Korea, such as before he executed top officials including his uncle Jang Song-thaek in late 2013, and following North Koreas fifth nuclear test in 2016.

He last went there in December, after declaring North Korea had completed its goal of becoming a nuclear state, according to state media.

(Moon) would add much legitimacy to Kim, who had never had any summit with a foreign leader until early this year, said Seo Yu-suk, a research manager at the Institute of North Korean Studies in Seoul. Its a diplomatic coup for him.

Moons parents fled the North during the 1950-53 Korean War, shortly before Moon was born in South Korea in 1953.
An official impact assessment for a controversial new Lao dam on the Mekong river has been directly copied and pasted in parts from a previous project, a coalition of groups fighting to protect the river has alleged.



The allegation came as Mekong River Commission (MRC) member countries met Thursday in Laoss capital, Vientiane, to discuss the study in question, the Pak Lay Transboundary Environmental and Social Impact Assessment and Cumulative Impact Assessment.



Save the Mekong alleged in statement that large sections of that study are simply copied directly from the Pak Beng [report] - a 2015 assessment for a different project that an MRC review found was inaccurate.



At least 90 percent of the Social Baseline Conditions section of the Pak Lay dam TBSEIA/CIA is copied directly from the Pak Beng dam assessment, including photos, tables and text, the statement said.



In one plagiarized section, the authors replaced the project name from the old report but forgot to adjust the correct listed developer, Save the Mekong said.



The Environmental Impacts and Mitigation section notes that after mitigation, all impacts from the Pak Lay dam will either be insignificant or positive. This section is not supported by evidence. Instead, it is copied from the Pak Beng assessment, they further alleged.



Under MRC regulations, Laos is obligated to submit transboundary impact studies as part of the prior consultation process with fellow member countries Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam on any new Mekong dam project.



The Save the Mekong groups are calling for the current study to be scrapped and the prior consultation process halted until a meaningful assessment is produced.



When asked about the copied sections of the study, a representative of the Pak Lay dam developer Powerchina Resources Ltd who declined to be named denied they had been plagiarized from the Pak Beng report.

[The] Laos government have the exact knowledge for the process. Were following almost the same process because the government of Laos have the sequence to make Pak Beng a little bit earlier than us but all of the documents are made by us independently, he said.

No one raised the plagiarisms during sessions of the forum attended by VOA and Lao government officials flatly refused to discuss the matter.



Anoulak Kittikhoun, spokesperson for MRC CEO Pham Tuan Phan, said he couldnt say if the plagiarism identified would be assessed as a major problem or not.



If it has minimal effects then its okay but if it prevents us from making a reasonable and sound assessment then we will point it out in our technical review report, he said. Because you have to understand that the projects are close together so some information, even though it appears in Pak Beng, could also be relevant for Pak Lay, so we have to assess that as well. So we cant say that if it is copied that it is not valid.



The Pak Lay project is almost 400 kilometers downstream from Pak Beng and about 190 kilometers directly overland.



From a transboundary and cumulative impact perspective though, they are in a similar region of the more than 4,000 kilometer river.



Maureen Harris, Southeast Asia program director of International Rivers, a member of the Save the Mekong coalition, said it was very misleading to imply that largely the same information could be used in a meaningful way to address the impacts of both projects.



It really looks to us like a fairly cynical view of the standard of information that is being provided to stakeholders in the prior consultation process, she said. And it really reinforces the perspective I think of many Mekong communities and civil society groups and other stakeholders that prior consultation is really just seen cynically as a rubber stamp.



Laos began the prior consultation process with its neighbors on the Pak Lay dam the day after it said it was temporarily suspending all new hydropower proposals in reaction to the catastrophic July collapse of an auxiliary dam in the countrys south.



Scores were killed and thousands displaced by the collapse of the Xe Pian Xe Namnoy Saddle Dam D, which the government eventually conceded was likely due to shoddy construction. It was the second dam collapse in Laos within a year.



In April, the MRC Secretariat presented findings of a landmark 6-year, $4.7 million study that warned of catastrophic environmental impacts if hydropower development plans for the Mekong continued unaltered - especially from mainstream dams.



Laos plans to build more than 140 dams on the Mekong and its tributaries, including five on the mainstream.
French far-right politician Marine Le Pen has been ordered to undergo psychiatric testing after tweeting graphic images of Islamic State executions, the leader of France's National Rally party revealed Thursday.

"I thought I had experienced everything, but no! For having denounced the horrors of Daesh (an Arabic acronym for the terror organization), the court has ordered me to undergo a psychiatric evaluation," Le Pen wrote on Twitter.

The court order, which Le Pen also tweeted, was dated to Sept. 11. The images that led to to the order were originally posted in December 2015, weeks after coordinated terrorist attacks killed 130 across Paris on Nov. 13.

Le Pen said she originally tweeted the images after a journalist compared her National Rally party, then called the National Front, to the Islamic State. Among them were photos of the body of James Foley, an American journalist who was beheaded by the Islamic State in 2014 after being captured in Syria. Le Pen later deleted that tweet at the request of Foley's family.

Le Pen was charged by authorities for spreading messages that "incite terrorism or pornography or seriously harm human dignity," and had her parliamentary immunity stripped in 2017 after an investigation. If Le Pen is found guilty, she could face up to three years in prison and fine of roughly $87,000.

Le Pen later said she would skip the test. "I'd like to see how the judge would try and force me do it," she told reporters.

Le Pen's National Rally is noted for its populist policies and anti-immigration sentiment. She lost the French presidential election to Emmanuel Macron last year.
Canada and the United States showed scant sign on Thursday of closing a deal to revamp NAFTA, and Canadian officials made clear Washington needed to withdraw a threat of possible autos tariffs, sources said.

The administration of U.S. President Donald Trump wants to be able to agree on a text of the three-nation North American Free Trade Agreement by the end of September, but major differences remain.

"We discussed some tough issues today," Canadian Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland told reporters after meeting with U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer.

Freeland, who has visited Washington four weeks in a row to discuss NAFTA, gave no further details.

Market fears over the future of the 1994 pact, which underscores $1.2 trillion in trade, have been regularly hitting stocks in all three nations, whose economies are now highly integrated.

While multiple deadlines have passed during the more than year-long negotiations to renew NAFTA, pressure on Canada to agree to a deal is growing, partly to push it through the U.S. Congress before Mexico's new government takes office on Dec. 1.

Canada says it does not feel bound by the latest deadline.

Asked whether time was running out, Freeland said her focus was getting a deal that was good for Canadians.

Trump came to power last year vowing to tear up NAFTA unless major changes were made to a pact he blames for the loss of U.S. manufacturing jobs.

Trump struck a side-deal on NAFTA with Mexico last month and has threatened to exclude Canada if necessary. He also said he might impose a 25 percent tariff on Canadian autos exports, which would badly hurt the economy.

Jerry Dias, president of Unifor, Canada's largest private-sector union, who was briefed on the talks by Canada's negotiating team, said Ottawa insisted that the tariff threat be withdrawn.

"Why would Canada sign a trade agreement with the United States ... and then have Donald Trump impose a 25 percent tariff on automobiles?" Dias told reporters.

"That for us is a deal breaker. It doesn't make a stitch of sense. ... We are a small nation, we're not a stupid nation," added Dias.

Freeland said she would return to Canada on Thursday ahead of a two-day meeting of female foreign ministers she is co-hosting in Montreal. Early next week she will be in New York for a United Nations session.

Ottawa is under pressure from some sectors to abandon its insistence that a bad NAFTA is worse than no NAFTA.

Jim Wilson, the trade minister of Ontario  Canada's most populous province and heart of the country's auto industry  met federal negotiators on Wednesday and tweeted on Thursday, "It is imperative that the feds reach a deal."

The Globe and Mail newspaper on Thursday reported that U.S. negotiators want Ottawa to agree to capping its auto exports to the United States at 1.7 million vehicles a year, something that Canadian industry sources dismissed as unacceptable.

Separately, a Canadian source directly familiar with the negotiations said, "We have not discussed a cap."

Reuters and other outlets reported in August that a side letter with Mexico would cap tariff-free or nearly duty-free Mexican imports to the United States at 2.4 million vehicles.

U.S. automakers privately question why the United States would seek to cap Canadian exports to the United States, given that companies are unlikely to expand production in Canada compared with lower-cost Mexico.
The recent closure of one of Beijing's largest independent churches, and a crackdown on congregations elsewhere in China, are part of a broader effort to bring religion more fully under the ruling Communist Party's control, say Christian leaders, scholars and rights advocates.



In recent weeks, authorities have used raids, religious censuses and even confessional statements to carry out that effort, according to accounts from Christian members, rights groups and postings online.



Authorities have characterized the efforts as moves aimed at protecting the public and using socialist values to guide religion and help believers unite around the countrys leadership. Earlier this year, stricter amendments were added to the Religious Affairs Regulation, a guideline whose stated aim is to protect religious freedoms. Those amendments, observers say, have helped pave the way for the crackdown on unregulated churches and general tightening on religion.



Nationwide, regardless of whether it is the officially recognized patriotic church, house churches or underground congregations, all are facing new circumstances, said Tang Jitian, a rights lawyer in Beijing. All of these moves highlight the regime's concerns about religion.



Earlier this month in central Henan province, authorities raided four churches, forcibly removed crosses and burned seized bibles. More recently, in Sichuan, authorities broke up a service of the Chengdu Early Rain Covenant Church, detaining its two pastors. One of the pastors remains in custody, according to the group Chinese Human Rights Defenders.



That move came just days after authorities shut down Beijing Zion Church, an independent congregation in the capital with about 1,500 members.

Illegal organization

The pastor, Jin Mingri, told VOA that the effort to shut down Beijing Zion Church began earlier this year when authorities ordered the congregation to install 24 surveillance cameras for fire safety reasons. Members refused to comply, citing concerns about personal privacy and the impact it would have on the churchs atmosphere, he said in an interview with VOAs Mandarin Service.



Since April, they started to forcefully suppress our congregation, mobilizing some 10,000, using the combined force of police and government, interviewing our members and telling them Beijing Zion Church is an evil cult, that were politically incorrect and an illegal organization, he said.



Chinas Communist Party, which is said to have some 90 million members, is officially atheist; but, increasingly, especially in recent years, the number of religious believers in its ranks has grown.



In late August, the party released new internal disciplinary measures that call for the strict handling of religious activities that undermine national unity.



According to the regulations, party committees in government departments or major enterprises were also ordered to strengthen the ideological education of religious members.



Outside the party, the number of religious followers has been growing too, even faster than authorities can control.



And the leaderships response to this has been clear since a major political party Congress was held last year. During that meeting, President Xi Jinping reasserted the partys dominance over facets of society.

More importantly, religious leaders and scholars note, was the shift in March to put the State Administration for Religious Affairs - a government office - back under the control of the Communist Partys United Front Work Department.

Expansive control

That move, Jin said, has once again turned religion into an ideological competition, pitting believers against the party. Unlike the religious affairs department, the United Front Work Department is much deeper into society, down into the local town and village level, and that will help the Communist Party exert more pressure over religions.



When the party is in charge of religious affairs, it can use all types of means to exert control, and its power to suppress is unprecedented, Jin said.

Jin said this type of expansive control over religion will become a hallmark of Xis leadership.

All religions, not only Christians but Buddhists, Catholics and Muslims, will all have to deal with the special challenges of this new era, he said.



In addition to the raid of churches and crackdowns already under way, pressure is being brought to bear within the party and outside through the use of pledge statements.



Online, many Christians have posted pledge letters that show how the party is trying to get believers to renounce their faith. Analysts say the pledge letters appear to be aimed at a wide range of targets, from party members to college teachers and students.



Were also seeing a mass scale campaign against party members who have religious beliefs, said Ying Fuk-tsang, director of the divinity school at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.



One signed pledge, posted online, read: After studying the Religious Affairs Regulation and thinking it over, I promise I will no longer believe in Christianity and that I will resolutely listen to and follow the party.



In Wenzhou City, authorities included a question about parents religious beliefs as part of a standard school contact information form. The form has raised concerns among believers, who have urged members to go ahead and declare their faith, come what may.



Neither authorities at the religious affairs bureau in Wenzhou nor the United Front Work Department could be reached for comment about the forms, raids or crackdown.



Joyce Huang and John Ai contributed to this report.
The tiny African nation of eSwatini is officially holding its first set of elections Friday under its new name, which was bestowed by the king in April. Critics say this poll is nothing but a pretense of democracy in the state, that was known as Swaziland, until the king unilaterally changed the name to celebrate the nation's 50th anniversary of independence from Britain.

Voters will choose 55 parliamentarians to fill the lower house in this nation of some 1.3 million people. King Mswati III, who has ruled since 1986 with unlimited constitutional powers, gets to choose another 10 legislators.

VOA made multiple attempts to reach government officials to discuss the elections, but calls and messages were not returned. The governments official website makes no pretense of eSwatini being an ordinary democracy, describing the king as being born to rule, and the only absolute monarch in Africa who rules his country with a firm hand.

'Is there any freedom?'

Political activist Kenneth Kunene, the general-secretary of the nations Communist Party, says he is not sorry to be missing this historic occasion. Political parties like his are banned from participating in elections. And since 2005, he has lived in exile just outside the enclave nation, which is surrounded on all sides by South Africa and Mozambique. Rights groups have frequently criticized the government for curbing freedoms and rights, and Kunene says he agrees.

In Swaziland, is there any freedom of expression?" he told VOA. "People, they want to express themselves, they are shot dead, they are beaten, they are silenced, and others are forced to leave the county in whatever way. And so, under such circumstances, can there be elections? We say no.

Taking to the streets

In recent days, Swazis have expressed themselves in large numbers, with hundreds of public sector workers taking to the streets of the nations four largest towns to demand higher wages and government reforms. In the commercial hub of Manzini, they were met with police force, including stun grenades and beatings, which drew condemnation from rights groups.

Chris Ngwenya, an organizer from the Ngwane National Liberatory Congress, was there. He says these protests are about far more than just wages and work conditions  they are, he said, political as well.

The workers are also, you know, demonstrating, or venting out against, the high levels of unemployment that are prevailing in the country amidst the grand corruption that we see," he told VOA. "Workers are also reflecting their frustrations with the shortages of drugs and medications in hospitals. Workers are also, you know, showing their displeasure with the way the country is being governed.

One man

Like Kunene, Ngwenya says he holds little hope of change with this poll. His party, the country's oldest, says only one thing can bring real change. And like everything in this tiny nation, it all comes down to one mans decision.

Our view has been that that the monarch must modernize," he said. "Our view has been that the king must relinquish, you know, certain political power. Our view has been that the powers of the monarch need to be curtailed so that the power to govern, or the power to actually form a government, can rest with the majority of the people.
A farm tractor with a crane lifts up half a dozen people holding Catalan independence flags in northeast Spain, trying to get high enough so they can peek into a prison courtyard and see their separatist heroes.

The distance makes it hard to recognize the faces of the Catalan activists and politicians jailed in the Lledoners penitentiary while they await trial for their involvement in a banned independence referendum last year in Catalonia. But inmates and supporters make a quick connection.

Shouts of "Freedom!" and "We want you home!" from outside are met with "We want to be out!" coming from the prison. And joy erupts when the unofficial Catalan flag embraced by secessionists, the "estelada," appears through the bars of a cell window.

"I'm convinced that the energy we send them from here helps them," said Quima Albalate a 58-year-old nurse who joins her son for twice-a-week picnics of solidarity in these quiet hills of rural Catalonia.

Jailed Catalan separatists, together with those who fled abroad to avoid prosecution by Spain, have become an emotional symbol of what many perceive as Spain's heavy-handed attempt to crush the independence movement in Catalonia. They are also a key stumbling block in negotiations trying to find a way out of the political deadlock, Spain's worst constitutional crisis in decades.

Their absence casts a shadow over Thursday's commemorations of the first year since Spanish police began searching regional government buildings in Barcelona and arresting Catalan officials.

Nine of the separatists remain in preventive jail on preliminary charges of rebellion and abuse of power. Seven are in Lledoners, including prominent activists Jordi Sanchez and Jordi Cuixart, who drew tens of thousands to the streets one year ago to protest police searches ahead of Catalonia's banned October 1, 2017 referendum on independence.Former regional ministers Oriol Junqueras and Jordi Turull are also here.

The latter's wife, Blanca Bragulat, stood this week outside the prison's walled perimeter and put her husband on speakerphone for supporters.

"We're OK, we are strong," Turull said, replying to questions by friends and relatives who applauded when they heard his voice.

Holding Catalan independence flags and wearing yellow t-shirts and ribbons  ubiquitous symbols of support for those they consider to be political prisoners  these families have been setting up the picnic tables twice a week ever since the inmates were transferred from prisons near Madrid to this facility 70 kilometers(43 miles) north of Barcelona.

The transfers were ordered by Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez soon after he came to power in June to ease the political conflict. But regional separatist authorities in Catalonia want more and are urging state prosecutors to change their position and allow the release of the prisoners.

The central government, which appoints the top prosecutor, is sticking to the line that the separatists are receiving due process according to Spanish law. But some officials have acknowledged that dialogue would be easier with the Catalans out of jail.

Foreign Minister Josep Borrell, a politician from Catalonia who presided over the European Parliament, recently said "at a personal level" he would have preferred for the separatists to be free while awaiting trial. That comment was mirrored by Territorial Affairs Minister Meritxell Batet, another Catalan in Sanchez's cabinet, who said "it would be better and much easier for the dialogue" if the Catalans were free.

For separatist parties in the prosperous region, however, the prisoners keep pro-independence supporters united, says political analyst Pablo Simon.

"For a highly fragmented Catalan movement that scrambles to find the next step in the fight for independence, the prisoners' plight is their only source of cohesion currently. But the politicians are in the hands of activists who think that with jailed separatists there can't be any compromise with central authorities," said the Carlos III University professor. "There's very little room to maneuver."

Meanwhile, divisions over the issue of independence are still running high in the streets of Catalonia. Some people have objected to using public spaces to hang symbols in support of the prisoners.

For separatists  but also for some of those who don't support a separate Catalonia  the jailing of the officials without even setting a date for a trial feels like a deep injustice.

"We need the higher courts to look at us here and see that these people defended political ideas," said Albalate, the nurse. "But that's not a reason for them to be in jail."

Bragulat said she hoped "the European Community at some point will say something."

But even Europe seems unmoved by the Catalan separatists' plight.

Council of Europe Secretary General Thorbjorn Jagland told reporters this month that he "had no doubt Spanish courts were treating the matter in accordance with Spanish law and the European Human Rights convention." He said the separatists could appeal their case in the European human rights court but only after they had gone through courts in Spain.

That's a bleak prospect for supporters and relatives like Bragulat, who told The Associated Press she has "gotten used to living day by day" in order to cope with her husband's absence.

"We don't know how long all of this will last," she said. "But it will end well, right?"
The tours begin at dusk and return after dark, lasting approximately 90 minutes. Guests will be led along a lighted path with woods on one side and the Fox River on the other while receiving a full tour of the historic Farnsworth House.
The uplifting strains of one of Puerto Ricos most beloved songs filled the air at 6:15 a.m. on Thursday as a choir stood in the coastal town where Hurricane Maria made landfall at that moment exactly one year ago.

The serenade in Yabucoa, a fishing and farming town of 37,000 still struggling to recover from the Category 4 storm, was the first in a series of events to mark the anniversary of the devastating storm and remember the estimated 2,975 people who lost their lives in its aftermath. Protests were planned in San Juan and elsewhere, as well as a funeral procession. Tens of thousands remain without adequate shelter and reliable access to electrical power a year after the hurricane, which caused an estimated $100 billion in damage.

While the U.S. government has invested billions of dollars to help clean up and repair the U.S. territory , much work remains. Major power outages are still being reported, tens of thousands of insurance claims are still pending and nearly 60,000 homes still have temporary roofs unable to withstand a Category 1 hurricane.

I think its inexplicable, Kumi Naidoo, Amnesty Internationals secretary general, told The Associated Press during a visit to the island Thursday. Theres no justifiable reason I can see for this gross level of negligence.

Government officials argue that many changes have been made to better prepare Puerto Rico for future storms, but they acknowledge that significant obstacles remain.

Jose Ortiz, director of Puerto Ricos Electric Power Authority, told reporters that 20 percent of repairs made to the power grid need to be redone. He said crews didnt have access to the best materials at the time or were forced to rely on temporary fixes, such as using trees as makeshift power polls after Maria destroyed up to 75 percent of transmission lines.

In addition, municipal officials have complained that reconstruction efforts are too slow. Ariel Soto, assistant to the mayor of the mountain town of Morovis, said that 220 families there remain without a proper roof.

Were still waiting for help, he said. This hit us hard.

In Yabucoa, tarps still covered many homes that have yet to be rebuilt even as the hopeful strains of Amanecer Borincano  Puerto Rican Dawn  resonated at the spot where Maria first unleashed its fury. I am the light of the morning that illuminates new paths, the choir sang to the dozens of local officials and residents gathered there. I am the son of palm trees, of fields and rivers.

In the capital, San Juan, among those still living under a blue tarp during the peak of hurricane season was Sixta Gladys Pena, a 72-year-old community leader.

You worry, because you think its going to fly off like it did before, she said. Weve lost an entire year and nothing has been resolved. You feel powerless.

Puerto Ricans also have become increasingly angry and frustrated as President Donald Trump recently touted what he said was a fantastic response to Hurricane Maria, calling it an unsung success as he denied the official death toll without presenting any evidence.

Nivia Rodriguez, a 60-year-old retiree whose uncle died a week after the storm, said she grew upset after watching videos of rescue crews in North Carolina when Hurricane Florence hit.

They saved five dogs that were drowning, she said, adding that she feels Puerto Rico didnt get the same treatment. That hits you.

Like many, Rodriguez hoped that after Thursday, she would no longer be bombarded by photos and videos that make her feel like shes reliving Hurricane Maria.

Its too much, she said.

But others felt that Marias tragic legacy still needs to be acknowledged, long after the anniversary has passed. Among them was a group of artists unveiling an exhibition called simply, 6:15 A.M.

Artist Omar Banuchi, who organized the exhibit, said he was reluctant at first, in part because he didnt know how to approach the subject. Its something that affected all of us and keeps affecting us, he said.

He said the exhibition walks a fine line, with some paintings showing beautiful landscapes alongside trailers set up by Puerto Ricos forensics institute as part of the effort to try to identify the bodies of those who perished in the storm. There also will be live music that will incorporate sounds of the hurricane hitting the island.

The point is for people to have a good time, Banuchi said. But there will be certain uncomfortable moments. ... Maria is still a difficult topic.
U.S. President Donald Trump tweeted Thursday that the remains of two U.S. soldiers had been identified from among the 55 boxes repatriated after his meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

The POW/MIA Accounting Agency said the remains were identified Sept. 13.

It said McDaniel was a medic with the 8th Cavalry Regiment Medical Company, supporting the regiment's 3rd Battalion. He was reported missing Nov. 2, 1950. McDaniel's military identification tag was among the boxes of remains.

Jones was a member of Company E, 2nd Battalion, 24th Infantry Regiment, 25th Infantry Division. He had been missing since Nov. 26, 1950.

Repatriation of remains was one of the deals struck during the Trump-Kim June summit in Singapore.

Of the 36,000 U.S. soldiers who died in the 1950-53 Korean War, 7,686 are listed as missing and 5,300 sets of remains are believed to be in North Korea.
The world is making progress in its efforts to lift people out of extreme poverty, but the global aspiration of eliminating such poverty by 2030 is unattainable, a new report found.

A World Bank report released Wednesday says the number of people living on less than $1.90 per day fell to a record low of 736 million, or 10 percent of the worlds population, in 2015, the latest year for which data is available.

The figure was less than the 11 percent recorded in 2013, showing slow but steady progress.

Over the last 25 years, more than a billion people have lifted themselves out of extreme poverty, and the global poverty rate is now lower than it has ever been in recorded history. This is one of the greatest human achievements of our time, World Bank Group President Jim Yong Kim said.

But if we are going to end poverty by 2030, we need much more investment, particularly in building human capital, to help promote the inclusive growth it will take to reach the remaining poor, he warned. For their sake, we cannot fail.

Poverty levels dropped across the world, except in the Middle East and North Africa, where civil wars spiked the extreme poverty rate from 9.5 million people in 2013 to 18.6 million in 2015.

The highest concentration of extreme poverty remained in sub-Saharan Africa, with 41.1 percent, down from 42.5 percent. South Asia showed the greatest progress with poverty levels dropping to 12.4 percent from 16.2 percent two years earlier.

The World Banks preliminary forecast is that extreme poverty has declined to 8.6 percent in 2018.

About half the nations now have extreme poverty rates of less than 3 percent, which is the target set for 2030. But the report said that goal is unlikely to be met.
The head of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee says the woman accusing Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of sexually assaulting her has until Friday morning to indicate she plans to testify before the panel in a hearing Monday.

California psychology professor Christine Blasey Ford has accused Kavanaugh of sexually assaulting her 36 years ago when both were in high school, an alleged attack that left Ford fearful for her life. Kavanaugh has denied the claims.

WATCH: Fate of Supreme Court Nominee Rests With a Divided Senate

As you know, I have reopened the hearing on Judge Kavanaughs nomination in light of Dr. Fords allegations, Chairman Chuck Grassley said in a letter Wednesday. That hearing will begin again on Monday, September 25, at 10 a.m. I have invited Dr. Ford to testify regarding her allegations against Judge Kavanaugh. And in recognition of how difficult it can be to discuss allegations of this kind in public, I have also offered her the choice of testifying in either a public or closed session of the hearing.

Ford has not indicated whether she will attend the hearing. Her lawyers have called for an FBI probe of her allegations before she testifies.

The rush to a hearing is unnecessary, and contrary to the committee discovering the truth, Lisa Banks, one of Fords lawyers, said in a statement to CNN on Wednesday.

Banks said Ford and her family have received threats, which has caused them to leave their home.

She continues to believe that a full, nonpartisan investigation of this matter is needed, and she is willing to cooperate with the committee, Banks said. However, the committees stated plan to move forward with a hearing that has only two witnesses is not a fair or good faith investigation; there are multiple witnesses whose names have appeared publicly and should be included in any proceeding.

The Senate Judiciary Committee is considering Kavanaughs nomination for a lifetime seat on the countrys highest court.

Republicans hold a slim majority in the Senate. The Judiciary Committee had been expected to vote on Kavanaugh Thursday, but that was pushed back after Ford went public with her accusation in a Washington Post article.

Many Republicans have called for the confirmation process to go forward, accusing Democrats of trying to stall. Democrats have said there is no need to rush and that the allegations should be fully considered.

Democrats seek FBI inquiry

That continued Wednesday with Democratic Senator Kamala Harris saying Republican opposition to an FBI probe doesnt make sense.

Members of the U.S. Senate should exercise due diligence, not rush toward a vote for a lifetime appointment. The people we represent didnt send us here to shirk our duty, she said.

Republican Senator Orrin Hatch wrote in the Washington Examiner that both Kavanaugh and Ford should directly address the allegations before the committee, but that Democrats have mishandled the process.

No matter the outcome, Democrats should be held responsible for circumventing the very process that protects people like Ford. Their decision to reveal this allegation at the most politically damaging moment reeks of opportunism, Hatch said.

Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein, to whom Ford wrote a letter in July outlining her allegations, has defended the timing of how the information became public, saying it was only appropriate for Ford to make that decision.

President Donald Trump expressed support for his nominee Wednesday, saying that its very hard for me to imagine that Kavanaugh sexually assaulted Ford.

Trump said he hopes Ford testifies at Mondays hearing.

I really want to see her, to see what she has to say, Trump said of Ford, now 51. He said it would be unfortunate if she does not appear.

Anita Hill

Meanwhile, Anita Hill, the law professor at the center of lurid 1991 confirmation hearings involving Clarence Thomas as a U.S. Supreme Court justice, supported Fords call for an FBI investigation of her claims.

Hill told ABCs Good Morning America show: The American public really is expecting something more. They want to know that the Senate takes this seriously.

Hill, now a law professor at Brandeis University, said Republican leaders are in an unnecessary rush to confirm Kavanaugh.

Either they dont take this seriously, she said, or ... they just want to get it over. Im not sure which is in play. Maybe theyre not concerned, or maybe they dont know how to handle this kind of situation.

The specter of Hills allegations 27 years ago that Thomas often sexually harassed her when they both worked for a federal government agency hangs heavy over the current Kavanaugh confirmation proceedings.

Hills accusations were largely dismissed then by the all-male Senate committee, but many American women sympathized with her claims against Thomas, saying they resonated with their own experiences in the workplace. Thomas was confirmed on a narrow Senate vote and remains a conservative stalwart on the court to this day.

Republican lawmakers are trying to win Senate confirmation for Kavanaugh ahead of the start of the courts new term, Oct. 1, or if not by then, ahead of the Nov. 6 nationwide congressional elections, to show Republican voters they have made good on campaign promises to place conservative judges like Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court.
Mexican troops and police committed two extrajudicial killings while confronting presumed fuel thieves in the central state of Puebla in May 2017, a Mexican human rights group said Wednesday, adding to allegations of abuse against the military.

A report by the National Human Rights Commission (CNDH) said police and troops manipulated the scene by placing high-caliber firearms beside the two bodies. Eight other people died and 13 people, including four minors, were detained with excessive force, the report said.

Neither the defense ministry nor the Puebla police force responded to requests for comment. The state government declined to comment.

Police duties

The military has assumed some police duties in Mexico for more than a decade, working to combat rising drug violence that contributed to a record 31,000 homicides in 2017. Their increased responsibilities have coincided with accusations of human rights violations including extrajudicial killings, kidnappings and torture.

As a result of its investigation, the CNDH has the evidence to show grave violations to human rights and personal freedom, the group said of the reported deaths in Puebla.

The CNDH urged state oil firm Pemex to cooperate in investigations and not let its property be used to hold detainees.

Pemex did not immediately respond to requests for comment. The CNDH previously found that armed forces were involved in the murder of four people in the state of Tamaulipas in 2014, and that soldiers arbitrarily executed two people after an illegal raid in 2016.

This case is one more example of how the Mexican military violates human rights, Amnesty International said in a statement in response to the CNDH report. Its time for the armed forces to return to their barracks.

Calls for investigation

The CNDH called on the Mexican attorney generals office to investigate, and said national and state officials should provide reparations for the victims.

Mexicos congress passed a controversial security law last year that would lay out the rules under which the armed forces can operate in the battle with organized crime. The law was strongly criticized by opponents who fear it could open the door to more abuses.

Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto has said the law will not be implemented until it is reviewed by the Supreme Court.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has accepted Israel's offer to share detailed information on the Israeli airstrike in Syria that triggered fire by Syrian forces which downed a Russian reconnaissance plane, the Kremlin said Wednesday.

Syrian forces mistook the Russian Il-20 for Israeli aircraft, killing all 15 people aboard Monday night. Russias Defense Ministry blamed the planes loss on Israel, but Putin sought to defuse tensions, pointing at a chain of tragic accidental circumstances.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called Putin on Tuesday to express sorrow over the death of the planes crew and blamed Syria. Syrian President Bashar Assad sent Putin a telegram Wednesday offering his condolences and putting the blame on Israeli aggression, the official SANA news agency said.

Israels air force chief is scheduled to arrive in Moscow on Thursday to provide details. Putin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters Wednesday that Russian experts will carefully study the data that the air force chief will deliver.

The Israeli military said its fighter jets were targeting a Syrian military facility involved in providing weapons for Irans proxy Hezbollah militia and insisted it warned Russia of the coming raid in accordance with de-confliction agreements. It said the Syrian army fired the missiles that hit the Russian plane when the Israeli jets had already returned to Israeli airspace.

The Russian Defense Ministry said the Israeli warning came less than a minute before the strike, leaving the Russian aircraft in the line of fire. It accused the Israeli military of deliberately using the Russian plane as a cover to dodge Syrian defenses and threatened to retaliate.

While Putin took a cautious stance on the incident, he warned that Russia will respond by taking additional steps to protect our servicemen and assets in Syria.

Deputy Prime Minister Yuri Borisov said Wednesday that those will include deploying automated protection systems at Russias air and naval bases in Syria.

Business daily Kommersant reported that Russia also may respond to the downing of its plane by becoming more reluctant to engage Iran and its proxy Hezbollah militia, to help assuage Israeli worries.

Moscow has played a delicate diplomatic game of maintaining friendly ties with both Israel and Iran. In July, Moscow struck a deal with Tehran to keep its fighters 85 kilometers (53 miles) from the Golan Heights to accommodate Israeli security concerns.
The chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee wrote a letter Wednesday to the lawyers for the woman accusing Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of assault when they were teenagers, informing them of steps the woman must take by Friday if she plans to testify about the 36-year-old incident on Monday.

California psychology professor Christine Blasey Ford has accused Kavanaugh of sexually assaulting her 36 years ago when both were in high school, an alleged attack that left Ford fearful for her life. Kavanaugh has denied the claims.

As you know, I have reopened the hearing on Judge Kavanaughs nomination in light of Dr. Fords allegations. That hearing will begin again on Monday, September 25, at 10 a.m. I have invited Dr. Ford to testify regarding her allegations against Judge Kavanaugh. And in recognition of how difficult it can be to discuss allegations of this kind in public, I have also offered her the choice of testifying in either a public or closed session of the hearing, Chuck Grassley said in a letter to lawyers Debra Katz and Lisa Banks.

Unnecessary rush

Banks, in a statement to CNN later Wednesday, said, The rush to a hearing is unnecessary, and contrary to the committee discovering the truth.

She said Ford and her family have received threats, which has caused them to leave their home.

She continues to believe that a full nonpartisan investigation of this matter is needed, and she is willing to cooperate with the committee, Banks said in the statement. However, the committees stated plan to move forward with a hearing that has only two witnesses is not a fair or good faith investigation; there are multiple witnesses whose names have appeared publicly and should be included in any proceeding.

Grassley, who oversaw Kavanaughs nomination hearing, is from Iowa and has served in the Senate since 1981. He ended his letter by saying, ... consistent with committee rules, Dr. Fords prepared testimony and biography are due to the committee by 10 a.m. on Friday, September 21, if she intends to testify on Monday.

Banks statement made no reference to testifying Monday.

Trump: Hard to imagine

Earlier Wednesday, President Donald Trump said that its very hard for me to imagine that Kavanaugh sexually assaulted then-teenager Ford.

Trump said he hopes Ford testifies at Mondays hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee, which is considering Kavanaughs nomination for a lifetime seat on the countrys highest court.

I really want to see her, to see what she has to say, Trump said of Ford, now 51. He said it would be unfortunate if she does not appear.

Fords lawyers late Tuesday called for an FBI probe of her claims before she testifies, but Trump and Republicans that control the Senate panel say an FBI investigation is unnecessary. Kavanaugh, who says he will appear at the Senate panels hearing, has adamantly denied knowledge of the purported 1982 party at a suburban Washington home and said he has never attacked any woman.

Trump, speaking to reporters at the White House as he headed to North Carolina to view the flood damage from Hurricane Florence, praised the 53-year-old Kavanaugh as an extraordinary man. But Trump said, its really up to the Senate to decide how to proceed with the confirmation process.

Advice from Anita Hill

Meanwhile, Anita Hill, the law professor at the center of lurid 1991 confirmation hearings involving Clarence Thomas as a U.S. Supreme Court justice, supported Fords call for an FBI investigation of her claims.

Hill told ABCs Good Morning America show, The American public really is expecting something more. They want to know that the Senate takes this seriously.

Hill, now a law professor at Brandeis University, said Republican leaders are in an unnecessary rush to confirm Kavanaugh.

Either they dont take this seriously, she said, or ... they just want to get it over. Im not sure which is in play. Maybe theyre not concerned, or maybe they dont know how to handle this kind of situation.

The specter of Hills allegations 27 years ago that Thomas often sexually harassed her when they both worked for a federal government agency hangs heavy over the current Kavanaugh confirmation proceedings.

Hills accusations were largely dismissed then by the all-male Senate committee, but many American women sympathized with her claims against Thomas, saying they resonated with their own experiences in the workplace. Thomas was confirmed on a narrow Senate vote and remains a conservative stalwart on the court to this day.

WATCH: Fate of Supreme Court Nominee Rests With a Divided Senate

Republican schedule

Republican lawmakers are trying to win Senate confirmation for Kavanaugh ahead of the courts start of a new term on Oct. 1, or, if not by then, ahead of the Nov. 6 nationwide congressional elections, to show Republican voters they have made good on campaign promises to place conservative judges like Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court.

Fords lawyers told Grassley in a letter late Tuesday that some of the senators on the committee appear to have made up their minds and believe Kavanaugh.

A full investigation by law enforcement officials will ensure that the crucial facts and witnesses in this matter are assessed in a nonpartisan manner and that the committee is fully informed before conducting any hearing or making any decisions, the letter said.

The lawyers also said Ford has become the subject of death threats and harassment, and expressed fears that the committee planned to have her relive this traumatic and harrowing incident while testifying at the same table as Kavanaugh and in front of national television cameras.

Nobody should be subject to threats and intimidation, and Dr. Ford is no exception, Grassley said in a statement later Tuesday.

The Republican senator said there were no plans to have Ford and Kavanaugh appear at the same time, and that the committee had offered her the opportunity to appear before a private hearing.

Ford alleged in a Washington Post interview that Kavanaugh groped her at the house party when she was 15 and he was 17.

She said Kavanaugh, stumbling drunk, threw her down on a bed, grinding his body against hers and trying to pull off her one-piece bathing suit and the clothing she was wearing over it. Ford said when she tried to scream, he put his hand over her mouth.

She said she feared Kavanaugh might inadvertently kill her before she managed to flee.
A number of top Algerian military commanders, including the heads of the air force and the army, have been dismissed within the past week.

In a series of moves, at least a dozen top officers have been replaced since June.

Analysts say that a core of military officers under the deputy defense minister are consolidating their power in the lead up to presidential elections next spring, which ailing outgoing President Abdel Aziz Bouteflika is expected to win.

Algerian state TV announced the ouster of a number of top military commanders earlier this week, including the country's air force chief and the army's head of ground operations. One top officer fled to Paris with his family through Algiers International Airport, prompting the firing of top airport security personnel.

A former Algerian diplomat, Mohammed Zeytout, told an Egyptian TV station the firings were part of an "extremely ugly power struggle" in which "top generals are firing, deposing or arresting each other, while some are trying to flee the country." Former military officers have had their passports canceled and are not being allowed to travel.

Hilal Khashan, who teaches political science at the American University of Beirut, termed the purges a "pre-emptive coup," while Mohammed Zeytout called them "unprecedented except for countries that have undergone regime change or a coup."

Bouteflika is running for a fifth term this coming spring, despite poor health, and Khashan says those who support him are using him as a figurehead behind which to govern.

"There is an agreement among the power elite in Algeria to keep Abdel Aziz Bouteflika in office because they run the country since he is incapacitated and they hide behind him and that gives them a sense of legitimacy," Khashan said. "The fear is that if Bouteflika is gone, Algeria would be gravely destabilized."

Khashan points out that Army Chief of Staff Gaid Salah, who appears to be calling the shots, has been using corruption as a pretext to get rid of possible rivals. "Corruption," he said "is nothing new in Algeria. It is a way of life."

France's influential Le Monde newspaper reported that top army officers have been accused of "running up to 30 private companies, each," both in their own names and in the names of family members.

Mohammed Bashoush, who teaches political science at the University of Algiers, told Al Hurra TV he thinks the current turmoil in Algeria is nevertheless part of an agreement between civilian and military leaders.

Bashoush said it is obvious the changes taking place in the military are directly related to preparations for the upcoming presidential elections, and despite the conflict between opposing sides, both the political and military wings of the presidency have come to a consensus over a road map to follow.

Prime Minister Ahmed Ouyahia told a press conference earlier this week, during the visit of German Chancellor Angela Merkel, that despite turmoil, Algeria has a free press and everyone is allowed to speak out.

Ouyahia said freedom of expression is an integral part of the Algerian press and its 160 newspapers, and no one is penalized for what they write about the president, the prime minister or the institutions of state.

But former diplomat Zeytout was less sanguine.

"President Bouteflika is sick and his health is miserable. He hasn't addressed the people in 6 years and 4 months," Zeytout said. "No one wants to talk about it, but the real power center is Army Chief of Staff Gaid Salah, who runs the country surrounded by 30 other generals."
The Trump administration's latest tariffs on Chinese imports have been welcomed by some in Washington who have advocated a tougher stance on China's trade practices. But as VOA's Bill Gallo reports, some are also questioning whether the White House is using the right strategy in its trade war with the world's second largest economy.
Turkish Finance Minister Berat Albayrak heads to Berlin Friday to meet with his German counterpart, Olaf Scholz, as Ankara struggles against an emerging financial crisis. Turkey's currency fell 40 percent this year and discussions on potential financial support from Berlin are expected to be on the agenda.

Albayrak, speaking in Istanbuls Dolmabahce Palace Thursday, unveiled his much-vaunted medium-term economic plan. He promised to curb debt-fueled growth, enforce financial austerity and undergo a reshaping into the "value-added" economy investors have been clamoring for for years.

The Turkish lira surged before Albayraks speech, fueled by rising expectations. However, once delivered, the currency fell sharply with investors criticizing the plan for lack of details, along with concerns over the exposure of Turkish banks to foreign debt.



The Turkish corporate sector is estimated to owe over $100 billion in foreign denominated debt in the next 12 months.

"We are talking of a five or six percent drop in the economy, to pay off debt by contracting imports and expanding exports at any cost, analyst Atilla Yesilada of Global Source Partners said. It's going to be extremely painful, really painful. The IMF(International Monetary Fund) can take some of the pain.

During Turkey's economic crises in the 1990s through to the early 2000s the country depended on bailouts from the IMF. However Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has repeatedly ruled out IMF support.

There is a stigma attached to the IMF given that the government has repeatedly said that one of its biggest achievements was to end Turkeys dependence on the IMF,  said Sinan Ulgen, head of the Istanbul-based research group Edam. So for these reasons Erdogan does not want to return to the IMF for support. 

The IMF might be unwilling to provide funds to Turkey given the current animosity between Ankara and Washington, warns international relations expert Soli Ozel of Istanbul.



The bill that was passed in (the U.S.) Congress to ask American agencies to block multi-international economic institutions, to actually block any kind of loans or favorable terms for Turkey was a very significant and very hostile move, Ozel said.

The bill Congress passed was in response to the ongoing detention of American pastor Andrew Brunson, who is on trial in Turkey on terrorism charges. Washington claims the allegations are baseless.

Analysts point out while the United States does not have a veto on IMF funding decisions, Washington could delay or complicate any deal with Ankara.



The European Union and in particular Berlin, observers suggest, is seen by Ankara as a politically acceptable source of international financial support. ...That is certainly an idea that is being openly discussed in some of the European capitals, analyst Ulgen said.

The EU could be an alternative to the IMF, but that is an open-ended question, he added, because we dont have examples of the EU acting unilaterally. Even in past cases related to Greece, for instance, the EU was part of a consortium that also included the IMF.

Analysts suggest Ankara is likely to be banking on its strategic importance. Turkey plays an important role in keeping the refugee flow outside the EU. That is a starting point, former senior Turkish diplomat Aydin Selcen said.

Two years ago Ankara and Belgium signed a migration agreement that resulted in a big reduction in the hundreds of thousands of refugees and migrants a year that once entered the EU.

The continuation of the migrant deal, analyst Ulgen argues, is viewed as a necessity by Berlin. From the German perspective, there seems to be a fear that the economic instability in Turkey could end up affecting the overall political stability of the country so possible jeopardize Turkeys ability to stand by its commitments on the refugee deal, Ulgen said.

However, given any financial assistance to Turkey would likely be in the tens of billions of dollars, there is skepticism about whether Berlin and the rest of the EU would be prepared to act alone.

Regarding the European funding, the indications are so far they would want an IMF involvement, chief economist Inan Demir of financial services company Nomura International said.

Even if there is no IMF involvement in the (financial support) package, he added, that funding would come with conditions similar to those that would come from the IMF. I am very skeptical that those conditions would be acceptable to the Turkish government.

Analysts suggest measures including ending Erdogans prestige mega-construction projects would likely be demanded in any financial assistance deal, along with calls for reform to ensure an independent judiciary, a concern of many foreign investors. The Turkish president has until now resisted such reforms.
He said everyone has bad days and it is OK not to be OK. The point we want to make is that there are services out there. Even if you only talk to someone for a few minutes, there is the chance to turn yourself around by having a complete stranger tell you: I get it.
Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko on Thursday backed a controversial bill that would require pro-Russian groups to register as "foreign agents," borrowing from the playbook of his arch-enemy Vladimir Putin.

"We see how the fifth column is raising its head," the Ukrainian leader said during his annual address to parliament.

"A network of Russian agents is still active in Ukraine," said Poroshenko, claiming they were seeking to get local media under their control.

"They are independent of Ukraine but are controlled by the Kremlin and they are whipping up anti-Ukrainian, anti-European and anti-American sentiments."

He said ensuring Ukraine's "information security" was a top priority ahead of a presidential election next year.

"Thus I support the idea of a bill to register agents of influence of the aggressor country," he added.

The bill on "foreign agents" was proposed by one of the main factions in the governing coalition, the People's Front, which says the ex-Soviet country needs to protect itself from Russia's influence.

Poroshenko backed the legislation after the Ukrainian Helsinki Human Rights Union cautioned against it earlier this week, saying the bill would "create legal mechanisms to suppress public initiatives."

Ukrainians are scheduled to go to the polls to elect a president next March.

Poroshenko is widely expected to run but has not yet made an official announcement.

By proposing the controversial bill, Ukrainian authorities are following in the footsteps of their foe Russian President Putin, who has backed a law requiring Western-funded non-governmental groups and media to register as "foreign agents."

Putin has justified the need for such a law by saying that a Western-backed "fifth column" was bent on destroying Russia.

Ties between Kyiv and its former master Moscow were shredded after Russia annexed Crimea in 2014 and supported a separatist uprising in the east of Ukraine, a conflict that has claimed more than 10,000 lives.

Ukraine and its Western allies have accused Russia of funneling troops and arms across the border, but Moscow has denied the claims despite evidence to the contrary.
A Russian-Turkish agreement to create a demilitarized buffer zone between the Syrian army and rebels inside Syria's northern Idlib province has averted a war for now, according to a senior United Nations official.

Earlier this week, Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Turkish counterpart, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, agreed to set aside a large area along the border between Turkey and Idlib to potentially protect some 3 million civilians from attack. Turkey already shelters more than 3 million Syrian refugees and fears a massive exodus into its territory if Idlib were under attack.

Jan Egeland, a senior adviser of the U.N. special envoy for Syria, says he was informed of the agreement's details during a meeting of a U.N.-backed task force on humanitarian access in Syria. Egeland says he feels relieved the countdown to war was stopped at the "11th hour."

Egeland says the threatened military onslaught by Syrian and Russian forces to retake Idlib, the last rebel-held enclave in Syria, would have risked the lives of the civilians, including one million children.

He says the Russian-Turkish agreement bought more time for diplomats and politicians to protect civilians inside the buffer zone and avert a catastrophic humanitarian disaster.

"What I understand is that the so-called war on terror is not called off," Egeland said. "On the contrary, there will be in the future, air raids against the listed organizations. There will also be fighting between armed groups, armed actors and the so-called terrorists, the so-called radicals."

Under the deal, Egeland says only al-Nusra and other U.N.-listed terrorist groups can be attacked. These groups, which number about 10,000, will be moved outside the buffer zone, he says, adding that other "more moderate fighters" supported by Turkey will not be attacked.

Egeland warns that the terrorist groups will be scattered in different parts of Idlib, which is cause for alarm. Many of the groups vow to fight to the end, he says, but efforts will be made to reach out to them to try to get them not to fight to the last fighter and not to fight to the last civilian in their areas.
Catholic bishops in the United States plan to set up a hotline to field complaints about bishops who have sexually abused or harassed children or adults, in response to a growing sexual misconduct scandal in the church's highest ranks.

The hotline was one of several moves unveiled on Wednesday by bishops to try to rebuild trust in the U.S. church hierarchy after recent allegations that bishops had abused children and covered up decades of sex crimes by priests.

"Some bishops, by their actions or their failures to act, have caused great harm to both individuals and the Church," the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) administrative committee said in a statement.

"They have used their authority and power to manipulate and sexually abuse others. They have allowed the fear of scandal to replace genuine concern and care for those who have been victimized by abusers."

The Catholic Church faces crises worldwide involving sexual abuse of minors. In the United States, the scandal has focused on church leaders after former Washington Archbishop Theodore McCarrick stepped down as a cardinal in July following sexual abuse allegations.

A Pennsylvania grand jury report in August alleged bishops tried to hide accusations that about 1,000 children and adults were abused by 301 priests over 70 years.

Last week, Pope Francis ordered an investigation into a West Virginia bishop accused of sexually harassing adults.

The "third-party" hotline will allow people to report sexual abuse of a minor or adult by a bishop and direct those complaints to civil authorities and the "appropriate" church authorities, the USCCB statement said.

The bishops' conference will develop a code of conduct specifically for bishops, and establish policies "addressing restrictions on bishops who were removed or resigned because of allegations of sexual abuse of minors or sexual harassment of or misconduct with adults, including seminarians and priests," the statement said.

New York's attorney general issued civil subpoenas last week to all eight Roman Catholic dioceses in the state as part of a sex abuse investigation.

In one of the largest settlements stemming from a sexual abuse case in the Catholic Church, the Brooklyn Diocese said on Tuesday it agreed to pay $27.5 million to four men abused by a catechism teacher when they were children.
The White House said Thursday it has made "significant progress" in restoring normal life on the U.S. island territory of Puerto Rico, exactly a year after the devastation wrought by Hurricane Maria.

It said the Federal Emergency Management Agency faced "unprecedented challenges" when the Category 4 hurricane swept over the Caribbean island with 250 kilometer-per-hour winds, knocking out its electrical grid, sending cascading landslides and fallen trees over thousands of kilometers of roads, and shutting down water systems.

Now, the White House said, power and water systems have been restored for nearly all of the island's 3.3 million residents, and all but 640 of Puerto Rico's 27,000 kilometers of roadways have been repaired. Nearly all of the island's cellular towers have also been restored.

The White House dispatched administration officials, including Housing Secretary Ben Carson, to the island to meet with Puerto Rico officials to discuss the ongoing recovery efforts.

Blue tarps still serve as roofs for some housing on the island, while many residents have run out of emergency funds needed to make more repairs to their homes. Other residents, especially poorer people, say their lives remain in turmoil as a result of the storm, with relief agencies reporting that more people are requesting food and other staples than before Maria hit.

Puerto Rico Gov. Ricardo Rossello said this week that the government is suing insurance companies that it says have not responded quickly enough to damage claims from the storm. The suit claimed that Puerto Ricans are owed $2.6 billion in unpaid damages.

The White House quoted President Donald Trump as saying earlier this week, "We stand with Puerto Rico, and we are helping them to rebuild stronger and better than ever before. To every family who has lost a loved one in these really devastating hurricanes and storms: All of America grieves with you. Our hands are folded in prayer and outstretched with love.

The White House made no mention of the controversy over the death toll from the storm. The initial toll was listed as 64 deaths, but several studies since then have pegged the number as much higher, partly because in the storm's aftermath, ailing island residents were unable to get the medical treatment they needed because of blocked roads or lack of electrical power they needed for surgeries and medical care.

WATCH: Year After Hurricane, Puerto Ricans Working to Move On

Researchers at George Washington University concluded last month that nearly 3,000 Puerto Ricans were killed by the storm, comparing normal mortality on the island with the number who died in the months after the hurricane. The Puerto Rican government accepted the figure as the correct death toll.

But Trump rejected the figure, saying on Twitter a week ago, "3000 people did not die in the two hurricanes that hit Puerto Rico," also referencing Hurricane Irma that delivered a glancing blow to the island a year ago.

"When I left the Island, AFTER the storm had hit, they had anywhere from 6 to 18 deaths. As time went by it did not go up by much. Then, a long time later, they started to report really large numbers, like 3000. This was done by the Democrats in order to make me look as bad as possible when I was successfully raising Billions of Dollars to help rebuild Puerto Rico. If a person died for any reason, like old age, just add them onto the list. Bad politics. I love Puerto Rico!"
The government of Zimbabwe says Foreign Affairs and International Trade Minister Retired Lieutenant General Sibusiso Moyo is in hospital where doctors are expected to do a small procedure on him today.

Moyo, who announced the military intervention last November that eventually led to former President Robert Mugabes ouster, was admitted Wednesday at Avenues Clinic in Harare.

Latest reports indicated that attempts were being made to move him to a specialized hospital outside Zimbabwe.

His admission set social media on fire with some people claiming that the minister, affectionately known by his legion of fans as General Bae or the Peoples General, had died. But Deputy Information, Publicity and Broadcasting Services Minister Energy Mutodi, told the state-controlled Herald newspaper that Moyo is in stable condition.

The newspaper quoted Mutodi as saying, I went to see him this morning and he is recovering well from a minor illness. I am sure doctors are going to do a simple procedure on him this afternoon. He is in a stable condition and when I arrived he was chatting with his relatives. We hope that he will be treated and discharged soon so that he will be back at work.

VOA Studio 7 was not allowed to see Moyo at Avenues Clinic and Information Minister Monica Mutsvangwa, Moyos wife and some of his close associates were not available for comment.

Moyo, a former combatant under Zapus armed wing, the Zimbabwe Revolutionary Peoples Army, rose through the Zimbabwe National Army ranks to become a major general before his retirement last year and became the face of the military intervention.

He was appointed foreign affairs minister soon after Mnangagwa was sworn-in last year.
Brian Williams, the veteran anchor who became an integral part of MSNBC after a critical on-air gaffe in 2015 while behind the anchor desk at NBC Nightly News led to his removal from that landmark program, is parting ways with the cable-news outlet and striking out on his own.
Stefanies reservation was supposed to be for a month. But she said that after complaining to both her host and Airbnb about the apartments condition, and the fact that she cleaned the unit herself for six hours, she was informed the morning after arriving that the host wanted her out in two hours.
Today, tribalism is eating away at the fabric of the nation. Is it too much of a leap to say we fear not our differences, but the fact that we are so different that the nation is foundering while we believe the worst about each other?
Buruma may believe he was pushed out of his job because of a Twitter frenzy of histrionic women, as New Yorker writer Jia Tolentino put it on Twitter. But, she aptly added, thats not the point: The Ghomeshi essay & Slate interview added up to a truly abysmal professional performance: you cant be a good editor with such a pathological distance from the texture of the world.
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And she knew shed be blamed, as women often are when they are assaulted. Why would he do that? Why were you there in the first place? Did you lead him on? Why is that skirt so short? Button up that blouse. What in Gods name is on your face? Wipe that lipstick off right now.
We have a great team  many of whom have served our residents since the first days of the Bowser Administration, Falcicchio said. After more than three and a half years, it is ordinary that some will take on new roles and others will seek opportunities outside of government. We are thankful to all who serve.
In a phone interview, Craig B. Futterman, a professor at the University of Chicago Law School who focuses on racial discrimination and police brutality, said Mr. Burges actions persisted for so long because of institutional denial, a code of silence and refusal to address patterns of abuse and racism. There was also a collective denial, he added, from a society that is resistant to believe that the people whom we trust to protect us from harm would be predatory.
Newsham said investigators are beginning to dive into Crawfords background, which includes a charge of theft under $100 in July in Prince Georges County. The chief told reporters that authorities will look very carefully at the suspects past to see if there is something to lead to this kind of incident that we could have potentially taken care of.
We served the search warrant at the address that we identified through the investigation, however the investigation led us to the wrong address, Stawinski said. The individual that we are targeting does not live at that address . . . a law-abiding, hard-working citizen of Prince Georges County and his daughter were home at the point where we were executing that search warrant.
This is honestly one of the most significant disasters Ive ever dealt with  as far as the number of people displaced, the age of the population and the complexity that that presents, said Paul Carden, the regional disaster officer for the Red Cross, who has worked in the area for about eight years. This would be a shock to me, let alone someone who is 60 to 70, 80 years old.
Members of Congress, who fly more than the average American, also bridle at the myriad airline fees that amounted to almost $2.4 billion in the first half of this year, and totaled $4.6 billion last year. Some of them fume in public, too, but they all are mindful that the airline industry has contributed $12.4 million to the campaigns of incumbents in the past 10 years, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, and already has given incumbents $2.4 million in the election cycle that will end with the Nov. 6 election.
This is not just a children thing, not just a teenager thing, not just a high school thing, the junior said. Were going to have issues and things that come up throughout our entire lives. I think that being able to learn how to cope with these things now, being able to cross the line together reminds us we are not alone.
Charges dropped against woman who took phone from teen daughter: Charges have been dismissed against a western Michigan woman who faced possible jail time after taking away a cellphone from her 15-year-old daughter as punishment. Jodie May of Grandville told WOOD-TV she took away the iPhone 6 in April after the girl got in trouble in school. May was arrested on a misdemeanor larceny charge after her ex-husband filed a complaint saying he owned the phone. May was immediately freed on bond but faced up to 93 days in jail. However, prosecutors say that as the mother's trial was to start Tuesday, they determined the girl owned the phone.
As the crisis escalated and the secretary became its public face before Congress and on cable TV, Azar adhered to the administrations talking points, betraying no hint he was caught unaware by zero tolerance. Such loyalty reflects the priority Azar has long placed on nurturing relationships, whether the recent one with Trump or with conservative legal luminaries who have long been his mentors, including the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, for whom he clerked, and Justice Clarence Thomas, whom he considers a second father.
On Tuesday, deputies were called back to the address for an individual being on the property and causing a disturbance, and when police arrived, they saw Goshorn at the corner of Finch and Trailside Drive, just east of where the vandalism had occurred. Police said they were familiar with Goshorn due to past disorderly conduct calls and arrests at his home.
The landslide hit while several northern Philippine provinces are still dealing with deaths and widespread damage from Typhoon Mangkhut, which pummeled the region Saturday and left at least 88 dead and more than 60 missing. A search is still underway for dozens of people feared dead after landslides in the town of Itogon.
FOLLOWING THROUGH on previous threats, President Trump announced on Monday new tariffs on $200 billion worth of imports from China, in addition to levies previously imposed on $50 billion worth of goods. The taxes, which go into effect Sept. 24, were not quite as stiff as Mr. Trump initially proposed: 10 percent rather than 25 percent, on a range of goods from which popular consumer items such as bike helmets and smartwatches have strategically been omitted. Still, the tariff will increase to 25 percent by the end of the year unless China agrees to do what the president wants, which, he said, is to give fair and reciprocal treatment to American companies. Beijings answer so far: to prepare retaliatory tariffs on $60 billion worth of U.S. goods, despite Mr. Trumps threat to respond with yet another round of U.S. levies if it does.
This holiday season will be a good time for workers who have had trouble finding employment or those who are discouraged or marginally attached to the labor force, as retail, transport and warehousing jobs will be plentiful, Andrew Challenger, the firms vice president, said in a recent holiday hiring forecast.
The Chinese government denies all accusations of political interference abroad and typically paints such reporting as anti-Chinese, Cold War thinking. The Chinese government complained after national security adviser John Bolton listed China as one of four countries that interfere in our political processes on ABC News on Aug. 19. The Trump administration responded to the complaints by asking Beijing to confirm that it does not engage in such activities. The Chinese government changed the subject.
Assuming Hatch is faithfully repeating this conversation, the assertion that Kavanaugh wasnt at a party like the one described is at best fishy. After all, Fords own recollection of the alleged incident is hazy and offers few details  including where the party was  beyond the fact that it was a house with no parents present, where just a few teens were drinking and Kavanaughs close friend was present, probably in 1982. Sometimes Kavanaughs defenders cite this lack of detail to cast doubt on her credibility, but his denial, given the lack of detail, would seem at least somewhat discrediting of him.
In an earlier go-round, Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, failed to persuasively make that case. He and his colleagues put out a memo in February claiming that the FBI kept from the court knowledge that one of the reports, the so-called Steele dossier (asserting that Russia wanted to help Trump win the presidency), was partly the product of Democratic Party opposition research. When the Democrats gained access to the FISA request and issued a competing memo, however, they were able to prove this was not so. They pointed out that the FBI had acknowledged in the document that the dossier had been commissioned for political purposes. So it is entirely possible that revealing more of the warrant request will once again fail to strengthen the presidents case.
Late Thursday afternoon, Republican and Democratic staffers on the Judiciary Committee spoke on the phone with Katz to begin negotiations for a potential hearing next week. The first concern Katz raised on the call, according to a senior Senate aide directly familiar with the conversation, was the issue of Fords security  asking the staffers what the protocol is for ensuring that she is safe and whether reporters could be kept at a distance from her, as was done for Kavanaugh during his confirmation hearings.
Its time for decision-makers to put up or shut up and state if they will welcome Puerto Rico as the 51st state, if they will do whats in their power to make it happen, or if they will reject the right side of history, Rossello said.
He shared a couple key points about brain development and chemistry to help parents understand the science of addiction. For one, the prefrontal cortex takes more time to develop than other parts of the brain, he said. Thats the area of the brain that affects decision-making and appreciation of consequences.
Kavanaughs accuser, Christine Blasey Ford, has alleged that while she and Kavanaugh were at a house party in the early 1980s, when the two were in high school, he drunkenly pinned her to a bed, groped her and put his hand over her mouth to stifle her screams as he tried to take off her clothes.
May faces opposition from not only a hard-bargaining Europe, which does not want to make it too appealing for members to leave their club, but also her own Conservative Party, populated by hard-line Brexiteers such as former foreign secretary Boris Johnson, who disparages the prime ministers exit plan as a weak capitulation to Brussels.
Trump embraced Mas promise as an early win for his new administration. Trump campaigned on bringing back U.S. jobs lost to the forces of globalization, and businesses scrambled to give him credit for their expansion plans on U.S. soil  even if some blueprints came together years before he sought office.
Long and others at the agency thought his use of the vehicles was justified, current and former officials said, because the FEMA administrator is responsible for the agencys National Continuity Programs, which requires the countrys leaders to maintain secure communications in the event of a catastrophe. Much of the NCP plans are classified, officials said, but it requires Long to be on call around the clock with access to secure equipment that allows the president to talk to him within minutes notice.
The repatriation effort, bogged down by years of mistrust on both sides, took a turn in July when North Korean officials turned over 55 cases of remains to U.S. officials. That marked one of the first concrete wins following President Trumps June summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in Singapore. No joint recovery operations have been carried out in North Korea since 2005.
A: I recently took an international trip and lost my iPhone along the way (long story). I had to be resourceful to get around without it, but I am very glad to have one back in my hands at all times.
Alibaba chairman Jack Ma said the company can no longer meet its promise to create 1 million jobs in the United States due to US-China trade tensions, Chinese news agency Xinhua reported.

Ma had met US President Donald Trump two years ago and laid out the Chinese e-commerce giant's plan to bring one million small US businesses onto its platform to sell to Chinese consumers over the next five years.

Alibaba founder Jack Ma. Credit:Bloomberg

"This commitment is based on friendly China-US cooperation and the rational and objective premise of bilateral trade," Ma told Xinhua.

"The current situation has already destroyed the original premise. There is no way to deliver the promise."
In your book Superannuation Made Simple you say "there is still no limit on the amount that can be held in the concessionally taxed accumulation phase". This seems at odds with the Tax Office's advice that further contributions are not allowed once total superannuation balance reaches $1.6 million.

Dont confuse held with contributions. No non-concessional contributions are allowed once your balance reaches $1.6 million but you can still make concessional contributions up to a total of $25,000 a year. And your fund should grow by its earnings. Think about a person aged 55 with $1.6 million in their super account. If they contribute $21,250 a year ($25,000 less 15 per cent entry tax) and their fund earns 8 per cent, their balance should be $3.8 million at age 65.

Credit:Simon Letch

Now think about a 65-year-old with a balance of $1.6 million in pension mode. If the fund earns 8 per cent and withdrawals are the mandatory 5 per cent, the balance at age 75 could be over $2 million, all in the tax-free pension mode.

I wonder if you could clarify something for me regarding possible SMSF strategies in response to Labors proposed removal of franking credits. Most commentators have said there is likely to be a move away from Australian equities paying franked dividends to overseas equities. I find this hard to understand as overseas equities generally pay very low dividends.
What do you do when you need to deliver a crane to Fremantle Port all the way from Shanghai, in China?

You chuck it on a ship, of course, along with four others destined for Brisbane, Melbourne and Sydney.

The Zhenhua 24 glided into Fremantle Port Thursday morning for the first stop of its journey around Australia to deliver a consignment of port cranes worth about $15 million each.

The Zhenhua 24 arriving at Fremantle Port on Thursday. Credit:Fremantle Port

The cranes were bought by DP World for its Australian container terminals, part of a nationwide infrastructure investment of more than $180 million by the company.
The Labor opposition says there is no case to compel universities to adopt new rules on free speech, arguing recent controversies demonstrate freedom of expression is "alive and well" on campuses.

Education Minister Dan Tehan is expected to raise concerns with vice-chancellors on Thursday, following a string of incidents including a violent protest against author Bettina Arndt at Sydney University last week.

Fairfax Media reported on Wednesday that Human Rights Commissioner Ed Santow was prepared to back a code of conduct on free speech on campus, possibly based on examples from the US, saying it was "definitely worth considering".

Free speech "alive and well": Labor's assistant minister for universities, Louise Pratt. Credit:Andrew Meares

But Louise Pratt, Labor's shadow assistant minister for universities, told Fairfax Media there was no need for such intervention. She also said universities had a special obligation to not give a platform to arguments that lacked evidence.
"The ABC was wrong in asserting that The West Australian backed Scott Morrison at my direction. That is not the way I operate. "Furthermore, the characterisation and supposed details of the private conversations assigned to me are wrong." Those around Mr Turnbull laid some of the blame on News Corp editors as well as Sky News commentators such as Peta Credlin, and 2GB hosts Alan Jones and Ray Hadley. Credit:Fairfax Media The conversations go to the heart of the media coverage of the chaos in Parliament before the final ballot, with Mr Murdoch apparently convinced the leadership spill was needed while Mr Stokes believed Mr Turnbull should stay. Prime Minister Scott Morrison dismissed the issue on Wednesday when asked by the ABC whether it was right for the media proprietors to play a "heavy hand" in the leadership spill.

"I dont think it happened," Mr Morrison said. "I dont believe it happened at all, and youd think Id know, given I was involved." But Fairfax Media has been told that Mr Turnbull and Mr Stokes spoke several times around the time of the first leadership ballot on Tuesday, August 21, and the final vote to remove Mr Turnbull on Friday, August 24. Failed leadership contender Peter Dutton at Parliament House on Wednesday. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen Several sources have also confirmed the conversation between Mr Turnbull and Mr Murdoch.

The role of the media was a major concern for Mr Turnbull as he and his supporters tried to counter Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton. Loading News Corp general manager Liz Deegan disputed the account of the conversation between Mr Murdoch and Mr Stokes reported by The Australian Financial Review on Tuesday and by ABC political editor Andrew Probyn later the same day. "The ABC and AFR reporting is merely that  speculation and conspiracy," Ms Deegan said. The phone conversation between Mr Turnbull and Mr Murdoch took place on Wednesday, August 22, one day after the first ballot amid widespread expectations that Mr Dutton would launch a second strike.

The discussion was the result of several days of organisation on both sides to set up the time for the call. News Corp coverage had been a significant factor in the days before the spill, with The Daily Telegraph reporting on Friday, August 17, that conservative MPs were urging Mr Dutton to mount a challenge. Mr Dutton responded with almost 24 hours of silence after the report appeared, while Mr Turnbull and Finance Minister Mathias Cormann worked behind the scenes to get him to issue a public statement of loyalty. News Corp publications were not alone in reporting the pressure on Mr Turnbull, with Fairfax Media revealing "Dutton set to strike" on Monday, August 20.

Those around Mr Turnbull laid some of the blame for the leadership unrest on News Corp editors as well as Sky News commentators such as Peta Credlin, the former chief of staff to former prime minister Tony Abbott. Mr Turnbull did not single out News Corp, however, and also blamed radio hosts Alan Jones and Ray Hadley of 2GB, a radio station controlled by Fairfax Media, the publisher of this newspaper. "The reality is that a minority in the party room supported by others outside the Parliament have sought to bully, intimidate others into making this change of leadership that they're seeking," Mr Turnbull said on the day before the final ballot. "Its been described by many people, including those who feel they cannot resist it, as a form of madness." Jones has admitted calling Liberal MPs to urge them to vote against Mr Turnbull.

One Liberal backbencher, Warren Entsch, last week described the messages from media commentators as an "absolute disgrace" and said he had seen some of the texts to his colleagues. News Corp columnist Chris Kenny, of The Australian and Sky News, blasted the "far-fetched" claims that Mr Murdoch "directed the dispensing of a prime minister" through his newspapers and pay-TV channel. While Mr Kenny cited editorials in The Australian as proof the paper did not campaign to remove Mr Turnbull, others pointed to relentless criticism in news stories and opinion pieces to build pressure on the then prime minister. One observer said it was the "oldest trick in the book" to quote editorials that few readers ever noticed.

"The damage you do on the front page is not outweighed by what you bury on page 13," he said. Loading Former prime minister Kevin Rudd seized on the ABC report to call for a royal commission into Mr Murdochs influence. "Turns out there may be more to all this than Murdoch wants us to know," Mr Rudd tweeted. "Murdoch ran a vicious campaign in 2013 to elect Abbott. Same in 2018 for Dutton/Morrison."
Brazil: The man charged with the murder of Sydney businesswoman Cecilia Haddad confessed to her killing while in jail, a detective has told a court in Rio de Janeiro.

Mario Marcelo Ferreira dos Santos Santoro, 40, appeared handcuffed at a pre-trial hearing accused of murdering Haddad, 38, his former girlfriend.

He sat impassively, dressed in a white T-shirt and jeans as Fabio Cardoso Junior, a homicide detective with Rio's Civil Police, told the court the suspect had confessed to the murder to a police officer outside of a formal interview setting.

"In informal conversation, he confirmed the whole dynamics of the murder," he said.
Early on, we were talking to some of the area groups the Franklin Park park district runs their own preschool, and they said they cant take all the kids that apply, said Polyak. They are full with a waiting list. We knew there was a local need as well as a staff need.
The men took two store employees to a back room and left with 10 to 20 iPhones and Samsung Galaxy phones, according to the release. They drove off in a silver Hyundai SUV and were last seen in the area turning southbound onto the Edens Expressway, police said.
After two months of recovery, a Trenton firefighter was badly hurt in a wreck in July was finally able to go home.

Troy Breton returned home from a rehab facility on Tuesday.

The children and staff of first place academy as well as other Trenton residents lined East Wade St. to cheer Breton's trip home in the family mini-van.

Among those on hand were family members and Ryan Cumbie, who was the second firefighter hurt when their emergency vehicle collided with a car on July 12th.

Cumbie has been recovering at home.
They objected because they created nine parking spaces behind their building for their and their tenants clients, and the parking garage will be two blocks away, so its unlikely their customers will use it. But they did not file a petition to oppose the taxing area.
WSU Hosts Conference to Strengthen Families

September 13, 2018

OGDEN, Utah  Weber State Universitys Department of Child and Family Studies will host the 2018 Families Alive conference, a three-day event focused on strengthening and improving relationships, Sept. 27-29 in the Shepherd Union Building.

The conference will offer classes, workshops and speakers to help participants learn skills to enhance their lives and relationships.

The Families Alive Conference provides students, professionals and community members a rewarding experience, said Wei Qiu, Child and Family Studies Department Chair. Attendees will learn about ways to empower individuals and families in this ever-changing society.

This years conference, themed The Armor Within, will begin with a free opening-night keynote speech, Sept. 27, 7:30 p.m. in the Shepherd Union Ballrooms. The community is invited to hear from keynote speaker Dr. Scott Kaufman, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and a groundbreaking psychologist expanding our definitions of creativity, human flourishing and intelligence.

A second keynote speaker, Dr. Randy Chatelain, will present Sept. 28, 8:45 a.m. in the Shepherd Union Ballrooms. Chatelain is a marriage and family therapist, a former associate professor at WSU and a past member of the Utah Commission on Marriage. During his speech, he will share skills that can be used daily to increase happiness, improve coping skills and strengthen relationships.

After Chatelains presentation, the days events will include workshops and sessions on topics such as trauma recovery, uniting family members as a team, child development and parenting during a divorce or separation.

Registration is open to all, with an option to receive continuing education credit for an additional fee. Currently enrolled students registered for 12-17 credit hours may add the conference to their load for a course fee of $75, which includes university credit, conference materials and food. WSU students may receive one university credit for attending the entire conference.

This conference is sponsored by the Department of Child and Family Studies in collaboration with WSUs Division of Online & Continuing Education, the Jerry & Vickie Moyes College of Education and O.C. Tanner Corporation.

To view a full schedule of events or to register for the conference, visit continue.weber.edu/familiesalive.

Visit weber.edu/wsutoday for more news about Weber State University.
After a five weeks of being a budget-busting punching bag for Republican Bob Stefanowski, who linked him continually with Gov. Dannel P. Malloys tax hikes, Democrat Ned Lamont on Wednesday announced that if elected, he would end the states business-entity tax and push other efforts to strengthen Connecticuts economy.

In a multi-part program released in a late-afternoon statement, Lamont said he wants to increase access to job training and reduce regulatory burdens on business, while investing more state dollars in tourism, and to create an urban renaissance.

But the bigger news is the plan to roll back the pesky $250 fee that all state businesses pay every other year, totaling about $25 million annually.

With the knowledge and experience I have running a business, I will be able to create an environment where startups and small businesses can thrive, Lamont said. It will be done by embracing Connecticuts core values of education, opportunity and equality - not abandoning the very priorities that make Connecticut a great place to live, like Bob Stefanowskis plan would do.

Kendall Marr, Stefanowskis spokesman, said the announcement was an attempt by Lamont to make a sharp change.

After finally realizing that Connecticut residents are tired of the horrible economic policies of Dan Malloy, Ned is desperately trying to reinvent himself with less than 50 days to the election. Why should we suddenly believe Ned now? Marr said in a statement. Ned Lamont continues to offer small concessions that will be more than offset by increased fees, taxes and tolls imposed on the hard-working people of Connecticut.

Stefanowski, the GOP candidate from Madison seeking his first elective office, has been singularly focused on Lamont, Malloy and tax hikes, charging that the Democratic opponent would be more of the same, and would bring even higher taxes as well as highway tolls and vehicle taxes. Stefanowski, while promising to eliminate the state income and corporate earnings taxes over eight years, has offered few specifics.

If elected, Lamont, a Greenwich businessman, said he would also free businesses with less than $10,000 in taxable personal property from that related tax, as a way to help startups and small businesses.

Lamont touted his role among other business leaders in bringing the India-based Infosys to Hartford, where the tech firm is expected to hire 1,000 employees. During Monday nights debate in New Haven, Stefanowski, critical of the company, charged that Infosys was an out-sourcing firm.

It didnt happen by chance, Lamont said of the Infosys deal. It happened because we convened a group of business leaders including Travelers, the head of Aetna, the head of Hartford HealthCare, and the head of Stanley Black and Decker to convince Infosys to build its new training and innovation hub in Hartford.

Lamont also vowed to work with business, education and labor to create more apprentice programs; and put more money in the states vocational-and-agricultural tech high school systems.

kdixon@ctpost.com Twitter: @KenDixonCT
GREENWICH  When a chipmunk squeezed through an open vent and ran across a North Mianus School classroom on the first day of school, parent Christine ONeill knew it was a bad call to open the building before Labor Day.

The district began installing a new heating ventilation and air conditioning system at North Mianus this summer, but problems with the company supplying the units delayed the project until the end of September for heating and Oct. 15 for air conditioning, Greenwich Public Schools Director of Facilities Dan Watson said.

The school relies on 30 small fans purchased for the classrooms and ventilation provided by the unfinished units. The chipmunk gained entry through one of those unfinished grates.

On Thursday, Aug. 30, it was brutal  77 degrees in the hallway, ONeill said. The next day, students tried to stay cool with water-spritzing fans and washcloths. Upstairs, fourth- and fifth-graders sweated the most, and downstairs in the third-grade wing, a few birds flew through the vent, too. She fired off an email to Interim Superintendent Ralph Mayo.

People were scared about their kids upstairs, said ONeill, a parent to a first-grade boy and a fourth-grade girl. I think parents wouldve pulled kids out if this kept going.

Mayo responded immediately and visited the school Saturday, she said. Students and teachers returned after Labor Day to find portable air-conditioning units, which they enjoyed for the rest of the week.

Even though there was no plan, I appreciated Ralph got back to me immediately and they tried to figure it out, ONeill said, adding that the units helped third-, fourth- and fifth-graders only marginally.

The portable units were a Friday-night arrangement, Watson said. It wasnt a perfect scenario, but it helped out a great deal, he said.

But the drop in temperatures and humidity, the noisiness of the units and their cost contributed to the schools decision to stop renting them, Watson said. The portable air conditioning was removed by Sept. 9.

The district has not received a final invoice for rented units, nor has it determined how to appropriate the money to pay for them.

To beat the heat, students spend time in the media center, which has air conditioning, and teachers give the children breaks. The school had early release on the first day.

Jennifer Donats fourth-grade daughter tries to wear as much light clothing as possible to beat the stifling heat of her upstairs classroom.

I think the heat is distracting, Donat said.

The heat probably affected the testing that students have to do in early September, ONeill predicted.

And theres no relief in the nurses office, where the air conditioning unit has been broken since the spring, ONeill said.

Aaron Leonards fifth-grade son said its hot 95 percent of the time  a description to take with a grain of salt, the parent said in an email.

It certainly has been hot and humid for most of the time theyve been back, he wrote. The fans are still there, but they dont help much.

The units will eventually provide heat, air-conditioning and ventilation, Watson said. Currently, the ventilation component of the units is working.

Debora Kuehnel said her second-grade grandson has not complained about the warmer temperatures.

Going back to when I was in school, we did not even have air-conditioning, she said.

When she walks him to school, the classrooms feel cooler than outside because the open vents bring in fresh air.

Pretty soon, theyll be wanting heat, not air, she said.

Watson said the manufacturing company is the source of the delays. It cited a higher demand for air-conditioning this year and larger companies buying up multiple units, he said.

We never got 100 percent straight answers to why, he said.

The delays are not the result of the contracted workers, who he commended for working after-hours.

Theyre a competent group, he said. If there was an issue with manpower, we wouldve solved that a long time ago.

Susan Isaak, whose son is in a fifth-grade classroom upstairs, said he does not mention the air-conditioning. The parents she knows are accepting the inconvenience.

If the school was not making efforts to fix the problem, she said her reaction would be different.

It seems out of their control, she said. I dont want to give the school a hard time.

jo.kroeker@hearstmediact.com
With the current advancement of technology, it's no surprise that states are in a race to outpace each other in the battle for technological dominance.

In a report released this week by Kempler Industries, an Illinois machinery company, Connecticut was ranked the eighth most innovative state in the country in terms of patents per capita during the past five years. Connecticut falls behind Massachusetts (2), Vermont (5) and New Hampshire (7) in terms of innovative New England states. Additionally, California was named the most innovative state in the country.

Doug Lyons, president of the Inventors Association of Connecticut, attributed this growth to Connecticut's long-standing tradition of innovation that blossomed during the industrial revolution. Specifically, Lyons points to Eli Whitney, the inventor of the cotton gin and interchangeable parts, as the patriarch of Connecticut innovation. "Connecticut's long history of innovation comes at least, in part, because of its long river, its start with interchangeable parts," detailed Lyons. "Then one thing led to another, and it became Bridgeport machines and manufacturers."

These numbers come shortly after the announcement that the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) celebrated the filing of their 10 millionth patent, a feat that has been in works since the patent numbering and examination system was first established in 1836. According to the USPTO glossary, a patent is a piece of intellectual property that "excludes others from making, using, offering for sale, or selling the invention throughout the United States or importing the invention into the United States."

As a follow-up to the announcement, Kempler Industries took a look into the USPTO's data schematics to find useful data in the realm of innovation. However, Kempler Industries came away with a lot more than they anticipated, finding out the best (and worst) places to file patents, as well as what companies are considered "the most innovative companies."

According to the report, the U.S. did not earn the top spot as the most innovative country in the world, with the spot going to Taiwan. As for the most innovative companies in the world, four out of the top 10 companies (GE, Ford, Amazon, Apple) are classified as American corporations, which boosts the U.S. to the number three position in the rankings.

Within the U.S., Idaho was named the easiest state to acquire a patent due to their number of grants versus the small number of applications. As for the toughest place in the states, Washington D.C. took the cake as being the most difficult, as the number of patents cannot meet the sheer demand.

In terms of the types of patents being issued, 91% of all patents pertain to their use as a utility while 9% fall into the category of design. A fractional amount fall either into the category of plant or reissue. For US residents filing a patent, 49% of these national patents will be granted while international patents have a higher likelihood of being granted, at 59%.

Technologically speaking, drug and bio-affecting compositions are considered to be the top technological class of patent since 1963, with organic compounds coming in at a close second. The least of patenting technological class fell to active solid-state devices, including transistors and diodes.

While some of most well-known inventions hailing from Connecticut include the submarine and the cotton gin, Lyons cautioned for the future on innovation in Connecticut as the negative population growth and government regulations are driving out key innovativeness from the state. Though, if Connecticut can change its ways soon, Lyons believes the state can continue to be "the arsenal of democracy" pertaining to the freedom of innovation.

Our researchers used data from the USPTO along with information from IFI Claims, which is a US-based patent database for patent researchers, to determine all cited rankings on the graphics. When combined with state population size, we were able to determine which states had the most and least patents issued to them (per capita).
WESTPORT  Its not uncommon for neighborhood groups to form in opposition to a proposed development, but forming a limited liability company is a rare move that comes with some serious teeth.

Westport Neighbors United, a group that coalesced in March to fight against an application for an 81-unit affordable housing complex on Lincoln Street, has taken that extra step. Theyve also raised $50,000 to go to battle with.

I would not say its usual, but I wouldnt say its unheard of, land-use attorney Timothy S. Hollister with the Hartford-based firm Shipman & Goodwin said of Neighbors Uniteds formation of an LLC.

The one other time Hollister, one of the states leading attorneys in regards to affordable housing cases, said he saw an opposition group create an LLC was in 2016, when the state proposed to relocate its firearms training ground to Willington. Hollister represented a group of residents who formed an LLC called Unwillington Inc. and successfully got the state to withdraw its proposal for Willington and proposed the new firearms training ground for Griswold instead.

I think groups do it to give some formal structure rather than someone running the organization out of the back of their car, Hollister said.

Financial reasons may also motivate opposition groups to form LLCs, he said. They might be more likely to get a tax-exempt status if they have a corporate structure.

Both Westport Planning and Zoning Director Mary Young and local developer David Waldman said they have never encountered a development opposition group from an LLC, but said this was perhaps only because they never checked a groups legal status or thought to ask.

Westport Neighbors United LLC registered with the state on April 13 as a domestic limited liability company, according to the secretary of the states website. Neighbors United member Rod Larsen is listed as the companys manager and Richard Bailey, one of the groups leaders is listed as the primary agent of the company. The companys address is listed as Baileys home on Riverside Avenue, near the Lincoln Street proposal.

I dont know why it happened that way. I think the people in our group in charge of the banking end were asked by the bank if this is a personal account, said Tina Torraco, who lives on the corner of Riverside Avenue and Lincoln Street and is one of the groups leaders. Were certainly not a nonprofit, so they chose LLC. It had nothing to do with anything, just a banking technicality.

To date, Westport Neighbors United has raised almost $50,000 in donations to fight the application, brought by Cross Street LLC, to build a six-story, 137,000 square-foot building on Lincoln Street near downtown Westport. The application proposes 30 percent of the buildings 81 units will be designated affordable housing and was submitted in accordance with the states 8-30g statute created to promote the construction of affordable housing.

Because the application qualifies for 8-30g status, towns Planning and Zoning Commission can only deny the application on the grounds of a substantial public interest, such as fire or traffic safety concerns. Westport does not yet have sufficient affordable housing in the eyes of the state and, therefore, has not received a moratorium on 8-30g applications, which prevents developers from bypassing town zoning regulations.

We get donations from concerned citizens who are supporting our cause, some from residents. We have a following of about 300 people who are concerned primarily about two things: safety and the general disruption of the area, Torraco said. The checks keep flowing in, which is a nice thing.

The Planning and Zoning Commission will hold its final public hearing on the Lincoln Street development on Sept. 27 in Westport Town Hall and is likely to make a decision on whether to approve the application by Oct. 11, according to the commissions chairman Paul Lebowitz.

svaughan@hearstmediact.com; 203-842-2638; @SophieCVaughan1
3 1 of 3 Contributed Photo / Westport Police Department / Contributed Photo Show More Show Less 2 of 3 Contributed Photo / Westport Police Department / Contributed Photo Show More Show Less 3 of 3





WESTPORT  Town police are hoping the public can help identify a suspect accused of stealing a wallet from someone at a local bank.

Police said the woman pictured allegedly took the victims wallet around 2:20 p.m. on Sept. 11 while at the Bank of America at 126 Post Road East.
Some of the areas at the time that were mentioned included the 1900 block of Joanna, the 2300 block of Gabriel Avenue, the 1800 block of Carmel Boulevard and on Lorelei Drive near Route 173. Police report there was also a shooting near 21st Street and Hebron Avenue where the victim was dropped off at a local hospital.
He said the district consolidation process would start with the generation of a petition by either the community or the school districts involved. It then would move to a community public hearing and a review by both the regional schools superintendent, who in this case would be Klaisner, and the state superintendent. It would be either approved or denied by the state official. If it is approved, it may be placed on a ballot and voted on by the community.
If those in charge of this years Thin Air 2018  Winnipeg International Writers Festival seem more preoccupied than in most years, its with good reason.

This article was published 19/9/2018 (1147 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

If those in charge of this years Thin Air 2018  Winnipeg International Writers Festival seem more preoccupied than in most years, its with good reason.

In addition to its typical slate of writers, the festival has added an opening weekend dubbed Voices in the Circle, three days of programming focused on issues of decolonization, reconciliation, Indigenous identity and more.

Author Joshua Whiteheads latest novel Jonny Appleseed recently made the Giller Prize long list. (Supplied)

And while you might not find many big-name novelists, poets and non-fiction writers among this years Thin Air attendees, the works of those who are participating are no less fascinating. "Our agenda has become less to lasso the famous writers  those people get a lot of attention," says festival director Charlene Diehl. "This year more than most, smaller presses are highly represented. We like working with those presses  theyre feisty, they take a lot of risks in what they publish. They can take a run on someone whos not as well-known, or people who come from communities who arent that well-represented yet in the literary establishment."

And while theres sure to be plenty of buzz around the events featuring Joshua Whitehead, whose novel Jonny Appleseed was longlisted for the Giller Prize earlier this week, there are many other must-see events at this years Thin Air.

Here are five of the hottest tickets for the festival, as chosen by Diehl and program associate and audience development co-ordinator/publicist Bruce Symaka.

OPENING NIGHT: VOICES IN THE CIRCLE

Friday, Sept. 21, 7:30 p.m., Manitoba Theatre for Young People, $10

Shelagh Rogers (Supplied)

Thin Airs opening night event is a double bill that that features many of the writers appearing over the course of the opening weekend as part of the Voices in the Circle programming. Among those appearing is CBC personality Shelagh Rogers, who will read from Richard Wagameses posthumous novel Starlight. "Shes a much-loved figure amongst all these writers," says Diehl.

Billy-Ray Belcourt, meanwhile, is from northern Albertas Driftpile Cree Nation, a Rhodes scholar whose most recent collection of poetry, This Wound is a World, won the $65,000 Griffin Poetry Prize. Saskatoon poet Tenille K. Campbell will read from her book #IndianLovePoems, which Diehl describes as "raunchy as all get out." Lucy Hache is coming in from the West Coast to read from her two books of poetry, Clouds and Stars. "Her voice is calm, wise and spare, meditative," says Diehl; "her poems are beautiful, and illustrated beautifully by local artist Michael Joyal."

Also on the bill is first-time author Darrel McLeod, whose book Mamaskatch Diehl calls as a "very funny, very heartfelt, beautifully written book." And while Saskatoon poet Zoey Roy doesnt have any published work in tow, Diehl explains she is a "young, feisty spoken-word artist who is working with high school kids and street kids. She was a street kid for a while, ran away from home, got sucked into the CFS system and made her way back out. Shes very strong youth advocate and a powerful voice  not a published author, but a storyteller."

The second half of the opening-night double bill is the Haiku Death Match, which sees competitors go head to head in crafting short, 5-7-5 poems in elimination rounds. "Many of the authors from the first event are sticking around for the Haiku Death Match," says Diehl. "Itll be raucous and fun."

Author Darrel J. McLeod (Ilja Herb photo)

UNSETTLING OUR STORIES

Saturday, Sept. 22, 4-5:30 p.m., MTYP, $10

A trio of authors continue the Voices in the Circle opening weekend theme, albeit from wildly different perspectives. "It wont be light, but theyre really resourceful, interesting people who are tackling something extremely topical  figuring out how to enter this period of reconciliation in a healthier way," says Diehl.

Alberta poet Billy-Ray Belcourt (Griffin Poetry Prize)

"Canadas not the only country grappling with these issues."

In addition to Belcourt, the event will feature Angola-born, Brazil-based Ondjaki, whose most recent novel Transparent City has garnered plenty of buzz. "Its a version of a decolonizing narrative thats happening in Africa," Diehl explains.

The third writer in the event is Deni Bechard, whose latest novel White delves into the Congo and, according to Diehl, sets out to unpack "the ugly side of white help in African countries." Bechard wasnt able to make it from Boston, so he will submit his portion of the reading and ensuing discussion via Skype.

MAINSTAGE: PARANOIA

Monday, Sept. 24, 7:30 p.m., MTYP, $12

The Monday mainstage event, dubbed "Paranoia," features six authors, including Essex, U.K.-born Alex Pheby. "I heard Alex read from his novel Playthings when I was in Edinburgh for the festival there," says Symaka. "His book is from the point of view of a real person, Daniel Paul Schreber, who has what we would now call paranoid schizophrenia. Its this fascinating, sad, darkly funny portrait of a man who doesnt know hes losing his mind."

Kagiso Lesego Molope (Supplied)

The paranoia theme doesnt end there. "The Andrew Daley book Resort is a love story about two con artists in Mexico, but the narrator doesnt really know if his partner is telling the truth," says Symaka. "Adam Dickinsons book of poetry, Anatomic, is about all the toxins we take into our body every day. He also becomes kind of paranoid; he becomes hypervigilant."

Rounding out the mainstage event are three other authors delving into paranoia: Jamie Quatros Fire Sermon, about a woman whos very religious and is having an affair; South Africas Kagiso Lesego Molope, whose young adult novel This Book Betrays My Brother is told from the point of view of a 13-year-old girl who witnesses her brother assault another girl from the local township; and Winnipeg author Jennifer Ilse Black, whose novel Small Predators takes many forms in its detailing of the aftermath of a violent demonstration at a university underetaken by student activists.

BIG IDEAS: A REFUGEE STORY

Friday, Sept. 28, 4:30-5:30 p.m., Carol Shields Auditorium, Millennium Library, free

Abu Bakr al Rabeeah (Supplied)

Abu Bakr al Rabeeah was born in Iraq during the war. His father eventually moved his family to where he thought there would be safety  Syria. The ensuing civil war there sent the family fleeing across the globe, eventually landing in Edmonton.

"The book Homes: A Refugee Story was written with his English teacher, Winnie Yeung, who will be here," explains Symaka. "Abu Bakr is also coming with his father, because hes only 17  hes still in high school. His father really comes through as the hero of the book."

Yeung will read from Homes, which will be followed by a discussion with al Rabeeah about his childhood and the process of collaboration.

PINT OF BITTER MURDER/POISONED CHALICE

Saturday, Sept. 29, Good Will Social Club, 2-4:30 p.m., $10

The programming at the Sept. 29 afternoon double bill ranges from the suspicious to the downright strange. "Weve got local author Michael J. Clark (Clean Sweep), who weve teamed him up with Sam Wiebe, whos a hotshot up-and-coming thriller writer from Vancouver," explains Symaka. Wiebes most recent book Cut You Down takes place in Vancouver and Surrey, B.C., with Symaka calling it "noir-ish suspense."

Susanna M. Smith (Suppllied)

In the second half of the double bill things take a turn toward darker, more surreal fiction. "Weve got Julie Demers, from Montreal; her book Barbe was translated into English as Little Beast has been translated to English. Its about a 14-year-old girl in rural Quebec in the 1940s who grows a beard and whose mother keeps her from the villagers  its a dark fairy tale," says Symaka.

The Fairy Tale Museum by Susanna M. Smith keeps things a little bit weird and a whole lot dark, "Its being called a novel, and I love that its called that," explains Symaka. "Its these little vignettes of dreamlike, nightmarish fairy tale sequences: a vampire with narcolepsy, people with bird heads, Little Black Riding Hood... and then at the very end you find out theres something that connects them all."

For a full list of authors, events and tickets, visit thinairwinnipeg.ca.

books@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @bensigurdson
Fulton Grove, a proposed residential development on the Parker lands by Gem Equities.
Check out the Byzantine style of Assumption Greek Orthodox Church. Apparently, the church upon opening emphasized integrating Greek immigrants into western society, and there are some really fascinating stories to tell there, said Rogers. Learn about the Catholic saints of Fraternite Notre Dame and hear tales of the circa-1930s Third Unitarian Church. See the pretty groovy 1960s addition at Catholic Charities Father Augustus Tolton Peace Center, which is the old, neo-classical Austin State Bank building. Third Unitarian and Assumption were built within a year of each other but theyre so different, Rogers said.
The Lieutenant Governors Awards are given annually to people and organizations that contribute to the vibrancy of the province and who inspire the rest of the community by their example.

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This article was published 20/9/2018 (1147 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The Lieutenant Governors Awards are given annually to people and organizations that contribute to the vibrancy of the province and who inspire the rest of the community by their example.

This years recipients are Abdo (Albert) El Tassi and StandardAero. They will be presented with the award by Manitobas lieutenant-governor, the honourable Janice Filmon, as part of the 35th Manitoba Business Awards on Oct. 26 at the Fairmont Winnipeg, hosted by Global National anchor Dawna Friesen.

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El Tassi is a well-known Manitoba businessman and philanthropist who works tirelessly to promote understanding, tolerance and respect not only in Winnipeg but globally. He has called Winnipeg home since 1969, when he started in the shipping department of Peerless Garments Ltd.

Since June 2006, he has been the president and CEO of Peerless Garments LP, which is a garment manufacturer and importer carrying two main businesses: leather and cold-weather garments. Peerless has remained a stalwart in the garment industry of Manitoba and for over 45 years, El Tassi has worked closely with Department of National Defence staff on the design and development of specialized garments for the military.

Recognized for his prominent and selfless philanthropy and community service, he was a recipient of the Queens Diamond Jubilee Medal; he is a Member of the Order of Canada; he was named to the Order of Manitoba; and he was named Humanitarian of the Year in 2012 by the Canadian Red Cross, among numerous other honours.

Founded in 1911, StandardAero has become one of the aerospace industrys largest independent maintenance, repair and overhaul providers. StandardAeros mission is to be the best to work for, the most trusted service partner and where custom solutions come standard. The companys vision is to inspire the best and constantly raise the standard of aviation services.

StandardAero employs more than 6,000 employees, with over 1,300 working in Winnipeg. As StandardAero has become a truly international company, its solid roots in Winnipeg are now the backbone of the provinces important aerospace sector.

StandardAero has created a work environment best described as a close-knit community. Volunteering opportunities also play a big role in the companys social environment. The company and its employees partner with the Canadian Cancer Society, the MS Society, the United Way, Habitat for Humanity and more.
If you're looking for smoked meat, better start walking to Montreal.

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This article was published 20/9/2018 (1146 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

If you're looking for smoked meat, better start walking to Montreal.

That's because one of the few spots serving up old-school smoked meat and deli classics in Winnipeg is shuttering its doors for good at the end of the month.

As of Sept. 30, the Sherbrook Street Delicatessen is no more.

"The team at Sherbrook Street Deli would like to thank you all for supporting us over the years, but it is time to move onto new projects," a post on the deli's Facebook page reads.

"Come bite into your favourite sandwiches, soups and bagels before the doors close forever."

The Winnipeg eatery announced the news Wednesday, giving its customers the heads up that if they're hankering for some hot mustard or potato knishes and latkes, they better act fast.

Located at 102 Sherbrook St., the restaurant has done fairly well for itself since opening in March, 2015. The news of the closure sparked comments from dozens of people online, who expressed their dismay.

The eatery took inspiration from New York delis from the early 1900s, as well as the flavours of Eastern Europe, according to its website. That approach made the spot a fairly unique option for hungry Winnipeggers.

Operations manager Riley Bernier said there were a few reasons for the closure, including the fact business slowed during the summer months. He added that certain efforts to counteract the downtick may not have helped.

"The place opened up really busy, for sure. But in the summers it slowed down quite a bit. The winter was our busy time. We tried to change the hours a little bit to manage that in the summer, and often times I think that led to confusion with our customer base," Bernier said.

"I'm glad we're going to get to close in the right way and have people come down for one last time. I do think it is going to be a place that once it's gone people are going to really miss it."

Executive director of the West Broadway BIZ, Leah McCormick, said she was surprised and sad to hear of the closing, indicating as far as she could tell the deli was popular and had an active customer base.

"I was sad to see that news. The Sherbrook Street restaurants all seem to be vibrant and happening right now, and that was my impression of the deli as well," McCormick said.

The closure of the deli comes a few months after the aborted opening of Kilter Brewing, a craft beer spot nearby at 80 Sherbrook St.

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In May, a few days before the brewery was slated to take over the space, the landlord backed out of the agreement, refusing to negotiate further, according to a post on the company's website at the time.

McCormick said that the false start with Kilter, and the closing of the Sherbrooke deli, isn't an indication of concerns with the viability of restaurants and businesses in the neighbourhood.

"I wouldn't see it as any indications there's a cause for concern. There was also a restaurant there before that didn't last very long in that spot -- which I just think is an indication that the restaurant industry is a difficult one," McCormick said.

"It would be one thing if we had a whole bunch of empty restaurants waiting for new occupants, but I don't think it will take long for that space to be snapped up by someone."

ryan.thorpe@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @rk_thorpe
Shandrika Thomas of Glenview-based Property Corporation of America, which manages the Landings complex, said on Thursday that arrangements were being made with the Cook County Department of Building and Zoning for residents to get into their units to survey the damage and remove any items.
For some time now, planners, real estate professionals and officials from various industries have often repeated the line that there is a serious lack of serviced industrial land in the city.

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This article was published 20/9/2018 (1146 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

For some time now, planners, real estate professionals and officials from various industries have often repeated the line that there is a serious lack of serviced industrial land in the city.

Thats why people were very interested to see what would happen when Crystal Properties decided to invest millions of dollars to lay sewer and water and telecommunications lines to service an 89-acre parcel of land off Brookside Boulevard and charge south-end prices for northwest Winnipeg industrial land.

Its turned into a hit.

Thursday, Freightliner announced a multimillion-dollar project to build a massive new truck dealership and service centre, doubling the size of its current Logan Avenue location. Edmonton-based Canada West Limited has bought 26 acres in the park, with plans to invest $60 million to build up to 350,000 square feet of high-end, multi-tenant industrial space in several phases.

"Were very happy that what we interpreted as the market demand really is the market demand," said Stephen Sherlock, vice-president of Cushman & Wakefield Winnipeg, which has been marketing Brookside Industrial Park Phase III.

After only officially starting to sell the land in the spring, it is close to 90 per cent sold out. (Granted, it did get a boost when the National Research Council committed to the purchase of three lots totalling almost 10 acres late last year for its $60-million Factory of the Future development.)

MIKAELA MACKENZIE / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS Ken Talbot (left), president of Freightliner Manitoba, and Chris Macsymic unveil renderings of their new planned facilities at Brookside Industrial Park Phase III on Thursday.

Ken Talbot, president and owner of Freightliner Manitoba, said he communicated with the industrial park developer even before the signs went up.

"We seriously outgrew our old facility, which was designed to do about 25 per cent of what we are demanding of it today," he said.

"We are selling more trucks than we possibly can out of this facility."

Talbot said he could not get enough land to build a new dealership and moved fast when the land went on the market.

Freightliner Manitoba, which sells between 800 and 1,000 units every year, will build a 78,000-square-foot showroom and 35-bay service centre on 13 acres.

Depending on the success of his plans, Dale Klein, president of Canada West Limited, could become the bellwether for further development at CentrePort.

His plan is to build high-end, high-ceilinged, multi-tenant buildings with stylish fit and finish that are just not available in Winnipeg, especially in northwest Winnipeg. And he is building on spec.

supplied Freightliner is planning to build a 78,000-square-foot showroom and 35-bay service centre.

The former Manitoban from the Dauphin area has been active across the country investing in and developing real estate through a couple of companies.

He has long subscribed to the narrative that there was a dearth of quality industrial land and buildings in Winnipeg.

"I think the market in Winnipeg is starved for new product," he said.

"When I travel to other markets and see industrial markets that are in other cities and compare to that to Winnipeg, in terms of quality of product, Winnipeg is way behind the rest of the country, in my opinion."

His plan is to start construction on a 50,000-square-foot building very soon with only 10,000 square feet spoken for and get a second 52,000-square-foot building started very soon after. He believes he will be fully built up within 24 months.

"I think its great for the city and about time," Klein said in an interview.

"Theres lots of buildings in the industrial space in Winnipeg that are functionally obsolete and should be knocked down."

Diane Gray, CentrePort Canada president and CEO

Diane Gray, president and CEO of CentrePort Canada Inc., could not be happier with the illustration of pent-up demand exhibited by the quick pace at which the land was sold.

"We are thrilled that Freightliner and Canada West have both found a home for their new facilities at CentrePort," Gray said. "Theyre investing in the continued success of their individual businesses, but they will also contribute the overall growth of Manitobas economy.

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"Thats ultimately what CentrePort is all about."

CentrePort was never going to magically allow Winnipeg to reclaim bragging rights as the distribution hub of the country, but it definitely can increase the concentration of development in its 20,000-acre footprint.

Sherlock said CentrePort has been an excellent aid in marketing the land.

"CentrePort has been an absolute pleasure to work with," Sherlock said.

"We have the same end goals. They want to see CentrePort get developed. I want to sell the land. We both help each other the best we can. The best deals are the ones where everyone walks away happy, and thats whats going on here."

martin.cash@freepress.mb.ca
Mayor Brian Bowman promised Wednesday to increase boots-on-the-ground policing without increasing taxes, but the head of the police union said the mayor is doing so on the backs of police officers.

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This article was published 19/9/2018 (1147 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Mayor Brian Bowman promised Wednesday to increase boots-on-the-ground policing without increasing taxes, but the head of the police union said the mayor is doing so on the backs of police officers.

Bowman pledged to remove overtime when calculating retiring police officers' pensionable earnings; a plan he said would save about $1.5 million annually from the police budget, which could be used to pay for 10 to 15 more officers.

"The leader of the police union, Mo Sabourin, has been very clear in what he's looking for. He has said he wants more front-line officers. This provides a path forward in a way that doesn't ask taxpayers to pay more," said Bowman before a backdrop of the Harrow Park playground in River Heights.

Sabourin, the Winnipeg Police Association president, said 18 officers would be needed to staff an additional police car based on the six-shift model with training and time off.

"The numbers he's quoting of the number of officers that could be hired wouldn't even fill half of a cruiser car. He's trying to put the decision back on us," Sabourin said.

"What Mayor Bowman is doing is deflecting away from the actual problem of public safety. I think he's upset with our public safety campaign and he's trying to tarnish the (union) by bringing the fact to the public that overtime is pensionable. What a lot of people don't realize is the service has the ability to limit overtime."

Sabourin said Winnipeg receives "a bargain" because police overtime pays time-and-a-half, not double-time like many other police services in Canada.

Bowman said "it is ultimately council's decision should the pensionable earnings of overtime be eliminated" under the Winnipeg Police Pension bylaw and wouldn't need to be approved by the union or Winnipeg Police Board.

Mayoral candidate Jenny Motkaluk disputed that statement Wednesday in an emailed response.

"If he intends to add front-line police officers by eliminating overtime from their pensionable earnings, he will have to break a 2017 collective bargaining agreement with the Winnipeg Police Association," she stated. "And even if he did find a way to add 10 front-line officers, it would still be a drop in the bucket."

She said her community safety plan includes re-deploying dozens of officers to the front line.

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Bowman pledged to work with the police board in increase "efficient and effective core policing activities," and denied assertions that the police budget has been reduced.

"It's been increased every single year since 2014. Over the last four years, funding to the police has increased 10 per cent while the City of Winnipeg's overall budget has increased only eight per cent," Bowman said. He said the police service's $291-million budget is the largest of all city departments and represents 27 per cent of all city expenditures.

Bowman said he will create a new community safety and crime-prevention fund of $400,000 over four years from Civic Initiatives Fund resources. Community groups and non-profit agencies could access the money to help reduce crime and address safety issues in their neighbourhoods.

"No city can arrest their way into becoming a safe city, and it's not fair to expect our police department to do it all," Bowman said.

The civic election is on Oct. 24.

ashley.prest@freepress.mb.ca
The Canadian National Institute for the Blind in Winnipeg wants your old smartphones as part of a new program to put devices loaded with helpful apps into the hands of sight-impaired Canadians.

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This article was published 19/9/2018 (1147 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The Canadian National Institute for the Blind in Winnipeg wants your old smartphones as part of a new program to put devices loaded with helpful apps into the hands of sight-impaired Canadians.

Phone it Forward is a campaign to collect used smartphones and tablets. They will clean and repurpose the phones so thousands of Canadians can navigate the world around them more easily.

The national charity, the oldest in Canada for the blind, has partnered with a private tech company to do the work.

Recipients of the phones will also receive technical training, discounted maintenance and a data support plan.

Donors, from individuals to corporations, will get tax receipts.

Brianna Fuellbrandt demonstrates the Key2Access app, which allows users to request a pedestrian crossing at traffic lights from their cellphone. Portage Avenue and Dominion Street is one of only two intersections currently set up for users with the app. (Daniel Crump / Winnipeg Free Press)

"This is a very simple concept, a straight-forward approach to get technology into the hands of people who need it," said CNIB Winnipeg executive director Garry Nenson at a press conference Wednesday to unveil the new program.

Apps include portable scanners to magnify small print, or to make it possible to do online banking using voice-activated technology.

Much of the technology already exists, its just a matter of training users to get the most out of it.

Brianna Fuellbrandt, a CNIB vision rehabilitation specialist, demonstrated the existing Key2Access app which amplifies voice-activated traffic lights to cross streets safely.

So far only two Winnipeg intersections  Dominion Street at Portage Avenue and Arlington Street at Portage Avenue  have lights that can key into the app. CNIB is in talks with the city to expand the use to other intersections.

"Anybody can get the app. You can download it on your phone and its free. It activates the volume on the button on the light (standard) so the countdown is audible," Fuellbrandt said.

Vivi Dabee tries out the Seeing AI app, which harnesses the power of artificial intelligence to narrate the surrounding world by describing people, text and objects. (Daniel Crump / Winnipeg Free Press)

Apps will also warn people about obstacles, such as construction.

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CNIB is in talks with a national retailer to act as a depot for donations. In the meantime, individuals and companies are asked to register their old smartphones online at phoneitforward.ca, pick up a prepaid envelope and either send in or drop off their old phones at a local CNIB office. The charitable agency will mail back a tax receipt.

"This is a great program. Its got the potential to get all those phones out of desk drawers," said Glenn Hildebrand, who sits on the national board for CNIBs Vision Loss Rehabilitation Canada. He handed in two iPhone 5s at the event.

The program was inspired by CNIBs new strategic plan, which also refreshed the old brand with a new name unveiled on Wednesday. CNIB is now CNIB Foundation to emphasize that it relies on charitable donations to fund services.

A total of 500,000 Canadians have some form of sight impairment and an estimated six million Canadians have an eye disease, which left untreated, can lead to blindness.

Unemployment among the blind is three times the national average, and 46 per cent of CNIB clients dont have smartphones, compared with 24 per cent of Canadians.

alexandra.paul@freepress.mb.ca
Making cities livable requires planners and developers to focus on people rather than cars and highrise buildings.

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This article was published 19/9/2018 (1147 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Making cities livable requires planners and developers to focus on people rather than cars and highrise buildings.

That was the message from Danish architect Jan Gehl, and several others speakers, as the citys business, development and planning communities gathered at a half-day conference hosted by the Winnipeg Chamber of Commerce Wednesday.

Gehl, 82, established an international reputation as a city planner who "pedestrianized" some of worlds major cities, including Moscow, and Times Square in New York City. He incorporated design and planning that removed vehicles from downtown areas and returned public places to pedestrians and cyclists.

He is the author of several influential books on planning, including Life Between Buildings, Public Spaces, Public Life and his most recent, Cities For People, which has been published in 31 languages.

During a 50-minute talk that was liberally sprinkled with humorous stories from his 60-year-career, Gehl explored the evolution of city planning through the 20th century to today.

After the Second World War, Gehl said, city planning was dominated by a preoccupation with the automobile and concrete buildings. Planners didnt consider how people interacted with their surroundings.

"The needs of the car became the major thing," Gehl said. "I hear the cars in Winnipeg are the most happiest cars in the world because you have three, four five parking spaces for each car and thats fantastic. I would love to be a car here."

MIKE DEAL / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS Jan Gehl, a Danish architect and urban design consultant based in Copenhagen, speaks during a luncheon called Livable Cities for the 21st Century. The conference was hosted by the Winnipeg Chamber of Commerce.

Gehl was critical of architecture schools and professors who emphasized design and aesthetics at the expense of people.

"We knew nothing about what effect this had on people and peoples desire to go outside and use public spaces," he said, telling the audience that he had a professor in architecture school who said, "a good housing area is something which looks good from a freeway. That was my training."

He credited the late city planner Jane Jacobs for sparking a revolution in urban planning by reacquainting planners and architects with the concept of designing streets and buildings for people.

The morning session was dominated by advocates in favour of reopening Portage and Main to pedestrians, including architect Brent Bellamy, and former Winnipeg mayor Glen Murray.

Others speakers talked about the suburban and urban development, including Eric Vogan, vice-president at homebuilder Qualico and president of the Urban Development Institute of Manitoba; City of Winnipeg chief planner Braden Smith; Jeanette Montufar, founding partner and CEP of MORR Transportation Consulting; and Hazel Borys, president and CEO of PlaceMakers, a planning firm with offices in Winnipeg and Calgary, and several U.S. cities.

Former mayor Glen Murray endorses Bowman Click to Expand Brian Bowman has received an unexpected endorsement in his bid for re-election. Speaking at a Winnipeg Chamber of Commerce event Wednesday, former mayor Glen Murray said he supports Bowman's efforts to re-open Portage and Main to pedestrians and he's backing Bowman in the civic election. "I'm a big fan of (Bowman). I think he's doing a great job. I think he's showing real courage and leadership," Murray told reporters. "I got to know Brian over the years and I've been very impressed with him." Read the full story

Chamber president Loren Remillard said the event was held during the civic election on purpose.

"This is the time we should be talking about what kind of city we want to build  not for the next four years, but for the next 40 years," Remillard said. "Today was all about talking about the big-picture issues.

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"Winnipeg is no different from any other city," Remillard said. "Now is the time to ask the question: is Winnipeg for people?"

Borys said streets are important but places and destinations, such as downtown and walkable neighbourhoods, make a community valuable.

"They are our cash cow," Borys said. "Im not going to be making the argument that we should do away with suburban development  thats not going to happen in Winnipeg  but I think we need to get clear on the return to the city and how we can level the playing field so that both forms of development are enabled and fully supported."

Borys said urban development projects generate greater value for communities than suburban growth. She pointed out suburban housing costs more than twice as much as the equivalent space in urban areas.

"While the suburbs are growing 150 per cent faster than cities in Canada, suburban dwellers pay only half the cost that city dwellers pay for roads," and other services, Borys said. "We simply cant keep building low-return places without having some cash cows downtown and notably distributed through our suburban fabric to up the ante."

aldo.santin@freepress.mb.ca
The decision by the Federal Court of Appeal against the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion seems to have come as a shock to the federal and Alberta governments.

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This article was published 20/9/2018 (1147 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Opinion

The decision by the Federal Court of Appeal against the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion seems to have come as a shock to the federal and Alberta governments.

In response, the Alberta government, the federal Conservative opposition and others demanded the Trudeau government take immediate action to get "shovels back in the ground."

In reality, the Federal Courts decision leaves the Trudeau government with few easy ways forward.

In its decision, the court highlighted the extent to which its conclusions were grounded in "largely uncontested legal principles" in Canadian law. The federal government may seek leave to appeal the decision to the Supreme Court of Canada, but an appeal could easily take more than a year to resolve.

It is also entirely possible, given the clear grounding of the Federal Courts decision in principles established by the Supreme Court of Canada itself, that the Supreme Court could uphold the Federal Courts decision, or even strengthen it.

Not quick or easy

The Federal Court of Appeals decision rested on two key elements: the federal governments failure to undertake adequate consultation with Indigenous peoples potentially affected by the project, and the National Energy Boards (NEB) decision to exclude the environmental impacts of increased shipping activity from the project in its review and recommendations to the federal cabinet.

Contrary to what some have suggested, neither issue lends itself to a quick or easy resolution.

The right of Indigenous peoples to consultation is grounded in Section 35 of the Constitution Act and cannot be overridden through legislation.

Addressing the Federal Courts objections will require meaningful and substantive engagement with First Nations and Indigenous peoples affected by the project. Such engagement will take time.

Finding appropriate accommodations with those communities will be difficult, given the fundamental objections that many hold against the project.

Further litigation is almost certain in response to any decision to proceed with the project in these circumstances.

Tanker traffic

The resolution of the second issue may be almost as challenging, but in different ways.

The federal government could choose the option implied by Alberta Premier Rachel Notley and others to use legislation to remove the question of marine traffic impacts from the review.

Such an option would, of course, make a mockery of the Trudeau governments promises to reform the federal environmental assessment process and protect the maritime environment.

As highlighted by the Federal Court in its decision, it would also likely require amendments to the federal Species at Risk Act to remove protections for affected species, notably the iconic population of southern resident orcas.

In its initial review, the NEB itself identified "significant" risks to the marine environment and wildlife flowing from the growth in tanker traffic, but it didnt include these risks in its final review.

If the NEB does go back and include the risks of increased tanker traffic in its report, it will likely lead to the very conclusion it sought to avoid.

Recognizing these risks would put the Trudeau government in the position of having to make a direct choice between environmental protection and economic development, something it has always sought to avoid.

Climate strategy

With respect to the federal governments overall climate change strategy, Notleys statement of her intent to withdraw from the Pan-Canadian Framework on Climate Change has brought already emerging issues to the forefront.

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Recent provincial leadership changes have introduced new officials, notably Ontario Premier Doug Ford, who want no part in Trudeaus national climate change strategy.

How the federal Liberals will respond to these developments remains uncertain.

Trudeaus electoral success in 2015 hinged, in large part, on his ability to consolidate the moderate and progressive voters around the federal Liberal party. Holding that coalition together will require the Liberals to maintain some degree of environmental credibility, especially in British Columbia, Quebec and Ontario. The Liberals may yet carry through on their federal carbon pricing initiative, regardless of provincial objections.

The Trans Mountain decision has brought a series of legal, political and environmental issues to a head. The Trudeau government has little time to reveal its strategy for reconciling its environmental and economic priorities. But the path it takes will influence the outcome of the 2019 federal election  and Canadas ability to meet its international environmental obligations.

Mark Winfield is a professor of environmental studies at York University.

This article was first published at The Conversation Canada: theconversation.com/ca.
Skip the Dishes driver Charleen Pokornik wants a different job  or, more precisely, she wants to do the same job, but wants the company to cover everything.

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This article was published 20/9/2018 (1147 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Opinion

Skip the Dishes driver Charleen Pokornik wants a different job  or, more precisely, she wants to do the same job, but wants the company to cover everything.

The companys founders left jobs like that to form Skip the Dishes, but she wont do the same to be paid in the manner she wants.

The result is a lawsuit, which she and her lawyers seek class-action certification for. It was launched by the Winnipeg driver via two Winnipeg law firms against an internationally successful Winnipeg startup.

It almost goes without saying that the lawsuit is bad for Winnipeg, but the result might be worse for everyone.

Skip the Dishes began with an idea. Josh Simair was an investment banker who often ordered meals with his colleagues as they worked long hours. He realized people like him could save valuable time if an online service company delivered meals. He and his brother Chris, who worked in information technology in Saskatoon, abandoned the security of their paying jobs and started Skip the Dishes.

They set up headquarters in Winnipeg and expanded to many Canadian and American cities. The company now operates in 70 cities and serves thousands of restaurants and their customers, laying claim to the fastest-growing food-delivery company on the continent. Imagine how many tax dollars come to Winnipeg.

Enter Pokornik. She started driving for Skip the Dishes in November 2016. Shes paid $4 to $7 for each meal she delivers, plus tips. Expenses are up to her.

But she wants guaranteed hourly pay and benefits instead, with all her expenses covered.

Her employers left regular-paying jobs to rely on their own performance and efficiency, but Pokornik would rather sue the ones paying her to do the same than move to a different job.

For more than seven years I worked in a similar arrangement to Pokorniks. As a commission-based agent for a non-profit advocacy group, I drove 50,000 kilometres a year. I had no salary or benefits, nor were my expenses covered. I kept a percentage of whatever funds I raised, with bonuses related to money from new supporters in a given week. Such a role rewards ambition and ensures the most efficient delivery of service. And thats to the benefit of the organization, the contributors and the independent contractors.

The model of the gig economy stands in stark contrast to the entitlement mentality found in some millennials and the labour movement. Emily Norgang, a senior researcher with the Canadian Labour Congress, insists "the most innovative aspect isnt the technology itself, but actually the expansion of this exploitative business model."

Two Winnipeg law firms apparently see dollar signs in a class-action lawsuit against a growing business. How ironic that both they and their plaintiff are pursuing economic profit involving expenses and no guarantee of success by attacking an entrepreneur doing just that.

It takes tremendous time, money and resources to wage a legal fight. Will there be any resources left for the company to pursue more growth? Would it even want to, amidst financial uncertainty as the result of the potentially high costs of legal fees, settlement payouts, tax repercussions, organizational restructuring, accounting and payroll changes and the like? Will they watch their growth potential permanently disappear as other upstarts steal their model and capture other markets?

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A legal win for the plaintiff would mean money for lawyers and a marginal payout for drivers. But a wonderful entitled future for drivers is unlikely to ensue. Legal costs and payouts could cripple this company, followed by compliance costs that could wipe out profits. They cant be covered by fee increases, since its already high enough for some restaurants to stop using the service.

Besides this, human nature suggests an employee with a guaranteed wage and benefits will never work as hard or efficiently as a contractor whos paid in direct correlation to their output. Compensation for drivers will drop accordingly, then be further gutted by payroll deductions for those coveted benefits. Low wages minus deductions could become an even harder sell for drivers than the former arrangement.

In the end, drivers like Pokornik might take their settlement money and look for new jobs, like they should have in the first place. Lawyers will laugh and labour leaders will celebrate while entrepreneurs are discouraged, consumers jilted, government coffers reduced and drivers left worse off.

If the plaintiffs win, citizens should push for a change in labour laws.

Lee Harding is research fellow for the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.

 Troy Media
Time is running out. From day one, U.S. Steel has built a series of proposals to try to split our union by throwing sparkles and bonuses at active workers while trying to separate future hires and retirees from the herd and isolate them. Its a tired old trick, and our committee isnt falling for it, the U.S. Steel union negotiating team wrote in a Sept. 18 memo.
Supporting Addiction Free Environments is teaming with Gary Drug Free Communities and Merrillville Drug Free Communities to welcome Jermaine Galloway and his Tall Cop program for two events: from 5:15-7:30 p.m. Tuesday at Thomas Edison High School, 3304 Parkside Ave., Lake Station; and Wednesday from 8:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. at the Purdue University Extension, Lake County campus, 2293 N. Main St., Crown Point. Tuesdays event, free to the public, is to help parents and guardians identify indications of drug and alcohol abuse. Wednesdays seminar delves into the issues on a more comprehensive level and is aimed at industry professionals, such as treatment specialists, law enforcement officials, prosecutors and educators. The session provides six continuing education units. Registration is at www.eventbrite.com. More information is with Renee Moy at 219-757-1851.
editor's pick

Dems in Congress demand answers from Walmart on how Trump tax cuts impacted workers

Reps point out Walmart's authorization for $20 billion in stock buybacks while many workers still make poverty wages
editor's pick watchdog

A decision by Wisconsin officials eight years ago to approve a big, new allotment of water from Lake Michigan to Pleasant Prairie is raising questions of transparency.
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.

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It was interesting seeing the report on the Illiana Expressway. The report showed that if the do-gooders had not blocked the project, we would now be reaping the benefits like 21 percent less Borman traffic and 11 percent fewer accidents. The part I liked best was almost one hour less travel time from Michigan City to Kankakee. I know all of the development speculation predicted in the report for Lake, LaPorte and Porter counties was not needed because of our already booming economies, but it sounded good for the benefit of our children and grandchildren.
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.
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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The following companies are subsidiares of Arthur J. Gallagher & Co.: 2235158 Alberta Limited, A.J. Amer Agency, AHC Digital LLC, AIX Limited, AJG Coal LLC, AJG Financial Services LLC, AJG Meadows LLC, AJG North America ULC, AJG RCF LLC, AJGRMS of Louisiana LLC, ARM RE Ltda., AVIATION INSURANCE SERVICES, AVRECO, Ace IRM Insurance Broking Group, Acumus Holdings Limited, Acumus Interco Limited, Acumus Ltd, Adams & Associates International, Adaptive Marketing LLC, Adco General Corporation, Advanced Benefit Advisors, Aequus Trade Credit, Affinity Marketing Group, Ahrold Fay Rosenberg, Aires Consulting Group, Alesco Risk Management Services Limited, Alize Limited, Allied Claims Administration Inc., Alternative Market Specialists, Altman & Cronin Benefit Consultants, American Freedom Carriers Inc., American Security Services Corp., American Wholesalers Underwriting Ltd, Andrew-Anthony Insurance Agency, Anthony Hodges Consulting Limited, Antrobus Investments Limited, AquaSurance, Argentis, Argentis Financial Group Limited, Argentis Financial Management Limited, Argus Benefits, Armstrong/Robitaille/Riegle, Artex (SAC) Limited, Artex Cedar Hill, Artex Corporate Services (Malta) Limited, Artex Corporate Services Limited, Artex Holdings (Gibraltar) Limited, Artex Holdings (Malta) Limited, Artex Insurance (Guernsey) PCC Limited, Artex Insurance (Tennessee) PCCIC Inc., Artex Insurance Brokers (Malta) PCC Limited, Artex Insurance ICC Limited, Artex Intermediaries Ltd, Artex Risk Solutions (Bermuda) Ltd, Artex Risk Solutions (Cayman) Limited, Artex Risk Solutions (Gibraltar) Limited, Artex Risk Solutions (Guernsey) Limited, Artex Risk Solutions (International) Ltd, Artex Risk Solutions (Malta) Limited, Artex Risk Solutions (Singapore) Pte Ltd, Artex Risk Solutions (UK) Limited, Artex Risk Solutions Inc., Arthur J Gallagher (Norway) Holdings AS, Arthur J. Gallagher & Co., Arthur J. Gallagher & Co. (AUS) Ltd, Arthur J. Gallagher & Co. (Bermuda) Limited, Arthur J. Gallagher & Co. (Illinois), Arthur J. Gallagher & Co. Insurance Brokers of California Inc., Arthur J. Gallagher (Aus) Pty Ltd, Arthur J. Gallagher (Bermuda) Holding Partnership, Arthur J. Gallagher (Life Solutions) Ltd, Arthur J. Gallagher (Singapore) Pte Ltd, Arthur J. Gallagher (U.S.) LLC, Arthur J. Gallagher (UK) Limited, Arthur J. Gallagher Asesoria S.A.C., Arthur J. Gallagher Australasia Holdings Pty Ltd., Arthur J. Gallagher Brokerage & Risk Management Services LLC, Arthur J. Gallagher Broking (NZ) Limited, Arthur J. Gallagher Financial Services Professionals Risk Purchasing Group LLC, Arthur J. Gallagher Group Quebec ULC, Arthur J. Gallagher Holdings (UK) Limited, Arthur J. Gallagher Insurance Brokers Limited, Arthur J. Gallagher Latin America LLC, Arthur J. Gallagher Management (Bermuda) Limited, Arthur J. Gallagher Real Estate Risk Purchasing Group LLC, Arthur J. Gallagher Risk Management Services (Hawaii) Inc., Arthur J. Gallagher Risk Management Services Inc., Arthur J. Gallagher Risk Management Services of Utah Inc., Arthur J. Gallagher School Risk Purchasing Group LLC, Arthur J. Gallagher Service Company LLC, Arthur J. Gallagher Services (UK) Ltd, Ashmore & Associates Insurance Agency, Atlantic Risk Management Corp., Atrex Insurance (Cayman) SPC Limited, Avantek Pty Ltd, Axe Insurance PCC Limited, BIS Insurance Services, Baker - Tillys employment benefits solutions, Ballard Benefit Works, Bankers Financial Benefits, Barmore Insurance Agency, Behnke & Co. Inc., Bellisle Pty Ltd, Belmont Associates Consultants, Belmont Insurance Holdings Limited, Belmont International, Belmont International Limited, Benefit Development Group, Benefit Management Group, BenefitLink Resource Group, Benefits Planning & Insurance Agency, Benefits Unlimited, Bennett & Shade Co., Bergvall Marine, Bergvall Marine A.S., Besselman & Little Agency, Big Savings Insurance Agency Inc., Blenheim Park Ltd, Blenheim Park Services Limited, Blue Holdings Pty Ltd, Blue Horizon Insurance Services, Blue Water Benefits, BluePeak Advisors, Blueleaf Consulting Pty Ltd., Bluewater Incorporated Cell Insurance Company, Bollinger Inc., Bollinger Insurance Services Inc., Bowen Miclette Britt & Merry of Arkansas Inc., Brendis & Brendis, Brim AB, Broker Benefit Services, Brokerage Professionals, Brown Hobbs & McMurray Insurance, Bultman/Bell Associates Inc., Burkwald & Associates, Burns-Fazzi Brock & Associates, Bushong Insurance Associates, C&B Consulting Group, CGM Gallagher Insruance Brokers (Trinidad & Tobago) Limited, CJM Solutions Inc., CMA Solutions LLC, Cairnstone Financial, California Insurance Center, Capital Bauer Insurance Agency, Capitol Benefits Group, Capsicum CRLA LLP, Capsicum Re Brasil Participacoes Ltda, Capsicum Re Latin America Corretora De Resseguros Ltda, Capsicum Reinsurance Brokers Bermuda Limited, Capsicum Reinsurance Brokers Miami Inc., Carefree Marketing Inc., Carpenter Cammack & Associates, Cashan & Co., Castle Insurance Associates, Centennial Insurance Agency, Charity First Insurance Services Inc., Charles Allen Agency, Charter Lakes Insurance Agency, Chris Schroeder Insurance, Christie-Phoenix, Cintran Claims Canada Limited, Classic Insurance Services, Cleaveland Insurance Group, Cohen & Lord Insurance Brokers, Cohn Financial Group, Coleman Group Holdings Limited, Coleman Holdings Limited, College and University Scholastic Excess Risk Purchasing Group LLC, Commercial Insurance Brokers, Complete Benefit Alliance, Complete Financial Balance, Complete Financial Balance Pty Ltd, Consolidated Casualty Specialties LLC, Construction Risk Solutions, Contego Underwriting Limited, Contego Underwriting Ltd, Continental Excess & Surplus, Convergence Risk Services Ltd, Copper Mountain Assurance Inc., Cornwall & Stevens Co., Corporate Benefit Advisors, Corporate Life Consultants, Countrywide Accident Assistance Limited, Coverdell & Company Inc., Coverdell Canada Corporation, Cowles and Connell, Craig M. Ferguson & Co., Crist Elliott Machette Insurance Services, Crombie Lockwood (NZ) Limited, Davis-Poston & Associates, Denman Consulting Services, Detlefs Johnson & Partners, DiBrina Group, Dickinson & Associates, Discount Development Services L.L.C., Discovery Benefit Solutions, Dodson-Bateman & Co., Donald P. Pipino Co. Ltd., E. S. Susanin Inc., EHE Holdings LLC, EHS Holdings Limited, Elantis Premium Funding (NZ) Limited, Elantis Premium Funding Limited, Elite Benefits Insurance Marketing Services, Employee Benefits Analysis Corp., Employee Benefits of The Carolinas, Encore Insurance & Bonding, Everett James, Evolution Risk Services Limited, Evolution Technology Services Limited, Evolution Underwriting Group, Evolution Underwriting Group Limited, Evolution Underwriting Limited, Excel Insurance Services, FYI Direct Canada Corporation, FYI Direct LLC, Farallone Pacific Insurance Services, Fenchurch Faris Limited, Fidelity Benefits & Insurance Services, Financial Profiles Inc., Finergy Solutions Pty Ltd, First Agency, First Iowa Insurance Agency, First Premium Inc., First Premium Insurance Group, Fish & Schulkamp, Fishermans Insurance Services, Foley Healthcare Limited, Fortress Financial Solutions Pty Ltd, Fortress Insurance LLC, Foundation Strategies, Fox Lawson & Associates, Franklin-Case Agency LLC, Fraser MacAndrew Ryan Limited, Friary Intermediate Limited, Fuller & O'Brien, G.S. Chapman & Associates Insurance Brokers, G.S. Levine Insurance Services, GBS (Australia) Holdings Pty Ltd, GBS Administrators Inc., GBS Insurance and Financial Services Inc., GBS Retirement Services Inc., GBS Specialty Markets LLC, GGB Finance 1 Limited, GGB Finance 2 Limited, GGB Finance 3 Limited, GGB Finance 4 Limited, GPL Assurance, GPL Assurance Inc., Gabor Insurance Services, Gale Smith & Co. Inc., Gallagher (Bermuda) Insurance Solutions Ltd., Gallagher - Grace/Mayer Insurance Agency, Gallagher Bassett Aires Inc., Gallagher Bassett Canada Inc., Gallagher Bassett Insurance Services Ltd., Gallagher Bassett International Ltd., Gallagher Bassett NZ Pty Ltd., Gallagher Bassett Services Inc. , Gallagher Bassett Services Pty Ltd., Gallagher Bassett Services Workers Compensation Victoria Pty Ltd., Gallagher Benefit Services (Canada) Group Inc., Gallagher Benefit Services (Holdings) Limited, Gallagher Benefit Services Inc., Gallagher Benefit Services Management Company Limited, Gallagher Benefit Services Pty Ltd, Gallagher Benefits Consulting Limited, Gallagher Bomford Couch Wilson, Gallagher Burgess, Gallagher Canada Acquisition Corporation, Gallagher Caribbean Group Limited, Gallagher Clean Energy LLC, Gallagher Communications Limited, Gallagher Community Clinic RPG LLC, Gallagher Consulting Ltda, Gallagher Corporate Services LLC, Gallagher Coyle, Gallagher CyberRisk, Gallagher Energy Risk Services Inc., Gallagher Fiduciary Advisors LLC, Gallagher Holdings (UK) Limited, Gallagher Holdings Bermuda Company Limited, Gallagher Holdings Four (UK) Limited, Gallagher Holdings Three (UK) Limited, Gallagher Insurance Brokers (Barbados) Limited, Gallagher Insurance Brokers (St. Kitts & Nevis) Limited, Gallagher Insurance Brokers (St. Lucia) Limited, Gallagher Insurance Brokers (St. Vincent) Limited, Gallagher Insurance Brokers Jamaica Limited, Gallagher International Cash Management s.r.l., Gallagher International Holdings (US) Inc., Gallagher Investment Advisors LLC, Gallagher Inwest Group, Gallagher Koster, Gallagher Lambert Group, Gallagher Madison Risk & Insurance Services, Gallagher Mauritius Holdings, Gallagher Mississippi Brokerage LLC, Gallagher RE Colombia Ltda Corredores de Reaseguros SA, Gallagher Risk & Reward Limited, Gallagher Risk Group LLC, Gallagher Risk Placements Pty Ltd, Gallagher SKS, Gallagher Service Center LLP, Gallagher-Tarantino, Galtney Group, Game Day Insurance Inc., Gardner & White Corp., Gardner Marine Agency, Garza Long Group, Gatehouse Consulting Limited, Gault Armstrong Kemble Pty Ltd, Gault Armstrong SARL, Giles Group, Giles Holdings Limited, Giles Insurance Brokers, Gillis Ellis & Baker Inc., Goodman Insurance Agency, Grandy Pratt Co., Greenseed Alternative Mangaers Platform Ltd, Grossman & Associates, Group Benefits of Arkansas, Group Insurance Associates, Gruppo Marcucci, HLG Holdings Limited, HMG-PCMS Limited, HPF Investments LLC, HR Owen Insurance Services Limited, Hagan Newkirk Financial Services, Hagedorn & Company, Hardman & Howell Benefits, Harlequin Insurance PCC Limited, Hartstein Associates Inc., Healthcare Professionals Purchasing Group LLC, Healthcare Risk Solutions, Heath Lambert Group Ltd., Heath Lambert Limited, Heath Lambert Overseas Limited, Heiser Insurance Agency, Henderson Phillips Fine Arts Insurance, Herbruck Alder & Co., Heritage Insurance Brokers (CI) Limited, Hesse & Partner AG, Hesse Consulting, Hexagon ICC Limited, Hexagon Insurance PCC Limited, Hill Chesson & Woody, Hogan Insurance Services, Home & Travel Limited, Honour Point Limited, Horseshoe Corporate Services Ltd, Horseshoe Fund Services (Cayman) Ltd, Horseshoe Fund Services Ltd, Horseshoe Fund Services USA Inc., Horseshoe ILS Services UK Ltd, Horseshoe Insurance Advisors US LLC, Horseshoe Insurance Advisory Ltd., Horseshoe Insurance Services Holdings Ltd, Horseshoe Insurance Services Holdings US Inc., Horseshoe Management (Gibraltar) Limited, Horseshoe Management (Ireland) Ltd, Horseshoe Management Ltd., Horseshoe PCC Limited, Horseshoe Re Limited, Horseshoe Services (Cayman) Ltd, Horseshoe Services (Pty) Ltd, Horton Insurance Agency, Housing Authorities Services Risk Purchasing Group LLC, Human Resource Management Systems, I-Protect Underwriting Pty Ltd, IBIS Advisors, IBS Reinsurance Singapore Pte Ltd, ILS Fund Services Ltd., ISG International, ITI Solutions, Igloo Insurance PCC Limited, Independent Benefit Services, Independent Fiduciary Services, Ink Underwriting Agencies Limited, InsSync Group Pty Ltd, Inspire Underwriting Limited, Instrat Insurance Brokers, Instrat Insurance Brokers Pty Ltd, Instrat Integration Holdco Pty Ltd, Insurance Acquisitions Holdings Limited, Insurance Associates Inc., Insurance Dialogue Limited, Insurance Dialogue Ltd., Insurance Plans Agency, Insurance Plus Risk Purchasing Group LLC, Insurance Point, Insurance Risk Managers of Missouri Inc., Insure My Villa Limited, Insure Pty Ltd, Integrated Healthcare Strategies, InterNational Insurance Group, InterPacific Underwriting Agencies, Intermountain Financial Benefits, Interstate Insurance Underwriters, JPGAC LLC, James F. Reda & Associates, James R. Weir Insurance Agency, Jenkins and Associates, Joe E. Martin Inc., John P. Woods Co. Inc., Jones Brown, Jones Brown Group Inc., Jones Brown Insurance Solutions Inc., Joseph Distel, Joseph James & Associates Insurance Agency, Just Landlords Insurance Services Ltd, KDC Associates, KRW Insurance Agency, Kahl Insurance Services, Kaler Carney Liffler & Co. Inc., Kane Group - Insurance Management Operations, Kelly Financial, Kent Kent & Tingle and RBS, Keyser Benefits Corp., Kingspark Enterprises Pty Ltd, L&R Benefits, LSG Insurance Partners, Learn About Money Limited, Lewis & Associates Insurance Brokers, Leystone Insurance & Financial, Life Plans Unlimited, Lincoln Financial Management, Longfellow Financial, Lucas Fettes Limited, Lucas Fettes and Partners Limited, Lutgert Insurance, MA Underwriting Pty Ltd, MDM Insurance Associates, MG Advanced Coal Technologies-1 LLC, MGA Insurance Services, MRS Holdings Ltd., Madison Scott & Associates, Managed Healthcare Solutions, Mannequin Insurance PCC Limited, Marchetti Robertson & Brickell Insurance, Marine Insurance Service, Martin Gordon & Jones Inc., McDowall Associates Human Resource Consultants, McIntyre Risk Management, McLean Insurance Agency, McNeary, McPherson Benefits Group, McRory & Co., Mecacem Insurance SPC Ltd, MedInsights Inc., Melton Insurance Associates, Memberworks Canada LLC, Merit Insurance, Metcom Excess, Metzler Bros. Insurance, Meyers-Reynolds & Associates, Mid America Group, Midwest Surety Services, Mike Henry Insurance Brokers, Mike Henry Insurance Brokers Limited, Mike Henry Insurance Funding Limited, Miller Buettner & Parrott, Miller-Harrison Insurance Services, Milne Alexander Pty Ltd, Minvielle & Chastanet Insurance Brokers, Monument Insurance (NZ) Limited, Monument Llc, Monument Premium Funding Limited, Mortgage Insurance Agency, Murphy Consultants, Mutual Insurance Services, NationAir Aviation Insurance, National Administration Co., National Ethics Association, National Transportation Adjusters, Nelson/Monarch Insurance Services, Nicoud Insurance Services, NiiS/Apex Group Holdings, Nonprofit Insurance Risk Purchasing Group LLC, Noraxis Capital Corp, Nordic Forsakring & Riskhantering AB, North Alabama Insurance, Nourse Insurance Brokers, O'Gorman & Young, OAMPS (UK) Limited, OAMPS Gault Armstrong Pty Ltd, OAMPS Limited, OAMPS Special Risks Ltd, Offshore Market Placements Limited, Optimum Talent, Orb Financial Services, Orb Financial Services Limited, Osprey Insurance Brokers Limited, Oval Group, Oval Healthcare Limited, Oval Insurance Broking Limited, Oval Limited, Oval Management Services Limited, Oxygen Insurance Managers, P2 Group, PEN Insurance Management Advisors Ltd, PT IBS Insurance Broking Service, Pacific Insurance Agency, Palmer Atlantic Insurance, Palmer Atlantic Insurance Ltd, Palmer Atlantic Risk Services Ltd., Park Row Associates, Parkstar Enterprises Pty Ltd, Parmia Pty Ltd, PartnerSource, Pastel Holding (NZ) Company, Pastel Holdings Pty Limited, Pastel Purchaser (NZ) Limited, Pastel Purchaser Pty Limited, Pavey Group Holdings (UK) Limited, Pavey Group Holdings Limited, Pavey Group Limited, Pearson Dunn Insurance Inc., Pen Underwriting Canada Limited, Pen Underwriting Group Pty. Ltd., Pen Underwriting Limited, Pen Underwriting Pty Ltd, Persing Dyckman & Toynbee Inc., Personal Advice Services Pty Ltd, Petty Burton Associates, Pointer Insurance Agency, Portmore Insurance Brokers (Wilshire) Limited, Portmore Insurance Brokers Limited, Potter-Holden & Co., Powell Insurance Agency, Premier Insurance Services Inc., Premier Risk Services, Premium Finance Corporation, Preston-Patterson, ProSource Financial, Professional Agents Risk Purchasing Group LLC, Professional Claims Managers, Proinova AB, Proinova Agency AB, Pronto California Agency LLC, Pronto California General Agency LLC, Pronto Florida Claims LLC, Pronto Florida General Agency LLC, Pronto Franchise LLC, Pronto General Agency Ltd, Pronto General Agency Management LLC, Pronto Holdco Inc., Pronto Holding California LLC, Pronto Holding Florida LLC, Pronto Insurance Agency of Laredo Inc., Pronto Premium Finance LLC, Property & Commercial Ltd., Property Insurance Initatives Limited, Property and Commercial Limited, Protected Insurance Company, Protection Plan Association Inc., Protek Group Limited, Providium Consulting Group, Ptarmigan Underwriting Agency Limited, Ptarmigan Underwriting UK Limited, Purple Bridge Claims Management Limited, Purple Bridge Finance Limited, Purple Bridge Group Limited, Purple Bridge Investments Limited, Purple Bridge Online Services Limited, Purple Bridge Publishing Limited, Quantum Underwriting Solutions Limited, Quillco 226 Limited, Quillco 227 Limited, R. L. Youngdahl & Associates, R.G. Speno Inc., R.W. Scobie, RA Rossborough (Guernsey) Ltd., RA Rossborough (Insurance Brokers) Ltd, REGENCY Group inc., RGA Referencing Limited, RGA Underwriting Limited, RIL Administrators (Guernsey) Ltd., RJ Dutton Inc., RSM Insurance Services Limited, Reassurance Holdings Inc., Rebholz Insurance Agency, Reid Manson Ltd., Reimbursement Services, Rentguard Limited, Reward Management Limited, Reynolds & Rodar Insurance Group, Riley & Associates, Rio 587 Limited, Rio 588 Limited, Risk & Reward Group, Risk Management Partners Limited, Risk Placement Services Inc., Risk Planners, Risk Services (NW) Limited, Risk Services (NW) Ltd., Risk Solutions Group Limited, Robert A. Schneider Agency, Robert Keith & Associates, Roberts & Roberts Insurance Service, Robinson-Adams Insurance, Rossborough Healthcare International Ltd, Rossborough Insurance (IOM) Ltd., Rossborough Insurance Services Ltd. (Jersey), S. A. Freerks & Associates, SEG Insurance Ltd, SGB-NIA Insurance Brokers, SHILLING Ltd, SKANCO International, SMERI AB, SRS Underwriting Pty Ltd, Secure Enterprises Pty Ltd, Securitas Re, Sellers Group, Sentinel Indemnity LLC, Septagon Insurance PCC Limited, Shuford Insurance Agency, Sigma II Insurance Agency, Sinclair Billard and Weld Limited, Sobieski & Bradley, Solid Benefit Guidance, Spanjers Insurance Agency, Spataro Insurance Agency, Specialised Broking Associates, Specialty Risk, Stackhouse Poland, Stackhouse Poland Bidco Limited, Stackhouse Poland Group Limited, Stackhouse Poland Holdings Limited, Stackhouse Poland Midco Limited, Stackouse Poland Limited, Stanton Group, Stark Johnson & Stinson Inc., Steel Agency, Strata Solicitors Ltd, Strategic Health Plans Corp., Strathearn Insurance Brokers, Strathearn Insurance Brokers (Qld) Trading Trust, Strathern Insurance Group Pty Ltd, Strathern Integration Holdco Pty Ltd, Strathern Unit Trust, Strong Financial Resources, Summit Insurance Group, Sunday and Associates, Sunderland Insurance Services, Super Advice Corporate Services Pty Ltd, Taylor Benefits, Texas Insurance Agency, Texas Insurance Managers, The BeneTex Group, The Buchholz Planning, The Chapman Group, The Commonwealth Consulting Group, The Daniels Group Inc., The EHE Group LLC, The EHE Insurance Agency LLC, The Eagle Insurance Agency LLC, The Eriksen Group, The Forker Company, The Gleason Agency, The Great Lakes Agency, The HR Group, The Hawk Agency, The Human Capital Group, The Lance Group, The Levitt/Kristan Co., The MW Bagnall Company, The Old Greenwich Consulting Group, The Parks Johnson Agency, The Plus Companies Inc., The Presidio Group, The Producers Choice, The Rains Group, The Splinter Group, The Titan Group, The Treiber Group, The Woodsmall Companies Inc., Title & Covenant Brokers Ltd., Title Investments Limited, Tom Sherwin Insurance Agency, Total Reward Group, Total Rewards Group (Holdings) Limited, Towle Agency, Transwestern, Tri-State General Insurance Agency, Triad Insurance Agency, Triad USA, Tribeca Strategic Advisors, Trinder & Norwood, Trip Mate, Trissel Graham & Toole, Tropp & Co., Tudor Risk Services, Tyloma Holdings Limited, Uni-Care Inc., Unison Inc., Universico Group, Unoccupied Direct Limited, V2V Holdings LLC, VEBA Service Group, Vasek Insurance Services Limited, Velo ACU LLC, Velo Holdings Inc., Verbag AG., Vertrue LLC, Victory Insurance Agency, Vincent L. Braband Insurance, Vital Benefits, Voluntary Benefits Solutions, W. E. Kingsley Co. Inc., WM. W. George & Associates, Walker Taylor Agency, Welling Associates, Wesfarmers Insurance - Insurance Brokerage Operations, Western Benefit Solutions, White & Company Insurance, Whitehaven Insurance Group, William Gallagher Associates Insurance Brokers, William H. Connolly & Co., Williams Insurance Agency Inc., Williams-Manny Insurance Group, Winn & Company Insurance Brokers, Wischmeyer Benefit Partners, Woodbrook Underwriting Agencies, Woods & Grooms, WorkCare Northwest, Worksite Communications, Y. S. Liedman & Associates, YOA Capsicum Reinsurance Broker Limited, Zenor Limited, Zuber Insurance Agency, and e3 Financial.
The family is obviously devastated by what happened, Lynch said. My client is devastated by what happened. Shell never be the same. She feels the exact same loss that the family feels, but its even heightened because of her role in the loss.
American Renal Associates Holdings, Inc. operates as a dialysis services provider in the United States. It operates dialysis clinics focusing on joint venture partnerships with physicians. The company offers kidney dialysis services to patients suffering from chronic kidney failure or end stage renal disease. As of December 31, 2019, it operated 246 dialysis clinics in partnership with 400 nephrologist partners treating approximately 17,300 patients in 27 states and the District of Columbia. The company was founded in 1999 and is headquartered in Beverly, Massachusetts.

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Is There A Bargain Opening Up With PayPal (NASDAQ: PYPL)?

There were not many on Wall Street who would have forecasted a 35% drop in PayPal (NASDAQ: PYPL) shares when they were trading at all-time highs back in July. But concerns around, and then confirmation of, soft forward guidance has done just that.

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Lloyds Banking Group plc, together with its subsidiaries, provides a range of banking and financial services in the United Kingdom and internationally. It operates through three segments: Retail; Commercial Banking; and Insurance and Wealth. The Retail segment offers a range of financial service products, including current accounts, savings accounts, mortgages, motor finance, unsecured loans, leasing solutions, credit cards, and other financial services to personal and small business customers. The Commercial Banking segment provides lending, transactional banking, working capital management, risk management, and debt capital market services to small and medium-sized entities, corporates, and financial institutions. The Insurance and Wealth segment offers life, home, and car insurance products; and pension, investment, and wealth management products and services. It also provides digital and mobile banking, and telephone services, as well as advisory services for savings, investments, and planning for retirement. The company offers its products and services under the Lloyds Bank, Halifax, Bank of Scotland, Scottish Widows, MBNA, Schroders Personal Wealth, Black Horse, Lex Autolease, Birmingham Midshires, LDC, IWeb, and Agricultural Mortgage Corporation brands. Lloyds Banking Group plc was founded in 1695 and is headquartered in London, the United Kingdom.

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The following companies are subsidiares of Ingersoll Rand: 211 E. Russell Road LLC, Air-Relief, Belliss & Morcom Brasil, Belliss and Morcom, Boardwalk Enterprises, Charm Merger Sub Inc., CompAir, CompAir (Hankook) Korea Co. Ltd., CompAir Acquisition (No. 2) Ltd., CompAir Acquisition Ltd., CompAir BroomWade Ltd., CompAir Canada, CompAir Finance Ltd., CompAir GmbH, CompAir Holdings Limited, CompAir Holman Ltd, CompAir International Trading (Shanghai) Co Ltd, CompAir Korea Ltd, CompAir South Africa (SA) (Pty) Ltd., CompAir UK Ltd, CompAir USA, Consolidated Distribution Holdings Ltd., DV Systems Inc., Emco Wheaton, Emco Wheaton GmbH Branch, Emco Wheaton Gmbh, Emco Wheaton UK, Emco Wheaton USA Inc, Enza Air Propriety Limited (South Africa), GD Aria Holdings #2 Limited, GD Aria Holdings Limited, GD Aria Investments Limited, GD First UK Ltd, GD German Holdings GmbH, GD German Holdings I Gmbh, GD German Holdings II GmbH, GD German Investments GmbH, GD Global Holdings, GD Global Holdings II, GD Global Holdings UK II Ltd., GD Global Ventures I B.V., GD Global Ventures II B.V., GD Global Ventures III B.V., GD Industrial Products Malaysia SDN. BHD., GD Investment KY, GD UK Finance Ltd., Gardner Denver (Thailand) Co. Ltd., Gardner Denver Austria GmbH, Gardner Denver Bad Neustadt Real Estate GmbH & Co KG, Gardner Denver Belgium NV, Gardner Denver Brasil Industria E Comercio de Maquinas Ltda., Gardner Denver CZ + SK sro, Gardner Denver Canada Corp, Gardner Denver Cyprus Investments II Ltd., Gardner Denver Cyprus Investments II Ltd. - US Branch, Gardner Denver Cyprus Investments Ltd., Gardner Denver Cyprus Investments Ltd. - US Branch, Gardner Denver Deutschland GmbH, Gardner Denver Engineered Products India Private Limited, Gardner Denver FZE, Gardner Denver Finance II LLC, Gardner Denver Finance Inc & Co KG, Gardner Denver France SA, Gardner Denver France SAS, Gardner Denver Group Services Ltd, Gardner Denver Group Svcs Ltd, Gardner Denver Hoffman, Gardner Denver Holdings, Gardner Denver Holdings Limited, Gardner Denver Hong Kong Investments Limited, Gardner Denver Hong Kong Ltd, Gardner Denver Iberica, Gardner Denver Industries Ltd., Gardner Denver Industries Pty Ltd., Gardner Denver Industries Pty Ltd. Branch, Gardner Denver International, Gardner Denver International Ltd., Gardner Denver Intl Ltd Middle East Regional Rep Office, Gardner Denver Investments, Gardner Denver Italy Holdings S.r.L., Gardner Denver Japan, Gardner Denver Kirchhain Real Estate GmbH & Co KG, Gardner Denver Korea, Gardner Denver Korea Ltd, Gardner Denver Ltd, Gardner Denver Ltd South Africa, Gardner Denver Ltd., Gardner Denver Ltd. Branch (Ireland), Gardner Denver Machinery (Shanghai) Co, Gardner Denver Machinery (Shanghai) Co., Gardner Denver Nash Brasil Industria E Comercio De Bombas Ltda, Gardner Denver Nash Deutschland GmbH, Gardner Denver Nash LLC, Gardner Denver Nash Machinery Ltd, Gardner Denver Nash Machinery Ltd., Gardner Denver Nederland BV, Gardner Denver Nederland Investments B.V., Gardner Denver Oberdorfer Pumps, Gardner Denver Oy, Gardner Denver Petroleum Pumps, Gardner Denver Polska Sp z.o.o., Gardner Denver Pte Ltd., Gardner Denver S.r.l., Gardner Denver Schopfheim GmbH, Gardner Denver Schopfheim Real Estate GmbH & Co KG, Gardner Denver Schweiz AG, Gardner Denver Slovakia, Gardner Denver SudAmerica S.r.l., Gardner Denver Sweden AB, Gardner Denver Taiwan Ltd., Gardner Denver Thomas, Gardner Denver Thomas GmbH, Gardner Denver Thomas Pneumatic Systems (Wuxi) Co., Gardner Denver Thomas Real Estate GmbH & Co KG, Gardner Denver UK, Gardner Denver Water Jetting Systems, Garo Dott. Ing. Roberto Gabbioneta S.r.l., Hamworthy Belliss & Morcom, ILMVAC (UK) Ltd., ILS Innovative Labor Systeme, ILS Inovative Laborsysteme GmbH, Indonesia Foreign Trade Representative Office, LeROI, LeRoi International Inc, MP Pumps Inc., Mako Compressors, Nash, Nash Elmo, Oina VV, Oina VV Aktiebolag, Robuschi, Rotary Compression Technologies, Runtech Systems, Runtech Systems (Shanghai) Co. Ltd., Runtech Systems Inc., Runtech Systems OY, Shanghai CompAir Compressors Co Ltd, Shanghai Compressors & Blowers Ltd., Syltone, TCM Investments, TIWR Real Estate GmbH & Co. KG, TODO AB, Tamrotor Marine Compressors AS, Thomas Industries, Thomas Industries Inc., Tri-Continent Scientific, Welch Vacuum Equipment (Shanghai) Co. Ltd., Zinsser Analytic, Zinsser Analytik GmbH, and Zinsser NA.
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 Tenneco: A.E. Group Machines Limited, AE International Limited, Anand I-Power Limited, Anqing TP Goetze Liner Co. Ltd., Anqing TP Goetze Piston Ring Co. Ltd., Anqing TP Powder Metallurgy Co. Ltd., Armstrong Properties (Pty.) Ltd., Ateliers Juliette Adam SAS, Autopartes Walker S. de R.L. de C.V., Beck Arnley Holdings LLC, CATAI s.r.l., CEDS Inc., Carter Automotive Company LLC, Clevite Industries Inc., Componentes Venezolanos de Direccion S.A., Cooperatief Federal-Mogul Dutch Investments B.A., Coventry Assurance Ltd., DRiV Automotive Inc., DRiV IP LLC, DRiV Incorporated, Dongsuh Federal-Mogul Co. Ltd., F-M Holding Daros AB, F-M Holding Goteborg AB, F-M Holding Mexico S.A. de C.V., F-M Motorparts Limited, F-M Motorparts TSC LLC, F-M TSC Real Estate Holdings LLC, F-M Trademarks Limited, FDML Holdings Limited, FM International LLC, FM PBW Bearings Private Limited, FM Participacoes e Investimentos LTDA, Farloc Argentina S.A.I.C. y F., Federal Mogul (Thailand) Ltd., Federal Mogul Aftermarket Egypt Ltd., Federal Mogul Argentina S.A., Federal Mogul Dis Ticaret Anonim Sirketi, Federal Mogul Hungary Kft., Federal Mogul Powertrain Otomotiv Anonim Sirketi, Federal Mogul SAS, Federal Mogul Services Sarl, Federal Mogul Systems Protection SAS, Federal-Mogul, Federal-Mogul (Anqing) Powder Metallurgy Co. Ltd., Federal-Mogul (Changshu) Automotive Parts Co. Ltd., Federal-Mogul (China) Co. Ltd., Federal-Mogul (Chongqing) Friction Materials Co. Ltd., Federal-Mogul (Dalian) Co. Ltd., Federal-Mogul (Langfang) Automotive Components Co. Ltd., Federal-Mogul (Proprietary) Limited, Federal-Mogul (Shanghai) Automotive Parts Co. Ltd., Federal-Mogul (T&N) Hong Kong Limited, Federal-Mogul (Tianjin) Surface Treatment Co. Ltd., Federal-Mogul (Vietnam) Ltd., Federal-Mogul Aftermarket Espana S.A., Federal-Mogul Aftermarket France SAS, Federal-Mogul Aftermarket GmbH, Federal-Mogul Aftermarket Southern Africa (Pty) Limited, Federal-Mogul Aftermarket UK Limited, Federal-Mogul Anand Bearings India Limited, Federal-Mogul Anand Sealings India Limited, Federal-Mogul Asia Investments Holding Korea Ltd., Federal-Mogul Asia Investments Limited, Federal-Mogul Automotive GmbH & Co. KG, Federal-Mogul Automotive Pty Ltd, Federal-Mogul Automotive Verwaltungs GmbH, Federal-Mogul Betriebsgrundstucke Burscheid GmbH, Federal-Mogul Bimet Spolka Akcyjna, Federal-Mogul Bradford Limited, Federal-Mogul Bremsbelag GmbH, Federal-Mogul Burscheid Beteiligungs GmbH, Federal-Mogul Burscheid GmbH, Federal-Mogul Canada Limited, Federal-Mogul Chassis LLC, Federal-Mogul Componentes de Motores Ltda., Federal-Mogul Controlled Power Limited, Federal-Mogul Coventry Limited, Federal-Mogul Deva (Qingdao) Automotive Parts Co. Ltd., Federal-Mogul Deva GmbH, Federal-Mogul Dimitrovgrad LLC, Federal-Mogul Distribucion de Mexico S. de R.L. de C.V., Federal-Mogul Dong Feng (Shiyan) Engine Components Co. Ltd., Federal-Mogul EMEA Distribution Services, Federal-Mogul Employee Trust Administration Limited, Federal-Mogul Engineering Limited, Federal-Mogul FIL-P43 S. de R.L. de C.V., Federal-Mogul FIL-S43 S. de R.L. de C.V., Federal-Mogul Filtration LLC, Federal-Mogul Finance 1 LLC, Federal-Mogul Finance 2 LLC, Federal-Mogul Financial Services Poland Sp.z.o.o., Federal-Mogul Financial Services S.A.S., Federal-Mogul Financing Corporation, Federal-Mogul Friction Products Barcelona S.L., Federal-Mogul Friction Products Co. Ltd., Federal-Mogul Friction Products GmbH, Federal-Mogul Friction Products International GmbH, Federal-Mogul Friction Products Limited, Federal-Mogul Friction Products Ploiesti SRL, Federal-Mogul Friction Products S.A., Federal-Mogul Friction Products a.s., Federal-Mogul Friction Spain S.L., Federal-Mogul Friedberg GmbH, Federal-Mogul Garennes SAS, Federal-Mogul Germany Investments Holding GmbH, Federal-Mogul Global Aftermarket EMEA, Federal-Mogul Global Growth Limited, Federal-Mogul GmbH, Federal-Mogul Goetze (India) Limited, Federal-Mogul Gorzyce Sp. z o.o., Federal-Mogul Holding Deutschland GmbH, Federal-Mogul Holding Sweden AB, Federal-Mogul Holdings Ltd., Federal-Mogul Iberica S.L., Federal-Mogul Ignition GmbH, Federal-Mogul Ignition LLC, Federal-Mogul Ignition Products India Limited, Federal-Mogul Ignition Products SAS, Federal-Mogul Industria de Autopecas Ltda., Federal-Mogul Investment Ltd., Federal-Mogul Investments B.V., Federal-Mogul Italy S.r.l., Federal-Mogul Izmit Piston ve Pim Uretim Tesisleri A.S., Federal-Mogul Japan K.K., Federal-Mogul Juarez S. de R.L. de C.V., Federal-Mogul Lighting S. de R.L. de C.V., Federal-Mogul Limited, Federal-Mogul Luxembourg S.a.r.l., Federal-Mogul MP US LLC, Federal-Mogul Motorparts (India) Limited, Federal-Mogul Motorparts (Netherlands) B.V., Federal-Mogul Motorparts (Pinghu) Trading Limited, Federal-Mogul Motorparts (Qingdao) Co. Ltd., Federal-Mogul Motorparts (Singapore) Pte. Ltd., Federal-Mogul Motorparts (Thailand) Limited, Federal-Mogul Motorparts (Zhejiang) Co. Ltd., Federal-Mogul Motorparts Colombia S.A.S., Federal-Mogul Motorparts Holding B.V., Federal-Mogul Motorparts Holding GmbH, Federal-Mogul Motorparts LLC, Federal-Mogul Motorparts Management (Shanghai) Co. Ltd., Federal-Mogul Motorparts Minority Holding B.V., Federal-Mogul Motorparts Philippines Inc., Federal-Mogul Motorparts Ploiesti SRL, Federal-Mogul Motorparts Poland Sp.z.o.o., Federal-Mogul Motorparts Pty Ltd, Federal-Mogul Motorparts Services SRL, Federal-Mogul Naberezhnye Chelny, Federal-Mogul Nurnberg GmbH, Federal-Mogul Operations France S.A.S., Federal-Mogul Piston Rings LLC, Federal-Mogul Plasticos Puntanos S.A., Federal-Mogul Powertrain (Netherlands) B.V., Federal-Mogul Powertrain Eastern Europe B.V., Federal-Mogul Powertrain IP LLC, Federal-Mogul Powertrain Italy S.R.L, Federal-Mogul Powertrain LLC, Federal-Mogul Powertrain Mexico Distribucion S. de R.L. de C.V., Federal-Mogul Powertrain Russia GmbH, Federal-Mogul Powertrain Solutions India Private Limited, Federal-Mogul Powertrain Systems S A (Proprietary) Limited, Federal-Mogul Powertrain Vostok OOO, Federal-Mogul Products US LLC, Federal-Mogul Pty Ltd, Federal-Mogul R&L Friedberg Casting GmbH & Co. KG, Federal-Mogul Risk Advisory Services LLC, Federal-Mogul S. de R.L. de C.V., Federal-Mogul S.A., Federal-Mogul SP Mexico S. de R.L. de C.V., Federal-Mogul Sealing System (Nanchang) Co. Ltd., Federal-Mogul Sealing Systems GmbH, Federal-Mogul Sejong Co. Ltd, Federal-Mogul Sejong Tech Ltd, Federal-Mogul Serina Co. Ltd., Federal-Mogul Sevierville LLC, Federal-Mogul Shanghai Bearing Co. Ltd., Federal-Mogul Shanghai Compound Material Co. Ltd., Federal-Mogul Singapore Investments Pte. Ltd., Federal-Mogul Sistemas Automotivos Ltda., Federal-Mogul Sistemas de Limpadores de Para-Brisas Ltda, Federal-Mogul Sorocaba-Holding Ltda, Federal-Mogul Systems Protection Hungary Kft., Federal-Mogul Systems Protection Morocco SARL AU, Federal-Mogul TP Europe GmbH & Co KG, Federal-Mogul TP Liner Europe Otomotiv Ltd. Sti, Federal-Mogul TP Liners Inc., Federal-Mogul TP Piston Rings GmbH, Federal-Mogul TPR (India) Limited, Federal-Mogul Technology Limited, Federal-Mogul Transaction LLC, Federal-Mogul UK Investments Limited, Federal-Mogul UK Powertrain Limited, Federal-Mogul VCS Holding B.V., Federal-Mogul VCS LLC, Federal-Mogul Valve Train International LLC, Federal-Mogul Valve Train S. de R.L. de C.V., Federal-Mogul Valvetrain GmbH, Federal-Mogul Valvetrain La Source SAS, Federal-Mogul Valvetrain Limited, Federal-Mogul Valvetrain Schirmeck SAS, Federal-Mogul Valvetrain s.r.o., Federal-Mogul Vermogensverwaltungs GmbH, Federal-Mogul Verwaltungs-und Beteiligungs-GmbH, Federal-Mogul Wiesbaden GmbH, Federal-Mogul World Trade (Asia) Limited, Federal-Mogul World Wide LLC, Federal-Mogul Yura (Qingdao) Ignition Co. Ltd., Federal-Mogul Zhengsheng (Changsha) Piston Ring Co. Ltd., Federal-Mogul de Costa Rica S.A., Federal-Mogul de Guatemala Sociedad Anonima, Federal-Mogul de Matamoros S. de R.L. de C.V., Federal-Mogul de Mexico S. de R.L. de C.V., Federal-Mogul de Venezuela C.A., Federal-Mogul of South Africa (Proprietary) Limited, Felt Products MFG. CO. LLC, Ferodo America LLC, Ferodo Limited, Fonciere de Liberation, Forjas y Maquinas S. de R.L. de C.V., Frenos Hidraulicos Automotrices S.A. de C.V., Fric-Rot S.A.I.C., Gabilan Manufacturing, Gasket Holdings LLC, Gillet Exhaust Manufacturing Limited, Gillet Pressings Cardiff Limited, Goetze Wohnungsbau GmbH, ISA Installations Steuerungs und Automatislerungs GmbH, J.W. Hartley (Motor Trade) Limited, Jurid do Brasil Sistemas Automotivos Ltda., KB Autosys (Zhangjiagang) Co. Ltd., KB Autosys Co. Ltd., KB Autosys India Private Ltd., Kinetic Pty. Ltd., Kontich, Leeds Piston Ring & Engineering Co. Limited, Maco Inversiones S.A., McCord Payen de Mexico S. de R.L. de C.V., McPherson Strut Company LLC, Monroe Amortisor Imalat Ve Ticaret Anonim Sirketi, Monroe Australia Pty. Limited, Monroe Czechia s.r.o., Monroe Holding S. de R.L. de C.V., Monroe Manufacturing (Proprietary) Ltd., Monroe Mexico S. de R.L. de C.V., Monroe Packaging BVBA, Monroe Ride Performance Sweden AB, Monroe Springs (Australia) Pty. Ltd., Montagewerk Abgastechnik Emden GmbH, Motocare India Private Limited, Muzzy-Lyon Auto Parts LLC, Parts Zone (Thailand) Co. Ltd., Payen International Limited, Piston Rings (UK) Limited, Precision Modular Assembly Corp., Productos de Frenos Automotrices de Calidad S.A. de C.V., Proveedora Walker S. de R.L. de C.V., Pullman, Pullman Standard Inc., Qingdao Tenneco FAWSN Automobile Parts Co. Ltd., Raimsa S. de R.L. de C.V., Ride Performance Canada Inc., Ride Performance Japan Ltd., Ride Performance Korea Limited, Ride Performance Mexico Holding LLC, SAXID Limited, Sapav Marketing Ltd, Saxid, Saxid s.r.l., Servicio de Componentes Automotrices S. de R.L. de C.V., Servicios Administrativos Industriales S. de R.L. de C.V., Shanghai Tenneco Exhaust System Co. Ltd., Sibirica Energy Limited, Sintration Limited, Speyside Real Estate LLC, Subensambles Internacionales S. de R.L. de C.V., T&N Industries LLC, T&N de Mexico S. de R.L. de C.V., TA (Australia) Group Pty. Ltd., TM S.r.l, TMC Texas Inc., TPR Federal-Mogul Tennessee Inc., Taiwan Federal-Mogul Motorparts Co. Limited, TecCom GmbH, Tenneco (Beijing) Exhaust System Co. Ltd., Tenneco (Beijing) Ride Control System Co. Ltd., Tenneco (Changzhou) Ride Performance Co. Ltd., Tenneco (China) Co. Ltd., Tenneco (Dalian) Exhaust System Co. Ltd., Tenneco (Guangzhou) Co. Ltd., Tenneco (Jingzhou) Ride Performance Co. Ltd., Tenneco (MSCan) Operations Inc., Tenneco (MUSA), Tenneco (Mauritius) Limited, Tenneco (Suzhou) Co. Ltd., Tenneco (Suzhou) Emission System Co. Ltd., Tenneco (Suzhou) Ride Control Co. Ltd., Tenneco (TM Asia) Ltd., Tenneco (TM Belgium) BVBA, Tenneco (Tianjin) Ride Performance Co. Ltd., Tenneco Asheville Inc., Tenneco Asia Inc., Tenneco Automotie Nederland B.V., Tenneco Automotive (Thailand) Limited, Tenneco Automotive Brasil Ltda., Tenneco Automotive Deutschland GmbH, Tenneco Automotive Eastern Europe Sp. z.o.o., Tenneco Automotive Europe BVBA, Tenneco Automotive Europe Coordination Center BVBA, Tenneco Automotive Foreign Sales Corporation Limited, Tenneco Automotive France S.A.S., Tenneco Automotive Holdings South Africa Pty. Limited, Tenneco Automotive Iberica S.A., Tenneco Automotive Inc. Nevada, Tenneco Automotive India Private Limited, Tenneco Automotive Italia S.r.l., Tenneco Automotive Operating Company Inc., Tenneco Automotive Polska Sp. z.o.o., Tenneco Automotive Port Elizabeth (Proprietary) Limited, Tenneco Automotive Portugal  Componentes Para Automovel Unipessoal LDA., Tenneco Automotive RSA Company, Tenneco Automotive Second RSA Company, Tenneco Automotive Services Societe Par Actions Simplifiee, Tenneco Automotive Servicios Mexico S. de R.L. de C.V., Tenneco Automotive Trading Company, Tenneco Automotive UK Limited, Tenneco Automotive Volga LLC, Tenneco Automotive Walker Inc., Tenneco Brake Inc., Tenneco CA Czech Republic s.r.o., Tenneco CA Mexico S. de R.L. de C.V., Tenneco CA Netherlands BV, Tenneco Canada Inc., Tenneco Clean Air Argentina S.A.I.C., Tenneco Clean Air India Private Limited, Tenneco Clean Air Spain S.L.U., Tenneco Clean Air US Inc., Tenneco Deutschland Holdinggesellschaft mbH, Tenneco Eastern European Holdings S.a.r.l., Tenneco Eberspaecher (Beijing) Exhaust System Co. Ltd., Tenneco Emission Control (Pty) Ltd, Tenneco Etain Societe Par Actions Simplifiee, Tenneco Europe Limited, Tenneco FAWSN (Changchun) Automobile Parts Co. Ltd., Tenneco FAWSN (Foshan) Automobile Parts Co. Ltd., Tenneco FAWSN (Tianjin) Automobile Parts Co. Ltd., Tenneco Fusheng (Chengdu) Automobile Parts Co. Ltd., Tenneco Global Holdings Inc., Tenneco GmbH, Tenneco Holdings Danmark ApS, Tenneco Hong Kong Holdings Limited, Tenneco Hungary Korlatolt Felelossegu Tarsasag, Tenneco Industria de Autopecas Ltda., Tenneco Innovacion S.L., Tenneco International Holding Corp., Tenneco International Luxembourg S.a.r.l., Tenneco International Manufacturing S.a.r.l., Tenneco Japan Ltd., Tenneco Korea Limited, Tenneco Lingchuan (Chongqing) Exhaust System Co. Ltd., Tenneco Management (Europe) Limited, Tenneco Mauritius China Holdings Ltd., Tenneco Mauritius Holdings Limited, Tenneco Mexico S. de R.L. de C.V., Tenneco RP Germany GmbH, Tenneco Ride Control South Africa (Pty) Ltd., Tenneco Ride Performance US 4 LLC, Tenneco Ride Performance US 5 LLC, Tenneco Silesia spolka z ograniczona odpowiedzialnoscia, Tenneco SpinCo Incorporated, Tenneco Sverige AB, Tenneco Walker (Tianjin) Exhaust System Co. Ltd., Tenneco Zwickau GmbH, Tenneco-Eberspaecher (Dalian) Exhaust System Co. Ltd., Tenneco-Walker (U.K.) Limited, The Pullman Company, The Tenneco Automotive (UK) Pension Scheme Trustee Limited, Thompson and Stammers (Dunmow) Number 6 Limited, Thompson and Stammers (Dunmow) Number 7 Limited, United Piston Ring Inc., VTD Vakuumtechnik Dresden GmbH, Walker Australia Pty. Limited, Walker Danmark ApS, Walker Electronic Silencing Inc., Walker Europe Inc., Walker Exhaust (Thailand) Company Limited, Walker Gillet (Europe) GmbH, Walker Limited, Walker Manufacturing Company, Walker UK Ltd, Wellworthy Limited, Wimetal Societe Par Actions Simplifiee, and Wuhan Tenneco Exhaust System Co. Ltd..
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.

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Murray International Trust PLC is a closed ended equity mutual fund launched and managed by Aberdeen Fund Managers Limited. It is co-managed by Aberdeen Asset Managers Limited. The fund invests in public equity markets across the globe. It seeks to invest in stocks of companies operating across diversified sectors. The fund invests in stocks of companies across all market capitalizations. It employs fundamental analysis with a top-down stock selection approach, focusing on such factors as value, performance, and macroeconomic and monetary factors to create its portfolio. The fund benchmarks the performance of its portfolio against a composite index comprised of 40% FTSE World UK Index and 60% FTSE World ex UK Index. Murray International Trust PLC was formed on December 18, 1907 and is domiciled in the United Kingdom.

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JPMorgan Chase & Co. is a financial holding company. It provides financial and investment banking services. The firm offers a range of investment banking products and services in all capital markets, including advising on corporate strategy and structure, capital raising in equity and debt markets, risk management, market making in cash securities and derivative instruments, and brokerage and research. It operates through the following segments: Consumer and Community Banking, Corporate and Investment Bank, Commercial Banking, and Asset and Wealth Management. The Consumer and Community Banking segment serves consumers and businesses through personal service at bank branches and through automated teller machine, online, mobile, and telephone banking. The Corporate and Investment Bank segment offers a suite of investment banking, market-making, prime brokerage, and treasury and securities products and services to a global client base of corporations, investors, financial institutions, government and municipal entities. The Commercial Banking segment delivers services to U.S. and its multinational clients, including corporations, municipalities, financial institutions, and non profit

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Pueblo to be home to 35-unit supportive housing complex

A 35-unit permanent supportive housing complex called The Right Place is open in Belmont, providing housing and resources for those in need.
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The following companies are subsidiares of Occidental Petroleum: 1PointFive Inc., 1PointFive P1 LLC, APC Aviation Inc., APC International Holdings LLC, APC Midstream Holdings LLC, APC Venezuela Srl, ARCO Long Beach, Altura Energy, Amarok Gathering LLC, Anadarko 20-25 Company, Anadarko 20-36 Company, Anadarko 20-47 Company, Anadarko 20-48 Company, Anadarko 20-49 Company, Anadarko Algeria Block 403 c/e Company, Anadarko Algeria Block 406B Company, Anadarko Algeria Company LLC, Anadarko Algeria Oil & Gas Company, Anadarko Brazil Investment I LLC, Anadarko Brazil Investment II LLC, Anadarko Canada E&P Limited, Anadarko China Holdings 2 Company, Anadarko Colombia Company, Anadarko Consolidated Holdings LLC, Anadarko Cote d'Ivoire Block 103 Company, Anadarko Cote d'Ivoire Company, Anadarko DBMOS Operator LLC, Anadarko Development Company, Anadarko Development Holding Limited, Anadarko E&P Onshore LLC, Anadarko Egypt Holdings Company, Anadarko Energy Holding Limited, Anadarko Energy Services Company, Anadarko Exploracao e Producao de Petroleo e Gas Natural Ltda., Anadarko Finance Company, Anadarko Gabon Company, Anadarko Ghana Mahogany-1 Company, Anadarko Global Energy S.a.r.l, Anadarko Global Funding 1 Company, Anadarko Global Funding II Ltd., Anadarko Guyana Company, Anadarko Holding Company, Anadarko International Development S.a.r.l, Anadarko International Energy Company, Anadarko International O&G Company, Anadarko International Trading Corporation, Anadarko Jordan Company, Anadarko Kenya Company, Anadarko LMM S.a.r.l, Anadarko Land Corp., Anadarko Mexico B.V., Anadarko Mexico S.a.r.l, Anadarko Midkiff/Chaney Dell BR Corp., Anadarko Midkiff/Chaney Dell LLC, Anadarko Natural Gas Company LLC, Anadarko New Zealand Company, Anadarko OGC Company, Anadarko Offshore Holding Company LLC, Anadarko Offshore Well Containment Company LLC, Anadarko Oil & Gas 5 LLC, Anadarko Peru B.V., Anadarko Petroleum, Anadarko Petroleum Corporation, Anadarko Realty LLC, Anadarko Rockies LLC, Anadarko Royalty Holdings Company, Anadarko UK Corporate Limited, Anadarko US Offshore LLC, Anadarko USH1 Corporation, Anadarko Venezuela Company, Anadarko Venezuela LLC, Anadarko Venezuela Srl, Anadarko WCTP Company, Anadarko West Texas BR Corp., Anadarko West Texas LLC, Anadarko Worldwide Holdings C.V., Atlantic Rim Mexico S. de R.L. de C.V., Aventine LLC, Baseball Merger Sub 2 Inc., Bear Branch Exploration LLC, Big Island Trona Company, Bitter Creek Coal Company, Bravo Pipeline Company, Cain Chemical, Cain Chemical Inc., Carbon Finance Labs LLC, Concord Petroleum Corporation, Conn Creek Shale Company, D.S. Ventures LLC, DMM Financial LLC, Deerwood Exploration LLC, Downtown Plaza II, Elk Hills Field, FLAG Development LLC, FP Westport Commodities Limited, FP Westport GmbH, FP Westport LLC, FP Westport Limited, FP Westport Services LLC, FP Westport Trading LLC, Fosters Mill Exploration LLC, Glenn Springs Holdings Inc., Globrep Representaciones S.A., Grand Bassa Tankers Inc., Grupo OxyChem de Mexico S.A. de C.V., Headwater II LLC, Houndstooth Resources LLC, INDSPEC Chemical B.V., INDSPEC Chemical Corporation, INDSPEC Chemical Corporation, INDSPEC Chemical Export Sales LLC, INDSPEC Holding Corporation, Ingleside Cogeneration GP LLC, Ingleside Cogeneration Limited Partnership, Interore Trading Ltd., Joslyn Partnership, KERR-McGEE TT E&P LTD., KM BM-C-Seven Ltd., KM International Insurance Ltd., Kerr-McGee Corporation, Kerr-McGee Natural Gas Company Inc., Kerr-McGee Oil & Gas Onshore LP, Kerr-McGee Shared Services Company LLC, Kerr-McGee Stored Power Corporation, Kerr-McGee U.K. Energy Corporation, Kerr-McGee Worldwide Corporation, Kerr-McGee do Brasil Ltda., Kerr-McGee of Canada Northwest Ltd., Laguna Petroleum Corp., Laguna Petroleum LLC, Liwa Oil & Gas Ltd., MC2 Technologies LLC, Mariana Properties Inc., Marico Exploration Inc., Miller Springs Remediation Management Inc., Moncrief Minerals Partnership L.P., NGL Ventures LLC, Natural Gas Odorizing Inc., New OPL LLC, OEVC Energy LLC, OEVC Midstream Projects LLC, OIH LLC, OLCV CE Holdings ULC, OLCV CE US Holdings Inc., OLCV Net Power LLC, OLCV Services LLC, OOG Partner LLC, OOOI Chem Holdings LLC, OOOI Chem Sub LLC, OOOI Chemical International LLC, OOOI Chile Holder LLC, OOOI Ecuador Management LLC, OOOI Oil and Gas Sub LLC, OOOI South America Management LLC, OPM GP Inc., OPM Holdco LLC, OTCF LLC, OTH LLC, OXY CV Pipeline LLC, OXY Campus LLC, OXY Inc., OXY LPG LLC, OXY Libya E&P Area 103 BR4 B.V., OXY Libya E&P Area 35 Ltd., OXY Libya E&P Concession 103 Ltd., OXY Libya E&P EPSA 102 B.V., OXY Libya E&P EPSA 1981 Ltd., OXY Libya E&P EPSA 1985 Ltd., OXY Libya E&P NC 143 144 145 150 B.V., OXY Libya Exploration SPC, OXY Libya LLC, OXY Little Knife LLC, OXY Mexico Holdings I LLC, OXY Mexico Holdings II LLC, OXY Middle East Holdings Ltd., OXY Oil Partners Inc., OXY PBLP Manager LLC, OXY Support Services LLC, OXY Tulsa Inc., OXY USA Inc., OXY USA WTP LP, OXY VPP Investments LLC, OXY West LLC, OXY of Saudi Arabia Ltd., OXYCHEM (CANADA) INC., OXYMAR, Oakwood Exploration LLC, Occidental (Bermuda) Ltd., Occidental (East Shabwa) LLC, Occidental Advance Sale Finance Inc., Occidental Al Hosn LLC, Occidental Angola Holdings Ltd., Occidental CIS Services Inc., Occidental Canada Holdings Ltd., Occidental Chemical Asia Limited, Occidental Chemical Belgium B.V.B.A., Occidental Chemical Chile Limitada, Occidental Chemical Corporation, Occidental Chemical Export Sales LLC, Occidental Chemical Far East Limited, Occidental Chemical Holding Corporation, Occidental Chemical International LLC, Occidental Chemical Investment (Canada) 1 Inc., Occidental Chemical Receivables LLC, Occidental Chemical de Mexico S.A. de C.V., Occidental Chile Investments LLC, Occidental Chile Minority Holder LLC, Occidental Colombia (Series G) Ltd., Occidental Colombia (Series J) Ltd., Occidental Colombia (Series K) Ltd., Occidental Colombia (Series L) Ltd., Occidental Colombia (Series M) Ltd., Occidental Colombia (Series N) Ltd., Occidental Colombia (Series O) Ltd., Occidental Crude Sales Inc. (Canada), Occidental Crude Sales Inc. (International), Occidental Dolphin Holdings Ltd., Occidental Energy Marketing Inc., Occidental Energy Ventures LLC, Occidental Exploradora del Peru Ltd., Occidental Exploration and Production Company, Occidental Hafar LLC, Occidental International (Libya) Inc., Occidental International Corporation, Occidental International Exploration and Production Company, Occidental International Holdings Ltd., Occidental International Oil and Gas Ltd., Occidental International Services Inc., Occidental Joslyn GP 2 Co., Occidental LNG (Malaysia) Ltd., Occidental Latin America Holdings LLC, Occidental Libya Oil & Gas B.V., Occidental MENA Manager Ltd., Occidental Middle East Development Company, Occidental Midland Basin LLC, Occidental Mukhaizna LLC, Occidental Oil Asia Pte. Ltd., Occidental Oil Shale Inc., Occidental Oil and Gas (Oman) Ltd., Occidental Oil and Gas Corporation, Occidental Oil and Gas International Inc., Occidental Oil and Gas International LLC, Occidental Oil and Gas Pakistan LLC, Occidental Oil and Gas of Peru LLC, Occidental Oman (Block 27) Holdings Ltd., Occidental Oman Block 51 Holding Ltd., Occidental Oman Block 51 LLC, Occidental Oman Block 65 Holding Ltd., Occidental Oman Block 65 LLC, Occidental Oman Block 72 Holding Ltd., Occidental Oman Block 72 LLC, Occidental Oman Gas Company LLC, Occidental Oman Gas Holdings Ltd., Occidental Oman North Holdings Ltd., Occidental Oriente Exploration and Production Ltd., Occidental Overseas Holdings B.V., Occidental PVC LLC, Occidental Peninsula II Inc., Occidental Peninsula LLC, Occidental Permian Ltd., Occidental Permian Manager LLC, Occidental Permian Services Inc., Occidental Peruana Inc., Occidental Petrolera del Peru (Block 101) Inc., Occidental Petrolera del Peru (Block 103) Inc., Occidental Petroleum (Pakistan) Inc., Occidental Petroleum Corporation, Occidental Petroleum Corporation Political Action Committee, Occidental Petroleum de Venezuela S.A., Occidental Petroleum of Nigeria, Occidental Petroleum of Oman Ltd., Occidental Petroleum of Qatar Ltd., Occidental Power Marketing L.P., Occidental Power Services Inc., Occidental Qatar Energy Company LLC, Occidental Red Sea Development LLC, Occidental Research Corporation, Occidental Resource Recovery Systems Inc., Occidental Resources Company, Occidental Shah Gas Holdings Ltd., Occidental South America Finance LLC, Occidental Specialty Marketing Inc., Occidental Tower Corporation, Occidental Transportation Holding Corporation, Occidental West Texas Overthrust Inc., Occidental Yemen Ltd., Occidental Yemen Sabatain Inc., Occidental del Ecuador Inc., Occidental of Abu Dhabi (Bab) Ltd., Occidental of Abu Dhabi (Shah) Ltd., Occidental of Abu Dhabi Holdings Ltd., Occidental of Abu Dhabi LLC, Occidental of Abu Dhabi Ltd., Occidental of Bahrain Ltd., Occidental of Bangladesh Inc., Occidental of Colombia (Chipiron) Inc., Occidental of Colombia (Cosecha) Inc., Occidental of Colombia (Medina) Inc., Occidental of Colombia (Putumayo) Ltd., Occidental of Colombia (Teca) Ltd., Occidental of Colombia PUT-36 LLC, Occidental of Dubai Inc., Occidental of Iraq Holdings Ltd., Occidental of Iraq LLC, Occidental of Oman Inc., Occidental of Russia Ltd., Occidental of South Africa (Offshore) Inc., Occidental of Yemen (Block 75) LLC, Oceanic Marine Transport Ltd., Opcal Insurance Inc., Oryx Crude Trading & Transportation Inc., Oxy BridgeTex Limited Partnership, Oxy C & I Bulk Sales LLC, Oxy Canada Sales Inc., Oxy Carbon Solutions LLC, Oxy Carbon Storage LLC, Oxy Climate Ventures Inc., Oxy Cogeneration Holding Company LLC, Oxy Colombia Holdings LLC, Oxy Colombia TopCo Ltd., Oxy Delaware Basin LLC, Oxy Delaware Basin Plant LLC, Oxy Dolphin E&P LLC, Oxy Dolphin Pipeline LLC, Oxy Energy Canada Inc., Oxy Energy Services LLC, Oxy Expatriate Services Inc., Oxy FFT Holdings Inc., Oxy Holding Company (Pipeline) Inc., Oxy International Ventures Ltd., Oxy LPG Terminal LLC, Oxy Levelland Pipeline Company LLC, Oxy Levelland Terminal Company LLC, Oxy Low Carbon Ventures LLC, Oxy Midstream Strategic Development LLC, Oxy Oleoducto SOP LLC, Oxy Overseas Services Ltd., Oxy Permian Gathering LLC, Oxy Permian Plaza LLC, Oxy Petroleum de Mexico S. de R.L. de C.V., Oxy Renewable Energy LLC, Oxy Salt Creek Pipeline LLC, Oxy TL LLC, Oxy Taft Hub LLC, Oxy Technology Ventures Inc., Oxy Transport I Company LLC, Oxy Vinyls Canada Co., Oxy Vinyls Export Sales LLC, Oxy Vinyls LP, Oxy Westwood Corporation, Oxy Y-1 Company, OxyChem Ingleside Ethylene Holdings Inc., OxyChem do Brasil Ltda., OxyChile Investments LLC, Oxychem Shipping Ltd., Permian Basin JV Tax Matters Member LLC, Permian Basin Limited Partnership, Permian VPP Holder LP, Permian VPP Manager LLC, Phibro, Placid Oil LLC, Ramlat Oxy Ltd., Rio de Viento Inc., Rodeo Midland Basin LLC, San Patricio Pipeline LLC, Scanports Shipping LLC, SequestCo LLC, Stetson Exploration LLC, Sun Offshore Gathering Company, Swiflite Aircraft Corporation, Transok Properties LLC, Troy Potter Inc., Turavent Oil GmbH [in liquidation], Tuscaloosa Holdings Inc., UP Petroleo III Ltd., Upland Industries Corporation, Venezuela US SRL, Vintage Gas Inc., Vintage Petroleum, Vintage Petroleum Argentina Ltd., Vintage Petroleum Boliviana Ltd., Vintage Petroleum International Finance B.V., Vintage Petroleum International Holdings LLC, Vintage Petroleum International LLC, Vintage Petroleum International Ventures Inc., Vintage Petroleum Italy Inc., Vintage Petroleum South America Holdings Inc., Vintage Petroleum South America LLC, Vintage Petroleum Turkey Inc., WGR Asset Holding Company LLC, WGR Canada Inc., Wardner Ranch Inc., Western Gas Resources Inc., Western Gas Resources-Westana Inc., Western Midstream Holdings LLC, Woodlands International Insurance Ltd., and YT Ranch LLC.
First BanCorp (Puerto Rico) is a holding company, which engages in the provision of personal, commercial, and corporate banking services through its subsidiaries. It operates through the following segments: Commercial and Corporate Banking, Consumer (Retail) Banking, Mortgage Banking, Treasury and Investments, United States Operations, and Virgin Islands Operations. The Commercial and Corporate Banking segment consists of the company's lending and other services for large customers represented by specialized and middle-market clients and the public sector. The Consumer (Retail) Banking segment includes consumer lending and deposit-taking activities conducted mainly through FirstBank's branch network in Puerto Rico. The Mortgage Banking segment focuses on the origination, sale, and servicing of a variety of residential mortgage loan products and related hedging activities. The Treasury and Investments segment deals with treasury and investment management functions. The United States Operations segment represents all banking activities conducted by FirstBank on the United States mainland. The Virgin Islands Operations segment includes all banking activities conducted by FirstBank in

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Chinas elderly population currently amounts to over 240 million. Further, 85 million people in the country live with disabilities and 20 million are users of temporary disability aids.

This growing and substantial population of senior citizens and persons with disabilities has resulted in an increasing demand for rehabilitation products and services.

It makes the disability aids industry one among Chinas fastest growing sectors, catering to potentially the largest domestic market in the world.

With Chinas new plan to facilitate the industrys development to service the growing internal demand, we look at how foreign firms can benefit from investing in the countrys disability aids industry.

Profiling Chinas emerging disability aids industry

Disability aids refer to products and services that improve, compensate, and replace certain human functions. It includes a wide range of products such as wheelchairs, hearing aids, and assistive devices and services such as rehabilitation and elderly care.

China started paying attention to the countrys needs for disability aids in the 1990s, when the government included the industry in its national five-year plan for the first time. Five-year plans charter the major economic goals that will be pursued by the government within that period.

In its 11th five year plan, for the period 2006 to 2010, China aimed to extend access to disability aids to its rural regions where 70 percent of its people with disability live. Falling within this period was the 2008 Beijing Olympics, which accelerated the use and development of disability aids in China. Official statistics show that the number of accessibility-related projects carried out in Beijing reached 14,000 between 2001 and 2008.

The countrys disability aids industry was valued at 430 billion yuan (US$63 billion) in 2015, including 330 billion yuan (US$48 billion) in goods and 100 billion yuan (US$15 billion) in services. According to the deputy director from the Ministry of Civil Affairs, the industrys annual growth rate averaged at 15 percent in recent years. The State Council aims for its market value to surpass 700 billion yuan (US$102 billion) by 2020.

Private enterprises have played a more significant role in this industry. There are eight disability aids companies listed on the National Equities Exchange and Quotation (NEEQ). However, the China Disabled Persons Federation (CDPF), which is a public organization, also plays an important role in providing disability aids to people with special needs in the country.

Chinas campaign for a barrier-free environment

In August 2012, China issued new regulations to encourage the improvement of accessibility and construct a barrier-free environment in China. The regulations required all newly-built roads and buildings to have barrier-free facilities constructed. The Ministry of Transport also issued a guideline to build barrier-free facilities at all public transits by 2020.

In the years between 2012 and 2018, China renovated around 2.1 million houses to meet the new regulations, though 3.3 million houses still await renovation. However, many of the newly built barrier-free facilities have suffered from quality issues, either being poorly designed or defective. For instance, some sidewalks in Chinese cities are full of obstructions and cannot be easily used by those who are visually challenged. Some barrier-free facilities in Beijings hospital, shopping malls, and subway stations simply do not work.

While there is little involvement of foreign companies in building barrier-free facilities in China, technological innovations provides such scope for participation. For example, the development of artificial intelligence (AI)-based technology in the barrier-free field offers an ideal platform for multinational firms (MNCs) to enter the Chinese market.

Recently, the Chinese technology giant Tencent introduced AI functionalities on its online platform WeChat  picture-to-speech, speech synthesis, and OCR recognition. The Chinese search engine Baidu is releasing an algorithm that can help pathologists identify breast cancer into the open source domain while Alibaba Health has cooperated with three Chinese hospitals to launch an AI medical laboratory to facilitate medical resources distribution.

National policy to promote manufacturing, development of disability aids

In October 2016, Chinas State Council issued Several Opinions of the State Council on Accelerating the Development of the Assistive Device Industry to promote the development of the disability aids industry. The plan lists out goals, development priorities, and policy support for the industry. It encourages more cooperation between local and foreign enterprises in trade, investment, technology exchange, and the capacity-utilization of the disability aids industry.

Under the policy, China invites established foreign companies to set up research and development (R&D) centers in the disability aids domain  together with the Chinese businesses. For example, the US automaker Ford has entered into a joint venture with Zotye, a new Chinese firm, with a view to manufacturing self-driving cars; they have already established a new manufacturing plant. Meanwhile, German automaker Volkswagen has an agreement with Didi  their interest lies in autonomous vehicles, robo-taxi services, and Chinas ride-sharing market.

In December 2017, the Ministry of Civil Affairs announced it will establish pilot zones for the disability aids industry in 12 municipalities: Shenzhen, Shijiazhuang, Jiaxing, and Lanzhou. These pilot zones will benefit from specialization and increased efficiency. The respective municipal governments will provide infrastructure support, such as the construction of industrial parks as well as financial and fiscal incentives to attract foreign companies.

In addition, Chinas Ministry of Commerce encourages the disability aids industry to hold more expos and fairs. Such events could open up opportunities for foreign enterprises in the industrial segment and facilitate the exchange of ideas and/or development of new businesses with Chinese manufacturers. Responding to the government directive, the Care and Rehabilitation Expo China, which has been held for 11 consecutive years, will be open to foreign exhibitors for the first time in 2018.

Absence of trained local workforce

The disability aids industry is under-supplied by qualified professionals in China due to its slow development. Few Chinese universities offer programs and courses in rehabilitation to students, while the majority of Chinese hospitals have no rehabilitation center.

As a result, China trains only 15 million rehabilitation workers each year, which is four times less than the market demand. China needs an additional four million rehabilitation doctors and 11 million geriatric nurses to fulfill its growing demand for rehabilitative care.

Low purchasing power

Disability and poverty are interconnected in China, creating a vicious circle. Around 40 percent of Chinas poor population comprise of people with disabilities. The absence of easy to navigate barrier-free environment or inaccessible assistive technology limits their work choices, offering little chance to move out of poverty.

Disability aids are unaffordable for many Chinese with special needs. In fact, most high-tech assistive devices are imported as China does not locally manufacture them, resulting in higher costs. For instance, an imported prosthesis costs 400,000 yuan (US$59,000), which is too expensive for most Chinese families.

Chinas medical insurance coverage also includes only few assistive devices and only those that are produced by local firms. While there are thousands of assistive devices in the world, Chinas medical insurance covers only around 20 types of these products.

Prospects and challenges for foreign investors

The plan issued by the State Council prioritizes investment by domestic companies. It pushes for local businesses to develop the capability to produce higher-end products in Chinas disability aids industry.

At present, Chinas disability aids companies primarily focus on the manufacture and sale of products. The new plan encourages these companies to build capabilities in supplying the whole production chain in the long term.

To materialize these goals, the government encourages foreign companies to set up R&D centers in China, which allow domestic firms to learn from foreign players.

In October 2016, Chinas Central Government and State Council issued the Outline of the Healthy China 2030 Plan, which advised local businesses in the industry to catch up with international standards by 2030. If the plans outline is realized, China will prioritize the development of its locals industry and may undermine foreign companies attempts to compete for the countrys market share. As both the plan and outline emphasize independent innovation of disability aids, foreign companies should be concerned about their intellectual property protection when entering this segment.

As things stand, there have been no significant legal claims concerning IP infringement in the disability aids industry in China. The Global Times argues that foreign companies usually keep secure their knowledge about advanced technologies when forming joint ventures with Chinese firms. On the other hand, criticisms abound that China aims to gain access to cutting edge medical innovation by any means to meet its Made in China 2025 targets.

The Made in China 2025 plan was unveiled as a grand strategy in 2015 to lift the countrys technology industries up the global value chain, replace imports with local manufactures, and rival Western tech giants. It has since become a geopolitically contested issue with the US wary of Chinas ambitions  an argument put forth to justify the trade war scenario.

Overall, the countrys disability aids industry will grow fast due to Chinas demographic situation and governmental supports.

Although the new plan emphasizes domestic participation and innovation, foreign companies can benefit from its ambitious scope in the short term, by offering higher-end products and services in disability aids. That said, foreign companies should make their IP protection a foremost priority when entering this segment, to avoid misappropriation or IP infringement in the long-term.
SinglePoint, Inc. is a fully reporting company with core holdings in solar energy services and industrial hemp based consumer Products. The firm through its subsidiary operates national solar sales brokerage model in 34 states. It designed 1606 Original Hemp for manufacturing and marketing smokable industrial hemp consumer products for sale through traditional retail channels and online. It has a portfolio of non-core focused business that are searching for strategic partnerships or other alternative solutions. The company was founded by Gregory P. Lambrecht on October 15, 2007 and is headquartered in Phoenix, AZ.

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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 The Procter & Gamble: "Procter & Gamble Services" LLC, "Procter & Gamble" LLC, Agile Pursuits, Agile Pursuits Franchising, Arbora, Arbora & Ausonia, Arborinvest, Billie, Braun (Shanghai) Co., Braun GmbH, Braun-Gillette Immobilien GmbH & Co. KG, Celtic Insurance Company, Compania Procter & Gamble Mexico, Compania Quimica S.A., Corporativo Procter & Gamble, Cosmetic Products Pty. Ltd., Detergent Products B.V., Detergent Products SARL, Detergenti S.A., Eurocos Cosmetic GmbH, FPG Oleochemicals Sdn. Bhd., Fameccanica Data S.p.A., Fameccanica Industria e Comercio Do Brasil LTDA., Fameccanica Machinery (Shanghai) Co., Fater S.p.A., Fountain Square Music Publishing Co., Gillette (China) Ltd., Gillette (Shanghai) Ltd., Gillette Aesop Ltd., Gillette Australia Pty. Ltd., Gillette Canada Holdings, Gillette Commercial Operations North America, Gillette Diversified Operations Pvt. Ltd., Gillette Egypt S.A.E., Gillette Group UK Ltd, Gillette Gruppe Deutschland GmbH & Co. oHG, Gillette Holding Company LLC, Gillette Holding GmbH, Gillette India Limited, Gillette Industries Ltd., Gillette International B.V., Gillette Latin America Holding B.V., Gillette Management LLC, Gillette Nova Scotia Company, Gillette Pakistan Limited, Gillette Poland International Sp. z.o.o., Gillette Poland S.A., Gillette U.K. Limited, Gillette del Uruguay, Giorgio Beverly Hills Inc., Hyginett KFT, Industries Marocaines Modernes SA, LLC "Procter & Gamble Novomoskovsk", LLL "Procter & Gamble Distributorskaya Compania", Laboratorios Vicks, Liberty Street Music Publishing Company, Limited Liability Company 'Procter & Gamble Trading Ukraine', Limited Liability Company with foreign investments Procter & and Gamble Ukraine, MDVIP, MERCK KGAA NPV, Marcvenca Inversiones, Modern Industries Company - Dammam, Modern Products Company - Jeddah, New Chapter, New Chapter Canada Inc., Olay LLC, Oral-B Laboratories, P&G Distribution Morocco SAS, P&G Hair Care Holding, P&G Industrial Peru S.R.L., P&G Innovation Godo Kaisha, P&G Israel M.D.O. Ltd., P&G K.K., P&G Northeast Asia Pte. Ltd., P&G Prestige Godo Kaisha, P&G Prestige Service GmbH, P&G South African Trading (Pty.) Ltd., PGT Health Care (Zhejiang) Limited, PGT Healthcare LLP, PPI ZAO, PT Procter & Gamble Home Products Indonesia, PT Procter & Gamble Operations Indonesia, Phase II Holdings Corporation, Procter & Gamble (Chengdu) Ltd., Procter & Gamble (China) Ltd., Procter & Gamble (China) Sales Co. Ltd., Procter & Gamble (East Africa) Limited, Procter & Gamble (Egypt) Manufacturing Company, Procter & Gamble (Enterprise Fund) Limited, Procter & Gamble (Guangzhou) Consumer Products Co. Ltd., Procter & Gamble (Guangzhou) Enterprise Management Service Company Limited, Procter & Gamble (Guangzhou) Ltd., Procter & Gamble (Health & Beauty Care) Limited, Procter & Gamble (Jiangsu) Ltd. China, Procter & Gamble (L&CP) Limited, Procter & Gamble (Malaysia) Sdn Bhd, Procter & Gamble (Manufacturing) Ireland Limited, Procter & Gamble (Shanghai) International Trade Company Ltd., Procter & Gamble (Singapore) Pte. Ltd., Procter & Gamble Acquisition GmbH, Procter & Gamble Administration GmbH, Procter & Gamble Algeria EURL, Procter & Gamble Amazon Holding B.V., Procter & Gamble Amiens S.A.S., Procter & Gamble Argentina SRL, Procter & Gamble Asia Pte. Ltd., Procter & Gamble Australia Proprietary Limited, Procter & Gamble Azerbaijan Services LLC, Procter & Gamble Bangladesh Private Ltd., Procter & Gamble Blois S.A.S., Procter & Gamble Brazil Holdings B.V., Procter & Gamble Bulgaria EOOD, Procter & Gamble Business Services Canada Company, Procter & Gamble Canada Holding B.V., Procter & Gamble Chile , Procter & Gamble Chile Limitada, Procter & Gamble Colombia Ltda., Procter & Gamble Commercial LLC, Procter & Gamble Commercial de Cuba S.A., Procter & Gamble Czech Republic s.r.o., Procter & Gamble DS Polska Sp. z o.o., Procter & Gamble Danmark ApS, Procter & Gamble Detergent (Beijing) Ltd., Procter & Gamble Deuttschland GmbH, Procter & Gamble Distributing (Philippines) Inc., Procter & Gamble Distributing New Zealand Limited, Procter & Gamble Distribution Company (Europe) BVBA, Procter & Gamble Distribution S.R.L., Procter & Gamble Eastern Europe, Procter & Gamble Ecuador Cia. Ltda., Procter & Gamble Egypt, Procter & Gamble Egypt Distribution, Procter & Gamble Egypt Holding, Procter & Gamble Egypt Supplies, Procter & Gamble Energy Company LLC, Procter & Gamble Espana, Procter & Gamble Europe SA, Procter & Gamble Export Operations SARL, Procter & Gamble Exportadora e Importadora Ltda., Procter & Gamble Exports, Procter & Gamble Fabricacao e Comercio Ltda., Procter & Gamble Far East, Procter & Gamble Finance (U.K.) Ltd., Procter & Gamble Finance Holding Ltd., Procter & Gamble Finance Management S.a.r.l., Procter & Gamble Financial Investments LLP, Procter & Gamble Financial Services Ltd., Procter & Gamble Financial Services S.a.r.l., Procter & Gamble Finland OY, Procter & Gamble France S.A.S., Procter & Gamble Germany GmbH, Procter & Gamble Germany GmbH & Co. Operations oHG, Procter & Gamble GmbH, Procter & Gamble Grundstucks-und Vermogensverwaltungs GmbH & Co. KG, Procter & Gamble Gulf FZE, Procter & Gamble Hair Care, Procter & Gamble Hellas Ltd., Procter & Gamble Holding (Thailand) Limited, Procter & Gamble Holding France S.A.S., Procter & Gamble Holding GmbH, Procter & Gamble Holding S.r.l., Procter & Gamble Holdings (UK) Ltd., Procter & Gamble Home Products Private Limited, Procter & Gamble Hong Kong Limited, Procter & Gamble Hungary Wholesale Trading Partnership (KKT), Procter & Gamble Hygiene & Health Care Limited, Procter & Gamble Inc., Procter & Gamble India Holdings, Procter & Gamble Indochina Limited Company, Procter & Gamble Industrial - 2012 C.A., Procter & Gamble Industrial Colombia Ltda., Procter & Gamble Industrial S.C.A., Procter & Gamble Industrial e Comercial Ltda., Procter & Gamble Interamericas de Costa Rica, Procter & Gamble Interamericas de Guatemala, Procter & Gamble Interamericas de Panama, Procter & Gamble International Operations Pte. Ltd., Procter & Gamble International Operations SA, Procter & Gamble International Operations SA-ROHQ, Procter & Gamble International S.a.r.l., Procter & Gamble Investment Company (UK) Ltd., Procter & Gamble Investment GmbH, Procter & Gamble Italia, Procter & Gamble Japan K.K., Procter & Gamble Kazakhstan Distribution LLP, Procter & Gamble Kazakhstan LLP, Procter & Gamble Korea, Procter & Gamble Korea S&D Co., Procter & Gamble Lanka Private Ltd. Sri Lanka, Procter & Gamble Leasing LLC, Procter & Gamble Levant S.A.L., Procter & Gamble Limited, Procter & Gamble Manufacturing (Thailand) Limited, Procter & Gamble Manufacturing (Tianjin) Co. Ltd., Procter & Gamble Manufacturing Belgium N.V., Procter & Gamble Manufacturing Berlin GmbH, Procter & Gamble Manufacturing GmbH, Procter & Gamble Manufacturing Mexico S. de R.L. de C.V., Procter & Gamble Manufacturing SA (Pty) Ltd, Procter & Gamble Marketing Romania SRL, Procter & Gamble Marketing and Services doo, Procter & Gamble Maroc SA, Procter & Gamble Mataro, Procter & Gamble Mexico Holding B.V., Procter & Gamble Mexico Inc., Procter & Gamble Middle East FZE, Procter & Gamble Nederland B.V., Procter & Gamble Netherlands Investments B.V., Procter & Gamble Netherlands Services B.V., Procter & Gamble Nigeria Limited, Procter & Gamble Nordic, Procter & Gamble Norge AS, Procter & Gamble Operations Polska Sp. z o.o., Procter & Gamble Overseas India B.V., Procter & Gamble Overseas Ltd., Procter & Gamble Pakistan (Private) Limited, Procter & Gamble Partnership LLP, Procter & Gamble Peru S.R.L., Procter & Gamble Pharmaceuticals France SAS, Procter & Gamble Philippines, Procter & Gamble Polska Sp. z o.o, Procter & Gamble Portugal - Produtos De Consumo, Procter & Gamble Product Supply (U.K.) Limited U.K., Procter & Gamble Production GmbH, Procter & Gamble Productions, Procter & Gamble Productos de Consumo, Procter & Gamble RHD, Procter & Gamble RSC Regional Service Company Ltd., Procter & Gamble Retail Services BVBA, Procter & Gamble S.r.l., Procter & Gamble SA (Pty) Ltd, Procter & Gamble Satis ve Dagitim Ltd. Sti., Procter & Gamble Seine S.A.S., Procter & Gamble Service GmbH, Procter & Gamble Services (Switzerland) SA, Procter & Gamble Services Company N.V., Procter & Gamble Services Ltd., Procter & Gamble Share Incentive Plan Trustee Ltd., Procter & Gamble South America Holding B.V., Procter & Gamble Spol. s.r.o. (Ltd.), Procter & Gamble Sports and Social Club Ltd., Procter & Gamble Sverige AB, Procter & Gamble Switzerland SARL, Procter & Gamble Taiwan Limited, Procter & Gamble Taiwan Sales Company Limited, Procter & Gamble Technical Centres Limited, Procter & Gamble Technology (Beijing) Co., Procter & Gamble Trading (Thailand) Limited, Procter & Gamble Tuketim Mallari Sanayii A.S., Procter & Gamble UK, Procter & Gamble UK Group Holdings Ltd, Procter & Gamble UK Parent Company Ltd., Procter & Gamble Universal Holding B.V., Procter & Gamble Verwaltungs GmbH, Procter & Gamble Vietnam, Procter & Gamble d.o.o. za trgovinu, Procter & Gamble de Venezuela S.C.A., Procter & Gamble de Venezuela S.R.L., Procter & Gamble do Brasil S/A, Procter & Gamble do Brazil, Procter & Gamble do Nordeste S/A, Procter & Gamble-Rakona s.r.o., Progam Realty & Development Corporation, Redmond Products, Richardson-Vicks Real Estate Inc., Richardson-Vicks do Brasil Quimica e Farmaceutica Ltda, Riverfront Music Publishing Co., Rosemount LLC, SPD Development Company Limited, SPD Swiss Precision Diagnostics GmbH, Scannon S.A.S., Series Acquisition B.V., Shulton, Surfac S.R.L., Sycamore Productions, TAOS - FL, TAOS Retail, Tambrands Inc., Temple Trees Impex & Investment Private Limited, The Art of Shaving - FL, The Dover Wipes Company, The Gillette Company, The Gillette Company LLC, The Gillette co., The Procter & Gamble Distributing LLC, The Procter & Gamble GBS Company, The Procter & Gamble Global Finance Company, The Procter & Gamble Manufacturing Company, The Procter & Gamble Paper Products Company, The Procter & Gamble U.S. Business Services Company, This is L., US CD LLC, Vidal Sassoon (Shanghai) Academy, Vidal Sassoon Co., WEBA Betriebsrenten-Verwaltungsgesellschaft mbH, Walker & Company Brands, and iMFLUX Inc..
Russia will consider establishing a consul in the city of Harbin, in Northeast China, according to Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zhakarova. The decision had already been made in principle as part of an intergovernmental agreement with China signed on September 3, 2015.

The announcement, however, comes after successful Sino-Russian trade and supply talks at the recently held Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok, which was attended by both Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Zhakharova elaborated that the decision to proceed with a consul at Harbin would be based upon the current state and prospects of developing political, economic, humanitarian and other bilateral ties, as well as the intensity of tourist flow to certain regions of China.

Harbin is the capital city of Chinas northernmost province of Heilongjiang, which shares a long border with Russia running down the center of the Amur (Hei Long or Black Dragon) river. The city experienced a large influx of Russian emigres fleeing the 1917 revolution and retains a strong Russian flavor.

Harbin was also the main rail hub for goods coming from Europe and Moscow into China. In the 1920s, it was known as the Paris of the North and as Chinas most fashionable city, as the latest clothes and trends from Paris would arrive in Harbin first before heading south to Shanghai.

Harbin retains its rail hub status and possesses several large markets at which Russian-made goods and products are sold. The city also possesses a large number of Russian restaurants since the 1920s, including the Huamei on Harbins main thoroughfare, famous for its caviar and hotpot. St. Sophias Cathedral is a city center tourist attraction, while Harbins ice festival, held on the banks of the Songhua River, continues to be a main winter tourist attraction for visitors across Northeast Asia.

Chris Devonshire-Ellis of Dezan Shira & Associates Russian Desk says, Increasing Russian travel and trade in Northern China requires consular development support and Harbin is well known to Russians. Reconnecting the citys soul with its Russian cultural origins will be part of the consular function and we look forward to the consular service opening.
Manulife Financial Corporation, together with its subsidiaries, provides financial products and services in Asia, Canada, the United States, and internationally. The company operates through Wealth and Asset Management Businesses; Insurance and Annuity Products; And Corporate and Other segments. The Wealth and Asset Management Businesses segment provides mutual funds and exchange-traded funds, group retirement and savings products, and institutional asset management services through agents and brokers affiliated with the company, securities brokerage firms, and financial advisors pension plan consultants and banks. The Insurance and Annuity Products segment offers deposit and credit products; individual life, and individual and group long-term care insurance; and guaranteed and partially guaranteed annuity products through insurance agents, brokers, banks, financial planners, and direct marketing. The Corporate and Other segment is involved in property and casualty insurance and reinsurance businesses; and run-off reinsurance operations, including variable annuities, and accident and health. It also manages timberland and agricultural portfolios; and engages in insurance agency, portfolio and mutual fund management, mutual fund dealer, life and financial reinsurance, and fund management businesses. Additionally, the company holds and manages oil and gas properties; holds oil and gas royalties, and foreign bonds and equities; and provides investment management, counseling, advisory, and dealer services. Manulife Financial Corporation was incorporated in 1887 and is headquartered in Toronto, Canada.

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4.8 Community Rank

Outperform Votes Quinsam Capital has received 74 outperform votes. (Add your outperform vote.)

Underperform Votes Quinsam Capital has received 30 underperform votes. (Add your underperform vote.)

Community Sentiment Quinsam Capital has received 71.15% outperform votes from our community.

MarketBeat's community ratings are surveys of what our community members think about Quinsam Capital and other stocks. Vote Outperform if you believe QCA will outperform the S&P 500 over the long term. Vote Underperform if you believe QCA will underperform the S&P 500 over the long term. You may vote once every thirty days.

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The following companies are subsidiares of InterContinental Hotels Group: 2250 Blake Street Hotel LLC, 24th Street Operator Sub LLC, 36th Street IHG Sub LLC, 426 Main Ave LLC, 46 Nevins Street Associates LLC, Allegro Management LLC, Alpha Kimball Hotel LLC, American Commonwealth Assurance Co. Ltd., Asia Pacific Holdings Limited, BHMC Canada Inc., BHR Holdings B.V., BHR Luxembourg SARL, BHR Pacific Holdings Inc., BHTC Canada Inc., BOC Barclay Sub LLC, Barclay Operating Corp., Bristol Oakbrook Tenant Company, Cafe Biarritz, Cambridge Lodging LLC, Capital Lodging LLC, Compania Inter-Continental De Hoteles El Salvador SA, Crowne Plaza Amsterdam (Management) B.V., Crowne Plaza LLC, Cumberland Akers Hotel LLC, Dunwoody Operations Inc., EVEN Real Estate Holding LLC, Edinburgh IC Limited, General Innkeeping Acceptance Corporation, Guangzhou SC Hotels Services Ltd., H.I. (Ireland) Limited, H.I. Soaltee Management Company Ltd, HC International Holdings Inc., HH France Holdings SAS, HH Hotels (EMEA) B.V., HH Hotels (Romania) SRL, HI Sugarloaf LLC, HIM (Aruba) NV, Hale International Ltd., Hoft Properties LLC, Holiday Hospitality Franchising LLC, Holiday Inn Mexicana S.A. de C.V., Holiday Inns (China) Ltd, Holiday Inns (Chongqing) Inc., Holiday Inns (Courtalin) Holdings SAS, Holiday Inns (Courtalin) SAS, Holiday Inns (England) Ltd., Holiday Inns (Germany) LLC, Holiday Inns (Guangzhou) Inc., Holiday Inns (Jamaica) Inc., Holiday Inns (Malaysia) Ltd., Holiday Inns (Middle East) Ltd., Holiday Inns (Philippines) Inc., Holiday Inns (Saudi Arabia) Inc., Holiday Inns (South East Asia) Inc., Holiday Inns (Thailand) Ltd., Holiday Inns (UK) Inc., Holiday Inns Crowne Plaza (Hong Kong) Inc., Holiday Inns Holdings (Australia) Pty Ltd, Holiday Inns Inc., Holiday Inns Investment (Nepal) Ltd., Holiday Inns of America (UK) Ltd., Holiday Inns of Belgium N.V., Holiday Pacific Equity Corporation, Holiday Pacific LLC, Holiday Pacific Partners LP, Hotel Inter-Continental London Limited, Hotel InterContinental London (Holdings) Limited, Hoteles Y Turismo HIH SRL, IC Hotelbetriebsfuhrungs GmbH, IC Hotels Management (Portugal) Unipessoal Lda, IC International Hotels Limited Liability Company, IHC (Thailand) Limited, IHC Buckhead LLC, IHC Edinburgh (Holdings), IHC Hopkins (Holdings) Corp., IHC Hotel Limited, IHC Inter-Continental (Holdings) Corp., IHC London (Holdings), IHC M-H (Holdings) Corp., IHC May Fair (Holdings) Limited, IHC May Fair Hotel Limited, IHC Overseas (U.K.) Limited, IHC UK (Holdings) Limited, IHC United States (Holdings) Corp., IHC Willard (Holdings) Corp., IHG (Australasia) Limited, IHG (Marseille) SAS, IHG (Thailand) Limited, IHG ANA Hotels Group Japan LLC, IHG ANA Hotels Holdings Co. Ltd., IHG Bangkok Ltd, IHG Brasil Administracao de Hoteis e Servicos Ltda, IHG Commission Services SRL, IHG Community Development LLC, IHG Cyprus Limited, IHG ECS (Barbados) SRL, IHG Franchising Brasil Ltda, IHG Franchising DR Corporation, IHG Franchising LLC, IHG Hotels (New Zealand) Limited, IHG Hotels Limited, IHG Hotels Management (Australia) Pty Limited, IHG Hotels Nigeria Limited, IHG Hotels South Africa (Pty) Ltd, IHG International Partnership, IHG Istanbul Otel Yonetim Limited Sirketi, IHG Japan (Management) LLC, IHG Japan (Osaka) LLC, IHG Management (Maryland) LLC, IHG Management (Netherlands) B.V., IHG Management MD Barclay Sub LLC, IHG Management SL d.o.o, IHG Management d.o.o. Beograd, IHG Orchard Street Member LLC, IHG PS Nominees Limited, IHG Systems Pty Ltd, IHG Szalloda Budapest Szolgaltato Kft., IHG de Argentina SA, IND East Village SD Holdings LLC, Inter-Continental D.C. Operating Corp., Inter-Continental Florida Investment Corp., Inter-Continental Florida Partner Corp., Inter-Continental Hospitality Corporation, Inter-Continental Hoteleira Limitada, Inter-Continental Hotels (Montreal) Operating Corp., Inter-Continental Hotels (Montreal) Owning Corp., Inter-Continental Hotels (Singapore) Pte. Ltd., Inter-Continental Hotels Corporation, Inter-Continental Hotels Corporation de Venezuela C.A., Inter-Continental Hotels of San Francisco Inc., Inter-Continental IOHC (Mauritius) Limited, Inter-Continental Management (Australia) Pty Limited, InterContinental (Branston) 1 Limited, InterContinental (PB) 1, InterContinental (PB) 2, InterContinental (PB) 3 Limited, InterContinental Berlin Service Company GmbH, InterContinental Brasil Administracao de Hoteis Ltda, InterContinental Gestion Hotelera S.L., InterContinental Hotel Berlin GmbH, InterContinental Hotel Dusseldorf GmbH (Germany), InterContinental Hotels (Puerto Rico) Inc., InterContinental Hotels Group (Asia Pacific) Pte Ltd, InterContinental Hotels Group (Australia) Pty Limited, InterContinental Hotels Group (Canada) Inc., InterContinental Hotels Group (Espana) SA, InterContinental Hotels Group (Greater China) Limited, InterContinental Hotels Group (India) Pvt. Ltd, InterContinental Hotels Group (Japan) Inc., InterContinental Hotels Group (New Zealand) Limited, InterContinental Hotels Group (Shanghai) Ltd., InterContinental Hotels Group Customer Services Ltd., InterContinental Hotels Group Healthcare Trustee Limited, InterContinental Hotels Group Operating Corp., InterContinental Hotels Group Resources Inc., InterContinental Hotels Group Services Company, InterContinental Hotels Group do Brasil Limitada, InterContinental Hotels Italia S.r.L., InterContinental Hotels Limited, InterContinental Hotels Management GmbH, InterContinental Hotels Nevada Corporation, InterContinental Management AM LLC, InterContinental Management Bulgaria EOOD, InterContinental Management France SAS, InterContinental Management Poland sp. z.o.o, InterContinental Overseas Holding Corporation, Intercontinental Hotels Corporation Limited, KG Benefits LLC, KG Gift Card Inc., KG Liability LLC, KG Technology LLC, KHP Washington Operator LLC, KHRG 11th Avenue Hotel LLC, KHRG 851 LLC, KHRG Aertson LLC, KHRG Alexandria LLC, KHRG Alexis LLC, KHRG Allegro LLC, KHRG Argyle LLC, KHRG Austin Beverage Company LLC, KHRG Baltimore LLC, KHRG Born LLC, KHRG Boston Hotel LLC, KHRG Canary LLC, KHRG Cayman Employer Ltd., KHRG Cayman LLC, KHRG DC 1731 LLC, KHRG DC 2505 LLC, KHRG Donovan LLC, KHRG Employer LLC, KHRG Goleta LLC, KHRG Gray LLC, KHRG Gray U2 LLC, KHRG Hillcrest LLC, KHRG Huntington Beach LLC, KHRG King Street LLC, KHRG La Peer LLC, KHRG Miami Beach LLC, KHRG Muse LLC, KHRG NPC LLC, KHRG Onyx LLC, KHRG Palladian LLC, KHRG Palomar Phoenix LLC, KHRG Philly Monaco LLC, KHRG Pittsburgh LLC, KHRG Reynolds LLC, KHRG Riverplace LLC, KHRG SFD LLC, KHRG Sacramento LLC, KHRG Savannah LLC, KHRG Schofield LLC, KHRG Sedona LLC, KHRG State Street LLC, KHRG Sutter LLC, KHRG Sutter Union LLC, KHRG Taconic LLC, KHRG Tariff LLC, KHRG Texas Hospitality LLC, KHRG Texas Operations LLC, KHRG Tryon LLC, KHRG VZ Austin LLC, KHRG Vero Beach LLC, KHRG Vintage Park LLC, KHRG WPB LLC, KHRG Wabash LLC, KHRG Westwood LLC, KHRG Wilshire LLC, KHRG Zamora LLC, Kimpton Hollywood Licenses LLC, Kimpton Hotel & Restaurant Group, Kimpton Hotel & Restaurant Group LLC, Kimpton Phoenix Licenses Holdings LLC, Kimpton Sedona Licenses LLC, Louisiana Acquisitions Corp., MH Lodging LLC, Mercer Fairview Holdings LLC, PML Services LLC, PT SC Hotels & Resorts Indonesia, Pollstrong Limited, Powell Pine Inc., Priscilla Holiday of Texas Inc., RM Lodging LLC, Regent Hotels and Resorts, Resort Services International (Cayo Largo) L.P., SBS Maryland Beverage Company LLC, SC Cellars Limited, SC Hotels International Services Inc., SC Leisure Group Limited, SC NAS 2 Limited, SC Quest Limited, SC Reservations (Philippines) Inc., SCH Insurance Company, SCIH Branston 3, SF MH Acquisition LLC, SPHC Group Pty Ltd., SPHC Management Ltd., Semiramis for training of Hotel Personnel and Hotel Management SAE, Six Continents Corporate Services, Six Continents Holdings Limited, Six Continents Hotels Inc., Six Continents Hotels International Limited, Six Continents Hotels de Colombia SA, Six Continents International Holdings B.V., Six Continents Investments Limited, Six Continents Limited, Six Continents Overseas Holdings Limited, Six Continents Restaurants Limited, SixCo North America Inc., Solamar Lodging LLC, Southern Pacific Hotel Corporation (BVI) Ltd., Southern Pacific Hotels Properties Limited, Universal de Hoteles SA, White Shield Insurance Company Limited, and World Trade Centre Montreal Hotel Corporation.
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.
iShares MSCI EAFE ETF's stock was trading at $56.05 on March 11th, 2020 when Coronavirus reached pandemic status according to the World Health Organization (WHO). Since then, EFA shares have increased by 45.6% and is now trading at $81.61.

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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.

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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 2018 Beijing Design Week gets underway on Saturday, with its opening ceremony set to take place at the China Millennium Monument.

Hosted by the Ministry of Culture and Tourism and the Beijing municipal government, and organized by Beijing Gehua Cultural Development Group in conjunction with the Beijing Industrial Design Center, the design week will run through Oct 7.

Themed "homage to life," this year's event pays special attention to the role of design in meeting the requirements of contemporary people for a better life.

According to Dong Dianyi, executive deputy director of the organizing committee, there are three key areas of focus: The construction of Beijing as a national cultural hub and the removal of non-capital functions, the construction of the city's sub-centers and the integrated development of traditional cultural inheritance and modern design.

This year, the thematic exhibition, 40 YearsDesign in China after 1978, will be presented at the China Millennium Monument throughout the design week, looking back at the 40 years of design development since China's reform and opening-up.

Copenhagen, the guest city of this year's Beijing Design Week, will bring a series of events that will run from Sept 26 to Oct 5, on the theme of "living is giving," including exhibitions and forums introducing Danish lifestyle, culture, values and sustainable development programs.

According to Dong, Beijing will take the opportunity of the design week to further expand cooperation with Denmark and carry out a Sino-Danish renovation project in Qinglong Hutong. The project aims to utilize advanced urban design concepts and sustainable environmental protection technologies from Denmark to reform and rejuvenate the antiquated areas of Beijing.

One of the highlights of this year's design week is the Beijing Design Expo from Friday to Tuesday. Themed "design beyond," the expo will center on aspects of people's daily lives and explore how to utilize design to satisfy daily needs and improve living conditions.

"Beijing Design Week is known to be held in the city across 40 venues. However, it is difficult for travelers to visit in a day or two," says Wang Yudong, deputy general manager of Gehua group. "With the design expo, we will concentrate the major projects for display at the National Agriculture Exhibition Center."

The expo consists of six major exhibitions, ranging from traditional Chinese crafts and intellectual property to home furnishings, fashion and interactive technology.

Expanding over the Mid-Autumn Festival public holiday, Beijing design expo is intended to be family-friendly, Wang adds.

"With catering service and rest areas provided in all the exhibition halls, families can enjoy a whole day at the expo."

A new component of this year's design week is intangible cultural heritage re-design, intending to promote the creative development of traditional crafts, extract the traditional Chinese aesthetics through design and integrate the intangible cultural heritage into our modern lifestyle.

"We often view intangible cultural heritage as something from the past when, in fact, much of it was the innovation of its time. Intangible cultural heritage is the collective display of the most advanced technology, materials and lifestyles of ancient times. That's why we want to use the power of design to instill new life into heritage," says Li Danyang, general manager of Gehua group.

Featuring a design exhibition focusing on the revitalization of traditional crafts, this part of the design week will showcase the latest achievements of craft culture, as well as a series of panels between inheritors of the intangible cultural heritage and modern designers.
iShares China Large-Cap ETF's stock was trading at $38.80 on March 11th, 2020 when COVID-19 (Coronavirus) reached pandemic status according to the World Health Organization (WHO). Since then, FXI shares have increased by 1.7% and is now trading at $39.47.

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iShares MSCI Emerging Markets ETF's stock was trading at $37.46 on March 11th, 2020 when Coronavirus (COVID-19) reached pandemic status according to the World Health Organization (WHO). Since then, EEM stock has increased by 36.6% and is now trading at $51.18.

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iShares MSCI Germany ETF's stock was trading at $23.17 on March 11th, 2020 when COVID-19 (Coronavirus) reached pandemic status according to the World Health Organization. Since then, EWG stock has increased by 48.5% and is now trading at $34.41.

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iShares MSCI Switzerland ETF's stock was trading at $35.66 on March 11th, 2020 when Coronavirus (COVID-19) reached pandemic status according to the World Health Organization. Since then, EWL stock has increased by 43.4% and is now trading at $51.14.

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Shares of iShares S&P 500 Growth ETF split before market open on Monday, October 19th 2020. The 4-1 split was announced on Friday, September 18th 2020. The newly issued shares were payable to shareholders after the market closes on Friday, October 16th 2020. An investor that had 100 shares of iShares S&P 500 Growth ETF stock prior to the split would have 400 shares after the split.
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.

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Kites Flying High from Vietnam, one of the five winners of the Golden Ribbon awards at the annual Belt and Road Media Community Summit Forum.[Photo provided to China Daily]

As the eastern starting point of the ancient Silk Road, Xi'an has once again become a hub for countries looking to exchange cultural ideas and expand cooperation with China.

The 2018 Belt and Road Media Community Summit Forum was held in Xi'anthe capital of imperial China for at least 12 dynastiesfrom Sept 10 to 13, attracting 110 media organizations from 50 countries.

As an annual event to join hands with countries involved in the Belt and Road Initiative, the forum that was launched in 2016 witnessed its community expand from the first batch of 41 media outlets from 29 countries to 103 organizations from 50 nations this month.

For most television audiences, documentaries are regarded as a shortcut to quickly get a glimpse of the local lifestyle and foreign culture.

Five short documentaries, shortlisted from more than 30 entries from 14 countries, took home a Golden Ribbon award, set out by the forum organizers to reflect the diversity of civilizations.
According to analysts' consensus price target of C$2.05, TMAC Resources has a forecasted upside of  from its current price of C$0.00.

TMAC Resources has received a consensus rating of Buy. The company's average rating score is 3.00, and is based on 1 buy rating, no hold ratings, and no sell ratings.

4.1 Community Rank

Outperform Votes TMAC Resources has received 324 outperform votes. (Add your outperform vote.)

Underperform Votes TMAC Resources has received 206 underperform votes. (Add your underperform vote.)

Community Sentiment TMAC Resources has received 61.13% outperform votes from our community.

MarketBeat's community ratings are surveys of what our community members think about TMAC Resources and other stocks. Vote Outperform if you believe TMR will outperform the S&P 500 over the long term. Vote Underperform if you believe TMR will underperform the S&P 500 over the long term. You may vote once every thirty days.

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Tahoe Resources Inc., together with its subsidiaries, acquires, explores for, develops, and operates mineral properties in the Americas. It explores for silver, gold, lead, zinc, and copper deposits, as well as precious metals assets. The company holds interest in the La Arena gold mine located in the Huamachuco district of northern Peru; Shahuindo mine located in the province of Cajabamba in northern Peru; and La Arena II, a copper-gold porphyry deposit located in Peru. It also holds interest in the Timmins mines, including the Bell Creek and Timmins West mines, the Fenn-Gib project, the Juby project, the Vogel project, and the Gold River project located in Timmins, Ontario. The company was formerly known as CKM Resources Inc. and changed its name to Tahoe Resources Inc. in January 2010. Tahoe Resources Inc. was incorporated in 2009 and is headquartered in Reno, Nevada.

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The Legend of Hao Lan, which uses the major cast of the popular series Story of Yanxi Palace, is one of the highlighted titles in Tencent Pictures' new lineup.[Photo provided to China Daily]

Co-financing deals for blockbusters such as Zhang Yimou's latest film Shadow and the new Terminator outing, have quickly propelled Tencent Picturesa newcomer that made its first foray in China's film industry in 2015into the upper rankings of global movie backers.

In the new 33-title lineup unveiled on Monday by Tencent Pictures, the film and television arm of Chinese internet giant Tencent Holdings Ltd, two big-budget Hollywood players revealed that the Chinese media company is now on board as one of their financiers.

These include the new James Cameron production of the Terminator franchise, referred to as Terminator 6, and is due to be released in the United States on Nov 22, 2019. As well as being a co-investor, Tencent Pictures will handle the movie's distribution in China.

"Arnold Schwarzenegger is back to play his iconic role with a slightly different twist and Linda Hamilton is returning to the franchise for the first time since Terminator 2: Judgment Day. We have great new characters to introduce, which will take the franchise to a new level," says director Tim Miller in a video statement, who is currently shooting the movie in Budapest, Hungary.

Another Hollywood film backed by Tencent Pictures is Venom, Sony Pictures' upcoming film about the titular Marvel Comics character, starring English actor Tom Hardy. Directed by Ruben Fleischer, the movie is set to premiere in North America on Oct 5, with a release date for the Chinese mainland to be confirmed at a later date.
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.
thyssenkrupp AG operates in the areas of automotive technology, industrial components, plant technology, marine systems, steel, and materials services in Germany, the United States, China, and internationally. The company's Automotive Technology segment develops and manufactures components and systems and automated production systems for the automotive industry. Its Industrial Components segment manufactures and sells forged components and system solutions for the resource, construction, and mobility sectors; and slewing rings, antifriction bearings, and seamless rolled rings for the wind energy and construction machinery sectors. The company's Plant Technology segment builds plants for the chemical, cement, and mining industries. Its Marine Systems segment provides systems in the submarine and surface ship building, as well as in the field of maritime electronics and security technology. The company's Materials Services segment distributes materials and offers technical services for the production and manufacturing sectors. Its Steel Europe segment provides flat carbon steel products, intelligent material solutions, and finished parts. thyssenkrupp AG was founded in 1811 and is headquartered in Essen, Germany.

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The late Yuan Yunfu, a well-established artist and former professor of Tsinghua University's arts and design academy, invested a lot of time depicting the elegance of lotus flowers in his later years. He once said that, "Every moment in the life of a lotus, from sprouting, budding, fully blooming to withering, is exuberant with a unique sense of beauty."

On Monday, Yuan's family donated Enduring Fragrance, a colorful ink painting which shows several lotuses in full blossom, to the Tsinghua University Art Museum in Beijing, where an exhibition that hails Yuan's lifelong creativity is currently underway.

The exhibition, which runs until Oct 7, is titled Glory and displays more than 120 of Yuan's paintings, including the donated piece, marking his devotion to China's decorative art.

An album dedicated to Yuan's great sense of color, The Beauty of Yuan Yunfu's Art, was also released by the university's publishing house.
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

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United Technologies Corporation provides technology products and services to building systems and aerospace industries worldwide. Its Otis segment designs, manufactures, sells, and installs passenger and freight elevators, escalators, and moving walkways; and offers modernization products to upgrade elevators and escalators, as well as maintenance and repair services. The company's Carrier segment provides heating, ventilating, air conditioning, refrigeration, fire, security, and building automation products, solutions, and services for commercial, government, infrastructure, residential, and refrigeration and transportation applications. This segment also offers building services, including audit, design, installation, system integration, repair, maintenance, and monitoring. Its Pratt & Whitney segment supplies aircraft engines for commercial, military, business jet, and general aviation markets; and provides aftermarket maintenance, repair, and overhaul, as well as fleet management services. The company's Collins Aerospace Systems segment provides electric power generation, power management, and distribution systems; air data and aircraft sensing systems; engine control, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance systems; engine components; environmental control systems; fire and ice detection, and protection systems; propeller systems; engine nacelle systems; aircraft lighting, seating, and cargo systems; actuation and landing systems; space products and subsystems; avionics systems; flight controls, communications, navigation, oxygen, and training systems; food and beverage preparation, and storage and galley systems; and lavatory and wastewater management systems. The company offers its services through manufacturers' representatives, distributors, wholesalers, dealers, retail outlets, and sales representatives, as well as directly to customers. United Technologies Corporation was founded in 1934 and is headquartered in Farmington, Connecticut.

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Andeavor Logistics LP operates as a diversified midstream company in the United States. The company's Terminalling and Transportation segment comprises the Northwest pipeline system, including a regulated common carrier products pipeline running from Salt Lake City, Utah to Spokane, Washington and a jet fuel pipeline to the Salt Lake City International Airport; a regulated common carrier refined products pipeline system connecting its refinery to its terminals in Anchorage, Alaska; tankage and related equipment at the refinery; and crude oil and refined products terminals and storage facilities in the western, and southwest and midwestern U.S. This segment also consists of marine terminals in California and Washington; a rail-car unloading and petroleum coke handling facilities; marine terminals; a manifest rail facility; an asphalt trucking operation; a petroleum coke handling and storage facility; asphalt terminalling and processing services; and other pipelines, which transport products and crude oil from its refineries to nearby facilities in Salt Lake City and Los Angeles. Its Gathering and Processing segment includes crude oil and natural gas, NGLs, and produced water gathering systems in the Bakken Shale/Williston Basin area of the Bakken Region, the Green River Basin, the Rockies Region, the Permian Basin System, and the Four Corners System, as well as crude trucking operations, and gas processing and fractionation complexes. The company's Wholesale segment consists of bulk petroleum distribution facilities and a fleet of refined product delivery trucks. Tesoro Logistics GP, LLC operates as the general partner of the company. The company was formerly known as Tesoro Logistics LP and changed its name to Andeavor Logistics LP in August 2017. Andeavor Logistics LP was founded in 2010 and is based in Findlay, Ohio.

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The following companies are subsidiares of UnitedHealth Group: 1031387 B.C. Unlimited Liability Company, 1070715 B.C. Unlimited Liability Company, 1st Avenue Pharmacy Inc., 310 Canyon Medical, 310 Canyon Medical LLC, 4C MSO LLC, 4C Medical Group PLC, 5995 Minnetonka LLC, ABCO International Holdings LLC, ACN Group IPA of New York, ACN Group IPA of New York Inc., ACN Group of California, ACN Group of California Inc., AHJV, AHJV MSO, AHN Accontable Care Organization LLC, AHN Central Services LLC, AHN Target Holdings LLC, AMIL International, AMIL International S.a.r.l., APS  Assistencia Personalizada a Saude Ltda., ARC Infusion, ASC Holdings of New Jersey LLC, ASC Network LLC, ASI Global, ASI Global LLC, Access Administrators Inc., Access HealthSource Administrators Inc., Access HealthSource Inc., Access I.V., Administradora Clinica La Colina S.A.S., Administradora Country S.A., Administradora Medica Centromed S.A., Advanced Care, Advanced Care Pharmacy, Advanced Pharma Inc., Advanced Surgery Center of Clifton LLC, Advanced Surgical Hospital LLC, Advantage Care Network Inc., Advocate Condell Ambulatory Surgery Center LLC, Advocate Sherman Ambulatory Surgery Center LLC, Advocate Southwest Ambulatory Surgery Center LLC, Advocate-SCA Partners LLC, Alere Health, Alere Health Improvement Company, Alere Healthcare of Illinois, Alere Wellbeing, Alere Wellology, Alere of New York, Aliansalud Entidad Promotora de Salud S.A., All Savers Insurance Company, All Savers Life Insurance Company of California, Alliance Surgical Center LLC, Aloha Surgical Center LLC, Ambient Healthcare, Ambient Healthcare Inc., Ambient Healthcare of Central Florida, Ambient Healthcare of Georgia, Ambient Healthcare of Northeast Florida, Ambient Healthcare of S. Florida, Ambient Healthcare of West Florida, Ambient Holdings, Ambient Holdings Inc., Ambient Nursing Services, AmeriChoice, AmeriChoice Corporation, AmeriChoice Health Services, AmeriChoice of Connecticut, AmeriChoice of New Jersey, AmeriChoice of New Jersey Inc., American Health Network of Indiana Care Organization LLC, American Health Network of Indiana II LLC, American Health Network of Indiana LLC, American Health Network of Ohio Care Organization LLC, American Health Network of Ohio II LLC, American Health Network of Ohio LLC, Amico Saude Ltda., Amil, Amil Assistencia Medica Internacional S.A., Amil Lifesciences Participacoes Ltda., Antelope Valley Surgery Center L.P., Analisis Clinicos ML S.A.C., Apothecary Holdings Inc., Apothecary Shop of Phoenix Inc., AppleCare Medical Management, AppleCare Medical Management LLC, Aquitania Chilean Holding SpA, Arise Physician Group, Arizona Physicians IPA, Arizona Physicians IPA Inc., AssuranceRx, AssuranceRx LLC, Athens ASC Holdings LLC, Audax Health Solutions, Audax Health Solutions LLC, Austin Center for Outpatient Surgery L.P., Avella Patient Access Program Inc., Avella Specialty Pharmacy, Avella of Austin Inc., Avella of Columbus Inc., Avella of Deer Valley Inc., Avella of Denver Inc., Avella of Gilbert Inc., Avella of Las Vegas II Inc., Avella of Orlando Inc., Avella of Phoenix III Inc., Avella of Sacramento Inc., Avella of Scottsdale Inc., Avella of St. Louis Inc., Avella of Tampa LLC, Avella of Tucson II Inc., Avella of Tucson Inc., Aveta Arizona, Aveta Health Solutions Inc., Aveta Inc., Aveta Kansas City, Aveta Tennessee, AxelaCare Health Solutions, AxelaCare Intermediate Holdings, AxelaCare Intermediate Holdings LLC, AxelaCare LLC, B.R.A.S.S. Partnership in Commendam, Banmedica Colombia SpA, Banmedica Internacional SpA, Banmedica S.A., Beach Surgical Holdings III LLC, Behavioral Healthcare Options, Behavioral Healthcare Options Inc., Belleville Surgical Center Ltd. an Illinois Limited Partnership, Benefit Administration for the Self Employed L.L.C., Benefitter Insurance Solutions Inc., Birmingham Outpatient Surgical Center LLC, Blackstone Valley Surgicare GP LLC, Blue Ridge GP LLC, Bordeaux (Barbados) Holdings I SRL, Bordeaux (Barbados) Holdings II SRL, Bordeaux (Barbados) Holdings III SRL, Bordeaux Holding SpA, Bordeaux International Holdings Inc., Bordeaux UK Holdings I Limited, Bordeaux UK Holdings II Limited, Bordeaux UK Holdings III Limited, Bosque Medical Center Ltda., Brandon Ambulatory Surgery Center LC, BriovaRx, BriovaRx, BriovaRx Infusion Services, BriovaRx Infusion Services 102 LLC, BriovaRx Infusion Services 200 Inc., BriovaRx Infusion Services 204 Inc., BriovaRx Infusion Services 209 Inc., BriovaRx Infusion Services 305 LLC, BriovaRx Infusion Services 402 LLC, BriovaRx Infusion Services Inc., BriovaRx Specialty LLC, BriovaRx of California, BriovaRx of California Inc., BriovaRx of Florida, BriovaRx of Florida Inc., BriovaRx of Georgia, BriovaRx of Georgia LLC, BriovaRx of Hawaii, BriovaRx of Indiana, BriovaRx of Louisiana, BriovaRx of Louisiana L.L.C., BriovaRx of Maine, BriovaRx of Maine Inc., BriovaRx of Massachusetts, BriovaRx of Massachusetts LLC, BriovaRx of Nevada, BriovaRx of New York, BriovaRx of New York Inc., BriovaRx of Texas, BriovaRx of Texas Inc., CDC Holdings Colombia S.A.S., CLISA  Clinica de Santo Antonio S.A., CMO  Centro Medico de Oftalmologia S/S Ltda., CMS  Central de Manipulacao e Servicos Farmaceuticos S.A., CNIC Health Solutions Inc., COI Participacoes S.A., COI  Clinicas Oncologicas Integradas S.A., Cabin Enterprises LLC, Cabin Holdings LLC, California MedTrans Network IPA LLC, California MedTrans Network MSO LLC, California Medical Group Insurance Company Risk Retention Group, Camp Hill-SCA Centers LLC, Capital City Medical Group L.L.C., Cardio Management, Cardio Management Inc., Care Improvement Plus Group Management, Care Improvement Plus Group Management LLC, Care Improvement Plus South Central Insurance Company, Care Improvement Plus Wisconsin Insurance Company, Care Improvement Plus of Texas Insurance Company, Casa de Saude Santa Therezinha Ltda., Casa de Saude Santa Therezinha S.A., Castle Rock SurgiCenter LLC, Catalyst360, Catalyst360 LLC, Catamaran Finance (Ireland) Unlimited Company, Catamaran Health Solutions, Catamaran Holdings I, Catamaran IPA III, Catamaran Mail, Catamaran PBM of Illinois II, Catamaran PBM of Puerto Rico, Catamaran PD of Pennsylvania, Catamaran PD of Puerto Rico, Catamaran Rebate Management, Catamaran S.a.r.l., Catamaran Senior Services, Catamaran of Pennsylvania, Cedar Park Surgery Center LLC, Cemed Care - Empressa de Atendimento Clinico Geral Ltda., Cemed Care  Empresa de Atendimento Clinico Geral Ltda., Central Indiana Care Organization LLC, Central Ohio Care Organization LLC, Central de Compras SpA, CentriHealth Corporation, CentriHealth UK Limited, CentrifyHealth LLC, Centro Medico Hospitalar Pitangueiras Ltda., Centro Medico Odontologico Americano S.A.C., Centro Medico PJ Ltda., Centro de Entrenamiento en Reanimacion y Prevencion Limitada (CERP), Centro de Servicios Compartidos Banmedica S.A., Centromed Quilpue S.A., Centros Medicos y Dentales Multimed Ltda., Centurion Casualty Company, Channel Islands Surgicenter L.P., Channel Islands Surgicenter Properties LLC, Charleston Surgery Properties LLC, Charlotte-SC LLC, Childrens Surgery Center LLC, ChinaGate (Hong Kong) Limited, ChinaGate Company Limited, Citrus Regional Surgery Center L.P., Clinica Oftalmologica Danilo de Castro Sociedade Simples, Clinical Partners of Colorado Springs LLC, Clinica Alameda S.A., Clinica Bio Bio S.A., Clinica Ciudad del Mar S.A., Clinica Davila y Servicios Medicos S.A., Clinica Medico Cirurgica de Santa Tecla S.A., Clinica San Borja (La Esperanza del Peru S.A.), Clinica San Felipe S.A., Clinica Santa Maria S.A., Clinica Sanchez Ferrer S.A., Clinica Vespucio S.A., Clinica del Country S.A., Coachella Valley Physicians of PrimeCare, Coachella Valley Physicians of PrimeCare Inc., Coalition For Advanced Pharmacy Services, Coalition for Advanced Pharmacy Services Inc., Coastal Physicians Management Inc., Collaborative Care Holdings, Collaborative Care Holdings LLC, Collaborative Care Services, Collaborative Care Services Inc., Collaborative Care Solutions, Collaborative Realty, Collaborative Realty LLC, Colmedica Medicina Prepagada, Colonial Outpatient Surgery Center LLC, Colorado Innovative Physician Solutions Inc., Colorado Springs Surgery Center Ltd., Comfort Care Transportation, Comfort Care Transportation LLC, Commonwealth Administrators, Connecticut Surgery Center Limited Partnership, Connecticut Surgery Properties LLC, Connecticut Surgical Center LLC, Connextions, Connextions HCI, Constructora e Inmobiliaria Magapoq S.A., Consumer Wellness Solutions Inc., Country Scan Ltda., Crescent Drug Corp., Cypress Care, Cypress Care Inc., DBP Services of New York IPA, DBP Services of New York IPA Inc., DTC Surgery Center LLC, DWIC of Tampa Bay, DWIC of Tampa Bay Inc., DaVita Magan Management Inc., Danbury Surgical Center L.P., Day-Op Surgery Consulting Company, Day-Op Surgery Consulting Company LLC, Definity Health, Dental Benefit Providers, Dental Benefit Providers Inc., Dental Benefit Providers of California, Dental Benefit Providers of California Inc., Dental Benefit Providers of Illinois, Dental Benefit Providers of Illinois Inc., Derry Surgical Center LLC, Diagnostico Ecotomografico Centromed Ltda., Diasnostico por Imagenes Centromed Ltda., Dilab Medicina Nuclear Ltda., Diplomat Pharmacy, Distance Learning Network, Distance Learning Network Inc., Doctor + S.A.C., Dry Creek Surgery Center LLC, Dublin Surgery Center LLC, Duncan Printing Services, Duncan Printing Services LLC, E Street Endoscopy LLC, ELG FZE, EP Campus I, EP Campus I LLC, East Brunswick Surgery Center LLC, Electronic Network Systems, Electronic Network Systems Inc., Elual Participacoes S.A., Empire Physician Management Company, Empire Physician Management Company LLC, Employers Health Choice PPO Inc., Empremedica S. A., Endoscopy Center Affiliates Inc., Enterprise Life Insurance Company, Equian, Equian LLC, Equian Parent Corp., Esho  Empresa de Servicos Hospitalares S.A., Etho  Empresa de Tecnologia Hospitalar Ltda., Evercare Collaborative Solutions, Evercare Collaborative Solutions Inc., Everett MSO Inc., Excellion Servicos Biomedicos Ltda., Excellion Servicos Biomedicos S.A., Excelsior Insurance Brokerage Inc., Executive Health Resources, Executive Health Resources Inc., Executive Surgery Center LLC, Eye Clinic Oftalmologia Clinico Cirurgica e Diagnostico Ltda., FMG Holdings, FMG Holdings LLC, FOR HEALTH OF ARIZONA, Family Health Care Services, Family Home Hospice, Family Home Hospice Inc., First Rx Specialty & Mail Services, Florida MedTrans Network LLC, Florida MedTrans Network MSO LLC, For Health, For Health Inc., For Health of Arizona Inc., Fortified Provider Network Inc., Fortify Technologies Asia LLC, Fortify Technologies LLC, Foundation Financial Services Inc., Franklin Surgical Center LLC, Freedom Life Insurance Company of America, Freeway Surgicenter of Houston LLC, Frontier MEDEX Limited, Frontier Medex Tanzania Limited, FrontierMEDEX, FrontierMEDEX (RMS), FrontierMEDEX (RMS) Inc., FrontierMEDEX Government Services, FrontierMEDEX Government Services LLC, FrontierMEDEX Inc., FrontierMEDEX Kenya Limited, FrontierMEDEX US, FrontierMEDEX US Inc., Fundacion Banmedica, GRANTS PASS SURGERY CENTER LLC, Gadsden Surgery Center LLC, Gadsden Surgery Center Ltd., Gainesville Surgery Center L.P., Gainesville Surgery Properties LLC, Genoa, Genoa Healthcare Inc., Genoa Healthcare LLC, Genoa QoL Wholesale LLC, Genoa Technology (Canada) Inc., Genoa Technology Inc., Genoa Telepsychiatry Inc., Genoa of Arkansas LLC, Glenwood Surgical Center L.P., Glenwood-SC Inc., Golden Outlook, Golden Outlook Inc., Golden Rule Financial Corporation, Golden Rule Insurance Company, Golden Triangle Surgicenter L.P., Grapevine Finance LLC, Greater Hartford ASC LLC, Grove Place Surgery Center L.L.C., Guardian Health Systems Limited Partnership, H&W Indemnity (SPC), H&W Indemnity (SPC) Ltd., H.I. Investments Holding Company LLC, HCP ACO California LLC, HCP ACO Nevada LLC, HCentive Technology India Private Limited, HMI NewCo LLC, Harken Health Insurance Company, Hayes-Strub LLC, Health Business Systems, Health Care-ONE Insurance Agency Inc., Health Inventures Employment Solutions LLC, Health Inventures LLC, Health Net Insurance of New York, Health Net Services (Bermuda) Ltd., Health Plan of Nevada, Health Plan of Nevada Inc., Health Technology Analysts Pty Limited, HealthAllies, HealthAllies Inc., HealthCare Partners ASC-LB LLC, HealthCare Partners Management Services California LLC, HealthCare Partners RE LLC, HealthFirst IPA Inc., HealthMarkets Group Inc., HealthMarkets Inc., HealthMarkets Insurance Agency Inc., HealthMarkets LLC, HealthMarkets NewCo Inc., HealthMarkets Services Inc., HealthSCOPE Holdings Inc., HealthScope Benefits Inc., Healthcare Partners Plan of Nevada Inc., Healthcare Solutions Inc., Heartland Heart and Vascular LLC, Help S.A., Help Service S.A., Highlands Ranch Healthcare, Highlands Ranch Healthcare LLC, Home Care I.V. of Bend, Home Infusion With Heart, Home Medical S.A., Hospice Inspiris Holdings, Hospice Inspiris Holdings Inc., Hospitais Associados de Pernambuco Ltda., Hospital Alvorada de Taguatinga Ltda., Hospital Ana Costa S.A., Hospital Maternidade Promater Ltda., Hospital Samaritano de Sao Paulo Ltda., Hospital Santa Helena S.A., Hospital de Clinicas de Jacarepagua Ltda., Humedica, Humedica Inc., Hygeia Corporation, Hygeia Corporation (Canada), Hygeia Corporation (DE), Hygeia Corporation (Ontario), INOV8 Surgical at Memorial City LLC, INSPIRIS of New York IPA, INSPIRIS of New York Management, INSPIRIS of New York Management Inc., INSPIRIS of Texas Physician Group, IRX Financing I LLC, Illinois Independent Care Network, Imed Star  Servicos de Desempenho Organizacional Ltda., Impel Consulting Experts, Impel Consulting Experts L.L.C., Impel Management Services L.L.C., Indian River Surgery Center Ltd., Indian River Surgery Properties LLC, Indiana Care Organization LLC, Infusource, Ingram & Associates, Ingram & Associates LLC, Inmobiliaria Apoquindo 3001 S.A., Inmobiliaria Apoquindo 3600 Ltda., Inmobiliaria Apoquindo S.A., Inmobiliaria Clinica Santa Maria S.A., Inmobiliaria Vinamed Ltda., Inmobiliaria e Inversiones Alameda S.A., Inspiris, Inspiris Inc., Inspiris Services Company, Inspiris of Tennessee, Instituto do Radium de Cammpinas Ltda, International Psychological Services Pty Limited, Inversiones Clinicas Santa Maria S.A., Isapre Banmedica S.A., Isapre Vida Tres S.A., Johnston Surgicare L.P., Joliet Surgery Center Limited Partnership, LHI, Laboratorio ROE S.A., Laboratorios Medicos Amed Quilpue S.A., LifePrint Health, LifePrint Health Inc., LifeStyles Marketing Group Inc., LifeWell Ltd. Co., Lifeprint Accountable Care Organization, Lifeprint Accountable Care Organization LLC, Lifeprint East, Lifeprint East Inc., Logistics Health Inc., Lotten-Eyes Oftalmologia Clinica e Cirurgica Ltda., Louisville S.C. Ltd., Louisville-SC Properties Inc., Loyola Ambulatory Surgery Center at Oakbrook Inc., Lusiadas - Parcerias Cascais S.A., Lusiadas A.C.E., Lusiadas S.A., Lusiadas SGPS S.A., MAMSI Insurance Resources, MAMSI Life and Health Insurance Company, MD Ops, MD Ops Inc., MD-Individual Practice Association, MD-Individual Practice Association Inc., ME AHS UC LLC, MEDEX Insurance Services, MEDEX Insurance Services Inc., MGH/SCA LLC, MHC Real Estate Holdings, MHC Real Estate Holdings LLC, MIAMI SURGERY CENTER LLC, MSLA Management LLC, MXMD Centros De Cancer, Mamoeco  Mamografia e Ecografia Centro de Diagnostico, Managed Physical Network, Managed Physical Network Inc., March Holdings, March Holdings Inc., March Vision Care, March Vision Care Inc., Marin Surgery Holdings Inc., Maryland Ambulatory Centers, Maryland-SCA Centers LLC, Massachusetts Assurance Company Ltd. PIC, Massachusetts Avenue Surgery Center LLC, Mat-Rx Development, Mat-Rx Fort Worth GP, MedExpress Development, MedExpress Development LLC, MedExpress Urgent Care Alabama LLC, MedExpress Urgent Care Inc. - Ohio, MedExpress Urgent Care Maine Inc., MedExpress Urgent Care New Hampshire Inc., MedExpress Urgent Care of Boynton Beach, MedExpress Urgent Care of Boynton Beach LLC, MedSynergies, MedSynergies LLC, MedSynergies North Texas, Medalliance Net Ltda, Medalliance Net Ltda., Medica Health Plans of Florida, Medica Health Plans of Florida Inc., Medica HealthCare Plans, Medica HealthCare Plans Inc., Medical Clinic of North Texas PLLC, Medical Hilfe S.A., Medical Preparatory School of Allied Health, Medical Support Los Angeles Inc., Medical Surgical Centers of America Inc., Medical Transportation Services, Medical Transportation Services LLC, Medication Management Systems Inc., Melbourne Surgery Center LLC, Memorial City Holdings LLC, Memorial City Partners LLC, Memphis-SC LLC, Memphis-SP LLC, Mesquite Liberty LLC, Metro I Stone Management, Metropolitan Medical Partners LLC, Metropolitan Medical Transportation IPA LLC, Mid Atlantic Medical Services, Mid-West National Life Insurance Company of Tennessee, Midwest Center for Day Surgery LLC, Mile High SurgiCenter LLC, Mississippi Surgery Holdings LLC, Mississippi Surgical Center Limited Partnership, Mobile Medical Professionals, Modern Medical Inc., Monarch Management Services, Monarch Management Services Inc., Montgomery Surgery Center Limited Partnership, Mountain View Medical Group LLC, Mt. Pleasant Surgery Center L.P., Multiangio Ltda., Muskogee Surgical Investors LLC, Mustang Razorback Holdings, Mustang Razorback Holdings Inc., My Wellness Solutions LLC, NAMM Holdings, NAMM Holdings Inc., NSC Fayetteville LLC, NSC Greensboro LLC, NSC Lancaster LLC, NSC Seattle Inc., NSC Upland LLC, Nashville-SCA Surgery Centers Inc., National Foundation Life Insurance Company, National MedTrans LLC, National Pacific Dental, National Pacific Dental Inc., National Surgery Centers LLC, Neighborhood Health Partnership, Neighborhood Health Partnership Inc., Netwerkes, Netwerkes LLC, Nevada Medical Services LLC, Nevada Pacific Dental, New Orleans Regional Physician Hospital Organization L.L.C., New West Physicians Inc., Newton Holdings LLC, North American Medical Management - Illinois, North American Medical Management California, North American Medical Management California Inc., North Puget Sound Center for Sleep Disorders LLC, North Puget Sound Oncology Equipment Leasing Company LLC, Northern Nevada Health Network, Northern Nevada Health Network Inc., Northern Rockies Surgicenter Inc., Northwest Surgicare LLC, Northwest Surgicare Ltd., Nutritional/Parenteral Home Care, Nutritional/Parenteral Home Care of Huntsville, OC Cardiology Practice Partners LLC, OSB  Tecnologia e Servicos de Suporte Ltda., Omesa S.A., OmniClaim LLC, Oncocare S.A.C., OneNet PPO, OneNet PPO LLC, Optimum Choice, Optimum Choice Inc., Optum, Optum Bank, Optum Bank Inc., Optum Biometrics, Optum Biometrics Inc., Optum Care Inc., Optum Care Services Company, Optum Clinical Services, Optum Clinics Holdings, Optum Clinics Holdings Inc., Optum Clinics Intermediate Holdings, Optum Clinics Intermediate Holdings Inc., Optum Digital Health Holdings LLC, Optum Finance (Ireland) Unlimited Company, Optum Global Finance (Ireland) Unlimited Company, Optum Global Solutions (India) Private Limited, Optum Global Solutions (Philippines), Optum Global Solutions (Philippines) Inc., Optum Global Solutions International B.V., Optum Government Solutions, Optum Government Solutions Inc., Optum Growth Partners LLC, Optum Health & Technology (Australia) Pty Ltd, Optum Health & Technology (Hong Kong) Limited, Optum Health & Technology (India) Private Limited, Optum Health & Technology (Singapore) Pte. Ltd., Optum Health & Technology (UK) Limited, Optum Health & Technology (US), Optum Health & Technology (US) LLC, Optum Health & Technology FZ-LLC, Optum Health & Technology Holdings (US), Optum Health & Technology Holdings (US) Inc., Optum Health & Technology Servicos do Brasil Ltda., Optum Health Services (Canada) Ltd., Optum Health Solutions (Australia) Pty Ltd, Optum Health Solutions (UK) Limited, Optum Health and Technology FZ-LLC, Optum Healthcare of Illinois, Optum Healthcare of Illinois Inc., Optum Hospice Pharmacy Services, Optum Hospice Pharmacy Services LLC, Optum Inc., Optum Infusion Services 100 Inc., Optum Infusion Services 101 Inc., Optum Infusion Services 103 LLC, Optum Infusion Services 201 Inc., Optum Infusion Services 202 Inc., Optum Infusion Services 203 Inc., Optum Infusion Services 205 Inc., Optum Infusion Services 206 Inc., Optum Infusion Services 207 Inc., Optum Infusion Services 208 Inc., Optum Infusion Services 301 LP, Optum Infusion Services 302 LLC, Optum Infusion Services 308 LLC, Optum Infusion Services 401 LLC, Optum Infusion Services 403 LLC, Optum Infusion Services 404 LLC, Optum Infusion Services 501 Inc., Optum Insurance of Ohio, Optum Insurance of Ohio Inc., Optum Labs, Optum Labs Dimensions, Optum Labs Dimensions Inc., Optum Labs Inc., Optum Labs International (UK) Ltd., Optum Life Sciences (Canada) Inc., Optum Management Consulting (Shanghai) Co., Optum Management Consulting (Shanghai) Co. Ltd., Optum Networks of New Jersey Inc., Optum Nevada Accountable Care Organization LLC, Optum Operations (Ireland) Unlimited Company, Optum Palliative and Hospice Care, Optum Palliative and Hospice Care Inc., Optum Palliative and Hospice Care of Pennsylvania, Optum Palliative and Hospice Care of Pennsylvania Inc., Optum Palliative and Hospice Care of Texas, Optum Palliative and Hospice Care of Texas Inc., Optum Perks LLC, Optum Pharmacy 701 LLC, Optum Pharmacy 702 LLC, Optum Pharmacy 703 LLC, Optum Pharmacy 705 LLC, Optum Public Sector Solutions, Optum Public Sector Solutions Inc., Optum Rocket, Optum Rocket Inc., Optum Senior Services LLC, Optum Services, Optum Services (Ireland) Limited, Optum Services (Puerto Rico) LLC, Optum Services Inc., Optum Solutions UK Holdings Limited, Optum Solutions do Brasil  Tecnologia e Servicos de Suporte Ltda., Optum Technology, Optum Technology LLC, Optum UK Solutions Group Limited, Optum Women's and Children's Health, Optum Women's and Children's Health LLC, Optum of New York Inc., Optum360, Optum360 LLC, Optum360 Services, Optum360 Services Inc., Optum360 Solutions LLC, OptumCare ACO Florida LLC, OptumCare ACO Holdings LLC, OptumCare ACO New Mexico LLC, OptumCare Clinical Trials LLC, OptumCare Colorado ASC LLC, OptumCare Colorado LLC, OptumCare Colorado Springs LLC, OptumCare Endoscopy Center New Mexico LLC, OptumCare Florida CI LLC, OptumCare Florida LLC, OptumCare Health Plan of California Inc., OptumCare Holdings Colorado LLC, OptumCare Holdings LLC, OptumCare Holdings New Mexico LLC, OptumCare Management LLC, OptumCare New Mexico LLC, OptumCare New York IPA Inc., OptumCare South Florida LLC, OptumHealth Care Solutions, OptumHealth Care Solutions LLC, OptumHealth Financial Services, OptumHealth Financial Services Inc., OptumHealth Holdings, OptumHealth Holdings LLC, OptumHealth International B.V., OptumInsight, OptumInsight Holdings, OptumInsight Holdings LLC, OptumInsight Inc., OptumInsight India Private Limited, OptumInsight Life Sciences, OptumInsight Life Sciences Inc., OptumRx, OptumRx Administrative Services, OptumRx Administrative Services LLC, OptumRx Discount Card Services, OptumRx Discount Card Services LLC, OptumRx Group Holdings, OptumRx Group Holdings Inc., OptumRx Health Solutions LLC, OptumRx Holdings, OptumRx Holdings I LLC, OptumRx Holdings LLC, OptumRx Home Delivery of Illinois, OptumRx Home Delivery of Ohio, OptumRx Home Delivery of Ohio LLC, OptumRx IPA III Inc., OptumRx Inc., OptumRx NY IPA, OptumRx NY IPA Inc., OptumRx PBM of Illinois, OptumRx PBM of Illinois Inc., OptumRx PBM of Maryland, OptumRx PBM of Maryland LLC, OptumRx PBM of Pennsylvania, OptumRx PBM of Pennsylvania LLC, OptumRx PBM of Puerto Rico LLC, OptumRx PBM of Wisconsin, OptumRx PBM of Wisconsin LLC, OptumRx PD of Maryland, OptumRx PD of Pennsylvania LLC, OptumRx Pharmacy, OptumRx Pharmacy Inc., OptumRx Pharmacy of Nevada, OptumRx Pharmacy of Nevada Inc., OptumRx of Pennsylvania LLC, OptumServe Technology Services Inc., Orlando Center for Outpatient Surgery L.P., OrthoNet Holdings, OrthoNet Holdings Inc., OrthoNet LLC, OrthoNet New York IPA, OrthoNet New York IPA Inc., OrthoNet Services, OrthoNet Services Inc., OrthoNet West, OrthoNet West Inc., OrthoNet of the Mid-Atlantic, OrthoNet of the South, OrthoNet of the South Inc., Ovations, Ovations Inc., Oxford Benefit Management, Oxford Benefit Management Inc., Oxford Health Insurance, Oxford Health Insurance Inc., Oxford Health Plans (CT), Oxford Health Plans (CT) Inc., Oxford Health Plans (NJ), Oxford Health Plans (NJ) Inc., Oxford Health Plans (NY), Oxford Health Plans (NY) Inc., Oxford Health Plans LLC, P2 Lower Acquisition, P2P Link LLC, PCCCV, PCCCV Inc., PCN DE Corp., PHC Subsidiary Holdings, PHC Subsidiary Holdings LLC, PHYS Holding Corp., PHYSICIANS DAY SURGERY CENTER LLC, PMI Acquisition, PMI Acquisition LLC, PMSI, PMSI Holdco II, PMSI Holdings, PMSI Holdings LLC, PMSI LLC, PMSI Settlement Solutions, PMSI Settlement Solutions LLC, POMCO Inc., POMCO Network Inc., PPH Holdings LLC, PacifiCare Health Systems, PacifiCare Life Assurance Company, PacifiCare Life and Health Insurance Company, PacifiCare of Arizona, PacifiCare of Arizona Inc., PacifiCare of Colorado, PacifiCare of Colorado Inc., PacifiCare of Nevada, PacifiCare of Nevada Inc., Pacific Casualty Company Inc., Pacifico S.A. Entidad Prestadora de Salud, Paoli Ambulatory Surgery Center, Paoli Surgery Center L.P., Parkway Surgery Center LLC, Pasteur Plaza Surgery Center GP Inc., PatientsLikeMe, PatientsLikeMe LLC, Patrimonio Autonomo Nueva Clinica - PANC., Payment Resolution Services, Payment Resolution Services LLC, Peoples Health, Peoples Health Inc., Pharmaceutical Care Network, Pharmacy Review Services, Pharmacy Software Holdco Inc., PhyServe Holdings, Physician Alliance of the Rockies LLC, Physician Care Partners, Physicians Health Choice of Texas, Physicians Health Choice of Texas LLC, Physicians Health Plan of Maryland, Physicians Health Plan of Maryland Inc., Physicians Plaza Holdings LLC, Plano de Saude Ana Costa Ltda., Plus One Health Management Puerto Rico, Plus One Health Management Puerto Rico Inc., Plus One Holdings, Plus One Holdings Inc., Polar II Fundo de Investimento em Participacoes, Polar II Fundo de Investimento em Participacoes Multiestrategia, Polo Holdco, Polo Holdco LLC, Pomerado 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Inc., PrimeCare of Temecula, PrimeCare of Temecula Inc., ProHEALTH Fitness of Lake Success, ProHEALTH Fitness of Lake Success LLC, ProHEALTH Medical Management LLC, ProHealth Medical Management, ProHealth Physicians, ProHealth Physicians ACO, ProHealth Physicians ACO LLC, ProHealth Physicians Inc., ProHealth Proton Center Management, ProHealth Proton Center Management LLC, Procura Management, Procura Management Inc., Progressive Enterprises Holdings, Progressive Enterprises Holdings Inc., Progressive Medical, Progressive Medical LLC, Progressive Solutions, Promotora Country S.A., Pronetics Health Care Group, Pronounced Health Solutions Inc., Prosemedic S.A.C., Prospero Management Services LLC, Pueblo-SCA Surgery Center LLC, Pulse Platform LLC, QoL Acquisition Holdings Corp., Quality Software Services, QuarterMaster Newco LLC, R&H Family Fitness Unlimited LLC, Rally Health, Rally Health Inc., Real Appeal Inc., Recaudacion y Cobranzas Honodav Ltda., Redlands Ambulatory Surgery Center, Redlands-SCA Surgery Centers Inc., Reliant MSO LLC, Research Surgical Center LLC, River Valley ASC LLC, Riverside Electronic Healthcare Resources Inc., Riverside Medical Management, Riverside Medical Management LLC, Riverside Surgical Center of Meadowlands LLC, Riverside Surgical Center of Newark LLC, Rocky Mountain Health Maintenance Organization Incorporated, Rocky Mountain HealthCare Options Inc., SC Affiliates LLC, SCA Alaska Surgery Center inc., SCA Athens LLC, SCA Austin Holdings LLC, SCA BOSC Holdings LLC, SCA California Surgical Holdings LLC, SCA Capital LLC, SCA Cedar Park Holdings LLC, SCA Clifton LLC, SCA Danbury Surgical Center LLC, SCA Development LLC, SCA EHSC Holdings LLC, SCA EWASC Holdings LLC, SCA Hays Holdings LLC, SCA Heartland Holdings LLC, SCA HoldCo Inc., SCA Holding Company Inc., SCA Holdings Inc., SCA IEC Holdings LLC, SCA Indiana Holdings LLC, SCA Nashville ASC LLC, SCA Pacific Holdings Inc., SCA Pennsylvania Holdings LLC, SCA Premier Surgery Center of Louisville LLC, SCA ROCS Holdings LLC, SCA Rockledge JV LLC, SCA SSC Holdings LLC, SCA SSSC Holdings LLC, SCA Sage Medical LLC, SCA Sage Medical MSO LLC, SCA Southwestern PA LLC, SCA Specialists of Florida LLC, SCA Stonegate Holdings LLC, SCA Surgery Center of Cullman LLC, SCA Surgery Holdings LLC, SCA Surgery Partners LLC, SCA Surgicare of Laguna Hills LLC, SCA Teammate Support Network, SCA eCode Solutions Private Limited, SCA of Clarksville Inc., SCA-Albuquerque Surgery Properties Inc., SCA-Alliance LLC, SCA-Anne Arundel LLC, SCA-Applecare Partners LLC, SCA-Bethesda LLC, SCA-Blue Ridge LLC, SCA-Bonita Springs LLC, SCA-Brandon LLC, SCA-Castle Rock LLC, SCA-Central Florida LLC, SCA-Charleston LLC, SCA-Chatham LLC, SCA-Chevy Chase LLC, SCA-Citrus Inc., SCA-Colorado Springs LLC, SCA-Connecticut Partners LLC, SCA-DRY CREEK LLC, SCA-Davenport LLC, SCA-Denver LLC, SCA-Denver Physicians Holdings LLC, SCA-Derry LLC, SCA-Doral LLC, SCA-Downey LLC, SCA-Dublin LLC, SCA-Encinitas Inc., SCA-Eugene Inc., SCA-First Coast LLC, SCA-Florence LLC, SCA-Fort Collins Inc., SCA-Fort Walton Inc., SCA-Franklin LLC, SCA-Frederick LLC, SCA-Freeway Holdings LLC, SCA-Ft. Myers LLC, SCA-GRANTS PASS LLC, SCA-Gainesville LLC, SCA-Gladiolus LLC, SCA-Grove Place LLC, SCA-Hagerstown LLC, SCA-Hamden LLC, SCA-Hilton Head LLC, SCA-Honolulu LLC, SCA-Houston Executive LLC, SCA-IT Holdings LLC, SCA-Illinois LLC, SCA-JPM Holdings LLC, SCA-Kissing Camels Holdings LLC, SCA-MC VBP Inc., SCA-Main Street LLC, SCA-Marina del Rey LLC, SCA-Mecklenburg Development Corp., SCA-Memorial City LLC, SCA-Merritt LLC, SCA-Midlands LLC, SCA-Midway Management LLC, SCA-Mobile LLC, SCA-Mokena LLC, SCA-Mokena Properties LLC, SCA-Morris County LLC, SCA-Mt. Pleasant LLC, SCA-ND VBP Inc., SCA-Naperville LLC, SCA-Naples LLC, SCA-New Jersey LLC, SCA-Newport Beach LLC, SCA-Northeast Georgia Health LLC, SCA-PORTLAND LLC, SCA-Palm Beach LLC, SCA-Palm Beach MSO Holdings LLC, SCA-Paoli LLC, SCA-Phoenix LLC, SCA-Pocono LLC, SCA-Practice Partners Holdings LLC, SCA-River Valley LLC, SCA-Riverside LLC, SCA-Riverside Partners LLC, SCA-Rockville LLC, SCA-Sacred Heart Holdings LLC, SCA-San Diego Inc., SCA-San Luis Obispo LLC, SCA-Sand Lake LLC, SCA-Santa Rosa Inc., SCA-Shelby Development Corp., SCA-Somerset LLC, SCA-South Jersey LLC, SCA-Sparta LLC, SCA-Spartanburg Holdings LLC, SCA-St. Louis LLC, SCA-St. Lucie LLC, SCA-SurgiCare LLC, SCA-Swiftpath LLC, SCA-VERTA LLC, SCA-Wake Forest LLC, SCA-Western Connecticut LLC, SCA-Westover Hills LLC, SCA-Wilmington LLC, SCA-Wilson LLC, SCA-Winchester LLC, SCA-Winter Park Inc., SCA-Woodlands Holdings LLC, SCAI Holdings LLC, SCP Specialty Infusion, SCP Specialty Infusion LLC, SHC Atlanta LLC, SHC Austin Inc., SHC Hawthorn Inc., SHC Melbourne Inc., SPINETRACK 20/20 Inc., SRPS LLC, SXC Comet, Sacred Heart ASC LLC, Saden S.A., Salem Surgery Center LLC, Salveo Specialty Pharmacy, Salveo Specialty Pharmacy Inc., Sand Lake SurgiCenter LLC, Santa Cruz Endoscopy Center LLC, Santa Helena Assistencia Medica S.A., Santos Administracao e Participacoes S.A., Savvysherpa Administrative Services LLC, Savvysherpa Asia Inc., Savvysherpa LLC, Scanner Centromed S.A., ScripNet, ScriptSwitch Limited, Seisa Servicos Integrados de Saude Ltda., Senate Street Surgery Center LLC, Senior Benefits L.L.C., Senior Care Partners, Serquinox Holdings LLC, Serquinox LLC, Servicios Integrados de Salud Ltda., Servicios Medicos Amed Quilpue S.A., Servicios Medicos Bio Bio Limitada, Servicios Medicos Ciudad del Mar Ltda., Servicios Medicos Santa Maria Limitada, Servicios Medicos Vespucio Ltda., Servicios de Entrenamiento en Competencias Clinicas Ltda., SharedClarity LLC, Shelby Surgery Properties Inc., Sierra Health Services, Sierra Health Services Inc, Sierra Health Services Inc., Sierra Health and Life Insurance Company, Sierra Health and Life Insurance Company Inc., Sierra Health-Care Options, Sierra Health-Care Options Inc., Sierra Home Medical Products, Sierra Home Medical Products Inc., Sierra Nevada Administrators, Sierra Nevada Administrators Inc., Sirona Infusion, Sistema de Administracion Hospitalaria S.A.C., Small Business Insurance Advisors Inc., Sobam  Centro Medico Hospitalar S.A., Sociedad Editorial para la Ciencia Limitada., Sociedad de Inversiones Santa Maria S.A., Somerset Outpatient Surgery L.L.C., Southwest Medical Associates, Southwest Medical Associates Inc., Southwest Michigan Health Network Inc., Southwest Surgery Center LLC, Southwest Surgical Center of Bakersfield L.P., Space Coast Surgical Center Ltd., Specialists in Urology Surgery Center LLC, Specialized Pharmaceuticals Inc., Specialty Benefits, Specialty Benefits LLC, Spectera, Spectera Inc., Spectera of New York IPA, Spectera of New York IPA Inc., Spotlite, Spotlite Inc., St. Cloud Surgical Center LLC, StoneRiver P2P Link, StoneRiver Pharmacy Solutions, Stonegate Surgery Center L.P., Streamlines Health LLC, Summit Home Infusion, SunSurgery LLC, Surgery Center Holding LLC, Surgery Center at Cherry Creek LLC, Surgery Center at Kissing Camels LLC, Surgery Center of Boca Raton Inc., Surgery Center of Clarksville L.P., Surgery Center of Colorado Springs LLC, Surgery Center of Des Moines LLC, Surgery Center of Easton LLC, Surgery Center of Ellicott City Inc., Surgery Center of Louisville LLC, Surgery Center of Maui LLC, Surgery Center of Muskogee LLC, Surgery Center of Rockville L.L.C., Surgery Center of Southern Pines LLC, Surgery Center of Spokane LLC, Surgery Center of Summerlin LLC, Surgery Center of The Woodlands LLC, Surgery Center of Vero Beach Inc., Surgery Center of Wilmington LLC, Surgery Center of Wilmington Properties LLC, Surgery Centers of Des Moines Ltd. an Iowa Limited Partnership, Surgery Centers-West Holdings LLC, Surgical Care Affiliates, Surgical Care Affiliates LLC, Surgical Care Affiliates Political Action Committee, Surgical Care Partners of Melbourne LLC, Surgical Center of South Jersey Limited Partnership, Surgical Center of Tuscaloosa Holdings LLC, Surgical Health LLC, Surgical Health of Orlando LLC, Surgical Hospital Holdings of Oklahoma LLC, Surgicare LLC, Surgicare of Belleville LLC, Surgicare of Jackson LLC, Surgicare of Joliet Inc., Surgicare of La Veta Inc., Surgicare of Minneapolis LLC, Surgicare of Mobile LLC, Surgicare of Oceanside Inc., Surgicare of Owensboro LLC, Surgicare of Salem LLC, Surgicenters of Southern California Inc., Symphonix Health Holdings, Symphonix Health Holdings LLC, Symphonix Health Insurance, Symphonix Health Insurance Inc., THE SURGICAL CENTER OF THE TREASURE COAST L.L.C., TeamMD Holdings Inc., TeamMD Iowa Inc., TeamMD Physicians of Texas Inc., TeamUP Insurance Services Inc., Tecnologias de Informacion en Salud S.A., The Advisory Board (Chile) SpA, The Chesapeake Life Insurance Company, The Lewin Group, The Lewin Group Inc., The Magan Medical Group, The Outpatient Surgery Center of Hilton Head LLC, The Polyclinic MSO LLC, Thomas Johnson Surgery Center LLC, Thousand Oaks Endoscopy Center LLC, Three Rivers Holdings, Three Rivers Holdings Inc., Three Rivers Surgical Care L.P., Tmesys, Tmesys LLC, Topimagem Diagnostico por Imagem Ltda., Touchpoint Health Plan, Trails Edge Surgery Center LLC, Travel Express Incorporated, TriMed LLC, Trinity Infusion, Trio Motion LLC, Tucson Arizona Surgical Center LLC, U.S. Behavioral Health Plan, U.S. Behavioral Health Plan California, UHC Finance (Ireland) Unlimited Company, UHC Global Health Services BC Ltd., UHC International Services, UHC International Services Inc., UHC of California, UHCG Holdings (Ireland) Limited, UHCG Services (Ireland) Limited, UHCG  FZE, UHG Brasil Participacoes S.A., UHIC Holdings, UHIC Holdings Inc., UICI Funding Corp. 2, UMR, UMR Inc., USHEALTH Academy Inc., USHEALTH Administrators LLC, USHEALTH Advisors L.L.C., USHEALTH Career Agency Inc., USHEALTH Funding Inc., USHEALTH Group Inc., USMD Administrative Services, USMD Administrative Services L.L.C., USMD Affiliated Services, USMD CT (Mo), USMD Cancer Treatment Centers, USMD Cancer Treatment Centers GP, USMD Diagnostic Services, USMD Holdings, USMD Holdings Inc., USMD Inc., USMD PPM, USMD PPM LLC, USMD of Arlington GP, Ultima Rx, Unidad Medica Diagnostico S.A., Unimerica Insurance Company, Unimerica Life Insurance Company of New York, Unison Administrative Services, Unison Health Plan of Delaware, Unison Health Plan of Delaware Inc., United Behavioral Health, United Behavioral Health of New York I.P.A., United Behavioral Health of New York I.P.A. Inc., United Group Reinsurance Inc., United Health Foundation, United HealthCare, United HealthCare Services Inc., United Management Services Inc., United Resource Networks IPA of New York, United Resource Networks IPA of New York Inc., UnitedHealth Advisors, UnitedHealth Advisors LLC, UnitedHealth Group Finance Inc., UnitedHealth Group Global Healthcare Services Limited, UnitedHealth Group Global Services, UnitedHealth Group Incorporated, UnitedHealth Group Information Services Private Limited, UnitedHealth Group International Finance (Ireland) Unlimited Company, UnitedHealth Group International GP, UnitedHealth Group International L.P., UnitedHealth International, UnitedHealth International Inc., UnitedHealth Military & Veterans Services, UnitedHealth Military & Veterans Services LLC, UnitedHealth UK Limited, UnitedHealthcare, UnitedHealthcare Benefits Plan of California, UnitedHealthcare Benefits of Texas, UnitedHealthcare Benefits of Texas Inc., UnitedHealthcare Children's Foundation Inc., UnitedHealthcare Community Plan, UnitedHealthcare Community Plan Inc., UnitedHealthcare Community Plan of California, UnitedHealthcare Community Plan of California Inc., UnitedHealthcare Community Plan of Georgia, UnitedHealthcare Community Plan of Georgia Inc., UnitedHealthcare Community Plan of Ohio, UnitedHealthcare Community Plan of Ohio Inc., UnitedHealthcare Community Plan of Texas, UnitedHealthcare Community Plan of Texas L.L.C., UnitedHealthcare Consulting & Assistance Service (Beijing) Co., UnitedHealthcare Consulting & Assistance Service (Beijing) Co. Ltd., UnitedHealthcare Europe S.a r.l., UnitedHealthcare Europe S.a.r.l., UnitedHealthcare Global Canada Limited, UnitedHealthcare Global Medical (UK) Limited, UnitedHealthcare Inc., UnitedHealthcare India Private Limited, UnitedHealthcare Insurance Company, UnitedHealthcare Insurance Company of Illinois, UnitedHealthcare Insurance Company of New York, UnitedHealthcare Insurance Company of the River Valley, UnitedHealthcare Insurance Designated Activity Company, UnitedHealthcare Integrated Services, UnitedHealthcare Integrated Services Inc., UnitedHealthcare International Asia, UnitedHealthcare International Asia LLC, UnitedHealthcare International I B.V., UnitedHealthcare International I S.a.r.l., UnitedHealthcare International II B.V., UnitedHealthcare International II S.a r.l., UnitedHealthcare International II S.a.r.l., UnitedHealthcare International III B.V., UnitedHealthcare International III S.a r.l., UnitedHealthcare International III S.a.r.l., UnitedHealthcare International IV S.a r.l., UnitedHealthcare International IV S.a.r.l., UnitedHealthcare International V S.a.r.l., UnitedHealthcare International VI S.a r.l., UnitedHealthcare International VII S.a r.l., UnitedHealthcare International VIII S.a r.l., UnitedHealthcare International X S.a r.l., UnitedHealthcare Life Insurance Company, UnitedHealthcare Plan of the River Valley, UnitedHealthcare Plan of the River Valley Inc., UnitedHealthcare Service LLC, UnitedHealthcare Services Company of the River Valley, UnitedHealthcare Specialty Benefits, UnitedHealthcare Specialty Benefits LLC, UnitedHealthcare of Alabama, UnitedHealthcare of Alabama Inc., UnitedHealthcare of Arizona, UnitedHealthcare of Arizona Inc., UnitedHealthcare of Arkansas, UnitedHealthcare of Arkansas Inc., UnitedHealthcare of Colorado, UnitedHealthcare of Colorado Inc., UnitedHealthcare of Florida, UnitedHealthcare of Florida Inc., UnitedHealthcare of Georgia, UnitedHealthcare of Georgia Inc., UnitedHealthcare of Illinois, UnitedHealthcare of Illinois Inc., UnitedHealthcare of Kentucky, UnitedHealthcare of Kentucky Ltd., UnitedHealthcare of Louisiana, UnitedHealthcare of Louisiana Inc., UnitedHealthcare of Mississippi, UnitedHealthcare of Mississippi Inc., UnitedHealthcare of New England, UnitedHealthcare of New England Inc., UnitedHealthcare of New Mexico, UnitedHealthcare of New Mexico Inc., UnitedHealthcare of New York, UnitedHealthcare of New York Inc., UnitedHealthcare of North Carolina, UnitedHealthcare of North Carolina Inc., UnitedHealthcare of Ohio, UnitedHealthcare of Ohio Inc., UnitedHealthcare of Oklahoma, UnitedHealthcare of Oklahoma Inc., UnitedHealthcare of Oregon, UnitedHealthcare of Oregon Inc., UnitedHealthcare of Pennsylvania, UnitedHealthcare of Pennsylvania Inc., UnitedHealthcare of South Carolina Inc., UnitedHealthcare of Texas, UnitedHealthcare of Texas Inc., UnitedHealthcare of Utah, UnitedHealthcare of Utah Inc., UnitedHealthcare of Washington, UnitedHealthcare of Washington Inc., UnitedHealthcare of Wisconsin, UnitedHealthcare of Wisconsin Inc., UnitedHealthcare of the Mid-Atlantic, UnitedHealthcare of the Mid-Atlantic Inc., UnitedHealthcare of the Midlands, UnitedHealthcare of the Midlands Inc., UnitedHealthcare of the Midwest, UnitedHealthcare of the Midwest Inc., UpFront Insurance Agency LLC, Upland Holdings LLC, Upland Outpatient Surgical Center L.P., Urgent Care Holdings, Urgent Care Holdings Inc., Urgent Care MSO, Urgent Care MSO LLC, Urology Associates of North Texas, Urology Associates of North Texas P.L.L.C., VERTA MANAGEMENT SERVICES LLC, Valley Hospital L.L.C., Valley Physicians Network, Valley Physicians Network Inc., Vida Tres Internacional S.A., Vidaintegra S.A., Vivify Health Canada Inc., Vivify Health Inc., WESTMED Practice Partners LLC, Wauwatosa Outpatient Surgery Center LLC, Wauwatosa Surgery Center Limited Partnership, Wayland Square Surgicare Acquisition L.P., Wayland Square Surgicare GP Inc., WebInsure Benefits LLC, WellMed Medical Management, WellMed Medical Management Inc., WellMed Medical Management of Florida, WellMed Medical Management of Florida Inc., WellMed Networks  DFW, West Coast Endoscopy Holdings LLC, Western Connecticut Orthopedic Surgical Center LLC, WillowB Labs LLC, Wilmington ASC LLC, Winchester Endoscopy LLC, Winter Park LLC, XLHealth Corporation, XLHealth Corporation India Private Limited, Your Health Options Insurance Services, Your Health Options Insurance Services Inc., Your Partner in Health Services, divvyDOSE, eCode Solutions LLC, gethealthinsurance.com Agency Inc., hCentive Inc., inPharmative, inPharmative Inc., and ppoONE.
Chinese and French designers and scholars gathered to share insights on the relationship between design and branding as well as possible avenues for cooperation between the two countries at the Sino-French Design and Brand Forum, a panel discussion of the 3rd Sino-French Cultural Forum, in Xi'an, Shaanxi province, on Sept. 18.

"Art inspires design and design changes life," said Claire Peillod, director of the Art and Design Institution inSaint Etienne, the French capital of design. At the forum she said that design innovates, experiments and improves people's living conditions and helps to embrace the challenge of industrialization.

Peillod hopes to see more Chinese artists and designers participate in the Biennale Internationale Design Exhibition held in Saint Etienne, the largest of its kind in Europe. A global gala for international designers, the exhibition showcases the latest design trends and offers a B2B platform for the design industry.

"Knowing and understanding each other leads the possible cooperation," she said.

Chinese designers and enterprises hoped to learn from their French counterparts, as France is home to many world-famous brands like Dior, Chanel, Pierre Cardin, and Louis Vuitton with the extensive list expanding every year.

"I am attending this forum hoping to meet and exchange with French experts in design and branding," said Yang Xuetai, director of the Quanzhou Industrial Design Association and a professor with Huaqiao University.

Yang believes a good design helps drive demand and pricing power, essential to developing a robust brand. He took his design for an umbrella company as an example. The new design helped to price each umbrella from the previous 20 yuan to the current 179-299 yuan. As a result, his client saw an annual sales increase of 50 percent.

Yang said Quanzhou, in southeast China's Fujian province, has numerous SMEs that produce life-necessities such as clothes, shoes, umbrellas and zippers. Top designers are in dire need as these enterprises aim to access the global market.

Building brands abroad is still an area where China's giants struggle, especially for brands of luxury goods and cosmetics. Only a few Chinese brands have entered foreign markets by working with intermediaries or foreign designing companies, a way to reduce the risks and cost, rather than direct distribution.

Herborist, a Chinese cosmetics brand, succeeded in Europe 10 years ago by cooperating with Centdegres, a French designing company, which helped Herborist redesign products and packaging from its original historic, traditional and rustic vision, explained Matthieu Rochette-Schneider, general manager of Centdegres China branch, to China.org.cn. Schneider was in Xi'an to attend the 3rd Sino-French Cultural Forum.

Embracing local culture and blending it into the design proves to be an efficient way to entice international customers, said Schneider.

Wu Yiran, executive president of Bonjour Shanghai, said cultural integration and top design could help a brand win global business.

Chow Tai Fook, a Hong Kong-based jewelry retailer, received an olive branch from Galeries Lafayette, who was originally reluctant to allow entry to the brand, after Chow Tai Fook developed a new jewelry brand which was well received by international high-end clients. Wu's company managed to bring Chow Tai Fook top-notch French designers for the new brand that blended the cultural elements of China's Forbidden City and the Palace of Versailles.

"Chinese product should change into 'Chinese design or Chinese brand' in the future," said Yang. He hopes more cooperation can be built up between China and France, through which China's own top designers and brands could seize a share of global market.

Initiated by former French Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin and Chen Zhu, vice chairman of China's National People's Congress Standing Committee and president of the Western Returned Scholars Association, the Sino-French Cultural Forum was first hosted in Beijing in 2016 and the French city of Lyon last year. It has become an exchange platform for culture, arts, education, technology and economic sectors between the two countries.
China's massive O2O service platform Meituan Dianping debuted on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange Thursday with a market value of around US$51 billion.

Following Xiaomi's listing on July 9 this year, Meituan Dianping is the second company to adopt weighted voting rights with dual-class shares. The company floated approximately 480 million shares globally priced at 69 HK dollars each and its stock opened at 72.9 HK dollar per share on the first day of the listing.

Once known as the Chinese equivalents of Groupon and Yelp, Meituan and Dianping merged in 2015 to become a company that sells movie tickets, delivers food, provides hotel and hospitality services and much more. Its latest frontiers are mobility and big data-powered new retail."

During the listing ceremony, Wang Xing, CEO and co-founder of the company, thanked the 340 million users, Meituan Dianping's employees, the investors as well as former Apple head Steve Jobs, saying that "there will be no breakthroughs of the mobile internet and hence the achievement of Meituan Dianping" without the legendary figure's development of the smart phone.

From a startup company to China's largest service-focused e-commerce platform, Meituan Dianping aims to provide a more convenient life for its over 300 million users and has created a new business model for the global service industry, said Shen Nanpeng, founding and managing partner of Sequoia Capital China, which gave A-round investments to both Meituan and Dianping in 2010 and 2006.

The venture capital firm has provided consistent support to the company's growth in financing, prudent judgement on key issues, and the consolidation of human resources.

Shen congratulates Meituan Dianping's achievement and called on the company to move forward from a new starting point.

Meituan Dianping's market value exceeds Chinese tech juggernauts Xiaomi and JD.com, also listed in the Hong Kong Exchange.
Temujin decided to apply to Wolverhampton after attending a university fair in Mongolia and being impressed by the family feel described by the Universitys representative.

He explains: As an international student it was very hard to leave my country, family and friends for the first time. I had to become accustomed to the different culture and custom in the UK. In the end, this was one of the best experiences I have ever had. I truly found myself from living alone and being in an unfamiliar environment.

I was surprised by how much the University really tried to help me. The lecturers at the University of Wolverhampton would always be open for discussion and ready to give advice. The Workplace at the University was also extremely helpful before my training contract interview by providing a mock interview at short notice. There are all sorts of help provided, which really helped me during my studies.

Temujin has these words of wisdom for students following in his footsteps: As cliche as it sounds, never give up on what you want. Although it may seem improbable to achieve, nothing is impossible if you really work hard for it.
The 2018 Summer Davos, held in Tianjin Sept. 18-20, to focus on shaping an innovative society for the fourth industrial revolution, provided an opportunity for some Chinese companies to share their views and experiences in how they have greatly promoted the growth of their respective industries.



Jinko Solar, the world's largest photovoltaic company, is one of these that has been able to achieve growth via green energy. Its Vice President Qian Jing said green infrastructure investment would become the new growth engine of the global economy.



Low-cost solar revolution

Being a low-cost but high-volume producer, Jinko Solar has taken advantage of the potential of this new industry. She said solar energy was one kind of clean energy not restricted by any shrinking availability of natural resources. In recent years, the production cost of solar energy has reduced by 80 percent, so the solar energy is not only clean, but also cheap, Qian added.

On May 31, the Chinese government announced it would suspend most solar subsidies. When talking about the policy, Qian said it could help promote healthy and sustainable development of the photovoltaic industry in the long run.

"The photovoltaic industry will form a mature business model in the next one or two years. From relying on government subsidies to boosting economic development, the green energy industry will become a new growth point for the global economy," she said.

In 2017, the output value of the photovoltaic industry reached US$117 billion in China, creating 2.2 million jobs, and, according to World Bank statistics, the global investment scale will reach US$ 1.5 trillion by 2020.

Innovation drives Jinko Solar to the world

According to Qian, Jinko Solar has become the world's largest solar panel manufacturer, with 80 percent of its operations overseas. It now has more than 30 overseas offices, 4overseas factories, and its products are sold in more than 90 countries.

Qian stressed that innovation was one of crucial factors to help the company go abroad. Driven by the innovation force, production costs will become lower, and the efficiency will be higher, Qian said, adding: The current production cost is only one third of the previous [level].

However, it is also necessary to innovate the company's operations and business model so as to help green investment, finance, and the supply chain achieve improved development.

Seize the opportunities of the Belt and Road Initiative

Qian said that the Belt and Road Initiative is providing more opportunities for photovoltaic companies to invest overseas.

"With poor power infrastructure, low natural energy, high thermal power prices, and abundant sunlight resources in many areas, most of the countries along the Belt and Road are developing countries, becoming ideal places to develop photovoltaics. These places have lacked talent, products, experience, and capital, which gives the private company like Jinko a great opportunity to go abroad, she said.

She cited the example of Jinko Malaysia, which has become the earliest and largest company in the photovoltaic industry to have a 3GW cell capacity and 2.5GW module capacity.

Jinko has also been successful in its bid for the largest independent solar power plant in Latin America, Mexico's 188MW power project. It has also invested in the world's largest independent photovoltaic power project, Abu Dhabi's 1.2GW power plant. There is also further immediate potential exceeding 1GW in the countries along the Belt and Road.

"From global sales, global manufacturing, to global investment, Jinko Solar, as the world's largest photovoltaic company, has always been committed to the development and popularization of photovoltaic power generation in the world, " she stressed.
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China's Tiangong II space laboratory, which has exceeded its designed life span, remains in space and is still able to conduct scientific tasks, according to its developer and a leading expert.

Pang Zhihao, a renowned space industry observer in Beijing, said despite the spacecraft's 24-month designed life span having been reached, it seems to be in good condition and is still carrying out work.

"Tiangong II is now like a large scientific satellite," he said on Wednesday.The China Manned Space Agency said in an article published on Saturday on its WeChat account that the space lab, which was lifted into space on Sept 15, 2016, remains in orbit and is still "unswervingly carrying out its missions". It did not elaborate on the space lab's future agenda or when it would return back to Earth from its orbit nearly 400 kilometers above ground.

Tiangong II has helped to pave the way for China's plans for a manned space station, the agency said.

"In addition to scientific applications, the spacecraft can also perform orbit transfer experiments," Pang said. "Such experiments can help to explore methods of avoiding space debris for our future space station, and also can allow Tiangong II's cameras to take high-definition pictures of Earth."

Pang added that researchers can use the space lab to repeat some tests and experiments on equipment or technologies that will be used on the future space station, further verifying the reliability of the equipment and relevant technologies.

China plans to start putting together its first manned space station around 2020. The space station is expected to be fully operational around 2022 and is set to operate for about 15 years, according to the China Academy of Space Technology.

In 2024, it likely will become the world's only space station if the United States-led International Space Station is retired that year as planned.

The multimodule station, named Tiangong, or Heavenly Palace, will be mainly composed of three partsa core module attached to two space labshaving a combined weight of more than 90 metric tons, the academy said.

Tiangong II was lifted atop a Long March 2F carrier rocket from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in Northwest China's Gobi Desert two years ago. It is 10.4 meters high, 3.35 meters in diameter and weighs 8.6 tons.

Chinese astronauts Jing Haipeng and Chen Dong entered the lab on Oct 19 that year, after their Shenzhou XI spacecraft docked with the lab, and stayed inside for 30 days.

From April to September 2017, Tiangong II and the Tianzhou I cargo spacecraft fulfilled several docking and in-orbit refueling operations, which demonstrated resupply and refueling technologies applicable to the planned manned space station.
Police in Shanghai captured a man suspected of stealing customer information from hotel management company Huazhu Group, the Shanghai Municipal Public Security Bureau said on Wednesday.

The suspect, surnamed Liu, 30, hacked into the hotel operator system to steal customer information. He tried to sell the information on foreign websites but failed, the bureau said on their official Weibo account.

The case is under further investigation and people or organizations that failed to protect internet security will be dealt with according to the law, the bureau said.

In August 2017, nearly 500 million pieces of customer-related information from the hotel operator emerged in an online post, which included customer registration information, personal data and booking records.

The Shanghai-based company operates 18 brands in China.
Experts at the World Conference on Science Literacy called for building a comprehensive STEM education system to inspire Chinese primary and middle school students and foster a critical thinking mindset.

Hu Weiping, professor and director of the key lab of Modern Teaching Technology at Shaanxi Normal University, said an increasing number of companies and schools have been engaged in STEM activitiesmeaning science, technology, engineering and mathematicsbut they tend to focus more on products rather than the young talent.

"Our country's STEM education needs to be systematically designed through a series of efforts, including policymaking, curriculum reform and teaching innovation," he said.

Hu said that even though the National Natural Science Foundation of China has been funding education projects since 2017, projects related to technology or science education are not on the list.

"Without funding there won't be input from scientists or anyone else," Hu said. "That's why I have called on the foundation to start working on this issue, so that more experts will be encouraged to do more research on curriculum reform to stimulate technological innovation."

He also urged schools to inject more STEM content into daily courses instead of extracurricular activities, because some of the most common extracurricular activities, such as making robots or participating in science competitions, don't require individual deep thinking or designing.

"The core aim of school activities should be making students able to think, not making products," he said.

China's STEM education also faces a major challenge with a shortage of both professional science teachers and proper science training for existing teachers. About 80.5 percent of teachers involved in STEM subjects received no serious science education, and many were at a middle or high school education level, Hu said.

Hu also urged Chinese educators to formulate different plans outlining teaching methods and goals that cater to different grades. Key scientific theories and capabilities should be taught through daily lectures, and educators should form an effective teaching method based on projects and evidence that can train students to think critically.

Schools should also set up an evaluation system to assess how students have progressed in scientific literacy, he said.

Ren Youqun, a professor in the educational information and technology department at East China Normal University, also stressed the importance of STEM education as society heads toward a digital future.

He said China's primary and middle schools should integrate more projects and interdisciplinary knowledge into textbooks, and students should improve their problem-solving and teamwork skills.

Ren proposed that the learning process should be thoroughly evaluated, and schools should start setting up innovation laboratories and facilitate an education environment that is applicable to both online and offline teaching scenarios.
Latakia, Syrias major port city and a stronghold of President Bashar al-Assads government, came under a missile attack on Monday, apparently downing a Russian military plane with 14 military personnel aboard.

The strikes came within hours of Russia and Turkey announcing a joint agreement to forestall a Russian-backed government offensive in the northwestern province of Idlib that had threatened to trigger a major Western intervention and a potential confrontation between the worlds two major nuclear powers, the US and Russia.

The state-owned Syrian news agency SANA said that the missile attacks were aimed at the Technical Industries Corporation, which is connected to the Syrian defense ministry and is reportedly involved in the production of missiles.

Syrian government sources said that the attacks came from the Mediterranean Sea, where both the US and Russia have built up naval forces in recent weeks amid rising tensions in Syria.

The missile strikes apparently took place near a major Russian airbase at Hmeymim.

Syrian sources claimed that the countrys air defense systems brought down a number of the missiles, which they said had been fired by Israel. Russian sources attributed the attacks to four F-16 fighter jets that had apparently flown over Lebanon and the Mediterranean to attack the port city.

Israels Jerusalem Post speculated that Russian-Israeli coordination may have been involved. The Russian and Israeli military commands have established close deconfliction ties, and it is widely believed that Israeli strikes on Iranian assets in Syria have been cleared in advance with Moscow.

But there were reports that Russian air defense systems were involved in shooting down the missiles fired at Latakia.

The Russian Defense Ministry also reported that one of its Il-20 aircraft with 14 people aboard had gone off the radar screens during the attack, raising the prospect that it had been shot down by the Israeli warplanes. Personnel at the Hmeymim airbase have organized a search and rescue operation.

Moscow also reported that the French Navy frigate FS Auvergne had fired missiles from the Mediterranean at the same time as the Israeli F-16 strikes.

A Pentagon spokesman, Navy Commander Sean Robertson, told Voice of America that he could unequivocally say this is not us. The US is insisting that a Syrian government anti-aircraft battery was accidentally responsible for bringing down the Russian Il-20.

The strikes were accompanied by a power outage, but there were conflicting reports over whether it was caused by incoming missiles, or the result of a deliberate decision to shut down the electrical system to conceal possible targets. Electricity was restored shortly after the attack.

The attack on Latakia comes just two days after Israel launched airstrikes on the Damascus International Airport, destroying hangars that reportedly contained weapons, as well as, according to some accounts, an Iranian Boeing cargo plane.

Earlier this month an Israeli military official broke with Tel Avivs traditional no comment on strikes against Syria and acknowledged that Israel has struck at least 200 targets over the past 18 months with some 800 munitions. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared on Saturday, just hours after the attack on the Damascus airport, that Israel is enforcing red lines in Syria, that include driving Iranian forces out of the country.

The White House and the Pentagon have enunciated the same foreign policy aim, justifying the permanent presence of US troops, over 2,000 of whom are currently deployed in Syria, in the name not just of combating the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), but of countering Iranian influence in Syria and the wider region.

The strike on Latakia undoubtedly had the support of Washington, whatever the direct role played by US forces, given US interests in keeping the Syrian conflict boiling.

It came in the immediate wake of Mondays meeting in the Russian Black Sea resort city of Sochi between Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan, where the two heads of state announced an agreement to establish a jointly-patrolled demilitarized zone between Syrian government troops and the Western-backed rebels concentrated in Idlib province.

Predominating among these forces is Tahrir al-Sham, a coalition of Islamist militias led by the group formerly known as the Al Nusra Front, Al Qaedas Syrian affiliate.

Putin told a press conference that the agreement provided for the withdrawal from Idlib of all radical fighters, including Al Nusra, and the removal from the demilitarized zone of all heavy weaponry.

Erdogan said that the deal will prevent a humanitarian tragedy that could happen as a result of military action and that the agreement between the two countries would bring hope to the region.

Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoygu told reporters that there would be no offensive against Idlib, which had been predicted as imminent for the past weeks.

Washington and its NATO allies, including France, Britain and Germany, had all threatened a major assault on Syria, invoking supposed plans by Damascus to stage a chemical weapons attack in Idlib. The Russian Defense Ministry, meanwhile, had claimed evidence that the rebels had prepared to stage such an attack by releasing chlorine, thereby providing the pretext for a US-NATO onslaught.

Recent statements from Washington had broadened the threat to include a military response not just to a chemical attack, but to any Russian-backed Syrian offensive that involved civilian casualties. This from a US government whose own operations in Syria and Iraq over the past two years have claimed tens of thousands of lives and turned millions into refugees.

Turkey, meanwhile, had moved its own forces into Idlib, with the daily Hurriyet reporting on Monday that tanks and some 50 military vehicles had crossed the border and headed toward the Jisr al-Shughour region in the south of the province, which had been targeted by Russian and Syrian government airstrikes.

When Putin, Erdogan and Iranian President Hassan Rouhani met in Tehran on September 7, Putin had rejected Erdogans proposal for a ceasefire in Idlib, and both Moscow and Damascus had affirmed their determination to drive Al Nusra out of the province and re-establish government control.

It would appear that, faced with a direct threat that an offensive would lead to a clash with Turkey, a NATO member, and a sustained military assault by the US and its allies, the Putin government decided to seek an accommodation with Ankara.

It is by no means clear how this agreement will be realized, particularly in terms of the separation of the Al Nusra-led forces from the supposedly moderate Islamist militias backed by Ankara. These forces are unlikely to accept relinquishing their human shieldsa term used freely by the US media when talking about Washingtons enemies, but never in relation to its Al Qaeda-linked allies. Reports from Idlib indicate that Al Nusra has set up gallows in the province to hang anyone supporting a peaceful settlement with the Syrian government.

Erdogan, meanwhile, told the press conference in Sochi that the biggest threat to Turkish interests in Syria was the presence of the Syrian Kurdish YPG militia, which serves as the main proxy ground force for the US military in taking control of the countrys strategically important oil fields in the eastern part of the country.

While the agreement in Sochi may have constituted a diplomatic coup for Erdogan, it is by no means viewed in the same light by Washington. The US and Turkey have been at increasing loggerheads over the US alliance with the Syrian Kurds, Erdogans rapprochement with Moscow and the imposition of US sanctions that have deepened Turkeys economic crisis.

Whether Mondays assault on Latakia is only the beginning of a broader US-led escalation of a war of aggression against Syria will become clear over the coming hours and days. What is certain is that the explosive geopolitical conflicts concentrated in the struggle in Syria are threatening to erupt into a far wider regional and even world war.
The distance between the southern edge of the Tengger Desert and the city of Zhongwei in northwest China's Ningxia Hui autonomous region was once just a few kilometers, but it has been expanding over the past several years.

Tengger, the fourth-largest desert in China, is mostly in the Inner Mongolia autonomous region and stretches to parts of Ningxia and Gansu province.

Residents of Zhongwei, who have suffered from desertification and land degradation for decades, said that in the 1950s, when the desert was around 5 kilometers away, even a gentle breeze would blow dust and sand into their homes.

The situation has improved significantly. Desertification is under control and the distance between the desert and Zhongwei has been pushed back to more than 20 kilometers - and a World Bank desertification control project has played an important role.

The Changliushui project started in 2013, with a World Bank loan of 300 million yuan ($44 million) to address desertification and land degradation.

"First, we established straw checkerboards to halt the movement of shifting sand dunes. Then we sowed grass seeds and planted shrubs. Eventually, we turned the desert into an oasis," said Tang Ximing, who is in charge of the project.

The checkerboards are low straw barriers arranged in squares that help block wind and provide some shade.

Lin Xiuxia, 45, a resident of Heilin village, has been making straw checkerboards for more than three years.

"Making straw checkerboards is a laborious and difficult task. Women usually wrap scarves around their faces and heads tightly to avoid sunshine and sand, while men wear straw hats," Lin said.

From March to October, Lin and other residents work around 12 hours per day in the desert. "Sometimes, we need to eat five meals a day, because it requires so much physical effort."

But Lin and her colleagues' hard work has been repaid with a good income and a better living environment.

In the village, more than 200 residents make straw checkerboards. They work not only in Zhongwei but also in Inner Mongolia, the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region and Shaanxi province. The average annual income is around 70,000 yuan per person.

"It's not only a desertification control project. It has become a poverty alleviation project as well," said Tang, adding that the Changliushui project has paid local residents more than 70 million yuan over the past six years.

As the project continues, straw checkerboards placed years ago are now covered by thriving sandy soil plants.

"I was born and grew up in the city. Desertification control is vital to sustain the city's development. We have received assistance from international society; therefore, we should work harder," Tang added.

The 52-year-old invented a seeding machine that can plant seeds in the desert with a higher survival rate and lower labor cost.

The straw-checkerboard mode has prevented the desert from engulfing the city, and the city's environment has become much better.

The project aims to bring 23,000 hectares of the desert under control when it ends in 2019. So far, more than 20,000 hectares have been harnessed.

The Changliushui project is part of the World Bank's desertification control and ecological protection project in Ningxia, one of the most ecologically fragile areas in northwestern China. The region has been struggling with drought, wind and sand, water and soil loss and soil salinity.

Statistics showed that the desertified land in the region reached nearly 3 million hectares in 2012, accounting for 57.2 percent of the total area of the region.

The World Bank approved a loan of $80 million to help control desertification and land degradation in Ningxia. Since 2013, projects covering an area of over 55,000 hectares have been started in Zhongwei, Lingwu, Qingtongxia and Wuzhong cities, as well as Yanchi county.

"Ecologically fragile areas in northwest China are always economically less-developed areas. Introducing international aid programs can obtain supplementary financing for indigenous ecological improvement projects," said Li Zhigang, director of the Ningxia management center for international forestry cooperation projects.

"The significance of the World Bank's project goes beyond ecological benefits. It has also increased local residents' incomes and accelerated social development," Li added.
On Monday, steelworkers at ArcelorMittals plants across the US voted unanimously to strike. In Burns Harbor, Indiana, members of United Steelworkers union (USW) Local 6787 packed the union hall throughout the day. Other locations throughout the US reporting unanimous votes on Monday included Riverdale, Illinois; East Chicago, Indiana; Columbus, Ohio; and Weirton, West Virginia.

The USW declared a unanimous strike authorization vote among members of its 13 locals nationwide Tuesday morning. This follows unanimous strike votes by workers at US Steel earlier this month.

A USW news release announcing the tally stated, although the union would prefer to resolve the outstanding issues without a work stoppage, USW members have delivered a clear message through their overwhelming support of strike authorization.

As was the case with the US Steel vote, the USW has no desire to strike against the corporation. Its intent all along was to use these votes to allow workers to release pent-up anger while the union collaborates with the steel companies to push through another sellout contract.

An estimated 15,000 workers are covered by the contract currently being negotiated with ArcelorMittal. Another 16,000 workers are under the USW contract with Pittsburgh-based US Steel.

ArcelorMittals proposal on September 7 demanded wage cuts, cuts to vacation pay and the elimination of profit-sharing bonuses for newer workers. It also would increase out-of-pocket health care costs, which could cost steelworkers $9,300 over the three years the contract.

Although the company as a whole has increased its earnings over the past three years, ArcelorMittal claims its US operations have not been profitable. Management insists that workers must take cuts for the company to maintain profitability in the face of competition from mini-mills and domestic competitors.

The unanimous strike votes among steelworkers come at a time when workers throughout the US and internationallyteachers, construction, logistics, hotel, transport, energy and autoworkershave displayed increasing militancy in the face of drastic cuts to their living standards and ballooning wealth among the richest layers of society.

Lewis Graff, a steelworker from Indiana, told the Northwest Indiana Times last week, We steelworkers face death, injury and a harsh work environment on a daily basis. Dont cut our healthcare. We need that when we can no longer breathe right from ammonia fumes or other harsh chemicals were inhaling. Dont cut our retirement. Most of us have devoted our entire lives to this mill, we would like to enjoy our last few years outside the plant. Dont cut our pay. We are not the unskilled workers you think us to be. It takes education to run your mills at the capacity they are running.

The dangerous conditions described by Graff were echoed by steelworkers on social media. Commenting on the NWI Times Steel News page, a worker painted a picture of deadly conditions: You climb into pits of sludge in several hundred degrees areas and drag out razor blade sharp straps covered in grease for 8 hrsbust buildup on troughs of 2700 degree iron flowing into ladlesclimb 300 feet with rotten plated stairs and tell us how high the pay is. Watch brothers and sisters die young from cancer and diseases caused by the hazards of the jobs and tell us how our insurance is too good.

There is plenty of money to meet steelworkers demands for higher pay, good health care benefits, safe working conditions, and time off to enjoy leisure with their families. Luxembourg-based ArcelorMittal is the worlds leading steel producer and raked in more than $8 billion in gross profits in 2017. ArcelorMittals CEO and chairman, Lakshmi Mittal, has a net worth of over $17 billion, according to Forbes.com.

The steelworkers who have voted unanimously to strike against these billion-dollar corporations are seeking a way to fight back. But they will not find any means to battle through the USW, which has spent decades collaborating with the steel bosses in the destruction of workers jobs and living standards.

For all of its posturing, the USW has not put forth a single counterproposal since negotiations began in Pittsburgh on July 9. Just days before the strike votes were called for US Steel, the union announced it would keep workers on the job without a new contract past the negotiation deadline of September 1.

During the 2015 contract struggle, the USW opposed any unified struggle by US Steel, ArcelorMittal, and specialty steel producer Allegheny Technologies (ATI). When ATI locked out 2,200 workers, the USW refused to call a strike by ArcelorMittal and US Steel workers to defend them.

The USW forced workers at US Steel and ArcelorMittal to continue to work under dangerous conditions and without a contract for seven months until a sellout deal was reached in the first half of 2016. Steelworkers went back to work to face layoffs, more-dangerous conditions, wage freezes and benefit cuts. The contracts also created lower tiers of workers by expanding the use of contract workers, who have fewer protections and benefits, thereby dividing the unity of the workers in the plants.

The USW claimed concessions were needed to protect their jobs from foreign competition. The USW has long peddled the lie that workers in China and Europe are to blame for steel mill closures and falling living standards. All the while, the USW pushed through concessions contracts that filled the coffers of corporate bank accounts and Wall Street and lined the pockets of the union bureaucracy.

USW President Leo Gerard earned $213,000 in 2015, excluding income from positions on corporate and government boards and Wall Street investments. Gerard is also one of the most vocal supporters of Trumps trade war against China. This vile nationalism is aimed at preventing a unified struggle of metal workers internationally while lining up North American workers for new wars.

The USW has every intention of ignoring the strike mandate by the membership. That is why steelworkers should form rank-and-file committees in every mill and workplace to set a date for an all-out strike by ArcelorMittal, US Steel, ATI and other steelworkers.

At the same time, in every department and shift, workers should elect the most trusted workers to monitor negotiations and report all details to the membership. No backroom deals and sellouts!

These committees, democratically controlled by rank-and-file workers themselves, should outline their own list of demands. These should include:

An immediate 40 percent across-the board raise and restoration of COLA payments.

All health care and pension benefits to be paid for by the company, regardless of labor grade.

A reduction of hours with no reduction in pay.

Workers control over production, including output speed and health and safety.

The committees must link up with other steelworkers across the US and around the world to wage a common struggle against the corporations and the nationalist trade unions. They must coordinate their struggles by joining hands internationally with workers around the world to prepare for a general strike. This must be combined with a political movement to fight for a socialist reorganization of economic life in the US and internationally, including the transformation of the steel industry into a public enterprise collectively owned and democratically controlled by the working class.

We encourage steelworkers interested in a real, fighting perspective and program for the working class to contact the World Socialist Web Site.
A 12-year-old girl, incarcerated in the Australian-controlled refugee detention centre on the small Pacific island nation of Nauru, has made multiple suicide attempts and is at high risk of death if she is not immediately evacuated and taken to Australia.

According to medical professionals and social workers, the child is one of dozens of detainees under the age of 18 who are suffering trauma and at risk of suicide due to their imprisonment on Nauru for up to six yearssince the last Australian Labor government reopened the facility in 2012.

Doctors treating her say the girl is suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder and a major depressive disorder. She is eating practically nothing and has made multiple attempts to kill herself, including dousing herself in petrol and trying to set herself alight. She told a psychiatrist that death is only way to get out of here and it is better being dead than here.

A doctors report filed on September 11 stated that if she does not receive treatment, her physical and mental health are very likely to continue [their] deterioration, with an ongoing high risk of suicide or death secondary to the consequences to dehydration or malnourishment. The doctor recommended that she be moved to an appropriate child and adolescent inpatient facility at the earliest opportunity.

This report was filed after she collapsed and was taken to the hospital in Nauru, only to be discharged a few hours later. The report detailed the need for her to have intravenous fluids and nasogastric feeding if her minimal food intake persists. However, there are no facilities of this nature on Nauru the report warned.

Against the backdrop of the 18-member Pacific Island Forum, which was held on Nauru and concluded on September 5, numerous stories and reports have surfaced on the horrendous conditions facing the roughly 900 detainees still on the island, 109 of whom are children.

Prior to the forum, medical and social workers blew the whistle on the life-threatening medical crisis faced by many of the detainee children on Nauru. Numbers of children were evacuated from the island, only after repeated warnings from health care professionals, and the story was leaked to the Australian media. But the underlying conditions have only worsened since then.

Just before the opening of the forum, the Nauruan government made clear that reports on the plight of the detainees would be suppressed. First, it published a series of tweets claiming that the children were being manipulated into self-harm by some of their families (supported by activists) in a disgusting & tragic political game.

President Baron Waqa reiterated this lie when interviewed by Australias Sky News, stating: We tend to think that these kids are pushed into something that theyre not aware of. Its a way of working the system and probably short circuiting it just to get to Australia.

In the lead up to the forum, Waqas authoritarian regime banned Australian Broadcasting Corporation journalists from attending. Those journalists who were granted visas were explicitly told to report on the Pacific Island Forum and nothing else. This was strictly enforced. When one New Zealand reporter was caught interviewing a refugee she was arrested, questioned for four hours and had her accreditation to cover the event revoked.

Next, the Nauruan government blocked the transfer of a critically ill refugee to Australia for treatment. A senior official said it was not convinced she needed to be transferred. Sources told the media that no such transfers were permitted during the forum so as to not embarrass Nauru.

Backed by Canberra, Waqas dictatorial government has imprisoned and deported all opposition party leaders. The conditions facing the asylum seekers on Nauru are above all the responsibility of successive Australian governments, including the previous Greens-backed Labor administration.

Nauru is a virtual client-state of Australia as a result of decades of imperialist plunder. After the island was discovered to be rich in phosphate reserves, Britain, Australia and New Zealand set about stripping the tiny 21-square-kilometre island, excavating one-third of its land before granting formal independence in 1968.

By the 1980s, the phosphate prices dropped, and the economy was in crisis. By the late 1990s nearly all the phosphate reserves were gone. Nauru was left with unemployment sitting at 90 percent and the once tropical island resembled the surface of the moon, scarred by large rock craters.

Today, virtually no area of the land can produce fresh food. Nearly all the islands food and water comes from imported canned and processed food productsover 92 percent from Australia. The health of those on the island has dramatically deteriorated. Nauru has the highest obesity rate per capita of any country in the world, with 95 percent overweight or obese.

The economic and social crisis facing Nauru was exploited by Australias Howard Liberal-National government in 2001 when it established the refugee prison camp, which came with an increase in financial aid. Labor Prime Minister Kevin Rudd closed the camp in 2008 but was replaced by Julia Gillard who reopened it in 2012. By that time the facilitys revenue amounted to one-fifth of the Nauru economy and in 2013, it became the second highest employer on the island, after the Nauruan government.

While Naurus government presides over the inhumane conditions inflicted on the asylum seeker population, it is obeying the dictates of the Australian political establishment. Both the Labor and Coalition parties are committed to denying the refugees entry to Australia indefinitely, as part of their efforts to scapegoat asylum seekers and immigrants for the worsening working and living conditions of the Australian working class.

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Pacific Islands Forum intensifies anti-China push

[12 September 2018]
Hundreds of Bangladesh readymade garment workers demonstrated outside the national press club and other parts of Dhaka last Friday, a day after the government announced a miserable pay offer from the Minimum Wage Board (MWB). Garment workers have not had their pay increased since 2013. They are demanding minimum monthly pay rates be set at 16,000 taka ($US189.63).

Prime Minister Sheikh Hasinas Awami League-led government established the MWB in January in an attempt to dissipate garment workers anger over their low pay. The tripartite board has representatives from the employers, national trade union federations and the government.

Labour Minister Mujibul Haque told the media last Thursday that the MWB had recommended the monthly pay be raised from 5,300 taka to just 8,000 taka, effective from December. The offer, just half the amount demanded by garment workers, will do nothing to overcome the escalating cost of living. Since 2013, both the general and urban consumer price indexes have risen by a thirdfrom 184.33 to 248.13 and from 180 to 249.31 respectively.

Last Fridays demonstrations, the latest in a series this year, were organised by the Garment Shramik Odhikar Andolan, a platform of 12 labour organisations, as well as the Garment Workers Trade Union Centre (GWTUC), the Movement for Garment Workers Rights (MGWR) and the Garment Workers Front (GWF). Protests were also planned this week, including local actions outside selected factories tomorrow. Another demonstration in front of the national press club is scheduled for September 28. The limited action is an attempt to divert workers demands for national strike action.

Addressing Fridays protest, MGWR coordinator Mahbubur Rahman Ismail denounced the wage boards offer as unrealistic and unfair and said workers would stick to their demand for a 16,000-taka minimum wage. GWF president Ahsan Habib Bulbul proclaimed the new proposal a farce. Mujahidul Islam Selim, president of the Stalinist Communist Party of Bangladesh, said the government had outwitted the workers and they should push for 21,000-taka monthly pay.

This is empty posturing and a crude attempt by the garment unions and labour rights group leaders to cover up their support for the governments MWB. They have consistently sought to block a unified movement of garment workers and other sections of the working class against the Hasina government and for decent wages and safe working conditions.

Garment workers have been fighting for wage increases for at least five years. Some 50,000 garment workers protested in Dhaka in September 2013 and about 150,000 workers from over 20 factories in Ashulia and Savar struck for 10 days in December 2016 to demand higher pay.

Fearing that the 2016 strike would draw in other sections of the working class, the Hasina government ruthlessly attacked garment workers, mobilising its Rapid Action Battalion and Border Guard Bangladesh. About 3,500 workers were sacked and more than 1,500, including union officials, were arrested under the states special powers act. Workers were prosecuted for inciting the agitation, trespassing, vandalism and theft.

Bangladesh is the worlds second largest exporter of readymade garments. The industry employs four million workers, mainly women, who last year produced 83 percent, or $30.6 billion, of the countrys annual export income.

While making huge profits, the garment companies pay the lowest wages in the world. According to a recent survey by the Centre for Policy Dialogue, a Bangladesh think tank, garment workers average income covers only 49.9 percent of their family expenditure. The survey found that poverty has led to falling birth rates among garment workers, with 47 percent of married workers having only one child and 27.8 percent not having any children.

The working conditions and social life of garment workers are harsh and dangerous. In 2013, the Rana Plaza garment factory building at Savar in Dhaka collapsed, killing 1,138 workers and injuring 2,000 others. On July 25 this year, hundreds of garment workers rallied outside the Rana Plaza building, demanding pay rises and punishment of the factory owners responsible for the 2013 disaster. The Hasina government responded by deploying police battalions to disperse the protesters.

Concerned about the growing unrest, the Awami League government, the ruling elite and international investors are encouraging the growth of trade unions in order to pre-empt and derail workers struggles. The Centre for Policy Dialogue survey reported that unions do not exist or are not functioning in 97.5 percent of the countrys garment factories.

On September 2, the government passed the Bangladesh Labour (Amendment) Bill 2018, which reduces the proportion of workers required to establish a legally-recognised union at a factory from 30 percent to 20 percent of the workforce. A European Union delegation is scheduled to visit Bangladesh this month to assess the labour rights situation.

The unionisation push does not stem from any concern for the plight of workers. As occurs internationally, the government and the companies will use corporatist unions to contain and suppress workers opposition and ensure that super-exploitation and massive profits continue.
Ever since the negotiations to form a coalition government in Germany earlier this year, the Sozialistische Gleichheitspartei (SGPSocialist Equality Party) has warned that the grand coalition government comprised of the Christian Democratic Union, Christian Social Union and Social Democratic Party is the product of a conspiracy to implement far-right policies in line with the programme of the fascistic Alternative for Germany (AfD).

This right-wing conspiracy was revealed once again on Tuesday night.

In recent weeks, Hans-Georg Maaen, the head of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV), the German secret service, has been increasingly exposed as a supporter and adviser to the AfD. It emerged that he consulted with the AfD before issuing the BfVs annual security report. Then, following the neo-fascist riot last month in Chemnitz, in which ultra-right demonstrators were videotaped hunting down and attacking people they presumed to be immigrants, Maaen publicly defended the rioters and cast doubt on the authenticity of the damning videos.

This provoked mass protests demanding that Maaen be forced to resign. Tens of thousands gathered in several cities to oppose the right-wing xenophobic agitation and the support given it by Maaen and Interior Minister Horst Seehofer, the leader of the Christian Social Union (CSU). In Chemnitz, 70,000 people took part in a rock against the right wing concert. Under these conditions, the Social Democrats (SPD) declared that Maaen was no longer acceptable as BfV president and demanded he be fired.

However, Seehofer publicly backed Maaen, declaring that his ministry was responsible for overseeing the secret service.

The coalition committee met Tuesday evening under the auspices of the three party leaders and agreed that Maaen would be replaced as BfV president. However, far from being dismissed, he would be given a position as state secretary in Seehofers Interior Ministry.

Maaen was not fired, he was given a promotion. He now holds a high position in the ministry that has powers of oversight and direction of the BfV. The coalition leaders declared that Maaen would not be responsible for overseeing the BfV in his new post, but Seehofer made clear the worthlessness of this claim by stating repeatedly that he valued Maaens work as a leading political official.

The indications are that Maaen will function as Seehofers right-hand man. He will receive a much higher salary as a state secretary than he did as head of the BfV.

It remains unclear who will take over as head of the secret service. However, it is likely that a current state secretary in the Interior Ministry will move to the BfV to complete the musical chairs maneuver, removing the domestic intelligence service from the firing line and strengthening it.

The German government has responded to the protests against the AfD and its neo-fascist provocations by shifting further to the right. The grand coalition is integrating the hated secret service president and his pro-AfD policy more directly into the government and attempting to cover up the right-wing conspiracy that has long been under way in the BfV by installing a new leadership.

The SPD is playing a key role in this operation. With Maaens promotion to state secretary, the SPD has demonstrated that its demand for his firing and its threat to withdraw from the coalition was pure theatre. The SPD is celebrating the elevation of Maaen within the state apparatus as a victory.

In reality, it wanted to avoid a new election at all costs. This was due not only to its fear of losing further support, but also because it did not want to hold an election in a situation where tens of thousands of people are taking to the streets each weekend to protest against the far-right and a powerful mass opposition to the grand coalitions right-wing policies is developing.

It was not for nothing that the SPD negotiated for months behind closed doors to bring about the coalition, thereby making the AfD the official opposition in parliament and granting it political legitimacy and greater prominence.

In almost all areas, the new governments policies conform to the AfDs right-wing extremist politics. The coalition agreed on the doubling of the defence budget to make it the largest military budget since World War II. Seehofers masterplan, adopted by the grand coalition, included a major expansion of deportation and internment camps for refugees. At the same time, the police state infrastructure is being strengthened.

The AfD has been fully integrated into parliamentary work by the SPD, in particular. As the new parliament was being constituted, the SPD demanded a collegial approach to the AfD. Stefan Brandner, a leading AfD politician, has the SPD to thank for his appointment as chairman of the parliamentary judicial committee. It was Thomas Oppermann, the SPD vice president of parliament, who proposed Brandner, a representative of the volkish-nationalist wing of the AfD and close ally of the right-wing extremist Bjorn Hocke.

The connection between the government and the AfD was clearest of all in the secret service. Maaen met with leading AfD politicians on numerous occasions and discussed his agencys plans with them, even though these plans were considered state secrets.

Brandner has confirmed that Maaen spoke with him about this years secret service report. Neither the AfD, nor its neo-fascist wing, nor numerous other right-wing extremist groups are mentioned in the report. Instead, organizations that oppose the right-wing extremists are labeled left-wing extremists. For the first time, the SGP is declared to be left-wing extremist because of its opposition to capitalism and nationalism, according to the report.

Maaen used the secret service to politically strengthen the AfD and the most right-wing circles in Germany. He is now being rewarded accordingly.

He took over as head of the BfV in the summer of 2012, when the intelligence agency was in deep crisis. Nine months earlier, news about the right-wing terrorist cell National Socialist Underground came to light. Many agents of the secret service were active in its milieu. The BfV subsequently shredded a large number of files. Heinz Fromm, Maaens predecessor, was forced out as a result of the scandal.

Maaen did not put a halt to ties with far-right extremist groups, but strengthened them. In early 2015, he filed criminal charges against two journalists from the blog Netzpolitik.org. He thus initiated a clampdown on freedom of speech while at the same time establishing close ties with the AfD.

It became clear this summer that the BfV was much more involved in the terrorist attack in Berlin in December 2016 than had previously been known. There is much to suggest that the attack was aimed at creating an atmosphere of fear at the beginning of an election year, so as to strengthen the AfD.

With its decision to promote Maaen, the grand coalition is giving its backing to the right-wing networks in the secret service and leaving no doubt about the character of the current government.

The SGP therefore demands the dissolution of the BfV and the immediate holding of new elections. The vast majority of the population opposes the governments right-wing policies, which were negotiated behind closed doors by the losers of last years election.

The SGP is doing everything in its power to mobilise the only social force capable of halting the right-wing, authoritarian and militarist policies of the ruling class and all of its partiesthe international working class. This requires a socialist perspective.

Our demands are:

Stop the conspiracy of the grand coalition, the state apparatus and right-wing extremists!

No more war! Stop Germanys return to a militarist great power policy!

Dissolve the secret service! An immediate halt to the surveillance of the SGP and other left-wing organizations!

Defend the right to asylum! No to the militarisation of the state! No to surveillance!

End poverty and exploitationfor social equality! Expropriate the super-wealthy and place the banks and corporations under public ownership and democratic control!
Last month, Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn gave the Alternative MacTaggart lecture to the annual Edinburgh International Television Festival addressing the condition of Britains media. His remarks underscore that, on the most pressing democratic issues of the daycorporate control of the media and growing censorshipLabour will do nothing.

Figures from the European Broadcasting Union show that the British people simply dont trust the media, Corbyn reported. The UK has the least trusted press in Europe, including non-EU countries like North Macedonia and Serbia most of our citizens think our newspapers churn out fake news day in, day out.

This extraordinary level of mistrust is rooted in vast disconnect between the official media and the reality of conditions for working people. Many understand that the real source of fake news is not Russian meddling, as is usually claimed, but the official media itself, which functions as little more than the propaganda department of the government and the financial oligarchyas was made all too plain by its response to the Grenfell Tower fire.

Corbyn presented statistics and details to back this up. Noting that just three companies control 71 percent of national newspaper circulation and five companies control 81 percent of local newspaper circulation, he said this showed how the unhealthy sway of a few corporations and billionaires shapes and skews the priorities and world-view of a powerful section of the media.

Far too few people have a grip on most of the power and it seems like our current system is making that situation worse, he went on, raising the real and present danger that a few tech giants and unaccountable billionaires will control huge swathes of our public space and discourse, with companies like Apple and Google controlling online news services and smart phone software.

The Labour leader knows of what he speaks. For months now he has been the target of a McCarthyite witch-huntco-ordinated between the official media, Tories, right-wing Labour MPs and the military-intelligence establishmentslandering him and his supporters as anti-Semites, racists and even neo-Nazis due to his criticisms of Israel, capitalism and militarism.

The aim is not only to prevent the possibility of a Corbyn-led government, which they fear will embolden workers and youth in their opposition to austerity and war, but to justify a clamp-down against the leftespecially socialists.

Amongst the millions who recognise this campaign for the political conspiracy it is, Corbyns insistence that we must break the stranglehold of elite power and billionaire domination will have struck a welcome chord. So too will his claim to be advancing big, bold, radical principles to ensure the media serves the interests of the many, not the few, as part of a strategy for socialism in the 21st century.

None of this was present in the small print of his remarks, however. There was not a single proposal for even minimal inroads against the corporate oligarchys domination of the media, let alone calls to nationalise the media corporations under the democratic control of the working classan essential pre-requisite for any socialist society worthy of the name.

All that was on offer was the possibility that grants, tax benefits and alternative ownership models, such as co-operatives, could counteract the malignant stranglehold of the official media and supposedly increase their accountability. As if a windfall tax on the media and tech monopolieseven if it were accepted by the likes of Rupert Murdoch, Jeff Bezos, et alwould change anything fundamentally.

Corbyn lauded the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) as a national treasure and beacon for driving up standards in the media. The BBC is popularly known as the British Bias Corporation and for good reason. Not only has it played a lead role in the bogus anti-Semitism witch-hunt, through the overwhelming preponderance of its coverage the BBC has reinforced the drum beat for military conflict with Russia and helped portray the imperialist powers proxy war in Syria as a humanitarian intervention against the Assad regime.

In the aftermath of the 2003 US/UK led war against Iraq, two separate studies--including one by Professor Justin Lewis, Dr. Rod Brookes and Kirsten Brander of the Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies department of Cardiff University--found that the BBC was the least anti-war in its news reports, even when compared with Rupert Murdochs Sky. As the official voice of British imperialism, it is regarded by the ruling elite as a vital instrument of its soft power on the world stage, thanks to the broad reach of the BBC World Service and the international sales of its media productions.

But the only change the Labour leader required of the BBC was that it employ gender and ethnic employment quotas.

Corbyns only concrete proposal was for the creation of a new sister organisation to BBC, the British Digital Corporation (BDC)that would use new technology and be integrated with state bodies to be set up by a future Labour government, such as its proposed National Investment Bank. The new BDC could involve a state-run social media system to rival Facebook and similar platforms.

This would effectively buttress the role of the BBC as state propagandist and strengthen state control over social media. But this Orwellian vision was packaged as enabling mass participatory democracy, facilitating audience polling on content commissioning and public access to difficult-to-access information such as that contained in public archives and museums.

Most glaring of all in Corbyns lecture was what he did not say. He was silent on the imposition of internet censorship by the big tech companies such as Google and Facebook, working hand-in-glove with governments and the military-intelligence complex, to suppress left-wing and anti-war viewpoints.

While he made reference to the courageous example of those journalists speaking out in defence of the truth, he made no mention at all of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, the most famous and egregious of the victims of state intimidation and censorship.

For more than six years, Assange has been holed up in a single room in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London for exposing war crimes and other nefarious activities of the US and its allies. He was forced to take refuge there in the face of trumped-up charges of sexual assault, aimed at justifying his extradition to the US where he faces a grand jury indictment and possible death penalty.

Assanges health has severely deteriorated as a result, and he now faces a conspiracy by the US and the British and Ecuadorian governments aimed at ejecting him from the embassy, as a prelude to his arrest.

If Corbyn was in any way serious about the need to speak truth to power against a corrupt and powerful media, he would have used his platform to denounce Assanges treatment, demand his immediate release and to pledge Labours guarantee for his safe-passage to Australia or a country of his choosing.

But Corbyn, who has made no statement in defence of Assange since he became Labour leader in 2015, said nothing.

His silence on the implications for democratic rights of Assanges treatment and the growth of internet censorship is damning. In every country, state censorship of social media is developing apace because it facilitates the co-ordination of political opposition by workers and youth against the powers-that-be.

The implications were outlined by former BBC news director James Harding, cited by Corbyn as the inspiration for his BDC proposals, in a speech last March. Complaining that new media is remaking our politics in ways we didnt expect, nor fully understand, Harding said: The tech companies face a stark, but obvious choice. Either they are going to set new standards by which they operate or their future will be decided for them. They should delete or demote dangerous information online...

Lets not underestimate the power of the state, Harding went on. If it wants to require companies to behave in the public interest and sustain our system of democracy, it can.

Corbyns own prescriptions for a supposedly, better, nicer form of state- and corporate-based media are bound up with his political agenda. He ascribes all the ills in society not to capitalism as a system of class exploitation but to mistaken government policies that are damaging an otherwise healthy economic set-up, and which the Labour Party can remedy through sensible measures in government.

But Labour is hostile to even such minimal tinkering with the neo-liberal order, as shown by the fact that that the majority of its MPs are openly conspiring against Corbyn and his supporters. Nonetheless, Corbyn continues to maintain that party unity is his priority.

Asked about the media campaign against him, Corbyn responded: Some of the daily papers have been fairly unkind about me in the past few weeks, but thats OK, I sleep well at night. While many of their claims are grotesquely unfair or deeply inaccurate, he has faith that the Labour Party media team deals with stories that are frankly not correct. He claimed that the slurs were all part of free debate in a vibrant democracy.

Corbyns platitudes are utterly absurd in the face of the grave dangers to democratic rights by the continued domination of the media by the state and corporate elite. Breaking their stranglehold requires the expropriation and nationalisation of the media under the democratic control of working people. And this is possible only through a workers government committed to socialist policies, which is the antithesis of the policy held out by Corbyn and the pro-capitalist party he heads.
On Monday, the Russian Ministry of Defence revealed new details in the shoot-down near Donetsk in eastern Ukraine of a Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 (MH17) flying from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur on July 17, 2014. The crash killed all 298 passengers and crew on board. The Russian Defence Ministry used serial number data to show that the missile that hit the jetliner was produced in 1986, before the Stalinist dissolution of the Soviet Union. It was held by the Ukrainian army.

Just after the crash, Washington and NATO, backed by the Western media, accused Moscow and pro-Russian separatist forces in eastern Ukraine of shooting down MH17. US ambassador to the UN Samantha Power blamed Moscow for downing the flight, stating that there was credible evidence that Russia was responsible for the crash. They did not, however, give any hard evidence implicating Moscow.

NATO then stoked an explosive war hysteria targeting Russia and built up its military forces across eastern Europe. It was less than six months after the US-orchestrated, fascist-led coup in February 2014 that toppled pro-Russian Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych in Kiev, and installed the far right in power. US and European media denounced Russian President Vladimir Putin as being personally responsible for the shoot-down, with Germanys Der Spiegel declaring that the time for diplomacy with Russia was over: The wreckage of MH17 is the wreckage of diplomacy.

Using data provided by the Ukrainian regime, which obtained veto power over the investigation, the Europol-affiliated Joint Investigation Team (JIT) blamed the crash on Moscow. In May, it concluded that the MH17 was shot down over eastern Ukraine by a Russian-made Buk missile, supplied by Russias 53rd anti-aircraft brigade in Kursk. Wilbert Paulissen, a Dutch JIT investigator, said: All the vehicles transporting missiles were part of the Russian armed forces.

Now, however, using the serial numbers provided by the JIT, Moscow has given damning evidence that this missile was in fact under the Kiev regimes control as it shot down MH17. This refutes NATO charges that Moscow shot down the jetcharges that NATO used to justify a massive military build-up in eastern Europe, on the borders of Russia.

According to the JIT, two serial numbers were found on fragments of the missile, one on the nose, and the other on the craft itself. The JIT claimed that MH17 was shot down by a 9M38-series missile from a Buk missile launcher and that the missile was manufactured in 1986; it also provided the serial number 9032 for the missiles rocket motor.

Russian officials claimed to have linked these identification numbers to a missile bearing serial number 8868720. It said that the missile was delivered to Ukraine and never sent back to Russia. In a media briefing, Nikolai Parshin, the head of the Main Missile and Artillery Directorate, said: So the missile...on December 29, 1986, was sent by rail to the military unit 20152. It is well known that the missile was received by the military unit.

The unit is stationed on Ukraines western borders, according to Parshinthat is, in territory securely held by the NATO-backed regime: Separately, I will mention the military unit 20152, where the missile with the number 886847349 was put, its real name is 221 anti-aircraft missile brigade. ... By the decree of the president of Ukraine this unit was renamed into 223 anti-aircraft missile regiment. Currently, this unit is located in the city of Stryi of the Lviv region, they still have the Buk systems.

The Russian Ministry of Defence said that the documentation for the Buk missile that brought down MH17 is still stored at the Dolgoprudny plant where it was built, and announced that it had sent declassified documents on the missile to the JIT. Parshin explained, This is a set of technical documentation that is filled at the manufacturing plant for each manufactured product and stored there, regardless of whether it is in Russia or abroad. Among the documents presented to you is a passport for the nozzle cluster 9D13105000 No. 8-30-113.

Moscow stated that the anti-aircraft missile regiment that received the Buk missile that shot down MH17 was involved in what Kiev called an anti-terrorist operation, against Russian-backed rebels of the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Lugansk Peoples Republics. Parshin added, It is noteworthy that units of the 223 regiment, since 2014, have repeatedly been involved in the so-called anti-terror operation in Donetsk and Lugansk regions.

This would have placed the battery in the region of Ukraine where MH17 was shot down. It bolsters Moscows previous charges that Ukrainian forces brought down the jetliner.

In response to the Russian revelation, the JIT said it would meticulously study its information as soon as it was made available. It also claimed it had always carefully analysed information provided by Russia, and found that information previously presented to the public and provided to the JIT was factually inaccurate on several points. However, JIT did not try to rebut the Russian evidence or provide evidence to prove its supposed inaccuracy.

Ukraines Defence Minister Stepan Poltorak dismissed Russias claims as another fake story.

These events cast a cold light on Russias post-Soviet capitalist oligarchys accommodation to Western imperialism. Unwilling and incapable of appealing to anti-war sentiment in the US and European working class, it oscillates between preparing for nuclear war and trying to work out a deal with what it calls its Western partners, all the while giving evidence implicating these partners in criminal provocations against Russia.

Nevertheless, a striking difference exists between Moscows charges and the hysterical campaign mounted by the NATO powers four years ago to justify a reckless military build-up on the borders of Russia. While Moscow presents evidence to back its claims, NATO issues blanket accusations based only on the say-so of US and European intelligence agencies.

Ever since a US-led coalition invaded Iraq in 2003, claiming that they were invading in order to destroy Iraqi weapons of mass destruction that did not in fact exist, Washington and its European allies have been infamous for launching wars and military campaigns based on lies.

Now, it appears the NATO escalation in eastern Europe was similarly based on lies. Claims that only Russia has Buk missiles, and that identifying the missile that brought down MH17 as a Buk in and of itself proved Russian responsibility for the crash, were false. Yet they were used to justify a military build-up that left Europe teetering on the brink of total war with nuclear-armed Russia, as French President Francois Hollande remarked in 2015.

The JIT neither released data from MH17s black boxtaken from Malaysian authorities after the crash and sent to Britainnor radar data on eastern Ukraine provided by Moscow. Nor did it publish US radar and satellite data on the area. Instead, it relied on wiretaps, photos and brief videos posted by unidentified users to Ukrainian social media and apparently collected by Ukrainian intelligence.

The Russian Ministry of Defence also charged that a video showing Russias Buk system in Ukraine is a doctored animation based on one photo. The images of a tractor, a trailer, and a Buk were built into the image of the corresponding section of the motor road during the production of this video. ... Many signs of falsification of the video recording were also revealed in an episode showing the movement of the Buk in Lugansk, it reported.

The author also recommends:

Are you ready for nuclear war?

[30 July 2014]
Leading members of Anticapitalistas, a Pabloite faction within Spains Podemos party, have written an article criticising the embrace by top advisers of Podemos General Secretary Pablo Iglesias of the Italian government led by Matteo Salvinis far-right Lega party. They are concerned that such a line will expose them to criticisms from the left, amid growing strike action in the working class.

After long-standing Stalinists Hector Illueca, Manuel Monereo and Julio Anguita posted an article titled Fascism in Italy? Dignity Decree, the Pabloites responded with a piece titled Dignity Decree: Fascism in Italy? A reply. The authors are leaders of Anticapitalistas, European parliamentarian Miguel Urban and the editor of the Pabloite magazine Viento Sur, Brais Fernandez.

The Illueca-Monereo-Anguita piece hails the Italian neo-fascists Dignity Decree as a turning point in the social policies applied in Italy since the eruption of neoliberalism and a remarkable effort to defend the Italian people against the lords of finance. The Stalinist trio are silent on Romes austerity policies, military intervention in Libya, the terror campaign against the Roma and refugees, and its threat to deport 500,000 immigrants, a move which would require putting much of Italy under martial law.

In their friendly reply to the Stalinist writers, the Pabloites Urban and Fernandez criticise the three heavyweights of the Spanish left for incorrectly analysing the Salvini government. They write that suddenly, through an analysis of the dignity decree that is unrelated to the broader programme of the current Italian government, the final conclusion suddenly appears: the Italian government is not a fascist government. This conclusion, in that form, may be correct.

However, they write, It is fundamental to understand the economic and social policy of a government by analysing the whole of its drift, not to present a measure in isolation and in part. This isolationist method prevents us, among other things, thinking of our own political project ... The left would limit itself to an observer position in which it supports, rejects, or criticizes the initiatives of capitalist governments.

The Anticapitalistas do not condemn Illueca, Monereo and Anguita for endorsing the far right. The Stalinist trio have made very clear that broad factions of Podemos can support far-right policies. Rather, they fear that that the emergence of explicit support for neo-fascists in Podemos will expose it to criticism on its left, namely, that Podemos simply offers tactical support or criticisms to parties trying to build far-right, militarist police states targeting the working class.

This criticism is bankrupt and unprincipled, and the opposition of Anticapitalistas to the growing support for neo-fascism in the leadership of Podemos is deeply cynical. While they accuse their Stalinist allies of whitewashing the Italian neo-fascists, they approve the public support given by Podemos to Spains Socialist Party (PSOE) government, which, no less than Salvini, is building a police-state regime aimed at the working class.

In its first 100 days, the PSOE government, put into power by Podemos in a confidence vote, has passed the austerity budget of the previous right-wing Popular Party government, maintained its massive defence budget increase, and sold precision bombs to the Saudi Arabian regime in its genocidal war on the Yemeni population.

At the same time, it has continued the police-state clampdown on the Catalan nationalists under the fraudulent charge that they attempted to violently overthrow the state during last Octobers Catalan independence referendum. The PSOE is also maintaining its predecessors law on public security, known as the gag law. It curtails freedom of speech, prohibits mass gatherings and imposes fines for protests and comments on social media.

On migration, the PSOE has deepened its predecessors reactionary policies. It is summarily deporting migrants, a practice condemned by the European Court of Human Rights and the UN, and backing Moroccos crackdown on thousands of migrants trying to enter Europe through Spains North African enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla, and by boat across the Mediterranean Sea. The raids by Moroccan security forces have so far left two young people dead.

The PSOEs ultra-reactionary policies, significantly, also end up strengthening Salvini. He recently used it to mock criticisms of his mass deportations of migrants, saying: If Spain does it its okay, but when I propose it then Im inhumane and a racist and a fascist.

If various factions of Podemos are now backing reactionary regimes in Italy and in Spain itself, including far-right forces, it is because its political personnel are drawn from sections of the affluent middle class indifferent to democratic rights and hostile to the working class. These forces themselves are now compelled to admit that there is growing support for far-right and fascistic nationalism within their own ranks.

Urban and Fernandez state that it is urgent to open a debate in the left on the shock over the rise of the far-right at a global level. This is because it seems there are sectors on the left with a certain fascination for the themes of the far right: protectionism, national sovereignty and anti-migration policies. This leads the most favourable approach to the development of an emancipatory project to progressively disappear: less and less is said about democracy, wealth redistribution through the expropriation of large companies and the expansion of rights, and more on the issues proposed by the extreme right.

In fact, Podemos has emerged as one of the most fervent proponents of national chauvinism. The fascination of Iglesias for patriotism and Spanish nationalism is well known, as his flirtations with neo-fascism through his political associate Jorge Verstrynge, an admirer of Frances National Front.

The Pabloites nationalist position in this debate is deeply rooted in their political DNA. They split with the International Committee of the Fourth International and Trotskyism in 1953 on the demoralized and reactionary grounds that one had to subordinate all organisational considerations, of formal independence or otherwise, to real integration into the mass movement, i.e., those led by Stalinist and bourgeois-nationalist forces. According to the Pabloites, these forces, not the working class led by the Fourth International, would lead the revolutionary struggle for centuries to come.

This anti-Trotskyist position was rapidly exposed, including within Spain itself. When the fascist regime created by Generalissimo Francisco Francos victory in the 1936-1939 Spanish Civil War collapsed amid rising strikes and workers struggles in the 1970s, the Stalinists sought to block a revolution and negotiate a transition to parliamentary rule and an amnesty for the Francoites. Based on their counterrevolutionary perspective, the Pabloites backed this collaboration between the Communist Party, the PSOE and the fascist right.

Forty years after the 1978 Transition from Francoite to parliamentary rule, Spanish and world capitalism are passing through the deepest political and economic crisis since the 1930s. In the face of the social disintegration that followed the 2008 Wall Street crash in Spain, the Stalinist and Pabloite elements came together to form Podemos in 2014. Theoretically rooted in a postmodernist rejection of both Marxism and the revolutionary role of the working class, they aimed to shore up the post-1978 order, as their support from Podemos for the PSOE government makes clear.

A year later, in January 2015, during the II Congress of Anticapitalistas, the Pabloites announced they were dissolving their party into Podemos because it was the only electoral instrument for the working social majority, which aims to be the tool that allows building a government at the service of the people below.

The political crisis has rapidly outstripped the political manoeuvres and illusions of the petty-bourgeois founders of Podemos, however. Three years later, they are confessing that they are shocked by the bourgeoisies turn to far-right politics and react by debating whether they themselves want to adopt xenophobic and nationalist policies.
On Monday, the Trump administration announced it will be setting the cap on the number of refugees allowed into United States in the fiscal year 2019 at 30,000. This marks a record low for the 43-year old refugee resettlement program, following the earlier historic low in 2018 of just 45,000 refugees, already less than half of the cap of 115,000 in 2017. As of now, with less than two weeks to go before the end of the fiscal year, the United States is on track to admit less than 21,000 refugees.

The US is drastically reducing its refugee intake at a time when the United Nations has reported an all-time high of more than 68 million displaced people, including 25 million refugees. A majority of refugees come from Syria, Afghanistan and South Sudan. As of this year, it is reported that nearly 5 million Syrians live as refugees in neighboring countries, such as Lebanon and Turkey. In 2018, the United States accepted just 60 Syrian refugees, and is on track to admit 744 Afghans and 12 South Sudanese.

Announcing the new limit on Monday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo defended the administrations position, citing Americas generosity in providing billions of dollars in aid and claiming that most refugees in any case prefer to stay closer to their home countries rather than come to America. Pompeo also cynically declared that it was more important to end conflicts than accept new refugees.

Given the role of American imperialism in destabilizing the Middle East and stoking the ongoing conflicts in Syria and Afghanistan, such statements can only be treated with absolute contempt. The callousness of reducing refugee resettlement caps at a time of increasing and acute global need has absolutely nothing to do with vague claims of generosity or concern for where refugees would like to be resettled. This is in fact yet another step in Trumps racist war against immigrants that is being waged with increasing brutality.

Trying to present the reduction as a positive measure, Pompeo declared that the administration would use resources freed up from refugee resettlement to facilitate the asylum adjudication process. As of now, there are nearly 800,000 asylum seekers in the United States whose applications have not been processed. The Trump administration claims it will process 280,000 applications in 2019.

Rather than let in more people, Pompeo stated the government would focus on those who were already in the country in consideration of both US national security interests and the urgent need to restore integrity to our overwhelmed asylum system...The ultimate goal is the best possible care and safety of these people in need, and our approach is designed to achieve this noble objective...We are and continue to be the most generous nation in the world.

The correlation that Pompeo and supporters of the Trump administration seek to make between refugees and asylum seekers is a false equivalence. The main commonality between the two groups is that they are comprised largely of working class men and women who have been driven from their homes due to war, violence and brutal poverty. However, as legal categories, these are very distinct groups. Refugees are those whose applications are vetted and who are granted admission to a country while abroad, whereas asylum seekers are those who enter the country prior to making an application. Unlike with refugees, there is no official cap on asylum seekers.

In the United States, the resources and funding for the two streams of immigrants has historically been distinct. While the State Department handles refugee admissions, the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Justice process asylum applications. However, hardliners in the Trump administration, foremost the fascistic senior policy advisor Stephen Miller, have consistently tried to link the two within a broader anti-immigrant framework.

Asylum seekers in the United States are primarily from Central and South Americathe undocumented migrants who have been the primary targets of the cruel and inhumane immigration regime that is taking shape under the Trump administration.

In his prepared statement to the press, Pompeo said that the 30,000 cap must be considered in the context of the many other forms of protection and assistance offered by the United States, and that while some would categorize the refugee ceiling as the sole barometer of America's commitment to vulnerable people around the world, that would be wrong."

The irony of Pompeos statement is hard to miss. The Trump administration has systematically undermined most of the existing forms of protections and assistance for vulnerable populations at all levels.

In addition to all its other well-documented attacks, the administration has also narrowed the definition of who qualifies for asylum, going so far as to curtail the Temporary Protected Status program for over 428,000 immigrants from El Salvador, Haiti, Honduras, Nepal, Nicaragua, and Sudan. Given this, to claim that reducing the number of refugees allowed into the country will help facilitate better treatment of asylum seekers is an outright lie.

While the lowering of the cap on refugees may not be the sole barometer, it definitely underscores the administrations commitment to the ongoing war on immigrants and the working class as a whole.
Wang Ke, a professor from Southeast University in Nanjing, Jiangsu province, won applause online for keeping his promise to students by traveling 737 kilometers by taxi in heavy rain brought by Super Typhoon Mangkhut to make it to class on time.

Wang was in Guangzhou, Guangdong province visiting friends when the typhoon hit on Sunday. He planned to go back to Nanjing by plane on Sunday morning, but found that airports, high-speed railways and buses had all been shut down because of the extreme weather.

"I had worked and lived in Fujian, a province often hit by summer typhoons, for 13 years and was familiar with them," Wang said. "But I didn't expect Typhoon Mangkhut would be this strong. I thought I could leave Guangzhou in the morning before the storm landed in the afternoon."

Wang thought about taking a taxi to the nearby airport in Changsha, Hunan province, but few taxi drivers wanted to go out of the city in the wind and rain.

"I was lucky to find a driver for a ride-hailing service who was brave. He found a friend and the two took turns driving the taxi."

On their way to the Changsha airport, they found that many highways with speed limits of 120 kilometers per hour had been closed, so they had to take provincial-level highways at 60 to 80 km/h.

"It was quite an experience," Wang said. "The traffic lights swayed in the fierce wind. We saw many trees blown down or broken. We could feel that sometimes the car was drifting. It was like taking a boat in the ocean."

Sometimes they had to drive at 20 km/h. After 13 hours, they arrived at the Changsha airport at 0:20 am.

Wang paid 4,600 yuan ($670) to the two drivers and thanked them. He caught a flight and completed his 23-hour journey back to Nanjing, managing to arrive at the university in time.

"It's not because I have high moral standards," said Wang. "I just thought that the students' schedule shouldn't be changed because of me."

"My parents were also teachers. My father jumped into floodwaters to save the lives of three students, and my mother used to take good care of a physically challenged student for years. I learned from them that teachers should value and care about their students."

According to Southeast University, Wang hasn't been responsible for a schedule change in 28 years.
It Floated From Myrtle Beach All the Way to Ireland
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A national decoration industry association is drafting a standard for rental apartments to improve indoor air quality to protect people's health.

The move came after a tenant in Hangzhou, Zhejiang province, died of leukemia in July, about three months after moving into a new apartment rented through the app Ziroom.

The incident flagged concerns about poor air quality in newly refurbished apartments listed by Ziroom, which handles at least 400,000 rooms and serves more than 1 million tenants in China.

Drafted by the China Building Decoration Association, the regulations are expected to be released early next year, said Yang Chunyu, secretary-general of the Residential Leasing Industry Branch of the association.

Yang said the technical regulations will lay down a unified standard for long-term and short-term rental apartments as well as shared office space. It will specify requirements for carcinogenic chemicals released by paints and varnishes, including formaldehyde, he said.

Yang said the Ziroom incident has had a negative influence not only on the rental business but also on decoration companies and has restricted their development.

"Air pollution is a tough problem for the entire decoration industry. ... There is an urgent need to formulate industry standards," he said.

At present, air testing in the industry goes by national standards. Levels of indoor formaldehyde should not exceed 0.1 mg per cubic meter, but a few companies rent out newly renovated apartments before they are qualified, he said.

Sun Chenxiao, who entrusted Ziroom with managing his apartments last year, completed a makeover for his apartment in less than 20 days and a tenant moved in almost immediately.

"With such a high turnover rate, the formaldehyde level in the property could be excessive," he said.

Zhang Dawei, chief analyst at Centaline Property Agency, said Ziroom aggregates scattered rental stock owned by individual landlords and then reconfigures and remodels them before renting out the refurbished homes.

Because of the company's upfront capital investment in the fitting-out process, the cost and time needed for maintenance upgrades will greatly affect the company's profitability.

Ziroom has said that beginning on Sept 24, newly refurbished apartments will be left vacant for at least 30 days and pass indoor air testing before being listed.
China has reassured private businesses of continued, equal and favorable policies compared with their state-owned counterparts as the private sector has become a significant part of the economy and a major source of market vitality.

Premier Li Keqiang reiterated the stance Wednesday during the Annual Meeting of the New Champions 2018, also known as Summer Davos, in north China's city of Tianjin.

The country will implement and optimize policies that support the development of private and non-public economy and remove relevant constraints, Li said.

The Chinese government had constantly taken measures to reduce taxes and fees on small, medium-sized and micro enterprises, while reducing their financing costs and easing their financing difficulties, Li said. "Most of these enterprises are privately-owned and have generated the most jobs for the country."

The premier's remarks came as the Chinese economy has entered a new period requiring a higher level of innovation and entrepreneurship.

"China will increasingly rely on endogenous innovation to spur economic development in the future, a process that needs risk takers from private businesses, while state firms, always slower and more cautious in decision-making, are relatively less vigorous and not that willing to take risks," said Fan Gang, president of the China Development Institute, a Shenzhen-based think tank.

"In a new era of reform and opening up, China needs to ponder how to further propel the private sector in a bid to make the broader economy more vibrant."

The private sector has witnessed booming growth thanks to the country's reform and opening up during the past decades.

Private businesses have emerged as a vibrant force in national economic and social development, currently providing more than 60 percent of China's GDP, 60 percent of fixed-asset investment, 75 percent of technological innovation and 90 percent of new urban jobs.

By the end of 2017, there were 27 million private companies across the country.

However, given increasing downward pressure on the economy and a changing, complicated situation at home and abroad, some private businesses are grappling with lackluster growth and financing difficulties.

Analysts believe more efforts are required to protect and motivate private entrepreneurs and create a better business environment for them.

Central bank governor Yi Gang has directed financial institutions to equally treat state and private companies in terms of making loans and issuing bonds, and encouraged big lenders to set a good example and provide better services. In China, it is usually more difficult for private businesses, considered more vulnerable to economic volatility, to secure loans than state firms.

The People's Bank of China will guide lenders to continue financing cash-starved companies that have good prospects, stable market share and technological advantages, Yi said.

More favorable policies are in the pipeline as the government has promised to take more action, including introducing bigger tax reductions and implementing better intellectual property protection, to further encourage private companies, particularly small and medium-sized enterprises.




WORLAND  The Washakie County Commission met Tuesday to further discuss recommendations for one county wilderness area, and ultimately approved the Washakie Countys Wyoming Public Lands Initiative (WPLI) Advisory Committees recommendation for the Honeycombs Wilderness Study Area.

Washakie Countys Wyoming Public Lands Initiative (WPLI) Advisory Committee ended a year-long consensus process last month, and sent to commissioners three recommendations to determine best-use for county wilderness study areas (WS The original goal of the WPLI group was to reach a consensus as to the use of the WSAs in the county, through public input. The primary areas of concentration in Washakie County include the Honeycombs (located between Ten Sleep and Worland), Cedar Mountain (south of Winchester and shared with Hot Springs County) and Bobcat Draw (in the northwest corner of the county, shared with Big Horn County).

Earlier this month, Washakie County Commissioners Aaron Anderson, Fred Frandson and Chairman Terry Wolf approved the WPLI recommendations for Bobcat Draw and Cedar Mountain, with added clarification regarding livestock grazing, while the commission stalled on a decision regarding the Honeycombs Wilderness Study Area, pending more time to consult with WPLI working group members and review of Bureau of Land Management guidelines.

Before voting to approve the recommendation on Tuesday, the commission verified that if released from wilderness status, and applying grazing protections in accordance with Congress, the area known as the Honeycombs would still be protected, under BLM guidelines, as a Visual Resource Management (VRM) area.

According to the Bureau of Land Management, VRM Class II and III lands allow progressively greater amounts of visual change to the existing landscape, while VRM Class IV lands provide for management activities which require major modification of the existing character of the landscape, and the level of change to the characteristic landscape can be high.

I think the amount of protection is pretty well balanced, noted Commissioner Aaron Anderson, who has facilitated the WPLI process for the last year and a half. I dont think you will see a lot of change in the management anyway.

The commissions final recommendations of the WPLI will be sent to a federal delegation for introduction in the U.S. House and Senate in 2018.

The original proposals, which were submitted for public comment last month, included for the Honeycombs WSA, located 16 miles southeast of Worland and encompassing 21,000 acres of BLM- administered lands, the group identified 10,000 acres of primarily the Hoodoo region, to be protected due to the unique rock formations and landscape, while the remainder of the WSA would be soft-released to a regular Resource Management Plan under legislation.

The recommendation was changed however, after group members voted to release the entire area to Resource Management Plan protections under the Bureau of Land Management.

Throughout the process, representatives of the Wilderness Society, The Yellowstone Coalition, Trout Unlimited and the Wyoming Outdoors Council have provided public input and also observed the meetings

During the public comment period, those organizations, along with the Wyoming Stock Growers Association, Wyoming Farm Bureau Federation and the Wyoming State Grazing Board, all expressed disagreement with the WPLI recommendations, and threatened to lobby against the changes at the congressional level, which caused some concern from the WPLI group.

The WPLI working group included Dan Rice, Shawn Christenson, Justin Smith, Richard Kroger, Dru Bower, Dwight Mayland, Karen Fenton, Ron Harvey, Aaron Anderson, Stan Wostenberg, Kaylea Matlock and C.J. Grimes.

On Tuesday, Anderson took time to thank the group for their investment in the process.

People gave up a lot of time on this, and I would just like to thank them, said Anderson. I know, a lot of times, it came down to an ideological discussion, and I appreciate the contribution they made.
Burt Reynolds was honored on Wednesday morning at a memorial service in West Palm Beach, Florida, PEOPLE confirms. The actor died earlier this month at the age of 82.

Friends and family of the late actor were in attendance to pay their respects including Judge Reinhold, Vanilla Ice and Broadway actress Avery Sommers.

The service was an hour long, with a private funeral scheduled for Thursday for close family members of Reynolds.

A source tells PEOPLE that after the small service, attendees went to the tavern, E.R. Bradleys Saloon, nearby.

Burt was a real person and he loved these kinds of casual watering holes, the source says.

A video of Reynolds and his history was shown, commemorating his decades-long career in Hollywood.

Burt Reynolds

A funeral program obtained by US Weekly shows that the eulogy was done by Todd Vittum, Reynolds The Last Movie Star costar. Reynolds Smokey and the Bandit II costar Patrick Moody delivered the closing prayer.

My uncle was not just a movie icon; he was a generous, passionate and sensitive man who was dedicated to his family, friends, fans and acting students, Reynolds niece, Nancy Lee Hess, said in a statement at the time of his death.

RELATED: Burt Reynolds Dead at 82: Kate Hudson, Josh Gad, Reba McEntire and More Mourn Hollywood Legend

He has had health issues, however, this was totally unexpected. He was tough. Anyone who breaks their tailbone on a river and finishes the movie is tough. And thats who he was. My uncle was looking forward to working with Quentin Tarantino (in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood) and the amazing cast that was assembled.

RELATED VIDEO: Remembering Burt Reynolds: The Life and Career of the Hollywood Icon

Reynolds famous former flame Sally Field, 71, was not in attendance at his memorial. In a statement after his death, the actress said her years with Burt never leave my mind in her own statement. He will be in my history and my heart, for as long as I live. Rest, Buddy.

Hes survived by son Quiton Anderson Reynolds, 30, his adopted son with ex-wife Loni Anderson.
Table for none.

A Montana restaurant has pulled the plug on hosting Donald Trump Jr. and girlfriend Kimberly Guilfoyles campaign rally for Republican Matt Rosendale.

President Donald Trumps eldest son and his girlfriend, a former Fox News host, were set to speak at the Midtown Tavern in Bozeman, Montana, next Tuesday, ahead of the midterm elections.

But shortly after Rosendales campaign announced the rally, the Bozeman Daily Chronicle reported Tuesday that the restaurant will no longer host the event because the management wants to stay out of politics.

We definitely dont want to take political sides. Thats never our intention, the restaurants manager, Jess Wilcox, told the newspaper. We just try to stay politically neutral.

Wilcox said he didnt know the event had been booked until it was announced on Tuesday, and added, Thats just not who we are. We just try to stay politically neutral. Were a restaurant.

RELATED VIDEO: Donald Trump Jr. Brings Girlfriend Kimberly Guilfoyle to White House

Rosendales campaign later released a statement saying they were looking for a new location for the rally. Weve had over 200 people RSVP for the event in less than four hours and were looking for a new venue to accommodate the unprecedented demand for the campaign rally with Trump Jr. and Kimberly Guilfoyle, the statement said.

This isnt the first time a member of Trumps inner circle has been turned away from a restaurant. In June, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders and her family were asked to leave the Red Hen restaurant in Virginia, because the owner objected to Sanders participation in Trumps inhumane and unethical administration.

Sanders confirmed the incident on Twitter, writing: Last night I was told by the owner of Red Hen in Lexington, VA to leave because I work for @POTUS and I politely left. Her actions say far more about her than about me. I always do my best to treat people, including those I disagree with, respectfully and will continue to do so.
Garry Winogrand hated being called a street photographer, even if he was regarded as the most essential of them all. The great success of Sasha Waters Freyers straightforward but evocative documentary Garry Winogrand: All Things Are Photographable, is how well it explains why someone could have such a strong aversion to a term that was practically invented to describe them.

Winogrand, for better or worse, was allergic to bullshit. A hyper-masculine Bronx Jew who many of Freyers interviewees graciously refer to as a man of his times (perhaps because misogynist would end the inquiry theyre hoping to deepen), the late artist is often likened to the Norman Mailer of the visual world, a comparison that grows more fraught  and less flattering  by the day. A photograph is a literal description of how a camera saw a time and space, we hear Winogrand say in his thick Cassavetes accent towards the very beginning of the film, the first of many excerpted snippets from his final lecture. A camera describes  to use it for anything else is foolish.

Later, someone in the audience asks him why he only uses available light. Thats the only light there is, Winogrand laughs.

Here was a man who shot what he saw and left the rest up to us. It was his world, not ours, said MoMA curator and Winogrand champion John Szarkowski, except to the degree that we might accept his pictures as a just metaphor for our recent past. As much as his voluminous Leica M4 snapshots form a vital picture of a country in the middle of its post-war identity crisis, they also serve as a million little monochrome self-portraits of an artist who was utterly inextricable from his art. Winogrand shot womens liberation marches because he liked the braless girls, he devoted his entire first book to zoo animals because he was a middle-aged divorcee who wanted to spend time with his kids, and he placed himself in his photographs in ways so obvious that it took years for someone to notice them (regarding that last point, Freyers doc builds to a beautiful revelation that resonates with a Wellesian smirk).

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Street photographer? What a sterile way to describe someone who just captured what he wanted  who didnt wait for permission to take pictures, or require an assignment.

Read More:Space Jam 2: Random Acts of Flyness Creator Terence Nance Will Direct Ryan Coogler-Produced Sequel

All Things Are Photographable is shaped like a stiflingly traditional bio-doc, with hundreds of Winogrands pictures interspersed between talking heads (Laurie Simmons, Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner, etc.) and choice bits of archival footage. Its no surprise to learn that, after its theatrical run, the film will move to its permanent home as part of the American Masters series on PBS. But Freyer  steeped in the world of photography and interested in probing deeper than a hagiography or a history lesson  finds new ways to complicate and enliven an old form. You become an artist despite, not because, Winogrand says, and this film takes that ethos to heart, revealing the full scope of a man who would sooner die than deny any part of himself.

Freyer is definitely a fan, and she justifies her interest to a wider audience without leaning too hard on unhelpful hooks (just because Winogrands style was a necessary precursor to Instagram doesnt mean that it would be interesting to unpack that for longer than 30 seconds). If anything, her documentary has an occasional tendency to wander into the weeds of art history, and threatens to get a bit tedious for anyone who doesnt come to the movie with a pre-existing interest in how Winogrand disrupted the establishment.

Fortunately, the film is clearer when it counts, and Feyer constructs an especially compelling account of Winogrands groundbreaking transition from photojournalism to art-making. He resented the posed fantasy of magazine work, which didnt square with the existential crisis he suffered for the brunt of his adult life. Winogrand was much happier publishing books like the controversial Women Are Beautiful, which he privately subtitled The Observations of a Male Chauvinist Pig. The brief section that Feyer devotes to that collection of photographs  an unapologetic monument to the male gaze  is the films best and most conflicted.

Read More:Stanley Kubrick Photo Album: 20 Early Photographs Shot by the Legendary Director (Exclusive)

The conversation that Feyer creates between her interviewees is balanced and insightful without resorting to false equivocation. On the one hand, theres something precious about Winogrands sincerity, which became all the more valuable after Andy Warhol and his ilk began to put everything at the distance required to deconstruct it. On the other hand, Women Are Beautiful was born out of a culture of cat-calling, and the gatekeepers who embraced these images as the stuff of fine art were helping to sanctify street harassment and general objectification.

Both arguments are convincing. The former, because Winogrands photos complicate our collective understanding of what makes for good art, or even what we know about the art that were so quick to classify. The latter, because Feyer doesnt shy away from the fact that Winogrand had a Trumpian view of the fairer sex. We even get to hear the photographers own Access Hollywood tape, as Feyer includes audio of Winogrand talking about his pick-up game: Who talks about it? I grab. If that doesnt work, you convince [the girls] with the other hand. A man of his time.

But All Things Are Photographable isnt contemptuous of Winogrands boorishness; any honest reflection of his life and work has to deal with the unvarnished whole of both, as he always did. Thats a challenge that Feyer takes seriously, though it makes the on-screen absence of Winogrands children a bit hard to reconcile, especially as his son composed the music for the film. All things may be photographable, but theres only so much we can fit in the frame.

Grade: B

Garry Winogrand: All Things Are Photographable is now playing in theaters. It will air on PBS in the future.

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Deadly flooding from Florence leaves 'long road ahead' for the Carolinas, governor says originally appeared on abcnews.go.com

Florence's deadly flooding means "a long road ahead" for North Carolina, Gov. Roy Cooper said at a joint briefing with President Donald Trump Wednesday.

"Thank you, Mr. President, for coming to North Carolina as our rescue and recovery continues," Cooper said. "Our state took a gut punch and our people are still reeling."

PHOTO: President Donald Trump and North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper listen while attending a briefing, after Trump arrived at Marine Corps Air Station Cherry Point to visit areas impacted by Hurricane Florence, Sept. 19, 2018, in Havelock, N.C. (Evan Vucci/AP)

"We have never seen one like this," Cooper added. "This one has been epic, it has been disastrous and it has been widespread. I'm asking you, sir, for your help every step of the way."

PHOTO: Lisa Shackleford hugs her pet dogs Izzy and Bella as she wades through flood waters to safety while the Northeast Cape Fear River breaks its banks in the aftermath Hurricane Florence in Burgaw, North Carolina, Sept. 17, 2018. (Jonathan Drake/Reuters)

PHOTO: Mary and Phil Pongonis look at the damaged roadway from Hurricane Florence in Boiling Spring Lakes, N.C., Sept. 18, 2018. (Ken Blevins/The Star-News/AP)

(MORE: How to help those impacted by Hurricane Florence)

Trump pledged that the federal government will "do whatever we have to do to make this perfect."

After the briefing the president stopped by a local church where he helped hand out meals to families affected by the storm.

PHOTO: President Donald Trump greets people while distributing food after Hurricane Florence in New Bern, N.C., Sept. 19, 2018. (Kevin Lamarque/Reuters)

Trump then headed to New Bern, North Carolina, which was devastated by the storm, and spoke with residents on the streets.

"We'll be here," the president said as he shook hands with men and women.

At least 37 people, including several young children, have died from Florence, which brought unprecedented rainfall and flooding to the Carolinas.

(MORE: 1-year-old swept away in floodwater among those killed by Florence)

Trump called Florence "one of the most powerful and devastating storms ever to hit our country."

He told family members who lost loved ones in the storm that "America grieves with you and our hearts break for you. God bless you. We will never forget your loss. We will never leave your side."

PHOTO: President Donald Trump walks down a street while on a tour of Hurricane Florence recovery efforts in New Bern, N.C., Sept. 19, 2018. (Kevin Lamarque/Reuters)

Trump also a toured a neighborhood in Conway, South Carolina, with Gov. Henry McMaster. He later visited an emergency operations center in Horry County for a disaster relief briefing.

McMaster stressed that the worst is yet to come" in terms of rising floodwaters.

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"Whatever we need from Washington, we are there," Trump assured McMaster.

(MORE: Hurricane Florence: NC nursing home patients ride out the storm despite warnings: 'It would be difficult for us to move them')

The hurricane has prompted widespread evacuations and about 10,000 people still remain in shelters.

PHOTO: Oliver Kelly, 1, cries as he is carried off the sheriff's airboat during his rescue from rising flood waters in the aftermath of Hurricane Florence in Leland, North Carolina, Sept. 16, 2018. (Jonathan Drake/Reuters)

Officials on Tuesday distributed goods including food, water and tarps to Wilmington, North Carolina, residents who lined up in cars and on foot.

Among those who showed up were Robert and Karen Foster.

"Everybody's closed, so we're hoping we can at least get a tarp here, maybe two," Karen Foster told ABC News.

Through tears, she said she has survived hurricanes Floyd in 1999 and Matthew in 2016 but "this has been the absolute worst one."

PHOTO: A car sits in a flooded parking lot at an apartment complex near the Cape Fear River as it continues to rise in the aftermath of Hurricane Florence in Fayetteville, Sept. 18, 2018. (David Goldman/AP)

ABC News' Jordyn Phelps and Alex Mallin contributed to this report.
Kensington Palace announced this week that, in recent months, Meghan Markle has made multiple visits to the Hubb Community Kitchen, which was started by survivors of the tragic 2017 Grenfell Tower fire in London. Additionally, it was reported that the duchess was supporting the kitchen's upcoming charity cookbook, Together: Our Community Cookbook, by writing the foreword.

And now, ahead of the book's release next week (you can preorder it here), The Mirror published Meghan's entire emotional foreword. In the three-page passage, she describes not only her own work in the community kitchen but also the incredible impact the women have had on their community and the incomparable power of coming together over something as simple as a home-cooked meal.

"Together is more than a cookbook. This is a tale of friendship, and a story of togetherness," she writes. "It is a homage to the power of cooking as a community, and the recipes that allow us to connect, share, and look forward."

She continues, "In January 2018, as I was settling in to my new home of London, it was important to me to get to know organizations working in the local community. I made a quiet trip to Al-Manaar, a mosque close to the Grenfell community.

"In 2017 I had watched the Grenfell Tower tragedy unfold on the news; I was in Canada at the time, sharing the global sentiment of shock and sympathy for what this community was enduring, while also deeply wanting to help. Fast-forward seven months, and I was set to meet some of the women affected by the fire, at a community kitchen in Al-Manaar."

"The kitchen was opened after the Grenfell tragedy, offering women who had been displaced and the community around them a space to cook food for their families," Meghan adds. "Their roles as matriarchs united them across their cultures; the kitchen provided an opportunity to cook what they knew and to taste the memory of home, albeit homes some had recently lost."

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Later in the foreword, Meghan writes that the kitchen buzzes with women of all ages. "It is cozy and brightly lit, with scents of cardamom, curry, and ginger dancing through the air," she continues. "It will take you about 15 minutes to enter the room, as you will joyfully be greeted by kisses (cheek x 3) by each of the incredible women there. You will find yourself in a melting pot of cultures and personalities, who have roots in Uganda, Iraq, Morocco, India, Russia, and at least 10 other countries. You should undoubtedly arrive on an empty stomach because upon departure you will have been stuffed to the gills with samosas flecked with cinnamon, chapatis flavored with carrots and onion, Russian semolina cake, Persian teas, and my very favorite avocado dip that I now make at home."

And "You will feel joyful in their company, and you will leave counting the days until you go back."

c Jenny Zarins/PA/REX/Shutterstock

On her first visit, Meghan asked Munira, "the resident chef de cuisine (so to speak)," how she could help. She was asked to wash the rice for lunch, while Munira's sister-in-law, who had flown in from Egypt after Grenfell to help her family, helped her get the right amount of butter and fresh thyme. Meghan remembers the laughter and aromas that filled the kitchen, and considers this one of her "most treasured" memories.

"I have a lifelong interest in the story of foodwhere it comes from, why we embrace it, and how it brings us together: the universal connection to community through the breaking of bread," she continues. "Within this kitchen's walls, there exists not only the communal bond of togetherness through sharing food but also a cultural diversity that creates what I would describe as a passport on a plate: the power of a meal to take you to places you've never been, or transport you right back to where you came from."

Meghan adds that one of her favorite meals is collard greens, black-eyed peas, and cornbread, a meal she remembers from her childhood. "This was always eaten on New Year's Day, a tradition steeped in ancestral history where each component has a meaning: the black-eyed peas for prosperity, the greens for wealth, the cornbread for health and nourishment. It wasn't a New Year's resolution; it was a wish. It wasn't simply a meal; it was a story."

She continues, "I've spent many years away from my birthplace of Los Angeles and have found that traveling far from home highlights the power of personally meaningful recipes. During my time at university in Chicago, I would wait with bated breath to return to L.A. for the winter break and have a bowl of my mother's gumbo. And while living in Toronto (seven years of being adopted by that beautiful place for work), I embraced poutine and several other Canadian culinary favorites, but the Southern California girl in me always craved fish tacos, and the memory of eating hometown fare infused with a strong Mexican influence."

"We've all had that experience where you have a bit of food, close your eyes, and taste, remember and even feel the first time you enjoyed it," she writes. "There is good reason that chicken soup is often credited with healing not just a cold but the soul. There is something quintessentially restorative about a taste of something meaningful."

Read Meghan Markle's Cookbook Foreword 2 Jenny Zarins/PA/REX/Shutterstock

Meghan also recalls meeting Zahira, a working mother who oversees much of the coordination at Al-Manaar, during her visit. She asked the woman why the kitchen was open only on Tuesdays and Thursdays and learned it was because of funding. "And now just a few months later, here we areTogether," Meghan writes. "Through this charitable endeavor, the proceeds will allow the kitchen to thrive and keep the global spirit of community alive. With the support of dynamic women from all walks of life, we have come together with a united vision to empower other women to share their stories through food."

Meghan describes the recipes that follow as "stories of family, love, of survival and of connection."

"From a Thanksgiving supper to a Shabbat dinner or a Sunday roast, the meals that bring us together are the meals that allow us to grow, to listen, to engage, and to be present," she explains. "We invite you to do the same, together, in your home, communities, and beyond."

She ends the forward with, "Great thanks to everyone who made this book possible. And thanks to you, the reader, for supporting the good work of the Hubb Community Kitchen. Now it's timeto gather, Together. HRH The Duchess of Sussex."

To read Meghan's full forewordand make the delicious recipes for yourselfpreorder the cookbook here.

Related: Londoners Describe Meghan Markle in One Word
The Daily Beast

The View/ScreenshotThe parade of conservative guest hosts auditioning to replace Meghan McCain continued this week on The View. And this time, yet another former Trump administration official took her turn, trying and failing to score gotcha points against the shows guest, in this case Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA).Schiff, who was there to promote his new book Midnight in Washington: How We Almost Lost Our Democracy and Still Could, fielding primarily friendly questions from the shows four left-lean
Cody Wilson, a staunch advocate for developing and releasing plans for 3D-printed guns on the internet via his organization Defense Distributed, has been charged with sexually assaulting a child.

According to an arrest affidavit filed in Travis County District Court on Wednesday, Wilson, 30, is accused of paying a juvenile female under the age of 17 $500 to have sex with him at a hotel in Austin, Texas, on Aug. 15, a second-degree felony.

Austin police say Wilson initially met the girl on the website SugarDaddyMeet.com where he operated under the alias Sanjuro. Wilson identified himself by name and arranged to meet for sex in subsequent conversation, according to a police search of the girls phone authorized by her parents.

In separate texts reviewed by police officers, Wilson sent the girl photos of his penis and described himself as a big deal, presumably referring to his efforts at Defense Distributed, the 3D-printing gun manufacturer he founded.

Cody Wilson poses with a 3D-printed gun in his factory in Austin, Texas, on Aug. 1, 2018. Austin authorities charged Wilson with sexually assaulting a child on Wednesday. (Photo: KELLY WEST via Getty Images)

Surveillance video obtained by the Austin Police Department corroborates the girls story and shows Wilson and the girl enter the hotel lobby and walk toward the guest rooms at 8:37 p.m. on Aug. 15, then leave roughly 40 minutes later at 9:19 p.m.

As of Wednesday morning, Wilson did not appear to have surrendered to authorities, Travis County records show. A county magistrate has ordered he surrender his passport and be held on $150,000 bail.

Austin Police Commander Troy Officer told reporters Wednesday afternoon that Wilson failed to appear for a flight home after being tipped off about the investigation by a friend of the victim. His last known whereabouts are Taipei, Taiwan.

We dont know why he went to the Taiwan, Officer said, but we do know that he was informed that he was being investigated.

Taiwan does not have an extradition treaty with the United States.

Defense Distributed did not respond to a request for comment Wednesday, nor did SugarDaddyMeet.

Wilson, a self-described crypto-anarchist, attempted to distribute free plans to 3D-print plastic firearms on the internet, touting its efforts as heralding the age of the downloadable gun. After a federal judge blocked Defense Distributed from sharing the plans for free, Wilson attempted to circumvent the ruling by selling the blueprints for a nominal fee instead.

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In subsequent filings, Defense Distributed and a second gun-rights group called the Second Amendment Foundation argued their ability to share schematics for printing firearms constitutes free speech thats protected under the First Amendment.

This story has been updated with comments from Officer.

Related...

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3D-Printed Gun Blueprints Are Already Being Downloaded By Thousands Of People

U.S. Judge Temporarily Halts Release Of 3D Printed Gun Blueprints

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A claim of sexual misconduct as a teen-ager has put the confirmation of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh in question for the first time, but abortion rights activists say their protests helped lay the groundwork for this moment.

Planned Parenthood Action Fund held more than 100 events with partners over the August recess in Senators home states. On Aug. 26 alone, NARAL and its partners were behind more than 200 protests against Kavanaugh in what organizers said was the largest single-day protest against a Supreme Court nomination in history.

Other activists disrupted his confirmation hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee, dressed up as Handmaids around the country, sent 3,000 coat hangers to potential swing vote Sen. Susan Collins office and raised $1 million worth of pledges for her next opponent if she votes to confirm Kavanaugh.

Still, Kavanaugh seemed set to be confirmed mostly along party lines until California professor Christine Blasey Ford went public, saying that Kavanaugh pinned her to a bed at a Maryland house party when he was 17, holding his hand over her mouth as he tried to remove her clothes.

But after the Washington Post published an interview with Ford over the weekend, the Judiciary Committee delayed a committee vote by a week as it sought to hold a hearing on the issue.

This very credible story is coming on top of a very, very damaged nominee, says NARAL president Ilyse Hogue, who says this level of activism around a Supreme Court nominee is unprecedented. He was already, because of the work of so many people, the least-popular nominee in modern history.

Polling by Gallup conducted just as the allegation surfaced shows that opposition to Kavanaugh had been rising, with 42% of Americans opposed to his confirmation and 39% supporting it  a margin that is closer to historical polls for failed nominees like Harriet Miers and Robert Bork.

Six weeks ago, people were like pooh pooh, and here we are now, says Jess Morales Rocketto, political director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance who helped organize the Rise Up for Roe national tour to mobilize opposition to Kavanaugh. The allegation is when people started to feel like OK, this could actually be the nail in his coffin.

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For weeks, activists have focused their energy on Collins and Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski, two potential swing votes who occasionally break with the GOP party line. Theyve now doubled down their efforts to pressure all senators, especially retiring Arizona Sen. Jeff Flake and Tennessee Sen. Bob Corker, who have publicly said they will not vote for Kavanaugh until the Judiciary Committee can hear from Ford.

Indivisible Anchorage got 3,000 Alaskans to pledge to make calls to Murkowski over the past few weeks, and even though she didnt come to Anchorage for the recess, it got another Indivisible group to deliver a letter to her in while she was visiting Lake Tahoe.

Activists noted that Murkowski called for Democratic Sen. Al Franken to step down in 2017 amid accusations that he groped women, noting in a tweet that Americans are seeing a culture of harassment and assault being exposed on a daily basis.

She had a super-definitive statement about Franken, saying that he should step down, says Shoshana Stone, 55, a retired nurse practitioner who runs Indivisible Anchorage, of Murkowski. It seems very hypocritical of her to be able to make a statement like that in regards to Franken and not make a statement like that in regards to Kavanaugh.

I think if she votes yes, her career would be done, says Stone. Maybe she thinks people forget. I dont think people will forget. No way will people forget.

Activists in Maine are even more energized. According to Planned Parenthood Action Fund, four times as many people have called Collins about Kavanaugh as called to lobby her not to vote to repeal the Affordable Care Act. Health-care activist Ady Barkan and local activists started a pledge drive to raise money for whoever runs against Collins if she votes to confirm Kavanaugh. As of Tuesday, they had raised nearly $1.4 million in pledges.

When Mainers for Accountable Leadership  a Maine-based group that uses the Indivisible model  announced a protest against Kavanaugh in Portland, 150 people showed up on a days notice. They went to her office in Portland every single day of the Senate recess, and held rallies attracting as many as 500 people, according to Marie Follayttar Smith, who runs the group.

The grassroots responsiveness has been increasing during the last month, says Smith, 42, who runs Mainers for Accountable Leadership full-time. It increased during the hearings, it increased during the release of the emails.

Maine was absolutely the most electric place, says Morales Rocketto. I think activists are the only ones who really thought that if we made enough noise and exposed who this guy really was, we could actually stop the nomination.

In Arizona, activists have been dressing up as Handmaids from the dystopian Hulu series The Handmaids Tale to illustrate what Kavanaughs confirmation could do to reproductive rights.

In my years of activism, I have never seen anything like what were seeing now, says Serena Knierim, 35, a regional organizing lead with the Human Rights Campaign who has been volunteering with Planned Parenthood and wearing the trademark red cloak and white bonnet. A 17-year-old immigrant was denied an abortion by Kavanaugh. Hes saying what happened at 17 doesnt matter. Why did it matter for her and not you?

While shes hopeful that Senator Flake will vote against Kavanaugh, shes not holding her breath. Ill believe it when I see it, says Knierim. Flake is notoriously flaky.

Smith says that the Kavanaugh vote is Collinss last chance to live up to the example of Maine hero Margaret Chase Smith, who famously urged her fellow Republicans to denounce McCarthyism in a speech on the Senate floor. Chase Smith is Collinss role model, and Smith says that she is running out of time to live up to her legacy.

This vote is Senator Collins legacy, her final chance for what we in Maine call a Margaret Chase Smith moment, says Smith. She made a stand against her party and made a stand for Maine values. And many of us are calling on Senator Collins to do the same thing.
Salzburg (Austria) (AFP) - Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez on Thursday acknowledged an "error" in a book of his which reportedly reproduces parts of a diplomat's speech without referencing him, just a week after being accused of plagiarising his thesis.

"There was an error in a reference which will be corrected in a new edition," Sanchez told reporters in Salzburg in Austria, where EU leaders were gathered.

The news comes as a Madrid university is embroiled in a "Mastergate" scandal that has seen several high-profile politicians, including the head of the opposition Popular Party, accused of being gifted degrees without attending lecturers.

Spanish daily El Pais reported that the book written by Sanchez and another economist in 2013 reproduced, without quotation marks or any reference, entire pages of a speech made by a Spanish diplomat even including a mistake in the original text.

The Spanish government told the newspaper it was an "involuntary mistake" and that the authors would correct it.

The book -- "The Spanish economy's new diplomacy" -- includes Sanchez's 2012 doctoral thesis as well as additions which include the diplomat's speech.

Last week Sanchez, Pedro Sanchez, a former economics professor, was forced to fight back against allegations he plagiarised the thesis with paragraphs from an article by fellow economists and from a government presentation.

He threatened to take legal action against media that published the claims and made his thesis public online.

In Salzburg, Sanchez said he was willing to go to the Senate to give explanations but warned that "being in the opposition isn't about making noise".

Pablo Iglesias, leader of far-left party Podemos and an ally of Sanchez, said the prime minister should explain himself.
Air passengers started to bleed from their nose and ears after pilots failed to regulate cabin pressure, officials claim.

At least 30 Indian passengers received treatment when Jet Airways flight 9W 697 from Mumbai to Jaipur turned back shortly after take off.

The Boeing 737 plane managed to land safely and not all of the 166 passengers on board were affected.

An investigation has been launched by the aviation ministry and the cockpit crew have been suspended from duties amid allegations pilots forgot to turn a switch to regulate cabin pressure.

Passengers bled from the nose and ears following the incident (Satish Nair/Twitter)

A video shared by passenger Darshak Hathi shows oxygen masks drop into the interior of the cabin as air pressure dropped.

Fellow passenger Satish Nair share a selfie while bleeding from the nose. Nair claimed the safety of passengers had been completely ignored during the incident.

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Senior official of Indias aviation regulator, the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA), Lalit Gupta reportedly told the Hindustan Times newspaper that crew hadnt turned a switch to regulate cabin pressure.

Jet Airways said the flight had returned due to loss in cabin pressure and that the firm regretted any distress or inconvenience caused to passengers.

The statement said: The B737 aircraft, with 166 guests and 5 crew landed normally in Mumbai. All guests were deplaned safely and taken to the terminal. First aid was administered to few guests who complained of ear pain, bleeding nose etc.




Luanda (AFP) - Angolan prosecutors dropped corruption charges against a former army chief of staff who was sacked in April by President Joao Lourenco as he moved to shake up his predecessor's administration.

The charges against Geraldo Sachipengo Nunda were dropped late on Wednesday because of a lack of evidence "proving criminal conduct", according to the Supreme Court.

Eight other accused, including a spokesman for the ruling party, four Thai nationals, a Canadian and an Eritrean were placed under house arrest in connection to a $50 billion (43 billion euros) fraud.

Their trials are expected to begin before the end of the month.

In April Lourenco removed Sachipengo Nunda who had been implicated in the scandal by prosecutors a month before.

Since coming to power in September 2017, Lourenco has fought against corruption while also removing figures associated with the regime of his predecessor Jose Eduardo dos Santos.

During his 38-year rule, dos Santos secured the unquestioning loyalty of his security chiefs including the head of the army.

Other prominent dos Santos-era scalps claimed by Lourenco include his predecessor's son, Jose Filomeno, who is accused of attempting to steal $1.5 billion during his time at the helm of Angola's sovereign wealth fund.

Lourenco also removed dos Santos' daughter from the helm of the state oil company Sonangol and she is now facing probes for alleged corruption.
Four people, including the shooter, were killed when a 26-year-old woman opened fire Thursday morning at the Rite Aid distribution center in Harford County, Maryland, where she worked, authorities confirmed.

An additional three people were injured and are expected to survive, police said.

The suspect, who has been identified as Snochia Moseley, was taken to an area hospital with a self-inflicted gunshot wound to her head, Harford County Sheriff Jeffrey Gahler said during a press conference. She died after arriving at the hospital in critical condition.

Suspect in todays shooting has been identified as Snochia Moseley, age 26 from Baltimore County.  Harford Sheriff (@Harford_Sheriff) September 20, 2018

No shots were fired by any law enforcement officials, the sheriff said.

Moseley was a temporary employee at the facility and reported to work as usual Thursday morning, carrying a 9mm Glock handgun registered in her name and multiple magazines, according to Gahler. She opened fire both inside and outside the facility around 9 a.m. Eastern time.

Her motivation is not yet known, but Gahler noted that there was no additional threat to the community. She was a resident of Baltimore County.

Authorities responded at 9:09 a.m. Eastern Time to the intersection of Spesutia and Perryman Roads in Perryman, Maryland, a semirural spot in a small town around 30 miles northeast of Baltimore.

The shooting took place on a three-building campus where Rite Aid employs around 1,300 people, Harford County spokeswoman Cindy Mumby told HuffPost. Mumby did not know how many employees were present at the time of the shooting.

Four injured people were transported to Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center in Baltimore with gunshot wounds needing urgent attention. Trauma director Raymond Fang could not comment on their identities.

We can confirm there was a shooting in the area of Spesutia Road and Perryman Road. Multiple victims. The situation is still fluid. Please avoid the area. Media staging area still TBD.  Harford Sheriff (@Harford_Sheriff) September 20, 2018

The FBI, the Maryland State Police and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives responded to the scene.

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Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan (R) said earlier his office was closely monitoring the incident, posting on his official Twitter page that the State stands ready to offer any support as the situation unfolded.

Krystal Watson, 33, told local news outlet WSAZ3 that her husband, Eric, was at the facility during the shooting.

She didnt aim. She just shot, Watson said.

Andre Cedeno, 30, told The Baltimore Sun that his sister, Lela, was also inside the Rite Aid facility during the shooting and hid in a bathroom.

She had a panic, he told the paper. Its crazy that people dont respect life.

Rite Aid spokesman Pete Strella said in a statement that those at the company felt deeply saddened by the events and would make grief counselors available to employees as long as they are needed.

A family reunification center has been set up at the Level Volunteer Fire House in Havre de Grace, Maryland. Authorities are asking people to otherwise avoid the area.

Harford County saw another mass shooting in October 2017, when a man shot and killed three people and wounded several others at the home remodeling business where he worked in Edgewood, Maryland.

Thursdays incident also marked the nations third mass shooting in the past 24 hours. A gunman in Pennsylvania shot and wounded four people before police shot and killed him Wednesday afternoon. Earlier in the day, a Wisconsin man shot three of his co-workers and died at a hospital.

We are closely monitoring the horrific shooting in Aberdeen. Our prayers are with all those impacted, including our first responders. The State stands ready to offer any support. https://t.co/fzugpo8C1Z  Governor Larry Hogan (@GovLarryHogan) September 20, 2018

Maryland has relatively strict gun laws compared to other states. Firearms dealers are required to conduct background checks on customers through state police, according to the Giffords Law Center To Prevent Gun Violence. Handgun owners must also have completed a firearms safety course within the last three years and obtain a license.

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Washington (AFP) - Argentina's budget proposal submitted this week is a key element in the reforms needed for a new loan package for the crisis-hit country, an International Monetary Fund spokesman said Thursday.

But there is still no timeframe for finalizing the aid, IMF spokesman Gerry Rice told reporters, repeating that the goal is to reach an agreement "in short order" to send to the IMF board.

The IMF on Monday said the team in Buenos Aires had made "important progress" on the economic reforms needed to strengthen the program supported by the Washington-based crisis lender.

Rice said draft budget submitted to Congress on Monday was "a fundamental part of the authorities' plan to strengthen their economic policies and to boost confidence."

And he noted that the budget proposal "protects spending on social assistance and health," including expansion of health programs for children.

But the austere spending plan was met by street protests.

The country's primary budget deficit has dropped from 6.0 percent in 2015 to 3.9 percent last year and is expected to reach 2.7 this year, according to the government.

Argentina's Finance Minister Nicolas Dujovne said fiscal balance is critical "to maintain economic order."

The IMF and Buenos Aires agreed in June on a three-year, $50 billion rescue lending program but Argentina has since asked for a more rapid disbursement, although Dujovne has denied the government is seeking additional funds.

Buenos Aires has received a $15 billion disbursement but any changes in the program require the approval of the IMF board.

The objective remains "to reach rapid conclusion" to the negotiations and present a new plan to the IMF board as soon as possible, Rice said, but "I don't have a specific timeline."

President Mauricio Macri is under increasing pressure as the peso has plunged -- despite intervention from the central bank -- and the recession worsens.

And he is facing growing opposition from the public for seeking help from the IMF, which has a bitter history in the country and is blamed for past economic woes.




UK automakers have navigated a rough road recently. Yet premium British brand Aston Martin is speeding towards a high-profile public listing in London early next month, targeting a 5.1bn ($6.8bn) valuation.

This comes as Brexit has slammed industry investment and executives worry about new 10% tariffs between the UK and EU in early 2019. The UKs plans for stricter diesel regulations have led to a 32% slide in domestic diesel sales in 2018. And US President Donald Trump has threatened tariffs against European automakers, contributing to a 10% decline in the STOXX Europe 600 Automobiles & Parts index this year.

On top of it all, shifting consumer tastes are forcing auto manufacturers around the world to kill off car models, rework their offerings to include more SUVs, and plan for more electric and self-driving vehicles.

Amid all this, Volvo Cars pulled out of its planned public offering this month, blaming general market instability.

But experts maintain that Aston Martin is different. They say the firms wealthy customers will keep buying its pricey, exclusive cars regardless of tariff-induced price hikes or even the threat of an economic slowdown.

As for Brexit?

I dont think it matters, to be quite honest, Michael Hewson, chief market analyst at CMC Markets, told Yahoo Finance UK. Someone who can afford an Aston Martin doesnt care so much about [higher costs due to tariffs]  I would suggest theres quite significant growth [opportunities] there for Aston Martin, Brexit notwithstanding.

Hewson pointed to Ferrari (RACE)  with a market capitalisation of nearly $26bn  as an example of what is achievable in the luxury car space. Shares have more than doubled since the firms public listing in 2015.

Aston Martins chief executive Andy Palmer brushed off the threat of new tariffs in an interview with Reuters.

If there are [Brexit-induced] tariffs  for every car we lose because of a 10% tariff into Europe, we presumably pick up from Ferrari and Lamborghini in the other direction because obviously their cars become more expensive in the UK, he said.

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Aston Martin, which builds all its cars in Britain, said the company had boosted its stock of engines and components in case frictionless trade with the European Union ends in March 2019.

We [have] up to five days of engine stock for example and weve got a very large warehouse in Wellesbourne (in central England) where we have at least five days of car stock, he said.

Aston Martin is betting on strong sales of the DB11, which was unveiled in 2016. Photo: Jason Alden/Bloomberg

While its famous for supplying James Bonds cars, Aston Martin has had its share of difficulties and has been through multiple bankruptcies.

Palmer is credited with recently turning things around, helping the firm bring in 876m ($1.2bn) in revenue in 2017, up more than 71% from 2015. The company has also branched out into other luxury projects, including real estate and ultra-exclusive submarines, to diversify its sales.

Still, many have expressed reservations about its projected valuation of 4bn to 5.1bn.

The suggested valuation seems over optimistic, said David Bailey, professor of industrial strategy at Aston University in the UK.

Dont get me wrong: Im greatly impressed with what Aston Martin has done of late, but thats a very recent [turnaround for] a firm with a poor long-term track record on profitability. The cars also sell at much lower prices than Ferrari, so the brand will have to shift upmarket even further in a big way to justify such a valuation, he said.
By Colin Packham SYDNEY (Reuters) - Australian doctors said on Thursday a "humanitarian emergency" is unfolding at an Australian-run detention center in the Pacific and they asked for government permission to treat asylum seekers at the remote facility. Australia's hardline immigration policy requires asylum seekers intercepted at sea trying to reach Australia to be sent for processing to three camps in Papua New Guinea and one on the South Pacific island of Nauru. In a letter to Prime Minister Scott Morrison, the Australian Medical Association (AMA) said there was an urgent need to send a delegation of doctors to Nauru after reports of some asylum seekers harming themselves. "There are now too many credible reports concerning the effects of long-term detention and uncertainty on the physical and mental health of asylum seekers," AMA President Tony Bartone said in the letter seen by Reuters. The AMA represents doctors and medical students. More than 1,000 men, woman and children are living in the camps in Papua New Guinea and Nauru. They are told they will never be settled in Australia. Morrison declined to comment on the AMA letter when asked by reporters in Canberra. He said many asylum seekers would soon be transferred to the United States. The United States has said it will accept up to 1,250 refugees from Australia's detention centers. Refugee advocates said about 300 have been resettled so far. Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton said in May hundreds of asylum-seekers are likely to remain in the centers indefinitely as no other country is willing to resettle them. The detention of about 100 children, some of whom have spent their entire lives on Nauru, has drawn the most severe criticism, spurred by a recent spate of self-harm incidents. Australia, which claims the policy is necessary to deter drownings at sea, has transferred several children off Nauru. In August, Australia relocated a 12-year Iranian boy who had been on a hunger strike, two sources familiar with the transfer said. (Reporting by Colin Packham; Editing by Darren Schuettler)
At first glance, this bee appears to be wearing what looks like a shiny brown vest, wrapped around its fuzzy midriff. But closer inspection reveals that the bee is crawling with dozens of wriggling, worm-like brown bodies: larvae belonging to the blister beetle species Meloe franciscanus.

The bee  a male  is the larvaes' first stop in a parasitic hitchhiking strategy that ultimately leads them right into the bees' homes. Once there, these uninvited guests eat the bees' stores of food. And the bees' young.

Known as triungulins, the beetle larvae attract male bees with a chemical signal that mimics the sex pheromones emitted by female bees. To ensure their success, populations of these parasites fine-tune their chemistry and behavior to appeal to different types of bees, depending on where the beetles live and which types of bees are closest to them, according to a new study. [8 Awful Parasite Infections That Will Make Your Skin Crawl]

When a blister beetle larva hatches, it has a lot of company. Hundreds of larvae emerge at once from an egg mass known as an aggregation, which contains about 761 eggs on average, the study authors reported. Scores of larvae siblings then climb nearby plants and huddle together in a single cluster for as long as two weeks, collectively sending a chemical come-hither message wafting through the air.

"And the instant that a male bee contacts an aggregation, the entire larval mass attaches to the male," the scientists wrote.

Triungulins' parasitic attachment to the male is temporary; the larvae hang out on their host's back only until he finds a mate. Then, the hitchhikers transfer to the female bee for a free ride back to the nest, where they gorge themselves on the bees' eggs, nectar and pollen, emerging only in the spring after they're fully grown.

The parasitic larvae were known to infest two species of ground-dwelling digger bees in Oregon and in California's Mojave Desert. Scientists compared different populations of the beetle larvae in those areas to better understand how the parasites interacted with the host bee species: Habropoda pallida and H. miserabilis.

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They found that the larvae had evolved adaptations to make themselves as tempting as possible to the bees that lived nearby. In experiments that transplanted groups of blister beetle larvae and exposed them to distant populations of digger bees, the larvae's sexy scents were less successful. In fact, the researchers discovered that the parasites were "significantly more attractive" to the male bees that were their close neighbors.

The scientists also observed that the clusters of newly hatched triungulins climbed to different heights on plants to project their sexy signal, depending on where local bees tended to look for female company.

A 'fantastic' puzzle

Blister beetle larvae aren't the only ones that rely on pheromones to trick and attract other species; bolas spiders also deploy a scent that mimics sexy-smelling female pheromones  a gambit that successfully lures male moths to their doom, the researchers reported.

And the digger bees should probably consider themselves lucky that these larvae only use them as a taxi service. Other parasitic insects turn hosts into living incubators for their growing young  a gruesome fate that culminates in the host becoming the larvae's first meal, as they consume it from the inside out.

Piecing together the strategies used by the parasitic beetle larvae offers new clues about how parasites adapt to best take advantage of their unsuspecting hosts, lead study author Leslie Saul-Gershenz, a doctoral candidate with the Department of Entomology and Nematology at the University of California, Davis, said in a statement.

"It has been fantastic to unravel this species' puzzle," Saul-Gershenz said.

The findings were published online Sept. 10 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Original article on Live Science.

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Theresa May and Charles Michel will meet in Salzburg: Reuters

Theresa May is facing new demands to stump up more cash for European migrant policing, with Belgiums prime minister set to corner her at an EU summit in Salzburg in a bid to extract money.

Belgian media reports that Charles Michel, the countrys PM, will meet with Ms May at this weeks EU summit in Salzburg and ask her for a budget contribution similar to the one Britain already pays to France.

The backdrop to the latest demand is an ongoing political row in Belgium about so-called trans-migrants  who are increasingly travelling through Flanders on their way to the UK.

Faced with disquiet in his governing coalition on the issue, Mr Michel is dragging Britain into the row in an apparent attempt to unite his domestic parties by shifting the focus on to the UK.

He is expected to tell Ms May that since the migrants are destined for the UK and it is Britain who benefits from the border policing, it should pay the bill to keep them excluded from the country.

Downing Street confirmed a bilateral meeting was scheduled between the two leaders, but a spokesperson said they were not aware of the expected demands for money, which have been reported in a number of Belgian media outlets.

Though focus on the Salzburg meeting in the UK media has been on the limited Brexit discussion set to take place, the headline topic of the summit is actually about migration and security  with countries piling in to defend their interests on the issue.

The UKs own National Crime Agency has already acknowledged that a crackdown on undocumented migration and people-smuggling in France has pushed activity into neighbouring Belgium, where people are now increasingly boarding lorries instead before travelling to the UK.

In Belgium smuggling is prevalent. They are putting people on lorries in Belgium and then moving them across the border, NCA deputy director Tom Dowdall told The Independent in July.

They are loading up HGVs at stops and service stations. Some of the drivers are being duped but an increasing number are complicit [and being paid].

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The NCA says it is working with the Belgian authorities, as well as those of neighbouring France and the Netherlands.

In January of this year, Britain agreed to pay an extra 44.5m to France for policing at channel ports after Ms May came under pressure from Emmanuel Macron on the issue. The payments are a bilateral deal and are not dependent on Britains membership of the EU.

France had threatened to drop the Le Touquet deal  which allows British border controls to be sited on the France side of the channel  if the UK did not make a contribution to cover the costs of police work. Belgium also has so-called juxtaposed controls with UK passport checks conducted in Brussels for Eurostar passengers, albeit on a smaller scale.

The backdrop of continuing Brexit negotiations also means that Britain needs allies on the European Council, giving the Belgian government some potential cards to play if it looks to extract concessions.
Chobe National Park (Botswana) (AFP) - Botswana has rejected claims of a surge of elephant poaching made by a leading conservation charity and put on display carcasses of animals allegedly slaughtered for ivory -- some with tusks still intact.

Elephants Without Borders (EWB) claimed two weeks ago that it had discovered at least 87 elephant carcasses during a routine aerial survey of conservation areas, suggesting a sudden spike in killings in recent months.

The claims led to global media attention and questions were raised about Botswana's anti-poaching efforts.

But officials demanded to see EWB's proof and subsequent visits to the Chobe National Park located just 19 corpses -- only six of which were found to be poaching victims.

- 'Haven't recorded any mass killing' -

"Last year, the whole year, we lost about 81 elephants. So I can say it's just normal, like any other year, we haven't recorded any mass killing," said Churchill Collyer, the deputy director of the Department of Wildlife and National Parks.

Officials added that since the start of the year, a total of 63 elephants had died across the country and that there had been no noticeable increase in elephant poaching.

Around 40,000 African elephants are killed every year for their tusks, according to conservation groups.

The elephants are illegally traded as part of a multi-billion dollar industry that extends from Africa to Asia and beyond.

Botswana, which has Africa's largest elephant population, is on the frontline of the battle against the illicit ivory trade.

This week, the country's authorities took journalists to the vast Chobe National Park in the northeast which has more than 100,000 elephants -- the country's largest concentration of the animals.

Several hours spent flying over the reserve which borders Namibia, Zambia and Zimbabwe, showed six elephant carcasses, four of which appeared to have been poached.

"This is almost more than six months since it was killed," said Collyer of one animal with dried, perforated skin and missing tusks.

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Around 20 kilometres (12 miles) away, another decomposed carcass was found but when EWB led rangers to it, the tusks were still intact, suggesting it was not killed for ivory.

"The cause of the natural death could either be from old age, from diseases, from starvation during the drought season," said anti-poaching deputy brigade commander George Bogatsu, a six-year veteran of the fight against poaching.

He stood next to the carcass with an assault rifle slung over his arm and a handgun tucked into the side pocket of his camouflage trousers.

The animal was one of those counted by Elephants Without Borders as poached. EWB said in a statement that "an unusually high number of elephant carcasses were seen by the survey team".

"Our current survey adheres to the highest international standards," it added.

- 'No cemetery in the wild' -

"There is no cemetery in the wild -- animals like elephants will take years and years to completely disappear" from the spots where they die, said Simon Barwabatsile, the country's anti-poaching coordinator.

EWB had been contracted by Botswana to conduct aerial elephant population surveys. Before concluding the work, the group's director Mike Chase said the survey pointed to elephant poaching on a scale "by far the largest" in Africa.

He said it coincided with the disarming of Botswana's rangers earlier this year.

But the military insisted it remained ready to repel poaching gangs armed with high-powered rifles.

Barwabatsile said there had been "legal issues" about rangers being armed with certain guns.

"There's been a withdrawal of some arms from the anti-poaching unit within the department of wildlife and national parks," he said.

He could not confirm how many weapons -- understood to be fully automatic rifles -- had been taken out of circulation.

A group of other wildlife conservation groups said last week that civilian rangers are still armed with "high-calibre weapons, but no longer carry automatic assault rifles".

Some in the conservation community have suggested that Elephants Without Borders made such alarming claims because of "vested interests".

Survival International's Stephen Corry said he expected more reports "stirring up panic over the increasing threat of poaching" as groups raise cash ahead of a conference in London on the illegal wildlife trade next month.

But EWB insisted that "given the high number of elephant carcasses seen during the survey, EWB felt it a moral and patriotic duty to immediately report this."

"EWB's sole concern is for the wildlife and the natural heritage of our wonderful country."
The California psychology professor who has accused Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of sexual assault is reportedly receiving death threats, as Donald Trump says he will make a decision on his nominee based on her testimony.

The professor, 51-year-old Christine Blasey Ford, has accused Mr Kavanaugh of sexually assaulting her at a party when they were both in high school. Mr Kavanugh has categorically denied the allegations.

In the days since Ms Blasey Fords name was made public, her attorneys said, her worst fears have materialised.

She has been the target of vicious harassment and even death threats, attorneys Debra Katz and Lisa Banks wrote in a letter to Senate Judiciary Committee chair Chuck Grassley.

As a result of these kind of threats, her family was forced to relocate out of their home, they added. Her email has been hacked and she has been impersonated online.

The attorneys asked for an FBI investigation of Ms Blasey Fords allegations before she was called to testify publicly in front of the Senate committee. Mr Grassley had previously scheduled a televised hearing on the allegations for Monday.

President Trump said on Wednesday that it would be wonderful if the professor appeared in front of the committee.

Look, if she shows up and makes a credible showing, that will be very interesting and well have to make a decision, he told reporters outside the White House.

But Ms Blasey Fords attorneys pushed back on the Monday deadline, saying the accusers life was being turned upside down, and chiding Mr Grassley for suggesting she relive a traumatic and harrowing incident at the same table as Mr Kavanaugh.

Democrats quickly spoke out in support of the professors wishes, saying the hearing should be delayed until a full investigation could be completed.

That this brave woman is receiving death threats and has been forced to flee with her family is appalling and heartbreaking, Senator Dianne Feinstein, the ranking Democrat on the judiciary committee, said in a statement. This abuse must stop. Were better than this.

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But Republicans were reluctant to delay the hearing, which could push a vote on Mr Kavanaughs confirmation until after the contentious midterm elections. Some pointed to a statement from the Justice Department that noted Ms Blasey Fords allegation does not concern a federal crime, and that the FBI does not make any judgement about the credibility or significance of any allegation.

Mr Grassley said on Tuesday that the hearing should proceed, regardless of whether or not Ms Blasey Ford decided to testify.

The invitation for Monday still stands. Dr Fords testimony would reflect her personal knowledge and memory of events, the chairman said. Nothing the FBI or any other investigator does would have any bearing on what Dr Ford tells the committee, so there is no reason for any further delay.

Meanwhile, in Ms Blasey Fords hometown of Palo Alto, a group of local mothers had gathered together to support their friend. Kirsten Leimroth, whose daughters are part of the same junior lifeguard programme as Ms Blasey Fords two sons, said it was preposterous to think the professor had invented the allegations for political reasons.

Theres absolutely no way its made up. She cant even go home, Ms Leimroth told the Mercury News. She had to have her kids stay somewhere else. She had to shut down all social media. Why would she do that?
(WASHINGTON)  Christine Blasey Ford wants the FBI to investigate her allegation that she was sexually assaulted by Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh before she testifies at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing next week, her lawyers said in a letter sent Tuesday to the panel.

The lawyers wrote that Ford, who is now a college professor in California, wants to cooperate with the committee. But in the days since she publicly accused Kavanaugh of the assault when they were teens at a party 35 years ago, the lawyers said, she has been the target of vicious harassment and even death threats. Her family has relocated, they said.

An FBI investigation should be the first step in addressing the allegations, the lawyers wrote in the letter, which was obtained by The Associated Press.

The development comes after President Donald Trump showered sympathy on his embattled nominee and as Senate Republicans and Democrats fought determinedly over who should testify at a high-stakes hearing on the allegation just six weeks before major congressional elections.

Trump has already rejected the idea of bringing in the FBI to reopen its background check of Kavanaugh. Should he order such a review, it would likely delay a confirmation vote until after the election. Republicans hope to have Kavanaugh confirmed by Oct. 1, the start of the next Supreme Court term.

Meanwhile, Republicans are suggesting that Ford, whose allegations have upended Kavanaughs nomination  the committees vote was already pushed from Thursday to likely next week  will have one chance to testify, and one chance only.

Monday is her opportunity, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said Tuesday, a line that was echoed by other Republicans throughout the day.

McConnell expressed confidence that Kavanaugh would be confirmed. Im not concerned about tanking the nomination, he said.

We should proceed as planned, said Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah, a key Republican on the panel.

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The furious jockeying over Fords testimony underscores the political potency so close to an election that will decide control of both the House and Senate, not to mention the confirmation of a conservative justice likely to serve on the high court for decades.

Democrats complain that Ford was not consulted before the hearing was announced. They also want more witnesses besides Kavanaugh and Ford, hoping to avoid what they said would turn into a he-said-she-said moment.

The lawyers for Ford predicted the hearing, as now scheduled, would include interrogation by senators who appear to have made up their minds that she is mistaken and mixed up.

But Democrats also said Tuesday they were planning to attend the hearing even if Ford did not show up.

Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., said he had a lot of questions for Kavanaugh. A simple denial is not the end of questioning.

As Democrats press for more time to investigate, Republicans have been careful to say that Ford should have her chance to speak, and they have stressed that they are willing to move Mondays hearing behind closed doors, if she prefers.

Were planning on a hearing Monday. It can be open. It can be closed, whatever Ms. Ford wants, said Sen. John Kennedy, a member of the Judiciary panel from Louisiana. Were ready to hear anything she has to say. I am, anyway, and I think most of us are.

GOP Sen. Bob Corker of Tennessee  among a handful of Republicans who insisted on hearing from Ford before voting  said it would be a shame if Ford didnt show up to testify. But he suggested Republicans will not bend from their offer of a hearing Monday.

That would be quite something if she decided she did not want to testify, Corker said. Id assume the committee would then move on as they should.

One witness the Democrats want to hear from is Kavanaughs high school friend Mark Judge, who Ford said was in the room when she was assaulted. Kavanaugh has denied Fords allegation, and Judge says he doesnt remember any such thing. More to the point, I never saw Brett act in the manner Dr. Ford describes, Judge said in a letter to the panel.

The risks of a public hearing starring the all-male lineup of Republicans on the committee could be high. Republicans said late Tuesday they were considering hiring outside attorneys, presumably including women, to question the witnesses. But that may be moot if Ford declines to appear.

Kavanaugh, 53, was at the White House on Tuesday for a second straight day, but again did not meet with Trump. The president said he was totally supporting Kavanaugh and felt terribly for him and his family.

I feel so badly for him that hes going through this, to be honest with you, I feel so badly for him, said Trump, who has himself faced numerous accusations of sexual harassment that hes denied. This is not a man that deserves this.

The No. 2 Senate Republican leader, John Cornyn of Texas, was one of the few Republicans who openly questioned Fords version of events. He called the allegations a drive-by attack on the judges character.

There are gaps in her memory, Cornyn said. She doesnt know how she got there, when it was and so that would logically be something where she would get questions.

Criticism like that fed a Democratic narrative that the GOPs handling of Ford could jeopardize that partys election prospects in the age of #MeToo, the response to sexual abuse that has torched the careers of prominent men.

Now this is really what #MeToo is all about, if you think about it, said Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California, the top Judiciary Committee Democrat. Thats sort of the first thing that happens, its the womans fault. And it is not the womans fault.

Meanwhile, Kavanaugh has been calling Republican senators, including Kennedy, who said the nominee was committed to moving forward.

Hes not happy, hes upset, Kennedy said. He said very clearly and unequivocally, This did not happen.'

Ford went public with her story Sunday, telling The Washington Post that Kavanaugh had forced himself on her in a bedroom at a party when he was 17 and she was 15, attempting to remove her clothes and clapping his hand over her mouth when she tried to scream. She says she escaped when Judge jumped on the bed.
(Reuters) - Britain is significantly increasing its ability to wage war in cyberspace with the creation of a new offensive cyber force of up to 2,000 personnel, Sky News reported on Thursday. The new force which is expected to be announced soon would represent a near four-fold increase in manpower focused on offensive cyber operations, Sky said. Made up of Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) officials, military personnel and contractors, it looks set to receive more than 250 million pounds in funding, a source told Sky. Sky also reported that a second source said that the figure would likely be higher. The plan by the Ministry of Defence and GCHQ comes amid a growing cyber threat from Russia and after Britain used cyber weapons for the first time to fight Islamic State, Sky said. Britain and Russia have been at loggerheads over many issues including an incident in Salisbury when London accused Moscow of poisoning a former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter with the nerve agent Novichok. (Reporting by Rishika Chatterjee in Bengaluru; Editing by James Dalgleish)
Ouagadougou (AFP) - The troubled Sahel state of Burkina Faso has banned night-time use of motorcycles in an eastern region plagued by hit-and-run raids by jihadist rebels.

"Road traffic between towns and villages in the region is strictly forbidden to travellers on two- or three-wheeled vehicles between 7:00 pm and 5:00 am until further notice," the governor of the Eastern Region, Colonel Ousmane Traore, said in a statement late Wednesday.

Cars, buses and trucks will not be subjected to the ban but "will be subjected to strict and rigorous controls," he said.

Traore also said mines used by subsistence gold miners -- who often use home-made explosives to remove earth -- would be temporarily closed as a security measure.

Islamist attacks on Burkina Faso began in 2015, starting with cross-border incursions in the north but then spreading to the east.

The east has seen a string of attacks this year on patrols using improvised explosive devices, in addition to night-time raids by motorbike on remote villages. Around 20 people have died in the past month.

On September 8, President Roch Marc Christian Kabore said additional security measures would shortly be unveiled "to eradicate the curse of terrorism."
By Kevin Yao

TIANJIN, China (Reuters) - China will not stoop to competitive devaluation of its currency, Premier Li Keqiang stressed, hours after China hit back, with a softer punch than the one landed by the United States, in an escalating tariff war between the world's largest economies.

Addressing a World Economic Forum event in the port city of Tianjin on Wednesday, Li did not directly mention the trade conflict but said talk of Beijing deliberately weakening its currency was "groundless."

"One-way depreciation of the yuan brings more harm than benefits for China," he said. "China will never go down the road of relying on yuan depreciation to stimulate exports."

China will not do that to chase "thin profits" and "a few small bucks".

Li went on to say that the world's multi-lateral trading system should be upheld, and that unilateral trade actions will not solve any problems.

His remarks gave a lift to the yuan [CNY=CFXS], which has lost about 9 percent of its value since mid-April amid the ongoing trade war.

On Tuesday, Beijing added $60 billion of U.S. products to its import tariff list in retaliation for U.S. President Donald Trump's planned levies on $200 billion of Chinese goods.

But Beijing is running out of room to respond to any further U.S. tariffs on a dollar-for-dollar basis, raising concerns it may resort to other measures to weather what could be a protracted trade battle.

China has yet to publicly accept an invitation extended last week by U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin to hold a fresh round of talks, which China welcomed at the time.

On Wednesday, Foreign Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang said he had no information on a possible trade delegation and questioned U.S. sincerity about wanting new talks, noting that the last round was followed immediately by the activation of new tariffs.

"This has become a kind of U.S. routine," he said.

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The United States wants to pressure China to make sweeping changes to its trade, technology transfer and high-tech industrial subsidy policies.

Trump had warned that retaliation by China would trigger tariffs on another $267 billion of Chinese goods, on top of duties on $250 billion in imports that are already in place or threatened. China, which bought only $130 billion in American goods last year, has imposed or threatened tariffs on $110 billion in U.S. products.

"China are out of bullets. The fight is done and dusted. Now it's just a question of how the Chinese can save face and say 'alright we're going to change, going to open up wider access not only to the U.S. but to the EU and Japan'," said Christopher Peel, chief investment officer at Tavistock Wealth in London.

"Their economy is export-led, they can't afford for it to go out of control," he told Reuters.

ECONOMIC HIT

The new U.S. tariffs will begin on Sept. 24 at 10 percent and will increase to 25 percent by the end of 2018, with Bank of America Merrill Lynch forecasting a 0.5 percentage point decline in Chinese gross domestic product (GDP) growth for 2019 to 6.1 percent.

Oxford Economics said in a note that China's economic growth in 2019 could fall well below 6 percent, and said prospects for near-term easing in tensions were low.

But, it added "the likelihood of de-escalation will rise over time as the increasing economic impact in the U.S. will make the Trump team less combative, and China realizes that it will be hard to integrate more into the global economy without some concessions regarding its specific economic model."

Investors were relieved that the latest escalation was less severe than some market participants had expected, with Asian stocks <.MIAPJ0000PUS> rising on Wednesday and U.S. Treasury yields near four-month highs.

FIGHTING TALK

China remains unafraid of the "extreme measures" taken by the United States, the People's Daily newspaper said in a front-page article in its overseas edition on Wednesday.

"To deal with the trade war, what China really should do is to focus on doing its own thing well," said the newspaper, which is published by the ruling Communist Party.

"(China) is not worried that the U.S. trade counter measures will raise domestic commodity prices by too much but will instead use it as an opportunity to replace imports, promote localization or develop export-oriented advanced manufacturing," it said.

The Global Times tabloid, which is affiliated to the People's Daily, said the trade war was a chance to pursue greater global recognition of its financial markets and that it could open its A-share market more to listings by Western firms.

Confidence among Asian companies has slumped to the weakest in almost three years as businesses fear collateral damage from the worsening trade war and China's slowing economy, the latest Thomson Reuters/INSEAD survey showed.

Chinese firms were the most pessimistic since the poll began in 2009.

(Additional reporting by Brenda Goh in SHANGHAI, Ben Blanchard in BEIJING and Helen Reid in LONDON; Writing by Tony Munroe; Editing by Simon Cameron-Moore and Kim Coghill)
(Alex Wong via Getty Images)

Why does Christine Blasey Ford want the FBI to investigate her charges against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh prior to testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee?

Because Blasey knows that shes telling the truth, and knows what happened to Anita Hill. Just as she and Kavanaugh both know that Clarence Thomas sits on the Supreme Court because, in all probability, he lied  and was duly rewarded by the forces of patriarchy and partisan politics. Only one of them has an incentive to lie.

That person is not Blasey (who goes by Christine Blasey professionally). Like Anita Hill, who was called a little bit nutty and a little bit slutty after she accused Thomas of sexual harassment, she faces an onslaught of opprobrium which will redefine her life. White male Republicans on the judiciary committee will pick apart every gap in memory to cast her as a mendacious partisan bent on destroying Kavanaugh. Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), who disdainfully called her mixed up, will reprise his contemptuous mistreatment of Hill. Conservative talking heads will insist that she must prove her charges. Fixated on cementing the high courts activist majority, all will ignore everything weve learned about the psychological and practical barriers facing a solitary woman subjected to sexual assault.

Applying logic to the charges themselves, there is a very good chance that Blaseys appalling account is accurate; virtually no chance that it is utterly fabricated. We know how difficult it is for a teenage girl now  and even more so in the 1980s  to charge a man with sexual assault. The rewards of reprising such a trauma include shame, shaming, ostracism and self-blame. Faced with inevitable misery, countless girls and women have chosen to choke down their suffering at whatever internal cost.

After paying that psychic price for 30 years, in 2012 Blasey told her husband and her therapist what Kavanaugh had done  a hard thing in any marriage. Her therapist has the notes. It is illogical  indeed inhumane  to imagine that Blasey deviously sought therapeutic help to plant the seeds of Kavanaughs destruction should he be nominated to the Supreme Court.

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Her account is the most vivid at its most terrifying  a drunken Kavanaugh covering her mouth to suppress screams, causing her to fear suffocation; placing his weight on top of her; wrenching at her swimsuit. She places a witness in the room, Donald Judge  further rendering her an exceedingly incautious, therefore improbable, liar.

The course Kavanaugh seems set on is a grievous sin  against her, against the court, and against our political and communal values.

Her account of escaping after Judge jumped on top of them is equally vivid. Her assertion that this happened at an unsupervised teenage party in Montgomery County, Maryland, where Kavanaugh lived, creates the possibility of further witnesses with a general memory of the party itself. Her gaps in recollection, such as the owners of the house itself, are consistent with what we know about trauma and memory, not to mention the passage of time.

Moreover, there is ample evidence of the social milieu which Blasey describes: that, as teenagers, Kavanaugh and Judge were participants in a drinking culture which combined entitlement with disinhibition. Indeed Judge has written an account of this period, describing himself as a blackout drunk  and referring to a Bart O Kavanaugh vomiting after excessive drinking.

However candid Judge chose to be in print, he has become more reticent in the wake of Blaseys charges. He has alternated between denying them and, more persuasively, claiming a lack of memory. He is firm on only one thing: He does not want to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee. That should not be his choice.

A final curiosity. According to Hatch, Kavanaugh claimed that he did not attend the party in question. How, then, does he know which party Blasey is describing? Did he never attend teenage parties in Montgomery County? Hatch later walked back the statement, but the oddity lingers.

Little wonder, then, that Blasey wants the FBI to investigate her charges  and that Kavanaugh, Donald Trump, and Republican senators do not. An FBI inquiry would require Kavanaugh and Judge to give detailed responses. Moreover, it could uncover witnesses who, at least in general, could corroborate the outlines of her story, including both the nature of the party and the drinking culture in which Kavanaugh and Judge were seemingly immersed. For Kavanaugh and his right-wing patrons, nothing good can come of this search for truth.

As of now, it seems likely that the Republicans will try to jam Kavanaugh through the Senate without an FBI investigation, engaging his accuser in a high-stakes inquisition without the support of a genuine investigation. For them, nothing has changed from the playbook they used to trash Anita Hill  which, among its many unsavory features, included preventing testimony from other woman who could corroborate Hills account of Thomas behavior. This speaks not only to the complete amorality of the confirmation process, but to the glaring power imbalance between Blasey and Judge Kavanaugh.

Blasey is a private citizen, a woman very much alone. Kavanaugh is a polished public figure who has been cosseted since prep school, advancing along a path of privilege opened for him by patrons in the Republican party, and especially the Federalist Society, which grooms ambitious conservatives like Kavanaugh to become politically and ideologically reliable judges. In each step of his advancement  from spearheading Kenneth Starrs attack on Bill Clinton for, ironically, lying about sex, to his service in the White House and subsequent appointment to the federal bench  he has been guided by right-wing ideologues who now expect him, as a justice, to pay his debts.

Brett Kavanaugh, right, during a meeting with independent counsel Kenneth Starr, center, and deputy independent counsel John Bates, left, on Nov. 13, 1996. (David Hume Kennerly via Getty Images)

In his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Kavanaugh did just that  obscuring or eliding the truth about his beliefs and actions in critical areas, pretending to dispassion where his patrons know better. This is not a process which rewards high character, or fidelity to truth.

Now Kavanaugh faces the Clarence Thomas test. Thomas accession tells him that he must unequivocally label Blasey a liar, enabling his sponsors to bulldoze wavering senators. Already he has committed himself to the same blanket denials deployed by Thomas.

If, contrary to reason, Blasey is the partisan fabulist painted by Kavanaugh supporters, this is just. But if she is not, the course Kavanaugh seems set on is a grievous sin  against her, against the court, and against our political and communal values. The only winners are ideologues for whom truth is not a value, but an impediment to power.

So let us stop to imagine another possibility. That Blasey is telling the truth, at least in essence  but that instead of denying her humanity, Kavanaugh apologizes.

I bitterly regret this, he could say  I lied for the sake of ambition and Im sickened by the decades of damage Ive done you. Or, perhaps, I dont fully remember what happened, but I dont drink like that anymore. Im a changed person, appalled by the entitlement and callousness of my teenage self.

I recognize that I advanced this far by suppressing the reality of my actions, believing that Blasey would continue to stifle her pain without revealing that I was the cause. I think I can atone, if at all, only by finally telling the truth and asking other men to draw lessons from my behavior then and now. As to my nomination, I leave it to others to judge me, and accept whatever judgment they render.

Too little too late, one can fervently object. Never worry  Kavanaugh cannot do this. Not simply because it would likely doom his nomination, but because the corrosive process through which young ideologues become judges creates a mountain of psychic debt. Including telling a terrible lie to advance your patrons goals.

Such is the process through which the right elevates judges to our highest court.



Richard North Patterson is the New York Times best-selling author of 22 novels, a former chairman of Common Cause, and a member of the Council On Foreign Relations.


By Nacho Doce and Daniel Flynn SOACHA, Colombia (Reuters) - Yeimy sobbed with her head in her hands as she described how her husband was tied to a pole, gagged and made to watch as she was raped by four fighters from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) 12 years ago. Her husband, Elkin, had been abducted by the FARC's 45th Front in the Tolima region of central Colombia after refusing to pay a revolutionary tax or hand their six-year-old son to the Marxist rebels to become part of the armed group, Yeimy said. After trekking through the jungle for days to find the rebel camp, Yeimy pleaded for her husband's release but the FARC commander, known by the nom de guerre Pepito, demanded a terrible price, she said. "He told me, 'I will pick four of my men and they can do what they want with you'," said the 37-year-old, who asked that her family name not be used. After securing a deal for the release of her husband, Yeimy fled with her family to Soacha, near Colombia's capital Bogota, which is home to tens of thousands displaced by the conflict. But two years later the rebels who had kidnapped Yeimy's husband found them, claiming the couple still owed FARC the so-called revolutionary tax. Yeimy said they took away her husband and shot him. Yeimy is one of hundreds of women who has come forward to talk to victims groups about their alleged sexual abuse during Colombia's five decades of civil war. After a 2016 peace deal with the FARC the government set up a Special Peace Tribunal (JEP) to try crimes committed by all sides in the conflict. Yeimy has started therapy sessions with a psychologist to overcome her fear so she can testify before a public defender, said Sonia Tarquino, who runs a victims program in Soacha. Reuters has not been able to verify Yeimy's account independently. FARC spokesman declined to comment on individual allegations of war crimes since the peace deal, saying these cases will be heard by the JEP. But last month, three victims associations delivered 2,000 documented cases of sexual abuse to the JEP. The tribunal's president, Patricia Linares, has said those responsible would not be allowed to escape justice, but would be eligible to receive non-jail sentences if they came clean about the crimes. Colombia's National Centre for Historical Memory estimates 15,687 people were victims of sexual violence during the conflict, at the hands of right-wing paramilitary groups, security forces and the guerrillas. Armed groups used sexual violence, including gang rape, to instill fear in communities, as a way of imposing their control over an area and as a form of punishment, rights groups have said. The 2016 peace deal between the Colombian government and the FARC guarantees non-jail sentences for crimes related to the conflict, provided those responsible fully admit their wrongdoing and tell the truth about what happened. It also furnishes rebels who disarm with lodging and a monthly stipend. The terms of the accord frustrated many Colombians and it was rejected in a referendum before a modified version was approved by Congress. IMPLEMENTING THE PEACE DEAL Colombia's right-wing President Ivan Duque, who took office in August, has promised to toughen the terms of the peace deal and make FARC commanders pay for crimes with prison time. He has said those guilty of rape should not be provided with special treatment under the deal. Yet Duque faces a challenge to overhaul the accord as most parties in Congress support it and the constitutional court has also ruled that the terms of the pact cannot be altered for three presidential terms. Former President Juan Manuel Santos, who signed the deal with the FARC, told Reuters in an interview in July that most Colombians wanted it implemented to turn the page on the conflict. Duque has pledged not to do anything that would derail the accord as his government seeks to restore peace but a presidency spokesman said that he would continue to press for rapists to not receive amnesty. Yet, with large areas of Colombia still prey to armed groups including dissident FARC fighters, Mexican-backed drug gangs, and the ELN leftist rebel group, some Colombians say they fear that tampering with the peace process could drive more former rebels to take up arms again. More than 7 million people, nearly one sixth of the population, remain displaced by violence in Colombia after decades of internal conflict, according to government figures. ABUSE BY PARAMILITARY AS WELL AS FARC Tarquino, who runs the victims program in Soacha, has been holding meetings for women abused during the conflict for four years. Many of the women have, like Yeimy, had family members killed by the FARC rebels or right-wing paramilitary fighters. Lina, who is now 49 and asked not to reveal her family name, said she was sexually assaulted 22 years ago in northern Colombia by paramilitaries belonging to the Heroes of the Montes de Maria group. When she refused to take any more, the men sexually abused her using a tent pole, Lina said. The paramilitary groups, which continued to operate in many parts of Colombia despite a 2006 peace deal, were founded by landowners to protect themselves from rebels but quickly turned to drug trafficking and violence. Linas home province of Sucre was involved in a scandal that erupted in 2006 over ties between paramilitary fighters and local politicians that resulted in the arrest of several congressmen. "The doctors were named by them. The mayor was appointed by them," said Lina. "I had to put on a mask to hide the pain that I felt from my child. After 22 years, I can finally declare the facts to the competent authorities." Colombia's government provides compensation to victims of sexual violence, including rape, under a 2011 law. Lina has given testimony to a public defender and has been classified as a victim but has not yet received any compensation. Her case document, reviewed by Reuters, recognizes she suffered sexual violence, torture and personal injury. Lina took part in a secret meeting this year with former paramilitaries, including one of the men who abused her, in which they asked forgiveness. Reuters reviewed a video of the meeting but Lina asked not to reveal its location nor the identity of the men. "We as women have to forgive because we cannot live with this anger inside us,"said Lina. Click on https://reut.rs/2xl3PY6 (Reporting by Daniel Flynn; editing by Diane Craft and Clive McKeef)
Taking a step further in its technological advancement journey, China, on September 10, launched its first domestically built polar icebreaker Xuelong 2. The vessel built by Shanghai-based Jiangnan Shipyard Group is the first of its kind and is capable of conducting complex missions in the polar regions.



Xuelong 2, which translates as Snow Dragon 2, is designed for a 60-day expedition with a capacity to carry 90 crew members and researchers. The ship can operate in minimum temperature of minus 30 degrees Celsius and can break 1.5-meter-thick ice at speeds of 2-3 knots. It is 122.5 meters long and 22.3 meters wide, with a displacement weight of 13,990 tons and a navigation capability of 20,000 nautical miles. It is first in the world to use a two-way ice-breaking technology, which means that it can break the ice while moving forward or backward  with the help of its bow and its stern.

The ship is equipped with six state-of-the-art laboratories  carrying intelligent sensors and wireless data connection  to collect data and manage samples. Additionally, its two 16-cylinder and two 12-cylinder Wartsila diesel engines help the vessel to speed up to 15 knots or 27.8km/h. It features a 3.2m x 3.2m moon pool near its bottom to provide access to the ice below the ship for scientific experiments and research.

Currently, Beijing's only active icebreaker is the first Xuelong, which was built in Ukraine in the early 1990s. However, the launch of Xuelong 2 has brought China into the league of nations with indigenous ice-breaking technology for marine research. This will also reduce its reliance on foreign technology.

Xuelong 2, upon completion and after necessary sea trials in 2019, is expected to join the first Xuelong in the country's expanding Arctic research fleet. During its missions, it will conduct complex surveys ranging from atmospheric research to seabed studies. The vessel will be a part of China's 10th Arctic and 35th Antarctic expeditions in 2019, as per Dong Yue, a research fellow at the Polar Research Institute of the Ocean University of China. It can be noted that the first Xuelong has already conducted nine Arctic expeditions and 32 Antarctic expeditions since its inception in 1994.

China, in recent years, has been making concerted effort to expand its reach in the new frontiers of technology such as polar regions, space, marine, and cyberspace. In January 2018, in its first Arctic policy, China clearly stated its ambition to explore and develop the region's natural resources jointly with the Arctic states.

Over the past few years, China's major shipping company COSCO has been continually sending its vessels through Russia's Northern Sea Route for exploration of the Arctic Region. China has also jointly funded  with Russia  the construction of Yamal gas plant in its Arctic Siberia region. The U.S. sanctions on Novatek  Russia's privately-owned gas producer  had made it impossible for the company to borrow funds from Western banks. However, the Chinese fund resolved this funding issue for the company. In order to strengthen its market presence in Asia, Russia is eager to develop a shorter route to access coveted Asian markets.

China, in its Arctic policy, has also proposed the construction of a "Polar Silk Route," which will integrate the Arctic region into its Belt and Road initiative. It also highlighted that this initiative could shorten the shipping time between China and Europe by 12 days in comparison to the traditional route which runs through the Indian Ocean and the Suez Canal. Moreover, China stated that it will conserve the natural environment and avoid any encroachment upon the traditions and cultures of the local people during the integration process.

Chinese officials in the recent past have confirmed Beijing's active participation in various researches along the Arctic Region. The main intention is to provide sustainable economic and social development of the region by facilitating its connectivity to the other parts of the world. Chinese engineers have already started working on another "next-generation icebreaker" which will be more advanced than Xuelong 2 with three meters of ice-breaking capacity in minus 45 degrees Celsius temperature.

The current trend indicates that China will continue to improve its technologies related to marine research in the polar regions. It will also accelerate its exploration along the Arctic and Antarctic regions in the years to follow. This endeavor will not only make China self-reliant in the areas of marine exploration but will also add many new feathers to its golden cap of technological advancements.

Rachana Gupta is a China Focus columnist, an expert author of Ezine articles and an active blogger and poetry writer.

Opinion articles reflect the views of their authors only, not necessarily those of China.org.cn.
The Venta Maersk in the Russian port of Vladivostok last month: Reuters

A commercial container ship has for the first time successfully navigated the Northern Sea Route of the Arctic Ocean, a route made possible by melting sea ice caused by global warming.

Maersk Line, the worlds biggest container shipping company, told The Independent its ship, Venta Maersk, was expected to reach its final destination of St Petersburg next week.

The new ice-class 42,000 ton vessel, carrying Russian fish and South Korea electronics, left Vladivostok, in the far east of Russia, on the 23 August.

With help from Russia's most powerful nuclear icebreaker, it followed the Northern Sea Route up through the Bering Strait between Russia and Alaska, before travelling along Russias north coast and into the Norwegian Sea.

The route has seen growing traffic during summer months already, with cargos of oil and gas regularly making the journey.

Arctic sea ice hit a record low for January this year, and an extreme event was declared in March as the Bering Seas ice levels reached the lowest level in recorded history as temperatures soared to 30C above average.

Data released by the National Snow and Ice Data Centre in Colorado showed this winters sea ice cover was less than a third of what it was just five years ago.

The Northern Sea Route can cut journey times between Asia and Europe by up to two weeks by allowing ships to avoid travelling through the Suez Canal or past the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa.

The Arctic Ocean route does, however, remain more costly as icebreakers are still required to accompany ships.

In an email to The Independent, Maersk confirmed the success of the one-off trial passage, with icebreaker ships providing assistance as required.

The trial passage will enable us to explore the operational feasibility of container shipping through the Northern Sea Route and to collect data, a spokesperson said.

Currently, we do not see the Northern Sea Route as a commercial alternative to our existing network.

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Sune Scheller, project leader of Greenpeace Nordic, told The Independent any regular shipping route in the Arctic Ocean ultimately risked an "environmental catastrophe".

"The most immediate threat comes from some of the problems with the fuel," he said.

Maersk hasnt spoken about which kind of fuel this [ship] is using, but in general container ships are using heavy fuel oil, which is basically whats left in the barrel.

Mr Scheller said the "dirty fuel" had "consequences" for the environment, including adding to particulate matter in the atmosphere.

Also known as black carbon, particulate matter rests on white surfaces like ice and snow and absorbs heat instead of reflecting it, which contributes to climate change.

According to The Economist, just 15 of the biggest ships emit more of the noxious oxides of nitrogen and sulphur than all the worlds cars put together.

"Its also of a concern in case of an accident," Mr Scheller continued. "It is more toxic and it is more difficult to get out of the environment again, especially an Arctic environment where the water is cold."

A combination of the use of heavy fuel oil, the shallow water of the Arctic Ocean, and the ice makes the Northern Sea Route one of "increased risk" of a catastrophe, he added.

But as global warming increases ice loss, Mr Scheller said banning commercial shipping in the area was unlikely to be a realistic possibility.

Whats important now is that you make sure that when this becomes available, you have the necessary regulation in place in the area," he said.

"So that means you have vessels that are capable of charting this area, But its also about putting bans on the most dirty types of fuels that exist."

Global estimates suggest ships are responsible for 15 per cent of nitrogen oxides and 8 per cent of sulphur gas worldwide. These gases have been linked with a range of health problems including asthma, heart disease and cancer.
By Gina Cherelus

(Reuters) - A Texas man at the center of a legal battle over his plan to make instructions available for 3-D printed plastic guns flew to Taiwan after learning police in Austin were investigating an accusation he had sex with an underage girl, police said on Wednesday.

Cody Wilson, 30, was placed under investigation after a counsellor on Aug. 22 told police that a 16-year-old girl had said she was paid $500 to have sex with Wilson at an Austin hotel, Austin Police Commander Troy Officer said at a news conference.

Police later interviewed the girl and on Wednesday obtained a warrant for Wilson's arrest, but by then he had caught a flight to Taiwan, Officer said.

"We know Mr. Wilson frequently travels for business. We don't know why he went to Taiwan," Officer said. "But we do know before he left he was informed by a friend of the victim that she had spoken to police and the police were investigating him for having sex with a minor."

Taiwan does not have an extradition treaty with the United States.

The island's Criminal Investigation Bureau told Reuters on Thursday that it had not received any request on the matter from the United States, and it was not immediately clear whether Wilson was in Taiwan.

Wilson founded the group Defense Distributed, which has been selling 3-D firearm-design files on flash drives via regular mail after a U.S. federal judge barred the group from posting the blueprints online.

A lawyer for Wilson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

In an Aug. 27 interview with police, the teenager said she had exchanged messages with a man using the screen name "Sanjuro" on SugarDaddyMeet.com, according to a police affidavit. The girl said "Sanjuro" later revealed his real name, described himself as a "big deal" and exchanged nude photos with her.The girl said she and Wilson had sex at a local hotel on Aug. 15, according to the document. Her statement was corroborated with security video footage and records showing Wilson registered as a guest at the hotel that night, police said.

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Wilson sparked a legal battle in 2015 after he challenged a government ban on posting the blueprints for printing 3-D guns to the internet, claiming it infringed on his rights to free speech and to bear arms.

The Trump administration earlier this year reached a settlement lifting the ban for Defense Distributed. But 19 states and the District of Columbia challenged that decision in court in July, arguing that publishing the blueprints would allow criminals easy access to unregistered weapons.

Last month, U.S. District Judge Robert Lasnik in Seattle ordered Wilson not to post blueprints online. Instead, Wilson began selling them by mail, saying the judge's order did not bar him from doing so.

(The story was refiled to correct spelling and gramatical errors in the sixth paragraph)

(Reporting by Gina Cherelus in New York; additional reporting by Alex Dobuzinskis in Los Angeles and Yimou Lee in TAIPEI; Editing by Bernadette Baum and Lisa Shumaker)
Ryan Reynolds and Karan Soni in Deadpool 2 (20th Century Fox)

With Disney soon to complete its purchase of 20th Century Fox, fans have begun to imagine what the Marvel Cinematic Universe could look like when the X-Men, Fantastic Four, and Deadpool are thrown into the mix.

Deadpool 2 star Karan Soni, who plays taxi driver Dopinder in both of the Ryan Reynolds-fronted superhero films, has also dreamt about this harmonious Marvel future. However, he thinks that if the Merc With a Mouth does team up with Earths Mightiest Heroes, future Deadpool films should stay true to the franchises trend-setting R-rated roots.

I just cant imagine us doing [another Deadpool film] thats not like that, I just cant imagine that, Soni tells Yahoo Movies UK while promoting the DVD and Blu-ray release of Deadpool 2.

Unless that would be like a bit. If that could be like a fourth-wall-break kind of bit where Deadpool knows hes being censored, I guess that could be kind of cool. But again, youre talking to someone who didnt have the script until the day before filming so Im the last person to know.

Avengers: Infinity War was one of the most adult MCU films yet, earning a 12 rating, but thats about as far as Marvel Studios has dared push it so far. Should Deadpool join the Marvel Cinematic Universe at Disney, Soni hopes the studio doesnt mess with the winning formula.

Actor Karan Soni attends the LA Premiere of Paramount Pictures Office Christmas Party on December 7, 2016. (Photo by Jonathan Leibson/Getty Images for Paramount Pictures)

Essentially I just hope that the teams, the writing teams, stay in that same world because they know the voice of the character really well and obviously Ryans such a big part of that.

But whatever they come up with, and if they would like me to be there then I would happily be there, and I hope [Deadpool] gets a trilogy, that would be great but if not then Im just happy to have been part of it.

We also spoke to the 29-year-old actor about how a bigger budget impacted the making of the sequel, whether he considered Dopinder a stereotype, and the secrecy involved on set.

Deadpool 2 is available now on digital download, Blu-ray and DVD.

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Yahoo Movies UK: Theres always a big risk with sequels, with much more pressure from all fronts to deliver, so you must be so happy that everyone has embraced this one the same as the first?





Karan Soni: Yeah, I definitely had all those fears going into it because I dont often prefer sequels, something always feels off about it always, and went into this experience with low expectations and then remember seeing it at the premiere for the first time and thinking Wait, I think this is actually really good!.

Its also nice to know that other people have felt that way, too, so its pretty cool.

The sequel adds so many new elements to it that there is always a risk that it will become convoluted and lose its originality but writers Rhett Reese, Paul Wernick and Ryan (Reynolds) have balanced everything really well, havent they?

Im good friends with the writers [Paul Wernick and Rhett Rheese] after doing the first movie and have been emailing them about it since we finished the first one but its really them and Ryan that should get all the credit for that because all of it is in the script and they worked through all of it and cracked the code and they did a great job.

With the first Deadpool, how aware were you of the character beforehand, where you a fan? Had you seen or heard about this test footage that had been leaked onto the internet before the film finally got a green light from the studio?

No, I didnt know anything about Deadpool at all. When I got the audition email  these things are very secretive  so the project then was called Lamb and they had changed Deadpools name in the script to George or something so I had absolutely no idea what it was.

Karan Soni and the cast of Deadpool 2 assemble for the films Thanksgiving poster (20th Century Fox)

The script said about his red suit lining and I basically got the job and they said what it was and I had no idea what it was but after I got the job, I reverse engineered by way to the test footage, and how long it had been in gestation and then I felt happy in a way that I didnt know all of that because I may have put a lot more pressure on myself.

Moving onto the second film, did you feel a change in terms of the size of the production as the first one was relatively small compared to other superhero films? Did the film feel different with a new director (David Leitch) at the helm?

Yeah, huge. It felt like a big, big, big movie.

There were many days where I would show up and they may not need you because they were shooting a scene for ten days so they would call me when they needed me whereas with the first one it was more Were ready to shoot now, we need you to shoot now!, here it was Have some tea, have some breakfast, maybe in three hours well get you into make-up it just felt we had so much more time to make it.

Josh Brolin plays time-travelling badass Cable in Deadpool 2 (20th Century Fox)

And obviously adding Josh Brolin, who is such an iconic star, it felt like we were adding bigger pieces to it and that was my fear going into it that it might get bogged down with all that stuff. But what I think helps is that the character [Deadpool] is so selfish, he never really wants to save the world and my problem with those bigger movies is that they get so big that you lose the idea of the stakes because all of it is like end of the world stuff but with this one the world is doing just fine without his help and its just him overcoming his personal demons so that just ends up helping the movie become more personal and feel smaller.

How surprised, and indeed happy, were you to discover how much Dopinders role in the sequel had been expanded upon?

On the first movie, we got physical scripts that werent watermarked and it didnt feel super secretive whereas on this one, I couldnt even get a script!

I went up to Vancouver for my costume fittings and I didnt even know what the themes were and I was asking for a script and people kept saying Im not approved and I was shooting in a week and I didnt know what I was doing.





And then finally, with this very complex internet software I downloaded and got a password so people could see what page I was reading the script on and that was the day before filming. And then I read it and I couldnt believe it. It was so awesome, and what was cool about it was  with the first one  I just loved the chance to be in something like this as Id never imagined that I would get to be in something like this, thats subversive and cool. But with the second one I personally was feeling so happy to come back but also wanted to show a bit more range and show more of my acting skills.

Id been working a lot, but a lot of people only know me from the first one and part of me was wanting to show other sides of myself and when I read the script its kind of what [Dopinder] is feeling too. So it was a happy marriage of the character settling into the groove of working with Deadpool and hes dying to take on more responsibilities, and as the script was going on I was wanting to show Ryan and everyone else more a side of myself and take on more as well so there was this beautiful parallel with me as an actor.

Did you ever think that the character of Dopinder could be seen as a stereotype or did you feel comfortable that he was in safe hands with the writers, and what they were going to do with him in the two films?

I never felt that when I read it. I wouldnt have done it if I felt it was offensive in any way. For me, what was unique about it was to see a character like this, in a superhero movie, where the hero is almost an anti-hero in the sense that the Deadpool character is so rude and doesnt care about anyone and in some ways the audience shouldnt be rooting for him because he is so selfish.

What I thought they were trying to do when I read the first movie, was to put him with a character like this who was an immigrant who isnt picking up on Deadpool and what he is saying exactly as hes saying it, yet Deadpool  instead of making fun of him which is what you would think he would do as he is kind of an easy target for him  instead he decides to help him and almost become this mentor to him. And that to me was a very endearing thing and I understood why my character was in the film to show a softer side to this grungy character.

Their unique dynamic  thats what I picked up on and in the second one we get to expand on that and make it an even bigger theme so it was their dynamic together that made it interesting.

And surprisingly when people come up to me and want to talk about the movie they feel they can relate to Dopinder and many of them arent Indian so I think its they almost feel thats what their relationship with Deadpool would be like if he was a real person.

Deadpool 2 is available now on digital download, Blu-ray and DVD.

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Bogota (AFP) - Suspected dissident FARC guerrillas murdered three geologists working for a Canadian gold mining company in northwestern Colombia, the army said on Thursday.

The alleged rebels attacked a party representing Continental Gold that was exploring mining deposits. Three other people were injured and one disappeared, the army said in a statement.

A Continental Gold source told AFP the three murdered victims were Colombians.

FARC rebels signed a historic peace accord with the Colombian government in December 2016, transforming themselves into a political party and ending a half century of armed insurrection.

But some dissident members refused to lay down arms and continue to operate in lawless jungle regions rife with drug trafficking violence close to the borders with Ecuador and Venezuela.

The army said an operation to track the culprits was ongoing.

Continental Gold, headquartered in Ontario, said in a statement it knew no details of the attack but "fears the worst."

The attack comes just two weeks after the company denounced another armed assault in which a worker was killed and another injured.

As well as FARC dissidents, who number around 1,200 according to the military, the ELN Marxist rebel group also operates in the same areas.

Since the FARC peace deal, the ELN has been considered the last recognized rebel group fighting government forces, although disarmament negotiations have been held.
Donald Trump has launched another series of tirades against Jeff Sessions, saying in a new interview, "I dont have an attorney general."

The president has repeatedly lambasted the man he appointed to spearhead the Justice Department, criticising his decision to recuse himself from the agencys ongoing investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election and possible collusion with Trump campaign officials.

Speaking outside the White House, Mr Trump said "a lot of people" have asked him to fire Mr Sessions, and that his administration was "looking at lots of different thngs".

"Im so sad over Jeff Sessions because he came to me. He was the first Senator that endorsed me. And he wanted to be Attorney General, and I didn't see it," Mr Trump said on Tuesday, speaking with Hill.TV in the Oval Office. "And then he went through the nominating process and he did very poorly. I mean, he was mixed up and confused, and people that worked with him for, you know, a long time in the Senate were not nice to him, but he was giving very confusing answers. Answers that should have been easily answered. And that was a rough time for him."

The presidents attacks on Mr Sessions arrived shortly after the White House ordered the Justice Department to declassify key documents related to the federal Russia probe.

The move will allow the release of various documents and text messages related to the investigation, an unprecedented order from a sitting president during an ongoing probe against his campaign.

Pres. Trump tells @jonkarl he's "disappointed" in Attorney General Jeff Sessions "for many reasons" https://t.co/j0OERejSSd pic.twitter.com/G3JcvDMDJY  ABC News Politics (@ABCPolitics) September 19, 2018

Mr Sessions delivered a strongly-worded defence of his leadership in the Justice Department, writing that the agency would not be "improperly influenced by political considerations" under his watch.

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During Mr Trumps Tuesday interview, the president continued to sharpen his attacks against Mr Sessions for recusing himself  a move he doesn't feel was warranted or even necessary, despite the attorney general having worked on his 2016 campaign.

He gets in and probably because of the experience that he had going through the nominating when somebody asked him the first question about Hillary Clinton or something he said I recuse myself, I recuse myself,'" Trump said. "And now it turned out he didn't have to recuse himself. Actually, the FBI reported shortly thereafter any reason for him to recuse himself. And its very sad what happened."

Recent reports have suggested the president is planning to remove Mr Sessions from his post after the 2018 midterm elections, replacing him with an attorney general who may be more willing to go along with Mr Trumps political demands. Speaking to reporters outside of the White House on Wednesday, Mr Trump echoed his Tuesday comments about Mr Sessions' recusal, saying, "My worst enemies...people that, you know, are on the other side of me, in a lot of ways including politically, have said that was a very unfair thing he did."

Senate Republicans  once adamant the president would face their backlash if he were to fire Mr Sessions  now appear resigned to the idea of his ousting.

"We wish the best for him, but as any administration would show, Cabinet members seldom last the entire administration, and this is clearly not an exception," Roy Blunt, a Montana Republican, told the Chicago Tribune.

Mr Sessions has previously defended his decision to recuse himself from Russia-related matters, telling the Senate Intelligence Committee last year, "I recused myself not because of any asserted wrongdoing on my part during the campaign, but because a Department of Justice regulation, 28 CFR 45.2, required it."
Kinshasa (AFP) - Election officials in Democratic Republic of Congo on Wednesday released an official list of candidates for December's presidential election, formally excluding two heavyweight opposition figures.

"Now we have finished with the candidacy stage, we are in the home stretch for the December 23 elections," said electoral commission chief Corneille Nangaa as he unveiled the list.

More than two dozen people registered their bid with the Independent National Electoral Commission (CENI), a much-contested panel tasked with overseeing the ballot in one of the Africa's biggest and most unstable nations.

It gave the green light to opposition figures Felix Tshisekedi and Vital Kamerhe, as well as to Emmanuel Ramazani Shadary, a hardline former interior minister backed by President Joseph Kabila.

But the list also confirmed the exclusion of former warlord Jean-Pierre Bemba and regional baron Moise Katumbi -- a move that raised howls of protest from their powerful blocs of supporters.

Bemba has lashed what he calls a "parody of an election."

He accused Kabila -- whom critics characterise as corrupt and manipulative -- of pulling strings "to ensure that the government's candidate does not have a serious challenger."

- Speculation about Kabila's plans

The DRC, previously known as Zaire, has never had a peaceful transition of power since it gained independence from Belgium in 1960.

Most of its citizens are deeply poor despite the DRC's wealth of gold, diamonds, copper, cobalt, uranium and oil. Bloody conflicts trouble the vast country's east and centre.

Kabila, 47, has been in power since 2001. His second and final term in office ended nearly two years ago, but he kept in power thanks to a caretaker clause in the constitution.

Months of feverish speculation about Kabila's plans, marked by protests that were bloodily repressed, ended in August when he threw his weight behind Shadary.

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Around 500 people gathered in Kinshasa's Roman Catholic cathedral late Wednesday for a mass to commemorate "martyrs" who died in anti-Kabila protests in 2016.

- Opposition dilemma -

Voting day on December 23 will take place for the presidency, legislature and provincial bodies, throwing down a huge logistical and technical challenge to CENI in a country where infrastructure is poor.

The big challenge for the fragmented opposition is to unite behind a credible candidate after the loss of the people-pulling power of Bemba and Katumbi.

It will stage a rally in Kinshasa on September 29 on the heels of talks in Brussels and a meeting in Johannesburg with South Africa's ruling African National Congress (ANC) party.

In the absence of a single champion, boycotting the election, citing for example security concerns over electronic voting machines, may loom as an opposition strategy, say analysts.

Last week, Tshisekedi, Kamerhe, Bemba and Katumbi joined with two fellow opposition leaders to warn CENI and Kabila's government to ensure fair elections or else "be held responsible for the chaos and consequences."

Bemba, 55, a former rebel and ex-vice president, declared his candidacy when he made a triumphant return home from Belgium after the International Criminal Court in The Hague acquitted him of war crimes charges.

But he was excluded by CENI, in a decision upheld by the Constitutional Court, on the grounds that the ICC had convicted him separately on charges of tampering with witnesses at his war-crimes trial.

That conviction and a one-year sentence were upheld by the ICC on Monday along with a 300,000-euro ($350,000) fine. Bemba's lawyer, Melinda Taylor, said in an email to AFP on Wednesday that he would file an appeal.

Katumbi, 53, a former Kabila ally and ex-governor of the mineral-rich province of Katanga, says he was blocked at the Zambian border to prevent him from returning to the country to file his candidacy.

He has lived in exile since 2016.
Sixteen years after kidnapping Elizabeth Smart in Utah, Wanda Barzee will be freed from prison  and Ms Smart is speaking out about the horrors she endured during captivity.

Barzee is set to be freed from a Utah prison on Wednesday, after having served concurrent sentences stemming from federal and state convictions. She had previously served a federal sentence in Texas before being sent to the Utah, and will now serve 60 months of federal supervision.

Ms Smart, 30, has spoken out in light of the upcoming release, telling CBS that Barzee had a dark and evil feeling that radiated from her during her captivity after she was taken by Brian David Mitchell from her home at knifepoint. Mitchell is serving a life sentence for his convictions.

That first morning when he brought me into the camp and told me I was now his wife and kept telling me it was time to consummate our marriage, I just  at first, I didn't know what he meant, Ms Smart, who was abducted at the age of 14, told CBS.

And then I remember having this idea come to my mind of what he could mean, she continued. And I remember thinking, There's no way.  And I was raped. And, I was raped every day after that, multiple times a day.

Ms Smart  who now advocates on behalf of trafficking and kidnapping victims  told the network that she is wary of Barzees release, even though she has been in contact with the federal agent who will be supervising her former captor.

I don't know all the conditions of her release, but I have been reassured multiple times that she will be kept a very close eye on, Ms Smart said. And as soon as she messes up, which I've been reassured that she will, she will be taken back to federal prison for the duration of the five years.

She continued: I have been informed on who the agent is, who the federal agent is, who will be supervising her. And I do believe that he will do the job to the best of his ability. I have faith in him. I just lack faith in her.

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Barzee will need to register as a sex offender upon her release, and will be watched by that federal agent to ensure that she complies with terms of her release. Her home will be subject to inspections, and she will be forced to tell officials about her work conditions and other information.

The kidnapper was arrested in March of 2003 after Ms Smart and her captors were recognized in public. She pleaded guilty in federal court in 2009 to one count of kidnapping and one count of enticement of a minor. She was sentenced to 180 months in prison and 60 months of supervised release.

A year later, Barzee pleaded guilty to a single count of aggravated kidnapping in Utah, which was a second-degree felony. These charges were related to a plot to kidnap one of Ms Smarts cousins shortly after the initial abduction. A judge sentenced her to 15 years for that crime, which is the maximum the state of Utah allows for that class of felony.
EU leaders openly called for the UK to have another Brexit referendum today, as talks over future relations with Britain entered a critical stage.

The prime ministers of the Czech Republic and of Malta both said they would prefer the British public to have a final say on the outcome of negotiations once they are complete and people can clearly see the options.

Speaking from a summit in Salzburg where Theresa May is holding meetings on Thursday, Joseph Muscat of Malta went on to say that the view was almost unanimously held among European leaders.

It comes just a day after a minister admitted that a new referendum was a possibility, contradicting Ms Mays assertion in a speech given to leaders in Austria that there would be no second public vote.

The Independent has launched its own campaign for a Final Say on the outcome of Brexit talks through a Peoples Vote referendum, with more than 800,000 having signed the petition so far.

Talking to BBC Radio 4s Today programme, Maltese prime minister Joseph Muscat said: My experience so far within the context of the European Council is that irrespective of ones political allegiances, there is a lot of respect [for the UKs decision].

Having said that there is a unanimous or almost unanimous point of view around the table that we would like the almost impossible to happen that the UK has another referendum.

The leader said he was unsure what the result would be or if it would be different from the 2016 result.

But he went on: I think most of us would welcome a situation where there is the possibility of the British people putting things into perspective, seeing what has been negotiated, seeing the options and then deciding once and for all.

Prime Minister of the Czech Republic Andrej Babis argued that people in the UK could have changed their view since the last referendum.

He added: Im very unhappy that UK is leaving, so it would be better maybe to make another referendum.

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At the gathering in Austria, Ms May used a ten minute address to the leaders to insist there would be no delay to the UKs March 2019 departure and no new vote, in a bid to put the onus on the continents leaders to compromise in order to avoid a no-deal Brexit.

She said: I want to be absolutely clear, this government will never accept a second referendum.

The British people voted to leave the European Union and we will be leaving on March 29, 2019.

But the approach, which Brexiteers see as necessary to prevent the EU offering the UK poor terms in any withdrawal agreement, was undermined by one of her ministers in the UK.

In an interview financial secretary to the Treasury Mel Stride acknowledged: There is a danger of [another vote] happening if Chequers doesnt prevail.

The minister also said we could end up not leaving the EU altogether, suggesting the ballot paper for any further referendum might give voters the option to remain in the EU.
 Flash

Dialogue and consultations based on equality, sincerity and mutual respect are the only viable way out for the China-U.S. trade issues, a Foreign Ministry spokesperson said Wednesday.

After Washington announced the latest tariff offensive against China, U.S. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross told media that the intention of the U.S. is to make constructive dialogue with China. As to whether and when the two sides would hold such dialogue, Ross said the matter is in China's ballpark.

In response, spokesperson Geng Shuang said at a daily news briefing that on one hand sending out negotiation invitations, on the other hand keeping up maximum pressure has become a routine trick of the U.S., while China has seen clearly and taken it calmly.

"Not long ago, China received an invitation from the U.S. to hold trade negotiations, and the two sides had been in discussion about the details," Geng said. "However, the U.S. on Tuesday announced additional tariffs to be levied on 200 billion U.S. dollars worth of Chinese goods, and threatening to adopt further tariff escalation measures."

Geng also mentioned two such cases that occured in June and August.

"Threats, intimidation and blackmail against China are useless," the spokesperson said, adding China would continue to steadfastly advance reform and opening up in line with its own timetable and roadmap while continuing to firmly safeguard its legitimate rights and interests.

"The essence of China-U.S. trade cooperation is mutual benefit," he said, adding that it is not terrible if there are differences, while dialogue and negotiations based on equality, sincerity and mutual respect are the only correct way to resolve China-U.S. trade issues.

"We hope the U.S. side could demonstrate goodwill and sincerity," he said.
A shelter used to house unaccompanied children in Tornillo, Texas., shown in an undated photo. (Photo: HHS Administration for Children and Families via AP)

The Department of Health and Human Services is diverting millions of dollars in funding from a number of programs, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health, to pay for housing for the growing population of detained immigrant children.

In a letter sent to Sen. Patty Murray, D.-Wash., and obtained by Yahoo News, HHS Secretary Alex Azar outlined his plan to reallocate up to $266 million in funding for the current fiscal year, which ends on Sept. 30, to the Unaccompanied Alien Children (UAC) program in the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR).

Nearly $80 million of that money will come from other refugee support programs within ORR, which have seen their needs significantly diminished as the Trump administration makes drastic cuts to the annual refugee numbers. The rest is being taken from other programs, including $16.7 million from Head Start, $5.7 million from the Ryan White HIV/AIDS program and $13.3 million from the National Cancer Institute. Money is also being diverted from programs dedicated to mental and maternal health, womens shelters and substance abuse.

According to data from the Office of Refugee Resettlement obtained by Yahoo News, there were 13,312 immigrant children in federal custody as of Wednesday, Sept. 19, with ORRs existing facilities at 92 percent capacity.

The latest figures demonstrate the continued growth of this population just one week after the New York Times reported that the number of detained immigrant children in the U.S. has soared to record highs over the last year, from 2,400 children in May of 2017 to 12,800 earlier this month. Last week, HHS confirmed its plan to extend use of an emergency shelter in Tornillo, Texas, for the third time since it opened in June, and expand capacity at the tent city from 400 to 3,800 beds. The estimated cost of operating such emergency facilities is $750 per child per day  approximately three times the cost of a regular ORR shelter.

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Immigrant children, many of whom have been separated from their parents, are being housed in this compound next to the Mexico border in Tornillo, Texas, in June. (Photo: Mike Blake/Reuters)

We support making sure ORR gets all the resources they need to help kids, said Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., a member of the Senate Appropriations Committee and one of 19 Democratic senators who wrote Azar in July expressing concern over a troubling pattern of chaotic, ideologically driven and opaque policymaking in ORRs unaccompanied child program.

Van Hollen told Yahoo News Wednesday that the notification of the reallocation of funds to the Unaccompanied Alien Children program leaves key questions unanswered.

Van Hollen said he was questioning the reasons for need for additional money and how much of it is because you have more UACs coming across the border and how much is due to the Trump administrations family separation policy? He urged the Senate Subcommittee on Appropriations for Labor, Health and Human Services, Education and Related Agencies call Azar and other administration officials to a hearing on how the money would be used in the UAC program, and the impacts on the programs being cut.

The American public is entitled to facts behind the policies here, he said.

This is hardly the first time HHS has had to move money around to accommodate an influx of unaccompanied immigrant children in its care. But although the number of unaccompanied immigrant children apprehended along the border U.S. in fiscal year 2018 is on track to surpass that of the previous year, the rate is still well below those seen in 2014, when the flow of unaccompanied children across the border reached crisis-level proportions, or during the subsequent peak in 2016. And while the family separation policy has contributed to the demand for additional beds, the main reason is that children are spending more time in custody before they are released to a sponsor or returned home.

Dozens of adults and their children, many fleeing poverty and violence in Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador, arrive at a bus station following release from Customs and Border Protection on June 23 in McAllen, Texas. (Photo: Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

So far this month, discharges from custody have been running at a rate of around 0.6 to 0.7 percent per day, less than half the 1.5 percent shown in reports obtained by Yahoo News from early April and from late July. Meanwhile the intake of unaccompanied immigrant children into ORR facilities has remained relatively steady, with average daily referrals from Customs and Border Protection in the range of 100 to 200.

This is not a story about a historically large surge in arrivals, said Mark Greenberg, a former official with HHSs Administration for Children and Families. The story is fundamentally about a significant slowdown in children being released from care.

Greenberg, now a senior fellow at the Migration Policy Institute, worked at the Administration for Children and Families (ACF), which includes ORR, from 2009 to 2017, serving as acting assistant secretary during the last three years of the Obama administration. He said that even during the major surges of 2014 and 2016, the goal was to keep the average daily discharge rate at 3 percent. Most typically, the discharge rate was somewhere in the 2s, with significant concern if it fell below 2, he said. It was certainly not below 1.

In his letter notifying Sen. Murray of the transfer of funds, Azar stated that, based on the current growth pattern and what he described as an increased length of time needed to safely release unaccompanied alien children to sponsors, HHS is preparing for the trend of high capacity to continue.

Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar speaks at a school safety meeting on Aug. 16. (Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

The majority of children housed in such facilities come to the U.S. on their own from the northern triangle countries of Central America  Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras  often fleeing gang violence. However, during the months that border officials were separating families under the Trump administrations zero-tolerance policy, children whod actually entered the country with a parent were being reclassified as unaccompanied and referred to ORR, in a chaotic process that left children stranded, in some cases while their parents were being deported. The subsequent effort to reunite those children, which has required the diversion of staff from ORR and elsewhere throughout the Administration for Children and Families, has likely contributed to the slowdown in discharges.

But thats not the only reason. Months before the family separation crisis came to a head, unaccompanied minors were already spending extended periods of time in ORR facilities, which are intended to house children temporarily until a parent or suitable adult sponsor can be identified.

In March, Yahoo News reported that a new policy requiring ORR Director Scott Lloyd to personally approve the release of certain children resulted in many remaining in custody longer, even after a proper sponsor had been approved. Lawyers representing the children and immigration advocates said they were being falsely suspected of gang affiliations. More and more aged out of custody and were transferred to adult detention facilities on their 18th birthdays. In response to a lawsuit by the New York Civil Liberties Union, a New York federal judge in June determined that Lloyd had violated the federal Administrative Procedure Act by enacting the policy almost immediately upon being sworn in as director, with no record demonstrating the need for change, and ordered him to halt it.

At the same time, parents and other potential adult sponsors who might have taken the children in were being frightened away by the environment of heightened enforcement under Trump. More than 400 people were arrested by ICE last summer in an operation targeting parents of unaccompanied immigrant kids. A rumor spread about an agreement among ORR, ICE and CBP that would require ORR to inform ICE with the names, fingerprints and other personal details of not only proposed sponsors but all adults in the household. Even before the policy was implemented in June, the prospect was deterring potential sponsors from coming forward.

As soon as the announcement was made that they were going to do this, it had an immediate chilling effect, said Jennifer Podkul, policy director at Kids in Need of Defense (KIND), which provides pro bono legal services to immigrant children.

This photo of Casa Padre, an immigrant shelter for unaccompanied minors, in Brownsville, Texas, was provided by the Department of Health and Human Services in June. (Photo: ACF/HHS/Handout via Reuters)

We started seeing kids linger in care longer before it officially went into effect, said Podkul, noting that KIND also received calls from the Honduran Embassy asking whether it should advise Honduran citizens in the U.S. against coming forward to sponsor a child.

Matthew Albence, the executive associate director for enforcement and removal operations at ICE, validated these fears during a hearing about family detention before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee on Tuesday, stating that under the policy ICE has apprehended 41 prospective sponsors so far.

Greenberg explained that the process of releasing unaccompanied minors into the care of adult sponsors has always involved a bit of a balancing act.

There are lots of tradeoffs and judgments involved in that process, he said. On the one hand, [its] important to be sure that children are being released in safe and appropriate settings. On the other hand, theres a strong interest in children being released to the least restrictive environment quickly, so long as it is safe to do.

Greenberg said the agency was prompted to review and strengthen its vetting policies after a number of teenagers whod come in the surge of 2014 were mistakenly released to traffickers in Ohio who claimed to be family friends. After that, he said, the agency expanded home studies and background checks for all prospective sponsors as well as backup care providers, checking for histories of child abuse and neglect.

Greenberg said that during his time at ORR, routine fingerprinting for parents seeking to regain custody of their children was not required, since ORR very rarely received any information from fingerprinting that they didnt otherwise get from public records checks for criminal history. And it was clear that fingerprinting was a significant deterrent for parents coming forward.

The more you create a situation where children are more likely to go to distant relatives or nonrelatives, the more dangerous it is for children, said Abigail Trillin, a staff attorney at the San Francisco-based Legal Services for Children. Were starting to see undocumented folks not going to come forward, therefore children either stay in detention or go to more distant people who might happen to be documented, she said, a situation that is at best challenging and at worst dangerous for children.

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Read more from Yahoo News:
Patty Delgado, 27, launched her Latinx-inspired fashion line Hija de Tu Madre (Daughter of Your Mother) two years ago with this special virgencita jacket. Indeed, she drew from some divine inspiration: Mexicos Virgin of Guadalupe. Delgados burgeoning fashion line started with a vintage denim jacket; she added a bedazzled interpretation of the virgin on the back  and two hours later the virgencita jacket was born. I wanted to create apparel that is the perfect depiction of my cultural intersection. Whats more American than denim? And whats more Mexican than la Virgen de Guadalupe? Delgado told Yahoo. Delgados work is all about honoring her Latina heritage. La Virgen just means so much to immigrants, especially Mexican immigrants coming from Mexico  and is this big symbol of home for me. The virgencita jacket took off, and her side-hustle quickly turned into a full-time gig. She now has 10 different versions of the jacket. I really wanted to appeal to a woman that was really proud to be Latina, Delgado explained. One style is a colorful homage to Mexican artist and feminist icon Frida Kahlo. Another is the popular bandera line that lets you proudly rock your countrys flag. These range in price from $150 to $165 and can be ordered exclusively on Delgados website Hija de Tu Madre. If you spend your morning commutes singing bidi bidi bom bom at the top of your lungs (and you know you do), theres even a Selena-inspired Baila Esta Cumbia design. Delgado has over 30 items on her site, including a mercado bag, phone cases, socks, and jewelry. One of her most popular accessories are the controversial F*** Trump hoop earrings. For Delgado, the design was personal. I think it was a great way for me to kind of just cope with my own political frustration as well as build community with like-minded women who had similar political sentiments as me, and it was a good way to make a statement with a simple gold hoop. A percentage of the sales goes to organizations that help undocumented youth. My biggest inspiration is my upbringing. I pull a lot from the phrases and images that I grew up seeing at home, in my community, and in my neighborhood.
Pau (France) (AFP) - Dozens of farmers and lawmakers stormed out of a meeting Thursday with France's new environment minister after he confirmed that two more bears would soon be released into the Pyrenees mountains.

Some 40 brown bears currently roam the range between France and Spain after France began importing them from Slovenia in 1996 after the native population had been hunted to near-extinction.

The latest move to increase their numbers infuriated farmers who have long complained about the predators killing sheep and other livestock.

The addition of two more females was announced by former environment minister Nicolas Hulot last March as part of a 10-year "Bear Plan" to increase their numbers to some 50 sexually mature bears.

Opponents had been hoping that following Hulot's shock resignation last month -- he accused President Emmanuel Macron's government of insufficient action on green causes -- his successor might roll back the plan.

But Francois de Rugy, after meeting with around 60 farmers and lawmakers in the southwestern city of Pau, told journalists the bears would be released "by early October".

The news prompted most of the participants at the meeting to walk out shortly after it started.

"What good is talking if the decision has already been made? We left," said Etienne Serna, the mayor of Aramits who acts as spokesman for an anti-bear association.

Meanwhile, around 200 shepherds and farmers who had refused to meet with Rugy held a protest in Asasp-Arros, a neighbouring village at the foot of the Pyrenees.

"Using all possible means, we will refuse the re-introduction of bears on our land, where they have no place," said Olivier Maurin, president of a local anti-bear group.

"And if we need weapons and rifles to make sure Francois de Rugy hears us, we'll use them," he said next to a teddy bear hanging from a noose with the words "Wanted: Dead or Toothless".

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Police appeared to take the threat seriously, setting up roadblocks to the village and searching vehicles.

Environmental activists say the bears are necessary for ensuring the region's biodiversity, and point to recent elections of pro-bear mayors in several towns, despite the loss of hundreds of sheep and other livestock each year.

The government compensates farmers for any livestock deaths from bear attacks.
Pau (France) (AFP) - Dozens of farmers and local officials stormed out of a meeting with France's new environment minister on Thursday as he confirmed two more bears would soon be released into the Pyrenees mountains.

Around 40 brown bears currently roam the range between France and Spain after France began importing them from Slovenia in 1996 after the native population had been hunted to near-extinction.

But the move to increase their numbers has infuriated farmers who have long complained about them killing sheep and other livestock.

The addition of two more females was announced by former environment minister Nicolas Hulot in March as part of a 10-year "Bear Plan" to increase their numbers to some 50 sexually mature bears. There are just two males in the area.

Environmental activists say the bears are integral to preserving a fragile ecosystem, and are emblematic of the government's plan announced in July to shore up biodiversity which is under threat from human activity and climate change.

Following Hulot's shock resignation last month -- on grounds President Emmanuel Macron's government was not taking enough action on green issues -- opponents of the plan had been hoping the plan might be sidelined.

But after meeting with around 60 farmers and officials in the southwestern city of Pau, new minister Francois de Rugy told journalists the bears would be released "by early October".

"Lots of lawmakers are against it," he acknowledged, "but at some point we have to decide, which is what I've done."

- 'Get rid of them' -

The news prompted most of those at the meeting to walk out.

"What good is talking if the decision has already been made? We left," said Etienne Serna, the mayor of Aramits who acts as spokesman for an anti-bear association.

Meanwhile, around 200 shepherds and farmers who had refused to meet with Rugy held a protest in Asasp-Arros, a neighbouring village at the foot of the Pyrenees.

Story continues

"Using all possible means, we will refuse the re-introduction of bears on our land, where they have no place," said Olivier Maurin, president of a local anti-bear group.

"We don't want these predators, and we will get rid of them," he said next to a teddy bear hanging from a noose with the words "Wanted: Dead or Toothless".

- Livestock deaths -

The battle over the bears echoes the controversy over policies encouraging the comeback of wolves across the Pyrenees starting in the 1990s.

Rugy said despite the protests he would push ahead with a visit to a summering pasture to meet with shepherds herding the flocks not far from the Spanish border.

"I believe in dialogue," he said, but "if we wait, we would never decide anything," adding that it was necessary to "get out of this stalemate."

The government compensates farmers for any livestock deaths from bear attacks, though that has failed to ease their ire.

They point to an incident in July 2017 when more than 200 sheep died after running over a cliff while being chased by a bear.

But environmentalists hailed the decision as a sign of shifting mentalities, pointing to recent elections of pro-bear mayors in several towns.

The WWF called Rugy's decision as "a strong signal of the government's determination to halt the disappearance of species on French territory."

Jean-David Abel of France Nature Environment (FNE) said the re-introductions should include measures to help farmers, such as training in the use of guard dogs.
SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP)  Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Republican from Kentucky, and Kevin de Leon, a Democrat in the California state Senate, rarely have much in common. But they're united in their condemnation this week of Sen. Dianne Feinstein.

The top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, Feinstein is playing a central role in the battle over Brett Kavanaugh's nomination to the Supreme Court. She received a confidential letter earlier this summer from a constituent who accused Kavanaugh of sexually assaulting her at a party more than three decades ago, allegations that didn't begin to surface publicly until last week. Feinstein has argued she sought to honor the confidentiality of the letter, whose author, Christine Blasey Ford, came forward last weekend in an interview with The Washington Post.

McConnell slammed Feinstein for keeping the letter "secret until the 11th hour." De Leon, who is challenging Feinstein in the Nov. 6 election, said her actions amounted to a "failure of leadership." Feinstein defended herself in a Tuesday interview, and Ford's lawyer has said she acted appropriately.

The accusation, which Kavanaugh has denied, is consuming Washington, where the nomination's fate is suddenly in limbo. It's also giving de Leon an opening to criticize Feinstein in his uphill election fight.

"That was a valuable piece of info that you could have kept the confidentiality and kept her privacy and still dealt with the issue at hand," he said in a Monday interview.

He said he would have shared the letter with fellow Democrats on the Judiciary Committee while redacting identifying information and said Feinstein should have asked Kavanaugh about his character during hearings.

Feinstein, who has been backed by several fellow Senate Democrats, said Tuesday she was honoring Ford's request to keep the information confidential.

"I did not know whether this woman would come forward or not. I did not know if it was credible," she told reporters. "We were looking for a way to get it investigated by an outside investigator and what we found is we had to go through (the rules committee) and we were discussing the pros and cons of doing that, so it hasn't been easy."

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Republicans also seized on a remark from Feinstein to Fox News that they saw as casting doubt on elements of Ford's story. "I can't say everything's truthful," Feinstein said when asked about Ford. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, tweeted the quote and said it's "now clear" why Feinstein kept the allegation secret.

Feinstein later clarified to reporters that she finds Ford credible, based on what she knowns so far. She added, "One of the things I know is what happens to women in this situation and how difficult it is, and I hope people will let her be."

Feinstein faces a fellow Democrat in November because of California's unusual primary system that sends the two highest vote-getters to the general election regardless of party. As one of California's best-known politicians and one with deep pockets, Feinstein has kept de Leon's challenge at bay even as he's sought to paint her as too deferential to President Donald Trump. On Tuesday, he released an online advertisement linking Feinstein's language in the 1990s about immigrants in the country illegally to Trump's rhetoric today.

But his criticism on the Kavanaugh issue, made in statements, interviews and even a fundraising appeal, doesn't come without risk.

He led the state Senate last fall when accusations of widespread misconduct rocked the Capitol. De Leon's former housemate was forced to resign after allegations he made advances on multiple women, including inviting a young woman in a fellowship program back to the house the two shared in Sacramento. De Leon denied knowledge of it and moved out after the news broke. He also hired outside investigators to look into complaints and introduced a resolution to expel Democratic Sen. Tony Mendoza, who eventually resigned.

A bill to give whistleblower protections to state legislative employees died repeatedly in the Senate, only passing this year, spurred by the #MeToo movement. That bill's sponsor, Republican Assemblywoman Melissa Melendez, took to Twitter to criticize de Leon, and women who led the Capitol's #MeToo movement chimed in.

"As one of the CA Capitol women who helped elevate the issue I can attest to Kevin's lack of action," tweeted Alicia Lewis, a Sacramento lobbyist. Lewis said she voted for de Leon in the California primary but will now back Feinstein in November.

De Leon said the whistleblower bill didn't explicitly reference sexual harassment victims until this year, when it passed the Senate, though Melendez said it was always the intent to protect employees who report harassment. He called comparisons between his and Feinstein's actions "apples to oranges," and noted the California Legislature's complete overhaul of its procedures for handling sexual misconduct this year following the #MeToo movement.

Elected to the Senate in 1992, Feinstein was one of the first women to sit on the Judiciary Committee. She joined the panel as its previously all-male membership was grappling with stinging criticism of its handling of Anita Hill's sexual harassment allegations against then-Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas.

Over the years, Feinstein has developed a reputation for her preference of decorum and discretion. But that approach clashes with the more aggressive style that a new generation of liberal lawmakers such as de Leon is promoting.

Upending decorum has never been Feinstein's style, said Sherry Bebitch Jeffe, a public policy professor at the University of Southern California.

"It seems to me this is in line with the way Dianne Feinstein has always behaved, very carefully, very circumspectly," Jeffe said.

___

Associated Press writer Juliet Linderman in Washington contributed to this report.
AMSTERDAM (Reuters) - Four children were killed and two people were wounded when a train struck a "cargo" bicycle, widely used by Dutch parents to transport their children, police said on Thursday. The accident occurred in the eastern city of Oss, near the German border. Police said the cargo bike was electrically powered and had been transporting the children from a pre-school center to school when the accident occurred. There were numerous witnesses, including other school-age children, police said. The two injured people have been taken to a nearby hospital, where they are in critical condition. "We have informed the families involved of this terrible news," police said in a statement. "We are investigating how this could have happened." (Reporting by Toby Sterling; Editing by Hugh Lawson)
Paris (AFP) - French far-right leader Marine Le Pen voiced outrage Thursday after being ordered to undergo psychiatric tests for having posted pictures of atrocities committed by the Islamic State group on Twitter.

Le Pen shared the gruesome images in December 2015, a few weeks after IS jihadists killed 130 people in attacks in Paris, sparking widespread condemnation in France.

The 50-year-old leader of the National Rally (formerly National Front), who lost to Emmanuel Macron in last year's presidential vote, was stripped of her parliamentary immunity over the pictures and charged with circulating messages that "incite terrorism or pornography or seriously harm human dignity".

On Thursday, she tweeted copies of a court order ordering her to undergo psychiatric evaluation.

Dated September 11, it calls for the tests to be carried out "as soon as possible" to establish whether she "is capable of understanding remarks and answering questions".

"It's crazy," fumed Le Pen, herself a trained lawyer. "This regime is really starting to be frightening," she tweeted, suggesting that the case was part of a government plot to discredit her.

"I thought I had been through it all: well, no! For having condemned Daesh (IS) horrors in tweets, the 'justice system' is putting me through psychiatric tests! Just how far will they go?" she asked.

Le Pen had shared the images in response to a French journalist who drew a comparison between IS and her party.

One of the pictures showed the body of James Foley, an American journalist beheaded by the Sunni extremists.

Another showed a man in an orange jumpsuit being run over by a tank, and a third showed a Jordanian pilot being burned alive in a cage.

"Daesh is this!" Le Pen wrote in a caption. Daesh is an Arabic acronym for IS.

She later deleted the picture of Foley after a request from his family, saying she had been unaware of his identity.

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If convicted, she faces up to three years in prison and a fine of 75,000 euros ($87,000).

Le Pen has denounced the case against her, which falls under a law punishing violent images that can be viewed by a minor, as a violation of her freedom of expression.

Another National Rally lawmaker, lawyer Gilbert Collard, has also been charged for tweeting pictures of IS atrocities.
Gavin Williamson with troops in the contested region of Ukraine. September 18th 2018.

Only a month ago, a Ukrainian soldier was killed by sniper fire at the spot where Gavin Williamson, the Defence Secretary, is now standing.

This is the front line of the Wests new war with Russia. Two hundred yards away, Russian-backed separatists are in position, their sniper rifles at the ready.

Protected by helmet and body armour, Mr Williamson is surveying the remains of a hospital, its walls bullet-riddled and the windows blown out. Separatist fighters had targeted it with mortars and machine gun fire from across the fields that now represent an illegal de facto border between Ukraine and Russian-occupied territory outside Marinka, a satellite town about three miles to the west of Donetsk.

Mr Williamson had deployed forward from the safety of Kiev, Ukraines capital city, to see for himself the effects of what he called Russias brazen and reckless act of initiating the conflict in the east of the country.

Britain will increase military support to its ally by sending Royal Marines later this year and increase the presence of Royal Navy patrols in the Black Sea in 2019. Odessa, Ukraines biggest port, located in the west of the country, is expected to come under pressure from the Russian Navy over the coming months as they try to effect an economic blockade.

Gavin Williamson with troops in the contested region of Ukraine. September 18th 2018.

Tension with Russia after Ukraines Maidan Revolution in 2014 led to separatists, backed by regular Russian military units, seizing Crimea and a large swathe of Ukrainian territory along the border. More than 10,000 lives have been lost in the conflict.

Mr Williamsons Ukrainian hosts watched nervously as the Secretary of State surveyed the damage, mindful that he stay on the paved surface. The fields either side are now feared to have been planted with landmines hidden beneath the soil.

The Ukrainian soldier killed last month had been shot at from a house on the Russian separatist side of the frontline. Mr Williamson became on Tuesday the first western minister outside of Ukraine to experience the frontline - and Vladimir Putins land grab - at such close proximity. He may as well have been sauntering down Whitehall.

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The Kremlin is trying to undermine our values, destroy our way of life, and reverse the outcome of the Cold War, said Mr Williamson, 42. Its behaviour only increases the risk of miscalculation and the prospect of crisis turning to chaos.

There needs to be a response to Russian encroachment. Weve got to make it clear that there is a price to be paid for such actions

Defence Secretary Gavin Williamson

The Mi-8 Hip helicopter taking us east towards the 300 mile-long Line of Control, the new, illegal border with Russia, had raced forward at 120 knots, pulling up sharply to get over trees and power lines. Twenty-six Ukrainian aircraft have been shot down by Russian-supplied surface to air missiles since the conflict started, so the pilots take no chances and cling to the safety of the folds in the earth.

Some 35,000 Russian-backed separatists and an estimated 4,000 regular Russian troops are located in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions of eastern Ukraine. Holding them back are around 60,000 Ukrainian forces. The Kremlin tried to break the will of the Ukrainian people, Mr Williamson said, but the nation came together against such a blatant act of aggression.

What youve seen is an independent free nation that has been attacked by a powerful neighbour and weve seen men and women come together to repel that invasion and push back those that would wish to do them harm, he told the Telegraph, accompanying him on the visit.

Vladimir Putin and his cronies around him want to abuse their power. This is not the type of behaviour we expect of any nation, let alone one that sits as a permanent member of the Security Council. [Russia is becoming] a pariah nation.

The Defence Secretary receives a brief in a hardened bunker from the Ukrainian General in command of the operational area.

Around 300,000 people live without clean water after the treatment plant supplying this region of Ukraine was destroyed by shelling. Just inside Russia an estimated 700 tanks are available to push further into Ukraine should the order come. Cyber attacks are common with Ukrainian military personnel regularly harassed on their personal mobile phones. The message from Russia is clear: we can get to you any time we want.

Russias military intelligence arm, the GRU, blamed by Britain for the nerve agent attack in Salisbury, is also present. Two GRU operatives were caught inside Ukraine in 2016 and exchanged for a pilot that had been shot down.

They are all constant reminders of how easily Russia and the separatists can raise or lower the pressure, according to the wider agenda of destabilising Ukraine and making it an unattractive prospect for Nato or EU membership.

Gavin Williamson stayed at the front line for about 20 minutes, accompanied by Ukraines Joint Force Operation Commander, Lieutenant General Serhiy Nayev. The protection party of around 50 soldiers, scanning the scrub and battered buildings nearby for signs of movement, were eager to move on.

Despite all the security measures, including having two Mi-24 Hind helicopter gunships cover our approach, the soldiers admitted Russia probably knew the British Defence Secretary was here. To attack the British minister would, of course, be an outrageous and provocative act, but after Salisbury all rules have changed.

Mr Williamson was undeterred and happy to stay chatting with Ukrainian troops. We have common values and we believe in standing up for those common values, he said, Its important that we stand up for the international rules-based order.

There is a constant pattern where Russia is pushing the boundaries of acceptable behaviour [and] there needs to be a response to Russian encroachment. Weve got to make it clear that there is a price to be paid for such actions.

Mr Williamson is in no doubt that blame lies directly with Mr Putin. The behaviour of the Putin-led regime is not acceptable. We want to be able to ensure that the people who are on the front line, where we are today, have the best ability to survive and defend their homeland.

He also fears Mr Putin is widening his new Cold War with the West. Mr Williamson added: Were seeing Russian aggression, not just on the front line but an increasingly more assertive posture in the Black Sea. They want to open up new fronts.

Gavin Williamson is shown the last checkpoint on the Ukrainian side of the contested Line of Control. The Russian-backed separatist checkpoint is 300m further down the road.

The Defence Secretary is pledging to stand firm. Were going to be upping our training and support efforts with the Royal Navy and Royal Marines, making sure that the Ukrainian Navy and Ukrainian forces have the skills and the technical ability to deal with these increasing threats.

Mr Williamson was criticised in the past for saying Russia should go away and shut up. Invited by the Telegraph to repeat his suggestion at full volume towards the trenches just a few hundred yards away, he politely declined.

It was time to get back in the heavily armoured vehicles and head West, to the relative safety of Kiev. Mr Williamsons full-throated support for his Ukrainian hosts and promise of increased British military personnel had earned much praise. You are very brave for coming here, one Ukrainian soldier told him.

Our commitment remains unwavering, Gavin Williamson said. As long as the danger lasts we will continue to stand by your side. The safer you are here, the safer we are in the UK.
Berlin (AFP) - The German authorities on Wednesday suspended an operation to evict protesters, holed up in forest treehouses to block the expansion of an open-pit coal mine, after the death of a journalist.

The man, "most likely a journalist" according to the police, died on Wednesday after falling from a bridge that connected two of the treehouses.

"We simply cannot continue as if nothing has happened," North Rhine-Westphalia Regional Minister Herbert Reul told a press conference.

A website of the forest activists said that "a friend who has accompanied us as a journalist for a long time in the forest, fell today from a suspension bridge over 20 meters high in Beechtown and died".

Police officers have faced fierce resistance since the middle of last week while attempting to clear the demonstrators from Hambach Forest near the border with Belgium and the Netherlands.

On Sunday, nine environmental activists were injured and 34 detained as part of the operation to remove dozens of treehouses, some as high as 25 metres (80 feet) off the ground.

The occupation began in 2012 and had until now been quietly tolerated.

But local authorities have now ordered the woods to be cleared immediately, citing fire hazards.

The death of the journalist was a "tragic accident" and not "related to the ongoing evacuation work," said the police.

The activists, who are protesting the expansion of energy giant RWE's open-pit lignite mine, one of Europe's largest, had called for a mass mobilisation by supporters to prevent the forest from being cleared.

The battle has intensified since RWE announced plans to clear half of the forest's remaining 200 hectares (500 acres) from mid-October.

RWE owns the forest and is legally allowed to cut down trees to access the brown coal, or lignite, in the ground during the annual logging season.

It says the clearing is necessary to ensure energy supply, including of nearby power plants in Germany's most populous state, North Rhine-Westphalia.

Activists oppose the use of the cheap but polluting fuel, and say the forest is home to protected species such as Bechstein's bat and century-old beech and oak trees.
 Flash

Chinese President Xi Jinping and his wife Peng Liyuan on Wednesday visited Cambodian King Norodom Sihamoni and Queen Mother Norodom Monineath Sihanouk, ahead of the traditional Mid-Autumn Festival, in Beijing.





Wishing the King and the Queen Mother a happy festival and good health, Xi said the close and special relationship between China and Cambodia is characterized by deep historical feelings.





Since the two countries established diplomatic ties 60 years ago, the China-Cambodia friendship, which was forged and cultivated by Chinese leaders of the older generation and Cambodian King Father Norodom Sihanouk, is growing more and more vibrant.





Applauding King Sihamoni and Queen Mother Monineath's significant contribution to the bilateral relations, Xi said China treasures the special friendship with the Cambodian royal family.





"From 2016 until now, I have met with King Sihamoni and Queen Mother Monineath every year, just like gatherings between family members," Xi said, adding that he and King Sihamoni have reached important consensus on inheriting and carrying forward the traditional friendship, leading the bilateral relationship to the best-ever period in history.





Xi called for frequent interactions between the two nations at a high official level as well as among the people "like close relatives."





Congratulating the successful general election in Cambodia, Xi expressed his wish that the Southeast Asian country win new and greater achievements in its national development.





Xi said China attaches great importance to its ties with Cambodia and will work together with the Cambodian side to carry forward the traditional friendship and step up the comprehensive strategic cooperative partnership continuously.





Expressing their gratitude for Xi and Peng, King Sihamoni and Queen Mother Monineath said it feels like meeting family members every time they see President Xi and Professor Peng.





The Cambodian people are grateful for China's firm and long-lasting support and assistance as well as President Xi's great attention to the development of the Cambodia-China ties, said King Sihamoni and Queen Mother Monineath.





Recalling President Xi's historic visit to Cambodia in 2016, King Sihamoni and Queen Mother Monineath said the visit elevated the Cambodia-China relationship to a new high.





Hailing the firm friendship and booming cooperation between the two countries, the King and the Mother Queen said the royal family will inherit the friendship forged by King Father Sihanouk and continue advancing the comprehensive strategic cooperation between Cambodia and China.
Khost (Afghanistan) (AFP) - The mother was admitted at 9:30 am, the birth recorded at 9:35. Women often arrive in extremis at the Doctors Without Borders maternity hospital in southeastern Afghanistan, one of the most active in the world, with more than 60 babies born daily.

The early hours of the morning are the most feverish for the hospital -- affectionately known by the NGO as "the baby factory" -- just a stone's throw from Pakistan's tribal areas, in Khost province.

The Taliban are active in the region and roads are often dangerous after dark, so when 25-year-old Asmad Fahri felt her contractions begin at night she knew she would have to wait until daybreak to begin the three-hour journey to the hospital.

Finally she is resting, her infant tightly swaddled and asleep between her knees.

On average new mothers are kept in the ward for six hours, but she has asked to leave after just three, to ensure she reaches home before darkness falls again.

Sometimes the mothers have to travel for days, in pain and bleeding, over unpaved, insecure roads in carts or by whatever mode of transportation they can find.

In an opposite wing, the delivery tables continuously welcome newcomers.

Most only have time to lift the long layers of clothing hiding their bodies and wedge their coloured veils between their teeth, too rushed even to change into MSF's standard red pyjamas.

The Khost Maternity Hospital (KMH) opened at the end of 2012 in a medical desert in the conflict-riven country with one of the highest infant and maternal mortality rates in the world.

It was an overnight success, with nearly 12,000 deliveries in its first full year in 2013.

By 2017 that figure had nearly doubled, to 23,000.

This year the hospital is on track to deliver 24,000 babies, says Dr Rasha Khoury, a Palestinian gynecologist who is medical officer at the site.

If so that puts it within crying distance of the busiest maternity wards in the United States, where the Northside Hospital in Atlanta delivered 27,000 babies in 2016, the highest number in the country that year.

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"Here we are saving lives for free," smiles Safia Khan, 24, the assistant manager of the midwifery team.

Behind her, a young mother of twins searches her skirts and hands her a folded banknote. It is a traditional gesture of gratitude after delivery, at times required in some hospitals but politely declined here. "It's forbidden," insists Khan.

- More deadly than war -

The UN and the World Bank put maternal mortality at around 396 deaths per 100,000 live births in Afghanistan.

But the figure is disputed, with experts pointing out it is an improbable fall from the 1,600 per 100,000 recorded in 2002.

Such a decline would mean Afghanistan would have reached its Millennium Development Goal set by the UN some five years early, a study published in the medical journal the Lancet noted in 2017.

The authors of that study say more credible figures released by the Afghan government in partnership with USAID suggest maternal mortality could still be as high as 1,291 per 100,000 -- meaning that giving birth is around five times more deadly for Afghan women than the conflict itself.

If so, it is a staggering figure 17 years after the fall of the Taliban regime, despite billions of dollars in international aid, in a country with one of the youngest, fastest-growing populations in the world.

Dr Khoury says that MSF facilitates around 40 percent of the births in Khost, which has an estimated 1.5 million inhabitants.

But to make a real dent in the mortality rates in the face of these challenges they would need "three hospitals like MSF", she says.

- Pashtunwali -

On top of war, poverty, and a galloping population, the medical staff face a further obstacle: the Pashtunwali, the patriarchal social code of honour that dictates life in the conservative Pashtun tribal region where Khost lies.

Under the Pashtunwali the genders must be segregated, and a woman must never show her face to a stranger.

As such, medical staff at the hospital are exclusively female, with the exception of some anaesthetists and the director of the neonatology department.

Even so, a little persuasion has at times been necessary, says Salamat Khan Mandozai, a respected local figure who deals with security for the hospital and has also acted as a community liaison.

"In this rural environment, some women still prefer to give birth at home," he notes.

Going to hospital embarrasses them, agrees Safia Khan -- birth is a private matter.

Dr Khoury says the hospital is aware that many women are not coming to them, but adds that the families who do come do so "without hesitation".

For many, she adds, obstacles are not about culture, but finances -- namely, paying for transportation -- or safety and security, especially at night.

Women must also wait until a man of the family is available to accompany them, she says.

But once inside the hospital power returns to the mothers-in-law who escort the patients until they reach the doors of the delivery room.

"We are really reaching people at the margin of the society in Afghanistan," says Dr Khoury.

"It's a success story."
Wilson, who gained notoriety for his efforts to promote the spread 3D printed guns, appears to be on the run

Cody Wilson, a guns rights activist, has been charged with sexually assaulting a 16-year-old girl. Photograph: Roger Askew/Rex/Shutterstock

A Texas gun rights activist whose quest to spread the availability of 3D printed guns sparked a legal battle, has been charged with sexually assaulting a 16-year-old girl and appears to have gone on the run.

A warrant was issued on Wednesday for the arrest of Cody Wilson. Texas police are now working with national and international law enforcement partners to locate the gun rights advocate, whose last known location was Taipei, Taiwan, an Austin police official said.

Wilson messaged an underaged girl through the website SugarDaddyMeet.com, had sex with her in an Austin, Texas, hotel on 15 August 2018, and gave her $500, according to an affidavit by an Austin police detective filed in Travis county district court on Wednesday.

Wilson, 30, identified himself to the young victim and told her that he was a big deal, according to the affidavit.

Wilson was informed by a friend of the victim that police were investigating him for having sex with a minor, and he missed a scheduled flight back to the US, commander Troy Officer of the Austin police departments organized crime division said at a press conference on Wednesday.

Police obtained footage of Wilson and the victim in the hotel on 15 August and matched the photograph on the SugarDaddyMeet.com profile to Wilsons drivers license photo, according to the affidavit. According to the detectives who interviewed the alleged victim: If someone mistakes her age, its because they think shes younger, not older than the 16-year-old she is.

Wilson has been charged with a second-degree felony that is punishable by two to 20 years in prison, Officer said.

While he is best known as a gun rights activist, Wilson also founded Hatreon, a now-defunct website that allowed neo-Nazis, white nationalists and other extremist figures to solicit crowdfunding online.

Wilsons advocacy for 3D printing guns had made him a minor celebrity in tech circles for years. In 2012, when he was 24, Wired magazine named him one of the 15 most dangerous people in the world. While Wilson did not invent the concept of 3D printing plastic guns, as the magazine noted, he had made himself their most prominent, media-savvy international defender. He framed his efforts to refine a 3D printed plastic gun and make blueprints for these guns widely available as a free speech issue.

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In 2013, after Wilson uploaded a plan for a 3D printed gun to the website of Defense Distributed, a group he founded, the state department ordered him to take the plans down. Defense Distributed claimed at the time the plans had already been downloaded more than 100,000 times.

This summer, in the wake of several high-profile mass shootings, Wilson announced that his protracted legal battle with the state department had been settled in his favor, and that Defense Distributed would repost the plans for 3D printed guns on 1 August. In celebration, he tweeted an image of a bouquet of flowers resting in front of a supposed memorial to American gun control.

Gun control organizations and Democratic lawmakers reacted to Wilsons announcement with outrage and high-profile campaigns to stop him from publicizing the plans. A group of state attorneys general sued Wilson to block the publication of the blueprints.

Hours before Wilson had said the plans would be made public, a US district judge issued a temporary restraining order stopping them from being shared. On 27 August , the judge extended the ban with a preliminary injunction blocking the publication of blueprints. Wilson told reporters in late August he was finding ways around the injunction to share the plans for a small fee, rather than posting them free of charge online. The Defense Distributed website urges supporters to back their legal fight with financial donations.

The Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors American hate groups, lists Wilsons Defense Distributed group among other anti-government extremists based on Wilsons stated anti-government beliefs.

Wilson has made a consistent point of allying himself with luminaries of the anti-government and hate movements in the US, Keegan Hankes, an SPLC senior research analyst, told the Guardian, noting that he typically plays his affiliations with such groups off as coincidental to his crypto-anarchist ambitions.

Last year, in the wake of the white nationalist violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, Wilson told Talking Points Memo that the site was a passion project and claimed he devoted $12,000 a month of his own money to support it.

Wilson further described himself as sympathetic to the alt-right, though not rightwing himself, and said he founded Hatreon so the alt-right could have a leg in this conversation and not be banished from the internet.
I was not at all prepared when the producers of The Kelly File on Fox News Channel added a guest to the lineup of an interview I was scheduled to do. This was during the Republican National Convention in Cleveland in 2016. Originally, I thought the interview was supposed to be between Megyn Kelly and me. But before I went on air, I was told that two other guests were added, one of them Laura Wilkerson, whose son, Josh, was killed by an undocumented immigrant. Producers sat us next to each other during the live hit.

Let me start with you, Laura, said Kelly as I sat uncomfortably in my chair, knitting my eyebrows. As a group of people, Kelly calls us illegals or illegal immigrants. In person, to my face, she always refers to me as undocumented.

You want a harder stance on illegal immigration, Kelly continued. And youre sitting next to Jose, who is himself an admitted undocumented immigrant. I mean, is it hard to look at him and say, I want you kicked out? You know, I want the Trump plan that would lead to you being removed?

My stomach dropped. I could feel myself shrinking. I wanted to walk out of the interview. To this day, I dont know how I managed to stay seated.

I think if youre not a United States citizen, you dont have a seat at the table regardless, especially where youre making laws, Wilkerson responded. I could feel her vitriol, wrapped in such profound loss. You just dont have a seat at the table.

But I was seated right next to her. We were sharing a table.

At the moment, the only thing I could do was turn toward her and acknowledge her pain.

Im really sorry about [your loss], I said. [Were] at the mercy of congresspeople, Congress members who havent done anything.

Its not up to Congress to do something, Wilkerson said. Its up to you to get in line and become an American citizen.

She said with such certainty youd think it were that simple. Get in line. Become a U.S. citizen. Done. She believes its so simple because the mainstream news media, of which Fox is a part, has perpetuated that false narrative for decades.

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Its difficult to overstate the role Fox has played in framing the publics understanding of immigration. No other news channel has dominated a single issue the way Fox has molded immigration. Though not everyone watches Fox, its been the most-watched cable news channel for more than 16 years, shaping the perception of immigrants and our families, especially for people who have no direct interaction with us and know us only through the media they consume. Anti-immigrant organizations (the Federation for American Immigration Reform, the Center for Immigration Studies and Numbers USA, among them) have become sources for other mainstream news outlets, too, which rely on the leaders of these groups for their so-called expertise so that the outlets can claim balance in their reporting. These well-funded, well-organized, anti-immigrant groups command the right on a level unmatched by progressives on the left who struggle to come up with a unifying and accessible message.

On Fox, illegals are cast as enemies, a collective burden to society, draining public programs and stealing jobs from native-born Americans. We are the criminalized and criminal Other, thoroughly un-American, and unwilling to become American. All the talk of criminality has clouded the reality that there is no process for millions of undocumented people like me to adjust our status. Immigration is not a not-size-fits-all issue. Theres no imaginary line for millions of people like me to get in the back of. When people order me to get in line, what it means, process-wise, is that I should leave the country Ive called my home for 25 years, accept a ten-year bar for having stayed in the U.S. illegally and try to come back, with no guarantee of return. For me getting in line means either self-deportation or living in a perpetual state of limbo.

At first I was conflicted about appearing on Fox. I didnt want to be just another character in their script. I did not want to be used. But my friend Jehmu Greene changed my mind. An unabashed progressive, Jehmu is a paid contributor on Fox News. Shes one of the very few black female voices on the network. Look, its either youre on Fox dismantling stereotypes about immigration in front of viewers who may call you illegal to your face, I remember Jehmu saying, or, you can just speak to the choir.

Wilkerson continued.

There is a law. It needs to be enforced. Close the borders. Enforce current laws and, you know, welcome to America if you come in the front door.

Actually, maam, there is no line for me to get in the back of, I said to her. I told myself: Look her in the eye. Dont cut her off. Be polite. I continued: Thats why we need for something to happen. Ill be here twenty-three years next month

Then youve had plenty of time, Wilkerson said.

If there was a process, I would have done it.

Kelly interjected and told Wilkerson that I was brought to America  like the approximately 1 million undocumented children under 18 living in the U.S. today, according to the Migration Policy Institute. Though we dont know the exact number of others like me  adults who were brought to the U.S. as children over time.

A few seconds that seemed like hours passed before Kelly asked Wilkerson if she favored any sort of path to legalization for immigrants like me.

Get in line, and come in and tell us who you are, Wilkerson said. We have a right to know whos in this country. So thats the only thing I believe. You know, theyve put themselves in harm by coming here.

There was no time to respond to what Wilkerson said.

I wanted to keep repeating: there is no line.

I wanted to scream, over and over again: THERE IS NO LINE! THERE IS NO LINE! THERE IS NO LINE!

I wanted to tell her that when it comes to harm, she has no idea, just like I have no idea what its like to lose a son. Indescribable, the harm, all around.

This essay is adapted from Dear America by Jose Antonio Vargas. Copyright  2018 by Undocumented LLC. Reprinted by permission of Dey Street Books, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
Beirut (AFP) - Lebanon's Hezbollah said Thursday it had acquired "precision missiles" despite extensive efforts by neighbour and foe Israel to prevent the Shiite movement developing this capability.

"It has been done. The resistance now owns precision missiles" as part of its weaponry, Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah said in a televised address during the key Shiite commemoration of Ashura.

Israel this month acknowledged carrying out more than 200 strikes over the past 18 months in war-torn Syria, where Hezbollah fights alongside Israel's arch-foe and Shiite powerhouse Iran in support of the Damascus regime.

Israel has said it is working to stop Iran from entrenching itself military there and to keep Hezbollah from acquiring sophisticated arms.

"Attempts in Syria to block the way towards this (missile) capability" have failed, Nasrallah said.

"If Israel imposes a war on Lebanon, it will face a fate that it never would have expected."

Israel has fought several conflicts against Hezbollah, the last in 2006.

The Israeli military believes Hezbollah has between 100,000 and 120,000 short-range missiles and rockets, as well as several hundred longer-range missiles.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Nasrallah should not think twice but "at least 20 times" before deciding whether to attack Israel.

"If he seeks conflict with us, he will receive a blow he cannot even imagine," Netanyahu said in a statement.

- Iran's 'dangerous deadline' -

Late Monday, an Israeli raid hit Syria's coastal province of Latakia to prevent what it said were deliveries of materials for advanced weaponry to Hezbollah.

The same evening Syrian air defences downed a Russian military plane by mistake, killing all 15 on board.

Russia backs Syria's government militarily and it was the worst case of friendly fire between the two allies since Moscow intervened in the conflict in 2015.

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On Tuesday, Netanyahu said his country was "determined to stop Iranian military entrenchment in Syria, and the attempts by Iran, which calls for the destruction of Israel, to transfer to Hezbollah lethal weaponry (to be used) against Israel".

Nasrallah accused the Israelis of trying to kill him "day and night". He has lived in a secret location for decades and rarely appears in public.

The Hezbollah chief also reiterated his support for Iran, after the United States withdrew from a landmark nuclear deal in May.

Washington reimposed sanctions on the Islamic republic last month, and a new round of even harsher sanctions targeting Iran's vital oil sector is set to go into effect in early November.

"It is our duty today to stand by Iran, who in a few weeks' time will face a dangerous deadline -- the start of American sanctions," he said.

Nasrallah accused the United States of "going to all the world's capitals in a bid to besiege" Iran, as Washington seeks support for its measures against the country.
By Gergely Szakacs SZEGED, Hungary (Reuters) - A Hungarian court sentenced a Syrian-Cypriot man to five years in prison on Thursday for crossing the border as part of a riot during the migrant crisis, in a case that has drawn criticism from the European Parliament and Amnesty International. Ahmed Hamed was among a group of migrants that crossed into Hungary on Sept. 16, 2015 from Serbia, pelting policemen with rocks before hundreds of migrants forced open the border gate and police fired water cannon and teargas. He was provisionally sentenced in March to seven years in jail for illegally crossing the border and for being an accomplice in what the court called a "terrorist act" during clashes with police at the border. Thursday's final ruling in the case, which has drawn criticism of Hungary's hardline stance against Muslim immigration to Europe, relaxed the sentence to five. The court upheld the preliminary verdict that Hamed should be expelled from Hungary for 10 years. Hamed's case featured in a report on the rule of law in Hungary, which culminated last week in an unprecedented decision by the European Parliament to sanction Hungary for flouting EU rules on democracy, civil rights and corruption. Prime Minister Viktor Orban's tough stance against immigration has pitted Hungary against fellow European Union members Germany and France. As well as building a steel fence on its southern border, Hungary has toughened laws on immigration and clamped down on non-government organizations that Orban accuses of supporting illegal immigration. Human rights group Amnesty International has said it believed the terrorism clause was unduly applied in Hamed's case by Hungarian authorities. On Tuesday, it submitted a petition to the Hungarian Justice Ministry calling for Hamed's release. The court found that the terrorism clause was applicable as Hamed and others acted in concert to force the border open. The final ruling relaxed the seven-year verdict issued in March as the court considered new mitigating circumstances in the case, Judge Erik Mezolaki told a courtroom packed with dozens of journalists. "The objective of punishment is to deter either the accused or anyone else from committing a crime," Mezolaki said. "Retribution does not fall under the scope of punishment." The court considered the fact that Hamed does not speak Hungarian, and that he has been separated from his family, as mitigating circumstances, as well as the fact that he has been detained for more than three years, the judge said. That means he is likely to serve two years in jail. The European Parliament's report said the court ruling issued in March raised "the issue of proper application of the laws against terrorism in Hungary, as well as the right to a fair trial." (Reporting by Gergely Szakacs; Editing by Susan Fenton)
Jakarta (AFP) - Indonesia's president has signed a moratorium on all new palm oil plantation development, an official said Thursday, in a move hailed by environmentalists.

The moratorium effectively halts any new land being made available for plantations in the world's top producer of the edible vegetable oil, a key ingredient in many everyday goods, from biscuits to shampoo and make-up.

President Joko Widodo signed the instruction, which will last three years, on Wednesday, Prabianto Mukti Wibowo, a deputy minister at the Coordinating Ministry for Economic Affairs, told AFP.

"(The moratorium) is to improve the governance of sustainable palm oil plantations, provide legal certainty, increase the productivity of smallholder palm oil plantations, maintain environmental sustainability and contribute to the reduction in greenhouse gases," he told AFP in a WhatsApp message.

Plantations on Sumatra island, Papua and the Indonesian part of Borneo have expanded in recent years as demand for palm oil has skyrocketed, bringing huge profits to companies and healthy tax revenues to the government.

But the rapid growth has been blamed for the destruction of tropical forests that are home to many endangered species, and forest fires that occur every year during the dry season due to illegal slash-and-burn clearance.

The Indonesian Forum for the Environment, Walhi, welcomed the moratorium.

"The presidential instruction is a good first step in restructuring natural resource management, especially in the palm oil sector," it said in a statement, adding ideally it would be in place for 25 years.

The moratorium was first proposed in 2015, following devastating blazes that cloaked large stretches of Southeast Asia in toxic smog for weeks.

A moratorium on conversions of new peat lands was established in 2011 to improve management and reduce fires, but campaigners say this is sometimes ignored when local governments grant concessions.

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Poor spatial data and overlapping forestry maps are a major hindrance for authorities trying to enforce regulations governing them.

In 2015, the government banned new development on all peat lands after swathes of carbon-rich peat were drained for use as plantations in recent years, creating highly flammable areas.

The decision comes as Indonesia and Malaysia battle a move by the European Parliament to ban the use of palm oil in biofuels.

It voted earlier this year voted in favour of a draft law on renewable energy that calls for the use of palm oil in biofuels to be banned from 2030, amid mounting worries about its impact on the environment.

Indonesia and Malaysia will be hard hit as they are the world's top exporters of palm oil.
McDonalds employees in cities across the U.S. launched #MeToo-inspired protests on Tuesday against workplace sexual harassment at the fast-food company, Agence France-Presse reports.

Organized by a union called Fight for $15, an advocacy union for fast-food workers, the one-day strike unfolded in 10 cities  Chicago, Kansas City, Miami, Milwaukee, New Orleans, Orlando, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Saint Louis, and Durham  with the goal of instituting stronger protections for workers at the chains 14,000 stores across the U.S.

Today, thousands of workers across the country have stepped out of the shadows and onto the picket lines, said Chicago community organizer Karla Altmayer, according to AFP. We can no longer accept that one out of two workers experience workplace sexual violence under their watch, she said in reference to McDonalds.

Demonstrations ran the gamut from silent protests with mouths taped shut to women brandishing signs and chanting. Protestors are hoping to establish a committee that will take serious action in addressing incidents like groping and propositions for sex.

Read more: The Silence Breakers Are TIMEs Person of the Year

When you feel that your livelihood is threatened, and you feel like you cant bring home a paycheck, it can be really scary, restaurant worker Ali Baker told AFP in Chicago.

McDonalds said in a statement that it had strong policies, procedures and training in place to prevent sexual harassment, and that it had engaged prevention and response experts to evolve our policies so everyone who works at McDonalds does so in a secure environment every day.

The protests caught the attention of high-profile figures including Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, who voiced his support for the campaign in a tweet.

40% of fast-food workers have reported experiencing sexual harassment. That is simply unacceptable.



We must stand with the brave McDonalds workers walking out today to demand the company address this epidemic of sexual harassment.  Bernie Sanders (@SenSanders) September 18, 2018

The strike marks a growing awareness of workplace sexual harassment among blue-collar workplaces, where employees can be more vulnerable than some of the higher-profile cases in Washington and Hollywood. Recently, female workers at Ford sued the auto-maker for harassment at two of its Chicago plants, which it apologized for in December.
 Flash

U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said on Wednesday that the United States is ready to transform its relations with the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) immediately.





In a statement regarding the outcomes of an earlier summit between leaders of ROK and the DPRK, Pompeo said that "the United States congratulates President Moon Jae-in and Chairman Kim Jong Un on the successful outcome of their summit meeting in Pyongyang."





"We welcome President Moon and Chairman Kim's reaffirmation of the Singapore joint statement of complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula," he said. "On the basis of these important commitments, the United States is prepared to engage immediately in negotiations to transform U.S.-DPRK relations."





He added that "This morning, I invited my counterpart Foreign Minister Ri Yong Ho to meet in New York City next week where we are both already scheduled to be in attendance at the United Nations General Assembly meeting."





"Likewise, we have invited North Korean representatives to meet our Special Representative for North Korea, Stephen Biegun, in Vienna, Austria at the earliest opportunity," Pompeo added.





This will mark the beginning of negotiations to transform U.S.-DPRK relations through the process of denuclearization of the DPRK and to construct a lasting and stable peace regime on the Korean Peninsula, Pompeo noted.





Earlier on the same day, U.S. President Donald Trump tweeted that the fruits of the summit are "very exciting."





The DPRK's top leader Kim Jong Un and visiting South Korean President Moon Jae-in on Wednesday signed a joint declaration, agreeing to take additional steps toward making the Korean Peninsula free of nuclear weapons and threats of armed conflict.





Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Geng Shuang said on Wednesday that China welcomes the consensus reached between the two nations.





"China, as a close neighbor, always supports the efforts of the north and south of the peninsula to improve their ties and push forward reconciliation and cooperation through dialogue and consultation," Geng said.





China hopes that the two sides will continue to implement the consensus, endeavor to promote interaction and cooperation and play a positive role in achieving a political solution to the peninsula issue as well as lasting peace in the region, Geng said.
Behavioral economist Shlomo Benartzi is joining Acorns as an academic advisor. (Source: YouTube)

Acorns has made it easier for Americans to invest in the stock market through features like round-ups where you can invest your spare change. Now the company is trying to tap into the minds of behavioral economists to incentivize its 4 million users to save and invest more.

Noah Kerner, Acorns CEO, announced the launch of Money Lab with Shlomo Benartzi, who is known for his research on retirement savings and the Save More Tomorrow (SMarT) program, on Thursday at Yahoo Finances All Markets Summit.

Benartzi, who is a professor at the UCLA Anderson School of Management, is joining Acorns as senior academic adviser and behavioral economics committee chair. His first experiment with Acorns focused on a simple question asked in three different ways: Would you like to save $5 every day, $35 a week or $150 a month?

Though the total amount set aside is pretty much the same, only 7% opted to save $150 a month, compared to 30% who decided to save $5 a day.

What accounts for this huge shift in preferences, even when all the choices are equivalent? Saving $5 a day makes us think about skipping a Starbucks latte (that seems doable), while $150 a month makes us think about car payments, which is a much more daunting amount to give up, said Benartzi.

The broader implications show that a slight tweak in language can convince lower-income users to save $5 daily, which feels less daunting than a monthly lump sum.

Diversifying the Acorns portfolio

Acorns, which manages over $1 billion in assets, focuses on micro-investing but also has a debit card called Spend and a retirement offering called Later.

Weve solved the first big societal problem: getting people to start investing. Now were focused on how we can combine insights of psychology and economics to create an entire financial system that helps people save and invest  our Money Lab can really make an impact. said Kerner.

We want to work with academics to run experiments across our product to both measure the impact of Acorns and how it shifts behavior and encourages better behavior, like how do you get people to spend on one less ride share a month.

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Currently 25 universities including Carnegie Mellon, University of Chicago, Columbia University and Yale University have submitted project ideas for the Money Lab.

Melody Hahm is a senior writer at Yahoo Finance, covering entrepreneurship, technology and real estate. Follow her on Twitter @melodyhahm.

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Moscow (AFP) - Israel's air force commander held a "transparent discussion" with Russian officials in Moscow on Thursday, the Israeli army said, after a Russian warplane was downed by Syria earlier in the week following Israeli air strikes.

Major General Amikam Norkin led a delegation to the Russian capital to share the military's findings on the incident, which Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has blamed on Israel.

"The meetings were held in good spirits and the representatives shared a professional, open and transparent discussion on various issues," the Israeli army said in a statement after the visit by Norkin.

"Both sides emphasised the importance of the states' interests and the continued implementation of the deconfliction system," the army said, referring to information exchanged between Israel and Russia to reduce the risk of air incidents.

Syrian air defences shot down the Russian Il-20 military plane on Monday, killing all 15 soldiers aboard after Israeli missiles struck the coastal region of Latakia.

The incident was the worst case of friendly fire between Moscow and Assad's regime since Russian forces intervened in the war-torn country in late 2015.

Afterwards, the Russian military accused Israeli pilots of using "the Russian plane as a cover, exposing it to fire from Syrian air defences".

Israel denied the allegations, saying its jets were already back in its airspace when Syrian forces launched the missiles that hit the Russian plane.

In a letter to his Russian counterpart on Wednesday, Assad offered his condolences for the deaths after the plane was downed by Syria's Russian-made S-200 air defence system.

"This unfortunate incident was the result of Israeli arrogance and depravity," the Syrian leader said.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Thursday that he had sent Norkin to Moscow to "preserve cooperation between our two countries".

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Netanyahu expressed his "sorrow" to Russian President Vladimir Putin in a phone call on Tuesday but insisted the Russian plane was shot down by "extensive and inaccurate Syrian anti-aircraft (fire)".

Putin has said the incident was the result of "tragic accidental circumstances," but also warned Netanyahu against carrying out such operations in the future.

According to Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, Putin held talks with his Security Council on Thursday.

"The strengthening of the security of the Russian military in Syria after the disaster of Il-20 was on the agenda," Peskov said, quoted by news agency Ria Novosti.

Israel has vowed to stop its arch-foe Iran, which backs the Assad regime, from entrenching itself militarily in neighbouring Syria.

Earlier this month, Israel acknowledged having carried out more than 200 strikes in Syria over the past 18 months, mainly against Iranian targets.
Milan (AFP) - A Milan judge on Thursday sentenced two men to four years in prison in the first ruling of a corruption case involving oil giants Eni and Shell in Nigeria, a judicial source said.

The judge also ordered the seizure of millions of dollars and Swiss francs from the pair, who acted as go-betweens in the attribution of Nigerian oil exploration rights worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

Nigerian Emeka Obi and Italian Gianluca Di Nardo had requested an accelerated trial, which took place behind closed doors and allowed for lighter penalties if they were found guilty.

The main trial of Eni and Shell for corruption opened in Milan in the spring.

Both oil companies deny any wrongdoing.

Italian magistrates suspect the two oil groups used bribes to obtain rights in 2011 to OPL245, an offshore oil block estimated to hold nine billion barrels of crude, for $1.3 billion (1.1 billion euros).

Of that amount, $1.092 billion is believed to represent bribes paid to a London bank account that ended up going to various Nigerian politicians, including former oil minister Dan Etete.

The Nigerian government received only $210 million.

On Thursday, the Italian judge ordered $98.4 million seized from Obi, and 21 million Swiss francs ($21.8 million, 18.6 million euros) from Di Nardo after finding them guilty of "international corruption".

Their four-year prison sentences were slightly less than the two five-year terms sought by the prosecutor.

But Barnaby Pace, a campaigner at anti-corruption group Global Witness, nevertheless hailed the convictions.

"Today sees the first men fall in the murky Malabu scandal," he said in a statement issued Thursday.

"As Shell and Enis trial looms, time will tell whether its just the middlemen who pay the price for this epic crime against the Nigerian people," he added.

"But one things for certain: this judgment will send shivers down the corporate spines of the oil industry -- and will surely alarm Shell and Eni employees and shareholders who have been repeatedly told that there was nothing amiss with the OPL 245 deal."

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According to Radiocor, the Italian economics information agency, Obi unwittingly revealed the affair by suing Etete in a London court for payment of his commission for setting up the deal.

He won that case in 2013, receiving $114 million, of which $24 million was paid to Di Nardo.

The main trial brought by Nigeria against Eni and Shell has scheduled its next hearing on September 26.

A total of 13 people face charges, including Etete, Eni boss Claudio Descalzi and his predecessor, Paolo Scaroni.
Rome (AFP) - Italy's competition authority Antitrust has opened an inquiry into low-cost airline Ryanair's decision to charge passengers for hand luggage, a which the body described an "essential" item for travellers.

From November, non-priority customers of the no-frills airline will only be allowed to take one "small personal bag", such as a handbag or laptop case, into the plane's cabin as long as it can fit under the seat in front.

However they will be charged if they want to take on a 10kg holdall or suitcase.

Hand luggage is "an essential element of transport" so Ryanair, and all other carriers, should include the price in the cost of a plane ticket, Antitrust said in a statement cited by the Italian press.

The new Ryanair policy could amount to unfair commercial practice in that it distorts the final price of the ticket and does not allow a true comparison with other airlines' prices, according to Antitrust.

Ryanair announced last month that customers who want to bring more than a small bag into the cabin will have to pay extra charges ranging up to A8 (9 euros).

Italian consumer associations had complained to Antitrust about the Ryanair decision.

"If its unfair commercial practice on hand luggage is confirmed, Ryanair... should reimburse all its customers who suffer unfair additional costs", the association Codacons said in a statement, promising to take the matter to court if necessary.

The Italian inquiry heaps even more negative publicity on Ryanair whose shareholders on Thursday delivered a blow to the airline's chairman amid widespread strike action by European staff that has rattled confidence in the company.

Chairman David Bonderman was re-elected but only with 70.5 percent of the vote at the annual general meeting -- a drop from last year's assembly where he garnered a 89.1 percent endorsement.

"Questions about the company's business model and governance now pose a threat to shareholder value," said the chairman of one of the shareholders, the Local Authority Pension Fund Forum.
Kanye West headed to Instagram on Thursday to address a few things that were not sitting right with his spirit. Over the course of four posts, Kanye gets a few things off his chest about Drake, Nick Cannon, and Tyson Beckford.

Things between Drake and Kanye have been tense this year thanks to Drizzys feud with Pusha-T. Ye apologized to Aubrey earlier this month for not putting a stop to Pushs diss from DAYTONA's "Infrared." The apology followed Drakes disses aimed at Kanye, including his I told her don't wear no 350s around me line when it leaked from a freshly released French Montana collab and saying Ye "flopped" during a show in Chicago.

In the IG videos, Kanye once again admits he could have stopped the feud in the first place had he been in the right headspace. If I wasnt in a medicated state, I might have thought or the wherewithal to say, Hey Pusha, dont diss drake on my beat, and I spoke about that and took accountability for that, he reiterates.

Ye then breaks down his current issue with Drake. The fact that is people making rumors or thinking that you fucked my wife and you not saying nothing and carrying it like that, that dont sit well with my spirit.

He goes on to reference Drakes Scorpion cut In My Feelings, insinuating the Canadian rapper purposefully fueled rumors by making a song with the line Kiki, do you love me? Rumors later surfaced that Kiki might be a reference to an alleged relationship with Yes wife Kim Kardashian, which she has denied ever happened.

If I had a girlfriend from Chicago, her name was Renita, and then you was married to Rihanna, I wouldnt make a song called Riri, he says. So when youre like, Oh I dont know where that comes from, you too smart for that. You know where that come from. Dont make a record with nothing that can be confused.

Kanye then pivots to another issue hes having with Drake that more broadly has to do with treatment of his Kardashian relatives. Now I told you. I didnt tell Pusha no information about your baby, baby mama, nothing like that. That didnt come from me, he continues. But when you played that record for me in the studio that said, Yo we got some Kylies we got some Kendalls, I told you Travis is your man. Dont make no record like that, that man just had a baby with her. Thats gonna be offensive...to her.

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The record hes referring to is an unreleased Drake and Future collab that surfaced back in March. It was expected to be on Scorpion, but it still hasnt been released. Before Ye could be called a hypocrite for speaking on Kylie and all his sister-in-laws on XTCY, which includes the line You got a sister-in-law you'd smash? I got four of 'em, he assures everyone he asked Travis if it was okay first.

Ye ends his Drake rant by telling the rapper to avoid speaking on his family directly or indirectly. Period, its like dont speak on nobody from my family. Nothing that can even be mentioned with my wife, period. We dont have to talk again, Im not giving no energy to that, he says.

Kanye spends a majority of the posts speaking on Drake, but he starts them off by bringing up Nick Cannon, who propelled the rumor that Drake and Kim Kardashian previously had some kind of romantic relationship. As previously mentioned, Kim totally denied that rumor, but Cannon still entertained it during an appearance on Everyday Struggle.

At around the 33-minute mark in the episode, DJ Akademiks speculates that Kanye ended the Pusha-T vs. Drake feud, because Drizzy held something damning over Ye. I think Drake smashed Kim K, Akademiks said, to which Cannon responded that it's not "that far off of a concept."

Cannon, who used to date Kim way back in 2006, then chimed in. Theres something real personal Drake holds over that whole family, that he's like, Yall dont want me to let this out, he said.

Who does Kanye West care about in a world besides himself? AK asked.

I was thinking the same thing, Cannon replied.

Kanye tells Cannon directly not to mention Kim in any interviews, which Cannon not only did on Everyday Struggle, but a recently released sit down with VladTV. "I understand that you used to date my wife, but you know you giving an interview don't mention my wife," he says. "If someone brings my wife say, 'Hey I respect that man I'm not speaking on that.' Don't be making no suggestions like nobody fucked my wife."

Ye's IG speech also gives an honorable mention to Tyson Beckford. Beckford and Kim K got into a spat on Instagram after he commented on one of the beauty mogul's pics writing, "Sorry. I don't care for it personally" and "She's not real, doctor fucked up on her right hip."

Kim clapped back, which garnered some criticism, and Ye clearly felt some way about the whole exchange because he tried to kick out a reporter who asked him about it at a New York Fashion Week Ralph Lauren show. "Ralph Lauren would be very ashamed that you asked that trash question," he told the reporter. The journalist apologized, but West still demanded that she leave the red carpet. "You have to go," he said.

"As far as Tyson Beckford go, don't speak on my wife bro. Like none of y'all speak on my wife period," Ye says finally, addressing all three of them and emphasizing the important of his family. "What is you talking about I'm married. We in love. We a family.... As men, all three of y'all, come talk to me. Y'all holler at me. We'll work it out. We'll come to a resolution."

So far, none of the three men have responded to Kanye's posts.
Washington (AFP) - Christine Blasey Ford, the woman accusing Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of sexually assaulting her at a party 36 years ago, is willing to testify next week in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee, US media reported on Thursday.

Blasey Ford's lawyers have told the committee she cannot appear at its hearing scheduled for Monday, calling the date Republicans set "arbitrary", according to the Washington Post and New York Times.

Both cited an email the lawyers sent to the committee seeking to negotiate a new date for the hearing, after committee chairman Chuck Grassley set a deadline of Friday morning to agree to appear on Monday.

The Monday date "is not possible and the committee's insistence that it occur then is arbitrary in any event," Blasey Ford's lawyers said.

"As you are aware, she has been receiving death threats, which have been reported to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and she and her family have been forced out of their home," it said.

"She wishes to testify, provided that we can agree on terms that are fair and which ensure her safety."

They asked to hold discussions with the committee to set up a new date and conditions for the hearing.

"Her strong preference continues to be for the Senate Judiciary Committee to allow for a full investigation prior to her testimony."

Blasey Ford has been reluctant to testify since she came forward Sunday with her bombshell allegation, which threatened to derail the nomination of Kavanaugh, who would deliver a momentous conservative shift to the powerful high court.

Instead she has sought to have the FBI investigate the incident as part of its official background check on the nominee.

But, with Kavanaugh denying the accusation and Blasey Ford so far unable to produce witnesses on her own behalf, Grassley and the White House have pressed for her to testify quickly in hopes they can get past the controversy and quickly get Kavanaugh approved for the high court.

Republicans fear if the nomination is delayed any further, it could be endangered by a possible Democratic sweep of the looming congressional midterm elections in seven weeks.
Astana (Kazakhstan) (AFP) - Kazakhstan on Thursday sentenced a man to three years in prison for inciting hatred on social media after he took a swipe at the country's septuagenarian leader and his kinsmen.

A court in the western city of Aktau found Ablovas Jumayev guilty of inciting social hatred on the messaging app Telegram and calling for the forcible overthrow of the government by distributing leaflets.

The 44-year-old father of four maintained that he was innocent of both crimes and intends to appeal the sentence, his lawyer said.

"There is a lot of evidence of his innocence that the court did not admit," lawyer Zhanargul Sundetkaliyeva told AFP. "We consider the verdict very unjust."

The case gathered much attention in Kazakhstan because of the central role played by a post written on Telegram, a messaging service founded by Russian entrepreneur Pavel Durov that has become popular in Kazakhstan.

Jumayev claimed on an opposition Telegram channel that the police chief in his region was a member of the same clan as 78-year-old Nursultan Nazarbayev, who became ex-Soviet Kazakhstan's president before the country's independence in 1991.

The recent appointment of the police chief was probably designed to stop members of Jumayev's clan rising up, he claimed, according to court documents cited by Sundetkaliyeva.

Clan and regional affiliations play an important role in Central Asia, a Muslim-majority region, although many analysts argue their influence has faded in the years since independence from Moscow.

Jumayev has admitted to writing the post but denied distributing leaflets which he said were planted in his car prior to his arrest in May.

Kazakhstan has never had a strong opposition and has no tradition of competitive elections.

A visiting delegation from the European Parliament criticised the country's rights record on Wednesday.

The delegation from the body's foreign affairs committee urged "the authorittes of Kazakhstan to stick to their commitments made under the international conventions."

Kazakhstan, a vast, oil-rich country, has sought to curry favour with the West without alienating traditional ally Russia as Moscow's geopolitical tensions with Brussels and Washington deepen.
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Syrian President Bashar al-Assad on Wednesday offered condolences to his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin for the death of Russian soldiers during a recent Israeli missile attack on Syria, state news agency SANA reported.





While offering his sincere condolences, Assad blamed the death of the Russian soldiers on the "Israeli smugness and arrogance."





On Monday evening, a Russian military aircraft with 15 Russian personnel onboard was mistakenly downed by a Syrian missile while the Syrian air defenses were responding to an Israeli missile strike that targeted Syria's Latakia province and lasted for one and a half hour.





The Russian Defense Ministry said a missile from Syria's S-200 air defense system shot down the Il-20 surveillance plane with Russian servicemen by mistake because an Israeli airstrike took place at the same time, blaming a simultaneous Israeli strike as the cause of the mistake.





The aircraft, which was on its way back to the Russian-run Hmeimim air base, disappeared from the radar on Monday night at a time when four Israeli F-16 fighters attacked targets in Syria's Latakia province.





The incident marked the first mistake strike between Syria and Russia, which is the main ally to the Syrian government.





"On behalf of the Syrian people and by my name, we express our deep condolence over the fall of the Russian jet on the Mediterranean, causing the martyrdom of the Russian heroes who were doing their noble duties along with their colleagues of the Russian military forces in the fight against terrorism in Syria," Assad said in his letter of condolences to Putin.





"We are confident that such painful acts would not affect you and us to continue fighting terrorism," Assad said.





Israel has carried out some 200 airstrikes over the last 18 months, claiming that the attacks aimed to prevent Iranian weapons convoys and stop Iran from establishing a military foothold in Syria.
Police have launched a manhunt for three suspects after a female jogger was stabbed to death in Washington DC.

The woman was running through the Logan Circle neighbourhood in Northwest Washington at about 8.00pm local time on Tuesday when the attack took place, according to Washington police spokesperson Alaina Gertz.

The stabbing death remained under investigation as of Wednesday afternoon, as local officials sought to determine whether there was a motive behind the killing, or if it was a random act of violence.

Witnesses observed the jogger stumbling into a nearby Chinese restaurant after the stabbing, covered in blood as people attempted to provide aid.

The restaurants security camera footage reportedly shows the woman entering the eatery before an ambulance rushed her to a nearby hospital, where she was pronounced dead.

Alert: Stabbing at 1956 hrs in the 1400 block of 11th Street,NW. Lookout for three B/M's. (1) wearing All black clothing. (2) wearing white hat, white shirt, and black pants. (3) wearing mustard colored shirt. DO NOT TAKE ACTION CALL 911 pic.twitter.com/5JSuz1OLu8  DC Police Department (@DCPoliceDept) September 19, 2018

In a tweet, the Metropolitan Police Department said it was searching for three male suspects, one of which was wearing all black clothing, while another was wearing white hat, white shirt, and black pants and the third was "wearing mustard colorued shirt".

Police did not immediately respond to enquiries, and have also yet to release the identity of the jogger.

Local residents expressed surprise over the fatal stabbing incident, acknowledging that the upscale neighbourhood wasnt known for violent crimes.

"'Wrong place at the wrong time is so inadequate and so unfair," one Twitter user wrote. "The number of times Ive run through that block & waited at that lightrandom violence will never, ever, ever make sense."

Police were expected to hold a press conference about the stabbing death on Wednesday afternoon.
A suspect was arrested in the stabbing death of a female jogger that has shaken Washington DC this week.

Wendy Karina Martinez was running in Logan Circle, a low-crime residential neighbourhood, when Anthony Crawford allegedly stabbed her in the neck in an "unprovoked attack," police chief Peter Newsham said during a press conference. Police said surveillance footage and community tips played a crucial role in identifying and locating the 23-year-old suspect, ending an exhaustive manhunt that took place throughout the week.

"A combination of information from patrol officers and tips helped establish identification," the police chief said Thursday. The suspect, who reportedly has a criminal history, refused to cooperate with investigators on Wednesday night when he was taken in for questioning and was subsequently arrested on first-degree murder charges. Mr Crawford was later taken to the hospital for an injury on his hand, according to police.

Ms Martinez entered a nearby Chinese-American restaurant immediately after the stabbing, approaching several customers before passing out. The diners provided aid until paramedics arrived and rushed her to the hospital, where she was pronounced dead.

In a statement, Ms Martinez family called the stabbing a senseless tragedy and remembered the avid runner as the light of our lives.

"We are deeply saddened by this senseless tragedy. Wendy Karina Martinez was the light of our lives. Not only was she an avid runner, but she was a devout Christian, a wonderful friend, and a driven professional," the statement read. "Everything you hope that a daughter and a friend could be. She was also excited to be planning her upcoming wedding to her fiance, Daniel Hincapie. They were engaged just last week."

Police offered a $25,000 reward for anyone with information on the suspect that could lead to a conviction, the Associated Press reported.

The stabbing death was not part of an attempted armed robbery, according to police, who said the suspect had a home in northwest DC.

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Ms Martinez was reportedly known by friends and family to jog several miles throughout the city during her runs, and was living close to the Logan Circle area where she was killed. Local residents have remembered Ms Martinez by leaving flowers outside of the restaurant where she was last seen alive.

The 35-year-old was the chief of staff of FiscalNote, Inc., a software and media company with headquarters in Washington.

Washington DC Mayor Muriel Bowser thanked the police department for their efforts, saying Thursday, "This is an outraged community; this is a woman who should be going to work today".
London (AFP) - Malta's prime minister on Thursday signalled unexpected support from EU leaders for a second referendum on Brexit in Britain, boosting a growing campaign for a new poll despite the British government's trenchant opposition.

Speaking to BBC radio on the sidelines of an informal European Union summit in Salzburg, Joseph Muscat said there was "almost unanimous" backing among its leaders for a vote.

"We would like the almost impossible to happen, that the UK has another referendum," Muscat said.

"I think most of us would welcome a situation where there is the possibility of the British people putting things into perspective, seeing what has been negotiated, seeing the options, and then deciding once and for all."

EU Council President Donald Tusk has previously said "our door remains open" if Britain changes its mind about leaving the bloc.

But, asked about support for another referendum, an EU source said on Thursday: "The EU certainly does not have a position on that".

A French presidency source also said: "It is not up to us to express a preference on what might happen in Britain. It is a sovereign choice for the British people".

But Muscat's stance was reiterated by Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babis, who said he would support Britain holding another vote on EU membership.

Babis added he had been "shocked" by Britons' June 2016 decision to leave the bloc -- now scheduled to happen in March next year -- which has added to Europe's growing list of problems.

"I'm very unhappy that (the) UK is leaving so it would be better maybe to make another referendum and maybe the people in the meantime they could change their view," he told the BBC.

"Because then we will solve the problem quite quickly."

- 'There will be no second referendum' -

Six months ahead of Britain's planned EU departure, calls within the country have been growing for a second referendum -- backed by an expanding list of centrist politicians.

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The campaign for another poll has also attracted hefty financial backing, including from Hungarian-US billionaire George Soros, with a series of events staged across Britain over the summer to drum up support.

But the government is opposed to another referendum and experts believe the prospect is highly unlikely.

May reiterated her position in a speech to EU leaders in Salzburg on Wednesday.

"We all recognise that time is short but delaying or extending these negotiations is not an option.

"I know that for many of you Brexit is not something you want but it is important to be clear that there will be no second referendum in the UK," she said.

"The public has delivered its verdict and I as prime minister will deliver upon that," she added.

Pro-EU and pro-Brexit supporters reacted to the Maltese and Czech leaders' comments.

The Best for Britain group said their statements showed "there is still time for the UK to check with the people if Brexit is what they still want."

Its chief Eloise Todd added: "It's time to give the people -- not politicians -- the final say on Brexit."

But pro-Brexit firebrand Nigel Farage responded on Twitter saying: "EU bosses want us to have a second referendum, quelle surprise."




A man has been arrested after reportedly threatening to shoot an 11-year-old boy over a game of Fortnite.

Michael Aliperti, 45, allegedly told the boy, who had just beat him on the online game, he was going to shoot him in threatening voice notes sent via his Xbox.

Officers say Aliperti also sent text messages, saying he intended to go to the boys home and harm him after the Fortnite defeat.

The messages, which also mentioned his school, were sent at around 9pm on Monday, police claim.

Suffolk County Police Chief of Department Stuart Cameron said that Aliperti, of Long Island, sent the threats after playing the child on the hit third-person shooter game.

Michael Aliperti, 45, reported threatened to shoot the boy, 11 (Police handout)

The pair had been playing Fortnite against one another for several months, officers claimed.

The boys family reported the allegations to police, who subsequently increased their presence at the childs school.

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We took this as a school threat, Cameron confirmed. That was done out of an abundance of caution.

Cameron also warned parents to remain vigilant and monitor their childrens online game playing and to be aware of their opponents.

The pair had been playing one another on Fortnite for months

As a result of the parents report, Aliperti was arrested on charges of aggravated harassment and acting in a manner to injure a child.

Bail was set at $2,500 and police issued an order of protection for the young victim.
A number of people have been killed in a shooting at a distribution centre in Maryland.

Officials have confirmed that seven people were shot with four deceased, including the lone suspect who has since been identified as 26-year-old Snochia Moseley from Baltimore County. The suspect died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

The shooting took place at a Rite Aid - a national pharmacy chain  distribution centre in Aberdeen.

I can confirm multiple wounded and multiple fatalities,  said Harford County Sheriff Jeffrey Gahler about the shooting about 30 miles from Baltimore at a press conference early Thursday afternoon.

The Harford Sheriff's Department has since confirmed on Twitter that three people injured from the shooting were expected to survive.

A law enforcement source also said officials believe the suspect had a work-related grievance, according to Reuters. Officials have not confirmed a motive at the time of publication.

"At this time we know that the suspect was temporarily employed at the Rite Aid distribution centre," Harford Sheriff's Department wrote on Twitter. "She reported for her work day as usual around 9am."

Agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and the FBI Baltimore were at the scene.

Maryland Governor Larry Hogan tweeted that the Maryland State Police Department had also arrived to the scene of the shooting.

"The First Lady and I are grieving for the loss of life in today's shooting in Harford County, and praying that those who were injured fully recover," Mr Hogan wrote on Twitter.

He added: Our prayers are with all those impacted, including our first responders. The State stands ready to offer any support.

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Three people were gunned down when a woman opened fire in a pharmacy distribution centre in the US state of Maryland. The shooter later turned the gun on herself, authorities said.

Officials said another three people were injured by the gunfire. The Harford Sheriff's Department has identified the lone suspect as 26-year-old Snochia Moseley from Baltimore County.

She was a temporary employee at the distribution centre for Rite Aid, a national pharmacy chain. Investigators believe the suspect had a work-related grievance, although a motive was not immediately clear.

Harford County Sheriff Jeffrey Gahler confirmed that there were multiple wounded and multiple fatalities as a result of the shooting at a press conference early Thursday afternoon.

The Harford Sheriff's Department had tweeted Thursday morning that the situation was "still fluid," telling residents to avoid the area. The department also noted that police had been dispatched to the shooting in Aberdeen.

The first shots were reported just after 9am at the Liberty Support Facility, which is a portion of the Rite Aid distribution centre.

Law enforcement officers did not fire any shots, Mr Gahler said during the news conference on Thursday.

Agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and the FBI Baltimore were at the scene. The FBI had described it as an "active shooter situation".

"FBI Baltimore is responding and assisting [Harford Sheriff's Department] with an active shooter situation," the agency tweeted.

Maryland Governor Larry Hogan said on Twitter he was "closely monitoring the horrific shooting".

He added: "Our prayers are with all those impacted, including our first responders. The State stands ready to offer any support".

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In a subsequent tweet, Mr Hogan noted that the Maryland State Police Department had also arrived to the scene of the shooting.

Schools in Harford County, including Roye Williams Elementary and Church Creek Elementary School had been placed on lockdown, according to local reports.

A family reunification centre had been set up at Level Volunteer Fire Company in Havre de Grace. During the news conference, officials said they did not believe there was any further threat to the community.
Guadalajara (Mexico) (AFP) - A state government in Mexico has fired a prosecutor over a spectacle in which a fetid-smelling tractor trailer carrying 273 bodies was driven around aimlessly for lack of room in the morgue.

"I am not willing to tolerate this kind of mistake, which shocks and horrifies public opinion," said the governor of western Jalisco state, Aristoteles Sandoval, as he fired prosecutor Raul Sanchez.

The state's chief coroner was fired earlier in the week over the sad drama in the state capital, Guadalajara.

The bodies were in the refrigerated truck because the morgue in Mexico's second-largest city was full.

Officials originally put the number of bodies at 157 but on Wednesday they raised it to 273.

The truck was parked for two weeks at a warehouse in a downtrodden neighborhood on the city outskirts until residents complained of the stench and the flies it attracted.

The authorities then moved the truck to an empty lot in another poor neighborhood far from the city center, until residents there protested Saturday.

Officials then moved it to a prosecution storage facility in the city center, where it remains parked for now.

News outlets broadcast footage Wednesday of the open trailer of the truck, with piles of bodies in black bags and a man in white boots stepping on the bags.

Officials have said the bodies were of victims of violent crime, so under Mexican law they cannot be cremated.

Authorities said they were looking for a longer-term solution.

The coroner who was fired over this case, Luis Octavio Cotero, said the state government was working on a site to bury 800 bodies outside Guadalajara.

The number of murder victims in Mexico has exploded in recent years.

Since the government deployed the army to fight the country's powerful drug cartels in 2006, Mexico has been hit by a wave of violence that has resulted in more than 200,000 murders.

Last year, the country registered a record 28,702 homicides.

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Mass graves are regularly discovered containing dozens or even hundreds of unidentified bodies. Nearly 4,000 such corpses have been found since 2007, according to the National Human Rights Commission.

Some of the highest-profile violence has been in Jalisco, home to the brutal Jalisco New Generation Cartel.

Other states hit hard by cartel violence have also struggled with overflowing morgues in recent years, including Veracruz in the east, Guerrero in the south and Chihuahua in the north.
Michael Cohen spoke to Mueller team for hours; asked about Russia, possible collusion, pardon: Sources originally appeared on abcnews.go.com

President Donald Trumps former personal attorney, Michael Cohen, has participated over the last month in multiple interview sessions lasting for hours with investigators from the office of special counsel, Robert Mueller, sources tell ABC News.

The special counsels questioning of Cohen, one of the presidents closest associates over the past decade, has focused primarily on all aspects of Trump's dealings with Russia -- including financial and business dealings and the investigation into alleged collusion with Russia by the Trump campaign and its surrogates to influence the outcome of the 2016 presidential election, sources familiar with the matter tell ABC News.

Investigators were also interested in knowing, the sources say, whether Trump or any of his associates discussed the possibility of a pardon with Cohen.

Over the 16 months that Mueller has been investigating, the president has repeatedly bashed the investigation as a partisan witch hunt, insisting there has been no collusion and no obstruction of justice.

PHOTO: Michael Cohen leaves Federal court, Aug. 21, 2018, in New York City. (Mary Altaffer/AP, FILE)

The interviews with Cohen took place in Washington, D.C., and New York City. They were also attended in part by prosecutors from the U.S. Attorneys Office in the Southern District of New York.

Cohens participation in the meetings has been voluntary -- without any guarantee of leniency from prosecutors, according to several people familiar with the situation.

ABC News has also learned that Cohen is also cooperating with a separate probe by New York state authorities into the inner workings of the Trump family charity and the Trump Organization, where Cohen served as an executive vice president and special counsel to Trump for 10 years.

PHOTO: Then-FBI Director Robert Mueller listens as he testifies on Capitol Hill in Washington, June 13, 2012. (J. Scott Applewhite/AP, FILE)

The news of Cohens dealings with federal and state investigators comes close on the heels of another potentially perilous legal development for the president: the guilty pleas last week from Trumps former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, who struck a deal with Muellers prosecutors in exchange for his cooperation.

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As the Manafort deal was taking shape -- Muellers team had already been talking to Cohen.

(MORE: Michael Cohen could be key witness in state investigation of Trump charity)

And given Cohens prolonged time spent in proximity to Trump, his family and the inner-workings of the Trump Organization, some insiders consider his cooperation with authorities to be one of most serious potential legal threats to confront the president.

PHOTO: President Donald Trump participates in the Sept. 11th Flight 93 Memorial Service, Sept. 11, 2018, in Shanksville, Pa. (Evan Vucci/AP)

Both of these guys want to be loved and they both want loyalty, says a person close to both President Trump and Cohen, who asked not to be named in order to speak freely. Cohens disavowal of Trump has triggered a series of events that turned once very good friends into permanent enemies. The consequences for both will be ugly.

President Trump and his lawyers have lately been harshly critical of Cohen ever since he made clear earlier this year, in an exclusive interview with ABC News, that he was willing to cooperate with prosecutors, even if that placed the president in legal or political jeopardy. The former Trump loyalist said in the interview he rejected Trumps claims that the Mueller investigation was a witch hunt orchestrated by his political enemies.

Cohen vowed to put family and country first.

(MORE: Michael Cohen, Trumps former longtime personal attorney, pleads guilty to illegal campaign contributions 'at the direction of a candidate for federal office')

Rudy Giuliani, Trumps current personal attorney, who in May called Cohen an honest, honorable lawyer, has more recently claimed that Cohen is fabricating stories about Trump in order to protect himself.

(MORE: Michael Cohen has information 'of interest' to Robert Mueller, would not accept Trump pardon, lawyer says)

Theres nobody that I know that knows him that hasnt warned me that if his back is up against the wall, hell lie like crazy, because hes lied all his life, Giuliani told CNN in July.

PHOTO: Attorney Michael Cohen, left, and special council Robert Mueller, right. (AP/Getty Images, FILE)

Last month in New York, Cohen pleaded guilty to eight felonies, including bank fraud, tax evasion and two campaign finance violations in connection with alleged hush money payments to women who have claimed affairs with Trump. Muellers team had referred the investigation of those crimes to federal prosecutors in New York, which led subsequently to coordinated raids of Cohens law office and residences in April.

At a plea hearing in August, Cohen told a federal judge that he had arranged for the payments to two women in coordination with, 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 the election.

Those statements, under oath, were an about-face from Cohens public comments about his role in the deals with Karen McDougal and Stephanie Clifford, aka Stormy Daniels. Cohen had previously insisted that hed paid Clifford with his own money, on his own initiative and without the knowledge of Trump.

PHOTO: Stormy Daniels speaks during a ceremony in West Hollywood, Calif., May 23, 2018. (Ringo H.W. Chiu/AP, FILE)

The president has long denied the allegations of the affairs with McDougal and Clifford and has claimed he did not know in advance about the deals Cohen secured. On the day of Cohens court appearance, the president openly mocked him on Twitter.

If anyone is looking for a good lawyer, I would strongly suggest that you dont retain the services of Michael Cohen! the president wrote.

Since entering his guilty pleas last month -- Cohen has also been in contact with the New York Attorney Generals office, according to multiple people close to the matter.

In June, the New York Attorney General, Barbara Underwood, filed a civil lawsuit accusing Trump's charitable foundation and its directors of having "operated in persistent violation of state and federal law governing New York State charities" for more than a decade by paying off legal bills with charitable funds, promoting Trump hotels, and purchasing personal items.

PHOTO: Karen McDougal in Phoenix, Feb. 2, 2008. (Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic via Getty Images, FILE)

The lawsuit names Trump, his sons Don Jr. and Eric, and his daughter, Ivanka, as defendants.

A representative of the Trump Foundation called the lawsuit, politics at its very worst.

Underwoods office has not ruled out launching a state criminal investigation into the foundation if the evidence warrants it. And she has also asked the Internal Revenue Service and the Federal Election Commission to look into the charitys operations.

A spokesperson for the New York Attorney Generals office declined to comment for this report.

In a prior public statement from the office, the spokesperson Amy Spitalnick said: We cannot comment on potential or ongoing investigations. As our lawsuit against the Trump Foundation illustrates, we will hold Donald Trump and his associates accountable for violations of state law, and will seek a criminal referral from the appropriate state agency as necessary.

PHOTO: President Donald Trump speaks at an event in Kansas City, Mo., July 24, 2018. (Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images, FILE)

Cohens relationship with Trump dates to the mid-2000s after Cohen, who owned condominiums in multiple Trump buildings in New York, took Trumps side in a legal dispute with the condo board at Trump World Tower on Manhattans East Side. He joined the Trump Organization in 2007.

Cohens dealings at the Trump family business cover a broad sweep of its global empire - including several projects that have caught the attention of federal investigators. Cohen played an integral role in early discussions about a possible Trump Tower in Moscow -- negotiations that were going on during the early months of the 2016 presidential campaign.

(MORE: Michael Cohen hints at possible cooperation with investigators)

That deal never reached fruition.

Cohen has confirmed he attended a lunch meeting with a Ukrainian politician one week after Trump took office, where the two men discussed the potential for Cohen to share a Ukraine peace proposal with his contacts at the White House.

And Cohens name appeared repeatedly in the now infamous dossier of unverified allegations, which included salacious claims about Trump, prepared by former British intelligence agent Christopher Steele. The agent, who was hired by an opposition research firm that was paid initially by Republicans and later by Democrats, alleged Cohens involvement in attempting to covering up contacts between Russian operatives and members of Trump campaign.

(MORE: EXCLUSIVE: Michael Cohen says family and country, not President Trump, is his 'first loyalty')

Cohen has fiercely denied the claims. In January, he tweeted: Enough is enough of the #fake #RussianDossier.

Since entering his guilty pleas last month, friends of Cohen say that he has felt isolated. He is unemployable, facing an avalanche of debt and the possibility of spending several years in federal prison.

With a net worth at one time of several million dollars, Cohen recently launched an online GoFundMe fundraising effort to help pay his mounting legal fees.

He is scheduled to be sentenced in New York federal court on December 12.

A spokesman for Office of the special counsel declined to comment on this story. An attorney for Cohen could not immediately be reached.

This report was featured in the Sept. 21, 2018, episode of ABC News' daily news podcast, "Start Here."

"Start Here" is a daily ABC News podcast hosted by Brad Mielke featuring original reporting on stories that are driving the national conversation. Listen for FREE on the ABC News app, Apple Podcasts, TuneIn, Spotify, Stitcher, Google Play Music, iHeartRadio -- or ask Alexa: "Play 'Start Here.'"

Follow @StartHereABC on social for exclusive content, show updates and more: Twitter, Facebook, Instagram.
As the ballots begin to be counted in the 2018 midterm elections, voters have had the chance to send a message to President Donald Trump and the Republican leadership that currently controls both chambers of Congress.

Last-minute polling says Democrats have a good chance to retake the House of Representatives  an outcome that would severely damage Mr Trumps prospects of pushing through any major legislative victories in the last two years of his first term.

It could also put the president in very real danger of facing impeachment proceedings if Democrats take over, too.

Here is how Democrats chances of flipping control of Congress are looking.

Can Democrats win control of the House?

Democrats see gaining control of the House has a major target in the midterms.

They would need to gain 24 seats across the country on top of their current holdings in order to reach the 218 majority threshold they need.

There is precedent, too. Republicans took more than 24 seats to regain control of the House in 2010, in President Barack Obamas first midterms. Democrats, on the other hand, pulled in 31 seats in the 2006 midterm elections  regaining control of the House during President George W Bushs second term.

Are there good signs for Democrats?

There are. While American voters tend to leave incumbents in place historically, some 39 Republican House members have decided not to run for re-election this year. Many of those representatives are anti-Trump, and have left races open across the US.

Democrats are also ahead in generic congressional vote tallies, which can indicate overall feeling towards the parties across the country. Democrats are up by 7.3 points in an average of those polls compiled by Real Clear Politics.

Where might we look for potentially important House races?

Of those 39 Republican seats being vacated, a good number of them are in key states that helped Mr Trump to his Electoral College victory in 2016. That includes races in Florida  a state that is viewed as something of a bellweather for American electoral politics  as well as in Pennsylvania, which surprised many in the US by breaking for Mr Trump.

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There have also been indicators that Mr Trump is facing waning support in some parts of the Midwest, where he has generally enjoyed strong support.

What about the Senate?

Democrats have a much harder path towards regaining control of the Senate, even though Republicans control that legislative body by just a single vote.

Thats because, of the 35 seats up for re-election this year in the Senate, the majority of seats are held by Democrats currently. There are a lot more opportunities for Democrats to lose seats, in other words.

That said, there are some good signs for Democrats on the Senate electoral map in 2018. Two races to replace Republicans are in states where the incumbent is not running for re-election  and those two are Arizona and Nevada. And, those seats are both in states that were narrowly won by Republicans the last time the Senate seats were up for voter consideration, in 2012.
KERBALA, Iraq (Reuters) - Millions of Shiites Muslims gathered at shrines and mosques in Kerbala and other parts of Iraq on Thursday to mark the climax of the annual ritual of Ashura with expressions of suffering. Huge crowds came from all over the world to commemorate the slaying of Imam Hussein, grandson of the Prophet Mohammed. Most Sunni Muslims also mourn Hussein's death, but less fervently, and Ashura is a reminder of Sunni-Shi'ite rifts dating from disputes over the Prophet Mohammad's succession. In the past, suicide bombers staged attacks on the mass gathering hoping to trigger sectarian tensions. Those days are gone. Iraqi worshippers are able to immerse themselves in their faith, setting aside other problems that impact daily lives, including poor government services, unemployment and corruption. Ashura is the 10th day of the lunar month of Muharram when according to Islamic tradition Imam Hussein was killed in battle in 680. It is observed in Iraq and in other countries with sizeable Shiite communities, including Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Iran, Lebanon, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Syria. On the first day of Muharram, the army of Caliph Yazid laid siege to Hussein and followers in the desert near Kerbala. Hussein was killed in battle 10 days later after he had refused to pledge allegiance to Yazid. Hussein was decapitated and his head was taken to Damascus, the seat of the Ummayad dynasty to which Yazid belonged. Self-flagellation is a big part of the ritual. On Thursday, crowds of pilgrims brandished swords. One man gashed the head of a teenager with a knife. Blood dripped down their heads to white smocks. A pilgrim banged a drum. "Blood is but a simple thing we offer to Hussein. All we offer Hussein is actually nothing," said pilgrim Haider Sabah. "Even if we give our lives for him it is not enough. We are ready to offer all we have, our lives, our children and our families for Hussein to have his intercession in doomsday." (Reporting by Reuters Television, Editing by Michael Georgy, William Maclean)
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Environmental and energy ministers from the Group of 7 gathered on Wednesday for a three-day meeting focusing on joint efforts on climate change, ocean conservation and clean energy.





Ministers of the world's advanced economies -- Canada, France, the United States, Britain, Germany, Japan and Italy -- will also hold talks on sustainable finance, plastic pollution and energy security.





These were also main topics at the G7 Charlevoix summit in June, in which five of the G7 nations and the European Union (EU) agreed to the Ocean Plastics Charter, a non-binding accord to tackle ocean plastic waste and marine litter to support resilient coasts and coastal communities.





The United States and Japan did not sign the document.





Representatives from Norway, Vietnam, South Africa, Kenya, Argentina and other countries were also invited to the meeting.
Many South Koreans want an improved North-South relationship. But if Moon improves that relationship without denuclearization progress, it could cause a rift with Washington

While the US is concerned about North Koreas nuclear program, South Korea has to live next door, and many there want an improved North-South relationship regardless of progress on the nuclear issue. Photograph: AP

Imagine you are the president of South Korea. Your country relies on its alliance with the United States as a deterrent against a nuclear-armed North Korea. Donald Trump criticizes your country over trade, spent the better part of a year threatening military strikes against North Korea, and reportedly even drafted a tweet ordering the withdrawal of the family members of US military stationed in South Korea, which would have been interpreted as a prelude to war.

What would you do? Youd rush to ease tensions with North Korea as fast as you could, while trying to mediate between the US and North Korea. And thats exactly what the world witnessed this week in the third summit this year between the South Korean president, Moon Jae-in, and North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un. Mission accomplished  for the moment.

In Pyongyang this week Moon and Kim announced a variety of inter-Korean agreements ranging from easing military tensions to more family reunions, and Kim agreed to become the first North Korean leader to visit South Korea. Taken together, these steps could reduce the chances for a conflict and will keep the diplomacy moving.

Any progress in addressing North Koreas nuclear program, however, was much less certain: The North expressed its willingness to continue to take additional measures, such as the permanent dismantlement of the nuclear facilities at Yongbyon, as the United States takes corresponding measures in accordance with the spirit of the 12 June US-DPRK Joint Statement. Exactly what corresponding measures the US would have to take, of course, is unclear.

While the US is concerned about North Koreas nuclear program, South Korea has to live next door, and many there want an improved North-South relationship regardless of progress on the nuclear issue. And so, Moon is gambling. If he improves the relationship with Pyongyang without tangible progress on the nuclear issue, that could cause a serious rift with Washington. China would support the Souths engagement with the North, further driving a wedge between Washington and Seoul. Japans anxiety over the threat from North Korea would increase, and its opposition to diplomacy could push Seoul and Tokyo  two American allies  further apart.

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A strong alliance with the US and progress on denuclearization are necessary to maintain popular support for diplomacy in South Korea

Moon recognizes that detente with North Korea will only go so far without progress on denuclearization, as past rounds of North-South diplomacy have shown. A strong alliance with the US and progress on denuclearization are necessary to maintain popular support for diplomacy in South Korea and the leverage necessary to extract concessions from Kim.

While far from perfect, the US should back Moons diplomatic efforts. Standing shoulder to shoulder with Moon will reduce the opportunities for North Korea and China to drive a bigger wedge in the US-South Korea alliance and keep the chances for a diplomatic breakthrough alive. And no approach to North Korea  whether tradeoffs in diplomacy or maintaining deterrence  will be successful without a united Seoul and Washington.

The US should ride the wave of North-South diplomacy by supporting a non-binding declaration to end the Korean war  which both Koreas are pushing, and which Trump reportedly promised Kim in Singapore  in exchange for the verifiable closing of nuclear facilities that Kim put on the table with Moon. This would be a significant step forward on which both sides could build.

While Kims intentions remain unclear, a key question is whether or not the US is capable of advancing diplomacy. While Trump has thrown the US head-first into diplomacy with North Korea  and may be the only top US official who supports the process  he is also uniquely incapable of taking advantage of complicated diplomatic negotiations, and seems only interested in the appearance of success.

Trump continues to fall for Kims fawning praise by regularly responding to one of the worlds most repressive dictators with comments like: Thank you to Chairman Kim. We will both prove everyone wrong! There is nothing like good dialogue from two people that like each other! Trump playing the role of North Korea desk officer undercuts his own diplomats: his impulsive comments make North Korea believe that Trump has already agreed to moves that are still being negotiated while sending the signal that only Trumps words matter. The result? North Korea publicly singles out US officials as obstacles to Trumps own wishes.

Trump is also unable to pursue a consistent strategy. After a year of threatening war, he announced a summit with Kim, then canceled the summit in a pique of anger at North Korean rhetoric only to reinstitute it days later after Moon patched things up. Trump then again abruptly canceled the secretary of state Mike Pompeos trip to Pyongyang mere hours after it was announced in September. Further complicating things are Trumps hardline advisers including the vice-president, Mike Pence, and the national security adviser, John Bolton, who continue to look for ways to scuttle talks.

In diplomacy with North Korea there are always plenty of risks. The South Korean government may very well be unrealistic about what diplomacy can achieve (the agreement to seek a joint bid for the 2032 Summer Olympics seems Pollyannaish at best). North Koreas asking price for progress may be too high. And the US administration may not be equipped to succeed in this round of diplomacy. But these diplomatic opportunities are rare, and without a strong US-South Korea alliance there will be no way to address the threats that North Korea poses.

The United States must give peace a chance, and that means giving Moon a chance.
Jerusalem (AFP) - Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu tested Israel's new high-speed train from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv on Thursday, but much work remains before it is fully operational.

Netanyahu joined Transportation Minister Yisrael Katz on the ride from a newly built train station in Jerusalem's city centre to Ben Gurion International Airport near Tel Aviv.

That portion of the route is due to open on Tuesday, but trains will not yet be able to reach Tel Aviv itself or other locations.

Travelling at speeds up to 160 kilometres (100 miles) per hour, the ride from central Jerusalem to the airport will take 21 minutes -- half the time it takes to drive there in normal traffic, though congestion often makes the trip much longer.

There is also an older train that runs from Jerusalem to the airport, but that journey takes some two hours and requires a change.

Netanyahu spoke briefly before the ride, saying it was a "historic day" and the beginning of a "new era".

The new train was due to open in March, but work to prepare the line has been slower than expected and its launch repeatedly delayed.

The project dates back many years, having first been planned in the 1990s, with an original opening date of 2008.

The new line includes 40 kilometres of tunnels and eight bridges, with a small part of it controversially passing through the occupied West Bank.

Companies involved in the project include Canadian firm Bombardier, Spain's Semi and France's Alstom.

Israel also wants to extend the line to include a Western Wall station, which would be sure to spark criticism.

The Western Wall is located in the ancient Old City in east Jerusalem, occupied by Israel in 1967 and later annexed in a move never recognised by the international community.

It is in an area at the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, located just below the Al-Aqsa mosque compound.

The hilltop compound is sacred to both Muslims and Jews, who refer to it as the Temple Mount. It is the holiest site in Judaism and the third-holiest in Islam, after Mecca and Medina.

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The Western Wall is considered one of the last remnants of the Second Jewish Temple, destroyed by the Romans in 70 AD.

While Israel sees all of Jerusalem as its undivided capital, the Palestinians view east Jerusalem as the capital of their future state.

Katz said Thursday the new line was cause for "celebration" for Jerusalem.

"Now, more than ever, when there are people trying to challenge and question the Jewish people's connection to Jerusalem and ownership of it, we're connecting Jerusalem," he said.
By Hyonhee Shin and Joyce Lee SEOUL (Reuters) - North Korea's Kim Jong Un wants a second summit with U.S. President Donald Trump soon to hasten denuclearization, but a key goal is declaring an end this year to the 1950-53 Korean War, the South's President Moon Jae-in said on Thursday. Moon said he and Kim spent most of a three-day summit discussing how to break an impasse and restart nuclear talks between Pyongyang and Washington, which are at odds over which should come first, denuclearization or ending the war. Kim, who recently proposed another summit with Trump after their unprecedented June talks in Singapore, said the North was willing to "permanently dismantle" key missile facilities in the presence of outside experts, and the Yongbyon main nuclear complex, if the United States took corresponding action. The joint statement from the summit stipulates his commitment to a "verifiable, irreversible dismantlement" of the nuclear programs, and ending the war would be a first U.S. reciprocal step, Moon said. "Chairman Kim expressed his wish that he wanted to complete denuclearization quickly and focus on economic development," Moon told a news conference in Seoul, shortly after returning from the summit with Kim in Pyongyang. "He hoped a second summit with Trump would take place in the near future, in order to move the denuclearization process along quickly." INSPECTIONS Moon said Kim was also open to inspection of a nuclear test site in the northwest town of Punggye-ri, which he called the North's sole existing facility for underground detonations. While Pyongyang has stopped nuclear and missile tests this year, it failed to keep its pledge to allow international inspections of its dismantling of the Punggye-ri site in May, stirring criticism that the move could be reversed. U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said on Wednesday he had invited North Korea's foreign minister to meet in New York next week and other Pyongyang officials to Vienna for talks with nuclear envoy Stephen Biegun. Asked on Thursday if those meetings would take place, U.S. State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert said invitations had been sent and added: "We certainly stand ready to meet if they are able to." Nauert said Washington looked forward to a formal readout of the North-South talks in meetings with the South Koreans next week, which will include one between Trump and Moon on Monday on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly. Asked about Pompeo's statement on Wednesday welcoming plans for the dismantlement of all facilities at Yongbyon in the presence of U.S. and IAEA inspectors, Nauert said Moon and Kim had talked about inspectors. "Having IAEA inspectors and United States inspectors be a part of anything is really just a shared understanding," she said. "Any time you have a nuclear situation like this where there is a dismantlement, the expectation is that the IAEA would be part of that, so that would be just the normal course of doing business. We have that shared understanding with the countries." Asked why this detail was not in the document signed by Moon and Kim, Nauert replied: "We have had conversations ... with the government of North Korea and that is our mutual understanding; that is also the understanding between (South) Korea and North Korea. That was one of the things discussed, according to my understanding of it, over the past few days." Nauert did not respond when asked if the United States was willing to take "corresponding measures," except to say: "Nothing can happen in the absence of denuclearization; denuclearization has to come first." The North Korean ambassador to the United Nations, Kim Song, did not reply when asked by reporters on Thursday if his foreign minister would meet Pompeo on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly next week. ENDING WAR Kim pledged to work toward the "complete denuclearization of the Korean peninsula" during two meetings with Moon and his encounter with Trump, but follow-up negotiations on how to implement the vague commitments have since faltered. Washington calls for concrete action, such as a full disclosure of North Korea's nuclear and missile facilities, before satisfying Pyongyang's key demands, including an official end to the war and the easing of international sanctions. The war ended in an armistice, rather than a peace treaty, meaning U.S.-led United Nations forces, including South Korea, are technically still at war with the North. But there have been concerns in South Korea and the United States that ending the war would ultimately prompt China and Russia, if not North Korea, to demand that the United Nations Command (UNC), which overlaps with U.S. forces in South Korea, be disbanded and leave. Seoul aims to jointly announce with the United States an end to the war within this year, a measure Moon said he would discuss with Trump when they meet next week at the United Nations General Assembly in New York. An end-of-war declaration would not affect the presence of U.S. troops and the UNC in the South, Moon said, adding that Kim shared his view. "It would be a political declaration that would mark a starting point for peace negotiations," Moon said. "A peace treaty would be sealed, as well as normalization of North Korea-U.S. relations, after the North achieves complete denuclearization." (Reporting by Hyonhee Shin and Joyce Lee; additional repotring by David Brunnstrom in Washington and Michelle Nichols at the United Nations; editing by Soyoung Kim, Clarence Fernandez and Lisa Shumaker)
Gaza City (Palestinian Territories) (AFP) - A Palestinian teenager was shot dead by Israeli fire in clashes near the border in southern Gaza late Wednesday, the health ministry in the enclave said.

The ministry said Mumin Abu Ayeda, 15, was shot along the heavily-fortified border east of Rafah in southern Gaza.

It said he was part of night time demonstrations which have taken place over months of protests, dubbed the Great March of Return.

There was no immediate confirmation from the Israeli army, which typically highlights the often violent nature of such demonstrations and labels them riots.

At least 184 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli fire in Gaza since the 'Great March' protests began on March 30.

One Israeli soldier was shot dead by a Palestinian sniper.

Protests have lessened in intensity in recent months, though smaller demonstrations continue.

On Tuesday two Palestinians were shot dead during violent protests next to the Erez crossing into Israel.

Demonstrators are calling to be allowed to return to the homes their families fled from in 1948, which are now inside Israel.

Israel accuses Gaza's Islamist rulers Hamas, with which it has fought three wars since 2008, of orchestrating the protests as cover for attacks.
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Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe won a third consecutive term as president of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) in an election on Thursday.

The victory will give Abe a chance to become the longest-serving prime minister in postwar Japan.
By Jonathan Drake

LELAND, N.C. (Reuters) - Three days after Hurricane Florence made landfall in North Carolina, I was documenting the damage to Wilmington and communities to the south when I was tipped that volunteer rescuers were headed to a Leland church where people were isolated by rising floodwaters.

Even with a pickup truck, it is daunting to drive through waters dark and deep enough to obscure road signs. But experience covering storms and good waders enable you to cautiously measure water depth and current strength so you can get to compelling stories waiting to be told.

Ryan Nichols and David Rebollar have another way of getting to people and animals trapped by floods: a boat they haul from their Texas home to disaster zones. In the case of North Carolina, that was more than a thousand miles (1,600 km).

Having endured Hurricane Harvey, which hit Houston last year, the former Marines are on a mission to help when disaster strikes.

This day, as they lowered their craft into the water from a slice of dry land, a road was identifiable only by a few 7-foot-high street signs jutting above water. My colleague and I joined Nichols in the boat, and we made our way to the church about a thousand feet (300 metres) ahead.

Colonies of fire ants formed little islands floating beside toys. Desultory swing sets, as well as trees, gravestones and doleful statues, peered above the waterline.

While Nichols spoke with people at the church, we heard persistent barking at the back of a property across from it. He went to investigate and before long reappeared, saying urgently that they were trapped and we should hurry.

We moved through knee-high water until we saw three hounds in a caged doghouse - two on their hind legs, the other on all fours with its head just above water. They were trembling, terrified and desperate to get out.

Nichols tried to soothe the dogs as he worked to open the cage. When he did, not three but six dogs bounded out, half swimming, half bouncing through a stretch of water that led to nearby dry ground. I followed the action with my camera close to the water at their height.

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A neighbor up the street found some dog food, which they devoured.

With more and more people in the vicinity needing help, the volunteers and local residents decided to leave a lot of food for the dogs and let them roam on the higher ground to which they now had access and to tell local authorities about them.

Floodwaters rose in the hours that followed, and only began receding the next day, when Nichols returned to check on the dogs. He encountered their owner, who said she had had to evacuate in haste with young children, and that someone sent to check on the dogs was refused entry to the area because of flooding.

See photo essay on https://reut.rs/2QIcnAj

(Reporting by Jonathan Drake; Editing by Toni Reinhold and Jonathan Oatis)
Mexico may not pay for a border wall, but Poland has offered to pay to build a permanent military base for the U.S. In a joint press conference following a meeting with Polish President Andrzej Duda, President Donald Trump said Poland had offered over $2 billion towards the costs.

Duda said, I invite you to post more American military troops in Poland, and offered to name the base Fort Trump. Duda didnt confirm the amount Trump stated.

The U.S. maintains about 3,000 troops in Poland on a rotating basis. Poland would like a larger and permanent presence. Trump said Russia has acted aggressively across the region, and that the U.S. will consider the base.

At the Pentagon, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said a permanent Polish base was being studied, but no decision had yet been made due to the extent of the logistics required.

Neither the presidents nor Mattis mentioned whether a permanent base would inflame relations with Russia, which would bolster that countrys contentions that NATO and the U.S. have offensive plans to constrain Russia. NATO denies any hostility.

The meeting between the two presidents covered defense, energy, and commercial relationships. Trump said the American alliance with Poland has never been stronger.

The leaders also discussed a new Russian natural-gas pipeline to deliver fuel to Germany, which both said would leave Europe too reliant on Russian demands. Duda said Russia could use supplies for political blackmail, while Trump suggested it was very unfortunate that Germany would would be sending billions and billions of dollars a year to Russia to pay for fuel.

Russia opposed Polands entry into NATO years ago, and has pursued tacit invasions, as in the Crimea region of Ukraine; reclaiming former portions of the Soviet Union within the Russian Federation, as with Chechnya; and support of strongmen in teetering democracies bordering and nearby countries, such as Turkey and Hungary.
(MEMPHIS, Tenn.)  Three police officers did not have their body or in-car cameras activated during the shooting of a man during a traffic stop, a possible violation of department policy, a Tennessee police chief said Tuesday.

Martavious Banks, 25, was in critical condition at a hospital after he was shot Monday in a confrontation with officers, said Lt. Karen Rudolph, a spokeswoman for the Memphis Police Department. The shooting drew angry protests from activists and relatives of Banks immediately after the shooting, including accusations of a police cover-up.

Rudolph said Banks, who is black, was stopped in his car by officers, and he told them he did not have an identification or insurance. Banks then reached down, and an officer advised that he saw a gun inside the vehicle, Rudolph said.

Rudolph said Banks then drove away.

Police then stopped Banks again a short distance from the first stop, Rudolph said. Banks ran away and was shot, police said.

A handgun was recovered at the scene, Rudolph said. Memphis Police Director Michael Rallings said it was not clear if Banks fired the gun that was seen in his car. Banks had outstanding warrants for assault, driving with a suspended license and violation of probation, Rudolph said.

The male officer who shot Banks was black and 26 years old, Rudolph said. He did not have his body camera turned on, but it was not clear if he ever had it activated or if he turned it off, Rallings said.

The officer who shot Banks has been relieved of duty pending the outcome of the investigation. His name has not yet been released.

Two other officers involved in the chase  one white male, one black male  deactivated their body-work or in-car cameras, Rallings said. They also have been relieved of duty.

I am not confident that policy was followed, Rallings said at a news conference.

Protesters gathered after the shooting and yelled at officers on the scene. Demonstrators disputed the official account, asserting the man was shot in the back.

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After the shooting, Memphis police said it was conducting its own investigation, rather than having the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation look into it. TBI, the states police agency, investigates officer-involved shootings that involve a death in Tennessee.

That drew an angry response from protesters, who suggested a police cover-up.

On Tuesday, Shelby County district attorney Amy Weirich asked the TBI to handle the investigation, after new information was revealed. TBI spokeswoman Susan Niland confirmed the investigation.

Memphis has had its share of shooting of black men during confrontations with police. The most high-profile was the fatal shooting of Darrius Stewart, an unarmed 19-year-old, during a fight with Connor Schilling, a white officer who was trying to arrest Stewart in July 2015. Stewart was a passenger in a car that was stopped, and a check of his background revealed outstanding warrants.

After a TBI investigation, Weirich recommended Schilling be charged with voluntary manslaughter. But a grand jury refused to indict him.

Tensions between police and black activists have been high in recent years. Protesters blocked the Interstate 40 bridge connecting Tennessee to Arkansas in July 2016. And, the police department has been sued by prominent activists associated with the Black Lives Matter movement and other groups who claim police conducted illegal surveillance against them.

Rallings said any officers found to have violated policy would be held accountable.

I will get answers, Rallings said.
Paris (AFP) - As global warming outpaces efforts to tame it, scientists have proposed building massive underwater structures to prevent an Antarctic glacier the size of Britain from sliding into the sea and lifting the world's oceans by several metres.

The more modest of two engineering schemes -- which is still on the scale of a Panama or Suez Canal -- to shore up Thwaites Glacier would require the construction of Eiffel Tower-sized columns resting on the seabed to support the glacier's ocean-facing edge, or ice shelf.

Option Two is a 100-metre tall underwater wall, or berm, running 80-100 kilometres (55-60 miles) beneath the ice shelf to block bottom-flowing warm water that erodes the glacier's underbelly, rendering it unstable.

The ambitious projects, detailed Thursday in the European Geophysical Union journal The Cryosphere, reflect a gathering awareness that slashing planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions -- while essential -- may not happen quickly enough to avoid catastrophic climate change impacts.

"Thwaites could easily trigger a runaway ice sheet collapse that would ultimately raise global sea levels by about three metres," said lead author Michael Wolovick, a researcher at Princeton University's Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory.

Nor will reducing carbon pollution be enough: any credible pathway to a world in which global warming is capped below two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels (3.6 degree Celsius) -- the target enshrined in the 2015 Paris climate treaty -- depends on sucking large quantities of CO2 out of the air.

As a result, geoengineering schemes once dismissed as impractical, unnecessary or outright dangerous -- injecting particles into space to deflect the sun, storing CO2 in the ground, planting millions of square kilometres in biofuels -- have rapidly moved from the margins toward the centre of scientific and policy discussion.

But none of these schemes address sea level rise, which is likely to cause more human misery than any other climate impact: by century's end, it could swamp dozens of island states and densely populated river deltas, especially in Asia and Africa.

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- Runaway collapse -

"The scientific community should carefully investigate the possibility of glacial geoengineering," said Wolovick. "There are hundreds of millions of people who live within a few metres of sea level."

Until recently, sea level rise was caused mainly by ocean water expanding under the influence of global warming. Today, the biggest driver is run off from ice sheets sitting atop the island of Greenland and the continent of Antarctica.

Taken together, Greenland and West Antarctica -- more vulnerable to global warming than East Antarctica -- contain enough frozen water to lift the ocean watermark by about 12 metres.

For Thwaites, there is an added sense of urgency.

"It may already have passed the tipping point, we won't know for sure for a decade or two," said co-author John Moore, chief scientist at the College of Global Change and Earth System Science at Beijing Normal University.

"But the acceleration starts slowly, so we will have a century or so to prevent runaway collapse."

Wolovick and Moore ran computer models to test their geoengineering schemes, taking into account the known variables influencing glacier-ocean dynamics.

The underwater towers -- which could be built with material dredged from the continental shelf or quarried from exposed rock -- stood a 30 percent change of significantly slowing the glacier's disintegration.

- Initially sceptical -

"We show that it is possible to stabilise glacier beds by providing extra pinning points they can use to support themselves," said Moore.

Building a berm to block the warm water eating at Thwaites' underside doubled the odds of success, but would likely carry a price tag in the hundreds of billions of dollars, they found.

"It is nowhere near ready for implementation, and the potential side effects require much more research", Wolovick said.

The goal of the study, he added, was mostly to spark a conversation among scientists.

"Initially, I was very Skeptical," said Moore. "But compared with the alternatives, the idea certainly deserves to be much better researched and investigated."

The researchers also emphasised that geoengineering solutions do not lessen the need for reducing humanity's output of greenhouse gases, which hit record levels in 2017.

"There are dishonest elements of society that will try to use our research to argue against the necessity of reducing emissions," said Wolovick. "Our research does not in any way support that interpretation."

"The more carbon we emit, the less likely it becomes that the ice sheets will survive in the long term."
 Flash

Photo taken on Sept. 18, 2018 shows the head office of ICBC Turkey in Istanbul. [Photo by Wang Wei/China.org.cn]

ICBC Turkey, as the first Chinese financial institution to operate in the country, is taking every opportunity to further promote Sino-Turkish economic and trade cooperation with a view to becoming the leading bank supporting Belt and Road projects.

Li Jinhong, deputy general manager of ICBC Turkey, emphasized that the unique geographical position of Turkey makes it possible to build a unified platform for the bank's business operations across 17 countries around the Mediterranean and Black Sea, such as Israel, Azerbaijan, Georgia and Macedonia.

While Turkey is a geographical bridge between Europe and Asia, ICBC Turkey aims to act as a bridge linking Chinese enterprises with the country's own market and provide more convenient and all-round financial services to jointly build the Belt and Road, Li said.

The largest foreign direct investment by China in Turkey in recent years is the 2015 acquisition of a majority stake in Kumport, the third largest container terminal in the country, by a Chinese investor consortium of COSCO Pacific, China Merchants Holdings International and CIC Capital.

"Chinese enterprises going global tend to be competent and competitive," said Liu Peiguo, non-executive director of ICBC Turkey. "Although they didn't need loan support for such an acquisition, they still applied for a working capital loan of US$40 million from ICBC Turkey for operation of the container terminal."

The bank has also provided refinancing and syndicated loans for projects to improve local livelihood, such as the Elazig Hospital PPP project and the suspension bridge over the Dardanelles Straits, Liu added.

Licensed for commercial banking, investment banking and asset management, ICBC Turkey is now the largest Chinese bank based in Turkey.

Since acquiring a majority share in Tekstilbank in May 2015, ICBC has formed a network of 44 branches and 20 units for securities businesses, spreading over 18 cities including Istanbul, Ankara and Izmir.

For the past three years, ICBC Turkey has taken measures to promote Sino-Turkish cooperation in infrastructure and production capacity, aiming to align the Belt and Road Initiative with the Turkish Middle Corridor Initiative, Li said.

This year, Turkey plans to issue Panda bonds  yuan-denominated debt sold in China by foreign firms or governments  to diversify its financing sources. ICBC Turkey has a mandate from the Turkish Treasury as one of the three lead underwriters to promote such bond operations, according to Li.

Not only is this a great move by the Turkish government, but it sends important signals to the Turkish people, said Oraj, general manager of the securities division of ICBC Turkey.

"The issuance of Panda bonds will attract the attention of the Turkish people, in particular, making them more concerned with the present China-Turkey relations," he said.

Such a cooperation would boost the internationalization of Chinese yuan, Oraj added. "Meanwhile, the funds raised from the Panda bonds will be included in the national central budget, and finally used for investment in local infrastructure construction."

He expected the investment would, to some extent, contribute to Belt and Road projects and bring more tangible benefits to the Turkish people.
Paris (AFP) - Eliminating dead-but-toxic cells occurring naturally in the brains of mice designed to mimic Alzheimer's slowed neuron damage and memory loss associated with the disease, according to a study published Wednesday that could open a new front in the fight against dementia.

The accumulation in the body of "zombie cells" that can no longer divide but still cause harm to other healthy cells, a process called senescence, is common to all mammals.

Scientists have long known that these dead-beat cells gather in regions of the brain linked to old age diseases ranging from osteoarthritis and atherosclerosis to Parkinson's and dementia.

Prior research had also shown that the elimination of senescent cells in ageing mice extended their healthy lifespan.

But the new results, published in Nature, are the first to demonstrate a cause-and-effect link with a specific disease, Alzheimer's, the scientists said.

But any treatments that might emerge from the research are many years down the road, they cautioned.

In experiments, a team led by Tyler Bussian of the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota used mice genetically modified to produce the destructive, cobweb-like tangles of tau protein that form in the neurons of Alzheimer's patients.

The mice were also programmed to allow for the elimination of "zombie" cells in the same region.

"When senescent cells were removed, we found that the diseased animals retained the ability to form memories, and eliminated signs of inflammation," said senior author Darren Baker, also from the Mayo Clinic.

The mice likewise failed to develop Alzheimer's signature protein "tangles", and retained normal brain mass.

- Keeping zombies at bay -

A closer look revealed that the "zombies" belonged to a class of cells in the brain and spinal cord, called glia, that provide crucial support and insulation to neurons.

"Preventing the build-up of senescent glia can block the cognitive decline and neuro-degeneration normally experienced by these mice," Jay Penney and Li-Huei Tsai, both from MIT, wrote in a comment, also in Nature.

Story continues

Bussian and his team duplicated the results with pharmaceuticals, suggesting that drugs could one day slow or block the emergence of Alzheimer's by keeping these zombie cells at bay.

"There hasn't been a new dementia drug in 15 years, so it's exciting to see the results of this promising study in mice," said James Pickett, head of research at Alzheimer's Society in London.

For Lawrence Rajendran, deputy director of the Dementia Research Institute at King's College London, the findings "open up new vistas for both diagnosis and therapy for neurodegenerative diseases, including Alzheimer's."

Up to now, dementia research has been mostly focused on the diseased neurons rather than their neighbouring cells.

"It is increasingly becoming clear that other brains cells play a defining role," Rajendran added.

Several barriers remain before the breakthrough can be translated into a "safe, effective treatment in people," Pickett and other said.

The elderly often have lots of harmless brain cells that look like the dangerous senescent cells a drug would target, so the molecule would have to be good at telling the two apart.

Worldwide, about seven percent of people over 65 suffer from Alzheimer's or some form of dementia, a percentage that rises to 40 percent above the age of 85.

The number afflicted is expected to triple by 2050 to 152 million, according to the World Health Organization, posing a huge challenge to healthcare systems.
(Mark Wilson via Getty Images)

Theres one person Christine Blasey Ford says was in the room when she was allegedly sexually assaulted by Brett Kavanaugh while they were in high school  and he appears to publicly back Kavanaughs denial that any sexual assault took place.

Yet Republicans are adamant about not calling conservative writer Mark Judge to testify at a hearing set for Monday, resisting Democrats demands for additional witnesses, beyond Blasey and Kavanaugh  even though Judge has backed the Supreme Court nominees claim that the accusation is false.

Wait, what!?

Its the kind of testimony youd think the White House and Senate Republicans would be eager to have. More than that, why wouldnt Judge, a classmate and friend of Kavanaughs during his years at Georgetown Prep in Maryland, himself want to help clear his old high school buddys name?

Judge responded after being contacted by reporters by telling The New Yorker on Friday that he had no recollection of any such assault. Later that day, he told The Weekly Standard the accusation is absolutely nuts, and claimed, I never saw Brett act that way.

Still, Judge wrote a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday in which he stated he had no intention of cooperating with the committee in any way, while reiterating he had no memory of the incident Blasey described.

Heres Judges chance to come to the aid of Kavananah, whom he proudly referred to in a Facebook update shortly after his school chum was nominated to the Supreme Court in July (quipping that Kavanaugh has the same hair as the night I met him in 1981). But hes completely backing away. Why?

That the question has to be asked at all is the reason why Judge, as well as others who were present at the party Blasey described, must be subpoenaed by the Judiciary Committee to testify.

Judge may repeat under oath that he has no memory of any sexual assault by Kavanaugh. But he can also be asked questions about Kavanaughs behavior in high school, including his drinking habits and partying (Blasey said both Kavanaugh and Judge were drunk during the alleged assault) and whether he and Kavanaugh drank so much in those days that they might not remember a sexual assault.

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Judge has written several memoirs, including, Wasted: Tales of a Gen X Drunk, in which he discussed being a blackout drunk in high school and attending wild parties with his classmates. His testimony is critical to understanding what happened back then.

If Senate Republicans actually cared about getting to the bottom of what happened, they would want Judges testimony. (Mark Wilson via Getty Images)

Tuesday night, after GOP Senate leaders resisted Democrats calls for additional witnesses, Blasey announced shell only testify after the FBI investigates her accusations. Her attorney, Debra Katz, had said on Monday that her client would be eager to testify, but didnt want to be part of a bloodletting ritual. She clearly wanted a real investigation, rather than to simply be used as a fig leaf for the GOP. Judiciary Committee Republicans almost immediately responded by saying that if Blasey didnt accept the invitation on Monday, they would proceed with a vote on Kavanaughs nomination anyway.

Regardless of whether there is an FBI investigation, and whether Blasey testifies before the Senate committee, Judge must be subpoenaed. According to Blasey, Judge was part of the assault, laughing maniacally  an alleged accomplise who watched and even jumped on Kavanaugh and Blasey while Kavanaugh molested her.

What seems evident, however, is that Republicans on the committee know that Judge would be a disaster as a character witness for Kavanaugh. Not only would there be much focus on his writings about being highly intoxicated at high school parties, but it would open Kavanaugh to questions about the slew of other offensive things Judge has written. For instance, his piece on how some women dressed in a way that might provoke rape  even though theres never any excuse for rape.

In a 2006 piece called Gay Sex, Judge trafficked in the most base anti-gay stereotypes, asking, Why are they still getting AIDS, the most preventable disease since alcoholism? Why were 90 percent of the priest abuse cases involving priests with teen-age boys?

He went on to further compare homosexuality with alcoholism and compulsion, speculating that along with the genetic or hormonal hardwiring that makes someone gay comes a level of pathological compulsiveness. Its there waiting to explode the way alcoholism is, and requires a constant struggle to tamp down.

Were Judge and Kavanaugh friends all through these years since high school, and does Kavanaugh share some of these bigoted views? Those arent questions Kavanaugh or Republicans want the media to dwell on.

But protecting Kavanaugh from tough questions shouldnt be the priority here. If Senate Republicans actually cared about getting to the bottom of what happened, they would want Judges testimony.

The fact that they dont, and their rush to make Blasey testify, speaks volumes.
Migrant rescue ship Aquarius was seeking a safe haven for 11 migrants it saved off Libya Thursday, after refusing to return them to the north African country, aid groups MSF and SOS Mediterranee said.

The vessel moved in to save 10 men and an unaccompanied minor from a sinking boat after trying to alert Libya's coastguard Thursday morning.

The migrants were from Pakistan and Ivory Coast.

The Aquarius said it had contacted Italy, Malta and Tunisia asking for help. Rome passed on the information to the Libyan coastguard, who asked them to hand over the migrants to one of their patrol vessels.

The crew of the Aquarius responded that they could not legally comply as Libyan ports were not considered places of safety, said SOS Mediterranee, a French NGO.

"The Aquarius 2 (the official name for the boat) has recovered about 10 people in Libyan search and rescue waters, a few miles from the mainland, but refused to cooperate with the coastguard in Tripoli," Italy's Interior Minister Matteo Salvini tweeted Thursday.

"Now it's floating in the Mediterranean. I say it again and again: go wherever you want, but not to Italy."

Since Salvini closed the country's ports to migrants in June, the Aquarius has been forced to find new havens for the migrants it saves and has landed people in Spanish ports.

The Aquarius was recently forced to lay up in the French Mediterranean port of Marseille after Gibraltar revoked its flag. It is now registered in Panama.

Earlier this month, the UN refugee agency UNHCR said that although the numbers attempting the crossing from north Africa to Europe had fallen sharply, the danger of dying during the crossing had sharply increased.
A major review is being undertaken into the rail timetable chaos that affected commuters in May (Getty/stock photo)

The Government has ordered a major review of Britains railways after an investigation into what caused the May timetable disruption found nobody took charge.

The May 20 timetable change was intended to deliver huge benefits to passengers as a result of major upgrades to the network, but instead saw services crippled in the north and south-east of England.

GTR and Northern cancelled up to 470 and 310 scheduled trains respectively each weekday during the disruption, which lasted several weeks.

Passengers on Northern and Thameslink networks were particularly badly hit, leaving tens of thousands stranded by reduced or cancelled services.

More than a third (36%) of Thameslink trains were delayed by at least five minutes between May 27 and June 23, compared with 18% in the same period last year.

Transport Secretary Chris Grayling previously insisted he did not run the railways (PA)

The proportion of Great Northern trains failing to hit the same punctuality target rose from 16% to 30%.

A series of failures have previously been blamed for the timetable chaos, including Network Rails delayed electrification projects in the North, poor planning by train operators and the decision by transport ministers to phase in the introduction of new Govia Thameslink Railway services.

An investigation by the Office of Rail and Road (ORR) regulator into the May timetable change concluded Network Rail, Govia Thameslink Railway (GTR), Northern, the Department for Transport and the ORR itself all made mistakes.

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The inquirys interim report warned of a lack of clarity about roles and responsibilities.

Trade unions representing railway workers are not expected to be criticised in the ORR report.

They had warned that train drivers had not been given enough time to prepare for the new timetable.

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The May 20 timetable change was intended to deliver huge benefits to passengers as a result of major upgrades to the network (PA)

It added: The present industry arrangements do not support clarity of decision making: it was unclear who was responsible for what.

Nobody took charge.

Transport Secretary Chris Grayling has previously insisted: I dont run the railways.

The ORR stated: The impact of this experience has had a significant financial and emotional cost to those passengers affected, directly impacting upon their work and families and in some circumstances their personal safety.

The regulators 183-page report catalogued failures by various organisations which led to this outcome.

They included:

Delays with Network Rails electrification work in the North;

Network Rails unit responsible for producing timetables did not have a sufficient method of working to manage the scale of changes required;

GTR and Northern were not properly aware or prepared for the problems with the new timetables and did not do enough to provide accurate information to passengers when disruption occurred;

The DfT and ORR failed to sufficiently examine the assurances they received from the industry about the risk of disruption.

Train services that were cancelled or late after the timetables came in (PA)

Events and decisions taken before January meant it was probably unavoidable that the launch would fail, according to the report. If there was a final go/no-go decision point it was in autumn 2017.

ORR chairman Professor Stephen Glaister, who led the inquiry, said: Good intentions and over-optimism within the rail industry about its ability to recover missed deadlines left no time to uncover and fix problems.

When problems arose, timetable planners were stretched and train operators were ill-equipped to help passengers.

The rail review commissioned by the Government will be led by Keith Williams  deputy chairman of John Lewis and former chief executive of British Airways  who will be supported by an external panel.

A White Paper will be published next year after Mr Williams publishes his report. Reforms are expected to be implemented from 2020.

Punctuality is at a 12-year low and commuters face an increase of up to 3.2% in the cost of season tickets from January.

There is also scepticism over the franchising system following the failure of Virgin Trains East Coast.

These issues have fuelled calls for the entire network to be taken into public ownership.

How companies were affected after the timetables were brought in (PA)

Mick Whelan, general secretary of Aslef, the train drivers union, said: The ORR report puts the blame where it belongs, at the door of the train operating companies; the DfT and Network Rail.

The train companies did not plan properly. They do not employ enough drivers to run the services they promise, in their franchise applications, to deliver and they started driver training far too late. The DfT was, as usual, asleep at the wheel and Network Rail was behind on track enhancements.

The result was that passengers suffered cancellations, delays and frustration for months. Which would have been far, far worse had it not been for train drivers, and other staff, who showed enormous flexibility in helping the companies through a crisis of their own devising.

Drivers  who went to work not knowing when or even if they would be able to get home  went above and beyond in helping the train companies provide a service. If it hadnt been for our help, the disruption would have been far worse than it was.

The call for proper leadership  a clear indictment of Chris Graylings failure to deliver at the DfT  lends weight to suggestions that Theresa Mays railway review, which will also be announced tomorrow, will end up recommending a new version of the Strategic Rail Authority.

Mr Grayling accepted that the railway needs reform to prioritise its passengers and noted plans for closer partnerships between track and train operators on the East Coast and South Eastern routes.

He added: It is vital that this review leaves no stone unturned and makes bold recommendations for the future.
Ronaldo did not take the decision well, lets be honest

A former Premier League referee has moved to explain why Cristiano Ronaldo was sent off for Juventus on his Champions League debut.

The 33-year-old, five times Champions League winner, was dismissed in the first half of Juves Group H game at Valencia after clashing with Jeison Murillo.

The duo clashed on the edge of the box with the Valencia man going down and Ronaldo appearing to take a swipe at his opponents hair. After consulting his additional assistant German referee Felix Brych showed the Portuguese a straight red.

READ MORE: Ronaldos sister calls for justice after red card

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Now, ex-Premier League referee Mark Clattenburg has tried to explain why Ronaldo was dismissed, and thinks a rogue elbow may be the explanation.

Cristiano Ronaldo was very unfortunate to be sent off on his Champions League debut for Juventus, Clattenburg said in the Daily Mail.

With the ball on the left wing, the forward tried to make a run into the penalty area and was blocked off by Murillo.

There was a small push from Ronaldo which resulted in the Valencia defender falling to the floor but that was not violent conduct.

Referee Felix Brych had his back to the incident. It was spotted by the additional assistant, standing behind the goal, who may have thought Ronaldo threw an elbow but that was not the case.

If UEFA add punishment to his one-game ban, that is

Ronaldo was then clearly annoyed by Murillos play-acting and placed a hand on the defenders head.

He continued: The contact looked very slight and I cannot see how the additional assistant, standing some 20 yards away, could deem it violent conduct.

If I had been officiating this game, I would have given Valencia a free-kick and shown a yellow card to each player.

Ronaldo will serve a one-match ban but anything more would be harsh.

READ MORE: Can in sexist outburst over Ronaldo red: We are not women

READ MORE: Revealed: What Ronaldo said to referee after red card

Story continues

It was Ronaldos first red card in 154 Champions League games and could potentially deny him a return to Old Trafford when his new side play former club Manchester United next month.

The automatic one-game ban for the red card means he misses next match against Young Boys in Turin and if UEFAs disciplinary panel decide to extend it depending on the contents of the referees report.

It is expected that Juventus will appeal the ban leaving Ronaldo sweating on a decision ahead of a romantic return to Old Trafford.




Geneva (AFP) - The deal to avoid a Syrian government offensive on Idlib province is still being worked out by Russia and Turkey, the UN said Thursday, stressing that the threat to civilians remained high.

"This is not a peace deal. It is an aversion of (a) whole-scale-war deal," the head of the United Nations Humanitarian Taskforce for Syria, Jan Egeland, told reporters in Geneva.

Syrian government ally Russia and rebel supporter Turkey reached an agreement to create a demilitarised buffer zone in Idlib, Syria's last opposition bastion, where half of its three million residents have been displaced from areas retaken by Syrian forces.

While briefing the taskforce about the pact on Thursday, Russian and Turkish envoys made clear they "are still working... on the details," Egeland said.

He expressed hope it was an indication that "the big war was averted" in Idlib, although Russia stressed it would continue operating against fighters it identifies as terrorists.

"I see a great potential for a lot of fighting," Egeland said. "We are concerned for the civilians in these areas, so it is not over."

The UN has repeatedly warned that a full-scale assault on Idlib could trigger the bloodiest episode of Syria's seven-year war, which has killed more than 360,000 people and displaced millions.

Despite the ongoing concerns, Egeland said he was "relieved" for now.

"The outcome here was the least bad of (the) realistic solutions," he said.
The centuries-long hunt for the remains of famed ship the Endeavour -- the vessel used by James Cook on a voyage of discovery to Australia and New Zealand -- could be nearing an end.

A team of marine archaeologists from Australia and the United States said Wednesday they believe they may have found the site where the vessel was scuttled in 1778.

"Early indications are that the team has narrowed the possible site for the wreck of HMB Endeavour to one site, which is very promising," said Kevin Sumption, head of the Australian National Maritime Museum.

That site is in Newport Harbour in the US state of Rhode Island.

"A lot more detailed work, analysis and research has to happen before we can definitively say we have found the remains of James Cook's HMB Endeavour," Sumption cautioned.

The Endeavour has entered popular lore thanks to Cook's voyages, which brought the British into contact with New Zealand and eastern Australia and foreshadowed the colonisation of the continent.

Today a replica of the cramped and surprisingly small vessel sits in Sydney's Darling Harbour, as a reminder of a pivotal point in the history of modern Australia.

After being used by Cook the Endeavour was decommissioned and sold to a commercial owner.

It was scuttled with 12 other vessels in Newport Harbour during the American War of Independence in 1778, but the remains have never been found.

Almost since it was sunk a series of expeditions have sought to find the ship or relics from it.
 Flash

Israeli Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman said on Thursday that a Russian reconnaissance plane was shot down due to lack of professionalism in Syrian army.

"The plane was shot down by irresponsible and unprofessional Syrian air defense personnel who fired when (our) air force jets had already returned to Israeli territory," Lieberman told Israel's Army Radio.

"I accept Russian President (Vladimir Putin's) words that it was a tragic mistake, but the one responsible for this tragic mistake is (Syrian President Bashar al-) Assad's army," said Lieberman.

His remark came as a delegation led by Israel's Air Force Commander Amikam Norkin was heading to Moscow to present findings from its probe on the accident in an attempt to dissolve a possible diplomatic crisis between the two countries.

Also on Thursday, Russian Embassy in Israel commented on its Twitter account that "Moscow views as irresponsible and unfriendly actions of Israeli Air Force, which exposed Russian Il-20 aircraft to danger and lead to the death of 15 servicemen."

"Russia would take all necessary measures to eliminate threat to life and security of our military fighting against terrorism," it added.

On Monday evening, a Russian military aircraft with 15 Russian personnel onboard was mistakenly downed by a Syrian anti-aircraft fire launched in response to an Israeli airstrike on Iranian target in Syria's Latakia province.

The Russian Defense Ministry said a missile from Syria's S-200 air defense system shot down the Il-20 surveillance plane with Russian servicemen by mistake because an Israeli airstrike took place at the same time, blaming a simultaneous Israeli strike as the cause of the mistake.

Israel has carried out some 200 airstrikes over the last 18 months, claiming that the attacks aimed to prevent Iranian weapons convoys and stop Iran from establishing a military foothold in Syria.




SYDNEY (Reuters) - A 12-year-old girl was attacked by a shark in waters off Australia's tropical northeast coast on Thursday, an ambulance official said, the second attack in the tourist region in as many days. Rescuers were called to Cid Harbour at Whitsunday Island, near the Great Barrier Reef, on Thursday afternoon and found the girl with bad leg injuries, said Tracey Eastwick, the regional ambulance operations manager. "The patient's injuries today are again a shark attack bite to the patient's thigh area, with significant blood loss," Eastwick told reporters in Mackay, where the girl is in a serious condition in hospital. "It is horrific ... it is quite confronting to have two similar incidents in the space of 24 hours," she said. Australia ranked behind only the United States in the number of unprovoked shark encounters with humans in 2017, according to the University of Florida's International Shark Attack File. The island where the girl was bitten is a popular tourist site 900 km (560 miles) northwest of the state capital Brisbane. The attack followed the dramatic rescue of a 46-year-old woman, Justine Barwick, who was bitten by a shark while swimming at dusk from a yacht in the same area on Wednesday evening. Barwick was badly hurt on the upper right leg, ambulance officials said, and a doctor who was on a nearby boat attended to her until rescuers arrived by helicopter. The doctor, John Hadock, was about to go for a swim when he was summoned to jump into a dinghy and rush to Barwick's aid. "I was very worried that I might find severe bleeding still going. They had been able to stop the bleeding but Justine was very, very ill," he told Channel Seven television. Hadock said he treated Barwick before a helicopter crew winched her to safety and flew her to Mackay hospital, where a spokeswoman said Barwick is in critical condition. Last year, a spate of shark attacks off Australia's northeast coast led to the controversial deployment of protective nets, which authorities said would save lives and guard the country's reputation as a tourist destination. Environmentalists say the nets can also harm a number of threatened and migratory species. A teenage girl was killed in 2017 by a shark while surfing at a break in Western Australia, and a surf competition at Margaret River was canceled after two surfers were bitten by sharks. (Reporting and writing by Tom Westbrook; Additional reporting by Jill Gralow; Editing by Darren Schuettler)
Salzburg (Austria) (AFP) - Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez said Thursday his government was aiming to reach an agreement with the UK over the post-Brexit future of the territory of Gibraltar by the middle of next month.

"We need to reach an agreement on Gibraltar by mid-October," Sanchez told reporters after meeting his EU counterparts at an informal summit dominated by Brexit and migration.

"We have still some complications but I think that the willingness of the British government and the Spanish government is to reach an agreement," Sanchez said.

In April 2017 the EU agreed to give Spain the right to veto any future post-Brexit relationship between the 27-member bloc and Gibraltar.

The territory has been under British control since 1713 but Madrid has long wanted it back.

Spain has nevertheless tried to reassure the territory's inhabitants that it won't use the negotiations over Gibraltar to try to get the territory back or to make their lives more complicated.

However, Sanchez said disagreements remained around the perennial Spanish accusations that Gibraltar acts as a tax haven and worries over tobacco smuggling over the border.

"We have some differences on environmental cooperation, judicial and policial cooperation, free movement, tobacco, and taxes," Sanchez said.

"It is not everything. We are very close to reaching an agreement," he added.
The woman who died after the caravan she was in was blown off a cliff during Storm Ali has been named locally as Swiss holidaymaker Elvira Ferraii.

Ms Ferraii was staying at the Clifden ecoBeach Camping and Caravan Park in Co Galway in Irelands west when a severe gust took her caravan over the side and down onto a beach.

Emergency services were called before 8am on Wednesday morning but the victim, aged in her 50s, was pronounced dead at the scene after a brief search.

Elvira Ferraii died after the caravan she was in was blown off a cliff during Storm Ali (PA)

A severe gust took the caravan over the side of the Clifden ecoBeach Camping and Caravan Park (PA)

Debris from the caravan was littered across the beach in County Galway (PA)

She was reported to have been staying at the remote beauty spot for several weeks.

Footage from the scene showed the caravan broken up into several pieces as the tide threatened to wash it out to sea.

Ireland was battered by some of the worst winds recorded at this time of year, the conditions wreaking havoc on power supplies and roads  and costing two lives.

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In Northern Ireland, a man in his 20s working on behalf of public utility Northern Ireland Water at a water pumping station died when a tree fell on him at a popular forest park in Co Armagh.

White overall-clad forensics experts combed the scene and the fire service oversaw work on the hefty tree, which had fallen across the main entrance road into Slieve Gullion park, a forested hill close to the border with the Republic in South Armagh.

Irish President Michael D Higgins was among those who expressed condolences following the Republics tragedy.

A man looks at debris at the scene in Claddaghduff, near Clifden (PA)

A man working on behalf of public utility Northern Ireland Water at a water pumping station died when a tree fell on him during Storm Ali (PA)

White overall-clad forensics experts combed the scene and the fire service oversaw work on the hefty tree (PA)

He said: I would also take this opportunity to pay tribute to all those, in statutory and voluntary organisations around the country, who are helping and stand ready to assist their fellow citizens, and who are working to maintain essential services around the country.

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Irelands Minister for Employment Regina Doherty also offered her condolences to the family of the dead woman.

More than 250,000 homes and businesses across the island of Ireland were at one stage without power as a result of Storm Ali, with emergency workers battling difficult conditions as wind speeds peaked during the afternoon.

The storm brought down several trees across the region (PA)

Forecasters have warned of more strong winds to come (PA)

Irelands electricity network, ESB Networks, said thousands of homes, businesses and farms have been left without power  with the most impacted in Cavan, Sligo, Donegal, Castlebar and Galway.

In Northern Ireland, thousands of homes and businesses were without power as gusts of 70mph caused significant damage.

Irish forecaster Met Eireann said the strongest gusts in the hour leading up to 10am reached speeds of 120km/h (74.5mph) at Mace Head in County Galway, 98km/h (60.9mph) at Dublin Airport and 107km/h (66.5mph) at Shannon.

The Met Office said gusts of 91mph hit Killowen in County Down.

A woman looks at a fallen tree outside her home in Belfast (PA)

Forecasters in Ireland issued a Status Orange wind warning for more than half the country due to the storm, while ore heavy rain and strong winds are predicted.

A new weather system moving in from the Atlantic has prompted a warning of possible flooding and further travel disruption.

While Northern Ireland and Scotland bore the brunt of the blustery conditions, the latest weather front is expected to bring downpours and gusts to Wales and much of England on Thursday.

Storm Ali brought 102mph winds to the north of the country (PA)

The Met Office has warned of a chance of injuries and danger to life as high winds threaten to blow tiles from roofs and fell trees.

Met Office meterologist Laura Paterson said: Through Thursday another area of low pressure will develop and approach the UK from the south west, bringing rain and a second spell of strong winds later.

The unsettled weather is due to last the rest of the week and is caused by a jet stream from Canada, the Met Office said.
Ryanair sees headwinds. Photo: Reuters

Ryanair (RYA.L) shareholders re-elected the airlines top bosses, including CEO Michael OLeary and chairman David Bonderman, at its annual general meeting on Thursday. The low-cost flyer also reversed its initial decision to bar media from its AGM dominated by talks of pilot strikes and Brexit.

Earlier this year, Ryanair was forced to recognise pilot unions for the first time in its 32-year history. But after another summer that saw hundreds of flights cancelled across Europe, the airline had said it was going to break another long-standing tradition by banning the media from its AGM.

This, it said, was to allow shareholders to discuss all matters freely with the board. The airline, however, unexpectedly allowed journalists into the meeting at the City North Hotel in County Meath, Ireland.

Pilot strikes

After being forced to cancel tens of thousands of flights in 2017 amid a global shortage of pilots, rostering issues, and industrial disputes across Europe, Ryanair faced its worst-ever summer of strikes in 2018. Two days of action involving its Belgian, Spanish, and Portuguese cabin crews and a 10 August walkout by pilots in five countries forced the airline to cancel hundreds of flights.

At the heart of issue is Ryanairs insistence that pilots across Europe be governed by Irish employment laws and not those of the countries in which the staff are based. Pilots are also employed on contracts through brokers, and unions are insisting that the airline offer them direct employment in 2019. Pilots in Belgium, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, and Spain are planning a 24-hour strike on 28 September unless Ryanair meets their demands.

Earlier in September, Irish pilots reached an agreement with Ryanair about promotional policies, transfers, and annual leave after years of qualms about its approach. On 12 September OLeary admitted that the strikes had damaged customer confidence.

On Thursday, he said that that this deal with Irish pilots could be used as a framework for similar deals in other countries, but that the airline would not accede to all demands.

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Calls for chairmans ouster

A number of groups, such as shareholder advisory firm Glass Lewis, the European Transport Workers Federation, the International Transport Workers Federation, and the UK Local Authority Pension Fund Forum, had called on shareholders to vote against the re-election of Ryanair chairman David Bonderman, a US billionaire who has been in the post since 1996. He is seen to be one of the drivers of the airlines anti-union culture. He was reelected this morning with a much narrower marginwith 70.5% votes in favour. OLeary secured an overwhelming 98.5% support, and said that he was in talks to extend his time as CEO.

Brexit

OLeary told British transport secretary to get off his backside last week and sort out an agreement that would prevent the post-Brexit grounding of flights. Though he said he suspected that the British government would allow flights to land in the UK in the event of a no-deal scenario, there is no indication the reverse is true.

During the AGM he said the risk of a hard Brexit was rising. Even though OLeary is more pessimistic than his counterparts in other European airlines, he had noted last week that a grounding of flights would not last more than a couple of days or a couple of weeks because politicians would solve the situation pretty damn quickly.

Baggage policies

One of the biggest consumer furores has centred around the airlines almost-incessant adjustments to its cabin baggage policy.

In August, it decided that customers would be charged for bringing wheelie suitcases to boarding gates, when previously they had been allowed to be placed in the hold for free. Though such moves irk customers, Ryanair said that the change was not revenue related, but rather a way of reducing delays at boarding gates.

Ryanair had reported full-year after-tax profits of 1.45bn (1.29bn) in May 2018, a 10% increase on 2017.
An active volcano, Mount Paektu is the tallest peak on the Korean peninsula and often considered the spiritual home of the Korean nation.

For all Koreans, it is the mythical birthplace of Dangun, the legendary founder of the first Korean kingdom more than 4,000 years ago.

The 2,744-metre (9,003-foot) peak is referenced in the first verse of the South Korean national anthem, and "Let's go to Mount Paektu" is a popular North Korean pop song calling for loyalty to Kim Jong Un.

Kim and Moon Jae-in went to the peak together on Thursday, in the last act of the South Korean president's three-day visit to the North.

"Mount Paektu is the spiritual mountain for the Korean people and it's the most symbolic mountain," Moon's spokesman told reporters.

For North Koreans, it is also where Kim Il Sung, the country's founder and Kim's grandfather, set up a secret military camp for anti-Japanese guerrilla missions during the 1910-45 colonial rule.

North Korea claims his son and successor Kim Jong Il was born there, although historians say he was actually born at a Soviet military base in Siberia where the older Kim was in exile.

Regardless, Pyongyang refers to the ruling Kim family as the "Paektu bloodline" and the peak is a favoured backdrop for the propaganda murals of the elder Kims, either singly or together, that are ubiquitous in the North.

The current North Korean leader makes frequent visits to the mountain. He hiked to the top of the peak in December -- his last known trip -- before the New Year speech in which he kickstarted his diplomatic overtures.

Despite its revered status on both sides of the border, South Koreans can only visit the mountain through China.

Known as Changbai in Chinese, the border between China and North Korea runs across the peak's beautiful crater lake.

The 1950-53 Korean War ended with an armistice rather than a peace treaty, leaving the two Koreas still technically still engaged in a war that placed an impenetrable border and banned all civilian exchanges between them.

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They agreed in 2007 to open tours to the peak for South Koreans and to run direct flights between it and Seoul, but the plan was never put into effect.

Seoul suspended South Korean tours to Mount Kumgang -- another scenic mountain in the North -- in 2008 after a tourist was shot dead by a North Korean soldier.

Moon's office quoted him as saying on board his aircraft when he arrived in Pyongyang: "I had vowed that I'd visit Mount Paektu, but from the North rather than from China."
Theresa May with German chancellor Angela Merkel in Salzburg (Reuters)

The heads of European governments have been privately expressing their hopes that the Brexit vote can be still be reversed, it has been revealed during a crunch EU summit.

Maltese prime minister Joseph Muscat has said that support for a second referendum in the UK is almost unanimous among the leaders of the other 27 EU member states.

I think most of us would welcome a situation where there is the possibility of the British people putting things into perspective, seeing what has been negotiated, seeing the options and then deciding once and for all, he told the Today programme.

His claim was supported by Czech prime minister Andre Babic, who said: We hope that we will reach a deal but basically Im very unhappy that the UK is leaving.

So, it would be better maybe to make another referendum and the people in the meantime could change their view.

MORE: Tusk tells May to rework Brexit plan in pre-emptive strike on PMs summit speech

Muscat admitted though he wasnt sure whether the result of a second referendum would differ from the first, a 52% to 48% victory for Leave.

The pair made their comments as EU leaders meet in Salzburg for top-level talks on Brexit, as well as migration and security.

It came after Treasury minister Mel Stride said on Wednesday that, if the Chequers deal doesnt prevail, there could be a situation where we could have a second referendum and we could end up not leaving the EU altogether.

But Theresa May explicitly ruled out another referendum  or even delaying Brexit beyond next March  in a 10 minute address to her fellow leaders in Salzburg on Wednesday night.

European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker sitting next to prime minister Theresa May at the EU leaders summit in Salzburg (Reuters)

That was designed to increase pressure on them to compromise over her Chequers plan, particularly the economic elements which have been repeatedly rejected by the EU.

If were going to achieve a successful conclusion then, just as the UK has evolved its position, the EU will need to evolve its position too, May said.

EU negotiators say Mays plan to maintain frictionless trade and avoid a hard border in Ireland by effectively keeping the UK in the single market for goods is unacceptable cherry picking.

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Mays appeal seemed to have little effect on EU leaders, who raised the same concerns about the Chequers plan as they arrived for the second day of the summit.

MORE: Barnier vows to improve EU Irish border plan in final push for Brexit deal

French prime minister Emmanuel Macron said: We have very clear principles about the integrity of the single market and regarding the Irish border.

European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker said: Whenever the commission is too flexible things are going wrong.

And Luxembourg prime minister Xavier Bettell stressed there could be no cherry picking.

European Council president Donald Tusk made the same point with a cheeky snap of him and Theresa May on his Instagram account.

That could make the meeting between the pair scheduled for Thursday afternoon a little awkward.

Before that EU leaders will chew over Mays proposals further at working lunch with the blocs Brexit chief, Michel Barnier.

They are set to agree that an emergency summit should be held in November, as a deal is now not expected to be ready by the longstanding deadline of the European Council on 18 October.

Labour MP Catherine McKinnell, a spokesperson for the Peoples Vote campaign, said the Salzburg summit has not taken us any nearer to a good deal.

Theresa May might hope that a blindfold Brexit where all the big questions are ignored might get her over the line, but across Europe more and more leaders can see it is no more in their interest than it is for the British people, who will be asked to shoulder all the risk of leaving the EU with no deal in place, she said.

MORE: Brexit deal deadline to be pushed back to November to avoid a catastrophe




Beirut (AFP) - A Russia-Turkey deal for a "demilitarised zone" in Syria's flashpoint region of Idlib buys more time for talks, analysts said Tuesday while warning it does not eliminate the risk of a deadly assault.

Residents of the Idlib region and aid groups breathed a sigh of relief when the two main brokers in northern Syria announced an agreement from the Russian resort of Sochi.

Here are some answers to key questions raised by the deal:

- What is the deal exactly?

A horseshoe-shaped demilitarised zone "along the contact line between the armed opposition and government troops", which roughly follows the boundaries of Idlib province, must be set up by October 15.

It will be controlled and patrolled by Turkish forces and Russian military police.

The deal also provides for the "withdrawal of heavy military equipment, tanks, multiple rocket launchers, cannon and mortars" held by rebels and jihadists there, a Kremlin statement said.

The deal says hardliners should pull out, including those from the dominant Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) group, an alliance led by Al-Qaeda's former Syrian affiliate.

Turkey sponsors some of the Syrian armed groups in Idlib directly but its leverage over the most radical forces there remains to be fully tested.

The agreement stipulates that key highways between the port city of Latakia and the cities of Homs and Aleppo respectively must also be reopened by the end of the year.

The pro-government daily Al-Watan also reported that by the end of 2018 the deal would see "the return of Syrian state institutions".

Analysts however argued too few details of the deal were public to assess its viability.

"I don't think this is the whole deal, I think this is only the beginning, stage one," said Haid Haid, an associate fellow at Chatham House.

The Syrian government had for weeks been massing forces on the edges of Idlib province, the last major rebel and jihadist bastion in the country.

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The foreign ministry in Damascus said Tuesday it welcomed the Sochi deal but Haid was not convinced.

"The regime is definitely not happy with it. The question is how will the regime try to spoil this agreement?"

- Is a bloodbath being averted?

Aid organisations had for weeks warned that a large scale assault against the Idlib region, which is home to around three million people, would be disastrous.

Large numbers of rebels and civilians displaced from other former opposition strongholds retaken by the regime have nowhere else to flee to.

The United Nations said a ground assault could cause the greatest humanitarian catastrophe of the 21st century and spark the worst bloodshed of a conflict that has already killed 360,000 people since 2011.

"The agreement is a temporary solution," said Nawar Oliver, a Syria specialist at the Turkey-based Omran Centre. "Russia was keen to preserve good relations with Turkey."

Turkey has scrambled to avert a fully-fledged onslaught and a fresh influx of Syrian refugees across its border.

Lina al-Khatib, who heads the Chatham House think tank's Middle East programme, cautioned: "The deal does not guarantee that an offensive is no longer on the table further down the line."

The agreement "should be seen as only the beginning of a process, it's not the end game for Idlib," she said.

The known points in the deal made no reference to the issue of humanitarian access.

In its reaction to the Sochi deal, the Syrian government made sure to reaffirm its commitment to "the fight against terrorism until the liberation of all Syria territory."

- Can Turkey live up to it?

Analysts say Turkey has always sought to consolidate its presence in Syrian regions along its border, in a bid to stabilise them and allow for the repatriation of the three million-plus refugees on its soil.

"The implementation of the deal is difficult and fraught with obstacles, especially for Turkey, which will be held responsible for how HTS is handled," said Sam Heller, an analyst with the International Crisis Group.

"HTS is likely to resist a deal that would paralyse it from a geographical point of view and dismantle its defence system," he said.

Oliver also predicted Turkey could find it difficult to implement its own proposal.

"How do you control HTS and how do you fight against other jihadists linked to Al-Qaeda?" he asked, in reference to the extremist Hurras al-Deen group.

Turkey has in recent days dispatched reinforcements to its 12 observation points scattered across Idlib.

According to pro-government Turkish daily Sabah, "a contingent of around 5,0000 soldiers is ready to intervene."

Heller described the deal as "a crucial test for Turkey".

"In spite of those challenges and considering the major damage that a collapse of the truce could cause to Turkish interests, Turkey has no choice," he said.
The L-20PP reconnaissance aircraft of the Russian Air Force was shot down 22 miles off Latakias coast in the eastern Mediterranean as it returned to its base - www.alamy.com

President Bashar al-Assad on Wednesday blamed Israel for the downing of a Russian plane, which was accidentally hit by Syrian anti-aircraft fire during an Israeli missile strike.

His intervention risks provoking fresh tensions a day after Moscow and Israel moved to de-escalate a row that threatened to build into a military confrontation.

"This unfortunate incident was the result of Israeli arrogance and depravity," the Syrian leader said, offering his condolences in a letter to his Russian counterpart for the death of 15 Russian crew members killed in the incident over Syria on Monday.

"We are determined that such tragic events will sway neither you nor us from continuing the fight against terrorism," he continued in the letter published by the official Sana agency.

The Russian plane was shot down by Syria's Russian-made S-200 air defence system and all aboard were killed on Tuesday.

The Russian military has accused Israeli pilots of using the Russian plane as cover, "exposing it to fire from Syrian air defences" while they mounted an air raid.

Israel said it had targeted a Syrian military facility where weapons manufacturing systems were "about to be transferred on behalf of Iran" to Lebanese Shia group Hizbollah.

It was the worst "friendly fire" incident between Moscow and the Syrian regime since Russian forces intervened in the country in late 2015 to support Mr Assad whose grip on power had been weakened by rebels and jihadist fighters.

Vladmir Putin, the Russian president, had struck a conciliatory tone a day earlier describing the incident as the result of "tragic accidental circumstances," but warning Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, against carrying out such operations in the future and promiding to beef up security for Russian forces in Syria.

Mr Netanyahu on Tuesday expressed his "sorrow" to Mr Putin in a phone call, offering to assist Moscow in the investigation.

However he insisted the Russian plane had been felled by "extensive and inaccurate Syrian anti-aircraft (fire)".

In recent months Israel has increased its attacks in Syria against the regime or its ally Iran.
Cody Wilson, the Texas man who gained a national profile for his legal fight over 3D-printed guns, is facing sexual assault charges after he allegedly had sex with an underage girl he met on sugardaddymeet.com, authorities said.

According to an arrest affidavit filed Wednesday, Wilson is charged with sexual assault of a minor. The affidavit said that on Aug. 22, Austin police received a call from a girl under age 17 who said she had sex with Wilson, 30, and was paid $500.

Wilson rose to prominence during his three-year legal battle with the federal government over publishing the blueprints for 3D-printed guns. Wilson, founder of Defense Distributed, sued the government in 2015, alleging that officials were violating his First Amendment right to free speech for blocking him from distributing the plans. In June, the State Department unexpectedly ended its legal battle with Wilson. However, the fight over 3D-printed guns is still ongoing and President Trump weighed in on the issue.

According to legal documents, Wilsons accuser told Child Protection Services that she created an online profile on the website sugardaddymeet.com and exchanged messages with someone with the screen name Sanjuro and began texting. Over text, Sunjuro identified himself as Cody Wilson and said he was a big deal. The girl told authorities she didnt know who Wilson was and read news articles about him to learn more, the affidavit said.

She also told detectives that she exchanged explicit images with Wilson over text message, according to the affidavit. Police were able to match Wilsons Texas drivers license image to his profile photo on sugardaddymeet.com, authorities said.

The girl said she met Wilson in person on Aug. 15 at an Austin coffee shop. According to the affidavit, police reviewed security footage at the coffee shop that showed the two leaving together in Wilsons black Ford Edge, which was registered to his nonprofit, Defense Distributed.

The girl told police the two travelled to a hotel, where they had sex, according to the arrest affidavit. She said Wilson then gave her five $100 bills. Police were able to confirm Wilson and the girl were at the hotel through surveillance footage of the hotels valet surveillance camera, the affidavit said.

Wilson had not been booked into the Travis County jail as of Wednesday morning. A message left with Wilsons lawyer was not immediately returned Wednesday.
Washington (AFP) - A Texas man who has played a central role in the US debate over 3D-printed weapons and caused panic by publishing firearm blueprints online is wanted for having sex with a 16-year-old, police said Wednesday.

Cody Wilson -- who is currently in Taiwan according to the island's authorities -- advocates 3D-printed weapons as a bulwark against gun control, but critics warn they give criminals access to untraceable firearms.

"Detectives with the Austin Police Department Organized Crime Division filed a warrant for sexual assault for a Cody Rutledge Wilson, white male, 30 years of age," Troy Officer, the commander of the division, told journalists.

The crime is a second-degree felony punishable by up to 20 years in prison, he said.

The investigation began after a counselor to whom the victim had spoken notified police "that a juvenile female under the age of 17 had reported having sexual contact with a 30-year-old male."

The victim met Wilson on sugardaddymeet.com, a website that bills itself as the "Best Sugar Daddy Dating Site for Attractive Women and Wealthy Men Seeking Mutually Beneficial Relationships."

Wilson and the 16-year-old had sex at a hotel, and he paid her $500, said Officer.

Detectives "were able to confirm each step of the victim's story with videotape and interviews," he said.

Wilson missed a flight back to the US, and police are "working with national and international law enforcement partners to locate him and bring him to justice," Officer said.

He noted that before leaving the US, Wilson was informed by a friend of the victim that she had spoken to police.

Taiwan's National Immigration Agency said Wilson remains on the island after arriving on September 6, adding authorities have "an initial grasp of the person's whereabouts in Taiwan".

The agency said: "If the US requests judicial assistance, our relevant government agencies will follow up."

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- Thousands of downloads -

Wilson published downloadable gun blueprints on his website after reaching a deal with President Donald Trump's administration in June that ended a multi-year effort by the federal government to block him.

But multiple states filed a joint lawsuit claiming Wilson endangered public safety and a federal judge issued a temporary order prohibiting the distribution of the digital blueprints.

Wilson -- who subscribes to an anarchist philosophy that the free exchange of ideas on the internet is a check on government -- then said he interpreted the ruling as only barring the free online distribution of the blueprints, and began offering the files for sale.

The recommended price per blueprint is $10, but the buyer is ultimately allowed to name the amount of money they want to pay. Many of the blueprints on the site have been downloaded thousands of times.

According to Wilson, the battle over the blueprints has ultimately aided the cause of spreading them.

"This attempt by these authorities to go into court and stifle this information drove more people to the website to download it and spread it deeper into the internet," he told AFP in August.

"No matter how badly I win or lose, you can download a gun from the internet," he said.
 Flash

Chinese Ambassador to Lebanon Wang Kejian presented to Lebanese caretaker Culture Minister Ghattas Khoury Wednesday the design plans for a new conservatory in Lebanon, a statement issued by Khoury's office said.

The conservatory, funded by China, will be worth of 31.9 million U.S. dollars. It will cover 25,000 square meters in the northern Beirut suburb of Dbayeh.

The project is considered a musical city and a cultural monument for Lebanon with teaching rooms, a library, lecture and auditorium halls.

It will also house a music show room with the most advanced logistical and technology equipment, which can host up to 1,200 people.

Following his meeting with the Chinese Ambassador, Khoury praised the special relations and high level cooperation in culture and other areas between the two countries.

"We thank the Chinese government for its interest in funding this great cultural and artistic landmark," he said while expressing his admiration for the designs which he described as "special."

On January 9 this year, China and Lebanon signed a memorandum to build the conservatory named National Higher Institute of Music.

According to the statement issued by Khoury's office, the project will contribute to development and construction process in Lebanon.

Additionally, it will help to attract students from Lebanon as well as neighboring countries to university studies in music.

"It will also attract more internationally renowned musicians and artists to play their shows in this center, which will make Lebanon a cultural and artistic hub for communication under the framework of the Belt and Road Initiative," the statement added.




Gaza City (Palestinian Territories) (AFP) - Thousands of employees of the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees protested in Gaza on Wednesday against forced redundancies as a result of US funding cuts, announcing a one-day strike next week.

More than 5,000 people attended the march that began at the Gaza headquarters of UNRWA, including senior figures from the enclave's Islamist rulers Hamas and other political factions.

The agency announced it would cut more than 250 jobs in Gaza and the West Bank and make over 500 other positions part-time, as it seeks to survive crippling financial shortfalls caused by US aid cuts.

Washington has provided more than $350 million a year for the agency, but US President Donald Trump pulled all funding earlier this year.

More than five million Palestinians are eligible for UNRWA support, while around three million access its services.

The job cuts have sparked fierce protests, with UNRWA's head in Gaza accusing the agency's labour union in the enclave of "mutiny".

During Wednesday's demonstration union representative Amir al-Mashal announced "a full strike in all UNRWA agencies on Monday, as a first step of protests."

He called on Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas to intervene.

Around 80 percent of Palestinians in the impoverished Gaza Strip are eligible for UNRWA aid, while the agency employs around 13,000 people there.

Unemployment is high in the enclave and employees say their families will be at risk if they are laid off from the agency.

The United Nations warned last week that the situation in Gaza is "catastrophic" after 11 years under a crippling Israeli blockade, during which Hamas and Israel have fought three wars.
Tiffany Haddish never misses an opportunity to make a statement with her red-carpet fashion (#tbt to the time she wore the same $4,000 Alexander McQueen dress to three different events, and her look at the 2018 Emmys is no exception.

The actress/comedian walked the red carpet in a multicolored gown by designer Prabal Gurung that she says was inspired by the Eritrean flag, where her late father was from. "It's custom actually," she said of the floor-length, rainbow-striped gown. "I asked them to make a dress that represents my father's land."

Tiffany-Haddish-70th-Primetime-Emmy-Awards-Dress Getty Images

This isn't the first time Haddish has drawn outfit inspiration from her father's home country. At the 2018 Oscars, she wore a traditional Eritrean gown as a way of honoring him after he passed away. "My father is from Eritrea, and he passed away last year," she said on the red carpet that night. "He said one day I would end up here, and if I ever end up at the Oscars, to honor my people. So I'm honoring my fellow Eritreans."

Tiffany-Haddish-70th-Emmy-Awards Getty Images

While on the Emmys red carpet, Haddish also discussed why she decided to become an actor and comedian. "I realized that I like to do a lot of different things," she said. "And I could just do one thing, acting, and then I could get paid for all of those different things because like I love beef jerky, I love dancing, I love horses, like I wanted to be ... a rancher you know... I figured I could get that part in a movie and do it that way."

Tiffany-haddish-emmys-2018-prabal-gurung-dress Getty Images

This is Haddish's first time attending the Emmys, where she's nominated for the award for Outstanding Guest Actress in a Comedy Series for her turn on SNL, and if she wins, that trophy's not going on some shelf. Instead, she said she's "putting it in the bed next to me so I feel like somebody's sleeping with me," Haddish joked. "I'm busy I don't sleep with nobody." Oh, Tiffany.

Get more beauty news from the 2018 Emmy Awards, below:

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Exclusive: Issa Rae's Makeup Artist Joanna Simkin Shares the Details of the Insecure Star's Emmys Makeup Look The Most Exciting Hair and Makeup Looks on the 2018 Emmy Awards Red Carpet

Go behind-the-scenes of our photo shoot with Rihanna for the cover of our October 2018 Best of Beauty Issue:
The Trump administration is reportedly continuing US support for the Saudi-led military operation in Yemen that has killed thousands of civilians, in order to safeguard American arms sales to Gulf allies.

Since 2015, the US and UK have been supporting the Saudi-led bombing operations against Houthi rebels in Yemen that Riyadh say are necessary to support what it considers the legitimate government in Yemen and to try and counter alleged Iranian support for the rebels. The United Nations has said the operation has killed at least 16,700 civilians and created one of the worlds largest humanitarian crisis.

Mike Pompeo, the secretary of state, is said to have recently decided to continue Americas increasingly controversial involvement, after being told if it stopped it could threaten $2bn of sales of US-manufactured weapons to Washingtons allies in the Gulf.

Among the deals at stake are the proposed sale of 120,000 precision-guided munitions (PGMs) to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) by Raytheon, which has its headquarters in Waltham, Massachusetts, and is Americas largest manufacturer of such weapons.

The Wall Street Journal report, based on a leaked classified email and sources familiar with the deal, said Mr Pompeo overruled concerns from most of the state department specialists involved in the debate who were worried about the rising civilian death toll in Yemen. It said Mr Pompeo, a former Director of CIA, decided to side with his legislative affairs team that warned of the potential threat to the proposed arms sales.

Among those groups he reportedly sided against were his departments Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs, the Bureau of Political-Military Affairs, the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labour, and the Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration. The US Agency for International Development (USAID) said Washington should halt military aid as continuing it would not help the approach of Saudi Arabia and the UAE civilian casualties or human protections.

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While the UK and US do not participate in bombing runs on Yemen, the US provides refuelling for the planes that do, intelligence and other logistical equipment.

The UK is also providing logistical and intelligence support and British prime minister Theresa May has ignored demands to block the sale of UK-manufactured munitions being used in the operation, amid mounting concerns about civilian casualties. In August, at least 43 people were killed in northern Yemen after a coalition air strike struck a school bus in the Houthi controlled area of Dahyan.

Activists said the latest revelations underscored the need for the US and UK to halt their support for the coalition, which also includes Bahrain, Kuwait and Jordan.

Andrew Smith of the London-based Campaign Against Arms Trade, told The Independent the US accounted for one third of all global arms sales, with almost half going to the Middle East. The largest individual buyer of US arms was Saudi Arabia. Meanwhile, since 2015, the UK government had licensed 4.7bn ($6.2bn) worth of arms to Saudi forces. These include aircraft, helicopters, drones, grenades and missiles.

The Saudi regime has one of the worst human rights records in the world and has waged a terrible war on Yemen. Arms companies have been allowed to rake in billions of dollars, while one of the worlds worst humanitarian catastrophes has been inflicted, he said. The war and destruction would not have been possible without the complicity and support of arms dealing governments like those in the US and the UK.

(Getty)

He added: If Donald Trump, Theresa May and their allies care about the rights and lives of people in Yemen then they must stop the arms sales and end their sycophantic support for the Saudi dictatorship.

Mark Curtis, the historian and author of Secret Affairs: Britains Collusion with Radical Islam, said: This sorry tale tells me that US officials, like their counterparts in the UK, are perfectly aware of the impact that their arms exports policies are having on civilians.

He added: Tragically, however, political leaders care much more about preserving alliances, and currying favour with foreign elites, than they do actual people. To the US administration, Yemenis are unpeople.

A spokesperson for the State Department said it would not comment on the deliberative process or allegedly leaked documents. The spokesperson, who asked not to be identified, said Mr Pompeo had certified that Saudi Arabia and the UAE were supporting diplomatic efforts to end the civil war, taking measures to alleviate the humanitarian crisis, and undertaking actions to reduce the risk of harm to civilians and civilian infrastructure.

While our Saudi and Emirati partners are making progress on these fronts, we are continuing discussions with them on additional steps they can take to address the humanitarian situation, advance the political track in cooperation with the UN Special Envoys efforts, and ensure that their military campaign complies with the law of armed conflict and international humanitarian law, the spokesperson added.

Asked what the US was doing to reduce civilian casualties, the spokesperson said: Throughout this conflict, the United States has urged all parties to abide by the Law of Armed Conflict, work to prevent harm to civilians and civilian infrastructure, and thoroughly investigate and ensure accountability for any violations.

Raytheon, which according to lobbying watchdog OpenSecrets.org, spent at least $3.3m in 2016 in contributions to the campaigns of politicians from both parties, did not respond to enquiries.

The USs involvement in the military operation has become increasingly controversial on Capitol Hill. Under a measure recently introduced by congress, the US must end its refuelling of coalition planes unless the state department certifies every six months Saudi Arabia and the UAE are doing what they can to reduce civilian harm. The US can continue to do so, if the state department believes it is warranted on national security grounds.

The journal said most of the departments specialists urged Mr Pompeo to reject certification due to a lack of progress on mitigating civilian casualties. As it was, he went ahead with the certification. His memo to Gulf allies read: Recent civilian casualty incidents indicate insufficient implementation of reforms and targeting practices. Investigations have not yielded accountability measures.

Earlier this year, a Democratic senator held up Raytheons proposed sale of 120,000 PGMs after saying the administration had not satisfied his concerns about what those countries were doing to reduce civilian deaths.

In a letter to Mr Pompeo and secretary of defence Jim Mattis, Bob Menendez, the senior Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee, wrote: I remind you that the American public has a right to insist that the sales of US weapons to foreign governments  especially those of this magnitude and lethality  are consistent with US values and national security objectives.
President Donald Trump denounced the FBI once again in an interview on Wednesday, describing the bureaus probe into Russian ties to the Trump campaign as a cancer in our country.

I hope to be able to put this up as one of my crowning achievements that I was able to... expose something that is truly a cancer in our country, Trump told The Hill when asked what he thought the outcome of his feud with the FBI would be.

President Donald Trump speaks to the press before boarding Marine One on the South Lawn of the White House on Wednesday. (Photo: BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI via Getty Images)

The Hills Josh Solomon and Buck Sexton interviewed Trump in the Oval Office, and the president was typically bellicose. He eviscerated Attorney General Jeff Sessions, saying I dont have an attorney general, and spoke about the FBIs investigation into his campaigns potential collusion with Russia.

Jeff Sessions, who is still the attorney general. (Photo: NICHOLAS KAMM via Getty Images)

On ordering the declassification of documents pertaining to former campaign staffer Carter Page, among other things tied to the Russia probe, earlier this week, Trump said: I hope to be able to call this, along with tax cuts and regulation and all the things Ive done... in its own way this might be the most important thing because this was corrupt.

The president told The Hill he hadnt read the documents he ordered declassified, but that he expected them to prove the Russia probe is a political hoax.

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BILLINGS, Mont. (AP)  The Trump administration on Tuesday rolled back an Obama-era rule that forced energy companies to capture methane  a key contributor to climate change that's released in huge amounts during drilling on U.S. and tribal lands.

A replacement rule from the Interior Department rescinds mandates for companies to reduce gas pollution, which Trump administration officials say already is required by some states.

Within hours of the announcement, attorneys general for California and New Mexico filed a lawsuit in federal court seeking to reinstate the 2016 rule.

"We've sued the administration before over the illegal delay and suspension of this rule and will continue doing everything in our power to hold them accountable to our people and planet," California Attorney General Xavier Becerra said.

The change by Trump could save companies as much as $2 billion in compliance costs over the next decade. It comes a week after the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency proposed weakening a separate methane emissions rule affecting private land and some public lands.

"We're for clean air and water, but at the same time, we're for reasonable regulations," Deputy Interior Secretary David Bernhardt told reporters.

Methane is a component of natural gas that's frequently wasted through leaks or intentional releases during drilling operations. The gas is considered a more potent contributor to climate change than carbon dioxide, although it occurs in smaller volumes.

Bernhardt and other Interior officials were unable to immediately say how much the new rule would affect methane emissions. But a U.S. Bureau of Land Management analysis provided to The Associated Press said all the reductions projected to occur under the original 2016 rule were lost with Tuesday's change.

The prior regulation would have cut methane emissions by as much as 180,000 tons a year. Emissions of potentially hazardous pollutants known as volatile organic compounds, which can cause health problems if inhaled, would have been reduced by up to 80,000 tons a year.

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The change could also result in the loss of $734 million in natural gas that would have been recovered over the next decade under the old rule. Those savings would have offset some of the industry's compliance costs.

Democratic U.S. Sen. Tom Udall of New Mexico criticized the rollback as a "giveaway to irresponsible polluters."

An estimated $330 million a year in methane is wasted on federal lands, enough to power about 5 million homes.

Kathleen Sgamma, president of Western Energy Alliance, said the old rule improperly put the Bureau of Land Management in the role of regulating air quality, which she said should instead be done by the EPA or state agencies.

The Obama rule has been tied up in the courts since its adoption. It was put on hold in April by a federal judge in Wyoming.

Energy companies said it was overly intrusive and that they already have an economic incentive to capture methane so they can sell it. However, that's not always practical in fast-growing oil and gas fields, where large volumes of gas are burned off using flares.

Flaring has been a common practice in Montana, Wyoming, North Dakota, New Mexico and other states.

___

Follow Matthew Brown on Twitter at @matthewbrownap
* Flooding expected to worsen in coming days

* At least 36 people killed, mostly in North Carolina

* More than 200,000 still without power (Adds Trump's remarks in South Carolina, changes dateline)

By Jeff Mason

CONWAY, S.C., Sept 19 (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump warned South Carolina on Wednesday "water is coming your way" from more floods as the death toll from Hurricane Florence rose to at least 36 after a sheriff's van was swept away killing two women.

"Over the next couple of days, it's going to get rough in South Carolina... Whatever you need from Washington, we are there," Trump told an official briefing in Conway, South Carolina.

"Now it looks nice, but it's really the calm before the storm," he said referring to water draining into rising rivers after Florence's epic deluge over the weekend.

Trump visited a neighborhood in Conway where residents were loading moving vans in anticipation of more flooding.

Florence has killed at least 36 people, including 27 in North Carolina, eight in South Carolina and one in Virginia. Two of the South Carolina victims were mental health patients who drowned on Tuesday when a van carrying them was swept away by floodwater.

More than 15,000 people remain in shelters and more than 200,000 customers are without power across North Carolina because of Florence, according to state officials.

Although the storm is long gone, river flooding still poses a danger. The Cape Fear River was expected to crest at 61.5 feet (19 meters), four times its normal height, on Wednesday in Fayetteville, North Carolina, a city of 200,000 near the Fort Bragg Army base in the southern part of the state, according to the National Weather Service. Floodwaters have disrupted efforts to restore power, clear roads and allow evacuated residents to go home.

Wilmington, just down the coast, remains almost completely cut off by flooding from the Cape Fear River and earlier storm surges from Florence.

ENVIRONMENTAL TOLL

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At least 16 rivers remained at a major flood stage, with three others set to crest in the coming days in North Carolina, the state said.

The toll of environmental damage was also mounting as human and animal waste gets swept up in the roiling floodwaters.

North Carolina is one of the leading U.S. hog-producing states and the floodwaters have caused 21 hog "lagoons," which store waste from pig farms, to overflow, creating a risk of standing water contaminated with bacteria like salmonella, according to the state's Department of Environmental Quality.

Trump promised North and South Carolina would have strong federal support. "We're going to be there 100 percent," Trump told officials at a briefing shortly after arriving at the Marine Corps Air Station Cherry Point in Havelock, North Carolina.

Trump, who has been criticized for his handling of Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico last year, also thanked first responders for their work since Florence made landfall on Friday.

He was accompanied by Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, Federal Emergency Management Agency chief Brock Long, Senators Richard Burr and Thom Tillis of North Carolina and Senators Lindsey Graham and Tim Scott of South Carolina.

Trump visited a church in New Bern, a town of 30,000 located at the confluence of the Neuse and Trent rivers that was hit especially hard by flooding, and joined volunteers in passing out boxed meals to locals in a drive-through line. He also walked through a neighborhood lined with discarded wet furniture, hugging residents and posing for pictures.

Thousands of rescues have taken place in the Carolinas. Fire and rescue crews were waiting to go into many areas to assist with structural damage resulting from Florence, which dumped up to 36 inches (91 cm) of rain in parts of North Carolina.

(Reporting by Jeff Mason and Ernest Scheyder; Additional reporting by Roberta Rampton in Washington, Bernie Woodall in Miami; Brendan O'Brien in Milwaukee; Jessica Resnick-Ault and Barbara Goldberg in New York; and Anna Mehler Paperny in North Carolina Writing by Bill Trott Editing by Bill Tarrant and Lisa Shumaker)
Fox News host Tucker Carlson on Wednesday blamed Democrats for death threats against Christine Blasey Ford after she came forward to accuse Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of sexual assault when they were in high school.

Blasey told The Washington Post she publicly told her story because Now I feel like my civic responsibility is outweighing my anguish and terror about retaliation.

But Carlson, on Tucker Carlson Tonight, saw it differently:

She had asked to remain anonymous. Democrats betrayed her and they dragged her into the public eye. Now Ford says she has had to leave her home because of threats. Democrats in the Senate did that purely for partisan advantage. And you should keep that in mind the next time they lecture you about how much they care about women.

Blaseys lawyers said death threats and vicious harassment have forced the California professor and her family to move from their residence.

Kavanaugh denies Blaseys story that he held her down, groped her and tried to undress her when they were teenagers.

Blasey said shes willing to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee, which is poised to vote on Kavanaughs nomination, but wants the FBI to investigate her story first. Judiciary Chairman Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) rejected the demand for an investigation and said he wants Blasey to testify on Monday.

H/T Media Matters

Related...

Trump Feels 'Terribly' For Brett Kavanaugh. What About Christine Blasey Ford?

Woman Claims She Heard About Christine Blasey Ford Allegation In 1980s

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Kim Jong Un and Moon Jae-in visited the spiritual birthplace of the Korean nation Thursday for a show of unity after their North-South summit gave new momentum to Pyongyang's negotiations with Washington.

The North Korean leader on Wednesday agreed to shutter the Tongchang-ri missile-testing site in the presence of international observers, a move the US welcomed by saying it was ready for immediate talks aimed at denuclearising the North.

Pyongyang also said it could dismantle its best-known nuclear facility at Yongbyon, if the US takes "corresponding measures", as Kim and the South Korean president held their third summit this year.

It is an important caveat -- Moon told reporters on his return to Seoul that the US would need to "end hostile relations with North Korea and provide security guarantees for the North Korean regime".

But the declaration appeared to break the North's logjam with Washington.

President Donald Trump welcomed the move, tweeting that Kim had "agreed to allow Nuclear inspections, subject to final negotiations", adding: "Very exciting!"

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo also praised the "important commitments", saying he invited his North Korean counterpart to talk next week on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly, and representatives of both sides to meet "at the earliest opportunity" in Vienna -- home of the International Atomic Energy Agency.

Washington was ready to "engage immediately in negotiations" to achieve the North's denuclearisation by January 2021, Pompeo added -- the end of Trump's first term.

Kim was hoping for a second summit with Trump "at an early date", Moon said in Seoul after concluding his three-day trip, adding he would take the US president a message from Kim when he meets him himself next week.

- 'Appease Trump' -

The nuclear discussions had stalled after the first historic summit between Trump and Kim in Singapore in June, when Kim declared his backing for denuclearisation of the peninsula but no details were agreed.

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Washington and Pyongyang have subsequently sparred over what that means and how it will be achieved, with the Trump administration consistently referring to the denuclearisation of North Korea specifically.

For its part, Pyongyang -- which wants a formal declaration the 1950-53 Korean War is over -- has condemned demands for its unilateral disarmament as "gangster-like".

Experts remain sceptical, pointing out that closing Tongchang-ri, also known as Sohae, would have no impact on the North's ability to manufacture rockets.

Pyongyang has used several other locations for missile launches and has repeatedly said it has no need for further testing.

Many also believe the North has other covert nuclear facilities.

"The North Koreans are offering gestures that mimic disarmament," arms control expert Jeffrey Lewis tweeted. "They don't meaningfully constrain North Korea's nuclear programme."

Their main purpose, he added, was "to appease Trump, so that Moon and Kim can keep their engagement alive".

- Peak diplomacy -

At their Pyongyang summit, Moon and Kim agreed that the North Korean leader will visit Seoul "at an early date".

It would be the first such trip by a North Korean leader since the Korean War ended in an armistice, leaving the peninsula divided and technically still in a state of war, and Moon said the historic journey could happen later this year.

The two leaders also agreed to open a permanent facility for family reunions, work towards joining up road and rail links, and bid jointly for the 2032 Olympics.

At a performance of the North's spectacular "Mass Games" propaganda display, Moon made an unprecedented address by a South Korean leader to a Northern crowd, telling them that Koreans had lived together for 5,000 years.

"I propose we move forward toward the big picture of peace in which the past 70-year-long hostility can be eradicated and we can become one again," he said, prompting rapturous applause.

On Thursday, Moon and Kim, accompanied by their wives, visited Mount Paektu on the Chinese border.

The 2,744-metre (9,003-foot) peak is considered sacred by all Koreans as the birthplace of Dangun, the legendary founder of the first Korean kingdom.

According to Pyongyang's narrative, it is also where Kim Jong Un's father Kim Jong Il was born, at a secret camp where his own father Kim Il Sung, the North's founder, was fighting Korea's Japanese colonial occupiers.

But overseas historians say Kim Jong Il was born in the Soviet Union, where his father was in exile.

South Korean tourists flock to see the mountain via China but only a handful of Southerners have been granted access from the North Korean side, mostly for research purposes.

Kim and Moon raised their clasped hands aloft on the crater rim and the South Korean president expressed hopes many of his countrymen would follow in his footsteps.
By Lesley Wroughton and Hyonhee Shin WASHINGTON/SEOUL (Reuters) - The United States said it was ready to resume talks with North Korea after Pyongyang pledged on Wednesday to dismantle its key missile facilities and suggested it would close its main Yongbyon nuclear complex if Washington took unspecified actions. U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said he had invited North Korea's foreign minister to meet in New York next week, with the aim of completing its denuclearization by January 2021, after a Pyongyang summit between the leaders of the two Koreas. The United States appeared eager to seize on commitments by North Korean leader Kim Jong Un at his talks with South Korean President Moon Jae-in even as critics said the steps did little to put Pyongyang on a course for irreversible denuclearization. North Korea will allow experts from "concerned countries" to watch the closure of its missile engine testing site and launch pad at Tongchang-ri, Moon said at a joint news conference with Kim after their meeting in the North Korean capital. North Korea will also take additional steps such as closing its main Yongbyon nuclear complex if the United States undertook unspecified reciprocal measures, Moon added. The sudden revival of diplomacy followed weeks of doubts in U.S. President Donald Trump's administration's about whether North Korea was willing to negotiate in good faith after a June summit between Trump and Kim yielded few tangible results. The January 2021 completion date was the most specific deadline set in what is expected to be a long process of trying to get the North to end its nuclear program, which may threaten U.S. allies South Korea and Japan as well as the U.S. homeland. In addition to inviting North Korean Foreign Minister Ri Yong Ho to meet when both are in New York next week for the annual U.N. General Assembly gathering of world leaders, Pompeo said Washington invited Pyongyang's representatives to meet the U.S. special representative for North Korea, Stephen Biegun, in Vienna at the "earliest opportunity." China, North Korea's most important economic backer and diplomatic ally, said it warmly welcomed the agreement reached in Pyongyang and strongly supported it. "We absolutely cannot let this hard to come by opportunity for peace slip away once again," the Chinese government's top diplomat, State Councillor Wang Yi, said in a statement. SKEPTICISM Some U.S. officials were deeply skeptical. Speaking before Pompeo's announcement, two senior U.S. officials involved in U.S.-North Korea policy voiced fears Kim was trying to drive a wedge between Washington and Seoul. At the summit, the two Koreas agreed on plans to resume economic cooperation, including working to reconnect rail and road links. They agreed as well to restart a joint factory park in a border city of Kaesong and tours to the North's Mount Kumgang resort, when conditions are met. U.S. officials suggested Kim was trying to ease the economic pressure on him to curb his nuclear programs and to undercut the rationale for U.S. troops being based in South Korea by improving relations with Seoul. The United States has some 28,500 U.S. troops in South Korea to deter North Korean attack. Pyongyang has long sought their withdrawal and Trump has questioned their rationale and cost. "There is nothing the North has offered so far that would constitute irreversible movement toward denuclearization, however you define that, by January 2021 or any other time, or even a reduction of the military threat it poses to the South and the region," said a U.S. intelligence official. "Everything that's out there now is conditional on U.S. actions that would reduce the pressure on the North to cooperate or (is) filled with loopholes and exit ramps," added the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. U.S. officials said the ambiguity about what Washington was supposed to do for the North to close its nuclear complex at Yongbyon gave Kim room to argue that Washington had not done enough for North Korea to follow through on its pledges. TRUMP: 'HE'S CALM, I'M CALM' Even if North Korea were to shut down Yongbyon, officials and experts believe it has other secret nuclear facilities. South Korea's national security adviser, Chung Eui-yong, said the reciprocal U.S. steps could include an end-of-war declaration. South Korea and the United States remain technically at war with North Korea because the 1950-53 Korean War ended in an armistice and not a peace treaty. Though Wednesday's inter-Korean agreement failed to stipulate the North's commitment to declare nuclear and missile facilities for inspection and eventual decommissioning, Seoul has been in talks with both Pyongyang and Washington over the issue, a senior South Korean official said. "What North Korea really wants and their priorities may be different from ours," the official told reporters on Thursday on condition of anonymity. "We're talking about a package that would carry many elements, including the declaration of the facilities, Yongbyon and Tongchang-ri, which are of U.S. interest, and from the North side, the issues of normalizing relations, ending the war and easing sanctions." Despite the doubts of U.S. officials and outside analysts, North Korea's pledge at the summit with the South Korean president drew an enthusiastic response from Trump. Speaking before Pompeo's comments, Trump welcomed Kim's pledges, calling them part of "tremendous progress" with Pyongyang on a number of fronts, and hailing "very good news" from the summit between the Koreas. "He's calm, I'm calm - so we'll see what happens," Trump, who last year threatened to destroy North Korea, told reporters. 'THEATRICAL PROMISES' Kim pledged to work toward the "complete denuclearization of the Korean peninsula" during two meetings with Moon earlier this year and at his summit with Trump. But discussions over how to implement the vague commitments have since faltered and North Korea has consistently refused to give up its nuclear arsenal unilaterally. Washington has demanded concrete action, such as a full disclosure of North Korea's nuclear and missile facilities, before agreeing to Pyongyang's key goals, including an easing of international sanctions and an official end to the Korean War. While North Korea has stopped nuclear and missile tests in the past year, it did not allow international inspections of its dismantling of its Punggye-ri nuclear test site in May, drawing criticism that its action was for show and could be reversed. The day after the June 12 Trump-Kim summit, Pompeo said he hoped to achieve "major disarmament" by North Korea by the end of Trumps first term in January 2021. His latest statement that the process "should be completed by January 2021" may be a signal Washington will not wait forever. "The statement clearly implies that inter-Korean summits and theatrical promises to dismantle the odd facility simply cant substitute for a negotiating process on the nuclear issue," said the Asia Society Policy Institute's Daniel Russel. "Invoking the end of Trumps term in January 2021 is another way of saying to the North that American patience is not unlimited and that Kim Jong Un wont be able to sidestep denuclearization indefinitely," Russel added. (Reporting by Lesley Wroughton in Washington and Hyonhee Shin in Seoul; Additional reporting by Joyce Lee, Soyoung Kim and Joint Press Corps, Jeongmin Kim, Haejin Choi and Ju-min Park in Seoul, Ben Blanchard and Zhang Min in Beijing, and Roberta Rampton, David Brunnstrom and John Walcott in Washington; Writing by Yara Bayoumy and Arshad Mohammed; Editing by David Gregorio, Peter Cooney and Lincoln Feast.)
Kampala (AFP) - Ugandan pop star turned opposition MP Robert Kyagulanyi returned from medical treatment abroad on Thursday to be met by police who forcibly escorted him to his home in the capital Kampala.

Since entering parliament last year, Kyagulanyi, 36, and better known as pop star Bobi Wine, has emerged as a leading critic of President Yoweri Museveni, a 74-year-old former rebel leader in charge since 1986.

Kyagulanyi has become an opposition firebrand, commanding widespread support among Uganda's youthful, urban population, earning him the government's ire.

He faces treason charges, alongside more than 30 others, after Museveni's motorcade was stoned by opposition supporters during a by-election in the northwestern town of Arua last month.

Kyagulanyi claims he was beaten and tortured in custody after being arrested, and sought medical care in the US.

His rough treatment at the hands of the government sparked street protests and on Thursday security forces took no chances.

Riot police and soldiers were deployed in the city, and access to the airport at Entebbe, 40 kilometres (25 miles) away, was tightly controlled with checkpoints and road closures.

In the past, Museveni's returning opponents have been greeted by large crowds that turned into an slow hours-long procession towards the capital marked by clashes between police and supporters.

Upon arrival, Kyagulanyi was separated from other passengers and bundled into a police vehicle without explanation.

His wife, Barbie, told AFP "security surrounded him and took him away".

- A new challenge -

Kyagulanyi's international lawyer, Robert Amsterdam, condemned his client's "illegal detention" which he said was "based on the fear of the power of the people".

But Uganda's police chief, Martin Okoth Ochola, said officers were merely providing a safe escort service.

"What we have done is to escort him from Entebbe airport to his home," Ochola said.

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Police had earlier banned "unlawful rallies, processions and assemblies".

But outside his house, officers watched as Kyagulanyi stood on the roof of a car to address a crowd which had gathered to welcome him.

"It's great to finally be home," he said to cheers.

"So many police officers grabbed me from the plane, they searched me took away my passport and all the documents," he said, but did not allege any mistreatment this time.

Speaking to AFP afterwards, Kyagulanyi was unbowed.

"To the youths and underprivileged of Uganda, this is your struggle and I am ready to take the leadership role," he said.

"Uganda is ready for change and this is not the time to let down that call."

Nicknamed "His Excellency the Ghetto President" during his pop star days, when he blended lyrics on social justice and poverty with catchy Afrobeat rhythms, Kyagulanyi is rare among a political class dominated by older Ugandans.

His relative youth and broad popularity represent a new challenge to Museveni's long rule.

In power for more than three decades, Museveni is the only president most citizens have ever known, in a country where the median age is less than 16.

He has had the constitution amended twice, to remove term and then age limits, clearing him to run for a sixth term in 2021.
Naypyidaw (Myanmar) (AFP) - British foreign minister Jeremy Hunt on Thursday called for justice on the Rohingya crisis after his visit to Myanmar's Rakhine state, telling embattled leader Aung San Suu Kyi the world "won't let it rest".

Hunt's rallying cry for accountability comes at the end of a busy two-day visit during which he visited Rakhine -- the epicentre of a brutal military campaign that drove out more than 700,000 Rohingya Muslims -- and met with Suu Kyi.

"Burma needs to know the international community won't let it rest," said Hunt using Myanmar's former name.

Myanmar has set up an "independent" commission to address the army's crackdown against the Rohingya, rejecting the UN probe and calls for the International Criminal Court to investigate.

"If we don't see that process happening, we will use all the tools at our disposal to make sure there is justice... the world is watching," Hunt said after the meeting, which he said was "lively" and "frank".

The British foreign minister's visit came the same week UN investigators released a damning and meticulous report detailing why six Myanmar generals should be prosecuted for genocide against the Rohingya Muslim minority.

The Rohingya fled to neighbouring Bangladesh, where they joined about 300,000 already in cramped refugee camps, carrying accounts of extrajudicial killings, extreme sexual violence and arson.

The evidence warrants the charges of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes, UN investigators said.

Hunt also brought up with Suu Kyi his "concerns" on the jailing of two Reuters journalists, Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo, who were sentenced earlier this month to seven years each under the state secrets act.

The pair had uncovered the extrajudicial killings of 10 Rohingya men in the Rakhine village of Inn Din -- something the army has since acknowledged.

Suu Kyi, who endured a total of 15 years of house arrest under the previous junta-led regime, said last week Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo's sentencing upheld the rule of law.

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"She said she would look into it," Hunt said Thursday.

- Tightly-managed tour -

Before the meeting, the foreign minister was led on a three-hour, tightly-managed tour of Rakhine via helicopter, which included the Taung Pyo Letwe returnee reception centre, opened to receive the refugees even though virtually no Rohingya have come back.

Bangladesh and Myanmar signed an agreement last year to repatriate the Muslim minority but it has stalled as they fear returning to Rakhine without their safety and rights guaranteed.

In each of the three other locations Hunt was shepherded to, he found a pre-selected group of locals waiting to speak to him. At Pan Taw Pyin village, the final stop, he walked off to try to speak with nearby residents about their experiences despite the heavy security presence.

The military has consistently denied nearly all wrongdoing, insisting that its campaign was justified to root out militants, and Myanmar's ambassador to the UN on Tuesday slammed the UN probe as "one-sided" and "flawed".

Suu Kyi, a former pro-democracy icon, has seen a sharp fall from grace internationally due to her failure to address the Rohingya crisis.

Her supporters say her hands are tied by a still powerful military, which controls a quarter of parliament's seats and three ministries.

UN investigators say her government's "acts and omissions" contributed to the "atrocity crimes" in the crisis.

Hunt will head to New York next week for the UN General Assembly, where he will chair a foreign ministers' meeting Monday on Myanmar.

Suu Kyi will not be travelling to New York for the UN top meeting.
Washington (AFP) - President Donald Trump on Wednesday said US relations with North Korea are making "tremendous progress" from the days before his presidency when the two countries appeared close to "going to war."

Trump said a recent letter from North Korean leader Kim Jong Un confirmed the positive track, which he said has seen the hardline communist country promise to halt its nuclear missile test program and mount a combined bid with South Korea for the 2032 Olympic Games.

"We're making tremendous progress with respect to North Korea. Prior to becoming president, it looked like we were going to war with North Korea and now we have a lot of progress," Trump told journalists at the White House.

"A lot of tremendous things but very importantly no missile testing, no nuclear testing."

"The relationships, I have to tell you, at least on a personal basis, are very good. It is very much calmed down," Trump said.

An unprecedented June summit in Singapore between Trump and Kim aimed to break a decades-long standoff between the two countries, which have never formally ended the 1950-1953 Korean War.

However, critics accused Trump of naively playing into the North Korean's hands by giving him credibility with little concrete in return.
WASHINGTON (AP)  A Chinese military agency and its director are facing U.S. sanctions over the purchase of Russian weapons, the State Department announced Thursday.

China's Equipment Development Department and director Li Shangfu made a "significant transaction" involving the purchase of Russian combat aircraft and surface-to-air missiles, State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert said in a written statement.

The purchase violated a 2017 law intended to punish the government of President Vladimir Putin for interfering in U.S. elections and other activities. Anyone engaging with Russian defense contractors or people associated with them can face economic sanctions that include prohibitions from entering the U.S. or from conducting transactions with the U.S. financial system under the Countering America's Adversaries Through Sanctions Act.

As part of Thursday's announcement, the U.S. also added 33 names to a list of people who could trigger sanctions for their ties to the Russian military. Some of those newly added were indicted in connection with special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into Russian election interference, according to administration officials who briefed reporters on the decision on condition that they are not identified by name.

The sanctions were enacted "to further impose costs on the Russian government in response to its malign activities," Nauert said in the statement. The U.S. will continue to "urge all countries to curtail relationships with Russia's defense and intelligence sectors, both of which are linked to malign activities worldwide," she added.

The legislation triggering the sanctions was overwhelmingly passed by Congress in 2017 and signed into law by President Donald Trump to punish Russia for interfering in the 2016 presidential election and for actions intended to subvert democracy in Europe.

The sanctions imposed Thursday include a visa ban for Li and restrict both Li and the Chinese agency, a component of the country's Central Military Commission, from engaging in transactions with the U.S. financial system as well as blocking their access to property and interests within U.S. jurisdiction.
Washington (AFP) - The United States expanded its sanctions war against Russia to China on Thursday, announcing punitive measures against a Chinese military organization for buying Russian fighter jets and missiles.

Stepping up pressure on Moscow over its "malign activities," the US State Department said it was placing financial sanctions on the Equipment Development Department of the Chinese Ministry of Defense, and its top administrator, for its recent purchase of Russian Sukhoi Su-35 fighter jets and S-400 surface-to-air missiles.

Officials said it was the first time a third country has been punished under the CAATSA sanctions legislation for dealing with Russia, and signaled the Trump administration's will to risk relations with other countries in its campaign against Moscow.

They also said that the US could consider similar action against other countries taking delivery of Russian fighter jets and missiles. US ally Turkey is currently talking with Moscow about an S400 deal.

"The ultimate target of these sanctions is Russia," a senior administration official told journalists, insisting on anonymity.

"CAATSA sanctions in this context are not intended to undermine the defense capabilities of any particular country. They are aimed at imposing costs on Russia in response to its malign activities."

CAATSA, or the Countering America's Adversaries Through Sanctions Act, was passed in 2017 as a tool that gives the Trump administration more ways to target Russia, Iran and North Korea with economic and political sanctions.

With regard to Russia, CAATSA arises from the country's "aggression in Ukraine, annexation of Crimea, cyber intrusions and attacks, interference in the 2016 elections, and other malign activities," the State Department said.

The legislation allows the government to take action against those companies and individuals who have been placed on the CAATSA blacklist.

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EDD and its director Li Shangfu became targets after taking delivery over the past year of the jets and missiles from Rosoboronexport, Russia's main arms export entity already on the CAATSA blacklist for its support of the Assad regime in Syria.

- Targeting Russian 'big ticket' arms deals -

At the same time, the State Department also announced it was placing 33 Russian intelligence and military-linked actors on its sanctions blacklist under the CAATSA rules.

All of them -- defense related firms, officers of the GRU military intelligence agency, and people associated with the St. Petersburg-based Internet Research Agency disinformation group -- have been on previous US sanctions lists and 28 of them have already been indicted by Russia election meddling investigator Robert Mueller.

"We will continue to vigorously implement CAATSA and urge all countries to curtail relationships with Russia's defense and intelligence sectors, both of which are linked to malign activities worldwide," the State Department said.

The sanctions freeze any of EDD's and Li's assets in US jurisdictions.

They also restrict EDD's access to global financial markets by blocking foreign exchange transactions under US jurisdiction or any transactions in the US financial system.

The senior official stressed that CAATSA is not going to be implemented across the board, but that the US was choosing Russia's sale of "bigger ticket items" of "new, fancy, qualitatively significant stuff" that could have a "security impact" on the United States.

"The CAATSA was not intended to take down the economy of third party countries. It's intended to impose appropriate pressures on Russia in response to Russian malign acts," the official said.

The official declined to answer if the US would take similar action if Russia delivers S400 missiles to other countries such as Turkey, which is in talks to buy them.

However, he said, "You can be confident that we have spent an enormous amount of time talking about prospective purchases of things such as S-400s and Sukhois with people all around the world who may have been interested in such things and some who may still be."

"We have made it very clear to them that these - that systems like the S-400 are a system of key concern with potential CAATSA implications."
A reality TV star surgeon and his girlfriend may have committed hundreds of sexual assault, investigators in California have claimed.

Grant William Robicheaux, 38, and Cerissa Laura Riley, 31, have been charged with rape using drugs and sexual assault after two women came forward.

But Orange County District Attorney Tony Rackauckas said hundreds of videos taken from the defendants phones suggest there could be many more alleged victims.

Mr Rackauckas said women seen in the videos appear to be highly intoxicated, beyond the ability to consent or resist and they are barely responsive to the defendants sexual advances.

Based on this evidence we believe there might be many unidentified victims out there.

We believe the defendants used their good looks and charm to lower the inhibitions of their potential prey, he added.

Mr Robicheaux  an orthopaedic surgeon from Newport Beach  once appeared on an American reality show called Online Dating Rituals of the American Male.

He and his partner are accused of working in tandem to sexually assault two women they met in 2016.

Grant Robicheaux and Cerissa Riley (EPA)

A 32-year-old woman said the pair took her back to Mr Robicheauxs apartment after meeting them at a restaurant and going with them to a beach party on 10 April. She has alleged she was raped.

The unnamed woman tested positive for a number of unspecified drugs after contacting Newport Beach police the following day.

Another unnamed woman said she woke up at Mr Robicheauxs apartment after drinking with the couple at a Newport Beach bar until she lost consciousness. She screamed after waking until a neighbour called the police.

In the second case, alleged to have taken place 2 October, both defendants have been charged with sexual assault with intent to commit rape.

Mr Robicheaux and Ms Riley also face drugs possession charges after the date rape drug GHB, psychedelic mushrooms, ecstasy and cocaine were found at the surgeons home in January 2018.

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If convicted on the various charges, Mr Robicheaux could spend 40 years in jail and Ms Riley could be given a 30-year sentence, according to the district attorney.

Its important to understand that rapists can look like anyone, they can be anyone, said Mr Rackauckas.

People often assume that rapists are creepy, scary men who lunge out from hiding amongst bushes and attack unsuspecting women. The reality is that rapists come in all socioeconomic groups, of any background.

Mr Rackauckas encouraged other potential victims to come forward.

Orange County prosecutors said they had received dozens of new leads in the hours after the attorney generals press conference.

Californias medical board has opened an inquiry into Mr Robicheaux, but there is no evidence as yet that his surgical patients could be victims of sexual assault.

Both Mr Robicheaux and Ms Riley have been released from police custody on $100,000 (76,000) bail bonds. They are due to be arraigned on 25 October.
Charles Blow appeared on "Cuomo Prime Time" on Wednesday night. (Photo: CNN)

A commentator just made a powerful plea to the Senate Judiciary Committee concerning the sexual assault accusation made by Christine Blasey Ford against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh.

We have to all take a step back and be respectful of Professor Ford. This is not only, if it is true, it is not only a sexual assault  its a childhood sexual assault, New York Times columnist Charles Blow said on a Wednesday night segment of CNNs Cuomo Prime Time. And if you have never been the victim of a childhood sexual assault, everybody needs to calm down and take a step back. Stop asking why she didnt say anything.

The conversation, which included CNN anchor Chris Cuomo and two other commentators, surrounded the recent accusation of the professor, who goes by Christine Blasey professionally. She publicly accused Kavanaugh on Sunday of sexually assaulting her in 1982 when the two were at a high school party.

As a victim of childhood sexual assault himself, Blow urged the Senate Judiciary Committee and the general public to understand why Blasey didnt tell her story for so long.

The first time I told somebody was 17 years later, a stranger. Next time I told somebody was two years after that. Next time I told somebody was eight years after that. It was 37 years before I told everybody in the world in a book, Blow continued, referring to his 2014 book Fire Shut Up in My Bones.

Blasey had initially resisted going public with her story because she believed speaking up about Kavanaugh could ruin her life and have little effect on his confirmation. After attempting to speak anonymously to lawmakers and, later, media leaking her story, she spoke on the record to The Washington Post in a story published Sunday.

Charles Blow talks about being assaulted as a child and why he never told anyone for 17 years - and says rushing ford is wrong and that we must take every step to get closer to knowing if kavanaugh is lying because he can not be confirmed if he is pic.twitter.com/sMUFB2zyvV  Christopher C. Cuomo (@ChrisCuomo) September 20, 2018

Although she remembers the specifics of the alleged assault, Blasey has said she has trouble remembering how she got to the house where she says the assault happened and the exact time frame. Blow said the things Blasey remembers and doesnt remember are understandable.

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I understand how if this happened to her and she can remember everything in that room and not the day, he said.

For us, it is a living thing that lives in our bodies. You wrestle with it all the time. I cant say that I thought about [my assault] every day but I thought about it all the time. It was a living memory, he continued. It didnt move like other memories in my brain where it starts to fade. Youre thinking about it all the time, so all of that minutiae  he stood there, they turned the music on  all of that is alive in you.

Blow called for a trauma-informed investigation and backed up Blaseys request for an FBI investigation into her claim.

Is this her first time ever going to be in a room with this man if in fact he did what [she said] he did? he asked. I just find that all of our discussions around this are all about politics and all about whether or not people are making the moves  and none of it is about whether or not, in fact, this was a childhood sexual abuse.

Kavanaugh has agreed to testify in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee on Monday, but Blasey has yet to commit to testify. Kavanaughs hearings before the committee concluded last week, but its vote was postponed to schedule a hearing on Blaseys accusation.

Related Coverage

Being 'Young And Stupid' Has Nothing To Do With The Brett Kavanaugh Assault Accusations

Brett Kavanaugh's Supporters Now Far More Reluctant To Speak Up Publicly

Trump Feels 'Terribly' For Brett Kavanaugh. What About Christine Blasey Ford?

Sexual Assault Survivors Ask Senate To 'Remember Our Stories' Amid Kavanaugh Vote

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Kevin Hassett, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, said on Thursday that American businesses should look to alternative suppliers as U.S. tariffs on foreign goods continue to rise.

If a tariff makes it so that you cant buy something from China, then you can just buy it from some other country or from our own country, Hassett said during Yahoo Finances All Market Summit event in New York. Theres a lot of demand thats sort of swinging around the world right now because of these tariffs.

The U.S. tacked on an additional $200 billion in tariffs on Chinese imports earlier this week, catalyzing China to retaliate with announcements of intentions to impose tariffs on $60 billion of U.S. goods. The U.S. tariffs, which will take effect on Sept. 24, will begin at a rate of 10%, and could jump to 25% on Jan. 1.

Hassett added that the tit-for-tat, which has escalated since the summer, will continue to have a greater impact in China than in the U.S. Markets in the U.S. rallied Thursday as the S&P 500 and Dow both climbed to record highs despite ongoing trade tensions.

The actions weve taken against China have had a big negative effect on their markets and their economy, but very little effect  here in the U.S, Hassett said.

Kevin Hassett, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, speaks during the daily press briefing at the White House, Monday, Sept. 10, 2018, in Washington. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

But business owners and economists have largely expressed concern over the tariffs and their impact on costs of imports and loss of access to overseas markets. A Yahoo Finance survey of business operators conducted Sept. 18 found that 23% of those polled felt tariffs will have an extremely negative effect on their businesses, with an additional 13% expecting a somewhat negative impact.

Hassett conceded that U.S. agricultural suppliers have been among those targeted by Chinas tariff retaliations, citing soybean and almond farmers in particular. Were aware that those short-run disruptions are what are the costs of pursuing this long-run reform, Hassett said. The Trump administration announced over the summer $12 billion in emergency relief for farmers hit by the ongoing trade war.

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The goal is for Americas major trade partners to open their markets and provide access thats just like the access we give them to ours, Hassett said. The basic principle that the presidents talked about all the way back to the campaign is that we need fair and reciprocal trade.

But the administration is willing to crack down if compromises cant be made, he added. Hassett called Sept. 30 a hard deadline for reaching an agreement with Canada over the North American Free Trade Agreement, echoing sentiments that House Majority Whip Steve Scalise made earlier in the week.

Were prepared to move ahead with Mexico by itself, Hassett. We have a great deal with Mexico  we love it, Mexico loves it.

Emily McCormick is a reporter for Yahoo Finance.

More from the Yahoo Finance All Markets Summit:

Larry Fink: The market will be higher in 10 years

Larry Fink: The new trade deals will be good, but will potentially come at a great cost
Willian puts Chelsea in front at PAOK Salonika in the seventh minute (Pic: Reuters/John Sibley)

Chelsea avoided a Greek tragedy when comfortably dispatching PAOK Salonika in their UEFA Europa League clash with a 1-0 win that was far more comfortable than the score-line suggested.

The hosts accorded Chelsea far too much respect and the Londoners dictated throughout, but spurned a series of good chances which left their fans facing a nervous last few minutes.

Yet in reality, once Willian had given them an early lead, the result was never in any doubt.

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Maurizio Sarri left Saturdays hat-trick hero Eden Hazard out of the travelling 21-man squad but Cesc Fabregas, who had not started a game for Chelsea since their Community Shield defeat to Manchester City, was on the bench after recovering from a knee injury.

Marcos Alonzo and Ross Barkley were restored to the line-up, however.

Willian celebrates scoring their first goal (Pic: Reuters/John Sibley)

Coming into the Group L opener in Thessaloniki, PAOK had never lost to English opponents and had not conceded a goal against them, but Chelsea had also never lost to a side from Greece. It did not take long for something to give.

The Blues got off to the ideal start at the intimidating 29,000-capacity Toumba Stadium when going in front after just seven minutes and it was Barkley, fit again and influencing things in midfield, who was the focal point of a classic counter-attack, driving at the heart of the POAK defence before slipping a cute pass through to Willian.

Ross Barkley breezes past PAOK Salonikas Yevhen Khacheridi (Pic: Reuters/John Sibley)

The Blues skipper was completely unmarked and he fired low past Alexandros Paschalakis for his second goal in as many games and his 46th for the London club.

POAK were almost undone again moments later when Pedros cross was headed over by Alvaro Morata, who could not keep the ball down and it sailed over the bar.

Morata was a constant threat and after 20 minutes he got away from Yevhen Khacheridi following a raking pass over the top from Antonio Rudiger, only to drag his shot across the face of goal.

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Pedro is denied by Alexandros Paschalakis in a first-half that Chelsea dominated (Pic: Reuters/John Sibley)

Though they had 62% possession in the first-half, they only had three shots on target.

With PAOK standing off Chelsea and looking a little overawed at times, they still could have gone in front level, as Barkley was lucky not to be punished when referee decided not to punish him for a blatant shirt pull in the box just before the interval.

Pedro had a golden chance to double the lead but fired straight at Paschalakis and Morata headed wide with a header from the resulting corner when it seemed easier to score.

In a totally comfortable first half, the most interesting moment in the first half came when Chelsea chairman Bruce Buck was seen handing out packets of crisps to travelling Blues fans. Perhaps he is a closet Charlton fan, who knew?

Chelsea chairman Bruce Buck hands out packets of crisps to travelling Blues fans

The second half started much in the manner of the first, with Willian volleying over, Barkley firing over from distance and Alonsos saw a shot deflected wide after another cutting counter-attack. From the resulting corner, Rudiger should have doubled the lead, but he spurned yet another chance.

PAOK rarely threatened Kepa Arrizabalagas goal, although Rudigers under-hit back-pass mid-way though the second period almost caused a few Blues fans to regurgitate their salt and vinegar snacks. However, the danger was quickly averted.

Fabregas, who replaced Jorgino after 65 minutes, almost had an immediate impact, with his precise pass allowing Morata to out-pace Khacheridi and although the Chelsea forward clipped the ball past the keeper and into the net, he was ruled off-side. It could only have been a couple of inches and it looked a harsh decision.

Paschalakis, who looked uncomfortable gathering crosses, showed there was nothing wrong with his shot-stopping ability as he made a tremendous save from a well-struck Pedro effort soon after.

Cesc Fabregas replaced Jorginho and almost made an instant impact, setting up Morata (Pic: Reuters/John Sibley)

Morata, who had a total of six shots, none of which were on target, was replaced by Olivier Giroud with 10 minutes remaining. It was not his night and Sarris pat on the back as he left the pitch shaking his head probably did little to console the luckless Spaniard.

Although Amr Warda was brought down by a combination of Barkley and substitute Cesar Azpilicueta with just seconds of normal time remaining, the resulting free-kick was easily dealt with and Chelsea broke clear at pace.

Pedro surged forward but his touch was far too heavy and he was brought down right on the edge of the PAOK box by Paschalakis. His left shoulder bore the brunt of a heavy challenge and he was in extreme discomfort. He could be a doubt for their clash with West Ham on Sunday.

While Girouds dead-ball chance came to nought, the Blues saw this through with some degree of comfort.
A woman claimed on social media Tuesday that she had heard about an alleged sexual assault by Brett Kavanaugh, now a Supreme Court nominee, when they were teens in the 1980s.

She has deleted her posts, but Cristina King Miranda confirmed to NPR that she remembered hearing buzz in high school about an unusually serious incident at a party.

Kavanaughs accuser, Christine Blasey Ford, came forward Sunday in a Washington Post story. She said that when they were teenagers, Kavanaugh pinned her to a bed during a party and tried to remove her clothes, covering her mouth with his hand to stifle her screams.

Kavanaugh and Mark Judge, a witness Blasey named, have denied the accusation. Republicans have said there is nothing to corroborate Blaseys claim.

Early on Tuesday, Miranda said on Twitter she heard about the incident shortly after it happened.

Christine Blasey Ford was a year or so behind me, I remember her, Miranda said in a tweet that can still be viewed via the Google cache. The incident was spoken about for days afterwards in school.

Blasey told the Post that she hadnt told anyone about the incident, which she said occurred during a summer party, until 2012.

Miranda deleted her tweet, as well as a lengthier version on Facebook under the name Cristina King, in which she wrote many of us heard about it in school. She also said in that post that she had had a crush on Judge.

Supreme Court nominee Judge Brett Kavanaugh leaves his home in Chevy Chase, Maryland, on Wednesday. (Photo: Win McNamee via Getty Images)

Mirandas name is one of the more than 900 on a letter that circulated among alumnae of Holton-Arms  an all-girls private school in Bethesda, Maryland, that Blasey attended  supporting her. The letters organizers said they verified all the names with a school directory, but a spokesperson for Holton-Arms declined to confirm Miranda had attended.

NBC News reported Wednesday afternoon that it confirmed the social media posts had indeed been posted by the Holton-Arms grad.

Another member of the class of 1983 who signed the letter told HuffPost she didnt recall hearing about the incident at that time. Members of Blaseys class of 1984 have written a separate letter supporting their former classmate.

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Miranda declined an interview request from HuffPost. In a follow-up tweet, she said she deleted her previous post because it served its purpose and I am now dealing with a slew of requests for interviews from The Wash Post, CNN, CBS News. Organizing how I want to proceed. Was not ready for that, not sure I am interested in pursuing.

In another tweet, apparently written before she spoke to NPR, she said she wouldnt do any media interviews.

To clarify: I do not have first hand knowledge of the incident that Dr. Christine Blasey Ford mentions, and I stand by my support for Christine. Thats it. I dont have more to say on the subject.

Miranda has since deleted her Twitter account entirely.

Amanda Terkel contributed reporting.

This article has been updated with information from Mirandas NPR interview.

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By Dean Arrindell

Since Christine Blasey Ford came forward on Sunday, accusing Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of sexually assaulting her when they were teenagers, she has been subjected to death threats and email hacking, and her family has had to leave their home and hire security, according to her lawyers.

Myths about Ford that attempt to discredit her have also been circulating. The myths have been debunked. Yahoo News explains.

Myth: Students left bad reviews about Ford on a website.

Fact: Ford is a professor at Palo Alto University, and several right-wing media outlets said she received negative reviews on the website RateMyProfessors.com calling her mad, troubled and unprofessional.

The reviews exist, but they were about another professor: Christine Adams Ford at California State University, Fullerton.

Myth: Ford is a major Democratic donor.

Fact: Ford is a registered Democrat, which was disclosed when she came forward in the Washington Post.

The Mercury News in San Jose, Calif., reports that she attended a Womens March protesting Trump in 2017 and wore a pink brain hat in a March for Science in 2017 that protested the Trump administrations proposed cuts to science research.

But her donations to Democratic committees and campaigns were small. According to the Federal Election Commission, they totaled around $80 between 2013 and 2017.

Myth: Brett Kavanaghs mother ruled against Fords parents in a foreclosure case.

Fact: Kavanaughs mother, Martha Kavanaugh, presided as a Maryland district court judge in a foreclosure case where Fords parents, Ralph and Paula Blasey, were the defendants in 1996.

However, the Blaseys were able to refinance their mortgage, and according to CBS News, Judge Martha Kavanaugh dismissed the case. The dismissal allowed the Blaseys to keep their house.

Ford has been given the opportunity to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee.
The BMW lineup for the Paris Motor Show, which opens Thursday, October 4, will include the world premiere of the brand's new Z4 roadster, the X5 SUV and the sporty M5 Competition sedan.

The BMW Z4 will make its debut at the Paris Motor Show. The car, which the German car manufacturer describes as a "contemporary interpretation of the traditional roadster concept," notably stands out with its electrically operated fabric hood and its sleek interior design. The driver-oriented cockpit focuses on the pleasure of driving, as much with the seating position as with BMW's latest operating system (7.0). The roadster will be available in three versions, with the most powerful -- the BMW Z4 M40i -- getting a 340-horsepower inline-six-cylinder engine.

BMW will also present the new-generation version of its X5 large SUV, which promises an even more spacious and robust design. The range gets a new chassis system, and an "Offroad Package" will be available for the first time, allowing the driver to change vehicle setup quickly to suit the terrain. Another new model coming to Paris is the BMW M5 Competition -- the most powerful version of the brand's high-performance sedan, with a 625-horsepower V8 engine promising 0-100 km/h in just 3.3 seconds. Note that BMW will also have the 8 Series Coupe on its stand.

The Paris Motor Show, runs October 4-14, 2018.
LUSAKA (Reuters) - Zambian President Edgar Lungu fired a cabinet minister in charge of social welfare funds on Wednesday after Britain and Finland froze aid over suspicions that $4 million of funding may have been misused. The money was channeled into the social cash transfer scheme, a donor-supported program under which the government relays money to vulnerable households in rural areas. Lungu's spokesman Amos Chanda said Olipa Phiri had been made Community Development and Social Welfare Minister, replacing Emerine Kabanshi. "The new minister has been given a clear mission to get down to work and clean up the mess that has been identified in the administration of the social cash transfer," Chanda said. Kabanshi has not made any public comment on the affair, and Reuters was unable to reach her by phone. Chanda said Phiri would work with the auditor-general and other investigative agencies to ensure that accountability was restored. Preliminary investigations revealed that the state-owned company engaged by the government to distribute the money had used part of it to pay its retirees and refurbish offices, Chanda said. Chanda said on Tuesday that Lungu had ordered an inquiry four months ago into possible misuse of the aid funds since 2012, and a number of suspects would be prosecuted. (Reporting by Chris Mfula; Editing by Kevin Liffey)
The parole board recently decided to shorten the sentences of two men who assisted the terrorists who carried out an attack in Jerusalem in June 2017 in which border policewoman Hadas Malka was murdered.

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The two, Ha'ani Da'ari and Muhammad Hamdan, were convicted of causing death by negligence and transporting illegal aliens. One of them is a bus driver who drove the terrorists and evaded security checks.

The attack took place when three terroristsAdel Anakush, Bura Saleh and Osama Ataarmed with knives and guns attacked in two different areas in the capital.

Hadas Malka

Malka, 23, was critically wounded and later died of her wounds, while two others were moderately wounded and two lightly wounded. All the terrorists were killed.

Hamdan, a resident of the West Bank, was released a few months ago without the knowledge of Malka's family. His release was only made known to them after they were contacted by the parole committee regarding their decision on the release Da'ari, a resident of East Jerusalem, who was released Monday. The decision was made contrary to the prosecution's position.

Last April, the Jerusalem Magistrate's Court sentenced them to 14 and 16 months in prison respectively after being convicted in a plea bargain.

"The actions of the defendants did not merely amount to the offense of transporting the illegals, three of whom committed the heinous attack," the court ruled.

Malka's funeral (Photo: Israel Police)

They acted in a premeditated manner to transfer illegal aliens and acted cunningly to sneak them into Israel for money. They had to suspect that those they drove might pose a security risk."

David and Geula Malka, Hadas's parents, turned to the court Monday morning to ask them not to allow Da'ari's release.

"In the name of Hadas and on behalf of all the terror victims, and before Yom Kippur, we plead and ask for understanding, that the court not allow, and certainly not approve the request of the terrorists' collaborators to mitigate the sentenceto take into account our feelings and to honor and respect the values and dedication of our daughter Hadas," they said.

We ask that you honor her fellow fighters who are working day and night for the security of the state and to honor the will of all bereaved families. Every day for us is a torment. Please, do not make us feel that we are denied even a minimal shred of justice is," they said in their impassioned appeal.

PM Netanyahu and his wife, Sara, visit Malka family after her murder (Photo: Gadi Kabalo)

"When it comes to fighting terrorism, the second and third circles (of involvement) should also pay a price. Any relief from punishment conveys a lenient attitude towards terrorism. We must stop the alarming trend of early release of security prisoners," said attorney Haim Bleicher of the Honenu organization, who is helping the Malka family.

The indictment alleges that the two were transporting in return for money more than six illegal residents on the day of the attack. It also states that they knew that the passengers had no entry permits.

The State Prosecutor's Office said that their actions "intentionally bypassed the screening and inspection system at the entrance to Jerusalem, knowing that this could lead to an attack and cause the death of civilians."

The GPO issued a statement saying that "Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu strongly opposes shortening the sentences of those involved in the murder of Hadas Malka. The matter will soon be decided in a legal process."
Sources in Gaza told Ynet Tuesday that Hamas has decided to escalate the weekly "March of Return" demonstrations in order to pressure Egypt and Israel to renew ceasefire talks, which have been suspended for the past three weeks.

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Since the end of August, after Israel and Hamas reached advanced stages of the agreementmediated by Egypt and the UN envoy to the Middle Eastthe ceasefire talks have been brought to a halt.

The reason for the delay is an explicit threat made by Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas to Egypt, saying that truce at in Gazathat includes significant efforts to ease the Israeli and Egyptian blockadewithout the PA's involvement, will result in the PA's complete withdrawal of monthly payments transferred to the strip.

Abbas's strong opposition stems from concerns of appearing to be ineffective, fearing that Hamas would flaunt its achievements, gained using violent methods, to demonstrate the PA's apparent ineptitude.

For the time being Egypt has responded to the threat by suspending the negotiation process.

In the past two weeks, Hamas has been encouraging the public in Gaza to intensify the weekly clashes on the fence. Sources in Gaza said that last week a $200 grant was handed over to every Palestinian who was wounded during the riots since the beginning of September.

In addition, sources say Hamas transferred a $100 grant to every Palestinian who was wounded in confrontations with the IDF in the weeks preceding the "March of Return" campaign.

According to the same sources, the funding came from Iran.

After a weeks-long lull, Hamas renewed the launching of incendiary balloon terror attacks and has called for a series of violent confrontations on the fence almost every evening.

Palestinians clash with IDF soldiers during 'March of Return' riot in Gaza (: )

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In addition, numerous attempts have been recorded to infiltrate into Israeli territory using drones, and increase the number of participants in the weekly riots on the border.

In August, it was reported that Israel and Hamas had reached a ceasefire under Egyptian mediation, as Israelis living in the south urged the government to stem the daily launching of incendiary balloons and near-daily barrage of rockets that threatened to drag the two sides into yet another conflict.

Two weeks ago, Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar said that no arrangement has been reached with Israel to put an end to daily hostilities, despite the quiet that has prevailed on the volatile border in recent days.

I will state clearly: So far there is no agreement and no outline for an agreement for a ceasefire with Israel, the terror leader during a Hamas conference in the coastal enclave.

More mass protests are expected to grip the Gaza border on Friday afternoon.

PA President Mahmoud Abbas (L) and Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar (Photo: AFP, EPA)

Last Friday, thousands of Palestinians took part in the weekly "March of Return" demonstrations along the border fence, with rioters hurling stones and burning tires.

According to the IDF Spokesperson's Unit, Palestinian terrorists tossed three grenades at the Karni crossing, and threw a pipe bomb in the Rafah area, targeting IDF troops.

The Israeli troops responded with crowd dispersal measures, and no casualties were reported among the soldiers.
The air force chief will on Thursday present findings in Moscow related to an incident in which a Russian military plane was downed off Syria's coast, Israel's military said.

Israel on Tuesday blamed Syria, saying its anti-aircraft batteries "fired indiscriminately" and failed to ensure that no Russian planes were in the air.
The Palestinian health ministry said Thursday that Israeli forces opened fire during violent riots in the southern Gaza Strip on Wednesday, resulting in the death of a 15-year-old demonstrator.

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An IDF spokeswoman said she had no knowledge of the incident.

Ashraf Al-Qidra, a spokesman for Gaza's health ministry, said 15-year-old Moamen Ibrahim Abu Eyada was shot dead by Israeli soldiers east of the town of Rafah, which lies at the southern end of the Gaza Strip and borders Egypt.

Gaza border riots (Photo: AP)

The border between Gaza and Israel has been the scene of weekly Palestinian demonstrations since March 30 and recently, protests have taken place late at night.

Some 20 Palestinians breached the security fence in the southern Gaza Strip Wednesday, spray painting an IDF outpost and leaving incendiary devices near the border fence, and two incendiary balloons were found in the Eshkol Regional Council, resulting in four fires breaking out in the area.

Most of the perpetrators retreated back to the strip soon after the breach.

Firefighting crews managed to gain control of the flames sparked by the flammable balloons.

The army said earlier that during the day there had been several incidents along the Gaza-Israel border "with the participation of hundreds of rioters" who rolled burning tires and hurled firebombs and rocks at soldiers. It said there were no Israeli casualties.

The IDF says it is defending its border against rioting protesters who have sought to breach the fence and enter Israel.

In addition, the Palestinians claimed on Tuesday that two Palestinians were killed and at least 46 wounded by the IDF fire in the northern Gaza Strip during violent demonstrations which took place on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish year.

Gaza medics said that two Palestinians were killed by an Israeli missile strike on terrorists who the IDF said were placing a suspicious object Monday night near the Gaza border fence.

An IDF spokesman said in a statement that an aircraft fired at "terrorists (who) suspiciously approached the security fence in the southern Gaza Strip and placed an object adjacent to the fence".

Furthermore, thousands gathered Monday on the beach along the border fence separating the Gaza Strip and Israel to demonstrate against Egypt and Israel's blockade.

Gaza's Health Ministry says 26 Palestinians were wounded during the mass protest.

Some 13,000 Palestinians gathered at several points near the fence Friday, some of them hurling rocks and fire bombs at troops, under the cover of smoke from burning tires.
The leader of Lebanon's Iran-backed Hezbollah terror group, a key Damascus ally, said on Wednesday his group would keep its military presence in Syria until further notice, commending a Russian-Turkish deal over Idlib as a step towards a broader political solution.

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But Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah indicated the number of fighters of the powerful Shi'ite group would be reduced as fronts across Syria become more quiet.

"We will stay there (in Syria) even after the settlement in Idlib. Our presence there is linked to the need and the consent of the Syrian leadership," he said in a televised address to hundreds of cheering followers in southern Beirut on the eve of the annual Ashura religious rally.

Hassan Nasrallah (Photo: ImageSat International)

"The quietness of the fronts and less number of threats will naturally affect the current numbers (of Hezbollah fighters)," he added. "Syria is heading to a great calm".

Ashura, the holiest day of the Shi'ite calendar, falls on Thursday. It commemorates the martyrdom of Hussein, a grandson of the Prophet Mohammad, and is marked by large public processions.

Hezbollah has provided vital support to Syria's military in the seven-year war, helping it regain swathes of the country. "We will stay there until further notice," Nasrallah said.

Nasrallah commended the outcome of the Iranian, Russian and Turkish diplomacy to spare Idlib a military offensive that could have led to a catastrophic humanitarian situation.

On Monday, Russian and Turkey agreed to rule out a military solution in the Idlib region, the opposition's last big foothold in Syria along with adjoining territory north of Aleppo, in favor of enforcing a new demilitarized zone from which "radical" rebels will be required to withdraw by the middle of next month.

"The outcome (of the diplomatic efforts) is good and reasonable but depends on results," Nasrallah said, describing the agreement as a step towards reaching a political solution to the conflict.

Russia, the biggest outside backer of Syrian President Bashar Assad in his fight against rebels, has been preparing for an offensive on the city of Idlib, controlled by rebels.

The United Nations had warned such an attack would create a humanitarian catastrophe in Idlib province, where about 3 million people live.

Assad has recovered other areas once held by rebels, with decisive military support from Iran and Russia.
Head of the Israel Atomic Energy Commission (IAEC), Ze'ev Snir, said Israel cannot ignore Iran and its proxies' repeated threats to attack its nuclear sites at the 62nd conference of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in Vienna Tuesday.

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"Those threats prompt Israel to act in order to protect its nuclear sites," Snir stated.

"The continuing turmoil in the region, threatens peace and security worldwide, and demands global attention.

"The IAEA must conduct a robust verification of Iran's clandestine activities. The covert Iranian nuclear weapons program is a documented fact," he went on to say.

Opening of 62nd conference of IAEA

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"The new information recently revealed by Israel, conclusively proves, that Iranian activities, were part of a well-orchestrated plan, to continue the development of nuclear weapons.

"In light of these destabilizing elements, we cannot ignore the repeated and explicit threats, made by Iran and its proxies, to attack Israel's nuclear sites," the IAEC head explained.

Security Cabinet member and Knesset member Minister Yisrael Katz said in an interview with Ynet Israel is constantly threatened by Iran.

"(Iran's) regime is attempting to carry out a revolution, to threaten Israel, to threaten Saudi Arabia, and everyone in the region who is not Shi'ite," he said.

"Obviously, (we are the ones mainly threateneded) since we are the powerful country that keeps Iran at bay. We know we have to protect our strategic locations," Katz elaborated.

Nuclear reactor in Dimona (Photo: Gettyimages)

"We should pose a threat to Iran and cerate a deterrence against it," he added.

It is the first time Israel has acknowledged it is reinforcing security around its nuclear reactor in Dimona.

Until now, the IAEA viewed the protection of the nuclear reactor in Dimona as a precaution against pollution rather than protection against military and terror threats.

Meanwhile, Iran has asked the United Nations to condemn Israeli threats against Tehran and to bring Israel's nuclear program under its supervision, state media reported on Thursday.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu used a visit to a secretive Israeli atomic reactor in late August to warn the country's enemies that it has the means to destroy them, in what appeared to be a veiled reference to its assumed nuclear arsenal.

"The United Nations' members should not turn a blind eye to these threats and must take firms actions to eliminate all Israeli nuclear weapons," Fars news agency quoted Iran's ambassador to the United Nations Gholamali Khoshrou as saying in letters to the UN secretary general and the Security Council.

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani (L) and PM Benjamin Netanyahu

Khoshrou asked the United Nations to force Israel to join the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and bring its nuclear program under supervision of the IAEA, a UN atomic watchdog.

Israel, which is outside the NPT, neither confirms nor denies having the bomb, a decades-old ambiguity policy that it says keeps hostile neighbours in check while avoiding the kind of public provocations that can spark regional arms races.

Israel is trying to lobby world powers to follow the United States in exiting their 2015 deal with Iran that capped the Islamic Republic's nuclear capabilities in return for lifting of sanctions.

The Israelis deem the agreement insufficient for denying their arch-foe the means to eventually get the bombsomething that Tehran, which is a signatory to the 1970 NPT, denies wanting.

Since its 1979 Islamic Revolution, Iran has preached Israel's destruction. It backs the Lebanese terror group Hezbollah and the Palestinian terror group Hamas. Its reinforcement of Damascus during Syria's civil war is seen by the Netanyahu government as a further Iranian deployment on Israel's borders.

Netanyahu reveals 'conclusive proof' of Iranian nuclear weapons program (:  )

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In Late April, Netanyahu revealed what he said was conclusive proof of a secret project underway in Iran for the development of a nuclear weaponevidence that he said proved that Tehran had lied big time to the international community.

Israel had obtained, he said, in a great intelligence achievement, secrets comprising a giant trove of documents and digital information pertaining to Iran's clandestine Amad nuclear weapons project whose goal was creating nuclear weapons

The evidence, Netanyahu posited, prove Iran has been hiding for years from the international community its nuclear weapons development program.

In August 2017, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah marked 11 years to the Second Lebanon War with a speech in which he threatened that "the defeat Israel suffered in 2006, it will suffer again, but it will be a much greater defeat."

Nasrallah argued that Israel recognized Hezbollah's strength, "an example of that is the evacuation of the ammonia tank in Haifa. We hope they examine moving the nuclear reactor in Dimona as well, as it is more dangerous and needs to be taken care of."

During operation Protective Edge, Israel intercepted three rockets that were launched at Dimona.
Russia's Ministry of Foreign Affairs invited Tuesday charge d'affaires of the State of Israel in Moscow K. Cohen-Gat.

During the conversation, Deputy Foreign Minister of Russia Vershinin emphasized that Moscow views as irresponsible and unfriendly the actions of the Israeli Air Force, which exposed the Russian Il-20 aircraft to danger and led to the death of the 15 Russian crewmen, referring to Israel's attack on Syria's Latakia.

Vershinin stressed that the Russia would take all necessary measures in order to eliminate any threat to life and security of Russian military, which assists the Syrian regime in its fight against the country's rebel groups.
IDF Chief of Staff Gadi Eisenkot joined senior Israeli officials on Thursday morning in expressing regret for the loss of 15 Russian lives that was caused Monday evening when Syrian air defenses downed a Russian plane while trying to intercept an airstrike launched by Israel.

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Israel claimed responsibility for the attack after originally maintaining silence.

Syrian President Bashar Assads forces accidentally shot down the Russian military aircraft following a missile strike on the Syrian coastal city of Latakia that was immediately attributed to the Israel Air Force.

Today, the State of Israel marks 45 years since the outbreak of the (1973) Yom Kippur Wara war that left the IDF with one clear mission: be ready and place the armys preparedness as a top priority, Eisenkot said during a ceremony in Holon to inaugurate the Our IDF exhibit.

Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Gadi Eisenkot (Photo: Yariv Katz)

Its operational and technological strength presented in the exhibit reflects extensive activity in the build up and action of the forcesaction that is carried out with great professionalism and discretion to prevent our enemies from having advanced capabilities that threaten the State of Israel, the military chief continued.

For this reason, the IDF went into action again this week in the north. Unfortunately, Syrian forces hit a Russian aircraft and we share the sorrow of the families and the Russian army.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told Russian President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday that Syrian forces were to blame for the downing of the Russian military plane, but he offered all necessary information to investigate the incident.

A day after the attack, the Russian Defense Ministry denounced what it described as Israels deliberate provocation and blamed Israel for the subsequent crash, saying the plane was caught in the crossfire as four Israeli strike hit targets in northwestern Syria.

In a bid to calm tensions between Jerusalem and Moscow, an IDF delegation headed by the IAFs Commander Amikam Norkin departed for the Russian capital to explain what led to the deadly mishap.

PM Netanyahu with President Putin during visit to Moscow (Photo: Reuters)

According to a statement put out by the IDF, Norkin and his delegation will present pictures to Russian officials showing the circumstances surrounding the incident, along with preliminary conclusions on the ongoing IDF investigation into the matter.

Israel's ambassador in Moscow was summoned to the Russian Foreign Ministry over the incident, foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said.

"The Israeli pilots were using the Russian aircraft as a shield and pushed it into the line of fire of the Syrian defense," ministry spokesman Maj. Gen. Igor Konashenkov said in a statement.

Russia said it would make an "appropriate response" to Israel.
The leader of Lebanon's Hezbollah terror group is boasting the group possesses "highly accurate" missiles despite Israeli attempts to prevent it from acquiring such weapons.

Hassan Nasrallah spoke in a televised speech on Thursday to supporters commemorating Ashoura, one of the most important religious holy days for Shiite Muslims.

Nasrallah says Israel knows the regional balance of power has changed, and that recent Israeli strikes in Syria to prevent Hezbollah from acquiring those weapons failed because this "has already been achieved."
The Kremlin said on Thursday it had received a telegram from Syrian President Bashar Assad in which he expressed his condolences over a Russian military plane being downed near Syria earlier this week, the Interfax news agency reported.

Russia's Defence Ministry said the Il-20 reconnaissance aircraft, with 15 Russians on board, had been downed by Syrian government anti-aircraft guns in a "friendly fire" incident on Monday, but blamed Israel for the incident.

Israel has blamed Syria for the shoot down.

Interfax cited President Vladimir Putin's spokesman Dmitry Peskov as saying on Thursday that the Kremlin had received a telegram from Assad about the incident.

Syria's SANA news agency reported on Wednesday that Assad had sent a telegram to Moscow saying he was sorry about the death of Russian military service people, but blamed Israel for the downing.
The leader of Lebanons Hezbollah terror group boasted on Thursday that the group possesses highly accurate missiles despite Israeli attempts to prevent it from acquiring such weapons.

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Hassan Nasrallah spoke in a televised speech to supporters commemorating Ashoura, one of the most important religious holy days for Shi'ite Muslims.

Nasrallah says Israel knows the regional balance of power has changed, and that recent Israeli strikes in Syria to prevent Hezbollah from acquiring those weapons failed because this has already been achieved.

Hassan Nasrallah (Photo: Reuters)

Syrian President Bashar Assads forces accidentally shot down a Russian military aircraft following a missile strike on the Syrian coastal city of Latakia that was immediately attributed to the Israel Air Force. Israel took responsibility for the attack shortly after.

He says Hezbollah now has highly accurate ... missiles and that, should Israel impose a war on Lebanon, it will face a fate and a reality it never expected on any day.

Israel worries Hezbollah has been improving its capabilities and increased its strikes in Syria to prevent weapons shipments to the group from Iran.

"No matter what you do to cut the route, the matter is over and the resistance possesses precision and non-precision rockets and weapons capabilities," Nasrallah said, addressing Israel in the broadcast speech while claiming that he was not speaking from a bunker.

They laugh at me and say I am threatening from a bunker. I am obviously not inside a bunker. I am in a specific place and the fact that I am here giving a speech proves that you are trying day and night to kill me and are only failing, he said.

The Israelis are angry and worried that their efforts are failing, Nasrallah said at the opening of his remarks.

Attack on Latakia

They pinned their hope on what has happened in Syria and Iraq, but these delusions have shattered. They realize that the axis of resistance is stronger than ever. They realize that there are new states that have joined the axis of resistance, countries that were outside the conflict with Israel are today part of it, he added as he continued his one of many diatribes against Israel.

Israel is scared of every war. They understand that a war against us will have numerous consequences in the region. Their weak points are exposed and they know about our strength, he declared.

According to Nasrallah, Israel is well aware of his organizations stockpile of precision missiles and has no solution.

File photo of plane model shot down by Syria (Photo: Kirill Naumenko/Wikipedia)

In 1973, the war was on the front at a time when people in Tel Aviv would drink coffee and read the papers. Now, everything is different. I say to Israel: be careful. Everything you have done up until this point is finished  Israel understands that war cannot be won with technology. The human element will decide the war, Nasrallah said.

In 1982 Israel threatened to occupy Beirut. Who speaks about that today? Nasrallah asked. Since 2006 no Israeli has said we will invade Lebanon and get to Beirut because such an operation requires ground forces. That cannot be done with an air force. Israel no longer has an army that can occupy land. Therefore, every Israeli threat focuses on the power of fire and not on the human power.

Hezbollah, backed by Iran, has played a critical role in supporting Syrian President Bashar Assad during Syria's seven-year-long civil war.

Iran's Revolutionary Guards helped form Hezbollah in the early 1980s to resist Israel's military presence in southern Lebanon, which ended in 2000. Israel and Hezbollah fought a brief war on Lebanese soil in 2006.
Israeli Air Force chief Maj. Gen. Amikam Norkin, will present on Thursday findings in Moscow related to an incident in which a Russian military plane was downed off Syria's coast, Israel's military said.

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Syrian President Bashar Assads forces accidentally shot down a Russian military aircraft following a missile strike on the Syrian coastal city of Latakia that was immediately attributed to the Israel Air Force. Israel took responsibility for the attack shortly after.

Israel's air force Chief Major-General Amikam Norkin (Photo: IDF Spokesperson's Unit )

Israel on Tuesday blamed Syria , and according to the investigation carried out by senior security and political officials, the Syrian army's anti-aircraft batteries "fired indiscriminately" and failed to ensure that no Russian planes were in the air.

The IDF added that its planes had already returned to Israel, when Assad's army launched the missiles which downed the Russian plane.

The army said Norkin and other senior officers would "present the situation report of the event regarding all aspects, including the pre-mission information and the findings of the IDF inquiry."

The incident initially appeared likely to cause friction between two countries that back opposing sides in Syria's complex civil war, with the head of the defence ministry in Moscow accusing Israel of indirectly causing it.

But President Vladimir Putin, who spoke to his Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu by phone on Tuesday, then called it "a chain of tragic chance events" although he added that Russia needed to "seriously get to the bottom of what happened".

Israel's military said on Tuesday its fighter jets had targeted a Syrian facility it said was about to transfer weapons to Hezbollah on behalf of Iran, and that when the plane was downed, the Israeli jets "were already within Israeli airspace".

Attack on Latakia

Netanyahu said Syrian forces were to blame and offered Russia "all necessary information" to investigate

Since intervening in Syria in 2015, Russia has usually turned a blind eye to Israeli attacks. Israeli officials say the country's military has carried out about 200

The military statement said the Israeli delegation would "present the continuous Iranian attempts to transfer strategic weapons to Hezbollah .... and to establish an Iranian military presence in Syria."

"Israel will forward Russia all the information needed to complete the investigation and support what has been concluded by the IDF's investigation," the military said.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said at a memorial ceremony for fallen soldiers of the 1973 Yom Kippur War on Thursday that Israel had a responsibility to undertake all efforts to avoid war, but that a but warned it would act with full force if it is forced upon it by those who seek to kill us, first and foremost by Iran.

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Iran, the prime minister noted, openly calls for Israels destruction. It is our obligation to defend ourselves against this danger and we will continue to do so, he said while delivering his remarks at the memorial ceremony held on Mount Herzl in Jerusalem.

PM Netanyahu lays memorial wreath at Yom Kippur War ceremony (Photo: Kobi Gideon)

Netanyahu also spoke about a telegram from the Yom Kippur War that was posted on the Israel State Archives website on Monday, which was sent by the former head of the Mossad, Zvi Zamir, warning that war was imminent and suggesting a plan to prevent it.

You all saw this week the urgent telegram written by Zvi Zamir hours before the war. This made clear in black and white the clear and immediate danger. Even the greatest skeptics should have acted accordingly, Netanyahu asserted.

The required decision to launch a preventative strike was the harder decision for the whole government because it could never have proven what would have happened if it had not acted. Israel should have delivered a preemptive strike, Netanyahu continued.

The lessons learned from the Yom Kippur War, he said, have been engraved on Israel, which he said will always uncompromisingly safeguard its own security interests and scour the horizon in order to diagnose the dangers that lie ahead.

President Rivlin with PM Netanyahu (Photo: Alex Kolomoisky)

Within the Middle East in our days, saturated with dangers, there are rays of lightour relations with the moderate Arab world. So many countries understand the great value in strengthening relations with Israel and the gradual rapprochement with yield fruit of normalization and peace. This goal guides me and we will continue to guarantee that the quality of our lives will never be broken, Netanyahu added.

President Reuven Rivlin also spoke at the event, saying that the Yom Kippur War was one of the toughest Israel had ever fought.

Our enemies found a failed military and political elite. Despite the serious blow that we suffered, it was precisely because of it that the victory for Israel was so great, he said.

The person who won the war was the simple soldier, mandatory conscripts who with their bodies defended this great land, he added, before describing the failure of the leadership in the Yom Kippur War and saying that Israel could not forget the lessons of the war.
Iran hit back at a US offer of negotiations on Thursday, saying Washington had violated the terms of the last big deal they agreed, the 2015 nuclear accord.

US President Donald Trump pulled out of that nuclear accord - which curbed Iran's atomic activities in return for sanctions reliefin May, saying it did not go far enough.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu responded to a mocking speech by Hezbollah Gen. Secretary Hassan Nasrallah and issued a warning to the Terrorist leader on Thursday: If he will confront us, he will receive a decisive blow that he cannot imagine, Netanyahu said at a Bible event at the PMs residence.
Maj. Gen. (res.) Amos Yadlin, head of the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS) and former head of Military Intelligence, said on Thursday the crisis caused by the Syrian army's downing of a Russian military aircraft during an Israeli raid on a weapons cache in Latakia was "very serious," and will limit Israel's "operational maneuverability" in the region.

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Yadlin drew attention to the statement by the Russian defense minister about Israel's responsibility for the downing and the fact that Russia reserves the right to respond as being very serious statements, but I think what Israel did was a very correct move," Yadlin said.

Maj. Gen. (res.) Amos Yadlin (Photo: Matan Turkia)

In light of the incident, an IDF delegation headed by the Air Force Commander Maj. Gen. Amikam Norkin departed for Moscow Thursday morning to present the IAF's findings on the incident.

The Russian Embassy in Israel tweeted that it views the IAFs actions as irresponsible and unfriendly."

"Russia will take all necessary measures to remove the threat to its forces fighting terrorism," said the statement.

Yadlin added that instead of maintaining silence, as it often does following attacks in Syria, Israel investigated and released the facts about the incident absolving itself of culpability for the crisis."

Search for downed Russian aircraft (Photo: Reuters)

The Air Force knows how to investigate, and photographs the radar images, the command bunkers and cockpits and has categorically proven, even in the post-truth era, that the there is no connection between Israel and the launching of a Russian missile by Syria at a Russian plane, Yadlin said.

Yadlin also labeled 'absurd' the notion that the Israeli aircraft used the downed Russian plane as bait for the Syrian anti-aircraft fire.

That is an absurd claim that has no technical or professional basis. It is crucial to place the blame, not on Israel, but on those who pressed the trigger and launched the missile and that is the Syrians, he exclaimed.

Russian President Vladimir Putin (Photo: Reuters)

He added that despite the fact that the Russian media and the Russian defense minister blamed Israel for the downing of their aircraft, Russian President Vladimir Putin cleared Israel (of responsibility).

Yadlin also emphasized that Israel will have to limit its operational activity in the region.

In my opinion, Israel will face limitations on its operational maneuverability. The Russians will try to complicate the friction prevention mechanism," he stressed.

Russian imposed limitations on airspace

Following the aircraft downing, the Russian military increased its activity in the Mediterranean Sea. They closed large segments of Cypriot airspace as well as segments abutting the Syrian coast for military maneuvers until Wednesday.

It is not possible to close the airspace for too long as civilian aircrafts use the airspace as well, Yadlin continued.

Regarding statements by Putin concerning strengthening Syrian air defenses, Yadlin said: "I think that his current interest is not to strengthen the Syrian system which ultimately downs Russian aircraft They probably need to train the Syrians how to differentiate between friend and foe. That is lesson number one in air defense.
Israel said on Thursday it would not halt strikes on Syria but would do more to "deconflict" them with Russian forces, after Moscow accused it of "irresponsible and unfriendly actions" that led to Syrian ground fire mistakenly downing a Russian plane.

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Fifteen Russian crew were killed when the IL-20 surveillance plane crashed near Latakia in northern Syria on Monday. Russia has said Syria shot the plane down shortly after Israeli jets hit the area, and accused Israel of creating the dangerous conditions by failing to give sufficient advance notice.

A map released by Russia detailing events that lead to plane downing (Photo: Russian Defense Ministry)

Although Russian President Vladimir Putin initially described the downing as "tragic chance", Moscow has made its anger clear.

"Moscow views as irresponsible and unfriendly actions of Israeli Air Force, which exposed Russian Il-20 aircraft to danger and led to death of 15 servicemen," the Russian embassy in Tel Aviv said on Twitter in English, adding that Russia would "take all necessary measures to eliminate threat to life and security of our military fighting against terrorism".

Russian military maneuvers (Photo: Rega)

Israel has struck Syria scores of times during its seven-year civil war to prevent what it says are transfers of weapons to Hezbollah fighters and other Iranian allies. Russia has largely overlooked the sorties, which the Israelis say pose no direct threat to Moscow's ally, President Bashar al-Assad.

Israel dispatched its air force chief to brief Moscow about the incident on Thursday. Expressing regret at the loss of life, Israel denied wrongdoing and blamed what it called wanton Syrian anti-aircraft fire after its jets had withdrawn back over the border.

Speaking to Army Radio, Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman made clear that Israel would not halt attacks in Syria.

Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman (Photo: Avihu Shapira)

"We will do whatever is necessary to safeguard the security of Israel's citizens ... and we will not hold these discussions over the airwaves," he said.

But when pressed during the interview, Lieberman avoided asserting Israeli "freedom of action" over Syria, a term he has used in the past.

Naftali Bennett, another member of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's security cabinet, said "deconfliction mechanisms" would be improved, referring to a Russian-Israeli hotline designed to avoid inadvertent clashes with forces Moscow sent to Syria as part of a military intervention mounted in 2015.

"We will of course strengthen these mechanisms. We will do everything so as not to harm anyone we do not intend to, God forbid," Bennett told Army Radio in a separate interview.

Ron Ben-Yishai, a veteran military commentator, predicted a more patient air force approach in future strikes.

"It is possible that, next time, they will say, 'Okay let's wait until the (Russian) plane goes back to its base, and then we will carry out the attack,'" Ben-Yishai told Ynet TV.

Lebanon's Hezbollah guerrillas, who like their patron Iran have been helping Assad militarily in Syria, said Israeli strikes there would not prevent them getting advanced weaponry.

"No matter what you do to cut the route, the matter is over and the resistance possesses precision and non-precision rockets and weapons capabilities," Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah said in a speech.
Some 4,500 activists from the Women Wage Peace movement gathered in Jerusalems Independence Park Thursday to protest the deadlocked peace process with the Palestinians. The rally was attended by Jewish and Arab women including those who have lost family members to the conflict and residents of the Gaza region.
A high-level Israeli military delegation visited Moscow on Thursday to present detailed information related to the downing of a Russian warplane by Syrian forces that responded to an Israeli air raid.

All 15 crew members on board the Russian Il-20 reconnaissance plane were killed when it was downed Monday by Syrian air defense forces that mistook it for Israeli jets. The incident threatened to derail the close security ties between Russia and Israel.
The White House announced Thursday that US President Donald Trump will meet with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu next week during the UN General Assembly in New York.
The White House announced Thursday that US President Donald Trump will meet with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu next week during the UN General Assembly in New York.

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President Trump will also hold discussions with leaders of South Korea, Egypt, France, Japan and Britain.

The meeting between Trump and Netanyahu comes amid tensions between Russia and Israel over the downing of a Russian plane by the Syrian army whose air defenses were trying to repel and IAF strike.

Last month, US National Security Adviser John Bolton said in an interview with Reuters that Russia is "stuck" in Syria and looking for others to fund its post-war reconstruction, and added that attacks on Syrian territories which are attributed to Israel are conducted in self-defense.

The meeting comes in light of a number of unprecedented steps the Trump administration has taken against the Palestinian Authority.

Two weeks ago the administration ordered the closure of the Palestinian diplomatic mission in Washington, citing the refusal of Palestinian leaders to enter into peace talks with Israel, prompting the Palestinians to accuse the administration of dismantling decades of US engagement with them.

Several weeks prior, US State Department announced it will cut more than $200 million in bilateral aid to the Palestinians, following a review of the funding for projects in the West Bank and Gaza.

The department notified Congress of the decision in a brief, three-paragraph notice sent first to lawmakers and then to reporters. It said the administration will redirect the money to "high priority projects elsewhere."

"At the direction of President Trump, we have undertaken a review of US assistance to the Palestinian Authority and in the West Bank and Gaza to ensure these funds are spent in accordance with US national interests and provide value to the US taxpayer," the department said. "As a result of that review, at the direction of the president, we will redirect more than $200 million ... originally planned for programs in the West Bank and Gaza," stressed the statement.

"This decision takes into account the challenges the international community faces in providing assistance in Gaza, where Hamas control endangers the lives of Gaza's citizens and degrades an already dire humanitarian and economic situation," the notice said, without providing additional details.

The notice did not give an exact amount of the funds to be cut, but said they had been approved in 2017.
An IAF aircraft attacked on Thursday a terror cell in the northern Gaza that was launching incendiary balloons into Israeli territory from the strip.

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The strike comes in light of violent demonstrations along the southern border, which continued throughout Yom Kippur.

Last night, a spokesman for Gaza's health ministry, said a 15-year-old boy was shot dead by Israeli soldiers east of the town of Rafah, which lies at the southern end of the Gaza Strip and borders Egypt.

Incendiary balloon

On Tuesday, two Palestinians were reportedly killed and at least 46 wounded by the IDF fire in the northern Gaza Strip during violent demonstrations which took place on the holiest day of the Jewish year.

On Wednesday, 20 Palestinians breached the security fence in the southern Gaza Strip, spray painting an IDF outpost and leaving incendiary devices near the border fence.

Most of the perpetrators retreated back to the strip soon after the breach.

The IDF said hundreds of Gazans participated in the riots, burning tires and throwing explosive devices and rocks at the soldiers. In one incident a grenade was thrown at the troops, prompting the forces to respond with crowd dispersal measures in accordance with IDFs open-fire regulations.

In addition, two incendiary balloons were found in the Eshkol Regional Council, resulting in four fires breaking out in the area. Firefighting crews managed to gain control of the flames.
By RALPH ANSAMI

[email protected]

IRONWOOD  A Find Your North Marketing Plan that details strategies for the city and the Ironwood Economic Development Corporation has been released.

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Ann Arbor, Michigan - Working in law enforcement is as tough as it is rewarding. I got my start in 1968 as a beat cop in Ann Arbor, Michigan. My initial years on the force eventually led me to a 50-year career in forensic science.

Ive seen a lot of changes in that time.

Back in my policing days, pretty much all we had was a uniform, a badge, a nightstick, handcuffs, a sidearm, a pair of comfortable shoes, perhaps a vehicle, a desire to protect and serve and each other. We didnt have much of the equipment considered essential to todays police work, such as body armor, computers, or even handheld radios, much less infrared cameras that can see in the dark or sophisticated forensics techniques.

Theres no question that science and technology have done much to make the justice system more effective and fair, thanks in part, I think, to the work done here at NIST.

NIST researchers have worked with law enforcement since the days of Wilmer Souder in the early 20th century and with companies since the 1970s to describe, test and improve the capabilities of body armor, which saves hundreds of police officers lives every year. Weve developed tests for calibrating radar guns (sorry, but dont speed!) and night vision cameras. Weve developed technologies and techniques for recovering data erased from video cameras and computer hard drives and serial numbers defaced on firearms and vehicles. Weve created a database for evaluating and comparing tool marks left on shell casings and bullets, and weve helped to improve how fingerprints are collected and evaluated.

The list goes on.

People in the forensic science community often talk about the CSI effectthe commonly accepted belief that their discipline has a seemingly supernatural ability to identify suspects. This belief often skews the publics expectations to the point where juries are less likely to convict if no forensic evidence is presented at trial, even if there is a preponderance of other evidence. While its true that forensic science can provide powerful and compelling evidence, its only one piece of the puzzle that police and prosecutors use to do their jobs.

A New Beat

After three years of active service, I learned that the University of Pittsburgh had started a new degree program in forensic chemistry and was looking for police officers with chemistry educations. My undergraduate degree was in chemistry, so I applied and was accepted. During my schooling, I was fortunate to be granted an internship in forensic biology at the Pittsburgh and Allegheny County Crime Laboratory. While there, I developed a true passion for forensic biology, and I am grateful to the forensic science mentors I had the privilege to learn from for being such an inspiration to me.

Here I am filling out a complaint report from a citizen while working as a plain clothes officer (no pun intended) at the Ann Arbor, Michigan, Police Community Relations Bureau.

In the early 1970s, crime laboratories in the U.S. were still analyzing human forensic biological evidence using mostly blood types. That genetic marker system divides the population into only four major groups (A, B, O and AB, known together as ABO), and nearly 90 percent of the time the tests returned either type O or type A. As a result, forensic biology was not very discriminating, and its value to investigators and the courts in answering questions of identification was extremely limited. We could eliminate individuals as the source of the biological evidence, but that was about it. Although there were a handful of other genetic marker systems that we could use to further zero in, like Rhesus (Rh, commonly referred to as positive and negative) testing and hemoglobin testing, they were seldom used in practice in those days.

Making an Impression

After completing my masters, I returned to Michigan and took a job with the state police as a forensic biologist. Shortly thereafter, I took a five-month sabbatical to study forensic biology at the Metropolitan Police Forensic Science Laboratory (Met Lab) in London, England, in 1975. Walking through southeast London surrounded by more than 1,000 years of history on my way to work each day was incredibly awe-inspiring. What I found inside the Met Lab turned out to be even more awe-inspiring.

I was astounded by all the new electrophoresis technology under development there (electrophoresis is a technique that uses electric fields to separate molecules by size and electric charge so they can be used to identify people). They were routinely using more than a dozen different inherited traits from blood proteins and enzymesbleeding edge stuff for the time.

The power of this new approach to forensic biology was mind-boggling, and I knew that I was witnessing a technological revolution in the world of criminal justice.

I was eager to share these new developments with my colleagues in Michigan, but we faced our own challenges. First, the Met Lab had a large staff and could finish testing in less than a week on average. The U.S. had many smaller laboratories spread across the country and, with rare exceptions, were staffed with only a half-dozen or fewer forensic biologists. Second, small blood and body fluid stains in most cases did not contain enough proteins to test all 16 different inherited traits if those markers had to be tested one at a time.

In 1976, I joined a research team at UC Berkely which received federal funding to develop a sleeker and faster methodology for using these multiple genetic markers in addition to ABO. The FBI taught the new system that emerged from that effort to its visiting scientists, and by the 1980s, more than 130 crime laboratories across the country were using it.

On the Case

Recognizing the potential of DNA testing to help investigators and criminal courts identify possible sources of forensic biological evidence, I left the government in 1989 to work for one of the first private forensic DNA enterprises. I began in the marketing department, serving as a liaison between our DNA laboratory and police, prosecutors, defense attorneys and crime laboratories trying to give everyone a basic understanding of just what the heck DNA is and how it could help identify people.

One of the more well-known cases I oversaw work in the private sector was the O.J. Simpson case, which arguably served as the watershed event that made forensic DNA testing a household term in the U.S. While serving as the executive director for laboratory operations, it also fell on my shoulders to serve at the organizations media spokesperson during our labs involvement in analyzing the DNA evidence in the Simpson case, the Unabomber (Ted Kaczynski) case and the JonBenet Ramsey case. Appearing in more than 150 TV interviews during the investigation of those cases was truly more challenging than giving expert testimony in criminal courts!

In 2008, I started as director of the Office of Law Enforcement Standards (OLES) at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). It was the thrill of a lifetime to join NIST, an organization with scientists with whom I had collaborated and respected throughout my career in forensic science.

Two of the more famous investigations I participated in were the O.J. Simpson murder trial and that of Ted Kaczynski, known as the Unabomber. The Simpson case in particular catapulted DNA forensics into the mainstream in the U.S.

Credit: Los Angeles Police Department, FBI

Bringing It All Together

Today, NIST has a wide-ranging forensic science program aimed at strengthening the methods and practices used in crime labs in the U.S. and around the world. As part of our forensic science research program, NIST scientists are developing advanced methods for analyzing fingerprints, ballistics, DNA and digital evidence, among others. We also support the Center for Statistics and Applications in Forensic Evidence (CSAFE), which is working on new statistical methods that will help forensic investigators to describe more accurately how strong the evidence is in a given case. This will allow juries to weigh the evidence appropriately when deciding guilt or innocence.

NIST is also leading a major effort to promote the development of standards and best practices at forensic laboratories. That effort is run through the Organization of Scientific Area Committees for Forensic Science (OSAC), a voluntary organization of more than 500 members representing 25 forensic disciplines, plus experts in scientific research, statistics, law and policy. Getting this large and diverse group of professionals to work together effectively toward their common goal is a major challenge. Its also my job. As the director of OSAC Affairs for NIST, I support and coordinate the efforts of this group as they build a new future for forensic science that is based on technically sound and robust standards.

Advancing forensic science methods through cutting-edge research and developing sound, science-based standards are among the most critical challenges in the criminal justice system today. When I started walking my beat in Ann Arbor 50 years ago, I could hardly have imagined that I would one day have the privilege of working with world-class scientists and industry leaders as they tackle these important issues.
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The high demand for doctors by Ghanas population has led to the establishment of medical schools like Accra College of Medicine. The establishment of medical schools in Ghana began in 1975 after the establishment of the School of Medical Sciences in KNUST. In 2006, the University for Development Studies (UDS) School of Health Sciences was developed. In 2009, the University of Cape Coast also set up a medical school. The principal aim of setting up these medical schools was to train doctors and nurses to handle health issues. Therefore, if you are thinking of joining one of the medical schools, then Accra College of Medicine should be your choice. Below is a detailed information about Accra College of Medicine courses, fees, and entry requirements.

Accra College of Medicine is among the prestigious medical schools in Ghana. It is a world-class facility. The location of Accra College of Medicine is Rose Avenue, East Legon, Accra, Ghana. It has invested in technology and the implementation of innovative and practical learning aids that provide the students with an opportunity to have a first-hand experience of advanced medical practices. This is significant in dealing with a broad diversity of diseases and patients. Accra College of Medicine courses are designed in a manner that the teaching staff is motivated to educate and teach a new generation of healthcare professionals.

READ ALSO: Valley View University distance learning programs

About Accra College of Medicine

The Accra College of Medicine (ACM) was established in 2013 with the primary aim of providing cutting-edge medical education in Ghana. The institution offers world-class training in medicine. It is also research-oriented and is concerned about solving health problems in Ghana and other parts of Africa. Medical professionals from the institution are passionate about the community. This explains the approach used by the college to solve health problems. The primary aim of the college is to train medical practitioners who will be competent. The trainees are trained to be ethical, innovative and great educators on matters of health and wellness. They are also meant to be scientists who are committed to making a difference in society.

The Accra College of Medicine is different from other medical schools because it provides its students with a collaborative learning experience which is driven by the critical value of "Heart-Power." We train our students to prioritize the needs of the patients to improve customer experience.

READ ALSO: Anglican University College of Technology courses and admission requirements

Accra College of Medicine programs

Courses offered at Accra College of Medicine are categorized into:

Preclinical science courses

Clinical Science courses

Elective Courses

Preclinical science courses

Preclinical science courses are compulsory. They include:

Applied Chemistry

Applied Physics

Human Biology

Mathematics and Statistics in Medicine

Creative and Critical thinking

Learning methodology

Scientific & Academic writing

Communication Skills

Medicine, Patients, and Society

History of Western Medicine in Ghana

Early Development of the human cells, genes, and molecules

Cardio-respiratory system

Endocrinology & Reproduction

Gastro-intestinal & Hepatobiliary system

Genito-urinary system

Skin & Locomotor system

Brain and Mind

Haematopoietic & Lymphatic System

The Medical Entrepreneur

Medical Ethics and Professionalism

Clinical Science courses

Clinical Science courses provide the students with an opportunity to understand the aspects of patient-centred care and clinical practice. The courses offered to the students during the period are divided into three major areas:

Clinical Care

Community Care

Ethics, Physicianship, Heart Power and Professionalism

The courses for the three clinical sciences are:

Introduction to clinical practice

General surgery

Child health

Womens health

General medicine

Elective courses

The elective courses would be taken during the long inter-semester breaks (between the end of one academic year and the next four (4) weeks). These elective courses are divided into three groups. You will be expected to choose one course from each group during the period.

Group I: The Medical Humanities

Singing

Musical instruments

Spirituality, Health, and Healing

Medicine and Literature

Medicine and Developmental Economics

Group II: Modern Languages

Spoken Medical French

Spoken Ghanaian languages (for Ghanaians; the choice will be one that is not their mother tongue).

Group III: Community Service

Each group of students or a single student is expected to choose a community to offer voluntary service to; a service that will uplift the community.

Accra College of Medicine fees

Below is a schedule showing fees of Accra College of Medicine which should be paid by each student for the academic year 2018/2019.

The above fees schedule have the total amount that both Ghanaian and international students are expected to pay for both postgraduate and undergraduate programmes. The institute has a right to change the fees without first notifying the students. However, the changes should be approved by the governing council before they are implemented. You should note that all students are required to have a medical insurance.

Accra College of Medicine entry requirements

There are two entry opportunities to the Accra College of Medicine for both postgraduate and undergraduate students. Below are the entry requirements for Accra College of Medicine.

Undergraduate entry requirements

Accra College of Medicine aims at providing the highest quality of medical education in Ghana as well as in other parts of Africa. The institution targets high performing students with a science background from senior high school. The students should have a desire to pursue a programme in medicine. Foreign students who want to pursue a programme in medicine are also welcome to apply.

You can, therefore, apply for admission if you meet the following qualifications:

Senior Secondary School Certificate (SSSCE/WASSSCE)

Baccalaureate (French)

International Baccalaureate (IB)

GCE (Cambridge) O and A Levels

IGCSE (Cambridge) O and A levels

American High School Grade  Grade 12 and 13 examinations

Other external qualifications which have equivalences to the SSSCE/WASSCE as determined by the National Accreditation Board will be considered.

You should also have obtained an average of 12 or more points in six subjects in the WASSCE/SSSCE examinations. You need to have passed the core subjects Mathematics, English, Integrated Science, and Social Studies as well as three elective subjects (Chemistry, Biology, Physics or Elective Mathematics).

If you satisfy the general requirements for admission under the A Level of the G.C.E. or the equivalence in Science (Chemistry, Physics, and Biology/Mathematics) with an average of 7 according to the University of Ghana, you can also apply for admission.

You should understand that all undergraduates will enter at Level 100 (first year) of the programme.

Graduate entry requirements

Accra College of Medicine provides degree holders with the same opportunity as undergraduate students to pursue medicine at the graduate level. The degree holders should have the necessary qualifications to be considered for admission. You should have a good first degree (minimum of a second class upper) in a science related course.

You will also be considered for admission if you have good qualifications in liberal arts and you have taken a university-level science course. You should also pass an entrance examination and an interview.

The following student background will determine the level of acceptance:

Graduate students with a background in any science discipline will enter at level 200 (the second year) of ACM. He or she will, however, still have to take selected Level 100 (first year) compulsory courses.

Liberal arts graduates as defined above will enter at level 100 (first year).

Entry requirements for all applicants

All applicants will be required to pass an entrance test and interviews before being given admission. The interview will confirm the students' level of admission including other exempted requirements. Representatives from the institution will be present on the interview panel.

All the applicants should be computer-literate and understand how to use tablets, search engines, how to access internet databases and have an ability to communicate through e-mail and other electronic media.

How to apply

Local applicants

Local applicants can choose to apply onsite or online:

If you want to make the onsite application you should:

Visit the campus at East Legon. Pay the application fee and pick up an application form.

You should then fill the form with the required details and attach copies of all documents requested.

Submit the completed form at the campus.

Wait for a call from the college to schedule the date for the entrance exam and interview.

If you decide to make an online application, you need to make payment for the application form at any Zenith Bank using the following details;

Account Name: Accra College of Medicine

Account Number: 6011208587

Branch: Labone branch

Then, follow the following procedure to apply:

Find the application form on the website.

Open it and fill in the all the details.

Upload all the required documents and receipt of fees as evidence of payment.

After filling the form and attaching the required documents, submit it online.

The institution will verify your application and communicate the date for entrance exam and interview.

Note that the application fee and entrance exam fees are as given below.

GHS 300.00 for the application fee.

GHS 500.00 for the entrance exam and interview fee.

Foreign applicants

Foreign applicants should make payment for the application form using the account below and follow the same online application procedure given above:

Account Name: Accra College of Medicine

Account Number: 6041208272

Bank Name: Zenith Bank Ghana Limited

Branch: Labone

SWIFT Code: ZEBLGHAC

Sort Code: 120108

Contact information

Telephone +233 303 961 788/303 967477

Email: info@acm.edu.gh

Accra College of Medicine is the best Universities for you to achieve your dream of becoming a medical doctor. The institution provides quality education and training to its students in order to improve health care in the community. Enrol today to get the best training ever in matters of health and medicine.

READ ALSO: Catholic University College of Ghana fees and programs offered

Source: Yen
Kwame Nkurumah University of Science and Technology is about to commence it's intake for new students for the 2020/2021 academic year. You might be there wondering, when will KNUST admission list be released and how will you be able check it and access your admission letter?

In this article we have answered all these and other important questions. Youll just have to read and follow the simple instructions outlined and get your questions answered.

About Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology and its admissions

Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology is a public university in Ghana. The university was established in the country in 1952 and currently has a population of more than 42,000 students. The university is located in Kumasi, Ashanti region in Ghana. You can visit the universitys website to view more about the university. The university is currently admitting students for undergraduate, postgraduate and distance and sandwich learning modes of which we are going to take a look at below.

KNUST admission 2021/21

The admission list of Kwame Nkrumah University is usually released between August and September every year. The admission list comes in batches. This is to inform you there is no need of panicking if you fail to find your name in the admission list, just try and check your name on supplementary batches. Names of successful applicants have already been released and the admission list is now available online.

How do you check whether you have been admitted to the university? The process is quite simple. All you need is a web browser to check your admission status by following these quick steps:

1. Visit KNUST admissions portal

2. The next thing is to select your category since there are many categories outlined there on the universities website. The various categories outlined there are such as

International applicants

SSSCE / WASSCE applicants

Fee paying applicants (SSSCE / WASSCE)

Mature/ other/ Ghanaian with foreign results applicants

Fee paying applicants ( Mature/ other / Ghanaian with foreign results )

Applicants from less endowed admission

3. You just have to recognize your category and click on it and then get to view the full list of successful applicants. The list of successful applicants is well displayed with the course one is admitted for.

KNUST admission list for undergraduates

A huge number of students got admitted under the SSSCE/ WASSCE application. It can be quite tedious if you were to look for your name in that list since it has more than 7000 students who are listed there. You can however choose to filter your search by typing your course of admission to make the work simpler.

IDL KNUST admission list

KNUST distance learning admission list was also successfully uploaded online in the university's portal. To check if you are in the list you will have to click on the distance learning applicants in the university's admission portal. Also get informed about the university's admission time table and other important announcements by visiting the Institute of distance learning portal Kwame Nkrumah University.

KNUST graduate admissions 2020

The approved list of admitted applicants for postgraduate students is also well available in the university's admissions portal. The list has a total of 2535 students pursuing various masters and doctorate degrees. Use this website to check whether your name is on the list on the postgraduate section.

READ ALSO: KNUST online application 2020-2021

KNUST admission list for international student

Kwame Nkrumah University is open to all international students who wish to study in Ghana. You can get the list of successful applicants of international students from the website.

KNUST contacts

In case you dont find your name on the admission list and feel that you need to contact the schools admission desk through the contacts;

Tel: +233 -3220- 60444/ +233-3220- 61831

Fax: +233 -3220- 60137

Email: admissions@knust.edu.gh

How to access your admission letter

The second thing after checking whether you were successfully admitted to the university is getting your admission letter.

The admission letter contains details pertaining the course you have been admitted to take, the duration of that course and some of the instructions that you will be required to meet when attending the university on the admission day. You can access your admission letter through the University's admissions portal.

Click on the category which you applied in i.e. International applicants, diploma applicants, SSSCE/ WASSCE applicants, postgraduate or any other category that you are in. Then click the category and look for your name in the list. After you have found your name and confirmed that you have been admitted to the right course click on the view details section. Enter your login id and pin and get to view your admission letter in the website.

READ ALSO: Knust admission 2020/2021

With the information provided, it in now easy to check all the details regarding the KNUST admission list 2020-2021.

Source: Yen
Knowing about the effects of abortion is very important. These effects can be short term or long term. If you know the effects, then chances are that you will know whether to do it or not. Abortions can be done medically. But, due to the societal expectations, many people are afraid to abort especially if there are medical complications involved. There are times that the doctor will recommended that the foetus growing inside should be removed to avoid complications or the death of the mother. Other reasons why abortion is carried out include unplanned pregnancies, lack of resources to raise the child, pregnancy out of rape and poor decision making among others. Whatever the reason is for abortion, it is always necessary to seek the doctors advice.

Deciding to abort or not can take a toll on your emotional and psychological well-being. At one point, you will be thinking about the implications of your actions, that is, the effects of abortion. On the other hand, you could think that it is only through abortion that you can avoid life threatening complications or end an unwanted pregnancy. Then, there is also a lot of pressure from the society. You are afraid that people will call you names. You also become afraid of not getting children in future when you will desperately need them. For these reasons, it is wise to seek advice from doctors so that you can make a wise decision.

Effects of abortion

Some people have undergone successful abortions that have not had any effects on them. However, there are other women who have had to endure short term and long term effects and complications due to the methods of abortion they might have used. This article discusses the effects of abortion.

Physical effects of abortion

Here are some of the effects and complications that one may experience in the body.

1. Abdominal pain and cramping

If the abortion was not successful, you might experience abdominal pain that will not go away easily. You could also experience cramping and this can be quite uncomfortable. Period-type of pain should not be a cause for alarm. However if it extends to more than two weeks, you should see a doctor.

2. Nausea

It is also possible for you to feel nauseous. If this feeling is intense, you might end up feeling ill and you should see the doctor again.

3. Excessive bleeding

If an abortion is successful, you are not supposed to bleed. Therefore, if you find yourself bleeding excessively, there must be a problem that needs fixing.

4. Vomiting

After an abortion, you could also vomit especially because of the nauseous feeling.

5. Diarrhoea

You can also diarrhoea. When it becomes intense, see the doctor again. Remember that these symptoms can really take a toll on your body leaving you weak. Therefore, if you experience any of them, rush to the hospital immediately. These are the side effects of an unsuccessful abortion.

6. Infections in the womb

If you have an infection in the womb, it means that you might experience complications when pregnant. The good thing is that the doctor can administer antibiotics which can remove the infections.

7. Death

You could also die if the correct procedures are not followed. There have been cases whereby some women died due to excessive bleeding or some other complications.

The effect of abortions on future pregnancies and fertility

If the abortion is carried out successfully, you should not be afraid of getting pregnant again in the future. As a matter of fact, a woman can get pregnant within a short period after the procedure. As such, it is wise for a woman to use contraceptives if they do not intend to get pregnant.

However, your fertility and the chances of getting pregnant in future can be affected if there is a womb infection. This particular happens if the infection is not treated soon enough. This infection can spread to other parts of your reproductive system such as the fallopian tube and the ovaries. This condition is usually known as Pelvic Inflammatory Disease (PID).

When you have Pelvic Inflammatory Disease, you can become infertile. Also, there are chances that you could have an ectopic pregnancy, one that grows in the fallopian tubes.

It goes without saying, therefore, that if you experience any of the abortion effects listed above, you should seek medical advice. The doctor will know the kind of treatment to administer so that the effects do not develop.

Note that carrying out abortion several times is not healthy for you. In future, you are likely to give birth to a premature baby. Taking care of a premature baby can affect you emotionally and financially, which is why you should avoid aborting as much as possible.

Emotional effects of abortion

Abortion, most of the times is usually a personal choice. However, it is never an easy process and women are emotionally affected in different ways. Notably, emotional effects of abortion are very common as opposed to the physical effects. Physical effects such as bleeding can be dealt with immediately. But with emotional effects, you might have to keep fighting battles in your mind for a long time after the abortion. This explains why you need to consult with your doctor or counselor before aborting.

One of the main reasons you are likely to experience emotional effects is due to the belief you had a baby. There are some people who believe that a foetus is not a baby and thus removing it is not bad. If you have this attitude, then you will not suffer emotionally. Then, there are other people who believe that from the moment they conceive, they are carrying life inside them. To them, aborting is killing an innocent child. If you carry this belief, you will be emotionally and psychologically tortured for quite a long time.

READ ALSO: Who is the minister of health in Ghana?

Listed below are some of the emotional and psychological effects of abortion;

1. Regret

You are likely to regret why you carried out the abortion. After the abortion, it becomes clear to you that carrying the child was not really a bad idea. This goes ahead to haunt them.

2. Anger

After aborting, some people tend to resent themselves. They create hatred due to the thought that they are murders. Such people can project their anger to others thus ruining their social relationships. They probability of harming themselves is also fairly high.

3. Shame

Abortion due to other reasons save for medical complications makes people ashamed of the action. The situation gets worse especially when people learn about it.

4. Loss of confidence

Aborting a foetus because someone was afraid of what the future would be like makes them lose confidence. They might start questioning their ability to handle challenges or mistakes in the future.

5. Insomnia and nightmares

Sleeping becomes a problem when the thought of the child strikes them.

6. Depression

One may fall into a deep state of regret, hence get depressed due to the action. At this state, the person is capable of doing anything to themselves that may hurt them so bad or even kill them.

Perhaps, one may feel relieved that the pregnancy is finally out, and considers this as one of the good side effects of abortion.

Summary: Emotional effects can be worse than physical effects. Encourage someone going through this to seek help from a counselor or stick by them.

Conclusion

Whether aborting is bad or not depends on your personal beliefs. However, you must be ready to face the short term and long term effect of your actions. The physical effects such as diarrhea, bleeding, cramping, vomiting and nausea can be treated with antibiotics. Contrary, the emotional effects can take a toll on you. This is the reason why you must do a lot of soul searching to know if aborting is the best choice for you. Determine if you can handle the effects of abortion. If the doctor says that there is no way out, you need to comply.

Disclaimer

The information in this article is not intended or implied to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. All content including text, graphics, images, and information contained on or available through this page is for general information purposes only.

READ ALSO: Ghana Health Service in need of doctors

Source: Yen
Kuami Eugene is known as the youngest achiever in the Ghana Music Industry.

He is also popular because of his sweet hit songs from Angela to Wish Me Well.

However, Kuami Eugene has come under massive criticism following what fans call his poor fashion sense.

READ ALSO: Emmanuel Tagoes baby mama accuses him of faking DNA test result of their 14-yr-old son

Some fans mocked him for dressing like an SHS student, while others said he does not dress the way he was expected to have dressed.

Kuami Eugene was also in the news for descending on a social media user who claimed that he does not understand why he dressed poorly.

The Angela hitmaker responded by telling the fan to ask sensible questions.

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However, YEN.com.gh has observed from recent photos shared by Kuami Eugene that he has indeed stepped-up his dress and fashion game.

The photos, as usual, have attracted massive comments from his fans and followers, but this time full or praises and not criticisms.

YEN.com.gh brings you five of these photos which prove that Kuami Eugene has improved massively in his fashion choices.

READ ALSO: GMB Akua finally reveals why she married 'old' millionaire Dr Oteng of many wives

1. In this photo, dazzles in a blue-black suit.

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2. In this photo, Kuami Eugene matches his pair of shoes with his shirt.

3. Kuami Eugene is the real 'rockstar' in this photo.

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4. Kuami Eugene dazzles in this photo as well.

5. While looking good in this photo, Kuami Eugene also flaunts his car.

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Meanwhile, Kuami Eugene has been making strides since his giant entrance into the music scene just last year 2017.

His debut 'Angela' was an instant hit song.

Kuami Eugene won the 'New Artiste of the Year' award at the 2018 Vodafone Ghana Music Awards.

He also has collaborations with Shatta Wale, Mz Vee, Tic, just to mention a few.

READ ALSO: Nana Kwaku Bonsam exposes top pastor who allegedly put actress in a family way

Kofi Annan Farewell Ceremony: Ghana Says Goodbye to Kofi Annan - Ghana News Today | Yen.com.gh

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Your stories and photos are always welcome. Get interactive via our Facebook page

Source: Yen.com.gh
Have you heard about the great food, hospitable population and great music in Poland? If not then now you have. Famous for its delicacies, spectacular music and beautiful and very hospitable people Poland is among the most popular states in Central Europe. Looking for facts about cities Poland or a destination for the holidays or to grow your geographic knowledge? Then this post is just right for you.

List of cities in Poland

The Republic of Poland is located on the central region of Europe. The country covers an approximate area of 312,696 sq.km therefore positioning itself among the most popular countries in Europe. Below is the list of cities in Poland, their population and their city area (from the largest to the smallest).

1. Warsaw City

Palace of Culture and Science, Warsaw

Source: UGC

Warsaw is the capital city, and also leads in the list of big cities in Poland. It is also the most populated with around 1,753,977 residents placing it in the eighth position on the list of most populated cities in the European Union. Warsaw City covers an area of 516.9 sq.km while its metropolitan covers an area limit of 6100.43 sq.km. It was granted the city rights in the year 1323. Surprisingly; Warsaw is ranked a major tourist destination and the wealthiest capital city in Central and Eastern Europe. The city is also ranked 32nd in the worlds livable cities.

2. Cracow City (Krakow)

Cracow is the second largest city in Poland with a population of around 765,320 residents. The city covers an area of 326.8 sq.km with a population density of 2327/sq.km. Coincidentally, Krakow has been the capital of Poland between the 7th century and the year 1596 but its population declined. It was granted the city rights since the year 1257 .It is popular for polished academics, improved living standards and culture reservations. However, Krakow has been ranked the most beautiful and unique city in the world.

3. Lodz City

Museum of odz City

Source: UGC

Lodz is the third largest city, therefore among the names of cities in Poland, with a population of 690,422 residents as per the 2017 findings. Lodz has a city area of 293.25 sq.km and a population density of 2400/sq.km. It was granted the city rights in the year 1423 with Piotrkowska street being the citys landmark. The city is located at the central region of the Poland and south west of Warsaw and has 36 districts. Before Poland gained independence, Lodz was a very small city but doubled its population between 1823 and 1873 when the Jewish ethnics established several industries within the city. Unfortunately, the population lowered due to war, diseases, low life expectancy, and low infertility rate among other reasons.

4. Wroclaw City

According to the 2017 findings, Wroclaw had a population of around 638,364 residents placing it in the fourth position of the biggest cities in Poland. Wroclaw covers a city area of 292.92 sq.km. Similarly, the city was issued with the city rights in the year 1214. Interestingly, the Mercer consulting Company ranked Wroclaw city among the top 100 cities in the world for the nature of life. Wroclaw hosted IFLA annual conference and the world games in 2017 among other functions.

5. Poznan City

Colorful renaissance facades on the central market square in Poznan

Source: UGC

Poznan is among the oldest and largest cities in Poland. Poznan is estimated to have a population of 550,000 inhabitants. It is a city rich in trade, sports, education, technology and tourism. In the past, the city has hosted Poznan International Fair which is the largest fair in Europe. The city was established in 10th century and received the town rights in 1253 and its coverage area is estimated to sit in 261.85 sq.km.

6. Gdansk City

Azamara Club Cruises

Source: UGC

Gdansk is also among the major cities of Poland, based on the Baltic Coasts .It was issued with the city rights in the year 1263. The city has a population of around 463,754 residents positioning it in the top ten list of the Polands cities. Similarly, the city settles on an area limit of 262 sq.km. Gdansk, has old age buildings constructed since the Hanseatic League which are located along the Ulica Diugi street and the Diugi Targ market. These buildings have categorized the city among the major tourist attraction destinations.

7. Szczecin City (pronounced settin in Germans and Swedish)

Castle of the Pomeranian Ksit, Szczecin

Source: UGC

Szczecin is among the major cities of Poland holding a population of 405,657 according to the 2015 findings. However, it covers an area of 301 sq.km with a population density of 1300/sq.km.Szczecin was also issued with city rights in the year 1243 due to its rapid growth. In 2016, Szczecin City became a candidate for the European Capital of Culture.

8. Bydgoszcz City

Poor Clares' Church, Bydgoszcz

Source: UGC

Bydgoszcz is also among the popular cities of Poland with a population of 350,614 residents and a population density of 21000/sq.km as per the 2014 findings. This city however covers an area of 175.98 sq.km therefore putting it at the 8th position in the list of Polands largest cities. Bydgoszcz City was established before 1238 and issued with the town rights in the year 1346. The Church of Assumption of the Holy Virgin is the oldest building the popular landmark of the city.

READ ALSO: List of cities in Austria, size and population

9. Lublin City (pronounced Lublinum in Latin)

Lublin The Krakowska Gate

Source: UGC

It is a major city of lesser and a capital of Lublin Voivodeship province. According to the 2011 statistics, the city has a population of 349,103 residents and a population density of 2400/sq.km. Lublin covers an area of 147 sq.km. It was issued with the city rights in the year 1317. The analytical financial times group categorized Lublin among the best business cities in Poland. However, the city is known of having high standards of living with the largest IT companies such as eLeader SP Z.O.O settling their regional offices in Lublin.

10. Katowice City

Katowice is the tenth largest city of Poland with a population of 297,197 residents according to the 2017 findings. It was issued with the city rights during the year 1865. Similarly the city settles in an area of 164.67 sq.km with a metropolitan population of 5,294,000 residents. Katowice diversifies in religion and cultures due to it being inhabited by the poles, Silesians, Moravians, Czechs and Germans. It is also the second biggest business center in Poland organizing tens of international trade fair per year.

11. Bialystok City

Mother of God in the tower of the church of Saint

Source: UGC

Bialystok City is also among the major polish cities and the largest city along the north east of Poland. It was issued with the city rights in the year 1692 and has 28 districts. Bialystok has a population of 297,338 as per the 2017 and a metropolitan population of 430,000. The city settles within an area of 102.12 sq.km. On the contrary, Bialystok demolished majority of the ancient buildings completely.

12. Gdynia City

Gdynia is also a polish city with relatively modern buildings. The city area is around 135 sq.km with a population of 247,799 and 1,080,700 residents as per the 2014 findings. Gdynia was issued with city rights since 1926 and has 22 districts. Historically, Gdynia was a small farming city for centuries until 1918 when Poland gained independence. The polish government proposed a construction of a sea port in the region which attracted foreign tourists and investors which increased the population rapidly to an extent of being categorized 12th largest city of Poland.

13. Czestochowa City

City Hall Czestochowa Poland

Source: UGC

Czestochowa is the 13th largest city in Poland. The city covers an area of 160 sq.km with a population of 227,270 residents according to the 2016 findings. Similarly, the city has a population density of 1400/sq.km and a metropolitan population of 400,000 residents. Czestochowa has 26,000 registered companies represented by the Regional Chamber of Commerce and Industry in Czestochowa. Interestingly, the city has been ranked the main tourist destination due to the numerous Souvenir shops which attracts millions of tourists. Finally, Czestochowa is subdivided into 20 neighborhoods each headed by a member of council.

14. Radom City

St .Wenceslaus church, Radom City

Source: UGC

Random is also among the popular cities of Poland located along the East  Central of Poland with a population of 219,703 residents according to the 2013 statistics. Similarly, it has a population density of 2000/sq.km and a metropolitan population of 371,000 inhabitants. The city was granted the city rights in the year 1364. Some of its ancient buildings include; St. Wenceslaus Church (Built in 13th century), St John the Baptist Church (13th century), the city hall (18th century) among others.

15. Sosnowiec City

Sosnowiec city center

Source: UGC

This is the 15th largest city of Poland. According to the 2017 findings, Sosnowiec has a city area of 91.06 sq.km with a population of 204,013 inhabitants. Also, its population density is 2200/sq.km with the population of the residents in the urban centers being 2,746,000 and those in metropolitan areas being 4,620,624 residents. Finally, the Sosnowiec City was issued with the city rights in the year 1902.

16. Torun City

Torun is the 16th largest polish cities located in the northern region of the country. The city was granted with the city rights in the year 1233. Consequently, it is the oldest and the most beautiful city in Poland which holds a population of 202,591 residents according to the June 2016 statistics. Torun, covers an area of 115.75 sq.km with a population density of 1800/sq.km and a metropolitan population of 297,646 residents. This city is subdivided into 24 districts, and has 6 medical hospitals to serve its residents and those in the surrounding regions.

Other major cities in Poland

Within the same context, below are other major cities in Poland which have a population below 200,000 residents.

Kielce City has 197,704 residents Rzeszow City has 187,422 residents Gliwice City with 182,156 residents Zabrze City with 175,459 residents Olsztyn City with 172,993 residents Bielsko-Biala with 172,030 residents Bytom City with 169,617 residents Zielona Gora with 139,330 residents Rybnik City with 139, 252 residents Ruda Slanka City with 139125residents Tychy City with 128,351 residents Gorzow Wielkopolski City with 123,995 residents Dabrowa Gornicza City with 123,995 residents Dabrowa Gornicza City with 121,802 residents Plock City with 121,295 residents Elblag City with 121,191 residents Opole City with 118,722 residents Walbrzych City with 114,568 residents Wloclawek City with 118,432 residents Tarnow City with 116,118 residents Chorzow City with 113,678 residents Kalisz City with 108,031 residents Koszalin City with 107,376 residents Legnica City with 104,754 residents

Conclusively, there is no difference between a city and a town in the polish system. Therefore, there are other 891 cities with a population of less than 100,000 residents.

READ ALSO: List of cities in Spain

Source: Yen
- The IGP, David Asante Appeatu, has ordered a DNA probe into the disappearance of a police officer, L/Cpl Michael Odonkor Adamtey

- Until his disappearance, he was a bodyguard for COP John Kudalor, who later became Inspector General of Police (IGP)

- According to his wife, also a police officer, she returned from the barracks common bath house to meet an empty room, as her husband was nowhere to be found

The Inspector General of Police (IGP), David Asante Apeatu, has called for a DNA probe into the disappearance of a police official, L/Cpl Michael Odonkor Adamtey.

L/Cpl Adamtey, who uses the staff number 38222, until his disappearance, was the bodyguard of a former Director of Operations of the Ghana Police Service, COP John Kudalor, who later became Inspector General of Police (IGP).

The Police High Command has therefore began scientific investigations into the mysterious disappearance of the policeman, which occurred nine years ago.

Source: Supplied

Source: UGC

READ ALSO: Police grab 70-year-old leader of armed robbers; seize drugs and more

Speaking about the matter, David Asante Apeatu, expressed his unreserved commitment to see through the investigation of this matter.

On September 22, 2009, L/Cpl Adamtey, who lived at Tema Newtown, prepared his uniform and boots ready for the days duty.

According to his wife, also a police officer, she returned from the barracks common bath house to meet an empty room, as her husband was nowhere to be found.

Meanwhile, his police accoutrements, service identity card and Ghanaian passport were intact in the room.

No stone was left unturned in the lookout for L/Cpl Adamtey, including spiritual searches, all to no avail.

His family also got involved by providing financial and physical supports to boost the investigation.

The police administration, as a procedure, declared him a deserter with an inquisition ongoing.

READ ALSO: Ibrah One reveals how NAM1 uses Menzgold;s money

In 2011, two years after the disappearance, workers of the Tema Metropolitan Assembly (TMA) while desilting a choked gutter in Tema New Town, discovered human bones in the manhole of an educational institution.

As part of the investigation, the bones were deposited at the Crime Laboratory of the Criminal Investigations Department (CID) of the Ghana Police Service.

The parents of the missing policeman were invited to the Forensic Laboratory, where their blood samples were obtained pending further action.

The facility was to establish the Deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) of the bones, but for unexplained reasons, that did not happen.

The police boss, a renowned forensic scientist, stated that the administration will ensure that the needed assistance is given for the laboratory to determine the DNA of the found human bones. According to the IGP, a report from the forensic analysis would inform the next line of action, which could be the declaration of the disappeared policeman as dead, otherwise the search continues.

He stated that if that unfortunate situation arises, then the detectives would change their method from search to investigate murder.

READ ALSO: Woman, 53, shot dead at her shop by armed robbers

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- Kennedy Agyapong, has backed the governments moves to clean up the financial space

- The MP said the NPP administration was wary of how the DKM saga, among other struggles within the financial sector, affected the NDC ahead of the 2016 elections

Member of Parliament for Assin Central, Kennedy Agyapong, believes government is doing the right thing by ensuring that Menzgold complies with the law.

According to him, the New Patriotic Party (NPP) administration will not be slow to act like the opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC) did in the case of DKM.

Menzgold has been in the news in recent weeks following disagreements with some state institutions regarding its operations.

Assin Central MP, Kennedy Agyapong

Source: UGC

READ ALSO: Why Shamima Muslim dislikes Kuami Eugene's Wish me well chorus

The issue took another twist two weeks ago following a directive from SEC to have the company shut down its gold trading activities.

Menzgold has since suspended its gold vault businesses, sparking fear from its customers about losing their investments.

Mr. Agyapong, though, has backed the governments moves to clean up the financial space and believes Menzgold should not be left out.

It [the Bernie Maddof scandal] is no different from what is happening, the maverick MP said on Adom TV.

Whether panic today or tomorrow or yesterday, they have to feel it so that next time, when someone offers an investment, you are more careful; because of greed you chase after 12 percent monthly interests, he added.

Explaining why the public should not interfere in the Menzgold, saga, the lawmaker said it is necessary for the gold dealership firm to be checked in order to avoid another Ponzi scheme hitting the nation.

READ ALSO: Amidu turns down request to probe Mahama, Debrah over suspicious Ghc40m BOST cash

You cant fight the Securities and Exchange Commission because we need to regulate this. If not, well get to the point where it is like DKM, which we in the NPP campaigned on and we have learnt our lessons.

If we just sit for some financial institutions to mess up, they [the people] will blame us, the MP said.

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Controversial Prophet, Kumchacha, has intimated that the directors who contributed to the collapse of Capital Bank including the founder of the International Central Gospel Church (ICGC), Pastor Mensa Otabil, must be jailed.

Following the collapse of the bank, Pastor Mensa Otabil, broke his silence, specifically, his role in the collapsed bank as Board Chairman.

He explained in a statement issued on August 14, 2018 that, during his non-executive role as a Board Chairman of the bank, some decisions that were made turned out well while some did not turn out as anticipated.

Prophet Kumchaca (Photo credit: Ghanaweb.com)

Source: Original

READ ALSO: I'm not afraid of Shatta Wale - Michy

"As far as I can tell, everything was done with the best of intentions and the interest of various stakeholders in mind.

"My foremost concern, as has been the case over the past year, is for the well-being of those who lost their jobs and those who may have been adversely affected in any way as a result of these developments. My heart goes out to them and to their dependents. I continue to pray for Gods guidance and sustenance as they navigate the course of their lives," he stated in the nine-point statement.

READ ALSO: Spraying money in public is my way of sharing my 'achievements' - Money Beast reveals

He concluded in the statement, that he will continue to cooperate with the state institutions probing the collapse of the bank.

However, founder of the Heavens Gate Ministries, Prophet Kumchacha, in a conversation with Sammykaymedia.com sighted by YEN.com.gh said all members on the board who contributed to the collapse of the bank must be jailed.

READ ALSO: I married Dr Kweku Oteng out of love and his humility  Akua GMB

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About 24 hours after the Eagle prophet predicted carnage around the Accra Mall, no such thing has happened and Ghanaians have not heard from the spiritual leader.

Earlier on Wednesday, September 19, 2018, a video surfaced on social media capturing the General Overseer of the Gods Crown Chapel, Prophet Reindolph Oduro Gyebi, warn of an impending explosion around the Accra Mall.

The prediction was expected to be fulfilled by 12 noon. Oduro Gyebi warned of dire consequences for life and property in the vicinity of the Accra Mall off the Spintex Road.

But as at the time of going to press which was after 12 noon, YEN.com.gh can confirm that no such explosion has occurred. Indeed, business in that area has not seen any change on Thursday.

READ ALSO: Accra Mall to explode in fuel tanker explosion on September 20 - Eagle Prophet warns

The spiritual leader whose congregation is based in Kumasi, is yet to offer an explanation as to why his deadly prediction has not actualised.

The story sent shock waves through the Ghanaian social media space. Within hours of our publication, thousands of people had viewed the story and offered comments on Facebook.

It is interesting to note that the Ghana Police Service did not treat the matter as a security threat. In previous times, similar predictions of a deadly nature have had people invited over investigations.

READ ALSO: Do not give allowances to trainee nurses and teachers - Prof Stephen Adei tells gov't

There is no of telling how this would hurt the reputation of Oduro Gyebi. He has in the past claimed credit for predicting other unfortunate happenings in the country.

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- A 2nd year KNUST student, Clinton Adusei Mensah, has been tried by Circuit Court for impersonation

- He is reported to have taken a WASSCE exam on behalf of one Isaac Baah who registered for the exam

- Mensah admitted the offence and has been accordingly charged

A second year student of the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), Clinton Adusei Mensah, has been sentenced by a Circuit Court for impersonation.

According to a report by MyNewsGH.com, Mensah was convicted at the Bekwai Circuit court for WASSCE impersonation contrary to section (a) and (b) of the West Africa Examination Council Act 719 of 2006.

The case, which was presided by his Lordship Frederick Nawura, fined the suspect 50 penalty units.

Source: Supplied

Source: Depositphotos

READ ALSO: Police grab 22 armed robbers led by a 70-year-old man; retrieve weapons, drugs and more

A failure to pay the fine will result in a six months prison sentence slapped on the suspect.

The suspect was grabbed on September 8, 2018, at Bekwai Roman Catholic Basic School Examination center, where he was impersonating one Isaac Baah to write the Mathematics paper of WASSCE NOV/DEC exams.

According to sources, he wrote the exam with the index number 1059523551, which belonged to Baah, who had registered for the exams.

YEN.com.gh understands that the Bekwai WAEC monitoring team went to Bekwai Catholic Basic school Examination center on inspection of candidates writing the NOV/DEC  WASSCE exams, where they discovered the illegality.

They found the suspect writing a paper and upon inspection and verification, realized that his photograph differed from that of Baah.

He was consequently arrested and handed over to the police, for criminal investigations to commence. Mensah has since admitted the offence and has been accordingly charged.

READ ALSO: IGP orders investigations into a 9-year-old disappearance of a police officer

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- Prophet Reindolph Oduro Gyebi, has cautioned the Akufo-Addo administration against acts of corruption in his government

- According to him, there is darkness surrounding the government and it will get worse if care is not taken

- He explained that the creation of the office of the Special Prosecutor was the creation for such 'attacks'

Popular Ghanaian prophet, Reindolph Oduro Gyebi, has cautioned President Akufo-Addo against corruption in his government.

According to him, some corrupt people in public offices are causing Ghana to sink into darkness.

If this is not dealt with, he went on, there will be catastrophic consequences that will cause harm to Ghanaians.

Prophet Reindolph Oduro Gyebi, also known as the Eagle Prophet Source: Supplied

Source: Depositphotos

READ ALSO: KNUST student in hot waters for writing Nov-Dec for WASSCE candidates

Speaking on Kasapa FM, a radio station, he added that there is a conspiracy by his political opponents and these elements within to bring down his administration into a dark abyss.

I had a revelation lately and Ive seen the president riding on a very shining star while his compatriots from across Africa were hailing him.

However, I saw some enemies who were trying to pull down the star and crush it. I must tell you if Akufo-Addo does not take care, his own people will destroy him.

These are the people he trusts so much and kept them in very strategic positions. Theres darkness lurking around the nation if the president fails to act quickly. he disclosed.

The message follows an earlier one given by the founder of Glorious Word and Power Ministries International, Prophet Isaac Owusu Bempah months ago.

Owusu Bempah is reported to have stated that some detractors and saboteurs of state were scheming to assassinate the President, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo.

The man of God disclosed that the creation of the office of the Special Prosecutor was the reason for this diabolical plan.

READ ALSO: Police grab 22 armed robbers led by a 70-year-old man; retrieve weapons, drugs and more

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Music as an art and business is a a very exciting but difficult task. As such, there are too many stories of talents and companies that have crashed after beginning spritely their adventure into music.

As such, YEN.com.gh compiles a list of five artistes who have managed to release hit after hit in and over the last 10 years years. These names are not just popular but they are associated with quality too.

Many artistes have been quite popular in the last few years and that would make some feel like these artistes have been around for 10 or so years. An example is Shatta Wale who is not included in here.

READ ALSO: No explosion at Accra Mall as predicting prophet goes silent on Thursday

1. Samini

Samini is a man from the late 1990s. He has demonstrated his ability to switch between genres from ragga to highlife.

It was inconceivable to have drawn the list without Samini. His ability to drop hits after hits has not gone unnoticed.

2. Sarkodie

Around 2006, very few would have given the young and skinny man from Tema any chance of being one of the biggest musical talents from Africa in 10 years. Sarkodie wrote his name in gold a bit too easily.

But if you are a talented rapper who marked your time and took your chances, no one should fault you for reaching greatness so quickly. Sarkodie is now being talked about as perhaps the best ever Ghanaian rapper.

3. Daddy Lumba

Perhaps, he has not been consistent as the rest of the names in this group. But Daddy Lumba no less deserves the spot.

It can be said that the true mark of genius is how Lumba can leave the scene every two years after dropping a hit that would last for 20 years. That is why he is here.

4. Becca

Becca is the only female artiste on our list. And rightly so.

If the industry is thought to be hard, it should be said that it is much harder for women. And so for Becca to remain as the female music act in Ghana in the last 10 years is a testament to her strength and talent.

READ ALSO: A-Plus tell Nana Akufo-Addo that no one forced him to make 18-month promises

5. R2Bees

R2Bees have mass appeal because apart from their music, they have swag. They bring something to the table that makes them appealing to an ever younger population.

The duo are definitely Ghana's best group in the last decade or so. We can say this with very little struggle.

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- An Islamic cleric, Mallam Shamuna Ustaz Jibril, has claimed that John Mahama will be Ghana's next president

- According to him, it is bound to happen, come rain or shine, the NDC will win the 2020 elections

- He however added that it may change, depending on God's will

A popular Islamic cleric, Mallam Shamuna Ustaz Jibril, has predicted that Former President John Mahama will be Ghanas next president.

According to him, the National Democratic Congress (NDC), of which Mahama has expressed his desire to lead, will win the 2020 elections.

YEN.com.gh understands that Mallam Jibril has accurately predicted a number of events, the latest being the results of the 2016 elections.

READ ALSO: Police officials grab 22 armed robbers led by a 70-year-old man; weapons and drusg seized

The NDCs flagbearer, Mahama won 44.4% of the votes and the New Patriotic Party (NPP)s Nana Akufo-Addo secured 53.9% to become president.

Besides, per my spiritual calculations, dreams and other related spiritual signals all point to the fact that the NDC will be victorious in the upcoming 2020 elections, he said.

He went on to say that The NDC should not take this prediction for granted and fold their arms but must work harder and pray for the prediction to manifest physically.

In his opinion, come rain or shine John Mahama will be once again be president of Ghana.

He however added that the NPP should not give up as the prediction is not a revelation from God. He went on to say that no condition is permanent, and for that reason, God may change the situation.

In that regard, he stated that he will inform Ghanaians if he received a new message from God.

READ ALSO: KNUST students in trouble for writing Nov/Dec for WASSCE students

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Prophet Reindolf Oduro Gyebi of the God's Crown Chapel has said that his previous prediction of a catastrophic explosion at the Accra Mall, is no longer going to happen.

The man known as the Eagle Prophet says his prayers prevented the explosion from happening.

The prediction was expected to be fulfilled by 12 noon. Oduro Gyebi warned of dire consequences for life and property in the vicinity of the Accra Mall off the Spintex Road.

But as at the time of going to press which was after 12 noon, YEN.com.gh can confirm that no such explosion has occurred. Indeed, business in that area has not seen any change on Thursday.

READ ALSO: No explosion at Accra Mall as predicting prophet goes silent on Thursday

The spiritual leader has gone on to predict dire consequences for the President if certain conditions are not met.

Source: UGC

As reported on Rainbowradioonline.com, the spiritual leader said: "We have prayed and still praying. We have anointed the Accra Mall, used oil to reverse the evil machinations of the enemy and red wine representing blood to reverse the incident. Ghanaians should not be afraid because God has intervened.

Meanwhile, the Eagle Prophet says some corrupt people in public offices are causing Ghana to sink into darkness. If this is not dealt with, he went on, there will be catastrophic consequences that will cause harm to Ghanaians.

READ ALSO: These are the five Ghanaian artistes who have been big for the last 10 years

The congregation head is therefore warning President Akufo-Addo to take heed to his caution lest something horrible befell his government.

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The decision by government, that Chinese firm, StarTimes, will provide infrastructure for digital terrestrial television has generated controversy in Ghana in the last two weeks.

This week, government through the Ministry of Communications announced that the Chinese firm will amongst others distribute decoders to 300 villages.

StarTimes initially blew their chance to supply and install the Digital Terrestrial Television (DTT) network platform for Ghana after their contract signed in 2012 was cancelled by government in 2015.

President of StarTimes Group, Pang Xinxing met President Nana Akufo-Addo in Beijing for the Summit of the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation.

Source: UGC

READ ALSO: Legalize marijuana - Kwame Sefa Kayi calls on government

But latest information from quarters of the government indicate, the Chinese outlet have been given a new deal by the Akufo-Addo administration.

A development which is generating serious conversation on the airwaves. YEN.com.gh presents three key reasons why governments deal with StarTimes is bad.

1. Ghanaian business (Media) will suffer

Nobody signs a deal which is not beneficial to their cause. In this deal, the Chinese government and StarTimes seem to benefit in several ways. The Ghana Independent Broadcasters Association (GIBA) have raised concerns on how the deal will affect their businesses in the long run.

"We advise the government to back out of whatever deals it has entered into with StarTimes, which as earlier stated, will negatively impact broadcasting in our nation  Ghana. We sincerely ask that broadcasting should be left out of the Chinese agenda, portions of GIBAs statement read.

2. Chinese will manipulate our content

It is believed that allowing the Chinese firm take over or space in Ghanas media circles will eventually push lots of Chinese content down the throat. StarTimes will show content that will project the values of the Chinese people. In the long-run, we will have Ghanaians patronising more Chinese made products and probably doing away with Ghanaian products.

3. Arguments have not been convincing

The Deputy Communications Minister, George Andah has been explaining what the StarTimes deal entails. But he has not been convincing enough.

A contract signed by the government with StarTimes in 2012 was cancelled in 2015 after the Chinese firm failed to supply and install the Digital Terrestrial Television (DTT) network platform for Ghana.

The government later signed a new deal with a Ghanaian-owned company K-NET who did the work for $82.4m which is $13m less than the failed Chinese offer.

StarTimes sued the government but lost. The Akufo-Addo government went back for a $1.5bn Chinese facility which was clinched by the Mills government in 2011 but never came.

Mr Andahs argument is that "I am sure you know how the Exim facility works? It is tied to a supplier that China determines. How do you accept any condition because you need a loan facility?"

Mr Andah adds that StarTimes is in the country this time to do "enhancement" work to that which was done by K-NET.

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A two-time failed presidential candidate in general elections in Ghana, Akwasi Addai Odike, has described the Ghanaian Parliament as containing no one with the "sense" to effectively help Ghanaians.

The United Front Party (UFP) politician, according to Mynewsgh.com, was on Angel FM discussing national issues.

Odike reportedly ignored all caution from the host of the programme after he was reminded that Parliament could take action against him. His response was that he was not a coward.

READ ALSO: No explosion at Accra Mall as predicting prophet goes silent on Thursday

In the report, the politician is quoted as saying: If a parliamentarian is sensible in his community when he or she gets to the house of the legislature he compromises his or her senses on decisions the house makes turning Parliament into a rubber stamp.

We are not cowards speaking. I am saying that if they have sense when they get to Parliament they compromise their senses to the detriment of the citizenry. We are not in Ghana today.

"If cash is coming to parliamentarians, NDC and NPP MPs will all come together and endorse it When a decision will affect the entire country they will take partisan lines. This is what is going on."

READ ALSO: These are the five Ghanaian artistes who have been big for the last 10 years

It is not clear if the Privileges Committee of Parliament will invite the politician to answer to his attacks on them. In the past, individuals like sitting lawmaker Ken Agyapong have been called due to similar comments.

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Source: Yen
The Koforidua Circuit Court A has sentenced the senior matron of Ghana Senior High School (GHANASS), Comfort Oduro Bruce, to a fine of GHC 17,600 for stealing food items belonging to the schools kitchen.

She was convicted to 700 penalty units which are equivalent to GHC 8,000 in addition to an amount of GHC6,000 to be paid into the schools account.

Her accomplice, Alfred Kuma, a driver with the Ghana Education Service (GES), was also fined 300 penalty units, equivalent to GHC3,600.

Source: adomonline.com

Source: UGC

READ ALSO: NDC will win the 2020 elections - Top Islamic cleric declares

In default, the convicts would serve a 4-year prison term.

Bruce, was, last year, arrested together with Kuma, when they were caught transporting the food items by the security man in the school, Kofi Kangyaga.

YEN.com.gh earlier reported that they were charged with the offence and subsequently granted bail.

Source: adomonline.com

Source: UGC

Prosecuting officer with the Attorney Generals office, Dickson Donkor, told the Court the accused persons attempted to smuggle quantities of food items from the school with a Pick Up belonging to the Regional Education Directorate to an unknown destination.

However, upon a tip-off, the security man on duty arrested the duo and school authorities handed them over to the police, led by Inspector Clement Ebow Philips, for prosecution.

Source: adomonline.com

Source: UGC

The suspects pleaded not guilty to charges of stealing and abetment of crime when they were put before a court.

The court presided over by Her Honour Janet Anima Marfo, however, found them guilty of the offences.

Source: adomonline.com

Source: UGC

In her ruling, the judge further directed that the unwholesome items which include bags rice and sugar be set ablaze while the rest of the food items returned to the schools kitchen.

READ ALSO: Police finally grab 22 armed robbers led by a 70-year-old man; weapons, drugs and more seized

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Source: Yen.com.gh
The Minister of Energy, Mr Peter Amewu, believes that the recent hike in fuel prices would have been worse if not for the interventions of the government.

Mr Amewu indicated the government saw it fit to mitigate the hardship on Ghanaians.

According to the initial report from Starrfmonline.com, Mr Amewu hoped that Ghanaians would know the true picture of affairs and be thankful of the government's contributions.

He cited among other things, the reduction of the Special Petroleum Tax from 17.5% to 13% as contributing to keeping prices within the Ghanaian's purchasing power. He said the Akufo-Addo-led government deserved this credit.

READ ALSO: The Ghana Parliament contains no one with sense -Akwasi Odike fires

According to the Energy Minister Peter Amewu, prices of fuel would have been worse but the government intervening

Source: UGC

Mr Amewu is quoted as saying: "Without government interventionprices today, would have been GH5.54 per litre for petrol and GH5.55 per litre for diesel.

So, what it means is that the price we are paying today, if the Mahama-led administration is still in force, youll be paying quite close between 9-10percent higher than the current prices that Ghanaians are paying.

I think its time you give this government the recognition for caring for the people of this country."

READ ALSO: Police arrest 23 armed robbers and seize various items from them

Petrol and diesel are selling currently at GH5.18p and GH5.14p per litre respectively.

The politics surrounding fuel prices are as old as Ghana's fourth republic. Successive governments have been known to campaign on reducing prices although Ghana is mostly under the mercy of international fuel trade.

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Source: Yen
- EOCO is chasing former government appointees over massive rots leading to financial loss to the state

- EOCOs probe started following a forensic audit into the financial transactions of these institutions under the previous John Mahama administration

The Economic and Organised Crimes Office (EOCO) is on the heels of some former Chief Executive Officers of some state-owned institutions for misappropriation of funds.

According to a memo sighted by YEN.com.gh , former CEOs of Ghana Free Zones Board (GFZB), and the Microfinance and Small Loans Centre (MASLOC); Kojo Twum Boafo and Sedinam Tamakloe are to account for monies embezzled under their watch.

Also, Mr Kwame Kingsley Awuah-Darko, a former Managing Director of the Bulk Oil Storage and Transportation (BOST) was cited by the report for same.

READ ALSO: Why Shamima Muslim dislikes Kuami Eugene's Wish me well chorus

The forensic audit commissioned by Cabinet revealed certain anomalies during the tenure of the above mentioned.

The report stated that, Mr Twum Boafo is expected to account for an amount of GHS3,919,622.00, equivalent to $1,622,821; while Ms Tamakloe is expected to account for GHS3,193,592.00.

READ ALSO: NPP won't allow a 'DKM experience' - Ken Agyapong

And lastly, Mr Kwame Kingsley Awuah-Darko is expected to account for GHS109, 498, 565.00 equivalent to $33, 305, 527.00.

EOCO after three 'Mahama CEOs' for GHS117m

Source: UGC

Details of the audit have been forwarded to EOCO to act on them.

Is Kofi Annan an Example for All? - Ghanaians Speak | Yen.com.gh

READ ALSO: Three reasons why the StarTimes deal is bad for Ghana

Know someone who is extremely talented and needs recognition? Your stories and photos are always welcome. Get interactive via our Facebook page.

Source: Yen
By Kane Wu, Julie Zhu, Sumeet Chatterjee, Anshuman Daga, Reuters | Sep. 19, 2018

China's HNA Group is in talks with banks to find a buyer for its CWT logistics unit, nine months after it acquired the Singaporean business in a US$1 billion deal, several people familiar with the matter told Reuters.

The sale, if completed, would be the latest in a series of divestments aimed at slashing debt at the aviation-to-financial services conglomerate. HNA has attracted much scrutiny for its US$50 billion worth of deals in recent years that included hotels in the United States and a stake in Deutsche Bank.

For CWT, HNA is targeting a non-Chinese buyer, three sources said. Another person said only a part of CWT would be put up for sale. The sources declined to be named as HNA's talks with investment banks for a buyer were confidential.

An HNA spokeswoman declined to comment.

The group completed the acquisition of Singapore-based CWT in December last year via a wholly owned subsidiary - HNA Belt and Road Investments Singapore.

The CWT business, spread across 90 countries, was folded into one of HNA's listed units in Hong Kong that was renamed CWT International Ltd.

Besides logistics, CWT operates a commodity marketing business and also provides engineering services primarily in Singapore through a subsidiary.

"Some parties are conducting due diligence on CWT," said one of the sources.

In July, the Hong Kong-listed CWT International said it had entered into a pact to sell and lease back five warehouse properties in Singapore for S$730 million (US$533 million).

CWT International also said in its interim results that it had "certain borrowings", raised to fund the purchase of Singapore's CWT, due this month that it would be unable to repay unless it was able to get "sufficient cash sources" through refinancing.

Asset Divestment

Recent asset sales by HNA, which counts Hainan Airlines Co as its core business, include holdings in companies such as Hilton Worldwide Holdings Inc, Park Hotels & Resorts and Spain's NH Hotels.

In August, Japan's Orix Corp struck a US$2.2 billion deal to buy a 30 percent stake in HNA's aircraft leasing business Avolon Holdings, the world's No. 3 lessor.

HNA is also open to sell its stakes in Deutsche Bank, Virgin Australia Holdings and shipping container leasing company SeaCo, which it acquired in 2011 for US$1 billion, according to separate sources.

The HNA spokeswoman declined to comment on this.

Assets not related to HNA's core aviation business are being sold, several people close to the group have told Reuters.

The conglomerate's total debt stood at US$96 billion at the end of the first half of 2018. While this was 10.7 percent below end-2017 levels, its total debt to EBITDA was still 21.36 times by the end of June.
China Aviation Daily | Sep. 20, 2018

Lufthansa crews are soon taking off in traditional Bavarian costume - just in time for Munich's Oktoberfest. As the yearly tradition, Lufthansa's cabin crews are wearing traditional Bavarian costume on selected flights from Munich instead of their uniforms. Additionally, Lufthansa is bringing beer kegs on board to serve fresh draft beer to customers as this year's special treat on these flights. For the first time ever, the crew has participated in developing an exclusive Oktoberfest menu for Business Class customers, that pairs perfectly with the fresh draft beer. This year, the first Lufthansa traditional costume flight will be taking off from the Bavarian capital on September 19, heading for New York (Newark). The second traditional costume flight is on September 25 from Munich to Singapore." And lastly, passengers travelling from Munich to Shanghai on October 6 can also experience this special flight just before Oktoberfest officially ends. There will also be further crews in traditional costumes on selected European flights.

Lufthansa employees in traditional Bavarian costumes

The attire of Lufthansa's long-haul crew was designed and custom-tailored by the Munich traditional costume specialist Angermaier. The Oktoberfest Dirndl worn by the female flight attendants is dark blue with a silver-gray apron and their male colleagues will be wearing short Lederhosen, with a dark blue waistcoat made from the same material as the Dirndl. This is the third year running that Angermaier has dressed the cabin crews to celebrate the largest folklore festival in the world. As in previous years, Lufthansa passengers can also enjoy seeing the traditional costumes on flights departing from Munich to selected European destinations. From October 5 to 7, one of the crews on the Lufthansa CityLine will swap their uniforms for traditional costumes. Their destinations this year are Berlin, Cologne/Bonn, Luxembourg, Pisa, Genoa, Amsterdam, Rzeszow, Timisoara, and Cagliari.

The tradition also continues for Lufthansa employees working in Passenger Services at Terminal 2, as they will also continue welcoming passengers in Bavarian costumes during the Oktoberfest. Instead of the Lufthansa uniform, female staff may wear a Dirndl and their male colleagues can opt for Lederhosen. The service employees in Lufthansa's First Class Lounges will be wearing traditional costumes in black and gold.

Draft beer on board and an Oktoberfest menu created by the flight attendants

Passengers enjoying freshly-tapped beer on Lufthansa flights, goes as far back as the 1960s. Back then, the "Lufthansa Senator Service" served draft beer and now, the beer kegs are coming back on board again this year. An "airworthy" keg was selected specifically for the Lufthansa traditional costume flights. In this special keg, the carbon dioxide pressure is regulated by a valve. This prevents the pressure from becoming too great on board so that tapping the keg can be done even at an altitude of 10,000 meters. And to go with the fresh beer, passengers in Business Class will also be served a special Oktoberfest menu. For the first time, these have been created by Lufthansa's flight attendants in cooperation with the culinary experts at LSG Sky Chefs. The ideas and experiences of the crew on previous traditional costume flights were taken into account while developing the menu. The selection this year includes ox tartare with truffle, followed by char with Riesling sauce and Bavarian cream with pistachio pesto. In September and October, Lufthansa passengers in Business Class can enjoy the Oktoberfest menu on all intercontinental flights.

Oktoberfest in the Lufthansa Lounge

Munich's Lufthansa Lounges are also ready for the Oktoberfest. As was the case last year, more than 4,000 kg of "Leberkase", more than 38,000 pretzels, and about 750 kg of white sausage will be consumed in the twelve lounges located in Terminal 2 and in the satellite building. The Oktoberfest menu in the restaurants of Lufthansa's First Class Lounges, which will be decorated accordingly, will begin with an Oktoberfest soup followed by duck served in a rustic style. For dessert, there will be apricot and plum dumplings with vanilla espuma. The Senator and Business Lounges will offer their guests an "Andechser" goulash soup or mushrooms in cream with dumplings. And, of course, all the lounges will be serving Oktoberfest draft beer.

Oktoberfest box for passengers

Passengers who land at Munich's Terminal 2 during the first weekend of the Oktoberfest will receive a special free Oktoberfest box. It contains everything you need for the festivities - a ribbon for a beer mug, vitamin drink, some salty pretzels, and fruit gummies in the shape of a beer mug.

Contributed by Lufthansa
I am convinced that we are living in an era of change. I see it all around me; people are trying to live with a higher sense of responsibility and a lower course of impact. Green technology has been on the up and up, and if theres one thing Im sure of, its that people really do care. They do! A zero emissions vehicle? Im interested.

If theres another thing I know, its that were all moving at 100 miles a minute, and in order for something to be a viable alternative, it needs to be able to fit into our lives without much sacrifice. Enter Chevy. The Chevy Bolt is a completely electric vehicle that paves the way for affordable, long range EVs.

Lets talk range, as it tends to be the biggest issue with electric vehicles. The Chevy bolt comes in with an impressive 238 miles per charge. Thats about twice as much as most EVs on the market. The only other long-range EVs currently available belong to Tesla. A long-range EV really does alleviate most of the stress that goes along with switching to electric. How often do you go to a gas station?

Youll likely need to re-charge this car less than that. Pretty cool. Something that I noticed is how much the range will fluctuate. The car comes equip with an L mode that saves energy and will actually recharge the battery while driving. How fast you drive, what mode you use, and the outside temperature are all things that will affect your battery. Heat will negatively affect range, particularly when you have the A/C blasting.

On my trip through Idaho with the Chevy Bolt, I travelled from Boise to Ketchum (about 153 miles) through a heat wave and made it with about 20 miles to spare. Now, all factors considered: an 80 mph speed limit, the air conditioning blasting the whole way, and over a 3,000 foot climb in altitude thats downright impressive. On the way back (same speed, a little cooler, decrease in altitude), the charge was barely impacted. I was surprised with just how little charge we used. The battery itself has thermal head management, so it will self-heat or self-cool to keep the battery at safe temperature, even when the car is off.

The price is something that is particularly exciting to me, because it makes this car accessible to most people across the country. This car is cutting edge, environmentally friendly technology at an affordable price. The bolt starts at $36,620 and is eligible for a $7,500 green technology credit, which brings the cost down to about $29,120. Thats the biggest difference between the Chevy Bolt and its long-range competitor, Tesla. Although Tesla plans to release a more affordable version of the model 3, as it stands that car can only be purchased starting at $49,000. Minus the tax credit, thats $41,500 minimum.

Two important cost factors that you may not have considered with an EV are fuel and maintenance. And heres the great news: they are incredibly minimal. As far as maintenance, most customers use L mode, which drastically reduced your use of brakes. That, along with an even weight distribution from the battery being on the bottom of the car, increase the cars brake life drastically. But say goodbye to engine repairs, oil leaks, fan belts, and whatever else is regular wear-and-tear on your typical vehicle. We asked chevy how long the battery life is on the car, and their answer was we dont know. Because none of them have expired yet.

Thats really great news for some cutting edge technology. The vehicle also comes with an 8 year, 100,000 mile warranty just in case. As far as fuel cost goes,the national average for electricity is 12 cents per kWh, and the bolt currently has the most efficient energy consumption for electric vehicles, at 28 kWh per 100 miles. Thats around

8 dollars for a full charge. Thats without any incentives that may be available to you. Here in Los Angeles, many employers and companies let their employees or customers charge for free while working or shopping.

What is charging like? This may seem daunting if you have the travel bug like me. Charging is a lot more accessible than you may think. Chevy has made an effort to include charging stations at their dealerships nationwide. If you live in a more urban city, charging stations are all over the place. If you live in a remote area, you can absolutely hook your car up to an outlet, although time is something youll have to be mindful of. Without modifications, most homes will charge a car at 4 miles per hour.

Installing a level 2 station in your home will provide about 25 miles of range per hour (via charge point.com). Public DC charging stations provide the quickest charges, at 90 miles per 30 minutes. Adding the DC feature is an upgrade of an additional $750. There are multiple charge station apps that you can download. You can find a nationwide community of people willing to share level 2 charging on plug share, or locate public stations with charge point. A lot of people will also seek out National Parks and RV parks across the country for charging between major cities. If you run out of charge, AAA has a mobile charging option to bail you out!

The technology and design on this car is brand new, created and built by the Chevy team in Michigan. The look and feel is surprisingly luxurious. The back is roomy, the interior is modern (equipped with a large smart monitor). As mentioned, the battery pack is on the bottom of the vehicle, so weight distribution is even. You can really feel this when braking. The L mode I mentioned earlier allows for one-pedal driving. So when youre in this mode, all energy is being conserved, and kinetic energy is being re-harnessed while braking. This means that for lower-speed driving, you dont need to use the brake at all. The car stops itself. There is also a hand brake on the steering wheel that will bring the car to a complete stop. This car is a complete re-imagining of the modern vehicle. I was very impressed.

The why: zero emissions. Minimal maintenance. Cost effective. Cool as hell. I am genuinely enthusiastic about this car, and the green technology that it makes available to the general public. And in looking to the future, I would like to add that Chevy has already started to draft a program for recycled car batteries. When I think about a company that is looking forward and giving people a responsible alternative, Chevy has done a truly outstanding job.
Peaceful and Prayerful Pro-Life Witness to be Held Across America and Canada to Call for an End to the Violence of Abortion National Life Chain Sunday 2018 - October 7 For location and time of each Chain in the U.S. and Canada, see www.LifeChain.net



Contact: Royce Dunn, Director, Life Chain, 530-674-5068, Royce@NationalLifeChain.org; www.LifeChain.net; www.NationalLifeChain.org



MEDIA ADVISORY, Sept. 20, 2018 /Christian Newswire/ -- Preparations are underway for National Life Chain Sunday 2018, a peaceful and prayerful pro-life witness to be held on sidewalks throughout the U.S. and Canada on Sunday afternoon, October 7. Last year, 1548 cities and towns joined the annual pro-life event which began in 1987. Participants hold signs that include Abortion Kills Children, Abortion Hurts Women, Adoption the Loving Option, Jesus Forgives and Heals, and Support a Constitutional Life Amendment (in the U.S.).



Church oriented and pastor focused, Life Chain encourages clergy of all Christian faiths to lead their congregations to their local sidewalk route for a time of public witness, solemn reflection, and personal prayer. Non-Christians devoted to pro-life are also welcomed and provided signs. One can follow National Life Chain Sunday 2018's daily growth at www.LifeChain.net and can view the free prep materials at www.NationalLifeChain.org.



Life Chain believes the end of legal abortion rests with us, the church, and that the forces sustaining the killing will yield when we repent and break the oppressive stronghold that blinds and subdues us. Frequent quoting of 2 Chronicles 7:14 will not free us, and neither will prayer used "as a substitute for obedience." To end the literal holocaust that is ravaging our nation, we must adhere, literally, to each requirement in 2 Chronicles 7:14: "If my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and I will forgive their sin and will heal their land."



Will the church commit to that scriptural mandate in 2018-2019? Will pastors throughout America and Canada pray and plead for the church to repent and commit? Will we in the pews value and obey our pastors' pleas? Will we who comprise the church identify and forsake our "wicked ways?"



For a half-centurysince Colorado and California legalized abortion in 1967America has accommodated unconscionable injustice. And what is our stance today? Opinion polls confirm our desire for strong limits on abortion but not for the overturn of Roe v. Wade. To conquer that principality, we need the power that true repentance and righteousness provide: the power of transforming love for helpless, unwanted children who are targeted for death.



National Life Chain Sunday 2018 hopes to draw our minds and hearts to honest self-assessment of our love for abortion victims. Will not the depth of our love determine the future of legal child killing in our church community and nation?



To that end, Life Chain is only one step, but it can be a very valuable step. Aware of that, satanic forces will prod the church in each locale to evade their sidewalk prayer chain on October 7. So please, to all who value our Lord's precious Little Ones (Psalm 127:3), reject the satanic proddings, join the local Chain, welcome God's counsel, and pray that He will anoint and use mightily National Life Chain Sunday 2018.



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California Governor Signs Law Allowing People to 'Aid, Advise, and Encourage' Suicide



NAPA, Calif., Sept. 20, 2018 /



The bill was introduced in the wake of Life Legal's challenge to California's End of Life Option Act. We have said from the outset that physician-assisted suicide is only the beginning. California is following other forced death jurisdictions like Canada, Belgium, and the Netherlands, which garnered support for assisted suicide before legalizing voluntary and involuntary euthanasia.



We refuse to stand idly by as California and the rest of the nation proceed down this deadly path.



For over two years, Life Legal has been battling California's assisted suicide law in the courts. Our opponents are California Attorney General Xavier Becerra, who is in Planned Parenthood's pocket and who charged David Daleiden and Sandra Merritt with 15 felony counts each for exposing the abortion giant's role in the criminal sale of baby parts for profit; and the grossly misnamed "Compassion and Choices," which is the Planned Parenthood of the forced death movement, heavily funded by the likes of George Soros.



We registered our opposition to SB 282 early on, as it grants complete legal immunity to anyone who wants to facilitate the death of someone who is defined as "terminally ill" under California's assisted suicide law. The law defines "terminal" as a condition expected to lead to death within six months if left untreated.



Link to opposition to SB 282.



This means diabetes, high blood pressure, treatable conditionseven an infectioncould be considered "terminal."



California's assisted suicide law allows "interested" witnesses, which include beneficiaries, to sign a person's request for assisted suicide drugs. The new law allows an individual to aid, advise, and encourage a person to commit suicideAND sign off on the method of suicidewhile financially benefitting from the person's death.



SB 282 will give unscrupulous family members and others unqualified immunity to actively participate in the killing of another human being.



We cannot imagine an issue more worthy of attention than the protection of vulnerable life. It is unfathomable to us how so many have remained silent in the face of this radical and dangerous policy shift.



Imagine if the state had passed a law saying it was okay to "aid, advise, and encourage" human trafficking. We would be outragedand rightly so.



But when the state allows any person to actively facilitate the death by suicide of another human being, we say nothing. After all, it's their "choice."



This cannot stand.



We don't say it's okay to allow women to pay doctors to rip their unborn children limb from limb because it's their "choice." We don't say it's okay to allow children to sell themselves into sex slavery because it's their "choice." And we should not say it's okay to allow people to help the vulnerable, the disabled, and the mentally ill kill themselves.



There are some choices that the state simply should not allow.



About Life Legal Defense Foundation

Life Legal Defense Foundation was established in 1989, and is a nonprofit organization composed of attorneys and other concerned citizens committed to giving helpless and innocent human beings of any age, and their advocates, a trained and committed voice in the courtrooms of our nation. For more information about the Life Legal Defense Foundation, visit



Share Tweet Contact: Alexandra Snyder, Life Legal Defense Foundation , 202-717-7371NAPA, Calif., Sept. 20, 2018 / Christian Newswire / -- California governor Jerry Brown signed into law yesterday a bill (SB 282) that allows any person to "aid, advise, and encourage" suicide under the state's assisted suicide law. Until now, these actions were felonies, as the state had a longstanding policy to protect people from self-harm.The bill was introduced in the wake of Life Legal's challenge to California's End of Life Option Act. We have said from the outset that physician-assisted suicide is only the beginning. California is following other forced death jurisdictions like Canada, Belgium, and the Netherlands, which garnered support for assisted suicide before legalizing voluntary and involuntary euthanasia.We refuse to stand idly by as California and the rest of the nation proceed down this deadly path.For over two years, Life Legal has been battling California's assisted suicide law in the courts. Our opponents are California Attorney General Xavier Becerra, who is in Planned Parenthood's pocket and who charged David Daleiden and Sandra Merritt with 15 felony counts each for exposing the abortion giant's role in the criminal sale of baby parts for profit; and the grossly misnamed "Compassion and Choices," which is the Planned Parenthood of the forced death movement, heavily funded by the likes of George Soros.We registered our opposition to SB 282 early on, as it grants complete legal immunity to anyone who wants to facilitate the death of someone who is defined as "terminally ill" under California's assisted suicide law. The law defines "terminal" as a condition expected to lead to death within six months if left untreated.This means diabetes, high blood pressure, treatable conditionseven an infectioncould be considered "terminal."California's assisted suicide law allows "interested" witnesses, which include beneficiaries, to sign a person's request for assisted suicide drugs. The new law allows an individual to aid, advise, and encourage a person to commit suicideAND sign off on the method of suicidewhile financially benefitting from the person's death.SB 282 will give unscrupulous family members and others unqualified immunity to actively participate in the killing of another human being.We cannot imagine an issue more worthy of attention than the protection of vulnerable life. It is unfathomable to us how so many have remained silent in the face of this radical and dangerous policy shift.Imagine if the state had passed a law saying it was okay to "aid, advise, and encourage" human trafficking. We would be outragedand rightly so.But when the state allows any person to actively facilitate the death by suicide of another human being, we say nothing. After all, it's their "choice."This cannot stand.We don't say it's okay to allow women to pay doctors to rip their unborn children limb from limb because it's their "choice." We don't say it's okay to allow children to sell themselves into sex slavery because it's their "choice." And we should not say it's okay to allow people to help the vulnerable, the disabled, and the mentally ill kill themselves.There are some choices that the state simply should not allow.About Life Legal Defense FoundationLife Legal Defense Foundation was established in 1989, and is a nonprofit organization composed of attorneys and other concerned citizens committed to giving helpless and innocent human beings of any age, and their advocates, a trained and committed voice in the courtrooms of our nation. For more information about the Life Legal Defense Foundation, visit www.lldf.org
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Contractarea serviciilor de consultanta pentru consolidarea capacitatilor OSC-urilor partenere din regiunile Cahul si Ungheni in vederea implicarii pro-active in initiativele de promovare a egalitatii de gen si de combatere a violentei domestice
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Market Overview:

Frozen Fruits offer the convenience of having our favourite fruit all year round, at an affordable price. Some Frozen Fruits companies provide the best products that give the feeling like they were frozen while fresh. With retained colours and flavours these brands also have detailed labels on the packaging giving the details of ingredients and products nutritional value rating. For Some companies, it could even be better than fresh regarding nutritional value while some brands fail to understand the value of frozen food and that, in some cases have added sugar or other ingredients that might be best to avoid. Frozen Fruits, by large are providing required nutritional values to the people with heady and busy lifestyles. More the urbanization; greater the Frozen Fruits market is becoming.

The percentage share of the frozen fruits compared to the total consumption of fruits is very less. However, the percentage share varies from region to region, comparatively high for developed markets like Europe and U.S. Advancements in technology and improved supply availability in the developing markets like India and China has led to strong growth opportunities for the market. Hence, the frozen fruits market is expected reach ~ and is expected to grow at CAGR of more than 5.34% from 2016 to 2027

Fruits are wasted due to its natural deterioration process, and low grade storage process. Frozen fruits can be preserved for a long period of time due to increase in the shelf-life. Hence the frozen fruits market is growing rapidly. North America is emerging market, accounting for 4.31 million tons and is projected to grow at a CAGR 1.86% by 2027.

Access Report Details @ https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/reports/frozen-fruits-market-1751

APAC will witness maximum growth in the water melon market followed by North America. However, volume wise market size will continue to be higher under APAC region with more than 60% share. With increasing disposable incomes in India and China and growing demand for frozen and processed products will drive higher demand as it is easy food. The tedious process of cleaning and peeling is eliminated, making it easy for direct consumption. Countries where there is shortage of fresh fruits, frozen and packed fruit are preferred. Because freezing preserves food, no unwanted additives are required in bags of frozen goodies like strawberries.

Industry/ Innovation/ Related News:

3 November 2017 - ITC Ltd. (India), a diversified company (the cigarettes-to-shampoo company) launched packaged potatoes under a new brand called Farmland in its first step into the fresh fruit and vegetables segment. ITC also has a presence in foods with staples, spices, ghee, and ready-to-eat meals, plans to launch frozen fruits and vegetables, ready-to-make versions, and may introduce sauces, dips and condiments later.

6 November 2017 - Farmer and entrepreneur Frank Tiegs (US) announced that he has been expanding his frozen fruit business with purchases of Rader Farms of Lynden, Wash., and Willamette Valley Fruit Co. in Salem, Ore. in Oregon and Washington.

Major Key Players:

The global Market of Frozen Fruits appears to be highly competitive but consolidated. Many large and small key players operating in the market are churning the competition to gain competitive advantage. To sustain their market position these players incorporate acquisition, collaboration, partnership, expansion, and technology launch. Manufacturers operating in the Frozen Fruits market strive to develop a state of art manufacturing facilities where they can make all their products from carefully sourced raw materials right in their own facility.

This report includes a study of strategies, of major market players. It includes the product portfolios, developments of leading major players such as Dole (U.S.), Ardo NV (Belgium), HJ Heinz (US), Simplot Australia PTY Ltd (Australia), General Mills (U.S.), Findus Sverige AB, (Sweden), Pinnacle Foods Corp. (US), and Bonduelle Group (France).

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Industry Segments:

Global Frozen Fruits Market is segmented in to 5 Key dynamics for an easy grasp and enhanced understanding.

Segmentation by Type: Comprises - Melons, Drupes, Tropical Fruits, Prune Fruits and Other Fruit.

Segmentation by Form: Comprises - Whole, Puree, Topping, Other Processed Forms.

Segmentation by Packaging: Comprises - <10 Kgs., 10-15 Kgs., 15-30 Kgs., 30 Kgs.

Segmentation by Application: Comprises - Fruit- Whole Fruits, Fruit Juices & Smoothies, Breakfast Cereals, Desserts, Bakery Foods, Yoghurt and Others.
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The Commando Regiment of the Sri Lanka Army carried out a hostage rescue and counter terrorism operation as part of the Exercise Cormorant Strike at the premises of the Nelum Pokuna Theatre today. State Minister of Defence, Ruwan Wijewardene, Chief of Defence Staff Ravindra Wijegunaratne and Army Commander Mahesh Senanayake were the guests of honour at this event and monitored the exercise in the presence of local and foreign military observers. Pix by Pradeep Pathirana
Mr. Lakshman Silva - CEO of DFCC Bank lighting the oil lamp

DFCC Bank inaugurated its newest branch in Ruwanwella recently, as part of its branch expansion drive in the southern and western provinces. The residents of Ruwanwella can now avail of DFCCs full range of development and commercial banking products and services, backed by excellent customer service and exciting promotions. The latest addition to DFCCs branch network was inaugurated on 20th September 2018 with fanfare by the CEO of DFCC Bank, Lakshman Silva, along with senior representatives and staff from the Bank and well-wishers from the local community. DFCC Bank has blazed a revolutionary trail across the industrial and commercial landscape of Sri Lanka through its unique brand of financial services, which will now be deployed in Ruwanwella as well.

Retail customers in Ruwanwella can look forward to an all-encompassing banking experience, as the Bank offers a variety of retail banking products and services such as current and savings accounts, fixed deposits, loans, pawning services, leasing facilities, NRFC/RFC accounts, credit cards and remittances. The business communities in the area will also benefit from DFCCs expertise in Corporate and SME Banking. These are complemented by the Banks innovative service delivery channels.

Commenting on the banks foray into Ruwanwella, CEO Lakshman Silva said, We are grateful to the town of Ruwanwella for welcoming DFCCs newest branch with open arms. We are proud to be located in a town with such a rich history that is known for housing many sites of archaeological and cultural interest. We look forward to engaging with the local people in the town and in tending to their financial needs with our signature customer service. While DFCC Bank is regarded as a unique commercial banking institution with a development banking forte, it has also engendered an image for innovation. We hope to partner with our customers to discover new opportunities for mutual growth and prosperity.

Mr. Lakshman Silva presenting the first housing loan to customer

DFCC Bank is committed to improving the digital customer experience in order to achieve customer satisfaction, retention, loyalty and engagement. Recognising that technology is changing the way in which Banks interact with customers, DFCC Bank has made great strides in enhancing its value proposition to customers in terms of new and innovative product offerings and enhanced service delivery. In line with this, in the recent past, a variety of technologically advanced products have been introduced by the Bank including the DFCC Virtual Wallet - Sri Lankas first digital wallet in the Banking Sector; Lanka Money Transfer  a cutting edge web-based remittance system; MTeller  a door step banking service and Premier Go  the first interactive premier banking application.

More recently the Bank introduced a state-of-the-art Treasury system to enhance the efficiency of Treasury operations, and DFCC iConnect, a cutting edge Payments Management Solution for businesses of all sizes.

With its innovative approach, dedication to providing superior customer service and the multi-faceted services on offer, DFCC Bank is well poised to keep growing. The Bank has set itself a challenging target for geographical expansion over the next few years and the inauguration of the branch at Ruwanwella takes the institution closer to its objective to facilitate financial inclusion across the country. The new branch at Ruwanwella is located at 183, Avissawella Road, Ruwanwella, and can be contacted via telephone on 0362268770 and 0362267775, or via fax on 0362267677.

DFCC Bank PLC, renowned as a national icon, possesses the expertise of a pioneer development bank and the energy of a dynamic commercial bank. The Bank was recently recognised as one of the Top 10 Most Admired Companies in Sri Lanka by the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants (CIMA) and the International Chamber of Commerce Sri Lanka (ICCSL). DFCC Bank is rated AA-(lka) by Fitch Ratings Lanka Limited.

The first Credit Card facility presented to customer

The first Vardhana Sahaya Loan presented to customer

The new DFCC branch in Ruwanwella
Former in charge of the Terrorist Investigation Division (TID) DIG Nalaka de Silva, against whom allegations had been levelled over his alleged plot to assassinate President Maithripala Sirisena and former Defence Secretary Gotabaya Rajapaksa, had connections with the LTTE, the National Freedom Front charged today.

Addressing a news briefing, NFF National Organizer Jayantha Samaraweera said they had evidence to prove that DIG Silva had had close relationships with LTTE personnel in Chavakachcheri among whom some of them still have contacts with the DIG.

Namal Kumara who is a reliable spy attached to the Sri Lanka Police recently leaked a phone conversation, which was reported to have had with DIG Nalaka Silva, where he has revealed facts related to a conspiracy to assassinate Maithripala Sirisena and Gotabaya Rajapaksa, Samaraweera said.

When the evidence is clear, we cant fathom as to why the Governmnt is not active to take any legal action against Nalaka Silva, he added. (Sheain Fernandopulle)

Video by Susantha
The Sri Lanka Bureau of Foreign Employment (SLBFE) yesterday said the former diplomat who had been recently arrested in Milan was an SLBFE official, and accordingly they had decided to interdict him from the service.

Earlier, the Malpensa Airport Border Police Bureau officials in Milan, Italy had arrested the Sri Lankan who attempted to bring four youths into Italy by aiding illegal migration.

The SLBFE in a statement said the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) had informed them of the arrest and they had identified the apprehended individual was an SLBFE official and was an ex- diplomat.

He was a diplomat attached to the Jordanian and Lebanese Embassies from August 2012 to February 2015. His diplomatic passport was cancelled after the said period. It was revealed that the officer in question went abroad on September 7, 2018 without obtaining prior approval from the bureau and the relevant ministry. Accordingly, the SLBFE has decided to interdict him from services and take disciplinary actions against him, it said. (Kalathma Jayawardhane)
A Ministerial inquiry would be conducted against Inspector General of Police (IGP) Pujith Jayasundera on several complaints received to the Law and Order Ministry regarding his conduct, Law and Order Deputy Minister Nalin Bandara said today.

He told Parliament that the Law and Order Minister Ranjith Maddumabandara had ordered the Ministry Secretary to conduct the investigation against the IGP.

Meanwhile, Deputy Minister Bandara also said neither the President nor the Prime Minister had ordered the IGP Pujith Jayasundera to resign within two weeks as reported in the media.

In response to a question raised by JO MP Kanaka Herath, he told Parliament that the Ministry or the National Police Commission (NPC) had not been informed of such a decision. (Ajith Siriwardana)
The Education Ministry said discussions are underway to hold the G.C.E. Ordinary Level and Advanced Level Examinations in December and to release their results by the end of December before the start of the new school term.

Speaking to the media at the Ministry, Education Minister Akila Viraj Kariyawasam said after the end of the A/L examinations, the University entrance will commence and after the O/L examinations the A/L classes will begin in January.

Preparations for changing the examination dates would be done after discussions with the Department of Examinations. The Ministry is planning to save the childrens waiting time for the examinations and to help the children to get their degrees and post graduate degrees at the age of 25 years. Due to the late issuance of exam results, Advanced Level students are not in a position to apply for foreign university programmes, the minister said.

Thus, he had instructed the Examination Commissioner General to issue the results on fixed dates.

Earlier the Education Ministry had issued fixed dates for the release of Grade Five Scholarship Examination, the G.C.E. Ordinary Level Examination and the G.C.E Advance Level examination results each year.

Accordingly, the release dates of examination results are as follows: G.C.E. A/L on December 27, G.C.E. O/L on March 28 and Grade Five Scholarship exam on October 5. (Chaturanga Samarawickrama)
Shalom, Salaam, peace: Twenty-five years ago, these words reverberated in the White House lawn and were flashed across the front pages of newspapers worldwide, as the adversaries became partners of peace to sign what was then hailed as the peace deal of the century.



On September 13, 1993, President Bill Clinton facilitated a handshake between Israels then Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and the Palestinian Liberation Organisation chairman Yasser Arafat after they placed their signatures on an agreement which was reached after painstaking secret talks facilitated by Norway. Peace at last in the Middle East, thought the peace-loving people, heaving a sigh of relief.



Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall enter the Kingdom of God: The land that witnessed Jesus Christ proclaim these words would no longer see bloodshed, peace zealots thought and wondered whether the time had come to beat swords into ploughshares, and spears into pruninghooks and whether the era had dawned when a nation would not lift up sword against another nation.



Alas! A quarter century later, the Oslo deal exists largely on paper. Even before the white paper on which the agreement was typed turned yellow, the agreement suffered blow after blow. Within years, the much hailed Oslo deal was dumped in the dustbin of history by hardliners opposed to peace; by the arms dealers who profit from wars, by the Zionists who dream of setting up an exclusively Jewish state in the whole of Palestine by expelling all the non-Jews; and by the American neoconservatives who are hand-in-glove with the Zionist lobby.



Jurists may insist that Pacta sunt servanda or agreements must be kept, but who cares when hardline and peace-allergic Israeli regimes are given protection by the worlds mightiest nation, the United States of America. Encouraged by the continuous US support, the Zionist nation commits war crimes and walks free among the civilised nations. Washingtons mollycoddling of Israel undermines the US Constitution which is nourished by the founders ideals of justice, peace and morality. The US action is tantamount to aiding and abetting Goliath to oppress a helpless people crying for freedom and condemned to statelessness.



If Israel had adhered to the Oslo deal in spirit and letter, a Palestinian state would have been set up in five years. In 1979, that is 14 years before the Oslo deal was signed, Israel and Egypt signed the Camp David agreement, in terms of which, Israel was expected to take measures to end its occupation of Palestine. If Israel had not observed the Camp David agreement in the breach, a Palestinian state would have long become a reality, US President Jimmy Carter who facilitated the Camp David talks, later observed in his book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid.



In terms of the Oslo deal, which gave the Nobel Peace Prize to Rabin, Shimon Peres who was the then Israeli foreign Minister, and Arafat, the occupied West Bank was to be divided into Zones A,B and C. Israel was to pull out completely from the Gaza Strip and the Zone A. The security of the Zone B was to be the joint responsibility of both Israel and the Palestinian Authority to be set up, while Israel would be in charge of the security of the Zone C until a final agreement was reached. In terms of the Oslo deal, the thorny issues such as the final status of Jerusalem, the Palestinian refugees right to return, the Israeli settlements in occupied Palestinian lands, and the borders of the two states were to be discussed within five years. The arrangement gave Israel 80 percent of the control in the West Bank, while the Palestinian got a glorified local authority called the Palestinian Authority.



The Oslo deal was conceived at a time when the Palestinians were at a point of despair. They were battered in whichever country they had found refuge in Jordan, they were butchered and in Lebanon, they were massacred. By 1987 Palestinian youths were sick and tired of being labelled as terrorists for launching a freedom struggle, just as many liberation movements had done during the fight against European colonialism. They began an uprising  called Intifada in Arabic  in December 1987. It lasted until the 1991 Madrid Conference, which, for the first time, brought a Palestinian delegation stuffed into a Jordanian delegation face to face with an Israeli delegation. The Intifada -- during which 1,500 Palestinians, including some 300 children, died -- spurred the Oslo-mediated secret talks between Israeli and Palestinian negotiators, while adding pressure on world powers to intensify diplomatic efforts to find a solution.



During this crucial period, Arafat and the PLO denounced terrorism and recognised Israels right to exist, key conditions Israel and the US had placed for direct talks.

Rabin was a willing partner for peace and wanted to give peace a chance. Arafat appeared pragm

atic and agreed to a Palestinian state within the 1967 borders, as had been recognised by the United Nations Security Council resolutions 242 and 338.

But the peace haters scuttled the deal. Four months after the deal, a Zionist extremist massacred worshippers at the Hebron mosque which houses the grave of Abraham, the father of both the Arabs and the Jews. Despite this blow, the peace process led to the September 28, 1995 Taba agreement, also known as Oslo II Accord. Months later, the peace process suffered its biggest blow. On November 4, 1995, Rabin was assassinated by a Jewish hardliner.



His death only increased the resolve of the peace lovers to push the peace process forward. President Clinton made hardline Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to sit with Arafat and sign the Wye River Agreement in 1998. Clintons successor, George W. Bush set up the Middle East Peace Quartet comprising the US, Russia, the European Union and the UN to salvage the peace process. In the meantime, Arafat died in November 2004, allegedly after he was exposed to radioactive polonium poisoning.



President Barack Obama made valiant efforts to beat the odds and revive the peace process. But Israels intransigence and the shrewdness of placing more conditions and pushing the goal post further each time the Palestinians reach it prevented any resurrection of the peace process.



In the present US President Donald Trump, Israeli hardliners have found a willing peace killer. Trump has undone decades of hard work that went into the peace process. In May this year, he recognised Jerusalem as the undisputed capital of Israel in violation of international law and last month he stopped US humanitarian assistance to the Palestinian refugees. Till Trump is ousted, the peace process will remain comatose.
(Colombo) REUTERS: Sri Lanka may have to downgrade its full-year forecast for tea production after output tumbled 14 percent in August from a year earlier due to a prolonged drought, the state-run Tea Board said on Tuesday.



The August decline meant output for the first eight months of this year fell 1.5 percent from the same period a year ago, it said. The fall is mainly because of the drought, Sri Lanka Tea Board Director General S.A. Siriwardena told Reuters, referring to the August data.



There was no rain and the drought has been continuing. We will have to revisit the data and will have to revise the full-year projection.



Industry officials have expected 2018 production to reach 320 million kg.



Tea is Sri Lankas top agricultural export and one of the main foreign currency earners for the US $ 87 billion economy.

Earnings from tea exports for the first six months rose 0.1 percent to US $ 728.9 million, compared with the same period last year. Sri Lankas tea output rose 5 percent to 307.1 million kg last year, recovering from a seven-year low of 292.6 million kg in 2016.



Tea production in 2017 was affected by severe drought followed by flooding and poor application of fertilisers, while a government ban on pesticides and restricted labour added to the sectors problems.
For a long time Ive been dreaming of a photo exhibition spanning the length and breadth of Sri Lanka. Such an exhibition would necessarily cost a lot, in particular since it would cover a whole range of themes and subject matter including, but not limited to, the art forms in this country, from dance to theatre to music and even to that most Western of all objects dart, film. Still, it would be a worthwhile enterprise, especially if its taken beyond the confines of Lionel Wendt and Barefoot and into areas less covered by photographers and exhibitions, and it would do much to educate the people, most significantly the young, of the shapes, sights, and scenes which have coloured this country. There can even be competitions organised.



Photography is an intricate craft. Some of the most ardent lovers of this country, whom I have had the fortune of meeting, are (or have been) photographers. It cannot be a coincidence. There is Tharindu Amunugama. There is Hiranya Malwatta. There is Lakshman Nadaraja. There is Dominic Sansoni. There is Henry Rajakaruna. There is my good friend, Tharosa Rajaratne, who is yet to emerge and who still uses those old roll film cameras. And towering over all of them, there is the late Nihal Fernando.



Whether through a camera or a phone, they have captured the beauty of this island in ways that no self-labelled patriot or populist has. They have rendered a service. They still are rendering a service. Isnt it time we thought about their contribution, and the contribution of their craft towards this tiny, battered, and yet resplendent island?



To be sure, photography costs a lot. Given the right circumstances, it pays a lot too. For a long time, however, it was and is considered the preserve of the wealthy. There is some truth to this view. If you dont have the bucks to spend, if you dont have the luxury of time, photography automatically becomes a way of earning those bucks and that luxury. That is why we have event photographers mushrooming every month or so on social media. That is why even landscape photographers have to resort once in a while to commercial photography. Especially advertising. This is true of a great many art forms. To give just one example, somewhere in the early nineties Lester James Peries earned from an hour-long shoot for a commercial the entire salary that had been paid to him for directing a whole film: Yuganthaya.



As such, the deterioration of this largely technology-driven art into a plastic enterprise bothers me, though it bothers me less than the indifference of the young towards the aesthetics which govern that art. For a great many people I have met, and talked to, photography involves tapping into a particular feature on their DLSRs, fixing a flash, and going on clicking, clicking, clicking. Despite the profusion of courses dedicated to the field cropping up everywhere, it has become as debased as those other art forms which have suffered the brunt of commercialisation. Like music.



Why does this disturb me? Simply because the generation of Nihal Fernando seems to be going extinct. Hiranya Malwatta takes amazing pictures of our cultural sites, but how many share her enthusiasm for the history of those sites? It cannot be that the art no longer inspires practitioners of the craft. And it cannot be that commercialisation is to blame. Someone told a friend of mine that Creativity pierces through plastic. In that respect, isnt it futile to denigrate the deterioration of an entire art on the basis of how it has been debased by commerce? What about those veterans I referred to and mentioned before? Didnt they dabble in commercial photography too?



Around a decade or so ago, there were very few photographers. Fewer professional photographers. Taking pictures was expensive. A person earning 15,000 rupees a month would have to spend a cool third of his salary on developing those pictures. Added to that was the cost of roll films, flashes, and tripods.



Then the great digital revolution transpired. Brands like Sony began marketing compact cameras to the dilettante. Before long, smartphones began tapping into the market. All this fermented a renaissance in the art. In 2004, 18.85 million cameras were sold globally, an increase of 28 percent over the previous year. The biggest sellers were and continued to be digital cameras. It was a trend which would survive the recession, a trend which today has more or less become saturated (in 2010, digital camera sales reached 120 million units, a figure that has dropped drastically because of, among other reasons, a diminishing rate of innovation). Not that it was all beds and roses, of course: Kodak, for instance, had to file for bankruptcy after its belated and failed attempts at adapting to the new world. Still, it was an exciting world.



My point is that before sales picked up, before the market began to saturate, there werent a great many professional practitioners in the field. The result was that we looked forward to the occasional exhibition, the infrequent coffee table book, with unflinching, unconditional enthusiasm. Now we have become indifferent to that exhibition and coffee table book. Not because, to paraphrase a Sinhala saying, cameras have become to photographers what knives are to monkeys, but because quantity has outstripped quality to such an extent that there is a rift between the number of photographers and their knowledge of the aesthetics and the etiquette surrounding what they practise.



The field that has suffered the most is landscape photography. Sure, the Tourist Board and other organisations have made it possible for landscape photographers to flourish. There still are books published on the Dalada Perahera and places like Sri Pada. It is a field that requires tremendous reserves of patience, dedication, care, and love. Not everyone harbours that kind of dedication. And not everyone has the time. Especially not the young. It is a paradox at one level, but even with this dilemma, school level photography has never been more popular than it is now. Clubs are springing up, making use of entry level if not intermediate level Nikons and Canons like never before. Events are being covered and photos taken at those events are being turned into veritable works of art. Exhibitions organised by budding practitioners, including, most prominently perhaps, Pilibimbu (by the Photographic Art Society at Ananda College), are seen every other month in and around Colombo. They display a deep perceptiveness, awareness, and appreciation of photography as a felt art, never for once limited to commercial events. Despite that, there is a problem. It is a problem that has escaped the notice of writers and experts (self-appointed or otherwise) on the subject.



Back when the likes of Lal Hegoda practised and/or wrote on their field, photography was never an art limited to form. The aesthetics governing it was always born out of experience. Actual, tangible experience. Sumitra Peries, who dabbled in photography before turning to filmmaking, once remarked to me that inasmuch as apertures, ISO levels, and shutter speeds are important to such aesthetic activities, form is nothing without experience, and art is the formalisation of that experience.

Photography costs a lot. Given the right circumstances, it pays a lot too. For a long time, however, it was and is considered the preserve of the wealthy



Which is true. The rules that have been written for photography were once tricks of expedience resorted to by the amateur. Some of Cartier-Bressons photographs, for instance, are blurred and hazily so, which had much to do with the fact that the camera he used, a portable Leica, was built more for the unobtrusive street dilettante than the artist that Bresson was. Moreover, many of his photographs strike a delicate balance between careful composition and carefree randomness: the compositions have not been carefully thought out in advance, but are seized immediately as a result of an intuitive awareness. Experience has consequently given birth to form, and form has grown out of the world surrounding that photographer. How can it be otherwise?



And yet, we tend to obsess over art-ifying photography. Even the Ananda College club has been careful to qualify what its dabbling in: its not a Photographic Society, its a Photographic ART Society. Without digging into the niceties of this issue, heres my question: how can we hope to develop the field, especially among the young and the enthusiastic, if this is the sort of confusion weve conceded ground to?



Premasiri Khemadasa once contended that for a human being to become an artist, he or she must traverse the land of his or her birth. As an example, he pointed out how music could be shaped by the many ways someone asks How are you? in parts of the country: patently different in the South and patently different in Colombo. The visual image is, I believe, as endowed with the ability of tapping into such nuances and subtleties. It is time to start thinking seriously about that exhibition, then. Time to pack our bags, leave our comfortable abodes, and start clicking away to our hearts content. Without just considering our cameras as instruments of another art, to be turned into a money-making enterprise detached from experience.
The media must be proactive, truthful and professional and be a partner in progress following ethical guidelines



The DMC under the Ministry of Disaster Management has been leading efforts to enhance disaster risk management



When President Sirisena was invited by former President Rajapaksa to take over the leadership of the SLFP, President Sirisena put certain conditions



We cannot be a party to nepotism



A government cannot be replaced or toppled by shouting anti-government slogans

The Dailymirror recently interviewed Irrigation, Water Resources Development and Disaster Management Minister Duminda Dissanayaka and these were the views he expressed on politics and current affairs.



Q How has the SLFP progressed with its preparations for the forthcoming provincial council, presidential and general elections?



We are keen to ensure a victory for the SLFP at these three elections. The partys reorganization is running in full gear after the setback at the local government elections and as of now we have completed about 90% of the partys rebuilding process at grassroots level. We have formed SLFP executive committees at district and constituency level in which we have given prominence to educated young men and women, professionals, social and community leaders like teachers, public servants, lawyers and doctors.



The SLFP trade unions, women and youth organizations have also been strengthened with new office bearers being appointed. A number of district and constituent organizers who have not participated in party activities and had aligned with rival parties in the past couple of years have been replaced with young and energetic organizers with a good educational background. You may be aware that the SLFP under President Maithripala Sirisena is determined to do clean politics based on policies and principles and not on self-centered politics which has disfigured. Sri Lankas current political culture.



Q Undoubtedly the SLFP will have to face a great challenge from the UNP and the SLPP at the three elections scheduled for next year. Are you ready for the challenge?



I admit that victory for the SLFP at the three upcoming elections will not be an easy task while confronting two major political fronts. Although it may be an uphill task, an SLFP victory is not something impossible if we work hard and put in place a pragmatic, up-to-date and an efficient political strategy. Our immediate target is to gather all progressive and patriotic politicians and political parties round the SLFP and build a strong front to face the two rival parties. The progress achieved so far in this endevour has been encouraging. Dont forget the recent statement made by President Sirisena that neither the UNP nor the SLPP would be able to form a government or win the presidential election without the support of the SLFP.

Even when I was in the UPFA government, I was not in good terms with Rajapaksas. Especially with Mahinda and Basil. I was extremely disappointed, disheartened, dejected and discriminated against



The main vehicle to educate people on the governments development projects is the media but I must admit that we have failed miserably in this department and having said this I must draw attention to the extremely bias nature of media against the government. President Donald Trump has castigated the so-called independent media in the US which is described as a five-star democracy. I wish to tell our media, whether print or electronic that they are even worse. They give prominence to negative, adverse anti-government, anti-President and anti-Prime Minister in their daily news coverage. I will give you a few examples. The government reduced the prices of 74 essential drugs which are used by heart, diabetic and kidney patients and children regularly, thus reducing the monthly medical bill by some 50% or more. In the past the drugs issued to cancer patients was limited to Rs.1.5 million a year. The government has removed the limit and today there are cancer patients who are given drugs worth more than Rs.5 million a year.



The paddy farmers had to face repeated periods of drought since this government took office. The only alternative for the government was to provide them financial relief to mitigate the suffering they were undergoing. The government has paid out nearly Rs.40,000 million as compensation to farmers up to now. In this case the private media highlighted only the sufferings and ill effects of the drought or the occasional drug shortage which were beyond the governments control. This is how the media use the freedom and democracy restored by President Sirisena and the government.



When a person reads a newspaper in the morning or watches the TV in the afternoon, he or she is mostly dished out accounts of mudslinging or character assassinations aimed at the President, the Premier and members of the government with distortions, fabrications, exaggerations, half baked news and absolute lies. What I am trying to say is that the private media is extremely discriminatory against the government and the government has miserably failed to give the people a true picture on whats happening in the country. It seems that the thinking of the media is that only killings, abductions, robberies, thefts, rapes, corruption and frauds are the news people prefer to read or watch. In my opinion, this is very sad and a bad media culture. Media in other countries disseminate better information, news and education on current and global affairs and of human interest to people. Not the kind sensational and low quality information like our media does.

At janabalaya kolombata protest, the participants were asked to shout only for the Rajapaksas and not for any other senior leader of the JO or SLPP like Kumara Welgama, Dinesh Gunawardana, Vasudeva Nanayakkara or even Wimal Weerawansa



I do not say that the media must be pro-government or give publicity only to rosy news. The media must be proactive, truthful and professional and be a partner in progress following ethical guidelines. The media must be bold enough to show the good and bad independently and in a balanced manner. Arriving at conclusions is the peoples right and not that of the media.



Quite in contrast to our media policy, what did the Mahinda Rajapaksa government do to media? The media institutions were subjected arson attacks by thugs, while journalists were threatened, beaten and killed. A large number of media personnel and their families fled the country. There were high profile cold blooded assassinations of well-known veteran journalists and there was no inquiry or legal action on the perpetrators. I believe that Sri Lankas media need to adopt a self regulatory and self-censorship mechanism to rescue the local media out of this mess. I hope Mass Media Minister Mangala Samaraweera will take the initiative in this regard.



Q Is there any possibility of a rapprochement between the Mahinda Rajapaksa led JO or SLPP and the SLFP?



When President Sirisena was invited by former President Rajapaksa to take over the leadership of the SLFP, President Sirisena put certain conditions. He said the SLFP must distance itself from corruption, frauds, embezzlement and nepotism if the concept of Yahapalanaya is to be successful.



Former President Rajapaksa has ruled the country as the executive president for 10 years after serving the country as an MP, minister, Opposition Leader, Prime Minister and finally as the Head of State. What else has he to achieve? I cannot agree with his decision to re-enter politics after his defeat in 2015. He is now only an MP. President Sirisena also took the same path in politics like Mr. Rajapaksa and held many position in various SLFP governments and elected as the executive president. When he decides to retire from politics someday in the future, I dont think he will retract his decision and come back.



Why are the Rajapaksas attempting to convince the SLFPers that there will be no future for the party without a Rajapaksa at the top? Why not they give an opportunity to other senior members of the party? We cant let this happen.



At the janabalaya kolombata protest, the advice to participants was to shout in support of only the Rajapaksas and not for any other senior leader of the JO or the SLPP like Kumara Welgama, Dinesh Gunawardana, Vasudeva Nanayakkara or even Wimal Weerawansa.



Do you know the reason why Mahinda contested from Kurunegala at the General election in 2015? It was because the Rajapaksa family was aware that there was no space in Hambantota for three Rajapaksas to get elected. To ensure Chamal and Namal get elected from the Hambantota District, Mahinda went to Kurunegala. What would have been the situation if the three Rajapaksas contested from Hambantota? We cannot be a party to nepotism.



Q Is the SLFP expecting to amend its Constitution at the partys annual convention to be held next month?



Yes, we are going to introduce a few amendments to the party Constitution that would reflect current political, social, cultural and global requirements. The party has appointed a few temporary office bearers for the purpose. We held religious ceremonies on a low key on August 23 to mark the 67th anniversary of the party. The main event of the anniversary will be held early next month.



Q Do you think there was any impact on the government from the janabalaya Kolombata protest?



It was a total flop. It showed that the euphoria created after the Galle Face protest and the success of the SLPP at the local government polls in February has now evaporated. Secondly, a government cannot be replaced or toppled by shouting anti-government slogans, filth and holding placards, posters and hooting at the party head office. The Constitution clearly says how a government could be changed and a President or the Prime Minister elected. This government will never cow down to thuggery, character assassinations and conspiracies. There will be so many Poya days before President Sirisena decides when to hold the parliamentary and presidential elections.



Q What made you to join common presidential candidate and the then SLFP General Secretary Maithripala Sirisena when he decided to run for the presidency in 2014?



Even when I was in the UPFA government, I was not in good terms with Rajapaksas. Especially with Mahinda and Basil. I was extremely disappointed, disheartened, dejected and discriminated against.



About 50% or more of the budgetary allocations were controlled by Mahinda and Basil and all appointments in the public and semi government sectors were overseen by Mahinda, Basil and Namal. None of the other ministers or deputy ministers had a say in these affairs and we were only onlookers.



Besides, I could not forget how, President Rajapaksa treated my father the late Berty Premalal Dissanayaka, who sacrificed his entire life for the SLFP. My father died of a broken heart when he was refused the chief ministers post in the North-Central Province after the 2012 PC polls. It was a discrimination against him because such posts were given to others who obtained the second most number of votes in other provinces. The Cabinet also was a total monopoly of the Rajapaksas.



QYou said your father the late Berty Premalal Dissanayaka was treated badly by the Rajapaksa regime. Can you elaborate?



Well, you are aware that he was the SLFP powerhouse in Rajarata for a long time and clashed with the UNP at all elections to ensure victory for the SLFP victory. At the 2012 polls in the North-Central Province, he did not get the expected support from the party though he was the group leader of the UPFA. Though the UPFA won in the Province he was second in the preferential vote list and he was denied the CMs post by the then party hierarchy but in certain other provinces the CMs post was given to members who got second most number of votes. My father took this ill-treatment very badly and it affected his health. That is why I told you he died with a broken heart.



Q How do you see the split in the JO and the SLPP?



The split has come to the fore and so many seniors express their displeasure and hopelessness on the subservient and sycophantic obedience to a single family. Leaders like Kumara Welgama and Vasudeva Nanayakkara have openly criticized the attempts to promote Rajapaksa family members as the next political power house in the country having the government, Presidency and Premiership under their thumb. You may see in the near future that Kumara and Vasu are not alone in this anti-nepotism stance.



However, I believe that Namal deserves a place in the country and in the SLFP in due course but not over the heads of other seniors. He has enough time to achieve that position and what he needs to meet that goal is patience, maturity and experience.



Q Do you think Sri Lanka is in a better position now than in 2004 to minimize the likely damage of another major disaster like the tsunami?



Yes indeed. In 2004, many people in Sri Lanka hadnt heard about a tsunami and therefore did not know how to face such a major natural disaster. But with the experience we gained, Sri Lanka has taken a number of measures on how to minimize damage to property and lives, relocation of victims, providing them basic facilities and long term facilities.



The December 26, 2004 tsunami was a wake up call to many countries in the Indian Ocean to be better prepared to face natural disasters. Many development partners are working closely with the Sri Lankan Government and its Disaster Management Centre (DMC) to mitigate the impact of another natural disaster.



The need for an early warning system and to be better prepared to manage disasters to save lives and livelihoods was the biggest lesson learned in the aftermath of the tsunami 10 years ago. According to the DMC the country now has better early warning systems to detect tsunamis and other disasters and is better equipped to respond to future disasters.



With the lessons learned following the 2004 tsunami, the DMC under the Ministry of Disaster Management has been leading efforts to enhance disaster risk management in close collaboration with development partners working in Sri Lanka. Working together, this group has been able to create a culture of safety in Sri Lanka. Establishment of early warning systems including robust communications links with local and international technical agencies, an around the clock emergency operations centre, and engaging people from the grassroots level in both disaster awareness and mitigation activities with the setting up of Early Warning Towers along the sea belt round the country and the Disaster Management Ministry conducts drills to make people aware of how to face another disaster. The last drill of this nature was held on August 5 with the participation of other Indian Ocean rim countries.



Q What happened to the Doppler Radar System Sri Lanka purchased some ten years ago?



We have abandoned the project because it is not viable to spend huge amount of money to repair it. I have just returned from Paris after a successful discussion with the French government to obtain a modern Meteorology Lab at a cost of US$30 million or about Rs.4,800 million.



The new Meteorology Lab will be equipped with the most modern machinery and equipment to forecast the change in weather patterns pinpointing the area affected. The French government will bear 35% of the cost with 65% of the cost on a soft loan to Sri Lanka. France produces the worlds best machinery and equipment related to meteorology.
Sri Lanka has suddenly shown a keen interest to strengthen ties with India with both Government representatives and members of the opposition meeting up with Premier Narendra Modi, in New Delhi recently.



India was lagging behind China, one of Sri Lankas main partners helping build the island nations infrastructure like ports and highways. But with the topic of elections emerging in Sri Lanka, India knows that it can make some influence in the little island. This is the reason for Sri Lankas obvious shift in focus towards India these days.

Right now the Government of India is being pushed by the Tamil Nadu Government to move sanctions against Sri Lanka at the UNHRC. This is regarding unresolved post war issues in the island. If India shows interest in meddling in the affairs of Sri Lankas national question, it is because of the disgruntled Tamil community in South India, the place where all Sri Lanka Tamils have their roots.



From the two entourages that travelled to India, its the one led by former President Mahinda Rajapaksa that received much media attention. Many believe that the ex-Sri Lankan president is the person to lead the country once again, even by playing a role from the backstage. And it seems that India has picked up this signal quite early. But Premier Modi also entertained an entourage representing the Government of Sri Lanka which was led by Speaker Karu Jayasuriya.



The focus of discussion with the representatives of the Government of Sri Lanka revolved around regional matters, bilateral trade agreements, the proposed new Constitution for Sri Lanka and problems arising from the 13th Amendment among others. Modi like Rajapaksa, too knows his onions when it comes to doing a balancing act and handled both entourages from Sri Lanka without a hitch.



The best news coming from India for Rajapaksa fans is that if there was any misunderstanding between Modi and the former Sri Lankan president, relationships between the two have now turned healthy.



There was much talk about India influencing Tamil voters during the last Presidential Elections. But what is clearer from the perspective of the Sri Lankan Tamils is that this community voted against Rajapaksa because the latter had little regard for the minorities.



India was silent during the final stages of the Sri Lanka ethnic conflict and didnt interfere in the activities of the security forces. Its a known fact that much that belonged to the Tamils like houses, schools and places of religious worship were destroyed during the fighting between the LTTE and Government troops.



This could be one reason, perhaps due to guilt, that the Government of India is trying to make amends by spending much money to build houses in the North, East and the Central Provinces on behalf of Sri Lankan Tamils.



The Government of India is planning to build as many as 60,000 houses over here with Sri Lankas neighbour dolling out US $ 350 million as pure grant assistance.

The latest about India in terms of involvement in the island is that they are expected to make input in developing the Palaly Airport. The project will be handled by the Airport Authority of India and it is working closely with the External Affairs Ministry of Sri Lanka. Right now both parties are awaiting a project report relating to this venture.



Though Sri Lanka has approached China much in terms of building its ports, the islanders know that India too is important given that the Indian Ocean Region is set to define the destiny of the planet in the 21st Century.



Modis housing projects here might not cost as much as the projects which the representatives of the Chinese Government have initiated. But Modi, in terms of an individual, has more value to Sri Lanka than any Chinese diplomat. This is because Modi can defuse tensions in Tamil Nadu, which is a simmering volcano from the perspective of the Tamil community living over there.
Rising temperatures and changing rainfall patterns pose a threat to Sri Lanka and could reduce GDP and living standards, a new World Bank report says.

The report South Asias Hotspots: The Impact of Temperature and Precipitation Changes on Living Standards flags that almost half of South Asias population now lives in vulnerable areas called hotspots that could see their living standards decline as a result of falling crop yields, lower labor productivity, or related health impacts. Some of these hotspots, the report notes, are already vulnerable as they are less developed, suffer from poor connectivity, and are water stressed.

According to the report, in Sri Lanka, areas in northern and north-western provinces are the most likely to experience increases in average temperature and more variable precipitation by 2050. The analysis concludes that Sri Lankas average annual temperatures could rise by 1.0C to 1.5C by 2050 even if carbon emission reduction measures are taken as recommended by the Paris Agreement of 2015. If no measures are taken average temperatures in Sri Lanka could increase by up to 2.0C.

Weather changes will result in lower per capita consumption levels that could further increase poverty and inequality across South Asia, said Muthukumara Mani, a lead economist in the World Bank South Asia Region and author of the report.

Identifying climate hotspots will help policymakers prioritize resources and actions in specific locations and communities where they are the most needed, he added.

The report provides options to prioritize investments and strategies to build local resilience to climate change. The analysis suggests that creating opportunities in less climate-sensitive sectors through enhancing education opportunities, improving market access, and generating non-agricultural jobs could reduce the overall severity of climate-related impact on the living standards of the vulnerable. If these interventions were implemented together, they would likely yield greater benefits than if implemented individually.

The World Bank is working closely with the Government of Sri Lanka to support climate resilience and adaptation to climate change. Under the Climate Resilience Improvement Project, which is supporting investments to improve flood protection and resilience to landslides. The proposed Climate Smart Irrigated Agriculture Project is scheduled for approval this year and will support improved water management for agriculture including the rehabilitation of irrigation systems in identified hotspot areas of the country.

Development is the best adaptation strategy, since it is associated with improved infrastructure, market-oriented reforms, enhanced human capabilities, and stronger institutional capacity to respond to the increasing threat of climate change and natural disasters, added Mani.
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RIDLEY TOWNSHIP  A preliminary hearing for a former Farmers Insurance agent facing more than 240 criminal counts for allegedly pocketing or mishandling thousands of dollars worth of client funds was continued Monday until Oct. 15, according to online court records.

Nicholas J. Palladino, 38, of the 300 block of Harding Avenue in Milmont Park, is charged with 27 counts each of theft by unlawful taking, receiving stolen property, theft by deception, fraudulent destruction of recordable instruments, forgery, deceptive or fraudulent business practices, misapplication of entrusted property to financial institutions, securing execution documents by deception and insurance fraud. Nearly all of the charges are felonies.

Palladino remains free on 10 percent of $10,000 bail, a reduced amount from the original bail set at 10 percent of $25,000. Palladino was confined at the county prison from Aug 9, when he was preliminarily arraigned, until Sept. 11, when a professional bondsman posted the reduced bail, online records show.

According to information received by Magisterial District Judge Vincent D. Gallagher Jr.s court from a family member and later verified by the court clerk on Monday, Palladino is currently in a rehabilitation facility. He has not yet retained an attorney.

Palladino joined Farmers in 2012, according to the probable cause affidavit filed by Detective Lt. Charles Palo Jr. of the Ridley Township Police Department. The insurance company initiated an investigation into Palladinos questionable handling (of) insurance premium practices in July 2017, the affidavit states.

Palladino was interviewed by Farmers Senior Investigator Marletta Wilmarth in August 2017, but was unable to account for $8,533 in premium collections, according to the affidavit.

The affidavit states that Palladino did pay back those funds between August and September of 2017, but provided falsified bank statements when he was asked to provide copies of his personal bank statements to validate the amounts of premiums going through his personal checking account, according to the affidavit.

Palladinos agent appointment agreement was terminated by Farmers March 2 due to embezzlement, the affidavit states. Following his termination, 27 insureds provided proof of premium payments totaling $19,327 that were made to Palladino and handled improperly, according to the affidavit.

Palo notes that agents are authorized to collect premiums on behalf of Farmers and are required to input the payment information into an online accounting system, which produces a receipt to be given to the insured. All payments put into the system are applied to the indicated policies and the agent is required to deposit the premium into a company-owned bank account.

The internal audit team is notified if the premium is not deposited or if an agent submits their own check that is returned for insufficient funds.

The affidavit lays out four methods of fraud Palladino allegedly engaged in:

For 13 payments totaling $9,731, he allegedly applied the checks to the policies but deposited the funds into his own personal checking account rather than the company account.

For eight payments totaling $5,912, Palladino did not receipt the payments so the insureds did not receive the appropriate credits to their policies, according to the affidavit. Those funds were also allegedly deposited into his personal account.

Palladino also allegedly receipted six check premium payments for amounts that were less than the payments given to him, so the insureds did not receive full policy credits. The funds, totaling $2,754, were not deposited into a company-owned account, but into Palladinos personal checking account, according to the affidavit.

The affidavit indicates Palladino also received and then voided one check for $929 so the insured did not receive credit on the policy. He then deposited that check into his personal account, according to the affidavit.
BERLIN, 19 September 2018 (AP)  Authorities in western Germany say theyre suspending the eviction of protesters from a threatened forest after a journalist fell to his death.

Police said Wednesday the young man plunged at least 15 meters (50 feet) from a rope bridge strung between two treehouses in Hambach forest in what appeared to be a tragic accident.

The government of North Rhine-Westphalia state later announced it was halting work to clear the forest, which is to make way for a coal mine.

Environmentalists have been trying to prevent the ancient woodland from being chopped down, arguing that Germany should stop extracting and burning fossil fuels.

Dozens of protesters have been camping in the trees in recent weeks, while hundreds more have tried to enter the woods to stop workers from preparing the clearance.
By Maria Socorro Oyola

20 September 2018

(NBC News)  In the days and weeks after Hurricane Maria, friends and family never turned their backs on me. Through all the havoc that these storms brought to Puerto Rico and to the Puerto Rican people, I cannot quite put into words how it felt to know that I had so many people who cared so much about me in my time of need. The emotional and economic support my children and I received was overwhelming to say the least. Ill never be able to repay their kindness, but should they need me, I hope I will be able to be there for them.

But while I am eternally grateful for my friends, this is not necessarily a happy story. Although it could be a hopeful one.

After the hurricane, I was ready to help rebuild Puerto Rico. I didnt criticize those that headed to the states for an easier life, but personally I wanted to stay. I didnt want to leave and come back to a homeland rebuilt by others. But as time passed, I started to get worried.Two months after the hurricane, when the school finally reopened, I would drop my kids off in the mornings on my way to work only to have them call me two hours later asking to be picked up again. They would tell me: Mom, they let us out early because the math teacher didnt come to work and neither did the English teacher and the Spanish teacher had to leave early. Every day there was a different excuse. Various teachers were absent or there wasnt water or electricity.I started to wonder if I was being selfish in wanting to stay. I owed my children a life, with a decent education and opportunities that just werent available in Puerto Rico any more. It was tough before the hurricane, I wont lie. But now? My twins were in 9th grade and my oldest was in 11th. They didnt have time to lose.When I was six years old, my mother chose to move my family to the U.S. to give us a chance at a better life. Now it was time for me to do the same. [more]
By Frances Robles and Jugal K. Patel

20 September 2018

PUNTA SANTIAGO, P.R. (The New York Times)  When it rains, Maritza Cruz Sanchez springs into a well-rehearsed, 30-minute ritual: She climbs a ladder to where her roof used to be and sucks on a hose to siphon puddles from the plastic tarp suspended over her house.

The tarp is held aloft by a few thin wooden posts, which have begun to warp and now seem almost certain to collapse. The temporary contraption that shelters Ms. Cruz and what little she still owns has been in place since March.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency gave her $6,000 to replace waterlogged belongings, but nothing to help make her house habitable again.

I am thankful for the little they gave me, she said, but thanks for nothing.A year ago, on Sept. 20, the deadliest storm to hit Puerto Rico in over 100 years slammed into the islands southeast coast, just 14 miles south of where Ms. Cruz lives in Punta Santiago. The tourist and fishing town of 5,000 people bore a terrible share of Marias initial fury.Almost 650 houses flooded with water from the sea; others were inundated by an overflowing lake, a river, and two ponds  and also raw sewage. Many homes lost walls and roofs in winds that reached 155 miles per hour when the storm made landfall.An aerial photo of Punta Santiagos handwritten, desperate S.O.S. plea, taken in the early days after the storm, circulated around the world. When the Puerto Rico government kicked off a recent public relations campaign to highlight a year of recovery, it did it here. A new sign in town reads: Bienvenidos. #Covertheprogress.
By Jason Hickel

12 September 2018

(Foreign Policy)  Warnings about ecological breakdown have become ubiquitous. Over the past few years, major newspapers, including the Guardian and the New York Times, have carried alarming stories on soil depletion, deforestation, and the collapse of fish stocks and insect populations. These crises are being driven by global economic growth, and its accompanying consumption, which is destroying the Earths biosphere and blowing past key planetary boundaries that scientists say must be respected to avoid triggering collapse.Many policymakers have responded by pushing for what has come to be called green growth. All we need to do, they argue, is invest in more efficient technology and introduce the right incentives, and well be able to keep growing while simultaneously reducing our impact on the natural world, which is already at an unsustainable level. In technical terms, the goal is to achieve absolute decoupling of GDP from the total use of natural resources, according to the U.N. definition.It sounds like an elegant solution to an otherwise catastrophic problem. Theres just one hitch: New evidence suggests that green growth isnt the panacea everyone has been hoping for. In fact, it isnt even possible.Green growth first became a buzz phrase in 2012 at the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development in Rio de Janeiro. In the run-up to the conference, the World Bank, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, and the U.N. Environment Program all produced reports promoting green growth. Today, it is a core plank of the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals.But the promise of green growth turns out to have been based more on wishful thinking than on evidence. In the years since the Rio conference, three major empirical studies have arrived at the same rather troubling conclusion: Even under the best conditions, absolute decoupling of GDP from resource use is not possible on a global scale.A team of scientists led by the German researcher Monika Dittrich first raised doubts in 2012. The group ran a sophisticated computer model that predicted what would happen to global resource use if economic growth continued on its current trajectory, increasing at about 2 to 3 percent per year. It found that human consumption of natural resources (including fish, livestock, forests, metals, minerals, and fossil fuels) would rise from 70 billion metric tons per year in 2012 to 180 billion metric tons per year by 2050. For reference, a sustainable level of resource use is about 50 billion metric tons per yeara boundary we breached back in 2000.The team then reran the model to see what would happen if every nation on Earth immediately adopted best practice in efficient resource use (an extremely optimistic assumption). The results improved; resource consumption would hit only 93 billion metric tons by 2050. But that is still a lot more than were consuming today. Burning through all those resources could hardly be described as absolute decoupling or green growth.In 2016, a second team of scientists tested a different premise: one in which the worlds nations all agreed to go above and beyond existing best practice. In their best-case scenario, the researchers assumed a tax that would raise the global price of carbon from $50 to $236 per metric ton and imagined technological innovations that would double the efficiency with which we use resources. The results were almost exactly the same as in Dittrichs study. Under these conditions, if the global economy kept growing by 3 percent each year, wed still hit about 95 billion metric tons of resource use by 2050. Bottom line: no absolute decoupling.Finally, last year the U.N. Environment Programonce one of the main cheerleaders of green growth theoryweighed in on the debate. It tested a scenario with carbon priced at a whopping $573 per metric ton, slapped on a resource extraction tax, and assumed rapid technological innovation spurred by strong government support. The result? We hit 132 billion metric tons by 2050. This finding is worse than those of the two previous studies because the researchers accounted for the rebound effect, whereby improvements in resource efficiency drive down prices and cause demand to risethus canceling out some of the gains. [more]
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SPOKANE (AP)  The Spokane City Council has quashed the mayor's veto of an ordinance that would push the city to reach fully sustainable energy by 2030.

The Spokesman-Review reports the council overturned Mayor David Condon's veto Monday by a vote of 6 to 1.





. . .
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WOODINVILLE  A warehouse at 14051 N.E. 200th St. in Woodinville has sold for just over $10.6 million, according to King County records.

The seller was RH Sunrise LLC, which acquired the property in 2001 for $7 million.





. . .
RIPLEY  Checkers Drive-In is up and running in Ripley, and franchise owner Sedrick Turner said it was the best opening weekend for any of his
WAYNE, NJ (Sept. 20, 2018)  JVC Professional Video, a division of JVCKENWOOD USA Corporation, today announced My Ireland, an upcoming feature-length documentary focused on Irish displacement, was shot on location across Ireland with two JVC GY-LS300 4KCAM Super 35 camcorders.

Based in St. Louis, Mo., Dancing Fox Pictures was hired by Monaghan Productions, also in St. Louis, to serve as cinematographers and crew for the production. Dancing Fox specializes in multi-camera event coverage, promotion videos, and cinema services. The company purchased its GY-LS300s in June just prior to the shoot.

Dancing Fox co-founder Elliott Geolat went to Ireland in June and July, conducting interviews and collecting B-roll footage across the country, from remote rural villages to Dublin. We needed something portable and cinematic, and something that would be fast to use, said Geolat, who shot most of the footage. The GY-LS300 is a cinema camera that handles like an ENG camera. It was fast and handy, but delivered an image that was filmic.

The documentary, which should be completed in early 2019, explores several causes of Irish displacement, including emigration to other countries to seek employment, mass evictions by vulture funds, a growing homeless crisis, and citizens with low-paying jobs who are unable to afford housing. The story reflects the life of My Ireland director and producer Anthony Monaghan, who left the country when he was 15 to find employment.

Most of the interviews were scheduled, but some were added during the shoot. For the impromptu interviews, Geolat needed to be able to setup quickly, often in locations where lighting was far from ideal. Its a compact camera, but all the external controls are at my fingertips. Its so fast to setup, he said. I spent more time leveling the tripod than prepping the camera for a shot.

For My Ireland, Geolat paired his GY-LS300s with three Rokinon Cine DS prime lenses. To create a cinematic look, My Ireland was shot in 4K/24p in J-Log mode, which expands dynamic range by 800 percent with film-like latitude. I didnt want to make a documentary with a small-chip look, Geolat explained, so that Super 35 sensor gave plenty of depth of field. Its as shallow as youd ever want it.

While Geolat avoided on-screen zooms to maintain a more cinematic look, he did use the cameras Prime Zoom feature, which allows fixed-focal lenses to zoom in and out without losing resolution or depth of field, for some shots. The Prime Zoom feature is amazing, he noted. If I needed to zoom in a pinch, I could get closer without moving the tripod.

Geolat recently shot additional footage for My Ireland in St. Louis with Dancing Fox co-founder Christopher Gibbs, and is already planning to use the cameras to shoot a full-length narrative feature next year. He praised the GY-LS300s streamlined menu, built-in neutral density filters, and low-light performance. Usually the words cinema and budget dont go together, but they do in this camera, Geolat said. At its price point, it offers a set of features that you just dont find. This is the best budget cinema camera in the world.

About JVC Professional Video

Headquartered in Wayne, New Jersey, JVC Professional Video is a division of JVCKENWOOD USA Corporation, a wholly-owned subsidiary of JVCKENWOOD Corporation. The company is a leading manufacturer and distributor of broadcast and professional video equipment, as well as D-ILA front projection systems. For more information, visit JVCs website at http://pro.jvc.com or call (800) 582 5825.

Caption: The upcoming documentary My Ireland was shot in locations across Ireland using two JVC GY-LS300 4KCAM Super 35 camcorders.
TikTok kicks off its global talent campaign, 1 Million Audition, in the Philippines;

Previously held in 10 countries regions to help creators gain more following;

Bela Padilla, Ella Cruz, Donnalyn Bartolome will be the challenge leaders to inspire the

contestants.

TikTok, the worlds fastest growing short-form video app, is bringing its

global talent search, 1 Million Audition, to the Philippines from September 7 to September 21, to look for the best Filipino creators online.

Trendsetters Bela Padilla, Ella Cruz, and Donnalyn Bartolome will act as the ambassadors and lead the Fashion, Talent, and Comedy categories respectively. The hashtags of each category will be as follows:

#1MPHTalent  Ella Cruz: https://instagram.com/p/BnWABYCnnZ0/

#1MPHComedy  Donnalyn Bartolome: https://www.instagram.com/p/BnTSXvWnNx1/

#1MPHFashion  Bela Padilla: https://www.instagram.com/p/BnaVBrhnC68/

Introduced in 2017, TikToks 1 Million Audition provides budding artists a platform to showcase their diverse talents and win millions of followers and rewards at the same time. It has been successfully held across Japan, India, Latin America, Europe, and the United States with over one million participants.

For talented Pinoys, the 1 Million Audition can be their gateway to stardom. Through TikToks 1 Million Audition, Indian creator Manjul Khattar has grown his followers to 700,000 in just three months while Korean influencer dancersona has gathered 1.3 million followers on TikTok within two months.

The 1 Million Audition winners will receive prizes of up to Php20,000 each. They will also be invited to the Gala Party on September 29 in Manila where the Top 3 Most Popular Awards on Instagram@tiktok_philippines, Facebook@tiktokphilippinesofficial, and Twitter@TikTokPH will be announced as well.

Whats more exciting is that the three final winners from each category will be invited to the TikTok Gala in Seoul, Korea in October to celebrate and meet other creators from the apps

global community.

The ambassadors, moreover, also shared some words of encouragement and excitement over the search.

So excited to see Pinoy fashionistas show off their OOTDs on TikToks 1 Million Audition.

TikTok will definitely change the way they express themselves, Bela said.

I love watching funny TikTok videos and I cant wait to see more from our talented kababayans. I hope they wont miss this chance to reach their dreams, Donnalyn added.

There are always talented people on TikTok! Im looking forward to discover these talented artists and to help them jumpstart their careers, Ella also said.

Whether its singing, dancing, or playing an instrument, TikTok opens its doors to talented Filipinos to share their talents and to become the next fast-rising superstar.

About TikTok

TikTok is a destination for short-form mobile videos. Our mission is to capture and present the

worlds creativity, knowledge, and moments that matter, directly from the mobile phone.

TikTok enables everyone to be a creator and encourages users to share their passion and creative expression through their videos. TikTok is based in Los Angeles, with global offices in

London, Tokyo, Seoul, Shanghai, Beijing, Singapore, Jakarta, Mumbai, and Moscow. In early 2018, TikTok was one of the most downloaded apps in the world. TikTok is available .worldwide

for iOS and Android. Visit tiktok.com.

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African swine fever cases in China total 20 and counting

Despite measures to contain African swine fever, it is unlikely that China has controlled the spread of the disease, based on the broad dispersion of cases reported so far, according to a report by the agricultural lender Rabobank.

Rabobank said that as of Sept. 18, China has reported 20 ASF cases in seven provinces, and that more cases are expected to be reported. The first ASF case in China was reported on Aug. 3 in Shenyang, the capital of Liaoning province.

To prevent the spread of the virus, China has restricted the movement of live animals within the seven affected provinces and in the 11 neighboring provinces.

However, the curb on transport of animals within China has created significant dislocations in animal and pork supplies.

Prices in affected provinces in eastern and southern China, which are without readily available production, have seen as much as a 40% increase in prices since transport bans were implemented, Rabobank said.

A supply gap of as much as 2 million to 3 million tonnes could emerge in the coming months, according to Rabobank, which based the figures on the herd losses seen in the 2007 outbreak of porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome virus (or blue ear disease).

Because of the more expensive and scarce supplies of pork, Chinese consumers are expected to shift to alternative proteins like chicken, farmed whitefish and even beef. In unaffected production zones, biosecurity and testing are expected to be stepped up to ensure continued access to export markets.

"While there is still much we do not know about how ASF will spread in the coming months, what is clear is that the scale of potential upside in demand and potential risk of contamination has perhaps never been greater", Rabobank said.
Putin informed Merkel about Syrias Idlib

Russian President Putin spoke to German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Wednesday about the deal reached between Turkey and Russia on Idlib.

The Kremlin press service announced on Wednesday that Russian President Vladimir Putin and German Chancellor Angela Merkel discussed Russian-Turkish agreements on stabilization in the Idlib de-escalation zone in Syria in a phone call. The conversation took place at Berlin's initiative.

"The issue of the Syrian issue settlement was discussed," the press service said in a statement. "The Russian President informed German Chancellor Merkel about the Russian-Turkish agreements on the stabilization efforts in the de-escalation zone in Idlib reached during talks with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on September 17 in Sochi. The sides confirmed mutual commitment to promoting the settlement of Ukrainian conflict, including within the Normandy format," the press service added.

PRESIDENT ERDOGAN-PUTIN MEETING IN SOCHI

On Monday, Turkey and Russia agreed to establish a demilitarized zone in Idlib, Syrias last opposition stronghold, following a meeting in Sochi between President Erdogan and Putin. Ankara and Moscow also signed a memorandum of understanding calling for the stabilization of Idlib's de-escalation zone, in which acts of aggression are expressly prohibited.

Putin also expressed concerns about the situation that resulted from the murder of the head of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic (DPR), Alexander Zakharchenko. He stressed the need for the complete implementation of the 2015 Minsk Package of Measures, including registering the region's special status legislatively by Kiev.
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They voted to "freeze" UK Government's draft to put People in jail for 42 Days on "anti-terrorist" suspicion without charge, or they abstained. Don't they look suspect ?

-------------------------

CoE's debate on UK controversy stirs PanEuropean check of anti-terror suspects' imprisonment





Former Leftists of the Sixties would boil in hot water if they heard PACE's debate on the controversial 42 days detention without charge, currently drafted by the British Government :

A "Socialist" Government, a Socialist PACE Rapporteur and a Socialist Chair of PACE's Legal Committee, opposed a .. "Conservative" amendment (supported by .. Liberals, Democrats, etc), to freeze the measure, in order to protect Citizens' Freedom, by "waiting" until CoE's Venice Committee checks its conformity with Human Rights' principles.

"Left"'s support to Conservative-Lib.Dem's criticism, wasn't enough to obtain a majority, nor to make things as they were back in the good old days, when "Left" and "Right" had a clear meaning, as "liberty" and "restrictions"...



Conservatives and most Democrats were joined by the Left in voting for the "freeze", as well as Liberal Paul Rowen, while Socialist MEP Ivan Popescu, an experienced MEP from Ukraine (PACE Member since 1996-2008) abstained. But most Socialists, added to a few Liberals and EPP's Right, voted against.



Fortunately, someone inside PACE had the wise idea to shorten the Debate for less than 1 Hour, and put it on the Agenda only at the end of an exceptionally busy day, towards the end of the Evening, when most MEPs had already gone to taste wins and foods at various Receptions all around Strasbourg's "European" area : As a result, not even 42 MEPs weren't present..



Socialist Lord Tomlinson accused the leaders of the PanEuropean Assembly, in its highest body : the "Bureau", to "lack wisdom" by deciding to hold a Debate on an issue that neither the Socialist Chair of the Legal Committee, nor its Socialist "reluctant Rapporteur", did "not want to do", ...







Finally, everybody (critics and supporters alike) was happy to agree, in substance, that the controversial measure "may" gravely violate Human Rights, and therefore, PACE asked Legal Experts of Venice Commission to check UK Government''s plans.



But this might take more than .. 42 Days to do, since PACE's Rapporteur asked the Experts to enlarge their study in a PanEuropean comparison of all that is happening on "anti-terrorism" legislation in 47 CoE Member Countries, including Russia, Turkey and Azerbaidjan..



Bad lack : "The existing 28 days detention without charge in the UK is, in comparison with other CoE member countries, one of the most extreme : In Turkey, the period is 7,5 days, in France 6 days, in Russia 5 days, and in .. the U.S. and Canada just 2 and 1 days respectively", denounced Democrat MEP Ms WOLDSETH from Norway..







"Numerous respected human rights organisations, including Liberty and Human Rights Watch, have expressed serious concern" "The proposed legislation ...could easily lead to extensive abuses. ...Detention for 42 days means six weeks in which one is taken away from ones family, friends, home and livelihood only to be let off without being charged. That will destroy lives and isolate communities", she added.



- "3 years ago, the UK Government sought to increase the period of pre-charge detention from 14 days to 90 days. Not long before that, it had been only 7 days. There was a vigorous debate ...and a ...compromise was reached of 28 days. We have to ask whether there are proper safeguards in place to extend the period to 42 days. I suggest that there are fatal flaws", reminded British Conservative Clappison.



- "What sort of society holds someone in detention for 42 days and does not have to tell the person who is in prison why they are there, or explain the suspicions that arose and led to their detention? What sort of society believes that that is the way to treat its citizens? That is an appalling injustice, ...A 42-day detention period will not make the UK safer. Instead, it will be the first step to giving in to terrorists; it is saying that we are prepared to sacrifice our democratic rights and the principles for which we have stood for centuries", criticized British Liberal Michael Hanckock







"Comments made ...by Norwegian delegates are unfortunate", replied British Socialist MEP Ms.Curtis-Thomas, accusing them to "besmirch the reputation of our police force, which is one of the Best in the World", as she said, believing that "there are significant safeguards ...to ensure that individuals are not subjected to unlawful detention"







PACE "has serious doubts whether ...the draft legislation are in conformity with the ...case-law of the European Court of Human Rights. A lack of ..safeguards may lead to arbitrariness, resulting in breaches of ... liberty and ...right to a fair trial". PACE "is particularly concerned that: ..the judge ..may not be in a position to examine whether there exist reasonable grounds for suspecting that the arrested person has committed an offence;"; that "... representation by a lawyer may be inappropriately restricted or delayed;" that "information on the grounds for suspicion of a person ...may be unduly withheld.. ;" that this "may give rise to arrests without the intention to charge;", and; in general, that "prolonged detention without proper information on the grounds for arrest may constitute inhuman treatment", says Klaus De Vries' Report, adopted with 29 votes against zero.







Records don't say if it took him 42 Days to draft his Report, but, at least, he knew why...




SAN FRANCISCO, September 20, 2018 /PRNewswire/ --

Next-generation learning solution accessible anytime, anywhere and on any device

Infosys [https://www.infosys.com ] , a global leader in consulting, technology and next-generation services, today announced the launch of Infosys Wingspan, its next-gen learning solution to help organizations accelerate their talent transformation journey. Based on open source technologies, the cloud-first and mobile-first solution is designed to provide a seamless interactive learning experience accessible anytime, anywhere and on any device.

(Logo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/633365/Infosys_Logo.jpg )

Infosys Wingspan provides best-in-class curated content from multiple sources that learners can access to enrich their knowledge. Users are provided a personal and engaging experience, by creating their own 'goals', measuring 'time spent' and 'learning history'. With machine learning capabilities, the solution provides tailored and relevant learning recommendations while the AI-powered voice-enabled 'learning assistant' also offers guidance at any stage of the learning process. The connected and collaborative solution also enables interaction with peers and provides opportunities for collaborative and competitive learning.

In addition, the solution allows learners to test their competencies through various assessments and gain relevant certifications. Wingspan also enables leaders to drive impactful learning initiatives with insights leveraging analytics, which helps companies understand the learning trends within the organization and plan requisite interventions.

Since its launch in April 2018, Infosys Wingspan (known as Lex internally) has been used by over 1,14,000 Infosys employees. The solution is now available for clients and can easily be integrated into any enterprise's IT infrastructure to transform its learning capabilities. Infosys Wingspan will be offered with round-the-clock guidance from experts and educators as well as technical and operational support.

Pravin Rao, Chief Operating Officer, Infosys, said, "The need to reskill and upskill the workforce has become business critical for global enterprises as they embrace the digital disruption. This was evident in a recent research [https://www.infosys.com/navigate-your-next/research/pages/in... ] we undertook, in which we found that the lack of digital skillsets was highlighted by many organizations as the greatest barrier to transformation. Infosys Wingspan is a robust holistic learning solution that will enable organizations to focus on reskilling their talent of today, to be ready for tomorrow in a hands-on and interactive way."

Phil Fersht, Founder and CEO, HfS Research, said, "We operate in an era where the demands on services talent to understand their clients' digital business models and apply emerging technologies to support them is unprecedented. The only way professional IT services firms can stay ahead of the market is to create university-like environments for their talent to thrive, and Wingspan is a powerful example of empowering the sharing of cutting-edge knowledge and insight across a massive global services organization."

Know more about Infosys Wingspan [https://www.infosys.com/products-and-platforms/wingspan/page... ]

About Infosys

Infosys is a global leader in next-generation digital services and consulting. We enable clients in 45 countries to navigate their digital transformation. With over three decades of experience in managing the systems and workings of global enterprises, we expertly steer our clients through their digital journey. We do it by enabling the enterprise with an AI-powered core that helps prioritize the execution of change. We also empower the business with agile digital at scale to deliver unprecedented levels of performance and customer delight. Our always-on learning agenda drives their continuous improvement through building and transferring digital skills, expertise, and ideas from our innovation ecosystem.

Visit www.infosys.com [http://www.infosys.com ] to see how Infosys can help your enterprise navigate your next.

Safe Harbor

Certain statements in this press release concerning our future growth prospects are forward-looking statements regarding our future business expectations intended to qualify for the 'safe harbor' under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, which involve a number of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those in such forward-looking statements. The risks and uncertainties relating to these statements include, but are not limited to, risks and uncertainties regarding fluctuations in earnings, fluctuations in foreign exchange rates, our ability to manage growth, intense competition in IT services including those factors which may affect our cost advantage, wage increases in India, our ability to attract and retain highly skilled professionals, client concentration, restrictions on immigration, industry segment concentration, our ability to manage our international operations, reduced demand for technology in our key focus areas, disruptions in telecommunication networks or system failures, our ability to successfully complete and integrate potential acquisitions, liability for damages on our service contracts, the success of the companies in which Infosys has made strategic investments, withdrawal or expiration of governmental fiscal incentives, political instability and regional conflicts, legal restrictions on raising capital or acquiring companies outside India, and unauthorized use of our intellectual property and general economic conditions affecting our industry. Additional risks that could affect our future operating results are more fully described in our United States Securities and Exchange Commission filings including our Annual Report on Form 20-F for the fiscal year ended March 31, 2018. These filings are available at www.sec.gov [https://www.infosys.com/links/redirectlink.aspx?id=sec-gov.a... ]. Infosys may, from time to time, make additional written and oral forward-looking statements, including statements contained in the company's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission and our reports to shareholders. In addition, please note that any forward-looking statements contained herein are based on assumptions that we believe to be reasonable as of the date of this press release. The company does not undertake to update any forward-looking statements that may be made from time to time by or on behalf of the company unless it is required by law.

Photo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/633365/Infosys_Logo.jpg

CONTACT: Media contacts: Asia Pacific, Sarah Gideon, Infosys, India,+91-80-4156-5007, Sarah_Gideon@infosys.com; EMEA, Margherita Di Cerbo,Infosys, Europe, +44-2075162748, Margherita.DiCerbo@infosys.com; Americas,Chiku Somaiya, Infosys, USA, +1-408-375-2722, Chiku.Somaiya@infosys.com
The Unit Trust of Fiji and VNPF signed an MOU yesterday for the establishment of Yumi Trust in Vanuatu. Above (l-r) CEO of UTOF Vilash Chand and Manager of Business Development and Company Secretary Bolaira, VNPFs GM Achary and Chief Enforcement Officer Manen Mala
Alumni Ventures Group, a Manchester, NH-based venture capital firm, has opened four new funds for accredited investors.

The funds now available for investment include:

 Elite Engineers Fund, which invests in ventures led by alums of top engineering schools,

 the B-School Fund, which invests in top business school grads,

 Little Ivy Ventures, which pools capital from alumni of Bowdoin, Middlebury, Amherst, Williams, and Tufts to back startups founded by fellow alums from those ecosystems

 the Midwest Value Fund, which creates venture portfolios in opportunities outside California, New York, and Massachusetts.

Each fund is targeting an annual raise of $5-10M.

These vehicles  which increase AVGs offerings to 25 funds  will offer accredited investors a portfolio of 20-30 diversified companies with deals led by top co-investors such as Andreessen Horowitz, Kleiner Perkins, Google Ventures, and similar firms.

Led by Michael Collins, CEO, Alumni Ventures Group is now one of the most active venture investors in the world, evaluating hundreds of opportunities every year and typically delivering fund investors a portfolio of 20-30 diversified deals. The funds are private, for-profit, and not affiliated with or sanctioned by any school.

FinSMEs

20/09/2018
IWD, a Paris, France-based virtual reality software publisher, received a minority investment from Ardian.

The amount of the deal was not disclosed.

The company intends to use the proceeds from the investment for organic growth and potential acquisitions. The initial focus will be on strengthening IWDs offering and broadening its customer portfolio, particularly through expansion into new markets.

Founded in Paris in 2000 by Gabriel Becker and Nicolas Martin, IWD offers innovative 2D, 3D and virtual reality software through its various businesses and supports luxury brands in their retail and merchandising strategies as well as in their training programs.

The company controls the entire life of the product, from its creation to its enhancement at the point of sale, enabling brands to build, communicate and analyze their merchandising strategies.

IWD has a diversified portfolio of customers made up by more than 300 brands (such as LOreal, LVMH, VF Corp, Chanel, Nespresso and Shiseido) and more than 50 employees in Paris and in its international offices in New York, Los Angeles, Singapore.

FinSMEs

20/09/2018
Everyone eligible should be vaccinated against COVID-19 as a condition of long-distance travel or employment.

Vaccination should be voluntary but those who don't get vaccinated should be frequently tested for COVID-19 as a condition of long-distance travel and employment.

Both vaccination and testing should be voluntary and not required as a condition of long-distance travel or employment.

I defer to the judgment of lawmakers as long as they base their decisions on a consensus of medical professionals.

Vote

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Oxbotica, an Oxford, UK-based autonomous vehicle software company, completed a 14m funding round.

Backers included IP Group, Parkwalk Advisors and AXA XL (formerly XL Catlin). In conjunction with the funding, Jamie Vollbracht from IP Group joined the board.

The company intends to use the funds to further accelerate growth in Europe, Asia and the US market.Founded in 2014 by Professors Paul Newman and Ingmar Posner as a spin-out from the Oxford Robotics Institute, and led by Graeme Smith, CEO, Oxbotica provides domain-agnostic software which uses computer vision, machine learning and artificial intelligence to enable vehicles to operate autonomously in any environment and on any terrain.

Its control system, Selenium, allows vehicles to sense their surroundings, while Caesium, the companys cloud-based fleet management system, can schedule and co-ordinate fleets of vehicles.

Based on research from Oxford Universitys Robotics Institute, the system has been deployed across multiple projects where the future application of autonomy is being trialled, such as with Ocado, at Heathrow Airport and on major city streets.

Customers include some of the worlds most prominent businesses in sectors including aerospace, automotive, construction, logistics and mining.

FinSMEs

20/09/2018
Proterra, a Burlingame, Calif.based heavy duty electric transportation company focused on the North American mass transit market, closed a $155m funding round.

The round was co-led by Daimler and Tao Capital Partners, with participation from G2VP and other investors.

In conjunction with the investment, Proterra and Daimler have entered into an agreement to explore the electrification of select Daimler heavy-duty vehicles.

The first of these efforts will be to explore potential synergies with Daimlers Thomas Built Buses division by bringing Proterras battery and drivetrain technologies to the North American school bus market.

Led by Ryan Popple, CEO, Proterra designs and manufactures zero-emission heavy-duty vehicles, enabling bus fleet operators to reduce operating costs while delivering clean, quiet transportation to local communities across North America.

The company has sold more than 675 vehicles to 90 different municipal, university, airport, federal and commercial transit agencies in 40 U.S. states and Canadian provinces.

FinSMEs

20/09/2018
WalkMe, a San Francisco, CA-based digital adoption platform provider, raised $40m in Series F financing.

The round was led by Insight Venture Partners, with participation from Mangrove Capital Partners.

The company, which has raised $207.5m in total funding to date, intends to use the funds:

 to continue to grow worldwide, localizing its offerings in new markets such as Asia Pacific and Europe,

 to invest in securing multinational customers, as well as

 to expand its solution offering through additional technology acquisitions.

Led by Dan Adika, co-founder and CEO, WalkMe provides a Digital Adoption Platform (DAP) that uses artificial intelligence, engagement, guidance and automation to assist users to complete tasks within any enterprise software, mobile application or website. The software is used by nearly 2,000 enterprises globally, including 30 percent of Fortune 500 companies.

Founded in 2011, WalkMe has close to 660 employees located in seven offices worldwide in the U.S., Europe and APAC.

The company has made three acquisitions to date, including:

 machine learning company DeepUI in June 2018,

 visual analytics company Jaco in April 2017, and

 native mobile AI company Abbi in January 2017.

FinSMEs

20/09/2018
.    100      ,     -      ,     ,  EU Observer.             ... ,       ,         ...
Hateful note left on car at school board meeting The Grand Blanc School Board meeting of Oct. 25 was well attended by concerned community members of all backgrounds. Before...

Support afterschool programs, support our future workforce Today, the Empire State Building shares a key characteristic with the streetlamps in downtown Flint. Theyve both swapped out their...
Ashley Judd will reportedly be allowed to pursue her defamation lawsuit against disgraced Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein, a judge ruled on Wednesday - but her sexual harassment claim against the mogul has been dismissed.

Judd's lawsuit stems from an alleged hotel encounter between herself and Weinstein roughly two decades ago, according to The Hollywood Reporter. She claimed she was ultimately able to leave after reportedly striking an agreement with Weinstein that if she snagged a coveted Academy Award, he would be permitted to touch her.

ASIA ARGENTO THREATENS TO SUE ROSE MCGOWAN OVER STATEMENT ON JIMMY BENNETT SEX ASSAULT CASE

Sometime after that encounter, the actress claims her potential casting in Lord of the Rings was thwarted when either Weinstein or a person within his company, Miramax, labeled her a nightmare on set, THR reported. The revelation was reportedly only brought to her attention in late 2017 after director Peter Jackson disclosed it during an interview.

While reportedly allowing the defamation and interference claims, Judge Philip Gutierrez chose to dismiss Judds sexual harassment claim, determining that the California law she was suing under was not applicable to the professional relationship she and Weinstein had at the time of the encounter, according to The Associated Press.

EMMY AWARDS A TOOTHLESS NBC SELF-PROMOTION ONSLAUGHT PEPPERED WITH #METOO CRACKS, CRITICS SAY

He allowed Judd a month to amend and attempt to revive that section of the lawsuit.

The ruling follows a court hearing a day prior in which Weinstein sought to have all of the allegations thrown out, THR reported.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Bizarre Foods host Andrew Zimmern said Anthony Bourdain told him to pursue his own happiness in their last conversation before the celebrity chefs death earlier this year.

Zimmern opened up to People on Wednesday about the advice he received from Bourdain, who was found dead in a bathroom of his French hotel room in June.

[Bourdain] was telling me about pursuing my own happiness and he gave me his long sort of speech about it, that I deserved to be happy and I was like, That is so great, where did you get that little nugget?' Zimmern told People, adding that he also gave Bourdain the same advice years ago.

I had said the same thing to him about five years earlier, which is great because sometimes you even know things yourself but you need to have a friend repeat it back to you, the host said.

Zimmern previously told Eater he, much like Bourdain, dealt with his own mental health issues. He found Bourdain an incredible sounding board. Zimmern also recalled the Parts Unknown host telling him hes never been happier in the last few years.

Tony was a close friend of mine and it was a beautiful relationship. Im a transparent person and sober a long time and deal with my own mental health issues, and I try to have honest conversations with people in my life. He was an incredible sounding board, a gracious and kind friend to me, Zimmern told Eater.

ANTHONY BOURDAIN, CNN HOST AND CELEBRITY CHEF, CAUSE OF DEATH REVEALED

Nearly four months after Bourdains death, Zimmern told People on Wednesday that he still thinks about his late friend all the time.

I always gave him a lot of grief about his desert boots. He was wearing cowboy boots a lot early on  these beige, leather cowboy boots  for the first four or five years that we were friends and then he kind of switched over to the desert trekking boot, Zimmern recalled. He thought that was so funny and he sent me a pair that I have, and yeah, I look at them every day that Im home.

The boots were the same ones Zimmern tweeted in his tribute to Bourdain on the day of his death.

Im so angry this morning. Life is fing hard and crazy and Tony I love you, Zimmern captioned a photo of the shoes.

Im wearing your boots that I never wore because they were yours and going to work. Everyone should hug some extra people today. My heart is heavy, he tweeted.
The Guardians of the Galaxy star Chris Pratt denied rumors that Hollywood is anti-religious, but rather kind of pro whatever is authentic to you.

I think that there's this narrative that exists out there that Hollywood is anti-Christian or anti-religious, but it's just not the case, Pratt told The Associated Press. They are kind of not anti-anything.

The actor has been vocal about his faith in the past.

Pratt used his time on stage to share a passionate speech about his belief in God during a recent MTV award show.

God is real. God loves, you, God wants the best for you, he said. Believe that. I do.

Pratt continued by telling viewers to learn to pray, adding Its easy, and its good for your soul.

Pratt told the AP his decision to open up about his faith on stage during the award show stemmed from a combination of the current state of the world, as well as what I'm feeling called to do right now.

That kind of a message, it might not be for everybody. But there is a group of people for whom that message is designed, he said. And nothing fills my soul more than to think that maybe some kid watching that would say, 'Hey, I've been thinking about that. I've been thinking about praying. Let me try that out.'

Pratt said he has never been shamed for expressing his Christianity.

I've never had anyone try to shame me, to my face. Maybe they go say it behind my back. But if that's the case, go ahead. You can say whatever you want about me - to my face or behind my back. I'm not going to change.

Religion was recently invoked at the 70th Annual Emmy Awards show on Monday, when co-host Michael Che, alongside his fellow "Saturday Night Live" star Colin Jost, stirred controversy for saying the only white people that thank Jesus are Republicans and ex-crackheads."
Dog the Bounty Hunter is joining the manhunt for a man who allegedly said he wanted to put a bullet in President Trumps head.

Dog the Bounty Hunter, whose name is Duane Chapman, told the Mansfield News Journal he was joining the search for Shawn Richard Christy, 26, a Pennsylvania man who allegedly threatened the commander in chief.

Christy has been on the run since June 19 after allegedly threatening John M. Morganelli, the district attorney of Northampton County, Pa., and Trump in a Facebook post that has since been deleted.

DOG THE BOUNTY HUNTERS BETH CHAPMAN ON HER CANCER DIAGNOSIS: MY MIND SHIFTED FROM DEATH TO LIFE

Keep it up Morganelli, I promise Ill put a bullet in your head as soon as I put one in the head of President Donald J. Trump, Christy allegedly wrote.

Chapman told the media outlet from his home in Hawaii that he had a very hot lead on Christy's location.

"I have delivered messages to him," he continued. "My goal is not to shoot him but get him to surrender."

The reality television star told the media outlet he was slated to arrive in Mansfield, Ohio, on Sept. 27. He was originally planning on visiting the area to host a town hall meeting on "Addiction and How to Find Your Road to Redemption.

Chapman said he hoped he can help with the search and bring him in peacefully.

DOG THE BOUNTY HUNTERS BETH CHAPMAN DIAGNOSED WITH STAGE 2 THROAT CANCER

Following the Facebook post, a federal warrant was issued for Christys arrest. He is also wanted in Pennsylvania for burglary, probation violation and failure to appear for an aggravated assault case.

The search, which now involves the U.S. Marshals Service, the FBI, and the Secret Service, has spanned several states and has reached as far north as Canada. Christy was likewise being sought in Ohio, where he was believed to have abandoned a stolen truck.

Authorities have offered a $20,000 reward for information leading to the capture of Christy but have warned that he should be considered armed and dangerous.

Fox News Bradford Betz and the Associated Press contributed to this report.
Heather Locklear on Wednesday posted a message about addiction and recovery while mourning the death of a friend amid her own personal struggles over the last year.

The 56-year-old actress posted a tribute on Instagram to her friend Josh, who died after battling addiction.

Addiction is ferocious and will try to take you down. Recovery is the best revenge. Be kind to everyone you meet, your light just might change their path. Rest in peace beautiful Josh. You touched my [heart], Locklear wrote.

The message comes amid Locklears own personal struggles. The troubled actress was arrested in February after an alleged confrontation with her boyfriend, Chris Heisser. Locklear then allegedly attacked officers who were responding to the incident, officials said at the time.

HOW HEATHER LOCKLEAR WENT FROM TV'S HOTTEST ACTRESS TO STRUGGLING STAR

Locklear ended up back in handcuffs again in June when police responded to her home after receiving a disturbance call. Police said officers found the actress heavily intoxicated and arguing with other subjects at the residence.

The Melrose Place star was arrested after she allegedly kicked a police officer and emergency personnel while she was being taken into custody.

Just hours after posting bail, Locklear was hospitalized for an alleged overdose. Locklear was fine after the incident and reportedly checked into rehab for alcohol and mental health treatment.

It was the second time in three months she was entering rehab. Its unclear if shes still in rehab.

Locklear returned to social media in August after a four-month hiatus. She has since shared several photos and videos of her Maltese dog, Mister.
Liberal celebrities have been leading the Resistance ever since President Trumps shock victory over Hollywood darling Hillary Clinton, and now superstars are going all-in on the upcoming midterm elections  but whether or not they can make a difference remains to be seen.

Since Trump took office, a gaggle of celebrities have become increasingly involved in politics. Chelsea Handler left her struggling Netflix show to focus on activism, actress Cynthia Nixon unsuccessfully challenged New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, Meryl Streep attacked Trump during a Golden Globes acceptance speech, Robert De Niro said he would like to punch the president and Madonna proclaimed shes thought about blowing up the White House.

If celebrities had a net positive impact on elections Hillary Clinton would be president."  Chris Barron

Former first lady Michelle Obama has enlisted Tom Hanks, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Janelle Monae, Tim McGraw and Faith Hill for her When We All Vote initiative. George Clooney, Jimmy Kimmel, Cher, Alec Baldwin, Chrissy Teigen, Debra Messing and Alyssa Milano are among the most outspoken critics of Trump and many more are expected to jump on the bandwagon heading into the midterms.

Just this week, actresses Julianne Moore, Eva Longoria, America Ferrera, Marisa Tomei, Gabrielle Union and Amber Tamblyn took part in a video praising Dr. Christine Blasey Ford  the woman who accused Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of sexual misconduct.

But some say it may all be for naught.

If celebrities had a net positive impact on elections Hillary Clinton would be president. Every election cycle the Democratic Party trots out a whos who of Hollywood stars to campaign for their candidates and every election cycle average Americans yawn, conservative strategist Chris Barron told Fox News.

While Barron doesnt think A-listers will make an impact, conservative columnist Daniella Greenbaum told Fox News that celebrities definitely have the potential to influence voting patterns generally, but doesn't think its wise for voters to allow a famous persons endorsement to influence their decision.

We need to teach the star struck among us that you can love an actor for the way they do their job, and still disagree with them on a political or ideological basis, Greenbaum said.

We need to teach the star struck among us that you can love an actor for the way they do their job."  Daniella Greenbaum

One way that celebrities can hold influence is through their pocketbooks, TheWraps Itay Hod, who covers the intersection of Hollywood and politics, told Fox News. He said celebrities can draw donors to fundraisers and raise awareness of a given candidate, which is has been critical in previous elections.

Think of 2007, when Oprah Winfrey hosted Obama at her estate. A-listers like Will Smith turned up, and the event raised several millions of dollars. That sent a signal that Obama was a serious candidate, even though he wasn't the most experienced politician, Hod said.

Last month, Variety reported that showbiz already has showered federal candidates with $27.7 million, the bulk to Democrats and the total didn't include a $1 million donated by Bill Maher to help the party win back control of the Senate.

Theres a wow factor in their appearance for a congressional candidate in their district that energizes that candidates voters."  Tim Young

Celebrities can clearly rack up cash and notoriety for a candidate, but Hod ultimately doesnt think endorsements make much of a difference.

If they did, Hillary Clinton would have won in 2016 by a landslide, Hod said, pointing to a study he conducted in 2016 that showed celebrities favored Clinton over Trump by a country mile.

That hasn't stopped various news organizations from publishing headlines such as The Hills Celebrities dive into midterms hoping to thwart Trump, and the Washington Posts How Hollywood can swing the midterm elections."

Political comedian Tim Young told Fox News that most political rhetoric from Hollywood is just "white noise in an already loud environment," but he feels celebrities can have more of an influence in the upcoming midterms than they did in the 2016 presidential race  especially if they physically show up somewhere.

Theres a wow factor in their appearance for a congressional candidate in their district that energizes that candidates voters, Young said.
India Oxenberg has left the Nxivm cult, which branded her as a sex slave, because she fell in love.

While her mother has been getting press for her efforts to extract India, it was love that finally did it, sources say.

Her mother, Dynasty actress Catherine Oxenberg, wrote Captive: A Mothers Crusade To Save Her Daughter From a Terrifying Cult.

In interviews promoting the book, Catherine has taken credit for rescuing her brainwashed daughter from the clutches of Keith Raniere, who is being held in Brooklyn on federal charges of identity theft, forced labor, sex trafficking and wire fraud.

But a source at Plantmade, the East Village vegan restaurant where India worked, said, What happens when you meet the love of your life? Boom!

India has reportedly fallen for Patrick DIgnazio, the handsome young chef at Double Zero, Matthew Kenneys restaurant on Second Avenue.

Frank Parlato, the former Nxivm publicist who worked for years to expose the cult, reported: Patrick said he would not tolerate his girlfriend taking orders from Raniere and being in a sex cult.

According to sources, the lovebirds recently took a vacation in Italy and are on their way to go live at Catherines home in Malibu.

Im happy for her that shes away, one co-worker told me.

This article originally appeared in the New York Post.
Actor Jack Black had a few choice words for President Trump during the unveiling of his Hollywood Walk of Fame star Tuesday.

Black, 49, told the crowd he was honored by the star and added that he dreamed about having one since he was a kid.

Ive wanted one of these things for so long, Black said. Since I was a kid I thought, Oh man, if you get one of those stars on the sidewalk that means youve made it. And I feel like Ive finally grasped that sweet brass ring.

CHEVY CHASE SLAMS SNL: WORST F------ HUMOR IN THE WORLD

The Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle star joked that he was retiring since he has already received his star.

Im here to announce my retirement, Black told a booing crowd. I got the thing! Why continue? Ive made it.

Black concluded his speech by thanking everyone except for the commander in chief.

I love you all so much, Black concluded before adding: Except for Donald Trump. Hes a piece of s---! Peace out, love you!

School of Rock director Richard Linklater and actors Tim Robbins and Mike White attended the ceremony in support of Black. White and Linklater gave speeches before Black, Variety reported.

TOM SELLECK STEPS DOWN FROM NRAS BOARD OF DIRECTORS

Hes the most charitable sweetheart of a guy, Linklater said. But from what I know working with him, I just wanna say, hes such a great guy to hang out with.

White added: The bigger the legend you are, like, the human, the person, recedes. What I think is the most impressive is that the legend that [people] love is incredibly close to the actual person that he is.
It is common for companies to organize various informal events where workers can come with their partners. One of those...
Meghan Markle will embark on her first solo engagement as a member of the royal family next week.

Kensington Palace has confirmed the Duchess of Sussex will attend the opening of the Oceania exhibition at the Royal Academy by herself.

The significant milestone for Meghan comes just four months after she married Prince Harry and puts the actress ahead of her sister-in-law, Kate Middleton.

The Duchess of Cambridge made her first solo appearance as a royal six months after her 2011 wedding to Prince William when she filled in for Prince Charles at a Clarence House charity dinner.

Meghans first solo outing will also provide her ample time to brush up on Commonwealth countries ahead of her royal tour with Harry next month, as the Oceania exhibition will include works from Australia, New Zealand, Fiji and Tonga.

Since her marriage, the Duchess of Sussex has had her royal duties fast-tracked much sooner than Kates.

Meghan attended her first official outing alongside Queen Elizabeth in June, while Kate made her first official appearance with the 92-year-old monarch more than a year after her wedding in June 2012.

This story originally appeared in news.com.au
Meghan Markle celebrated the launch of her charity cookbook Thursday with her mother Doria Ragland and husband Prince Harry by her side at Kensington Palace.

The Duchess of Sussexs mother made a surprise appearance at the luncheon on Perks Field for Markles first solo project as a member of the royal family. Its the first time Markles mother has been seen with her daughter since the royal wedding in May.

Ragland, who reportedly flew to London from Los Angeles last week, introduced herself by saying, Hi, Im Megs mom, People reported.

Ragland also told Baroness Gail Rebuck, chair of Penguin Random House, that she was head over heels for Markle and the launch of Together: Our Community Cookbook.

Markle and the women from the Hubb Community Kitchen  the organization that first inspired the former Suits actress to write the book  came together and created a lunch meal that included coconut chicken curry, aubergine masala and capatis.

The Duchess, wearing a black top with a pleated skirt and bright blue coat, also delivered a speech during the event. She recalled feeling immediately embraced by the women in the kitchen when she first moved to London.

"Working on this project for the past nine months has been a tremendous labor of love. I had just recently moved to London and I felt so immediately embraced by the women in the kitchen, your warmth, your kindness and also to be able to be in the city and to see in this one small room how multicultural it was, she said.

On a personal level, I feel so proud to live in a city that can have so much diversity. It's 12 countries represented in this one group of womenit's pretty outstanding," Markle added.

The book features recipes from women who were affected by the 2017 Grenfell Tower fire that killed 72 people. Markle, who wrote the foreword, came up with the idea of the charity book when she heard the Hubb Community Kitchen was only open two days a week because of lack of funds. The cookbook is aimed at raising money for the victims of the deadly fire.

"I said in the foreword that this is more than a cookbook and what I mean by that is the power of food is more than just the meal itself, Markle said on Thursday. It is the story behind it and when you get to know the story of the recipe, you get to know the person behind it and that's what we're talking about in terms of coming together to really engage and talk and to be able to celebrate what connects us rather than what divides us.

Ragland also said she felt very much at home in London.

Im so glad I can put the face with the recipes. Im going to tell everyone, I met her [each of the cooks]! Im going to make everything, Im serious, she said to the women at the event.

The power of women, Ragland said at the event. We make things happen. We're curious, we say yes, we show up. I'm inspired.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Cary Joji Fukunaga is taking on Bond 25.

The official James Bond Twitter account revealed the American director will tackle the upcoming, currently untitled spy flick on Thursday.

The spy flick will begin filming at Pinewood Studios on 4 March 2019 under the helm of director, Cary Joji Fukunaga with a worldwide release date of 14 February 2020," the account revealed.

Producers Michael G. Wilson and Barbara Broccoli said they were "delighted" to be working with Fukunaga.

His versatility and innovation make him an excellent choice for our next James Bond adventure," they said in a statement.

NEW 'SPACE JAM' MOVIE WILL STAR LEBRON JAMES: REPORT

Last month, the Twitter account revealed director Danny Boyle was stepping away from the project.

The English filmmaker apparently chose to opt out due to creative differences.

The movie was supposed to kick off production in December, the Hollywood Reporter said at the time of Boyles departure, with Oct. 25, 2019, and Nov. 8, 2019 release dates lined up for the U.K. and U.S., respectively.

'DOWNTON ABBEY' MOVIE RELEASE DATE REVEALED

Fukunaga won an Emmy Award for the first season of TV series True Detective and wrote and directed gritty war movie Beasts of No Nation, starring Idris Elba  often named as a potential successor to Daniel Craig as the suave superspy.

The new film will be Craigs fifth, and likely last, big-screen performance as 007.

Fukunaga, 41, is the first American director in the series, which began in 1962 with Dr. No.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Editor of the New York Review of Books Ian Buruma is out at the publication following swift backlash over a self-serving essay by Jian Ghomeshi, a Canadian former radio host who was accused of sexual assault and battery by more than 20 women.

Buruma told Slate last week, This seemed like a story that was worth hearing  not necessarily as a defense . . . but it is an angle on an issue that is clearly very important and that I felt had not been exposed very much.

Reps confirmed Buruma, who took the job last May, is no longer the editor, but didnt say if he resigned or was dismissed.

Ghomeshi was acquitted of sexual-assault charges.

Click here for more from Page Six.
Algernod Washington, the rapper better known as Plies, was arrested Wednesday at Tampa International Airport for allegedly carrying a concealed Glock firearm through a security checkpoint.

TSA agents said they spotted the weapon in his carry-on bag, the Miami Herald reported. They found a Glock 43 9 mm pistol and what appeared to be a loaded magazine next to it, a Tampa airport police spokeswoman told the paper.

He did not have a concealed carry permit, authorities said, according to the Tampa Bay Times.

The TSA (Transportation Security Administration) requires unloaded firearms to be placed in a locked, hard-covered container. The container must completely secure the firearm from being accessed.

Washington, 42, was arrested around noon, the report said. He was released from jail after posting $2,000 bail.
Sandra Bullock's father, John. W. Bullock, has died. He was 93.

News broke of the World War II veteran's passing after the actress' boyfriend, Bryan Randall, posted a tribute to her father on his private Instagram account, according to People.

Randall posted a black-and-white image of John smiling with a sign that says "no bulls - allowed," with a caption saying that the Army veteran had "left the building" and was "surrounded by family and friends."

He then added, As a father, grandfather and WWII veteran, we #thankyouforyourservice. PS: Hey God, were sending you a live one!

The "Blind Side" actress has yet to address her father's death.

John, who attended several red carpet events with his famous daughter, worked in the U.S. Army following the Great War. His death comes 18 years after Bullock's mother, Helga, died at age 58.

According to People, John met his wife while he was in charge of the U.S. Armys Military Postal Service in Europe and was stationed in Nuremberg, Germany.

The couple married in Germany but then returned to the U.S. and moved to Virginia, where John took up work for the Pentagon. But it wasn't long before the couple decided to move back to Germany with Bullock's younger sister, Gesine. They stayed there for 12 years.

The Oscar-winning actress recalled her childhood days in a 2010 interview with People.

We were raised that we are all the same. No one greater, smarter, more powerful. We are all equal, Bullock said before adding that she wants her adoptive son, Louis, to be raised the same way. I would love for Louis to know that. He has a big, beautiful, diverse family. As long as he knows he is loved and protected and given the opportunity to touch and see everything, then I will have done my job as a mama."
Snoop Dogg lashed out at President Trump and his supporters, including fellow rapper Kanye West.

In a new interview, the "Drop It Like It's Hot" rapper shared some harsh words about the president on DJ Suss Ones SiriusXM show.

The DJ started out by saying that he thinks that "a lot of people in our culture don't jive with Donald Trump," to which the artist quickly responded and said, "I tell them straight up, I don't give a f---. If you like that n--- you're a motherf--- racist. F--- you and f--- him."

Snoop went on to explain that Trump has been responsible for "drawing the lines," alluding to the divide the country has seen since the 2016 election.

The rapper said, "Before him, there were no lines. Everybody was everybody, we respected everything, we didn't trip ... but when he drew the line and started pointing motherf--- out and singling them out, then f--- them. You and them. Kanye too. Don't forget about him. F--- you too."

West became a target for most celebrities back in April after he openly addressed his admiration and support of Trump on Twitter.

In one tweet the Yeezy designer and husband of Kim Kardashian said of Trump, We are both dragon energy. He is my brother.

West later found himself battling more backlash after he shared a photo of himself sporting a MAGA hat. Friend John Legend was one of the many celebrities who publically addressed West about his controversial words.

But this isn't the first time Snoop has attacked West and his political views. Following West's Trump support tweets, Snoop posted a photo of him out-and-about in California wearing a sweatshirt and a MAGA hat. The rapper shared the image on his Instagram and said in the photo caption, "Thats mighty white of u Kanye. !N---- if u dont snap out of it Get out part 2."

And Snoop didn't stop there. A week later, the rapper shared another Photoshopped image of the Yeezy mogul with a much lighter complexion on his Instagram.

The rapper captioned the post, "The new. Kanye well all white now way to go dude."
Former rap mogul Marion "Suge" Knight pleaded no contest Thursday to voluntary manslaughter for running over and killing a Compton businessman nearly four years ago and agreed to serve nearly 30 years in prison.

The Death Row Records co-founder entered the plea in Los Angeles Superior Court and has agreed to serve 28 years in prison. The plea came days before jury selection was scheduled to begin in the long-delayed case.

Knight was charged with murder, attempted murder and hit-and-run after fleeing the scene of an altercation in January 2015 outside a Compton burger stand. Knight and Cle "Bone" Sloan, a consultant on the N.W.A. biopic "Straight Outta Compton" were involved in a fistfight that ended with Knight clipping the man with his pickup truck and running over businessman Terry Carter, who died from his injuries.

Knight's attorneys have said he was acting in self-defense and was fleeing armed attackers when he ran over Carter and Sloan. Sloan has denied he was carrying a gun during the confrontation.

During Thursday's hearing, Knight answered Judge Ronald Coen's questions, loudly and quickly saying "no contest" when the judge asked for his plea. He will be formally sentenced on Oct. 4.

The plea deal calls for Knight to serve 22 years in prison on the voluntary manslaughter count, and another six years because it is a third strike violation.

Carter's daughter, Crystal, sat in the front row of the courtroom and displayed no visible reaction to the proceedings. "I'm surprised he pleaded out," Crystal Carter said outside court. "Normally he likes the cameras to be on him 24-7."

Delays, detours and drama marked the run-up to Knight's trial, which was expected to begin Oct. 1 under tight security and secrecy. Court officials had said that no witness list would be released ahead of the trial, and that some witnesses might not be identified by name during the case.

Knight collapsed during one court hearing, two of his former attorneys were indicted on witness-tampering charges, and his fiancee pleaded no contest to selling video of Knight hitting the two men with his truck.

His attorney Albert DeBlanc Jr., appointed by the court five months ago, was his 16th, and Knight tried to fire him and get yet another lawyer just a day before the deal was reached. DeBlanc declined comment Thursday.

While awaiting trial, Knight was also accused of threatening "Straight Outta Compton" director F. Gary Gray.

Knight would frequently, against the advice of Coen and his attorneys, speak extensively during hearings, complaining about jail conditions, his attorneys and his health issues.

While Coen read legal language about the plea and told Knight he was subject to deportation if he was not a citizen, Knight said "ICE is coming to get me?" to a smattering of laughs.

The 53-year-old was a key player in the gangster rap scene that flourished in the 1990s, and his label once listed Dr. Dre, Tupac Shakur and Snoop Dogg among its artists. Knight lost control of the company after it was forced into bankruptcy. He has prior felony convictions for armed robbery and assault with a gun. He pleaded no contest in 1995 and was sentenced to five years' probation for assaulting two rap entertainers at a Hollywood recording studio in 1992.

He was sentenced in February 1997 to prison for violating terms of that probation by taking part in a fight at a Las Vegas hotel hours before Shakur was fatally wounded in a drive-by attack as he rode in Knight's car just east of the Las Vegas Strip. Shakur's slaying remains unsolved.

He had faced life in prison if convicted of murder for killing Carter.

___

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New York police are reportedly searching for a woman who dramatically threw iced coffee across the counter of a 7-Eleven after a reported squabble over the price of the drink.

On Aug. 30, the unnamed woman became irate after she learned the price for the three iced coffees she intended to purchase at the 7-Eleven in Mastic, Long Island, WNBC reported.

RYAN GOSLING STOPS BY TORONTO COFFEE SHOP AFTER MANAGEMENT LOBBIES FOR VISIT WITH CARDBOARD CUT-OUT

In video footage obtained by Fox News, the customer chatted on the phone as she tried to buy the drinks at the register before the transaction quickly turned sour. Getting in an argument with the 7-Eleven staffer working the cashier, the customer dumped the drink after learning how much it all cost, according to police.

Storming out of the convenience store, the disgruntled woman proceeded to escape in a GMC Yukon with New Jersey plates, the outlet reported.

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The dramatic incident caused damage to $200 worth of cigarettes, investigators said.

Now, the Suffolk County Crime Stoppers is offering a $5,000 cash reward as they urge witnesses to contact them with any tips on the crime.

Representatives for 7-Eleven did not immediately return Fox News' request for comment regarding prices for iced coffee at the Mastic location.
A church group in Birmingham, Ala., pooled together a whopping $900 for their Dominos delivery man, all because they thought the driver could use a blessing.

DOMINO'S CUSTOMER ARRESTED FOR PLACING EMPLOYEE IN HEADLOCK OVER WRONG ORDER

Senior Minister Garry Brantley of the CrossBridge Church of Christ told ABC 33/40 that his congregation got the idea to reward the anonymous driver after his associate pastor walked into their local Dominos last week and learned that the driver was working multiple jobs to support his family.

[He] went into this establishment and asked is there anyone in here who could use a blessing," Brantley told the outlet.

The group later arranged for the driver to drop off a delivery order on Sunday, where he was rewarded with the $900 tip.

DOMINO'S PIZZA CUTS PROMOTION PROMISING FREE PIZZA FOR LIFE TO THOSE WHO GOT BRAND'S LOGO TATTOOED

The employees manager, Camron Donahoo, told to ABC 33/40 hes never seen anything like it.

I mean theres good tips but nothing like that where theres life-changing money, added Donahoo.
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A big game hunter and former beauty queen is facing backlash after she claimed in a television interview that hunting helps with anti-poaching and conservation efforts.

Oliva Nalos Opre, who won the title of Mrs. Nebraska in 2003, spoke about her hobby on the U.K.-based show This Morning via satellite Wednesday from her home in Montana.

The mother of four told hosts Phillip Schofield and Holly Willoughby shes killed about 100 species of animals in six different continents.

Her Facebook bio says shes hunted in Benin, Cameroon, Ethiopia, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, Tanzania, Zimbabwe, Argentina, Mongolia, France, Spain, Romania, New Zealand, Mexico, Canada, and throughout the United States.

AMERICAN AIRLINES APOLOGIZES TO RAPPER WALE AFTER HE CLAIMED EMPLOYEES WERE RACIST

She also discussed her belief that hunters are the ones that are giving so much back to preserving the wild species.

No photographer is going to go to Liberia to take a photograph. But hunters have that desire to see new areas, and as a result of these hunters coming in, theyre creating jobs, theyre helping to drill wells and take animal censuses, and whats most important is the anti-poaching efforts, Opre said. There are biologists that have been paid for by hunters trophy dollars that go in and take censuses, she added.

Opre also claimed that organizations like Safari Club International fund research in hunting areas to make sure the numbers are sustainable.

Big game hunters such as Opre often receive harsh backlash, especially online, when they share images of their trophies.

Earlier this week, a fellow big game hunter and friend of Opre's, Brittany, was shamed online for killing a leopard in Namibia.

The photo of Longoria holding the carcass of the big cat went viral after it was posted on Instagram by David Bonnouvrier, co-founder of "Knot on my Planet," an organization that works to end elephant ivory poaching.

It was later shared by many others, including celebrities like Naomi Campbell, Doutzen Kroes and Kyle Richards, all of whom expressed their disapproval of Longorias hobby.

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Opre has also been the focus of social media backlash, with commenters calling her vile and evil, among other insults.

Theres a huge difference between hunting and poaching, and what hunters are doing is legal. So when you have death threats on somebody who has done something legal, its extremely frustrating, she said.
A Florida womans wish to marry her childhood best friend came true hours before her tragic death earlier this month, and now her husband is on a mission to complete the rest of the items that she had on her bucket list.

Nina Marino, 19, and Joey Williams, 21, exchanged I dos on Sept. 3 at St. Josephs Children Hospital, Fox 35 Orlando reported.

The hours leading up to their vows were hectic, as the plans were made for Sept. 4, but doctors feared Marino wouldnt survive the night. There was a scramble to find a photographer when the couples plans were shifted, but a photographer friend reached out to Nil Patel of Patel Creative who was able to capture the couples special moments.

DYING BOY'S CHRISTMAS DECORATIONS ALLEGEDLY VANDALIZED

I dropped everything, ran upstairs, took a shower, changed and grabbed my gear, Patel wrote on Love What Matters. I bolted out the door to St. Josephs Hospital. The ceremony was originally going to take place in the small chapel within the hospital, but unfortunately Nina was too frail to walk down the aisle. So, we had to set up the ceremony location directly in her room inside the Pediatric Intense Care Unit.

Patel shared that the couple had met as young children while attending the same camp together, and that their love had grown through the years. According to their Facebook page, The Chronic Travelers, Marino had been diagnosed with undifferentiated pleomorphic sarcoma.

In a post dedicated to his wife, Williams  who suffers from chronic heart issues  detailed the many adventures the couple had embarked on together, included multiple trips to Disney, trips to visit friends, picnics on a runway, days at the beach, and of course their wedding.

All of these memories that I will never forget and that make me so happy, he wrote on Sept. 6. But perhaps the most amazing memory of all is when we finally got to fulfill our dream of getting married. It may not have been what we had seen in our heads when we thought about our wedding, but it was perfect. You looked so beautiful in your dress, and the way your eyes lit up when I put the ring on your finger will stay with me forever.

Patel wrote that although Marino was unable to speak her vows, it took a simple look from her for Williams to understand her love.

4 LITTLE GIRLS WHO BEAT CANCER REUNITE AT HOSPITAL FOR TOUCHING PHOTO

Previous posts had announced the couples engagement on Aug. 13, followed by another in early September that told followers Marino had been admitted to the hospital again.

Patel said in her post on Love What Matters that her family and friends gathered on Sept. 3 to help decorate Marinos room with photos of the couple, and to help her dress in her gown. The couple wed in the presence of their parents and Marinos care team. An update on Patels post announced that Marino had died on Sept. 6.

In his dedication post, Williams said his wife taught him about what love means, and how to love himself.

I promise that I will never forget you and I will never stop love you, he wrote. I promise that I will finish the thing you wanted to do that you didnt have the chance to do, I am going to cross every last thing off of that list that you made. I promise that I will continue what you started and advocate for chronic-complex young adults. I promise to love your family and friends because they have really shown how much they love you. I promise that one day I will have a tiny house and it will be perfect and just like we would always talk about, and even though you wont be there to help like we had planned, Ill still paint part of it teal.

Williams wrote that the past 450 days of dating you have been some of the best days of my life, and the 2 days 15 hours and 23 minutes I had with you here as your husband were magical.
A South Dakota surgeon admitted to mistakenly removing an Iowa woman's healthy kidney but denied that he breached the standard of care, according to the surgeon's response to a lawsuit filed by the patient.

Dr. Scott Baker and The Surgical Institute of South Dakota acknowledged in an answer to Dena Knapp's lawsuit that Baker removed Knapp's right kidney instead of an adrenal gland and an associated mass, the Argus Leader reported. Knapp, of Milford, Iowa, filed the lawsuit last month alleging professional negligence.

She developed stage-three kidney disease after her October 2016 surgery.

VIETNAM WAR VET DONATES LIFE-SAVING KIDNEY TO FELLOW AIRMAN

Baker and the Sioux Falls hospital "deny the nature, scope and extent of plaintiff's claimed injuries, losses and damages," their response stated.

Knapp alleged that she wasn't told about the mix-up until after she was released from the hospital. Baker had known on the day of the surgery that he hadn't removed the adrenal gland because he was notified by Avera McKennan Hospital's pathology department, according to the lawsuit.

But Baker denied the claim in his answer, claiming that Knapp was provided with the information on the day of her surgery.

MICHIGAN RESIDENT INFECTED WITH DEADLY MOSQUITO-BORNE ILLNESS

Knapp's medical records also indicated "a very superiorly located right adrenal gland," which was near the large lobe of her liver, according to the defendant's answer.

Baker and The Surgical Institute said they did not breach the standard of care by removing the kidney, failing to remove the adrenal gland and failing to admit the mistake. They also deny that Knapp suffered damages.

Knapp chose to have her adrenal gland removed at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota.
Health officials are investigating a poultry plant in New Market, Virginia, after 50 employees were recently sickened by Psittacosis, a rare illness humans typically contract through infected birds.

The infectious disease, "caused by infection of the respiratory tract (throat, windpipe, and lungs) with Chlamydia psittaci, most commonly affects those who care or clean up after infected birds, according to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention.

Employees were first infected at the plant in late August, Brad Respess, president and CEO of Tip Top Poultry, which owns New Market Poultry, told Fox News Thursday.

CHILDREN'S ADVIL BUBBLE GUM FLAVOR RECALLED DUE TO OVERDOSE CONCERNS

Weve taken a ton of caution to make sure our people are healthy and safe. Were a small, family-owned business, so theyre like our family, Respess said, adding the company is working closely with the Virginia Department of Health, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and other health entities to understand what happened.

The workers at New Market Poultry were likely infected by breathing in bacteria that is shed in the birds droppings, health officials told WHSV-News.

When birds secretions dry, small dust particles (including the bacteria) can become airborne. The most common way someone gets infected is by breathing in the dust from these dried secretions," the CDC explained.

Laura Kornegay, health director for the Central Shenandoah Health District, told WHSV-News this bacteria is quite unusual for commercial poultry to be a source of the infection," adding the "bacteria is more often associated with pet birds like parakeets."

Respess said he's also been told its "very rare" and likely a "one-time occurance."

Theres some speculation that one flock of chickens came through with it, he added, noting the plant has since been cleaned and officials have collected environmental samples to better investigate the source of the bacteria.

CARGILL RECALLS MORE THAN 132,000 LBS OF BEEF POSSIBLY CONTAMINATED WITH E. COLI, USDA SAYS

Common symptoms of a Psittacosis infection include headache, fever and chills, as well as a dry cough and muscle aches, according to the CDC, which noted it can also cause pneumonia. It's not usually spread from person to person.

A spokesperson for the Virginia Department of Health did not immediately return Fox News request for comment on Thursday.
While the Zika virus is feared for its ability to severely harm brain development and neurological health, researchers are seeking to use that power in an attempt to target aggressive brain cancer.

In a report published Tuesday in the journal mBIO, University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston researchers claimed to have successfully used a harmless form of the virus to dramatically slow the spread of glioblastoma cells, according to Chron.com.

Pei-Yong Shi, the studys lead investigator, told the news outlet that the team created a vaccine from an inactivated form of Zika, which was able to target the glioblastoma stem cells while largely leaving the healthy brain neurons unaffected.

The team stripped the virus ability to replicate inside cells, essentially causing it to channel its energy into targeting glioblastoma stem cells.

SURGEON DENIES NEGLIGENCE IN REMOVING WOMAN'S HEALTHY KIDNEY

Shi told Chron.com that his teams study found that glioblastomas developed slower in mice who were injected with glioblastoma stem cells and the Zika vaccine, and that it will be tested as a preventative in Brazil in the near future.

More work needs to be done, but these findings represent major progress toward developing the Zika vaccine as a safe and effective treatment for human glioblastoma, Shi told Chron.com. This could be a great example of sciences ability to turn something bad into something useful.

Glioblastoma is the aggressive form of brain cancer that killed Sen. John McCain in August. With a combination of surgery, radiation and chemotherapy, patients are typically given between 11 and 15 months to live post-diagnosis.
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The more we learn about the allegations from Christine Blasey Ford, the woman accusing Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of sexual assault, the more apparent it becomes that she likely wasnt ever comfortable coming forward publicly.

Rather, all evidence seems to point to her being a victim of the strong arm of the Democratic Partys political machine. Theyre very likely putting the pressure on and promising her the sun, moon and the stars, in exchange for using her as a political prop in a last ditch effort to sink Kavanaughs nomination, and provide momentum into the midterm elections.

If women really want to be treated equally then they need to stop asking for special treatment. Sexual assault allegations affect everyone involved, including the accused, which people often forget in this day and age where men accused of misconduct are often presumed guilty until proven innocent.

The men involved are often someones husband, father and son. Women have a responsibility to be sure theyre accusing the right man before they set out to shred a mans reputation and ruin his career with allegations filled with holes and fuzzy on details.

Lets recap the chain of events. Ford initially wanted to remain anonymous, according to Sen. Diane Feinstein, D-Calif. Feinstein received a letter written by Ford alleging sexual misconduct by Kavanaugh in July and was reluctant to share it with anyone, including fellow senators who were meeting with Kavanaugh, until the 11th hour.

Was it a last minute power play to drop a political bombshell, or did she sit on it for so long because even she didnt think the allegations were credible? Just yesterday she said she didnt know if everything in the letter was true. Perhaps she just showed her hand. You be the judge.

After the letter leaked publicly Ford came forward this weekend in a Washington Post article outlining her allegations from more than three decades ago. This came less than a week before the Senate Judiciary Committee was scheduled to vote on Kavanaughs nomination.

Ford certainly isnt behaving like someone who wants to be heard, and shes not behaving like a woman who is sure of anything. Shes behaving like someone whos feeling the unrelenting pressure of the Democrats. As if shes just the latest act in their circus.

The next morning Fords lawyer made the TV rounds and emphatically announced that Ford wanted to be heard and was ready to testify. However, after Republicans agreed that it was a good idea to hear from both her and Kavanaugh before moving to a vote, her lawyer released a statement yesterday saying Ford wanted the FBI to investigate before she testified.

Ford certainly isnt behaving like someone who wants to be heard, and shes not behaving like a woman who is sure of anything. Shes behaving like someone whos feeling the unrelenting pressure of the Democrats. As if shes just the latest act in their circus.

Kavanaugh suggested the other day this was a case of mistaken identity. If thats the case, shame on the Democrats and Feinstein, the supposed feminist, for pouncing on this opportunity and taking advantage of her.

Fords account of the alleged incident leaves a lot of unanswered questions, because theres much she doesnt remember. She has no recollection of either the time or exact location where the incident allegedly took place.

Kavanaugh has vehemently and unequivocally denied the allegations and said he is more than willing to testify publicly before the Senate Judiciary Committee and answer any questions. Two of the men named in Fords letter as being aware of the alleged incident have also come out and said what Ford is alleging never happened.

Countless women have emerged recently and attested to Kavanaughs character. These women span the course of Kavanaughs life, and have known him both personally and politically.

We always need to take charges of sexual assault seriously, but we need to be 100 percent sure those allegations are directed at the correct person. We cant convict good men based on poor memories and no evidence. They have families  and in Kavanaughs case, two young daughters.

Just because a woman said so does not make it so.

The Senate has given Ford the opportunity to testify and be heard on Monday. If she doesnt want to do so, Sen. Grassley and the Republicans need to shut what is effectively a smear campaign down and vote on Kavanaughs nomination. Theyre not running a circus, theyre running a democracy  at least thats what were told.

Senators Collins, R-Maine, and Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, need to send a strong message on behalf of all women and vehemently condemn Feinstein and the Democrats' tactics. There is nothing courageous about women who throw out sexual misconduct allegations without evidence or facts to back them up.

It is deeply irresponsible. It doesnt just potentially ruin a decent man, it undermines credible sexual assault allegations from women.
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If you have been following the serious destruction brought about by Hurricane Florence in North Carolina and the political turmoil caused by the allegations of teenage sexual misconduct made by Dr. Christine Blasey Ford against Judge Brett Kavanaugh, along with his firm and unbending denials, you might have missed a profound event in a federal courtroom in the nation's capital late last week.

The Florence damage may take years to repair, and the Kavanaugh nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court, which once seemed assured, at this writing is in a sort of limbo, pending an Anita Hill/Clarence Thomas-like confrontation before the Senate Judiciary Committee next week. But when Paul Manafort, President Donald Trump's one-time campaign chair, entered a guilty plea in federal court last week, it created the potential for a political earthquake.

Here is the backstory.

Manafort was indicted by two federal grand juries -- one in Arlington, Virginia, and the other in Washington, D.C. -- for financial crimes committed before and during his time running the 2016 Trump presidential campaign. Both prosecutions have been led by Robert Mueller, the Department of Justice-appointed special counsel charged with investigating whether there was a conspiracy between the Trump campaign and people working for the Russian government.

Often, when prosecutors are looking for evidence of crime A, they find evidence of crime B. This is what happened to Manafort. Yet, as the trial judge said in Manafort's Virginia trial last month, which ended in convictions on 8 of 18 charges, the feds were indeed looking for evidence of crime B as well. We all know that the principal reason for pursuing Manafort on financial crimes has been to squeeze him for what he knows about Trump.

Last week, on the eve of Manaforts second trial, that prosecutorial strategy paid off when he entered a guilty plea before a federal judge in Washington, D.C. Manaforts guilty plea is unique and extraordinary. In the plea, Manafort, who only pleaded guilty to two federal crimes -- witness tampering and conspiracy to defraud the government -- also admitted that he committed dozens of other federal and state crimes.

This was intentionally maneuvered by Mueller as part of the plea agreement so as to make it bulletproof from a presidential pardon. I have never seen this before. The president can only pardon federal crimes. Should he do so for Manafort, state prosecutors in New York, Virginia and California -- the states where these crimes (mainly bank fraud) to which Manafort admitted under oath actually took place -- can seek indictments immediately. It will be easy to indict and easy to convict Manafort because of his public admissions last Friday.

The pattern of crimes to which Manafort admitted but for which he did not plead guilty is breathtaking. It involves tens of millions of dollars, the highest-ranking former government officials in the Ukraine, an unnamed Obama Cabinet member and a few Russian oligarchs. The only good news for Trump in all this is that he and his Republican congressional colleagues will be spared the daily barrage of negative headlines from a second Manafort trial, which was scheduled to start this week and which would have led up to the midterm elections, had it not been aborted by the guilty plea. But the president surely fears a beast in the night in the form of whatever Manafort privately tells Mueller.

The plea agreement -- all 117 pages of it -- does not spell out what evidence Manafort gave Mueller to persuade him to agree to cap Manafort's prison time exposure at 10 years when he could have gotten 60. But it does spell out Manafort's willingness and now legal obligation to assist Mueller.

We know that Manafort's personal offer of assistance to Mueller took place over the course of two days of negotiations on Monday and Tuesday of last week. That type of meeting, during which Manafort tipped his hand as to what evidence he could give Mueller about Trump, has been called a "Queen for a Day" by federal prosecutors and FBI agents because the defendant gets to say whatever he wants and if the negotiations fail to produce a deal the feds cannot use what the defendant has told them. The meeting obviously intrigued and excited Mueller's team, and hence a deal was struck.

What did he tell them?

Manafort was present at the July 2016 Trump Tower meeting between campaign officials and Russian intelligence agents, and he made notes. He was present at the preparatory meeting for that Trump Tower meeting. He can probably explain the circuitous and mysterious route of Russian money transfers that followed the Trump Tower meeting. He can explain the 80 times the campaign was in contact with the Russians while he was the campaign chair, and he probably knows if Trump personally knew of the Trump Tower meeting in advance and of any agreements made there.

Stated differently, Manafort can help Mueller paint the Trump Tower meeting and whatever followed it as an agreement by the campaign to accept something of value from a foreign entity, even if the thing of value never arrived: That would be a criminal conspiracy, which my media colleagues call "collusion," a non-legal term. Manafort can also inform Mueller of his financial deals with Trump that preceded Trump's candidacy, at least one of which involved Russian money.

The president's lawyers have shrugged off the Manafort guilty plea as unrelated to the president. This is false bravado for public consumption only, and I don't blame them for it when their client is the president. But if their client has been candid with them, then they can prepare for the Manafort bombshells that are coming.
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Brett Kavanaugh's Supreme Court nomination remains in suspended animation Thursday. Thanks, as you well know, to allegations that he assaulted a psychology professor called Christine Blasey Ford some 36 years ago while both of them were still in high school.

Despite blanket media coverage, the basic details of that story remain murky. Ford has not said when or where it happened precisely. She has said she didn't tell a soul about it for three decades.

There are significant inconsistencies in her account. But we have never doubted Ford's sincerity and we have never questioned her motives. Unless we learn new facts that give us a reason to, we won't do that. We give her every benefit of every doubt.

But there's another side to this story as well. Brett Kavanaugh, he's also got a family and a career and a reputation and all have been gravely damaged by these claims.

The Democrats could have helped clear this up weeks ago if they had asked Kavanaugh about Ford's story as he sat before them for days in the U.S. Senate. That's what hearings are for. But they didn't do that.

Instead, they hid what they knew in order to cause maximum political damage. Now, in the process they overturned his life but they also overturned Christine Ford's life. She had asked to remain anonymous. Democrats betrayed her and they dragged her into the public eye.

Now Ford says she's had to leave her home because of threats. Democrats in the Senate did that purely for partisan advantage, and you should keep that in mind the next time they lecture you about how much they care about women.

So, what happens next?

Well 36 hours ago, Democrats were adamant that Ford get a hearing on Capitol Hill. The nomination couldn't move forward until she did, they told us. It's only fair. Now, they are saying precisely the opposite of that. Watch Hawaii Senator Mazie Hirono explain that having Ford testify before the Senate would itself constitute a form of abuse.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

MAZIE KEIKO HIRONO, JUNIOR UNITED STATES SENATOR, HAWAII: I am totally disappointed that all these people who have come forward to say "We should hear from her," and now that she's expecting a modicum of fairness so she's not re-victimized are now saying "Well if she doesn't want to testify we should just go ahead." That is additional callousness from my colleagues that I am totally appalled by.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: They are trying to set up a he-said she-said scenario and bully her into either testifying on Monday or not being heard at all.

JOY BEHAR, CO-HOST, THE VIEW: These people in Congress right now in that Senate Judiciary Committee, these white men, old by the way, are not protecting women.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Yes.

BEHAR: They're protecting a man who is probably guilty

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CARLSON: Did you get to the last part? Not just men but old white men, the worst kind, the kind who should be punished just for who they are.

If nothing else, the story has opened a window into how many on the left really think it's a tribal world view where people are not regarded as individuals with distinct personalities and beliefs and aspirations but instead as faceless members of ethnic blocs sorted by genes.

It's a world where some people are inherently good and some are inherently bad. It's a place where how you're born determines what you're worth. That's what the left now believes. They say so all the time. But remember, you're the Nazi here, so shut up.

Well you either find this brand of hard identity politics disgusting or you don't. Hillary Clinton is drawn to it like a bear to donuts. She came out of semi-retirement last night to weigh in at length on cable news. Here's how she said the Trump administration ought to respond to the allegations against Brett Kavanaugh.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

HILLARY CLINTON, FORMER FIRST LADY OF THE UNITED STATES, AMERICAN POLITICIAN AND DIPLOMAT: The White House could answer it very quickly by asking the FBI to reopen its background check and to take into account the accusation that's been made and to gather the evidence about what can be known.

What I think the White House and the Republicans on the committee are trying to do is, you know, basically put her in the dock and try to rush this through.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CARLSON: Now just pause for a minute and savor this. Imagine you're Hillary Clinton, imagine saying something like that, you have to believe that the internet doesn't exist that there was no record at all of anything you had ever said in public about claims of sexual abuse.

Well as it happens we have access to the internet here as well as a pretty long memory. Hillary Clinton has said an awful lot about sexual assault allegations, credible allegations, including of rape, all of them aimed at her husband Bill for many women over many years.

Hillary sounded a lot different then, like a totally different person. Of course, she was fighting to keep political power and that gave her another perspective. Listen, as Hillary Clinton dismisses and belittles the claims of female abuse survivors.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

CLINTON: We're right in the middle of a rather vigorous feeding frenzy right now and people are saying all kinds of things and putting out rumor and innuendo.

It's just a very unfortunate turn of events that we are using the criminal justice system to try to achieve political ends in this country.

And I just think that a lot of this is deliberately designed to sensationalize charges against my husband, because everything else they've tried has failed.

The great story here for anybody willing to find it and write about it and explain it is this vast right-wing conspiracy that has been conspiring against my husband since the day he announced for president.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CARLSON: Oh, how times have changed? One thing that has not changed is the torrent of propaganda from the left. Whenever their control of this country is challenged they will say literally anything.

Jim Sciutto, for example, a former Obama appointee, now posing as a journalist over at CNN, summed up today's news this way.

"The offer to Christina Blasey Ford is blunt: testify in public six days from now while under death threats, or your allegation will be ignored in the confirmation of a SCOTUS nominee."

In other words, says Jim Sciutto, Republicans are jeopardizing Ford's life by asking her to tell her story. Not only is this overwrought and dumb, it's factually wrong.

Republicans want Ford to testify because they want to get this over with and vote. That's what you do in a democracy. They've even offered to interview her privately in California. Senator Grassley sent a letter to that effect just recently.

Democrats oppose that, of course. They would like to ride this story into November and beyond. Instead, the left is calling for an FBI investigation. The FBI wants nothing to do with any of this, as we reported on this show last night. So, Democrats are now demanding that Trump order the FBI to investigate the story.

But investigate what exactly? Where would you start?

Ford cannot even state definitively what year this supposedly happened. And by the way, why would the FBI be in charge of the investigation? Nobody's even alleged a federal crime here.

If you really wanted justice in this case, you would bring it to the police in Maryland. That's a state with no statute of limitations on sex crimes. How would that end?

Well Ford says Kavanaugh was a juvenile at the time. If evidence of his guilt emerged would he be tried as a minor? Would his record be sealed afterwards so it wouldn't overshadow his life?

If those sound like absurd questions that's because this whole thing is absurd. The Democrats don't care about Christine Ford. If they did, they wouldn't have outed her in the first place. They care about keeping a Republican off the court, which is fine.

But if that's the case then make the case for why Kavanaugh's ideas are wrong. But don't personally destroy a man simply because he's in the way. That's what they're doing. And the rest of us should stop playing along and say it out loud.

Adapted from the September 19 edition of "Tucker."
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When President Obama embraced Medicare for All earlier this month, it was a remarkable moment. Not because the proposal will be adopted (it wont) or because the price tag would bankrupt the nation (it would).

Rather, it was a remarkable moment because a former American president played the role of enabler for the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).

Indeed, Obamas endorsement was a moment of great celebration for an organization that for years has plotted to hijack the Democratic Party and use it as a parasitic host to remake the nation.

Heres how.

Back in 2012, the Vice Chairman of DSA Joseph M. Schwartz and fellow Political Committee Member Jason Schulman published a strategy document that presented their dream of a socialist America and the political path to get there.

The dream was to abolish privately owned businesses, from small mom-and-pop stores to large corporate enterprises.

Wealth, they explained, is a social creation and should be controlled by society as a whole.

DSA would thus replace Americas entrepreneurs with Socialist bureaucrats or worker groups. Businesses would be renamed cooperatives, though in advanced socialism  Communism  they might once again be called soviets.

If Democratic leaders and candidates refuse to disavow DSA, its time for moderate Democrats to rise up in peaceful revolution.

Schwartz and Schulman admitted that this old-but-new economic system raised a host of uncomfortable questions, including exactly how cooperatives might be run or precisely who would run them.

There is no final blueprint for socialism.

Yet for all their uncertainty, DSAs leaders were abundantly clear that workers would not choose their own destiny.

However we organize the division of labor  the structure of careers and life opportunities  it should be decided democratically.

Schwartz and Schulman offered no guidance for how this might happen, naturally. But one can imagine a group of sycophants gathering in a distant city to decide each workers fate. (Democratically, of course.)

DSAs treatise was quick to acknowledge that these proposals were fraught with historical failure and all but certain to be rejected by most Americans.

Socialism is no longer a pure, innocent ideal, they explained. Its appeal has been tarnished by the authoritarian, statist regimes that have ruled in its name.

Regimes like Soviet Russia, Cuba, and Venezuela.

The DSAs plan simply needed intellectual dimwits and journalistic chowderheads to help rebrand a failed ideology that has left every nation whos adopted it in complete tatters.

American socialism would thus need a reboot, something that minimized its troubled past with a more alluring future.

Schwartz and Schulman settled on populist proposals, listing universal health care, housing, education, child care, and federal jobs. They also argued for mandated worker and consumer representation on corporate boards.

DSAs leaders didnt explain how these programs might work or be paid for, nor have they in the six years since their 2012 pronouncements. But thats the point, it seems. The endeavor was not about actually governing but rather rebranding and normalizing a broken ideology.

Indeed that rebranding helps explain why DSA has distanced itself from the established Socialist Party when running political candidates like New Yorks Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. As Schwartz and Schulman point out, Americas political system rarely embraces third parties, rendering DSAs normal political home pointless and lacking credibility.

They argued that this left them with but one choice: hijacking the Democratic Party. And theyd do it by collaborating with other activists to push self-described progressives hard to the left. In time, these radicalized voters would peel away from the party of Roosevelt and Kennedy, instead forming the backbone of a new, more palatable Socialist Party.

DSAs future would thus run through the Democratic Party, not around it. Candidates like Ocasio-Cortez would be Democrats all right, but in name only.

One would think that the leadership of the Democratic Party would be aware of this political ruse. After all, the DSA plainly lists the Schwartz-Schulman treatise on its website.

Incredibly, however, Democratic leadership seems willing to go along for the ride.

In July, the Chair of the Democratic National Committee declared Ocasio-Cortez the future of our party. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi added that our party is a big tent when welcoming the upstart DSA candidate.

Indeed, not a single Democratic leader has stood up to the DSA or its candidates for their transparent fraud.

Meanwhile, the nations journalists have all but abandoned their duty in reporting on DSAs charade. In fact, MSBNC and CNN have seemingly taken the lead in promoting it.

To wit, MSNBCs Mika Brzezinski called Ocasio-Cortez badass just after her primary victory this summer, while Rachel Maddow fawned that the New York socialist was super impressive.

Others in the media have gone so far as to spread supportive talking points, including daytime talk show host Joy Behar. She claimed that socialists were accomplishing great things in countries like Sweden.

Nevermind that Sweden is not a socialist nation. In fact, Schwartz and Schulman lamented the lack of socialist progress in Nordic countries, most especially Sweden.

This absurd theater might go otherwise unnoticed or dismissed but for DSAs alarming electoral success in 2018. Ms. Ocasio-Cortez is the most notable of the lot but theyve made in-roads in unlikely places  Pittsburgh, for example  and increased their membership from a couple thousand to 50,000 in two years.

This growing threat leaves sensible Americans with a pressing challenge, most especially for the moderate and conservative Democrats who still hold 50 percent of the partys membership.

Its these pragmatic voices that must convince Independents and fellow Democrats that the party should reject the DSA and its Trojan Horse partnership. And if Democratic elders like Obama and Pelosi will not listen, the party faithful would be wise to withhold their vote, money, and volunteer time starting this November.

We should expect Big Tent Democrats to recoil at this hardline strategy, with pleas to accommodate DSAs comrades. That request, however, must be firmly rejected. In the wise words of Schwartz and Schulman, There is more political freedom and social mobility under Western capitalism than in all previous societies.

Why on earth would America  or the Democratic Party  ever trade that away?
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The nomination of Judge Brett Kavanaugh seemed all but certain a few days ago, until a woman named Christine Blasey Ford came forward accusing him of sexual assault when they were in high school. The alleged crime having taken place decades ago has prompted many to ask: Why did she wait so long?

I can tell you why.

In a word ... Fear

In my freshman year of college, I was the victim of something quite similar, on my 18th birthday. I understand why Dr. Ford remained silent. She was afraid. Afraid that no one would believe her  after all, she had been drinking. Fear if it went to court, her sex life would be revealed. Fear she would be judged. Fear her name would be dragged through the mud. And shes not alone.

Rape and sexual assault are the most underreported crimes in our nation. Worldwide, one in three women experience some sexual violence in their lifetime, according to the World Health Organization. Yet it is fear that keeps them from coming forward.

Remaining silent doesnt mean forgetting. It just means suffering in silence.

We judge victims of sexual violence harshly in our society. Juries have at times acquitted the accused simply based on the way a woman was dressed.

The issue of how much time has lapsed has even been the subject of a landmark legal case: 1994s People v. Brown.

But remaining silent doesnt mean forgetting. It just means suffering in silence. Dr. Ford spoke of the psychological trauma. If you Google psychological factors that inhibit reporting of sexual violence youll find there are numerous articles and studies on this very issue. But the question still remains: Does the length of time that has lapsed after the alleged incident lessen the significance of a victims claim?

It shouldnt, but it does.

And should she or any other victim be believed? Well the National Sexual Violence Resource Center states that 2 to 10 percent of victims' claims are false. Meaning at least 90 percent are telling the truth.

So if fear prevented her from reporting this, why come forward now? Well for any woman who has been abused by a man and sees that individual gain influence and power years later, it hits you in the face like a bucket of cold water. Its shocking, startling, unjust. And its a reminder. A reminder of the incident, a reminder of the pain and a reminder that you remained silent. Even in light of the #MeToo movement, only a handful will come forward like Dr. Ford. For the rest, the silence continues.

I am guilty of that silence. Just last year, someone from college re-connected with me on Facebook. We talked about what some of our classmates are doing now, including the one from my 18th birthday. When I found out he is a successful professional in chosen career, it sickened me. I wanted to tell someone. But I didnt. Fear prevented me from picking up the phone.

In coming forward, Dr. Ford is overcoming her fear. And that, I would imagine, will truly help her to heal.

I only wish I could be as brave.
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As Democratic socialists chalk up victories across the country during primary season, there are indications that the wave is having an impact on the Democratic Party at large.

Backed by Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, a slew of liberal candidates have pulled off upsets in Democratic primaries across the country this year by embracing a Democratic socialist platform, with agenda items such as implementing Medicare-for-all, free college tuition, abolishing the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency and impeaching President Trump.

Among candidates embraced by the left wing of the party who have won primaries in major contests this year: New York Democratic congressional candidate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Maryland Democratic gubernatorial nominee Ben Jealous and Florida Democratic gubernatorial nominee Andrew Gillum.

The results have been a mixed bag, however, with a number of candidates falling flat. Most notably, Sex and the City actress and New York gubernatorial challenger Cynthia Nixon was soundly beaten by establishment Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo last week despite a high-profile campaign.

Cuomo mocked the idea of a left-wing wave in remarks Friday, saying that his brand of pragmatic progressivism was where the real revolution was.

That is a revolution, he said of his win, according to The New York Daily News. That is a wave. On the numbers. Not on some Twittersphere dialogue where I tweet you and you tweet me and between the two of us, we think we have a wave. Were not even a ripple.

But there is no sign that left-wing push is slowing down and party elders are warning the party not to go too far to the left. Even the liberal former President Jimmy Carter is expressing concern that Democrats could alienate independents.

Independents need to know they can invest their vote in the Democratic Party, Carter said Tuesday during a speech at his post-presidential center and library in Atlanta.

Joe Lieberman, who was the Democratic Party's candidate for vice president in 2000, said in an interview with Fox News last month that Ocasio-Cortezs ideas will struggle to gain support across America.

"When I see somebody who really says she's a socialist -- she's a very captivating, charismatic candidate -- when you look at those policies, those policies will not be supported in many places across America," Lieberman said.

ALEXANDRIA OCASIO-CORTEZ SHUNS HOLLYWOOD ELITES IN WEST COAST TOUR

House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., has also expressed concerns about the left-wings push for the impeachment of Trump, calling it a gift to Republicans.

Pelosi told Politico in May that impeachment was popular in her district, but that she still didnt support it: Im not walking away from impeachment for political reasons and Im not walking toward it for political reasons. I just think its divisive and I think what we should do is always try to unify.

But there are signs that the groundswell of hard-leftism is having an effect on more mainstream, national candidates.

For instance, while Cuomo brushed off Nixons challenge, he had also dipped his toe into some left-wing positions such as abolishing ICE, at the same time as Nixon was calling it a terrorist organization.

Controversially, Cuomo took a left-wing turn in August and declared that America was never that great.

We have not reached greatness, we will reach greatness when every America is fully engaged, we will reach greatness when discrimination and stereotyping against women, 51 percent of our population, is gone, he said.

"I think this is just another example of Andrew Cuomo trying to figure out what a progressive sounds like and missing by a mile," Nixon told NY1.

Top 2020 Democratic prospects have also started endorsing some of those radical ideas. Sens. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., Kamala Harris, D-Calif., and Kirsten Gillibrand, D-NY, have all expressed support for abolishing or overhauling ICE. President Barack Obama recently voiced his support for Medicare-for-all healthcare plans.

Polls are showing increasing support for socialism, once a dirty word in American political discourse. According to a Gallup poll released in August, more Democrats view socialism positively than they do capitalism.

Fifty-seven percent of Democrats polled by Gallup have a favorable view of socialism, while just 47 percent of Democrats in the poll have positive feelings about capitalism.

Republicans meanwhile, are licking their lips at the prospect of a hard-left turn by Democrats. President Trump, in an interview with Fox News Maria Bartiromo in July, predicted that if Democrats push to abolish ICE, they will get beaten in elections.

Well I hope they keep thinking about it. Because theyre going to get beaten so badly, he said.

Fox News Alex Pappas and Lukas Mikelionis contributed to this report.
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There is a stasis on Capitol Hill as to how things may unfold for a potential hearing on Monday for Supreme Court pick Judge Brett Kavanaugh and the allegations leveled by Dr. Christine Blasey Ford.

That said, Monday may not be the day to watch. Its likely that well know by late morning or midday Friday if theres to be a public session Monday.

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, sent Fords counsel another letter Wednesday. In the missive, Grassley states that if Ford intends to come to the public forum on Monday, that consistent with Committee rules, Dr. Fords prepared testimony and biography are due to the Committee by 10:00 am on Friday, September 21.

In other words, the committee needs to know Friday morning if it should prepare for an open hearing. Is it likely they still give Ford some time beyond 10 a.m. on Friday to decide? Yes. But there is a cut-off period.

Republicans are trying to extend a great deal of latitude to Ford as to how she may come forward to talk to the committee. After all, it was Ford who chose to go public over the weekend. So Republicans on the Judiciary Committee are reluctant to push, demean or attack Ford.

Grassley is willing to hear from Ford in private, even off Capitol Hill and away from the glare of TV lights. In a letter to Fords counsel, Grassley said hed listen to Ford at a time and place convenient to her. Fox News is told committee aides are even willing to fly to California to interview Ford. But Grassley insists on one thing. The Iowa Republican wants this complete by Monday, September 24.

Grassley is reluctant to grant a key element of Fords request: linking her appearance to the completion of a probe of the allegations by the FBI.

The FBI does not make a credibility assessment of any information it receives with respect to a nominee. Nor is it tasked with investigating a matter simply because the Committee deems it important. The Constitution assigns the Senate, and only the Senate, with the task of advising the President on his nominee and consenting to the nomination if the circumstances merit. We have no power to commandeer an Executive Branch agency into conducting our due diligence. The job of assessing and investigating a nominees qualifications in order to decide whether to consent to the nomination is ours, and ours alone, Grassley said in the letter.

Will there be a hearing if Ford rejects the committee offer? Doubtful.

If shes not attending I dont know what the point of going forward would be, said Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn, R-Texas, a member of the Judiciary Committee.

Why the Republican deference to Ford? The GOP doesnt want to be perceived as not hearing from her or taking Fords claims seriously. Its also significant that President Trump has said repeatedly Ford should testify. On previous occasions, the president has questioned the intelligence and integrity of women, ranging from House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., to Reps. Frederica Wilson, D-Fla., and Maxine Waters, D-Calif. But Trump has shown restraint with Ford. A tweet storm by the president directed at Ford could prove catastrophic for Republicans on the ballot this fall.

The GOP fears a political backlash from female voters, a la what unfolded in 1991 following hearings with Justice Clarence Thomas and law professor Anita Hill. The Thomas/Hill saga  coupled with sexual harassment allegations against then-Sen. Bob Packwood, R-Ore.  triggered what political observers dubbed The Year of the Woman in the 1992 elections. The number of women in the Senate swelled from two to five. California became the first state in the nation to boast two female senators, one of whom is Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee today.

The Thomas/Hill hearings transfixed the nation. Moreover, senators from both parties came off looking like buffoons. Saturday Night Live parodied the hearings in an epic cold open. The sketch portrayed senators as eager pupils, hungry to learn dating tips from Thomas and hear his views on lewd movies.

This is why some Republicans are eager to avoid the spectacle of a hearing. Some Republicans suggested privately it may be better for Ford not to testify publicly at all. That means Republicans get the upper hand with optics and dont have to endure the spectacle of 11 male GOP senators questioning Ford.

Democrats and those close to Ford hardly think GOPers are doing her any favors.

'DISAPPOINTED' GRASSLEY DEMANDS FEINSTEIN TURN OVER KAVANAUGH ACCUSER'S LETTER

Ford attorney Lisa Banks says her client is unable to go home, and is receiving ongoing threats to her and her family's safety. Fairness and respect for her situation dictate that she should have time to deal with this. Banks accused Republicans of a rush to a hearing.

Its unreasonable for the committee to force her hand without doing the appropriate investigation in my opinion. I think that they jumped the gun on this and I would like to see an investigation done, said Sen. Doug Jones, D-Ala.; a potential swing vote on the nomination.

But, the confirmation or rejection of Kavanaugh boils down to a political question, not a legal one. As Grassley asserts, its up to the committee and the Senate to provide Constitutional advice and consent. Nothing else.

So whats a possible timeline to potentially conduct a committee vote and a confirmation vote on Kavanaugh?

Sources repeatedly chased Fox News away from the idea of a Monday committee vote on Kavanaugh. However, what happens if theres no hearing? Does the committee vote on Monday? Unclear. But the confirmation map would likely consume at least five calendar days.

Heres a hypothetical scenario, crafted strictly for the purposes of establishing a plausible timetable:

Lets say the committee votes on the nomination on a Monday. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., would prepare whats called a cloture petition to end debate on the nomination. But McConnell cant file the cloture petition until the next day, a Tuesday. By rule, efforts to limit debate in the Senate must lay over for one day before the procedural vote. So, if cloture is filed on a Tuesday, the layover day is a Wednesday. By rule, the vote to halt the filibuster is taken on the following day, Thursday. If 51 senators vote to break the filibuster, the nomination is on a glide path toward confirmation. But if opponents of the nomination use all time afforded them under Senate rules, the actual confirmation vote doesnt happen until later in the day on Friday.

LAURA INGRAHAM: SHADES OF DUKE LACROSS 'RUSH TO JUDGMENT' IN KAVANAUGH CHAOS

In other words, that process alone, by the book, consumes nearly a five-day workweek. McConnells goal is to get Kavanaugh on the High Court by October 1, the start of the Supreme Courts new term. Thats why the Senate could be in session next weekend or the confirmation fight could even spill over into October.

It wasnt that long ago it was thought that moderate Democrats facing competitive re-election campaigns this fall would have an easy path to vote in favor of Kavanaugh. Then, it was thought that the allegations may actually grant some of those Democrats a reason to vote nay. However, the accusations only complicate matters for those senators. Lawmakers like Sens. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., Heidi Heitkamp, D-N.D., and Joe Donnelly D-Ind., represent states where Trump is popular. These senators may be reluctant to vote nay on Kavanaugh anyway. But what if nothing more is heard from Ford and the unproven allegations just linger in the political ether? Those senators then have a much tougher choice to make.

It's also unclear what the allegations mean for the midterm elections. How will voters interpret the actions of both parties? How did they treat Ford? How did they treat Kavanaugh? Was Kavanaugh confirmed? Was Kavanaugh rejected? We think we know a lot about the midterms at this stage in the election cycle. But theres a long way to go to before one can plug the Kavanaugh/Ford dispute into the political calculus.

When asked about Fords allegation on Tuesday, Feinstein declared: I cant say everythings truthful. I dont know.

But an hour later, Feinstein clarified her remark. Based on what I know at this stage, she is credible, said the California Democrat.

Feinsteins comments crystallize the Kavanaugh/Ford narrative. We have two credible people who have risen to the tops of their professions. Yet, no ones certain about whos truthful.

And, theres no guarantee well know for sure even after a public hearing.

After all, people still wonder about Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill, 27 years later.
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New Jersey Democratic Sen. Cory Booker is facing accusations of hypocrisy over his calls to delay the confirmation vote of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh amid sexual misconduct allegations, as he once admitted groping a friend without her consent in high school.

The senator, who urged the Senate Judiciary Committee to first let the FBI conduct an investigation after California professor Christine Blasey Ford accused the high court nominee of sexual assault over 35 years ago, once wrote an article detailing an instance where he groped a female friend.

New Year's Eve 1984 I will never forget. I was 15. As the ball dropped, I leaned over to hug a friend and she met me instead with an overwhelming kiss. As we fumbled upon the bed, I remember debating my next 'move' as if it were a chess game, Booker wrote in the student-run Stanford Daily newspaper in 1992.

With the 'Top Gun' slogan ringing in my head, I slowly reached for her breast. After having my hand pushed away once, I reached my 'mark, he continued, without explaining what he meant by mark.

"With the 'Top Gun' slogan ringing in my head, I slowly reached for her breast. After having my hand pushed away once, I reached my 'mark.'"  Cory Booker

Our groping ended soon and while no 'relationship' ensued, a friendship did. You see, the next week in school she told me that she was drunk that night and didn't really know what she was doing, he added.

Bookers intent of the column was to detail his transformation from a 15-year-old who was trotting around the bases and stealing second to someone who was called a man-hater over his pro-women views.

In retrospect, my soliloquy titled The Oppressive Nature of Male Dominated Society and Its Violent Manifestations Rape, Anorexia, Battered Wives may have been a surreptitious attempt to convince her that I was a sensitive man, but more likely I was trying to convince myself that my attitudes had changed, he wrote.

The now-senator came back to the topic a few months later in 1992, penning another article that mentioned the controversial column, which he said was about date rape, and admitted that his actions were at odds with his beliefs.

But by my second column, as I raised my noble pen to address the issue of date rape, I realized that the person holding it wasn't so noble after all, he wrote. With this issue as with so many others, a dash of sincere introspection has revealed to me a dangerous gap  a gap between my beliefs and my actions.

"With this issue as with so many others, a dash of sincere introspection has revealed to me a dangerous gap  a gap between my beliefs and my actions."  Cory Booker

The columns by Booker, a potential 2020 presidential contender, have resurfaced after he became one of the leading voices of the Democratic opposition against Kavanaughs confirmation.

Following allegations of sexual misconduct against Kavanaugh, which he vehemently denied, Booker said the accusations are serious, credible, and deeply troubling. After the committee vote was delayed and Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley invited both Ford and Kavanaugh to testify on Monday, Booker called for an FBI investigation before holding a hearing.

Paul Mulshine, a columnist for the Star-Ledger, the largest newspaper in New Jersey, wrote Thursday that Bookers columns will put him in an awkward position amid the scandal rocking the confirmation hearings.

Based on that Stanford Daily column, Booker should be giving Kavanaugh the benefit of the doubt as well. The point of it was that the future senator had a wake-up call and decided I will never be the same.

Bookers office pushed back strongly.

This disingenuous right-wing attack, which has circulated online and in partisan outlets for the past five years, rings hollow to anyone who reads the entirety of Senator Bookers Stanford Daily column, a spokesperson for the senator said in a statement to Fox News.

The column is in fact a direct criticism of a culture that encourages young men to take advantage of women -- written at a time when so candidly discussing these issues was rare -- and speaks to the impact Senator Bookers experience working to help rape and sexual assault survivors as a college peer counselor had on him.
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Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh's wife, Ashley, has been receiving graphic and violent threats, according to emails obtained by Fox News, following reported harassment also directed at accuser Christine Blasey Ford and Kavanaugh himself.

WARNING: GRAPHIC LANGUAGE BELOW

"Please tell your rapist, lying, cheating, corrupt b---h of a husband to put a bullet in his ugly f-----g skull," one email to Kavanaughs wife read. "My condolences to you for being married to a rapist. Although you probably deserve it."

Another email, with the subject line, "Did your know your husband is a rapist?????" stated: "Hey b---h, did you know your husband was a rapist before you married him? F--k you and your f-----g family."

A third email, typed entirely in capital letters, read, "F--K YOU AND YOUR RAPIST HUSBAND."

"F--K YOU, RAPE ENABLING C--T. YOUR HUSBAND IS A LIAR, THIEF, RAPIST AND PROBABLY A PEDOPHILE. BURN IN HELL YOU WORTHLESS F-----G C--T," the email stated. "MAY YOU, YOUR HUSBAND AND YOUR KIDS BURN IN HELL YOU F-----G PIECES OF TRASH. EAAAAATTTTT S-----------T!!!!!!!!!!"

Ashley Estes, who served as George W. Bush's personal secretary during his years in the White House, married Kavanaugh in 2004. She works as a town manager in Chevy Chase, Maryland.

WHY STATUS OF KAVANAUGH CONFIRMATION PROCESS COULD BECOME MORE CLEAR ON FRIDAY

Kavanaugh, the nominee, is himself receiving death threats, a senior source told Fox News. He has adamantly denied Ford's allegations against him.

In the days after she accused Kavanaugh, 53, of pinning her to a bed in the 1980s and trying to forcibly remove her clothing, Ford, a college professor in California, has reportedly received threats against her life.

WHO IS CHRISTINE FORD, THE PROFESSOR WHO ACCUSED BRETT KAVANAUGH OF SEXUAL MISCONDUCT?

Ford's lawyers told The New York Times that in addition to threats, her email account has been hacked and she's been forced to leave her home.

Ford's attorney on Thursday said the professor "would be prepared to testify" to the Senate Judiciary Commmittee about her accusations against the nominee next week, as long as senators provide "terms that are fair and which ensure her safety."

Fox News' Kristin Brown and Gregg Re contributed to this report.
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Wisconsin Democratic Sen. Tammy Baldwins campaign on Thursday invited supporters to a fundraiser next month with the two attorneys representing Kavanaugh accuser Christine Blasey Ford, according to an invitation obtained by Fox News -- only to abruptly cancel those plans after they became public.

The two attorneys, Debra Katz and Lisa Banks, have been in the news advocating on Fords behalf and negotiating with Senate Republicans about whether Ford will testify on her allegations. The nominee has denied sexually assaulting Ford in high school.

Please Join Debra Katz, Lisa Banks and End Citizens United for Cocktails and Conversation with U.S. Senator Tammy Baldwin (D-WI) to support her re-election campaign, read the invitation, which Fox News received from two separate sources.

But the Baldwin campaign told Fox News that Katz and Banks are no longer involved in the event, saying the fundraiser was scheduled before Ford made the allegations.

The fundraiser, according to the invite, was scheduled for the night of Oct. 1 in Dupont Circle, an area of Washington D.C.

It asks for a $1,000 donation to host the event, $500 to co-host, $250 to attend as a friend or $100 to come as a supporter. The invitation said it was paid for by Tammy Baldwin for Senate.

Your support for Tammy's campaign has been wonderful and we really appreciate the help, the invitation reads. We are fast approaching the final weeks and we could use your help one more time.

Katz and Banks did not return a request for comment.

Baldwins Republican opponent, Leah Vukmir, in a statement sent to Fox News before it was clear the attorneys were pulling out, called the fundraiser despicable.

"In the most despicable manner, Senator Baldwin, who opposed Judge Kavanaugh within 48 hours of his nomination and refused to meet with him, will be holding a political fundraiser with the lawyers of Dr. Ford who is now accusing him of sexual assault, Vukmir said. Baldwin and her Democrat colleagues will take advantage and fundraise off any situation  even the most egregious.

In a letter to Senate Republicans on Wednesday, Katz and Banks said, "Dr. Ford was reluctantly thrust into the public spotlight only two days ago. She is currently unable to go home, and is receiving ongoing threats to her and her family's safety.
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Rep. Eric Swalwell, D-Calif., apologized and deleted a tweet that seemed to make light of threats made to a female senator regarding Brett Kavanaughs contentious Supreme Court confirmation.

Swalwell originally shared a report from The Hill about threats Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, and her office has received. Though not a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Collins has been the target of liberal groups hoping to persuade her to vote against President Trumps Supreme Court pick.

Kavanaughs confirmation is on hold after he was publicly accused of sexual assault  an incident that allegedly happened in the 1980s  by a California psychology professor. Kavanaugh has vehemently denied the allegations and offered to appear before lawmakers in a hearing to clear his name.

Attorneys for Christine Blasey Ford, the woman who made the allegation, called for an FBI investigation before she accepts an invitation to meet with lawmakers. Her lawyers have also said she and her family have been forced to relocate out of their home because shes been the target of vicious harassment and even death threats.

KAVANAUGH ACCUSER CHRISTINE BLASEY FORD WANTS FBI TO INVESTIGATE ASSAULT CLAIM: WHY THE BUREAU LIKELY WON'T

As the back-and-forth among lawmakers over what to do with Kavanaughs confirmation continues, Collins said her office has received intimating messages.

My office has received some pretty ugly voicemails, threats, terrible things said to my staff, Collins recently told WVOM radio. This has been a very ugly process, and I think thats very unfortunate for everyone involved.

In a since-deleted tweet, posted at 3:24 a.m. Thursday, Swalwell responded: Boo hoo hoo. Youre a senator who police will protect. A sexual assault victim cant sleep in her own home tonight because of threats.

Where are you sleeping? Shes on her own while you and your [Senate GOP] colleagues try to rush her through a hearing, he continued.

GRASSLEY SETS FRIDAY DEADLINE FOR KAVANAUGH ACCUSER TO SAY IF SHE WILL TESTIFY

In subsequent tweets, Swalwell said no one should make threats," adding he didnt mean to suggest violence is acceptable.

Sexual assault victims deserve respect. And senators shouldnt be threatened by the public, the congressman said. I said something stupid and minimized ugly behavior. That tweet is deleted and Im sorry for that.

Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley has given Ford until Friday morning to determine whether shell testify before lawmakers  publicly or privately  Monday as Republicans have requested.

Fox News Alex Pappas contributed to this report.
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As Democrats come under pressure over their handling of the sexual assault accusation made against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, at least one Democrat is peeling away from the escalating calls for delay.

Democrats have demanded that Republicans delay the confirmation vote on Kavanaugh until a full FBI investigation is carried out into an accusation made by Christine Blasey Ford -- who claims Kavanaugh assaulted her in high school at a party in the 1980s.

Republicans have said that an FBI investigation is unnecessary, and have instead invited Ford to testify to the Senate Judiciary Committee on Monday in either open or closed session, and have attacked Democrats for sitting on the accusation since July.

"The fact is that these allegations could have been raised both within the last seven weeks and in a way that protected Dr. Ford's anonymity," Commitee Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, said in a letter to Ranking Member Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., Wednesday.

"Instead you chose to sit on the allegations until a politically opportune moment. I cannot overstate how disappointed I am in this decision," he wrote.

Grassley has indicated that if Ford does not testify on Monday, then the committee will proceed to a vote on confirmation. Ford, meanwhile, has said she will not testify unless there is a full FBI investigation over the accusation.

Democratic Senate candidate Phil Bredesen, who is running in the deep-red state of Tennessee, appeared to support that position and said that while Ford has a very credible story, the committee should "go forward" if she declines to testify.

"She has put herself out there, Bredesen said in an interview with The Associated Press. If she decided at this point to not do something, I guess the committee has to go ahead and say, Well, we were willing to listen, but if shes not willing to talk, we need to go forward.

This is out of step with committee Democrats, who have backed Ford and accused Republicans of trying to force her to testify at a sham hearing.

Denying Dr. Ford an FBI investigation is silencing her, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-NY, tweeted Wednesday. Forcing her into a sham hearing is silencing her. And pushing through Brett Kavanaughs confirmation is silencing her.

The Tennessee race is among the most competitive in the country as Bredesen is running against Rep. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., and looks to keep his distance from Washington Democrats. The seat is open because Sen. Bob Corker is retiring.

DEMOCRATS UNDER FIRE FOR PUSHING MISLEADING KAVANAUGH VIDEOS

Bredesen did not say whether he would vote to confirm Kavanaugh, although he did say that if the allegation were true, it was close to being disqualifying, if not disqualifying.

Currently Republicans hold a majority in the Senate and as long as moderate senators, such as Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., and Susan Collins, R-Maine, vote along party lines -- Kavanaughs confirmation would seem assured.

But even if some Republicans vote against Kavanaugh, his confirmation could still go through if red-state Democrats vote for him. Sens. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., Heidi Heitkamp, D-N.D. and Joe Donnelly, D-Ind., voted for the confirmation of Justice Neil Gorsuch in 2017.

Donnelly on Wednesday said that the FBI should investigate Fords allegation and said there was no need to rush.

"I have thought from the start that we're better off having more information, that the FBI's role in this process is to do a thorough background review of the nominee. And so I would prefer to have that. I don't think there's a need to rush," Donnelly told The Journal Gazette.

"But if this process is moving forward, it's moving forward," he added. He has not yet said how he would vote.

Manchin, meanwhile, tweeted Monday that both Ford and Kavanaugh should be given the opportunity to testify "as quickly as possible."

The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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Protesters have ramped up efforts to stop Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh's nomination in recent weeks after Christine Blasey Ford accused the judge of sexually assaulting her three decades ago  an allegation Kavanaugh has vehemently denied.

Dozens of demonstrators were arrested on Capitol Hill Thursday after taking over the offices of Republican Sens. Chuck Grassley, Sen. Bob Corker, Susan Collins, Jeff Flake, among others, to once again call on lawmakers to reject Kavanaugh's nomination to the nation's highest court.

A crowd of protesters crammed into Grassley's office for most of the day  even ordering in lunch. The majority were from various women's rights groups, sharing personal stories of sexual assault in the Senate Judiciary Committee chairman's front room.

KAVANAUGH PROTESTERS FLOOD GRASSLEY'S OFFICE AHEAD OF HEARING: 'WE'VE GOT SOME THINGS TO TALK ABOUT"

"Senator Grassleys staff continued to answer phone calls from Iowans as best they could while the demonstrators were in the front office," Michael Zona, communications director for Grassley, told Fox News.

At least one woman dressed in a "Handmaid's Tale" costume reportedly paced back and forth outside Grassley's office.

The protesters chanted, in part: "We believe Christine Ford!"

At least two dozen people crowded outside of Corker's office, chanting "we believe women" while sporting "I Believe Dr. Christine Blasey Ford" buttons on their clothes, The Hill reports.

WHO IS CHRISTINE BLASEY FORD, THE PROFESSOR WHO ACCUSED BRETT KAVAUGH OF SEXUAL MISCONDUCT?

Twenty-three people were arrested Thursday morning for unlawful demonstrations. They were charged with violating the Washington, D.C., law that makes it illegal to obstruct the entrances and passageways of public buildings.

U.S. Capitol Police spokeswoman Eva Malecki says an additional 33 people were arrested Thursday afternoon on the same charge.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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The father of a Parkland school shooting victim is criticizing Democratic gubernatorial hopeful Andrew Gillum for receiving support from controversial Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel.

Israel has been widely criticized for his handling of events surrounding the tragic mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School on Feb. 14, which left 17 people dead. Andrew Pollacks daughter, Meadow, was among the victims.

Israel is one of several local officials hosting a fundraising breakfast for Gillum, the Tallahassee mayor, this weekend, The Sun-Sentinel reported.

It is absolutely disgraceful that Andrew Gillum would campaign with Sheriff Israel. Gillum is siding with Sheriff Israel above the interests of our students and citizens, making our schools and communities less safe, Pollack said in a statement to the Tampa Bay Times. We need to elect [GOP nominee] Ron DeSantis so people like Sheriff Israel can be held accountable and removed from office.

FOX NEWS MIDTERM ELECTION HEADQUARTERS

In a tweet about the fundraiser, Pollack called Israel a disgraceful sheriff that is partially responsible for the death of my daughter.

DeSantis, a former congressman, has said he would have suspended Israel.

A progressive, Gillum has often touted his plan for stricter gun control if elected governor. On his campaign website, hes promised to never back down from common sense solutions to keep our streets, parks and schools safe from gun violence.

FLORIDA GOVERNOR RACE HEATS UP WITH TRUMP ENDORSEMENT, FBI PROBE: A LOOK AT THE CANDIDATES

Pollack has been extremely vocal about his opposition to Gillum on social media.

Electing [Gillum] as Governor would be the worst mistake in the history of Florida, Pollack said in one tweet.

A friend of the pathetic Sheriff Israel, is an enemy of mine, he said in another, linking to a Tampa Bay Times article about Israels support of Gillum. Pollack added the hashtag #FixIt.

Gillum is also connected to an ongoing FBI investigation into possible corruption in Tallahassee, which hes led since 2014. Gillum has stressed he is not the focus of the investigation and has denied any wrongdoing.

Fox News has ranked the race between DeSantis and Gillum a tossup.

Fox News Alex Pappas contributed to this report.
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Christine Ford, the California professor accusing Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of sexual assault, told the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday that she would be prepared to testify next week" -- apparently backing off her bid for the FBI to first launch a new inquiry.

According to an email sent by her attorney Debra Katz and first obtained by The New York Times, Ford would appear as long as senators provide terms that are fair and which ensure her safety." Fox News has also obtained the email.

As you are aware, she has been receiving death threats, which have been reported to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and she and her family have been forced out of their home, the email continued. She wishes to testify, provided that we can agree on terms that are fair and which ensure her safety.

Senate Republicans had invited Ford to testify at a hearing on Monday, and gave her a Friday deadline to indicate whether she would attend.

A Monday hearing still appears unlikely, though, even though Kavanaugh said through the White House late Thursday that he'd be willing and ready to testify then.

In the letter Thursday, Ford's attorney wrote that it is not possible" for Ford to testify on Monday. She added that "the Committees insistence that it occur then is arbitrary in any event.

Ford's openness to testifying threatened to once again upend Kavanaugh's confirmation process. Senate Republicans had said that if Ford stuck to her apparent refusal to testifiy, they would have moved forward with a vote on Kavanaugh on Wednesday. That vote is now in doubt.

However, the attorneys concluded: "Her strong preference continues to be for the Senate Judiciary Committee to allow for a full investigation prior to her testimony. "

Late Tuesday, Ford's lawyers strongly suggested she would testify only if the FBI first conducted a "full investigation."

INCONSISTENCIES EMERGE IN KAVANAUGH ACCUSATIONS AS WITNESS DELETES ONLINE ACCOUNT

Senate Judiciary Committee Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, pushed back sharply on that request, writing in a letter that it was not the FBI's role to investigate a matter such as this" and that the agency already had reviewed the allegations and supplemented its background check of Kavanaugh.

And in a series of tweets earlier Thursday, Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee noted they had obtained statements, under penalty of felony, from three people at the house party where the alleged assault occured, including Kavanaugh, his friend Mark Judge, and another individual. Fox News has learned that Kavanaugh provided his statements under oath, exposing him to potential perjury liability if he were lying.

Committee members also wrote that they had reached out to a "fourth person allegedly at the party," as well as "a schoolmate who claimed on social media this week to have info related to Dr. Fords allegations" -- but had not heard back.

That was an apparent reference to a widely circulated online account by Cristina Miranda King, who claimed that she heard about the alleged assault at the time. King deleted her online post after questions emerged about apparent inconsistencies.

"[Ford's] attorneys say there needs to be an investigation, which is exactly what the committee has been doing all week," the GOP members wrote. "And we would love to hear from Dr. Ford. Democratic staff is invited to participate fully every step of the way."

Meanwhile, tensions over Kavanaugh's nomination were evident Thursday on Capitol Hill. A total of 33 protesters were arrested outside Grassley's office in the Hart Senate Office Building this afternoon, and 23 were booked in the morning in the Dirksen Senate Office Building. They were charged with obstructing and crowding, according to Capitol Police officials.

Images posted on social media showed several demonstrators eating lunch in Grassley's office as aides took notes of their complaints.

WATCH: FEINSTEIN ADMITS SHE'S NOT SURE ACCUSER BEING ENTIRELY 'TRUTHFUL'

Sources tell Fox News that several death threats have been sent to Kavanaugh and his family, as well as Ford. Maine Republican Sen. Susan Collins, a moderate and potential key swing vote in Kavanaugh's confirmation, also said she had been receiving threatening messages.

In response to Collins' complaint, a top Democratic California lawmaker, Rep. Eric Swalwell, tweeted, "Boo Hoo Hoo." He later deleted the tweet and called it "stupid."

Late Thursday, Democrats on the Judiciary Committee wrote a letter demanding the FBI investigate threats against Ford.

"We are increasingly concerned by reports of alleged death threats against her, the hacking of her email, and the harassment and intimidation [Dr. Blasey Ford] has faced since being forced into the spotlight late last week," the Democrats wrote, adding that they "believe that how Dr. Blasey Ford is treated in this moment reflects upon how seriously our Nation treats credible claims of sexual assault, and whether we have learned from past mistakes."

Ford, who has acknowledged she could not remember exactly when or where the alleged sexual assault incident happened more than three decades ago, had been under intense pressure to make her allegations against Kavanaugh under oath. She reportedly had asked a friend over the summer whether she had ever confided in her that she had been sexually assaulted, and was told that she had not.

Kavanaugh denied the allegations when he spoke under oath with Senate Republican staff earlier his week, Fox News has learned. Democratic Judiciary Committee members and staff refused to participate in those closed-door proceedings.

The California professor said she was reluctant to come forward and did so only because her hand was forced by the media. She wrote a letter outlining her allegations in July to Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., but Feinstein did not mention them to other senators or federal investigators until last week.

Feinstein, the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, has said she was motivated by a desire to protect Ford's identity, but Republicans countered that Feinstein could have mentioned the allegations without naming Ford.

According to a scathing letter sent by Grassley to top Democrats this week, Feinstein actually compromised Ford's privacy by waiting so long and allowing information about her letter to leak to the media just days before a key vote on Kavanaugh's confirmation.

Grassley also blasted Feinstein for failing to disclose to Republicans an unredacted version of the July 30 letter she received from Ford.

"I cannot overstate how disappointed I am," Grassley wrote, charging that Feinstein "chose to sit on the allegations until a politically opportune moment."

Fox News' Chad Pergram and Alex Pappas contributed to this report.
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After the nation was riveted by the Senate testimony of Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas, the Supreme Court nomination came to a vote.

Democrats controlled the Senate. Joe Biden had chaired the hearings.

And yet Thomas was confirmed, with 11 Democrats joining 41 Republicans to provide the margin of victory (and two Republicans voting against him).

That would be inconceivable today. The hyperpartisan nature of todays politics would never allow so many Democrats to defect in favor of a Republican president's nominee, one who was not only extremely conservative but had faced a last-minute accusation of sexual harassment.

With Brett Kavanaugh's nomination now on the line after an eleventh-hour charge of long-ago sexual assault, it's become a cliche to say that America is a very different place than it was back in 1991. Indeed, it's a very different place than in 1998, when most Democrats stuck by Bill Clinton despite numerous sex scandals, including his affair with a White House intern.

The cultural landscape now includes Bill Cosby (who is being sentenced next week) and a #MeToo Movement that has cost powerful men their jobs in Hollywood, media, Silicon Valley and many other businesses and walks of life. With more female office-holders, there is an automatic presumption that women making such accusations are entitled to a fair hearing.

That's why Christine Blasey Ford, who came forward with a harrowing tale of what she called attempted rape when she and Kavanaugh were high school students, posed such a grave threat to the judge's confirmation.

But in the last day or so, that threat seems to be deflating.

When Republicans invited Ford to a hearing next Monday, she had a prime opportunity to make her case. A credible appearance, even with Kavanaugh's steadfast denials, would have made it difficult for at least some GOP senators to approve him for the high court.

But Ford, after saying through her lawyer she was willing to testify, is balking. She is balking even though Chuck Grassley offered her the option of testifying in a private session (though that would lessen the public impact of her appearance). And that is taking the air out of the Kavanaugh opposition.

Even Mika Brzezinski, the MSNBC liberal and women's rights advocate, said yesterday that if Ford won't testify, "you have to wonder what the Republicans are supposed to do except demand a vote ... This is something that happened in high school. This is going to need her voice. There's no other way around it. No one can do it for her, as miserable as that may be."

Across the political spectrum, National Review's David French agreed:

"It is of course extraordinarily difficult for any person to face cross-examination. It's even more difficult when facing examination based on memories so painful and so far in the distant past." But, he said, it is crucial to our system of justice.

Now I get why this is so daunting for Christina Ford. She has, according to The New York Times, gotten death threats, moved out of her house, away from her kids, and is "essentially in hiding." She has gotten a ton of online abuse, along with plenty of support. It's a sad spectacle that underscores why she was reluctant to go public in the first place.

But for Ford to insist on an FBI investigation before she appears, whether you agree with that or not, is overplaying her hand. It turns what had been an alleged tale of moral outrage into a process story. Now we're down to Grassley offering to send a team to interview Ford in California. Maybe she's just getting cold feet.

Some minor developments aren't helping her case. Mark Judge, the Kavanaugh friend named by Ford as having joined Kavanaugh in the assault at a party (and who has acknowledged being a teenage alcoholic), has denied being at the party or involved in any such assault.

A woman named Cristina King Miranda wrote on Facebook that she knew Ford and Kavanaugh in high school and that "the incident was spoken about for days afterwards in school. Kavanaugh should stop lying." But that contradicts Ford's account that she told no one for 30 yearsand Miranda quickly deleted the post. ("I will not be doing anymore [sic] interviews. No more circus," she tweeted yesterday.)

Patrick J. Smyth, who attended Georgetown Prep with Kavanaugh, said in a statement that he understands he is the person identified by Ford as "PJ" who was supposedly present at the party: "I have no knowledge of the party in question; nor do I have any knowledge of the allegations of improper conduct she has leveled against Brett Kavanaugh." It is not clear why he believes that Ford named him.

All this dramatizes how hard it is to prove a 36-year-old allegation without witnesses, without an address, and without at least an approximate date. And without Ford's testimony, that is very likely where it will remain.
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The woman who accused U.S. Rep. Keith Ellison, D-Minn., of domestic abuse released on Wednesday what appeared to be a medical document from 2017 detailing the abuse allegedly caused by the congressman.

Karen Monahan, an ex-girlfriend of Ellison, published the document on social media just days after saying the Democratic Party smeared her and threatened to isolate her over her allegations against the deputy of the Democratic National Committee (DNC).

A doctor wrote in the medical document that Monahan states that she was in a very stressful environment for years, emotional and physical abuse by a partner with whom she is now separated.

She identifies the individual she was involved with as Congressman Ellison, and she is worried about retribution if she identifies him publicly, the document added.

The woman claims the documents date  Nov. 28, 2017  proves she discussed the abuse story long before she publicly voiced her accusations against the Democrat.

"She identifies the individual she was involved with as Congressman Ellison, and she is worried about retribution if she identifies him publicly."  Medical document provided by Karen Monahan

She came forward with her story last month, alleging that Ellison sent her threatening text messages and once screamed obscenities at her as he dragged her off a bed by her feet.

Ellison has denied all the accusations, saying he never behaved this way. He did acknowledge he was in a relationship with the woman.

Monahan previously said that she has a video of Ellison attacking her, but declined the requests to release the footage, saying its too traumatic.

The allegations didnt lead to any immediate action against the congressman, except for the announcement that the DNC would review the accusations. He went on to win the Democratic primary election for Minnesota attorney general.

KEITH ELLISON DOMESTIC VIOLENCE ACCUSER SAYS DEMOCRATIC PARTY DOESN'T BELIEVE HER STORY

Earlier this week, Monahan said the Democratic Party doesnt believe her allegations, even as it stood behind Christine Blasey Ford, who accused Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaughs accuser of sexual misconduct.

No, they don't, Monahan tweeted in response to a question whether the party believes womens stories about misconduct. I've been smeared, threatened, isolated from my own party. I provided medical records from 2017, stating on two different Dr. Visits, I told them about the abuse and who did it. My therapist released records stating I have been dealing and healing from the abuse.

Four people, including my supervisor at the time, stated that I came to them after and shared the exact story I shared publicly, she added. I shared multiple texts between me and Keith, where I discuss the abuse with him and much more. As I said before, I knew I wouldn't be believed.

Monahan went on to reiterate that her story has nothing to do with politics. I have nothing to prove to anyone, I simply shared my story. People can believe it or not. I dont need anyone to affirm my humanity, I affirmed it, she wrote in another tweet.

The fact that both parties only care if it scores political points is hypocritical, she added. Do you think a person who has dealt with any form of abuse by politicians is thinking about politics? No, we & are families are trying to heal.
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Politicians turned to social media Thursday to offer their support for those impacted by the shooting in Aberdeen, Maryland, which reportedly killed at least three people.

We are closely monitoring the horrific shooting in Aberdeen, Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan tweeted. Our prayers are with all those impacted, including our first responders. The State stands ready to offer any support.

The Republican confirmed authorities were on the scene and doing everything they could to help victims of the shooting, adding that he had spoken with Harford County Executive Barry Glassman and Harford County Sheriff Jeff Gahler.

.@MDSP is on the scene assisting @Harford_Sheriff, he wrote. We stand ready to offer any additional support needed.

MULTIPLE PEOPLE KILLED IN MARYLAND SHOOTING, OFFICIALS SAY

Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger, D-Md., asked everyone to join him in prayer.

Monitoring shooting in #Md02 #Aberdeen. @Harford_Sheriff asking folks to avoid the area, he tweeted. Praying for the victims and their loved ones. Please join me.

Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., also said he's been briefed about the incident.

3 INJURED IN WISCONSIN OFFICE BUILDING SHOOTING; SUSPECT KILLED, OFFICIAL SAYS

Ive been in touch with local authorities about the shooting in Harford County, he said. My heart is with the families and victims of those impacted.

But Van Hollen stressed that "words are not enough."

"We must do more to end the toll of gun violence in our communities," he added.

Sen. Ben Cardin, D-Md., encouraged people to avoid the area.

Just horrific, he tweeted. Im monitoring this carefully, and urge residents to stay clear of the area until further notice.
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Rapists should be punished with rape and murderers should in turn be killed, Nevada gubernatorial candidate Ryan Bundys campaign website briefly stated. The controversial "rape for rape" crime policy was met with swift outrage.

Bundy, who is running as an independent for governor, is a part of a family infamously involved in two armed standoffs with U.S. agents over federal ownership of public land.

Instead of paying for ineffective jail sentences, Ryan Bundy proposes to The People of Nevada a more efficient retribution process: eye-for-an-eye. If you murder 10 people, you will be murdered 10 times before your freedom is returned to you, the campaign website listed as an action plan for the prison system, which has since been deleted.

If you rape 3 people, you will be raped 3 times as forced by the Nevada Government and orchestrated by the victims (if they are still alive)," the statement continued.

Bundy said he did not approve the controversial policy. It was added by Cardiff Gerhardt, Bundys 26-year-old campaign manager and website developer, according to The Oregonian.

Thats not my words. Thats not my ideals, Bundy told the Las Vegas Review-Journal. I did not approve of that. I did not review it. I had not even read it. It went up there prior to my approval.

FOX NEWS MIDTERM ELECTION HEADQUARTERS

Bundy did concede he supports capital punishment for someone convicted of murder, but clarified he does not agree with rape as a form of punishment.

A rape for a rape doesnt make sense, Bundy told The Oregonian. Thats ridiculously stupid as far as Im concerned.

For his part, Gerhardt told the Review-Journal the plan fits his own personal ideals, and explained he posted it because he thinks its fair. He also said the campaign needs to move very fast because we are the underdog, the peoples choice.

"Yes, I would like to see rapists be raped. I would like to see murderers be murdered."  Cardiff Gerhardt, Ryan Bundy's campaign manager

All of that content was my words written at 2 oclock in the morning, Gerhardt confirmed to The Oregonian, saying he added content to the website ahead of President Trumps planned trip to Nevada this week. I stand by every word I wrote and encouraged him to leave it, but its his campaign.

NEVADA PIMP RUNNING FOR STATE ASSEMBLY LOSES BROTHEL LICENSE

It is my creative solution to refer to biblical retribution systems. Yes, I would like to see rapists be raped. I would like to see murderers be murdered, he continued. They are criminals, and they deserve to encounter the golden rule  treat others like you would like to be treated.

Despite going rogue with the campaign website, Gerhardt still remains Bundys campaign manager.

A federal judge dismissed all charges against Bundy  as well as his father, Cliven, and brother, Ammon  in January over the 2014 armed standoff to block authorities who planned to capture and impound Bundy cattle that allegedly crossed onto government land.

In 2016, the Bundy brothers led a takeover of a national wildlife refuge in Oregon. The pair was also acquitted in that case.

Former Texas Rep. Ron Paul, a libertarian idol, endorsed Bundy in August.

Nevada Attorney Gen. Adam Laxalt is the GOP nominee for governor, and Clark County Commissioner Steve Sisolak is the Democrat. Fox News has ranked the gubernatorial election as a tossup.

Fox News Benjamin Brown contributed to this report.
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With less than two months to go before Novembers midterm elections, President Trump is traveling to Nevada to lend his support for an incumbent senator at risk of losing his seat.

While Sen. Dean Heller, R-Nev., has faced tight races in the past, hes never lost an election. But Democrats see an opportunity to make this the first for him  and gain headway in taking control of the Senate.

Trump lost Nevada in the 2016 election to Democrat Hillary Clinton, 46 percent to 48 percent, respectively. Fox News has ranked the Senate race a tossup.

Read on for a look at the candidates.

Dean Heller

A longtime Nevada politician, incumbent Sen. Dean Heller has served in his current role since 2011, when he was first appointed to the seat. Prior to that, Heller represented the 2nd congressional district in the House and served as Nevadas secretary of state.

At one point, Heller dismissed Trump and returned a campaign donation. But now, Heller has  for the most part  aligned himself with the president on certain issues, including tax reform, stronger border security and supporting gun rights.

Eighty percent of what this president has done has been very, very good, very positive, Heller said. The other 20 percent  he has a reality show. I get it. Its a reality show.

FOX NEWS MIDTERM ELECTIONS

Trump has backed Heller in the race.

His goal for this election, he told the Washington Examiner, is to keep the focus of the campaign on Nevada, instead of Washington, D.C., some 2,400 miles away. And to be sure, his campaign website says he approaches policy issues with one question in mind: How does it affect Nevada?

In his last election, which was in 2012, Heller had a one-point victory over Democrat Shelley Berkley.

This time around, Heller benefits from more name recognition in the state as well as a heftier campaign coffer. Hes outraised Jacky Rosen so far, with $10.6 million in campaign contributions compared to her $9.2 million.

Jacky Rosen

Rep. Jacky Rosen is a first-term congresswoman, having only been elected in 2016. But Democrats are banking on her as an option to flip control of the Senate back to them.

A former synagogue leader, Rosen is a member of the Problem Solvers Caucus and touts her efforts for bipartisanship in Congress on her campaign website.

Im going to try to give people someone to vote for instead of something to vote against, she previously told Politico, adding, I believe Im going to win this race.

TRUMP BACKS NEVADA SEN. HELLER, GIVES OPPONENT NICKNAME

Rosen has lived in Nevada for almost 40 years and was the first person in her family to graduate from college, according to her campaign website. To do that, she was a waitress and continued to work weekends at banquets when she began her career as a software developer.

Rosen has been endorsed by former President Barack Obama and EMILYs List, a pro-choice organization.

She supports access to abortion, a pathway to citizenship for those protected under DACA and more stringent gun control, especially in the wake of the Las Vegas concert shooting in 2017 that left 58 people dead.

She hasnt shied away from criticizing the president or hitting Heller over support for his policies, including when it comes to immigration, efforts to repeal ObamaCare, the Republican-led tax reform and his backing of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh.

While Heller has outraised Rosen so far, outside groups have poured $17 million into the race  with about $10 million going to either support Rosen or oppose Heller, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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A rebel group of Democrats in the U.S. House is pushing a petition to change party rules for electing their speaker -- in what is viewed as a bid to stop current House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi from regaining her former role.

At least 10 anti-Pelosi Democrats have signed a letter addressed to Caucus Chair Joe Crowley that seeks to change the rules on how the Democratic candidate for the speaker of the House is elected, the Atlantic magazine reported.

Currently, a nominee needs to receive just the majority of the votes from the Democratic caucus to be put forward as a candidate to the whole U.S. House for a vote. This gives leeway for Democrats running in red states as they can distance themselves from the California Democrat and even vote against her without actually stopping her bid.

As lawmakers vote according to their party lines, the caucus approved nominee always takes the top position in the lower chamber, assuming the Democratic Party has the most seats.

But the rebel Democrats are seeking to change the process. The letter asks to change the caucus rules so that the next nominee would have to get at least 218 votes in the caucus, a majority of the full House, if Democrats have the majority of the seats.

The letter was reportedly delivered by U.S. Reps. Ed Perlmutter of Colorado and Kathleen Rice of New York, the magazine reported.

DEM REVOLT AGAINST PELOSI GROWS, AMID FEARS HER SHADOW COULD CAST PALL OVER MIDTERM HOPES

The potential rule change will be voted on next week and, if passed, would make it considerably more difficult for Pelosi to get the votes with the potential influx of newly elected anti-establishment Democrats who stated that they wont throw their support behind Pelosis bid for leadership.

One of those newcomers could be Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the 28-year-old democratic socialist candidate who ousted Crowley in New York's June primary.

According to some counts, at least 27 Democratic House candidates wont commit to supporting to Pelosi, 78, who previously served as speaker from January 2007 to January 2011.

Other counts put the number to over 50 Democratic candidates and incumbents who would prefer to see a different speaker than Pelosi.

Despite the efforts to push through the new rules, many believe the change is destined to fail as theres no member in the Democratic caucus who would receive the required 218 votes in order to be put forward as the next speaker of the House.

Even those who seek to dethrone Pelosi, according to the Atlantic, are fearful of supporting the motion as they would risk alienating pro-Pelosi Democrats whose votes will be needed to approve another candidate.
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Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Wednesday criticized John Kerry for meeting with Iranian officials and said the former Obama administration official "can't seem to get off the stage."

Pompeo, who sat down exclusively with Laura Ingraham, the host of "The Ingraham Angle," said the former secretary of state fundamentally got it wrong with Iran, and were trying to make it right for America.

Secretary Kerry cant seem to get off the stage, and you have to," he said. "When Im the former secretary, Ill get off. Every previous former secretary has done that, too."

Last week, Pompeo called out his predecessor for "actively undermining" U.S. policy by holding meetings with Mohammad Javad Zarif, the foreign minister, since leaving office, whom he reportedly met with on several occasions and discussed the scraped nuclear deal.

Pompeo said speaking with foreign governments is fine, as long as you are working on behalf of American foreign policy.

Theyre working for the foreign policy which is theirs, not the one that belongs to the United States, he said.

During an appearance on Fox News The Daily Briefing with Dana Perino, Kerry did not deny the suggestion hes telling the Iranians to wait out Trump until there is a Democratic president again.

I think everybody in the world is talking about waiting out President Trump, said Kerry.

Let me be crystal clear: When I met with the Iranians, the policies of the United States was still to be in the Iran deal because the president had not decided and not pulled out, Kerry said.

Pompeo said he is focused on executing Americas foreign policy, and will leave the legal action to others.

They are not only unhelpful, but they are acting in ways that are harmful to achieving whats best for the American people, he said. Thats my criticism. Stop it. Let it go. Youve had your day.
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President Trump's outside legal counsel is "pleased with the progress being made" in talks with Special Counsel Robert Mueller about a potential interview of the president, a source familiar with the process told Fox News on Thursday.

The source said any interview of Trump is unlikely to take place before the November midterm elections. However, when asked about the odds of Trump answering questions posed by Mueller, the source said: "I think the plane lands."

Earlier this month, Fox News reported that Trump's attorneys had proposed to Mueller that any presidential interview be limited to written questions and answers about allegations of Russian collusion with members of the Trump campaign. The proposal also stated that the Trump legal team would not entertain questions about obstruction of justice.

Mueller has previously asked for the option of an in-person follow-up interview on the collusion issue, which Trump's team is resistant to but has not rejected outright.

Trump has repeatedly stated that he is willing to answer the special counsel's questions, while his legal team -- led by Rudy Giuliani and Jay Sekulow -- has shown more reluctance to allow such an encounter.

The information comes one day after a federal judge set Dec. 18 as the sentencing date for former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, who has been a key cooperator in the Mueller probe.

Flynn resigned in February 2017 and pleaded guilty that December to lying to the FBI about his contacts with Sergey Kislyak, Russia's ambassador to the U.S., during the transition period between Trump's election and inauguration.

According to his plea , Flynn discussed U.S. sanctions with Kislyak on Trump's behalf during the presidential transition and said members of the president's inner circle were aware of, and in some cases directing, his efforts. Flynn had urged Kislyak not to respond to sanctions imposed by the Obama administration in response to Russian election interference.

Flynn also admitted to lying about Turkish lobbying and research work. He belatedly registered with the Justice Department as a foreign agent for the work weeks after he left the White House.

Flynn and other Trump campaign officials who have pleaded guilty in the Mueller investigation -- including former campaign chairman Paul Manafort and former foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos -- have not been accused of any crimes related to election interference.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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Nellie Ohr, who worked as a contractor for the firm behind the anti-Trump dossier and whose Justice Department husband became a backchannel for passing along that information, has refused multiple requests to appear voluntarily before House committees, Fox News has learned.

Former FBI general counsel James Baker also has refused similar requests.

The House judiciary and oversight committees have spoken to numerous other witnesses, including Nellies husband Bruce Ohr, as part of their joint investigation into actions taken by DOJ during the Hillary Clinton email and Russia investigations. Bruce Ohr testified in late August about his relationship with former British spy and dossier author Christopher Steele.

But with the committee unable to secure a commitment to appear from Nellie Ohr or Baker, a Republican House Judiciary Committee aide indicated subpoenas are an option.

The Committee continues to seek the testimony of Ohr and Baker and will compel their testimony if necessary, the aide said.

The Ohrs role has become a key focus for Republican congressional investigators. They first alleged in the January 2018 House Intelligence Committee FISA memo that Ohr was the backchannel for Steele after he was fired by the bureau in November 2016 over his contacts with the media.

Investigators want to hear specifically from Nellie Ohr, as she worked as a contractor for the opposition research firm Fusion GPS, which was behind the dossier, and did Russia research.

Bruce Ohr told the FBI about his wifes work for Fusion GPS, as well as his reservations about the credibility of the document and Steeles animus for then-candidate Donald Trump. However, this was not shared with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court when the dossier was used to help secure a surveillance warrant for then-Trump campaign aide Carter Page.

Congressional Republicans argue that the dossier was improperly used to obtain that warrant, and subsequent renewals.

Amid the probe, Trump on Monday took the extraordinary step of ordering the declassification of key documents related to the FBI investigation of Russian meddling in the 2016 election. This includes 21 pages of an application for a renewed surveillance warrant against Page, and all FBI reports on interviews with Bruce Ohr.

James Baker, as former FBI general counsel, also is a focus of the Republican investigation into alleged FISA abuse, and congressional sources believe Baker can explain why information about Steeles bias, among other issues, was withheld from the national security court.

Baker, who has been teaching at Harvard Law School, has not responded to a request for comment. Lawyers for Fusion GPS said they are not representing Nellie Ohr. A message left at a number connected to an Ohr home address was not immediately returned.

Democrats, meanwhile, accused Republicans of crossing the line in their dig for information.

House Intelligence Committee ranking member Adam Schiff, D-Calif., called Trump's declassification decision "a clear abuse of power."

"[Trump] has decided to intervene in a pending law enforcement investigation by ordering the selective release of materials he believes are helpful to his defense team and thinks will advance a false narrative," Schiff said. "With respect to some of these materials, I have been previously informed by the FBI and Justice Department that they would consider their release a red line that must not be crossed as they may compromise sources and methods.

"This is evidently of no consequence to a President who cares about nothing about the country and everything about his narrow self-interest," Schiff added.

Fox News Samuel Chamberlain contributed to this report.
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A Republican candidate won a shocking victory Tuesday in Texas, capturing a state Senate seat that has been held by Democrats for 139 years -- and fizzling out Democrats blue wave aspirations to flip the Lone Star State.

Pete Flores, a former leader of the state Parks and Wildlife Departments law enforcement division, won the reliably blue district against Democrat Pete Gallego.

I owe this first to God and then to the grassroots in all of our counties in Senate District 19, Flores said after his opponent conceded the race, the Texas Tribune reported. Primarily this is an example of what happens when you have a united front and a grassroots effort. So now its time to go to work.

"I owe this first to God and then to the grassroots in all of our counties in Senate District 19. Primarily this is an example of what happens when you have a united front and a grassroots effort. So now its time to go to work."  Pete Flores

The runoff election was held following the resignation of Democratic state Sen. Carlos Uresti, who was convicted of helping an oilfield service company he co-owned run a Ponzi scheme.

The Republicans victory cements the partys control over the states upper chamber, controlling 21 of the states 31 Senate seats.

Petes strong law enforcement background will be invaluable to the Legislature as we work to combat human trafficking and provide greater protections for our peace officers, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said in a statement. I look forward to working alongside him next session to build a brighter future for all Texans.

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich pointed to Flores victory as a blueprint for Republicans to stop the so-called blue wave  the coming election of droves of Democrats that some have predicted.

Flores, a political newcomer competing against a seasoned former Democratic congressman, won in a district that is 73 percent Hispanic and African American  despite virtually all political analysts expectations, Gingrich wrote in a column for Fox News, noting that Flores ran a big choice campaign.

Republicans everywhere should also study this Texas state special election and make the 2018 midterms a big choice election for all American voters. And with only 48 days left until November 6, they must act now, he added.

"Flores, a political newcomer competing against a seasoned former Democratic congressman, won in a district that is 73 percent Hispanic and African American  despite virtually all political analysts expectations."  Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich

Democrats have been targeting Texas as the place where the party could make significant gains in the upcoming midterm election. Among its top targets is Republican Sen. Ted Cruz whos being challenged by Rep. Beto ORourke.

According to recent polling, ORourke is trailing Cruz by 9 points.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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President Trump blasted Republicans on Thursday for not including funding for the southern border wall in what he described as a ridiculous spending bill passed by the Senate this week.

The Senate approved an $854 billion bill on Tuesday that funds the military and other civilian agencies for the next year. It also includes a short-term fix the keep the government open into December. It includes $675 billion for the Pentagon, as well as a $206 million increase in money to fight opioid addiction.

The bill, approved 93-7, now goes to the House ahead of a Sept. 30 deadline to avoid a government shutdown. But Republican congressional leaders have said they would prefer to tackle the border wall after the midterms in November. The appropriations for the Department of Homeland Security will be handled after Dec. 7, where the money for the wall would be set.

But the Republican inaction drew the ire of Trump on Thursday.

I want to know, where is the money for Border Security and the WALL in this ridiculous Spending Bill, and where will it come from after the Midterms? he tweeted. Dems are obstructing Law Enforcement and Border Security.

REPUBLICANS MUST FINALLY GET TOUGH! he added.

The Republican push to keep the wall out of play until after the midterms is stoking long-standing fears from Trumps base that Washington Republicans are kicking the can on an issue they aren't passionate about until they no longer have control of Congress -- and can then tell voters that the matter is out of their hands.

Currently Republicans control the Senate, the House and the White House and while the wall was a central plank of Trumps 2016 candidacy, so far little progress has been made.

In March, a $1.3 trillion spending bill included just $1.6 billion for border measures -- much of which was for repairs to already existing fencing -- and ruled out any new prototypes of the kind that Trump viewed in California. The White House has said that the wall needs approximately $25 billion in funding overall.



Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said in July that funding of the wall will have to wait until after the midterms. Trump appeared to reluctantly back such a tactic in an interview this month with Fox News Pete Hegseth at a rally in Billings, Mont., saying that he was banking on a good performance from Republicans in the elections.



If it were up to me Id shut down the government over border security in a second, he said to cheers from the crowd behind him.



But I dont want to do anything that is going to hurt us or potentially hurt us because I have a feeling that Republicans are going to do very well, he said, before adding that he had commitments from McConnell and House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., that it would be done immediately after the midterms.

Fox News Chad Pergram and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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Just days before the Senate Judiciary Committee was set to vote on Brett Kavanaughs Supreme Court confirmation, Christine Blasey Ford publicly came forward to accuse the federal appeals judge of sexual assault decades ago.

The sexual assault allegation first came to light in the form of a letter obtained by Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., who sent shockwaves through Washington when she announced last week she forwarded it to the FBI. Feinstein is the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, which is tasked with deciding whether to formally recommend a Supreme Court nominee to the full Senate for a vote.

But Ford publicly came forward in an interview with The Washington Post over the weekend, saying her civic responsibility is outweighing my anguish and terror about retaliation.

She has accused Kavanaugh of pinning her to a bed during a house party in Maryland in the early 1980s, attempting to remove her clothes and putting his hand over her mouth when she tried to scream. At the time of the alleged incident, Ford was 15 and Kavanaugh was 17, she said, adding that Kavanaugh was drunk.

I thought he might inadvertently kill me, Ford said. He was trying to attack me and remove my clothing.

She said she was able to escape when Mark Judge  a friend of Kavanaughs who has come to his defense after the allegations became public  jumped on top of them.

Kavanaugh has denied the allegations, saying, I categorically and unequivocally deny this allegation. I did not do this back in high school or at any time. Judge said he has no recollection of the alleged events.

Kavanaugh and Ford are both set to testify before lawmakers on Sept. 27.

Read on for a look at four things to know about Ford.

Ford is a college professor

Ford is a clinical psychology professor at Palo Alto University in California. A biostatistician, she specializes in the design and analysis of clinical trials and other forms of intervention evaluation, according to the university.

Her work has also been published in several academic journals, covering topics such as 9/11 and child abuse.

KAVANAUGH ACCUSER MAY TESTIFY UNDER OATH, KELLYANNE CONWAY SAYS, AS LAWYER OPENS DOOR

Ford has also taught and worked at Stanford University since 1988, according to a Holton-Arms alumni magazine, the Bethesda, Maryland, school from where she graduated, The Wall Street Journal reported. She teaches at both schools in consortium, according to the newspaper.

The magazine also noted she is an avid surfer, and she and her family spend a great deal of time surfing in the Santa Cruz and San Francisco areas.

Her husband has backed her allegations

Russell Ford, her husband, also told The Washington Post that his wife detailed the alleged assault during a couples therapy session in 2012. During therapy, he said his wife talked about a time when she was trapped in a room with two drunken boys, and one of them had pinned her to a bed, molested her and tried to prevent her from screaming.

He said he remembered his wife specifically using Kavanaughs name. She said during the session, Russell Ford recalled, she was scared he would one day be nominated to the Supreme Court.

KAVANAUGH FACES UNCERTAIN FUTURE AFTER ACCUSER BREAKS SILENCE, REPUBLICANS WORRY IN PRIVATE ABOUT MIDTERMS

Ford provided a copy of the therapists notes to The Washington Post, which detailed her recollection of being assaulted by young men from an elitist boys school who would become highly respected and high-ranking members of society in Washington.

Additional notes from a later therapy session said she discussed a rape attempt that occurred when she was a teenager, The Washington Post reported.

Shes a registered Democrat

Ford is a registered Democrat who has given small monetary donations to political causes, according to The Washington Post.

She has donated to ActBlue, a nonprofit group that aims to help Democrats and progressive candidates, The Wall Street Journal reported.

KAVANAUGH STAUNCH GUN-RIGHTS DEFENSE AMONG HUNDREDS OF DECISIONS IN SPOTLIGHT

She is also among the thousands of medical professionals who signed onto a Physicians for Human Rights letter in June decrying the practice of separating children from their parents at the border and urging the Trump administration to stop it.

Ford already took a polygraph test

Once it was clear that Kavanaugh was President Trumps pick to replace retired Justice Anthony Kennedy on the Supreme Court, Ford contacted The Washington Posts tip line, according to the newspaper.

She also contacted her representative in Congress, Democrat Anna Eshoo. She sent a letter to Eshoos office about the allegations that was passed onto Feinstein.

After she retained the services of Debra Katz, a Washington, D.C.-based attorney, she took a polygraph test administered by a former FBI agent. According to the results shared with The Washington Post, the test concluded that Ford was being honest.

Fox News Gregg Re and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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The Yale Law professor accused of saying Judge Brett Kavanaugh only had law clerks who "looked like models" blasted the claim, saying the Supreme Court nominee's only "litmus test" when hiring is "excellence."

The Guardian reported Thursday that Yale Law Professor Amy Chua advised students that it was "no accident" that Kavanaughs female clerks all looked like models, and reportedly provided fashion advice to female students preparing to interview with him.

The article also cited former students who claimed that Chuas husband, Yale Law Professor Jed Rubenfeld, also told students that Kavanaugh liked a certain look.

Chua denied the claims, noting that Kavanaughs only litmus test when hiring has been excellence.

He hires only the most qualified clerks, and they have been diverse as well as exceptionally talented and capable, Chua said in a statement. There is good reason so many of them have gone on to Supreme Court clerkships; he only hires those who are extraordinarily qualified.

Of the 48 clerks who worked for Kavanaugh over 12 years on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, 25 were women.

In July, Chua penned an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal, endorsing Kavanaughs nomination to the high court and praising him for being a mentor to women.

As I wrote in the Wall Street Journal, he has also been an exceptional mentor to his female clerks and a champion of their careers, Chua said in a statement. Among my proudest moments as a parent was the day I learned our daughter would join those ranks.

Chuas daughter is a clerk in Kavanaughs chambers.

A former Kavanaugh clerk from 2007 to 2008, Porter Wilkinson, also blasted the claims, calling them "offensive."

Judge Kavanuagh hires law clerks based solely on their intellect and qualifications," Wilkinson said in a statement to Fox News. The only thing all of us have in common is that we worked hard and proved ourselves able to meet his rigorous substantive standards. Otherwise, the 48 of us are diverse by gender, race and ethnicity, sexual orientation, geography, political persuasion, religion, education, socioeconomic background, and so much more.

She added: It is offensive and demeaning for anyone to suggest that Judge Kavanaugh hired law clerks based on anything other than merit.

Kavanaugh is currently facing intense scrutiny after allegations surfaced last week that he had sexually assaulted a woman while in high school in the 1980s.

Christine Blasey Ford, the woman who made the accusations, claimed that at a party 36 years ago, Kavanaugh pinned her down, tried to remove her bathing suit and put his hand over her mouth when she attempted to scream. Fords attorney, Debra Katz, said her client considered this to be an attempted rape.

Kavanaugh has vehemently denied the allegations and has offered to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee, again, under oath.

Through her attorneys this week, Ford demanded that the FBI launch an investigation into the allegations prior to her appearance. On Thursday afternoon, Ford's attorneys said she would be willing to testify should the committee be able to guarantee her safety.

This is a completely false allegation. I have never done anything like what the accuser describesto her or anyone, Kavanaugh said in a statement Monday. Because this never happened, I had no idea who was making the accusation until she identified herself [Sunday.]

Fords identity was first revealed in a Washington Post article on Sunday. Her accusations first surfaced after Senate Judiciary Committee Ranking Member Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., obtained her letter detailing the alleged incident.

More than five dozen women who knew Kavanaugh while in high school wrote a letter in his defense, calling him a good person.
Talk about being crabby.

Angry green crabs from Nova Scotia, angrier than their already ornery green cousins in Maine, are migrating south. They have started to destroy the coastal ecosystem off the shores of Maine, as they eat more than their share of soft-shell clams and wreck native eel grass, according to research from Markus Frederich, a professor at the University of New England.

"What we're seeing is this insane level of aggressiveness," Frederich told the Associated Press.

GIANT SPIDER WEB STRETCHES 1,00 FEET ACROSS LAGOON: THEY'RE HAVING A 'PARTY'

Though the green crabs are related, they're genetically different from one another. The angry Nova Scotia crabs have their roots in northern Europe and have adapted to cold water, while the slightly calmer Maine version came from the southern part of Europe.

They first entered the U.S. in the mid 1800's, according to the Washington Dept. of Fish & Wildlife. After arriving in Maine in the 1950's, they caused a soft shell clam population decline and then eventually made their way up to Nova Scotia.

"The green crab is most often confused with native helmet crabs or hairy shore crab," the Dept. of Fish & Wildlife wrote on its website. "The most distinctive feature is not its color  which can vary from reddish to a dark mottled green  but the five spines or teeth on each side of the shell. There are three rounded lobes between the eyes, and the last pair of legs are somewhat flattened. The carapace is broader than it is long, and seldom exceeds 3.5 to 4 inches across."

Louis Logan, a University of New England graduate student, had the unpleasant task of labeling the crabs captured from Nova Scotia waters for the research. The crabs were in no mood for games.

At a distance of 5 feet, the pint-sized brutes assumed a fighting posture. Those that grabbed him were in no hurry to let go.

"Any time I went down to grab one they went to grab me instead," he wrote in an email.

One of them, in particular, would jump out of the water in its frenzy to attack.

INDIANA MAN WARNS LOCALS TO 'BEWARE' OF GIANT SPIDERS AFTER SPOTTING 6-INCH CRAWLER AT WORK

During the research, both sets of green crabs were unleashed on a bed of eel grass and the Canadian species destroyed it, with Frederich comparing the damage to that of Edward Scissorhands, as they tried to look for marine organisms to eat.

Green crabs have been known to be particularly disruptive to existing ecosystems. The University of Washington has given some tips on what to look for and what do if they are found.

Additional studies will be done in the coming months to decipher whether a specific gene plays a role in the aggressiveness or if a factor called hybrid vigor is in play, Frederich said. The hybrid vigor theory suggests that crabs could be more aggressive as they establish themselves, but will mellow out later.

The quarrelsome newcomers currently comprise only about 2 to 3 percent of green crabs crawling on the ocean floor off Maine, but those numbers are certain to grow, Frederich said.

"It will be an entirely different ball game," he predicted. "It's just a question of when more of the crabs come and out-compete the Maine green crabs."

Eventually, the newcomers will move farther southward. "We can't do anything about it," he said. "The only thing that we can do is learn how to live with it."

The Associated Press contributed to this report. Follow Chris Ciaccia on Twitter @Chris_Ciaccia
Archaeologists have unlocked the secrets of an amazing 1,500-year-old altar discovered at a Maya temple deep in the Guatemalan jungle.

The ornately carved altar was discovered in 2017 at the Maya site of La Corona, located in the Peten jungle near the Mexico border.

When it was first found, the altar was encased in the roots of a tree in a collapsed temple. It took a year to painstakingly pry the massive stone slab from the roots, fully excavate it and move it to Guatemala City, where it was presented earlier week at a museum.

INCREDIBLE MAYA DISCOVERY: ANCIENT KING'S MASK UNCOVERED IN MEXICO

Made of limestone, the altar depicts the image of the previously unknown king Chak Took Ichaak carrying a double-headed serpent effigy. Two local gods are shown emerging from the snake.

Hieroglyphs that accompany the image record the end of a period in the Long Count Maya calendar that corresponds to May 12, 544 AD.

Experts say the altar shows the Maya dynasty of Kaanul, known as the Snake Kings, acting like its namesake in slowly squeezing the rival kingdom of Tikal.

MYSTERIOUS LOST MAYA CITIES DISCOVERED IN GUATEMALAN JUNGLE

For several centuries during the Classic period, the Kaanul kings dominated much of the Maya Lowlands, said Tomas Barrientos, co-director of the project and director of the Center for Archaeological and Anthropological Research at the University of the Valley of Guatemala, in a statement. This altar contains information about their early strategies of expansion, demonstrating that La Corona played an important role in the process from the beginning.

Chak Took Ichaak appears 20 years later as a vassal of the Kaanul dynasty and the ruler of the larger, nearby city of Peru-Waka. But the gods associated with him are different local deities associated with that place.

The discovery of this altar allows us to identify an entirely new king of La Corona who apparently had close political ties with the capital of the Kaanul kingdom, Dzibanche, and with the nearby city of El Peru-Waka, said Tulane University Professor Marcello Canuto, in the statement. Canuto was co-leader of the team that made the discovery.

GRUESOME HUMAN SACRIFICE DISCOVERY: SKULLS REVEAL GRISLY SECRETS OF LOST AZTEC CITY

The archaeologist said the altar suggests Kaanul's eventual victory was the result of decades of astute politicking and cultural appropriation, not just battles.

Francisco Estrada-Belli, a Tulane University archaeologist who was not involved in the La Corona discovery, said: "Its broader significance is that it shows the behind-the-scenes ... machinations of the Snake Kings as they are expanding their empire in the direction of Tikal."

"Not long ago, we thought the victory over Tikal was the result of a sort of out-of-the-blue blitz," Estrada-Belli said. "It is fascinating to learn more about how Maya empires expanded, just like in the 'Game of Thrones.'"

GRUESOME 'GAME OF THRONES' MASSACRE SITE REVEALS ITS GRISLY SECRETS

The altar is the latest fascinating find to shed light on the ancient Maya civilization.

An ancient mask depicting a 7th-century Maya king, for example, was recently discovered in southern Mexico.

Earlier this year archaeologists harnessed sophisticated technology to reveal lost cities and thousands of ancient structures deep in the Guatemalan jungle, confirming that the Maya civilization was much larger than previously thought.

From its heart in what is now Guatemala, the Maya empire reached the peak of its power in the sixth century A.D., according to History.com, although most of the civilizations cities were abandoned around 900 A.D.

The Associated Press contributed to this article.

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An enormous ice sheet is at risk of melting even if temperatures rise by just 2C, potentially sparking major climate chaos.

Scientists say that if the East Antarctic Ice Sheet which is 60 times the size of England  melts, sea levels could rise by four meters, putting areas of the UK at risk of disappearing entirely.

Experts are now warning that more needs to be done to prevent continued global warming.

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Melting ice can have a devastating effect on the world, causing the planet to heat up more quickly, changing ocean circulation systems that regulate global weather, and increasing the risk of flooding and tsunamis damage.

A study into historical ice loss suggests even "moderate warming" of Earth could melt the East Antarctic Ice Sheet.

"With current global temperatures already one degree higher than during pre-industrial times, future ice loss seems inevitable if we fail to reduce carbon emissions," said Dr. David Wilson, of Imperial College London, who worked on the research.

Scientists have poured lots of effort into investigating the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, which mostly sits on land below sea level.

Due to its low-lying position, it contributes to most of the continent's ice melt today.

But experts at Imperial College London and the University of Queensland have now investigated risks facing the East Antarctic Ice Sheet.

The EAIS is the largest ice sheet on Earth, and poses a major hazard if it disappears.

Now a study in Nature suggests that 2C of warming over "a couple of millennia" could cause significant melting of the EAIS.

"Antarctica is around twice the size of Australia, with ice sheets severalkilometerss thick and containing around half of the world's fresh water," said Dr Kevin Welsh, at the University of Queensland, a co-author on the study.

"The East Antarctic Ice Sheet covers about two thirds of the area, and because its base is largely above sea level it was generally thought to be less sensitive to warming climates than the adjacent West Antarctic Ice Sheet.

"However, some areas  like the Wilkes Land Subglacial Basin, directly south of Australia  are below sea level and contain enough ice to raise global sea levels by several meterss.

"The evidence we have suggests that with the predicted 2C warming in Antarctica  if sustained over a couple of millennia  the sheet would start melting in these locations."

Welsh's team examined historic ice movements to effectively predict the future.

Glaciers, which are created by ice sheets, grind up rocks on land.

These rocks are then transported into the nearby Southern Ocean as sediment. This creates a record of earlier erosion by the ice sheet.

Researchers chemically analyzed layers of sediment from the ocean floor, which would have originated from the Wilkes Subglacial Basin  collected as part of the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program.

The study looked at sediment layers that had settled on the seafloor during the four warm intervals occurring between ice ages over the last 450,000 years.

"Studying ice sheet behavior in the geological past can inform us about future changes," said Dr Wilson.

"By building a picture of how the ice sheet has grown and shrunk as temperatures have fluctuated, we can understand the response of the EAIS to future warming."

The team found chemical "fingerprints" in the sediment which revealed the patterns of erosion as the ice sheet advanced and retreated.

It turned out that the ice sheet had retreated from its current size during some of these warmer "interglacial" periods, between 125,000 and 400,000 years ago.

Importantly, at the time, temperatures were as little as two degrees warmer than pre-industrial times  and one degree warmer than today.

During these warmer periods, global sea levels were between six and 13 meters higher than they are today.

According to researchers, if all the ice in the Wilkes Subglacial Basin melted in modern times, global sea levels would rise by up to four meters.

"We found that the most extreme changes in the ice sheet occurred during two interglacial periods 125,000 and 400,000 years ago, when global sea levels were several meters higher than they are today," Dr Walsh explained.

"These periods could be analogues for future climates and it seems likely that ice loss from the East Antarctic Ice Sheet contributed to those higher sea levels.

"Ice loss contributes to rising global sea levels which are a threat to many coastal communities, and making projections requires a solid understanding of how sensitive these ice sheets are."

One of the biggest concerns about rising sea levels is the risk than smaller, more common tsunamis could have a more damaging effect than they do today.

Last month, scientists issued a warning about the risk of devastating tsunamis caused by climate change.

Research in Science Advances suggested that rising sea levels  caused by global warming  significantly increase the threat of giant killer waves.

Experts modeled the impact of tsunamis based on sea level increases, and discovered worrying results.

It found that rising sea levels allowed tsunamis to reach much further inland, significantly increasing the risk of floods.

This means small tsunamis that might not be deadly today could wreak havoc in the future.

Our research shows that sea-level rise can significantly increase the tsunami hazard, which means that smaller tsunamis in the future can have the same adverse impacts as big tsunamis would today, said Robert Weiss, a professor of geosciences at Virginia Tech.

And if you think Britain is safe from tsunamis, think again.

Earlier this week, research revealed that deadly tsunamis crashing into the UK is more common than previously thought.

Scientists believe three killer waves have hit the UK within the last 10,000 years  raising the possibility that another one may be due.

We already knew about one of these: around 8,200 years ago, the Storegga submarine landslide off the coast of Norway sparked a 20-meter high tsunami that swept across Shetland.

Now experts have discovered evidence of two additional tsunamis that took place even more recently.

Researchers from Dundee University and the British Geological Survey found sands on Shetland that prove two separate tsunamis hit Britain in fairly recent history.

We found sands aged 5,000 and 1,500 years old at multiple locations in Shetland, up to 13m above sea level, said Dr. Sue Dawson, of the University of Dundee.

This story originally appeared in The Sun.


Faculty at the University of Richmond are being credited for rescuing nearly 70,000 bees after a tornado on Monday took down a tree near the schools campus.

University facilities, who were called to remove the tree, found an unusual surprise upon arrival: thousands of bees were swarming the area. The tree, which had rotted in the middle, was "full of bees. Lots of bees, Karla Connelly, an administrative assistant in facilities, said this week in a media release.

THOUSANDS OF BEES SWARM TEXAS WALMART STORE

Thats when Kirstin Berben, a campus beekeeper and laboratories manager in the university's biology department, was called to the scene. Berben said in the release the situation was a catastrophic situation for the bee colony inside. She estimated 70,000 bees were living inside the tree based on the amount of honeycomb.

Then, Berben and David Rodriquez, an electrician at the university, along with Karen Williams, a landscape manager, suited up and got to work.

The trio then started picking up the comb and transferring clusters of bees into a large storage bin, Berben said, adding there was a large cluster of comb which likely included the queen.

So we focused on that, she added.

FLORENCE FLOODWATERS RESULT IN 'ISLANDS' OF FLOATING FIRE ANTS

Berben then took the bees to her home, where she has beehives. She noted in the release she took the bees off campus to prevent the colony from attempting to return to its original location.

The bees rescued on Monday may be relocated again to the hives Berben manages on campus, she said. Berben noted, however, they would likely remain at her home until the spring.
New destroyers, fighter jets, tanks, submarines, Black Hawk helicopters, supersonic weapons and more will make the U.S. military even more powerful next year.

In line with White House recommendations, it looks as though defense will receive an increase of 3 percent in funding - meaning the military will receive $674 billion in support in 2019.

How will it be spent?

Not only will the force be expanded with 16,400 additional active-duty and reserves and a 2.6 percent pay raise be introduced, there will be a mega-boost in cutting-edge tech to help ensure the United States continues to dominate in land, sea and air power.

WEAPONS UPGRADE SET TO MAKE US SPECIAL OPERATIONS EVEN MORE DEADLY

More than 200 new combat aircraft, more than 130 upgraded tanks and more than a dozen new naval warships will be joining the nations arsenal in 2019.

So whats on the government-adapted, military shopping list for 2019? Heres a look at what to expect.

93 F-35 fifth generation fighter jets

The Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II is a fifth-generation fighter jet and the most advanced in the world. It provides unprecedented capabilities like remarkable stealth features that allow it to evade air defenses and penetrate deep into enemy space when necessary.

The situational awareness alone is extraordinary and provides a decisive advantage. The single seater can be used for ground attack, but also against enemy aircraft and targets at sea. It is so advanced that pilots can see through the floor of the aircraft to the ground with their remarkable helmets.

NEW LASER-EQUIPPED DRONES WILL TAKE OUT MISSILE THREATS AGAINST THE US

There are three primary variants: the USAF flies the F-35A conventional takeoff and landing (CTOL), the Marine Corps flies the F-35B short take-off and vertical-landing (STOVL), and the Navy flies the F-35C catapult-assisted take-off but arrested recovery (CATOBAR), which are tailored for basing on military aircraft carriers.

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58 UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters

Black Hawk helicopters were developed by Sikorsky more than 40 years ago. They are just as vital today for air assault and a wide range of other purposes from medevac through to special operations missions.

The Black Hawk has evolved significantly over the years and todays variant can fly even higher while carrying even more than before.

These powerful, heavily-armed helicopters can fight their way into a battlespace to deliver a substantial number of troops and fight their way out when extracting them.

66 AH-64 Apache helicopters

The AH-64 Apache attack helicopter has served in the U.S. Army arsenal for more than three decades. Made by Boeing, they now look on track to serve the military for more than another two decades.

'GIRAFFES' JOIN THE NAVY AND HUNT ENEMY THREATS

Apaches have continued to advance. This helicopter can fly at speeds exceeding 150 knots per hour and can carry hard-hitting weaponry tailored for missions. The Longbow variant, for example, can carry 16 Hellfire missiles on four launchers and four air-to-air missiles.

13 V-22 Osprey aircraft

With its special tiltrotor tech, the Boeing Osprey combat helicopter has a very distinctive, recognizable look and delivers unique capabilities. It combines the vertical performance of a helicopter with the speed and range of a fixed-wing aircraft.

When the rotors are in a vertical position, this aircraft takes off, lands and hovers like a helicopter. Once airborne, it can convert to a turboprop airplane capable of delivering high-speed, high-altitude flight.

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$1.5 billion in M1 Abrams tank enhancements

M1 Abrams tanks have been an iconic element of U.S. Army might since 1980.

A MILITARY HELICOPTER DRONE THAT CAN FIGHT WILDFIRES

In 2019, 135 tanks are expected to receive upgrades - $1.5 billion of modernizing and enhancing what these tanks bring to the fight and how they protect American warriors.

These main battle tanks will most likely receive armor enhancements to stop the latest evolution in threats on the battlefield. The Army has been very interested in active-protection systems that have proven very effective at stopping antitank missiles and other threats.

3 DDG-51 Guided-Missile Destroyers (Arleigh-Burke class)

The DDG 51 is a warship with offensive and defensive capabilities for a wide range of missions.

These are surface combatant ships that can attack, and defend against, enemy air aircraft, enemy submarines and other enemy surface warships.

This Destroyer is armed to the teeth and will provide vital firepower for strikes. Enemies will not want to be on the receiving end of the MK-41 Vertical Launching System (VLS).

'FORCE FIELD' TECHNOLOGY COULD MAKE US TANKS UNSTOPPABLE

Destroyers can conduct missions on their own or as part of carrier strike groups, surface action groups, expeditionary strike groups, and missile defense action groups.

2 Virginia-Class submarines

The new Virginia Class attack submarine is nuclear-powered. Leveraging its advanced stealth, it can be used for deep ocean anti-submarine warfare and shallow water (littoral) operations such as hugging enemy coastlines to conduct surveillance without ever being detected.

The weapons systems on these submarines are phenomenal. They are equipped with 12 vertical missile launch tubes and four 533mm torpedo tubes. The vertical launching system alone has the capacity to launch 16 Tomahawk submarine-launched cruise missiles (SLCM) in a single salvo.

From the 21-inch torpedo tubes, 26 mk48 ADCAP mod 6 heavyweight torpedoes and sub harpoon anti-ship missiles can be fired. In addition, Mk60 CAPTOR mines can be added to its firepower.

Littoral Combat Ship (the LCS)

Designed to fight in littoral areas and plagued with bad press and performance concerns, there are already three more LCS underway thanks to funding in 2018.

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Military focus has shifted to introducing a new frigate. The White House recommended only one additional LCS would be necessary; however, politicians seem to have a different view to our military and more may be funded in 2019.

Hypersonic Weapons

Hypersonic weapons travel at Mach 5 or faster - five times the speed of sound. The Senate has added $508 million more funding for the extremely important field of hypersonic weapons.

In recent years, the United States has not prioritized hypersonic development whereas countries like Russia and China have been very public about their advancements.

The military requires funding not just to develop a U.S. arsenal of this new era of weapons, but to develop solutions to defend against these missiles that can strike with unprecedented speed.
Attacking enemy fighters in close-air-support aircraft, using ground-based laser designators to paint targets for aircraft and training friendly forces for the rigors of high-casualty close-in combat -- are all U.S. Air Force Special Operations Force skills tested and refined during the last decade and a half of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Drawing upon these Tactics, Techniques and Procedures (TTPs), Air Force Special Operations Command is accelerating a strategic shift from its recent counterinsurgency focus to preparing for high-end combat - or major force-on-force warfare against a technologically advanced enemy.

I would tell you there is definitely strategic value for Special Operations in the high-end fight. With our mentality, we think outside of the box and about how to present dilemmas for the enemy, Lt. Gen Marshall Webb, Commander - Air Force Special Operations Command, said Sept. 17 at the Air Force Association Convention.

Webb emphasized that the Commands counterterrorism focus will not diminish in coming years but likely increase as existing threats persist and new ones emerge. At the same time, he made it clear that AFSOC is laser focused on the high-end and currently adapting its well-established TTPs to support major power warfare.

We have to extend the TTPs for high-end conflict as well, including multi-domain command and control, Webb said.

Interestingly, migrating combat-tested TTPs to a high-end fight does not seem to be an insurmountable stretch but, rather, an extension of refined combat practices. Significantly, many TTPs fundamental to counterinsurgency are also of great tactical and strategic relevance to major-power warfare. For example, during Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan, Air Force Special Operations, the Special Tactics Squadron, used advanced targeting techniques to guide aircraft attacking the Taliban. This included using Forward Air Controllers to radio strike coordinates to circling attack aircraft and using laser designators to paint ground targets.

AFSOC contributions to the war in Afghanistan are highlighted in a 2017 Special Operations Annex portion of Air Force Doctrine published by the Lemay Center for Doctrine, Maxwell AFB.

AFSOC CCTs [Combat Controllers] were instrumental in the first major gain of the conflict, leveraging airpower that led to the capture of the northern city of Mazar-e-Sharif on 9 November 2001a major breakthrough in the struggle to oust the Taliban and al-Qaeda, the doctrine writes.

This kind of integrated air-ground operation, used to great effect in Afghanistan, is also something of potentially great value in a high-end conflict as well. The prospect of needing close air support to fortify advancing units on the ground or attacking low-flying enemy air assets presents the kinds of scenarios anticipated in major war.

The Air Force Special Operations AC-130 gunship, for instance, often circled Kandahar in Afghanistan, to fire its 105mm side-firing cannons to attack Taliban fighters. While there are of course major differences when between attacking insurgents and engaging in major air combat with a near-peer enemy, some of the tactics, approaches and technologies do seem to cross over and offer value to both kinds of conflict.

Webb further elaborated upon AFSOCs role in close air support missions will be enhanced by the services emerging Light Attack Aircraft. The aircraft is designed for rugged counterinsurgency missions in combat environments where the Air Force has established air superiority. At the same time, the need for these kinds of attack missions are at very least conceivable, if not likely, in large-scale warfare also.

The need for the Light Attack Aircraft is an excellent requirement for AFSOC, Webb said.

Special Operations Forces (SOF) are also known for a substantial intelligence expertise, used to both train and equip friendly forces and offer crucial combat-relevant detail to the larger force. Advising allied fighters is yet another instance of skills likely to be of great value in major war. Part of this intel mission includes air and ground reconnaissance using sensors, scouting forces and unique positioning in combat terrain in support of the larger fight.

Operating in small units, often somewhat autonomously, SOF are experienced fighters in austere, or otherwise hard to reach, combat areas. This skill also, quite naturally, would add value in major force-on-force warfare, as well.

SOF is out there in the hinterlands and dont have the luxury of an F-16, Webb explained.

The Air Forces Curtis Lemay Center for Doctrine, Development and Education also cites the full range of Special Operations mission sets, many of which are specifically designed for large scale war. Combat areas listed in the Doctrine text include a range of missions relevant to both COIN and major war such as information operations, precision strike, ISR, command and control and specialized air mobility.

The overall strategic roadmap, such as that articulated by Webb, mirrors multi-domain concepts written into special ops doctrine materials. The Lemay Centers 2017 Doctrine Special Ops Annex text identifies a combat continuum for Special Ops missions, to include low-intensity conflict such as security cooperation and deterrence, limited contingencies and major operations.

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American Airlines has appologized to the rapper who accused two employees of being "racist" after they allegedly questioned his first-class ticket.

Olubowale Victor Akintimehin, a D.C.-based recording artist who goes by the name Wale, tweeted about the alleged incident Sunday evening, which occured on a flight from New York to Los Angeles.

DELTA AIR LINES PILOT GROUNDED FOR CONCEALING 'MAJOR DEPRESSIVE DISORDER' TO KEEP FLYING

Initially he was just complaining about the flight delay after being stuck on the runway for what he said was a half-hour and counting.

American Airlines Twitter account responded to Wales complaints, apologizing for the wait and blaming the delay on aircraft maintenance.

It was then that Wale accused two specific employees of questioning his place in first class.

How about ur employees Megumi and Don told me ur [sic] not supposed to be in first class Im calling the police, he tweeted.

He also shared a photo of his ticket showing his seat assignment, 4F, in the first class cabin. He then accused the airline of being racist and asked what they planned on doing about it.

American Airlines is now appologizing for what they claim was a system error that didn't register Wale's seat assignment.

When the flight was delayed, passengers had to deplane due to the maintenance issue, and when they reboarded, the airline said many passengers sat in the wrong seats.

A spokesperson for the airline said in a statement that the flight attendants were just trying to figure out why he wasnt listed on the flight in the first place. His seat was inadvertently dropped in the system when they boarded back.

When the flight landed [in Los Angeles], he was sitting in his correct seatbut he wasnt showing on their tablets as being on their aircraft, a spokesperson for the airline said in a statement.

We just want to apologize to Wale for what really occurred here, the spokesperson said. We understand his frustration...Hes a good customer of ours. He flies with us regularly. We really just want to apologize profusely, the spokesperson said.

After Wale first tweeted about the incident, a spokesperson for the airline released the following statement:

Discrimination has no place at American Airlines. From the team members we hire to the customers we serve, inclusion and diversity is a way of life at American. Every day, our team members work to make American a place where people of all generations, races, ethnicities, genders, sexual orientations, religious affiliations and backgrounds feel welcome and valued, the spokesperson said in a statement.

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In July, the NAACP lifted a travel advisory it had placed on American Airlines following several incidents of reported racial discrimination.

NAACP President Derrick Johnson announced at the time that the company was making improvements that address worries about African-Americans being subject to discrimination or even unsafe conditions while flying.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Delta Air Lines has apologized to a customer for calling the police after an argument over damaged luggage escalated. The customer, who is black, feels the incident with the customer service agent, who is white, was racially motivated.

I do feel like the situation was racial, customer Arlene, who declined to give her last name, told Yahoo Lifestyle. If a white person calls the police on a black person, it can end badly. If I were white, she may not have called.

DELTA AIRLINES PAYS WOMAN $4,000 TO GIVE UP HER SEAT

In a statement to Fox News, Delta Air Lines said they hope to learn from the womans experience to improve their customer service operations.

We apologize to this customer for her experience in the Boston baggage service office and Delta is in contact with her to better understand what transpired. We take situations like these seriously and we are working directly with this customer to use this as an opportunity to learn from her experience and improve on future customer interactions.

The incident happened on Aug. 24, when Arlene landed in Boston Logan International Airport from Kentucky. Upon landing, she noticed her suitcase had been damaged during travel and went to file a claim with a Delta Air Lines customer service representative at the airport.

DELTA AIR LINES PILOT GROUNDED FOR CONCEALING 'MAJOR DEPRESSIVE DISORDER' TO KEEP FLYING

I was told that damage happens to suitcases, which I understand, but I wanted to report it anyway, Arlene told Yahoo Lifestyle. But it didnt seem like anyone was taking me seriously.

According to Arlene, she asked for a manager and while she waited, Arlene said the Delta employees began talking about her.

I was on the phone with my friend and mentioned they were talking about me, she says. Then one told me, No one is talking about you. Youre out of your mind.'

Arlene said she asked them to stop talking about her and waited for the manager. When the manager arrived, Arlene told Yahoo Lifestyle he dismissed her when she complained about the employees behavior.

The manager left after filing Arlenes baggage complaint, but before Arlene could get his name. When Arlene requested the manager to return or to get his name from another customer service agent, identified as Teddra, Teddra refused.

Hes not going to be able to come back down here, Teddra told Arlene, who responded, But I need his name for my claim.

SINGAPORE AIRLINES PILOT SUSPENDED FOR FAILING BREATHALYZER TEST; CARRIER CURRENTLY INVESTIGATING

The situation between the women escalates when Arlene begins filming. Teddra, after refusing to give any information about the manager, picks up the phone to call the police.

Hey Frank, its Teddra. Can I have the state police in baggage, please? she said into the phone. I have a lady who is in my face recording me and wont leave the office.

Arlene, who left the counter at that point, said she followed up with Delta four different times and did not receive more than a tweet apologizing for the incident.

I am so very sorry to hear that this happened to you. Rude behavior of any kind isnt tolerated by our employees, no matter who they are. I will definitely forward your feedback over to the appropriate desk for further review, the tweet read.

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Weeks later, Arlene posted the footage online, where it has made the rounds on social media. According to Arlene, she said a Delta Air Lines employee reached out to her and asked her to remove the video  a request she refused.

I would like to know why she called the police, she says. Company diversity training is needed.

Delta Air Lines did not confirm if the employee was still working for the airliner.
A Jet Airways flight returned to Mumbai, India's financial capital, on Thursday after dozens of passengers complained of ear pain and nose bleeding due to the loss in cabin pressure.

An airline statement said Flight 9W697 with 166 passengers and five crew members landed normally in Mumbai. Medical help was given to 30 passengers.

AIRLINE SPELLS OWN NAME WRONG ON SIDE OF PLANE

Oxygen masks were deployed during the emergency aboard the Boeing 737, said Darshak Hathi, a passenger.

According to Flightradar24 aviation tracking site, the plane stopped climbing at 11,000 feet (3,350 meters) before returning to Mumbai.

Hathi also said there was a problem with the plane's air conditioning after it took off from Mumbai.

SINGAPORE AIRLINES PILOT SUSPENDED FOR FAILING BREATHALYZER TEST

The Press Trust of India news agency quoted an official as saying the malfunctioning occurred during the plane's climb. The plane was heading to Jaipur, a tourist destination and the capital of Rajasthan state.

The airline said the flight's cockpit crew was taken off scheduled duties pending an investigation.
Manchester Airport in England has apologized to a family after a security staff member allegedly told a 13-year-old girl that her diabetes medication could make the plane crash and that it would be her fault.

Joanne Holland, 47, was traveling to Naples with her husband Simon and their 13-year-old daughter Polly, who has Type 1 diabetes. The family had Pollys life-saving insulin in their carry-on luggage, like they always do when they travel. In addition to the medication, the family carried letters from the Sheffield Childrens Hospital authorizing the insulin, The Star reported.

AMERICAN AIRLINES APOLOGIZES TO RAPPER WALE AFTER HE CLAIMED EMPLOYEES WERE RACIST

However, despite the paperwork, the Holland family from Sheffield said that the security staff made them feel like terrorists.

Joanne told The Star the family was made to open all their medication and place it into individual plastic bags  like other, non-medical liquids. Joanne feared this could cause contamination of the medication.

Later, the family said they were called back by security, who then allegedly told Polly her medicine could make the plane crash and told her it would be her fault.

DELTA APOLOGIZES FOR CALLING POLICE ON BLACK CUSTOMER FOR TRYING TO FILE A CLAIM OVER DAMAGED LUGGAGE

As a parent, your children are always your priority but with Polly it is even more because I am carrying medicine that will keep her alive, Joanna told The Star. For me it was frustrating but she was worried she would not be able to go on holiday. I just held her hand and said everything was going to be ok. She looked close to tears.

Manchester Airport did not respond to Fox News request for comment, but said in a statement to The Star that they apologized to the family for the incident and explained their medication policy.

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Wed like to apologize to the Hollands for their experience when travelling through the airport recently. The correct procedure for medicines and medical equipment is that they require scanning unless there is a written exemption from a doctor or hospital. This is why the Hollands were asked to present their daughters diabetes medication for screening.
Passengers on an Oceania Cruise ship got quite the scare on Wednesday when powerful storm winds tore the vessel from its moorings and pushed it out to sea with people still on board.

On Sept. 19, Storm Alis massive winds pulled the Nautica, a nearly 600-feet, 30,000 ton ship, from its port in Greenock, Scotland.

According to Business Insider, the Nautica was halfway a 12-day cruise in the U.K. and Ireland.

Video and images of the surprising event soon circulated on social media.

All guests and crew onboard are safe and there were no injuries. Tugs have been called in to assist and the vessel is currently being held at anchor with a pilot from the port authorities onboard, a rep for the cruise line confirmed to Fox News of the incident.

478 guests and 26 crew are ashore and are being looked after by the shore operations teams until conditions are safe enough for the vessel to be returned to the passenger terminal, they added.

It remains unclear at this time how many people were on board as the ship was pushed out to sea.

CRUISE WORKER RECEIVES $3.34 MILLION PAYOUT AFTER SHIP DOCTOR GIVES 'WRONG MEDICATION AND WRONG DOSAGE'

As of Thursday morning, the Nautica was docked in Belfast, a scheduled port along the voyage, the Oceania Cruises spokesperson confirmed to Fox News.

Storm Ali has brought gusts of up to 90 mph to Scotland and is battering other parts of the U.K. and Ireland, downing trees and leaving thousands without power.

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As per BBC, Ali is currently lashing the U.K. with winds up to 100 mph. Two people have been killed in the storms path.
A former Southwest Airlines employee has accused the airliner of racial discrimination, claiming coworkers set up a whites-only breakroom at Houston Hobby Airport in Texas and hung a noose at gate 45 at the airport during the four years he worked there, the federal lawsuit alleges.

Former employee Jamel Parker filed the suit in United States District Court in Houston on Wednesday.

Parker, who began working for AirTran in 2008 and joined Southwest in 2013 after the companies merged, says in the lawsuit that Southwest employee were allowed to create a WB, a whites-only break room.

DELTA APOLOGIZES FOR CALLING POLICE ON BLACK CUSTOMER FOR TRYING TO FILE A CLAIM OVER DAMAGED LUGGAGE

According to Parker, his supervisor knew of the breakroom, but did not remove it. The lawsuit alleges Parker learned of the whites-only break room in August 2013, and that it remained up until 2016 or 2017 when that area was renovated into offices.

Parker was fired in April 2017 after failing to report damage to a vehicle he was operating  another example of racial discrimination he argues in his lawsuit.

He was reportedly operating a vehicle when the tow bar got caught on a power cable under the jet bridge. Parker was fired for not reporting the damages immediately.

The lawsuit alleges that two white employees had damaged vehicles without reporting them and only received notices when the destruction was discovered.

MANCHESTER AIRPORT APOLOGIZES FOR TELLING YOUNG GIRL HER DIABETES MEDICATION COULD 'MAKE THE PLANE CRASH'

Southwest Airlines said in a comment to Fox News they could not comment on pending litigation, but emphasize that Southwest is and always has been a company that puts its people first.

We work relentlessly to foster an environment that is diverse and inclusive. We do not tolerate or condone discrimination of any kind, and we cultivate a workplace that mirrors the Customers we serve, the statement read.

Southwest Airlines is an Equal Opportunity Employer and prides itself on an open and inclusive work environment that consistently ranks among the worlds best places to work. We employ more than 57,000 People who provide the worlds best hospitality to our more than 120 million annual Customers as they travel throughout the Southwest network. Our People are our greatest asset, and it is our goal to support our Employees and our Customers who come from all walks of life, the statement continued.

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Parker is suing for back pay, damages and mental anguish, among other compensation.
More and more Americans and Europeans are rediscovering Turkey, a fascinating country where East meets West  and with good reason, too.

As Karen Fedorko Sefer from Sea Song Tours told Fox, Over the last two years, many of the most important historical sites have had major restorations and are now in their glory. It is the perfect time to visit and learn about the history and culture of our beautiful Istanbul.

Plus, the American dollar is strong in Turkey and will go a long way, especially so for savvy travelers  and Turkey is investing major money in the tourist industry. One of the worlds largest airports is set to open in Istanbul in 2018, making the city one of the most important international gateways to connect all over the world.

The Istanbul New Airport, as it will be called, will allow up to 200 million passengers per year, and is likely to further cement Turkish Airlines as one of the worlds largest airlines, and the largest airline in terms of destinations.

HIKING, HIGHLANDS AND HISTORY: SCOTLAND HAS LOTS TO OFFER

Turkey has direct flights from nine U.S. cities, and you can often find great deals if you layover in Istanbul no matter where your final destination might be. In fact, Turkish Airlines will pay for one night's accommodations if you book a long layover in Istanbul, so you can see the city. If you have a layover of more than six hours, you can also take a free tour of Istanbul.

Sea Song Tours is a good bet for arranging your trip. Their guide will meet you at the airport and take you on full-day tours or even arrange week-long adventures at a reasonable price. Its best to have a guide as they can bring you around in safety and comfort without missing anything.

In Istanbul, tourists can really appreciate how old meets new meets ancient in this beautiful city surrounded by water. Originally known as Constantinople, Istanbul dates back to pre-history  it's one of the oldest continually populated areas of the world. In fact, a recent discovery of nine Roman ships while a subway was under construction would have made international headlines if found in Rome, but its just another day in Istanbul.

Must-see attractions include the Blue Mosque, the Topkapi Palace, The Suleymaniye Mosque, the underground Roman cisterns, and one of the most important sites in Christianity, the Hagia Sophia.

WHY A TRIP TO CHARLESTON SHOULD BE ON ANY TRAVELER'S ITINERARY

The Hagia Sophia, one of the first major Christian churches, is considered the peak of Byzantine architecture. It was built in 537 AD at the dawn of the Middle Ages before becoming an Ottoman imperial mosque when the Turks took over the city. Its now a spectacular museum with ancient Christian treasures and beautiful mosaics. It is also a highlight of any trip to the city.

But being in an ancient city doesnt mean you have to skimp on modern amenities. There is no lack of luxury hotels in Istanbul, and many offer great deals for those willing to do some research.

For a more opulent experience, you can live like a king at the Ciragan Palace Kempinski. Its a five-star hotel in a former Ottoman Sultans palace with spectacular views of the Bosphorous. Its also got an incredible Turkish hammam where you can enjoy a traditional Turkish bath. Cruises around the city also leave directly from the hotel.

Istanbul is not the only place to visit in Turkey, though.

Cappadocia is one of the safest, and most fascinating parts of Turkey. Its in the middle of the country, and a quick flight from both Istanbul or the capital of Ankara.

An overnight at one of the many cave hotels in the area should be on any travelers bucket list. The five-star Argos, for instance, is built around, above, and inside ancient caves, and the rooms are literally carved out of rock. Its an incredible way to spend a few nights.

TOKYO OFFERS A FASCINATING  AND UNUSUAL  VACATION LIKE NO OTHER

However, Cappadocia is perhaps now best known for its incredible hot air ballooning. The tours take place at dawn every day (weather permitting), allowing you to watch the sun rise while drifting over the deep ravines and canyons of this stunning part of the world. Or if you prefer to watch on land, head over to one of the many hills in the region and see the scores of balloons rising with the sun over the incredible landscapes.

Trips start at about $180, but try to book in advance as they often sell out. Best to give yourself a few days in this fascinating region, as the balloons dont fly if theres too much wind.

Murat Ozguc is the managing partner at Travel Atelier, a tour company that arranges tours of Cappadocia and other areas of Turkey. As he told Fox News, Cappadocia offers something for all age groups and any travel interests," and noted the area's Mars-like landscape and its important role in history.

The Goreme Open Air Museum is another must-visit. It features a series of Christian cave churches painted by Medieval Orthodox Christian monks between the years 1000-1200 AD. It's also a UNESCO world heritage site, and it's absolutely incredible: You can explore beautiful Byzantine mosaics and paintings leftover from the time when Christians hid and worshipped in the region.

Theres plenty more to Turkey  European and Russian tourists swarm the coast of the Mediterranean and Aegean Seas. Gorgeous resorts line the waters they call The Turquoise Coast, or The Turkish Riviera. And too many archeological sites in Turkey to list, located in the ancient Greek cities of Ephesus and Aphrodisias  both of which are UNESCO world heritage sites.

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Theres a lot to do and see in Turkey, and now might be the best and most affordable time in our lives to see it.
Three men were indicted Wednesday for allegedly victimizing hundreds of people across the U.S. in a $364 million Ponzi scheme.

Kevin Merrill, 53, of Maryland; Jay Ledford, 54, of Texas and Nevada; and Cameron Jezierski, 28, of Texas, were charged by federal prosecutors for an alleged scheme that dates back to January 2013.

MAN SENTENCED TO 15 YEARS IN PRISON FOR $70M PONZI SCHEME

According to the U.S. Attorney Office for the District of Maryland, Merrill and Ledford invited people to buy consumer debt portfolios and falsely claimed that theyd profit from the debt payments.

Prosecutors claim the defendants falsely asserted the money they paid investors were "proceeds" from collections or sales, and that the money came from other investors. The men created impostor companies and incorporated them in Texas, authorities said.

"Most of these investors are just learning that they have been victimized," U.S. Attorney Robert Hur said in a news release. "The effects of this kind of fraud can be devastating."

The men concealed their diversion of $73 million in investor funds to host a "lavish lifestyle," which included purchasing multiple properties, jewelry, more than 20 high-end cars and a boat, the attorney's office alleged.

SEC BUSTS $102M PONZI SCHEME THAT DEFRAUDED 600 INVESTORS

The trio also allegedly spent some $25 million to gamble in casinos.

Merrill, Ledford and Jezierski have been arrested and face a slew of charges, including conspiracy, wire fraud, identity theft and money laundering.

Anyone who believes they may have been a victim of the scheme is urged to contact the FBI.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.
A U.S. military veteran who was deported to Mexico six years ago walked back across the U.S.-Mexico border Wednesday proudly wearing his Army uniform and maroon beret to reunite with his family.

Anxious to greet Fabian Rebolledo, 43, across the border in San Diego were his parents, siblings and 18-year-old son, The Los Angeles Daily News reported.

The family returned to their Azusa, Calif. home afterword.

Rebolledo was first deported to Mexico in 2010 after authorities said he cashed a $750 check they believed to be forged. He insisted he received the check for construction work he performed and didnt know it was fraudulent.

He reentered the country and in 2012, immigration officers picked him up at his parents home and he was deported again.

His battle with the U.S. immigration system received help from the University of California, Irvine Immigrant Rights Clinic and other advocacy groups.

We fought for this Constitution, not only for our own families but for everybody in the United States so they can walk free, Rebolledo said. There are a lot of veterans out there that need our help.

As a young boy, he grew up near Mexico City where he shared a small home with his family of seven. His older siblings and father came to the United States first and sent for him when he was 13, settling in El Monte, Calif., a city just east of Los Angeles.

The Daily News reported Rebolledo dropped out of college to work before he joined the Army. A recruiter brainwashed him into thinking he would automatically become a citizen, he told reporters.

He was a legal resident at the time.

The Los Angeles Times reported Rebolledo was stationed at Fort Bragg and deployed to Kosovo on a peacekeeping mission, where he cleared landmines and the bodies of villagers killed by Serbian forces.

When Rebolledo was deported to Tijuana, Mexico, 2,000 miles from the town where he was born, he slept on the streets before finding housing and support among other deported veterans.

His son Derick, who was 12 when his father left, said Dad youre a soldier, you can make it.

Rebolledo began advocating for others who suffered the same plight and helped create a mural project at the Friendship Park in Tijuana and met and married his wife.

With the passing of Californias Prop. 47 in 2015, a team from the UCI clinic was able to get Rebolledos fraud charge downgraded from a felony to a misdemeanor.

Three years of paperwork and court petitions followed before his deportation case was thrown out in August and his lawful residency status was restored.

Rebolledo's attorneys are working to recover his veterans benefits and obtain a passport for his wife to bring her to the U.S., the Daily News said.

"Step by step, Rebolledo said. But Im excited for whats next.
Cody Wilson, the owner of a company that makes untraceable 3D-printed guns who is wanted on an arrest warrant accusing him of sex with an underage girl, has left the U.S. and was last known to be in Taiwan, investigators in Texas said Wednesday.

Austin Police Cmdr. Troy Officer told reporters that the department was working with national and international law enforcement to locate Wilson, whom Officer said missed a scheduled return flight to the U.S.

Officer said it was unclear why Wilson went to Taiwan, but he added that a friend of the 16-year-old alleged victim told Wilson that he was under investigation before he left. The commander also said Wilson's name had been entered into a national law enforcement computer listing him as wanted for sexual assault of a child.

Investigators said Wilson met the girl for sex at an Austin hotel on Aug. 15 and paid her $500 afterward. A counselor for the teenager reported the accusation to Austin police a week later, saying Wilson met the girl online.

In an affidavit, Austin Police Detective Shaun Donovan wrote that surveillance footage showed Wilson and the girl getting out of an SUV at the hotel and then exiting an elevator together on the seventh floor, Donovan wrote. The footage showed them returning to the elevator later that night.

CODY WILSON ACCUSED OF SEX ASSAULT

Investigators said the SUV's license plate matched one of the vehicles registered to Wilsons business, Defense Distributed. Donovan wrote in his affidavit that hotel records showed that Wilson registered the same room -- number 718 -- as the room where the girl reported he had sex with her.

Officer told reporters that detectives believe "if someone mistakes [the alleged victim's] age it would be because they think she's younger, not older than the 16-year-old that she is."

WILSON SAYS HE'S SELLING 3D-PRINTED GUN PLANS DESPITE RULING

After a federal court barred Wilson from posting the printable gun blueprints online for free last month, he announced he had started selling them for any amount of money to U.S. customers through his website.

More than a dozen states sued to stop an agreement that the government reached with Defense Distributed, arguing that the blueprints for how to print plastic guns could be obtained by felons or terrorists.

Fox News' Lucia I. Suarez-Sang, Christopher Carbone and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Authorities in Georgia arrested a 17-year-old boy early Wednesday on charges that he stabbed his mother 11 times in an attack that left her in critical condition.

Bremen Police Chief Keith Pesnell told Fox 5 that Peyton Cook Jr. had argued with his mother, Tammy Lee Watson, for much of Tuesday night at their home west of Atlanta. Shortly before 1 a.m. Wednesday, Pesnell said Cook attacked Watson with a kitchen knife while she was lying down.

Cook has been charged with aggravated assault, aggravated battery and two counts of cruelty to children.

Pesnell told Fox 5 that two other children, aged 12 and 10, were inside the house at the time.

Watson was airlifted to an Atlanta hospital.

Click for more from Fox5Atlanta.com.
A Pennsylvania man died Thursday morning after crashing his car into a home given to his ex-wife in the couple's just-finalized divorce agreement, marking a violent end to a deadly rampage spurred by the couple's split, officials said.

Before dying in the wreck, Bruce Rogal was involved in a shootout with cops, and it wasn't immediately clear if his death was a suicide or due to police gunfire. Rogal, 59, had earlier murdered his parents at the senior center where they lived and tried to kill his ex-wife, officials said.

Bruce Rogal is dead," Chester County District Attorney Tom Hogan posted on Facebook. "There is no ongoing threat in Chester County. All law enforcement personnel involved are unhurt. It is a tragedy that the defendant killed his elderly parents. All of the first responders did a tremendous job under enormous pressure. Details will follow at a later time."

Rogals rampage began when he received his divorce papers, a development which seemed to have set him off," Hogan told FOX29 Philadelphia. Rogals ex-wife was awarded the West Bradford Township house the couple used to live in.

Investigators said Rogal got in his car, drove past the house he had just lost in the divorce and opened fire when he spotted his ex-wife outside at around 5:45 p.m.

The woman, who was not identified, was not injured in the attack.

Rogal then drove to Bellingham Senior Living Center in East Goshen Township and fatally shot his parents, both of whom were in their late 80s, police said.

Police issued a lockdown for the area around the senior living center -- including for West Chester Area School District -- during the brief manhunt for Rogal, FOX29 reported.
A woman who owns a child care facility in Texas is in custody on accusations of child endangerment after she allegedly tied shoe laces around young childrens necks to help restrain them in their car seats.

The allegations against Rebecca Anderson, 60, came after a parent notified authorities last week of a video they obtained that depicted the alleged behavior, The Washington Post reported Tuesday.

In the video, Anderson was allegedly seen dispensing something in a syringe to the parents 6-month-old, as well as grabbing and pulling the childs ankle while sitting in his car seat, the outlet said, citing court records.

Authorities arrived to the womans residence on Friday and discovered multiple children in car seats stashed within a darkened closet and bathroom inside the home, the court records stated.

The children at Beckys Home Child Care were tied up in car seats for at least seven hours a day, according to an affidavit obtained by The Associated Press.

Some juveniles had ligatures, which were shoelaces, secured around their necks, The Post reported.

The woman confessed to having tied the ligatures onto the victims in order to limit their movement and prevent them from reaching the latching mechanisms and being able to get out of the seat, authorities told the outlet.

She also confessed to administering medicine to make them stop crying and to make her job easier, authorities said, despite initially denying it.

Anderson was booked Sunday night into the Dallas County jail on multiple counts of child endangerment.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.
An anti-Trump professor at Georgetown University went on a profanity-laced Twitter rant against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, who has been accused of committing a sexual assault as a teen.

Dr. Carol Christine Fair is an associate professor in the Security Studies Program at Georgetown, according to the schools website.

Fair referred to Kreepy Kavanaugh as a perjurer and a rapist on her verified Twitter account, adding that nothing has changed since Anita Hill.

Fair also said the GOP doesnt care about women. We knew this. F--- them.

INCONSISTENCIES EMERGE IN KAVANAUGH ACCUSATIONS, WITH HEARING IN DOUBT

In another tweet about Kavanaugh, Fair referred to the GOP as pro-rape, pro-pederasty, pro-perjury, pro-corruption, pro-Russian hacking, pro-child trafficking, pro-white male supremacy, pro-VERY-late-term abortion of children with AR-15s  a f---ing death cult and filthy swine.

Fair told Fox News late Thursday that the tweets came from her personal account. I do not follow my students' social media feeds and I do not ask them their opinions about contemporary politics in class.

She added: I devote a considerable amount of time helping my students get jobs even when they explain to me that their political leanings differ from my own. I maintain a healthy set of contacts of all political persuasions on LinkedIn for the exclusive use of my students. I do not ask my students about their politics before helping them with their job search.

Describing her teaching methods, she said: My exams are empirical and fact-based. There are appeals processes should a student feel aggrieved in my assessments. I have been teaching since 2009 and I have never been accused of being unfair to students nor has any student challenged a grade.

Professor Christine Fair should remember that she has Republican students in her classes, Amelia Irvine, a Georgetown student who is co-president of Network of Enlightened Women and president of Love Saxa, told Campus Reform. Is she accusing them of hating women as well? I think Fair would be hard pressed to call herself unbiased in the classroom when shes spewing hate like an immature teenager online.

GEORGETOWN STUDENT GROUP TARGETED AS HATE GROUP FOR CATHOLIC BELIEFS, COULD BE SANCTIONED

F--- Trump and f--- you for voting for him, Fair wrote on Tumblr. What AMAZES me about Trumpanzees  apart from the fact that they are a bunch of Xphobic, women-hating, white supremacist, whiney-ass snowflakes who love a criminal traitor 

TEXAS BIOLOGY TEACHER ON LEAVE FOR ALLEGEDLY BULLYING PRO-TRUMP STUDENT

On Tumblr, Fair has also dubbed MAGA hats socially-acceptable Klan hoods that say I heart White-Male-Christian Supremacy.

A Georgetown spokesperson told Fox News in a statement that Fairs private views do not reflect the views of the university.

MICHIGAN PROFESSOR SLAMMED AFTER REFUSING TO WRITE LETTER OF RECOMMENDATION FOR STUDENT APPLYING TO STUDY IN ISRAEL

While Georgetown is committed to free speech and expression, we do not approve or endorse every statement made by our faculty members, the statement read.
Authorities recovered the body of a missing man on Monday after an "unprecedented" recovery that required a remote-operated vehicle to travel 1,000 feet underwater at Lake Tahoe.

Chaitanya Datla, 33, was found in the lake's depths by the Douglas County Sheriff's Office's marine unit, the El Dorado County Sheriff's Office said in a release.

"This search and recovery effort was unprecedented in Lake Tahoe due to the extreme depths and the technology needed to facilitate this type of recovery," the release said.

The technology used to locate Datla's body came from a local resident who recently donated the underwater remote operated vehicle (ROV) to local authorities.

Datla was on a rental boat with family on Sept. 9 when he jumped into Lake Tahoe without a life vest, a release from the El Dorado County Sheriff's Department said.

Pavan Bhupatiraju, a close friend, has set up a GoFundMe campaign to help Datla's family. He described Datla as a "truly aspirational guy."

"His family back in India is still in deep shock," Bhupatiraju said.
With the effort to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border seemingly stalled in Washington, the National Sheriffs' Association is looking to help break the logjam by raising funds for the project.

The group has launched a crowdfunding website that it announced during a White House meeting attended by President Trump and 43 sheriffs from 35 states, the Charlotte Observer reported.

In a Wednesday news release, Sheriff Sam Page of North Carolina chastised Congress for its (refusal) to act on the security aspects of immigration reform, as thus, have done nothing to stop the flow of drugs such as Heroin, into our neighborhoods.

Page said Congress inaction prompted the nation's sheriffs to come together and act for the safety of the people we have sworn to protect.

Without border security and immigration reform, more Americans will continue to be victims of crime, the homepage reads. Now is the time to act! Secure our borders!

Contributions to the project are tax deductible, and go to a special account specifically designated for the border security wall project, according to the website.

As of Wednesday evening, $14,000 of the $100,000 goal had been raised  a fraction of the projected cost for the wall, which ranges from $4 to $67 billion, Quartz reported.

Earlier this year, the National Sheriffs' Association sent a letter to Congress, insisting that legislation be passed to strengthen border security and increase resources. The letter was signed by more than 300 sheriffs from across the country.

The border, which spans from California to Texas, is approximately 1,900 miles. A barrier of some capacity exists for about a third of that area, the Mercury News of San Jose, Calif., reported.
A 5-year-old boy was ejected from a truck when his mother crashed on a California highway on Tuesday while she was on her cellphone, authorities told a local station.

The boy survived, but sustained major injuries and was airlifted to a trauma center, the California Highway Patrol said.

"It was an absolutely awful, traumatic scene," CHP Officer Sam Courtney told California's KSBW-TV. "As soon as the truck started rolling, he came out of the truck."

"It was an absolutely awful, traumatic scene. ... As soon as the truck started rolling, he came out of the truck."  Sam Courtney, CHP Officer

The boy's mother was using her cellphone and driving distracted, the CHP told the station.

The wreck occurred at about 9:12 a.m. local time when the mother crashed into the center divider of the Highway 1 in Capitola, causing the vehicle to roll over multiple times, CHP said. Capitola is about 80 miles south of San Francisco.

The 5-year-old was not properly secured in a child safety seat, CHP said.

Officers found the boy's seat belt still buckled in the damaged truck, so they believe the boy slipped out of his belt, KSBW-TV reported.

"Dont assume a seatbelt will restrain a child who is not at least 49!" CHP said. "Tragically this child could have been uninjured if he were in the proper seat."

The boy's mother suffered moderate injuries, according to the station. She was identified as a 40-year-old woman from Watsonville.

Investigators will look into the possibility of recommending criminal charges against her, CHP Sgt. Grant Boles told the station.

"This is an unfortunate lesson to other parents," Boles said.
Autopsy reports released Wednesday in one of Ohios most-notorious unsolved mass murders revealed the mysterious massacre was systematically executed  and brutal.

The April 2016 murders of seven adults and one teenage boy, all members of the Rhoden family, in their Piketon homes still remains unsolved more than two years later.

The report revealed Christopher Rhoden Sr., the father of the teenager and two others killed that day, was shot nine times and it noted that his body was decomposed more than all the others. He appeared to have suffered a defensive wound to his right forearm and that another bullet went through a door before hitting him, the Chillicothe Gazette reported. His body was found in the back bedroom of a trailer.

Gary Rhoden, Christopher Rhoden Sr.s cousin, was also found dead in the same trailer, according to the Chillicothe Gazette. The report indicated a gun was pressed to his head, according to the newspaper.

Christopher Rhoden Sr.s brother, Kenneth Rhoden, 44; his ex-wife Dana Manley Rhoden, 38; and their three children Clarence Frankie Rhoden, 20; Hanna Rhoden, 19; and Chris Rhoden, Jr., 16, were killed in the slayings. Clarences Rhodens fiancee, Hannah Gilley, 20, was also murdered.

Heavily redacted versions of the reports showed all but one of the victims was shot multiple times in the head. Information on bullet types were not released. Toxicology results were also blacked out.

Kenneth Rhoden was found dead in a camper three miles from where Christopher Rhoden Sr. was shot dead, according to the Chillicothe Gazette. He died of a single gunshot to his right eye.

Dana Manley Rhoden, and her children Chris and Hanna, were found dead in the same camper. She was shot four times on the right side of her head and once under her chin. Christopher Rhoden, Jr., was shot in the head multiple times and Hanna was shot twice in the head. She was found in her bed with her 5-day-old daughter, according to the newspaper.

Inside a separate trailer, Frankie Rhoden and Hannah Gilley were shot to death in their bed. Their 6-month-old son was found in between them, unharmed. Gilley had one bullet wound to her left eye. A second child in the trailer was also found unharmed.

Authorities suspect there were multiple attackers in the slayings and that they were familiar with the area. Piketon is located 70 miles south of Columbus. The killers are believed to have worked to cover their tracks, authorities have said.

Nobody's seen anything like this, Pike County Prosecutor Rob Junk said Wednesday.

Christopher Rhoden Sr. had a large-scale marijuana growing operation, according to Attorney General Mike DeWine, sparking speculation that the killings were drug-related.

The reports were released after the Ohio Supreme Court unanimously favored the Cincinnati Enquirer, saying Ohio law allows reporters to view preliminary autopsies and investigative notes, findings and photographs.

If a journalist submits a proper request to review preliminary autopsy and investigative notes and findings, suicide notes, or photographs of the decedent made by the coroner, the coroner 'shall' grant the request, the court said.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.
The daughter of one of the women who drowned while shackled inside a medical transfer van that was overrun by Florence floodwaters demands to know why sheriffs deputies drove through a flooded road.

Rose Hershberger, 19, told reporters she was stunned to hear that her mother, Nicolette Green, 43, and another woman in the care of the Horry County Sheriffs Office died during a medical transfer between mental health hospitals Tuesday night.

Deputies are supposed [to] take care [of] the people that are in the back of their car, she told WMBF.

Two deputies were shuttling Green and Windy Newton, 45, from one hospital to another when the van was overcome by floodwaters on Highway 76, less than a mile from Little Pee Dee River. The two deputies attempted to extricate the two shackled women, but were unable to open the doors as water rushed toward them.

"I'm not sure if it was the way the van was positioned, against a guardrail, or if it was pressure from the water, but unfortunately they were not able to get the van doors open and get the ladies out," Horry County Sheriff Phillip Thompson told reporters.

Rescue crews needed about 45 minutes to find the van, which was underwater at that point, and plucked the Horry County deputies from the roof, the sheriff said.

"I was confused as to why someone would, or the police officers would drive down a road that was in an area that was known for flooding, Hershberger told NBC News. "If they saw the waterthey have their own, you know, 'turn around, dont drown.' They have that everywhere.

She told WMBF that her mother battled schizophrenia and was showing improvements. On Tuesday, she had taken her mother to Waccamaw Mental Health to meet with a new therapist, who determined she needed to be committed to mental health institution.

Greens sister, Donnela Green-Johnson, said she knew about the transfer and felt her heart drop when she saw in the news about the van caught in the floodwaters.

It was devastating because we had found her again, then to have her taken by a senseless crime, its devastating to us, she told WMBF.

Thompson told reporters that deputies appear to have driven around a barrier blocking the road. The investigation is ongoing.

"It hasn't been confirmed to me that they did, but here's my question: There's barriers there. It could be assumed that he did," Thompson said Wednesday.

The incident is being investigated by the State Law Enforcement Division.

I feel very upset and kind of betrayed, because my mom was a very, very trusting person, Hershberger told NBC News. "And she still put her trust in the deputies that were supposed to take care of her and made sure she got there safely, and the fact that they were able to get out but my mom and the other woman wasn't makes me feel really like hurt and betrayed by them.

Justin Bamberg, a state lawmaker and lawyer who has represented the families of several people injured or killed by law enforcement officers, said he's perplexed by the decision to transport anyone in such uncertain weather conditions.

"If that road is in an area where it is a flood risk, and waters were rising, why were they driving on that road anyway?" he said. "People need to know exactly how it happened. It makes it seem like someone took a very unnecessary risk in creating the problem in the first place."

More than 36 people have died since Florence made landfall as a Category 1 hurricane late last week in North Carolina.

Thompson said he has also begun an internal investigation and put the deputies involved  Joshua Bishop and Stephen Flood  on administrative leave.

Despite the pain, Hershberger said she and her sister are trying to remember the happy memories they have together with their mom.

My mom and I used to bake a lot together. She said if you ever have anything bad, just put all your bad feelings in these cupcakes and eat them, she told WMBF.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.
A Florida airport was briefly placed on lockdown Thursday after a man jumped a fence and entered a vacant commercial airliner, an official said.

The suspect was identified as Nishal Sankat, 22, who was charged with criminal attempt to steal an airplane, The Associated Press reported, citing officials.

He also faces a visa violation and criminal trespassing charges, airport spokeswoman Lori Booker said.

Sankat, a man from Trinidad and Tobago who entered the United States through Canada and who has a Florida drivers license, parked a red sedan curbside and entered an Orlando Melbourne International Airport at around 2 a.m., Booker said. It wasn't clear if the man was in the U.S. legally.

Booker said two Melbourne Airport Police officers spotted the suspect boarding a vacant American Airlines-owned Airbus A321. Within two minutes, officers had apprehended the man.

The jetliner was sitting at a maintenance facility at the time and not scheduled to fly, Booker said.

After the man was detained, the airport was placed on lockdown while authorities investigated. It re-opened around 7 a.m., police said.

The suspect was believed to be a student-pilot and may have had commercial pilot training at an unidentified facility in the area, Booker said.

Florida Institute of Technology in a statement confirmed the suspect is a part-time student at their university who is "studying aviation management" and "had completed some flight training in the past."

"Florida Institute of Technology has monitored this mornings incident at Orlando Melbourne International Airport. The university has confirmed that the suspect from Trinidad & Tobago is a part-time Florida Tech student studying aviation management who had completed some flight training in the past," the statement said. "It would be inappropriate for the university to release the suspects name, and law enforcement is continuing its investigation. University officials will collaborate with authorities to further review this matter. No additional information is available at this time."

Authorities were transporting the suspect to Brevard County Jail, and charges were expected to be announced later Thursday.

Fox News' Jacqui Heinrich, Elizabeth Zwirz and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
A Georgia man pleaded guilty this week to the murder of his 15-month-old daughter, whose death police say may have been caused by rituals tied to an "Islam-based cult."

The man, Calvin Mcintosh, 48, entered a guilty plea on Monday in the starving-death of his daughter, Alcenti, on Nov. 11, 2014.

His charges included felony murder and cruelty to children in the first degree. He could face up to life in prison (with a possibility of parole) when he is sentenced in November.

The Gwinnett District Attorney's Office said on Thursday that it could not elaborate on Mcintosh's case, but a press release from the day of Mcintosh's arrest revealed that the child's death may be connected to cult rituals.

Police responded to the Northside Hospital in Sandy Springs on Nov. 11, 2014, after Mcintosh brought in his daughter, who was pronounced dead on arrival.

According to police, hospital staff quickly determined that it "was most likely a case of neglect and abuse."

The county medical examiner ruled that starvation was the official cause of death.

Authorities returned to the hotel where Mcintosh was living and discovered three more "severely malnourished" children, one 5 and the other two 3 years old.

"Investigators also discovered during the execution of a search warrant, copious amounts of literature and notes in reference to ritualistic behavior and the Nuwaubian Nation of Moors, an Islam-based cult which is known for being a sovereign group," the press release stated.

They also found Mcintosh's 23-year-old daughter, Najlaa Mcintosh, and a 21-year-old named Iasia Sweeting, who was said to be "in desperate need of medical attention."

According to authorities, Mcintosh ordered Najlaa to deprive the four children and Sweeting of food if they were disobedient

Investigators learned that Mcintosh had fathered two of the children in an incestuous relationship with his biological daughter Najlaa and fathered the other two children with Sweeting, one of them being the deceased.

Sweeting claimed she was kidnapped in 2010 by Mcintosh, The Atlantic Journal-Constitution reported.

When police found her she weighed just 59 pounds.

Najlass Mcintosh was also charged in the case but her trial date has yet to be set.
A Pennsylvania man who was apparently upset that his ex-wife had been awarded their home in their divorce was found dead early Thursday, several hours after he shot at her and later killed his own parents.

Bruce Rogal, 59, died after a manhunt and a police chase that ended when he crashed his car at the West Bradford Township home he had shared with his wife, Chester County District Attorney Tom Hogan said.

State police said at least one trooper shot at Rogal following the crash, but it's not clear if he returned fire. A gun was found in his car, authorities said, but a cause of death hasn't been determined.

No troopers were injured, authorities said.

Rogal had received word of an order finalizing the divorce that authorities said was mailed on Wednesday and "that appears to be what set him off," Hogan said.

Rogal first went to the house where his ex-wife was in the driveway changing her car's oil, shot at her and missed. He then drove to a retirement center in East Goshen where he shot and killed his parents, William and Nancy Rogal, who were both in their late 80s.

Rogal then drove off, and police soon sent out an alert about the car he was driving. State police spotted the vehicle driving past the agency's Embreeville Barracks shortly before 1 a.m. Thursday, and a chase ensued that also involved SWAT team members.

Aided by a police helicopter, the troopers were able to follow Rogal a few miles into the West Bradford neighborhood where his ex-wife lives and where the initial shooting incident happened.

The chase ended when Rogal's crashed his car into the side of the house.

Court documents obtained by the Daily Local News in West Chester, Pennsylvania, showed Rogal's ex-wife had filed an order of protection from abuse against him in 2015, shortly before filing for divorce.

Rogal's attorneys had argued the order was a way to gain an upper hand in the divorce and said some of the incidents she had listed in the petition alleging Rogal had threatened or assaulted her. The court ordered him to leave their home.

Authorities confirmed they contacted both the special master who oversaw the divorce and the judge who signed the decree, eventually evacuating the special master from her home Wednesday night as a safety precaution.

___

This story has been corrected to show Rogal drove his car into his ex-wife's home in East Bradford Township, not into his home in Glenmoore.
A head-on collision in Arizona Wednesday night killed eight people, including some illegal immigrants, officials said.

The two-vehicle crash happened around 10 p.m. on State Route 79 south of Florence, Arizona, a news release from the states Department of Public Safety said. The area is more than 120 miles north of the Mexico border.

A Chevy Suburban with nine individuals inside was driving north on the highway before a Buick traveling the opposite direction slammed into it, officials said.

FEDERAL AGENCY CANT DETERMINE WHEREABOUTS OF NEARLY 1,500 ILLEGAL IMMIGRANT MINORS

It is unknown why the southbound Buick went left of center and collided head on with the Suburban, officials said.

The deceased individuals in the Chevy Suburban were the driver, front seat passenger and four other riders  who were illegal immigrants, according to the news release.

The remaining three passengers  also illegal immigrants  sustained serious to life-threatening injuries and were transported to nearby hospitals, officials said.

BORDER PATROL AGENTS DISCOVER NEARLY 200 ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS IN REMOTE ARIZONA DESERT

Of the nine occupants in the Suburban, the driver, front seat passenger and four additional passengers were killed as a result. Three other passengers are at area hospitals with serious to life-threatening injuries, the news release said. The driver and front seat passenger are U.S. citizens and the additional seven occupants are undocumented immigrants.

Authorities, with the help of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), are trying to identify the deceased individuals in order to notify their families.

Two people in the Buick  the driver and the person riding in the front seat  also died, officials said, adding that troopers are working to make next-of-kin notifications.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.
The lone shooter responsible for killing at least three people and wounding several others during a Thursday morning assault on a Maryland distribution center died at the hospital after she shot herself in the head, police said.

The suspect was identified as Snochia Moseley of Baltimore County, the Harford Sheriff announced on Twitter.

In total, four people were killed in the shooting at the Rite Aid distribution center in Aberdeen, including the 26-year-old suspect, Harford County Sheriff Jeffrey Gahler said at a news conference.

Three others who were also shot are expected to survive, he said.

Police responded to the shooting just after 9 a.m. at a distribution center near Spesutia and Perryman roads. Authorities arrived on the scene in just over five minutes of the first call.

Authorities discovered that the suspect was a temporary employee at the center and "had reported for her workday as usual" before shots were fired, Gahler said.

A motive for the "senseless crime" remained unclear, he added.

The suspect appeared to be "armed with one handgun and several magazines," Gahler said, adding that the weapon was owned and registered to her.

"No shots were fired by any law enforcement responder," he said.

The incident is thought to have begun outside before it moved inward and shot individuals were found both inside and outside the business, Gahler said.

MARYLAND SHOOTING WITNESSES DESCRIBE 'SHOCKING' INCIDENT AT RITE AID DISTRIBUTION CENTER

A law enforcement official previously told Fox News the shooter may have been a woman and confirmed the incident was no longer an "active shooter" situation as of 11:30 a.m.

An FBI official told Fox News that the suspect's name had been run through the system and didn't find any terror ties.

Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan described the scene as "horrific."

"We are closely monitoring the horrific shooting in Aberdeen. Our prayers are with all those impacted, including our first responders," Hogan tweeted. "The State stands ready to offer any support."

He later added that he and his wife were "grieving the loss of life" and "praying that those who were injured fully recover."

"We are wholeheartedly grateful to the first responders who were at the scene in five minutes, and all medical and law enforcement personnel who are helping in the aftermath of this tragic shooting," he tweeted.

FBI Baltimore said it was responding to the scene, and a spokesperson told Fox News one of the bureau's crisis specialist teams was en route.

Aberdeen is located about 30 miles northeast of Baltimore.

In October 2017 Harford police officers were called to a shooting at a granite company in which three people were killed and two others were wounded. The gunman, Radee Prince, opened fire at his workplace in nearby Edgewood, less than 10 miles from Thursday's shooting.

He was captured in Delaware after a 10-hour manhunt.

In July, five people were killed when Jarrod Ramos, 38, launched a targeted attack at the Capital Gazette newspaper building in Annapolis.

Fox News' Jake Gibson, Griff Jenkins, Peter Doocy and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
The man who punched and carjacked an 88-year-old woman in Michigan on Tuesday may want to think twice before crossing her path again.

The Livonia Police Department said in a news release that Gloria Kevelighan was attacked in the parking lot of a Walmart in the Detroit suburb by a man who approached her from behind and grabbed her purse.

After trying to fight the man off with her cane, the man then punched the 88-year-old in her head and threw her to the ground while his accomplice jumped into the passenger side of her vehicle. The man then got behind the wheel of Kevelighan's car and drove off, nearly running her over as she lay on the ground.

The 88-year-old shared details of her attack on Wednesday, telling FOX2 it was "traumatic" and "happened in seconds."

"He pushed me and I fell flat on my face," she told FOX2. "I hit my head, I was bleeding and everything."

The 88-year-old said she did everything she could to fight back against her attacker.

"I tried to hit him with my cane but I couldn't, he seemed to want to stay behind me," Kevelighan said. "So I couldn't see his face, you know. I tried to turn around and sock him with my cane. If anyone bothers me, I use my cane."

"I'd kill the son of a b___. The way he pushed me, he didn't care, he was very strong."  Gloria Kevelighan

WOMAN CARRYING BABY LEADS TEXAS COPS ON HIGH-SPEED CHASE, CRASHES AND ATTEMPTS TO CARJACK VEHICLE

A witness who saw the whole attack unfold followed the vehicle, but lost track of the car. Officers later spotted the two in the same area and arrested them without incident.

The man, a 38-year-old from Sterling Heights, and a 41-year-old woman from Lincoln Park, are expected to be arraigned on Thursday. Livonia Police the said identities of the suspects are being withheld until their arraignment.

When asked by FOX2 what she would do if she ever came face-to-face with her attacker, the 88-year-old said in stark terms how she would respond.

"I'd kill the son of a b___," she told FOX2. "The way he pushed me, he didn't care. He was very strong."
A Michigan rapist managed to go undetected for nearly two decades before justice finally caught up with him.

Arthur David Long was sentenced Tuesday to 10 to 20 years in prison, the Michigan Department of Attorney General confirmed. DNA evidence left behind at the crime scene helped seal Long's fate.

Long and another man broke into a Flint, Michigan woman's home in 1998. Long sexually assaulted the woman before the pair took off, officials said.

After the crime, the woman  who has not been named  could only manage to identify Long's accomplice.

DNA evidence found at the scene was entered into a state database but they couldn't find a match. For years, officials cross-checked it against other crimes and "DNA samples obtained from court orders, the attorney general's office said.

SURGEON WHO APPEARED ON BRAVO, ACCUSED OF DRUGGING, RAPING WOMEN, SEES NEW ACCUSERS STEP FORWARD

It wasn't until years later, in 2015, Long's DNA was tested and a match was made.

At the time of the match, Long was in custody of the states department of corrections following a conviction for criminal sexual conduct  3rd degree at the time."

He was released on parole in 2016 but his freedom was short-lived. Long was taken into custody for the decades-old crime in February 2017. The Michigan Department of Attorney General charged him with two counts of criminal sexual assault in the 1st degree. Long plead guilty to the charges in August.

ATLANTA MAN GETS LIFE SENTENCE FOR RAPE AFTER VICTIM RECOGNIZES HIM AT TRAIN STATION SIX YEARS LATER

The conviction and sentencing of Arthur Long prove what I have said many times, justice may have been delayed, but it will not be denied to victims of violent crime or their families, Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette said in a statement.

Long will simultaneously serve 10 to 20 years for each offense, according to officials.
A New Mexico solar observatory reopened Monday after an 11-day FBI investigation of a janitor who was suspected of using the facilitys internet to download child pornography, federal court documents revealed Wednesday.

The National Solar Observatory in Sunspot, New Mexico, abruptly closed Sept. 6 over an undisclosed security issue. The lack of explanation fueled conspiracy theories, given the facilitys close proximity to Roswell  the location of a supposed UFO sighting in 1947.

An FBI officer said she was investigating the activities of an individual who was utilizing the wireless internet service of the National Solar Observatory  to download and distribute child pornography.

Officials on Monday said the observatory did not communicate with the public during the investigation because they didnt want the suspect to be tipped off.

[O]ur desire to provide additional information had to be balanced against the risk that, if spread at the time, the news would alert the suspect and impede the law enforcement investigation. That was a risk we could not take, officials said.

Investigators determined the observatorys janitor had used his laptop to connect to the facilitys wireless internet system, an FBI affidavit said. Federal authorities obtained a warrant to the search the suspects residence, Reuters reported, citing FBI records.

On Sept. 14, FBI agents removed three cell phones, five laptops, one iPad, an external hard drive, and other electronic devices, from the suspects home, FBI records showed.

An FBI spokesman said the case is still under investigation. According to the FBI, the suspect has not been arrested or charged.

Sunspot is located in South Central New Mexico, about a four-hour drive from Albuquerque.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Cardinal Timothy Dolan, Archdiocese of New York, said his flock is calling the last few months the summer of hell.

Dolan held a press conference on Thursday with a two-fold purpose: to assuage the widespread anger surrounding the sexual abuse crisis and to show whats being done.

He acknowledged a severe loss of trust among parishioners and announced a new initiative meant to create accountability.

If I lost the trust of my people and this community, I don't have a lot left, Dolan said, they want transparency, accountability and action.

Dolan introduced a new special counsel and independent reviewer, former judge Barbara Jones, whose legal firm will not only hold priests accountable but also bishops whove been seen as part of a culture that has covered up for accused priests.

The announcement comes as the church struggles over how to deal with a growing number of sex abuse cases and allegations that they covered it up.

Two years ago, the Manhattan-based archdiocese, the nation's second-biggest after Los Angeles, announced a compensation fund for victims of clergy sex abuse willing to forego lawsuits. It has paid out about $60 million so far. In Pennsylvania, a recent grand jury report detailed widespread abuse and systematic cover-up by church officials there.

The appointment of Jones comes two weeks after New York's attorney general announced that she was doing a comprehensive investigation of how the church and its leaders handled abuse allegations across the state, as other states have also undertaken since the Pennsylvania grand jury report.

"I approach this important assignment with an open mind and understanding of the scope and scale of the issues that challenge the Archdiocese," Jones said.

The special counsel has been on the job for about 10 days now but Jones said the archbishop has promised her firm complete access to its records -- and total independence.

Includes reporting by The Associated Press.
Remembrances and religious ceremonies are planned throughout Puerto Rico on Thursday, with Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson joining Gov. Ricardo Rossello in San Juan. One year ago today, Category 4 Hurricane Maria ravaged the U.S. Commonwealth, storming ashore with recorded wind gusts of 170 miles an hour.

An estimated 3,000 people lost their lives on the island and much of Puerto Ricos infrastructure crumbled. Most of the island lost electricity for at least three months. Some just had it restored last month.

Rossello told Fox News that Maria caused about $140 billion in damage. And he worries that the next hurricane could break it all apart again.

We have some stronger infrastructure that has been put in, the governor said. But all weve done right now is essentially lift up the old system, and in some parts its even more vulnerable than it was before Maria."

Across the island, recovery and rebuilding is still happening every day.

Marylinette Martinezs house lost its roof when the hurricane blew it into her neighborhood. Martinez and her 4- and 5-year-old daughters have been spending the past year crashing at her in-laws house. Her city, Yabucoa, remains only 50 percent repaired.

The disaster relief organization Samaritans Purse is helping her rebuild the roof this month.

Its really hard to not have a safe place for the kids, she said.

Samaritans Purse distributed 75,000 blue tarps after Maria hit. Flying around the island on Thursday, you still see numerous homes covered in tarps.

Its a year later, and while a lot has been done, were still finding people living under plastic, said Samaritans Purse Daniel Stephens. "So, its still a struggle.

His workers are still aiding residents, even installing solar panels to help keep their power working.

At Hector Batistas house in the mountains, a passing thunderstorm shot a bolt of lightning nearby, knocking out his power. He and his wife went six months without electricity after the hurricane. He said its still unreliable.

Now, every time it rains, the power goes away, he said.

Damage and debris is still a prominent part of the new landscape. A massive wind-power farm remains standing, with pieces of the huge turbines still on the ground. The power utility still hasnt gotten to that.

In the northern, coastal town of Barceloneta, Maria ate up the beach, which has resulted in a dozen houses to collapse into the sand. They still sit there, piles of abandoned rubble.

To commemorate the anniversary of the worst and most costly hurricane to ever hit Puerto Rico, the governor and mayors across the island are holding ceremonies on Thursday. Carson will be joining the governor in San Juan.

And all government flags are flying at half-staff.
Prosecutors on Thursday rested their case in the first-degree murder trial of Jason Van Dyke, a white Chicago police officer accused of fatally shooting Laquan McDonald, a black teenager, 16 times.

McDonalds death roiled Chicago, led to impassioned demonstrations and exposed deep resentment and mistrust between officers and the people they're sworn to protect.

Special Prosecutor Joseph McMahon called the 2014 killing completely unnecessary and argued that race had been a factor.

Prosecutors say that on the night McDonald was shot and killed, the only thing the defendant saw was a black boy walking down the street who had the audacity to ignore the police.

OPENING ARGUMENTS BEGIN IN THE MURDER TRIAL OF WHITE CHICAGO COP WHO SHOT BLACK TEEN

Van Dyke is charged with first-degree murder, 16 counts of aggravated battery and one count of official misconduct in McDonalds death. He was suspended without pay and has pleaded not guilty to murder.

His attorneys have painted McDonald as a troubled teen who refused to drop the three-inch retractable knife he'd been carrying the night he was killed.

Defense attorney Daniel Herbert described McDonald as an out-of-control individual who didnt care about anyone, and argued that Van Dyke was a scared police officer who was fearful of his life and the life of others.

Van Dyke claimed he shot McDonald 16 times when the teen swung a knife at him. Grainy dashcam video  released 13 months later after a court order  showed McDonald holding a knife at the side of his body, about 15 feet away from Van Dyke, and walking away from him and other officers who'd responded to a report that the youth was trying to break into vehicles.

McDonald fell to the pavement less than two seconds after he was shot. Van Dyke continued shooting for another 12 seconds, emptying his 16-shot semiautomatic gun.

Eury Patrick, the prosecutions expert on deadly use of force by the police, testified Thursday that Van Dyke kept shooting long beyond the point of being reasonable.

Theyre not trained to just empty their gun, Patrick said. Its not a knee-jerk reaction. Theyre trained to shoot until the risk is ended.

Witness Jose Torres told jurors he heard more gunshots after McDonald fell than before.

Im not going to use the word, but I said, Why the "f" are they still shooting him if hes on the ground?'

CHICAGO JUDGE SLAPS WHITE COP ON TRIAL FOR LAQUAN MCDONALD MURDER WITH $2G FINE FOR VIOLATING GAG ORDER

Over the course of the week, prosecutors showed the jury --eight women and four men -- the dashcam video more than a half-dozen times. They also showed the jury every gunshot wound on McDonalds body.

On Wednesday, Cook County Medical Examiner Dr. Ponni Arunkumar spent two hours on the stand, detailing the multiple bullet holes on McDonalds back, chest, leg, arms and hand. She also pointed out where the bullets had burned McDonalds skin, shattered his bones and ripped through his lung. She testified they picked bullet fragments from his teeth and mouth.

The Rev. Jesse Jackson showed up at the Chicago courthouse on Wednesday afternoon. He watched an hour of testimony and told reporters that the McDonald case was one of the most heinous crimes since Emmitt Till.

Till, who was born in Chicago in 1941, was savagely beaten and killed in a racially motivated attack in Mississippi when he was 14. He was abducted, beaten and shot in the head. His killers, who later confessed to the crime, were acquitted.

Van Dykes partner and two other officers face trials this fall on conspiracy and obstruction of justice charges. Prosecutors contend that they lied to protect Van Dyke, filing reports that echoed his statement characterizing McDonald as a danger.
At least 30 immigrant men who are living in the United States illegally and have sex crime records remain in custody in California despite having completed their sentences and wanting to be deported, a newspaper reported Thursday.

The men committed crimes and served their prison sentences. But instead of being released, a state-mandated mental evaluation of sex offenders put them in Coalinga State Hospital, which houses sexually violent predators, The Fresno Bee reported .

Their predicament seems to be nobody's jurisdiction.

The Department of State Hospitals says it does not track patients' immigration status and only a judge can decide if patients are ready to be released. Federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement says the decision is up to the state.

Rudy Kraft, a San Luis Obispo attorney who has been representing sex offenders for nearly 20 years, said California is holding on to the men because it worries they would commit sex offenses in their home countries.

Kraft represents Leo Gutierrez, who was transferred to the Coalinga hospital when it opened in 2005.

"The state government takes the position that if he's deported, we cannot ensure that he's not committing sex offenses in his home country," Kraft said. "In a sensible system, we would work out a supervision program with the home country and let them decide how to keep an eye on him. But there's no consideration of that."

Gutierrez was convicted in 1998 and released early from prison for good behavior, serving three of six sentenced years. He was sent to Atascadero State Hospital before moving into Coalinga State Hospital, a maximum-security facility.

Gutierrez, whose kidneys are failing, said he would like to return to El Salvador, where relatives have offered their organs for transplant.

"I asked (ICE) why they don't pick me up. They said the hospital says I'm still paying for a crime. But that's not true. I finished my time in 2001," said Gutierrez, 49. "I don't know why I did what I did then, but I can't correct it. And all this time, I've been in this place."

The state's convicted sex offenders are referred to the Department of State Hospitals within six months of their parole to undergo a mental health evaluation to determine if they are sexually violent predators.

The 1,300 men at Coalinga have been diagnosed as having a mental disorder and being likely to reoffend, according to the state, which spends $250 million a year to operate the hospital.

While California law limits the state's cooperation with ICE, it doesn't apply when dealing with people convicted of serious or violent felonies, including sexual abuse and crimes endangering children.

An ICE spokesman said the state of California determines the custody of sexually violent predators.

"If ICE has an interest in an individual after being released from custody, our agency would review the case and make appropriate decisions regarding next steps," spokesman Richard Rocha said in an email.

Kraft is grim about the options for people like his client under current policies.

"There is no way out other than death," he said.

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Information from: The Fresno Bee, http://www.fresnobee.com
A suspect was arrested in the seemingly "unprovoked" stabbing death of a female jogger, whose slaying Tuesday evening in a very safe neighborhood" stunned Washington, D.C. residents, officials announced Thursday.

D.C. Police Chief Peter Newsham said Anthony Crawford, 23, was arrested and charged with first-degree murder while armed in connection with the stabbing death of Wendy K. Martinez.

"It looks like it was an unprovoked attack," Newsham told reporters.

Crawford was arrested Wednesday night after he was found at a park by officers, who then took him in for questioning. Crawford, who has a criminal history, is "not cooperating" with investigators, the chief added.

The 35-year-old Martinez was jogging in Logan Circle around 8 p.m. Tuesday when an assailant stabbed her in the neck.

"This happened very quickly," Newsham said Thursday.

After being stabbed, Martinez stumbled away and into a nearby takeout restaurant, where surveillance video showed the woman appearing to alert customers to her attacker's location.

Some of those inside the eatery ran out to track down the assailant while others tried to help Martinez, who was later pronounced dead at a hospital, FOX5DC reported.

Crawford reportedly dropped the knife used in the assault at the scene, where it was recovered by investigators.

JOGGER STABBED TO DEATH IN WASHINGTON, DC, COLLAPSES IN TAKEOUT RESTAURANT AS ATTACKER FLEES, COPS SAY

Warning: Graphic image below.

Newsham said said Wednesday that patrons at the restaurant "did the best they could" to save Martinez's life.

A blurry surveillance video was released Wednesday showing the person believed to be Martinezs attacker. The suspect was last seen wearing a mustard-colored shirt, dark-colored pants and sandals with white socks.

That "very distinct shirt," according to Newsham, was what helped officers identify Crawford and led to his arrest. The chief said Thursday that Crawford was living in Northwest D.C., and is not homeless.

"Surveillance video was really the key to closing this case," he said.

Detectives said the attack was random and that Martinez did not know Crawford. The incident was not a robbery attempt and the motive remains unclear, police added.

Martinez' death came just a week after she announced she was engaged, her family said in a statement to local news outlets.

We are deeply saddened by this senseless tragedy," Martinez's family said. "Wendy Karina Martinez was the light of our lives. Not only was she an avid runner, but she was a devout Christian, a wonderful friend, and a driven professional. Everything you hope that a daughter and a friend could be. She was also excited to be planning her upcoming wedding to her fiance, Daniel Hincapie. They were engaged just last week.

Friends of Martinez made a statement on Thursday during a press conference announcing the arrest of Crawford.

Wendy should have been shopping for her wedding dress on Friday," a friend said.

Martinez, the chief of staff at FiscalNote, was described as an avid jogger who lived near Logan Circle, a popular D.C. neighborhood Newsham described as very safe. Martinez said in a recent interview with thebridgework.com that she liked to unwind from work by running around the city or working out at her favorite local studio.
Authorities say a drunken southwestern Missouri man badly injured a horse by dragging it behind his pickup truck until he was stopped by angry witnesses.

Sasha Martinez told KSPR that she, her daughter and a friend saw the horse tied to the pickup Saturday as it drove down the road next to their Wright County home at 15-20 mph. She said she thought it was odd, but hoped the driver was going to drop the horse off at a nearby home. Martinez said about two hours later, they saw the truck driving down the road going the opposite way. She said her 12-year-old daughter went out to the road and started hollering "Mom, the horse has dropped and he's dragging her."

Martinez said the driver wouldn't stop until she stood in front of his truck and grabbed the grill.

When two Missouri State Highway Patrol troopers arrived, they found several people arguing with a man who was holding a horse with severe road rash injuries over most of its body, trooper J. Piccinino wrote in a probable cause statement. The horse's bloody hoof prints and the drag marks indicated that it had been dragged and walked up and down the road for about one-half mile.

According to Piccinino's statement, the truck's driver, 63-year-old Curtis Campbell, said he was pulling the 15-year-old mare Fox Trotter with his truck to "train her." When the trooper asked how the horse was injured, Campbell said it had laid down and he was trying to get her to stand up, but he said he didn't drag the animal. When the trooper asked Campbell a second time how the horse was injured, he said it was hurt in a pasture and continued to deny that he had dragged it, Piccinino wrote.

Campbell, of Mountain Grove, was charged Thursday with animal abuse, driving while intoxicated and failing to register a motor vehicle.

The statement also said Campbell failed two blood-alcohol tests.

Campbell's attorney, Joseph Passanise, said in a statement that Campbell, known as "Dowe," has lived in the Wright County area of more than 30 years, has a reputation for being a kind and helpful neighbor and has no prior criminal record.

"This has been an unfortunate incident and (Campbell) is deeply ashamed for bring this kind of attention to himself, family and community," Passanise said. "Animals have been a big part of his life and he has always treated animals with love and care. He would never intentionally or knowingly cause injury or suffering or fail to provide adequate care to result in substantial harm to an animal."

Missouri State Highway Patrol Sgt. Jeff Kinder said the injured horse was taken to a veterinarian in Mountain Grove. A woman who answered the phone there said the clinic could not provide information on the horse's condition.

___

Information from: KSPR-TV, http://kspr.com
Two police officers were shot late Wednesday evening while serving a search warrant at an apartment complex in Maryland.

Both officers were airlifted to a nearby trauma center but suffered non-life-threatening injuries, the Baltimore Sun reported.

A unit of nine officers in Prince George's County were executing a search warrant at a complex roughly 30 miles southeast of Annapolis, a spokeswoman for the county police said at a news conference.

When no one answered the door, officers made a forced entry and were immediately fired upon by a suspect armed with a shotgun, the spokeswoman said.

One officer returned fire, but the suspect was not hit.

One officer was struck in an arm and another was hit near one of his shoulder. A tactical medic in the unit applied life-saving medical assistance to the officers, the spokeswoman said.

The suspect was in custody after surrendering to authorities, according to police. Another individual in the apartment was not involved and was being considered as a witness.
One of Minnesotas most violent and infamous sex offenders -- who has admitted to raping more than 60 women and who has quickly re-offended every time he's been previously released from prison -- is set to go free yet again, after more than 30 years behind bars.

The Minnesota Supreme Court on Tuesday rejected a request by the states Department of Human Services to review the case of Thomas Ray Duvall, a serial rapist who admitted to brutally raping dozens of teenage girls in the 1970s and 1980s.

The courts ruling comes two months after the state Court of Appeals ruled Duvall should be allowed to be released into the community -- under supervision -- after spending three decades behind bars, the Star Tribune reported.

The ruling ends a five-year legal battle over Duvall's future. The case set off a political firestorm over Minnesotas civil commitment system, which confines sex offenders indefinitely after their prison terms ends.

CODY WILSON, GUN ENTREPRENEUR ACCUSED OF SEX WITH MINOR, LEFT US FOR TAIWAN, OFFICIALS SAY

I am honestly so devastated, I have no words at this moment, a family member of one of Duvalls victims told FOX9 after the courts ruling. We are terrified. The public needs to know how dangerous Duvall is.

Duvall, now 63, committed his first known sexual assault in 1975, when he and two other males raped a 17-year-old girl. He re-offended three years later when he picked up a 17-year-old girl at the State Fair, promised to drive her home, and instead raped her.

Within months of his release from prison for that crime, he attempted to force another woman into his car and threatened her with a knife, the Star Tribune reported.

Over the next decade, Duvall was arrested  and released  multiple times for raping several other teenagers, including a 14-year-old and 15-year-old in 1982.

BORDER PATROL AGENTS DISCOVER NEARLY 200 ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS IN REMOTE ARIZONA DESERT

Duvall was finally sentenced to his current term, 20 years in prison, after he was nabbed for raping a 17-year-old girl inside a Brooklyn Park apartment -- just 12 days after his release from jail in 1987. According to the Star Tribune, Duvall talked his way into the apartment a day after Christmas, bound the teenager with an electric cord and then repeatedly raped her for more than three hours while hitting her with a hammer.

In 1991, Duvall was civilly committed as a psychopathic personality and sent to the Minnesota Sex Offender Program. Duvall was diagnosed as a sexual sadist and has admitted to more than 60 victims, the Star Tribune reported.

In June 2015, U.S. District Judge Donovan Frank ruled the states sex offender program was unconstitutional, calling it a punitive system that violates offenders rights to due process. Franks ruling was later overturned by a higher court, but signified a shift among specialists to be more willing to support offenders petitions for conditional release.

The Star Tribune reported that, before Franks ruling, only three sex offenders had been discharged from the program in its 20-year history. Since then, the number has risen to 26.

At a trial last spring, Duvall testified he had earned his right to a provisional discharge and had learned to control his violent sexual fantasies.

At the same trial, three outside evaluators testified that Duvall should not be released from the program, arguing he remains fixated on deviant and violent sexual thoughts despite treatment. One of the evaluators, forensic psychologist Dr. James Alsdurf, described Duvall as obsessed with sex  most of it violent, the Star Tribune reported.

NEW MEXICO OBSERVATORY SHUT DOWN AMID FBI CHILD PORN INVESTIGATION: DOCUMENTS

Meanwhile, the programs own staff described Duvall as a model detainee who was committed to his treatment program  testimony the appeals court panel heavily relied on when saying he should be released into the community -- despite acknowledging that Duvall still has a risk of reoffending, given his violent history.

Human Services Commissioner Emily Piper said in statement that she opposed Duvalls release out of a deep concern for public safety.

The Star Tribune reported Duvall is expected to be released to a secure group home in the Twin Cities this fall. If he violates any of the more than two dozen conditions of his plan, the sex offender program can revoke his discharge and place him back in confinement.
European leaders are changing their course as their efforts to curb migration have triggered what the U.N. and other groups condemn as massive humanitarian failures. Deeply divided over how and where to control Europes borders, leaders met Wednesday in a summit in Austria.

One of Europes main solutions to migration  Greeces overcrowded, unsanitary Moria migrant camp  has suicidal children and conditions that a psychiatrist compared to an old-fashioned mental asylum.

In another heavily criticized solution to immigration, imprisoned men and women have been shuttled away from one gun battle only to end up incarcerated on the front line of another, vulnerable to both trafficking and new abuse.

The jammed Moria camp on the Greek island of Lesbos and the dangerous migrant detention centers in Libya serve as a sober reminder that the current plans seem to be unworkable.

Migrant sea arrivals to Europe have plummeted this year, but each journey now carries increasing risks of death or indefinite detention in squalid conditions. More than 1,700 people already have died on Mediterranean crossings this year.

Abbas Elnaser, an Iraqi who arrived in Moria about three weeks ago, said his 8-year-old daughters health always had been frail, and she was deteriorating quickly in the camp that was built for 3,100, but now houses over 9,000 people.

She has problems breathing most of the time, she has problems in her lungs, he said. The tent is surrounded by garbage.

In the central Mediterranean, Europe effectively has outsourced sea rescues of migrants to the Libyan coast guard; its boats have returned 13,000 migrants to Libyan detention centers this year. In some of those centers around the Libyan capital of Tripoli, migrants ended up on the front lines of gun battles as militias fought for control of the city.

At one point in the fighting, detainees abandoned by their jailers for days broke out of at least one center but ended up caught in a gun battle. A half-dozen people were shot, according to Ibrahim Younis, head of the Libya mission for the aid group Doctors without Borders.

As a Tripoli cease-fire brokered by the U.N. threatens to fracture, food for the detainees there is dwindling. Libyan officials have complained that both they and the migrants have been largely abandoned by Europe. In the Janzour detention center, around 900 people were crammed into a space intended for half that many.

We have difficulties in providing subsistence, difficulties in providing food, and difficulties in sheltering them, said 1st Lt. Jamal Hussain. The government, which runs the facility, refused to allow an Associated Press journalist to speak to detainees.

The official number of asylum-seekers and refugees in detention in Libya is around 5,000, but thousands more are believed to be captive in warehouses and other buildings, where there have been widespread reports of slavery, sexual abuse and other atrocities.

This month the U.N. broke its silence over Europes policy of allowing the Libyan coast guard to intercept migrants, saying it was untenable and putting thousands of people at risk of being jailed indefinitely in inhumane conditions. Detailing allegations of torture, sexual abuse, violence and nightmarish conditions, the U.N. refugee agency said Libya didnt remotely meet the criteria as a place of safety.

In all, around 56,000 refugees and asylum-seekers are registered with the U.N. in Libya and neighboring Niger, which have accepted millions of euros in exchange for European promises to evaluate a portion for resettlement.

But, critics say, resettlement simply isnt happening. A total of 657 people had left for resettlement in Europe as of last week, out of 3,886 slots promised over a year ago in 11 European countries and Canada.

Meanwhile, the Libyan and Greek detention centers have continued to fill, with migrants and refugees waiting a year or more for a decision in their cases. That, however, suits many anti-immigrant populists in Europe just fine.

Until the message is made abundantly clear that illegal economic migrants will not be processed, that boats will be turned back, thousands and thousands more sad and desperate lives will be lost in vain, all for your feelings of virtue, said Nathan Gill, a British member of the European parliament, accusing fellow legislators last week of being soft on immigration. Youre not really helping people.

If migrants have made it to the Greek island of Lesbos, theyre already one step ahead of those trapped in Libya. But conditions are hardly better. Raw sewage flows out the main entrance in Moria, garbage piles up outside the containers where migrants sleep.

Luca Fontana, who works for Doctors without Borders in Lesbos, said a quarter of the minors there had either attempted suicide, had suicidal thoughts or were harming themselves.

Only last week had to suture the wrists of a couple of unaccompanied minors, they tried to cut their veins inside Moria camp, he said.

Psychiatrist Alessandro Barbero of Doctors without Borders said Moria was as grim as an old-fashioned mental asylum, not seen in parts of Europe since the mid-twentieth century.

Any hope of an easy solution to Europes immigration dilemma has faded.

Paolo Campana, who has studied the smuggling networks that lead through Libya, has said a solution is possible only if legal migration into Europe opens up at the same time as peace, stability and prosperity emerge in violence-plagued nations like Iraq, Syria, Ethiopia and Eritrea.

We need to be humanitarian and to be pragmatic, he said.

As of last week, 73,696 migrants and refugees have entered Europe by sea this year along with over 11,000 land arrivals, compared with 128,993 sea arrivals in 2017 and 298,663 in 2016.

European leaders in June proposed creating centers to process migrants in North Africa but those governments quickly rejected the idea. The EU now is pitching plans of an upgraded border force.

Last week, Austria and Italys right-wing interior ministers called for shipboard screenings of migrants on the Mediterranean, raising new questions about whose ships and where  given that Italy has blocked humanitarian groups from docking with migrants rescued at sea, favoring Libyan boats instead.

Riccardo Magi, an Italian lawmaker from the tiny left-wing +Europa party, said Libyas deteriorating crisis has risked sending migrants and refugees on ever smaller boats into greater danger.

What is sure is that the departures will continue and that deaths will continue to occur and that there will be fewer and fewer eyes on the sea to rescue those in need, Magi said.

Two survivors of a deadly wreck who were picked up by the coast guard later were imprisoned and tortured, said Giorgia Linardi, a spokeswoman for the SeaWatch rescue boat. The two escaped in July and again set sail, this time being rescued by the NGO ship Aquarius.

Linardi said at least one of the two has brought a case to the European Court of Human Rights for alleged violation of the EU convention banning torture.

Trying to tackle the enormous problem at Moria, Greece on Tuesday agreed to transfer 2,000 asylum-seekers from the camp on Lesbos to the mainland this month. The move could not come soon enough for the migrants there. Ali Sajjad Faizy, a 19-year-old from Afghanistan, said conditions at Moria steadily have worsened and residents must stand in line for four or five hours just to get food.

Its completely full, he said.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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Austria urged its European Union partners Thursday to enter talks with Egypt to help stem the flow of migrants entering Europe from Africa, amid deep divisions over how to manage the challenge.

Kurz, whose country currently holds the EU's rotating presidency, and EU Council President Donald Tusk visited Cairo over the weekend for talks with President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi, a top army general who took office in 2014.

Both men have praised him for stopping people from leaving its coast bound for Europe.

"Egypt has proven that it can be efficient," Kurz told reporters at an EU summit in Salzburg, Austria. "Since 2016, it has prevented ships sailing from Egypt to Europe or, when they have sailed, it has taken them back."

Kurz said Egypt is "now prepared possibly to deepen cooperation with us in talks. We should use that."

He also said EU leaders support the idea of entering into talks with other North African countries as well.

Beyond keeping tight control over Egypt's coastline, Sissi could have important influence with the military and militias in lawless, neighboring Libya; a main departure point for migrants trying to enter Europe through Italy.

The call comes after a summer in which Italy's anti-migrant government closed its ports to NGO ships, and even its own coast guard, carrying people rescued at sea. Hundreds of migrants spent unnecessary days at sea or aboard boats while EU countries bickered over who should take them.

Looking for help from Sissi is a new sign of the EU's determination to outsource the migrant challenge, even though arrival numbers are barely a trickle compared to 2015, when well over a million people entered Europe, mostly fleeing conflict in Syria and Iraq.

EU countries are studying plans to create "disembarkation platforms" in northern African countries, where people rescued at sea could be dropped off for screening. No African country has expressed interest in hosting one so far.

The EU's inability to balance responsibility for the migrants and share the burden of hosting them has been a vote-winner for far-right parties across the 28-nation bloc.

French President Emmanuel Macron, who supports talks with North Africa, believes countries like Italy, Greece and Spain must take responsibility for migrant arrivals, but he also underlines the importance of European solidarity.

"There are rules and they have to be respected. We have to protect our citizens but we must do it while respecting our values. Also, responsibilities cannot be upheld if there is no solidarity," he said.

Macron and the leaders of Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands repeated a similar joint line on the balance between responsibilities and solidarity after talks earlier this month. However, they appeared to suggest that solidarity is best expressed by giving European money to partners who need help. No leader offered to share the refugee burden.

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Geir Moulson in Berlin and Raf Casert in Brussels contributed.
British detectives are reportedly investigating the possibility of a hoax in the case of a couple who apparently fell ill at an Italian restaurant steps away from where a Russian ex-spy and his daughter were found poisoned.

Police sources told U.K. reporters that they want to question Alex King, 42, and his wife Anna Shapiro, 30, who were hospitalized on Sunday after reportedly falling ill at a restaurant in Salisbury.

They were eating at Prezzo restaurant, which is just a short walk from where Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia were found unconscious after coming into contact with a Soviet-grade nerve agent in March. British authorities have accused two Russian agents of poisoning them.

NOVICHOK UNLIKELY AFTER RUSSIAN NATIONAL FALLS ILL IN UK EATERY, POLICE SAY

King and Shapiro were quickly tested for exposure to the nerve agent novichok  which was responsible for the death of another woman in Salisbury this summer.

Detectives said they want to question the couple after Shapiro told The Sun that they had also been targeted by Moscow, the Guardian reported.

The Sun reported King was fighting for his life and suggested that he might have been poisoned with strychnine. However, on Wednesday night, that account unraveled after the Salisbury district hospital said in a statement that both patients had been discharged.

The Sun has since removed the story from its website for legal reasons, the BBC reported.

A Wiltshire police spokesperson told the Guardian on Thursday that they have already spoken to Shapiro and are looking to speak to her husband.

Police confirmed Wednesday that both King and Shapiro were tested for nerve agents, and the tests turned out to be negative.

The BBC reported that Shapiro is a model and an Israeli citizen of Russian heritage, while King is a convicted criminal who pranked Prince Charles in 2006. According to the report, King inserted himself into an official line-up of stars being greeted by the Prince of Wales at a film premiere. He said at the time that the prank was carried out as part of a $132,000 bet from his employer.

On March 4, Skripal and his daughter collapsed in Salisbury after being exposed to a nerve agent  sending them to the hospital in critical condition. They recovered after several weeks in the hospital and were released to an unknown location.

In June, two residents from nearby Amesbury also fell ill after being exposed to the same nerve agent. Dawn Sturgess, 44, later died.

British officials have accused two Russian men  Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov  of attempting to kill the Skripals. However, they have denied any involvement and said they were tourists visiting the area.
An anesthesiologist who was convicted of killing his wife and daughter by placing a leaking carbon monoxide-filled yoga ball in their car was sentenced to life in prison in Hong Kong.

Khaw Kim Sun, 53, a Malaysian citizen, was accused of leaving the exercise ball filled with gas in the trunk of a locked car with the two women on May 22, 2015, It then slowly leaked carbon monoxide that killed his wife and 16-year-old daughter.

DOCTOR USED YOGA BALL FILLED WITH GAS TO KILL WIFE, DAUGHTER, PROSECUTORS SAY

A jury of five men and four women found him guilty at Hong Kong's High Court after seven hours of deliberation on Wednesday.

An autopsy determined the doctors wife and daughter died from carbon monoxide poisoning. While investigating, police discovered a deflated yoga ball in the car near where the two bodies were found. The South China Morning Post reported a jogger found the bodies in the parked car.

CODY WILSON, GUN ENTREPRENEUR ACCUSED OF SEX WITH MINOR, LEFT US FOR TAIWAN, OFFICIALS SAY

Khaw, who was an associate professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, allegedly killed his wife because he was having an affair with a student and his wife wouldnt divorce him, prosecutors told Hong Kongs High Court, according to the BBC. However, prosecutors said they didnt think Khaw intended to kill his daughter.

Witnesses reportedly said they saw Khaw filling exercise balls with carbon monoxide. The professor told colleagues he was using the gas to kill rabbits, however, he allegedly contradicted his statement when speaking to the police, saying he was using the carbon monoxide to kill rats in his residence.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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The leader of Lebanon's militant Hezbollah boasted Thursday the group now possesses "highly accurate" missiles despite Israeli attempts to prevent it from acquiring such weapons.

Hassan Nasrallah didn't offer specifics on the precision weapons, but his comments prompted a reply from Israel's Prime Minister.

Benjamin Netanyahu warned the Hezbollah leader that "if he confronts us, he will receive a lethal blow that he can't even imagine."

Israel worries that Hezbollah has been improving its capabilities and Israeli officials have said they will not allow "game-changing" weapons, such as guided missiles, to reach the group.

In recent months, Israel has acknowledged carrying out scores of strikes in Syria, most of them believed aimed at halting suspected arms shipments for Hezbollah from Iran, its main backer and Israel's archenemy.

On Thursday, Nasrallah claimed Israeli strikes in Syria to prevent Hezbollah from acquiring precise missiles were ineffective.

"I tell (Israel) no matter what it did to cut the route, it is over. It has already been achieved," he said, adding that Hezbollah "now possesses precision missiles and non-precision and weapons capabilities."

Nasrallah was speaking during a traditional televised speech at the end of Ashoura, a top religious holy day for Shiite Muslims that lasts for ten days.

He told supporters to be confident and Israelis to be concerned of Hezbollah's capabilities.

Nasrallah said the balance of power in the region has changed.

Hezbollah has thousands of fighters in Syria supporting President Bashar Assad's forces in the civil war.

"If Israel imposes a war on Lebanon, Israel will face a destiny and reality it didn't expect any day," Nasrallah said.

Nasrallah's speech was broadcast on a large screen to supporters in Beirut's majority-Shiite suburb of Dahiya.

On Wednesday, Nasrallah said Israeli claims to have targeted a shipment to Hezbollah in Syria's Latakia province earlier this week were "lies."

Hezbollah fighters will continue to be deployed in Syria, he said, but perhaps in lesser numbers due to reduced fighting there after Syrian government forces regained control of most rebel-held areas.

Nasrallah also urged supporters to rally behind Iran, saying it's facing hard times as more U.S. sanctions take effect in November.
Iran continues to wreak havoc in the Middle East by allowing Al Qaeda to maintain a "facilitation base" within the Islamic Republic's borders, according to the U.S State Departments annual Country Reports on Terrorism.

The report, released this week, reinforces assessments published in years past that not only does Iran enable Al Qaeda to conduct global operations from within its borders, but also remains "unwilling to bring to justice senior Al Qaeda members residing in Iran and has refused to publicly identify the members in its custody.

On the surface, it would seem that Shia-dominant Iran would hardly have an incentive to partner with the Sunni-led Al Qaeda. But analysts are hardly surprised by the findings of the report.

This has been known within the U.S. intelligence community for years. Although Iran and Al Qaeda are at odds in Syria and Yemen, the Iranian regime has allowed this 'core pipeline' to exist since well before Osama bin Laden's death, said Tom Joscelyn, Senior Fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), and Senior Editor of the Long War Journal.

Using language similar to past State Department reports and statements, the Long War Journal noted the U.S once again charges that since 2009, Tehran has given access to Al Qaeda facilitators to operate a core facilitation pipeline through Iran, which then allows funds and fighters to spread to South Asia and Syria.

The UN also released a report in late July noting Al Qaeda leaders in Iran have grown more prominent, and were working to erode the jurisdiction of the Turkey-backed Sunni rebel group Hayat Tahir al Sham, which dominates in Syrias Idlib province  the last remaining opposition enclave in the civil war-ravaged country.

For the past seven years, both the U.S Treasury and State departments have consistently slapped sanctions on Al Qaedas leadership, accused of hiding out in Iran as part of a once secret deal between the Iranian government and Al Qaeda. In July 2016, the U.S. Treasury named three senior al Qaeda members located in Iran with the purpose of moving money and operatives in acts of disruption across South Asia and the Middle East.

So how do both sides benefit from such a deal?

It allows Al Qaeda to move personnel, funds and communications to and from South Asia. This 'core pipeline' connects Al Qaeda's senior leadership in Afghanistan and Pakistan with the organization's arms throughout the Middle East, Joscelyn explained. From Iran's perspective, it provides insurance against a possible al Qaeda attack inside Iran, as any attempt to attack would lead the Iranians to shut down the network.

Since pulling the United States out of the controversial 2015 JCPOA, better known as the Iran Deal, President Donald Trump has widely accused Iran of supporting terrorist proxies and militias such as al-Qaeda. For years, the annual terrorism report has described Iran as the foremost state sponsor of terrorism, highlighting that groups supported by Iran maintained their capability to threaten U.S. interests and allies.

VENEZUELAN OPPOSITION LEADER LAMENTS "GENOCIDE" IN HIS COUNTRY, REVEALS HIS ESCAPE FROM DETAINMENT

Analysts emphasized ties between the two unlikely partners is hardly new.

Its about money, security - and your enemy is my enemy situation, said one U.S security and intelligence source. The two dont get along, but Al Qaeda needs the safe haven, and the Iranians get a cut of the smuggling and drug money. Been going on for years.

According to the 9/11 Commission, Sudanese officials in the 1990s facilitated meetings between bin Laden  who was being protected in the African nation  and Iran. That alliance then allegedly turned into Tehran training terror members in tactics - on Iranian territory.

After the Taliban seized power in Afghanistan 1996 - and bin Laden relocated there - the Commission accused Iran of enabling terrorist transit, with Iranian border officials not stamping the passports of Al Qaeda terrorists moving through.

Despite such well-documented connections, other experts contend relations between Iran and Al Qaeda are far murkier.

Irans relationship with AQ goes back to the 1990s, and has long been documented by researchers in and outside the U.S. government. But Iran and AQ both seeing each other very negatively, maintained Ariane Tabatabai, associate political scientist at the RAND Corporation. In a nutshell, the relationship is an ad hoc marriage of convenience, one that has allowed to Iran to essentially buy some good will from AQ leadership, which has helped deter attacks on the Iranian territory, population, and interests, while providing AQ with the means to move money and operatives across the region.

IRAN, IN SHADOW PROXY WAR WITH SAUDIS, EXPANDS ITS PAKISTAN INFLUENCE

A study released earlier this month by the Washington-based think-tank New America  based on an analysis of documents recovered from Usama bin Ladens compound in 2011  asserted there is next to no evidence Tehran and the terror group co-operated in executing attacks.

The report argues instead that Iran during this time was especially uncomfortable with Al Qaedas presence within its borders, and after the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of neighboring Iraq, took action in detaining its members, and forbade them from leaving the country.

So the current depth of relations between the two parties remains subject to debate.

Iran had an evolving, tactical understanding with Al Qaeda, which it saw as the enemy of its enemies, but not a trusted ally. But Iran can be very ecumenical when it comes to terrorist groups, said Jim Phillips, Senior Research Fellow for Middle Eastern Affairs at The Heritage Foundation.

Although Iran and Al Qaeda see themselves as rival leaders of a global Islamist revolution, they share a set of common enemies: the United States, Israel, and Arab states such as Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan. Iran undoubtedly saw al-Qaeda as a useful force for undermining Arab governments aligned with the United States.
A high-level Israeli military delegation visited Moscow on Thursday to present detailed information related to the downing of a Russian warplane by Syrian forces that responded to an Israeli air raid.

All 15 crew members on board the Russian Il-20 reconnaissance plane were killed when it was downed Monday by Syrian air defense forces that mistook it for Israeli jets. The incident threatened to derail the close security ties between Russia and Israel.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu quickly called Russian President Vladimir to express sorrow over the death of the plane's crew, blamed Syria and offered to share detailed data.

On Thursday, a delegation of Israeli military officers led by the air force chief, Maj. Gen. Amikam Norkin, held several meetings in Moscow with their Russian counterparts.

The Israeli military said in a statement that they presented the situation report regarding the plane's downing, as well as the pre-mission information and the findings of an Israeli military inquiry.

"The meetings were held in good spirits and the representatives shared a professional, open and transparent discussion on various issues," the Israeli military said. "Both sides emphasized the importance of the states' interests and the continued implementation of the deconfliction system."

The Israeli military has said its fighter jets were targeting a Syrian military facility involved in providing weapons for Iran's proxy Hezbollah militia and insisted it warned Russia of the coming raid in accordance with deconfliction agreements. It said the Syrian army fired the missiles that hit the Russian plane when the Israeli jets had already returned to Israeli airspace.

But the Russian Defense Ministry charged that the Israeli warning came less than a minute before the strike, leaving the Russian aircraft in the line of fire. It accused the Israeli military of deliberately using the Russian plane as a cover to dodge Syrian defenses and threatened to retaliate.

The Russian military made no comment after Thursday's meetings with the Israeli delegation.

While the Russian Defense Ministry blamed the plane's loss on Israel, Putin quickly sought to defuse tensions Tuesday, pointing at "a chain of tragic accidental circumstances."

The Israeli military also noted that its delegation "presented the ongoing Iranian attempts to establish its military presence in Syria and to transfer strategic weapons to the Hezbollah terror organization."

Moscow has played a delicate diplomatic game of maintaining friendly ties with both Israel and Iran. In July, Moscow struck a deal with Tehran to keep its fighters 85 kilometers (53 miles) from the Golan Heights to accommodate Israeli security concerns.

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Associated Press writers Nataliya Vasilyeva in Moscow and Josef Federman in Jerusalem contributed to this report.
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The Latest on Europe's response to the influx of migrants (all times local):

5:40 p.m.

Cyprus police say 65 people  including 24 children and 18 women  believed to be Syrian migrants are receiving medical check-ups after arriving aboard a boat spotted southeast of the east Mediterranean island nation.

Police said their vessel is believed to have set sail from Lebanon and was escorted by patrol boats into a harbor along Cyprus' eastern coast Thursday.

The boat's arrival coincided with an appeal for help with coping with migrants that Cypriot President Nicos Anastasiades issued to other European Union leaders during a summit in Austria on Thursday. Anastasiades said EU leaders showed understanding and that he expects "tangible" assistance.

Anastasiades earlier told leaders that Cyprus with a population of just over a million has reached its limits in absorbing more migrants amid a surge in asylum applications.

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1:50 p.m.

The European Union and Serbia have agreed that the bloc's border agency teams will work with Serbian police to help secure the Balkan country's borders against migrants.

Serbia lies at the heart of the so-called Balkan route for migrants trying to reach wealthy EU nations while fleeing war and poverty in their home countries.

The EU Commissioner for migration Dimitris Avramopoulos and Serbia's Interior Minister Nebojsa Stefanovic signed an agreement on Thursday for officials from the EU's Frontex border agency to work with Serbian police. The deal still needs ratification in Serbia's parliament before formally taking effect.

Hundreds of thousands of people passed through the Balkans toward the EU in 2015.

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9:30 a.m.

Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz is urging the European Union to enter talks with Egypt to help stem the flow of migrants entering Europe from Africa.

Kurz said Thursday that "Egypt has proven that it can be efficient" in stopping people leaving its coast for Europe in search of better and safer lives.

Austria currently holds the EU's rotating presidency, and Kurz and EU Council President Donald Tusk recently visited Cairo for talks with President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi.

Tusk said Tuesday that no migrants are leaving Egypt at the moment.

Kurz said that "Egypt is now prepared possibly to deepen cooperation with us in talks. We should use that."
The suspect in last year's deadly London Bridge attack was apparently motivated by a hatred of President Donald Trump and British Prime Minister Theresa May, reports said.

Khalid Masood, 52, had called May a liar and complained about Trumps racism and rudeness, according to his childrens testimony to British authorities, according to The Telegraph.

The deadly rampage on March 22, 2017 began when an SUV plowed into pedestrians on the Westminster Bridge in London. Four pedestrians were killed and an unarmed police officer was fatally stabbed in the incident. Masood was fatally shot by police. Dozens were left injured in the attack. An investigation indicated the Masood had acted alone.

Masood, an English school teacher, had sent religious text messages to several friends before the alleged attack, cops said.

The March 2017 attack was the first in a series of extremist attacks on British soil in 2017, during which dozens were killed. It was followed by the May bombing of a concert hall in Manchester, a June attack on London Bridge and Borough Market and an attack on a mosque in Finsbury Park in the same month.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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A sacred volcano at the heart of North Korea's founding mythology. The ruling party's headquarters, said to be a potential target of South Korean and U.S. military attacks. An art studio that produces giant propaganda statues. And a 150,000-seat stadium in Pyongyang where the country's unique mass games are performed.

The places South Korean President Moon Jae-in has been during his three-day visit to North Korea are glimpses into the country and how it sees itself.

A look at what Moon has seen:

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MOUNT PAEKTU

Moon and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un visited the picturesque and active volcano on the North Korean-Chinese border on Thursday and took a cable car to the crater lake called "Chonji" where they strolled together.

North Korean documents say national founder Kim Il Sung, the current leader's grandfather, had an anti-Japan guerrilla base on the slopes of Paektu during Tokyo's colonial rule. The official biography of Kim Jong Il says the second-generation leader was born on Paektu when a double rainbow filled the skies. The North's state media has described Kim Jong Un visiting the mountain days before significant events such as the execution of his powerful uncle in 2013 and his New Year's Day speech this year in which he suggested both Koreas cooperate during the Winter Olympics that were held in February.

Moon's Paektu trip was arranged at Kim's suggestion. During their April summit, Moon told Kim that a Paektu trek was one of his unrealized wishes.

Paektu is the highest peak on the Korean Peninsula, and climbing the mountain from its Chinese side is popular among South Korean tourists.

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THE WORKERS' PARTY HEADQUARTERS

Moon and Kim held the first of their summit talks Tuesday at the Pyongyang headquarters of the ruling Workers' Party. It's where Kim's office is located and South Korean media dub it "the heart of North Korea." Kim rules North Korea in his capacity as the party's chairman, one of his many official titles such as supreme commander of the North's 1.2-million-strong People's Army.

South Korean and U.S. militaries have designated the headquarters among their targets to attack in the event of war on the Korean Peninsula, according to South Korean media.

Moon is the first South Korean leader to hold an inter-Korean summit at the building. The leaders who went to Pyongyang for summits in 2000 and 2007 met with Kim's father at the Paekhwawon guesthouse where they stayed.

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MANSUDAE ART STUDIO

Thousands of government artists work in the huge studio complex to produce everything from propaganda-themed paintings, huge, bronze statues and mosaics to watercolor tigers. The studio is on the U.N. sanctions blacklist and subject to an asset freeze and travel ban because it sends artists and other workers to do projects abroad to generate revenue for the Kim government. African countries are Mansudae's main overseas market for its socialist-style monuments and statues.

During his visit Wednesday to the studio, Moon looked at paintings on Paektu, an ancient Pyongyang pavilion and the scenic Diamond Mountain where the Koreas once ran a joint tourism project.

He also looked at paintings of Pungsan dogs, the same breed as Moon's pet, Maru, who lives at the presidential palace in Seoul.

In a guestbook, Moon wrote, "I wish that art would become a bridge connecting South and North Korea as one."

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MAY DAY STADIUM

On Wednesday evening, the two leaders went to the 150,000-seat May Day Stadium to watch a "Glorious Country" mass performance.

The performers moved in unison to display handshakes between Kim and Moon and an undivided Korean Peninsula.

Moon delivered an emotionally charged speech to the crowd, saying that "We lived together for 5,000 years and lived in separation for 70 years. I now propose that we completely eliminate the hostility of the past 70 years and take a big step forward in peace so that we can become one again."

It was the first public speech a South Korean president made in North Korea since the end of the 1950-53 Korean War.

The mass games embody socialist ideals, and North Korea revived them for its 70th birthday last month after a five-year hiatus.

In 2000, Kim's father took visiting U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright to a mass performance. The show included a giant mosaic displaying a flying rocket, and Albright later said she was spellbound by the precision of the performance but felt uncomfortable with its glorification of the North Korean government. Kim reportedly told Albright at the time, "This will be our last missile."
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A farm tractor with a crane lifts up half a dozen people holding Catalan independence flags in northeast Spain, trying to get high enough so they can peek into a prison courtyard and see their separatist heroes.

The distance makes it hard to recognize the faces of the Catalan activists and politicians jailed in the Lledoners penitentiary while they await trial for their involvement in a banned independence referendum last year in Catalonia. But inmates and supporters make a quick connection.

Shouts of "Freedom!" and "We want you home!" from outside are met with "We want to be out!" coming from the prison. And joy erupts when the unofficial Catalan flag embraced by secessionists, the "estelada," appears through the bars of a cell window.

"I'm convinced that the energy we send them from here helps them," said Quima Albalate a 58-year-old nurse who joins her son for twice-a-week picnics of solidarity in these quiet hills of rural Catalonia.

Jailed Catalan separatists, together with those who fled abroad to avoid prosecution by Spain, have become an emotional symbol of what many perceive as Spain's heavy-handed attempt to crush the independence movement in Catalonia. They are also a key stumbling block in negotiations trying to find a way out of the political deadlock, Spain's worst constitutional crisis in decades.

Their absence casts a shadow over Thursday's commemorations of the first year since Spanish police began searching regional government buildings in Barcelona and arresting Catalan officials.

Nine of the separatists remain in preventive jail on preliminary charges of rebellion and abuse of power. Seven are in Lledoners, including prominent activists Jordi Sanchez and Jordi Cuixart, who drew tens of thousands to the streets one year ago to protest police searches ahead of Catalonia's banned Oct. 1, 2017 referendum on independence. Former regional ministers Oriol Junqueras and Jordi Turull are also here.

The latter's wife, Blanca Bragulat, stood this week outside the prison's walled perimeter and put her husband on speakerphone for supporters.

"We're OK, we are strong," Turull said, replying to questions by friends and relatives who applauded when they heard his voice.

Holding Catalan independence flags and wearing yellow t-shirts and ribbons  ubiquitous symbols of support for those they consider to be political prisoners  these families have been setting up the picnic tables twice a week ever since the inmates were transferred from prisons near Madrid to this facility 70 kilometers (43 miles) north of Barcelona.

The transfers were ordered by Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez soon after he came to power in June to ease the political conflict. But regional separatist authorities in Catalonia want more and are urging state prosecutors to change their position and allow the release of the prisoners.

The central government, which appoints the top prosecutor, is sticking to the line that the separatists are receiving due process according to Spanish law. But some officials have acknowledged that dialogue would be easier with the Catalans out of jail.

Foreign Minister Josep Borrell, a politician from Catalonia who presided over the European Parliament, recently said "at a personal level" he would have preferred for the separatists to be free while awaiting trial. That comment was mirrored by Territorial Affairs Minister Meritxell Batet, another Catalan in Sanchez's cabinet, who said "it would be better and much easier for the dialogue" if the Catalans were free.

For separatist parties in the prosperous region, however, the prisoners keep pro-independence supporters united, says political analyst Pablo Simon.

"For a highly fragmented Catalan movement that scrambles to find the next step in the fight for independence, the prisoners' plight is their only source of cohesion currently. But the politicians are in the hands of activists who think that with jailed separatists there can't be any compromise with central authorities," said the Carlos III University professor. "There's very little room to maneuver."

Meanwhile, divisions over the issue of independence are still running high in the streets of Catalonia. Some people have objected to using public spaces to hang symbols in support of the prisoners.

For separatists  but also for some of those who don't support a separate Catalonia  the jailing of the officials without even setting a date for a trial feels like a deep injustice.

"We need the higher courts to look at us here and see that these people defended political ideas," said Albalate, the nurse. "But that's not a reason for them to be in jail."

Bragulat said she hoped "the European Community at some point will say something."

But even Europe seems unmoved by the Catalan separatists' plight.

Council of Europe Secretary General Thorbjorn Jagland told reporters this month that he "had no doubt Spanish courts were treating the matter in accordance with Spanish law and the European Human Rights convention." He said the separatists could appeal their case in the European human rights court but only after they had gone through courts in Spain.

That's a bleak prospect for supporters and relatives like Bragulat, who told The Associated Press she has "gotten used to living day by day" in order to cope with her husband's absence.

"We don't know how long all of this will last," she said. "But it will end well, right?"

__

Parra reported from Madrid.
A pair of Russian nuclear-capable bombers buzzed the British coastline along the North Sea on Thursday while ignoring repeated radio calls, according to the U.K.s ministry of defense.

Royal Air Force (RAF) Typhoon fighter jets on alert launched from a base in Scotland to intercept the bombers.

The Russian Blackjacks... were not talking to air traffic control, making them a hazard to all other aviation, said a statement from the British military.

Russian bombers probing U.K. airspace is another reminder of the very serious military challenge that Russia poses us today, said British Defense Secretary Gavin Williamson.

We will not hesitate to continually defend our skies from acts of aggression. Once again the rapid reactions of our RAF have demonstrated how vital our Armed Forces are in protecting Britain, he added.

The Russian Tu-160 supersonic long-range bombers never entered British airspace. The Royal Air Force launched fighter jets because the Russian aircraft were ignoring air traffic controllers, the statement said.

The bombers approached the United Kingdom off the coast of Newcastle in international airspace according to a radar image from airlive.net, which said one French jet and its supporting tanker plane joined their NATO allies in the intercept.

Its at least the third time this month NATO aircraft have scrambled to intercept a formation of Russian long-range bombers. Two incidents took place off the United States on September 1 and again on September 11.

On the 11th, a pair of Cold War-era Tu-95 Bear bombers, also nuclear-capable, flew near Alaska. The Russian bombers were escorted by Su-35 Flanker fighter jets, a rare move by Moscow sending bombers under fighter escort. It was not clear if the Russian aircraft were armed.

At a Pentagon news conference this week, the head of NORAD (North American Aerospace Defense Command) said the Russians were sending a message to the United States by flying on 9/11, a sacred day in American history.

I think anytime that we see these kinds of events there is a strategic message as part of that and that's part of the broader geo-political situation that we find ourselves in these days, said Gen. Terrence J. OShaughnessy.

Asked if the flight of Russian bombers off the United States on September 11 angered him, OShaughnessy dodged the question.

We're prepared to respond and we responded appropriately, he replied.

The Russians have flown bombers off Alaska three times this year, according to a NORAD spokesman.
Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warned Thursday that negotiations between the two Koreas won't be successful unless there is simultaneous success in U.S.-North Korean negotiations to denuclearize the Korean Peninsula.

The U.N. chief told a news conference that the results of this week's summit between South Korean President Moon Jae-in and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un "were positive," but progress is also essential between Washington and Pyongyang.

"It is clear for me that there will not be success in inter-Korean negotiations if simultaneously there is not success in the American-North Korea ... negotiations to achieve the full and verifiable denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula in the context of regional security," Guterres said.

While the leaders of the two Koreas have been building ties, diplomacy between the U.S. and North Korea had gotten nowhere since the historic June summit between President Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un.

Nonetheless, although Kim didn't commit to give up his arsenal of nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles that pose a threat to the U.S. mainland during this week's summit, he did make an offer that has kick-started new diplomatic efforts between the U.S. and North Korea.

Kim promised to dismantle North Korea's main rocket launch site in the presence of international experts, and offered to shutter its Nyongbyon nuclear site. That's where the North has a plutonium reactor and a uranium enrichment facility that can produce fissile material for atomic bombs.

The North Korean leader stressed, however, that the U.S. needs to take unspecified "corresponding steps"  possibly declaring a formal end to the 1950-53 Korean War, which ended without a peace treaty, or easing up on sanctions that are hurting its struggling economy  which could pose difficulties for the Trump administration.

Guterres noted that U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is ready to start negotiations again with North Korea, and said he is "impressed" by the "courage" and "determination" of Trump and Kim Jong Un.

"I hope that it will produce the result we all want" on denuclearizing the Korean peninsula, he said.

Guterres said the United Nations will be "at the disposal" of the United States and North Korea if they consider that the International Atomic Energy Agency can play a role, or the U.N. can help in any other way.

"We are not creating a parallel track," he stressed. "I think that when you have too many parallel tracks you just complicate things. I think now all the effort must be to support those that are in the middle of negotiations to be successful in their efforts."

Guterres spoke to reporters ahead of next week's annual gathering of world leaders at the U.N. General Assembly and said he would receive North Korea's Foreign Minister Ri Yong-ho, just as he did last year.

Asked whether there was a possibility that Kim Jong Un might show up he shrugged his shoulders and said later: "I have no indication whatsoever of any change in the Korean delegation."
The Gamasutra Job Board is the most diverse, active and established board of its kind for the video game industry!



Here is just one of the many, many positions being advertised right now.

Location: Culver City, California

Heart Machine is a small, deeply motivated and close-knit team located in Los Angeles. Our focus is gameplay thats engaging, fluid and fun, while also building atmosphere through lush art and sound design. Were immensely excited to be creating things we love every day.

Our next project is ramping up production, using Unreal 4 in a fully 3d gameplay experience. Were looking for talented, passionate, smart and good people to become part of our crew, to help build and shape something ambitious and completely unique from the ground up.

Your role - Gameplay Engineer:

As a critical anchor for the project, youll be crafting code for character interactions, NPC interactions, scripted sequences, combat, environmental interactions and much more. Help us build something satisfying and fluid while overcoming new and exciting challenges in gameplay.

Your responsibilities + attributes:

Ability to express and rapidly prototype gameplay ideas.

Capable of giving and receiving constructive feedback on designs. Strong communication skills are vital, as were incredibly open and straightforward when it comes to our internal conversations about gameplay.

Ability to creatively overcome complex gameplay and systems problems with innovative solutions.

Ability to break down tasks with accurate time estimates, from high-level components to smaller tasks.

Capable of working independently, keeping on-task and motivated.

Excited and able to work with a small, nimble team and participate in major decisions.

Flexible with any additional responsibilities; small teams require each member to have a willingness to expand their role and take on other tasks.

Skills + Experience:

Extensive knowledge of C/C++ programming languages.

Visual Studio experience.

Proficient in Unreal 4, including ample familiarity with the Blueprint system.

Excellent 3d math skills.

Familiarity with Maya is a plus.

Working with us:

Since were a smaller team we each have several roles we fulfill, so a broad and deep knowledge of game design is a huge advantage. Youll be working and communicating with many other multi-disciplined team members in order to bring this vision to life.

Although we work incredibly hard, our studio is not a crunch-factory - we like to live our lives, have holidays, and remain healthy throughout a project. We like to hang out with other devs, host events, have board game nights and go to museums.

All full-time employees will be offered a robust medical package, including dental. Salary and bonus structure can be discussed upon interview. Ideally, youre located in Los Angeles, or willing to relocate.

Interested? Apply now.

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AbleGamers Invests in its Need to Quantify and Further Explore the Mental Health Aspects of its Mission in Order to Further Programmatic Innovation and Integration
For A Good Cause: Ways you can help others
kacylee at 20-09-2018 08:38 PM (3 years ago) (f)

A 25 year old woman, Safiya Idris has been caught by the Niger state Police for kidnapping a three year old child of her neighbor for N5, 000.

A 25 year old woman, Safiya Idris has been caught by the Niger state Police for kidnapping a three year old child of her neighbor for N5, 000.

The mother of four who is working for a handful was convinced to kidnap the child in order for her to get money to start a business.



The Suspect was given N5,000 as her transportation to cross the child from Pandogari in Rafi Local Government Area of Niger state to Kastina state.



The suspected kidnapper was arrested by the police detectives attached to Kagara Division before she could take the child across to Kastina state.





When paraded by the Police, Safiya blamed her father for making her go into kidnapping adding that the inability of the father to train her properly led her into the crime world.

My father did not consider it necessary to train me to be responsible, otherwise why should I involve myself in this wicked act. Why should I even kidnap my neighbors child who always play with my own children, it is unfortunate.



I do not think that Allah and my neighbours will forgive me for what I did to this little girl, in fact, I do not deserve to be alive to face all this shame.



The Commands Public Relations Officer, Muhammad Abubakar said that the suspect confessed that some kidnappers gave her N5 000 to kidnap the child and bring it to them in Kastina.



He said that the victim had been released to her parents adding that the police are on the trail of the other fleeing members of the gang. The mother of four who is working for a handful was convinced to kidnap the child in order for her to get money to start a business.The Suspect was given N5,000 as her transportation to cross the child from Pandogari in Rafi Local Government Area of Niger state to Kastina state.The suspected kidnapper was arrested by the police detectives attached to Kagara Division before she could take the child across to Kastina state.When paraded by the Police, Safiya blamed her father for making her go into kidnapping adding that the inability of the father to train her properly led her into the crime world.The Commands Public Relations Officer, Muhammad Abubakar said that the suspect confessed that some kidnappers gave her N5 000 to kidnap the child and bring it to them in Kastina.He said that the victim had been released to her parents adding that the police are on the trail of the other fleeing members of the gang.

Post Reply I have been reporting for several years now and I am very interested in visual news reportage with strong inclusion of photos and video multimedia. Posted: at 20-09-2018 08:38 PM (3 years ago) | Addicted Hero
Joe Donnelly greets a right-wing rapist Trump wants confirmed



Thus cycle, I have very mixed emotions when it comes to writing about conservative Democrats. I am fully aware about what kind of damage they do to progressivism by relentlessly pulling the Democratic Party towards the right and usually reject less-of-two-evils politics-- the #1 organizing principle of the 21st century Democratic Party. But, this cycle... Trump. If you believe, as I do, that he really is an existential threat to our democracy, our families, our country you've got to be thinking about how to defend against him. One way-- the easiest way-- is through the ballot box. Electing even the worst Democrats-- Blue Dogs and New Dems, the whole corrupt Democrap garbage that makes up the massive and growing Republican wing of the Democratic Party-- is something that has to be seriously considered to stop Trump. Or does someone have a viable post-primary alternative?





Normally I wouldn't be cheering, for example, Tim Kaine's massive lead over neo-fascist Republican Corey Stewart in the Virginia Senate race, nor the fact that Republican Winsome Sears, an ex-Delegate just jumped into the race as a write-in candidate to give more mainstream Republicans an alternative to Stewart. Obviously. Blue America isn't about to add Tim Kaine to our 2018 Senate contributions page , but... I'm glad Kaine's going to win this one without breaking a sweat... and that Trump will probably be spending/wasting time campaigning in Virginia and turning out more Democratic voters there.





And I find myself hoping that Andrew Gillum has strong enough coattails in Florida-- where his gubernatorial campaign against neo-fascist Ron DeSantis is surging-- to pull elderly, bumbling conservative dullard Bill Nelson, who should have retired, over the finish line. Gillum has been leading DeSantis in every poll and in even poll by more than the last one. The new Reuters/Ipsos poll released yesterday shows Gillum leading DeSantis by 6 points (outside of the margin of error), while Nelson lags by one point.













All that leads to the Indiana situation. The Republican, Mike Braun, is a hopeless Trumpist. The Democrat, Joe Donnelly, is not exactly my cup of tea. He's an accidental senator who succeeded with a Hail Mary pass is 2012 when he was going to lose his House seat and decided to make a long-shot run for the Senate instead. Because of events that had virtually nothing to do with him-- the Indiana GOP imploded-- it worked and a House Blue Dog came over and became one of the Senate's most conservative Democrats, not as bad as Heidi Heitkamp or Joe Manchin... but almost. On the other hand, the Democrats can't afford to lose him if they're going to take back control of the Senate in November. The Associated Press did a report on the state of the race in Indiana yesterday, GOP frets about prospects for picking up Indiana Senate seat . It should be relatively easy-- Pence's home state, PVI of R+9 (same as Mississippi and Missouri), Trump beat Hillary 57-38%. But... Donnelly has been out-working Braun and is hardly rolling over and playing dead.

Groups that typically back GOP candidates, such as the Indiana Chamber of Commerce, are sitting on the sidelines. Brauns recent three-stop solutions tour-- spread out across three days-- was ridiculed by Democrats, who pointed to Donnellys seven-day, 40-stop trek in August.



And while Braun, a multimillionaire businessman, took out $6.4 million in loans to fund his primary campaign, he also publicly groused about the cost. Now, with less than two months until the election, he has yet to purchase air time for October, while Donnelly has outspent him by almost double on TV and radio since June, records show.



Thats cause for concern, according to a half-dozen GOP officials, operatives and commentators familiar with the race, most of whom spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity to offer candid assessments of the contest. They say Braun appears to be coasting at a time when he ought to be investing more of his own money and rallying the base.



Conservative talk radio host Rob Kendall summed up the GOPs worries by pointing to Brauns recent appearance with President Donald Trump at a rally in Evansville.



Hes in front of (thousands of) people at the Ford Center and it sounds like youre at a funeral, said Kendall, who is a producer and has a show on Indianapolis-based WIBC radio. I would have been like James Brown and the Blues Brothers shouting out Do You See the Light to the congregation. And this guy, you have to check him for a pulse.



Republicans have viewed Donnellys seat as a prime pickup opportunity in a state Trump won by nearly 20 points in 2016. The criticism of Brauns performance reflects a sudden sense among the GOP that Senate contests in several states Trump carried may be tougher than expected and that control of the Republican-led chamber could be at stake-- a prospect that was unthinkable just a few weeks ago.



...While commuting back-and-forth between Indiana and Washington, Donnelly has held more than 190 campaign events since May-- more than double the number attended by Braun, who resigned from his seat in the Indiana Legislature to focus on campaigning.



Bob Grand, a GOP fundraiser and Indiana powerbroker, said Donnelly has done a phenomenal job campaigning, but doubted it will be enough to win in an overwhelmingly Republican state.



Hes even featuring Donald Trump in his ads. What does that tell you? Grand said.



Still, groups that have enthusiastically supported GOP nominees in the past are uncharacteristically absent.



In addition to the Indiana Chamber of Commerce, which opted against issuing an endorsement, the U.S. Chamber was mum over whether it will get involved. In 2016, the group spent at least $3.7 million backing GOP Sen. Todd Young in his race against Democrat Evan Bayh, a popular former Indiana governor and senator who previously worked for them.



Americans for Prosperity, the political arm of billionaire industrialists Charles and David Koch, interviewed Braun but decided not to directly support him. Two years ago, they launched a door-knocking and phone-bank operation that helped Young win.



On paper, Braun has everything the GOP wants: He built a national auto parts distribution company from the ground up, speaks with a subtle southern Indiana twang and is a virtual outsider to politics, despite his brief stint in the Legislature.



He also has the ability to self-fund.



During the GOP primary, Braun used his wealth, worth somewhere between $37 million and $95 million, to bury U.S. Reps. Todd Rokita and Luke Messer with more than $6.2 million worth of radio and TV spots, Federal Election Commission records show.



But Braun-- whose wife once described him to the Indianapolis Star as the tightest guy I know-- said after his May 8 victory that he wasnt looking to do the same in the general election.



With November looming, his campaign only started to ramp up spending on TV ads this week. Meanwhile, Democratic groups and super PACs are set to spend $22 million, much of it ruthlessly attacking Brauns business record.



Theyve seized on stories by the AP that revealed his companies racked up safety violations and were sued by employees for unfair treatment, including a worker kicked off health insurance days after he suffered a heart attack.



Democrats also labeled Braun a hypocrite for attacking Donnellys family business for outsourcing jobs to Mexico while using Chinese goods for his own brand of auto accessories.

This looks very optimistic. I wonder how Donnelly will vote on Kavanaugh, don't you?
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.
Randy Boyd, a Knoxville businessman, philanthropist and former Republican candidate for governor, has been tapped to lead the University of Tennessee following the retirement of the college systems outgoing president.The UT Board of Trustees will meet next week to consider hiring Boyd as interim president. The plan, proposed Wednesday morning by the board chair and touted as a "win" by the governor, calls for Boyd to serve for one or two years.Boyd's work could pave the way for major changes to the college system that includes the states flagship campus in Knoxville as well as institutions in Memphis, Chattanooga and Martin.
The Ohio Department of Medicaid on Tuesday released a heavily redacted report analyzing the costly practices of pharmacy middlemen in the $24 billion tax-funded Medicaid program.The move comes as a Franklin County judge continues to mull over whether to order disclosure of the full, or unredacted, analysis of drug pricing, pharmaceutical rebates and other cost data.Common Pleas Judge Jenifer Frenchs decision is at least three months away after she agreed to move a hearing on the matter scheduled for this week to Dec. 18.In the meantime, French said parts of the 51-page report that are not in dispute could be released to the public.French last month granted a temporary restraining order to block release of the full report at the request of CVS Caremark ard OptumRx  pharmacy benefit managers for Medicaid's five managed care plans  who said it contained "trade secrets" that would hurt their businesses if disclosed. They have asked French to grant an injunction permanently blocking release of the full report.
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Washington state

By the time New Yorks primary election arrived earlier this month, Julia Salazar was drowning in controversy.The 27-year-old Democratic state Senate candidate had drawn intense criticism over how she described her personal background -- calling herself an immigrant despite being born in Florida and suggesting she grew up working-class while her brother maintained their family was middle-class. The candidate faced questions about her political and religious conversions from conservatism to leftism and Christianity to Judaism. There were also bizarre revelations about an alleged affair with a former New York Mets player, which both parties have denied.Yet when the votes were tallied on Sept. 13, none of this seemed to matter. Salazar trounced incumbent state Sen. Martin Dilan by a whopping 18 points , buoyed by her populist left-wing platform and a robust organizing operation built primarily by one increasingly influential political organization.I want to thank the Democratic Socialists of America, she said in her victory speech, prompting chants of D-S-A! D-S-A! from the crowd.Its been a remarkable two years for the DSA -- a once-marginal group whose national membership swelled from roughly 5,000 to 35,000 following the 2016 presidential campaign of Democratic Socialist U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders. The organization gave Salazar a national endorsement , and her success was a bright spot on a night when two candidates backed by the groups New York City chapter -- gubernatorial hopeful Cynthia Nixon and would-be lieutenant governor Jumaane Williams -- lost their races.Sanders and DSA-backed Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a New York Democratic congressional nominee, are shaking up politics at the federal level with calls for Medicare for All, a $15 minimum wage and dramatically reining in the power of corporations. This years primaries also demonstrated that their movement to shift American politics leftward is making inroads at the state and local level.DSA chapters endorsed 93 state and local candidates in 2018, according to the national group. Of those, 43 lost their primaries, but 50 are advancing to the general election after either winning or facing no competition in the primary season. They could win seats for school boards, city councils and legislatures in 20 states. (Of the 25 state and local candidates who also earned DSAs national endorsement, eight lost their primaries.)We're very excited about what's happening, says Allie Cohn, who serves on DSA's National Political Committee. I think its been an amazing election cycle.  You lose some battles, but it's very obvious that we're winning the ideological war.DSA first turned heads with its electoral gains last November, when 15 of the groups candidates won their races nationwide. In a stunning upset, 30-year-old Marine veteran Lee Carter defeated one of Virginias most powerful Republicans to win a seat in the state's House of Delegates.This years campaigns received even more attention. In a June column titled  The Millennial Socialists Are Coming ,columnist Michelle Goldberg highlighted three young women -- Summer Lee, Sara Innamorato and Elizabeth Fiedler -- who won state legislative primaries in Pennsylvania with DSAs backing. Goldberg noted that these candidates won decisive primary victories over men heavily favored by the political establishment and described them as part of a grass-roots civic renewal that is happening across this country.Fiedler was previously a reporter at a local public radio station. A mother of two, she says shes running to address the inequality that exists in our public schools, and specifically the under-funding of schools primarily attended by people of color or immigrant communities. Like all DSA candidates, Fiedler consciously differentiates herself from traditional Democrats. She says, many of our politicians are bought and paid for by the fossil fuel industry and stresses, I do not take any money from big oil and big gas.Being a Democrat is not enough, she says. It was never enough, and it's certainly not enough right now. In this way, she sounds like a number of left-wing insurgents nationally, who insist that  any old blue just wont do  for their party in 2018. Its part of why a growing number of Democrats are embracing the term Democratic Socialist for the first time.Part of the draw for people like me using that term is that the term 'progressive' has been watered down, says Vaughn Stewart, a Democratic nominee for the Maryland House of Delegates. The term liberal was so demonized by the right that everyone in the Democratic Party abandoned it.  Calling yourself a Democratic Socialist inherently is a critique of capitalism.Stewart hopes to tackle the intersection of environmental justice and public health in the House of Delegates, moving Maryland as quickly as possible to 100 percent clean energy and expanding public transportation. In the meantime, hes under no illusions there will be a Democratic Socialist takeover of Annapolis anytime soon."Obviously I'm not going to be able to overthrow or become the speaker of the Maryland state house in a year, he says, but I want to spread the gospel.Stewart thinks the state and local level is the best place to spread that gospel.If the left wants to win, reverting to the laboratories of democracy idea and investing in state and local races is the future, he says. I think the media and the Democratic Party are always so obsessed with national elections. It's part of why we lost so many state and local offices during the Obama era.For all its growth, the DSA remains a relatively minor player in Democratic politics. The vast majority of party candidates arent aligned with the group or embracing the term Democratic Socialist. Yet this movement is having other discernible effects.In Florida, Sanders-backed Tallahassee Mayor Andrew Gillum won a surprise victory to become the Democratic nominee for governor. While Gillum wouldn't call himself a Democratic Socialist, he campaigned on key Democratic Socialist priorities, including Medicare for All, legalizing marijuana and abolishing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement -- and hes currently ahead in the polls In New York, Cynthia Nixon, the former Sex and the City actress who ran as a Democratic Socialist against Gov. Andrew Cuomo, spoke in her concession speech about what people had called the Cynthia effect. Her candidacy over the course of the past six months appeared to prompt the governor to shift his policy views left on a whole host of issues.Before even a single vote was cast in this election, Nixon said, we had already won. We have fundamentally changed the political landscape in this state, and we have changed what is expected of a Democratic candidate running in New York."
A Republican activist who donated more than $20,000 to Ron DeSantis and lined up a speech for him at President Trumps Mar-a-Lago club called President Obama a F---- MUSLIM N---- on Twitter recently, in addition to other inflammatory remarks.Steven M. Alembik told POLITICO Wednesday he wrote the Obama tweet in anger, that hes absolutely not a racist and that he understood that DeSantiss campaign for governor would need to distance himself from the comments  which the campaign promptly did.Weve said it before, well say it again: we adamantly denounce this sort of disgusting rhetoric, DeSantis campaign spokesman Stephen Lawson said in a written statement.The controversy comes after DeSantis sent his campaign into a tailspin the day after the Aug. 28 primary by using the awkward phrase monkey this up in describing how the economy could falter under the plans of his opponent, Andrew Gillum, the Florida Democratic Partys first African-American nominee for governor.
This cycle, Democrats have grown used to winning special elections deep in red territory, as big anti-Trump Democratic turn-out surged to overwhelm demoralized and disgusted Republicans. The opposite happened in Texas last night, where a little known right-wing Republican, Pete Flores, beat an all too well-known right-wing Democrat, Pete Gallego, in a very important special election for a state Senate seat-- a seat that will now give the GOP a super-majority in the state Senate.





Pete Gallego is a corrupt Blue Dog, the kind the DCCC and Nancy Pelosi play footsie with and are re-stocking the Democratic House caucus with this cycle. Ex-Congressman Gallego is the same kind of piece of crap like current DCCC candidates Jeff Van Drew (NJ), Max Rose (NY), Kathy Manning (NC), Anthony Brindisi (NY), Ron DiNicola (PA)... When will the DCCC ever learn to stop recruiting and supporting this garbage? Democratic voters do not want them. (To answer my own question: never, not while the crew that has controlled the DCCC since 2005 still runs the dysfunctional show over there.)





This was the first time in 139 years-- think of that... 1879. Rutherford B. Hayes (R) had just lost the popular vote to Samuel Tilden (D) but a "special" congressional commission awarded him 20 contested electoral votes. The Compromise of 1877-- in which the Democrats acquiesced to Hayes's election on the condition that he withdraw remaining troops protecting African-Americans from the KKK in the South-- brought about the end of Reconstruction. Yes... another one-term illegitimate president, except without help from the Kremlin, doing long-term irrepairable harm to our country. Yesterday was the first time in 139 years that the Democrats managed to lose the district-- a district with a PVI of D+12. How horrible does a Democratic candidate have to be to lose that blue of a seat in the middle of an anti-red wave cycle? Ask the DCCC. Gallego has been their boy for years. He's what they look for in every canddiate-- someone with no values, with an innate conservative lean, who will be happy to line his pockets and vote with the leadership, especially when they need someone to kill "business unfriendly" progressive legislation.





Gallego lost 53% to 47% , to a retired game warden, giving the Republicans a 3/5 super-majority in the state Senate. The two were competing for the seat of state Sen. Carlos Uresti (D) who was forced to retiree after being convicted of 11 felony charges. (People don't like corrupt politicians. Why is that so hard to grok?)

Christian Archer, Gallegos campaign strategist, said he was shocked by the results, adding that they werent able to generate as much excitement as the Republicans.



I dont have any regrets, but I have a lot of disappointment, Archer said.

No excitement generated? For a former congressman beloved of the DC establishment for his easy-going corruption and rot-gut conservatism? How is that possible? You mean Democratic voters don't want corrupt conservatives, even in wave election years? STAT! Someone tell Pelosi! Oh... too late.

It will provide a completely unexpected gift for Republicans for the next legislative session, said Mark Jones, a professor of political science at Rice University.



Jones said Flores victory all but assured a Republican supermajority next year, which would allow Senate Republicans to bring bills to the floor without any Democratic support.



Tonight, I doubt anyone other than Pete Flores is happier than Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, Jones said.



Indeed, Patrick was jubilant at Flores victory party at Don Pedros restaurant on San Antonios Southwest Side.



Tonight, you all just made history, Patrick told supporters. For the first time in history, we have 21 Republican senators. For the first time in history, we have a Hispanic Republican senator.



Patrick, who spent around $175,000 on Flores campaign, said the supermajority was secured Tuesday night.



This guy gives us a two-thirds majority, he said.



Late Tuesday, the Republican Party of Texas also touted Flores win.



Congratulations to Peter Flores on his stunning victory in SD 19 tonight-- a thrilling win for Peter Flores, the citizens of SD 19 and Republicans across Texas, Chairman James Dickey said in a statement.



More than 25,000 Texans voted in the early voting period and by mail before Tuesday. Some county election officials said theyve seen higher turnout in the runoff than the special election a few months ago.



Brandon Rottinghaus, a professor of political science at the University of Houston and author of Inside Texas Politics, credited Gallegos loss to complacency.

Warning to DC Dems: Texas Senate District 19 stretches from San Antonio's east side to far West Texas-- just like must-win TX-23, where Gina Jones is up against Republican incumbent Will Hurd. The 23rd district-- formerly "represented" by Gallego-- has a PVI of R+1. Hillary beat Trump there 49.8% to 46.4%. It's a 71% Latino district. The DCCC, Blue Dogs, New Dems and Texas party establishment originally ran Jay Hulings, who only managed to garner 15% of the vote and come in a distant 4th. That's the DCCC being in touch with Texas, the same exact way they're in touch with California, Pennsylvania, Iowa , Florida and everywhere else. Anyway, too bad Rick Trevino didn't win the runoff. We'd be breathing easy for TX-23 now if he had. But he only was able to raise $56,021. So far Gina Jones has spent $1,177,927 to Will Hurd's $2,019,314. This corporate money in elections thing seems to be working out poorly. Maybe it should be a Democratic priority... rather than PAYGO.
Three Alabama citizens are suing state Secretary of State John Merrill for blocking them on Twitter.The three registered voters claim in a complaint filed on their behalf Wednesday by the American Civil Liberties Union of Alabama that Merrill violated their First Amendment rights by blocking them from interacting with his official @JohnHMerrill account on the popular social media site.Brock Boone, an attorney with the ACLU of Alabama, described the move by Merrill as a "violation of the First Amendment" that amounts to a decision to "discriminate against" his own constituents."When a government official intentionally opens up a public conversation, that official can't block individuals from joining the conversation because of the views that are expressed" Brock Boone, an attorney with the ACLU of Alabama, told AL.com via email Tuesday.Merrill spoke with AL.com Wednesday morning about the lawsuit, which he called "a political hack job" and said he had not previously heard about."I hope what you'll do is what I've asked you to do in the past and that's to put my cellphone number in the paper: 334-328-2787. Because anyone in the state that wants to get in touch with me, can call me on my cellphone," he said."This is the bottom line: anyone who wants to get in touch with me in this state can do so, but they don't get to choose how they get in touch with me."The question of whether public officials have a right to block their constituents has emerged as a national issue in recent months. In May, the topic garnered national headlines when a federal judge ruled that President Donald Trump cannot block Twitter users. The ruling came in response to a July 2017 lawsuit filed by Columbia University's Knight First Amendment Institute and seven Americans who Trump had blocked on Twitter.The Montgomery Advertiser reported in June that Merrill addressed the topic of his blocking Twitter users following the federal court ruling regarding Trump's Twitter feed."I'm not unblocking anybody I've already blocked, because there's a reason those people were blocked. Anyone else that I feel needs to be blocked in the future will also be blocked," Merrill said at the time, according to the Advertiser.The three plaintiffs in the ACLU's new case before the U.S. District Court of Alabama's Middle District claim that Merrill violated their First Amendment rights when he blocked them on Twitter. Kimberly Fasking, a student at Samford University's Cumberland School of Law, says Merrill blocked her after she tweeted a question about crossover voting; Alabama resident Heather Melvin Boothe claims in the complaint she was "blocked for stating 'Good point! Ballot has major typo'"; and Alabama farmer and educator Herbert Hicks says he "was blocked after asking Merrill about a speaking engagement."According to the complaint, Merrill blocking the Twitter users "imposes an unconstitutional restriction on their participation in a designated public forum. It imposes an unconstitutional restriction on their right to access statements that Defendants are otherwise making available to the public at large. It imposes an unconstitutional restriction on their right to petition the government for redress of grievances."Merrill rejects that argument and blames the controversy on partisan politics."Its not worth the ACLU's time, it's a political hack job and they're trying to build support for the democratic nominee for secretary of state," he said Wednesday.Fasking said that she was "disappointed" by Merrill's decision to block her."It is upsetting to me that the Secretary of State, who primarily uses his Twitter account to disseminate information on issues related to his office, has also weaponized that account by blocking those with whom he disagrees politically," Fasking said in an ACLU statement. "It is not the Secretary of State's job to communicate only with those who agree with him, but with all of the people of the State of Alabama."Steven Gregory, an attorney for the plaintiffs, seconded those concerns."The First Amendment protects everyone's right to participate in political speech without regard to political viewpoint," Gregory said in the ACLU statement. "The Alabama Secretary of State should engage in protecting that right on his Twitter account, not suppressing it by blocking inoffensive content."
The Georgia Association of Educators, one of the state's largest education groups, has endorsed Stacey Abrams in the governor's race.The association, which has about 30,000 members, scheduled a news conference Wednesday with Abrams at a school in East Atlanta to announce the endorsement.The association said public education is at "a crossroads" in the state and "Georgia needs a true 'public education' governor to take the state where it belongs with regards to educating all of its children."Abrams, a Democrat, is battling Secretary of State Brian Kemp, a Republican, in the race to become governor. Kemp is scheduled Wednesday afternoon to announce his school safety plan at an event in Buckhead.
Jon Burge, the disgraced Chicago police commander and felon whose sordid legacy of torture and other misconduct exacted an agonizing price from the city, has died in Florida at age 70, according to police union officials and a Florida funeral home.Details about his death were scarce as the union and family members declined to speak with members of the news media, which spent years reporting on the numerous cases in which Burge was accused of torturing suspects in order to obtain confessions.Representatives of Zipperer Funeral Home in Ruskin, Fla., confirmed receiving Burge's body but declined to share any further information, citing the family's wishes. Burge, who had previously been treated for cancer, lived in nearby Apollo Beach."They (family members) let us know they're not doing anything in any newspapers," said Sarah Zipperer.Stories of the violence committed under Burge -- including beatings, electric shock, suffocation with typewriter covers and games of Russian roulette -- proved to have a long reach. Although most of Burge's alleged misconduct took place in the 1970s and '80s, his accusers played a fundamental role in former Gov. George Ryan's decision to vacate Illinois' death row in 2000 and declare a moratorium on capital punishment in the state.Lawsuits from Burge's victims, meanwhile, have cost taxpayers many millions in settlements and judgments, much of it paid out of city coffers in the past decade.Burge himself never was charged directly in any of the torture allegations, though he was fired from the Chicago Police Department in 1993. Years later, in 2010, he was convicted of lying to federal authorities about his conduct and sentenced to prison. He was released in 2014 and returned to his waterfront home south of Tampa.News of Burge's death began to surface publicly Wednesday at the trial of Officer Jason Van Dyke, charged with murder after he shot a Chicago teenager 16 times.The Rev. Jesse Jackson, who was in the courthouse to observe the trial, said Burge left a stain on the city."As a person, may his soul rest in peace," Jackson said. "As a policeman, he did a lot of harm to a lot of people and left on this city a mark. It stains us for a long time. His legacy, unfortunately, is tied in with forced confessions and wrongful convictions."Current police and city officials were silent on the passing of Burge, but police union officials, past and present, offered support.Dean Angelo, former head of the Fraternal Order of Police in Chicago, told reporters during a break in the Van Dyke trial that he had gotten word of Burge's death and "it came as kind of a shock." The police union posted condolences on social media along with a message asserting that the "full story" about Burge has never been told."Jon Burge put a lot of bad guys in prison that belonged ... in prison," Angelo said in the lobby of the Leighton Criminal Court Building. "People picked a career apart that was considered for a long time to be an honorable career and a very effective career. I don't know that Jon Burge got a fair shake based on the years and years of service that he gave the city. But we'll have to wait and see how that eventually plays out in history."Diverging assessments of Burge's legacy have been a lightning rod that further polarized the long-tense relationship between the mostly white Chicago Police Department and the black and brown communities it patrols. Burge's conduct and the subsequent department cover-ups are a seminal scandal in that history.By tolerating and supporting Burge's behavior for years, the department affirmed a police culture in which the mistreatment of black men was acceptable, critics say. That issue has never been more prominent than at the trial of Van Dyke, whose 2014 shooting of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald might have gone unexamined if a judge had not ordered the release of video showing that police had misrepresented the facts of how his killing took place.Among the first journalists to pay serious attention to the Burge allegations, former Chicago Reader reporter John Conroy, said Wednesday that Burge "couldn't have done what he did without supervisors looking the other way."Burge was a talented investigator whose worse instincts were allowed to run amok in a corrupt system, said Conroy, now senior investigator at the MacArthur Justice Center."What's overlooked in all of this is that Burge was ambitious and a leader of men, and if the first time he'd gone astray and beaten somebody up, if somebody had pulled him aside ... Jon Burge wouldn't have become the abhorrent figure he did," Conroy said. "It comes back to a lack of supervision."The widespread impact of the allegations against Burge included questions about the conduct of former Mayor Richard M. Daley, who was Cook County state's attorney in the 1980s when much of the alleged torture took place, and former State's Attorney Richard Devine, whose office opposed inmates' allegations of torture.A Vietnam War veteran, Burge joined the Police Department in 1970. He worked as a detective and in supervisory jobs at Calumet Area headquarters through the mid-1980s, but allegations of torture surfaced early. In 1973, Anthony Holmes alleged that he was electric-shocked and "bagged" after his arrest for murder, according to G. Flint Taylor, a civil rights lawyer who represented several Burge victims. Holmes, who was paroled after spending 33 years in prison, has maintained his innocence.Much of the scandal surrounding Burge grew out of brutal crimes. Andrew Wilson alleged he was tortured after his arrest -- with his brother Jackie Wilson -- for the murder of two Chicago police officers in 1982. Madison Hobley made similar allegations after he was charged in a 1987 arson that killed his wife, young child and five others. Hobley was sentenced to death row before being pardoned and freed by Ryan.In all, Burge and detectives under his command were alleged to have tortured and abused more than 100 suspects in the 1970s and '80s.Burge was suspended in 1991 and fired in 1993 by the Chicago Police Board for the torture of Andrew Wilson. Thirteen years later, special Cook County prosecutors found evidence of widespread abuse by Burge and detectives under his command but concluded that the statute of limitations on criminal charges had passed.In 2008 he was arrested in Florida after being indicted on charges of perjury and obstruction of justice for denying involvement in torture in his written answers in a 2003 lawsuit.In one example, Burge was asked to "state whether you have ever used methods, procedures or techniques involving any form of verbal or physical coercion of suspects while in detention or during interrogation, such as deprivation of sleep, quiet, food, drink, bathroom facilities, or contact with legal counsel and/or family members; the use of verbal and/or physical threats or intimidation, physical beatings, or hangings; the use of racial slurs or profanity; the use of physical restraints, such as handcuffs; the use of photographs or polygraph testing; and the use of physical objects to inflict pain, suffering or fear, such as firearms, telephone books, typewriter covers, radiators, or machines that deliver an electric shock."He answered: "... I have never used any techniques set forth above as a means of improper coercion of suspects while in detention or during interrogation."At his 2010 trial, a number of former convicts testified that Burge had used cattle prods on their genitals, suffocated them with plastic and beaten them with phone books.Burge testified in his defense, denying in court that he ever tortured suspects or condoned torture. He said he had never witnessed a cop abusing a suspect in his 30 years with the department. He was convicted and served time in a North Carolina prison.Despite costing the city tens of millions of dollars in legal expenses because of lawsuits related to the torture and abuse, Burge continued collecting a $4,000-a-month police pension. Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan filed suit to challenge the decision, but the Illinois Supreme Court ruled that she did not have standing to take up the matter.At last count, the city and Cook County have spent nearly $100 million combined on Burge-related settlements and legal fees.In 2013, Mayor Rahm Emanuel issued an unexpected public apology for the damage Burge did to the city, calling the era a "dark chapter" that needed to be put in the past. In 2015, a reparations settlement with some Burge victims mandated that Chicago Public Schools teach eighth-graders and high school sophomores about Burge's crimes. The curriculum went into effect in 2017.Burge's cases were most recently in the news when a Cook County judge in June ordered the release of Jackie Wilson after deciding that his confession in the 1982 murder of the two police officers had been physically coerced by detectives under Burge's command. It was Wilson's brother, Andrew Wilson, whose allegations of torture first drew attention to Burge in the late 1980s. Andrew Wilson died in prison in 2007.
On Wednesday, in the morning, at Government House, His Excellency the Honourable Paul de Jersey AC and Mrs Kaye de Jersey hosted an Investiture Ceremony for residents of Queensland who were recipients of awards under the Australian Honours and Awards System, announced in the 2018 Australia Day and 2018 Queens Birthday Honours Lists, and the Governor addressed guests.

In the afternoon, at Government House, His Excellency and Mrs de Jersey hosted a second Investiture Ceremony for residents of Queensland who were recipients of awards under the Australian Honours and Awards System, announced in the 2018 Australia Day and 2018 Queens Birthday Honours Lists, and the Governor addressed guests.
Description

GIS  20 September 2018: The Role of Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) in the industralisation process in Southern Africa was the focus today at the 24th Session of the Inter-Governmental Committee of Experts  United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA) which is currently being held at Le Meridien Hotel in Pointe aux Piments.

The Minister of Business, Enterprise and Cooperatives, Mr Soomilduth Bholah, the Director of the UNECA Southern Africa Regional Office, Mr Said Adejumobi , and the Director Policy, Planning and Resource Mobilisation, the Southern African Development Community (SADC) Secretariat, Mr Mubita Luwabelwa, as well as other eminent personalities were present at the event.

In his keynote address, Minister Bholah highlighted the need for a comprehensive programme for the consolidation of the SME sector in the African Continent adding that it will contribute to enhancing the competiveness of SMEs and improve the business. The programme, he emphasised, will serve as catalyst in the reinforcement of institutional support systems and the promotion of technology transfers as well as industrial innovations hence improving productivity. In a fast-paced world, Southern African countries have to harness ambitions and focus on strategies to experience a booming SME sector, he pointed out.

Minister Bholah underlined that according to the African Development Bank, SMEs are the engines that are most likely to drive economies and are the ultimate stepping stone to industrialisation. He underscored that SMEs have been positioned as major drivers for poverty alleviation and income generation with a contribution of some 60% of total employment worldwide. In Mauritius, he emphasised, SMEs have been identified as key channels for an inclusive and balanced economic growth thereby evolving as an important pillar of the economy.

Minister Bholah underscored that Government is determined to support the development of the SMEs through the implementation of appropriate policy decisions and strategies. He highlighted that the 10-year SME Master Plan, a game changer in the economic development scenario of Mauritius, has been put in place to bring a structural transformation of the SME sector. The setting up of the SME Mauritius Ltd, he observed, was also part of the major changes which have paved the way forward for the SME sector by providing a better system of governance and doing away with bureaucratic inefficiencies.

Government, he underpinned, is leaving no stone unturned to conclude regional and multilateral agreements with a view to further increase commerce on the international front. He further added that Mauritius together with African countries should gear up to address challenges faced by SMEs and pledge for a regional approach to SME support and development for the successful operation of the sector in the Southern Africa region. On this score, the Minister urged fruitful deliberations during the Ad-Hoc Expert Meeting with regard to necessary reforms aimed at better equipping SMEs so that they could participate fully in the process of industrialisation.

For his part, Mr Said Adejumobi underscored that there should be a convergence of interests and determination between the UNECA and SADC for a successful regional cooperation. Speaking of the role of UNECA, he pointed out that it is an agency which has been mandated to operate at regional and sub-regional levels in order to bring countries together and harness resources for a prosperous Africa.

Director Mubita Luwabelwa, on the other hand, spoke of institutional strengthening as the foundation for sustainable development of the SME sector in the Southern African regions. He emphasised that the attainment of sustainable developments goals will be possible only if a roadmap determining future course of action is prepared. He also underlined that the Meeting will serve as platform for sharing new information related to SMEs and reporting on the Southern African economic development.
Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (DOHMH) data sets on Rooftop Drinking Water Tank Inspections, Dog Licenses and MenuStat (an online database of nutrition and menu information from top national restaurant chains)

Department of Transportation (DOT) street furniture location information, including bus stop shelters, bike parking shelters, newsstands, and parking meters

A series of data tables from a relational database on Housing Development Projects Receiving City Financial Assistance (Local Law 44) from the Department of Housing Preservation & Development

2017 Intimate Partner Violence Related Snapshots at the NYC community board-level from the Mayors Office to End Domestic and Gender-Based Violence (ENDGBV) (formerly known as the Mayor's Office to Combat Domestic Violence (OCDV))

The NYCgov Poverty Measure from 2005-2016, published by the Mayors Office of Economic Opportunity

NYCs Chief Technology Officer Releases Guide for Civic Tech Challenges

Cincinnati Data and Analytics Office Partners with Police on Daily Online Stats Report

Code for America Brigades Collaborate on Hurricane Florence Response

New York City has released its annual open data report, including 600 new data sets from across 38 city agencies, the city announced in a press release.The Open Data for All Report 2018 is available online now, and in addition to the new data sets, the city also noted that this year pulls back the curtain on digital government to show how the city collects data, how data powers city operations, and how publishing that data publicly creates value in communities across the five boroughs.A brief list of the data sets that are new for this year is below, culled directly from New Yorks press release:Theres also a storytelling component to this report, which is something that is increasingly of concern as government data folks seek to spread awareness about their work and its value. This years report in NYC features a series of vignettes looking at how open data powers government efficiency within city agencies. It also promises that an additional 400 new data sets will be added to the open data plan soon.In other New York City news this week, the chief technology officer there released a how-to guide for creating civic tech challenges.Partnering with Cornell Tech, the city created and released NYCx Moonshot Launchpad , which is a free downloadable guide aimed at instructing readers about how to address challenges faced by the public sector via what it called moonshot challenges, noting that likely beneficiaries include city agencies, community groups, partners in the private sector and other stakeholders.This all stems from that jurisdictions own NYCx Moonshot Challenge, which invites participants from across the globe to partner with the city in the development and testing of solutions for pressing urban problems in ways that stand to improve community and quality of life. This guide comes after the city has twice successfully run its own challenge events, the city said in a press release.The NYCx Moonshot Launchpad was born from collaboration with New York City agencies, entrepreneurs and tech industry partners wanting to work together to solve urban challenges, Jeremy M. Goldberg, deputy CTO of NYCx and managing director of NYC Digital, said in a press release. The Launchpad is derived from the development of our first two challenges focused on Connectivity and Climate Action  from mapping the problem to defining an outcome. Now, this resource is available to any organization or government agency seeking to pursue their own Moonshot and serve the public realm.Daily online police statistics reports are somewhat of a rarity, even in this age of increasingly open municipal data. But Cincinnati recently partnered with the police department to get it done.Through the citys CincyInsights portal , residents there can browse crime statistics that are updated daily, using the functionality to search by neighborhood or by any number of other fields. Info on these reports, include the types, locations and the frequency of crimes. The platform also allows users to look backward at past statistics, to get a sense of the frequency of incidents over time.This functionality is yet another step in Cincinnatis robust and ongoing work with open data.As Hurricane Florence beset the Carolinas this week, a number of Code for America brigades across the country banded together to collaborate on Florenceresponse.org , which hosts an active crowdsourced shelter map as well as links to other useful resources.Other resources include information about the nearest public food and supply distribution points, links to FEMA, a donation button and more. Theres also a functionality for rumor control, which is always a challenge during natural disasters that warrant evacuating homes.
The Knight Foundation is stepping directly into the smart cities and transportation arena with the award of more than $5 million to five cities.The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation is awarding $5.25 million to Detroit; Long Beach and San Jose, Calif.; Miami; and Pittsburgh. The funding is to be used by each city to develop pilot projects designed to engage residents around self-driving car technologies.Details are still being worked out, but it's anticipated that the grant will be divided equally among all five cities, said Lilian Coral, director of National Strategy and Technology Innovation at the Knight Foundation.We envision projects driven by residents  where the design, planning and delivery, and execution of the project, moves beyond typical in-person town-hall meetings or resident surveys, Coral said.The cities have all expressed an interest in using human-centered design, design-thinking, and participatory planning processes that empower residents and enable cities to lead with resident ideas, she added.The pilots may harness community engagement by using crowdsourcing platforms like Nextdoor to learn about mobility barriers or where there may be opportunities for autonomous vehicle adoption that would improve the mobility of residents in the area, she said.In all of the projects there is an emphasis on outreach to underserved communities. In addition, they all aim to use these projects to develop multi-year conversations in their cities about the future societal impact of autonomous vehicles, Coral said.Leaders from the five pilot cities are expected to meet regularly to discuss their findings and generate insights and lessons for other communities trying to keep up with the increasing pace of testing and deployment of self-driving vehicles, according to a foundation press release.Pittsburgh has had a toehold in the autonomous vehicle testing landscape for several years. Uber began testing the technology in 2016  even though that testing has since been paused. Pittsburgh also hosted the 2018 Pennsylvania Automated Vehicle Summit.However, it could still be too soon to say what form the citys pilot project will take, said Timothy McNulty, director of communications for the Pittsburgh Mayors Office.There is not all that much we can say at this point, he said. It's related to smart city initiatives in the city, and specifically our Department of Mobility and Performance."Generally the grant is going to support community engagement and planning on AV initiatives, but the specifics aren't fully worked out yet, he added in an email. Certainly it will be informed by work in the AV space that the city is very involved in.Detroit will explore some of the first-mile-last-mile issues in the city and how to get residents to transit stops and employment centers.In Long Beach, the pilot project will also explore the issue of short-distance travel, looking at options like AVs, scooters, bikes and other modes.The Miami pilot will look into developing an on-demand driverless shuttle program as a replacement for a more conventional fixed-route bus.San Jose  often known as the capital of Silicon Valley  will examine how to better integrate autonomous vehicles into other forms of mobility, and connect destinations such as shopping areas or nightlife locations.The cities were selected, in part, because of their readiness and ability to look to residents for answers on issues affecting the community; but also because most of them are locations where the Knight Foundation has offices and has invested in the past.The Knight Foundation focuses its efforts in journalism, the arts, community development, technology and other areas. And autonomous vehicles have the opportunity to represent a significant shift in technology and how transportation may evolve in the coming decades.We know its an industry where investment levels exceed more than $80 billion and a great percentage of that amount has been transacted in the last two-three years, said Coral. We know the tsunami is coming. The question is how do we get ahead of it, so that we can try to influence its implementation to ensure that communities can truly benefit from the changes that come.
(TNS)  In the shadow of Silicon Valley, the hub of the worlds digital revolution, California officials still submit their records to the feds justifying billions in Medicaid spending the old-fashioned way: on paper.Stacks and stacks of it.Stuck with decades-old technology, the nations largest Medicaid program forces federal officials to sift through thousands of documents by hand rather than sending electronic files. Thats one of the critical findings in a Sept. 5 report from the federal governments chief watchdog citing inefficient and lax oversight of Medicaid nationwide.To illustrate, the U.S. Government Accountability Office published a photo showing piles of records submitted for one three-month period. One folder was placed upright to show the height of the heap.Its really amazing when you look at that picture, said Carolyn Yocom, a health care director at the GAO who focuses on Medicaid, the federal-state health insurance program for low-income people. For this type of reporting on expenditures, California really should be able to provide that electronically.California, with more than 13 million Medicaid enrollees, said its hamstrung because it uses 92 separate computer systems to run its Medicaid program  although it has plans underway to modernize its technology.Given system limitations and the magnitude of the supporting documentation, providing it electronically is currently not feasible, the California Department of Health Care Services said in a statement.The states Medicaid program, known as Medi-Cal, has struggled with technology for years. The state thought it had a solution in 2010 when it awarded a $1.7 billion contract to Xerox, which included $168 million for a new system. But after years of delay, the state scrapped the contract in 2016 and started from scratch, leaving the patchwork system in place a few more years.Nationwide, despite industry buzz about electronic medical records, smartphone apps and artificial intelligence, a lot of paper is still being pushed across the health care system. Consider all those forms patients repeatedly fill out in the waiting room, the screeching sound of fax machines inside doctors offices and the bulging binders of patients records in file rooms.Under Medicaid, states submit data quarterly to the federal government on their spending and include supporting documents such as invoices, cost reports and eligibility records. In California, reports on spending are shared electronically, but the copious supporting documentation required for federal review is not, according to the GAO.When the Xerox venture failed, the company agreed to pay California more than $123 million as part of a settlement agreement, according to state officials.Meantime, Conduent, the services unit of Xerox that was spun off into a separate company, was left to keep operating the system and process claims.Last month, the state awarded a contract to DXC Technology of Tysons, Va., to take over some operations from Conduent. The state said the contract could be worth $698 million over 10 years.Separately, Californias Medicaid officials are working on plans for a new system that would cost an estimated $500 million. Under the federal-state partnership on Medicaid, the federal government would cover 90 percent of those costs for design and implementation, and the states share would be about $50 million.Pressure has been mounting on California to fix the situation. The Medicaid IT system needs to be replaced, because it is more than 40 years old, its operations are inefficient, maintaining the system is difficult and there is a high risk of system failure, state auditor Elaine Howle wrote in a June 26 letter to Gov. Jerry Brown and legislative leaders.In her letter, Howle said the state was paying about $30 million annually to maintain the legacy system.Overall, Medi-Cal serves 1 in 3 Californians. The annual Medicaid budget in California is about $104 billion, counting federal and state funds.Beyond California, the GAO criticized the U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) more broadly. One complaint: Federal officials assign a similar number of staff to states for reviewing case files  even though some states, like California, pose a far bigger risk for enrollment errors and misspent money due to their size and complexity.For instance, the reports authors said, CMS reviewed claims for the same number of newly eligible Medicaid enrollees  30  in California as it did in Arkansas, even though California had 10 times the number of newly enrolled patients under the Affordable Care Act.The report also said CMS devoted a similar number of staff to review both California, which represents 15 percent of federal Medicaid spending, and Arkansas, which accounts for 1 percent.CMS needs to step back and assess where are the biggest threats and vulnerabilities, Yocom said. If you arent looking, you dont know what you arent catching.Overall, from fiscal years 2014 to 2018, federal Medicaid spending increased by about 31 percent, according to the GAO report. But the full-time staff at CMS dedicated to financial oversight declined by roughly 19 percent over the same period.In a July 18 letter to the GAO, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services agreed with the agencys recommendations for improving oversight efforts.HHS wrote that it will complete a comprehensive national review to assess the risk of Medicaid expenditures reported by states and allocate resources based on risk.
(TNS)  A new facility is coming to south metro Denver where the use of data-collecting internet of things technology will be explored and tested as means to make urban services and infrastructure work better for residents.Officials with Arrow Electronics took the stage at the inaugural Colorado Smart Cities Symposium in Denver on Tuesday to announce plans to open what it is calling the Colorado Open Lab next year. Working with the 19 Colorado municipalities and agencies that, along with a collection of private businesses, universities and research institutions, make up the Colorado Smart Cities Alliance , Arrow intends to use the forthcoming lab as a place to showcase ideas such a data-driven smart street lighting, smart parking and connected, automated vehicles.Aiden Mitchell, Arrows vice president of IoT Global Solutions , described the lab as a technology innovation center that will allow for the development, testing, evaluation and integration of technology that is meeting some of the toughest challenges that (we) need to meet across mobility, transportation, public safety, citizen engagement and the advancement of economic development across the state.In the design phase now, the lab is slated to open on the ground floor of Arrows corporate headquarters in Centennial sometime in the spring, according to Mitchell. It is being supported in part by a $500,000 grant from the Colorado Office of Economic Development and International Trade . The announcement comes after Panasonic unveiled a mini smart city testing ground near Denver International Airport earlier this year.Our partners at Arrow Electronics have one of the broadest global technology networks in the world, Jake Rishavy, vice president of innovation for the Denver South Economic Development Partnership, said in a news release. His organization co-founded the Colorado Smart Cities Alliance. Now with the support of the advanced industries grant program, the Colorado Open Lab will bring these leading technology companies here to Denver South and Colorado to work alongside Colorado cities and other public sector leaders to co-develop the next generation of smart cities technologies.The data collected at the lab there wont belong to Arrow, Mitchell emphasized, but all smart city partners.While this is at our facility, this is very much your lab, he said. This is a going to be an open environment.One major company that will be part of the Open Lab ecosystem from the start is Intel. The Silicon Valley giant will use the lab as a place to study what it sees as the next phase in computing, something called ambient science. It doesnt have a firm definition yet, but Jeff Fedders, a chief strategist with Intel, made it clear artificial intelligence will be a key element.If you think of a piece of technology or a piece of data that is out in the industry or out in smart cities, think of that piece of technology as immersive, intelligent and self-aware, Fedders said at Tuesdays event. This piece of technology can start to make its own decisions.South metro officials expressed high hopes for what having a tech lab with potentially international drawing power in their own backyards will mean for their residents. Appearing as part of a symposium panel discussing connected smart regions, Centennial Mayor Stephanie Piko said she is hopeful the lab will help adapt and install internet-of-things infrastructure in already developed parts of cities, not just in yet-to-develop green fields that can be built with the technology in mind.Neighboring Lone Tree is already home to one Smart Cities Alliance-endorsed pilot program. It is partnering with Uber to put one of its Lone Tree Link shuttles to work providing free rides around town at defined times of day . It is working with other south metro cities to sync their traffic signal systems so that traffic flows smoothly across municipal boundaries.Lone Tree City Manager Seth Hoffman on Tuesday called the lab the physical manifestation of the moment that were in where there is so much opportunity for cities to really improve the quality of life (of their residents) in partnership with the private sector.
(TNS) As part of an unusual plea deal, a former Rutgers student who once called himself "Dread" has been ordered to work for the FBI as punishment for staging a cyberattack that brought down huge swathes of the internet across the globe.Paras Jha, 22, was one of three men sentenced in Alaska on Tuesday for his role in creating Mirai, a powerful malware assault that knocked out thousands of websites in the Northeast, California, and Western Europe in September 2016.Citing "substantial if not extraordinary levels of cooperation," federal prosecutors recommended equally extraordinary leniency.Jha, of Fanwood, N.J.; Dalton "Uber" Norman, 22, of Metairie, La.; and Josiah "LiteSpeed" White, 21, of Washington, Pa., pleaded guilty Dec. 8 to conspiracy charges. Each was sentenced to five years' probation and ordered to pay $127,000 in restitution. They were also required to abandon "significant amounts" of crypto currency seized by investigators.Most interestingly, each was ordered to serve 2,500 hours of community service "to include continued work with the FBI on cybercrime and cybersecurity matters," the sentencing document said. The men's assistance to the FBI already has "substantially contributed both to active complex cybercrimes investigations as well as the broader defensive effort on the part of law enforcement and the research community in this arena."According to a report in Wired, the trio already has already donned white hats , helping domestic and international investigators on more than a dozen cases that also has included undercover work."The plea agreement with the young offenders in this case  will give FBI investigators the knowledge and tools they need to stay ahead of cybercriminals around the world," said Bryan Schroder, U.S. Attorney for the District of Alaska.The case was prosecuted in Alaska because the lead federal investigator is stationed there, said Brian Krebs, a cybercrimes expert and journalist who publishes KrebsOnSecurity.com The Mirai malware, named after an anime film character , initially was designed to create an advantage for players of the online game Minecraft . Mirai hijacked and enslaved poorly secured Internet of Things devices to create a botnet that included computer routers, security cameras, and baby monitors. The botnet then could be deployed to hobble their Minecraft competitors. Jha and his buddies, however, soon discovered the Mirai botnet also could be used to launch widespread distributed denial of service attacks (DDoS) for criminal purposes that throttled internet service providers and websites.Jha unleashed the first major attacks using Mirai in 2015 on the computer network at Rutgers, where he was enrolled as a student. During the intermittent attacks that caused significant disruptions on campus, Jha taunted the school's IT department."The Rutgers infrastructure crumpled like a tin can under the heel of my boot," he wrote.Jha, who described himself as "the untouchable hacker god," then conspired with White to hire out the Mirai botnet to other criminal actors for $2,000 and $3,000 per attack. After building out the botnet to encompass hundreds of thousands of devices, Jha tried to monetize the botnet by sending out extortion notices to internet service providers (ISPs). When the ISPs didn't pay up in bitcoin, Jha unleashed a sustained DDoS attack on the companies.The men also turned the enslaved Internet of Things devices into a tool that was used for "clickfraud," a scheme to make it appear that real users have clicked on advertisements to artificially generate revenue, prosecutors said.When Krebs, the cybersecurity journalist, wrote about the attacks and smoked out the wrongdoers, Jha trained the malicious software on KrebsOnSecurity.com.The men's involvement with Mirai ended in the fall of 2016, when Jha, wary of the FBI closing in, posted the source code online for anyone to use. Since then, Mirai variants have been employed in dozens of other cyberattacks, prosecutors said.Jha, according to reports, is currently employed by a Silicon Valley tech company. He faces sentencing in New Jersey next week for his attacks on the Rutgers computer system.
Ugandas planned oil refinery may start two years behind schedule after project studies were delayed.

The front-end engineering design ( FEED), initially due for completion last year, has only just begun, according to the countrys Energy Minister Irene Muloni made a statement in Kampala.

FEED is just beginning and it will impact on the completion of the refinery. For the refinery there is definitely a slippage, Muloni said.

A consortium led by General Electric Co. is contracted to build the 60,000 barrel-a-day plant in the Hoima district of western Uganda. It will take oil from fields being developed by Total SA, Cnooc Limted. and Tullow Oil Plc, due to start flowing in 2020.

Minister Muloni said Plans have also been submitted for a 900-mile crude-export pipeline via Tanzania, which will be completed before the refinery.

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Other partners in the GE-led group, which will own a 60 percent stake in the refinery are Yaatra Ventures LLC, Italys Saipem SpA and Kenya-based private-equity firm FireWorks Capital. Uganda has said Total will also invest, as will the Tanzanian and Kenyan governments.

Muloni insisted Uganda is still targeting the start of oil production in 2020, even though Cnooc has suggested output may begin a year later because of delays to final investment decisions.

In 2006, Tullow began to get encouraging exploration results and flow tests from some initial wells. Further significant discoveries and appraisal success led in 2009 to the basin development commercial volume threshold being exceeded. Following further success, contingent resources are now estimated to be around 1.7 billion barrels of oil.

Development

The Lake Albert Development Project is a major development which expects to achieve around 230,000 bopd when it reaches plateau. Development plans were approved by the government in August 2016 to develop the first 1.2 billion barrels of oil. The Government of Uganda has agreed an export route through Tanzania to the Port of Tanga.

Tullow farm down in Uganda

A series of transactions took place in 2010-2012 whereby Tullow acquired 100 per cent of the three licences before farming down a third of the equity to both CNOOC and Total. The transaction was for a total consideration of $2.9 billion and effectively unitised the basin equally between all three parties ahead the basin development.

On 9 January 2017, Tullow announced that it has agreed a substantial farm-down of its assets in Uganda to Total. Under the Sale and Purchase Agreement, Tullow has agreed to transfer 21.57 percent of its 33.33 per cent interest in Exploration Areas 1, 1A, 2 and 3A in Uganda to Total for a total consideration of US $900 million.

CNOOC Uganda Limited (CNOOC) subsequently exercised its pre-emption rights under the joint operating agreements to acquire 50 per cent of the interests being transferred to Total on the same terms and conditions. The farm-down leaves Tullow with an 11.76 per cent interest in the upstream and pipeline, which will reduce to 10 per cent when the Government of Uganda formally exercises its right to back-in.

The consideration is split into US $200 million in cash, consisting of US $100 million payable on completion of the transaction, $50 million payable at FID and $50 million payable at first oil. The remaining US $700 million is in deferred consideration and represents reimbursement in cash of a proportion of Tullows past exploration and development costs. The deferred consideration will fund Tullows share of the development and pipeline costs as the Lake Albert Development reaches a series of key milestones.

The Joint Venture Partners have officially notified the Government of Uganda of the farm-down, seeking its approval of the transaction. Tullow now anticipates that the farm-down will complete in the second half of 2018 with cash payment on completion and payment of deferred consideration for the pre-completion period (including the whole of 2017) being received in 2018.

Once production commences, the governments current potential share of oil resources is estimated to be US $50 billion, representing approximately 80 per cent of oil revenues after exploration costs are recouped, based on approximate reserves of 1.7 billion barrels of oil.

Ugandas petroleum history

Petroleum systems in rift basins, like the Lake Albert Rift Basin, were formed over eight million years ago. Natural oil seeps on the shores of Lake Albert have been recorded over many years and in 1938 the first exploration well was drilled. This well demonstrated that there was an oil source in the basin but it was nearly 70 years before any further activity took place. To date, oil has been discovered on the eastern shores of Lake Albert, and onshore to the north of the lake. While the area is highly prospective, it is also home to around 400,000 residents and recognised as one of Africas most beautiful environments.
(TNS)  UMass Memorial Health Care entities will pay $230,000 to resolve a lawsuit filed by Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey after two separate data breaches exposed personal and health information of more than 15,000 residents.Investigations by Healey's office revealed that the breaches exposed information including names, addresses, social security numbers, clinical information and health insurance information, Healey's office announced Thursday.Two former employees UMass Memorial Medical Group Inc. and UMass Memorial Medical Center Inc. -- entities of UMass Memorial Health Care -- improperly accessed patients' personal and protected health information for fraudulent purposes, including opening cell phone and credit card accounts, Healey's office said in a statement.A complaint by Healey, as well as a consent judgment in Suffolk Superior Court, were filed last week. Healey's office alleges the UMass Memorial entities violated the Consumer Protection Act, the Massachusetts Data Security Law, and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act when they failed to properly protect patients' information.UMass Memorial allegedly knew of employee's misconduct but failed to properly investigate complaints related to the data breaches. The healthcare system also failed to discipline the employees in a timely manner or take other steps to safeguard information, the statement said.UMass Memorial Health Care said it would provide a statement regarding the settlement, but that statement was not immediately available."Massachusetts residents rely on their health care providers to keep private health information safe and secure," Healey said. "This resolution ensures UMass Memorial implements important measures to prevent this type of breach from happening again."As a part of the settlement, the UMass Memorial entities have agreed to conduct employee background checks and ensure proper employee discipline; train employees on the proper handling of patient information; limit employee access to patient information; identify and remediate potential data security issues; and promptly investigate suspected improper access to patient information, the statement said.The entities will also be required to hire an independent third-party firm to perform a review of its data security policies and procedures, which the system will report to Healey's office.
(TNS)  Connecticuts electric, natural gas and water utilities repelled countless attempts to breach their computer and other systems in the past year, according to a state report released Tuesday.The threats are real and include a prolonged loss of electricity and water, evaporation of company records and breach of customer privacy, said the report to Gov. Dannel P. Malloy.Arthur House, the states chief cybersecurity risk officer, was blunt about the threats utilities and their customers face.Im often asked in my job are we safe from cyberattack? And the answer, of course, is no, he said at a Capitol news conference. Were not safe. Nobodys safe. No federal agency, no state agency, no city, no business, no individual can take safety as an assumption. Were all threatened all the time.Attempts to compromise utilities systems are becoming more sophisticated and frequent, he said.Theyre growing in volume. We have to defend ourselves and Connecticut is doing that, House said.Jim Hunt, senior vice president for regulatory affairs at Eversource, said the utilities and state officials launched a partnership to face down cybersecurity threats, turning away from the typical relationship in which utilities must yield to regulators.House said utilities are assigning qualified people to the task of defending their operations and are spending money on cyberdefenses. In addition, utilities boards of directors and top management of the utilities are on board, he said.Still, numerous problems need to be addressed, the report said. State officials and the utilities said the impact of a loss of service to Connecticut is not well understood and utilities need to increase their attention to response and recovery planning for a major cybersecurity attack.Utilities also are having trouble competing for qualified young workers, facing off against companies offering higher salaries and government agencies providing greater resources, the report said.In addition, Connecticut utilities need to improve crisis management, and vendors of materials and services are potential sources of compromise, the report said.The utilities realize that there is no template or playbook for the broad and unpredictable effects of a cyberattack, the report said.Exercises with a range of possibilities, including breakdown in public order and large-scale movements of people seeking water and other necessities need to be planned and executed, the report said.China, Iran, North Korea, Russia and Turkey have been identified as among the sources of cyberthreats, seeking to undermine U.S. security, officials said.The U.S. Department of Homeland Security warned earlier this year of Russian reconnaissance of U.S. critical infrastructure and said Russian military intelligence conducted in the past two years a hacking campaign targeting hundreds of critical infrastructure companies that included electric power utilities.Connecticuts utilities have not been informed that they were among those breached, the report said.House said that in addition to governments seeking to undermine the U.S., cybermercenaries in the Middle East and eastern Europe could be hired by somebody to launch an attack.House said states must take the lead on improving cybersecurity because the federal government is doing little.
(TNS)  Right before midterms, a United States District Court judge found that Georgias electronic voting machines are extremely vulnerable to hacking and foreign meddling  including from Russia  but ruled against changing the states elections systems to avoid voter confusion and chaos.But by simply highlighting the vulnerability of Georgias electronic voting machines, the judge may have already undermined voter confidence just weeks before the midterms. The new ruling from Judge Amy Totenberg in Curling v. Kemp found that Georgias electronic voting machines are so easily hacked that it is irresponsible for a locality or state to use them without a paper audit trail.Georgias machines do not have paper audit trails.Totenberg admonished the state of Georgia for not properly addressing election security issues in time for the 2018 midterm elections, reminding them that 2020 elections are around the corner and that if a new balloting system is to be launched in Georgia in an effective manner, it should address democracys critical need for transparent, fair, accurate, and verifiable election processes that guarantee each citizens fundamental right to cast an accountable vote.Over the past few years, cybersecurity experts and lawyers have told state and local governments repeatedly that electronic voting machines and platforms are easily hacked and should either be substantially reinforced or at least have verifiable paper audit trails.Just last week, an MIT computer scientist demonstrated how to hack an electronic voting machine  the AccuVote TS-X  which is used in some localities of 18 states, but is used statewide in Georgia.Atlanta attorney Bruce Brown, who told the state of Georgia that its central election server was insecure months before the 2016 presidential election, told Totenberg in an August court filing that it would be prudent for the state to switch to paper ballots.According to the ruling, In August 2016, Logan Lamb, a professional cybersecurity expert in Georgia, went to CESs public website and discovered that he was able to access key election system files, including multiple gigabytes of data and thousands of files with private elector information. The information included electors drivers license numbers, birth dates, full home addresses, the last four digits of their Social Security numbers, and more. Mr. Lamb was also able to access, for at least 15 counties, the election management databases from the GEMS central tabulator used to create ballot definitions, program memory cards, and tally and store and report all votes. He also was able to access passwords for polling place supervisors to operate the DREs and make administrative corrections to the DREs.Lamb alerted authorities but the state did not act on his research.The plaintiffs  which included lead plaintiff Donna Curling and the Coalition for Good Governance  sought a court order to declare use of Georgias electronic voting machines unconstitutional (because they are insecure and thus deprive Georgians of their constitutional right to vote) and an injunction prohibiting [the state] from conducting public elections with optical scanned paper ballots without also requiring post-election audits of paper ballots to verify the results.While Totenberg sympathized with the plaintiffs, she ruled in favor of the defendants (including Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp and the State Election Board) due to such close proximity to midterms while advising the defendants that further delay is not tolerable in their confronting and tackling the challenges before the States election balloting system.The plaintiffs told thethat they are confident they will eventually succeed because Totenberg has not ruled on the underlying claims of the case  that use of the machines is unconstitutional. They plan to appeal.Despite Totenbergs recommendation that the state should update its election system to include a paper audit trail, the fact that her decision comes so close to midterms and is so dismissive of Georgias election security may cast substantial doubt on Georgias midterm results and could have serious consequences for voter confidence.The Center for Democracy and Technologys Senior Technologist Maurice Turner toldin an interview that Totenbergs ruling is a net negative for voter confidence and the integrity of Georgias election systems.Voter confidence is critical, Maurice said. If election officials cant convince voters that the election systems themselves are sound, I cant think of any other reason why voters would feel confident their ballot is going to be counted correctly. We need to move beyond having faith in the election officials, they really need to stand up and prove that the procedures they haven place are actually valid and worthy of voters having confidence.Maurice said he totally agrees with Totenbergs decision that switching the election system two months before midterms is impractical, but he also said her decision could create chaos after the votes are counted.It provides ample opportunity for folks on either side of any of these races to be able to point at this fundamental flaw in the Georgia election system and say, hey look theres something wrong here, so if one side loses they might blame the voting machines, and I believe thats the worst case scenario, he said.Furthermore, he said, despite Totenbergs rebuke to the state, its unlikely the state will fix its election system in time for the 2020 presidential election.I have my doubts two years is long enough, he said. If youre talking about the same governor, secretary of state and staff, it seems that there are issues below the surface we may not have visibility into, and unless those are addressed, Im not confident theyll implement this new system and be effective and with fewer errors by 2020. They may need some assistance.Maurice said the case also speaks to the importance of security researchers, not only when it comes to finding vulnerabilities but also being able to report on them in a responsible manner.Lamb did the right thing repeatedly, but unfortunately there was not an appropriate system in place to handle it, Maurice said. It highlights the need for all organizations to have a clear, publicly available vulnerability disclosure policy so when a researcher in good faith finds vulnerabilities, there is a legal safe harbor and the vulnerabilities can be mitigated in an appropriate amount of time.
Russia is not ruling out making its grand prix a night race in future.

Although Sochi has been on the calendar since 2014, the organisation of the event has been taken over by a company called Rosgonki.

It is headed by Alexei Titov, and he told Ria Novosti news agency that a night race is on the table for the future.

"We are always trying to find the best option that would be convenient for the fans and economically justified," he said.

"Now we seem to have the best option, with the Olympic Park against the backdrop of the sea and the mountains that look great on the TV in beautiful September.

"But we cannot rule out the option that one of the races will be at night," Titov added.

(GMM)
Max Verstappen says Red Bull never considered signing up Fernando Alonso for 2019.

That is despite the fact that, recently, retiring Spaniard Alonso and Red Bull chiefs were locked in a dispute over whether the energy drink company wanted him to fill a cockpit.

"I had (an offer) in 2007, in 2009, in 2011, in 2013, and two this year, one in Monaco, and one in August," Alonso said.

But Dutchman Verstappen, who drives for Red Bull Racing, disagrees.

"Alonso was not an option for 2019. It's something I know," he is quoted by AS newspaper as saying at a sponsor event in his home country.

Instead, Red Bull has chosen from its own talent pool to replace the Renault-bound Daniel Ricciardo.

"I think I can get along very well with Pierre (Gasly) and I think they have also evaluated that, so I am satisfied knowing that they have chosen him," Verstappen said.

The 20-year-old, who is a regular critic of Red Bull's current Renault power, said he is hopeful the team can take a step forward with Honda engines next year.

"We have the best car on the grid, as we saw in Singapore," said Verstappen.

"We hope that next year with the arrival of Honda, and its budget that is much higher than that of our current engine supplier, we will continue in the right direction," he added.

"We have the right people, it's just the full package has not been ideal. It will be difficult to get it next year, but I hope we have an opportunity in 2020.

"As a team we already have the winning mentality, and now we will also have it on the engine side as well," said Verstappen.

(GMM)
Bombay to Goas ros omelette. Photo: Melissa Hom

New Yorkers love their eggs (consider the cult of the bacon, egg, and cheese), and so does Instagram. Or, rather, the platform loves Instagram-y eggs: jammy and soft-boiled, cheesy and scrambled, sunny yolks split open over bread. Put an egg on it, because youll get more likes. Great dishes though, dont always scream delicious. Take the classic Goan dish ros omelette, an egg thing served in an earthy-looking gravy that doesnt look great  and also tastes leagues better than the sunny-side up egg on avocado toast you eat because its there. Ros omelette is a dish youll want to seek out when its not there.

Ros omelette is a favorite street food of the coastal Indian state of Goa, where the cuisine bears the marks of the former Portuguese colonizers. To find it in New York, well, you wont readily find it in New York. Instead, youll have to cross the Hudson River, head to Jersey City, and make a beeline for Bombay to Goa, which just opened in Journal Square last month. Its a short walk from the nearest PATH station, but even if it wasnt it wouldnt matter. If you didnt grow up on it, ros omelette will make you wonder why everyone doesnt douse their eggs in gravy.

Xacuti with paneer. Photo: Melissa Hom

At this snug, square restaurant decorated with photos of beaches and street-style signs with names of Goan locales, the dish is listed in the Early Risers Choice section. Dont let that deter you from ordering it after dark; it should always be your choice. Punched up with green peppers, onion, and cilantro, the omelette itself is sturdy and fat so that it doesnt disappear into the gravy, like one of those dainty French ones would. What makes the dish is that gravy of chicken and, most importantly, coconut, which gives it a distinct richness. That quality doesnt go unchecked; the chorus of onions, curry leaves, black mustard seeds, and dried red chilies make sure of that. The result is a sauce thats thick, heady, and sultry, and makes your everyday omelette something more irresistible. Even after youve declared yourself too full to eat and all your dishes have gone cold, youll find yourself sneaking a few more spoonfuls. Its what certain of my friends like to call saucy food, made for being soaked up by carbs (good thing theres bread on the side for mopping it up) and nourishing.

Regional Indian food isnt all that easy to find in New York City, Goas coconut and seafood heavy cuisine being no exception. At Bombay Bread Bar, Floyd Cardoz nods to his Goan heritage with dishes like Goan crab cakes and caldin curry. Another restaurant, Cardamom, opened this month in Sunnyside and serves a few of the states specialties. Bombay to Goa puts it focus squarely on the cuisine, with a few dishes (hence its name) from Mumbai. These include xacuti, a coconut gravy served with paneer or mushroom; the states signature fish coconut curry; and galinha cafreal, the spicy chicken dish that, the story goes, came from the Portuguese by way of Africa. Just dont forget why you came here: the delicious eggs in brown sauce.
News

Expo helps find solutions to fundamental challenges

World expositions have become the harbinger since a century and 70 years back for what are to improve and better lives. For this, the management of a leading global pharmaceutical company has been grateful for having given the opportunity to share with the world not only what they have been into and their plans but more importantly, helping spread awareness on otherwise preventable diseases.


Uganda through National Water and Sewerage Cooperation (NWSC) has been selected to host 2019 Solutions to Intermittent water supply conference and the 79th Africa Water Association Congress.

The conference that is scheduled to start April, 8 is aimed at debating and defining new solutions to tackle the global water crisis. Water scarcity, increasingly impacted by climate change, floods and droughts, coupled with threats from pollution and growing demand for water, are some of the top risks facing the world today.

The Congress and Exhibition will bring together over 5,000 of the worlds leading water professionals. It is a unique opportunity for connecting and networking with water sector leaders, and to share knowledge on the latest trends in leading practices, innovative technologies, ground breaking research and pioneering science.

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Uganda was selected in the concluding September World Water Exhibition that is taking place in Tokyo, Japan. Uganda among other countries exhibited the newest technologies, best practice and those leading-edge solutions to water problems.

The exhibition was attended by junior Minister for Water Ronald Kibuule, NWSC Managing Director Dr. Silver Mugisha among other members. Eng. Mugisha presented a paper on the milestones of the achievements of NWSC. NWSC is a success story of a government entity that has made a breakthrough.

Uganda also hosted the 79th Africa Water Association Congress of the Scientific and Technical Council and Exhibition will be held in Kampala, Uganda, from 16 to 20th July 2018 at the International Resources Center of the National Water and Sewerage Corporation.

The congress will be pivoted on Harnessing ICT to accelerate sustainable water and sanitation for all in Africa to deliberate on the strategic priorities of the water sector in Africa and promote your products and services by participating in the exhibition.




Haiti - Social : Young Leaders of the Americas, List of Haitian Fellows





The US Embassy is proud to announce that 9 young Haitian entrepreneurs and professionals have been accepted into the 2018 cohort of nearly 2,500 applications to participate in the Young Leaders of the Americas Initiative (YLAI) Professional Fellows Program, which will bring together 250 young leaders from 36 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean.



This program will take place in September and October 2018 and will bring 250 young leaders from 36 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean to the United States. This year we are pleased to announce that nine (9) young entrepreneurs from Haiti have been accepted out of approximately about 2,500 applications.



The five-week YLAI Professional Fellows Program, sponsored by the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs of the U.S. Department of State, will place business and social entrepreneurs in small businesses, non-governmental organizations, and similar entities in 20 U.S. cities. The participants, hosted by U.S. organizations, will further develop their business or social venture plans, learn from their U.S. counterparts, and share best practices.



Let's recall that YLAI Professional Fellows Program will begin on September 20 in Detroit, Michigan. Participants will then engage in four-week fellowships in cities throughout the U.S. The program will conclude with a Closing Summit in Washington, DC.



2018 Haitian cohort :



Frantzia Augustin - Founder and CEO of Fafa Distribution, a fair-trade company that sells artwork made by independent Haitian women artists. The goal of Fafa Distribution is to empower Haiti's female artists by giving them the opportunity to present and sell their products locally and worldwide.



Jeanida Azor is the Co-Founder and President of the Association Femmes d'Impact, an organization that provides social assistance to young mothers in Haiti. The organization provides professional development, entrepreneurship, and leadership training to prepare them for a future career.



Samuel Bastien is the Founder of the Health Education Project (HEP), an NGO that seeks to improve health education and awareness among Haiti's most vulnerable communities. HEP members travel to cities and rural villages throughout the country, giving presentations in schools, churches, marketplaces, and on the streets.



Nadia Jean Charles is the Co-Founder and Treasurer of Haiti Femmes & TIC, an association of women employed in the sciences. Haiti Femmes & TIC provides scholarships and hosts workshops, seminars, and competitions for women interested in working in Communications and Information Technology.



Jupille Facile is the Founder and CEO of the Haitian bamboo company Bambou Facile. Bambou Facile uses its bamboo to ensure sustainable socio-economic, infrastructural and environmental development of the country.



Valesca Saint Cyr is the COO of Saint Apollonia Mobile Dental Clinic, a health organization that seeks to address the limited access, quality, and equity of dental care delivery in Haiti. Valesca's organization sends specialists to communities throughout the Haiti, where they set up mobile clinics that treat locals who are unable to afford traditional dental care.



Emmanuel Tilias is the Co-Founder and CEO of the Haitian furniture company CG-Meb Lakay. The company designs locally made furniture and prides itself on its efficient process and durable products.



Abner Volsaint is the CEO of La Confiserie Soulouquoise, a candy production company focused on creating sweets using organic ingredients. One of his company's main products is Dous Makos, a flavored milk paste.



Sagine Zizi is the Founder, CEO, and Designer at Sazi Creations, a Haitian handbag company. Sazi Creations offers high-quality handbags using fabrics and techniques unique to their company.



HL/ HaitiLibre






















Haiti - Environment : Haiti leads the Dominican Republic





The fight against single-use plastic and styrofoam has been gathering steam over the past years, and the Caribbean has been one of the regions taking the lead in this area. 14 Caribbean et Central America nations have implemented bans on plastics and styrofoam.



Concening Haiti "The Haitian government has banned black plastic bags and foam containers. The ban, which came into force on 1 August 2013 https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-8995-haiti-notice-ban-on-plastic-bags-and-styrofoam.html , is not the first ban of Michel Martelly's government; a previous attempt https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-6395-haiti-environment-measures-of-protection-for-the-environment.html was largely ignored, and environmental activists fear the government may not be able to enforce it this time either," writes the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP).



As for the Dominican Republic "The Dominican Republic is drawing up or adopting national plans and legislation to combat marine litter. Nevertheless, the board behind the organization Change.org has sent a petition to minister Francisco Dominguez Brito of Environment and Natural Resources. In this petition they make a call to ban the use of plastic packing material, and the use of plastic bags. Whatever you purchase in a supermarket in Dominican Republic, it will be packed abundantly in plastic bags," says UNEP.



A UNEP study map on the progress made by the Caribbean region, Central America, in banning plastics and styrofoams, shows that :



14 countries have established (Mexico, Antigua and Barbuda, Aruba, Colombia, France, Guyana, Haiti, Panama, Puerto Rico, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Turks and Caicos, United States Virgin Islands, Guatemala, Honduras) of bans.



5 countries have bans announced (Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, Costa Rica, Dominica)



8 countries are under discussion to adopt them at government level (Cayman Islands, Grenada, El Salvador, Jamaica, St Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, United States of America, Trinidad and Tobago)



5 countries are in discussion to adopt them at NGO level (Curacao, Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, Suriname, British Virgin Islands)



While 2 countries (Cuba and Venezuela) have no ban.



However, it should be noted that having legislation is not enough if it is not applied as it has been in Haiti since the prohibition came into effect in 2013. https://www.icihaiti.com/en/news-21244-icihaiti-environment-5-years-of-ineffective-fight-against-polystyrene-and-styrofoam-products.html



See also :

https://www.icihaiti.com/en/news-21244-icihaiti-environment-5-years-of-ineffective-fight-against-polystyrene-and-styrofoam-products.html

https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-8995-haiti-notice-ban-on-plastic-bags-and-styrofoam.html

https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-6395-haiti-environment-measures-of-protection-for-the-environment.html



HL/ HaiitiLibre






















Haiti - Economy : Learning from the success of Haitian women entrepreneurs





On September 13, a workshop was organized Digicel Entrepreneur of the Year team invited past women finalists to join a one-off workshop with two key aims : boosting their enterprises through shared experience and refreshing and developing their networking skills.



The workshop was a powerhouse of female business expertise. Joining Danielle St Lot were two other female entrepreneurs  both past Digicel Entrepreneur of the Year finalists.

Marie Effoisie Dorceus of was a co-founder of the food cooperative, AFASDAH, which provided a template for empowering resource-poor rural women by providing sustainable employment to help them support themselves and their families. She was a Digicel Entrepreneur of the Year finalist in 2017  and she is particularly interesting on the nuts and bolts of how to reinforce the autonomy of women and their communities. Two other women entrepreneurs, also finalists of Digicel Entrepreneur of the Year was alongside Danielle Saint Lot.



Magalie Noelle Dresse of Caribbean Craft was a finalist in 2010. Her aim too was to provide much needed artisanal employment for a local workforce.Magalietalked about strategies that help local enterprises achieve a foothold on the international ladder, how to develop and preserve productive business partnerships, and how to ensure that such collaboration not alone survives but thrives amid the rigours of growth.



"Our aim is to make this an invaluable exercise in collective intelligence-gathering for women in business, says Brona Cusack, Director of the Digicel Entrepreneur of the Year awards.



"It will set out to identify the type of real-life challenges faced most often by entrepreneurs on the cusp of growth. It will give participants an opportunity to describe and analyse their own experiences in a supportive business environment. And it will add the type of hard-won expertise and insight that makes all the difference to achieving success in the marketplace."



HL/ HaitiLibre




















Thursday, September 20, 2018

Romanian Referendum on the definition on marriage will take place 6 and 7 October

It is already more than 2 years ago when 3 million Romanian citizens requested a referendum to define marriage as a union between one man and one woman. But after the last vote in the Romanian senate on 11 September where 107 voted in favour, 13 against and 3 abstained and the approval of the Romanian Constitutional Court, the road is free to organize the referendum. Last Tuesday, the Romanian government decided to established the dates for the referendum on the 6th and 7th of October.

Adrian Merka, President of ECPM Member the Democratic Union of Slovaks and Czechs and Slovaks in Romania was pleased with the result we welcome the decision because we are in favour of traditional families. The family consisting of father, mother and child is a foundation for our society.
Touko Aalto, the chairperson of the Green League, Jussi Halla-aho, the chairperson of the Finns Party, and Sampo Terho, the chairperson of the Blue Reform, similarly have a hard time getting their messages across to the public, according to the survey.

Prime Minister Juha Sipilas (Centre) statements are deemed trustworthy by only 24 per cent of Finns, finds a survey commissioned by Alma Media.

Aalto was considered trustworthy by 18 per cent, Halla-aho by 22 per cent and Terho by 25 per cent of the 1,500 respondents surveyed by Tietoykkonen between 12 and 17 September 2018. The respondents were asked to select any number of the chairpersons of the eight largest political parties whose statements they would be inclined to trust.

Sipila was asked about the apparent lack of public confidence in him in a debate event organised by Alma Media on Wednesday. He responded by drawing attention to the responsibility shouldered by his government.

I knew that Id face decisions that arent pleasant as prime minister. I knew that support for the party and for me personally would take a hit, he stated.

I knew all of that from the onset but thought that we have to do what has to be done.

Sipila also questioned the popular saying that while politicians know the decisions that need to be made, they do not know how to secure re-election if they make those decisions, viewing that the saying does not apply to Finland.

Thats something Ill be testing [in the parliamentary elections], he asserted.

The survey was topped by Sari Essayah of the Christian Democrats (58%), Li Andersson of the Left Alliance (48%) and Anna-Maja Henriksson of the Swedish Peoples Party (47%).

Jenni Karimaki, a senior researcher at the Centre for Parliamentary Studies of the University of Turku, attributes the publics inclination to trust the three opposition leaders to the fact that they have received relatively little negative publicity in comparison to ruling party leaders.

Ruling party leaders have to justify their unpopular decisions much more often and they are challenged in public to explain why they did something or didnt take something into consideration. When opposition leaders receive publicity, they typically get to voice their own opinion on a particular issue but they arent challenged in the same way, explained Karimaki. That creates the image that you can take their word for it.

Petteri Orpo of the National Coalition and Antti Rinne of the Social Democrats were both considered trustworthy by 40 per cent of the respondents.

Aleksi Teivainen  HT

Source: Uusi Suomi
The Greens, Left Alliance, Social Democrats and Swedish Peoples Party announced earlier this month they will bring a motion of no confidence against the minister for foreign affairs on grounds that he has repeatedly acted against womens rights and the foreign policy of Finland.

The Finnish Parliament is set to vote on a motion of no confidence against Minister for Foreign Affairs Timo Soini (BR) on Friday, a parliamentary spokesperson has told Uusi Suomi.

Soini has repeatedly articulated his opposition to abortion, including during an official visit to Ottawa, Canada, in May. His statements have provoked criticism also from his fellow cabinet members.

The only opposition parties not backing the motion of no confidence are the Finns Party and the Christian Democratic Party.

The case is unusual in that typically motions of no confidence are brought against the entire government. The government would have to resign if it failed to win the support of the majority of Members of the Parliament.

Scheduling the motion of no confidence has been difficult due to, for example, ministerial visits overseas. The final timetable will be confirmed after the opposition parties have formally brought the motion of no confidence to the Speakers of the Parliament, which is expected to happen this evening.

The vote, in turn, is expected to take place at the start of tomorrows plenary session, at approximately 1pm.

Chancellor of Justice Tuomas Poysti ruled on Wednesday that Soinis decision to participate in an anti-abortion event while on an official visit abroad is problematic but not illegal.

Aleksi Teivainen  HT

Source: Uusi Suomi
Kai Mykkanen (NCP), the Minister of the Interior, told YLE on Wednesday that he is no longer intent on proposing that dual citizens be prevented from advancing to senior positions at the Finnish Border Guard, which operates under the Ministry of the Interior.

The Blue Reform and National Coalition are in apparent disagreement about whether it is necessary to prevent dual citizenship holders from advancing to senior military positions in Finland.

He revealed that he had a last-minute change of heart after considering the position of the Swedish-speaking population of Finland.

Well naturally have to carefully consider how this would affect the position of, for example, the Swedish-speaking Finns who are dual citizens. We think these admittedly warranted concerns can be managed by means of the security clearance when it comes to the Border Guard, he stated to the public broadcasting company.

We and the Ministry of Defence decided together not to extend the ban to the Border Guard.

Jussi Niinisto (BR), the Minister of Defence, contrastively confirmed recently that he will submit a proposal to prevent dual citizens from advancing to senior positions at the Finnish Defence Forces. The objective, he added, is to implement the necessary legislative revisions as soon as at the beginning of next year.

The Ministry of Defence and Ministry of the Interior were originally expected to present their proposals together to the Parliament.

Mikko Karna (Centre), a former officer at the Finnish Border Guard, stated on Twitter on Wednesday that the decision will lead to a confusing situation and, possibly, also to Niinisto scrapping his proposal.

I have no intention to call off [the proposal], replied Niinisto. The National Coalition must shape up.

Hannu Sipila, the secretary general of the Finnish Officers Union, similarly expressed his puzzlement with the decision of Mykkanen. The Offices Union, he highlighted, has ruled that people selected for training for officerships and military positions at the Defence Forces must not be dual citizens in a way that poses a threat to national security.

How can Mykkanen guarantee this without the new law? asked Sipila.

Aleksi Teivainen  HT

Source: Uusi Suomi
LEANDER Club in Henley has raised at least 8,000 for charity by auctioning off 180 papier-mache hippos.

The 1ft long figures were among 200 that were decorated by schools, businesses and community groups to help celebrate the rowing clubs bicentenary.

They were exhibited at the towns River & Rowing Museum in May, then put on public display at various locations over the summer before being reunited at the club after the royal regatta.

Some were painted in colourful patterns while others were decorated with items of clothing, wigs and even miniature props like aeroplanes and rowing boats.

More than 300 people bid for the models in an online auction which ended on Sunday. The clubs website crashed briefly due to a last-minute rush of bids.

The hippos are now being packaged for sending to successful bidders as far away as Italy, America, New Zealand and Australia. Some are Leander members.

Darren West, who owns Henley Self Storage, successfully bid for 50 hippos and plans to display them at his premises on the Newtown Road industrial estate.

The proceeds will go to the Kafue River and Rowing Centre on the Zambezi river in Zambia, which researches ways of providing clean water and conserving aquatic wildlife.

Earlier this year, four Leander members took part in a 830km row on the Zambezi in aid of the project.

The hippos were the idea of Caroline Mulcahy, Leanders house manager, and Shelley Robertson, of Wilson Avenue, Henley.

Mrs Mulcahy said: Were still taking the money but so far everyone has been very good at paying.

Some of the schools and childrens group wanted their hippos back but we had a flurry of bids for the remaining ones and were very sorry if anyone wasnt able to get through.

It was very popular due to word of mouth, social media or simply people seeing the hippos during the regatta. The artists all enjoyed taking part and it was wonderful to see the sheer variety of entries. It clearly unleashed a lot of peoples talent, creativity and imagination.

It will be strange not to have them here after all this time but people have promised to send photographs so their story will continue.
Montevideo, Sep 20 (EFE).- Uruguayan President Tabare Vazquez said here Thursday that he and the leaders of the other Mercosur countries - Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay - will meet next week in New York on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly.

His discussions with counterparts Mauricio Macri of Argentina, Michel Temer of Brazil and Mario Abdo Benitez and Paraguay will focus on Mercosur's efforts to forge trade agreements with third countries and other trade blocs, Vazquez said.

The summit was originally set for Sept. 18, but scheduling conflicts forced a postponement, the president told reporters in Montevideo.

Vazquez will travel to the United States on Sunday to participate in the General Assembly, where he said he plans to raise issues such as "the impact of climate change on the global low-income population."

"That's the political issue I want to talk about as the president of our country, but afterward I will work in the United Nations on non-communicable diseases," he said.

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Sonia dArtois (nee Sonia Esmee Florence Butt) was only 20 years old when she parachuted into occupied France on May 28, 1944, just nine days before the D-Day landings in Normandy, to support the resistance as a spy and saboteur. A superior in Britains Special Operations Executive (SOE) would later describe her as utterly fearless. DArtois died in Pointe-Claire, Quebec, in 2014 at age 90. This article is adapted from a piece she wrote in 1955 (with Anne Fromer) for Coronet magazine.

I began my mission in wartime France as a British secret agent. My job was to recruit, arm, and train a secret French force to carry out sabotage and harassment



MANY THINGS HAPPENED TO ME FOR THE FIRST TIME ON A NIGHT IN APRIL 1944. I rode in a Black Maria; I jumped from a bomber with a tangled parachute; and I began my mission in wartime France as a British secret agent.

We drove in the Black Maria from Intelligence Headquarters somewhere in London to an American airbase equally cryptically located somewhere in England. At headquarters the Chief, Colonel Maurice Buckmaster, had told me what my assignment was:

You will parachute into France with a wireless operator and a demolition specialist. The drop will be 40 miles from Le Mans, where [Field Marshal Erwin] Rommels army is concentrated. Your job is, first, to recruit, arm and train a secret French force to carry out sabotage and harassment under code wireless orders you will receive from London Headquarters. Second, you will obtain and transmit to us all possible information on enemy strength, movement, and disposal of personnel and material.

The chief handed me four large sheets of paper covered with single-spaced typingit was a complete summary of my mission. It also detailed my cover story.

It was a curious experience, to read and memorize the detailed life history of the person I was now to become. It meant adopting not only a new name and identity but a new nationality and personality.

My name is Suzanne Bonvie. I am the daughter of Alcide and Marie Bonvie, of number ten Rue de Riviere, Bonneville

The cover story was careful to pick as my place of residence a small town which had been so thoroughly destroyed by Allied raids that no municipal records remained. The address, which was genuine, was a bombed-out house.

The story took my personal history back to grandfathers and grandmothers, aunts and uncles. There were, purposely, little inconsistencies in it since a perfectly consistent story would be more likely to arouse suspicion.

I am now going, my cover story stated, to stay with my cousin Jean-Paul Bonvie, who has a chateau near Le Mans

There was a man named Bonvie who had a small chateau near Le Mans, and that was my destination. Bonvie was of the Maquis.

The chief opened a drawer of his desk and took out a small Glassine envelope containing some white tablets and a single blue capsule. He handed it to me and said in an even voice:

The whiteremember, the white are stimulants. Take one if you ever need a last extra ounce of endurance to pull you through an emergency. The bluewell, if you are captured and at your last extremityit will work in three minutes.

His words were a grim reminder of what could be the climax of the six strange months I had just spent.

It had all started when I was summoned to an interview in a dingy London hotel, given a casual but thorough examination in French and my knowledge of the French people, assigned to the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry and hustled off to an isolated country house in Surrey for training.

The FANY, of course, was only a cover for the real purpose of my enlistmentto become a spy, an intelligence agent, an underground organizer behind the German linesa member of a secret third front which was to pin down and harass the German defenders against the invasion of Europe.

My fellow agents at the Surrey country house where we trained were English who, like myself, had been educated in France; citizens of Mauritius, a French-speaking English colony; South Africans who had lived in Madagascar; and some French-Canadians.

We spoke nothing but French. But more, we had to live French. We were watched every moment. Did we instinctively place our knives and forks in the French position after eating? Parties were heldfor the sole purpose of getting us a little drunk. Did we lapse into English? Did we talk too much?

One night after such a party I awoke to find an officer sitting at my bedside. I sat up indignantly.

Quite all right, I was told stiffly, we were only ascertaining if you talk in your sleepand if so, in what language.

Candidate agents had to learn how to recognize one person in a crowd solely from a description, be able to appraise a persons character and sincerity almost at sight, after a short talk with him.

Youre going to have to choose people to work with, we were told, people who might be planted by the enemy, people whom the enemy could later bribe. One mistake might literally mean death.

We had to learn how to stealfrom another students quarters, from a locked and guarded room. We had to be able to remove one sheet of paper from a drawer full of documents and leave the other contents undisturbed.

In what we called the Cooking School we learned how to combine ingredients obtainable at any corner store into deadly explosives.

All that was a preliminary to the toughening school in Scotland. The object of this second school, they told us, was to condition our bodies to withstand fatigue. It nearly killed me.

The few feminine agents were treated exactly the same as men, on the reasonable grounds that we would be living, working and fighting under the same conditionsand against the same enemy. The constant watch, the penetrating appraisal of us, was carried until the very end when I was told to report to London for further orders.

At briefing headquarters the chief greeted me with one word: Good! Three days later he summoned me again. That night he rode with me in the Black Maria out to the airport.

The plane banked to the leftthe signal that we were over the drop. As I looked out on the moonlit mass of France, I was horribly afraid. Yet it was a relief.

I moved to the hatch in the belly of the plane. Behind me crouched my wireless operator, a young Englishman who had recently acquired the incongruous name of Alexandre Dumont, and a wiry, middle-aged, genuinely French Maquis I knew only as Paul.

The light on a panel facing the hatch glowed redready. When it turned green, that was go. From my half-crouched jump position I watched that light. It stayed red for an eternity of 10 seconds. Then it was green.

A huge paper bag popped in my ears and a giant slapped me between the shoulders. Then everything was still and silent; even the sound of the planes engines, already incredibly distant, was only something rhythmic blending with the silence.

But I had bungled my jump. After four perfect practice drops I had failed when the real thing came, and I was impotently furious at myself. Endlessly our parachute instructor had repeated: Hold your head up when you go through the hatch, otherwise youll turn ears over bottom and twist your shroud lines. I had done just that. I had found it impossible not to look down.

According to everything I had rehearsed, I should now be floating gently to earth, manipulating the shroud lines to guide the chute toward a friendly ring of dimmed signal lights on the ground. Instead I was dropping out of control and much too fast. I could see no lights. I didnt even know which way the earth was. Worst of all, in tumbling helplessly through the air I had lost my grip on the precious bundle of French clothes which British Intelligence had gone to so much trouble to collect for my French mission.

I struggled with the lines for another 10 futile seconds before the earth came up and hit me. I blacked out.

When I came to, there was a rumbling noise in my ears. I got my breath back, collected my senses, but the noise remained. It was low, insistent, and not too distant.

My instinct was to move in the opposite direction. In enemy territory so continuous a sound was not likely to be made by friends.

A grove of trees to the left offered cover. I got up and discovered that I was still firmly attached to my parachute. Bury your parachute immediately was the A of our alphabet. I tugged furiously at the release. Nothing came loose. I must somehow have fouled it in my bungled drop.

I pulled my Colt automatic out of my pocket and started toward the trees, dragging the chute. It seemed to take hours of hard work, like walking in a plowed field up a steep grade, before I reached the leafy shadows.

I could still hear that ominous rumble off to the right. Once it stopped for a moment, to the accompaniment of much screeching, then started again. I guessed that it was a line of trucks on a road, running blacked-out and brought to a sudden halt.

I stopped under the first tree and called as loudly as I dared: Andre. That was the code name of the man who was to meet me if all went well.

There was no answer, but something stirred in the shadows and presently I could make out the shape of a man, watching me. Then another figure took shape, and anotheruntil there were eight.

I gripped my pistol tighter. I had to decide quickly whether to speak againor shoot. Then, with blessed relief, I heard a voice say in French: It is a woman!

The men came closer, and I could see that they were quite elderly and roughly dressed.

Andre is deadthe Boche got him three days ago. This revelation of the violent death of the man who was to have been my chief helper and adviser made me realize, as nothing else could, that I was now among people by whom sudden death was accepted as a way of life.

I explained to the Maquis who seemed to be the leader of the groupthe only man who had spoken until thenthat two men had parachuted with me, that the pack containing my clothes had dropped after me, and that we must search for the men and the bundle.

He shook his head and jerked his thumb toward the rumbling noise which continued ceaselessly.

There is a big Boche convoy moving tonight, he said. He pointed to one of the shadowy figures about him. Pierre here has just told us that he watched the convoy from behind a hedge and saw it stop to pick up a pack. We knew it belonged to one of you who had jumped. As for those who came with you, there are others to meet them.

That was the most blood-chilling news of a night of misadventure. The enemy would now know not only that an agent had been dropped in the area, but that it was a womanand a woman whose general description could be pieced together from the size of the clothing in the pack.

We must hurry, said the Maquis leader.

We moved through the wood, away from the rumbling trucks. Out in the open moonlight I saw that my companions were even older than they had seemed in the shadows.

As if in answer to my thought, their spokesman, whose name was Alain, said: We old ones meet and guide those who come in planes. The younger men are needed for more serious work.

All night we walked through fields, but when dawn came we took to the road. We were only three now. The rest of the men had melted away, one by one, in the night. A party of nine traveling together would be sure to arouse suspicion.

It seemed a curious reversal, to hide by night and to walk openly by day, but Alain explained that there was a curfew in the area and that anyone found out at night would be arrested. On the other hand, to attempt concealment by traveling through fields in daylight would be equally suspicious.

But it took a real effort for me to try to walk along that French road as though I belonged there, a road that soon would be crawling with enemy trucks, perhaps marching soldiers who would pass close enough to touch.

The sun rose and it became unbearably hot. The clothes I was wearing when I jumpedall the clothes I now ownedconsisted of sweater, divided skirt, and ski boots.

Underneath, next to my skin, I wore a money belt containing a million francs. It had had a comforting feeling when first I strapped it ona million francs in genuine smuggled French banknotes, but now it was an intolerable burden in the heat.

For 30 hours we walked without sleep, with scarcely a pause to rest and eat. Thus it was at dawn that we arrived at the Chateau Bonvie. My English wireless operator and Paul, the explosives expert, were already there and greeted me like a long-lost friend. So did my cousin Bonvie, who turned out to be very young, not more than a year or two older than I.

We have been expecting help so long and need it so badly, he said. Organization, training, weaponswe have had nonesince the last group was wiped out, and that was almost a year ago.

Yes, I said, we will start work tomorrow.

Next morning began the strange double life I was to lead for the next five months, lives so different from the rational existence I had led for 18 years, so kaleidoscopic in incident, adventure, and danger, that sometimes now it is difficult to believe that they really existed at all. Bonvie took me into Le Mans to introduce me to contacts; to the safe houses where I could obtain information, make contacts, or seek refuge in an emergency.

The streets swarmed with German soldiers. They crowded the stores, the restaurants, the hotels. The townsfolk were in evidence, too, going silently about their business affairs. Walking casually among the teeming German uniforms with Bonvie, I was aware that not one among them would have hesitated to shoot me down on the spot if they had known who I was.

We entered a number of little shops on side streets to be greeted, after Bonvies introduction, with a sort of guarded warmth.

In each shop I made a purchase. This served two purposes; first, to accustom me to the actual use of the Occupation ration books, which in training school I had studied as carefully as a textbook; second, to avoid suspicion if we were being followed, as conversation not accompanied by a business transaction might well have aroused something more than curiosity. The ration books I carried were expert forgeries of the real thing, printed in England, along with my identification papers from authentic originals stolen and smuggled out of France.

By day I belonged in the lower town, making contacts among the men of the district who had been demobilized after the fall of France and were restless for action; among the refugees who had fled from farther north with the invasion and could not go backor had no home, no village, no town to return to because Allied air raids had wiped them out. It was as dangerous as handling dynamite, this business of recruiting an army under the very noses of the conquerors. One error of judgment, letting a traitor into our ranks, couldand probably wouldmean torture and death to everyone in my group, and to their families.

By night I disappeared from the haunts of honest Frenchmen into the shadowy quarter of black-market cafes and bistros patronized almost entirely by Rommels officers and collaboratorsmale and female. Soon I was accepted by the German officersand, equally important, by the even more suspicious and calculating French collaborators and officers girls.

One German colonel in particular took to stopping at my table to exchange a few words, then to sitting with me over aperitifs.

From him and from other contacts I drew my information for transmission over my wireless frequency to headquarters in London. Here it was fitted into the intricate mosaic of intelligence contributed by other agents, which was then transmitted to Supreme Allied Headquarters.

Then, one evening, a strange mishap occurred. For a moment I was certain that it meant the end of my mission and myself.

The colonel sat down at my table, and I shifted my chair to make room for him. My handbagin which I carried my revolverslipped off the back of the chair and fell to the floor with an ominously audible clank.

For an instant I felt terror. It must have communicated itself to him, because the cold penetrating gaze he turned on me left no doubt he knew what my bag contained.

I reached for the bag and, as casually as I could, opened it. But what I took out was not the revolver. It was my forged permit to carry a gun and it was signed by Gestapo headquarters.

I pushed it across the table, left it in front of him for a moment, then returned it to my purse. I managed a faint smile that I was far from feeling.

From that moment the colonel and I understood each other. I was a Gestapo spy, probably the mistress of a high Gestapo officer, which accounted to him for a lot of thingswhy I frequented the expensive black-market cafes, why I never let him accompany me to my quarters. I was a dangerous person, but that lent spice to our tete-a-tetes. He was playing with fire, he let me know in so many wordsbut he liked it.

The colonel, whom I could easily visualize as one of those interrogating officers, became my most valuable informant.

One day he gave me the ominous information that for weeks now the Abwehr had been looking for a British woman agent who had been parachuted into the area. Her clothes had been found, some other clues had been unearthed, and the Abwehr expected to have her in their hands soon. Very soon, in fact, he added grimly.

That is one thing I could never bring myself to do, I said drop in a parachute. And the shudder which accompanied this comment was very real.

IT NOW BECAME MORE URGENT THAN EVER TO RAISE OUR MAQUIS FORCE to required strength. I turned for aid to an influential parish priest in Le Mans, Father LeBlanc. Thereafter, Father LeBlancs influence with his parishioners became our potent ally. Before long we had our force of 500 staunch Frenchmen, incredibly brave, utterly reckless when they got an opportunity to deal a hurtful blow against the invaders. They were divided into three groups, with widely scattered rendezvous.

Our arms and ammunition came from the skies. In answer to our requests, we would receive code messages giving the time and place of a parachute drop. Our favored method would be to round up the supplies, bury them, and wait for market day, when there was least risk in moving them. The enemy never knew that many of the innocent carts slowly trundling their way to market were loaded, under the turnips or hay, with Bren and Sten guns and long black boxes of cartridges.

Now we were able to launch a minor reign of terror in the very heart of Rommels area. We cut his communication lines as often as they were repaired. We blew up his petrol tanks. We kept the German maintenance crews busy with emery powder in diesel electric generators; we ambushed convoys, lying silently behind hedges and leaping out behind a blast of gunfire.

For these jobs we traveled miles into the lonely countryside, not only to minimize the danger of German reinforcements being rushed to the ambush but to avoid the brutal reprisals.

Then it camethe message we had waited forthe message which was, in the final analysis, the reason for our being there. None of us knew, of course, when the invasion was to come.

Our special instructions were only that we were to listen to the BBC without fail on the first and 15th of every month.

As soon as a prearranged alert came, each agent was to act on nightly preparatory commands aimed at deploying our forces for the crucial, coordinated strike on D-Day eve.

It came on the night of June 5, 1944. That midnight in full force we followed our blueprint.blow up the turntables in the Le Mans railway yardscut every telephone wire leading out of the city. Blow up all possible road and rail bridges.

Never had my Maquis been so bold, so ruthless, so reckless. What they had scarcely dared hope for during four years of soul-deadening defeat had come true. They were like men possessedpossessed by an unholy joy. So reckless had they been, in fact, that we thought it wise to suspend all operations for a day or two.

On the night we were to reassemble I walked through the forest toward our meeting place. Suddenly a hand was laid on my arm and a voice whispered, It is Jean. Do not speak.

I walked beside Jean, knowing something terrible had happened. Not until we had gone more than a mileaway from the rendezvousdid he speak, and then there was agony in his voice.

They came, he said. The Abwehr. As we were eating. They surrounded the place, at least 200 of them. We got a warning from the lookouts, but as soon as they shouted, the Boche opened fire. We fired back as we ran. How many broke out, and how many were killed and captured, I do not know.

We made our way in grim silence to the emergency rendezvous. A handful of men were there. I was glad to see that Paul, our dependable, resourceful group leader, was among them. He tried to be optimistic.

It will be hours before we know how many are lost, he said. Many will make wide detours, and many will be waiting hidden in the woods to warn you.

By dawn 80 men had stumbled into the hidden clearing, some wounded, some exhausted. One man I kept watching for did not come. He was the wireless operatorby far the most important single person in the group. I questioned each man as he arrived. One of the last to come in told me: Dumont is dead. He was sitting beside me.

Without Dumont we were no longer an organized action group. There could be no more contact with headquarters in London. His death made us guerrillas.

In the afternoon one of the men who had escaped the raid came in with the bitter details that he had gathered in the town.

Few of our men had salvaged their guns. We had practically no ammunition. By now the Abwehr would know the names of everyone in the group, so that none could enter Le Mans. Worse, because we were out of touch with headquarters, there could be no more droppings of guns and ammunition.

There remained only one course of action open to usto do as much damage as we could before the inevitable closed in.

OUR LAST PROPOSED OPERATION ASSUMED DOUBLE IMPORTANCEthe blowing up of a munitions train bringing guns and ammunition to Rommel. There would have to be a change in plans, for we would now have to disable the engine and capture precious supplies intact before setting the train afire.

Never had we planned an operation more carefully, or measured out demolition charges so precisely.

We could see the smoke of the engine far off as we lay flattened along the top of the embankment.

The train approached with maddening deliberation, seemed to hang poised over the detonatorthen, in slow motion, the engine toppled on its side and dragged with it three or four freight cars.

Instantly all was confusion.

Hissing white steam enveloped the engine. Guards screamed as they jumped from the overturned cars. From the embankment came the crash of rifle volleys. Here and there I could see the trains guards drop and lie still by the tracks. Others returned our fire wildly. Groups of Maquis moved in on the crippled train, guns blazing. Soon came the signalall resistance ended.

Speed had been the essential ingredient of the operation, and now it was even more necessary. In a few minuteswhen the train failed to confirm its arrival at the next signal pointretribution would be on its way. We worked against time to locate and unload the small, light, and efficient German utility guns of the tommy-gun variety; these we would use in running battles with the Wehrmacht.

Those who had lost their guns in the raid rearmed themselves immediately and stuffed their pockets full of cartridges. We formed lines to carry guns and ammunition to waiting trucks.

Finally we laid short-fused demolition charges under the railway wagons. Then we scattered, to travel fast but by wide detours to the new rendezvous.

We were still in sight of the train when the first charge went off with a force that nearly lifted us off our feet. When we were miles away, we could still hear muffled explosions as the train methodically blew itself to pieces.

In the frenzied days that followed, many of our gallant men died in forays, in ambushes, in attacks on the flanks of enemy columns moving against the invasion. Then one day a patrol brought back tremendous news. They had contacted a patrol from General [George] Pattons army. Conducted to an advance post they had asked what action would best fit in with the Americans plan of campaign around Le Mans.

Airports, they were told. Tackle any airports in your district. Those Heinkel dive-bombers have been giving us hell!

Three planes had crashed to earth before the airports defenders, a regiment of Luftwaffe troops, were alerted. Although they greatly outnumbered the Maquis, we had one tremendous advantagecover. Every time they tried to cross the airport and get within striking distance of us, we pinned them down with rapid fire.

Until midafternoon we contained the Luftwaffe regiment. Then it camethe sound of heavy gunfire from the direction of Le Mans. By nightfall General Pattons forces had the airfield surrounded.

WITH MY IDENTITY ESTABLISHED, THE AMERICANS ASSIGNED ME TO INTELLIGENCE COORDINATIONquestioning prisoners. Then came the strangest experience in that final phase of my military career.

One day I was assigned a prisoner who had proved exceptionally stubborn under preliminary questioning by American Intelligence officers. They were turning him over to me in hopes that I might be able to break down his adamant silence.

I glanced at the name on the briefing sheet. It was my colonel of the bistros.

He marched in with his head in the air, stood before my desk, saluted automatically, and looked at me for the first time. His eyes stared from their sockets. His face turned crimson. You! he gasped. You!

As I motioned him to the chair before my desk, I could almost see the thoughts whirling through his brainamazement, disbelief, self-reproach, then finally a grudging respect. He shrugged and sat down. A grim half smile flickered on his lips.

What is it you would like to knowthat I have not already told you? he asked. There was bitterness in his tone, but also a slight note of mockery in his voice, almost of banter.

Oh, there are a few gaps, I answered. MHQ

This article appears in the Autumn 2018 issue (Vol. 31, No. 1) of MHQThe Quarterly Journal of Military History with the headline: I, Spy
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SEOULHumane Society International is celebrating a successful end to its campaign in South Korea to abolish the use of beagles in long-term testing of pesticides. This follows an announcement by the countrys pesticide authority that it will join the United States, European Union, India, Canada and Japan in removing the unnecessary 1-year dog test requirement.

The decision was announced as a part of the 2018 Regulatory Innovation project by Koreas Rural Development Administration to harmonize pesticide regulation internationally, following intense pressure from HSI, industry and members of Koreas National Assembly. This represents the final step in a nearly 20-year effort to abolish this cruel and needless test. More than 250,000 HSI supporters worldwide signed the petition to abolish the outdated test.

HSI Vice President of Research & Toxicology Troy Seidle stated, We welcome Koreas decision to abolish this unnecessary and inhumane test on dogs but urge the Rural Development Administration to move more swiftly toward the replacement of obsolete animal test requirements and the adoption of new approaches once the scientific evidence is in. It is unacceptable that thousands of beagles have been made to suffer needlessly for two decades due to bureaucratic foot-dragging.

Help us win more victories for animals.

Pesticides are among the most extensively animal-tested products in existence. As many as 10,000 rodents, fish, birds, rabbits, dogs and other animals are killed in government-required toxicity (chemical poisoning) tests for every pesticide chemical authorized for use. There is a great deal of redundancy in current requirements, such as repeating the same test in two or more species, or via different routes of exposure (force-feeding, forced inhalation, skin contact). Scientists have questioned the value of the 1-year dog test since the late 1990s, and its removal from government test requirements across the globe has been a gradual process driven by a variety of stakeholders, including HSI.

HSIs team in Korea has briefed Rural Development Administration officials and the Korean Society of Pesticide Science on this topic, and HSI was responsible for bringing this issue to the attention of members of the National Assembly Committee on Agriculture, Food, Rural Affairs and Oceans & Fisheries. During the Assemblys 2017 inspection process of government ministries, agriculture committee member Mr. Wanju Park urged the administrator of RDA to do more to reduce animal testing for pesticide tests, to which the administrator responded that RDA will strengthen its efforts to replace animal testing.

Mr. Park stated, I applaud the authoritys decision to stop unnecessary animal suffering of dogs for the testing of pesticides. I hope this is one of many more progressive regulatory changes to come by the RDA.

Although RDAs recent announcement is encouraging, HSI notes with disappointment that the December 2017 updated test guidelines continue to require animal tests where non-animal replacement approaches are readily available, particularly in eye and skin irritation tests involving rabbits. HSI is urging Korean authorities to move more swiftly to adopt internationally recognized test methods and to collaborate more actively across ministries to lead regulatory science into the 21st century and away from outdated animal testing.

Rural Development Administration announcement (Korean)

END

Media contact: Borami Seo, bseo@hsi.org, +82 (0)2 2015 7988
Suzanne Merritt gives U.S. Small Business Administration officials Robert Nelson, Keith Girouard, and Wendell Davis a tour of Lenox Fit. Jefferson Diller will be one of the speakers at Thursday's conference. Merritt has put a lot of time, effort, and money into sprucing up the fitness center and finding other businesses to which to lease space. Steve Oakes says thousands of pounds of bed sheets and linens from hotels need to be cleaned every day and he's willing to provide a more efficient way to do so. PreviousNext

SBA Touts Small Business Success Stories of The Berkshires



Steve Oakes has a really cool washing machine  well, actually four of them. LENOX, Mass.  For most of her life, Suzanne Merritt always played it safe and conservative.

Then she got cancer and her perspective changed. For years she had it in her mind that one day she would be able to own the gym where she was a trainer but always saw it as an intimidating risk.

But after cancer, she realized the worst thing that would happen with a business is that it would fail, not kill her.

So she went all in for it. It took some 10 months to finally work out a deal but eventually, she purchased Lenox Fitness Center and Spa  now called Lenox Fit  and transformed it into what she envisioned.

Her plan was to have a physical therapy business rent out the spa area and that happened in one year  not the three she expected. All of the equipment has been revamped. There are more and more businesses and trainers leasing space.

But the biggest turning point isn't what immediately strikes the eye, but what doesn't. It was estimated that she needed $70,000 worth of investment in the air system. But she worked with more contractors and ultimately decided to do an insulation project instead. That freed up money for her to pave the parking lot.

Those two projects were a large part of Merritt being able to grow her income exponentially. But they wouldn't have been possible without the help of the U.S. Small Business Administration.

"I didn't have the capital needed to put down," Merritt said.

The federal agency provides loans to small businesses to help them grown. Wendell Davis, the Region I New England administrator, said that capital component is what ultimately sinks many businesses as the owners just try to squeak by without putting in needed investment.

"A lot of small businesses start without that capital piece, or they wait too long. They try to do it with sweat equity and a credit card here or a credit card there," Davis said.

Now three years later, Merritt is seeing the fruits of that early labor and has invested another $20,000 more of her own capital  without using a loan  to further upgrade the historic farmhouse in which her business is located. And she's got plenty of plans for future growth.

Jefferson Diller and his wife, Klara Austin, started their business out of their apartment in 2007. Klara's Gourmet Cookies started to catch on and they moved into a house in a commercial zone. They started adding employees, and are now up to three full-timers and a part-timer. But the demand from stores in every state continues to grow.

"We work 13-14 hours a day at this point, which we hope we will moderate," Diller said of him and his wife.

They're running out of space, but not for long. They found a building on Water Street in Lee and with the help of a U.S. Small Business Administration loan are building it out to double capacity. And with that, they'll be adding two more people.

Massachusetts Director Robert Nelson said the SBA gives out millions of dollars worth of loans. There are lenders throughout the state that offer the assistance. An SBA 504 loan lowers the amount down a small business will have to put in order to secure funding and some SBA-backed loans guarantee banks 75 to 85 percent of the borrowed amount.

"Last year in Massachusetts, we helped about 2,800 small businesses get about $800,000 million in capital support. The smallest loan was for $1,000 and the largest was $5 million. Most of our loans in Massachusetts are under $150,000. We are really successful with low-dollar loans," Nelson said.

There are 150 lenders across the state equipped to offer those loans. Melissa Tremblay, vice president of commercial lending for Adams Community Bank, worked with Diller and Austin on their loan. She said the bank financed the entire project up front after the couple spent two years looking for a location.

Tremblay said Adams Community Bank alone has five loans through the SBA's guarantee program and two through the 504 program this year.

Davis said the idea isn't to become a lender, but rather to help banks expand their offerings to clients who may not traditionally be eligible.

"We're not here to replace banks. We are here to help banks sleep at night. A lot of startups don't meet all of the criteria a bank needs so we're here to expand that reach for the banks to reach out to," Davis said.

Right here in the Berkshires, the Massachusetts Small Business Development Center Network serves as the way to connect small businesses to such loans and provide other resources.

"It is access to capital. It is counseling, technical assistance, but it is also government-contractual assistance in trying to help small businesses be more successful in selling to the federal government," Nelson said.

Keith Girouard and Jayne Monteleone-Bellora both work out of the Dunham Mall office in Pittsfield and connect the right players. Such was the case with Steve Oakes when he sought to open Green Apple Linens on West Housatonic Street.

"It was the grimiest, dilapidated, beat-up, falling-down building in Pittsfield. But what it has going for it was high ceilings, wide open space, a parking lot, a place to pull a truck in. We just kept going down the list and the price was very good," Oakes said.

It was the old Tire Warehouse, which moved to a nicer location on Merrill Road. Oakes had originally wanted to open such a business from the basement of a building he already owns on North Street but that wasn't feasible.

He bought the building, with help from Mill Town Capital and an SBA loan, and cleaned up the inside, put in a new gas line, power, and water line to the street, and purchased state-of-the-art laundry machines. He had just one customer, but one worth bragging about: Canyon Ranch.



By the end of the year, Klara's Gourmet Cookies will be baked in the new location and there will be a whole lot more for sale. His business model is fairly unique for the Berkshires. When it comes to hotel sheets and other linen, hotels often rent them from a company that also cleans them. But some hotels use their own linen and laundry. That's where Oakes Green Apple Linens comes in.

Oakes said he has very efficient technology that includes beads being used to reduce the amount of chemicals, computer-controlled measuring of water content, and a $70,000 ironer to cut down manpower needed for folding from four to one. The chemicals are all computer-controlled and mixed through pre-set recipes and the beads use a static charge to reduce the amount of detergent and water needed.

"There is still detergent involved but it is about half. There is still some tumbling but it is more of making sure the beads get access to every surface," Oakes said.

Because of the increased efficiency, Oakes said he can do the laundry for hotels at a lower cost. He plans on expanding in the future, too, as more hotels close their in-house laundries and contract that work elsewhere.

The three business were all stops from U.S. Small Business Administration officials on Wednesday, the day before a business summit on loan programs at the Berkshire Athenaeum. Davis said federal officials from all over will be meeting in the Berkshires to particularly promote rural development and programs helping small businesses more easily get federal contracts.

"This is one of a series and we are continually scheduling more of them," Davis said, with Nelson adding that it will be the second one in Massachusetts.
North Adams Airport Receives Two Bids for Administration Building

NORTH ADAMS, Mass.  The Airport Commission only received two bids for the Administrative Building renovation project.

Peter Enzien of Stantec Consulting Services, the airport's engineer, told the commission Tuesday that bids were opened Sept. 7 from DA Sullivan & Sons of Northampton and Burke Construction of Adams.

"We received two bids, which was a little bit of a surprise based on the interest," he said. "We thought we would get four or five."

Enzien said close to 80 different companies had responded to the project and pulled bid documents so the drastically lower number was surprising.

DA Sullivan & Sons is the low bidder at $3.6 million. Burke came in at $3.8 million.

"Both bids were in about 3 percent of each other so they were pretty good," he said.

The 8,700 square foot facility was built in 2001 on leased airport land, was donated to the city by Berkshire Health Systems. The city plans to move the vacant medical building on the north side of the airport onto the campus and use it as a new administrative building. The structure will contain administrative offices and a small public restaurant, although that will be slightly larger than the previous version with 62 seats. The second floor will also hold offices, storage and mechanicals. The building will need to be moved, expanded and renovated to meet the airport's needs.

Enzien said sub bids were opened in late August, however, no one filed bids for acoustical tile and roofing. He said the bid opening was extended for the general contractors because they had to absorb these two sub bids.

An application for a state Department of Transportation grant will have to be prepared and some other paperwork finalized before the commission can award a bid.

If all goes as planned, construction could start in mid- to late October.

In other business, Administrative Officer Michael Canales relayed a request from the airport manager to cut brush at the far end of the airport.

"We had these done a few years ago," Canales said. "But there hasn't been any cutting done and the concern is that if we let it go, we won't be able to clean it but right now we think we can clear it."

Canales said he will work with the Department of Public Works and try to make this an annual city task.

"We should be trying to stay up on that, and we want to get an annual cutting over there," he said. "We don't want it to get overgrown in the future."




iciHaiti - Education : Grand'Anse handing over keys for 11 reconstructed and rehabilitated schools





Wednesday, September 19 at the National School Catherine Flon in the city of Jeremie, was held the ceremony of handing over keys by Solidarite Laique Haiti, for 11 schools rebuilt and rehabilitated in the department of Grand'Anse with the support of the French Development Agency (AFD) and the French Embassy. The opportunity to review the history of this project that brought together the efforts of 6 French and Haitian organizations, Haitian authorities and local populations.



This new infrastructure with anticyclonic and earthquake standards has a capacity of about 3,500 students.



Mrs. Anna Lipchitz, Director of AFD, Thomas Poirier, Representative of the Embassy of France, Jean Ernseau Dauphin, Departmental Director of Education and Junior Mercier Head of Mission of Solidarite Laique Haiti, spoke around the importance education for sustainable reconstruction in Haiti.



This key handover also made it possible to present the future actions of "Timoun Retounen Lekol" a reconstruction project started in 2017 and co-financed by AFD with the aim of sustainably encouraging children to return to and stay in school in 60 schools in the Great South and make the population less vulnerable to climate hazards.



The ceremony began at the Catherine Flon National School in Jeremie and continued at Lycee Nord Alexis, still in the city of Jeremie.



IH/ iciHaiti


















Photo for illustration (Source: VNA)

It is an initiative of the Vietnamese Embassy in Ukraine and belongs to the curriculum of the field of hotel, Department of Hotel and Restaurant Business of the Kyiv National University of Trade and Economics. The first ever activity is also part of the Vietnam Cultural Year in Ukraine launched by the Vietnamese Embassy.

At the event, Vietnamese experts introduced the cuisine culture of Vietnam, provided documents and guidance on how to make the two dishes to lecturers and students of the university.

Mr. Valery Say, Deputy Rector of the university, highly appreciated the initiative, hoping that the two sides would have more activities to boost the cooperation in the fields of education and cultural exchange./.
By Andre Vltchek

September 19, 2018 " Information Clearing House " - Im sitting at the splendid building of the Singapore National Library, in a semi-dark room, microfilm inserted into a high-tech machine. Im watching and then filming and photographing several old Malaysian newspapers dating back from October 1965.



These reports were published right after the horrible 1965 military coup in Indonesia, which basically overthrew the progressive President Sukarno and liquidated then the third largest Communist party on Earth, PKI (Partai Komunis Indonesia). More than one million Indonesian people lost their lives in some of the most horrifying massacres of the 20th century. From a socialist (and soon to be Communist) country, Indonesia descended into the present pits of turbo-capitalism, as well as religious and extreme right-wing gaga.



The United States, United Kingdom, Australia, Holland and several other Western nations, directly sponsored the coup, while directing both the pro-Western treasonous factions in the military, as well as the religious leaders who stood, from the start, at the forefront of the genocide.



All this information is, of course, widely available in the de-classified archives of both the CIA and U.S. State Department. It can be accessed, analyzed and reproduced. I personally made a film about the events, and so have several other directors.



But it isnt part of the memory of humanity. In Southeast Asia, it is known only to a handful of intellectuals.



In Malaysia, Singapore or Thailand, the Indonesian post-1965 fascism is a taboo topic. It is simply not discussed. Progressive intellectuals here are, like in all other client states of the West, paid to be preoccupied with their sex orientation, with gender issues and personal freedoms, but definitely not with the essential matters (Western imperialism, neo-colonialism, the savage and grotesque forms of capitalism, the plunder of local natural resources and environment, as well as disinformation, plus the forcefully injected ignorance that is accompanied by mass amnesia) that have been shaping so extremely and so negatively this part of the world.

In Indonesia itself, the Communist Party is banned and the general public sees it as a culprit, not as a victim.

The West is laughing behind the back of its brainwashed victims. It is laughing all the way to the bank.

Lies are obviously paying off.

No other part of the world has suffered from Western imperialism as much after WWII, as Southeast Asia did, perhaps with two exceptions, those of Africa and the Middle East.

In so-called Indochina, the West murdered close to ten million people, during the indiscriminate bombing campaigns and other forms of terror  in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. The abovementioned Indonesian coup took at least 1 million human lives. 30% of the population of East Timor was exterminated by the Indonesian occupation, which was fully supported by the West. The Thai regime, fully subservient to the West, killed indiscriminately its leftists in the north and in the capital. The entire region has been suffering from extreme religious implants, sponsored by the West itself, and by its allies from the Gulf.

But the West is admired here, with an almost religious zeal.

The U.S., British and French press agencies and cultural centers are spreading disinformation through local media outlets owned by subservient elites. Local education has been devotedly shaped by Western didactic concepts. In places like Malaysia, Indonesia, but also Thailand, the greatest achievement is to graduate from university in one of the countries that used to colonize this part of the world.

Victim countries, instead of seeking compensation in courts, are actually admiring and plagiarizing the West, while pursuing, even begging for funding from their past and present tormentors.

Southeast Asia, now obedient, submissive, phlegmatic and stripped off the former revolutionary left-wing ideologies, is where the Western indoctrination and propaganda scored unquestionable victory.

*

The same day, I turned on the television set in my hotel room, and watched the Western coverage of the situation in Idlib, the last stronghold of the Western-sponsored terrorists on Syrian territory.

Russia has called for an emergency UN Security Council meeting warning that the terrorists might stage a chemical attack, and then blame it, together with the West, on the forces of President Bashar al-Assad.

NATO battleships have been deployed to the region. There can be no doubt  it has been a good old European/North American scenario at work, once again: We hit you, kill your people, and then bomb you as a punishment.

Imperialist gangsters then point accusative fingers at the victims (in this case Syria) and at those who are trying to protect them (Russia, Iran, Hezbollah, China). Just like in a kindergarten, or a primary school; remember? A boy hits someone from behind and then screams, pointing at someone else: It was him, it was him! Miraculously, until now, the West has always gotten away with this strategy, of course, at the cost of billions of victims, on all continents.

That is how it used to be for centuries, and that is how it still works. That is how it will continue to be, until such terror and gangsterism is stopped.

*

For years and decades, we were told that the world is now increasingly inter-connected, that nothing of great importance could happen, without it being immediately spotted and reported by vigilant media lenses, and civil society.

Yet, thousands of things are happening and no one is noticing.

Just in the last two decades, entire countries have been singled-out by North America and Europe, then half-starved to death through embargos and sanctions, before being finally attacked and broken to pieces: Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya to mention just a few. Governments of several left-wing nations have been overthrown either from outside, or through their own, local, servile elites and media; among them Brazil, Honduras and Paraguay. Countless Western companies and their local cohorts are committing the unbridled plunder of natural resources in such places as Borneo/Kalimantan or the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), totally ruining tropical forests while murdering hundreds of species.

Are we, as a planet, really inter-connected? How much do people know about each other, or about what is done to their brothers and sisters on different continents?

I have worked in some 160 countries, and I can testify without the slightest hesitation: Almost nothing. And: Less and much less!

The Western empire and its lies, has managed to fragment the world to previously unknown extremes. It is all done in the open, in full view of the world, which is somehow unable to see and identify the most urgent threats to its survival. Mass media propaganda outlets are serving as vehicles of indoctrination, so do cultural and educational institutions of the West or those local ones shaped by the Western concepts. That includes such diverse tools as universities, Internet traffic manipulators, censors and self-censored individuals, social media, advertisement agencies and pop culture artists.

*

There is a clear pattern to Western colonialist and neo-colonialist barbarity and lies:

Indonesian President Sukarno and his closest ally the Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI) were trying to build a progressive and self-sufficient country. Therefore, they had to be stopped, government overthrown, party members massacred, PKI itself banned and the entire country privatized; sold to foreign interests. The overwhelming majority of Indonesians are so brainwashed by the local and Western propaganda that they still blame the Communists for the 1965 coup, no matter what the CIA archives say.

Mossadegh of Iran was on the same, progressive course. And he ended up the same way as Sukarno. And the whole world was then charmed by the butcher, who was put to power by the West  the Shah and his lavish wife.

Chile in 1973, and thereafter, the same deadly pattern occurred, more evidence of how freedom-loving and democratic the West is.

Patrice Lumumba of Congo nationalized natural resources and tried to feed and educate his great nation. Result? Overthrown, killed. The price: some 8 million people massacred in the last two decades, or maybe many more than that (see my film: Rwanda Gambit ). Nobody knows, or everyone pretends that they dont know.

Syria! The biggest crime of this country, at least in the eyes of the West, consisted of trying to provide its citizens with high quality of life, while promoting Pan-Arabism. The results we all know (or do we, really?): hundreds of thousands killed by West-sponsored murderous extremists, millions exiled and millions internally displaced. And the West, naturally, is blaming Syrian President, and is ready to punish him if he wins the war.

Irrational? But can global-scale fascism ever be rational?

The lies that are being spread by the West are piling up. They overlap, often contradict one another. But the world public is not trained to search for the truth, anymore. Subconsciously it senses that it is being lied to, but the truth is so horrifying, that the great majority of people prefer to simply take selfies, analyze and parade its sexual orientation, stick earphones into its ears and listen to empty pop music, instead of fighting for the survival of humanity.

I wrote entire books on this topic, including the near 1,000-page :  Exposing Lies Of The Empire .

This essay is just a series of thoughts that came to my mind, while I was sitting at a projector in a dark room of the Singapore National Library.

A rhetorical question kept materializing: Can all this be happening? Can the West get away with all these crimes it has been committing for centuries, all over the world?

The answer was clear: But of course, as long as it is not stopped!

And so, A luta continua!

*

Andre Vltchek is a philosopher, novelist, filmmaker and investigative journalist. He has covered wars and conflicts in dozens of countries. Three of his latest books are Revolutionary Optimism, Western Nihilism , a revolutionary novel Aurora and a bestselling work of political non-fiction:  Exposing Lies Of The Empire . View his other books here . Watch Rwanda Gambit , his groundbreaking documentary about Rwanda and DRCongo and his film/dialogue with Noam Chomsky On Western Terrorism . Vltchek presently resides in East Asia and the Middle East, and continues to work around the world. He can be reached through his website and his Twitter .

This article was originally published on New Eastern Outlook.

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==See Also==

Vietnam: The Quiet Mutiny from John Pilger on Vimeo.

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Peace and joy
By James Petras

Introduction

September 19, 2018 " Information Clearing House " - In a previous article (US: The Century of Lost Wars) I recorded the repeated US military defeats over the past two decades. In this discussion I will describe the role of military strategists who bear responsibility for the US defeats, but also for Israeli political successes.

The key to this apparent contradiction is to uncover how and why the destruction of Israeli adversaries prolonged costly US military invasions.

The two outcomes are inter-related. The same US military strategists whose policies lead to failed US wars in the Middle East facilitated and augmented the power of Israel.

US war strategists operations reflect dual loyalties. On the one-hand they receive their elite education and high positions in the US, while their political loyalties to Tel Aviv express their Israel First strategic decisions.

Our hypothesis is that dual loyalist strategists have fabricated threats, identified adversaries and committed hundreds of thousands of US soldiers to losing wars based on calculations that effectively increase Israeli power and influence in the Middle East.

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We will proceed by identifying the war strategists and their policies and conclude by proposing an alternative framework for re-thinking the relationship between dual citizens and military strategy.

The Best and the Brightest: The Blind Ally of Military Defeats

There is an apparent contradiction between the high academic achievements of elite military strategists and their abominable record in pursuing military conflicts.

Most, if not all, policy makers who led the US in prolonged wars against Iraq, Somalia, Libya, Yemen, Afghanistan, Lebanon and Syria were Israel-firsters, either Zionists or Israeli fellow travelers.

In each of these wars, the Israel firster war strategists, (1) identified the enemy, (2) exaggerated the threat to the US and (3) grossly inflated the military capacity of the targeted country. They started with Iraq and Afghanistan and then proceeded to the other nations, all opponents of Israel.

By coincidence all countries supported the Palestinians rights of self-determination and opposed Israeli annexation and colonization of Arab lands.

Driven by their loyalty to Israels expansionist goals, the military strategists ignored the real world political and economic costs to the US people and state. Professional and academic credentials, nepotism and tribal loyalties, each contributed to the Israel firsters advance to securing strategic decision-making positions and elite advisory posts in the Pentagon, State Department, Treasury and White House.

Their policies led to an unending trillion-dollar war in Afghanistan; losing wars in Libya, Iraq and Syria; and costly economic sanctions against Iran.

The main beneficiary was Israel which confronted less political and military opposition; zero cost in lives and money; and substantial gains in territory.

Why did the Yale, Harvard, Princeton, Chicago, Johns Hopkins cum laude graduates repeatedly produce the worst possible military outcomes?

In part because the US acted as an instrument of another power (Israel). Moreover, the Israel firsters never were obliged to reflect in self-criticism nor to admit their failures and rectify their disastrous strategies..

Their refusal to assume their responsibilities resulted from several causes. Their criteria for success was based on whether their policies advanced Israeli goals, not US interests.

Moreover, while their decisions were objectionable to US citizens they were supported by the 52 Presidents of the Major American Jewish Organization including the powerful Zionist lobby, AIPAC, which dictated Middle East policy to both political parties and the US Congress.

Ordinarily, military strategists whose policies lead to repeated political disasters are denounced, fired or even investigated for treason. In our experience nothing of the sort happened.

The best and the brightest rotated between six-digit jobs in Washington to seven-digit positions on Wall Street, or secured positions in lucrative law firms in Washington and New York (many with offices in Israel) or were appointed to prestigious academic posts in Ivy League universities.

What Should be Done?

There are countervailing measures which can lessen the impact of the strategic policies of the Israel Firsters. Academic Israel firsters should be encouraged to remain in Academia; rather than serve Israel in the State.

If they remain in the Ivory Tower they will inflict less destructive policies on American citizens and the state.

Secondly, since the vast-majority of Israel firsters are more likely to be arm chair war monger, who have not risked their lives in any of the wars that they promote, obligatory recruitment into combat zones would dampen their ardor for wars.

Thirdly, as matters stand, since many more Israel firsters choose to serve in the so-called Israeli Defense (sic) Force (IDF) they should reimburse US taxpayers for their free ride to education, health and welfare .

Fourthly, since most Israel firsters who volunteer to join the IDF prefer shooting unarmed Palestinian protesters, medics, journalists and kite flying kids they should be drafted into the US Army to serve in Afghanistan and face armed Taliban fighters surrounding Kabul, an experience which might knock a bit of realism in their dreams of converting the Middle East into an Israeli fiefdom.

Many national loyalties are forged by shared lives with families and friends of US soldiers who endure endless wars. Israel firsters dispatched to the war front would receive existential experiences that the Harvard, Princeton and Yale military strategists who make wars for Israel failed to understand.

Obligatory courses on the genocide of millions of Palestinian, Iraqi, Syrian, and Libyan people would enrich Israel firsters understanding of holocausts in diverse ethno-religious settings.

Face to face encounters in life threatening military situations, where superior arms do not prevail, would deflate the hubris, arrogance and superiority complexes which fuel the tribal loyalties of Israel firsters.

In conclusion we offer modest suggestions for educated and cultured scientists, doctors, artists and entrepreneurs:

1/ Convert your skills to raising a new generation which will defend democratic values and social solidarity and eschew wars, persecution and phony claims of anti-semitism against critics of an ethnically exclusionary state.

2/ Forsake exclusive control of the mass media which glorifies Israeli war crimes and denigrates critics as anti Semites for speaking truth to power.

Lets join together to liberate America from military entanglements that privilege Israel while thirty million Us workers lack health coverage and forty percent of upstate New York children live in poverty.

Yes, there is an honorable place for everyone who joins in solidarity with the victims of Israeli First war strategists.

James Petras is a Bartle Professor (Emeritus) of Sociology at Binghamton University, New York.

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By John W. Whitehead

That was when they suspended the Constitution. They said it would be temporary. There wasn't even any rioting in the streets. People stayed home at night, watching television, looking for some direction. There wasn't even an enemy you could put your finger on.Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale

September 19, 2018 " Information Clearing House " - We can pretend that the Constitution, which was written to hold the government accountable, is still our governing document.

The reality we must come to terms with, however, is that in the America we live in today, the government does whatever it wants, freedom be damned.

We the people have been terrorized, traumatized, and tricked into a semi-permanent state of compliance by a government that cares nothing for our lives or our liberties.

The bogeymans names and faces may change over time (terrorism, the war on drugs, illegal immigration, etc.), but the end result remains the same: our unquestioning acquiescence to anything the government wants to do in exchange for the phantom promise of safety and security.

Thus, in the so-called named of national security, the Constitution has been steadily chipped away at, undermined, eroded, whittled down, and generally discarded to such an extent that what we are left with today is but a shadow of the robust document adopted more than two centuries ago.

Most of the damage, however, has been inflicted upon the Bill of Rightsthe first ten amendments to the Constitutionwhich historically served as the bulwark from government abuse.

A recitation of the Bill of Rightsset against a backdrop of government surveillance, militarized police, SWAT team raids, asset forfeiture, eminent domain, overcriminalization, armed surveillance drones, whole body scanners, stop and frisk searches (all sanctioned by Congress, the White House, the courts and the like)would understandably sound more like a eulogy to freedoms lost than an affirmation of rights we truly possess.

Here is what it means to live under the Constitution today.

The First Amendment is supposed to protect the freedom to speak your mind, assemble and protest nonviolently without being bridled by the government. It also protects the freedom of the media, as well as the right to worship and pray without interference. In other words, Americans should not be silenced by the government. To the founders, all of America was a free speech zone.

Despite the clear protections found in the First Amendment, the freedoms described therein are under constant assault. Increasingly, Americans are being arrested and charged with bogus contempt of cop charges such as disrupting the peace or resisting arrest for daring to film police officers engaged in harassment or abusive practices. Journalists are being prosecuted for reporting on whistleblowers. States are passing legislation to muzzle reporting on cruel and abusive corporate practices. Religious ministries are being fined for attempting to feed and house the homeless. Protesters are being tear-gassed, beaten, arrested and forced into free speech zones. And under the guise of government speech, the courts have reasoned that the government can discriminate freely against any First Amendment activity that takes place within a government forum.

The Second Amendment was intended to guarantee the right of the people to keep and bear arms. Essentially, this amendment was intended to give the citizenry the means to resist tyrannical government. Yet while gun ownership has been recognized by the U.S. Supreme Court as an individual citizen right, Americans remain powerless to defend themselves against SWAT team raids and government agents armed to the teeth with military weapons better suited for the battlefield. As such, this amendment has been rendered null and void.

The Third Amendment reinforces the principle that civilian-elected officials are superior to the military by prohibiting the military from entering any citizens home without the consent of the owner. With the police increasingly training like the military, acting like the military, and posing as military forcescomplete with heavily armed SWAT teams, military weapons, assault vehicles, etc.it is clear that we now have what the founders feared mosta standing army on American soil.

The Fourth Amendment prohibits government agents from conducting surveillance on you or touching you or invading you, unless they have some evidence that youre up to something criminal. In other words, the Fourth Amendment ensures privacy and bodily integrity. Unfortunately, the Fourth Amendment has suffered the greatest damage in recent years and has been all but eviscerated by an unwarranted expansion of police powers that include strip searches and even anal and vaginal searches of citizens, surveillance (corporate and otherwise) and intrusions justified in the name of fighting terrorism, as well as the outsourcing of otherwise illegal activities to private contractors.

The Fifth Amendment and the Sixth Amendment work in tandem. These amendments supposedly ensure that you are innocent until proven guilty, and government authorities cannot deprive you of your life, your liberty or your property without the right to an attorney and a fair trial before a civilian judge. However, in the new suspect society in which we live, where surveillance is the norm, these fundamental principles have been upended. Certainly, if the government can arbitrarily freeze, seize or lay claim to your property (money, land or possessions) under government asset forfeiture schemes, you have no true rights.

The Seventh Amendment guarantees citizens the right to a jury trial. Yet when the populace has no idea of whats in the Constitutioncivic education has virtually disappeared from most school curriculumsthat inevitably translates to an ignorant jury incapable of distinguishing justice and the law from their own preconceived notions and fears. However, as a growing number of citizens are coming to realize, the power of the jury to nullify the governments actionsand thereby help balance the scales of justiceis not to be underestimated. Jury nullification reminds the government that we the people retain the power to ultimately determine what laws are just.

The Eighth Amendment is similar to the Sixth in that it is supposed to protect the rights of the accused and forbid the use of cruel and unusual punishment. However, the Supreme Courts determination that what constitutes cruel and unusual should be dependent on the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society leaves us with little protection in the face of a society lacking in morals altogether.

The Ninth Amendment provides that other rights not enumerated in the Constitution are nonetheless retained by the people. Popular sovereigntythe belief that the power to govern flows upward from the people rather than downward from the rulersis clearly evident in this amendment. However, it has since been turned on its head by a centralized federal government that sees itself as supreme and which continues to pass more and more laws that restrict our freedoms under the pretext that it has an important government interest in doing so.

As for the Tenth Amendments reminder that the people and the states retain every authority that is not otherwise mentioned in the Constitution, that assurance of a system of government in which power is divided among local, state and national entities has long since been rendered moot by the centralized Washington, DC, power elitethe president, Congress and the courts. Indeed, the federal governmental bureaucracy has grown so large that it has made local and state legislatures relatively irrelevant. Through its many agencies and regulations, the federal government has stripped states of the right to regulate countless issues that were originally governed at the local level.

If there is any sense to be made from this recitation of freedoms lost, it is simply this: our individual freedoms have been eviscerated so that the governments powers could be expanded.

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Yet those who gave us the Constitution and the Bill of Rights believed that the government exists at the behest of its citizens. It is there to protect, defend and even enhance our freedoms, not violate them.

It was no idle happenstance that the Constitution opens with these three powerful words: We the people. As the Preamble proclaims:

We, the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this CONSTITUTION for the United States of America.

In other words, we have the power to make and break the government. We are the masters and they are the servants. We the American peoplethe citizenryare the arbiters and ultimate guardians of Americas welfare, defense, liberty, laws and prosperity.

Still, its hard to be a good citizen if you dont know anything about your rights or how the government is supposed to operate.

As the National Review rightly asks, How can Americans possibly make intelligent and informed political choices if they dont understand the fundamental structure of their government? American citizens have the right to self-government, but it seems that we increasingly lack the capacity for it.

Americans are constitutionally illiterate.

Most citizens have little, if any, knowledge about their basic rights. And our educational system does a poor job of teaching the basic freedoms guaranteed in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. For instance, when Newsweek asked 1,000 adult U.S. citizens to take Americas official citizenship test, 44% were unable to define the Bill of Rights.

A survey by the Annenberg Public Policy Center found that a little more than one-third of respondents (36 percent) could name all three branches of the U.S. government, while another one-third (35 percent) could not name a single one. Only a quarter of Americans (27 percent) know it takes a two-thirds vote of the House and Senate to override a presidential veto. One in five Americans (21 percent) incorrectly thinks that a 5-4 Supreme Court decision is sent back to Congress for reconsideration. And more than half of Americans do not know which party controls the House and Senate.

A 2006 survey by the McCormick Tribune Freedom Museum found that only one out of a thousand adults could identify the five rights protected by the First Amendment. On the other hand, more than half (52%) of the respondents could name at least two of the characters in the animated Simpsonstelevision family, and 20% could name all five. And although half could name none of the freedoms in the First Amendment, a majority (54%) could name at least one of the three judges on the TV program American Idol, 41% could name two and one-fourth could name all three.



It gets worse.

Many who responded to the survey had a strange conception of what was in the First Amendment. For example, 21% said the right to own a pet was listed someplace between Congress shall make no law and redress of grievances. Some 17% said that the First Amendment contained the right to drive a car, and 38% believed that taking the Fifth was part of the First Amendment.

Teachers and school administrators do not fare much better. A study conducted by the Center for Survey Research and Analysis found that one educator in five was unable to name any of the freedoms in the First Amendment.

In fact, while some educators want students to learn about freedom, they do not necessarily want them to exercise their freedoms in school. As the researchers conclude, Most educators think that students already have enough freedom, and that restrictions on freedom in the school are necessary. Many support filtering the Internet, censoring T-shirts, disallowing student distribution of political or religious material, and conducting prior review of school newspapers.

Government leaders and politicians are also ill-informed. Although they take an oath to uphold, support and defend the Constitution against enemies foreign and domestic, their lack of education about our fundamental rights often causes them to be enemies of the Bill of Rights.

So whats the solution?

Thomas Jefferson recognized that a citizenry educated on their rights, interests, and duties is the only real assurance that freedom will survive.

As Jefferson wrote in 1820: I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of our society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education. This is the true corrective of abuses of constitutional power.

From the President on down, anyone taking public office should have a working knowledge of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights and should be held accountable for upholding their precepts. One way to ensure this would be to require government leaders to take a course on the Constitution and pass a thorough examination thereof before being allowed to take office.

Some critics are advocating that students pass the United States citizenship exam in order to graduate from high school. Others recommend that it must be a prerequisite for attending college. Id go so far as to argue that students should have to pass the citizenship exam before graduating from grade school.

Heres an idea to get educated and take a stand for freedom: anyone who signs up to become a member of The Rutherford Institute gets a wallet-sized Bill of Rights card and a Know Your Rights card. Use this card to teach your children the freedoms found in the Bill of Rights.

If this constitutional illiteracy is not remedied and soon, freedom in America will be doomed.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, we have managed to keep the wolf at bay so far. Barely.

Our national priorities need to be re-prioritized. For instance, some argue that we need to make America great again. I, for one, would prefer to make America free again.

As actor-turned-activist Richard Dreyfuss warned:

Unless we teach the ideas that make America a miracle of government, it will go away in your kids lifetimes, and we will be a fable.You have to find the time and creativity to teach it in schools, and if you dont, you will lose it. You will lose it to the darkness, and what this country represents is a tiny twinkle of light in a history of oppression and darkness and cruelty. If it lasts for more than our lifetime, for more than our kids lifetime, it is only because we put some effort into teaching what it is, the ideas of America: the idea of opportunity, mobility, freedom of thought, freedom of assembly.

Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute . His new book Battlefield America: The War on the American People (SelectBooks, 2015) is available online at www.amazon.com. Whitehead can be contacted at johnw@rutherford.org.

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Home Search ICH Yellow Journalism and Trump Derangement Syndrome By Jerry Kroth September 19, 2018 " Information Clearing House " - This piece is not written by any hog-wild Trump minion, but it is an attempt to set the record straight against the backdrop of an unprecedented anti-Trump journalistic hysteria that has infected the media and, in turn, the American population. There indeed have been episodes of yellow journalism in our history. The Hearst newspapers whipped up collective hysteria to such intensity it led to he Spanish American War. The New York Times, Washington Post, U.S. News and World Reports and the Weekly Standard preached endlessly that said Saddam Hussein was involved with 9/11, was actively developing nuclear weaponsor both. Their cannonade of falsehood tipped the scales sufficiently to dupe the U.S. population into violating the UN charter, attacking a country that had never attacked us, and murdering more than 100,000 of its citizenssome say 500,000.i Todays warped journalism has reached a level of bias and one-sidedness that outdistances anything that preceded it. The storied New York Times published over 200 negative hit-pieces on Trump since his taking office, approximating a ratio of 40:1 negative to positive commentary, a level of imbalance unprecedented in modern times or for this newspaper. Perhaps Donald Trump is indeed a crook, a liar, a Putin puppet, an adulterer, whoremonger, narcissist, sociopath, thief, racist, fascist, and a tax-cheating, emollient-plotting criminal whose flock of felons are perched on the cusp of imprisonment and impeachment, but here instead is a compilation of facts rarely seen, easily disregarded, and generally denied which keep Americas collective Trump derangement syndrome primed, fueled, and fully alive. Buckle up for some objectivity and balance: Only three Presidents in American history declined to receive their salary. Donald Trump is one. ii iii

Trump donated $1 million to the victims of Hurricane Harvey, the largest single private charitable contribution of any sitting President in American history.iv v Since Trumps election, the stock market soared 34 percent and the wealth of Americas pensioners and holders of 401Ks increased $6 trillion in value.vi While the scourge of ISIS was occurring, from video beheadings to the genocidal rape and enslavement of whole populations like the Yazidis, Trump played a very large role in destroying this malignancy. The US holds the record for the largest trade deficit of any nation in the world, $566 billion in 2017, vii and while the media decries the evils of Trumpian protectionism, it rarely opines against the protectionism of China, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan or Germany. Each of these countries boast trade surpluses every year. Trump is the first president to attempt a reversal of this pathological trend by using tariffs to restore a balance in egregious American deficits that have been going on since 1973. A Harvard-Gallup reveals that Americans overwhelmingly wish to see an end to illegal immigration with 76 percent wanting more secure borders and 70 percent stricter enforcement. viii Despite the hyperbolic criticism showering Trump for separating families and for his racist actions against migrants, his zero tolerance policy and attempts to criminalize illegal migration resulted in an increase of detentions by 25 percent since Obama, ix and a June decline in illegal immigration by 18 percent. x Donald Trump is the only President in the last 60 years to sit down and talk with North Koreas leader, something Obama promised to do but never did. Neither the left nor the right is prepared to applaud or recognize this move toward peace and security in the world. While Trump has been obsessively accused of colluding with Russia to steal the election from Hillary Clinton, despite 15 months of investigation, and the expenditure of $16 million, no charges against Trump specifically support that allegation to date. xi xii Trumps travel ban from 7 so-called terrorist countries was labeled a Muslim ban, unconstitutional, unworkable, racist, illegal, discriminatory, and Trump himself fascistic, xiii but it was upheld by the Supreme Court and went into effect with virtually no media fanfare.xiv Most Americans, caught up in the anti-Trump-Putin propaganda frenzy, remain woefully ignorant that Crimea was part of Russia for 200 years, that the majority of its citizens speak Russian, not Ukrainian, and that during the referendum of 2014, exit polls revealed that upwards of 90 percent of Crimeans favored Crimeas return to Russia.xv xvi While the media endlessly asserts Russia interfered in the U.S. election, it conspicuously ignores American interference in the elections of other countries, most particularly the US overthrow of the Ukrainian government in 2014. State Department official Victoria Nuland was recorded conspiring with U.S. ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt to actually choose the next President of the Ukraine. xvii Indeed, she admitted the voice on the YouTube video which surreptitiously recorded her telephone call, was hers, and the individual she and Pyatt plotted to ascend to the Presidency, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, actually did. xviii So perhaps our narcissistic, sociopathic, treasonous, adulterous, fascistic, demagogic Putin-puppet will be impeached shortly, but in the interim, let us recognize that a large segment of the American citizenry is suffering under the yoke of an oppressive media propaganda fusillade that distorts its sense of balance, objectivity, fairness, and clarity. Yes, it is estimated Donald Trump lied or made misleading statements over 4,000 times,xix but it is equally important to recognize the Trump Derangement Syndrome in the media has led us to an almost hysterical frenzy that has left the American population living in a fugue state of distortion and surrealistic misperception. Stormy Daniels, a putative prostitute and porn actress, xx along with her attorney made over 147 televised appearances, 77 on CNN alone. xxi First Lady of the United States, Melania Trump, by comparison, only appeared 15 times in the same period. xxii Sixty two percent of the American people believe the media is biased, xxiii and with such ignominious statistics as these, one can only agree their perceptions are spot on. Our collective loss of contact reality is corroborated by the Vanderbilt Television Archives which carefully monitors every prime time news broadcast. There were 38 broadcasts about Trumps pre-presidential affairs, and 23 prime time stories on Stormy Danielsa total of 61 broadcasts on prime time news. However, the half-million people suffering from cholera in Yemen garnered only 1 slot, while one million Uighurs in China who have been placed in concentration camps only saw 2 stories appearing on mainstream media in the last 8 years! xxiv From the Vanderbilt data alone, and with just these 4 stories, it shows that 96 percent of the consciousness of the American people appears obsessed with titillating, salacious gossip while the half a million Yemenis suffering cholera, and a million Uighurs in captivity received only 4 percent of their attention.

If we are so bold as to generalize from this data, it would imply that there is a severe and pathological distortion of reality happening inside American collective consciousness, and it falls largely at the feet of corporate journalisms need to garner more eye balls and higher ratings, so they can sell cars, toys, watches, and laxatives to their couch potato consumers. A porn star and a playboy model get more attention and sell more cars than an epidemic of cholera or the incarceration of a million people far far far away. . . . and so it goes. Jerry Kroth, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor Emeritus (ret) from Santa Clara University and may be contacted through his website, collectivepsych.com Notes i https://deadline.com/2018/06/fake-news-gallup-poll-americans-believe-news-is-biased-inaccurate-1202414504/ ii http://fortune.com/2016/11/14/donald-trump-presidential-salary/ iii https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-refuse-salary/ iv http://thehill.com/homenews/administration/350999-trump-makes-good-on-pledge-to-donate-to-harvey-relief v https://www.cnn.com/2017/09/06/politics/trump-harvey-donation/index.html vi CNBC, Aug. 23, 2018 vii https://www.thebalance.com/trade-deficit-by-county-3306264 viii https://caps.gov.harvard.edu/news/caps-harris-poll-immigration-and-foreign-policy ix https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_detention_in_the_United_States#/media/File:ADP_Detained_Immigrants_1994-2017.png x https://www.presstv.com/Detail/2017/12/08/544882/New-York-Protest-Donald-Trump-Dream-Act-Dreamers-Muslim-ban-Supreme-Court xi https://www.washingtonpost.com/ xii http://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/386160-mueller-will-not-charge-trump xiii https://www.presstv.com/Detail/2017/12/08/544882/New-York-Protest-Donald-Trump-Dream-Act-Dreamers-Muslim-ban-Supreme-Court xiv https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/courts_law/supreme-court-upholds-trump-travel-ban/2018/06/26/b79cb09a-7943-11e8-80be-6d32e182a3bc_story.html? xv https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annexation_of_Crimea_by_the_Russian_Federation xvi https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-europe-26604221/crimea-exit-poll-more-than-90-back-russia-union xvii https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WV9J6sxCs5k xviii https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arseniy_Yatsenyuk xix https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2018/08/01/president-trump-has-made-4229-false-or-misleading-claims-in-558-days/?utm_term=.5f3d901f059c xx https://www.houstonchronicle.com/opinion/outlook/article/Stormy-Daniels-may-be-a-prostitute-but-at-12778283.php xxi https://www.dailywire.com/news/30712/porn-star-lawyer-interviewed-147-times-just-10-joseph-curl xxii Vanderbilt Television Archives. xxiii https://deadline.com/2018/06/fake-news-gallup-poll-americans-believe-news-is-biased-inaccurate-1202414504/ xxiv https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/china-holds-million-uighur-muslims-concentration-camps-180912105738481.html ==See Also== 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.
Blaming the Victim of Aggression By Finian Cunningham September 19, 2018 " Information Clearing House " - The tragic loss of a Russian military aircraft with 15 personnel onboard, off the Syrian coast, has to be seen in the context of the Arab country being attacked.

Attacked by the Israeli air force and facing an unprecedented buildup of NATO warships. Yet, Syria  the victim of aggression  is the one being blamed. Whats more, the Western news media are shamefully silent on condemning the aggression. Their silence is giving cover for further violence. What exactly happened to the doomed Ilyushin IL-20 recon plane on Monday night is still being investigated. It appears to have been accidentally shot down by Syrian air defenses as it approached the Russian base at Hmeimim in northwest Syria.

Russias defense ministry blamed Israeli forces for putting the Il-20 in danger by flying four F-16 fighter jets in the vicinity, thereby possibly confusing Syrian radar signals to fire on an allied Russian plane. Was that a deliberate move by the Israelis?

But heres the infuriating thing. Israel is saying that the Assad regime is fully to blame for the shoot-down of the Russian aircraft, adding that it regrets the loss of Russian lives.

At around the time of the Russian plane disappearing from radar screens, air strikes were being conducted on the northwest city of Latakia, as well as the port city of Tartous, according to Syrian state media reports. It is not clear who was firing the missiles.

Israeli warplanes were active, but it could also have been American and other NATO forces.

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Russias defense ministry claims that a French navy frigate was firing missiles at the time. It seems certain that, at the very least, the US would have approved the air strikes by the Israelis, if they carried them out. The suggestion is a concerted NATO-Israeli offensive.

Earlier, over the weekend, the Israelis carried out air strikes on Syrias international airport in the capital, Damascus. Those strikes follow hundreds of similar attacks by the Israeli air force on Syrian territory over the past two years.

NATO member Turkey is amassing tanks and troops along Syrias northern border.

Russias President Vladimir Putin agreed this week to a deescalation deal with Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan over the situation in Syrias northwest province of Idlib, which is the last-remaining stronghold for anti-government militants.

But it remains to be seen how viable or trustworthy the Turkish deal will be.

The signs are not good when NATO forces are building up relentlessly around Syrian territory. What is more, the NATO aggression is being carried out with impunity. Where are senior United Nations figures denouncing this aggression?

The pretext used by the US and its NATO partners of protecting civilians in Idlib from an offensive or from the use of chemical weapons by the Syrian Army is a risible charade. NATOs aggression against Syria is to complete the criminal task of regime change against the Assad government which the NATO-backed terror proxies failed to achieve after nearly eight years of war on the country.

In the coming days it will be clear if the low-intensity aggression on Syria by NATO forces and their Israeli accomplice mounts into a full-fledged war on the country.

But it seems already clear that a US-led overt war on Syria is underway with aggression from different directions.

Given the combustible configuration of forces in Syria  with NATO, Israel and Saudi Arabia potentially pitted against Russia and Iran  the dangerous dynamic could explode into an all-out regional war, if not a world war.

The silence of the UN and the Western news media is shameful. The aggression being waged against Syria is transparent and totally unacceptable. What is particularly unacceptable is the way Syria and its sovereign right to defend its territory is being blamed. The victim is being vilified.

In this volatile, reckless situation, any incident could ignite a conflagration. The shooting down of the Russian Il-20 recon plane evinces the very real danger of that happening.

However, the responsibility for this criminal and potentially catastrophic situation lies with the US, and its NATO and regional partners which are pouring fuel on to a fire. A fire, it has to be said, that they already lit through stoking an illegal war for regime change in Syria.

Finian Cunningham has written extensively on international affairs, with articles published in several languages. He is a Masters graduate in Agricultural Chemistry and worked as a scientific editor for the Royal Society of Chemistry, Cambridge, England, before pursuing a career in newspaper journalism. He is also a musician and songwriter. For nearly 20 years, he worked as an editor and writer in major news media organisations, including The Mirror, Irish Times and Independent.

This article was originally published by " Sputnik " -

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By Paul Craig Roberts

September 19, 2018 " Information Clearing House " - In an act of intentional deception, Israel used a Russian airplane to cloak an Israeli attack on a Syrian ground position, with the consequence that Syrian air defense missiles downed the Russian airplane with the lost of 15 Russian military lives.

In the words of the Russian Ministry of Defense: The Israeli pilots used the Russian plane as cover and set it up to be targeted by the Syrian air defense forces. As a consequence, the Il-20, which has radar cross-section much larger than the [Israeli] F-16, was shot down by an S-200 system missile. Russian Defense Minister Shoigu said: The blame for the downing of the Russian plane and the deaths of its crew members lies squarely on the Israeli side. The actions of the Israeli military were not in keeping with the spirit of the Russian-Israeli partnership, so we reserve the right to respond. https://russia-insider.com/en/russian-military-says-holds-israel-responsible-deaths-15-servicemen-reserves-right-respond/ri24780 See also: http://tass.com/defense/1022123

For a few minutes it looked like Israel was finally to be held accountable for its reckless and irresponsible actions, but it was not to be. Russian President Putin contradicted his Defense Minister by declaring the loss of Russian lives to be accidental, a result of a chain of tragic circumstances.

One wonders how Israel does it. President Putin covered up for Israels destruction of the Russian IL-20 just as President Johnson covered up for Israels murderous attack on the USS Liberty that resulted in 208 US Navy casualties. https://www.rt.com/news/438728-putin-israel-syria-plane/ As Israel gets away with everything, including routine massacres of unarmed Palestinian women and children, there is no reason to expect Israel to change its behavior.

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Putin, however, might have to change his behavior or go to full-scale war. I have long admired and defended Putins refusal to escalate conflict by refusing to reply to provocation with provocation. Putin understands that he is dealing with irrationality both in Washington and the West generally and in Israel. He doesnt want to see this irrationality erupt in nuclear war. Everyone should admire Putin for his rectitude. Nevertheless, when dealing with bullies, which is what Washington and Israel are, there is a downside to Putins policy of turning the other cheek. Acceptance of provocations and insults leads to more provocations and insults.

Although this is historys lesson, I learned it from the American TV program, Kung Fu, about a Shaolin priest, Caine, on the American western frontier during the 1800s who ignores provocations until he has no alternative but to fight.

This is what Putin is doing. Putins disinclination to fight encouraged Russias partner Netanyahu to demonstrate that Israel has the same power over Russia that Israel has over the US. Netanyahu wasnt the least bit fearful of sacrificing 15 Russian lives in order to successfully attack a Syrian site. Netanyahu knew that only Putin would suffer any adverse consequences.

The consequences for Putin are serious. Russian nationalists, as opposed to the pro-American Atlanticist Integrationists, are angry that Putin will not defend Russias honor. The Russian military is incensed that Putin, for Israels sake, cut the legs off of the beloved Defense Minister. According to some reports that I cannot verify, confidence in Putin is eroding as Russians hear from the Jewish controlled elements of the Russian media that Putin, by deflecting the murderous incident, is strengthening the Russian-Israeli relationship. One Internet site actually has the headline: Putin to Powers Attacking Syria: Please Keep Getting My Soldiers Killed, I Wont Do Anything About It.

The consequences for Putin and for Syria could be worse than serious. Putin had just called off the announced Russian/Syrian liberation of Idlib province from the terrorists, euphemistically called the Syrian opposition by the Russian government, in a concession to Turkeys President Erdogan, who also shot down a Russian aircraft. What does this tell Washington and its well-paid terrorist allies?

It tells them that Russia is easily stymied and that Idlib is secure in Washingtons hands while forces there are built up for a renewal of the effort to turn Syria, like Libya, like Iraq, like Yeman, like Somalia, into a wasteland.

Israel wants Syria as a wasteland, like Iraq, and intends to produce that outcome in Iran as well. Israel wants the water resources of southern Lebanon, but the Hezbollah militia, supported and supplied by Syria and Iran is in the way. Twice the Israeli Army sent to occupy southern Lebanon was defeated and driven out by Hezbollah. Israel cannot risk a third defeat, so Israel uses its American puppet. Indeed, the only reason Washington has been at war in the Middle East for the entirety of the 21st century is because Washington is serving Israels agenda.

It is difficult to believe that the Russian government is so poorly advised that it does not understand this. The Russian-Israeli partnership described by Russian Defense Minister Shoigu can be based on nothing other than Russian ignorance. The two countries have totally different agendas in the Middle East. Israel is attempting to use Washington to eliminate governments independent of Washingtons Israeli-directed foreign policy in the Middle East as these governments are a constraint on Israeli expansion. Russia is attempting to prevent the spread of the US-supported jihadists to Russias borders, or so I think or thought.

My understanding, however, is being challenged. I am contradicted by Russian nationalists who maintain that Putin, misunderstanding that the jihadists terrorists are an American organized and supported force, went into Syria in order to show his solidarity with Americas war against terrorism. I find it difficult to believe that Putin, even surrounded by American-worshipping Atlanticist Integrationists, could possibly be this misinformed. But who knows? When did the US last have an informed president? Informed by the real facts, not by the special interests whispering into his ear.

I am concerned that Putin, by giving in to Turkey, by covering up for Israel, by calling off the liberation of Idlib province, and by his previous non-responses has set himself up for his next test, which could be in Ukraine. By his refusal to accept the breakaway Russian republics of Donetsk and Luhansk back into Russia where they belong, Putin has allowed this sore to fester. Washington has used the opportunity to arm its Ukrainian puppet and is betting that Putin will refuse to defend the breakaway Russians just as he refused to defend the Russian military from Israel in Syria.

Sooner or later Putin is going to find himself in the identical position as Caine. He will have to fight or surrender. By waiting Putin guarantees that provocations will increase in intensity until there is no alternative to putting the Russian foot down in a major way. Thus, the avoidance of conflict guarantees the conflict, but a larger, more dangerous one.

I was astonished to read that the Russian Defense Minister spoke of a Russian-Israeli partnership. I was even more astonished to learn that Russia, which has been engaged for some years in the liberation of Syria from Western supported terrorists, permits Israel and France to attack Syria. Russia can wipe Israel and France off the face of the earth in a few minutes with zero cost to Russia, but Russia accepts constraints and defeats from insignificant military powers.

The Russian military reports that, at the same time the Russian aircraft was destroyed by Israeli deception, missiles were fired from the French frigate FS Auvergne, apparently at the same target in Syrias Latakia province that were struck by the Israeli aircraft. What sense does it make for Russia, intent on liberating one province, to allow Israeli and French attacks on another Syrian province?

In my opinion, Russias inability to stand firm in the face of Western and Israeli aggression will be the principal cause of World War Three in which we will all die and the planet as well.

NOTE:

Strategies Have Unintended Consequences

Since posting my remarks  https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2018/09/18/can-russia-survive-her-partnerships-has-putin-made-a-strategic-miscalculation/  other comments on President Putins response to the loss of Russian lives have appeared. I am providing links to two of them as examples of the negative consequences for Putin:

https://www.fort-russ.com/2018/09/the-overarching-strategic-logic-behind-provocations-against-russia-2014-2018/

https://russia-insider.com/en/il-20-loss-perfect-opportunity-russia-close-down-syria-israeli-attacks-good/ri24794

Understand that I am not denigrating President Putin. I understand his strategy and consider his strategy to be moral and responsible. My concern is with the unintended consequences of his strategy.

Unintended consequences are a bane of mankind and must be considered and, hopefully, anticipated.

Dr. Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal. He was columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard News Service, and Creators Syndicate. He has had many university appointments. His internet columns have attracted a worldwide following. Roberts' latest books are The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism and Economic Dissolution of the West , How America Was Lost , and The Neoconservative Threat to World Order .

==See Also==

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Home Search ICH Woodward: No Evidence of Trump-Russia Collusion, I Searched Hard for Two Years



Little reported fact is that Resistance hero Woodward, who has gone from Nixon ouster to water-carrier for the deep state, and whose ties to the intelligence agencies are as deep as they come, nonetheless dismisses the entire Russia investigation as a fools errand



By John V. Walsh



September 19, 2018 " Information Clearing House " - Bob Woodwards book Fear has been a sensation in many respects. But one aspect has barely been mentioned. After two years of exhaustive research for his book, Woodward says that he has found no evidence of collusion between Putins government and Donald Trumps campaign in 2016. Zilch, nada, zero. And Woodward strained very hard looking for it.



This largely ignored blockbuster admission came in a radio interview with Hugh Hewitt reported by Real Clear Politics here, where a recording of the full interview can also be found. Real Clear Politics reports the text of the exchange thus: "In an interview with Hugh Hewitt on Friday, Bob Woodward said that in his two years of investigating for his new book, Fear, he found no evidence of collusion or espionage between Trump and Russia. Woodward said he looked for it hard and yet turned up nothing. "Did you, Bob Woodward, hear anything in your research in your interviews that sounded like espionage or collusion? Hugh Hewitt asked Woodward. I did not, and of course, I looked for it, looked for it hard, Woodward answered. And so you know, there we are. .. (Emphasis, jw) But youve seen no collusion? Hewitt asked again to confirm. I have not, Woodward affirmed. "Hewitt would once again ask Woodward about collusion at the conclusion of the interview. Very last question, Bob Woodward, I just want to confirm, at the end of two years of writing this book, this intensive effort, you saw no effort, you, personally, had no evidence of collusion or espionage by the president presented to you? Hewitt asked. That is correct, Woodward said." The attitude in the mass media with respect to the work that Woodward has done on Fury borders on a sort of deification. He is considered careful, exhaustive and reliable. He is considered to have sources throughout the government that provide the best information possible. So it is said, over and over. Thus, his word on this issue should be worth its weight in gold. Unfortunately, this failure to uncover collusion barely gets covered. Are You Tired Of The Lies And Non-Stop Propaganda? Get Your FREE Daily Newsletter Perhaps the need to emphasize the importance of this issue needs to be emphasized more. The issue of collusion is of great importance, because it hangs over the head of the Presidency, unresolved after two years. Why is this of great importance? It should not need to be said, but the issue of collusion involves the two nuclear superpowers, each of which has 1550 nuclear weapons on hair trigger alert ready to go at a moments notice and capable of reaching one another within minutes. It is an issue that can affect our very survival. As Daniel Ellsberg informs us in his book, The Doomsday Machine, this situation is fraught with the chance of miscalculation or accident, which would immediately engulf us in nuclear holocaust leading to the death of billions and possibly of all humanity. This issue of collusion and its embodiment in the Mueller investigation in a dispute often called Russiagate has prevented the Presidents of Russia and the US from meeting sufficiently long to deal with this nuclear danger. And as Stephen F. Cohen, Professor Emeritus of Russian History at Princeton University, has often pointed out, this prevents our President from making concessions on some issues to get movement on others. Anything less than a tough guy approach, the approach of an Uber-hawk, is treated by an hysterical press with suspicion and denunciation. Take the recent and very brief Summit between Trump and Putin in Helsinki as an example. Condemnation was everywhere in the media and the follow-up Summit has been postponed until next year, probably out of concern for how the press would treat it leading up to the midterms. This has happened even though it does not quite make sense. Polling showed that a majority of the American people approved of the Helsinki Summit and also of the planned follow-up. Over 60% desire improved relationship with Russia, sometimes called Detente 2.0. And yet there was virtually no support voiced for this Summit from the US Peace Community, CodePink being a prominent exception. So let us take note. Woodward has added his voice to those who have been unable to find any evidence of collusion with Russia. After two years of finding nothing and given the danger that the crippling of US-Russia relation poses to our survival, is it not time to say "Enough"? Woodward has now added his voice to many, many others. They have worked hard for years and have found no evidence for collusion. Enough of Partisanship and hysteria. For the sake of our survival, Enough. ==See Also== 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.
By Ron Paul The Polish president proposed a permanent US military base on his country's territory. He said Poland would contribute two billion dollars toward the project and even joked that he'd call it "Fort Trump." Is this a good idea?

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==See Also==

US-Poland base plans must include NATO, says ex-Pentagon official; Retired General Ben Hodges has told DW that any new US military base in Poland must be a 'cohesive' NATO plan. That's because "all allies will have to bear some of the consequences" of Russia's reaction, he warned.

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Overview of the old fire station in New South Wales (Photo: kenh14.vn)

Living in Sydney, New South Wales, he is a founding member and the President of the Viet Biz Support Club in Australia, as well as a member of the Vietnamese Entrepreneurs Association in Sydney.

Andy Hoang has been chosen to own the station because he has a common ambition with the previous owner of turning the historical relic into a luxury hotel although he was not person who gave the highest price at the auction.

In addition, he also desires to turn the building into a Vietnam House, a place to gather Vietnamese entrepreneurs and businesses operating in Australia, and connect Vietnamese businesses to seek business opportunities in Australia.

Built in 1886, Stanmore Fire Station is located in an area of 892 square meters with unique architectural structure.

After its closure in 1991, the building was bought by an Australian entrepreneur and renovated into a villa, however, it still maintains its ancient architecture./.
By John Pilger

Ed Note: September 22, 2018 - Article updated to correct an error

September 20, 2018 " Information Clearing House " - The death of Robert Parry earlier this year felt like a farewell to the age of the reporter. Parry was "a trailblazer for independent journalism", wrote Seymour Hersh, with whom he shared much in common.

Hersh revealed the My Lai massacre in Vietnam and the secret bombing of Cambodia, Parry exposed Iran-Contra, a drugs and gun-running conspiracy that led to the White House. In 2016, they separately produced compelling evidence that the Assad government in Syria had not used chemical weapons. They were not forgiven.

Driven from the "mainstream", Hersh must publish his work outside the United States. Parry set up his own independent news website Consortium News, where, in a final piece following a stroke, he referred to journalism's veneration of "approved opinions" while "unapproved evidence is brushed aside or disparaged regardless of its quality."

Although journalism was always a loose extension of establishment power, something has changed in recent years. Dissent tolerated when I joined a national newspaper in Britain in the 1960s has regressed to a metaphoric underground as liberal capitalism moves towards a form of corporate dictatorship. This is a seismic shift, with journalists policing the new "groupthink", as Parry called it, dispensing its myths and distractions, pursuing its enemies.

Witness the witch-hunts against refugees and immigrants, the wilful abandonment by the "MeToo" zealots of our oldest freedom, presumption of innocence, the anti-Russia racism and anti-Brexit hysteria, the growing anti-China campaign and the suppression of a warning of world war.

With many if not most independent journalists barred or ejected from the "mainstream", a corner of the Internet has become a vital source of disclosure and evidence-based analysis: true journalism. Sites such as wikileaks.org, consortiumnews.com, ZNet zcomm.org, wsws.org, truthdig.com, globalresearch.org, counterpunch.org and informationclearinghouse.info are required reading for those trying to make sense of a world in which science and technology advance wondrously while political and economic life in the fearful "democracies" regress behind a media facade of narcissistic spectacle.

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In Britain, just one website offers consistently independent media criticism. This is the remarkable Media Lens - remarkable partly because its founders and editors as well as its only writers, David Edwards and David Cromwell, since 2001 have concentrated their gaze not on the usual suspects, the Tory press, but the paragons of reputable liberal journalism: the BBC, the Guardian, Channel 4 News.

Their method is simple. Meticulous in their research, they are respectful and polite when they ask why a journalist why he or she produced such a one-sided report, or failed to disclose essential facts or promoted discredited myths.

The replies they receive are often defensive, at times abusive; some are hysterical, as if they have pushed back a screen on a protected species.

I would say Media Lens has shattered a silence about corporate journalism. Like Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman in Manufacturing Consent, they represent a Fifth Estate that deconstructs and demystifies the media's power.

What is especially interesting about them is that neither is a journalist. David Edwards is a former teacher, David Cromwell is an oceanographer. Yet, their understanding of the morality of journalism - a term rarely used; let's call it true objectivity - is a bracing quality of their online Media Lens dispatches.

I think their work is heroic and I would place a copy of their just published book, Propaganda Blitz, in every journalism school that services the corporate system, as they all do.

Take the chapter, Dismantling the National Health Service, in which Edwards and Cromwell describe the critical part played by journalists in the crisis facing Britain's pioneering health service.

The NHS crisis is the product of a political and media construct known as "austerity", with its deceitful, weasel language of "efficiency savings" (the BBC term for slashing public expenditure) and "hard choices" (the wilful destruction of the premises of civilised life in modern Britain).

"Austerity" is an invention. Britain is a rich country with a debt owed by its crooked banks, not its people. The resources that would comfortably fund the National Health Service have been stolen in broad daylight by the few allowed to avoid and evade billions in taxes.

Using a vocabulary of corporate euphemisms, the publicly-funded Health Service is being deliberately run down by free market fanatics, to justify its selling-off . The Labour Party of Jeremy Corbyn may appear to oppose this, but is it? The answer is very likely no. Little of any of this is alluded to in the media, let alone explained.

Edwards and Cromwell have dissected the 2012 Health and Social Care Act, whose innocuous title belies its dire consequences. Unknown to most of the population, the Act ends the legal obligation of British governments to provide universal free health care: the bedrock on which the NHS was set up following the Second World War. Private companies can now insinuate themselves into the NHS, piece by piece.

Where, asks Edwards and Cromwell, was the BBC while this momentous Bill was making its way through Parliament? With a statutory commitment to "providing a breadth of view" and to properly inform the public of "matters of public policy", the BBC never spelt out the threat posed to one of the nation's most cherished institutions. A BBC headline said: "Bill which gives power to GPs passes." This was pure state propaganda.

There is a striking similarity with the BBC's coverage of Prime Minister Tony Blair's lawless invasion of Iraq in 2003, which left a million dead and many more dispossessed. A study by the University of Wales, Cardiff, found that the BBC reflected the government line "overwhelmingly" while relegating reports of civilian suffering. A Media Tenor study placed the BBC at the bottom of a league of western broadcasters in the time they gave to opponents of the invasion. The corporation's much-vaunted "principle" of impartiality was never a consideration.

One of the most telling chapters in Propaganda Blitz describes the smear campaigns mounted by journalists against dissenters, political mavericks and whistleblowers. The Guardian's campaign against the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is the most disturbing.

Assange, whose epic WikiLeaks disclosures brought fame, journalism prizes and largesse to the Guardian, was abandoned when he was no longer useful. He was then subjected to a vituperative - and cowardly - onslaught of a kind I have rarely known.

With not a penny going to WikiLeaks, a hyped Guardian book led to a lucrative Hollywood movie deal. The book's authors, Luke Harding and David Leigh, gratuitously described

Assange as a "damaged personality" and "callous". They also disclosed the secret password he had given the paper in confidence, which was designed to protect a digital file containing the US embassy cables.

With Assange now trapped in the Ecuadorean embassy, Harding, standing among the police outside, gloated on his blog that "Scotland Yard may get the last laugh".

The Guardian columnist Suzanne Moore wrote, "I bet Assange is stuffing himself full of flattened guinea pigs. He really is the most massive turd."

Moore, who describes herself as a feminist, later complained that, after attacking Assange, she had suffered "vile abuse". Edwards and Cromwell wrote to her: "That's a real shame, sorry to hear that. But how would you describe calling someone 'the most massive turd'? Vile abuse?"

Moore replied that no, she would not, adding, "I would advise you to stop being so bloody patronising."

Her former Guardian colleague James Ball wrote, "It's difficult to imagine what Ecuador's London embassy smells like more than five and a half years after Julian Assange moved in."

Such slow-witted viciousness appeared in a newspaper described by its editor, Katharine Viner, as "thoughtful and progressive". What is the root of this vindictiveness? Is it jealousy, a perverse recognition that Assange has achieved more journalistic firsts than his snipers can claim in a lifetime? Is it that he refuses to be "one of us" and shames those who have long sold out the independence of journalism?

Journalism students should study this to understand that the source of "fake news" is not only trollism, or the likes of Fox news, or Donald Trump, but a journalism self-anointed with a false respectability: a liberal journalism that claims to challenge corrupt state power but, in reality, courts and protects it, and colludes with it. The amorality of the years of Tony Blair, whom the Guardian has failed to rehabilitate, is its echo.

"[It is] an age in which people yearn for new ideas and fresh alternatives," wrote Katharine Viner. Her political writer Jonathan Freedland dismissed the yearning of young people who supported the modest policies of Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn as "a form of narcissism".

"How did this man...", brayed the Guardian's Zoe Williams, "get on the ballot in the first place?" A choir of the paper's precocious windbags joined in, thereafter queuing to fall on their blunt swords when Corbyn came close to winning the 2017 general election in spite of the media.

Complex stories are reported to a cult-like formula of bias, hearsay and omission: Brexit, Venezuela, Russia, Syria. On Syria, only the investigations of a group of independent journalists have countered this, revealing the network of Anglo-American backing of jihadists in Syria, including those related to ISIS.

Supported by a "psyops" campaign funded by the British Foreign Office and the US Agency of International Aid, the aim is to hoodwink the Western public and speed the overthrow the government in Damascus, regardless of the medieval alternative and the risk of war with Russia.

The Syria Campaign, set up by a New York PR agency, Purpose, funds a group known as the White Helmets, who claim falsely to be "Syria Civil Defence" and are seen uncritically on TV news and social media, apparently rescuing the victims of bombing, which they film and edit themselves, though viewers are unlikely to be told this. George Clooney is a fan.

The White Helmets are appendages to the jihadists with whom they share addresses. Their media-smart uniforms and equipment are supplied by their Western paymasters. That their exploits are not questioned by major news organisations is an indication of how deep the influence of state-backed PR now runs in the media. As Robert Fisk noted recently, no "mainstream" reporter reports Syria, from Syria.

In what is known as a hatchet job, a Guardian reporter based in San Francisco, Olivia Solon, who has never visited Syria, was allowed to smear the substantiated investigative work of journalists Vanessa Beeley and Eva Bartlett on the White Helmets as "propagated online by a network of anti-imperialist activists, conspiracy theorists and trolls with the support of the Russian government".

This abuse was published without permitting a single correction, let alone a right-of-reply. The Guardian Comment page was blocked, as Edwards and Cromwell document. I saw the list of questions Solon sent to Beeley, which reads like a McCarthyite charge sheet - "Have you ever been invited to North Korea?"

So much of the mainstream has descended to this level. Subjectivism is all; slogans and outrage are proof enough. What matters is the "perception".

When he was US commander in Afghanistan, General David Petraeus declared what he called "a war of perception... conducted continuously using the news media". What really mattered was not the facts but the way the story played in the United States. The undeclared enemy was, as always, an informed and critical public at home.

Nothing has changed. In the 1970s, I met Leni Riefenstahl, Hitler's film-maker, whose propaganda mesmerised the German public.

She told me the "messages" of her films were dependent not on "orders from above", but on the "submissive void" of an uninformed public.

"Did that include the liberal, educated bourgeoisie?" I asked.

"Everyone," she said. "Propaganda always wins, if you allow it."

Propaganda Blitz by David Edwards and David Cromwell is published by Pluto.

Follow John Pilger on twitter @johnpilger

==See Also==
Embattled governor of Lagos, Akinwumi Ambode is currently in Abuja to meet President Muhammadu Buhari.

The president is meeting the Lagos State Governor at the Presidential Villa, Abuja.

Ambode is not in an enviable situation right now as he may have lost the support of his political father. There have also been reports that APC stakeholders in the state are backing another governorship candidate against Ambode.

Ambode definitely needs all the supports he can get before the September 29th APC governorship primary election .

The meeting started around 2.40 p.m and details will be brought to you shortly .
Lagos State Governor, Mr. Akinwunmi Ambodes intense peace moves in the last 72 hours, to save his political career, has fallen flat; following the insistence of All Progressives Congress (APC) chieftains that the governor must go.

Guardian
The Peoples Democratic Party(PDP) has called on the police to desist from acting the script of the All Progressives Congress (APC) concerning its candidate in the September 22, Osun State governorship election, Senator Ademola Adeleke.

According to the PDP, the police springing up fresh allegations of malpractice in NECO against Adeleke is unwelcome.

The sudden realisation of allegations that Adeleke was involved in a NECO exam malpractice in 2017, as well as his subsequent invitation by the police, barely two days to the governorship election, is a ploy by the @OfficialAPCNg to distract.

In a statement signed by Kola Ologbondiyan, its National publicity secretary on Wednesday, the party said the police was yet to invite the erstwhile finance minister, Kemi Adeosun to confessing to certificate forgery.

The party also alleged that there were many in the APC with questionable certificates yet no investigation has been done.

The PDP also urged the Inspector General of Police, Ibrahim Idris to protect the integrity of the force.
LOGO RITCH MUELLER 320 x 215

These exemptions are generally extended to intermediate entities or vehicles, but are subject to limitations that should be carefully analysed when structuring an investment to avoid jeopardising its tax-free treatment.

In order to attract foreign capital and promote inbound investments in Mexico, a presidential decree was issued in March 1992 granting an income tax exemption for investments made by FPFs. The FPF exemptions, as originally introduced, granted a full withholding tax exemption on any type of Mexican-sourced income derived from investments made by FPFs in the country; provided such funds were exempt from income tax in their country and applied for their registry annually to the Mexican tax authorities.

This withholding tax exemption was incorporated into the Mexican Income Tax Law (MITL) later that year, with the intention of providing further certainty to the FPF tax regime.

Evolution of FPF rules through the years

Since their enactment, the FPF rules have been revised to extend their application to intermediate entities or vehicles through which FPFs route their investments, and limit their scope mainly with respect to: (i) the number of intermediary corporate layers allowed for FPF investments; (ii) the types of income subject to the exemption; and (iii) the minimum holding period of the income-producing assets.

Initially, to preserve the tax-free nature of investments made by FPFs through intermediaries, FPF exemptions were extended in 1995, through administrative tax rules, to foreign investment funds owned by FPFs; these also had to be registered with the Mexican tax authorities (this exemption was later also extended to intermediate foreign entities in 2002 through administrative tax rules). This exemption only applied in proportion to the participation of the FPF in the foreign investment funds or entities, regardless of the corporate levels of the investment structure.

These provisions were then amended in 1998 to limit the exemption only to interest, rental income and capital gains derived from the sale of shares and real property located in Mexico, to the extent that the FPFs were the beneficial owners of such income and the real property had been leased for at least one year prior to its sale. These rules expressly excluded variable rental income from the exemption, which became relevant for commercial leases as it is common practice for such agreements to include a variable consideration based on the income obtained by the tenants.

A big change followed in 1999, when a new provision was included to grant a corporate tax exemption to Mexican entities in which FPFs were shareholders, in proportion to the participation of the FPFs in these entities. This is one of the few examples under Mexican tax law of a Mexican entity being granted a corporate tax exemption.

The FPF tax regime remained substantially unchanged until 2014, when a new MITL was published eliminating the FPF registry in Mexico and increasing the lock-up rental period from one to four years. The holding period was increased to four years in order to mirror the rules governing Mexican real estate investment trusts (FIBRAS).

Where do we stand today?

The latest amendments to the FPF tax regime came in late 2015, generating much concern amongst those FPFs already investing in Mexico, as they:

(i) introduced limitations on the levels of entities or vehicles allowed to be interposed within FPF investments, which in most cases resulted in having to restructure existing investment structures;

(ii) created income tests at the level of the intermediary foreign entities or vehicles, putting at risk the exemptions of such entities or vehicles if, for instance, they were also used to invest in other countries; and

(iii) limited the exemption on interest income, and the deduction of such expenses for Mexican borrowers, only to interest derived from loans granted directly by FPF.

As of today, the MITL provides that FPFs are exempt from income tax on interest, capital gains and income from granting the temporary use or enjoyment of real estate property in Mexico that has been leased for at least four years (Qualifying Income). In general terms, the FPF exemptions are currently granted at the following levels:

(i) Withholding tax exemption on Qualifying Income (including interest) obtained directly by FPFs;

(ii) Withholding tax exemption on Qualifying Income (excluding interest) obtained directly by foreign legal entities or foreign investment funds in which FPFs participate directly (only one level of foreign entities or foreign investment funds allowed);

(iii) Corporate tax exemption on Qualifying Income obtained by Mexican entities in which FPFs participate directly (only one level of intermediate Mexican entities allowed). This exemption was rounded out with a withholding tax exemption on dividends distributed by such entities from Qualifying Income; and

(iv) Corporate tax exemption on Qualifying Income obtained by Mexican entities in which foreign legal entities owned by FPFs participate directly (only one level of intermediate foreign entities allowed). This exemption was also rounded out with a withholding tax exemption on dividends distributed by such entities from Qualifying Income, but in this case the dividends have to actually reach the pension funds in order for the exemption to apply.

What are the main challenges faced by FPFs investing in Mexico?

One of the most significant challenges for FPFs has been to achieve tax-free treatment along their investment structures. This has not been easy considering the limitations on the number of corporate layers allowed and the Qualifying Income tests at the level of intermediary entities or vehicles.





These limitations tend to take centre stage when negotiating co-investments or joint venture structures, as FPFs generally have very low flexibility as they are required to ensure that any intermediate vehicle or entity will not put their exemptions at risk. It is common for joint venture partners to each have to set up sophisticated structures on top of their joint-venture vehicles to satisfy their particular requirements.

While there is no one-size-fits-all structure, the most common joint venture vehicles for FPFs have proven to be certain types of foreign investment funds which can be disregarded for the purposes of the corporate-layer limitations, or agreements governed under local law that lack legal personality and can achieve tax transparency. However, as is often the case, the devil is in the detail in such structures, as those vehicles may be deemed to have lost their lack of personality or their tax transparent status if not properly set up, putting the FPF exemptions at risk.

It is also relevant to consider that since the exemptions for intermediate entities or vehicles are granted in proportion to the participation of the FPF, if these are ever diluted, the exemption is generally lost in that percentage.

Another practical issue generally arises if FPFs invest simultaneously in several projects, as projects generating non-Qualifying Income may contaminate other projects if not routed through an appropriate structure, therefore jeopardising the exemptions for all projects. This usually results in having to create complex structures to segregate project risks and protect projects generating Qualifying Income.

FPF financing structures have also proven to be head-scratchers. The challenge has been to create financing structures for FPFs to fund Mexican projects, while maintaining local FPF exemptions on interest income and allowing the Mexican project companies to claim the deduction of the expenses associated with such financing.

As touched on earlier, the latest amendments to the FPF rules introduced new requirements for such purposes, which basically limited the FPF exemption on interest income, and the deduction of such expenses for Mexican borrowers, only to interest derived from loans granted directly by FPFs. In practice, it is rarely the case that FPFs grant financing directly to project companies, so advisors often have to come up with new and exciting ways to channel the funds to the project companies while also being able to reap the benefits.

While this tax regime remains very attractive, FPFs should be mindful of the rules that limit their exemptions and carefully review their structures as they pursue their investments in Mexico, in order to preserve the tax free nature of their investments.

This article was written by Oscar A. Lopez Velarde, Santiago Diaz Rivera Bravo and Daniela Inigo Arroyo of Ritch, Mueller, Heather y Nicolau, S.C.

Oscar A. Lopez Velarde (olopezvelarde@ritch.com.mx)

Santiago Diaz Rivera Bravo (sdiazrivera@ritch.com.mx)

Daniela Inigo Arroyo (dinigo@ritch.com.mx)

Ritch, Mueller, Heather y Nicolau, S.C.

www.ritch.com.mx

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Narragansett object to library project The Narragansett Indian Tribe is considering legal action against the library board of trustees if excavation is performed for the proposed expansion at 26 North Road. We are being pushed...

Housing authority hires new director With the appointment of a new executive director, residents at the 47 federally subsidized apartments on Pemberton Avenue are hoping for peace and quiet following 32 months of instability in...
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[ Editor: zyq ]

A farmer inspects highland barley in Lhaze County of Xigaze, southwest China's Tibet Autonomous Region, Sept. 13, 2018. The highland barley in Tibet is entering harvest season. (Xinhua/Purbu Zhaxi)
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Chinese Premier Li Keqiang (R) meets with Klaus Schwab, founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum (WEF), in Tianjin, north China, Sept. 19, 2018. (Xinhua/Ding Haitao)

TIANJIN, Sept. 19 (Xinhua) -- Chinese Premier Li Keqiang on Wednesday called for enhanced discussions among all parties on problems facing the global economy so that common development and prosperity can be promoted.

Li made the remarks when he met with Klaus Schwab, World Economic Forum (WEF) founder and executive chair, in north China's Tianjin Municipality during the Annual Meeting of the New Champions 2018, also known as the Summer Davos Forum.

Li said that China's cooperation with the WEF has not only provided a platform for communication between Chinese and foreign business circles but also opened a window for the world to better understand China.

He said China is willing to work with the WEF and all parties to jointly discuss the problems facing the global economy and promote the continuous improvement of the global governance system, for common development and prosperity.

"Facing opportunities and challenges arising from the new round of industrial revolution and technological innovation, all sides should join hands to promote sustainable and inclusive growth of the global economy, jointly safeguard multilateralism and free trade, and create a sound macro environment for world economic recovery and stable growth," Li said.

For his part, Schwab said this year's forum will be the largest so far, which fully reflects the high importance attached by all parties to the annual event.

The WEF stands ready to enhance cooperation with the Chinese side, support globalization and multilateralism and promote a rule-based global governance structure, Schwab said.

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KIGALI, Sep. 19 (Xinhua) -- Rwanda's newly-elected parliament members were Wednesday sworn in for a five-year term in the capital city Kigali.

The 80 members of the lower house Chamber of Deputies were voted in parliamentary elections conducted from Sept. 2 to 4, where the ruling Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) and its six allied parties won 40 seats out of 53 seats directly elected by proportional representation. The other 27 seats reserved for special interest groups including women, the young and the disabled were elected indirectly.

Rwandan President Paul Kagame, who officiated the swearing-in ceremony, urged the lawmakers to hold government accountable in serving citizens and delivering development.

"It is about starting a new mandate and committing to working hard. Rwandans have placed their trust in you to serve them and work towards transforming this country into what Rwandans want and deserve," he said after the ceremony.

He also urged them to remain to the citizenry.

After the swearing in ceremony, the lawmakers elected Donatille Mukabalisa of Liberal Party as Speaker for a second term with 80 votes out of 80. They also elected Edda Mukabagwiza and Musa Fazil Harelimana to Deputy Speaker.

More than 7 million voters participated in the elections, according to the National Electoral Commission.

Parties who also won seats in the elections include the Social Democratic Party, the Liberal Party, the Democratic Green Party of Rwanda and the Social Party Imberakuri.

[ Editor: Zhang Zhou ]
According to the Vietnam Association of Seafood Exporters and Producers (VASEP), Vietnams seafood export turnover to the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) hit US$612 million in 2017, up from only US$66 million in 1998.

Although the figure remained modest compared with exports to major markets like the US, the EU, Japan and China, ASEAN ranked fifth among the most important markets of Vietnamese seafood.

The 10-member group maintained this position in the first six months of this year, with most exports to ASEAN posting positive growth. Of note, ASEAN surpassed the Republic of Korea (RoK) to become Vietnams biggest fried fish paste and surimi importer with a value of US$43 million.

Among ASEAN countries, Thailand has been the largest partner of Vietnams fishery sector, as reflected through the export revenue of US$248 million in 2017 and more than US$185 million in the first eight months of this year.

Thailand is the only ASEAN country among the top 10 single markets of Vietnamese seafood, together with countries like the US, Japan, China, the RoK, the Netherlands and the UK.

After Thailand, the Philippines and Singapore are Vietnams second and third largest seafood importers in the group.

Vietnamese fishery products have been shipped to all other ASEAN countries, with top items being saltwater fish, tra fish, cuttlefish and octopus.

VASEP said Vietnam has potential to step up its seafood exports to the group with a combined population of 632 million whose seafood demand is forecast to rise from 24.5 million tonnes in 2015 to 36.9 million tonnes in 2030 and 41.7 million tonnes in 2050.

Seafood trading in ASEAN stands at US$20 billion each year and is expected to expand by 3.7% annually in the years to come.
The official made the statement in Brussels on September 18 at a high-level conference on the EU-Vietnam Free Trade Agreement (EVFTA), which was attended by nearly 100 delegates who are experts, entrepreneurs and representatives of organisations from the EU and Vietnam.

Speakers at the event provided participants with an insight into the agreement and the benefits it will bring to the two sides enterprises in fields ranging from services, trade, investment and intellectual property to e-commerce.

Peter Berz, Head of Unit in the Directorate General for Trade of the European Commission responsible for trade relations with Southeast Asian nations, said the EVFTA and the Investment Protection Agreement (IPA), once signed and brought into effect, will become a model for FTAs between Vietnam and other partners in the future.

Ambassador Vu Anh Quang, head of the Vietnam Delegation to the EU, stated Vietnam and the EU shared a common view on multilateralism in maintaining relations and international law.

He said the EVFTA will create a legal framework for free trade between the two sides and become part of the EU-Vietnam Framework Agreement on Comprehensive Partnership and Cooperation (PCA).

Axel Goethals, CEO of the European Institute for Asian Studies (EIAS), said up to 99% of EU tariffs will be removed for Vietnamese products thanks to the EVFTA.

Therefore, the agreement is expected to raise the volume of exports to the EU by a third, and open up a new chapter for bilateral trade, he added.

Deputy Minister Khanh stressed the Vietnamese Government is preparing a plan on the enforcement of the EVFTA, and is willing to work with the EU towards trade liberalisation.

He affirmed that the EU is a trusted partner of Vietnam.

Legal reviews for a free trade agreement between Vietnam and the EU started after negotiations on the deal concluded on December 2, 2015. However, the EU changed its regulations on the process of approving FTAs, with the division of contents related to investment protection and investor-state dispute settlement made into a separate deal called Investment Protection Agreement (IPA).

In April 2018, the agreement was successfully divided into the EVFTA and the IPA.

On June 25, 2018, the two sides finished the legal review process for the EVFTA and agreed on the investment protection deal.

The EVFTA has now been finalised after a series of efforts to solve technical problems. It is being translated into the 24 official languages of the European Union (EU) and sent to member countries for consideration.
GRANTS PASS, Ore.  Community policing is coming back to Josephine County in the form of a new Resident Deputy Program, according to a statement from Sheriff Dave Daniel on Wednesday.

According to Daniel, this isn't the first time that the County has seen such a program  but it was phased out over a decade ago for "unknown reasons," and would have been done away with regardless due to a tightening budget.

The new Resident Deputy Program will feature three deputies centrally stationed at the Three Rivers School District schools, each one responsible for a different region  one from Merlin to Wolf Creek, another from Hayes Hill to the California border, and the third from New Hope to Williams.

"The idea is to get back into the community to begin to rebuild relationships, provide targeted enforcement and work on the many livability issues our citizenry has struggled with every day," said Daniel.

Resident deputies will share space at the schools with three new soon-to-be-hired School Resource Officers  thanks to funding from state taxed marijuana revenues, Daniel said.

"Residents of Josephine County will begin to see these deputies at public events more often and in and around our schools," said Daniel. "Already they are receiving questions from citizens as to 'What is wrong and why are you here?' For residents of Josephine County, this is the new norm, so don't be alarmed as we increase service and the presence in our communities with the goal of serving you better. Your Sheriff's Office is coming back!"
GRANTS PASS, Ore.  Police arrested a student at Grants Pass High School on Wednesday morning after reports of a gun threat, according to the Grants Pass Department of Public Safety (GPDPS).

A School Resource Officer from GPDPS responded to an alert from school officials around 11 a.m. A 14-year-old student had reportedly told another student that he was going to bring a gun to school on Thursday  with plans to use the gun against others at the school. One student informed school officials, prompting them to report the matter to police.

According to GPDPS, the 14-year-old who originated the threat was then arrested and transported to the Josephine County Juvenile Detention Center, charged with Disorderly Conduct 1.

GPDPS had the following to say about the situation:

"The Grants Pass Department of Public Safety would like to remind the general public that GPDPS takes threats of violence in our schools seriously. GPDPS works closely with the District 7 Schools to keep our schools a safe place for our children. GPDPS would also like to commend the student that came forward and reported the incident to school officials in a quick manner."

On Tuesday, a student at Illinois Valley High School was arrested for making a similar threat.
Mayoral challenger Tom Dyas fears the Kelowna Costco store might be looking to move to the Westside and says city officials haven't been accommodating enough.
At the event, Vice President of the Vietnam Fatherland Front (VFF) Central Committee cum Chairman of the VMFA, Ngo Sach Thuc, sent his congratulations to Malaysian Ambassador to Vietnam Zamruni Khalid, and asked the diplomat to convey his best wishes to the Malaysian leaders and people on the occasion.

While expressing his joy at Malaysias great achievements across various fields, he noted that Malaysia has enjoyed high economic growth of about 5 percent. The countrys economic growth in 2018 is likely to reach 5-5.5 percent.

The country also recorded positive development in terms of culture, education, science-technology and social security, while the local peoples living conditions have been improved, and the nations position and international prestige has been raised.

Over the last 45 years, the Vietnam-Malaysia friendship and multifaceted cooperation have been bolstered across fields from politics, trade, security-defence, culture, labour and tourism.

As the key forces in promoting the friendship between the two countries people, the VUFO, the VMFA and Malaysian partners have made positive contributions in recent years.

Many practical activities such as exchanges and art performances have been organised by the two organisations, contributing to enhancing mutual understanding between the two people, thus promoting the bilateral relations.

Chairman of the VMFA Ngo Sach Thuc hoped for closer coordination and more effective support of one another between the VMFA and the Malaysian Embassy in Vietnam in the coming time, contributing to pushing the friendship and cooperation between the two nations.

For his part, Malaysian Ambassador Zamruni Khalid was pleased to announce that Vietnam and his country have reached important milestones in economic ties, especially in investment, trade and tourism cooperation.

Malaysia is the seventh largest investor in Vietnam with a total investment of US$12.2 billion. Malaysian firms mainly invest in real estate, production, banking and oil and gas sectors.

Two-way trade between Vietnam and Malaysia hit over 11 billion USF in 2017. Vietnams key exports to Malaysia are mobile phones, electronic products and rice.

Regarding tourism links, more than 480,000 Malaysians visited Vietnam in 2017, ranking tenth among the largest tourism markets of Vietnam.

Ambassador Zamruni Khalid said with the increasing number of flights between the two countries, the number Malaysian tourists to Vietnam will increase.

He believed that the Vietnam-Malaysia Strategic Partnership would become closer in the time to come.
The plenary session followed a ceremony to open the 14th ASOSAI Assembly and celebrate 40 years of the ASOSAI Charter.

In his speech, Phoc said it is an honour for him to assume the chairmanship of ASOSAI in the 2018-2021 term, noting that it is also the pride of the SAV as well as the Vietnamese people.

The SAV will continue making utmost efforts to help build a strong ASOSAI community to contribute to economic development in Asia and around the world, he added.

At the plenum, Auditor General of the National Audit Office of China Hu Zejun, who is also head of the ASOSAI Working Group on Environmental Auditing (WGEA), delivered a report of the WGEA.

She said that thanks to the joint efforts of all member supreme audit institutions (SAIs), the WGEA successfully implemented the action plan for 2014-2016 and is actively performing the tasks under the action plan for 2017-2019.

Over the past years, the WGEA has implemented many important activities, including the sixth and seventh seminars on environmental auditing, the fifth and sixth working meetings of the WGEA, promoting cooperation in environmental auditing across Asia, maintaining regular contact within ASOSAI, launching exchanges with working groups in other regions, and sharing experience in environmental auditing in Asia.

It has actively taken part in activities of the International Organisation of Supreme Audit Institutions (INTOSAI) Working Group on Environmental Auditing. The member SAIs have also participated in projects relating to climate change and air pollution fight, agricultural and food production.

Hu said pushing ahead with the action plan for 2017-2019, the WGEA will take active measures to reform environmental auditing techniques and step up cooperation. The ASOSAI Secretariat will also make stronger efforts in the WGEAs activities and continually contribute to environmental protection and sustainable development in Asia.

At the session, ASOSAI Secretary General Choe Jaehyeong, who is Chairman of the Board of Audit and Inspection of the Republic of Korea, reported on activities of the ASOSAI Secretariat since the previous assembly.

Accordingly, the ASOSAI approved the Strategic Plan for 2016-2021. The ASOSAI Strategic Plan Management Task Force, led by the Secretary General, has developed annual operation plans since 2016 to ensure the successful implementation of the Strategic Plan. So far, this plan has been carried out very well, he noted.

In this period, the ASOSAI Secretariat has bolstered cooperation with other regional bodies such as the European Organisation of Supreme Audit Institutions (EUROSAI), the African Organisation of Supreme Audit Institutions (AFRSAI), as well as INTOSAI.

He announced that the 52nd meeting of the ASOSAI Governing Board in Hanoi on September 18 accepted the SAI of Palestine to become the 47th member of the organisation.

At the plenary session, participants chose the SAI of Thailand as host of the 15th ASOSAI Assembly in 2021 and the SAI of China as ASOSAI Secretary General for 2018-2021.

The 14th ASOSAI Assembly is taking place in Hanoi from September 19 to 22 under the theme Environmental Audit for Sustainable Development.
EUGENE, Ore. -- Geometry students at Willamette High School in Eugene got a chance Wednesday to see that what theyre learning in the classroom is used in real life.

Thirty-one high school students visited Western Shelter Systems, a Eugene company that makes flame-retardant shelters and clothing.

Workers explained to the students how they use geometry in their daily work  things like points, lines, planes and the Pythagorean theorem.

Its a little bit more difficult to measure a roof thats a triangle than a roof that would be square because the tip of a triangle is not as wide as the edge of a triangle, so that was probably the hardest part, sophomore Trevor Flaherty said.

Students also toured the plant and learned what its like to enter the workforce.
EUGENE, Ore. -- The Eugene-based nonprofit organization Centro Latino Americano received a $50,000 grant from the state earlier this month to help underserved people in the community sign up for health insurance.

Staff with the nonprofit said the grant is from the Department of Consumer and Business Services, Oregon Health Insurance Marketplace.

With the new grant, staff said they will be able to train four of their staff members to help people enroll in health insurance and provide outreach throughout Lane, Douglas and Linn and Benton counties.

They said this is key because the Latino community, which is the majority of the people they serve, have a hard time accessing and enrolling in health care because of the language barrier.

KEZI 9 News spoke with Laura Diaz whose been utilizing the services at the nonprofit for nearly 20 years.

She doesn't speak English and doesn't have health insurance. Diaz said the organization has played a vital role in her life and is excited for what this grant will do for her and others in the Latino community.

Diaz said if Centro Latino wasn't here, she's not sure what the Latino community would do because it's a lot of help not just in the aspect of translating things but also in the support they provide on a daily basis.

Centro Latino services are open to the public Monday through Friday right off 5th Avenue in Eugene.
ALBERT LEA, Minn.- All of the staff at the Albert Lea Veterans Clinic participated in a 20-minute walk to honor the 20 veterans every day who take their own lives.

"I hope that people will become more aware of the signs and symptoms of suicide and know that there's help out there."

Mental illness knows no boundaries, so those at the event encourage veterans and families or friends of veterans to educate themselves about the warning signs and red flags of suicide.

Those participating in Wednesday's walkout say they hope by doing that, they can spread awareness and start a conversation.
CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa  A Clear Lake man is going to federal prison for a gun crime.

Nicholas Freitag, 36, pleaded guilty in March to possession of a firearm by a felon and domestic abuser. Freitag confessed to buying a gun from someone at a truck stop in Evansdale in July 2017. He told authorities he needed the weapon for protection while working as a truck driver.

The U.S. Attorneys Office for the Northern District of Iowa says Freitag has multiple felony and domestic abuse convictions on his record.

He was sentenced Wednesday to three years and one month in federal prison, followed by three years of supervised release.

This case was investigated by the Clear Lake Police Department.
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Flood Warning

Areas Affected: Cerro Gordo; Floyd; Worth

NWS DesMoines (Central Iowa)

...The Flood Warning has been extended for all or portions of the following rivers in Iowa...Cedar River...Winnebago River...Shell Rock River... Affecting the following counties in Iowa...Black Hawk...Bremer... Butler...Cerro Gordo...Floyd...Worth ...The Flood Warning continues for all or portions of the following rivers in Iowa...West Fork Des Moines River... Affecting the following counties in Iowa...Emmet River forecasts include observed precipitation, as well as expected precipitation over the next 24 hours. ...Flood Warning now in effect until Sunday afternoon... The Flood Warning continues for The Winnebago River at Mason City, or From Beaver Creek near Fertile...to the Shell Rock River near Rockford.

* Until Sunday afternoon.

* At 4:30 AM Thursday the stage was 8.0 feet, or 2.0 feet below Flood Stage.

* Flood Stage is 10.0 feet.

* No flooding is occurring and Minor flooding is forecast.

* Forecast...rise to Flood Stage early Friday morning. Continue rising to 11.5 feet, or 1.5 feet above Flood Stage, early Saturday morning. Then begin falling and go below Flood Stage Sunday afternoon.

* Impact...At 11.0 feet, Sandbagging occurs on the dike from 12th Street Northeast to Carolina Street. &&

If you encounter a flooded area, turn around and find an alternate route. Turn around, do not drown. More information--including impact statements and crest histories--is available on the Web at... www.weather.gov/desmoines. Click on the Rivers and Lakes link.

Flood Warning

Areas Affected: Cerro Gordo; Kossuth

NWS DesMoines (Central Iowa)

The National Weather Service in Des Moines has issued a

* Flood Warning for... Southern Emmet County in northwestern Iowa... Southern Worth County in north central Iowa... Kossuth County in north central Iowa... Hancock County in north central Iowa... Cerro Gordo County in north central Iowa... Southern Winnebago County in north central Iowa... Palo Alto County in northwestern Iowa...

* Until 845 AM CDT Friday.

* At 848 AM CDT, emergency management reported thunderstorms with heavy rain across much of north-central Iowa. The heavy rain will cause overland flooding and local rises in creeks and streams. Up to five inches of rain have already fallen over the last 24 hours with more rain expected...especially later this afternoon and tonight.

* Some locations that will experience flooding include... Mason City, Algona, Forest City, Emmetsburg, Garner, Britt, Manly, Swan Lake, Five Island Lake, Ingham Lake, Union Slogh, High Lake, Clear Lake, Lost Island Lake, Eagle Lake, Mason City Municipal Airport, Silver Lake, Rush Lake, Graettinger and West Bend.

Turn around, don't drown when encountering flooded roads. Most flood deaths occur in vehicles. Excessive runoff from heavy rainfall will cause flooding of small creeks and streams, country roads, farmland, and other low lying spots.

Flood Warning

Areas Affected: Franklin

NWS DesMoines (Central Iowa)

The National Weather Service in Des Moines has issued a

* Flood Warning for... Eastern Wright County in north central Iowa... Franklin County in north central Iowa...

* Until 415 AM CDT Friday.

* At 412 AM CDT, local law enforcement reported flooding in portions of Wright and Franklin Counties, including impassable roads. As much has 4 or more inches of rain have fallen overnight, with scattered storms continuing this morning.

* Some locations that may experience flooding include... Hampton, Belmond, Ackley, Sheffield, Big Wall Lake, Elm Lake, Dows, Latimer, Coulter, Alexander, Geneva, Rowan, Bradford, Hansell, Chapin, Popejoy, Galt, Beeds Lake State Park, Hampton Municipal Airport and Belmond Municipal Airport.

Turn around, don't drown when encountering flooded roads. Most flood deaths occur in vehicles. Excessive runoff from heavy rainfall will cause flooding of small creeks and streams, country roads, farmland, and other low lying spots.

Flood Warning

Areas Affected: Hancock

NWS DesMoines (Central Iowa)

The National Weather Service in Des Moines has issued a

* Flood Warning for... Southern Emmet County in northwestern Iowa... Southern Worth County in north central Iowa... Kossuth County in north central Iowa... Hancock County in north central Iowa... Cerro Gordo County in north central Iowa... Southern Winnebago County in north central Iowa... Palo Alto County in northwestern Iowa...

* Until 845 AM CDT Friday.

* At 848 AM CDT, emergency management reported thunderstorms with heavy rain across much of north-central Iowa. The heavy rain will cause overland flooding and local rises in creeks and streams. Up to five inches of rain have already fallen over the last 24 hours with more rain expected...especially later this afternoon and tonight.

* Some locations that will experience flooding include... Mason City, Algona, Forest City, Emmetsburg, Garner, Britt, Manly, Swan Lake, Five Island Lake, Ingham Lake, Union Slogh, High Lake, Clear Lake, Lost Island Lake, Eagle Lake, Mason City Municipal Airport, Silver Lake, Rush Lake, Graettinger and West Bend.

Turn around, don't drown when encountering flooded roads. Most flood deaths occur in vehicles. Excessive runoff from heavy rainfall will cause flooding of small creeks and streams, country roads, farmland, and other low lying spots.

Flood Warning

Areas Affected: Winnebago

NWS DesMoines (Central Iowa)

The National Weather Service in Des Moines has issued a

* Flood Warning for... Southern Emmet County in northwestern Iowa... Southern Worth County in north central Iowa... Kossuth County in north central Iowa... Hancock County in north central Iowa... Cerro Gordo County in north central Iowa... Southern Winnebago County in north central Iowa... Palo Alto County in northwestern Iowa...

* Until 845 AM CDT Friday.

* At 848 AM CDT, emergency management reported thunderstorms with heavy rain across much of north-central Iowa. The heavy rain will cause overland flooding and local rises in creeks and streams. Up to five inches of rain have already fallen over the last 24 hours with more rain expected...especially later this afternoon and tonight.

* Some locations that will experience flooding include... Mason City, Algona, Forest City, Emmetsburg, Garner, Britt, Manly, Swan Lake, Five Island Lake, Ingham Lake, Union Slogh, High Lake, Clear Lake, Lost Island Lake, Eagle Lake, Mason City Municipal Airport, Silver Lake, Rush Lake, Graettinger and West Bend.

Turn around, don't drown when encountering flooded roads. Most flood deaths occur in vehicles. Excessive runoff from heavy rainfall will cause flooding of small creeks and streams, country roads, farmland, and other low lying spots.

Flood Warning

Areas Affected: Worth

NWS DesMoines (Central Iowa)

The National Weather Service in Des Moines has issued a

* Flood Warning for... Southern Emmet County in northwestern Iowa... Southern Worth County in north central Iowa... Kossuth County in north central Iowa... Hancock County in north central Iowa... Cerro Gordo County in north central Iowa... Southern Winnebago County in north central Iowa... Palo Alto County in northwestern Iowa...

* Until 845 AM CDT Friday.

* At 848 AM CDT, emergency management reported thunderstorms with heavy rain across much of north-central Iowa. The heavy rain will cause overland flooding and local rises in creeks and streams. Up to five inches of rain have already fallen over the last 24 hours with more rain expected...especially later this afternoon and tonight.

* Some locations that will experience flooding include... Mason City, Algona, Forest City, Emmetsburg, Garner, Britt, Manly, Swan Lake, Five Island Lake, Ingham Lake, Union Slogh, High Lake, Clear Lake, Lost Island Lake, Eagle Lake, Mason City Municipal Airport, Silver Lake, Rush Lake, Graettinger and West Bend.

Turn around, don't drown when encountering flooded roads. Most flood deaths occur in vehicles. Excessive runoff from heavy rainfall will cause flooding of small creeks and streams, country roads, farmland, and other low lying spots.
ROCHESTER, Minn.- Nearly two weeks ago, we told you about a fire that caused over $200,000 in damage.

Now the family is starting over but theyre struggling.

I mean when you got four kids that are freaking out inside, as a parent you got to try to keep it together for them, you know, said Shantel Foust.

She and her family lost their home and theyre heading to Michigan to stay with a family friend as they try to figure out the next move.

There's some good news.

Thursday, students at John Marshall High School are having a fundraiser to help the family.

Foust said shes grateful for the community and the school for helping her family out.

I think it wonderful how all the Rochester people are neighbors and are great coming up to us. So many people have reached out for us, for the kids if they need clothing or school supplies.

If youre not a student you can drop of a donation at the front office at the high school.

You can also donate to their go fund me page by clicking here.
ALBERT LEA, Minn.  A Freeborn County man accused of hitting his brother with a shovel is pleading not guilty.

Tyler Dain Christensen, 30 of Albert Lea, is charged with 2nd degree assault with a dangerous weapon and intentional discharge of a firearm. He was arrested on August 29 after Albert Lea police and the Freeborn County Sheriffs Office responded to a report of shots fired.

Authorities say it appears an argument over family issues turned into a physical fight where Tyler Christensen hit his brother in the back with a shovel and told his brother he was going to get a gun. The brother told law enforcement that as he got into his vehicle to leave, he heard a shot.

Police and deputies surrounded the building where Tyler Christensen was and he was arrested without trouble. Court documents say

Christensen admitted to firing a rifle in the air to scare his brother into leaving.

No trial date has been set.
AUSTIN, Minn.  Police are looking to identify two possible suspects in the burglary of the Hiawatha Bar.

It happened the morning of July 22. An officer was flagged down around 4 am by someone who said the west door of the bar was open and two men had been seen in the area. A check of the bar found a safe containing checks and cash was missing.

Austin police said video from an exterior camera showed two men outside the bar. They have now released images of two individuals and a silver SUV they may have been driving.

Anyone with information about these men, their vehicle, or this burglary is asked to contact the Mower County Law Enforcement Center.
IOWA CITY, Iowa (AP)  An agency director who was a top ally of Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds committed a range of sexual misconduct, harassment and inappropriate behavior that went on for years, an independent investigation concluded Thursday.

Iowa Finance Authority Director Dave Jamison grabbed one subordinate's breasts in front of several colleagues, and watched a pornographic video in front of the woman during a different trip, the report found. Jamison repeatedly made crude sexual comments to that woman and a second female employee whom he asked to come to his hotel room during travel, it said.

Jamison, 60, also routinely made inappropriate jokes and obscene gestures in front colleagues and left the office by mid-afternoon to drink and socialize with his top staff at two bars, the report found. He created a Snapchat group for his top aides that he named "IFA Trouble" and frequently traveled to conferences with female aides where he drank heavily, the report found.

Reynolds fired Jamison, whom she had known for two decades, in March after the pornography incident prompted two women to complain to the governor. Reynolds ordered the investigation in April amid questions about how her administration handled the case.

Independent investigator Mark Weinhardt said he found no evidence that anyone in state government outside of the authority had been aware of Jamison's behavior. But his graphic 35-page report said Jamison often boasted about his close relationship with Reynolds, which included helping edit some of her key speeches.

"At least some IFA employees inferred from Mr. Jamison's claims about his relationship with the Governor that he had the power to squelch complaints about his behavior. That may have discouraged reports about his behavior," the report found.

The two women who suffered the most harassment also received major pay increases from Jamison, and investigators found "evidence of similar personnel decisions with other younger female employees." In one case, Jamison got the governor's office to intervene with the Department of Administrative Services to reclassify a woman's job so he could increase her pay. One witness told investigators that Jamison liked to have "arm candy" with him at conferences.

Jamison told a third employee that she looked sexy after he was drinking at one conference. He apologized when she later confronted him.

Reynolds told investigators in an interview that Jamison was a "partier" who had a strange sense of humor.

Jamison didn't return a message from The Associated Press seeking comment about the report. He told investigators that the allegations either weren't true or were taken out of context, but investigators found his denials weren't credible.

The report corroborated a letter that one woman sent to Reynolds in March in which she pleaded for the governor's help stopping Jamison. The woman said Jamison often commented on her breasts and twice tried to get her in his hotel room while traveling, including once after driving drunk to a casino, the report said.

Investigators said two incidents involving another woman stood out as particularly serious.

One involved him grabbing the woman's breasts while they and other co-workers were at a bar near Okoboji. Jamison later told the woman she could "sue him and take everything that he had," but nonetheless continued to joke about the incident. In the second, Jamison used his cellphone to play a pornographic video that he tried to show the woman while she was driving them to a meeting in March. "Mr. Jamison said to her, 'Can you tell when I'm excited?" while looking at his crotch," the report said.

Governor Reynolds issued the following statement on the results of the investigation:

In April, I called for an independent investigation into the allegations against David Jamison.

The report confirms that he committed sexual harassment and that we made the correct decision to immediately terminate him.

While it is not a secret that Mr. Jamison and I were friends, having served as county treasurers at the same time, I had no idea that he behaved this way. I never witnessed or experienced anything like what is described in the report. Had I known, I would have fired him a long time ago. There is no excuse for this kind of behavior.

First, I want everyone in state government to know that sexual harassment will not be tolerated in my administration - from anyone.

Second, I want them to know that they have a place to go. Im glad that the victims felt comfortable reporting these horrific incidents to my office, but Im sorry that they felt inhibited from telling their stories sooner. Among many troubling issues raised by this investigation, I am frustrated that Mr. Jamison created the impression that he wouldnt face consequences because of my friendship with him. That could not be further from the truth.

In his report, Mr. Weinhardt suggested that our policy should be clearer when it comes to making harassment complaints against a director. We will immediately take up this issue and make that change.

Finally, I want to thank the victims for their bravery. It takes courage to come forward, and we must continue to do all we can to protect those who do.
The leaders of the two countries court sectors informed each other of their agencies achievements in judicial reform and judgment experience.

They expressed their delights at the great attainments recorded in judicial reform in each nation as well as the development of the judicial collaboration between the two countries over the past years.

Binh said that the visit by the high-raking delegation of the Supreme Peoples Court of China helps further tighten the affiliation between the two countries court sectors, actively contributing to deepening the Vietnam-China solidarity and friendship.

On the basis of the signed memorandum of understanding, the two sides should enhance cooperation in various judicial areas such as personnel training, information technology application, legal precedent research, and mutual judicial assistance.

For his part, Zhou said he is impressed at Vietnams socio-economic development as well as the comprehensive development of bilateral ties, affirming that the relationship between the two courts will further develop in the future.

The two sides agreed to strengthen cooperation in judge training, set up and promote partnership between the Vietnam Court Academy and the China National Judicial Academy, and share experience in IT application and smart court building.
AUSTIN, Minn. - Riverland Community College students stood in front of their peers, professors, and staff in the library and shared their stories of coming to America. It's a part of Austin's participation in Welcoming Week.

Welcoming Week is a national campaign by Welcoming America to bring together new and long-term residents of communities from a variety of countries, cultures, and backgrounds.

Student Tina Jibi is Sudanese, but grew up mostly in Egypt and Indonesia. She told her story today. To her, welcoming someone means "to make them feel at home and hospitality and just to be there in any kind of way and that's what I found here in Austin. I found home and slowly but surely found family," she says.

She says it's the community she's discovered in Minnesota that encouraged her to apply for citizenship and pursue becoming a nurse. "They don't even ask you, first thing, 'where are you from?' They just say, 'I love your accent.' They know you're not from here but they're welcoming you and it's just a beautiful feeling."

Oballa Oballa shared his story of leaving Ethiopia, a country affected by genocide, and coming to the United States with very few posessions. He thinks its important to tell his story so that people can understand him. "Not everyone knows until you tell them," he explains. "When we tell our story, we tell for a reason, so that you know what brought me here and you know what I can do."

He hopes telling his story will have a positive impact on others. "Having something like Welcoming Week for immigrants and refugees, it really empowers them and motivates them to do more for themselves as they live here and grow up here in America."

Austin was the second community in Minnesota to join in on Welcoming Week. Welcoming Week is September 14-23.
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Larry Fink, chief executive of BlackRock (BLK.N), the worlds largest asset manager, on Thursday said the United States is a big winner in the trade war with China in the short-term.

Fink, speaking at Yahoo Finances second annual All Markets Summit, said the United States is currently the dominant force in the trade war because U.S. companies are currently benefiting from the strong dollar, driving U.S. stocks up, while global equities have fallen. However, in the long term, trade tensions will hurt the United States as they are leading more non-American companies to China, Fink said.

BlackRocks $6.3 trillion assets under management make the New York-based firm one of the most influential voices on investing worldwide. Fink was the first speaker at the event, addressing a group that included investors, executives and journalists.
(Kitco News) - The worlds biggest beer festival will kick off this weekend in Munich, Germany and in an interesting twist for gold investors, the price of beer in gold terms is relatively stable, according to research from a European investment firm.

In its unique gold/Okoberfest beer ratio, Incrementum AG noted that golds purchasing power is holding around its historical averages, while the price of beer in euros continues to rise.

This year festival goers will pay 11.10 per one-liter stein or Ma of beer, an increase of 2.8% from last year. At the same time, one ounce of gold will buy 93 liters of beer, down from 101.90 liters in 2017.

Rising beer prices and a falling gold price are forcing gold investors to be moderate this year, wrote the analysts, who also create the annual In Gold We Trust report. Measured against the historical average of 89 Ma, the beer purchasing power of gold is slightly above the long-term average.

Since last years festival, gold prices have declined nearly 7%. Gold has been stuck in a rut for the last five weeks, holding critical support above $1,200 an ounce. December gold futures last traded at $1,208.40 an ounce, up 0.46% on the day.

The analysts explained that the unorthodox research continues to show how gold is able to preserve its value and purchasing power.

The steady loss of purchasing power of the euro is clearly visible, while gold has not lost purchasing power in the past seven decades, despite some fluctuations, they said. The comparison with the gold/Oktoberfest beer ratio thus makes one thing certain: gold protects against paper moneys ongoing loss of purchasing power -- or expressed in Wiesn terminology: against dry throats.

According to economists, the 16-day beer festival generates about 1.3 billion in economic activity for the region as 8 million liters of beer is expected to be consumed.
(Kitco News) - New technology, new players and new ideas are helping revitalize Idahos mining sector more than 150 years after gold was first discovered and led to the creation of the state.

While Idaho has always been one of the top mining jurisdictions in the U.S. and the world, the region has recently toiled in obscurity; it has been nearly two decades since gold was produced in the area.

However, perceptions are starting to change. In an interview with Kitco News, C.L. "Butch" Otter, governor of Idaho, said that the state is open for business as it works with a variety of new junior miners that see untapped potential in the regions mineralization.

Otter noted that Idaho has rich mineralization and is home to the historic Coeur D'Alene silver valley and major silver producer Hecla Mining (NYSE: HL). The region is one of the richest mining areas in the world, producing metals valued at $2 billion since 1885.

Mining is part of Idahos DNA, he said. We have established a reputation that we are doing business in the right way. Capital wants stability, security and predictability, and those are all things our government is providing for the resource sector.

Major producers are even starting to take notice of Idahos renewed potential as Barrick Gold (NYSE: ABX, TSX: ABX) recently invested $38 million in Midas Gold, which is pushing its Stibnite gold project through the permitting stage, which could be concluded by 2020.

Along with Midas Gold (TSX: MAX), other junior companies like Revival Gold (TSX.V: RVG)and Integra Resources (TSX.V: ITR) are pushing forward with their plans to revive historic projects.

Intregra Resources' DeLamar project

Integra Resources is currently developing its DeLamar project, which produced 1.6 million ounces of gold and 100 million ounces of silver. The mine closed in 1998 because of lackluster precious metals prices.

George Salamis, president and chief executive officer, said when his team was looking for a new mining opportunity, Idaho fit his criteria of being a world-class jurisdiction. He added he expects to see further interest in the state from major precious-metal producers.

You just cant ignore the rich mining culture and history in Idaho, he said. Idaho is at the turning point of being recognized once again as a major mining jurisdiction.

One factor that is helping to change investor and market perception, he said, is the states commitment to the resource sector.

In a specific example, Salamis said that the state government has been a lot more proactive during the permitting process. He noted that it took only six weeks for Integra to get exploration drill permits. This past year the company has spent $10 million on a drill program, the first exploration program on the property in the last 25 years.

Not only is Integra providing a fresh look at its project resource, but Salamis said that the company is taking advantage of technology and a new understanding of the regions geology to review and find new drill targets.

There has been a lot of advances in the geology and we are using some of the latest thinking in how deposits are formed to guide us where to go next, and it is bearing fruit, he said.

Revival Gold's Beartrack property

Revival Gold is currently exploring and developing its resource at its Beartrack property, which produced 600,000 ounces of gold in the 1990s.

Hugh Agro, president and CEO of Revival, said that his company is looking to capitalize on what he sees will be a new bull market in gold. He added that officials are excited to be working in Idaho not just because of the projects potential but because of strong support from the government.

There is a resurgence of interest in projects in the United States, and Idaho is a big piece of that, he said. The state has an interest in growing its economy and doing so by leveraging its resources sector in a responsible and sustainable manner.

He added that in the current environment with growing political uncertainty, investors are putting a premium on projects in safe jurisdictions with established rules of law.

Idaho is probably one of the most mining-friendly states and that gives investors some security, he said. The last thing investors want is to be sideswiped with a political issue, which renders their investment ineffective.

Finally, Agro added that this team was attracted to Idaho because of its geology. He explained that the Beartrack mine suffered because of low gold prices and a lack of focus. However, he said that a new understanding of the areas geology is helping to revive the property and adding resources.

In July, the company revised its resource and identified 1.2 million ounces of indicated gold and 800,000 ounces of inferred gold resources.

Idaho has great geology and is rich in resources that we are only starting to understand, he said.

While there is momentum and perception that Idaho is a world-class jurisdiction, the industry also recognizes that more work needs to be done to maintain this energy.

Benjamin Davenport, an executive with the Idaho Mining Association, said companies like Integra and Revival are not just breathing new life in the sector, but in also communities that have suffering economically.

People are getting excited in our communities again that that is a great thing to experience, he said.

Davenport said that the association is working with the government and regulators in an ongoing effort to improve the development of the resource sector. He added that some of the laws and regulations havent been updated since the late 1970s.

We want to make sure there are clear expectations for projects, he said. Everything we are doing is creating a high level of confidence in the sector.

Davenport added that the association is also working with the states geological survey to get an updated picture of the states resource.
PARIS (Reuters) - Frances highest court of appeal on Thursday rejected the final appeal by former rogue trader Jerome Kerviel against his three-year jail sentence for causing a 4.9 billion euro loss to Societe Generale, a lawyer for the bank said.

Lawyer Jean Veil said Kerviel had no further avenues to appeal his criminal conviction.

The former trader was sentenced to jail after being convicted by a Paris court in October 2010 for breach of trust and fraud after making massive losses in unauthorized equity derivative trades in 2008.

The case has dogged Frances third largest bank for more than a decade, with Kerviel successively characterized as an irresponsible and greedy trader, a victim of the system and eventually a reformed criminal eager to denounce the excesses of the finance industry.

Kerviel, 41, has never denied masking his 50 billion euro positions but contends his managers should have been aware of his actions, something the bank has always rejected.

Kerviel served a few months in prison in 2014 before being granted an early release, but he has fought on to clear his name. At the time he was still locked in a battle in Frances civil courts over damages.

In September 2016, the Versailles Court of Appeals slashed the damages liable to the bank from Kerviel to 1 million euros down from almost 5 billion euros, judging the bank to be partially responsible for failing to halt Kerviels bets.

Months earlier, a labor court had ordered Societe Generale to pay Kerviel more than 450,000 euros for wrongfully firing him.

Societe Generale still faces a dispute with the French finance ministry over the tax treatment of the 2008 loss triggered by Kerviel.
Shenandoah, IA (51601)

Today

Showers early, becoming a steady rain later in the day. High near 60F. Winds SSE at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 100%. Rainfall near a quarter of an inch..

Tonight

Rain showers early with clearing later at night. Low 38F. Winds NW at 10 to 20 mph. Chance of rain 80%.
ASOSAI 14 is taking place in Hanoi from September 19-22 under the theme Environmental Audit for Sustainable Development, and has attracted 46 supreme audit agencies in Asia and 15 international organisations.

At the meeting, Auditor General of the State Audit Office of Vietnam (SAV) Ho Duc Phoc informed President Quang on ASOSAI 14s agenda, adding that foreign delegates highly valued Vietnams preparations for the triennial assembly, as well as its agenda and theme.

President Quang welcomed foreign delegations to Hanoi for the event, which also coincides with the 40th anniversary of the ASOSAI Charter.

He spoke highly of the development of ASOSAI, which has developed from 11 initial members to 46 members over the last 40 years and become one of seven regional organisations of the International Organisation of Supreme Audit Institutions (INTOSAI).

ASOSAI has always taken the lead in public audit and public governance, as well as greatly contributed towards the development of supreme audit institutions (SAIs) in the region and the world, President Quang said.

He thanked ASOSAI for entrusting the SAV with the hosting of the 14th assembly and the chairmanship of ASOSAI for the 2018-2021 term.

President Quang also appreciated the organisations active and effective assistance to Vietnam and valued the increasingly important role of SAIs in the sustainable development of each country and the region. He added that the role of SAIs in supervising the management and use of resources will thereby help to ensure transparency and improve the effectiveness of budget and public asset use in member nations.

According to the State leader, in Vietnam, the SAV has made major contributions to the public finance examining and monitoring system. Its legal status is clearly regulated in the 2013 Constitution and in line with the Lima Declaration of INTOSAI. The SAV has proved useful in helping the National Assembly to supervise the management and use of the budget and public asset.

President Quang also took this occasion to ask INTOSAI, ASOSAI, and member agencies to enhance cooperation in order to realise initiatives and solutions towards stable and sustainable public finance, to promote efforts in the direction of sustainable development goals, and to boost initiatives on environmental auditing.

He also called on them to increase the sharing of information and experience, especially in training auditors, and to help the SAV to fulfill its role as the ASOSAI Chair for 2018-2021.
The President highlighted the rapid and comprehensive growth of Vietnam-China cooperation in all fields, which has been mutually beneficial for people of both sides.

The senior leaders of the two nations have regularly met and signed several cooperation agreements, laying the legal foundations for long-term partnership between the two sides, he noted.

The President held that the affiliation between the Supreme Peoples Courts of Vietnam and China has been reinforced, bringing about specific and practical benefits to the development of each nation as well as further tightening the traditional cooperation between Vietnam and China.

Throughout Vietnams socio-economic development, judicial reform has been a key task for its relevant agencies. During the process, agencies and the Supreme Peoples Court must stay in close coordination to share experience with courts around the world, including the Supreme Peoples Court of China, he said.

He also lauded the signing of a memorandum of understanding on judicial cooperation between the Supreme Peoples Courts of Vietnam and China during Vietnamese Chief Judge of the Supreme Peoples Court Nguyen Hoa Binhs visit to China last May, which marked a new milestone in the partnership between the two agencies.

He stressed that the deal is a foundation for the courts to continue sharing experience and information on court organisation, operation, and management as well as judge training.

He affirmed that the Party and State of Vietnam will continue to support the two courts in deepening their collaboration, stressing his hope that the Supreme Peoples Court of China will share more experience with Vietnam in judicial reform, thus enhancing its peoples access to justice, while also making court operations more transparent and open.

For his part, Zhou Qiang expressed his admiration of Vietnams socio-economic growth, as well as the comprehensive development of bilateral partnership, including the ties between the two court sectors.

He briefed his host on the outcomes of his talks with his Vietnamese counterpart Nguyen Hoa Binh, during which both sides agreed on the need to further bolster collaboration in personnel training, IT application, legal precedent research, and mutual judicial support.


By Kang Seung-woo









Grand Hilton unveils Chuseok promotion



The Grand Hilton Seoul is presenting the Chuseok Package" that will be available until Oct. 10.



The one-night promotion includes a breakfast buffet for two and a 20 percent buffet discount voucher. In addition, package guests will be given free access to the swimming pool and the fitness center as well as a 50 percent discount at the property's sauna.



Furthermore, the Grand Hilton Seoul also offers benefits for long-term stays: if a guest stays more than two nights during the holiday season from Sept. 17 to Oct. 10, a complimentary one-night stay will additionally be given.




Haitai Confectionery's "Matdongsan" / Korea Times file



New book says artistic quotient helps confectionery business grow



By Kang Hyun-kyung



Turn on the music, and cookie dough will feel the groove.



Thirteen pieces of a wide range of music from Korean folk songs to classical music are being played one after another for 20 hours a day while cookie dough is fermented at a confectionary factory in the midwestern city of Cheongju.



"Music therapy" was used by Haitai Confectionery when it produces its decades-old hit cookie "Matdongsan," which was created back in 1975.



According to CEO Youn Young-dal, the music's sound waves helps facilitate yeast activity inside the cookie dough and this has played a part in making Matdongsan a favorite sweet treat for Koreans for decades.



In the book, "Cookies Are Hearts," released earlier this week, Youn said the recipe for the hit cookie was based on the traditional Korean cookie yakgwa.

"Just like yakgwa, cookie dough is fried and then its surface is coated with honey or syrup," the book states. "Over half a century has passed since the cookie was introduced but it still captivates Koreans."





"Cookies Are Hearts" by Youn Young-dal
North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, second from left, and South Korean President Moon Jae-in pose with North Korean first lady Ri-Sol-ju, left, and her South Korean counterpart Kim Jung-sook next to them at Changgun-bong, the peak of Mount Paekdu, Thursday morning. Joint Press Corps



President Moon Jae-in and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un raised each other's hand atop Mount Paekdu, the Korean Peninsula's highest peak considered the birthplace of the Korean people, in a highly symbolic gesture underlining their commitment to reconciliation and eventual unification.

The joint visit put a powerful ending to Moon's three-day trip to the North that produced a series of tangible results, including Kim's pledge to take concrete denuclearization steps, such as dismantling the country's ICBM test site, and his pledge to make a reciprocal visit to Seoul.

The two leaders also agreed to take sweeping measures to reduce military tensions and further bolster inter-Korean exchanges and economic cooperation, such as reconnecting cross-border roads and railways, and to work together to win the right to host the Summer Olympics in 2032.

Officials said Kim first proposed the joint visit to Paekdu and Moon accepted the offer.

The North's leader is believed to have made the offer because Moon said during a dinner after his first summit with Kim in April at the border village of Panmunjom that he hopes to trek up the mountain and he believes Kim will make the wish come true.

"I believe there will come a time when ordinary people of the South can make sightseeing trips to Mount Paekdu," Moon said, overlooking the caldera lake at the top of the mountain, named Cheonji in Korean, which means Heaven Lake. "The first step has now been taken, and if this step is repeated, much more people will be coming here."





South Korean President Moon Jae-in fills a plastic bottle with water from the Heaven lake of Mt. Paekdu, North Korea, September 20, 2018. Joint Press Corps



Kim said Paekdu has been a mountain out of reach for South Koreans since the national division.

"Though a small number of people came here today, (more) people from the South and overseas should come see Mount Paekdu," he said.

The leaders and their wives wore winter coats, given the chilly temperatures at the mountain, located on the border with China in the North's northwest. Officials said the morning low dipped to as low as 2 C.












In this June. 12, 2018, file photo, U.S. President Donald Trump, right, stands with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un on Sentosa Island in Singapore. AP-Yonhap



The United States is prepared to "immediately" engage in talks with North Korea, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Wednesday, signaling a breakthrough in stalled negotiations to dismantle the regime's nuclear weapons program.

North Korean leader Kim Jong-un reaffirmed his commitment to a nuclear weapons-free Korean Peninsula during his third summit with South Korean President Moon Jae-in earlier in the day.

Kim also said following the two-day meeting in Pyongyang that he was ready to dismantle a missile testing site in front of international inspectors and, if the U.S. took reciprocal steps, a key nuclear facility.

"On the basis of these important commitments, the United States is prepared to engage immediately in negotiations to transform U.S.-DPRK relations," the top U.S. diplomat said, referring to North Korea by its formal name, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.

The U.S. has invited North Korean officials to meet with the new U.S. special representative for North Korea, Stephen Biegun, in Vienna, Austria, "at the earliest opportunity," he said.





Secretary of State Mike Pompeo speaks about refugees as he makes a statement to the media Monday, Sept. 17, 2018, at the State Department in Washington. AP-Yonhap



Biegun has been tasked with leading negotiations with Pyongyang to implement an agreement reached by U.S. President Donald Trump and Kim at their historic Singapore summit in June.

In that agreement, Kim committed to work toward "complete denuclearization" of the Korean Peninsula in exchange for security guarantees from the U.S. But progress on the deal stalled as each side demanded the other move first.

The Trump administration has sought concrete denuclearization steps, such as an inventory of the North's nuclear arsenal and a timeline for the nuclear program's dismantlement. Pyongyang has instead pushed the U.S. to jointly declare an end to the 1950-53 Korean War, which ended only with an armistice and left the two sides technically still at war.

Pompeo said the proposed Vienna meeting will "mark the beginning of negotiations to transform U.S.-DPRK relations through the process of rapid denuclearization of North Korea, to be completed by January 2021, as committed by Chairman Kim, and to construct a lasting and stable peace regime on the Korean Peninsula."












South Korean foreign ministry's representative for Korean Peninsula peace and security affairs Lee Do-hoon speaks about his analysis upon the agreed terms for North Korea's denuclearization from the latest inter-Korean Pyongyang summit at Main Press Center inside Dongdaemun Design Plaza in Jung-gu, Seoul, Thursday. Yonhap



South Korea's chief nuclear envoy voiced expectations Thursday that Seoul will go beyond its mediation role between Washington and Pyongyang to play an "active" role in efforts to denuclearize the peninsula.



Lee Do-hoon, the foreign ministry's representative for Korean Peninsula peace and security affairs, made the remarks a day after the third inter-Korean summit in Pyongyang where North Korean leader Kim Jong-un reaffirmed his commitment to nuclear disarmament.



"(South Korea's) role has so far been that of a stepping stone or a guide (in the denuclearization process) ... but we think we can play an active role beyond that role," Lee said at a press center set up for this week's summit between President Moon Jae-in and Kim.



It is the first time that the denuclearization issue has made it to the official agenda for a cross-border summit. In the past, Pyongyang refused to discuss the nuclear issue with Seoul, arguing it is only an issue to be settled through dialogue with Washington.



But the communist state agreed to the denuclearization agenda, as Moon has served as a go-between to facilitate negotiations between the United States and North Korea, based upon trust he has built with Kim and U.S. President Donald Trump.





In this April 15, 2017, file photo, an unidentified missile that analysts believe could be the North Korean Hwasong-12 is paraded across Kim Il Sung Square in Pyongyang. The country's official Korean Central News Agency said the missile fired Sunday, May 14, 2017, was a Hwasong-12 "capable of carrying a large-size heavy nuclear warhead." The Hwasong-10 appeared in the military parade in Pyongyang on April 15, 2017, followed by this unidentified missile. Korea Times file



Noting the positive atmospherics from the latest cross-border summit, Lee stressed the need to make the best of the "crucial opportunity" to spur the denuclearization efforts that had faltered amid differences between the U.S. and the North over the sequencing of the disarmament process.



"I think this period of time .... it is a crucial opportunity that we cannot miss out on," the envoy said. "Our foreign ministry and government will make all-out efforts in all processes."



During the latest inter-Korean summit, the North Korean leader agreed to dismantle a key long-range rocket engine test site in the presence of international inspectors and possibly shut down the main Yongbyon nuclear compound should the U.S. take "corresponding measures."



Lee hailed the agreement, saying that such a progress will be "very conducive" for the declaration of a formal end to the 1950-53 Korean War.



Pyongyang has demanded the political declaration apparently as a way to ensure the security of its regime, whereas Washington maintains that the North should first take tangible denuclearization steps, such as a full declaration of its nuclear arsenal.





North Korea's Punggye-ri nuclear test facility is shown in this DigitalGlobe satellite image in North Hamgyong Province, North Korea, May 23, 2018. Korea Times file


By Jung Min-ho, Joint Press Corps



SEOUL/PYONGYANG  South Korean President Moon Jae-in called on "all Koreans" to take a big step toward reunification of the Korean Peninsula late Wednesday in the first-ever speech by a South head of state in Pyongyang.





"We had lived together for 5,000 years and have lived separately for only 70 years. I urge all of you to end those hostilities and take a big step toward reunification," Moon said before 150,000 North Koreans in the May Day Stadium.





"Chairman Kim Jong-un and I will work hand in hand to build a new country, with 80 million people across North and South Korea. Let's move forward into a new era together."





Moon gave the speech after watching a mass games performance with Kim. It was one of the special events Kim had prepared for Moon, who came to the North Korean capital for this year's third inter-Korean summit, as the two leaders seek to establish a lasting peace on the peninsula.













Moon said, "My fellow Koreans, Chairman Kim and I embraced at Panmunjeom on April 27. We have declared that there will be no war on the Korean Peninsula and opened a new era of peace.





"We have also reaffirmed that we will take charge of our own destiny  We have promised to improve South-North relations drastically so we can achieve prosperity and reunification quickly."





One of the main items on the summit agenda was North Korea's denuclearization progress. During the talks, Kim promised to take some practical steps toward denuclearization, such as closing the main Yongbyon nuclear facility.





Moon said Kim promised to make the country nuclear-free. He also said the two agreed to take concrete steps to eliminate the risk of military conflict at the border.





Moon, who was born to North Korean refugees in South Korea during the Korean War (1950-53), is well aware of the horrors of war and the pain of separated families.





During his speech, Moon said the two leaders would cooperate to find ways to "ease their pain fundamentally."





The speech made Moon the first South Korean leader to speak before the North Korean public. The speech was initially supposed to take for only one or two minutes before the performance, but it was delivered for seven minutes after the show.





The audience gave Moon enthusiastic standing ovations.


Interviewees pose for a photo during interviews with The Korea Times, downtown Seoul Thursday. Korea Times photo by Jung Da-min



By Jung Da-min



During his Sept. 18 to 20 visit to Pyongyang, President Moon Jae-in achieved some memorable moments including his seven-minute speech in front of 150,000 in the May Day Stadium there and a visit to Mount Paektu.



South Koreans all had differing views on which were the most distinctive, though.



"The seven-minute speech was the most memorable scene and gave me the impression that we (the two Koreas) are definitely one, in that we are same people who speak the same language," Kim Kyung-min, 70, told the Korea Times in downtown Seoul Thursday. "Korea would be more powerful when unified, with a total of 80 million people," she said.



Lee Dong-soo, 56, also said President Moon's public speech Wednesday was the most impressive moment.



"It is amazing that President Moon could give such public speech in North Korea, which the previous administrations had never done," he said. "The fact that such a chance was given (to President Moon) is itself a big issue."






Deputy PM Binh has been on an official visit to Poland from September 20-22 at the invitation of Polish Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Science and Higher Education Jaroslaw Gowin.

The government official has held talks with Gowin and met with Marshal of the Senate Stanisaw Karczewski and Chief of the Chancellery of the President Halina Szymanska.

At these meetings, Deputy PM Binh affirmed that Vietnam always treasures the precious assistance and support that the Polish people extended to Vietnam during the cause of national liberation and construction, especially its help in training thousands of Vietnamese personnel.

He congratulated Polands achievements in socio-economic development and European integration, while the Polish leaders expressed their impression at Vietnams high economic growth, stable society, and growing position in the region and in the world.

The Polish officials stressed that Vietnam has been an important partner of Poland over the past seven decades.

They agreed with Deputy PM Binhs proposal on soon organising the first meeting of the Vietnam-Poland economic cooperation consultation mechanism and resuming the operation of the joint committee for science-technology cooperation, saying that they are ready to send delegations to Vietnam.

They also concurred with the early signing of an agreement on degree equivalence and on the establishment of cooperation mechanisms in security and crime prevention. The Polish officials said they would create favourable conditions for the Vietnamese community living and studying in Poland.

The two sides agreed to maintain meetings between their high-ranking officials, and exchange delegations at all levels, sectors, and localities.

They promised to support each other in issues of common interest at multilateral forums, particularly at the United Nations and the Asia-Europe Meeting (ASEM).

Binh took the occasion to thank Poland for its support for Vietnams bid to become a non-permanent member of the UN Security Council for the 2020-2021 term and stressed his belief that Poland will achieve more while holding the non-permanent seat of the UN Security Council for the 2018-2019 term.

At their talks, the two Deputy PMs reviewed past collaboration across sectors and reached an agreement on specific measures to boost bilateral ties.

They applauded the strong development in bilateral economic-trade-investment ties. Trade between Vietnam and Poland exceeded US$1 billion last year and hit US$750 million in the first half of 2018, up 50 percent year-on-year. Polands direct investment in Vietnam increased 2.5 times in the past three years to reach US$230 million.

To sustain the growth, the two Deputy PMs agreed to step up trade and investment promotion, as well as create conditions for Vietnamese and Polish firms to network, carry out market studies, seek investment opportunities, and form joint ventures in the fields of agriculture, food processing, pharmacy, and environmental protection, among others.

They affirmed the need to strengthen judicial cooperation, particularly the negotiation and signing of a regional agreement on extradition, as well as agreements on the transfer of prisoners and the criminal judicial assistance. They said the establishment of collaboration between the two supreme courts and supreme procuracies are also necessary.

The Polish leader stressed that Poland is willing to exchange its experience with Vietnam concerning anti-corruption policy and measures.

Gowin and Karczewski agreed with Binhs view on the importance of the EU-Vietnam Free Trade Agreement (EVFTA) and stressed their commitments to backing the early signing of the pact in 2018 and its ratification next year.

The Polish officials showed their support toward Vietnams stance on international and regional matters, including the East Sea issue.






North Korean leader Kim Jong-un has sent a vast amount of expensive pine mushrooms to South Korea as a gift for President Moon Jae-in, Moon's top press secretary said Thursday.







The special gift arrived in South Korea earlier in the day, well before Moon returned from the North after his three-day trip there, according to Yoon Young-chan.







"While the president and his wife continued to stay in the North, Chairman Kim Jong-un's gift arrived here. Two tons of pine mushrooms arrived at Seoul Air Base early this morning," he told a press briefing.







Moon has instructed his office Cheong Wa Dae to equally share the mushrooms among all separated families here that have yet to be reunited with their loved ones in the North.







"I hope the mushrooms, with the scent of North Korea intact, may offer some condolence," Moon was quoted as saying.







The divided Koreas resumed their joint events to reunite separated families in August after nearly three years.







Still, tens of thousands remain separated from their family members since the end of the 1950-53 Korean War. (Yonhap)




South Korean President Moon Jae-in and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un wave to the crowd as the South's first lady Kim Jung-sook and the North's first lady Ri Sol-ju applaud before watching the North's "Glorious Country" performance at the May Day Stadium in Pyongyang, Wednesday. Moon gave the first ever speech by a South Korean leader to North Koreans urging cooperation to end hostility, and seek peace and prosperity. / Joint Press Corps



By Park Ji-won, Joint Press Corps





SEOUL/PYONGYANG _ President Moon Jae-in gave a speech to North Korean citizens _ the first ever by a South Korean leader _ calling for the people's efforts to end 70 years of hostility and seek a new path toward peace and prosperity, at the close of a choreographed mass-performance in Pyongyang late Wednesday.



Moon and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, along with their wives, watched the large-scale group gymnastics and artistic propaganda performances at the May Day Stadium on the second day of Moon's three-day summit trip to the North. After watching the performance, Moon said "we two leaders declared there will be no more war on the Korean Peninsula and the beginning of a new era of peace for 80 million Korean citizens and the world.



"We have lived together for 5,000 years but separated for only 70. I, now, here, suggest that we completely end the past 70 years of hostility and draw a big picture of peace to become one again."



Praising Kim for his efforts, Moon spoke about their joint agreement made earlier that day saying, "Pyongyang citizens, fellow citizens who I love, today, I agreed with detailed measures to get rid of fears of war and risks of armed conflict from the Korean Peninsula."



Prior to Moon, Kim said "I and President Moon Jae-in made a meaningful result which will be a milestone on the way to seek development of North-South relations and peace and prosperity."



Expressing his gratitude to Moon, Kim urged people to applaud him.



Giving the first speech of its kind by a South Korean leader, Moon waved to the crowd at the stadium as they cheered for both him and Kim.





North Korea's "Glorious Country" performance was displayed at the May Day Stadium in Pyongyang, Wednesday. The flip-card mosaics read, "Let's not lose each other's hands, and pioneer our country's fate" and "Let's achieve unification, unification and unification." President Moon Jae-in and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un watched the performance together and afterwards delivered speeches to the audience. / Joint Press Corps
Journalists, including those from outside South Korea, attend to covering the third inter-Korean summit between South Korean President Moon Jae-in and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un on Sept. 18-20 at the Main Press Center in Dongdaemun Design Plaza in Jongno-gu, Seoul. Joint Press Corps



By Jung Da-min



Foreign reporters based in Seoul are upset that they were not invited to Pyongyang to cover the three-day inter-Korean summit from Tuesday to Thursday.





Chad O'Carroll in Pyongyang during his reporting trip to cover North Korea's Sept. 9 foundation day celebrations. Courtesy of NK News

"Foreign media should be there because it is an international event surrounding the biggest foreign policy concern of the U.S.," NK News managing director Chad O'Carroll told The Korea Times, Wednesday.



He has made five times of trips to the North since 2010.



"South Korean media were welcomed en masse to Singapore and hundreds of South Korean journalists went, because that issue was as much of concern to Seoul as the inter-Korean summit is to foreigners," he said.










The ruling Democratic Party (DP) called Thursday for bipartisan cooperation for parliamentary ratification of the April summit accord between the two Koreas, following this week's inter-Korean summit.







Rival parties earlier agreed to handle the government's proposal on the ratification of the Panmunjom Declaration after President Moon Jae-in's third summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un.







The North's leader agreed to "permanently" dismantle a key missile-testing site under the observation of international experts. He also expressed the country's readiness to close its nuclear complex in Yongbyon, depending on corresponding actions by Washington.







The DP denounced conservative opposition parties for underestimating the latest summit deal and called for bipartisan cooperation in ratifying the April summit agreement.







"The Pyongyang summit deal set the stage for the Koreas to live without fears over war. We anticipate a declaration to end the 1950-53 Korean War this year," Hong Young-pyo, the floor leader of the DP, said at a policy meeting with party officials.







He called for the ratification of the summit agreement signed by Moon and Kim at the truce village of Panmunjom on April 27.







"The main opposition Liberty Korea Party (LKP) should decide until when it will serve as a bystander or an obstructor when it comes to peace," Hong added.







President Moon hopes inter-Korean summit agreements can survive government changes through parliamentary ratification. The summit agreements in 2000 and 2007 were not ratified, which led their implementation to fizzle out under succeeding conservative governments.







The minor opposition Bareunmirae Party expressed its willingness to cooperate on Thursday, though the third-largest party preferred the adoption of a resolution to buttress the agreement as a realistic option prior to ratification.







But the LKP is opposing the ratification, citing a lack of progress in North Korea's denuclearization.







A resolution to support the April summit was put up for a vote in May, but rival parties failed to approve it as they differed on the wording with respect to North Korea's denuclearization. (Yonhap)


By Kim Yoo-chul



North Korea has a "serious intention" to possibly hand over a list of its nuclear warheads to the United States if Washington applies reciprocal measures in exchange for North Korean leader Kim Jong-un's determination to abandon its nuclear programs, a senior U.S. expert said.



"I didn't expect such a nuclear list to be handed over at the Pyongyang summit. However, I hope that there are serious expressions of intent to do so backed by additional signs for Washington that Moon is able to convey to Trump so as to jump-start the negotiation process between the United States and North Korea," Scott Snyder, the director of the U.S.-Korea policy program at the Council on Foreign Relations, said in an email interview, Thursday.



Snyder, also chief Korea analyst at the council, said intent was largely based on a better-than-expected outcome from the third inter-Korean summit this year with the North's Kim committing to move toward abandoning its nuclear programs, subject to corresponding moves by the United States.





Scott Snyder, director of the U.S.-Korea policy program at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), the United States. Courtesy of CFR

But the expert warned that any overhyped-expectations about the pace of inter-Korean relations may bring unexpected results.
President Moon Jae-in speaks to journalists at the Main Press Center in Dongdaemun Design Plaza in Jung-gu, Seoul, after arriving at the Seoul Airport in Seongnam, Gyeonggi Province, from Samjiyon Airport in North Korea in Thursday evening. Korea Times photos by Choi Won-suk



By Kim Bo-eun



President Moon Jae-in brought home substantial progress in inter-Korean relations as well as denuclearization, Thursday, after a summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un in Pyongyang.



The leaders agreed to ease military tension and remove the danger of war on the Korean Peninsula by setting up maritime, air and ground buffer zones along border areas.



The summit also elicited a public statement from the North Korean leader on his willingness to denuclearize and produced tangible denuclearization measures, such as the permanent shutting down of the North's Tongchang-ri missile testing site in the presence of international experts.



The agreement reached between the leaders at the Pyongyang summit was welcomed by South Korea's key allies.



"We had very good news from North Korea, South Korea. They met, and we had some great responses," Trump told reporters at the White House, Wednesday. "We're making tremendous progress with respect to North Korea," he said.



In a statement, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo referred to the agreements as a "successful outcome" and welcomed Moon and Kim's "reaffirmation of the Singapore joint statement of complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula."



China's Foreign Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang said the Koreas had "reached new important consensus." "As a close neighbor to the Korean Peninsula, China always supports North and South Korea in improving their relations," he said.







Japan's Chief Cabinet Secretary Minister expressed respect for the leaders' efforts to reach the agreements and stated hopes that they would lead to the complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula. He told reporters Japan will continue to work closely with the U.S. and South Korea on the matter.









Russia's presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov referred to the agreements as "good news" and stated Russia's support for "effective steps towards the settlement of the Korean problem."



Cheong Wa Dae stated it was significant that all of the relevant states showed their support.



"We believe a new process which is supported by all the relevant states is unfolding," senior presidential press secretary Yoon Young-chan said.



Meanwhile, North Korea's pledge to take tangible denuclearization measures prompted Washington to immediately extend its hand to Pyongyang for further talks. The invitation comes after weeks of stalled negotiations between the countries.



In the statement, Pompeo stated the U.S. is "prepared to engage immediately in negotiations to transform U.S.-North Korea relations."



It said Pompeo invited North Korean Foreign Minister Ri Yong-ho to New York for a meeting and asked Pyongyang to begin denuclearization talks with its new Special Representative Stephen Biegun in Vienna, as soon as circumstances allow.




Seen is a box of pine mushrooms received from North Korean leader Kim Jong-un as a return gift upon South Korean President Moon Jae-in's visit to the North for the third inter-Korean summit, Thursday. The presidential office Cheong Wa Dae revealed Thursday that two tons of pine mushrooms have arrived at Seoul Air Base, Seongnam, Gyeonggi Province, as a gift from North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, which will be distributed to South Korean separated families, who haven't met their relatives in the North, as a Chuseok holiday present. / Courtesy of Cheong Wa Dae



By Park Ji-won



Kim Jong-un has sent two tons of pine mushrooms, a North Korean specialty, as a gift to South Korean relatives separated by the Korean War following the summit with President Moon Jae-in in Pyongyang, a presidential secretary told reporters, Thursday.



On the last day of the Pyongyang summit, Yoon Young-chan, senior secretary to the president for public communications said during the afternoon briefing that "while the South Korean President and first lady are staying in North Korea, North Korean leader Kim Jong-un's present has already arrived here. Two tons of pine mushrooms arrived at Seoul Air Base in Seongnam by cargo plane at 5:36 a.m. in the early morning, today."



"All of the mushrooms will be distributed to separated families in South Korea who haven't met their relatives in the North and still embrace sorrow in their hearts."



Kim's move is likely part of diplomatic courtesy to exchange presents. What kind of present Moon would have sent to the North hasn't been disclosed. Moon and his delegates visited North Korea for the third inter-Korean summit from Tuesday to Thursday, where the two leaders signed the Pyongyang Joint Declaration that reaffirms the abolishment of all threats of war on the Korean Peninsula.
By Lee Min-hyung, Joint Press Corps



SEOUL/PYONGYANG - Seoul has opened an opportunity for the exploitation of possible security loopholes by North Korea after signing a "hasty" inter-Korean military agreement that does not contain any details for Pyongyang's specific and verifiable timeline for denuclearization, experts said Thursday.



On Wednesday, the two Koreas reached the agreement outlining joint military disarmament near the border. The South Korean government said the decision will help speed up the denuclearization of the regime, calling the agreement a de facto end to the technical state of the 1950-53 Korean War.



But critics have raised concerns about the agreement, saying that the South should have taken a step-by-step approach in line with the ongoing moves toward the North's denuclearization.



"Seoul's decision to set up a 'no-fly zone' near the border village was a rash act," said Lim Jae-chun, a professor at Korea University's North Korean studies. "Such a decision should have been made after the North showed a concrete and systemic step for its denuclearization."



Under the joint military agreement, Seoul and Pyongyang decided to set up buffer zones on land, sea and air. Of note was that they agreed to establish a no-fly zone about 40 kilometers west of the military demarcation line (MDL) and 80 kilometers east of it.



The South Korean Defense Ministry said the move will help prevent any accidental military conflict in the air, thereby creating a mood for the two Koreas to develop their ongoing peace momentum.



"North Korea did not set up a specific timeline for its complete denuclearization in the agreement," Lim said. "The South does not have to remain hasty in reaching any peace agreements with the North."



Any national security-related agreements with the North should be made after careful consideration of the unpredictable nature of the regime, according to him.






By Kim Hyun-bin



Foreign media have shown mixed responses to the results of the third inter-Korean summit in Pyongyang.



BBC reported that the recent summit talks have put "diplomatic process back on track" after North Korean leader Kim Jong-un expressed readiness to shut down its nuclear facility in Yongbyon once the U.S. take reciprocal actions. Yongbyon is where the North is believed to have produced materials to develop its nuclear weapons.



Kim also announced North Korea would permanently close down its main missile test site in Dongchang-ri "in the presence of experts from relevant nations," which BBC called a major leap forward.



The Independent reported that "The future of the Korean Peninsula has never looked brighter than it does now."



It said the recent agreements to dismantle border posts, scale back military drills and establish no-fly zones and one of the most significant agreements to jointly bid for the 2032 Summer Olympics could do much to transform North Korea's economy with the help of South Korean conglomerates such as Hyundai and Samsung.



However, not all reports have been positive, with some criticizing the North for exploiting the summit for economic gains.






President Moon Jae-in, second from right, and his wife Kim Jung-sook, right, stand with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, second from left, and his wife Ri Sol-ju on Mount Paektu in North Korea, Thursday. Joint Press Corps



By Kim Yoo-chul, Joint Press Corps



SEOUL/PYONGYANG  Dreams can come true. President Moon Jae-in cleared a top item off his "bucket list," Thursday, as he ascended Mount Paektu with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un.



According to pool reports from Korean journalists covering the third inter-Korean summit this year, President Moon reached Chonji, the mountain's well-known crater lake, with Kim around 10:20 a.m. via cable car.



The two were accompanied by first lady Kim Jung-sook, the North Korean leader's wife Ri Sol-ju and high-profile delegates from both sides.



"Where is the border?" was the first comment by Moon after reaching the peak of the mountain. "There are four seasons on Mount Paektu," Kim responded.



Moon held several photo ops with the first lady, and took a deep breath when he reached the peak, where he stayed for 30 minutes, the pool reports said.









The joint excursion came after Kim suggested to Moon that they visit the "symbolic mountain" on the Chinese border. Climbing the mountain was an "unfulfilled dream" for Moon, who is well known for his passion for mountain trekking _ he has visited the Himalayas twice.



The mountain has a sacred role in Korean folklore and has been used to lend gravitas to the North Korean regime's propaganda across generations. As the highest mountain on the Korean Peninsula at about 2,750 meters above sea level, it has long been considered as the mythical place of origin for Koreans.



As the mountain is also a "spiritual spot" for the North Korean "revolution," the excursion was seen by many as sincere treatment of President Moon and a reaffirmation of the commitment to denuclearization, according to Cheong Wa Dae officials.




Hang made the statement at a regular press briefing on September 20 while answering reporters query about the outcome of the inter-Korean summit, which took place in Pyongyang, the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea (DPRK).

Vietnam supported the concerned parties maintaining dialogue and high-level meetings, and having constructive and practical actions in order to denuclearise the Korean Peninsula; and promoting dialogue, cooperation, peace and stability in the region and the world as well, she said.
By Kim Ae-ran





With the arrival of hundreds of people fleeing from Yemen, the migrant issue has become more sensitive, serious, and critical in Korea. Some people still protest against the acceptance of refugees and demand to abolish the Jeju Island visa so that the refugees may not settle in the asylum.



Every year, more migrant workers are coming to perform not only professional work but also take on demanding jobs. Migrants from China are the biggest group, among other groups from Vietnam, Thailand, the United States, Uzbekistan, the Philippines, Japan, Cambodia, Mongolia, Indonesia, Russia, and others.



Naturally, migrant communities are increasing here and also throughout Korea. In Seoul alone, English Mass is offered in various Catholic parishes such as Hyewha-dong, Myeongdong, Hannam-dong, Doksan-dong, Nakseongdae-dong, and so on. Masses in Tagalog, Vietnamese, and Chinese are served as well every Sunday.



Each diocese has its own migrant community. For example, the Daejeon diocese has its "Moyse" migrants center; the Uijeongbu diocese, its "Exodus" migrants center; the Suwon diocese, its 'Emmaus' migrants center.



In the industrial suburbs such as Ansan and Siheung in Gyeonggi-do, many migrant workers are staying there temporarily, and even illegally. Furthermore, bi-national marriage is encouraged in rural districts, thus creating multinational families and multicultural society.



In our history, many Koreans also went abroad to Germany, the United States or the Middle East as farmers, miners, nurses or workers to overcome their economic limitations. Many of them worked hard at two or three part-time jobs a day to survive, settling down in a foreign country with better surroundings to support their families.



In fact, our ancestors had a nomadic life moving and upgrading constantly in search of grasses, fruits, and vegetables. Israelites in the era of Exodus in the Old Testament moved on and on through the desert.



Nowadays, due to wars, violence, persecution, natural disaster, lots of people cannot but depart from their comfort nests to challenge themselves going to the frontiers.

In the Catholic Church, with special intentions, going voluntarily to the frontiers with a mission to proclaim the Good News has become the witness of living a missionary spirit. We are challenged to go on a journey to the frontiers so as to sow the truth among people.



Looking back to myself, I also have undergone a journey constantly. Geographically growing up in a little village in the rural area where I was born, I was later transferred to a middle-class city, then to the capital city, and then to several countries in the world. I kept going forward. Along the geographical movement and transference, my mentality and spirituality also have progressed and transformed continually.



Such journeys, both geographical and spiritual, would never end at one point, for they are something like a spiral circle or staircase without end. The spiral journey is repeated, circulating, and perpetual. Of course, every turn in the spiral pattern is filled with valuable experiences, inspiring learning, and abundant graces. All the ups and downs, turns and twists make our life full of energy, inspiration, and enlightenment.



Thus, without knowing where we will end, we just go on, living every moment to the fullest. On the way, we encounter various people and diverse situations. Quite unexpected sometimes, but the thing is that we follow the light, full of vital life leading to "the truth of love." From this vitality comes the principles of solidarity, integrity, tolerance, flexibility, and universality that invite us to do good without cost to others beyond discrimination.





The author is a member of the Daughters of St. Paul (Figlie di San Paolo) living and giving the Good News to the world by means of social communication. Learn more about the congregation at fsp.pauline.or.kr.


By Younghoon David Kim





With three inter-Korean summits this year and the possibility that North Korea may denuclearize and come out of the cold, political leaders and energy experts in Seoul and Moscow are blowing the dust off an old plan to build a natural gas pipeline from Vladivostok to the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ).



Indeed, President Moon Jae-in and Russian President Vladimir Putin have already agreed to start joint feasibility studies.



The flow of Russian gas overland through North Korea to South Korea could be a flagship project of inter-Korean cooperation. But it could also be even more significant. It is possible the pipeline could represent the first small step towards eventual regional East Asian economic integration.



The argument for that conclusion is quite simple. Until now, this project has not gone ahead because of politics.



When it came up a generation ago following the state visit of then President Kim Dae-jung to Russia, the government of North Korea at that time could not ideologically justify welcoming outside experts to visit North Korea for a feasibility study on its territory and the pipeline died a natural death.



But times are changing. If the age of ideological confrontation on the Korean Peninsula is ending, as we hope it is, all players will be motivated by their respective national self-interest.



What are those interests? Consider first the three main players  Russia, and North and South Korea.



Russia wants the pipeline because it is looking to diversify its gas markets from Europe to Asia. It aims by 2030 to be selling 25 percent of its natural gas to Asia.



South Korea takes 1.5 million tons of Sakhalin gas a year now and this could increase to 7 million with a pipeline. This will allow Seoul to reduce dependency on current suppliers. Another attraction is that piped gas is cheaper than LNG, which has to be liquefied, shipped and then re-gasified at importing terminals.



As for North Korea, once the pipeline is built, it would be able to charge transit fees. These could be around $150 million a year.



Consider also the interests of the other concerned regional powers.



They, too, could benefit, albeit less directly. It is possible, for example, that Japan might be interested in an extension of the pipeline, from Busan under the sea to Kyushu and even to Honshu.



China is looking for energy security. It now gets its gas from Turkmenistan to the west and Siberia to the north. Were the trans-Korean pipeline to be extended under the sea to China, it would receive gas from the east, so to speak.



That all said, there is another issue in the way and that is the geopolitical standoff between the United States and Russia. Contrary to the general assumption that the gas pipeline will proceed as soon as the relationship between North and South Korea improves, based on a reliable denuclearization scheme, the U.S. still might be unhappy because the project would raise Russia's political and economic clout in the Far East.



On the plus side, it is possible the U.S. could benefit economically, if it were able to ship gas from Alaska to Korea's east coast and feed it into the East Asian loop of the gas network. But, clearly, the political aspect of the U.S.-Russia relationship is a consideration.



It is possible that the parties involved may iron out the various issues and practical considerations at the next World Energy Congress.



The triennial event of the World Energy Congress is being held next in Abu Dhabi in 2019. Besides North Korea, the concerned countries are active members of the organization. (North Korea was a member and is now expressing interest in rejoining).



As an interesting historical note, the World Energy Council, which is a non-political and non-commercial global forum, was originally formed to rebuild the electricity grid in Europe after World War I. Three decades later, in 1951, the European Coal and Steel Community was established and it later evolved into today's European Union.



In a similar way, with the right leadership, the cooperation and investment required to create the infrastructure to feed gas into the grids of China, Japan and South Korea, with add-ins from the United States, could form the basis for East Asian economic integration that would eventually reshape our region.





Younghoon David Kim is the chairman of the London-based World Energy Council and chairman and CEO of the Daesung Group.


Medical industry needs deregulation to hone competitiveness



The secret to the U.S. dominance in high-tech medicine is its excellent use of data. For example, the U.S. government has taken the lead in securing the atrial fibrillation data of tens of thousands people and opening them for researchers' use. The country also plans to make public 200 terabytes of genetic data under its genetic information project.



America has established a system in which private firms can use health and medical data for commercial purposes. The world's largest economy is trying hard to create an ecosystem of public health and medicine on the national level.



In Korea, too, some large hospitals, including Seoul National University Hospital, Severance Hospital and Asan Medical Center, are working to standardize data by turning long-accumulated but unstructured medical information into a structured and meaningful system. Such efforts show these medical institutions have finally come to realize the importance of big data.



Though lagging behind advanced countries, the large hospitals' moves are welcome from the aspect of enhancing a competitive edge for Korea's medical industry in the future. Medical services now call for integrating separate acts, ranging from diagnosis to prognosis, and from treatment to post-treatment management, into one continuous process.



The Ministry of Science and ICT is also taking meaningful steps by encouraging hospitals to research and develop big data, and providing financial support to this end.



One exception, however, is the Ministry of Health and Welfare, the agency responsible for supervising hospitals, which is applying the brakes to the use of big data under the pretext of protecting the privacy of patients. Such disharmony among government ministries can confuse the private sector.



Big data has long become a global trend. The U.S. has already relaxed regulations to help businesses use big data by taking identify protection steps and winning individuals' approval.



Korea may not be able to lead the world in this area but should struggle not to lag far behind. It should benchmark industrialized nations and create a big data ecosystem. Future medical competitiveness comes from data. The Moon Jae-in administration should make an overall policy review urgently to utilize big data in many more industrial sectors.






Moon, Kim hold hands at Mount Paekdu



President Moon Jae-in's Pyongyang visit culminated in an unprecedented visit to Mount Paekdu Thursday morning with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un.



Accompanied by their wives, the leaders of the two Koreas held hands on the highest peak of the Korean Peninsula. Without a doubt, this will be remembered as one of the most iconic moments in the history of inter-Korean summit diplomacy. Cheong Wa Dae explained that Kim suggested the trip to the mountain, and Moon, an avid climber who has long wanted to visit it, accepted. The President mentioned his wish to visit Mount Paekdu when he hosted a dinner for Kim during their first summit in April.



The two leaders' historic trip to the mountain which has a special meaning for the people of the two Koreas reflects their unwavering determination to expedite reconciliation of the two Koreas. It also shows how close the two leaders have become after repeated meetings this year, starting with their first summit at the southern side of the truce village of Panmunjeom on April 27. They met for the second time on the northern side of Panmunjeom in May.



During their third summit this week, the two leaders produced the Pyongyang Joint Declaration, which was hailed as significant momentum for achieving North Korea's denuclearization. U.S. President Donald Trump showed a positive reaction to the outcome of the summit. The two leaders also agreed on various measures to reduce military tension on the Korean Peninsula.



Another memorable aspect of Moon's trip was his speech at a mass performance in Pyongyang Wednesday. It was the first time for a South Korean head of state to give a public speech to the North Korean people. More than 150,000 citizens were present.



One of the most impressive aspects of the declaration is that Kim committed to visit Seoul in the document. If realized, it would be the first time for a North Korean leader to visit the nation's capital. The June 15 Joint Declaration, produced during the first inter-Korean summit in Pyongyang between former President Kim Dae-jung and Kim Jong-il, the incumbent's father, states that Kim will visit Seoul "at an appropriate time." But Kim Jong-il died in December 2011 without making the visit.



This time, the North Korean leader must keep his word to visit Seoul to prove his sincerity toward implementing the agreements reached between him and President Moon.










By Donald Kirk





Stephen King, author of global best-selling novels of horror and fantasy, has written about the craving for horror stories, books and films. He thinks all of us are more or less "mentally ill," but most of us hide or sublimate our worst instincts. From there he tries to answer why we sit through horror movies that frighten us.



King digs deep into what motivates people. A horror movie, he says, has "a dirty job to do." It "appeals to all that is worst in us," "our nastiest fantasies." He sees tales of horror as devices to hold our cravings in check, satisfying inner desires, feeding evil spirits in fiction rather than real life. A master of hyperbole, King no doubt has a point. After watching horror on film, he believes we should get over it. Optimistically, he evokes the message of the Beatles song, "All you need is love."



In the real world of conflict and confrontation on the Korean Peninsula, the threat posed by North Korean nukes and other weapons of mass destruction has seemed like the stuff of nightmares. Some day we hope to wake up, look around and see a society that, to outward appearances, is normal. We are so accustomed to the apparition of horror posed by North Korea that we often pay no attention to it. Yet we know it's there, and we imagine forms of attack far more devastating than any of the terrible weapons deployed in the Korean War.



Could we now be awakening from the nightmare that's been hanging over the daily lives of everyone in Korea since the North Korean invasion of June 1950? President Moon Jae-in's three meetings with Kim Jong-un, most recently this week in Pyongyang, suggest the bad dream is over and the 80 million people in North and South Korea can forget about a war in which tens of millions might die  many more than the 3-4 million killed in the horrors of the Korean War.



As we look back on the constant fear that is always with us, the fantasy of death and destruction beyond imagination, we wonder if the cloud is lifting and the two Koreas can get along while the armies of their allies, the U.S., ready "to fight tonight" for the South, the Chinese, poised to intervene as they did in 1950, forget about a second Korean War.



Actually, by no means is the bad dream over. We can be pretty sure they're not going to be used any time soon, but we still have no assurance North Korea is giving up its nukes, much less the horde of biological and chemical weapons that doesn't seem to have come up for discussion.



I vividly remember we had high hopes after Kim Dae-jung flew to Pyongyang to see Kim Jong-il in June 2000 for the first inter-Korean summit. Hopes were revived when DJ's successor, Roh Moo-hyun, went there for the second such summit in October 2007 one year after the North's first nuclear test.



The most memorable result of the Kim and Kim summit was agreement on reunions of families divided by the Korean War, but so far there have been only 21, the latest last month. It's hard to remember what came out of the Roh-Kim summit beyond generalities, but they did come to some understanding on North Korea's claims to waters off the west coast. That one fell apart totally when a North Korean mini-sub torpedoed the corvette Cheonan in March 2010, killing 46 sailors.



The test of this week's Moon-Kim summit, their third since Kim stepped across the line and met Moon at the truce village of Panmunjeom on April 27 but their first in Pyongyang, will not be whether the North gives up its nukes and missiles and the facilities for making them, as the Americans demand and the North Koreans are not going to do, but whether they can fulfill lesser deals. For instance, the South Koreans are closing some of their guard posts south of the military demarcation line, as agreed Wednesday, but who knows what the North Koreans are doing?



Oh, and two or three other issues either never arose or were swiftly brushed aside. The North Koreans are saying nothing about withdrawing several hundred thousand troops within striking distance of the South or pulling back several thousand missiles that could rain fire and fury on the Seoul-Incheon megalopolis, just as President Donald Trump famously threatened last year to do to the North. And it would be extremely impolite to breathe a word in Kim Jong-un's presence about systemic human rights abuses, notably to several hundred thousand prisoners consigned mostly for badmouthing Kim, to spend the rest of their shortened lives within the North's sprawling gulag system.



Hope, however, springs eternal. We'll know more when or if Kim pays a return visit to Seoul, as Moon said was agreed. It would be nice to think Jong-un was doing more to bring about reconciliation than did his late father, Kim Jong-il, who promised to see Kim Dae-jung in Seoul but never made it. As in denuclearization, the proof lies in deeds not words.





Donald Kirk, www.donaldkirk.com, covered both the June 2000 and October 2007 summits in Seoul as well as Moon's meetings with Kim in April and May.


SPC Group employees give free food and drinks to reporters covering the inter-Korean summit in Pyongyang at the media center located at Dongdaemun Design Plaza in Seoul, Wednesday. The confectionery company, which is owned by North Korean-born Chairman Hur Young-in, ran the booth from Monday to Thursday, as it did during the previous inter-Korean summit in April in Panmunjeom and the North Korea-U.S. summit in June in Singapore. / Courtesy of SPC Group
By Nam Hyun-woo





KCC Chairman Chung Mong-jin
Eight hundred residents of Hanam, Gyeonggi Province, hold a rally in front of Shinsegae Group's Starfield Hanam shopping mall, April 28, to protest the retailer's plan to build a logistics center in the city for its e-commerce business. / Courtesy of Misa Riverside City residents in Hanam



By Park Jae-hyuk



Affinity Equity Partners and BRV Capital Management are in dilemma over their planned 1 trillion won ($930 million) investment into Shinsegae Group's e-commerce business as the retailer has been denied a permit to build a logistics center for its online shopping business in Hanam, Gyeonggi Province, industry analysts said Thursday.



The Hanam City Government recently rejected Shinsegae's request for a permit to build the 30-story logistics center in the city, due to strong opposition from local residents, who are concerned the facility would cause traffic congestion and safety problems.



Analysts say the local government measure could affect not only Shinsegae but also investors.



"Although I do not know all the details of the memorandum of understanding between Shinsegae and its investors, I can say there is concern about the growing uncertainty," Korea Ratings analyst Song Jong-yoo said. "It is definitely an issue that we should monitor carefully."



According to a previous report from the credit-rating agency, Shinsegae cannot achieve its goal of increasing sales 10-fold by 2023, unless it proceeds with bits plan to start an integrated e-commerce corporation.



Shinsegae had planned to build the logistics center as the key facility for its e-commerce operation.



The conglomerate came up with a plan to raise funds from foreign asset management companies and to list the new corporation on the stock market, after merging Shinsegae Department Store's online business division with E-mart.



However, the Hanam City Government said Wednesday it sent an official letter to Korea Land & Housing Corp. to clarify that the city opposes the construction of Shinsegae's logistics center on land near Misa Riverside City in Hanam.



"Although I myself want to attract conglomerates to Hanam to make it a self-sustaining city, they must be welcomed by our citizens as well," Hanam Mayor Kim Sang-ho said.



Hanam had wanted Shinsegae to set up the e-commerce corporation's headquarters on the site for the logistics center, but the company refused, saying the site was too small to accommodate all the employees of the headquarters.



Claiming that the postponement of construction of the logistics center was irrelevant to the establishment of its e-commerce corporation, Shinsegae said it will look for another place in Hanam to build it.



Shinsegae faced a similar setback in 2017 when it wanted to build a logistics center for its online shopping business in Guri, Gyeonggi Province.



At that time, the group entered into a purchasing agreement to buy a 16,528-square meter lot, but withdrew from contract after only four months due to protests from local residents who also raised concerns over potential damage to the residential and educational environment as well as traffic jams.






By Park Jae-hyuk







Coupang has delivered more than 1 billion items through its signature "Rocket Delivery" service over the past four years, the e-commerce company said Thursday.







The service has been popular with Coupang's customers because most can receive their purchase within 24 hours wherever they live in Korea. To offer the service, Coupang set up its own logistics center and hired deliverymen dubbed "Coupang men."







The company said it has made 261 million Rocket Deliveries so far this year. In 2014, only 23 million items were delivered throughout the year. Currently, 3.5 million items can be delivered.







Coupang plans to hire an additional 1,000 delivery workers by the end of the year to improve the service.







It has also begun offering part-time jobs called "Coupang flex." The firm said housewives who want to earn money during the day are among applicants for the positions.







Coupang Senior Vice President Navid Veiseh said his company will continue to come up with new services to satisfy its customers.


In the letter, PM stated bilateral friendship and cooperation have thrived across all fields over the past 45 years, meeting aspiration of and bringing practical benefit for the two countries people, thus contributing to peace, stability, prosperity, cooperation and development in the region and in the world.

Vietnam and Japan have become each others important partner, he wrote. Based on good outcomes obtained so far, PM Phuc suggested the two countries continue strengthening their extensive strategic partnership toward a new height.

The PM also congratulated Abe on his re-election as president of the Liberal Democratic Party.

The same day, Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Pham Binh Minh sent a congratulatory letter to Japanese Foreign Minister Taro Kono.
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Kendallville, IN (46755)

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Partly cloudy skies in the morning will give way to cloudy skies during the afternoon. High 57F. Winds E at 5 to 10 mph..

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He made the remarks at the 35th ASEAN Social Security Association (ASSA) Board Meeting that opened on September 18 in Nha Trang, the resort city of Khanh Hoa in central Vietnam.

Vietnam wishes to share experience with regional and global social security associations to create sustainable environment to develop social insurance for all workers and health insurance for all people, Deputy Prime Minister Dam said.

The ASSA Board Meeting, hosted by the Vietnam Social Security (VSS), brought together about 170 delegates, including ASSA President, leaders of national social security institutions and diplomats from ASEAN member states.

The events main theme is the challenges and opportunities of ASEAN social security institutions in the context of the 4th Industrial Revolution and free flow of labour.

Addressing the event, Deputy Minister, Director General of VSS Nguyen Thi Minh stressed the need for ASSA members to work together for sustainable social security for all in the ASEAN Community.

ASEAN social security is entering a new phase of development with opportunities and challenges due to the revolution 4.0 and the free flow of labour in region. Therefore, ASSA needs to have a creative approach and a long-term vision to fully use the experience and technology of the members, said Minh.

President of ASSA Suradej Waleeittikul told the event he believed with the sharing of knowledge and experience from organizations and experts, the meeting will put forth new policies regarding social security in the context of the 4th industrial revolution and free flow of labour, contributing to building a strong, united and effective social security community in ASEAN.

The ASSA was found in 1998 following the signing of a Memorandum of Agreement in Bangkok, Thailand on February 13 that year, involving heads of social security institutions from five countries - the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand. Representatives from Laos and Vietnam also attended the signing ceremony as observers. Later the year, the VSS became a member of ASSA.

It is the fifth time the VSS has chaired the ASSA Board Meeting. It undertook the chairmanship during the 2002-2003 term and successfully organised the ASSA Board Meeting in 1999, 2002, 2005 and 2010.
At the 2018 FACIM (Fair Agriculture, Commercial and Industrial of Mozambique) trade show, which took place from August 27 to September 2 in Mozambiques capital city of Maputo, the embassy introduced typical Vietnamese agricultural products such as tea, coffee and rice as well as interior decor products.

Activities were also held to promote Vietnams land, people, culture and tourism to Malagasy people.

Meanwhile, visitors to the Agriculture International Fair (AIF) Madagascar, which was held from September 13 to 16, showed great interest in Vietnams top export products including rice and coffee, as well as confectionary, and consumer goods thanks to their quality, price and design.

Vietnamese booths at the two events attracted a lot of attention from businesses of the host countries, who sought cooperation and experience sharing in the production and processing of agricultural products and consumer goods.

Representatives from the Vietnamese embassy, Honorary Consulate, and businesses provided visitors with information on the production, packaging and processing of Vietnamese agricultural products as well as current procedures for import-export activities.
NAPILI  During the morning hours of Aug. 23, West Side activist Kai Nishiki video-documented a construction crew ripping apart the shoreline fronting Napili Sunset.

Hurricane Lane was headed our way the next day, and the Napili Bay property was armoring its frontage in advance of the projected onslaught without a permit.

Nishikis postings on the Access Denied! Surf?Fish?Di-

ve? Facebook page about the rogue construction activity went viral, local-style; and the response to the vigilante action taken by the Napili Sunset homeowners to protect the property at the expense of others was anything but compliant.

There were damages that had occurred; safety was in question.

These guys were dropping huge boulders on the beach from the property 20 feet above while little kids (were) walking by! Nishiki exclaimed.

Dana Reed, Napili Bay and Beach Foundation director, witnessed the events as they unfolded that morning.

In a later interview, she recalled: It is not yet clear to me whether the general manager knew that there was no permit for the work that was going on. I talked to him the day that Kai came and effectively shut them down. I asked about a permit and was told there was a permit for the work.

However, Reed objectified, I told him I was not happy about what was going on, because they were working during a hurricane warning, had no BMPs (Best Management Practices) in place and could not produce a permit.

Furthermore, they were making a mess with mud everywhere. I saw that there were large rocks that had been dropped on the property that were being lowered to the beach with heavy equipment.

Reed, West Maui regional coordinator for Hui O Ka Wai Ola, had other pointed questions.

I asked if the rocks were new, and the answer I got was maybe. I asked the contractor in charge when they started work, and it was just the day before. It was clear to me that they were trying to sneak this work in before Hurricane Lane in hopes that high storm surges would not undermine the property.

Accomplished photographer Damian Dooma Antioco was taken aback by the action: What are they doing? Seawall coming? Removing rocks will make all that dirt fall and go into the ocean. Bad timing  storm surfs gonna make all that dirt wash out. What are they thinking?

The authorities were subsequently called; and, on Friday, Sept. 7, 15 days later, Joe Alueta, county Planning Department deputy director, released a statement.

There was no authorization for emergency work granted for the shoreline area at Napili Sunset, he said.

Work was ordered to stop, and Napili Sunset complied.

Two citations were issued for the following violations: removal of a section of the existing rock structure; new rock material placed along the shoreline; staging of new rocks along Hui Road; use of heavy equipment; activity within the public beach access; and work in the shoreline area without the use of appropriate Best Management Practices to minimize safety and environmental impacts.

Appropriate fines will be imposed, it was noted, as per County of Maui Special Management Rules 12-202-25 and County of Maui Shoreline Rules 12-203-17.

Fortunately, Alueta added, the activities so far have not incurred damages to the beach or water quality. However, alterations to the shoreline area may have to be corrected.

But that was before Olivia made landfall near Kahakuloa and swamped the West Maui Mountains from Waihee to Kahana and points beyond on Sept. 12.

Enter Nishiki again, video-documenting the damages a second time as the muddy runoff drained unchecked down the damaged beach access path next to Napili Sunset onto the sand and into the bay.

Tere Patterson responded to the affront: Too bad we all have to suffer because of their No Aloha for our aina.

Brown water advisories, however, were not isolated to the West Maui shoreline; the warnings were posted island-wide.

We need to solve our coastal erosion issues, Reed advised, but need to do that in a legal and safe way!

Pat Lindquist, president and founder of the Napili Bay and Beach Foundation, is on the same page.

We need to put heads together to think of best practices and infrastructure improvements to help maintain the health of Napili Bay, and all of the coral reefs and marine life along our beloved West Maui shoreline.
HONOLULU  The Hawaii State Department of Education (HIDOE) recently named its 2018 Employee and Team of the Year award winners, recognizing employees for their outstanding and continued contributions to education and the students of Hawaii.

Francine Flores, custodian at King Kamehameha III Elementary School in Lahaina, was named HIDOEs 2018 Employee of the Year.

For the past 32 years, Flores has worked tirelessly to keep the grounds of King Kamehameha III Elementary School beautiful, safe and meticulously groomed.

Her ability to anticipate issues, combined with her self-starting nature, has produced solutions to potential problems before they develop.

These traits have made her a consistent favorite among students, parents and staff. Her hard work and dedication have played a major role in making the King Kamehameha III Elementary campus along Front Street stand out as an example for all schools.

The Kula Elementary Cafeteria Staff of Kelsey Kahaleauki-Nobriga, Laura McLean and Lynne Yonamine was honored with a Team Excellence Award of Merit.

Flores and the Windward District Academic Integration Team will represent HIDOE in the upcoming annual Governors Awards ceremony for Distinguished State Service among distinguished awardees from other state departments.

The success of our students is founded on the hard work and dedication of our employees, and we want to take every opportunity to spotlight the great work thats happening at our schools, said Dr. Christina Kishimoto, HIDOE superintendent.

From daily operations like school lunch preparation to our professional development trainings and multi-year plans, the work of our employees guide the progress of education in Hawaii, and these awards recognize only a small fraction of our collective efforts.
Headaches are among the most common disorders of the human nervous system worldwide. The most common headache types include tension, migraine and cluster. In the United States, over 15 percent of all adults complain about chronic severe headaches, with prevalence among women more than twice as high as among men.

It is estimated that 90 percent of all adults have experienced tension headaches, which are usually described as a band of pain that surrounds the forehead, temples, scalp, face, eyes, jaw and/or neck.

Classic symptoms of migraine include intense, throbbing pain on one or both sides of the head accompanied by nausea, vomiting, dizziness, visual disturbances and sensitivity to light and sound.

Cluster headaches are often considered the worst headache type known to medical science. These headaches occur in attacks known as clusters and typically involve debilitating pain on one side of the head behind the eye as well as tearing of the eye, drooping of the eyelid and nasal congestion.

While headaches can be triggered by a number of factors, including alcohol, stress, clenching of the teeth and jaw, computer work, poor posture, excessive light or sound, fatigue, hunger, food sensitivities, hormonal fluctuation, weather changes, caffeine, cigarette smoke or barometric pressure changes, it is important to understand that these trigger factors may not necessarily be the underlying cause of an individuals chronic headaches.

Instead, one causal factor, which is beginning to appear more frequently in medical research, is head and/or neck trauma. Common sources of trauma include blows to the head, whiplash and/or concussion sustained as a result of motor vehicle accidents, falls, and through high-impact sports. Any of the above incidences of trauma may cause ligaments supporting the head and neck to be sprained (stretched), which forces the skull and upper cervical (neck) vertebrae out of their normal biomechanical position. It is thought that trauma to the alignment of the head and upper neck (C1 and C2 vertebrae) alters nerve and blood flow in the brainstem, leading to headaches.

Luckily, a rare chiropractic technique which focuses upon the alignment of the head and neck, known as upper cervical care, has shown promise for headache patients. In order to determine whether a headache patient may benefit from care, the upper cervical chiropractor will perform two diagnostic tests  thermal imaging and digital X-rays of the spine. If an upper cervical misalignment is diagnosed, the patients injured neck is corrected by administering a precise adjustment by hand on a specially-designed knee chest table. Many headache patients notice improvement in symptoms with just a few treatments.

With over 20 years of experience as a specialist in the upper cervical spine, Upper Cervical Chiropractor Dr. Erin Elster, D.C., has successfully treated over 300 patients with chronic headaches including cluster, migraine and tension. Her published headache research is available on her website: www.erinelster.com. For more information, or to schedule an appointment, contact Dr. Elster in Kahului at (808) 866-6551 or erin@erinelster.com.
An event on Thursday, Sept. 27, will raise awareness of the millions of healthy pets awaiting adoption in animal shelters and encourage communities to opt to adopt and reduce the number of orphan pets euthanized each year.

Hawaii Animal Rescue Foundation (HARF) is uniting with animal lovers and welfare organizations around the world to participate in the sixth annual Remember Me Thursday candle-lighting ceremony. The community is invited to participate.

The event aims to unite individuals and pet adoption organizations to be an unstoppable, integrated voice advocating for orphan pets to live in forever homes  not die waiting for them.

There are approximately seven million pets in homes throughout the U.S., but only 30 percent of these pets come from rescue facilities. The rest come from pet stores, puppy mills and breeders, said Dawn Hall of HARF. Millions of beautiful, healthy orphan pets die every year without the benefit of a loving home, simply because the public is not aware of how truly amazing these animals are.

The team here at HARF sees so many wonderful pets that are simply abandoned because their owners had to move or didnt understand the time and care that a pet requires. These pets can be purebred, well-behaved, loving animals, but they dont get a second chance because there is so little awareness of the types of animals available at local rescue facilities.

HARF invites the community to be part of the movement at this very special Remember Me Thursday Facebook candle-lighting ceremony.

On Sept. 27, post a photo of your rescue pet to Facebook and tag it with #RememberMeThursday and Hawaii Animal Rescue Foundation.

In addition, for that day, go to HARFs Facebook page and update your profile picture with the #RememberMeThursday logo. Any supporters that would like to help save more orphaned animals can use the Facebook Fundraising tool and hold a personal fundraiser with proceeds going to HARFs animal rescue program.

For more information on Remember Me Thursday, contact Hall at (808) 876-0022 or dawn@hawaiianimalrescue.org.

This is a day to remember orphan animals that lost their lives without the benefit of a loving home and, equally important, to encourage friends and family to always adopt their pets.
HONOLULU  UNITE HERE Local 5 hotel workers from six Marriott-operated hotels in Honolulu and Maui last week voted to authorize a strike with a 95 percent approval vote.

The strike authorization comes after months of negotiations with Marriott for contracts covering over 3,500 hotel workers.

Workers from six Marriott-operated hotels  Waikiki Beach Marriott, Sheraton Waikiki, The Royal Hawaiian, Westin Moana Surfrider, Sheraton Princess Kaiulani, and Sheraton Maui  voted to authorize a strike.

We want to come to an agreement with Marriott, but our members are preparing for a strike if contracts are not settled soon, said Eric Gill, secretary/treasurer of UNITE HERE Local 5. Our proposal is to make one job enough to live in Hawaii. Marriotts proposal is to get another job.

Laurie DeCoite, a PBX operator who has worked at the Sheraton Maui for 30 years, also voted to strike.

Generations of my family have worked at the Sheraton Maui. Those who worked before went on strike so that we could enjoy the benefits we do today. Now, its our turn to make sure we protect what they won for future generations, DeCoite said.

Workers are also fighting for job security by addressing issues like automation and technology, workplace safety, immigration and more.

Local 5 represents approximately 11,000 workers throughout Hawaii who work in the hospitality, health care and food service industries. n

It is an affiliate of UNITE HERE, an international union that represents over 250,000 workers throughout the U.S. and Canada.

For more information, visit www.unitehere5.org.
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The Long Beach Police Department is taking heat over its use of an app that deletes text messages.

The app -- previously known as TigerText and now called TigerConnect -- provides a secure channel for sending texts before deleting them, Snapchat-style. State law requires city agencies to preserve all records for at least two years.

On Tuesday, Al Jazeera broke the story that the department has been using the app.

The city of Long Beach released a statement Tuesday saying it's suspending use of the app "pending further review of whether the use is consistent with the City's record retention policy."

The police department started using the app on half of its 291 department-issued cell phones when it switched to iPhones back in 2014, the statement said, adding that the department chose TigerConnect because it offered "transitory, immediate, and secure communications regarding operational and personnel matters."

Critics say Long Beach didn't need a special app.

"If you really want to send secure text messages, you can use iMessage," said ACLU attorney Mohammad Tajsar. "And iMessage texts are end-to-end encrypted. So they're as secure as you can possibly get."

Tajsar argued that "the only reason why you'd want to use the application is if you were trying to hide records."

Hundreds of criminal and civil cases in Long Beach could be affected, he said.

Nikhil Ramnaney, an attorney at the Los Angeles County Public Defender's office, said he's going to look into that possibility.

Since Long Beach homicide detectives were among those who had TigerConnect on their phones, "I plan to file discovery requests on [homicide] cases for TigerTexts or ask the court to preserve any messaging between officers about those messages," he said.

Ramnaney said the app generates an email notifying you when someone has sent you a text.

Besides putting the app on homicide detectives' phones, the department installed TigerConnect on the phones of other "specialized details," such as internal affairs, and the phones of command staff, according to the city's statement.

It added that "Police Department employees have been trained to and do document any exculpatory/discoverable evidence in a police report or other formal departmental communication."

The controversy helps explain why TigerConnect doesn't try to sell its product to the police.

TigerConnect is a secure health care messaging app. In the App Store it falls under the medical category.

The app integrates with hospital tech, like scheduling and lab systems. Deleting texts is important because health care employees discuss confidential patient health information.

Employees can create group messages, and they can text people based on their titles rather than their names (because sometimes at 3 a.m. you need to get hold of the on-call cardiologist and can't remember his name).

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.
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Two Los Angeles County sheriff's deputies are in the hospital Thursday morning after they were injured in a shooting that left a male suspect dead at a park in East L.A.

It happened around 6:30 p.m. Wednesday night at Ruben F. Salazar Park after deputies responded to a call of an assault with a deadly weapon. According to sheriff's department officials, responding deputies located the vehicle described in the crime report and followed the suspects into the park.

The suspects' vehicle stopped and at least one man got out and opened fire on the deputies, who were "hit by gun fire and went down," authorities said. More deputies responded to the scene and opened fire on the suspects, striking two.

Authorities say one suspect was killed at the scene. Another suspect was wounded and taken to a hospital and a third suspect was arrested.

Preliminary info @EastLALASD Deputy Involved Shooting. 2 Deputies struck by gunfire and transported to a local hospital. 1 Suspect deceased at scene. @LASDHQ Homicide investigating. More info later  LA County Sheriffs (@LASDHQ) September 20, 2018

At a press conference late Wednesday, Sheriff Jim McDonnell said the two wounded deputies were hit in the upper body and taken to the hospital by patrol cars, not paramedics.

"Do you wait or do you just get them off and get them as quickly as you can into the emergency room and the trauma center?" McDonnell said. "That's what they did in this case."

The injured deputies, who McDonnell said were both in their thirties and "very seasoned," were listed in serious but stable condition.

At the scene Thursday morning, sheriff's investigators continued to work the scene and a mobile command center was up and running.

A woman, who gave her name as Giselle, said she is a homeless resident in the area and witnessed the shootout.

"It was a bunch of gunshots," she recounted. "Pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop."

LAist news editor Ryan Fonseca and reporter Matt Tinoco contributed to this report.

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.
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A shooting near a Van Nuys charter school Thursday afternoon left a female teacher and a male student wounded, according to Los Angeles police. Two people are in custody and a gun has been recovered at the scene, authorities said.

The shooting happened near the campus of CHAMPS Charter High School of the Arts in Van Nuys, Los Angeles Police Department Sgt. Lance Montgomery said at a news conference.

Jordan Duke, the school's communications director, told KPCC the female victim is a special education teacher. Both she and the student are in stable condition.

The school, located on the 6800 block of Van Nuys Boulevard just north of Vanowen Street, was placed on lockdown through the end of the school day.

Students were released and reunited with parents starting at about 3:30 p.m.

The first kids are being released to go home with their parents. Kids as they walk out are filling in their parents with what they heard. pic.twitter.com/2gFlTK6GOq  Caleigh Wells (@cgrey307) September 20, 2018

Destiny Fuentes was among those waiting outside. She said her sister, an 11th grader, had texted her that the student who was wounded was shot in the leg.

Cece Tsou, whose son attends the school, said he was also friends with the student who was shot. She said her son texted her from inside.

"He said there's a lockdown because of a shooter. And of course that's when I fell apart," Tsou said. "Immediately, I'm like, 'Well, can you give me more details, because that's really scary!'"

Tsou said she had bought her son a bulletproof backpack on Amazon after a recent shooting in Florida, and she told him to stay behind it.

"This is our biggest fear right now, is this. It's the biggest, biggest fear," Tsou said.

Both men in custody were described as Latino and about 18-20 years old, Montgomery said.

Deputy Chief Trevor Richmond of the L.A. Fire Department said both shooting victims were shot in their extremities. Both are in stable condition.

UPDATES:

2:25 p.m.: Updated with a tweet from our reporter on the scene and information about extent of victims' injuries.

2:40 p.m.: Updated with information about reunification plan for parents and students.

3:19 p.m.: Updated with second person in custody.

3:32 p.m.: Updated with comments from parent Cece Tsou.

3:41 p.m.: Updated with details from Destiny Fuentes.

4:26 p.m.: Updated with students being released.

6:52 p.m.: Updated with information from school communications director.

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.
ASSA members, for the first time, adopted a joint statement manifesting the associations common viewpoints and perceptions, with a unanimous agreement on the objective and orientation for social security cooperation in the region.

The document affirmed the associations commitment to fostering a united social security community on the basis of consensus that would develop in the best interests of the people, as well as for stability and development in the region.

This will be the orientation of ASSA activities in the coming time and is in line with the ASEAN Community Vision 2025 which was signed at the 27th ASSA Summit in Kuala Lumpur, Indonesia in 2015.

At the press conference after the meeting, Nguyen Thi Minh, President of ASSA for the 2018-2019 term, said that in order to realise the joint statement, the ASSA will continue to strengthen internal connectivity towards a prosperous, civilised, and developed ASEAN.

The ASSA will work out an action plan suitable for the associations orientation and relevant to each member state, especially in the context of the Fourth Industrial Revolution and the free flow of labour, said Minh, who is also Deputy Minister and Director General of the Vietnam Social Security (VSS).

In answer to the Vietnam News Agencys question regarding improving the efficiency of experience sharing among ASSA members amidst the differences in social security systems, ASSA Secretary General Dao Viet Anh said that while the differences are challenges, they also create opportunities for ASSA members to cooperate for mutual development.

Over the past 20 years, ASSA members have well implemented the associations common principle for the sake of people, Anh noted, adding that despite the differences, cooperation among ASSA members has been effective.

What the VSS has achieved is the sectors efforts and is the result of experience sharing with regional countries, said Anh, who is also Deputy Director General of the VSS.

Suradej Waleeittikul, ASSA President for the 2017-2018 term, said that ASSA 35 received the valuable cooperation from the VSS. He said he hopes that ASSA will make a lot of progress and receive the full support of the Vietnamese member.

We will have more members and provide decent jobs for our citizens, he added.

Regarding the ASSAs international cooperation activities in the future, Nguyen Tien Thanh, head of the VSS International Cooperation Department, said the expansion of cooperation with other international social security organisations was also one of the five initiatives affirmed at the VSSs recently finished meeting and was welcomed by ASSA members.

ASSA Secretariat will work out a detailed plan to implement the initiative towards building a modern and sustainable social security system, he said.

The ASSA was found in 1998 following the signing of a Memorandum of Agreement in Bangkok, Thailand on February 13 that year, involving heads of social security institutions from five countries - the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand. Representatives from Laos and Vietnam also attended the signing ceremony as observers. Later the year, the VSS became a member of ASSA.

The association was formed to promote the development of social security in the region in consonance with the aspirations, laws and regulations of the member countries, promote regional cooperation in all areas of social security and exchange experience and information on social security.

It works in cooperation with other social security institutions in the region and East Asia, and with similar or related organisations of social security in any part of the world. It cooperates in the protection, promotion and development of social security schemes through training, seminars, consultations and dialogues, among others.

ASSA members now comprise 19 social security institutions from ten ASEAN nations.
Car break-ins up in The Shores

At the Sept. 12 La Jolla Shores Association meeting, San Diego Police Community Relations Officer (CRO) Larry Hesselgesser and San Diego Fire & Rescue Marine Safety Lt. Rich Stropky were on hand to update the board on safety issues pertaining to the area.

Hesselgesser was asked to address the spike in car break-ins and car thefts in La Jolla Shores. (See police blotter next page.)

Since July 1, in just La Jolla Shores, weve had 10 auto thefts and 26 car burglaries (someone breaking into a car and stealing something from it), and thats just what has been reported. Theres probably a good percentage that does not get reported, he said. As long as Ive been here (since 1994), this whole stretch of La Jolla Shores has been easy pickings and a big target area. A lot of college students and surfers come here and hide their car keys somewhere, but people are watching and seeing where those keys are hidden.

Among his list of safety tips:

- Dont leave valuables out in the open.

- Lock car doors.

- Try to park in busy and well-traveled areas.

- Set any alarm or anti-theft devices.

- Dont leave any sign there may be valuables in the car (such as connector cables).

- Report suspicious activity (such as people walking up and down the street checking for unlocked doors).

Speaking to the broader state of affairs at the police department, he noted it is so chronically short staffed, CROs have been asked to join fellow officers out on patrol. Therefore, Hesselgesser may be less present at community meetings.

Further, Stropky talked about a fortunate coincidence that led to two rescues near Blacks Beach: We got a 911 call  for a cliff rescue and it got our lifeguards to move up the beach to the bottom of the trail, he explained. The cliff call ended up not being a major rescue, but the blessing in disguise was, as guards went up the stairs to respond to the cliff call, a paraglider landed in the ocean about 300 yards offshore.

(The male paraglider) hit the water and couldnt get out of his harness. So he was fighting to keep his head up above the surface and not get tangled in his equipment ... it really came down to a couple of minutes  it was really a close call. It was so serendipitous that someone was up there and someone else went hey look! A lot of things came together.

19 apprehended in immigration attempt at WindanSea

Around 2 a.m. Saturday, Sept. 15, the U.S. Coast Guard intercepted a panga boat off the La Jolla coast with 19 people aboard who were all suspected of trying to enter the United States illegally.

The panga was stopped about 8 miles west of WindanSea beach, and all 19 people aboard were taken into custody and believed to be unauthorized immigrants from Mexico.

Two were arrested on suspicion of human smuggling, officials said.

Former Country Day teacher arrested for sexual misconduct Former Country Day School teacher arrested on sexual misconduct charges

Jonathan Sammartino, a teacher who taught in the La Jolla Country Day School upper school from 2012 to 2016, has been arrested in the San Jose area for three felony accounts of sexual misconduct with a minor (later confirmed to be a La Jolla Country Day School student).

According to an arrest warrant filed by San Diego Police Department, Sammartino had an unlawful relationship with a 17-year-old girl between April 2016 and September 2016, while he was her teacher. He and the girl met on multiple occasions, including in Sammartinos car and at his home, to engage in sexual activity. Occasionally, the girl would sneak out of her home to meet with Sammartino, according to the warrant.

She told police that Sammartino used no force or fear to get her to engage in the sex acts.

In a letter to alumni, La Jolla Country Day School head of school Gary Krahn wrote: As a community rooted in trust and dignity, I am profoundly sorry that this incident has occurred with a person in a position of trust. Please know that the safety and well-being of all of our students, past and present, is our paramount concern. We are urging community members who have information related to this matter to reach out immediately.

Krahn can be reached at (858) 453-3440, ext. 240 or gkrahn@ljcds.org

Sergeant Ron Bailiff, the detective assigned to the case, can be reached at (619) 531-2781 or rbailiff@pd.sandiego.gov

As of press deadline, no further developments had been announced.

Motorcyclist hit by car on Pearl Street

An accident involving a motorcycle and a car left the cyclist with only minor injuries, around 12:30 p.m. Friday, Sept. 14 on the 600 block of Pearl Street. According to witnesses, the cyclist was hit by a car turning left out of the alley just east of 623 Pearl St.

Resident Doug Moranville, who stored the bike in his T-shirt store behind the alley, said the motorcyclist appeared to have suffered only wrist and ankle injuries. But its only a matter of time before someone gets killed because  you cant see the street from the alley because of the line of people always waiting along the sidewalks at (nearby restaurants), he said.

The scene following a collision between a motorcycle and car on the 600 block of Pearl Street, Sept. 14. (Corey Levitan)

Police Blotter

Sept. 4

Vehicle theft, 7200 block Monte Vista Ave., 7:34 p.m.

Vehicle break-in/theft, 300 block Nautilus St., 11:20 p.m.

Vehicle break-in/theft, 1400 block Park Row, 11:30 p.m.

Sept. 5

Vehicle break-in/theft, 7700 block Hidden Valley Court, 10 p.m.

Sept. 6

Grand theft, money/labor/property over $950, 2500 block Torrey Pines Road, 7:10 a.m.

Vehicle break-in/theft, 8300 block Camino del Oro, 8:50 a.m.

Vehicle break-in/theft, 2600 block Torrey Pines Road, 9 p.m.

Sept. 7

Under influence of controlled substance, 7900 block La Jolla Shores Drive, 1:09 a.m.

DUI: Alcohol, 8800 block Nottingham Place, 3:38 a.m.

Residential burglary, 1300 block Torrey Pines Road, 9 a.m.

Vehicle break-in/theft, 8800 block Villa La Jolla Drive, 10 a.m.

Vehicle break-in/theft, 8300 block Camino del Oro, 1 p.m.

Vehicle break-in/theft, 8300 block Camino del Oro, 2 p.m.

Commercial robbery, 3200 block La Jolla Village Drive, 3:30 p.m.

Vehicle break-in/theft, 8400 block La Jolla Shores Drive, 4:30 p.m.

Vandalism (less than $400), 8500 block La Jolla Shores Drive, 6:15 p.m.

Assault with a deadly weapon (other than firearm), 800 block Coast Blvd. 10:15 p.m.

Vehicle break-in/theft, 1300 block Virginia Way, 10:26 p.m.

Vehicle break-in/theft, 800 block Archer St., 11:30 p.m.

Sept. 8

Petty theft, 2500 block Azure Coast Drive, 4:20 a.m.

Residential burglary, 300 block Kolmar St., 4:54 a.m.

Assault with a deadly weapon, 8600 block Villa La Jolla Drive, 8:13 a.m.

Open cannabis container, 5100 block Chelsea St., 4:10 p.m.

Vehicle break-in/theft, 5700 block La Jolla Blvd. 6:50 p.m.

Sept. 9

Vandalism ($400 or more), 8800 block Cliffridge Ave., 2 a.m.

Vehicle break-in/theft, 8300 block Camino del Oro, 8:30 a.m.

Grand theft, 7700 block Herschel Ave., 2 p.m.

Petty theft, 1400 block Opal St., 3 p.m.

Open container in park, 6200 block Camino de la Costa, 3:45 p.m.

Open container in park, 200 block Playa del Norte, 4:15 p.m.

Vehicle break-in/theft, 8800 block Villa La Jolla Drive, 6:50 p.m.

Under influence of controlled substance, 8500 block La Jolla Shores Drive, 11:57 p.m.

Sept. 10

Fraud, 8300 block Camino del Oro, 1 p.m.

Battery with serious injury, 2800 block Torrey Pines Scenic Drive, 1:40 p.m.

Vehicle break-in/theft, 8300 block Camino del Oro, 3:15 p.m.

Fraud, 3200 block Caminito Eastbluff, 4 p.m.

Grand theft, 7600 block Fay Ave., 8:45 p.m.

Sept. 11

Residential burglary, 5700 block Chelsea Ave., 6 a.m.

Vehicle break-in/theft, 8300 block Camino del Oro, 6:10 a.m.

Petty theft, 800 block Nautilus St., 8:48 a.m.

Fraud, 8200 block Camino del Oro, 10:30 a.m.

Sept. 12

Vehicle break-in/theft, 300 block Coast Blvd., 5 p.m.

Residential burglary, 5000 block La Jolla Blvd., 8 p.m.

Grand theft, 900 block Agate St., 11:50 p.m.Sept. 13

Vehicle break-in/theft, 1300 block Vue de Ville Court, 1 a.m.

Sept. 14

Misdemeanor vandalism, 2000 block Via Done Benito, 5 a.m.

Misdemeanor vandalism, 6800 block La Jolla Blvd., 8 a.m.

Grand theft, 5700 block La Jolla Hermosa Ave., 11 p.m.

Sept. 16

Fraud, 5200 block Cardeno Drive, 4:17 p.m.

Vehicle theft, 5400 block Castle Hills Drive, 7 p.m.

Sept. 17

Fraud, 1200 block Prospect St., 9:57 a.m.

 Compiled by Ashley Mackin-Solomon
Advertisers are spending more money on online sites such as Google and Facebook, with digital ads this year expected to account for more than half of U.S. ad sales for the first time, according to a report released Thursday.

The nations advertisers are projected to have spent $106 billion in digital ads by the time 2018 closes out, up 16% from a year ago, according to Magna, a division of IPG Mediabrands.

Advertisers are increasing their spending in this category because they are eager to reach younger consumers increasingly tied to their smartphones. Additionally, the lower cost of online ads has made it more attractive to businesses that may be priced out of more expensive TV spots, analysts said.

And more small businesses are putting money into social media and search ads, said Vincent Letang, a Magna executive vice president of global market intelligence.

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The development of these new digital marketing tools creates new demand, Letang said. Its new money growing the advertising pie.

Google and Facebook lead the nations digital ad sales, representing a 58% market share combined, according to research firm EMarketer. Google, which operates services such as YouTube and Search, is the leader with a 37% market share, EMarketer said.

Unlike traditional TV ads, ads on sites such as Google and Facebook can give marketers more detailed information about their audiences. Businesses could target their ads based on gender, an age range, or user interests on Facebook. Marketers could also learn exactly how long a viewer watched their video ad online on sites such as YouTube.

Digital is a lot more sophisticated at delivering those metrics, said Paul Verna, an EMarketer principal analyst.

Whereas digital ad spending is expected to increase 11.8% in 2019, ad sales for national and local TV ads will decline, according to Magnas report. Local TV sales will decline 4.5% in 2019, and national TV sales will drop 1.5%, excluding cyclical events such as the Olympics or political elections, according to the report.

Although some consumer products companies have opted to market their items online first rather than through TV spots, digital ad sale growth isnt primarily due to TV ad dollars moving to Google and Facebook, Letang said. He points out that Google and Facebook themselves have paid for TV ads.

Taking budgets away from TV is not the primary growth engine, Letang said.

wendy.lee@latimes.com

Twitter: @thewendylee
Congress faces a Sept. 30 deadline to approve funding to keep the Federal Aviation Administration afloat. Right now the bill includes language to curtail unreasonable airline fees. The airlines, with $4.6 billion on the line, are lobbying hard against it.

The FAA reauthorization bill, as currently stipulated, would strip airlines of the ability to levy all sorts of fees and entrust that oversight to the secretary of Transportation.

The only thing the airline industry is more committed to than increasing fees for passengers is defeating the provision in the FAA reauthorization bill, said Sen. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.).

So, who will win? The airline industry, which has contributed millions to the political campaigns of those who will make the decision? Or consumers, virtually all of whom  Democrat and Republican  hate the fees that airlines add to their ticket prices and will cast votes for their political representatives Nov. 6?

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Members of Congress, who fly more than the average American, also bridle at the myriad airline fees that amounted to almost $2.4 billion in the first half of this year and totaled $4.6 billion last year. Some of them fume in public too. But they all are mindful that the airline industry has contributed $12.4 million to the campaigns of incumbents in the last 10 years, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, and already has given incumbents $2.4 million in the election cycle that will end with the Nov. 6 election.

With 470 seats in the House and Senate at stake, there is an element of bite-the-hand-that-feeds-you to the legislation, which must pass by the end of the month. Unless its approved, the FAA wont be funded and  though theoretically implausible  planes wont be allowed to fly.

People who have flown on something other than Southwest Airlines (which Consumer Reports calls the top-rated carrier for price transparency) probably are familiar with the largely opaque and confusing ways in which an apparently cheap ticket can mushroom into something a whole lot more pricey.

 If you buy a basic economy ticket on some airlines, including United and American, you dont have access to the overhead bins  which means no carry-on luggage. A basic economy passenger on United who brings a large carry-on, in addition to a small personal item, is charged an extra $50  the standard $25 fee, plus an additional $25 for checking a bag at the gate. Or they can spend more and buy an economy ticket.

 The cost of changing a flight varies widely among airlines  as do deadlines for making such changes  with some fees below $100 and others pegged at a flat $200 change fee, unless its an international flight. For flights to foreign destinations, change fees escalate.

 Most airlines charge extra for something more than the most basic seat. Its not just economy, business class and first class anymore. If you dont want the middle of the row or if you desire two seats together, that can cost you more. Leg room and seats that recline also come at a price.

 The cost of Wi-Fi and the strength of the signal vary in both the fee charged and the power. Want a stronger signal? It costs more.

So, will members of Congress come down on the side of travelers?

Brent Bowen, a dean at the Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Arizona, thinks theres a fairly good probability they will.

Some of Americas more frequent fliers are members of Congress, Bowen said. They get tired of all this. The last time I checked, the top five calls to members of Congress offices were complaints about an airline.

Bowen, who for 28 years has put out the Airline Quality Rating study, said: The biggest complaint of the flying public right now is always about fees.

Forty years after U.S. airlines were deregulated, Section 3129, known as the fair fees provision, opens the door for the government to re-regulate how much airlines should charge for these secondary products, said Sean Kennedy, a vice president at Airlines for America, a lobbying group for several key players in the industry.

Theyre offering more rock-bottom fares with fewer perks for those families that simply say, I want to get from point A to point B in the cheapest, safest way possible, Kennedy said. The industry now sells things that were free, or included in a base price in the regulated era, but now that were deregulated, its a la carte.

Issues like cramped seats, the distance between rows or banning carry-on bags?

People wouldnt buy that ticket if they didnt want that, Kennedy said. An airline that offers a product that people arent going to use will go out of business very quickly.

Kennedy said the top goal for airlines is FAA reauthorization, but beyond that their highest priority is getting Section 3129 removed.

Airlines began imposing fees in earnest in 2007; the federal Bureau of Transportation Statistics says 22 airlines collected $464 million for various specified items that year. If the balance of the current year mirrors its first two quarters, the airlines will collect fees of more than $4.7 billion by years end.

A bipartisan quartet  two senators and two members of the House  wrote to the Senate and House transportation leadership last week, underscoring that the flying public doesnt want Section 3129 removed from the bill once it gets to the floor for final passage.

Major U.S. air carriers now charge domestic air travelers baggage fees from $30 for the first checked bag to $150 for the third checked bag, yet there appears to be no appreciable cost increase for processing the additional bags, wrote Sens. Markey and Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) and Reps. Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.) and Walter B. Jones (R-N.C.).

The provision they support would leave it to the Transportation Department chief to decide whether fees are unreasonable or disproportional to the costs incurred by the airline.
Chinese technology titan Jack Ma emerged from a meeting at Trump Tower last year with a bold promise: His e-commerce giant Alibaba would help then-President-elect Trump create a million American jobs.

Now Ma has retracted the pledge, saying the escalating U.S.-China trade war has wrecked it.

The promise was made on the premise of friendly U.S.-China partnership and rational trade relations, the celebrity billionaire told Chinese state media Wednesday. That premise no longer exists today, so our promise cannot be fulfilled.

Analysts say this retraction would have been a loss for Americas workforce  if Mas offer had been serious in the first place.

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Its pretty obvious that Mas original pledge was political theatrics, not a serious promise, said Arthur Kroeber, a founding partner at the Beijing consultancy Gavekal Dragonomics. It was part of a Chinese effort to butter up Trump early in his tenure.

In January 2017, Alibaba  Asias largest online retailer, valued at $500 billion  announced it would create a million jobs in the United States over the next five years.

The pledge followed Mas high-profile visit to Trump Tower in New York, where, according to Trump administration officials at the time, Trump and the Chinese businessman discussed how Alibaba can create 1 million U.S. jobs by enabling 1 million U.S. small businesses to sell goods into the China and the Asian marketplace.

Ma had said he wanted to boost small businesses, particularly in the Midwest, and help workers like farmers and clothing makers connect to a larger market. (Alibaba has performed similar outreach to rural merchants in China.)

Right away, it was clear: These would not be direct jobs  Alibaba employs a comparatively minuscule 66,000 or so full-time workers. Rather, Ma forecast that the company would enable U.S. sellers to reach more Chinese consumers, fueling a spike in entrepreneurial employment.

Data on jobs tied to trade tell a different story.

U.S. exports of goods and services to China would have to jump $206 billion  more than doubling  in order to create a million American jobs, according to figures from the Commerce Department.

Last year, the value of those exports was $188 billion total  and current American exports feature items Alibaba cant sell, including education services and aircraft, said Derek Scissors, a China economy scholar at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington.

If all tariffs went to zero, wed still be waiting a long, long time for Ma to fulfill his pledge, Scissors said.

Trump had embraced Mas promise as an early win for his administration. The president had campaigned on bringing back U.S. jobs lost to the forces of globalization, and businesses scrambled to give him credit for their expansion plans on American soil, even if some blueprints came together years before he sought office.

Jack and I are going to do some great things, Trump told reporters.

China business observers raised an eyebrow.

Theatrics, Duncan Clark, author of Alibaba: The House That Jack Ma Built, said a year ago.

Who knows what he meant then or now, Anne Stevenson-Yang, co-founder of J Capital Research in Beijing, said about Mas recent reversal.

Jack Ma is a master of marketing and very adept political operator, said James McGregor, chairman of the greater China region for the consultancy APCO Worldwide.

Alibaba did not respond for requests for comment.

Kroeber, the China consultant, said Mas Wednesday statement probably is sending another sort of message.

Hes signaling that he no longer believes that constructive engagement with the U.S. is possible, Kroeber said.

Beijing vowed Tuesday to immediately strike back at Trumps next avalanche of tariffs on $200 billion worth of Chinese imports, which will take effect Monday, with duties on an additional $60 billion worth of American goods.

Trump has said such retaliation would compel him to slap levies on an additional $267 billion worth of Chinese products, effectively placing higher border taxes on everything the United States buys from China.

As the commercial battle intensified this month, Ma announced he planned to step down next year from his role as chairman at Alibaba. He said the increasingly chaotic international business climate had nothing to do with that.

Paquette writes for the Washington Post.
At his surgery center near San Diego, Rodney Davis wore scrubs, was referred to as Dr. Rod and carried the title of director of surgery. But he was a physician assistant, not a doctor, who anesthetized patients and performed liposuction with little input from his supervising doctor, court records show.

His surgical work ended, though, in 2016 when an administrative judge stripped Davis of his license, concluding it was the only way to protect the public. State officials also accused two former medical directors of Pacific Liposculpture of enabling Davis to act as a doctor.

One powerful authority in California took a different view. The state-approved private accreditation agency that oversees the center left its approval in place. So the center is still operating and Davis remains an owner and administrator, state records show.

Davis declined to comment for this story and denied wrongdoing in administrative and civil court proceedings.

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California is the only state with more than 1,000 surgery centers that has given private accreditors a lead role in oversight.

That approach to oversight has created a troubling legacy of laxity, an investigation by Kaiser Health News shows. In case after case, as federal or state authorities waved red flags, state-approved accreditation agencies affixed gold seals of approval, according to a KHN review of hundreds of pages of doctors disciplinary records, court files and accreditor reports  which are public only for California surgery centers.

One accreditation inspector called a doctors anesthesia technique impressive just months before the state medical board accused her of gross negligence for putting patients in deep sedation without the training to save them if they stopped breathing.

In another case, Medicare officials declared a state of immediate jeopardy at a center that put an untrained receptionist in charge of disinfecting surgical scopes, a Medicare inspection report says. Its accreditor renewed its approval within a week.

Since 2010, at least 102 patients have died after care in Californias surgery centers, state records show. Such facilities perform a variety of outpatient surgeries and now outnumber hospitals nationally.

State Sen. Jerry Hill, a San Francisco Bay Area Democrat, chairs the committee that oversees the state Medical Board, which reviews and approves the states surgery center accreditation agencies every three years.

Briefed on the investigations findings, Hill said this definitely warrants a deeper examination into whats going on at the surgery centers and how the accreditation process is working today  and [whether its] providing the patient protection I was hoping for when we established it.

Surgery centers safely perform millions of procedures ranging from sinus surgery to knee replacements. Many patients go to a center if a doctor refers them or an insurer advises them of potential cost savings.

Californias oversight of surgery centers was upended about a decade ago when a physicians legal victory led the Department of Public Health to conclude it could no longer license doctor-owned surgery centers.

In 2011, state lawmakers came up with a new oversight scheme, mandating that the state medical board approve the private accreditors that would be on the front lines of oversight. Today, five accreditors are allowed to both inspect surgery centers and to grant or deny surgery centers approval to operate. (Centers can also operate with just Medicare approval.)

The new rules meant the state health department  which oversees hospitals  would no longer license surgery centers, aside from about 40 that are not doctor-owned. Medicare still certifies hundreds of centers that treat seniors, and officials from the state medical board still probe complaints about physicians.

With the change in California, the state-approved accreditation agencies got a guaranteed source of income, since the centers each pay their accrediting agency about $15,000 every three years for their oversight role. Large accreditors get most of their funding from those payments.

In turn, the accreditors made their inspection reports open to the public on a state website.

Those reports show that accreditors, at times, were at odds with other officials.

On May 1, 2012, the Institute for Medical Quality, or IMQ, a San Francisco-based accreditor, inspected Advanced Medical Spa in Rocklin, Calif. The inspectors were required to check whether the person administering anesthesia was qualified and working within their scope of practice.

The inspectors note says the surgeons wife, a pediatrician, was performing conscious sedation anesthesia and said her technique with the drug propofol was impressive. The standard was marked as met and accreditation was awarded through 2015.

A month later, the state medical board launched an investigation of the pediatrician, Dr. Yessennia Candelaria, over complaints that she was handling anesthesia for plastic surgery procedures without requisite training in anesthesia, including propofol, the boards records show.

Investigators for the Medical Board of California found that before and after the accreditors review, Candelaria was using propofol to put patients in a state of deep sedation even though she didnt have the advanced airway training to rescue them if their breathing shut down. Medical board authorities deemed the lapse gross negligence in an accusation filed in 2014.

Candelarias medical license was put on probation for seven years. Medical board authorities recently moved to revoke her license over unauthorized prescribing, and she has not yet filed a written response.

An attorney for Candelaria declined to comment and Candelaria did not respond to a request for comment. In February 2013, IMQ revoked its approval of Advanced Medical Spa.

The following month, Candelaria and her husband, Dr. Efrain Gonzalez, were arrested in a separate criminal case. Gonzalez was charged with 37 felony counts that included mayhem and conspiracy. Candelaria was charged with 24 felony counts, including mayhem and grand theft by false pretense.

Gonzalez pleaded guilty to three felonies and was sentenced to three months of house arrest in the criminal case and surrendered his medical license. Charges were ultimately dismissed against Candelaria, who pleaded not guilty.

Victoria Samper, vice president of ambulatory programs with IMQ, said she could not comment on specific facilities. But she did note that California law allows doctors to practice outside of the field they initially train in.

The medical board said in a statement that the private accreditor who dubbed Candelarias technique impressive reviewed her work with a different patient than those cited in the boards accusation.

Accreditation agencies have stood by eight California surgery centers facing the federal Medicare programs harshest consequence  involuntary decertification. Its a rare sanction that amounts to being deemed unfit to care for seniors.

On March 22, 2016, California Department of Public of Health inspectors notified federal authorities about a state of immediate jeopardy at Digestive Diagnostic Center, a small endoscopy center south of San Francisco.

A state inspection report said the center had pressed its new receptionist into duty to disinfect medical devices that probe patients colons  with no formal training.

Something else happened that day as well. The Accreditation Association for Ambulatory Health Care, or AAAHC, renewed its approval of the center, which the agency describes as a widely recognized symbol of quality to patients and health insurers.

Medicare involuntarily decertified the facility a month later, which meant the federal agency would no longer pay for seniors care at the center. But with private accreditation still in place, private insurers would be likely to continue funding care there.

Dr. Michael Bishop, a former California medical board member, said the case exposes a gap in state oversight if a center falls below one overseers standard but meets anothers. You want no one to have easier [approval] process than any other one, he said. Thats quite egregious.

Kevin Calisher, president of the surgery center management firm Calisher & Associates, said his company took over management of the center in 2017, and that he could not comment on Medicares findings.

AAAHC said in a statement that it could not discuss individual facilities.

The medical boards statement said it will be looking into the matter.

On April 9, 2015, an inspector from AAAHC arrived to perform an initial inspection of Pacific Liposculpture, which had been operating since 2011.

The inspectors checklist included a review of complaints filed against the center by a state licensure board. Davis had already been publicly accused by the state physician assistant board of engaging in the unlawful practice of medicine.

The inspector checked the box for substantial compliance and awarded the center approval through April 2018.

That decision was enraging actually, outrageous, said Todd Glanz, a San Diego-area attorney. He represents a patient, Cecilia ONeill, who went to the center for liposuction a few weeks after it was accredited.

ONeill returned a few days after her May 28, 2015, procedure, complaining of pain, dizziness and signs of infection, her lawsuit alleges. But she claims her condition got worse. On June 9, 2015, she went to an emergency room, where she was told she had sepsis and needed emergency surgery followed by a stay in the ICU, according to her lawsuit.

Davis and Dr. Harrison Robbins, the facilitys former medical director and other owner, have denied wrongdoing and are fighting the ongoing lawsuit.

The following year, Davis faced an administrative hearing over whether he should keep his license as a physician assistant. A central issue was whether he truly worked under a doctors supervision, as the law requires, or hired a figurehead who would exert little control.

One 2010 email discussed in court was by Davis, saying he hoped his new supervising physician, Dr. Jerrell Borup, would not be another clumsy physician getting in the way.

His attorney presented experts and argued that he did not mislead anyone about his credentials, he had the appropriate legal agreement with his supervising doctor and should keep his license. At its conclusion, the administrative judge revoked his license and reached a searing conclusion.

Davis purposefully and intentionally set out to create a business arrangement that looked legitimate on paper, Judge Susan Boyle wrote, but allowed him to manipulate the system and run a liposuction business without the interference of a physician.

The two former medical directors of the center were accused by the Medical Board of California of aiding and abetting Davis unlicensed practice of medicine. Neither doctor actively supervised Davis, who performed all the procedures, the accusations say.

One of the former medical directors, Borup, surrendered his license in 2016. The other, Dr. Harrison Robbins, is fighting the medical boards similar case against him. The controversy did not deter AAAHC, which earlier this year approved the center through April 2021.

Robert Frank, a San Diego attorney who represented Davis and Robbins, said Robbins has retired and the public should have no concerns about Davis ongoing administrative role at Pacific Liposculpture.

[Davis] knows the business, he knows the procedure and he knows hes being watched and scrutinized during the ongoing legal case, Frank said.

Davis contested his license revocation, saying the administrative judges findings werent supported by the evidence at his hearing. He lost that case in Sacramento Superior Court. Hes now challenging that decision in appeals court.

Jewett is a senior correspondent for Kaiser Health News, an editorially independent publication of the Kaiser Family Foundation.
West Wing actor Joshua Malina is heading to the Westside after scooping a Traditional-style home for $2.005 million in Mar Vista, real estate records show.

Built in 1948, the one-story dwelling is approached by a stone walkway that cuts through a landscaped frontyard. The front door opens directly into the homes focal point: a hardwood-lined open floor plan with a tile-wrapped fireplace and indoor-outdoor dining area.

Within 2,026 square feet, theres also an eat-in kitchen, a bright family room, four bedrooms and three bathrooms. From the master suite, French doors open to a fenced backyard with a saltwater pool.

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The space also holds a stone patio with a lounge, a grill and a detached two-car garage.

Sherri Noel of Keller Williams Santa Monica held the listing. Renee Westerhout, also with Keller Williams Santa Monica, represented Malina.

In addition to The West Wing, Malina also starred in another Aaron Sorkin show  Sports Night  as well as Big Shots and In Plain Sight. More recently, the 52-year-old appeared in ABCs Scandal.

jack.flemming@latimes.com | Twitter: @jflem94
How did it happen?

An outlier orchestra far from the center of Old Europe and never admitted to the so-called Big Five  the lofty philharmonics and symphony orchestras of New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Cleveland and Chicago  that once dominated America, the Los Angeles Philharmonic has become the most significant and successful major orchestra anywhere. Astonishingly, this insurgency involves a supposedly traditional symbol of cultural elitism in La La Land, Tinseltown, the Land of the Plastic Lotus, a place, as Woody Allens tired slam goes, where the only cultural advantage is that you can turn right on a red light.

Well, one corner where you cant turn right on a red light is on your way out of the Hollywood Bowl after an LA Phil concert. And though a right on a red may be permissible downtown, who wouldnt rather pause at an intersection and ogle the visually sexy Walt Disney Concert Hall? Once multimedia artist Refik Anadols video projections illuminate the nighttime steel exterior of Frank Gehrys architectural masterpiece  Sept. 27 through Oct. 6  as part of the opening celebrations that begin the LA Phils centennial season, you will be able to thank (or curse) the orchestra for outright gridlock from rubberneckers.

The LA Phils upcoming season will lead to the 100th anniversary of the announcement in the Los Angeles Times on June 11, 1919, of a new orchestra for a booming town. This season of its centennial, the institution will surely break every orchestra record in the book with more than 50 commissions of new work. There will be a multitude of dance, theater and opera projects. There will be symphonic cycles; crossovers into pop and jazz, world music and film scores; a spotlight on Los Angeles African American symphonic music and the avant garde. Then there are the numerous community events including a massive eight-mile street party and a free Hollywood Bowl concert; and projects for its youth orchestra YOLA. Oh, yes, theres also that $500-million fundraiser close to its goal. A big gift from John Williams. Im surely leaving something out.

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How the LA Phil became the envy of classical music may be what everyone wants to know. Its maybe even more useful, though, to ask why as well. The story of the LA Phil feat is ultimately about a reason for being. Every great orchestra has had its heydays when it has been uniquely true to its place and population and purpose and art and era.

A symphony for an incipient city

A photo of the newly formed Los Angeles Philharmonic, circa 1919. Credit: Los Angeles Philharmonic. Los Angeles Philharmonic Archives / LA Phil (Los Angeles Philharmonic Archives / LA Phil)

TIMELINE: The Los Angeles Philharmonic through the years 

We dont choose our parents, and the LA Phil was born to an eccentric father. In 1919, the urbane black-sheep son of a Montana mining and railroad magnate  and Gilded Age scoundrel who reputedly bribed his way into the Senate (and was called the most disgusting creature that the republic has produced since Tweeds time by Mark Twain)  decided L.A. needed an orchestra superior to the then-struggling, 11-year-old Los Angeles Symphony. William Andrews Clark Jr., an amateur violinist and rare-book collector who built a mansion on West Adams Boulevard, founded the Los Angeles Philharmonic as an alternative to the floundering Los Angeles Symphony (which he finished off by stealing its best players) and underwrote some $3 million in losses until his sudden death in 1934.

The man and the moment were right. L.A. already had movies. The Hollywood Bowl was about to be built, and the LA Phil got involved almost from the beginning, uniquely bridging classical and popular culture. The KNX radio station helped usher in radio in 1920, and the LA Phil was the first orchestra anywhere to broadcast a full concert. Artists, inventors (like the father of John Cage, who was born downtown at Good Samaritan Hospital in 1913) and outsiders were attracted as if by a magnet to a city of possibilities. The Los Angeles Philharmonic grew up as a child of its time.

That meant Clarks orchestra wouldnt operate out of the hermetic classical music box, so to speak. Instead he redefined the box as modern, indoor-outdoor L.A. architecture. An aesthete, Clark clearly wanted something fancy-schmancy. But he was also an outdoorsman from Montana who sought an unstuffy, accessible ensemble, equally at home at schools, public parks and the Hollywood Bowl as in its then-lofty downtown hall.

Los Angeles Philharmonic Archives: Illustrated program page for the first Los Angeles Philharmonic concerts: Friday, October 24 and Saturday, October 25, 1919. (Los Angeles Philharmonic Archives)

An L.A. Times review from Oct. 25, 1919, of the premiere concert recounts the scene: The audience was not especially notable as to size, the glamour of a premiere was not broadly apparent, but the people who were there represented musical taste.

The first three music directors  Gustav Mahlers assistant Henry Rothwell, Finn and Jean Sibelius friend Georg Schneevoigt and the volatile, upcoming young Pole, Artur Rodzinski  were not the ones to shake things up. But they had one pertinent thing in common: a connection to the living composers.

The teen years

Otto Klemperer rehearsing for a performance at the Hollywood Bowl. (LA Phil)

LA Phils new CEO Simon Woods is helping to reframe what it means to be an American orchestra 

The connection between the LA Phil and the early sound pictures with their lavish orchestral scores is a little slippery. However weary the orchestras first big-name music director  the serious and imperious Otto Klemperer  was toward Hollywood during his tenure in the 1930s, the close proximity to the movie industry made it impossible to keep the worlds apart.

When he stepped off the train for the first time at Santa Fe Station in 1933, Klemperer may not have been able to answer waiting L.A. Times reporters questions about his favorite movies or stars. But the music world was clearly excited. The Times reported that Klemperer was greeted with a fanfare from the brass section of the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra.

The German conductor knew next to nothing about L.A. He had simply been desperate to get out of Adolf Hitlers Berlin, which was under Nazi control in 1933.

His first culture shock was, while staying with Clark, his hosts habit of breakfast in the nude. His second culture shock was being called Klempie by the players.

Yet, the LA Phils teenage years proved one of the most remarkable  and too little recognized  eras in orchestral history. Klemperer made his ensemble world class (if still dismissed by the Big Fivers). Furthermore, recognizing that L.A. was home to the two greatest composers of the first half of the 20th century, the competitive Igor Stravinsky and Arnold Schoenberg, Klemperer championed both.

Making its mark

The Hollywood Bowl stage in 1926. (The Music Center Archives / Hollywood Bowl Collection / Fred Kuphal Photography)

By the end of the 1930s, the LA Phil had a recognizable personality. It was a well-grounded but highly flexible ensemble with an unmistakable vitality. It was a pioneer in inviting a woman to conduct (that didnt go well at first) and hiring African American players. It took bold chances, presenting avant-garde music at, of all places, the Hollywood Bowl.

Edgard Vareses revolutionary all-percussion score, Ionisation, for instance, was played on a 1933 Hollywood Bowl program titled Symphonies Under the Stars. It was a revelation for a young John Cage that helped inspire his devotion to percussion, which has had a lasting effect on American music. English conductor Leopold Stokowski undertook wild experiments with electronic effects and the LA Phil, something he couldnt so easily get away with with his own Philadelphia Orchestra.

The intermingling of traditional values and experimentation never comes easily . The orchestra still had a lot to figure out. In 1943, the LA Phil came up with another major U.S. orchestra first, this time hiring an American music director, Alfred Wallenstein. He was a tyrant. He lacked charisma on the podium. But he was a solid musician. He was not adventurous, but he did program living American composers.

An angel of Los Angeles

Dorothy Buffum Chandler at the opening of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion with usher on December 6, 1964. (Otto Rothschild Collection / The Music Center Archives)

Management is another slightly odd area of LA Phil lore. It was run by non-professionals up to the hiring of Ernest Fleischmann in 1969. Clark left the orchestra nothing in his will, which meant years of trying to invent funding schemes. It did, though, have its angels, and most notably Dorothy Buffum Chandler, the strong-minded wife of L.A. Times publisher Norman Chandler, who left no checkbook unturned raising money to save the Hollywood Bowl when it was about to go bankrupt in the early 1950s and then to build the Music Center, anchored with the citys first dedicated concert hall, the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.

Her other great feat was to hire the dashing but as-yet-untried, 25-year-old Zubin Mehta as music director in 1961, who was then on hand to open the new hall three years later. None of this was by the book. Chandler operated by a combined sense of civic duty, instinct and personal profit (the Music Center having the advantage of being good for the Chandlers downtown property interests).

A controversial rising star, Mehta essentially created the modern LA Phil. He came onboard with the notion that it mattered more to play all the orchestral music of Schoenberg right away than work right away through another Beethoven symphony cycle. Fortunately, there was no one to stop him.

He was too flashy or superficial or foreign for some. He could also be too traditional for others in his attempts to create a Vienna Philharmonic sound. But that made Mehta perfect for L.A. All that was needed was a manager with a never-ending supply of chutzpah, a shameless promoter who was also a knowing musician and master professional.

Zubin Metha speaks with Dorothy Buffum Chandler at the opening of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion at The Music Center. (Otto Rothschild Collection / The Music Center Archives)

Fleischmann and Mehta undertook a full-scale orchestral revolution. It was often messy. But there was a sense that an orchestra had to stand for something and it did, as when Mehta and the LA Phil daringly played at a UCLA anti-Vietnam War rally in the early 1970s or endeavored to collaborate with Frank Zappa and his Mothers of Invention.

Defying expectations

Carlo Maria Giulini conducting the LA Philharmonic in 1982 staff file photo. (Gary Friedman / Los Angeles Times)

By the time Mehta decamped to the New York Philharmonic in 1978, the LA Phil had, thanks in part to Fleischmanns promotional flamboyance, more of a reputation for flair than substance. Never easy to pin down artistically, Fleischmann broke that mold by appointing a beloved elder Italian orchestra statesman, Carlo Maria Giulini, as Mehtas successor. He meant to break that mold next with Andre Previn, who, instead, came as a classicist wanting to put long behind him his early career as a film composer and jazz pianist.

Yet that only gave Fleischmann more leeway to mastermind the LA Phils moves in new directions. He formed a new music group within the orchestra, a first, which is now widely imitated. He went on the warpath for a modern concert hall, making sure that, by hook or by crook, it would be designed by his close friend Frank Gehry (there was a competition, but the winner was a forgone conclusion).

Finally, Fleischmann had long had his eye on Esa-Pekka Salonen as representing the future. He got him even if it meant underhandedly pushing Previn out.

Essa-Pekka Salonen of the Los Angeles Philharmonic throws a kiss to the audience after conducting Ravels Bolero in 2000. (Con Keyes / Los Angeles Times)

It is easy to forget, given the universal adulation Salonen now commands and his place in the hearts of the LA Phil and its public, just how radical a move this was on Fleischmanns part. There was resistance from a number of players, the audience and The Times. Salonen arrived, moreover, in 1992, during L.A.s bad few years of rioting and recession. After having been initiated six years earlier thanks to a $50-million gift from Lillian Disney, the new concert hall to be named after her late husband, Walt, had come to a fundraising standstill.

Fleischmann also let nothing deter him in his vision of a modern orchestra that played music of our time and a hall suited for it. Purists and many patrons were appalled by Gehrys architecture. In the early 1990s, the project was generally considered hopeless. But Fleischmann insisted on looking ahead. He cared little about deficits. He knew it took time to build audiences as well as concert halls.

When the Green Umbrella  his whimsically named, groundbreaking new music concert series  was about to be killed by the board to help balance the budget, Fleischmann and Salonen underwrote it themselves.

You know the outcome. Disney got built and instantly became an L.A. landmark and model for the modern concert hall. In his 17 years leading the LA Phil, Salonen made it the new, relevant model of the modern orchestra.

Now Green Umbrella tickets sell like hotcakes.

Reimagining the orchestra

Gustavo Dudamel conducts the Simon Bolivar Symphony Orchestra of Venezuela for Immortal Beethoven: Symphonies 3 & 4 at the Walt Disney Concert Hall in downtown Los Angeles on October 2, 2015. (Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

None of this is unrelated, and it took one final persistent manager to ultimately make Fleischmanns vision a reality. When he stepped down in 1998, Disney was finally being built and would open in 2003, but the challenge was to proceed with all the artistic plans Fleischmann had in place as though the organization could pay for them. It hired the wrong man from the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam.

In a brief 18 months before he left amid controversy, Willem Wijnbergen seemingly angled to unseat Salonen, demonstrated a greater interest in the Hollywood Bowl than Disney Hall and created what could have become fatal palace intrigue inside the orchestra.

Deborah Borda, who was hired away from the New York Philharmonic, had the reputation for brilliantly strengthening structural and financial problems. She was strong and feared and not well liked in New York and probably wouldnt have lasted much longer there.

But for L.A. when she arrived, but she had a key strength Fleischmann lacked. She didnt think she had all the answers.

Instead of wanting to remake the institution in her own image, as Wijnbergen attempted, she valued Fleischmanns and Salonens visions, and remade it as it had never been before. She balanced the budget without compromising artistic priorities, giving patrons the strongest reason for wanting to support the orchestra. She understood that Disney Hall, which she opened magnificently, was not just a symbol but a tool to be used to reimagine what an orchestra could be. She thought of the orchestra as a family, a place where soloists and composers would develop a regular relationship with the orchestra.

Salonen was allowed to experiment and think big. And when Fleischmann and Salonen discovered Gustavo Dudamel in a German conducting competition, she then managed two great coups. Not only did she sign one of the greatest natural conducting talents since Leonard Bernstein to be music director at age 27 but she also empowered him in his vast  and enormously expensive  musical ambitions as well as his social concerns, particularly music education for underserved youth.

Colliding past and future

Deborah Borda presided over the opening of the Walt Disney Concert Hall and the hiring of the worlds most celebrated young conductor, Gustavo Dudamel. (Mark Boster / Los Angeles Times)

Now for the final LA Phil secret.

It is, of course, Disney Hall. The miracle of the hall is that it looks like the future. It feels like the future to be inside it. But it sounds like and it acts like the past. It is, under all its sheen, one of the best traditional halls in the world.

In the end, the hall is about one thing and one thing only. The orchestra. Its sound and everything it stands for is made to feel both physically present and of the moment and, with Gehrys architecture, echt L.A., a lotus no longer plastic but coated in the most alluring and musical steel on the planet.

Walt Disney Concert Hall is the fourth hall of the Los Angeles Music Center and was designed by Frank Gehry, photographed from the Los Angeles City Hall Observation Deck on February 14, 2018. (Kent Nishimura / Los Angeles Times)

mark.swed@latimes.com
When Deborah Borda made a surprise announcement last year that she would leave her enviable post as president and CEO of the Los Angeles Philharmonic and try to revivify the beleaguered New York Philharmonic, the joke was that she left behind the best job in the world  and the worst.

Simon Woods, who now sits in Bordas old office at Walt Disney Concert Hall, explains that its the best because the orchestra has financial security, Disney Hall, the Hollywood Bowl, Gustavo Dudamel, basically everything going for it. Its the worst, he quips, because its all those things, and who would want to follow Deborah?

I cant say that didnt weigh on me, he says. He also cant say it didnt stop him from succeeding her.

There was little surprise that Woods  who is genial, 55 years old and British  got the most enviable and the best-paid orchestra job in the business. His was the first name that came to the mind of almost everyone in the know. He is a consummate professional who studied conducting and composition at Cambridge University, worked as a record producer for EMI at Abbey Road studios for a decade and then moved on to orchestral management, most recently at the Seattle Symphony.

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In large part thanks to Woods progressive leadership, which embraced Seattles consummation with innovation while also addressing its social impact on economic inequality and homelessness, Gramophone magazine just voted Seattle Symphony its orchestra of the year.

The notion of how you create compelling experiences on stage and how you build vast community around them is, I think, the next frontier. Simon Woods

In love with Seattle and having appointed a new music director, Thomas Dausgaard (the imaginative Ludovic Morlot had begun just when Woods arrived in 2010 and is now in his last season)  and with the youngest of his two children still having another year to go in high school  Woods insists that only one thing could have pulled him away from the city, where his wife and daughter will remain for the school year. Describing himself as a big fan of what Deborahs done here and a big fan of Gustavo, he says Los Angeles offers an opportunity to do what he was already doing on a greater scale.

Woods describes his musical roots as growing up with parents who werent musicians but who loved music. An avid record collector from an early age, he can to this day list his dads eclectic record collection, which included Beethoven, the Beach Boys, Sondheim, Sgt. Peppers, early music, jazz and so on.

He absorbed it all and says he still does. Although Ive worked my entire life on the classical side, Woods says, you are just as likely to find me at home listening to pop music or jazz. Im extremely eclectic, because thats what Ive always known.

The conducting bug began early, and in college Woods, as had John Eliot Gardner and others before him at Cambridge, formed his own orchestras as well as conducting the university orchestra and opera. He even later had a master class in 1985 with Leonard Bernstein. He was amazing, but I did very badly, he says.

I knew I wanted to make a meaningful contribution to music, but it was not going to be with conducting, he says.

LA Phil at 100: How the Angeleno orchestra raised from humble roots became one of the worlds best 

The lure of the recording world was always there as well, and the timing couldnt have been better, the development of CDs leading to a bonanza. With everybody rebuying their collections, record companies decided to re-record all the repertory with the new generation of performers, he says.

The turning point, Woods says, came after he had been producing orchestral recordings for about a year when he happened to be sitting at the mixing board, working on a recording by the Dutch conductor Bernard Haitink.

Bernard turned to me at one point and asked, Do you think its too slow? he says. Here is one of the greatest conductors in the world asking me, a 26-year-old, whether its too slow.

That moment of feeling like even the greatest musicians need people around them to help bring their vision to reality made me realize that I can be one of those people.

But after a decade in the studio, Woods says he began to need something more than the transactional act of making one record and then another. He wanted to get more deeply into the orchestra.

That led to being the artistic director of the Philadelphia Orchestra, then he worked his way up, heading the New Jersey Symphony, the Royal Scottish National Orchestra and Seattle.

When you think of what success will look like a decade from now, it is creating an organization that is as welcoming as it is innovative Simon Woods

The goal of what follows will be how to take the organization to the next level of how we engage with the community around us, says LA Phils new CEO Simon Woods. (Craig T. Mathew and Greg Grudt / Mathew Imaging)

At those other orchestras, Woods took over at a time of either crisis or unfulfilled ambition. Here, however, the wildly audacious centennial projects were fully planned before he began last January, but Woods says, all the values that are in the centennial about community and collaboration and working across genres are exactly the things that I fully embrace. A lot of what I believe in is already being instituted.

So at the moment Woods says he is more interested in implementation than adding yet more newness. As Ive said to a lot of people, the commitment to continuity is an intentional leadership act.

That said, the goal of what follows will be how to take the organization to the next level of how we engage with the community around us.

The big question of relevance is the one that dogs Woods most. By around 2040, there will be no single racial majority in this country, he warns. If that doesnt tell you something about where you have to go as an art form, then youre not paying attention.

So when you think of what success will look like a decade from now, it is creating an organization that is as welcoming as it is innovative.

That means more risk, Woods contends. Subscribing to the Silicon Valley concept that learning comes from failure and that orchestras need to take bold steps with programming, the concert experience and reaching a much wider audience. If you never fail, you are doing something wrong, he maintains, before adding a necessary proviso.

At the same time as being ardent in my commitment to social impact, Im also incredibly conservative about my passion for the art form and the traditions. And I dont see the two things as contradictory. What is incredible about the LA Phil is that it has begun the process of reframing what it means to be an American orchestra. This is the orchestra that has leveled the playing field between the tradition of the new, of other cultures and our own culture.

The challenge is to find an integrated approach that enlarges the number of people who are in our orbit, he says. As demographics change and people become more distracted, the notion of how you create compelling experiences on stage and how you build vast community around them is, I think, the next frontier. I dont think we fully know how to do that yet.

TIMELINE: The Los Angeles Philharmonic through the years 

One way, though, will mean coming to terms with new media. Woods put his record-producing experience to good use in Seattle, creating the orchestras own label for its recordings and winning three Grammys in the process, including for John Luther Adams revolutionarily immersive Become Ocean, which the orchestra commissioned, and which won the composer a Pulitzer Prize.

But that was then.

Like with coffee places, Woods, ever the Seattle maven who quickly learned the downtown coffee bars, says, were now at the third phase of recordings, after LPs and CDs. There is certainly in the LA Phils future some kind of groundbreaking media project, but I dont know what it is yet.

It wont be a traditional recording label but rather more community-oriented, Woods expects, making it evident that his ambitions do, in fact, go well beyond maintaining status quo.

How might a new media project build community and support our mission around young people? he says. I think well answer that in the next few years.

ALSO:

FROM THE ARCHIVES: Philharmonic makes debut; new orchestra raises tone of local music

mark.swed@latimes.com
Shows that might be worth your while this weekend include a remount of LA Operas Don Carlo, a second chance to see Debra Jo Rupp on stage in The Cake, and the return of rock music titans Arcade Fire to SoCal. Also, CAP UCLA opens a new season, a beloved musical is back on the big screen at the Bowl, and two separate festivals spotlight Spanish-language theater and local dance companies, respectively.

Don Carlo returns to LA Opera

Mexican tenor Ramon Vargas sings the title role as LA Opera opens its 2018/19 season with a remount of the companys 2006 production of Don Carlo, Verdis tale of romance and intrigue at the Spanish court. Sung in Italian with English supertitles. Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, 135 N. Grand Ave., L.A. 6 p.m. Saturday; other dates through Oct. 14. $24 and up. www.LAOpera.org. (Opening night will also be simulcast, for free, to large screens at El Cariso Community Regional Park, 13100 Hubbard St., Sylmar, and Santa Monica Pier, 200 Santa Monica Pier, Santa Monica)

Geffen serves up Cake

Debra Jo Rupp (That 70s Show) reprises her role as a baker who receives a personal request to make a cake for a same-sex wedding in an encore run of The Cake, Bekah Brunstetters topical, LGBTQ-themed comedy. An L.A. Times Critics Choice. Geffen Playhouse, Audrey Skirball Kenis Theater, 10886 Le Conte Ave., Westwood. 8 p.m. Thursday and Friday, 3 and 8 p.m. Saturday, 2 and 7 p.m. Sunday; other dates through Oct. 21. $30-$120. www.geffenplayhouse.org

Debra Jo Rupp reprises her role as a conflicted baker in the hit comedy The Cake at Geffen Playhouse. (Darrett Sanders)

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Fired up at the Greek

Canadian alt-rockers Arcade Fire bring their arty and at times achingly beautiful anthems back to SoCal in support of the bands divisive 2017 album Everything Now. The Zombies, of 1960s British Invasion fame, open the show. The Greek Theatre, 2700 N. Vermont Ave., L.A. 7:15 p.m. Thursday. $59.50.$125. www.lagreektheatre.com

Arcade Fire, with Win Butler and Regine Chassagne, returns to Southern California for a show at the Greek Theatre on Thursday. (Hayne Palmour IV / San Diego Union-Tribune)

Cole and Iyers Blind Spot in DTLA

The Center for the Art of Performance at UCLA launches a new season of eclectic offerings with Blind Spot, a multimedia-enhanced mix of spoken word and live music from photographer and essayist Teju Cole and jazz pianist Vijay Iyer, and based on Coles book of the same name. The Theatre at Ace Hotel, 933 S. Broadway, L.A. 8 p.m. Saturday. $29.50$59.50. www.cap.ucla.edu

Author-photographer Teju Cole will be at the Theatre at Ace Hotel with a performance based on his book Blind Spot. (Martin U. K. Lengemann)

Sound of Music fills the Bowl

The hills are alive ... with the sound of the Sing-a-long Sound of Music. Melissa Peterman returns as host of this annual celebration of the beloved 1965 Julie Andrews film based on the Broadway musical. Hollywood Bowl, 2301 N. Highland Ave., Hollywood. 6 p.m. Saturday. $14-$99. www.hollywoodbowl.com

Audience members are invited to sing along with Julie Andrews and company at a screening of The Sound of Music at the Hollywood Bowl. (20th Century Fox)

Bilingual theater fest on Fairfax

Local and international theater performers assemble for LA Escena 2018. Presented by UCLAs Diversifying the Classics program, this inaugural three-day festival showcases works  some in English and some in Spanish with English supertitles  written by or inspired by such Golden Age greats as Cervantes, Lope de Vega and Maria de Zayas. Greenway Court Theatre, 544 N. Fairfax Ave., L.A. 6 and 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday, 5 and 7 p.m. Sunday. $10. www.brownpapertickets.com

Fernando Villa will perform his comedic one-man show El Merolico as part of the LA Escana 2018 theater festival. (Pedro Pazaran)

Theyre dancing in San Pedro

The dance component of this years edition of the San Pedro  Festival of the Arts includes performances by San Pedro City Ballet, Tango San Pedro, White Crane Dance Company, Louise Reichlin & Dancers and many others. Port of Los Angeles, 250 S. Harbor Blvd., San Pedro. 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday, 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. Sunday. Free. www.triartsp.com
At the World Travel Awards (WTA) Asia & Australasia Gala Ceremony 2018 in Hong Kong (China), Vietnam was honored in one of the most important award categories  the Asia's Leading Destination category. Accordingly, Vietnam's tourism growth rate ranked sixth in the world and topped Asia. Along with the national awards, a number of Vietnam's tourism service providers including Vietravel, the national flag carrier Vietnam Airlines, Sun Perinsuda International Resort in Da Nang and Naman Retreat Resort in Danang, were also honoured with top awards in the region.

The results demonstrate an obvious advance in quality and the efforts of Vietnam's tourism industry during the long journey of creating a foothold in the world tourism map. However, according to experts, although Vietnam's tourism sector has shown a good appearance and brought significant benefits to the country, the development of Vietnam's tourism is still not commensurate with its potential and is facing warnings on the risk of unsustainable development and waste of resources. According to a report by the World Economic Forum (WEF) 2017's Tourism Competitiveness Report, Vietnam has jumped eight levels compared with two years ago. However, Vietnam is very short of unique, innovative products, with appropriate market demand. In Hanoi or Ho Chi Minh City, where are identified as the tourist capitals of Vietnam, there is also a lack of tourist products after 6pm for tourists. The monotonous, repetitive products of tourism in the provinces and cities in the same area are easy to see. This is the "bottleneck" on the journey to upgrading the quality of tourism in Vietnam.

Aiming to find solutions to overcome the "bottleneck", the conference "Creative in tourism products - from ideas to business reality" was organised by the Vietnam National Administration of Tourism (VNAT) in Ho Chi Minh City, under the framework of the Ho Chi Minh City International Travel Expo (ITE HCMC) 2018. The Deputy Head of the VNAT, Ha Van Sieu, affirmed that innovation in tourism products in the right direction will help increase the value of tourism resources, thereby creating a distinct platform in the competitive advantage of tourism among nations, especially in the context of deep integration and the Fourth Industrial Revolution (also known as Industry 4.0) which is spreading across the globe. Innovative tourism products are expected to help to reduce the focus on traditional tourist destinations, evenly distribute the tourist space, and reduce overcrowding and current imbalances. It is also an important direction to restructure the tourism industry to meet the development needs in the new situation.

In fact, in previous years, Vietnam had the tourism products with creative elements such as "Becoming residents of Hoi An during one day" tour and the "Ripe rice season" tour in Duong Lam ancient village. In order to gather the elements of innovative tourism products such as: having different ideas, creating impressive emotions in the experience for visitors and creating high added value, until recently, Vietnam also had outstanding products. Typical highlights include the Hoi An Impression Theme Park, which was opened not long ago, with the 'Hoi An Memories' show. The show brings viewers the emotion and special experience of a unique art product imbued with the national identity of Hoi An, a land of rich history and culture. Or the art show entitled 'The Quintessence of Tonkin' - the first outdoor visual arts performance in Hanoi, which is staged with a sound system, modern light technology, and a large number of performers. The project explores six aspects of the cultural essence of the Tonkin, including Poetry, Buddhism, Nostalgia, Music and Painting, Joy and Festivities. Recently, the Golden Bridge built in Da Nang suddenly emerged as a phenomenon not only for the Vietnamese but also for travellers from around the world due to its majestic and impressive nature.

Creating innovative products is not enough, the key is how to make these products last and grow. According to experts, it is necessary to involve state management agencies in making policies, the courage of investors in investing in new products, and the role of travel agencies in connecting and promoting travel, as well as the role of the media in promoting travel produces and community involvement. In addition, according to Jason Lusk, the project Mekong Innovative Startups in Tourism (MIST), creativity is necessary to create a unique impression that attracts visitors but in order to develop well, it is necessary to be accompanied by environmental protection and natural resources, especially when Vietnam is one of the countries with the highest tourism growth rate in the region and the world. The Deputy Head of the VNAT, Ha Van Sieu also emphasised that creativity in tourism must go together with sustainable development, increasing the value of tourism resources but using originality of destination as resources of creativity.
Teju Cole sits at the center of a peculiar Venn diagram: He is a novelist who does double duty as a photographer and a photographer who also happens to be a photography critic. (Cole is the writer behind the ruminative On Photography column for New York Times Magazine.) In his work, one area of interest frequently seeps into the next.

His debut novel, Every Day Is for the Thief (published in Africa in 2007 and in the U.S. in 2014), features his photography of interstitial snippets of urban life in Nigeria, where his family is from. Last year, he published Blind Spot, a hybrid book that more formally pairs his photography with diminutive essays  often no more than one, two or three paragraphs long  that function as reflections on topics as diverse as history, forgetting and dreaming.

Now he is teaming up with another polymath: Vijay Iyer, the composer and jazz pianist  who also happens to be a trained physicist  and whose musical work absorbs influences from an array of genres, including hip-hop and south Indian classical music.

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Musician and composer Vijay Iyer, left, and novelist and photographer Teju Cole. (Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times, left; Rob Stothard / Getty Images, right)

On Saturday, the pair will collaborate on an experimental performance inspired by Blind Spot that will be presented by UCLAs Center for the Art of Performance at the Theatre at the Ace Hotel in downtown Los Angeles. Iyer and a band of musicians will improvise a score as Cole delivers his essay fragments as spoken word. Functioning as visual backdrop will be the authors images: Photos that might seem banal  a set of closet doors or a stretch of blue tarp  but which, upon further scrutiny, often reveal surprising layers.

Cole says that he and Iyer have performed the work on several occasions and its different every time.

Its a high-wire act, he adds. It doesnt have a set text.

In this edited conversation, Cole, who is based in New York, chats about stalking jazz musicians, how its possible to create a musical score out of pictures, and why he could always, always use another camera.

You first worked with Iyer on a performance tied to your 2011 novel Open City. How did you two come to work together?

I know the first time I heard of him: It was the year 2000 and I was reading Time Out New York and it says this dude trained as a physicist and hes now a pianist. In the years that followed I started to go to his concerts. If you show up enough at somebodys concerts, theyre like, Theres that dude. Jazz fans can be a bit scary. They will stalk you!

When I published my first book, Every Day Is for the Thief, I mentioned him in passing. I gave him a copy of that book. Then Open City came out and he read that, and a year or so after, he asked if he could use it and I wanted to be involved. So we did Open City at Montclair State University [in New Jersey] with this beautiful big band. Everyone in that band was a leader in their own band and the level was ferociously high. It was only two performances, but that was the genesis.

I tell Vijay that we are on peculiarly parallel tracks. We practice very different art forms and our forms of expression are different, but our political views are very similar. We are both extremely hybrid and approach the question of inclusivity in a very complex way. Neither of us has very much time for simplicities.

For Blind Spot, Iyer doesnt work with a set score. Instead, he improvises one based on your text and your images. How does that work?

The question we get often is, Is this improvised? I love the answer that Vijay gives to that. He gives a very thoughtful and philosophical answer to what we mean by a score. A score is not just notes walking up and down a Western staff. For him, and in practice for us, the score was the images, the words Im reading, and the pace at which I move to the next image, our collective presence and those of us on the stage and those of us in the audience. So if you zoom out and you say that the score is what youre reading, rather than what you play, there is a score.

Pianist Vijay Iyer in New York last year. (Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times)

When did you first pick up a camera? And how does it intersect with your writing?

My writing and my photography started  in terms of level of focus, seriousness and confidence  these two things started at the same time. I was training my eye.

In 2004, I started photographing in earnest. Since that time, Ive done both very seriously. Its just that the writerly aspect came out into the world first. Thats why Blind Spot feels like a culmination. For me, those pictures have the same maturity as my writing.

Im a photography critic, so its thinking not just how to write about pictures, but how to talk about what a photographer is doing. Its not possible to separate the eye with which I look at someones photography from the eye with which I look through the viewfinder. Photography is photography criticism. Writing is literary criticism. My writing is full of the reading Ive done and my photography is full of the photography Ive seen  combined with my own experience.

In Blind Spot, Teju Cole gathers images from his travels around the world, including this tarp in Indonesia. (Teju Cole)

Are you a film guy? Or do you prefer digital?

Ive done both. I have the problem that every photographer has, which is, I have too much gear. I have nine cameras  four are film, five are digital. There is nothing I need so urgently right now like a 10th. You always think your next camera is going to be the access to a new way of seeing.

Sometimes I use [my phone] as notation. Im very open. People always ask, Whats the best camera to use? My answer is, The one that is with you.

You often capture images of images: the reflection of sky on glass or palm trees rendered on a mans shirt. Why do these intrigue you?

I think they are discursive moments. Life is reflecting on itself  no pun. If the camera is what Im approaching with, it cannot pretend to be the only camera in the world and I cannot pretend to be the only image maker in the world. But I dont know what the attraction is. It has, in part, to do with being a writer. These are very much the pictures of a writer. They are think-y and a bit ironic. Theyre just a little bit unstable and sly.

The idea of the quiet revelation brings us to what the title of the book is. The book is called Blind Spot. I had eye trouble. I temporarily went blind in my left eye. It was only for a few days. In the years that followed, my photography got quieter and more attentive. I came to care more for the everyday miracle, the miracle that is so soft it barely counts as a miracle at all  to be standing in a landscape and the wind suddenly lifts up a net. It is the most ordinary thing and it takes my breath away.

As a photographer, Teju Cole is preoccupied with reflections and images of images  such as this photograph, snapped in Beirut. (Teju Cole)

Whats the process of putting text and image together? Do you shoot first, then write? Or vice versa?

I take notes at the time of being in places. I take a lot of photographs. You never know until you develop your film whether that idea worked. If I photograph a shining Mediterranean full of boats, it could be a perfectly banal picture or it could work. It might just have enough tension in it. I dont know for weeks and months after I develop the film whether something Ive done retains its charge. And I dont know of the many things Ive jotted down which one is worth writing up more fully. Its not about text or image coming first. Its about being attentive  about having both pieces come together like magnets.

You have shown your photos in books, galleries and Instagram. How does including them in a musical performance shape what you present?

I think there is the larger theoretical work. That would be 10,000 images and it looks like an obsession unfolding. The book is a quintessence of a certain tendency inside of the work. The archive isnt deep enough for another book of this quality. But it is deep enough for another 30 images that tell another story. For the exhibition, which is 33 images, I have to pick it mostly based on what looks good printed large. Meanwhile, for the stage performance, which is 25 to 30 images, the stronger criterion is what sounds good spoken out loud, what creates a cloud of oral meaning. That becomes the strongest criterion  it becomes about indeed creating a good score for the musicians.

An image snapped by Teju Cole in a Chicago parking lot advises Wrong Way. (Teju Cole)

Vijay Iyer and Teju Cole: Blind Spot

Where: The Theatre at Ace Hotel, 929 S. Broadway, downtown Los Angeles

When: Sept. 22 at 8 p.m.

Tickets: $26-$60

Info: cap.ucla.edu and theatre.acehotel.com

ALSO

Teju Cole uses his camera and his writing to pry open the cities he visits in Blind Spot

Going back to Lagos in Teju Coles Every Day Is for the Thief

Ojai Music Festival expands its eclectic vision under the eye of Vijay Iyer

Vijay Iyer jazzes up the Ojai Music Festival

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carolina.miranda@latimes.com | Twitter: @cmonstah
Something old, something new: The selections in this weeks 99 Seat Beat column are either world premieres or plays making their first appearance on local stages; nevertheless, they all have deep, long-established roots in L.A.s vibrant small theater scene. All feature characters coping with dire economic, domestic and existential predicaments.

Old Clown Wanted at Odyssey Theatre

The essentials: Washed-up circus clowns answering a casting call cling to faded glory and trot out well-worn slapstick routines, alternately comforting and taunting one another as they as they await an audition that never materializes  think Bozo the Clown waiting for Godot. Romanian-French playwright Matei Visniecs absurdist comedy is a modern-day successor to the existentialist theater of Samuel Beckett and Eugene Ionesco, this time with balloons.

Why this? The show is directed by Visniecs fellow Romanian ex-pat Florinel Fatulescu, whose expertise with this specialized genre includes a long association with Hollywoods now-shuttered Stages Theatre Center, a bastion of European avant garde theatre. As the clowns, Jose A. Garcia joins Odyssey Theatre Ensemble veterans Alan Abelew and Beth Hogan in this new translation by Jeremy Lawrence, also an accomplished actor at the Odyssey and other prominent local stages.

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Details: An Odyssey Theatre Ensemble production at Odyssey Theatre, 2055 S. Sepulveda Blvd., West Los Angeles. 8 p.m. Wednesday Oct. 24, 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, 2 p.m. Sundays (dark this Sunday); ends Nov. 4. $ $32 to $37 ($10 Sept. 29 and Oct. 24). (310) 477-2055, Ext. 2, www.odysseytheatre.com.

Laura Mann and Graham Outerbridge in American Hero (Dean Cechvala)

American Hero at IAMA Theatre

The essentials: The disappearance of a sub shop franchise owner leaves a trio of minimum-wage sandwich artists holding the bag in IAMA Theatres West Coast premiere of Bess Wohls 2014 subversive comedy. In deftly sketched, compassionate portraits of the working poor, a jaded single mother, a laid-off mid-level bank manager and an exhausted teenager supporting her ailing father struggle to keep their hopes alive despite by an upward mobility escalator that seems perpetually out of order.

Why this? In addition to clever dialog and insider insights into the fast food assembly line, the play is a prescient takedown of the so-called booming economy and its unequal beneficiaries. Opening its 11th season, IAMA Theatre Company continues its commitment to cutting-edge, cool and hyper-modern stories for a streaming generation.

Details: An IAMA Theatre Company production at the Pasadena Playhouse Carrie Hamilton Theatre, 39 S. El Molino Ave., Pasadena. 8 p.m. Fridays (8:30 opening Sept. 21) and Saturdays, 7 p.m. Sundays; ends Oct. 21. $30 ($40 Sept. 21). (323) 380-8843,www.iamatheatre.com.

Meeghan Holaway and Rahul Rai in The Rescued (Brian M. Cole)

The Rescued at The Road

The essentials: In Julie Marie Myatts quirky new allegorical character study, inspired by the stories of prison inmates, actors give human shape and voice to household pets rescued from animal shelters. Its understood the men represent dogs and the women cats, but their sophisticated thoughts, conflicts and self-discoveries are all-too recognizably our own.

Why this? NoHos The Road Theatre excels in showcasing emerging playwrights with quality performances and productions. The companys 2016 productions of John is a father and Birder showed a memorable synergy with Myatts touching, sympathetic treatment of damaged people and their struggle to overcome psychological wounds.

Details: A Road Theatre Company production at the Road Theatre on Magnolia, 10747 Magnolia Blvd. in North Hollywood. 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, 2 p.m. Sundays; ends Nov. 11. $34. (818) 761-8838, www.roadtheatre.org.

Steve Spiro in UK Underdog (Natalie Ford)

UK Underdog at Zephyr Theatre

The essentials: In an affirmative tale of self-transformation, London-born actor-playwright Steve Spiros new solo piece chronicles his evolution from a bullied Jewish runt into an accomplished martial artist, boxer community leader and animal rights activist. Like The Rescued, the show also draws explicit parallels between at-risk humans and rescued animals.

Why this?: Spiro, a member of Venice-based Pacific Resident Theatre, developed this nuanced multi-character performance with director and company colleague Ann Bronston, also a prominent veteran of Rogue Machine, City Garage. All proceeds from the production will benefit Shelter Transport Animal Rescue Team and other selected animal charities and anti-bullying groups.

Details: A Shelter Transport Animal Rescue Team in association with Pacific Resident Theatre production at Zephyr Theater, 7456 Melrose Ave., Los Angeles. 8 p.m. Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays, 2 p.m. Sundays; ends Oct. 28. $25. (323) 960-7788, www.plays411.com/ukunderdog
The history of the arts, among other zones of human accomplishment, is full of mediocre men who have taken credit for the accomplishments of extraordinary women. Sometimes, the man and the woman happen to be married to each other. Film scholars have been gradually restoring the legacy of the silent-era director and producer Alice Guy-Blache, whose trailblazing work was often misattributed to her husband. A few years ago, the movie Big Eyes recounted the trials of the popular artist Margaret Keane in the 1950s and 60s, when her charlatan of a spouse passed off her paintings as his own.

We can imagine how much worse it was for female artists working in earlier, even more repressive societies. Here to prove the point  and also to complicate it, in unexpected and pleasurable ways  is Colette, a witty, spirited portrait of the great French writer and libertine during the early Belle Epoque years of her career. It recounts the tempestuous, convention-defying marriage of Colette (Keira Knightley, very good) and Henry Gauthier-Villars (Dominic West, ditto), better known by his nom de plume, Willy, a self-styled impresario of the publishing world who nurtured, exploited and ultimately betrayed his wifes writing talent.

The British-born director Wash Westmoreland (Still Alice), who wrote the script with his late husband, Richard Glatzer, and Rebecca Lenkiewicz, treats this story as an emblematic one. The political resonance of Colettes story transcends barriers of language, culture and milieu, which doesnt entirely offset the awkwardness of hearing a distinctly French story performed in English. Still, after watching Knightley and West match wits and tempers for the better part of two hours, sparring with a precision and vigor that recalls the great drawing-room comedies of yesteryear, its hard not to appreciate the obvious benefits of this compromise.

If Colette is a bit too Anglicized and airbrushed to conform to strict standards of movie realism (fin de siecle France is played, well enough, by Hungary), it also resists the visual extravagance typically assumed to be the prestige costume dramas stock-in-trade. The period trappings, which include Michael Carlins sleek production design and especially Andrea Fleschs luscious costumes, supply their share of on-screen distractions, but they never feel indulgent or overpowering. Instead they serve the storys bracingly modern sensibility, its insistence on dramatizing the injustices of the past while confronting the patriarchies of the present.

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This goal, for all its unimpeachable relevance, might have left Colette feeling smug and self-satisfied, an exercise in shooting toxic male fish in a barrel. But there is nothing complacent or easy about the empowerment being offered up here. Westmoreland means to celebrate Colette the literary titan and bisexual pioneer, and to dissolve your initial outrage at her mistreatment in a warm bath of feel-good satisfaction. But he also wants to paint a lively, credible portrait of a genuinely complicated marital arrangement and to show how one womans genius could flourish even amid so much oppression and compromise.

Dominic West stars in Collete, as Willy, the husband of the title character who took credit for her writing.. (Robert Viglasky / Bleecker Street)

It begins with Willy marrying the young Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette in 1893 and whisking her away from her Burgundy country-mouse parents (Robert Pugh and Fiona Shaw) to the salons and soirees of Paris. At first, Colette, as she will eventually call herself, is put off by the gossipy social circles in which her husband moves and flirts, and even more so by his chronic gambling and philandering. But as a woman of letters, she is fascinated by Willys bustling literary fiefdom and soon finds her place in it, first as a proofer and then as one of his ghostwriters.

In little time, she produces a novel, Claudine at School (Claudine a lEcole), drawn from her own thoughts and experiences as a 15-year-old schoolgirl. Although Willy is disappointed that the book prioritizes psychological insight over narrative drive  hardly the last of his blatantly gendered assumptions  he publishes it, under his name, bien sur. With its intimate prose and descriptions of lesbian longing, Claudine at School becomes a scandal and a sensation, making a fortune that Willy will quickly squander and force Colette to recoup, many times over, by cranking out one bestseller after another.

Colette ends up writing four Claudine novels in all, a feat that the movie glosses over in a way that will probably amuse and infuriate writers in the audience. This is hardly the first author biopic in which you learn more about the subjects penmanship than about the nuts and bolts of her artistic process. Drafting a story or a novel may not be the most cinematic activity, but given how skillfully Knightley deconstructed a characters intellect in David Cronenbergs A Dangerous Method, its a shame that Colette doesnt require her to do much more in this department than hold a pen convincingly.

The challenge, for Knightley, is to suggest a measure of Colettes sensibility off the page, to express the uninhibited openness to life, lust and love that remains one of the hallmarks of the authors work. And happily, this is where the picture spreads its wings, at one point working itself up into a mild but pleasing pansexual lather. As Colette rises in Parisian society and takes her first steps onto the world stage, her interest in women  emotional, intellectual, physical  asserts itself gradually at first, then with irresistible force. A fling with an heiress from Louisiana (Eleanor Tomlinson) is eventually followed by a more permanent relationship with Mathilde de Morny, or Missy (Denise Gough), a gender-nonconforming artist.

The gender-nonconforming Missy (Denise Gough) and Collette (Keira Knightley). (Robert Viglasky / Bleecker Street)

Colettes sentimental education is a sartorial one too: Ditching her Burgundy braids and floor-length dresses for short, Claudine-esque curls and sharply cut mens suits, she flirts with androgyny and embraces her liberation. She is free to experiment, in part, because Willy doesnt discourage her dalliances with women (although, as he points out, affairs with other men would be a different story). And as the movies more diffuse, time-hopping second act tracks the growing popularity of the Claudine books and the authors early self-reinvention as a dancer and mime, it is Colette and Willys open marriage that holds your attention and gives the story its emotional momentum.

Willy is a man of flagrant dishonesty and crude habits: Farting and belching on-screen, hes a literal and figurative gasbag. But as faithless and manipulative as he can be, he somehow manages, at least until the final scenes, to escape the movies outright condemnation. West, his charisma peeking out from behind an eminently twirlable mustache and a series of fat suits, gives a performance of warm and irrepressible comic gusto. The movies unmistakable affection for this outsized cad suggests an honest reflection of how Colette herself must have viewed him  with exasperation and resentment, certainly, but also with tenderness and, once upon a time, desire.

And maybe, at least for a while, a modicum of grudging respect. As the movie presents it, there is something Faustian about Colettes marriage to Willy, whose devotion to his wife is anything but unconditional; hes the kind of man who would buy her a beautiful house in the countryside (using the fruits of her labors, of course), only to trap her in the study until shed finished writing her next book. Some might argue that he played a role in helping unlock her talent. But as Colette reminds us, that talent was hers and hers alone.

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Colette

Rating: R, for some sexuality/nudity

Running time: 1 hour, 51 minutes

Playing: Arclight Cinemas, Hollywood, and the Landmark, West Los Angeles

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justin.chang@latimes.com

@JustinCChang
Jane Fonda has, as they say, lived a life. More than a few, in fact, as evidenced by the highly enjoyable and immersive HBO documentary Jane Fonda in Five Acts, receiving a brief theatrical opening ahead of its Sept. 24 premiere on the premium network and its streaming platforms.

For as much as Fondas fans and observers may already know  or think they do  about the legendary actress, activist and daughter of venerable actor Henry, director Susan Lacy (she also helmed last years well-regarded HBO documentary Spielberg) places as much if not more focus on Jane the woman and soul-searcher than on her famed movie career, giving this lengthy piece an effectively intimate, deep-dive quality.

It certainly didnt hurt that Lacy had a reported 21 hours (shot from 2015-17) of meaty, candidly reflective interviews with Fonda to form an absorbing spine for this mostly chronological retelling of the now-80-year-olds starry life.

While its not an entirely warts-and-all portrayal  despite her frank yet also laudably rueful approach here, Fonda can come off as studied at times  the film deftly unpeels and contextualizes the actress many achievements, setbacks and transformations against the eras in which they took place; an intriguingly human mirror of eight decades worth of whirling social, political and cultural change.

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Given Fondas famed feminism, it may seem odd that the first four of the five acts would be titled for the man that dominated each period: Henry, Vadim (for first husband, French director Roger Vadim), Tom (second husband, activist-politician Tom Hayden) and Ted (third hubby, media mogul Ted Turner). The fifth part, significantly, is called Jane.

As her story unfolds, one of the films main themes takes shape: Much of Fondas life was spent attempting to please controlling men and molding herself to their wants and needs, often losing her own identity in the process. It makes for intriguing and often revealing personal dissection, particularly for those unfamiliar with her 2005 autobiography, My Life So Far.

Fonda discusses at length the lasting effects of her complex childhood in the spotlight, which included her beloved but emotionally distant father and manic-depressive mother, Frances, who committed suicide when Fonda was 12. Fondas privileged but often lonely youth led to her shaky confidence, uncertain self-image and the self-described belief, If Im not perfect, no one can love me.

Lacy then explores Fondas early stage-and-screen career, her move to France, where she met ladies man Vadim (he directed her in several films, most notably 1968s sci-fi sex farce Barbarella), her controversial plunge into the Vietnam-era anti-war movement, which brought on the wrath of conservatives and the nickname Hanoi Jane (she expresses deep regret for her missteps back then but defends her overall mission), and her bohemian, activism-centric life with Hayden.

Its also a kick to revisit Jane Fondas Workout, the 1982 exercise video produced to raise money for her and Haydens political causes, which startlingly became the top-selling VHS tape of all time.

Although the documentary, which is studded with an evocative cornucopia of archival news, film and TV clips, plus home movies and personal photos, spends ample time recalling the seven-time Academy Award nominee and two-time winners key big-screen roles  They Shoot Horses, Dont They?, Klute, Coming Home, The China Syndrome, 9 to 5, On Golden Pond and several earlier and more recent efforts  it offers a far from comprehensive look at her film career, focusing mainly on seminal roles and/or pictures she had a hand in getting made.

The film features chats with such co-stars as Robert Redford and Lily Tomlin; son Troy Garity, stepdaughter Nathalie Vadim and adoptive daughter Mary Luana Williams; best friend and producer Paula Weinstein; and others, but doesnt overdo the celebrity testimonials. Noticeably missing are input from daughter Vanessa Vadim (an apologetic Fonda suggests difficulties between them) and any non-archival bits with brother Peter.

All in all, Jane Fonda in Five Acts proves a captivating, extremely well-told and crafted, decidedly fitting tribute to a Hollywood legend, fighter and survivor who just might surprise us one day with a sixth act.

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Jane Fonda in Five Acts

Not rated

Running time: 2 hours, 13 minutes

Playing: Starts Sept. 21, Laemmle Playhouse 7, Pasadena; Sept. 24 on HBO
Neither about a piece of furniture nor a backstage theater person, American Dresser refers to the motorcycle Tom Berengers widower takes on a life-affirming, Long Island-to-Oregon road trip in this draggy drama.

Coping poorly with the death of his wife, Sandra (Gina Gershon in flashbacks), crusty Vietnam vet John Moore (Berenger) opts to let the undisclosed contents of a letter found in a record-album sleeve to provide healing direction as he takes to his trusty touring bike along with old war buddy, Charlie (Keith David).



For the record: An earlier version of this review mistakenly stated that the motorcycles used in the film came from the collection of musician Billy Joel.

Making like a pair of wheezy riders, the guys soon add a third to their cross-country trek  a quiet stranger with a secret past (stiffly played by the films writer-director, Carmine Cangialosi), as they cross paths with various characters played by Bruce Dern, Penelope Ann Miller and Jeff Fahey.

While its nice to see so many familiar faces, one wished it would have been in a more competent piece of filmmaking. Riddled with as many plot holes as those highways and byways have potholes, the heavy-handed writing and direction, with its awkward close-ups and purposeful, sustained takes does its cast few favors.

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American Dresser

Not rated

Running time: 1 hour, 37 minutes

Playing: Starts Sept. 21, Laemmle Monica Film Center, Santa Monica; also on VOD
Tiantian Qiu navigates the narrow passageways of her kitchen at Hip Hot restaurant in Monterey Park, moving between the stove, installed with woks of various sizes, and an island loaded with containers, jars and bottles. She adjusts the temperature of the burners by turning a lever with her knee while she drops ingredients  garlic, ginger, chiles, broth  into one of the woks, stirring and tasting the contents with a huge ladle.

Tall and slight, her dark hair in a pixie cut and dressed in a fitted, short-sleeved chefs jacket decorated with a lobster pin, Qiu is one of the few women to both own and operate Sichuan kitchens in Los Angeles vibrant San Gabriel Valley restaurant community. As she cooks, making a fish stew with Sichuan pickles that is one of her house specials, she calls out in Mandarin to the cooks, all men, who bring her small plates with more components  glass noodles, Wood Ear mushrooms  to add to the dish.

Qiu, 29, and co-owner Kai Lin opened Hip Hot three-and-a-half years ago, in a lofty space next to the movie theaters and boba joints of the Atlantic Times Square mall. Both her cooking style and the menu that it engendered are a playful mash-up of Sichuan and Cantonese styles, a combination of the chile-focused cooking of the former with the emphasis on seafood of the latter.

People say theyre family recipes,  Qiu says of the classic dishes, such as water-boiled fish and twice-cooked pork slices that many Chinese chefs put on their menus, because its easier. But theyre everyones dishes.

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Summer Szechuan noodles from Hip Hot. (Kirk McKoy / Los Angeles Times)

Recipe: Summer Szechuan noodles 

There are plates of la zi ji, fried chicken spiked with an abundance of dried red chiles; and mapo tofu, the homey cubes of silken tofu doused in fiery sauce  dishes that youll find on most Sichuan restaurant menus. Then there are the dishes that Qiu engineers to fit her particular love of seafood: razor clams with green onion sauce; stir-fried Dungeness crab with chile sauce; and scallop sashimi with Santa Barbara uni. There are also dry pots, or dishes stir-fried in a dry hot pot. For hot pots, another classic preparation in which myriad ingredients are cooked in a simmering, fragrant broth, there is Qius upcoming project.

She and Lin are opening a second restaurant later this fall, in the Sawtelle neighborhood of the Westside. Called Mala Town (mala is the word for the numb spice engendered by Sichuan peppercorns), it will be a casual restaurant, with a menu of individually sized hot pots in a variety of different styles, not only from Chengdu, but also Cantonese, Mongolian and more.

Its comfort food, says Qiu. As for why Sawtelle, she says: I went to Santa Monica College; I know the area.

Also in the works is a third restaurant, with many of the same dishes as Hip Hot, in the Westfield Santa Anita Mall, in Arcadia. The dishes will be smaller, more accessible; the menu an abbreviated version of Hip Hot.

Tiantian Qiu in the kitchen preparing the house special fish stew with Szechuan pickles. (Kirk McKoy / Los Angeles Times)

Born and raised in Chengdu, the capital of Chinas Sichuan province, Qiu moved wto Shenzhen, a major city in Guandong that borders Hong Kong, when she was a teenager. She says she spent a lot of time in Guangzhou, Guandongs capital  mostly eating.

Qiu came to the United States for college, spending a year at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland (It was too cold.) before coming to Los Angeles, first to attend Santa Monica College, then USC, where she graduated with a business degree in 2014.

Between Santa Monica College and USC, she went back to China to work in restaurants, moving between five different kitchens in about nine months, each restaurant specializing in a different style of cooking. It was a kind of self-orchestrated boot camp, a way to simultaneously learn various cooking techniques and check out business models. After she graduated from USC, she opened Hip Hot with a start-up investment from her father.

Qiu adds vibrant pink pickles to the fish stew  she makes all her own pickles  as well as a pour of the bright red pickle juice, ladles up another taste, then pours the stew into a bowl to serve. She adds stir-fried jalapenos, cilantro and liberal doses from a bottle of Sichuan peppercorn oil, the heady aroma filling the airspace above the bowl. Next to her on the line, a cook drops skewers threaded with duck tongues into a deep-fryer. Five-pound white plastic pails filled with soy sauce load the shelf under the main kitchen island like paint buckets at a Sherwin-Williams store.

The house special fish stew with Szechuan pickles and topped with chiles. (Kirk McKoy / Los Angeles Times)

To continue staying in the country, the chef has renewed her student visa by studying interior design at UCLA Extension. This is, she says, a practical matter as well as an aesthetic one, as she can design her own restaurants. (As a general rule, Qiu prefers to do things herself.) She loads another bowl with noodles, dresses them with sweet soy sauce, black vinegar and chile oil and artfully arranges a thatch of chicken and green onions on top. This dish complete, she heads back to her ad hoc office, a table in the corner of the restaurant upon which she has an electric kettle, a teapot, cups and a scale to measure tea. Her commute home isnt much longer: She lives in an apartment above the restaurant.

Running three restaurants instead of one will be a trick, but its likely one that Qiu will sort out. If theres no homework, she says, pouring out another cup of tea, Im OK.

500 N. Atlantic Blvd., Ste. 149, Monterey Park; (626) 782-7711; hiphotinla.com. Instagram: @hiphot_cookingtata.

amy.scattergood@latimes.com

@ascattergood
The California bullet train would cut through Sun Valley, San Fernando, Santa Clarita and Agua Dulce, the state rail authority proposed Wednesday as it laid out its plans for the complicated route from Burbank to Palmdale  one of its most controversial and costly segments.

Compared with other alternatives, the route would be the easiest to build and cause the least harm, rail authority officials said, but it is likely to face intense opposition from communities and institutions along the way.

The 38-mile route closely follows the 14 Freeway through the San Gabriel Mountains via five separate tunnels, numerous bridges and various sections that would run at-grade.

If the plan is selected by the California High-Speed Rail Authority board, its myriad impacts on the community and environment would be detailed by next year in extensive environmental documents. But it appears that the route could affect homes, businesses, horse ranches, schools, the Angeles National Forest, an airport and a hospital.

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The decision was based on an attempt to balance the objectives of building the railroad with its effects on the environment and communities along the route, said Michelle Boehm, the rail authoritys Southern California regional director.

No route is perfect, she said in a web address that did not take news media questions.

(Los Angeles Times)

The route beat out two other potential paths that would have cut deeper into the national forest and potentially had great effects on water resources as a result of deep tunnels in ancient aquifers. The route following the 14 is the easiest and fastest to build, Boehm added, noting that the geology along the route was better for tunneling.

The selection was not based on cost, though risk and ease of construction was a factor.

One of the biggest challenges of the entire bullet train project is the passage it will have to make over the San Gabriel and Tehachapi mountains, which could cost between $26 billion and $45 billion, according to the rail authoritys 2018 business plan. The preferred route through the San Gabriels includes a 13-mile and a 7-mile tunnel  part of the most ambitious tunneling project in U.S. history.

Because the rail authority lacks funding for the job, it has delayed that part of the project, meaning the states largest city will be the last to be connected in the Los Angeles-to-San Francisco system.

The route will probably face stiff opposition in a number of communities along the way, which have demanded over the last two years that the entire passage from Burbank to Palmdale be underground.

Santa Clarita Councilwoman and Mayor Pro Tem Marsha McLean said she was disappointed that the route maps released Wednesday do not provide adequate detail to understand their exact effects on neighborhoods. The route would emerge from its southernmost tunnel at Branford Street near San Fernando Road in Pacoima, a business area north of a high school and a hospital.

The Santa Clarita City Council had told the rail authority it would oppose any route that was not fully underground, McLean said.

Anything above ground takes out homes, schools and churches, she said. That is not going to happen.

Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti has strongly supported the rail project and over the last few years kept his distance from opposition groups in city neighborhoods along the route, including Shadow Hills, Lake View Terrace, Pacoima, Sylmar and Sun Valley. A spokesman for Garcetti said he was observing the Yom Kippur holiday and was not available to discuss the decision.

Garcetti had advocated in letters to the rail authority that it use the existing Metrolink commuter rail right of way from Burbank to Palmdale, a twisty route that was built in the 1870s by Southern Pacific. Such a compromise, which was supported by other Southern California officials, would have been similar to the deal made in the Bay Area to use the Caltrain right of way from San Jose to San Francisco.

But the state nixed the proposal.

David DePinto, who heads the watchdog group Save Angeles National Forest for Everyone, criticized state officials for calling the route the best alternative.

It is the choice of lesser evils, he said, noting that it would have a potentially devastating effect on Sun Valley and other communities. The group has long had concerns about disruption from construction, the seizure of private homes, the impacts on the areas unique equestrian culture and the noise of high-speed trains, he said.

DePinto said the rail authority failed to abide by a commitment it made publicly this year to hold a board meeting in the San Fernando Valley before the selection of a preferred alignment. The board plans to hold a meeting in the area in November.

The rail authority plans to make public its draft environmental documents under federal and state laws in 2019, allowing the public, businesses and other government agencies to file formal comments. A final report would be issued in 2020, which would be made into a formal decision. The rail authority will begin a community outreach program in coming weeks, which should provide additional details.

The rail authoritys business plan says the Los Angeles-to-San Francisco system would be completed by 2033. But because there is not funding to build the Southern California segment of the system, it is impossible to know when any construction here would actually begin. The projected costs hit $77 billion this year, more than double the original estimate, and its completion date is now more than a decade delayed.

ralph.vartabedian@latimes.com

Follow me on Twitter @rvartabedian
After news broke over the weekend that a woman had accused Judge Brett Kavanaugh of sexual assault, AP Government teacher Brandon Cabezas didnt have to ask himself whether he should talk to his students about it. His students brought it up.

This was definitely a robust discussion, Cabezas said. We didnt talk about anything else for the first half-hour of class.

Most of Cabezas 12th-graders at the Ramon C. Cortines School of Visual and Performing Arts in downtown Los Angeles are 17 years old. Theyre the same age Kavanaugh was when, Christine Blasey Ford said, he pinned her down, groped her and covered her mouth to stop her from screaming. Kavanaugh has denied her allegations.

Theyre also old enough to have followed the 2016 election, been exposed to then-candidate Donald Trumps infamous Access Hollywood video and read a years worth of #MeToo headlines. In other words, theyre familiar with the debate over how sexual misconduct allegations should be treated.

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Whats not clear is how this issue should be treated in the classroom.

For some social studies and civics teachers, President Trumps nomination of Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court was an ideal, real-world lesson in the separation of powers and the checks and balances built into American government. The Senate Judiciary Committees hearings were ready-made course material.

But Fords accusation that Kavanaugh had sexually assaulted her when they were teenagers has changed the conversation unexpectedly.

Jasmine Uribe, director of community initiatives for Break the Cycle, an advocacy organization that helps young people build healthy relationships, said this period of political turmoil could be a good teaching moment.

The scenario described by Ford, a California professor  regardless of any questions it may raise  is one that high school students may already have confronted or may encounter in the future, she said. It provides an opportunity for health teachers to get a discussion going about drinking and boundaries, sexual harassment and assault.

Its easier for students to talk about incidents that are out in the media versus talking about their personal life, Uribe said.

Its a chance to ask students, she said, How do we talk about whats healthy, whats unhealthy in this situation? How would you help this student in this situation? Would you speak up?

In some respects, California students may be better equipped to have these conversations than most.

Gov. Jerry Brown signed legislation in 2015 that made California the first state in the nation to mandate that schools teach sexual consent. Since 2016, when the law took effect, school districts that require their graduates to take a health class have had to teach students about affirmative consent, defined by the state as conscious and voluntary agreement to engage in sexual activity.

California students also now are required to take sexual health classes unless their parents request that they be excused.

In his AP Government class, Cabezas had asked students to bring in examples of current events related to what they are studying. Several arrived with news stories about Fords accusations  and questions.

Why would an accuser bring this up so many years later? Could Kavanaugh be criminally prosecuted? How is it that a man facing multiple allegations of sexual misconduct could be elected president but have a higher standard applied to his nominee for the Supreme Court?

On the whole, they thought this was something that was relevant and should be vetted out, Cabezas said. The responses were really nuanced because they did consider the fact that people can change over time.

Kevin Thompson, a government teacher at Oceanside High School in San Diego County, said he doesnt plan to introduce such a polarizing topic into his classroom so early in the school year.

At some point, he said, his classes will have to talk about Kavanaughs nomination and the allegations because its vital to their development as informed citizens.

You have to talk about it, he said. Its how our democracy works.

He might have the class analyze media coverage of the allegations or compare what happens in this case with what happened when Anita Hill spoke out about Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas, more than a decade before they were born.

But he plans to hold off for a while.

He doesnt want to be perceived as having an agenda or trying to indoctrinate his students, he said, though hell facilitate the discussion if students bring it up on their own.

Right now, he said, his students are just learning about federalism. They wont get to the media and the Supreme Court for another month at least.

anna.phillips@latimes.com

Twitter: @annamphillips

sonali.kohli@latimes.com

Twitter: @Sonali_Kohli
BEIJING, Sept. 19 (Xinhua) -- President Xi Jinping said Wednesday that China would "unswervingly take the road of peaceful development and remain a builder of world peace, a contributor to global development and a defender of the international order."

Xi, also general secretary of the Communist Party of China Central Committee, made the remarks in a congratulatory letter to the commemorative event in Nanjing marking the 2018 International Day of Peace.

Xi extended a warm welcome to the participants of the event, wishing it a complete success.

Pointing out that peace has been universally aspired after and pursued by human society, Xi said that peace and development had become themes of the times, but countries still faced increasingly complex security threats and the lingering threat of war.

"The Chinese nation loves peace and the Chinese people know well the value of peace," Xi said, adding that China was committed to peaceful development.

Xi said the commemorative event had become an important platform for all parties to enhance cooperation in security governance and unite global forces for peace.

This year's commemorative event is themed on working together to build a community with a shared future for humanity and a world of lasting peace and universal security.

Xi said the theme was in line with the founding principles of the International Day of Peace and was in the fundamental interests of all countries and peoples.

Xi called on those engaged in the activities to pool their wisdom and strength, build consensus and contribute to the building of a community with a shared future for humanity and a better world.
Charles Rappleye, a resolute Los Angeles investigative reporter and editor who wrote critically acclaimed books about historical figures, has died at 62.

Rappleye, who battled cancer for six years, had been working on a book about little-remembered President Zachary Taylor when he died at home in Echo Park on Saturday.

The overlooked were his specialty  be they mafia figures, slave-trading Founding Fathers, mistreated gang members or downtrodden journalists.

He was especially interested in telling the stories of the overlooked of Los Angeles, such as a gang member targeted for blowing the whistle on crooked cops. In 2002, he recounted in the L.A. Weekly how Carlos Oliva Menjivar was charged three times with resisting arrest, once after four officers manhandled him in his wheelchair, repeatedly slamming his head against a metal door frame.

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Rappleye castigated the Los Angeles Times in 1996 for trying to discredit a controversial series by journalist Gary Webb on the roots of the L.A. crack-cocaine epidemic, and used the pages of the Weekly to build on Webbs work.

It wasnt just about a good story with Charlie. He wanted to root out wrong, said Sue Horton, a senior editor at Reuters and a former editor in chief at the L.A. Weekly.

Born in Texas in 1956, Rappleye grew up in Cambridge, Mass., where he captained a top-rated high school rowing team, his brother Tim said. At the University of Wisconsin in Madison, he worked on the college paper and majored in economics, graduating in 1978. After moving to California, he became editor of the weekly Santa Barbara News & Review. He earned a masters degree in professional writing at USC in 1988.

His first book, published in 1991, All American Mafioso: The Johnny Rosselli Story, chronicled the life of a mobster who reached into Hollywood.

Rappleye worked for the L.A. Weekly as news editor, reporter and writer from 1994 to 2003, during the heyday of its investigative journalism. He helped break open, along with The Times, the Rampart police-corruption scandal.

Former Times investigative reporter Scott Glover described Rappleye as a dogged, tenacious reporter whose slightly disheveled, Columbo-like appearance made him the sort of guy people didnt see coming.

It made him a formidable competitor, said Glover, who now works for CNN. I opened up the L.A. Weekly more than once to see his byline above a story we wished wed done or one that we had in the works but had yet to publish. Put another way, thats called getting beat.

Rappleye next turned to writing historical biographies, beginning with Sons of Providence: The Brown Brothers, the Slave Trade, and the American Revolution, about the founders of Brown University  and the brothers conflict over the slave trade. The university made the book  which won numerous prizes  required reading for incoming freshmen in 2012. Rappleye also wrote books about Robert Morris, the financier of the American Revolution, and Herbert Hoover.

Just over a decade ago, he helped Tulsa Kinney, his wife of 15 years, launch the L.A. art magazine Artillery.

In addition to Kinney, Rappleye is survived by his mother, Ann Crompton; his children, Dexter and Kelly; and their mother, Gale Holland, his first wife, who is a Times reporter.

howard.blume@latimes.com

Twitter: @howardblume
Sen. Dianne Feinstein was fighting for her political life in 1994, facing a tight election that was swinging on the issue of immigration.

Proposition 187, which would cut many public services to those in California illegally, was leading in the polls and her Republican opponent for the U.S. Senate, Michael Huffington, had embraced it. Her own television campaign ad captured a shadowy image, presumably of immigrants streaming across the border from Mexico, and touted her efforts to secure funding for more border agents and fencing. Yet, with weeks to go before election day, Feinstein stood strong against Prop. 187.

I know that this could cost me votes, quite possibly even the election, Feinstein said at the time. But I simply do not believe it will work.

She won, despite the wave of support for the measure.

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California is a much different state both politically and demographically 24 years later. And as Feinstein seeks reelection this year, she is facing another immigration challenge, this time from the left.

Her Democratic opponent, state Sen. Kevin de Leon, released a video this week attacking her stance on immigration and making parallels between comments Feinstein made in the 1990s about criminal immigrants and recent anti-immigrant quotes from President Trump, whose crackdown is highly unpopular in California.

The video  released only online  recreates scenes from De Leons childhood, being raised by a single immigrant mother who worked as a housekeeper. It goes on to show how De Leons life would have changed had he lived in present-day America and been separated from his mother by officers from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

The video includes two clips of Feinstein, one from 1994, where she says: The illegal immigrants who come here and commit felonies, thats not what this nation, before it cuts off. The second clip, from 1993, begins mid-sentence, and includes her saying, I say return them to their own country where that country may be. The video then cuts to a clip of Trump referring to immigrants as rapists. Soft, dramatic music plays throughout.

Feinstein has emerged as a foe of the presidents, having clashed with the administration on issues including gun control, immigration and womens rights. But she also faces criticism from more liberal Democrats, who say she should be doing more to fight Trumps agenda.

De Leon said in an interview Wednesday that he wants Californians to understand that Feinsteins priority in Congress has not been protecting immigrants.

Youre the ranking member of the judiciary committee, and you represent the largest state in the nation with the largest number of immigrants  youre supposed to be the leading voice, De Leon said.

The video is an attempt by de Leon to spark interest in a campaign that has gotten little attention and in a race where numerous polls have shown Feinstein holding a significant and steady lead.

De Leon has tried to position himself a leader of the California resistance to Trump in a state that is home to a quarter of the countrys immigrants, including roughly 2.3 million living here without legal residency.

He was a key architect of Californias sanctuary state legislation, the most far-reaching of its kind in the country. It limits state and local law enforcement communication with federal immigration authorities, and prevents officers from questioning and holding people on immigration violations.

But the bill sent to Gov. Jerry Brown was a drastically scaled-back version of the first version of SB 54, the result of tough negotiations between Brown and De Leon in the last weeks of the legislative session. It included provisions that allow federal immigration authorities to keep working with state corrections officials and to continue entering county jails to question immigrants. The new law also permits police and sheriffs to share jail release dates of inmates and to transfer them to immigration authorities if they have been convicted of one or more crimes from a list of 800 outlined in a previous law, the California Trust Act.

In rejecting the notion that Feinstein hasnt been a leader in protecting Californias immigrant communities, her supporters noted the parallels between what Feinstein is quoted saying in the video and what De Leon himself has supported.

From opposing Proposition 187 and championing AgJobs to defending Dreamers and authorizing legislation to end Trumps policy of separating families at the border, Senator Feinstein has been a strong leader and defender of Californias hard working immigrant families, California Secretary of State Alex Padilla said in a comment sent on his behalf by the Feinstein campaign.

Her supporters also pointed out that Feinstein authored legislation to stop Trumps policy of separating children from their families at the border, and voted to preserve DACA many times.

However, De Leons ad struck a chord with several in the immigrant rights movement.

To our members and membership base, the ad was very relatable, said Diana Colin, program director for the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles.

Colin said De Leons candidacy is a result of Prop. 187, which activated a lot of college-age Latinos, propelling them to get involved in immigrant rights movement.

Although the organization hasnt publicly endorsed either candidate, Colin said theyve been critical of Feinstein in the past for being too soft on immigration rights and not initially voting on legislation that would advance immigrant rights.

Last year, Colin said, Feinstein had to be convinced to hold back her vote on the budget unless it came with a vote for legislation that would include the DREAM Act.

(It was a funding bill to prevent the government from shutting down and, after hearing from interest groups, Feinstein not only voted no on the bill but also urged colleagues to join her.)

Karla Estrada, a 27-year-old immigrant rights organizer based in Los Angeles, said shes not a fan of Feinstein because she doesnt believe the U.S. senator is progressive enough on immigration at a time when its most needed.

Still, she said, De Leons ad went a bit too far. Estrada pointed out that the clips of Feinstein in the ad are old and that she seems to no longer hold stridently anti-immigrant ideas.

Hes losing, and thats why he is resorting to those type of attack ads, Estrada said.

Larry Gerston, a professor of political science emeritus at San Jose State University, said Feinsteins comments on the tape also speak to how much immigration politics have changed over the years.

This is what happens to a person who is in public service for many decades, Gerston said. Because in that time, most public servants have adapted to different issues of the day as conditions and times change.

Times staff writer Sarah D. Wire contributed to this report.
AllenCo Energy Inc. says it is planning to resume operations next month at a South Los Angeles oil site where neighbors once complained of nausea, nosebleeds and other ailments, according to a document sent to state regulators.

The company agreed to suspend oil production at the site nearly five years ago at the urging of then-U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer, after a public outcry spurred federal and local investigations and environmental officials were sickened by fumes at the site. Los Angeles City Atty. Mike Feuer then sued and got a court order requiring AllenCo to follow new rules if it wants to restart operations.

Last week, AllenCo sent a written plan to the state Division of Oil, Gas and Geothermal Resources citing a planned startup date of Oct. 15. It indicated that the facility would be staffed and operating all day, every day. Two supervisors would be working at all times, and their primary responsibility is to maintain the facility in a safe and environmentally responsible condition.

In addition, the company wrote that the site was now surrounded by an emissions monitoring system and that any oil residue would be cleaned as soon as possible.

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AllenCo did not respond to an email and phone message Wednesday seeking comment.

The Division of Oil, Gas and Geothermal Resources said it is still reviewing the startup plan, as well as recent tests of pipelines and tanks at the facility. Even if it is deemed adequate, inspections involving the Los Angeles Fire Department and state regulators would have to take place, division spokesman Donald Drysdale said in an email.

It seems unlikely the facilitys reopening is imminent, Drysdale wrote.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency also said it has not received a mandatory certification from AllenCo, which it must provide to the agency 15 days before the site reopens.

Community activists say they are gravely worried about oil operations restarting at the South L.A. site, despite announced upgrades.

There is no safe way to have such an industrial activity in a residential community, said Nancy Halpern Ibrahim, executive director of Esperanza Community Housing.

Uduak-Joe Ntuk, L.A.s petroleum administrator, has argued that the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles, which owns the site and has a leasing agreement with the company, could terminate that lease. The archdiocese has repeatedly countered that it does not have the right to shut down the facility, but says it has been working with the city and AllenCo to find an alternative use.

Feuer could not be reached for comment Wednesday because he was observing Yom Kippur. His spokesman, Rob Wilcox, said it was too early to know if AllenCo had met the legal requirements to reopen because state regulators need to review any application to resume operations.

The courts order assures the community that AllenCo will never be allowed to reopen unless it complies with every single health and safety regulation  and installs a state-of-the-art health and safety monitoring system, overseen by an independent environmental expert authorized to shut the facility down, Wilcox said in a written statement.

Earlier this month, the City Council voted to ask city lawyers to draft an ordinance that would repeal the oil drilling district that covers the AllenCo site, which City Councilman Gil Cedillo said might stop it from reopening. That ordinance still has to come back for approval, however, and Ntuk called it kind of uncharted territory.

Ntuk said that in light of AllenCos history, he, too, is concerned about the firm resuming operations there.

We havent had anybody else with this level of violations, he said.

emily.alpert@latimes.com

Twitter: @AlpertReyes
Doctors in California will now be required to notify patients if they are put on disciplinary probation for sexual misconduct.

Gov. Jerry Brown announced Wednesday that he had signed the Patient Right to Know Act, making California the first state in the nation to require physicians to inform patients when regulators put them on probation for harming those under their care.

The disciplinary actions taken against doctors are already public, but the onus has been on patients to research a doctors record. The Medical Board of California has an online registry that lists when physicians are on probation and the reasons for the disciplinary action.

Under the new law, physicians on probation after July 1, 2019, must directly alert clients about their status before an appointment.

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The requirement applies only to physicians who are on probation for hurting patients through sexual misconduct, drug abuse or improper prescribing, or if the physician has been convicted of a crime that involves harm to a patient.

Lee Harris, president of the Consumer Attorneys of California, said the statute was a long-overdue fix that would bring greater transparency.

Its never made sense that doctors have had to tell their insurance companies, hospitals and clinics when they are put on probation, but not the people who are most at risk  their patients, Harris said in a statement.

Surgeons, osteopaths, naturopathic doctors, chiropractors, podiatrists and acupuncturists are also bound by the new law.

The bill faced steep opposition from groups representing medical professionals, who said it would interfere with the doctor-patient relationship. Opponents also said it would violate a doctors due process and potentially put a practice out of business.

Janus Norman, the California Medical Assn.s senior vice president for government relations, said in a statement Wednesday that amendments to the law ensure due process and appropriately define patient harm.

Of the roughly 140,000 licensed physicians, about 130 are put on probation by the Medical Board each year.

State Sen. Jerry Hill (D-San Mateo), a co-author of the bill, campaigned over three years for passage of the law, and the recent push included testimony from U.S. Olympic gymnasts who were victims of Dr. Larry Nassar. Advocates of the bill also cited longtime USC gynecologist Dr. George Tyndall, who has been accused of sexually abusing dozens of women at a campus health center, as another case that necessitated passage of the disclosure law.

As the testimony of survivors showed, leaving patients in the dark about this critical information makes them vulnerable to abuse, Hill said.

matt.hamilton@latimes.com

Twitter: @MattHjourno
Los Angeles City Council President Herb Wesson has instructed the citys personnel department to convene a special panel to look into a complaint of harassment, discrimination and retaliation against Councilman Jose Huizar, officials said this week.

The complaint was filed on MyVoiceLA, Mayor Eric Garcettis new website for staffers, city commissioners and others to report workplace bias, retaliation and sexual harassment. Personnel spokesman Bruce Whidden said Wesson was notified of the complaint Sept. 13 and called for the formation of the five-member committee a day later.

The committee is formed any time an elected city official becomes the target of a complaint involving harassment or discrimination. Wessons action last week marks the second time that the panel, known formally as the Special Committee on Investigative Oversight, has been called to look into an allegation involving Huizar.

By law, the committee must decide whether a complaint is serious enough to warrant the hiring of an independent investigator. If a probe is carried out, the panel then would review the findings and forward them to the council for any action.

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Council President Wesson takes personnel issues very seriously, and as such immediately authorized the personnel department to pursue the matter, said Wesson spokeswoman Vanessa Rodriguez, who declined to comment further.

Huizar, in a prepared statement, said Thursday that he was not aware of any details of a complaint and therefore could not comment on it.

I take great pains to ensure that my staff and I conduct city business in a professional environment and treat all employees and visitors with the upmost dignity and respect, he said. Given that, I am quite frankly confounded under what basis anyone would have to file a legitimate complaint. Obviously, I take this matter seriously and look forward to a full, transparent and expeditious resolution.

Whidden did not identify the person who filed the complaint, saying the accusers identity must remain confidential. However, he said the allegations against Huizar include harassment, discrimination and retaliation.

The complaint was made June 20 on MyVoiceLA, while the web portal still was undergoing testing, Whidden said. The website had been unveiled by Garcetti two months earlier.

Wesson was informed of the complaint on the same day that Huizars wife, City Commissioner Richelle Huizar, announced her decision to run for her husbands seat in the 2020 election. Huizar, who represents neighborhoods stretching from Boyle Heights to Eagle Rock, is being termed out of office.

Wesson has instructed officials to convene the special committee once before, in 2013, to look into claims of sexual harassment filed against Huizar by Francine Godoy, his former deputy chief of staff.

Godoy alleged that Huizar had retaliated against her after she refused to provide him with sexual favors. She also accused the councilman of forcing her to transfer to a different job and pressuring her to quit.

At the time, Huizar called Godoys allegations false and malicious. He said he had engaged in a consensual extramarital affair with his aide, whose pay jumped from $47,000 to more than $132,000 during her seven years in his office, according to personnel officials.

Godoy declined to be interviewed for the committees investigation, arguing that the process was tainted since its findings would be forwarded to Wesson, a Huizar ally. While the committee was looking into her claims, Wesson endorsed Huizars reelection bid and referred to him as his best friend on the council.

According to an excerpt of the panels findings obtained by The Times in 2014, the committee did not find evidence of harassment. The city did not release the full report, calling its contents confidential.

Godoy separately filed a sexual harassment lawsuit, which was settled privately by Huizar five months before his reelection in 2015. At the time, a Huizar spokesman declined to say whether the councilman had paid Godoy to resolve the case.

Under the citys rules, the special committee must be composed of two former judges, one male and one female; two law school professors, one male and one female; and one member of the American Arbitration Assn. The panel has met five times since it was formed in the 1990s.

david.zahniser@latimes.com

Twitter: @DavidZahniser

UPDATES:

4:15 p.m.: This article was updated with a statement from Huizar.

This article originally published at 1:30 p.m.
Architect Robert Venturi, who rejected austere modern design and instead ushered in postmodern complexity with the dictum less is a bore, has died. He was 93.

His family released a statement on his firms website saying Venturi died Tuesday at home in Philadelphia after a brief illness, surrounded by his wife, architect Denise Scott Brown, and son, James Venturi.

He remained active well into his 80s at Venturi, Scott Brown & Associates, the architectural firm he founded in the 1960s. Its now known as VSBA Architects + Planners.

All of us at VSBA are heartbroken. Viva Bob, the firm said in a statement.

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Unlike the spare aesthetic of modernists like Mies van der Rohe, Venturis work celebrated complexity and even inconsistency in design. He encouraged architects and consumers to enjoy messy vitality in architecture  whether whimsical, sarcastic, humorous or honky-tonk.

Often referred to as the father of postmodernism, Venturi shunned the title, calling it an easy catchphrase, the equivalent of a political sound bite.

In 1991, Venturi was awarded the Pritzker Prize, architectures equivalent of the Nobel Prize, for expanding and redefining the limits of architecture in this century, as perhaps no other has.

Architects today are too educated to be either primitive or totally spontaneous, and architecture is too complex to be approached with carefully maintained ignorance, Venturi wrote in his 1966 manifesto against what he saw as the excesses of modernism: Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture.

In that book, Venturi established his less is a bore philosophy  in defiance of the minimalist approach to architecture espoused in Van der Rohes credo less is more.

The 1972 book Learning from Las Vegas, which Venturi and Scott Brown wrote with the late Steven Izenour, embraced the blinking facades and flashy signs of the Las Vegas strip as a reinvigoration of architectural design.

Naturally, we were punished by the architecture establishment for being so vulgar, Venturi said in a 1991 interview. But we used it as a vehicle to learn about symbolism.

In downtown Philadelphia, for example, a painted steel outline of the former site of Benjamin Franklins house serves as a monument, while a museum is buried underground. A firehouse near Walt Disney World in Florida is decorated with Dalmatian spots, and Venturi once proposed a 90-foot-tall red apple for Times Square in New York.

In 1978, Venturi set a series of 34-foot letters along the facade of the boxlike Basco showroom and warehouse in Philadelphia that spelled out the store name. In 1979, he had a windowless Best Products Co. showroom in suburban Langhorne painted over with enormous stylized red and white flowers.

He approached the design of living spaces with the same slant: Guild House, a senior housing complex in Philadelphia with a nonfunctional gilded TV antenna on top (it has since been removed), is loved or loathed by architects and residents alike.

I think hes one of the most important American intellectuals of the 20th century, said David Brownlee, an expert on Venturis work and a professor at the University of Pennsylvania.

He took an academic approach to architecture, Brownlee said Thursday. It wasnt about style, it wasnt about flash and shape. It was about seriously coming to terms with the material and intellectual challenge of the work.

Removing architecture from its rarefied air was criticized by traditionalists who saw some of Venturis work as lacking in refinement, but he argued that buildings should reflect the culture in which they exist.

Architecture must be tolerant of different tastes and cultures, Venturi said. Theres not just an elite culture. There is elite and folk cultures.

Elsewhere, his most prominent works include the Seattle Art Museum, completed in 1991, which has been incorporated into a larger building, and the Sainsbury Wing of the National Gallery in London, also completed in 1991. Venturi became involved in the British project after Prince Charles denounced an earlier design as a monstrous carbuncle.

Venturi was born in Philadelphia on June 25, 1925, the son of a produce wholesaler. He earned his bachelors and masters degrees at Princeton University.

From 1954 to 1956 he was a fellow at the American Academy in Rome. He returned to Philadelphia in 1957 to teach at the University of Pennsylvania and practice architecture, and quickly gained prominence in the so-called Philadelphia school of architects, dominated by the late Louis I. Kahn.

He founded his own practice in 1958. Scott Brown, whom he met at Penn and married in 1967, joined the firm that year and became a partner in 1969.

Venturis first notable building was a house he designed for his mother, Vanna, in the citys Chestnut Hill neighborhood in 1961.

The Vanna Venturi House (Matt Rourke / Associated Press)

The buildings broken classical pediment that splits the gabled roof, and its overscaled moldings on each side of the symmetrically positioned doorway represented a major break from the established architectural thinking of the time: that a modern house should contain no historical elements.

Architect Frederick Schwartz referred to the Vanna Venturi House as the first postmodern anything.

The American Institute of Architects in 1989 named the Vanna Venturi House the winner of its 25 Year Award for its enduring significance that has withstood the test of time.

A while back, when it was considered very daring, we did very simple things, Venturi said in 1991. We did buildings that looked ordinary, that were not trying to be revolutionary the way modern architecture was going to go.

That horrified people. We did houses that looked like houses, elemental concepts of houses. We did fire stations that looked like fire stations.
The Trump administration on Thursday imposed sanctions on 33 foreign individuals and businesses, including at least 25 Russian nationals previously indicted by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III on charges of interfering with the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign.

The sanctions, announced by the State Department, are the latest sign of the discordant U.S. policy toward Moscow, with President Trump repeatedly praising Russian President Vladimir Putin while other parts of the administration move to crack down on Russian abuses.

The latest list means 72 Russians have been sanctioned since Trump took office last year. In March, the administration also expelled 60 Russian diplomats, who it said were spies, in retaliation for the nerve agent attack on a former Russian spy living in England.

The State Department said those named Thursday were a part of, or operating for or on behalf of, the defense or intelligence sectors of the Russian government. A division of the Chinese military also was blacklisted for buying Russian weaponry.

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The target list also included several Russian individuals and entities that the State Department says played a role in Russias 2014 invasion of neighboring Ukraine and its seizure of Crimea.

The sanctions are in direct response to Russias aggressive actions against our country, our allies and our partners, said a State Department official who briefed reporters on condition of anonymity in keeping with department rules.

The list includes 12 Russians who were indicted by a federal grand jury in July for the hacking of the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clintons presidential campaign in 2016. The Russians were identified as military intelligence officers in the indictment, which was handed down three days before Trump met with Putin in Helsinki, Finland.

The list also includes 13 other Russians who where indicted in February on charges of misusing social media in attempt to spread disinformation during the campaign.

The sanctions freeze any financial assets the targets have in U.S. banks or institutions, and bar Americans from doing business with them. It wasnt immediately clear those named had any such assets or businesses, so the impact is likely to be more symbolic that substantive.

The Chinese military entity was identified as the Equipment Development Department, the division responsible for weapons and equipment. Its director, Li Shangfu, was also blacklisted for conducting significant transactions with a leading Russia arms exporter, the State Department said.

At issue were Chinese purchases of 10 Su-35 fighter planes in 2017 and equipment for S-400 surface-to-air missile systems in 2018.

The State Department official said the goal was to punish Moscow, not Beijing, to prevent Russia from profiting from its arms industry.

The Russian government has routinely dismissed U.S. sanctions as senseless and ineffective. Putin said in Helsinki that he wanted Trump to win the 2016 election, in part to gain relief from sanctions.

tracy.wilkinson@latimes.com

For more on international affairs, follow @TracyKWilkinson on Twitter

UPDATES:

5:17 p.m.: This article has been updated with a new total of the number of previously indicted Russians now facing sanctions.

This article was originally published at 4:20 p.m.
A U.S. judge on Thursday rejected a request to put off the trial of notorious Mexican drug lord Joaquin El Chapo Guzman.

Lawyers for Guzman told U.S. District Judge Brian Cogan at a hearing in federal court in Brooklyn that they needed more time to review evidence in the drug-trafficking case.

But the judge said he was sticking with a schedule that has jury selection beginning on Nov. 5. He had already agreed in July to delay the trial by two months.

A lawyer for Guzman, Jeffrey Lichtman, told reporters afterward that the defense team is faced with processing a gargantuan amount of material before the trial starts.

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I am disappointed we did not get more time but as the judge said, you never feel that you are totally ready in a trial of this magnitude, Lichtman said. We deal with the hand that were dealt.

Guzman, who was extradited to the U.S. last year, has pleaded not guilty to charges that his cartel laundered billions of dollars and oversaw a ruthless campaign of murders and kidnappings. He faces life in prison if convicted at a trial that could last several weeks.

Authorities have kept Guzman in solitary confinement, mindful that he has twice escaped from prison in Mexico. The second time, it was via a mile-long tunnel dug to the shower in his cell.

Lichtman called his client a mythical character that they are trying as if it was the only drug dealer in the world.

The lawyer officially joined the defense team after Guzman waived objections to any potential conflict of interest the lawyer may have in connection with witnesses in the case. Lichtman is known for successfully defending John Junior Gotti, son of the notorious organized crime family boss, at a 2005 trial.

The younger Gotti walked free after an acquittal on a securities fraud count and a mistrial on more serious racketeering counts.
Duke Energy activated a high-level emergency alert at a retired coal-fired power plant in North Carolina as floodwaters from the Cape Fear River overtopped an earthen dike at the facility and inundated a large lake, raising concerns of a potential breach.

The dam containing Sutton Lake appeared stable and Duke officials were monitoring it with helicopters and drones, Duke spokeswoman Paige Sheehan said Thursday, adding that it was an evolving situation.

Company employees notified state regulators overnight that the 1,100-acre lake at the L.V. Sutton Power Station near Wilmington was at the highest level of alert under its emergency action plan.

A copy of that plan reviewed by the Associated Press defines an Emergency Level 1 event as: Urgent! Dam failure is imminent or in progress.

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Flash flooding will occur downstream of the dam, the manual says. This situation is also applicable when flow through the earth spillway is causing downstream flooding of people and roads.

Sheehan described that language as a worst-case scenario to allow everyone to prepare accordingly. She said the company was in touch with local emergency management officials, but the high water levels meant if the berm were to break there would be very minimal impact downriver.

The reservoir is a former cooling pond for the Sutton power plant and is adjacent to three large coal-ash dumps. The coal-fired plant was retired in 2013 and replaced with a new generating station that runs off of natural gas.

A landfill that was under construction at the site ruptured over the weekend, spilling enough material to fill 180 dump trucks. Coal ash contains arsenic, mercury and other toxic metals.

Sheehan said the company does not believe any coal ash is at risk of spilling from the site amid the current flooding, as work continues to clean up the earlier spill. The site has received more than 30 inches of rainfall as a result of former Hurricane Florence, with the Cape Fear River expected to crest on Saturday.

State inspectors were able to make it to Sutton on Tuesday and to collect samples from the area around the breached coal-ash landfill. Sutton Lake is used for public recreation, including fishing and boating.

Duke Energy said Wednesday that water samples collected by its employees and tested at the companys own lab showed no evidence of a coal ash impact to Sutton Lake or the Cape Fear River.

Those results, provided to the AP, did detect chemicals that are present in coal ash in wetlands immediately adjacent to the shoreline. And they show that the employees collected their samples for Sutton Lake on the opposite side of the reservoir from the affected wetlands.

State regulators were awaiting the results of their own testing before determining whether there were any violations of clean-water-quality rules, said Megan Thorpe, a spokeswoman for the state environmental agency.

Dukes handling of its ash waste has faced intense scrutiny since a drainage pipe collapsed under a waste pit at an old plant in Eden in 2014, triggering a massive spill that coated 70 miles of the Dan River in gray sludge. The utility later agreed to plead guilty to nine Clean Water Act violations and pay $102 million in fines and restitution for illegally discharging pollution from ash dumps at five North Carolina power plants. It plans to close all its ash dumps by 2029.

At the H.F. Lee Power Plant near Goldsboro on Thursday, three old coal-ash dumps capped with soil were underwater after flooding from the Neuse River.

Staff from the Waterkeeper Alliance, an environmental advocacy group, visited the site by boat on Wednesday and took photographs and collected samples of gray-colored sludge and water that they said was washing off into the floodwaters. The group said the samples would be analyzed by a private lab to determine whether the gray muck contained coal ash.

Sheehan said Thursday that Duke was monitoring the site and that any release of coal ash appeared minimal.

Well learn more as floodwater recedes, she said.
The uplifting strains of one of Puerto Ricos most beloved songs filled the air at 6:15 a.m. on Thursday as a choir stood in the coastal town where Hurricane Maria made landfall at that moment exactly one year ago.

The serenade in Yabucoa, a fishing and farming town of 37,000 still struggling to recover from the Category 4 storm, was the first in a series of events to mark the anniversary of the devastating storm and remember the estimated 2,975 people who lost their lives in its aftermath. Protests were planned in San Juan and elsewhere, as well as a funeral procession. Tens of thousands remain without adequate shelter and reliable access to electrical power a year after the hurricane, which caused an estimated $100 billion in damage.

Though the U.S. government has invested billions of dollars to help clean up and repair the island, much work remains. Major power outages are still being reported, tens of thousands of insurance claims are still pending, and nearly 60,000 homes still have temporary roofs unable to withstand a Category 1 hurricane.

I think its inexplicable, Kumi Naidoo, Amnesty Internationals secretary general, told the Associated Press during a visit to Puerto Rico on Thursday. Theres no justifiable reason I can see for this gross level of negligence.

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Government officials argue that many changes have been made to better prepare Puerto Rico for future storms, but they acknowledge that significant obstacles remain.

We still have a lot to learn from the challenge of future catastrophic events, Puerto Rican Gov. Ricardo Rossello said, noting that reconstruction continues across the U.S. territory.

Jose Ortiz, director of Puerto Ricos Electric Power Authority, told reporters that 20% of the repairs made to the power grid need to be redone. He said crews didnt have access to the best materials at the time or were forced to rely on temporary fixes, such as using trees as makeshift power polls after Maria destroyed up to 75% of the islands transmission lines.

In addition, municipal officials have complained that reconstruction efforts are too slow. Ariel Soto, assistant to the mayor of the mountain town of Morovis, said that 220 families there remain without proper roofs.

Were still waiting for help, he said. This hit us hard.

In Yabucoa, tarps still covered many homes that have yet to be rebuilt, as the hopeful strains of Amanecer Borincano  Puerto Rican Dawn  resonated at the spot where Maria first unleashed its fury. I am the light of the morning that illuminates new paths, the choir sang to the dozens of local officials and residents gathered there. I am the son of palm trees, of fields and rivers.

In the capital, San Juan, among those still living under a blue tarp during the peak of hurricane season was Sixta Gladys Pena, a 72-year-old community leader.

You worry, because you think its going to fly off like it did before, she said. Weve lost an entire year and nothing has been resolved. You feel powerless.

On Thursday, Ben Carson, secretary of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, announced in San Juan that $1.5 billion was being released to Puerto Rico as part of the overall $20 billion pledged for rebuilding, the largest in the agencys history.

Officials said the priority is to help people still living under tarps, as well as those in low- and middle-income housing. The money will be used to repair and rebuild homes, relocate people and help them obtain property titles if needed.

The path forward is challenging and will be measured not in months, but really in years, Carson said.

In recent weeks, Puerto Ricans have become increasingly angry and frustrated as President Trump recently touted what he said was a fantastic response to Hurricane Maria, calling it an unsung success as he denied the official death toll without presenting any evidence.

On Thursday, Trump issued a one-sentence statement on the anniversary of Maria. We stand with Puerto Rico, and we are helping them to rebuild stronger and better than ever before, it said.

Nivia Rodriguez, a 60-year-old retiree whose uncle died a week after Maria, is among those disgruntled by Trumps comments, as well as by videos of rescue crews responding to Hurricane Florence on the U.S. mainland.

They saved five dogs that were drowning, she said of the ongoing effort in North Carolina. She thinks Puerto Rico didnt get the same treatment. That hits you.
WASHINGTON, Sept. 19 (Xinhua) -- U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said on Wednesday that the United States is ready to transform its relations with the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) immediately.

In a statement regarding the outcomes of an earlier summit between leaders of South Korea and the DPRK, Pompeo said that "the United States congratulates President Moon Jae-in and Chairman Kim Jong Un on the successful outcome of their summit meeting in Pyongyang."

"We welcome President Moon and Chairman Kim's reaffirmation of the Singapore joint statement of complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula," he said. "On the basis of these important commitments, the United States is prepared to engage immediately in negotiations to transform U.S.-DPRK relations."

He added that "this morning, I invited my counterpart Foreign Minister Ri Yong Ho to meet in New York City next week where we are both already scheduled to be in attendance at the United Nations General Assembly meeting."

"Likewise, we have invited North Korean representatives to meet our Special Representative for North Korea, Stephen Biegun, in Vienna, Austria at the earliest opportunity," Pompeo added.

This will mark the beginning of negotiations to transform U.S.-DPRK relations through the process of denuclearization of the DPRK and to construct a lasting and stable peace regime on the Korean Peninsula, Pompeo noted.

Earlier on the same day, U.S. President Donald Trump tweeted that the fruits of the summit are "very exciting."

The DPRK's top leader Kim Jong Un and visiting South Korean President Moon Jae-in on Wednesday signed a joint declaration, agreeing to take additional steps toward making the Korean Peninsula free of nuclear weapons and threats of armed conflict.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Geng Shuang said on Wednesday that China welcomes the consensus reached between the two nations.

"China, as a neighbor, always supports the efforts of the north and south of the peninsula to improve their ties and push forward reconciliation and cooperation through dialogue and consultation," Geng said.

China hopes that the two sides will continue to implement the consensus, endeavor to promote interaction and cooperation and play a positive role in achieving a political solution to the peninsula issue as well as lasting peace in the region, Geng said.
A daughter who never returned home, a son gunned down at point-blank range, a mom who was brutally attacked  all deaths at the hands of immigrants in the country illegally, all gripping stories the White House has been eager to share.

But for all the talk of murderers, rapists and other bad hombres, the people netted in President Trumps crackdown on immigration are typically accused of lesser offenses, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents are increasingly apprehending those with no criminal records at all.

Unshackling ICE has really allowed it to go after more individuals, said Sarah Pierce, a policy analyst with the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute, who calls the apprehension of noncriminal immigrants, in particular, a defining characteristic of this administrations approach to immigration.

The case of Mollie Tibbetts  a 20-year-old Iowa college student who authorities say was killed by a man living in the U.S. illegally  is among the latest used by Trump to advance his argument for stricter immigration controls. Yet the governments own statistics show such cases are far more likely to be the exception than the rule.

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ICE arrests of noncriminals increased 66% in the first nine months of the 2018 fiscal year over the same period a year earlier. Arrests of convicts, meantime, rose nearly 2%. More noncriminals have also been deported. Among those expelled from the U.S. interior in fiscal 2017, there was a 174% increase from the previous year of those with no criminal convictions. Deportations of those with convictions rose nearly 13% over the same period.

As a result, immigration courts are filling with defendants like Ruben Moroyoqui, a 45-year-old mechanic in Tucson whose only run-in with police came last year, his attorney said, when he was pulled over while picking up auto parts.

Ruben Moroyoqui, second from left, with his family at their Tucson home, entered the country legally 16 years ago but overstayed his visa. His only run-in with the law over that time, a traffic stop last year, led to deportation proceedings. (Rick Scuteri / Associated Press)

First, the officer asked for his license. His second question, Moroyoqui said, was Are you here legally? He wasnt cited for any driving violation; he was simply handed over to ICE, which began proceedings to deport him to Mexico. An appeal is pending.

Moroyoqui entered the country with authorization 16 years ago but then overstayed his visa, not wanting to return home because of the lack of opportunity there. He has four U.S. citizen children and said he has always paid his taxes. I feel great respect and love for this country, he said.

ICE has heralded its deportations of drug kingpins, violent gang members and others accused of serious offenses, and in the 2017 fiscal year, it reported that 56% of all deportees it processed  from the U.S. interior and border areas  had been convicted of crimes. But under Trump, as with prior administrations, when a deportee does have a criminal record, its generally for lesser infractions.

Among more than 220,000 people deported in the 2017 fiscal year, 79,270 had no convictions, according to ICE data housed by the Transactional Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University. For 1 in 4 of those who had a criminal a record, according to the data, illegal entry or reentry to the U.S. was their most serious offenses. Those two counts represented the first- and third-most common charges among deportees. Driving under the influence was second, followed by assault convictions and traffic offenses. Drug trafficking, burglary, domestic violence, larceny and selling marijuana rounded out the top 10 offenses.

The rest of those with a record were convicted of a wide range of misdeeds, both grave crimes like kidnapping and minor offenses including taking a joy ride, gambling or violating a fish conservation statute.

For Ariel Vences-Lopez, the offense that led to deportation proceedings was an accusation that he rode the light rail in Minneapolis last year without a ticket. After asking whether Vences-Lopez was in the country illegally, a transit officer used a stun gun on him and arrested him on suspicion of fare evasion before turning him over to ICE. The charges were later dropped, but the 25-year-old roofer is still fighting his deportation back to Mexico. Proceedings have been put off until 2019.

Adriana Cerrillo, an immigrant advocate who took part in protests over the case and has befriended Vences-Lopez, said the public should know how seldom those deported are actually accused of violent crimes.

My mothers not a criminal. My sisters not a criminal, she said. She questions how many so-called bad hombres  a term Trump has used  there actually are in the U.S. and urges Americans to think critically about the message being promulgated. How do we say brainwashing in a different term?

Daniel Stein, president of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, said focusing solely on whether those in the country illegally have committed a serious crime ignores the law and that they should be deported whether they have a rap sheet or not. His group supports restrictive immigration measures.

Who decided that the policy of the United States was that anybody could come into the country regardless of the law as long as you didnt commit a violent felony? he asked.

Stein said many in the country illegally have probably committed crimes  including securing employment by fraudulent means  but havent been caught yet. Ignoring that fact, he said, makes a mockery of immigration laws and encourages more people to break them.

Luis Alberto Enamorado Gomez, who left Honduras for the U.S. in 2005, was charged with a DUI in 2012 and ordered deported the following year, but because his case was considered a low priority under the Obama administration, he never was forced to leave. That was common in the final two years of the Obama presidency, when ICE was directed to exercise discretion to defer action on certain migrants with standing removal orders, including those with citizen children and living in the U.S. prior to 2010.

That ended under Trump, and with new marching orders to prioritize any and all immigration cases, ICE followed up earlier this year and took Gomez into custody. He was held for about six weeks and is now fighting his deportation. The 31-year-old from Grandview, Mo., said he fears what his removal would mean for his seven children, all U.S. citizens for whom he is the sole provider.

How are we criminals when we just come here and work and provide for our families? he asked.

With a spotlight on the separation of immigrant children from their parents this summer, Trump tried to refocus attention on dangerous immigrants by hosting a White House event with relatives of those killed by people in the country illegally. These are the American citizens that are permanently separated from their loved ones, Trump said. These are the stories that Democrats and the people that are weak on immigration, they dont want to discuss.

And yet the most serious crimes, such as murder and rape, are relatively rare among deportees. Studies also have found immigrants to the U.S. have a lower level of criminality than citizens.

Some local law enforcement agencies partner with ICE and immediately alert the agency if an immigrant in the country illegally comes in contact with an officer  whether because they committed a crime or were a victim of one. Even without such cooperation, ICE can send its officers to courthouses when immigrants are scheduled to appear to apprehend them for deportation.

Thats what happened to Nefi Rodas, a 34-year-old construction worker in Worcester, Mass., who paid a smuggler to escape Guatemala in 2003. After he was cited last year for suspicion of driving under the influence, he went to court for a prearraignment appearance. ICE agents were waiting outside the building.

We dont even know what to do as immigration attorneys, said Cindy Burke, who represents Rodas. You have to show up to state court, but theres a good chance ICE is going to be waiting for you.

Because Rodas never made it to his hearing, a warrant was issued for his arrest, complicating his drunken driving case. He spent nearly four months in ICE custody, but deportation proceedings ended after a judge found that sending Rodas back to Guatemala would have caused undue hardship on his special-needs daughter. He is now a legal permanent resident of the U.S.

One person does something, and its as if we all have done it, he said of the inclination of some Americans to brand all without legal status as violent criminals. I havent murdered anybody. I havent violated anybody.

The share of deportees not convicted of a crime was higher at the end of George W. Bushs presidency, when two-thirds had no record, according to ICE data. Total deportations reached a peak in the early years of the Obama administration  but the share of those people without a criminal record fell. Overall, when examining deportations of both those caught at the border and living within the country, the percentage of those with no convictions has increased slightly under Trump compared to Obama. But with increased arrests of immigrants already living in the U.S., experts expect the numbers to continue rising.

We see ICE doing things that allows them to get the low-hanging fruit, so to speak, the easy enforcement, said Pierce, referring to arrests at ICE-mandated office check-ins, for example.

Melissa Aispuro, 20, of Tucson is another immigrant with no criminal record to find herself in deportation proceedings. Aispuro has lived most of her life in the U.S. She was brought as a child and returned to Mexico for a time after high school before coming back in 2016. She entered legally with a border crossing card, but overstayed.

When her car was struck by another motorist last October, she didnt think anything of calling police. She hadnt even considered they would call ICE on someone with no criminal record who had just been in an accident.

Its like really sad because not all of us are criminals. Some just come here for education, for a better life, said Aispuro, who is married to a U.S. citizen and fighting her deportation. You can think whatever you want, but in my heart I know what I am.
Since credit markets froze and Wall Street banks collapsed a decade ago, sending much of the global economy into a tailspin, progressive activists have pushed cities and states to take their money out of Wall Streets hands and put it into publicly owned banks. Anger over the Wells Fargo fraudulent account scandal and frustration over the lack of banking services for marijuana businesses have added to the momentum for change.

Government leaders in Massachusetts, Maine, San Francisco, Oakland and Santa Fe, among other places, have all considered or are still considering creating public banks. Now some Los Angeles officials want to do it, too.

The City Council has put a measure on the November ballot  Charter Amendment B  that would amend the City Charter to allow for the creation of a Bank of Los Angeles. What exactly would this bank do? We dont know. How much would it cost to start a public bank? We have no idea. Why is this measure even on the ballot? Good question.

Charter Amendment B is one of the most ill-conceived, half-baked ballot measures to come out of City Hall in years, and thats saying something. Theres been no formal study, no plan, nothing of substance completed to determine whether a Bank of Los Angeles is even feasible, much less a good idea. Voters are being asked to approve a vague concept and put their trust  and their money  in City Hall to figure it all out.

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Charter Amendment B is one of the most ill-conceived, half-baked ballot measures to come out of City Hall in years, and thats saying something.

Even Council President Herb Wesson, who is leading the push for the public bank, admits there are a lot of unanswered questions. To Wesson, this is an opportunity to have a citywide dialogue about the issue. Fine. But why not have a dialogue and answer those questions before putting the bank on the ballot?

Wesson said he intends to bring the bank proposal back to the ballot again after the idea has been fleshed out so voters can approve the final concept. But his final term in office ends in 2020, and whether a second vote is actually necessary depends on what responsibilities the bank would take on. So maybe there would be another vote before the bank opened, maybe there wouldnt.

Of the many cities and states that have recently proposed creating a public bank, not one has actually done it yet. In fact, there is only one established public bank in the United States: the Bank of North Dakota, which was formed a century ago to help farmers there get credit. (American Samoa, the tiny U.S. territory in the South Pacific, was cleared to create a public bank in April after the last major bank left the island.)

Enter the Fray: First takes on the news of the minute from L.A. Times Opinion 

The reason so few localities have moved ahead with the public bank idea is that they soon discover its a really expensive, complicated and risky business, particularly when it involves taxpayer dollars. Setting up a bank requires a huge up-front investment  a study for the proposed Massachusetts state bank estimated it would take $3.6 billion just to provide the bank enough capital to get started. It also would take changes to state and federal law, along with changes to the City Charter, just to get permission to start a public bank.

Even if all those legal and financial hurdles could be cleared, there is good reason to question whether a Bank of L.A. would be a good deal for taxpayers. A public bank runs the risk of political interference, as elected officials might put pressure on the bank to make risky loans to and investments in favored individuals, causes and communities.

The Los Angeles Community Development Bank, a quasi-public bank created after the 1992 riots to stimulate economic development in low-income communities, went insolvent after less than a decade. One of the reasons, according to an evaluation, was that the bank made high-risk loans to well-connected borrowers. Supporters of the Charter Amendment B say that wouldnt happen because the city-owned bank would be overseen by an independent board of governors. But again, with the ballot measure utterly lacking in detail, voters would have to trust city leaders to somehow design an incorruptible public bank. Good luck with that!

Banking is a serious business. So is managing the public treasury. Charter Amendment B is not a serious ballot measure. Voters should say no to its airy promises.

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Blue tarps still substitute for roofs in scattered spots around Puerto Rico a year after Hurricane Maria slammed into the island and upended the lives of virtually every resident. The electric grid only recently has returned to something near full service, although some homes still rely on generators. Water service has been officially restored, but many people still get their daily supplies from plastic bottles. With attention understandably now drawn to the Carolinas and the lingering misery wrought by Hurricane Florence, and with anxiety mounting over the prospect of continuing destructive weather events in the Caribbean and the Atlantic, the nation still isnt exactly sure what happened last year in Puerto Rico, what lessons to learn and how much to care.

We cant even settle on how many people Maria killed. Perhaps a dozen died from drowning and flying debris when the hurricane made landfall on Sept. 20, 2017. The following weeks, though, presented dramatic and tragic evidence both that Puerto Ricos infrastructure and government were unready for a major disaster  and that officials there and in Washington cant count. By December the toll from the storm and the aftermath together was reported to be 64, yet academic studies found that figure to be off by a factor of 70. Last month the government of Puerto Rico accepted the results of a Milken Institute study and raised the official toll to 2,975  triggering a political storm of tweets and recriminations.



For the record: An earlier version of this editorial misstated the limits that the Jones Act places on foreign flagged vessels. They can serve Puerto Rico directly, but cannot carry cargo from the U.S. mainland to the island.

The attitude of the nation toward the island, and vice versa, is characterized by ambivalence.

Some on the island argue that the damage was greater than it might otherwise have been and has lasted longer because of U.S. mainland ignorance and xenophobia, in that not enough people realize that Puerto Ricans are in fact American citizens and therefore didnt respond to islanders with the same care and compassion they reserve for other Americans. Thats too simplistic an analysis. The Federal Emergency and Management Agency didnt have to look up Puerto Rico on a map. It responded quickly, and officials argue that its Maria effort was the largest response to a disaster in U.S. history. True, President Trumps manner and statements at the time were typically unhelpful  tossing paper towel rolls to suffering residents seems less than presidential, and tweeting that Puerto Ricans want everything done for them is both false and mean. Yet its also true that the commonwealth hadnt done enough to prepare. Emergency response plans were not up to date.

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In some obvious ways, Puerto Rico is different from the Carolinas, Houston, New Orleans, New York or any of the other places on the mainland devastated in recent years by hurricanes and tropical storms. Its an island, which makes it harder for residents to quickly leave and return, or for entrepreneurs from out of state to drive in needed services in the way that food suppliers and construction workers could in the wake of Katrina, Irene and Harvey. The fact that its predominantly Spanish-speaking separates it from the nations dominant English-language news cycle and therefore much of the national consciousness.

Primarily, though, Puerto Rico is different because so much of the island is relatively underdeveloped, and because its status as a commonwealth  part of the United States, yet not one of the united states  has left it far short of its potential. The attitude of the nation toward the island, and vice versa, is characterized by ambivalence.

Enter the Fray: First takes on the news of the minute from L.A. Times Opinion 

If it were considered a nation, Puerto Rico would be one of Latin Americas bright spots, with thriving petrochemical, pharmaceutical and electronics manufacturing, and successful finance and insurance industries. But as a U.S. state, it would by far be the poorest, with nearly half the population living in poverty. Twelve straight years of economic contraction is a result in part of official mismanagement in the commonwealth  but also in part due to policies set in Washington that have curbed tax incentives for mainland investors, and laws like the Jones Act, which prevents foreign-flagged vessels from carrying cargo to Puerto Rico from other U.S. ports. The U.S. too often treats Puerto Rico like a possession to be exploited rather than an integral part of the nation to be supported.

FEMA may well have done its best in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria, but it was responding to a disaster that has its roots in the still-amorphous relationship between the island and the rest of the U.S. The storm was a stress test, and Puerto Rico and the rest of the nation failed together. More, and tougher, tests are undoubtedly on their way, as warming oceans make hurricane season more hazardous.

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The 120-year epic tragedy of Puerto Rico can be told as a tale of two hurricanes. The one fresh in our memory is Maria, which reached Puerto Rico a year ago. The other was hurricane San Ciriaco in 1899, which devastated the island just after it became part of the United States.

In 1898, the United States invaded Puerto Rico during the Spanish-American War and annexed it soon afterward. Months later, San Ciriaco slammed the island. Floods raged. Buildings and infrastructure collapsed. Crops were ruined. People starved. The newly installed U.S. governor recounted an appalling story of death, hunger, and suffering. After the storm, a quarter of the 1 million residents lacked food or shelter and 3,000 were dead.



For the record: The Jones Act does not require that all goods entering Puerto Rico seaports be carried by U.S. flagged ships. The law requires that cargo moved between two U.S. ports, including Puerto Rico, be transported by U.S. vessels.

However, because Puerto Rico had just become a U.S. territory, President William McKinleys administration oversaw a massive relief effort and cast it as a down payment on the benefits of U.S. rule. Soon 32 million pounds of food had been distributed, likely saving up to 100,000 lives. This also allowed the U.S. to blame Spain, which had bequeathed Puerto Rico its fragile infrastructure. McKinleys secretary of war, Elihu Root, promised the island more generous and beneficent treatment at our hands.

This colonial oppression should be intolerable in the United States, a rich democracy born of anticolonial revolt.

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Thats not, of course, how it worked out. Instead, Congress passed the Foraker Act of 1900. Under it, Puerto Ricans received no federal voting power, no U.S. citizenship, no extension of full constitutional protections, no fully elected legislature, no role in choosing their governor and certainly no guarantee of eventual statehood.

The U.S. Supreme Court soon declared this conspicuous colonialism constitutional.

This shocking gap between the countrys purported ideals and its treatment of Puerto Rico undermined Americas moral authority around the world. So during World War I, the United States extended citizenship and a fully elected legislature to Puerto Ricans. Still, it wasnt until after World War II, when decolonization became a global ideal, that the United States granted Puerto Rico home rule, including its own constitution and an elected governor.

Still, Puerto Rico has remained part of the United States, subject to the whims of a U.S. Congress in which it has no vote. That has left it involuntarily dependent on U.S. idealism and good will, and subject to federal neglect and small-mindedness. The Jones Act is one small example. For nearly a century it has subsidized the U.S. merchant marine by requiring that all goods entering Puerto Rico seaports be carried by U.S. flagged ships. Puerto Ricans protests that the subsidy is paid from their pockets have been for naught.

The islands economic development has been similarly subject to federal caprice. Starting in the 1920s, the U.S. government gave corporations tax incentives to invest in Puerto Rico. Predictably, those incentives became the cornerstone of the islands economy. Congress then withdrew the incentives, and an islandwide recession ensued. Twelve years into it, no end is in sight.

The story of debt adjustment is the same. Congress singularly imposed on Puerto Rico the inability to respond to debt crises. The island was unable to secure a repeal. When its debts ballooned beyond its capacity to pay, there was no way forward. With Washington gridlocked, Puerto Rico enacted its own debt-restructuring law in 2014  which the U.S. Supreme Court promptly invalidated. By the time Congress stepped in to authorize debt restructuring, the islands finances were in tatters  where they remain.

This colonial oppression should be intolerable in the United States, a rich democracy born of anticolonial revolt. Puerto Rico deserves better  including the chance to be a state if it chooses. Instead, the injustices have been compounding for more than a century. Compared with other American citizens, those in Puerto Rico earn barely a third as much and are three times more likely to live in poverty. They pay the same Medicare payroll taxes for hardly half as much spending on care. Such outrageous inequities have driven a mass northern migration: About 65% of all Americans of Puerto Rican descent now reside stateside.

Just as San Ciriaco starkly revealed the failings of Spanish rule, Hurricane Maria gave the lie to Americas pretensions of generous and beneficent treatment. Once again floods raged. Buildings and infrastructure collapsed. Crops were ruined. Roads became unusable. The fragile electric system gave out and stayed out for almost a year. The hurricanes death toll has neared 3,000.

Enter the Fray: First takes on the news of the minute from L.A. Times Opinion 

What makes it worse this time is that President Trump has, in effect, finally renounced any promise that U.S. rule will have any material or moral benefits. Without even a single vote in Congress, Puerto Rico lacked leverage to secure adequate federal relief after Hurricane Maria. Food, water, tarps, personnel, helicopters and individual-assistance funds all reached the island much more slowly than they did Texas, which Hurricane Harvey clobbered that same summer. Today, the rapid and massive federal hurricane relief that states receive is on display in the Carolinas.

Puerto Rico remains the oldest colony in the world  to borrow the phrase of Jose Trias Monge, the late chief justice of the Puerto Rico Supreme Court  despite 120 years as part of the worlds oldest surviving democracy. The result is not just discriminatory, but in the face of natural disasters like Hurricane Maria, deadly.

It is time for the U.S. to fulfill its ideals. Absent a constitutional amendment, a newfound appetite among Puerto Ricans for independence, or Supreme Court activism, the only legitimate path is to offer Puerto Rico the option to become a state. Democracy accepts no less.

Sam Erman is an assistant professor at USC and author of Almost Citizens: Puerto Rico, the U.S. Constitution, and Empire.

Follow the Opinion section on Twitter @latimesopinionand Facebook
To the editor: Why does Supreme Court nominee Judge Brett Kavanaughs accuser want an FBI inquiry?

Is it because testifying in a free-for-all Senate hearing will likely subject her to unjust treatment by older men who have already verbalized their disbelief of Christine Blasey Fords account? Picture a rabbit being invited into the center of a pack of hungry coyotes who promised they would listen to the rabbit. What could possibly go wrong?

Why is Kavanaugh, a self-described supporter of precedent, not insisting on an FBI investigation when one was done for Justice Clarence Thomas during his confirmation process in 1991? If Kavanaugh is telling the truth, why doesnt he want to credibly clear his name, under oath, by an unbiased team of FBI professionals?

Marcy Bregman, Agoura Hills

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To the editor: How does a good man clear his name? How does a good man prove a negative?

How can Kavanaugh prove that he wasnt at a particular place 36 years ago, and that he didnt assault a woman who evidently cant remember many specifics of the event other than that she was traumatized by this man who was then a boy?

Enough is enough. The vote to confirm Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court should proceed as soon as possible.

Laurella A. Cross, Irvine

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To the editor: I take issue with the 92-year-old letter writer who wanted to know why this accuser was allowed to attend a party where alcohol was being served when she was only 15.

Why wasnt she equally concerned that Kavanaugh was being allowed to attend a party where alcohol was being served when he was only 17?

The double standard has been around far too long, it seems.

Barbara Terrill, Monrovia

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To the editor: The 92-year-old letter writers definition of sexual assault, as the forceful penetration of a woman by a man, is both out-of-date and inaccurate. She also believes that Kavanaugh is not the same person he was when he was 17.

Thats not the issue. The issue, as Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) so aptly put it, is this: If Judge Kavanaugh has lied about what happened, that would be disqualifying.

Marcia Goodman, Long Beach

Follow the Opinion section on Twitter @latimesopinion and Facebook
To the editor: The concerns expressed in the media over President Trumps declassification of emails and documents based on some risk of weakening national security or revealing sources and methods are laughable.

In the early 1970s, I was the certified public accountant responsible for the accounting and tax returns of the Pentagon Papers Fund and the Daniel Ellsberg Defense Fund. These organizations were set up to defend Ellsberg precisely because he provided the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times, which published them in their entirety.

Then, the media praised that act and elevated Ellsberg to hero status. Now, a president legally reveals classified information necessary to understanding truth, and the press has a fit. Thats all one needs to say about the motive behind those hypocritical concerns.

Kip Dellinger, Santa Monica

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To the editor: We have a president who has a higher regard for his own self-interest than anything else, including our national security.

In the case of his release of certain classified documents relating to the Russia investigation, Trump has put the nation at risk. His narcissistic action is purely to protect himself and reduce the chance that he will be impeached. Indeed, he seems to care little about how he may have exposed the FBIs methods.

There is, however, one silver lining to this: It further exemplifies his continuous obstruction of justice. Thus, an increasingly large majority of the populace is more likely to make sure he is held accountable.

Joseph DeVitis, Rancho Mirage

Follow the Opinion section on Twitter @latimesopinion and Facebook
After days of silence about whether she would appear, California professor Christine Blasey Ford told the Senate Judiciary Committee Thursday that she is willing to testify next week about her allegations of a decades-old sexual assault by Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh.

The offer, made in a letter from her attorney to the committee, could put plans to arrange the high-stakes public hearing back on track, though it came with some unspecified conditions that GOP senators may not accept. For one, she ruled out a hearing on Monday, when Republicans have scheduled the proceeding.

Her letter in effect kicked the ball back into Republicans court. Publicly, GOP lawmakers have grumbled in recent days that Ford had failed to respond to their invitation to appear Monday, but privately many worried she might accept. A public hearing could make Kavanaughs confirmation  already in question  more difficult, particularly if Fords story is credible and compelling.

Now Republican leaders will have to decide whether to give Ford a few more days, or stick to their demand that the hearing take place on Monday. Late Thursday, Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa), the Judiciary Committee chairman, said that his staff had discussed the issue with Fords attorney earlier in the day and that he would consult with his fellow committee members about the next move.

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Fords offer also increased the pressure on several key moderates  particularly GOP Sens. Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska  whose votes will probably be needed to put Kavanaugh on the high court. Both were already facing heavy pressure from abortion rights groups concerned that Kavanaugh, a staunch conservative and longtime GOP attorney, might vote to restrict access to abortion. The sexual assault allegation, which the nominee has denied, has upended his seemingly sure-bet confirmation and only increased the stakes for the key lawmakers.

Ford, who says the attack took place when she and Kavanaugh were in high school in the early 1980s, said she would only testify under terms that ensure her safety and are fair. She did not specify what fair would require, leaving open the possibility that talks could reach a stalemate.

As you are aware, she has been receiving death threats, which have been reported to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and she and her family have been forced out of their home, Fords attorney Debra Katz wrote. She wishes to testify, provided that we can agree on terms that are fair and which ensure her safety. A hearing on Monday is not possible and the committees insistence that it occur then is arbitrary in any event.

Senators scheduled the Monday hearing without consulting Ford.

Invoking security concerns will make it hard for the committee to reject Fords request to delay the hearing a few days, said John Hudak, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution think tank.

That is a reasonable accommodation that if Republicans are unwilling to make, they are going to be dragged through the mud, Hudak said.

In a separate letter Thursday, Kavanaugh seemed to urge the committee to stick with Mondays hearing, saying he had hoped to have it even earlier.

I continue to want a hearing as soon as possible, so that I can clear my name, Kavanaugh wrote. Since the moment I first heard this allegation, I have categorically and unequivocally denied it. I remain committed to defending my integrity.

Neither Collins nor Murkowski  whose views other GOP senators will be watching closely  reacted immediately to Fords latest offer. Earlier in the week Collins joined other GOP lawmakers in urging Ford to testify Monday, either privately or publicly. Collins also drew fire from liberal groups for saying it was not fair to Kavanaugh if Ford did not testify.

In some previous allegations of sexual misconduct, both senators have sided with the accusers, condemning then-Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.), Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore and then-candidate Donald Trump, when an Access Hollywood video surfaced of him talking about grabbing women by their genitals as he wished.

Collins and Murkowski have said the allegations against Kavanaugh need to be taken seriously, but theyve also indicated they need more information before deciding how to vote.

They are considered swing votes on Kavanaugh because they both support abortion rights. Democrats have made the future of the landmark Roe vs. Wade decision a key part of their opposition to the nominee. Also, Collins and Murkowski have been willing to buck their party on key issues, such as their opposition to Republicans efforts last year to repeal the Affordable Care Act.

Demand Justice, a liberal judicial advocacy group, plans to launch television ads in Alaska and Maine on Friday featuring a female narrator reciting Fords allegation that Kavanaugh, while groping her, covered her mouth to muffle her shouts for help. The ad closes by asking whether the GOP senators will listen to her now.

The ad is also set to run in Nevada to target Republican Sen. Dean Heller, who is facing a difficult reelection this fall, and in Colorado, where Republican Sen. Cory Gardner is likely to face a tough reelection in 2020.

NARAL Pro-Choice America, an abortion rights group, threatened to fight against Collins 2020 reelection if she votes for Kavanaugh. She will never again be able to claim the mantle of an ally to women or survivors, and that is not something that women will ever forget, said Ilyse Hogue, the groups president.

Activists have raised more than $1 million to give to Collins 2020 opponent if she votes for Kavanaugh, a move that the Maine Republican likened to an illegal political bribe.

Murkowski came under pressure to oppose Kavanaugh in her home state Thursday when Alaska Gov. Bill Walker and Lt. Gov. Byron Mallott, both independents, announced that they oppose the nominee.

Collins and Murkowski are generally the two most moderate Republicans in a Senate conference that largely votes together. They are also two of just six female GOP senators.

Pressure has been building on Collins and Murkowski to vote no for weeks, with a flood of phone calls and emails and protesters outside their offices.

But even opponents of Kavanaugh said it was unfair to put added pressure on the two senators because of their gender.

Planned Parenthood Federation of America Political Communications Director Erica Sackin said that Collins and Murkowski are getting pressure because they are vocal supporters of womens rights, but that they are definitely not our only focus. We are targeting members of the committee. Really weve been targeting all senators.

Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii) declined to comment specifically on Collins and Murkowski, saying the pressure should be placed on all senators, but particularly the Republicans in the Senate Judiciary Committee.

During a news conference Thursday to voice support for Ford, Hirono also predicted Republicans treatment of the professor could backfire in the midterm election if voters think she is being mistreated.

I hope the women of America  as well as the men, by the way, because why should it just be the women who care about fair treatment? Its men. Its all of America, she said. I think theres a lot more attention being paid to how this whole thing is being handled.

The latest from Washington 

jennifer.haberkorn@latimes.com

@jenhab

UPDATES:

6:25 p.m.: The story was updated with Sen. Grassleys statement.

4:50 p.m.: The story was updated with Kavanaughs statement and background about Collins and Murkowski.

The story was originally published at 12:20 p.m.
Officials at Californias Department of Motor Vehicles said Wednesday that an additional 3,000 people were mistakenly signed up to vote during the rollout of the states new motor voter program, errors made during the spring and summer and part of a larger batch of problems first reported two weeks ago.

While the total number of registration errors between mid-April and early August remains the same  estimated at roughly 23,000  the new discovery more than doubles the instances in which customers unsuccessfully tried to opt out of registering to vote, the DMV said.

We have completed our review of records and already have new and improved processes in place to ensure this error doesnt occur again, DMV Director Jean Shiomoto said in a written statement to The Times.

The 3,000 newly discovered registrations will be canceled, Secretary of State Alex Padilla told local elections officials during a conference call Wednesday.

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The motor voter program was designed to automatically register to vote any eligible Californian who applied for a drivers license or identification card unless that person declined to participate. Since problems were first reported, elections officials have urged those who used the DMVs services to check the status of their voter registration by logging on to voterstatus.sos.ca.gov. Changes in registration are transmitted to the county where a voter lives.

California voters will be able to fix sloppy signatures and track their ballots under new election laws 

Two weeks ago, DMV officials disclosed that a series of administrative processing errors were made when the departments employees failed to properly clear customer information from computer screens between appointments. In most cases, the errors involved details about the persons voter preferences  their political party affiliation and whether they wanted to receive a ballot in the mail, for example.

At the time, a smaller number of the errors  about 1,600  affected people who did not intend to register. Wednesdays disclosure brings that total number to about 4,600, or one of every five reported mistakes.

DMV officials said they completed their review of the 23,000 customer errors last week. Customers who were affected by the issues are being notified by mail.

These are not the first reported problems with the launch of the motor voter law. In May, some 77,000 voter records were misreported to elections officials  in some cases, more than one registration form was generated by DMV computers for a single voter. Had that error gone unnoticed, in the most extreme cases it could have resulted in two ballots being issued to a single voter.

Democratic lawmakers pushed through the law that created the new voter registration system in 2015, and Gov. Jerry Brown signed it that fall. Supporters said the program would raise voter participation rates by making it easier to register. The programs launch was contingent on completion of a new statewide voter registration system, which was certified by Padilla in March 2016. But it took until April of this year for motor voter program to get up and running at the DMV, and even then the rollout was delayed by two weeks.

The problems with the voter registration system have come at the end of an especially difficult summer for the DMV, which has faced sharp criticism over long lines at field offices across the state. Efforts to initiate a formal audit of the agency were rebuffed by legislative Democrats, and the problems have become a familiar talking point for Republican candidates, led by John Cox, the GOP candidate for governor.

Of the 3,000 additional wrongly enrolled voters, DMV officials said that as many as 2,500 had no prior history of registration and that theres no clear answer as to what mistake was made that caused registration data for them to be sent to Californias secretary of state.

Because the errors were identified early, none of the people were considered to be fully registered voters and none were able to cast ballots. DMV officials have said they believe all problems were resolved once the registration system was restarted Aug. 23.

john.myers@latimes.com

Follow @johnmyers on Twitter, sign up for our daily Essential Politics newsletter and listen to the weekly California Politics Podcast
California Gov. Jerry Brown on Thursday signed the nations first state law barring dine-in restaurants from giving customers plastic straws unless they are requested, saying discarded plastic is choking our planet.

Brown cited the damage that discarded plastic has done to marine life and its threat to human health.

Plastic has helped advance innovation in our society, but our infatuation with single-use convenience has led to disastrous consequences, Brown wrote in a signing message.

The governor said plastic in the oceans is estimated to kill millions of marine animals each year, and he noted that when a dead pilot whale washed up on a beach in Thailand recently, 80 plastic bags were found in its stomach that prevented the digestion of food.

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Nor are humans immune as microplastics were recently found in tap water around the world, Brown wrote. Plastics, in all forms  straws, bottles, packaging, bags, etc.  are choking our planet.

The new law, which takes effect Jan. 1, exempts fast-food restaurants and provides full-service restaurants with a written warning on the first two violations and a fine of $25 a day for subsequent infractions.

It is a very small step to make a customer who wants a plastic straw ask for it, Brown said. And it might make them pause and think again about an alternative. But one thing is clear, we must find ways to reduce and eventually eliminate single-use plastic products.

The measure is part of a global effort to reduce the use of plastic, which experts say makes up as much as 80% of all marine debris.

Earlier this month, a ship left San Francisco Bay with plans to remove the 79,000 metric tons of plastic believed to be floating in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch midway between California and Hawaii, a collection of marine debris estimated to be twice the size of Texas.

Closer to home, the California Coastal Commission recorded roughly 835,425 plastic straws and stirrers that were picked up during organized beach cleanups during a quarter-century period ending in 2014, according to Assemblyman Ian Calderon (D-Whittier), who introduced the legislation.

By removing the default behavior of providing straws with every drink, consumers have an opportunity to make a deliberate, small change that will minimize the harmful impacts of single-use plastic straws in the environment, Calderon said Thursday after the governors announcement.

The measure was largely opposed by Republican lawmakers who predicted it is the first step toward a total ban on straws that will be a burden to small businesses.

Assemblywoman Melissa Melendez (R-Lake Elsinore) said exempting fast-food restaurants means it will not apply to those eateries where customers take the straws away with them to dispose later.

I just dont see how this is going to make that much a difference in reducing straws in the waterways, Melendez said. Punishing the restaurant for defying this mandate I just think sends the wrong message.

Assemblyman Devon Mathis (R-Visalia) also objected to the state meddling in the affairs of restaurants.

When I take my wife out to eat and we sit down and we finally have a chance to get away from the kids, Im not looking for a lecture on straws and ocean health, and an interruption of the ambience, Mathis said.

Limits on access to straws concern some in the disabled community, who note they are needed by people who dont have the arm or hand strength to lift cups and glasses and tilt them for drinking. The straws-on-request policy is reasonable in principle, according to Karin Willison, a travel blogger with cerebral palsy, but she worries some restaurants may stop offering plastic straws to avoid the possibility of fines or otherwise make access difficult.

Some people who need straws may have an invisible disability or illness, and they should be able to receive a straw without being judged or asked if they really need it, said Willison, who is the disability editor at the Mighty, a website on health issues.

The European Commission proposed in May that the European Union limit the use of single-use plastic products. Several California cities, including Santa Monica, have adopted local ordinances requiring food service workers to provide plastic utensils only upon request.

The California Legislature is continuing to fill the vacuum of federal leadership by tackling our plastic pollution crisis and the throw-away culture that causes it, said Mark Murray, executive director of Californians Against Waste.

Coverage of California politics 

patrick.mcgreevy@latimes.com

Twitter: @mcgreevy99
Chinese President Xi Jinping (2nd R) and his wife Peng Liyuan (1st R) visit Cambodian King Norodom Sihamoni (2nd L) and Queen Mother Norodom Monineath Sihanouk, ahead of the traditional Mid-Autumn Festival, in Beijing, capital of China, Sept. 19, 2018. (Xinhua/Huang Jingwen)

BEIJING, Sept. 19 (Xinhua) -- Chinese President Xi Jinping and his wife Peng Liyuan on Wednesday visited Cambodian King Norodom Sihamoni and Queen Mother Norodom Monineath Sihanouk, ahead of the traditional Mid-Autumn Festival, in Beijing.

Wishing the King and the Queen Mother a happy festival and good health, Xi said the and special relationship between China and Cambodia is characterized by deep historical feelings.

Since the two countries established diplomatic ties 60 years ago, the China-Cambodia friendship, which was forged and cultivated by Chinese leaders of the older generation and Cambodian King Father Norodom Sihanouk, is growing more and more vibrant.

Applauding King Sihamoni and Queen Mother Monineath's significant contribution to the bilateral relations, Xi said China treasures the special friendship with the Cambodian royal family.

"From 2016 until now, I have met with King Sihamoni and Queen Mother Monineath every year, just like gatherings between family members," Xi said, adding that he and King Sihamoni have reached important consensus on inheriting and carrying forward the traditional friendship, leading the bilateral relationship to the best-ever period in history.

Xi called for frequent interactions between the two nations at a high official level as well as among the people "like relatives."

Congratulating the successful general election in Cambodia, Xi expressed his wish that the Southeast Asian country win new and greater achievements in its national development.

Xi said China attaches great importance to its ties with Cambodia and will work together with the Cambodian side to carry forward the traditional friendship and step up the comprehensive strategic cooperative partnership continuously.

Expressing their gratitude for Xi and Peng, King Sihamoni and Queen Mother Monineath said it feels like meeting family members every time they see President Xi and Professor Peng.

The Cambodian people are grateful for China's firm and long-lasting support and assistance as well as President Xi's great attention to the development of the Cambodia-China ties, said King Sihamoni and Queen Mother Monineath.

Recalling President Xi's historic visit to Cambodia in 2016, King Sihamoni and Queen Mother Monineath said the visit elevated the Cambodia-China relationship to a new high.

Hailing the firm friendship and booming cooperation between the two countries, the King and the Mother Queen said the royal family will inherit the friendship forged by King Father Sihanouk and continue advancing the comprehensive strategic cooperation between Cambodia and China.
California teenagers will not get to sleep in on weekdays after Gov. Jerry Brown vetoed a bill that would have required middle and high schools to start no earlier than 8:30 a.m.

Scientific findings about how sleep affects teenagers developing brains inspired advocates for the bill. But many local officials opposed the measure, citing the need to set rules that work for their communities.

Under Senate Bill 328, public and charter schools would have had to adhere to the start time rule by Jan. 1, 2021, a change researchers believe would have decreased students risk of depression, suicide and car accidents while increasing their attendance rates, grade-point averages and test scores.

This is a one-size-fits-all approach that is opposed by teachers and school boards, Brown said in a veto message. Several schools have already moved to later start times. Others prefer beginning the school day earlier. These are the types of decisions best handled in the local community.

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State Sen. Anthony Portantino (D-La Canada Flintridge) introduced the bill following recommendations from the American Academy of Pediatrics, which has urged junior high and high schools to start no earlier than 8:30 a.m. Researchers found that most teenagers circadian rhythms  innate, hormone-driven schedules that make some people early birds and some night owls  result in their natural bedtime coming after 11 p.m. Traditional school hours make it difficult for them to get each night the recommended amount of sleep of at least 8  hours.

This is a real thing, said Dr. Rafael Pelayo, a pediatrician and sleep researcher at Stanford University. A population of teenagers, on average, has a secretion of melatonin that occurs later, so they fall asleep later.

Portantino said he was very disappointed that the governor vetoed his bill.

Three decades of science and overwhelming evidence that this was whats best for our kids took a backseat to status-quo lobbying interests, he said.

Last year, an earlier version of the bill fell significantly short of the votes it needed to pass the Assembly. Even among those lawmakers who saw a benefit to beginning classes at 8:30 a.m., some argued that local school boards should be able to choose schedules that fit the needs of their communities.

Several lawmakers who abstained from taking a position on the 2017 bill helped this years measure squeak through the Legislature in the final days of the session before adjournment last month. Many said that they heard from constituents on both sides of the issue and that the conversations convinced them to vote for Senate Bill 328 despite their reservations.

If we as a Legislature do not make it a point to assist and support our schools to adequately implement the provisions of this bill, we will hurt school and students performance, rather than help it, Assemblywoman Eloise Reyes (D-Grand Terrace) said on the Assembly floor. But I want to listen to the students whove called me  like Diego and Raquel and Gabi and Izzy  who tell me this would be a good thing.

One in five California schools already begins at or after 8:30 a.m., and many have recently moved to do so. In the Los Angeles Unified School District, six middle and high schools have established start times that meet the bills requirements. Eight more are piloting plans to start between 8:30 and 8:45 a.m.

But later start times have not worked everywhere. When Antelope Valley High School adopted a later school day, for instance, officials reported that attendance rates went down. Since then, the school has returned to a 7:20 a.m. start time.

A statewide mandate could have also posed hardships for districts that stagger start times to allow buses to make multiple trips each morning. Opponents of SB 328 have said these districts would have to use existing budgets to buy more buses, which cost between $65,000 and $190,000 apiece.

We can barely pay for mandated school transportation for special education students, said Nancy Espinoza, a legislative advocate for the California School Boards Assn. SB 328 will directly divert funding away from other programs.

But a study by the Rand Corp., a nonprofit think tank based in Santa Monica, projected that a statewide 8:30 a.m. start time would save money in the long term. According to researchers estimates, improved academic performances and fewer deaths in drowsy driving crashes could contribute billions to the California economy over the next 15 years.

Its a fairly short time period in which the costs would exceed the benefits, said Wendy Troxel, a Rand researcher.

Opponents also said that a later start time could be a hassle for teens pursuing activities outside of school.

I have a school district that actually starts a first period at 6:30 [a.m.] a couple days of the week, Assemblyman Patrick ODonnell (D-Long Beach) said. And what are they, theyre out surfing at 6:30 in the morning, because thats what we have in my community.

Portantino said SB 328 would not affect zero periods, the extra time slots before school that allow students to take advanced, remedial or extracurricular courses. Teenagers could still choose to participate in optional activities before 8:30 a.m.

Some lawmakers argued that parents schedules are not so flexible.

We have families that have to be at work early in the morning, and even without an 8:30 [a.m.] time slot, Ive often seen kids dropped off at schools at 7 a.m or earlier, said Assemblywoman Sharon Quirk-Silva (D-Fullerton), a former teacher, in last months floor debate. Theyre sitting on the steps in front of schools, waiting for school to start, until usually 8:00 a.m.

Parent concerns have prevented several school districts from changing start times in the past. Marc Friedman, a board member for the San Mateo Union High School District, said his district had long pushed to delay the school day.

Roughly 50 parents showed up and complained mainly about convenience issues and brought up a lot of science issues that were not true and didnt hold [water], Friedman said in a committee hearing last year. And so they convinced three board members not to do it.

A later start time could also inconvenience teachers, many of whom signed contracts expecting earlier hours. Under late amendments, SB 328 would have postponed the mandate until after 2021 for districts renegotiating their union agreements.

Joshua Pechthalt, the president of the California Federation of Teachers, said the union decided to support the bill despite some members opposition.

Whatever our concerns are for our members, our primary concern has to be about what is good for young people, Pechthalt said.

mini.racker@latimes.com

UPDATES:

4:15 p.m.: This article was updated with a quote from Portantino.

This article was originally published at 3:05 p.m.
Many of us undoubtedly snickered last week when Gov. Jerry Brown announced  again  that he was going to build a state satellite. Yes, a damn satellite. Gov. Moonbeam was back.

Just what the state of California needs: its own Earth-orbiting satellite, right? Never mind all the other pressing priorities: lower college tuition, more affordable housing, lots more renewable energy, beefed up wildfire fighting ability

That was the initial, natural reaction to Browns surprise announcement at the close of his big climate summit in San Francisco that drew an estimated 4,000 people from around the globe.

No more talk. Nows the time for action, he told departing delegates. In California, with science under attack  in fact, were under attack by a lot of people, including Donald Trump, but the climate threat still keeps growing. We want to know what the hell is going on all over the world, all the time.

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So were going to launch our own satellite  our own damn satellite  to figure out where the pollution is and how were going to end it with great precision.

He added: This initiative will enable us to spotlight the methane  the pollution  and then be able to  point out those who pollute and develop the remedies to end it This is an existential threat.

Fine, but did Brown forget that hell be governor for only 3  more months? The satellite  theyre actually talking about several  will probably take two to four years to develop and launch. The next governor, presumably Democratic Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom, will wind up giving the A-OK for development or scuttling the project.

Has anyone asked Newsom? Apparently not. I contacted his campaign headquarters and learned he was non-committal, which he should be.

He hasnt seen the specifics of the proposal, but he has a very high regard for Gov. Browns climate leadership generally, spokesman Nathan Click emailed.

I asked again: Does Newsom think a state satellite is a good idea or not?: Again, hes looking forward to reviewing the details.

John Cox, the underdog Republican candidate for governor, emailed me: While we need to continue to lead on combatting climate change, if theres money to spend on a satellite, Id rather see it spent to update firefighting equipment and outdated helicopters. I see that as a bigger near-term priority.

That makes total sense. Brown, however, has already budgeted $285 million to start buying 12 state-of-the-art helicopters.

More from George Skelton 

After my initial satellite skepticism, I looked into the project and concluded that Browns idea probably is a pretty good one. It might not cost the state much, if anything. And it would reap a lot of free climate data.

The satellite will be developed in a public-private partnership between the California Air Resources Board and Planet Labs, a San Francisco-based Earth imaging firm founded by ex-NASA scientists in 2010.

Were not asking the state of California for any sort of money, says Robbie Schingler, co-founder and chief strategy officer of Planet Labs. We think this is a big enough idea that we can get funded with grants from foundations. What were thinking about is making the data available as a free public good.

Thats specific climate data, principally about methane. The company thinks it will also be able to develop other types of data that can be sold for a profit. And the state could essentially serve as a rainmaker for the firm, attracting new clients.

Two foundations have already kicked in a total of $3 million for initial financing.

One reason Brown announced the project at his high-profile summit was to generate interest among foundations and perhaps draw some grants, says his spokesman, Evan Westrup.

Coverage of California politics 

Schingler wont talk about a satellites cost. Thats private information. He says that satellites have gotten a lot smaller and much cheaper in recent years.

It wont be private info, however, if Planet Labs ever asks the state to kick in money. That sort of detail would need to be aired publicly by legislative budget committees. So far, the states only investment is a handful of staff researchers assigned to the project.

The satellites size will be somewhere between a bread loaf and a washing machine, Schingler says. The more sophisticated, the bigger the bird.

Well find out in the next six months.

The chief state honcho on the project is Mary Nichols, chairwoman of the Air Resources Board. She was a board member when Brown was governor in the 1970s. Nichols says Newsom has asked her to stay on the job if hes elected, and she has agreed.

If the state is going to continue to have a climate program, Nichols says, its important to base [the program] on science.

Brown has been talking about launching a satellite for 40 years.

In his proposed 1978 state budget, the governor set aside $5.8 million to begin developing a communications satellite. That year, however, voters rebelled against taxes and overwhelmingly passed Proposition 13, cutting property taxes substantially. Brown quickly backed off his satellite.

But Chicago newspaper columnist Mike Royko had already pinned on Brown the moniker that would last a lifetime: Gov. Moonbeam.

Right after Trump was elected president and was threatening to junk climate programs, Brown defiantly declared in a San Francisco speech: If Trump turns off the satellites, California will launch its own damn satellites.

Hopefully Browns successor finally will. The satellite should be named after Royko.

george.skelton@latimes.com

Follow @LATimesSkelton on Twitter
Despite years of turmoil at Orange County Animal Care, the new director says he believes the county animal shelter can become the countrys best.

In mid-August, Mike Kaviani took over the department that runs a shelter in Tustin, licenses about 130,000 pets a year and patrols 13 contracted cities, as well as unincorporated areas. In his last job he improved the already high animal save rate at a city shelter in Austin, Texas, and says he wants to do the same here.

In recent years, OC Animal Care has been working toward improving its methods following a scathing 2015 grand jury report and criticism from animal activists.

To that end, the department opened a new, $35-million shelter in March at the former Marine Corps Air Station in Tustin, replacing an outdated facility built in 1941.

Kaviani, who has 14 years of experience in animal welfare, said his team will also start to implement programs outlined in a strategic plan the department created in partnership with consultant JVR Shelter Strategies.

The plan is perfectly aligned with my priorities, said Kaviani, 33, of Aliso Viejo. Now its just a matter of making that plan a reality.

Outlining of the strategic plan began in July 2017, but it is still considered a working document.

Increasing the kitten save rate is a focal point.

Kaviani said shelters nationwide struggle to save kittens because they require a great deal of resources and time. Due to their fragility and constant need for nourishment, kittens are more commonly euthanized than other shelter animals.

According to OC Animal Care statistics, 2,517 of 4,756 kittens born or brought into the shelter were euthanized last year.

Kaviani said the department will strengthen its kitten programs with help from a recent $100,000 grant from Best Friends Animal Society, a nonprofit.

This will allow us to raise the bar on how many kittens we can save, Kaviani said.

The commitment to improving the kitten programs is what attracted Kaviani to the job.

This initiative started even before I came on, he said. It was apparent to me when I was making the decision to come out here that there was a commitment there.

County officials are also optimistic.

The county provides state-of-the-art animal care services, particularly now that the new OC Animal Care shelter has been up and running since March, said Dylan Wright, director of OC Community Resources, which oversees OC Animal Care, in a news release. It is fitting that we are now welcoming a new, highly experienced director to lead the organization during this exciting time for OC Animal Care.

Kaviani began working in animal welfare at 18, though he didnt expect to stay in the occupation this long.

Growing up in Irvine, he wanted to become a firefighter.

While attending the fire academy at Santa Ana College, he ruptured two discs in his lower back.

It was definitely shell shock for me, Kaviani said. I had put all my eggs in that basket.

Kaviani, who grew up with two shelter dogs, decided to work at the Irvine Animal Care Center and attend Irvine Valley College.

The work came naturally. Kaviani remembers gaining the trust of a particularly cantankerous mutt as a turning point.

I feel very fortunate I got injured, Kaviani said. If I could go back in time, I would absolutely get injured all over again.

His career path was set. Before coming back to O.C., Kaviani worked on Long Island, N.Y., and later at the nonprofit Austin Pets Alive! Starting in 2012, Kaviani was tasked with improving Austins already high save rate, 90%.

He formed a behavior department, which he ran for about four years before heading life-saving operations.

Kaviani said the save rate was at 99% when he left Austin.

He believes he can do the same in Orange County.

I think we are really in this exciting new chapter for OC Animal Care, Kaviani said. I know this sounds corny, but I see no reason why we cant be the best shelter in the country.

benjamin.brazil@latimes.com

Twitter:@benbrazilpilot
Red herrings abound in murder mystery fiction, and no author was more adept at the practice than Agatha Christie, whose published works rank in volume only behind Shakespeare and the Bible.

Christie specialized in the whodunit genre, assembling a group of people together, knocking one off and then bringing in a police inspector to ferret out the guilty party among the survivors. One of her later works was The Hollow, now challenging audience sleuths at the Newport Theatre Arts Center.

Not as craftily accomplished as The Mousetrap or And Then There were None, this twisty tale still manages to draw the playgoer into its web of intrigue, chiefly because of its enthusiastic interpretation. Its first act is fairly talky but director Sharyn Case moves her actors briskly about the stage to fend off ennui.

When the murder is committed there are, as usual, several suspects with sufficient motive. This gives the competent cast members ample opportunity to stretch their performing muscles, which they do with gusto.

Most impressive of the troupe is Harriet Whitmyer as the dotty dowager who may or may not be a candidate for a home for the easily amused. Whitmyers non-sequitur outbursts throw the others, and the audience, off guard repeatedly.

Alan Slabodkin as her stuffily calm husband provides an effective contrast, while Sarah Regli as their artistic daughter banks her inner fires nicely until they flare up in an emotional rampage.

Visitors Stephen Saatjian and Carla Naragon as a prominent doctor and his disillusioned wife impress early on with their verbal combat. Jack Talbott and Jasmine OHea are less involving in their youthful, awkward courtship.

A movie actress from the colonies, richly enacted by Kerri Malmgren, further disrupts the proceedings while Gordon Marhoefer as the aged, crumbling butler lends a typical British touch.

Investigating the crime, Brian Page brings a strong, knowledgeable presence. Mark Series and Kristina Anderson complete the cast in more servile assignments as a police sergeant and a parlor maid.

Set designer Andrew Otero has added a musty, early-1950s atmosphere, abetted by Jackson Halphides clever lighting effects. Otero and Claudia Berglund have created fine period costumes.

A bit lengthy at just under three hours, The Hollow nevertheless engages the attention of its audience. Its a Christie mystery stuffed with red herrings at the Newport Theatre Arts Center.

Tom Titus reviews local theater.

If You Go:

What: The Hollow

Where: Newport Theatre Arts Center, 2501 Cliff Drive, Newport Beach

When: Thursdays through Saturdays at 8 p.m., Sundays at 2 p.m. until Oct.7

Cost: $20

Information: (949) 631-0288 or ntaconline.com
Huntington Beach Mayor Mike Posey will hold a town hall meeting Thursday to discuss what local, county and state officials are doing to address sober-living homes, which critics contend have negative effects on residential communities.

The meeting will include presentations from U.S. Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Costa Mesa), state Assemblyman Matthew Harper (R-Huntington Beach), Huntington Beach City Attorney Michael Gates and Orange County District Attorney Tony Rackauckas.

In March, Rackauckas introduced a Sober Living Home Accountability Task Force composed of cities, law enforcement and other agencies. Two months later, Rohrabacher introduced House Resolution 5724, a bill that would allow cities to ban sober-living facilities in residential areas.

Sober-living homes typically house recovering alcoholics and drug addicts, who are considered disabled under state and federal laws and must be provided with certain accommodations for housing.

This infusion of drug addicts and alcoholics into residential communities has had a deleterious impact on the quality of life of local families, who now suffer increases in police activity, transient residences next door and a decline in property values, Rohrabacher said in May.

In Huntington Beach, city officials have said little can be done about sober-living dwellings with six or fewer residents that dont offer treatment, are zoned residential and dont require a license to operate. Those are classified as regular households.

Its six people living as a family unit, Posey said in an interview. Our hands are tied based on fair-housing practices. We get constituents saying Do something, do something. We want to do something as long as we can defend ourselves in court.

City officials have kept a close eye on cities such as Costa Mesa that also are trying to address the issue but have met with legal challenges.

On Monday, the Huntington Beach City Council gave Gates the green light to partner with Rackauckas to craft a plan to clamp down on illegal in-home businesses in residential areas. Illegal sober-living homes would fall under that, but facilities with six or fewer residents would not.

It is unclear how many unregulated sober-living homes are operating in Huntington Beach, but 45 licensed or certified recovery or treatment facilities are listed in the city by the state Department of Health Care Services.

Thursdays meeting will begin at 5 p.m. in the council chamber at City Hall, 2000 Main St.

Priscella.Vega@latimes.com

Twitter: @vegapriscella
In 1950, the USS Glendale was preparing for its third life. The ship had already seen action during World War II and had then been loaned  along with several other U.S. ships and aircraft  to the Soviets for a secret mission.

The Soviets returned the ship to the Yokosuka Naval Base in Japan in late 1949. It was recommissioned in October of the following year, just in time for another war, with Korea.

A 125-man crew was assigned to the Glendale. Gerald F. Doyle of Baltimore, Md. described his first view of the ship in the March-April 2001 The Graybeards, the official publication of the Korean War Veterans Assn.

It was in poor condition from misuse and lack of care according to U.S. Navy practice. It had a red star painted on the bow and a Russian name on the stern. The mess trays of Russian sailors were still on the mess tables when the Americans first went on board, according to Doyle.

The war in Korea seemed to be winding down, and Gen. MacArthur was promising to have the troops home for Christmas, Doyle wrote.

The Glendale was sent to Marcus Island in the Mariannas to set up a weather station. While there, the ship was armed to the teeth with war materials abandoned at the end of WWII.

Their return to Japan coincided with Chinas entry into the war and MacArthurs announcement of a new war.

The situation deteriorated rapidly and the Glendale rushed to supply itself with ammunition, foodstores and foul-weather gear for an emergency run up to Hungnam in northeast Korea, Doyle wrote.

The Hungnam port was the site of a major evacuation of United Nations and South Korean military, plus North Korean civilians.

As described by Wikipedia, approximately 100,000 troops and material and 100,000 civilians were loaded onto merchant ships and military transports totaling 193 shiploads over the weeks leading up to Christmas 1950 and transported to safety.

Moored at the dock in the harbor during the evacuation, the Glendale acted as the harbor-control vessel. Doyle recalled a small boy rescued and brought aboard by the crew.

There was talk of keeping the lad as a ship mascot, but the Navy vetoed that plan, Doyle said.

On Christmas Eve, the last personnel were evacuated and the port was blown up, according to Doyle. The Glendale was the lead vessel of the final convoy out of Hungnam on Christmas Day.

The next day, the Glendale headed for Inchon to repeat the evacuation and demolition action. While there, the crew guarded against sampans, which are a relatively flat-bottomed Chinese wooden boats, that slipped out at night to lay mines.

In one encounter, Doyle wrote, the Glendale destroyed a large sampan.

The USS Glendale was sent to Yokosuka for refitting and resupplying and by mid-March, the ship was back in Korea for shore bombardment around Wonsan and Chongchan.

In April, while maneuvering in a channel at Songjin, the Glendale was struck by another vessel, the USS Carmick DMS 533. Both ships made their way to Sasebo for dry dock and repairs.

Doyle added that the ship continued to see action until late October 1951, when she was decommissioned again and transferred to the government of Thailand.

Readers Write:

A July 1 email from Nina Kelty:

All my friends really liked the information you shared about the naming of streets in Glendale. Today, when I read The Times story reminding us of the arrival of the Boat People from Vietnam and how they were treated, it took me back to the article you wrote about my student and how Glendale came to the aid of those poor unfortunate souls. [Verdugo Views, Aug. 11, 2012, about Keltys 1975 work with Vietnamese refugees.] It is good for us all to read about it again, or perhaps even for the first time. Keep up the good work.

A July 1 letter from John M. Bodden: Thank you for your most interesting article on street names. A newcomer to Glendale, he arrived in 2010. Bodden lives north of Kenneth Road and frequently drives on Louise Street. Now I know why the name. Your article took lots of research, special interest and, above all, dedication to spreading knowledge of our citys history.

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.
The Starbucks in Montrose is looking to serve beer and wine alongside its longtime staples of mochas and lattes.

Since 2010, the coffee giant has offered alcohol at select locations throughout the country and nine, so far, in the Los Angeles area under whats been branded Starbucks Evenings.

The chain stated in a release last month that 70% of its customers drink wine, compared to 30% of the general U.S. public.

Starbucks applied for an administrative-use permit from the city to sell beer and wine in the afternoons out of its location at 2284 Honolulu Ave.

The Community Development Department is scheduled to render its decision on Tuesday.

If approved, it would next have to get a beer-and-wine license from Californias Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control.

But members of Montroses Shopping Park Assn. say they feel theyve been left out of the loop and have unanswered questions about how alcohol would be served.

Steve Pierce, the associations communications administrator, said Starbucks wont have typical waiter service, where an employee brings a drink to a customer like at other Montrose restaurants.

Instead, it will be picked up at the counter by the customer, and one of his concerns is a glass of beer or wine being handed off to a minor.

You get your beer at the counter and then you go sit down and what happens after to that beer after you leave the counter is anyones guess, he said.

A glass pour, however, wont be left at the pickup counter by a barista like a coffee drink would, said Keith Glassman, owner of Glassman Planning Associates, a consulting firm hired by Starbucks to assist in the application process.

Your name wont be called it. It has to be handed to a person, he said.

And that handoff comes after the person ordering has shown identification that they are the legal drinking age of 21 or older, Glassman said.

All employees must also be 21 or older if the change is made, he said. Glassman added that alcohol would be stored behind the counter.

Thee Elbow Room owner Crystal Arguelles, whose business serves beer and wine, said she wasnt in support of Starbucks becoming her competition. Her staff is trained and certified by the states Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control.

Theres a lot of responsibility that goes along with that, she said.

Starbucks employees will receive training, Glassman said.

Patrons of age would be allowed to consume beer and wine on the coffee shops outdoor patio, he said.

During their rounds through the business interior and outdoor areas, workers would make sure the person enjoying a drink is the one who ordered it and ensure no one is overindulging, Glassman said.

The choices of craft beer and wine will range in price from $6 to $12, and there wont be a happy hour or discounted drinks, he said.

Andre Ordubegian, the shopping associations president, said hes upset Starbucks didnt involve or gather feedback from the close-knit business community during the application process.

Theyre trying to bypass us, and go to the city directly, he said.

Glassman said he plans to meet with the association in November, after the decision date for the administrative-use permit. He added that the permit is always revocable.

Community development staff members have drafted a recommendation in favor of beer-and-wine sales, stating its not expected to negatively impact the neighborhood.
Water officials discussed Monday extending the supply contract for the State Water Project, a program that provides water for 25 million people and irrigates more than 750,000 acres of California farmland, for a 50-year period.

Members of the Board of Directors for Foothill Municipal Water District  which distributes water imported from Metropolitan Water District to customers of the La Canada Irrigation District, Valley Water Co. and the Crescenta Valley and Mesa Crest water districts, among others  considered the matter in a regular board meeting.

FMWD Board President and Metropolitan Water District Director Rich Atwater assured fellow members a renewal is necessary so bonds can be issued into the future to fund maintenance and building projects associated with the program.

Without an extension, he said, the California Department of Water Resources (DWR) wont be able to issue revenue bonds beyond the current contract period, which ends in 2035.

For the last five to 10 years, DWR and state contractors have been realizing this was something they need to renew, to extend out, he said. Nobody expects the State Water Project to go away  clearly you need to roll that over.

Extending the contract would also give agencies more time to pay for bonds that have already been issued, which would otherwise come due in 2035 and likely result in steep rate increases to ratepayers, Atwater told board members.

FMWD General Manager Nina Jazmadarian said the amount of water the agency receives through the State Water Project varies widely depending on need, from none in 2014 to 75% last year. For the last three years, FMWD has annually imported an average of nearly 8,000 acre-feet (about 2.6 billion gallons) through the program.

The State Water Project could become more vital as other major sources of water, such as the Colorado River, reach historic lows. As of June 25, the Lake Mead reservoir, a basin that captures water from the Colorado, was only 38% full.

Officials assured talk of extending the supply contract was in no way related to the California WaterFix project, an effort to build underground tunnels that would transport Sacramento River water 35 miles under the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta to farms and cities to the south, including Southern California.

The $16.7-billion plan (to which MWD board members committed $11 billion in July) is currently being challenged by environmentalist groups in a Restore the Delta campaign. Opponents say depleting the Delta of its river water would further degrade an already delicate ecosystem.

Its gotten a lot of press play, Atwater said Monday. Its a big controversy.

If approved, the State Water Project Supply Contract would be extended until 2085.

sara.cardine@latimes.com

Twitter: @SaraCardine
It seems like every La Canadan living within earshot of the Foothill (210) Freeway agrees the city needs more protective sound walls. But the question of how to fund them is older than the city itself.

In May, city officials learned state Sen. Anthony Portantino (D-La Canada Flintridge) had secured $5 million in funding through a program under SB 1, a state transportation funding bill that instituted gas and vehicle tax hikes on California motorists.

An effort to repeal the tax on the November ballot, however, could mean a complete withdrawal of the funding Portantino secured for the city.

But even if it stands, La Canada officials have learned they must put up equal matching funds for the $5 million and that the grant, approved by the California Transportation Commission, can be applied only to hard construction costs and not the estimated $2 million needed for design or environmental review. The grant also specifically names four sound walls Metro provided to the CTC without consulting La Canada officials.

In short, to receive the $5 million from SB 1, the city would have to pay $7 million for four walls whose locations they did not choose. There are 20 locations where sound walls are needed but have not been built.

On Tuesday, the La Canada Flintridge City Council considered options for sound wall funding and moving forward whatever the November election may bring. They looked to two transportation bills whose coffers hold millions earmarked specifically for La Canada projects  Measures R and M.

Passed by L.A. County voters in 2008, the 30-year Measure R sales tax dedicated $10.1 million in subregional funding for La Canada projects through its lifespan. City officials have used $6.4 million to build three sound walls and design a fourth, leaving $3.7 million available that can be advanced to the city to build walls where it chooses.

Measure M, an indefinite half-cent sales tax, was passed by county voters in 2016. La Canadas annual per capita share of that is $282,000, but any advance of that funding would constitute a loan, which would require the city to pay interest.

Wed either have to float bonds for that, or Metro does and we end up having to pay the interest and all the costs of that, said Councilman Greg Brown, who serves on a council sound wall committee with Mayor Pro Tem Len Pieroni. Its really a question of proceeding with Measure R funds  thats where the funds ought to end up going. The only difference now is the nuance of which segments (to prioritize).

Three residents shared their grievances with increasing freeway noise and asked the council to consider a sound wall on the portion of the 210 that passes over Hampton Road.

I would like to invite you all to come out to dinner some night at our place, said Alminar Avenue resident Doug Freeze. You wouldnt be able to hear yourselves talk  its gotten progressively worse.

Ann Wilson, division manager of the city Administration Department, recommended the council request Metro advance the $3.7 million in Measure R subregional funding before a November Metro board meeting, even if the specific sound walls locations had not yet been selected.

Councilman Jon Curtis said he supports sound walls and appreciates Portantinos efforts, but expressed frustration at the citys being forced to deplete its remaining 20-year Measure R commitment on something that should have been paid for by the state when the 210 Freeway was built.

We have not gotten our fair share over the years, he said. We shouldnt be making a rash decision tonight just because Metros saying I want you to [make] the decision tonight. I dont think weve got the right information in front of us.

Ultimately, council members agreed to request that Metro program the $3.7 million in Measure R money, and schedule a special meeting or forum to collect public input on where the money might best be applied.

sara.cardine@latimes.com

Twitter: @SaraCardine
Chinese President Xi Jinping (R) meets with Pakistan's Chief of Army Staff Qamar Javed Bajwa in Beijing, capital of China, Sept. 19, 2018. (Xinhua/Li Gang)

BEIJING, Sept. 19 (Xinhua) -- Chinese President Xi Jinping met with Pakistan's Chief of Army Staff Qamar Javed Bajwa here Wednesday, calling on the two countries to firmly support each other on issues concerning their respective core interests.

Bajwa conveyed cordial greetings from Pakistani President Arif Alvi and Prime Minister Imran Khan to Xi. Xi expressed thanks and asked Bajwa to convey his sincere greetings and best wishes to them.

Noting the China-Pakistan all-weather strategic cooperative partnership and that the two countries are "iron friends," Xi said the two sides have been keeping "highly aligned" with each other on major international and regional issues.

China always places a high premium on China-Pakistan relations, Xi said, adding that the two sides had maintained a high level of mutual trust on issues of each other's major concerns.

During the meeting, Xi expressed appreciation for the support and security safeguard provided by the Pakistani side for the Belt and Road Initiative and the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor construction.

"As long as high-degree mutual trust and concrete measures are in place, the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor construction will succeed and deliver benefits to people of the two countries," Xi said.

"At present, the international and regional situation is undergoing complex changes, and the two countries are supporting each other, helping each other and enhancing mutually beneficial cooperation, which have yielded fruitful outcomes," Xi said, adding that such efforts comply with the trend of the times.

He also hailed the practical achievements reached during the deepening of cooperation between the two countries' militaries.

The two countries' militaries should further deepen exchanges and cooperation in various fields and at all levels, take resolute measures against terrorist forces, make efforts to ensure the security of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor construction and serve as a reliable safeguard for the common interests and common development of the two countries.

Bajwa said the Pakistani side resolutely supports the Belt and Road Initiative, and Pakistan always places relations with China at a primary strategic position in developing foreign relations and always sides with China on issues involving each other's core interests.

He expressed Pakistan's sincere thanks to the help China has provided to the country in various fields.

He said the Pakistani side is willing to strengthen strategic communication, practical exchanges and counter-terrorism cooperation with Chinese military to maintain the common interests and strategic security of the two countries and contribute to international and regional peace and stability.
You can tour flood-ravaged parts of Death Valley National Park from late fall through spring three years after a flood did major damage.

On Oct. 18, 2015, a flash flood raced through the parks Grapevine Canyon, ripping up roads and sending water crashing through buildings surrounding Scottys Castle. It left behind massive piles of mud and rock  as much as 4 feet deep in the visitor center that had to be cleared using hand tools.

Set on slightly higher ground, the mansion itself escaped the worst of the flooding, but it is still two years away from reopening.

Two-hour ranger-led tours are scheduled every Sunday from Dec. 2 to April 14. The start times will alternate between 9:30 a.m. and 1 p.m.

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Major repairs from the storm, which unleashed record rainfall, will not begin until next month and are not expected to be completed until 2020.

We lost all the utilities, including the water and the sewer system. We have to repair several historic buildings and replace the road, said Abby Wines, a park spokeswoman who spent 10 years working at the historic castle.

The projected cost is astonishing.

Right now, its at $49 million, Wines said. And thats a moving target. Most of these [projects] havent gone out to bid for contractors yet.

Federal funding for most of the repairs is already appropriated or promised, but revenue from the tours will cover the cost of smaller, projects, such as repair of the mansions pipe organ.

Work on the first of the major projects, including replacement of several miles of washed-away road, is scheduled to begin next month.

Park service employees use shovels and other hand tools to remove mud and rock deposited outside and inside outbuildings at Scottys Castle during a flash flood in October 2015. The historic attraction has been closed ever since. (National Park Service)

Those taking the tour will reach the castle in park vans. Once there, the walking distance is less than a quarter-mile but is over uneven terrain.

The tours will include a peek inside the majestic, wood-paneled and beamed rooms. The historic furnishings, however, wont be returned until a new heating and air conditioning unit provides the needed climate control.

Reservations are required. Tickets, now on sale, cost $25 per person, plus a $2 ticketing fee.

Scottys Castle is named for Walter Scott, a crook who never lived there.

Most of his life, he was a professional con man and how he made most of his money was by claiming to have a gold mine in Death Valley, Wines said. The truth was he didnt even have a hole in the ground in Death Valley. He had nothing. All he had was a story.

Construction of Scottys Castle began in 1922, with funding from Albert Johnson, a Chicago millionaire who wanted a vacation home in Death Valley. Johnson, an early investor in Scotts scam, later befriended him.

Scotts much more modest home, Lower Vine Ranch, still stands within the park. Rangers occasionally lead tours to the house, about five miles from the imposing home named for him.
The shelves of Beijings luxury supermarkets are crammed with familiar products that American expatriates cannot seem to do without, from breakfast cereals with just the right level of sugar and crunch to smoky salted nuts and cleaning products with the correct amount of oomph.

But Westerners  the main customers in supermarkets like Jenny Lous, Jenny Wang and April Gourmet  will have to pay more for a taste of home, according to Jenny Lous manager, Rocky Jia, with President Trump moving forward with stiff new tariffs, the latest round of which, affecting $200 billion worth of goods, was announced Monday.

China vowed to retaliate this week with tax increases on $60 billion worth of U.S. imports, including coffee, honey and chemicals  and analysts predict a long, uncertain battle ahead.

Some familiar products, such as certain Oreo cookies and Skippy peanut butter, are produced under license in China and would probably not go up in price.

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But many others are imported and are likely to see steep markups, Jia said.

In supermarkets of such Beijing neighborhoods as Sanlitun, reminiscent of the U.S. or Europe with its bars, eateries, shopping malls and tree-lined streets, some Western customers said they would not be cowed by price hikes.

I guess I would keep on buying them, said Patricia Water, a German consultant and former diplomat who has lived in China for 15 years and shops at April Gourmet for brands she knows and trusts.

Ronald Walter, a translator from the Netherlands whos lived in China for 21 years, said that even if his grocery bill escalates, I guess I would still come here because its one of the shops that has a lot of Western products. I buy groceries, food, basically everything.

Not everyone can afford to be so fussy. Stephanie Landes, 23, an American in Beijing, takes pains to economize. She said she only dropped into April Gourmet in Sanlitun because they had a sale on breakfast cereal.

Jenny Lous supermarket in Beijing. (Gaochao Zhang / For The Times)

Despite the brand loyalty of many customers, Jenny Lous, which imports about 30% of its stock from the U.S., is bracing for a big impact on prices and profits. The supermarket chain launched in 1988 and has 10 stores, with almost three-quarters of its products from overseas, Jia said.

Jia said imported laundry powder is more popular than well-known Western brands produced under license in southern China.

For our customers, people really want things that come from outside China, he said. They believe in these brands. They believe in the quality, and also its habit.

Although some Westerners say they would continue to buy their favorite American wares, Jia said that if prices rose steeply, some would probably choose similar products manufactured in Europe.

He said Jenny Lous income would probably decline by 10% to 20% once the impact of new tariffs hit.

Many U.S. companies doing business with China are facing similar painful choices in coming months.

My sense in communicating with people in the Chinese and U.S. government is that both sides are hardening their positions and that neither is willing to take the kind of unilateral action that would resolve the situation, said Jacob Parker, vice president of China operations at the U.S.-China Business Council. The U.S. government is waiting for the Chinese government to show good-faith efforts such as announcing [that it is] implementing new liberalizations that allow China to operate more like a market economy.

China views those liberalizations as negotiated bargaining chips that it will not give up unilaterally.

The Trump administration wants China to stop restrictive trade practices, such as forcing foreign companies to hand over key technologies in return for access to Chinas vast market. It also wants fundamental long-term changes, demanding that China operate more like a market economy, less reliant on subsidies to state firms that make it difficult for outside companies to compete.

But the more the trade war piles pressure on Chinese leader Xi Jinping, the less willing he may be to yield, because it would be perceived as humiliation and loss of face. Analysts warn the trade war will probably be protracted and painful.

While China is unable to match the U.S. dollar amount on tariffs because it imports less from the United States than it exports, it has myriad ways to make American companies, consumers and farmers feel pain.

China is an important market for U.S. cherries, for example, and China not only targeted cherries with tariffs but also imposed a new weeklong quarantine period, enough to make fruit spoil. Tariffs alone cost Northwest cherry farmers at least $86 million this summer, according to the Northwest Horticultural Council.

Imported American cars in China are subject to a 40% tariff, making it impossible for them to compete with imported European cars that face a 15% tariff.

Parker said a wide range of U.S. companies faces costly inspections, delays and regulatory scrutiny. One car manufacturer recently saw its random inspection rate jump from 2% to 100%, he said.

Closed investigations into the prices American companies were charging have been abruptly reopened. Even advertising slogans, used for years, were suddenly being questioned.

We feel that theres enough anecdotal evidence to indicate that theres something of a trend happening, Parker said.

Another risk is that omnipresent businesses such as Starbucks, McDonalds and KFC could face a consumer boycott.

Both countries appear to believe they will win the trade war. Chinese state media commentaries say the economy is strong enough to outlast the U.S.

Trump, meanwhile, said Tuesday the U.S. might slap tariffs on an additional $267 billion in Chinese goods.

We dont want to do it, but we probably  well have no choice, he said.

Chinese Commerce Ministry spokesman Gao Feng said Thursday that the U.S., seeking to make China a scapegoat for its own problems, had started a trade war that would undermine world trade and harm its trading partners.

He said China would pursue a range of measures in retaliation, without detailing what would be done apart from raising tariffs.

The Trump administration has unveiled a $12-billion assistance package for U.S. farmers affected by the trade war, but some of those farmers fear it will fall short.

China, a major market for U.S. soybeans, has plans to boost domestic soy production and import beans from Brazil, Poland and Argentina.

A possible long-term effect of the trade war may be Chinas increasing determination to also boost its production in high-tech products such as superconductors.

Parker said that in that sense, damage to U.S. companies had already been done. Theres a significant concern by many in Chinas government that the United States is able to control and hold hostage key links in the supply chain and that only the development of domestic industry and diversifying away from Americas products will allow Chinas supply chains to be safe going forward.

He said that members of the business council shared Trumps concerns, but do not support tariffs. Instead, they believe the administration should pursue grievances though the World Trade Organization and other multilateral bodies alongside allies in Europe and elsewhere.

robyn.dixon@latimes.com

Twitter: @RobynDixon_LAT
Colombia saw a record level of coca plant cultivation last year, according to a United Nations report released Wednesday, raising renewed concerns about the war on drugs.

Reasons for the increased cultivation of the plant used to make cocaine include the suspension three years ago of an aerial herbicide spraying program and a lack of alternatives for poor farmers, authorities said.

Colombian President Ivan Duque, who took office last month, has called coca production a national security risk and faces challenges to placate the United States, a staunch ally that has spent billions of dollars in anti-drug aid in the country. President Trump has warned that he may consider Colombia uncooperative in the drug war.

Enough coca plants were grown in 2017 to produce 1,379 metric tons of cocaine, up 31% from the 2016 harvest, said Bo Mathiasen, representative of the U.N.s Office on Drugs and Crime in Colombia.

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This is the highest figure since the United Nations began monitoring coca crops in Colombia in 1999, Mathiasen told reporters in Bogota, the capital.

Perceived impunity among farmers in remote coca-growing areas has opened the way for entry of more fertilizers and other agricultural aids, pushing up yields, he said. Drug gangs in remote lawless areas often give farmers no choice but to grow coca, he said.

Michael Shifter, president of the Inter-American Dialogue, a policy think tank in Washington, said he was not surprised but still shocked by the result in light of the $10 billion in anti-drug and counter-terrorism aid the U.S. has given to Colombia since 2000. Policies including crop substitution and forced eradication have not yet yielded sustainable results, he said.

The best anti-drug policy is building strong governmental institutions in areas where coca is grown and in focusing on rural development, Shifter said. To date, however, there has been scant if any progress on those fronts.

Satellite imagery and on-the-ground monitors show Colombian farmers were growing 422,550 acres of coca on Dec. 31, or 17% more than the 360,773 acres detected the previous year, which was a record crop.

The increase in the coca farming dates from 2015 when then-President Juan Manuel Santos halted U.S.-financed aerial spraying of the herbicide glyphosate because of concerns that it causes cancer.

Santos also reduced manual eradication of coca in a bid to smooth over peace negotiations with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, which admitted to engaging in drug trafficking before signing a peace deal in late 2016.

Mathiasen said the increase in coca crops also has much to do with the lack of economic alternatives for 119,000 farm families estimated to be growing the illicit crop, and he urged international assistance to help Colombia bear the high cost of such alternatives. The U.N. has long held that crop substitution is the only effective method of combating coca farming.

Many farmers are being forced by drug gangs to stick to coca, and those who opt out to grow legal crops are risking their lives, Mathiasen said.

To illustrate his point, he said that 63% of the 288 social leaders killed over the last two years in Colombia were slain in townships where coca crops are present. Many victims were urging farmers to join crop substitution programs.

Adam Isacson, a senior fellow at the Washington Office on Latin America, said Duque is likely to come under increased U.S. pressure to achieve short-term reductions in coca production.

U.S. pressure could result in Colombia restarting aerial fumigation with glyphosate at least in a limited way as part of a mix of strategies, Isacson said. The U.S. government is making it very clear to the Duque government that it is willing to restart the fumigation program, although not on the scale during George W. Bushs administration, when a full-blown program cost taxpayers $200 million a year.

Such a resumption of aerial spraying is opposed by Colombian human rights and environmental groups and could lead to social strife among the thousands of families who depend on coca for their livelihoods, he said.

A Colombian government program pushing voluntary eradication by coca farmers who got economic aid to grow legal crops has sputtered, Isacson said. Of the 125,000 acres of coca that the Colombian government promised to neutralize that way in 2017, only 17,000 acres were converted voluntarily, he said.

Duque is expected to prepare a new comprehensive anti-drug strategy to combat coca farming and reduce cocaine production.

Kraul is a special correspondent.
South Korean President Moon Jae-in said he was told by North Korean leader Kim Jong Un that he wants the U.S. secretary of State to come to Pyongyang for nuclear talks. Kim also wants a second summit with President Trump as soon as possible.

Moon was briefing reporters Thursday after returning to Seoul after a three-day summit in Pyongyang with the North Korean leader.

Moon said he would carry a private message from Kim for Trump when he meets the U.S. president in New York next week at a U.N. meeting.

Moon also said he would convey to Trump his and Kims desire to get a declaration ending the Korean War by the end of this year. The 1950-53 war still technically continues because it ended with a cease-fire, not a peace treaty.

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Such a declaration would be the first step toward a formal peace treaty, but the U.S. is worried that it could result in Kim pushing for the removal of U.S. troops from South Korea.
Olga Matamoros recalls running out of her swaying apartment building, certain that the six-story structure would collapse before she reached safety.

When I got outside I saw a disaster: Dust everywhere, the building in ruins, and I unable to move, said Matamoros, 65, sobbing at the recollection. A neighbor helped me because I couldnt react. It was the worst experience of my life.

That was one year ago, on Sept. 19, 2017, when a magnitude 7.1 quake struck, killing 228 people in the capital and 141 more elsewhere in Mexico. The earthquake hit 32 years to the day after the even more destructive 1985 quake that killed thousands.

Among the dead last year were nine who perished in the collapse of Matamoros former home, Building 1C of the so-called multi-family Tlalpan development in the southern fringes of Mexico City. The complex consisted of 10 buildings with 500 apartments, and while only one building collapsed, engineers have yet to declare the other structures safe.

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Matamoros and more than 1,000 other former Tlalpan residents are among multitudes in Mexico City who have had to arrange alternate housing while waiting on official word about whether their onetime residences will be reconstructed.

Nothing has been done for us, said Matamoros, who attended a Catholic Mass in honor of the victims in a church across the street from the empty complex.

Across Mexico City, hundreds of heavily damaged buildings remain uninhabitable. Demolition has proceeded at sluggish pace, while repair work has been even more desultory. Residents left without homes because of the quake were among hundreds who marched in the afternoon to the center of Mexico City, hoisting posters demanding reconstruction. We dont want commemorations, we want our homes, read one poster.

Capital residents have become accustomed to walking around the yellow tape and plywood boards cordoning off damaged structures. For most, life has returned to normal. Bars and cafes have reopened, patrons oblivious to the empty buildings and vacant lots where buildings once stood.

Throughout the city on Wednesday, officials and residents held solemn remembrance ceremonies.

President Enrique Pena Nieto presided over the raising of the Mexican flag, at half-staff, in the central plaza, or zocalo.

At 1:14 p.m., the hour of last years quake, residents across the city held a moment of silence.

People gathered at many of the sites of the 40 or so collapsed buildings, where most of the fatalities occurred. Mourners left flowers and candles. Some shed tears. There were even joyful reunions between rescuers and the rescued.

I dreaded even thinking of this day, said Jose Antonio Vazquez, 42, who was among those gathered at what has become an iconic site  the former six-story office building at Number 286 Alvaro Obregon Ave., in the capitals central Roma Norte district.

The office buildings collapse last Sept. 19, just before the lunch hour, resulted in the largest number of fatalities at any one site. The final death toll: 49  30 men and 19 women.

Vazquez was a workman in the building. He was leaving the fourth floor to get something to eat when the structure began to shake. He rushed to an emergency staircase and was outside on the sidewalk just before much of the structure came crashing down.

I was saved by a question of seconds, Vazquez said. It was a matter of inches.

Rather than go home, he stayed on as a volunteer rescuer for more than a week, helping to save half a dozen people trapped inside  including the buildings former owners, a father and son. He was lauded as a hero at Wednesdays ceremony, but said he wasnt seeking any recognition.

Im just happy to be alive, happy that I was able to help some people stay alive, said Vazquez, who was accompanied by his wife and three children.

Among those inside the office building on Alvaro Obregon when it collapsed was Erick Martin Acosta, 23, who had begun work there six months earlier as an accountant at a firm housed in the structure.

His family was one of the many that held hopeful vigils on the street outside the collapsed building for days as rescue workers combed through the ruins, seeking survivors. Relatives held out hope to the end that Acosta would be among them. Rescuers pulled about 30 people alive from the rubble pile.

The body of Acosta was found on Sept. 29, 10 days after the quake.

He suffered a major blow on the head and was immediately unconscious, recalled his brother, Omar Barrera, 25, who was among the family members carrying a poster commemorating Acosta  with color photos of him on his motorbike, and smiling in various poses.

We dont think he suffered any pain, Barrera said.

The city purchased the property on Alvaro Obregon with the intention of erecting a monument for the victims. But community groups have objected. Critics called the planned monument unseemly, alleging that widespread corruption covered up building-code violations and contributed to the death toll in the quake. The project is on hold.

Monuments no, reconstruction yes, reads a spray-painted sign on a wall facing the vacant lot where the office building once stood.

Miles to the south, at the Tlalpan housing complex, Matamoros and others are losing hope that their homes may be rebuilt.

A year has passed and we are stuck in the same situation, said Matamoros, who has been living with her sister. I cant sleep like I did before the earthquake. My health has declined. My life has changed completely.

Here, too, people say they dont seek a monument. They want their homes back, said Cristian Garcia Guzman, 25, whose sister, Viridiana Garcia Guzman, 29, the mother of a 9-year-old boy, was among those who perished in the Tlalpan collapse. She lived on the second floor of Building 1C, the doomed structure.

We cant get my sister back, she is gone, said Garcia. But people should have their homes back. Everything else  the monuments, the homage paid to the dead  its all a farce. People need to be able to return to their homes.

McDonnell is a Times staff writer and Sanchez is a special correspondent in The Times Mexico City bureau.
A massive landslide buried dozens of homes near a central Philippine mountain Thursday, killing at least 21 people and sending rescuers scrambling to find survivors after some sent text messages pleading for help.

The slide surged down on about 30 houses in two rural villages after daybreak in Naga city in Cebu province, city Police Chief Roderick Gonzales said by telephone as he helped supervise the search and rescue. Seven injured villagers were rescued from the huge mound of earth and debris.

Some victims managed to send messages after the landslide hit, Gonzales said, adding that elderly women and a child were among the dead.

Naga Mayor Kristine Vanessa Chiong said at least 64 people remained missing.

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Were really hoping we can still recover them alive, she said.

The landslide hit while several northern Philippine provinces are still dealing with deaths and widespread damage wrought by Typhoon Mangkhut, which pummeled the agricultural region Saturday and left at least 88 people dead and more than 60 missing. A massive search is still underway for dozens of people feared dead after landslides in the gold-mining town of Itogon in the north.

Cebu province was not directly hit by Mangkhut but the massive typhoon intensified monsoon rains across a large part of the archipelago, including the central region where Naga city lies about 350 miles southeast of Manila.

Rescuers were treading carefully in small groups on the unstable ground to avoid further casualties.

Were running out of time. The ground in the area is still vibrating. Were striking a balance between intensifying our rescue efforts and ensuring the safety of our rescuers, Naga city Councilor Carmelino Cruz said by phone.

Cristita Villarba, a 53-year-old resident, said her husband and son were preparing to leave for work when the ground shook and they were overwhelmed by a roar.

It was like an earthquake and there was this thundering, loud banging sound. All of us ran out, Villarba said, adding that she, her husband and three children were shocked but unhurt.

Outside, she saw the house of her older brother, Lauro, and his family buried in the landslide.

Many of our neighbors were crying and screaming for help. Some wanted to help those who got hit but there was too much earth covering the houses, including my brothers, she said.

Nearly 20 people lived in her brothers home, mostly his family and grandchildren, she said.

Villarba said she had felt sorry a few days earlier for the landslide victims in the countrys north.

I had no idea we would be the next, she said.

Elsewhere in the community, a father and his young daughter were found dead in each others embrace in a house, volunteer rescuer Vic Santillan said.

Its not clear what set off the landslide, but some residents blamed limestone quarries, which they suspect may have caused cracks in the mountainside facing their villages. Villarba said a light rain stopped when the landslide hit and there was no rain on Wednesday.

The nearest quarry was abandoned about a year ago, but another government-authorized quarry is still being operated not far away, said Angeline Templo, an assistant to the mayor. Villagers also profit from the limestone business, she said.

The Philippines is one of the worlds most disaster-prone countries. It is lashed by about 20 storms each year and is located in the Pacific Ring of Fire that is vulnerable to earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. Poverty has forced many to live on or near volcanoes, steep mountains and storm-vulnerable coasts, often leading to tragedy.

UPDATES:

Sept. 20, 7:15 a.m.: This article was updated with a death toll of at least 21 and additional details from officials and residents.

This article was originally published on Sept. 19 at 9:05 p.m.
China welcomed the consensus reached between the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) and the Republic of Korea (ROK) Wednesday to improve inter-Korean ties, ease military tensions in the region and advance the denuclearization process and peace talks on the Korean Peninsula.

"China, as a close neighbor, always supports the efforts of the north and south of the peninsula to improve their ties and push forward reconciliation and cooperation through dialogue and consultation," Foreign Ministry spokesperson Geng Shuang said at a regular press briefing, commenting on the Pyongyang summit between leaders of the DPRK and the ROK.

The DPRK's top leader Kim Jong Un and visiting ROK President Moon Jae-in Wednesday signed a joint declaration, agreeing to take additional steps toward making the Korean Peninsula free of nuclear weapons and threats of armed conflict.

China welcomes the consensus and appreciates the efforts of both sides to this end, Geng said.

It is the shared aspiration of the people on the peninsula and across the region to realize peace and prosperity, as well as reconciliation and cooperation, Geng said.

China hopes that the two sides will continue to implement the consensus, endeavor to promote interaction and cooperation and play a positive role in achieving a political solution to the peninsula issue as well as lasting peace in the region, said the spokesperson.
The Cape Coral City Council on Monday had several land use ordinances to consider during its regular meeting at City Hall, including one that looks to adding much needed commercial and affordable housing elements.

The council voted to approve the transmittal to the state of a city-initiated, large-scale, future land use amendment covering 1,581 acres and 20 properties throughout the city.

The amendment proposes that low density residential, mixed-use preserve and highway commercial land uses be eliminated for the properties located on the Zemel property, Burnt Store Road, Old Burnt Store Road, on both sides of Veterans Memorial Parkway and Old Pondella Road.

Wyatt Daltrey, planning team coordinator, said the amendment promotes both the increase in commercial base as well as housing diversity.

Staff gave council two alternatives on the Zemel property. They could choose to turn the mixed-use preserve into mixed use and the western portion of the property near Gator Circle to multi-family to address the citys lack of affordable properties (about 3,200 units would come from there) or mixed use with more commercial and a smaller residential footprint, about 640 units.

Daltrey said staff leaned toward multi-family, while council agreed more with the commercial option, as it still addresses both needs. The motion passes unanimously.

The City Council also approved the expansion of a planned development project Santa Barbara Plaza East on the corner of Santa Barbara Boulevard and Nicholas Parkway East, the vacationing of a plat for an alley and underlying public utility and drainage easements on Adalusia Boulevard, and the rezoning of property from residential to pedestrian commercial on Burnt Store Road and Northwest 32nd Place.

Among the legislation coming down the pike, the council heard the first readings on the proposed franchise agreement between the city and electric provider LCEC (for next week) and an ordinance that would ban retail sale of dogs and cats in the city, set for Oct. 1.

In other business, City Council also voted to approve Kenneth Jenkins and Blanca Contreras for the Affordable Housing Advisory Committee and Jesse Marker to the Planning & Zoning Commission, replacing James Schneider, who resigned.

The council also voted to add $5,000 to the citys budget to fund the Youth Council for the upcoming fiscal year and move the Committee of the Whole meeting from Sept. 26 to Oct. 3.

Also, the city recognized Dolores Bertolini for her being awarded the Distinguished Service Award at the 2018 National Community Emergency Response Team Conference in Naples, which she received in July.
More South Australians are standing for council

Nominations for the 2018 South Australian (SA) council elections have reached a twenty year high.

A total of 1375 nominations were received by the Electoral Commission of SA (ECSA)  41 more than in 2014.

This is the highest number of nominations received since 1995, when SA had 115 councils compared to 68 today.

Local Government Association (LGA) President, Councillor Sue Clearihan, All candidates are to be applauded for putting their hand up to serve their community.

The council election is a chance for residents to help shape their local area, she said, by deciding who would represent them in local decision making.

Voting in council elections is voluntary in SA, unlike state and federal elections.

Nearly 32 percent of eligible voters participated in the 2014 council elections, with participation rates higher in rural communities than in metropolitan areas.

With around 700 positions open across metropolitan and regional councils, council elections are an incredible undertaking.

We have a near record number of candidates, and were hoping to see this matched with an increase in voter participation this year, with more people engaging in this important democratic process.
Style / Fashion

Mens Folio was privileged to have a chat with Artistic Director Alessandro Sartori before the race to find out more about his creative direction across the Zegna lines and pick his brains on the state of fashion today.

Sep 20, 2018 | By Yong Wei Jian

Ermenegildo Zegna hosted VIP guests and celebrities at the Zegna Suite in Fullerton Hotel on 16 September 2018, Sunday, to watch the final race of the Singapore Formula One Grand Prix. Gildo Zegna, CEO of Ermenegildo Zegna Group, and Alessandro Sartori, Artistic Director of Ermenegildo Zegna, were present at the event to meet guests and VIP attendees from around the world. It was an adrenaline-filled night witnessing Lewis Hamilton clinch the win and revelling in an upclose, unblocked view of the celebratory fireworks after.

Mens Folio was privileged to have a chat with Artistic Director Alessandro Sartori before the race to find out more about his creative direction across the Zegna lines and pick his brains on the state of fashion today.

An Interview with Alessandro Sartori, Artistic Director of Ermenegildo Zegna

Welcome to Singapore, could you share why you have decided to make a stopover here?

We like the feeling and energy of the city because its like a small universe  there are a lot of different people, a lot of different cultures. We have three stores, we have a store we particularly love, which is Marina (Bay Sands) and there is a beautiful Formula One event and the Singapore team has been organising these for a few years now, so we want to consolidate our relationship with the country, with the people, with you, with the customers, so we decided to put the two things together and to do this event, with the trunk show, with a couple of interview and with a couple of other meetings.

What does the symbol XXX mean to you when designing for the couture line, outside of its definition of manual craft?

The XXX is not only a symbol, but is a meaning. The XXX of course is the logo of the couture collection but also has multiple meanings I would say. As a symbol it means manual craft because a single X is the typical criss-cross stitch that we do for the bespoke and couture garment. In the visible part, but also in the hidden parts, like inside the linings, inside the shoulders, inside the splits of the pants, and of course in the visible parts, outside the lining, outside the pockets and so on. The reason why it was chosen in 2006 for the just-born couture collection and we decided to expose it on the outside as logo, because we like the graphics particularly, for modern movement, for modern people, for a younger mindset, and thats the reason why we decided to emphasise it, to make it bigger and bolder.

So, would you say its a reaction to the trend of logomania that is prevalent to fashion?

Even before the logo trend, it was an idea to take the symbolism of craft into a logo. Then after the logo became important, at that point, it was a good thing to have and use it. But I find it particularly interesting to not use the name, or to not use a newly created symbol. But to take a symbol which is arriving from craft, and to translate it into a logo.

What are your thoughts about celebrities turned designers, who do collaborations?

It could be a very long answer. First of all, I see celebrities designing objects before with furniture. Now, its fashion, maybe tomorrow it will be food, Im kidding but Im not and theyre so talented that they can design whatever they like. In the same way and at the same time, I see other celebrities that are trying to design objects which are horrible. I dont think there is a specific rule that puts together these two and is the perfect combination. Its just about talent, and the final customer  maybe at the first sight doesnt get it, but later, he gets it. So I like well thought-out things and the things done by talented people. Doesnt matter if they are VIP or if they arent, but the personality of the designer is still important. Because he (the celebrity) is influencing then yes, it (status) is important, but again the talent should be the first point, even before personality. Then again, its my opinion.

Androgyny has become a buzzword in fashion and many women have openly shared their love for menswear, do you have plans to introduce women in your runway and presentations?

No, we dont. Its funny because some stores around the world share about products that has been purchased by women  maybe small (sized) top, more jackets, sometimes leather product. But no, because i think the strength of Zegna is to be concentrated on menswear, we are recognised for that and we want to be even bolder in menswear.

Read the full interview in the October18 issue of Mens Folio.
ROME, Italy  Austin Steffen, a Diocese of Madison seminarian, will be ordained as a transitional deacon on Thursday, Sept. 27, at 9:30 a.m. at St. Peters Basilica in Rome.

The son of Colette and Tim Steffen of St. Rose of Lima Parish in Cuba City, he attended St. Rose Catholic Grade School and Cuba City High School in Cuba City; the University of Wisconsin (UW)-Platteville; Immaculate Heart of Mary Seminary, Winona, Minn., where he obtained a Bachelors degree in philosophy; the North American College and the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross in Rome.

He was involved as an altar server throughout grade school and went on mission trips through the Catholic Heart Work Camp in high school. He attended daily Mass throughout the summers off from school and while in college. He also helped with a youth group in Platteville while he was a student there.

He explains why he decided to enter the seminary. I joined the seminary after discerning for many years. I first heard Gods call when I was an altar server in fifth grade. I continued to feel called through high school, but to be honest, in a public high school, religious attitudes were met with a sort of judgement and thought of as uncool. Plus, I wanted to be an engineer who designed cars and mechanical systems, so I went to UW-Platteville instead of the seminary.

While he was at UW-Platteville, he said, I was greatly impressed by the witness of the Society of Jesus Christ the Priest priests and their commitment to the Gospel even in persecution. I started to pray more earnestly about my vocation and was able to respond to Gods call in my sophomore year.

The most influential people in his decision to enter the seminary were the priests in Platteville. I was moved by the example of the priests in Platteville. Their faithfulness and reverence in the liturgy really struck me and gave me a new appreciation for the importance of the sacraments. Outside of the liturgy, they were just themselves, and they embodied a joyful life that the priesthood could be.

He said his seminary experiences have helped him by giving the tools needed to discern well and be formed into the man God has called. I have grown deeper in my relationship with God through retreats and spiritual direction and came to the certainty of Gods call at Immaculate Heart of Mary Seminary.

At the North American College, I have come to grow in my pastoral skills through conferences and seminars, especially in opportunities to practice preaching and counseling. I have grown in a better understanding of myself and what gifts and talents God has asked me to share with others through the sometimes trying experience of living in a different country. In my studies, I have grown in a deeper understanding of our Catholic faith and how the truth of the Gospel interacts with daily life.

His pastoral assignments during the seminary have included visiting people in the hospital and nursing homes, tutoring grade school students, serving food to the poor, and assisting with campus ministry.

In the summer of 2017, he returned to the Diocese of Madison to help at St. Peter and St. Martin of Tours Parishes in Ashton and Martinsville. I assisted with liturgies by setting up before Mass, serving and reading at daily Mass, and helping the servers for Sunday Masses. I brought Communion to the homebound and went with Fr. Tait Schroeder (then the pastor) on his pastoral visits.

On his ordination to the transitional diaconate, Steffen said, I am excited to be getting ordained and looking forward to preaching the Word of God and assisting the priest at the altar. It will be wonderful to be able to minister after six years of studies and practice.
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Alibaba chairman Jack Ma said efforts should be made to promote the healthy development of China-U.S. trade even though it is hard to fulfill his previous promise of creating 1 million jobs for the United States under current circumstances.

Alibaba chairman Jack Ma speaks in an exclusive interview with Xinhua in Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province, on Tuesday, September 18, 2018. [Photo: Xinhua]

In an exclusive interview with Xinhua on Tuesday, Ma said his promise was based on friendly cooperation between China and the United States and a rational growth of China-U.S. trade.

"However, the previous basis for trade has been undermined," he said. "But we will continue to work hard to promote the healthy development of China-U.S. trade."

Trade is not a weapon and cannot be used for wars, he added. "Trade should be the propeller of peace."

Alibaba has always worked toward the goal of "making doing business easy and fun." Against the backdrop of rising trade protectionism and anti-globalization, Ma said the goal has become even more relevant.

He said the younger generation and new leadership in Alibaba will go straight ahead toward the goal, even after he steps down.

"Good entrepreneurs and companies all have their times of difficulties, and the best companies are often born in difficult times or have gone through such times," Ma said.

He said business opportunities are still bountiful in the world, such as in Europe, South America, Russia and Africa. China is also furthering its reform and improving the business environment.

"There are still many things that Chinese companies should and can do. They still have many opportunities despite the trade frictions between China and the U.S.," Ma said.

Ma also stayed confident about the company's future after announcing his plan of stepping down.

Ma announced in an open letter on Sept. 10 that he would retire as the chairman of the board on Sept. 10, 2019, Alibaba's 20th anniversary, adding that the company CEO Daniel Zhang will take over as the chairman of the board.

"I believe it will be a time of progress for both the company and myself," Ma said on Tuesday.

He said he would work closely with the company's next generation of leaders to ensure a smooth transition and is full of confidence about Alibaba's future.

Daniel Zhang has been the company's CEO since May 2015. Ma said that in the past three years, he and Zhang have worked closely and have in-depth discussions about the business a few days every month.

Ma said he and Zhang will work together on the internalization and cultural development of the company as well as the cooperation between Alibaba and Ant Financial during the last year of him being chairman of the board. Ma will still be a board member until the annual shareholders meeting in 2020.

Ma said in the open letter that he had made preparations for a 10-year succession plan in order to cultivate a system of corporate governance based on culture and mechanism for developing consistent talent and successors.

Ma also said in the interview that a company with great vision should train talent with culture and mechanism instead of relying on a single person. "Only when a company has developed a mechanism and consistent talent, can it run smoothly," he said.

"I'm just 54, and I still have at least 16 years to do something new. I have gained rich experience from four years at university, six years of being a teacher and 23 years doing business," he said. "It's exciting to have more than a dozen years to take on a new career."

Ma, a former English teacher, said in the open letter that he wants to return to education. "I am thinking about building boarding schools in rural areas so that teachers will be willing to stay," he said in the interview. "Rural students should be able to get a good education."
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Speakers at the MARQUES annual conference analysed how the European copyright legislation could raise challenges for brand owners and benefit the furniture industry. They delved into amendments made to the directive draft voted through last week
Kottayam : The Kerala police will question Jalandhar Bishop Franco Mulakkal for a second day in a row on Thursday over the allegations that he had raped a Nun. The questioning is scheduled to begin at 11 am.

On Wednesday, the police had grilled the Bishop for nearly seven hours. Reports say that Bishop may be arrested during evening.

The discrepancies in the replies during the interrogation had put the Bishop in a tight spot. During the interrogation, Mulkkal repeatedly pleaded his innocence and said that the allegations were 'a cooked up story to wreak vengeance'.

Meanwhile, the agitation of the Nuns demanding the arrest of the Bishop enters the 13th day.
The government will exercise maximum tolerance against protesters as anti-Duterte groups planned to stage demonstrations in various areas of Manila in commemoration of the 46th anniversary of the declaration of martial law, Malacanang said Thursday. Maximum tolerance is what is in the law and that is what the President follows even without the law, but more so since there is a law, said Presidential Spokesman Harry Roque in a Palace press briefing Thursday afternoon. Roque said that no one can complain that the Duterte is overly-sensitive as the President recognizes the importance of free speech. But more so, since there is a law, no one can complain that the President is onion-skinned. He lets them protest as he recognizes the importance of free speech, said Roque. So, we will give maximum tolerance to everyone, because after all the President was not the one who declared martial law on September 21 many years ago, he added. Asked to assess the threat against the administration, Roque said the anti-Duterte demonstrations are not something that the government cannot handle. Its not anything that the State cannot deal with. Dream on to those who want to remove the President, he said. In his previous statement, Duterte claimed that several groups were planning for his ouster, or worse, assassination on Sept. 21. Someone said, thats their plan now. If they cant achieve their goal through explosions, they will assassinate [me], said Duterte in a one-on-one live interview with Chief Presidential Legal Counsel Salvador Panelo last week. But he dares his perceived enemies to continue their plan early, and not wait until Sept. 21. Start it now, dont delay your plan to sabotage on Sept. 21. Do it now, he said.Duterte earlier said he has in his possession a record of conversations, provided by sympathetic foreign governments, proving a loose conspiracy to oust him, involving the opposition Liberal Party, Senator Antonio Trillanes IV, and the communist rebels. Meanwhile, the Manila Development Authority and the city government of Manila will enforce road closure affecting major roads in the city today (Friday) and on Sunday to give way for activities in connection with the anniversary of the declaration of Martial Law. The MMDA and the citys District Traffic Enforcement Unit (MDTEU) urged motorists traversing Manila to take alternate routes to avoid heavy traffic caused by the road closure. Starting at 6 a.m. onwards on Friday, the following roads will be closed for Talakayan sa Mapayapang Paggunita ng Martial Law event: North and Southbound lane of Roxas Boulevard from Katigbak to Pres. Quirino Ave.; Eastbound lane of TM Kalaw from Ma. Orosa to Taft Avenue and the East and Westbound lane of TM Kalaw from M.H Del Pilar to Roxas Boulevard. The MMDA also advised motorists to take the following alternate routes on Friday: all vehicles coming from the northern part of Manila intending to utilize the stretch of Roxas Blvd; Southbound lane coming from Delpan Bridge-Pier Zone shall turn left to P. Burgos Street to point of destination; all vehicles utilizing westbound lane of TM Kalaw going to Roxas Boulevard shall turn left to MH Del Pilar to point of destination; vehicles coming from Mabini St. utilizing eastbound lane of TM Kalaw going to Taft Ave. shall turn left to Ma. Orosa to point of destination and those coming from southern part of Manila utilizing northbound lane of Roxas Boulevard shall turn right to Pres. Quirino Ave. to point of destination. Meanwhile, the following roads will be closed at exactly 4 pm on Sunday, September 23 for Alay Lakad Para sa Kabataan 2018 event: North and Southbound lane of Roxas Boulevard from Anda Circle to P. Ocampo; P. Burgos from Roxas Blvd. to Lagusnilad east and westbound; T.M. Kalaw from Roxas Blvd. to MH del Pilar westbound; Finance Rd. from P. Burgos to Taft Ave. (both lanes); Stretch of Ma. Orosa from P. Burgos to TM Kalaw north and southbound lane; Westbound lane of Ayala Blvd. from Romualdez to Taft Avenue. Motorists, meanwhile, are advised to take the following alternate routes on Sunday: All vehicles coming from Romualdez intending to utilize the stretch of Ayala Blvd. shall go straight to N.A Lopez, left to San Marino to point of destination; All vehicles coming from southern part of Manila intending to utilize the stretch of Roxas Blvd. northbound lane shall turn right to P. Ocampo, left to Taft Ave.; all public utility vehicles traveling along A. Mabini shall turn right to P. Gil or may either go straight and turn right to TM Kalaw, left to Taft Ave. to point of destination; all vehicles coming from northern part of Manila intending to traverse the stretch of Roxas Blvd.; southbound lane coming from Delpan Bridge-Pier Zone shall take A. Soriano, go straight to Magallanes Drive, right to P. Burgos, straight to Lagusnilad (Taft Avenue) to point of destination; all vehicles coming from Binondo (Jones Bridge) going to Intramuros area shall turn right to Magallanes Drive while vehicles coming from Sta. Cruz (McArthur Bridge) and Quiapo (Quezon Bridge) intending to proceed to Intramuros area shall turn right to Victoria St. to point of destination. During the said period, all cargo trucks traveling Osmena Highway are advised to turn right to Pres. Quirino Ave., straight ahead to Nagtahan, AH Lacson, Yuseco St. crossing Jose Abad Santos straight Raxabago, Capulong to point of destinations. On the other hand, all cargo trucks intending to use the southbound truck route coming from Pier area shall take R-10 Northbound, then turn right to Capulong straight to Yuseco St. to AH Lacson Ave. to point of destination.
As the 73session of the United Nations General Assembly will convene on Sept. 18, 2018, at UN headquarters in New York, I am writing this letter to call for the kind support for Taiwans determination to participate in the UN system by the people of the Philippines. The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, adopted at the 70th session of the United Nations General Assembly in 2015, set bold goals to shift the world onto a sustainable, resilient path. Here was also pledged the formation of a revitalized Global Partnership for Sustainable Development including all countries, all stakeholders and all people, such that no one would be left behind. Despite such a pledge, Taiwans 23-million people have been left out of this global effort. This violates the principle of universality upon which the UN was founded and deprives Taiwan as well as the international community of opportunities to work together for the common good. To ensure the UN remains relevant to all people, the organization should stand up to the external pressures and open its doors to Taiwan. I hereby urge the Philippines, a dynamic democracy in Asia, to support democratic Taiwan s campaign to participate in the UN system and to recognize Taiwans determination to contribute to regional and global affairs. Taiwan provides development assistance to other countries. Through the International Cooperation and Development Fund (TaiwanICDF), Taiwans official development assistance organization, we have launched various programs in the Pacific, Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean. These programs aim to help countries in these regions to achieve clean energy, food security, food safety, sustainable agriculture, better education, health and well-being for all age groups, and disaster reduction and adaptation. TaiwanICDF also works with the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development to assist countries in Central Asia and Central and Eastern Europe to develop market economies and a green economy. While Taiwans valuable contributions have been widely acclaimed around the globe, the UN continues to ignore what Taiwan can offer. Taiwans tourists, experts and professionals are denied entry into UN premises simply because the UN does not accept the Republic of China (Taiwan)s passport, which is recognized by almost every country in the world. The UN has refused to accredit Taiwans journalists covering its meetings and activities, yet the work of such people is in the interests of the people of Taiwan and the world. We are extremely disappointed that the UN continues to misuse 1971s General Assembly Resolution 2758 (XXVI) to justify Taiwans exclusion and isolation. As we have pointed out before, this resolution neither addresses the issue of representation of Taiwan and its people in the UN system, nor defines the relationship between Taiwan and China. The so-called one-China principle has been challenged by many UN Member States. It is wrong for the UN, an organization created to serve all of humankind, to unilaterally define Taiwans status.Article 1 of the UN Charter proclaims that the purposes of the organization are to achieve international co-operation in solving international problems of an economic, social, cultural, and humanitarian character, and in promoting and encouraging respect for human rights. At this critical juncture when humankind is facing multiple challenges, global cooperation that includes all countries, all stakeholders, and all people is ever more important. By excluding a willing and able partner like Taiwan, the UN not only violates the fundamental human rights of Taiwans 23-million people but also greatly harms human welfare. A friend in need is a friend indeed. People in Taiwan are ready and well-prepared to make meaningful and substantial contributions to the UN Sustainable Development Goals to achieve a better and more sustainable future for all human beings on earth, including the people in the Philippines. Thank you very much for your attention to this matter. Respectfully yours,
Protesters participate in a gathering in Tokyo, Japan, on Sept. 19, 2018. Thousands of people across Japan rallied Wednesday to protest against the controversial security laws that were enacted by the parliament three year ago. Over 5,000 protesters gathered in Hibiya Park, downtown Tokyo on Wednesday evening, calling for scrapping the controversial security laws. (Xinhua/Du Xiaoyi)

TOKYO, Sept. 19 (Xinhua) -- Thousands of people across Japan rallied Wednesday to protest against the controversial security laws that were enacted by the parliament three year ago.

Over 5,000 protesters gathered in Hibiya Park, downtown Tokyo on Wednesday evening, calling for scrapping the controversial security laws.

Tetsuro Fukuyama, secretary general of the Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan (CDPJ), said at the gathering that the security laws violated Japan's pacifist Constitution and the people would continue to fight for scrapping the controversial laws.

At another gathering near the parliamentary building, Hitomi Sugiura, a representative of a civil group dedicated to filing lawsuits against the controversial security laws, said that as of September this year, 25 such lawsuits had been filed with 22 courts across Japan with over 7,500 plaintiffs.

She said that the controversial security laws eroded into Japan's pacifist Constitution and could drag Japan into wars, and it's hoped that the lawsuits could alert people of the risks brought by the controversial laws.

Japanese military critic Tetsuo Maeda said that since the new security laws were enacted, integration between the U.S. military and the Japanese Self Defense Forces has been deepening, and the Japanese government has also been trying to revise the pacifist Constitution.

He called upon people to take actions and prevent such movements that could bring danger to Japan.

Protests of various scales were also held in the prefectures of Hokkaido, Niigata, Yamagata and Kagoshima.

The Japanese government forcibly enacted the controversial security laws on Sept. 19, 2015, which, marking a significant overturn of Japan's "purely defensive" defense posture, caused widespread concerns and criticism both at home and abroad.
This is Episode 1 of a miniseries targeting entrepreneurs in rural economies. Join Julia Quigley in discovering why high tech growth is a critical strategy for Montanas entrepreneurs. Whether you are a startup or experiencing growing pains, find out why MT is a great place to build and grow your high tech business.

Julia Quigley

***

More videos from Julia: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCFwVtr6rQ3sQlanFuJka8MQ

***

The Montana Governors Office of Economic Development is the states lead organization to help businesses succeed in our state.

Visit http://business.mt.gov/
Eagle Jet Solutions was welcomed to Great Falls on Tuesday.

Eagle Jet is is building a new hangar at the Great Falls International Airport.

Eagle Jet is an aircraft management company that assists with all aspects of aircraft ownership; it buys and sells aircraft and provides storage for aircraft up to the size of a Boeing 737.

The hangar will be the Montanas biggest private hangar with the capability to house two 737 aircraft. In addition to accommodating Eagle Jets aircraft, the new hangar will be available to house private aircraft that are visiting Montana.
More Bozeman schools are going solar, and the girl who got the ball rolling at her middle school has just been named a "young hero."

The Bozeman School District opened bids last for installing 50-kilowatt, rooftop solar systems at Hyalite and Meadowlark elementary schools and the bids were favorable, Todd Swinehart, facilities director, said Wednesday.

Claire Vlases, 15, was a Sacajawea eighth-grader when she started the fundraising campaign to install solar panels as her school underwent a major renovation and expansion.

By Gail Schontzler Chronicle Staff Writer

https://www.bozemandailychronicle.com/news/education/two-more-bozeman-schools-getting-solar-panels-student-advocate-named/article_11f09ef9-3976-5c7b-9974-85ff953c2171.html
An artist's rendition of China's Mars rover.

China plans to launch a probe to Mars in 2020, which is expected to reach the red planet in 2021, said an official of the China National Space Administration (CNSA) at a sub-forum of the World Conference on Science Literacy 2018, held on Sept. 18, Beijing News reported.

China is currently planning deep space exploration programs, said Li Guoping, Director General of the Department of System Engineering of China National Space Administration (CNSA) at the sub-forum on Space Exploration and the Future of Mankind.

The probe will launch in July 2020, and is expected to land on Mars in 2021. China plans to conduct its second Mars exploration mission in 2028, with the intention of bringing back Martian soil for scientific investigation, Li noted.

China will also launch the heavy-lift carrier rocket, Long March-9, in 2028. The rocket will exceed 90 meters in length, with a diameter of 10 meters.

Li explained that it will be able to carry a weight of 140 tons into low-Earth orbit, five times that of the Long March-5.

The country will also step up its efforts to use space technology to monitor global climate change, said Li, adding that projects using two specific satellites have already been launched, one for monitoring atmospheric environment and the other for terrestrial ecosystems.

The Chinese government holds a positive attitude towards commercial rocket companies who have launched small, self-developed rockets recently, Li disclosed, saying that the government is working on details to reinforce management of their launches and activities.
Coming off a well deserved Emmy Award win this week for his performance in the HBO series "Barry," you would think Henry Winkler would be hitting up Hollywood parties in style, but the iconic actor is actually dreaming of his upcoming fly-fishing adventure to Montana and a recent family expedition in Idaho, all while dusting his new Emmy statue.

An accomplished sportsman who meticulously records the measurements of every fish he hooks, actor Henry Winkler has learned that his seasonal fly fishing trips throughout American rivers are not just about catching trout. They are about adopting the proper perspectives on life, where fly fishing recharges him and reminds him that anything is possible.

Jim Dobson

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jimdobson/2018/09/19/fly-fishing-with-henry-winkler-in-montana-the-emmy-winning-actor-on-his-love-for-the-sport/#614b75d844b4
Are you interested in Early Stage MT http://www.matr.net/events.phtml?showdetail=6947 but cant make the Statewide Showcase this Saturday? Well there are many students at Montana colleges and universities who would love to attend, and you can make it possible.

If you buy one ticket for $50 between now and Friday at noon, Early Stage MT will create TWO seats for students to attend in your place. Just go to this event ticket page https://www.eventbrite.com/e/early-stage-montana-statewide-showcase-tickets-47853773926?aff=eac2&mc_cid=9aaa221f74&mc_eid=cc38aee65e and enter your information as you normally would, but include the word "student" after your first name. Then ESMT will know that you dont plan to attend and can give your seat to a student. You still get the tax deduction since Early Stage MT is a program of the 501(c)3 Montana Technology Acceleration Association.

This will be a great event celebrating innovation and tech entrepreneurship in Montana and ESMT http://www.matr.net/events.phtml?showdetail=6947 would love to give as many students as possible the chance to come see how local entrepreneurs are developing world-class innovations right here in MT and learn from tech sector experts from around the western US.
No one should underestimate China's determination to uphold peace in South China Sea: Chinese ambassador

Chinese Ambassador to Britain Liu Xiaoming on Wednesday said that the freedom of navigation in the South China Sea has never been a problem, warning that no one should underestimate China's determination to uphold peace and stability in the region.

Liu made the remarks at the annual Commonwealth Diplomats Induction Program. His remarks came weeks after Britain's HMS Albion-class landing platform dock entered China's territorial sea of the Xisha Qundao (the Xisha Islands) without the Chinese government's approval. The Chinese navy identified and verified the British warship in accordance with law and warned and expelled it.

The ambassador said that thanks to the concerted efforts of China and countries of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), the situation in the South China Sea has been improving.

"Relevant parties have returned to the right track of addressing disputes through negotiation and consultation," he said. "Relations between China and relevant countries have been sound and stable."

Liu stressed that countries in the region have the confidence, capability and wisdom to deal with the South China Sea issue properly and achieve enduring stability, development and prosperity.

"Yet to everyone's confusion, some big countries outside the region did not seem to appreciate the peace and tranquility in the South China Sea," he said. "They sent warships and aircraft all the way to the South China Sea to create trouble."

The senior diplomat said that under the excuse of so-called "freedom of navigation," these countries ignored the vast sea lane and chose to sail into the adjacent waters of China's islands and reefs to show off their military might.

"This was a serious infringement" of China's sovereignty, he said. "It threatened China's security and put regional peace and stability in jeopardy."

Liu stressed that China has all along respected and upheld the freedom of navigation and over-flight in the South China Sea in accordance with international law, including the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea.

"Freedom of navigation is not a license to do whatever one wishes," he said, noting that freedom of navigation is not freedom to invade other countries' territorial waters and infringe upon other countries' sovereignty.

"Such 'freedom' must be stopped," Liu noted. "Otherwise the South China Sea will never be tranquil."

He said that no one should underestimate China's will to safeguard its national sovereignty, security and development interests and no one should underestimate China's determination to uphold peace and stability in the South China Sea.
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Egypt's Foreign Ministry Spokesman Ahmed Abu Zeid stated that EU-Arab Summit is set to be held in Egypt and will focus on Arab-European cooperation in general, as it won't be limited to discussing migration.

The decision to hold the summit in Egypt is based on the Arab League Council Resolution 147 and 148 and the Arab Summit held last March by the Dead Sea in Jordan.

His comment came in response to statements made by the EU High Commissioner for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Frederica Mogherini, and European Council President Donald Tusk on holding an EU-Arab Summit in Egypt on migration issues in 2019.



Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurzand EU Council President Donald Tuskbothvisited Cairo over the weekend for talks with President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi.

Tusk and Kurz called for an EU-Arab League summit sometime in early 2019, following a joint visit to Cairo this week. Austria currently holds the presidency of the Council of the European Union, a role that is rotated between countries every six months.



Austria urged EU partners on Thursday to enter talks with Egypt in order to discuss ways to manage migration from Africa to Europe.
Against the background of an increasingly complex regional and global scene, Egypt will be presenting a notably full agenda at this years UN General Assembly meetings in New York

President Abdel-Fattah Al-Sisi is heading to New York tomorrow to attend the 73rd Session of the UN General Assembly, which, kicking off on 18 September and ending on 5 October, is an annual opportunity for member states to speak their minds to the international community.

Egypt will take the opportunity to present its take on sustainable development, counter-terrorism efforts, the Palestinian cause, regional turmoil in the Middle East and coping with climate change.

This years General Assembly is of particular importance because Egypt is not just presenting its own agenda, but is also the president of the G-77 group of nations for 2018.

President Al-Sisi will give the inaugural address at the G-77 plus China ministerial meeting on 27 September, which will be attended by the UN secretary-general.

With most world leaders under the same roof, the General Assembly Session is an opportunity to discuss pressing issues and promote bilateral relations.

Al-Sisi is scheduled to meet US President Donald Trump, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, French President Emmanuel Macron and Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conti.

He will also hold meetings with members of the US House of Representatives and Senate to present Egypts vision on regional issues and bilateral relations.

The talks will discuss the strengthening of bilateral relations at all levels, especially economic and political. The president will also emphasise the importance of reaching a just and comprehensive settlement of the Palestinian issue in order to contribute effectively to the stability of the Middle East and to provide security for the region.

The discussions are scheduled to tackle efforts regarding the renewal of religious discourse to reflect the true spirit of Islam. Egypts efforts to balance respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms while maintaining security and stability will also be discussed.

Egypt will present its approach to counter-terrorism, which includes security and military aspects as well as the renewal of religious discourse and promoting the values of citizenship and coexistence.

We have a long experience of counter-terrorism. Egypt has proposed issues that are a priority for us, and it has succeeded in passing two UN Security Council resolutions on the matter by consensus, Egypts permanent representative to the UN, Ambassador Mohamed Idris, told Al-Ahram Weekly.

These are UN Security Council Resolution 2354 (2017), which focuses on implementing the Comprehensive Global Framework for Countering Terrorist Rhetoric, and UN Security Council Resolution 2370 (2017), which focuses on preventing terrorists from acquiring weapons.

Egypt was particularly keen on passing the latter resolution due to the serious threat posed by some countries  especially some in the Middle East  in supplying weapons to terrorists and armed groups to carry out destructive regional agendas, Idris said.

Egypt is participating in the Ninth Session of the Global Counter-Terrorism Forum (GCTF) on 26 September, which is the annual meeting of ministers concerned in New York.

Egypt was one of the 30 founding states of the Global Counter-Terrorism Forum (GCTF) in 2011, and it currently chairs one of five working groups focused on building the capability of East African countries in counter-terrorism, according to Idris.

Egypts presence in the world gathering mirrors the keenness of its political leadership to declare the countrys stances regarding different issues and to highlight its priorities, said Hassan Abu Taleb, an expert at the Al-Ahram Centre for Political and Strategic Studies in Cairo.

Egypt has been focusing on the importance of combating terrorism under the umbrella of the United Nations and on garnering the cooperation of other countries via exchanging information and banning any form of assistance to countries that support terrorism, Abu Taleb said.

Terrorism remains a challenge as it is connected to several regional issues such as the situation in Yemen, Libya and Syria, he added. Egypt stresses the importance of world security as well as that of the region, he added.

Egypt is also keen to show off the recent economic development of the country. Egypt is opening its markets to foreign investment. This is a chance for Egypt to show the world that it offers a stable environment for different investments, Abu Taleb said.

Egypt will also present its current national efforts to mobilise domestic resources to fund development through its economic reform programme, and it will confirm the need for consolidating international efforts to assist developing countries in achieving the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), Idris told the Weekly.

The UN General Assembly Session is also an ideal opportunity to lobby for the Palestinian cause, Abu Taleb said.

Egypt is against the US recognising Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and its stopping aid sent to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees in the Near East (UNWRA) and its pressuring the Palestinians to gain further rights for the Israelis, he explained.

While the Palestinian cause topped the agenda of the UN Security Council before 2011, todays agenda is packed with other issues, such as the situations in Syria, Libya and Yemen.

Nonetheless, Idris said, there is an Arab consensus not to surrender to this muddle, because we believe the Palestinians legal rights are inalienable.

Accordingly, during its membership of the UN Security Council and through its influential presence in the UN agencies, Egypt has worked to protect provisions regarding the Palestinian cause in the Security Council, renewing and embedding the rights of our Palestinian brothers to their land.

Al-Sisi will also review Egypts vision of various regional crises at the session, emphasising the need to preserve the regions nation states and to support their institutions and strengthen their cohesion.

Egypt is concerned about the situation in Libya and the Libyan governments apparent inability to control the situation there, especially terrorism, Abu Taleb said. Egypt insists on the importance of international cooperation to support the legitimate Libyan institutions, he said.

Egypt believes that the best way to handle the Libyan crisis is to support the Libyan Political Agreement and the UN Plan of Action on Libya, Idris added.

For these to succeed, the international community must take a firm stand against funding and supporting terrorist elements in Libya, he stressed.

The presidents agenda in New York includes one-on-one meetings with the leaders of various African nations, especially regarding South Sudan, Libya, the Sahel and the Great Lakes regions, according to Idris.

Egypt is interested in promoting cooperation between the UN and the African Union (AU), especially as it nears its presidency of the AU beginning in January 2019, by strengthening existing treaty frameworks in this regard, he added.

Egypt will participate in a high-level dialogue with the UN secretary-general on Implementing the Paris Agreement on Climate Change and the 24th Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) on 24 September, since it heads the G-77 negotiations on the outcomes of the UNFCCC to activate and implement the Paris Agreement on Climate Change, especially articles relating to funding and adaptation, Idris said.

* A version of this article appears in print in the 20 September 2018 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly under the headline: Garnering international support

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Montgomery County Community College will present the spring installment of the interview/talk show program Issues and Insights April 20 from 12:30 to 2 p.m. in Science Center room 214, 340 DeKalb Pike, Blue Bell. The programs will be simulcast to the Colleges West Campus in South Hall room 216, 101 College Drive, Pottstown. Dr. Kolsky will offer a humorous presentation, Carrots, Sticks and Politics: A State of the Nation and the World Message. In this speech, he will provide his interpretation of domestic and international politics and then welcome questions from the audience for discussion. Issues and Insights, is free and open to the public. For information, contact Dr. Thomas Kolsky, professor of political science, at 215-641-6380 or tkolsky@mc3.edu.

Montgomery County Community Colleges STEM Scholars Program will host a STEM Jam! open house April 25 from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. in the Advanced Technology Center at the Colleges Central Campus, 340 DeKalb Pike, Blue Bell. The drop-in event is designed for students interested in learning more about careers in science, technology, engineering and mathematics. Activities will include STEM program information and career advising, STEM speakers throughout the day from industry and academia, micro-helicopter and robotics competitive obstacle courses and demonstrations and static models of STEM student and faculty work. For more information about STEM Jam! or STEM programs at MCCC, contact William Brownlowe at wbrownlowe@mc3.edu or 215-641-6644, or Robin Zuhlke at 215-619-7440 or rzuhlke@mc3.edu.

Temple Ambler, located at 580 Meetinghouse Road, presents the following events:

International Club Global Bazaar April 15 from 5 to 8 p.m. The Ambler Campus International Club invites all students, faculty, staff and the community to celebrate a multitude of diverse cultures, which will be showcased at the organizations Global Bazaar. This family friendly event will highlight cultural traditions and celebrations in Asia, Europe, the Middle East, South American, North America and Africa through music, entertainment, food and informative displays developed and presented by students at the Ambler Campus. Young visitors will be provided with passports, which they may get stamped at each country they visit. Prizes will be awarded to world travelers who talk to cultural representatives, answer questions about the countries theyve visited and take part in fun-filled activities designed to help them learn about the rich diversity of cultures found throughout the world. Refreshments will be served. The event is free. For more information, call 267-468-8108 or e-mail tuc36466@temple.edu.

EarthFest 2011 April 29 from 9:30 a.m. to 2 p.m. More than 75 exhibitors, including the Philadelphia Zoo, The Franklin Institute, the Academy of Natural Sciences, the Elmwood Park Zoo and the Insectarium, will take part in EarthFest 2011. School students of all ages are invited to attend and develop displays of their own. EarthFest partner the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society also offers its Kids Grow Expo, featuring the Junior Flower Show, as part of the event. For more information, call 267-468-8108 or e-mail duffyj@temple.edu.

Annual Spring Plant Sale May 7 from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. The plant sale  an Ambler Campus tradition dating back to the early 1900s  will feature woody plants and perennials in portable sizes, hardy trees, shrubs, and vines, native plants that are attractive to wildlife, herbs, and hanging baskets. There will also be numerous special plants for sale to highlight Amblers special anniversary year. Garden books and garden tools will also be available for sale. Students, staff, and volunteers from the Department of Landscape Architecture and Horticulture and the Ambler Arboretum Advisory Committee will be available to answer questions. All proceeds from the Spring Plant Sale will support the Ambler Arboretum Fund and the Pi Alpha Xi National Honor Society. Information: 267-468-8001 or judy.shatz@temple.edu. Learn more at www.ambler.temple.edu/anniversary.

June Homecoming/Louise Bush-Brown Garden Dedication June 5 from 12:30 to 2 p.m. (June Homecoming), Bright Hall Lounge; 2 p.m. (Garden Dedication), Ambler Campus Formal Perennial Gardens. Tickets  June Homecoming: Participant  $18 per person; Sustainer  $25 per person; Benefactor  $40 per person. The 2011 June Homecoming, sponsored by the School of Environmental Design Alumni Association, will include the Alumni Association annual meeting and luncheon. June Homecoming will be followed by the formal dedication of Temple University Amblers Formal Perennial Gardens as the Louise Bush-Brown Formal Gardens. During this 100th anniversary of the campus, Temple University Ambler and the Ambler Arboretum of the Temple University is honoring Louise Bush-Browns many contributions to the history of the campus by formally dedicating the gardens in her honor. During the program, campus Executive William Parshall will welcome guests, Ambler Arboretum Director Jenny Rose Carey will speak about the Bush-Browns and the history of the garden, and an official ribbon cutting will be held for the Louise Bush-Brown Formal Garden. Following the ribbon cutting, guests are invited to take a tour of the gardens, which will wend their way to the Campus Greenhouse for the School of Environmental Designs annual Plant Auction. Information (Garden Dedication): 267-468-8001 or judy.shatz@temple.edu. Information (June Homecoming): 215-482-0722. Learn more at www.ambler.temple.edu/anniversary.

Northview Garden Tour and Fundraiser for the Ambler Arboretum June 12 from noon to 5 p.m. Call for reservations. Tickets: $15 per person or $20 at the door. In addition to the gardens of the Ambler Arboretum of Temple University, Arboretum Director Jenny Rose Carey has a garden oasis all her own right in Ambler  Northview. Visitors will have the opportunity to take self-guided tours throughout the many gardens, where garden experts will be available to answer questions about the various designs. The Ambler Keystone Chapter of the Womans National Farm and Garden Association will also provide tea and refreshments. All proceeds from the tours will support the Ambler Arboretum of Temple University. Information or to register: 267-468-8001 or judy.shatz@temple.edu. Learn more at www.ambler.temple.edu/anniversary.

The Senior Adult Activities Center of Montgomery County, 536 George Street, Norristown, will hold the following events:

SAAC Adult Day Care, an alternative to Nursing Home Care is available  for information call 610-275-1960

Volunteers are needed for Meals on Wheels Program (call the number above)

SAACs Fifth Avenue Boutique opens Monday through Friday from 10 a.m.-1:30 p.m.

Exercise with Theresa will be held every Monday, Wednesday and Friday at 1 p.m.

Dance class is held every Monday at 10 a.m.

Tai Chi is held every Monday at 10 a.m.

Yoga is held every Tuesday at 10:30 a.m.

Line Dancing is held every Thursday at 10:30 a.m.

Dancing with Joan is held every Wednesday at 10:30 a.m.

Sculpture Class is held Wednesdays from 2 to 3:30 p.m.

Why Should I Learn Spanish? will be held Wednesdays at 10:30 a.m.

Generations On-Line computer classes for seniors will be held Monday through Friday from 8 a.m.  4 p.m.  computers are available during those hours.

Health Living will be held every Tuesday at 1 p.m.

Boomer U will hold the following events. Boomer U is located at 45 Forest Avenue, Ambler. Registration & payment is required for all events: 215-619-8863.

Pilates Class is held Wednesdays and Fridays at 9:30 a.m. First class is free; please bring a mat. For information call 610-291-5376.

Blue Bell School of Dance, 921 Penllyn Blue Bell Pike, Blue Bell, hosts Argentine Tango Classes and a Milonga dance party every Friday evening. Lessons start at 8:30 p.m. followed by dancing at 9:30 p.m. Andrew Conway, master Argentine Tango dancer, instructor and performer and his partner Linda Chase will instruct. All levels welcome and no partner is needed. Refreshments will be served. Fee is $12 per person and includes lesson and dancing. Information: 215-634-1101 or www.amoretango.com.

The Montgomery Hospital Medical Center will offer the following classes:

Childbirth Education Class- all parents are invited to participate, including those who are delivering at

other hospitals. For more information on maternity services or classes, call 610-270-2020.

CPR and First Aid Courses are offered for beginners to experiences health care providers. Call 610-270-2313.

The Ambler SAAC (Senior Adult Activities Center), located at 45 Forest Ave in Ambler will hold the following events:

Tai Chi every Monday and Thursday at 11 a.m.

Yoga is every Tuesday at 1 p.m. and Friday at 10:30 a.m.

Strength and balance training every Wednesday at 10 a.m.

Armchair Aerobics is held every Monday at 10 a.m.

Gourmet Weight Wise every Thursday at 12:30.

Fitness Center and Pool Room open daily 8 a.m.-4 p.m.

The Diabetes Education Center will offer day and evening classes each month. Health insurance pays for diabetes education classes. Preregistration is required. Call 610-270-2301.

For Kids & Families

The Ambler Kiwanis Club will host its annual Easter Egg Hunt April 26 at 10 a.m. in Ambler Borough Park, located just off of the intersection of Hendricks Street and Valley Brook Road. Members of the Wissahickon Key Club will assist Kiwanians in hiding thousands of wrapped chocolate eggs in a designated area of the park. Also hidden will be plastic colored eggs, which are redeemed for prizes. Elementary school children are separated by age.

Upper Dublin Parks & Recreation will hold its 21st annual Storybook Egg-Stravaganza April 15 fom 6 to 7:30 p.m. at the Upper Dublin Township Building. Toddlers and preschoolers love this annual event where photo opportunities with favorite friends abound! Treasures are collected from UDP&Rs assortment of lifesize cutouts of favorite cartoon characters from Disney, Sesame Street, Nickelodeon and other well-known animation. Children can have their picture taken with Bugsy OHare; bring your own camera. And dont forget a basket for goodies! $7 for UD residents; $12 for non-residents. Pre-register at 215-643-1600 ext. 3443.

Splash Week is a free week-long program that teaches children and families basic swimming skills and water safety practices. All YMCA branches will host multiple classes each day from April 11 to 15. For more information, contact the Ambler Area YMCA at 215-628-9950.

Healthy Kids Day is April 16 from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. The day is filled with fun, engaging and artistic activities that cultivate healthy living as part of the YMCAs larger efforts to help more kids and families become physically active. All activities are free and open to the community. For more information, contact the Ambler YMCA at 215-628-9950. No reservation is required.

The Ambler Area YMCA has added several new programs for area youngsters. Classes are held late afternoons or evenings on various weekdays. For more information, visit philaymca.org or call 215-628-9950.

Basic Beading: Ages: 10+. Wednesdays 7 to 7:45 p.m. This class will teach you the fundamentals of wiring and stringing along with how color can be used to create unique and vibrant beadwork design. You will create various jewelry including earrings, bracelets, charm pendants and much more! Supplies will be provided. Bringing your own jewelry pliers or tools would be a plus.

Messin with the Masters: Ages: 8-12. Thursdays 7 to 7:45 p.m. Learn about some of the worlds greatest artists. You will be inspired to create your own Starry Night with oil pastels and tempera paints, a tissue paper painted Monet garden, a Picasso head using scraps of paper, a Georgia OKeeffe clay flower bowl and a Rousseau jungle collage.

Super Scientist: Ages: 5-7. Mondays 4:30 to 5:15 p.m. Well be concocting chemistry experiments such as making slime, mixing potions and having fun with magnet magic. Your budding little scientist will enhance his/her creative thinking and motor skills and to top it off will learn that science can be serious fun.

Wacky Junk Art: Ages: 8-12. Thursdays 6 to 6:45 p.m. Why throw it away! Instead join us to make household junk into aliens from outer space, wacky specs, crazy hats, body masks or a recycled train.

Globe Trotters: Ages: 4-6. Tuesdays 4:30 to 5:15 p.m. Youre never too young to start thinking globally. Each week, we explore a new country through crafts, games, music, stories and even some taste-testing. A perfect introduction to our great big world!

Crazy about Crafts: Ages: 5-7, Thursdays 4:30 to 5:15 p.m. Let your childs creative juices flow with our fun arts and crafts projects each week. Fine motor skills and creative thinking skills will be enhanced with this crafty class.

Come out and join the Ambler Area YMCAs Teen and Junior Leaders Club. Participants are given the freedom to plan community service projects year round and truly make a difference in the lives of people in need. Those in Teen and Junior Leaders also attend leadership retreats all along the East Coast three times a year and meet other leaders who are doing the same great work in their respective areas. Dont miss out on this inspiring opportunity. Teen Leaders, ages 13-17, meet every Wednesday from 6 to 7:30 p.m. Junior Leaders, ages 10-12, will begin in the spring and will meet every Monday. For more information, contact Mike Miles, Teen Director, 215- 628-9950 x 1540 or mmiles@philaymca.org.

Did you know that the new Ambler Area YMCA holds childrens birthday parties at its site for members and non members as well. The Ambler Y does all the work from start to finish and birthday parties include a personalized cake, ice cream, beverage and paper products. Parties are held on Saturday and Sunday afternoons and include two party hosts to lead activities, set-up, clean-up and assist with serving. You can have a Splash Party for children ages six to 12 in the new zero depth entry pool with water slide and spray fountains. Up to 25 children have exclusive use of the pool area with 30 minutes in the party room. Sports Parties are offered for kids ages four to 12 with age appropriate activities and games, and sports such as floor hockey, soccer, basketball or dodge ball. Children ages three to five years of age will enjoy parties in the Family Active Center with use of the Moon Bounce and organized activities, such as parachute play and songs. For information, 215-628-9950 ext. 1583.

Community Events at the Ambler Y:

-YAchievers YMCA Achievers is a developmentally based, extracurricular, educational and team mentoring program designed to help students in grades five through 12 prepare for fulfilled livelihoods in college and beyond. Participation is free and all students in this program receive a free YMCA membership. Registration for the 2009 program begins now. You do not need to be a YMCA member to utilize these special services. Call 215-628-9950 to register.

Greater Norristown Art Leagues Childrens Weeklong Summer Art Camps will be held at 800 West Germantown Pike in East Norriton, 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Monday through Friday throughout the summer. The cost per session is $125 per student for ages 6 and up. Jo Ann Cooksey Bono teaches an introduction to basic drawing skills and techniques from 10 a.m. until the lunch break each day. In the afternoon sessions, Mary Vogel Lozinak involves the students in hands on projects such as collage, papermaking, T-shirt printing, 3D design and sculpy clay. Fridays Graduation Day includes an art show, awards ceremony and reception for parents, siblings, grandparents and friends. All supplies are included. Students provide their own lunch. A refrigerator is available and the building is air-conditioned. This is the 15th year to run this successful program. Both instructors are professional artists with State Police and Child Abuse Clearances. To register, call Jo Ann at 610-279-1008, or register on-line at www.gnal.org.

Health

Dresher Physical Therapy is hosting an interactive seminar discussing its Golf Assessment Progam April 30 from 10 a.m. to noon at Dresher Physical Therapy, 1075 Virginia Drive, Suite 200, Fort Washington. Physical therapist Chris Miller, certified through the Titleist Performance Institute, will discuss why your body may be the most important piece of golf equipment you invest in and how this can drastically improve your game. $10 in advance; $15 at the door. Call 215-619-4545 to reserve your spot.

The Chestnut Hill Center for Enrichment, Center on the Hill and Chestnut Hill Hospital will host a Senior Health and Resource Fair April 14 from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. at Chestnut Hill Presbyterian Church, 8855 Germantown Ave. The event is free. For more information, call 215-248-0180 or e-mail chseniors@cavtel.net.

The Ambler Senior Adult Activities Center is hosting Help Yourself to Health, a new six-week workshop for older adults with ongoing health conditions such as arthritis, diabetes, high blood pressure, anxiety, heart disease and others. The free workshop will take place at the Ambler Senior Adult Activities Center, 45 Forest Ave. on six Thursdays, May 12 through June 16 from 9:30 a.m. to noon. Although there is no charge to participate, registration is required. To register, call 215-619-8863.

The Ambler Senior Adult Activities Center is sponsoring an eight-week program called A Matter of Balance: Managing Concerns About Falls. Presented by the Montgomery County Health Department, this workshop will be held on Tuesdays, May 3 to June 21 from 10 a.m. to noon at the Ambler Center, 45 Forest Ave. If you pre-register by April 27, the fee is only $5! Registration at the first class is $10. (Checks should be payable to SAAC and will benefit our Meals on Wheels program that serves homebound seniors.) A workbook will be provided and refreshments will be served. Call 215-619-8863 to register or for more information.

Fort Washington Wellness Center classes are ongoing. There are several offered during lunch or right after work, for your convenience: Boot Camp from noon to 1 p.m. on Monday; Zumba is MWF from 11 a.m. to noon and Friday at 4 p.m.; there are 25 cycling classes; Ashtanga and Vinyasana Yoga and Pilates; and a group Womens Strength Training class M-F from 10 to 11 a.m. Questions, call Cathy DeMarco at 215-641-1245.

Following the success of other local area programs, Impact Sports and Upper Dublin Parks and Recreation are delighted to team up again to offer a spring program for the 2011 season! Upper Dublin area children ages 3-5 years old can attend a Sports Program featuring their favorite sports games; soccer, rugby, hockey, track and field, basketball, and more. The program will start on April 27 and run through June 1. Cost for the program is $85 for the six weeks. The classes will be running 12- 1 p.m.; 1- 2 p.m.; 2- 3 p.m. For more info or to register, call Upper Dublin Township on 215 643 1600 or visit their website a http://www.upperdublin.net.

Spring Aquatic Programs  UDHS Pool:

-Summer is just around the corner  Community Aquatic Programs at the UDHS Pool can help get you into shape! Programs begin in March; preregistration is required.

 Shallow Water Aerobics  Two 5-week programs, Wednesday nights, 8-8:45 p.m., $40R/$50NR.

 Adult Swim Instructions  Two 5-week programs, Wednesday nights, 7-8 p.m., $50R/$60NR

-Open Rec Swims are fun for the whole family! Come out on Fridays from 7-9 p.m. or Saturdays from 1-4 p.m. and enjoy use of the pool and diving area. Fridays are offered through June 17; Saturdays are offered March 12-May 21.

-Join a growing group of adult lap swimmers and water walkers. Lanes are set aside evenings and weekends for use; lanes are shared. Monday  Thursday from 7:30-9:30 p.m.; Fridays from 7-9 p.m. and Saturdays (March 12-May 21) from 1-4 p.m.

-Private Swimming & Diving Lessons for ages 3-adult are offered at the UDHS Pool through a partnership with the Upper Dublin Aquatic Club (UDAC). Visit the UDAC website for more information, www.udac.us, and click the link to UDHS Private Lessons.

-Looking for local programs for US Masters Swimming (adults) or Water Polo (all ages)? UDAC and UDSD are working together to develop programs that will be offered at the UDHS Pool. Add your name to Interest Lists by emailing slohoefer@upperdublin.net. emails will be sent about clinics and program start dates.

Questions about Community Aquatic Programs at the UDHS Pool, group use of the pool or pool rental? Contact Susan Lohoefer, Facility & Community Affairs Manager at slohoefer@upperdublin.net or call 215-643-8800 x8994.

SilverSneakers Fitness Program. The Healthyways SilverSneakers Fitness Program is a result-oriented program that enables older adults to take charge of their health. The program is an innovative blend of physical activity, healthy lifestyle and socially oriented programing. Members of the program are eligible for a free YMCA membership, with use of the pool and exercise equipment, along with customized classes designed for older adults who want to improve their strength, flexibility, balance and endurance. If you are a subscriber to Independence Blue Cross (Personal Choice 65 PPO) or Keystone 65 HMO, Bravo Health, or Health Options Programs (HOP), call the Ambler Area YMCA, 215-628-9950 or Hatboro Area YMCA, 215-674-4545. You can also visit www.silversneakers.com.

Zumba Fitness offers Zumba dance/fitness classes at Academy of Dance and Music/BBAD Studio located at 1524 DeKalb Pike in Blue Bell (behind Sherwin Williams). Classes are offered three times a week: Tuesdays at 6 p.m., Thursdays at 6:30 p.m. and Saturdays at 8 a.m. For a free trial pass for your first class, email us at info@danceandmusic.biz or call 610-277-2557. For more info, visit our site at www.academyofdanceandmusic.org.

Chestnut Hill Health Systems presents the following Health Education Programs:

FITNESS CLASSES

Golden Yoga: A Breathing, Stretching and Relaxation Class. Fridays, 2:30-3:30 p.m. Lea Auditorium, Chestnut Hill Hospital, 8835 Germantown Ave. Registration for four classes at a time required. Golden Yoga is Classical Yoga, adapted by the SKY Foundation, to accommodate those who have difficulty getting up and down from the floor. The program includes postures, breathing, relaxation and meditation techniques, all performed while sitting in a chair and standing. Registration required. Call 215-247-3029. Cost: $20 for 4 classes per month.

Tai Chi: Tuesdays & Thursdays, 8:30  9:30 a.m. Springfield Residence, 8601 Stenton Ave. Classes, for the novice or beginner/intermediate student, are designed to improve balance, power, posture, coordination, flexibility and mental focus. Slow, gentle movements are modified to most everyones abilities. For more information or to sign up for a free introductory class, call 215-882-2804. Cost: $8 per class/paid monthly.

SUPPORT GROUPS

Weight Loss Surgery Support Group: Fourth Wednesday of the month, 7-8 p.m. Williams Conference Room, Chestnut Hill Hospital, 8835 Germantown Ave., Philadelphia. Join us for a monthly get-together where well share information for those interested in weight loss surgery, learn from guest speakers discussing current news on issues including lifestyle modification, nutrition and exercise and provide ongoing support for those who have completed surgery. Registration required. Call 215-753-2000.

Breast Cancer Networking Group: Fourth Tuesday of the month 5:30  7 p.m. Williams Conference Room, Chestnut Hill Hospital, 8835 Germantown Ave., Philadelphia. A free, confidential support group for women living with a diagnosis of breast cancer designed to provide a forum for sharing information, feelings and concerns associated with breast cancer. Facilitated by Tish Wakefield, LCSW, Oncology Social Worker. Registration required. To register or for more information, call 215-248-8047.

New Moms Support Groups Tuesdays 10:30 a.m.  12 p.m.; contact Jeanine ORourke, MSW or 2:30  4 p.m.; contact Susan Schack, Ph.D Volunteer Conference Room, Chestnut Hill Hospital, 8835 Germantown Ave. The Center for Postpartum Depression at Chestnut Hill Hospital is pleased to offer two new support groups to support new moms. Both groups will be run by experienced mental health professionals who really get it when it comes to new motherhood and juggling relationships, extended family, work/family balance and self-care. If you are experiencing new mom challenges that often heighten anxiety and involve hormonally driven depression, join us for an informative and supportive forum to connect with other moms. Infants are welcome. $30 per session (flexible based on need). Registration is required. Call Dr. Schack, 646-265-2484, or Ms. ORourke, 215-206-2931.

Man to Man Prostate Cancer Support Group Third Thursday of the month 8-9 a.m. Williams Conference Room, Chestnut Hill Hospital, 8835 Germantown Ave. A networking group for men diagnosed with prostate cancer designed to provide education, support and encouragement. Spouses and partners welcome. Harry M. Baer, MD, Chief, Urology Division, will host Ask the Doctor. Registration required. Call 215-248-8325.

Contact the Senior Center by phone 215-248-0180 or email (chseniors@cavtel.net) with your questions about these programs or any of our on-going activities and classes.

Holy Redeemer HomeCare and Hospice seeks compassionate and emotionally mature volunteers to provide support to local hospice patients and their families in Bucks, Montgomery and Philadelphia counties. Volunteers may also assist with pet therapy and administrative work within the hospice department and are requested to have daytime availability. Hospice patient care volunteers visit with patients in their homes or nursing facilities once a week for two to three hours. They provide emotional support and companionship to patients and family members, assist with errands or provide respite for caregivers. Bereavement volunteers support the families of hospice patients following the loss of a loved one, while administrative volunteers assist with typing, mailings and/or filing. Hospice care workers provide a great service to families and loved ones of hospice patients. Many volunteers also report a great deal of personal satisfaction as a result of their services. Patient care and bereavement volunteers complete an application and attend an 18-hour volunteer training program that covers the medical, psychological and spiritual aspects of hospice volunteering. Day and evening training programs are offered. To sign up for volunteer opportunities in Pennsylvania, contact Holy Redeemer Volunteer Coordinator Jean Francis at 215-698-3737 or email jfrancis@holyredeemer.com.

Librarytalk

Upper Dublin Public Library, 805 Loch Alsh Avenue, Ft. Washington, 215-628-8744

www.upperdublinlibrary.org

APRIL CHILDRENS PROGRAMS:

Storytimes: Please register in the library.

o Wee Ones: 0 to 23 months Thursdays and Fridays 10:30 to 10:50 a.m.

o Tiny Tots: age 2. Wednesdays 10:30 to 10:50 a.m. and Fridays 11 to 11:20 a.m.

o Jr. Book Lovers: ages 3 to 6. Tuesdays 10:30 to 11 a.m.

o Bedtime Storytimes: 7 to 7:30 p.m. April 20 and 27. Wear your jammies, bring your teddy & hear Miss Barbara read bedtime stories! For ages 3 to 6.

APRIL TEEN PROGRAMS:

North Hills Library Teens April 28 from 4 to 6 p.m. Movie Matinee

APRIL UDPL ADULT PROGRAMS:

NEW! ESL Conversation Group. Tuesdays from 7 to 8 p.m. Interested in practicing your English in a safe and caring environment? Come to our conversation group and improve your skills! Please register with Kay Klocko at 215-628-8744 or kklocko@mclinc.org.

One-on-One Computer Mentoring. Get personalized assistance from experienced computer volunteers! Sign-up for a one-hour session. Limit one session per month. Please register  contact info above.

Book Groups Please register with Kay Klocko 215-628-8744.

o Daytimers: April 21 at 1:30 p.m. Tired of book groups where you all read the same book? Read any fiction or non-fiction book on this months theme: Explorers. Please register.

Meetings:

Annual Meeting of the Friends of UDPL: April 14 at 1 p.m.

Board of Directors: April 20 at 7 p.m.

Blue Bell Library www.wvpl.org Upcoming Events: The Wissahickon Valley Public Library, 650 Skippack Pike (Route 73) in Blue Bell, is diagonally across from the Blue Bell Inn. Call 215-643-1320 or visit their website at www.wvpl.org.

For children and teens at Blue Bell:

* Story times with guitar music by Miss Michelle, the singing librarian.

* Mondays at 10:30 a.m. for all ages.

* Wednesdays at 4:30 p.m. for all ages.

* Fridays at 10:30 a.m. for all ages.

* Family Movies, new releases, second Saturdays of the month at 1:30 p.m.

* May 14  Despicable Me

* June 11  Alpha and Omega

* Special Events

* April  watch for date of spring/Easter events

* April 14 at 4:30 p.m.  Junior Lego Club for children ages 3 through 5. Parents and caregivers need to stay with children.

* April 14 at 7 p.m.  Jeopardy for ages 11 to 18. Test your book and library knowledge for prizes. Sign up to be a contestant. No sign up to be in the audience. Snacks provided.

* April 16 at 1 p.m.  Adult Mystery Book Group discussing The Beekeepers Apprentice by Laurie King.

* April 16 at 1:30 p.m.  Childrens event for One Book, Every Young Child celebration. Story and craft for book Whose Shoes?

* April 19 at 7 p.m. and April 26 at 1:30 p.m.- Adult book group discusses The Professor and the Madman by Simon Winchester. Group led by Adam Button.

* April 30 through May 3  Friends book sale with about 10,000 items for sale for children, teens and adults.

* May  sign up for Science in the Summer

* June  sign up for Enrichment Programs for Elementary-Age children

* June  sign up for Summer Reading, all ages

For adults at Blue Bell:

* Daytime Book Discussion Group  fourth Tuesday, Jan  April at 1:30 p.m.

* April 26  The Professor and the Madman by Simon Winchester

* Night-time Book Discussion Group  third Tuesday of each month at 7 p.m.

o April 19  The Professor and the Madman by Simon Winchester

* Art Series with Dr. Sheldon Weintraub, docent at The Barnes and speaker at local colleges

o April 27 at 2 p.m. The Art of Looking at Art-Is She Nude or Is She Naked?

*Mystery Book Discussion Group, third Saturday of the month at 1 p.m.; new mystery theme each month; www.wvpl.org/programs

* Yoga on Mondays at 1:30 p.m. $20 for eight classes; $5 per drop-in class.

* Tai Chi on Mondays at 3 p.m. with Dr. Kurt Findeisen. $20 for eight classes; $5 per drop in class.

* Philadelphia Museum of Art presents class on their Marc Chagall exhibit, April 13 at 2 p.m.

* Giant Book Sale, April 29  May 3

o Starts with almost 10,000 items for children and adults!

o Held during library hours.

o Preview for members of the Friends of the Library, April 28 at 7 p.m.

o Join the Friends and attend the preview sale. Modest fee to join.

* Blooms at Blue Bell Gardening Series

o May 11 at 1 p.m.  Summer Bulbs by PA Horticultural Society

* Knitting group Mondays and Wednesdays at 10 a.m. Work on your project or observe and learn. The groups continue year-round in the community room.

* Socrates Cafe discussion group every Monday at 7 p.m. You pick the topic to discuss each week. No sign-up, nothing to read.

* Bridge every Friday at 12:30 p.m. New players welcome.

* Mah Jong every Wednesday at 1 p.m. New players welcome.

*Chess every Wednesday at 7p.m. for adults and teens 14 and older.

* Movie Matinee showing recent releases every Thursday at 2 p.m. April 14: Maos Last Dancer; April 21: Welcome to the Rileys; April 28: Conviction; May 5: Inception; May 12: Inside Job; May 19 The Kings Speech; May 26 The Fighter; June 2 Rabbit Hole; June 9 Black Swan; June 16 127 Hours

* Ongoing like-new, year-round book sale for adults & children during library hours

* Library opening at 10 a.m. Monday through Saturday!

Ambler Library, a branch of the Wissahickon Valley Public Library, 209 Race St., 215-646-1072. www.wvpl.org. All the following events occur at the Ambler Library.

* Story times with guitar music by Miss Michelle, the singing librarian.

* Tuesdays at 10:30 a.m. for all ages.

* Thursdays at 4:30 p.m. for all ages.

* For adults:

* Beading Group meets the first and third Monday of every month at 1 p.m. Work on your own projects or come to watch and learn.

* Free Family History Lookup with Connie Briggs. Email Connie for an appointment at the Ambler Library. conniebriggs@comcast.net

* Special Events:

* April 14 at 1:30 p.m.  Book Group discusses Skeletons at the Feast by Chris Bohjalian.

* April 19 at 7 p.m.  Travel to Paris with world traveler Harry Balin. Tea and scones at 6:30 p.m.

* April 21 at 7 p.m.  Art with Sara for children in fourth through seventh grades.

*May 2 at 6:30 p.m.  Discuss the movie Lone Star with Temple Professor Lisa Hawkins. Watch the movie ahead of time.

*May 10  Robert Capucci discusses Art into Fashion. Tea and scones served at 6:30 p.m. Program at 7 p.m.

*May 12 at 1:30p.m.  Book Group discusses The Imperfectionists by Tom Rachman.

*May 17  Tour the gardens of Devon and Southwest England with Lois McMullen. Tea and Scones at 6:30 p.m. Program at 7 p.m.

*June 13 at 6:30 p.m.  Discuss the movie Blade Runner with Temple Professor Lisa Hawkins. Watch the movie ahead of time.

Meetings and Lectures

The Unisys Blue Bell Retiree Group will meet in the Church on the Mall in the Plymouth Meeting Mall April 14 at 1:30 p.m. Kathy Sacket Young, director/trainer with the North Penn YMCA, will speak on Keeping Fit in Retirement. For more information, contact Membership Committee Chairperson Jerry Feldscher at 610-275-3538 or President Al Rollin at 215-368-4833.

The next FWBA meeting will be April 28 at the Hilton Garden Inn Fort Washington. Networking begins at 11:30 a.m.; meeting from noon to 1 p.m. Leon Singletary, Principal, First Contact HR and FWBA Executive Board, will present: Social Media: How to Use It To Get More Business. Lunch is provided courtesy of the Hilton Garden Inn Fort Washington. Members are welcome to bring a guest. An RSVP is requested by return email or 215-628-0313.

Big Brothers Big Sisters Southeastern PA is hosting a information sessions over the next few weeks on how to become a Big Brother. The information sessions will take place: April 16 at noon, April 19 at 8 a.m. and April 28 at 6 p.m. All sessions will be held at the groups Norristown Office,t 530 DeKalb St., Norristown. For more information, call 610-277-2200.

The North Penn Chapter of the Institute of Management Accountants (IMA) normally meets on the third Tuesday of each month from now until May. Meetings are held at the William Penn Inn on Route 202 and Sumneytown Pike, Upper Gwynedd, PA. Social hour starts at 5:30 p.m., dinner is served at 6:30 p.m., and the technical program begins at 7 p.m. Cost with reservation is $28 for members. Members without reservations and guests pay $30. Students with reservations pay $15. Reservations may be made by noon on the Monday preceding the meeting by phoning 215-371-1854 or emailing the reservation to northpennima@yahoo.com northpennima@yahoo.com. Information about the North Penn Chapter is available at http://northpenn.imanet.org/.

LeTip, a professional organization of men and women who are dedicated to the highest standards of competence and service meets every Tuesday at Cedar Brook Country Club, 180 Penllyn Pike, Blue Bell at 7 a.m. -meeting officially starts at 7:16 a.m. and ends at 8:31 a.m. Our purpose is the exchange of business tips, leads, and referrals. Each business category is represented by one member and conflicts of interest are disallowed. Guests are welcome to visit any of our breakfast meetings.

Every third Thursday of month, Sunrise Assisted Living of Blue Bell (795 Penllyn Pike, Blue Bell, PA 19422, 215-619-2777) serves as a satellite site to 148th Legislative district PA congressman Mike Gerber from 10 a.m. to noon. Stop by for help needed with things such as disability placards and license plates, vehicle registration, utilities issues, birth/death certificates,property tax/rent rebates, etc. Notary services arranged by appointment.

The Eastern Montgomery County Chamber of Commerce is an action-oriented organization dedicated to promoting its members and the economic health of eastern Montgomery county. The Chamber is committed to serving as a catalyst by uniting business, community agencies, government and education to make our county a great place to live and work. For information, call 215-887-5122 or visit www.emccc.org.

Do you have a fear of public speaking? Blue Bell Toastmasters Club can help. We meet from 7 to 9 p.m., on the second and fourth Tuesday at the Marriott Courtyard, located on Route 202, directly across from the Montgomeryville Mall. Learn how to improve communication and leadership skills in a friendly and supportive environment. Guests are welcome. Admission fee: $5. For more info, visit www.bbtoast.org.

The PennSuburban Chamber of Commerce will hold the following meetings (for reservations to any of the following, email info@PennSuburban.org)

-Breakfast News Network, 7:30-8:45 a.m. at Normandy Farm Hotel (1401 Morris Road, Blue Bell, PA 19422) $15 members, includes full buffet breakfast. Join us for a networking program at Normandy Farm Hotel every Thursday morning for breakfast, business news, informative speakers, and plenty of networking. The cost includes a full breakfast buffet. Copies of the business cards will be made available to those who would like them.

The BNI, Fort Washington Chapter meets every Monday at The Hilton Garden Inn, 520 Pennsylvania Ave., Fort Washington for a networking meeting. Meetings are from 11:30 a.m. until 1 p.m. Visitors are welcome. The only cost to attend is the cost of your meal. For information or a reservation to attend, please call Luanne Cram at 215-947-7784, or visit our Internet site at: http://www.BNIDVR.Com and click on the menu item Find a Chapter.

For the past seven years, people have enjoyed participating in WVWAs Adopt-a-Tree program. Individuals can support the Association in its reforestation efforts by purchasing native trees to be planted. Supporters can plant their adopted tree or have WVWA volunteers will plant it. Trees cost $30 each. If you would like to volunteer or purchase a tree(s), please contact: Bob Adams at Bob@wvwa.org or call: 215-646-8866 for more information. Check www.WVWA.org for directions and maps.

Sustainable Upper Dublin, http://sustainableupperdublin.org, meets the first Thursday of each month at 6:30 p.m., at the Upper Dublin Township Building, 801 Loch Alsh Avenue, Fort Washington, PA 19034. Please send any questions to suec@sustainableupperdublin.org or call 610-996-6316. To learn more about Sustainable Upper Dublin, view or join the discussion at http://googlegroups.com/group/sustainableupperdublin.

Special Events

The Mattie N. Dixon Community Cupboard will hold its first nutrition class April 19 at 10 a.m. at the Community Cupboard, 150 N. Main St., Ambler. Lynne Sinclair, a nutritionist from Abington Memorial Hospital specializing in diabetic nutrition, will conduct the class. Topics will include healthy eating, beneficial foods, recipes, making meals with every day foods, and how to use unfamiliar produce. A healthy snack will be provided.The class is is open to all residents in Montgomery County.

The Historical Society of Fort Washington presents The History of Conshohocken April 19 at 8 p.m. at the Clifton House, 473 Bethlehem Pike, Fort Washington. Jack Coll will present an illustrated program on the history of the Borough of Conshohocken. Coll is a longtime resident of Conshohocken and a member of the Conshohocken Historical Society. He is co-author with his son, Brian, of the Arcadia Then and Now Series book Conshohocken. He has also done books Conshohocken and West Conshohocken Sports and Our Lady of Mt. Carmel Italian Feast. He has taken many photos for the Conshohocken Record and the Norristown Times Herald. This program is free. Refreshments will be served. For additional information, call 215-646-6065.

Taste of the White House Soiree featuring former White House Chef Walter Scheib will take place April 29 at 6 p.m. at Manufacturers Golf & Country Club in Fort Washington to celebrate HealthLinks 10th anniversary and honor its founders, the Eugene Jackson Family. The evening will heat up with a Chef Meet & Greet, followed by a specially selected presidential menu. Gala tickets are $150 per person. Proceeds benefit HealthLink, a free clinic providing compassionate, quality medical and dental care to uninsured, working adults in Bucks and Montgomery counties who fall in between the health care cracks. Go to http://tasteofthewhitehouse.charityhappenings.org to make reservations online or lend support through sponsorship. For event information, call 267-699-0124 or email jmarushak@healthlinkmedical.org.

The Wissahickon Valley Watershed Association will hold an open house at the Evans-Mumbower Mill April 17 from 1 to 4 p.m. The Mill is at the corner of Swedesford and Township Line Roads in Upper Gwynedd. The open house is free but donations are welcome. For more information, call 215-646-8866 o email info@wvwa.org.

The Eastern Montgomery County Chamber of Commerce will host Breakfast With Your County Commissioners and State Representatives April 21 from 8 to 9:30 a.m. at the Holiday Inn Fort Washington, 432 W. Pennasylvania Ave. Commissioners: James R. Matthews (Chairman), Joseph M. Hoeffel (Vice Chair), State Representatives: Todd Stephens (District 151) and Josh Shapiro (District 153). Register onlineat www.emccc.org. $10 for EMCCC member; $20 for non-members.

Upper Dublins Districtwide Allied Art Show will be held April 27 from 5:30 to 9 p.m. in the Upper Dublin High School Athletic Complex.

The Rev. Alfred Muli, chaplain at Fort Washington Estates, will be the featured speaker at the Kiwanis sponsored breakfast observing the National Day of Prayer May 5 at 7 a.m. at the William Penn Inn. The breakfast is open to the public ($15). Reservations can be made by calling 215-646-4356 or by emailing georgesaurman@Juno.com.

The Upper Dublin Shade Tree Commission invites people to participate in its spring bare root planting events, sponsored in part by Upper Dublin Parks & Recreation and Friends of Robbins Park. On April 9, zix trees will be planted at the Evelyn B. Wright Park & Community Pool, 401 Logan Ave., North Hills, at 9 a.m., followed by the planting of 10 trees at Sheeleigh Park, Loch Alsh Avenue and Douglas Street, Ambler, at 10:15 a.m. On April 29, students from Upper Dublin High School will join the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society to plant 16 trees in Robbins Park, Butler Pike and Meetinghouse Road, Ambler, to help launch the societys Million Trees campaign. This event will occur in conjunction with Temple Amblers EarthFest. Experienced tree-tenders are sought to assist the students. For more information,contact Ron Ayres at 215-653-0421 or 215-483-4348.

The Friends of the Wissahickon and the Wissahickon Valley Watershed Association are teaming up once again to clean the Wissahickon Creek from top to bottom April 30 from 9 a.m. to noon. This spring marks the 41st anniversary of Wissahickon Valley Watershed Associations annual Creek Clean Up, and the second year that FOW has teamed up with WVWA. Volunteers of all ages will clean the creek, the surrounding trails and the many tributaries of the Wissahickon Creek. Armed with bags, volunteers will be assigned to sections of the creek. Following the clean up, all volunteers are invited to WVWAs Talkin Trash picnic in Fort Washington State Park, with food provided by Whole Foods Market of North Wales. The pavilion is located on Mill Road in Flourtown. To help out in Montgomery County, all volunteers must be pre-assigned a section of the Wissahickon Creek to clean. Please contact Bob Adams, WVWA director of stewardship, at 215-646-8866 ext. 14 or bob@wvwa.org. To work with the Friends of the Wissahickon in Philadelphia, meet at the pavilion along Forbidden Drive, a short distance south of the intersection of Forbidden Drive and Northwestern Avenue. Limited parking is available along Northwestern Avenue and other nearby streets. Volunteers are encouraged to bike or carpool to the event. To participate, register at www.fow.org. Contact Kevin Groves with questions at 215-247-0417 ext. 105 or groves@fow.org.

Montgomery County Community Colleges International Club invites the community to the second annual International Festival April 20 from 5 to 9 p.m. at the Central Campus, 340 DeKalb Pike, Blue Bell. The rain date is April 26. The International Club will transform the outside quad area into multicultural celebration with various performances by dancers, singers and musicians. Artists will share their artwork at various display tables. Activities include games, raffles, Easter egg decorating and henna tattoos. Students will have samples of international cuisine at tables representing different countries and will serve food from various local ethnic restaurants. Throughout the evening, volunteers will accept donations and will raffle gift baskets and prizes to raise funds for Habitat for Humanity. Donations of food, international clothes and prizes are needed. Volunteers, including artists and performers, are welcome. For more information or to sponsor an activity, contact Gillian Nel, International Club president, at gnel9277@students.mc3.edu or 267-974-0163.

The Arts and Humanities Division at Montgomery County Community College is partnering with the Philadelphia Writers Conference to host Memoirs Matter: How Life Stories (Including Yours) Can Transform Your Relationship to Literature April 23 from 1 to 3 p.m. in Advanced Technology Center room 101, 340 DeKalb Pike, Blue Bell. The event is free and open to the public. In the first part of this two-hour seminar, professor and author Robert Waxler will explain how writing his two memoirs affected his life as well as his relationship to literature. In the second part, blogger and workshop leader Jerry Waxler will present a sequence of steps to help writers find their own story. For information, contact Dana Resente at dresente@mc3.edu.

The Maple Glen Garden Club will hold its fourth annual Plant Sale on May 7 from 8 to 11 a.m. Perennials, shrubs, vegetables and native plants grown by the club members will be sold. The club uses the plant sale proceeds to fund community projects, a college scholarship and community plantings. The sale will be held in the 500 block of Coach Road, Horsham, as part of a neighborhood garage sale. Plants will be sold at bargain prices. For more information, email MapleGlenGardenClub@gmail.com.

The Relay for Life Craft Show is looking for local crafters to participate in show, which will be May 21 from 11:30 a.m. to 3 p.m. on the Wissahickon High School track, 521 Houston Road, Ambler. There is a $10 entry fee, and 20 percent of sales are donated to the American Cancer Society. Participants will receive a 6-foot table under a tent. For information, contact Joanne at joannescoles@comcast.net or Mindy at mcamsilver@comcast.net.

Spring House Estates is hosting its annual book fair on April 18 from 4 to 7 p.m. and April 9 from 8:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. Included will be hardback and paperback used books. Spring House Estates is located at 728 Norristown Road, Lower Gwynedd.

The PennSuburban Chamber of Commerce will present the Penn Suburban/Hatfield Joint Business Card Exchange April 20 from 5 to 7 p.m. at Univest Bank Lansdale Area Financial Service Center, 120 Forty Foot Road, Hatfield. The event is free. To make reservations, visit PennSuburban.org/Events. Join Univest National Bank and Trust Co. for a spring-inspired Business Card Exchange at its newest office in the Hatfield Pointe Shopping Center. Come out and meet members of Univests executive management team while enjoying fine food and beverages.

13th Annual Community Reading Day Kick-off Breakfast Get Together April 26 from 8 to 9:30 a.m. at the North Wales Area Library, 233 Swartley St., North Wales. The event is free. To make reservations, visit PennSuburban.org/Events. For more information, contact the chamber office at 215-362-9200 or info@pennsuburban.org. Join presenting sponsor Verizon, chamber staff and fellow members for the Community Reading Day volunteer get together. The Community Reading Day program allows volunteers to read a designated book to second-grade students throughout 38 area public and private schools and present the book as a gift to each class. Even if you are not a volunteer, you are cordially invited to stop by to network, enjoy coffee and pastries.

Ambler Mennonite Church is hosting a Spring Craft Show and Flea Market May 21 from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. Rain date will be May 28. The community is invited to shop the great craft booths, find some gifts and deals, as well as enjoy home baked goods and tasty lunch specials. Childrens activities are planned. All vendors are encouraged to contact the church at 215-643-4876 or AmblerMennonite@verizon.net. Advertising, signage, customer parking and a shuttle to auxiliary parking at nearby lots for vendors will be provided. 10 foot by 10 foot spaces can be rented for $5 each and tables for an additional $5 each. All proceeds from space and table rentals go toward school kits for children around the world. The church is located at the corner of East Mt. Pleasant Avenue and North Spring Garden Street, Ambler.

The Wissahickon Valley Watershed Association presents The Life & Times of Aquatic Insects in the Wissahickon Creek April 16 from 1 to 3 p.m. Join WVWA for a hands-on program. RSVP required: www.wvwa.org or 215-646-8866. WVWA member fee: $5 per person / $15 per family. Non-WVWA member fee: $10 per person / $20 per family.

The photography exhibition Natures Palette by photo-artist Judy Miller will run March 18 to May 19 at the Art in the Storefront gallery, 41 E. Butler Pike, Ambler.

JPRN  Networking For People in Transition & People Who Can Help Them  Unemployment remains high. JPRN, the Jarrettown Professional Relationship Network can help. Are you trying to network your way to a new job? Do you have expertise or contacts that can help people in transition? Is your company or organization looking for people in the area? This is a free outreach program to support those seeking work, involve people with contacts and networking know how, and involve local companies. Meetings held monthly at Jarrettown United Methodist Church, Limekiln Pike.

Pennsylvanias Low-Income Home Energy Assistance (LIHEAP) grant program is now open for the 2010-11 heating season. Grants are based on income, family size, type of heating fuel and region. Additional information, such as specific income limits, and applications for LIHEAP grants are available online via the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania Access to Social Services (COMPASS) website at www.compass.state.pa.us. Applications are available at most public officals district offices, county assistance offices, local utility companies and community service agencies, such as Area Agencies on Aging or community action agencies.

Begin your holiday shopping at Upper Dublin Parks & Recreation! Entertainment books for 2011, Philadelphia North, are now on sale at $30 each. Regal/United Artists movie tickets are on sale for just $7.50 each, and tickets to the Adventure Aquarium, Baltimore Aquarium, and the Philadelphia Zoo are also available. Discounted ski vouchers to area mountains will be arriving in December; call 215-643-1600 x3443 for more information. Upper Dublin Parks & Recreation office hours are Monday through Friday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.

RSVP of Montgomery County and the Wissahickon Valley Public Library have partnered again to offer the public their popular free mock interview sessions. The mock interviews are conducted by RSVP volunteers who are retired professionals, some of whom were in hiring positions themselves. Packets of information which include a sample employment application and interviewing tips with mock interview questions are available at the library to pick up prior to a scheduled mock interview or will be sent via email once the interview is scheduled. To schedule your interview, please contact Janis Glusman at RSVP 610-834-1040, ext. 16. The library is also offering a free resume review service. Bring in your current resume and the professional reference staff will assist you with hints and tips on capturing your work history accurately.

Registration for Upper Dublin Parks & Recreation summer playgrounds, Camp B.I.G. and Small Folks, X-Zone, and sports camps has began. Register online at www.upperdublin.net/store, or at the UDP&R office, 801 Loch Alsh Avenue, Fort Washington. Call 215-643-1600 x3443 for more information.

Upper Dublin Parks & Recreation and Danielles Espresso Cafe presents Mornings at Mondaug Bark Park April 16 and May 21 from 8:30 to 10:30 a.m. Meet fellow dog lovers. These events include complimentary coffee, treats for people and pups and raffles/giveaways.

Upper Dublins Annual Spring Flea Market will be held June 4 from 8 a.m. to 1 p.m. Reserve a table, or come and shop. Tables are $15 for UD residents, $20 for non-residents. This successful event occurs rain or shine. Refreshments available. Call 215-643-1600 ext. 3443 to register for a table.

Regal movie tickets available for purchase at Upper Dublin Township Parks & Recreation. Reduced rate: $7.50 per ticket. Some restrictions apply. Call 215-643-1600 x3443.

Whitpain Township Parks & Recreation movie tickets $7.50 Regal Cinemas, United Artist & Edwards Cinemas on sale throughout the year Monday  Friday from 9 a.m.  4 p.m.

Whitpain Township Parks & Recreation Camp Sign-ups for Stony Creek Day Camp  Stony Creek Tracers and Park n Tots. Register on-line at www.whitpaintownship.org OrCome to Township Building with check or Visa MasterCard Monday  Friday from 9 a.m.  4 p.m. For additional information call 610.277-2400 ext. 374

Upper Dublin Parks & Recreation offers exciting new programs for the fall:

-Returning favorites include UK Elite Petite Soccer, Tiny Dancers, Kiddie Tennis, Fun-nastics, Messy Playtime, Little Chefs, and more. Babysitters Training will be offered in November and December. Continuing Adult Fitness Classes include Cardio Circuit, Core & More, Yoga, Boxing, and Adult G.Y.M. For more information call 215-643-1600 x3443. Register for programs online at www.upperdublin.net/store.

Music and Theater

The community is invited to a Cantors Concert April 16 at 8 p.m. Congregation Beth Or, 239 Welsh Road, Maple Glen. Listen and hum-along to the Yiddish, pop tunes and classical music performed by Congregation Beth Ors own Cantor David Green and his special guest, Cantor Irvin Bell, from Temple Beth Israel in Deerfield Beach, Fla. The cantors will be accompanied by Mark Sobol and his Klezmer musicians. Tickets are $18 in advance and $25 at the door. RSVP with payment to Barb Murtha, 239 Welsh Road, Maple Glen, PA 19002, or call 215-646-5806 ext. 220.

Gwynedd Friends Coffeehouse will host the Jameson Sisters May 14. Doors open at 7:30 pm, performance at 8:00 pm. Gwynedd Friends Coffeehouse is located at the corner of Rte. 202 & Sumneytown Pike, Gwynedd. $5 suggested donation. Light refreshment available at a modest cost. For further information, call 215-393-9576 or visit gwyneddmeeting.org/coffeehouse.html.

Celebrate patriotism through song with Gwynedd-Mercy Colleges choir, the Voices of Gwynedd, as it presents Hear America Singing April 15 at 8 p.m. The choir will perform song selections from all over the country, including Georgia on My Mind, New York State of Mind, and a medley including Philadelphia Freedom and Allentown. The performance will end with When the Saints Go Marching In to acknowledge the choirs upcoming tour in New Orleans. Hear America Singing will take place in the Julia Ball Auditorium, located in St. Bernard Hall. Parking is available in lots A, C and D. Admission is free.

The Choristers will present Anton Dvoraks Stabat Mater April 16 at 7:30 p.m. at Upper Dublin Lutheran Church in Ambler. The choir will be accompanied by a 41-piece orchestra. Tickets are $20 for adults, $15 for senior citizens, $10 for students and children are free. Tickets will be sold in advance or at the door. For more information, call 215-542-7871 or visit TheChoristers.org

Religious News

The Staircase Gallery at Or Hadash: A Reconstructionist Congregation in Fort Washington will feature the work of Emily Ennuat-Lustine. The artist will be showing paintings and graphics inspired by her own personal spiritual journey and quest for meaning. Some of the works to be shown have been inspired by Biblical Psalms and writings. Her work has been shown at Abington Art Center, Cheltenham Arts Center and Old City Gallery of Jewish Art among others. The exhibition is open Friday evenings starting Feb. 18 after Shabbat services. Gallery hours are: Mondays through Thursdays 10-4:30, Fridays 10-3 and following Shabbat Services and Sundays 10-1. The synagogue is located at 190 Camp Hill Road in Fort Washington. For additional information contact the synagogue office at 215-283-0276.

Reunions

St. Matthews High School Conshohocken Class of 1961 is looking for classmates. For details, contact Greg Marincola at 215-646-2239, 215-740-1296 or gregcola@comcast.net.

Olney High School Class of 1971 is Lloking for classmates for a 40th reunion Oct. 28. For details, contact Judy at ohsclassof71@yahoo.com or 215-870-7572.

Abington High School Class of 1961 is seeking classmates for a 50-year reunion to be held Oct. 14-15, 2011.Visit the website, www.abington61.com, for details or call 215-947-1779.

Overbrook High School class of January 1956 is having a 55 year reunion on May 22, 2011 at the Bala Golf Club in Philadelphia. For information please contact overbrookreunion56@comcast.net

Germantown High School Class Of January 1961 is looking for classmates for 50th year reunion to take place in May of 2011. Please contact: 215-362-9148, 856-577-0659 or samdelcomo@comcast.net

The June 1961 class of Germantown High School is holding their 50th reunion on May 15, which will be a brunch. For further details please contact Linda Dorfman Alten at lindaalten@yahoo.com or call 215-441-8411.

Support

New Life Presbyterian Church in Dresher, will host GriefShare, a special seminar and support group which will run on Monday evenings from 7 to 9 p.m., from March 7 through June 6. At each meeting there will be a DVD about the grief process, discussion and reference to a grief workbook. Preregistration is required to secure a place in the group and to purchase a GriefShare notebook (for a one-time fee of $15). The notebook goes along with the 13-week schedule covering such topics as: living with grief, the effects of grief, and stuck in grief. For more information or to register, call: Sandy Elder at 215-884-5149.

PUPS (People Understanding Parkinsons) A self-help group for those adjusting to a new diagnosis or dealing with the early stages of Parkinsons Disease. Meets fourth Tuesday of the month from 1 to 2:30 p.m., at Abington Health Center, Schilling Campus, Willowood Building, 2510 Maryland Road, Suite 251, Willow Grove. For more information or to RSVP, contact Lorna at 215-542-2931.

The North Penn Visiting Nurse Associations Meals on Wheels program is looking for volunteers to pack or deliver meals to the elderly and infirmed. Meals are packed and delivered mornings, Monday through Friday. You can volunteer for as many days per week or month as you would like. Packaging meals requires approximately 2-1/2 hours of your time each day and involves making sandwiches, packaging food into individual serving containers and packing coolers with the meals. Delivering meals requires approximately 1-1/2 hours of your time each day and involves loading coolers into your car and delivering a route of approximately 10 to 15 stops. The Meals on Wheels program is also in need of emergency, winter-weather volunteers to pack and deliver meals in bad weather. North Penn VNA is located at 51 Medical Campus Drive in Lansdale and delivers meals in the Lansdale, North Wales and Blue Bell areas. For more information or to volunteer, please call Bridget, North Penn VNA Meals on Wheels coordinator at 215-855-8296.

Elkins Park Area CHADD (Children and Adults with Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder) meets the first Tuesday of every month, 7- 8:30 p.m., at Einstein at Elkins Park Hospital in Elkins Park. For information on CHADD or ADHD, please see our website www.chadd.net/249 or call Claire Noyes at: 215-779-6656.

Center for Loss and Bereavement, 3847 Skippack Pike, Skippack (610-222-4110) www.bereavementcenter.org Offers professional counseling for individuals, couples, children and families dealing with issues of loss and bereavement. Six-week adult support groups: Newly forming young adult grief support group  every other Wednesday, 7  8:15 p.m. (free of charge); Monthly loss of child support  second Mondays, 7-8:15 p.m.; Six-week young loss of spouse/partner  Thursdays, 10-11:15 a.m.; Other groups scheduled as interest is shown for suicide loss support, adult loss of parent, motherless daughters, adult loss of sibling, coping with chronic illness and disability and mens loss of spouse. Nellos Corner Family Bereavement program offers peer grief support groups for ages 4 through teen and their caregivers  Every other Tuesday or Wednesday (free of charge) Local chapter of Parents of Murdered Children also meets at the Center. Registration required. Call for further information.

CHADD is a national organization for children & adults with Attention-Deficit/ Hyperactivity Disorder, providing education, advocacy and support for individuals and their families with AD/HD. Einstein at Elkins Park Hospital, 60 Township Line Road, Elkins Park, PA 19027, will host children & adults with Attention-Deficit/ Hyperactivity Disorder on the First Tuesday of each month 7  8:30 p.m. Free, no childcare provided.

The Jewish Federation of Greater Philadelphias Kehillah of Old York Road is sponsoring a free Caregiver Support Group for individuals who care for an elderly person with cognitive and/or physical impairments. The group meets at SarahCare Adult Day Care Center, 101 Washington Lane, Suite G-6, Jenkintown, Pa., on the first Wednesday of each month. Patty Rich,
September 20, 2018 Trump's Staff Overrides His Policies - They Are A Dangerous 'Resistance' Three recent publications claim that U.S. President Trump is not allowed to make policies, that his staff is sabotaging him as much as it can. An anti-Trump author at the Washington Post, Greg Miller, just released a new book about Trump. The Post prints an excerpt: The Apprentice book excerpt: At CIAs Russia House, growing alarm about 2016 election interference Trumps admiration for the leader of Russia was inexplicable and never wavered after taking office. He praised the Russian leader, congratulated him, defended him, pursued meetings with him, and fought virtually any policy or punitive measure that might displease him. A trained intelligence operative, Putin understood the power of playing to someones insecurities and ego. On cue, he reciprocated with frequent praise for the president he had sought to install in the White House. In phone conversations with Trump, Putin would whisper conspiratorially, telling the U.S. president that it wasnt their fault that they could not consummate the relationship that each had sought. Instead, Putin sought to reinforce Trumps belief that he was being undermined by a secret government cabal, a bureaucratic deep state. Its not us. We get it, Putin would tell Trump, according to White House aides. Its the subordinates fighting against our friendship. The Putin quote is probably genuine. But is it "playing to someone's insecurity and ego"? Or is it simply the truth? A few lines later the author confirms that Putin is right. When Britain's Prime Minister Theresa May asked Trump to support her ridiculous 'Novichok' claims, Trump's underlings set out to further sabotage the relations with Russia: During a weekend retreat at his Mar-a-Lago estate, Trumps advisers persuaded him to support a plan to expel 60 suspected Russian intelligence operatives from the United States, telling him that Washingtons move would be matched in magnitude by allies in Europe. Trump acquiesced, but his commitment unraveled on the trip back to Washington. Maybe we shouldnt do this, he said to deputy national security adviser Ricky L. Waddell during the short helicopter flight from Andrews Air Force Base to the White House on March 25. The expulsions were set to be announced the next day in coordination with allies in Europe  an international show of resolve  and Trump was balking. Late that evening, Waddell scrambled to pull together a Situation Room meeting to confer with other top advisers on how to salvage the plan. White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly, who called in on a secure phone line, said that he would phone Trump at his residence. Ill convince him, Kelly said. Kelly succeeded. But when the expulsions were announced, Trump erupted. He had expected France, Germany and other countries each to match the U.S. total, rather than for the cumulative response from Europe to be roughly equal to that of the United States. Trump worried that Putin would see him as the aggressor and accused aides of misleading him. Trump's aids did exactly what Putin lamented about. They sabotaged the personal relations between Trump and Putin by convincing him to expel a too high number of Russian embassy officials. North Korea complained when Secretary of State Pompeo pressed for immediate nuclear disarmament. The Singapore Statement, signed by Kim Jong Un and Trump, foresees this as only the third step of a larger process. Kim Jong Un, similar to Putin, expressed his dismay over Pompeo's demands, while expressing confidence in Trump himself. Also recently published was a book by Bob Woodward, which follows a similar theme as Miller's 'Apprentice': Jim Mattis Compared Trump to Fifth or Sixth Grader, Bob Woodward Says in Book Mr. Woodwards reporting adds another layer to a recurring theme in the Trump White House: frustrated aides who sometimes resort to extraordinary measures to thwart the presidents decisions  a phenomenon the author describes as an administrative coup detat. (Woodward's book was well received by the anti-Trump 'resistance'. But few mentioned that Woodward searched for, but did not find any evidence for the alleged Trump-Russia collusion.) The above book excerpts are confirmed by a quite ridiculous anonymous op-ed in the New York Times in which a senior officials in Trump's administration confirms that s/he and others sabotage Trump's policies: [W]e believe our first duty is to this country, and the president continues to act in a manner that is detrimental to the health of our republic. That is why many Trump appointees have vowed to do what we can to preserve our democratic institutions while thwarting Mr. Trumps more misguided impulses until he is out of office. The op-ed names two specific issues on which the staff sabotages Trump's initiatives: [We] are trying to do whats right even when Donald Trump wont. The result is a two-track presidency. Take foreign policy: In public and in private, President Trump shows a preference for autocrats and dictators, such as President Vladimir Putin of Russia and North Koreas leader, Kim Jong-un, and displays little genuine appreciation for the ties that bind us to allied, like-minded nations. Astute observers have noted, though, that the rest of the administration is operating on another track, one where countries like Russia are called out for meddling and punished accordingly, and where allies around the world are engaged as peers rather than ridiculed as rivals. On Russia, for instance, the president was reluctant to expel so many of Mr. Putins spies as punishment for the poisoning of a former Russian spy in Britain. He complained for weeks about senior staff members letting him get boxed into further confrontation with Russia, and he expressed frustration that the United States continued to impose sanctions on the country for its malign behavior. But his national security team knew better  such actions had to be taken, to hold Moscow accountable. This isnt the work of the so-called deep state. Its the work of the steady state. The deep state, the bureaucrats and policy minions who staff the White House and the government agencies, are actively subverting the elected president. They publicly brag about it. Trump campaigned for better relations with Russia. But as soon as he was sworn into office, an "administrative coup detat" happened and the policies reverted to the opposite. He said that he wanted the U.S. out of Syria and out of Afghanistan, but the "steady state" prevented that. Trump signed an agreement with North Korea that promises peace before disarmament. Then his staff went out and tried to turn it into the opposite. Trump is the elected president. It is his privilege and duty to determine the policies of his administration. Why is no public figure expressing concern about this subversion of democracy? How come no one protests? There are suggestions that Trump is only faking the discontent about his staff. That the effectively pursued policies are the ones he really wants. The three accounts above do not support that idea. This situation undermines Trump standing in international negotiations as nothing he signs can be taken for granted, unless his staff agrees to it. This sorry state of the state will also have repercussions in future elections. Why would anyone vote for Trump, or someone else, if an elected president is unable to enforce policies? Trump and his party pursue extreme right wing policies that I do not support at all. He might well have some dangerous impulses that could cause unforeseen damage. But is it really better to let these unaccountable policy operators override his choices? Should we trust certified hawks like Bolton, Pompeo or Mattis any more that him? Is war with Russia or North Korea preferable to peaceful relations? Posted by b on September 20, 2018 at 14:51 UTC | Permalink Comments
Morgan Hill Councilmember Rene Spring has consistently voted against development projects that he says threaten the agricultural integrity of the city. Its smart growth, he said.

He has often been in the minority, most recently opposing a Sept. 5 decision to seek approval of a proposed annexation of land to pave the way for construction of a private Catholic high school.

But the November electionwith the citys first district representatives and no incumbents running for Mayor in Districts D or Boffers Spring the opportunity to gain more smart growth allies.

Julie Hutcheson is running in District D against John Mckay and former councilmember Marilyn Librers. Spring is acting as Hutchesons campaign manager and said the two have been friends for many years, and she said she is against the revised southeast Morgan Hill annexation.

Spring said growth is a big issue on voters minds and believes his campaign for city council in 2016, running on a 1-percent growth platform, put pressure on the council to lower the rate of growth.

Although Spring would still like the current 2 percent annual growth rate to be lower, he credits his campaign for changing popular opinion. If someone like Julie Hutcheson wouldve been on the council, we would have won that vote, said Spring.

Hutcheson has a long history of advocating for environmental issues in Morgan Hill. Hutcheson advocated for an update to the citys growth control measure, which has been in place since 1977. The update resulted in Measure S, which passed in 2016 with an annual cap of 215 housing unitsa number the council can reduce each year.

When describing her background, Hutcheson said, One of the things I first tell everybody is a big part of that work has been around responsible growth, the opposite of sprawl.

Hutcheson said she would like to focus growth throughout the Monterey Street corridor. She believes this space could offer a good space for diversified housing and may allow for younger residents to stay in Morgan Hill.

A lot of folks move here because they like the look and feel, said Hutcheson. So how you grow is really important to them.

John Mckay, one of Hutchesons opponents in District D, has served as a city planning commissioner. Its obvious the community cares about the same basic things, said McKay. He believes the term urban sprawl is a catch phrase, and that the city does not suffer from it.

Where Spring and Hutcheson have fought against annexing land in the Southeast Quadrant, McKay said annexing the land may have given the city more control over the growth that may occur on those properties.

He said the group advocating for the annexation of the full Southeast Quadrant, which was denied by LAFCO in 2015, were also environmentalists, but with a different view of how to do that. We also want to preserve land, said McKay. Its two different approaches.

McKay said in a statement to the Times that he does not support the annexation of land unless absolutely necessary and that he would like to focus on increasing density within city limits before looking outside to grow.

Similar to Hutcheson, McKay hopes to continue to build along the Monterey corridor.

Spring has also publicly endorsed Yvonne Martinez-Beltran in District B. Beltran is a city planning commissioner. Her campaign website states, While I realize we cant preserve Morgan Hill the way it is or was, we can preserve the essence of Morgan Hill so our children and grandchildren can grow, live, work and play here, too.

Kenneth Murray, one of Martinez-Beltrans opponents in District B, told the Times he would like to focus on commercial growth as opposed to residential growth. Every time we have another resident, that has a negative impact on our city, said Murray.

Murray says he has the knowledge to bring jobs to Morgan Hill because of his background in the private sector. If elected, he hopes to see satellite tech offices open in Morgan Hill so residents dont have to commute to San Jose.

My focus on growth is about developing a comprehensive revenue plan for the city, said Murray. Growth for growths sake is not of interest to me.

Murray thinks Butterfield Boulevard would be a good location for more commercial use.

In the Morgan Hill mayors race, former councilmember Greg Sellers is running against current Councilmember Rich Constantine and Kirk Bertolet, who previously ran for mayor in 2016.

Constantine warned that the spike in growth in Morgan Hill in recent years was not due to the council permitting an abundance of projects, but rather remaining allotments being used by developers who were unable to complete projects during the 2008 financial crisis.

Constantine said he is focused on diversifying Morgan Hills tax space with commercial and industrial growth along with residential. He said ultimately there is nothing more the city can do to curb growth because Morgan Hill voters already voted to update and retain the growth control measure.

Constantine had been the only councilmember to vote against putting the measure on the 2016 ballot, because he felt that the councils 215 cap on residential units was not substantiated by data presented to the council. However, he urged the public to pass the measure.

When residents express concerns about growth, Constantine says he congratulates them because as voters they made sure Morgan Hill had a plan in place. He said candidates are not smart growth. The citizens are smart growth, he said.

Constantine said his worry now is that future councilmembers will feel pressure to change industrial zoning to residential in an effort to increase city revenue. He encouraged future councilmembers to think long term when making decisions.

You have to think past your term, said Constantine, but ultimately he believed at this point Morgan Hill is a well planned city when it comes to growth.

Bertolet publicly criticized Measure S as a candidate in 2016, and said he wanted a 0.5-percent increase in growth each year. Bertolet does not want to focus on residential growth and instead hopes to promote commercial growth if elected. He criticized Constantine and Sellers and said the two had shown too much support for growth throughout their public service.

If people are happy with the way Morgan Hill is growing for the last four to eight years, then vote for Sellers or Constantine, said Bertolet. If theyre not happy and they want someone to limit growth, then vote for me.

Sellers says smart growth is key, and he led the downtown revitalization task force before serving three terms on the city council.

Focusing on providing a variety of housing options for residents, Sellers said, is a priority for him. He hopes to fill development as much a possible within city limits and work with state agencies on what the government is mandating cities like Morgan Hill provide.

Sellers said growth has been an issue in Morgan Hill for 40 years and that it is important to get people on both sides of the issue sitting down together to come up with a plan. He said that as both a landowner and an environmentalist, he is in a unique position when it comes to approaching growth in Morgan Hill.

For me, its about coming up with a long-term plan that really preserves open space, not just saying no to growth, said Sellers. Theyre two very different things.
The first regional conference of general prosecutors and attorneys of African and Europe continued sessions for the third day on Thursday.

The conference is being held at Egypt's Red Sea resort of Sharm El-Sheikh.

Egypt's Prosecutor General Nabil Sadeq, and European Union Ambassador in Cairo Ivan Surkos, had opened the three-day event on Tuesday.

The gathering brings together lawyers and chief prosecutors across 24 African countries, three European states and six international organizations. Sessions focus on fighting smuggling, human trafficking and the exchange of information between international and regional authorities.

Cristina Albertin, Representative of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) Regional Office for the Middle East and North Africa, is scheduled to address today's session.

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A Cairo criminal court ordered the release on bail of the two sons of ousted Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak on Thursday, just five days after their arrest over charges of stock market manipulation, a judicial source has said.

The decision came after Alaa and Gamal Mubarak's defence team filed an appeal against their detention. They will each pay LE100,000 (approx. $5,500) on bail.

The pair faces charges of violating stock market and central bank regulations in order to make illegal profits through insider trading.

Five other men stand accused in the same case, including Yasser El Mallawany and Hassan Heikal, both respectively current and former board members at Egyptian investment bank EFG-Hermes.They will also be released on bail.

The case began in 2012 but Mubarak's two sons had been released on bail and banned from travel. The court has set 20 November as the date for the next session.

Alaa and Gamal Mubarak, along with their father, were sentenced in May 2015 to three years in prison following a conviction on corruption charges for embezzling millions of dollars of state funds intended to upgrade presidential palaces; rather the funds were diverted to renovate private family residencies.

The pair was freed five months later for their time already served.





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Egypt's President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi led earlier on Thursday the meeting of the Supreme Council of Police in Cairo where the latest security developments in Egypt were discussed, the Egyptian Presidency announced.

According to the Egyptian Presidency's statement El-Sisi discussed the security situation with the Minister of Interior Mohamed Tawfiq and leading figures of Egyptian police forces. This included the security situation in the country along with security and political developments in the region, as well the results of the war on terror and the fight against crime in general.

During the meeting, President Sisi asserted the necessity to continue implementing security plans and strategies that depend on pre-emptive strikes to terrorism and crime, and to achieve the security of citizens and the state all while remaining committed to law and human rights.

Sisi also expressed his appreciation to policemen and their efforts to maintain stability and achieve development in the country.

The Egyptian President also called for the ongoing coordination between the different security apparatuses and the Egyptian armed forces in order to continue achieving success in Sinai 2018 operations.

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A persistent team of individuals had a dream: More Michigan Tech faculty from underrepresented minorities, better retention of those faculty and something even more importanta change to a more inclusive campus culture.

Original efforts began with former Provost Leslie Lovett-Doust and a team of faculty who earned a $500,000 ADVANCE grant in 2008 from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to develop a recruitment program that would attract more women to Michigan Tech. Now, NSF has granted Michigan Tech Faculty Adrienne Minerick, Patricia Sotirin, Sonia Goltz, Andrew Storer and Audrey Mayer $1 million to continue the work. The three-year grant will focus on four initiatives:

The ongoing AMP-UP program. More than 70 faculty and staff have already signed on as AMP-UP volunteers.

An adaptation of the University of Michigans STRIDE faculty development program.

Adaptation of North Dakota State Universitys FORWARD Allies and Advocates

An adaptation of the Department Enhancement Program at Iowa State University.

ADVANCE Matrix Process for University Programs

Anita Quinn, a policy and planning analyst in the Provosts office, coordinated the many moving parts of the AMP-UP pilot, helping them work together and keep moving steadily toward their goal.

This is not just about high-level initiatives, says Quinn. It includes work at the ground-level, collecting and analyzing data and making sure that initiatives are actually implemented.

The team created AMP-UP (ADVANCE Matrix Process for University Programs), a data-driven, continuous improvement process to improve faculty retention, satisfaction and career progress. AMP-UP addressed scholarship and research dynamics, unit climate and dual career issues. A LEAN-inspired process, AMP-UP helped to design programs to intervene and correct issues and added the framework for continuous improvement.

Adrienne Minerick, dean of the School of Technology, explains how the new ADVANCE grant will grow from the AMP-UP pilot and draw from the strengths of other University programs.

Sonia Goltz, a professor of organizational behavior in Michigan Techs School of Business and Economics, adds: AMP-UP was instrumental to understanding key career obstacles on campus as well as what programs could be used to address those problems. So, the three additional programs that are being adapted from other institutions were chosen based on the AMP-UP discussions that occurred in the past few years. The application of continuous improvement has been done at other universities, but has rarely been done in the academic arm.

NSF has granted Audrey Mayer, Sonia Goltz, Patricia Sotirin, Adrienne Minerick and Andrew Storer $1 million to fund programs that improve faculty diversity.

Making Programs Unique to Michigan Tech

Michigan Tech will rework the programs to fit our Universitys culture, says Patricia Sotirin, professor of communications in the Department of Humanities. We are inspired by, but not bound to, the work of other ADVANCE teams, Sotirin explains. We look forward to the collaborative development of programs that are responsive to Techs uniqueness and that open new possibilities for campus change, equity and success.

Examples of the programs include Techs adaptation of the suite of STRIDE faculty development programs, which is already underway with the early career management committees piloted and institutionalized at Michigan Tech. Future efforts will focus on associate professors to address retention after tenure. FORWARD Allies and Advocates uses restorative justice and broad engagement to change university culture. It does this by training men as allies and advocates who can influence from within the faculty.

Andrew Storer, dean of the School of Forest Resources and Environmental Science, is an outspoken advocate for gender equity.

"This grant provides a great opportunity to realize an enduring return on the investments we make in faculty with diverse backgrounds and perspectives. The project represents a challenge to everyone at Michigan Tech to undertake changes in culture so that our opportunities for career progression represents the values, standards and expectations of this institution, rather than the standards and expectations that have been passed down through generations and convey an archaic image of academia." Andrew Storer



Those changes will be grounded in data. Adaptation of Iowa States ADVANCE Department Enhancement Program will include analysis of factors affecting productivity, promotion and retention of faculty, based on a database already developed by AMP-UP and a University-wide campus climate survey.

A primary focus of this analysis will be factors affecting the climate and advancement for women and under-represented minorities, Minerick says. Analysis results and strategies will be shared with faculty and chairs to assist them in implementing action plans. AMP-UP will also coordinate a year-long professional development program adapted from Iowa States orientation program, to help our chairs become change leaders, she explains.

Path to Success

Minerick has a personal interest in this work. From a single-parent, low-income family herself, she managed to build a successful academic career.

Most of my friends did not, she says. Structures that impede the success of certain individuals disturbs me to my core.

Audrey Mayer, associate professor of ecology and environmental policy in the School of Forest Resources and Environmental Science, assistant to the provost for diversity, equity and inclusion, observes that its personal for many on campus. Policies and biases that impact peoples families, health, career trajectory and behavior can disproportionately affect people who do not fit the dominant culture.

So, what will success look like?

We hope to see measurable increases in retention of women, under-represented minorities and intersectional faculty at Michigan Tech within the next 3 years, Minerick says. Ultimately, we aim to evolve our STEM culture to embrace different perspectives and experiences such that all individuals find this a place to thrive in their careers.

ADVANCE The goal of the National Science Foundation's (NSF) ADVANCE program is an integral part of the NSF's strategy to broaden participation in the STEM workforce and advance the status of women/underrepresented faculty in academic science and engineering. Since 2001, the NSF has invested over $270 million to support ADVANCE projects at more than 100 institutions of higher education and STEM-related not-for-profit organizations in 41 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico.

Michigan Technological University is a public research university founded in 1885 in Houghton, Michigan, and is home to more than 7,000 students from 55 countries around the world. Consistently ranked among the best universities in the country for return on investment, the University offers more than 125 undergraduate and graduate degree programs in science and technology, engineering, computing, forestry, business and economics, health professions, humanities, mathematics, social sciences, and the arts. The rural campus is situated just miles from Lake Superior in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, offering year-round opportunities for outdoor adventure.
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 []
Ezzat Ibrahim spoke with Egypts permanent representative to the UN, Ambassador Mohamed Idris, about Egypts participation in the 73rd Session of the UN General Assembly and President Abdel-Fattah Al-Sisis agenda

The 73rd Session of the UN General Assembly began on Tuesday this week, next Tuesday seeing the beginning of the high-level general debate when heads of country delegations deliver their statements in front of the General Assembly.

This years session is headed Making the United Nations Relevant to all People: Global Leadership and Shared Responsibilities for Peaceful, Equitable and Sustainable Societies, and Egypts delegation is finalising arrangements for President Abdel-Fattah Al-Sisis meetings with various international leaders and officials, including the UN secretary-general, the president of the World Bank, the leaders of Arab, African, Asian and Western countries, the heads of major US companies and other influential US figures.

Including presenting its take on sustainable development, combating terrorism and coping with climate change, Egypts agenda for the UN meetings is a particular full one, and it is explored in comments made by Egypts permanent representative to the UN, Ambassador Mohamed Idris, below.

What are the most important meetings to be held on the sidelines of the high-level segment of the 73rd Session of the UN General Assembly?

The Nelson Mandela Peace Summit will be held on 24 September, marking the centennial of the birth of the former South African leader with the participation of many world leaders.

A political declaration will be adopted, and Egypts statement at the event will highlight Mandelas journey and his historic role in national liberation movements, the anti-apartheid movement and the development of the African nations.

A high-level meeting on funding the UN 2030 Development Agenda will be held upon the invitation of the UN secretary-general on 24 September to launch the secretary-generals strategy on funding and mobilising the support needed to close the funding gap if the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are to be achieved.

The meeting will also be attended by representatives from the private sector, among them Microsoft founder Bill Gates.

Will Egypt be a key player in this session?

Egypt will present its current national efforts to mobilise domestic resources to fund development through its economic reform programme, and it will confirm the need for consolidating international efforts to assist developing countries in achieving the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

This event comes at a time when international efforts are underway to carry out the Addis Ababa Agenda for Funding Development and to ensure the availability of the needed resources to implement the UN 2030 Agenda.

Some have said that Egypt is particularly involved in the UN 2030 Youth Strategy.

Egypt is participating in a high-level event hosted by the UN envoy for youth and the UN secretary-general to launch the UN 2030 Youth Strategy next Monday.

Egypt is basing its participation in this important event on its achievements in the 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda, which is consistent with the importance Egypt attaches to the role and the effective participation of young people in all aspects of economic, social and political life. Egypt also hosts the World Youth Forum in November every year, which is a global platform to promote dialogue and exchange experiences.

Egypt is currently heading the G-77, giving it a more active role in coordinating activities among UN member states.

Since Egypt is the president of the G-77 for 2018, President Abdel-Fattah Al-Sisi will give the inaugural address of the G-77 plus China ministerial meeting on 27 September, which will be attended by the UN secretary-general.

Egypt will also participate in a high-level dialogue with the secretary-general on Implementing the Paris Agreement on Climate Change and the 24th Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) on 24 September, since it heads the G-77 negotiations on the outcomes of the UNFCCC to activate and implement the Paris Agreement on Climate Change, especially the articles relating to funding and adaptation.

Fighting terrorism is now a global focus, and here are many activities in this session of the UN General Assembly to coordinate international efforts in this regard. What are the key meetings and what issues will Egypt focus on?

We are participating in the Ninth Session of the Global Counter-Terrorism Forum (GCTF) on 26 September, which is the annual meeting of ministers concerned in New York.

This year the focus is on foreign terrorist combatants, the relationship between terrorism and organised crime, and prosecuting those accused of terrorism.

Egypt was one of the 30 founding states of the GCTF in 2011, and it currently chairs one of five working groups focused on building the capability of East African countries in counter-terrorism.

Egypt will brief the meeting on the main accomplishments of this working group. Other GCTF working groups address countering violent extremism, foreign terrorist fighters, criminal justice and the rule of law, and building the capability of West African states.

Have there been developments on an international code of conduct on counter-terrorism?

Kazakhstan will host a meeting on the sidelines of the UN high-level meetings to adopt an international code of conduct on counter-terrorism, which has been agreed on after months of negotiations.

It includes the main principles countries must abide by as part of their counter-terrorism efforts in the form of a political declaration that it is optional for countries to join.

The declaration includes the principles of abiding by international law in counter-terrorism, ending all funding and all forms of support of terrorism, confronting terrorist ideology and messages, improving counter-terrorism cooperation among countries, and banning the use of IT and communication, including the Internet, for terrorist purposes.

Egypt was one of the first countries that called for the setting up of an office in the UN secretariat to combat terrorism during the fifth periodic review of the UN Global Strategy for Counter-Terrorism in 2016.

Egypt believed that such an office would improve the coordination of counter-terrorism efforts by UN agencies, and it was created with a deputy of the secretary-general at the helm in September 2017.

Are you satisfied with the achievements of Egypts diplomacy at the UN on the issue of counter-terrorism?

We have a long experience of counter-terrorism. Egypt has proposed issues that are a priority for us, and it has succeeded in passing two UN Security Council resolutions on the matter by consensus.

UN Security Council Resolution 2354 (2017) focuses on implementing the Comprehensive Global Framework for Countering Terrorist Rhetoric, and UN Security Council Resolution 2370 (2017) focuses on preventing terrorists from acquiring weapons.

Egypt was particularly keen on passing the latter resolution due to the serious threat posed by some countries  especially some in the Middle East  in supplying weapons to terrorists and armed groups to carry out destructive regional agendas.

Egypt also succeeded in including clear references to this issue for the first time in the outcomes of the conference reviewing the UN Programme of Action on Illicit Small Arms and Light Weapons in June 2018.

It succeeded in adding Al-Azhars Dar Al-Iftaa (the religious rulings authority) and the Cairo International Centre for Conflict Resolution, Peacekeeping and Peace-building on the list of international think tanks and institutions that the directorate of the UN Counter-Terrorism Committee consults on various matters.

The Palestinian cause has reached a crossroads after the recent actions by the US administration. What actions will Egypt and the Arabs take in this regard in New York?

The Palestinian cause is a priority for the meetings of the president and the foreign minister with regional or international parties while they are at the UN General Assembly in New York.

There will also be informal meetings on the sidelines to discuss the crises in the Middle East and the challenges facing UNRWA, the UN agency assisting the Palestinian refugees.

There has been talk about a deal of the century on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. How does Egyptian diplomacy see such developments?

The serious conflicts in the Middle East over the past seven years and the unprecedented humanitarian catastrophes there have shaken the Arab peoples to the core and impacted how the international community has been dealing with the Palestinian cause due to the muddled positions of international institutions and players.

Looking at the agenda of the UN Security Council before 2011, the Palestinian cause was a top priority in the Middle East; todays agenda is packed with other issues, such as the situations in Syria, Libya and Yemen.

Nonetheless, there is an Arab consensus not to surrender to this muddle, because we believe the Palestinians legal rights are inalienable. Accordingly, during its membership of the UN Security Council and through its influential presence in the UN agencies, Egypt has worked to protect provisions regarding the Palestinian cause in the Security Council, renewing and embedding the rights of our Palestinian brothers to their land.

Egypt also continues to mediate for Palestinian reconciliation, and it is mindful of the deplorable humanitarian conditions in the Gaza Strip. It is aware of the importance of Palestinian unity under the umbrella of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) to strengthen the Palestinian hand in the negotiations.

In the 73rd Session of the UN General Assembly, we will be reiterating that the only way the Palestinians and Israelis can live in peace is by returning to the negotiating table on the basis of international resolutions and the Arab Initiative on Palestine.

Egypt believes that this is the foundation for a comprehensive settlement that serves the interests of all the parties.

Egypts support for the Libyan national army has been indisputable, even as the international communitys handling of the armed militias in Libya has been ineffective.

Libya is facing a very serious threat, namely the spread of armed groups and the inability of state institutions to carry out their duties.

Egypt believes that the best way to handle the Libyan crisis is to support the Libyan Political Agreement and the UN Plan of Action on Libya. In order for this to happen in a stable environment, there is a need to unify Libyas military and to eliminate the militias.

Egypt is working on creating the necessary conditions for this unification to take place, but it is not interfering in the details because this is an internal Libyan issue.

In order for efforts by Egypt and the UN to succeed, the international community must take a firm stand against funding and supporting terrorist elements in Libya.

Despite the victories of the national Libyan army, some parties are continuing to play a destructive role by supplying weapons to terrorist groups. We are trying to confront this through our contacts with members of the UN Security Council and international and regional players.

The explosive situation in Idlib in Syria is also on the agenda in New York. What is Egypts view of this?

Egypt will participate in the ministerial meeting on Syria hosted by the EU to follow up on the Brussels meetings in support of countries hosting Syrian refugees.

Egypts decisions and actions are determined by its commitment to the interests of the Syrian people. This has given our position more credibility as time passes, and there is a keen interest by key players in the UN Security Council  despite their competing against each other  to listen to our viewpoint regarding terrorism, humanitarian issues and the political process in Syria.

Our view on Idlib is in the same vein as the above-mentioned general stance. Despite the challenges of acute disagreements among Security Council members, Egypt was able at the end of its term in the Security Council in December 2017 to renew the trans-border mandate of the humanitarian aid system in Syria by passing a binding resolution on the issue. This system is benefiting millions of Syrians, especially in Idlib, today.

Egypt is continuing this role through communicating with influential parties and groups on the ground in Syria, such as Russia, the Astana Group, and the Focus Group on Syria that includes several Western and Arab countries, including Egypt. Our constant course is combattng the terrorist groups that have flourished in Syria and threaten the entire region, while addressing the humanitarian situation of our Syrian brothers, whether through continued humanitarian aid or protecting civilians.

Are there new developments in Egyptian-African relations that will be reviewed in New York?

The presidents agenda in New York includes one-on-one meetings with the leaders of African nations, especially regarding South Sudan, Libya, the Sahel and the Great Lakes regions.

Egypt is also interested in promoting cooperation between the UN and the African Union (AU), especially as it nears its presidency of the AU beginning in January 2019, by strengthening existing treaty frameworks in this regard.

*A version of this article appears in print in the 20 September 2018 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly under the headline: Egypts priority at the UNGA: Building capabilities to fight terrorism

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Egypt President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi will arrive in New York on Friday to take part in the 73rd UN General Assembly (UNGA) meetings which kicked off Tuesday at the UN headquarter.



The agenda of the running UN General Assemblys meetings focuses on development issues, preserving international security, fighting terrorism, and human rights.



The presidents speech will expound on Egypts comprehensive vision regarding all international challenges. He is also expected to urge the world to contain all armed conflicts, combat terrorism, push for denuclearization, and tackle economic concerns.



El-Sisi's speech is also expected to shed light on deteriorating situations in the Middle East and Arab world.

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Congress holds protest rally in Tripura on Rafale deal

Nearly a thousand supporters joined the Bharat Bachao Jana Andolan rally which started from Pradesh Congress Bhavan and ended in front of Old Raj Bhavan. (The Indian Express)

AGARTALA, SEP 20 (AGENCIES) | Publish Date: 9/20/2018 12:36:21 PM IST

Opposition Congress Thursday organized a protest rally till Tripura Raj Bhavan in Agartala and submitted a memorandum to the office of Governor Kaptan Singh Solanki over alleged scam of Rs. 1.30 lakh crore in purchase of Rafale aircrafts from France, The Indian Express reported.

It is the third agitation on the issue in North East India by Youth Congress after Assam and Manipur.

Addressing a press conference at Pradesh Congress Bhavan here this evening, party president Birajit Sinha said the movement was jointly organized by Congress and its frontal organizations like Youth Congress and National Students Union of India (NSUI).

Nearly a thousand supporters joined the Bharat Bachao Jana Andolan rally which started from Pradesh Congress Bhavan and ended in front of Old Raj Bhavan.

Indian Youth Congress president Keshav Chand Yadav, IYC vice president Srinivas B.V. and other leaders also joined the agitation today.

Speaking to The Indian Express, Indian Youth Congress president Keshav Chand Yadav said later this evening that the Rafale deal was the biggest scam in history of India and claimed Prime Minister Narendra Modi has a direct part in it.

We believe the Prime Minister is a party (Bhagidaar) in the scam. Price of the aircrafts have tripled and Defence Minister Nirmala Sitaraman is silent about the whole issue. We demand that the Prime Minister explains it to the people of India, Yadav said.

The agitators met an official from the Governors House and handed him a memorandum with the demand.

The Rafale deal was first fixed by the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government in December, 2012. The price of the Rafale jets, which would be inducted into the Indian Air Force, were fixed at Rs. 526.10 crores per aircraft. An international bid was floated for 126 aircrafts at the price.

After BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government came to power in 2014, Prime Minister Modi announced emergency off the shelf purchase of 36 Rafale aircrafts in Paris for Rs. 60,145 crores.

Earlier in August, All India Mahila Congress president Sushmita Dev joined an agitation on the issue in Tripura and accused Prime Minister Modi of being the principal benefactor of the alleged Rafale scam.

Indian Youth Congress president Keshav Yadav also said Congress would be holding similar agitations in different states of the country.
Related Lebanese Hezbollah leader says group stronger than ever before

The leader of Lebanon's Hezbollah said on Thursday that his group had obtained precision rockets despite Israeli strikes in recent years aimed at cutting the supply route through Syria.

"No matter what you do to cut the route, the matter is over and the resistance possesses precision and non-precision rockets and weapons capabilities," Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah said, addressing Israel in a broadcast speech.

"If Israel imposes a war on Lebanon, Israel will face a fate and a reality it has never expected on any day," he added.

Hezbollah, backed by Iran, has played a critical role in supporting Syrian President Bashar al-Assad during Syria's seven-year-long civil war.

Israel regards Hezbollah as the biggest threat on its borders and has said that it has carried out repeated strikes in Syria to prevent it getting arms deliveries from Iran.

Iran's Revolutionary Guards helped form Hezbollah in the early 1980s to resist Israel's occupation of southern Lebanon, which ended in 2000. Israel and Hezbollah fought a brief war on Lebanese soil in 2006

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By Express News Service

NEW DELHI: The income tax (I-T) department has started searching the offices of Jet Airways for alleged fudging of account books, siphoning off funds and irregularities in the Godrej-Buildcon deal.

According to the sources in the I-T department, the survey operation was conducted at Jets Andheri and Nariman Point offices in Mumbai and two premises in Delhi to collect evidence related to financial irregularities. The survey, which began on Wednesday, may continue in the coming days, sources added.

I-T departments action follows doubts raised by auditors over irregularities in the airlines account books.

A company spokesman confirmed the survey operation but declined to divulge more details.

Jet Airways financial woes came under public scrutiny recently after staff were asked to take salary cuts up to 25 per cent. The cash-strapped airline had recently come under a cloud of suspicion after it deferred declaring its first-quarter results.

Last month, the corporate affairs ministry had ordered an inspection of books and papers of Jet Airways. The airline was also under Sebi glare for deferring results amid differences with auditors.

The airline finally reported a loss of over Rs 1,326 crore for the first quarter. The company claimed things were under control and that it was looking at various avenues to raise money.

On Wednesday, shares of the airline fell 3.67 per cent to close at Rs 244.25 on the BSE. The market valuation of the airline, too, fell by Rs 105.38 crore to Rs 2,774.62 crore on the BSE.

The Naresh Goyal-controlled carrier is reportedly working on a turnaround plan to tide over financial woes. This, according to reports, includes cutting costs by as much as Rs 2,000 crore over two years, improving pricing and better inventory management.

No free meal for economy flyers from next week

From September 28, Jet Airways will not offer complimentary meals for domestic passengers in the economy light and economy deal categories. Flyers, however, can buy meals on-board.

Customers will be served beverages  including tea and coffee  for free.
Members of Qatar's Al-Ghufran tribe said on Thursday they have been subjected to injustice for the past 22 years at the hands of Qatari regime, which stripped them off their nationality and rights.

In a press conference held in Geneva at the Swiss Press Club on the sidelines of the 39th session of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), members of Al-Ghufran tribe spoke about systematic human rights violations practiced against them from 1996 until now.

The members of the tribe spoke on how they had lost their jobs while their children were forcibly removed from schools and banned them from education. They were also prevented from accessing civil rights or health care. In a final blow to the tribal community, the Qatari government stripped them off their Qatari nationality and deported them from the country.

"The Qatari regime began its discrimination against all the members of Al-Ghufran tribe after the arrest 21 officers who were member of tribe for their attempt to restore the rule of Sheikh Khalifa Bin Hamad after the coup of Sheikh Hamad Bin Khalifa " said Jaber Saleh Al-Ghufrany, a leading figure in the tribe.

Sheikh Hamad Bin Khalifa is the father of Qatar's current role Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani.

"The Qatari regime released members of other tribes who were against the coup afterwards but only the Ghufran tribe remained to suffer from humiliation and discrimination" he added.

The Al-Ghufran delegation met with Mohamed Al-Nsour, chief of the United Nations Human Rights Office of the High Commission (OHCHR) Middle East and North Africa Section, earlier on Monday in Geneva to hand him a letter that detailed the tribe's sufferings since 1996.

The Egyptian Organization for Human Rights is currently adopting the case of the Ghufran to assist in them being able to regain their rights.

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By Express News Service

MUMBAI: While experts have maintained that mutual fund investors, especially long-term investors, could benefit from the latest fee reduction announced by Securities Exchange Board of India (SEBI) on Tuesday, investors in shares of Asset Management Companies (AMC) had little to rejoice, as the news brought their prices crashing down.

While shares of HDFC Asset Management Company Ltd fell 8.55 per cent to close at Rs 1,408.55, Reliance Nippon Asset Management crashed 11.28 per cent to close at Rs 190.

AMC corpus has grown much in the years, and the fees have come down.

Even at the current level, it can be deemed expensive, said an investment advisor. AMC corpus had grown to Rs 25 lakh crore by August-end, bringing in bulk as well as regular inflows through systematic investment plans.

There has been two different assessments of Indian fee structure. Morningstar, in its report last year, termed Indias average TER (total expense ratio) of 2.22 per cent as one of the largest, while the Foundation of Independent Financial Advisors said it is one of the lowest at 1.88 per cent.

Cut in TER will directly lead to cut in agency commission for us. This could affect inflows as some of the smaller agents may start selling other attractive products, said a mutual fund distributor. Expense ratios are fees AMCs charge on the mutual fund assets managed by them. SEBI has also barred any upfront commission to agents, a practice most AMCs had done away with.

Analysts expect brokerages to pass on the cut in TER to distributors. Yet, they expect the earnings per share of AMCs to fall by around 15 per cent.

Large marketing spends by AMCs would take a toll and further to this, the growth of large AMCs could suffer due to these changes, said Amit Singh, CEO of Investica, an online investment platform.

This could also bring down the gap between the regular and direct schemes, he said.
By Express News Service

HYDERABAD:A distressed woman on Wednesday appealed to Minister of External Affairs Sushma Swaraj to take action against a travel agent for allegedly cheating and trafficking her sister to Oman.

Chaderghat resident Reshma Begum was allegedly cheated by one Sattar, an Amberpet-based travel agent who had promised her a well-paying job at a house of a sheikh in Oman. However, Sattar purportedly sold her to a kafeel for `3 lakh, who in turn would not let Reshma return to India until that sum is paid.

Reshma, was approachesd by Sattar when he learnt that she was looking for a job. Zubaida Begum, her sister, said, She was promised a salary of `25,000 and she went to Muscat in 2017. However, she was received by another agent who deployed her to work at the house of a kafeel. She was tortured a lot over here, then again sold to another kafeel Mohammad Sultan where she was made to work for 15 hours without proper food or accommodation. On top of that, she was being paid only `10,000, Zubaida added.

Zubaida urged Swaraj to take necessary action against the travel agent. Please write to NRI Department and the Indian Embassy in Muscat Oman to rescue her and send her back to India as soon as possible.

Deputy Commissioner of Police (East Zone) D Ramesh has directed Chaderghat police station to take appropriate action.
Donita Jose By

Express News Service

HYDERABAD: Is criminalizing instant triple talaq the only way to curb the menace of Muslim men abandoning their wives? This was the mood that loomed largely among the activists working with victims of triple talaq in Hyderabad.

Though the activists admit that men have misused the provision and abandoned wives at their will, they wonder what good a criminal provision can do. It has been a year since the Supreme Court banned the practice of instant triple talaq, but the practice continues because there are no provisions in the new law to help the divorced wives, says Jameela.

Activists suggest that the new law should provide for a consultation with the woman in the event of a Talaq and be given a say when the negotiations are done.Triple talaq is a bad and gender-unjust provision in the Muslim personal law, but can a husband be sent to jail for it? How many men will you jail? More importantly, will it restore the woman back to the family?, asks Jameela Nishat of Shaheen Womens Resource and Welfare Centre.

In Hyderabad, the largely followed practice is that of written divorce where the husband goes to the Qazi and submits his reasons for divorcing his wife, which are then forwarded to his wife as a notice of Talaq. In the entire process, the woman is never asked for an opinion in the matter.

There is yet another form of harassment that the women fear when assorting to legal measures in a divorce, known as Qula. The married Muslim woman is required to get the Qula documents and give them to the husband for his signatures, asking for a divorce. Also, as per the Muslim personal law, women are not entitled to maintenance money when they ask for a divorce. While it is not required to even consult his wife when a man gives a divorce, the woman has to take permission from the husband she wants to divorce. This, says Jameela, is the main issue of the Triple Talaq law. How is that just? Why cant they take a womans consultation before Talaq?  she asks.

Are we punishing men or women, asks Owaisi

AIMIM president Asaduddin Owaisi contended that the triple talaq ordinance would be more detrimental than favourable to Muslim women. When the man is penalised and sent to jail, he would still be married. So what is the justification of punishing someone when the marriage is still intact? The Supreme Court had also pointed out this issue, he said. For instance, if a case is registered under this Ordinance, who will speak for the woman? The burden of proof will fall entirely on her. The man could easily go to the police and say that he said talaq only twice and not thrice, he said, slamming the Ordinance which says that the penalised person should provide financial assistance to the affected woman. How can anyone provide financial assistance when lodged in jail? The law also calls for three years of jail for a Muslim man, when the maximum penalty for driving recklessly and killing someone is two years. Owaisi instead asked Prime Minister Narendra Modi to introduce a law for the safety of those 24 lakh women, who are married, but their husbands do not live with them.

In a snide remark, he attacked the Prime Minister over his personal life.The PM should bring a law for those women, who, despite being married, despite fasting for the long life of their husbands and their political growth, are not living with each other. Among the 24 lakh, 22 lakh are Hindus. He termed the Ordinance as a way of distracting the public from core issues such as rising petrol prices, the Kashmir issue, Rafale deal and so on.

BJPs Laxman welcomes Ordinance

Hyderabad: BJP state president K Laxman welcomed the triple talaq ordinance saying it would help Muslim women in the country. Speaking to the media on Wednesday, Laxman claimed that Muslim women were very happy with the Ordinance. Saying the Ordinance will empower Muslim women to achieve gender equality, he hailed it as a historic decision by the Narendra Modi government.
By Express News Service

TIRUVANANTHAPURAM: South Korea is interested to make investments in Kerala, said Shin Bongkil, the countrys Ambassador to India. Addressing reporters on Wednesday, Bongkil, who was in the city to attend Korean Caravan - a diplomatic outreach programme organised by the Korean embassy - said discussions were already held with Industries Minister E P Jayarajan and state government officials.

The ambassador said that the state government has evinced interest in electronic hardware manufacturing, knowledge industry, basic infrastructure development, port development and shipbuilding. Many Korean companies already have investments in India and many others are waiting for an opportunity to invest in the country, said the Ambassador. He added India has been drawing international attention due to its growing market and high purchasing power. Necessary steps would be taken in order to improve cultural exchanges between both countries, he said, adding the visa procedure would be simplified for Indians as part of the same.

The Korean delegation led by the Ambassador held discussions with the business community in the state in the business summit. Discussions were held on investment possibilities and bilateral trade. Representatives of 22 Korean companies, including Samsung, Kia, Hyundai and Korean Airline participated in the discussions. Korean Caravan was organised with the aim to enhance bilateral trade and cultural exchanges between both countries. A cultural programme by Korean artists, under the aegis of Jump, will be held at Tagore Hall at 6 pm on Thursday.
By Express News Service

BENGALURU: Meghana Rajs next Iruvudellava Bittu, directed by Kantha Kanalli, is extra special for the actor for whom it is the first release post marriage. And coincidentally, the subject of the film revolves around career, marriage and family.

I wouldnt say it is the same. But, todays men and women are thrown with choices. The world has become so competitive with everyone wanting to succeed, she says ahead of the films release this Friday.

Iruvudellava Bittu talks about how career takes preccedance over family matters often. Sometimes, we forget our personal dreams as we chase professional ones, she says.

Meghana as Purvi is self-centred. She always thinks of herself, she says, adding,  The director highlights the importance of relationships of any kind. There is laughter, sentiment, and every feeling of entertaining elements.

Iruvudellava Bittu is a typical family entertainer and and is not targeted at any particular age group. This is one of the best characters that has come my way. In fact, I was hesitant to take up the role thinking whether I can pull it off or not. I took four months to say yes, she says. About her next move, she says she is still meeting directors and reading scripts before finalising on one.

Right now, I am concentrating on this films release, says Meghana, adding, My husband Chiru (Chiranjeevi Sarja) and my brother in law Dhruva Sarja are positive about the film. I have my family completely backing me in my career.
By PTI

NEW DELHI: The CBI said Wednesday that it was awaiting confirmation from the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) on reports about the extradition of Christian Michel, an alleged middleman in AgustaWestland helicopter scam case, from the UAE.

A Dubai court had reportedly cleared the extradition of Michel to India on September 2, 2018.

CBI sources said the agency was in touch with MEA officials but they did not receive any official communication from the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

"We are awaiting official communication in this regard," one of the sources said.

ALSO READ: AgustaWestland VVIP choppers deal: Dubai court orders middleman Christian Michel's extradition

The CBI had filed charge sheet in the matter in September last year, naming former IAF Chief S P Tyagi as one of the accused.

Besides him, the agency has also charge-sheeted retired Air Marshal J S Gujral along with eight others, including five foreign nationals.

Michel is one of the three foreign country-based middlemen charge-sheeted in the matter.

The agency has alleged that there was an estimated loss of Euro 398.

21 million (approximately Rs 2,666 crore) to the exchequer in the deal that was signed on February 8, 2010 for the supply of VVIP choppers worth Euro 556.262 million.

The CBI had earlier alleged that during Tyagi's tenure as air force chief, the Air Force conceded to reduce the mandatory service ceiling for VVIP helicopters from 6,000 metres to 4,500 metres.

The Air Force was earlier vehemently opposing the service ceiling reduction on the grounds of security constraints and other related reasons.

It has claimed that reduction of the service ceiling, or the maximum height at which a helicopter can perform normally, allowed UK-based AgustaWestland to come into the fray as, otherwise, its helicopters were not even qualified for submission of bids.
By PTI

GANDHINAGAR: The Gujarat Assembly passed a bill on Wednesday by which the salaries of the MLAs, ministers, speaker, deputy speaker and leader of the opposition will go up by at least Rs 45,000 a month.

Accordingly, the monthly salary of the MLAs will be hiked to Rs 1.16 lakh as against the existing Rs 70,727, a rise of about 64 per cent, while those of the ministers, Assembly speaker, deputy speaker and leader of the opposition will go up to Rs 1.32 lakh from Rs 86,000, an increase of about 54 per cent.

The revised salaries will come into effect retrospectively from February 2017, with a disbursal of Rs 6 crore in arrears.

The new remuneration structure will put an extra burden of Rs 10 crore annually on the state treasury.

The Salaries and Allowances of Members, Speaker and Deputy Speaker of the Gujarat Legislative Assembly, Ministers and Leader of Opposition Laws (Amendment) Bill 2018 was introduced in the House by Minister of State for Parliamentary Affairs Pradipsinh Jadeja and passed unanimously.

After tabling the bill in the House, Jadeja said the salary of the MLAs in the 182-member Gujarat Assembly was not revised since 2005, even as the remuneration of their counterparts in other states was comparatively much higher.

The salaries of the lawmakers in states like Uttarakhand, Telangana, Jharkhand and Maharashtra are Rs 2. 91 lakh, Rs 2.50 lakh, Rs 2.25 lakh and Rs 2.13 lakh respectively, while in Bihar, West Bengal, Tamil Nadu and Odisha, their salaries are over Rs 1 lakh, he added.

The previous pay structure took the basic salary of an undersecretary as the criterion to determine the remuneration of the MLAs and office-bearers.

The new bill will take the basic salary of the deputy secretary as the criterion, Jadeja said. Citing an example, he said in Maharashtra, the basic pay of the principal secretary was taken into account while determining the legislators' salary.

Congress MLA Niranjan Patel supported the bill, saying costs had increased. Deputy Chief Minister Nitin Patel supported the bill from the government's side.
By PTI

NEW DELHI: Terming 'Swacch Bharat' a "hollow slogan" Congress president Rahul Gandhi on Wednesday alleged that Prime Minister Narendra Modi was "blind" to the plight of manual scavengers.

Gandhi made the remark over the death of a sanitation worker in Delhi due to suffocation after falling in a sewer.

Anil, a sanitation worker suffocated to death after allegedly falling in the sewer of a building which he had entered to clean in Dwarka's Dabri area last week.

The incident had come a week after five people died due to asphyxiation when they entered a sewage treatment plant in Moti Nagar area here.

"Anil's tragic death in the sewers of Delhi & photographs of his grieving son have made headlines worldwide.

Our PM's "Swacch Bharat" is a hollow slogan, when he's blind to the plight of thousands of manual scavengers forced to excavate toilets & sewer lines in inhuman conditions (sic)," Gandhi tweeted.

Congress' Scheduled Caste department Chairperson Nitin Raut expressed his condolences over the death of the sewerage cleaning workers and said the UPA government had passed the Prohibition of Employment as Manual Scavengers and their Rehabilitation Bill 2012, but the NDA dispensation "failed" to implement it.

In a statement, he said this was not the only incident as in the past too such incidents have been reported across states where workers lost their life due to the "government's lack of support" towards their safety and welfare.

Raut demanded a government job and Rs 50 lakh compensation for the kin of the deceased and Rs 25 lakh ex gratia for people who suffer injuries in such incidents.

Urging the government to take care of education, health expenses of all sewer workers and ensure their mandatory health check up and insurance cover, he also called for a disaster cell for immediate response to any such incidents.

Raut said if these demands were not considered, the AICC's SC cell will raise these issues with the public.
By PTI

NEW DELHI: There is no order by any UAE court to extradite Christian Michel, the alleged middleman in AgustaWestland deal, to India, it is learnt.

According to available details here, the UAE government posed a question to a Dubai court whether a British national can be extradited to a third country and on September 2, the court gave an opinion on the query.

It is learnt that there was no court order on extradition of Michel to India as reported. There have been reports that a Dubai court had ordered extradition of Michel to India.

The external affairs ministry had asked its embassy in the UAE to find out all the details relating to the issue.

Government sources said India has not received any official communication from authorities in the UAE relating to extradition of Michel.

He is wanted in India in connection with the Rs 3,600 crore AgustaWestland VVIP choppers deal case.

The Enforcement Directorate (ED), in its charge sheet filed against Michel in June 2016, had alleged that he received EUR 30 million (about Rs 225 crore) from AgustaWestland.

Michel is one of the three middlemen being probed in the case, besides Guido Haschke and Carlo Gerosa, by the ED and the Central Bureau of Investigation.

Both the agencies have notified an Interpol red corner notice against him after the court issued a non-bailable warrant.
By PTI

RAJKOT: The carcasses of 11 lions were found in Gujarat's Gir forest, prompting the state government to order an inquiry, officials said Thursday.

All the dead lions were found in Gir (east) division, mainly from Dalkhaniya range in the last few days, an official said.

"We have found carcasses of 11 lions from Gir east forest range," said P Purushothama, the Deputy Conservator of Forest, Gir (east).

For administrative purpose, the Gir forest has been divided in east and west parts.

A carcass of a lioness was found in a forest near Rajula of Amreli district Wednesday, while three more lions were found dead the same day in Dalkhaniya range area in the Gir forest, a senior official said.

Carcasses of seven other lions were found in the last few days, he said.

"We have collected viscera samples of the dead animals and sent them to the Junagadh Veterinary Hospital and are waiting for the postmortem report," he added.

Additional chief secretary of the Forest and Environment Department Dr Rajiv Kumar Gupta said the state government has ordered an inquiry which would be conducted by the principal chief conservator of forest (wildllife).

"Primary information shows that eight deaths have occurred due to infighting. For the rest three, postmortem reports are awaited," Gupta added.

PCCF wildlife A K Saxena, who rushed to the Gir forest, told PTI that most of the deaths are due to infighting and resultant injuries.

"Most of the deaths are due to infighting and injuries caused thereby, mainly affecting cubs and females. This trend is being noticed over a period of three to four years. No foul play or suspicion is suspected," Saxena said.

As per the 2015 census, Gir is home to 520 lions. Rajya Sabha MP Parimal Nathwani said on Thursday that a probe must be conducted to see if the deaths occurred due to electrocution, poisoning or poaching.
Egypt's President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi has issued a decree approving a $1.9 billion grant agreement in order to apply international standards for the preparation of financial reports for the Egyptian Electricity Holding Company (EEHC).

The agreement, signed in Cairo, is between the Investment and International Cooperation Ministry and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD). It was signed on August 6, 2017. The grant is worth $1,969 billion.

The President also ratified a loan agreement between the Government of Egypt and the Kuwaiti Fund for Economic Development for the development of the drinking water system in North Sinai's Al-Arish city. Worth 12.5 Million Kuwaiti dinars ($41.2 million), the agreement was signed in Kuwait on 19 November 2017.

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By Express News Service

NEW DELHI: A day after the big buzz on an UAE court ordering the extradition of AgustaWestland helicopter deal middleman Christian Michel, there was no confirmation here on whether the directive was actually issued. Michel went underground fearing arrest, his lawyer revealed on Wednesday.

He will be arrested if found. He is likely to file an appeal before the Supreme Court, his counsel Amal Alsubei said. Michel, a British national, has time till October 2 to file his appeal.

However, in New Delhi, sources claimed there was no extradition order in the first place. We have not received any official communication from Dubai, they said. CBI sources, too, denied having any official confirmation on the extradition.

Yet, Law Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad called it a positive development and in an apparent reference to the Congress, claiming the news had created unease among some leaders.

It is a good development, but I must point out that I notice a profound sense of unease in some leaders, he rubbed in.

Michel was arrested in the UAE last year and is out on bail. He is wanted in India for allegedly funnelling bribes in exchange for a contract for VVIP helicopters.

The AgustaWestland case involves the purchase of 12 luxury helicopters for use by top leaders. The deal was signed between the UPA-I government and Agusta in 2007.

It was scrapped in 2013 after AgustaWestlands parent company Finmeccanica was accused of bribery in Italy.
By Express News Service

KOLKATA: Another suspected Jamatul Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB) operative suspected to be involved in Bodh Gaya blasts in January this year was nabbed from Burdwan in West Bengal.

Accused Abdul Rezzak, a resident of Shamserganj in Murshidabad district, is suspected to have stolen the vehicle that was used in transporting the bombs to Bodh Gaya. This is the sixth arrest made by Kolkata Police Special Task Force in the Bodh Gaya blast case.

Kolkata STF and National Investigation Agency (NIA) had earlier visited Samsherganj several times to nab Rezzak but he had given a slip every time, sources revealed. He was nabbed from Burdwan on Wednesday after being tipped-off by informers.

During the interrogation, Rezzak has revealed that he had been hiding in different parts of Purba Burdwan district, sources revealed. The accused was produced in court and remanded to police custody on Thursday.

Police sources revealed that the plan for Bodh Gaya blast was hatched in Shamserganj and other parts of Murshidabad district and top JMB operatives from Bangladesh were present during the planning. The bombs are suspected to be built at Dhuliyan in Murshidabad district. Most of the JMB operatives arrested in the case hail from the district.
Namita Bajpai By

Express News Service

LUCKNOW: In an early morning crackdown on Thursday, the Aligarh police shot dead two criminals carrying a cash reward of Rs 25,000 each and wanted in a number of murder and loot cases.

The 90-minute gunfight between the criminals and the police was captured on camera by local media persons. The video was doing rounds on social media. However, the police denied having called the media to shoot the encounter.

Over 60 criminals have been killed in police encounters since the BJP government came in power in March last year. Four policemen have lost lives and over 500 people injured in these operations. In July, the Supreme Court sought a response from the government over a plea seeking a court-monitored CBI or SIT probe into the alleged encounter killings. The PIL was filed by the People's Union for Civil Liberty (PUCL).

The Thursdays encounter, as per police sources, took place at Machua canal in Harduaganj area of Aligarh district at 6:30 am when the police team was fired upon. Those killed, identified as Naushad and Mustakeem, were accused of murdering six people, including three Hindu priests and a couple. Five of their accomplices were also arrested three days ago for their involvement in six murders which they executed in and around Aligarh within the last one month.

One of their aides is still absconding and the police have launched a hunt for him. In the operation, inspector Pali Mukeempur Pradip Kumar sustained bullet injuries. He was admitted to a trauma Centre in Aligarh. "These two criminals were changing their locations after committing crimes in Atrauli, Harduaganj, and Pali Mukeempur and were involved in murders. They had robbed a man of his motorbike on Wednesday night in Aligarh," said SP (Rural), Aligarh Manilal Patidar.

According to Aligarh police, all those involved in half a dozen murders were part of a gang active in neighbouring Etah district. During the interrogation of those arrested three days ago, the police said, the criminals admitted that they were targeting the sadhus as part of their strategy to defame the Yogi Adityanath government.

Police sent the bodies of the two men for autopsy at the Aligarh district hospital.
Anand ST Das By

Express News Service

PATNA: Five juvenile inmates lodged at a remand home in Bihars Purnea escaped after shooting a fellow juvenile and the warden dead apparently to avenge reporting about their habit of consuming a cough syrup as a narcotic, police said on Thursday.

Warden Vijendra Mandal, 29, and juvenile inmate Saroj Kumar, 17, were rushed to a nearby hospital moments after they were shot at on Wednesday evening, but they were declared brought dead. They were shot by a pistol and from close range, said police sources. Two other juvenile inmates were left injured in the firing.

The two juveniles who perpetrated the crime brandished the pistol at the watchman and forced him to open the gate before escaping with three other juveniles. Sources said the juvenile who opened fire is the son of a local leader of Bihars ruling JD(U), Amarendra Kumar Kushwaha.

Police officials probing the case interrogated Kushwaha for an hour on Thursday. I often found acute lawlessness at this remand home. I want an impartial probe to ascertain how a pistol came into the facility and who fired, said Kushwaha, whose son was lodged there a few months ago after being arrested for firing at a college student in Purnea.

The five juveniles who escaped had allegedly been consuming a banned cough syrup as a narcotic. Warden Vijendra Mandal was informed about it by juvenile inmate Saroj Kumar. A day before the incident, Mandal had rebuked the five inmates and asked them to quit consuming the cough syrup.

Incidentally, Purnea judicial magistrate first class Divya Prakash, who heads the juvenile justice board, had directed on Wednesday that the five drug-addicted juveniles be transferred to the remand home at Sheikhpura.

A manhunt has been launched to trace and nab the five juveniles who escaped. A probe team has been formed to ascertain how the pistol came into the remand home, said SP Vishal Sharma.

Meanwhile, a judicial probe was ordered into the incident on the recommendation of Purnea district magistrate Pradip Kumar Jha.
By Online Desk

5 out of 30 passengers, who suffered ear and nose-bleed due to fall in cabin pressure onboard Mumbai-Jaipur Jet Airways flight (Boeing 9W 697), have been taken to Mumbai's Nanavati Hospital upon their arrival.

One of the five persons was later admitted to the hospital for check-up, Dr Rajendra Patenkar, Chief Operating Officer, Nanavati Hospital, said.

ALSO READ: 30 passengers on Jet Airways flight suffer nasal, ear bleeding as crew forgets to maintain cabin pressure

Most of them will have mild conductive deafness for some period of time. Till then they've been advised not to fly until their condition normalises, Dr Patnekar futher said.

"At this point of time they needn't be admitted, consultants are evaluating them. Some of them had nose&ear bleeding. It's called Barotrauma."

5 passengers have come here till now. At this point of time they needn't be admitted, consultants are evaluating them. Some of them had nose&ear bleeding. It's called Barotrauma: Dr. Rajendra Patenkar,Nanavati Hospital on passengers of the Jet Airways Mumbai-Jaipur flight #Mumbai pic.twitter.com/00wwi3YKUM  ANI (@ANI) September 20, 2018

Most of them will have mild conductive deafness for some period of time. Till then they've been advised not to fly again: Dr Rajendra Patenkar,Chief Operating Officer, Nanavati Hospital on passengers of the Jet Airways Mumbai-Jaipur flight which suffered cabin pressure loss today pic.twitter.com/lrJtBmmVUR  ANI (@ANI) September 20, 2018

At least 30 passengers suffered ear and nose-bleed onboard a Mumbai-Jaipur Jet Airways flight soon after take-off due to a blunder by the cabin crew on Thursday morning.

The Boeing 9W 697 had to be manoeuvred back to Mumbai as passengers on board fell sick.

The civil aviation ministry has taken note of the situation and has requested the aviation regulator DGCA to file its report immediately on the issue.
By PTI

NEW DELHI: The Congress Thursday demanded that Nirmala Sitharaman resigns as defence minister for "lying" on the Rafale deal and said her "position has become untenable" as a former HAL chief has "nailed her lie".

Party president Rahul Gandhi took to Twitter to attack Sitharaman and accused her of "lying" on the Hindustan Aeronautics Limited's capability to build Rafale aircraft.

"The RM (Rafale Minister) tasked with defending corruption has been caught lying again. The former HAL Chief, T S Raju, has nailed her lie, that HAL didn't have the capability to build the RAFALE. Her position is untenable & she must resign," he tweeted and tagged a media report on the former HAL chief's assertion.

The RM (Rafale Minister) tasked with defending corruption has been caught lying again. The former HAL Chief, T S Raju, has nailed her lie, that HAL didnt have the capability to build the RAFALE. Her position is untenable & she must resign. https://t.co/7mKXV5wo8x  Rahul Gandhi (@RahulGandhi) September 20, 2018

Congress spokesperson Manish Tewari said Sitharaman should resign for allegedly "misleading" the people on the Rafale deal and said the government's arguments have been "demolished" by the statement of a former chief of the state-run HAL.

He cited the remarks of former HAL chief T Suvarna Raju to attack Sitharaman over the issue of HAL's capability to build the Rafale aircraft.

Tewari hit out at Sitharaman for alleging that the UPA did not extend support to HAL when the state-run company was engaged in talks with French firm Dassault Aviation for the manufacturer of Rafale jets in India under the offset agreement.

He said the former HAL chief had made certain "extremely pertinent points" that "absolutely demolish" the entire case that the NDA government has been trying to build on the Rafale issue.

"We demand the resignation of the defence minister on the charge of misleading the people of India. After the disclosure which has been made today by the former head of HAL, the defence minister has no moral authority or no moral right to continue even for a second," he said.

Tewari said that Raju had made it clear in his statement that HAL and Dassault had signed the mutual workshare contract and given it to the government.

The first question that arises is that did the defence minister of India intentionally tried to mislead the people of India, the Congress leader said.

He also reiterated the Congress demand of a Joint Parliamentary Committee (JPC) probe into the Rafale deal.

The Congress spokesperson also cited that Raju had stated that HAL would have built Rafale jets, had the government closed the original contract for 126 Medium Multi-Role Combat Aircraft (MMRCA).

Therefore, the government's argument that because HAL and Dassault could not come to an agreement and so the 126 MMRCA contract had to be scrapped does not hold, he said.

"What has happened today has really blown the defence minister's assertion out of the water," Tewari said.

He also cited Raju's remarks that HAL had built a 25-tonne Sukhoi-30, a fourth-generation fighter jet that forms the mainstay of the Air Force, from raw material stage, and maintained the Mirage-2000 aircraft, manufactured by Rafale maker Dassault Aviation, to highlight the public sector undertaking's capability.

"The nailer is that he (ex-HAL chief) says that if the 126 MMRCA contract would have gone through, India would have been self reliant in so far as the fighter aircraft platform is concerned," Tewari said.

"What happened to Make in India. Make in India seems to have gone out the window," he said.

The Congress has alleged that the government caused loss of over Rs 41,000 crore to the exchequer and endangered national security by bypassing the state-run HAL in favour of some businessman "friends" for offset contract in the Rafale deal.

Under India's offset policy, foreign defence entities are mandated to spend at least 30 per cent of the total contract value in India through procurement of components or setting up of research and development facilities.

Sitharaman had earlier told PTI that it was former defence minister A K Antony's unprecedented intervention that led to the deal being cancelled after the price negotiation committee had almost finalised the deal.

The charge has been denied by Antony as false.

Sitharaman had also accused Antony of not supporting HAL in getting the Rafale deal.

The Congress has stepped up the attack on the government over the Rafale deal and is seeking to make it a major poll issue ahead of assembly elections in some key states later this year and the parliamentary election in 2019.
By Express News Service

NEW DELHI: India on Thursday opened a window of opportunity by announcing that Foreign Minister Sushma Swaraj would meet her Pakistani counterpart Shah Mahmood Qureshi in New York on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly.

I can confirm that on the request of the Pakistani side, a meeting between EAM & Pakistani foreign minister will take place on the sidelines of UNGA at a mutually convenient date and time, said Raveesh Kumar, spokesperson, MEA.

ALSO READ: Pakistan PM Imran Khan writes to 'Modi Sahab' seeking resumption of Indo-Pak peace talks

If it goes through, this would be the first such high-level engagement since the suspension of dialogue between the two countries following the Pathankot air base terror attack in 2016.

The permanent missions of India and Pakistan will work out the date of the meeting, said the MEA spokesperson.

He, however, sought to clarify that this would only be a meeting and shouldnt be construed as resumption of dialogue. Talking to reporters, he said the meetings agenda was yet to be finalised.

Swaraj will leave for New York on September 24.

The general debate will commence on September 25 and will run for nine working days.

Swaraj and her Pakistan counterpart Qureshi are also scheduled to attend the SAARC foreign ministers lunch and get-together on September 27.

Indias decision comes after the new Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan wrote to Prime Minister Narendra Modi seeking resumption of dialogue. Subsequently, Qureshi also wrote to Swaraj.

Why the meeting is important

This will give India a chance to test Pakistan under the new leadership with Imran Khan, who is considered by many experts as a stooge of the Pakistan military.
Hemant Kumar Rout By

Express News Service

BHUBANESWAR: Amidst downpour, India successfully test-fired surface-to-surface short-range tactical ballistic missile Prahaar from a defence facility off Odisha coast on Thursday paving the way for its induction.

Mounted on a mobile launcher the indigenously developed missile was flight tested from the launching complex-III of the Integrated Test Range (ITR) at about 1.35 pm.

The missile blasted off from a canister travelled the desired range before zeroing on the target. All systems functioned normally. The mission achieved a copybook success, said a defence official.

Equipped with state of the art navigation, guidance and electromechanical actuation systems with the latest onboard computer, the missile achieved the terminal accuracy of fewer than 10 meters. It went up vertically and then manoeuvred as coordinated.

The missile was launched from a road-mobile launcher, which can carry six missiles at a time and can be fired in salvo mode in all directions covering the entire azimuth plane. There was not a single degree deviation during the entire flight path, the official told The New Indian Express.

Having a strike range of 150 km, Prahaar has no parallel in the world in its range category. It fills the vital gap between multi-barrel rocket Pinaka and medium-range ballistic missile Prithvi. Unlike Prithvi, it can engage multiple targets in different directions.

The missile capable of carrying different types of warheads will operate as battlefield support system to the Indian Army. It has a greater manoeuvring capability, acceleration and can be deployed in different kinds of terrain making it more effective against strategic targets.

The weapon has sophisticated inertial navigation and electro-mechanical actuation system. It can be transported to anywhere within a short span of time. It was the second test of the missile, which was first tested on July 21, 2011. It will be indicted in the army after few more tests, the official said.

Fuelled by solid propellant Prahaar missile is about 7.32 meter long and its diameter is 420 mm. While its launch weight is about 1.28 tonne, it can carry a payload of 200 kg. The missile system is developed to provide the Indian Army with a cost-effective, quick reaction, all weather, all terrain, high accurate battlefield support tactical system.

Prior to the test, 4228 people including 3593 adults and 635 children from 634 families in five hamlets located within two km radius of the test range were shifted to two temporary shelters and mariners were alerted.

What makes Prahaar lethal
By Express News Service

RANCHI: Jharkhand Urban Development Minister CP Singh on Wednesday launched a dharna at Kotwali Police Station in Ranchi to protest against the arrest of five persons of the majority community over communal clashes.

I will not tolerate injustice and whoever is responsible for the incident must be brought forward. Police is putting innocent people behind bars in the name of action and it will not be tolerated at any cost, he said.

Earlier in the day, the police arrested five persons after clashes broke out between two communities near Pahadi temple.

Members from the majority community had on Tuesday accused the minority community of the area of desecrating the prayer site.

The issue was, however, resolved following police intervention. But on Wednesday, members of the two communities once again clashed and pelted stones at each other.

Singh further said that he will not leave until the detained persons were released. He said the police should have tried to resolve the matter instead of taking action against innocent people. He also alleged that the police had been targeting people of the majority community.

Some people including policemen and media persons were injured in the stone-pelting incident. Extra forces have been deployed and Section 144 imposed in the area, said City SP Aman Kumar.

(With inputs from IANS)
Aishik Chanda By

Express News Service

KOLKATA: One student was killed and four others were injured after police allegedly opened fire on students at a school during a protest against the appointment of an Urdu teacher, at Islampur in Uttar Dinajpur district of West Bengal on Thursday afternoon. Three policemen were also injured in the incident.

The deceased was identified as Rajesh Sarkar. He succumbed to his injuries after being brought to Islampur sub-divisional hospital. The other injured are under treatment. The students of Daribhit High School near Islampur were protesting against the appointment of an Urdu teacher at their school since Tuesday stating that they did not need the Urdu teacher and instead demanded teachers for other subjects.

A verbal agreement was also reached between the students, local villagers and administration on Wednesday after the local Block Development Officer (BDO) reached the area and promised that the Urdu teacher won't be appointed, sources revealed. However, the Urdu teacher was seen at the school on Thursday morning which sparked off protests and students blocked the entrance to the school.

Following this, police cordoned off the area, sources revealed.

While the police claimed that the protesting students attacked the cops following which they lathicharged and lobbed tear-gas shells to break the protests, students claimed that police fired on them unprovoked. "We were holding a blockade at the entrance of the school protesting against Urdu teacher appointment but police suddenly opened fire on us. They even manhandled and verbally abused the women," a student said.

However, Islampur MLA Kanhaiyalal Agarwal said that police told him that they did not open fire on the protesting students. "I have seen the dead body and he was hit at the back. But local police station SHO told me that police did not open fire. Everything will be clear only after post-mortem," he said.

Police officials could not be reached for a comment. On the other hand, BJP has promised to widen the agitation. "The incident shows how police are acting at the behest of the ruling party. Implications of this incident will be felt across the district," district BJP President Shankar Chakraborty said.
Chairman of the Suez Canal Authority (SCA) and the Suez Canal Economic Zone (SCEZ) Mohab Mamish signed a memorandum of understanding with the Portuguese Port of Sines.

The MoU is intended to strengthen parternships and exchange expertise and information regarding the field of ports, according to a statement released by the SCEZ on Thursday.

The statement continued on to highlight that the agreement was signed during a meeting between Mamish and Portugal's Minister of Sea Ana Paula Vitorino. The meeting was held in order to discuss boosting bilateral cooperation in the port sector.

During the meeting, Mamish reviewed a number of key mega-national projects implemented by the country, including the underway Suez Canal development corridor.

Furthermore, the statement outlined that Mamish invited the Portuguese minister to visit the SCEZ and updated her on the mega-projects currently under construction in the sea, noting that these are being carried out in the industrial zone in Port Said.

Mamish is currently on an official visit to Portugal to take part in the Ocean Meeting International Conference in Lisbon, upon invitation from Vitorino.

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By Online Desk

In a letter to Prime minister Narendra Modi, Pakistan's newly elected Prime Minister Imran Khan has proposed a meeting between foreign minister Sushma Swaraj and her Pak counterpart Shah Mehmood Qureshi in the last week of September.

"I wish to propose a meeting between Foreign Minister, Makhdoom Shah Mahmood Qureshi and the External Affairs Minister, Ms Sushma Swaraj, before the informal meeting of the SAARC Foreign Ministers at the sidelines of the upcoming UN General Assembly in New York," the Prime Minister wrote.

"Pakistan remains ready to discuss terrorism", Khan wrote.

"Pakistan and India have an undeniably challenging relationship. We, however, owe it to our peoples, especially the future generations, to peacefully resolve all outstanding issues, including the Jammu and Kashmir dispute," the Prime Minister wrote.

Khan also raised Siachen and Sir Creek issues in the letter saying that both needed close attention to move towards a resolution.

The text of the letter reads:

Dear Modi Sahab,

I wish to thank you for your warm greetings and best wishes on my assumption of charge as the Prime Minister of Pakistan.

I endorse your sentiment that the only way forward for our two countries lies in "constructive engagement". It was in this spirit that Pakistan's Minister of Law and Information attended the funeral of Mr Atal Bihari Vajpayee in New Delhi. Mr Vajpayee contributed in trying to bring a positive change in our bilateral relations and was also a major proponent of a strong SAARC for building bridges and developing ties.

Pakistan and India have an undeniably challenging relationship. We, however, owe it to our peoples, especially the future generations, to peacefully resolve all outstanding issues, including the Jammu and Kashmir dispute, to bridge differences and achieve a mutually beneficial outcome. Siachin and Sir Creek also need close attention to move towards resolution.

Pakistan remains ready to discuss terrorism.

Discussions on trade, people to people contacts, religious tourism, humanitarian issues are also important.

Building on the mutual desire for peace between our two countries, I wish to propose a meeting between Foreign Minister, Makhdoom Shah Mahmood Qureshi and the External Affairs Minister, Ms Sushma Swaraj, before the informal meeting of the SAARC Foreign Ministers at the sidelines of the upcoming UN General Assembly in New York. They can explore the way forward, especially the holding of the SAARC Council of Ministers followed by the SAARC Summit in Islamabad. The summit will offer an opportunity for you to visit Pakistan and for us to restart the stalled dialogue process.

I look forward to working with you for the benefit of the people of both our countries.

Please accept, Excellency, the assurances of my highest consideration.
Anand ST Das By

Express News Service

PATNA: The principal of a private school in Patna and one his employees were arrested for raping a girl for about three months.

Principal Raj Singhania, 28, and accountant Abhishek Kumar, 26 had also been allegedly filming the crime with their mobile phones and threatening the 12-year-old girl of dire consequences, if she informed anyone about it.

The matter came to light after the girl complained of frequent abdominal pain and also bouts of vomiting. Her parents took her for a medical checkup, which revealed that she was pregnant, the police said.

READ| Gang rape in Dehradun boarding school, nine taken into custody

"The two accused were arrested after a written complaint lodged by the girl's parents. We have recommended this case for speedy trial," Patna SSP Manu Maharaj said. The duo is booked under the Pocso Act.

Police officials investigating the case said Singhania, who is also the school's owner, would often call the girl to his chamber on the pretext of checking her homework and handwriting. "After the accountant learnt about it, he also started sexually abusing the girl. He also made video clips. Then, the duo jointly continued the crime," said a police officer.

The school, which had about 90 students up to Class V, was shut down following the arrests.

In July, two incidents of gang rape inside school premises had come to light in Bihar. A Class 10 girl student of a private school in Saran was raped by 15 students and three teachers for seven months. Another girl of a government school in West Champaran was gang-raped by 11 students, including one of her seniors. All the accused were later arrested.
Sumi Sukanya Dutta By

Express News Service

NEW DELHI: The Centres flagship health insurance scheme for 50 crore Indians will be launched officially on September 23 in about 10,000 government and private hospitals.

Officials in the National Health Agency, a body constituted by the Union government to implement the scheme, said the Ayushman Bharat-Pradhan Mantri Jan Arogya Yojanas official launch was been brought forward due to unavailability of Prime Minister Narendra Modi on September 25.

He will launch the scheme in Ranchi on September 23 after which it will be kick-started in most other states, NHA Chief Executive Officer Indu Bhushan told TNIE.

In his I-Day speech, Modi had announced the scheme would be rolled out on the birth anniversary of BJP ideologue Deen Dayal Upadhyay (Sept. 25). The scheme has already been soft-launched in a few states.

Of the 30 states and Union Territories that are onboard, Goa, Punjab, Jammu and Kashmir, Rajasthan and Puducherry will see the schemes launch in later stages.

So far, Telangana, Odisha and Delhi have not evinced interest in the yojana, which envisages a funding share of 60:40 basis between the Centre and the states.

Rajasthan which has a successful health scheme, Bhamashah, in place will implement the scheme only after the assembly elections, but other four states will join the programme in a few months, Bhushan said.

He added about 50 per cent of the hospitals where the cashless hospitalisation would begin next week, were in the private sector.

We have already listed out about 8,000 hospitals, and 2,000-3,000 more will join in two-three days. Bhushans deputy Dinesh Arora said last-minute preparation is in full swing for a successful launch of the scheme.

Big private players evince interest

Some corporate hospitals such as Medanta have also got empanelled for the scheme already, and many others have expressed a willingness to join it.
By Express News Service

JAIPUR: Congress President Rahul Gandhi was at his aggressive best and targeted Prime Minister Narendra Modi directly during his Sankalp rally in Rajasthan's Dungarpur district.

Lashing out at Modi over the alleged corruption in the Rafale deal and over the government's failure to prevent Vijay Mallya from fleeing the country, Rahul said the PM Modi calls himself the 'chaukidaar' of the country but he is now involved in theft.

In slamming the PM, Rahul even coined a fresh slogan: " Gali Gali mein shor hai , Desh ka Chaukidaar chor hai "( People in every nook and corner are shouting that the watchman is the thief).

He also remarked: "PM gave Anil Ambani the Rafale contract which raised the cost of each plane from 526 crores to Rupees 1600 crores each. We were to purchase 126 planes in such an amount and BJP has bought only 36. Why? When I ask this question, Modiji can't even see me in the eye."

Rahul was speaking in the tribal-dominated Mewar-Wagad region of southern Rajasthan which is critical politically, as the party which dominates in this region has traditionally formed the government in Rajasthan.

The Congress President even attacked Finance Minister Arun Jaitley claiming that he let Vijay Mallya escape to London after meeting him a day before in the Parliament.

"It was a deliberate effort by BJP leaders and they should be implicated. If a constable lets a thief escape, the constable is then put behind bars for collusion. These people let a man escape with 9000 crore Rupees. Modiji says he is the watchman of the country but today the entire country knows that he is a thief", he said.

On the issue of unemployment, Rahul was scathing in his attack, saying that both the central and state government had failed to tackle the issue. Rahul said that Raje had promised to deliver 15 lakh jobs in the last assembly elections but they still do not have any plans to implement that grand promise. He promised that as soon as Congress comes to power youth will have more jobs and help from the banking system as well.

He went on to remind the people that the UPA government had approved a rail project of rupees 2,000 crore for Mewar, which was subsequently cancelled by BJP.

"Modi ji has sanctioned 1 lakh crore rupees bullet train project for 5000-7000 rich people,but has cancelled our 2000 crore rupees project for the people of Mewar. When we form the government we will connect this region with the rest of the country so that the youth has more job opportunities.

When you see your appliances today you see 'made in China' tag at the back, I want to make sure that very soon it should read as 'made in Rajasthan', Rahul added. One of the prime problems facing Congress in Rajasthan is the in-fighting between the two chief ministerial candidates, PCC chief ,Sachin Pilot and former Chief Minister, Ashok Gehlot.

Earlier at a rally in Jaipur Rahul Gandhi made sure both of them hugged each other on the stage sending a message of unity. On Thursday He mentioned about the viral picture of Ashok Gehlot and Sachin Pilot sitting on a motorbike together from last week.

"I was happy to see the picture and it made me realise that we are definitely going to win the elections in Rajasthan because we are fighting together. Normally we have to request everyone to work together in congress, but I did not have to say anything to them, they became friends on their own", he said.

Two days back BJP President Amit Shah had conducted a public rally in Udaipur targeting ST votes and now Rahul Gandhi has kick started his campaign in the region with the rally in Saagawada, Dungarpur.

The dominating ST voter is traditionally a Congress vote bank but in the last assembly elections BJP had won 70 percent more seats out of the total 28 seats and formed a majority government. It seems now that Mewar has become the epicenter of caste politics before the elections again.
By IANS

NEW DELHI: The Supreme Court on Thursday decided to monitor the CBI probe in the case of Muzaffarpur shelter home rapes and sought a status report from the central agency in four weeks. The top court asked the media to exercise caution while reporting the case.

A bench of Justice Madan B. Lokur and Justice Deepak Gupta also vacated a Patna High Court order restraining the media from reporting the case. The apex court clarified that "there can't be a blanket ban but the media needs to be cautious and diligent while reporting".

Earlier, the Patna High Court was monitoring the case. Perusing the status reports an investigation in the case filed by the CBI before it, the bench ordered Income Tax department to conduct a probe involving accused Brajesh Thakur and his NGO Seva Sankalp Evam Vikas Samiti in Muzaffarpur shelter home rape case and find out details of their assets and expenditure of Rs 4.5 crore granted by Bihar government in the last decade.

"It is necessary, in our opinion, that the Income Tax Department should look into the income and assets of Brajesh Thakur and indeed of the NGO Sewa Sankalp Evam Vikas Samiti," ordered the bench.

The apex court also said that it appears that the person-in-charge of the NGO, Brajesh Thakur is a very influential person and people in the neighbourhood are scared of him and not able to make any complaint against him.

"It has come to light that people in the neighbourhood have heard screaming by girls in the shelter home but they did not bring it to the notice of anybody because of the apparent terror of Brajesh Thakur. The CBI will need to look into the antecedents, connections and influence of Brajesh Thakur," the bench said.

The sexual abuse of at least 34 girl inmates at the shelter home run by NGO of Thakur in Muzaffarpur came to light during a social audit by the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai.

An FIR was lodged against 11 people, including Thakur, on May 31. The probe was later taken over by the CBI.

In the order, the court also said that has also come on record that one Chandrashekhar Verma and his wife Manju Verma have been in possession of illegal ammunition of a fairly large quantity and it is not clear whether they were in possession of illegal arms as well.

"The status report mentions that an FIR has been lodged against Chandrashekhar Verma and Manju Verma. The affairs of these two need to be looked into, particularly with regard to their procurement and possession of illegal ammunition and availability of illegal weapons, if any," it added.

The CBI's status report also mentioned that some girls were transferred on March 20, 2018 by the Social Welfare Department from shelter home run by Thakur's NGO.

It is not clear why these girls were transferred out, particularly when the report given by TISS became known to the state government sometime in May 2018.

"The transfer seems to suggest that the Social Welfare Department of the government of Bihar was aware of certain unsavoury activities in the shelter home and that may have been the reason for transfer of the victim girls," the court said and ordered the CBI to seize the record of the Social Welfare Department and carry out the investigation.

It further asked the Bihar government to file the affidavit indicating the circumstances necessitating the transfer of some girls out of the shelter home by the Social Welfare Department.
By PTI

PATNA: RJD leader Tejashwi Yadav on Thursday charged BJP MP in the neighbouring Jharkhand state, whose feet was washed by a party worker who later drank that water, with trying to "intimidate people in the media" by getting a case filed against them "through his proxies".

Yadav levelled the allegation against Nishikant Dubey, a resident of Bhagalpur district in Bihar who is a two-time MP from Godda in Jharkhand.

Dubey had landed in a controversy earlier this week when reports surfaced in the media that a party worker - Pavan Sah - had washed his feet in public and gulped down the water.

Sharing screenshot of a case lodged by Sah against heads of major news organizations at a Godda court, Yadav tweeted "instead of apologising for his shameful conduct, BJP MP Nishikant Dubey (getting his dirty feet washed by a poor man who then drank that water) is bullying and trying to intimidate people in the media and social media through cases through his proxies".

The RJD heir apparent's post was retweeted by Delhi Chief Minister and Aam Aadmi Party supremo Arvind Kejriwal who remarked "so far the BJP was controlling media by controlling advertisers adn through money. But now it seems it has decided to file police cases against media if it dares to question shameful acts of its MPs".
By Express News Service

NEW DELHI: Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley on Thursday derided Congress president Rahul Gandhi as clown prince and questioned his continuation in public life for consistently spreading falsehood in the country.

Seeking to counter the Congress charges against the government over Rafale deal and non-performing assets (NPAs) of public sector banks, Jaitley took potshots at Rahul in a Facebook blog.

In mature democracies, those who rely on falsehood are considered unfit for public life. Many have been banished from political activity because they were caught lying. But this rule obviously cant apply to a dynastic organisation like Congress, the minister wrote.

He said the Congress partys campaign of falsehood on Rafale exposed Rahuls strategy to concoct a lie and repeat as many times.

If the Rafale concoctions were the first big lie, the second one stated repeatedly is that Modi waived off Rs 2.50 lakh crores of fifteen industrialists. Every word of that sentence repeatedly uttered by Rahul Gandhi is false, he wrote.

Jaitley claimed the stated amounts were lent by the banks prior to 2014 and the UPA government concealed the loans despite default by rolling them over.

He said the UPA leaders claimed that when they went out of power, the NPAs were only Rs 2.5 lakh crore.

The truth is that actually the NPAs were hidden under the carpet, noted Jaitley, and an asset quality review in 2015 by the RBI, revealed the NPAs were to the tune of Rs 8.96 lakh crore.

Hitting out at Rahul, Jaitley said: You lied on the Rafale deal, you lied on the NPAs. Your temperament to concoct facts raises a legitimate question  do people whose natural preference is falsehood deserve to be a part of the public discourse.

Public discourse was a serious activity, Jaitley said, not a laughter challenge.

It cannot be reduced to a hug, a wink or repetition of falsehood. The worlds largest democracy must seriously introspect whether public discourse should be allowed to be polluted by the falsehood of a Clown Prince.
By PTI

NEW DELHI: Deputy Chief of Air Staff Air Marshal Raghunath Nambiar on Thursday flew the first Rafale fighter jet manufactured by Dassault Aviation for India, official sources said.

Nambiar, who reached Paris four days ago, flew the aircraft in France to assess its efficacy, they said.

He is in France to also assess the progress in the production of Rafale jets by Dassault Aviation.

Air Marshal Nambiar flew the first Rafale fighter jet manufactured by Dassault Aviation for India, the sources said.

The delivery of the jets -- capable of carrying a range of potent weapons and missiles -- is scheduled to begin from September next year.

A team of the Indian Air Force is already in France to help Dassault Aviation to incorporate the India-specific avionics and weapons system in the aircraft.

The development comes amid a raging controversy in India over the deal to procure the Rafale fighter jets.

In 2016, the Modi government signed a government-to-government deal with France for purchase of 36 Rafale jets at a cost of Rs 58,000 crore.

The Congress has been alleging irregularities in the deal, saying the UPA had finalised the price of each aircraft at Rs 526 crore while the NDA was buying the same jet at Rs 1,670 crore.

The government has refuted these allegations.
Balbir Punj By

While a part of the Christian clergy is busy pontificating on the falling moral and ethical values in the country, the Catholic Church itself has been in the news for the wrong reasons, both in India and abroad.

The Church in Kerala is in turmoil. A 44-year-old nun has lodged a complaint with the state police alleging that she was first sexually abused in 2014 by Jalandhar Bishop Franco Mulakkal, who summoned her to a convent in Kerala where he was on a visit, on the pretext of discussing an important matter. According to her, she was subsequently raped 12 times by the bishop in the following two years.

In the last week of June this year, the Kuravilangad police in Kottayam district had registered a case of rape and unnatural sex against the bishop. The nun has alleged that the bishop, a native of Thrissur, sexually exploited her at the Missionaries of Jesus house at Kuravilangad in Kottayam. As the Jalandhar bishop is the patron of the Missionaries of Jesus, he had easy access to the congregations house in Kuravilangad.

Why was there such a delay on the part of the nun in lodging a complaint? She told the police that she had informed superiors of the church last year. As there was no action, she approached the police. The Kuravilangad house of the congregation has six nunsthe victim among thempolice said. Apart from the complainant, four other nuns of the same house have given statements against the bishop, a police official told a newspaper.

Some laypeople belonging to the Ernakulam archdiocese have field a complaint in Kochi demanding legal action against Cardinal George Alencherry, who according to reports, has allegedly tried to protect the accused and threatened the victim to take back her complaint.

The decision to summon the highly placed accused was taken after five nuns along with their supporters, including priests from other churches, held a sit-in outside the Kerala High Court under the banner of Joint Christian Council. But why has no tangible action been taken against the bishop and the cardinal, who has been accused of a cover-up of a heinous crime?

Flash back to 1998. Four nuns were raped in Jhabua district in Madhya Pradesh. There was global uproar and Hindu organisations (read BJP and RSS) were accused by some of the ghastly crime. Many prominent Christian and so-called human rights activists started a tirade against the then NDA government led by Atal Bihari Vajpayee.

In the wake of this dastardly incident, social activists appealed to the US and the UK for sanctions against India and in the process maligned the countrys image the world over. Later on, many of the rapists were found to be Christians, mainly tribals who had been converted to Christianity. Soon after, Jhabua was history. But the damage was done.

The rape and murder of an eight-year-old girl in Kathua, Jammu, and the rape of a 17-year-old girl in UPs Unnao are two incidents that have shocked the nation in recent times. In the first case, a girl child was kidnapped on January 10 this year and her body was subsequently discovered near the village temple. The police promptly made some arrests; the local populace claimed there were gaping holes in the police theory and demanded a CBI inquiry. The plea for a CBI probe was termed as standing with the rapists.

In the Unnao case, the girl was raped on 4 June 2017. Two separate chargesheets, one by the CBI on 11 July 2018 naming Kuldeep Singh Sengar, a BJP MLA from Uttar Pradesh, and another on 13 July 2018 naming Sengar and his brother, three policemen and others for allegedly falsely implicating the father of Unnao rape survivor in an Arms Act case, were filed. The accused had a high status in the ruling dispensation, but this did not stop the police from taking action against them.

The Catholic Church stood with the rape victims of Kathua and Unnao. In a statement issued by the Archdiocese of Bombay, its spokesperson, Fr Nigel Barrett, urged the laity to speak up. He said, Evil exists and perpetuates because good people are silent. He said the Church has always stood in solidarity with victims of injustice. Too often we are silent to the pain and suffering around us. Many people tend to think that if it does not affect me then its not my problem.

In Thane, Bishop Allwyn DSilva said, Not just Catholics, people of all faiths are urged to come and raise their voice against the growing culture of intolerance and violence against women. The culprits must be brought to book and victims must receive speedy justice and compensation.However, there is deafening silence on the part of all such votaries of human dignity and moral values in the case of the Kerala nun. Where are the rent-a-cause activists who take to the streets at the slightest pretext? Why is there no public outrage against the tardy investigation in the Kerala nun case?

It is not only in India that the scourge of sex crimes has hit the Church. The situation at the global level is alarming. Thousands of cases of sexual exploitation, including the abuse of hapless children, by Church officials are being reported from dozens of countries all over the world. Is it not the time that the Church does some introspection, takes corrective measures and heeds its own words rather than pontificating to the rest of the society?
By Express News Service

VIJAYAWADA:The Opposition parties in the State slammed the report submitted by Justice (retired) CY Somayajulu after inquiring into the stampede that killed 29 people on the first day of the Godavari Pushkaram in Rajamahendravaram in 2015. While the YSRC rejected the report saying that it was drafted to absolve Chief Minister N Chandrababu of his mistakes and shift the blame to the public and media, the BJP found fault with it for making observations which were far from the truth.

Former minister and BJP MLA Pydikondala Manikyala Rao said that the Somayajulus observations were unethical and toed the line of the TDP.

The entire report is far from the truth. How can the people or the media be blamed for it? A government has intelligence at its disposal. If its planning a massive event, it has to get reports from the intelligence and manage the crowds accordingly. It was a complete failure of the police and intelligence departments, Manikyala Rao told TNIE. Incidentally, Rao was the Endowments Minister and was at the location when the tragedy took place.

Earlier in the day, YSRC spokesperson Vasireddy Padma, in a press meet in Hyderabad, said that the report appeared as if the CM himself prepared it and got it signed by Justice Somajayulu.

We reject the commission report as it is nothing but an eyewash and it overlooked the basic facts vouchsafed by the top officials immediately after the incident. The lapse of time does not change or alter the happenings and we blame Chandrababu Naidu not only for the stampede but also for trying to distort the facts, she observed.
The Egyptian cabinet approved on Thursday a draft presidential resolution to sign a cooperation deal with the International Labor Organization (ILO) focussed on developing the country's private sector. It is intended to be signed with the country's investment ministry

The cooperation deal is aimed at encouraging private investment, providing technical training for business owners, and supporting entrepreneurs, young businessmen and producers, particularly in rural areas.

The deal is expected to be effective for more than three years, from 2018 through 2021.

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By Express News Service

BENGALURU: The Congress high command wants no threats to the JD(S)-Congress coalition government, from outside or within. State leaders KPCC president Dinesh Gundu Rao, Deputy CM G Parameshwara, co-ordination committee chief Siddaramaiah along with AICC general secretary in charge of Karnataka, KC Venugopal, who met AICC president on Wednesday night, have been asked to do everything they can to keep the HD Kumaraswamy-led government floating.

The state leaders also handed over a list of four names for the upcoming bypolls to the Karnataka Legislative Council. Out of more than 20 aspirants, four names were, zeroed in on for the three vacant posts out of which one has been given to JD(S), sources pointed out.

Also Read | Karnataka CM HD Kumaraswamy trying to poach our MLAs, claims BS Yeddyurappa

While Parameshwara has pushed for Nivedith Alva, former minister Ramalinga Reddy was in New Delhi on Wednesday to lobby for M C Venugopal and U B Venkatesh. Nazeer Ahmeds name has also been suggested to Rahul Gandhi who will pick the final two candidates.

The state leaders met Rahul Gandhi and held talks for an hour over MLC candidate selection apart from the ongoing political tussle in the state.

Sources privy to the meeting suggest that while Rahul Gandhi has asked state leaders to address concerns voiced by MLAs, especially with regards to fund allocation and coordination within the government, a firm message has been given to keep the coalition going.

Read | This government wont fall even if I am jailed: Karnataka Minister DK Shivakumar

The sources said the Congress high command asked the state leaders to sort the issues at the earlier.

It was Siddaramaiah and Parameshwaras responsibility to ensure that the coalition government runs smoothly, but they have failed to such an extent that the Chief Minister had to intervene, said a senior Congress leader. Allowing dissent within the party to grow has only benefitted the BJP, the leader added.

With candidate selection for MLC polls as the primary agenda, state leaders held a meeting at Venugopals residence before meeting the Congress chief.

While it was suggested that the party choose candidates from the same community as those who have vacated the seats, a final list of four have been handed over to Rahul Gandhi.

An official announcement is likely to be made soon from the central leadership.

Satish Jarkiholi who was in Delhi to meet the high command also spoke to the media and expressed contentment over the AICC chief being apprised of their concerns.

Rahul Gandhi now knows of the concerns we have raised. Our state leaders have been asked to address and solve them. The high command has asked them to take everybody along, Satish Jarkiholi said.

With not enough numbers to threaten the Congress on the one hand, and a smaller rebellion, especially from Ballari, brewing against them within the party, the Jarkiholi brothers are likely to be pushed to fall in line. With the high command making it clear that it wants state leaders to come up with solutions, a truce is likely to be arrived at between warring factions of the Congress.

Ramesh Jarkiholi visiting an ailing D K Shivakumar at a hospital in Bengaluru on the day Rahul Gandhi asked for the rebellion to be quelled, is being seen as an indication that the brothers may, after all, be willing to take a step back.

While Siddaramaiah and Parameshwara are yet to find a middle path to address the issues plaguing the Congress, the high command has made it clear that solutions, and not problems, are what they expect from its senior leaders.
By Express News Service

KOCHI: Accepting Jalandhar Bishop Franco Mulakkal's desire to step aside from the post in the wake of police probe into rape allegations against him, Vatican has temporarily relieved him of his pastoral responsibilities and appointed Agnelo Rufino Gracias, Titular Bishop of Molicunza and Auxiliary Bishop emeritus of Bombay as administrator of Jalandhar Diocese.

In a letter, Apostolic Nunciature in India said The Holy Father has received the request of Rt. Rev. Bishop Franco Mulakkal to be temporarily relieved of his pastoral responsibilities in Diocese of Jullundur. Having considered all circumstances, the Holy Father has accepted this request of Bishop Mulakkal and has appointed the Ret Rev Agnelo Rufino Gracias, Titular Bishop of Molicunza and Auxiliary Bishop emeritus of Bombay as administrator of Jalandhar Diocese.

It was after Kerala Police served notice to Bishop Franco to appear before the investigation team on September 19 in connection with the rape case that Franco wrote a letter to the Pope expressing his desire to step down from the post temporarily.
By Express News Service

KOCHI: Kalpetta native Nashidul Hamzafar, who was deported after trying to join the Islamic State (IS) in Afghanistan, was brought by officers of the National Investigation Agency (NIA) from New Delhi to Kochi on Thursday. Hamzafar is the 16th accused in the case related to the migration of 14 persons from Kasargod to IS-controlled areas in Afghanistan in 2016. After being deported, he was taken into custody by NIA from New Delhi airport on Wednesday. He will be interrogated in Kochi till Friday. He was radicalised by people who moved from Kasargod to Afghanistan.

They maintained contact with him. For this purpose, encrypted social media platforms were used to go undetected. The accused and his friend obtained a travel visa to Oman. After leaving India on October 2, 2017, they moved to Tehran to reach Afghanistan. However, the friend, following pressure from the family, decided to return to India. Nashidul, who moved to Kabul, was intercepted by the Afghan police.

He was under detention in Kabul for several months, said sources.An official statement released by the NIA claimed that Hamzafar participated in a conspiracy with other absconding persons such as Abdul Rashid Abdulla and Ashfak Majeed, who were known to him through his college mates Shihas, Firoz Khan and Bestin Vincent.This is for the first time that the NIA has arrested an Indian citizen who joined the IS in Afghanistan. He was also interrogated by foreign agencies in Afghanistan.

He will be produced before an NIA judge here on Friday. By questioning Hamzafar, NIA officers hope to gather more information regarding the people who facilitated the passage of IS sympathisers from India to Afghanistan.

The travel routes were chosen and facilities arranged by handlers who were in contact with the arrested person. Evidence against those staying in Afghanistan is already with the NIA. Hamzafars custody will be sought once he is produced before the judge in Kochi, sources said.In March, the NIA court had awarded seven years of rigorous imprisonment to Bihar native Yasmeen Mohammed Zahid who tried to join IS in Afghanistan but was caught at New Delhi airport in 2016.

The other accused are Mohammed Sajid Kuthirummal, Sonia Sebastian, Murshid Mohammed T K, Muhammad M Becker, Hafesudheen Theke Koleth, Firoshkhan M T P, Shamsiya Kuriya, Ashfak Majeed Kallukettiya Purayil, Mohammed Manzad, Ijas, Raffeala, Shihas and Ajmala. The Interpol has issued red corner notices against them.
Toby Antony By

Express News Service

KOCHI: It seems Tehran has become a major transit point for Indians looking to join the Islamic State (IS) in Syria and Afghanistan. In all major cases registered in Kerala related to the migration of Malayalis to IS-held territories since 2016, the preferred route has been via Tehran. Intelligence agencies are clueless about who are facilitating such journeys in Iran. It is suspected that smugglers operating in Iran are helping jihadis to cross the border to Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan.

They select Imam Khomeini International Airport, Tehran, as a transit point to reach by air. From there, they cross the border illegally to Afghanistan or Turkey. For reaching Syria, the group cross the border from Turkey. However, no probe has taken place about people in Iran who facilitate IS sympathisers to cross the border, said sources.

In the first two IS cases registered in Kerala  related to 21 people from Kasargod and Palakkad who moved to Afghanistan in 2016  the group used Tehran as a transit point. Kozhikode native Shajeer Mangalasseri, who was reportedly killed in Afghanistan, also moved via Tehran to reach the IS-held territory. Moinudheen Parakadavath, a member of an IS module Ansarul Khilafa-Kerala, also reached Tehran in June 2016. However, he returned to the UAE and was deported last year.

In another case related to the migration of Malayalis from Kannur and Kozhikode to Syria, it was seen that the group chose an indirect route via Iran. Nashidul Hamzafar, a suspected IS sympathiser from Kalpetta, also attempted to reach Afghanistan through Tehran in October 2017. The group that went to Afghanistan moved to Mashhad bordering Turkmenistan. They stayed there for some weeks before moving to Afghan border areas. The group that went to Syria crossed the border through Tabriz in North Iran to reach Dogubeyazit in Turkey, sources said.

Even intelligence agencies are surprised that IS sympathisers are clandestinely using Iran to reach Afghanistan and Syria. Iran is battling IS in Iraq and surprisingly the jihadis are using its borders to sneak into IS-held territories. Since these borders pass through deserted places and actively used by smugglers, the enforcement agencies there are also finding it hard to control the situation, said an officer.
By Express News Service

BHUBANESWAR: A former woman employee of Air Odisha has levelled rape charges against founder of the airlines and lodged a complaint against him at Khandagiri police station here on Wednesday. The married woman, hailing from Kolkata, reached the city in the morning and lodged the complaint in which she stated that founder of Air Odisha Aviation Private Ltd Santosh Pani had raped her on August 10 and 12.

The complainant had joined the regional airline on July 2 as a security supervisor. She said, on August 10, Pani offered her a lift to her rented accommodation near Punama Gate here and on the way stopped near a liquor outlet. Pani consumed alcohol in the car and also offered her cold drinks laced with sedatives, she claimed.

Pani had harassed me inside the car on August 10 evening before forcibly entering my house and raping me. On August 11, I left early from the office, but on August 12 he again offered me a lift till my residence and instead of dropping me home he took me to one of his friends house in Khandagiri where he raped me again, said the woman.

Currently working with Air Deccan, the woman told mediapersons here that she had joined Air Deccans Kolkata office on September 6 and informed the officials there that her former employer had not cleared her dues.

She was accompanied to Khandagiri police station by Air Deccans chief of security Taufiq Ahmed.

We have registered a case and recorded her statement, said Khandagiri police station IIC Himanshu Swain. Police are trying to verify about Panis friend about whose house the woman had mentioned.

On being asked why did the woman take so long to lodge a police complaint in this regard, Ahmed claimed that the woman told them Pani was very influential and she could not garner the courage to approach the cops.

Meanwhile, Pani has rejected the allegations against him. The woman was asked to leave the company for her lack of understanding with her colleagues and inefficiency in work. All the allegations levelled against me are completely baseless, he said.
By Express News Service

CHENNAI: Apollo hospitals has informed the Justice A Arumughaswamy probe panel that CCTV footage captured while admitting the then Chief Minister J Jayalalithaa on September 22, 2016, got erased. On September 7, the panel which is inquiring into the circumstances leading to the death of Jayalalithaa, directed the hospital chief operating officer Subbiah Viswanathan to submit the footage captured during hospitalisation of Jayalalithaa within seven days. It also raised questions including on whose direction the CCTV cameras were turned off.

In an affidavit submitted before the panel, the hospital claimed that the footage recorded in the server will automatically get erased every 45 days. The hospital also said that it could not submit any camera footage of Jayalalithaa.

The commission has summoned hospital chief operating officer Subbiah Viswanathan to appear before it panel on September 25. Besides, the commission has written to the Governors secretary seeking details of information sought by the then Governor from AIIMS and Apollo Hospitals during 75-day hospitalisation. The commission has asked Governors office whether any information on health condition of Jayalalithaa was sought from medical experts and Apollo hospitals during her hospitalisation.
By Express News Service

CHENNAI : The Reserve Forest Area in The Nilgiris is now off limits for everyone, including The Nilgiri Wildlife and Environment Association, and will be open only to forest officials discharging their official functions, Madras HC has ruled.

Justice N Kirubakaran passed the interim order on a petition filed by L.Seetharaman, an advocate, who sought a directive to the authorities to verify the antecedents of newly admitted members of the association in the interest of forest, wildlife and nature and to remove members who are unconnected with cause of conservation and with criminal antecedents.

He also directed The Nilgiris Collector to issue a circular to individual members and public notice to the general public and through websites inviting objections or details of the antecedents of members of the association. On receipt of such details, the Collector should file a report, the judge said while posting hearing for Oct 4.

The judge said as per the Collectors counter affidavit, the association was not functioning satisfactorily and members were busy fighting for membership, as membership gave a social status to claim they were environment and wildlife servants.

The Reserve Forest area is being used for recreational activities, not only by members, but by guests of the association members also.Though it is not stated in the counter affidavit about the role of some of the forest officials, from the arguments put forth, the court could infer that some officials were also involved, the judge said.
Donita Jose By

Express News Service

HYDERABAD: The back-to-back incidents of attacks on couples marrying outside their caste has put light on vengeful fathers riding high on pride and power, say experts. The brutality and organised execution witnessed in both these murders is a new syndrome that is different from the past, says EFLU professor K Satyanarayana.

Earlier, they merely thought of transgressors as a bane on their family, now its a matter of pride for the entire community, he says. These vengeful fathers are running high on caste pride and have immense power and capitalistic clout. They now invoke the community pride instead of family pride. They treat their daughters transgressions as towards the entire community, not just their family, he says.

Also Read | We are all responsible for the intolerance against inter-caste marriages

Satyanarayana also blamed the ruling TRS government for encouraging caste-based groups to flourish in the State. Suneetha Rani, an expert on Dalit issues, says such brutal lynching and murder was earlier common only in North India. On one side the issue highlights that caste identities are becoming stronger while on the other, it indicates that more youngsters are transgressing the caste boundaries, says Suneetha.

Both the instances, activists say, seem as if the fathers want to make a statement. Its like they want to tell other fathers to take action on their children who are not abiding by their rules. Maruthi Rao wanted to make a statement. Otherwise, why would they chose such a public location to kill Pranay? Why would the video be made to go viral. It is as if they want to send a message to Dalit youngsters, that they could face similar fate if they transgressed the caste boundaries, says professor Sujatha Surepally.

So, what is police doing to manage such situations?

We do get cases where couples occasionally come and tell us that their parents are stalking and threatening them. These cases are not handled by She Teams but we forward them to respective police stations, says IG for womens safety Swati Lakra.
By PTI

WASHINGTON DC: The process of rapid denuclearisation of North Korea, which will be done by constant negotiations with the United States, will be completed by 2021, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said on Wednesday.

In a statement, Pompeo hoped that the nuclear talks between the two countries would lead to long-lasting peace and stability on the Korean Peninsula.

Congratulating North Korean leader Kim Jong-un and South Korean president Moon Jae-in on the "successful outcome" of the the meeting between them in Pyongyang, Pompeo said, "We welcome President Moon and Chairman Kim's reaffirmation of the Singapore joint statement of complete denuclearisation of the Korean Peninsula, including the permanent dismantlement of all facilities at Yongbyon in the presence of US and IAEA inspectors."

"We also welcome Chairman Kim's decision to complete the previously announced dismantlement of the Tongchang-ri site in the presence of U.S. and international inspectors as a step toward the final fully verified denuclearization of North Korea, as agreed by Chairman Kim at the Singapore summit with President Trump," he added.

The US Secretary of State further noted that Washington "is prepared to engage immediately in negotiations to transform relations between the two countries."

Furthermore, Pompeo extended an invitation to his North Korean counterpart Ri Yong Ho to meet in New York City next week during the United Nations General Assembly meeting. He also invited North Korean representatives to meet Special Representative of North Korea, Stephen Biegun, in Vienna at the earliest opportunity.

Earlier on Wednesday, North and South Korea signed a joint military agreement and a joint statement to heighten peace and denuclearisation talks. Additionally, the two sides agreed to take "additional step" to achieve the process of denuclearisation.

President Moon and Kim also proclaimed the end of the state of war, a South Korean presidential spokesperson confirmed.

As a part of the agreement, the two Koreas agreed to cease large-scale artillery exercises and military flights near the demilitarized zone to prevent incidents from November 1.

Reacting to the meeting, US President Donald Trump lauded Kim's steps to shut down a nuclear testing site in the presence of international experts and dubbed the inter-Korean summit as "very exciting".

"Kim Jong Un has agreed to allow Nuclear inspections, subject to final negotiations, and to permanently dismantle a test site and launch pad in the presence of international experts. In the meantime there will be no Rocket or Nuclear testing. Hero remains to continue being.....returned home to the United States. Also, North and South Korea will file a joint bid to host the 2032 Olympics. Very exciting!" Trump wrote in his Twitter handle.
Renowned veteran actor Gamil Rateb died on 19 September in Cairo at the age of 92

Renowned Egyptian actor Gamil Rateb, who passed away Wednesday, has left behind a 65 year legacy.

The actor had just celebrated his 92nd birthday last month.

Born in Egypt on 28 August 1926, Rateb attended university in France, graduating from law school.

His repertoire includes over 80 credits between Egyptian and international cinemas, theatres and television screens.

Between Egypt and France

His debut came with a role in the 1945 with Egyptian film Ana El-Sharq (I am the East), before he went to Paris and joined the Comedie Francaise theatre in the 1950s, taking on leading roles.

Some of his stage roles include a 1960 rendition of Shakespeare's Hamlet at the Theatre des Champs-Elysees produced by Philippe Dauchez and Maurice Jacquemont, and a 1967 play of Scheherazade by Jules Supervielle at the Theatre des Mathurins.

Some of the his appearances in French cinema include Peau D'Espion (To Commit a Murder, 1967), Un ete a La Goulette (Summer in La Goulette, 1996)

Rateb also appeared in American cinema, including Panic in Bangkok (1964) and the award-winning American films Trapeze (1956), and Lawrence of Arabia (1962) in which he starred alongside Egyptian actor Omar El-Sharif.

He also made appearances in several Tunisian joint productions with France and Egypt.

His career took off in Egyptian cinema during the 1970s. Al-Sooud ela El-Haweya (Rising to the Bottom, 1978), Hob Fel Zenzana (Love Inside a Prison Cell, 1983), Al-Baree (The Innocent, 1986), Toyoor El-Zalam (Birds of Darkness, 1995) are some of the numerous films he is known for.

He also worked with some of Egypts top directors, including Mohamed Khan in El-Keif (Dope, 1985) and Youssef Chahine in Adieu Bonaparte (1985), and alongside some of Egypt's best actors including Faten Hamama, Ahmed Zaki, Adel Imam and Mahmoud Hemeida.

His last film appeared was in 2018 with a small role in the Egyptian film, Bel Hagm El-Aely (Family-Sized, 2018), directed by Hala Khalil.

He also played a part in Hier, a Hungarian film directed by Balint Kenyeres. The film was just released last August.

Between 1994 and 2013 he was on the Egyptian television show Yawmeat Wanees (Diaries, 1994) alongside Mohamed Sobhy, among other notable television roles.

Rateb also had roles on French television, including a 1969 series titled Thibaud ou Les Croisades (Thibaud, or the Crusades).

His last television role in an Egyptian television series was in Haret El-Yahood (Jew's Alley, 2015).

Awards

In the late stages of his career, Rateb received many awards in appreciation for his work.

He was the Legion of Honour by France, the highest French award of merit for military and civil merits. He also received an award from the Cairo International Film Festival in 2005.

In 2011 he was awarded with a lifetime achievement award at the Dubai International Film Festival.

In 2015, the Syndicate of Acting Professions honoured him with an appreciation award for his collective works, as did the Cairo Experimental Theatre festival for its 33rd edition in 2016.

Earlier in 2018, the UN-ARTs council was honoured his legacy as part of marking the occasion of Father's Day.

For more arts and culture news and updates, follow Ahram Online Arts and Culture on Twitter at @AhramOnlineArts and on Facebook at Ahram Online: Arts & Culture

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Nagy Shaker, puppeteer, painter, stage and film director, costume, set and lighting designer and all-round scenograph passed away on 18 August. His favorite puppet Rihana and endless creations live on

In the morning hours of Saturday 11 August, Nagy Shaker was in bed, fatigued by illness but in a good mood.

I had a dream, he told his wife, Vera Lagator. I dreamt that I went to the faculty and saw my students. I miss them. I will overcome this disease and go see them.

He then asked for his laptop so he could do some online research for one of his students. A few minutes later Vera thought her husband had fallen asleep but the truth was that he had slipped into a coma, a state which only deteriorated over the following days leading to his passing a week later, on 18 August.

Egypts renowned puppeteer is widely known for his role as a chief designer and puppet maker on one the 1960s greatest works Al-Leila Al-Kebira (The Grand Night), a puppet operetta with poetry by Salah Jahin, music by Sayed Mekawy, scenography by Mostafa Kamel and mise-en-scene by Salah El Sakka.

Nagy Shaker was in fact a jack-of-all-arts (and master of them all) as well as an incredible human being. Both Lagator, who hails from the former Yugoslavia, and Shakers lifelong friend Omneya Yehia, once his student at the Faculty of Fine Arts, Cairo, and now a professor at the same institution, testify to a humanity beyond even the highest expectations.

But the range and penetration of his work is just as impressive.

Shakers seven-decades of artistic practice were not limited to the art of puppetry and it would be unfair to confine his creativity, dynamism and passions to one genre.

Al-Leila Al-Kebiras creator and the father of Rihana from Shehab Al-Dins Donkey (1962) explored numerous creative genres apart from puppetry, often interweaving two or more of them in unexpected ways. He was, among other things, painter, stage and film director, costume, set and lighting designer and all-round scenograph. In these tasks, he explored light, shadow and movement, words and silence, objects and symbols.

To Shaker, art was a medium through which to translate and materialise his bountiful thoughts and ideas, experiences and observations, reveries and daydreams.

Shaker came to this world on 16 February 1932 and he was fascinated by art since childhood. As Lagator divulges, he was fortunate to have support from his family for his first drawings and paintings.

While many parents prefer their children to have proper jobs, become doctors or engineers, Nagys family encouraged his artistic enthusiasm, she explains.

He started painting at the age of eight and soon after took art lessons. To his mothers surprise he was already painting nudes at the age of 12, astonishing his teacher with his talent. When he was 14 he received an art scholarship from France but was unable to go.

Such a fertile background allowed Shaker to spread his wings. Having entered the Faculty of Fine Arts decor department, Shaker became the first student in the schools history to dedicate himself to puppetry, and the first to present a puppeteering graduation project, Oqlet Al-Sobaa (1957).

At the time his knowledge of the field was fed in large part by contact with international practitioners, and an ongoing search for magazines and books. It did not take him long to realise the importance of puppetry outside his homeland, and how its rich meanders were far more complex than the popular aragoz marionette known in Egypts grassroots culture.

Shakers talent, passion and determination had the power to open many doors. His first years after graduating produced the epic-making operetta, Al-Leila Al-Kebira. Shakers inspiration for it came from short radio programmes on the moulid (a folk carnival celebrating the Prophet or a saints anniversary). Turning the celebratory mood into a full-length play with a developed plot and distinctive characters was definitely a challenge, yet the towering trio, Shaker, Jahin and Mekawy, were determined.

In 1960, the play finally saw the light to unprecedented success. The story and the marionettes touched the hearts of children and grown-ups alike, and filled local and international art critics with awe. For the play, Shaker created numerous unique and lovable characters: children, clowns, a lion tamer, the omda (mayor), and street vendors such as Nishan, a puppet modelled on Salah Jahin. Not many of us know that when Mekawy, a blind musician, found out Nishan was modelled on the poet, he placed a coin for good luck inside its head where it remains to date.

And indeed, the play turned to be a resounding hit. The international accolades began with Bucharests international puppet festival (1960), where it won awards for puppet and scenography designs. Such achievements were repeated over the years as the play continued to collect awards and recognition in Syria (1967), the USA (1980), Jordan (1993), France (1995), Italy (1997) and Tunisia (2000) as well as Egypt.

In Bucharest, Shaker learnt that the city had three puppet theatres with vibrant year-round programming. Comparing with Cairo, which didnt have even one puppet theatre, Shaker resolved to shake up the status quo. Together with Jahin he presented a puppet theatres project to then Minister of Culture Tharwat Okasha, who approved it three months later.

In 1960 Shaker travelled to then West Germany to continue his studies of puppetry. Upon his return (1963) he was pleasantly surprised to find a new edifice erected in Cairos Abdeen neighbourhood, ready to host a puppet theatre.

The theatres opening was coupled with a celebration dedicated to Shakers years of creativity (March 1964). The evening included Al-Shater Hassan, a play that had premiered at the Arabic Music Institute in Cairo back in 1959, in addition to extracts from his other works including Bent Soltan (A Sultans Daughter, 1960) in which he collaborated with the renowned Romanian puppeteer Margareta Niculeuscu, another lifelong friend who passed away within hours of him.

Shakers second cooperation with Jahin and Mekawy  now working with Romanian artist Florica Teodoru  was Shehab Al-Dins Donkey (1962). It had a special place in his heart, especially one particular character, Shehab El-Dins daughter Rihana.

An epitome of poverty and kindness, this Egyptian girl  created during his stay in Germany  may well have represented the artists longing for home. He loved Rihana as if she were his own daughter and was often pained to see her neglected in the theatres storage rooms.

Throughout the years that followed she returned to the stage several times and participated in numerous local and international puppet exhibitions, each time restored by Shaker. Rihana made her last significant appearance in 2016, during the artists retrospective exhibition organized at the Gezira Art Centre in Cairo, one year after Shaker was honoured with a state Appreciation Award in the field of arts, one of top awards granted by Egypts Ministry of Culture.

At the Gezira Art Centre, Rihana was in a glass box, a small space that also included minor touches from the scenography so that the puppet could enjoy her original environment. She was dressed in a blue and ochre-olive outfit; her big eyes contrasted with a small fine nose and her tiny rosy lips added sweet innocence to the ebony face. Rihana knew all the secrets of Nagy Shaker, and stood by him through the years. At the Gezira Arts Centre, she greeted the visitors silently projecting her charming timidity, as if not wanting to take the spotlight away from her creator.

Nagy would often ask Rihana, How come I am getting older and you never change? And he always treated her with tenderness, Lagator reveals.

The special bond between Rihana and Shaker was also obvious to the visitors of his 2016 retrospective. I remember Shakers eyes twinkling as he proudly introduced me to the daughter who stole his heart, probably more nimbly than all the popularity of Al-Leila Al-Kebira ever could.

In an article published in Ahram Online about Shakers retrospective, Soha El-Sirgany quotes Mohamed Nour, the Cairo Puppet Theatre director, Despite Al-Leila Al-Kebira being the more famous show, I believe Shehab Al-Dins Donkey can be seen as the superior piece, as it is technically very finely executed, and we think of it as a school for teaching marionette technique.

For such a multi-layered artist, puppetry was not an exclusive art nor was it his only interest. In his own words, explaining the lack of dialogue, he underlined how the connection on stage would be between forms and not just puppets: Eliminating dialogue provides an opportunity for reaching the full potential of thus creative expression.

This idea first materialised in Madinet Al-Ahlam (or City of Dreams, 1964), a shadow theatre-based play with poetry by Abdel-Moati Hegazi and tackling many social issues. Margareta Niculeuscu wrote extensively about City of Dreams, stressing its novel approach to form, light, colour, shadow and movement, leading to a new level of poetic, philosophical and artistic symbolism.

As both Lagator and Yehia reveal, thoughts and daydreams always preoccupied Shaker, and he would often drift away into his own world, from which he would emerge with ideas for the execution of new projects. In the process, he always remained fresh and had something unique to offer.

In City of Dreams Shaker explored shapes, shadow and light in an unconventional way. In fact, image and light played very important roles in all his creative work, giving vitality to his practice, Yehia explains, pointing to one of Shakers last exhibitions, Light Talk (2015), held on faculty premises. Light Talk closed a circle of light explorations but that resulted from illness and death, not from lack of ideas or indeed the energy to execute them.

The 1960s were probably the most inspiring years for Shaker and artists at large. With many doors opening, theatre, ballet, film academies, music conservatory and international exchanges, there was enough dynamism to nurture creative minds.

In those years, Shaker cooperated with many big names such as poet Fouad Haddad in a play, Doqqi Ya Mazzika (1967) which he directed while scenography and puppets were designed by his brother Ihab Shaker. He also worked with Alfred Farag, whose Al-Zir Salem (starring Samiha Ayoub) was staged at the National Theatre (1967) with his scenography and costumes.

Along parallel lines, Shakers international recognitions multiplied though, despite many opportunities to settle outside Egypt, he never wanted to leave.

Nagy Shaker would say, Why should I leave Egypt? Where can I find this sun? I cant live or create without sun. Even though he travelled a lot, cooperated with many international artists, reached many successes on world stages, he felt he primarily belonged to Egypt. His practice and thoughts were fed by international art, experimental theatre and film practices included, yet at the same time he was deeply rooted in Egypt and its culture. Isnt this obvious in many of his works? Yehia reminisces before picking the thread of Shakers experimental film titled Saif Sabin (Summer 70, 1970-71).

Summer 70, produced on a minimal budget and a 16 mm camera, was an unscripted, silent black and white experimental film, 66 minutes long, co-directed by Shaker and Italian filmmaker Paolo Isaja. The young protagonist is an American woman with Italian roots named Gloria, who visits Rome in search of her identity.

The film, which was screened in 1972 at the San Marino International Experimental Film Festival and then across Europe, is now included in the famed New York Museum of Modern Art (MoMa) Mapping Subjectivity film series. The film also entered the Arsenal  Institute for Film and Video Art in Berlin and took part in the 16 mm format exhibition A Paradise Built in Hell in the 2014 International Summer Festival Kampnagel, Hamburg.

Early 1970 also saw Shakers explorations of what he called theatrical games materialised through Al-Walad wa Al-Usfour (The Boy and The Bird, 1973) with scenography, scenario and mise-en-scene by the artist. Performed in Bucharest, the play saw childrens participation in the work that combined actors and masks.

With such a portfolio, Shaker continued to create, in those years giving a lot of time to scenography and costume work for cinema.

Among his significant contributions to the cinema are costume and accessories designs done for Shafika and Metwally (1978), a film directed by Aly Badrakhan, with screenplay and poetry by Jahin, and starring Soad Hosny and Ahmed Zaki among other renowned actors. No wonder the sketches for the film took up a lot of room at the Gezira Arts Centre during the 2016 retrospective, while the film screened in one corner.

Meanwhile Shaker did not give up on his work in theatre and television. He designed scenography and costumes for The Wedding (1975) directed by Mohamed Morgan and staged at the Modern Theatre as well as a 1986 play, All in One, directed by Mamdouh Tantawi. A few years later, the puppets designed by Shaker were featured in Kani wa Mani (1992), an Egyptian television production.

This was followed by puppet and scenography design for The Affairs of Kariagos (1993), performed in Wekalet Al-Ghoury, a project that joined puppets with humans while showcasing his interest in exploring new and unconventional theatrical spaces. The famed photo in which Shaker appeared surrounded by puppets comes from this play.

Another work worth mentioning was his scenography for Ghorba: Images of Alienation (2006) presented by the Experimental Group.

Unlike many creative minds, Nagy Shaker was very organised; all his work was labelled and archived in files with reference notes and in the computer, Yehia tells me.

This fact was of great help when in 2007 together with Shaker she embarked on creating a book about the artist. Today, the first sample copy is ready, waiting for a publisher. Titled My Papers and Beyond, the book opens with a dedication to Vera Lagator and her portrait painted in oil by Ihab Shaker.

My Papers and Beyond lists Shakers creative journey with text and abundant illustrations of his work, adding background on Egypts art surrounding the creative minds of the time. In it, we find hundreds of scenography works, costume designs  those realised and those presented only as sketches  interiors and studio designs for on on-air programmes such as Salon de la Femme / American Express for the Cairo Sheraton Hotel (1988), Windows Display for commercial areas, graphic art with film posters designs (for Youssef Chahines LAutre, Le Destin and Alexandria Why? and Hany Lasheens Al-Aragoz starring Omar Sharif), posters for artistic troupes, creative symposia, many festivals and special events held by the Ministry of Culture and Bibliotheca Alexandrina, drawings for press that include artwork and front covers of Sabah El Kheir magazine, alongside dozens of periodical and book covers.

Away from his creative work, Shaker was also a dedicated academic and a beloved professor, mentor and father to all his students, and a supervisor of hundreds of research papers including MA and PhD theses.

Every time Nagy Shaker entered the faculty, we could feel his amazing vibes; everyone around him was inspired and happy. He was a great professor, giving a completely different dynamic to the time spent with the students, Yehia recalls, referring to Shaker as her greatest mentor and second father, a brother and a friend  feelings shared by all his students.

Not only was he our guru on the academic and artistic levels, his support also extended to personal issues.

She adds that Shaker would go to the extent of buying books for the students, photocopying articles from magazines, searching for additional material online, supervising their work not only on the academic and official but also often the personal level, always doing much more than is required of a professor. On the other hand he listened to their worries, encouraged their dreams and gently directed their lives and careers.

We were all his children whom he embraced with love and wisdom, regardless of generation, Yehia comments pointing to Shakers last minutes when his research for a material for one of his students was interrupted by a coma.

Shakers academia and artistic mind had boundless curiosity, which continually triggered it. As Yehia explains, He enjoyed discovering new things and sharing them with his students. He has always been up to date with the world and its artistic developments; he never stood still or stopped being in search for new trends and new creative vocabularies. You change the face of art in the world, he would tell his students, encouraging them to continuous development with his support, knowledge and an unconditionally positive spirit. He also had great respect for everyone around him regardless of their background, education, social status, religion or nationality.

Yehia sums up Shaker saying that he was an extraordinary academic, artist, human, while Lagator immediately adds and my love. As both ladies sit on a couch reminiscing about the artist, Yehia underlines the love with which he showered his wife. Whenever I called Shaker to ask after him, he would reply with a few short words and then immediately talk about Vera, she says, smiling.

It becomes obvious how Vera and Nagy created an image of beautiful contrasts, with Veras extrovert dynamism and Nagys internalised passions, thoughts and ideas materialising in art. He was loved by everyone. This was so obvious. A huge crowd of people of all ages, his students and colleagues, who came to his funeral at church to pay their final respect, Lagator comments.

Until the last weeks of his life, Shaker had ideas for new projects and thought about them even in the most unusual  not to say, challenging  situations, when in an ambulance on his way to the hospital or having just finished his MRI tests.

Shortly after Shakers passing, the Faculty of Fine Arts organised a gathering that saw large crowds of his students and colleagues. He was also honoured during the 25th Cairo International Festival for Contemporary and Experimental Theatre, which closes on 21 September.

He will be remembered in the international scene that opened doors to him and honoured him with many awards. At the same time, it is not enough to say that Nagy Shaker enriched Egypts arts scene and scores of students with many values. He actually repositioned the countrys creative landscape and its image on the international arena. For this he deserves to receive a stronger light inside Egypt, the young generations should be taught and reminded of the creative riches that Shaker  and very few of his equals  brought to them.

Shakers passion, skill, knowledge, patience, determination, unconditional support and warm smile are forever engraved in the minds of those with whom he interacted. His art remains in the cultural consciousness of millions while Rihanas beautiful face will keep reminding us of the wealth that her father gave us generously.

* A version of this article appears in print in the 20 September 2018 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly under the headline: The puppeteer

For more arts and culture news and updates, follow Ahram Online Arts and Culture on Twitter at @AhramOnlineArts and on Facebook at Ahram Online: Arts & Culture

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Julie Wurth is a reporter covering the University of Illinois at The News-Gazette. Her email is jwurth@news-gazette.com, and you can follow her on Twitter (@jawurth).
Chief Executive Carrie Lam

My Government is committed to seeing Hong Kong rise as a caring, compassionate and inclusive society, and we are working, with determination and innovation, to realise that goal. I often quoted the following two facts, which really speak for themselves. The first is that some 60% of our recurrent government budget is spent on education, social welfare and medical services. The second is that our spending on social welfare has surged by over 86% in the past six years, with a range of initiatives on social security pioneered by the Commission on Poverty, which I chaired during my time as the Chief Secretary for Administration. Despite the above, I can assure you that we will not hesitate to put in more resources as necessary to meet the complex challenges that pervade our community.

Thankfully, the Government is not working alone. Philanthropy has a long and proud history in Hong Kong. The first Chinese hospital in Hong Kong was built by a group of civic-minded local leaders through community fundraising. The University of Hong Kong was founded in 1911 thanks largely to the generosity of an Indian-born philanthropist. Two of the oldest charitable organisations in Hong Kong, the Tung Wah Group of Hospitals and Po Leung Kuk, date all the way back to the 1870s. And through its Charities Trust, the Hong Kong Jockey Club, this forum's organiser, is among the world's leading charities, with annual donations in recent years reaching over $4 billion.

We have gained international recognition on this front. In last year's "World Giving Index", published by the UK-based Charities Aid Foundation, Hong Kong ranked 25th out of 139 countries and regions. And in the inaugural "Global Philanthropy Report", published earlier this year by the Harvard Kennedy School, Hong Kong finished fifth among 39 countries and cities, based on philanthropic assets as a proportion of GDP.

We are also seeing more and more Hong Kong families establish philanthropic foundations, making significant donations to a variety of worthy causes. Indeed, the number of charitable institutions and trusts registered for tax exemption purposes doubled from 4,400 in 2006 to more than 8,800 in 2016.

It is an encouraging trend, but given the multitude of social issues that daily confront us, from poverty and rapid ageing to the social exclusion that disadvantaged groups within our society can face, we must be innovative. We need to find ways to expand our sources of assistance and collaborate with more sectors of our community.

It's why we created the Social Innovation & Entrepreneurship Development Fund (SIE Fund) five years ago. The fund was designed to support social entrepreneurs, those focused on developing innovative and successful products and services for society's needs. Over the past three years, the SIE Fund has put more than $120 million into 140 projects, and I am pleased to say that it's finding success.

Consider, for example, the Yeh Family Philanthropy (YFP) fund. The YFP, working with the SIE Fund, runs an educational programme on social entrepreneurship and venture philanthropy at two Hong Kong universities, and has added a third local university this academic year. To date, the universities have made available nine credit-bearing courses, inspiring more than 200 students. They work with social ventures to tackle real-life social and business problems and, in doing so, benefit our underprivileged and the needy.

Then there's the Community Housing Movement, launched one year ago this month by the Hong Kong Council of Social Service. With funding from the SIE Fund and Community Chest, the Movement offers an intermediary platform in soliciting and renovating idle residential properties from private developers, and then let them to families in need of transitional housing through eligible NGOs. The Movement hopes to offer, over the next three years, 500 housing units benefiting 1,000 households.

Philanthropy is a major source of matching funds for SIE-sponsored social ventures. To date, about 40% of such social ventures are funded with support from a dozen philanthropic foundations. The SIE Fund is also introducing new funding options through equity investment and "pay-for-success". The latter, sometimes called a "social impact bond", is gaining interest worldwide. A public-private partnership, it funds public services through performance-based contracts, enabling governments to partner with high-performing service providers using private investment.

Public-philanthropy partnerships can enhance expertise, boosting the likelihood of a social venture's success. For example, the Lee Hysan Foundation, a family institution, is providing advice in the operation of Food-Co, a collaborative effort created to reduce food waste. Food-Co works to get otherwise wasted food to the needy through a network of Hong Kong service operators, corporate food donors and volunteers.

Given the prominent role of philanthropy in driving social innovation, four members from our philanthropic community were added to the SIE Fund Task Force just two months ago. It's a first, but it may be the first of many such collaborations.

In short, our efforts in building a caring and inclusive society are evolving, our collaborations expanding and the results encouraging. What we need now is to take our efforts to an entirely new level or in another dimension. I'm talking about the concerted and comprehensive involvement of business, at every level in every industry and sector. I'm talking about embracing the "creating shared value" mindset - truly a transcendent vision - introduced by Harvard Business School Professor Michael Porter who spoke at the 2016 Forum here. In a city or a community meaningfully supported by shared value, business creates economic benefit both for companies and society. They do so by focusing on the needs of societies no less than the needs of their shareholders.

Business here in Hong Kong is increasingly aware of this opportunity. Indeed, in the past our companies have been making sizable donations. I am grateful for their generosity but this is not enough. What we need is more than an "add on" to business management and annual expenses. What Hong Kong needs, or what the world and its people need, is the systematic incorporation of creating shared value to the strategy, the mission statement, and the bottom line of every business. It may sound idealistic, but through such forums as today's, through such resolute commitment and innovation as you bring to this day, I am hopeful that we will sooner than later make it happen.

Chief Executive Carrie Lam gave these remarks at the Philanthropy for Better Cities Forum.
President Emmerson Mnangagwa has arrived in New York for the 73 rd session of the United Nations General Assembly.

President Mnangagwa who will make his maiden appearance as Head of State at the UN General Assembly was received at JFK Airport by Zimbabwes permanent representative to the United Nations Mission in New York Ambassador Frederick Shava and embassy staff.

The President is accompanied by the Minister of Finance and Economic Development Professor Mthuli Ncube and Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe governor Dr John Mangudya.
President Mnangagwa is expected to hold bilateral talks with fellow leaders, as well as have engagements with business interest groups as part of an investment drive that has secured commitments worth more than $20 billion in less than a year.
The criminal law is not a procedure for the enforcement or the remedy of alleged breach of contract. There are specific measures provided for this. It has been held that the State does not need the help of the criminal law to relate to the enforcement and remedy of public contracts.
She Gave the OK for Steel Used

in Navy Subs. Now, a Guilty Plea
(Newser)  A South Dakota surgeon admitted to mistakenly removing an Iowa woman's healthy kidney but denied that he breached the standard of care, according to the surgeon's response to a lawsuit filed by the patient. Dr. Scott Baker and the Surgical Institute of South Dakota acknowledged in an answer to Dena Knapp's lawsuit that Baker removed Knapp's right kidney instead of an adrenal gland and an associated mass, the Argus Leader reports. Knapp, of Milford, Iowa, filed the lawsuit last month alleging professional negligence. She developed stage-three kidney disease after her Oct. 2016 surgery. Baker and the Sioux Falls hospital "deny the nature, scope, and extent of plaintiff's claimed injuries, losses, and damages," their response states.

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Knapp alleged that she wasn't told about the mix-up until after she was released from the hospital, the AP reports. Baker had known on the day of the surgery that he hadn't removed the adrenal gland because he was notified by Avera McKennan Hospital's pathology department, according to the lawsuit. But Baker claims that Knapp was provided with the information on the day of her surgery. Knapp's medical records also indicated "a very superiorly located right adrenal gland," which was near the large lobe of her liver, according to the defendant's answer. Baker and the Surgical Institute said they did not breach the standard of care by removing the kidney, failing to remove the adrenal gland, and failing to admit the mistake. They also deny that Knapp suffered damages.

(Read more surgery stories.)
(Newser)  Fayette County, Penn., officials say police shot and killed a gunman who opened fire in the lobby of the Masontown Borough Center. District Attorney Richard Bower confirmed Wednesday that a German Township police officer shot the gunman multiple times, killing him, per the AP. Bower says the gunman, who was not identified, was due in court on a domestic violence charge.

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He says the gunman entered the lobby of the building just after 2pm with a handgun drawn and exchanged gunfire with a police officer who was injured. Bower says the gunman then shot two males and one female. He declined to say whether the gunman knew them. A spokesman for the West Virginia hospital where the civilians were taken says they are all in fair condition.

(Read more Pennsylvania stories.)
(Newser)  Spain's foreign minister says President Trump offered the Spanish government some very Trumpian advice on dealing with an influx of cross-Mediterranean migrants. Josep Borrell says the president suggested building a wall across the Sahara desert, even though only two small enclaves in the region are Spanish territory, the Telegraph. Borrell, who accompanied Spanish royals to the White House in June, told an event in Madrid this week that when skeptical Spanish diplomats pointed out that such a wall would have to be more than 3,000 miles long, Trump said, incorrectly: "The Sahara border can't be bigger than our border with Mexico." A ministry spokesman tells the Guardian: "We can confirm that's what the minister said, but we won't be making any further comment on the minister's remarks." (Read more Sahara stories.)
(Newser)  A Republican lawmaker who dropped out of a House race in upstate New York after being charged with insider trading has decided to drop back in. Rep. Chris Collins, the first member of Congress to endorse President Trump, said in a statement that constituents in his Buffalo-area district can now count on him to "actively campaign" for the 27th District seat. "The stakes are too high to allow the radical left to take control of this seat in Congress," Collins said, warning that his opponents want to impeach Trump and "impose Canadian-style health care," among other things. Collins had been on course to easily win the heavily Republican district before his indictment in August, NPR reports.

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Prosecutors say Collins, while serving on the board of Australian company Innate Immunotherapeutics, warned his son Cameron about a failed drug trial, helping the son, the father of the son's fiancee, and other individuals avoid $768,000 in losses by selling stock before the trial results were made public. Collins has pleaded not guilty to the federal charges. Nate McMurray, Collins' Democratic rival, said in a statement that it "looks like the criminal is returning to the scene of the crime," CNBC reports. "Chris, if you're listening from Manhattan, here are a few words you may remember, 'lock him up' 'drain the swamp,'" McMurray said. "I welcome you on the campaign trail, sir. Bring it." (Read more Chris Collins stories.)
(Newser)  Missouri Sen. Claire McCaskill is a "no" on Brett Kavanaugh. She's one of five Senate Democrats facing a challenging re-election bid who had been undecided on the Supreme Court nominee and is the first of that group to reveal her vote, reports the AP. Politico reports her decision isn't a "huge surprise," as she was also a no vote on Neil Gorsuch in 2017. McCaskill said the accusation of sexual assault by Christine Blasey Ford didn't play into her choice, which was informed by what she described as Kavanaugh's positions on presidential power and on the "dark, anonymous money that is crushing our democracy."

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She continued, "He has revealed his bias against limits on campaign donations which places him completely out of the mainstream of this nation." Politico notes that Kavanaugh doesn't actually need any Democrats to support him so long as he can secure aye votes from 50 of the 51 Senate Republicans. As for McCaskill, she's in a tight race against Republican Missouri Attorney General Josh Hawley, once a law clerk to Chief Justice John Roberts. (Read more Brett Kavanaugh stories.)
(Newser)  Take your pick as to which of these statements from Alibaba founder Jack Ma is gloomier: He's going back on his pledge to create 1 million US jobs, and the US-China trade war that he blames for that plan's undoing is one that he believes could last two decades. "It's going to last long, it's going to be a mess," the Chinese tech billionaire said Tuesday. He addressed the jobs plan, made after he met with then president-elect Donald Trump in January 2017, on Wednesday: "This promise was on the basis of friendly China-US cooperation and reasonable bilateral trade relations, but the current situation has already destroyed that basis. This promise can't be completed."

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CNN provides background, explaining Ma's "vague promise" didn't involve building Alibaba facilities in the US, but rather by helping fire up small US businesses by enabling them to better tap into the Chinese market. The Wall Street Journal also uses the word "vague" to describe how critics viewed Ma's pledge, observing that, nearly two years later, Alibaba hasn't released any figures related to the number of jobs created thus far. Count the Washington Post among those critics. It points out that based on Commerce Department figures, 1 million new American jobs would require that US exports to China rise by an additional $206 billion a year. That's a more than 100% jump over 2017's $188 billion in exports, a figure that encompasses things that wouldn't benefit from Alibaba's platform, like airplanes. (Read more Jack Ma stories.)
(Newser)  Those oxygen masks you never want to see drop down on a flight came down on one in India Thursday morning, and irate fliers say they weren't told why, or what to do by negligent flight crewand that for about 45 minutes, the 160 or so passengers went through quite a frightening experience, per the Guardian. That experience for about 30 of them on the Jet Airways flight between Mumbai and Jaipur resulted in headaches, ear pain, nosebleeds, and panic after pilots "forgot" to flick a switch that pressurized the plane's cabin, the BBC reports. Some of the passengers documented their "terrifying" experience online, with one noting passenger safety was "completely ignored," per the Times. "I thought this is it," Joel D'Souza tells the Mumbai Mirror, noting crew didn't tell anyone what was happening, other than that they were returning to Mumbai, and that one woman began demanding information.

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At least five people required hospitalization upon landing for "barotrauma" (injury from differences in pressure) of the nose and ear, with one doctor telling the Times of India "most of them will have mild conductive deafness for some period of time" and shouldn't fly for a week or so. The Guardian explains continued low pressure can put a strain on tissues in the nose and ears, which can lead to ruptures and bleeding. In a statement, Jet Airways concedes the plane had to return to Mumbai "due to loss in cabin pressure" and that it "regretted" the incident, per the BBC. India's Ministry of Civil Aviation has asked for a report ASAP from its investigatory arm, Al Jazeera reports. "This was a petrifying episode and frankly, air travel worries me a little now," D'Souza tells the Mirror. Quartz notes Jet Airways has been contending with other recent troubles as well, including debt and tax woes. (Read more emergency landing stories.)
(Newser)  The hunt for a Pennsylvania man who cops say shot at his ex-wife, then gunned down his elderly parents on Wednesday is over. Chester County District Attorney Tom Hogan told reporters Thursday that 59-year-old Bruce Rogal had crashed his minivan into his ex-wife's home earlier that morning, and that he was found dead, NBC Philadelphia reports. "The last five or six hours were extremely tense," Hogan said. "Everyone knew that we had a killer out, and a killer could kill again." Hogan said that Rogal's reportedly murderous Wednesday began when he received a final divorce order saying the former family home in West Bradford Township was to be turned over to his ex, per Action News. Shortly before 6 that evening, cops say Rogal showed up at that house and shot at his ex, who was changing her car's oil in the driveway. She escaped injury.

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Rogal's next alleged victims, however, weren't so lucky. Police say he left his ex's house and headed to a senior living center in East Goshen Township, where he shot and killed his parents, William and Nancy Rogal, both in their late 80s. A manhunt was soon underway, with at least 16 local schools locked down. Cops spotted him around 1am Thursday, and a car chase ensued, ending with Rogal back at his ex-wife's house, into which he crashed his car. There was then "an exchange of gunfire" with copsAction News says it hasn't been confirmed if Rogal actually fired any shotsand Rogal was pronounced dead at the scene. It hasn't been said whether he was shot by police or died of a self-inflicted wound. "Bruce Rogal is dead. There is no ongoing threat in Chester County," Hogan posted on Facebook shortly after. (Read more Pennsylvania stories.)
(Newser)  Pope Benedict pledged to remain "hidden to the world" when he became pope emeritus and turned things over to Pope Francis, but some newly surfaced letters are changing that. In them, Benedict sends a message to those who prefer his more conservative leadership over Francis' relatively liberal style that they're carrying things too far, reports the New York Times. A key passage, in a letter published in the German newspaper Bild from Benedict to Cardinal Walter Brandmuller of Germany: I can well understand the deep-seated pain that the end of my pontificate caused you and many others," he writes. "But for someand it seems to me for you as wellthe pain has turned to anger, which no longer just affects the abdication but my person and the entirety of my pontificate."

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Brandmuller was among the cardinals who signed a 2016 letter to Francis seen as a rebuke to him for his position on church doctrine. The Tablet assesses it like so: "The overriding concern from Benedict appears to be that his papacy is being devalued by those using it as a political weapon to undermine Francis." In fact, those who signed that letter are now embracing the extraordinary new call for Francis to resign over his handling of church's sex abuse scandal, notes the Times. In his letter to Brandmuller, the 91-year-old Benedict also referred to the "sadness about the situation of the church today," which the Tablet notes could be interpreted as him agreeing with Francis' critics on the direction of the church doctrine. But he defended his decision to step down. If you know a better way [i.e. resignation] and therefore think that you can judge the one chosen by me, please tell me. (Read more Pope Francis stories.)
(Newser)  Taiwan said Thursday it is looking for the owner of a Texas company that makes untraceable 3D-printed guns who is wanted on an arrest warrant tied to an accusation that he had sex with an underage girl and paid her $500 afterward. The National Immigration Agency and Criminal Investigation Bureau confirmed that Cody Wilson was in Taiwan after arriving on the island earlier this month. Division Director Kan Yen-min was quoted by the official Central News Agency as saying the bureau has yet to receive intelligence from the US regarding Wilson, but will continue seeking more information about the case. Taiwan and the US do not have an extradition treaty but cooperate extensively on legal and security matters, reports the AP.

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Austin, Texas, police Cmdr. Troy Officer said Wednesday that his department is working with national and international law enforcement agencies to find Wilson, whose last known location was Taiwan's capital, Taipei. Officer said it's unclear why Wilson went to Taiwan, but he is known to travel extensively. He said before Wilson flew there, a friend of the 16-year-old girl informed Wilson that police were investigating the accusation that he had sex with the youth. Wilson is identified in the affidavit as the owner of Austin-based Defense Distributed. After a federal court barred Wilson from posting the printable gun blueprints online for free last month, he announced he had begun selling them for any amount of money to US customers through his website.

(Read more Cody Wilson stories.)
(Newser)  A long-lost da Vinci sold at auction last year for a record $450.3 million, quite a jump from the $120 price it fetched in 1958, before anyone knew it was a work by the master. The Wall Street Journal has done some detective work to piece together the fascinating history of how the sale of Salvator Mundi came to be. The key part: A Louisiana family owned the painting for nearly 50 years, unaware it was a da Vinci. As the Journal recounts, a New Orleans couple named Warren and Minnie Kuntz bought the painting at auction while on a trip to Europe in 1958 for $120, after being told it had been painted not by da Vinci but by one of his adherents. The work was passed on to their nephew, Basil Hendry of Baton Rouge, in the 1980s. After he died in 2004, a sharp-eyed dealer named Alexander Parrish spotted the paintingin a real-estate listing for Hendry's home.

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Parrish and a fellow dealer, Robert Simon, teamed up to buy the painting for less than $10,000 at Hendry's estate sale. At that point, they didn't know it was by da Vinci, either, but they suspected the painting could be valuable if one of his students had indeed created it. They had the painting restored, and it was during that process that it was discovered da Vinci himself painted it. The two successfully lobbied the powers-that-be in the art world to have the work authenticated, the result being last year's mind-boggling auction price. "We can't believe it, that such an incredible piece could have been in our family and we didn't even know it all this time," Hendry's daughter tells the Journal, and she seems mostly OK with the lost fortune. "But now you know it's like, 'Oh God, why couldn't we still have this thing?'" (Read more Leonardo da Vinci stories.)
(Newser)  It's been two years since the Rhoden family massacre in Pike County, Ohio, and while the killings remain stubbornly unsolved, more details of the crime itself have now emerged. That's thanks to a ruling from the Ohio Supreme Court, which allowed journalists to see the preliminary autopsy reports of those killed. They show the crime was "methodical, calculated, and vicious," writes the Cincinnati Enquirer, with seven of the eight family members shot in the head more than once. It reports officials have said the family members killed across four locations were murdered in their sleep, but the Columbus Dispatch reports investigators had told the paper they believed family patriarch Christopher Rhoden Sr. was awake when the killers came upon them on April 22, 2016.

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The autopsy indicates that may be the case: The report states Rhoden suffered what appears to be a defensive wound to his right forearm, and that one bullet passed through a door before striking him. The 40-year-old was also shot in the torso and cheek. His cousin, Gary Rhoden, 38, was found dead in the same trailer; a "muzzle stain" on the side of his head indicates one of the three shots he received to the head was made with the gun pressed against him. The Enquirer details what befell each of the remaining victims; some were shot under the chin and in the eye. (Read more Rhoden family massacre stories.)
(Newser)  A firebrand politician of the far right in France has been ordered by a court to undergo a psychiatric evaluationand Marine Le Pen is daring the court to force her to do so. The leader of the National Rally broke the news herself in a (French-language) tweet, saying that the psych evaluation was ordered as part of the charges she faces for posting graphic images of ISIS executions, reports Reuters. "I thought I had been through it all: well, no!" she wrote. "For denouncing the horrors of [ISIS] by tweets the 'justice system' has referred me for a psychiatric assessment. How far will they go?!" As the Local explains, these evals are standard procedure in such cases, meaning Le Pen isn't being singled out.

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"The argument that this is harassment by the judiciary does not hold water," says an official with the magistrates union. "She is a political personality but this is not a political decision." Le Pen, though, may see an opportunity to score political points with her base. "Of course I will not go to this psychiatric assessment and I will wait to see how the magistrate intends to force me," she told a French TV network. The charges stem from Le Pen's decision to post the images, including a photo of decapitated US journalist James Foley, after the Paris terror attacks in November 2015. She was then charged with violating a law that bars the circulation of "violent messages that incite terrorism or pornography or seriously harm human dignity" and that can be viewed by children. (Read more Marine Le Pen stories.)
(Newser)  The Texas State Board of Education has proposed teaching changes that would, among other things, remove Hillary Clinton and Helen Keller from the curriculum. But in an op-ed at the Washington Post, the chair of the state board pushes back against what she sees as "misguided criticism" of the changes. It's not about politics, it's about streamlining teachers' time, writes Donna Bahorich. On Clinton, for example, critics fail to point out that while she would be dropped from the high school curriculum, so would a conservative icon, Barry Goldwater. "It is difficult to see partisanship" at play there, writes Bahorich. And, yes, elementary students might not hear about Helen Keller, but they'd still learn about American Red Cross founder Clara Barton and civil rights figure Ruby Bridges.

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Other critics have faulted the board for keeping the biblical figure Moses as part of the curriculum in US government classes. But this is the same Moses whose image is on the Supreme Court building, whose marble relief is located across from where the speaker of the House sits, and whose Ten Commandments are "acknowledged in an engraving in the floor of the National Archives," near the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, writes Bahorich. "While reasonable and knowledgeable people can disagree on 'essential knowledge,' what should also matter is a strong process where transparency reigns and an opportunity for public response is provided," she writes. The board can't be faulted on those counts, she argues, adding that all responses will be considered before the final vote in November. Read the full column. (Read more Texas stories.)
(Newser)  A French bus driver who slapped a 12-year-old boy who ran out into the road faces disciplinary actionbut more than 300,000 people so far have signed a petition supporting the driver. (See the petition here; link is in French.) After the driver was forced to brake hard to avoid hitting the boy during the Sept. 13 incident, the driver yelled at him to pay attention; the boy then yelled back, "Shut up, go on, move on," the BBC reports. Video of what happened next (the BBC link has it) has gone viral after initially being shared on Snapchat: The driver exits the bus and slaps the boy across the face. The boy's mother filed a complaint against the driver. But the petition insists he not be fired, noting the boy forced him to "sharply hit the brakes and rough up customers inside" the bus, per euronews.

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The Paris transport authority, RATP, has condemned the driver's actions and launched disciplinary procedures against him; the agency says the driver, himself a father of two teens, has expressed regret for reacting emotionally. But many on social media have pointed to the boy's "disrespect" and "bad behavior" in their support of the driver, and the local mayor notes that children often run into the street in the area where the incident occurred, sometimes putting "themselves in danger." The petition says the driver initially chided the boy "as any parent would have done," CNN reports. But the mayor adds that the slap "was neither proportionate nor appropriate. It's a child." And France's transport minister insists that it's "not normal to slap a youngster." (Read more France stories.)
New Delhi:

The Supreme Court which extended the house arrest of five rights activists in connection with the Koregaon-Bhima violence, Thursday reserved its order on the petitions filed by Romila Thapar and four others challenging the arrest of five right activists from several cities across India. The three-judge bench headed by Chief Justice Dipak Misra also asked parties to file their written notes by Monday.

"Supreme Court reserves its order on the petitions filed by Romila Thapar and others challenging the arrest of activists. The court has also asked parties to file their written notes by Monday," the news agency ANI reported.

#BhimaKoregaon case: Supreme Court reserves its order on the petitions filed by Romila Thapar and others challenging the arrest of activists. The court has also asked parties to file their written notes by Monday.  ANI (@ANI) September 20, 2018

On Wednesday, the apex court extended the house arrest for a day, saying liberty cannot be "sacrificed at the altar of conjectures". Those arrested activists include Varavara Rao, Arun Ferreira, Vernon Gonsalves, Sudha Bharadwaj and Gautam Navlakha.

Read | Kerala Nun Rape Case: Accused Franco Mulakkal grilled for seven hours, interrogation to continue tomorrow

During its last hearing, the Supreme Court told the Maharashtra government that there should be a clear-cut distinction between opposition and dissent on one hand and attempts to create disturbance, law and order problems or overthrow the government on the other.

"Our institutions must be robust enough to accommodate any dissent or opposition to the system or even to this court. We cannot sacrifice liberty at the altar of conjectures," the SC directed.

The bench also comprising Justices A M Khanwilkar and D Y Chandrachud, may order a court-monitored Special Investigation Team (SIT) if it found that the evidence has been "cooked up" in the Koregaon-Bhima case.

Read | Rahul Gandhi in Kurnool: 'All promises made by government broken by PM Modi'

Bhima Koregaon violence refers to be an alleged Maoist attack early this year that rocked Maharashtra's Bhima Koregaon on January 1 during the 200th-anniversary celebration of a British-era war. It is also is believed to be the assassination attempt of Prime Minister Narendra Modi on the lines of former PM Rajiv Gandhi.

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New Delhi:

As many as 30 out of 166 passengers on a Jet Airways flight from Mumbai to Jaipur on Thursday suffered nasal and ear bleeding while several others complained of a headache owing to a cabin pressure problem, sources said.

According to reports, the incident took place during the climb as cabin crews reportedly forgot to select switch to maintain cabin pressure. The Boeing 737 aircraft returned to Mumbai mid-air after suffering a loss in cabin pressure.

"During the climb, the crew forgot to select bleed switch due to which cabin pressurisation could not be maintained. "As a result, oxygen masks got deployed," the official at aviation regulator DGCA said. "Out of 166 passengers on board, 30 passengers are affected... some have nose bleeding, few have ear bleeding and some are complaining of a headache," the official added.

#WATCH: Inside visuals of Jet Airways Mumbai-Jaipur flight that was turned back to Mumbai airport midway today after a loss in cabin pressure (Source: Mobile visuals) pic.twitter.com/SEktwy3kvw  ANI (@ANI) September 20, 2018

Read | Jet Airways to start Bhopal-Delhi daily flights from October 28

As per the latest reports, Five of the 30 passengers have been taken to Dr Balabhai Nanavati Hospital in suburban Vile Parle after they were deplaned in Mumbai.

Briefing about their medical conditions, Dr Rajendra Patenkar, Chief Operating Officer of the hospital said, "Most of them will have mild conductive deafness for some period of time. Till then they have been advised not to fly again".

Most of them will have mild conductive deafness for some period of time. Till then they've been advised not to fly again: Dr Rajendra Patenkar,Chief Operating Officer, Nanavati Hospital on passengers of the Jet Airways Mumbai-Jaipur flight which suffered cabin pressure loss today pic.twitter.com/lrJtBmmVUR  ANI (@ANI) September 20, 2018

However, Jet Airways has made alternative flight arrangements for the guests onboard Boeing 737, which is now scheduled to take off from Mumbai for Jaipur at 10.15 am.

Taking cognisance of the dreadful incident, Ministry of Civil Aviation Minister Suresh Prabhu ordered an enquiry asking the Director-General to submit a report in connection to the incident soon. The crew has also been taken off duty while the Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau (AAIB) started an investigation into the same.

Meanwhile, narrating the incident, a passenger said, "The flight landed at Mumbai airport after an hour and we were told that we will be shifted to a different flight. This is an unfortunate incident. After we took off the AC malfunctioned, then air pressure system malfunctioned too and oxygen masks came out. Some of us experienced nose bleeding and headache".

The mishap would be considered another big blow for Jet Airways as the airline company was already hit by a standalone net loss of Rs 1,323 crore for the quarter ended June 30.

Read | Jet Airways chairman Naresh Goyal feeling guilty and embarrassed about investors losing money

The company, however, has blamed macroeconomic factors led by an increase in skyrocketing fuel price, a depreciating rupee and the resulting mismatch between high fuel prices and low fares primarily for poor performance in the quarter.

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The Court of Urgent Matters ruled in favour of a Bahraini woman who wanted to rejoin her husband. According to court details, the woman left her husband a few months ago and since then she had been staying with her father. Although she expected her husband to reconcile with her, it did not happen despite staying at fathers home for a few months. The husband did not make any attempts to bring her back to his house, sources say.

It is learnt that the woman made many attempts to rejoin her husband but the man blocked all of them. She also sought help from the police before taking the matter to the Court of Urgent Matters, sources added. The judges at the Court of Urgent Matters who heard the petition ruled in the womans favour, directing the husband to allow her back at his home apart from fulfilling her other demands.
Bahrain is lagging behind globally and even in the GCC region when it comes to protecting the intellectual property of its people, it emerged.

The 2018 version of the Intellectual Property Rights Index brought out by US-based Property Rights Alliance pinned Bahrain at 45th, while not impressive on a global scale it was also worse than neighboring countries including Oman, Saudi Arabia and Qatar.

Only Kuwait marked a worse ranking than Bahrain this year. Bahrains ranking at 45 is below its previous ranking when it was ranked 42nd worldwide.

According to economist Ammar Awachi, this could be due to a number of factors. He said that the main reason for the Kingdom to lag behind is because its ecosystem has not been mature enough to help the use of patents and intellectual properties thrive.
Best foot forward, Walkathon to be organised as part of Smile Initiative to support children suffering from cancer

Best foot forward, Walkathon to be organised as part of Smile Initiative to support children suffering from cancer

The Future Society for Youth will host a walkathon as part of its Smite Initiative to support children suffering from cancer.

Kids R Golden Walk-A-Thon will be held on Friday, September 28, 2018, at Prince Khalifa bin Salman Park, Hidd and the event comes in line with the societys initiative to spread awareness on cancer among children.

The event puts Bahrain on the list of countries that participate annually in highlighting achievements in health and medical services for children suffering from cancer. Adnan Aljaber, event director, told Tribune, On behalf of the members of Smile Initiative to support children with cancer and their parents, we are pleased to inform you that the Fifth Annual Kids R Golden Walk-A-Thon will be at Prince Khalifa bin Salman Park, Hidd.

The walk-a-thon comes as one of our programmes in Childhood Cancer September events that come in line with Childhood Cancer Awareness Month every September.
North Korea has agreed to abolish its missile engine testing facilities in the presence of international experts, and expressed readiness to close its main nuclear complex if the US takes reciprocal action. Speaking at a joint news conference in Pyongyang, South Korean President Moon Jae-in and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un said they agreed to turn the Korean peninsula into a land of peace without nuclear weapons and nuclear threats.

Among the steps toward that goal, Kim pledged to shut down the Yongbyon Nuclear Complex which is home to a 5-megawatt reactor, centrifuges, uranium and plutonium used to build bombs, a radiochemical laboratory and nuclear fuel rod production facility. Kim also said he would abolish facilities at the Dongchang-ri rocket motor test centre which is also the launch pad for Hwasong- 15 intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) which can reach the United States.

Guard posts and minefields in the demilitarised zone (DMZ) would be removed to transform the worlds most heavily fortified border into a no-weapons zone. Other joint projects include plans to reopen the Kaesong Industrial Complex and the construction of an inter-Korean railway, which Moon has publicly backed, and resuming tours to Mount Kumgang, a landmark considered sacred by many Koreans.

However, former U.S. Treasury official, William Newcomb, who is on the United Nations Security Councils Panel of Experts on North Korea, has warned that joint economic projects with Pyongyang would need exemptions on sanctions from the UN Security Council Sanctions Committee on North Korea. If South Korea does not ask for exemptions, Seoul could violate sanctions and fracture the U.S.-South Korean alliance. Sources:
Singapore : Online ads in Singapore offering Indonesian maids for sale were yesterday condemned as unjust and demeaning, in a rare flare-up of tensions between the neighbours over domestic helpers. Singapore is home to almost 250,000 maids, mostly from poor parts of Indonesia or the Philippines, who head to the wealthy city-state to earn higher salaries than they can back home.

While Indonesia regularly protests about abuse and exploitation of helpers in Malaysia and parts of the Middle East, complaints about treatment of maids in tightly-regulated Singapore are less common. However reports that Indonesian helpers were being offered for sale in the city-state on online marketplace Carousell quickly drew condemnation from rights groups.

The adverts under the user name maid.recruitment reportedly offered the services of several helpers from Indonesia, while some ads indicated maids had been sold. The posts on the e-commerce site, which operates in several Asian countries and describes itself as a simple way to sell the clutter in your life, have now been removed. Wahyu Susilo, executive director of Indonesian NGO Migrant Care, said the group strongly condemned the adverts and called for those behind them to be brought to justice. This is very unjust and demeaning to the migrant workers dignity, he told AFP.

Singapores labour ministry said it was aware of cases where maids were being marketed inappropriately on Singapore- headquartered Carousell, and had got the adverts taken down and launched an investigation. Advertising (foreign domestic workers) like commodities is unacceptable and an offence under local laws, a statement from the ministry said. Employment agencies found guilty of such practices will have their licences revoked or suspended, it said.
The opportunity of another diplomatic travel will always, hopefully for some time to come, be an allure for me. So, an invitation to Manama, Bahrain, from September 9-13, as senior adviser to H.E. Jose Ramos-Horta, former president of East Timor and Nobel Peace Laureate was a very welcomed development. Jose Ramos-Horta had rallied the entire world to support freedom for his country and was recognised by the Nobel Committee in 1996 for this role. At independence, he served as foreign minister, subsequently as prime minister and finally as president of his country.

Part of my excitement for participation in the visit to the Kingdom of Bahrain was the fact that two other former presidents and Nobel Peace Laureates: F. W. De Klerk of South Africa, who had joined hands with Nelson Mandelas African National Congress to dismantle apartheid, and Lech Walesa, who led the Solidarity movement  a trade union in Poland that signaled the trend towards the crumbling of the former Soviet Union, and then became president of Poland, were also going to be in Bahrain.

I had met F.W. De Klerk in 1991 when I accompanied General Olusegun Obasanjo on a peace venture sponsored by President Babangida, to explore what Nigeria could do to help the difficult negotiations that were ongoing at the time to end apartheid. September 10, 2018 was my first meeting with the revolutionary President Lech Walesa.

Another Nobel Peace Laureate, Kailash Satyarthi, an Indian child welfare activist of over 30 years, especially on eradicating the keeping of children in slavery, who shared the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize with Malala Yousafzai was also in Bahrain for the same visit. Professor Anna Tibaijuka, the former Head of UN-Habitat and former Tanzanian minister and a leader in her own rights, was the fifth principal during the visit to Bahrain.

Africa has only produced nine Peace Laureates, out of some 100 individuals (aside from institutional winners), since the beginning of the awards in 1901. Europe, with 50, has the bulk of the Laureates for peace and United States alone accounts for 10, including three who are of African descent: Ralph Bunche; Martin Luther King Jnr. and President Barack Obama. On the African continent, South Africa has provided four Laureates, starting with Chief Albert Jacob Luthuli, then president of the banned ANC, who won the prize in 1960 for his Ghandist non-violent effort towards ending apartheid; Archbishop Desmond Tutu defending human rights from the pulpit won his prize in 1984. Of course, Nelson Mandela/F.W. De Klerk shared the prize that recognised their joint and respective roles towards ending apartheid in 1993.

Earlier, beyond the duo of Mandela/De Klerk, Anwar Sadat, as president of Egypt had pursued the peace option with Menachem Begin, one time prime minister of Israel. Both shared the Nobel in 1978, as a result of the Camp David Accord that President Jimmy Carter had facilitated. The signing of that Accord did not go down well with many Arabs and was given as a possible reason, for the subsequent assassination of President Anwar Sadat.

Kofi Annan from Ghana shared the honour of the prize with the United Nations that he led in 2001. In addition, Africa had late Wangari Maathai from Kenya who is on record as the first female  affording the Nobel Committee the opportunity of a wider definition of peace  to win the prize in 2004 for her struggles for the protection of the environment in Kenya. She not only planted thousands of trees and organised others to do the same for decades, she went to jail in protecting green spaces from encroachment by powerful individuals/institutions in Kenya.

Leymah Gbowee and President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf (both Liberians) shared the prize in 2011. This sharing turned out to be very controversial. It did appear that the Nobel Committee became partisan and interfered in the Liberian elections by giving an incumbent president the prize on the eve of an election in which she was seeking mandate renewal. Furthermore, President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf was criticised as not deserving the prize for being the mother of the initial round of civil war in Liberia and for which the Truth and Reconciliation Commission for Liberia had recommended that she be banned from politics for quite a while. That the Nobel Committee ignored this development was of concern to many, especially Liberians.

Well, it appears the Nobel Committee may be easily forgiving on past misdeeds and President Sirleaf may not be unique in this respect. Or else how does one explain Menachem Begin being awarded the Peace Prize in 1978. And some may even argue that the same should be said of Nelson Mandela, whose strive for freedom by any means necessary has my respect. But then, he had been classified as a terrorist not only by the apartheid governments of South Africa but also by Western leaders like President Ronald Reagan of the U.S.

Important, however, was the criticism of President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf by her compatriot and 2011 co-winner, Leymah Gbowee. According to her, President Sirleaf failed to speak up against ills perpetrated under her rulership, including nepotism. Leymah Gbowee was reported to have said: you are as bad as being an accomplice for things that are happening in the country if you dont speak up.

There is yet to be any Nigerian winner arising from dedication to any issue that bothers on peace, even using the larger definition like the case for Wangari Maatahi or Kailash Satyarthi. Consistency in being at the fore-front of handling many conflicts must not be vitiated by other behaviours that suggest a lack of respect for the rule of law on other issues. In effect, one cannot be dousing the fire of conflict on one front and pouring fuel into potential creation of conflicts elsewhere or on other issues.

In effect, being in the delegation that included four Nobel Peace Laureates is of importance. This is more so when they shared their respective experiences and made recommendations on improving the strive for peace and development in our world. This theme was equally well articulated during the arrival meeting and at the state banquet given by His Royal Highness (HRH) Prime Minister Prince Khalifa bin Salman Al Khalifa. HRH argued for spirited efforts to address root causes of conflicts in order to advance development in the world. He equally stressed the desire of Bahrain for tolerance and peaceful coexistence.

In addition, being in Bahrain, aside from the opportunity to meet and interact with many interesting Bahraini leaders and others from the world at large, was a major eye opener on the positive achievements of the Bahraini leadership in deploying the relatively small oil wealth and material support from Saudi Arabia into development in spite of challenges.

President Lech Walesa found time to attend a Catholic mass, thus confirming religious tolerance in Bahrain. With a large labour population from the Philippines, Catholicism is being overtly practiced unlike in other countries where this would be a major problem. Indians probably constitute the largest expatriate community. So, Hindu temples and Synagogues, for the few remaining Jewish families, exist.

The more recent divide in the Gulf that saw Qatar blockaded by Saudi Arabia, Egypt, UAE and Bahrain remains. The US as the major power that should help on this problem, given its having bases in both Qatar and Bahrain and strong relations with Saudi Arabia, appear to have thrown up its arms as its leadership responsibility in the world is abandoned for tweets on whether there was collusion or not in the 2016 American elections. Maybe some Nobel Peace Laureates could summon up the courage and make facilitation/mediation moves that could address a complex problem of regional dimension that is bigger than little Bahrain.

One of the surprises of my visit was an evening at a private/civil society centre, the Shaikh Ebrahim Bin Mohammed Al Khalifa Centre for Culture and Research. The Centre was particularly interesting, beyond hosting an assembly of the diplomatic community in Manama, in listening to two major world leaders  President Jose Ramos-Horta and Professor Anna Tibaijuka  share the respective experiences. This Centre, led by a visionary lady, Shaikha Mai Bint Mohammad Al Khalifa, houses a centre for high energy physics that is dealing with the issue of what is our universe made of and why? This involves exploring the basic particles of our universe and the forces that bind them together. This effort, in collaboration with the University of Bahrain, is part of the 25 projects being funded by the Centre from family resources and additional support from the private sector over the last 15 years.

I am a novice in this area, having run away from physics in the secondary school. I was, however, enthused that this exploratory effort into our universe is not left alone to the European Centre for Nuclear Research. Bahrain is showing that we should not only be consumers of products from major research centres of the world but we, in the developing countries like Nigeria and Bahrain, can be activists in making contributions. It was pleasing to listen to plans that are afoot in collaboration with the European Centre.

It is interesting that the Bahrainis probably commenced the idea of setting up a sovereign wealth fund from oil proceeds in the 1930s, when a third of earnings went into external investments, a third for development of Bahrain and another third for governance. I did not have the opportunity to learn more about the current size of the sovereign wealth fund but thought that Nigeria and Angola could have benefitted if leadership in my part of the world had pursued such visionary approach to the common patrimony, as opposed to being a means for corruptly enriching those who had the luck of receiving the mantle to lead. I now know that Norway did not teach the world on this. Ramos-Horta, who used to think East Timor was second, following the example of Norway, now knows that Bahrain honorably set aside a sovereign wealth fund, a long while before Norway did.

It is not often that individuals so recognised for peace in the world find time to come together to share their experiences in the Arab world. So, it was great for Bahrainis to be exposed to ideas on making the world a better place with respect to peace. I personally hope that the Nobel Laureates would push further on the need for a peaceful Gulf, even if the major powers and the United Nations are currently not doing enough to ensure this. There is no conflict that cannot be subjected to dialogue. Facilitation of such may not appear easy, but formal and informal efforts at facilitation/mediation could help when a positive outcome was not anticipated. It may be difficult to have the immediate resolution or improved management. But striving to help must continue with some vigour.

(Babafemi A Badejo, Ph.D, is former head of Political Affairs at UNAMID, Darfur, Sudan.)
The date of the wedding between Princess Ayako, the youngest daughter of Emperor Akihito's late cousin, and commoner Kei Moriya was officially set for Oct 29 in a traditional ceremony held Wednesday.

In the "Kokki no Gi" rite held at the Takamado residence in Tokyo, a relative of Moriya acting as his messenger announced the date to Princess Ayako in the presence of her mother Princess Hisako. It was one of a string of traditional rites preceding their marriage.

"I gratefully accept," the 28-year-old princess told 76-year-old Tatsuya Kondo, a former head of the Center Hospital of the National Center for Global Health and Medicine, according to the Imperial Household Agency.

The wedding between Princess Ayako and Moriya, 32, will take place at Tokyo's Meiji Shrine and will be attended by imperial family members including Princess Hisako, the widow of the late Prince Takamado, and Princess Tsuguko, the eldest sister of the bride.

The day after the nuptials, a banquet to be attended by Crown Prince Naruhito and Crown Princess Masako as well as the heads of the three branches of government will be held at Hotel New Otani in Tokyo.

According to the agency, the princess and her fiance are busy preparing for a series of ceremonies and their life at a new residence after their marriage. They currently do not plan to make a honeymoon trip.

- Japan Today
President Muhammadu Buhari on Thursday in Abuja met behind closed door with Gov. Akinwunmi Ambode of Lagos State at the Presidential Villa, Abuja.The News Agency of Nigeria reliably learnt that the governor would be updating the president on latest political development within the All Progressives Congress in Lagos State.The governors political godfather, Asiwaju Bola Tinubu and the leadership of the APC in Lagos State were alleged to have mounted pressure on Ambode, to drop his second term bid.Tinubu, who is alleged to have endorsed Ambodes opponent within the APC, Mr Babajide Sanwo-Olu, had refused to back Ambodes second term ambition despite pleas by concerned individuals and several socio- political groups from within and outside Lagos state.NAN, however, gathered that governors under the platform of APC, who met on Wednesday night in Abuja, had on behalf of Ambode, sought the intervention of President Buhari in the APC crisis in Lagos state.NAN reports that the Chairman of the APC Governors Forum, Gov. Rochas Okorocha, delivered the governors message to the president few minutes before his meeting with Ambode.A source in the presidency told NAN that the president might end the tussle between Ambode and the Mandate Group, led by the APC National leader, Asiwaju Bola Tinubu.NAN gathered that the president may also meet with other APC stakeholders in Lagos state within the week as part of efforts toward resolving the rift.
Jimoh Moshood, police spokesman, says Ademola Adeleke, governorship candidate of Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) in Osun, has not been exon...

Jimoh Moshood, police spokesman, says Ademola Adeleke, governorship candidate of Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) in Osun, has not been exonerated in spite of President Muhammadu Buharis directive not to invite him.





On Wednesday, the police invited Adeleke to appear at the force headquarters over an alleged malpractice while sitting for the 2017 National Examination Council (NECO) test.





But shortly after the invitation, Buhari ordered Ibrahim Idris, inspector-general of police (IGP), to suspend the invitation until after the election.





Adeleke is one of the four strong contenders in the election scheduled for Saturday.





Speaking on Good Morning Nigeria, a programme on NTA, on Thursday, Moshood said a suspect could be invited at any time.





There is no time limit to arrest a suspect any suspect that has been accused or there is allegation of an offence can be invited at any time. Police action terminates when a matter has been taken to court. We have filed charges in court and the matter is off our hands, he said.





But if there is any directive that we should not invite him, that directive does not exonerate him from [allegation/] court process and the people should know that the rule of law prevails above any other consideration.





The spokesman said the police is working to ensure a peaceful atmosphere for Osun governorship election.





As at yesterday, the deputy inspector-general of police in the state have gone round the state on what we call the show of force exercise with other security agencies, Moshood said.





The DIG operations is in charge of the security architecture in the state for the election, they have gone round, they have met with people and equally talk to them.








A two-term governor of Sokoto State and the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, Presidential aspirant, Dr Attahiru Bafarawa, yesterday, described the President Muhammadu Buhari-led government as a disaster.Bafarawa, who insisted that Nigeria is sick because the leadership is sick, said the opposition party will get rid of the government in 2019.He spoke with newsmen shortly after addressing Ogun State executives and delegates of the PDP, as part of his ongoing campaign tour in Abeokuta.Bafarawa said: We dont have a nation under the leadership of APC government. That is why we, in PDP, have to put our house in order and ensure that we get rid of the APC government in this country because it is a disaster to the country. This country is sick because the leadership is sick.We cannot allow this to continue. Forget about the number of aspirants, we are all members of one family. Whoever gets the party ticket, we will all work together and make sure we succeed in 2019.In trying to do damage control, we are not going to witch-hunt anybody because when you are building a nation.As a leader, you are not expected to look at the back; you have to face the problem. Nobody can do it alone. It requires our collective resolve as a people and as a nation to put the country in good place.I also want you to know that my presidential ambition is not a do or die affair.
Yakubu Dogara, speaker of the house of representatives, stormed the national secretariat of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) in Abuja on...

Yakubu Dogara, speaker of the house of representatives, stormed the national secretariat of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) in Abuja on Thursday.





Accompanied by some of his supporters, Dogara announced that he had pulled out of the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC).





I have decided to come back, Dogara told the jubilant crowd.





He also submitted the 2019 expression of interest and nomination forms which some of his constituents present to him last week.





people in the APC who are mostly after their own interests. Speaking after submitting the forms, the speaker said there are a lot ofpeople in the APC who are mostly after their own interests.





He alleged that the APC in Bauchi state has not delivered on any of its promises to the people.





To begin with, I was a founding member of this party that is what a lot of people do not know, I worked with Colonel Yohanna Madaki of late  of blessed memory. Anybody who doubts that I have the raw planning sheets, Dogara said.





Due to certain developments, I had to leave the party for another party. I believed that I was teaming together with people to heal the people of Nigeria but I dont want to be a prophet of lamentation. Im not known to be lamenting to much.





Everybody knows where we are in Bauchi state. It will take only someone who has lost his conscience to still support the order that is in the state. We went round the state campaigning for the APC and I tell you that we have not fulfilled a single promise.





Nationally we all know what is happening, I will speak to that maybe on another occasion. But I must tell you that I am still shocked. When I recover, I will now tell my story devoid of sentiments in a way people will easily understand why I have taken this decision, that is being with the PDP today and I will certainly do that.





In the APC, there are wonderful people but equally there are people who I will call ravenous. We have a lot of bouncers, you know bouncers in the party. For me I was in the situation where I will I had serious questions. I will tell you that Id rather be hated for who I am than be loved for who Im not. So, I have decided to come back.




The Federal Government is set to resume its legal battle to extradite serving senator, Prince Buruji Kashamu to the United States of Ameri...

The Federal Government is set to resume its legal battle to extradite serving senator, Prince Buruji Kashamu to the United States of America to face trial for an alleged drug trafficking.





The government will on September 24 at the Supreme Court resume the final legal action seeking the lawmakers extradition.





The Supreme Court will on the set date determine the veracity of the two judgments delivered in favour of the Attorney General of the Federation, AGF, by the Lagos division of Court of Appeal on May 4 this year.





Kashamu had in his notice of appeal to the Supreme Court, complained that the Court of Appeal erred in law by voiding and setting aside the two judgments of the Federal High Court which barred Federal Government from going ahead with his extradition.





Kashamu is asking the apex Court to set aside the decisions of the Court of Appeal as they affected him.





The AGF, acting on behalf of the Federal Government, filed a counter prayer that the Apex Court should uphold the judgments of the Court of Appeal which cleared the coast for Kashamus extradition.





The AGF claimed that the Appeal Court was right in setting aside the judgments of the High Court because they were based on hearsay evidence of Kashamu before the court.





The AGF is urging the Supreme Court to allow the judgments of the Court of Appeal to enable the Federal government extradite the Senator to USA to prove his innocence or otherwise in the hard drug criminal charge filed against him by the American government since 2015 when he was alleged to have escaped to Nigeria.





One of the senior lawyers in the Senators legal team, Olusegun Odubela SAN, confirmed to journalists in Abuja that the senator and the Federal Government have shifted their legal battle on the extradition to the Supreme Court, adding that Kashamu is challenging the validity of the two judgments of the Court of Appeal.





Legal luminary, Prince Lateef Fagbemi SAN, is leading the legal team of the Senator at the Supreme Court while Chief Emeka Ngige SAN is leading the Federal Government legal team.





However, in spite of his appeal to the Supreme Court, Senator Kashamu has again filed a fresh fundamental human rights enforcement suit at the Federal High Court in Abuja where he is praying the court to bar the federal government from extraditing him or giving effect to judgments of Appeal Court.





But Justice Ahmed Ramat Mohammed had in a ruling on ex-parte motion of Kashamu refused to grant order of interim injunction against the federal government.





The judge in the ruling delivered on May 30 refused to stop the execution of the two judgments secured by the Attorney General of the Federation (AGF) and Minister of Justice against the senator representing Ogun East Senatorial district in the senate.





The court held that granting the request by Kashamu to stay the appellate court decisions against him in an ex-parte application will be against the rule of law and natural justice.





In the ruling on the ex-parte application filed against the Attorney General of the Federation (AGF) and the National Drug Law Enforcement Agency (NDLEA), Justice Mohammed rather asked the embattled senator to put the AGF and NDLEA on notice in respect of his fresh suit.





Justice Mohammed had noted that since what the senator sought in his originating summon was to prevent his extradition, it will be unfair against the AGF and NDLEA to put the extradition on hold without going into the merit of the whole issue as contained in the originating summon.





The Judge, therefore, declined to stop the implementation of the appeal verdict delivered on May 4 this year.





Kashamu through his counsel Dr. Alex Izinyun SAN had in the ex-parte motion, argued that he was afraid and apprehensive that the federal government may likely pick him and extradite him to USA on the strength of the Court of Appeal Judgments.





He told Justice Mohammed that if the extradition is executed via the judgments of the appellate court, his fundamental right to freedom of liberty will be jeopardized.





The senior lawyer argued that if senator Kashamu is picked by the federal government through the NDLEA; no court in Nigeria will have jurisdiction to safe him because he (Kashamu) would have been flown to a foreign country.





Izinyon SAN, insisted that there is likelihood now of his client being picked by the Federal Government and the NDLEA adding that his fundamental human rights will be breached in the process.





But Justice Mohammed stood his ground that his court was not persuaded to stop the appellate court judgment but will rather wish that Kashamu puts both AGF and NDLEA on notice to show cause on why the two Judgments against the senator should not be stayed from execution.





The Court of Appeal had on May 4 cleared the coast for the federal government to extradite the senator, who had engaged government in a long drawn legal battle since 2014





The appellate court in a landmark judgment voided and set aside all orders made by a Federal High Court between 2014 and 2017 restraining the government from proceeding with the extradition.





In a judgment in an appeal filed by the AGF Justice Joseph Ikyeghi held that the orders granted Kashamu by Justice Okon Abang were invalid, nonsensical and unacceptable to laws because they were based on hearsays and speculations by Senator Kashamu.





The unanimous judgment was prepared by Justice Ikyeghi and was delivered by Justice Yargata Nimpar.





The court held that the hearsay that a former President, Chief Olusegun Obasanjo was instigating the extradition was not established under any law.





The appeal court said that an affidavit deposed to by the senator on the issue was worthless and not in compliance with Evidence Act because the senator himself claimed that he was told by several persons who were not called to testify in court.





Justice Ikyeghi held that Justice Abang in his two judgments on the issue erred in law by playing undue reliance on affidavit that offended Evidence Act to give judgment against the Federal government.





Consequently, the order of injunction stopping the extraction process was voided and set aside.




Against the backdrop of the Federal Governments alleged lackadaisical attitude over new minimum wage, the Senior Staff Association of Nigerian Universities, SSANU, has warned the government not to push workers to the wall, saying the consequence may be grievous.SSANU in a communique after its 34th National Executive Council, NEC, meeting at the Delta State University, DELSU, Abraka, signed by its National President, Samson Ugwoke and the National Public Relations Officer, Abdussobur Salaam, accused the government of not being sincere with the negotiation team.In its resolution, the union said: NEC in session notes that the negotiations on the new national minimum wage are becoming unnecessarily protracted. NEC observes that the Federal Government appears not to be sincere about the negotiations and that the decision of the Federal Government side, to postpone the meeting of the Committee sine die, on the grounds of further consultations, is flimsy.SSANU joins the Nigeria Labour Congress to call on the Federal Government to face the serious business of reviewing the national minimum wage lest it incurs the wrath of the Nigerian workers and their millions of dependents who have been long-suffering and patient. Nigerian workers should not be pushed to the wall, as the implication of this could have dire consequences on governance.
With the resignation of Kemi Adeosun as minister of finance over certificate forgery, Okoi Obono-Obla, another appointee of President Muha...

With the resignation of Kemi Adeosun as minister of finance over certificate forgery, Okoi Obono-Obla, another appointee of President Muhammadu Buahri, is back in the limelight over a similar issue.





Obono-Obla, who is the senior special assistant to the president on prosecution, is alleged to be in possession of an invalid Olevel result, according to findings by the house of representatives ad hoc panel investigating the special presidential investigative panel for the recovery of public property (SPIP).





The panel had said in the course of its primary assignment, it discovered the presidential aide might have forged his way into the University of Jos where he studied and subsequently, the Nigerian Law School.





THE GENESIS





The issue first came to light in a petition to the house by the Human Rights Writers Association of Nigeria (HURIWA), regarding the contradictions in the result from the West African Examination Council (WAEC).





In the petition, HURIWA said it investigated the presidential aide and discovered thus: Obono-Obla gained admission into the University of Jos with a suspected fake WASCE result. Evidence available to us shows that Okoi Obono-Obla (Ofem Okoi Ofem) sat for May/June 1982 (examination registration No. 09403/247) at Mary Knoll College, Ogoja, where he obtained the following results: English Language  C6, Literature in English- Absent, Bible Knowledge- C4, Government- A1, Economics- C5, Mathematics- F9, Chemistry- F9, Biology- F9. We attach herewith a copy of the result issued by WAEC.





This result can also be easily verified on WAEC result portal by obtaining a PIN card at the cost of N700.00 (Seven hundred naira only).





The association added that after he was called to bar in 1991. Ofem Okoi Ofem, for reasons best known to him, changed his name to Okoi Obono-Obla.





WAEC CONFIRMED RESULT WAS ALTERED





In the light of the startling allegations, the committee had swung into action, digging deeper into the issue and seeking clarification from all parties concerned. Testifying before the house of panel, Femi Ola, deputy WAEC registrar, had told the committee that available evidence indicate that the results were altered and therefore makes them invalid.





Considering the results, particularly on what is before me, I would say what I have brought here is the authentic and genuine one; his is not because it has been altered and such alteration renders it invalid, he had said.





From our record, the genuine candidate is Ofem Okoi Ofem, 09403/247 of Mary Knoll College, Ogoja. The exam number and number of subjects are the same. The difference is the grade in English literature in which he claimed to have scored C6 despite being marked absent in the true, certified copy.





While also appearing before the house panel, Isa-Hayatu Chiroma, director-general of Nigerian Law School, Abuja, had said the school has no record of Okoi Obono-Oblas WAEC results, and thus cannot comment on its authenticity.





He had said under the Legal Education Act, the school is not required to demand for candidates OLevel results, adding that the minimum admission requirements is the Bachelor of Laws (LLB).





PANEL REPORT INDICTS OBONO-OBLA





The committee made several attempts to invite the presidential aide to its hearing but was not successful, leading to request for his arrest. The panel, however, indicted him. In its final report, it recommended the withdrawal of both the law degree and law school certificate obtained with the result.





NIGERIANS DEMAND HIS RESIGNATION





While the Adeosun scandal got to its climax, some Nigerians took to the social media to demand action on the allegations against the presidential aide.





They asked the president to act on the house repetition and sack him or order a fresh investigation into the issue.





Writing via his Twitter handle, Chidi Odinkalu, former chairman of the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) said keeping Obono-Obla in his job would be a mess.




There was drama as the Nigeria Police Force, yesterday, filed charges of examination malpractices, impersonation and criminal conspiracy against the governorship candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, in Saturdays election in Osun State, Senator Ademola Adeleke.However, in a new twist, President Muhammadu Buhari has ordered the Inspector General of Police, Abubakar Idris to stop the invitation of Senator Adeleke.A Presidency source, who pleaded for anonymity, confirmed this development to newsmen.According to the source, Buhari ordered that Adeleke should not be invited until after Saturdays election.But a presidential source told reporters that Buhari had ordered the IGP not to go ahead with the invitation until the governorship election is over.This was as the West African Examination Council, WAEC, yesterday, confirmed before an Abuja High Court sitting at Bwari, that Adeleke, was among 221 candidates that sat for examination it conducted in May/June, 1981.The police asked him and four others to report to the Special Investigation Panel at the Abuja headquarters for arraignment in court.He and other suspects will face a charge of examination malpractice, criminal conspiracy, and impersonation.The PDP, however, tackled the Police for the warrant of arrest saying it was an attempt to run down the PDP candidate for the candidate of the All Progressives Congress, APC, Alhaji Gboyega Oyetola.Adeleke declared wantedSpeaking to journalist in Abuja, Police spokesperson, Jimoh Moshood, said that investigations revealed that Senator Adeleke and his brother Sikiru Adeleke registered and sat for the National Examination Council Examination (NECO) 2017 as internal candidates, impersonating students of the school at the ages of 57 and 42 years respectively.Moshood said: When the Police operative arrived at the school, only Sikiru Adeleke was found seated for the examination while Senator Ademola Adeleke seat was vacant and was suspected to have escaped before the arrival of the Police operatives.Further investigation revealed that both Senator Ademola Adeleke and his brother Sikiru Adeleke registered and were sitting for the National Examination Council Examination, NECO, 2017 as internal candidates impersonating students of the School at the ages of 57years and 42years respectively. This crime was facilitated by the principal of the school, and two other members of staff of the school for which they are under investigation and being charged to court.The Principal of the school, Alhaji Aregbesola Mufutau, the staff responsible for registration, Mr Gbadamosi Thomas Ojo and a teacher Mr Dare Olutope were arrested on 21 July 2017. Senator Ademola Adeleke was arrested on 27 July 2017 and Sikiru Adeleke was arrested on 8 August 2017.Senator Ademola Adeleke made cautionary statement and admitted that he registered for the 2017 NECO examinations as an internal student in the said school but he didnt sit for the examination. However, Police investigation revealed the following primafacial and culpability facts against Senator Ademola Adeleke and four (4) others.Senator Ademola Adeleke made cautionary statement and admitted that he registered for the 2017 NECO examinations as an internal student in the said school and did not sit for the examination but have a result from NECO with Seven (7) Credit and One (1) Pass, a copy of which was obtained from NECO by the Police.The Ojo/Aro 2017 NECO, SSCE school photo album (Schools copy), with Senator Ademola Adeleke and Sikiru Adeleke photographs in school uniform in the said album.Senator Ademola Adeleke in the NECO Result obtained claimed that he was born on 12th June 1997 but in his statement to the Police, senator Ademola Adeleke wrote 13th May 1960 as his Date of Birth.The photographs of both Senator Ademola Adeleke and Sikiru Adeleke appearing side by side in the photo album have no NECO stamps on them.  Consequently, Senator Ademola Adeleke (PDP Governorship Aspirant in the 22nd September, 2018 Gubernatorial Election in Osun State) and four (4) others namely; MR Sikiru Adeleke, Alhaji Aregbesola Mufutau (Principal of Ojo-Aro Community High School, Egbedore LGA, Osun State), Mr Gbadamosi Thomas Ojo (School Staff responsible for the registration of candidates for NECO), Mr Dare Olutope (School Teacher who facilitated the commission of the crime) are, hereby, advised in their own interest to report to the Special Investigation Panel, Force Headquarters, Abuja immediately for arraignment in court.
A civil society organisation, African Network for Environment and Economic Justice, said on Wednesday that it had begun the monitoring of the Federal Governments disbursement of the $322.5m General Sani Abacha loot recovered from Switzerland.The group said it was working with six other partners with the support of a United Kingdom agency, UK Aid Direct, to ensure that the loot was spent on the Conditional Cash Transfer Programme across the 36 states as promised by the Federal Government.It noted that this step was part of the Monitoring of Recovered Assets in Nigeria through Transparency and Accountability Project being coordinated by the civil society and the international agencies.The Group Executive Director, ANEEJ, David Ugolor, said the Federal Government had pledged to spend the loot on a conditional cash transfer programme and there was a need for the civil society to ensure the transparent utilisation of looted assets in the country.He stated, In December 2017, the Swiss government repatriated funds stolen from Nigeria by the late Gen. Sani Abacha. A total of $322.5m was repatriated comprising $321m and $1.5m interest.The Federal Government of Nigeria announced to Nigerians that the $322.5m would be used to support the poorest of the poor through the Conditional Cash Transfer Programme. The cash transfer programme has been on since 2017 with funding from the national budget and a loan facility from the World Bank. The disbursement of the $322.5m Abacha loot in the programme is scheduled to start from October 2018.As part of the implementation of the Monitoring of Recovered Assets in Nigeria through the Transparency and Accountability Project with support from UKAID, we are working with six partners to monitor the use of the Abacha loot in the Conditional Cash Transfer Programme across states that are implementing the programme.The group said its involvement in the monitoring was prompted by the fact that we were part of the MoU between Switzerland and Nigeria for the repatriation of this tranche of the Abacha loot.
The Coalition of United Political Parties (CUPP) has reacted to the confirmation by the West African Examinations Council (WAEC) that Adem...

The Coalition of United Political Parties (CUPP) has reacted to the confirmation by the West African Examinations Council (WAEC) that Ademola Adeleke, candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) in the Osun governorship election, sat for its examination in 1981.





The coalition said it was high time President Muhammadu Buhari released his own certificate.





Imo Ugochinyere, CUPP spokesperson, in a statement on Wednesday, said the last desperate option of causing confusion among voters by pushing for Adelekes disqualification has failed and the All Progressives Congress (APC) is on the way out.





He said: It gladdens our hearts that Senator Adeleke did not hire 13 SANs to frustrate the hearing of the case by filing numerous frivolous applications and appeals like President Muhammadu Buhari did when summoned to Court to produce his own certificate.





Mr. Buhari who undeservedly prides himself as Mr. Integrity is yet to provide his certificate; apparently because he does not have any. How can one attach integrity to such a character? President Buhari is hereby called upon to now direct the Army Secretary to produce the certificate he tendered to the Army on the day he joined the Nigerian Army.





Having failed in this last plot to continue to hold down a resolute Osun electorate in their mire of misgovernance, we have it on good authority that the APC led Federal Government has activated the Nigeria Police which has effectively turned itself into the militant wing of the ruling Party to summon the candidate again based on concocted allegations just to derail the sack of APC from the Osun Government House.





The same Nigeria Police that refused to comment or take action on the now proven certificate forgery of former Minister of Finance, Kemi Adeosun for over two months when her scandal broke nor the continuing raging scandal of Mr. Okoi Obono-Obla against whom the Registrar of WAEC had testified at a House of Representatives investigation that he parades a fake certificate is now the Police running from pillar to post groping for nonexistent evidence.





Since he was rewarded with appointment as Inspector General of Police, Ibrahim Idris has not investigated nor prosecuted any official of this government for all the allegations of crime made against them. The politically induced summoning of Adeleke is like a wild goose chase, it will not achieve any noble end.





The Buhari administration has now become shameless, purposeless, conscienceless and clueless. The plot by the APC government working with the Police, which now behave like the Security Arm of the APC to arrest key opposition governorship candidates and their supporters 24 hours to election to deprive them of the chance to make adequate preparation for the election shall be resisted.




The Christian Association of Nigeria, CAN, has challenged the Federal Government to put its acts together and ensure the release of the ab...

The Christian Association of Nigeria, CAN, has challenged the Federal Government to put its acts together and ensure the release of the abducted Leah Sharibu before its too late.





CAN President, Samson Ayokunle, while making the call also demanded the release of the remaining Chibok girls from Boko Haram custody.





Speaking in Oshogbo, the Osun State capital, Ayokunle said Nigerian government and its security agencies should ensure the release of the abducted girls because its their constitutional responsibility to do so.





Ayokunle also lamented that many Nigerians die untimely due to unchecked murderous activities of gunmen and Fulani herdsmen.





He said, It is regrettable that many Nigerians are living in poverty and are not able to fulfil their dreams because of low income or lack of employment at all. Substantial welfare policy as well is not forthcoming from the government.





A very sad case is that of Leah Sharibu and the Chibok girls that are still in captivity for months and years now either because of their faith or religious malady of some crazy Islamic fundamentalists.




Governor Aminu Waziri Tambuwal, presidential aspirant under the platform of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) said that he forfeited his second term as a governor under the APC because of his commitment to the unity and development of Nigeria.He made this known Ibadan, Oyo state during his campaign to the south west geo-political zone were he promised to provide purposeful and visionary leadership that will unite the country.Tambuwal, who is also the governor of Sokoto state, told a mammoth crowd of PDP supporters and delegates at the Osun state party secretariat on Wednesday that there is the urgent need to provide a credible alternative that will oust the All Progressives Congress (APC) led government of Muhammadu Buhari which has failed in all ramifications.This country is at a cross road. We need leaders that can bring people together and reunite us, bring the country together and secure it.Tambuwal, who is also the immediate past speaker of the House of Representatives said:  We need to also provide jobs for our teeming youths and women; there is a lot of poverty all over the land.We know how PDP left the economy of this country and we know what is happening today. Dont mind what they are telling you is just simple lie. The economy is not doing well. The fight against corruption is selective and indeed there are no jobs for our people. So have they not failed on their promises to our people?I assure you that this ticket by all standards and by all measures is not going to be compared to that of Muhammadu Buhari. We have understanding of the dynamics of the Nigerian state, there is no part of this country that I have been to. We shall promote national unity and harmonyHe told the delegates that I have a very good understanding of what it takes to provide leadership in Nigeria. I have the energy, the capacity in terms of experience I have been a member of the National Assembly for 12 years four of which I was the speaker, and I am now governor of Sokoto state I have garnered enough executive experience to pilot the affairs of this country. Not only that I have been very close to Nigerian judiciary I have been a lawyer who has practiced in many courts in this country so I have understanding of the workings of both the executive, legislature and the judiciary.We will provide leadership in such a way that every Nigerian will be proud of the country. The security of this country has never been this bad, we shall also work to ensure that every Nigerian live in peace and harmony.Responding, an elder statesman and PDP stalwart, Alhaji Shuaibu Oyedokun who is also a member of the partys BoT described Tambuwal as a legislative wizard, dynamic and patriotic person.He respects elders said the saddest day in his life was when Tambuwal left PDP and that one of his happiest day was when he heard that Tambuwal has returned to PDP. And that he came back stronger, he said.In Ibadan, Oyo state, governor Tambuwal told PDP delegates and journalists that he took the decision to forfeit his second term as a governor under the APC because of his commitment to the unity and development of Nigeria.Yes, I am serving my first term as a governor of Sokoto state with the probability of winning a second term by 60-70 percent but because of my patriotism and commitment to the development of this country, I decided to not only volunteer but also heed to the calls of Nigerians not just to run for the presidency but also leave the APC which had majority in the north west and that is not a small decision that I decided to take because of my commitment to the unity of this country because things are not going well in Nigeria and we are all aware of it and we need to do something. It is for us to rally round and effect a change of government at the centre and that is my motivation.He acknowledged that Nigerian security services cannot protect the country because they understaffed and ill-equipped.
Last Wednesday, Lee County Mosquito Control District commissioners decided to postpone their vote on whether to purchase Woodstock airstrip on Pine Island. Approximately 20- 25 Pine Island residents arrived at the meeting to voice their objections to the purchase.

Residents brought up legal issues, concerns about excessive noise, the effect of the airport on quality of life, possible reduction in home values, hurricanes and possible fuel and insecticide spills, budget questions, the use of Roundup products and pilots using helicopters to go to lunch at various restaurants on Pine Island.

Im very pleased with the turnout for this meeting, Woodstock Road resident Ndakhte Ndiaye said. We decided to try to get as many people to this budget meeting as possible because in their last board meeting the District Commissioners appeared to be reconsidering the purchase of the airport. They said they were putting the decision off until next months meeting and I thought this would be a good opportunity for Pine Islanders to have their say.

LCMCD proposed to purchase the 35-acre property last year as a satellite facility. LCMCD states that 70 percent of its mosquito spraying operations take place in Pine Island and western portions of Cape Coral. The ability to store the helicopters conducting those missions and, in turn, not having to ferry them from the Buckingham Airfield, will provide cost savings.

Several Gulf Coast Estates residents filed a lawsuit last year to stop the sale. The lawsuit, filed by William S. Peratino, Jamie M. Saunders, Debbie Memoli, Claudia Bringe and Joseph T. Scaccio, claimed the airstrip would violate zoning restrictions for AG (agricultural) zoned districts, and violates the special conditions of the prior 1975 exception. The group, known as the Woodstock Airport Opposition Group, filed an injunction stopping LCMCD from purchasing the property.

The lawsuit delayed the purchase of the property for six months. In the interim, in anticipation of the eventual purchase, LCMCD leased the property from the owners, Frank and Ila Valcarcel, for $10,000 per month.

In June 2018 a Circuit Court judge ruled in favor of Lee County Mosquito Control District stating the airport is permitted under the definition of aircraft landing facility, private and that the property meets the special permit issued in 1975. The Woodstock Airport Opposition Group filed an appeal.

John Lafara stated the Flamingo Bay Action Committee does not support the purchase of the airstrip and Claudia Bringe, president of the Greater Pine Island Civic Association, stated the GPICA also opposes the purchase.

As a homeowner I am concerned about noise, traffic and privacy, resident Jamie Saunders said. We are not against Mosquito Control. We feel this is a small private landing strip and that a commercial airstrip is the safest and most appropriate place for you to run your operation. This was never meant to be a big airport.

LCMCD has been advised that the airstrip is a licensed airport, offers an opportunity to store aircraft, save ferry time and consolidate two other helistops in Pine Island Center and St. James into one.

LCMCD attorney John Englewood advised that the lawsuit could take anywhere from 6 months to a year to resolve.

Bokeelia resident John Reynolds spoke in favor of the airport. Reynolds lives near the Harbor Drive heliport in Bokeelia said LCMCD is a good neighbor.

Among the many issues residents brought up at the meeting was easements on the property. According to Ndiaye, the Woodstock Airport Opposition Group believes there are several easements and roads that have been gated and made unusable by residents.

Mike Ellis, who chaired the meeting, said the options were: purchase the airport, dont purchase the airport or move it into next fiscal years budget. Commissioners present were Bruce Scott, Ed Brantley, Mike Ellis, Brian Farrar and George Mann. Thomas Hart was absent.

The commission voted 4-1 to move the purchase of Woodstock airstrip into next years budget (October 2018). Commissioner Scott voted no.

I was impressed that several commissioners, notably Commissioner Mann, clearly wanted more information on the serious issues that were raised such as permits, dedicated roads, the runway and zoning, Ndiaye said. There was visible concern when Director (T. Wayne) Gayle was unable to offer any assurance about the roads and easements, nor could their attorney, who twice was asked to approach the podium for answers.
MOSCOW, Sept. 19 (Xinhua) -- Russian President Vladimir Putin and German Chancellor Angela Merkel discussed over the phone Russia's recent deals with Turkey for the Syrian province of Idlib, the last rebel stronghold in the war-torn country, the Kremlin said Wednesday.

The conversation, initiated by the German side, focused on the Syrian peace settlement, during which Putin informed Merkel of the agreements between Moscow and Ankara to "promote stabilization in the Idlib de-escalation zone," a Kremlin statement said.

On Monday, Russia and Turkey decided to set up a demilitarized zone between the armed opposition and the government troops in Idlib by Oct. 15, following talks between the presidents of the two countries.

Putin and Merkel also reaffirmed their mutual commitment to further facilitating the settlement of the Ukrainian conflict, the statement said.

They also touched upon bilateral relations and a number of issues on the global financial markets, it said.
Chinese President Xi Jinping with Serbian counterpart Aleksandar Vucic (Image: Xinhua)

Source: DEFENSE WORLD. NET

Serbia is eyeing to acquire sophisticated weapons and military technology for integrating complex systems into unmanned aircraft from China.

Serbia will acquire combat drones, which will have the ability to scout, discover targets during the day and at night, as well as to shoot with laser-guided bombs and missiles, Nenad Miloradovic, Deputy defense minister was quoted as saying in Beijing by B92 web portal Tuesday.

The Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic is on a visit to China to attend the Summer Davos Forum annual meeting in Tianjin. "That's capability that only the most capable militaries of the world have, which the Serbian Army will have at its disposal," Miloradovic said.

Miloradovic pointed out that the Serbian Army does not have such a capability for the time being, but that this is also true of a large number of the countries in the region. The package, which is has been agreed on, he, said, will include industrial cooperation, i.e., technology transfer, the news portal reported. According to him, this will be a transfer of technology for integrating complex systems into unmanned aircraft, on the basis of which unmanned aircraft that will be manufactured in Serbia be equipped with optical-electronic systems. In that way, he explained, our aircraft will have three of these four capabilities - they will be able to observe the battlefield byday and night, coordinate targets and control artillery fire, guide laser-guided bombs and missiles, which will be launched by other weapons, or other unmanned aircraft. This concerns two systems of new generation combat drones, each consisting of three drones, land-based control stations and a remote video terminal.

In addition, it has been agreed that remaining five systems will be manufactured by Serbia itself, using Chinese technology. These are the first forms of military-technological cooperation with China, aimed at diversifying Serbia's equipment as a neutral military country. Miloradovic assessed that this arrangement cannot compromise cooperation with any previous partners.
Illustration: Liu Rui/GT

Editor's Note:

The world has been undergoing dramatic changes as the US has soured its relations with both China and Russia, and wielded trade war stick against not only China, but US allies. Is a second Cold War imminent? How should China and Russia react to the changes? Global Times (GT) reporter Sun Xiaobo talked with Alexander Lukin (Lukin), head of Department of International Relations at Higher School of Economics in Moscow, about these issues.

GT: Dr. Sergey Karaganov, who has been presidential advisor to both Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin, said we are experiencing a new Cold War. Given the current international situation, do you think a Cold War has already taken place or is looming?

Lukin: "Cold War" is just a symbolic term. You can call it a Cold War or not, it doesn't matter. But we do have a situation of a serious conflict of interests, which can lead to confrontation. In some cases it has already led to confrontation. I think in Russia most people believe this conflict has a geopolitical source because it's a struggle for power by the United States. Some experts in Russia call it "one-sided Cold War," as the US is waging a war against us but Russia doesn't want a war, since it does not struggle for world domination. Russia just wants to protect its own interests and territory.

The US is very clearly a declining power. It is still the world's strongest, but its influence is going down, such as on the economic front. As China and some other countries are growing, the US' comparative influence is much smaller than before. But they don't like it because after WWII until today, especially after the collapse of the Soviet Union, they got used to being the most powerful country. They thought, as some people in the US like Francis Fukuyama wrote, that history had ended. They thought the world would be dominated by the "liberal" US, but suddenly they proved to be wrong because other countries try to protect themselves from American domination. It happened in 2014 when Russia tried to protect its interests in the Ukraine. And then we see it's beginning to happen with China because in general China is seen as a much more dangerous threat to the US domination than Russia because China is getting stronger with growing global influence. China has achieved what the Soviet Union failed to achieve: created an economically effective model without political dependence on the West. There are already countries which are interested in more cooperation with China than with the US and its allies.

Americans don't like it. They now try to limit China's growth because the sanctions and measures they take now, especially under (US President Donald) Trump, are not what they truly aim at. For example, some of their measures are against trade deficits. This looks more like looking for pretexts. Because what the US wants is that China change all its policies at once under foreign pressure, but no government can afford to do it. Americans would always find something else and you cannot fulfill it. It's the same with Russia.

GT: In the context of a deteriorating international situation, will China and Russia get closer? Your new book is about the new rapprochement between China and Russia. What do you mean by "new?"

Lukin: The two countries had a rapprochement in the 1950s, which was mostly ideological, and the relationship was not entirely equal because the Soviet Union was stronger and called the elder brother. Today Russia and China work together, with a comprehensive strategic partnership of coordination, and they coordinate a lot of actions. But now we don't share any ideological goals. We just coordinate our policies because of the geopolitical situation and because the US is trying to limit the growth of China and Russia. We also cooperate with Iran and others such as the EU on some issues since Europeans are also not much satisfied with the US at the moment.

China and Russia have been close, but they won't come to the stage of formal alliance which means mutual defense obligations. It's not necessary for China and Russia to become formal allies, but we would cooperate very closely. The more pressure from the US we have, the closer we get. This is a geopolitical reality.

GT: Against the backdrop of the current international situation, will US-Russian relations worsen further?

Lukin: US-Russia relations won't worsen because they are already at the bottom. I can hardly imagine what can be worse, maybe a war. But I don't think there will be a war since that would destroy the world, which even Americans cannot afford. The US-Russia relationship is pretty bad. In the US there is very strong anti-Russia propaganda. Whatever bad happens in the world is attributed to Russia. It's similar with China, except that China is often blamed for economic "crimes."

GT: The US is trying to build a frontline to counter China. What do you think China can do about it?

Lukin: In this context, it's wise for China to improve its relations with neighboring countries such as India, Vietnam and Japan, which the US is wooing. In fact, the relationship with China has become an internal issue of many neighboring countries such as Malaysia and Sri Lanka where some political parties use the China threat theory to become more popular. China should not give them the pretext since that can be quite dangerous.

Trump has an unpredictable personal character. But the personality of a US president is not very important. What's important is that he represents a strong tendency of American internal politics - the rise of right-wing politics. The criticism of China is one of the main ideas of this ideology. Until the geopolitical reality of US decline and China's emergence becomes accepted by Washington, it will go on with its policy limiting China's power. China and Russia should be prepared for it.

I appreciate the Chinese idea that it doesn't overestimate itself but publicly underestimates its influence so as not to scare others. Your rhetoric should be less strong than your real power. This is a clever policy. Russia should learn from Chinese experience of this kind.

And China needs to maintain economic strength to keep its global influence. China's major soft power lies in its economic model that works effectively. Many countries in the world now think this model is more economically effective than the Western system. So if China stops economic development, you lose everything.

In this process China and Russia can coordinate efforts on military and political fronts. For instance, if we are to create some areas around our borders without American influence, Russia can provide security guarantees, such as in Central Asian countries, and China can provide more economic aid. We have long cooperated in the UN on international issues and will continue doing so.

GT: Given that global political dynamics are undergoing dramatic change, what do you think a new international order should be like?

Lukin: I don't think there was a liberal international order. This is an American myth. The liberal international order, which Western experts are talking about, never existed.

Harvard Professor Graham Allison also wrote an article about it. They (Americans) want an American dominated "liberal" international order, but never achieved it. It only existed like a utopian goal.

The US and its allies, so-called liberal countries, have never controlled the world. Instead of a unipolar world, what we see now is the emergence of multi-centers and a tendency of a multi-polar world taking shape. Multi-polarity is still a tendency because one pole - the US - is still stronger than others, but it is emerging. This is also the reason for conflicts because the strongest doesn't want to give its place to others. It's natural in a geopolitical view.

We just need to survive through this dangerous period and also to educate the US about living in such a multi-polar world. Americans need to understand that they may control quite a lot, but definitely not everything. Unfortunately, they don't want to believe it for now. Maybe they can change after one generation passes when young people come to understand it, like what Russians came through after the Soviet Union collapsed. And we are now used to the reality and don't want to return to the Soviet Union.
Staff from Zhizhangyi Technology demonstrate their system in Chengdu, Sichuan Province, during 2018 China Cybersecurity Week on Wednesday. Photo: Zhao Yusha/GT

The Chinese military is requiring its personnel to install monitoring software that helps analyze their social media patterns and tests their political sensibilities, a move the software developer said helps soldiers to use internet in a more rational way.

The software, developed by Zhizhangyi Technology, a Beijing-based company, can detect sensitive words and websites instantly, once it is installed into soldiers' mobile phones.

In addition to preventing military personnel from being exposed to harmful information, the system can also gather information from its users, according to a handbook sent to the Global Times on Tuesday by the company.

The gathered data, including users' browsing history, contacts and messages, is used to help analyze their behavior, social circles and interests.

Apart from analyzing a single soldier's social and psychological pattern, the system can assign a soldier into a high risk group, so the military can give them political education, according to the handbook.

Soldiers may be easily corrupted by online vices such as gambling and pornography. Politically incorrect information can poison their mind, leading to serious consequences, Zhou Ling, chief marketing officer of the company, told the Global Times.

According to the company, it has cooperated with more than 100 military institutions from the Army, Navy and Air Force of the People's Liberation Army. Its software has been installed in over 500,000 mobile devices within military institutions, said Zhou.

Threat to national security

These analyses help the military take precautions and safeguard the minds of soldiers who are in danger of being corrupted, said Zhou.

He said the inappropriate use of mobile devices in the military is very serious because it threatens China's national security, so special technology must be used to prevent the leaking of information.

"Everyone in our barracks was asked to install such software in recent years We firmly support such technology because serving in the military requires us to be triple careful compared to people in other industries," a soldier serving in a military base in Northwest China's Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, who asked for anonymity, told the Global Times.

He said that the military also imposes punishment on those who refuse to install or try to circumvent such software.

One soldier from his barracks was put on a six-month probation period and fined 30,000 yuan ($4,400) when caught using a second phone without such software, said the anonymous soldier.

Early in 2016, the PLA released comprehensive counter-espionage software, which can be installed on PLA personnel's mobile devices, to curb leaks of military information and filter unhealthy information on their mobile phones, said the People's Liberation Army Daily.

The newspaper also warned soldiers in 2017 against the use of food delivery and fitness tracking apps, which can all potentially leak sensitive military information.

Data collected from the anti-espionage system is analyzed by military personnel in the Western Theater Command. This data includes the number of illegal websites visited and messages with sensitive words that have been intercepted. Photo: Zhizhangyi Technology

Privacy concerns

According to the anonymous soldier, one of the biggest problems that concerns him is that software developers may give users' personal information away.

His concern was dismissed by Li Daguang, a professor at the National Defense University of the PLA in Beijing, saying such a situation is "unlikely."

Li told the Global Times that "such companies only gather data and provide analyses to the military. And the military is the one who holds control of all the data."

Moreover, these kinds of software use encrypted data, which makes it a closed system and hard to hack into, Li said.

There are many successful examples of private companies helping the military build safe cyberspaces and protecting the military's big data, Liu Jinyu, a professor at the Research Center of the National Defense University, said at a conference during 2018 China Cybersecurity Week, which is held in Chengdu this week.

During the conference, some experts noted that China still relies on imported technology to defend its cybersecurity.

"When it comes to core technology for protecting military information, we'd better use Chinese technology. That's why we need to encourage the participation of private institutes in the field," said Liu.
U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has welcomed the "important commitments" made by North Korean leader Kim Jong-un at a summit with his South Korean counterpart this week.

North Korea announced it would disassemble the main nuclear complex in Yongbyong if the United States takes "corresponding measures" under a comprehensive agreement reached by the leaders of the two rival Koreas.

Pompeo said Wednesday that he had invited North Korean Foreign Minister Ri Yong-ho to meet with him in New York at next week's United Nations General Assembly. He also said Pyongyang's representatives have been invited to hold talks with the U.S. special envoy for North Korea in Austria "at the earliest opportunity."

"This will mark the beginning of negotiations to transform U.S.-DPRK relations through the process of rapid denuclearization of North Korea, to be completed by January 2021, as committed by Chairman Kim, and to construct a lasting and stable peace regime on the Korean Peninsula," Pompeo said in a statement.


China has held talks with the U.S. in an attempt to urge Washington not to require some Chinese state media outlets to register as foreign agents, China's Foreign Ministry said Wednesday.

Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang said Beijing "communicated" with the U.S. about the issue and added it was opposed to "politicizing" the media.

The Wall Street Journal newspaper reported Tuesday the U.S. Justice Department has demanded that China's Xinhua news agency and its English language television station, CGTN, register as foreign agents.

The demand, also reported by Bloomberg News, came amid increasing scrutiny of foreign media groups that could influence U.S. public opinion.

Registering as a foreign agent could limit the news outlets' access in Washington. It would put them in the same legal category as lobbyists who work for overseas entities and could cause them to lose their congressional media credentials.

Most news outlets in China are state-run and heavily controlled. Beijing maintains strict limits on the presence of foreign media and its ability to cover events and travel in the country.

The issue could further escalate tensions between the two countries, which are engaged in an increasingly intense trade war.
20/09/2018 - The OECD welcomes Frances recently announced plans to increase its foreign aid flows, particularly in the form of grants, and prioritise the most fragile countries, commitments that respond to recommendations made in a new DAC Peer Review of France.





The Review, released today after being presented to the French government in July, said that having started increasing aid in 2017 following a five-year decline, France now needed to increase the share of grants compared to loans in line with its ambitions to support fragile and least-developed countries. France said in August that it would raise its official development assistance (ODA) budget for 2019 and would treble the amount of aid provided as grants.





We are pleased to see France restoring its ODA levels and reaffirming its ambition for further increases. We encourage France to focus on its stated priorities and to be cautious not to prioritise security and immigration policies over development and humanitarian objectives, said OECD Development Assistance Committee (DAC) Chair Charlotte Petri Gornitzka.





The Review welcomes Frances setting out of a clear strategic framework and priorities for development co-operation, its improvement of staff management at the French development agency and its adoption of innovative financing instruments. It underlines, however, that care should be taken to ensure aid stays focused on fighting poverty and inequality and is not diverted to cover needs related to domestic policy and security or regulating migration flows.





French ODA rose by 15% in 2017, more than any other official donor, to reach USD 11.36 billion, or 0.43% of gross national income (GNI). This restores French ODA to its 2012 levels following a steady decline in its ODA to GNI ratio from 0.45% to 0.38% over 2012-16. For comparison, the average ODA/GNI ratio for DAC donors was 0.31% in 2017, and five donors have reached the UN target of 0.7%. The plan for EUR 1 billion extra in aid for 2019 responds well to the Reviews call for France to move towards its 2022 goal of 0.55% ODA/GNI.





The Review underlines Frances leading role in international stability, through its part in maintaining security, particularly in the Sahel. France has also prioritised the environment and biodiversity, and pledged to provide EUR 5 billion in climate finance by 2020.





The top five recipients of French aid in 2015/16 were Morocco, Colombia, Ivory Coast, Cameroon and Jordan, all middle-income countries. France allocated just 14% of its bilateral ODA to its 19 priority countries, and only 19% of its bilateral ODA went to least-developed countries compared to an average of 37% for DAC members. This may be partly explained by the fact that France relies heavily on loans, which were for 45% of gross bilateral ODA in 2016.





The Review says France fully implemented three and partially implemented another 11 of 17 recommendations from its 2012 Peer Review. The three recommendations not implemented include increasing the share of grants to loans and raising the humanitarian aid budget.





Each DAC member is reviewed every five years to monitor its performance, hold it accountable for past commitments and recommend improvements. Reviews use input from officials in the review country and partner countries  Niger and Morocco for this Review  as well as civil society and the private sector. Read more on DAC Peer Reviews.





Read the DAC Peer Review of France





For further information journalists are invited to contact the OECD Media Office (+33 1 45 24 97 00.).

Working with over 100 countries, the OECD is a global policy forum that promotes policies to improve the economic and social well-being of people around the world.
President Moon Jae-in and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un headed to Mt. Baekdu on the Chinese border on Thursday morning to climb the mythical birthplace of the Korean nation on the final day of Moon's visit.

Cheong Wa Dae spokesman Kim Eui-kyeom on Wednesday said Kim Kong-un proposed the outing.

The two leaders took a plane at around 7:30 a.m. from Sunan International Airport in Pyongyang to arrive at Samjiyon near Mt. Beakdu some 390 km away an hour later. There they took a car to travel to the mountain.

They are to be taken to the peak by bus and tracked vehicle.


The University of Pennsylvania in the U.S. will offer bachelor's degree programs accessible online in the fall of 2019, it said on Tuesday.

Students will not have to be present on the campus to obtain a degree from the university.

It is the first case among the prestigious Ivy League universities "to offer a fully-accredited, online education... for working adults and other non-traditional students," the university said.

"The goal of this new platform is to make an Arts and Sciences education more accessible, flexible, and affordable for working adults," the university added.


U.S. President Donald Trump on Wednesday hailed President Moon Jae-in's declaration with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un as "tremendous progress" although the two leaders agreed little of any substance.

"Kim Jong-un has agreed to allow nuclear inspections, subject to final negotiations, and to permanently dismantle a test site and launch pad in the presence of international experts," Trump claimed hyperbolically. "In the meantime there will be no Rocket or Nuclear testing."

In fact, Kim only agreed to let international inspectors verify the destruction of a missile engine test site that has already taken place.

The tweet came just about an hour and 20 minutes after Moon and Kim gave a press conference around 10:40 p.m. Eastern Standard Time in the U.S. He tweeted again seven minutes later, "Also, North and South Korea will file a joint bid to host the 2032 Olympics. Very exciting!"

He then told reporters at the White House there had been "tremendous progress" on several fronts, adding, "We have a lot of very good things going."

U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was equally enthusiastic, saying he had invited his North Korean counterpart Ri Yong-ho to meet in New York at the UN General Assembly.

In a written statement, he added, "This will mark the beginning of negotiations to transform U.S.-[North Korea] relations through the process of rapid denuclearization of North Korea, to be completed by January 2021, as committed by Chairman Kim, and to construct a lasting and stable peace regime on the Korean Peninsula."

But commentators in the U.S. immediately expressed skepticism, though they pointed out that Trump's very hyperbole could also pave the way for a second summit that might then produce more palpable results.

Trump needs to play up his achievements ahead of looming mid-term elections in the U.S., where his sorry approval ratings among all but his core supporters and his dismal international image present a liability to his Republican Party.
National security adviser Chung Eui-yong on Wednesday tried to dispel the impression that the latest inter-Korean summit produced little but hot air. "Broad discussions were held in addition to what was included in the joint declaration" announced by President Moon Jae-in and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un in Pyongyang the same day, Chung claimed in a meeting with reporters.



National security adviser Chung Eui-yong (second from right) talks to reporters in Pyongyang on Wednesday.

He appeared to be hinting that the two leaders discussed denuclearization steps in addition to the closure of a missile test site that has already taken place but was touted as an achievement of the summit. "This will make possible in-depth discussions between the leaders of [South] Korea and the U.S. to be held during talks in New York early next week," Chung added. "We expect to see denuclearization talks between the U.S. and North Korea gain more speed and hope that a U.S.-North Korea summit would be held in the near future."

The joint declaration signed by President Moon Jae-in and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un sits on a table at North's state guesthouse Paekhwawon in Pyongyang on Wednesday. /Newsis

Indeed, U.S. President Donald Trump, who has been criticized for his failure to win any binding commitment from Kim, hailed "tremendous progress" in a tweet after the press conference. U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo also said Washington is ready to restart negotiations "immediately." Both seemed to be putting the most optimistic spin on Moon and Kim's declared intent to "cooperate closely in the process of pursuing complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula." Moon Chung-in, a special security adviser to the president, told reporters in Pyongyang, "There will be a message from Kim that was not included in the joint declaration. President Moon will directly deliver that message to President Trump in New York. I believe Secretary of State Mike Pompeo will travel to Pyongyang very soon." Pompeo said he invited his North Korean counterpart, Ri Yong-ho, to New York instead for talks with the U.S. special envoy for North Korea in Austria "at the earliest opportunity." President Moon heads to New York to attend the UN General Assembly following his trip to Pyongyang and meets Trump on Monday.
From now on, tactical maneuvers, including live-fire drills like air-to-ground missile attack drills, and aerial reconnaissance activities will be banned in the no-fly zone. Currently, the UN Command sets only a 9-km-wide no-fly zone from the MDL.

Pundits were quick to warn that this could weaken South Korea's defenses in the face of an unpredictable North Korea. They were especially alarmed at a 10 to 40-km-wide no-fly zone across the military demarcation line and the proposed halt of aerial reconnaissance activities.

The two Koreas agreed to completely halt all hostile acts in all spaces on the land, at sea and in the air that could cause military tensions and clashes. They also agreed to launch a cross-border military committee to discuss massive military drills and arms buildups, blockades and interdictions of various types and obstruction of marine navigation, and reconnaissance activities.

The pact establishes ground, maritime, and air buffer zones in frontline areas for the first time since the armistice in 1953. Cheong Wa Dae said this is a concrete measure aimed at reducing the risk of war on the Korean Peninsula.

The two Koreas signed a military pact in Pyongyang on Wednesday to implement the declaration, which was adopted at the first inter-Korean summit in Panmunjom on April 27.

The South Korean and U.S. militaries have overwhelming superiority over the North Korean military in terms of tactical capabilities of aerial reconnaissance and mid- and large-sized drones over the demilitarized zone, so the agreement mostly benefits North Korea.

Spying on the DMZ is important for South Korea because the North has deployed about 70 percent of its army, naval and air force troops and equipment south of Pyongyang and Wonsan. If reconnaissance activities are halted, that could create a serious vacuum in South Korea's surveillance of the North's 340-plus long-range artillery pieces that are pointed at the Seoul metropolitan area.

Shin Won-sik, a former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said, "We've depended heavily on unmanned aerial vehicles for surveillance of the North's long-range guns that are hidden inside caves. But from now on, it'll be difficult to adequately spy on them."

The two Koreas also agreed to halt various types of military drills near the DMZ from Nov. 1. Accordingly, artillery drills and regimental-level field maneuvers will be suspended in areas within 5 km from the MDL.

They also agreed to withdraw 11 guard posts on each side that are located within 1 km from the MDL. But North Korea has 160 guard posts there, about three times South Korea's 60, so again the reduction is far more significant from the South Korean side.

The agreement was signed by Defense Minister Song Young-moo and his North Korean counterpart No Kwang-chol.

Some of the key elements in the agreement, such as the expansion of the no-fly zone and the disarming of the Joint Security Area in the truce village of Panmunjom, require consultations with the UN Command and therefore the U.S. Forces Korea.

The Defense Ministry here explained that there will be a trilateral consultative body between the two Koreas and the UNC to discuss and implement the decision to disarm the JSA, which is stated in the appendix of the agreement.
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President Moon Jae-in and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un met in an atmosphere of great conviviality in Pyongyang over the last couple of days. Kim is to visit South Korea before the end of this year, and it is no small matter if the leaders meet regularly to try and resolve 70 years' worth of differences. "We have agreed to make the Korean Peninsula a land of peace that is free from nuclear weapons and nuclear threat," Kim said. That is an important commitment and the first time that a North Korean leader made such direct comments in public.

What was entirely absent from their joint declaration on Wednesday was a commitment to concrete steps toward denuclearization. The North offered to destroy a missile engine test facility and launch pad in Tongchang-ri and permit international inspectors to verify that. It also offered to destroy its main nuclear facility in Yongbyon "if the U.S. takes corresponding measures."

But the North already promised demolish the Tongchang-ri facility during the summit with U.S. President Donald Trump in Singapore in June and has started doing it. It already has mobile missile launchers, so it no longer needs the launch pad. The Yongbyon nuclear facility includes the same 5-MW reactor that was the subject of negotiations during the first nuclear crisis back in 1993 plus the adjacent plutonium reprocessing facility. But North Korea now enriches uranium God knows where else to build nuclear bombs. In other words, the North has offered up nothing of great value.

At the center of North Korea's nuclear weapons program are scores of warheads, fissile materials and underground facilities for uranium enrichment. The U.S. wants North Korea to report them, but the North Korean offers entirely, and deliberately, miss the mark.

Yet while denuclearization progresses at a snail's pace, steps toward cross-border economic cooperation are racing ahead at lightning speed. Moon and Kim agreed to hold a ground-breaking ceremony later this year to reconnect railways severed during the Korean War, while talking already about reopening the Kaesong Industrial Complex and resuming cruise ship tours to the North's Mt. Kumgang resort, which were halted in 2008 after a North Korean soldier shot a South Korean tourist dead. They also want to talk about building more joint economic zones.

None of those projects can proceed as long as sanctions against the North remain in place, so what is the point of breaking ground on them? To be sure, the two leaders said the projects would go ahead "when conditions become ripe," but they seem to feel that ripeness is a few weeks away this harvest season. If the South Korean government really wants to pursue those projects, it should prod North Korea to take concrete denuclearization steps, but there was no mention of that, except for a vague claim by Moon's national security adviser that more had been agreed than meets the eye.

Moon said in an interview early this month with Indonesian media that his goal is to make "irreversible progress" in denuclearization and establish a peace framework on the Korean Peninsula by the end of this year. But the summit declaration focuses only on cross-border economic projects.

Still, Kim's visit to South Korea would be a monumental development in inter-Korean relations, just as Moon stepping briefly over the border at Panmunjom in April was a milestone event. But as long as North Korea's nuclear weapons remain, Kim's visit to South Korea will produce little more than another gust of warm atmosphere.


Grindr has launched a new anti-discrimination initiative "Kindr" in an attempt to address the bullying and discrimination that the app has become known forfrom racism, transphobia and ableism, to colorism, sizeism and femmephobia. The company has created a strict new set of guidelines officially banning discrimination, enabling users to report bullying and abusive language, i.e. no more "no fats, no femmes, no rice" etc. on profiles.

The revamped community guidelines promise: "a zero-tolerance policy for discrimination, harassment, and abusive behavior. We want you to be yourself, but not at the expense of someone else. Anyone found bullying, threatening, or defaming another user will be banned."

The site will be monitoring and removing discriminatory profile statements: "You're free to express your preferences, but we'd rather hear about what you're into, not what you aren't. Profile language that is used to openly discriminate against other users' traits and characteristics will not be tolerated and will be subject to review"

Users can report abusive and bullying language: "If you see someone breaking the rules, please report them using the button found in the upper right corner of their profile. We'll take it from there. You may also encounter people on the app who upset or offend you without necessarily violating our guidelines. In those instances we recommend using the block feature, which will prevent you and the other user from seeing each other or having future contact."

"Sexual racism, transphobia, fat and femme shaming and further forms of othering such as stigmatization of HIV positive individuals are pervasive problems in the LGBTQ community," said Grindr's head of communications Landen Zumwalt in a statement. "These community issues get brought onto our platform, and as a leader in the gay dating space, Grindr has a responsibility to not only protect our users, but also to set the standard for the broader community that we serve.

Beyond disciplinary restrictions, Grindr is also aiming to facilitate a conversation about prejudice in the queer community. They've also unveiled the a five-part video series, in which each episode will tackle a different form of discrimination.

The first episode tackles sexual racism and features Grindr users, including RuPaul's Drag Race alum The Vixen and original Queer Eye star Jai Rodriguez, talking about the kind of discrimination they've experienced on the app. Future episodes are slated to take on body shaming, transphobia, HIV stigma and femme shaming.

The campaign emerges after a years of criticism of the site's handling of discrimination (or lack there-of). This summer, a Gindr user named Sinakhone Keodara threatened the dating app with a class action lawsuit.

Also this summer, British model and activist Munroe Bergdorf posted a series of screenshots of violent comments she'd received on Grindr, publicly calling the site out for failing to address racism on their platform.

After her tweets went viral, Grindr reached out to Bergdorf, and she later announced that she'd be collaborating with them on the initiative that would become Kindr.
Florida Senator Marco Rubio (R) who sits on the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence has sent a letter to Apple Inc's CEO Tim Cook today asking him to explain why Apple did not immediately respond to reports it received about an app, Adware Doctor, covertly sending customers' browsing histories to servers in China.





Senator Rubio sent out a press release earlier today that stated the following:



"U.S. Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) today raised concerns with Apple CEO Tim Cook after recent reports revealed that the Adware Doctor application, sold through the Mac App Store, was collecting, storing and sending user information to a server in the Peoples Republic of China. While Apple was aware of the practice, the company took weeks to inform consumers and pull the app from its platform. Rubio, in the letter, is requesting answers to Apples practices and seeks assurances that security protocols are in place to avoid a future reoccurrence.The text of the letter is presented below.

Dear Mr. Cook:

I write to express my concern with regard to recent reports that the Adware Doctor application (app), sold through the Mac App Store, was covertly collecting browser histories from users, storing the data in a locked file, and periodically sending this user information to a server based in the Peoples Republic of China. Heightening concerns, moreover, were reports that Apple had been informed of Adware Doctors actions for at least several weeks but did not pull the Adware Doctor app until these actions were made public. For a company that prides itself on prioritizing user privacy and security, this delayed response is extremely disconcerting. It is also troubling that Apple researchers failed to uncover Adware Doctors covert collection and storage process. Over the last decade, Apples Mac App Store has seen more than 170 billion downloads, and your users have trusted your company to protect them from unsolicited intrusions.

I have serious concerns about Chinas malevolent economic behavior involving the theft of U.S. intellectual property, which costs the United States hundreds of billions of dollars annually. However, the threat of American user data being kept on a server in China is equally alarming.

While I am aware of Apples efforts to protect against these intrusions by keeping apps compartmentalized from each other in sandboxes, it is evident that Adware Doctor managed to circumvent your implemented guidelines and protections. While I understand the difficulty in managing the security threats posed by millions of apps, in this case security researchers contacted you in mid-August about the Adware Doctor issue, yet actions to address the issue did not materialize until reports were made public on September 7, 2018. This significant lapse exposes a range of problems, not least of which are internal coordination issues and possibly a blatant disregard for significant user security concerns that were brought to your attention.

I therefore ask that you answer the following questions to address my concerns.

1) Why were the claims involving Adware Doctors use of user data not immediately investigated? Was this an oversight issue or were the claims of the researchers simply disregarded?

2) What steps will Apple management take to respond in a more prompt and efficient manner to researcher concerns that are brought to your attention?

3) What steps will Apple take to audit application updates in a more expeditious manner?

4) What steps will Apple take to ensure that applications using Apples Mac App Store have appropriate security protocols in place to prevent foreign actors from gaining access to user data?

When users access the Mac App Store, they do so under the belief and reasonable expectation that the application options presented to them have been thoroughly vetted and approved by Apple. This incident with Adware Doctor has brought this trust into question. Therefore, I respectfully request that you provide the public with answers to the questions posed in this letter in order to provide needed transparency and accountability into how this incident occurred."

Today I raised concerns with @Apple CEO Tim Cook after reports revealed that an app, Adware Doctor, was covertly sending Americans browsing history to a server in #China. https://t.co/E51BWVoUJq  Senator Rubio Press (@SenRubioPress) September 19, 2018

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This special column for the Deseret News was published on 13 December 2011, and the comment to which I took exception back then is long and justly forgotten. Still, its conceivable that some will find the historical information in this little essay interesting and/or helpful. So I share it here:

Newt Gingrich presents himself as a thoughtful statesman distinguished from his rivals by his deep historical learning.

Remember, there was no Palestine as a state, Gingrich told the Jewish Channel last week. It was part of the Ottoman Empire. And I think that weve had an invented Palestinian people, who are in fact Arabs and were historically part of the Arab community. And they had a chance to go many places.

Challenged during Saturdays Republican debate, Gingrich insisted that his comments were factually correct and historically true, declaring that Palestinian did not become a common term until after 1977.

Predictably, Palestinians and liberals have objected to his remarks. And, also predictably, many conservatives, staunch friends of Israel, have applauded what he himself has called his courage to tell the truth.

There are, I think, relatively few politically conservative American Arabists. But Im one, and I reject Mr. Gingrichs declaration that Palestinians are merely an invented people. His claim is not only needlessly provocative and inflammatory (in a region that scarcely needs inflaming) but false.

First of all, Arabs arent fungible, as Gingrich implies. That is, they arent interchangeable in the way one bushel of corn or bottle of Coke can easily be substituted for another. Morocco, Lebanon, Kuwait, Egypt, Yemen, Iraqeach differs from the others in cuisine, dialect, traditions, social structure, and political practices. There is no monolithic, undifferentiated Arab community.

Few Americans would be comforted, if the United States were conquered by foreign invaders, to be told that they could just go home to Johannesburg, Brisbane, or London. Americans arent New Zealanders, nor are they Scots. Likewise, though theyre all Arabs, Palestinians arent Saudis, who arent Algerians, who arent Lebanese. They have separate histories and cultures.

Modern Standard Arabic is taught in schools and is the language of formal speech and almost all publishing. But the dialects spoken on Arab streets and in Arab homesunlike Brooklyn or Mississippi accents, and unlike Australian, North American, and British Englishconstitute virtually separate languages. Moroccan Arabic, for instance, is almost incomprehensible to Iraqis (and, for that matter, to Egyptians and Palestinians). A quick on-line search will find many published books on the distinct grammars and vocabularies of Egyptian Arabic, Moroccan Arabic, Levantine Arabic, and Iraqi Arabic.

Second, while its true that there was no Palestinian state under the Ottoman Empire, which officially fell only in late 1923, that signifies little. There was also no truly independent Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Tunisia, Algeria, Libya, or Jordan. The Ottoman Empire wasnt particularly supportive of nationalist sentiments among its subjects.

Arab nationalism emerged in the late nineteenth century, paralleling the Ottomans long, slow decline. (The term nationalism itself had been invented in Europe, where nationalistic movements first arose, only in the late eighteenth century.) It was part of the same broad trend that, in Europe, resulted in the unification of Italy and the creation of Germany (both in 1871) and inspired the Czechs Smetana (b. 1824) and Dvorak (b. 1841)) and the Norwegian Grieg (b. 1843) and the Finn Sibelius (b. 1865) to base great classical compositions upon the folk songs and tales of their homelands. (Early Arab nationalism from the time of the First World War is brilliantly depicted in David Leans 1962 film Lawrence of Arabia.) Zionism itselfJewish nationalismcan be said to have been born with the publication of Theodor Herzls The Jewish State in 1896.

Third, its true that a specifically Palestinian identity is a relatively recent development. But its false to suggest that this only became current after 1977.

The name Palestine stems from the ancient Philistines, who formed an independent state alongside the ancient biblical kingdom of Israel. Greeks and Romans regularly used the term, and the Romans officially gave the name Palestine to the province of Judea around 135 C.E., after the second Jewish revolt. The name survived throughout the Middle Ages under both Arab and Ottoman rulers, who routinely referred to Palestines residents as Palestinians. Medieval and early modern Jewish writers also often called the Holy Land Palestine.

A sense of Palestinian identity is clearly evident in the Arab-organized Syrian-Palestinian Congress of 1921 and was fostered by the establishment, under the League of Nations, of the British Mandate for Palestine in 1922. In 1927, more than twenty years before the founding of Israel, Palestinian coins were issued bearing the name Palestine. Even the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) was created in 1964, thirteen years before Newt Gingrichs 1977.

Fourth, its false to say that Palestinians were invented as propaganda. Palestinians have had a distinct and quite depressing history of their own for at least a century. It would be inexplicably bizarre if they had failed to develop a separate sense of identity. Moreover, their Arabic dialect is recognizably unique.

Fifth, its misleading to suggest that Palestinian identity is merely a tool used by the Arabs to manipulate the West. Arabs themselves, though universally sympathetic to Palestinian grievances, perceive Palestinians as distinct. In fact, though this is seldom openly discussed, displaced Palestinians living in their diaspora have often been felt, and resented, as a foreign presence in the Gulf and elsewhere in the Arab worldincluding, even, in Jordan.

Newt Gingrich may or may not be a solid historian of America. With his dismissal of the Palestinians as an invented people, however, he hasnt established his credibility on the Middle East. And Israel isnt helped by bad history.
U.S. Ambassador Says Volkswagen Agrees To Pull Out Of Iran

09/20/18

Source: RFE/RL

The U.S. ambassador to Germany has told Bloomberg News that automaker Volkswagen has agreed to comply with U.S. sanctions and suspend most of its operations in Iran. "We are pleased with this decision because Iran diverts its economic resources away from its people to spread violence and instability across the globe," Ambassador Richard Grenell said on September 19.





Grenell said U.S. officials and Volkswagen finalized the details of the pullout on September 18 following weeks of talks.



The German automaker will still be allowed to conduct some business in Iran under a humanitarian exception, the ambassador added.



A spokesman for the Wolfsburg-based carmaker told the AFP news agency that it was sticking to its long-standing position that it "obeys all national and international laws as well as export regulations."



"We are also taking into account possible effects related to the reintroduction of U.S. sanctions," the spokesman also said.



AFP quoted a source familiar with the talks as saying that Volkswagen and the U.S. administration had not yet reached a final accord.



The White House has not commented.



Volkswagen announced last year that it planned to begin selling cars in Iran for the first time in 17 years.



But U.S. President Donald Trump in May withdrew from a 2015 nuclear deal that Iran signed with six world powers and last month began reimposing some of the sanctions that had been eased in return for curbs on Tehran's nuclear programs.



Trump complained that the deal did not do enough to prevent Iran from eventually developing the capacity to produce a nuclear weapon.



He also alleged that Iran was violating the spirit of the accord by financing militant activity in the region, an allegation Tehran has denied.



The reimposition of sanctions has weakened the Iranian economy, with the country's currency, the rial, falling sharply against hard currencies in recent months.



Britain and France, along with other European nations, have said they want to protect European companies that continue doing business in Iran.



However, international companies including French oil firm Total, German carmaker Daimler, and Deutsche Telekom have pulled out of the country since the U.S. decision to withdraw from the nuclear deal, fearing they will be targeted by secondary sanctions.



With reporting by Bloomberg, AFP, and Reuters
Ghana-based Chinese investment company, Daily Wads (DW), has taken over Planters Capital, a microfinance company, after acquiring 80 per cent shares of the Sunyani-based local financial institution.

The company now operates under the new name Daily Wads Microfinance.



With its operational headquarters in Sunyani and a branch in Techiman, both in the Brong Ahafo Region, the company intends to establish its presence in Accra by the close of November 2018.



According to DW officials, the move will enable them to meet the demands of their new target audience while positioning the company to advance into other local markets like Kasoa in the Central Region; Madina, Ashaiman and Tema, all of which are strategic markets in the Greater Accra Region.



Managing Director of DW, Asafo Adjei, indicated during the takeover ceremony that they are coming in with experience and credible people who are going to steer the affairs of the company and support small businesses.



Our aim is to target the rural poor, middle-class and business partners, especially those importing from China, he noted at the takeover ceremony in Accra.



A representative of Planters Capital, Francis Adjade, told the gathering that the takeover of Planters Capital will see DW collaborate with Africa-China Union (ACU) to create access and platform for businesses in Ghana to do business with firms in China.



The institution is policy-driven, conscious of depositors funds and the regulatory requirements. All one has to do is to have a relationship with DW, which is operating with ACU, and get registered for them to do all your business transactions for you, which comes with cost-effective measures. What this means is that we are liberalising trade, giving confidence and creating wealth for the people, he noted.













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The Public Relations Officer for Ghana Union of Traders Association (GUTA) and also Chairman of Abbosey Okai Spare Parts Dealers Association, Mr Joseph Paddy, has called on the public to disregard a story suggesting that spare parts dealers have apologized to the former president John Mahama.



Speaking to the media over the issue, he said, those flying stories were just propagandists with evil intent and will therefore like to categorically state that, they (spare parts dealers) "have never apologized to the former president and see no reason why they owe him an apology".



Mr. Paddy further indicated that the group parading itself as Concerned Spare Parts Dealers Association does not exist and must therefore not be given any hearing by the public, most especially the media. He believes the group is a politically motivated one seeking to do the bidding of the opposition NDC Party.



News in circulation suggest that, spare parts dealers have expressed disappointment in President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo and the New Patriotic Party (NPP) and have apologised to former President John Mahama for calling him incompetent in his administration.



According to the publication, the association will go on his knees and apologise to Mahama for the insults hurled at him and the NDC government.



"As a personal apology, wherever Mahama is, he should forgive us. I want him to also forgive me personally. We insulted him we embarrassed him. We called him a thief, incompetent and all sort of names. We thought this one (Nana Addo) was coming to help us, but he is rather finishing us!" Takyi Addo said in an interview on a Kumasi-based radio station.



However, the PRO for GUTA, reacting to the publication, charged Ghanaians to "disregard and treat it with the contempt it deserves, since the association has no knowledge of this malicious intent" and further appealed to the "media to be circumspect in its reportage".



Mr. Paddy, in contrast praised the government of President Akufo-Addo for the many tax reliefs he has granted tta business community, as well as, the several business friendly policies he has implemented.



For us as traders and importers we know government has not increased import duties, at least, since last year. There are obviously issues at the ports but it goes beyond government policy. There are individuals at the ports and customs officials who must be dealt with so that the good policies by government can yield the right results. - he indicated.



He further gave assurances of his group's commitment to work hand in hand with government to iron out any challenges confronting their industry.

Source: Chris Joe Quaicoe/ Email: [email protected]









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Tullow Ghana Limited (TGL), was honoured by the Prempeh College Old Students Association (Amanfo) during the annual Pearson/Osae Appreciation Lectures on August 16, 2018. The Association recognised TGLs support for Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) education and the Companys sponsorship of a science laboratory block for Prempeh College.



Completed in 2017, the Prempeh College Science Laboratory Block Project has been named after the founder and former Chief Executive Officer of Tullow Oil plc, Mr. Aidan Heavey. TGL collaborated with Amanfo to sponsor construction of the building as part of a Science Laboratories for Schools initiative under TGLs STEM programme. The initiative was designed to provide centres of excellence in science to secondary education institutions, in order to motivate students to pursue STEM subjects, drive innovation and guarantee development of skills relevant to Ghanas changing needs.





Director for External Affairs, Social Performance and Local Content, Cynthia Lumor, stated that, Building STEM capacity from basic to tertiary education levels is aligned with Tullows Shared Prosperity philosophy. We believe that Ghanas petroleum resource should be a catalyst for development, and providing support towards national developmental agenda targeted at a future founded on technology and innovation is consistent with that philosophy. TGL will continue to provide the support needed by our host country to achieve national goals.



The citation presented to Tullow Ghana reads;



For your immense contribution to the development of science education in Ghana under your Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) programme. You have taken upon yourself to equip schools and colleges in Ghana with STEM teaching equipment to augment the efforts of government and the various interest groups in our second cycle education system to train our countrys future.



Through your programme, we have benefited from the construction of a multi-purpose science laboratory block for the students of Prempeh College which has been named the Aidan Heavey Science Laboratory Block. The Prempeh College Old Students Association is appreciative of your efforts and is proud to be associated with you.



In recognition of this forward-looking initiative and many others, the Prempeh College Old Students Association, Amanfo presents this certificate of honour as a token of appreciation.



Under the Science Laboratories for Schools initiative, TGL supported centres of excellence in science by collaborating with alumni association to provide select second cycle schools with refurbished infrastructure, newly constructed laboratories or equipment. Prempeh College is one of such beneficiaries. Other beneficiaries include, Mfantsipim School, Archbishop Porter Girls School, Achimota School, Accra Academy, Half Assini Senior High School and Nkroful Senior High School. Other projects undertaken under STEM include interventions for kindergarten, primary, secondary schools as well as capacity building for teachers and scholarships for students in Ghanas universities. Tullow Ghana Limited (TGL), was honoured by the Prempeh College Old Students Association (Amanfo) during the annual Pearson/Osae Appreciation Lectures on August 16, 2018. The Association recognised TGLs support for Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) education and the Companys sponsorship of a science laboratory block for Prempeh College.



Completed in 2017, the Prempeh College Science Laboratory Block Project has been named after the founder and former Chief Executive Officer of Tullow Oil plc, Mr. Aidan Heavey. TGL collaborated with Amanfo to sponsor construction of the building as part of a Science Laboratories for Schools initiative under TGLs STEM programme. The initiative was designed to provide centres of excellence in science to secondary education institutions, in order to motivate students to pursue STEM subjects, drive innovation and guarantee development of skills relevant to Ghanas changing needs.



Director for External Affairs, Social Performance and Local Content, Cynthia Lumor, stated that, Building STEM capacity from basic to tertiary education levels is aligned with Tullows Shared Prosperity philosophy. We believe that Ghanas petroleum resource should be a catalyst for development, and providing support towards national developmental agenda targeted at a future founded on technology and innovation is consistent with that philosophy. TGL will continue to provide the support needed by our host country to achieve national goals.



The citation presented to Tullow Ghana reads;



For your immense contribution to the development of science education in Ghana under your Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) programme. You have taken upon yourself to equip schools and colleges in Ghana with STEM teaching equipment to augment the efforts of government and the various interest groups in our second cycle education system to train our countrys future.



Through your programme, we have benefited from the construction of a multi-purpose science laboratory block for the students of Prempeh College which has been named the Aidan Heavey Science Laboratory Block. The Prempeh College Old Students Association is appreciative of your efforts and is proud to be associated with you.



In recognition of this forward-looking initiative and many others, the Prempeh College Old Students Association, Amanfo presents this certificate of honour as a token of appreciation.



Under the Science Laboratories for Schools initiative, TGL supported centres of excellence in science by collaborating with alumni association to provide select second cycle schools with refurbished infrastructure, newly constructed laboratories or equipment. Prempeh College is one of such beneficiaries. Other beneficiaries include, Mfantsipim School, Archbishop Porter Girls School, Achimota School, Accra Academy, Half Assini Senior High School and Nkroful Senior High School. Other projects undertaken under STEM include interventions for kindergarten, primary, secondary schools as well as capacity building for teachers and scholarships for students in Ghanas universities.

Source: Peacefmonline.com









Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority.

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Roche plans center in Pudong to boost medical R&D

From:ChinaDaily | 2018-09-20 11:02

Swiss pharmaceutical giant Roche announced it will build an 863 million yuan ($125.87 million) innovation center in Shanghai's Pudong New Area. Set to open in 2019, it will be the company's third-largest strategic center after those in Switzerland and the United States.

The state-of-the-art innovation center is expected to boost the city's top-level medical research and development capabilities by becoming a dream workplace for pharmaceutical scientists, said Shen Hong, head of medicinal chemistry and head of external innovation at Roche Innovation Center Shanghai, Roche R&D Center (China) Ltd.

The center's focus will be developing antibiotics, as well as medicines to treat hepatitis B, and inflammatory and autoimmune diseases, Shen said.

Founded in 1994, Roche established the first Chinese joint venture in Pudong's Zhangjiang area - Shanghai Roche Pharmaceutical Co Ltd. It quickly formed a complete pharmaceutical value chain that includes research, development, manufacturing and sales.

Thanks to its 24 years of steady development in the country, Shanghai Roche generated 10.45 billion yuan in sales revenue in 2017, and the company had invested 6 billion yuan across the nation as of 2016.

Like Roche, 310 Fortune 500 companies have set up branches in Pudong over the past 28 years, and the area has attracted $79 billion in foreign investment, said Weng Zuliang, secretary of Pudong New Area's Party committee.

Jennifer Goforth, chief engineer of GM China electrification in Shanghai, arrived in China in March 2017 with her family to lead a program designing electric vehicles specifically for the Chinese customer.

"We know Chinese customers' needs are very different from other regions', so every product we bring here is tailored for the Chinese customer."

The 1,210-square-kilometer area has attracted 615 corporate research institutes and 230 foreign funded R&D centers. The total number of registered foreign-invested enterprises in Pudong has reached 23,985, with 281 multinational corporations' regional headquarters, accounting for 45 percent of the total in Shanghai, Weng said.

The new China (Shanghai) Pilot Free Trade Zone, established in 2013 in the district, is encouraging more foreign enterprises to register there, and currently nearly half of Shanghai's foreign companies have set up their offices in the free trade zone, Weng said.
Speakers at a regional conference of the Association of Ghana Industries(AGI) have reiterated the need for deepened industrialisation if the Ghana Beyond Aid initiative will be realised.



The Eastern Regional Minister, Mr Eric Kwakye Darfour, the Volta Regional Minister, Dr Archibald Yao Letsa, the Chief Executive Officer of the AGI, Mr Seth Twum Aboakwa, and the CEO of Joissam Ghana Ltd, Mr Samuel Apenteng, all alluded to the fact that the country had what it took to develop without handouts but currently lacked the drive from majority of its youth who were expected to champion Ghana's quest for rapid industrialisation.



Mr Darfour expressed regret that the country, even though was blessed with countless mineral resources, depended on donors for its development.



Donor dependency, he observed, had failed to yield the expected economic growth hence the government's Ghana Beyond Aid agenda.



He described the theme for the occasion: "Moving Ghana Beyond Aid through industrialisation as a means to contributing to the agenda of the government" as apt.



Mr Darfour advised the youth against engaging in galamsey activities, but rather channel their energies into agriculture, especially mechanised one to protect the environment and create employment and wealth.



Job creation



Dr Letsa observed that aid dependency had been the bane of the country's development.



"It cannot lead us to where we want to go, that is why the government has come up with a policy to build an economy that is not dependent on charity and handouts".



Dr Letsa said it was imperative that as stakeholders: we pool our resources to drive home this agenda of industrialisation ".



Business environment



Mr Twum Aboakwa said a key element of the Ghana Beyond Aid agenda was a reliable industrial sector.



The AGI, he announced, had been monitoring the business environment and the indicators since the last three quarters which had shown marked improvements over the previous ones.



The Volta and Eastern Regional Chairman of the AGI, Mr Dela Gadzanku, commended the government for abolishing some taxes.



Mr Apenteng, who was the chairman for the occasion, called on the youth to pay more attention to industrialisation.



There were solidarity messages from the Ghana Investment Promotion Council (GIPC), Ghana Export Promotion Council and Ghana Free Zones Authority.

Source: Daily Graphic









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Madam Cecilia Abena Dapaah, the Minister of Sanitation and Water Resources, Wednesday, encouraged investors to take advantage of the countrys conducive environment for business saying, Ghana is the best place to invest in Africa.



She said the country had all the ingredients to do business and urged foreign investors to abide by the rules and regulations to enjoy their stay and ensure peaceful coexistence.



Madam Dapaah said this when Mr Birender Singh Yadav, the Indian High Commissioner to Ghana, called on her, in Accra, to invite her to the 150th Anniversary Celebration of Mahatma Gandhi, in India, on October 2.



Mahatma Gandhi was the leader of India's non-violent independence movement against British Rule and an advocate for the civil rights of Indians. He also inspired similar campaigns across the world.



Madam Dapaah welcomed the collaboration with the India Community in the country, and pledged to continue the relationship for mutual benefits.



She expressed readiness to participate in the celebration, explaining that the event would create effective synergies for both countries to share ideas on national issues, especially in area of sanitation and water.



She said as an India business delegation intended to set up a solar pump for water there should be technology transfer and capacity building for the Ghanaian side so that they would not perpetually rely on their Indian counterparts for technical support.



The Minister explained that the move would enable Ghanaians to have hands-on experience and be equipped with the technology know-how to address the challenges that may be associated with running Indian technologies.



She said the Ministry had been collaborating with Non-Governmental Organisations to provide various forms of drinking water in the rural areas, such as stand-alone boreholes and mechanized systems.



Madam Dapaah said as of 2017 water projects, such as the Wa, Essakyir, Akim Oda and Winneba Water Projects had been completed, while 1,000 boreholes were drilled.



A number of Cabinet Memoranda on funding to support the improvement of water supply across the country had been prepared and submitted to the Ministry of Finance towards the execution of the projects including those in Yendi, Damongo, Tamale, Sekondi-Takoradi, Sunyani, Dorma-Ahenkro, Essiama, Begoro-Fanteakwa and Kpong Phase II.



The Indian High Commissioner to Ghana, for his part, said the idea behind the series of events was to spread the philosophy of Mahatma Gandhi to the masses, especially the concept of communal harmony.



Mr Yadav said the programme would be followed by academic events like lecture series and symposiums on topics related to the philosophies practised by Mahatma Gandhi.



College students from educational institutions across the globe and academics would be encouraged to participate in the programmes.



There will be drama and short film competitions on the themes of the ideologies of Mahatma Gandhi, he added.

Source: GNA









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Seventy-two Nigerians and a Togolese, all women, are to be deported by the Enforcement Unit of the Ghana Immigration Service (GIS) for being in the country illegally.



Some of the deportees were also said to have engaged in prostitution in Ghana, apart from lacking the requisite resident permits.



They were arrested along with nine Ghanaians in a swoop at the Redco Flats neighbourhood at Madina in Accra Thursday dawn.



The Ghanaians are to be handed over to the Ghana Police Service for prosecution.



Press briefing



The 2IC at the Public Affairs of the GIS, Deputy Superintendent of Immigration (DSI), Linda Asare Mantey, at a press briefing said the swoop was based on intelligence the service gathered.



According to her, 20 of the suspects were arrested at the Junior Hotel at Madina whilst the rest were arrested in the same vicinity, which is noted for prostitution activities.



She said the foreign nationals would be repatriated to their home countries whilst the Ghanaian nationals would be handed over to the police for further investigations and prosecution.



Illegalities



Supt. Mantey said although eight of the foreign nationals claimed they had passports, they could not produce any such documents, explaining that the GIS has requested for their travel certificates from the Nigerian High Commission as well as the Togo Embassy to send them back to their various countries.



The suspects, she said, had refused to give details of their presence in the country, including when they entered Ghana.



According to her, the suspects have built ghettos and kiosks where they operate, adding that some of the suspects were arrested in the act.



It is illegal to come to the country and engage in prostitution, she said, cautioning prospective foreign nationals and Ghanaians who engage in such practices to desist from it.



Caution



Supt. Mantey also cautioned owners and managers of hotel facilities who hire their facilities out to irregular migrants and locals to use for prostitution to refrain from it, saying We will go after them.



She gave a hint that the Enforcement Unit of GIS would embark on similar exercises in other areas where both irregular foreign nationals and locals engageprostitution activities.

Source: Daily Graphic









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Representatives of the Governments of the United States of America (USA) and Ghana have participated in the 4th Security Governance Initiative (SGI) steering committee meeting on Tuesday in Accra.



A statement copied to the Ghana News Agency said the SGI focused area leads briefed the Steering committee members on progress and the next steps.



Mr Joshua Kyeremeh, the Ghana National Security Coordinator, Mr Christopher J. Lamora, U.S. Charge dAffaires, and Mr Michael Arietti, a US Ambassador (retired) delivered the opening remarks, underscoring both nations commitment to improving security sector governance in the country.



The statement said, SGI is a partnership between the government of Ghana and The United States, aimed at improving the effectiveness of Ghanas security sector.



It said the United States also had SGI partnerships with other countries like Kenya, Mali, Niger, Nigeria and Tunisia.



It added that in 2016, under the SGI, Ghana and the US signed a joint Country Action Plan (JCAP), which identified three priority areas of the partnership; maritime security, border security and cyber security.

Source: GNA









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Government has declared Friday, 21st September, 2018 as a statutory public holiday.



A statement signed by Ambrose Dery, the Minister for Interior, and copied to Peacefmonline.com, says the day marks the birthday of Osagyefo Dr. Kwame Nkrumah which is often declared Kwame Nkrumah Memorial Day.



The statement further asked all and sundry to observe the day as such throughout the country.



Kwame Nkrumah Memorial Day, is a day set aside to remember and honour Ghanas first

President.



Osagyefo Dr Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana's first President, was born on September 21, 1909 at Nkroful in the Western Region.



He attended Achimota School and also trained as a teacher. He went to the United States in 1935 for advanced studies, receiving a B.A. from Lincoln University in 1939.



He also received an STB (Bachelor of Sacred Theology) in 1942, a Master of Science in Education from the University of Pennsylvania in 1942 and a Master of Arts in Philosophy the following year.



Elected



While lecturing in Political Science at Lincoln, Dr Nkrumah was elected President of the African Students Organisation of America and Canada.



He continued his schooling in England, where he helped to organise the Fifth Pan-African Congress in 1945.



He then founded the West African National Secretariat to work for the decolonisation of Africa. Nkrumah also served as Vice-President of the West African Students' Union (WASU).



During his lifetime, Nkrumah was awarded honorary doctorates by Lincoln University, Moscow State University, Cairo University, Jagielloniaan University in Krakow, Poland and Humboldt University in former East Germany.



Formation of the CPP



On June 12, 1949, Dr Nkrumah led the formation of the CPP at Arena in Accra before a crowd of some 60,000.



He was made Chairman, with Komla Agbeli Gbedemah as Vice Chairman and Kojo Botsio as Secretary. Other members of the Central Committee included N.A. Welbeck, Kwesi Plange, Krobo Edusei, Dzenkle Dzewu and Ashie Nikoi.



Dr Nkrumah declared positive action on January 8, 1950 in front of a large CPP crowd at a public meeting in Accra. He travelled to Sekondi, Cape Coast and Takoradi to repeat it.



The colonial government declared a state of emergency which took effect from January 12, 1950 and prohibited the holding of processions, imposed curfews and disconnected public services in certain areas.



Three years imprisonment



Dr Nkrumah was arrested on January 21, 1950, tried for inciting an illegal strike and sedition for an article in the Cape Coast Daily Mail and sentenced to three years imprisonment.



Mr Gbedemah kept the party running and was in constant touch with Dr Nkrumah who was held at the James Fort Prison from where messages were smuggled out on toilet paper to the party headquarters.



Stunning victory



While in prison, Dr Nkrumah led the CPP to achieve a stunning victory in the February 1951 election.



He was freed to form a government, and he led the colony to independence in 1957.



A firm believer in African liberation, Nkrumah pursued a radical pan-African policy, playing a key role in the formation of the Organisation of African Unity in 1963.



At home, he led a massive socio-economic development that saw the springing up of infrastructure across the country.



As time passed, he was accused of being a dictator and also of forming a one-party state in 1964, with himself as President for life, as well as actively promoting a cult of his own personality.



Overthrown by the military in 1966 with the help of Western backing, he spent his last years in exile, dying in Bucharest, Romania, on April 27, 1972. His legacy and dream of a "United States of Africa" still remains a goal among many.







Source: Peacefmonline.com









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The African Union on Tuesday, expressed dismay after Italian Interior Minister and Deputy Premier, Matteo Salvini compared migrants to slaves.



"The African Union Commission expresses dismay at the comments made by the Italian Deputy Prime Minister, Mr. Matteo Salvini, at a recent conference in Vienna at which he likened African immigrants to slaves," the AU said in a statement.



"It is the view of the African Union that name-calling will not resolve the migration challenges facing Africa and Europe".



Salvini had a verbal spat with Luxembourg Foreign Minister Jean Asselborn after reportedly saying "we don't need to have new slaves to replace the children we no longer produce" last week.



"In the interests of constructive engagement on the migration debate between the two continents, the African Union requests the Italian Deputy Prime Minister to retract his derogatory statement about African migrants and further urge Italy to emulate and support other European Union member states, like Spain, which have extended support and protection to migrants in distress, irrespective of their origin and legal status, before their admission status is determined," the AU said.

Source: Reuters









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Mrs Inger Ultredt, the Sweden Ambassador to Ghana says renewable energy is safe, cost-effective and environmentally friendly for developing countries in their power generation.



She encouraged countries to venture into renewable energy technology such as; tidal wave energy production, which she said was originated from Sweden.



Mrs Inger Ultredt made the remark when she paid a days working visit to Ada Foah, in the Greater Accra Region, to ascertain the progress of work on a tidal wave energy production project being undertaken by a Sweden-based company, SEABASE.



Mr Anthony Poku, the Chief Executive Officer of Tcs Energy, the implementers of the tidal wave energy production in Ghana and his team of technocrats conducted the Ambassador and her entourage round the switch gear room, the vessel and crane which deplore tidal wave under the sea for the production of the energy.



He said the implementation of the tidal wave energy would supplement the power supply sector of the country and that all technical planning, drawings, erection of sub-station for the evacuation of power and administrative work had been completed.

Source: GNA









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Audio Attachment: Listen to John Boadu in an interview with Nana Yaw Kesseh

General Secretary of the ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP), John Boadu has appealed to Ghanaians to give the party 40 years in government to transform the country.



Speaking in an interview with Nana Yaw Kesseh sit-in host of Peace FM's 'Kokrokoo' programme Thursday, he stated that the incumbent government is rolling out several socio-economic initiatives to enhance the development of Ghana.



However, the transformation that the NPP anticipates, he noted, cannot be possible if the party doesn't get an extensive period in governance.



He cited that Ghanaians are facing lots of hardships because the citizenry didn't give the mandate to President Nana Akufo-Addo and his government in 2008 after Ex-President John Agyekum Kufour handed over the baton to him to run for elections on the ticket of the NPP.



To him, voting the National Democratic Congress (NDC) into power following the good works and social interventions that the Kufour government laid for Ghanaians was the genesis of the economic challenges confronting Ghanaians.



John Boadu doesn't want Ghanaians to make another mistake and so stressed that the NPP needs "not less than 40 years to run this country to bring this country to a level that well all be happy . . . We should keep focus as a party because were not doing it for ourselves but for posterity. Generations and generations to come will not forgive us if we dont stay in power for a very long time.





Source: Ameyaw Adu Gyamfi/Peacefmonline.com/Ghana









Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority.

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Ghana has been nominated as the host country for the Fifth Edition of the All Africa Music Awards (AFRIMA), slated for November this year.



The four-day event, from November 21 to 24, is aimed at using music to sell Africa to the rest of the world.



Mrs Catherine Abelema Afeku, Minister of Tourism, Arts and Culture said on Tuesday that the countrys nomination was a call to duty, and that, every creative artist in the country, from the east to the west, from the north to the south must show the world that we were up to the task and even more.



She said the narrative of Africa must change and that can be done through Africas music, by using it as a concrete for peace, to send strong signals to the rest of the world that although Africa had challenges they had overcome most of them.



Our young people are talented, gifted, intelligent, and are ambassadors of hope for the next generation. Let us show the world that the first country in sub-Sahara Africa to free itself from mental slavery would use music to tell the story of Africa.



Let Ghana carry the rest of the continent in November to tell the Ghana beyond aid story through music, she said.



She entreated all to be advocates of AFRIMA to tell and share the message to the whole country especially in the rural areas and communities, and expressed appreciation to all who supported to get Ghana to host the AFRIMA for the next three years.



Mr Mike Dada, President of AFRIMA expressed appreciation to the Ministry for the support and collaboration, saying, the unveiling of Ghana as the host country of AFRIMA was not in doubt, as this was done in Ethiopia by the African Union Commission, the body responsible for driving AFRIMA.



He said a letter was officially sent to the Minister on September 6 to this effect communicating the hosting right to the people of Ghana through the ministry.



Mr Dada said fairness, objectivity, creativity, excellence, integrity and transparency, as the core values of AFRIMA, were informed by its clear cut values set to sell the positive side of Africa to the world.



Activities lined up for the four day event include AFRIMA welcome Soiree, on November 21, media interviews, Africa Music Business Summit, and AFRIMA music village on November 22.



A tour of the country would be held on November 23, and the main awards ceremony and a reception on November 24.









Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority.

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Starbucks launches delivery services in Beijing, Shanghai

From:ChinaDaily | 2018-09-20 13:15

Starbucks China launched its delivery services on Wednesday in Beijing and Shanghai before expanding to more than 2,000 stores in 30 cities in the country by the end of this year.

This means more than half of its current Starbucks stores in China will be covered and the coverage will continue to grow in 2019.

The services dubbed "Starbucks Delivers" is the first delivery services offered by Starbucks globally. It will be available through both the Starbucks app and ele.me app. The delivery fee for each order will be nine yuan ($1.31).

Pressured by emerging coffee brands that have offered delivery services such as Luckin Coffee, which has opened 1,100 stores and has free delivery for items priced above 35 yuan or 6 yuan for each order under 35 yuan.

"Delivery is a must-to-do for Starbucks to catch up with its domestic rivals that have already offered such services," said Zhu Danpeng, an independent food and beverage analyst.

How to maintain the same quality between a handcrafted cup of coffee brewed at stores and one delivered to customers sitting in an office or at home is the priority for Starbucks and its delivery collaborator ele.me, which has 3 million registered delivery riders.

Starbucks partnered with Alibaba Group, the parent of ele.me, on August 2 in a bid to extend its reach to consumers' lives through digital and delivery connections.

An intelligent order-and-delivery system will automatically choose the nearest Starbucks location to fulfill an order to ensure timely and efficient delivery.

The two sides have developed a delivery riders specifically for Starbucks deliveries, customized packaging, including the specially designed spill-proof cups for both hot and cold beverages, tamper-proof packaging seals and delivery containers.

Each order will receive a tamper-proof packaging seal to ensure Starbucks strict quality and food safety assurance. Customers can reject an order if the seal is not intact during delivery.

Starbucks will be the first retail brand to establish a "Starbucks Delivery Kitchens" within Hema Fresh, a retail unit of Alibaba Group, as part of its the delivery capabilities complementing its existing and future Starbucks stores. .

Starbucks will test "Starbucks Delivery Kitchens" in selected Hema supermarkets in Shanghai and Hangzhou in October 2018, with plans to expand the presence to other cities over time.
Members of Penticton city council and the business community aboard a bus headed to Kelowna in June for the Grant Thornton Okanagan Business Excellence Awards presentations. All of the local businesses were nominated by the City of Pentictons economic development team.
Thousands of shoes honoring Chinese laborers killed in World War II

From:ChinaDaily | 2018-09-20 10:31

"Don't forget history for peace", a special exhibition focused on the tragic history of Chinese laborers was held at the "Mukden Incident" history museum in Shenyang.

Thousands of pairs of black cloth shoes were placed neatly on the museum square, from the east side of the museum monument to an "S"-shaped walkway at the entrance of the exhibition hall. The display commemorates 6,830 Chinese laborers killed in Japan during World War II. At that time, those forced to go to Japan did not wear shoes. These shoes, denied to the victims, symbolizes their dignity by being neatly placed in the same area today.

This not only honors victims, but also reminds people from China and Japan of history and promotes peace.
Taobao Home Launch Pop Up Store in Malaysia

Do you know that Alibaba Groups Tmall World(), serving over 100 million overseas Chinese users and other buyers from around the world? The good news is they launched the Taobao Home Pop Up Store, an offline interactive consumer showcase of offerings from its home and living categories, at Lot 10 Shopping Centre in Kuala Lumpur today.









The 3-day showcase is part of Tmall Worlds exclusive September home & living promotions from 17  22 September 2018 on Taobao.com, which features an array of exclusive online promotions and offers from popular brands and on a wide range of products.

We went to Lot 10 Shopping Centre to check out this new retail pop up store with our blogger and Instagrammer friends. The cool thing is they have a Taobao Home in front of Lot 10 Shopping Centre.

On top of that, you can also experience the Taobao Home pop-up store, an exclusive offline interactive consumer event featuring a host of exciting home and lifestyle products, showcased for the very first time in Malaysia.

From today till the 22 September 2018, Malaysian shoppers who visit the Taobao Home pop-up concept store at Lot 10 Shopping Centre, will get a taste of Alibabas new retail concept as visitors just need to scan the product QR code through their Taobao or Taobao Lite mobile app to be able to immediately purchase their favorite items on display at the event.









You can check out the pictures we took but it is better for you to check out the Taobao Home retail concept. You can touch, feel and experience the quality of Taobao Home products.

Of course there are perks in visiting Taobao Home pop-up concept store at Lot 10 Shopping Centre. Among the many exclusive promotions available to Malaysians from Tmall Worlds Taobao Home debut until 22 September 2018 include:

Free Shipping: Tmall Signature Store () on Taobao mobile app and website is giving away free shipping for the whole store from 20  22 September.

Waiver of Transaction Fees: Where consumers make their purchase through the Taobao or Taobao Lite mobile app and pay via online banking from 20  22 September, the corresponding transaction fees will be waived (subject to the terms and conditions of the payment partner).

Limited-Time Deals: Consumers can grab top ranking products from just RMB1.10 at 10:00am and 6:00pm daily.

Exclusive Discounts: Consumers can grab up to 50% off vouchers every day, with value up to RMB150.

New Users Exclusive: Exclusively for new users on Tmall World, new users who install the Taobao or Taobao Lite mobile app and register for an account will enjoy a new-user RMB20 voucher. Whats more, new users get to enjoy a waiver of corresponding transaction fees (online banking and credit card transaction fees) via the Taobao or Taobao Lite app for their first purchase.

Lot 10 Shopping Centre is located next to Pavilion Bukit Bintang MRT Station and also the Bukit Bintang Monorail Station so it is very convenient to visit the Taobao Home pop-up store concept.









For more details about Taobao Home or to find out more on the exciting engagements daily, please visit https://world.taobao.com or Taobao Homes promotion page here

Wilson Ng A Father and traveler who enjoys to eat, shop, travel and taking pictures with Samsung S21 Ultra. Im a full time blogger, youtuber and father for two.

I travel around 17 International trips per year. Remember to follow us at www.instagram.com/placesandfoods and www.youtube.com/placesandfoods. For advertisements or features, contact me at [email protected] See author's posts
Scientists think Ultima Thule is a building block of larger objects in the Kuiper Belt, a band of frigid worlds that orbit the Sun beyond Neptune. Objects in the belt serve as time capsules from the dawn of the solar system, when a cloud of dust and gas collapsed to form the Sun, planets, and other small bodies. The temperature on Ultima Thule is expected to be just 40 or 50 degrees above absolute zero, said Alan Stern, the principal investigator of the New Horizons mission.

"It's a big deal because we're going 4 billion years into the past," he said. "Nothing that we've ever explored in the entire history of space exploration has been kept in this kind of deep freeze the way Ultima has."

New Horizons made worldwide headlines when it flew past Pluto in 2015, revealing a complex world with icy mountains and frozen plains. The big reveal of Ultima Thule probably won't garner as much publicity  but that hardly means it's going to be a cakewalk.

"Everything about this flyby is tougher," said Stern.

For the Pluto encounter, the team knew exactly where to aim, thanks to decades of telescopic observations that refined our understanding of its orbit. That won't be the case with Ultima Thule, which was only discovered in 2014 by the Hubble Space Telescope. The New Horizons team must continually track the object using optical navigation cameras, and make the appropriate course corrections.

"The orbit is not very well characterized," said Alice Bowman, the mission operations manager for New Horizons. "That's why we're doing optical navigation measurements, continuously looking to make sure we know the point in space we want to target."

That's a tricky task because Ultima Thule is dark and reddish, and only reflects about as much light as potting soil, Stern said. The object is also set against a particularly crowded region of space that is flush with background stars.
MUKONO  Mukono Municipality MP Betty Nambooze Bakireke has told her Kyadondo East counterpart Robert Kyagulanyi aka Bobi Wine that he faces a bumpy road in his struggle against the current government, warning him that he should not expect much help from Ugandans whom she said are cowards.

In a strongly worded open letter posted on social media site Facebook, Ms Nambooze told Bobi Wine that he will suffer more brutality at the hands of the state and even the Ugandans currently backing him will turn against him.

I have read the Police guidelines issued to regulate your return journey. I know the journey you are headed to, having walked the same path many timesin summary, the Police is saying that Security will kidnap you on arrival and drive you around recklessly, then deposit you home later in the day battered, crestfallen and frustrated, she said.

Our people are weak. Its mostly excitement that drives them, they find happiness sort of in our suffering, the sort of happiness and excitement one gets while watching a horror movie. A few semi-brave characters will cause skirmishes but that is alleventually they will forget and even start insulting you, some will even feel its you who gains from your suffering, she added.

The outspoken legislator alluded to opposition leader Kizza Besigye whom she said has been a victim of police brutality and state-sponsored propaganda.

My brother Bobi, you are headed for the long walk but this is the journey all freedom fighters have walked and must walkthe people abused Mandela, they killed Gandhi, they killed Martin Lutherthe very people who were victims of misrule! The Police will beat or even kill and thereafter these deaths and torture will be blamed on you, not Police not MuseveniBattisa abaana babantu Nga bo olubakwatako bagenda America, they will later accuse you, she said.

Some people with you(hope they are genuine this time) have been accusing Dr.Besigye of doing what you are set to do. They say, he causes havoc in Buganda to improvish Baganda.they tell people that; see his businesses are prospering, he is in the same boat with Museveni,look his wife works for UN,look at his big house,Besigye bought that hotel the other day,that man is funded by bazungu, look at his son Anselm (Solomon Kampala) what type of father is he,..etc, she added.

==========See full statement below=======================================

Dear Bobi,

You maybe airborne by now but I know you will find this note and read it when you land home.

I have read the Police guidelines issued to regulate your return journey. I know the journey you are headed to having walked the same path many timesin summary, the Police is saying that Security will kidnap you on arrival and drive you around recklessly then deposit you home later in the day battered, crestfallen and frustrated.

Our people are weak, it is mostly excitement that drives them, they find happiness sort of in our suffering, the sort of happiness and excitement one gets while watching a horror movie. A few semi~brave characters will cause skirmishes but that is alleventually they will forget and even starting to insult you, some will even feel its you who gains from your sufferingthey can afford even to be influenced by the regime propagandist and abuse youthe same way some of them abuse Besigye,Lukwago and Nambooze

My brother Bobi you are headed for the long walk but this is the journey all freedom fighters have walked and must walkthe people abused Mandela,they killed Gandhi,they killed Martin Lutherthe very people who were victims of misrule! The Police will beat or even kill and thereafter these deaths and torture will be blamed on you, not Police not MuseveniBattisa abaana babantu Nga bo olubakwatako bagenda America, they will later accuse you.

Some people with you(hope they are genuine this time) have been accusing Dr.Besigye of doing what you are set to do. They say, he causes havoc in Buganda to improvish Baganda.they tell people that; see his businesses are prospering, he is in the same boat with Museveni,look his wife works for UN,look at his big house,Besigye bought that hotel the other day,that man is funded by bazungu, look at his son Anselm(Solomon Kampala) what type of father is he,..etc

For violence committed against people by the State while fighting youthey will shift the blame to youyet how can one avoid mayhem by the State security apparatus that does apply violence so that in fear of violence, the people can give up on their rights? Museveni has always used this as a strategy, he believes in it as an ideology, he even wrote his University thesis justifying it. No wonder his mouthpiece Mwenda is now advocating for genocide as a mean of cleansing Uganda.

Bobi, I am not saying this to discourage you, no we must fight on. I liked it when you said that you will rather die trying but not giving up on the struggle for freedom; that was brave of you. I know where you have reached is a point of no return.And there is only two roads for you. Forget that its not you who is great and experiment on taking the masses who support you to a wrong direction like Nasser Ssebagala (God forbid) or remain consistent and battle dictatorship like Besigye despite the risks (I pray that you take this road).

Lastly, Bobi, some propagandists in favour of the regime or comrades who have old scores to settle have opportunistically taken high table positions in your crusadethey are setting you up for a battle with fellow freedom fighters. They are cheering you on and are advising that you create a third forcethey want to ride on your back and divide the forces of change into two warring groups. Yet as you have always said, Uganda is divided into two groups; the Oppressor and the Oppressed.we might not be under the same command but we are definitely pushing in the same direction. Your first test in leadership therefore lies in how efficiently and promptly you will prevail over these anti ~change agents or confused comrades dressed as part of your team.dont be tempted to harvest mischief you will never be able to feed it to its satisfaction.

We shall talk a lot in futurewell come back to Kyadondo, let the struggle be refreshed and energised by your great additionMay God be with you. WE ARE THE CHANGE WE ARE WAITING FOR!

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With only four months left in office, California Governor Jerry Brown is busy commuting the sentences of more than 1,000 people convicted of a variety of crimes, including drug dealing, driving while intoxicated, and forgery.

Among those handed pardons by the outgoing governor are 20 people convicted of murderand serving life sentencesaccording to the Mercury News.

Browns commutations for the 20 murder convicts were tucked into a larger batch of pardons and commutations that he handed out last month.

In addition to his pardons and commutations, the governor has approved parole for more than 2,000 individuals sentenced for murder.

Patricia Wenskunasfounder and chief executive of the Crime Survivors Resource Centertold the newspaper, "The sad reality is, California is not a victim-friendly state. Its an offender-friendly state."
Kathmandu, September 20

The Investment Board Nepal has shortlisted six companies for the feasibility study of proposed Naagdhunga-Dhulikhel metro railway project.

The Board had called for applications from international companies for the feasibility study, detailed project report and preparations for the project around four months ago.

Accordingly, the Board shortlisted two Chinese, one Japanese, one Indian, one Korean and one Turkish companies, according to the Boards spokesperson Uttam Bhakta Wagle. Total 23 companies had filed applications.

The government of Nepal itself will fund the feasibility study.

Meanwhile, the Board claims the 45 kilometre project will be complete in next four years. The project will cost around Rs 180 billion.

The Board plans to construct the project in build-own-operate-transfer (BOOT) model.

Earlier, the National Planning Commission had recommended the government to establish a railway line from Naagdhunga of Kathmandu to Dhulikhel of Kavre. Accordingly, the Board had decided to conduct a feasibility study and prepare a detailed project report.
A disgraced former police officer with the Jersey City (NJ) Police Department has been sentenced to nearly two years in prison for his role in a scheme to receive tens of thousands of dollars in off-duty pay for jobs he and other officers never performed.

Anthony Iannicco is the third former officer implicated in the scheme to receive a prison sentence in the scandal that has resulted in 11 officers pleading guilty to a variety of charges, including the former chief of police.

Iannicco had been facing as many as 57 months behind bars after pleading guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit fraud and accept corrupt payments. His sentence was reduced because prosecutors said his cooperation led to three additional guilty pleas.
Payment of EU funds to Hungary could be delayed - Commission source

A dispute between Hungary and the European Commission about some EU-funded projects may not be settled this year which could delay payments from the EU, a Commission source told Reuters on Wednesday.

The disbursement of EU funds is a sensitive matter and the EU executive never make a habit out of sending messages about it through the press. A Commission source commenting on the matter, though, points out how crucial the situation is.A delay in reimbursements of billions of euros has already increased Hungary's cash-flow budget deficit and a row over payments could worsen relations with the EU that has threatened to impose sanctions on a country it accuses of flouting EU rules on democracy, civil rights and corruption, the news agency said.Article 7 proceedings against Hungary were officially opened yesterday. The EU parliament backed the launch of Article 7 after Dutch MEP Judith Sargentini wrote in a report that Hungary had breached various EU values, citing migrant abuse, restrictions on press freedom, corruption and conflicts of interest as well as "stereotypical attitudes" towards women. The motion, often dubbed the "nuclear option", could see the EU impose sanctions on Hungary and restrict its voting rights.Hungarys Prime Minister Viktor Orban, a self-proclaimed defender of Christian values from unwanted migrants, dismissed what he described as "absurdities" in the report and had his cabinet contest the EP green-light in court.The Commission source said that the Hungarian state was making "considerable advance payments" before recipients have issued bills for the projects.

As far as we know the Hungarian side did not present yet the bills (to the EU) to be reimbursed, and there is an ongoing discussion on irregularities. It may not be settled this year.

There are also questions over whether certain projects will be fully eligible for EU funding, the source added.Hungary is one of the biggest recipients of EU development funds, which have helped boost investments and its economy.The Finance Ministry and the government spokesman did not reply to emailed Reuters questions.According Finance Ministry data, in the first eight months the cash-flow deficit widened to 1.646 trillion forints, exceeding the full-year target of 1.361 trillion in the 2018 budget.By the end of August budget spending related to EU projects totalled HUF 1.388 trillion, while reimbursements were only HUF 183 billion, the Finance Ministry said in a statement earlier this month.While spending linked to EU-funded projects boosts the cash-flow deficit and needs to be financed from debt issuance, it does not affect the deficit calculated based on EU standards.Hungary targets a budget deficit of 2.4% of GDP, below the EU's ceiling of 3%.The Government Debt Management Agency (AKK) told Reuters in June that in the first five months it had already met its net financing issuance target for the full year.It added that in the second half it would need to cover remaining debt expiries and any additional pre-financing of EU projects that boost the net financing need for 2018.The cabinet will need to finance the cash flow deficit running to or over HUF 2 trillion, which means government security issuances. This could further tighten the fixed-income market and lead to a higher-than-expected public debt, and consequently a higher debt-to-GDP ratio than atd the end of 2017.Given that a lot of reimbursements are expected to be made next year, the 2019 cash flow balance could possibly show a massive surplus, which means debt instruments may not have to be issued. Moreover, these could be extracted" from the market, as a result of which public debt could correct back to its original trajectory after a jump this year.As regards the EU funds that will be lost for good, these will persistently push the ESA gap, public debt and the debt-to-GDP ratio higher. Given that the source has not made any indication about the volume of the affected projects, it is impossible to have estimates in this respect.
Findings Lean on Extensive Research, Expert Insight and Global Survey Data From Nearly 700 Talent Acquisition Stakeholders

HANOVER, Maryland, Sept. 20, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Allegis Group, the global leader in talent solutions, has released its "Global Workforce Trends" report, offering a region-by-region breakdown of major economic and demographic trends influencing the supply and demand for talent around the world. Accompanying these trends is expert insight on evolving talent acquisition practices and changing markets for staffing, recruitment process outsourcing (RPO) and managed services provider (MSP) solutions. The Global Workforce Trends report is available for download at https://www.allegisgroup.com/en/insights/workforce-trends.

As part of the report, Allegis Group surveyed nearly 700 talent acquisition stakeholders around the world. Findings from the survey reveal that the changing talent landscape is affecting how organizations acquire the workers they need. Highlights include:

Changing markets are creating talent challenges for 80 percent of employers.

The leading issues affecting the ability to attract and retain talent include the economic environment (55 percent) and demographic shifts (32 percent). Notably, only 10 percent cite political volatility as an issue influencing their ability to attract and retain talent.

IT (37 percent) and engineering (33 percent) lead the list of in-demand skills.

Nearly two-thirds of companies (65 percent) have had to adjust business strategy because they could not secure the right talent in a specific function or geographic area.

More than a quarter of companies (26 percent) are not confident they know the true market value of the skills they seek. The top challenges in understanding that value are job definitions and requirements that vary across different departments (48 percent) and a lack of defined success metrics (42 percent).

"With low unemployment rates, shifting skill demands due to the impact of new technologies and ever-changing socio-economic and political factors, employers must be proactive in addressing talent shortages head-on," said Allegis Group's Director of Labor Market Business Intelligence Ron Hetrick. "Responding effectively to the global talent shortage will require a clear and comprehensive understanding of the global forces at work."

The report highlights several notable trends around the world. For example, demand for talent in the United States continues to be strong, setting record highs this year. Openings have risen approximately 16 percent between 2017 and 2018, and May 2018 marked the first time in U.S. history that the number of jobs exceeded the number of job seekers.

In Europe, the U.K.'s impeding exit from the European Union and high unemployment on the continent are driving talent trends. Brexit remains the most significant factor molding the U.K. labor supply landscape. If Brexit causes an exodus of skilled people and positions, the benefit may go to countries such as Germany, the Nordics and the Netherlands. In France, both high-skill and low-skill industries are expanding, yet the unemployment rate remains elevated. In Spain, the unemployment rate is even higher, and employers seeking skilled talent may experience sourcing difficulties due to shortages in certain fields.

In Asia, Japan's most recent economic data suggests the country needs more workers. In fact, there are indications that the aging of Japan's population is accelerating. Deaths now outnumber births by an average of 1,000 per day. In contrast, India benefits from a large supply of new workers but struggles to develop the skills needed to keep up with the demands associated with evolving technologies. The report provides additional insight into these countries and more across the EMEA and APAC regions.

Tips for Responding to Changing Talent Markets

Based on extensive talent management experience and original research, the Global Workforce Trends report recommends that organizations respond to the talent shortage with an approach that focuses on three critical areas.

First, they must improve visibility into the demand for critical skills and the supply of available talent. Data analytics coupled with new technologies enable employers to bring together data from disparate sources and leverage them to make informed decisions on key topics ranging from compensation, ideal geographies for available skills, timelines and work models best fit for certain roles. The second priority is to boost talent acquisition effectiveness. Flexibility, job requirements, automation and recruiter specialization are all factors in competitive talent acquisition. Finally, companies must protect the talent within their organizations. Two areas of increasing importance for retaining employees, especially among Millennials and Gen Zs, lie in creative career paths and placing a strong emphasis on learning and development.

"In times of talent scarcity, employers will need to take an employee-first approach when searching for tools and developing recruitment and retention strategies," Hetrick added. "This report is intended to guide and inform HR and business leaders as they develop those crucial talent management strategies."

Download your free copy of Allegis Group's Global Workforce Trends report at https://www.allegisgroup.com/en/insights/workforce-trends.

About Allegis Group

As the global leader in talent solutions, we take pride in what we do, connecting great people to great opportunities, helping businesses win and careers soar. Today, with $12.3 billion in revenues and 500+ global locations, Allegis Group and its network of specialized companies provide a full suite of complementary talent solutions that solves nearly every workforce challenge to empower business success while consistently delivering an unsurpassed quality experience. Our companies include Aerotek; TEKsystems; Aston Carter; Allegis Global Solutions; Major, Lindsey & Africa; Allegis Partners; MarketSource; EASi; The Stamford Group; and Getting Hired. Learn more at www.AllegisGroup.com.

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Joseph Rigoli, LEWIS

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Home  Just In  Dahal: My China trip helped two countries expand bilateral ties

Kathmandu, September 20

Ruling Nepal Communist Party Chairman Pushpa Kamal Dahal says his recent visit to China helped Nepal and China expand the bilateral ties between them to the next level.

Dahal returned home concluding his four-day visit to the northern neighbour last night.

Upon arrival at the Tribhuvan International Airport, Dahal said, I have set the objective of expanding the relations between two governments as well as between our party and the Communist Party of China. I am successful in meeting that objective.

Dahal claimed he held discussions with Chinese leaders on implementing various agreements made between the two governments.

In another context, Dahal said some minor voices of dissatisfaction over the constitution should be accepted. They are ornaments of democracy, he said.

Dahal had left for China immediately after concluding a visit to India.
NEW DELHI, September 20, 2018 /PRNewswire/ --

Strategic Collaboration to enhance productivity in Rice

India has 44 mha of Rice which contributes approximately 30% to Agriculture GDP impacting livelihood of millions of farmers. Brown Plant Hopper in Rice impacts the crop productivity substantially and reduces the yield up to 20-30% and sometimes the whole crop can be lost under high pest pressure. Additionally, Brown Plant Hopper develops fast resistance and therefore requires newer solutions to be developed every 2-3 years for sustainable production.

Crystal Crop Protection Limited (Crystal) embarked on a collaborative project with Bayer CropScience Limited (Bayer) which will endeavor to enhance the productivity of Rice by developing a new crop protection solutions for effective control of Brown Plant Hopper.

Crop dynamics and farmer needs in India are very different than those of large scale agriculture dynamics of western countries. The difference is mainly on account of tropical climate with high pest pressure which requires safe, effective and cost-efficient solutions to meet the needs of sustainable crop production. One of the ways to serve these unique needs of Rice farmers is to develop customized products through proximity innovation.

Bayer is a multi-national renowned player in Seeds and Crop protection with over 50 years of history in India and has a strong track record of innovations which have helped the farmers to increase the crop productivity across crops.

Crystal is an R&D based crop protection manufacturing and marketing company with experience in technical manufacturing, formulation and marketing of agrochemical products in India.

Under this collaboration, Bayer will provide Crystal access to newer compound, enabling Crystal, based on their manufacturing and development strength, to bring new proximity solutions to the Indian market and which can be extended to other South Asian countries. This is a unique model to foster proximity innovation which is tailor-made for the specific needs of the Indian farmer.

On the signing of the agreement, Mr. Ankur Aggarwal, Managing Director, Crystal Crop Protection Limited, said: "We are proud to collaborate with Bayer. This is a valuable collaboration as it will provide safe and economical solutions for rice farmers."

Srinath Bala, Head of Marketing, Bayer Crop Science Limited, South Asia, said: "Bayer strongly believes in the power of collaboration and trust. This collaboration is an affirmation of our commitment to work for our farmers and ensure faster and better solutions are made available to them."

About Crystal:

Crystal Crop Protection Ltd is a R&D based crop protection manufacturing and marketing company. The company manufactures crop protection products which include insecticides, fungicides, herbicides and plant growth regulators and bio-stimulants. The company provides crop protection solutions to the Indian farmer to assist them to maximize productivity and profitability. It has integrated operations, from undertaking R&D of new molecules to manufacturing and delivering products to farmers across India through extensive distribution network.

The Company recently enhanced its Technical production capacity by acquiring Plant of Cytec India at Nagpur (2017) with leasehold rights on land area of 40,500 sq.m. For increased commitment on the seeds Business, the company acquired Indian grain sorghum, fodder sorghum and pearl millet seeds business from Syngenta India Limited, Devgen Seeds and Crop Technology Private Limited and Devgen N.V., Belgium.

Disclaimer: "Crystal Crop Protection Limited is proposing, subject to receipt of requisite approvals, market conditions and other considerations, to make an initial public offering of its equity shares and has filed a Draft Red Herring Prospectus ("DRHP") with the Securities and Exchange Board of India ("SEBI"). The DRHP is available on the website of the SEBI at http://www.sebi.gov.in and the respective websites of the Global Book Running Lead Managers at http://www.icicisecurities.com ,http://www.axiscapital.co.in, http://www.hsbc.co.in/1/2/corporate/equitiesglobalinvestmentbanking , http://www.nomuraholdings.com/company/group/asia/india/index.html and Co-Book Running Lead Manager at http://www.smccapitals.com , respectively. Investors should note that investment in equity shares involves a high degree of risk. For details, potential investors should refer to the RHP/Prospectus which may be filed with the Registrar of Companies in future, including the section titled "Risk Factors". Potential investors should not rely on the DRHP filed with the SEBI in making any investment decision."

About Bayer:

Bayer is a global enterprise with core competencies in the Life Science fields of health care and agriculture. Its products and services are designed to benefit people and improve their quality of life. At the same time, the Group aims to create value through innovation, growth and high earning power. Bayer is committed to the principles of sustainable development and to its social and ethical responsibilities as a corporate citizen. In fiscal 2017, the Group employed around 99,800 people and had sales of EUR 35.0 billion. Capital expenditures amounted to EUR 2.4 billion, R&D expenses to EUR 4.5 billion. For more information, go to http://www.bayer.com.

Disclaimer: "Crystal Crop Protection Limited is proposing, subject to receipt of requisite approvals, market conditions and other considerations, to make an initial public offering of its equity shares and has filed a Draft Red Herring Prospectus ("DRHP") with the Securities and Exchange Board of India ("SEBI"). The DRHP is available on the website of the SEBI at http://www.sebi.gov.in and the respective websites of the Global Book Running Lead Managers at http://www.icicisecurities.com, http://www.axiscapital.co.in, http://www.hsbc.co.in/1/2/corporate/equitiesglobalinvestmentbanking, http://www.nomuraholdings.com/company/group/asia/india/index.html and Co-Book Running Lead Manager at http://www.smccapitals.com respectively.

Investors should note that investment in equity shares involves a high degree of risk. For details, potential investors should refer to the RHP/Prospectus which may be filed with the Registrar of Companies, Gujarat situated at Ahmedabad in future, including the section titled "Risk Factors". Potential investors should not rely on the DRHP filed with the SEBI in making any investment decision."

This press release is not an offer for sale within the United States of any securities of Crystal Crop Protection Limited or any rights to purchase such securities. Securities of Crystal Crop Protection Limited may not be offered or sold in the United States absent registration under US securities laws or unless exempt from registration under such laws.

Media Contact:

Shahab Shaikh

[email protected]

+91-9320897525

Concept Public Relations India Limited



SOURCE Crystal Crop Protection Ltd.
"Unlike competing command centers that serve specific objectives, GE's solution is holistic and custom-fitted, covering the entire hospital or health system's operations and targeting multiple tasks based on the facility's needs," said Siddharth Shah, Industry Analyst at Frost & Sullivan. "The GE approach is technology-agnostic, but relies on the data collected by various technologies implemented in the hospital. This makes the command center scalable, and expands its application scope to cover patient access, patient throughput through the length of stay, clinical pathways, clinical imaging, patient discharge, and even telehealth and population health initiatives."

Command centers employ a slew of advanced technologies to ensure optimum workflow efficiency. GE Healthcare Partners, for instance, employs a digital twin of the hospital to simulate patient arrivals, discharges, and other parameters to make predictions. A second component is the 'ongoing discovery service', wherein GE's team members brainstorm with the hospital's team to design and develop frameworks to tackle the next set of challenges. This makes the command center a continuously evolving organic entity, instead of a one-time deployment.

GE's command center information system delivers a range of benefits such as:

Drawing data from various software systems and machines;

Persisting an integrated, real-time data model that fuses data from all sources;

Employing artificial intelligence, including machine learning, natural language processing, and computer vision;

Being independent of any single transactional or source system;

Being as much as possible predictive and/or prescriptive;

Allowing retrospective searches of the information-rich data model for continuous learning and improvement.

"Hospital departments typically work in silos, but GE Healthcare Partners' co-location approach promotes synergies as well as facilitates future technology adoption of tele-ICU, telehealth services, home health services, and population health efforts," noted Shah. "One of the reasons for the success of GE's command center is the company's decision to not disrupt the front-line care team members, but rather empower and support them in their daily duties. The combination of human and artificial intelligence has proved a winning move and positioned the company for further growth."

Each year, Frost & Sullivan bestows this award upon the company that demonstrates excellence in growth and customer value. It recognizes the superiority of the product/service, as well as the overall customer, purchase, ownership, and service experience delivered, which has resulted in the recipient company seeing above-market growth and greater share of wallet. The award lauds the growth, diversification, and sustainability strategies of the company.

Frost & Sullivan Best Practices awards recognize companies in a variety of regional and global markets for demonstrating outstanding achievement and superior performance in areas such as leadership, technological innovation, customer service, and strategic product development. Industry analysts compare market participants and measure performance through in-depth interviews, analysis, and extensive secondary research to identify best practices in the industry.

About GE Healthcare Partners

As the global management consulting arm for GE Healthcare, the GE Healthcare Partners team is dedicated to becoming the leading provider of outcomes-based solutions in healthcare via Performance Partnerships, Command Center Partnerships, and Consulting Solutions--three areas primed to drive transformational change in healthcare organizations.

GE Healthcare Partners creates value for clients by leveraging the power of GE Healthcare to solve the most challenging problems in healthcare through the delivery of client problem-back solutions, long-term strategic partnerships, and advanced analytic capabilities. By connecting with clients to define and prioritize their critical challenges, the Partners team designs the best strategies and activates impactful solutions to create sustainable outcomes to enable them to transform and succeed.

About Frost & Sullivan

Frost & Sullivan, the Growth Partnership Company, works in collaboration with clients to leverage visionary innovation that addresses the global challenges and related growth opportunities that will make or break today's market participants. For more than 50 years, we have been developing growth strategies for the global 1000, emerging businesses, the public sector and the investment community. Contact us: Start the discussion.

Contact:

Samantha Park

P: 210.247.2426

F: 210.348.1003

E: [email protected]

Related Links

http://www.frost.com



SOURCE Frost & Sullivan
Major Nepali and English broadsheet dailies published from Kathmandu on Thursday have highlighted a host of issues from political, sociocultural and economic issues. A number of newspapers have published reports about Nepali political leaders love for foreign visits. All three private newspapersThe Kathmandu Post, The Himalayan Times and Republicahave published Prime Minister KP Sharma Olis statement made during his Constitution Day address that Nepal cannot be made a guinea pig to experiment rights movements on their front pages. Nepali broadsheets, however, have largely ignored the statement. Likewise, the boycott of Constitution Day celebrations by Madhesh-centric parties has also been featured on front pages of the newspapers.

Following up on the rape and murder of Nirmala Pant in Bhimdutta Nagar of Kanchanpur, some newspapers have published reports about increasing rape cases across the country.

Important

Province 2 govt boycotts Constitution Day

While the federal government and six other provincial governments celebrated the Constitution Day with much fanfare, the Province 2 government boycotted marking it, according to newspaper reports.

Nagarik reports in its lead story that only staff celebrated the Day in Province 2 capital Janakpur, as Chief Minister Lalbabu Raut chose to boycott the event. On the other hand, the report also carries a photograph of provincial minister Jitendra Sonal taking part in the event organised to protest the constitution.

Leaders just love foreign visits

Rajdhani, Annapurna Post and Nagarik report that more political leaders have been engaged in a number of foreign visits of late. Currently, nine teams of leaders representing ruling and opposition parties are abroad whereas three other teams are at the last stage of preparations. Two other teams have just returned home, according to the Annapurna Post report.

Just yesterday, Vice-President Nanda Bahadur Pun left for China whereas Nepal Communist Party senior leader Madhav Kumar Nepal took a flight to Ghana.

30 per cent increase in rape cases

Nepal Samacharpatra and Naya Patrika report on their front pages that criminal cases, rape and murder in particular, are increasing every day.

Whereas the increase was around 10 per cent every year in past seven years, the latest increase is about 30 per cent, according to Nepal Samacharpatra. Meanwhile, Naya Patrika reports that two murders and three rapes are reported to police everyday on average.

Ignored

Congress accuses govt of weakening federalism

The main opposition party Nepali Congress has accused the incumbent government of weakening federalism and federal structures, reports Rajdhani in a two column story.

During a press conference in Kathmandu yesterday, the partys Vice-President Bimalendra Nidhi said failure to name provinces except two and apparent differences surfaced between federal and provincial governments were some of the indications of the governments failure to strengthen federalism.

Indian company fails to collect funds for Upper Karnali

Indian company GMR, which was assigned to construct 900 megawatt Upper Karnali Hydropower Project, has failed to meet the second deadline to collect funds for the project, reports Karobar in a two column story.

Meanwhile, the company has filed an application at the Investment Board Nepal seeking another extension. The Boards Chief Executive Officer Maha Prasad Adhikari says the Board will take an appropriate decision soon.

Nepal Police losing public trust

Naya Patrikas lead story for the day claims that Nepal Police is gradually losing public trust in the wake of rising criminal incidents. Even Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli and Home Minister Ram Bahadur Thapa have also expressed doubts over police capacity to handle criminal cases whereas Inspector General Sarbendra Khanal has also conceded weaknesses, according to the report.

Interesting

Nawalparasi teenage girls being trained in self defence

In the wake of incidents of violence against women and children, non-government activists have launched a self defence training programme for teenage girls in Nawalparasi district, according to Kantipur anchor story.

During the training, the girls are trained to make people aware about violence against women and counter attempts of attack against them, among others.
Home  Just In  Nepal and China are connected inseparably, says VP Pun

Kathmandu, September 20

Nepals Vice-President Nanda Bahadur Pun says Nepal and China are connected so strongly that they can never be separated again.

Addressing the inaugural ceremony of an international fair in Chengdu of China on Thursday, Pun said histories, traditions and norms and values of Nepal and China were connected closely for ages.

Chinese Vice Premier Hu Chunhua and Communist Party of Chinas Sichuan Province Secretary Peng Qinghua among others addressed the function.

Pun also addressed the ninth West China International Cooperation Forum today.

On the occasion, he said Nepal was committed to One China Policy, and stated that Nepal would not let anti-China activities happen in the country.

Vice-President Pun is in China since Wednesday.
Foreign exchange market

Bitcoin Prospects From Investors' Standpoint

The latest events taking place in the international market of cryptocurrencies seem to be making international traders and investors doubt the future behavior of digital currencies. With that being said, they are trying to be cautious about their predictions related to cryptocurrencies. For instance, in his recent interview to Bloomberg, the Commercial Director of BitPay Inc shared his own opinion on the likelihood of Bitcoin restoring some of the lost ground in the near future. Among other questions, he underlined that it's difficult to give a clear answer to the the question of whether the cryptocurrency market has reached the bottom and is now getting ready to go up in value. According to him, today's market is really sensitive about various rumors related to cryptocurrencies to some extent. Taking into account those hints and rumors, some investors decide to abandon investing in cryptocurrencies because of the relatively high risk and uncertainty. However, the expert thinks, next year we are going to witness a range of events that will change the situation in the market of digital currencies. To be more specific, Goldman Sachs is expected to allow crypto-trading, Fidelity is expected to launch a new BTC derivative, and Square is expected to start accepting payments in cryptocurrencies. On top of that, Blackrock is expected to launch its Bitcoin ETF. So, the expert assumes that after all of these events, the BTC exchange rate will likely start growing once again. You are free to discuss this article here: forum for traders and investors 



Got a question?  Ask it here

VWAP Indicator. Usage Peculiarities. In order to get a competitive edge over others and simplify the process of reaching the trading goals, many traders take advantage of a number of helper tools like trading strategies and indicators. Today, we are going to take a closer look at the indicator named Value-Weighted Average Price (VWAP). What are the benefits of using it and why do they recommend using it? Read more 

Forex Consolidation. EUR/USD and GBP/USD The stock market has been ambitious in its attempt to eliminate September's retracement and take the "blue wave" into account but the forex market has been more conservative recently in terms of restoring risky bets. However, when it comes to the stock market, each and every scenario out there eventually boils down to the smart money, which cannot but affect the international currency market. Still, there are many questions to be answered yet, which makes it really difficult to make more or less clear predictions. Read more 

Tape Patterns Indicator Traders often use various kinds of technical indicators these days. The list can be rather long, from popular ones like RIS, MACD etc. to less popular ones like Tape Patterns. Read more 

Bitcoin's Getting Ready For a Strong Rally While Bitcoin could have been more volatile over the recent weeks, the king of cryptocurrencies stoped in the range between 10K and 11K dollars per coin. Do BTC miners know in which way the coin is going in the near future? Read more 

Bloomberg: Crypto Is Better Than Gold In 2020 According to the recent Bloomberg report, cryptocurrencies are way better than gold in terms of investments in 2020. Which is interesting, most cryptocurrencies have been growing much faster than gold this year. It's not a secret that gold is considered a safe-haven asset amid crises. Bloomberg Galaxy Crypto Index (BGCI) has gained 66% this year,while gold has gained only 20% over the same period. Read more 

Gold Prices Drop Below $1860/oz, Seeing A Major Downtrend On Thursday morning, the spot price of gold dropped roughly down to $1850/oz withing the scope of a strong downtrend started earlier this week, with a strong gap from the consolidation level. The key factors contributing to the price drop was the sudden strengthening of the U.S. Dollar. Read more 

Texas Authorities Spot New Crypto Scams The TSSB, which is the financial regulator of Texas, is reported to have revealed a couple of potential scams in the international market of cryptocurrencies. These are named Forex Birds and PEK Universe. From now on, both of these projects cannot work in Texas anymore. These projects were banned on September, 3rd. Read more 

Cryptocurrencies On Sale: ChainLink and TRON Go Down, Bitcoin Is Stable Wednesday's session is bringing a retracement in the market of digital assets, which is affecting the entire crypto market cap. Chainlink (LINK), TRON (TRX), and Tezos (XTZ) have been the biggest losers over the last 24 hours. They lost 9,7%, 8,7%, and 5,5% respectively. Bitcoins remains stable and one of the very few tokens among the top 20 that are still showing some gains, though modest ones. Read more 

What's Next For Bitcoin? Some analysts argue the future of Bitcoin, also known as the digital gold. Last week, the Winkelvoss brothers stated that the BTC price may skyrocket all the way up to 500.000 dollars per coin in the near future. This opinion is shared by Bloomberg analysts. But on the other hand, Bitcoin may see the opposite scenario, which is a major crash to make it as cheap as dirt. Read more 
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Moscow court extends detention of alleged gang leader Pichugin

 RAPSI

15:59 20/09/2018

MOSCOW, September 20 (RAPSI)  The Moscow City Court has upheld extension of detention for an alleged criminal group leader Yury Pichugin, the press-service of the court has told RAPSI.

The defendant is to stay in detention until November 18. Pichugin is charged with unlawful trafficking of weapons and ammunition as well as organizing a criminal group.

In February 2017, Russias Investigative Committee reported that it managed to disrupt activity of an organized criminal group operating in the Komi Republic.

According to investigators, in 1994, Pichugin organized a gang, which included athletes, former law enforcement officers and military servicemen. The crime syndicate was involved in racket, large scale embezzlement, robbery, real estate fraud and other crimes, including management of funds transferred to and from prison inmates.
Russian ombudsman stands against prison terms for unintentional reposts

 RAPSI

12:48 20/09/2018

MOSCOW, September 20 (RAPSI) - Russian Human Rights Commissioner Tatiana Moskalkova believes that criminal sentence including imprisonment is disproportionately tough punishment for unintentional likesand reposts on social media, a statement published on the ombudsmans website reads.

Legally speaking, malice is to be proven in such cases, Moskalkova said. The posted information itself may be injurious for the society, state or certain persons. However, if users did not realize that they made repost of an injurious fake, they are innocent because of criminal intent absence, which is not the case for an author of the publication, who willfully purported to drive a wedge or panic in the society, according to the statement.

People transferring information are not always able to entirely assess its level of public danger and conceivable detrimental effects of its distribution, Moskalkova stated. Therefore, the ombudsman backed an initiative to decriminalize the Criminal Codes articles stipulating punishment for reposts and likes on social media.

Moreover, on Thursday, the Supreme Court of Russia in its Plenum resolution explained that courts considering extremism cases should proceed from a level of public danger and hazard mode.

The Criminal Code of Russia attracts a criminal sentence for incitement of enmity but not for reposts on social networks. If a publication is extremist, malice of the repost must be proven, the Supreme Courts Judge Vladimir Davydov said during the Plenums session.
Russian Justice Ministry wants to oblige convicts released on parole to pay expenses

 RIA Novosti

16:03 20/09/2018

MOSCOW, September 20 (RAPSI)  Russias Justice Ministry is preparing a bill making reimbursement of court costs and expenses a mandatory requirement during release of convicts on parole, according to the federal website of draft laws and regulations.

Thus, amendments to the Criminal Code envisage obligatory payment of expenses in criminal cases by convicts, who received suspended sentence or would be granted parole, including fees for services of attorneys appointed by court or investigators.

Failure to comply with the requirements may result for convicts in withdrawal by court of suspended sentence, extension of probation, parole denial or refusal to mitigate unserved sentence.

Moreover, the initiative calls for amendments to the Criminal Procedure Code. The bill would enshrine in the law courts duty to recover costs including appointed attorneys fees in criminal proceedings. Under these circumstances, attorneys are to be assigned with the use of an automated information system eliminating the influence of investigators and courts on dividing dock brief duties among attorneys.
Early on September 19, 2018, Travis County District Court issued an arrest warrant for Cody Wilson stating they have good reason to believe Wilson committed second-degree felony sexual assault of a minor. If the public face of 3D printed guns is convicted, he faces up to 20 years in prison. Read the original documents in the link below.

Appearing in dozens of interviews about the 3D printing of guns with news agencies all over the globe Wilson is no stranger to the media. RECOIL interviewed Wilson several times, first in 2016 when he released his book Come and Take It and twice more in 2018 when Adam Kraut spoke with him about the settlement agreement allowing 3D printed gun files to be shared, as well as just days later when a judge issued an order suspending the settlement.

Wilson's company raised more than $340,000 in donations to fight legislation that prevents the sharing of 3D printed gun files.

What Is the Warrant For?

RECOIL obtained two documents detailing the alleged actions of the founder of Defense Distributed, the first of which is the actual warrant for Wilson's arrest. While much of the information in this particular document is in the Affidavit for Arrest Warrant we linked above (and that we'll dive into later) the warrant is the document that actually directs all Texas peace officers to place Wilson under arrest should they come in contact with him.

Wilson is being charged with Sexual Assault under Texas Penal Code section 22.011 (a)(2)(A).

The warrant also directs the officer who makes the arrest to collect a very specific piece of evidence, photographs of the inside of the suspect's upper legs aka his groin area where Wilson is alleged to have a uniquely identifiable skin condition. The document also states bond would be set at $150,000, and he would be required to not only wear a GPS but that he also surrender his passport and have no contact with the victim identified by the initials CW.

The Arrest Affidavit Summarized

The second document we obtained is a probable cause affidavit for an arrest warrant filed in the Travis County Circuit Court.

The affidavit was prepared by Austin Police Detective Shaun Donovan, a member of the Austin Police Department's Human Trafficking/Vice Unit whose duties include investigations involving child pornography, online solicitation of a minor, child sexual assault, and child sexual exploitation as well as the Internet Crimes Against Children (ICAC) task force for the Austin, Travis County, Texas area.

Per the affidavit, the female juvenile stated she created an online profile using the website SugarDaddyMeet.com. According to the document, Wilson first met the female juvenile through SugarDaddyMeet.com. After Wilson told the female he was a big deal, she then looked him up online and learned he was in recent news articles. After knowing who Cody Wilson was, the female continued to engage in text messages and the pair exchanged nude photos.

The pair arranged to meet in person for the first time on August 15, 2018. The affidavit continues to lay out events that took place on August 15th which led to Wilson allegedly paying the female 500 dollars after allegedly engaging in sexual intercourse and oral sex.

According to the affidavit, after Wilson and the female left the hotel, Wilson drove her to a Whataburger fast-food restaurant where they sat in the car for approximately eight minutes before the female juvenile exited the passenger side of the car and walked to a parked car.

The document states Cody Wilson used the username Sanjuro, a possible reference to either League of Legends or the Japanese term for bodyguard or bouncer. The profile on SugarDaddyMeet.com has been removed from the site.

Download the document yourself HERE for all of the details surrounding the warrant for Cody Wilson's arrest.

Austin Police Press Conference

Austin Police Department held a press conference at approximately 3 PM CST where Austin Police Commander Troy Officer recounted the details of the Cody arrest affidavit for the press.

Commander Officer stated Wilson is not currently in custody his last known location was Taipei, Taiwan. Austin Police department was not able to interview Wilson before the warrant was issued as he'd already left the country.

Commander Officer stated the female is 16 years of age and lives in Central Texas. Officer also stated police were notified by the female juvenile's counselor due to a legal requirement that the counselor notifies the police in cases of sexual assault. When the police interviewed with the female juvenile, she cooperated with law enforcement.

The case was originally assigned to the Austin PD Child Abuse Unit but was transferred to the Human Trafficking Unit after the investigation indicated the case had potential human trafficking elements. This despite the police having no reason to believe anyone other than the female juvenile signed herself up for the website.

Commander Officer was asked if the female juvenile lied about her age to join the dating site, would that potentially lessen Wilson's charges? Since the statute states that anyone under the age of 17 is considered a child, it is not required that the suspect knows the minor is underage to constitute a crime in the state of Texas. While it has no bearing to the severity of the charges, the detectives stated that after interviewing the female juvenile their opinion was that if someone mistakes her age, it would be because they think she is younger, not older than the 16 years old that she is, according to Commander Officer.

The International Manhunt For Cody Wilson

Expanding more on the fact that Wilson's last known location in Taiwan, Commander Officer stated in the press conference before [Wilson] left, he was informed by a friend of the female juvenile that [the victim] had spoken to police and police were investigating him for having sex with a minor. At the time of the APD press conference, Wilson had missed a return flight to the United States.

Currently, Taiwan does not have an extradition treaty in place with the US according to the U.S. Department of State website so there is a possibility that he might evade capture for the time being.

Since the warrant was filed today, there has been no statement from Wilson that he intends to return to the United States to surrender himself to law enforcement.

The Future Of Defense Distributed

We reached out to Defense Distributed have not received a response at the time of publication. The fate of the company is unknown, and there is no indication of what will happen to the hundreds of thousands in donations that Defense Distributed gathered to fuel the legal fight against anti-3D firearm printing legislation.

According to the tax details on the Texas Comptroller website, the company has two named individuals, Cody Wilson and Zak Kubin, who both hold the title of Director at Defense Distributed.

Thanks to S.B., Jeff, and T.S. for their assistance with this story.
Vijaya Bank assured employees that the service conditions will remain unaffected and staff benefits retained

Illustration: Uttam Ghosh/Rediff.com

In an effort to soothe nervousness among employees, the managements of Bank of Baroda, Vijaya Bank and Dena Bank have assured that service conditions wont be compromised after the merger.

In addition, all three public sector banks said business continues to remain as usual.

In the current state, where the banking industry is fragmented with 21 public sector banks having limited differentiation, sub-optimal scale of operations and unhealthy competition for similar business, consolidation is inevitable, Bank of Barodas top management, including managing director and chief executive officer P S Jayakumar, wrote to employees.

We would also like to state that Barodians should not have any apprehension on the amalgamation, as service conditions will remain unaffected.

"The combined entity will offer more and diverse opportunities to employees since it will have a broader geographic footprint to operate in, the letter read.

The amalgamation will increase Bank of Barodas reach in the south and Maharashtra, apart from cementing its leadership position in Gujarat.

Each of the banks has its own strength and niche relationships that can be pooled in. We will leverage upon the same to build a stronger bank, the Bank of Baroda management wrote.

Similarly, Vijaya Bank, including MD and CEO R A Sankara Narayanan, assured employees that the service conditions will remain unaffected and staff benefits retained.

The amalgamation will create a gigantic entity with global presence, Vijaya Bank wrote, adding, With increase in business volumes and branch network, there is good scope for career progression.

The Centre plans to merge the three banks to create the countrys third largest bank, after State Bank of India and HDFC Bank.

Dena Bank, headed by executive director Ramesh Singh, wrote that employees need not worry about their employment in future.

The amalgamation will provide benefits in information technology, especially in digital banking services to Dena Bank customers, it wrote.

Last week, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley and Financial Services Secretary Rajiv Kumar held a surprise press conference to announce that the government would want to merge these three banks.

Among the three, Dena Bank is a laggard. It is under the PCA framework and has net non-performing asset (NPA) ratio of 11.04 per cent. High bad debts have eroded the capital base of the bank, with the core equity ratio (CET1) at 8.15 per cent of the risk-weighted assets.

Vijaya Bank is one of the best performers among public sector banks, having net NPA ratio of 4.10 per cent, and a CET1 of 10.35 per cent.

BoB, the biggest of the three, has a steady profile, net NPA ratio at 5.40 per cent, and CET1 at 9.27 per cent.

The combined entity will have net NPA ratio of 5.71 per cent, and CET1 of 9.32 per cent.
The RBI has cited corporate governance and regulatory issues for not extending Kapoors term. Further, the lender has been directed to search for a successor.

YES Bank managing director (MD) and chief executive officer (CEO) Rana Kapoor will have to step down from his position early next year.

The private sector lender said on Wednesday that the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) had allowed Kapoor to continue only till January 31.

The board of directors of the bank is scheduled to meet on September 25 to decide on the course of action, YES Bank said in a filing to the stock exchanges.

According to sources, the RBI has cited corporate governance and regulatory issues for not extending Kapoors term. Further, the lender has been directed to search for a successor.

Uncertainty over Kapoors continuance as MD and CEO for three more years emerged at the end of August 2018, when the RBI postponed its decision on YES Banks proposal to grant him the extension.

On August 30, the RBI allowed him to continue till further notice.

In June, YES Banks shareholders had cleared the reappointment of Kapoor for three years.

This was then sent to the RBI for final approval. Experts said the RBIs latest move might not put an end to the uncertainty, and investors would take time to regain confidence in the bank.

Sandeep Parekh, founder, Finsec Law Advisor, said it was quite a disruptive move for the lender as there was no succession plan in place.

Finding a successor in four months is not sufficient. This will impact not only investor confidence but also the whole governance at the bank, he added.

Some others said they would like to know the reasons for the RBI decision.

I like that we have a muscular regulator. It will be good to have clarity on the RBIs thinking on the CEO and banks performance.

"I expect that investors will remain tentative towards the bank till there is clarity on the successor, said Amit Tandon, founder and MD, Institutional Investor Advisory Services.

Earlier this year, the RBI had denied a three-year extension to Axis Bank CEO Shikha Sharma, despite the board endorsing her reappointment.

Kapoor, along with Ashok Kapur, who died in 2008, was part of the founding team of YES Bank.

As a promoter, Kapoor and his family own a 10.66 per cent stake in the bank. He has been the bank's CEO since 2004.

The banking sector has seen increased regulatory scrutiny over the last two years as the RBI has tried to push for appropriate recognition of bad loans.

The asset quality review initiated in December 2015 resulted in an increase in bad loans over Rs 6 trillion across banks, including YES Bank.

Banks were asked to disclose divergences in bad loan reporting.

As a result, the RBI judged gross NPAs at Rs 83.73 billion for YES Bank for 2016-17 against declared gross NPAs at Rs 2,018 crore.

Thus, there was a divergence of Rs 63.55 billion, or three times the reported amount.

Ashvin Parekh, managing partner at Ashvin Parekh Advisory Services LLP, said systemic stability (asset quality) and depositors interest were paramount for the regulator while taking a call on top managers of any bank.

This case is no different, he added.

It would be crucial to see whether he would be allowed to become non-executive chairman, an analyst said.

Photograph: PTI Photo
Delhi brokers under SEBI's glare for drawing investors through ads promising unrealistic returns.

Shrimi Choudhary reports.

Illustration: Uttam Ghosh/ Rediff.com

The Securities and Exchange Board of India has started cracking down on a fraud scheme promising unreasonable returns from the stock market in a short span of time.

The move comes after dozens of investors complained to the regulator at its New Delhi office against a scheme promising high returns.

Calling it a business offer, scrupulous entities lured investors through advertisements in local and national dailies in New Delhi.

'Invest Rs 12 lakh, earn Rs 3 lakh weekly approximately,' the ad claimed.

'Open online trading account and deposit money in your own name with any NSE discount broker', the ad further said.

Sources say Sebi has begun to round up brokers who are suspected to be facilitating such trades in the market.

The market regulator has also shared this information with the economic offence wing of the Delhi police.

"The regulator has approached the Delhi police following the complaint against unknown entities. More information is being collected and action will accordingly be taken," said a person privy to the development.

The advertisement claimed that the scheme has 481 clients on board.

WHAT THE SCHEME PROMISED Invest Rs 1,200,000, earn Rs 300,000 weekly

Invest Rs 500,000, earn returns of 12% monthly

Invest Rs 1 million, earn returns of 15% monthly WHAT CLIENTS HAVE TO DO Open Online-trading account

Share log-in ID and password

Operators will trade on behalf of clients

The scheme also promised 12 per cent monthly return on an investment of Rs 500,000 and 15 per cent monthly return on investment of Rs 1 million.

Under the plan, a client has to open online trading account and share the login and password with this operator.

The ad mentions the name, address and the WhatsApp details to start the business.

"Unsolicited advice is rampant on television shows, print media and social media. These exploit the basic human greed. Sebi has already initiated action against crimes, which are similar in nature. Supply has to be stopped; demand will automatically go away," said Prithvi Haldea, founder, Prime Database.

The brokers association says it has received several such complaints and are constantly warning their members about such schemes and companies.

"None of these so-called acclaimed brokers/intermediaries are registered with Sebi. However, we keep encouraging our members to report such instances to the regulator. We observe that several such schemes are being operated by various small and unknown entities, and their network is spread across the country," said Rajesh Baheti, president, Association of National Members of India.

However, some of these entities are registered under the Companies Act, but in most of the cases, they do not have any approval from any authority.

Sources say for such operators have widespread network and it is difficult for authorities to trace them. The police's economic offence wing is mostly relying on depositor legislation formed by various states which deals with both civil and criminal remedies.

In recent years, a number of such schemes have been busted by the authorities. Some of them include Singapore based-Speak Asia, City Limousine and PACL.
Under the fare policy announced, domestic passengers opting for lowest fares will not be served complimentary meals

Economy class passengers whose fares are the lowest will no longer get free meals on Jet Airways domestic flights.

This will come into effect for tickets purchased from September 25 and for travel on or after September 28.

Vistara introduced a buy-on-board option for economy class passengers last month in order to compete with no frill brands.

Jet Airways is following suit. Under the fare policy announced on Wednesday, domestic passengers opting for lowest fares will not be served complimentary meals.

Free meals will be available to economy class passengers on international flights, irrespective of ticket price.

The Mumbai-headquartered airline is working on cost-saving and revenue maximisation initiatives after Rs 2300 crore losses in two preceding quarters. The buy-on-board option is one such step.

Another possible step could be restrictions on lounge access for its loyalty plan members.

Jet was toying with the idea of discontinuing free liquor service on its Gulf sector flights but its spokesperson denied any such move.

Jet said the revised fare offer would allow its customers more value for money by letting them choose a travel plan based on their preference, travel requirements and budget.

Service philosophies and models are being reviewed and remodelled by global airlines virtually every day.

"As India's premier international airline, we are receptive to these changes and endeavour to align our service framework to embrace such needs of various segments of customers, said Raj Sivakumar, senior vice president (worldwide sales).

Photograph: Amit Dave/Reuters
West Bengal signed an MoU with the Centre for jointly implementing Ayushman Bharat but so far officials have received no word about how it will be done and the deadline is almost here.



The concluding part of the series analyses the ground realities in West Bengal ahead of the mega health scheme launch on September 25.

Part 1: Why Gujarat is better prepared to launch Ayushman Bharat



Part 2: Where the health of Ayushman Bharat is in a shambles



Part 3: Can Chhattisgarh maintain its lead?



The practical problems in implementing Swasthyasathi scheme give a clue to the problems Ayushman Bharat might face.

At 3.30 pm at Howrah General Hospital, an elderly woman is the lone applicant for Swasthyasathi, the mass health insurance scheme of the West Bengal government.

Most days, only four to five people turn up to apply. But thats not a concern for officials. The scheme at Howrah has already met 95 per cent of its target.

The latest enrolment drive is purely to mop up people, like the woman who turned up that day, who have slipped through the net.

Rather, the concern of Swasthyasathi officials these days is that, with the Centre declaring September 25 as the roll out date for the national health insurance scheme, Ayushman Bharat, how will joint implementation work?

West Bengal signed an MoU with the Centre for jointly implementing Ayushman Bharat but so far officials have received no word about how it will be done and the deadline is almost here.

The fact of West Bengal agreeing to a joint implementation was a milestone in itself.

In general, it has taken a dim view of central schemes.

For example, it refused to participate in the Smart Cities project because it has already developed satellite cities.

But it agreed to collaborate on Ayushman Bharat owing to soaring health expenses.

West Bengal provides free treatment at all government hospitals.

The budget for this increased by about 190 per cent between 2011-12 and 2017-18 to about Rs 857 crore.

In December 2016, the state launched Swasthyasathi, the paperless, cashless scheme, smart card-enabled scheme that provides insurance cover up to Rs 150,000 and up to Rs 500,000 in assurance mode (ie, the claims are paid by the government and not an insurance company).

With no cap on family size, parents of both spouses are eligible under the scheme.

It covers all pre-existing diseases and is available for any person remotely associated with the government. From February 1, 2017, till July 31, 2018, about 47 lakh families have been covered.

Till the end of July 2018, about Rs 258 crore has been paid out as Swasthyasathi insurance claims, with private hospitals accounting for the major part.

However, the number of assurance claims (where the state pays for expenses above Rs 150,000 to Rs 500,000) is fewer with only about 148 cases at a cost of Rs 86 lakh.

Therefore, it makes sense for West Bengal to join hands with the Centre on Ayushman Bharat as it will mean being able to provide insurance cover up to Rs 500,000, covering a large number of families, and, most importantly, sharing the premium burden.

At Barasat District Hospital in North 24 Parganas, Papiya Barui, who is having her daughter treated, has heard neither the name Swasthyasathi nor Ayushman.

After spending a night outside, under an asbestos sheet, she is hoping her daughter will recover from acute fever.

Hundreds of other patients wait under the shade as the humidity crosses 90 per cent.

Inside, the superintendent doctor, who just finished the afternoon round, has hardly had time for lunch.

The hospital sees around 10,000 patients per day, all receiving free treatment.

In contrast to the crowded corridors, the Swasthyasathi cell in the hospital has only about five attendants.

Like Howrah, the district has achieved more than 95 per cent enrollment

However, none of the staff has any inkling about the implementation plan for Ayushman Bharat.

Jhuma Roy, an officer in charge of Swasthyasathi, has heard about Ayushman only on Facebook.

But she is aware of the hiccups in the implementation of Swasthyasathi that could serve as a case study for Ayushman Bharat.

Sometimes the insurance companies take a lot of time in claim settlement, and we are forced to unblock patients from Swasthyasathi. In that case, the hospital pays for the entire treatment, said Roy.

This happens because insurance companies can take up to a week to settle claims.

Problems arise when the district hospitals refer patients to bigger hospitals but are unable to provide discharge certificates as they dont get the claims settled in time.

Without discharge certificates, patients cannot move to bigger hospitals.

In that case, government hospitals are forced to unblock the patients from Swasthyasathi, making them liable to bear the entire cost.

Implementing a health insurance scheme at a mass level also comes with the challenge of right pricing of the premium, which has to be borne by the government.

Till last year, only public sector general insurance firms were allowed to participate in the Swasthyasathi bidding process.

This year, two private insurers, IIFCO Tokio and Bajaj Allianz, have been partnered by the government because the public sector firms found the pricing unviable.

This year, in some districts, the premium has fallen as low as Rs 500 per family, against last years range of Rs 2,000-2,200.

Last year, while claims were around Rs 150 crore, out of a premium collection of about Rs 700 crore, insurance companies were allowed to retain close to Rs 120-130 crore as fees.

The rest had to be returned to the government as per the terms of the agreement.

However, if claims exceed the premium in any year, the government does not need to compensate the insurance company.

Claims in any government scheme start coming after one or two years of inception, when the scheme becomes popular. This year, we found the pricing unviable, said a public sector insurance firm official.

In short, its only when claims start increasing (in about two to three years) that the long term economic viability of Swasthyasathi will be tested. Its clear that an alliance with Ayushman Bharat will help boost its prospects.

Photograph: Babu/Reuters
'The frequency of vikas being used in speeches and slogans has reduced noticeably.

Why is the 'BJP's Chanakya' so aggressive and combative?' asks Utkarsh Mishra.

IMAGE: Bharatiya Janata Party President Amit Anilchandra Shah addresses the 'Enlightened Citizens Conference' in Jaipur. Photograph: PTI Photo

In George Orwell's classic Animal Farm, whenever discontent was sensed among the animals against the antagonist hog Napoleon, Squealer, Napoleon's spokesperson, would warn them that their disloyalty may result in the return of Mr Jones, the previous owner of the farm who was ousted by animal 'rebellion'.

Animals always found this argument unanswerable. Napoleon could be bad, but no one wanted Jones back for sure.

Do I want to draw any analogy by beginning the column with this reference? Of course not! Who would face the wrath of Napoleon's growling dogs by daring to draw such condescending parallels?

Instead, I intend to talk about Bharatiya Janata Party chief Amit Anilchandra Shah's addresses at the party's national executive, and later at a gathering of partymen in Jaipur, this month.

On both occasions, I found the saffron party's 'Chanakya' unusually combative and aggressive.

After the euphoria of May 2014, few would have imagined that five years later, the election campaign of the party promising 'Acchhe Din' will take such a turn.

In both these addresses by Shah, there was no mention of measures once touted as 'mega reforms' -- demonetisation, goods and services tax, etc.

The major portion of his speeches was dedicated to drive home the point that a leaderless 'grand alliance' of opposition parties is no match to the 'strong leadership' provided by Prime Minister Narendra Damodardas Modi and even the coming together of arch-rivals would not make a dent in the BJP vote bank.

Party workers were told to ask people whether they want Rahul Gandhi as prime minister, apparently in order to make them realise what lies ahead if they are contemplating a change.

Shah also tried to allay the apprehensions of party workers by stressing on the fact that the BJP was invincible. To do that, he resorted to an insensitive example, telling workers that the party could not be defeated even during the post-Dadri lynching uproar.

'Urban Naxals', 'infiltrators' set to be deported post completion of the NRC exercise in Assam and surgical strikes also found mention in Shah's address, telling the people who is the 'enemy' they should be wary of and who alone can deal with them.

The Congress and other Opposition parties were said to be defending and supporting those 'who want to assassinate a PM who is working for making India', clearly an attempt to establish that it is not a party they will be voting for, but national pride and honour.

Modi's slogan 'Ajeya Bharat, Atal BJP' is also an effort in the same direction, besides exploiting the name of the late Atal Bihari Vajpayee.

'India has won', he had declared after the 2014 mandate. With 'Ajey Bharat' or 'Invincible India' he again wants to indicate that 'India's victory' lies in 'Atal BJP' or a 'robust BJP'.

Surprisingly, the frequency of 'vikas' being used in speeches and slogans has reduced noticeably.

But why is the 'BJP's Chanakya' so aggressive and combative?

Time and again, he reassures BJP workers and the public, mostly in Rajasthan, that the party will win the Lok Sabha election with an even bigger mandate than it won in 2014; apparently advising them against going for a change at the state level.

The BJP's internal survey says the party will win 300 seats on its own this time. Shah has claimed the BJP will win all states it currently rules, and anti-incumbency in states not ruled by it will work in the party's favour.

Only he knows whether he is saying this because anti-incumbency is most visible in the BJP-ruled states of Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh -- which go to the polls later this year -- or despite that.

Shah knows that the 2014 mandate for the BJP included a clean sweep in Rajasthan and Gujarat and a near clean sweep in Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh.

A repeat of this performance seems very difficult this time.

A tie-up between the Samajwadi Party and the Bahujan Samaj Party has already cost the BJP two of its bastions in UP -- including its chief minister's Gorakhpur Lok Sabha constituency.

The BJP's attempts to get a lion's share of seats in Bihar has already soured its relationship with allies in the state.

In Maharashtra, the Shiv Sena has decided not to contest the 2019 election with the BJP. The saffron party has also lost a major ally in the Telugu Desam Party.

Pinning hopes of getting a mandate larger than 2014 on gains made in the north eastern states and Odisha is quite fantastic.

Moreover, Dalit and farmer movements in the country are on the rise, supported by the Opposition parties.

The government's efforts to assuage Dalit anger have met with hostility by the BJP's upper caste vote bank.

'Bharat bandhs' called on various issues by upper caste organisations, Opposition parties and Dalit groups have been most successful in Madhya Pradesh, indicating how unpopular the Shivraj Singh Chouhan government has become.

Shah is very well aware of these facts.

And hence he understands the need to enthuse party cadres who may confront tough questions from voters about the state of the economy or the party's unkept promises.

It is important for him to continuously denigrate the Opposition, branding them as obstacles in the path of making a better India and linking them with ideologies touted as being against the country.

It is also important to stress on the vastness the BJP has acquired in the past five years, to show how the party has entrenched itself in the country's governance and it 'cannot be dislodged for at least 50 years'; to strongly react to and silence every voice of dissent; to rebut every news or information critical of the government or party's top leadership; to deny any wrongdoing and refusing to take any responsibility for things gone wrong.

Any admission by the government or the BJP about the failure of policies like demonetisation, rising agrarian distress and the poor shape of the economy will only provide ammunition to the Opposition parties.

Therefore, the bluster and bombast are necessary to prevent any loss of votes. To keep up the momentum, the party has also decided to continue with Shah as chief till the 2019 election, deferring the organisational presidential election.

Consequently, this makes one wonder if Shah's extra combativeness and aggression is more a sign of nervousness than confidence.

That said, his ability to spring surprises cannot be discounted.
'The arrests of Sanatan Sanstha members for committing murder and stockpiling explosives with the alleged intent of committing mass murder must be embarrassing to a majoritarian government,' notes Devangshu Datta.

Illustration: Uttam Ghosh/Rediff.com

The great Jadugar K Lal once told me that stage magic just involved using imagination, followed by careful scripting and practice.

He said the really difficult thing was learning the art of distraction.

Misdirecting the audience's attention was, he said, a skill that far transcended the performance of smooth sleights of hand and the crafting of clever mechanical illusions.

It is a skill that the current political establishment has learnt well.

Whenever it's under pressure, it creates some sort of distraction to drag attention away from the embarrassment of the moment.

The dawn raids by the Pune police on activists across the country was undoubtedly an attempt to do just that.

It succeeded since the arrests have dominated the news cycle for the next two days.

The question is, what was so embarrassing that the Centre decided to risk public opprobrium and ridicule by arresting elderly academics and lawyers on absurd charges?

It's hard to find answers.

Could it have been demonetisation?

A Parliamentary committee had just criticised the exercise in no uncertain terms, pointing out the many undesirable outcomes.

The Reserve Bank of India's annual report has also underlined the futility of the foolish exercise, which, if you remember, led to the deaths of over 100 people and caused misery to hundreds of millions.

Practically all the cash came back.

Cash held by the public now is back above pre-demonetisation levels.

The structure of household savings has changed for the worse, with the aam janta pulling money out of banks.

Bureaucrats told to defend the move have been reduced to risible statements like 'Demonetisation worked, don't ask how.'

Or, perhaps, it's the meanness displayed in disbursing relief funds to Kerala? The southern state will require many, many thousands of millions to bootstrap out of this calamity.

The Centre is being niggardly in releasing tiny amounts in dribs and drabs.

Enough 'friends of the establishment' have pushed out faked images of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh delivering aid to lead the cynical among us to wonder why no real images could be produced.

And the less said about refusing aid from abroad the better.

The excuse is that this is government policy.

Well, surely this brave decisive government could change the policy?

However, it might not be Kerala or demonetisation that required fuzzing out of primetime focus.

The arrests of Sanatan Sanstha members for committing murder and stockpiling explosives with the alleged intent of committing mass murder must be embarrassing to a majoritarian government.

Maybe the civil rights activists were arrested in order to ensure that mass media did not focus on those arrests?

Or is it actually the Rafale controversy that the government doesn't want debated on primetime?

There are so many weird elements to that story that it would be hard to peddle it as fiction. One government negotiates for 126 planes.

The next government decides to pay much larger sums for 36 planes.

What's more, an industrialist who has never fabricated a plane in his career and whose companies owe over Rs 450 billion, suddenly becomes a joint venture partner of Dassault Aviation.

The French say they have no objection to the costs being mentioned in Parliament.

The Indian government says it can't mention the numbers because it has a secrecy clause in a treaty with France!

Maybe it's not the Rafale controversy either.

It could just be the record prices of diesel and petrol and the record weakness of the rupee.

After all, the current prime minister spent a lot of time excoriating the last government for the weak rupee and the high price of fuels.

Or, it could be the release of the Sudipto Mundle-led committee report on real sector statistics that suggested the last government did a better job in terms of generating growth.

Or, it might be Doklam, where the People's Liberation Army has apparently been settling down.

Or, it may be the failure of helicopter diplomacy in the Maldives.

That's a lot of potentially embarrassing stuff that could have made it to the news cycle.

Instead, we had the spectacle of 70-year-old academics being interrogated on why they read books on Marx and Mao.

Well played!
'A precedent in the Rajv killers' plea for freedom may flow from slain brigand Veerappans 2000 demand for the release of 109 associates languishing in prisons in Karnataka for him to release abducted Kannada matinee icon, the late Rajkumar.'

'Acting on a petition filed by the father of a Karnataka cadre IPS officer killed by Veerappan, the Supreme Court reversed the orders of lower court orders in Tamil Nadu and Karnataka.'

If democratically-elected governments give an impression to the citizens of this country of being law-breakers, would it not breed contempt for the law? Would it not invite citizens to become a law unto themselves? the Supreme Court had observed on the occasion, recalls N Sathiya Moorthy.

Even as the Supreme Court of India admitted pending petitions from other victims in the Rajiv Gandhi assassination case and the Raj Bhavan in Chennai denied claims of peripheral pan-Tamil political parties that Governor Banwarilal Purohit had forwarded the state cabinet resolution recommending freedom for Rajiv Gandhis assassins to the Union home ministry for advice, the question arises if the apex court verdict in the Veerappan associates case from the previous decade would have any bearing on the emerging situation.

A bench comprising Chief Justice-designate Ranjan Gogoi and Justices Navin Sinha and K M Joseph have since posted the victims plea for further hearing four weeks hence. Incidentally, the victims petition has been pending since March 2014, and the bench allowed the petitioners in the case to amend their pleas in the light of the state cabinet resolution and the like.

Incidentally, the current issue flows from a bench headed by Justice Ranjan directing governor Purohit to consider the mercy petitions of seven convicts languishing in prison under Article 161 of the Constitution.

During the arguments in the case, the Centre submitted that it did not concur with the Tamil Nadu government's proposal to release the seven convicts. It argued that the case involved the assassination of a former prime minister in a brutal manner in pursuance of a "diabolical" plot carefully conceived and executed by a foreign terrorist organisation.

For now, the Raj Bhavan has clarified through a statement that it had not forwarded the state cabinet resolution to the Union home ministry for advice. As the statement said, the voluminous records in the case required deeper and closer study and legal consultations before governor Purohit could arrive at a decision.

The revival of the victims petition may have caused a new situation in Purohit taking an early decision on the cabinet resolution, which is what the pan-Tamil groups wanted. Describing the life convicts only as the Tamil Seven, they had sought to cast aspersions on the governor purportedly delaying the decision, without possibly giving even the state government the time to forward the resolution and case details to the Raj Bhavan.

Independent of the Raj Bhavans clarifications, some legal luminaries do say that the governor would also be well within his rights -- and responsibilities -- to seek advice from the Centre, among others, if he deemed fit. After all, they point out, the governor (also) acts as the eyes and ears of the Union and the President of India, and he should not do something that contravened the larger constitutional scheme.

This was more so when different SC verdicts in the very same Rajiv assassination case were seen as contradicting each other or one another. Better or worse still, as the Raj Bhavan statement indicated the number and volume of assassins plea for stopping execution, and then for freedom, should run into tens of lakhs of pages, requiring closer examination, if only to avoid later-day criticism of every kind.

A precedent in this regard may flow from slain brigand Veerappans 2000 demand for the release of 109 associates languishing in prisons in Karnataka for him to release abducted Kannada matinee icon, the late Rajkumar. Acting on a petition filed by the father of a Karnataka cadre IPS officer killed by Veerappan, the Supreme Court reversed the orders of lower court orders in Tamil Nadu and Karnataka.

If democratically-elected governments give an impression to the citizens of this country of being law-breakers, would it not breed contempt for the law? Would it not invite citizens to become a law unto themselves? the Supreme Court had observed on the occasion.

The governments yielded to the pressure tactics of those who are out to terrorise the police force and overawe elected governments... No one ever considered that people may lose faith in the democratic process when they see the helplessness of the government, when they see public authority being flouted, the court added.

According to a section of the media, surviving victims or family members of some of the other victims in the case are upset about the turn of events. Tamil daily Dinamalar reported how Abbas, 33, who had lost his mother in the blast and was forced to discontinue his studies and enter an orphanage, and Shanthakumari, who had lost her sister Saroja Devi, have expressed reservations about freedom for the convicts.

Rajkumar, son of police constable Dharman, who died in the blast, went a step further, when he told the Dinamalar that politicians should not shout for the assassins freedom for their personal ends.

The Hindu has since quoted Anusuya Daisy Ernest, who suffered serious injuries and had a finger in her hand amputated after the blast, that like the victims who are living with their loss, the convicts too should live through imprisonment for life.

Police constable Anusuya, who had tried to shoo away human bomb Dhanu from approaching Rajiv Gandhi, was on duty at the venue of Rajivs election meeting. After months of hospitalisation, she returned to duty and retired as assistant superintendent of police, Villuppuram, in May this year.

As the more recent report in The Hindu on the Supreme Courts revival of the victims pleas recalled, the petitioners contended that the Jayalalithaa government of the time had taken the decision for narrow political gain...The attitude of the state government is against the constitutional value and national spirit, and for narrow political consideration as against the effect of the release...on the families of the victims and society, and the wrong precedent it would set.

However, the Supreme Court at the time had said that it would look into the Centres petition against the state governments initiative, submitting that the latter did not have the powers for granting remission in CBI cases. The SC having decided on related issues, and the state cabinet acted on the September 7 order, which suggested that the governor consider the convicts requests (afresh), the victims have since sought to revive their forgotten petitions.

Be it as it may, the operative portion of terrorise mentioned in the Veerappan aides case may not apply to the Rajiv Gandhi assassins after the Supreme Court earlier declared that it was not an act of terror or an anti-national act, as the prosecution had charged under the Prevention of Terrorism Act, but only culpable homicide amounting to murder under Section 302 the Indian Penal Code.

Yet, there is another similarity to the two cases, as Rajiv Gandhi was not the only victim in that case. At least 14 others, including Tamil Nadu police officers from IPS rank downwards, had also died in the human bomb suicide blast that claimed the life of the former prime minister.

It is unclear if the Supreme Court or the governor or the Union of India could back the state cabinet resolution, should family members of any or all other victims who were killed alongside Rajiv Gandhi at Sriperumpudur on the fateful night of May 21, 1991.

This is because the Supreme Court, while disposing of an earlier petition by some of the accused in the case, starting with Perarivalan whose aged mother has been actively campaigning for her sons freedom, did commute the death sentence to one of life imprisonment. At the same time, the court had held that life sentence did not translate into one of 14 or 20 years as commonly conceived, but ran the full course of the life of one thus sentenced.

More importantly, on related issues, the Supreme Court itself had held in the Rajiv Gandhi case(s) that the governor under Article 161 and the state government had no role to play in deciding on mercy petitions moved in cases prosecuted by the CBI, a central agency. In such a case, the petition should lie, if at all, before the President and the Union government, a five-judge bench headed by then CJI, H L Dattu, held in 2015.

Opinion is divided even otherwise on the question of family members of Rajiv Gandhi pardoning the killers for their sins extending to cover such conduct on the behaviour of those of other victims. Thus, even if any or all relatives of other victims in the case pardoned the convicts, it may not mean anything before the eyes of law.

As an aside to another of Veerappan aides case, the Supreme Court did stay the execution of four of them in January 2014, but refused to fast-track the hearing in the case.

The death row convicts in the case had cited the apex court verdict in the Rajiv Gandhi assassins case, where too it was argued that the President had taken undue time in deciding on their mercy pleas, before rejecting them.

It is another matter that even while staying the execution on that occasion, the SC bench threw out the demand for a fresh trial, purportedly based on fresh evidence that the defence claimed had come to their notice.

If we encourage this writ petition, then in every case there will be pleas for fresh investigation...If we encourage this type of petitions, it will set a bad precedent, then Chief Justice P Sathasivam, heading the bench, observed.

In this context, CJI Sathasivam (now governor of Kerala) also referred to a statement made by an investigating officer in the Rajiv Gandhi assassination case that he had not fully recorded the statement of accused/convict Perarivalan.

The IO makes a statement after 20 years, CJI Sathasivam observed, adding, 'Nowadays it has become a fashion to make such statements, maybe it is in the Veerappan case, or the Rajiv Gandhi case. We cannot encourage such petitions.

N Sathiya Moorthy, veteran journalist and political analyst, is director, Observer Research Foundation, Chennai Centre.
'Once the military starts to draw up plans for using nuclear weapons, then nuclear weapons could be used earlier in a crisis than otherwise.'

IMAGE: Pakistan rolls out its long-range ballistic missile Shaheen III. Photograph: @AsimBajwaISPR/Twitter

Pakistan's nuclear arsenal is growing at a faster rate than predicted, with a reliable report from the non-profit Federation of American Scientists putting the figure at about 150 warheads now.

In the FAS's Nuclear Notebook: Pakistani Nuclear Forces, 2018, the authors, Hans Kristensen and Robert Norris, suggest that this could mean the country is not only on target to have up to 250 warheads by 2025, but that its production of tactical nuclear weapons risked a quicker slide from conventional clashes to a nuclear war.

The report was put together using requests under the United States Freedom of Information Act and declassified documents. Dr Kristensen cautioned that the estimates came with considerable uncertainty, given that all the nuclear nations shrouded their programmes in secrecy.



Photograph: Hans Kristensen/Twitter

Dr Kristensen, director, FAS Nuclear Information Project, has a resume steeped in analytical research including, early in his career, a long stint at Greenpeace, the environmental non-profit that, among other issues, also argues against reliance on nuclear power, saying it is ridden with problems and could also help spawn new nuclear powers.

"Once one side starts using nuclear weapons, all bets are off," Dr Hans Kristensen tells Rediff.com's senior US contributor P Rajendran.

You are reputed to provide the best publicly available information on nuclear arms worldwide. How do you go about analysing the information? First of all, the fact that we are called the best estimates reflects that there are no official estimates -- the point being that none of those countries release any information about how many nuclear weapons they have. So it is up to others to make those estimates. What we have done over the years is to develop a methodology by which we combine information from declassified documents here in the United States and elsewhere and combine that with other information about the country's military postures, specifically what kind of weapons systems they have, what kind of strategy they have, and also how much fissile material they are thought to have available for their nuclear weapons programme. We try to combine all of these related information into estimates that obviously come with considerable uncertainty because we don't know the specifics of the country's nuclear weapons numbers.

You are also looking at the political situation in those countries, right? Nuclear forces develop slowly and so the political climate can change and, of course, it can have an effect on weapons programmes. But over the years nuclear weapons programmes tend to follow longer-term plans rather than quickly change depending on the mood between countries.

So if a country plans to have nuclear weapons soon, such as in the case of Saddam Hussein, president and dictator of Iraq for about 23 years, it cannot develop one easily. Yeah, there's a long period of design development that all countries must go through. India and Pakistan went through that in the seventies, eighties and nineties before they got to the point of even detonating nuclear weapons.

Given the chaotic nature of the nuclear standoff in South Asia, and the fact that there are actually three actors present -- India, China and Pakistan -- can Pakistan's increased nuclear weaponry escalate the arms race there? Yes, specially India and Pakistan will look closely at each other's nuclear postures and obviously follow what the other side is doing. That can have real impact on what they decide to do. If you look at the Pakistani and Indian arsenals they were, for the first couple of decades, they were relatively closely linked in terms of what categories of weapons they developed. But within the last decade we have seen some change, for example, in the case of Pakistan, putting more emphasis on what appears to be more tactical nuclear weapons. They have their reasons for doing that, and India seems to be putting more emphasis on longer-range systems because of the way it is planning vis-a-vis China.

So Pakistan is planning for trouble with India, while India is planning in the longer term for China? Well, India's planning for Pakistan and China.

The Bharatiya Janata Party was the party in power when the first nuclear tests were conducted in 1998 (after India exploded an atom bomb in 1974) even though, as you suggested, all the material must have been ready for some time.

Did the perception that India's current BJP-led government is more combative have helped change Pakistan's posture? The main reason Pakistan has put more emphasis on tactical nuclear weapons appears to be their concern about what to do about India's larger conventional forces. (If) those forces invaded Pakistan would they be able to go in and basically win without India ever having to cross the nuclear threshold. The Pakistani planners concluded that they needed to have tactical nuclear weapons to stop such an invasion without having to resort to strategic nuclear attacks against India.

Do you think any low-level nuclear use could lead to a larger nuclear war? Yes, that's always the danger, of course, not just in the case of India and Pakistan, but in all Nuclear Weapons States. Once the military starts to draw up plans for using nuclear weapons in what you could call the pre-strategic environment, then you get two situations. One, of course, is that nuclear weapons could be used earlier in a crisis than otherwise. Once you start using nuclear weapons on one side it is very unlikely that the other side will just be sitting there, saying, 'Oh, I guess we shouldn't do that.' They will take measures, of course. If India has decided that it is necessary to invade Pakistan for whatever reason and its forces are being annihilated inside Pakistan because of the Pakistani use of tactical nuclear weapons, it is very hard to imagine the Indians would say, 'I guess we were wrong, we're just going to pull back here.' So once one side starts using nuclear weapons, all bets are off.

India does have a policy of no first use of nuclear weapons, but if there is this reason, could it go all the way? When countries have no first use policies, these are policies that play more of a role in peacetime. I have a hard time imagining that a country in a war where significant national interests were threatened, that it would say, 'Oh, gee, we should not use it first because we have a no first use policy.' Once you get into that situation, countries will do pretty much what they think is necessary. I see the value and the message of no first use policies more as something that's important in peacetime.

The new government in Pakistan led by Imran Khan is believed to be working with or controlled by the military. Could that at least in the short term reduce the chance of a conflict with India? We don't really know what the new Pakistani government believes about these issues. It is in any case very unlikely to fundamentally change the role of Pakistan's nuclear weapons. So we'll have to wait and see.

China is a bigger threat to India than Pakistan even if it is less likely to act precipitately.

When you wrote about Chinese nuclear weapons you addressed it essentially from the viewpoint of America.

China has had military standoffs with India. Could any of them move into the nuclear realm? Oh yeah. All conventional conflicts, of course, can escalate into nuclear use -- potentially. So, of course, given that India and China has had several serious border incidents over the years, that could, of course, happen again. And if it does, it is possible that you could get to a potential role for nuclear weapons if the conventional phase of the crisis escalated to very serious levels. My guess is that you would have to see more than just a border skirmish for that to happen. It would have be something that escalates to strategic attacks with conventional forces against cities or military bases of something like that for it to trigger that kind of (nuclear conflict).

You have said the capabilities of China's nuclear modernisation programme could influence its nuclear policy. Yeah...

What kind of changes do you expect to see? When countries modernise their forces that modernisation inevitably sooner or later provides the military planners different options. They can begin to contemplate more limited strikes, more precise strikes, with less explosive yield into something that begins to look like a counterforce attack. I have to caution that just because a country attacks a military base with a nuclear weapon doesn't mean they have a counterforce strategy, which is a much more ambitious strategy. But if you look at the Chinese arsenal, they are mixing conventional and nuclear ballistic missiles in a way that seems to indicate that they would use force that could very quickly be misunderstood to be nuclear attacks. There's no way in a confusing conflict to distinguish whether the launch of a Chinese DF21 is a conventional or nuclear weapons -- until it detonates, of course.* You could easily imagine some serious misunderstandings in such a crisis. Of course, it is for the Chinese leadership that has to decide what policy and strategy they have. Chinese military planners get better weapons and can offer different scenarios to the political leadership. Then it is possible down the line that we can see a slight adjustment in the way the Chinese think about using nuclear weapons. More flexible options, maybe even some limited scenarios in which they would use nuclear weapons, not just in the final retaliatory strike, but in ways to try to influence the military conflict. But we'll have to see what happens. We are still in the early phases.

Dr James Hansen, in a feisty interview with me some years ago, argued for some reliance on many small nuclear plants, if only to offset the damage done by climate-changing fossil fuels.

If other South Asians nations -- such as Bangladesh or Sri Lanka -- take up such options would there be a possibility of more nuclear states emerging in the region? Potentially, yes, because not only is that the way you get nuclear material (for weapons) but that is also the way you train technicians to be able to handle these technologies. All Nuclear Weapons States have evolved their nuclear capabilities from programmes that were originally mainly peaceful, of course the United States being different because it specifically started the project to go after the bomb. Other countries have done it the other way. Having said that, the danger of arguing that nuclear power is needed to reduce climate effects from coal power is, of course, a very simplistic line of argument because it only looks at one particular effect. There are other effects of nuclear power as well one has to take into consideration.

There is the problem of nuclear waste, for example, that remains radioactive for years... That's a big problem, and it's a real reason, for example here in the United States, for why nuclear power today is less and less attractive. It's a very expensive form of energy production and they still, after all these years, have not resolved the issue of what to do with the waste.

Countries Number of warheads Russia 6,850 USA 6,450 France 300 China 280 UK 215 Pakistan 140 to 150 India 130 to 140 Israel 80 North Korea 10 to 20

* The Dong-Feng 21 is a single-warhead medium-range ballstic missile that can carry either nuclear or conventional armaments and which can go as far as 1,700 kilometres.

Production: Rajesh Alva/Rediff.com
Priest Franco Mulakkal was on Thursday grilled for more than eight hours by Kerala police over allegations of rape and unnatural sex levelled by a nun and he will be questioned for the third straight day on Friday, police said.

The Vatican has, meanwhile, divested Mulakkal, who was the bishop of the Jalandhar diocese of Missionaries of Jesus despite shedding his administrative role, of his pastoral responsibilities 'temporarily', the Catholic Bishops' Conference of India (CBCI) said.

"We had decided to complete the interrogation today (Thursday). But it could not be completed even after 7:30 pm. Verification is required in matters so far placed before the investigation team and that will be completed by tomorrow (Friday) morning.

"Three teams will verify them. So, the investigation will continue tomorrow (on Friday) also. By tomorrow (Friday) we will be able to complete the verification," Kottayam Superintendent of Police Hari Sankar said after the marathon questioning of the priest.

Terming the interrogation as 'positive', he said Mulakkal has been issued a notice to appear before the SIT at 10:30 am.

Sources in the Special Investigating Team probing the case said the interrogation was likely to conclude on Friday.

He was questioned for over seven hours on Wednesday.

Earlier in the day, Kerala's police chief Loknath Behera said the decision on whether to arrest Mulakkal will be taken in the next couple of days.

"After examining him only a decision will be taken. Investigating team is examining him. Let us wait. A decision will be definitely taken today (Thursday) or tomorrow (Friday) after the interrogation," Behera told reporters in Thiruvananthapuram.

Amid the continued outrage over the alleged sexual assault of the nun, the CBCI said Pope Francis had temporarily relieved him of his pastoral responsibilities, a decision that was welcomed by the protesting nuns who termed the development as the 'first victory' in their fight against the former bishop.

"The Pope appointed Bishop Emeritus of the Archdiocese of Bombay Agnelo Rufino Gracias as the Apostolic administrator of the diocese of Jalandhar with immediate effect," a CBCI statement said.

The Pope took the decision in response to Mulakkal's September 16 letter offering to 'step aside temporarily' as the bishop of the Jalandhar diocese, Kerala Catholic Bishops' Council Spokesman Fr Varghese Vallikkattu told PTI.

According to the statement issued by CBCI president Cardinal Oswald Gracias, "The Holy Father has received the request of Bishop Franco Mulakkal to be temporarily relieved of his pastoral responsibilities in the diocese of Jalandhar."

"Having considered all circumstances the Holy Father has accepted this request of Bishop Mulakkal and has appointed Bishop Agnelo Rufino Gracias, Auxilary Bishop Emeritus of the Archdiocese of Bombay as Apostolic Administrator of the diocese of Jalandhar... with immediate effect," it said.

The group of nuns staging a protest here with representatives of various Catholic reform organisations seeking Mulakkal's arrest and justice for the nun lauded the Pope's decision.

"We are very happy.....the Vatican has finally heard our prayers. It is the first victory in our struggle against the Bishop," a nun said.

More support came in for their agitation from the church, with Fr Augustine Vattoli, convenor of 'Save Our Sisters', criticising the government for the delay in arresting the priest.

"We feel cheated," Vattoli said and warned there would be "uprising" in the streets of Kerala if Mulakkal was not arrested.

Activists of the All India Youth Federation, the students front of the CPI, also held a protest demanding his arrest.

They had also staged a protest Wednesday. Some people burnt an effigy of Mulakkal.

Mulakkal has been accused of repeated rape and sexual assault by the Kerala-based nun of his own religious order, but he has denied the allegations.
The Border Security Force has registered a strong protest with its Pakistani counterpart over the killing and slitting of throat of one of its jawans in Jammu and has told the Pak Rangers that the act was 'unsoldierly', official sources said on Thursday.

They said the atmosphere along the border areas was 'tense' and a high alert is in place along this region of the Indo-Pak international border.

The sources said the Pakistani side, which spoke to the Border Security Force officials in the noon over phone, 'denied any hand' in the killing of Head Constable Narender Singh on September 18.

The Indian side termed the act as 'unsoldierly'.

It was informed that Pakistani troops 'shot and killed' the BSF trooper, they said.

They added that on getting this response, the BSF told the other side that any future misadventure on the India-Pakistan border will be the responsibility of the Pak Rangers.

"A brief phone call talk took place between the two sides this noon. When it was brought to the notice of Pakistan that they had killed the jawan by resorting to unprovoked fire, they flatly refused any hand of their troops in the incident," a senior official said.

This was the second round of protest that the BSF registered with their counterparts in the last over three days over the killing and throat slitting of their jawan who along with seven others had gone beyond the border fence in the Ramgarh sector as part of a elephant grass (sarkanda) cutting patrol.

The official said the force has issued a 'high alert' to all its forward locations on the 192-km-long frontier in Jammu in the backdrop of this incident which is suspected to be 'handiwork of a probably a pair of troops from the other side'.

The force, they said, has also observed the movement of helicopters and drones in the forward locations across the border in Jammu and hence border posts and patrols have been asked to remain extra vigilant, they said.

The force has also sought, they said, for a sector commander-level (Deputy Inspector General rank level) talks between the two sides in Jammu to thrash out issues but has not received any positive response.

They added that various field formations of the force have been receiving 'spoof calls' from across the border where people masquerading as government intelligence operatives or journalists are wanting to seek details about the incident.

Over a dozen calls have been received over the last two days on the personal and official numbers of field officers and it is suspected that the calls are being made from across the border, they said.

Meanwhile, Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh has told the BSF to take strongest possible action against the Pakistani troops who slit the BSF jawan's throat, officials said on Thursday.

This was conveyed to the top brass of the border guarding force which is deployed along the highly volatile Indo-Pak border.

The home minister told top officials of the BSF in no uncertain terms that the strongest possible action should be taken against the Pakistani troops involved in Tuesday's incident, a home ministry official, privy to the development, said.

The BSF jawan's throat was slit and his body bore multiple bullet injuries. The missing trooper was found killed by Pakistani troops in the Jammu region, in a first-of-its-kind barbaric act against Indian forces along the International Border.

Another official said the BSF is expected to take some 'pro-active' action against the Pakistan Rangers to 'avenge' the mutilation of the jawan's body.

In an atmosphere of anger and gloom, a huge gathering on Thursday bid a tearful adieu to BSF jawan Narender Singh, in Sonipat.

The mortal remains of BSF Head Constable Narender Singh were cremated with full state honours at his native Thana Kalan village in Haryana's Sonipat district.

Slogans of 'Bharat Mata ki Jai', Narender Singh Amar Rahe' rent the air as the body, wrapped in a tricolour, reached the village in the morning.

Several villagers chanted slogans against Pakistan. Family members and locals demanded that Pakistan should be taught a lesson for the "barbaric" act.

The funeral pyre was lit by his elder son Mohit.

"We are proud of our father for laying down his life for the nation. His death should be avenged," said a teary-eyed Mohit.

"Not everyone gets a chance to be draped in the tricolour...But we just cannot keep feeling proud. We will feel proud again, when another death takes place. We demand action against Pakistan," he said.

He also demanded that the concerned authorities provide whatever help the family needs.

Other family members also appealed to the Centre to act tough against Pakistan.

Several prominent persons inlcuding Haryana minister Krishan Bedi, Congress leader Randeep Singh Surjewala and senior officials of BSF were also among the mourners.
Deputy Chief of Air Staff Air Marshal Raghunath Nambiar on Thursday flew the first Rafale fighter jet manufactured by Dassault Aviation for India, official sources said.

Nambiar, who reached Paris four days ago, flew the aircraft in France to assess its efficacy, they said.

He is in France to also assess the progress in the production of Rafale jets by Dassault Aviation.

Air Marshal Nambiar flew the first Rafale fighter jet manufactured by Dassault Aviation for India, the sources said.

The delivery of the jets -- capable of carrying a range of potent weapons and missiles -- is scheduled to begin from September next year.

A team of the Indian Air Force is already in France to help Dassault Aviation to incorporate the India-specific avionics and weapons system in the aircraft.

The development comes amid a raging controversy in India over the deal to procure the Rafale fighter jets.

Meanwhile, official sources said on Thursday that there were 'serious differences' between Hindustan Aeronautics Ltd and Dassault Aviation for production of Rafale jets in India when the United Progressive Alliance government was negotiating the deal with the French company.

The previous UPA government in 2012 started negotiations with Dassault Aviation to buy 126 Medium Multi-Role Combat Aircraft (MMRCA).

The plan was for Dassault Aviation to supply 18 Rafale jets in fly-away condition while 108 aircraft were to be manufactured in India by the company along with HAL. However, the deal could not be sealed.

The sources said the HAL in a letter dated October 11, 2012, to the defence ministry brought out various disagreements pertaining to the work share between HAL and the Dassault Aviation, the makers of Rafale jets.

Subsequently, in July 2014, HAL in its letter to the ministry has also highlighted one major unresolved issue regarding responsibility sharing between Dassault Aviation and HAL for licence manufacture of the aircraft, the sources said.

They said observations by experts that the HAL was capable of manufacturing Rafale jets was incorrect.

"There were serious differences between HAL and Dassault Aviation when the UPA government was negotiating the deal with the French company," a source said.

Last week, Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said negotiations for procurement of 126 Rafale jets under the UPA government fell through as HAL did not have the required capability to produce the jets in India in collaboration with Dassault Aviation.

After rounds of negotiations with Hindustan Aeronautics Ltd (HAL), Dassault Aviation felt that the cost of the Rafale jets will escalate significantly if they were to be produced in India, she said.

The Congress has demanded answers from the government on why HAL was not involved in the new deal.

In 2016, the Modi government signed a government-to-government deal with France for purchase of 36 Rafale jets at a cost of Rs 58,000 crore.

The Congress has been alleging irregularities in the deal.

Photographs: ANI
Goa Health Minister Vishwajit Rane on Thursday ruled out a change in the leadership of the Bharatiya Janata Party-led dispensation on account of Chief Minister Manohar Parrikars ill health, and alleged the Congress was playing to the gallery by staking claim to form the government as it did not have the required numbers.

The government is functioning very well and all the alliance partners are firmly supporting Parrikar, who is undergoing treatment at Delhi's AIIMS, the BJP leader asserted.

The Congress, which is the single-largest party with 16 MLAs, has staked claim to form the government in the coastal state and said it has the support of over 21 legislators in the 40-member assembly.

The opposition party's claim comes at a time when sixty-two-year-old Parrikar is admitted to the All India Institute of Medical Sciences for a pancreatic ailment.

The Congress doesn't have the numbers. If they have the support of 21 MLAs, then they should parade them before the governor. They are just playing to the gallery," Rane told reporters in Panaji.

He claimed the Congress leaders were constantly calling up BJP MLAs and pleading for support.

Asked about the current political situation in the state, he said, Where is the question of leadership change? We have our chief minister in place. He is undergoing treatment, but that does not mean we should replace him.

"The state government is functioning very well and all the alliance partners are firmly supporting Parrikar, providing stability to the coalition for last one-and-a-half years," he said.

On the visit of BJP's central observers to Goa during the weekend, Rane said, "The party leaders never discussed about change in leadership during their meeting."

Even if there is a question of leadership change, it would be decided by central leaders in consultation with the local BJP unit and alliance partners, he said.

"Right now, it is not the time for leadership change in Goa," he added.

BJP president Amit Shah had sent three party observers -- B L Santhosh, Ram Lal and Vijay Puranik -- to Goa on Sunday to meet the local leaders and alliance partners and take stock of the current political situation.

Rane rubbished the Congress's allegations that governance in the state has come to a standstill in Parrikar's absence.

Today's world is technology driven. Files can be cleared on e-mail. Even when I am abroad, if there is any urgent file, I clear it on e-mail, the minister said.

The Congress, in its memorandum submitted earlier to Governor Mridula Sinha, had claimed that in absence of the chief minister, the government was not functioning properly.

Leader of Opposition in the Assembly Chandrakant Kavlekar said Wednesday that the Congress had the support of over 21 MLAs, giving it enough strength to form the government in the state.

He had earlier said the BJP might force dissolution of the assembly and another election in just a year-and-a-half.

The Assembly polls in Goa were held in February 2017.

The state is being ruled by the BJP with the support of the Goa Forward Party, the Maharashtrawadi Gomantak Party, the Nationalist Congress Party and Independent MLAs.

The BJP has 14 seats in the assembly, the GFP and the MGP have three each and the NCP has one.

There are also three Independent legislators.
Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley on Thursday called Congress president Rahul Gandhi a 'Clown Prince' and the opposition party hit back to dub the senior Bharatiya Janata Party leader as a 'court jester' in bitter personal attacks over Rafale deal, non-performing assets and waiving loans of industrialists.

As the rival parties accused each other of resorting to falsehood and lies, the Congress also demanded Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman's resignation for allegedly 'misleading' the people on the Rafale deal.

Gandhi accusing the minister of 'lying' on HAL's capability to build the jet fighters, saying her position is untenable.

In a hard hitting Facebook blog titled 'Falsehood of a 'Clown Prince'' to reply to Gandhi's charges made during his political rallies, Jaitley accused him of 'lying' about Modi government waiving Rs 2.5 lakh crore of loans of 15 industrialists.

He asserted not a single rupee of any debtor has been waived by the BJP government.

Loans to the country's 12 defaulters were given out prior to 2014 and it was only the present government which was making recoveries, he said, adding defaulters are losing their companies and assets as they are being auctioned to recover dues.

'You lied on the Rafale deal, you lied on the Non Performing Assets(NPAs). Your temperament to concoct facts raises a legitimate question -- do people whose natural preference is falsehood deserve to be a part of the public discourse,' he said.

'The world's largest democracy must seriously introspect whether public discourse should be allowed to be polluted by the falsehood of a 'Clown Prince'.'

Jaitley alleged the previous Congress-led UPA government "concealed" the loans despite default by rolling them over and NPAs or bad loans were hidden under the carpet.

'The truth, Mr Rahul Gandhi, is that your Government allowed the banks to be looted. The loans were inadequately securitized. Your Government was in complicity,' he wrote.

Jaitley accused Gandhi of 'concocting a lie' and repeating it as many times and went on to cite previous arguments he had made to counter the charges on Rafale deal.

'In mature democracies, those who rely on falsehood are considered unfit for public life. Many have been banished from political activity because they were caught lying. But this rule obviously can't apply to a dynastic organisation like Congress party,' he said.

'If the 'Rafale concoctions' were the first big lie, the second one stated repeatedly is that Mr Modi waived off Rs 2.50 lakh crores of 15 industrialists. Every word of that sentence repeatedly uttered by Rahul Gandhi is false.'

The Congress on its part accused Jaitley of 'lying' on the issue of NPAs and dubbed him as a 'court jester' writing 'wasteful' blogs,

Congress chief spokesperson Randeep Surjewala accused Jaitley of making desperate attempts at spreading 'fake agenda to stay relevant as a court jester' and asked him why he is hiding behind abuse to the opposition and demanded answers from him on the issue of NPAs as well as the Rafale jet fighter deal with France.

He said Jaitley and the Modi government have been 'trapped' on the Rafale issue and that is why they are resorting to abuse against the opposition instead of replying to questions asked.

"Arun Jaitley is desperate in his attempt to stay relevant as a Court Jester' to Modi Sultanate'. 'Abuse, diversion' and deception' are the desperate tools of a 'Lying -Jait-LIE'.

"Instead of hiding behind the cloak of expletives for the opposition, let FM coherently answer politically relevant issues," Surjewala told reporters.

Attacking the government on the issue of NPAs, the Congress leader alleged collusion between NPA's, bank looters and the Modi government.

"Political amnesia and chest thumping cannot obliterate your dismal record of dismantling India's economic progress or as also the surging NPA's resulting out of bankruptcy of economic vision' of Modi Government," he alleged.

Gandhi took to Twitter to attack Sitharaman, alleging that her position as the defence minister has become untenable as a former chief of the state-run Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL) has 'nailed her lie'.

'The RM (Rafale Minister) tasked with defending corruption has been caught lying again. The former HAL Chief, T S Raju, has nailed her lie, that HAL didn't have the capability to build the RAFALE. Her position is untenable & she must resign,' he tweeted and tagged a media report on the former HAL chief's assertion.

Congress spokesperson Manish Tewari cited the remarks of former HAL chief T Suvarna Raju to attack Sitharaman over the issue of HAL's capability to build the Rafale aircraft.

Tewari hit out at Sitharaman for alleging that the United Progressive Alliance did not extend support to HAL when the state-run company was engaged in talks with French firm Dassault Aviation for the manufacturer of Rafale jets in India under the offset agreement.

He said the former HAL chief had made certain 'extremely pertinent points' that 'absolutely demolish' the entire case that the NDA government has been trying to build on the Rafale issue.

Tewari said Raju had made it clear in his statement that HAL and Dassault had signed the mutual workshare contract and given it to the government.
IMAGE: Prime Minister Narendra Modi interacts with the employees at the all women TCS IT Centre, in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia on April 3, 2016. Photograph: PIB

Alleging that the Narendra Modi government has forgotten Lord Ram, former Vishwa Hindu Parishad president Pravin Togadia said that his supporters will march from Lucknow to Ayodhya on October 21 to awaken the Centre from its slumber.

Togadia, who now heads an organisation called Antarrashtriya Hindu Parishad, said the Centre has reneged on its promises.

"Our expectation was that that a Ram temple will be built in Ayodhya through an act of Parliament, that education will be made affordable and crores of our youth will get jobs. Petrol will become cheaper and farmers will be exempted from repaying their debts," Togadia told reporters here on way to Haldwani to attend a programme of his outfit.

Accusing the Modi government of belying all the expectations, he said it "has forgotten Lord Ram and become the advocate of Muslim women" on the issue of triple talaq.

He said the Parishad will take out a march from Lucknow to Ayodhya on October 21 to awaken the Centre from its sleep.
The United States has said the Jaish-e-Mohammed and Lashkar-e-Tayiba militant groups continue to pose a regional threat and that Pakistan did not adequately address America's concerns on terrorism in 2017.

Although al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan has been seriously degraded, remnants of its global leadership, as well as its regional affiliate al-Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent, continued to operate from remote locations in the region that historically have been exploited as safe havens, the US State Department said in its annual Country Reports on Terrorism for the year 2017.

"Pakistan-based Jaish-e-Mohammed and Lashkar-e-Tayiba continued to pose a regional threat in the subcontinent," it said on Wednesday.

The report notes that from August to December 2017, the Trump administration placed a pause on spending new foreign military financing for Pakistan, holding these funds until Pakistan addressed key US concerns, including the threat posed by the Haqqani Network and other terrorist groups that enjoyed safe haven in Pakistan.

"Pakistan did not adequately address these concerns in 2017," said the report.

Although Pakistan's National Action Plan calls to "ensure that no armed militias are allowed to function in the country," several terrorist groups focused on attacks outside of the country continued to operate from Pakistani soil in 2017, it said.

These groups included the Haqqani Network, besides the LeT and JeM which are directed against India.

Though Pakistan continued military operations to eradicate terrorist safe havens in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, their impact on all terrorist groups was uneven, said the State Department report.

According to the report, the Pakistani military and security forces undertook operations against groups that conducted attacks within Pakistan, such as the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan.

Even as the Pakistani government pledged support to political reconciliation between the Afghan government and the Afghan Taliban it did not restrict the Afghan Taliban and Haqqani Network from operating in Pakistan-based safe havens and threatening US and Afghan forces in Afghanistan.

"Pakistan did not take sufficient action against other externally focused groups such as Lashkar e-Taiba (LeT) and Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM) in 2017, which continued to operate, train, organise, and fundraise in Pakistan," the report said.

Pakistan detained Hafiz Saeed, leader of LeT and its front organisation Jamaat ud-Dawa (JuD), in January 2017, but a Pakistani court ordered his release from house arrest in November 2017, it said.

In its report, the State Department rued that progress remained slow on the Pakistan government's efforts to implement UN sanctions related to designated entities and enforce anti-money laundering/countering the financing of terrorism controls.

The Financial Action Task Force, it said, continued to note with concern that Pakistan's outstanding gaps in the implementation of the UN Security Council ISIS and al-Qaeda sanctions regime have not been resolved, and that UN-listed entities -- including LeT and its affiliates -- were not effectively prohibited from raising funds in Pakistan, nor were they denied financial services.

"Although Pakistan's laws technically comply with international anti-money laundering/countering the financing of terrorism standards, authorities failed to uniformly implement UN sanctions related to designated entities and individuals such as LeT and its affiliates, which continued to make use of economic resources and raise funds," it said.
The cockpit crew of the flight, which had 171 people on board, have been derostered and the Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau (AAIB) has been directed to probe the incident.

At least 30 passengers on a Jet Airways flight from Mumbai to Jaipur suffered nose and ear bleeding on Thursday after the crew 'forgot' to turn on a switch that controls cabin air pressure, officials said.

The cockpit crew of the flight, which had 171 people on board, have been derostered and the Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau (AAIB) has been directed to probe the incident.

An AAIB official told PTI that the incident could be a case of negligence on the part of the pilots since controlling cabin pressure control is part of check before operating a flight.

One of the pilots of the flight, which returned to Mumbai airport after being airborne for around 23 minutes, is a captain with more than five years of experience, sources said.

"During climb, the crew forgot to select bleed switch due to which cabin pressurisation could not be maintained. As a result, oxygen masks got deployed," the official at aviation regulator, Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA), said.

The Boeing 737 aircraft returned to Mumbai due to 'loss of cabin pressure' and the pilots have been taken off duty pending investigation, a Jet Airways spokesperson said.

Citing initial information, the official said few passengers have nose bleeding.

"Out of 166 passengers on board, 30 passengers are affected... some have nose bleeding, few have ear bleeding and some are complaining of headache," he added.

There were 166 passengers and five crew members on board flight 9W697.

WATCH: Midair panic as cabin pressure drops in Jet Airways flight from Mumbai to Jaipur

The Jet Airways spokesperson expressed regret for the inconvenience caused to passengers and said alternative arrangements are being made for the passengers.

Officials in Mumbai said that five passengers, who suffered nose and ear bleeding, were diagnosed with 'mild conductive deafness' and later discharged from hospital.

Mumbai-based Dr Balabhai Nanavati Hospital's chief operating officer Rajendra Patankar said their health condition was stable and they did not require admission.

As per their examination by ENT doctors, the five passengers suffered 'barotrauma' of ear, which is caused due to a change in air pressure, he said.

"I was sitting on an aisle seat when suddenly air pressure in the cabin dropped and oxygen masks came down. I saw a passenger sitting next to me bleeding from nose. Several others complained of extreme pain in their ears," Mumbai-based professional Prashant Sharma, who was in the flight, told PTI in Jaipur. He landed there in an alternative flight.

The Civil Aviation Ministry said it has requested the DGCA to immediately file the report on the issue.

'The crew is being derostered. Of the 166 people on board, 30 were affected and have been given treatment,' the ministry said in a tweet.

Against the backdrop of recent incidents related to safety of air passengers, Civil Aviation Minister Suresh Prabhu Thursday ordered a safety audit of all scheduled airlines and airports.

IMAGES: Video grabs of the incident on board Jet Airways flight shot by an passenger, Darshak Hathi. Photograph: Kind courtesy @DarshakHathi/Twitter
IMAGE: Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman addresses a press conference. Photograph: Ravi Choudhary/PTI Photo

Congress President Rahul Gandhi on Thursday accused Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman of "lying" on Hindustan Aeronautics Limited's capability to build Rafale aircraft and demanded her resignation.

The Congress chief took to Twitter to attack Sitharaman, alleging that her position as the defence minister has become untenable as a former chief of the state-run HAL has "nailed her lie".

"The RM (Rafale Minister) tasked with defending corruption has been caught lying again. The former HAL Chief, T S Raju, has nailed her lie, that HAL didn't have the capability to build the RAFALE. Her position is untenable & she must resign," he tweeted and tagged of a media report on the former HAL chief's assertion.

The Congress has alleged that the government caused loss of over Rs 41,000 crore to the exchequer and endangered national security by bypassing the state-run HAL in favour of some businessman "friends" for offset contract in the Rafale deal.

Under India's offset policy, foreign defence entities are mandated to spend at least 30 per cent of the total contract value in India through procurement of components or setting up of research and development facilities.

Sitharaman had earlier told PTI that it was former defence minister A K Antony's unprecedented intervention that led to the deal being cancelled after the price negotiation committee had almost finalised the deal.

The charge has been denied by Antony as false.

Sitharaman had also accused Antony of not supporting HAL in getting the Rafale deal.

The Congress has stepped up the attack on the government over the Rafale deal and is seeking to make it a major poll issue ahead of assembly elections in some key states later this year and the parliamentary election in 2019.
The ruling Republican party in the United States has apologised to the Hindus after a newspaper advertisement featuring Lord Ganesha to woo the minority community voters in Texas ended up 'offending' them.

The advert, on the occasion of the 'Ganesh Chaturthi' festival, included the imagery of Lord Ganesha with the text, 'Would you worship a donkey or an elephant? The choice is yours.'

The elephant is the party symbol of the Republicans while Democrats have donkey as their party's symbol.

The Indian-American community described the political advertisement of the Grand Old Party in an Indian-American newspaper as 'offensive' for featuring Lord Ganesha.

The party's county unit, Fort Bend County Republican Party which published the ad, apologised and clarified that it 'was not meant to disparage Hindu customs or traditions in any way'.

The ad, with arrows pointing to the body parts of Lord Ganesha, listed out qualities such as -- 'A BIG HEAD, TO THINK OUT OF THE BOX', 'BIG EYES TO LOOK BEYOND WHAT YOU SEE', 'LARGE EARS TO LISTEN TO OTHERS ATTENTIVELY', 'LARGE STOMACH, TO PEACEFULLY DIGEST ALL THE GOOD AND BAD IN LIFE' among others.

An advocacy group, the Hindu-American Foundation of Houston, called on the Fort Bend County Republican Party to apologise for the advert about the celebration of the 'Ganesh Chaturthi' festival.

"While we appreciate the Fort Bend County GOP's attempt to reach out to Hindus on an important Hindu festival, its ad - equating Hindus' veneration of the Lord Ganesha with choosing a political party based on its animal symbol - is problematic and offensive," said Rishi Bhutada, HAF Board Member and Fort Bend County resident.

Using religious imagery in order to explicitly appeal for political support should best be avoided by any political party, he said.

"The implication regarding the worship of animals as gods was also disheartening to the HAF leaders, as that is a common misconception taught in US schools, which frequently ends up becoming a taunt used to bully Hindu students," the HAF said.

Bhutada also called upon the Fort Bend County Republican Party to apologise for the offensive and inaccurate reference, not to run the advert again and for elected officials in the County to send the same message to the Party as well.

Sri Preston Kulkarni, the Democratic candidate for the US Congress from District 22 in Texas, seized on the Republican advert, calling it offensive in a tweet on Tuesday.

"Asking Hindu-Americans if they would rather vote for a donkey or an elephant by comparing Ganesha, a religious figure, to a political party is highly inappropriate. The Fort Bend County Republican party must retract this ad," he said.

Meanwhile, the Fort Bend Republican party responded and said: "The ad was not meant to disparage Hindu customs or traditions in any way. We offer our sincerest apologies to anyone that was offended by the ad. Obviously, that was not the intent."

In a letter, chairman Jacey Jetton, the first Korean-American to lead the Fort Bend County Republican Party said: "The ad was meant to be part of the celebration to acknowledge the 'Ganesh Chaturthi' festival of September 13".

"This ad was created with input from those of Hindu faith so that we could properly pay respect to the sacred festival. This highlights the difficulty in outreach that can be positive for one group but not for another in the same community.

"We offer our sincerest apologies to anyone that was offended by the ad. Obviously, that was not the intent. The ad was not meant to disparage Hindu customs or traditions in any way," Jetton said.
There cannot be a 'blanket ban' on media reporting on cases of rape and sexual abuse but such incidents should not be sensationalised, the Supreme Court said on Thursday.

It made the observations after vacating a Patna high court order restraining the media from reporting on the probe into the Muzaffarpur shelter home case where several women were allegedly raped and sexually abused over a period of time.

Asking both the print and the electronic media not to 'sensationalise' incidents of sexual assaults and abuse and report such cases responsibly so as not to reveal the identity of the victim, a bench of Justices Madan B Lokur and Deepak Gupta issued notices to the Press Council of India, Editors Guild of India, News Broadcasting Standards Authority and News Broadcasters Association seeking their assistance in the matter.

The bench said it would need the help of these bodies on the issue of media reporting in such cases as it related to the criminal justice system and press freedom.

"In the meanwhile, the blanket order passed by the Patna high court on August 23 with regard to media reporting (in Muzaffarpur shelter home case) is vacated," it said.

The bench also restrained the electronic media from telecasting or showing the victims of sexual abuse and violence, even in a morphed or blurred form, saying this would be in the interest of such victims.

"We request the media not to interview the victims. The news of the event may of course be disseminated," the bench said, adding 'we also request the electronic and print media not to sensationalise such events'.

Senior advocate Shekhar Naphade, appearing for a scribe who has challenged the Patna high court order, argued that there were guidelines, including on journalistic ethics, and statutory provisions, but these were being violated as the media was conducting 'parallel investigations' and trial.

"It appears that there is no mechanism of enforcement and implementation of statutory provisions and guidelines," the bench observed, adding that 'in the absence of any mechanism, it is possible that there could be some person, who is not involved in a case, be mistakenly made an accused by the media'.

Naphade said 'media trial' of cases cannot be allowed and they should be asked to do factual reporting.

The bench observed that 'there cannot be a blanket ban on media reporting. One of the aspects is how do you prevent disclosure of identity (of victims of sexual assaults). The second aspect is conclusions are drawn by the media'.

"They (media) announce a fellow guilty," it said, adding 'there cannot be media trials'.

The bench then asked Naphade 'where to draw the line and how to check it?'

The senior counsel said the media cannot pronounce a person guilty and conduct parallel investigation.

"It is the duty of media to report facts. Somewhere, a line has to be drawn. We have to look into it."

Referring to section 228-A of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) which deals with disclosure of identity of such victims, Naphade said the media was taking a 'circuitous route', like interviewing the father of the victim, to do this.

He said that under section 228-A, revealing the identity is a cognisable offence and the police is bound to take action in such cases.

"If they (media) do not obey this, it amounts to contempt and also abetment of offence. Police has to be alerted," he said.

However, the bench observed, "Tell us about this. We will prepare some guidelines. We may need the assistance of Press Council of India also."

Naphade referred to the Protection of Children from Sexual Offenses (POCSO) Act and said disclosure of a victim's identity is a 'non-cognisable' offence and the apex court could direct the police chiefs of all the states to nominate an officer who could file complaints in this regard before a magistrate.

The bench asked its registry to issue notices to the Press Council of India, Editors' Guild of India, News Broadcasting Standards Authority and News Broadcasters Association to assist the court and posted the matter for hearing after two weeks.

At the fag end of hearing, lawyer Aparna Bhat, assisting the court as an amicus curiae in the matter, referred to an earlier report of the Law Commission and said the same issue was dealt with in it.

Naphade also referred to the Broadcasting Services Regulation Bill, 2006 and said that it has lapsed.

He said the apex court can pass direction under Article 142 of the Constitution, which deals with enforcement of decrees and orders of the Supreme Court, as was done at the time of Visakha guidelines which dealt with the issue of sexual harassment of women at workplace.

"We cannot become Parliament," the bench told Naphade, who said he would circulate the bill among the parties in the case.

On September 18, the apex court had referred to the recent Rewari gang rape case and asked why no action was taken against media houses for flouting the law as 'everything has been said' about the 19-year-old victim.

In the Muzaffarpur case, over 30 girls were allegedly raped at the shelter home run by one Brajesh Thakur, the chief of a state-funded NGO.

The alleged sexual exploitation of the girls was first highlighted in an audit report submitted by Tata Institute of Social Sciences to the state's social welfare department.

A first information report was lodged against 11 people, including Thakur, on May 31. The probe was later taken over by the CBI.

The Supreme Court termed the facts emerging from CBI's probe as 'very disturbing' and asked the Bihar Police to probe the alleged recovery of large quantity of ammunition from former state minister Manju Verma and her husband.

Manju Verma had resigned as the Social Welfare Minister in the Bihar government after it came to light that her husband Chandrashekhar Verma had spoken to prime accused Brajesh Thakur several times between January and June this year.

The apex court, which observed that CBI's probe in the case seemed to be on track, said it was not clear whether illegal arms were also recovered from the possession of the Vermas and the matter needed to be looked into by the local police.

Taking note of the facts emerging from the two status reports filed by the CBI, the bench said that Thakur appeared to be a 'very influential' man, as his neighbours were scared to file any complaint against him despite the fact that they had heard screams of girls from the shelter home.

The bench said, "It has also come on record that one Chandrashekhar Verma and his wife Manju Verma have been in possession of illegal ammunition of a fairly large quantity. It is not clear whether they were in possession of illegal arms as well. The status report mentions that an FIR has been lodged against Chandrashekhar Verma and Manju Verma."

"The affairs of these two need to be looked into, particularly with regard to their procurement and possession of illegal ammunition and availability of illegal weapons, if any. We request the local police in the state of Bihar to look into this aspect with some degree of seriousness," it said.

The bench took note of the fact that the state's social welfare department had shifted some girls from the shelter home run by Brajesh Thakur in March this year, but the purpose of shifting was not clear.

"The status report also mentions that some girls were transferred on March 20, 2018 by social welfare department from the shelter home, which is the subject matter of present investigation by the CBI," it said.

It is not clear why these girls were transferred out, particularly when the report given by Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS) about the status of the shelter home was known to the state in May, the bench observed.

"The transfer seems to suggest that the social welfare department of the Government of Bihar was aware of certain unsavoury activities in the shelter home and that may have been the reason for transfer of the victim girls," it said.

"The CBI should seize the record of the social welfare department in this regard and carry out the investigation," it said and asked Bihar to file an affidavit indicating the circumstances necessitating the transfer of these girls.

Regarding Thakur, the bench said 'it appears that the person in-charge of the NGO 'Sewa Sankalp Evam Vikas Samiti', Brajesh Thakur, is a very influential person and people in the neighbourhood are scared of him and not able to make any complaint against him'.

"In fact it has come out that people in the neighbourhood have heard screaming by the girls in the shelter home but they did not bring it to the notice of anybody because of the apparent terror of Brajesh Thakur. The CBI will need to look into the antecedents, connections and influence of Brajesh Thakur," the bench said.

Referring to the CBI's reports, it said the NGO had received around Rs 4.5 crore worth of funds from the state over a period of 10 years and 35 vehicles were purchased.

"The other assets of the NGO or Brajesh Thakur do not appear to be very clear. It is necessary, in our opinion, that the Income Tax Department should look into the income and assets of Brajesh Thakur and indeed of the NGO Sewa Sankalp Evam Vikas Samiti," it said.

"The CBI team should request the Chief Commissioner/Commissioner having jurisdiction in the area to look into this matter and investigate the affairs of the NGO and of Brajesh Thakur from the income tax angle," it said.

The apex court said that issues concerning the shelter home was of an 'extremely serious nature' and requires a 'greater in-depth scrutiny' by the CBI.

It also directed the agency to file their next status report of investigation before it in a sealed cover within four weeks.

Earlier during the hearing, the bench said it had perused the two status reports filed by the CBI and the facts indicated that what had happened was 'very disturbing'.

"There is much more into it, than what meets the eyes," Justice Lokur told Attorney General K K Venugopal.

"It needs to be looked into very, very carefully," it said, adding, "You (CBI) continue with your investigation."

During the hearing, advocate Aparna Bhat, assisting the court as an amicus curiae in the matter, said the National Institute of Mental Health and Neuro Sciences (NIMHANS) was assisting CBI on the psycho-social and rehabilitation issues of the victims and they may be permitted to complete the task by first week of October.

The bench said other agencies like TISS, should allow the CBI and NIMHANS for the time being to carry out their work.

The court has posted the matter for hearing on October 25.
Foreign ministers of India and Pakistan will meet on sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in New York, the government announced on Thursday, the first such high-level engagement since suspension of dialogue between the two nations after the Pathankot air base terror attack in 2016.

Announcing the meeting between External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj with her Pakistani counterpart Shah Mahmood Qureshi, MEA Spokesperson Raveesh Kumar, however, made it clear it is not a resumption of the Indo-Pak dialogue and India agreed to the meeting following a request from Pakistan.

He also insisted the decision doesn't change the country's position on cross-border terrorism.

During the meeting, likely to take place next week, India is expected to strongly raise the issue of terrorism emanating from the Pakistani soil.

The Swaraj-Qureshi meeting will be the first engagement at this level since January 2016 when New Delhi halted the dialogue with Islamabad in the aftermath of Pathankot terror attack, for which India holds Pakistan-based groups responsible.

Indo-Pak ties have nose-dived since then in view of a number of terror strikes by Pakistan-based groups, which India retaliated by carrying out 'surgical strikes' in September 2016 across the LoC.

India has been maintaining that terror and talks cannot go together.

"I must distinguish between a meeting and dialogue. This does not indicate any change in policy as far as our stand on terrorism and cross-border terrorism is concerned," the MEA spokesperson said at a media briefing.

The last meeting between the two foreign ministers was held during Swaraj's visit to Islamabad in December 2015 to attend the Heart of Asia Summit, where she had met he then Pakistan foreign minister Sartaj Aziz.

After the meeting, the two sides had announced resumption of Indo-Pak dialogue under the comprehensive bilateral format, but the initiative did not take off after Pakistan-based terror groups attacked the Pathankot air base.

Kumar said Swaraj will also attend the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation foreign ministers' meeting on the sidelines of the UNGA.

India has been maintaining that there cannot be any comprehensive dialogue with Pakistan till it stops cross-border terrorism.

India agreed to Swaraj-Qureshi meeting following a letter to Prime Minister Narendra Modi by his Pakistani counterpart Imran Khan seeking a ministerial interaction on the sidelines of the UNGA.

Separately, the Pakistan Foreign Minister has also written a letter to Swaraj reiterating Khan's proposal for a meeting. Both the letters were handed over to India on September 17 by Pakistan High Commissioner, Kumar said.

The date for the meeting was being finalised by the permanent missions of the two countries in New York, he said adding the agenda for the meeting is yet to be finalised.

Swaraj is scheduled to leave for New York on September 22 morning and return on September 30.

Khan, who was sworn in as Pakistan prime minister last month, has been favouring resumption of talks between the two sides.

In his letter to Modi, Khan also indicated Pakistan's willingness to discuss terrorism.

Asked about Pakistan's push for a SAARC summit, Kumar said the atmosphere in the region is not conducive.

"There are number of other countries in the region who also felt that under the shadow of terrorism, it (SAARC summit) will be difficult to hold," said Kumar.

Kumar said Swaraj will also raise the issue of Kartarpur Sahib during the meeting.

The Kartarpur Sahib shrine in Pakistan is revered by Indian Sikhs, who have been seeking permission for easier access to go there for pilgrimage.

He said India will also take up killing of a Border Security Force jawan by Pakistani troops along the International Border in an 'appropriate' manner.

The BSF jawan's throat was slit and his body bore multiple bullet injuries after the missing trooper was found killed by Pakistani troops in the Jammu region, in a first-of-its-kind barbaric act against Indian forces along the International Border.

"We are ascertaining the facts on this matter...I can say (it is) a barbaric incident which not only defies logic, not only defies civilised behaviour, but also is against all international norms," Kumar said.

He said the BSF had strongly taken up the matter with their counterpart on the Pakistani side.

"It is a very serious issue and definitely we will take it up with the Pakistani side in an appropriate manner," he said.
The startling story of how a bitter ex-girlfriend helped capture artefacts raider Subhash Kapoor.

Illustration: Dominic Xavier/Rediff.com

The arrest of idol thief Subhash Chandra Kapoor, then 62, on October 30, 2011, at Frankfurt international airport, after Interpol issued a red corner alert, revealed something shocking to the world.

It showed how a ring of fancily-turned out, high-flying antique dealers, like Kapoor, were stealing so many of India's historical treasures to send to art markets and museums in the West, while the guardians of these relics, be they temple caretakers or government officials, either turned a blind eye or secretly facilitated this illegal trade.

The smooth, urbane Kapoor, India born but an American citizen, ran Art of the Past, a posh, spendy gallery at 1242 Madison Avenue in Manhattan, and belonged to a family of Indian art dealers.

He was brought back to Chennai on July 14, 2012 to Puzhal Central Jail. Some years later he was transferred to the Trichy Central Prison in Tiruchirapalli, Tamil Nadu, as his trial proceeds. He faces trial eventually in the US too.

Kapoor was not the biggest of antiquity thieves. But his arrest was timely.

It brought global awareness.

Kapoor has till date been found allegedly responsible for the theft of 2,622 artefacts worth $107.6 million (approximately Rs 6,671 crore/Rs 66.71 billion), according to The New York Times.

A combination of factors led to Kapoor's lucky arrest.

Very few know that it was a bitter ex-girlfriend named Grace Paramaspry Punusamy who helped set the ball rolling.

IMAGE: Prime Minister Narendra Damodardas Modi with then US attorney general Loretta E Lynch at a ceremony in 2016 for the return of temple idols stolen and smuggled from India. Photograph: Kind courtesy MEA/Flickr

When the Brooklyn Museum in 2009 purchased a Chola-era Shiva and announced its arrival on its Web site, Punusamy, who knew way too much about Kapoor's pieces, writing under the handle Grace Paramaspry, started posting messages there, wondering about the piece's provenance (place of origin):

Punusamy: 'Does this Siva has (sic) any history of passing through Mr Subhash Kapoor in New York, any part of the provenance history from UK?'

Brooklyn Museum curator Joan Cummins, not providing details of the Shiva's provenance, sidestepped the question with this lame answer: 'We know the Shiva's history since the late 1960s, and in that time it was not in the UK, nor did it come through Subhash Kapoor'.

Punusamy's post caught the eye of an ICE (US Immigration and Customs Enforcement) officer named Brenton Easter and his team and they began their own course of action in building a case against Kapoor and his operation.

Meanwhile Punusamy began to aid the Indian authorities too in their efforts to track down Kapoor, apparently even providing photographs and information on his movements, so he could be nabbed at Flughafen Frankfurt am Main in 2012.

S Vijay Kumar's book The Idol Thief, profiles Grace Punusamy and explains her connection with Subhash Kapoor and how she helped bring about his arrest.

Singapore-based Kumar, who calls himself VJ and works in shipping, several years ago turned blogging into a special and very useful art, when he started keeping track, online, of idol thefts and the illicit artefacts trade.

From his office/home desk chair, thousands of miles away, after diligently, laboriously scanning the Internet and newspaper reports, VJ would regularly post exhaustive details of the Indian artefacts and murtis that had been burgled and then catalogue when they reappeared in museums and auctions in other parts of the world.

His efforts drew attention and eventually both American and Indian authorities reached out to VJ for his assistance in building a case against Kapoor.

An exclusive excerpt from S Vijay Kumar's The Idol Thief: The True Story Of The Looting Of India's Temples:

IMAGE: Singapore-based S Vijay Kumar, who calls himself VJ and works in shipping, several years ago turned blogging into a special and very useful art, when he started keeping track, online, of idol thefts and the illicit artefacts trade. Photograph: Kind courtesy Vijay Kumar

A rather rundown shopping mall by Singapore's high standards, the Tanglin Shopping Centre on Tanglin Road, just off the high-end Orchard Road, holds within it a sprinkling of 'art galleries' selling a myriad art pieces, from modern Buddha faces in eclectic colours to Khmer funeral reliquary.

They hardly seem to have any visitors except for the occasional 'foreign' tourist looking for a cheap memento. But art galleries the world over are similar -- they display a fraction of their actual stock, leaving the 'better' ones safe in their godowns for private viewings of their elite clients.

One such gallery at the Tanglin Shopping Mall was Jazmin Asian Arts, run by Grace Paramaspry Punusamy.

Punusamy, who'd grown up in the island city-State, was the daughter of a Tamil father and a Chinese mother. She sold Kapoor's artefacts on consignment basis, and they began dating soon after they met in 1997.

Kapoor had married Neeru in 1976 in India, shortly before the family emigrated to America. The couple had a daughter, Mamta Kapoor, but they had divorced in 1986 and had been living separately since then.

Very scant details are available about the Grace-Subhash relationship, but they seem to have been quite a pair, embarking on many 'business development' trips into South-East Asia and creating a network of dealers and suppliers.

In fact, Kapoor was so comfortable with Grace that he started using her as a cover for provenance paperwork which enabled him to create fake ownership records and helped to sell to prestigious museums -- paperwork actually signed by Grace for his artefacts.

But some time in 2008, after nearly a decade together, Kapoor ended their relationship. During this time Kapoor had started a relationship with another woman, Selina Mohamed, in America, but it is not known if this was the reason for the split.

What we do know is that Selina was also involved in Subhash's work.

However, the parting was not peaceful, to say the least. They went to court in 2010 in Singapore to settle their business dealings. Kapoor won the case, displaying his shrewd business acumen and his relationship with dealers.

This is what the Straits Times had to say in March 2010:

A Singaporean art dealer, who was in a relationship with an American art dealer, kept antiques worth hundreds of thousands of dollars after their affair soured two years ago. In an attempt to get these back, Mr Subhash Kapoor, 61, took her to the High Court and succeeded.

Delivering his verdict on Thursday, Judicial Commissioner Steven Chong said he agreed with Ms Paramaspry Punusamy's lawyer that the case should have never come to court as it really was about a break-up between two lovers.

The judge also noted that while both parties were unable to produce much in documentation to prove ownership of the 19 contested antiques, Mr Kapoor, 61, had called on three art traders from Bangkok to testify that they have sold some of the pieces to him.

Ms Paramaspry, 54, did not produce any witnesses during the three-day hearing heard last month. Ms Punusamy, the proprietor of Jazmin Asian Arts at Tanglin Shopping Centre, was also ordered to pay costs for the proceedings.

It is interesting to note a key finding by the judge that 'both parties were unable to produce much in documentation to prove ownership of the 19 contested antiques'.

Though this was not front-page news in conservative Singapore, the Asian Civilisations Museum, which had done business with Subhash Kapoor's Art of the Past, would have surely followed this case keenly.

Grace took the verdict badly.

She had lost her case, money, artefacts and had also been publicly shamed.

She was itching for retribution, hence her indiscreet and innuendo-laden comments on the Brooklyn Museum's Web site that had caught the attention of Indy (Easter) and his team.

Grace would in due course reach out to Indian law enforcement agencies to nail Subhash Kapoor and extract her sweet revenge.

Photograph: P Rajendran/ Rediff.com IMAGE: A recovered black-stone Boddhisattva from Bihar or West Bengal, dated to the 11th-12th century, photographed during a repatriation ceremony of artefacts at the Indian consulate in New York, January 14, 2014.

We turn again to an extract from the confession of Subhash Kapoor to piece together the story in his own words:

'My wife and I divorced in the year 1986-1987 in America and my wife is living separately now. My daughter Mamtha is presently 32 years old and she is living with her husband in New York... I could remember that the Chandrasekar bronze idol received from Sanjivi Ashokan was sold to (an) antique collector and now I believe it is in Brooklyn Museum...'

'I created false provenance documents for all these stolen idols received from Sanjivi Ashokan with the help of my long time girlfriend Selena Mohammed, my employee Aaron Friedman and Jennifer Moore...'

His confession also stated that he had been in a relationship with Selena for ten years and that 'she has the access for my office and residence'.

Excerpted from The Idol Thief: The True Story Of The Looting Of India's Temples by S Vijay Kumar, with the kind permission of the publishers, Juggernaut.
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German auto giant Volkswagen AG (VKW.L,VLKAF.PK, VOW.BE) will end almost all of its in Iran, Bloomberg reported citing a U.S. official who led discussions with the Wolfsburg-based company.

The Trump administration persuaded Volkswagen AG to comply with sanctions on Iran.

The U.S. and Volkswagen hammered out the final details on Tuesday after weeks of talks. Volkswagen will still be allowed to do some business in Iran under a humanitarian exception, U.S. Ambassador to Germany Richard Grenell reportedly said.

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Norcross, Georgia -based Nutracap Holdings, LLC is recalling various dietary supplements due to undeclared wheat, milk, soy and/or coconut on the labels, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration said. The Boba Origin brand 100% Whey Protein Isolate product that comes in Brown Sugar Milk Tea flavor may have the presence of undeclared milk & soy.

While reporting financial results for the first quarter on Tuesday, healthcare services company Cardinal Health, Inc. (CAH) reaffirmed its adjusted earnings guidance in the range of $5.60 to $5.90 per share. On average, 13 analysts polled by Thomson Reuters expect the company to report earnings of...

Macy's, Inc. (M) said, beginning in February 2022, it will provide a debt-free education benefit program to its colleagues, investing approximately $35 million over the next 4 years. The program, available for regular, salaried and hourly colleagues, will cover 100% of tuition, books and fees for a wide...
Higher futures and steady gold prices point to a slightly positive start for the Canadian stock market on Thursday.

Activity is likely to be mostly stock specific with corporate news providing some direction.

The market has been closely following the developments on the NAFTA front. Canada's Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland and her U.S. trade counterpart continue negotiate, aiming to find a compromise that would help finalise the NAFTA ahead of the October 1 deadline.

"Trade agreements do take some time, both to negotiate and to update, because the is complicated and trade agreements are complicated," said Freeland.

When asked about whether she could hear the clock ticking, she is reported to have said, "Canada's sole objective, the only target that we are aiming for, is getting a good deal for Canada, so that's what we're focused on.

The benchmark S&P/TSX Composite Index ended down 46.12 points, or 0.28%, at 16,149.92, the day's low. The index touched a high of 16,229.99 during the session.

In company news, Magna International Inc. (MG.TO) announced today that its powertrain unit has signed an agreement to sell its global Fluid Pressure & Controls to South Korea-based Hanon Systems, for

approximately $1.23 billion.

IntelGenx Corp. (IGX.V.TO) announced that it has executed a non-binding letter of intent or LOI with Tilray, Inc. to enter into a world-wide agreement to produce cannabis-infused VersaFilm products.

Asian were subdued on Thursday with investors largely staying on the sidelines amid trade war worries. The Chinese market ended flat after Alibaba's founder and chairman Jack Ma said the e-commerce giant no longer

plans to create one million jobs in the U.S., amid the ongoing trade conflict between the U.S. and China.

European markets edged higher, extending recent gains, with investors shrugging off trade worries and looking ahead to next week's monetary policy meeting of the Federal Reserve for further direction.

In economic news, the Organization for Economic Cooperation & Development downgraded it global growth projections for both 2018 and 2019. According to Interim Economic Outlook, the global economy will grow 3.7% each this year and next. In May, the OECD had projected 3.8% expansion for 2018 and 3.9% for 2019.

The United States will expand 2.9% in 2018 and 2.7% in 2019, the agency said. China's growth is seen at 6.7% this year and 6.4% in 2019.

The Paris-based think tank said escalating trade tensions, tightening financial conditions in emerging markets and political risks could further undermine strong and sustainable medium-term growth worldwide.

"Trade tensions are starting to bite, and are already having adverse effects on confidence and investment plans," OECD Chief Economist Laurence Boone, said.

"Trade growth has stalled, restrictions are having marked sectoral effects and the level of uncertainty on trade stances remains high."

In U.K., retail sales grew unexpectedly in August, gaining 0.3% month-on-month, data from the Office for National Statistics revealed. However, it was slower than the 0.9% increase seen in July. Sales were expected to fall 0.2% in the month.

In the United States, data on weekly jobless claims and the Philadelphia Fed manufacturing index for September are due at 8:30 AM ET.

Data on U.S. existing home sales will be released at 10:00 AM ET.

In commodities, crude oil futures for October were down $0.11, or 0.16%, at $70.66 a barrel.

Natural gas futures for October were up $0.014, or 0.48%, at $2.922 per million btu.

Gold futures for December were gaining $2.20, or 0.18%, at $1,210.50 an ounce.

Silver futures for October were up $0.050, or 0.35%, at $14.330 an ounce, while Copper futures were declining marginally, at $2.727 per pound.

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Business News
China's central bank warned investors of risks in Initial Coin Offerings or ICOs and cryptocurrency investment amid the increased activity by overseas operators.

In a public notice, the Shanghai Head Office of People's Bank of China or PBOC urged consumers and investors to increase their risk awareness of ICO variants, and to be away from overseas operators issuing ICOs and virtual currency transactions for domestic residents.

Chinese regulators had started a crackdown on cryptocurrency exchanges in Septermber 2017, as the growth of the crypto market in the country raised concern.

The PBoC had issued a blanket ban on all ICOs, citing it as an illegal practice of fundraising. Many big crypto exchanges in China relocated to Hong Kong and Japan following the clampdown.

In its latest notice, the bank noted that the global share of domestic virtual currency transactions has dropped from the initial 90% to less than 5%, effectively avoiding the virtual currency bubble.

In August, it was reported that central bank's internet authority was targeting up to 124 offshore cryptocurrency trading platforms serving China's citizens by blocking their IP addresses.

The PBoC now said it would strengthen the monitoring of the offshore servers of 124 platforms. It will also closely monitor ICOs and its multiple variants, strengthen research and judgement, proactively fight and prevent concerns.

The bank also asked the investors to report suspected illegal crimes to the relevant regulatory authorities.

Chinese internet giants Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent have blocked cryptocurrency-related activities on their platforms amid the country's intensifying crackdown on cryptocurrencies.

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Business News
A consortium of fifteen of the world's largest banks, trading companies, an energy major, and an inspection company are set to develop a decentralized Ethereum blockchain-powered commodity trading platform. It is expected to catalyze the world's commodity trade finance network.

The new joint venture called "komgo SA" will be managed and operated as an independent entity. The fifteen investors in the venture include ABN Amro, BNP Paribas, Citibank, Credit Agricole CIB, Gunvor, ING, Koch, Macquarie, Mercuria, MUFG Bank, Natixis, Rabobank, Shell, SGS and Societe Generale.

The platform, to be launched before the end of the year, will be developed in partnership with ConsenSys, which builds applications, infrastructure, and solutions on the Ethereum network. It will be supported by one of the investors SGS, which will help in inspection, verification, testing, and certification of the platform.

This platform will provide trusted digital ledgers to limit operational risks of fraud, counterfeiting or human error. With all data available on the same platform, komgo will reduce time spent on processing documents and data, which will in turn speed up the transaction process.

Geneva-based komgo will start with two products, expected to launch before year end. The first one will standardize and facilitate KYC process without using a central database. The exchange of documents will be executed in an encrypted way over the blockchain on a need to know basis.

The second product will be digital letters of credit, allowing commodity houses or other platforms to submit digital trade data and documents to komgo customer banks of their choice.

The consortium includes most of the organizations that were part of a core team that successfully tested two blockchain-based Proofs of Concept (PoC) previously in energy and soft commodities trading.

Societe Generale, ING and Mercuria were involved in the first platform prototype completed in February 2017 that demonstrated how blockchain enhanced real time access to information by all parties, the efficiency and the security of the process.

Later in January 2018, Louis Dreyfus Co., ING, Societe Generale and ABN AMRO executed a soybean shipment transaction from the U.S. to China on blockchain. It mirrored the paper-based process to show significant efficiency improvements with data being reduced fivefold with faster document processing.

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Technology News
Encouraged by Pyongyang's "important commitments" during the inter-Korean summit Wednesday, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said the United States is prepared to engage immediately in negotiations to transform U.S.-North Korea relations.

In a high profile meeting in the North Korean capital, its leader Kim Jong-un told South Korean President Moon Jae-in that his government will shut a major missile launch site. Also, both the leaders agreed on a way to achieve denuclearisation on the Korean peninsula.

"We welcome President Moon and Chairman Kim's reaffirmation of the Singapore joint statement of complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula, including the permanent dismantlement of all facilities at Yongbyon in the presence of U.S. and IAEA inspectors," Pompeo said in a statement.

North Korea is believed to have produced the material used in its nuclear tests at the Yongbyon nuclear facility.

He also welcomed Kim's decision to complete the previously announced dismantlement of the Tongchang-ri nuclear site in the presence of U.S. and international inspectors as a step toward the final fully verified denuclearization of North Korea. This was one of the key promises made by Kim to US President Donald Trump at their Singapore summit.

In the biggest ever breakthrough for peace on the Korean peninsula as well as restoration of bilateral ties, the United States and North Korea agreed on June 12 to halt two major defense deterrents that posed the biggest threat to each other.

North Korea committed to work towards "the complete denuclearization of the Korean peninsula." In return, the U.S. gave assurance to North Korea that it is ready to stop "provocative and expensive" war games with South Korea.

And in a rare move from Trump in defusing tensions last month, he annulled his Defense Secretary's move to resume the United States' joint war games with South Korea.

Pompeo said he has invited his North Korean counterpart Ri Yong Ho to meet in New York City next week on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly meeting.

Also, North Korean representatives have been invited to meet US Special Representative for North Korea, Stephen Biegun, in Vienna "at the earliest opportunity."

"This will mark the beginning of negotiations to transform U.S.-DPRK relations through the process of rapid denuclearization of North Korea, to be completed by January 2021, as committed by Chairman Kim, and to construct a lasting and stable peace regime on the Korean Peninsula," the statement said.

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Business News
The takeover battle by Comcast Corp. (CMCSK,CMCSA) and Rupert Murdoch's 21st Century Fox Inc. (FOX, FOXA) for British broadcaster Sky plc (BSY.L, SKY.L) will be settled through an auction.

The UK Takeover Panel said Thursday that an auction procedure is expected to commence on the evening of Friday, September 21, 2018 and end in the evening of September 22, 2018.

The winner of the auction, after a maximum of three rounds, will be announced on Saturday. However, it is very rare to settle a takeover of a high-profile public company through a takeover auction.

In the first round, only the offeror with the lowest offer as at the commencement of the auction may make an increased bid. In this case, 21st Century Fox can make an increased bid for Sky.

In the second round, Comcast, which was not eligible to make a bid in the first round, can make an increased bid for Sky.

If the auction procedure has not concluded after the second round, a final round will be held, in which both offerors may make an increased bid.

Sky has a market capitalization of 27 billion pounds, or about $36 billion. 21st Century Fox already owns a 39 percent stake in Sky.

In July, Comcast increased its cash offer for Sky to 26 billion pounds, or about $34 billion. The move by Comcast came less than a day after 21st Century Fox increased its offer to 24.5 billion pounds, or about $32.5 billion.

If Fox emerges as the winner in the Sky auction process, it would also mean Walt Disney Co. (DIS) could gain control over Sky. Disney has already agreed to acquire certain assets of Fox, including its stake in Sky.

The UK Takeover Panel noted that Sky, Comcast, Fox and Disney have agreed to the terms of the auction procedure.

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Business News
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, has asked the committee top Democrat Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., to give him a copy of the letter she received from Dr. Christine Blasey Ford regarding sexual assault allegations against President Donald Trump's Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh.

"It's critical for the full committee to have access to the original letter in order to conduct a fair and thorough investigation," Grassley said in a letter he sent to Feinstein.

It was in the letter Ford sent to Feinstein in July that the 51-year old clinical psychology professor first made an allegation that Kavanaugh attempted to rape her on the sidelines of a party in Maryland more than three decades ago, when they were teenagers.

The allegations in the letter were published in a report by the Washington Post on Sunday, after which Grassley invited both Ford and Kavanaugh to testify before the committee regarding the allegation.

Ford wants an FBI inquiry ahead of the hearing, but Grassley claims it is not the FBI's role to investigate such matters

Grassley said he has made a formal request for a copy of the letter Feinstein received.

"While Feinstein eventually referred the letter to the FBI last week, which was then redacted and added to Judge Kavanaugh's background file, committee Republicans have not yet been able to access an unredacted version of the letter," Grassley said.

He added that sexual assault allegations should not be deployed strategically for political gain.

Feinstein said the FBI routinely investigates allegations like Ford's.

"They did it with Anita Hill's allegations 27 years ago and they did it this year with allegations against Rob Porter. The FBI needs to investigate and the Senate needs to wait until that's done", said the California senator.

"In 1991, Senate Republicans said an FBI investigation was the 'the very right thing to do' - but now, those same Republicans insist the FBI cannot investigate whether Judge Kavanaugh committed sexual assault. Why?" she asked on Twitter.

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Political News


Congress President Rahul Gandhi (file photo) Terming Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman the "Rafale Minister", Congress President Rahul Gandhi on Thursday demanded her resignation after former HAL chief T. Suvarna Raju refuted her claims that the state-owned aerospace and defence company did not have the capability to build the fighter jets. "The RM (Rafale Minister) tasked with defending corruption has been caught lying again. The former HAL chief, T.S. Raju, has nailed her lie, that HAL (Hindustan Aeronautics Limited) didn't have the capability to build the Rafale," Gandhi said.



"Her position is untenable and she must resign" he said.



Gandhi's comment came amid a war of words between the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government and the Congress, after Sitharaman during an interview to a news channel claimed that the Bengaluru headquartered company governed under the management of the Indian Ministry of Defence was not competent enough to produce the aircraft.






Supreme Court (file photo) The Supreme Court on Thursday reserved its order on a plea seeking court-monitored SIT probe into the charge that the five right activists have links with banned outfit CPI (Maoist) and were allegedly involved in a conspiracy to kill sovereign leaders. A bench of Chief Justice Dipak Misra, Justice A.M. Khanwilkar and Justice D.Y. Chandrachud reserved the order with senior counsel Abhishek Manu Singhvi taking the court through the sequence of events demonstrating that entire case is cooked up.



Picking holes in the Maharashtra police investigation leading to the arrest of five activists -- Varavara Rao, Arun Ferreira, Vernon Gonsalves, Sudha Bhardwaj and Gautam Navlakha -- Singhvi told the bench that when there is a real doubt about the credibility and sanctity of the probe, it should be entrusted to a Special Investigating Team.



Singhvi pointed out that there was no separate FIR on the alleged Maoist plot to kill high dignitaries like the Prime Minister or Rajiv Gandhi assassination-type plot. He said that the aim of the entire exercise was to "create a climate of real threat".



Appearing for the complainant, senior counsel Harish Salve said that the court has to decide where free speech ends and unlawful activities begin. "If unlawful activities are involved, the investigation must continue."



Dwelling on the dangers of seeking court-monitored SIT probe every time, Salve said "if they did not trust the CBI, NIA, who will they call FBI".



"There is a danger of embarking on the path of SIT probe. People are framed day in and day out. Four tiers of courts are there," Salve said pointing that all important cases end up in the top court.




The Tenders Board has awarded the contract for Maliolio River to Ah Liki Construction.

This was confirmed in a statement from the Land Transport Authority yesterday.

Upon voluntary withdrawal by China Railway First Group from the award of the above works, the evaluation panel comprised of representatives from the Ministry of Works, Transport and Infrastructure, Ministry of Finance, Attorney Generals Office and Land Transport Authority; resumed the evaluation process to confirm the next lowest and compliant bidder, the statement reads.

The evaluation resulted in the panels recommendation to award the contract to Ah Liki Construction; this recommendation has been approved by the Tenders Board as well as the Cabinet.

The construction contract between Land Transport Authority and Ah Liki Construction has now been signed and works will commence in the coming months.

Maliolio Bridge and access road works is funded by the World Bank, government of Australia, and government of Samoa.

Earlier this week, the World Bank approved US$35.75 million (T$95.09m) grant to improve Samoas road network.

Safe, reliable and resilient roads are critical to our nations economic development, connecting people, facilitating the rapid movement of goods, and enabling people to access vital services, said Minister of Finance Sili Epa Tuioti in a statement by the World Bank.

The Government of Samoa has been working with the World Bank on improving our road network through multiple projects for more than a decade, and we are pleased to see this partnership continue.

The Samoa Climate Resilient Transport Project is the first in a series under the Pacific Climate Resilient Transport Program that focuses on building resilience in infrastructure and institutions through four components:

1. Technical assistance to improve the way that climate change is factored into road development, including through better asset management and planning systems;

2. Infrastructure investments to improve the climate resilience of the West Coast Road between Malua and Faleolo, and slope protection and stabilisation and drainage on the East Coast Road to reduce landslip and rock fall hazards. Further works will include the replacement of the Afega Bridge and the Lano Ford Crossing, and a study into potential future upgrades of Alafaalava Road;

3. Institutional and regulatory reforms for road sector asset management and maintenance, including measures to strengthen local capacity and to increase the sustainability of climate resilient road investments; and

4. A provision for the Government of Samoa to redirect uncommitted project funds to rapidly fund urgent post-disaster rehabilitation or reconstruction needs in the event of a major natural disaster.
The Chief Executive Officer of the Ministry of Revenue, Matafeo Avalisa Viali-Fautuaalii, has explained their position in relation to a helicopter that has been in their possession since 2016. Below is the letter she wrote in response to questions from the Samoa Observer. It is published in full:

18th September 2018

Chief Editor

Samoa Observer

APIA

RE: HELICOPTER VH-VWA

1. I refer to the above matter and to an email dated 17th September 2018 by Ivamere Nataro requesting our responses to certain questions regarding Helicopter VH-VWA.

2. Accordingly, my responses to questions asked are set out below.

Will the auction of the helicopter still go ahead, despite an Australian company claiming ownership of the said helicopter?

3. At the moment, the auction has been put on hold to allow anyone who claims or is claiming to have an interest in the seized helicopter (such as the Australian company) to write to the Comptroller (CEO of the Ministry for Revenue) to reconsider her decision in seizing the helicopter that was done pursuant to section 268 of the Customs Act 20l4 (the Act). This is required under section 274 of the

Act. Accordingly, a Public Notice was sent to Samoa Observer to publish in its newspaper informing the general public about this deferred Auction. What this means is that the Ministry will give anyone who has interest in the helicopter including the original Australian owners the opportunity to submit their written position regarding the seized helicopter within the requirements of section 274 of the

Act. Once we receive an application for reconsideration, our Ministry will then assess the application as per sections 275, 276, 277 and 278 of the Act. The timeframe for written application for reconsideration is 5th October 2018. If the Comptroller does not receive any application within this set timeframe, then the original intended auction will proceed under section 283 of the Act, which will mean a new Public Notice will be sent out advising the public of the new time and date of the auction. So, to answer your question, if the Australian company does not submit a written application for reconsideration under section 274 of the Act within 5th October 2018, the Ministry will proceed with the auction as Government has a legal right to seize and sold of the helicopter given it is an uncustomed goods under sections 267(1)(a)(viii) and 283 of the Act.

4. Further, according to registration documents, the Australian company traded in Samoa for the operation of the helicopter as Samoa Helicopters Limited; as such, the Ministry has already contacted the lawyer on record for Samoa Helicopters Limited informing them of the seized helicopter and inviting them to submit their position for reconsideration of seizure no later than 5th Oct 201 8. Failure of which will lead to the Comptroller disposing of the helicopter under section 283 of the Act.

Citing the public notice in todays paper, the Australian company claims they have the helicopters log book and service manuals and without them the helicopter is rendered unable to fly. What can the Ministry say about that? Is this true?

5. Our Ministrys background research into this matter shows that the absence of log books and service manual does not render the helicopter unusable. Not having the log books and service manual would only affect the value of the helicopter.

Is the Ministry in any negotiation process with the Australian company or are there plans to have the negotiations?

6. No negotiations.

How long has the helicopter been in the Ministrys possession?

7. Since September 2016 but stored at PFL premises pursuant to section 19(2) of the Customs Act 2014, given the lack of proper facilities at Customs Services Headquarters at Matautu-tai to store the helicopter.

The public notice in todays paper states that repeated attempts by the Australian company to get comments from the Ministry have been ignored. Why is this?

8. For the record, there were never any repeated attempts by the Australian company to get comments from the Ministry regarding the helicopter. In fact, there was a letter from the Chief Executive Officer to Mr. Michael van der Zypp dated 1st September 2016 in which Mr. Zypp requested re-export of the helicopter back to Australia. In response to this request, the Chief Executive Officer advised that the helicopter can only be re-exported after settlement in full of the import GST that is due to the State(amongst others).

9. In fact, there was communication between the Ministry and the lawyer for Samoa Helicopters Ltd,

Mr. Travis Lamb, dated 27 April 20I7 in which the Ministry advised inter alia that even if proof was presented confirming the true owner of the helicopter, this does not remove the fact that import GST is owing on the helicopter, and section 102(2) of the Customs Act 2014 clearly provides that the duty is owed by the importer of the goods. An importer here includes amongst others the consignee of the goods; the consignee on the import entry is Samoa Helicopters Ltd. As such, until and unless the import GST payable on the helicopter is paid in full, the Comptroller has a right to the helicopter as per section 114 and has the power to seize and detain it as an uncustomed good under subsection

267(1)(a)(viii) of the Customs Act 2018.

Will the Ministry be releasing the helicopter soon?

10. No.

11. I trust my responses to queries raised helps clarify the Ministrys position concerning the helicopter. For any future questions pertaining to these matters, please direct them to our media officer, Mr. Jerry Leleimalefaga.

Yours sincerely,

Matafeo Avalisa Viali-Fautuaalii

CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER

MINISTRY OF REVENUE
A regional meeting being held in Samoa this week is reviewing the results of the A.C.P. Multilateral Environmental Agreements (M.E.As) capacity building project and it also serves as the first review meeting of the Inform project.

Both meetings are hosted at S.P.R.E.P. headquarters Vailima, and are being coordinated by the Environmental Monitoring and Governance Programme (E.M.G.) of S.P.R.E.P.

The A.C.P.M.E.A.2 project is funded by the European Union (E.U.) and the Global Environment Facility (G.E.F.) funds the Inform project. The two projects complement each other and are implemented through UN Environment and executed by S.P.R.E.P.

Deputy Prime Minister, Fiame Naomi Mataafa, acknowledged the continued support of the European Union and the Global Environment Fund in building Pacific island capacities and efforts to improve the management of our environment and natural resources.

The invaluable support and assistance provided by the U.N. Environment programme and S.P.R.E.P. in this regard are greatly appreciated, as each of our countries have benefitted from opportunities to strengthen our engagement at international conferences, particularly those related to the UN conventions on climate change, biodiversity, and lad degradation and other related multi-lateral environment agreements, she said.

Using the Blue Pacific narrative that the Leaders endorsed at their meeting in Samoa last year, you would be well placed to build on and strengthen the successes of the A.C.P.M.E.A.2 programme and Inform Project to deliver on national and regional priorities.

Samoa has benefited from the assistance and support provided through the EU ACP-MEA project, including the development of Samoas 2013 State of Environment (SoE) Report. This Report was used as a basis to inform our National Environment Sector Plan coordinated by the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment.

S.P.R.E.P. Officer In Charge, Dr. Vicky Hall, welcomed participants on behalf of the Director General, and said that S.P.R.E.P. has come along way and have achieved notable achievements in the last 25 years which include results and achievements delivered through the A.C.P.M.E.A. programme, and more recently through the Inform project.

The A.C.P.M.E.A. programme responds directly to specific capacity needs of Small Island States which include negotiation skills, capacity to develop policies and daft laws, environmental impact assessment and mainstreaming of environmental issues into key planning processes of government, establishing a good understanding of the state of environment, meeting M.E.A. reporting which are essential building blocks for well-informed planning and decision-making.

The primary objective of the A.C.P.M.E.A. programme for the Pacific is to strengthen and enhance the capacity of Pacific A.C.P. countries to effectively implement biodiversity related M.E.A.s and meet their reporting obligations. S.P.R.E.P. serves as the Pacific Hub for the Pacific A.C.P. component of the ACPMEA programme and the objectives of the A.C.P.M.E.A. programme are aligned to, and integrated into SPREPs Strategic Plan 2017-2026.

Dr. Hall also acknowledged the contribution of the A.C.P.M.E.A. programme in leveraging new funding from G.E.F. which resulted in the regional GEF Informed project implemented through U.N. Environment and executed by S.P.R.E.P.

Speaking on behalf of the UN Environment, Mr. Sefanaia Nawadra acknowledged the strong partnership between S.P.R.E.P, U.N. Environment and Pacific island countries in developing and implementing policies to protect the environment. The Pacific island countries are stepping up and requesting assistance to manage environmental data. This is a significant development for countries to help get the information they need for their reporting requirements including the S.D.Gs, S.A.M.O.A pathway and others.

The Inform project is assisting Pacific island countries to enhance their reporting capacity to the various multilateral environmental agreements (M.E.As) including key international commitments. This is done through addressing the on-going challenge of compiling high-quality, and up to date data on the environment including a place to store data.

National environmental data portals are established in14 Pacific island countries of the Cook Islands, Federated States of Micronesia, Fiji, Kiribati, Republic of the Marshall Islands , Nauru, Niue, Palau, Papua New Guinea , Samoa, Solomon Islands, Tonga, Tuvalu, and Vanuatu.

The development of national data portals will help enhance the monitoring and evaluation of environment work undertaken in the region by providing reliable access for national datasets and indicators for environment information.

The meeting this week will further build capacities and enhance awareness and understanding of the importance of environmental data management in supporting planning and decision-making, as well as the need to strengthen national and international reporting efforts.

The discussions this week will also consider opportunities through data management to further strengthen and support countries engagement and participation at international M.E.A. negotiation processes.
MOSCOW (AP)  A high-level Israeli military delegation visited Moscow on Thursday to present detailed information related to the downing of a Russian warplane by Syrian forces that responded to an Israeli air raid.

All 15 crew members on board the Russian Il-20 reconnaissance plane were killed when it was downed Monday by Syrian air defense forces that mistook it for Israeli jets. The incident threatened to derail the close security ties between Russia and Israel.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu quickly called Russian President Vladimir to express sorrow over the death of the plane's crew, blamed Syria and offered to share detailed data.

Netanyahu said Thursday that while voicing regret over the deaths, he told Putin that "the root of the problem is Iran's attempt to use Syrian territory for attacks against Israel and to arm our enemies, such as Hezbollah."

"I told him that we have the right of self defense," Netanyahu said, adding that "there is also very great importance to maintaining the security coordination between Israel and Russia."

He said he dispatched the Israeli air force chief, Maj. Gen. Amikam Norkin, to Moscow with a double objective: "One, to continue defending our citizens, and two, to preserve the cooperation between our two countries."

On Thursday, a delegation of Israeli military officers led by Norkin, held several meetings in Moscow with their Russian counterparts.

The Israeli military said in a statement that they presented the situation report regarding the plane's downing, as well as the pre-mission information and the findings of an Israeli military inquiry.

"The meetings were held in good spirits and the representatives shared a professional, open and transparent discussion on various issues," the Israeli military said. "Both sides emphasized the importance of the states' interests and the continued implementation of the deconfliction system."

The Israeli military has said its fighter jets were targeting a Syrian military facility involved in providing weapons for Iran's proxy Hezbollah militia and insisted it warned Russia of the coming raid in accordance with deconfliction agreements. It said the Syrian army fired the missiles that hit the Russian plane when the Israeli jets had already returned to Israeli airspace.

But the Russian Defense Ministry charged that the Israeli warning came less than a minute before the strike, leaving the Russian aircraft in the line of fire. It accused the Israeli military of deliberately using the Russian plane as a cover to dodge Syrian defenses and threatened to retaliate.

The Russian military made no comment after Thursday's meetings with the Israeli delegation.

While the Russian Defense Ministry blamed the plane's loss on Israel, Putin quickly sought to defuse tensions Tuesday, pointing at "a chain of tragic accidental circumstances."

The Israeli military also noted that its delegation "presented the ongoing Iranian attempts to establish its military presence in Syria and to transfer strategic weapons to the Hezbollah terror organization."

Moscow has played a delicate diplomatic game of maintaining friendly ties with both Israel and Iran. In July, Moscow struck a deal with Tehran to keep its fighters 85 kilometers (53 miles) from the Golan Heights to accommodate Israeli security concerns.
Jeff Bezos will invest just over $1 billion next year in Blue Origins New Glenn rocket program, and the company will fly people to space this coming year, the Amazon.com Inc. chief executive said Wednesday.

Speaking during a keynote address at the Air Force Assn.s Air, Space and Cyber Conference in National Harbor, Md., Bezos said a big team of people is working on the rockets development. The Kent, Wash., company has said the rocket will be available in two- and three-stage versions, and has already netted several commercial satellite launch orders.

The rockets BE-4 engine test program is also going very well, Bezos said. The engine, which will be propelled by liquefied natural gas and liquid oxygen, is being considered for use in the first stage of the next generation Vulcan Centaur rocket under development by a joint venture of Lockheed Martin Corp. and Boeing Co. known as United Launch Alliance.

Analysts have said New Glenn could compete with the likes of Hawthorne-based SpaceX and ULA for national security launch contracts, as well as commercial orders.

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Blue Origin opened a 650,000-square-foot manufacturing facility in Florida and has been constructing its launch pad at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. The two represent a total investment of about $1 billion, Bezos said Wednesday.

In addition to satellite launch contracts, Blue Origin expects to generate revenue through space tourism with its New Shepard launch vehicle and crew capsule. Well be putting people in space this coming year, Bezos said.

The company has already conducted a number of tests of the system, though ticket prices for the suborbital flight have not been announced.

samantha.masunaga@latimes.com

Twitter: @smasunaga
When Wine Spectator unveiled in July its list of the 20 San Diego County restaurants that won its 2018 Award of Excellence, most of the names were to be expected.

Perennial winners Addison, Mille Fleurs, Humphreys, Vivace and Juniper and Ivy turned up, along with a surprise new addition: Belching Beaver Brewery Tavern & Grill in Vista.

Since its founding in 2012, Belching Beaver Brewery has built a small empire on its famous Peanut Butter Milk Stout beer and a near-constant stream of new flavorful stouts and inventive IPA beer releases.

So how did the whimsically named Vista brewery end up earning an honor that no other brewpub in America can claim? That credit goes to Ralph Lizarraga, a Level 1 sommelier who joined the company three years ago as its director of hospitality.

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Hes also director of wine at the companys 2-year-old Tavern & Grill in downtown Vista, which has more than 1,000 bottles stored in its wine vault. The wine list features 93 wines by the bottle and 15 to 20 wines by the glass.

The Vista resident said Belching Beaver is proud to have received the prestigious recognition from Wine Spectator, but getting the word out about its award-winning wine program remains a work in progress.

Not surprisingly, beer makes up nearly 80 percent of alcohol sales at the 280-seat restaurant. Wine competes with distilled spirits for the rest.

Belching Beaver may be unlikely to attract the lions share of North Countys wine-sipping crowd, but Lizarraga hopes some of his new sales, marketing and dining-related ideas will help.

Lizarraga was managing Trulucks seafood and steak restaurant in La Jolla in 2015 when he met Belching Beavers owner Tom Vogel. The enticement Vogel offered him to join Belching Beaver was impossible to turn down: the ability to create his own restaurant wine list from scratch.

The interior of Belching Beaver Brewery Tavern & Grill in downtown Vista. (Pam Kragen/San Diego U-T)

Lizarraga started drinking wine while a student at UC Santa Barbara, then got his first industry job at a wine bar in San Luis Obispo. In 2010, he joined Trulucks as a server and bartender before working his way into management.

At the time, Trulucks sold 100 wines by the glass, which gave him a golden opportunity to immerse himself in the study of wine, which led to him earning Level 1 sommelier certification.

When Lizarraga joined Belching Beaver, Vogel gave him just two rules  to stock his favorite wine, Caymus, and to not gouge customers with over-inflated bottle prices.

Thanks to the high volume of beer sales, Lizarraga said hes had the financial freedom to find bargains through bulk-buy discounts. As a result, most wines are priced at $30 to $50 a bottle, and all wines under $60 are half-price on Wednesdays.

The wine list is intentionally made up of mostly California wines along with selections from New Zealand, Australia, Italy, Chile and more, so that everything is in English and easy to understand.

I wanted my wine list to be not too intimidating so people arent afraid to ask questions, he said. My goal is for people to get a great bottle of wine thats affordable but really high-quality stuff.

Vogel said he likes having the wine program because its part of his company policy of serving customers what they want to drink, rather just than what the brewer wants to make.

Our customer is boss, said Vogel, a San Marcos resident.

Before the recession hit in 2008, Vogel was working in the real estate industry, but new lending restrictions made it tough to do business so he decided to try something new.

I wanted to find a business that was fun and the beer industry sounded like fun, he said.

In keeping with that theme, he named his 2012 startup Belching Beaver, a suggestion he heard at a cocktail party which was catchy, fun and lighthearted.

Five years ago, head brewer Thomas Peters joined the company. A home brewer whod worked before as beer buyer at Sublime Alehouse in San Marcos, Peters came to Belching Beaver as an unpaid trainee.

He started out cleaning brew tanks, but his beermaking genius was apparent from the start. Six months later, Vogel hired him as head brewer and nine months after that he won first place in the 2014 Alpha King Challenge, a national competition that attracted 170 breweries last year (when Peters won first place once again).

To keep up with demand for its beer, Belching Beaver now has five San Diego County locations, including breweries, tasting rooms and pubs. It will soon expand production into Orange and L.A. counties as well as Arizona, and by next spring its beers will be available in eight foreign countries.

Each year, Belching Beaver releases as many as 100 new beers, which equals the number of taps at the Vista restaurant. With so many beers to keep track of, the servers have scant time to study the wine list. Lizarraga said he runs a weekly wine education program to try and fill that knowledge gap.

Hes looking at adding less-expensive, half-bottle options to the wine list to encourage beer drinkers to give wine a try.

He also uses the restaurants wine vault  built inside a former bank branch vault  as a private dining and events room for added visibility.

Finally, this fall, executive chef Ramiro Guerra will introduce a new menu that will include, for the first time, suggested pairings of beers and wines for each entree. Guerra said wine pairings are easy compared to pairing beers with food because beers can have a complexity of flavors.

Belching Beaver Brewery Tavern & Grill

Where: 302 E. Broadway, Vista

Phone: (760) 295-8599

Online: https://belchingbeaver.com/menu

pam.kragen@sduniontribune.com
The educational background of a San Marcos school trustee has come into question after a challenger in the upcoming election accused her of falsely claiming she had a college degree.

San Marcos Unified School Board President Stacy Carlson had listed a degree in business administration from Vanguard University on the website for the governing board.

However, her opponent in the Nov. 6 election, Christina Linden, claims that Carlson never graduated from the private, Christian University, located in Orange County.

In response to questions about Carlsons record at the university, a spokeswoman confirmed that she attended Vanguard, but said the campus did not have a record of her graduation.

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Stacy was a student at Vanguard University with senior status, but we do not have a record of her receiving a degree, Emilie Perkins, an account executive with the public relations firm Reveille Inc., stated in an e-mail to The San Diego Union-Tribune. Under Federal law, we cannot disclose any further information.

Although Carlsons biography on the San Marcos School Board website had previously cited a degree from Vanguard, that reference was removed as of Wednesday.

Carlson could not be reached by phone or e-mail by the Union-Tribune, but in a statement to Channel 10 News Tuesday, she said that she had walked in a commencement ceremony at Vanguard 16 years ago, with one lab course pending. She said she took the course the following summer at MiraCosta College and submitted transcripts that she believed fulfilled her degree requirements.

As this has been the first time my degree has been called into question, this is the first time I had heard that my lab science course did not qualify, Carlson is quoted as saying in the statement to Channel 10. I am embarrassed that I have gone the last 16 years believing that I had my degree only to learn that I have a class pending. I am working with Vanguard to determine if the coursework I did in 2002 qualified at the time even if it does not qualify now. If it did not, then I will complete that course as soon as possible and ask for grace on behalf of all students maneuvering their way toward a college education.

Linden questioned why Carlson was unaware that her degree was not finalized, and said she believes that Carlson was not truthful about her educational background.

We find it disingenuous for Stacy Carlson to make the claim that in 16 years it never occurred to her to ask why her degree had never been mailed to her from Vanguard University, Linden said in a statement to the Union-Tribune. A School Boards first duty is to the guidance of the students of the district, and a Board has a duty to be completely transparent about their governance and credentials.

deborah.brennan@sduniontribune.com Twitter@deborahsbrennan
Blue or green?

That was the weighty question bantered about by the Chula Vista City Council Tuesday as it considered the proposed color scheme for a 12,500-square-foot fire station in the eastern part of the city.

Firefighters, it turns out, want their new station to be blue; the developers paying for the $10.6 million facility prefer green.

The conversation began with an innocent question from Councilman John McCann, who had heard rumblings of discontent from firefighters.

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What is the color of the building, he asked Stacy Kurz, the citys senior project coordinator.

Officially, the color is a yellow, but its really more of a lime-green, Kurz responded.

Millenia Developments official colorist, a person consulted on every project in the development, chose the fire stations color. The city hosted a public meeting about it and didnt hear any negative feedback about the color, she added.

Firefighters were under the impression that theyd have final say. Several rank-and-file members of the fire department were concerned about the color and complaints made their way up the chain of command to Fire Chief Jim Gerring.

While recognizing that the color isnt that big of a deal, the chief asked the council to at least consider blue.

Were not going to try to slow down the process or put a stake in the ground necessarily, Geering said. I would just like to entertain a further discussion on the color just to discuss the possibility of blue.

All four members of the City Council and the mayor weighed in.

Councilwoman Pat Aguilar prefers green.

As far as the color is concerned, I disagree with you chief and I disagree with you also Councilman McCann, with all due respect. I think we should listen to the colorist on this one, she said.

Councilman Steve Padilla, who represents the district where the station will be built, also likes green.

Padilla said he did not receive a single complaint about the color from his constituents and wondered why firefighters didnt reach out to him.

I havent heard anything from members of the fire department or the (fire union) or anyone else so maybe in the future you might want to consider that if there is an issue you might communicate with the person whose district its in, he said.

Councilman Mike Diaz, a retired firefighter, doesnt care.

Im going to jump in on it because everyone else has, he said. As a 30-year firefighter, I really dont care whats on the outside.

Ultimately, the City Council voted unanimously to continue the project as is.

City staff expect the permitting process to be completed by the end of the year and construction to start early next year. They hope the new station will open early 2020

The station will be on the corner of Millenia Avenue and Stylus Street in eastern Chula Vista. It will have enough room for 10 people  enough for two four-person fire crews and one two-person ambulance crew.

It will also be green.

Contact Gustavo Solis via Email or Twitter
City leaders in National City decided Tuesday to move forward with an outside investigation into whether Councilwoman Mona Rios violated state law as former president of the Rotary Club, which failed to file tax forms to the IRS and pay rent to the city while Rios was at the helm.

In a 3-1 vote, Mayor Ron Morrison and Councilmen Albert Mendivil and Jerry Cano went against input from acting City Attorney Nicole Pedone, who told the City Council the matter was outside the purview of the city.

She said it was an issue for the Rotary Club to address if it desires.

If theres an issue with how money was handled or how a member of the Rotary Club handled the club  thats really something that the Rotary Club can investigate, Pedone said.

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She added that the Attorney Generals Office, which oversees charitable nonprofits, would be the proper venue for an investigation into the matter.

Despite Pedones advise, Morrison, Mendivil and Cano successfully pushed for an outside investigation, which will be contingent upon a state agencys opinion.

The city will reach out to the states Fair Political Practices Commission and/or the state Attorney Generals Office for input on whether it is appropriate and legal for the city to use public funds to hire an independent law firm for the investigation.

State law bans the city from using public funds on matters that dont serve a public purpose, Pedone said.

At this point, I dont see a public purpose, she told the council before the vote.

She said she anticipates it will take a few months to hear back from the state agencies.

If the state agencies suggest an outside investigation is appropriate, city staff would ask the City Council how to fund the probe.

The investigation would focus on whether Rios and Marcus Bush, former Planning Commission chairman and Rios former campaign manager, violated state law that bans public officials from using their position to influence a governmental decision for the sake of their financial interest.

Pedone said the facts available did not show there was a violation of state law.

A request for an investigation was made by Mendivil earlier this month in response to an Aug. 1 article by The San Diego Union-Tribune that brought to light financial troubles the Rotary Club faced between 2014 and 2017, a period in which Rios, then Bush, served as president.

In the article, members placed much of the blame for the clubs financial woes on Rios and Bush.

Councilwoman Alejandra Sotelo-Solis, who cast the dissenting vote, labeled calls for an outside investigation political and vindictive against Rios, who called for a similar investigation into Canos failure to address building code violations at his home for a period of five years.

Rios recused herself from the discussion and vote on Tuesday.

Mendivil said the move was not political.

In my heart I believe this is something that is investigateable, he said. Something is amiss here.

Morrison contended an issue that was tied to the city was the Rotary Clubs failure to pay rent for the city-owned Martin Luther King Jr. Community Center, where the club held weekly meetings.

Was there any favoritism given because of their position? Morrison asked, referring to Rios and Bush.

Pedone said rent fees were not waived for the club. She said that failure to pay rent is considered a contract breach, not a state law violation.

On the topic of state law violations, she added: It has to be shown there was some sort of financial interest.

The mayor also raised concerns that the Rotary Club printed campaign materials with Rios name while she was president of the club.

If Rotary wants to, it can look at how members spent money on events or how money was managed, Pedone said.

The city spent about $37,000 to hire an outside investigator who focused on whether Cano, who avoided fines for building code violations, violated the state law that prohibits public officials from influencing a governmental decision for the sake of their financial interest.

The investigation, completed in June, found no evidence Cano had a hand in the lax enforcement, though Cano refused to participate in the probe.

Email: david.hernandez@sduniontribune.com

Phone: (619) 293-1876

Twitter: @D4VIDHernandez
The GI Film Festival San Diego is launching its fourth year in style, with an expanded lineup and a very special guest on opening night.

Tuesdays opening night will feature Star Trek alum George Takei, who will join in the festivities and discuss the short film American.

While Takei hasnt attended the festival before, this is not the first visit here for the multitalented actor/activist, who plays a main character in American. He and his husband, Brad Altman Takei, lived in San Diego for a few months in 2012 while he starred in the Old Globes Allegiance. That musical, which set an all-time box-office record at the prestigious Balboa Park theater, went on to Broadway.

We have an existing love for San Diego, Takei said from his home in Los Angeles. And the Old Globe agreeing to stage the premiere of Allegiance also endeared your city to me. Im so glad the GI Film Festival has given us the opportunity to visit again.

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Joining Takei will be Richie Adams, who wrote and directed American. Also participating in opening-night festivities and discussions will be Bill Kubota and Steve Ozone. Their film, The Registry, which follows the Takei short, is an hourlong documentary about Japanese Americans who served in the U.S. Military Intelligence Service during World War II.

In American, Takei, 81, portrays a 94-year-old veteran who volunteers at Los Angeles Japanese American National Museum, where the movie was filmed. His characters encounter with a mother and her daughter brings up memories of his being forced into one of the notorious internment camps that, during World War II, imprisoned Japanese Americans. Takeis character later joins the United States 442nd Regimental Combat Team, the highly honored Japanese American Army unit.

Many Takei fans know that the internment-camp theme  like the one chronicled in Allegiance  is personal for him. At the age of 5, in 1942, he and his family were forcibly relocated from Los Angeles to an internment camp in Arkansas.

This movie is very relevant, Takei said. The government couldnt draw the distinction between Japanese bombers and Japanese Americans. Its about using a broad brush to characterize a group of people as dangerous enemy agents. 

Local lens, national scope

Because the national GI Film Festival held in Washington, D.C., in May was truncated, the local festival was asked to work with national organizers to present the full lineup here. But this did not diminish the GI Film Festival San Diegos dedication to promote movies with local representation.

Organized by the Film Consortium San Diego, KPBS and the GI Film Group of Washington, D.C., the festivals San Diego version launched in 2015.

The film festival was only in D.C., and we wanted it here because we have such a huge military population, Film Consortium founder and president Jodi Cilley said. It made sense to show films here and get people talking about issues concerning veterans and active military.

Our mission is twofold. We want to showcase the local film talent. And we want to explore the different conflicts, generations and groups of people connected to the military.

Last year, more than 30 experts, filmmakers and their subjects participated in the festivals panels. This year, 34 films  19 documentaries and 15 fictional narratives  are set to be screened. Several entries highlight African American or Latino experiences in, and after, military life. Others explore issues involving people in the LGBTQ community, as well as women who have served. The festival includes films about conflicts in Iraq, Vietnam, and both world wars. And a three-minute documentary about parents and deployment, My Voice, My American, was directed by children at Camp Pendletons Stewart Mesa School.

In deciding the selections, we look at the overall picture of the films being screened, making sure its not your typical group of stories, Cilley said. We really push for diversity, so that were giving a wide-ranging perspective.

Wood is a freelance writer.

GI Film Festival San Diego

When: Various times, Tuesday through Sept. 30

Where: Museum of Photographic Arts, 1649 El Prado, Balboa Park, and UltraStar Cinemas, 7510 Hazard Center Drive, Mission Valley

Tickets: $8 to $10 for individual films; $120 for an all-access pass

Online: gifilmfestivalsd.org
From the moment Shaun and Abigail Bengson met 11 years ago, there was a third wheel in their relationship  a matter for no small measure of stress and apprehension.

In fact, the matter was stress and apprehension  a kind of shared existential terror that the two seemed to fall into as deeply as they fell for each other.

It happened immediately with our feeling in love, Shaun Bengson says now. Just becoming consumed with fear and being paralyzed by it.

Theres something to be said for an affection so all-encompassing that it cant be separated from the dread of losing one another. And at the very least, for Abigail and Shaun, that feeling sparked a greater appreciation for how tenuous our hold on existence can be.

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As Shaun puts it: We became abundantly aware of each others fragility, and by extension the reality of that fact for all of us walking this planet.

The feeling also sparked the creation of art: an autobiographical live piece called Hundred Days thats now receiving its latest production  and the first since its off-Broadway premiere last year with New York Theatre Workshop  at San Diegos La Jolla Playhouse.

The title of the show takes its cues from a hypothetical born of the Bengsons trepidation: What would you do, and how would you live your life, if you had only 100 days remaining?

The notion of precious time passing, and of how to make the most of ones days, seems a natural fit for theater  a creative form whose very evanescence is part of its attraction, and its magic.

Its also an idea thats been explored and expressed memorably in musical theater via everything from the Hello, Dolly! standard Before the Parade Passes By to the Rent anthem Seasons of Love, with its parsing of a year down to 525,600 blink-and-theyre-gone minutes.

But the approach taken by The Bengsons  the pairs chosen stage name  brings an extra measure of intimacy and immediacy: Not only did they create Hundred Days as a reflection on their own lives, but they star in the show as well.

The work by the two folk-punk musicians has been called a musical memoir, although Shaun says they prefer the term theatrical concert.

The show is not by any stretch a book musical: Its entire story is told through the songs, which will be released this Friday on a cast album recorded during the 2017 run at New York Theatre Workshop.

Suffice to say, this is not a work with an explicit, conventional dramatic arc. And yet its not an experimental tone poem either, Shaun is quick to clarify.

It definitely has a narrative, a story we walk you through, he says. Its us doing us through storytelling.

He cites as a kindred artistic soul the composer Dave Malloy (best-known for the much-admired immersive Broadway show Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812) and his recent song cycle Ghost Quartet, which likewise was staged at New York Theatre Workshop.

Shaun also reacts enthusiastically to a mention of Passing Strange, the groundbreaking, autobiographical Broadway musical by the composer-writer-actor Stew.

In general, he and Abigail gravitate to work that is trying to break open this form, Shaun says.

I feel theres a much wider range of music that can exist in theater.

Finding their voices

The two, it turns out, have been working on Hundred Days from pretty much the first moment we fell in love, at a band rehearsal more than a decade ago, Shaun says.

An earlier incarnation was staged close to five years ago in San Francisco. But after further revisions, we finally felt that by the time we got to New York Theatre Workshop, this is what we meant. (That production led to a prestigious Lucille Lortel Award nomination.)

The pair created the piece with the playwright Sarah Gancher, who conveniently lives just across the hall from them in a Queens apartment building.

Director Anne Kauffman (right) goes over a scene from Hundred Days in rehearsal with The Bengsons (standing, left), movement director Sonya Tayeh and band members. (Jim Carmody)

Hundred Days is directed by the University of California San Diego grad and top New York theater pro Anne Kauffman, with movement direction by Sonya Tayeh, whose work was seen locally with the Old Globes 2013 production of The Last Goodbye.

Shaun and Abigail, both of whom sing and play guitar, appear alongside Ashley Baier (drums/percussion), El Beh (cello), Barrie Lobo McLain (vocals/accordion/guitar) and Reggie D. White (vocals/keys).

As Shaun talks by phone about the show on a mid-September afternoon, Abigail is otherwise engaged with the couples young son, who has come down with a fever.

The fact the couple not only weathered the three emotionally fraught weeks of courtship that Hundred Days documents  and then got married and, eventually, became parents  would seem to indicate that love triumphed over fear.

And Shaun does allow that the emotional state depicted in the show is not totally where I am now.

But the feelings that stirred the works creation cant necessarily be cast off with ease. Part of the inspiration behind Hundred Days was a dream Abigail had as a teen-ager that the love of her life would have only 100 days left on Earth by the time they met.

And part of her more general feeling of unease had to do with a long-ago family tragedy  one thats explored more deeply in The Lucky Ones, a piece The Bengsons premiered just a few months ago in New York.

That work, along with Hundred Days, is part of a developing trilogy that also will include a piece tentatively called Ohio (after Shauns home state) and rooted in struggles with spirituality.

Abigail went through some pretty traumatic experiences early in life  some people didnt make it out, and others were hospitalized, as Shaun puts it. And Ive also had people in my life who had close calls.

So we both became really kind of convinced that it was going to happen.

And yet in creating Hundred Days, he says, what gave us some freedom was to say, OK, what if it does happen? And then move on from there.

The show is saying: Yes, this is true. Now what are you going to do about it?

Hundred Days

When: Previews begin Sept. 22. Opens Sept. 30. 7:30 p.m. Tuesdays-Wednesdays; 8 p.m. Thursdays-Fridays; 2 and 8 p.m. Saturdays; 2 and 7 p.m. Sundays. Through Oct. 21.

Where: La Jolla Playhouses Mandell Weiss Forum, 2910 La Jolla Village Drive, Playhouse/UC San Diego Theatre District.

Tickets: $25-$55

Phone: (858) 550-1010

Online: lajollaplayhouse.org

jim.hebert@sduniontribune.com

Twitter: @jimhebert
The annual Pacific Islander Festival returns to Mission Bay in celebration of the indigenous people of Melanesia, Micronesia and Polynesia with dancing, singing, music, food, history, language, attire, and the crowning of Miss PIFA (Pacific Islander Festival Association). A celebration of the traditional cultures, ancient history and values of the people of each location, the weekend includes a procession, introduction of colors, singing of the national anthem, church service and plenty of performances.

2018 Pacific Islander Festival: 8:45 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday and 8 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. Sunday. Ski Beach in Mission Bay. pifasandiego.com
September 20, 1919 The San Diego Union

The San Diego Union-Tribune will mark its 150th anniversary in 2018 by presenting a significant front page from the archives each day throughout the year.

Saturday, September 20, 1919

In 1919 President Woodrow Wilson spoke to a crowd of more than 50,000 at San Diego's city stadium, later named Balboa Stadium, while touring the country to lobby support for the League of Nations.

Wilson was the second U.S. president to visit the city while in office.

Here are the first few paragraphs of the story:

MORE THAN 50,000 HEAR PRESIDENT WILSON DEFEND LEAGUE OF NATIONS

GREATEST CROWED OF WILSONS TOUR GATHER AT BIG CITY STADIUM

Most Enthusiastic Ovation Ever Given to Chief Executive, Members of His Suite Say; Huge Inclosure Inadequate To Accommodate Crowds; Declares Roosevelt and Lodge Previously Advocated League; Number of Votes Given to Great Britain Defended as Only Just.

(Associated Press)

DEL MAR, Calif. Sept. 20.(Saturday)President Wilson arrived here shortly after midnight this morning, and went to a hotel to remain until 6, oclock, when his train is scheduled to leave for Los Angeles. Del Mar is about 20 miles north of San Diego.

PRESIDENT WOODROW WILSON has come and gone.

His long-heralded visit to San Diego yesterday passed away without a hitch, and will always be regarded as one of the really great events in the citys history.

Fifty thousand strong!

These were the words of Mayor L.J. Wilde at the city stadium yesterday afternoon when, in introducing President Wilson to the vast audience, he sized up the crowd and declared that to a man they awaited the Presidents pleasure.

Nor did the mayor over-estimate it. In honor of the nations chief, the great amphitheatre was filled to overflowing. For the first time since the stadium was built it proved of inadequate seating capacity to meet the tax put upon it. It was San Diegos record crowd. And, above all, it was by far the greatest assemblage that has heard President Wilson on his western tourperhaps the largest crowd that has heard him speak since he took office.

Greatest Reception of His Career

The reception given to President Wilson at the stadium was the greatest he has ever been accorded, a member of his suite told G.A. Davidson, chairman of the reception committee, when the presidential party was boarding the train last night.

The greeting at the stadium far exceeded anything ever accorded Mr. Wilson even while he was on his European tours and was being acclaimed by the high and low. Those who have been associated with the President during his entire political career say that the ovation given him when he entered the stadium and drove around the track, and which continued during his speech, was by far the most spontaneous and enthusiastic of his life.

View anniversary front pages online at sandiegouniontribune.com/150-years. For more from the Union-Tribune digital archives, go to newslibrary.com/sites/sdub. Searching is free, with registration. A fee is required to view full stories.
The arrest of a Baja California murder suspect believed to be a lead operative in a totoaba trafficking ring linked to the Sinaloa cartel has raised faint hopes that authorities can somehow save a marine species on the brink of extinction.

The odds have been and continue to be low for the vaquita, a small porpoise that calls the waters in the Upper Gulf of California home. With fewer than 30 left in the world, the vaquita are not likely to survive beyond the first part of next year unless something changes soon, scientists say.

High demand for totoaba swim bladders, or maw, that can sell for up to $20,000 each in China led to a booming illegal fishing trade involving Mexican drug cartels. Because the kind of nets used by totoaba fisherman often accidentally catch and drown other marine life, demand for totoaba has been devastating to the already tiny vaquita population.

Oscar Parra Aispuro was arrested early last Thursday morning as the target of a special operation by Baja Californias State Preventive Police. Authorities had a warrant for his arrest since the beginning of the year in connection with the murder in San Felipe of a member of the Mexican military.

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According to multiple Mexican news reports citing Mexican government sources, a security camera at a nearby business captured footage of Parra shooting the soldier after a road rage incident escalated.

Officials found Parra and two body guards on the San Felipe-Mexicali highway in a Toyota Tacoma truck and a Honda Civic carrying an assortment of weapons including three AR-15s, an AK-47 and three hand guns, police said. Police also found 50 grams of methamphetamine.

The Mexican federal prosecutors office is working on the case, police said.

According to Mexican news outlet El Universal, the initial charges filed against Parra and his guards are weapons- and drug-related, and the men will have a hearing on Thursday morning to determine how the case will proceed.

It is not yet clear whether Parras alleged affiliation with totoaba trafficking will come up in the case or whether his arrest will have any impact on the vaquitas future.

The Mexican government has implemented bans on fishing using gillnets, the type of net used to catch totoaba, as a way to save the vaquita and offered fishermen compensation for not fishing. Last year, it backed a high-risk plan to capture vaquita using a team of international scientists in the hopes of breeding a pair in captivity, but the operation was abandoned after one vaquita died from stress.

None of these has proven effective as the number of porpoises has continued to decline.

One conservation group, Sea Shepherd, has worked for the past five years to search for and remove illegal gillnets from vaquita-inhabited waters. The organization is launching its Operation Milagro V this week, which is much earlier in the fishing season than in years past because the vaquitas situation has become so critical, said Carolina Castro, a spokeswoman for Sea Shepherd.

If officials decide to press Parra for information about the totoaba trafficking network and his connections to Chinese smugglers in Tijuana and Mexico, and if Parra decides to cooperate, Mexican authorities could have a way to disrupt the trafficking chain, said Andrea Crosta, founder of the Elephant Action League, an organization focused on intelligence gathering related to wild life crime that has studied the international totoaba smuggling network.

If authorities arent able to stop the trade network further up the chain, other traffickers will likely take Parras place, and illegal trade in totoaba maw will continue unabated, Crosta said.

It would be an incredible missed opportunity not to use him now to stop the next season, Crosta said. I hope they will do it. I really dont know.

Crosta emphasized that many mistakenly think of environmental- or wildlife-related crime as something softer than crime associated with other kinds of trafficking.

Wildlife crime and environmental crime is not just about animals and a few poor people trying to become rich, Crosta said. Its about very serious organized crime exploiting the fisherman as well, and profiting, making millions of dollars out of illegal wildlife products. The players are very, very serious players.

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
Eight years after immigration officials detained Fabian Rebolledo in his Baldwin Park home and deported him to Tijuana, the U.S. Army veteran has returned home.

Rebolledo crossed the border at San Ysidro on Wednesday morning, proudly wearing his Army uniform. It was the culmination of a years-long battle by the UC Irvine Immigrant Rights Clinic, which was able to reopen the case in December and regain his green-card status in August.

It took a few weeks to make preparations, but he was able to cross through today, and hes now in the U.S. and reunited with his family, said Annie Lai, a professor and co-director of the immigration clinic.

Rebolledo was recruited into the military as a young man. He served at Ft. Bragg and in 1999 was deployed to Kosovo, where he was a peacekeeper who retrieved bodies of villagers killed by Serbian forces. Upon his return to California, his Kosovo experience began haunting him. He sought help for post-traumatic stress disorder and struggled with alcohol, leading to a series of DUI charges.

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That experience was harrowing for him, Lai said. But thats all behind him now.

The veteran still worked diligently to care for his family and obtained several jobs. But in 2007, a check he received from one employer turned out to be fraudulent  that would be the offense that led to his deportation.

Crus Cuevas, mother of Fabian Rebolledo, wipes away tears as her son speaks at a press conference outside the family home in Azusa. (Kent Nishimura / Los Angeles Times)

In Tijuana, Rebolledo slept on the streets and in shelters before finding more permanent housing with another deported veteran. He found support among a group of veterans who had also been deported, and he began doing advocacy work. He even helped create a mural at Tijuanas Friendship Park to educate people about deported veterans.

In 2015, Proposition 47 made it possible for Rebolledos fraud charge to be reduced to a misdemeanor. Led by Lai, UC Irvine School of Law graduates Andani Alcantara Diaz and Danielle Nygren were able to file a motion with the Board of Immigration Appeals to reopen his case. In August, a judge closed the case, giving him the OK to return to the U.S.

Rebolledo will talk with reporters about the plight of deported veterans Wednesday in Azusa, where his family lives.

Its outrageous that our country deports veterans who have served the country and sacrificed their lives, Lai said. But its important to see this in a broader context. Our immigration laws are harsh on many people, and the fact that veterans are also affected illustrates just how much more congressional leadership is needed to look hard at our immigration system.

Lai added that many people of color who live in low-income communities are recruited into the armed forces. Those who are not U.S. citizens join with the promise that they will obtain citizenship.

When they come back, its not a surprise they may have criminal justice involvement sometimes related to their post-traumatic stress disorder, Lai said.

Rebolledo plans to continue advocating for the return of all deported veterans.

Rebolledo hugs Danielle Nygrenm 27, who worked on his case while she was at the UC Irvine Immigrant Rights Clinic. (Kent Nishimura / Los Angeles Times)

alejandra.reyesvelarde@latimes.com

Twitter: @r_valejandra
A man and two teens were arrested this week in Victorville after authorities suspected them of duping people into donating money for the funeral of a young boy who wasnt dead.

Victorville police say Richard Navarrete, 20, and two 14-year-old boys used poster board signs with handwritten messages to solicit donations along the 395 Freeway and Palmdale Road. Law enforcement launched an investigation Monday after two deputies spotted the group on the street holding the signs.

RIP Johnny, one poster read alongside a picture of a boy wearing camouflage pants and holding what appears to be a toy.

Other messages included, Thank you & God bless you! and Anything helps!

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Police say the group placed the donated money in plastic water jugs. It is not clear how much they collected.

Deputies discovered that the boy pictured on the poster is alive and is the son of Navarretes friend, police said.

Navarrete was booked at the High Desert Detention Center on suspicion of theft by false pretense. The two teenagers, who were not identified, were taken to the High Desert Juvenile Detention Center, according to police.

Police found a person who apparently donated to the fraudulent scheme nearby, but authorities are seeking additional victims.

Anyone with information is asked to call the Victorville Police Department at (760) 241-2911 or San Bernardino County Sheriffs Department dispatch at (760) 956-5001.

hannah.fry@latimes.com

Twitter: @Hannahnfry
She told the 2,000 or so people in the Hilton San Diego Bayfront ballroom that they could all call her Michelle. And by the end of Michelle Obamas hour-long keynote speech at the BOLD Mindbody Conference on Wednesday, it was easy to believe you were on first-name basis with the former first lady.

Oh, who are we kidding? It felt that way after about five minutes.

In town to support the fitness and wellness industry that she started championing while she was in the White House, Obama took the audience on a casual guided tour of her big life.

The journey started with her childhood growing up in an itty-bitty house on the South Side of Chicago, wound through her attempts to balance motherhood and high-stress jobs while her husband was out campaigning before bringing us to the surreal White House adventures that included wondering what her daughters could possibly be saying to the Pope.

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She looked chic in her black pantsuit and strappy red heels, but when she talked about showing up to a job interview with daughter Sasha in her stroller, or the time her presidential husband pulled the ultimate dorky Dad move, Obama focused on the small, humane details that made being first lady sound not all that different from being any other working woman. The kind with too many balls in the air and not enough time in the day.

One thing we do as women is, we beat up on ourselves, Obama said during her on-stage conversation with Mindbody CEO and co-founder Rick Stollmeyer. To do a good job, you feel like you have to go above and beyond. My message is, to give yourself a break.

Easy for her to say, given that the road trip of her life made stops at Princeton (where she graduated cum laude), Harvard Law School, and the Chicago law firm where she ended up being the adviser for a summer intern named Barack.

The rest is history, but the former first lady did not make it feel like history.

I just left with the feeling that shes a real person. Shes just like us, attendee Michole McBroom said after the talk, which ended with Obama promising to come back and the audience giving her a standing ovation.

I loved that she said being a woman and a mom is not about being perfect. You know that being a mom is her highest priority, and that comes through in everything she says and does.

When Stollmeyer asked her where the fire inside her comes from, Obama took the audience back to the house at 74th and Euclid that her mom still owns. That is where Michelle and her older brother, Craig, grew up learning to express their opinions around a kitchen table covered with a plastic tablecloth that had every single story of our lives on it. Including the time somebody spilled Easter egg dye all over everywhere.

It was around that kitchen table that Michelle and Craig Robinson were encouraged to talk with their parents about anything and everything. And when the Obamas moved into the White House with Sasha and big sister Malia, they made a point of honoring that kitchen-table tradition. Although the tablecloth was a lot nicer, and a butler was in attendance.

It was important that we made sure to give the girls a space that was just about them, Obama said of the regular family meals in the White House. Bin Laden was not invited to dinner. The financial crisis was not invited for dinner.

There was room in her talk for humor. Like the eye-rolling time President Obama introduced Justin Bieber at a White House event and pronounced his last name wrong. Or when Michelle was talked into throwing one last slumber party on the night before the Obamas moved out and President Trump moved in.

It is the morning of the inauguration, and Ive got eight little girls ordering their favorite breakfasts. I see trays of food rolling into the bedrooms. Im asking them how their parents are going to come pick them up when all the roads are closed. And then Im scooting all of them out through the freight elevator because the Trumps are coming.

Many of these stories will appear in Obamas autobiography, Becoming, which is out on Nov. 13. Its all about her, but when Stollmeyer asked her for details, she once again made it all about us.

I say in the book, Its hard to hate up close, the former first lady said. People can easily dehumanize people they feel is (an) other. Other happens when you dont know a persons story. When we attack people, we are attacking the unknown things about them.

We are told that only rich peoples stories matter. Or only male stories matter. This book is a call for people to talk and share their stories with themselves and with each other.

Its her book, but the message is ours if we want to hear it.

Twitter: @karla_peterson

karla.peterson@sduniontribune.com
A 27-year-old woman was standing just inside the back door of Frank Pancho Maganas Clairemont home when she heard two voices at the front door.

One man outside the open door said, twice, Its J.T. Magana, who was inside, replied, Hang on one second.

Then there was a blast of a gun.

The woman who had been taking a cigarette break at the back of the house took off running. She didnt stop until she got to her mothers nearby home, she testified in San Diego Superior Court on Wednesday.

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Were you scared of J.T? Deputy District Attorney Kristie Nikoletich asked the witness.

I was scared of whoever, answered the woman, a primary but reluctant witness against Jeffery Alan Turner, 37, who is accused of shooting Magana on June 3.

Magana, 52, survived a bullet to the brain for nearly two weeks, until he died at a trauma center on June 16.

The San Diego Union-Tribune is withholding the name of the shooting eyewitness at the request of the prosecutor, who said she had serious concerns about the womans safety from Turners associates.

Turner is charged with murder and allegations that he personally used a firearm. He faces 50 years to life in prison if convicted.

Nikoletich said no motive for the shooting at Sauk Street and Boise Avenue has emerged.

Court records available online show Turner has had several other criminal prosecutions. No further information about those cases was immediately available.

In Wednesdays preliminary hearing, Judge Jay Bloom heard a string of prosecution witnesses, then found there was enough evidence to order Turners case to go to trial.

A San Diego police homicide investigator, a criminalist and others testified that a revolver bearing DNA from Turner and Magana was found in Turners bedroom. A bullet retrieved from Maganas head came from the gun, an expert said.

Police also seized a shotgun and several rounds of ammunition in the bedroom.

A woman who lived next door to Magana testified that she was in her kitchen when she heard a gunshot at 6:40 p.m. Without looking out her window, she ran into her backyard to take refuge in a granny flat.

A patrol officer said he was sent to the shooting about 7 p.m. and found Magana in a pool of blood on his front walkway, with more blood on the doorstep.

He said footage from home security cameras at Turners residence on Tipton Street in the College Area showed him leave at 2:46 p.m. and return at 8:35 p.m. carrying something that could not be seen clearly.

The woman who was in Maganas home during the shooting was on the witness stand for more than an hour, growing increasingly drowsy as she answered questions.

She yawned broadly and several times nodded off briefly with her head back on the chair before acknowledging she had taken Librium, a sedative, before coming to court.

She had been taken into custody by the Fugitive Task Force on Tuesday, jailed on charges of possessing a controlled substance and contempt of court for failing to appear in court on a previous date, the prosecutor said.

Asked by Deputy Public Defender John OConnell what drugs she has taken in the past, the woman said heroin and methamphetamine.

She told the prosecutor she didnt recall telling any officers the shooter said, Its J.T., but then admitted it when Nikoletich played video from one officers body-worn camera. The woman could be heard repeating the few words exchanged between Magana and his shooter.

She told the officer she recognized the voice of Jeffery Turner, who was about 40, white, and bald. Turner fit that description when he was arrested a day after the shooting.

In court, the witness told Nikoletich that anybody could have been saying he was J.T.

OConnell said he believed not enough evidence had been presented to show that his client was the shooter.

pauline.repard@sduniontribune

Twitter: @pdrepard
A major research project released this week claims California has under-funded its schools by $25.6 billion, many California students are entering school already behind in learning and California schools dont have nearly enough teachers, counselors and other personnel.

The project, called Getting Down to Facts II, includes three dozen reports and 19 briefs that provide a comprehensive look at Californias education system as the state prepares to choose a new governor, state superintendent and legislators.

For the record: This story has been amended from its original posting to reflect corrected education funding shortfall numbers released by the studys authors on Oct. 12.

The San Diego Union-Tribune spoke with Jennifer Imazeki of San Diego State University, the only local researcher who wrote for the project. Imazeki wrote a report and co-wrote a research brief about school funding. She also co-wrote the summary report for the whole project.

Imazeki and other researchers found that, even though Californias school funding levels have been increasing, they have still been consistently below the national average. School districts with high numbers of disadvantaged students especially suffer wide funding gaps, Imazeki said.

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Researchers said that California needed to spend $92.3 billion of operational funds on education in 2016-2017 in order for all students to have the chance to meet education goals set by the state. California spent $66.7 billion. Just 3 percent of California students attended school in a district that was spending enough money on education, which researchers estimated to be $16,800 per student.

Researchers suggested that more funds need to go toward adding more teachers to reduce class sizes and improve special education, expanding programs that can especially help disadvantaged students such as preschool and summer programs, hiring more support staff such as guidance counselors, school psychologists and social workers and growing the length of time students spend in school by extending the school day and school year.

Weve had increases in funding, but were a high-cost state, so comparisons to other states can be kind of tricky because other states dont have the cost of living that we have, Imazeki said. We still need more. We really do.

Heres what Imazeki had to say about the research project:

What can be done to improve school funding?

California is different than a lot of other states. In most states, the majority of funding comes from local districts through property taxes. In most other states, local districts can choose to raise additional revenue for their schools by taxing themselves more. We dont have that option in California because of Prop 13. My paper talks about what some of the alternatives are. We already have parcel taxes. Other states also have local taxes, like sales or even income taxes at the local level. One of the options that is sort of perennially floated is making adjustments to Prop 13, having what is called split roll so businesses can be reassessed more often.

What did you find interesting or surprising about the project?

There have been huge changes in Californias K-12 education system over the last decade. The overhaul of the school finance was huge, but that was accompanied by new standards  Common Core  and it was accompanied by a new accountability system. I think there were a few things that I think were important and, I will say, a little surprising to me. One was the amount of support that was found for these changes. Some of the authors did surveys where they talked to superintendents, principals and stakeholders across the board and a lot of folks think these changes have been for the better. The concerns that were raised tended to be about, people feel like they didnt know how to take full advantage of the opportunities that the reforms allowed.

One concern I have personally is, you got a new governor, new superintendent, new legislators coming in. There are still big achievement gaps. I think its just important for folks coming in to recognize that there have been improvements, and no, we may not be where we want to be yet, but rather than trying to go at it in a totally different direction, we need to make sure to take advantage fully of what weve already done. Early childhood is a big one  we havent really done anything to reform or support early childhood. Special education was also not included in the overhaul of the school finance system. We have higher student-teacher ratios than other states. We dont have counselors. We dont have nurses. There arent as many adults in our schools as in other states.

What does this report mean for San Diego?

Im not actually an expert in San Diego schools. I havent looked at the specific data from the adequacy study for San Diego. I will say that San Diego Unified is the second largest K-12 district in the state, and I think San Diego sometimes gets overlooked compared to Los Angeles. But I do think that we have a lot of the concerns and problems with high-risk populations. All of the achievement gap concerns, I think, are really salient, at least for the city of San Diego, because we have a lot of students that fall into those high-risk populations.

Is there anything that you think has been overlooked in other media reports about the project?

I dont want to use hyperbole, but the pressure  I wont say crisis  the pressure created by the pension problem is only getting bigger. And I think its partly problematic because its not something that I think most people who got directly involved with schools are necessarily thinking about. Its basically like having credit card debt. If you never pay off the balance, it just keeps getting bigger. Weve been under-funding it for so long that simply paying off the obligations we currently have is going to start, if it already hasnt started encroaching on money going into the classroom. In my mind, thats the most important, from a finance perspective, the most important thing going on.

Kristen Taketa

Email: kristen.taketa@sduniontribune.com

Twitter: @Kristen_Taketa
Union workers picketed Palomar Health hospitals Wednesday alleging chronic short staffing and working conditions that contribute to high turnover and undermine the quality of patient care.

Palomar, however, saw different motivations in the protest by the California Nurses Association and its affiliate, the Caregiver Healthcare Employees Union, saying in a statement that the motivation to picket might not have anything to do with its labor practices but rather with a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision.

The recent accusations of understaffing and poor working conditions are false and seem to be an attempt to rally nurses in light of the Janus Supreme Court decision which threatens to undermine the power of labor unions, Palomar said.

Published on June 27, the Janus ruling declared that unions can no longer require employees to pay union dues, otherwise known as agency fees, if they decide they dont want to be represented along with their fellow employees.

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Sue Phillips, a Palomar registered nurse, said in an email that her employer isnt working in good faith to resolve workers concerns.

It is an insult to the nurses and caregivers to say this is about Janus. That is the hospital ignoring our voices, Phillips said.

A statement issued by the CNA does not mention Janus, but does accuse Palomar management of hiring practices that have required nurses to work extra shifts, causing some to go without sleep in order to work these extra hours. The union also calls Palomar out for failing to hire adequate cooks, housekeepers, transport staff and other caregivers.

Palomar fired back, noting that the inland North County health system bargained for and signed a contract with the union just nine months ago that covers many of the issues from hours to working conditions cited on the picket line Wednesday.

Staffing levels at Palomar Medical Centers Escondido and Poway meet or exceed federal guidelines and received five- and four-star ratings respectively for quality from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, Palomar said.

The picket came just four months after the CNA and two other unions held a three-day strike in front of UC San Diego hospitals as part of a statewide labor protest. The CNA recently announced that the two sides reached agreement on a five-year contract that covers 14,000 registered nurses throughout the UC system.

Health Playlist On Now Video: Why aren't Americans getting flu shots? 0:37 On Now Video: Leaders urge public to help extinguish hepatitis outbreak On Now San Diego starts cleansing sidewalks, streets to combat hepatitis A On Now Video: Scripps to shutter its hospice service On Now Video: Scripps La Jolla hospitals nab top local spot in annual hospital rankings On Now Video: Does a parent's Alzheimer's doom their children? On Now Video: Vaccine can prevent human papillomavirus, which can cause cancer 0:31 On Now 23 local doctors have already faced state discipline in 2017 0:48 On Now EpiPen recall expands On Now Kids can add years to your life

paul.sisson@sduniontribune.com

(619) 293-1850

Twitter: @paulsisson
Police in Washington D.C. have made an arrest in the death of a 35-year-old jogger, who was killed during a run in her upscale neighborhood a week after she became engaged.

Anthony Crawford, 23, was arrested and charged with first-degree murder while armed late Wednesday night for repeatedly stabbing Wendy Martinez, D.C. Police Chief Peter Newsham announced Thursday morning. Martinez was jogging in Logan circle just after 8 p.m. Tuesday when she was attacked.

We feel very confident that we have in our custody the person responsible for this murder, said D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser.

There is no evidence to suggest Martinez knew the suspect and investigators do not believe the attack was a robbery. The motive in the brutal stabbing remains unknown, but authorities do not believe the public is in any additional danger.

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Its unsettling for anyone who lives in this city to see this happen. Its an isolated incident, Newsham told reporters. Im sure that doesnt bring any level of comfort to the Martinez family.

Martinez, left for dead in the street, managed to stagger into a nearby takeout restaurant, where members of the public tried to tend to her life-threatening wounds. Security cameras from inside the Chinese American eatery shows the Georgetown University alumnae bleeding from her neck before collapsing on the ground.

The restaurant manager called 911 and responders transported her to a nearby hospital, where she died from her injuries a short time later, Newsham said.

Police earlier this week released surveillance video of a possible suspect in the case, asking the public for any information on the man recorded wearing a oversized mustard hoodie near the crime scene. They were offering a $25,000 reward for details leading to an arrest and conviction in the murder.

Wendy Karina Martinez, 35, was fatally stabbed while on a run near her home in Washington, D.C. (DC Police Department)

Newsham said tips from the public, combined with detectives efforts allowed them to identify Crawford as the man in the footage. Its not clear if anyone will be collecting the reward.

Police located the suspect at a park at 14th and Girard Wednesday night and brought him in for questioning. He was not cooperative with investigators and authorities are now looking into whether he had any criminal history or mental illness.

We expect people to feel safe in any neighborhood, Bowser said. This is an outraged community. This is a woman who should have been going to work today.

Martinez, the Chief of Staff at a D.C.-based software company called FiscalNote, was remembered as an invaluable employee and a vibrant member of the community.

The entire FiscalNote family is shocked and deeply saddened to learn that Wendy Martinez, our Chief of Staff, was killed last night, the company tweeted.

Her family described Martinez as the light of our lives and an avid runner as well as a devout Christian, a wonderful friend, and a driven professional. They added that she became engaged just last week.

A pair of sneakers surrounded by a colorful array of flowers remained on the corner of 11th and P streets, where the crime occurred, to honor Martinez.

I cannot even begin to imagine what her fiance, what her family, what her mom, what her brother, what her friends are going through right now, Newsham said.
Theres the prickly pear, now theres the pointy strawberry.

A boy in New South Wales, Australia, has admitted to inserting sewing needles into fresh strawberries.

The suspects age and identity were not released, nor was there any information as to whether he faces charges.

The boy confessed that it was just a prank and has nothing to do with some other perpetrator who has been contaminating produce in the same region, New South Wales police authorities told ABC News.

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What weve seen in this state we believe is the work of copycats and pranksters, said Stuart Smith, the acting assistant commissioner of the New South Wales police on Wednesday.

Last week, freaked-out consumers reported discovering sewing needles inside strawberries across South Australia, Tasmania, Queensland and New South Wales last week.

People convicted of deliberately tampering with food products face up to a 10-year prison term, Smith warned.

He also announced a reward of about $73,000 American dollars for information that leads to the prosecution of any person deliberately trying to hurt others with contaminated food.

Whether its done with the intention of prank, whether its done with the intention of serious harm to another individual, its no difference, Smith remarked. They are going to be charged with that offense and they are gong to find themselves in front of a court.
NEW YORK  A daughter who never returned home, a son gunned down point-blank, a mom who was attacked  all deaths at the hands of immigrants in the country illegally, all gripping stories the White House has been eager to share.

But for all the talk of murderers, rapists and other bad hombres, those netted in President Donald Trumps crackdown on immigration are typically accused of lesser offenses, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents are increasingly apprehending those with no criminal records at all.

Unshackling ICE has really allowed it to go after more individuals, said Sarah Pierce, a policy analyst with the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute who calls the apprehension of noncriminal immigrants, in particular, a defining characteristic of this administrations approach to immigration.

The case of Mollie Tibbetts  a 20-year-old Iowa college student authorities say was killed by a man living in the U.S. illegally  is among the latest used by Trump to advance his argument for stricter immigration controls. Yet government statistics show such cases are far more likely to be the exception than the rule.

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ICE arrests of noncriminals soared 66 percent in the first nine months of the 2018 fiscal year over the same period a year earlier. Arrests of convicts, meantime, rose 2 percent. More noncriminals have also been deported. Among those expelled from the U.S. interior in fiscal 2017, there was a 174 percent increase from the previous year of those with no criminal convictions. Deportations of those with convictions rose nearly 13 percent over the same period.

The result is immigration courts are filling with defendants like Melissa Aispuro, 20, of Tucson, Arizona, who only came in contact with police because she called to report a car accident.

Ruben Moyoroqui poses for a portrait in his auto repair shop in Tucson, Ariz., on Tuesday, Sept. 4, 2018. (Rick Scuteri / AP)

Aispuro was brought to the U.S. as a child and returned to Mexico for a time after high school before crossing back into the country in 2016. She entered legally with a border crossing card, but overstayed.

She hadnt even considered police would call ICE on someone with no criminal record.

Not all of us are criminals. Some just come here for education, for a better life, said Aispuro, who is married to a U.S. citizen and fighting her deportation. You can think whatever you want, but in my heart I know what I am.

ICE has heralded its deportations of drug kingpins and others accused of serious offenses, and in the 2017 fiscal year, it reported that 56 percent of all deportees it processed had been convicted of crimes. But under Trump, as with prior administrations, when a deportee does have a criminal record, its generally for lesser infractions.

Among more than 220,000 deportees in the 2017 fiscal year, 79,270 had no convictions, according to ICE data housed by the Transactional Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University. Of those with a record, according to the data, 1 in 4 had illegal entry or re-entry to the U.S. as their most serious offenses. Those two counts represented the first- and third-most common charges among deportees. Driving under the influence was second, followed by assault convictions and traffic offenses. Drug trafficking, burglary, domestic violence, larceny and selling marijuana rounded out the top 10 offenses.

The rest of those with a record were convicted of a wide range of misdeeds, both grave crimes like kidnapping and minor offenses including taking a joy ride, gambling or violating a fish conservation statute.

Ruben Moroyoqui, a 45-year-old mechanic in Tucson, had no conviction at all. His only run-in with police, his attorney said, was when he was pulled over last year while picking up auto parts. The officer asked for his license, Moroyoqui said, and then inquired: Are you here legally? He wasnt cited for any driving violation but was handed over to ICE, which began proceedings to deport him to Mexico. An appeal is pending.

Moroyoqui entered the country with authorization 16 years ago but then overstayed his visa. He has four U.S. citizen children and said he has always paid his taxes. I feel great respect and love for this country, he said.

With a spotlight this summer on the separation of immigrant children and their parents, Trump tried to refocus attention on dangerous immigrants by hosting a White House event with relatives of those killed by people in the country illegally. These are the American citizens that are permanently separated from their loved ones, Trump said. These are the stories that Democrats and the people that are weak on immigration, they dont want to discuss.

And yet the most serious crimes, such as murder and rape, are relatively rare among deportees. Studies also have found immigrants to the U.S. have a lower level of criminality than citizens.

Daniel Stein, president of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which supports restrictive immigration measures, said focusing solely on whether those in the country illegally have committed a serious crime ignores the law and that those residents should be deported regardless of whether they have a rap sheet.

Who decided that the policy of the United States was that anybody could come into the country regardless of the law as long as you didnt commit a violent felony? he asked.

Stein said many in the country illegally likely have committed crimes  including securing employment by fraudulent means  but havent been caught yet. Ignoring that fact, he said, makes a mockery of immigration laws.
A man attempted to seas the day when packages of marijuana began washing up on a Florida beach  but ended up getting arrested.

Robert Kelley was arrested for possession of marijuana, over 20 grams, after he tried to steal a brick of the drug on Sept. 13., according to the Flagler County Sheriffs Office.

This guy tried to take advantage of a situation and it completely backfired on him, Sheriff Rick Staly said in a news release.

The beaches in St. Johns, Flagler and Volusia counties had packages of marijuana washing up on shore over the course of two days.

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Approximately 100 pounds of the drug had washed up.

Robert Kelley was arrested on Sept. 13. (Flagler County Sheriff)

Kelley, 61, was seen by witnesses trying to open up and take the bundles of what was presumed to contain marijuana.

Others were attempting to do the same thing, police said in a statement.

Witnesses directed police to Kelley when they arrived.

When Kelley was asked why he had not alerted law enforcement immediately, he stated he did not alert FCSO because he did not know if the Sheriffs Office was going to come or not, police said.

Police found an 11-pound bundle of a green leafy substance in Kelleys brown Toyota and covered in a beach towel.

Kelley (pictured) was sent to Sheriff Perry Hall Inmate Detention Facility where he was released on a $2,500 bond. (Flagler County Sheriff)

This is another great example of See Something, Say Something, said Staly, who praised the witnesses and good policing that kept the illegal drug off the streets.

To anyone thinking they can take advantage of marijuana washing up on shore, I have a warning for you. Is it worth a trip to the Green Roof Inn charged with a felony just for some free weed?

Kelley was sent to Sheriff Perry Hall Inmate Detention Facility where he was ultimately released on a $2,500 bond.

U.S. Customs and Border Patrol will continue the investigation and Kelley is scheduled to be arraigned Oct. 29.
A Maryland man must be hot under the collar after getting arrested for bringing his dementia-stricken wife out on a leash.

Walter William Wolford Sr. was charged Saturday with one count of simple assault after walking his wife around the York Fair in Pennsylvania  with a dog-style leash, according to the York Daily Record.

A witness saw the 65-year-old man dragging his wife Catherine Wolford along on a red nylon leash Saturday afternoon.

According to documents, the witness observed Wolford aggressively pull the 8-foot-long lease  which left red marks around the womans throat. She called the police.

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Wolford had yanked that leash when all of the slack had gone out of it and caused his wifes head to move backward, the witness said.

She was very disoriented, did not know where she was, her own name, and spoke in gibberish, cops said.

In his defense, Wolford said his wife was diagnosed with dementia and had wandered away from him at the fair last year.

He also said the leash was originally placed around her waist but somehow moved up to her neck.

Wolfords son, Walter Wolford Jr., was also at the fair that day and felt his father was not abusive toward his mother.

When police took Wolford to central booking, Wolford Jr. left with his mother.

Wolford was released on $5,000 unsecured bail and is scheduled for an Oct. 18 preliminary hearing.
Mili Bonilla remembers walking hand in hand with her father as a little girl growing up in the Bronx. They remained close as she grew older, speaking on the phone daily. When he moved back to Puerto Rico in the 1970s, she would visit him for father-daughter beach excursions and to enjoy his succulent pork loin.

Jose Maria Bonilla died on Oct. 27, one month and seven days after Hurricane Maria slammed the island with 155-mph winds, causing the largest power outage in U.S. history.

He was a healthy 87-year-old who, before October, had been hospitalized just once  when he broke his hip stepping over a small cat, his 62-year-old daughter said.

A year after Maria roared across the Caribbean, a detailed portrait of the storms victims 

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He was active. He ran around, drove, went shopping, cooked, saw friends, drank beer and played dominoes, she told the Daily News days before the storms one-year anniversary on Sept. 20.

Two days after the hurricane, Jose developed respiratory issues, which turned into pneumonia.

When he arrived at Doctors Central Hospital in Bayamon, medical staff told him he should leave Puerto Rico because the island-wide blackout had limited hospitals operational capacity.

They told him he should go to the U.S. to seek treatment, Bonilla said.

But Jose didnt want to travel, and stayed on the island, where he expected he would soon recover.

Its not easy to get on a plane and get out of here, Bonilla added.

He remained on a ventilator until the hospital ran out of oxygen, according to Bonilla. He was then transferred to Hospital Hermanos Melendez where, days later, he took his last breath.

Obstructed roads, disabled bottling centers and the inability to communicate the need for critical supplies can all impair the availability of oxygen in hospitals following a disaster.

The oxygen supply chains get disrupted and its a major problem, said Irwin Redlener, director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University.

Bonilla is sure the governments response to Maria on Puerto Rico cost her father his life.

I believe that if it wasnt for the limitations that everyone had  not just the hospitals, there were so many  for my father, things would have turned out different, she said.

A George Washington University study commissioned by the Puerto Rican government found that an estimated 2,975 people died in the hurricanes aftermath. The revised death toll was nearly 50 times the governments earlier estimate of 64.

Gov. Ricardo Rossello accepted the results.

How FDNY Urban Search and Rescue team helped locate Hurricane Maria survivors 

This shows the magnitude of the catastrophe, he told El Nuevo Dia newspaper last month.

Independent experts also back the studys findings, adding that the death toll is likely to increase. I wouldnt be surprised if it gets updated to at least 4,000 by the end of the year, Redlener said.

President Trump refuses to acknowledge thousands of lives lost on his watch. 3,000 people did not die from the storm, he tweeted on Sept. 13, accusing Democrats of inflating the number to make me look as bad as possible.

Its such an affront to people who lost loved ones, Bonilla said of Trumps tweet.

Embattled FEMA administrator Brock Long echoed the Presidents remarks, suggesting some of the deaths linked to the storm were actually caused by domestic violence.

You cant blame spousal abuse after a disaster on anybody, he said on Meet the Press.

President Trump delivered more callous remarks Wednesday when he visited the Carolinas, where Hurricane Florence killed at least 37 people, telling victims to have a good time as he passed out supplies.

Eduviges Roque is another Puerto Rican whose death was blamed on the hurricane.

Luisa Roque lost her mother, Eduviges, in the days that followed Hurricane Maria. (Marel Malaret / Oxfam)

She suffered from pulmonary fibrosis and was living with her jewelry designer daughter, Luisa, in Vega Baja, when the hurricane knocked out the familys power and water supplies.

She, too, was discouraged from entering island hospitals.

The conditions were terrible. I avoided taking her in because I knew that as soon as she walked through the door, I would lose her right away. I was worried about the bacteria because she was fragile, Luisa, 50, said.

They borrowed a neighbors generator so that Roque could stay connected to an oxygen concentrator and receive respiratory therapy.

But Luisa struggled to decontaminate their home after it was flooded with rainwater, causing her mothers condition to worsen.

I could see her deteriorating, Luisa said.

Roque died on Nov. 22, 2017, at age 77. She was a warrior but she wasnt able to last in the conditions, her daughter said.

Other families are still searching for relatives who disappeared in the days after the storm.

It has been more than a year since Juan Basques Rodriguez, 58, saw his younger brother, Adan.

Milagros Rodriguez, 64, hasnt seen her brother, Adan, since before Hurricane Maria. (Megan Cerullo / New York Daily News)

Juan Basques Rodriguez, 58, hasnt seen his younger brother, Adan, since Hurricane Maria struck (Megan Cerullo / New York Daily News)

The brothers lived with their sister, Miraglos, in a cluster of three homes in Yabucoa.

Juan was home the day the hurricane hit, but doesnt know where Adan  who was an alcoholic  weathered the storm.

He never came back, and I know nothing of his whereabouts, Juan told The News in Spanish.

Ive searched hospitals, been to the police, forensic services, but nobody knows anything, he said.

Juan reflected on spending the past year without his brother.

He was my companion and my sons godfather. We loved him, he said through tears.

The siblings say its agonizing not knowing for certain what happened to their brother.

Everything is on hold, Milagros said. We dont even know if he is dead or alive, she said.

Its not easy that its the anniversary. By now, we would like some concrete news. None of the authorities have told us anything.
Gabriel Rosario, 27, lost his job as a project manager and event coordinator after Hurricane Maria wiped out his business.

The self-described jack-of-all-trades said his hours were cut in half as fewer clients sought his services  leading him to revisit his studies instead of working part-time.

For so little money, it wasnt worth it, he said.

He now lives with his uncle, and is working toward obtaining a degree in business administration.

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Hes frustrated by the governments response to the hurricane.

Its a joke. There needs to be better communication, he said.

Esperanza Cepeda, 60, is an Uber driver and landlord. (Megan Cerullo / New York Daily News)

Esperanza Cepeda, an Uber driver, said she has had to pick up a second job to make ends meet after Hurricane Maria pummeled Puerto Ricos tourism industry.

Cepeda, 60, says she now works in real estate too to help pay the bills.

She still has flashbacks to the day the storm ravaged the island with 155-mph winds.

Its emotional and traumatic. I have flashbacks of waiting on long lines for water, food, supplies, and think of when we had no light, no power. It completely disrupted my routine, she said.

She sees fewer tourists than she used to, which has had a big impact on her earnings.

It has really affected me, she said.

Maria tore off the roof of her home, but FEMA deemed her ineligible for aid.

If another hurricane hits, we will be in the same situation all over again, she said.

Nayda Ayala Quinones, a lower school teacher, said many of her students struggled with depression after Hurricane Maria. (Megan Cerullo / New York Daily News)

Nayda Ayala Quinones, a lower school teacher in Loiza, where just under 30,000 people live, said many of her students suffered emotionally after the hurricane.

Children whose families lost their homes became depressed and some didnt want to return to school, she told the Daily News in Spanish.

It was very traumatic for a lot of kids, she said.

Many of her students are now seeing therapists to help work through painful memories associated with the storm.

We are trying to help them through their respective situations that they can get settled again, Quinones said.

Edwin, a police officer in San Juan, said his workload increased after the hurricane. (Megan Cerullo / New York Daily News)

Edwin Vasquez, a police officer in San Juan, said his department was stretched thin after the hurricane.

We were helping so many people. Theres nobody it didnt affect, he said.

Hes struck by how many homes still have blue tarp roofs a year after the hurricane.

I cant believe they still havent been repaired, Vasquez said.

He saw a spike in crime immediately after the hurricane, which he said is more controlled now.

We have to keep our heads up, he said on moving forward.

Valentin Colon Montanez said FEMA helped him rebuild his home in Yabucoa. (Megan Cerullo / New York Daily News)

Hes no fan of Trump, who he says regularly trashes immigrants, but Valentin Colon Montanez cant complain about the Federal Emergency Management Agencys response to Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico.

The 76-year-old resident of Yabucoa said he and his wife applied for aid, and were visited right away by FEMA agents.

We had a really good experience with FEMA, he told the Daily News in Spanish.

With an SBA loan from FEMA, the couple was able to repave the driveway, repair ceilings, paint their house and replace two televisions.

We had no problems with FEMA, but I dont like Trump because hes always insulting immigrants, Montanez said.
Ashley Judd can proceed with her defamation lawsuit against Harvey Weinstein, a federal judge ruled Wednesday.

In a 15-page opinion, U.S. District Judge Philip Gutierrez said Judd could conceivably prove Weinstein fabricated false and damaging statements about her when he allegedly told Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson that she was a nightmare to work with.

The green light came only a day after both sides squared off in a Los Angeles courtroom to argue over Weinsteins motion to dismiss the entire action.

Judge Gutierrez said Weinsteins alleged statements that he previously had bad experiences with Judd and that she was a nightmare to work with, heard together, could lead a reasonable person in Jacksons position to conclude Judd engaged in undesirable conduct during the production of previous films.

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This is a fact that (Judd) could prove false if she is able to show that (Weinstein) had no such knowledge, he wrote.

Judge Gutierrez split with Judd when he ruled her related sexual harassment claim didnt seem to fit with the broadly worded California statute she cited in her complaint.

The judge found that the anti-harassment statute clearly covers service providers and their clients, but he said hes not convinced it was intended to cover harassment between an actor and producer.

He granted Weinsteins request to toss that claim for now but gave Judd until Oct. 19 to file an amended complaint that could revive it.

The court is skeptical that (the statute) covers relationships between employers and prospective employees. But plaintiff has asked for the opportunity to allege additional facts demonstrating that her relationship with defendant was not the ordinary potential employer-prospective employee relationship. At this stage, the court cannot conclude that amendment would be futile, he wrote.

Judds lawyer Theodore J. Boutrous, Jr., said Wednesday he was happy with the overall ruling.

We are very pleased that today the District Court held that Ashley Judd can proceed with her lawsuit against Harvey Weinstein and continue her effort to vindicate the wrongs he committed against her among so many other women, Boutrous said in a statement.

We are also pleased that the court gave us an opportunity to amend our complaint and present additional facts related to one of Ms. Judds claims, he said

We will move forward immediately with discovery, including Mr. Weinsteins deposition, and look forward to proving to a jury at trial that Mr. Weinstein defamed Ms. Judd, interfered with her ability to earn a living, and engaged in unlawful business practices, he said. The law should not tolerate this abuse of power to damage anothers career.

Weinsteins lawyer Phyllis Kupferstein said in her oral arguments Tuesday that Judd exercised no diligence back in 1998 to learn why she was passed over for Lord of the Rings, so she shouldnt be allowed to skirt the statute of limitations and make a late claim now that she was robbed of the role.

The judge ultimately disagreed and said that at this stage of the lawsuit, Judd only has to show that she likely would have been unable to learn of Weinsteins alleged comments to Jackson back when the incident occurred.

The judge said Jackson likely would have kept his discussions with Weinstein a secret even if Judd asked him point blank why she was not cast.

The court finds this allegation plausible. Individuals often do not reveal the content of their confidential conversations, especially when the conversation is with a powerful figure who carries influence over them and includes derogatory information about the person inquiring about it, Judge Gutierrez wrote in his ruling.

Judd filed her lawsuit back in April, claiming Weinstein trash-talked her to Jackson after she rebuffed his advances.

She claimed the defamation caused a ripple effect in her career because a role in the wildly successful Rings franchise likely would have led to other high-profile opportunities.

Echoing what she told the New York Times in its blockbuster Weinstein expose last year, Judd said in her complaint that Weinstein lured her to a suite of the Peninsula Beverly Hills hotel under the guise of a business meeting in 1996 or 1997, stripped naked and asked her to engage in massage and watch him shower.

She said it wasnt until after she stepped forward last year that she learned Weinstein allegedly smeared her to Jackson.

Jackson blew the whistle when he gave an interview in December saying he was close to casting Judd in Lord of the Rings but removed her from consideration as a direct result of false information he received from Miramax regarding Judd and fellow actress Mira Sorvino, another Weinstein accuser.

I recall Miramax telling us they were a nightmare to work with and we should avoid them at all costs, Jackson told Stuff.

At the time, we had no reason to question what these guys were telling us, but in hindsight, I realize that this was very likely the Miramax smear campaign in full swing, he said.

Attempts to reach Kupferstein were not immediately successful Wednesday.

Weinstein, 66, has been indicted on rape and criminal sex act counts involving different women in New York and remains free on $1 million bail as he fights the charges.
A former teacher in Maine found not guilty of having sex with a student said she wants to write a book to share her story with others.

As reported in the Journal Tribune, 30-year-old former Kennebunk High School teacher Jill Lamontagne was first accused of sex charges with a student in 2017. She was acquitted of all charges in July after a four-day trial.

Ive filled multiple notebooks over the past year, she told the Journal Tribune. A book is a goal.

Lamontagne resigned after teaching health at the school for almost five years in September 2017 when a student came forward with sexual allegations. The student, now 19, was 17 at the time Lamontagne began helping him with schoolwork to graduate.

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She has been working at a diner since she resigned in September 2017. Lamontagne was shocked when she learned about the allegations.

She knew people who are innocent are sometimes convicted for crimes they did not commit, and had to prepare herself for that possibility, despite not being able to sleep or eat and taking to her living room couch for a month.

The student testified that he and Lamontagnes relationship changed toward the end of the school year in 2017 when his graduation was nearing, and claimed they engaged in a sexual relationship in a closet at her portable classroom and at her home.

A former colleague and daycare provider each testified that Lamontagne was with them during the two separate incidents where the teen claimed to engage in sexual relations with his former teacher.

I think the weak part of the puzzle was my administration and superintendent, Lamontagne said to the Journal Tribune, placing blame on school officials. The superintendent and principal assisted the police in building a case against me.

Although she was acquitted of all 14 charges against her, Lamontagnes life will never go back to the way it used to be.

I dont get my job back, (attorney) fees back, the old version of me back, she told the newspaper. I dont get rid of the trauma. Im innocent, thats it.

Teachers were discouraged from texting and calling students, but Lamontagne says it was not official policy until earlier this year.

It became more evident that math was not the only thing he was struggling with, Lamontagne said to the Journal Tribune.

The student testified he tried to take his life on June 9 when he was supposed to be attending a graduation assembly for seniors.

After the trial, Superintendent Dr. Kathryn Hawes released a letter commenting on Lamontagnes violation of the schools policy.

Although Ms. Lamontagne was acquitted of the criminal charges, I think it is important to acknowledge that the evidence that was presented during the trial demonstrated a troubling failure by one of our teachers to comply with the standards we expect of all of our employees, Hawes said in her letter.

Lamontagne said the the texts and phone calls were all solely for her efforts toward helping the student.

She was in communication with the schools guidance counselor and sought advice on how to help him emotionally because she knew he was struggling. The student was not referred to the social worker at the school, however, because the two did not get along according to Lamontagne.

Although she has not ruled out teaching, Lamontagne, who studied nursing before she was a teacher, is exploring careers in the medical field. Holistic health or counseling are two possibilities she considers.

She told the Journal Tribune she wouldnt do anything different today, despite all that happened.

I gave 110 percent. I did what I thought was right for a kid in a rough spot, she said. I couldnt have done more, but I couldnt have done less and been OK with it.
Two women gave Glory to God in the Highest a new meaning when they were caught selling edible marijuana products in a bake sale as part of an entrepreneurs fair at a church in Georgia.

Ebony Cooper, 28, and Leah Pressley, 26, were arrested last week for selling the marijuana products on the Savannah church property.

According to a Facebook post by the Chatham-Savannah Counter Narcotics Team, undercover agents purchased several edibles from Cooper, who had them displayed openly on a booth table. Seized items included marijuana-laced cereal treats, brownies and pudding.

Police continued to monitor Cooper after the sale, and followed her to an off-site location where she met with Pressley. Authorities then made contact with the women, and upon searching Pressleys vehicle, found a large amount of edibles and over $1,000 in cash.

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Authorities also found a loaded gun that they believe Cooper had in her possession while selling the edibles on church property.

Both women were arrested and face felony drug charges. They were being held in the Chatham County Detention Center.

Cooper was advertising her desserts on social media during the event.

The event was hosted by an outside vendor, and the church had no knowledge of the illegal activities that were happening on-site. All the other vendors were operating lawfully, the CNT team wrote.

With News Wire Services
3 / 25

On Feb. 2, 1998, Darrell Issa speaks before a crowd in his companys warehouse as he announces his candidacy for U.S. Senate. After years of backing other Republican candidates, Issa spent $9 million of his own money in his first bid for public office, only to lose the GOP primary in part due to news reports that he had been arrested for car theft decades earlier (charges were dropped) and allegations that he benefited from a suspicious fire in 1982 at his Ohio factory and lied when taking over his car alarm company. He lost to then-state Treasurer Matt Fong, who in turn lost to incumbent Barbara Boxer. (David Carlson / U-T file)
New safety proposals unveiled by electric scooter companies on Wednesday failed to satisfy community leaders concerned the zooming devices dont mix well with pedestrians on sidewalks and boardwalks.

Some critics called for a moratorium on the scooters to allow city officials to craft strict regulations, while others lobbied for a crackdown by police, special scooter parking areas and the city charging scooter companies large operating fees.

The public isnt safe and our neighborhoods are becoming unlivable, Jonathan Freeman, leader of a Facebook group focused on safe walking conditions, told the City Councils Public Safety committee. We need immediate relief.

San Diego has among the loosest rules in California governing electric scooters, which have exploded in popularity. The Police Department also lacks the manpower to enforce laws requiring scooter riders to wear helmets and stay off city sidewalks.

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Meanwhile, local hospitals have reported a growing number of people showing up in emergency rooms with scooter-related injuries.

Mayor Kevin Faulconer and other city leaders say they are reluctant to crack down too hard because they dont want scooter companies to leave, contending the positive effect of the environmentally friendly mode of transportation outweighs the negatives.

Theyve focused instead on finding ways to encourage scooter riders to drive more safely and respectfully, which prompted three local scooter companies  Bird, Lime and Razor  to unveil several safety proposals Wednesday.

They include using technology to limit scooter speeds in dangerous areas, and educating riders with warnings and training sessions in the phone app they use to rent a scooter.

Other proposals include allowing scooter users to report reckless riding by others, designating specific parking areas in the app, and requiring users to end their ride by sending a photo proving they parked in an appropriate place.

The companies also offered to provide detailed data about scooter use, including where they are most often rented, how far users typically travel and other usage patterns. City officials say the data could help them craft smarter regulations.

Officials from the scooter companies also promised to partner with local hotels on education classes, primarily because so many scooter users in San Diego are tourists in downtown or the citys beach communities.

Namara Mercer, executive director of the San Diego Hotel-Motel Association, said her industry is embracing the scooters and would gladly help educate tourists.

The safety of our visitors is our No. 1 priority, and they do like to ride scooters, she said.

Others, however, said the scooters do more to deter tourists than attract them because they have made many people scared to walk on beach boardwalks or the Embarcadero.

Michael Trimble, executive director of the Gaslamp Quarter Association, said his members frequently complain about users illegally riding on sidewalks and parking scooters where they block sidewalks or business entrances.

San Diego should follow the lead of other cities and place a moratorium on scooters until appropriate regulations can be crafted, Trimble said.

Councilwoman Lorie Zapf said the city should consider circulating a request for proposals from scooter companies, which would allow the city to choose the one or two companies with the most impressive proposals.

Zapf, who represents the beach communities, lobbied last spring for a scooter ban on city boardwalks. But her council colleagues rejected the proposal in a 6-3 vote.

On Wednesday, she said city officials should have crafted carefully written rules before allowing scooters to operate.

Regulations should have been in place so we didnt just wake up one day and all these scooters just fell out of the sky and magically appeared all over our city without any regulations, she said.

She also expressed frustration that the loud presence of scooters is essentially free advertising for the companies, in contrast to local delis that get fined for putting sandwich boards in front of their businesses.

Greg Block, a spokesman for Mayor Faulconer, said Faulconers staff has been working with City Attorney Mara Elliott on regulations that could be unveiled in a matter of weeks.

We have been closely watching the growth of this industry, Block said. We believe it is time to put a regulatory framework in place. Like many new technologies, these scooters are not without their disruptions to our status quo.

Block, however, reiterated that Faulconer believes the positives outweigh the negatives.

They provide a unique alternative to cars and they are the type of innovations we do need in San Diego, he said.

Police have also stepped up scooter enforcement, issuing since January 2,200 helmet citations, 190 sidewalk riding tickets and 58 citations for having two passengers on a scooter.

Freeman, the Facebook group leader, said those totals are remarkably low with an estimated three million local scooter rides this year in San Diego.

He also scoffed at the idea that education campaigns would sharply improve safety, contending riders use sidewalks because they feel vulnerable on the street aboard a narrow, upright scooter.

Education, as desirable as it is, unfortunately will not make an inherently unsafe design safe, said Freeman, who was applauded several times by dozens of other scooter critics at Wednesdays hearing.

The helmet rule might also soon end. A bill allowing adult scooter riders to go without helmets has been approved by the state Legislature and is awaiting Gov. Jerry Browns signature.

david.garrick@sduniontribune.com (619) 269-8906 Twitter:@UTDavidGarrick
The number of independent voters in San Diego County has surpassed the number of registered Republicans.

As of the end of August, there were 509,359 voters who registered as no party preference compared to 487,259 registered Republicans, according to the latest numbers from the San Diego County Registrar of Voters. Both trail the Democratic Party, which has 618,088 registrants.

The surge in independent voters and the decline in registered Republicans brings San Diego County in line with a trend that has played out in the rest of the state. It represents a dramatic shift from several decades of Republican dominance here from the 1980s through 2008.

That dominance remains a feature of county politics.

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Republican Kevin Faulconer was elected mayor of San Diego four years ago despite the city then having nearly 100,000 more registered Democrats. All five members of the county Board of Supervisors have traditionally been, and currently are, Republican. And with one exception, the Republican presidential nominee carried the county in every election from 1948 to 2004.

At the GOPs peak in 1992, Republicans had more than 627,000 registered voters in San Diego County compared to 517,551 registered Democrats. Fewer than 200,000 voters registered with no party preference.

Experts say the change in registration may say more about todays voters than it does about the Republican Party.

I think the choice to identify as an independent is sort of separate from the decline in Republican registration, said Casey Dominguez, professor of political science at the University of San Diego. That may not have anything to do with peoples actual voting behavior.

Tony Krvaric, chairman of the San Diego County Republican Party, said he was not surprised to see the number of independent voters surpass the number of Republicans, given the volume of people registering as a matter of convenience when they are getting their drivers licenses  as opposed to doing so as part of a political commitment.

He said hes not seeing a mass exodus from the Republican Party, and hes not sure how many motor voter registrants will actually vote.

Regardless of what happens with registration, he said, the job of the party in San Diego County remains the same.

Our job is to field candidates regardless of the environment for as many offices as possible and field candidates that fit the district they are running in, he said, adding that the party has done a good job of promoting candidates who share the values and experiences of their constituents. We have been punching above our weight for a long time.

Jessica Hayes, chairwoman of the San Diego County Democratic Party, said the shift in registration does have something to do with the Republican Party.

I think it indicates that people are sick with whats going on, she said. The damage that has been done and continues to be done to our country is significant.

I dont blame people for leaving, she said.

Hayes said she thinks many Republicans in San Diego County are troubled by President Donald Trump and that the direction hes taken the Republican Party is one they no longer recognize.

Thats not who they used to be, Hayes said.

Hayes also said that people changing their party doesnt make a statement unless they are casting votes.

Jeff Marston, co-chair of the San Diego-based Independent Voter Project, credits the surge in no party preference voters to something larger.

Youre seeing in this country more and more people consider themselves independents, Marston said. Basically, people are tired of both parties.

Marston said he was surprised nonpartisan registration hadnt overtaken Republicans sooner and wouldnt be surprised if it overtakes Democrats at some point as well.

He said the independent designation is especially popular among young people and first-time registrants, and that a common misconception of nonpartisan voters is that they are moderates.

It is not about electing more moderates, that is the biggest fallacy, Marston said. Its about the attitude of men and women in office and the attitude of candidates in reaching out to voters.

Marston, a former assemblymember, said candidates often lack the desire to look beyond their base.

Jemery Laguna, 20, a Mesa College student who registered with no party preference earlier this year, said he feels closer to Democrats on social issues, but also agrees with Republicans on many financial ones.

He also said he thinks he understands why so many people are registering as independents.

I like to think it is a distrust in the political parties, said Laguna, adding that voters often end up backing candidates they dont really believe in. There are a lot of empty promises and a lot of the time it comes down to, Im going to vote for the lesser of two evils.

charles.clark@sduniontribune.com

@bycharlesclark
The decomposed body of a man was found Friday in a field in Oceanside and police say they hope the county Medical Examiners Office will be able to determine how he died.

A person walking in the area called police after spotting the body in an open field off San Luis Rey Road near Benet Drive in Oceanside, near the San Diego Humane Societys Oceanside campus, said Oceanside police Lt. Kedrick Sadler.

It looks like hes been there for awhile, Sadler said. He said there were no obvious signs of suspicious circumstances related to the death.

It doesnt look like something that just happened, he said. We arent sure when it happened or what the cause of death is at this time.

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Homicide detectives were sent to the scene to look for any evidence of a crime, and the county Medical Examiners Office was called in to take custody of the body.

Twitter: @karenkucher

(619) 293-1350

karen.kucher@sduniontribune.com
An attorney for a Carlsbad woman who fatally shot her husband during an argument while their children watched cartoons downstairs in their home filed a motion Wednesday in hopes that a judge will slash her clients lengthy prison sentence.

Julie Harper does not seek to minimize the harm she caused or escape punishment, wrote attorney Gloria Collins, who on Wednesday was officially appointed to represent Harper.

She understands and accepts that she must live with the guilt and grief over the pain she has caused so many people she loved so much for the rest of her life, Collins wrote.

In October 2015, a Vista Superior Court jury found Harper, 45, guilty of second-degree murder in the 2012 death of Jason Harper in their home. She is serving a sentence of 40 years to life, including 25 years for using a gun.

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Harper is hoping Superior Court Judge Blaine Bowman will cut that 25 years from her sentence, dropping it to 15 years to life in prison.

Harpers case is among those affected by a new state law that gives trial judges the power to decide if a person should serve extra prison time for using a gun during a crime. Until the law change, judges had no such discretion. The extra time was mandatory.

In the motion filed Wednesday, Collins argued that the gunshot Harper fired was not an execution-type shot, but rather a single shot that entered his side and unfortunately struck him in the heart.

Collins argued that the shot came during an argument, and was not planned or premeditated.

Reached by phone, Collins said she doesnt like any law that ties a judges hands. I think that the sentence ought to be tailored to fit the case and the accused.

Harper, who had filed for divorce, testified that mid-morning on Aug. 7, 2002, her 6-foot, 7-inch tall husband came at her during an argument, and that she fired her small handgun accidentally but in fear of her life.

The motion also argues that Harpers post-shooting behavior  she fled with the kids and ditched the gun  was done to protect her children from seeing what had happened, not an effort to cover her tracks.

Collins said that Harper tried to find someone to watch the children  ages 1, 6, and 8 at the time  then hired an attorney and made arrangements to turn herself in.

Police first learned of the death after the attorney Julie Harper had hired that day called and told them to go to the Harper home, where they found Jason Harpers body.

Deputy District Attorney Keith Watanabe said in an email that Jason Harpers family was satisfied with the 40-years-to-life sentence and are upset at the prospect that the sentence could be reduced.

However, they will appear at resentencing and urge the court to not reduce Ms. Harpers sentence, Watanabe said.

Bowman is the judge who oversaw the trial. When he sentenced Harper in 2016, Bowman said he found that none of her testimony rang true. He also said she was inherently untrustworthy and not worthy of belief.

Harpers resentencing hearing is set for Oct. 24.

teri.figueroa@sduniontribune.com

(760) 529-4945

Twitter: @TeriFigueroaUT
The driver of a flatbed truck was trapped in his vehicle and seriously injured Thursday when he slammed into the back of a stopped city water truck in Paradise Hills, authorities said.

It took firefighters more than 30 minutes to free the trapped man, who was taken to a hospital with injuries that were serious but not considered life-threatening, according to San Diego police and the San Diego Fire-Rescue Department.

The 28-year-old driver was traveling east on Paradise Valley Road about noon when he rear-ended the back of the San Diego Public Utilities Department water truck that was in a turn lane preparing to make a left onto Gilmartin Drive, Officer Steve Bourasa said.

From the impact, it appeared the flatbed truck was travelling close to the speed limit, or about 50 mph, when it struck the city truck, SDFD Battalion Chief Alan Arrollado told OnScene TV.

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The driver was pinned in such a manner that he was wrapped around and entangled inside the vehicle and the pedals and everything, Arrollado told OnScene TV. It took quite a time to get him out  much longer than were accustomed to.

Arrollado said it took firefighters between 30 and 45 minutes to free the driver, who groaned in pain as he was pulled from his vehicle on a stretcher. The battalion chief called the rescue quite tedious.

Medics took the wounded man to Scripps Mercy Hospital in Hillcrest for treatment of serious leg and internal injuries, police and firefighters said.

The city workers in the water truck sustained minor injuries, but none were taken to hospitals, Arrollado said.

Bourasa said the San Diego Police Departments traffic division was investigating the crash.

Traffic was expected to be backed up on Paradise Valley Road in the area for several hours.

Twitter: @Alex_Riggins

(619) 293-1710

alex.riggins@sduniontribune.com
When the California subsidiary of Netherlands-based Rabobank was sentenced earlier this year for conspiring to defraud the United States, the bank was ordered to forfeit $368.7 million  the largest financial penalty ever levied in a federal courtroom in San Diego.

On Wednesday, more than $26 million of those forfeited funds were disbursed to the San Diego and Chula Vista police departments for helping investigate Rabobank, which pleaded guilty to failing to properly investigate or alert regulators to thousands of cash-heavy transactions likely linked to organized crime in Mexico.

In total, the Financial Investigations and Border Crimes Task Force that led the Rabobank investigation received $119 million in the banks forfeited funds. The Internal Revenue Service Criminal Investigation unit, which led the task force, gave the San Diego Police Department $20.8 million and the Chula Vista Police Department $5.9 million.

The California Franchise Tax Board also received $20.8 million from the IRS for its role in the investigation.

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These funds will keep San Diego one of the safest large cities in America, San Diego police Chief Dave Nisleit said after receiving an oversized check at a ceremony outside Chula Vista police headquarters.

These funds will allow us to purchase equipment, participate in advanced training and keep the department up to date in the latest technology to assist us in both reducing and preventing crime, Nisleit said.

Chula Vista police Chief Roxana Kennedy, third from right, accepts a check for $5.9 million from the IRS Criminal Investigation unit on Wednesday outside Chula Vista police headquarters. (Courtesy of IRS Criminal Investigation)

Chula Vista police Chief Roxana Kennedy joked at the ceremony that, normally Im writing a check to the IRS, instead of receiving a check.

For our budget, which is $56 million, to have an additional $5.9 million is huge, Kennedy said. The funds will help us acquire the new tools and technology to further our public safety mission.

Maura Krajewski, assistant special agent in charge of the IRS Criminal Investigation unit, said her agency was grateful to the San Diego and Chula Vista police departments, and the California Franchise Tax Board, for their hard work.

We are honored that they can put the money to good use for their departments, Krajewski said in a statement.

The Rabobank investigation and prosecution was unique because of the size of the forfeiture and the brazenness with which bank executives defied federal regulators.

According to the 45-page plea agreement, the bank admitted that not only did it fail to investigate or report hundreds of millions of dollars of suspicious transactions, but it solicited additional business from customers who likely had criminal ties.

In the plea agreement, Rabobank  which federal regulators had previously found lacked oversight of its anti-money-laundering compliance program  did not dispute that the transactions involved criminal activity, including money laundering, bulk cash smuggling and depositing money in increments of just less than $10,000 to avoid mandatory reporting thresholds.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Daniel Silva said no bank officials have gone to prison in the investigation.

Not yet, Silva said, though he declined to say whether prosecutions may be forthcoming.

When the U.S. Department of the Treasurys Office of the Comptroller of the Currency  the primary regulator  tried to investigate the most recent allegations against the bank, several high-level bank executives in 2013 obstructed the probe, provided false and misleading information and fired a colleague who spoke out about the banks failings, according to the plea agreement.

Twitter: @Alex_Riggins

(619) 293-1710

alex.riggins@sduniontribune.com
A man flashed a gun at a yogurt shop employee and took cash from the register Wednesday evening in a Rolando shopping center near San Diego State University, police said.

The robbery happened about 6:35 p.m. at Yogurtland, a self-serve dessert shop off El Cajon Boulevard and College Avenue in the Campus Plaza shopping center, San Diego police Officer Robert Heims said.

The suspect was walking around near the registers when he approached an employee and lifted his shirt up, displaying a black gun in his waistband, Heims said in a statement.

The employee opened the register and stepped back, Heims said. The suspect took money from the register and fled out the front door in an unknown direction.

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The suspect was described as a clean-shaven black or Hispanic man wearing a burgundy sweatshirt, jeans and a black and red hat.

Officers at the scene said the suspect matched the description of a man who robbed two Fred Loya Insurance branches within about 45 minutes Tuesday evening in Kearny Mesa and Clairemont, according to police radio traffic.

Heims said it wasnt immediately clear if the robberies were being investigated as potentially related.

Like the Yogurtland suspect, the man who robbed the insurance branches on Clairemont Mesa Boulevard also carried a black gun and wore a burgundy sweatshirt and hat.

Police additionally described the suspect from Tuesdays double-robbery as a thin, roughly 5-foot-6-inch black man in his 30s who wore pants, black shoes and sunglasses.

Robbery detectives from the San Diego Police Department were handling all three investigations.

Twitter: @Alex_Riggins

(619) 293-1710

alex.riggins@sduniontribune.com
A UC San Diego scientist who was sexually harassed while doing research in Antarctica has been given a bit of emotional support by an obscure government board that decided to relabel a glacier that bore the name of her tormentor.

The 7-mile long glacier had been named Marchant in honor of David Marchant, a prominent geologist at Boston University. Earlier this month, the U.S. Board on Geographic Names quietly changed the name to Matataua Peak.

I was surprised and pleased. I had no idea it was happening, said Jane Willenbring, a geoscientist at UC San Diegos Scripps Institution of Oceanography.

I didnt even know that you could rename glaciers.

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The change comes after BU determined that Marchant sexually harassed Willenbring nearly 20 years ago when she was one of his graduate students.

She did not file a formal complaint against Marchant until late 2016, after she had obtained a tenured position at Scripps.

I had a moment of revelation (earlier that year), Willenbring told the Union-Tribune. It happened when I took my daughter to my lab, where she saw me in a lab coat. She said she wanted to become a scientist and it made me sad thinking of how she could be treated like garbage in 20 years.

I decided to do something about it (and filed a complaint). He couldnt ruin my career; I have tenure.

Willenbring says she didnt notify the University of Pennsylvania, where she had been working, or her new employer, Scripps.

The complaint became public in October 2017 when the influential journal Science published a story about the matter.

Science reported that Willenbring alleges that Marchant repeatedly shoved her down a steep slope, pelted her with rocks while she was urinating in the field, called her a slut and a whore, and urged her to have sex with his brother, who was also on the trip.

Willenbring says the harassment occurred during research trips in 1999-2000 and 2000-01.

The journal highlighted incidents during the 1999-2000 field season when Willenbring, Marchant, Marchants brother, and another student were working alone in the Antarctic, where the temperature sometimes fell to minus 40 degrees Fahrenheit.

Science said that, According to Willenbring, Marchant told her repeatedly that his brother had a porn-sized penis, and said she should have sex with him and feel lucky for the opportunity ...

The article also says, In another instance, Willenbring alleges in the complaint, Marchant declared it was training time. Excited that he might be about to teach her something, Willenbring allowed him to pour volcanic ash, which includes tiny shards of glass, into her hand.

She had been troubled by ice blindness, caused by excessive ultraviolet light exposure, which sensitizes the eyes. She says she leaned in to observe, and Marchant blew the ash into her eyes.

The Science story further alleges that Marchant threatened to ruin her career if she did not write a positive letter about him for his tenure and promotion file.

BU conducted an investigation and reported in late 2017 that, Professor Marchant directed derogatory sex-based slurs and sexual comments at Dr. Willenbring during the 1999-2000 field expedition to Antarctica.

The investigators did not find credible evidence to support Dr. Willenbrings remaining claims regarding Professor Marchants behavior, which included allegations of direct physical attacks, and other types of psychological and physical abuse.

The investigators found, based on all of the available evidence, that the sexual harassment was sufficiently severe and pervasive so as to create a hostile learning and living environment for Dr. Willenberg at the camp in Antarctica.

BU is trying to fire Marchant from his position.

David Marchant is continuing to appeal the recommended sanction of termination, as is his right under Boston Universitys policies, said Colin Riley, a spokesman for the university.

Marchant did not respond to a request from the Union-Tribune for comment.

Willenbring did discuss the case with the U-T, offering an explanation for why she wrote a letter on Marchants behalf. The journal Science reported that Willenbring alleged Marchant threatened to ruin her career if the letter was not a positive one.

I wrote that he was a good scientist but omitted the parts about the treatment I received from him, said Willenbring, who studies how earths landscape changes over time.

She added that she has spoken to many women in science and every one of them said that they would not have talked about something like this until they got tenure.

Theres such a huge chance of retaliation and attacks on your credibility just for reporting something.

As she works with students today, Willenbring says, I am open and honest about my experience so that they go into the field with their eyes wide open.

I try to be the kind of person that I needed when I was younger  someone who would fight for me, someone who would change the rules if they needed to be changed.

Willenbring also said that serious attention should be given to people who say that they were mistreated a long time ago  including people like Christine Blasey Ford, who claims that Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her when they were in high school.

When someone comes forward after decades of silence, some people evoke the idea that theres a statute of limitations on things like this, Willenbring said.

Theres this feeling that people dont remember what happened decades ago. I am shocked by that idea. A woman absolutely remembers the event.

Willenbring added: There is this perception that men are on thin ice with women. It is easy to remain off thin ice; treat women professionally.
With his home state flooded and the death toll rising, FEMA Administrator William Brock Long was on the verge of quitting this week.

On Sunday, his bitter feud with Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen seemed as though it would abate. The two agreed to a truce so that the Trump administrations response to Hurricane Florence would not be further overshadowed by the deepening acrimony between them since the disclosure of an internal investigation into Longs use of government vehicles to travel between Washington and his home in North Carolina.

Nothing would happen to Long in the near term, Nielsen assured him, according to three senior government officials familiar with the conversation. Lets just get through the storm, she said.

About 24 hours later, as Longs plane landed in North Carolina, he learned that the Homeland Security Office of Inspector General had referred his case to federal prosecutors for a possible criminal investigation. He felt devastated and betrayed, according to the three government officials, who had knowledge of Longs reaction.

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It was FEMA personnel who convinced him not to quit, said one congressional aide briefed on the matter. A senior administration official confirmed the account.

The political upheaval surrounding Long now threatens to undercut the nations top disaster official at the moment hes needed most, his allies say. State and local officials in North Carolina have praised the Federal Emergency Management Agency for its response to the storm. But the discord has sparked worry and some level of panic within FEMA and Homeland Security as they prepare for what is forecast to be a hectic hurricane season, and as FEMA seeks to rehabilitate its image amid renewed criticism of its handling of Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico last year.

Long called his relationship with Nielsen professional and functional. But behind the scenes, he and other FEMA officials have told colleagues they think she has her mind set on ousting him.

Long spoke briefly with the Washington Post on Wednesday as he was driven in an SUV to a helicopter waiting to take him to greet President Trump, who had arrived with Nielsen in North Carolina to assess the federal response. We both understand what needs to be done, he said of himself and Nielsen, and we will continue to work together.

Long said he has not seen the inspector generals findings nor retained an attorney. He would not discuss the investigation except to say that whats being put out there, its far from the reality. He has repeatedly denied doing anything improper.

Tension between Nielsen and Long dates back to summer 2017, when Nielsen was chief of staff to Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly, said an administration official who has observed their interactions. It deteriorated further once she took over at Homeland Security in December, this official said.

Nielsen was irritated with Long for not attending early-morning meetings with top-level Homeland Security staff, and she disapproved of his absences from Washington, an official said. As Homeland Security secretary, Nielsen is Longs boss, but the FEMA administrator directly advises the president during disasters. This competing chain of command has contributed to the friction between Nielsen and Long, current and former administration officials said.

On Sunday, things boiled over. Within hours of their phone call establishing a truce, Longs aides learned that Nielsen was preparing to visit North Carolina to speak with emergency responders, four officials said. No one had told FEMA of her plans. Long and his aides scrambled to get there as well.

A senior administration official familiar with the planning contested that account. The official said senior FEMA staff were told Friday that Nielsen was considering a trip, but her travel plans werent finalized until midday Sunday during a meeting with Long.

A FEMA spokeswoman declined to comment. A Homeland Security spokesman did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Though Longs future with the administration remains in question, officials acknowledge the situation presents a dilemma. He is considered highly competent and, perhaps as important, Trump appears to like him. The president praised Long, and Nielsen, during a media appearance Wednesday.

But Longs personal relationship with the president may have contributed to what one administration official called creeping hubris, notably as he used government vehicles for his trips home even after Nielsen chided him for it. Several officials who have worked with Long in the past say he is highly skilled and experienced at emergency management but not adept at the political dynamics of Washington.

It was unclear whether Trump and Long discussed his future during the presidents visit to North Carolina.

The inspector generals investigation centers on Longs travel to Hickory, N.C., where his wife and two young sons live. Investigators surveilled Long during those trips, which occasionally included other FEMA staffers, raising questions internally about his use of government resources, two administration officials said.

Nielsen promised to give Long a copy of the investigations preliminary findings in recent days but has not followed through, said the three government officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to offer their candid assessment of the rift. Nielsen and others at Homeland Security have known for weeks that the inspector general was preparing to refer the matter to the Justice Department for possible prosecution, according to one of those officials.

Another administration official familiar with the investigation challenged those claims, and said the Homeland Security inspector general is independent of the secretary and therefore Nielsen would not be able to share the investigations findings with Long. It is not her report, the official said.

A spokesman for the Justice Department declined to comment.

Long and others at the agency thought his use of the vehicles was justified, current and former officials said, because the FEMA administrator is responsible for the agencys National Continuity Programs, which require the countrys leaders to maintain secure communications in the event of a catastrophe. Much of the NCP plans are classified, officials said, but they require Long to be on call around the clock with access to secure equipment that allow the president to talk to him within minutes notice.

Officials familiar with Longs schedule said his trips home were not as prolific as his detractors have suggested and that he has tried not to waste taxpayer money, using public transportation to commute to and from his residence in Washington.

In his interview with the Post, Long said: I took the Metro to work. I ride an electric scooter to work. I walked to work. Ive been bitten by a dog walking to work.

Florences path through North Carolina has, in some ways, proved fortuitous for Long. He has been able to leverage his lifelong knowledge of the state and relationships forged with disaster management officials there as he has toured stricken areas and sought to assure those in distress that the federal response would be robust and sustained.

Its important for me to be on the ground, he told the Post, describing his visit to a shelter where he talked to storm survivors and made personal calls to responders to adjust their plans.

Local officials said Long has been highly effective and praised FEMAs response to the crisis thus far. Nearly 20,000 federal and military personnel have been involved. More than 3,000 people have been rescued from the floodwaters, and 2 million meals have been delivered to those in need across North and South Carolina, according to federal officials.

In North Carolina, leaders said theyve benefited, too, from an innovative program that embeds FEMA workers in the state before disasters strike. Long launched the program there in April and plans to spread it across the country.

Long is widely liked and respected across FEMAs sprawling staff and among those staffing the emergency operations center in Raleigh, North Carolinas capital. Many have expressed anxiety at the prospect of Longs ouster and what it could mean for the agency.

FEMAs No. 2 position has been vacant for nearly two years, and Trumps current nominee, Peter Gaynor, still awaits Senate confirmation. The third in command  Daniel Kaniewski, a close friend and onetime housemate of Nielsen, according to three current and former colleagues  could take over, at least on an interim basis, if Long were to leave. But his background in policy and academia, and his lack of hands-on emergency management experience, has generated concern inside and outside FEMA.

Thats what freaks us out. You see what Rex Tillerson did at the State Department, taking a machete to their staffing and budget, said one current FEMA staffer, referring to the former secretary of State who met stiff resistance internally as he sought to restructure the department. Nobody knows who Trump could pick to replace Brock. And thats petrifying when youre talking about the agency at the heart of this countrys disaster response.

One high-ranking employee posted a picture of himself with Long on social media with the hashtag "#teambrock. Others have posted memories of working with him over the past year through several difficult disasters.

Because of the storm, some staffers have been working 16-hour days, far past their paid hours and to the point of exhaustion. Before Longs troubles, many felt stung by public criticism of FEMAs response to Hurricane Maria last year. And some saw Florence as their agencys chance to prove its competency.

The people were helping now, thats the whole reason we get into these jobs. Its the reason we endure all the other stuff because we want to make a difference, said one staffer.

In an interview, Tom Bossert, the presidents former homeland security advisor, praised Longs performance and said he knew him to be extraordinarily ethical, even as he said he respected the inspector generals work. He is as good as you could want in the job, said Bossert, who has known Long since 2003.

Long has worked in emergency management for almost 20 years: first as a school safety coordinator for the Georgias emergency management agency; then as FEMAs hurricane program manager for southeastern states. From 2008 to 2011, he was director of Alabamas emergency management.

I came to D.C. to serve my country, he told the Post. Those close to him say the past week has taken a heavy toll on his family, and Long said he would return to North Carolina when his time leading FEMA eventually ends. I look forward to simplicity and helping my dedicated wife raise our two beautiful boys, he said. God knows they are truly serving their country right now, too  probably even more than I am.

At the moment, Long said, FEMA is in the shortest and most dramatic stage of emergency management. After the rescues comes the longer and often most frustrating phase: helping the victims return to some sense of normalcy.

People are about to get frustrated, Long acknowledged.

Was he also frustrated? Yes, the embattled FEMA chief said. Then he turned, opened the SUV door and stepped out to shake hands before boarding a helicopter to meet the president.

Wan, Dawsey and Miroff reported from Washington.
Tony Schwartz, the ghostwriter of President Trumps The Art of the Deal, took particular glee in donating $10,000 he earned in royalties from the book to Planned Parenthood on Wednesday.

The fact that this takes place against the backdrop of the Brett Kavanaugh hearings is like icing on the cake, Schwartz told the Daily News, referencing a Democratic suspicion that Trumps Supreme Court pick would be inclined to undermine or even overturn the 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling, which has been credited with legalizing abortion nationwide.

Its a certain pleasure, Schwartz added.

The 66-year-old author co-wrote Trumps 1987 bestseller but has been a thorn in his side since he announced his 2016 campaign for the White House.

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Vehemently opposed to Trumps policies on immigration, gun control, womens rights and other issues, Schwartz pledged last year to donate all royalties earned from The Art of the Deal to various social justice organizations.

And he has lived up to that pledge, according to Keith Corso, chief development officer at Planned Parenthood of New York City.

Mr. Schwartz has been a consistent donor to us, Corso told The News. But his contribution has not been of this size previously.

A White House spokeswoman did not return a request for comment.

Corso said Planned Parenthood has faced an uphill battle since Trump took office, as his administration has tried to defund the organization while the President himself has pledged to only appoint justices to the Supreme Court who will automatically overturn Roe v. Wade.

We obviously are very grateful for all the contributions that we receive but this one has a special meaning knowing that the person who gave it worked for someone who has been so hostile to reproductive rights, Corso said of Schwartz five-figure donation.

Kavanaugh, 53, has been conspicuously evasive about his personal views on Roe, only saying he considers it settled law.

The Senate Judiciary Committee has indefinitely delayed a vote on Kavanaughs Supreme Court nomination amid allegations he sexually assaulted a woman in high school. He is expected to testify alongside his accuser on Monday.

Schwartz says he has donated over $200,000 in Art of the Deal royalties since July 2016 to groups representing people who I think Trumps policies disenfranchise.

He said the allegations against Kavanaugh emboldens him to continue to donate to organizations fighting for womens rights.

Women are one of the groups that are most under siege from Trump and Trump policies, Schwartz said.
Q&A with Steve Poizner, candidate for state insurance commissioner

Former insurance commissioner Steve Poizner Howard Lipin/Union-Tribune photo

California voters will be choosing a state insurance commissioner in the fall. Although the position gets little attention, it has a broad impact on Californians. The insurance commissioner oversees an office with 1,400 employees and a budget of $250 million. The Department of Insurance enforces insurance laws, regulates companies and investigates fraud.

Former insurance commissioner Steve Poizner and state Sen. Ricardo Lara are vying for the job. The San Diego Union-Tribune Editorial Board met separately with each of the candidates. Here is the transcript and audio recording of the interview with Steve Poizner.

Union-Tribune: What weve been doing is to put the audio and a full transcript online and then one edited transcript for space reasons in the paper. So tell us why insurance commissioner and obviously you are one of the rare examples of a third-party candidate of a non-Democrat, non-Republican running, so how do you see that for the race changing

POIZNER: Right.

Union-Tribune:  not only state politics, but potentially other races?

POIZNER: Right. If its okay, let me just first mention just all the time I spent in San Diego for the last few years. Im just I feel Ive just got a strong connection here. You know, so after getting out of politics in 2011, you know, I went back into the private sector and started, you know, my third company called Empowered, which was a company that built mobile education technology for teachers and professors, so that it could better utilize mobile technology in the classroom.

That company got acquired by Qualcomm, my second company to get acquired by Qualcomm. I dont know if you remember my history, but my second company was SnapTrack where we invented GPS for cell phones and Qualcomm bought that one too and so I Ive done a couple of tours of duty at Qualcomm.

This time they asked me to move to San Diego and we were empty nesters and so forth, so we moved here in 2016 and I took over Qualcomms entire emerging business portfolio, which was a whole bunch of start-ups inside of Qualcomm that hadnt been managed for a long time and I, you know, worked really hard to clean that up and and then after doing that for a bit of time, I then decided, well, you know, Qualcomm has 30,000 employees and Im really more of a start-up person, so thats when I decided, okay, Ill I got to get back into start-up world and walking on the beach in La Jolla, I meet the dean of the Rady Business School at UC San Diego who invited me to become an entrepreneur in residence there, which I still am and and Im kind of on a leave of absence at the moment during my campaign. But as an EIR there, Ive done a bunch of mentoring of, you know, students and alums who, you know, want to launch companies, you know, mainly in San Diego.

In addition, I also joined EvoNexus. Are you familiar with EvoNexus? And so Im on their selection committee and worked closely with Rory Moore on strategy. You know thats the largest nonprofit tech incubator in Southern California. Its a very cool thing, you know, about 50 companies now in that incubator and the final thing that Ive done in the last few years is starting this this Alliance for Southern California Innovation and the whole idea there is, you know, I was able to, you know people who live in Silicon Valley like I have for over 40 years, close to 40 years, and now Ive lived in San Diego for a few years, now we split time.

I was able to compare and contrast the tech ecosystem up there to here and in Silicon Valley, as I was mentioning, its really gotten congested and saturated and, you know, its a victim of its own success. You know, Google, Facebook, and Apple just squeezing the lifeblood out of the place, but its really a difficult place to start a company now for a whole bunch of reasons. I think southern California has this enormous potential and so I was able to put together a new not-for-profit starting a couple of years ago and UC San Diego was the first to join. So its its a partnership with every major university in southern California, so all five UC campuses, Caltech, USC, Qualcomm, Disney, Warner Bros.

Anyhow, the purpose is to attract more venture capital and more entrepreneurship to Southern California. What I didnt know is well, I really didnt know how all the universities hated each other. Gosh, it was really hard to pull them all together, but they kind of put their rivalries aside over this goal and so anyways, thats just what some of the things Ive been doing since Ive gotten out of politics.

Now why get back in? Why insurance commissioner? Why run as an independent? And one thing now I would note is that you mentioned third party, I actually draw a major distinction between running as a no-party preference and running as a third party, you know, because theres a lot of independent third-party movements out there right now where they want to form third parties.

But actually at least for me Im passionate about not belonging to a party and and this wouldnt necessarily work for, you know, every political office out there. Of course, theres, you know, partisan politics is built into the fabric of our country. It always will be there in the Legislature, in Congress, you know, in the governors mansion. But Im running for insurance commissioner. Im not running for those other positions and there really isnt room for partisan politics at the Department of Insurance and Im on record, you know, in 2006.

That was one of the reasons, you know, one of the parts of my platform when I first ran for insurance commissioner is that, hey, if you if elected, I will go to the Legislature and I will ask them to make this position officially nonpartisan and I got elected, went to the Legislature and both Republicans and Democrats, you know, absolutely opposed and didnt make it out of the insurance committee. But now, here Im running again and now I can put my money where my mouth is.

Now we have open primaries and we can debate the pros and cons of those things, but now with open primaries I can now run, you know, and have at least a chance, you know, as a no-party preference as an independent. So Im real excited about running as an independent. I mean I think its a perfect fit for the office. Ive been saying this for, you know, a decade now. In addition, I find it very liberating personally to not have to deal, you know, with commenting on lots of stuff that have absolutely nothing to do with the office.

You know, I dont have to comment on every tweet or everything that everything Nancy Pelosi says or whatever and again this is just a personal thing, Im sick and tired of partisan politics. Now other people, you know, fine, but for me, I at 61, stage of my life here, I really am excited about doing something where I can just focus on being a problem solver again.

Now why insurance commissioner? When I was elected, you know, in 2006, you know, it was exciting. It was the first time Ive been elected to any statewide office, to any office and this is one of eight positions elected statewide. I just had beaten the sitting lieutenant governor who was very formidable. My daughter comes up to me right when the newspapers called the race for me. She she was 12 at the time and she comes up to me and says, insurance commissioner? Is that the most boring job in the state of California?

It does sound I mean, you know, it sounds a little boring. I got my daughter, Rebecca and maybe you shouldnt tell her this, but I absolutely loved being the insurance commissioner and I and when insurance commissioner in 2007 and 2011, maybe unfortunately, but I did spend a lot of time here in San Diego, there, you know, it was terrible, wildfires, you know, you remember 2,000 homes burned down and I spent a big chunk of my time helping wildfire victims get paid and to avoid getting ripped off and this is a lot of insurance issues that come out of these wildfires.

So Ive got to say one of the reasons I decided to run again is not only is it a tremendous job in terms of completely independent of of doesnt report to the governor. You know, its just its just this autonomous thing. Theres no Insurance Commission any longer. Theres one person, you know, who oversees this, you know, $250 million dollar insurance Department of Insurance budget, 1400 employees.

Theres a $300 billion dollar insurance sector. I mean this is a decision-maker. I mean this person when you make a decision, you know, it really impacts millions of people and billion-dollar decisions are made all the time. It really matters whos at the helm of this obscure position. But one of the reasons why I decided to run for this again is that, you know, I could see more wildfires coming. Of course, its happening. The state is on fire. Id be happy to talk more about that, but that was one of the key reasons I decided to run again.

Steve Poizner John Gastaldo / Union-Tribune

Union-Tribune: But is it the fact that youre the only non-movie star to win as a Republican running statewide this century. So is it your decision not to run as a Republican ...

POIZNER: Was that is that a compliment or an insult?

Union-Tribune: No, its a compliment. But is it your decision to run as an independent given this fact this unique status [mean] you have also [given up on] the California Republican Party?

POIZNER: I dont think so. No, not really. I mean Im hoping for a really strong two-party state. I mean this you know, having monopoly rule on this state is not a good thing, whether youre a Democrat or a Republican or whatever, I mean you you want choices for voters. You want competition. You want checks and balances. We dont have that right now and so Im running as an independent because its a really good fit for that office.

Ill say this though, I really do think Im Im pioneering a path for other people who might not want to be a partisan warrior as I was referring to earlier and I think that right now theres this sort of this this reputation that, you know, you have to be from one part of one party to win statewide. If I could shatter that image, you know, then hopefully this will open up the floodgates for other people, you know, who might want to run and serve. Of the eight positions elected statewide, probably six of them, you know, would be perfectly suited for a nonpartisan independent. I mean treasurer, controller, you know, secretary of state, insurance commissioner, so yeah, I mean its clear that the Republican Party in California has a lot of rebuilding to do. I hope they rebuild. I hope they become nice and healthy.

Union-Tribune: So in your opinion, whats the biggest insurance issue facing the state of California right now?

POIZNER: Yeah. So the my three top priorities, Ill only just list the three and then dig in where you like, but you know, the wildfires, health insurance, you know, fraud health insurance rates, premiums, and then and cyber security and cyber insurance are my three big issues. I mean it turns out the Department of Insurance, you know, deals with hundreds of issues, you know, theres lots of different aspects. Those are my three top priorities. The biggest issue in the state of California right now is how to deal with the huge impact that these wildfires are going to have, you know, on the state of California and, you know, a couple things.

First, on how can we prevent fewer of them? Now, of course, the Insurance Commissioner doesnt oversee forest management, but the fact is we will have an insurance crisis in the state, if we as a state dont do a lot more proactive work to clean up the 130 million dead trees, you know, that exist out there. You know, we have to do that because the every time we have one of these wildfires by the way I mean youve probably written about this I mean its it just mass negative impact on the environment. I mean so were not helping the environment by keeping those trees sitting there. Weve got to clean up those trees. I feel I have every right to pound the tables as insurance commissioner on this question because otherwise, whats going to happen, Im telling you whats going to happen, its a free country, right?

Insurance companies will stop offering homeowners insurance in the state if something if if they continue to absorb these huge losses. Insurance companies lost $10 billion in 2017 in Northern California alone. So there will be availability crisis someday. There isnt one today by the way and Im happy to tell you why I think thats the case. Its a very competitive market.

Union-Tribune: Why is it because [of the] story today that said insurers dropped 10,000 policies in the 24 California counties at the highest fire risk in 2016 alone.

POIZNER: Yeah.

Union-Tribune: Thats 10,000 policies, thats a lot of policies.

POIZNER: Yeah, but dropping them doesnt mean those people do not get insurance. That just means insurance companies are rebalancing and I think thats a very important thing to allow insurance companies to rebalance and theres all these bills in the Legislature that want to, you know, prohibit insurance companies from dropping you or requiring insurance companies to absolutely renew you.

I dont think thats a smart thing at all because as insurance commissioner, one of my most important duties is to make sure that insurance companies are financially sound. They got to, you know, be there. I mean this isnt like buying a toaster or a television set. You buy it and you dont care what happens to the television company or what. Here, you know, your its an odd product. You buy it. You hope you never use it. 20 years later, you have a disaster. You know, they better have money there and so if State Farm had, you know, for example, if they have, you know, in a high fire zone, if it turns out they have too much exposure then let them rebalance, you know, by dropping some, adding some someplace else.

The question is the people they drop, what happens to them? It turns out theres 100 some odd companies in California offering homeowners insurance. Its a very competitive market because the market is so ginormous. Thats good. Now, heres how I know that there really isnt an availability problem, at least as of today. Now, Im predicting there will be one in the future if were not careful, but today you know, theres, you know, the canary in the coal mine thing that you can look at for availability is the Fair Plan. You know, the Fair Plan is that plan, you know, created by the state of California. Its a partnership between the state of California and the insurance companies since 1968. So the Fair Plan is the last resort.

If you cannot get fire insurance, you know, for your house, unless youre, you know, completely, you know, unsafe. I mean you can get, you know, an insurance policy from the fair plan. So thats so you can look at the number of policies they have and when I left the Department of Insurance in 2011, there was 159,000 Fair Plan policies; today theres 140,000. Okay, fewer, so thats the Fair Plan policies will shoot up. I mean that thatll be the indication that, oh my gosh, we really now have a serious, you know, availability problem.

Union-Tribune: Do you take into account that maybe some people because obviously the cost is going to be higher, so maybe they decide to not have insurance. I mean do you know how many people dont have insurance?

POIZNER: I dont know that number, but

Union-Tribune: (Unintelligible) mortgage.

POIZNER: But, but I that I was about to say, I mean I think going uninsured would be, you know, either impossible because your the bank wont let you do it or thatd be pretty crazy. I do believe by the way on on the subject of pricing, I absolutely believe the price that you pay has to reflect the exact risk. I dont think subsidies make any sense here because it leads to the wrong behavior. You got to send the right financial signals. So specifically if you live in that one of those new, you know, apartment complexes here in downtown San Diego, why should you subsidize someone whos living in the middle of the Sierra, you know, forest.

So people I mean so Im a big believer that that as insurance commissioner I want the insurance companies to properly price the insurance and then if you live in high in a risky area, you should pay a lot more and that will let people need to think twice maybe about living there. Now if they really want to live there and they can afford the insurance, then more power to them. Yeah. I remember dealing with one person here in San Diego. His house burned down three times and he rebuilt it in the same place.

You know, San Diego has these, you know these canyons and the wind tunnel I mean theres a few places where its just dangerous and and its and the likely, you know, the likelihood that theres going to be another fire there is probably high. I mean that person should be paying a premium to have insurance to build a house there again.

Union-Tribune: Well, on that issue 3.6 million California homes are in wildlife, urban interface and more than a million of those are in higher very high fire risk. Do you see that escalating based on what you just said, whether because people are rebuilding or because growth of California and

POIZNER: Well, I think for a bunch of reasons were going to have more and more wildfires and so I think thats going to expand, you know, the risk map, no question about it. By the way, I think one of the biggest problems so today, if you ask me is there an availability problem and I think the answer is no, theres not.

The market is very competitive. Theres 100 companies offering it and and the Fair Plan the number of Fair Plan policies have not gone up. So overall, I think, you know, the markets are still functioning, which is great and at least from what I could tell back in 2011 I dont have access to this data here as a civilian, but the health the insurance companies, the homeowners insurance companies are financially sound. You know, theyre thats good. But the biggest problem I think, you know, were just getting back to your question, the biggest problem is underinsurance. That is rampant.

You know, when your house burns down and you figure out you dont have enough insurance too late and, you know, the problem of underinsurance it falls upon both the consumer and the insurance company and both parties, you know, are part of the problem here. Now when I left the Department of Insurance in 2011, you know, right at the very end, you know, Ive dealt so much with fire victims, you know. You know, why why dont you have enough insurance? I mean why didnt you have enough insurance?

Now sometimes its because, you know, we we did do a second-story addition and we forgot to tell the insurance company and or we did a kitchen remodel. So I havent or I havent talked to my insurance broker in 10 years, you know, and construction costs changed radically. So part of what I want to do this time around is a massive educational campaign, you know, to really sensitize homeowners that, you know, theyve got a responsibility here, you know, to make sure that they talk to their insurance agent or broker annually and make sure that their insurance is up to date and shopping, shopping for insurance is a smart thing to do.

I mean its its just very competitive. You can go from one great company to another. Let them compete for you and you can really you help keep your cost down. So theres something I can do as insurance commissioner to help educate consumers, but on the other hand, insurance companies have a role here and at the at part of what I heard from people is that well, I did keep my insurance up to date. I thought I had the right amount of insurance. It says look at my policy. It says replacement cost coverage and lo and behold thats indeed what a lot of policies say, replacement cost coverage and I said, well, hey, hang on a second.

You know, State Farm and Farmers and Allstate and if youre going to sell someone something that says replacement cost coverage, it better replace the thing if it burns down or rename it, you know, to something else and so they said, hey, you know, mind your own business. You dont have, you know, you dont have that authority, you know, to tell us what we should call a policy and so I and so I went through the process and I didnt do too much of this, but I, you know you go through the process of when you issue new regulations you know how it goes.

You know, you have to put out a proposal and then theres people get to read it and then theres hearings and this thing goes on for months and months and months. All this input and and so I right at the very end of my term I issued, you know, new regulations that said, if youre going to call the thing replacement cost coverage then it better include, you know, the cost of the building code upgrades and the foundation replacement and all those things.

I felt strongly about that because, you know, I believe, you know, in free markets, but, you know, the consumer has to understand what its buying and in this particular case, I thought, you know, theres a lot of evidence that consumers were confused by, you know, the the marketing language. So we those regulations got, you know, legally issued. Then two weeks after I left office, the insurance sector sued me what well, sued the new insurance commissioner, saying the insurance commissioner does not have this authority and by the way its good its good just for you should know, every the the insurance commissioner has huge power.

Im not even sure Id set up the way it is, huge power. You cant change the price of your product. You cant issue new products. You cant be an insurance agent or broker. You cant become an insurance company. None of that happens without the permission of the insurance commissioner. I mean its a really power position. Every decision that the insurance commissioner makes though, can be, you know, challenged in court. Good. At least theres some checks and balances. You know, like I say, I wouldnt necessarily even set it up that way. Its just so powerful, but it is what it is and thats why its so important whos at the helm of this thing.

Anyhow, the California Superior Court agreed with the insurance industry, you know, and this and this lawsuit against the Department of Insurance that this is beyond the power or the the insurance commissioners power only comes from stat sheets that are passed by the Legislature properly properly so or by ballot initiatives passed by the voters. Then the Department of Insurance appealed it and the court of appeals agreed with the insurance industry that this was beyond the scope of the insurance commissioner. Then this and not years have gone by and then just a little over I think its been, you know, 15 months ago, it finally makes it to the California Supreme Court.

You know, that ruled unanimously, seven, zero, that of course, the insurance commissioner has the power to make sure consumers understand what theyre buying. Anyhow, that so thats thats now that regulation when I get back in there, Im going to make sure that regulation gets fully enforced and implemented now. You know, eight years later because that thatll help, you know, clear up I think a lot of misunderstandings, you know, which lead to because underinsurance is a devastating thing, you know, because... your house burns down and youre half insured or something or off by 30 percent. I mean its just terrible. So I spend a little bit of time answering your question, but all the all the issues related to wildfires is by is definitely the number one top priority.

Union-Tribune: We did an editorial a few weeks ago praising Jerry Brown for encouraging forest management in his latest budget, but we also noted that when the federal government controlling 20 million to 25 million acres in California that the federal government has to take a lead in this issue. So yesterday, Secretary of Interior, Todd Zinke gives a speech in which he says, this is a huge problem. Weve got to address it.

And the San Francisco Chronicle makes it sound like its about [promoting] logging. It just the ineradicable quality of the nuttiness on forest management on the left, I just dont know how we get around it in California. Any attempt to do reasonable things to thin forests is depicted as a gift to the loggers as opposed to common sense, so how do you fight that?

POIZNER: Yeah. So Chris I read that all that. I think, you know, the state is on fire and I think there are people dying, more firefighters died just in the last few days. This is really this is a crisis situation. Ive spoken to environmental groups. Ive spoken to lots of people about this. I really do think that theres a coalition that could be put together to finally address this thing and I think the extreme reaction that cleaning up the forest means more logging is ridiculous, right?

Union-Tribune: Theyre dead trees.

POIZNER: Yeah, I mean thats I mean that doesnt make any sense. You know, so yeah, I mean the John Muir, hed probably go nuts if he knew what so when he came here what, in the 1800s, there was what was it, roughly 40 trees per acre was the density in the Sierras. Now the density, hundreds of trees per acre and so you get these these trees compete, you know, for resources, then then they weaken and then the drought and then the beetles and then theres I mean you got all this this unmaintained, you know, forest, you know, thats causing lots of issues.

Devastation to the environment too and thats why there there is a partnership to put together here amongst people who care and that should be environmentalist, it should be the insurance industry, it should be the utilities, it should be lots of people. Weve got to weve got to clean up the forest, both on state and federal and private lands and I think because, you know, a few years ago, maybe it was impossible to get this done. But I think, you know, I want to be one of those people really pushing for a solution to this. Otherwise, I mean its going to be a terrible crisis.

...Reducing any financial pressure on the public utilities to do whatever they humanly can to mitigate wildfires before they start is a just a really bad idea. Steve Poizner

Union-Tribune: Last fall, the PUC voted unanimously to not let San Diego Gas & Electric get away from $370 million or so in 2007 expenses because they held SDG&E directly responsible for fires because of poor maintenance. I find it kind of amazing that 11 months later, were at a point where theres a [push] on the Legislature from Jerry Brown to exempt utilities from the consequences of their poor practices and whats whats your view about Browns late-career attempt to change the rules on what utilities are responsible for and not responsible for in wildfires (overtalk)?

POIZNER: Completely oppose to what the governor is trying to do here. The idea of reducing any financial pressure on the public utilities to do whatever they humanly can to mitigate wildfires before they start is a just a really bad idea. So it is the case, you know, that not every wildfire, you know, is started because of their negligence. Now Cal Fire is, you know, theres so many fires going on in northern California, theyre up just in the last year, Cal Fire has now finished, you know, analyzing at least 16 of the wildfires they concluded as due to PG&E negligence and thats one thing if you have, you know, youve done, you know, you got these power lines and then a hurricane comes in, you know, and knocks it down.

I mean you cant accuse them of negligence for that. I mean you could argue, you can debate who should pay for the results. But were were still talking negligence here and I mean were talking the utilities are not doing everything they humanly can at this point. So the idea of reducing the financial pressure on them is just a big mistake. Heres what would happen. So if you reduce the final financial liability, youll push that onto insurance companies. I mean, you know, because right now when your house burns down, one nice thing about a homeowners insurance policy is your house burns down, its PG&Es fault or whatever the utility is, you know, the homeowner doesnt have to go to PG&E for it.

You know, your insurance company will pay you and thats a really nice feature, you know, that people need to fully appreciate. So your insurance company pays you, but then the insurance company goes and tries to collect, you know, from the utility and when they do collect that money, then that goes into rate setting, so at the Department of Insurance, you know, all these modelers and actuaries and stuff, I mean it is what it is, I know it probably makes your head explode that theres thats the way it works, but its the way it works. I mean and so when the insurance companies are able to collect that money back from the utilities then they dont raise their rates to cover all those losses that have been reimbursed, you know, by the utilities.

So if the utilities, you know, somehow, you know, become immune from those liabilities, by these changes that are being proposed, then the homeowners insurance rates are going to go way up. I mean what a bad time for that happen when theres already, you know, a housing crisis as it is and then youre pushing the liability onto people who cant do anything about it. See its one thing to have liability in the hands of the utilities who can do something about it. I mean they can, you know, bury their lines or strengthen their lines or use drones or use sensors or, you know, make sure theres no tree within, you know, a million miles of their line, they can do all those things, but insurance companies arent in a position to do anything and homeowners arent in a position to do anything about the power equipment.

So it itd be a big mistake if the Legislature, you know, changes those rules. Its not clear that its even constitutional, right. I mean, gosh, they have this imminent domain power. They go in there and they go, were going to put this power line on your land whether you like it or not. They have that power to do that and so if their power lines end up burning your house down, I mean gosh, they should be liable. It seems clear.

Union-Tribune: You mentioned cybersecuritys a big issue.

POIZNER: Yes.

Union-Tribune: How does that play out (overtalk)?

POIZNER: And what does cyber security have to do with insurance?

Union-Tribune: Sure.

POIZNER: I first got exposed to cybersecurity issues in 2001. I was the one thing I do share in common with Dave Jones is we were both White House Fellows at different times. White House Fellowship is a turns out to be a nonpartisan program where you spend a year working for someone senior in the executive branch as kind of a leadership training thing. Of all years, I get selected in 2001 and so because of my technology background I get assigned to work in the National Security Council in the Office of Trans National Threats and my start date believe or not, Sept. 4, 2001.

You know, one week before 9/11. 9/11 happens, you know, wow, (unintelligible) now. It was what an honor it was great really rewarding to be there to help build a new Homeland Security plan and my focus was on cyber security. That was the part that I worked on quite a bit there and then in Silicon Valley, you know, in some of my mentoring down here in southern California for technology start-ups Ive been lots of exposure to cyber security. Okay.

So theres about $100 billion of cyber losses a year, you know, in the country and, you know, we read about the big ones, you know, youve probably written about the big ones. You know, the Target and Sony and Equifax and P.F. Changs and Chipotle and they break in and steal customer databases. Huge liability, right? Well then the next wave of these cyber attacks will, you know, shut down these companies, you know, screw up their computer networks and theres a lot of risk of business disruption, as well as liability to protect, you know, confidential databases. So $100 billion of losses, $3 billion right now of cyber insurance. Heres so heres where the insurance comes in.

So theres a huge amount of underinsurance and so you have the cyber insurance market in its infancy. I, you know, California, you know, its insurance market is the largest in the country by a factor of two. I mean, you know, you think New York is big. Well, you know, New York is big, but California is twice as big when it comes to the size of the insurance market. So California has the fifth largest insurance market in the world. So the cool thing about being a proactive sort of visionary insurance commissioner with a technology background is that you can do some things that can impact the whole country because, you know, were market leading.

So as insurance commissioner, I really want to help promote the growth of cyber insurance. Cybersecurity insurance because, you know, it not only will it help fill in that big liability hole, it will also help police. You know, insurance companies they nag you. All they they dont like taking risk, so you know, like with my home in up in Silicon Valley, you know, theyve made me cut down trees and put on different kinds of vents. Smart things, you know, that reduce the risk of my house burning down.

So if they start offering you cyber insurance, theyre going to start forcing you to clean up your cyber hygiene, which is a good thing. Now, why isnt this market already, you know, humming? Well, insurance companies are having a difficult time, sort of figuring out the risks of how do you price it? You know, how do you do underwriting on something like this? So I think that, you know, here in California, I think we can help. I mean I think we can like in other lines of insurance if we pass the right kind of, you know, rules. I mean you can allow insurance companies to share data.

You know thats been you can keep it proprietary and protect the proprietary information. But by pooling data like theyve done in other lines, they that can help, you know, speed up the collection of the amount of information they need in order to, you know, properly price it. So I would love to really get a robust healthy cyber insurance marketplace rolling here in California. Thatd be good for California, itd be good for the country.

Union-Tribune: Leon Panetta has suggested that its the public will never wake up to the risks of cyber disaster until we have a cyber 9/11. Theres just not an appreciation out there of the dimension of the threat. What do you say about that?

POIZNER: Yeah. I mean folks who know have to have to really help educate folks and I do think all of the mischief from and mischief is maybe too wide of a word. I mean all of the intrusion into our into our election system from outside. I mean some of the major break ins like in Sony and Equifax. Some of the, you know, Yahoo even, gosh. I mean these massive break ins cause people, you know, to start paying attention.

But, you know, we theres I mean theres huge I mean I cant even talk about some of the things I know. I mean this theres some huge risks and weve come a long way in the last 10 years, but theres a lot of work to do be done and a lot of these cyber break ins are due to human error still. You know, peoples passwords 123 and stupid things. I mean so so thats why Im really excited about the role insurance companies can play because, you know, they can be the enforcer of some, you know, better you know, practices out there.

Union-Tribune: You talked about your perception that your job should be seen as non-partisan.

POIZNER: Yes.

Union-Tribune: When we had Senator Lara in last week, I asked him what he thought about [former Insurance Commissioner John] Garamendis unilateral decision to say you cant use ZIP codes in determining auto insurance and Garamendi, he cursed me out when I asked him about this once, but the question is isnt that social engineering?

POIZNER: Thats a badge of honor if youve been cursed out by him.

Union-Tribune: I dont know about that, but anyway, theres a policy aspect there. If youre totally committed to the idea that actuarial stuff should be the only factor in this, then saying ZIP code shouldnt be a part of it seems arbitrary and to favor urban dwellers/Democrats over suburban Republicans. So where do you come on Garamendis decision and do you see it as social engineering or an attempt to insure fairness?

POIZNER: Well, I only, you know, for all the variables that are to be used under my watch, you know, Im and there may be a lot there could be a lot of history there and you cant necessarily undo everything. You got to pick your battles, right, because, you know, youve got, you know, you got just a few employees that you can really count on, you know, and you just I mean its youve got to pick your battles.

But the way Ill make decisions is is 100 percent based on correlation to risk. I just want insurance companies to properly calculate risk and so whatever they can do to properly calculate risk is what, you know, I (overtalk).

Union-Tribune: So its possible you agree with Garamendis decision?

POIZNER: Well, I have to I mean

Union-Tribune: Well, you were there already after Garamendi made it and you didnt undo it the first time.

POIZNER: Yeah. I mean so Id have to look at it. Im going to have to, you know, look at it again to see if its completely, you know, not correlated to risk at all and its just theres no support for it. I mean Ill look at it. You know, yeah, I just have to look at it, but I mean I absolutely, you know, would be opposed to it if there wasnt any correlation to risk because thats the business that the insurance commissioner should be in.

Create healthy markets. Its a very regulated market and so in order to not scare off all the companies out there, you have to be very predictable. You have to be, you know, fair, apply the rules uniformly and speed things up. I mean one thing thats going on right now with the Department of Insurance is slow and and so you know, it can take a year to get a pricing decision. It can take 18 months to get a new product decision made. I really want to speed things up and when the decisions that are made and they have to be based on the data, the analytics of having something to do (overtalk).

Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner announces an investigation of consumer complaints against Anthem Blue Cross has reveled more than 700 violations of state law, during a Capitol news conference in Sacramento, Calif., Monday, Feb. 22, 2010. AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli

Union-Tribune: But if thats the case in auto insurance, what do you say about being the case in health insurance? We have the whole Obamacare set up with extreme rates on young people to help subsidize the extreme the rates of older people. So theres a fundamental disconnect between the idea of only the data decides on auto insurance, but thats not the whole linchpin of the Affordable Care Act.

POIZNER: Well, you know, the insurance, you know, insurance is a funny product. So if the young person who buys health insurance, you know, 25 years old, doesnt smoke, exercises a lot, should pay a lot less than someone whos has more risky health conditions. That should be so

Union-Tribune: Well, how do believe that and then oversee Covered California (overtalk)?

POIZNER: Well, I well, first of all, I dont oversee Covered I mean thats the funny thing about California by the way is that unlike practically every other state, health insurance is regulated by a whole bunch of people. So it turns out that the I dont know if Senator Lara mentioned this to you or not. You know, his passion for single payer, but the Department of Insurance has very little to do, you know, with the health insurance market. That doesnt mean the insurance commissioner shouldnt have positions on how to improve the insurance markets, but Covered California is managed by somebody who reports to the governor.

The HMOs are managed by the Department of Managed health care, which reports to the governor. Medi-Cal is managed by somebody who reports to the governor. Whats left are the individual plans, you know, theres not and which is, you know, 5 percent of the market, something like that. Now where the where the insurance commissioner does play a big role is in health insurance fraud. Now that is an area where I think I can have an immediate impact.

So yes yes, thats one thing about, you know when you talk about the whole health insurance area, health care, all these people have all these proposals that either make absolutely no sense like single payer or will never happen in the form that was passed. I mean the thing actually passed the Senate, Senator Laras bill. Ill conceived, never going to happen, would cost, you know, a tremendous amount of money and would really disrupt things. I mean including cancelling Medicare and good luck telling all the seniors they cant use Medicare anymore, but instead they have to go to a DMV-like state agency, oh my God, so terrible idea. But here, but and so, I dont want to do is get into the business of promising a bunch of stuff that I could never really deliver on.

But heres what I can deliver on in the health care space, despite the fact that the Department of Insurance has just a small little role now. You know, health insurance fraud is just rampant and some people tell me, eh, dont worry about it. You know, its victimless and health insurance companies have lots of money. You know, who cares? Well, I can tell you this for sure, these health insurance companies do not eat one dime of losses from fraud. They pass all of it onto consumers in the form of higher rates.

So health insurance fraud is very important to crack down on. The last time I was insurance commissioner I arrested over 3,000 people, you know, for various types of insurance fraud, a lot of workers comp fraud, a lot of health insurance fraud and that made a difference. Now, if you look at the Department of Insurance now, the vacancy rate this is from the state auditor, the same state auditor, by the way, who they wont let into the DMV. Same state auditor audited the, you know, the Department of Insurance recently, also audited me when I was insurance commissioner by the way. I mean why on Earth would you not want, you know... that state auditors got great team? Surely, youd want them to look at every state agency for that matter.

Anyhow the recent state audit report of the Department of Insurance noted that, hey, the vacancy rate in the fraud division is now really high and in some of the fraud offices like in Los Angeles, the vacancy rate is up to 50 percent. Okay. So if youre in a health insurance company and you come up with some potential fraud and you have to send it on to the Department of Insurance, you know, why bother to investigate the thing if theyre not going to do anything with it? So we got to fill these positions and its not and these are not these are gun carrying police officers a bunch of them, so its not necessarily easy to fill all these positions.

By the way, there should be more flexibility. All these constraints on why do they all have to be gun-carrying police officers? I mean, you know, health insurance fraud, maybe some data analyst or, you know, big data people. I mean Ill fill those vacancies and Im going to go after health insurance fraud aggressively and that thatll help, you know, with the escalating costs of health care. I also think

Union-Tribune: Well, what kind of premium are we talking about on accounts that cover the health insurance fraud?

POIZNER: Well, you know, just last year, you know, the I mean theres about $250 million worth of health insurance fraud that was prosecuted by district attorneys in California. In the Department of Insurance you partner with the DAs in each of the counties and thats just, Im telling you, tip of the iceberg. When I was insurance commissioner, there was so much of it. So you cant go after all of it. So you go after some high-profile cases and then and then really make a high-profile stink of it.

So my biggest bust was in Orange County where these doctors and these lawyers had created this organized crime ring and then they were they recruited these people to stage accidents on freeways and then theyd be dangerous enough to do that and then these supposed victims they would bring into these clinics that were more like assembly lines, you know, doing unnecessary procedures and surgeries and so forth. So we went in undercover and arrested them all. The doctors and the lawyers and theyre now in state prison. I know theyre there because I get letters from some of them. But, but thats what you have to do though, I think is theres so much fraud you have to high profile and people need to know, okay, now the Department of Insurance really focusing on it now. Workers comp fraud huge amounts of fraud. You know, theres no deductibles, theres no co-payments in workers comp.

You know, the first dollar gets I mean its that lots of fraud there that needs to get addressed, it really can make a difference. By the way, another thing I would do though, I would advocate for a single regulator. I mean I was mentioning thats the way it is in those states and right now, you know, you get, you know, this odd gaming of the system and the regulators dont talk to each other here. I mean its just really a pretty dysfunctional thing and put it all on the Department of Insurance or put somewhere else. Just put it in one place and heres one last thing while were on the subject of insurance, what else can I do as insurance commissioner because Im surely not in the position to overhaul the whole thing. I would love to be the captain of transparency.

I mean we spend $400 billion a year on health care in California, that includes Medicare and Medi-Cal and private insurance. How is that money getting spent? Im telling you theres some oddball things going on in that health care system, which maybe youre well aware. I mean for example you whoever mentioned the Affordable Care Act, those medical loss ratios in the Affordable Care Act, 80 or 85 percent, you know, depending on the situation. Just just think for a moment about the oddball financial incentive of those things put in place. You know, so you you know the law is every health dollar premium dollar that a health insurance company collects, $0.80 of it has to be, you know, paid back out in health care clients.

Okay. I mean I thats the intent was lets make sure the health insurance companies arent, you know, too profitable, whatever. Maybe that was the intent of it, but heres what happens in practice. So okay, you got 20 percent left then for the health insurance companies for profits and marketing and stuff. So if youre a health insurance executive, would you prefer to, you know, have 20 percent of a billion of 20 percent of 5 billion? I mean so you have the four horsemen of the health care system that drive the costs, hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, health insurance companies, and medical providers and all of them have this huge incentive to make the pot bigger. I mean the so so theres Im absolutely in favor of major reform.

Now how you fix this whole thing, you know, I dont have any silver bullets. Its going to be a lot of changes that are needed. But what I what the contribution I can make as just the lowly insurance commissioner of the state of California is I can put a spotlight on hows this ... now and having access to that information and the visibility surrounding how all the money get spent will hopefully lead the media and policy makers, you know, and the Legislature give them more ammo to come up with, you know, thoughtful improvements.

Union-Tribune: Our editorial board a couple years ago completely changed its stance and came out for some kind of single payer. The United States spends more on health care per capita than Britain and Canada, which have national health systems, so its like we have the worse of both worlds. We dont have uniform access for poor people and yet we still spend an absolute ton on this and in Singapore and Taiwan and France they have hybrid systems that work just fine.

So one of the frustrations things about this and about government in general is theres so little best practices, theres so little looking to what others have done well and trying to copy that. Isnt that part of the answer to this is looking to what other nations have done and say, if they can make it work and they have better health outcomes and less cost that we do, then shouldnt we try to do that?

POIZNER: Well, absolutely, we should be looking at best practices. I dont think you have to go outside the country only of course, we should look at all over the world. Just I mean just look at Kaiser. I dont know any of you go to Kaiser. I do not go to Kaiser. Ive never been to Kaiser, but Ive looked at Kaiser just from an analytical point of view and, you know, 20 or 30 years ago, no one wanted to go to Kaiser.

You know, not a great reputation for service, but things have really changed at Kaiser and Kaiser has a very interesting model, right, where there, you know, if an employer offers their employees, you know, availability of Kaiser, they pay Kaiser a flat fee, you know, per month, per employee. Not a fee for so this fee for service thing where, you know, you get paid for the more pills you prescribe and the more surgeries you do. You know, at least to, you know, lots of, you know, distortions.

Kaiser has really proven out, I think, and theyre not perfect, but theyve proven out a model where if you put the health care providers if you give if they have a financial incentive to keep you healthy from and from a holistic point of view, that leads to lower costs overall because youre healthier. You come in less and theres studies of it now. I mean the California Health Foundation studied this to death.

Kaisers cost structure is now lower and in addition the quality is higher. Quality what does that mean? Well, you know, theres all kinds of measures of quality now, the, you know, diabetes patients and how often they come in for, you know, crisis and, you know, various chronic care effectiveness, you know, and whatever and so Kaiser wins on both scores. So I mean I think theres something to learn about, you know, the idea of getting the health care system into a financial kind of structure where the incentive is not to become bigger.

Thats the way it is today. But instead the incentive is to make you healthy and taxpayers, we have every right to demand this, right? I mean we dont have single payer in this country, but I mean gosh if you just if you add up Medi-Cal plus Medicare, I mean thats what is that, 40 percent, 50 percent. I mean thats huge. So you know, were paying all, you know, a big chunk of this and we have every right to demand more cost effectiveness, you know, quality measures that the whole health care system should be compensated on outcomes, not on volume. So as insurance commissioner, you know, I can at least pound the table, you know, for some of these things and more so I mean and the one I think like I say, the substantive thing I can offer is data because in the insurance code it says the insurance commissioner can get access to information he or she needs to do his or her job and I plan, you know, to use that to collect information and publish it.

...in general I dont see self-driving cars taking over anytime soon. Steve Poizner

Union-Tribune: The SANDAG, the San Diego Association of Government has been preparing for autonomous vehicles, it says, since 2005. How long have you been thinking about it and how is what are the thorny issues that youre going to face as insurance commissioner if youre elected?

POIZNER: Yeah. So at Qualcomm, I mentioned I was in charge of their emerging business portfolio. Some of that had to do with technology that would go into autonomous, you know, self-driving cars. So I know a lot about it. Its a lot of progress has been made, its very cool technology. However, my personal opinion, we are nowhere close I mean nowhere close to having the software or the hardware to be reliable enough to actually turn one of those things loose on the streets here. I mean I dont think were even close to that.

Now semi-autonomous driving, thats a different story. You know, were you already seen that in your cars where, you know, that blind spot sensor is the best thing Ive ever had in my car, you know, where you look in your rearview mirror and a light comes on in one of those mirrors, you know, with if theres a car in your blind spot. That kind so theyre adding all kinds of... Qualcomms in the middle of all this. You know, sensor technology, so that the driver will have a real 360 view of whats going on all around them. Thats good stuff and and that that should reduce the amount of accidents. That should reduce cost of auto insurance. Good stuff.

The idea though that you could get in the back seat and let the car drive you, I just, you know, now if youre going to close off part of Beijing to all traffic, you know, polluted, congested place, and just have self-driving taxis go back and forth, that may be possible, if you get rid of all traffic, but in general I dont see self-driving cars taking over anytime soon. Im really stunned by how much frenzy theres been in Silicon Valley over, you know, pouring just tons of money, you know, into something thats just not going to

Union-Tribune: GM, Ford, Mercedes, I mean theres its not just Silicon Valley. The automakers seem to assume its coming.

POIZNER: Sure. What and because a big chunk of the research will help will be enormously valuable and and even if its semi-autonomous and so all the sensor technology and all of the, you know youre about to hit something, warning technology is all of that is good stuff. I just and yes, you want you want people thinking 30 years ahead or 40 or 50 years ahead, those companies that have those kind of resources, but dont see that happening in the short term.

The reason why I think thats an important issue here, at least from my point of view, is I dont see the need to completely overhaul, you know, the auto insurance marketplace because, you know, in the next, you know, year or two theres going to be all these, you know, autonomous driving cars. I just dont see that happening in the in my at least in my next term as insurance commissioner. That doesnt necessarily mean though I would I would love to, you know, make sure that there all these, you know, and the incentive incentives are all in the right place. I mean we want to encourage people to build and deploy, you know, safer vehicles and there that should there should be reflection, you know, lower cost means lower insurance and so you know, thats a good thing if ultimately accident rates go down.

Union-Tribune: You talk about overhauling an aspect of the insurance industry, go back to wildfires for a second because this is a thorny issue, right? I mean what is what would your solution be to this problem so that utilities dont go bankrupt in providing energy to us?

POIZNER: Well, I dont think, you know, theres a free lunch here. You know, this is expensive, you know, to do this. We should have probably been starting this 20 or 30 or 50 years ago and now we have a lot of history to clean up for plus the future. So I do think it would be really helpful if we could figure out how to build some revenue streams associated with cleaning up the forest. That that would be helpful, part of the solution because, you know, its expensive to go in there and and sometimes the dead tree needs to be cut down, sometimes already falling down. I mean, but to go in there and haul it out, costs money, you know, so whos going to pay for it?

So theres new technologies coming out now that can take a lot of these dead tree materials and make them into really valuable, useful, you know, building materials. Thats interesting. Of course, more use of biomass for electricity generation. You know, could be very interesting because, you know, all those, that wood chips and stuff and dead trees, you know, perfect for that. So  you know, of course, all this is beyond the insurance commissioner, but like I say I think the insurance commissioner needs to weigh in because of all the impacts on the insurance market. So one thing Id like to see is lets figure out a way, you know, to build revenue streams... ongoing, annual revenue streams from all of this stuff because that was then help provide ongoing monies to clean up the forest.

The second thing is that we clearly have to come up with, you know, some kind of partnership here amongst all of the players, you know, to allow for the clean up to even occur, you know, because, you know, there are some groups that just, you know, arent in support of touching one tree and and dead firefighters and all these burned down houses and insurance crises, hopefully theyll be enough of a crisis situation here where we can get people to come together and compromise and then

Union-Tribune: Apart from trees, on the liability issue of the utilities.

POIZNER: Yeah. So the utilities, you know, thats the business theyre in, you know, so

Union-Tribune: You draw a hard line.

POIZNER: I draw a hard line and then let them I mean its not like, you know, they shouldnt I mean if part of their business is to make sure that they spend a lot of money on mitigation then thats part of their business model and they need to have a business structure that allows for that expense to be a part of their business structure. I just wouldnt I mean, so yes, thats where I draw the hard line.

Steve Poizner K.C. Alfred

Union-Tribune: Quick question, Senator Lara, we asked about this Consumer Watchdog is one of the most common interveners and theyve never revealed who their funders are. Lara quickly said, yes, of course, they should reveal who their funders are. We need to know whos intervening and why. How do you feel about Consumer Watchdog?

POIZNER: Theyre must have a lot of their funding comes from the Department of Insurance.

Union-Tribune: Yeah. Yeah, but they dont disclose who their formal backers are, one assumes its trial lawyers, but they wont ever say. How can an agency or an organization with such a prominent role in California be allowed to operate, in some ways, in secret?

POIZNER: Well, I wouldnt put any special, you know, disclosure rules on Consumer Watchdog that I wouldnt impose on other not-for-profits. I mean so let me just talk about my view of interveners and Consumer Watchdog is the biggest one. You might disagree, but I Consumer Watchdog overall has played a positive, constructive role when they intervene in the right places.

Union-Tribune: Lara said the same thing.

POIZNER: Okay. Ive seen it in action where, you know, some of these cases are very technical. Consumer Watchdog has some, you know, legal expertise thats specialized and so when things, you know, go off track is when the department allows interveners to intervene when there really isnt a unique set of expertise or work that needs to be done.

So if Consumer Watchdog is just going to repeat what the department is already doing then thats just a waste of money and so you know, the insurance commissioner has to have, you know, the ability to sort through all of the intervener applications and have the, you know the wisdom to go, you know, we need you here. Thank you for intervening. We need you here. Thank you for intervening. We dont need you here and here and here. So it needs to be managed, you know, so that, you know, its a net positive rather than, you know there is, you know, Im sure theres examples of where theyve intervened and then they get paid and its been kind of a waste because there wasnt anything really uniquely new that was offered there.

Union-Tribune: In terms of earthquake insurance, how solvent is the state in case something really major happens and should people should everybody have earthquake insurance?

POIZNER: Gosh, yeah, so insurance commissioner is on the California Earthquake Authority, you know, along with the treasury and the governor, you know, gosh, but still this is the one area where I got to say, I its nightmarish, you know, and its hard to sleep when I think about this, you know, because the insurance commissioner and, you know, were overdue for the big one, right. 11 or 12 percent of the state has earthquake insurance right now.

Now, the California Earthquake Authority is very strong financially. They havent paid out ever since they got started. You know, so they got huge reserves now. Thats good. Good thing. I remember a meeting, you know, so there I was with, you know, the governor, his appointee and the treasurer and me, you know, listening to this report from the California Earthquake Authority staff and they were so proud, you know, that that they they were there were some small earthquakes that had occurred in 2008 or something like that and they didnt pay out a dime and they were so proud of their low payout ratios and I go, hang on a second. Why why didnt you pay out anything?

Well because, you know, the deductible was so high, you know, and thats the thing. Most earthquakes are not going to knock their house down, most earthquakes are going to knock your chimney down or, you know, cause some cracking and so maybe youll have $50,000 damage or $100,000 of damage which is thats a huge amount of money to most people and, but a lot of the CEA policies, you know, dont even you dont even get through the deductible with that and so there needs to be more, you know, work with the CEA to create more options and I know theyve tried to theyve issued some new products now and theyve tried to come reduce the deductibles and I think theyre making some steps in the right direction, but its an urgent thing. Its kind of, you know, when it compared to wildfires you dont think about earthquakes because, you know, youre not seeing it on the news. But according to the U.S. geological survey, you know, were way overdue, especially Southern California and LA.

Union-Tribune: But the U.S. Geological Survey says within the next 600 years we can expect a volcanic eruption in central California that ...

POIZNER: No, I tend to not to want to disbelieve them on this one. I mean I think, you know, with the whole place is full of earthquake faults and there really hasnt been, you know, a release, you know, of, you know, in terms of a big earthquake in a long time. I think weve made a lot of progress in building codes. I can tell you that for a fact. So you know, we remodeled our house, you know, in Silicon Valley. A house that was built in 74, just remodeled now.

The earthquake codes, building codes have changed dramatically and we had to completely overhaul the whole the whole way just our house was constructed. Good. I mean I mean, so the state has made a lot of progress on making, you know, buildings safer and more resilient. Thats important. Thats really important and there and there should be, you know, insurance earthquake insurance should offer incentives to people to, you know, brace their water heaters to the wall and to secure the foundation and to, you know those automatic gas shutoff valves? If everyone would do that alone, you know what?

You know what those things on your gas valves... so if theres a shaking, it automatically cuts the gas off because, you know, in an earthquake most of the damage is done by the fires that occur after the earthquake, not the earthquake damage. Anyhow, yeah, theres a lot of work to be done here, you know, to get many a much higher percentage in state insured. Thats going to require, you know, lower cost products, more attractive products, better marketing. I mean theres a lot of work to be done there.

Union-Tribune: Give us your 30-second elevator pitch why voters should return you after a hiatus to the commissioner (overtalk).

POIZNER: Yeah, for two reasons. One is you really dont want a rookie at the helm. I mean the insurance commissioner is going to be in the middle of some of the biggest issues facing the state of California. You know, natural disaster issues, wildfire issues, health insurance fraud rampant, you know, cyber security issues. So I mean you want an insurance commissioner that has a track record. You know, its easy I mean people come to you all the time. There the politicians pitch, you know, whatever. In my case you can look at my track record. How did I do during my four years as insurance commissioner? Its, you know, its something that you can analyze.

Your paper, as a matter of fact, has evaluated, you know, the what I did when I was here. You know, you can go back and look at very positive reviews of really helping a lot of the victims here. So my track record, my technology background. The fact that the Department of Insurance is a very complicated place... 1,400 employees and you really want to hire someone whos managed complex large organizations and with a technology background all the better. So thats number one and the do you really want a career politician with no experience in this position? I dont think so and theres a lot of positions for career politicians. I dont know... the insurance commissioner is not a place to, you know, gamble.

The second reason why voters, you know, I think should get excited about my campaign is that I am trying to do something thats never been done before and some people ask me is, you know, doing this independent thing, is this a political maneuver? Well, no, its not. Its never been done before ever, in fact, Im the first person in California history thats ever even gotten into the general election as an independent and so what Im trying to do is hard, pave a new path, but you know, as I mentioned at the beginning, no matter whether youre a Republican or a Democrat or an independent, you cant be happy with the way Sacramento operates right now. One party rule, not a good thing for the state. If I can carve out a new path for people that want to run, but dont have to be partisan warriors, that would be a huge contribution to the state of California and so Im excited about, you know, both aspects of my candidacy.

Union-Tribune: Quick follow up on that. Whats your path beyond this office?

POIZNER: Yeah, you know, honestly, Im 61 and I, you know I have one more term before Im termed out. It would be an honor to serve a second term. Im I was a great insurance commissioner, if I can say so, the first time around, but there is a big learning curve. I wont have that learning curve this time around. So I can even be a better insurance commissioner, you know, now and I dont I dont have any other plans.

This is, you know I dont its not a place for me to land. Im not about to get termed out, you know, at the Legislature or whatever. I mean this is a public service opportunity, you know, for me and I this is not a stepping stone. I just want to be a great insurance commissioner again and which, by the way, huge, you know, complicated job that can have a big impact and its a great position.

Union-Tribune: Thanks for coming in, Steve.
Investigation talk is just a political stunt

Re GOP warns time running out for Brett Kavanaughs accuser to talk (Sept. 21): So now the Senate Democrats want the FBI to investigate an incident that was alleged to have occurred at a high school party 35 years ago? What next?

And why the FBI? Was the alleged incident a federal crime? It is obviously another delaying effort by the Democrats to attempt to derail the appointment of an extremely qualified jurist to the Supreme Court who, by the way, has already had six background checks done by the FBI. What happened to all the talk recently at Sen McCains funeral about bipartisanship?

David Jones

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Vista

We deserve to know truth about Kavanaugh

Sen. Chuck Grassley should let the FBI do its job. For your information background checks is what it does.

What do the Republicans have to hide? What kind of approach is this? Dr. Ford needs to be heard.

Sandi Gonzales

Bay Park

Dems want to revisit days of witch trials

Re Kavanaugh supporters, Ford still at impasse over testimony (Sept. 20): Are the Democrats pining for the good old days of the Salem Witch Trials for Judge Kavanaugh? You know, accuse someone without evidence or corroboration of a crime not knowing when or where it occurred and pronounce the person guilty?

How do you prove you are not a witch? What evidence will be persuasive to those who could care less about collateral damage, the damage to Judge Kavanaugh or Christine Blasey Ford? Ford wanted to accuse the judge anonymously but Democrats, the only persons knowing her name, outed her in their never-ending craving for power. So much for Democrats protecting women (Ford) or innocent until proven guilty (Kavanaugh). If Democrats win the House back in November will Kangaroo Courts also be reinstated.

Fred Schnaubelt

San Diego

Victims dont forget attack or attackers

Re Digging into teen indiscretions is unfair (Sept. 19): It amazes me that Jeffrey Ridgway calls Brett Kavanaughs alleged attempted rape a teen indiscretion, and should be ignored because it happened a long time ago.

Anyone who has ever been raped or attacked will never forget the horror of this evil act. If he did indeed commit this then he is a man with no moral fiber.

Ellen L. Cotter

La Mesa

How long should one pay for a mistake?

Re Lets listen to Christine Blasey Ford (Sept. 17): Assuming the allegation is true, even without a confirming witness or any details and despite the political agenda, does it matter?

Is a man or woman forever characterized by a single incident of bad behavior for the rest of their life? Are they destined to never rise above it, despite a subsequent life of value and purpose?

John M. LaCrosse

Oceanside

Accuser should face public Senate probe

Re Slow down Senate (Feb. 19): Contrary to slowing down these hearings, the first order of business is to obtain verified testimony, on the record, under oath, in public, before any further actions by the Senates Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearings move forward. All else is simple hearsay and inadmissible.

The witness has previously agreed to participate and should not be permitted to further delay these without testimony under oath. Such would constitute a very bad precedent for future such hearings.

Put up, or shut up. Ford should testify now or forever hold her peace.

Jim Gordon

San Diego

GOP to put on show before confirmation

Anyone who thinks the Kavanaugh hearing is intended to bring out the truth is naive. Not only did Christine Blasey Ford recently pass a polygraph, she told her husband years ago and identified Kavanaugh. She also went through therapy because of it.

Kavanaugh is still denying the charge. His position is not going to change unless a miracle happens. The GOP is still trying to jam his appointment through. Will they get the polygraph examiner under oath? No. Will they get the witness to the attempted rape under oath? No. Will they get her therapist under oath? No. Will they get the FBI to impartially determine the facts of the matter? No.

Is this only a show hearing? Yes.

While it might be possible to view him as an honorable man if he admitted youthful (and drunk) wrong-doing, his dishonesty is clearly disqualifying.

Robert Benson

Misson Valley

Arent there more immediate concerns?

I am not supportive of the nomination of Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court but it is ridiculous that an issue be made about a sexual incident that occurred 30 years ago when our sitting president has a checkered past.

Jean Morgan

Del Mar

The MeToo movement has gone too far

For elected officials like Dianne Feinstein to bring up alleged attacks by Brett Kavanaugh when he was a teenager is ludicrous. How many of us did party when we were teenagers? Let he who is innocent throw the first stone.

Strange the lady in question would bring up this allegation 35 years later just days before a vote on the Supreme Court justice! This MeToo thing has gotten out of hand.

If we had to examine the teenage acts of every elected official, we would throw all the rascals out of office!

Lets examine and evaluate Kavanaughs adult life to see if he is fit for this highest office.

Genie Brown

Poway

Minimizing Fords claim shows sexism exists

So let me get this straight. When men recall being sexually abused 30 years ago by priests in the Catholic Church everyone is appalled and outraged, but when a woman claims that she was attacked 30 years ago by a man she is mixed up, not believed and there is to be no investigation into the matter.

You cant tell me there is no double standard in this country.

S.A. Peters

Lakeside

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Veterans of Foreign Wars Post 7907 in Poway is holding a Prisoners of War/Missing in Action recognition event on Friday.

The event begins at 5 p.m. and will be held at Poway Veterans Park, 14134 Midland Road, across from Old Poway Park. A complimentary dinner for attendees will follow at Post 7907, 12342 Old Pomerado Road.

POW/MIA Recognition Day is a nationally observed day. While the VFW has privately held an event each year, this is the first year it will be open to the public, said Don Stonecipher, former VFW commander and the head of this years event.

Stonecipher said he hopes the timing and location of the event will encourage the public to attend, especially children, who often do not know about POWs and those MIA. We want this to be a community event, he added.

The ceremony at the park will begin with Stonecipher offering a welcome and introductions, followed by Joylani Nicolas performing The Star-Spangled Banner. Commander Don Biadog, command chaplain at MCAS Miramar, will offer an opening prayer, followed by Major Tom Breneman Jr., retired USMC, giving a presentation.

The POW/MIA comrades will be honored by reading their names and ringing a bell. Nicolas will then perform Amazing Grace. A closing prayer will end the ceremony.

The first name will be read by VFW member Tom Farrell, who will read the name of his uncle, William Kern, who was a captain in the Army Air Force who went MIA in World War II. A total of 50 names of POWs/MIA will be read, all originating from California.

The event also honors those killed in action or unaccounted for, said Stonecipher.

Email: news@pomeradonews.com
Driver trapped, seriously injured after rear-ending San Diego city water truck in Paradise Hills The driver of a flatbed truck was trapped in his vehicle and seriously injured Thursday when he slammed into the back of a stopped city water truck in Paradise Hills, authorities said.


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Valley Cottage, NY -- (SBWIRE) -- 09/19/2018 -- Future Market Insights delivers key insights on the global electrical enclosure market a new publication. The long-term outlook on the global electrical enclosure market remains positive with the market value expected to increase at a CAGR of 4.9% during the forecast period (2018-2028). Among the end use segments in the electrical enclosure market, the industrial segment is expected to expand at a significant CAGR in terms of value as well as volume over the forecast period. Global sales revenue of electrical enclosures is estimated to be valued at US$ 6,429.8 Mn by the end of 2018. China is estimated to account for a value share of 37.1% in the global electrical enclosure market by 2018 end and is anticipated to retain its dominance throughout the forecast period. In this report, Future Market Insights throws light on the various drivers and restraints likely to impact revenue growth of the market during this period.



Rapid Growth of Renewable Power Generation Key Growth Driver



Most of the end users are now shifting their focus to alternative forms of power or energy rather than depending on energy generation by fossil fuel operated power generators. These alternative forms of energies  for instance, wind power, solar power and other forms of renewable energy are gaining popularity among all types of end users. Additionally, carbon emission and dependency on fossil resources is increasing day-by-day. Thus, in order to control this dependency, usage of renewable energy sources such as wind and solar energy is likely to be the new trend in the energy and power industry. Establishment of these power generation facilities will increase the demand for electrical enclosures in the upcoming years. Many countries such as the U.K. and Germany among others, are planning to adopt renewable energy sources, which is expected to further increase the demand for electrical enclosures for transmission and distribution.



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Capacity Addition Plans and Installation of New Grids to Power the Electrical Enclosure Market



The governments of various countries have planned to make huge investments on numerous projects to provide better electricity services. For instance, the government of Russia has devised plans such as the GOELRO plan, Russian SFSR Electrification Plan, and Railway Electrification Plan among others, for establishing new power grids to provide electricity in the rural areas of the country. These plans are being supported by the State Commission for Electrification of Russia. Also, the government is focussing on installing new transmission lines in order to create a national grid and also to develop railway electrification, which will in turn boost the demand for electrical enclosures. These planned investments across various sectors such as infrastructure, power, and railways among others, will drive significant growth in the electrical enclosure market.



Need for Integration of Grid Infrastructure



Increasing transmission and distribution activities across the globe have increased the demand for installations of enclosures, which in turn, is driving the market of electrical enclosures. Transmission and distribution expansion, along with urbanisation, is necessary for the development of industrial and manufacturing sectors. Some countries, such as GCC countries and Turkey have the potential to become the hub for many manufacturing industries, which will increase the demand for electrical enclosures owing to rapid industrialisation. By material type, metallic enclosures will witness supreme demand as they have a longer life and reduce the risk of fire hazards. Climate control enclosures can work in extreme climatic conditions and are ideal for use in several regions, thereby driving demand in the global market.



Segmentation Analysis



The electrical enclosure market is segmented on the basis of product type into junction enclosure, disconnect enclosure, operator interface enclosure, environment and climate control enclosure and push button enclosure.



On the basis of product type, the junction enclosure segment is anticipated to continue to dominate the global market in terms of value over the forecast period. The junction enclosure segment is estimated to grow at a relatively high CAGR as compared to other types over the forecast period. It is expected to represent a total incremental opportunity of US$ 1,691.2 Mn between 2018 and 2028.



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Regional Market Projections



The electrical enclosure market in China is expected to represent significantly high incremental opportunity between 2018 and 2028, while the North America electrical enclosure market is projected to expand at a significant CAGR in terms of volume over the forecast period. Sales of electrical enclosures in North America is expected to represent a total incremental opportunity of US$ 523.3 Mn between 2018 and 2028.
Valley Cottage, NY -- (SBWIRE) -- 09/19/2018 -- Several countries across the world are either already facing or will face a demographic disaster in the near future. They will undergo severe socio-economic pressures due to a rapidly ageing population with not enough children being born to replace the workforce. This is particularly true in North America, Europe, Russia, South Korea & Japan. According to a government report compiled in Japan in 2012, 22% of the country is 65 or older and this is expected to rise to nearly 40% by 2060. In 2010, Japan had 30 million elderly individuals in old-age homes, but a serious dearth of caregivers to assist them. These countries are the mean reason that the eldercare-assistive robot market has come into existence. Over the past few years, eldercare-assistive robot R&D has become much cheaper, giving rise to helpers with more functionality & a cheaper price. It has also gained wider acceptance not only in Japan but also in the western nations.



Eldercare-Assistive Robots Market Drivers



The ageing population in developed countries is the main driver for the eldercare-assistive robot market. According to U.N data, the global over-65 population will grow by 181% and they will account for nearly 16% of the population by 2050. Caring for these individuals will be an enormous physical, mental & emotional undertaking. There will be a tremendous shortage of qualified & willing medical personnel for this. Eldercare-assistive robots have the potential to serve this demographic exceptionally well. They can use camera sensors to supervise the senior citizen, ensure that they take their prescribed medication at the right time & also prevent them from falling & injuring themselves. Another factor is the individualistic societies in western countries, as opposed to collective Asian ones. People prefer to live on their own as much as possible. Even in old age, they prefer the privacy, comfort & security of their own homes over that of an institutional caregiver like an old-age home. To address these requirements, eldercare-assistive robots can come in handy. Not only will they fulfil the role of medical practitioner, but they can also provide human-like companionship to the patient. They will be able to enhance the health & psychological well-being of the elderly in several ways. By reminding them off daily tasks & other important information, they could help dementia patients. With informal chit-chat, they might keep a senior citizen's mind sharp, reducing the probability of clinical depression, or Alzheimer's disease. Robots could also act as telepresence machines, bridging the gap between doctors and their elderly patients. These individuals might not always be able to travel to the hospital to seek treatment, & frequent nurse visits are also very costly. The doctor could check in with their patients through the robot's screen, even control the machine for simple tasks. These are some of the factors helping the eldercare-assistive robot market.



A sample of this report is available upon request@ https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/reports/sample/rep-gb-2409



Eldercare-Assistive Robots Market Restraints



There are a few challenges faced by the eldercare-assistive robot market. These robots must be able to manage & cope with more uncertain environments than industrial robots. This makes it a challenge to build safe & certified ones. Another issue might be human opposition. Either the elderly individual, their family or both might not be comfortable with the idea of a robot playing a caregiver role. Older people, in particular, might be very resistant to adopting high-tech equipment like eldercare-assistive robots to simplify their lives. Cost can also be a major restraint. While the price of these assistive robots has dropped over the last decade, they still cost thousands of dollars each. People from lower income or middle-class families might not see the benefit in adopting them as much. Even with many advances made in the eldercare-assistive robot market, it is estimated that it will be several decades before full assistive robotic care is possible.



Eldercare-Assistive Robots Market Key Regions



The main eldercare assistive robot markets are those regions which have an ageing population, i.e. North America (barring Mexico), the E.U, Japan, and China & South Korea. Japan is the largest eldercare-assistive robot market since it has the most rapidly ageing population along with very low immigration & birth rates. It also has several domestic players involved in making assistive robots. North America has also slowly but surely begun to warm up to the eldercare-assistive robot market.



Eldercare-Assistive Robots Market Key Market Players



Some of the companies involved in the eldercare-assistive robot market are Paro Robots, Aldebaran, Togo Seisakusyo Corporation, and Hasbro.



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The research report presents a comprehensive assessment of the market and contains thoughtful insights, facts, historical data, and statistically supported and industry-validated market data. It also contains projections using a suitable set of assumptions and methodologies. The research report provides analysis and information according to market segments such as geographies, types and applications.
New York, NY -- (SBWIRE) -- 09/19/2018 -- The latest report, Floating Walkways market enables stakeholders to gain insights into their potential consumers to construct more effective marketing strategies for the forecast period, 2018 to 2025. With an exclusive coverage of the top vendors, the study enables business owners to know more about the local market and locate potential consumers.



Now you can download the FREE Sample Copy of Floating Walkways Market @ https://www.marketexpertz.com/sample-enquiry-form/18622



Market Segment on the basis of Top Manufacturers - Atlantic Marine, CANDOCK, Clement Germany, EZ Dock, FDN Group, Inland and Coastal Marina Systems, Marina Dock Systems, Metalu Industries International, Structurmarine, Yacht Port Marinas



The research further examines and provides data on the market by type, application and geography interspersed with illustrations and other graphical representations. The market analysis not only determines the attractiveness of the industry but also the evolving challenges and opportunities and their association with the weaknesses and strengths of prominent market leaders. Most importantly, the document empowers business owners to seek information about potential consumers and where they can find them. Apart from this, the literature sheds light on how major vendors operating in the Floating Walkways market are making the best use of their marketing campaigns.



Market Segment on the basis of Product, the report covers:

- Wood

- Aluminum

- Other



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Market Segment on the basis of application, the report covers:

- Ports

- Marinas

- Other



Key Topics Covered:

- Floating Walkways Market Overview

- Global Floating Walkways Market Competition by Manufacturers

- Global Floating Walkways Capacity, Production, Revenue (Value) by Region (2013-2018)

- Global Floating Walkways Supply (Production), Consumption, Export, Import by Region (2013-2018)

- Global Floating Walkways Production, Revenue (Value), Price Trend by Type

- Global Floating Walkways Market Analysis by Application

- Global Floating Walkways Manufacturers Profiles/Analysis



The study segments the complete Floating Walkways market on the basis of different application, end-use, end-user, and production capability. From a business standpoint, the industry has been thoroughly examined across various countries located in North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, and others. The size of the industry for the forecast period 2018 - 2025 is evaluated on the basis of current sales figures and past financial report can be used to forecast the future sales.



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Toronto, ON -- (SBWIRE) -- 09/20/2018 -- Canada's Gift Baskets, a leading company in the gift basket business, announces that the industry is going to witness its biggest jump forward thanks to their premium services.



"Our premium, high-quality gifts are sure to impress even the hardest to please recipients," announces the company's spokesperson. "Thanks to the help of our valued customers and product supply companies, we have over ten years experience in creating beautifully presented gift baskets filled with the most wonderful and unique items from around the world."



The company, who has been in the industry for more than a decade, announced that it's going to revolutionize the industry by following the market's latest trends and implementing state of the art technologies in order to deliver premium gifts that are suitable for every occasion.



Not only does Canada's Gift Baskets offer gift baskets for babies and newborns, but it also has a vast collection of adult gifts so that everyone can get a taste of their quality products that can be shipped all across Canada.



The company's catalog includes over 850 contemporary custom stylish gift baskets, including Chocolate, Gourmet, Cheese, Wine, and Baby Gift Baskets, all of which can be shipped for free to anywhere in Canada. The products delivered by Canada's Gift Baskets are made by the hands of veteran professionals that aim at satisfying every taste. Each gift baskets passes through a solid quality control procedure before hitting the market, which tells a lot about the company's care for customers.



Canada's Gift Baskets is already a leading company in the Canadian market, but it also aspires to reach a worldwide audience and expand its premium services to the global market and customers.



The company's vision and plans are promising, and the industry's experts believe that it will reach its goal in no time.



To know more about Canada's Gift Baskets, visit their website at canadasgiftbaskets.



About Canada's Gift Baskets Inc.

Ever since its creation back in 1995, Canada's Gift Baskets Inc. has been providing premium gift baskets for all ages, genders, and preferences, and therefore making hundreds of thousands of customers happy each year.



The company promises to deliver gifts that are bound to please the hardest to satisfy recipients, and their clients have nothing but positive words to say about them so far. To get a clearer idea about the company and the services it provides, you can check their website at canadasgiftbaskets.ca.



Contact info:

John Mayer

Canada's Gift Baskets Inc.

http://www.canadasgiftbaskets.ca

info@canadasgiftbaskets.ca

Toronto

Ontario

Canada

Phone Number: 416-544-8978
Rockville Pike, MD -- (SBWIRE) -- 09/20/2018 -- Halloumi cheese production remains concentrated in northern and southern Cyprus. The producers in Cyprus export halloumi cheese to rest of Europe and other regions where consumption is significant. Considering the nature of the market, the top 4 companies, account for over 50% of revenue share of the market. These top 4 players include Petrou Bros Dairy Products, Zita Dairies Ltd, Pittas Dairy Industries Ltd, and Uhrenholt A/S. The Tier 3 category in the halloumi cheese market is penetrated by a large number of unorganized players. These unorganized players cater to the domestic demand for Halloumi, with the Tier 1 companies accounting for the bulk of exports.



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'PDO Status' of Halloumi Cheese Can Alleviate Concerns Related to Adulteration



Halloumi cheese products have gained considerable popularity owing to positive perception about their authenticity and health benefits. However, frequent reports about proliferation of 'counterfeit Halloumi cheese' that uses cow milk as an ingredient has dented some of the consumer confidence. These developments have led producers, distributors, and other stakeholders in the supply chain to clamor for tougher regulations. The clamor for granting 'PDO Status' to halloumi cheese has reached a crescendo, and it is highly likely that such a step will change the demand-supply status quo. Considering the nature of the product, it is expected that the halloumi cheese marketplace will continue to be massively influenced by ever-evolving government regulations. The regulations may pose challenges to supply in the short-term, but experts are bullish on the long term impact of these developments.



Supply-Demand Fluctuations Continue to Drive R&D Initiatives



The demand for halloumi cheese is on the rise and the popularity is not foreseen to decline anytime soon. Producers in Cyprus are focusing on increasing the total production, whereas key players are investing in R&D to keep up with this overwhelming demand. Genetic improvement of local goat and sheep breeds has been perceived to be one of the most efficient ways to meet the ever-increasing demand for halloumi cheese. Further, upgrading the quality and production of the animal feed is gaining the attention of producers. Market players are also relying on science to alleviate challenges posed by supply-demand fluctuations. For instance, researchers at the Edinburgh University are working in collaboration with farmers to formulate selective breeding programs. These breeding programs will be solely based on genetic dissimilarities linked to increased milk production.



Organic Halloumi Cheese Gaining Popularity, yet Conventional Halloumi Cheese Holds Higher Revenue Share



Demand for conventional halloumi cheese continues to remain significantly higher than organic variants. This popularity of conventional halloumi cheese can be attributed to multiple factors including easy availability and cost convenience. However, the prospects of organic variants remain bullish, with double-digit growth projected for the period 2018-2028. The growing popularity of organic halloumi cheese can be attributed to the broader trends pertaining to organic and natural. Additionally, growing awareness among consumers about the health benefits of organic halloumi, especially the rich concentration of polyunsaturated fatty acids (FA), is also believed to boost its widespread adoption. The production of organic halloumi cheese using organic milk complements its nutritional affluence, thereby elevating its demand among the health-savvy consumers.



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Animal Welfare Commitments Continue to Influence Buying Behavior



In addition to ingredient origin, animal-related claims have also evolved as a sought-after information amid consumers purchasing halloumi cheese. Sensing this trend, key stakeholders of the halloumi cheese market are voluntarily overseeing welfare of livestock involved in the production framework. Prominent stakeholders in the halloumi cheese market have started voluntarily identifying high standards of animal welfare that are achievable for their supply bases. Moreover, the industry stakeholders are also joining various animal welfare programs such as Red Tractor, Global G.A.P Aquaculture, and Responsible use of Medicines in Agriculture to positively drive animal welfare.



Brands Looking to Capitalize on Growing Popularity of Halloumi Cheese as an All-time Favorite Snack



The higher-than-normal melting point of halloumi cheese makes it a great option for grilling and frying, and it has emerged as one of the favorite snacking options. The demand for halloumi cheese is escalating at a rapid pace, by virtue of the fact that it is extremely unique from all other types. Food enthusiasts are getting to explore enticing variants like halloumi chips, thereby boosting the demand for halloumi cheese by a notable margin. This trend is projected to stand out as a prime opportunity for manufacturers of halloumi cheese to bank on.



Competitive Landscape



The competitive landscape of halloumi cheese market features some of the key players operating in the industry based on their market shares, key differential moves and strategies, marketing approaches, product portfolios, and many more. Some of the key players featured in the report include Petrou Bros Dairy Products, Zita Dairies Ltd, Hadjipieris Ltd, Galaktokomio A.D.S Dafni Ltd, Nordex Food A / S, Achnagal Dairies Industry, Akgol Dairy,Food and Packing Industries Ltd, Lefkonitziatis Dairy Products Ltd, Olympus Cheese, Pittas Dairy Industries Ltd, Arla Foods Amba, Almarai, Sussex High Weald Dairy Ltd, Charalambides Christis Ltd, Uhrenholt A/S, Pandelyssi, La Montanara Melkery (Pty) Ltd, Pathos Continental Foods, CowBoy Farm Ltd, and Lemnos Foods.



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Albany, NY -- (SBWIRE) -- 09/19/2018 -- The global roofing market was valued at US$ 92,430.94 Mn in 2017 and is anticipated to expand at a CAGR of 4.9% from 2018 to 2026, according to a new report titled 'Roofing Market: Global Industry Analysis, Size, Share, Growth, Trends, and Forecast, 20182026,' published by Transparency Market Research (TMR). The global roofing market is driven by expansion in the global construction industry. Asia Pacific accounts for major share of the global roofing market, led by the increase in construction activities and rise in awareness about sustainable construction materials in the region.



Expansion in Global Construction Industry to Drive Market



The construction industry is a significant end-user of roofing materials. It is expanding steadily in developing countries and sub-regions such as India, China, ASEAN, GCC, and Africa. The rate of urbanization is on the rise in these countries and sub-regions due to the improvement in standard of living. The roofing market is expanding rapidly with industrialization and growth in residential and commercial developments. Significant expansion in the construction sector in developing countries and technological advancements have boosted the adoption of quality roofing systems. The construction industry in India and the Middle East has expanded at a rapid pace in the last few years. This trend is expected to continue in the near future. Robust expansion in the construction industry in the UAE and Qatar due to the increase in government expenditure on commercial and industrial projects is anticipated to drive the roofing market in these countries. This is estimated to create significant opportunities for roofing manufacturers, primarily in the industrial sector. Increase in re-roofing activities for existing buildings, typically in the U.S., Canada, and Germany, is estimated to boost the demand for roofing materials during the forecast period. Additionally, increase in reconstruction activities in Asia Pacific in countries such as Malaysia, Singapore, Nepal, and Sri Lanka is also projected to drive the market during the forecast period.



Rise in Demand for Metal Roofing Likely to Offer Attractive Growth Opportunities



Metal roofing, especially steel roofing with galvanized iron or ZN-Al coating, has been gaining momentum in commercial and industrial applications of the roofing market since the last few years. It is also becoming increasingly popular in residential projects including multi-story apartments, complexes, and single-family homes. Currently, metal roofs have become a rapidly developing innovation in the home remodeling applications, they are durable and offer exceptional protection and high longevity. These roofing materials are recyclable and are available in a wide range of shapes, colors, and finishes. Metal roofing is proving attractive to many homeowners as it is designed to last for 50 years. Metal roofing can accommodate green technologies such as solar harvesting panels and water harvesting systems. For instance, the Government of India is planning to introduce tax benefits for house owners who install metal roofs. Rise in demand for energy-efficient metal roofs with built-in solar panels is expected to provide lucrative opportunities to roofing manufacturers.



Volatility in Raw Material Prices Anticipated to Hamper Roofing Market



The global roofing market is prone to fluctuations in prices of raw materials such as acrylic acid. Constant volatility in prices of raw materials is adversely affecting the roofing market. Bitumen or asphalt is the major raw material used in the manufacture of bituminous roofing materials, which is the leading product segment of the roofing market. Quality and availability of asphalt is a challenge for manufacturers of roofing materials. Gasoline is a key raw material for bitumen. Demand for gasoline is still declining. This has adversely affected the supply of bitumen and asphalt. Furthermore, high cost of manufacturing techniques such as the oxidation process have raised the production cost of bituminous roofing. Additionally, high prices of polymer and fiber cement are estimated to hamper the roofing market during the forecast period.



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Bituminous Segment to Dominate Global Roofing Market



The global roofing market has been segmented based on product, application, and region. Based on product, the market can be divided into bituminous, metal, elastomeric, tiles, and others. Bituminous is the dominant segment of the roofing market. Bitumen roofing can be applied for hot as well as cold applications. It provides superior waterproofing protection to buildings and is highly durable. It possesses high tensile strength and is unlikely to form cracks compared to its counterparts. Rise in demand for modified bitumen roofing systems is driving the demand for bituminous roofing.



Asia Pacific Dominates Global Roofing Market



In terms of region, Asia Pacific accounted for major share of the global roofing market in 2017. Countries such as India, China, Vietnam, and Indonesia are expected to provide lucrative opportunities to manufacturers of roofing owing to the increase in disposable income, growth in population, expansion in construction industry, and rise in demand for residential complexes and industrial warehouses. Demand for retrofitting of residential complexes is significantly high in the U.S. and Europe. This is estimated to boost the roofing market in these regions during the forecast period. Middle East & Africa is expected to provide lucrative opportunities to the roofing market during the forecast period due to the rising investment in the construction sector, which consists of commercial establishments, public infrastructure, and utilities, in the region. Increase in government expenditure on commercial and industrial projects typically in the UAE and Qatar due to government efforts to reduce its reliance on oil revenues is expected to drive the market in these countries. These factors are driving the global roofing market.



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High Degree of Competition among Established Players



Key players profiled in the report are Owens Corning, CertainTeed Corporation, GAF Materials Corporation, TAMKO Building Products, Inc., Carlisle Companies Incorporated, Atlas Roofing Corporation, Berkshire Hathaway Inc., Firestone Building Products Company, LLC, Sika AG, Monier Building Group, and IKO Industries Ltd. The top five players  Owens Corning, Carlisle Companies Incorporated, Braas Monier Building Group Services S.A., Berkshire Hathaway Inc. (Johns Manville), and CertainTeed Corporation  cumulatively accounted for more than 10% share of the market in 2017. These companies consistently develop new global strategies to expand their capacity and product portfolios of roofing products through joint ventures and research & development activities. For instance, in 2017, Tamco Building Products Inc. launched a new series Heritage Designer Ridge asphalt shingle for western, southwest, and central U.S. These products are manufactured by using SBS modified bitumen technology.



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Sept. 15-17, 2020

Seatrade Cruise Med will take place in Malaga Sept. 15-17 at Palacio de Ferias y Congresos de Malaga (Trade Fairs and Congress Center of Malaga). The event will be hosted by Port of Malaga, Andalucia, Costa del Sol and City of Malaga.

A Mediterranean port with nearly 3,000 years of history, Malaga will become the 13th destination to host Seatrade Cruise Med, which is held biennially in different locations around the region and includes an international exhibition, conference program and vast networking opportunities.

According to Vanessa Stephens, global events director of Seatrade, organisers of the event: 'We are delighted to announce today that the next destination for Seatrade Cruise Med is Malaga, the capital city of the Costa del Sol.

'We have visited the magnificent Trade Fairs and Congress Center of Malaga and know that the 2020 event will be an exciting destination to work with, thanks to the efforts of the hosts.'

A popular cruise destination, Malaga is strategically located in southern Spain between the provinces of Granada and Cadiz, and neighboring the provinces of Seville and Cordoba, all of which have UNESCO World Heritage Sites.

Three cruise terminals and an international airport

Malaga Cruise Port manages all three cruise terminals of the port, which is located 15 minutes away from Malaga International Airport, served by flights from Europe and around the world. The city's port facilities, hotels and airport make for a world-class international homeport.

Terminal A, Terminal B and the Palm Grove Terminal can handle cruise ships of any size. Larger vessels dock in the eastern area and smaller ships at the inner basin next to the Palm Grove waterfront, within five minutes' walking distance of the cathedral. There are full turnaround and transit services as well as a small shopping center offering duty-free and souvenir items. A shuttle service operates to the city center.

All three terminals have been designed with the latest safety and security requirements, and each fully complies with the International Ship and Port Facility Security Code. Terminal A is equipped with two boarding bridges designed for the latest generation of ships and has hosted vessels as large as Royal Caribbean's Oasis class. Terminal B has a modern boarding bridge and provides full turnaround and transit services. Palm Grove Terminal handles small and mid-sized ships up to 200 meters.
Passengers will be able to embark at the Malaysian ports of Port Klang, Penang and Langkawi for round-trip sailings, with Port Klang's proximity to Kuala Lumpur providing the opportunity to attract international travelers from across Asia Pacific.

Replaces SuperStar Libra

'Genting Cruise Lines has a long history in this part of Southeast Asia and we are excited to be making Malaysia SuperStar Geminis new home in November 2018 to carry on the legacy of SuperStar Libra, which recently retired from active duty from the Star Cruises fleet,' said Kent Zhu, president, Genting Cruise Lines, the parent of Star Cruises.

Convenience of multiple homeports

'With multiple homeports, including Port Klang, Penang, Langkawi and Phuket, we want to make it more convenient for more guests to join us,' said Ang Moo Lim, president of Star Cruises. 'Various travel options, including fly-cruise packages, make it easy to discover the hassle-free joy of cruising to multiple destinations, which is an affordable, value for money and truly a-one-of-a-kind experience.'

SuperStar Gemini will sail three-night journeys, as well as a special four-night (Feb. 6) and two-night (Feb. 10) cruise. Besides the Malaysian ports and Thailand's Phuket, destinations include Krabi (Thailand) and Singapore.
Ideas on how Dearborn can grow its entrepreneurial ecosystem are posted to a board.

Metromode is on tour.

Its a listening tour. We're traveling to four cities in Metro Detroit to hear from local entrepreneurs and the folks working to help them succeed.

At top of mind: As Midtown and Downtown Detroit boom, what strategies do Metro Detroit's suburban communities have to grow their entrepreneurial ecosystems, both in cooperation with Detroit and independently?

Our work, funded by the Davidson Foundation and executed in partnership with Bill Sullivan Enterprises, is all about convening conversations to help us better understand whats working--and what's not--to support small-scale entrepreneurs across some of Metro Detroits larger urban communities.

Our first stop was Dearborn, where last week we met with 18 small business owners, entrepreneurs, creatives, placemakers, local economic development officials, and nonprofit leaders. We asked them three simple questions: what does entrepreneurship look like in Dearborn today, what assets and resources do entrepreneurs use, and where are the opportunities for building a better future?

What resulted was a rich conversation that we hope will continue. Our next stops: Mount Clemens, Pontiac, and Ypsilanti.

Heres what we learned in Dearborn:

Resources for entrepreneurs exist in Dearborn, but they are fragmented.

Plans, resources, and strategies to support entrepreneurs exist in many places within the city, including the Economic and Community Development Department, and within the DDA, within the Chamber, the universities, and nonprofits such as ACCESS.

Each of these programs serves a specific demographic and geography, and entrepreneurs pointed out that it can be difficult, especially for new business owners, to know where to go.

Many would like to see more coordination between resources and more bottom-up input into plans and strategies. The group discussed how while an entrepreneurial ecosystem functions much like a natural ecosystem--without a single central organizer, they see a need for more intentional coordination of the assets and resources within that ecosystem.

For example, Dearborn has a citywide economic development strategy as part of its work to become a certified Redevelopment Ready Community under the Michigan Economic Development Corporations statewide program. But that plan, the group acknowledged, has received little publicity and was prepared largely to the state's specifications.

Participants expressed a desire for this plan, and all plans for economic development and entrepreneurship within the city, to coordinate with all city resources, and to seek input from ground-level entrepreneurs across the city.

Dearborn Senior Economic Development specialist Steve Horstman agrees with this sentiment.

What I would like to see is more of this convening of local businesses and residents, says Horstman. Help us build that strategy. We can't dictate it to you. We have to hear what it is that you all want out of an economic development strategy for the city.

Bring out the welcome wagons.

It may be a digital world, but nothing beats a basket of paper directories, coupons, samples, and special offers that you can touch, taste, and feel. Thats what many of the entrepreneurs we convened would like to see the city provide for Ideas on how Dearborn can grow its entrepreneurial ecosystem are posted to a board.new entrepreneurs.

Windy Weber would also like to see a portal on the citys website welcoming new and potential new business owners.

She says the portal could be A tab that says NEW BUSINESS. You open it and it gives a rundown of the DDA offices, of a partnered realtor who can help them find a space, of a city inspector who can guarantee a place is free of leaks and mold and does not flood, a link to the Small Business Association and local banks who are more apt to work with small biz loans.

Weber adds that the information could also be shared in print and available at local shops to have on hand for any customer who says anything about wanting to open a shop in the city.

Dearborn is not Detroit--but there are things it can learn from the (other) D.

Several participants sang the praises of Detroits hotspots--the food, the ambiance, the uniqueness, the opportunity to support small business. The group grappled with the question of how Dearborn can learn from Detroit while maintaining its own sense of unique identity.

Participants would like to see some of the tactics employed in Detroit brought to Dearborn--making streets walkable, interiors unique and cozy, and an emphasis on outdoor seating and greenspace. They noted that prior conversations with residents have revealed that Dearborn residents want these amenities--and would rather not have to travel to another community to get them.

Connecting with Detroit can also be seen as a success story. A prime example is the Detroit opening of Sam Abbas second location of Brome Modern Eatery in Detroit's financial district. The proximity to Detroit presents a real opportunity for Dearborn entrepreneurs to connect with and do business in both markets, according to the group.

But Dearborn shouldnt try to be Detroit, some pointed out, because it has a uniqueness all its own. And that uniqueness is grounded squarely in its diversity.



God knows we have enough individuality to be our own city, and we certainly are world famous with the largest Arabic population outside the Middle East, says Weber.

Weber would like to see more focus on serving diversity in race and income, by acknowledging those realities as part of the citys economic strategy.

In NYC and San Fran, they celebrate Little China; why don't we seem to do those things here? she asks. I am seeing gaps in racial issues, and also in income. East Dearborn and western Detroit are not simply Arabic people. they are truly a mix of backgrounds, but the unifying factor actually seems to be the residents are working people, poorer people. With Dearborn being 20th in the USA for having the highest percentage of poor people in a city of 65,000 or more, we either have to change our idea of success or work harder to make people from higher income areas come to us.

Entrepreneurs need more help navigating the brick and mortar landscape.

Whether its finding the right space, dealing with rising rents, or getting a landlord to fix a leaking roof, would-be entrepreneurs need lots of help navigating the world of the small-scale commercial real estate.

Entrepreneurs in the group generally agreed that they would like to see more resources allocated to helping business owners with all phases of procuring and maintaining their physical spaces, from scouting for locations, to negotiating rents, to assisting with improvements, to grants and funding, to code enforcement.

Theyd also like to see the city adopt some programs to help early-stage entrepreneurs test their products and services by making temporary spaces available. Examples of such pop-up retail programs can be found in Detroit, Dayton, Atlanta, and many other places. Dearborn resident Stacey Grant successfully experimented with the idea through her Made Metro Collective concept earlier this year.

Outside of retail, the group would also like to see the development of local spaces to help entrepreneurs to develop and test their ideas as part of a larger community with access to business development resources. Such spaces might take the form of incubator spaces or maker spaces where people can use equipment and consult with business development experts on legal, technical and financial issues.

Dearborn needs more third spaces to foster a community of the like-minded and build a startup culture.

The future belongs to freelancers. According to a study by Freelancers Union, more than 50 percent of the U.S. workforce will be freelancing within ten years if current trends hold.

What that means is that many cities, particularly those with large residential populations, will increase their local workforces. Many will work in home offices, and the demand for third places to work or hold meetings--coffee shops, coworking spaces--will increase.

Another opportunity for Dearborn might be to steal a page from Detroits Open City program, a monthly networking event for entrepreneurship featuring talks by business owners on various topics related to launching and sustaining a small business.

Participants noted that Dearborn does not currently have enough of these types of places and opportunities available and that the city needs to build more of a startup culture. Many who freelance travel to Detroit to work at its well-trafficked coffee shops and multiple co-working spaces.

Group participants would like to see a proactive emphasis on attracting places for freelancers and contract workers to work in the city, so they dont have to travel to another town or city.

Dearborns downtown is great--but theres a whole city, too.

Its a familiar story, and one we hear all the time in Detroit, where the lions share of investment is happening in targeted areas of the city--mainly Midtown, Downtown, and Corktown.

In Dearborn, economic development efforts--and media attention-- have focused mainly on its two downtown areas and along Michigan Avenue. West Downtowns iconic Wagner Place Development, in particular, has received a significant share of investment and attention over the past year.

The area features higher-end eateries and retail. It is overseen by the Downtown Development Authority, which can only fund projects and improvements within the DDA district boundary.

We can build on those two blocks, but they alone will not save our downtown, says Windy Weber, owner of Stormy Records. In a way, they introduce more issues, as rent in them will be higher. [High rent] negates the option for what the public keeps asking for: Small boutique funky retail.

As the city invests resources in developing a plan to develop and unite its East and West downtowns, the group sees more opportunity for its overall strategy citywide.

Whats the Dearborn Experience?

Dearborn is a destination--but more people need to know it.

The group expressed a desire for a more coherent marketing of the cumulative resources in Dearborn to create an awareness of the potential for multiple-destination visits to the city. They noted that while Dearborn is full of destinations--The Henry Ford, The Arab American Museum, restaurants like Fords Garage--many people dont understand all of the options they have in the city to make up a full day trip or evening out.

And thats a huge opportunity that Dearborn is currently not taking advantage of.

I have in my mind if I feel that I want to have the Ferndale experience I can distinctly feel what that experience is. So I'll go to Ferndale. If I'm feeling Royal Oak one day, that's a very distinct experience that I can articulate and then I'll go to Royal Oak, says Hassan Bazzi, director of regional opportunities for ACCESS.

I don't think we have that yet in Dearborn. I think we have destination businesses that people will come to. But I don't think there's a cohesive experience that will bring people here and have them stay here for an evening or a day.




Now in its sixth year, the Regional Stormwater Summit is returning to Lawrence Technological Universitys campus. The event takes place Friday, Oct. 5.



In addition to students and educators, the summit will draw elected officials, public works professionals, environmentalists, contractors, water industry professionals, and more to the Southfield-based universitys campus.



Lawrence Tech partners with the office of Oakland County Water Resources Commissioner and the nonprofit group Pure Oakland Water for the event.



"Since starting these events in 2013, we have brought regional stakeholders together with experts in stormwater design and technologies," said Oakland County Water Resources Commissioner Jim Nash.



"These efforts are now bearing fruit in projects across the region."



Beginning at 9 a.m., Lawrence Tech President Virinder Moudgil, Nash, and Donald Carpenter, PE, professor of practice at Lawrence Tech and director of LTUs Great Lakes Stormwater Management Institute will welcome attendees.



Keynote speaker Branko Kerkez, Gerker and Goygit Faculty Scholar at the University of Michigans Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and Brandon Wong, a doctoral student at U-M will give their presentation on Real-time Stormwater Monitoring.



Following presentations include low impact development technologies, green infrastructure champions, stormwater standards, and non-profit updates.



Leela Arava, chief executive officer of Microbuoy Inc., and three Wayne State University students will host Next Generation Real-time Water Sensor Integrated with High Power Miniaturized Batteries, a 3 p.m. free learning session.



There is a $25 registration fee. The event is open to the public.



Got a development news story to share? Email MJ Galbraith here or send him a tweet @mikegalbraith.
Sterling Heights may not be traditionally known for its culinary scene, but that didnt stop nearly 3000 participants from enjoying the annual Chamber Food Truck Rally on September 6th. The donation-entry event raised funds for the Clinton Township Firefighter Fund and Metromode photographer Joe Powers captured the diverse flavors that make up the city and its surrounds.







Sterling Heights-based Rita's ice cream truck brought some smiles at the rally, serving Italian Ice and frozen custard.







Polish Mania Warsaw Cuisine provides fare from its Sterling Heights location and food truck, including Pierogis, Polish sausages, stuffed cabbage and potato pancakes.







Crepe Day Twah paid homage to Detroit's French history, and poked fun at the English pronunciation of French words.







Buck n Dinks got things smoking in a unique style with their BBQ, providing some southern flavors such as pulled pork, frito pie and brisket.







The family-owned and run El Charro was a popular choice for hungry visitors, dishing out unique Mexican fare like their "Puffy Tacos".



Sterling Heights-based Rita's ice cream truck brought some smiles at the rally, serving Italian Ice and frozen custard.Polish Mania Warsaw Cuisine provides fare from its Sterling Heights location and food truck, including Pierogis, Polish sausages, stuffed cabbage and potato pancakes.Crepe Day Twah paid homage to Detroit's French history, and poked fun at the English pronunciation of French words.Buck n Dinks got things smoking in a unique style with their BBQ, providing some southern flavors such as pulled pork, frito pie and brisket.The family-owned and run El Charro was a popular choice for hungry visitors, dishing out unique Mexican fare like their "Puffy Tacos".
Pfizer plans a job fair Sept. 24.

Pfizer recently announced a huge investment in its manufacturing operation in Portage -- $465 million expansion of its sterile injectable production capabilities. Along with that will come an increase in jobs -- about 450 over the next several years.



The plant also has more than 200 immediate openings, including manufacturing, engineering, skilled trades, and many other openings.



To meet this need, Pfizer is holding a career fair on Monday, Sept. 24 from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m., at the Radisson in downtown Kalamazoo, 100 W. Michigan Ave.



Pfizer representatives will be there to conduct onsite interviews, with the goal of filling openings as quickly as the next few weeks.



Information that job seekers should know:



 The open positions require a minimum of a high school diploma or GED. For some jobs, Pfizer may prefer an associates degree or six months of relatable work experience or military experience. For engineering and professional positions the company requires a higher degree and in some cases prefer relatable experience as well.



 Pfizer encourages candidates to apply for positions online before the job fair. That way they can be interviewed right onsite. Available positions can be found at pfizer.com/careers.



 Candidates are also encouraged to pre-register for the job fair pfizermi.eventbrite.com.



 While applying and pre-registering are the best approach, candidates who simply show up will be welcome.



 The career fair will include information tables so job candidates can learn more about Pfizer, the medicines it makes and details about the local site.



Source: Rick Chambers and Associates
The organizers are hoping that 5,000 people will show up for the 2010 Audiotree Festival.

Why is the Audiotree Festival coming back to Kalamazoo?Adam Thurston laughs at the question. "Sometimes we ask ourselves that as well," he says from Chicago.Thurston and Michael Johnston co-founded Audiotree in 2010, a Chicago company that Forbes calls a "music discovery platform." Audiotree records video/audio of up-and-coming bands, puts them on YouTube and their own site, and splits the proceeds with the acts.They also own two Chicago clubs as venues for their bands. The population of that burg is 2.7 million, surely enough of an audience to draw from for a big annual showcase of the talent they've discovered.But to stage the sixth Audiotree Festival , Thurston and Johnston are coming back to a city of 75,985.They'll return to the Arcadia Creek Festival Place with what Thurston says is "the best lineup we've ever had," Sept. 22-23.Thurston and Johnston were friends growing up in Portage, trying to see cool bands as teens in the late '90s. They were too young to get into bars, and the bands they were into only played in Grand Rapids, Detroit and Chicago. "We got lucky with Weezer, and Jimmy Eat World came to Wings Stadium one time. But it was rare," Thurston says.College and the birth of Audiotree followed. They held their first showcase at The Strutt (now Ruperts Brew House) in 2011. But they wanted to do something much bigger.The first full Audiotree festival was at the Wings Stadium parking lot in 2013. They ambitiously booked the big '90s headliner Blues Traveler, plus a variety of acts, from Islamic hip hop to Kalamazoo's famous Greensky Bluegrass."Oh, yeah, you just book the bands and people are going to show up in droves," is what they assumed, Thurston says. They expected a crowd of thousands, but only got 1,200 attending. Not bad for a new festival, but, "You've got to take the time to build something like this."To build that festival, Audiotree turned to the Arcadia Festival Place as its home. Maintained by Downtown Kalamazoo Incorporated, the site had hosted nearly a festival a week during summer months, but activities rapidly declined in the past few years.DKI president Andrew Haan says in an email to Second Wave, puts that in perspective, saying Arcadia Creek Festival Place is one of the most iconic public spaces downtown. When conceived of in the early 2000s, the community came together to raise the resources necessary to construct a place where people could connect, a venue to host events that brought people downtown, and an everyday public space to be enjoyed by all.Since its opening in 2004, the Festival Place has drawn hundreds of thousands of visitors downtown, bringing with them millions of dollars of spending at local retailers, restaurants, and hotels. When initially launched, the venue played host to five major festivals, today, two of those remain, and two new major events have been brought to the Festival Place in recent years.The site has its drawbacks. There's the obvious, which comes with every outdoor festival site: The weather. In 2016 a tornado warning in Allegan county spooked Audiotree into canceling the first four bands. Last year a heatwave dampened attendance. They'd hoped to get more than the actual 3,550 who attended the two days.Aside from unpredictable September weather, what's the problem with Arcadia? "I think now, it's about 25 years ago since that was built, I think the site's struggled with its identity. What it is exactly? It's a public park, essentially, it was built to have events and festivals, have stuff happening downtown and bring people downtown."The reason behind the dwindling use of the site is clear to Thurston. "I understand that DKI has expenses, bills that need to get paid to keep the place clean and managed and all that, but it seems that they kind of push too much of that on festival organizers, or potential festival organizers," he says."Just the expense to rent the site for a couple of days and rent the parking, bag the meters, and the mandatory cleaning fees and power washing fees and everything that goes into putting an event on there, it can be prohibitive for people who are doing smaller events.... Those expenses can total up into the $10,000-to-$15,000 range just to put an event on there."DKI president Andrew Haan told Second Wave last October that DKI would convene a group of leaders from community, residents, concert promoters, and venue managers to, as Haan said, "take a hard look at how we leverage the huge investment the community has put in that space already, and capitalize on the warm feelings the community still has."That meeting took place but those called together quickly realized resources were needed to move forward.Haan's says in his email: With long-term improvements in mind, a Task Force was convened in late 2017 to review the infrastructure needs, programming, operations, and maintenance of the Festival Place. Realizing the scope of the work needed, the Task Force has been on hiatus as the necessary work of developing resources moves forward.He goes on to say that DKI and those it works with have heard from the community through the Imagine Kalamazoo 2025 that more everyday public spaces, events for all, a four season programming are high priorities. We believe the Arcadia Creek Festival Site is a key community asset in helping to realize that vision, with the necessary resources and investments.In its current configuration, that the site presents challenges to event promotors and DKI looks forward to working with stakeholders to address those challenges in the future, Haan says. The Festival Place has served the community well but is in need of improvements to infrastructure, additional programming, and continued maintenance. Moving forward, we are excited to work with the community to leverage the Arcadia Creek Festival Place to its fullest potential.In close partnership with the City of Kalamazoo, downtown businesses, institutional partners, and many additional stakeholders, Downtown Kalamazoo Incorporated has worked over the last year to identify a sustainable funding source to support downtown infrastructure and public space development.The needed resources appear to be forthcoming. We are in the final stages of an approval process to establish a new Downtown Economic Growth Authority, which the City Commission will decide by vote on Monday, October 15th, that will provide the necessary resources to improve not only the Festival Place, but infrastructure and public spaces throughout downtown, Haan says.And Thurston says, I think they need to figure out what they are and what that space is. If they want to have more events there, they should figure out other ways to raise more money...so you don't have to worry about an extra $15,000 just to be able to set foot on the site. That seems silly to me, because we're already taking on massive financial risks."In August, Thurston was at Arcadia planning for the festival when he noticed a groundbreaking ceremony -- what was Parking Lot #9 will be a $70 million mixed-use development.Will this mean more neighbors to complain about festival noise? "That's true!" he says, laughing.The positives still outweigh the negatives at Arcadia for Audiotree. "The Arcadia Creek Festival site sets up for us very well. A lot of infrastructure is there already, it's centrally located obviously in downtown Kalamazoo, people are familiar with it. It sets up very well for what we're trying to do," he says."Like you said, a company based in Chicago trying to do a music festival in Kalamazoo, really doesn't make sense, for any other reason than we're doing it for the community."If they did the festival in Chicago "we'd probably get something like 10,000-15,000 people to come out."But in Kalamazoo, Thurston has seen the crowds grow with every year. He's hoping for 5,000 this year.Audiotree's brand isn't so much genre-specific -- bands run from indie rock to hip hop to folk to metal-based. The company runs through "almost a thousand bands a year" at its Chicago studios and venues, so festival-goers trust that they'll get the standouts to the Arcadia stage.Thurston hears people say every year, "I walked away with two new favorite bands."Loyal followers of the Audiotree brand "trust our taste in music," he says. "Every band might not be their favorite band, but they trust us that if we give a band a nod to either hop on our festival lineup or come to our studio in Chicago to play a session, that we think they're talented and have promise."As they bring in their Chicago-choice of bands, Audiotree also knows that if the festival continues, they have to involve the community. WMU's student radio station, WIDR will have its own stage for Kalamazoo and regional bands. And food/drink vendors will be nearly all local.Thurston understands there's a smaller audience in Kalamazoo. "But we do it because we love music and we love southwest Michigan and that's where we're from, he says. "And we love this community, and we want to continue to push good music."
Sharon Ferraro says many homes in Edison qualify as historical homes.

This home is found in what used to be the Linden Park part of the Edison neighborhood.

You might feel that youve stepped back a hundred years if you take a walk in the Edison Neighborhood. One of the homes was built during the American Civil War (in the 1860s). Most were built in the early 1900s. Many are big, majestic, elegant; they have character and heritageand theyre a lot less expensive than similar homes in other parts of town. Sharon Ferraro, Kalamazoos Historical Preservation Coordinator, says many could qualify to be designated as historic homes.The oldest home in the neighborhood is on Brownell, a little dirt road, just a block long. Yes, a dirt road, right in the middle of town! (Talk about going back in time!) And the house is an unpretentious box, that was built by Daniel and Sarah Allen, as a farmhouse surrounded by large celery fields. Before being the Mall City and the Paper City, Kalamazoo was nationally known as the Celery City.Hollie DeHaan has lived in the house for several years but says shes not a historian. She says what she knows about it she learned from former county commissioner Rob Barnard. And while the neighborhood's oldest home is modest, the Allens built the second-oldest home, a large, Italianate house for their daughter and son-in-law. Its right across the street on Brownell and is being restored by Barnard, who owns a construction company.The son-in-law was Alfred Brownell (thus the street name), who owned Kalamazoos large windmill factory (in the mid- to late-1800s the city was also known for making windmills). The house is more than 3,000 square feet, Barnard says, with ornate plaster designs in the 9-1/2-foot tall ceilings, and originally had a wide, second-story porch with large pillars. It was built in 1878. The soffits (roof overhang) are 24 inches deep, with 22-inch by 60-inch windows, and a 9-foot-tall entry door. A maids quarters was built into the rear of the house.But most people couldnt afford a home like that then. In fact, prior to 1920, according to Ferraro, 80 percent of the homes in Kalamazoo were rentals. Thats because back then you had to put 50 percent down to buy a house. (No wonder they called homeownership the American dream.)That changed in the 1920s, according to Ferraro. The Russian Revolution of 1918 caused the first Red Scare, and our leaders felt that if Americans owned their homes, theyd be less likely to want to rebel. Thus, down-payments dropped from 50 percent to 20 percent. During the Great Depression of the 1930s, and for the same reason, a 10 percent down-payment became commonplace.Homes were still relatively expensive, however. They were constructed by hand, by experienced carpenters, and individual boards had to be cut with a handsaw, one by one, on-site (zoopa-zoopa-zoopa-zoopa). That began to change in 1912-1914, when Sears Roebuck (yes, the Sears that's now at the mall) began to sell complete home kits. Blueprints were provided and all the lumber was pre-cut and ready to assemble. They were called Precut Homes. All you had to do is put them together, like large Lego kits. Thats why you see, basically, the same homes in many places. Soon, the Montgomery Ward catalog also included home kits.Local lumber yards started to lose business to the mass-produced kit suppliers, shipped in on the railroad. But they fought back. There was no reason local lumber yards couldnt pre-cut lumber, too, and so, home building became easier and less expensive. The local businesses would design homes, or simply copy the nationally designed floor plans. Home ownership boomed.The area featured several lumber yards. As late as the 1970s, Southside Lumber was where Aunt Millies is now, at Portage and Alcott. Just a few blocks north, was North Lumber Company, and Lake Street Lumber was only a few blocks east of Portage.You can see one of the Sears kit houses at 1501 Egleston. The style was The Walton, and it was owned by Howard Chenery, after whom Chenery Auditorium was named.Ferraro says there are many homes in Edison that could qualify as historic homes. She says the benefit is that the designation is sought after by home buyers. A recent study showed that the per-square-foot market value of a historic home is an average of 16 percent higher than equivalent homes. There are also generous tax credits for the owners.Some people worry that if their home is designated historic that they wont be able to remodel, but Ferraro says that 96 percent of improvements are immediately approved by the city, and many of the rest are approved after only minor adjustments.Many of the homes in the neighborhood might be called mansions, with a square-foot cost that makes them attractive for home buyers, even if theyre not historically minded. But Edison also has many starter homes. In the southern part of the neighborhood, small homes line many streets. They were built to house the soldiers returning from World War II, wanting to put down roots and start families.The same thing happened after World War I (The Great War), which ended in 1918. Many homes were quickly built then, too. Although they still have plenty of charm and character. In fact, Ferraro says she would like to designate one such section, an entire four-block area west of Town & Country Market, as a historic district.The plat was known as Linden Park. An October 1920 Kalamazoo Gazette article announced the construction by the Kalamazoo Land Company, noting that a model home could be toured at the corner of Melrose and Elgin streets. At that time, the idea of a fully furnished model home was a unique idea. The furniture was on loan from E.L. Yapel, draperies and rugs came from Gilmore Brothers Department Store, and the kitchen was courtesy, Edwards and Chamberlain. The merchants used the home as a showroom for their own merchandise.At the time that the article was written, 28 homes had been completed, eight were occupied, and nine had been sold. A total of 56 homes were planned for the plot. The article noted that the plot was located, but a block west of the Portage Street School (now Washington Writers Academy).Whether youre looking for a starter home, or one to house the entire extended family, youll find heritage at an Ikea price in Edison.
Press Release

September 20, 2018 Nearly half of unemployed are youth

ANGARA TO DOLE: HELP PINOYS GET HIGH-PAYING JOBS Senator Sonny Angara has urged the government to intensify its jobs programs that will help Filipinos, especially the youth, land high-paying jobs amid high youth unemployment and underemployment rates in the country. Based on the July 2018 labor force survey, 1.04 million or almost half of the 2.32 million unemployed Filipinos are youth aged 15 to 24. The survey showed that many of the unemployed were still awaiting results of their previous job application, waiting for rehire or job recall, and were tired or they believed that there is no more work available. While unemployment rate has decreased from 5.6% in July last year to 5.4% this year, underemployment has increased from 16.3% to 17.2%. Such higher underemployment rate means that more employed Filipinos are still looking for more work or longer working hours because they do not have regular full-time jobs that are high-paying, or because they are experiencing job mismatch. "The figures suggest that: 1) the country's unemployment challenge is primarily a youth phenomenon, and 2) the quality of jobs in the Philippines is deteriorating," said the lawmaker who is a known advocate of labor reforms. "The government should intensify its jobs programs which target the youth. We commend the decrease in unemployment but more than that, we should look at the incomes. The country should be generating higher paying jobs," added Angara, vice chairman of the finance committee, who is tasked to sponsor and defend the budget of the Department of Labor and Employment (DOLE). Among the employment facilitation programs of DOLE are the Public Employment Service Office (PESO), the Special Program for Employment of Students (SPES), and the JobStart Program--all of which are mandated by laws sponsored by Angara when he was chairman of the labor committee. According to the data from DOLE, in 2017 alone, 6.5 million individuals were provided with labor market information and referred for job placement through PESO; almost 200,000 youth were provided with temporary employment under SPES; and, nearly 8,000 youth were provided with life skills training under JobStart. The senator has assured that such programs will be given sufficient funding to enable DOLE to meet or even exceed its target beneficiaries for next year. DOLE Bureau of Local Employment Director Nikki Tutay said the number of unemployed youth dropped from 1.5 million in 2010 to 1.1 million in 2018 because of the SPES and JobStart programs. "We ushered the passage of laws strengthening PESO and SPES, and institutionalizing JobStart primarily to solve our unemployment problems and to help the youth land a job faster. Kahit iyong mga college graduate kasi ay inaabot ng dalawang taon bago makakuha ng trabaho. Paano pa kaya yung mga hindi nakapagtapos. "Pero bukod sa tulungan silang magka-trabaho, dapat ay siguruhin din na sapat ang kanilang kita. Parang sa edukayon--mas malawak na ang access ngayon dahil libre na ang tuition, pero dapat ay de-kalidad pa din ang pagtuturo," Angara said.
Press Release

September 20, 2018 De Lima hits Calida's arrogance in refusing to attend Senate probe Opposition Senator Leila M. de Lima has slammed Solicitor General Jose Calida's arrogance in refusing to attend a Senate inquiry into the multi-million deals his family-own security firm entered with government agencies. De Lima, the first prominent political prisoner under the Duterte regime, said Calida is not exempted from being probed by the Senate in the latter's exercise of its oversight power over alleged favored contracts with government. "Mr. Calida has the constitutional obligation to personally appear before the Senate to answer questions about his supposed conflict of interest for bagging fat government contracts for security agency his family owns," she said. "Refusing to attend the Senate hearings about his family's security firm is showing an outright disrespect of the Senate and its rules. Just because he is a Solicitor General doesn't exempt him from public scrutiny," she added. Calida's security firm, Vigilant Investigative and Security Agency Inc., reportedly won at least 10 government contracts between August 2016 and January 2018. Two of these contracts amounting to P12.4 million were with the Department of Justice (DOJ), which prepares the budget of the Office of the Solicitor General (OSG). Although Calida has denied any conflict of interest, documents from the Securities and Exchange Commission showed he owned 60% of shares in the company as of Sept. 29, 2016, or two months since he became Solicitor General. As early as May 30, De Lima and other members of the Senate minority bloc filed Senate Resolution 760 seeking to inquire into Calida's alleged conflict of interest for securing government contracts for his security company. It was only recently, through the Senate Committee on Civil Service, Government Reorganization and Professional Regulation chaired by Sen. Antonio Trillanes IV, that Calida was sent a summon to appear in the hearings on the Calida family's security agency., but to no avail. Through a letter sent to his legal counsel, Jose Bernas, Calida insisted he would not attend the Senate hearings due to his pending petition before the Supreme Court seeking to stop the Senate from conducting its inquiry. If Calida is not guilty of violating the Constitution to fulfill his personal agenda, De Lima pointed out that he should not be afraid to attend and probed during the course of the Senate hearings. "Calida's arrogance in refusing to attend the Senate hearings is his other way of saying that he is guilty of corruption anomaly, in that he is the majority stockholder of a security agency that has bagged multiple government contracts," she said. "After all, if Calida has nothing to hide, he should not be afraid to attend the hearings and answer questions from the good chair," she added. The Senator from Bicol said Calida should not be allowed to get away with his crime which normalizes thievery and promotes corruption in public service, noting, "when you and your family are profiting from the government, clearly, there is a conflict of interest." Mr. Duterte recently confirmed that Calida was behind the review of the Trillanes' amnesty, which resulted in the issuance of Presidential Proclamation No. 572 voiding the amnesty granted him in 2010. Trillanes has suspected that Calida made the move to stop the ongoing Senate investigation. Last May, De Lima backed mounting calls by her colleagues and some other quarters for Calida to vacate immediately his post as the government's chief legal counsel because of corruption anomaly.
Press Release

September 20, 2018 De Lima seeks stricter regulations vs fly-by-night NGOs To prevent abuses and scams victimizing hapless individuals, Senator Leila M. de Lima has filed a measure seeking stricter rules and regulations for groups engaged in social welfare and development services for marginalized and vulnerable sectors. De Lima filed Senate Bill No. 2011, or An Act Strengthening the Regulation of Social Welfare and Development Agencies, which seeks to set the standards and the mechanism of registering, licensing, accrediting and monitoring individuals, agencies and organizations engaged in welfare and development projects or services. "Our recent history has shown that even these institutions, which are supposed to be operating to perform humanitarian functions, can be used to commit crimes that seek to use the resources meant for the beneficiaries for personal gains," she said. "In order to prevent similar situations from happening, we must clearly establish a process that can help donors to verify the legitimacy of the NGOs (non-governmental organizations) as well as provide them with recourse against fake NGOs," she added. In 2013, the Commission on Audit has found massive irregularities in the use of congressional development funds involving 12 senators and 180 congressmen funneled through fake non-governmental organizations (NGOs). At least PhP6.156 billion were released to questionable NGOs for 2007 to 2009 with a total of 82 NGOs found to have questionable backgrounds and operations, and eventually misused or failed to account for the funds. It was during De Lima's term as justice secretary that the government slapped criminal charges against those involved in what is now popularly referred to as the "pork barrel scam" masterminded by businesswoman Janet Lim-Napoles. Apart from Napoles, De Lima had also sent to jail Senators Juan Ponce Enrile, Jinggoy Estrada and Ramon "Bong" Revilla for their involvement in the congressional fund scam. Enrile and Estrada, however, have been granted bail. De Lima underscored the need to provide protection to beneficiaries against the malpractice, abuse and even exploitation by private individuals, agencies and organizations engaged in providing social welfare and development services. "With the goal to increase efficiency of various social welfare programs to assist the marginalized and vulnerable sector, greater coordination of NGOs with the government is essential," she said. Under the measure, social welfare and development service providers, also known as social welfare and development agencies (SWDAs), need to secure their registration and license from the Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD). All registered and licensed SWDAs also need to obtain their accreditation from DSWD to enjoy the benefits and privileges, including endorsement for cash incentives or tax exemption, and for 50 percent discount to electricity, water and telephone services, among many others. Also covered under the proposed measure are individuals, public and private groups, private foundations, associations and organizations engaged in or want to engage in social welfare and development activities. SDWAs who fail to secure registration and license to operate issued by DSWD shall be meted with a fine of P100,000 to P500,000 or imprisonment ranging from one to three years.
Press Release

September 20, 2018 HONTIVEROS: DUTERTE IS "DESTABILIZER-IN-CHIEF" "Destabilizer-in-Chief." This was how Akbayan Senator Risa Hontiveros described President Rodrigo Duterte a day before the country commemorates the 46th anniversary of the declaration of Martial Law by the deposed dictator Ferdinand Marcos. Responding to Duterte's accusations that the opposition is involved in a destabilization plot to unseat him, Hontiveros said that Duterte is the real destabilizer of the country's state of affairs, comparing the President to the late dictator Ferdinand Marcos. She said that under both regimes, thousands became victims of extrajudicial killings, both resorted to Martial Law, committed gross acts of human rights abuses, mismanaged the economy and persecuted the opposition and political dissidents. "The President is desperately linking the opposition to a so-called destabilization plot not admitting that he is actually the country's 'destabilizer-in-chief.' Like his idol, the dictator Ferdinand Marcos, President Duterte has destabilized the country's economy and the price of basic goods and commodities, he has destablized our democracy and institutions of governnance," Hontiveros said. "If President Duterte is looking for destabilizers, he has only to look into a mirror," Hontiveros added. Hontiveros challenged Duterte to focus his time and energy on addressing the country's worsening economic woes instead of "chasing ghosts of destabilization plots." "President Duterte should stop obsessing about destabilization conspiracies and start working to stabilize the economy through sound economic policies," she said. Hontiveros is expected to join a "democracy rally" this Thursday afternoon. Dubbed as "Manindigan Para Sa Demokrasya: A Rally for Moral Courage," more than a thousand people are expected to converge at the historic Plaza Miranda. Aside from Hontiveros, some of the other personalities expected to attend are Manila Archbishop Broderick Pabillo, former Commission on Human Rights (CHR) Chairperson Loretta Ann Rosales, Akbayan Rep. Tom Villarin and Father Bernardine Leones. Students from the University of the Philippines (UP), Polytechnic University of the Philippines (PUP), University of Santo Tomas (UST), Miriam College, Ateneo de Manila University (ADMU) and De La Salle University (DLSU) are also expected to attend the rally. The rally is reportedly led by Akbayan Party, Kilusan para sa Makabansang Ekonomiya (KME), Kilusan para sa Pambansang Demokrasya (KPD), Sentro ng Nagkakaisa at Progresibong Manggagawa (SENTRO), Student Council Alliance of the Philippines (SCAP) and Akbayan Youth.
Press Release

September 20, 2018 HONTIVEROS REAFFIRMS CALL FOR SAFER STREETS FOR WOMEN Akbayan Senator Risa hontiveros on Thursday re-affirmed the call for safer streets for women during a conference with the Institute for Politics and Governance (IPG) and the Senate Gender and Development Focal Point, which was held at the Brentwood Hotel in Quezon City. The event was attended by various local government officials, and gave them the opportunity to share best practices and ask questions regarding the best way to craft and implement local legislation to protect gender rights. "Sexual harassment is a real issue that many Filipinas still confront daily, and most often in the most public of places. Making our streets safer from harassment is not only desirable, it is a vital part of making our cities safer for everyone. Three in five women experience sexual harassment at least once in their lifetime. And the state has to do its part to ensure that women don't become victims. The Safe Streets and public Spaces Act is one way for us to respond," Hontiveros said. The cities of Manila and Quezon City passed their own ordinances criminalizing cat calling, wolf whistling and other forms of a street harassment. Senator Hontiveros lauded the efforts and said that they could serve as models for other cities to follow. For its part, Attorney Maria Valentina Cruz of the Senate Gender and Development Focal Point expressed support for the Safe Streets Bill. "We welcome and fully support this measure, and we welcome all measures that uphold and support women's rights and welfare," she said. Hontiveros is the chairperson of the Senate committee on Women, Children, and Family Relations.
Press Release

September 20, 2018 Villar welcomes Senate OK of bill reconstituting PCA Board on Second Reading Sen. Cynthia Villar welcomed the approval on Second Reading of the bill giving greater representation to coconut farmers in the body tasked to manage the P105-billion coconut levy funds. Villar, chairperson of the Committee on Agriculture and Food, authored Senate Bill 1976 or the Strengthened Philippine Coconut Authority (PCA) Law. This amends Presidential Decree 1468 otherwise known as the Revised Coconut Industry Code of 1978 and puts six representatives from the coconut farmer sector in the 11-member PCA Board. In accordance with Senate Rules, the Senate will pass the bill on Third Reading next week. SB 1976 is an accompanying bill of Senate Bill 1233 or the Coconut Farmers and Industry Development Act, which was already submitted for the President's signature. "This bill addresses the concern that farmers will not be adequately represented in the body that will manage the coconut levy trust fund. With six farmer-representatives in the 11-member board, it is guaranteed that the interest of the coconut farmers will be protected," Villar said. The Coconut Farmers and Industry Development Act, puts the responsibility to manage and safeguard the coconut levy funds for the benefit of 3.5 million coconut farmers to a reconstituted PCA Board. Villar also added that the reconstituted PCA Board will be be tasked to strictly implement the programs for the development of the coconut industry as earmarked in the bill. Under the bill, the corporate powers and duties of PCA shall be vested in and exercised by a board of 11 members as follows: a. Four representatives of the government, the Secretary of the Department of Agriculture as Chairperson; the Secretary of the Department of Finance as the Vice Chairperson; and as members, the Secretary of the Department of Budget and Management, and the Administrator of the PCA who will be appointed by the President; b. One representative from the coconut industry; and c. Six representatives from the coconut farmers sector, divided into two representatives each for the island groups of Luzon, Visayas and Mindanao as members. The farmer representatives must be Filipino citizens, registered with the Coconut Farmers Registry, have considerable experience and reputable track record in promoting coconut farmer's interest and welfare, and nominated by coconut farmers organizations or cooperatives that are active for the past three years in the farmers organizations and development or community enterprise development.
Press Release

September 20, 2018 Zubiri urges President Duterte to appoint the Anti-Red Tape czar Sen. Juan Miguel F. Zubiri, sponsor of the Ease of Doing Business Law, urged the President to appoint the Anti-Red Tape Authority czar. "We want business and livelihoods to move fast. Our citizens need government services for all their needs. That's why we crafted a law to speed up transactions. I certainly hope it won't be government who's violating its own laws," Senator Zubiri said. "Its title has business in it, but, we want ordinary Filipinos, not just big business, to get the full benefits of the law. The essence of the law is to raise the bar for all government agencies. We're not asking for lightning speed, but we deserve better than business-as-usual. It's almost four months since the passage of the law, yet, no one is wielding the whip. We needed an Anti-Red Tape czar, yesterday," said Zubiri. "The Anti-red Tape Czar and the Anti-red Tape Authority would be the one we would go to for all our complaints on red tape and "pangongotong" by government agencies both local and national." "The Czar is mandated to immediately investigate these accusations of violation of this Law. The Czar is also mandated to file the necessary cases with the Ombudsman and the Civil Service Commission on the violators of the Anti-red tape law." "Alam naman natin na takot ang mga negosyante mag sumbong at mag file nang kaso sa mga government agencies kaya yan na ang trabaho nang Anti-red tape Czar." "We crafted the EODB law and amended the 11-year-old ARTA for everyone, hoping that the small entrepreneurs generating more than 80% of business activities and employing millions will benefit. If business moves fast because of the EODB law, we can drive our anti-poverty agenda faster. As of now, despite our high-quality produce, hardworking labor and innovation masters, we continue to be laggards as no one cracks the whip on foot dragging agencies. We need a man at the helm." Designed to eliminate bureaucratic bottlenecks and red tape that hamper transactions between businesses and the government, the EODB Act shall foster a "culture of trust among government agencies and businessmen-to give the businessmen applying for permits, licenses, and certifications the presumption of regularity for their businesses. Under the law, prescribed processing times for transactions were set as follows: three to five working days for simple transactions, and seven to ten working days for complex ones, with a ceiling of twenty working days for highly technical applications," Zubiri explained. "We also provided the appointment of a Director-General for the Authority, as czar, to oversee its implementation. The ARTA czar is to be appointed by the President, co-terminus with his tenure." Zubiri said he received reports from small entrepreneurs writing him and through Industry Chambers of the continuing delays and obstacles to engage in business. "The latest came from farmers who want to process their crops, livestock, poultry, and fisheries harvested from their organic farms. Organic agriculture is burdened by red tape and exorbitant fees. Organic farmers are charged by the DOST- and FDA-accredited Third Party certifier from P45k to P150k per farm per commodity, per year." The report arose from the Congressional Oversight Committee hearing on Organic Agriculture held last week chaired by Sen. Cynthia A. Villar. "We're missing out on the organics market worldwide since very few farms can afford that yearly certification thus can't price their produce the premium price that consumers are willing to pay. The organics market is expected to grow to $323.56 Billion in six years, or in 2024." Zubiri is the main author of the Organic Agriculture law passed in 2010. "The housing sector is similarly affected wherein developers for mid-range housing units are bearing the burden of excessive delays thus affecting their roll-out to low-income buyers. All micro-, small-, and medium-sized businesses don't have the luxury of time. Delays are triple burdens and magnify their expenses." "The laggard government agencies are virtually telling farmers, business, and industry that it's hard to do business. Similarly, foreign investors are driven away by the voluminous documentation and long waiting time required of them. We lose out in billions worth of opportunities and millions of jobs."
Strong hydro and wind generation saw 85 percent of the countrys electricity produced from renewables in the June quarter, according to government data.

That is the highest share for that period  when winter demand usually increases demand for coal- and gas-fired generation  in 37 years, the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment says.

Total generation increased to 11,046 gigawatt-hours  1.6 percent more than a year earlier. Hydro generation increased to 6,843 GWh, the most since the September quarter of 2016. It was almost 13 percent more than the June quarter last year when South Island lake levels were low.

Wind generation rose to 560 GWh, the most since the first quarter of 2017 and almost 12 percent more than a year earlier.

New Zealand has a target to achieve 90 percent renewable power generation by 2025. The Labour-led coalition has suggested going to 100 percent renewable  in a year of normal hydrology  by 2035.

The interim climate change committee is testing the feasibility of that as a goal, given the variability of the hydro generation the country depends on and an expected increase in equally variable wind production.

Generation in 2016 was almost 85 percent renewable  the biggest share since 1981. Renewables fell below 73 percent in the dry year of 2012 and below 66 percent in the dry year of 2008.

Other data published by the ministry today shows that net gas production fell to a seven-year low of 36 petajoules. Output fell 17 percent from the June quarter last year due to reduced production from the offshore Pohokura field, the countrys biggest gas producer.

The field - owned by Shell, OMV and Todd Energy - last year accounted for almost 40 percent of the countrys gas production.

Pohokura produces from an offshore production platform and three extended reach wells drilled from the shore. Production from the platform was cut in late March while the partners inspected the line delivering gas and condensate to shore for possible leaks. Output from the offshore wells resumed in July.

In a separate announcement on June quarter GDP today, Stats NZ noted that the shutdown at Pohokura contributed to an almost 20 percent fall in mining activity during the period, the largest quarterly decline in almost 30 years.

(BusinessDesk)

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Abhijit Iyer has been taken to Nizamuddin police station.He has been told that a case has been registered against him in Odisha. He hasn't been told what the case is or who has registered it. He hasn't been given a copy of the FIR. He's being taken to Saket court for remand. We're going there to oppose it. We haven't even been given a copy of the FIR, so we can't say what the offences are, who the complainant is or under what sections case has been registered, his lawyer told agency ANI.

Abhijit Iyer Mitra was detained in New Delhi on Thursday by police on charges of making derogatory remarks against Odisha.

Abhijit Iyer has been taken to Nizamuddin police station.He has been told that a case has been registered against him in Odisha. He hasn't been told what the case is or who has registered it. He hasn't been given a copy of the FIR: Counsel for journalist Abhijit Iyer Mitra #Delhi pic.twitter.com/HOs5qXv7T7  ANI (@ANI) September 20, 2018

So Odisha Police has arrested my friend @Iyervval for his satirical humor because it hurt religious sentiments. This is the other side of Indian democracy where religious sentiment supersedes and prevails over all other fundamental rights. We remain stuck in Middle Ages. Shame.  Aarti Tikoo Singh (@AartiTikoo) September 20, 2018

Apparently, Odisha Police has detained him without a warrant and no one knows his whereabouts.  Aarti Tikoo Singh (@AartiTikoo) September 20, 2018

Earlier, on Thursday, a privilege motion has been moved against journalist Abhijit Iyer Mitra in Odisha Assembly today demanding action against him for allegedly hurting religious sentiments. Assembly Speaker has approved proposal to form house committee led by leader of opposition to investigate the matter.

Abhijit is also well-known on Twitter and several Twitterati voiced out their support and condemned his arrest.

This is terrible news. @Iyervval has been detained ??? Really !!!! For what ? For satire? Are we a police state ? #IStandWithAbhijit September 20, 2018

WHAT? Believe @Iyervval has been detained by #Odisha police for "hurting religious sentiments". What are we? Some Sharia nation?  Smita Barooah (@smitabarooah) September 20, 2018

It is terrifying and unacceptable that an individual can be detained by state police for saying something offensive. Stay safe and strong @Iyervval, many, many people are supporting you. https://t.co/0QAc47esvf  Rajeev Mantri (@RMantri) September 20, 2018

On the other hand, Iyers statements were discussed in Odisha State assembly with ruling party members Samir Ranjan Dash and Byamokesh Ray raked up the issue related to the alleged derogatory statement Abhijit Iyer-Mitra on the Sun Temple at Konark and Lord Jagannath. The ruling BJD and opposition Congress had demanded action against Iyer.

The ruling party members staged a dharna in the well of the House and later near Mahatma Gandhi statue on the assembly premises. In a video uploaded on social media, Mitra is seen criticising the 13th Century temple.

Stating that Mitra has ridiculed the Sun Temple, BJD MLA Sanjay Dasburma had said, "It (Mitra's video) is an insult to the state and its existence. Action should be taken against the man (Mitra)." Konark Sun Temple is a 13th century monument built by King Narasimhadeva I. It is renowned for intricate artwork on the walls.

Leader of Opposition Narasingha Mishra said, "It hurts the sentiments of Odisha irrespective of party and religion. He says the art and sculpture are contrary to Hindu culture. This is unwarranted and condemnable." "Mitra should be prosecuted. Contents in the video are enough evidence to prosecute him under the law," Mishra said.

As per information available at the Biju Patnaik International Airport, Mitra flew in along with Panda in a chopper on September 15.

BJP legislature party leader K V Singhdeo said, "He (Mitra) is not a BJP man. RSS has nothing to do with the proposed Ram Temple at Ayodhya. It is also not in BJP's agenda. Let us not do politics over it." Speaking on BJD's protest against Mitra's remarks, Singhdeo alleged that it was a diversionary tactic of the ruling party to avoid the alleged cooperative bank scam being raised by the BJP and opposition parties.

Apart from his video on Sun Temple, Mitra also uploaded videos of himself flying around the Sun Temple and the Jagannath Temple in Puri on social media.
Australia eyes PNG military base to curb China's Pacific influence



Sydney, Sept 20 (AFP) Sep 20, 2018



Australia is planning to build new naval base in Papua New Guinea, reports said Wednesday, an apparent move to curb China's influence in the Pacific.

Canberra was aiming to finalise an agreement on the joint facility -- to be built on the Pacific nation's Manus island -- ahead of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Port Moresby in November, The Australian reported.

The newspaper said Australian defence officials visited PNG's Lombrum Naval Base on Manus to review a potential redevelopment after that country's prime minister Peter O'Neill visited Brisbane in July.

"The Pacific is a very high-priority area of strategic national security interest for Australia," Prime Minister Scott Morrison said Wednesday, refusing to deny the report.

"But I'm not going to comment on speculation on national security issues, that would not be appropriate."

Beijing has been showering billions of dollars in infrastructure loans to tiny island nations across the Pacific Ocean, a region considered strategically important as a maritime gateway to Asia.

Canberra, which has a history of military cooperation in the Pacific with close ally Washington, has warned of a need to counter China's influence in the region.

Australia has been critical of Beijing's Pacific "soft diplomacy", and announced this year it would negotiate a security treaty with Vanuatu and also build an undersea communications cable to the Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea.

Canberra's PNG move follows reports China had approached Vanuatu about the possibility of opening a military base there.

World leaders, including Chinese President Xi Jinping, will attend the APEC summit in November, an event both Canberra and Beijing have openly supported, throwing millions of dollars at security and infrastructure improvements in PNG.
China's doctor shortage prompts rush for AI health care



Shanghai, Sept 20 (AFP) Sep 20, 2018



Qu Jianguo, 64, had a futuristic medical visit in Shanghai as he put his wrist through an automated pulse-taking machine and received the result within two minutes on a mobile phone -- without a doctor present.

The small device, which has a half-open clasp that records the heartbeat, is one of the technologies developed by hi-tech firms aiming to help China offset its shortage of physicians by combining big data and artificial intelligence (AI).

The machine made by Ping An Good Doctor was shown off at the 2018 World AI Expo in Shanghai at a time when Chinese policymakers are making a major push to turn the country into a global tech leader.

"I came here to see how Chinese-style medical treatment could be done without a doctor. That would be really convenient," said Qu, a retired IT worker attending the expo.

China had less than 12 million health workers in 2017 in a population of almost 1.4 billion, according to the National Health Commission.

Ping An Good Doctor, which recently listed in Hong Kong, has one of China's largest online healthcare platforms with 228 million registered patients.

Bi Ge, a company spokesman, said the company receives 500,000 online consultation requests daily.

The pulse-taking machine is part of Ping An Good Doctor's AI-assisted medical consultation system, which allows patients to do quick preliminary checks and get prescriptions without having to go to the hospital or pharmacy.

Ping An's services include a mobile app in which patients enter their personal data, medical history and describe their symptoms to an AI-assisted "receptionist" that transfers the information to a real-life doctor for a diagnosis.

"It can definitely ease China's doctor shortage problem... With the assistance of AI, it can relieve doctors from doing the mundane, simple, and repetitive work," said Liu Kang, a former doctor at Peking Union Medical College Hospital.

"But China's overall AI development in medical fields is still at the catching-up phase," Liu added.



- 'Still need real doctor' -



US and European companies, startups and researchers have also been harnessing AI to apply the technology to various health care needs.

Chinese companies have been learning from other countries to develop and implement AI-assisted care such as medical imaging diagnosis, robot surgical systems, and drug research and development.

Good doctors in China are highly sought-after, but the supply is low and not equally distributed.

Less than 10 percent of China's hospitals are considered high-level facilities, but they treat half of the country's patients, according to a 2017 State Information Center report.

Big data and AI-assisted services and remote communication offered by companies such as Ping An allow patients from second- and third-tier cities to access professional advice from qualified doctors based in big cities.

"We are imitating and duplicating the skills of qualified doctors, the ones from tertiary-level (highest-level) hospitals, and spread it to smaller cities and local counties," said Fang Qu, CTO of Proxima, a health care technology company focusing on AI-assisted medical imaging diagnosis.

Traditional Chinese methods of medical assessment -- including pulse taking, which Qu experienced at the AI expo -- are still popular among the elderly, although some might prefer a more human touch.

"It doesn't feel the same as a doctor yet. I also don't understand what the result means," said Qu. "I'd still need a real doctor."

kwa/lth/rox




Page Content

During her visit to the UN Security Council Hearing on Haiti, Prime Minister Leona Romeo Marlin met with the Ambassadors of CARICOM-member states accredited to the United Nations. On the agenda was the status of Sint Maartens application for associate membership to CARICOM and its relationship with other countries in the region. Addressing the first point was the Permanent Representative of CARICOM to the United Nations who indicated that consideration is still being given to the applications of Aruba, Curacao, and Sint Maarten. The process for membership is being looked at in the context of CARICOM's expansion plan.





During the meeting, Prime Minister Romeo Marlin highlighted Sint Maarten's progress in recovery including the most recent joining of the Caribbean Catastrophe Risk Insurance Facility (CCRIF) which is a regional catastrophic fund for Caribbean governments to limit the financial impact devastating hurricanes and earthquakes by quickly providing financial liquidity. I also indicated interest in the Caribbean Disaster Emergency Management Agency (CDEMA), an inter-regional network of emergency units in the Caribbean. The Ambassadors underscored Sint Maarten's continued hospitality as home to many of the Caribbean diaspora and the economic importance of the island in the region. They indicated a desire to see greater inclusion of the island in regional organizations.





Prime Minister Leona Romeo Marlin wrapped up the visit with a meet and greet with the staff of the Permanent Mission of the Kingdom of the Netherlands to the United Nations. The meeting included a discussion with the Netherlands Foreign Investment Agency (NFIA), which assists persons looking to conduct business in the Netherlands.





The agency expressed its willingness to assist Sint Maarten in identifying investors whose priorities align with those of the country. During the meeting the Prime Minister indicated the importance of targeted and well focused investment now during the reconstruction phase and welcomed the assistance from the investment agency. Offers were also made, among others, by the Cultural Diplomacy arm of the Mission to highlight the arts and artists from Sint Maarten at the Mission.





This initiative was well received underscoring the important role that the arts continues to play in Sint Maarten and the wealth of artists on island and those representing the island abroad.





Photo caption  Prime Minister Leona Romeo Marlin together with CARICOM Ambassadors




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Poland may not be ready for 'Fort Trump': US Army head



Washington, Sept 19 (AFP) Sep 19, 2018



Poland might not yet be ready for a permanent US military base, the head of the US Army said Wednesday, the day after Polish President Andrzej Duda offered to host "Fort Trump."

Duda went to the White House on Tuesday to reiterate Poland's long-standing desire for a permanent US troop deployment to the eastern European country -- a contentious move some worry would anger Russia and draw US troops away from long-established bases in Germany.

But US Army Secretary Mark Esper told AFP that when he visited Poland in January, it appeared there was not enough space on offer to fulfill the training requirements for US soldiers.

"It was not sufficient in terms of size and what we could do in the manoeuver space and certainly on the ranges," Esper said.

"You need a lot of range space to do tank gunnery, for example."

He added that, in many cases, the terrain was "maybe not robust enough to really allow us to maintain the level of readiness we would like to maintain."

Defense Secretary Jim Mattis on Tuesday expressed similar concerns, saying there was a "host of details" that need to be studied alongside the Poles before any decision is made.

"It's not just about a base," Mattis told reporters.

"It's about training ranges, it's about maintenance facilities at the base, all these kinds of things."

Trump said Poland is offering to pay Washington at least $2 billion to help meet the costs of the base, which Duda said could be called "Fort Trump," and that the US is "looking at it very seriously."

Duda said Russian military expansion, starting with a takeover of rebel areas of neighboring Georgia and more recently the annexation of Ukraine's Black Sea Crimea region, was part of "constant violation of international law."

Poland has been angling for a permanent US troop presence since at least a decade ago, when it was in talks with president George W. Bush's administration to host a missile-defense complex.

That deal eventually fell through under president Barack Obama, but Poland in March signed a $4.75 billion contract to purchase a US-made Patriot anti-missile system.

NATO last year opened a counter-espionage hub in Poland aimed at expanding the alliance's intelligence-gathering capabilities amid tensions with Russia.

The US-led alliance has also bolstered its forces in eastern Europe with four international battalions acting as tripwires against possible Russian adventurism in the region.

Esper is set to visit Europe next weekend, traveling to Germany, Bulgaria and France, where he will attend the Meuse-Argonne American Cemetery for a commemoration 100 years after World War I.
Putin shows off sniper skills firing Kalashnikov rifle



Moscow, Sept 19 (AFP) Sep 19, 2018



Russian President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday showed off his marksmanship by testing out a new Kalashnikov sniper rifle and hitting the target more than half the time.

Russian state television showed Putin in goggles and earphones crouching as he fired the silver rifle at the Kalashnikov company's shooting range outside Moscow.

"The target is set up practically at the maximum distance," Rossiya 24 television reported, saying that Putin appeared to be pressing the trigger while holding his breath and between heartbeats as professional snipers are supposed to do.

Putin "shot five times and hit the target more than half the time" the television channel reported.

Russian defence ministry channel TV Zvezda reported the semi-automatic weapon Putin fired is "an ultra-modern rifle for Russian snipers".

Putin was visiting a military-themed park called Patriot in the Moscow region where he laid the foundation stone for a Russian Orthodox Church.

Kalashnikov, known for the iconic AK-47 assault rifle, last month surprised observers by unveiling the prototype for a retro-styled electric car.
Israeli air force chief to give Moscow findings on Russian plane downing



Jerusalem, Sept 19 (AFP) Sep 19, 2018



Israel's air force commander will lead a delegation to Moscow to share the military's findings on the Syrian downing of a Russian warplane following Israeli air strikes, the army said Wednesday.

The delegation, led by Major General Amikam Norkin, would on Thursday "present the situation report... regarding all aspects" of the incident, the army said in a statement.

"In addition, they will present the continuous Iranian attempts to transfer strategic weapons to the Hezbollah terror organisation and to establish an Iranian military presence in Syria."

On Monday, Syrian air defences shot down a Russian military plane, killing 15 soldiers, after Israeli missiles had struck the coastal region of Latakia.

The Russian military accused Israeli pilots of using "the Russian plane as a cover, exposing it to fire from Syrian air defences".

Israel denied the allegations, saying its jets were already back in Israeli airspace when Syrian forces launched the missiles that hit the Russian plane.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu expressed his "sorrow" to Russian President Vladimir Putin in a phone call on Tuesday, offering to assist Moscow in the investigation.

Putin had said the incident was the result of "tragic accidental circumstances," warning Netanyahu against carrying out such operations in the future and pledging to beef up security for Russian forces in Syria.

Accompanying Norkin on the Thursday visit will be officers from the intelligence and operations directorates, the army said in its Wednesday statement.
N. Korea's Kim to visit Seoul, shut missile site



Seoul, Sept 19 (AFP) Sep 19, 2018



North Korea's Kim Jong Un agreed Wednesday to shutter a missile-testing site and visit Seoul, a historic move the US welcomed by saying it was ready for immediate talks aimed at denuclearising North Korea by January 2021.

Kim's ground-breaking announcement came at a summit with the South's President Moon Jae-in in Pyongyang, where the two signed a document to strengthen ties between the two halves of the divided peninsula.

Progress on the key issue of the North's nuclear arsenal was limited but, building on a growing rapprochement, the two leaders agreed to create a facility to hold family reunions at any time, work towards joining up road and rail links, and mount a combined bid for the 2032 Olympics.

The agreement "carries the people's fresh hope and the people's strong, flaming desire for reunification," Kim said.

Kim's trip to Seoul would be the first by a Northern leader since the end of the 1950-53 Korean War, when hostilities ceased with an armistice rather than a peace treaty, leaving them technically in a state of war.

In their agreement, the North also said it would "permanently close" a missile engine testing site and launch facility in Tongchang-ri "in the presence of experts from relevant nations."

US President Donald Trump welcomed Wednesday's declaration, tweeting that Kim had "agreed to allow Nuclear inspections, subject to final negotiations," adding: "Very exciting!"

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said he spoke with his North Korean counterpart and invited him to meet in New York next week on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly.

Pompeo praised the "important commitments" made by Pyongyang, adding Washington was ready to "engage immediately in negotiations" to achieve the denuclearisation of North Korea "by January 2021."

Moon, who brokered Kim's historic summit with Trump in Singapore in June, had hoped to bring fresh momentum to stalled talks between his hosts and Washington.



- Historic address -



Moon later addressed an estimated 150,000 North Koreans at the close of a spectacular propaganda display known as the "Mass Games." He called for the peninsula to reunite after he received a standing ovation from the crowd.

"I propose that we should completely end the past 70 years of hostility and take a big stride of peace to become one again," Moon said according to South Korea's news agency Yonhap.

"Chairman Kim Jong Un and I will make a new fatherland, firmly holding the hands of 80 million Koreans in the South and the North."

In Singapore, Kim declared his backing for denuclearisation of the peninsula but no details were agreed.

Washington and Pyongyang have since sparred over what that means and how it will be achieved -- and experts remain skeptical.

The North -- whose ballistic missile programme is banned under UN Security Council resolutions -- has carried out several long-range rocket launches from the site, also known as Sohae, but has also used many other locations including Pyongyang airport.

Satellite pictures in August suggested workers were already dismantling an engine test stand at Sohae.

"Kim is playing this brilliantly: verify that I dismantle a single site that I no longer need anyway while I mass-produce the missiles the site helped me develop," Vipin Narang of MIT said.

Moon also said the North could close its Yongbyon nuclear plant if Washington takes "corresponding measures" -- a significant caveat.

Arms control expert Jeffrey Lewis said the consensus view was that the uranium enrichment facility at Yongbyon "was built for (the) express purpose of being sacrificed."

After the high symbolism of Moon and Kim's first meeting in April in the Demilitarized Zone, and the Singapore summit, progress had largely stalled.

Washington is pressing for the North's "final, fully verified denuclearisation," but Pyongyang has condemned "gangster-like" demands for it to give up its weapons unilaterally.

Ahead of the Pyongyang summit there had been speculation Moon could secure a promise from Kim of a list of the North's nuclear assets, but no such document was mentioned.

"On the denuclearisation issue, the agreement fell short of expectations," Korea University political science professor Yoo Ho-yeol told AFP.



- Spiritual birthplace -



But the two Koreas have been pressing ahead with their own rapprochement, with Kim looking to secure economic cooperation from the far wealthier South, and Moon trying to reduce the risk of a US-North Korean conflict that would devastate his country.

The Rodong Sinmun newspaper -- the mouthpiece of the North's ruling party -- has carried dozens of photos of the two leaders embracing on Moon's arrival Tuesday, parading together through the streets of the capital, enjoying a concert and toasting at a banquet.

On Wednesday evening Moon's party dined with Kim and his wife at a new fish restaurant in Pyongyang.

It was chosen after Moon expressed interest in dining at a local restaurant with ordinary citizens. However, a retail shop there sells North Korean caviar at $50 for a 50-gramme jar -- a luxury far beyond the reach of most North Koreans.

Before returning home on Thursday, Seoul said Moon will travel to Mount Paektu, the spiritual birthplace of the Korean nation on the Chinese-North Korean border.
Italian navy smuggles cigarettes after Libya mission



Rome, Sept 19 (AFP) Sep 19, 2018



An Italian naval vessel was used to smuggle crates of cigarettes while returning from a mission to stop migrants from travelling from Libya to Europe, the navy confirmed on Wednesday after revelations in the press.

The Caprera ship had aboard more than 700 kg of contraband cigarettes, a total of 3,600 cartons in 72 boxes, according to the website of TV programme Le Iene.

The vessel had spent three and a half months in the port of Tripoli on an assistance mission with the Libyan coastguard to intercept and rescue migrant boats in the mediterranean.

When the Caprera returned to the southern Italian base of Brindisi in mid-July, the commander ordered a complete search that revealed the crates of foreign cigarettes, according to a statement from the navy.

The cigarettes have been seized and a judicial inquiry and internal investigation has begun.
Texan campaigner for 3D-printed guns wanted for sex with minor



Washington, Sept 20 (AFP) Sep 20, 2018



A Texas man who has played a central role in the US debate over 3D-printed weapons and caused panic by publishing firearm blueprints online is wanted for having sex with a 16-year-old, police said Wednesday.

Cody Wilson -- who is currently outside the United States -- advocates 3D-printed weapons as a bulwark against gun control, but critics warn they give criminals access to untraceable firearms.

"Detectives with the Austin Police Department Organized Crime Division filed a warrant for sexual assault for a Cody Rutledge Wilson, white male, 30 years of age," Troy Officer, the commander of the division, told journalists.

The crime is a second-degree felony punishable by up to 20 years in prison, he said.

The investigation began after a counselor to whom the victim had spoken notified police "that a juvenile female under the age of 17 had reported having sexual contact with a 30-year-old male."

The victim met Wilson on sugardaddymeet.com, a website that bills itself as the "Best Sugar Daddy Dating Site for Attractive Women and Wealthy Men Seeking Mutually Beneficial Relationships."

Wilson and the 16-year-old had sex at a hotel, and he paid her $500, said Officer.

Detectives "were able to confirm each step of the victim's story with videotape and interviews," he said.

Wilson, whose last known location was Taipei, Taiwan, missed a flight to the US, and police are "working with national and international law enforcement partners to locate him and bring him to justice," Officer said.

He noted that before leaving the US, Wilson was informed by a friend of the victim that she had spoken to police.

Taiwan's Criminal Investigation Bureau said so far they have not received any notification or request of assistance from either US police or Interpol.



- Thousands of downloads -



Wilson published downloadable gun blueprints on his website after reaching a deal with President Donald Trump's administration in June that ended a multi-year effort by the federal government to block him.

But multiple states filed a joint lawsuit claiming Wilson endangered public safety and a federal judge issued a temporary order prohibiting the distribution of the digital blueprints.

Wilson -- who subscribes to an anarchist philosophy that the free exchange of ideas on the internet is a check on government -- then said he interpreted the ruling as only barring the free online distribution of the blueprints, and began offering the files for sale.

The recommended price per blueprint is $10, but the buyer is ultimately allowed to name the amount of money they want to pay. Many of the blueprints on the site have been downloaded thousands of times.

According to Wilson, the battle over the blueprints has ultimately aided the cause of spreading them.

"This attempt by these authorities to go into court and stifle this information drove more people to the website to download it and spread it deeper into the internet," he told AFP in August.

"No matter how badly I win or lose, you can download a gun from the internet," he said.
Texan campaigner for 3D-printed guns wanted for sex with minor



Washington, Sept 20 (AFP) Sep 20, 2018



A Texas man who has played a central role in the US debate over 3D-printed weapons and caused panic by publishing firearm blueprints online is wanted for having sex with a 16-year-old, police said Wednesday.

Cody Wilson -- who is currently in Taiwan according to the island's authorities -- advocates 3D-printed weapons as a bulwark against gun control, but critics warn they give criminals access to untraceable firearms.

"Detectives with the Austin Police Department Organized Crime Division filed a warrant for sexual assault for a Cody Rutledge Wilson, white male, 30 years of age," Troy Officer, the commander of the division, told journalists.

The crime is a second-degree felony punishable by up to 20 years in prison, he said.

The investigation began after a counselor to whom the victim had spoken notified police "that a juvenile female under the age of 17 had reported having sexual contact with a 30-year-old male."

The victim met Wilson on sugardaddymeet.com, a website that bills itself as the "Best Sugar Daddy Dating Site for Attractive Women and Wealthy Men Seeking Mutually Beneficial Relationships."

Wilson and the 16-year-old had sex at a hotel, and he paid her $500, said Officer.

Detectives "were able to confirm each step of the victim's story with videotape and interviews," he said.

Wilson missed a flight back to the US, and police are "working with national and international law enforcement partners to locate him and bring him to justice," Officer said.

He noted that before leaving the US, Wilson was informed by a friend of the victim that she had spoken to police.

Taiwan's National Immigration Agency said Wilson remains on the island after arriving on September 6, adding authorities have "an initial grasp of the person's whereabouts in Taiwan".

The agency said: "If the US requests judicial assistance, our relevant government agencies will follow up."



- Thousands of downloads -



Wilson published downloadable gun blueprints on his website after reaching a deal with President Donald Trump's administration in June that ended a multi-year effort by the federal government to block him.

But multiple states filed a joint lawsuit claiming Wilson endangered public safety and a federal judge issued a temporary order prohibiting the distribution of the digital blueprints.

Wilson -- who subscribes to an anarchist philosophy that the free exchange of ideas on the internet is a check on government -- then said he interpreted the ruling as only barring the free online distribution of the blueprints, and began offering the files for sale.

The recommended price per blueprint is $10, but the buyer is ultimately allowed to name the amount of money they want to pay. Many of the blueprints on the site have been downloaded thousands of times.

According to Wilson, the battle over the blueprints has ultimately aided the cause of spreading them.

"This attempt by these authorities to go into court and stifle this information drove more people to the website to download it and spread it deeper into the internet," he told AFP in August.

"No matter how badly I win or lose, you can download a gun from the internet," he said.
US slaps sanctions on Chinese military unit for buying Russian jets, missiles



Washington, Sept 20 (AFP) Sep 20, 2018



The US government slapped punitive sanctions on a key unit of the Chinese military for its purchase of Russian Sukhoi Su-25 fighter jets and S-400 surface-to-air missiles.

Washington said the purchases by the Equipment Development Department of the Ministry of Defense violated US sanctions on Russia.

The action is "aimed at imposing costs on Russia in response to its malign activities," a senior US administration official said.
US takes off the gloves in global cyber wars: top officials



Washington, Sept 20 (AFP) Sep 20, 2018



The United States is taking off the gloves in the growing, shadowy cyber war waged with China, Russia and other rivals, a top White House official said Thursday.

National Security Advisor John Bolton said the country's "first fully articulated cyber strategy in 15 years" was now in effect.

The new more aggressive posture follows a decision by President Donald Trump to revoke rules established by his predecessor Barack Obama to require high-level authority for any big military cyber operations.

"Our hands are not tied as they were in the Obama administration," Bolton said.

"For any nation that's taking cyber activity against the United States, they should expect... we will respond offensively, as well as defensively," Bolton said.

"Not every response to a cyber attack would be in the cyber world," he added.

Bolton referred to China, Iran, North Korea and Russia as major sources of threats, saying "Americans and our allies are under attack every day in cyberspace."

Hostile intrusions target everything from US infrastructure to government bureaucracies, businesses and elections, according to Bolton.

Among the most notorious incidents is the hacking, allegedly by Russian military agents, of Democrat figures' email accounts just before the 2016 elections, in which Republican Trump took a surprise win against the heavily favored Hillary Clinton.



- Multi-pronged offense -



On the defensive side, US efforts will include "network hardening" and improved cyber security, the Pentagon said.

But the new strategy of what the Pentagon called "countering, disrupting, degrading and deterring" attacks emphasizes much more than better firewalls.

US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said that the department "has used its cyber sanctions authorities to impose costs on Russia, North Korea, Iran and others for a wide range of behavior."

And Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen said that the domestic security department would push "for electronic surveillance and computer crime laws to be updated to keep pace with the rapidly evolving environment."

"Transnational criminal groups are employing increasingly sophisticated digital tools and techniques," she said.

The State Department, meanwhile, focused on what it said would be increased efforts to build up internet security in allied countries "because of the interconnected nature of cyberspace."

"When our partners improve their cyber security practices, it ultimately makes other states, including the United States, safer and more resilient against cyber threats," the State Department said.
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Geneva Sept 20, 2018 (SPS) - UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres criticized in a report the human rights situation in the occupied Sahrawi territories, stressing that Morocco has violated the International Convention against Torture and Other Cruel Treatment or Punishment.

Antonio Guterres' services released the report on the occasion of the 39th session of the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva from 10 to 28 September, media reports said.

The UN Secretary-General's report focused on the UN's cooperation programme with human rights representatives and mechanisms, the sources said.

Concerning Morocco, the document mentioned in particular three cases of Sahrawi victims of cruel treatment and deprivation of their rights, illustrating the deplorable situation of human rights in the Sahrawi territories illegally occupied by the Kingdom.

"Several Sahrawi human rights groups continued to experience difficulties in carrying out their activities. Indeed, they were not recognized legally, as the Moroccan Government had not answered their applications for registration," denounced the report

On the basis of the work of the UN Committee Against Torture, composed of 10 independent experts, Antonio Guterres particularly referred to the poor conditions of imprisonment of Naama Asfari, sentenced to 30 years in prison after the Gdim Izik trial. Placed in solitary confinement from 13 February to 13 March 2018, the detainee is still deprived of visits of his wife, Claude Mangin. SPS

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Listening to friends, family and St. Louis Jewish community leaders talk about Eli M. Abeles, it is clear that he and his boundless energy made an indelible impression on all who knew him during his 40 years. He was described by Andrew Rehfeld, CEO and President of Jewish Federation of St. Louis, as not just an extraordinary individual, husband, father, son, grandson, friend and nephew, (but) someone whose leadership will be missed for many years to come.

Mr. Abeles, who was 40 years old, died on Monday, Sept. 10, from renal cancer, which he fought so valiantly since he was diagnosed a year ago. Despite his young years, Mr. Abeles was well established as a Jewish communal leader who did not allow even his final illness to deter him from coming to meetings as long as he was able to, keeping up with organizational activities via email and other social media, and providing wise advice and counsel to the groups in which he was active.

Eli was an active member of our Jewish community, serving in many leadership capacities at the J and Federation, recalled Rehfeld. As one of the first Millstone Fellows in Federations leadership development program, Eli brought his warm sense of humor and quiet, yet effective leadership style. He was very well loved and respected by his friends. He was known to be a committed dad and husband as well.

Despite family commitments, professional obligations and work with Jewish organizations, Mr. Abeles was always looking to give back.

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He joined Federations Audit Committee and his extraordinary knowledge of financial matters was of great value to the group that worked with external auditors and staff to ensure an accurate and complete audit, Rehfeld continued. He took his responsibilities seriously. While he could no longer attend meetings as he became ill, Eli continued to participate in the selection of a new external auditor in the fall of 2017.

Earlier this summer, Federation selected Mr. Abeles as one of the recipients of the David N. and Roselin Grosberg Young Leadership Award, which recognizes volunteer leaders in the Jewish community who are 40 years and under who demonstrate active leadership. The award will be presented to Mr. Abeles posthumously at Federations annual meeting on Thursday, Sept. 27, at 5:30 p.m.

Lynn Wittels, president and CEO of the Jewish Community Center, said that everyone associated with the J was deeply saddened over the passing of Mr. Abeles.

Eli served in a variety of leadership positions at the J, Wittels said. He was instrumental on the Camp Sabra Committee, chair of the Audit Committee, assistant treasurer of our Finance Committee, and ultimately vice chair of our board. As a member of our lay leadership, Eli was especially helpful in creating our strategic plan to create the vibrant J we have today.

Eli was a trusted adviser and mentor, but most of all, he was a friend, she continued. He was wise beyond his years. He had a sharp wit and a big heart.

She added that Camp Sabra was Mr. Abeles special place. He knew first-hand the impact that summers at Camp Sabra had on campers and staff alike, Wittels said. Sabra was his true passion. He met (his wife) Stacy at Sabra, and his son, Aaron is a two-year camper. Both Aaron and (his other son) Jonah have attended Family Camp weekends and I have a long stream of text messages to and from Eli that I will cherish, she said. These messages provided an eye into his soul. He was a good man, a good friend and a good role model for us all.

Eli Mical Abeles was born April 16, 1978, the son of Ronald and Bette Altman Abeles, both of whom have been active with the local Jewish community for decades. Mr. Abeles attended H.F. Epstein Hebrew Academy from kindergarten through eighth grade and later went to Parkway Central High School. He graduated from the University of Wisconsin, where he majored in accounting, and entered a five-year BA/MA program.







In 2002, Mr. Abeles and Stacy Sapot became engaged and they married on Aug. 31, 2003 at the Chase Park Plaza. They resided in Washington, D.C., first in DuPont Circle and then at a condo in Bethesda, Md.

The couple moved back to St. Louis, where Mr. Abeles worked at the accounting firm Deloitte. He later joined his fathers firm, Abeles and Hoffman.

In his eulogy, Kol Rinah Rabbi Noah Arnow noted, Eli was adamant about earning every role and title, and he really did earn everything. He grew the business dramatically, and a few years ago, was named president.

In discussing Mr. Abeles, Arnow pointed out that devotion to family was his greatest passion.

In April 2009, Aaron was born, and in 2012, Stacy and Eli were blessed with Jonah, the rabbi added. He also explained that the funeral service for Mr. Abeles was hosted by Congregation Shaare Emeth because the large number of people who wanted to attend the service exceeded the current capacity of the Kol Rinah building.

Another person who spoke very movingly about the passing of Mr. Abeles, was his longtime friend, Matt Litwack.

Eli was my best friend. Sure, I have a couple of other besties, but Eli was, and will always be my best friend, said Litwack.

Eli wasnt just my best friend. He was the best friend. He was my confidant, my accountant, my personal adviser, my consigliere and the good cop to my bad cop. Our friendship dates back nearly three decades.

Litwack also expressed admiration for Mr. Abeles wife, Stacy, saying she is incredible.

You have carried your family and friends on your back for the last year, Litwack said. Your positivity and optimism gave all of us an incredible amount of strength during Elis fight. Eli was so lucky to have you by his side and we have been, too. He loved you and the boys the most.

Following the service at Shaare Emeth, burial was at the Beth Hamedrosh Hagodol Cemetery, 9125 Ladue Road. Memorial contributions preferred to the Siteman Cancer Center, Pedal the Cause, the J or Camp Sabra.
Special session on Rosh Hashanah shows continuing need for awareness, sensitivity

On Aug. 30, 2018, I received an email from the acting majority floor leader informing the legislature and staff that Gov. Mike Parson was expected to call an extraordinary session of the legislature beginning on Sept. 10.

Sept. 10.

Rosh Hashanah.

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Reading that email, my heart sank.

For most of us, it is second nature to make plans to be absent from work for two or three days during the High Holidays.

Most of us dont live or work in Jefferson City. I do.

I knew I had to do something.

One of the best parts of my work as a legislator comes in the form of opportunities to learn about so many topics, areas of the state and the people who live here.

These conversations are important for education, understanding and appreciation of one another.

I immediately emailed the acting majority floor leader, then sent a letter to Parson alerting them both of this conflict. My letter included the decision Jewish lawmakers and government employees were required to make to either participate in prayer and celebration during this holy time, or to work and be present in Jefferson City.

I likened the sacred nature of the Jewish Holy Days to the Christian celebrations of Easter and Christmas. I assured them should the need arise, I would be standing up to defend their days needed for celebration and prayer.

It was also painfully obvious that should special session extend beyond its expected week (which has happened before), there could again be special session during Yom Kippur.

At noon on Monday, Sept. 10, special session began.

It began without me.







I spent Rosh Hashanah at Congregation Shaare Emeth with my family, including a beautiful dinner that night. My family has always celebrated the first day of the holiday. The next day, when the gavel fell and opened the second day of special session, I was in my seat, proudly representing the people of my district in the State Senate.

As we went about the days business, the situation continued to weigh on me. I needed to make a choice: Would I be alone in frustration? Or, would I work to help my colleagues understand and appreciate the significance of what had transpired?

I hope to always work for understanding.

The next day I filed Senate Resolution 16, urging all future governors and legislative leaders to refrain from scheduling special or extraordinary sessions of the Missouri General Assembly on any important religious holidays, including the Jewish High Holy Days.

My resolution stated, in part:  the decision to begin this extraordinary session during Rosh Hashanah could, unfortunately be viewed as sending a message to the Jewish community throughout this great state that Jewish High Holy Days are not important or deserving of consideration  and that  it is probable that the date of Sept. 10, 2018, was chosen without knowledge of the holiday or its significance when this extraordinary session was called.

I do not believe the governors mistake was intentional, but I do know it was avoidable.

I have since spoken with Parsons office as well as on the Senate floor to convey the seriousness of the matter. My words were warmly welcomed by many.

Going forward, I am reminded that even in 2018, people of the Jewish faith still have a lot of work to do to facilitate awareness and understanding of our holidays and traditions.

I hope that by sharing my story with each of you, you too, will be comfortable heeding Hillels words:

If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am only for myself, what am I? If not now, when?

Our faith matters.

Our holidays matter.

We matter.

State Sen. Jill Schupp, a Democrat, represents Missouris 24th District.
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While North Korea is officially still seeking to work out a deal that would result in the dismantling of their nuclear weapons program, most North Koreans and many foreign observers dont believe this will happen. The main reason for that negative attitude is that since the Cold War ended, along with regular and substantial foreign aid from Russia, in 1991 the North Korean leaders have been successful in promising much and delivering little in an effort to obtain foreign aid to replace what the Russians long supplied. The hustle was not successful in replacing enough of the Russian aid to avoid a deadly (over a million dead) famine and the collapse of the economy. Despite that North Korea diverted enormous resources to developing nukes and now North Korea is a nuclear power that is starving. Despite the privation, most North Koreans take the nukes as a plus. One thing North Korea has done that South Korea and Japan have not is create nuclear weapons. There are no other achievements worth mentioning (certainly not the mass starvation, labor camps and an oppressive police state). One thing North Korea has become very good at is extorting foreign aid by promising to reform but demanding large quantities of aid first. Then North Korea reneges, finding some way to blame their benefactor and waits for another opportunity to do it again. While many in the West and South Korea are willing to go along with another cycle of this scam the majority have noticed the pattern and are opposed to aid without verifiable denuclearization first. Kim Jong Un is doing his best to avoid that. Saying he will do it is easy but actually following though would be difficult and unprecedented. Kim Jong Un sees an opportunity in exploiting the new Cold War Russia and China are waging against the West by offering to cooperate with this northern neighbors in return for assistance in beating the sanctions and scaring some freebies out of South Korea and the West.

There are other reasons for the northern neighbors to help North Korea. China has a growing problem with the Americans waging a trade war (because of decades of economic scams). Russia is withering away because of corruption, low oil prices and sanctions (for attacking its neighbors). China has also triggered a regional arms race and the formation of a large anti-China coalition because of aggressive Chinese territorial claims. Anything North Korea can do to distract the Americans would be useful for China and Russia.

Even though China has also complied with imposing many (but not all) of the sanctions North Koreans still believe China is an ally. Thats because China still allows smugglers to operate. North Koreans know the Chinese can shut down smuggling if they want to and have done so in the past so the fact that China is willing to cooperate with North Korea in evading the sanctions is seen as a positive thing. Then again, China is the only powerful and prosperous friend North Korea has. Russia tries but really is too broke and weak to be much help. North Korea also believes that China is willing to live with a nuclear-armed North Korea as long as North Korea is stable and not in danger of falling apart and leaving the expensive cleanup to China. South Korea is a democracy and most of the voters are not willing to provide billions of aid in return for vague assurances that denuclearization will happen eventually, maybe.

Sanctions

Although North Korea is willing to talk about getting rid of its nukes and other unsavory (and often illegal) activities, actually doing anything is another matter. The UN monitors sanctions compliance and issues regular reports. As of mid-2018 North Korea is still exporting weapons (rockets, small arms and ammo are showing up in Yemen, Libya and Syria). With the help of Russian and Chines partners, North Korea is exporting its coal and importing oil. North Korea is also exporting more drugs like opium, heroin and methamphetamine (meth). These drugs have long been manufactured by the North Korean government for export to obtain foreign currency. The United States is organizing an international anti-smuggling patrol to counter North Korean smuggling at sea, particularly oil. The new joint patrol effort will include ships, satellites and aircraft from the U.S., Britain, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Japan, South Korea and France.

North Korea has also been caught selling software illegally by establishing companies in China and Russia that pretend to be local but are actually staffed and run by North Koreans. These two companies quietly offer semi-legal or obviously illegal software services as well and advertise on social media. The U.S. has imposed sanctions on these firms and their key personnel (who are largely North Korean).

Impossible Dreams

Any disarmament deal (involving nukes, ballistic missiles, chemical weapons and so on) would (according to the American demands) require verification. That would be done by foreign inspectors. In North Korea, there is the general belief that the Kim government would never allow treaty inspectors to check wherever they wished to validate compliance to a disarmament deal. Russian officials, who know how extensive, and well, the verification procedures used late in the cold war by Russia and the United States worked, doubt North Korea would put up with that sort of thing. Russians who have met with Kim or his close advisors do not believe there is any chance North Korea will give up its nukes. Yet the Russians also agree that the bold new tactics the Americans are using has the North Koreans worried. The U.S. is no longer seen as a pushover and easy to deceive. The Americans want verifiable disarmament (getting rid of nukes and ballistic missiles that can deliver them) or else (more sanctions and more enforcement). The North Koreans believe the Americans wont be able to keep this up and feel they can get away with delaying decisions about denuclearization until the Americans have a new government that is willing to do things the old way.

Another seemingly impossible development would be dismantling the inefficient command (communist planned) economy North Korea keeps alive. China has been suggesting economic changes with increasing urgency for over a decade. But now it is happening without anyone ordering it to happen. By allowing some legal markets, and then a growing list of privately owned enterprises North Korea has made it possible for the government planners to issue less detailed (and less likely to fail miserably) economic plans. The government officials know that if their plans fail spectacularly enough the supreme leader will feel compelled to order punishment (often execution) of the officials responsible. With the assistance of the growing donju (entrepreneur) class government planners allow activities that are quasi-legal and largely protected (from government interference) if they succeed. This has allowed government officials to concentrate on more urgent matters, like figuring out effective ways to extract bribes from donju and put away enough cash to get themselves and their families out of the country. That last bit gets little official attention but is a major preoccupation with the secret police and senior leaders. Many North Koreans have picked up on these new developments and view being a donju as a more attractive career than the traditional goal of getting into college and becoming a government official.

The donju make themselves very useful, even coming up with joint ventures that can include government run businesses as partners. These deals are increasingly acceptable because the donju get things done, sometimes by bending the laws in ways few government officials would dare try. In effect, the donju are quietly and gradually implementing the reforms the Chinese have been urging. The Chinese, both government officials and entrepreneurs, understand and respect the donju who in turn rely on Chinese businesses to help them out with advice and guidance. Chinese business publications and books are popular with the Donju and more of these are being translated into Korean because of the growing market for that knowledge in North Korea. A lot of practical business advice and information is available on the Internet and North Korean secret police note that a lot more of the electronic media being smuggled in consists of technically legal stuff from Chinese websites devoted to business matters. The illegal stuff is similar information from South Korean websites. Chinese advice for entrepreneurs is OK, the same stuff from South Korea can get you killed. Despite that, because most smuggled media comes in on tiny and easy to conceal SD (and micro-SD) cards most of it gets through.

Some forms of South Korean information is considered militarily significant, like the amount of food South Korean soldiers get compared to their North Korean counterparts. The worsening food situation in North Korea has, over the last few years, been felt by most members of the military. This was becoming a major morale problem for North Korean troops stationed close to the South Korean border (DMZ or demilitarized zone). Most of the North Korean military is stationed within fifty kilometers of the DMZ and many units are right on the DMZ and regularly patrol it. They occasionally see South Korean soldiers and the southerners appeared better fed and larger. North Korean propagandists tried to dismiss this as a South Korean deception but a lot of that South Korean media getting smuggled into North Korea reached the soldiers on the DMZ. Worse, a growing number of soldiers have kin who escaped to South Korea. There is some communication (illegal phone calls and smuggled messages, often home videos from the south) that makes it clear the southerners eat better and those taller, well-fed South Korean soldiers are no deception but the norm. There have also been cases where northerners living near the DMZ have obtained South Korean cell phones and, for a fee, will allow North Korean soldiers to make calls to kin in South Korea, or anywhere else in the world because cell phone calls outside North Korea are so cheap and legal. So in North Korea, the government has ordered an increase in the quality and quantity of food for frontline (near the DMZ) North Korean soldiers. Also ordered was a more energetic crackdown on the illegal use of foreign cell phones on the Chinese and South Korean borders.

Despite the growing efforts to keep South Korean media out, North Korea has ordered its propaganda officials to ease up on criticism of South Korean president Moon, who is seen as making a serious effort to work out a peace deal with the north. Moon is also trying to persuade South Korean legislators to approve over $400 million worth of aid for North Korea that is meant to persuade the north to do something in return. South Korean politicians note that the north has done nothing so far except talk about what they might do under the right conditions. Southern politicians have seen this routine before and consider it a scam to obtain foreign aid in return for nothing.

It has also been noticed that North Korea recently replaced several senior military commanders with younger men known to be more amenable to peace with South Korea. Kim Jong Un has been eliminating hardliners from the military leadership since he took power in 2012 and the results appear to have been what Kim wanted. The older hardline commanders were constantly complaining about how the military was starved for resources and increasingly unable to launch a credible offensive against South Korea. Kim saw that has as an unlikely and, for North Korea, unaffordable goal. Kim showed his displeasure by replacing the older commanders with younger ones who saw the situation more like Kim Jong Un did. Message delivered and acknowledged. The remaining hardliners are much less of a threat and becoming more so with each new retirement.

September 18, 2018: The leaders of the two Koreas met personally for the third time as South Korean president Moon Jae In flew into the North Korean capital for three days of meetings. The two leaders promptly signed an agreement in which North Korea said it would dismantle a rocket engine testing site and would allow foreign inspectors to observe. Kim also said there would be no more ballistic missile testing. Kim also agreed to allow inspections of nuclear weapons facilities after the United States reciprocated. In other words, Kim wants the U.S. to pay a lot to take a peak and hear more assurances that there might be denuclearization someday, somehow. Kim also said he would visit the South Korean capital sometime in the future and discuss more ways the north can reform its economy (with some economic aid from the south).

What it comes down to is Kim wants to get paid because his people, especially his soldiers, are hungry and not looking forward to another four months of very cold weather, little fuel to keep warm with and not much electricity either. China is doing whatever it can to assist North Korea in getting some (or a lot) of financial assistance from South Korea and the United States. China does not provide large quantities of aid but will sell you stuff and even do it on credit if you have collateral.

The first two meeting between Kim and Moon took place on April and May at the Peace Village on the DMZ. This had long been the scene of fruitless negotiations over disagreements between the two Koreas. North Korea leader Kim Jong Un and the South Korean president agreed that the Korean peninsula should be free of all nuclear weapons. The two also agreed that there should be an official end to the Korean War, which has been suspended (by an armistice) since 1953. The two also agreed that there should be more meetings between them.

September 17, 2018: Russia denied it had been aiding North Korea to evade the sanctions and import oil (via transfers at sea from Russian tankers) and export coal. Russia has been seen importing North Korean coal and then shipping it to South Korea as Russian coal.

September 14, 2018: Someone in North Korea leaked the lecture notes used for gatherings of key Workers Party members during the second week of September. The lectures emphasized the importance of North Korea nuclear weapons and the leadership of Kim Jong Un who kept the nuclear program going. These lectures are how the government informs key party members what current policy is. So while Kim Jong Un is telling South Korea and the United States that denuclearization is a possibility he is telling his key followers that the nukes are the reason why, as the lecture notes put it, North Korea is a nuclear superpower. The key points in these mandatory but technically secret lectures are usually evident in the chatter (on the street and via illegal phone calls to people outside North Korea). In North Korea, the chatter has always been that the nuclear weapons would never be surrendered. American intel officials report that they are monitoring increasing North Korean efforts to conceal all aspects of their nuclear weapons program. This involves more than putting all the facilities underground but also taking elaborate measures to conceal the movement of material and people to and from these hidden facilities.

South Korean leaders repeated their belief that South Korea must continue increasing its military capabilities as long as North Korea keeps its nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles. South Korea has backed this up with more large orders for new military equipment. North Korean protests are seen as confirmation that the new gear is needed.

September 12, 2018: The U.S. has approved the sale of six P-8A submarine hunting aircraft and 64 PAC 3 anti-missile missiles to South Korea. Total value is $2.6 billion. At the same time, the U.S. also approved the sale of nine E-2D Advanced Hawkeye Airborne Early Warning and Control aircraft to Japan. This will cost $3.1 billion. Both of these sales elicited an angry protest from North Korea, which has no access to such tech and couldnt afford it if they did.

September 10, 2018: The U.S. revealed that when the leaders of the two Koreas met last April Kim Jong Un commented that that denuclearization could be accomplished in two years.

September 9, 2018: In the North Korean capital there was an enormous parade and elaborate events to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the founding of North Korea. There were no ballistic missiles in the parade this year. President Xi of China had said he would visit the North Korean capital as a guest at the 70th anniversary events. The presence of Xi would have been s a big deal for Kim Jong Un and would have put Kim even more in debt to his powerful patron. But at the last minute Xi canceled and sent the number three man in China as a replacement. Kim still considered this a mark of respect because the man Xi sent was widely known in China and Koreas as a powerful and influential official. Besides Kim met with Xi three times this year, an unprecedented situation for relations between the two nations. Yet there is some tension between Kim and Xi because the North Korean leader has indicated that North Korea will not give up its nuclear weapons. China does not want that and continues to pressure Kim to disarm or at least restore stability and order to North Korea.

The events in the capital were recorded for broadcast on the 10th and release to foreign news outlets. Most of the 600 invited foreign guests were government officials and not journalists so it was easier to control what foreign journalists saw and recorded. The official video had to be carefully checked to ensure there were no errors.

For the rest of North Korea, the 9th was a normal workday. Farmers were particularly busy because the harvest this year was poor and months of cold weather are imminent. The only other unusual activity outside the capital was the extra security at the borders and around the thousands of monuments to the Kim dynasty found all over the country. This extra security was to discourage North Koreans from expressing what many really thought about the last 70 years. It was feared that more people would either try to flee the country or deface the monuments. Both illegal activities are occurring with increasing frequency. There is also been more crime of all sorts, some out of desperation (literally stealing to buy food) but the more clever criminals are targeting the donju (entrepreneurs), often by impersonating police or government officials in order to steal from these newly wealthy North Koreans.

September 6, 2018: For the first time the U.S. identified and indicted a North Korea hacker (Pak Jin Hyok) for participation in major hacking attacks. The most famous of these was the Sony Pictures extortion in 2014 and the WannaCry ransomware in 2017. There were others involving attacks on banks. Pak got sloppy with a gmail account and that led to tracking him down and identifying him and many details of how he did what he did. The U.S. imposed economic sanctions on Pak and a week later North Korea denied all the charges. South Korea and the United States have been tracking down North Korean hackers for over a decade. This has become easier as North Korea produces more of these hackers and puts more pressure on them to raise cash for the Kim dynasty.

A South Korea delegation returned from North Korea and reported that they were told by Kim Jong Un that he wanted to proceed with denuclearization.

September 5, 2018: China was accused of allowing increased trade with North Korea back in May. Satellite photos and ship tracking data showed over 30 North Korean cargo ships visiting a Chinese port in May and June and unloading coal. China would not comment but did accuse the United States of not following through with denuclearization talks with North Korea. Meanwhile, the U.S. is imposing sanctions on hundreds of Chinese, Russian and North Korean firms for violating the North Korean sanctions.

September 4, 2018: In South Korea, army commanders warned that preparations would have to be made do deal with the millions of landmines in the DMZ. Many of these are over sixty years old and many are in unknown locations. If the Koreas are unified opening the DMZ to the public will be a big deal but that will not be possible until all the landlines and unexploded shells, bombs and grenades are found and disposed of.

August 30, 2018: In Japan, the government issued a document detailing its military strategy and justification for increased defense spending over the last decade. The document pointed out that while North Korea was still a threat, long-term China was a larger threat. Unlike North Korea, whose economy and military are a mess, China has a robust and growing economy and armed forces that continue to modernize.

August 29, 2018: South Korea complained to China that another Chinese military aircraft had violated South Koreas ADIZ (Air Defense Identification Zone) and remained in the ADIZ four hours before leaving. South Korea sent ten warplanes aloft to confront the intruder. This is the second such intrusion in a month. In 2013 China announced a new ADIZ that overlapped South Korean, Philippine and Japanese airspace. China demanded that any foreign military or commercial aircraft request permission before flying into this zone. South Korea and Japan protested while the United States quickly flew some B-52s into the disputed zone without asking for Chinese permission. China protested and the United States ignored them just as China ignores South Korean protests.

August 28, 2018: Russia and South Korea agreed to establish a hotline between South Korean and Russian air force commanders responsible for Pacific coast operations. This would make it easier to quickly resolve the growing number of incidents where Russian warplanes enter South Korean airspace (the ADIZ) without permission.
Since late August Boko Haram has carried out several successful attacks against the military in the northeast. The number of soldiers killed is unclear because the army continues to provide misleading data on losses or no information at all. So most Nigerians are dependent on rumor and a few eyewitnesses. Disgruntles soldiers are often speaking up and in August one unit refused to go back to the northeast. Soldiers continue to complain of corruption among their superiors and insufficient equipment, weapons and support in general. One thing most everyone can agree on is that soldier morale in the northeast is poor and getting worse.

The recent increase in Boko Haram attacks is mainly due to another factional feud within Boko Haram. One of the more moderate (willing to negotiate) leaders, Mamman Nur, was deposed and killed on August 21st by more aggressive subordinates who also suspected Nur of getting large payments from the government and not sharing them. The new Boko Haram leader is willing to carry out more attacks, no matter what the risk is to the Boko Haram attackers. Nur was a key leader in the Barnawi faction of Boko Haram, which considers itself part of ISIL (Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant). This faction not only attracts the more fanatic Boko Haram diehards but also many of the most paranoid ones. Mamman Nur was known as an effective leader and unlikely to be capable of accepting a secret ransom and keeping that quiet. The death of Nur triggered a number of large-scale attacks by the ISIL faction of Boko Haram and these raids got a lot of Boko Haram men killed or wounded. Since many of the attacks took place near the Niger border it attracted the attention of the Niger military which has sent more troops to the Nigeria border to seek out the base camps these Boko Haram factions are using. The Boko Haram knew enough to behave on the Niger side of the border and that worked until the Boko Haram violence on the Nigeria side of the border became too frequent to ignore.

Boko Haram persists in the northeast in large part because one of the two rival factions has adopted more effective tactics, at least until recently. The Barnawi (or Albarnawi) faction is recognized by ISIL and follows the current ISIL doctrine of concentrating attacks on security forces and government officials (preferably the corrupt ones). That makes it easier to extort (raise taxes) cash and other goods from the local population. The Barnawi faction has several thousand active gunmen and operates mainly in the far north of Borno state near Lake Chad and the Niger border. The smaller Shekau faction has about half as many armed men and operates further south near the Borno State capital of Maiduguri and the Sambisa Forest.

Money matters and one reason the Barnawi faction has been more successful is their emphasis on raising cash, especially via large ransoms for hostages, especially foreign hostages. There was never a specific demand made in public but the government paid for high-value captives, like the May 2017 agreement that got 82 of the Chibok captives (from 2014) released in exchange for the freedom of eight Boko Haram leaders being held and awaiting prosecution for mass murder, terrorism and so on. Many Nigerians believed these men should have at least stood trial before being traded for hostages. As expected some of the freed Boko Haram leaders promptly went back to Islamic terrorism. At the same time, Boko Haram had very visibly divided into factions. Back in March 2017, Boko Haram leader Abubakar Shekau released a video to boast that he was still alive and operating in the northeast. At that point, security forces had claimed Shekau was dead at least five times since 2011 but so far had always been wrong. In late 2016 there was hope that a recent split in Boko Haram might lead to Shekau getting killed by other Islamic terrorists but that hasnt happened either and the two main factions appear to have achieved some kind of truce with each other and continue to operate.

The Boko Haram split began in August 2016 when ISIL announced that it was replacing Shekau, who was accused of mismanagement, with Abu Musab al Barnawi. ISIL believed Shekau devoted too much effort to killing fellow Moslems (especially civilians) rather than the real enemies of ISIL (local security forces and non-Moslems in general). ISIL leadership was also unhappy with the Boko Haram use of children and women as suicide bombers. That has become an issue in Nigeria because the use of children as suicide bombers has tripled during 2017. While the new Boko Haram leader has concentrated attacks on the security forces and non-Moslems he has also used children, especially females, as suicide bombers. Barnawi is a son of Mohammed Yusuf, one of the ISIL founders. Barnawi was appointed the main Boko Haram spokesman in January 2015. Although Barnawi has developed a following in Boko Haram Shekau refused to accept the ISIL decision. The Barnawi faction has also been more successful at online recruiting (via encrypted messaging systems like Telegram and frequently shifting presence on social media sites like Facebook.) Barnawi was also more willing to delegate important tasks to subordinates, like Nur. That worked until it didnt and now many of the Barnawi factions appear to have gone rogue.

The national government has occasionally carried on unofficial talks with the Barnawi faction of Boko Haram. This faction is also known as ISWA (the Islamic State West Africa province) and has access to resources Islamic terror groups use help negotiate large ransoms for hostages, especially foreign hostages. These hostage negotiations apparently evolved into discussions about a peace deal but appeared to get nowhere.

September 17, 2018: The Red Cross reported that one of its personnel was killed after being held by Boko Haram for six months.

September 14, 2018: In the northeast (Borno State) Boko Haram attacked two villages 90 kilometers north of the state capital Maiduguri. Local defense volunteers tried to stop them but lost eight dead and four wounded. Boko Haram rounded up most of the livestock and fled with the animals. Soldiers and local militiamen arrived after Boko Haram had left.

September 12, 2018: In the northeast (Borno State) Boko Haram attacked an army base at Damasak and were repulsed losing seven dead. The soldiers had seven wounded and believe the Boko Haram attackers came from bases across the nearby border in Niger.

September 10, 2018: Nigeria signed several agreements with Chinese oilfield development companies for China to participate in exploring for oil in Nigeria in addition to developing new oil and gas fields as well as existing ones. Many Western companies will no longer do this work in Nigeria because of the lawlessness and corruption, which frequently cause oil operations to be shut down. Oil buyers have noted this as well and Nigerians complain that they are losing sales to American producers, who use fracking to produce so much oil that the U.S. is again a major exporter. The quality of the U.S. and Nigerian is similar and the prices are often lower. In April-June Nigerian production was 1.84 million BPD (barrels per day), which was down from two million BPD during the first three months of the year. By the end of 2017 Nigerian oil production had hit 2.03 million BPD and so far 2018 looks like it will average 1.8 million BDP because of long-delayed maintenance and refurbishment of the oil production facilities in the Niger River Delta (where most of the production is). At the end of 2016 Nigerian oil production was rising to levels not seen for years. That has been the trend for most of 2017 because the new government had negotiated a peace deal with the local rebels (who opposed corruption and bad treatment of locals in general). Production rose and is on the way to the goal of 2.5 million BPD by 2020 but achieving that level of production depends on keeping the peace in the Delta. Continued corruption and rampant oil theft makes it difficult to increase production and sustain those higher production levels.

September 7, 2018: In the northeast (Borno State) soldiers tracked down a group of Boko Haram who had ambushed a convoy two days earlier and kidnapped 21 civilians. After a brief gun battle 14 Boko Haram were dead, four soldiers wounded and 21 civilians rescued.

Elsewhere in Borno several hundred Boko Haram attacked the town of Gudumbali, which is halfway between the state capital Maiduguri and where the borders of Niger and Chad meet. The fighting went on overnight and several hundred civilians fled to Maiduguri where they gave different accounts of what happened during the overnight fighting. Many civilians thought Boko Haram was going to overrun the town again and kill all the soldiers and many civilians. The army reported that they had repulsed the attack. Many civilians insisted that Boko Haram had overrun parts of the town and nearby military base and looted before troops forced them out.

August 31, 2018: In central Nigeria (Plateau state) Fulani herders have been particularly aggressive during the last week of August, bringing their livestock into farming areas so their cattle can fatten up on crops. The armed Fulani often get away with it and when soldiers or police do show up and seize the cattle the Fulani have to pay compensation to the farmers to get their cattle back. Some of these Fulani go after local farmer leaders. These are often Christian clerics, as most of the farmers are Christian. The violence has left several dozens dead in a week and considerable damage to crops. To make matters worse the troops are often reluctant to go after the Fulani, who are heavily armed and willing to fight the soldiers.

Further north, in Zamfara state there is similar violence but everyone involved is Moslem. This area is also undergoing an upsurge in fighting between Fulani herders and Hausa farmers. To make matters worse the area is notorious for groups of bandits that steal cattle as well as raid farming villages. That, plus the Fulani violence has caused at least 3,000 deaths in the last two years. Most of the attacks are raids for the purpose of looting and leaving. The Fulani raiders often run into Hausa self-defense militias and the resulting battles leave many on both sides dead or wounded. The Fulani raids are usually after cattle and other loot. Both Hausa and Fulani are Moslem so religion is not a factor here. Moslem leaders want attention paid to the growing tribal feuds between Moslem tribes, especially like the battles between Fulani and Hausa in Zamfara. The violence in Zamfara state has led to the national police sending in hundreds of additional paramilitary personnel to deal (or try to deal) with that situation. The police have not had much impact and usually, leave after conducting some operations that are avoided by the local bandits.

August 30, 2018: In the northeast (Borno State) a Boko Haram attack on an army base near the Niger border left over 40 soldiers dead.
Something wicked this way comes... When the Phoenix Players bring their production of Terry Pratchett's Wyrd Sisters to the Bear Pit Theatre, Stratford, next week, from 26th to 29th September at 7.30pm.

On a dark and stormy night, a king is murdered, his infant son taken from the castle. As the usurping Duke Felmet claims the throne, three witches  the severe Granny Weatherwax, the amiable Nanny Ogg, and the naive Magrat Garlick  meet to plan the fate of the exiled Prince and, indeed, the entire country. At least, theyll get round to that, once theyve had a nice cup of tea. With biscuits.

Adapted from Terry Pratchetts novel by Stephen Briggs, and brought to life in this amateur production by the Phoenix Players, Wyrd Sisters takes all the classic trappings of a Shakespeare tragedy and turns them up till the knobs fall off. With an evil Duke and Duchess, three Witches, a Fool, a ghost, a demon, an unlikely troupe of actors, and more besides, this play has something for everyone  and nothing is quite as it seems

Tickets are 12 available from www.thebearpit.org.uk or call 01789 403416
Bridging the Streaming Media Gender Gap

I just returned from IBC in Amsterdam, where I walked away with two bits of very heartening newsneither of which have anything to do with technology.

The first one actually isnt so much a single news item as it is a trend. Companies in the streaming media space seem to be focusing more on long-term planning and success than on proving they can keep up with the latest buzzwords. So while it meant that there werent that many "Wow!" moments walking around the show floor, there were plenty of "Hey, thats a really smart way to approach the market" conversations. And most of the companies that did have new products were actually shipping them, not just talking about things on the drawing board. As our publisher Joel Unickow said, "Less fluff, more stuff."

The second bit of news is one that is about neither technology nor business, but has tremendous implications for both. Saturday morning was the first in-person gathering of a group that couldnt be more important for the future of our industry: Women in Streaming Media. Its painfully apparent at events like NAB and IBC (and yes, at Streaming Media conferences as well) that women are woefully underrepresented on panels and at vendors booths. [Editor's note: IBC made huge strides this year, with 37% of its speakers being women, according to analyst Ben Keen.]

Of course, its not just an issue in our industry; check out the All Male Panels Tumblr to see just how pervasive and pernicious the problem is. I say its pernicious because even if women are still a minority in our industry, they arent such a tiny minority that you cant find at least one woman to speak on a panel of four or five. If youre putting together a panel and cant find at least one woman to join it, youre not looking hard enough.

Since Ive been in charge of Streaming Media conference programming, Ive made an effort to make sure more women speak at our eventstwo out of the three keynotes at the 2018 Streaming Media East were womenbut I know we need to do much more. And some events are already doing a terrific job of making sure that women are better represented not just on the stage but in the audience. In particular, Im thinking of the Nordic TV Summit (formerly called the Nordic Media Summit), which (surprise!) is programmed by a woman, Brynhild Vinskei of 24i Media. And this year's inaugural Video Marketing Summit, programmed by our own Troy Dreier, also featured a program that was about 30% women.

I first heard about the Women in Streaming Media group from Vinskei, and not long afterward from Diane Strutner, CEO of Datazoom. In just a few years, Strutner has become one of the most recognized people in our industry; a number of us at the groups first meetup joked that her business card title should read Powerhouse. Strutner spearheaded the effort, along with founding members Peggy Dau of MAD Perspectives, Sangeeta Ramakrishnan of Cisco Systems, and Alicia Pritchett of Fastly.

While exclusion from conference speaking was the impetus for the groups formation, Women in Streaming Medias goals are much broader. The groups mission statement, according to Strutner, is "to increase diversity and give more visibility to women leaders within the technology side of the streaming media industry. To do this, Women in Streaming Media (WSM) will create forums and events to connect women, provide mentorship and internship programs to increase and grow womens participation in the industry and in leadership roles, and promote other opportunities to help accelerate women professionally."

The groups inaugural meetup, cheekily called "But First  Coffee," drew about 50 women from all sectors of our industry. (A few men, tooI was honored to be asked to join and talk about speaking and writing opportunities at Streaming Media.) Thats a pretty good showing, especially for 9 a.m. on a Saturday morning in Amsterdam. The group currently boasts 123 members on its LinkedIn page, and Strutner says the founding members are in the process of selecting a board. Women interested in officially joining the group can fill out this Google form to apply.

As long as streaming media remains male-dominated, men in the industry need to make efforts to be more inclusive. Weve committed to do that with Streaming Media shows and publications, and my co-hosts on the monthly SM Advanced Forum webcast (SMAF for short) have committed to making sure one of each shows two guests is a woman. We need to do better, but this is a start.

The Women in Streaming Media group had its first meeting at IBC.

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Among the companies attending the 2018 edition of the prestigious event, which kicks off this week, will be German bespoke safe makers Stockinger. And coming along for the ride will be several of the brands flagship products, including the new Cube Azure & Rose Gold safe and the Hotel Safe II 3V, both of which will be making their debut at the show.

Combining timeless design with effortless security, both safes have been created to sit in perfect aesthetic harmony with anywhere from a design-oriented hotel interior, superyacht or private home.

Awash with bespoke interiors and covered in the very finest Stockinger Suede, the new safes offer generous space for items such as documents, personal valuables and up to three precision watch winders.

Also on display in Monaco will be the Ming, a state-of-the-art wireless alert system that ensures personal assistance is only ever a discreet call away, immediately summoning your captain or steward / butler without having to interrupt your conversation or meal. As well as being ideal for superyachts, it can also be housed in residential properties, private island resorts, executive boardrooms, exclusive restaurants and other venues that demand the upmost in security.

As with all Stockinger products, each safe being showcased in Monaco will take great pride in their Made in German label, meshing beautiful design with flawless functionality.

The Cube Azure & Rose Gold safe, Hotel Safe II 3V and Ming steward call system will be on display at the Monaco Yacht Show from 26-29 September at the MYS Breaking News Center, Quai Antoine 1er, Stand QA1.

For more information about Stockinger products, visit www.stockinger.com. Additionally, if you have any personal security consulting needs, you can contact Stockingers CEO Matthias Fitzthum at [email protected].
Office hours changing at MICA Family Centers

At MICA, the last year has reinforced to us that families need our flexibility now more than ever in how they access our services. Fortunately, we have made changes to meet that need, including virtual visits, curbside pickup, and more. We have evaluated how we can use the lessons from this last year to better serve the needs of families, and that has resulted in making some changes at our Family Development Centers. Effective 11/1, MICAs Tama County Family Development office hours will change to Tuesday and Thursday from 9:00AM to 4:00PM. These hours are intended to be available ...
Mexico marks anniversaries of two deadly quakes



Mexico City, Sept 19 (AFP) Sep 19, 2018



Mexico held memorials and protests Wednesday in memory of the two earthquakes that devastated the country on September 19 -- one that killed 369 people last year, and another in 1985 that killed more than 10,000.

Raising their fists in the air -- the symbol used by rescue workers to call for quiet as they search for signs of life in the rubble -- Mexico City residents held a minute of silence for the victims of both quakes.

Then, as it does every year, the sprawling capital of 20 million people held an earthquake drill, preparing for the inevitable next quake in one of the most seismically active regions on Earth.

As the city's deafening earthquake alarms droned out their chilling message -- "seismic alert, seismic alert" -- some residents broke down in tears.

"The trauma is still there, even though time has passed, even though we know this isn't real," said Ofelia Gomez, 39, a bank teller.



- 'That enormous building danced' -



The 1985 earthquake, which measured 8.1 in magnitude, left huge swathes of Mexico City in ruins.

In an early morning ceremony, locals paid tribute to victims of one of the worst collapses, the 15-story Nuevo Leon apartment building, where 472 people died.

Former resident Fernando Lopez Padilla, 67, recounted the moment of the quake.

"At 7:19 am, that enormous building started to dance, to break into pieces," he told AFP.

"In a matter of seconds, the whole thing collapsed."

The government was so overwhelmed by the disaster 33 years ago that residents had little choice but to take matters into their own hands.

Thousands of civilian volunteers flooded the streets and tunneled through the rubble of collapsed buildings, frantically searching for survivors.

Many Mexicans say the quake changed the country forever. Political analysts often say the ensuing outrage drove Mexico's transition from a one-party state to a nascent democracy over the next 15 years.



- A drill turns real -



The many changes wrought by the 1985 quake included the installation of Mexico City's alarm system. Using seismic monitors, it aims to give residents up to a minute's warning before a quake strikes.

Every year since it was installed in 2015, the city has held a massive drill on September 19.

One year ago, the capital had just completed the annual rite when, some two hours later, the ground started trembling for real.

Ironically, because the epicenter of the 7.1-magnitude quake was just 120 kilometers (75 miles) away -- and not on the Pacific coast, where the seismic monitors are concentrated -- the alarms did not sound until the city was already shaking violently.

Scenes reminiscent of 1985 unfolded across the capital: dozens of buildings collapsed into tangled mountains of concrete and steel, which were soon swarming with frantic volunteers racing to reach those trapped inside.



- Lingering scars -



Mexico City, a vibrant and cosmopolitan capital, has largely bounced back in the past year.

But look closely, and the scars are still visible.

At the Tlalpan housing project on the south side of the city, some 100 people still live in an improvised camp beside what used to be building 1C -- left homeless by its collapse, which killed nine people.

Former residents protested there Wednesday, accusing the authorities of turning a blind eye to their plight and breaking their promises to help them.

Nearby, at the Rebsamen elementary school, where 19 children and seven adults were killed, families held an emotional religious ceremony.

"A school should be a child's second home, not her grave," said Alejandro Jurado, whose seven-year-old daughter Paola died in the collapse.

He is part of a group of parents who have pressed charges against local authorities, after experts determined the private school collapsed because of illegal construction practices.

The irregularities included allowing the owner to build herself a penthouse apartment above the school.

It is one of dozens of buildings that experts say collapsed because of corruption by owners, construction companies and the authorities meant to regulate them -- despite rigorous changes to the building code adopted since 1985.
Governor blames 'colonialism' for US's poor Puerto Rico hurricane response



Miami, Sept 20 (AFP) Sep 20, 2018



One year after Hurricane Maria slammed into Puerto Rico, the island's governor blamed US "colonialism" for delays in receiving aid and the weak emergency response to the disaster that left nearly 3,000 people dead.

"Puerto Rico is a colonial territory," and therein lies the "inherent difficulty," Rosello said in an interview with local radio WKAQ 580, as commemoration ceremonies for the hurricane victims were under way.

Puerto Ricans are US citizens, but since the island is a US territory they cannot vote in national elections, and are represented in Congress only by a non-voting representative.

Rosello complained that bureaucratic dealings with the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) "have been excessive," and said the response by the Army Corps of Engineers -- which sent personnel to the island days after the hurricane struck to re-establish electrical power -- "was insufficient" and "lacked urgency."

He compared the sluggish response last year to the quick federal responses in Texas and Florida, states hit weeks earlier by hurricanes Harvey and Irma, as well as the federal response to 2005's Hurricane Katrina in the US Gulf of Mexico.

"Why are there bureaucratic processes here that were addition to those in Florida and Texas?" he asked.

"And why, when Katrina struck, did they pay 100 percent of the emergency work and they did not extend this to Puerto Rico?"

Bitter debates still rage over the failings of the US government's response to the Category 4 storm in Puerto Rico and the terrible human toll it took.

Maria destroyed Puerto Rico's electricity grid, leaving the island largely without power for weeks and crippling its health care system.

The local government decreed a day of mourning to remember hurricane victims on Thursday. Flags fluttered at half mast across the island and in Florida, where many Puerto Ricans who fled the hurricane moved to live.
36th Annual Vista Lights to be held November 18 The Congaree Vista Guild will host its 36th annual Vista Lights Thursday, November 18 from 6 p.m. to 10 p.m. The family-friendly holiday event is returning to its original format...

Coming Soon Join Columbia Childrens Theatre this October for the musical production of Ragtime! At the dawn of a new century, everything is changingand anything is possible. Set in the volatile melting...
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Linkedin Andi Widjajanto (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Thu, September 20, 2018 09:42 1147 882ab4bc56dbda08a069b308773a23fb 3 Opinion trade-war,Jokowi-administration,Jokowi,World-Economic-Forum,global-economy,Insight Free

President Joko Jokowi Widodo used The Avengers analogy at the World Economic Forum in Hanoi recently to argue that he was among the superheroes opposed resolutely to the idea of trade wars.



The comparison is an apt one. Although he declined to identify Thanos in the real-world scenario, the Indonesian leader definitely repudiated the notion  embodied in that character  that some must die so that others can survive in a world beleaguered by limited resources and population growth.



That Malthusian idea belongs to a pretechnological era, in which the survival of the fittest meant just this savage war of each against all. That was all the state of nature made possible. Today, technology has emerged as a source of great empowerment, so that more people can share what the Earth has to offer. But they must maximize the use of technological, human and natural resources.



Trade exemplifies the benefits of human competition through cooperation. The international division of labor gives nations a stake in one anothers prosperity. The global production chain that runs through countries like a golden thread integrates them into trade and investment networks of prosperity.



Thus, China does not rise at the United States expense; each rises because of the other.



Admittedly, there are winners and losers in every nation. Those who can make the most of technological know-how profit the most. Those who cannot, do not. Companies and workers in the US that kept up with change prospered. Those who could not suffered. But that holds true of workers in China, India, Indonesia and Singapore as well.



However, globalization prevents the emergence of national winners and losers. Would the US be at the vanguard of economic and technological change today but for globalization, a process that it  more than any other country  unleashed? America is a victor, not a loser, in the contest called globalization.



It is true that China would not have taken its unbelievable economic leap forward without access to global markets, but could those markets have become truly globalized in Chinas absence? It is Chinas competitive presence in global markets that has helped America move even higher. That is the paradoxical consequence of economic competition: It is a form of cooperation.



This is why the oncoming trade war between the two global giants is so worrying. It is one thing for nations to spar at the World Trade Organization (WTO), whose dispute resolution mechanism exists precisely to allow them to joust peacefully.



Tariffs are a different game altogether. They are the bullets of trade; they kill, maim and destroy the ecosystem, in which international trade can work for the collective good of mankind.



Indeed, there is a danger that trade wars will lead to real wars. The Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act helped trigger the Great Depression, which in turn, led to World War II. Beggar-thy-neighbor policies boomerang ultimately on proponents by shrinking the economic pie and making recourse to arms a natural alternative. If that alternative is tempting enough, great powers go to war and drag smaller nations with them into the quagmire.



It happened once. It can happen again.



If threats are taken seriously, it might be possible to find a solution to them. In the current global context, which is characterized by the countervailing strategies of the US and China, other economic players must throw their weight behind what they think is best for the global economy.



The WTO possesses both the legitimacy and clout to stay the course of globalization. The European Union is no pushover, even with Brexit looming. The Group of Seven and Group of 20 nations, the latter being more representative of the global economy than the former, both play a role in rejecting protectionism among their members.



Closer to home, ASEAN must retain its institutional ability to act as a common platform for its members in their dealings with the economic superpowers. This is easier said than done. Faced with the threat of protectionism, and the response to it, severing the links that bind ASEAN nations into global value chains of production, the easy choice is to bandwagon with one power or the other at the expense of ties with fellow ASEAN nations.



This would be the economic equivalent of strategic bandwagoning. Once the race to the bottom begins, nations enter a common free fall that negates years of learning to rise through cooperative competition. They compete to weaken others. Sadly, that is the process that the US has inaugurated with China. The victims will include ASEAN countries.



The regional grouping must respond to the challenge by displaying its capacity for coherence that was apparent during the Vietnam War and the Asian and global economic crises of the last century and this one. The danger is not that ASEAN would split, but that its members would go their separate ways in all but name.



The Avengers is set in fictional terrain. It is possible to watch that terrifying film and still remain calm because its malevolent universe is unlike this one. But art is often a harbinger of reality.



President Jokowis role remains the most viable one for the rest of us as well.

***

The writer, a former Cabinet secretary, is a senior analyst at P8 think tank, Jakarta.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not reflect the official stance of The Jakarta Post.
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Linkedin Editorial Board (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Thu, September 20, 2018 08:43 1147 882ab4bc56dbda08a069b3087739eedf 4 Editorial #Editorial,cigarette,smoking,cigarette-smoking,local-governments Free

While the government drags its feet and lacks unity in fighting health hazards caused by smoking, people can now rely on regional governments for protection. That is one of the messages of last weeks 12th Asia-Pacific Conference on Tobacco or Health in Bali.



In sharing their experience, a number of regional heads from Asia  including Kulonprogo Regent Hasto Wardoyo, Bogor Mayor Bima Arya, Klungkung Regent I Nyoman Suwirta from Indonesia, Muntinlupa Mayor Jaime Fresnedi of the Philippines and Xiaopeng Zeng of Beijing  showed that local initiatives to combat smoking work and have won popular support where there is political will.



The challenge of course would be far more complicated for tobacco and cigarette producing regions as their survival depends on these commodities. But the autonomy bestowed on regional governments has enabled local leaders to make the right choice. For Suwirta and other leaders, their mandate has been to introduce and enforce ordinances on no-smoking zones for their people.



The Bali regency of Klungkung and 10 other regions across Indonesia have been lauded by the Health Ministry for their tobacco control policies . Klungkung bans smoking in public places, including schools, playgrounds, public transportation, houses of worship, workplaces and tourist sites. No tobacco ads are permitted in those places either. Violations of the bylaw are punishable by three months in jail or fines of up to Rp 50 million (US$3,350).



Such a ban could affect the revenues of tourist destinations like Klungkung, but Suwitra convinced all stakeholders, including religious leaders, to heed it. He is now campaigning against smoking during all religious rituals, which are many, and asking shop and stall owners to avoid displaying cigarette products so as not to tempt the youth to smoke.



When it comes to enforcing the tobacco control bylaw, Muntinlupa city is perhaps the most stringent. The Smoke Free Task Force, led by the city police chief, arrests any individual caught smoking in public places or outside assigned smoking areas.



Indonesia, as well as the world, needs tough leaders committed to the protection of their people and future generations from any threat, including toxic cigarette smoke. The Southeast Asia Tobacco Control Alliance has projected cigarette consumption in the region will to reach 548 billion cigarettes this year, primarily in Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam as transnational tobacco giants relocate from developed countries.



For Indonesia, with Southeast Asias highest prevalence of adult smokers, the danger is clear and present. Diseases resulting from smoking and second-hand smoke will thwart its bid to achieve the sustainable development goals and our dream of the demographic bonus.



Indonesias tug-of-war persists between the tobacco industry and health stakeholders, and our leaders remain undecided in between. This prevents Indonesia from ratifying the World Health Organizations Framework Convention on Tobacco Control to reduce the devastating health, social, economic and environmental harm caused by tobacco. Thankfully, regional heads lead the way.
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Linkedin - (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta, Indonesia  Thu, September 20, 2018 15:09 1147 882ab4bc56dbda08a069b308773b4c9b 4 Inforial Free

The Workers Social Security Agency (BPJS Ketenagakerjaan) made another international-scale achievement after winning an ASEAN Social Security Association (ASSA) Recognition Award in the information technology category.

ASSA awarded BPJS Ketenagakerjaan for empowering Indonesias social security through its BPJSTKU mobile application.

ASSA chairman Suradej Waleeittikul presented the award to BPJS Ketenagakerjaan president director Agus Susanto during the 35th ASSA Board Meeting in Nha Trang, Vietnam, on Tuesday in front of the representatives of 20 social security organizations in ASEAN.

ASSA recognized the BPJSTKU application for its digital service that provides ease of use for all members of the Workers Social Security program across the country.

This award serves as motivation for us to keep developing our digital service facility in response to participants and members of the public who desire fast access to information and services in this digital era, Agus said.

BPJSTKU, a development from the previous application BPJSTK Mobile, is the latest innovation of BPJS Ketenagakerjaan in providing information and services to its participants.

Since being developed in 2017, the BPJSTKU application has been downloaded by more than 1 million users and has stayed on top of the financial application ranking on Google Play Store.

The latest version of the BPJSTK mobile application offers various new features, such as program information, new membership registration, balance inquiry and digital card that eliminates the hassle of carrying a physical card.

Through the application, members can also check social security payments made by their employers and receive instant notification from BPJS Ketenagakerjaan of possible payment mismatch in their accounts.

Members can easily claim social security through the e-claim feature and skip the line through the online queuing facility.

The BPJSTKU application also offers a list of merchants, restaurants and hotels across Indonesia that partners with BPJS Ketenagakerjaan.

Now, nonwage recipients (BPU) can register through the application so they can receive their social security benefits instantly without having to visit a BPJS Ketenagakerjaan office.

The application also enables Indonesian migrant workers overseas to register and avail of the benefits of the BPJS Ketenagakerjaan program. BPJS Ketenagakerjaan has been providing social security coverage for Indonesian migrant workers since Aug. 1, 2017.

BPJS Ketenagakerjaan will continue to perfect the application to face the digital era and in response to the shift to the digital paradigm. The agency will also continue to offer services at is offices to cater members who choose not to use the application.
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Linkedin - (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta, Indonesia  Fri, September 21, 2018 00:04 1146 882ab4bc56dbda08a069b308773c71fd 4 Inforial Free

Indonesia is a highly promising, growing economy, offering a big marketplace for industries across the world.

According to Euromonitor International, Indonesia has the largest chunk of middle-class households  constituting 30 percent of all households representing different socioeconomic brackets in 2018  amongst other ASEAN countries, offering a consumer segment with disposable income for various products and services.

Euromonitor International is a global business intelligence and strategic market analysis provider, possessing more than 40 years of experience in publishing international market reports, business reference books and online databases on consumer markets.

The firm also predicts that big cities on Indonesias Sumatra island  specifically Medan in North Sumatra, Bandar Lampung in Lampung as well as Padang in West Sumatra  will have the highest penetration of middle class households by 2030.

The three Sumatran cities mentioned above, meanwhile, will be Indonesias top three big cities, with almost 50 percent of its population enjoying annual incomes between US$10,000 to $25,000. This fact offers a sizable market potential for companies to tap into Indonesia, Euromonitor International Indonesia research manager Adhitya Nugroho said.

These facts make analyzing different aspects of Indonesias economy highly interesting. Keeping this in mind, global market research company Euromonitor International is ready to host its first conference in Indonesia, seeking to provide business insight to Indonesian companies, on Sept. 25 in Pullman Jakarta Central Park, West Jakarta, all the while celebrating its 20th operational anniversary in Southeast Asia.

To mark the 20th anniversary of its Southeast Asia operations, the firm seeks to share market insights to maximize business opportunities in the regions trendsetting countries. The upcoming Jakarta seminar will be part of this mission.

The upcoming conference will be dedicated to top-level managers from companies representing various industrial sectors: fast-moving consumer goods, banking and trade, along with governmental organizations as well as trade associations. It will discuss economic trends and opportunities in Indonesia and the wider ASEAN region, specifically how connectivity brought by the internet has rewired peoples lifestyles.

Conference overview

The conference helps participants learn the latest trends in the Indonesian business landscape, as well as how they can tap into market insights to maximize business opportunities in the trendsetting country.

The first topic that the conference will cover is trends and opportunities in Indonesia and ASEAN in general. The economies of ASEAN and Indonesia are still expected to continue growing healthily. The countrys middle-income household size and consumers expenditure are also still projected to grow. How will Indonesian consumers spending patterns evolve in the future? The panel, presented by Adhitya, seeks to address that key question.

For instance, travel is set to be one of the fastest growing industries in Indonesia, increasing by 49.2 percent by 2023. The promising growth of the travel industry is, and will be, spurred mainly by the millennial as well as the Z generations  comprising individuals born from 1989 to 1995 and 1996 to 2012, respectively  thanks to their high exposure to internet connectivity.

Their access to digital gadgets allows them to have greater desire to spend more money in traveling to different places to enjoy a diversity of life experiences, spurring unprecedented growth in Indonesias travel industry. The penetration of smartphones among Indonesian people  constituting 142 percent of households in 2017  also supports the young generation in their activities planning their holidays.

The second panel, presented by Euromonitor International Indonesia consulting team leader Dhea Sutanto, senior regional business manager Felicia Gunawan and senior account manager Nadia Jean, meanwhile, will explore megatrends in Indonesia as well as the Asia-Pacific region.

In a rapidly changing global environment, megatrend analysis is critical for companies seeking to drive sustainable growth and remain relevant amid ever-increasing competition and the emergence of new ideas disrupting how industries work. The key question to be addressed by the panel would be: How have three variables  consumer inter-connection, product upgrade and enhanced experience  influenced the local and regional economic landscape?

To get a sample of Euromonitor Internationals analysis on the trends and opportunities in Indonesia and the wider ASEAN region, visit https://bit.ly/2M6tW9S.
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Linkedin - (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta, Indonesia  Fri, September 21, 2018 00:02 1146 882ab4bc56dbda08a069b308773c7053 4 Inforial Free

The Immigration Directorate General has implemented the online Immigration Management Information System (SIMKIM) in 67 Indonesias representatives across the globe.

The online system enables immigration officers at airports, immigration offices and attache offices to have secure, real-time access to immigration data.

Immigration Director General Ronny F. Sompie announced the online system during a coordination meeting on the immigration functions of Indonesias attache offices in Seoul from Sept. 16 to 21.

SIMKIM has been installed in 67 Indonesia attache offices and 58 are operating the system, Ronny said.

The use of SIMKIM in attache offices is an immigration surveillance measure for foreign nationals who submit visa applications to visit Indonesia. The online system also supports the passport application service of Indonesians living abroad.

The meeting was attended by 22 immigration attaches and technical staff, who received directions from the officials of the Foreign Ministry, National Counterterrorism Agency (BNPT) and the Law and Human Rights Ministry.

. (./.)

The meeting touched on some of the key immigration issues, such as protection measures to save Indonesians from falling prey to human trafficking networks.

The Immigration Directorate General implemented protection measures by withholding the issuance of passports at immigration offices and delaying the departure of non-procedural Indonesian workers at immigration checkpoints in airports and seaports.

As of Sept. 14, 2018, we have withheld the issuance of passports for 4,724 suspected non-procedural Indonesian migrant workers, Ronny said.

He also added that the directorate general had delayed the departure of 362 non-procedural Indonesian migrant workers at immigration checkpoints.
The Bali International Film Festival, better known as Balinale, will return for its 12th iteration to satisfy moviegoers with carefully curated, high quality and award-winning films in September.



Running from Sept. 24 to 30 at Cinemaxx Lippo Mall Kuta and Plaza Renon, the festival will screen over 100 films from more than 30 countries, out of the 400 submitted this year.



Balinales theme for 2018 is Timeless, which according to the festivals official statement, reflects the ability of movies to communicate the largest of human stories, as well as the briefest moments of world changing emotion.



According to festival director Groza Subhakty, Indonesian films dominate this years Balinale with 45 titles from various genres.



This year, we will also screen four movies that feature Indonesian heroic figures; Moonrise Over Egypt, Nyai Ahmad Dahlan, Wage, and Sultan Agung.



Opening the festival will be Sultan Agung, a Hanung Bramantyo directed historical biopic portraying the Indonesian heros struggle against the Dutch East India Company encroaching on the sultanate of Mataram. The closing film will be Shoplifters by Hirokazu Kore-eda, a story of an impoverished Japanese family of small-time crooks who adopt a homeless girl they find on the streets despite their own situation.



Groza says the festivals focus on Indonesian figures will also be joined by 175 local students invited to see the movies.



Step by step, we want our children to also remember our historical roots, not just The Avengers, Groza said.



As well as period movies, Balinale will also screen contemporary and popular Indonesian flicks such as 22 Menit and Dilan 1990, along with family-friendly films like Coco, Goodbye Christopher Robin and The Breadwinner.



Balinale will also hold a movie competition for three categories; short films, feature-length films and documentaries.



Balinale founder Deborah Gabinetti said the additional Indonesian content was attributed to the additional venue this year, which according to Gabinetti attracted different crowds.



Plaza Renon will be interesting because it has a different audience; it caters more to the universities, the young professionals, whereas Lippo Mall Kuta is perhaps 60 percent expatriates. So it would be a really nice mix, hence the additional Indonesian content, Gabinetti said.



With 8,000 visitors for last years event, Gabinetti expects an audience of 9,000 for this year.



Gabinetti also explained that the reason she started the festival was to try to get more people to see Indonesian films and consider doing projects in Indonesia.



We invite foreign filmmakers here, and each year we are very lucky to have probably 30 [to] 40 international filmmakers that come here to see Indonesian films and meet Indonesian filmmakers, Gabinetti said, adding that they would discuss story ideas, see locations and meet local talent.



For this year, Balinale will invite English-French director Roland Joffe, known for directing Academy Award-winning movies The Killing Fields ( 1984 ) and The Mission ( 1986 ).



Gabinetti said she had been in talks with Joffe for 12 years for a movie he would like to do in Indonesia on the story of Mata Hari, the stage name of Dutch exotic dancer Margaretha Gertruida Zelle, who was convicted of being a spy for Germany during World War I.



While Joffe scouts locations and talent for his project, he will also attend the BalinaleX industry forum on Sunday for a discussion with Indonesian filmmakers, as well as a talk show segment titled Directors Dialogue with Variety Asia editor Patrick Frater.



Joining Joffe in BalinaleX are a slew of industry figures, including fellow director Hanung Bramantyo, actress Cinta Laura Kiehl, and Tony Award-winning Broadway producer Jhett Tolentino.



Joffe will return for Balinales closing ceremony, where he will be awarded the Bali Taksu award, becoming the first recipient of the new award.



Taksuin Balinese means inspired creativity, and we think that this man has done that, Gabinetti explained.
BTS will reportedly make a speech at the 73rd General Assembly of the United Nations.

According to media reports on Thursday, the K-pop act is scheduled to attend a ceremony for Generation Unlimited, a new global partnership by the United Nations Childrens Fund at noon Monday at the UN headquarters in New York, a day before the general assembly kicks off.

The partnership is dedicated to increasing opportunities and investments for children and young people aged between 10 and 24, according to UNICEF. At the event, BTS will give a three-minute speech in front of high authority figures and heads of state, including UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, Executive Director of UNICEF Henrietta Fore and South Koreas first lady Kim Jung-sook. It marks the first time a K-pop act has been invited to the assembly.

Read also: BTS to appear on Jimmy Fallons Tonight Show

BTS had previously partnered with UNICEF to launch a global campaign dubbed Love Myself, an initiative that calls for an end to violence against children and teenagers, last November, as an extension of its mainstay Love Yourself narrative.

Currently on the US leg of its Love Yourself world tour, BTS recently wrapped up its performance in Los Angeles.

This month is poised to be a busy one for the group, as it is set to perform on The Tonight Show, one of the most popular and longest-running nighttime talk shows in the US, on Sept. 25, on Good

Morning America on Sept. 26 and at the Prudential Center from Sept. 28-29.
For the first time in history, Indonesia might score her first Oscar nomination  or even win  at the Academy Awards in February 2019, with Marlina the Murder in Four Acts (2017) being Indonesias official submission for the 91st Academy Awards in the foreign film category.

The film tells the story of widow in Sumba seeking justice after burglars forcefully take her wealth and dignity. Written and directed by Citra Trophy winner Mouly Surya and based on the original story by Garin Nugroho, the film has been screened at numerous international festivals, such as the 2017 Cannes Film Festival (Directors Fortnight) and the 2017 Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), bringing it praise from critics all over the world. Marlina was also screened in the United States and received positive reviews. Godfrey Cheshire from Rogerebert.com gave Marlina a score of 3 out of 4.

There was a lot of misconception when the news went viral. People thought an official submission in the Academy Awards meant that the film had already been nominated. The number of nominations that will be recognized by the members of the Academy for Oscar night will be only five. Submitting a film for a category doesnt mean that it has been officially recognized by the international community. On the contrary, it is our job to campaign for the film to ensure its nominated.

The members of the Academy are highly political. The chance of them watching every film submitted for an award is not that big. And the trend of who wins a category constantly changes. Last year, Sebastian Lelios A Fantastic Woman (2017) from Chile won the category, while Asghar Farhadis The Salesman (2016) won the category before that. And if we reflect based on these two past recipients, we could come up with certain indicators and a strategy on how to campaign for Marlina to be victorious.

Read also: 'Marlina' to represent Indonesia at 2019 Academy Awards

First, the films most likely to be nominated (or even win) the category are ones that are socially relevant. The #MeToo initiative campaigned during the award season last year managed to direct the focus on gender equality, making films embody this message, like A Fantastic Woman telling the story of a transgender attempting to mourn his partners death while facing discrimination. And like it or not, the Academy likes being political. The whole reason why Frances McDormand managed to win her second Oscar for her portrayal as Mildred Hayes in the Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017) was because it screamed values that theyd been championing.

The second indicator in determining films to be nominated is the halo effect. Farhadi won his first Oscar for A Separation (2011). Before it was nominated for an Oscar, The Salesman had been screened at numerous international festivals and had received positive reviews. Having critics constantly talk about films alerts member of the Academy, who will then watch and vote on the films to be nominated.

Im not going to sugarcoat it. Frankly speaking, several other foreign films have their own Oscar buzz. Hirokazu Kore-edas Shoplifters (2018) won the Palme d'Or at Cannes this year. The Academy Award-winning director, Alfonso Cuaron, also managed to get his film Roma (2018) screened at the Venice Film Festival, TIFF and Telluride Film festivalthree festivals considered to be the festival darlings for any movie running for Best Picture. The movies have also receive positive reviews and are likely to score nominations.

So, what does that mean? Have we lost already? Nope. Not at all. This is actually the moment when we should fight. Marlina the Murder in Four Acts is probably more relevant than the two aforementioned contenders. The issue for gender equality remains sexy these days, and with McDormans speech last year, it will remain relevant for a few more years. Mouly Surya is also a director who happens to be a woman. If the members of the Academy do a quick Google search on this film, theres a big chance they will like the film and cast, and give Indonesia her first nomination at the Oscars. Grassroots movements like this need the participation of every social media user and Indonesian moviegoer. Simple things, like #MarlinaGoesToOscar could be an influential campaign that creates awareness. To have our official submission constantly talked about by ourselves is a start to creating bigger noise. At the end of the day, we should be the one making our own Oscar buzz.

Having one of our films awarded in Hollywood would open doors for our amazing filmmakers in attracting investors and boosting our creative economy. Its not just a matter of pride. Its also a matter of sustainability, betterment and creating a healthier film ecosystem in this country. (kes)

***

Reza Mardian is a film enthusiast and a big fan of Disney, Pixar, Studio Ghibli, and all films in the running for an Oscar or Festival Film Indonesia award. He is also a nursing graduate who is not working as a nurse, and likes to post anything related to books and movies on his Instagram account @mardian.reza
A French court Wednesday dismissed an appeal by the editors of gossip magazine Closer, who were fined 45,000 euros ($53,000) for publishing pictures of the Duchess of Cambridge sunbathing topless in 2012.

The court in Versailles near Paris upheld the maximum fines imposed by a lower court last year, which found Closer guilty of invading the privacy of Prince William's wife Kate.

It also confirmed that the celebrity magazine had to pay 100,000 euros in damages to the royal couple.

Closer published the grainy snaps of Kate wearing only bikini bottoms while on holiday with the prince at a chateau in the Luberon region of southeastern France in September 2012.

The pictures caused outrage among the British public and the royal family, which filed a criminal complaint and obtained a court injunction preventing further use of the images.

Even the British tabloids, usually voracious in their appetite for pictures of the royal family, declined to publish the images when they were first circulated.

In a letter read out in court in May last year, William said the case had brought back "particularly painful" memories of the paparazzi hounding his mother, the late princess Diana who was killed in a Paris car crash in 1997 while being pursued by photographers.

Lawyers for Closer editor Laurence Pieau and publisher Ernesto Mauri argued that the pictures of the royals were in the public interest and conveyed a "positive image" of them.

But the court of appeal rejected that argument and ordered both Pieau and Mauri to pay 45,000 euros in fines.

The court also upheld the fines handed to the two photographers suspected of taking the shots.

They were ordered to pay 5,000 euros each, and warned they faced additional 5,000-euro fines if they reoffended.

Read also: French appeals court to rule on topless Kate Middleton photos

'Dignity of a woman'

Closer's lawyers had asked the court to either cancel or reduce the fines, arguing that they were excessive for a privacy case in France where fines and damages usually reach just a fraction of that seen in the United States or Britain.

But the prosecution had argued that the editors' fines were commensurate with their offence and the penalties imposed on the photographers should be stiffened rather than eased.

"There was an absolutely unacceptable breach, not only of the privacy and the private lives of these two individuals, but also of the dignity of a woman," French prosecutor Marc Brisset-Foucault told the court.

The royals, who have three children, had yet to react to the appeal court decision.

They had initially sought 1.5 million euros in damages, but said last year said they were "pleased" with the court's verdict.
Indonesian illustrator Dinda Puspitasari launched a series of visual arts books on Thursday.

Titled Dinda Puspitasaris World of Pattern, the series comprises three themes, namely Shapes, Flowers and My Favorite Things.

Each book is priced at Rp 95,000 (US$6.40) and features 44 colorful illustrated patterns.

Indonesian illustrator Dinda Puspitasari during the launching of her visual arts books. (JP/Jessicha Valentina)

Dinda said during a media gathering at Brood-en-Boter restaurant in South Jakarta that the books were not only a feast for the eyes, explaining that the patterns could be used for DIY projects, such as collages, envelopes, stationery and greeting cards.

Dinda also said the binding was designed to allow art lovers to easily tear out and lay out the pages.

The books can be used [as a property] for flat lay photos, added Dinda.

Read also: Diana Rikasari, Dinda Puspitasari share priorities in third book

Dinda is no stranger to publishing books. Prior to this, the illustrator had published #88LOVELIFE series, in collaboration with fashion blogger/entrepreneur Diana Rikasari.

However, Dinda Puspitasaris World of Pattern is her first series of visual art books.

I love visual arts books and wanted to participate in the [book] market, sharing what I love, she said.

In conjunction with the book launching, Dinda is currently hosting several events until Sunday at Brood-en-Boter restaurant.

On Friday, Dinda is set to host DIY Part Decoration workshop, teaching art lovers how to create decorations using Dinda Puspitasaris World of Patterns books.

Meanwhile, on Sunday, the illustrator will host a fashion drawing workshop. (kes)
A photography exhibition, The Refugee Crisis  A Global Issue by Aleix Oriol Verges, brashly communicates the incredibly harsh, inhumane conditions that force the refugees to leave their lives behind, hopefully for a better one.

I would like to think each of my images tell a story on its own. The final goal is to make the audience identify the refugees, to see them as real people, not only a statistic or a threat to the Western way of life, Verges says.

This isnt something that everyone in the countries the refugees are fleeing to aware of (or want to be aware of). But the incredible emotionality of Verges photos make it impossible not to be emotional.

There is a lot of prejudice and misinformation about the refugees in Europe, so I basically try to tell people the truth: The refugees leave their homelands because thats their only option to survive.

The exhibition, which takes place at Balis Rumah Sanur from Sept. 13 until Oct. 4, comes in two parts  with the first focuses on the conditions of Afghan refugees stuck in Indonesia as a result of their failed attempt to reach Australia through the hands of smugglers.

The second part looks at the liberation of the Kurdish Syrian town of Kobane, which is located in the Northeastern part of the country.

The Barcelona-born photographer kick-started his passion for taking pictures in the early 2000s, coinciding with his interest in traveling.

Having initially focused on travel photography, Verges organically gravitated toward photojournalism, putting plenty of on-the-ground focus onto the refugee crisis in the Middle East and Europe.

Reality bites: Syrian Kurds gather around a fire in the city of Kobane. After the liberation, most houses were left without electricity or running water and food was also hard to find (March 2015). (Courtesy of Aleix Oriol Verges/-)

It all started with a trip I took to Iran and Iraq, Verges recalls of his early introduction towards the refugee issue.

In the Kurdish region of Iraq, Verges visited several refugee camps that sheltered thousands of Syrian refugees who were fleeing the war that was occurring in their homeland. He realized he could somehow contribute to helping more people be aware of the issue with his camera.

That was the moment when I thought I could use my voice as a photographer and writer to raise awareness about the refugee problem. I think its my responsibility as a visual storyteller. Since that time, in 2015, I have traveled all over the Middle East and Europe to document the situation of refugees to make the audience open their eyes about this global issue, Verges recalled.

For the viewer, Verges hopes that they are able to identify with the life displayed in pictures and feel the refugees reality, their everyday life, the fact they live a tough life but also showing that no matter what they are resilient and determined people, doing whatever they can to survive and to take care of their families.

Many of Verges photos garner their weight through the proximity of the realities and the people in it. It is difficult to look away as the subjects brim with so much life. This certainly has a lot to do with how Verges captures his subjects.

In my opinion, you have to get close to the subject if you want the image to be powerful and meaningful. That means spending a lot of time with them, getting to know them and make them feel comfortable so you can capture their true essence. I think thats what really gets to the heart of the viewer, he explains.

Right there: Photographer Aleix Oriol Verges poses with refugee children in Idomeni, Greece, where many refugees tried to cross the border into Macedonia (2016). (Courtesy of Aleix Oriol Verges/-)

Having such experiences, it is impossible that Verges hasnt been affected in some way. This sense of changing perspective and perception is something that his photos evoke strongly. He calls it a humbling experience and an opportunity to share time with people who are incredibly strong and resilient, no matter how hard their life is.

There is an appreciation of life that far-more privileged people sometimes even lack.

Thats what I learned from them, to persevere and to enjoy the little things in life. I am still struggling with that, of course.

Though there is an obvious feeling of sadness in these photos, there is indeed those awe-inspiring glimmers of joy. It is heart-rending and captures a wealth of emotions.

I think the key is to capture whatever they are feeling in the moment. If they are sad, lets tell it like it is. But lets not only capture those moments, lets also tell the audience that they refugees, as any other human being, experience moments of joy, happiness and fulfilment.

For Verges, it is about presenting that balance of humanity  to showcase a range of being instead relying solely on the dramatics of tragedy.

I dont particularly care for visual storytellers who only capture the negative or sad side of a situation, I think its biased. I dont wait for the momentum, I just spend time with them and capture whatever they feel they can share with me, he says, continuing that his position is always as on observer, but also someone who creates a bond with the subject, without that I think the image will be empty of feeling and emotion.

Verges understands the situation is grim and complicated  with little possibility of changing soon. But he wants to retain an optimism that building awareness will lead towards some kind of change.

Throughout history there have been endless migratory and refugee crisis World War II, Rwanda, Sudan, and others.

But I think nowadays the coverage of the current crisis is broader thanks to the use of social media to broadcast the events in real time. I think thats the main difference with previous crisis, but unfortunately we dont seem to learn from previous mistakes, he says.

In his opinion, he said there is need for a more serious commitment from governments to address the root causes of these migratory fluxes, which are mainly caused by armed conflicts  fueled by colonialism, sectarian violence and the intrusion of Western superpowers in the sovereignty of other countries.

So, for me, even if the situation is grim its in our hands to change things by demanding our governments to take real action and put an end to these stagnant conflicts.
It was not a portable battery charger, but a spycam disguised as one.

The device was discovered in a room used by South Korean actress Shin Se-kyung and girlband Apink's Yoon Bo-mi while they were shooting a variety program called Borderless Food Cart.

According to the program's channel, Olive, the spycam was exposed by Shin on Sunday when the stars were filming overseas. The spycam was installed by a male employee from a company contracted to set up cameras for the shoot.

"We found that the illegally installed camera was his personal belonging brought at his own discretion. We confirmed that the camera did not contain any problematic footage and nothing has been leaked," said the channel.

"All of us, including the staff, have immediately returned to South Korea after confiscating all the equipment related to the incident and the employee voluntarily underwent a police investigation."

The man reportedly told the police that curiosity was behind his act. The police plan to seek an arrest warrant.

Read also: South Korea cracks down on spycam porn in public toilets

Borderless Food Cart, which features South Korean celebrities running a Korean-style food cart in foreign countries, is scheduled to air later this month.

High-tech South Korea has been battling a growing epidemic of spycam videos, which largely involves men secretly filming women in schools, offices, trains, toilets, changing rooms and on the street.

Such crimes reported to the police surged from about 1,100 in 2010 to more than 6,500 last year, with many offenders sharing or selling photos and videos online.
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Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Thu, September 20, 2018 08:03 1147 882ab4bc56dbda08a069b3087739cdc6 1 City soekarno-hatta-airport,Kadin,arrest,Fraud Free

Soekarno-Hatta International Airport Chamber of Commerce (Kadin) head Sapto Kashariyanto has been held at the Jakarta Police detention center for alleged fraud since July.

Yes, the concerned [Sapto] has been declared a suspect and detained, Jakarta Police spokesman Sr. Comr. Argo Yuwono said on Wednesday as reported by kompas.com.

Gilbert Marciano, the lawyer of businessman Geminiantoro Raharjo who reported the case to the police in October last year, said his client wanted to rent a cargo plane from Sapto to send his products to Papua.

He added that Sapto had allegedly claimed to be the owner of PT Ramadan Utama Solusi (RUS) and Airline Career Training (ACT) school, adding that his client believed Sapto and they agreed to sign a plane rental agreement.

Gilbert said the deal had allegedly been signed in 2016 and it stipulated that a payment of Rp 3 billion (US$ 201,822) should be made in three stages.

Pak Sapto had asked for Rp 1 billion in the first stage [as a down payment], which was paid. But before the second stage or before the plane arrived, he had already asked for another Rp 200 million. So, my client paid Rp 1.2 billion but the rented plane never materialized, Gilbert claimed.

He added that his client had repeatedly asked Sapto about the whereabouts of the plane, but the latter allegedly said it was in Manila. However, when his client checked on its whereabouts, he found out that the plane did not exist.

Before reporting the matter to the police, we issued a subpoena but Sapto never responded. That was why we made the police report, Gilbert said. (ami)
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Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Thu, September 20, 2018 12:47 1147 882ab4bc56dbda08a069b308773aaf16 4 Business rice-imports,debate,Budi-Waseso,Enggartiasto-Lukita Free

Trade Minister Enggartiasto Lukita has appeared reluctant to comment on a statement made by state-owned logistics company Bulog president director Budi Waseaso, who criticized a plan to import 2 million tons of rice.

Never mind. Dont prolong [the debate], Enggartiasto said when visiting a tempeh factory in West Jakarta on Wednesday as reported by tempo.co.

The fact is that the decision to import 2 million tons of rice was made at a coordination meeting. It was the coordination meeting's decision, not mine.

The minister was responding to a statement by Budi, who said Indonesia did not have to import rice through June 2019 as the country had enough stock.

Budi said Bulogs warehouses currently had 2.4 million tons or rice, while another 400,000 tons of imported rice would arrive in October.

Budi estimated that Bulog would be managing up to 3 million tons of rice by year-end as the agency purchased 4,000 tons of unhusked rice from farmers every day. He added that Bulog might not need to release the imported rice to meet market demand.

Enggartiasto said the coordination meeting in April, attended by representatives of the Office of the Coordinating Economic Minister, the Trade Ministry, the Agriculture Ministry and Bulog, made the decision because domestic rice production could not meet market demand.

The coordination meeting made the decision in accordance with a government regulation and a presidential regulation. I then issued the import recommendation, Enggartiasto said. (bbn)
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Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Thu, September 20, 2018 10:49 1147 882ab4bc56dbda08a069b308773a698f 4 City Dharma-Jaya,capital-injection,Jakarta-council,beef Free

The Jakarta Council has said it will give a capital injection to city-owned slaughterhouse PD Dharma Jaya, which can only provide less than 1 percent of 500 tons of beef consumed in the city per day.

Dharma Jaya president director Johan Romadhon told the council during a meeting on Tuesday that the company could only distribute 10 tons per day or around 300 tons of beef per month.

The council's deputy speaker M. Taufik said the council would approve the grant proposal for the capital injection to the company, so it could supply 50 percent of the total beef needed in the city.

The company should calculate the amount of funds needed and propose a revision of the regulation on PD Dharma Jaya, Taufik said.

The regulation states that a capital injection given to the company should not exceed Rp 250 billion (US$16.8 million).

Please calculate the capital injection you need and submit the draft of the revised regulation to us. If, for instance, you need Rp 1 trillion, we will push it so you can get the capital, Taufik said on Tuesday as quoted by kompas.com. (cal)
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Linkedin Gina Cherelus (Reuters) New York, United States  Thu, September 20, 2018 10:30 1147 882ab4bc56dbda08a069b308773a5396 2 World #Crime,#SexualViolence,USA,suspect,Sexual-assault,Taiwan Free

A Texas man at the center of a legal battle over his plan to make instructions available for 3-D printed plastic guns flew to Taiwan after learning police in Austin were investigating an accusation he had sex with an underage girl, police said on Wednesday.

Cody Wilson, 30, was placed under investigation after a counselor on Aug. 22 told police that a 16-year-old girl had said she was paid $500 to have sex with Wilson at an Austin hotel, Austin Police Commander Troy Officer said at a news conference.

Police later interviewed the girl and on Wednesday obtained a warrant for Wilson's arrest, but by then he had caught a flight to Taiwan, Officer said.

"We know Mr. Wilson frequently travels for business. We don't know why he went to Taiwan," Officer said. "But we do know before he left he was informed by a friend of the victim that she had spoken to police and the police were investigating him for having sex with a minor."

Taiwan does not have an extradition treaty with the United States.

Wilson founded the group Defense Distributed, which has been selling 3-D firearm-design files on flash drives via regular mail after a US federal judge barred the group from posting the blueprints online.

A lawyer for Wilson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

In an Aug. 27 interview with police, the teenager said she had exchanged messages with a man using the screen name "Sanjuro" on SugarDaddyMeet.com, according to a police affidavit. The girl said "Sanjuro" later revealed his real name, described himself as a "big deal" and exchanged nude photos with her.

The girl said she and Wilson had sex at a local hotel on Aug. 15, according to the document. Her statement was corroborated with security video footage and records showing Wilson registered as a guest at the hotel that night, police said.

Wilson sparked a legal battle in 2015 after he challenged a government ban on posting the blueprints for printing 3-D guns to the internet, claiming it infringed on his rights to free speech and to bear arms.

The Trump administration earlier this year reached a settlement lifting the ban for Defense Distributed. But 19 states and the District of Columbia challenged that decision in court in July, arguing that publishing the blueprints would allow criminals easy access to unregistered weapons.

Last month, US District Judge Robert Lasnik in Seattle ordered Wilson not to post blueprints online. Instead, Wilson began selling them by mail, saying the judge's order did not bar him from doing so.
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Linkedin N Adri (The Jakarta Post) Balikpapan  Thu, September 20, 2018 18:02 1146 882ab4bc56dbda08a069b308773bd2c3 1 National sexual-abuse,pedophile,environment,environmentalist,Balikpapan,Yogyakarta,UGM,rape Free

The Balikpapan District Court has sentenced a former leader of a youth organization to 12 years in prison after he was found guilty of molesting nine teenagers.

Pandu Dharma Wicaksono, 22, led Green Generation, an environmental organization for teenagers, when he abused nine boys in several different cities in his capacity as the organizations chief.

The police received the first complaint from a victim in October last year and later discovered another eight victims. All nine boys were underage.

Pandu was immediately arrested in Yogyakarta, and later Green Generation dismissed him from his position.

The panel of judges said the Balikpapan native was guilty of sodomy, which was revealed in the victims testimonies.

The defendant will also be fined Rp 1 million [US$67.40], said presiding judge Agus Akhyudi on Wednesday when delivering the verdict.

Read also: Former green NGO president awaits trial in alleged sex abuse

Pandu decided to appeal the verdict.

Before the case emerged, Pandu was known as a youth with abundant achievements. When he was arrested in Yogyakarta in November, he was waiting to graduate from Gadjah Mada University. He was also preparing to go to the United Kingdom to continue his studies.

Police investigation found that the nine victims were aged between 12 and 17 in 2013 when the crime took place. They were students in junior and senior high schools. Pandu himself was 17 years old at the time.

The victims resided in Balikpapan and Samarinda, East Kalimantan, and in Tarakan, North Kalimantan.
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Linkedin (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Thu, September 20 2018

Suspected car thieves have made millions of rupiah by selling the cars in East Jakarta. The police arrested two suspects, identified as Azizah Azmari and Muhamad, on Monday.

East Jakarta Police chief Sr. Comr. Tony Surya Putra said reports had been lodged by several people whose cars had been stolen, most of whom were car rental owners. At least 44 cars have been reported stolen in the case.

The perpetrators committed the crime by renting cars from car rental companies or individuals, Tony said as quoted by wartakota.tribunnews.com on Tuesday.
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Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Thu, September 20, 2018 14:39 1147 882ab4bc56dbda08a069b308773b4a4a 1 Business Hilton,food-and-beverage,academy Free

Hilton Worldwide has launched a special training program in Singapore to equip employees in the food and beverage (F&B) and culinary departments across its 37 hotels in Southeast Asia, including Indonesia, with knowledge and techniques maximizing the potential of F&B outlets.

Collectively, Hiltons F&B outlets in South East Asia generate nearly 40 percent of total revenue for its properties in the region and have become the cornerstone of Hiltons operations around the world, Hilton vice president of South East Asia operations Paul Hutton noted in a press release on Thursday.

Hutton, who is based in Singapore, said the program, known as the F&B Operations Academy, would run for seven months each year and comprise a series of webinars hosted by seasoned F&B practitioners in Hilton as well as a workshop facilitated by award-winning training provider TMI Consultancy.

In its inaugural year, the program would welcome participants from six countries: Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Sri Lanka and Thailand. Through this initiative, Hilton aims to develop a diverse and talented pool of F&B specialists for the growing number of restaurants and dining outlets in its properties across South East Asia.

Hilton at present manages three hotels in Bali, one in Bandung and one in Jakarta under premium and mid-market brands and is constructing several more properties in Bali, Tangerang and Jakarta, including its luxury brand, 74-storey Waldorf Astoria at the Thamrin throughfare. (vin/bbn)
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Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Thu, September 20, 2018 11:30 1147 882ab4bc56dbda08a069b308773a98b7 4 City jakpro,LRT,Jakarta-city-council,rusunawa,development,city-budget Free

The Jakarta City Council budget committee rejected a request for Rp 2.3 trillion (US$154.94 million) in additional funds by city-owned developer PT Jakarta Propertindo during an annual budget readjustment meeting on Thursday.

Jakarta Propertindo, also known as JakPro, requested the funds to continue phase two of the construction of the light rapid transit (LRT) worth Rp 1.84 trillion and to build low-cost housing worth Rp 531.5 billion.

The budget committee rejected the request out of concern that JakPro would not be able to use the funds by the end of the year  a requirement to receive additional funds  as JakPro still needs to secure approval from the Transportation Ministry and the Jakarta Transportation Agency to continue the LRT construction.

Phase one of JakPro's LRT project will connect Kelapa Gading in North Jakarta to Velodrome in East Jakarta.

Furthermore, a 2014 regional regulation issued during former governor Joko Jokowi Widow's administration prevents JakPro from receiving more than Rp 10 trillion per year. Given JakPro has received Rp 9.4 trillion this year, it can only receive a maximum of Rp 591 billion in additional funds.

We will just submit the proposal again next year, said JakPro director Dwi Wahyu Daryoto as reported by tempo.co, in reference to the 2019 annual budget meeting.

Its not that the budget committee 100 percent disagreed with the additional funds. But they asked that we request the funds next year instead of this year, he added. (nor/evi)
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Linkedin Fahda Kurnia Dimas Putra (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Thu, September 20 2018

Sea fortress: Japans Izumo-class helicopter carrier, JS Kaga, is seen docking in waters just off Tanjung Priok Port in North Jakarta on Tuesday. Three of the Japan Maritime Self Defense Forces warships are in town for joint exercises with troops from Indonesia and other countries. (JP/Umair Rizaludin)

The public are being welcomed to visit Japanese warships moored at the Jakarta International Container Terminal as part of their deployment in the Indo-Pacific region, which aims to enhance the strategic capacity of naval forces and improve maritime defense in the region.

The public can visit the Akizuki-class destroyer JS Suzutsuki on Thursday from 9 a.m. until 11:30 a.m. and from 1:30 p.m. until 3:30 p.m.
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Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Thu, September 20, 2018 10:43 1147 882ab4bc56dbda08a069b308773a5ed2 1 Business precast,concrete,production-capacity,2018 Free

The production target for Indonesia's precast concrete producers for 2018 has been set at 37 million tons, Precast and Prestressed Concrete Companies Association (AP3I) chairman Wilfred Singkali said in Jakarta on Wednesday.

Our production capacity was 34 million tons last year and we aim to produce 37 million this year, he said in his remarks at the opening ceremony of the Construction Indonesia and Concrete Show Southeast Asia 2018 at the Jakarta International Expo.

Wilfred said the association members had expanded their production capacity in the past few years to respond to the increasing demand for precast concrete for various projects including infrastructure development and housing. The demand from the housing sector continues to increase, he said.

Currently, the association had 42 members that operated 76 factories, Wilfred said, adding that the association's members had looked forward to the event as they wanted to learn about the latest technology in the concrete industry.

The event, held from Sept. 19 to 21, involves more than 200 exhibitors from Indonesia and 23 other countries.

The participants are showcasing various concrete and construction-related products, services and technologies, such as precast concrete, concrete mixers and batching plants.
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Linkedin Riza Roidila Mufti (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Thu, September 20, 2018 15:39 1147 882ab4bc56dbda08a069b308773b6272 1 Business transportation-ministry,denial,state-owned-ride-hailing-app Free

The Transportation Ministry announced on Thursday that the government is not planning to launch its own ride-hailing app, quashing media speculation over the past several days.

Transportation Ministry Land Transportation Director General Budi Setiyadi said the government would focus on carrying out its duties as a regulator and that it was now preparing a more comprehensive regulation on ride-hailing services.

With this clarification, I hope there will no longer be speculation about a state-owned ride-hailing app. The government is focusing on drafting a regulation, and I will not mix the tasks of regulator and operator, Budi told a press conference.

Previously, quoting the ministry's public transportation and multi-mode director Ahmad Yani, several media outlets reported that the government was planning to develop its own ride-hailing app through state-owned telecommunication company PT Telekomunikasi Indonesia. The platform will be like the one owned by the South Korean government, Yani said.

He said only Go-Jek and Grab had been registered by the ministry as ride-hailing service providers.

He said that the idea of establishing a state-owned ride-hailing app originally came from representatives of the Ride-Hailing App Drivers Association, who demanded the government operate its own service so that the industry was not only dominated by Grab and Go-Jek.

Budi said the drivers complained about their declining incomes as more and more people became ride-hailing app drivers and that they had called on the government to launch its own version. He, however, made assurances that the government did not have such plan. (bbn)
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Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Thu, September 20, 2018 08:12 1147 882ab4bc56dbda08a069b3087739e5aa 4 Business bank-indonesia,sharia-economy,national-movement,current-account-deficit Free

Bank Indonesia (BI) deputy governor Dody Budi Waluyo has said a national movement was needed to develop sharia economics to help develop and stabilize the economy.

Dody said in Jakarta on Tuesday that national movements had been successful in developing sharia economics in other countries.

The other aspects in developing sharia economics included government support, the existence of a special body to coordinate with relevant institutions, improving the countrys competitiveness and the availability of a national strategy to develop sharia economics, including sharia finance.

Sharia economics and sharia finance would not only support economic growth but also address economic problems like the current account deficit, Dody said, as quoted by kompas.com, adding that sharia economics could make the countrys economy more resistance to global market instability.

The current account deficit was recorded at US$8 billion, or 3 percent of gross domestic product (GDP), in the second quarter, compared to $5.7 billion or 2.2 percent of GDP in the first quarter.

Dody explained that many countries where the population was not predominantly Muslim had successfully developed sharia economics.

However, Indonesia, the population of which is predominantly Muslim, was struggling to develop sharia economics and sharia finance. In halal tourism, Indonesia still acts more like a customer rather than a producer, he said in giving an example.

He said local sharia finance, for example, was limited to financing business. (bbn)
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Linkedin Stefanno Reinard Sulaiman (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Thu, September 20, 2018 17:05 1146 882ab4bc56dbda08a069b308773bab1c 1 Business pertamina,unsold-blocks,Djoko-Siswanto Free

The government plans to instruct state-owned energy company Pertamina to assume control of unsold oil and gas blocks as the government puts seven blocks up for auction, including four onstream blocks.

"I plan to assign Pertamina to closed or unsold blocks. We will draft a regulation if necessary," the Energy and Mineral Resources Ministrys director for oil and gas, Djoko Siswanto, said in a press briefing in Jakarta on Thursday.

His statement came two days after he called Pertamina "lazy" for preferring to buy oil and gas blocks in other countries instead of carrying out exploration at home.

Pertamina upstream director Dharmawan Samsu said on Wednesday that the company was in the process of finalizing its exploration plan and formulating a strategy to maintain the production rate of the existing oil and gas blocks.

"We will talk in person with [Djoko Siswanto] regarding our upstream plans," he said.

Djoko made the statement after he announced that the onstream West Kampar Block in Riau was on the auction list, along with three other onstream blocks -- South Jambi B, Selat Panjang and Makassar Strait. The government is also auctioning three exploration blocks -- Banyumas, Andika Bumi Kita and Southeast Mahakam.

The deadline for bidding for the seven blocks is November. (bbn)
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Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Melbourne  Thu, September 20, 2018 08:41 1147 882ab4bc56dbda08a069b3087739eebc 1 Business Telstra,Australia,mobile,technology,exhibition,5G Free

Australian telecommunication giant Telstra is rolling out its innovations, ideas and insights for the state-of-the-art 5G mobile network during the fifth edition of its annual 2018 Telstra Vantage showcase in Melbourne, Australia.

Before an audience of more than 6,000 business partners, Telstra chief executive Andrew Penn announced a new report by Deloitte on 5G technology, titled "5G mobile technology: Are businesses ready to seize the opportunity?, which estimates the benefits the technology may contribute to the countrys economy could be worth up to AUD$2,000 per person, or between $32 billion and $50 billion by 2030.

The report finds 5G technology will contribute to economic growth through increased productivity, workforce participation and new business opportunities, Penn told the media at the Melbourne Exhibition Centre on Wednesday, underlining the importance of raising the awareness of the community, business players and policymakers about the transformational opportunity presented by the 5G.

A robot that has sonar sensor and voice recognition technology performs some kungfu moves during the Telstra Vantage exhibition at the Melbourne Exhibition Centre in Australia on Wednesday. (JP/Damar Harsanto)

Citing the report that surveyed more than 550 business leaders across the country, Penn added that the Australian economy was already 2 percent larger thanks to the productivity benefits contributed by the use of mobile technology.

He revealed that more than 78 percent of respondents surveyed said that faster, more reliable and more responsive mobile telecommunications would benefit their businesses.

The implementation of 5G will improve the speed, reliability and capacity of the previous Gs technology to ramp up the uptake and capabilities of new technologies, especially artificial intelligence, drones and augmented reality.

The most cited barrier for businesses potentially adopting emerging technologies is that it might be too expensive, Penn said, adding that at least 40 percent of the businesses expressed that among their top three concerns. Interestingly though, close to half of businesses said they would be willing to pay at least 10 percent more than they currently pay in order to have faster, more reliable mobile telecommunications.

The Telstra Vantage exhibition in which more than 130 exhibitors are participating will run until Thursday. (dmr)

Here is the link to download the full report.
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Linkedin (The Jakarta Post) Baku, Azerbaijan  Fri, September 21 2018

Indonesian Cultural Festival in Baku. (Courtesy of Indonesian Embassy of Baku)

The Indonesian Embassy in Azerbaijan recently hosted the Indonesian Cultural Festival (ICF) 2018 to introduce Indonesian culture to the people there.

Present at the festival, which was held from Sept. 13 to 15, was Education and Culture Minister Muhadjir Effendy. This [ICF 2018] is being held to promote the dignity and self-worth of the Indonesian people. It is one of the best festivals. I am proud, Muhadjir said, as quoted by kompas.com.
Delta Air Lines Inc. raised its fee for a first checked bag to $30, following in competitors footsteps as U.S. carriers expand efforts to offset stubbornly higher fuel prices.

The $5 increase at the No. 2 airline means most U.S. travelers will pay $30 for a first piece of luggage and $40 for a second. United Continental Holdings Inc. and JetBlue Airways Corp. boosted the charges last month. American Airlines Group Inc., the worlds biggest carrier, hasnt changed its fees.

Deltas move extends an industry push for more revenue from items other than tickets. U.S. airlines already are slowing growth in the last half of the year in an effort to tighten the seat supply and gain added power to raise fares. Fuel prices have climbed about 27 percent in the last year, adding pressure on an industry thats facing a third consecutive year of declining profits.

Delta offers a variety of optional products and services and routinely makes fee adjustments, Morgan Durrant, a spokesman for the Atlanta-based airline, said in an email about the change, which took effect Wednesday. He declined further comment.

Read also: Ryanair bans carry-ons for passengers paying its lowest fares

Ancillary fees

United generated $3.39 billion last year from bag fees and other products and services priced separately from tickets, according to IdeaWorks Co. Delta got $2.38 billion while American brought in $2.2 billion. Thirteen U.S. carriers collected $4.6 billion in bag fees alone last year, according to U.S. Transportation Department statistics.

JetBlue, which didnt have a bag fee before 2015, kicked off the flurry of increases on Aug. 27. While Southwest Airlines Co. remains the only large U.S. carrier without a fee for a first or second checked bag, the Dallas-based airline raised its early boarding fee on Aug. 29.

American Chief Executive Officer Doug Parker declined to comment Tuesday on whether the airline would boost bag fees. It was the first U.S. carrier to adopt a checked-bag fee of $15 in May 2008. The charge followed a surge in jet-fuel prices during a year in which airlines also reduced schedules and cut jobs.

Deltas higher bag fees wont affect passengers who bought tickets before Wednesday.
Five tourist destinations in Gorontalo province will be developed into one geopark. The five destinations are Olele Marine Park, East Biluhu dive site, Botubarani whale shark site, Cargo Ship ruins and Bongo religious village.

Kompas.com reported that the destinations were located in three administrative regions, namely Bone Bolango regency, Gorontalo regency and Gorontalo city.

This geopark concept has a sustainable aspect and has vast potential, but there are also risks, Budi Sidiki, head of the Gorontalo Development Planning Board (Bappeda), told Kompas.com during a workshop on geopark tourist destination development on Tuesday.

The sustainable aspect is expected to promote conservation efforts, paired with education and welfare programs for local residents.

Read also: A closer look at Indonesia's four UNESCO-recognized Global Geoparks

The integration of the five destinations will begin with the unification of tourism workers, entrepreneurs and provincial administrations to design a destination concept to be offered to international tourists.

All five destinations are on one long coastline of the Gulf of Tomini, the biggest gulf on the equator.

We are open to ideas and suggestions for the revision of the Provincial Tourism Development Masterplan (RIPPDA) regarding the geopark, said Sofyan Puloo, Gorontalo Tourism Agency head of destination development. (mut)
Tourism Minister Arief Yahya says five dishes will be declared Indonesian foods, according to Tempo.co. The dishes are soto (aromatic soup), rendang (meat stewed in coconut milk and spices), nasi goreng (fried rice), satay and gado-gado (vegetables with peanut-based sauce).

He said the move would solve the problem of Indonesia not officially having any national food.

This is a problem of plenty because we have so many [types of] food, said Arief in a press conference at the Tourism Ministry on Tuesday.

Arief said there was no significant problem with the rise of local tourists through culinary attractions, but that work still needed to be done to attract foreign travelers through Indonesian food.

Arief went on to say that soto was nominated as a national dish by five ministries and agencies led by Creative Economy Agency (Bekraf). The reason is because soto is widely available in the archipelago.

However, the Tourism Ministry independently decided on soto, rendang, nasi goreng, satay and gado-gado as the five national dishes. Three of the dishes have been recognized by CNN as being among the World's Most Delicious Food.

Read also: Six culinary destinations to visit in Medan

The second strategy to be applied to promote culinary tourism in Indonesia is by naming culinary destinations. The Tourism Ministry is in the process of certifying three culinary destinations. These are Bali, Bandung and Yogyakarta.

I am hoping that Bali will become a culinary destination in 2018, followed by Bandung, said the minister.

Furthermore, Indonesian cuisine can be promoted with a co-branding strategy applied at Indonesian restaurants abroad.

However, the minister acknowledged that there were not many Indonesian restaurants abroad.

The Tourism Ministry is obliged to promote these restaurants. We will cooperate with the restaurant owners, and I have signed [for this project] in a coordination meeting, Arief was quoted as saying. (mut)
Sep 20 2018 9:43 am

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A new cardiac catheterization lab at Henry Ford Wyandotte Hospital will go a long way in helping save lives.

The state-of-the-art cath lab was revealed to more than 40 hospital staff, community leaders and stakeholders who attended an Aug. 23 celebration and community open house at the hospital.

The event program was held in the main lobby. A ribbon-cutting ceremony

and tours of the newly renovated facility took place on the hospitals lower level.

The cutting-edge cath lab is designed to:

?Integrate technology, space and workflow.

?Create a multi-sensor environment that operates efficiently to achieve a world-class care experience for patients, families and staff.

We are marking another milestone in continuing to provide top-of-the-line healthcare to our patients at Henry Ford Wyandotte Hospital, said president and CEO Denise Brooks-Williams. The one word that resonates with everyone is quality. Our goal is to help the staff and community know what quality is all about.

She said the event offered an opportunity for the community to get a first peek of the new cath lab and extended a special thank you to the donors who helped make the expansion possible.

Thank you so much for what you allow us to do, Brooks-Williams said.

She also touted the hospitals latest critical care honors awarded by Healthgrades, the leading online resource for comprehensive information about physicians and hospitals.

Henry Ford Wyandotte is the only hospital in Wayne County to receive the awards six years in a row, including honors in cardiac, orthopedic, neuroscience, pulmonary and gastrointestinal care.

Tracy Garland, director of cardiovascular services, said the new lab is a labor of love for herself and the entire team.

As living proof of the life-saving work done by the cardiac cath team, Garland introduced Trenton resident Jack Scola, who has undergone numerous heart catheterizations at Henry Ford Wyandotte.

Were so excited (he) came tonight because we have developed a personal relationship with this man, Garland said.

Scola, 58, is a care minister at St. Paul Lutheran Church in Trenton. Early one Saturday, he began experiencing what he thought were diabetes complications.

His wife, Deb, rushed him to the Emergency Department at Henry Ford Wyandotte Hospital.

It turned out I was having massive heart attacks, Scola recalled, adding that his kidneys also were failing. Due to your care at Henry Ford Wyandotte, I survived what was considered to be a very tenuous situation. I was brought to the cath lab where Dr. Hashem and the staff went to work on me.

Mustafa Hashem, medical director of the cardiac catheterization lab, inserted a heart pump and a stent in Scolas heart. He spent 12 days in the hospital, including six in the ICU, at Henry Ford Wyandotte.

I came here 15 years ago, and the lab has grown tremendously since then, Hashem said of the renovated space. This gives us the opportunity to work on multiple cases at the same time.

Scola stood by Hashems side as the hospital celebrated the cardiac cath lab expansion and also shared his touching story with the crowd of medical staff, volunteers, donors and community members.

I absolutely believe that God answered many prayers by using Dr. Hashem and all the people at Henry Ford Wyandotte, he said.

Since then, he has had three more heart catheterizations at Henry Ford Wyandotte  with the last procedure on July 19, 2018  and now has a total of eight stents.

Both of his grandfathers died of heart attacks at relatively young ages, so Scola said he feels extremely fortunate to be alive.

They didnt live in a time when medicine could save their lives, he said. I know how lucky I am to be here in this time when miracles happen. When I had my first heart cath, they had discovered more blockages that werent there before.

He credits the hospitals care with saving his life, and said he cant speak highly enough about the staffs kind, compassionate natures.

I know without Dr. Hashems work, I wouldnt be around today, he said. Everyone was incredibly kind and spent a lot of time worrying about my needs.

Being on the other side of the hospital bed also helped Scola gain new perspective in his work as a care minister.

Its helped me be more compassionate when I make my visits, he said.

A lot of people said to me: Gods not done with you; you have more work to do. I know God used Dr. Hashem to keep me here.
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MBABANE  Two companies were disqualified in SWACAAs over E200 000 climate survey tender.



The Pacific Institute of Swaziland and MBHL (Pty) Ltd were disqualified because their technical evaluation scores were below the 70 per cent qualifying mark.

The Swaziland Civil Aviation Authority (SWACAA) disclosed that the best evaluated tenderer which stands to be granted the tender was Emergency Growth. The company which priced their bid at E235 698.60 will be granted the job soon after the lapse of a 10 day working period for the submission of an application of a review in line with the Public Procurement Act of 2011.



Tender results issued by the Swaziland Public Procurement Regulatory Agency (SPPRA) reflect that Emergency Growth scored 84.18 per cent total evaluation score. It was closely followed by 360 Degree Business Solution which scored 72.33 per cent during evaluation.

The latter had priced their bid at E482 500.

It should be mentioned that in another SWACAA tender for waste management services, PSSN Investments and The Specialist Pest Control, were disqualified by the tender evaluation committee for failing to score more than 80 per cent when their technical proposals were evaluated.



The eventual shortlisted company, EcoBuzz Investments, which stood to enter into a contract with the SWACAA for provision of integrated waste management services at the Matsapha and King Mswati International Airports, scored 94.75 per cent.



The company, who priced their bid at E3 972 951.97, ought to sign a three year contract with SWACAA soon after the lapse of the waiting period for submission of any application for review in line with the procurement legislation.
MBABANE  Will the newly crowned Miss Eswatini participate in Miss World? The answer to the question remains a mystery as no affirmative response was given to this publication by Pageants Eswatini after discovering a confirmed list of contestants who are to take part in Miss World 2018.



Miss World 2018 is set for December 8 in Sanya, China after Miss World President Julia Morley signed the contract with Jiajun Li in March 2018.

Eswatini is currently not listed among the 99 countries which are listed under confirmed participants.



Pageants Eswatini President Catriene Potgieter, in an interview with this publication, said the committee is yet to meet pertaining to Miss Eswatinis participation in Miss World when asked if the newly crowned Miss Eswatini Nosipho Dlamini will participate in the internationally renowned pageant.

probability



When probed about the probability of Dlaminis participation, she asked to comment no further, while emphasising that the committee was yet to meet.

In the meantime, Eswatini National Council of Arts and Culture CEO Stanley Dlamini, told this publication that his entity was not involved in the planning of pageants.



Please inquire with the organisers as we get information from them, said Dlamini.



The last Miss Eswatini to attend Miss World was Nomphilo Mncina in 2009 and since then, no beauty queen in the country has seen the Miss World stage.

Some of the African countries which have been confirmed to participate this year are South Africa, Cameroon, Cote dIvoire, Ethopia, Kenya, Malawi, Zambia, Zimbabwe and others.



The recent former Miss Eswatini Linda Hutchinson refused to comment when asked if she had hopes and/or she was promised to attend the ultimate pageant in the world.
MBABANE  The late businessman, Victor Gamedzes wife has put it in no uncertain terms that if Nosipho feels that the DNA test is disgusting, she must voluntarily relinquish her claim to inherit from the estate.



Nosipho is the woman who claims to be the biological daughter of the late businessman and she wants to benefit from his estate worth millions of Emalangeni.

Through her attorney Mlungisi Khumalo, Gamedzes wife, Lungile, has filed an application at the High Court where she is seeking an order compelling Nosipho to undergo a DNA test.



Nosipho is vigorously opposing the matter and she is of the view that Lungiles application was not of trying to find the truth but was about public humiliation.

In her application, Lungile argued that the court had powers to compel Nosipho to undertake the paternity test.



She contended that the first respondents (Nosipho) rights to dignity and privacy might be limited where it was necessary and justifiable.

According to Lungile, in the present case, it was reasonable and justifiable to compel Nosipho to undergo the paternity test, since her rights did not supersede the interests of the minor child, which were protected by Section 29 of the Constitution and the Child Protection and Welfare Act.



She averred that it was fair to say the allegations in Nospiphos answering affidavit amounted to conjecture, insinuations and innuendos.

The first respondent is bringing up a contrived and false notion that the deceased is not my husband and that Tiyandza and Temalungelo were not his biological children, submitted Lungile.



She told the court that it was insulting and embarrassing in the extreme that Nosipho had the audacity to make such unfounded and spurious allegations. Lungile said she would not burden the court by responding to all the irrelevant and vexatious allegations contained in Nosiphos answering affidavit.

She told the court that it was not her intention to embarrass and humiliate Nosipho but her only request was that she should undergo the paternity test.

According to Lungile, Nosipho failed to state what prejudice she was going to suffer by submitting to a paternity test.



We submit that her refusal to do a DNA test might affect her credibility, argued the applicant.

Lungile said it was in the best interest of all the beneficiaries that Nosipho undergoes the paternity test. She pointed out that, Nosipho could submit herself for paternity test at Emerlo Provincial Hospital in South Africa.



Lungile averred that she and the two children had a locus standi because of their direct and substantial interest in the paternity of Nosipho, as she filed a claim against the estate of the late businessman.

The matter is still pending at the High Court. Nosipho is represented by lawyers from Henwood Masuku Nsibande Attorneys.
MBABANE  In light of the two press releases issued by government on Monday, teachers have opted to stick to the one by the Ministry of Education and Training of closing schools.



Most schools were not operational yesterday.

Outgoing Swaziland National Association of Teachers (SNAT) Secretary General, Zwelithini Mndzebele, said they have chosen to stick to the ministrys statement to close schools until Monday.



Government, later on Monday released a statement ordering schools to continue operating, denouncing the earlier statement that they should remain closed until Monday.



The earlier statement of closing schools was communicated by the Principal Secretary in the Ministry of Education and Training, Dr Sibongile Mtshali.

Mndzebele said schools reported to the education ministry and they had an official memo which was signed by the PS that schools must close.



He said they respected the PS as she was enlightened and made her decisions for the protection of pupils.

Mndzebele said the union owed the PS a present for the great leadership she had displayed.



A visit by this reporter to most of the schools was proof enough that they were not operating.

Borders at St Marks High School were found leaving the premises, while others said they were waiting for the arrival of their parents.



They said they had been officially released by the school authorities and would be returning on Sunday, as classes would resume on Monday.

Schools that were closed included SOS Herman Gmeiner, KaBoyce High, St Marks Primary and High, Cedusizi Primary.

Some private schools were closed, which included Siyakhula Primary among others. Teachers were found in some of the visited schools but there were no pupils present.



According to one of the teachers who was found at SOS Primary School, who preferred to remain anonymous, they were busy with their administrative duties.

She said the pupils decided to remain at home at their parents discretion for safety reasons.



Through the announcements that were made, the parents resolved to keep their children safe, the teacher said.

She said teachers who decided to come to school were busy with their administrative duties.

The Head teacher at Woodlands High School, who identified herself as Ms Manyatsi, said they had not told pupils what to do but they resolved to stay at home.

What is good is that it was not the school that mandated the pupils to remain at home but they decided by themselves, she said.

She said parents and pupils used their own discretion to keep their children home for saftey reasons.
Currently available in Greek and English, there are plans to also provide the website's contents in another four languages, while users can follow the site via the main social media platforms (Facebook, instagram, pinterest, youtube)

The new, improved Attica Region tourist website, www.athensattica.com, aims to become the go-to site for useful info and tips for visitors to Athens and Attica, presented in an attractive, modern and user-friendly format that is also accessible to the sight-impaired, ANA reports.

The recently updated and redesigned website offers ideas, suggestions for things to do in the Greek capital - including tips for families - as well as a large number of active links that are in line with the Attica Region's Strategic Tourist Promotion Plan 2016-2020.

The content was the outcome of cooperation with the region's municipalities, local tourism commissions and other tourism-, culture- and sports-related associations in Attica. It includes original articles, audiovisual material and information on tourist products, services and destinations that will be constantly enriched and updated.

RELATED TOPICS: Greece, Greek tourism news, Tourism in Greece, Greek islands, Hotels in Greece, Travel to Greece, Greek destinations , Greek travel market, Greek tourism statistics, Greek tourism report

Photo Source: Wikimedia Commons Copyright: A.Savin License: CC-BY-SA
Cuban cinema fans will have an opportunity to watch nine fiction features, a documentary, and a short film

A Greek cinema festival is to be held in Havana, and is being organized by Greeces Ambassador to Cuba Stella Bezirtzoglou, according to Prensa Latina news agency.

It has been four years since Greek films have been screened in Cuba and the festival will feature nine films. Specifically, Cuban cinema fans will have an opportunity to watch nine fiction features, a documentary, and a short film.

The festival will be inaugurated on Thursday with the screening of the film El Greco (2007) by director Yannis Smaragdis, a biographical approach to the life of the influential painter with the special style that had a profound impact at the end of the Renaissance.

El Greco is the most costly production in the history of Greek film, with Academy Award winning composer Vangelis providing the soundtrack.

The festival also includes Stella (1955) by Michael Cacoyannis, a landmark of Greek cinema, and Eternity and a Day, winner of the Palme dOr at the 1998 Cannes Film Festival, by acclaimed director Theo Angelopoulos.

Read more at greekreporter.com

RELATED TOPICS: Greece, Greek tourism news, Tourism in Greece, Greek islands, Hotels in Greece, Travel to Greece, Greek destinations , Greek travel market, Greek tourism statistics, Greek tourism report
Homage to the roots of Europe and its founding values

The global congress Greece, Magna Greece, Europe held in Reggio Calabria, Italy, on Saturday and Sunday, will pay homage to the roots of Europe and its founding values.

The congress is held by the Association Bova Life, in cooperation with the National archaeological museum of Reggio Calabria, the Greek embassy in Italy, and with the scientific coordination of Professor Louis Godart as part of the European Heritage Days.

Greeces Ambassador to Italy, Tasia Athanasiou, as well as top Italian and Greek professors and researchers will attend, according to Italian news agency ANSA.

According to Godart, Since the second millennium AD, during the Minoan and Mycenaean pre-colonization until the Classical and Byzantine era, Magna Greece and Calabria had a privileged relationship with Hellas, welcoming those who came from Greek land and recuperating the values of classicism (the centrality of humankind in history and democracy) to transmit to Europe and the world.

Godart added that Greece and Italy share a privileged relationship, being the pillars of European culture.

Read more at greekreporter.com

RELATED TOPICS: Greece, Greek tourism news, Tourism in Greece, Greek islands, Hotels in Greece, Travel to Greece, Greek destinations , Greek travel market, Greek tourism statistics, Greek tourism report
Chania is the second biggest city in Crete, which is the largest island in Greece

Chania is by far one of the most wonderful cities in Greece and given its astonishing history, spectacular old town, stunning Venetian harbour, and not to mention some of the most breathtaking beaches in Europe, its easy to see why its one of Greeces number one destinations for both locals and international visitors.

Chania is the second biggest city in Crete, which is the largest island in Greece, and the fifth largest in the Mediterranean Sea. Here, you can explore glorious beaches, a picturesque old town and the islands rich gastronomical culture.

Wandering around the Old Towns maze-like alleys, beautiful Venetian buildings, fountains and elaborate churches will help you discover well-preserved historical monuments. You can easily become familiar with the city of Chania by wandering around aimlessly in its streets, visiting museums and admiring the different architectural styles that are on display throughout the entire town.

Chania is perfect for people of all ages and whether you are travelling solo, with a group of friends, on a romantic getaway, or on a family holiday with young children, there is something in Chania for everyone.

BEACHES

Seitan Limani boasts magical views and pristine water. Its a bit of a hike to get there and you need to walk down quite a few steps to go for a swim, so maybe best for people without children. Please note its a remote location with no shops around, so dont forget to take water, snacks and other essentials with you.

For a morning swim and for a great frappe, go to Loutraki beach, with lots of sunbeds, you can sit back and relax all day.

For those who love their beach parties go to Agia Marina where the music is blaring and the crowd is there to have fun. And when the sun goes down, you can kick on at Villa, a popular night club in Chania, which is also located here.

Marathi is an amazing beach for people with young children as you have all the family friendly facilities you need. From easy parking, to shops, taverns and bathrooms all close by and for families- dont forget to add to your list Falasarna and Stavros Beach (where Zorba the Greek was filmed).

Balos Lagoon, Elafonisi and Gramvousa Islet are by far Chanias most photographed and picturesque beaches and you shouldnt leave Chania until you have at least been to one.

FOOD

Bougatsa tou Iordani in Chania Town, make famous bougatsa (pastry with filling) using fresh Cretan Mizithra. This famous type of bougatsa cant be found anywhere else in the world.

Sea urchin (achinous) may be rare to come across in your average restaurant but in Chania you will surely find them in nearly every Fish Tavern (psarotaverna) you go to.

Gamopilafo is traditional wedding rice dish, that has now been included in most Cretan tavern menus and is like a deluxe risotto prepared in a rich meat broth.

Fried snails (saligaria tiganita) are very much loved by the locals and are served as mezedakia.

Stamnagathis are a type of greens, which are boiled and served with olive oil and lemon juice, it is a specific kind of Xorta (greens) which are grown locally.

Cretan Dakos is a rye dusk topped with juicy grated tomatoes and crumbled feta, it is eaten here anytime of the day and is very popular.

Kaltsounia are Cretan cheese pies with handmade pastry dough and can be found in each and every every Creatan bakery you come across.

Arni me Stamnagathi is lamb with a wild green, where the meat is sauteed in hot olive oil and oregano, then served with either avgolemono (egg and lemon sauce) or a squeeze of lemon juice- it is served in most Creatan restaurants.

If you love cheese, you should definitely try Graviera, which is a hard type, Pichtogalo Chanion, which has AOC protection and Myzithra, a young Cretan whey cheese.

Raki or Tsikoudia is a Cretan Brandy made locally. Distilled from grapes and served in every Cretan taverna and kafeneio, this traditional beverage is definitely not for the faint hearted.

TAVERNS

Nea Chora is a wonderful waterfront location filled with traditional fish taverns, which are popular with the locals. These include Akrogiali, Volakas and Achilleas.

Taverna Mpourakis is situated in Kounoupidiana and its specialty is Xoirino Kotsi (pork hog), which is baked for hours and all their traditional Cretan appetizers are also delicious.

Patrelantonis Fish Tavern and cafe Metaksi Mas are located at Marathi Beach and have amazing mezedes and souvlaki, so if you are after a casual lunch or dinner this is the place to go.

Ta Chalkina is a sensational restaurant at the Port, which offers the complete Cretan experience- from stunning views, to live music and traditional cuisine- you really cant go wrong here.

Tamam in set in the Old Town, where the decor is rustic, vibe is cool and wine is plentiful. The menu consists of a wide variety of traditional dishes.

In Kaliviani village, which is on your way to or from Gramvousa Islet you will find Gramvousa Taverna. Here you can eat after a long swim and make sure to try the Dakos

TIPS

Wonder the Old Town, which is filled with colourful alleyways that lead to wonderful taverns, cafes and shops for visitors to explore.

Visit the lighthouse at the entrance of the old harbor, this 21 meter tall lighthouse offers an amazing sea breeze, great views and the mystique of the old buildings create the ideal setting for a romantic, relaxing walk.

Listen to live Cretan music and join in on some local Cretan dancing, which will be one of your most memorable experiences! If you wonder around the Old Port at night, you will find some taverns that turn into all-night music and dancing venues.

Check out the local markets in the Agora, where you will discover the freshest local produce being sold. From herbs and spices, fruit and vegetables, to fresh seafood and meats, plus all other local delicacies, this is the place to grab some of your fave Cretan products to take home.

Read more at greekcitytimes.com

RELATED TOPICS: Greece, Greek tourism news, Tourism in Greece, Greek islands, Hotels in Greece, Travel to Greece, Greek destinations , Greek travel market, Greek tourism statistics, Greek tourism report

Photo Source: Wikimedia Commons Copyright: Lapplaender License: CC-BY-SA
The 4th season of Wanderlust Greece, which visited Crete and for 15 days sought out and revealed all the reasons why travelers should add the popular island to their list of holiday destinations

Marketing Greece has launched a new campaign showcasing the beauty of Crete island in an effort to increase average spending per tourist and extend the tourist season in Greek destinations.

From the old town of Chania to the mountain Mylopotamos, and from Heraklion to the island of Chrissi, "Wanderlust" presenter George Lentzas travelled across the island. Yoga overlooking the imposing landscape of Triopetra, mountain biking in Kapetaniana, a natural "balcony" with an endless view of the Libyan Sea, excursions to the picturesque villages of Crete, a boat trip to Chrissi and Loutro, SUP boarding in Elounda Bay against the background of the historic island of Spinalonga, local traditions and customs to the accompaniment of the Cretan lyre, genuine Cretan gastronomic delights are just some of the experiences captured in the new video.

"The trip to Crete has been a real challenge for us as the destination constitutes a top Greek tourist brand. One of our quests was to follow the promotion strategy of the Region of Crete, working in a supportive and fully harmonised way with its central message 'The Island Inside You'", Marketing Greece CEO Ioanna Dreta noted and added: "Our goal was to create a list of experiences that highlight all those aspects of the product that make Crete a flagship of Greek tourism."

RELATED TOPICS: Greece, Greek tourism news, Tourism in Greece, Greek islands, Hotels in Greece, Travel to Greece, Greek destinations , Greek travel market, Greek tourism statistics, Greek tourism report

Photo Source: Marketing Greece
There is something about arriving by ferry at a wonderful Greek port that makes you feel immediately relaxed. Reaching Skopelos, a lush island part of the Sporades cluster in the western Aegean, was no exception. The island where Mama Mia, one of the most successful and highest grossing Hollywood movies was shot, is rapidly becoming a paradise for property investors.

It is quite the contrast for travelers disembarking the old Proteus ferry of a different era with its worn upholstery in the sitting lounge, and bygone decor, as they enter the newly constructed five-star boutique hotel Natura at the islands harbour with state of the art facilities.

The five-star boutique hotel Natura in Loutraki cost nearly 2 million euros

Upon arriving at the reception of Natura, you can see that some serious money has gone into the project, as you check automatically via your smart mobile phone or device with the application Ilumio. You tap the screen at the door of the room and it opens automatically, the temperature is at the points you have selected and on the TV remote control, there is a button that connects you to Netflix.

The construction of the specific hotel cost nearly 2 million euros. It offers 900-euro suites per night private pools and a Batmobile boat that whizzes you to Loutraki from Skiathos in a convenient 10 minutes. They are signs that great things are happening on the island.

A beer at the Steki tou Mastora is the perfect spot to sit down and get some inside info on who is buying what, where. Thats where we found out that an Italian investor had been purchasing land plots on the island. He is just one of numerous foreigners who was drawn to the beauties of the island and decided to explore the opportunities.

Another one, a big shot Romanian lawyer bought a seaside plot in Armenopetra for 500,000 euros with the construction of his villa exceeding 4 million euros.

Nothing, however, compares to a property that recently changed hands. A Dutch businessman had for a long time set his eyes on a shack located on the Bloh coastline. He forked out a cool 1 million euros to become the owner of a shack after serious haggling. He intends to demolish the shack and build a holiday house, costing more than 1.5 million euros.

In Loutraki Skopelos, an American entrepreneur and major shareholder in Nike recently purchased 18 acres for 1 million euros and plans to build two villas, 500 square meters each, with the total investment amounting to 7 million euros.

Skopelos island is still an untapped paradise, and despite the fact that the biggest part of the first Mamma Mia was shot on its enchanting beaches, the locals did not manage to reap the benefit of the global exposure.

In fact, the slow-moving and cumbersome Greek state, mired in red tape forced the producers of the movies sequel of Mama Mia to elect Croatia, instead.

The Greek islands are a top tourist destination, but the most popular ones like Mykonos and Santorini are showing signs of saturation, leading foreign investors to turn to other places, such as Paros, Naxos, Patmos and now Skopelos for new investment openings with property agents projecting their prices will skyrocket 5 years down the road.

Read more at protothema.gr

RELATED TOPICS: Greece, Greek tourism news, Tourism in Greece, Greek islands, Hotels in Greece, Travel to Greece, Greek destinations , Greek travel market, Greek tourism statistics, Greek tourism report

Photo Source: pixabay.com
The Dubai Chamber of Commerce and Industry recently hosted a workshop which aimed to familiarise retailers and members of the business community with the UAEs new value-added tax (VAT) refund scheme for tourists.



The workshop, hosted at Dubai Chambers premises, was organised by the Federal Tax Authority (FTA) in cooperation with Planet, the exclusive Tourist Refund operator for the tourist refund scheme which will be rolled out in the last quarter of 2018.



More than 250 members of the business community attended the workshop where participants were briefed on the steps, processes and procedures associated with registering under the UAEs new VAT refund scheme for tourists.



Khalid Ali Al Bustani, director general of the Federal Tax Authority, said the Cabinet Decision No. (41) of 2018 On Introducing the Tax Refunds for Tourist Scheme is set to come into effect in the last quarter of 2018, and supports the vision of the UAEs wise leadership and diversification efforts, and added that the system is expected to contribute to the UAEs economy and boost the countrys appeal as an attractive tourism destination.



Al Bustani noted that the VAT refund scheme for tourists is based on the best international practices, and uses advanced technology and an integrated electronic system that connects retailers with exit points, which is designed for seamless and efficient transactions.



Atiq Juma Nasib, senior vice president of Commercial Services at Dubai Chamber, said the introduction of VAT refunds in the UAE is expected to have a very positive impact on the tourism sector, as it will strengthen countrys position as one of the worlds most sough-after destinations for tourism and shopping.



The strong attendance at the workshop clearly reflected the growing interest among retailers in Dubai that are keen to improve their understanding of VAT refunds, the benefits of using the new system, as well as its implications for the sector, said Nasib.



Earlier, the FTA announced conditions and procedures for tourists who claim VAT refunds when leaving the UAE. Upon exiting the country, tourists will be able to reclaim taxes paid on their purchases through an electronic system which will be connected to the FTA, airports, land and sea ports of entry. Retails must meet the requirements outlined by FTA in order to register and participate in the VAT Refunds scheme for Tourists.  TradeArabia News Service
Seatrade Cruise Med, the worlds largest cruise industry event focussed on the Mediterranean and its adjoining seas, opened yesterday (September 19) in Lisbon, Portugal and continues until today (September 20) at FIL  Lisbon Exhibition and Congress Centre.



Hosted by the Port of Lisbon Authority and supported by MedCruise and Cruise Lines International Association (CLIA), the event features a showcase exhibition, conference and a full networking programme. It is part of Portugal Shipping Week.



On the opening morning, Portugals Minister of the Sea, Ana Paula Vitorino, addressed more than 350 delegates in her welcome speech and said it was an excellent opportunity for Portuguese companies to showcase themselves to the cruise industry and for all government, public entities and private stakeholders to work together to build the future.



Also taking to the stage as part of the welcome were: vice president of the Municipality of Lisbon, Duarte Cordeiro and Portugal secretary of state for Tourism, Ana Mendes Godhino.

In his keynote, Airam Diaz Pastor, president, MedCruise & Commercial director, Port Authority of Santa Cruz de Tenerife, told the packed room that the Mediterranean is facing a bright future with more capacity arriving and more investment in port infrastructure.



Taking to the stage, chairman, CLIA Europe and chairman, Carnival UK, David Dingle, spoke with his CLIA (Cruise Lines International Association) hat and made mention to the fact that the state of the cruise industry is very good indeed.



He said: Last year, 26.7 million cruises were taken the world over6 per cent growth over the previous year. Assuming occupancy levels remain broadly the same this year, over 28 million cruises will have been sold in 2018, a further 5 per cent growth. European source market growth has continued steadily and if anything has been capacity-constrained due to the redeployment of some ships to Asia and other places. In 2017, 26 per cent of global cruise sales were in Europe, but we comfortably predict that this will rise to 28 per cent in 2018 and 2019 as more capacity begins to arrive.



He added: Looking at Europe as a source market, a destination and an industrial hub, what is most impressive is the growth in the economic contribution of the European cruise industry  near on 48 billion ($56 billion) in 2017, a 16.9 per cent increase since the last survey in 2015. Thats a phenomenal rise, and it comes from source market growth, more cruise operating activities in Europe and more cruise ship building, which has grown by more than 22 per cent compared with 2015 as the order book has increased to record levels, a remarkable 66 new ships by 2021 worth almost 30 billion ($35 billion).



With 7 million cruise sales in 2017, 8 per cent more than 2015, Europe is the worlds second biggest source market. Over 80 per cent of those European sales were for cruises in Europe, and adding to these the numbers of Americans, Asians and Australians coming to Europe to cruise, 6.5 million people took a cruise here last year, 6% more than in 2015.



I can see every reason for the European cruise economy to continue to grow at this rate. Even with 7 million cruises sold, European market penetration is no more than 2 per cent of the total population whilst for North America and Australia that figure is closer to 4 per cent. The new orders destined for Europe will drive a new surge in demand."



Whilst the conference area was busy, the showfloor was also vibrant with more than 2,700 attendees from 105 countries anticipated over the two days with plenty of exhibitor activities including: A Taste of Portugal networking events hosted by Cruise Portugal; a Cruise Europe Happy Hour; Caribbean Village A Taste of the Tropics Welcome Reception and Region Sud Provence French Riviera Cocktail Reception.



Seatrade Cruise Med is held biennially and is this year hosted by Port of Lisbon Authority with principal sponsor and supporter, MedCruise (The Association of Mediterranean Cruise Ports), of which Lisbon has been a member since 2000. - TradeArabia News Service
ACCORDS COVER KEY SECTORS

Bahrain, UAE sign deals to enhance cooperation

Bahrain and the UAE have agreed to enhance their bilateral cooperation in several key areas and have signed a number of agreements and memoranda of understanding that will support the economic growth plans of both countries.
The Humanitarian Association of World Turkmens (HAWT) held its XXI conference in Ashgabat ahead of Turkmenistan's Independence Day. The forum was attended by the representatives of Turkmen diasporas living in foreign countries, as well as the delegates from all the regions of Turkmenistan.

The conference heard the report on the work of the Humanitarian Association of World Turkmens. According to the report, 27 GATM offices operate in 14 countries of the world accounting for over three hundred collective and hundreds of individual members, including about 400 in foreign countries.

The conference stressed that consolidation of compatriots, worldwide popularization of the history, culture, traditions and customs of the Turkmen people remain the main areas of the GATM work. The conference noted the Associations role in developing international cooperation and implementing Turkmenistans peace-loving policy and progressive initiatives. As part of the conference, the GATM activists were awarded the letters of commendation. The conference concluded with a festive concert.

President of Turkmenistan Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov sent a welcome message to the participants of the XXI conference of the Humanitarian Association of World Turkmens. The head of state noted that Turkmen ancestors had to leave their native land for various reasons. Nevertheless, they always remembered their historical homeland, believing that the fatherland is the most valuable thing in life.

The Turkmen leader expressed confidence that the forum, which was held on the eve of the 27th anniversary of Turkmenistans independence, would be of great importance in consolidating the world Turkmens and strengthening partnership relations in various fields.

 TURKMENISTAN.RU, 2021
New Delhi, Sep 19 (UNI) India on Wednesday snubbed Pakistan for its inaction against cross border terrorism and said there will be no change in Indian position vis-a-vis South Asian Association of Regional Cooperation unless there is "an end" to cross border terror menace.

"....the government of India's position as of now (on SAARC) is that unless there is reduction or end to the cross border terrorism, we see no purpose of having a regional meeting," a government source said here.

The source, however, declined to confirm or deny on the possibility of a meeting between External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj and her Pakistani counterpart Shah Mehmood Qureshi on the sidelines of the SAARC Council of Foreign Ministers meeting in New York.

"I really can't say much on this matter except to say that the External Affairs Minister's schedules are being prepared....So we are not in a position to comment on any individual meeting she may or may not have," the source said.

The comments came even as India and Pakistan are 'reportedly' in discussion through their respective missions for a possible 'interaction' between the two foreign ministers since the change of guard in Pakistan.

The annual SAARC meeting on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly session is slated for September 27. Ms Swaraj may leave for New York at the end of September.

Meanwhile, in yet another dastardly act Pakistani troops have slit the throat of a BSF jawan head constable Narendra Kumar along the international border near Jammu.

Official sources said the body of Kumar also bore three bullet wounds and it could be retrieved from a spot ahead of the Indo-Pak fence only after over six hours of search.

The government representative, however, remained cautious about possible breakthrough saying he is "not in a position to say what will come out from the informal meeting of SAARC foreign ministers in New York".

Pakistan is slated to to host the SAARC Summit, but since Uri terror strike that killed 17 Indian army personnel in September 2016, New Delhi is leading the boycott of such a regional meet in Islamabad.

The Minister of State for External Affairs Gen VK Singh has in last few days slammed Imran Khan regime saying it was 'propped' up by the Pakistan army and nothing has changed in that country.

There is also a stalemate on the issue of opening the Kartarpur corridor for helping pilgrims visit the esteemed Gurudwara, located about 120 KM from Pakistan.

In fact, India and Pakistan has not had any substantial dialogue since 2012.

The two sides had inched forward for kicking off a renamed Comprehensive Bilateral Dialogue, but it too got stalled after the Pathankot terror attack in 2016.

The US recently said it would support a peaceful dialogue between India and Pakistan.

UNI DEVN SY 2051
Lawyers, specialized in family law, receive training on guidelines for assistance to child victims of human trafficking

Bogota D.C., 20 September 2018 - UNODC, under the framework of the Global Action against Trafficking in Persons and the Smuggling of Migrants ( GLO.ACT), and the Colombian Family Welfare Institute (ICBF) conducted on 14 September 2018 in Bogota the first training on the ICBF technical guidelines for the care of child and adolescent victims of trafficking in persons.

The technical guidelines, which aim to establish the route, modalities and process for dealing with cases in which the direct or indirect victim of trafficking in persons is a minor, is the product of joint work between UNODC and ICBF, following a participatory and consultative exercise with national authorities, international cooperation agencies, territorial visits and civil society.

The roll-out of the guidelines, which were also developed with the support of the GLO.ACT, has been designed in such a way that workshop participants have to engage in practical activities. This includes using real case studies as means to ensure that participants have to try and apply the new guidelines while being supported by the technical team of the Directorate of Protection of the ICBF and the team in charge of combatting trafficking in persons (TIP) at UNODC.

Additional workshop will take place between September to November 2018 and the aim is to train over 150 officials working within Colombia's familt wealfrae system on the application of these new guidelines.

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:

Mr. Carlos Andres Perez

GLO.ACT National Project Officer

Email: carlos.perez@un.org

www.unodc.org/unodc/en/human-trafficking/glo-act/

Email: glo.act@un.org

Twitter: @glo_act
(Sept. 20, 2018) -- Midterm elections are right around the corner and its time to get engaged. Civically engaged, that is!

Voters across Texas will be deciding on races for seats in the House of Representatives and Senate along with Governor, Lt. Governor, Comptroller, State Land Commissioner, State Agriculture Commissioner and State Railroad Commissioner. Bexar County elections include County Commissioner, District Attorney, District Clerk, County Clerk and County Judge.

During the 2014 midterm elections, out of the 26,841 UTSA students eligible to vote, 19,769 (73%) registered to vote and 4,103 (20.8%) voted with 59 percent voting during early voting and nearly 40 percent voting on election day. Students aged 50+ years voted at a rate of 49.7 percent compared to a rate of 10.5 percent by 18-21 year old students. *

The UTSA Center for Civic Engagement strives to work together with students and campus partners to increase those numbers and encourages all students, faculty and staff to vote. The deadline to register to vote in Bexar County is Oct. 9.

For those interested in leading the effort in registering people to vote can become a Deputized Registrar. Students, faculty and staff can receive training from a Bexar County election official on Thursday, Sept. 20 from 1:30  2:30 pm in the Buena Vista Street Building (BVB 3.304) on the UTSA Downtown Campus.

Tuesday, Sept. 25 is National Voter Registration Day. Representatives from the Center for Civic Engagement and partnering UTSA student organizations will be registering students around the Main and Downtown Campuses. Participants are encouraged to tag their event using the hashtag #ROWDYVOTES.

The Center for Civic Engagement strongly encourages students, faculty, staff and the community to make their voices heard by casting their vote at UTSA during early voting Oct. 22  Nov. 2 in the H-E-B Student Union Bexar Room (HSU 1.102) on the Main Campus. The university will be celebrating the start of early voting with a #ROWDYVOTES Voter Kick-off at 8 a.m. on Monday, October 22 on the west side of the H-E-B Student Union. The Downtown Campus community can vote early at the Bexar County Elections Office located at 1103 S. Frio St, a short 13-minute walk from campus.

Early voting times at UTSA:

Monday, Oct. 22  Friday, Oct. 26

8 a.m. to 6 p.m.

Saturday, Oct. 27

8 a.m. to 8 p.m.

Sunday, Oct. 28

12 p.m. to 6 p.m.

Monday, Oct. 29  Friday, Nov. 2

8 a.m. to 8 p.m.

Voters should be prepared to show a valid photo ID or secondary supporting ID.

Deaf and hard of hearing voters can vote using Deaflink Technology during the early voting period at the Bexar County Election Department located at 1103 S. Frio St.
New UW Publication Looks at Wyoming Population Shifts

The population of Albany County, including Laramie, grew by 4.5 percent from 2010-15, while other non-energy-producing counties -- as well as some energy-producing counties -- also saw increases. Changes in growth patterns at the municipal, county and state levels in Wyoming from 2010-15 are explained in a new bulletin from UWs Wyoming Open Spaces Initiative. (UW Photo)

A new publication from the Wyoming Open Spaces Initiative at the University of Wyoming describes recent patterns of population growth and change in Wyoming.

The latest in a series of bulletins that have tracked Wyomings population since 1990, Population Growth in Wyoming: 2010-2015, led by UW Professor David Tex Taylor, uses U.S. Census Bureau population estimates to explain changes in population growth patterns at the municipal, county and state levels in Wyoming from 2010-15.

Since 2010, Wyoming has experienced moderate population growth, increasing by 3.9 percent from 2010 through 2015. That rate is slightly above the national average (3.7 percent), but well below that of regional states including North Dakota (12.2 percent), Colorado (7.9 percent), Utah (7.8 percent), Idaho (5.2 percent) and South Dakota (5.1 percent). Wyomings population growth rate from 2010-15 was comparable to the rates of Montana (4.2 percent) and Nebraska (3.5 percent).

Between 2010 and 2015, 20 percent of Wyomings population growth occurred in rural areas of the state. Though rural population growth for this time period has slowed compared to 2000-2010, when one-third of growth occurred in rural areas, rural residential development has important implications for Wyoming, including loss of open space and increasing the cost of community services to local governments. In 2015, slightly more than 30 percent of Wyoming residents lived in rural areas of the state.

During 2010-15, the fastest-growing counties included both energy-producing counties such as Natrona (8.9 percent) and Campbell (6.7 percent), and mostly non-energy-producing counties such as Teton (8.3 percent) and Albany (4.5 percent). At the other end of the spectrum, counties that experienced a net loss in population included those with older populations such as Hot Springs (-1.4 percent) and Washakie (-2.5 percent), and energy-producing counties such as Sublette (-3.6 percent), Carbon (-1.8 percent) and Uinta (-1.3 percent).

Sublette County, which recorded the largest population growth rate in Wyoming between 2000 and 2010 (+73 percent), experienced the largest negative population growth rate between 2010 and 2015 due to a boom in natural gas production (2000-08) followed by a decrease in development caused by a decline in natural gas prices (2008-2015).

Understanding changing population patterns is a key step in understanding growth issues in Wyoming, says report author Taylor, of UWs Department of Agricultural and Applied Economics. Our analysis shows that Wyomings population growth is happening in both rural and urban areas of the state, with much of the change being driven by energy markets.

From 2015 to 2017, Wyomings total population declined by nearly 6,800 residents, or 1.2 percent. The annual decrease in 2017 (-5,595) was the largest decline for the state in 25 years, due to people leaving the state.

Historically, Wyoming has experienced substantial fluctuations in its population growth. After increasing by more than 50 percent during the energy boom from 1970-1983, Wyomings population declined by more than 10 percent during the energy bust of 1983-1990. Since then, Wyomings population has continued to fluctuate, although at a more moderate rate. Wyomings population increased by nearly 9 percent between 1990-2000 and by more than 14 percent between 2000-2010.

The Wyoming Open Spaces Initiative is a collaborative effort of the Ruckelshaus Institute of Environment and Natural Resources, the Wyoming Geographic Information Science Center, the Department of Agricultural and Applied Economics, the Department of Geography, UW Extension and the Wyoming Natural Diversity Database. The initiative supports Wyoming citizens conservation of open spaces through research, information, education and decision-making assistance. The research group considers agricultural sustainability, community planning and development, wildlife, and other related cultural, economic and environmental issues of importance in Wyoming.

Download the publication at www.uwyo.edu/haub, or request a copy by emailing ruckelshaus@uwyo.edu or by calling (307) 766-5146.
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Avnet showcases integrated IoT connectivity solutions in Vietnam

Avnet Asia-Pacific presented connected solutions to empower various markets sectors in Vietnam at the Avnet LPWAN Vietnam TechDays 2018 Showcase, which was held in Ho Chi Minh City on September 17 and in Hanoi on September 19.

Through the manufacturing and export of electronics, Vietnam is considered one of the fastest growing economies in the world, with the vision to be an industrial nation by 2020. To help support these thriving industries, Avnet is showcasing its capabilities to enable and drive IoT innovation and related initiatives in Vietnam.

IoT is reshaping the electronics industry. LPWAN technologies can be integrated into many applications, namely fleet management and tracking, agriculture, metering, surveillance and monitoring of environmental air and water quality, providing cost-effective and secure connectivity solutions, said Andy Wong, senior vice president of global design solutions at Avnet Asia.

Wong added, By introducing our latest connected solutions to OEMs and enterprises in Vietnam, companies doing business in these industrial sectors will be empowered to adopt automation processes that bring performance and efficiency to their operations. With Vietnams smart city and industrialisation plans, Avnet is ready to support the growing demand for IoT with our LPWAN solutions.

Avnets solutions encompass an integrated ecosystem of LPWAN technologies, which include LoRa, NB-IoT, and Sigfox. The provision of IoT capabilities feature long-range connectivity in rural, remote, and offshore industries, enhanced cellular systems for mobile networks; and wireless networks for low-powered connectivity.

Avnet's integrated IoT solutions can be utilised through the entire spectrum of the Vietnamese industry

At these events, Avnet will take to the stage with sensors, gateways, connectivity modules, and other technology solutions including environmental sensing for LoRa and starter kits for NB-IoT and Sigfox, all offering higher performance for industrial applications.

From idea to design and from prototype to production, Avnet supports customers at each stage of a products lifecycle. A comprehensive portfolio of design and supply chain services makes Avnet the go-to guide for innovators who set the pace for technological change.
The first train started the test at Yen Nghia Station

A great crowd gathered at 5.50 AM today at Yen Nghia Depot (Hadong District) to see the trains begin their test runs across the Cat Linh-Hadong route.

Deputy Minister of Transport Nguyen Ngoc Dong discussing with the main contractor and the project management unit before the test run

At 6.30 AM, the first train left Yen Nghia depot, with the Ministry of Transports supervisor delegation, the railway project management unit, and the Chinese main contractor, as well as reporters on board.

Each train has four carriages and four doors on each side

When the first train arrived at Nguyen Trai Street, the next one was ordered to start. Vu Hong Phuong, deputy director of the Railway Project Management Unit said that the trains will run every ten minutes. The train will turn back to Yen Nghia when it arrives to the final destination at Cat Linh.

Hoang Cau Lake from the elevated railway

The five trains were running for two hours this morning. The main contractor will continue completing the remaining tasks before officially launching and handing the route over to Hanoi for commercial operation. The average speed of the trains is 32km per hour.

According to Hanois general master plan by 2030 with vision to 2050 approved by the prime minister in Decision No. 519/QD-TTg dated March 31, 2016, Hanois metro network will have eight routes running on elevated runways and underground, with the total length of 318km.

Of these, the Cat Linh-Hadong route developed by the Ministry of Transport started construction in October 2011 and has a length of 13.1km. This route (named 2A) is expected to be launched officially in the end of this year, followed by Route 3 (Nhon-Hanoi Station), Route 1 (Ngoc Hoi-Yen Vien), and Route 2 (South Thang Long-Tran Hung Dao-Thuong Dinh).

The green trains will start commercial operation by the end of the year

The total initial investment of Route 2A was $552.86 million (in 2008), including $133.86 million from the Vietnamese government and $419 million borrowed from China. However, this has been adjusted $868 million, with loans from China increasing by around $250 million to $669 million.

Route 2A will have 13 trains with four carriages each. The length of a train is 79m, with a height of 3.8m and width of 2.8m. The trains will be painted green and sport the image of Khue Van Cac, a symbol of Hanoi.

Once completed, the trains will transport up to 2,110 passengers across 12 stations across the route. The stations are Cat Linh, La Thanh, Thai Ha, Lang, Thuong Dinh, Ring Road 3, Phung Khoang, Van Quan, Hadong, La Khe, Van Khe, and Yen Nghia.
Cuckoo officially enters the household electrical appliance sector in Vietnam

On September 19, Cuckoo officially announced the establishment of a subsidiary in Vietnam, with the vision to bring high-quality home appliances closer to Vietnamese people.

The move will help Cuckoo make sales and after-sales services at its authorised distributors more professional.

To meet the increasing demand of Vietnamese people, Cuckoo will open the Easy on programme allowing customers to buy water filters, air filters, and electric stoves, which rank at the high-end segment, at prices that are a quarter or one-third of the general market price in the segment. Besides, customers will be able to enjoy after-sales services of the highest quality.

"Launching the two pressure rice cooker models, which are designed for the Vietnamese market, will help to meet the demand of Vietnamese people. Cuckoo expects to become an electronic home appliance brand close to the hearts of Vietnamese people," the representative of Cuckoo said.

In the framework of the launching ceremony, Cuckoo introduced two new pressure rice cooker products, namely CRP-PK1000S and CRP-M1000S, which are designed particularly for Vietnamese people. Accordingly, these products have Vietnamese language instructions instead of English or Korean. Besides, their prices are also lower than the market average.

Cuckoo expects that these products will create convenience for Vietnamese users, and simultaneously affirm the firms determinationto conquer the rice cooker market in Vietnam.

Speaking at the launching ceremony, a representative of Cuckoo said, Establishing a subsidiary in Vietnam aims to bring Vietnamese people products with better quality and more diverse models. Besides, launching the two pressure rice cooker models, which are designed for the Vietnamese market, will help to meet the demand of Vietnamese people. Cuckoo expects to become an electronic home appliance brand close to the hearts of Vietnamese people.

Cuckoo specialises in manufacturing kitchen appliances as well as healthcare and living appliances. It has been the leader in the rice cooker segment for 14 years in South Korea and has sold over 25 million rice cookers. Its rice cooker products make up 73 per cent of the market.

With its successes in Korea, Cuckoo now looks to grow on the global market. Based on high-quality rice cookers and its more than 30 years of experience, Cuckoo have begun global trading in 1998. Cuckoo has been expanding its distribution channels to numerous nations and recorded average annual growth of 22 per cent in the past years.

Customers shared their opinions about the new pressure rice cooker products
Former Vice Chairman of the Ho Chi Minh City People's Committee, Nguyen Huu Tin

The Ministry of Public Security will investigate alleged relations between the eight defendants and Phan Van Anh Vu (also known as Vu Nhom), who was jailed for revealing state secrets.

On September 18, 2018, the ministrys investigation agency has issued a decision to start criminal proceedings for Offences against regulations on the management and use of state-owned property that lead to losses or wastefulness (Article 219 of Criminal Code 2015) in Ho Chi Minh City and Offences against regulations on land management (Article 229) in Danang.

The authority also decided to prosecute the accused, put them under house arrest, and search their houses and workplaces in an attempt to collect additional evidence for eight former leaders and officials in Ho Chi Minh City and Danang. The defendants include:

Nguyen Huu Tin (1957), former Vice Chairman of the Ho Chi Minh City Peoples Committee;

Dao Anh Kiet (1957), former director general of the Ho Chi Minh City Department of Natural Resources and Environment;

Le Van Thanh (1962), former deputy chief of Ho Chi Minh City Peoples Committees Office;

Nguyen Thanh Chuong (1974), head of the Urban Division of the Ho Chi Minh City Peoples Committee;

Dao Tan Bang (1975), former deputy chief of the Danang City Peoples Committee Office, now Secretary of the Danang Industrial Zones Party Committee;

Nguyen Viet Vinh (1978), former head of the Urban Division of the Danang City Peoples Committee, currently serving as director of the Danang Inland Waterway Port Authority;

Nguyen Van Can (1954), former chief of the Danang City Peoples Committee Office;

Phan Xuan It (1954), former deputy chief of the Danang City Peoples Committee Office.

Dao Tan Bang and Nguyen Viet Vinh are currently kept in police custody.

These eight defendants have been interrogated about their involvement in violations committed by Vu Nhom, who used to be one of the biggest property developers in Danang. He was the chairman of three large property companies and a shareholder in a number of projects in the city. He was sentenced to nine years in prison for deliberately disclosing state secrets.

Vu is now under investigation for "tax evasion," "abuse of power or position in performance of official duties," "abuse of power or position to appropriate property," and "violating regulations on the management and use of state-owned property that led to losses or wastefulness" in separate cases, which include alleged graft at DongA Bank and the violation of land regulations in Danang.

Earlier, the Danang police started legal proceedings of several former leaders and business executives, including former city chairmen Tran Van Minh and Van Huu Chien.
A French priest killed himself amid allegations from a local mother that her grown-up daughter had been a victim of "indecent behavior and sexual assault" AFP/SEBASTIEN BOZON

Jean-Baptiste Sebe killed himself Tuesday in the church north of Rouen amid allegations from a local mother that her grown-up daughter had been a victim of "indecent behaviour and sexual assault," a police source said.

The initial complaint was made to the archbishop of Rouen, and "police were not notified prior to the suicide," the source added, stressing that investigators remained "very cautious at this stage."

Local prosecutor Etienne Thieffry confirmed that an investigation was underway into "the exact reasons for the suicide" at the Saint-Jean XXIII church.

"At this point, no complaint has been filed," Thieffry said.

A spokesman for the Rouen diocese, Eric de la Bourdonnaye, told AFP he could "neither confirm nor deny these reports."

The Catholic Church has been shaken by a string of paedophile scandals over the past 25 years.

It was rocked in August by a devastating US report on child sex abuse which accused more than 300 "predator" priests of abusing more than 1,000 minors over seven decades in the state of Pennsylvania.

The most senior French Catholic cleric to be caught up in scandal is Cardinal Philippe Barbarin, who is to go on trial in January for allegedly covering up for a priest accused of abusing boy scouts in the Lyon area in the 1980s.
With the number of tourists rising, international hotel operators are working up an appetite for the Vietnamese market

The country has witnessed a large amount of growth in the numbers of international hotel brands and foreign management companies over the past few years.

According to the latest figures by Savills Vietnam, the number of international hotel operators has increased from 30 in 2010 to just short of 80 at the end of 2017. In the first half of 2018, some additional famous brand names came to Vietnam. Among them are Mandarin Oriental in Ho Chi Minh City and Best Western Premier in the central province of Quang Binh.

Radisson Hotel Group recently opened Radisson Blu Resort on Phu Quoc  its first hotel in Vietnam. Travelodge Asia also announced plans for its first property in the central coastal city of Nha Trang, which is scheduled to open in 2020.

Meanwhile, Spains Melia Hotel International has strengthened its footprint in Vietnam with the recent signing of three new properties in Ho Chi Minh City, namely Melia Saigon Central, INNSIDE Saigon Central, and INNSIDE Saigon Mariamman, bringing the groups number of current and future properties in Vietnam to 10.

There have also been new brands introduced into the market in the last three years, including Ozo and X2 Vibe (in New Hoi An City), Double Tree by Hilton (in Halong, Vung Tau, and Hanoi), Four Seasons (in Quang Nam and Hanoi), Oakwood (in Ho Chi Minh City), Glow (in Danang), and Mai House (in Ho Chi Minh City).

Mauro Gasparotti, director of Savills Hotels Asia Pacific, said that he observed a large increase of interest in the country from operators over the past three years, following the expansion of the hospitality market.

Vietnamese developers are still new to hospitality products, but with the large amount of supply coming, they will learn quickly, and more high-quality assets are expected to be under way. We have forecast that a total of more than 30,000 new rooms will be opened by the end of 2019, said Gasparotti.

The number of international operators is expected to grow in the coming years, along with the number of local management companies.

We are very positive about the growth of the sector and the attraction of international operators to Vietnam. It is very interesting to see that operators themselves are launching new brands to target new types of clients such as millennials or health-conscious travellers. Vietnam would be a high-potential market for them to introduce focused brands, as the categories of travellers here are largely diversified, said Gasparotti.

A recent report by CBRE revealed that foreign investor demand has mostly been led by Asian-based groups. These hold several hotels in large cities and resort destinations.

The comparatively higher yields available in Vietnam continue to lure Asian-based property developers and real estate companies. Mid-market business and hotels in Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi are the main focus, due to the lack of supply in the gap between high-end and local operators.

Recently, InterContinental Hotel Group (IHG) acquired a 51-per-cent stake in Regent Hotels and Resorts for an amount of $39 million. Regent has an operation contract for BIM Groups Regent Residences Phu Quoc, which will become operational in 2019. With the transaction, IHG expanded its portfolio to 10 hotels and resorts in Hanoi, Danang, and Ho Chi Minh City.

Indochina Capital lately joined with Japans Kajima to build up a chain of hotels in Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh City, and Danang under the brand name Wink Hotels. The two first land plots were revealed to be in Ho Chi Minh City and Danang  two business and tourism hubs of Vietnam. The 226-room hotel in Ho Chi Minh City will come online in 2019, whereas the 243-room hotel in Danang will be put into operation in 2020.

The hotel segment has been very active in the last three years and has caught the attention of many foreign investors, mainly from Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, and Singapore.

South Korean investors mostly seek large-scale, high-end hotels with up to 250 rooms in Hanoi, Danang, and Ho Chi Minh City, where many South Koreans live, while Japanese investors are interested in smaller-scale hotels with fewer than 150 rooms in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City. Singaporean investors, meanwhile, hunt for multi-purpose complexes featuring a hotel segment.

Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City currently have limited land funds for hotel development, since the prices are high, while Danang and Phu Quoc are offering more opportunities for investors, with much land left to develop.

It can be expected that the number of hotel transactions will remain high until at least 2019, due to the limited supply and high demand.

Vietnam was at the third position of the fastest-growing tourist destinations in 2017 in a report published by the United Nations

World Tourism Organization (UNWTO). Vietnam received more than 13 million international visitors in 2017, an increase of 6.8 per cent compared to 2016. International arrivals to Vietnam in the first eight months of 2018 reached more than 10.4 million, increasing by 22.8 per cent compared to the same period of last year.
The Vietnamese youth is optimistic about the changes Industry 4.0 will bring, Photo: Le Toan

Source: World Economic Forum and Sea, one of Southeast Asias leading internet companies

Last weeks visit to Vietnam by Klaus Schwab, founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum (WEF), was quite special. He came to the country with a big gift, a great deal of novel ideas for Vietnam to go forwards sustainably within the unfolding Fourth Industrial Revolution.

The gift was the Vietnamese-language version of his world-famous book titled Shaping the Fourth Industrial Revolution, which has already been translated into 29 languages.

Shaping the Fourth Industrial Revolution draws on contributions by more than 200 of the worlds leading technological, economic, and sociological experts to present a practical guide for citizens, business leaders, social influencers, and policy-makers.

It outlines the most important dynamics of todays

technological revolution, highlights important stakeholders that are often overlooked in discussions of the latest scientific breakthroughs, and dives into 12 different technological areas that are key to the future of humanity.

I dont want to see Vietnam miss its Industry 4.0 opportunities, and you will be the very drivers of Vietnams future, which everyone wants to see continuing to be bright, Schwab told the Open Forum ASEAN, part of the WEF on ASEAN 2018 event held last week in Hanoi.

The Open Forum ASEAN was partaken in by more than 1,000 people, including hundreds of students from several universities in Hanoi.

I would like to tell you that Vietnam will miss its train to Industry 4.0 if its people and its businesses fail to improve themselves with knowledge of the ongoing digital technology revolution, Schwab said.

Future of employment

Nguyen Thanh Binh from the University of Transport and Communications was one of the students at the event. In addition to his studies, he also works as a waiter at a restaurant near his university to earn money to take an English class and a class on design using digital technologies.

I dont want to be unemployed after graduation, and all parts of transport projects have begun to apply digital solutions, Binh told VIR. I have to prepare for my future. I dont want to earn a living as my parents are doing, working on a rice field just to earn enough to survive.

According to the World Bank, Vietnams shift from a centrally planned to a market economy has transformed the country from one of the poorest in the world into a lower middle-income country. Vietnam is now one of the most dynamic emerging countries in East Asia.

Vietnam is experiencing rapid demographic and social change. After years of growth, the population reached about 95 million in 2017 (up from about 60 million in 1986) and is expected to expand to 120 million before tailing off around 2050. Currently, 70 per cent of the population is under 35 years of age, with a life expectancy of close to 73 years. There is an emerging middle class, currently accounting for 13 per cent of the population, but expected to reach 26 per cent by 2026.

However, in the labour market, the International Labour Organization forecasts that 56 per cent of all employment in Cambodia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam is at high risk of being replaced by technology over the next decade or two.

Over the past two decades, Vietnam has successfully inserted itself into select global value chains while achieving a remarkable reduction in poverty. In the years ahead, disruptive technologies will present both challenges and opportunities for remaining on this successful trajectory, said Ousmane Dione, the World Banks country director for Vietnam.

Currently, about 1.6 million people enter the domestic labour market each year, creating a major burden for the government in trying to provide sufficient employment for its citizens. This burden is expected to grow further with Industry 4.0 rising on, as robots and high technologies are believed to replace a great deal of workers, especially manual labourers.

The Fourth Industrial Revolution is changing everything  from the way we relate to one another, to the way our economies work, to what it means to be human. We cannot let the brave new world that technology is creating simply happen. We must shape a future we want to live in, Schwab said.

Binh said he felt worried by what Schwab was talking about, because even though he is preparing for his future, he does not know for sure whether he will be able to apply what he has learned to his future work.

At the WEF on ASEAN, the WEF also launched a survey on how technology will impact the ASEANs youth like Binh. 64,000 ASEAN citizens responded, including more than 11,000 from Vietnam.

Results showed that 51.5 per cent of Vietnamese youth believe that technology will increase the number of jobs, which is lower than the rates of 54 per cent in Indonesia and 60.3 per cent in the Philippines. However, it is also higher than the 45.5 per cent in Malaysia, the 45.2 per cent in Thailand, and the 31.2 per cent in Singapore (see box for details).

Fourth Industrial Revolution technologies like artificial intelligence, advanced robotics, and self-driving vehicles will bring significant disruption to the job market, said Justin Wood, head of Asia-Pacific and member of the executive committee at the WEF.

No one knows yet what impact these technologies will have on jobs and salaries. Globally, there is concern that technological change may bring rising inequality and joblessness. But in the ASEAN, the sentiment seems to be much more positive, he said.

More investment into human resources needed

Vietnam must invest now in skills and health for the workforce of the future, said the World Banks Dione.

In 1999, the US Department of Labor predicted that 65 per cent of primary school children would end up in jobs that had not been invented at the time. Last year, this number jumped to 85 per cent, according to Dell Technologies.

We are looking at an unknown job landscape in the future. In human capital terms, Vietnam is well positioned. It has achieved good basic education outcomes, reflected through its strong results in international assessments such as PISA and Young Lives, and it has a dynamic young generation that can embrace and adapt to changes. Also, Vietnam ranks seventh in terms of improvements to its universal health coverage score, Dione said.

However, according to him, the country is ageing. The share of Vietnams population at working age peaked last year, and is now on a decline. By 2050, it is expected that one out of every five Vietnamese people will be over 65 years old. A critical challenge in Vietnam is that only 8 per cent of the labour force has university education, and this is insufficient to make the leap into Industry 4.0. Workers need to be equipped with the right skill mix to ride the wave.

In order to stay ahead and embrace shifts in innovation, promoting digital literacy is important. This includes the existing public sector workforce, so it can respond to emerging digital demands, Dione said.

In many cases, this will require a change in mindset and a departure from comfort zones. Partnering with the private sector and citizens to leverage their participation, creativity, and innovation in public services will be useful to help the public sector workforce keep up with the digital pace, he said.

As an example, China has been able to move forward with transformative digital health services that can improve access to, and the quality of, healthcare. This is made possible by plentiful domestic venture capital resources of $5-10 billion, promising IPO valuations, and the power of the public sector to integrate innovations quickly into service delivery models.

These digital health service initiatives include the Robot, a telemedicine system that aims to boost the appropriateness of care at village-level clinic in Anhui, or the WeDoctor platform that provides online access to health professionals and allows bookings for face-to-face appointments.

Student Binh from the University of Transport and Communications expects that Diones words and Schwabs book should be heeded and translated into actions.

I dont want to be a burden to society after graduation. Young people like me want to be a strong wheel for the economys train heading towards Industry 4.0, Binh said.
TH Group kicks off giant dairy complex in Russia

Once completed, the project, the first phase of which is valued at $500 million, will become the largest and most modern fresh milk plant in Russia, and also Vietnams first project of the type in the country. With a capacity of 1,500 tonnes of milk per day, the plant is expected to begin production in 2019 and will entirely source material from TH Groups existing dairy farms in Moscow and Kaluga.

TH Groups milk project does not only contribute to bolstering investment and trade exchanges between Russia and Vietnam, it also attests to Vietnams efforts to support Russia in the rebuilding of its agricultural production, which was once foremost in the world, said Party General Secretary Nguyen Phu Trong at the ground-breaking ceremony for the project, which he attended as part of his official visit to Russia.

The Party leader said that the project heralds the start of a new investment trend of Vietnamese companies in Russia. So far, most of Vietnams outbound investment projects in Russia are in the oil and gas sector and mostly run by state-owned businesses. TH Groups project differs greatly from them, as it is run by a private company and involves high-tech agriculture.

I believe more and more Vietnamese companies will look at Russia as an up-and-coming investment target and set up businesses in the country, said Party General Secretary Trong.

As per the plan, TH Group will complete disbursing the whole $2.7 billion investment in Russia within the next decade.

Shortly after receiving the investment certificate for the project in May 2016, TH began the construction of a dairy farm in Moscow and another in the Kaluga region in October 2016, located just under 100 kilometres south-west of Moscow. Late last year, the first 1,100 dairy cows were imported from the US to THs Moscow farm.

The Russian milk market is facing mounting hardships following the ban on food imports, including milk, from the EU and the US. Statistics showed that from 2013 to 2017, the milk material produced by Russia came to about 20 million tonnes, making up 76 per cent of the total demand, while the remaining 24 per cent  equalling about seven million tonnes per year  must be made up by imports.

Thai Huong, founder of TH Group, saw the opportunity and decided to invest in Russia. The plan received active support of Russian President Vladimir Putins administration.

The Foreign Investment Agencys latest figures show that Vietnamese companies have registered 13 investment projects in Russia valued at nearly $3 billion.
Nguyen Xuan Phuc - Prime Minister When thinking about the ASEAN, abundant natural resources with great potential a global manufacturing base comes to mind. However, in the Fourth Industrial Revolution with its spectacular scientific and technological achievements, the ASEAN is now known as one of the cradles of novel and innovative ideas. High-technology and the new digital economy have become high-potential sectors for the ASEAN, forecast to quadruple in value to $200 billion by 2025. The opportunities that the Fourth Industrial Revolution is bringing to ASEAN member states are tremendous. I would like to highlight a number of opportunities and benefits, such as creating breakthroughs in increasing labour productivity in five major industries including electronics, chemical and petroleum, consumer goods, foodstuff, and pharmacy. The opportunities also include the promotion of more inclusive growth to meet the Sustainable Development Goals initiated by the United Nations, based on the application of Industry 4.0 in order to create connectivity and sharing of values and new innovations. Another opportunity is to develop small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), which are the backbone of the ASEAN economies and are also the source of many new ideas. Industry 4.0 has opened up opportunities to link SMEs with transnational and global markets. We also have an opportunity to take a shortcut in boosting the national industrialisation policy. The ASEAN can bypass traditional industrial development stages through the development of artificial intelligence, robots, unmanned aircrafts, satellites, and sensors. This is aimed at improving productivity and effectively exploiting all human and natural resources. However, the ASEAN also has to face lots of challenges, such as the danger of unemployment due to automation. According to the International Labour Organization, 56 per cent of all employment in five ASEAN nations [Cambodia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam] is at high risk of being replaced with technology over the next decade or two. This would mean that the traditional age of Asian manufacturing will come to an end. Another challenge is that there will be an increase in the gap in incomes. Industry 4.0 can help increase the incomes of people and nations with talent and knowledge, while also being able to cause social instability. In this context, the ASEAN is proud to have Singapore as a successful example in developing a digital economy. This nation has applied achievements of Industry 4.0 to develop by leaps and bounds over the past years. Facing all of the coming opportunities and challenges, ASEAN member states need to advance their policy priorities based on the shared interests of the whole region. Martin Frick - Managing director of Asia-Pacific, Temenos Temenos is leading the digital transformation of banking services in the Asia-Pacific region and around the world, and 3,000 banks globally are using Temenos software. In Vietnam, we have 19 clients including banks such as VPBank, Military Bank, Sacombank, and Techombank. These banks are very keen on improving their technology in order to improve efficiency and provide better customer service. Today, banks in Vietnam and across the ASEAN region understand that to survive in an increasingly competitive market  and to better serve their customers  it is important to become truly digital. Just as the need to digitally transform core systems is fully understood, there is also a growing realisation that software designed in-house runs a high risk of wasting resources. In Vietnam, Industry 4.0 has also become a hot topic, and we can see rapid growth in the use of the internet through e-commerce and e-payment. At Temenos, we are very optimistic about the continuing development of the internet in Vietnam. However, Industry 4.0 can have a major economic impact due to opening borders for cross-border trade and payments. In addition to the challenges of Industry 4.0, more widespread regulation and tougher market conditions are accelerating change and exacerbating the difficulties that banks face. New technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning offer both a challenge and an opportunity to improve banking performance and banks across the Asia-Pacific region are now deploying AI to differentiate their services from those of their competitors. This trend was illustrated earlier in the year when China Construction Bank opened a bank entirely operated by robots. Like any other industry that faces significant ethical and regulatory constraints, I believe that banking needs to carefully consider the impact of AI on the workforce before it is widely deployed. Le Hong Minh - CEO, VNG I often tell my friends that we are a very lucky generation to have grown up in the 1990s, because at that time, computers were first introduced into Vietnam, and then came the internet. They are wonderful technologies which can help people realise their dreams, play games, and connect with those living on the other side of the earth. However, for young people, these technologies are nothing special. In the 1990s, when we grew up, they took place in a very special context as they changed everything. We wanted to build up a company from such wonderful things, which later on became the ordinary things that we see now. At present, wonderful things take place around us. For example, when we pose a question to a computer, the computer will give an answer naturally thanks to Googles artificial intelligence (AI) technology. In another example, when Steve Jobs introduced the first iPhone in 2007, we, as technological developers, understood that that was a wonderful moment. Over the next 20 years, you will be looking back at the past as we are doing now. Please do not do normal things, go for the extraordinary. The future of humankind will depend on what you think is unimaginable, different or wonderful. Five years ago, digital marketing was a hot training sector. However, currently, the strong development of AI has almost changed the way digital marketing is going. Technologies are changing the world drastically. Yutaka Sanada - Regional senior vice president, Nissan Motor Co., Ltd. Countries like Vietnam have the opportunity to bypass traditional phases of industrial development and leapfrog into Industry 4.0. With the Internet of Things, Big Data, and analytics, know-how is accessible to all countries, including Vietnam. Nissan has been here in Vietnam for many years. And, right now, Vietnam is joining the Fourth Industrial Revolution. According to some research specific to Vietnam-oriented projects, the boost is positive. Here at Nissan, we have a local engineering centre for automotive technology. We have hired 2,000 young engineers who are highly capable. They are touching on the latest modern developments for the US and China markets. It is the same for other manufacturers: engineers here in Vietnam know how to make the latest technology and how to assemble it locally. These engineers can innovate their own ideas, and create a uniquely Vietnamese way to do it. Some revolutions are not expected to happen immediately, and Vietnam is still in the work-in-progress stage. However, the demand for young engineers is likely to expand rapidly in the next five years. So motorisation will accelerate in maybe five years time, meaning that in 2022 or 2023, some surprising, revolutionary events may happen in Vietnams industry. Kim Jung In- CEO, Sein I&D Vietnam Co., Ltd. The Fourth Industrial Revolution has offered and will continue to offer both opportunities and challenges. It is time for Vietnam and South Korea to prepare a new form of co-operation in a manner suitable to their own development situations. The onset of Industry 4.0 is all about technical capacities and ideas which are created by humans. Thus, we must look for opportunities in the development of human resources suitable to Industry 4.0. The sectors to which the Vietnamese government is attaching great importance include smart cities, e-government, and construction of infrastructure for information and communications. These are also the sectors which are the strengths of South Korean businesses. If enterprises and research agencies in both countries develop a joint network for close co-operation, good outcomes will be achieved. In Industry 4.0, the co-operation space for the two countries enterprises needs to be expanded. We will also have to expand the co-operation network within the ASEAN and in the world, and actively grab opportunities from the super-connected society. It will be very good if we can create opportunities from this foundation. I suggest that efforts must be made to further cement the South Korea-Vietnam co-operation via healthy competition. BumRyung Yoo - CEO, Mobidays Mobidays is a global mobile marketing company which connects and mediates domestic and international advertisers, advertising agencies, and general media representatives with major mobile mediums. Not only Vietnam, but also the ASEAN as a whole is being hit by the Fourth Industrial Revolution. However, from my sense, the prospects of Vietnam are promising because of the countrys continued high growth for the next five years, and its large population with substantial consumption power. Customers in Vietnam will need more time to spend much more on digital content. The infrastructure for digital content in Vietnam will also need time to develop more. In order for Vietnam to seize opportunities from Industry 4.0, Vietnamese people will need to be equipped with foreign languages.
Latvia is presently building a metal fence, 90 kilometres long and 2.5 metres high, along its frontier with Russia. It will be finished before the end of the year, and will be extended in 2019 along more than 190 kilometres of the frontier, for a planned cost of 17 million Euros.

A similar 135 kilometre fence is being built by Lithuania along its frontier with the Russian territory of Kaliningrad.

Estonia has announced the impending construction of a wall, also along the frontier with Russia, 110 kilometres long and also 2.5 metres high. Planned cost  more than 70 million Euros, for which the Estonian government intends to ask for finance from the European Union.

The objective of these walls, according to goverment declarations, is to  protect the exterior frontiers of Europe and NATO . If we leave aside for a moment the idea that they need to be  protected  from massive migratory flows from Russia, there is only one motive left - the exterior frontiers of the EU and NATO now need to be  protected  from the  Russian menace .

Since the fences built by the Baltic countries along their frontiers with Russia have a military efficiency approaching zero, their objective must be fundamentally ideological  a physical symbol that just beyond the fence, there lurks a dangerous enemy who is threatening us.

This is part of the thunderous politico-media psyop (psychological operation) intended to justify the escalation of the USA and NATO against Russia.

In this context, the President of the Italian Republic, Sergio Mattarella, visited Latvia twice  the first time in July on the occasion of his tour of the Baltic countries and Georgia. Then, at the official dinner in Riga, he congratulated Latvia for having chosen  integration with NATO and the European Union  and for having decided to  adopt the model of an open society, founded on the respect of the rule of Law, democracy, and the central place of human rights .

He addressed this comment to Latvian President Raymond Vejonis, who, in April, had already approved the project for a law forbidding the teaching of Russian in Latvia, a country whose population is composed of almost 30 % of ethnic Russians, and where Russian is the main language of 40 % of its citizens.

A liberticide measure which, by forbidding multilingualism  which is recognised by the European Union itself - will later discriminate against the Russian minority, accused of being  Russias fifth column .

Two months later, in September, President Mattarella returned to Latvia to take part in an informal summit of the heads of state of the European Union, where, amongst other subjects, they dealt with the theme of cyber-attacks by  states which have a hostile attitude  (a clear reference to Russia).

After the summit,the President of the Republic visited the military base of dazi, where he met with the Italian contingent included in the NATO battle group deployed in Latvia as part of the  advanced forward presence  at the frontiers with Russia.  Your presence is an element which reassures our friends from Latvia and the other Baltic states , he declared  words which substantially bolster the psyop by suggesting that there exists a threat from Russia to the Baltic nations and the rest of Europe.

On 24 September, Pope Francis will also be arriving in Latvia on a visit to the three Baltic countries. We dont yet know if, by repeating  we must build bridges, not walls , he will have something to say about the new iron curtain which divides the European region and is preparing peoples minds for war. Or whether in Riga, laying flowers on the  Monument to Freedom , he will demand the freedom for young Russian Latvians to learn and use their own language.
New Chairman of Universitys Board of Governors

The Minister with responsibility for the University, Gilbert Licudi, has announced the appointment of Albert Langston as the new chairman of the Board of Governors of the University.

Albert Langston brings extensive experience and understanding of corporate governance built over a period of over 40 years. He is a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Bankers and is Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Gibraltar International Bank Limited.

Mr Langston is a former Chairman and Country Manager of Lloyds Bank Gibraltar and former Assistant General Manager of Barclays (Gibraltar Management) Limited. He has been President of the Gibraltar Bankers Association (two terms) as well as having served on the board of the Gibraltar Deposit Protection Scheme and founding member of the Gibraltar Finance Centre Council. He is also Chairman of the Gibraltar Magistrates Association and a Lay Assessor for complicated financial Supreme Court cases.

Mr Langston succeeds Jose Julio Pisharello as Chairman of the Universitys Board of Governors. Mr Pisharellos term of office comes to an end on 24 September 2018.

Mr Pisharello said, I was truly humbled when Mr Licudi approached me back in 2015 to serve as Chair of the Board. It has indeed been a privilege and honour to have done so notwithstanding the many challenges and the understandable high expectations that such an exciting project elicited.

I was extremely fortunate in chairing a Board which included professionals of the highest calibre and repute. I would like to express my sincere thanks to them. I wish the University every success.

Mr Langston said, It is a tremendous privilege to have been invited by the Minister to serve as Chairman of the Board of Governors of the University of Gibraltar. The University has a very promising and exciting future ahead and I am honoured to have been approached to be its Chair.

Darren Grech has also been appointed as one of the governors. Mr Grech brings a great deal of experience in education and in management and has already been working with the University.

Mr Langston and Mr Grech join the existing members of the Board, Frank Carreras, Professor Clive Finlayson, Professor Ian Peate, the recently appointed staff representative, Louise Garcia as well as the Universitys Vice-Chancellor (ag) Professor Catherine Bachleda, the Universitys Financial Comptroller, Paul Bowling and the Director of Education, Jackie Mason.

Mr Licudi said, I wish to thank Mr Pisharello as well as the two other outgoing members of the Board, Peter Montegriffo and Ernest Gomez for their service to the University. They have made a very substantial contribution to the University both collectively and individually. They were inaugural governors and took over a brand new institution with all the challenges that that entails. Under their leadership, the University has set solid foundations and is now in a position to reap rewards through a process of consolidation and expansion.

I have always believed that we created a unique institution with enormous potential. The availability of student accommodation as from next year puts the University well on the road towards achieving that potential. Albert Langstons experience and expertise will no doubt be an asset to the University combined with the range of talent in the Board of Governors. I am truly excited about the future of the University.
Tea with the Dames. Photo: Mark Johnson/Sundance Selects

If you could spend the weekend in the English countryside drinking tea and champagne with anyone, who would it be? Im pretty sure the answer would be the subjects of IFC Films new documentary Tea With the Dames: Dames Eileen Atkins, Judi Dench, Joan Plowright, and Maggie Smith. The four renowned actresses are also longtime friends, and in this film they get together at the cottage Plowright once shared with her husband, Laurence Olivier, where they reminisce about the old days, lament the aging process, discuss their craft, and laugh. A lot. The old friends cover a whole host of topics, all of which I would have listened to them go on about for hours, but here are 11 of the best takeaways from our quick visit to the English countryside with these four legends, who also happen to be a real hoot.

Judi Dench will give you all the advice about becoming a dame that you really need.

Each of the ladies shares what it felt like to be named a Dame by the Queen: It was a tremendous honor not just for them, but for the people who helped get them there; more than that, Joan Plowright points out that it represented a sort of acceptance of her career on a grand stage. But becoming a Dame can be nerve-wracking, so sharing advice with the newbies is of the utmost importance. Judi Dench has the right idea (she was the first of the four to become a Dame). When the honor was bestowed upon Maggie Smith, Dench called her up to congratulate her and give her some thoughts on the whole thing: It doesnt make any difference, you can still swear. And this is why we all want to have tea with these dames. And also champagne.

All four actresses still get nervous when theyre working.

People might assume that after all the awards and accolades and just working in the business for as long as they have, our four dames wouldve conquered stage fright or on-set nerves  but the women dont hesitate to set the record straight: All four of them suffered from insecurities and fear throughout their careers  it never goes away. Eileen Atkins remembers suffering from intense doubt and fear every day on her way to the theater, thinking, Would you like to be run over now? and barely being able to answer, no. Dames: Theyre just like us! And its not just early in their careers: Both Smith and Dench talk about fear on film sets. They dont want to be the person who messes up a take and has to endure all the passive-aggressive sighing from everyone else on set. Dont these ladies know who they are? As if anyone would step to Smith, Dench, Atkins, or Plowright if they flubbed a line.

Set-photographing aint easy.

Poor Mark! Mark is the on-set photographer of Tea With the Dames and he takes a lot of shit. The ladies are not pleased with the angles hes chosen for their group photo  its just not kind to old ladies, Eileen Atkins tells him  and Maggie Smith even goes so far as to ask if this is Marks first day. Its not a knock on him! Everyone has to start somewhere! Later, Mark starts taking photos while Maggie Smith is talking about the insane amount of reaction shots she and Alan Rickman had to come up with on the Harry Potter movies, and Smith is not having it. She thinks Mark has taken enough photos for a while and dismisses him. It sounds a little harsh, but lets be honest  Mark is having the time of his life. Oh, to be bossed around by Professor McGonagall!

Theres a paramedic out there who should be very, very scared of Judi Dench.

Like, very scared. Theres a lovely little section in which the four actresses reflect on aging. Perhaps reflect is the wrong word, since these ladies are never overly sentimental. Instead of waxing poetic about how fleeting life is, they talk more about the practical parts of getting older  how much of a pain in the ass it is. Theres discussion of hearing aids (You need to get them, Jud, Smith tells her reluctant buddy Dench), and poor eyesight (they laughed when producers suggested printing out materials for the ladies to look at), and even how gauche it is to talk about planning your funeral. But what Judi Dench really cant stand about getting older is how patronizing everyone gets, including paramedics who come to your rescue. I dont want to ruin the entire story for you because it is an actual delight, but know that it starts with Judi Dench getting stung by a bee on her butt and ends with her yelling, You fuck off! Ive just done 8 weeks in The Winters Tale at the Garrick Theatre! The story is honestly worth the price of admission for this thing.

The Dowager Countess has not watched Downton Abbey and that feels very on-brand.

At one point, Maggie Smith and Judi Dench are Sitting on a Couch Together  very much a show I would watch  which is hilarious in and of itself because of how ridiculous they find it (When have we ever sat like this?), but it also provides the backdrop for one of the best moments of the entire film. Mags and Jud are talking about some of their bigger productions, and when Judi asks Maggie how many episodes of Downton Abbey she did, she cant answer. And then were privy to a secret between friends: Maggie whispers that she hasnt seen the show yet even though they gave her a box set of DVDs: I havent got time. Whether this is method acting or not, youll never love Maggie Smith more than in this moment.

We have Judi Denchs late husband to thank for her turn as James Bonds M.

Judi Dench played James Bonds superior, M, for 17 years (from GoldenEye through Skyfall), but when she was initially asked to take on the role, she was a little taken aback. It was her husband, actor Michael Williams, who pushed her to do it. She says he told her, I long to live with a Bond woman, and so she obliged. The world is forever grateful.

These four dames will make you cry with their advice to their younger selves.

Again, this lot is in no way sentimental or schmaltzy (typical Brits, you know), but their responses are so thoughtful when asked what advice theyd bestow upon their younger selves, should their younger selves listen (Smith isnt so convinced). Plowright would tell herself to get into mindfulness and meditation, things she relies on now. Atkins wishes she wasnt so bad-tempered and that she listened more. Maggie Smith gives such a Maggie Smith response: When in doubt, dont, which Ill now go get tattooed on myself. Judi Dench is the most wistful: Try not to be so susceptible to falling in love, she offers up. Her friends promptly boo her for being so forlorn about the whole thing. When they mostly agree that its too late to change anything now anyway, Joan Plowright chimes in, Its never too late. Its not fair because theyre all drinking champagne and Im not and I am having a lot of feelings about all of this.

Dame Judi Dench is the perfect tongue twister for all your vocal warm-up needs.

The film is bookended with the four dames doing some vocal warm-ups  you know, your typical red leather, yellow leather stuff, but then they pull out the twistiest twister of all: Dame Judi Dench. Seriously, say it out loud. Now, faster. Its hard! Dame Judi Dench herself gets it, and so does Eileen Atkins, but Maggie Smith stumbles a bit. Is this the real way Dame Judi Dench prepares for a scene? It should be! Shes earned it.

Eileen Atkins doesnt think she needed the sixties to have a good time.

And neither does Judi Dench! These two were the wild ones of the bunch, it seems; they were just living and loving and rocking some fine-as-hell outfits during the tumultuous 1960s. But aside from the photos and footage of their great wardrobes during their discussion of the decade, this section of the film also gives us a great Vanessa Redgrave story. Both Atkins and Dench were part of the Vietnam War protest in Trafalgar Square. Atkins and Dench ran off when things got bad, but Dench remembers one glorious detail about their friend and fellow stage actress: Vanessa got arrested and remembered she had a matinee. What a time!

These women are the best of friends; you know this because they revel in calling out Judi Dench for taking all of their parts.

When asked if theyd like to continue working for as long as they can, they all respond with a Yes  as long as they keep being asked. But the friends arent above some playful ribbing of their pal Jud, who seems to get asked more than anyone else. Judi Dench starts to take offense, but Plowright has a story to back up the claim. Her American agent told her that they could look for a nice little cameo role that Judi Dench hasnt got her paws on! Rude, but true. More than just revealing some cheeky little friendship moments, this all demonstrates that these legendary actresses want to keep working  so people should keep asking.

Basically nothing has changed in regards to women being judged on their looks.

Not that this is surprising to anyone, but even legendary stage and screen actresses have had to put up with bullshit over their looks from the very start of their careers. Before sending her off to chase her dream, Joan Plowrights own mother told her, Youre no oil painting, my girl, but you have the spark. Eileen Atkins has a similar story about being introduced by a teacher to another actor; she overheard the teacher express concern that although she was a good actress, she wasnt pretty. The actors response, however, changed Atkinss whole mindset: No, shes not conventionally pretty in any way, but do you know what? Shes sexy. And so she went on her merry way.

The focus on their looks clearly stayed with all of the actresses: All four feared playing Cleopatra in any production of Antony and Cleopatra. Judi Denchs assessment on being cast in the 1987 National Theatre production of the play is perhaps the most famous: She told director Peter Hall that he had just cast a menopausal dwarf to play the great beauty. Maggie Smith would only take the role in a Canadian production for fear of being laughed out of London. And Eileen Atkins turned down the role four times before agreeing to it because she didnt have the courage to take on Cleopatra and all the critics. So basically what theyre saying is, SAME AS IT EVER WAS.
What Jacobson imagines is in Oprahs bag. Photo: Courtesy of Abbi Jacobson

Being one of the high priestesses of Comedy Central aside, Broad Citys Abbi Jacobson is an incredibly warm and witty illustrator, talents of which went on display two years ago upon the release of her first full-fledged illustrative work, Carry This Book. In it, Jacobson imagines a world where peoples handbags  both real-world celebrities and fictional characters  get the X-ray treatment, and its contents are on display for all the world to see. Elegant fake lashes? Throat lozenges? Dave & Busters membership cards? Blunts? You name it, its there. You can find out so much about someone by what they carry around with them and what they have handy, Jacobson explained to us over the phone this week, calling in from Broad Citys set. Peoples bags are interesting to me, even how they organize them, too. The more I thought about it, the more I thought it was an interesting and voyeuristic idea.

Jacobson, who grew up in an artistic family, attended art school in Maryland as an undergraduate, but it was only upon moving to the concrete, claustrophobic jungle of New York City that she pursued illustration as an artistic medium. I did drawing and painting, but I changed to illustration because I didnt have a studio anymore, so I had no space, she said with a laugh. I had a desk, so I switched to illustration, because I only had that workspace available. With 100% of the proceeds going to support the ACLU, Jacobson will be selling some of her original artwork to benefit the organization during a pop-up on September 30, in New York City, at 163 Bowery. In anticipation, she was nice enough to guide us through five of her favorite illustrations from Carry This Book.

RuPaul

Photo: Courtesy of Abbi Jacobson

Judge Judy is one of RuPauls favorites, which I found out doing some research. That page is hilarious to me, because he hadnt done the show yet, and I legitimately put that in there because we were writing the fourth season at the same time I was making the book. I was like, Im getting him on the show! Im putting the script in here for him to do the show! We hadnt gotten him to agree yet, so it was hilarious to me how meta it was.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg

Photo: Courtesy of Abbi Jacobson

Selecting who was going to be in the book was hard  and I couldve done a lot more people  but I love and admire her so much, so that was an easy decision. I thought it could be funny, not so much what was in her bag, but what was in her bag under the bench. The judges have to sit for so long, so what snacks does she have? I love imagining that she pumps herself up with Jock Jams. The whole thing of looking inside any celebritys bag is the relatability factor. You wanna see something juicy and wanna be like, Oh my God, I have that too! Right? Thats what were always seeking out. I love the thinking of Its such a nerve-racking job, so what does she do to calm herself down?

Oprah Winfrey

Photo: Courtesy of Abbi Jacobson

Some pages in the book are definitely more jam-packed, the more I either love the person or the more information I know about them, for whatever reason. With Oprah, I had so much fun with her because Im a big fan. With Farmville, I dont play Farmville, but wouldnt it be funny if Oprah plays some game on her phone all the time that youd never think? The keys were so fun for a lot of different people, seeing somebodys keychain. Im sure Oprah doesnt even have to carry any actual keys for all of her different houses and cars! And with money, shes always so generous and giving people stuff all the time. The gratitude journal Ive known forever about her. When I was researching her, the amount of quotes Oprah has that people recite I couldnt even tell you, because it was so many. It was hard to pick, shes just that inspirational. She was one of the first illustrations I did, so I started off strong.

Anna Wintour

Photo: Courtesy of Abbi Jacobson

The illustration of her book was one of my favorite things to do. Annas book! I get to write what all of these crazy, ridiculous, and probably not even that-far-off fashion trends! Those little pads in her book. Then I thought, it would be so funny if Anna Wintour ate Chipotle every day. Just picturing her in line at Chipotle makes me laugh.

Abbi Abrams

Photo: Courtesy of Abbi Jacobson

Drawing Abbi and Ilanas pages were so fun, because it allowed me to do all of these little inside jokes and get, from a totally different perspective, their lives and what things they might have with them in their bags. I give my character a lot of my illustrations on the show that Ive had years ago. All of her artwork is stuff I drew. So it was a nice moment for me to draw her stuff, since her style is also in my style. It was also cathartic, too, because doing the book was really stressful while we were writing the fourth season. It was so nice that I was diving into these characters in a different way.
Photo: Annapurna Pictures

The Sisters Brothers shootouts, including the one that opens the film, almost all take place in ultrawides, as if to suggest to get any closer to the action would not reveal anything we hadnt already seen before a dozen times. Were inclined to agree, especially if we know anything about the plot going in. But the idea that the well-worn Western genre has never seen the likes of this before is a stylistic and textual premise that almost has to be baked into contemporary stories. Of course, it cant be true for all of them (or necessarily a good thing). But credit to The Sisters Brothers: besides the cat-and-mouse chase across the frontier, the skeletal settlements and pristine wilderness, approximately half of it really does feel like a story about the American Frontier that is underreported at best.

The film follows Charlie and Eli Sisters (Joaquin Phoenix and John C. Reilly, respectively), assassin brothers who are making their way across the Oregon Territory, hired to apprehend a man who theyre told has robbed their boss. That man is Hermann Kermit Warm (Riz Ahmed), a soft-spoken eccentric type who claims to have created a chemical formula that instantly detects gold deposits. A third associate of the brothers, John Morris (Jake Gyllenhaal), has been hired to go ahead of them to capture Hermann and hold him in custody until they arrive, but it doesnt take long for him to take a liking to his charge, and abandon the job he was hired to do. Hermann, in addition to being an entrepreneur, has dreams of starting a utopian community  a very hot trend in the 1800s that doesnt get nearly as much air time as its louder, more violent contemporaries  and Morris is swept up in the dream as well.

Ahmed is mesmerizing here  exuding a kind of radical kindness thats just strange enough to keep one on ones guard  and the friendship between his and Gyllenhaals characters is quiet, curious, and affectionate. Of course most, if not all, attempts at intentional living such as Warms failed, and theres a kind of bittersweet longing that hangs over The Sisters Brothers, for all the idiocy of man that stands in the way of peace and prosperity.

Maybe it truly does take an outside perspective to breathe new life into a genre  the director, Jacques Audiard, is making his English-language debut with the film, based on a 2011 novel by Canadian Patrick deWitt, and theres a pleasant enough tonal zag for every expected zig in the plot. But the central story, between Charlie and Eli, and the path of their contentious, lopsided, but ultimately loyal relationship, doesnt feel particularly insightful, even with a warm, vulnerable performance from Reilly. (Phoenix proves once again that theres nobody quite as good as him at playing violent idiots, though its not exactly a revelation this time around.) Without the Western trappings (which are realized proficiently enough but lack some kind of conviction) this would be an exceedingly simplistic sibling drama, with barely enough meat on its bones for 90 minutes, much less 121.

The film reaches a strange, horrifying climax  a series of events that feels absolutely plausible as a lost chapter of tragic human idiocy. But then it hobbles on for another 15 or so minutes, dead-set on finding some resolution for Charlie and Eli that feels absolutely unearned  a little deus ex mommy. Put up side-by-side, the redemption of killers doesnt feel quite as urgent a narrative as the alliance of idealists, and in its final minutes The Sisters Brothers retreats back from some interesting, adventurous territory to something all too familiar.
The Lion Hunt. Photo: Eugene Delacroix/Franck Raux/RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY.

Prepare to grapple with the cosmic grandiosity and optical hot-messes of that 19th-century French freak of painterly nature, Eugene Delacroix, whos churning, turgid, crimson-tinged floridity has enkindled the respiratory systems of artists since he first debuted at the Paris Salon of 1822  and given many others agita.

Now, at the Met, comes the first large-scale North American retrospective of his epoch-altering work. How did it alter his epoch? Delacroixs style is so uncontained, convulsive, and atmospheric its hard to pigeonhole as simply Romanticism. At times I often look at his painting and mourn the death of his extraordinary comrade, Theodore Gericault, he of the 1819 Raft of the Medusa, as this artist might have made French Romanticism less flamboyant and easier to take had he not died before the age of 33. Delacroix pushed much harder, which means that his work is more demanding and hard to digest, even now, but, as a result, he is one of the most influential artists of the last two centuries.

What do you see when you look at a Delacroix? Fuzziness, smears, fibrillating paint, irradiated color that destabilize space and emulsify objects. The technique fuses the Italian, Flemish, and Spanish painterly dash of Titian, Rubens, and Velazquez. His art also points directly at Cezanne, Manet, Gauguin, Renoir, and van Gogh (all of whom name-checked him in painting titles) and then to Matisse, Soutine, De Kooning, Frankenthaler, Marlene Dumas, and Kara Walker. Cezanne exclaimed, You can find us all in this Delacroix. Legendary gallerist Peter Nagy recently wrote, We owe all of 20th century painting to Delacroix. And 21st century too.

Yet by the time he died, Delacroix was already something of an anachronism, seen more as a painter-patriarch of the grand manner, a last old master. The artists who followed him quickly moved on to collectively create Realism, Impressionism, and Post-Impressionism  styles that are Grand Canyonsized gaps from his sensibility. Delacroix said artists must look within, and pointedly painted the stuff of the imagination, rather than engaging directly with subjects of the world, choosing from Dante, Shakespeare, Byron, Goethe, and Walter Scott. The last entry in his notebooks (must-reads for aspiring artists) declares that painting should be a feast for the eye, and one admiring contemporary critic wrote his large paintings were about paint and nothing more which would lead eventually to the idea of art for arts sake. But the younger artists of Delacroixs time wanted to paint the weight of the world; they turned to everyday scenes, subjects, people, and places. Think of Courbets Stone Breakers, Millets Gleaners, van Goghs shoes, Monets Parisian scenes, Manets 1863 Luncheon on the Grass (painted the year Delacroix died). Delacroix painted from and for art history; the new generations were making history paintings of modern life.

Combat du Giaour et du Pacha. Photo: Eugene Delacroix /Petit Palais / Roger-Viollet

Before we look at whats here and importantly whats not, a few biographical notes to let us know where hes coming from and maybe why he got ensnared in ideals of ages gone by. Born in France in 1798, Delacroix is a true son of the revolution. His father was foreign minister in the revolutionary government; his older brother a general in the Napoleonic Army. Everything was on the rise for the young artist when his life took a drastic turn. He was orphaned at 16 and soon lived in near poverty. This explains why, even though his style is revolutionary, Delacroixs politics are steeped in far more moderate values and tempered by fears of loss. He was committed to a French Republic; he portrayed the barricades better than anyone before or since, but he never fought on them. After the three-day July Revolution of 1830 that saw the overthrow of the Bourbon King Charles X and the installation of Louis Philippe, cousin of King Louis XVI, two of his most important patrons were not only high government officials, one was Talleyrand, another was the despised archconservative prime minister Adolphe Thiers. His art education was being apprenticed to the neoclassicist Pierre-Narcisse Guerin  who was also training Gericault. Delacroix also devoured all the new masterpieces looted by Napoleon from all over Europe and Africa and now installed as trophies in the Louvre.

Under Guerin, Delacroix came to loathe the smoothed-over, finicky fussiness, blended paint, and affected poses of neoclassists like Ingres and David. For him this kind of work was lifeless, a waste of labor, the display of mere dexterity. Cold exactitude, he wrote, is not art. Amen! Instead, Delacroix wrote of the pleasure in vagueness. We may say that he touched Vagueness Sublime.

Hamlet and Horatio in the Cemetery. Photo: Eugene Delacroix/Courtesy of Stadel Museum/ARTOTHEK

Over 150 prints, drawings, watercolors, paintings, and manuscripts fill 12 galleries at the Met. Because much of the work is small we dont get the wide-open retinal fireworks of his big pictures. Which is a small shame; Delacroix himself wrote small paintingsbore me. (Of course they were good for the market.) So rather than having our toes curled by his huge optical painting machines, here narrative, tighter composition and brush-handling predominate. This can really wear you down. See Hamlet in the graveyard (with one foot already in the grave), Michelangelo brooding in his studio, literary and biblical scenes, and of course all those scenes of stallions, warriors, and lolling odalisques. Theres also a lot of work on paper here, and while its pleasurable to peruse this material, we dont come to Delacroix for his line and draftsmanship. On the contrary, one of the things that make his paintings so extraordinary is that theres almost no drawing in them at all. Instead hes continually winging it with paint, making it up as he goes, mixing varnishes, viscosities, wet-on-wet application, and importantly deploying what he called flochetage  interlaced strokes of complimentary colors that combine in the eye to heighten hue. Flochetage leads directly to Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Seurat, and Signac. Van Gogh described it as color seeking life.

The Lion Hunt. Photo: Eugene Delacroix/ Musee des Beaux-Arts, ville de Bordeaux

Unfortunately, only flashes of this sublimity illuminate this show. The galleries are painted an adumbral-shade of aubergine  which instantly puts his work back in the crypt. There are only about a dozen large paintings here. Fortunately, one of them  Women of Algiers in Their Apartment  is a world-class, history-changing, discomforting Orientalist masterpiece. This lack of large works isnt the fault of the Met. No Delacroix survey outside France can feature his gigantic showboats  some as big as barges, others painted on the ceiling of Parisian museums and former palaces. But before we take a close look at the above-mentioned painting, and the final three galleries where the show finally flowers with a handful of paintings displaying some of his all-out giddily swirly flourish, several things to know about four of the monuments that didnt make the trip.

In his debut in the Salon of 1822, Delacroix exhibited Barque of Dante, an enormous canvass depicting the poets Dante and Virgil being ferried across the infernal River Styx while writhing dead souls and sinners reach up from the murk to grab or gnaw this vessel. Dante recoils in horror and the infernal city of Dis blazes in the tinged distance. Salon crowds instantly grasped the feelings the painting portrayed. This was a generation, after all, who, like Delacroix, had lived through the French Revolution, death, destruction, the beheadings of the king and queen, Robespierre, the Reign of Terror, the guillotine, Napoleons rise, France as empire, Napoleonic wars, the decimation of Europe, and the total defeat of the French army. The country was then subjugated by the allies and saw the unthinkable restoration of a Bourbon King. Censorship was back; there were no widespread voting rights at all. These people knew what it meant to live in uncertainty, famine, and chaos; going through hell was something they knew in their bones. Delacroix gave them all this in theatrical fashion, removed it from actual events (unlike Raft of the Medusa) and did it in rougher, looser, intensely colored paint mixtures that had ever been seen in the world before. They loved it.

The crowds, that is. The big biennial Paris salons had been the domain of elites, yet in a very modern way, Delacroix intentionally side-stepped authorities, teachers, the academy and decided to play directly to the crowds, using the salons as platforms to wow them. Delacroix knew what he wanted and why. Fame, he wrote at 26, is not an empty word for me  the sound of praise gives me real happiness.

Two years after the Barque of Dante, writing that he wanted to set myself apart, he pushed the envelope further in a huge strange picture of a contemporary Ottoman massacre of Greek freedom fighters, women and children. This was Scenes from the Massacres at Chios. Critics called it hideous, barbaric, and coarse; viewers wondered if the paint was glue or putty and accused Delacroix of having an out-of-control imagination. (He did!) The famous Neo-Classicist Antoine-Jean Gros deemed the work a massacre of painting. The shows excellent catalog says the work represents a semantic slippage from paintings subject to its form; [one that] reduced the publics apprehension of the painting to its materiality. This means Delacroix provided no real story or narrative, just disconnected figures, shapes, forms, paint. Crowds complained of being denied the possibility of penetrating beyond the foreground. This is a perfect observation of this works relentlessly modern frontality.

In his next major work, this unreadability reached its apotheosis. The Death of Sardanapalus is a vertiginous painting said to have neither top nor bottom  the school of the ugly. This gyrating composition depicts the last act of corruption, despotism, and sadism of an Assyrian king lounging atop a huge red bed, staring detachedly as murder, rape, and destruction are carried on all around him  all of it ordered by him rather than having himself captured by invading armies outside the burning window. Its one of the most punch-drunk pictorial hallucinations in Western art  precarious perspective and volatile open space dominate the middle of the painting, things tumble around and out of this almost-abstraction of flesh, turbans, decoration, blood, knives, elephant sculpture bedposts, horses stabbed by slaves. Its still a mystery how this titanic nowhere-ness holds together at all.

Finally in our roll call of the missing is one of the most reproduced images of all time, July 28, 1830: Liberty Leading the People (1830). If youre thinking that painting isnt like those other three, youre right  much more than a radical style, Delacroix dialed back and offered radical content. It worked, and secured his place in history and peoples hearts. Included in the 1831 Salon, it famously depicts an allegorical figure of a bare-breasted female Liberty in perfect Roman profile. She boldly strides the Paris barricades, tricolor flag raised in her right hand, rifle held in the other, surrounded by armed students, workers, tradesmen, and businessmen atop rubble and bloody dead bodies. One is a pantless male, apparently dragged out of his bed and killed in his nightshirt  his pubic hair shows, which scandalized crowds. In the place of the burning City of Dis, however, is a tiny Notre Dame displaying the blue, white, and red flag of Liberty.

It would be among the last times Delacroix painted something inspired by current events. (Its like he did this to free himself forever of ever having to do it again.) France bought the painting and it was slated it to one day hang in the Louvre. Two years later, the timid government of Louis-Philippe deemed the painting too dangerous to be publicly exhibited and put into storage. Liberty was not seen again in public until around the time of the next revolution of 1848. By then it was already a legend. Today the figure of Liberty has been used in more illustrations and political cartoons than can ever be counted. Delacroix was all of 33 years old and the most famous painter in the world. He remained that for the rest of his life. At his funeral, however, was only a small contingent of dedicated artists.

Among them were Manet; Baudelaire, his lifelong champion, who delivered a eulogy; and Henri Fantin-Latour, who would paint his famous Hommage a Delacroix, a group picture (now hanging in the Musee dOrsay) of militant young artists and writers, including himself, Manet, and Whistler  all surrounding a painted portrait of Delacroix.

Now you have the tools to visit the Met, look at whats here and know about whats not. I recommend first making your way to the seventh gallery of the exhibition where the aforementioned blockbuster Women of Algiers in Their Apartment is installed. This loan from the Louvre has mesmerized, inspired, and flummoxed artists ever since.

Women of Algiers in Their Apartment. Photo: Eugene Delacroix/Franck Raux/RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY.

Delacroix painted Women only two years after Liberty. Yet structurally it rushes forward to the implacable, un-enterable scrimmed-and-plaited space of Courbet and Cezanne and the bejeweled incandescence of Seurat and Matisse. Women is beyond narrative and real logic and is closer to a hashish dream or entering a cathedral and taking in atmosphere, ambience, temperature. Delacroix called it akin to beautiful verses.

Its real and unreal, seen, imagined, reassembled, made up with African and Caucasian models. In 1832, Delacroix was brought by the government on a diplomatic mission to Northern Africa. The light, spaces, colors, costumes, architecture, and living antiquity of the place put a fix on his brain that changed the course of his art. From here on out, we see more voluptuous color and scenes of otherness.

Women came about on the return voyage, when Delacroix finally gained entry inside a Muslim household. (He had been allowed inside Jewish households before then, but never Muslim.) The memory of that moment is what he tried to paint in Women of Algiers in Their Apartment. Yes, its an Orientalist portrayal of the other that will make some skins crawl, anger many people, and will strike many others as creepy male fetishization and fantasy. Theres no doubt that a deeper content of the painting, like almost all such works of these places at this time, is colonialism  be it insidious, unconscious, callous, or otherwise. In addition to all this, Women is a monumental genre scene, pointedly not a harem, brothel, or slave market. The women arent naked, nude, lascivious, seeking approval, being bought and sold, or performing. Dressed in Algerian-style chemises, arm braces, and jewelry, they are grouped around a glowing brazier and a hookah. The plain interior is marked by a Venetian mirror, decorative tiles, Persian carpets, velvet cushions, discarded slippers, and a standing figure turning away. Many have projected that this is a slave, although this is not at all clear. Cosmopolitan goods are seen all around and on the central woman who wears a hanging watch. So these arent primitives. Theyre real people.

The implications of the rules that Delacroix was shattering here and in almost all his work, is that youre seeing works that ignited Modernism itself, that led to the collapse of perspective, new ideas about the imagination, genre, subject matter, touch, process, and color. Somewhere I once read that Delacroix commented that what he saw in Africa gave him information that could last 10,000 lifetimes. True or not, limited as it may be due to travel restrictions, the work in this show has the pictorial potential for that many artists. That is the metaphysical infinitude of the work  whether you find it annoying and too much, or not.

*A version of this article appears in the October 1, 2018, issue of New York Magazine. Subscribe Now!
A mother is arrested for stealing after taking away her teen daughter's cellphone as punishment.

Posted: Sep 20, 2018 10:26 AM
Adam Chambers was arrested on September 20, 2018 by the Athens Police for his involvement in the recent Limestone County counterfeit money crimes.

Chambers is being held on 36 counts of Possession of a Forged Instrument 1st Degree, one count of Possession of a Forgery Device and one count of Possession of a Forged Instrument 3rd Degree, as well as several probation violations and bond revocations.
on Firday, Madison City Schools hosted the Federal Impact Aid Kickoff, along with the Garrison Commander of Redstone Arsenal.

Federal Impact Aid is money the government pays to school systems in lieu of property taxes, if a parent works on federal land, such as NASA or the post office.

For example, Madison City Schools has received more than $3 million in aid over the last decade.

Superintendents of Madison City, Madison County and Huntsville took part in the kickoff. Colonel Kelsey Smith said she wants to make sure parents fill the form out correctly to ensure them the money.

"It is absolutely important. Without filling out those forms, you cannot guarantee that your child's education is appropriately paid for by the federal government," Smith said.

The students should be given the form at their school, and if not, officials advise to contact their school leader to make sure their student recived the form.
A Limestone County man escaped unscathed from a fire that quickly destroyed the house around him.

Shortly before 2:30 a.m. Thursday morning, Luther Walke was asleep in a cabin on Segers Road that he was watching for a friend when he woke up to what he thought was a light in the home. When he opened his eyes, he saw flames coming from part of the cabin. He was able to get out without being burned and called 911.



Fire crews said the cabin was fully engulfed in flames when they arrive. The cabin was ruled a total loss. Fire crews said the cabin was fully engulfed in flames when they arrive. The cabin was ruled a total loss.

"The fire had gone from the kitchen to all the way out the porch door. I mean the flames were already coming out. I couldn't get back in to get my work boots," said Walke.

The homeowners, who live just down the road, said theyve owned the cabin since 1972 and were crushed to see it go up in flames.

"It's not going to hit til tomorrow. It's not really going to hit completely until tomorrow," said homeowner Carol Blue.

The Blues' said another man rents the home from them, but he often lets others stay in it, which is okay with them.

"Giving people a home when they need it for a few days or making sure they got fed and taken care of."

Walke told us he's just one of the few people the renter has helped out.

"It's been open to everybody here on the streets. Anybody that's been addicted to drugs or don't have anywhere to go. If they've got warrants and are on the run from the law they can come here."

Seger Volunteer Fire Department responded to the fire and called in Madison Fire and Rescue for support. Officials told WAAY 31 the cabin was fully involved when they arrived.

Madison Police blocked off the intersection of Powell Road and Segers Road while crews worked. Athens Utilities cut the power to the home while crews worked to knock down the flames.

The cause of the fire is unknown and will be investigated by the fire marshall for Limestone County.
Briley Holland, was taken by ambulance to Huntsville Hospital after her boyfriend, Adam Cottingham, shot her in the legs after an argument on September 18, 2018.

According to Holland, she and her friend, Asia Gardner, went to her and Cottingham's home at County Road 222 in Moulton to collect some of her belongings when he came outside and shot toward the road. Cottingham then shot one round toward the ground shooting Holland in both legs.

Gardner drove Holland to her grandmother's house in Trinity where she then called the Sheriff's Office and EMS. Holland was released from Huntsville Hospital that night with non-life threatening injuries.

Deputies attempted to locate Cottingham, but he had left his residence. Officials said Holland has declined to prosecute.
On 4th September, 2018 in Phnom Penh, Cambodia representatives from the World Customs Organizations Asia Pacific Security Project, which is funded by the Japanese Government, attended a handover and training session involving the donation of Raman Spectrometer devices. These items were purchased from the Rigaku Corporation for the General Department of Customs and Excise (GDCE) of Cambodia. They will be used to detect and identify precursor chemicals used in the manufacture of Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs).

In his opening remarks, Mr Nuon Chanrith, Deputy Director General of Enforcement for GDCE, thanked both the WCO and the Japanese Government for providing the equipment. He stressed the importance of maintaining security at the border and of enhancing trade facilitation and expressed his belief that the equipment provided would be able to assist in both those aims.

A full day of training was then provided by the Asia Pacific Security Project and representatives of Rigaku Corporation for twenty front line officers of the GDCE prior to the equipments deployment to various operational locations.
From 10 to 19 September 2018, the WCO organized an IPR, Health and Safety Operation on the African mainland. The Operation was conducted under the codename MIRAGE, referring to the deception and delusion inherent to substandard and counterfeit medicines.

A workshop, organized in close cooperation with Benin Customs in Cotonou from 5 to 7 September 2018, preceded the Operation. Sixteen countries from West, East and Southern Africa participated in the workshop, namely fourteen countries with major seaports on the African mainland and two landlocked countries, which joined on their own initiative.

The World Health Organization (WHO), the World Organisation for Animal Health (OiE) and INTERPOL took part in the workshop. Their participation led to greater understanding of the roles of the different authorities and the importance of improving cooperation.

The Operation was focused on counterfeit and illicit medicines; however, other goods that could jeopardize the health and safety of African citizens were also targeted.

In the majority of the participating countries, the National Focal Points from the WHO as well as the veterinary authorities assisted Customs officers to inspect pharmaceutical consignments during the Operation. The relevant Regional Intelligence Liaison Offices (RILO), Southern African Customs Union (SACU) representative and local Container Control Programme (CCP) teams all supported the Operation. After just one week of the Operation, millions of illicit medicines and thousands of counterfeit items had already been intercepted and new modus operandi discovered.

The final results of the Operation will be presented during the Counterfeiting and Piracy (CAP) Group meeting to be held on 6 and 7 December 2018 at WCO headquarters.
A team of WCO experts supported the delivery of a workshop on Customs transit for the Members of the Andean Community  Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru. The workshop was held on 17 and 18 September 2018 at the General Secretariat of the Andean Community (SGCAN) in Lima, Peru and aimed at enhancing the efficiency of the community transit procedure based on guiding principles and recommended practices drawn from the WCO Transit Guidelines.

The participants discussed various aspects of the Customs transit procedure, such as legal framework, use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) and electronic information exchange, simplification of formalities, guarantee system, risk management and the use of Customs seals and other security measures. Best practices in the area of transit were also presented during the workshop.

As part of the discussions on ICT and efficient information management, the workshop participants studied the benefits of the SINTIA system  an IT system for transit operations deployed in the countries of the MERCOSUR region - Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay. Current initiates of having the SINTIA coverage extended to Colombia and Ecuador were also subject of discussion.

The information exchanged during the event will help the Members of the Andean Community to update the Community Customs Transit Regulation - Decision 617.

The WCO assistance in the delivery of the sub-regional workshop on transit was highly appreciated by the SGCAN and the workshop participants.
Excerpt from the unpublished manuscript of Dr. McCartneys book From The Heart And Soul: For Love Of Country

The policymakers, who were responsible for the changes made in the education system of The Bahamas in 1967, appear not to have taken into consideration the historic or cultural factors. Hence, instead of enhancing the education system, the changes seem, in my opinion to have had deleterious consequences for students. I do believe that the action that was taken by the policymakers was to provide universal and equal educational opportunities for all students in The Bahamas. This action was taken because historically the majority of Bahamians were denied access to universal and equal educational opportunities.

To the credit of the policymakers, they were doing what they thought was best for the education system and those who would have benefited from it. Coupled with historical circumstances, the rhetorical situation, and the expectations of the people, objective observers will agree that the policymakers had created the situation that was ripe for change.The change was designed to enhance and improve an education system that had not service the needs of the majority of the population of The Bahamas. However well-intentioned the change, there was a lack of consultation with the relevant stakeholders, that is, parents, the church (leaders and members), teachers, and members of the Bahamian community in general.

Making too many systemic changes, at the same time,is dangerous. The danger lies in the fact that, that which was meant for good can be deleterious to the very same system the changes were supposed to improve.Whenever systemic changes are being made, those changes should be made incrementally, which will allow for correcting errors, in the initial changes, before additional changes are made. In view of the foregoing, it can be concluded, that while the systemic changes made to the education system in 1967 had some positive results, children lost two years of preparation before entering the junior school.

However, in retrospect and in the interest of balance and fairness, it can also be concluded that the changes made in 1967 were radical, and therefore radically and negatively impacted the education of children at a very critical age, and changed the approach to the delivery of education to the most vulnerable in the system. At the time that the changes were being made, the policymakers would not have been aware of the deleterious impact of the change. There is a lesson that should have been learned from the sweeping policy changes that were made in 1967. However, lessons are best learned through periods of introspection. Presumably, the new policymakers, in their exuberance, had no time for introspection or saw no need for introspection. If there is no retrospection; no lessons are learned. From 1967 to now has provided much time for introspection and change, which should be designed to improve upon what was decided over fifty years ago.

Change is inevitable. However, any changes made, in any system, must take into consideration the history and culture. History and culture are inseparable twins. History conveys to us a sense of where we have been, and culture conveys a sense of where we are. If these concepts are accepted, it can also be said that our history and culture are essential to our holistic development. Knowing where we have been and who we are, are the compasses that are needed for all of us to chart our courses to a bright and successful future. It is important and necessary for our survival as a people that we expose ourselves, particularly our children, to the history and culture, of their ancestors, that make up our traditions to ensure their successful transition from childhood to adulthood.

Prior to 1967, all students in The Bahamas spent the first two years of their education in Classes 1 and2 in Preparatory Schools. This prepared them for the Junior School, which began at Grade 1 and continued through Grade 4. The next level of schooling was the Senior School, which began at Grade 5 (equivalent to today's Grade 7). In the Senior School, students progressed to Grade 6-7 (equivalent to today's Grade 8 and nine).

By comparison, the five-year-olds who would have entered the Prep School at age five or six, depending upon what was the admission age, spent at least two years setting the foundation for their education.In 1967, the new policy mandated that five-year-olds be placed in Grade 1. Therefore, they missed the two years of preparation for was, at the time, the Junior School.

Prior to 1967, Class 1 and Class 2 were the equivalents of preschool and kindergarten respectively. By eliminating those first two years of preparatory schooling, students were disadvantaged. This change in educational policy, though good in its intention, was implemented without reference to the relevant stakeholders is at the root of the problems being experienced today.

The attempt to introduce preschools was an effort to correct the changes that were made in 1967, which precipitated the problems alluded to in the previous paragraph. Those problems are too numerous to elucidate upon in this post. In previous posts about the Education System, I have attempted to address some of those problems. None-the-less, future posts will further discuss the Education System and its issues, successes, and problems.

While at Eastern Senior School, I recall progressing from Grade 5 to Standard 6, where I took the School Leaving Certificate at the age of 13. From Grade 6, I advanced to Standard 7(equivalent to today's Grade 9). Standard 7 was the first year preparation for the Bahamas Junior Certificate (BJC), which had replaced the Cambridge Junior Certificate (CJC) in 1954.The following year (1961), I matriculated from Standard 7 to Form 7, where I had the final preparation for the BJC Examination. However, in retrospect, the rigor and the level of the work given in Form 7 was more than equivalent to 12th Grade studies today.

Prior to 1963, the BJC was awarded at three levels: Grade I, Grade II, and Grade III. In all levels, passes Mathematics and English were mandatory. Each of the levels of the BJC was awarded when students passed a combination of subjects with grades of A, B, or C.The BJC Examination was the terminating examination for all Senior School students because the General Certificate of Education (GCE) was only taken in the High Schools such as Government High School and all the other private high schools. The BJC subjects, prior to the to the modern version, were set at GCE O Level.

The BJC, prior to the modern version, was the determining factor for entrance into the public and private employment market and for students to enter private high schools, for 5th and 6th Form studies, if you did not enter by taking the Common Entrance Examination. My entry into the teaching profession, as a Student Teacher, was on the basis of the quality of my BJC passes.

As an educator for over 55 years, it is my considered professional opinion that the national D average, along with other factors (McCartney, 2012) has its foundation in the policy that was mandated in 1967. In truth and in fact, in pre-1967, the education system had it right; but progress, while good, can cause a system to go awry by "throwing out the baby" with the bath water. Perhaps the pre-1967 system needs to be revisited to help us determine where we took the wrong turn.

 Dr. Donald M. McCartney, D.M., MPA, MSc.Ed. [Hons], BA, T.C.
Fort Polk, LA (71446)

Today

Cloudy early with partial sunshine expected late. High 73F. Winds SSE at 5 to 10 mph..

Tonight

Partly cloudy in the evening then becoming cloudy with periods of rain after midnight. Low 61F. Winds S at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 80%. Rainfall near a quarter of an inch.
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By West Kentucky Star Staff

Sep. 20, 2018 | PADUCAH

By West Kentucky Star Staff Sep. 20, 2018 | 12:10 PM | PADUCAH

Five people face drug charges following an investigation by McCracken and Marshall County detectives, and U.S. Marshals.



The McCracken County Sheriff's Department says detectives stopped a vehicle Tuesday afternoon on Holt Road driven by 22-year-old Tyler Bray of Metropolis. Detectives said they seized more than nine ounces of marijuana and $439 in cash during a search of the vehicle. Bray was arrested on marijuana trafficking and possession of drug paraphernalia charges.



The next afternoon, detectives stopped a vehicle at the intersection of Seitz and Old Mayfield Road driven by 38-year-old Chastity Tabor of Paducah. Deputies said a police dog smelled illegal drugs coming from the car. During a search, they seized about five grams of crystal methamphetamine, Valium, smoking pipes, scales, $545 in cash and handgun with an obscured serial number. Both Tabor and her passenger, 41-year-old Derek Barnhill, also of Paducah were arrested. Tabor is charged with possession of meth and driving on a suspended license. Barnhill is charged with firearm enhanced trafficking in meth, possession of a handgun by a felon, possession of a defaced firearm and possession of drug paraphernalia.



Later that day, detectives learned 42-year-old Kendrick Malone of Paducah, a federal fugitive from Memphis TN, was staying at a home on Highland Boulevard and selling meth. McCracken and Marshall County Sheriff's detectives and Deputy US Marshals found Malone and Daisy Downen inside the apartment. During a search they seized 102 grams of crystal meth, marijuana, scales, a smoking pipe and $901. Malone was arrested on charges of meth trafficking, possession of marijuana, possession of drug paraphernalia and being a fugitive from another state. Downen was cited for possession of meth and released.



Detectives said the seized meth has an estimated street value of more than $10,000.
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By West Kentucky Star Staff

Sep. 19, 2018 | MURRAY

By West Kentucky Star Staff Sep. 19, 2018 | 07:35 PM | MURRAY

The 2018 Penguin Project, Shrek, Jr., will open Friday, September 21st, at Playhouse in the Park in Murray.



Playhouse in the Park joined The Penguin Project in 2014 as the 7th theatre in the nation, and the first in Kentucky, to participate in the program.



Speaking on the Greg Dunker Show, Lisa Cope and Holly Bloodworth, explained how that this program gives special needs children the opportunity to participate in the performing arts, by being pared with a mentor, to put on a full production.



The Penguin Project demonstrates that individuals with special needs are fully capable of participating in community activities with the same dedication and enthusiasm as others, when given the opportunity and support.



The origin of the name, "Penguin Project", came about from the unque characteristics of penguins. They are extremely playful and curious, and they work well together. More importantly however, they have a "disability" that separates them from other birds, that being they can't fly. Instead, penguins waddle and toboggan on the bellies over the snow, and are also excellent swimmers. So, like the young artists in the Penguin Project, they have adapted to the challenges of their environment, and have not allowed their unique difference to interfere with their lives.



The performances will be Friday and Saturday evenings, September 21st, 22nd, 28th, and 29th. Also two matinee performances will be presented, Sunday, September 23rd and 30th.



Playhouse in the Park is located at 701 Gil Hopson Drive in Murray. Tickets can be purchased online at playhousemurray.org, or by calling the theatre at (270)-759-1752. Cope and Bloodworth suggest getting tickets early, as these performances tend to sell out, and purchasing tickets at the door is sometimes not possible.
By The Associated Press Sep. 19, 2018 | 08:22 PM | FRANKFORT

Kentucky's governor and attorney general, potential opponents in next year's race for governor, clashed before the state's Supreme Court on Thursday as they argued about the future of one of the country's worst-funded public pension systems.The state's Republican-dominated legislature passed a law earlier this year that put new teacher hires into a hybrid pension plan. Supporters say the plan has the potential to be more lucrative for teachers than a traditional pension, while opponents argue it is less predictable and makes it harder to plan.All of Kentucky's public pension systems are significantly underfunded. Actuaries estimate the state is at least $37 billion short of the money needed to pay benefits over the next few decades. The law included other provisions designed to help the state pay off the debt sooner.But the law has been a political flashpoint, inspiring thousands of teachers to protest at the Capitol. In May, a high school math teacher with no prior political experience defeated the House majority floor leader in a Republican primary. In November, at least 34 current and former teachers are on the ballot for seats in the state legislature.Thursday's hearing before the state Supreme Court was more subdued. Kentucky Educational Television broadcast the arguments live for only the second time in the court's history. The small courtroom was full, with a small crowd watching on a TV just outside the courtroom.Across the state, some civics and government teachers planned to use the Supreme Court arguments as part of their lesson plans. Others, like Rockcastle County High School Spanish teacher Erin Grace, did not have that option. But Grace said she's through thinking about the law's future."I'm mostly thinking about elections right now," she said. "We've just got to vote in the elections so they don't have a chance to do it again."Beshear argued the case himself, which was broadcast live on Kentucky Educational Television, giving him a platform to speak to the state's teachers and their families. Bevin did not attend Thursday's hearing, but he made his arguments in a series of messages posted to his official Twitter account.Bevin and his lawyers believe the law is constitutional in that it does not violate the contract rights of public employees. But they never got to make that argument on Thursday, as the Supreme Court justices focused solely on the process that lawmakers used to pass the bill.The state Constitution says bills must have three "readings" on three separate days in the House and Senate before it can become law. But lawmakers passed the pension bill in about seven hours. They took a bill about sewer systems that had already passed the Senate and been given two readings in the House and replaced it with the pension bill. House lawmakers then voted on it, and the Senate agreed with the changes.Beshear says this is illegal. He says the state Constitution requires the three readings on three separate days to prevent bills from being rushed through the legislature in one day."The Kentucky Constitution crates a government by the people and for the people, which means you can never shut the people out," Beshear said.Steve Pitt, Bevin's attorney, noted the Constitution gives the legislature the power to make its own rules about procedure. House and Senate rules say lawmakers can change a bill without restarting the legislative process."What the attorney general wants here is for this court to tell the General Assembly how to conduct its own internal business," Pitt said. "The question is do we have separation of powers in this state?"Pitt's argument did not sit well with a number of judges, including Justice Lisabeth Hughes."(The legislature) cannot make a decision if it is contrary to the plain language of the Constitution. I took an oath to uphold the Constitution of the United States and the Constitution of this commonwealth. And the legislators took the same oath," Hughes said. "This is not a matter of judiciary sticking its nose, if you will, into the legislative branch."The court did not make a ruling Thursday. There is no deadline for their decision, but it will likely come before lawmakers return to Kentucky in January for the next legislative session.Original Story:The Kentucky Supreme Court will decide today if changes to the state's struggling retirement systems are legal.

Earlier this year, Kentucky's legislature approved changes to the system, including moving all new teacher hires into a hybrid plan. Attorney General Andy Beshear, who's running for governor next year, challenged the law, calling it unconstitutional.

In June, Franklin Circuit Judge Phillip Shepherd agreed. Now, the case is in the hands of the state's Supreme Court, who will hear arguments from both the attorney general, who will personally argue the case, and the governor's attorneys.
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By: Paige Cline Sometimes I am asked to reprint a column from the past. Here[Read More]
BW Offshore is pleased to announce that first oil from the BW Adolo FPSO was safely achieved on 16 September 2018, 18 months after the initial investment was made in the Dussafu license offshore Gabon.

"We have achieved first oil from the Dussafu license within budget and on schedule", said Carl K. Arnet, the CEO of BW Offshore. "The execution of the Dussafu project confirms the attractiveness of our model by combining proven resources, a resourceful organisation and access to production assets to achieve short time-to-oil."

The BW Adolo arrived in Gabon in late July and hook up of mooring systems and installation of risers and umbilicals were completed in September. The project was safely completed without any harm to people or the environment.

The FPSO is installed on the Tortue field, one of five proven discoveries in the Dussafu license. The BW Adolo is a converted VLCC with a production capacity of 40,000 barrels of oil per day. The vessel has undergone an increased life extension scope enabling an extended production profile on the back of positive reserve developments.

"Our first priority now is to complete start-up activities and stabilise production on BW Adolo. We will at the same time work towards the final investment decision on Tortue Phase 2, which will unlock additional production volumes, and continue the appraisal program of the recently announced discovery at Ruche NE as well as to confirm additional resources and strengthen the commerciality of the Dussafu license," said Carl K. Arnet.

For further information, please contact:

Knut R. Sthre, CFO, +47 911 17 876

IR@bwoffshore.com or www.bwoffshore.com

About BW Offshore:

BW Offshore is a leading provider of floating production services to the oil and gas industry. The company also participates in developing proven offshore hydrocarbon reservoirs. BW Offshore is represented in all major oil and gas regions world-wide with a fleet of 15 owned FPSOs. The company has more than 30 years of production track record, having executed 40 FPSO and FSO projects. BW Offshore is listed on the Oslo Stock Exchange.
Science, art and social cohesion play clinches BASA award

All From One, which has toured SA, Kenya and Tanzania shines at the Business and Arts South Africa Awards.

The Palaeontological Scientific Trust (PAST) and Standard Bank were named winners in the Development Award category at the 21st Annual BASA (Business and Arts South Africa) Awards which took place in Johannesburg on Sunday.

Awarded to business and arts partnerships with an implicit educational and development element, PAST and Standard Bank were recognised for their 20-year partnership in taking Walking Talls All From One message to learners, educators and communities in South Africa, Kenya, Tanzania and beyond.

The Walking Tall Educational Theatre Project enables Africas youth to gain powerful insight into our shared originsand so confront misconceptions about race and humankinds role in the natural world. Comprised of a physical theatre performance piece and a science session, and capable of being staged in a school hall, an auditorium or under a tree, Walking Tall plays a pivotal role in spreading the message of PASTs global public understanding campaign, All From One.

Winning this award is a wonderful recognition for how a combination of science and the arts can produce a message thats expressed in physical theatre, but that tells a scientific story about the unity of humankind and how we are all part of nature, commented PAST chief scientist, Professor Robert Blumenschine.

Speaking at the awards event, Professor Blumenschine and PAST CEO, Andrea Leenen, paid tribute to Standard Banks support for Walking Tall/All From One, as well as the role of Walking Talls director, Matthew Lotter, and Physical Theatre Director Sbo Ntshebe and cast.

Winning this award is a privilege for a scientific organisation like PAST, said Leenen. Its an endorsement of our relationship with Standard Bank who has supported this two decade-long mix of science, art and social cohesion. What makes Walking Tall unique is that it is a truly collaborative production where the scriptwriting and direction of the piece is a joint effort between our scientists and team of theatre specialists. This award is testament to the fact that, even when you have complicated messages based on science, DNA and natural selection, you can use art to bring these to anyone, of any age and skillset, anywhere in the world.

Id like to pay special tribute to our directors and cast. Its just incredible that a 45-minute physical theatre production can take you on a 4.6-billion year journey of earths and lifes history and make it engaging, accessible and impactful.

Business and Arts South Africas flagship award event recognising dynamic business and arts partnerships was held in the Victoria Yards precinct and honoured winners in 11 adjudicated categories.
First South African fossil hunters

Public Lecture series to celebrate Heritage Day will focus on the earliest fossil hunters in Southern Africa and their findings.

The Evolutionary Studies Institute at Wits together with a number of partners invite you to a public lecture series in celebration of Heritage Day.

The scientific relevance of the wealth of fossils from South Africa is internationally acknowledged, however little is known about the fossil discoveries that took place before the scientific era, particularly in pre-colonial times. The public lecture series seeks to raise awareness about the earliest fossil hunters of southern Africa among academics and students by presenting evidence of early fossil findings made by early European settlers and indigenous people.

Held on Tuesday, 25 September 2018, from 8.30am to 3.30pm in Senate Room in Solomon Mahlangu House, the lecture series will include talks by Prof. Anusya Chinsamy-Turan from the University of Cape Town on The relevance of the South African fossil record: where do we stand?; Dr Sharad Master from the Wits School for Geosciences on the First fossils discovered in South Africa between 1652-1850; Dr Cammeron Penn-Clarke from the Iziko Museum in Cape Town and the Wits Evolutionary Studies Institute (ESI) on Pre and early colonial fossil discoveries in the Cape Supergroup of South Africa.

These will be followed by a presentation from Dr Charled Helm from the African Center for Coastal Palaeosciences on Interest in Geological and Palaeontological curiosities by non-western societies of Southern Africa; followed by short talks by current palaeoscience students  Aviwe Matiwane, a PhD student from Rhodes University, Kimberleigh Tommy from the Centre of Excellence in Palaeosciences and Cebisa Mdekazi from the ESI  on the future of palaeosciences.

According to Julien Benoit, the organiser of the lecture series, the archaeological record of fossil findings can be traced back to Early Homo sapiens in Africa (Morocco, 300 000 years ago) and early European settlers were trying to account for the existence of fossils some 200 years before Darwin published his theory of the Evolution of species.

These lectures will focus on the international relevance of South African palaeontological research, says Benoit. In this respect, the three students will be presenting their current research projects and how their work is going to affect the future of South African palaeosciences. In this way, the lectures will summarize the past, present and future challenges of palaeosciences in South Africa.

For more information, contact Julien Benoit.
Republican Rep. Mike Coffman is sitting in a church communicating with a group of Spanish-speaking parishioners in their native tongue with a heavy American accent.

He quietly listens to their questions, answering them slowly and methodically. The parishioners are constituents he desperately needs to vote for him if he has any chance of winning re-election in his suburban Denver seat in November.

Donald Trump Elections and campaigns Government and public administration Government bodies and offices Government organizations - US Jason Crow Mike Coffman Political Figures - US Political organizations Politics US Congress US Democratic Party US federal government US House of Representatives US political parties US Republican Party White House

Colorado's 6th District is the ultimate battleground. For years, Democrats have poured millions of dollars in here to try to beat Coffman, but always fall short. In 2016, Hillary Clinton won here by 9 percentage points, but Coffman still won re-election by more than 8 points.

This year, Democrats on a national level are looking to this district as a bellwether, and the party has a poster candidate for a nominee -- Jason Crow, a combat veteran. If Democrats can finally win here, strategists say, they feel confident about taking back the House.

For Republicans, the race is a test of whether an incumbent congressman who has crafted a strong personal brand in an increasingly diverse district can survive an election where the enthusiasm is clearly on the Democratic side.

So Coffman is relying on his political survival skills that have helped him win against all odds in the past. Being there for his diverse district is Coffman's calling card.

To signal a kinship with his Mexican and Salvadoran American constituents, Coffman hired a Spanish tutor, with whom he studies every Sunday for two hours. She sits with him at his event, and he turns to her when he needs a language lifeline.

The Hispanic community is just one of the large ethnic enclaves in his district, and Coffman knows it. He had just come from a visit with the Chinese community, and is next headed to an Ethiopian celebration, where he will be greeted as a rock star because of the time and effort he has spent helping combat human rights abuses in Ethiopia.

"With this President, this midterm is going to be rough for Republicans. It's those members of Congress that have established a brand in their district, that is independent of quite frankly, of the party in Washington, DC, that are going to survive this," Coffman told CNN in an interview here.

"They don't see me as a Republican, or they don't see me in a partisan way. They just see me as their congressman," Coffman said.

The Trump factor

Crow is taking every opportunity he has to tie Coffman to President Trump, whose immigration policies, chaotic approach to governing, and often crass tone has made him unpopular with key voting blocs here -- from ethnic groups to independent suburban women.

He's never run for office before, which is something he emphasizes as he goes door to door making his pitch to voters.

"I'm a first-time candidate, I've never run for anything before but I feel really strongly about the direction our country is going in," Crow tells Esperanza Valle, while standing on her front stoop.

He won't take PAC money and is running hard against everything Washington, even his own party leadership.

"From day one of this campaign, I've been very clear, this is about bringing the new generation of leadership to Washington to turn the page and to move us forward as a country. We have this culture of partisanship that has delivered dysfunction and lack of progress, right? And this applies for Democrats and Republicans, right?" Crow tells us in an interview.

"I will not vote for Nancy Pelosi," he says.

But Crow insists he will be able to beat Coffman this year -- something previous Democratic candidates failed to do in the past four elections -- for one reason: the man in the White House.

"We live in a very different world than we lived in just two years ago. Donald Trump is President of the United States," Crow said flatly.

In television ads blanketing the airwaves, Democrats paint Coffman in grainy black and white footage as a Trump puppet.

Coffman has worked hard to distance himself from Trump -- on everything from immigration policies to the President's twitter tirades.

"When they were separating families on the border, I certainly was one who protested that -- against the administration -- went down to the border to see what was occurring myself with those families, and the Administration stopped that policy," Coffman told us.

"When the President went to Europe I did statements of support, when he talked to the Europeans. Statements of opposition when he met with Putin in private."

But even so, he admitted, Trump is a big drag on his candidacy.

"There are people that are going to be swept up in a partisan lens, that probably there's not a whole lot I can say," he said.

"It's less about his policies than it is about his tone. College educated independent women, just really are offended by his tone and his mannerisms in the office. So it's baked in now." Coffman said, with resignation in his voice.

Independents are the majority here

Maybe more than any other race this year, it is all about independents in Colorado's 6th district. The district is growing so much, so fast, they now outnumber both Democrats and Republicans here.

John and Meredith Brackney were registered Republicans, but left the party after Trump was elected, and say they're not alone.

"We personally know dozens of them, well respected Republicans [who left the GOP]. They want nothing to do with that man," said John Brackney.

He was a local GOP elected official in this suburban district, has known Coffman for years and is leaning towards voting for him. But he also says it's "conceivable" that he will not.

"The only question is, is my disappointment in the President so significant that I wanna vote all the way down the ticket against Republicans," Brackney said, explaining his struggle.

His wife Meredith, who has voted for both Republicans and Democrats all of her life, is surer about her approach this year.

"I'm probably voting for the Democrat. I'm hoping for a blue wave. I think we need checks and balances, and right now we don't have any. And so, I'm planning on pretty much all Democrat," said Meredith Brackney.

Independent voter Ann Santos says she's still undecided about whether to vote Republican or Democrat in the House race here in November, but also says her vote is really going to be a protest against President Trump.

"He is so destructive, he is so divisive," Santos says of the president.

She also expresses a sentiment building for years among voters -- especially independents. She is disgusted with the chaos of Washington, and wants a change, and likes the fact that Crow has never run for office before.

"That is a plus for me. 'Cause that means that he is still wanting my vote, he is very interested in what the regular person wants. I guess yeah, I think he would be more in touch with the everyday person," Santos said.

Same goes for Dayna Kreutzer, another independent voter here who says Coffman has done a good job for the district, but thinks it's time for fresh ideas in Washington.

"I think it's time for a change. I think we're getting too set in our ways, and we need to make changes," said Kreutzer.

Battle tested

First-time candidate Crow, the Democrat, plays up his military service on the campaign trail and weaves it into his narrative.

"This is a battle for the soul of America. Two very different visions of what America is about and who we will become. I learned what the soul of America is when I served with my fellow soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. When I think of America, the faces of those young men and women pop into my mind," Crow told a group of supporters before they fanned out to knock on doors on his behalf.

Though Coffman doesn't talk about it as much, he, too, is a veteran. He is the only member of Congress to serve in both Iraq wars, first in the Army, then the Marines.

He says he is falling back on his Marine training for much needed stamina in this political race. He tries to do 500 pushups each day and dropped and gave us 20 for our camera.

But it's his experience on the front lines of politics -- being in a neck-and-neck race in this district several times before -- that he hopes really makes a difference.

"In a bad political environment, [we] are more likely to survive than people that suddenly find themselves in headwinds that they've never experienced before," he told us.

Coffman calls it being "battle tested."

As competitive races go, Coffman believes he is doing everything he can. Republicans in Washington say he is doing everything right.

But this year, it may not be enough -- thanks to President Trump. He says it used to drive him crazy that his own fate is so tied to Trump, whom he says he did not vote for.

Now?

"You know at this point, I'm resigned to it," Coffman said.
ORISKANY FALLS  Rep. Claudia Tenney on Thursday visited the site of the former Covidien Manufacturing site in Oriskany Falls.

The plant has been shut down for years, and in 2016 a fire broke out at the facility.

Tenney met with members of the Environmental Protection Agency and local officials regarding the removal of the materials left from the site.

The EPA is working to put this into their super fund funding pattern, so that's what we're trying to help them do is get the money, make sure that there's no obligation or liability on the part of the village and town. They've done everything they can to remediate and mitigate against any kind of damages, Tenney said.

We also asked Tenney about the New York Post article that talked about a memo sent out by Tenneys campaign to campaign staffers, warning them about the criminal history of her opponent Anthony Brindisis family. The memo used words like criminal and thuggish to describe his family, but Tenney did not want to address it on Thursday, instead choosing to focus on the reason for the tour.

The mayor of Oriskany Falls says they've been working on cleaning up the site for years, and it will be completed soon.
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., Sept. 19, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The FIDO Alliance is making significant progress in its mission to reduce the worlds reliance on passwords with simpler and stronger authentication. Join the FIDO Alliance on October 8 in Singapore to learn about the latest trends in strong authentication, including key updates on newly released FIDO2 specifications being supported in leading browsers such as Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge and Mozilla Firefox.

Attendees will hear about the uptake of FIDO Authentication in the APAC region with case studies on real world deployments from leading companies such as BC Card, Tradelink Electronic Commerce, Ltd. and LINE. Speakers will also cover the technical details of FIDO standards, FIDO Certification programs, and FIDOs role in the global regulatory landscape for strong authentication.

Why Attend: FIDO standards offer a simple, low-cost way to improve security and user experience. Attend this seminar to learn more about FIDO specifications and the benefits of deployment.

When: October 8, 2018; 9am  2pm

Where: Pan Pacific Hotel, Singapore

Who Can Attend: The event is free and open to anyone to attend, but registration is required .

Agenda & Registration: https://fidoalliance.org/events/fido-authentication-seminar-singapore/

About The FIDO Alliance

The FIDO (Fast IDentity Online) Alliance, www.fidoalliance.org , was formed in July 2012 to address the lack of interoperability among strong authentication technologies, and remedy the problems users face with creating and remembering multiple usernames and passwords. The FIDO Alliance is changing the nature of authentication with standards for simpler, stronger authentication that define an open, scalable, interoperable set of mechanisms that reduce reliance on passwords. FIDO Authentication is stronger, private, and easier to use when authenticating to online services.
A woman killed three people and wounded three others before fatally shooting herself at a drugstore distribution center Thursday in Harford County, Maryland, officials said.

A source close to the investigation said the woman was a disgruntled employee. Sheriff Jeffrey Gahler told reporters the woman was a temporary employee and showed up for work at her normal time at the facility near Aberdeen.

She shot people outside the building and on the warehouse floor, he said. The woman died at a nearby hospital after shooting herself in the head, he said.

She was identified by the sheriff's office as Snochia Moseley, 26, from Baltimore County.

Police are still searching for a motive, he added.

A law enforcement official briefed on the incident said the suspect was at some point a security guard at the Rite Aid support facility where the shooting occurred.

The suspect used a 9 mm Glock pistol and brought several magazines for the gun, Gahler said at a news conference. The gun was hers and was purchased legally, he said.

The sheriff wouldn't release any details about the six victims or the shooter, saying that their next of kin were still being notified.

No law enforcement officers fired shots during their response, he said. Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center received four patients with "priority one gunshot wounds," said spokeswoman Kristin Mears.

At a news conference, Ray Fang, the hospital's trauma medical director, said two of the victims were stable and doing well, while two remain seriously injured. All the victims were out of surgery, he said.

Fang declined to provide additional information until he was sure all the victims' families had been notified.

Rite Aid spokeswoman Susan Henderson said roughly 1,000 employees work at the distribution center, where products are received and processed for delivery.

"The shooting happened adjacent to the primary building," she said.

Neighbor: 'It's right on the doorstep'

Colleen Hendrickson, who lives and works in the area, said she was waiting on the bus when someone told her there had been a shooting nearby.

"I, of course, thought it was far off or, that's like down the road or something, right?" she told CNN affiliate WJZ. "No, it's right outside. It's right on the doorstep."

She saw emergency vehicles, including ambulances, and helicopters, which were out of place for the "sleepy" part of the county, she said. The area is home to many warehouses and plants, some belonging to major brands, including makeup and bleach companies.

"It's really just usually very calm, and this is the most chaotic I've ever seen it," she told the station. "It's very scary when it's just right there on your doorstep because you can see a billion news reports about shooters, about emergency instances, and it still doesn't make it real to you."

People were being asked to avoid the area just outside the city of Perryman, roughly 30 miles northeast of Baltimore. Homes, churches and a cemetery are in the vicinity. Railroad tracks run alongside a business park.

It's the third high-profile shooting in the US in two days

Deputies were dispatched at 9:09 a.m. ET, the sheriff said. They were on the scene in five minutes.

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives sent agents from Baltimore. The FBI's Baltimore office is also assisting.

"We are closely monitoring the horrific shooting," Gov. Larry Hogan tweeted. "Our prayers are with all those impacted, including our first responders. The state stands ready to offer any support."

The shooting came a day after two other shootings that made national news. A shooting at an office complex in Middleton, Wisconsin, left three people hurt Wednesday, and a gunman wounded four people at the Masontown Borough Municipal Center in Pennsylvania later in the day.

Police killed the shooters in both Wednesday incidents.

Harford County authorities responded to another fatal shooting in October, when a man killed three people and wounded two others at a remodeling business where he worked in Edgewood. The gunman later drove to Wilmington, Delaware, where he shot and wounded a sixth victim.
TIPPECANOE COUNTY, Ind. (WLFI)  In early October, the League of Women Voters of Greater Lafayette is hosting a debate for the candidates running for Tippecanoe County Clerk. The candidates are Republican Julie Roush and democrat Vicky Woeste.

The debate will be the same type of format as Wednesday night's Tippecanoe County sheriff's debate. On Sep. 19 Republican Jason Dombkowski and Democrat Bob Goldsmith took the stage to answer questions from several groups at Harrison High School. Topics included staffing shortages at the jail, the drug epidemic and transparency within the sheriff's office.

Questions will come from the Wabash Area Lifetime learning, LWV, WLFI and Harrison and Jeff high school students. LWV member Ken Jones said events like these are unfiltered. You get the chance to learn a lot about the candidates and what type of people they are.

Jones said, "I'm looking forward to just sitting back and also being the voter who's listening to their policies and how they'll run the office."

The clerk's debate is being held at the Tippecanoe County Office Building. If you would like to go, then mark your calendars for Tuesday Oct. 9 at 7 p.m.
TIPPECANOE COUNTY, Ind (WLFI) - A special guest was in attendance at Wea Ridge Middle School today. Holocaust survivor Eva Mozes Kor spoke to students about her experiences.

"It was such a massive failure of human rights, said Kor, reflecting back on the Holocaust.

She was only six years old when Axis forces occupied her Romanian village in 1944. Shortly after, her family was forced to the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland. "Everything was crazy and they treated us like we weren't human beings. Even worse than animals, said Kor.

While imprisoned, Eva and her twin sister Marian were subject to human experimentation conducted by Doctor Josef Mengele. She recalled not understanding the magnitude of where she was, until she saw other children who had passed away. "When I saw the dead children on the floor I was very upset that somehow they couldn't stay alive, said Kor.

Kor quickly made survival a priority. "I did not want evil to win. My only way of stopping evil and defeating them was by staying alive, stated Kor.

On January 27th, 1945, the Soviet Army liberated the camp. Only Eva and Marian survived out of their immediate family.

Eva gained international attention when she attended the trial of former Nazi Oskar Groning She forgave Groning for his actions as they shared an embrace. "I really want to point out what happens if we don't try to get along. Things don't get better by themselves, there is no push button that is going to make us get along, said Kor.

Now Eva now travels, lecturing about the importance of forgiveness. "If we can plant a seed in the minds of young people that they can be the difference, those little seeds will germinate, said Kor.

Apart from lecturing, Kor founded the CANDLES Holocaust Museum and Education Center. Since it's opening in 1984 it has helped locate more than 80 Mengele survivors.
Lafayette, Ind. (WLFI) -- The Community Foundation of Greater Lafayette awarded $125,000 to seven organizations.

The grants ranged from over $6,000 to almost $35,000. Lafayette Urban Ministry is the recipient of the biggest grant of $34,900.

The facility is investing its grant into a solar panel roof. Executive Director of LUM Joe Micon said the solar panels will save the organization thousands of dollars each year. That money will be put back into the children and families LUM serves.

It's going to allow us to keep the fees in our after school program at their current rate for the next two years and that's a significant things for the families and the children that we're serving, said Micon.

Micon said installing the solar panels will save the organization $4,500 annually, which is a significant amount for an organization that heavily relies on the generosity of the community. He said the grant funding the solar panel roofing is a continuous gift.

Although the grant is coming now, to pay for a new roof. It really is a grant that will continue to give for decades to come, said Micon.

The new roof will go up in two weeks.The solar panels are expected to be added by the end of this year.

Other Community Foundation grant recipients included Bauer Family Resources received $30,000, Wabash Center received $16,429, Robert and Ellen Haan Museum of Indiana Art received $14,927, Right Steps Child Development Centers received $11,968, Willowstone Family Services received $10,530 and Big Brothers Big Sisters received $6,246.
TIPPECANOE COUNTY, Ind. (WLFI)  News 18 is partnering with the League of Women Voters to broadcast and stream the Tippecanoe County Sheriff's Debate live.

Republican candidate Jason Dombkowski and Democratic opponent Bob Goldsmith will be asked questions from LWV, the Wabash Area Lifetime Learning Association, students from both Jefferson and Harrison High Schools and WLFI.




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VANCOUVER, British Columbia, Sept. 19, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Sandfire Resources America Inc. (TSX.V:SFR) (OTCQB:SRAFF) ("Sandfire" or the "Company") announces that it will conduct a rights offering to raise gross proceeds of up to approximately C$18.9 million (the "Rights Offering").



The Company will issue rights (the "Rights") to existing shareholders in Canada and to eligible shareholders in the United States and in certain other jurisdictions at the close of business on the record date of September 27, 2018 (the "Record Date"). The Company is pleased that shareholders in Montana and elsewhere in the U.S. will be entitled to participate in the Rights Offering due to recent rule changes in the United States.

Eligible shareholders will receive five (5) Rights for each common share of the Company (each a "Share") held. Eight (8) Rights will entitle the holder to subscribe for one (1) Share upon payment of the subscription price of C$0.06 per Share (the "Subscription Price"). For example, a holder of 1,000 Shares will be entitled to subscribe for 625 Shares for an aggregate subscription price of C$37.50.

Shareholders who fully exercise their Rights will also be entitled to subscribe for additional shares in the Rights Offering, if available as a result of unexercised Rights prior to the Expiry Time, subject to certain limitations set out in the Company's rights offering circular (the "Circular").

The Rights will trade on the TSX Venture Exchange under the symbol SFR.RT commencing on the first trading day prior to the Record Date and until 9:00 a.m. (Vancouver time) on October 30, 2018. The Rights will expire at 2:00 p.m. (Vancouver time) on October 30, 2018 (the "Expiry Time"), after which time unexercised Rights will be void and of no value. No fractional shares will be issued under the Rights Offering.

A rights offering notice and rights certificate will be mailed to each registered shareholder of the Company resident in Canada and to each eligible shareholders in the United States as at the Record Date. Registered shareholders who wish to exercise their Rights must forward the completed rights certificate, together with the applicable funds, to the rights agent, Computershare Investor Services Inc., on or before the Expiry Time. Shareholders who own their shares through an intermediary, such as a bank, trust company, securities dealer or broker, will receive materials and instructions from their intermediary. Further details of the Rights Offering are contained in the Companys Circular, which has been filed on SEDAR under the Company's profile at www.sedar.com .

The Company currently has 503,281,865 Shares issued and outstanding. If all of the Rights issued under the Rights Offering are validly exercised, an additional 314,551,166 Shares would be issued. The Company intends to use the net proceeds of the Rights Offering to advance the Black Butte Copper Project and for general working capital purposes.

This news release shall not constitute an offer to sell or solicitation of an offer to buy the securities of the Company. There shall be no offer or sale of these securities in any jurisdiction in which such offer, solicitation or sale would be unlawful prior to the registration or qualification of such securities under the laws of any such jurisdiction.

Purchase Commitment Agreement

In connection with the Rights Offering, the Company has entered into a purchase commitment agreement (the "Commitment Agreement") with Sandfire BC Holdings Inc. (the "Purchaser"). The Purchaser has agreed, subject to the satisfaction of certain conditions, to fully exercise its basic subscription privilege to purchase its pro rata share of the Shares offered in the Rights Offering. The subscription amount for the Purchaser will be C$14,733,123.84. Further details of the Commitment Agreement are contained in the Companys Circular.

As of the date hereof, the Purchaser owns 78.06% of the Companys issued and outstanding Shares. If the purchase obligations of the Purchaser are fulfilled in full, the Purchaser does not subscribe for additional shares in the Rights Offering and no other shareholders exercise their Rights, the Purchaser will own 85.26% of the issued and outstanding Shares on completion of the Rights Offering.

About Sandfire Resources America Inc.

Sandfire Resources America Inc. is a growth company focused on the exploration, development, and mining of its 100% owned flagship property, the Black Butte Copper project in central Montana, USA. The Company is led by a highly experienced executive management team that has a successful track record of building shareholder value through exploration, corporate finance, and mine development.

Contact Information:

Sandfire Resources America Inc.

Nancy Schlepp, Director of Public Affairs

Mobile: 406-224-8180

Office: 406-547-3466

Email: nschlepp@sandfireamerica.com

Cautionary statement regarding forwardlooking information

Certain disclosures in this release constitute forward-looking information within the meaning of Canadian securities legislation. Forward-looking statements are statements that are not historical facts and are generally, but not always, identified by words such as the following: expects, plans, anticipates, believes, intends, estimates, projects, assumes, potential and similar expressions. Forward-looking statements also include reference to events or conditions that will, would, may, could or should occur, including, without limitation, statements regarding the Companys plans for advancing the Black Butte Copper Project (including plans to complete permitting), details of the Rights Offering, the intended use of proceeds of the Rights Offering, resource estimates and expected outcomes. In making the forward-looking statements in this news release, the Company has applied certain factors and assumptions that the Company believes are reasonable, including that the Companys permitting will proceed as expected; that the Rights Offering will be completed and will raise the expected proceeds; that the results of exploration and development activities are consistent with managements expectations and that the assumptions underlying mineral resource estimates are valid. However, the forward-looking statements in this news release are subject to numerous risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause future results to differ materially from those expressed or implied in such forward-looking statements, including without limitation: that the Rights Offering will otherwise not be completed or will raise less than the expected proceeds; uncertainties as to the costs to completion of the Rights Offering; the results of exploration and development activities will not be consistent with managements expectations, the risk of unexpected variations in mineral resources, grade or recovery rates, delays in obtaining or inability to obtain required government or other regulatory approvals or financing, failure of plant, equipment or processes to operate as anticipated, the risk of accidents, labor disputes, inclement or hazardous weather conditions, unusual or unexpected geological conditions, ground control problems, earthquakes, flooding and all of the other risks generally associated with the development of mining facilities and the operation of a producing mine. 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. Readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on forward-looking statements. The Company does not intend, and expressly disclaims any intention or obligation to, update or revise any forward-looking statements whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except as required by law.

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.
Tickets on sale Friday! Super Furry Animals frontman to perform in Wrexham

This article is old - Published: Thursday, Sep 20th, 2018

The frontman of the legendary Welsh band Super Furry Animals has been unveiled as the first of a series of acts to perform at Wrexhams newest music venue.

Gruff Rhys, also of the Mercury nominated outfit Neon Neon, will play a special full band show at The Live Rooms, Wrexham on Friday 7th December.

The show follows the release of Babelsberg earlier this year  Gruffs fifth solo album, and his first record release on Rough Trade Records since 2007s classic Candylion.

The albums ten tracks were initially recorded in early 2016 in a whirlwind three day session. The band he gathered for the record were his regular drummer Kliph Scurlock (ex-Flaming Lips) and multi-instrumentalists Stephen Black (Sweet Baboo) and Osian Gwynedd.

Over the course of Babelsbergs forty something minutes, Gruff manages to perfectly document our troubled and troubling times with humour, grace and always addictive melody.

In a career thats spanned three decades, two languages, multiple bands, offshoots, collaborations and one boundless imagination, Babelsberg is arguably Gruffs finest set of songs to date.

Gruff will take to the stage at the revamped Central Station in Wrexham as part of his tour across the US, Europe and the UK.

Earlier this week Wrexham.com reported that the iconic venue on Hill Street in the town centre will reopen to the public on October 13th under the new name The Live Rooms, Wrexham.

The work will also see a significant upgrade to the interior decor of the venue and the creation of an entirely new room; along with a brand new seated bar area as well as multipurpose nightclub and live spaces

Gruff Rhys will perform at The Live Rooms, Wrexham with his full band on Friday 7th December.

Tickets are on sale tomorrow, Thursday 20th September at 9am via focuswales.com/tickets
LONDON, Sept. 19, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- One of the top data mining conferences, ACM SIGKDD (Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining Conference, abbreviated as KDD), was held from August 19 to 23rd in London, U.K. this year. The annual KDD conference is a premier interdisciplinary data science conference, bringing together researchers and practitioners from data science, data mining, knowledge discovery, and large-scale data analytics. It also attracts the world's leading technology companies to attend and present including Google, Facebook, and Microsoft along with Chinese Technology giants Alibaba, Tencent, Baidu and JD.



As the only Chinese Company in the AI Adaptive learning field, many attendees were very interested to learn much more about how Yixue Squirrel AI workedspecifically, the AI and learning systems that it has recently developed along with plans for new systems that will be coming soon. Moreover, Dr. Dan Bindman, Chief Data Scientist of Squirrel AI, gave a talk on Multi- Dimensional Models for Knowledge Assessment and AI Adaptive Learning: Now and the Future. He described the competitive advantages of Squirrel AI in efficiently and accurately assessing student knowledge of the curriculum, pinpointing exactly each students strengths and weaknesses at the highest level of granularity and providing personalized teaching. He also discussed the key AI algorithms of Squirrel AI, the current experiments his team has been developing and their focus on R&D in the future. These developments seemed very well received and quite impressed many professors, scientists, and industry practitioners attending the conference.

A photo accompanying this announcement is available at http://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/ec2b5921-eafb-4338-99b9-afa57dc7cf5e

In addition, Squirrel AI also announced further expansions of its open data plan. It is looking to use its already vast student data in collaborative projects with global researchers and scientists to deliver the absolute state of the art AI adaptive learning experience.

Great attendees, great talks, great panels:

Some of the important attendees discussing their research and the frontiers of artificial intelligence and machine learning are given below:

Usama M. Fayyad, former Chief Data Officer at Barclays Bank and co-founder of KDD conferences and ACM SIGKDD

Jeannette M. Wing, Avanessians Director of the Data Sciences Institute at Columbia University, former Corporate Vice President of Microsoft Research with oversight of its core research laboratories around the world and Microsoft Research Connections, and former President's Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University

Yike Guo, Professor of Computing Science at Imperial College London, Academician of the Royal Academy of Engineering, and the founding Director of the Data Science Institute at Imperial College

Alvin E. Roth, Nobel laureate in economics and professor of economics at Stanford University

Joseph Sirosh, Microsoft AI Chief Technology Officer

Yee Whye, Professor of machine learning at Oxford University

Bo Xing, Machine Learning Professor at Carnegie Mellon Lung

Andrej KARPATHY, Tesla AI Director

Faisal Farooq, IBM chief scientist

A photo accompanying this announcement is available at http://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/5468ed6e-0cc2-4508-9714-97cb3b556beb

After learning about the cutting-edge algorithms and the results that Squirrel AI has achieved, Yike Guo and Jeannette Wing, along with key AI practitioners from Facebook and other leading technology companies, were among those who seemed impressed by what Squirrel AI has achieved in successfully applying AI in education, as well as their commitment to bringing equitable, efficient and personalized education to every Chinese child.

Also of note, Yee Whye The, Professor of Statistical Machine Learning at the University of Oxford, was one of the keynote speakers at KDD 2018. He gave a speech of On Big Data Learning for Small Data Problems. As of June 14th, 2018, his papers have been cited 20,142 times! Prior to working at the University of Oxford, Yee Whye Teh worked as a University Lecturer at the Department of Statistics University College London. He was one of the original developers of deep belief networks and of hierarchical dirichlet processes. He has also served on many occasions as chairperson on NIPS, ICML and AISTATS.

Dr. Dan Bindman, Chief Data Scientist of Squirrel AI, gives a powerful talk on AI adaptive learning:

Dans talk first focused on the 3 Key Components of an Ultimate AI Adaptive Learning System:

The first component is complete and deep content, meaning (a) complete curriculum coverage using high-quality nuts and bolts questions, with all the ancillaries like engaging videos and explanations, at a high level of granularity for easier student learning, and (b) a large and diverse set of more complex exercises that gives students a much deeper understanding of the curriculum. These exercises are often open-ended and thus difficult to create and score for student understanding. An expert in adaptive learning content, Dan believes that Yixue Squirrel AI is already very good in providing strong nuts and bolts content coverage across our wide variety of K-12 products. The extent of the deeper content, however, is currently limited by business needs, as many users want deep content only if it substantially improves their success on the high stakes tests that they are studying for. But in the next 5 to 10 years, Dan believes providing a strong deep content system will become the make or break for the success of many AI adaptive learning systems, and he has been very impressed how Yixue Squirrel AI has been investing heavily in this area to be sure it is at the forefront of AI adaptive learning.

The second component is a strong student knowledge assessment system, which can efficiently and accurately assess student knowledge of the entire curriculum, exactly pinpointing each students strengths and weaknesses at the highest level of granularity. And ideally it can be updated in real time using the students history on the product, without the requirement of formal periodic assessments or tests except for a short initial assessment to more accurately initialize the system. Again, Dan was impressed by the systems currently used by Squirrel AI in this regard, including Item Response Theory, Knowledge Space Theory, and Bayesian Knowledge Tracing. And perhaps most especially impressive is how some of the subjects that Squirrel AI is covering, like Ancient Chinese, have never been implemented with adaptive AI technology until now! And going forward, he is excited by how Squirrel AI is willing to try multi dimensional, mixed model approaches, along with using exciting new models (like his own, see below) to achieve the most accurate assessments. And he is hopeful that within the next year Squirrel AI will be able to update the students knowledge of the entire course without periodic assessments.

The third and final component is a content recommendation system that maximizes student learning. In the classical sense, the primary input to such a system is the students current assessed knowledge. The system then uses that to recommend one (or more) lessons or questions that are at just the right difficulty for the student to learn. But Dan also thinks it is becoming clear that these system must focus more on student engagementadjusting the recommendation depending on the emotional state of the student. Almost certainly there are times that the student needs easier problems to get out of a rut. There may also be other times when a reward, like a game, will be a great motivator. Or there may be other times when a challenging problem will be best. And again, Dan was impressed by Squirrel AIs current, classical recommendation system, but he is even more impressed by how Squirrel AI is working and investing in researching new approaches to maximize student engagementlike real-time heart rate, brain wave, and facial recognition analysis along with a Virtual Personal Assistant to get an emotional measure on the student that will lead to better recommendations. He also discussed how Squirrel AI is currently working with the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) and the Chinese Academy of Sciences on many of these things and is just about to begin to collect some larger-scale student data.

In the second part of his talk, Dan talked about new model that he is working with Squirrel AI to implement. The key in his model is Probabilistic Knowledge State, or PKS. The PKS for any given student on any given question at any given time is determined by three factors: The students abilities A(t), the questions weight W(q), and the questions center C(q). After the student answers only 15-20 questions the model can accurately estimate the PKS for the student on every question, which tells us the students strengths and weaknesses at the highest level of granularity. And because the PKS is so accurate and is updated continuously as the student answers more questions, it is very useful for both student knowledge analytics and AI adaptive learningbasically providing an X-Ray of what the students current knowledge is and at the same time providing for an optimal way to choose the next question or lesson for the student.

Finally, Dan also shared some other of Squirrel AI R&Ds current achievements and future plan. All attendees displayed a strong interest in Dans model, Squirrel AIs algorithms and the current projects.

More about KDD and Chinas growing influence at the conference:

KDD was established in 1998 by the Association for Computing Machinery, or ACM. KDD has hosted the annual ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD) since 1995, and conference papers are published through ACM. KDD is widely considered the most influential forum for knowledge discovery and data mining research. Each year, over 2000 global top data-mining scholars as well as representatives from leading companies from all over the world, attend KDD. This year, 293 papers were accepted at KDD, and 64.5% or 189 of these accepted papers had at least one Chinese author.

About YiXue Squirrel AI Learning Inc.

YiXue Squirrel AI Inc. is a leading AI-based adaptive learning service provider for K-12 students in China. Headquartered in Shanghai, China, YiXue offers after-school courses for Math, English, Chinese, Physics and Chemistry subjects, powered by its proprietary AI adaptive engine and custom-built courseware. Students on Squirrel AI 's platform enjoy a supervised adaptive learning experience that has been proven to improve both efficacy and student engagement across Squirrel AI's online learning platform and in-person learning centers.

To learn more about YiXue Squirrel AI Learning, please visit http://www.squirrelai.us/.
The European Union (EU) has advanced plans for the continent-wide censorship of the internet. Giving his final State of the Union speech last Wednesday, European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker outlined plans to compel online platforms to take down terrorist content within one hour of it being flagged by national authorities.

Failure to comply will result in fines of up to four percent of the offending companys annual global turnover.

These proposals have vast, grave implications for the democratic right of hundreds of millions of people to access and use the internet freely. The law will mean EU member-state governments and national security services will determine what is acceptable for publication on the internetwith no reference to the courts or any kind of democratic oversight. The one-hour time limit for removing content will force platforms to prevent certain postings lest they run the risk of sanctions.

The measure will make little difference to the major tech companies, who are already censoring their platforms and employing tens of thousands of people to enforce it. But the legislation will be used to strictly police more independent outlets. That this will be primarily at the expense of postings seen as damaging to the corporate and financial elite is obvious.

The plans envisage a mitigation procedure that allows platforms the right to challenge a removal order, but the content must still be removed. Only if an appeal is successful will content be restored to the site.

A critical element in the moves to police and fine the tech giantswho are all US basedis to assert the dominance of Europes governments over US corporations. Under conditions of a fracturing of relations between the US and EU, with the launching of reciprocal trade war measures, the European elite wants to ensure that the internet is compatible with their interests.

Once accepted by member states and the European Parliament, the law will formalise across Europe even closer relationships between state security services and tech companies pioneered by Germany and increasingly adopted by other European nations.

The Network Enforcement Act, which came into operation in Germany on January 1, requires operators of internet platforms with over two million users to remove or block obviously unlawful content within 24 hours of receipt of a complaint. Failure to comply incurs a fine of 50 million.

Platforms must report to government authorities regularly on their handling of complaints and inform them on who wrote controversial statements. Germany is home to a 10,000 square-meter office building, currently occupied by 1,000 staff, for Facebooks fact checkers in Europe.

In July, the French National Assembly passed an anti-fake news bill allowing judges to censor not simply fake information, but material containing any allegation or implying of a fact without providing verifiable information that makes it plausible.

In August, the UK parliaments Department of Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee released an interim report on fake news which suggested the government assign verification ratings to web sites and establish a new category of tech company with a clear legal liability to act against harmful and illegal content.

The scale of the censorship planned by the EU is immense.

For the last six months, online platforms have been acting under the guidance of a European Commission official recommendation demanding proactive measures against any information which is not in compliance with Union law or the law of the member state concerned.

The recommendation was introduced on March 1, with the acknowledgement that online platforms were already censoring their users to an unprecedented degree but insisted that more had to be done.

The EUs Digital Commissioner Andrus Ansip said at the time, While several platforms have been removing more illegal content than ever before... we still need to react faster against terrorist propaganda and other illegal content which is a serious threat to our citizens security, safety and fundamental rights.

Prior to this announcement, YouTube had removed nearly two million videos between June and December 2017. Twitter suspended 1.2 million accounts between August 2015 and December 2017, removing 300,000 accounts between January and June 2017. Facebook took down more than 30,000 fake accounts during the 2017 French general election. Both Google and Facebook laid out plans to hire more than 10,000 staff to police their content and both put in place algorithms to suppress untrusted or divisive material on their platforms.

Even this is not enough. More content is to be taken down or be prevented from even being published in the first place. In Junckers words, Whilst significant progress has been made under the EU Internet Forum established in 2015, it is clear that more needs to be done to ensure the engagement of all internet platforms and national authorities to protect Europeans online...

In response to Junckers speech, Facebook issued a statement saying, There is no place for terrorism on Facebook and we share the goal of the European Commission to fight it, and believe that it is only through a common effort across companies, civil society and institutions that results can be achieved.

Weve made significant strides finding and removing terrorist propaganda quickly and at scale, but we know we can do more.

YouTube said it shared the European Commissions desire to react rapidly to terrorist content and keep violent extremism off our platforms.

Juncker claimed, Several of the recent terrorist attacks in the EU have shown how terrorists misuse the internet to spread their messages.

In fact, the most serious terror incidents in Europe have been carried out by organisations or individuals known to the security agencies. A large number have been active in, and supportive of, the proxy forces used by the Western imperialist powers to pursue their geo-strategic aims in the Middle East and Africa.

While the proposed measures deal specifically with terrorist contentwhose definition will be up to the censorsprevious guidelines have used even broader categories of extremist or grossly offensive material to enforce its removal.

The now default resort to the threat of terrorism in order to justify draconian censorship by the authorities is a fraud. These measures have nothing to do with protecting Europes population from terror attacks. Rather, they are designed to gag them in the face of austerity, militarism and the build-up of right-wing forces across the continent.

Junckers call for unprecedented levels of internet censorship has overwhelming support in the European Parliament and the national parliaments of each EU member state. As the EU fractures under the impact of the global capitalist crisis, one thing its constituent governments agree on is the danger posed by rising social discontent and opposition in the working class. The European Commissions proposals make clear they will spare no efforts in imposing authoritarian measures to suppress this development.

In April 2017, Ben Gomes, who is responsible for Googles search engine, met with leading German politicians. Shortly afterwards, Google began censoring the World Socialist Web Site and other anti-war and progressive web sites.

In his April 25, 2017 blog post announcing the changes to Googles algorithm, Gomes linked to the guidelines issued to the companys evaluators, which made clear that its search engine should show results from sites presenting alternative viewpoints only if the query clearly indicates the user is seeking an alternative viewpoint.

Within two months, a manner consistent with this mechanism, many pages from the World Socialist Web Site were removed from search results.

In January of this year, the World Socialist Web Site issued an open letter calling for socialist, anti-war, left-wing and progressive web sites, organizations and activists to join an international coalition to fight internet censorship.

The WSWS explained, Without access to alternative news and social media, workers in different countries will not be able to effectively coordinate their common struggles. Unfettered access to the Internet will facilitate the international unity of the working class in the global fight for socialism, democracy and equality.

We urge everyone seeking to fight the grip of the technology monopolies and intelligence agencies over the internet to contact us and join the fight against censorship!
In the month since the August 14 collapse of Genoas Morandi Bridge, it has become clear that there were repeated warnings about the dangerous decay of the bridges structural integrity. Although minor repairs were carried out, calls from engineers and other experts for major repairs and the decommissioning of the structure were ignored by the private operator and the government.

The most recent warning came in October 2017, when Carmelo Gentile, a structural engineering professor at the Politecnico di Milano, sent results of structural integrity tests to Autostrade per lItalia, the bridge operator, and the central governments highways agency. Gentile warned of troubling signs of corrosion or other possible damage to the southern bridge supports.

These supports ultimately failed and collapsed a portion of the bridge, killing 43 people and making 150 residents homeless. In all, more than 600 homes were destroyed by the collapse. Countless more people rely on the major throughway in and out of Genoa.

In an interview with the New York Times published on September 6, professor Gentile commented, Probably they [highway officials and Autostrade] underestimated the importance of the information.

Autostrade responded with a statement this month claiming professor Gentiles suggestions were included in a proposal to retrofit the viaduct that was approved in June, and the company blames the Ministry of Infrastructure for months of delays in authorizing the work.

The potential for a total collapse has been well documented, going all the way back to a 1979 report by the bridges architect Riccardo Morandi, recommending constant maintenance of the structure to remove all traces of rust and fill in exposed patches on the reinforcements.

Morandis report, published 12 years after the completion of the bridge, noted a well-known loss of superficial chemical resistance of the concrete due to sea air and pollution from a nearby steel plant. The steel cable stays alone have been under continuous maintenance since the 1990s.

Evacuated residents who lived under or very near the bridgedesignated as the red zoneraised concerns about the construction of the bridge, and over the years since it was built have repeatedly raised concerns about a collapse. These concerns went totally ignored by the state authorities.

The economic loss is crippling for businesses and residents alike. In a statement on September 11, Autostrade reported it has satisfied almost all the requests for compensation by residents within the red zone. The statement explains that it is offering various types of grants, on average within 24 hours of the request, to meet the most immediate needs of those who were forced to abandon their home: the purchase of furniture, payment of mortgages, reimbursement of rental payments, fees for school, and payments to craftsmen and traders.

This is cold comfort for the residents who are expected to never be able to return to their homes and businesses. In a RAI-TG1 Italia broadcast, displaced residents reported that they are relying on donations from volunteers, friends, and family to get by and are living in cramped quarters.

In an August 18 interview with the Guardian, University of Genoa Professor Antonio Bercich, who also warned authorities about the Morandi bridge, said, We have used materials which are destined to deteriorate quickly, like those of the bridge in Genoa  There are structures from those years that should now be demolished.

The situation is an indictment of the entire political establishment. After years of warnings and disastrous developments, the representatives of the capitalist state are unable and unwilling to address decaying infrastructure. Governments of the center-left and center-right alike, including members of the current executive, have ignored reports, neglected desperately needed maintenance and participated in the dismantling of public infrastructure regulations while they pursued its privatization.

In bitter struggles following World War II, the Italian working class won concessions from a deeply hated ruling class discredited by the crimes of fascism. These included the requirement that road infrastructure be operated as a public utility and maintained by the state.

In 1999, the center-left government of former Stalinist Massimo DAlema privatized Societa Autostrade, the public company overseeing transport infrastructure. The fashion brand Benetton Group took over 30 percent of the state assets, with the rest sold in a public stock offering.

In 2006, the Benetton Group contributed 1.1 million in political donations to various parties. It donated 150,000 to the far right Northern League (predecessor to the Lega, the party of co-deputy prime minister Matteo Salvini) as part of a strategy to renew its roadway operator license. In 2008, Salvini himself, and his party, voted in favor of the renewal.

The consequences of this program of privatization have been disastrous. Twelve bridges have collapsed since 2004, and five in the past five years, including four in Sicily, one of the poorest regions in Italy. It is widely reported that at least 300 bridges and thousands of kilometers of roadways are at risk of collapse.

Last month, in an attempt to placate mass outrage over the disaster and the negligence of authorities, the central government called for the closure of the most dangerous bridges and roadways.

These closuresto the extent they are taking placeare carried out in the most arbitrary manner. In the city Nettuno, south of Rome, for example, officials closed a pedestrian bridge connecting the north side of the city with the train station as well as at least two residential roads, providing no advance notice to residents.

Residents reported that police officers came early in the morning and shouted and whistled for people to move their cars. Those who didnt come down immediately were fined. Since then, the government has not returned to evaluate, let alone repair, the closed roads or bridge. Some residents remain without legal access to their homes.

Any increase in Italys social spending, including infrastructure, is opposed by the European Union, which is demanding that Italy maintain a prudent budget in 2019 to pay 2.1 trillion in debt to the banks and financial institutions.

The 2018 Italian budget allocated just 6 billion toward infrastructure. A report by the Bank of Canada suggests that the rebuilding of the Morandi bridge and paying out of damages from the collapse could reach 1 billion. In contrast to the insignificant funds allocated to the most essential infrastructure, the government spends 25 billion per year on the military. At the end of July, Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte met with US President Donald Trump, and indicated his support for increasing Italys NATO military spending to 37 billion per year.
Prospects for a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing next Monday to hear allegations of sexual misconduct against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh were thrown in question Wednesday as the attorneys for the accuser, Christine Blasey Ford, indicated that she would not appear before the committee without a prior FBI investigation into her claims.

A letter from the attorneys Tuesday to the Judiciary Committee chairman, Republican Senator Charles Grassley, seemed to leave open the possibility that Ford might appear at the hearing. The hearing was scheduled for six short days from today and would include interrogation by Senators who appear to have made up their minds that she is mistaken' and mixed up, they wrote.

The letter demanded an FBI investigation of the alleged incident first, but it did not explicitly declare that Ford would refuse to come to the hearing. However, one of Fords attorneys, Lisa Banks, in media interviews Tuesday night and Wednesday, flatly stated that Ford would not attend Mondays hearing and wanted a more drawn-out process.

Grassley and other Senate Republicans rejected the demand for a delay, and President Trump, who could order the FBI investigation, declared he would not do so. Trump, who has so far withheld his usual Twitter smears against Ford, said Wednesday that it is very hard for me to imagine anything happened between Kavanaugh and Ford, calling his nominee an extraordinary man with an unblemished record and presenting him, not Ford, as the main victim.

Whatever took place at a home in Montgomery County, Maryland in 1982 is long past the statute of limitations and would have been a matter for local police, not the FBI. Nor is it clear what the FBI would actually investigate, beyond the accounts of Ford and Kavanaugh, and the third person allegedly in the room, Kavanaughs friend, Mark Judge. It is highly doubtful that reliable evidence of even such elementary facts as where and when the party took place, if one took place at all, could be obtained after 36 years. And no one knows what went on in the room, if something did occur, except those involved, the boys then 17, the girl 15.

The Democratic Party seized on the demand for an FBI investigation only after it had been rejected by the Republicans and Trump, making their position transparently an effort to prolong the process of confirming Kavanaugh until as late as possible, even after the mid-term election. This is not so much an effort to defeat him, as to free Democratic senators from supposedly pro-Trump states, like North Dakota, Indiana, Missouri, West Virginia and Montana, from having to cast a vote on the nomination in the midst of difficult reelection campaigns.

Fords allegations have been seized on and promoted by the Democrats to serve as a substitute for any more extensive political effort to block the nomination of a vicious right winger to the Supreme Court, giving the highest court a hard-right five-member majority for the foreseeable future. This under conditions where only 31 percent in the most recent poll voice support for the Kavanaugh nomination.

Democratic senators, and particularly women senators, have increasingly used the language of the #MeToo campaign to suppress any airing of the political issues at stake in Kavanaughs nomination. Perhaps the crudest statement came from Hawaii Senator Mazie Hirono. Guess whos perpetuating all of these kinds of actions? Its the men in this country, she told a news conference. And I just want to say to the men in this country: Just shut up and step up.

There is nothing remotely progressive or democratic about smearing half the adult population of the United States over what may or may not have happened to a teenage girl 36 years ago.

Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, posted on Twitter a video clip of Kavanaugh speaking at his alma mater, Georgetown Preparatory School, in 2015. What happens at Georgetown Prep stays at Georgetown Prep, he said. Thats been a good thing for all of us, I think.

Warren said sententiously, I cant imagine any parent accepting this view. Is this really what America wants in its next Supreme Court Justice?

Again, there is ample reason to oppose the installation of an apologist for torture, adamant opponent of abortion rights and judicial shill for big business on the Supreme Court. But the Democrats choose to focus on an alleged sexual assault and blur the critical political issues. The Democrats degrade politics into scandal-mongeringemploying the same weapons used by the Republicans for decades, as in the Clinton impeachment.

The direction of the Democrats was suggested in a commercial released Tuesday by the group, Demand Justice, that links Donald Trumps celebration of his right to assault women, in the Access Hollywood tape; Trumps support for Roy Moore, the Alabama Senate candidate defeated after a press campaign alleging sexual misconduct with teenage girls; and the allegation against Kavanaugh. The Republican Party is the party of sexual predators, the commercial fairly shouts, and the Democratic Party is the party of #MeToo.

Meanwhile, the Republicans appeared to be strengthened in their determination to push through the Kavanaugh nomination, after initial disarray when Ford first came forward publicly. Several Republican senators flatly declared that if Ford did not appear at the hearing Monday, they would move forward to a vote on the nomination.

Grassley rejected any delay for an outside investigation, saying in a statement, Dr. Fords testimony would reflect her personal knowledge and memory of events. Nothing the FBI or any other investigator does would have any bearing on what Dr. Ford tells the committee, so there is no reason for any further delay.

The political calculations of the Republicans are identical to those of the Democrats, albeit in reverse. They are concerned that any failure to push through the Kavanaugh nomination will alienate Christian fundamentalists and ultra-conservative Catholics in the run-up to the mid-term election. At the same time, they want to maintain the pretense of offering respect to Ford.

This was indicated by the seemingly curious proposal Tuesday from Senator Susan Collins that the questioning of Ford should be conducted by an attorney for Kavanaugh, rather than by the senators directly. This was followed by the announcement Wednesday that Kavanaugh has hired a prominent female litigator, Beth Wilkinson, for his legal team. The clear intention is to avoid an Anita Hill-style line-up of male senators bullying a female witness about an alleged sexual assault, by bringing in a female lawyer to do the job.

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Brett Kavanaugh and the roleonce againof sexual misconduct allegations in American politics

[18 September 2018]
It has been two months since workers at Fiat Chryslers transmission plants in Kokomo and Tipton, Indiana, voted by 99.9 percent to authorize the United Auto Workers to call a strike to settle an estimated 200 unresolved local grievances, including health and safety issues and the abuse of temporary part-time employees.

Since then, UAW Local 685 and UAW International officials at the unions Solidarity House headquarters have ignored the mandate by rank-and-file workers and kept workers in the dark about ongoing negotiations. UAW Local 685 President Rick Ward and UAW International Vice President Cindy Estrada have made it clear that the UAW will do nothing to disrupt the companys production and profits.

The Kokomo-area plantswhich include Indiana Transmission I and II, Kokomo Transmission, Kokomo Casting and Tiptonemploy more than 7,000 workers and are key to Fiat Chryslers operations around the world.

Over the last two weeks, workers have become increasingly livid over the obstruction of the UAW and the unions refusal to keep workers informed. At the factory gates, one worker told the WSWS Autoworker Newsletter, We shouldnt still be working in here. Its two months since the strike vote.

The horrific injury of Eric Parsons, who was crushed when a die slide fell on him at the Kokomo Casting Plant on September 5, has brought home the health and safety issues raised by workers, which make up the bulk of the grievances the UAW has allowed to pile up.

On top of this there are new threats to jobs. After 15 years, the last five-speed transmission was produced at Indiana Transmission Plant (ITP) II in August, and the factory is now down to less than 200 workers. At least 80 temporary part-time workers also recently lost their jobs, according to workers.

In addition, FCA has subcontracted some of its 8- and 9-speed transmission production to the Germany-based supplier ZF Group, which reportedly pays workers as little as $9 an hour at its plants in Gray Court, South Carolina, and Lafayette, Indiana.

With access to such a source of cheap labor, there is little doubt FCA is seeking major concessions in wages, benefits and working conditions from Kokomo workers. For its part, the UAW has demonstrated that it will blackmail workers into accepting any concession in exchange for promises of jobs, which never pan out.

On Tuesday, supporters of the World Socialist Web Site Autoworker Newsletter distributed hundreds of newsletters to workers at the Kokomo Transmission Plant and at union meetings called by UAW Local 685.

The newsletter urged workers to reject the stonewalling by the UAW and to use the opportunity of todays meetings to form a rank-and-file committee to organize a fight. Workers should demand the implementation of a strike deadline of 12:01 a.m. on Monday, September 24, for the company to resolve all outstanding grievances.

It added: The committee of trusted rank-and-file workers, with one representative from every department and every shift, should demand the ability to monitor all negotiations and provide detailed reports to the membership. No more backroom deals and sellouts!

John, a worker with two decades in the plant, pointed to the corruption scandal engulfing the UAW, which involved the payment of millions of dollars in bribes to union negotiators to sign contracts favorable to Fiat Chrysler. Workers are not happy with the UAW here. [Former union president] Dennis Williams said the bribes had nothing to do with the negotiations. Thats ridiculous. Why else would they be paying the union?

According to workers who attended the union meetings, UAW Local 685 President Rick Ward tried to adjourn the gatherings as fast as possible to avoid any discussion by members who voted unanimously for a strike. Ward opened the morning meeting by announcing that he was surprised by the larger turnout since there was nothing special about the meeting or anything new to report. He then hurriedly closed the meeting without taking any comments.

In the evening, a veteran autoworker took the floor and sharply criticized the stalling by the UAW. If were going to strike it needs to be now, he said. If we beat the war drums and do nothing, the companies will laugh at us, and when the next contract comes they will be demanding three tiers. We have all the leverage were going to have. The company depends on the eight-speed transmissions built here.

According to reports given to the WSWS Autoworker Newsletter, the worker pointed to the severe injury of Eric Parsons at the casting plant and then called for a floor vote from the members to walk out on strike Monday to fight for the resolution of all the outstanding grievances and to defend jobs.

After repeatedly telling members that the UAW didnt want a strike, Ward responded to the worker by saying he was fully in support of a strike, but that the worker couldnt call for a vote because it was not possible to strike unless it was sanctioned by the UAW International. Without the Internationals sanction, Ward claimed, the company could fire all the workers, and the union would be fined for all the downtime, leading to its bankruptcy.

Ward added that there is no expiration on the strike authorization vote, meaning the UAW could drag things out for months and months without acting on the 99.9 percent mandate by workers. He also hinted that a deal to impose new concessions was in the works, saying, We got this transmission that will give us a 180 more jobs; if you dont take that there is a good chance that there can be 1,000 jobs lost.

Why should workers wait for permission to fight from UAW International executives at Solidarity House who are implicated in a massive bribery scheme with the auto bosses? The UAW International and Local 685 officials have repeatedly stated that they have no intention of disrupting FCAs production or profits. Both the UAW and auto executives fear that a powerful struggle by Kokomo workers would encourage workers throughout FCA, GM and Ford to overturn the rotten contracts signed by bribed UAW officials and fight to restore all the UAW-backed concessions.

For workers, however, the fight in Kokomo, as the deadly conditions in the plants show, is a life-and-death matter. That is why workers must form a rank-and-file committee, independent of the UAW, to take the conduct of this fight into their own hands. This committee should link up with workers throughout the auto and auto parts industry in the US and internationally to prepare a common fight.

After the meetings, the WSWS spoke with Kokomo workers about their struggle. If we walk, 7,000 workers are a lot of power, one worker said. Right now, they need the 8-speed for the Jeep, the 300 sedan and the Charger and Challenger, which are big sellers. The plants are working seven days a week and holidays and still cant keep up with demand. If we shut these plants down, it would quickly close plants throughout the US and world, and it would cripple the company. They made record profits last month and wouldnt want a walkout to last long.

If other workers see us fighting and winning this battle, it would motivate them. They all have great selling trucks like the GM Silverado and Ford F-150, and when we stick together we can fight to get rid of tiers, get our pensions back.

In my view, we need a general strike by all workers, not just autoworkers.

Im this close to withdrawing my union dues. I always said I would die a union member, but Im sick of being screwed over by the company and the union. Were getting raped by the union and paying them to do it. The last few meetings, they rush through the agenda and put a motion to end it before any discussion like there is something they dont want us to know.

Another worker added, The workers dont recognize their strength and power. In fact, we are the most powerful section of the economy. We have to get it together and recognize that we have more in common with each other than we will ever have with the elites, the corporations and the unions, which are one and the same. Its like the Democrats and Republicanstheyre all the same.

Referring to the UAW, she said, It is evident that this is not a democratically run organization. There is no rehabilitating the UAW. If they could have been reformed it would have been done 10 years ago. The same people who imposed all the concessions are still here. They are making six figures and gave themselves a 30 percent raise.

If we wait until 2019, we will get the same or worse than the way we fared while FCA was bribing the UAW officials. Collectively we are powerful beyond measure. If we recognize that we will be unbeatable. The powers-that-be recognize it and are scared to death.
The leaders of the two Koreas signed a declaration on Wednesday following two days of talks in Pyongyang on denuclearization and inter-Korean relations. South Korean President Moon Jae-in travelled to North Korea to hold his third summit this year with Chairman Kim Jong-un. While tensions have appeared to ease, the barely-veiled threat of a US military assault on impoverished North Korea still exists.

With Moon posing as a mediator, the latest agreement is aimed at restarting negotiations between North Korea and the US, which have been stalled since August when US President Trump cancelled Secretary of State Mike Pompeos scheduled fourth trip to Pyongyang.

The declaration states that the North will take additional steps towards denuclearization and disarmament. During a press conference with Kim broadcast by the South Korean media, Moon stated that the two had discussed specific measures for the first time.

The North has agreed to permanently shut down its Dongchang-ri missile engine testing facility and missile launch pad under the participation of experts from related countries, the South Korean president said.

The agreement, according to Moon, also stated: Contingent upon corresponding measures by the United States, the North will also carry out further measures such as the permanent dismantlement of the Yeongbyeon nuclear facility. The installation includes North Koreas only nuclear reactor and an associated plutonium reprocessing plant.

Other parts of the agreement include cooperation on environmental and healthcare issues, reconnecting roads and railways between the two countries this year, and reopening the Kaesong Industrial Park along the border if favorable conditions materialize.

Kim promised to visit Seoul by the end of the year as well. In a separate agreement between the North and South military chiefs, the two sides will form an inter-Korean military committee to hold regular consultations.

Both Moon and Kim claimed that the agreement would bring about a new era of peace. Kim stated, The September declaration will open a higher level for the improvement in relations [between the South and the North]... and bring closer the era of peace and prosperity.

As with other agreements and declarations though, nothing has actually been resolved. This fact was echoed by Cheon Seon-whun, an analyst at the South Korean think tank, the Asan Institute for Policy Studies, who stated: No matter how hard I look, I can find no real progress in denuclearization in todays announcements.

Pyongyangs pledge to dismantle the Yeongbyeon nuclear facility comes with the caveat that Washington takes corresponding measures, which has consistently been the Norths position.

Washington, however, refuses to relax sanctions or provide any security guarantees unless Pyongyang completely denuclearizes first, a fraught prospect for the North Korean leadership, which is seeking a formal peace treaty to end the Korean War.

North Korea knows the US could tear up any agreement or choose to attack after it disarms. Pyongyang has regularly pointed to Iraq and Libya as examples of Washingtons backstabbing after making disarmament agreements. Trumps tearing up of the nuclear deal with Iran further underscores that political considerations would dictate resumed threats against the North, not Pyongyangs actual conduct.

Even if North Korea completely capitulates to US demands, this will not end the danger of war. Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Washington has used the supposed North Korean threat as the rationale for maintaining and building up its military forces and hardware in the Asia-Pacific in order to maintain its hegemony in the region.

That Washington may choose to abrogate any future deal stems from this broader strategy, aimed above all at forcing China to submit to the interests of US imperialism, including if need be through waging war on the worlds most populous nation. This was made clear at the beginning of the year when the Pentagon declared that great power competition would now be Washingtons primary focus, singling out China and Russia.

For the time being, Washington has welcomed the results of the latest inter-Korean summit. Trump wrote on Twitter: Kim Jong Un has agreed to allow Nuclear inspections, subject to final negotiations, and to permanently dismantle a test site and launch pad in the presence of international experts.

However, Kim did not agree to any nuclear inspections, an indication that the measures agreed to in Pyongyang did not go far enough for Washington, which is demanding a list of North Koreas nuclear arsenal and facilities in addition to inspections. Pyongyang has rejected both of these demands.

US Secretary of State Pompeo signalled yesterday that he was prepared to restart talks with North Korea and had invited its foreign minister, Ri Yong Ho, to meet during the UN General Assembly session next week in New York. He claimed that talks would result in the rapid denuclearization of North Korea, to be completed by January 2021.

Seoul expressed the hope that both sides would go ahead with the proposed second summit between Trump and Kim. In the end though, any talks between Pyongyang and Washington, whose demands the former has previously described as gangster-like, would be used to emphasize the US ultimatum that North Korea abandon its alliance with China and join the US war drive, or become the first casualty in the conflict.

Moon has backed this war drive against North Korea and China, including by agreeing to host the Terminal High-Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) anti-ballistic missile system. However, South Korea envisions turning North Korea into a cheap labor platform and invited leading chaebol officials from Samsung, Hyundai Motors, and SK, among others as part of the delegation to Pyongyang.

These officials met with North Koreas Deputy Prime Minister Ri Yong-nam, in charge of matters on international economic cooperation. Both sides praised one another as Pyongyang is seeking to attract investment. Sin Han-yong, chairman of the Souths Kaesong Industrial Complex Enterprise Association, stated: I eagerly hope that inter-Korean economic cooperation projects will develop and expand considerably as a result of the summit.

The reopening of the Kaesong complex would be just one step towards allowing South Korean companies to exploit the North Korean working class more broadly. Current economic cooperation plans also include resuming tourist trips to the Norths Mount Geumgang and rail and roadway construction.

However, Moons statement that economic cooperation would only proceed if favorable conditions materialize implies that his government will not violate current US sanctions. Washington has previously expressed dissatisfaction with South Koreas economic push, warning Seoul not to ease US-led pressure on Pyongyang.

Moon and his delegation returned to the South on Thursday and will travel to New York on Sunday for the United Nations General Assembly meeting. The following day, he will meet with Trump to discuss the outcome of the summit.
This week, America witnessed a scene that has become all too familiar in recent years: facing record-breaking floods, tens of thousands of men, women, and children in some of the poorest areas of the country were left with inadequate food, shelter and water, waiting for hours for gasoline and turned away from over-filled shelters as they fled toxic flood waters.

As the waters recede, they will return to their damaged or destroyed homes needing tens of thousands of dollars in repairsin a country where the average household cannot cover an unforeseen $500 expense. When they ask why the government will do next to nothing to help them cover the expenses, they will be told: there is no money. When they ask why the government cannot build adequate flood-prevention mechanisms, they will be told: there is no money.

But as the television news breathlessly reported every step of the catastrophe, the US Senate gave a very different answer to demands by the Trump Administration and the Pentagon for a major expansion of military spending.

The Senate, by an overwhelming bipartisan vote of 93-7, passed a bill to fund almost the entire US federal government for the coming year. And 80 percent of that bill$675 out of $854 billionconsisted of military spending, a $60 billion increase over last years military budget.

Given that the passage of the bill was neither mentioned on any of the national evening news programs, nor appeared on the front pages of any major newspaper, it would be surprising if one in a hundred Americans knew about its passage. And this is exactly as intended.

In a revealing statement, Republican Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Richard Shelby hailed the passage of the bill, declaring, We are going to make the appropriations trains run again. It was, to say the least, a peculiar metaphor. A Google search for the phrase make the trains run brings up only references to the Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, who, as the saying goes, made the trains run on time by trampling democratic procedures underfoot.

In an equally revealing statement, Patrick Leahy, the top Democrat on the Senate appropriations panel, declared: We did our job and focused on what we should be doingmaking responsible, thoughtful decisions about how to fund these federal agencies and leaving controversial policy issues out of it.

In other words, for the opposition Democratic partywhose members in the Senate voted unanimously for the billone of the largest military spending buildups in American history is not a controversial policy issue, but is accepted without question.

Among the expenditures included in the bill are nearly $150 billion for new and upgraded military hardware. This includes some $24.2 billion for the construction of 13 new navy ships, including two brand new nuclear-powered Virginia-class submarines, costing $2.4 billion apiece.

This massive figure does not include the costs for the construction of Americas two new Gerald R. Ford-class aircraft carriers, costing $13 billion apiece, which is currently underway.

Another $9.3 billion is set aside for military contractor Lockheed Martin for the purchase of 93 new F-35 fighters, arguably the most over-priced, incompetently managed project in the history of war profiteering. The funding of this program is, according to the Democrats, not a controversial policy issue.

The massive expansion in military spending expressed in the passage of the bill represents the practical implementation of the Pentagons National Defense Strategy, which declared that Inter-state strategic competition, not terrorism, is now the primary concern in US national security.

The various branches of the military have concluded from this document that they must be prepared to fight a war with either Russia or China or both as soon as 2025. On Monday, the Air Force presented its proposal for meeting this goal.

Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson told the Air Force Associations conference in Maryland this week that the US Air Force would need to grow by 25 percent, adding roughly 1,500 aircraft to its current active fleet of about 6,000.

We must see the world as it is, said Wilson. That is why the National Defense Strategy explicitly recognizes that we have returned to an era of great power competition. We must prepare, she said, to win against a major power.

The Air Force is too small for what the nation expects of us, she said.

The Air Force needs five more bomber squadrons and seven additional space squadrons so that we can dominate in space, where we have not been threatened in the past. well need 14 more tanker squadrons 22 squadrons need to be added to our command and control, intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance, and so on and so forth.

She made clear to the assembled defense contractors in the audience that there is money to be made as the Air Force begins buying things faster. She teased them with the prospect of one-day contract awards for contractors, who would be invited to give their pitch, and if the program manager likes it, the company walks out that day with funding, and a one-day signed contract.

In other words, with tens of billions of dollars of cash in hand, the Air Force will be doling it out hand over fist to the war profiteers, all but throwing it out the window.

Jeff Bezos, the worlds richest man, will be there to catch it. Speaking at the same Air Force Association conference as Wilson, Bezos, who has all but clinched the largest technology contract in the Pentagons history, worth some $10 billion, declared, "Its so important for the DoD, for the Air Force, for every government institutionwhen they canto use commercial solutions, like the one he came to peddle.

Wilson capped her speech with the declaration, Our dominance as a global power is not a birthright. It is a choice.

A listener might ask: whos doing the choosing? No one has asked the American people whether they want to rush into a war with oneor even twonuclear powers, a war that would inevitably entail the use of nuclear weapons, killing millions, or billions, of people.

Wilson added ominously, It is an obligation to our countrymen, to tell them what should be done, what must be done to make the Air Force, which she referred to as Americas clenched fist, more lethal.

The use of language reminiscent of fascismmaking the trains run, the clenched fist, the military telling the public what must be doneexpresses something essential about the Pentagons plan for great-power conflict.

It is not compatible with democracy. Indeed, the Pentagons strategy paper makes this clear, declaring the homeland a battleground, vulnerable to political subversion by non-state actorsa euphemism for political dissidents.

And, true to this prescription, the military buildup is accompanied by the construction of a regime of state censorship by the technology companies, all of whom have lined up at the Pentagons trough for lucrative contracts.

One conclusion is inescapable: Capitalism and war are incompatible with democracy. The struggle against war, and against political censorship, requires a socialist program.
Few groups have incited the ire of President Donald Trump more than MS-13 for the gang's recent vicious attacks and gruesome killings on US soil.

Charging that dangerous gangsters and criminals from Central America have been entering the United States through Mexico, the Trump administration in April launched a "zero tolerance" policy that has led to the prosecution and deportation of any adult caught illegally crossing the border.

There is no question the MS-13 gang must be stopped. It is a vile organization of hoodlums with no regard for life. But to entirely turn our backs on those who are trying to escape from being terrorized by the gang ignores the role that our government played in its monstrous evolution.

On the ground

Within an hour of landing in San Salvador, the capital of El Salvador, in 2005, where I was reporting on MS-13 for the National Geographic Channel, I was informed that a member of the notorious street gang had just been assassinated in the middle of the city. With my luggage in tow, I headed straight to the homicide location, where I saw a young man face down in a pool of blood, his body riddled with bullet holes.

I had reported on a number of different gangs in cities across America, but here I was in a country that was being terrorized and overtaken by street gangs, the largest of which was MS-13. What was astounding to me at the time was that 15 years prior to my visit, El Salvador had virtually no street gang presence.

MS-13 consists mostly of Salvadorans, but there are many Hondurans and Guatemalans who claim allegiance to the gang as well. To understand how MS-13 grew to become one of the deadliest gangs in the world, you have to understand the role the US played over the past four decades in the Central American countries from which most of these gang members come.

Money for fuel

Beginning in the 1980s, the United States government funneled billions of dollars to corrupt, human-rights abusing officials throughout the region to prevent it from falling into the hands of leftists who had been staging uprisings throughout those countries in Central America, known as the Northern Triangle.

A gruesome civil war between the government and Marxist guerrillas in El Salvador from 1980-1992 claimed 75,000 lives. The United Nations Truth Commission found that Salvadoran government forces, which included military officers trained by the US, paramilitaries and death squads, were responsible for more than 85 percent of the killings and torture.

One of the most brutal conflicts in Latin American history was that of Guatemala's 36-year war in which, according to a truth commission, more than 200,000 mostly indigenous people were killed after being accused of being sympathetic to leftist guerrillas. The US supported the government, despite knowing of its egregious human-rights abuses.

Honduras did not have a civil war but became a staging ground for the various conflicts in neighboring Central American countries, including for US-backed groups.

A gang is born

Years of brutal armed conflict have left the region utterly destabilized and led hundreds of thousands of people to seek refuge in the United States. Many Salvadorans began to settle in the barrios of Los Angeles in the early 1980s. In order to protect themselves from already established neighborhood gangs, a group of them formed their own gang called Mara Salvatrucha or MS-13.

It initially consisted of a bunch of heavy metal enthusiasts who chose devil horns as their insignia, according to the International Committee of the Red Cross. They would grow to become one of the deadliest gangs in L.A. and throughout the country.

In the early 1990s, ICE's precursor, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, began rounding up thousands of alleged criminal gang members and deporting them back to their countries of origin  even though many had left their homelands when they were small children fleeing war and had never been back since.

These new, criminalized arrivals began to wreak havoc on the streets of El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras  countries that were still reeling from years of conflict and destabilization. It was a deadly combination. The gang problem exploded. As I witnessed in El Salvador in 2005, the country was paralyzed with fear of gangs like MS-13. By 2015, it had become the most murderous country in the world.

Give me shelter

In 2014, a massive wave of unaccompanied minors began showing up on the US-Mexico border, mostly from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras. Most had been sent for by family members who had previously settled in the US in an attempt to create better and safer lives for themselves and their children.

Not long after, brutal killings began being reported in the US, mostly in cities on the East Coast where large communities of Central Americans reside.

As I experienced when reporting on the latest wave of MS-13 killings in Maryland for the premiere episode of CNN's "This Is Life With Lisa Ling" Season 5, newly arrived unaccompanied minors are continuing to come to the US and are being preyed on by an emboldened MS-13. They and their families, both in the US and back in their home countries, are threatened with death if they don't ally with the gang. Law enforcement officials in Fairfax County, Virginia, told me that violence is ordered from El Salvador.

So when the White House deems MS-13 members "violent animals," let's also acknowledge that US policies helped create this devastating situation. And when the innocent ask our government for shelter from the terror aided by our decisions, perhaps we shouldn't be so hasty to turn them away.
TERRE HAUTE, Ind. (WTHI) - Music filled the air on the campus of Indiana State University Wednesday night.

That's where the school of music hosted the Ambassador Brass Quintet.

ISU faculty make up the act.

They performed numbers from works like West Side Story and the Pink Panther.

The musicians even honored the Hoosier state by playing Back Home Again in Indiana.
It was one week after 9/11, and the world's attention was on New York City. The terrorist attack had changed the world forever, but in a small country in the Horn of Africa, things were about to alter even more drastically.

In the early hours of September 18th, 2001, a radio message announced the shutdown of the press in Eritrea.

Africa Continents and regions Eastern Africa Eritrea Ethiopia Isaias Afewerki Political Figures - Intl

Following the announcement, a group of journalists and politicians who had been advocating for democratic reforms were imprisoned without a trial.

The country was due to hold its first-ever elections, but they were canceled, and several democratic institutions were shut down.

September 18 represented a significant turning point in Eritrean history, but the government's actions went mostly unnoticed to the outside world.

I grew up hearing about this date because my uncle, Seyoum Tsehaye, was one of the journalists imprisoned in 2001. Being born in Sweden, thousands of miles away from the rest of my family in Eritrea, my mom raised me with stories about home.

When I was 16 years old, I started advocating for Seyoum's release but realized quickly that his imprisonment was much more than a personal tragedy. There were so many more people affected.

Eritrea has been a country marked by war. It has been locked in perpetual conflict with neighboring Ethiopia. But in 2001, citizens were feeling generally optimistic about the future.

They had lived through a long independence struggle and the guerrilla group, the Eritrean People's Liberation Front (EPLF), had been instrumental in liberating the country from Ethiopia.

Almost by default, the EPLF guerrilla leader, Isaias Afwerki, became Eritrea's first president in 1993. The war of independence was fought on the premise of democracy, justice, and equality, so the unelected president assured the people that he would hold elections.

However, there have not been national elections in Eritrea since independence.

In 1998, a dispute centered on the new border with Ethiopia resulted in a war lasting two years. The Eritrean government has used this border war with Ethiopia as a justification for turning the country into a dictatorship.

A government has the right to suspend certain individual rights if there is a threat to national security, but the actions that have been committed as a response to the "no peace, no war" situation have been disproportionate to the actual threats.

The fact that there has been a standoff at the border cannot justify enlisting all capable Eritreans in national military service indefinitely and denying them autonomy over their own lives.

Neither does it justify the horrible rape, torture, and crimes committed with impunity there. The UN commission on human rights in Eritrea has described the country's national service as a "crime against humanity," and likened it to slavery.

It cannot justify the fact that the only university in the country has been shut down or that Eritreans between the ages of six and 65 are not allowed to leave the country unless granted an exit visa, one that is almost impossible to obtain.

The fact that Ethiopia has refused to demarcate the border cannot justify the fact that Eritrea is the only country without any independent press in Africa.

It cannot possibly justify the fact that the parliament has not convened since 2002. The government has refused to implement the country's first constitution, and tens of thousands of people have been imprisoned, without a trial, for merely expressing their opinions, practicing their religion or attempting to leave the country.

For the past five years, I have been advocating for human rights in Eritrea through the organization One Day Seyoum that I started in the name of my uncle. Despite the Eritrean government's insistence on using the border dispute as an excuse for the oppression in the country, I have never taken this justification seriously.

Not only have the crimes perpetrated by the Eritrean government been disproportionate to the threats posed by the conflict, but more than two months after signing a peace agreement with Ethiopia, President Afwerki has not addressed the domestic situation in the country, let alone made any promises to bring about change.

Despite this, this peace deal was blindly celebrated, and Afwerki congratulated by politicians from all over the world. With the prospects of change seeming as distant as before the peace agreement, we started the campaign #QuestionsForIsaias demanding answers about Eritrea's future.

With our leader not listening to the cry of his people, Eritreans from all over the world were forced to turn to social media.

We are launching a new campaign on the 17th anniversary of the creation of the Eritrean dictatorship to increase pressure on the Eritrean government.

We aim to continue to actively and publicly ask questions to Afwerki but also to share content explaining our questions to raise awareness about what is going on in Eritrea, to increase worldwide pressure for change.

We ask questions because 17 years on, Eritreans, home and abroad have tried everything and do not know what else to do.

We ask questions because my cousins deserve to see their father. We ask questions because my cousins are far from the only ones.

We ask questions because enough is enough. The indefinite national service program is robbing Eritrean youth of their future.

They face the stark choices of a life without a future in Eritrea or being killed or severely traumatized as they try to flee the country.

We ask questions because we refuse to stay silent when our people are suffering.

We ask questions because the Eritrean people deserve better.
English German

Steinhausen, 20 September, 2018 - Schweiter Technologies is further strengthening its display business and has entered into an agreement to acquire the European acrylic sheet business of Lucite International (Lucite Acrylic Sheet) and the UK distribution company Perspex Distribution Ltd. (PDL). In the financial year ended 31 March 2018 the acquired business generated sales of around GBP 126 million. The agreed enterprise value for the businesses (on a cash free/debt free basis) is GBP 92 million. The transaction will be completed following approval by the relevant competition authorities and the carve-out of the production activities into a new legal entity.

Lucite Acrylic Sheet is one of Europe's leading manufacturers of acrylic sheet and composites and is based in Darwen, Lancashire, UK. Lucite Acrylic Sheet manufactures two major categories of acrylic sheets, Perspex general purpose sheets and Lucite saniware sheets. Perspex sheets are used by customers in the display, visual communication and related industries and are sold through a distribution network including PDL in the UK, and other long established partners in Continental Europe, Africa and other regions. The Perspex product range is one of the widest in the industry and the Perspex brand name is one of the leading global brand names for acrylic sheet products. The Perspex production facilities, product range and customer relationships will fully complement the existing 3A Composites acrylic sheet business based on the Crylon, Akrylon and Crylux product families with production facilities in Germany, Slovakia and Spain.

The PDL business provides a full distribution service to UK based customers in the display and communication industries from 5 branches and offers a range of complementary products in addition to Perspex acrylic sheets.

3A Composites has successfully established a position in acrylic sheets for visual communication, interior design, industrial applications and the sanitary ware industry through the integration of Athlone Extrusions (2017) and Polycasa (2015). The acquisition of Lucite Acrylic Sheets will further strengthen the 3A Composites product range. The acquired business has a total of around 330 employees.

3A Composites anticipates that the incorporation of Lucite Acrylic Sheets into the dedicated multi product sheet activities of the 3A Composites division will lead to significant opportunities for further product development and expansion outside the UK.

For further information please contact:

Martin Kloti, CFO

Tel. +41 41 757 77 00, Fax +41 41 757 70 01, martin.kloeti@schweiter.com

Schweiter Technologies AG, Hinterbergstrasse 20, 6312 Steinhausen, Switzerland

Telefon +41 41 757 77 00 Fax +41 41 757 70 01 info@schweiter.com

www.schweiter.com

Please find the Media release in the PDF attached:
Pop star-turned-MP Bobi Wine is heading back to Uganda, where he's facing treason charges, a few weeks after he traveled to the US for medical treatment.

Wine, whose real name is Robert Kyagulanyi, posted a photo of himself at the airport in Amsterdam on his social media pages Wednesday, saying: "Headed home."

Africa Alcoholic beverages Beverages Business and industry sectors Business, economy and trade Consumer products Continents and regions Eastern Africa Food and drink Health and medical Kinds of foods and beverages Medical treatments and procedures Uganda Wine

Authorities in Uganda say they have received reports of planned rallies by his supporters to welcome him and have clamped down on any gatherings.

Uganda police spokesman Emilian Kayima issued a statement saying that only his immediate family will be allowed to receive him.

The musician will be escorted by security personnel directly from the airport to his home, Kayima added.

While waiting for his flight home, the musician said he had seen the orders and would not be intimidated.

"I am a free Ugandan with the right to move freely in my country," he wrote.

"The police have no business telling me who receives me and who cannot or where I go and where I cannot. This impunity must stop now. Wama see you friends tomorrow," he said in a tweet.

Wine traveled to the United States earlier this month on bail to seek medical treatment for injuries he said he sustained in military custody following his arrest on August 13.

The government has denied all allegations of torture.

Wine was first arrested by the military on August 15 after rioting broke out between rival parties ahead of a local parliamentary election.
Update 09/20/18 3:26 p.m.

The university's chancellor Jeffrey Vitter released the following statement to the Ole Miss community:

"To the UM Community:

We are writing about a disturbing incident and the path forward. On Wednesday, the namesake of our journalism school, Ed Meek, posted a comment on Facebook that we condemned as having highly offensive racial overtones.

This social media post was deeply hurtful because of the sentiment conveyed about the presence of African-Americans in Oxford and at Ole Miss. We are outraged that photographs of two of our female African-American students were used to make this point. University leaders have been in contact with the students to give them support and assistance.

The Universitys Senior Leadership Group met in emergency session about this incident and its impact on our community. We have important decisions to make, and they will be made in a thoughtful and intentional manner.

As part of this process, we are hosting a listening session for the UM community this evening at 7:30 p.m. at Nutt Auditorium. It is important to come together as a community. We support all members of our community and respect the dignity of each person."

Update 09/20/18 2:58 p.m.

On Thursday, faculty members with the Meek School of Journalism released the following video.

Dean Will Norton Jr. with the support of the faculty released this video statement on Thursday. pic.twitter.com/54nUK8lqFr  Meek School (@MeekJournalism) September 20, 2018

See the original post below.

OXFORD, Miss. (WTVA) -- Ole Miss Chancellor Jeffrey Vitter is condemning a critical Facebook post by a university alumnus that some are seeing as offensive and having a racial overtone.

The post was made by Ed Meek, whose name is on the journalism school at Ole Miss.

Meek wrote that he was concerned about what was happening on The Square late at night after a ballgame.

He said the campus newspaper, The Daily Mississippian, quoted the police chief saying officers made over 40 arrests, and that there were fights in most venues.

However, the criticism is over the pictures of two black women in the post who were apparently on The Square at the time.

The Daily Mississippian reports that the chancellor responded on Facebook to the post.

He wrote that the pictures suggest an unjustified racial overtone that is highly offensive and that Meek should withdraw his comments and apologize to anyone who was offended.

The campus newspaper reports that they tried calling Meek's cellphone for a response.

However, Meek hung up.

Meek has since taken down the post, but before it was removed, it had received over a thousand comments and nearly 600 shares.

Meek later apologized in a post.
LEFLORE COUNTY, Miss. (WTVA) - A Leflore County family is desperate to find Trinity Harvey, who's been missing since July, and reunite her with her children.

Harvey, 27, is the mother of a pair of twins and a three-year-old, according to her grandmother, Allie Harvey.

Trinity Harvey Trinity Harvey

Harvey has been missing since July, according to the Yalobusha County Sheriff's Office. She is originally from Greenwood but lives in Water Valley.

In an exclusive interview with WTVA, Allie said she believes her granddaughter is dead. Harvey's sister, Camille Harvey, believes that as well.

"I'm terrified," Camille said. "I mean we all pray for the best outcome on this, but honestly, I believe that my sister is dead. I just can't shake the feeling."

Harvey's family said she was active on social media and on her phone. They said for her to vanish is unlike her.

Yalobusha County investigators continue to search for Harvey with help from the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation.

If you know where Trinity Harvey is, call your local law enforcement.
JACKSONVILLE, Fla. (AP) - Police say a 17-year-old student was critically injured in an apparent drive-by shooting just before he boarded his school bus in Florida.

Jacksonville Sheriff's Lt. Will Janes tells News 4 Jax that the student got onto the bus after being shot in the chest around 6:15 a.m. Wednesday.

Janes says the driver made "a split-second" decision to take him to a nearby fire station, where he began getting immediate medical care.

Duval County School Board member Scott Shine tells news outlets that the student was undergoing surgery Wednesday.

Shine says police were questioning the 21 students were on the bus. Two were uncooperative and one tried to take an officer's Taser. He was shot with the stun gun and taken to a hospital.

Police are searching for the gunman.

(Copyright 2018 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.)
TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (AP) - Florida's two main contenders for governor are making widely different promises when it comes to the state's education system.

Republican Ron DeSantis on Tuesday vowed to expand the state's private school voucher program while at the same time pledging to spend more on classrooms by making cuts in other parts of the education budget. He also wants to take a closer look at what the state is teaching in schools.

Democrat Andrew Gillum, meanwhile, continues to push a proposed $1 billion increase in the state's corporate income tax.

Gillum wants to use the extra money to pay teachers more, as well as spend more on early childhood programs and on vocational training. Gillum does not support expanding the state's voucher programs.

The November winner will replace outgoing Gov. Rick Scott.

(Copyright 2018 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.)
English Swedish

Skandinaviska Enskilda Banken AB's(publ) Annual General Meeting will be held on Tuesday, 26 March 2019.

The Nomination Committee members are:

Petra Hedengran, Investor AB, Chairman

Magnus Billing, Alecta

Lars Heikensten, Trygg-Stiftelsen

Javiera Ragnartz, AMF

Marcus Wallenberg, Chairman of the Board, SEB

The shareholders having appointed members of the Nomination Committee together represent approximately 37,2 per cent of the voting rights for all shares in the Bank as of 31 August 2018.

The SEB Board has appointed Tomas Nicolin additional member of the Committee.

The Nomination Committee will prepare a proposal for Directors etc. to be presented to the Annual General Meeting 2019 for decision. The matters to be dealt with by the Nomination Committee are described on www.sebgroup.com under the heading 'Annual General Meeting'.

A shareholder who would like to submit a proposal to the Nomination Committee can do so by e-mail to nomination.committee@seb.se or by ordinary mail under the address Skandinaviska Enskilda Banken AB(publ), Nomination Committee, Att: Ulf Thornander, KA1, 106 40 Stockholm, by Tuesday 8 January 2019 at the latest.
TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (WTXL) - The North American Interfraternity Conference plans to tighten the rules regarding the use of hard liquor at it's chapters activities, in response to many alcohol-related deaths.

The new rules go into effect Sept. 1 2019, for the organization's more than 6,000 fraternity chapters on 800 campuses in the United States and Canada.

Amy Hecht, Florida State University's Vice President for Student Affairs, says she welcomes the national organization's leadership on this issue.

"What it sends is a message that we're putting student's health and wellness first over things that might have been tradition in the past," said Hecht. "There has been noted on multiple occasions that while we're very supportive of fraternity and sorority life at Florida State, if this behavior continues the industry is going to suffer as a whole."

Hecht also says chapters can not purchase alcohol with chapter funds, so a third party would collect money per drink from the individual purchasing alcohol.
GRADY COUNTY, Ga. (WTXL) - Students at Cairo High School were sent home early on Thursday after pepper spray was released, getting into the ventilation system.

According to the Grady County School District's Facebook page, there was a situation at Cairo High School where pepper spray was released.

The school district said as a result, the spray got into the ventilation system and all students were evacuated from the main building to the gym.

After talking with the fire department, the school let the students go to lunch and then let them go home. Buses began running at 11:30 a.m. for the students.

The school district said anyone that needs to remain at CHS can do so in the College and Career building.

Students were released at 11:30 a.m.

In their Facebook post, the school district said the safety of the students and staff is their first concern and they will work Thursday afternoon to make sure the ventilation system is clear for school on Friday.
TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (WTXL) - It was an exciting day for Florida State University as University President John Thrasher greeted the President of Botswana, all while the Marching Chiefs played behind them.

His Excellency President Masisi, his wife, and young daughter met with University President John Thrasher and his wife Jean Friday.

The newly elected Botswanan leader received his Master's degree in education from FSU in 1990, before returning to his home country to work in education and politics.

Thrasher and Masisi met Thursday to discuss the possibility of a partnership between the country and the university.

"So there's a lot of value to that you bring. We have a number of university's both public and private that would benefit from partnering with you," said President Masisi. "I want to besiege you to use me and abuse me in creating those linkages and rekindling them."

President Masisi also met some of the African students at FSU, including one student from Botswana.
MIDWAY, Fla. (WTXL) - A new report says Florida's growing charter school system is wasteful for taxpayers and in some cases , gives rise to criminal fraud.

On average, 20 charter schools close down each year in the Sunshine State, according to a new study from Integrity Florida.

Not only do taxpayers lose money spent on lease payments and school improvements, closures also cause problems for school districts which then must absorb the students.

"All that comes with a cost to taxpayers and this report makes an argument that we should try to eliminate some those wasteful ways that taxpayer money is being spent," said Ben Wilcox, Research Director for Integrity Florida.

Wilcox says one of the biggest issues is the growing political influence of charter schools.

The report found the charter school industry has spent more than 13 million dollars to influence state education policy through political campaign contributions over a 20-year period.

"With the rise of the for-profit charter schools, you see a shift away from that original intent for education innovation and more of an emphasis on profit making," said Wilcox.

Lax state regulation, he says, creates an opportunity for criminal corruption and financial mismanagement.

The study reports 45 percent of Florida's charter schools are managed by for-profit companies and in most cases these schools have poor student performance rates.

One that's run as a not-for-profit is the School of Arts and Sciences here in Tallahassee.

"We have been high performing for about 15 years now so we would call ourselves high-achieving, independent, public charter school," said Eirin Lombardo, Principal of the School of Arts and Sciences. "We're governed by a local group, a board of directors, and we have no affiliation to a management company."

While the report shows mixed student success in Florida charter schools, the School of Arts and Sciences has received an A grade from the Florida Department of Education since 2003.

Wilcox says it's charter schools like this one that prove the system, with changes, can work.

Integrity Florida recommends more widespread disclosure of charter school finances, especially greater oversight of the ways tax dollars end up in private companies' profits.
MELBOURNE, Fla. (AP) - Authorities say a 22-year-old student pilot has been charged with criminal attempt to steal an airplane at a central Florida airport.

Orlando-Melbourne International Airport spokeswoman Lori Booker tells news outlets that the man also has been charged with a visa violation and criminal trespassing. His name hasn't been released.

The case unfolded Thursday morning in Melbourne, on Florida's Atlantic coast.

Booker says the man boarded a vacant American Airlines Airbus A321, which can seat up to 200 passengers. Florida Today reports the plane was blocked in to prevent movement. Two technicians doing work inside the plane confronted him and tackled him. One called police while the other subdued him. He was arrested within minutes.

Booker says the case is being investigated by the Joint Terrorism Task Force. They're trying to determine a motive.

MELBOURNE, FL (WESH/CNN) - Authorities are investigating a security breach at Orlando-Melbourne International Airport.

Airport officials said a student pilot breached security early Thursday morning by jumping a fence.

An employee saw him board a commercial jet that was undergoing maintenance and they alerted police.

It's not clear what he was trying to do but police quickly took him into custody.

An airport spokeswoman said the man is 22 years old and from Trinidad and Tobago.

Authorities used a robot to search his car. His car was later towed.

The airport was on lockdown for about five hours but it is now reopened.

Copyright 2018 WESH via CNN. All rights reserved.
TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (WTXL) - A Tallahassee man has been arrested after admitting to sexually assaulting a young child.

Ivan Henry, 29, was arrested by the Leon County Sheriff's Office on Monday.

According to the police report, on Monday the victim told her school staff what Henry did to her, and in turn, the staff called in investigators from the Florida Department of Children and Families.

During a forensic interview, the victim discussed in detail exactly what Henry did, the police document stated. Later that day, deputies found Henry at his job, where he confessed to what the victim told school staff and investigators.

Henry told deputies what he did to the victim did not sexually arouse him. Based on his own admission, he is being charged with sexual battery to a victim under the age of 12.

He was taken to the Leon County Detention Facility and has been given no bond.
TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (WTXL) - The Tally Cat Cafe was busier than normal Wednesday as locals came together for some feline fitness.

The Tally Cat Cafe recently opened its doors back in May.

Since then, owners started cat yoga classes to get the community more involved.

This gives the cats a chance to interact with people as they get their workout in.

All cats are rescued by the Leon County Humane Society.

Business owners express how this workout is helping cats involved get a second chance at life.

"Not only are we increasing the adoption rate of out local shelters, but are lowering the euthanization rates around us as well," said Courtney Kendrick.

So far, there's been 89 cat adoptions.

Owners attribute cat yoga as apart of their success.

The next yoga session is on Oct. 3.

A portion of the admission is donated to the Leon County Humane Society.
OCILLA, GA (WALB) - The Georgia Bureau of Investigation is looking into the death of a 41-year-old woman who was found unresponsive in the bedroom of a house on South Irwin Avenue in Ocilla Tuesday afternoon.
U.S. President Donald Trump and Polish President Andrzej Duda hold a joint press conference in the East Room of the White House in Washington, D.C., on Sept. 18, 2018. (Xinhua/AFP)

WASHINGTON, Sept. 18 (Xinhua) -- U.S. President Donald Trump said on Tuesday that the United States is weighing the idea of establishing a permanent military base in Poland, a proposal raised by visiting Poland leader.

In a joint press conference at the White House, Polish President Andrzej Duda told reporters that he had suggested a permanent American base be set up in Poland in talks with Trump earlier in the day.

"We would call (it) Fort Trump," Duda said.

Responding to Warsaw's request, Trump said earlier that the United States was "looking at it very seriously."

"I know Poland likes the idea very much. And it's something that we are considering, yes," Trump told reporters before his meeting with Duda.

At the press conference, Trump said that the United States is reviewing the proposal from the standpoint of "military protection for both countries and also the cost."

"I think Russia has acted aggressively," Trump said, adding that Duda had offered the United States "much more than 2 billion (U.S.) dollars to do this."

"So we're looking at it," the White House host said.

Also on Tuesday, U.S. Defense Secretary James Mattis said that no decisions had been made regarding the permanent military presence in Poland.

"It's not just about a base. It's about training ranges, it's about maintenance facilities at the base, all these kinds of things," the Pentagon chief told reporters.

"So no decision's been made, we are studying it and we are working together on that," Mattis added.

Poland, a NATO member, has repeatedly required permanent presence of U.S. troops on its territory.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-09-20 00:50:04|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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LISBON, Sept. 19 (Xinhua) -- Taxi drivers brought downtown Lisbon traffic to a standstill on Wednesday in protest at a new law designed to regulate app-based car hire platforms.

Hundreds of taxi drivers from Lisbon and the surrounding area began parking their taxis in bus lanes along Avenida Liberdade, one of the city's main arteries, from 5 a.m .local time. Come rush hour, commuters found the boulevard to be shut off to all traffic except buses (forced to use the regular lanes) and bicycles.

Taxi drivers are angry at a new law drafted to regulate taxi app firms. Popularly known as the "Uber Law", the new legislation applies to the Taxify, Cabify and Chauffeur Prive platforms, as well as Uber.

"We are not anti-Uber per se, we don't object to their drivers making a living," said Fernando Monteiro, who has been a taxi driver in Lisbon for 15 years. "All we're asking for is a level playing field, because the new law just isn't fair, it gives their drivers too many advantages."

Taxi drivers have repeatedly protested that taxi app drivers do not have to comply with industry regulations and licensing standards.

One bone of contention with the new law is the absence of quotas limiting the number of unmarked taxis in a town or region, which marked taxis are subjected to.

Uber was briefly banned by the Court of Lisbon, though the ruling was ultimately overturned. Taxi drivers were promised that the taxi app industry would be regulated. A new law duly passed through parliament July 12, albeit narrowly.

The new law was ratified by Portugal's president, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa on July 31 and is due to come into effect Nov. 1. The protesters want to prevent its roll-out and force revisions.

On Monday, the government sent taxi unions suggested amendments to the new rules. This was deemed to be too little too late for many taxi drivers who considered it a hollow gesture aimed at taking the sting out of the protest.

Nevertheless, union leaders organized talks with lawmakers to coincide with the protest. Taxi drivers have pledged to remain where they are parked until the results of those talks are known.

There are estimated to be 1,000 taxis parked up in Lisbon. Similar blockades have been taking place in Porto in the north of the country and Faro in the south.
NEW YORK, Sept. 20, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The global infusion pump market is expected to grow significantly from USD 9,210 million in 2017 to USD 14,500 million in 2024, at a CAGR of 6.6% from 2018 to 2024. The growth in the market is attributed to the growing incidence of chronic diseases, and increasing number of surgical procedures performed across the globe. Moreover, rising demand in ambulatory settings, and continuous technological innovations in pump technology coupled with new product launches are also driving the market growth.



Key findings from the report:

On the basis of products type, the insulin pump segment held the major share of the market in 2017, owing to growing prevalence of diabetes across the globe and technological advancements in insulin pump devices. In addition, the development of home infusion therapy and artificial pancreas technology is also driving the growth in the segment.

On the basis of application,

 The cancer segment held the major share of the market in 2017. The growth is attributed to the growing number of cancer patients and availability of infusion pump for chemotherapy.

 The diabetes segment is expected to witness highest CAGR during the forecast period

 The cancer segment held the major share of the market in 2017. The growth is attributed to the growing number of cancer patients and availability of infusion pump for chemotherapy.  The diabetes segment is expected to witness highest CAGR during the forecast period Based on end-user, the hospital segment held major share of the market in 2017. The growth is attributed to the growing number of hospitalization cases globally.

Geographically, North America held the major share of the global market in 2017. Asia-Pacific is expected to witness the highest CAGR during the forecast period.

Some of the key companies operating in the market include Fresenius SE & Co. KGaA, B. Braun Melsungen AG, Medtronic, Baxter International Inc., Medical International Limited, Terumo Corporation, F. Hoffmann-La Roche Ltd., Johnson & Johnson, Becton, Dickinson and Company, and ICU Medical, Inc.

Growing adoption of infusion pump technology driving the market growth

Infusion pump is a medical device that is capable of delivering nutrients, antibiotics, insulin, chemotherapy or pain relief drugs and other medications into the patients body in a controlled amount. Approximately, millions of infusion pumps are used around the world in various end-user segments such as home setting, hospital, clinics, laboratory, and ambulatory surgical centers. The infusion pump plays the important role in providing preoperative care, critical care, and pain management. Growing research and development activities in medical device technology has augmented the growth of the infusion pump market. The infusion pump devices such as a smart infusion pumps is playing important role in reducing the risks while administering intravenous medications.

Browse full research report with TOC on " Global Infusion Pump Market Outlook, Trend and Opportunity Analysis, Competitive Insights, Actionable Segmentation & Forecast 2024 " at: https://www.energiasmarketresearch.com/global-infusion-pump-market-report/

To purchase report: sales@energiasmarketresearch.com

Infusion Pump Market  Regional insight

Geographically, North America held the largest share of the market in 2017. The growth in the region is attributed to the increasing prevalence of chronic diseases and rising adoption of infusion pump device. Moreover, growing number of hospitals and ambulatory surgical centers has also resulted in increased usage of infusion pump in the region. Technological advancement in smart infusion pump and presence of major players in the region is further boosting the market growth. The growth of infusion pump market in the Europe is primarily due to the increasing number of diabetic patients, and introduction of new products in the region. Asia-Pacific is expected to witness the highest CAGR during the forecast period owing to growing healthcare expenditure.

This report segments global infusion pump market based on product type, application, channel, end-user and region.

By Products Type

Syringe Pumps

Volumetric Pumps

 Cassette/Piston

 Peristaltic

 Cassette/Piston  Peristaltic Implantable Pumps

Ambulatory Pumps

Patient-controlled analgesia (PCA) Pumps

Enteral Pumps

Pump Accessories

Insulin Pumps

By Application

Cardiovascular disease

Cancer

 Lung cancer

 Breast cancer

 Blood cancer

 Brain cancer

 Colorectal cancer

 Others

 Lung cancer  Breast cancer  Blood cancer  Brain cancer  Colorectal cancer  Others Arthritis

Diabetes

Neurology disorder

Gastroenterology

Inflammatory diseases

Immune deficiency disorder,

Pain management

Nephrology & urological disorder

Others

By Channel Type

Single Channel

Multi-Channel

By End-user

Hospitals

Clinics

Research and Laboratory

Ambulatory surgical centers

Home care settings

By Region

North America

Europe

Asia-Pacific

Central & South America

Middle East and Africa (MEA

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Source: Xinhua| 2018-09-20 01:15:09|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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DUBAI, Sept. 19 (Xinhua) -- The Dubai tourism chief said on Wednesday that the Gulf Arab emirate will focus on tourism relations with China.

The "China-ready" commitment was declared by Helal Saeed Almarri, director general of Dubai Tourism, at the two-day inaugural Dubai China Conference attended by more than 900 local dignitaries, stakeholders and Chinese partners.

Activities including city-wide Chinese New Year celebrations will be launched to be better able to cater to Chinese traveler requests, according to Almarri.

Earlier this year, the Dubai Tourism authority signed an agreement with Huawei, one of China's largest smartphone manufacturers, to pre-load devices with both user-generated and official cinematographic content of Dubai.

In May, the agreement was expanded further, with Huawei Mobile Services agreeing to offer useful and accessible content about Dubai, in particular through the company's newly-updated SkyTone travel and roaming apps.

On Sept. 17, China Eastern Airlines launched direct flights from Dubai to China's eastern metropolis of Shanghai.

Dubai welcomed 453,000 Chinese visitors in the first six months of 2018, up nine percent from a year ago.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-09-20 01:40:14|Editor: xuxin

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Tourist ministers and officials from China and 16 Central and Eastern European Countries (CEEC) pose for a group photo before the 4th high-level meeting on tourism cooperation in Dubrovnik, Croatia, on Sept. 19, 2018. Officials from China and 16 Central and Eastern European Countries (CEEC) agreed to further develop tourism partnership during the 4th high-level meeting on tourism cooperation in southern Croatian city Dubrovnik on Wednesday. (Xinhua/Gao Lei)

DUBROVNIK, Croatia, Sept. 19 (Xinhua) -- Officials from China and 16 Central and Eastern European Countries (CEEC) agreed to further develop tourism partnership during the 4th high-level meeting on tourism cooperation in southern Croatian city Dubrovnik on Wednesday.

As an essential part of the "16+1" cooperative mechanism, the three-day meeting which officially kicked off on Tuesday was attended by tourist ministers and officials from all participating countries.

The Central and Eastern European Countries reported growing inflow of Chinese tourists. According to Croatian Tourist Minister Gari Cappelli, from January to September this year, 153,000 Chinese tourists have already visited the country, compared with to the total count of 160,000 for the whole year of 2017, when the number of Chinese tourists increased 56 percent than previous year.

"Tourism connects people, reduces misunderstandings and has an impact on billions of people in China and Europe. We are glad that we have built the foundations of trust," Cappelli said.

Chinese Minister of Culture and Tourism, Luo Shugang, said that the "16+1" platform has vastly progressed in the last five years.

"In the future, we have to put more emphasis on establishing direct flights in order to further stimulate the mutual exchange of tourist visits, which has already reached 1.7 million, and strengthen the tourism cooperation," Luo said.

He also suggested that all parties should expand the scope of tourism cooperation, invest more resources in the industry and realize more frequent people-to-people exchanges.

Addressing the meeting, Peter Szijjarto, Hungarian Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade, said, "Chinese tourists are the ones who spend the most when they travel."

Since tourism revenues play an important role in this region's gross domestic product (GDP), "we understand that it is extremely important to increase the attractiveness of this region for Chinese tourists," Szijjarto said.

Topics high on the agenda of the meeting include the necessity of introducing direct flights from China to the region, creation of joint tourism packages, further simplifying visa application procedures and positive investment climate that would be a bridge for the successful future cooperation of counties' initiatives. Examples of Czech Republic, Serbia, Poland and Bosnia and Herzegovina have proved that direct air links or visa-free policies contribute dramatically to the increase of mutual tourists flow.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-09-20 02:50:24|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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RIYADH, Sept. 19 (Xinhua) -- Saudi-led coalition involved in a war in Yemen announced on Wednesday the interception of a missile shot towards border city Jazan.

The coalition spokesperson, Col. Turki Al Maliki, said in a statement on Saudi Press Agency that with the fresh attack, the number of missiles shot by Houthis militias towards the kingdom reached 198. Most of those missiles targeted the cities on the south border of Saudi Arabia.

He said that the Saudi air forces intercepted and destroyed the missile that was shot from Saada governorate in Yemen without reporting any injuries. He renewed his accusations of the involvement of Iran in such attacks by supplying the Houthi rebels with weapons and missiles.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-09-20 03:10:28|Editor: Liangyu

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Chinese Minister of Ecology and Environment Li Ganjie (Front) speaks at the opening of the 40th Civil Engineering Fair in Budva, Montenegro, Sept. 19, 2018. The 40th Civil Engineering Fair opened here on Wednesday. Seven Chinese companies, including China Civil Engineering Construction Corporation (CCECC) and China Road and Bridge Corporation (CRBC), presented their recent projects at the fair. (Xinhua/Nemanja Cabric)

BUDVA, Montenegro, Sept. 19 (Xinhua) -- Highlighted as special part of the 40th Civil Engineering Fair that opened here on Wednesday, Chinese companies set to tap into new engagements and local partnerships through presentation of their technology, experience and knowhow in their past successful projects.

The fair opened in the coastal city of Budva at the ground of the Adriatic Fair together with the 13th Water Supply Systems and Sanitary Technologies Fair and the 6th Energy Fair, with China as the partner country.

Seven Chinese companies, including China Civil Engineering Construction Corporation (CCECC) and China Road and Bridge Corporation (CRBC), presented their recent projects in the region and other parts of the world.

Rajko Bujkovic, executive manager of the Adriatic Fair, who opened the fair, told Xinhua that in regard to the partner country status, Chinese companies have better visibility at the fair that represents a "business gate of Montenegro".

"The potentials of Chinese companies are immense, while their opportunities are great, as they are already present at the market and additionally represent ongoing projects, which is a great opportunity for them to gain recommendation for future projects," said Bujkovic.

"They are engaged in the greatest project in Montenegro (Bar-Boljare highway), but each presentation opens new possibilities for projects in the future," he said, reminding that China is a powerful economy whose companies are also significant contractors and investors in Montenegro.

He continued that Chinese companies are highly competitive thanks to the technology they are offering, "which is far superior to that used in Montenegro, as well as in the global market".

"Chinese companies have great job opportunities in the region and it seems to me that there isn't a single significant project where they are not engaged in," he estimated.

Bujkovic explained that while infrastructure projects such as Bar-Boljare highway give results in the long run, employment of domestic companies as contractors enables them to employ their existing capacities as well as gain fresh knowhow. In the meantime, Chinese high-quality products are distributed to the local market by Montenegrin companies.

In his speech, Chinese Minister of Ecology and Environment Li Ganjie estimated that the fair plays an important role in technology exchange, business cooperation and infrastructure in the region, and expressed his hope that the engineering companies from China and Central and East European (CEE) countries would advocate for green development in order to "contribute to joint effort in improving sustainability and building a clean, beautiful and green Belt and Road".

"It is my sincere hope that the entrepreneurs present here today can use this opportunity to enhance communication and exchange and learn from one another on sustainable infrastructure building, green building, clean energy and environmental engineering," he said.

"China and CEE countries will build on the longstanding and traditional friendship as a solid station to build further and deepen our environmental exchange and cooperation," Li concluded.

Milutin Simovic, Vice Prime Minister of Montenegro, estimated that the Bar-Boljare highway project, with CRBC as the main contractor, once realized will turn the country into one of European business hubs, as well as improve safety of transport.

The fair aims to create opportunity for exhibitors from the region and beyond to enter the Montenegrin market and establish economic cooperation and direct approach to the buyers and clients.

Among the Chinese companies is CCECC, who just finished the Kolasin-Kos railway rehabilitation project of Montenegro last year.

According to Zhu Tianran, general director CCECC Montenegro Ltd., the company presented its achievements in the international market in the fields of railway construction, which is its core business, together with road construction, as well as the corporate social responsibilities in countries where they operate.

"CCECC aims to show its strength and experience, to expand its influence and to attract potential local partners, creating conditions for more participation in infrastructural projects in the Balkan area," Zhu said.

Meanwhile, representatives of local companies see Chinese companies as reliable, experienced, competitive and technologically advanced.

Dragan Markovic, official of the public enterprise for coastal zone management, told Xinhua that his company invests several million euros in infrastructural works, and welcomes companies from all sides to compete.

"Chinese companies appear as convincing and serious, but our projects are not so huge as highways... Chinese companies are already present at this market through the capital infrastructure projects they are engaged on, which are both of immense importance to them as well as their Montenegrin partners. They are also welcome to participate in smaller projects with their technology and knowhow," he assured.

Momcilo Stojanovic, member of the award jury for the best presentation of the fair, told Xinhua that he sees Chinese companies as "highly professional".

"They are very serious and I am not surprised because of the comprehensive and fast expansion of the Chinese model of economy in Montenegro, Europe and the whole world", he said.

Speaking about the potentials for Chinese companies, he said that China is among the most technologically advanced countries in the world, and that the realization of projects of its companies in Montenegro is impressive.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-09-20 03:30:36|Editor: Yurou

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MOSCOW, Sept. 19 (Xinhua) -- Russian President Vladimir Putin and German Chancellor Angela Merkel discussed over the phone Russia's recent deals with Turkey for the Syrian province of Idlib, the last rebel stronghold in the war-torn country, the Kremlin said Wednesday.

The conversation, initiated by the German side, focused on the Syrian peace settlement, during which Putin informed Merkel of the agreements between Moscow and Ankara to "promote stabilization in the Idlib de-escalation zone," a Kremlin statement said.

On Monday, Russia and Turkey decided to set up a demilitarized zone between the armed opposition and the government troops in Idlib by Oct. 15, following talks between the presidents of the two countries.

Putin and Merkel also reaffirmed their mutual commitment to further facilitating the settlement of the Ukrainian conflict, the statement said.

They also touched upon bilateral relations and a number of issues on the global financial markets, it said.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-09-20 03:35:37|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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GENEVA, Sept. 19 (Xinhua) -- The World Health Organization (WHO) rolled out its first investment case on Wednesday, which requires an investment of 14.1 billion U.S. dollars from 2019 to 2023 to save up to 30 million lives worldwide.

The WHO said the estimate, including a 10 billion dollars' base budget, 2.5 billion dollars for humanitarian response and 1.6 billion dollars for polio eradication, represents a 14 percent increase of the base budget only, instead of the overall budget, over the previous five-year period.

The total amount would help save up to 30 million lives, add up to 100 million years of healthy living to the world's population, and add up to four percent of economic growth in low and middle-income countries by 2023, it said.

Also, the investment would help achieve the "triple billion" targets of the WHO's General Program of Work: one billion more people benefiting from universal health coverage, one billion more people better protected from health emergencies, and one billion more people enjoying better health and well-being.

With the investment, the WHO said it can better serve and guide governments and partners in their efforts to improve the health of their populations, through new mechanisms to measure success that ensures a strict model of accountability, while setting ambitious targets for savings and efficiencies.

The plan, in particular, focuses on equity, gender and rights-based approaches that aim to close gaps in health service coverage and empower individuals and communities to ensure no one is left behind.

"This is the first time we have estimated the results we could achieve and the impact we could deliver with the right resources," said WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. "Our investment case isn't only about investing in an institution, it's about investing in people, and in the healthier, safer, fairer world we all want."
A Russian MIG-31 jet carrying a high-precision hypersonic aero-ballistic missile 'Kinzhal' ('Dagger') takes part in the Victory Day military parade in the Red Square in Moscow, Russia, on May 9, 2018. (EPA PHOTO)

MOSCOW, Sept. 19 (Xinhua) -- A MiG-31 fighter crashed in the Nizhny Novgorod region in the center of European Russia, with both pilots ejected, the Russian Defense Ministry said Wednesday.

"The flight was carried out without ammunition and the plane fell in a deserted place causing no damage on the ground," RIA Novosti news agency quoted a ministry statement as saying.

The aircraft was carrying out a scheduled training flight, the ministry said. Rescuers promptly evacuated the pilots, whose lives are not threatened, it said.

A commission of the ministry is working at the crash site to establish the causes of the accident.

According to preliminary data, the cause of the accident was a technical malfunction, the statement said.

A source in a law enforcement agency told RIA Novosti that the plane fell near the town of Kulebaki, some 188 km to the southwest of Nizhny Novgorod, the capital of the region.

The plane exploded after the fall and was completely burned, the source added.

MiG-31 is a supersonic fighter designed to intercept and destroy air targets at low and high altitudes.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-09-20 04:15:46|Editor: Yurou

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BERLIN, Sept. 19 (Xinhua) -- Chinese exhibitors are showcasing their innovative products and services here on the bi-annual "InnoTrans" railway industry trade fair, the largest of its kind in the world.

CRRC Zhuzhou Locomotive (CRRC ZELC), an advanced company in China in the rail industry, released on Wednesday the shunting locomotive specially customized for German rail service provider Deutsche Bahn (DB).

It is reported that the locomotive will be delivered directly to Germany Hamburg depot, serving the German market after the fair.

"This is s typical green product with new technology, new material, new process and new structure," Sun Yongcai, CEO of CRRC Corporation Limited, introduced at the technology release conference of DB hybrid shunting locomotive.

CRRC is set to build various transportation systems and to contribute its products, technologies, wisdom and solutions to the development of global rail and human civilization, Sun said.

China Railway Signal & Communication Co.,Ltd(CRSC) is another Chinese company to invest notably in the innovation.

According to Zhao Xiaodong, assistant president of CRSC, Chinese companies now own the technologies of the same level as their European rivals do. Meanwhile, Chinese companies profit significantly from the big domestic market and have lots of opportunities to put their products and services into practice.

Zhao said that its rail transportation control systems will be more intelligent, interconnected and networked in the future.

"Innovative technology, management, thinking and cooperation with local companies would be the right way for CRSC to further develop and expand its business on the world stage," Zhao concluded.

Some 3,062 exhibitors from 61 countries and regions with over 400 new products have participated in the Berlin Exhibition Grounds. Over 62 percent of them are foreign participants.

Around 180 Chinese exhibitors, with a total of exhibiting area of more than 6,000 square metres, have attended the fair.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-09-20 06:01:05|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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BRASILIA, Sept. 19 (Xinhua) -- Brazil's main presidential candidates on Wednesday said the possibility of a second electoral round remains open, following the disclosure of a new poll.

With less than three weeks remaining before the Oct. 7 elections, the Ibope Institute released a new poll of likely voters.

It showed Jair Bolsonaro of the right-wing Social Liberal Party (PSL) with 28 percent; followed by Fernando Haddad of the Workers' Party (PT) with 19 percent.

Ciro Gomes, of the Democratic Labor Party (PDT) was third with 11 percent; Geraldo Alckmin of the Brazilian Social Democracy Party (PSDB) with 7 percent and Marina Silva of the Sustainability Network Party had 6 percent.

Bolsonaro also leads in voter dissatisfaction with 42 percent followed by Haddad at 29 percent, Silva 26 percent, Alckmin 20 percent and Gomes 19 percent.

Gomes said the poll only reflects the sentiment of the moment, and he is continuing to campaign hard.

"The country can no longer take the PT's polarization bomb," he said.

For his part, Alckmin reacted to the poll suggesting that the PT is already assured a spot in a second round.

"I see the candidate's curve (Haddad) is a curve that is moving upward, (Bolsonaro's curve) is not at the top and he will have a tendency to fall," Alckmin said.

Silva said the first round is "to vote for your dream candidate" while looking for the useful vote.

Others consider that it is premature to say the electorate is lining up with the possibility of a contest between Bolsonaro and Haddad.

Candidate Alvaro Dias of the Podemos Party, said he would not withdraw from the race in order to support a rival candidate and "will continue until the last minute with his party with the hope of reaching the second round."
Source: Xinhua| 2018-09-20 06:21:09|Editor: Liangyu

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HAVANA, Sept. 19 (Xinhua) -- Stars from several U.S. dance companies will take part in a gala performance at the upcoming Havana International Ballet Festival, organizers said on Wednesday.

Called "Stars of American Ballet," the show will feature acclaimed members of the New York City Ballet (NYCB) and other major U.S. companies on two nights, Oct. 29 and 30, at Havana's Mella Theater.

Among the featured dancers are Daniel Ulbricht, Teresa Reichlen, Ask la Cour, Sterling Hyltin, Adrian Danchig-Waring, Indiana Woodward and Gonzalo Garcia, all from the NYCB.

Cuban audiences will also be treated to the art of ballroom dancing with performances by the award-winning Ukraine-born U.S. residents Antonina Skobina and Denys Drozdyuk.

Most of the choreography in the program is made by renowned authors, such as George Balanchine, Christopher Wheeldon and Alexei Ratmansky.

The 26th edition of the festival, named in honor of Cuban dancer-choreographer Alicia Alonso, will open on Oct. 28 and run through Nov. 6, with the participation of dancers and companies from numerous countries.

This edition also celebrates the 70th anniversary of the founding of Cuba's National Ballet (NBC), whose history is closely linked to the history of ballet in the United States.

Before creating her own company in 1948, Alonso, Cuba's prima ballerina assoluta, attended the School of American Ballet. She made her U.S. debut in the musical comedies "Great Lady" and "Stars in Your Eyes," and became the first star of the American Ballet Theatre (ABT) in 1946. Her company went on to become Cuba's National Ballet in 1955.
VANCOUVER, Washington, Sept. 20, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- CytoDyn Inc. (OTC.QB: CYDY), a biotechnology company developing a novel humanized CCR5 monoclonal antibody for multiple therapeutic indications, announces that management will present at two upcoming investment conferences:



Fourth Annual Robins Equity Research Roundup on Tuesday, September 25, at 10:00 a.m. Pacific time, in Portland, Oregon; and



on Tuesday, September 25, at 10:00 a.m. Pacific time, in Portland, Oregon; and The MicroCap Conference on Monday, October 1, at 9:00 a.m. Eastern time (6:00 a.m. Pacific time) at the Essex House in New York City.

A live webcast and replay of the presentation at The MicroCap Conference will be available on the Investors section of the Companys website, http://ir.cytodyn.com/ , prior to the presentation date.

About PRO 140

PRO 140 is a humanized IgG4 monoclonal antibody that blocks CCR5, a cellular receptor that plays multiple roles with implications in HIV infection, tumor metastasis, and immune signaling.

In the setting of HIV/AIDS, PRO 140 belongs to a new class of therapeutics called viral-entry inhibitors; it masks CCR5, thus protecting healthy T cells from viral infection by blocking the predominant HIV (R5) subtype from entering those cells. At the same time, PRO 140 does not appear to interfere with the normal function of CCR5 in mediating immune responses. PRO 140 has been the subject of seven clinical trials, each demonstrating efficacy by significantly reducing or controlling HIV viral load in human test subjects. PRO 140 has been designated a fast track product by the FDA. The PRO 140 antibody appears to be a powerful antiviral agent leading to potentially fewer side effects and less frequent dosing requirements compared with daily drug therapies currently in use.

In the setting of cancer, research has shown that CCR5 plays a central role in tumor invasion and metastasis and that an increased CCR5 is an indicator of disease status in several cancers. Moreover, researchers have shown that drugs that block CCR5, can block tumor metastases in laboratory and animal models of aggressive breast and prostate cancer. CytoDyn is conducting additional research with PRO 140 in the cancer setting and plans to initiate Phase 2 human clinical trials when appropriate.

The CCR5 receptor also plays a central role in modulating immune cell trafficking to sites of inflammation and it is crucial for the development of acute graft-versus-host disease (GvHD) and other inflammatory conditions. Clinical studies by others have shown that blocking CCR5 using a chemical inhibitor can reduce the clinical impact of acute GvHD without significantly affecting the engraftment of transplanted bone marrow stem cells. CytoDyn is currently conducting a Phase 2 clinical study with PRO 140 to further support the concept that the CCR5 receptor on engrafted cells is critical for the development of acute GvHD and that blocking this receptor from recognizing certain immune signaling molecules is a viable approach to mitigating acute GvHD. The FDA has granted orphan drug designation to PRO 140 for the prevention of graft-versus-host disease (GvHD).

About CytoDyn

CytoDyn is a biotechnology company focused on the clinical development and potential commercialization of humanized monoclonal antibodies for the treatment and prevention of HIV infection. The Company has one of the leading monoclonal antibodies under development for HIV infection, PRO 140, which has completed Phase 2 clinical trials with demonstrated antiviral activity in humans and is currently in Phase 3 development. PRO 140 blocks the HIV co-receptor CCR5 on T cells, which prevents viral entry. Clinical trial results thus far indicate that PRO 140 does not negatively affect the normal immune functions that are mediated by CCR5. Results from seven Phase 1 and Phase 2 human clinical trials have shown that PRO 140 can significantly reduce viral burden in people infected with HIV. A recent Phase 2b clinical trial demonstrated that PRO 140 can prevent viral escape in patients during several months of interruption from conventional drug therapy. CytoDyn intends to continue to develop PRO 140 as a therapeutic anti-viral agent in persons infected with HIV and to pursue non-HIV, inflammatory indications where CCR5 and its ligand CCL5 may be involved. For more information on the Company, please visit http://www.cytodyn.com .

Forward-Looking Statements

This press release contains certain forward-looking statements that involve risks, uncertainties and assumptions that are difficult to predict, including statements regarding the proposed transaction with ProstaGene, the likelihood of closing the proposed transaction with ProstaGene, the Companys clinical focus, and the Companys current and proposed trials. Words and expressions reflecting optimism, satisfaction or disappointment with current prospects, as well as words such as believes, hopes, intends, estimates, expects, projects, plans, anticipates and variations thereof, or the use of future tense, identify forward-looking statements, but their absence does not mean that a statement is not forward-looking. The Companys forward-looking statements are not guarantees of performance and actual results could differ materially from those contained in or expressed by such statements. In evaluating all such statements, the Company urges investors to specifically consider the various risk factors identified in the Companys Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended May 31, 2018 in the section titled Risk Factors in Part I, Item 1A, any of which could cause actual results to differ materially from those indicated by the Companys forward-looking statements.

The Companys forward-looking statements reflect its current views with respect to future events and are based on currently available financial, economic, scientific, and competitive data and information on current business plans. Investors should not place undue reliance on the Companys forward-looking statements, which are subject to risks and uncertainties relating to, among other things: (i) the sufficiency of the Companys cash position and the Companys ongoing ability to raise additional capital to fund its operations, (ii) the Companys ability to complete its Phase 2b/3 pivotal combination therapy trial for PRO 140 (CD02) and to meet the FDAs requirements with respect to safety and efficacy to support the filing of a Biologics License Application, (iii) the Companys ability to meet its debt obligations, if any, (iv) the Companys ability to identify patients to enroll in its clinical trials in a timely fashion, (v) the Companys ability to achieve approval of a marketable product, (vi) design, implementation and conduct of clinical trials, (vii) the results of the Companys clinical trials, including the possibility of unfavorable clinical trial results, (viii) the market for, and marketability of, any product that is approved, (ix) the existence or development of vaccines, drugs, or other treatments for infection with HIV that are viewed by medical professionals or patients as superior to the Companys products, (x) regulatory initiatives, compliance with governmental regulations and the regulatory approval process, (xi) general economic and business conditions, (xii) changes in foreign, political, and social conditions, and (xiii) various other matters, many of which are beyond the Companys control. Should one or more of these risks or uncertainties develop, or should underlying assumptions prove to be incorrect, actual results may vary materially and adversely from those anticipated, believed, estimated, or otherwise indicated by the Companys forward-looking statements.

The Company intends that all forward-looking statements made in this press release will be subject to the safe harbor protection of the federal securities laws pursuant to Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933, as amended, to the extent applicable. Except as required by law, the Company does not undertake any responsibility to update these forward-looking statements to take into account events or circumstances that occur after the date of this press release. Additionally, the Company does not undertake any responsibility to update investors upon the occurrence of any unanticipated events which may cause actual results to differ from those expressed or implied by these forward-looking statements.

CONTACTS:

Investors:

LHA Investor Relations

Jody Cain

310-691-7100

jcain@lhai.com
Source: Xinhua| 2018-09-20 06:26:11|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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MONROVIA, Sept. 19 (Xinhua) -- Liberian government on Wednesday confirmed it is probing the disappearance of 104 million U.S. dollars from the central bank, saying the missing money "has national security implications."

The money, an equivalent of over 16 billion Liberian dollars, was ordered by the Central Bank of Liberia from printers overseas but is yet to be traced after a series of shipments, the government said.

Records showed that the money got missing since last year, toward the end of the erstwhile administration of Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf.

The shipments were recorded between November 2017 and August 2018.

Fifteen people, including former central bank governor Milton Weeks and Charles Sirleaf, son of the former president, have been banned from leaving the country pending the investigation, said Information Minister Eugene Nagbe.

Only the Central Bank of Liberia has the power to order new currency. The country does not have its own mint.

The ministry of justice said national police and other security agencies, including the Financial Intelligence Unit of Liberia, have been ordered to carry out the probe.

One source told Xinhua that President George Weah only became aware of the missing notes last month.

The Liberian government last approved the printing of new notes in August 2016.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-09-20 06:26:12|Editor: Yurou

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SALZBURG, Austria, Sept.19 (Xinhua) -- European Council President Donald Tusk on Wednesday said he would call a special Brexit summit to reach a deal with Britain.

Tusk told reporters that the Brexit negotiations are entering their crucial phase, he is to call a Brexit summit of EU member states' leaders around mid-November, seeking to reach a deal with Britain.

His remarks were made before the EU summit in Salzburg in Austria.

"The Brexit negotiations are entering their decisive phase. Various scenarios are still possible today," he said.

A key point of Brexit currently is how to maintain a frictionless border on the island of Ireland. In terms of the question or the economic cooperation, Britain's proposals will need to be reworked and further negotiated, said Tusk.

However, he is still not pessimistic of reaching a deal with Britain. "Every day that is left we must use for talks. I'd like to finalize them still this autumn," he said.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-09-20 06:46:14|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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CHICAGO, Sept. 19 (Xinhua) -- Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT) agricultural commodities closed higher on Wednesday, with soybean futures rebounding nearly 2 percent, as bargain hunters snap up cheap supplies that hit record low on Tuesday.

The most active corn contract for December delivery went up 2.5 cents, or 0.73 percent to close at 3.4575 dollars per bushel. December wheat delivery added 12 cents, or 2.35 percent to close at 5.225 dollars per bushel. November soybean delivery rose 16 cents, or 1.97 percent to close at 8.3 dollars per bushel.

CBOT wheat futures climbed on technical buying and tightening global supplies, while corn futures followed the firm trend.

Wheat firmed on a mix of chart-based buying, with the December contract approaching resistance at its 20-and 200-day moving averages, along with a pick-up in global export business that has reinforced ideas of tightening global supplies.

Egypt's main state wheat buyer on Tuesday booked 475,000 tonnes of wheat for two shipment periods, Syria bought about 200,000 tonnes of Russian wheat, and Turkey's state grain board issued a tender for around 252,000 tonnes of wheat.

Traders were also monitoring dry weather and potential for additional cold temperatures in Australia, a key wheat exporter, following possible frost damage last weekend.

As for weather forecast for agricultural crop, flash flood watches and flood warnings are in effect for parts of southwestern Wisconsin, southeastern Minnesota and northeastern Iowa this morning, according to the National Weather Service.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-09-20 07:01:15|Editor: Yurou

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HOUSTON, Sept. 19 (Xinhua) -- The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) reported significant draws in U.S. crude oil and gasoline inventories during last week, and both major benchmarks of crude oil increased on Wednesday.

West Texas Intermediate (WTI) for October delivery price settled 1.8 percent higher with the support of high U.S. crude oil exports information released by EIA. While Brent crude for November delivery increased 0.5 percent.

According to the Weekly Petroleum Status Report by EIA, U.S. commercial crude oil inventories, excluding those in the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR), decreased 2.06 million barrels during the week ending Sept. 14.

The market's expectation was a draw of 2.7 million barrels in crude oil inventories. EIA also reported a larger than expected draw in the inventories of gasoline, and smaller than expected build in the inventories of distillates.

In the previous week ending Sept. 7, EIA reported a draw of 5.3 million barrels in the U.S. crude oil inventories. The commercial crude oil inventories excluding SPR is 16.6 percent below the levels of the same week last year.

U.S. crude oil refinery inputs averaged 17.42 million barrels per day during last week, which was 442,000 barrels per day lower than the previous week's average. Over the past four weeks, refinery inputs averaged 17.62 million barrels per day which was 14.7 percent higher than the same four-week period of last year.

The big increase in crude oil inputs to refineries from the same period of the last year was due to the fact that Hurricane Harvey hit the Gulf coast a year ago and it caused major disruptions in refinery activities. During the same week last year, crude oil inputs to refineries averaged 15.17 million barrels per day due to Hurricane Harvey.

Refinery utilization is going down as the high demand season is over and the refineries start their seasonal maintenance projects.

U.S. total motor gasoline inventories decreased 1.7 million barrels last week, but still about 8.3 percent above the levels of the same week last year. Distillate fuel inventories increased 0.8 million barrels last week, 0.9 percent above the levels of the same week last year. Total commercial petroleum inventories decreased 400,000 barrels last week.

According to EIA, U.S. total products supplied over the last four-week period averaged 21.38 million barrels per day, up 4.9 percent from the same period last year. Over the past four weeks, motor gasoline supplied averaged 9.70 million barrels per day, up 2.0 percent from the same period last year.

Distillate fuel oil supplied over the last four-week period averaged 4.04 million barrels per day, down 0.8 percent from the same period last year. Over the past four weeks, jet fuel supplied averaged 1.81 million barrels per day, up 5.0 percent from the same period last year.

Meanwhile, EIA reported that the estimated weekly U.S. crude oil production went up 100,000 to 11 million barrels per day during last week.

U.S. crude oil imports averaged 8.02 million barrels per day last week, 433,000 barrels per day higher than the levels of the previous week. Over the past four weeks, crude oil imports averaged 7.70 million barrels per day, 6.9 percent higher than the same four-week period last year.

U.S. crude oil exports averaged 2.37 million barrels per day last week, up 539,000 barrels per day from the previous week.

Oil prices moved upward on Wednesday after official data showed large draw in U.S crude oil and gasoline inventories and lower than expect build in distillates inventories, despite an increase in the U.S. weekly crude oil production.

Analysts said that the new export data about Iranian crude oil led to supply concerns due to the declined level compared with the level in April.

On Wednesday, WTI increased 1.8 percent to settle at 71.12 U.S. dollars a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange, while Brent crude for November delivery increased 0.5 percent to settle at 79.40 dollars a barrel on the London ICE Futures Exchange.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-09-20 07:11:16|Editor: Liu

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Guillermo Malpica Soto, head of the trade and NAFTA office for Mexico's Ministry of Economy in Washington D.C., delivers a keynote speech at the 25th North American Logistics & Manufacturing Symposium in Laredo, the United States, on Sept. 19, 2018. The growing protectionism in the world is a big challenge for global trade and economy, Guillermo Malpica Soto said here Wednesday. (Xinhua/Liu Liwei)

LAREDO, the United States, Sept. 19 (Xinhua) -- The growing protectionism in the world is a big challenge for global trade and economy, Mexican official said here Wednesday.

Guillermo Malpica Soto, head of the trade and NAFTA office for Mexico's Ministry of Economy in Washington D.C., made the remarks when delivering a keynote speech at the 25th North American Logistics & Manufacturing Symposium in Laredo, an American city on the border with Mexico.

"There are many challenges. One of the main challenges as you can see is the growing protectionism in the world," he said, adding that "it's important to stand for free trade. We need to be clear that trade benefits all."

Talking about tariffs that the United States imposed on Mexican steel and aluminum and Mexico's retaliatory measures, Soto said countries with trade disputes should seek resolution through international organizations rather than putting tariffs.

"The result of tariff does not lead to healthy market, does not lead to profit. We need those issues to be addressed in the international trade organizations," he said.

"We are committed to having a solution on the steel and aluminum tariffs. We will be able to stop the (U.S.) tariff on the Mexico sector and at the same time to withdraw our retaliatory measures," he said.

With the theme of "Supply Chains in the New Global Reality," this year's symposium focused on the impact of rapidly changing political climate on the international trade, transportation, and manufacturing sectors for both the short and long term.

Around 200 politicians, businessmen and scholars from the U.S., Mexico and Canada attended the two-day symposium.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-09-20 07:31:23|Editor: Yang Yi

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A tourist shows a freshly caught Chinese mitten crab during a tourist festival held ashore the Yangcheng Lake in Xiangcheng District of Suzhou, east China's Jiangsu Province, Sept. 19, 2018. The Chinese mitten crabs inhabiting Suzhou's Yangcheng Lake are a popular cooking ingredient for many food lovers. In the annual event which kicked off here on Wednesday, tourists will be able to have a taste of this year's first Chinese mitten crabs ready to serve the table, while the official netting of Yangcheng Lake crabs will begin on Sept. 21. (Xinhua/Hao Qunying)
Source: Xinhua| 2018-09-20 09:51:32|Editor: Liu

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MANILA, Sept. 20 (Xinhua) -- Up to 35 houses were destroyed early Thursday by a landslide in two villages in Naga City in the central Philippine Cebu province, authorities said.

Marian Codilla, spokesperson of the Mines and Geosciences Bureau (MGB) in central Visayas region, told GMA News Online that the landslide occurred at 6 a.m. local time and destroyed houses in the villages of Naalad and Tinaan.

Initial estimates by the MGB said at least 10 houses were destroyed, while the local police said the number of damaged row houses could reach up to 35.

Already, Codilla said MGB personnel and policemen were sent to the site to assess the damage.

Naga City Police Chief Roderick Gonzales said they are still determining if there were residents hurt in the tragedy.

Initial investigation showed that it rained all night in the villages, causing the soil to loosen.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-09-20 10:16:39|Editor: Liu

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NEW DELHI, Sept. 20 (Xinhua) -- Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Afghan President Ashraf Ghani on Wednesday reviewed progress of the multi-faceted bilateral strategic partnership between their countries.

"The two leaders expressed satisfaction over the increase in bilateral trade that has crossed the 1 billion U. S. dollars mark," said a statement issued by the Indian Prime Minister's office.

"The two leaders also appreciated the successful conclusion of the India-Afghanistan trade and investment show in Mumbai last week and expressed determination to strengthen connectivity, through Chabahar port and air-freight corridor."

According to officials, Modi reiterated India's support to the Afghan government's peace and reconciliation process.

Ghani on Wednesday arrived in New Delhi on a day-long visit to meet Modi.

"While expressing satisfaction at the coordination and consultation on activities at various international fora, the two sides agreed to strengthen this cooperation and also to work even more closely with their regional and international partners for prosperity, peace, stability and progress," a spokesman said.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-09-20 10:16:39|Editor: Liu

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SYDNEY, Sept. 20 (Xinhua) -- An Australian woman is in a critical condition on Thursday after being attacked by a shark while holidaying in the world-famous Whitsunday Islands, in the country's northeast.

The 46-year-old from Tasmania was swimming near a charter yacht at the time of the attack, which left her with significant leg and torso injuries.

Authorities said the extent of the woman's injuries mean she is lucky to be alive, mostly thanks to an emergency room doctor who happened to be on a nearby boat, and the rapid assistance of a medical response helicopter which was also nearby.

Doctor John Hadok, an off-duty emergency department doctor from Mackay Base Hospital, was able to attend the woman when she was pulled from the water, bleeding heavily from a wound on her leg.

"The original first aid was actually really well done," rescue helicopter crewman Ben McCauley said.

"We actually didn't have to do anything with the leg, it was pretty much tourniqueted up, bandaged up and bleeding had stopped. They'd done a really good job."

The woman was transported by helicopter to Mackay Base Hospital where she remained in a critical condition.
Actors perform in "The Lion King" in Singapore's Marina Bay Sands Theatre, on June 28, 2018. (Xinhua/Then Chih Wey)

SINGAPORE,Sept. 19 (Xinhua) -- The world renowned Lion King musical is presented here in Singapore, with its Asian and African cultural elements and artful performance to intoxicate the audiences.

On stage at Singapore's Marina Bay Sands Theatre, the show, which is transformed from the 1994 Disney animated film by American director Julie Taymor, continues to lure and entertain viewers.

Besides delicate performance and exquisite costumes, the show also features Asian-style puppets and African languages, which also contributed to the charm of the musical.

It is reported that more than 200 animal puppets were shown in the play, including the animatronic and cable suspension puppets, rod puppets, traditional African masked dance puppets and Indonesian shadow puppets. The puppets add to the vividness of the show. In the meantime, viewers could also see the faces of the actors or actresses who operate the puppets, which give a human touch to the story-telling.

"The arts of Asia are extremely prevalent in not just the designing of the costumes, but also in the various forms of mask and puppetry and dance," Taymor was quoted as saying to the English-language newspaper The Straits Times.

African languages are spoken in the show, such as the Congolese and Swahili, as this is a story happening in the African wilderness.

While the audiences are grabbed by the struggle of the Lion Simba, they can also enjoy the humor and wisdom in the show, which is brought together by an international cast and crew coming from 19 countries.

Hyojin Um brought her daughters who are four and eight years old to watch the show. She thought the music was very good and the costumes were great and easy for the kids to understand.

The musical is on an Asian tour which started in the Philippines in March and will go to South Korea and Japan after Singapore. It was on stage in Singapore from June 27 and will run until Sept. 23.

The Lion King musical with different performers was previously staged at the Marina Bay Sands Theatre in 2011 and was put on stage here for over eight months -- making it the longest-running musical in Singapore.

Since its debut in the New York theatre in 1997, the Lion King musical has been watched by more than 90 million people and has won more than 70 global theatrical awards.
SAN JOSE, Calif., Sept. 20, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- NetEnrich , a provider of platform-driven Azure services, will be an exhibitor at Microsoft Ignite 2018, the annual customer-focused technology conference hosted by Microsoft. This years event will be held at the Orange County Convention Center in Orlando, Florida, September 24-28. NetEnrich will be in booth #444.



NetEnrich is a Microsoft Gold partner for Azure services with 100+ partners and 1,500+ clients in the US, Europe and Japan. Its offerings include guaranteed 24x7 performance and scalability of customer workloads in Azure and on-premises; an effective and secure data strategy in Azure; fixed-cost migrations to Azure; proactive and ongoing optimization of customers Azure consumption as well as maintenance within a fixed monthly spend; modernization of workloads leveraging Azure Cloud Native Services; and enabled agility and collaboration in managing workloads in Azure by platform driven DevOps and TechOps services.

NetEnrich clients are experiencing results with its Azure services. Universal Hospital Services (UHS), one of the largest providers of clinical equipment services for healthcare facilities in the US, recently modernized its legacy data center infrastructure using NetEnrichs Azure services. The work helped UHS save on data center costs, improve application performance and reduce recovery time. Meanwhile, Fulton Street Software, an application provider for non-profit social service agencies, engaged NetEnrich to migrate its web application and data to Microsoft Azure. Backed by NetEnrichs assessment and migration services, they were able to save on compute and storage costs, increase deployment speed and achieve a scalable infrastructure.

To learn more about NetEnrichs platform-driven Azure services or to meet with executives from the company at Ignite, visit this website.

About NetEnrich

NetEnrich combines industrialized services and a proprietary automation platform to deliver IT infrastructure and operations management services from on-premises to cloud. NetEnrich is also a Microsoft technology partner specializing in accelerating deployment, migration and management of application workloads on Azure. Our approach to IT operations reduces costs, mitigates risk, provides control and drives innovation. NetEnrich has five global delivery centers, is headquartered in Silicon Valley, California, and is a Gartner 2015 Cool Vendor and featured in Gartner Hype Cycle for Hybrid Infrastructure 2016 and 2017. To learn more about NetEnrich, visit www.netenrich.com .
Source: Xinhua| 2018-09-20 10:31:42|Editor: Yurou

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MANILA, Sept. 20 (Xinhua) -- At least two died, including a woman in her 60s, in a landslide that destroyed at least dozens of houses in Naga City in the central Philippine Cebu province Thursday, authorities said.

Authorities and witnesses said the landslide occurred shortly before 6 a.m. local time and destroyed houses in the villages of Naalad and Tinaan.

Initial new reports said at least 10 houses were buried, while the police said the number of damaged row houses could reach up to 35.

Local media in Cebu posted pictures of policemen searching and rescuing some of the victims.

Initial investigation showed that it rained all night in the villages, causing the soil to loosen.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi (R) shakes hands with visiting Afghan President Ashraf Ghani before a meeting at Hyderabad House in New Delhi, India, on Sept. 19, 2018. (Xinhua/Partha Sarkar)

NEW DELHI, Sept. 20 (Xinhua) -- Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Afghan President Ashraf Ghani on Wednesday reviewed progress of the multi-faceted bilateral strategic partnership between their countries.

"The two leaders expressed satisfaction over the increase in bilateral trade that has crossed the 1 billion U. S. dollars mark," said a statement issued by the Indian Prime Minister's office.

"The two leaders also appreciated the successful conclusion of the India-Afghanistan trade and investment show in Mumbai last week and expressed determination to strengthen connectivity, through Chabahar port and air-freight corridor."

According to officials, Modi reiterated India's support to the Afghan government's peace and reconciliation process.

Ghani on Wednesday arrived in New Delhi on a day-long visit to meet Modi.

"While expressing satisfaction at the coordination and consultation on activities at various international fora, the two sides agreed to strengthen this cooperation and also to work even more closely with their regional and international partners for prosperity, peace, stability and progress," a spokesman said.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-09-20 10:41:46|Editor: Liu

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CANBERRA, Sept. 20 (Xinhua) -- The president of Australia's peak medical body has called on the nation's prime minister to remove asylum seekers from indefinite detention on Nauru.

Tony Bartone, president of the Australian Medical Association, on Thursday wrote to PM Scott Morrison "demanding a change of policy" regarding the detention of asylum seekers.

Under the current system, people caught coming to Australia by boat are detained indefinitely on Nauru.

Bartone said the mental and physical wellbeing of the detainees had become "a humanitarian emergency requiring urgent intervention."

According to reports, 20 out of the 100 children in detention on Nauru are at risk of permanent harm or death.

Bartone asked Morrison to facilitate access to Nauru for a delegation of Australian doctors, saying that making their findings public would "assure the Australian public that the Australian government has done all that is possible to protect the health and wellbeing of asylum seekers and refugees."

Bartone also wrote to every member of parliament asking them to support his initiative.

He said he was inspired to write the letters by the escalation in reports of catastrophic mental and physical health conditions being experienced by the asylum seekers, especially children.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-09-20 11:01:48|Editor: Liu

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CANBERRA, Sept. 20 (Xinhua) -- Police in South Australia (SA) on Thursday charged Geoffrey Adams over the 45-year-old cold case murder of his wife Colleen.

Officers arrested Adams, aged 70, at his home in Wallaroo, 156 km north of SA's capital Adelaide, on Wednesday evening and charged him with murder.

Shortly after making the arrest, police travelled with Adams to a property in Maitland, 50 km south, where the couple lived with their two children at the time of Colleen's disappearance in 1973.

Footage captured by local news showed Adams in the backyard of the property with officers where he pointed to a concrete slab before becoming visually emotional.

Police on Thursday began work to recover Colleen Adams' remains from that site.

"It doesn't replace Colleen but it's immensely important and we can't underestimate how important it is for family and loved ones," SA Police Detective Superintendent Des Bray told reporters.

Colleen Adams was last seen alive on Nov. 22, 1973, at the Maitland property where Geoffrey Adams claimed she left with an unidentified middle-aged woman at 7 a.m. local time having told him that she was leaving him.

She was officially reported missing by her mother the following month.

The case was declared a major crime in 1979 but police never made an arrest.

SA Police on Sunday announced that the case would be reviewed as part of Operation Persist, saying that they "have not given up hope of providing her family with some answers about her disappearance."

"We have an open mind as to what's happened and how it's happened, but we are of the opinion she has been murdered. We don't hold out hope that she's just missing and will turn up," Michael Newbury, a sergeant with the Major Crime investigation unit, said on Sunday.

The review led to a new search of the Maitland property using ground penetrating radar, resulting in Wednesday's arrest.

Geoffrey Adams denied any involvement in his wife's disappearance as recently as Wednesday morning. He will face a bail hearing at an Adelaide Magistrates Court on Thursday.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-09-20 11:06:49|Editor: Liu

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CANBERRA, Sept. 20 (Xinhua) -- An Australian Senate inquiry has recommended introducing a ban on the nation's domestic ivory trade.

The 120-page report, tabled by the committee on Wednesday evening, found that Australia's ivory laws were falling behind those in China, Britain and the United States.

Under current laws, ivory and rhino horn products dating back earlier than 1975 can be traded domestically without identification.

Products from 1975 onwards are subject to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES).

The committee, chaired by government Member of Parliament (MP) Craig Kelly, heard "overwhelming support for the implementation of a domestic trade ban for both elephant ivory and rhino horn" during public hearings in capital cities.

"The individual traders and industry representatives that would be adversely impacted by a ban also recognised that action is needed," the report said.

It said that there was clear evidence of the "devastating" impact that the illegal wildlife trade was having on environments globally.

The committee uncovered glaring weaknesses in Australia's wildlife control laws, most notably the lack of regulations on the domestic market.

"For example, there is no legal requirement for any ivory or rhino horn item to be identified as a pre-Cites item before it is traded within Australia," it said.

However, the report did recommend that exemptions be introduced for musical instruments with ivory content lower than 20 percent.

Melissa Price, Australia's Minister for the Environment, said she would consider the recommendations before attending an international wildlife trade conference in London in October.

Lisa Singh, the Senator responsible for launching the inquiry, said the lack of domestic regulations made Australia a "market for poachers."

"There is no doubt that the existence of legal domestic markets around the world in ivory and rhino horn is continuing to fuel the poaching crisis," she said.

"Australia is not immune from contributing to that poaching crisis as a consumer market and as a transit route to Asia."
Source: Xinhua| 2018-09-20 11:26:52|Editor: Yurou

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UNITED NATIONS, Sept. 19 (Xinhua) -- United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on Wednesday welcomed the outcome of the third summit this year between the leaders of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) and the Republic of Korea.

The secretary-general "commends the determination and diplomacy which led to the important agreements contained in today's Pyongyang Joint Declaration," according to a statement issued by Guterres' spokesman Stephane Dujarric.

"The commitments reflected in the joint statement include important military confidence-building measures and a commitment by the DPRK to dismantle missile engine testing infrastructure in the presence of experts from related countries. Now it is time for concrete action," the statement said.

"The secretary-general calls for unity of the international community to support the parties in their endeavors towards sustainable peace, security and complete and verifiable denuclearization on the Korean Peninsula in accordance with relevant Security Council Resolutions," according to the statement.

"The secretary-general reiterates his commitment and readiness of the United Nations system to further assist the parties in any way they deem appropriate," the statement noted.

The DPRK's top leader Kim Jong Un and South Korean President Moon Jae-in on Wednesday signed a joint declaration, agreeing to take additional steps toward making the Korean Peninsula free of nuclear weapons and threats of armed conflict.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-09-20 11:31:54|Editor: Yang Yi

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WASHINGTON, Sept. 19 (Xinhua) -- Michael Flynn, former national security adviser to U.S. President Donald Trump, is set to be sentenced on Dec. 18, one year after pleading guilty to lying to the FBI in special counsel Robert Mueller's Russia probe, according to court filing released Wednesday.

The date falls several weeks after the Nov. 6 mid-term elections.

Flynn has been cooperating with the Mueller probe after pleading guilty on Dec. 1, 2017 to a charge of making two false statements to the FBI about his interactions with then Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak after the 2016 U.S. elections and before Trump's inauguration in January 2017.

The retired lieutenant general is the first senior White House official to be charged in Mueller's probe.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-09-20 11:51:59|Editor: Yang Yi

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MANILA, Sept. 20 (Xinhua) -- The Asian Development Bank (ADB) announced on Thursday that its Board of Directors has approved a new 6-year country partnership strategy, expecting to lend an estimated 7.8 billion U.S. dollars until 2021 to lay out its support to the Philippines in attaining sustained high and inclusive economic growth.

Under the new strategy, the Manila-based bank said its programs and projects in the Philippines will focus on three priority areas, including accelerating infrastructure and long-term investments, promoting local economic development in central and southern Philippines, and investing in people.

ADB said it expects to lend to the Philippines an estimated 7.8 billion U.S. dollars, or nearly 2 billion U.S. dollars annually, from 2018 to 2021, the highest for any 4-year period.

ADB added the annual average also doubles the current estimated yearly lending pipeline.

"Our country partnership strategy aims to improve the standard of living of Filipinos, particularly the poorest half of the population, and allow them to feel the benefits of a growing economy through better education, jobs, and income opportunities. Our operations are leveraging resources to support the government's transformative social and economic agenda," said ADB Vice President Stephen Groff.

ADB said it will rebalance its financing assistance to support the Philippine government's massive "Build, Build, Build" infrastructure development program to address connectivity issues, allowing the country to catch up with its regional peers in infrastructure competitiveness and achieve its goal of reaching upper middle-income status by 2022.

Reflecting the rebalanced lending pipeline, ADB said transport will make up 47 percent of ADB's Philippine operations from 2018 to 2021, up from 2.2 percent in the last seven years.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-09-20 12:52:05|Editor: Yang Yi

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MEXICO CITY, Sept. 19 (Xinhua) -- The renegotiated terms of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) meet Mexico's objectives, the country's biggest bank said Wednesday.

An agreement in principle reached at the end of August between the United States and Mexico succeeds in minimizing the impact of the proposed changes to the trade deal that came into force in 1994, BBVA Bancomer financial group said.

Carlos Serrano, chief economist of BBVA Research for Mexico, said the agreement signed on Aug. 27 is even-handed, ensuring opportunities for both sides.

"It doesn't have a negative impact on value chains, investment or trade exchange taking place as of now between the two nations," said Serrano.

The agreement "limits uncertainty and is a good outcome" of the renegotiation of the NAFTA, he added.

One of the biggest points of contention between the two countries was a U.S. proposal to tighten rules of origin for the automotive industry, by raising the ceiling of regional content for vehicles manufactured in North America. The two finally agreed to increase the percentage from 62.5 percent to 75 percent.

Both sides also agreed that at least 70 percent of the steel and aluminum used to make a car must come from North America, and that between 40 and 45 percent of an automobile must be made by workers earning at least 15 U.S. dollars an hour, a demand that low-wage Mexico has been resisting.

However, "Mexico will continue to be competitive in producing and exporting vehicles," said Serrano. "These rules don't entail structural changes to the sector," he added.

Additionally, the agreement takes into account a possible U.S. tariff of 25 percent on light vehicles for reasons of national security or withdrawal from the World Trade Organization (WTO), and would exempt 2.4 million Mexican vehicles from import tax. The figure accounts for about 40 percent of Mexico's current total exports.

Canada, also a NAFTA partner, has trade issues of its own with the United States, and is in the process of separately reviewing the agreement.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-09-20 13:17:07|Editor: Yurou

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CARACAS, Sept. 19 (Xinhua) -- There have been 88 corruption accusations against personnel at the state-run oil corporation Petroleos de Venezuela, S.A.(PDVSA) since August 2017, Venezuela's public prosecutor Tarek William Saab said on Wednesday.

"Among those 88 accusations there are two final sentences, two factual admissions and three individuals who have accepted the charges," Saab said.

He added that some had fled justice in Venezuela and are "living comfortably in the United States." The government will work with Interpol to ask for their deportation.

"There will be Red Notices from Interpol and an international arrest warrant, and it is our duty to bring these individuals here. Once they complete a prison sentence, the civil part of retrieving the stolen money will begin," he said.

"As I estimate, in a prudential period, perhaps before the end of the year, we will have the respective convictions, setting the precedent that this does not happen again in the country," he said.

In June, 11 PDVSA managers were arrested, bringing the total to 90 officials arrested for corruption.
ISTANBUL, Sept. 20, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- It has just been announced that the President of the Republic of Turkey Recep Tayyip Erdogan will be making the closing address at the TRT World Forum, a programme of internationally-renowned thought-leaders and humanitarians.



Queen Rania of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan is the latest high profile figure to confirm attendance to this years TRT World Forum. Speakers will also include the former President of Lebanon Fuad Siniora, former Managing Director of the World Bank Mamphela Ramphele, former Afghan President Hamid Karzai, former Croatian President Ivo Josipovic, President of the Peoples Justice Party and Prime Minister-designate of Malaysia Anwar Ibrahim, President of World Economic Forum Borge Brende, UN Secretary-Generals Special Envoy to Syria Staffan de Mistura, former Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs of the UK Jack Straw and Francesco Rocca, President of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies.

The TRT World Forum 2018, recognised as one of the most prestigious and high-profile events of the year, will take place from October 3-4th in Istanbul. The theme of this years Forum is Envisioning Peace & Security in a Fragmented World.

Engaging with most pressing global challenges of our time, the TRT World Forum will be bringing together more than six hundred guests from all around the world, including policy-makers, academics, journalists and leading experts.

About TRT World

Turkeys first English broadcasting international news platform was launched in 2015 with headquarters in Istanbul and four newsrooms including an extensive global bureau network covering major regions and hot spots.

For more information contact:

Turkey:

Aslihan Amir, Acting Head of Global Affairs

Tel.: +90 212 326 30 00 / Ext.: 3229

Mob.: +90 530 069 74 56

Email: corporate.comm@trtworld.com

UK:

Malcolm Munro, PGC

Tel: +44 (0)20 3143 3595

Mob.: +44 (0)7795 013 006

Email: mmunro@pagefieldglobalcounsel.com
Source: Xinhua| 2018-09-20 13:42:12|Editor: Liangyu

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BEIJING, Sept. 20 (Xinhua) -- A drought remote monitoring system developed by Chinese researchers has been handed over for service in Mongolia, with a transfer agreement signed.

The drought observation system, known as DroughtWatch-Mongolia, aims to provide real-time and wide-range drought information for disaster prevention and mitigation departments in Mongolia.

The DroughtWatch-Mongolia system covers multiple zones and provides multi-index reports. It overcomes inaccurately describing the occurrence and situation of drought by a single index, according to a source from its developer, the Institute of Aerospace Information Research with the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Before the transfer held Monday, Chinese researchers have conducted rounds of ground monitoring experiments with Mongolian specialists. And the accuracy and monitoring capabilities of DroughtWatch-Mongolia have met the operational requirements after four years of testing.

The DroughtWatch is a global multi-satellite, multi-scale drought monitoring system and has been in service continuously for more than 20 years. It has become the ideal mechanism for drought monitoring recommended by the UN Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-09-20 14:12:19|Editor: Yurou

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ULAN BATOR, Sept. 20 (Xinhua) -- Mongolian Prime Minister Uknhaa Khurelsukh and U.S. Vice President Mike Pence exchanged views on enhancing bilateral ties and cooperation in the White House on Wednesday, the Mongolian Ministry of Foreign Affairs said Thursday.

Noting the United States is a good friend and partner of Mongolia, Khurelsukh said the Mongolian government is willing to cooperate closely with Washington to further strengthen bilateral cooperation in a wide range of areas including trade, investment, agriculture and renewable energy, the foreign ministry said in a statement.

The two sides outlined a roadmap for further strengthening economic cooperation, the statement added.

"Implementing the roadmap is an important part of Mongolia's goal of diversifying its economy and enhancing cooperation with the United States in various sectors such as trade, agriculture and renewable energy," the ministry said.

During the meeting, Khurelsukh invited Pence to visit Mongolia at an appropriate time.

Pence thanked the Mongolian side for its humanitarian aid of camel hair blankets worth 100,000 U.S. dollars to people affected by Hurricane Florence.

"Our government has attached great significance to the bilateral relations. Agreement worth 350 million U.S. dollars between U.S. aid-giving body Millennium Challenge Corporation and Mongolia is an example of it," he said.

Khurelsukh arrived in Washington D.C. on Tuesday for a three-day official visit to the United States.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-09-20 15:47:35|Editor: xuxin

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DAMASCUS, Sept. 20 (Xinhua) -- The former U.S.-backed Liwa Shuhada al-Qaryatayn rebels will evacuate from southern Syria to positions of the Turkey-backed rebels in northern Syria under a deal with the Russians, a pro-government newspaper reported on Thursday.

Citing opposition activists, the al-Watan newspaper said around 5,000 rebels and their families will evacuate in the coming days their positions near the U.S.-run base in the al-Tanf area toward areas controlled by Syrian Democratic Force (SDF) in Aleppo province.

The evacuation comes following negotiations between the group and the Russian and Syrian government side.

The group was formerly backed by the U.S., but the support was lifted off as its commanders refused to focus solely on fighting the Islamic State (IS) without fighting the forces of President Bashar al-Assad.

Citing Russian reports, the al-Watan newspaper said negotiations have been undergoing between the Russian and U.S. side over the past few days for the withdrawal of the U.S. forces from al-Tanf, as a first step for the full pull out of the U.S. forces from Syria.

The U.S. would also dismantle the al-Rukban camp near the Jordanian border and would allow the 80,000 civilians in the camp to return to their hometowns across the country.

Al-Tanf, a military base of the U.S.-led international coalition with a declared purpose of countering IS militants, locates 24 km to the west from the al-Tanf border crossing between Syria and Iraq in the eastern countryside of Homs Governorate.

There are approximately 1,500 - 2,000 U.S. Special Operations Forces in Syria, spreading across 12 different facilities, mostly being used as training bases for Kurdish rebels.

The deal that is being talked about comes as the Russian and Turkish sides have reached another deal for the fate of Idlib.

On Monday, the leaders of Turkey and Russia agreed to establish a demilitarized zone in Idlib to avert that province a wide-scale military operation by the Syrian army and its allies.

The deal, which will go into effect on Oct.15, will see the withdrawal of hardline rebels from the demilitarized zone as well as heavy rebels' weapons from that buffer zone between the army and the rebels under the supervision of Russia and Turkey.

Activists, however, said that the al-Qaida-linked militants and likeminded groups rejected to withdraw from the demilitarized zone, which would be the mission of the Turkish side to persuade them to do so, or else the deal would collapse and a war would hang over Idlib.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-09-20 16:02:42|Editor: Li Xia

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URUMQI, Sept. 20 (Xinhua) -- A team of 100 Chinese engineering and medical troops left for a one-year peacekeeping mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo on Thursday.

Their plane left the Diwopu airport in Urumqi, capital of northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, at 3 a.m.

They are the first group of the 22nd batch of peacekeepers that China has dispatched to the central African nation. The rest of the 218-member batch will leave on Sept. 28.

After arriving in mission areas, the engineering detachment will take on tasks such as maintaining roads, bridges, blindages and airports, while the medical team will focus on treating the wounded, epidemic prevention and humanitarian aid.

While preparing for the mission, they completed special training.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-09-20 16:07:43|Editor: xuxin

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HAVANA, Sept. 19 (Xinhua) -- Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez met with visiting U.S. Senator Bob Corker on Wednesday to discuss the current situation in ties between the Caribbean nation and the United States.

According to a brief release from the Cuban Foreign Ministry, Rodriguez and Corker met at an undisclosed location to talk about "issues related to the current situation in bilateral links and other topics of reciprocal interest."

Corker, Chairman of Senate Foreign Relations Committee, traveled for the second time to Havana for his "interest in exchanging with local authorities about U.S.-Cuba relations." He was accompanied by two of his legislative assistants this time.

Last week, the U.S. Senator met with a Cuban delegation of scientists that visited Washington to discuss alleged health incidents that affected U.S. diplomats in the island.

Bilateral ties suffered a serious setback after U.S. president Donald Trump assumed office in 2017, rolling back thawing relations reestablished by his predecessor, Barack Obama.

Last year, Trump signed a presidential memorandum prohibiting U.S. companies from doing business with firms associated with Cuba's military and restricting U.S. citizens from traveling to the Caribbean nation.

Relations were also hampered by alleged attacks on U.S. diplomats on the island which led to the partial closure of the U.S. embassy in Havana and the expulsion of 15 Cuban diplomats in Washington.

Over 20 U.S. diplomats and their family members reportedly suffered symptoms such as hearing loss, tinnitus, vertigo, headaches and fatigue since November 2016. However, after months of investigation security agencies from both countries said the alleged attacks never took place.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-09-20 16:22:45|Editor: Li Xia

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BEIJING, Sept. 20 (Xinhua) -- Chinese acoustics technology start-up SoundAI has teamed up with Internet giant Baidu to roll out a smart sound box lamp solution built on AI technologies.

Equipped with the company's smart voice interaction system, the AI sound box unveiled Wednesday is also an intelligent lamp capable of offering a wide range of shades and light colors.

The gadget also integrates Baidu's AI voice control system DuerOS, enabling smart services such as playing music, reading audio books and turning on or off home appliances, with a voice interaction process that takes less than two seconds, the company said in a statement.

Founded in 2016, SoundAI develops sonic technologies focusing on acoustics, including far-field voice interaction and real-time communication technologies, to support AI technology applications. The company's technology has been used in Alibaba's Magic Box, Qihoo 360's smart camera and Baidu's and Xiaomi's AI speakers.

China has become the world's fastest growing smart sound box market. Data from global technology market analyst firm Canalys shows that China contributed 52 percent to worldwide growth volume in the second quarter of this year.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-09-20 16:42:47|Editor: xuxin

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European leaders arrive for a family picture during the informal EU summit in Salzburg, Austria, Sept. 20, 2018. European Union (EU) leaders on Wednesday kicked off a two-day informal summit in the Austrian city of Salzburg, focusing on the controversial issues of migration and Brexit. (Xinhua/Ye Pingfan)

SALZBURG, Austria, Sept. 19 (Xinhua) -- European Union (EU) leaders on Wednesday kicked off a two-day informal summit in the Austrian city of Salzburg, focusing on the controversial issues of migration and Brexit.

The summit is hosted by Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz, who took office last year. He leads the conservative Austrian People's Party and governs in coalition with the far-right, anti-immigrant and Eurosceptic Freedom Party.

The Austrian government has placed migration at the top of its EU presidency's agenda, as political tensions on migrants run high in the EU.

CLASHES ON MIGRATION

Following the last EU leaders' summit in June, the European Commission vowed to strengthen the bloc's border management agency Frontex, and set up migrant processing centers in North Africa.

In his State of Union speech last week in Strasbourg, European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker said the European Border and Coast Guard should be bolstered with an additional 10,000 European border guards by 2020 funded by the EU budget.

Juncker's proposal was welcomed by Germany and France. Kurz also appeared to put aside his previous clash with German Chancellor Angela Merkel on migration and turned to support the plan to beef up external EU borders.

"There can be no open borders within Europe without proper protection of external EU borders," Kurz told the German press agency (dpa). "That's why it is so important to strengthen Frontex."

However, the proposal was opposed by some member states like Hungary and Italy who want to police their own borders against illegal migration and are unwilling to give up sovereignty to a central authority in Brussels.

Recently the Czech and Slovak leaders also bristled at EU immigration policy according to media reports.

The leaders of countries in eastern Europe said the EU should allocate funds to its member countries instead of Frontex to help them guard their own borders.

"Malta, Italy, Greece, Spain need to be told that they will get more money. They each have their own coast guard. They don't need any Frontex," Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babis said in a televised press conference after a joint session with the Slovak government.

"This evening, I will call on leaders to stop the migration blame game," European Council President Donald Tusk said in a press conference ahead of the informal Salzburg summit.

"Despite the aggressive rhetoric, things are moving in the right direction. Mostly because we have been focused on external border control and cooperation with third countries, which has brought down the number of irregular migrants from almost two million in 2015 to fewer than 100,000 this year," Tusk added.

EU official data showed that the influx of illegal migrants has dropped sharply since the huge inflows in 2015 and has gone back to pre-crisis levels.

According to the latest data by Frontex, in the first eight months of 2018, the number of irregular border crossings into the EU fell 40 percent from a year ago to about 86,500. In 2015, more than 1 million refugees and migrants crossed into Europe.

"I am hoping that in Salzburg, we will be able to put an end to the mutual resentment and return to a constructive approach," Tusk wrote in his invitation letter to the leaders of the member states ahead of the summit in Salzburg.

However, analysts say that because of the growing divergence on migration, it is difficult to say whether this EU summit will make any breakthrough.

In addition, the EU hopes to set up immigration centers in North African countries such as Algeria, Libya, Tunisia and Morocco to help refugees apply for asylum. But so far, no country has expressed its willingness to do so.

It is even harder to achieve the goal of reforming the European Asylum System and the Dublin Agreement, adding further difficulty to finding a solution in the short term.

BREXIT IN DEADLOCK

According to the leaders' agenda, Brexit will also be discussed in the presence of the EU chief negotiator Michel Barnier.

Time is running out with only six months to go before Britain's withdrawal from the EU, and the two sides are entering the final weeks of negotiations.

British Prime Minister Theresa May on Wednesday warned EU leaders that she will walk away from the Brexit negotiations unless a deal is concluded within the next two months. In an ultimatum at a summit in Austria, the prime minister insisted that extending the deadlocked talks beyond November was "not an option."

May also ruled out that there will be a second referendum.

"I want to be absolutely clear: this government will never accept a second referendum. The British people have voted to leave the European Union and we will be leaving on the 29th of March, 2019," May told reporters Wednesday.

Concerning Northern Ireland, both May and the Irish government have said a hard border between the two would be unacceptable.

In contrast, Brussels has insisted Northern Ireland must stay aligned with EU rules unless another solution can be found. EU leaders seem unwilling to compromise in their eyes the key EU principles to get a Brexit deal done.

Tusk told reporters Wednesday that May's proposals from Chequers indicate a "positive evolution in the UK's approach" as well as a will to minimize the negative effects of Brexit.

However, on other issues, such as the Irish question, or the framework for economic cooperation, "the UK's proposals will need to be reworked and further negotiated."

A no-deal scenario must be avoided, said Tusk. "Let me recall that limiting the damage caused by Brexit is our shared interest. Unfortunately, a no-deal scenario is still quite possible. But if we all act responsibly, we can avoid a catastrophe," Tusk wrote in a letter to leaders of the member states inviting them to the Salzburg meeting.

Tusk noted that he may call a special Brexit summit in November in a last-ditch effort to avoid a no-deal scenario.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-09-20 16:47:50|Editor: xuxin

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VIENTIANE, Sept. 20 (Xinhua) -- Lao heath authorities are assessing their response to dengue fever after more than 4,600 infections along with 14 deaths have been recorded in the country up to Sept. 14 this year.

This compares to 5,584 dengue fever cases including 14 deaths countrywide for all of 2017, local daily Vientiane Times reported on Thursday.

Savannakhet in central Laos has recorded dengue fever infections at a higher rate with 719 cases including six deaths recorded this year so far while three deaths were reported last year.

So far in 2018, the Lao capital Vientiane has reported 585 dengue cases with no deaths, Champassak in the south has had 773 cases and two deaths, while another southern province of Attapeu 877 cases and three deaths.

Saravan in the south, Xayaboury and Oudomxay provinces in the north reported one death each, according to the Lao National Center for Laboratory and Epidemiology under the Ministry of Health.

Deputy General Director of Vientiane Health Department, Xayaphone Nanthaphone gave details of plans to tackle dengue fever last week during an interview with Lao media.

She said authorities were particularly concerned with the death rate from dengue recorded in Savannakhet province which is higher than other areas of the country.

Health authorities have admitted their concerns about the rate of dengue fever cases this year and have been reiterating prevention and control measures to prevent a future pandemic.

"With dengue fever infections continuing to increase health experts have convened meetings every Monday to discuss interventions undertaken in the fight against the virus," she said.

"We acknowledge that increasing public awareness is one of the main strategies to reduce the risk of dengue transmission," Xayaphone added. Therefore, local officials and health authorities have been urging people to clear potential mosquito breeding sites around their homes and workplaces to help curb the spread of the virus.

Village heads, associations, charities, and monks are also important in the battle against the potentially fatal virus.

Schools, hospitals, factories, hotels, restaurants, tourist facilities, and offices should organize cleaning activities to remove any sources of stagnant water to slow mosquito breeding.

These activities are focused on long-term prevention rather than one-off treatment and are vital to combating the disease. In particular, local communities needed to keep their surroundings clean, while focusing on killing mosquitoes and their larva inside and near these areas.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-09-20 16:52:51|Editor: Li Xia

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TIANJIN, Sept. 20 (Xinhua) -- A few seconds after a visitor read a short text on the screen, everything about him ranging from height, body size, age and skeleton structure to general health and personality was displayed.

What does your voice say about you? To find the answer, curious visitors waited in a queue at an exhibition space at Summer Davos (the Annual Meeting of the New Champions 2018) in Tianjin.

Not all the predictions were accurate, but they showed a very young technology -- voice analysis powered by AI -- being developed by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University.

"Voice is more unique than your fingerprint because your fingerprint doesn't change, but voice tells about your current state," said Rita Singh, associate research professor with the university's School of Computer Science.

Singh and her colleagues studied human faces and recorded voices corresponding to the faces in order to make the connections. They then make judgments based on a string of voice qualities.

Profiling humans using their voice has the potential to be used by law enforcement agencies or hospitals.

In 2014, the technology helped the Coastguard of the United States to successfully catch a criminal who made hoax calls.

"Anything that affects your body and mind internally will affect your voice," Singh said. "Maybe someday we will be able to analyze a voice and say you have taken blood pressure medication, an antibiotic or something like that."

Established by the World Economic Forum (WEF) in 2007, the Summer Davos Forum is held annually in China, alternating between the two port cities of Tianjin and Dalian.

Themed "Shaping Innovative Societies in the Fourth Industrial Revolution," the three-day event has drawn more than 2,000 politicians, businesspeople, scholars and media representatives to discuss issues that will shape the future, such as applications of advanced technologies ranging from AI and robots to the blockchain.

Thanks to advances in voice, facial and DNA-recognition technology, you won't need your keys. Your wallet, ID card and passport will be a distant memory. This was what was discussed by researchers at Wednesday's interactive panel salon "Biometric World."

Rob Livingston, senior vice-president of Special Projects, Visa, described some prototypes that could change the way people make purchases in the future, including "blood flow" based technologies, where you would swipe your wrist to be identified, rings that use near-field communication, and plastic cards with in-built fingerprint recognition.

While some people may think these changes seem vague, the WEF published a list on the top 10 emerging technologies of 2018, ranging from augmented reality and personalized medicine to implantable drug-making cells and lab-grown meat.

They were selected by a panel of scientists and experts, and are likely to take effect within three to five years.

Take the lab-grown meat for example. Scientists claim that meat grown from cultured cells could cut the environmental costs of producing meat and eliminate the unethical treatment suffered by animals that are raised for food.

Startups like Mosa Meat and Memphis Meats have already attracted millions in funding, even though the production costs are high and taste-test results have been mixed, according to the WEF.

Skeptics are concerned that advanced technologies such as AI might pose privacy risks and robots may take jobs from humans.

Singh warned that people should be more aware of what happens to their data when they talk to voice recognition services.

"They don't know, so they let their voice be recorded. If somebody gets hold of the recording, they may attack the voice password enabled system,' she said. "People should use it more judiciously."

She added that while scientists look at the research side of voice profiling technology, the media and lawmakers must take it in the right direction.

The WEF's latest research sees a more positive trend. It forecast that by 2025, more than half of all current workplace tasks will be performed by machines, as opposed to 29 percent today.

Such a transformation will have a profound effect on the global labor force. However, in terms of overall job numbers the outlook is positive, with 133 million new jobs expected to be created by 2022, compared to 75 million that will be displaced.

When asked whether he fears humans could be controlled by robots, Klaus Schwab, WEF's founder and executive chairman, said no.

"Change is now happening, but we can influence change," he said in an interview with Xinhua.

In his recent book "Shaping the Fourth industrial Revolution," Schwab sent a message that the new industrial revolution should be human-centered.

"We should make use of robots rather than become the servants of robots," he said.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-09-20 17:12:54|Editor: xuxin

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HANGZHOU, Sept. 20 (Xinhua) -- Zhejiang Province in east China has led the country in encouraging the use of rooftop solar systems on residential houses in efforts to massively boost environmentally friendly new energy.

Figures from the provincial development and reform commission suggested that 7.22 million kilowatts out of the province's combined solar power capacity of 10.6 million kilowatts were generated by solar power systems installed on residential rooftops at the end of August.

Cai Gang, deputy director of the commission, said solar energy has been designated as the main source of renewable energy in Zhejiang. It has become an effective substitute power source when electricity consumption peaks in the province.

The provincial government encouraged the use of solar energy use this year with subsidies of 0.32 yuan (0.05 U.S. dollar) per kilowatt-hour of residential electricity generated by household solar power.

The commission said that with the incentive, in the first eight months alone, 121,000 households installed the rooftop solar system. During the same period, 572,000 kilowatts out of the province's 2.3 million-kilowatt newly installed rooftop solar power capacity were added by solar power systems installed on residential houses.

On average, the rooftop of a rural house can accommodate 12 to 22 solar squares, while urban buildings have a much larger capacity. Residents can either buy or rent the panels from local new energy firms, which provide free maintenance services.
HOUSTON, Sept. 20, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- LINN Energy, Inc. (OTCQB: LNGG) (LINN or the Company) announces that is has posted on its website IRS Form 8937 regarding the estimated federal income tax characteristics of its spin-off of Riviera Resources, Inc. (Riviera) from LINN (the Spin-Off) that was completed on August 7, 2018.



As previously disclosed, the Spin-Off was a taxable distribution. LINN stockholders who held LINN common stock on August 3, 2018 (the record date) received a distribution of one share of Riviera common stock for each share of LINN common stock held on the record date. In accordance with IRS Code Section 6045B, the company was required to file Form 8937, Report of Organizational Actions Affecting Basis of Securities, within 45 days of the distribution. The Form includes additional information regarding the distribution, including an updated estimate of the amount of LINNs earnings and profits and LINNs determination of the value of the distributed Riviera common stock.

The company is releasing information at this time to aid banks, brokerage firms, and institutional investors that are required to issue Form 1099s to their account holders. The estimated determination of the tax characteristics of the Spin-Off are provided on Form 8937 which is posted and available on the companys website at www.linnenergy.com .

The material U.S. federal income tax consequences of the distribution are described in detail in Rivieras Registration Statement on Form S-1 (File No. 333-225927) under Material U.S. Federal Income Tax Consequences of the Spin-Off. Information regarding tax matters in this press release is for general information purposes only and does not constitute tax advice. STOCKHOLDERS ARE ENCOURAGED TO CONSULT THEIR OWN TAX ADVISORS REGARDING THE PARTICULAR TAX CONSEQUENCES OF THE SPIN-OFF TO THEM.

ABOUT LINN ENERGY

LINN Energy, Inc., headquartered in Houston, Texas, is currently focused on the development of the Merge/ SCOOP/ STACK in Oklahoma through its equity interest in Roan Resources, LLC.

ABOUT RIVIERA RESOURCES

Riviera Resources, Inc. is an independent oil and natural gas company with a strategic focus on efficiently operating its mature low-decline assets, developing its growth-oriented assets, and returning capital to its stockholders. Rivieras properties are located in the Hugoton Basin, East Texas, North Louisiana, Michigan/Illinois, the Uinta Basin and Mid-Continent regions. Riviera also owns Blue Mountain Midstream LLC, a midstream company centered in the core of the Merge play in the Anadarko Basin. More information about Riviera and Blue Mountain Midstream LLC is available at the Companys website, www.RivieraResourcesInc.com .

CONTACT:

LINN Energy, Inc.

Investor Relations

(281) 840-4110

ir@linnenergy.com

Forward-Looking Statements

Statements made in this press release that are not historical facts are forward-looking statements. These statements are based on certain assumptions and expectations made by LINN and Riviera, which reflect LINNs or Rivieras managements experience, estimates and perception of historical trends, current conditions and anticipated future developments. Such statements are subject to a number of assumptions, risks and uncertainties, many of which are beyond the control of LINN and Riviera, which may cause actual results to differ materially from those implied or anticipated in the forward-looking statements. These include risks relating to uncertainties related to LINNs and Riviera's ability to realize the anticipated benefits of the Spin-Off, the potential negative effects of the Spin-Off, the availability of sufficient cash flow to execute our business plan, continued low or further declining commodity prices and demand for oil, natural gas and natural gas liquids, ability to hedge future production, ability to replace reserves and efficiently develop current reserves, the capacity and utilization of midstream facilities and the regulatory environment. These and other important factors could cause actual results to differ materially from those anticipated or implied in the forward-looking statements. Please read Risk Factors in LINNs Annual Reports on Form 10-K, Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q and other public filings as well as the risk factors in Rivieras Registration Statement on Form S-1. We undertake no obligation to publicly update any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information or future events.




Source: Xinhua| 2018-09-20 17:22:56|Editor: xuxin

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SEOUL, Sept. 20 (Xinhua) -- South Korean President Moon Jae-in returned home Thursday after a summit with top leader of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) Kim Jong Un.

An airplane carrying Moon and his entourage arrived at the Seongnam Airport outside the capital Seoul at about 5:40 p.m. local time (0840 GMT), a live broadcast at the Seoul press center showed.

Moon and Kim held their third summit in the DPRK's capital Pyongyang, having face-to-face talks Tuesday afternoon and a one-on-one dialogue Wednesday morning.

After the summit talks, Moon and Kim agreed to further steps for the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula and concrete measures to end hostile acts near inter-Korean border areas.

Moon became the third South Korean leader who visited Pyongyang for an inter-Korean summit. The current leaders of the two Koreas held three summit meetings this year, including the ones on April 27 and May 26 respectively.

The DPRK leader promised to visit Seoul for the fourth summit with the South Korean president in the near future.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-09-20 17:32:57|Editor: xuxin

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PHNOM PENH, Sept. 20 (Xinhua) -- About 565 endangered Asian giant softshell turtle hatchlings have been released into the natural habitat along the Mekong River in northeast Cambodia's Kratie province, a conservationist group said in a statement on Thursday.

The hatchlings are part of a community protection project designed to increase the wild population of the species, and had been collected from nests that were guarded by local communities, the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) said in the statement.

The Asian giant softshell turtle (Pelochelys cantorii) is listed on the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List as globally endangered.

It was thought to be extinct in the Cambodian portion of the Mekong River until it was re-discovered in 2007 in a 48-kilometer stretch of the river between Kratie and Stung Treng provinces.

"This release aims at increasing the wild population of the Asian Giant Softshell Turtles," said Ngourn Chanti, WCS's Asian Giant Softshell Turtle Conservation Project coordinator.

"As the project pays local people as guardians and rangers, the release will also increase local incomes and encourage the support and involvement of local communities in conserving the species," he said.

The project has been undertaking since 2007, it was formerly run by the Conservation International, and now by the WCS in collaboration with the Cambodia's Fisheries Administration, Wildlife Reserve Singapore (WRS), and the Turtle Survival Alliance.

The community-based protection project encourages the participation of local communities living in Kratie and Stung Treng provinces by hiring former nest collectors to search for and protect nests, instead of harvesting the eggs. Since 2007, 402 nests have been protected and 9,047 hatchlings released.

"Protection is needed to conserve Asian Giant Softshell Turtle from extinction by combating with illegal trading of the species," said Ouk Vibol, director of Fisheries Conservation Department of the Fisheries Administration. "Collection of eggs or adults for consumption or sale is illegal in Cambodia."

"Everyone can help conserve the Asian Giant Softshell Turtles by not buying or eating their meat or eggs," he said.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-09-20 17:37:57|Editor: xuxin

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DHAKA, Sept. 20 (Xinhua) -- The government of Bangladesh has signed a 50-million-U.S.-dollar grant financing agreement with the World Bank to help strengthen the government's health care services to respond to the health, nutrition, and family planning needs of the Rohingya population.

The agreement was signed by Kazi Shofiqul Azam, senior secretary of Bangladesh's Economic Relations Division, and Qimiao Fan, World Bank country director for Bangladesh, Nepal, and Bhutan, on behalf of the government and the World Bank, respectively, at the Economic Relations Division in Dhaka on Thursday.

This additional financing to the existing Health Sector Support Project will help provide essential health and nutrition services to the Rohingya people in Cox's Bazaar, some 292 km southeast of capital Dhaka.

The financing will cover maternal, neonatal, infant, child, and adolescent health, nutrition and psychosocial services, as well as reproductive health care, said the bank in a statement.

"Nearly 1 million Rohingya live in congested camps, including the Kutupalong camp, the world's largest refugee camp. They face risks of disease outbreaks and suffer from high rates of child malnutrition. Their health care needs are enormous," said Fan.

"This grant financing will help the government plan and manage health, nutrition and population services for the Rohingya people while the existing project will continue to provide healthcare to the local population."

This is the first in a series of projects financed by the World Bank to support Bangladesh in dealing with the Rohingya influx, said the bank.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-09-20 18:08:03|Editor: xuxin

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HARARE, Sept. 20 (Xinhua) -- Zimbabwean President Emmerson Mnangagwa on Wednesday appointed new permanent secretaries, reassigned and retires some as he moves to reinvigorate his new government.

The reshuffling comes after he appointed two weeks ago, a lean 20-member cabinet comprising talented, young and experienced ministers, the state newspaper Herald reported Thursday.

On the permanent secretaries, Mnangagwa elevated long-serving secretary for information George Charamba to the position of deputy chief secretary responsible for presidential communications.

The appointments are with immediate effect.

Mnangagwa also appointed 18 permanent secretaries, reassigned 19 senior officials and retired nine others.

Among the new permanent secretaries appointed are former banker George Guvamatanga for the Ministry of Finance and engineer Gloria Magombo for Energy Ministry.

Meanwhile, Mnangagwa also appointed Owen Ncube as the new minister of state for national security in the President's Office.

The appointment brings to 21 the number of cabinet ministers in the new government.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-09-20 18:58:10|Editor: xuxin

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SEOUL, Sept. 20 (Xinhua) -- South Korean President Moon Jae-in said Thursday that Kim Jong Un, top leader of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK), had expressed his hope to rapidly hold his second summit with U.S. President Donald Trump during the inter-Korean summit in Pyongyang.

Moon made the remarks in his address to the people at the Seoul press center for the Pyongyang summit, which lasted for three days from Tuesday.

Moon said he also hoped that the DPRK-U.S. dialogue would be resumed rapidly, noting that conditions were created via the Pyongyang summit to restart the talks between the DPRK and the United States.

The DPRK called for Moon to broker talks between Pyongyang and Washington, offering to closely cooperate with South Korea for the peninsula's complete denuclearization, the South Korean president said.

During the phone call before Moon's visit to Pyongyang, Trump called for Moon to play a role as chief negotiator between the DPRK and the United States for the denuclearization negotiations.

Moon said the DPRK leader repeatedly confirmed his firm commitment to the peninsula's denuclearization during their third summit in Pyongyang.

After the summit talks, Moon and Kim agreed to further steps for the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula and concrete measures to end hostile acts near inter-Korean border areas.

Moon and Kim have held summit meetings three times this year, including the ones on April 27 and May 26 each. Kim promised to visit Seoul for the fourth summit with Moon in the near future.

Kim and Trump held the first-ever DPRK-U.S. summit in Singapore on June 12.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-09-20 19:03:11|Editor: xuxin

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JALALABAD, Afghanistan, Sept. 20 (Xinhua) -- At least four Islamic State (IS) militants have been killed by a U.S. drone strike in Afghanistan's eastern province of Nangarhar, local police said Thursday.

The strike was launched by U.S.-led NATO coalition forces' pilotless aircraft against an IS hideout in Dih Bala district of the province, 120 km east of Afghan capital Kabul city, on Wednesday, the Afghan 202 Shamshad Police Zone based in the region said in a statement.

No civilian was injured following the strike in the remote area, the statement added.

The mountainous province with Jalalabad city as its capital has been the scene of clashes between security forces and IS militants since the emergence of IS there in early 2015.

The IS militant group has yet to make comments on the report.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-09-20 19:03:12|Editor: xuxin

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VIENTIANE, Sept. 20 (Xinhua) -- The Lao government has promised to handle the investigation of the cause of the collapse of the auxiliary dam of Xe Pian-Xe Namnoy Hydropower project transparently and openly with assistance and participation of multilateral parties of industry specialists, the nation's Deputy Prime Minister Sonexay Siphandone has confirmed.

Sonexay, who is also Chairman of the National Ad Hoc Committee in charge of the post-disaster response, conveyed the promise in a press conference on Wednesday held by the committee for the first time since the immediate aftermath of the tragic incident resulting from the collapse the dam.

"We have hired a company from Switzerland to investigate the factors leading to the collapse of the dam," Sonexay said.

He noted the firm came replete with experienced independent international dam safety specialists.

"The investigation will be undertaken in a transparent, open and accountable way," he said.

Switzerland was one of the countries that had many dams but no major dam-related accidents had occurred, the Lao official said.

He also spoke about the dam developers hiring a consultancy firm to study the factors leading to the accident, noting that the two companies will work independently, with the respective investigations' results to be revealed by January next year.

While natural disasters were an unavoidable phenomenon, the dam safety was also related to its geologic survey and design, the official said.

To ensure transparency of the investigation, Sonexay revealed that a team from China had also expressed an intention to participate under their financial auspices to support the investigation activities and glean lessons.

According to the Deputy Prime Minister, the inspections will be imposed on the technical procedures of the project, usage of construction materials, and management of reservoirs.

Concerning disasters in Laos, he said the collapse of the auxiliary dam of Xe Pian-Xe Namnoy Hydropower project had brought a historic toll in the tragic loss of lives and property.

The incident caused by the collapse of the dam has pressed the Lao government to inspect the safety measures of all hydropower projects across the country and decide to temporarily postpone all small hydropower projects including those authorized by provincial authorities

An under-construction saddle dam of the Xe Pian-Xe Nam Noy hydropower project, invested by South Korean, Thai and Lao companies, collapsed on July 23, unleashing a large amount of water into some 13 villages of Sanamxay district, some 560 km southeast of Lao capital Vientiane.

The incident killed at least 40 people, thousands were affected and dwellings and property destroyed in the six villages of Sanamxay district, Attapeu province.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-09-20 19:03:12|Editor: xuxin

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TOKYO, Sept. 20 (Xinhua) -- Japanese cryptocurrency exchange Zaif said Thursday that the exchange had lost 6.7 billion yen (around 60 million U.S. dollars) in digital currencies in a hacker attack.

The hacker attack occurred last Friday and the company detected an abnormality in the system on Monday and found out Tuesday that the cryptocurrencies had been stolen.

About 2.2 billion yen (19.6 million U.S. dollars) of the stolen cryptocurrencies belonged to the exchange and the rest was client money, said the Osaka-based company.

The company said it plans to compensate its users in full amount.

Japan's Financial Services Agency, a government body that oversees banking, securities and exchange, and insurance sectors, has launched an investigation into the incident and whether the company had taken proper security measures before the attack.

The financial watchdog has issued two administrative warnings to the company over slack management earlier this year.

The theft followed a string of similar incidents across the world which alerted many institutional investors from putting money in cryptocurrencies.

About 58 billion yen worth of the cryptocurrency NEM was stolen from Japanese exchange Coincheck Inc. in January this year.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-09-20 19:13:13|Editor: Li Xia

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CHENGDU, Sept. 20 (Xinhua) -- A total of 90 countries and regions sent delegations to participate in the 17th Western China International Fair (WCIF) that opened in the southwestern city of Chengdu Thursday.

The latest technology, products, and development trends in fields including artificial intelligence, military-civilian integration, intelligent manufacturing and energy conservation and environmental protection will be highlighted during the five-day event, according to the expo affairs bureau of Sichuan Province.

Italy, as the Guest Country of Honor, has reached 600 million Euros in business deals with Sichuan, according to Luigi Di Maio, deputy prime minister of Italy and minister of Economic Development, Labour and Social Policies.

He said Chengdu, an important post of the Belt and Road Initiative, and Italy, which its government regards as an important European destination of the initiative, have an even broader space for cooperation.

The expo also provided a pavilion specifically for Belt and Road cooperation, where more than 200 companies from 31 countries and regions along the Belt and Road presented their cooperation achievements with China in industrial projects, service and commodities trade, as well as their technological innovations.

Established in 2000, the WCIF, organized by China's National Development and Reform Commission, the Ministry of Commerce, and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, has become an important platform for western China to promote investment, carry out cooperation and conduct diplomacy.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-09-20 19:18:13|Editor: xuxin

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PARIS, Sept. 20 (Xinhua) -- France was set to number less job claims this year despite lower-than-expected economic growth, mainly by pouring more cash into training to incite recruitment, Prime Minister Edouard Philippe said on Thursday.

"Unemployment rate is going down and will continue to decline. Without making up the numbers, we're going to invest heavily to find the skills," he told France inter-radio.

Asked whether the joblessness rate could stand at 8 percent in 2019, Philippe declined to give figures, saying "the aim is to make unemployment fall. We can do it".

Currently, France's unemployment rate stands at 9.1 percent. The government targets to lower the rate to 7 percent by 2022 which, according to Philippe, was "perfectly achievable".

Speaking about growth rate, Philippe admitted that this year's growth "is too little", but he rejected "the apocalyptic image" painted by some critics.

"The growth rate will be at 1.7 percent... This is twice more than the last ten years," he said. Previously, the government targeted to accelerate the gross domestic product (GDP) growth to 1.9 percent.

"What is ... disturbing is that in a country with normal growth, we are still at 9.1 percent of unemployment and we are struggling to recruit," he added.

In its latest economic outlook, French central bank saw the GDP growth at 1.6 percent in 2018, down by two percentages point from an initial forecast, blaming unfavorable international business climate clouded by mounting protectionism.

As to the jobless rate, it expected the figure to stand at 8.3 percent in 2020.
FREMONT, Calif., Sept. 20, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Asterias Biotherapeutics, Inc. (NYSE American: AST), a biotechnology company dedicated to developing cell-based therapeutics to treat neurological conditions associated with demyelination and cellular immunotherapies to treat cancer, today announced that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has accepted its request to meet to discuss proposed next steps for the OPC1 clinical development program. The Companys Type B meeting request was made in accordance with the Regenerative Medicine Advanced Therapy (RMAT) designation under the 21st Century Cures Act.



Based on the encouraging findings-to-date of the current study and our upcoming meeting with the FDA, we hope to finalize the trial design for a randomized controlled Phase 2 trial of OPC1 in the coming months, commented Ed Wirth, Chief Medical Officer. We look forward to updating investors on the study design in early 2019.

The Company is currently completing the ongoing SCiStar trial, an open-label, single-arm trial testing three sequential escalating doses of OPC1 administered at up to 20 million OPC1 cells in 25 subjects with subacute motor complete (AIS-A or AIS-B) cervical (C-4 to C-7) spinal cord injuries (SCI). All of the patients have been enrolled and dosed and the Company believes the data presented to date have been consistently positive and reaffirm the Companys view that OPC1 is safe and durably engrafts and has the potential to improve motor function.

OPC1 Therapeutic Platform

OPC1, an oligodendrocyte progenitor cell population derived from human embryonic stem cells, has been shown in preclinical testing in animals and in vitro to have three potentially reparative functions that address the complex pathologies observed in demyelination disorders, such as spinal cord injury and multiple neurodegenerative diseases, including multiple sclerosis and white matter stroke. These potential reparative functions of OPC1 include the production of neurotrophic factors, the stimulation of vascularization, and the induction of remyelination of denuded axons, all of which are critical for survival and regrowth ofand conduction of nerve impulses throughaxons at the injury site.

Each year in the United States, more than 17,000 people suffer a severe, debilitating spinal cord injury. As of 2016, the National Spinal Cord Injury Statistical Center reported that approximately 4,500 of these new spinal cord injuries annually in the U. S. are AIS-A, AIS-B, or AIS-C patients with C-4 to C-7 spinal cord injuries (https://www.nscisc.uab.edu/). These injuries can be devastating to quality of life and ability to function independently. Lifetime healthcare costs for these patients can often approach $5 million. Improvements in arm, hand, and finger functional capabilities in these patients can result in meaningfully lower healthcare costs, significant improvements in quality of life, greater ability to engage in activities of daily living, and increased independence.

About the SCiStar Trial

The SCiStar trial is an open-label, single-arm trial testing three sequential escalating doses of OPC1 administered at up to 20 million OPC1 cells in 25 subjects with subacute motor complete (AIS-A or AIS-B) cervical (C-4 to C-7) SCI. These individuals have essentially lost all movement below their injury site and experience severe paralysis of the upper and lower limbs. AIS-A subjects have lost all motor and sensory function below their injury site, while AIS-B subjects have lost all motor function but may have retained some minimal sensory function below their injury site. OPC1 is administered 21 to 42 days post-injury. Subjects will be followed by neurological exams and imaging procedures to assess the safety and activity of the product.

Asterias has received a Strategic Partnerships Award grant from the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, which provided $14.3 million of non-dilutive funding for the Phase 1/2a clinical trial and other product development activities for OPC1.

Additional information on the Phase 1/2a trial, including trial sites, can be found at www.clinicaltrials.gov, using Identifier NCT02302157, and at the SCiStar Study Website ( www.SCiStar-study.com ).

About Asterias Biotherapeutics

Asterias Biotherapeutics, Inc. is a biotechnology company dedicated to developing cell-based therapeutics to treat neurological conditions associated with demyelination and cellular immunotherapies to treat cancer. Asterias is presently focused on advancing three clinical-stage programs which have the potential to address areas of very high unmet medical need in the fields of neurology and oncology. OPC1 (oligodendrocyte progenitor cells) is currently in a Phase 1/2a dose escalation clinical trial in spinal cord injury. VAC2 (antigen-presenting allogeneic dendritic cells) is an allogeneic cancer immunotherapy. The company's research partner, Cancer Research UK, has commenced a first-in-human clinical trial of VAC2 in non-small cell lung cancer. VAC1 (antigen-presenting autologous dendritic cells) is an autologous cancer immunotherapy with promising efficacy and safety data from an earlier Phase 2 study in Acute Myeloid Leukemia (AML). Asterias is also sponsoring pre-clinical work in two conditions with a demyelinating component: Multiple Sclerosis and White Matter Stroke, and is evaluating other cancer indications where its immunotherapy platform could provide therapeutic benefit. Additional information about Asterias can be found at www.asteriasbiotherapeutics.com.

FORWARD-LOOKING STATEMENTS

Statements pertaining to future financial and/or operating and/or clinical research results, future growth in research, technology, clinical development, and potential opportunities for Asterias, along with other statements about the future expectations, beliefs, goals, plans, or prospects expressed by management constitute forward-looking statements. Any statements that are not historical fact (including, but not limited to statements that contain words such as "will," "believes," "plans," "anticipates," "expects," "estimates") should also be considered to be forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties, including, without limitation, risks inherent in the development and/or commercialization of potential products, uncertainty in the results of clinical trials or regulatory approvals, need and ability to obtain future capital, and maintenance of intellectual property rights. Actual results may differ materially from the results anticipated in these forward-looking statements and as such should be evaluated together with the many uncertainties that affect the businesses of Asterias, particularly those mentioned in the cautionary statements found in Asterias' filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Asterias disclaims any intent or obligation to update these forward-looking statements.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-09-20 19:23:14|Editor: Li Xia

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BEIJING, Sept. 20 (Xinhua) -- Chinese President Xi Jinping has sent a congratulatory letter to the 17th Western China International Fair, which opened in the city of Chengdu Thursday.

As a major window for China's opening-up, the fair has created an important platform for China's western regions to jointly develop the Belt and Road as well as enhance communication and cooperation with countries around the world, Xi said.

Xi said the western regions, with vast landmass, rich resources, great opportunities and advantageous locations, have achieved significant development over the past years as China pushes forward the strategy to develop and open up western regions.

By actively participating in the development of the Belt and Road, more vitality will be unleashed in the western regions, making them an important part of the efforts to make new ground in opening China further through links running eastward and westward, across the land and over the sea, he said.

Xi emphasized that the fair, with the theme "New Era in China, New Advances in Western China" and a focus on jointly developing the Belt and Road, bears positive significance for the western regions to enhance external communication and cooperation.

He expressed the hope that participants at the fair can gain insight into western China, strengthen friendships, enhance cooperation and communication and share new development opportunities brought by opening-up.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-09-20 19:28:16|Editor: xuxin

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JERUSALEM, Sept. 20 (Xinhua) -- Israeli Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman said on Thursday that a Russian reconnaissance plane was shot down due to lack of professionalism in Syrian army.

"The plane was shot down by irresponsible and unprofessional Syrian air defense personnel who fired when (our) air force jets had already returned to Israeli territory," Lieberman told Israel's Army Radio.

"I accept Russian President (Vladimir Putin's) words that it was a tragic mistake, but the one responsible for this tragic mistake is (Syrian President Bashar al-) Assad's army," said Lieberman.

His remark came as a delegation led by Israel's Air Force Commander Amikam Norkin was heading to Moscow to present findings from its probe on the accident in an attempt to dissolve a possible diplomatic crisis between the two countries.

Also on Thursday, Russian Embassy in Israel commented on its Twitter account that "Moscow views as irresponsible and unfriendly actions of Israeli Air Force, which exposed Russian Il-20 aircraft to danger and lead to the death of 15 servicemen."

"Russia would take all necessary measures to eliminate threat to life and security of our military fighting against terrorism," it added.

On Monday evening, a Russian military aircraft with 15 Russian personnel onboard was mistakenly downed by a Syrian anti-aircraft fire launched in response to an Israeli airstrike on Iranian target in Syria's Latakia province.

The Russian Defense Ministry said a missile from Syria's S-200 air defense system shot down the Il-20 surveillance plane with Russian servicemen by mistake because an Israeli airstrike took place at the same time, blaming a simultaneous Israeli strike as the cause of the mistake.

Israel has carried out some 200 airstrikes over the last 18 months, claiming that the attacks aimed to prevent Iranian weapons convoys and stop Iran from establishing a military foothold in Syria.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-09-20 19:28:17|Editor: Li Xia

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BEIJING, Sept. 20 (Xinhua) -- China has reassured private businesses of continued, equal and favorable policies compared with their state-owned counterparts as the private sector has become a significant part of the economy and a major source of market vitality.

Premier Li Keqiang reiterated the stance Wednesday during the Annual Meeting of the New Champions 2018, also known as Summer Davos, in north China's city of Tianjin.

The country will implement and optimize policies that support the development of private and non-public economy and remove relevant constraints, Li said.

The Chinese government had constantly taken measures to reduce taxes and fees on small, medium-sized and micro enterprises, while reducing their financing costs and easing their financing difficulties, Li said. "Most of these enterprises are privately-owned and have generated the most jobs for the country."

The premier's remarks came as the Chinese economy has entered a new period requiring a higher level of innovation and entrepreneurship.

"China will increasingly rely on endogenous innovation to spur economic development in the future, a process that needs risk takers from private businesses, while state firms, always slower and more cautious in decision-making, are relatively less vigorous and not that willing to take risks," said Fan Gang, president of the China Development Institute, a Shenzhen-based think tank.

"In a new era of reform and opening up, China needs to ponder how to further propel the private sector in a bid to make the broader economy more vibrant."

The private sector has witnessed booming growth thanks to the country's reform and opening up during the past decades.

Private businesses have emerged as a vibrant force in national economic and social development, currently providing more than 60 percent of China's GDP, 60 percent of fixed-asset investment, 75 percent of technological innovation and 90 percent of new urban jobs.

By the end of 2017, there were 27 million private companies across the country.

However, given increasing downward pressure on the economy and a changing, complicated situation at home and abroad, some private businesses are grappling with lackluster growth and financing difficulties.

Analysts believe more efforts are required to protect and motivate private entrepreneurs and create a better business environment for them.

Central bank governor Yi Gang has directed financial institutions to equally treat state and private companies in terms of making loans and issuing bonds, and encouraged big lenders to set a good example and provide better services. In China, it is usually more difficult for private businesses, considered more vulnerable to economic volatility, to secure loans than state firms.

The People's Bank of China will guide lenders to continue financing cash-starved companies that have good prospects, stable market share and technological advantages, Yi said.

More favorable policies are in the pipeline as the government has promised to take more action, including introducing bigger tax reductions and implementing better intellectual property protection, to further encourage private companies, particularly small and medium-sized enterprises.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-09-20 19:33:19|Editor: Li Xia

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BEIRUT, Sept. 20 (Xinhua) -- Chinese Ambassador to Lebanon Wang Kejian presented to Lebanese caretaker Culture Minister Ghattas Khoury Wednesday the design plans for a new conservatory in Lebanon, a statement issued by Khoury's office said.

The conservatory, funded by China, will be worth of 31.9 million U.S. dollars. It will cover 25,000 square meters in the northern Beirut suburb of Dbayeh.

The project is considered a musical city and a cultural monument for Lebanon with teaching rooms, a library, lecture and auditorium halls.

It will also house a music show room with the most advanced logistical and technology equipment, which can host up to 1,200 people.

Following his meeting with the Chinese Ambassador, Khoury praised the special relations and high level cooperation in culture and other areas between the two countries.

"We thank the Chinese government for its interest in funding this great cultural and artistic landmark," he said while expressing his admiration for the designs which he described as "special."

On January 9 this year, China and Lebanon signed a memorandum to build the conservatory named National Higher Institute of Music.

According to the statement issued by Khoury's office, the project will contribute to development and construction process in Lebanon.

Additionally, it will help to attract students from Lebanon as well as neighboring countries to university studies in music.

"It will also attract more internationally renowned musicians and artists to play their shows in this center, which will make Lebanon a cultural and artistic hub for communication under the framework of the Belt and Road Initiative," the statement added.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-09-20 19:38:20|Editor: xuxin

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NEW DELHI, Sept. 20 (Xinhua) -- India Thursday successfully test-fired its surface-to-surface short range ballistic missile - Prahaar in its eastern sate of Odisha, officials said.

The indigenously developed missile was flight tested from launching complex-III of the integrated test range (ITR) in Chandipur at around 1:35 p.m. (local time).

"The missile blasted off from a canister that travelled the desired range before zeroing on the target. All systems functioned normally and the mission achieved a copybook success," local media quoted a defence official as having said.

The missile has been designed and developed by India's Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO).

Officials said Thursday's test of missile has paved its way for induction.

The missile about 7.32 meter long is having a strike range of 150 km and is capable of carrying different types of warheads weighing up to 200 kg, reports said.
Rwandan Finance Minister Uzziel Ndagijimana addresses the reception celebrating the 69th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China, in Kigali, capital of Rwanda, on Sept. 19, 2018. (Xinhua/Lyu Tianran)

KIGALI, Sept. 20 (Xinhua) -- Rwandan finance minister Uzziel Ndagijimana on Wednesday reiterated the commitment of the Rwandan government to further advance ties with China for their common purpose and mutual benefit.

The exchange visits between the heads of state of Rwanda and China and Rwandan President Paul Kagame's attendance at the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) Beijing Summit held on Sept. 3-4, strengthen the relations and partnership between the two countries, said Ndagijimana.

Rwanda appreciates the support and collaboration from China as the central African country works to achieve its development goals in key sectors such as infrastructure, agriculture, health and capacity building, said the minister.

Jean de Dieu Mugiraneza, an engineer of Rwandan government's Rural Sector Support Project, demonstrates dam valve operation in Eastern province, Rwanda, July 13, 2018. Chinese companies have played a vital role in enabling Rwandan farmers to increase agricultural productivity and household incomes, a Rwandan analyst said. (Xinhua/Zhang Gaiping)

By adhering to the principles of sincerity, practical results, affinity and good faith, and upholding the values of friendship, justice and shared interests, China will work with Rwanda and carry out more exchanges on governance and guidelines of development, said Rao Hongwei, Chinese Ambassador to Rwanda.

China and Rwanda will further match the development strategies and seek to harvest more fruits across multiple areas, including the Belt and Road Initiative, public health, human resources training, E-commerce, mining, law enforcement cooperation, among others, Rao said.

Photo taken on Feb. 16, 2018 shows a view of Muyanza Dam built by China Geo-Engineering Corporation (CGC) in Rulindo District, Northern Province of Rwanda. The recently completed Muyanza Dam is the second highest in Rwanda and the country's highest and largest earth fill dam in the agriculture sector. It will benefit farmers and help grow crops for exports, a Rwandan official said on Thursday. (Xinhua/CGC)

The two countries will further enhance collaboration in regional and international arena and uphold the legitimate rights and interests of developing countries, he added.

The envoy also said Rwanda will achieve more across all areas of cooperation under the FOCAC through the joint efforts between the two countries.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-09-20 19:48:24|Editor: xuxin

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BERLIN, Sept. 20 (Xinhua) -- Marcel Kuschela, a prominent German neo-Nazi and Hooligan, was found dead in the country's western town of Moenchengladbach, German media reported on Thursday.

Police confirmed that a body with several stab wounds had been discovered by a passer-by near a local museum on Wednesday. The exact cause of death of the 32-year-old man is still unknown with an autopsy having been scheduled for Thursday.

According to the German newspaper Bild and public broadcaster WDR, the victim is a known right-wing extremist and Hooligan who is part of the extreme right-wing band "Kategorie C" and co-founded a movement known as "Hooligans against Salafists" (Hogesa).

Bild reported that while Kuschela was himself last registered in Bremen, his girlfriend lives in Moenchengladbach.

The death of the neo-Nazi has been met with regret on far-right online portals, sparking fears among Moenchengladbach municipal officials that the scene could now mobilize in the town like it has recently done in East German Chemnitz and Koethen.

Dominik Roeseler, the original founder of Hogesa, has already called for a commemorative event to be organized at the site where Kuschela's body was found on Thursday night. At the same time, some far-left groups have welcomed the news of the 32-year-olds passing.

In response, Moenchengladbach mayor Hans-Wilhelm Reiners issued a plea for calm on his Facebook profile on Thursday.

"I am deeply concerned to read appeals on the internet to travel to Moenchengladbach and hunt for the murderers after this horrible violent crime," Reiners wrote.

Reiners added that he had "trust that our police will do everything in its power to clarify the incident as quickly as possible" and that the German rule of law would ensure that the culprit was punished. "Level-headedness is now needed on all sides," the mayor wrote.

Police have warned that a large number of right-wing extremists could arrive at Moenchengladbach from all over the country on Thursday as a result of the incident.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-09-20 19:48:26|Editor: xuxin

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BEIRUT, Sept. 20 (Xinhua) -- Lebanon's economic bodies and the General Labor Union (GLU) are considering to plan demonstrations to press political parties to form a government, local newspaper Al Jumhuriya reported Thursday.

"Economic bodies, GLU and free trade unions are seriously considered taking escalated measures that could reach the level of declaring civil disobedience to put big pressure on politicians," according to Al Jumhuriya.

Sources told Al Jumhuriya that the economic situation in Lebanon is more than bad and any further delay in government formation will cause a disaster in financial situation in the country.

Lebanon's economic bodies announced earlier in August that they will not spare any efforts to take necessary measures to stop the economy from deteriorating further.

Lebanese Prime Minister-designate Saad Hariri has been facing various hurdles to form a 30-member national unity government over the representations of the main Christian parties, the Druze sect and the Sunni representations from outside Hariri's Future Movement.

Local economists warned on several occasions against the negative repercussions of any delay in cabinet formation. .
Source: Xinhua| 2018-09-20 19:48:26|Editor: xuxin

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by Federico Grandesso

BRUSSELS, Sept. 20 (Xinhua) -- Former European Council (EC) President Herman Van Rompuy has urged the European Union (EU) to do more to defend its outer borders in order to stop the influx of migrants.

"We must do a better job protecting our external borders in the Mediterranean Sea," the Belgian official told Xinhua in a recent interview in Brussels as EU leaders met in the Austrian city of Salzburg for an informal summit on migration and other issues.

"But I want also to stress that the initiatives that were put in place in the last two years have been very effective," Van Rompuy added, pointing to a 97 percent drop in migrants along the Turkish route and an 80 percent decrease in flows along routes from North Africa.

"In this context, it is important that the migrant flows continue to decrease," he continued.

EU official data show the influx of illegal migrants has reduced sharply, back to levels before the 2015 crisis when more than 1 million refugees and migrants crossed into Europe. In the first eight months of 2018, irregular border crossings into the EU fell 40 percent from a year ago to about 86,500 in number.

Van Rompuy praised the European Commission's decision to beef up the EU border agency Frontex with 10,000 additional border guards as a step in the right direction to strengthen the protection of the EU outer borders.

Another such step is setting up hot spots in non-EU countries where asylum seekers can apply for international protection, he said.

"Now the real challenge is to find suitable countries ready to take part in this plan," he said. "African countries could host such hot spots, but one must also take the symbolic side into consideration: some could consider it a violation of their national sovereignty."

Van Rompuy added, "If other European countries that are not EU members, such as Albania, offer their cooperation on this front thanks to their good relations with Italy, this is also positive."

The former Belgian Prime Minister also praised Italy's agreements with Libya.

"It (Libya) is a very complicated country because its government does not have control over every province," said Van Rompuy. "The initiatives taken by former Italian Prime Minister, Paolo Gentiloni, whose administration first negotiated with the Libyans, gave good results."

"The figures confirm a strong decrease in migrant flows from Libya," he said. "Now we must continue to help our Libyan partners, because we need them to continue doing a good job. We may not be completely satisfied all the time with the agreement we signed, but I think in the end the result is the most important element."

On the relocation of migrants already in Europe, Van Rompuy explained that the EU's agreement on "flexible solidarity" means that there is no real legal obligation to host refugees.

"The EU found consensus under this plan, the problem now is to implement it concretely," he added.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-09-20 19:58:32|Editor: xuxin

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WELLINGTON, Sept. 20 (Xinhua) -- New Zealands gross domestic product (GDP) rose one percent in the June 2018 quarter, up from 0.5 percent last quarter, which is the largest quarterly rise in two years, the countrys statistics department Stats NZ said on Thursday.

Growth was broad-based, with 15 of 16 industries recording higher production. Mining was the only industry to decline, reflecting one-off factors, Stats NZ said.

The largest contribution to growth came from agriculture, up 4.2 percent, Hollows said, adding the real strength of services this quarter lay in a consistent performance across a range of industries.

GDP per capita was up 0.5 percent in the June 2018 quarter, following a flat quarter in March, statistics show.

Annual GDP growth for the year ended June 2018 was 2.7 percent, and the size of the economy in current prices was 289 billion NZ dollars (192 billion U.S. dollars), Stats NZ said.
Genesis Blockchain Technologies Committed to Paying Royalty of 2% of Gross Revenue and $5 Million Payment upon Commencement of Initial Coin Offering



Santa Monica, CA, Sept. 20, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- via NEWMEDIAWIRE -- Gopher Protocol Inc. (OTCQB: GOPH) ("Gopher), a company specializing in the creation of Internet of Things (IoT) and Artificial Intelligence enabled mobile technologies, including a global platform with both mobile and fixed solutions, announced today that it has entered into a definitive agreement to exclusively license Gophers GRC Blockchain-Based Radio Generated Digital Currency proprietary technology to Genesis Blockchain to integrate into Genesiss Blockchain based lines of business.

Genesis is a Costa Rican based operation incorporated as GBT Technologies, S.A. (GBT). GBT is a fully compliant and regulated exchange platform that currently operates as a decentralized digital platform, which is explained by GBT in the following link - https://youtu.be/V6_WOu016f0. GBT intends to incorporate the Digital Currency Technology into its products.

Pablo Gonzalez, GBTs CEO and founder, stated, Our goal is to overhaul Blockchain technology as we know it, from a transaction confirmation speed standpoint to a more robust communication infrastructure that is truly decentralized. We believe this will allow Blockchain technology to reach further into the mainstream financial services arena as well as accountable data storage, audit and transfer. With this goal of reshaping the Blockchain as we know it, we are looking forward to starting the process of incorporating the Gopher technology into our products and systems to be offered. We believe the secured algorithms and radio technology of Gophers Digital Currency Technology will enable us to create a new type of secured network that is fast and scalable. Unlike other digital assets, we believe our product offerings utilizing the Digital Currency Technology will facilitate a less expensive, faster and more efficient method to store or send data and digital assets on the Blockchain anywhere in the world allowing us to give users full proprietorship of their data as well as digital assets.

In consideration for providing the license to the Digital Currency Technology, GBT paid Gopher $300,000 and agreed to pay Gopher $5 million upon commencing an Initial Coin Offering (ICO). Prior to signing the license agreement, GBT provided an advance of $200,000 to the Company which the parties have agreed will be applied toward the $5 million payment when due. Further, Gopher shall receive 2% of gross revenue of licensed products sold by GBT under the license agreement for a period of five years after commencement of sales. Upon GBT commencing its ICO, Gopher will have the option of acquiring 30% of the ICO at a discount of 30% to the offering price.

About Gopher Protocol Inc.

Gopher Protocol Inc. (OTCQB: GOPH) (Gopher) (http://gopherprotocol.com/) is a development-stage company which consider itself Native IoT creator, developing Internet of Things (IoT) and Artificial Intelligence enabled mobile technology. Gopher has a portfolio of Intellectual Property that when commercialized will include smart microchips, mobile application software and supporting cloud software. The system contemplates the creation of a global network. The core of the system will be its advanced microchip technology that can be installed in any mobile device worldwide. Gopher envisions this system as an internal, private network between all enabled mobile devices providing shared processing, advanced mobile database management/sharing and enhanced mobile features.

Corporate Site: http://gopherprotocol.com

Press page/ press kit - http://gopherprotocol.com/?page_id=228

Consumer and product website for Guardian Patch: http://www.guardianpatch.com/.

Forward-Looking Statements

Certain statements contained in this press release may constitute "forward-looking statements". Forward-looking statements provide current expectations of future events based on certain assumptions and include any statement that does not directly relate to any historical or current fact. Actual results may differ materially from those indicated by such forward-looking statements as a result of various important factors as disclosed in our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission located at their website (http://www.sec.gov). In addition to these factors, actual future performance, outcomes, and results may differ materially because of more general factors including (without limitation) general industry and market conditions and growth rates, economic conditions, governmental and public policy changes, the Companys ability to raise capital on acceptable terms, if at all, the Companys successful development of its products and the integration into its existing products and the commercial acceptance of the Companys products. The forward-looking statements included in this press release represent the Company's views as of the date of this press release and these views could change. However, while the Company may elect to update these forward-looking statements at some point in the future, the Company specifically disclaims any obligation to do so. These forward-looking statements should not be relied upon as representing the Company's views as of any date subsequent to the date of the press release.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-09-20 19:58:34|Editor: xuxin

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SALZBURG, Austria, Sept. 20 (Xinhua) -- Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz doesn't believe there will be a solution for the migration issue at the informal EU summit here on Thursday.

Ahead of the day's meeting, Kurz again spoke against a discussion about the distribution of refugees in Europe, noting the migration issue could not be resolved at the summit.

The debate over the distribution of refugees at the summit is not a solution, Kurz told reporters, but still he saw the chance to come to a solution while cooperating with north African states.

There is a need for a deeper cooperation with the north African countries, according to the Austrian chancellor, with a view to Egypt. The proposal to talk with Egypt and others was supported by EU leaders.

Ahead of the Salzburg summit, European Council President Donald Tusk and Kurz have hold talks with Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi in Cairo about possible cooperation.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-09-20 20:03:35|Editor: xuxin

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Photo taken on Sept. 20, 2018 shows a scene of trial operation of Vietnam's first urban railway in Hanoi, Vietnam. Vietnam's first urban railway, constructed by China Railway Sixth Group Co. Ltd, started its trial operation on Thursday. TO GO WITH Feature: China-constructed urban railway in Vietnam on horizon (Xinhua/Ngo Minh Tien)

by Tao Jun, Bui Long

HANOI, Sept. 20 (Xinhua) -- Vietnam's first urban railway, constructed by China Railway Sixth Group Co. Ltd, started its trial operation on Thursday.

The Cat Linh-Ha Dong elevated rail line in Vietnam's Hanoi capital is scheduled to run on a pilot basis for three to six months before commercial operation which is expected to start before lunar new year festival (early February 2019).

Urban railway is a new means of transport in Vietnam, transporting a large number of passengers in a convenient and comfortable way, Nguyen Ngoc Dong, Vietnamese deputy minister of transport, said on Thursday when he took part in checking and supervising its trial operation.

The trial operation is a milestone in the urban railway project before the rail line is put into use, he stated.

"I think that technical aspects will be OK. The only issue is management work, how to build up apparatus, master techniques and procedures needed to operate the rail line, and organize transport connections," the deputy minister said.

Hanoi has a big population, so it should develop at least three urban rail lines and more bus routes to link its urban transport systems, he stated.

Vietnam and China are cooperating to implement some programs and projects on railway development and connection.

"China has developed urban railways very quickly," and the country currently has up to 27,000 km of high-speed railway, accounting for nearly one half of the world's total, the deputy minister said while comfortably sitting in an air-conditioned green train to participate in evaluating its trial operation.

From Thursday, 13 four-carriage trains are scheduled to run on a pilot basis transporting passengers for a total distance of more than 13 km through 12 stations in the three districts of Ha Dong, Thanh Xuan and Dong Da in 30 minutes.

Trains run on both directions and they depart at interval of 10 minutes. Each train stops at each station for one minute.

An air-conditioned train, whose length is some 80m, can accommodate up to 1,000 people. Each carriage is some 19m long, 2.8m wide and 3.8m high.

After taking a short ride, the Vietnamese deputy minister got off the train at Van Quan Station, and entered a control room full of computers and technical boards on its walls.

One of the big boards bears a Vietnamese sentence "Diagram of Electricity Supply System for Urban Railway in Hanoi, Vietnam". Another board features buttons, switches and name tags which say "Escalator", "Anti-fire pump" and "Smoke-discharging fan".

Chinese technicians in the room, mostly handsome guys wearing short-sighted glasses, glued their eyes to computer screens, while Dong and Vietnamese reporters listened to presentations about technical issues.

According to Vu Hong Phuong, vice head of the Cat Linh-Ha Dong railway project management unit, the railway's trial operation is of significance because it ensures safe and sound commercial operation to serve people in the next few months.

"We are checking the smooth combination of equipment in the whole system. We are also completing final steps such as decoration and equipment, including stairways, escalators and elevators," Phuong said.

Regarding personnel for the urban railway, a number of Vietnamese people have been sent to China for training, and others have been trained in Vietnam, Phuong said, noting that they will gradually master relevant technologies and techniques to well manage, operate and maintain the whole railway system.

"The trains' average speed is 35 km per hour," although they can run at twice of that speed, he said, noting that the short distance of some 1 km between two adjacent stations make it hard for trains to travel at their maximum speed.

Inside one train on Thursday, many local reporters were busy taking photos, shooting videos, or livestreaming elevated trains and their trial operations. Major Vietnamese media outlets, including Vietnam News Agency and online newspaper VnExpress posted many nice photos and videos about the trains on the move.

Hu Suojin, commercial counselor of the Chinese embassy in Vietnam, said Vietnam's first urban railway, constructed by China Railway Sixth Group Co. Ltd using Chinese ODA and Vietnamese reciprocal capital, will help ease transport pressure in Hanoi, contributing to the closer all-round cooperation between the two countries.

In August, during a test run of Cat Linh-Ha Dong rail line, many Vietnamese people were invited to board trains. They were eager to see designated areas for people with mobility disabilities. Seats for the elderly, pregnant women and children are highlighted in yellow color, while steel holders are there to make sure safe positions for standing passengers.

"The train is clean and cool. Unlike roads with traffic lights and frequent congestions below, it runs fairly fast and smoothly. I hope more urban rail routes like this will be built in Hanoi and other localities," Nguyen Anh Duc, an 11th-grade student of Cao Ba Quat High School in Hanoi's Gia Lam district, told Xinhua.

Duc, whose father works as a driver for the Cat Linh-Ha Dong urban railway project, said he is studying hard to be admitted to the Automobile Technology Faculty of the Hanoi University of Industry.

"I want to develop advanced vehicles for both personal use and mass transport. I do not want people to think that going on roads in Hanoi is a nightmare. I want daily trips are relaxing," the young man boasted, grinning from ear to ear.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-09-20 20:03:35|Editor: xuxin

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ARUSHA, Tanzania, Sept. 20 (Xinhua) -- Three people were killed and 18 others rescued after a boat carrying 21 passengers capsized in Rufiji River in eastern Tanzania's Coast region, police said on Thursday.

Onesmo Lyanga, Coast Regional Police Commander, said that the accident occurred on Wednesday morning and the vessel had 21 people on board.

Lyanga said that eighteen people were rescued and were rushed to the nearby health facility in the district located 170 kilometers from the country's commercial capital, Dar es Salaam.

Police said that most of the passengers were farmers from Nyaminywili village and they were heading to attend their farms in the area.

"Survivors were rescued by villagers who came few minutes after the accident," the regional police chief said, adding that the boat capsized when the vessel hit a submerged log.

The boat is a property of Nyaminywili village in Kipugira ward in Rufiji District.

According to Lyanga, bodies of the deceased were preserved at Nyaminywili Health Center.

Juma Njwayo, Rufiji District Commissioner also confirmed on the accident, urging vessel operators in the river to be careful to avoid such unnecessary accidents as well as ensuring that their boats have all the necessary rescue gears.

According to Njwayo, the vessel has been removed from the river, one of Tanzania's breeding sites of giant crocodiles and hippos.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-09-20 20:08:38|Editor: xuxin

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BAGHDAD, Sept. 20 (Xinhua) -- Hundreds of thousands of Shiite Muslims rallied at holy sites of Iraq's Karbala and Kadhmiyah for the annual religious ritual of Ashura on Thursday amid tight security measures.

Shiite pilgrims from Iraq and other countries, including Iran, flocked into Karbala, some 110 km south of the capital Baghdad, and into Kadhmiyah district in northern Baghdad.

They commemorated Ashura, which marks the death of Imam Hussein, grandson of Prophet Mohammed, who was killed and buried in 680 A.D. in Karbala.

Dozens of tents were set up on the streets leading to the shrine to serve water, food and medication to the pilgrims.

In Kadhmiyah, people clad in black and accompanied by drummers were marching in lines in honor of Imam Hussein.

In Karbala, where the tomb of Imam Hussein locates, hundreds of thousands of Shiite pilgrims converged to commemorate the climax of the Shiite religious rite of Ashura.

Processions of elderly, young men and children marched through thousands of other pilgrims, waving green, black and red flags at the wide avenue in front of Imam Hussein shrine in Karbala.

The Shiite ritual was held under tightened security measures as hundreds of Iraqi security troops manned dozens of checkpoints and patrol across Baghdad.

More than 30,000 security members with hundreds of civilian guards were deployed in and around the city of Karbala and Baghdad's Kadhmiyah district to protect the worshippers, according to security officials.

Ashura, meaning "ten" in Arabic, takes place on the 10th day of Muharam, the first month in the Islamic lunar calendar.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-09-20 20:08:39|Editor: xuxin

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BERLIN, Sept. 20 (Xinhua) -- German authorities have called for the immediate and voluntary end of an ongoing occupation of the Hambach forest by environmental activists on Thursday after a journalist fell to his death from a treehouse in the contested area.

Herbert Reul, interior minister of North Rhine-Westphalia, urged the activists to leave the forest to prevent "anything more from happening".

Speaking to the radio station "WDR 2", Reul said that a widely-publicized police operation to clear the forest, officially due to safety concerns in relation to the activist-built treehouses, had temporarily been halted "until further notice" as a consequence of the incident.

The Hambach forest forms part of a property owned by German energy giant RWE which comprises the world's largest open pit brown coal mine. The Essen-based company plans to cut down 100 out of a remaining 200 hectares of woodland from October 2018 onwards in order for the site to be used for mining operations.

Environmental activists have vehemently resisted the development for years by moving into the threatened area, setting up makeshift camps and erecting barriers. Local government authorities recently ordered the inhabitants to leave their dwellings peacefully before they would be removed forcibly.

The now-stalled police operation is one of the largest to be recorded to date in North Rhine-Westphalia and is supported by reinforcements from other German states as well as special forces commando.

As a consequence, the treehouse settlement has become known as a symbol for grassroots resistance against coal power generation and deforestation across Europe. Last week, at least 4,000 largely peaceful protesters marched to Hambach forest to voice their opposition to its felling.

Speaking to press on Thursday, police spokesperson Paul Kemen described the death of the journalist as a "tragic accident." Kemen stressed that the deadly fall was "not connected in any way to the police operation concerning clearing the treehouses."

According to police, as well as corroborative reports from activists, the victim fell roughly 15 meters from a treehouse structure to the ground when he attempted to cross a wooden suspension bridge. The man had been documenting the life of Hambach forest occupiers over a longer period but was alone at the time and succumbed to injuries sustained during the fall while still at the site of the accident.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-09-20 20:13:43|Editor: mmm

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South Korean President Moon Jae-in speaks at the Seoul press center in Seoul, South Korea on Sept. 20, 2018. South Korean President Moon Jae-in said Thursday that Kim Jong Un, top leader of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK), had expressed his hope to rapidly hold his second summit with U.S. President Donald Trump during the inter-Korean summit in Pyongyang. (Xinhua/Wang Jingqiang)

SEOUL, Sept. 20 (Xinhua) -- South Korean President Moon Jae-in said Thursday that Kim Jong Un, top leader of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK), had expressed his hope to rapidly hold his second summit with U.S. President Donald Trump during the inter-Korean summit in Pyongyang.

Moon made the remarks in his address to the people at the Seoul press center for the Pyongyang summit, which lasted for three days from Tuesday.

Moon noted that Kim also wished U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo visit the DPRK.

Moon expressed his hope for the rapid resumption of the DPRK-U.S. talks, saying conditions were created through the Pyongyang summit to restart the dialogue between the DPRK and the United States.

The DPRK called for Moon to broker talks between Pyongyang and Washington, offering to closely cooperate with South Korea for the peninsula's complete denuclearization, the South Korean president said.

During a phone call before Moon's visit to Pyongyang, Trump called for Moon to play a role as chief negotiator between the DPRK and the United States for the denuclearization negotiations.

Moon was expected to deliver Kim's message to Trump during his scheduled visit to New York next week to attend the UN General Assembly. Moon was slated to hold a separate summit with Trump on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly.

What was discussed between Moon and Kim for the denuclearization but not included in the Pyongyang Declaration will be conveyed to Trump at the South Korea-U.S. summit, the South Korean leader noted.

Moon and Kim signed the Pyongyang Declaration after their summit talks in Pyongyang, agreeing to further steps for the peninsula's denuclearization and concrete measures to end hostile acts near inter-Korean border areas.

Moon said Kim repeatedly confirmed his firm commitment to the peninsula's denuclearization during their talks in Pyongyang. The DPRK leader wished to focus on economic development after completing the denuclearization, Moon noted.

Under the Pyongyang Declaration, the DPRK said it is willing to take additional steps for the denuclearization, such as the permanent destruction of its main Yongbyon nuclear facility, if the United States takes corresponding actions in accordance with the spirit of the June 12 DPRK-U.S. summit agreement.

The Yongbyon nuclear facility in northwestern DPRK is known to house a five-megawatt graphite-moderated reactor, which produces nuclear material necessary for nuclear warheads.

Calling the DPRK's mentioning of the Yongbyon nuclear facility dismantlement an "important, big step," Moon said the permanent dismantlement of the DPRK nukes had the meaning of being verifiable and irreversible.

The DPRK already dismantled its main Punggye-ri nuclear test site and its key Tongchang-ri missile engine test site.

Under the Pyongyang Declaration, the DPRK agreed to allow experts from relevant countries to monitor a permanent closedown of the Tongchang-ri engine test site and missile launch pads.

Touching on the declaration to end the 1950-53 Korean War, Moon said it is a political declaration to end the war and hostile relations that will become a starting point for negotiations on a peace treaty.

The peace treaty, Moon said, will be signed in the final stage of the complete denuclearization. The Korean Peninsula remains in a technical state of war as the Korean War ended with armistice.

Moon said his country aimed to make the war-ending declaration by the end of this year, adding that he will discuss the issue with Trump during the upcoming South Korea-U.S. summit on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly.

Moon and Kim have held summit meetings three times this year, including the ones on April 27 and May 26 each. Kim promised to visit Seoul for the fourth summit with Moon in the near future.

Kim and Trump held the first-ever DPRK-U.S. summit in Singapore on June 12.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-09-20 20:18:43|Editor: Li Xia

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BEIJING, Sept. 20 (Xinhua) -- China firmly supports the Pyongyang summit between the leaders of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) and the Republic of Korea (ROK), and hopes the DPRK and the United States lose no time to have further contact and dialogue to push the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula, a Foreign Ministry spokesperson said Thursday.

Under a joint declaration signed at the summit, the DPRK said it is willing to continue with additional steps toward denuclearization, such as the permanent destruction of its main Yongbyon nuclear facility, if the United States takes corresponding actions in line with the spirit of the DPRK-U.S. agreement reached at a summit in Singapore in June.

The DPRK's stance is worth approving, spokesperson Geng Shuang told a routine press briefing. "We hope the DPRK and the United States meet each other halfway."

U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said on Wednesday in a statement that the United States is prepared to engage immediately in negotiations to transform U.S.-DPRK relations.

Noting the positive comments made by the United States, Geng said China supports and hopes the DPRK and the United States lose no time to have further contact and dialogue, take each other's reasonable concerns into consideration, build up mutual trust, implement the consensus reached by leaders of the two countries and work for continuous development in the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula and in the political settlement of the issue.

"Other relevant parties should also take action and make joint efforts," said the spokesperson.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-09-20 20:18:44|Editor: xuxin

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NAIROBI, Sept. 20 (Xinhua) -- Kenya plans to put in place a privacy data law in order to enhance consumer protection, a government official said on Thursday.

Jerome Ochieng, the principal secretary in the ministry of information communication and technology (ICT), told a technology forum in Nairobi that the Data Protection Bill is currently undergoing stakeholder engagement before it is presented to parliament for debate.

"When the law is in place, it will safeguard the privacy and interests of consumers, especially in the digital space by ensuring personal data is not collected or transferred to third parties without their consent," Ochieng said during the Connected 2018 Partners Forum.

The proposed law will levy stiff penalties to those who infringe on data privacy laws.

Ochieng said the East African nation lacks a comprehensive data protection even as the country moves towards becoming a digital economy.

The principal secretary noted that there are currently industry specific data protection laws especially in the health and telecommunication sectors.

"The Data Protection Bill will provide an overarching legal framework to protect consumer data from exploitation," he added.

Some of the provisions of the law will be an obligation that companies to be required to get consumers consent before selling their data to third parties.

Ochieng revealed that the law comes at a time when there is increased collection of data from government and private bodies, especially in the digital sphere.

In order to promote consumer protection, the law will ensure that individuals be notified whenever their data is being collected.

He said the law will help to promote uptake of e-government services as it will provide comfort to those who are reluctant to disclose personal information online.

In order to enforce the data protection law, the bill proposes the establishment of an entity to handle complaints from those whose rights have been violated.

"The body will oversee and investigate observance of the right to privacy for consumers," said Ochieng.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-09-20 20:18:44|Editor: Li Xia

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ZHENGZHOU, Sept. 20 (Xinhua) -- At an exhibition in central China's Henan Province, a dinosaur embryo fossil dating back 86 million years caught the attention of audiences due to its paleontological value.

The 118-cm-long Beibeilong sinensis fossil was excavated in Henan in 1993, but later taken out of the country. After three years of efforts by Chinese authorities, the precious fossil was returned to China in 2013.

A precious dinosaur nest fossil shown at another exhibition in eastern Jiangsu Province has a similar storyline.

The fossil, discovered in China, made its surprise public debut at an auction in the United States where it sold for 420,000 U.S. dollars. It was returned to China after five years of efforts.

"These exhibitions help raise public awareness about protecting fossils, which are a precious natural heritage and non-renewable resource," said Wang Lixia, an official with the national expert committee on paleontology and fossils.

"China is a country rich in fossils," Wang said. "Those excavated in the country cover all biological categories and almost the entire evolutionary history of life."

More than 220 dinosaur fossils have been discovered in China, the most in the world. However, many have been smuggled out of the country for profit.

To combat smuggling, China has implemented regulations on the excavation, collection, as well as import and export control of fossils. More than 10,000 fossils have been returned to China.

The government has also made effort to create more public awareness about protecting fossils. By July last year, the Chinese government had named 53 areas as places of national fossil origins, established 17 fossil-themed national geological parks and set up special funds for fossil preservation.

"Raising public awareness is fundamental to fossil protection," said Xu Li, the curator of Henan Geological Museum, which houses a large collection of fossils.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-09-20 20:33:47|Editor: Li Xia

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HANOVER, Germany, Sept. 20 (Xinhua) -- A central Chinese city held an auto industry cluster promotion conference on Thursday at the biannual IAA Commercial Vehicles in the German city of Hanover, focusing on auto industry cooperation with European partners.

Xiangyang, in central China's Hubei Province, is an important gathering place for the automobile industry in China.

The city aims to establish all-round and multi-level cooperation with European countries represented by Germany in the development of automobile industry, said Xiangyang deputy mayor Zhang Xiaofan.

Thomas Hermann, deputy mayor of Hanover, welcomed Chinese exhibitors and guests during his speech.

"It is of particular importance for Hanover as a fair and car city to host the IAA and that Xiangyang could get inspirations here for its future development," Hermann said.

Tao Bailiang, commercial counselor of general consulate of China in Hamburg, believed China and Germany will move from traditional manufacturing cooperation to intelligent R&D cooperation in the automotive field, along with China's new round of opening up policy.

"The field is broader and more abundant. Huge space for cooperation has been created for the business community," Tao said.

The 67th trade fair includes 2,174 exhibitors from around 48 countries and regions. In total, exhibitors present 435 global premieres for the commercial vehicle sector, a record figure for the IAA, on an area of 282,000 square meters.
NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION TO UNITED STATES NEWSWIRE SERVICES OR FOR DISSEMINATION IN THE UNITED STATES



VANCOUVER, British Columbia, Sept. 20, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- ExGen Resources Inc. (TSX.V: EXG; OTC: BXXRF) (ExGen, the Company) is pleased to provide an update in respect of Phoenix Global Mining Ltd.s (Phoenix) exploration and development activities at the Empire Mine Project in Idaho, USA. Further to previous ExGen news releases, ExGen owns 20% and Phoenix owns 80% of Konnex Resources, Inc. (Konnex), which holds the leases and claims to the Empire Mine Project. ExGen further has a 2.5% NSR royalty on the Empire Mine Project and is one of Phoenixs largest shareholders, owning 1,330,000 common shares (4.18% of Phoenix).



ExGen is pleased to announce a further set of results from the Companys ongoing 2018 drilling program at the Empire Copper Mine in Idaho, USA (the Empire Mine). These results follow those announced in the September 13th press release.

Highlights:

Extensive evidence of copper sulphides found below the Empire mine and to the north-west, east and south.



Significant high-grade copper drill intersections to upgrade the inferred resources inside the current resource including:

 Hole KXD18-10: 24.7 m of 3.33% copper equivalent from 7.3 m depth  including 1.5 m of 10.13% copper equivalent from 11.9 m depth  including 2.9 m of 9.11% copper equivalent from 26.5 m depth  Hole KX18-44: 19.8 m of 2.98% copper equivalent from 164.6 m depth  including 7.6 m of 6.38% copper equivalent from 166.1 m depth  including 1.6 m of 12.88% copper equivalent from 168 m depth The copper equivalent grade (Cu Equ) is calculated on the basis of metal prices as follows  copper $6,000/tonne, zinc $2,325/tonne, gold $1,200/oz and silver $14.0/oz.

Stepout drilling outside the current resource intersects high grade copper sulphide mineralisation, including:

 Hole KX18-36: 3.0 m of 3.03% copper equivalent from 94.5 m depth  Hole KX18-39: 7.6 m of 1.22% copper equivalent from 6.1 m depth  Hole KX18-47: 18.3 m of 1.72% copper equivalent from 54.9 m depth  and 4.6 m of 4.83% copper equivalent from 77.7 m depth  Hole KXD18-9: 2.7 m of 5.46% copper equivalent from 26.4 m depth  Hole KXD18-12: 4 m of 0.71% copper equivalent from 88.4 m depth The copper equivalent grade (Cu Equ) is calculated on the basis of metal prices as follows  copper $6,000/tonne, zinc $2,325/tonne, gold $1,200/oz and silver $14.0/oz.

A new zone of mineralisation to be called Red Star has been discovered 330 metres north-west of the current resource towards the old Horseshoe Mine. The outcrop is 20 metres wide and contains heavy oxide/sulphide mineralisation. Trench samples have been sent for assaying.

Five drill hole intercepts contain predominantly chalcopyrite & bornite copper sulphide mineralisation.



Hole KX18-47 confirms the presence of higher-grade sulphide mineralisation beneath the current resource.



Elevated zinc, gold and silver values are associated with the copper intersections. Grades of up to 8.82% zinc, 7.93 grammes per tonne (g/t) gold, 256 g/t silver.



Assay results from a further 19 drill holes and 298 surface channel samples are pending and will be reported shortly.

Dennis Thomas, Chief Executive Officer of Phoenix, said, It is our pleasure to present the latest assay results from the ongoing 2018 Empire drill programme. These results are game changing for the Company given they provide extensive evidence that a high-grade feeder system exists below the Empire oxide resource and demonstrate the existence of such a sulphide system within the Empire Mine.

To date, we have focused on the oxides at surface but these results will inevitably require following up with further exploration of the sulphide system. We now have five drill holes that have intercepted predominantly chalcopyrite and bornite copper sulphide mineralisation in high-grade vein structures. This batch of results has given us renewed confidence to explore the sulphides in more detail. Also, quite significantly we have reported material gold and silver grades that would boost project economics.

In addition, we are pleased to report the discovery of a new zone of surface mineralisation in the Empire block, now referred to as Red Star. Red Star is located approximately 330 metres north-west of the northern end of the Empire resource area and is a 20 metre-wide surface outcrop across the structure. The mineralisation is a mix of oxides and sulphides, with strong chrysocolla and bornite showings, exposed in a heavily timbered canyon. Weather permitting, we plan to drill Red Star before the year end. I look forward to reporting the channel sampling results from Red Star when they become available.

With regard to the ongoing  copper oxide exploration, we are highly encouraged by the infill drilling results in and around the Empire pit. Notable results are 19.8 metres of 1.88% copper including 1.6 metres of 8.85%, and 24.7 metres of 1.58% copper which include 0.9 metres of 7.72% copper in hole KX18-10. Not only do we believe that these results will have a positive effect on the overall grade and tonnage in the existing resource, but the 19.8 metre intercept sits entirely below the [current resource], which should have a positive effect on the expansion of the resource in that area. We would also point out that the 7.72% (KXD18-10) and 8.85% copper (KX18-44) intercepts present as copper oxides in the core and reverse circulation (RC) chips appear to be associated with high-angle structures continuing at depth. The Empire team will use these higher-grade intervals to continue defining the deeper sulphide system. Drill hole KX18-44 (8.85% copper) was a follow-up to last seasons drill hole KXD17-10 (4.6 metres of 1.34% copper, including 1.5 metres of 2.45% copper), which was part of a 2017 deep sulphide drilling programme, the results of which were reported by the Company in January 2018.

Finally, we are now targeting additional drilling to be completed in the next two months that will follow up on the previously reported eastern and western mineralised extensions, as well as the newly recognised north-western extension, and follow up on the sulphide mineralisation reported here. Our infill drilling programme will also continue into the autumn, which is designed to upgrade the inferred resources to the measured and indicated category. Thus far, the infill drilling programme results are robust and will be used to update the resource model in which the average grade of the measured and indicated resource is 0.52% copper. Our hope is that continued drilling results similar to those reported here and previously will have a positive effect on the overall grade and tonnage, which will materially enhance the economics of the project.

We will continue to report new assay results over the next few months as the drilling progresses and the results are received from the ALS Global laboratory in Nevada.

Mr. Jason Riley, CEO of ExGen commented: We are very pleased with this second round of assays in September. The drilling has encountered impressive grades of copper, zinc, and gold which we believe provides compelling evidence that a high-grade feeder system exists below the Empire oxide resource. We are excited to see what the next drill results will deliver and look forward to the follow up work at the numerous additional possible mineralized extensions, including Red Star before year end.

Drilling Update

Of the planned 12,200 metre drill programme scheduled for completion in 2018, Phoenix has completed a total of 7,604 metres of drilling at Empire. To date this consists of 5,328 metres of RC drilling, 1,573 metres of HQ core drilling, and 703 metres of PQ core drilling. Drill samples are being delivered to the ALS Global laboratory in Nevada for assay with a turnaround time of approximately six weeks. The drill hole results received to date from core holes KXD18-7 through to KXD18-13 and RC holes KX18-35 through to KX18-47 are shown below. The copper equivalent grade (Cu Equ) is calculated on the basis of metal prices as follows  copper $6,000/tonne, zinc $2,325/tonne, gold $1,200/oz and silver $14.0/oz.

Hole Intersection

Metres Tcu Zn Au Ag Cu Equ Number From To Interval % % g/t g/ % Comments KX18-36 94.5 97.5 3.00 1.14 0.04 1.25 9.3 3.03 stepout KX18-38 100.6 102.1 1.50 0.79 0.13 0.39 29.2 1.31 stepout KX18-39 6.1 13.7 7.60 0.31 0.14 1.10 20.0 1.22 stepout KX18-42 19.8 27.4 7.60 0.27 0.07 0.10 5.5 0.40 infill and 38.1 45.7 7.60 0.32 0.07 0.17 5.9 0.50 infill and 62.5 64.0 1.50 0.40 0.07 0.06 4.5 0.50 stepout KX18-43 29.0 32.0 3.00 0.42 0.21 0.01 2.4 0.53 infill KX18-44 164.6 184.4 19.80 1.88 0.65 0.79 44.8 2.98 infill including 166.1 173.7 7.60 4.23 0.77 1.71 100.6 6.38 infill including 168.0 169.0 1.60 8.85 0.79 4.56 105.0 12.88 infill KX18-47 6.1 16.8 10.70 0.61 0.02 1.46 29.8 1.78 infill including 7.6 12.2 4.60 0.91 0.02 2.42 49.2 2.84 infill and 54.9 73.2 18.30 0.96 0.08 0.83 26.3 1.72 stepout including 65.5 71.6 6.10 1.62 0.04 0.88 25.9 2.40 stepout and 77.7 82.3 4.60 2.54 0.07 2.85 57.0 4.83 stepout including 77.7 79.2 1.50 5.53 0.14 7.67 120.0 11.42 stepout KXD18-9 0.0 3.1 3.10 0.36 0.50 0.06 6.7 0.64 stepout and 13.7 16.8 3.00 0.48 2.07 0.07 6.6 1.38 stepout and 26.4 29.1 2.70 2.99 5.07 0.33 39.2 5.46 stepout including 27.4 29.1 1.70 5.19 8.82 0.42 59.1 9.32 stepout KXD18-10 0.0 1.5 1.50 0.71 1.10 0.12 8.8 1.28 infill and 7.3 32.0 24.70 1.58 1.96 1.20 28.7 3.33 infill including 11.9 13.4 1.50 2.85 4.80 7.93 43.2 10.13 infill including 17.7 32.0 14.30 2.23 1.11 0.89 41.5 3.54 infill including 26.5 29.4 2.90 4.53 0.19 4.02 256.3 9.11 infill including 21.0 21.9 0.90 7.72 1.46 3.32 83.5 11.05 infill KXD18-11 38.7 43.2 4.60 0.47 0.10 0.68 9.2 1.02 infill and 57.6 62.2 4.60 0.79 0.06 0.24 14.9 1.08 stepout including 57.6 59.1 1.50 1.61 0.09 0.70 41.0 2.40 stepout KXD18-12 9.8 11.3 1.50 0.40 0.06 0.02 9.3 0.51 infill and 84.4 88.4 4.00 0.55 0.07 0.03 15.0 0.71 stepout KXD18-13 22.7 26.5 3.80 0.59 0.07 0.13 17.8 0.83 infill including 25.1 26.5 1.30 1.23 0.05 0.49 53.5 1.97 infill Reported widths are drill widths, true widths have not been determined

Copper, zinc and silver were determined by the ICP method. Copper and zinc >1%ICP are assayed using four-acid digestion and silver >100ppm by four acid digestion, whereas gold was determined by a 30gm fire assay followed by atomic absorption. The QP for this news release notes that Phoenix inserted industry standards, blanks and duplicates into their sample stream, as standard QA/QC protocol.



There are currently 5 RC holes and 14 diamond drill holes, along with 298 surface channel samples, awaiting assay results. These results will be announced following the receipt of assay certificates and QA/QC sign-off.

Qualified Person

Roger Turner A.C.S.M., M.Sc., M.I.M.M.M., C.Eng., a Qualified Person as defined by National Instrument 43-101, and Chief Technical Officer and Director of Phoenix Global Mining, has reviewed and verified the technical mining information provided in this release. Mr. Turner is a graduate mining engineer from the Camborne School of Mines with an MSc in Economic Geology from Leicester University with more than 40 years experience in mine development, construction and operation.

SHAREHOLDER COMMUNICATIONS

ExGen is also pleased to announce that it recently became a member of the 8020 Connect Inc., ("8020 Connect"), investor community.

We invite all shareholders and stakeholders to join the ExGen Resources Inc. portal on 8020 Connect.

Connect here http://bit.ly/8020exgen

Through the 8020 platform, ExGen will engage with open lines of communication to ensure each shareholder and interested investor can stay up to date with corporate developments as well as have an opportunity to be engaged through a social media portal. The interactive structure of the portal provides for an opportunity for shareholders to become a part of the communication process and support the development of the Company's investor audience. 8020 Connect actively ensures timely and regulatory compliant information dissemination while providing one-stop access to company executives, news, and educational materials.

8020 Connect is the first social media platform directly connecting existing and potential investors to the Executive Management teams of the savviest publicly traded companies.

About ExGen Resources Inc.

ExGen, formerly Boxxer Gold Corp, is a project accelerator that seeks to fund exploration and development of our projects through joint ventures and partnership agreements. This approach significantly reduces the technical and financial risks for ExGen, while maintaining the upside exposure to new discoveries and potential cash flow. The company intends to build a diverse portfolio of projects across exploration stages and various commodity groups. ExGen currently has 6 projects in Canada and the US.

For more information on ExGen please contact ExGen Resources Inc.

Jason Tong

Chief Financial Officer

Email: jason@catapultgroup.ca

Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

Forward-Looking Information: This news release contains certain forward-looking information. All statements included herein, other than statements of historical fact, are forward-looking information and such information involves various risks and uncertainties. There can be no assurance that such information will prove to be accurate, and actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such information. In particular, this news release contains forward-looking information in relation to: the Empire Mine Project and the exploration and development of the Empire Mine Project; the earning of the Option by Phoenix and the potential transfer back to ExGen of the Konnex shares; the exploration and development strategy of the Empire Mine Project, including the exploration program, drilling, mine development, completion of a potential feasibility study in compliance with NI 43-101, and the timing for completion of these events; the timing for the completion of exploration drilling and the receipt of exploration information and drill assays; the potential of the underground sulphide mineralization and the potential re-opening of the 700 and 1100 level portals to assist in the analysis of the potential sulphide mineralization. There can be no assurance that such information will prove to be accurate, and actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such information. There can be no assurance that the development of the Empire Mine Project will be completed, and if development is completed, that such development will result in a producing mine. In the forward looking information contained in this news release, ExGen has made numerous assumptions, based upon practices and methodologies which are consistent with the mineral industry. In addition, ExGen has assumed: the continued market acceptance of its joint venture partnership model; the ability of ExGen to raise future equity financing, if needed, at prices acceptable to ExGen; ExGen's current and initial understanding and analysis of the Empire Mine Project; the ability of ExGen or third parties to discover viable exploration targets and the results of exploration on the Empire Mine Project; the ability of Phoenix to explore and develop the Empire Mine Project; the cost of exploration, including sampling, drilling and assaying, on the Empire Mine Project, the costs of developing the Empire Mine Project and the costs and the ability of Phoenix to produce a feasibility study in compliance with NI 43-101; the costs and work required to re-open the 700 and 1100 level portals; and ExGen's general and administrative costs remaining sustainable. While, ExGen considers these assumptions to be reasonable, these assumptions are inherently subject to significant uncertainties and contingencies. Additionally, there are known and unknown risk factors which could cause ExGen's observations, actual results, performance or achievements to be materially different from any future results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by the forward-looking information contained herein. Known risk factors include, among others: there is no certainty that the Option will result in significant exploration of the Empire Mine Project or development of the Empire Mine Project into a producing mine; uncertainties relating to interpretation of drill results and the geology, continuity and grade of mineralization and uncertainty as to the actual results of exploration and development or operational activities; uncertainty as to the availability and terms of future financing; uncertainty as to timely availability of permits and other governmental approvals; ExGen may not be able to comply with its ongoing obligations regarding its properties; the early stage development of ExGen and its projects, and in particular, the Empire Mine Project; general business, economic, competitive, political and social uncertainties; capital market conditions and market prices for securities, junior market securities and mining exploration company securities; commodity prices, in particular copper, gold, silver, and zinc prices; competition; changes in project parameters as plans continue to be refined; accidents and other risks inherent in the mining industry; lack of insurance; delay or failure to receive board or regulatory approvals; changes in legislation, including environmental legislation, affecting ExGen; conclusions of economic evaluations; and lack of qualified, skilled labour or loss of key individuals. A description of additional assumptions and risk factors used to develop such forward-looking information that may cause actual results to differ materially from forward-looking information can be found in ExGen's disclosure documents on the SEDAR website at www.sedar.com. Although ExGen has attempted to identify important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those contained in forward-looking information, there may be other factors that cause results not to be as anticipated, estimated or intended. Accordingly, readers should not place undue reliance on forward-looking information. ExGen does not undertake to update any forward-looking information except in accordance with applicable securities laws.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-09-20 20:33:48|Editor: Li Xia

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XICHANG, Sept. 20 (Xinhua) -- China's BeiDou navigation satellites will provide danger alerts and navigation services for global users after the successful launch of two satellites on Wednesday.

The twin BeiDou-3 navigation satellites were sent into space on a single carrier rocket Long March-3B from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center at 10:07 p.m. on Wednesday. It was the 285th mission of the Long March rocket series.

The twin satellites are the 37th and 38th editions of the BeiDou navigation system. After a series of tests and evaluations, they will work together with 12 BeiDou-3 satellites already in orbit.

China will have BeiDou medium orbit rescue system with the launch of the two satellites and provide danger alerts and navigation services for users at sea, on land and in the sky, said Beidou spokesperson Ran Chengqi.

The rescue payload on the two satellites will improve the alarm forwarding efficiency and safeguard people's lives.

In February of this year, the BeiDou system was listed on a global satellite search and rescue implementation plan by COSPAS-SARSAT, an international satellite system for search and rescue.

In the future, the BeiDou navigation system will be able to send feedback information to people in danger, notifying them that their calls were received.

A basic system with 18 orbiting BeiDou-3 satellites will be in place by the end of the year. Named after the Chinese term for the Big Dipper, the BeiDou system started serving China in 2000 and the Asia-Pacific region in 2012.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-09-20 20:33:50|Editor: xuxin

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AMMAN, Sept. 20 (Xinhua) -- The Kuwait Fund for Arab Economic Development signed an agreement with Jordan Thursday to reschedule Jordan's debt of 300 million U.S. dollars for 40 years, with 15 years grace period.

The deal will help reduce the burden on Jordan and seeks to help the country overcome pressing challenges due to regional instability and negative consequences on the economy, Jordanian Ministry of Planning and International Cooperation said in a statement.

Ziad Obeidat, the ministry's acting secretary general, voiced appreciation to Kuwait for the deal, adding that it will help Jordan that is facing high public debt.

"Jordan is currently facing several financial challenges due to many issue including the influx of large numbers of Syrian refugees and the regional conditions and this deal will support Jordan's reform efforts," he said.

Kuwaiti officials voiced their support to Jordan, pledging continued support to help the country overcome challenges.

Jordan's public debt reached JD 26.6 billion during the first seven months of this year, compared to JD 25.4 billion at the end of 2017.

The country's economy is expected to grow by 1.8 percent at the end of the year, which experts believe is insufficient to create more jobs. Jordan's unemployment rate was 18.7 percent during the second quarter of 2018.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-09-20 20:43:53|Editor: Li Xia

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BEIJING, Sept. 20 (Xinhua) -- Xi Jinping, general secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, Thursday called for efforts to make reform focus on solving practical issues.

Xi, also Chinese president and chairman of the Central Military Commission, made the remarks while presiding over the fourth meeting of the central committee for deepening overall reform, which he heads.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-09-20 20:43:54|Editor: xuxin

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RAMALLAH, Sept. 20 (Xinhua) -- An official from Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) said Thursday that intensive Palestinian diplomatic movement is ongoing on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly (UNGA) in New York.

Hanan Ashrawi, member of PLO Executive Committee, told Xinhua that the Palestinian movement aims at "finding political alternatives and breaking the U.S. exclusive supervision over the peace process."

"We want to rally international support to our plight to find an international alternative away from the U.S. hegemony," said Ashrawi.

She added that Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas is set to hold a meeting with foreign ministers and diplomats of member states at the UNGA on Sept. 26.

The meeting will "focus on supporting the Palestinian cause and confronting U.S. policies that are based on unjust unilateral moves by recognizing Jerusalem as Israel's capital and cutting aid," Ashrawi said.

She expressed hope for a "more effective European role," noting that Abbas will visit France and Ireland before heading to New York.

The Palestinians have boycotted the U.S. administration since it recognized Jerusalem as Israel's capital and moved its embassy to Jerusalem.

They said in several statements that the U.S. "Deal of the Century" falls way short of their expectations and aspirations for lasting and just peace settlement.

The Middle East peace process was resumed more than once under U.S. supervision. The last round of U.S. sponsored negotiations between Palestine and Israel was ended in 2014 after nine months of talks without achieving any breakthrough.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-09-20 20:48:55|Editor: xuxin

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NAIROBI, Sept. 20 (Xinhua) -- Kenyan police on Thursday dawn raided a private residence in the coastal county of Kilifi and seized 92 kilograms of heroin valued at 1.5 million U.S. dollars.

The officers said they were acting on intelligence on the presence of the narcotics at the house.

The narcotics had been kept in bags and seemed to have been earmarked for transit at the time of the seizure.

Police said the owners of the house were not present at the time of the raid.

The seizure was described as huge given there has been a lull in such operations despite high consumption of narcotics in the coast region.

Kenyan police have mounted operations against drug trafficking and consumption in the past months in efforts to eradicate the menace.

Cases of drug trafficking have been on the rise in Kenya even as most traffickers avoid the mainly used routes to carry out their criminal enterprise.

Police said they now use roads as opposed to airports to carry out their business. The most commonly trafficked narcotics from Tanzania and through Uganda is heroin. Cocaine is also trafficked from the two countries.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-09-20 21:03:58|Editor: xuxin

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NICOSIA, Sept. 20 (Xinhua) -- Cyprus warned its European Union (EU) partners that it has reached its limits as far as immigration flows into the eastern Mediterranean island are concerned, and appealed for practical solidarity, government spokesman Prodromos Prodromou said on Thursday.

Prodromou said the appeal was made by President Nicos Anastasiades at an informal dinner of EU leaders who met in Salzburg on Wednesday to discuss current issues ahead of a formal summit, but mainly focusing on the upcoming Brexit.

"We are struggling to cope with an increase influx immigrants...Cyprus has reached the limits of its capacity to host asylum seekers," Anastasiades was quoted as saying.

He told his fellow EU leaders that Cyprus is counting on a joint EU response on solidarity and a policy to be applied proportionally by all European member states, pointing out that Turkey refuses to cooperate with Cyprus on implementing an agreement with EU to receive back immigrants arriving from its soil, said Prodromou.

Prodromou said that Anastasiades also spoke on the issue of Brexit as reports suggest that Britain and EU are possibly heading to a break-up without a formal agreement.

"President Anastasiades is discussing the issue from the point of view of the close relations that our country has with Britain and which we would not like to abandon," Prodromou said.

Cyprus is seeking an arrangement on thousands of Cypriot nationals who live in the British Sovereign Base Areas, which are considered as British soil under the 1960 agreements which led to the decolonization of the island.

As an EU member, Britain is currently using Cypriot ports to freely bring in supplies for its bases, but there will be an issue after a Brexit without a formal agreement containing arrangements similar to those being sought to regulate the British-Irish border.

On another issue, Anastasiades suggested holding a summit between EU and Arab states to be held in Egypt in February.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-09-20 21:34:03|Editor: xuxin

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JERUSALEM, Sept. 20 (Xinhua) -- Israel officially inaugurated a fast train between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, seven months behind schedule.

The new electrified route, which costs two billion U.S. dollars, is expected to be fully operational in 2019, according to local media reports.

The Ministry of Transportation said in a statement that a partial operation of the new route will begin on Tuesday. Passengers could only travel from Jerusalem to the Ben Gurion Airport, outside Tel Aviv.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Transportation Minister Israel Katz took a test ride in the new train.

Netanyahu hailed the event as a "historic moment," because connecting Jerusalem to the national train network heralds a "new era."

The route would be Israel's first electric railway. Once completed, it will travel at a speed of 160 kph, reducing the commute time from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv to less than 30 minutes.

Currently, a railway built about 126 years ago in the Ottoman Empire era takes an hour and 40 minutes. A bus drive between the two cities is usually affected by heavy traffic and might take more than an hour.

The new rail was originally planned to be launched in 2008 and its inauguration has been repeatedly postponed.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-09-20 21:49:10|Editor: xuxin

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BERLIN, Sept. 20 (Xinhua) -- Email exchanges between German far-right party AfD and an officially-independent association had reinforced suspicions that the party has benefited from illegal campaign finance, local media reported Thursday.

German newspapers Zeit and Woz and the German public broadcaster ARD had all run similar stories.

According to the reports, at least one regional AfD branch accepted an offer from the German law and freedom society to receive free copies of its pro-AfD Deutschland-Kurier newspaper ahead of last year's federal elections.

Emails providing evidence of such cooperation obtained by Zeit, Woz and ARD hereby further implicate the AfD party in an ongoing illegal campaign finance scandal which could result in the imposition of hefty fines.

So far, the law and freedom society, which is a close affiliate of the Swiss marketing company Goal AG, has refused to reveal the identity of its financiers.

Although it is illegal for political parties in Germany to accept donations without being aware of the exact source of funds used, several AfD election campaign initiatives have been channeled through the two organizations since 2016.

The administrative office of the German parliament (Bundestag) has recently launched a formal investigation into the matter.

Under German law, illegally-received campaign finance must be forwarded immediately to the office of the president of the federal parliament by the party in question.

Despite previously rejecting accusations of illegal campaign finance, the AfD surprisingly already made a first small transfer of 535,225 euros (629,663 U.S. dollars) to the federal parliament administration in early August, a sum which is equivalent to the value of two specific supportive measures rendered by Goal AG to AfD leader Joerg Moethen.

In earlier bookkeeping reports filed on campaign contributions, the AfD has described the assistance received from Goal AG worth several million euros in total as a "friendship service" which should not be categorized as regular party income.

Back in July, Moethen also claimed contrary to the emails published on Thursday that his party had "never worked together with this (related) law and freedom society".

Speaking to Zeit, Woz and ARD, Sophie Schoenberger, a law professor at the University of Konstanz, described the exchanges as clear evidence for cooperation and illegal in-kind election campaign financing in the shape of thousands of free Deutschland-Kurier copies.

"There is an urgent suspicion that it amounts to an illicit donation," Schoenberger said.

A spokesperson for the administrative office of the German parliament told press on Thursday that it was currently in the process of assessing the new evidence which had surfaced in relation to its probe.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-09-20 21:54:10|Editor: xuxin

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MOSCOW, Sept. 20 (Xinhua) -- The recent downing of a Russian military plane in Syria requires additional investigations and explanations from Israel, and new information about its involvement will be available soon, the Russian Foreign Ministry said Thursday.

An Il-20 surveillance plane with 15 people on board was mistakenly downed by a Syrian missile on Monday, when Israel was conducting an airstrike on Syria's Latakia province at the same time.

The Defense Ministry said that using the Russian aircraft as a shield against Syrian air defense systems was an "irresponsible action" of the Israeli army and it led the accident.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-09-20 22:09:14|Editor: Liangyu

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Greek President Prokopis Pavlopoulos (R) welcomes German Minister of Foreign Affairs Heiko Maas in Athens, Greece, on Sept. 20, 2018. (Xinhua/Marios Lolos)

ATHENS, Sept. 20 (Xinhua) -- Greece and Germany support a stronger common EU foreign and security policy, Greek President Prokopis Pavlopoulos and visiting German Minister of Foreign Affairs Heiko Maas said here on Thursday.

"Your visit coincides with the informal EU summit in Austria and the agenda of this meeting I think that highlights how important is the issue of strengthening the pillar of the EU's Foreign and Security Policy," Pavlopoulos said while welcoming Maas.

"We do have the institutional framework. Inaction in front of what is happening in the wider area is unacceptable. We should not leave this pillar weak, when it comes to the common foreign policy ... as well as in issues of security. The refugee issue is of existential significance for the European Union, as I have said many times," the Greek leader stressed, according to an e-mailed press release.

"I agree with what you have said Mr. President regarding the common Foreign and Security Policy which is very important for us and a challenge," the German minister said on his part.

"It is important to seek a solution to the migration issue with all partners assuming responsibilities. Maybe not all sides assume the same weight, but one cannot only talk about the rights that come with EU membership and seek them and in parallel setting aside the obligations," he added.

On the agenda of separate talks with Greek foreign minister Nikos Kotzias on Thursday were also efforts to strengthen bilateral ties and developments in the western Balkans and the eastern Mediterranean, the two ministers said in joint statements to the press.

"We support the Prespes agreement... Stability and security (in the Balkans) is our common goal," Kotzias said, according to Greek public broadcaster ERT, referring to the agreement the Greek government reached with Skopje authorities in June to end a long-standing dispute over the use of the term "Macedonia".

Maas who visited also Skopje and Tirana before arriving in Athens talked about a "historic opportunity" to strengthen stability in the region by solving the issue.

The German minister also praised Greek people for the difficult battles they gave in recent years to exit the acute debt crisis which started in late 2009.

The country exited on Aug. 20 this year the third of the bailout programs implemented to address the crisis.

"We are confident that Greek economy will continue on the path of recovery," Maas said.
TSX-Venture Exchange: RRL



CALGARY, Alberta, Sept. 20, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- SugarBud Craft Growers Corp. (SugarBud or the Company) (trading as Relentless Resources Ltd.) is pleased to announce the results of its rights offering (the Rights Offering) to holders (Shareholders) of common shares (Common Shares) of SugarBud. Under the Rights Offering, Shareholders subscribed for and purchased an aggregate of 110,261,353 units (each, a Unit) for total approximate proceeds of $7.4 million, of which an aggregate of approximately $1.5 million worth of Units was purchased by insiders, management, and key shareholders of the Company. Units were subscribed for at a price of $0.0675 per Unit. Each Unit will consist of one Common Share and one half of one Common Share purchase warrant (a Warrant), with each whole Warrant entitling the holder thereof to purchase one Common Share at a price of $0.10 until September 12, 2023.



Mr. Jeff Swainson, Chief Financial Officer of SugarBud stated: This highly successful Rights Offering for proceeds of $7.4 million demonstrates the continued support provided by SugarBuds shareholders, and the belief that they have in our hybrid business model. We previously announced a $17.65 million non-dilutive credit facility with Farm Credit Canada and we have now achieved a significant equity investment led by our devoted insider group and new institutional shareholders. Under a full development we will have the luxury of an appropriate capital structure and a very low cost of capital, and at this stage we do not require any further dilution. In addition to our successful financings, which demonstrate strong access to capital, we are moving diligently to finalize Change of Business, to close the Grunewahl acquisition, and to close the second tranche of the Inner Spirit investment. Perhaps most importantly, we continue to execute on the construction of Phase 1 of our 29,800 square foot Stavely, Alberta aeroponic cannabis cultivation facility, which is currently progressing on-time and on-budget.

The Company also announces that it continues to work diligently with the TSX Venture Exchange (TSXV) to obtain approval in respect of a series of transactions (the Transactions) that will collectively constitute a Change of Business of the Company from an exclusively oil and gas company to an emerging cannabis and oil and gas company. The Transactions include, without limitation: (i) the completion of the Rights Offering; (ii) the acquisition (the Acquisition) of Grunewahl Organics Inc. (Grunewahl); (iii) the second tranche of a strategic investment with Inner Spirit Holdings Ltd. (Inner Spirit); (iv) the entering into of a strategic alliance agreement with Inner Spirit that will govern the on-going business relationship of the parties; and (v) the appointment of Darren Bondar, Chief Executive Officer of Inner Spirit, as a director of SugarBud.

Grunewahl is a late stage applicant under Health Canadas Access to Cannabis for Medical Purposes Regulations (ACMPR). The Grunewahl Acquisition will not close until the Company receives approval of Change of Business from the TSXV and current shareholders of Grunewahl will not receive their SugarBud Common Shares until the Acquisition closes.

Closing of the Transactions (including the Rights Offering) is subject to a number of conditions including, but not limited to: TSXV approval of the Change of Business; approval of the Transactions by greater than 50.1% of Shareholders by written consent (which has been achieved); and closing conditions customary to transactions of the nature of the Transactions. The Acquisition was approved by Grunewahls shareholders at a special meeting held on September 11, 2018.

The Rights Offering will result in the issuance of 110,261,353 Common Shares and 55,130,677 Warrants underlying the Units, following which the Company will have 330,784,059 Common Shares and 146,001,083 Warrants outstanding. No Units will be issued in connection with the Rights Offering.

The Company is unable to determine when Shareholders will receive their Common Shares and Warrants issued as a result of their participation in the Rights Offering.

Upon completion of the Transactions, the Company intends to use the proceeds of the Rights Offering to fund an aeroponic cannabis cultivation facility at Stavely, Alberta, which is currently under construction.

Upon completion of the Transactions, the Company intends to be listed on the TSXV as a Tier 2 Life Sciences Issuer. Trading in the common shares of the Company is expected to commence on the TSXV under the name SugarBud Craft Growers Corp. and the symbol SUGR following the issuance by the TSXV of its final bulletin in respect of the Transactions.

The Company also announces that, pursuant to the terms and conditions of its stock option plan, it has granted an aggregate of 10,150,000 stock options to purchase Common Shares to directors and officers of the Company. The options expire five years from the date of grant and are exercisable at a price of $0.11 per Common Share. The options vest as to one third on the grant date and one third on each of the first and second anniversaries of the grant date.

The Company also announces the resignation of Stanley Swiatek from the board of directors of the Company. The Company thanks Mr. Swiatek for his contributions.

About SugarBud Craft Growers Corp.

SugarBud is a Calgary based emerging cannabis and oil and natural gas company engaged in the development, acquisition and production of cannabis and natural gas and crude oil reserves in Alberta.

For further information regarding this news release, please contact:

Craig Kolochuk

President & Chief Executive Officer

SugarBud Craft Growers Corp.

Phone: (403) 875-5665

E-mail: craigk@sugarbud.ca Jeff Swainson

Chief Financial Officer

SugarBud Craft Growers Corp.

Phone: (403) 796-3640

E-mail: jeffs@sugarbud.ca



Investor Relations Contact

Gary Perkins, President

Tekkfund Capital Corp.

Tel: (416) 882-0020

E-mail: garyperkins@rogers.com

Website: http://www.sugarbud.ca/

Address: Suite 620, 634  6th Avenue S.W., Calgary, Alberta T2P 0S4

Telephone: 4035324466

Fax: 5879559668

Reader Advisory

Completion of the Transactions (including the Rights Offering) is subject to a number of conditions, including but not limited to, TSXV acceptance and Shareholder approval. Investors are cautioned that, except as disclosed in the filing statement to be filed in connection with the Transactions, any information released or received with respect to the Transactions may not be accurate or complete and should not be relied upon. There can be no assurance that the Transactions will be completed as proposed or at all. Trading in the securities of SugarBud should be considered highly speculative. The TSXV has in no way passed upon the merits of the Transactions and has neither approved nor disapproved of the contents of this news release.

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 release.

Forward Looking and Cautionary Statements

This news release may include forward-looking statements including opinions, assumptions, estimates, the Companys assessment of future plans and operations, and, more particularly, statements concerning the completion of the Transactions (including the Rights Offering), the use of proceeds of the Rights Offering and the trading in the common shares of the Company under the new name and new symbol. When used in this document, the words will, anticipate, believe, estimate, expect, intent, may, project, should, and similar expressions are intended to be among the statements that identify forward-looking statements. The forward-looking statements are founded on the basis of expectations and assumptions made by the Company which include, but are not limited to, the timely receipt of all required securityholder, TSXV and regulatory approvals and the satisfaction of other closing conditions in accordance with the terms of the amalgamation agreement entered into between SugarBud and Grunewahl and the investment agreement entered into between SugarBud and Inner Spirit. Forward-looking statements are subject to a wide range of risks and uncertainties, and although the Company believes that the expectations represented by such forward-looking statements are reasonable, there can be no assurance that such expectations will be realized. Any number of important factors could cause actual results to differ materially from those in the forward-looking statements including, but not limited to: regulatory and third party approvals, including receipt of cultivation and sales licenses from Health Canada, not being obtained in the manner or timing anticipated; the ability to implement corporate strategies; the state of domestic capital markets; the ability to obtain financing; changes in general market conditions; industry conditions and events; the size of the medical marijuana market and the recreational marijuana market; government regulations, including future legislative and regulatory developments involving medical and recreational marijuana; construction delays; competition from other industry participants; and other factors more fully described from time to time in the reports and filings made by the Company with securities regulatory authorities. Please refer to the Companys annual information form (AIF) and managements discussion and analysis (MD&A) for the year ended December 31, 2017 for additional risk factors relating to the Company. The AIF and MD&A can be accessed under the Companys profile on www.sedar.com.

Except as required by applicable laws, the Company does not undertake any obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statements.




Source: Xinhua| 2018-09-20 22:09:15|Editor: zh

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Photo taken on Sept. 20, 2018 shows the entrance of the exhibition "Rome: City and Empire" at the National Museum of Australia in Canberra, Australia. Two wall paintings from Pompeii, a frieze featuring a rare depiction of female gladiators and sculptures of figures dressed in Persian style were among the treasures brought by the British Museum to National Museum of Australia in Canberra. (Xinhua/Pan Xiangyue)

by Bai Xu

CANBERRA, Sept. 20 (Xinhua) -- Two wall paintings from Pompeii, a frieze featuring a rare depiction of female gladiators and sculptures of figures dressed in Persian style were among the treasures brought by the British Museum to National Museum of Australia in Canberra.

The exhibition, "Rome: City and Empire," will start on Friday and will run until Feb. 3, 2019. It put on display more than 200 objects dating from the 9th century BC to the late 6th century AD.

"The story of Rome and its vast empire continue to captivate and intrigue people almost 3,000 years after their foundation," said Dr. Hartwig Fischer, director of the British Museum.

Dr. Mathew Trinca, director of the National Museum of Australia, said that the Roman Empire's legacy "endures in modern Australia today, encompassing our languages, our art and architecture, the design of our towns and cities and the laws by which we live."

The largest statue of the show is the colossal Roman magistrate from 70 to 90 AD, which featured an adult male in a toga and holding a scroll standing at 2.41 meters tall.

Another imposing marble statue is a priestess from 25 to 50 AD, which was rarely on display even in London. "It was prepared specifically for the exhibition," said Dr. Thorsten Opper, British Museum senior curator, head of the museum's Roman section. "It took us hours of conservation to get her back to stage."

He also liked two colored wall paintings from Pompeii, the Roman city destroyed when Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 AD.

"It feels like a moment frozen in time," he said. "I was really touched by this, a swallow and a sparrow. I always think when I look out of my kitchen window in the morning in Oxford, that is what I could see now."

The exhibition also includes a massive marble head of Empress Faustina I of 140 AD, which stands 1.7 meters tall and weighs 1,000 kg. The head came from a statue that once stood in the temple of Artemis at Sardis in Turkey.

"She was the wife of Emperor Antoninus Pius. At that time we know there are record of delegations between Roman Empire and China," Opper told Xinhua. "It gave you a sense of the diversity and the vast region of Rome."

Roman Empire was vast at that time, "from Scottish borders in the North to Sahara Desert in the South, from the Atlantic Ocean in the West to the Caucasus Mountains and Persian Gulf in the east," Opper said.

So the exhibition also demonstrated diversity of the culture within the empire. "We have objects almost from every province of Rome, from Europe, from Africa, from the Middle East. There is a gold coin excavated in India. The Romans paid for pepper and luxury goods," said the curator.

Opper especially talked about three exotic statues found from tombs between 200 and 273 AD in Palmyra, Syria. Pointing at a female image, he said that yellow pigment is still visible on the elaborately decorated headband of the woman, which means that objects like this would have originally been colored.

Next to the exhibit there is a screen. Visitors could apply their own color scheme to the image on the screen.

Although thousands years have passed and gone are the days of the Roman glory, people have never ceased to make new discoveries.

Opper told Xinhua that a latest discovered object was a golden votive plaque for the goddess Seuna, which was found in England in 2003. "It was discovered by metal detector by enthusiasts," he said.

The Roman Empire also never ceased to impress people nowadays, according to Dr. Lily Withycombe, curator of the National Museum of Australia, citing Australian writer Colleen McCullough's Masters of Rome series and actor Russell Crowe's blockbuster Gladiator.

"Ancient Rome continues to resonate in Australia and in the world," she said.

Withycombe said one of her favorite exhibit was a large stone with the sculpture of female gladiators, found in Turkey. "It is such a surprising representation of women in the ancient world," she said.

"At the exhibition we not only have monuments like statues and architectural fragments from imperials palaces and villas, and also the everyday objects of the ordinary people," said Opper, the British curator. "Two thousand years disappear, and you feel you are there, having a dialogue with people who lived under the Roman Empire."
Source: Xinhua| 2018-09-20 22:22:48|Editor: mmm

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Aerial photo taken on Sept. 20, 2018 shows combine harvesters working in rice paddies during a rice harvest festival held in Xinpu Village, Xuyi County of Huai'an, east China's Jiangsu Province. The local farmers are encouraged to use rice paddies to raise crayfish, which is also a popular foodstuff in Chinese cooking. The Xuyi County government has succeeded in boosting farmers' income by promoting such agricultural mode. (Xinhua/Li Xiang)
Source: Xinhua| 2018-09-20 22:19:17|Editor: xuxin

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BUDAPEST, Sept. 20 (Xinhua) -- A Hungarian tribunal in Szeged gave a final five-year jail sentence to a Syrian man on Thursday for "act of terrorism" perpetrated on the Hungarian border with Serbia in a clash between migrants and Hungarian police in the summer of 2015.

The tribunal found him guilty of "illegal crossing of a border as a participant and as a coordinator of a riot aimed at enforcing the State with an act of terrorist offense, as well as in violent behavior against a person".

The man may be released on conditional leave after having purged two thirds of the punishment at the earliest.

In his decision, the tribunal relieved the seven-year prison sentence imposed by the First Instance Court of Szeged in March earlier this year.

The sentence was lowered due to the fact that the defendant did not speak Hungarian and he had to take care of his family living abroad, according to the court.

Ahmed H., a 41-year-old resident of Cyprus for around a decade, has already received a ten-year term in November 2016, but a court of appeal in Szeged last June has annulled that first verdict in June 2017.

The court in southern Hungary had ordered a retrial, citing inconsistent evidence in the original trial.

After the end of his jail term, Ahmed H will also be expelled from Hungary for a period of ten years, as an additional sentence.

During the legal procedures, Ahmed H. repeatedly rejected the charge of terrorist acts. He said that he just planned to help his family get away from war.

The Syrian man was arrested in Hungary in September of 2015 following the clashes. The prosecutors also claimed that Ahmed H. had thrown rocks at police, and given police an ultimatum.

The verdict comes in the middle of tensions between the Hungarian government and the European Union.

Last week, the European Parliament adopted the so-called Sargentini report, condemning Hungary for the non respect of EU values it vowed to respect upon its entry in the EU back in 2004.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-09-20 22:39:24|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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MANILA, Sept. 20 (Xinhua) -- The Philippine Navy has sent a strategic sealift vessel for a port visit to Russia, a military spokesman said on Thursday.

Jonathan Zata, the Philippine Navy spokesman, said the strategic sealift vessel BRP Tarlac with around 440 personnel, which left Manila on Thursday morning, is scheduled for a port visit to Russian Pacific Fleet in Vladivostok.

According to the spokesman, the Philippine Navy ship is due to arrive at the Russian naval base in Vladivostok on Oct. 1 and will depart on Oct. 6.

"It's a goodwill visit in reciprocation of the port visits by the Russia Navy. We're reciprocating the Russian Navy efforts and we're looking forward to improving further relations between our Navy and theirs," said Zata.

Russian Navy warships paid port visits to the Philippines in October last year and this June.

"This is the first time that a Philippine Navy contingent will visit the Russian Pacific Fleet in Vladivostok," Zata added.

While in Russia, Zata said the contingent will be engaged in various activities, including a visit of the headquarters of the Russian Pacific Fleet and a Russian submarine manufacturing facility.

After visiting Russia, the Philippine Navy ship will head to Jeju Island in South Korea to participate in the International Fleet Review, added the spokesman.

BRP Tarlac, one of the largest Philippine Navy ships in service, has an overall length of 120 meters, breadth of 21 meters. The ship can carry 500 troops, two rigid-hull inflatable boats, two landing craft units and three helicopters.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-09-20 23:09:32|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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BERLIN, Sept. 20 (Xinhua) -- German Social Democrat (SPD) leader Andrea Nahles has announced on Thursday that emergency talks will take place in her party next week in response to an angry backlash against the promotion of former intelligence chief Hans-Georg Maassen.

Speaking to press in Munich, Nahles admitted that a recent decision by the federal government to transfer Maassen from the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV) to a more senior post as secretary of state had sparked a heated debate within the SPD.

Earlier, the party, which forms a "grand coalition" government with the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and Christian Social Union (CSU), threatened to return to the opposition benches unless chancellor Angela Merkel (CDU) ensured that Maassen was sacked as president of the BfV.

Maassen is at the center of an escalating national controversy in Germany for questioning the authenticity of video footage showing right-wing extremists chasing foreigners in Chemnitz. In doing so, the intelligence agency chief directly contradicted Merkel and local security officers on the issue, only to backtrack on the public statements again in a subsequent report.

Although Maassen's promotion was justified by Nahles and the leadership of the CDU and CSU as a pragmatic compromise to preserve the continued existence of the "grand coalition", the personnel decision has provoked outrage among many SPD members.

Maassen will now receive a pay rise while continuing to report to interior minister and CSU leader Horst Seehofer, a staunch supporter of the former BfV president.

Nahles argued on Thursday that confronted with the protection offered by Seehofer to Maassen, she had been forced to make a difficult decision which would still enable the SPD to achieve its desired removal of the intelligence officer from the BfV. She emphasized, however, that this did not mean that she agreed with the decision of Seehofer to offer Maassen a better post in his own ministry and understood resulting criticism.

For a growing number of senior SPD politicians, the time has now come for the party to either resist the unusual personnel reshuffle or turn its back on the increasingly unpopular "grand coalition" entirely.

"I urge all SPD members in the governing cabinet to vote against Maassen's nomination," SPD vice-president Natascha Kohnen told the German press agency (dpa).

Similarly, SPD youth organization (Jusos) leader Kevin Kuehnert argued that the SPD could not afford to allow itself to be mocked by Seehofer. According to Kuehnert, it was already high time for the German Social Democrats to quit Merkel's fourth ruling cabinet in order to prevent further losses of voter support.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-09-20 23:19:35|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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MOSCOW, Sept. 20 (Xinhua) -- The recent downing of a Russian military plane in Syria requires further investigation and an explanation from Israel, the Russian Foreign Ministry said Thursday.

An Il-20 surveillance plane with 15 people on board was mistakenly downed by a Syrian missile on Monday, when Israel was conducting an airstrike on Syria's Latakia province at the same time.

The Defense Ministry said Tuesday that using the Russian aircraft as a shield against Syrian air defense systems was an "irresponsible action" by the Israeli army and led to the accident.

"For my part, I believe that the Israeli pilots who created the threat resulting in the destruction of the Russian aircraft ... behaved unprofessionally, to say the least," the ministry spokeswoman said at a news briefing.

Russian and foreign media reported earlier that an Israeli Defense Force delegation led by the commander of the Israeli Air Force would visit Moscow Thursday to provide an explanation.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-09-20 23:24:39|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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WASHINGTON, Sept. 20 (Xinhua) -- Multiple victims were reported in a shooting on Thursday morning in Harford County, in the U.S. state of Maryland, local police said.

"We can confirm there was a shooting in the area of Spesutia Road and Perryman Road. Multiple victims." the Harford County sheriff's office tweeted.

"The situation is still fluid. Please avoid the area." the tweet went on.

The police said the shooting erupted at a business park area near Aberdeen, about 55 miles (about 88 kms) northeast of Baltimore.

Maryland Governor Larry Hogan tweeted that his office was closely monitoring the "horrific shooting" in Aberdeen.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-09-20 23:39:42|Editor: Liangyu

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MOSCOW, Sept. 20 (Xinhua) -- The Russian government approved Thursday a draft of the country's federal budget for the next three years, expecting a surplus during the period.

"The surplus of the Russian budget in 2019 will be 1.8 percent of GDP, and the budget will be in surplus in the next three-year period," said First Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister Anton Siluanov.

The Russian Economic Development Ministry said earlier this month it expects the country's budget this year to be in a surplus of around 1 percent of gross domestic product (GDP).

Russia's budget surplus is planned at 1.8 percent of GDP in 2019, 1.1 percent of GDP in 2020 and 0.8 percent of GDP in 2021, according to the draft quoted by Russian news agencies.

The budget has to pass three readings in the Russian State Duma, the lower parliament house, then be endorsed by the Federation Council upper parliament house before being signed into law by Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-09-20 23:49:44|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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by Farid Behbud

KABUL, Sept. 20 (Xinhua) -- Established in 2008, Shamsa Children's Village has now become a peaceful home for orphans and abandoned children as well as vulnerable women in a permanent family environment in the Afghan capital city of Kabul.

Maryam Gailani, the founder of the center and the Adela Foundation, provides financial support for the orphanage, which currently houses 130 children of which 50 are girls, according to Nadera Kharoot, the principal of the Shamsa Children's Village refuge.

"We are witnessing tragic and deadly incidents in Afghanistan. We're accommodating a new orphan every day. Maryam Gailani and her honored family's concept was to urgently establish such a shelter to help parentless children feel comfortable and peaceful," principal Kharoot told Xinhua recently.

Highly proud of calling her orphanage a "mini-Afghanistan," she said a number of deserving children were unbiasedly collected from around the country through a board within the Ministry of Labor, Social Affairs, Martyrs and Disabled and sent to the orphanage, aimed at giving them the feeling and sense of a real and peaceful home.

Children of the secure center which provides academic studies, located in the Qasaba vicinity of the 15th municipality district of Kabul city, are not only enrolled in private and government schools free of charge, but are also provided with complementary subjects such as English language, computer programming and holy Quran studies, inside the 24-hour dormitory.

They are also regularly taken on outdoor recreational trips.

"The Chinese embassy has been supporting Shamsa Children's Village in establishing a reading room and has provided books to the children here," Kharoot said.

According to Kharoot, Sino-Afghan relations in recent years have deepened and been elevated to a higher level thanks to the Belt and Road Initiative, proposed by China in 2013. The initiative has provided Shamsa Children's Village with the facilities to make children's dreams a reality.

One grade-5 student, Shahab, from Parwan, a province north of Kabul, who attends the Ufoq-e-Sabz private school, said he was delighted to live and study in the orphanage.

"My father became a drug addict in Iran and died after returning home. My mother married another man and no one was looking after me. I was sent here, and through the help of this center, I am hopeful for a brighter future," said Shahab, adding that he hoped to become a doctor in the future.

Pari Gul, a grade 7 student who lost her father to a suicide attack said her mother remarried and could not support her, so her cousin took her here.

Each child becomes part of a 12-member family of brothers and sisters at the center which is set to expand to accommodate more children.

The center not only helps orphans, but also aids vulnerable women who would have nowhere to go otherwise.

Nasima, a widow and mother of four children said she works as a foster mother in the orphanage. "Taliban insurgents killed my husband and I now work as a foster mother here. I have three daughters with me here but my son is in another orphanage," she said.

Kharoot urged all national and international donors to cooperate with the orphanage as it plans to widen its activity and help orphans around the country.

"We plan to travel to provinces and identify the needy children on our own to take them to the center, if we gain more assistance," she said.

Expressing her heartfelt appreciation for China's assistance, including the latest donation to the orphanage center, she said that China and Afghanistan are true friends.

The Chinese embassy has donated lap-top computers, schoolbags, notebooks, toys and some other necessities, as well as providing a well-equipped library.

The embassy has also funded a wide-capacity water reservoir and rebuilt the center's boundary wall.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-09-20 23:59:46|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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WASHINGTON, Sept. 20 (Xinhua) -- Three people were killed and two others wounded in a shooting on Thursday morning at a business park area in Harford County, U.S. east state Maryland, the authorities said.

A shooter opened fire at a Rite Aid distribution center in Aberdeen, local media reported.

Local WBAL TV station reported that the suspect is a female and has been taken to a hospital, quoting law enforcement source.

"What I understand is the location is secure," Rite Aid spokeswoman Susan Henderson told CNN.

"The distribution center is where products are received and processed for delivery," she said. "This is part of a large facility that is a distribution center. The shooting happened adjacent to the primary building."

Henderson said about 1,000 employees work at the drugstore's Aid support facility.

A caller, identifying herself as Alexi, told local WBAL TV station her mother had texted her to report a shooter in her building. The mother finally responded to another family member after 90 minutes to report she was safe.

Following the shooting, Maryland Governor Larry Hogan tweeted that his office was closely monitoring the "horrific shooting" in Aberdeen.

One day earlier, at least four people were injured in a shooting at a judge's office in Fayette County, Pennsylvania. The shooter was reportedly dead on the scene.

The Fayette shooting came just hours after a gunman opened fire on Wednesday morning at a Wisconsin software company, wounding four people before being killed in a shootout with police.
VANCOUVER, British Columbia, Sept. 20, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Integrated Cannabis Company, Inc. (CSE: ICAN, OTCQB: ICNAF) (Integrated Cannabis), is pleased to announce the completion of a Letter of Intent (LOI) to distribute X-SPRAYS products throughout the clinics and doctors offices of Empower Clinics Inc. (CSE: EPW; FRA: 8EC) (Empower), a leading owner and operator of medical cannabis and wellness clinics in the United States (US).



The companies have recently engaged with their marketing and distribution teams to streamline the logistics of rolling out new products in the Empower clinics. Integrated Cannabis will distribute all of its CBD-infused X-SPRAYS including; CBD, Sleep, Recover, Libido and Energy throughout the Empower ecosystem.

We believe this milestone marks another significant move for distribution of X-SPRAYS in key markets across the United States. In addition, we believe this alliance will help increase awareness from credible sources about alternative treatments for those struggling with opioid addiction, pain, anxiety, sleep issues and people seeking overall well-being, said Mr. John Knapp, CEO of Integrated Cannabis. The Company expects to sign a definitive agreement with Empower in the coming weeks.

We are very excited about our partnership with X-SPRAYS as we believe it brings leading technology and treatment for the most common conditions our patients face. X-SPRAYS state of the art product formulations and unique metered dosage help consistently deliver a world class product, said Mr. Craig Snyder, CEO of Empower.

As of August 31, Empower has more than 25,000 patients under care across 15 locations with medical cannabis treatments in Oregon, Washington and Illinois. The patient base in Oregon represents approximately one-third of the states total medical card issuance. In addition, Empower has an historical patient database of more than 120,000 in the two states.

On September 12, Empower announced the opening of its flagship Chicago clinic. In Illinois, the company seeks to expand its operations and achieve a leadership position as it executes on parallel national clinic and product strategies. There is currently an opioid epidemic in the United States and the companys announced Chicago facility closely followed the endorsement by Illinois Governor Bruce Rauner of medical cannabis as a frontline treatment and alternative for patients with a new statewide measure he signed into law on Aug 28.

ABOUT EMPOWER

Empower is a leading owner and operator of medical cannabis and wellness clinics, as well as a developer of medical products in the US, focused on enabling individuals to improve and protect their health. The company provides treatment solutions through its physician-staffed clinics that are focused on education, data, and efficacy. Empower is a recognized leader and the first choice for patients seeking quality experience and improved health.

About Integrated Cannabis Company

Integrated Cannabis Company, Inc. is comprised of dedicated scientists and product engineers who are passionate about health and creating health and lifestyle products utilizing advanced delivery systems and formulations. For more information, please visit the companys website at: www.x-sprays.com.

ON BEHALF OF THE BOARD

John Knapp

Chief Executive Officer

For further information, please contact:

Telephone: 778-403-3358

Email: info@cnrpmining.com

The CSE does not accept responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

Neither the Canadian Securities Exchange nor its Market Regulator (as that term is defined in the policies of the Canadian Securities Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release. The Canadian Securities Exchange has not in any way passed upon the merits of the proposed transaction and has neither approved nor disapproved the contents of this press release.

This news release may include forward-looking statements that are subject to risks and uncertainties. All statements within, other than statements of historical fact, are to be considered forward looking. Although the Company believes the expectations expressed in such forward-looking statements are based on reasonable assumptions, such statements are not guarantees of future performance and actual results or developments may differ materially from those in forward-looking statements. Factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those in forward-looking statements include market prices, exploitation and exploration successes, continued availability of capital and financing, and general economic, market or business conditions. There can be no assurances that such statements will prove accurate and, therefore, readers are advised to rely on their own evaluation of such uncertainties. We do not assume any obligation to update any forward-looking statements except as required under the applicable laws.




Source: Xinhua| 2018-09-21 00:04:49|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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Syria's Assistant Foreign Minister Ayman Soussan speaks during an interview with Xinhua on Sept. 20, 2018. The official said that the recently reached deal for creating a demilitarized zone in Syria's northwestern province of Idlib is a temporary one and should end with ridding Idlib of terrorism. (Xinhua/Monsef Memari)

DAMASCUS, Sept. 20 (Xinhua) -- The recently reached deal for creating a demilitarized zone in Syria's northwestern province of Idlib is a temporary one and should end with ridding Idlib of terrorism, Syria's Assistant Foreign Minister Ayman Soussan told Xinhua in an interview Thursday.

Soussan's remarks came against the backdrop of the deal that was reached earlier this week between Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan about the need to establish a demilitarized zone between the Syrian forces and the rebels in Idlib province, which is considered as the last major rebel stronghold in Syria.

During a joint press conference with his Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Russian President Vladimir Putin said that the demilitarization zone will be established by Oct. 15. It will be created along the contact line of the armed opposition and the government forces with a depth of 15-20 km.

The radical rebels will withdraw from the demilitarized zone along with heavy weapons.

The deal came after negotiations between the Russian and Turkish sides, as the Syrian army was preparing to launch an all-out offensive to rid Idlib of the ultra-radical groups, which stood against the government's reconciliation offers such as the al-Qaida-linked Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), or the Levant Liberation Committee.

The Syrian army has been sending reinforcement to the frontline areas around Idlib as part of preparations to launch a wide-scale offensive to retake Idlib, where three million civilians live along with an estimated number of up to 50,000 rebels, including al-Qaida-linked ones.

The Syrian Foreign Ministry said in a statement that the Syrian government welcomes the deal.

In his interview Thursday, Soussan said that the deal is positive for the Syrian government as it would help in ridding Idlib of terrorist groups.

"First, this deal has been reached after consultations with the Syrian government, and secondly, it has pushed far the ghost of armed confrontation, and thirdly it would achieve the main goal for us, which is eliminating terrorism," the official said.

The official made it clear that the deal is temporary not a permanent one, noting that it should end with the full return of Idlib under the government control and the end of terror groups' presence in that part of the country.

"The basis of this formula in these areas is that this measure (Idlib deal) is temporary as it should end with the ridding the areas of terrorism, achieving national reconciliation and the full return of the authority of the Syrian state and its constitutions to those areas," he said.

He stressed that "in the final stages of achieving this deal, Idlib should return under the Syrian government control just as it was before."

Soussan pointed out to fact that any deal that could lead to end terrorism would surely be a step on the way out of the more than seven-year-long crisis, stressing that there should be no areas in Syrian under the control of the rebels or foreign forces that have entered Syrian without the consent of the government such as the U.S.-led coalition.

"There would be no abnormal situation in Syria and what I mean by that is that there would be no areas out of the government control, especially the areas under the terrorist groups' control or the control of foreign forces or some (foreign-backed) militias such as those in eastern Syria," he said, referring to the U.S.-backed forces operating in the eastern part of the country.

He reiterated that the Syrian government will wrest full control over Syria, adding that the presence of foreign forces without Damascus' consent is unacceptable.

"The return of the government's authority to all of Syria will be full and any foreign presence on Syrian soil without the consent of the Syrian government and out of the international framework is an illegitimate foreign occupation and it must end," he said.

The foreign ministry official stressed that "the only legitimate force in Syria is the Syrian Arab Army other than that any presence of other forces wouldn't be acceptable."
Source: Xinhua| 2018-09-21 00:04:50|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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BEIJING, Sept. 20 (Xinhua) -- Xi Jinping, general secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China (CPC), called for focusing reforms on solving practical problems on Thursday.

Xi, also Chinese president and chairman of the Central Military Commission, made the remarks while presiding over the fourth meeting of the central committee for deepening overall reform, which he heads.

Both the importance and difficulty of reform lie in implementation, Xi said.

Saying that there are more and more favorable conditions for carrying out reforms and focusing on implementation, he called for putting more energy and efforts into implementation and focusing reforms on solving real problems.

Li Keqiang and Wang Huning, both members of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee and deputy heads of the reform committee, attended the meeting.

The meeting approved a number of documents:

-- a document on promoting high-quality development;

-- a document on establishing more effective mechanisms for coordinated regional development;

-- measures on supporting pilot free trade zones' efforts to deepen reform and innovation;

-- a guideline on improving regulation of systematically important financial institutions;

-- a document on reforming and improving the national vaccine regulation system;

-- a document on integrating systems of planning to make national development plans play a better role of strategic guidance;

-- a document on promoting the alignment of small farmers with the development of modern agriculture.

More efforts should be made to formulate policies that promote high-quality development in important areas including manufacturing, high-tech industries, service and infrastructure, and public services, and to put protecting the people's interests at a more prominent position, said a statement released after the meeting.

More effective mechanisms for coordinated regional development should be set up by sticking to the new development philosophy, giving play to comparative advantages of each area, and narrowing regional development gap, said the statement,

Pilot free trade zones should be granted more power to reform and further open up, as well as policy support to create a good environment for investment, boost trade facilitation, and make financial innovation serve the real economy, said the statement.

Policies should be clarified to put in place institutional arrangements for identifying, regulating and dealing with systematically important financial institutions, it said.

On vaccine regulation, strong measures should be adopted to enforce strict market access, strengthen market supervision, improve logistics and delivery, standardize vaccination management, eradicate regulation loopholes, and crack down on acts violating laws and regulations, it said.

More efforts should also be made to set up a policy system supporting small farmers' development, boost their level of organization, and improve their production and operation capabilities, to transform them from traditional small farmers into modern ones, according to the statement.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-09-21 00:14:53|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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BEIJING, Sept. 20 (Xinhua) -- China's reform and opening-up has produced abundant stories the world will be interested in, and they need to be told well, said documentary directors and producers at a forum.

They said this while attending the forum held on the sidelines of a media event to encourage documentary-making on China's reform and opening-up. The event was hosted by the State Council Information Office and undertaken by Chinese-language online search engine Chinaso.com.

"Over the past 40 years, the transformation of China and its accelerating pace of change has produced a wealth of fascinating stories," said Matthew Springford, executive producer at BBC Studios.

"For producers and directors, China is a thrilling place to be. It feels like the center of the world," he said.

Academy Award winning director Malcolm Clarke, who made the China-themed documentary "Better Angels" in 2016, said there are "a million stories we can tell" as the world needs to know the Chinese people today.

"Boldly show the world what China is," he said. "Those fears and suspicions would be replaced by admiration of everything China has achieved."

Clarke first came to China in the 1980s as a young director working for the American Broadcasting Corporation. He returned after more than three decades to find tremendous changes had taken place.

What impressed him most was the disappearing scenes of poverty.

Since the reform and opening-up, more than 700 million Chinese have been lifted out of poverty. The middle-income group has reached 400 million and continues to grow.

"That singular achievement is something China can be proud of. But does the world know about it? I doubt it," he said. Much more work needs to be done in closing the "information gap," and the focus should be placed on the people, especially ordinary people, he added.

In addition to poverty alleviation, scientific and technological innovation, arts, as well as the development of third-tier and fourth-tier Chinese cities are among the topics that interest directors at home and overseas.

"If we celebrate what we say ordinary is actually extraordinary...We could do a better job," Malcolm said.

Abram Sitzer, director of original content at Discovery Networks Asia Pacific, said for the world to understand China the key lies in why.

It is the country's vision and leadership that enabled China to achieve more than others, he said.

Tsinghua University professor Li Daokui challenged professors to sum up a couple of simple rules that underpin China's achievements through reform and opening-up.

Telling stories about China's reform and opening-up that convey these rules will help China send its messages and convince Western audiences, Li said.

In recent years, documentary co-production has been on the rise.

While teaching at Zhejiang Normal University, Hodan Osman Abdi was able to make a documentary last year featuring Africans in the city of Yiwu -- the celebrated marketplace for Made-in-China consumer goods in Zhejiang Province.

She said all the 24 Africans featured in the documentary are common people and the collaboration of Chinese and African crew managed to get the most from the interviewees and produce better quality content.

The Somali research fellow said the crew also makes the documentaries into short video clips and puts them on social media.

The rapid development of digital technology has provided convenience for documentaries to spread through multiple channels and perspectives, said Jin Zhongwei, editor-in-chief of Guancha.cn.

"Short videos that my colleagues and I made concerning China's reform and opening-up have been widely shared. It is unexpected," said Pan Xiaoli with the China Institute at Fudan University. "This shows that there is a need to understand China more."
Source: Xinhua| 2018-09-21 00:19:54|Editor: Liangyu

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Adel Alsadoon, a famous Kuwaiti astronomer and historian, shows his collection of aircraft models in his house in Ahmadi Governorate, Kuwait, on Sept. 20, 2018. "I would like to go to China to admire China's Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST), the world's largest single-dish radio telescope," Adel Alsadoon said in an interview with Xinhua on Thursday. Alsadoon, 70 years old, makes hand-painted astrology speculation of the sunrise and sunset and observes various astronomical phenomena with telescopes at night. (Xinhua/Joseph Shagra)

KUWAIT CITY, Sept. 20 (Xinhua) -- "I would like to go to China to admire China's Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope (FAST), the world's largest single-dish radio telescope," Adel Alsadoon, a famous Kuwaiti astronomer and historian, said in an interview with Xinhua on Thursday.

Alsadoon, 70 years old, makes hand-painted astrology speculation of the sunrise and sunset and observes various astronomical phenomena with telescopes at night.

"The Chinese people had astronomical wisdom thousands of years ago, dividing the sky near the ecliptic into 28 stars, which is still useful for today's astrology observation," he noted.

"Now China has the largest radio telescope, or Tianyan, which is the most advanced telescope in the world and can observe farther and more materials in the universe," he said.

China completed construction of FAST, currently the largest radio telescope in the world, in September 2016.

Currently there is no astronomical research institution in Kuwait, the historian said.

"There is only one astronomical science club composed of dozens of astronomy enthusiasts in Kuwait," he said, noting that there is a long way to go for the country to become a world-class astronomical giant.

Adel Alsadoon is an enthusiast of various aircraft models.

There are more than 250 aircraft models of all sizes in his house, from the first aircraft invented by the Wright brothers to the latest Kuwait Airline aircraft, from the warplanes of the First World War to the Boeing 777. He has been collecting these models for more than 30 years.

"The study of astronomy, especially the space technology, requires not only the state's financial support, but also top talents, huge testing sites and sophisticated laboratories. Like China, the United States and Russia, these countries have advanced aviation technology," he said.

"We are very happy that China is actively conducting space research, and we can also enjoy these scientific and technological achievements, such as China's Beidou navigation system," he said happily.

Alsadoon is also a collector. His house is a small museum with collections from all over the world, including more than 10,000 books, 5,000 perfume bottles, and more than 1,000 cartoon characters and toys, some of which are from China.

He said he is very pleased with the fact that relations between Kuwait and China are strengthening.

"The Kuwaiti emir visited China in early July and signed cooperation agreements with China, which provides an opportunity for cooperation between Kuwait and China," he said, noting that "in the future we hope to participate in more space science and technology projects of China."
Source: Xinhua| 2018-09-21 00:44:59|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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DAR ES SALAAM, Sept. 20 (Xinhua) -- Tanzania has suspended advertisements on family planning sponsored by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and other organizations.

In a letter, Mpoki Ulisubisya, permanent secretary for the Ministry of Health, told organizations carrying out family planning activities in Tanzania, including USAID, to recall family planning advertising spots from local media.

The letter, dated Sept. 19, 2018, ordered the organizations to stop airing all content on family planning until it is revised by the government.

"The ministry intends to revise the contents of all your ongoing radio and TV spots for family planning, thus I request you to stop with immediate effect airing and publishing any family planning contents in any media channels until further notice," Ulisubisya said in the letter.

The letter, however, said the Ministry of Health acknowledged efforts being undertaken by the organizations in supporting family planning activities.

"We want to come up with a standard message to the public on family planning," Ulisubisya told Xinhua over the phone.

The suspension of family planning ads came about 10 days after President John Magufuli reiterated his opposition to birth control.

Speaking at a public rally in Meatu in Simiyu region on Sept. 9, Magufuli said people should not listen to those advising about birth control, some of it coming from foreigners, because it has sinister motives.

Those going for family planning are lazy, Magufuli said, because they are afraid they will not be able to feed their children.
Attendants wait for passengers at the Mombasa Railway Station in Mombasa, Kenya, on June 2, 2018. (Xinhua/Wang Teng)

NAIROBI, Sept. 20 (Xinhua) -- The financial support China has been extending to African countries has propelled their socio-economic transformation as opposed to worsening their debt burden, Kenyan scholars said on Tuesday.

The scholars who attended a roundtable on Chinese aid to Africa organized by Nairobi-based pan African policy think-tank, Africa Policy Institute (API), said loans and grants from China have sustained Africa's growth momentum without placing burden on taxpayers.

Peter Kagwanja, the chief executive officer of Africa Policy Institute, said Chinese financial support to Africa which is advanced on friendly terms has provided answer to the continent's endemic challenges like poverty, disease, infrastructure bottlenecks and skills gap.

He noted that Chinese investments have stimulated economic growth in Africa while opening new job opportunities for the continent's youthful population.

"China's Belt and Road Initiative is funding infrastructure and opening up Africa for business. China has filled the vacuum created by the diminishing support from western donors," Kagwanja remarked.

David Owiro, the executive director of Nairobi-based Africa Development think tank, noted that Chinese aid to Africa has been earmarked in areas that have direct benefits to ordinary citizens yet they are not attached to geopolitical considerations.

"China has made a deliberate effort to respond to Africa's development needs like connectivity," said Owiro, adding that China's lending to Africa has not disrupted the continent's fiscal health contrary to the false narrative of "Debt Trap" advanced by critics.

Anzetse Were, an economist and public policy analyst said that a conversation involving key players like policymakers, academia and media is key to help counter the false narrative that Chinese lending practices have imposed a fiscal burden on African countries.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-09-21 01:10:06|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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NAIROBI, Sept. 20 (Xinhua) -- The transport sector is a major contributor to air pollution in Africa, a UN Environment (UNEP) official said on Thursday.

Juliette Biao Koudenoukpo, the UN Environment regional director for Africa, attributed the situation to the importation of fuel inefficient second-hand vehicles, inadequate vehicle import regulation policies and the low purchasing power among the population.

"African countries need to put in place air quality standards to help inform their policies," said Koudenoukpo during a forum in Nairobi on transforming mobility in Africa through innovative solutions.

She said the transport sector has been identified as a major source of greenhouse gas emissions and other pollutants that have significant effects on the environment and health.

The UNEP official said in an effort to provide adequate transport infrastructure and services, many African governments are giving rise to unregulated transport systems that further complicates the quest for clean air.

She said the UN Environment is taking a leading role through research, innovation and implementation of programs that seek to tackle poor air quality.

A number of African countries like Cote d'Ivoire have developed air quality standards, and sought to further develop their monitoring capacity.

Coletha Ruhamya, director general of Rwanda Environmental Management Authority, said a 2017 study showed that motorcycles contribute 51 percent to air pollution in the country.

She said the Rwandan government is promoting an efficient transport system that includes use of low-carbon vehicles, use of public transit as opposed to personal cars.

Ruhamya said the government has entered into an agreement with a car maker that is developing electric vehicles, with the aim of introducing them into the local market.

"We need to invest in research and development to enable us come up with clean and affordable technologies," said Ruhamya.

Rob De Jong, head of air quality and mobility unit at UN Environment, challenged African governments to develop programs that promote the use of shared mobility, use of electric vehicles and use of automatic vehicles.

He said UN Environment is helping Rwanda, Kenya and Nigeria to come up with pedestrian pathways along major roads in the cities.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-09-21 01:50:12|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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PRAGUE, Sept. 20 (Xinhua) -- The Safeguard exercise has been held at the Dukovany nuclear power plant in Czech Republic since Tuesday with the aim to inspect the external protection of the power plant, said Jan Nachaj, head of the regional military command in Jihlava, on Thursday.

The exercise culminated on Thursday when Czech soldiers and policemen were dealing with two simulated terrorist attacks against the nuclear power plant.

A total of 235 people were involved in the exercise, including the military's active reserves. The regional firefighters participated in the exercise for the first time.

In a simulated attack, a bomb disposal expert had to make harmless a planted explosive with a robot. The police also joined with their equipment, including a special monitoring vehicle.

Regional police chief Milos Trojanek said that one can not underestimate the threats of possible terror attacks at present. The safety of the nuclear power plant and its surroundings has long been among their priorities. He said a special police unit is in charge of the safety of the power plant and is ready to intervene elsewhere in the region.

The Safeguard exercise has been held annually since 2014 and alternately at the nuclear power plants in Dukovany and Temelin, south Bohemia.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-09-21 01:55:13|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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DAR ES SALAAM, Sept. 20 (Xinhua) -- Tanzanian traders who import goods from abroad complained on Thursday over what they termed as lack of transparency in tax evaluations, delays resulting from multiple agencies doing same duties, and unpredictable port charges.

Silver Kiondo, chairman of the Tanzania Business Community, said lack of transparency in tax evaluation has caused most of the traders to incur unexpected expenses.

Kiondo also complained of lack of coordination between the Tanzania Bureau of Standards (TBS) and the Tanzania Food and Drug Authority (TFDA), a situation that resulted in unpredictable port charges.

The traders voiced their complaints in the commercial capital Dar es Salaam at a meeting chaired by Minister for Works, Transport and Communication Isack Kamwelwe.

Minister for Finance and Planning Philip Mpango and Minister for Trade, Industries and Investment Charles Mwijage also attended the meeting.

In his response, Kamwelwe promised to sort out problems raised by the traders to facilitate smooth operations of their businesses.

Mwijage, the trade minister, directed TBS and TFDA officials to resolve challenges raised by the traders.
Iran's President Hassan Rouhani (L) welcomes Russia's President Vladimir Putin during the Gas Exporting Countries Forum (GECF) in Tehran November 23, 2015. (Reuters photo)

TEHRAN, Sept. 20 (Xinhua) -- Tehran and Moscow are closely cooperating in various fields of the nuclear industry, the spokesperson for the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI) said on Thursday.

"Nuclear cooperation between Iran and Russia is in progress at high level in diverse areas," Behrouz Kamalvandi was quoted as saying by Tasnim news agency.

Iran's cooperation with Russia includes the construction of two new power plants, as well as projects on stable isotopes and nuclear fuel, Kamalvandi said.

Kamalvandi also said that senior Iranian and Russian officials are in talks on building small- and medium-sized nuclear power plants in Iran.

Iran's first 1,000-megawatt Bushehr nuclear power plant was completed by Russia in May 2011.

Iran and Russia have also agreed to develop the Bushehr power plant. The Bushehr Phase-2 will consist of two units having a cumulative output capacity of 2,100 megawatt.

Foundation stone for the 10-billion-U.S. dollar Bushehr Phase-2 was laid in September 2016, while an official ceremony marking the start of construction was held in October 2017. The construction is expected to be completed by 2026.
SAN FRANCISCO and TEL AVIV, Israel, Sept. 20, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Kalytera Therapeutics, Inc. (TSX VENTURE: KALY and OTCQB: KALTF) (the "Company" or "Kalytera") today provided an update on its lead product development program evaluating cannabidiol (CBD) for the prevention and treatment of acute graft versus host disease (GVHD).



GVHD is a life-threatening complication commonly occurring after bone marrow transplant procedures. GVHD occurs when the transplanted donor cells attack the patients organs, including the skin, GI tract, liver, lungs, and eyes. GVHD is associated with acute and chronic illness, infections, disability, reduced quality of life, and death.

It is estimated that up to 50% of patients who undergo a bone marrow transplant from a sibling donor, and up to 70% of patients who undergo a bone marrow transplant from an unrelated donor, will develop some level of GVHD. There are currently no FDA approved therapies for either the prevention or treatment of acute GVHD.

CBD is a non-psychotropic ingredient of cannabis that does not cause euphoria or cognitive effects. The formulation of CBD that Kalytera is evaluating for the prevention and treatment of acute GVHD is a proprietary formulation that is designed to improve product stability and absorption after oral dosing.

Kalyteras Two Separate Programs in GVHD

The work that Kalytera is doing in GVHD consists of two separate product development programs: a program evaluating CBD for the prevention of acute GVHD; and a separate program evaluating CBD for the treatment of acute GVHD. Although there is some overlap between the two programs in terms of the data that will be required for FDA registration and marketing approval, the Phase 2 and Phase 3 clinical studies for each of these two programs will be separate and distinct.

The Companys program in prevention of acute GVHD is more advanced than is the program in treatment of acute GVHD. The prevention program is currently in Phase 2 clinical testing, with an ongoing study enrolling patients at three clinical sites in Israel. To expedite the enrollment process, Kalytera is expanding this study to include one additional site in Israel, and up to four additional sites in other jurisdictions, including Australia. Upon completion of this Phase 2 clinical study, the Company will begin preparations for the pivotal Phase 3 clinical study that will be required for approval.

We believe the best strategy for building shareholder value will be to advance our programs in GVHD to Phase 3 status. We will be able to initiate the Phase 3 pivotal registration study in prevention of acute GVHD ahead of the Phase 3 study in treatment of acute GVHD, and, for this reason, we will prioritize the program in prevention of acute GVHD over the companion program in treatment of acute GVHD, said Robert Farrell, President and CEO of Kalytera. We expect to initiate the Phase 3 clinical study in prevention of acute GVHD within the next 12 months. Our plans for this program are as follows: (1) we plan to announce interim data from the ongoing Phase 2 study later this year; (2) we will complete the Phase 2 study in Q2 2019; and (3) we plan to initiate the Phase 3 clinical study during Q3 2019. We have also begun the process of seeking corporate partnering opportunities for both of our GVHD programs. The objective of such a partnership will be to provide a non-dilutive source of funding for the programs, as well as future revenue through licensing fees, milestone payments and royalties.

Prior to the ongoing Phase 2 clinical study in prevention of acute GVHD, two Phase 2a clinical studies were completed evaluating CBD in the prevention of GVHD. Data from both of these clinical studies were positive and highly encouraging. Dr. Moshe Yeshurun, Kalyteras Chief Medical Officer, was the Principal Investigator for both of these studies, which were conducted at the Institute of Hematology, Davidoff Center, Rabin Medical Center, Petah Tikva, Israel. These studies were carried out by Dr. Yeshurun prior to the date he joined the Company, and the Company subsequently acquired the relevant technology through its acquisition of Talent Biotechs Ltd. in February 2017.

The results from the first of these clinical studies were published in Biology of Blood and Marrow Transplantation (Cannabidiol for the Prevention of Graft-versus-Host-Disease after Allogeneic Hematopoietic Cell Transplantation: Results of a Phase II Study, M. Yeshurun et al. / Biology Blood Marrow Transplant 21 (2015) 1770 - 1775).

As previously announced, the data from this study, in which 48 patients received daily doses of 150 mg of CBD administered twice daily for 7 days prior to the bone marrow transplant procedure and for 30 days after, demonstrated the following results:

No patients developed acute GVHD while being treated with CBD;

The rates of grades 2-4 acute GVHD by day 100 were 12.1%, compared with 46% in a group of all 101 hematopoietic stem cell transplant recipients who received standard GVHD prophylaxis at the same institution in Israel (the Institute of Hematology, Davidoff Center, Rabin Medical Center at Beilinson Hospital) directly prior to the onset of this study; and

CBD was found to be safe and well tolerated

Kalytera also previously announced the results from the second of the two prior clinical studies, in which 12 patients were administered CBD at a dose of 150 mg administered twice daily from 7 days prior to the bone marrow transplant procedure until up to 100-days post transplantation. In that study, no safety issues were observed, and only 15% of patients in the CBD treatment group developed grades 2-4 acute GVHD, compared to a 46% incidence at the same institution in the historical group of 101 patients described above.

On July 31, the Company met with the United States Food & Drug Administration (FDA). In accordance with the guidance received from the FDA, the Company plans to initiate two clinical studies in healthy volunteers this year. These studies will assess certain safety and laboratory parameters of CBD, including the effect of food intake on the absorption of oral CBD and the interaction of CBD with certain anti-fungal drugs. These studies will be conducted in parallel with the companys ongoing Phase 2 clinical study in prevention of GVHD, and the data from these studies will be required by the FDA for both the Companys prevention and treatment programs.

Acute GVHD is a severe complication of bone marrow transplant procedures that can lead to permanent impairment of quality of life and even death, said Robert Farrell, President and CEO of Kalytera. With no FDA approved therapy for the prevention of acute GVHD, there exists an important unmet medical need that we believe we can address. Based on the positive and encouraging results from the two prior Phase 2a clinical studies in prevention of GVHD, we are optimistic that our CBD product will address this unmet need, and will be demonstrated to be a safe and effective means to prevent the onset of acute GVHD.

The commercial opportunity for Kalyteras CBD products for the prevention and treatment of GVHD is large. According to the January 2018 Market Forecast Report by DelveInsight Perspective, the potential market for a successful product for prevention and treatment of GVHD in the 7 major jurisdictions (the U.S., Germany, France, Italy, Spain, the U.K. and Japan) is estimated to be more than USD $408 million in 2018, and could grow to approximately USD $1.3 billion by 2027.

If Kalyteras CBD products are approved for the prevention and/or treatment of acute GVHD, the Company believes that, given the severe and life-threatening nature of this disorder, treating physicians would not be expected to prescribe anything other than the Companys approved formulation of CBD (rather than non-approved CBD that might be available online or from other commercial sources).

Kalytera is the exclusive licensee of two issued U.S. patents covering the use of CBD in the prevention and treatment of GVHD, and is also the exclusive licensee of pending patent applications in other jurisdictions for the use of CBD in the prevention and treatment of GVHD. In addition to these patents and patent applications, the Company has also obtained four orphan drug designations for the treatment and prevention of GVHD in the U.S. and Europe. Such orphan drug designations will provide 7-years of market exclusivity in the U.S., and 10-years of market exclusivity in the E.U., upon regulatory approval of the Companys CBD products for the prevention and/or treatment of acute GVHD.

The U.S. FDA has recommended that Kalytera apply for both Breakthrough Therapy and Fast Track Designations for our CBD products for prevention and treatment of acute GVHD, each of which could accelerate the approval process for these products.

About Kalytera Therapeutics

Kalytera Therapeutics, Inc. is pioneering the development of CBD therapeutics. Through its proven leadership, drug development expertise, and intellectual property portfolio, Kalytera seeks to establish a leading position in the development of CBD medicines for a range of important unmet medical needs, with an initial focus on GVHD and treatment of acute and chronic pain.

Cautionary Statements

Neither TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

This press release may contain certain forward-looking information and statements ("forward-looking information") within the meaning of applicable Canadian securities legislation, that are not based on historical fact, including without limitation in respect of its product candidate pipeline, planned clinical trials, regulatory approval prospects, intellectual property objectives and other statements containing the words "believes", "anticipates", "plans", "intends", "will", "should", "expects", "continue", "estimate", "forecasts" and other similar expressions. Readers are cautioned to not place undue reliance on forward-looking information. Actual results and developments may differ materially from those contemplated by these statements depending on, among other things, the risk that future clinical studies may not proceed as expected or may produce unfavourable results. Kalytera undertakes no obligation to comment on analyses, expectations or statements made by third parties, its securities, or financial or operating results (as applicable). Although Kalytera believes that the expectations reflected in forward-looking information in this press release are reasonable, such forward-looking information has been based on expectations, factors and assumptions concerning future events which may prove to be inaccurate and are subject to numerous risks and uncertainties, certain of which are beyond Kalytera's control. The forward-looking information contained in this press release is expressly qualified by this cautionary statement and is made as of the date hereof. Kalytera disclaims any intention and has no obligation or responsibility, except as required by law, to update or revise any forward-looking information, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.

Contact Information
Source: Xinhua| 2018-09-21 02:00:14|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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WARSAW, Sept. 20 (Xinhua) -- Poland will increase subsidies for creating and developing child care institutions and creches network, Polish Minister of Family, Labour and Social Policy, Elzbieta Rafalska, announced on Thursday.

The government's new program named "Toddler Plus", will increase subsidies up to 450 million Polish zloty (123 million U.S. dollars) in 2019. It will also bring more support for local government already running creches, in order to create more places in already existing institutions.

According to Rafalska, a subsidy for creating a single creche care place will increase from 20,000 Polish zloty (around 5,500 U.S. dollars) to 30,000 Polish zloty (8,188 U.S. dollars). A subsidy for already existing creche place will increase up to 22,000 Polish zloty (around 6,000 U.S. dollars).

Rafalska said that within the "Toddler Plus" program, around 24,000 child care places dedicated to children up to three years old will be created this year in the whole country.

"We want local governments to feel the support from the governmental program so that they can take up the challenges to improve this social service that allows parents, mostly mums, to reconcile their professional duties with care over a young child", she added.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-09-21 02:05:14|Editor: Liangyu

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by John S. Marshall

LAREDO, the United States, Sept. 20 (Xinhua) -- As the drumbeats of a trade war grew louder, a group of business leaders and executives met in a dusty Texas border city to discuss international trade and its future direction as the United States seems increasingly at odds with a number of nations.

The two-day annual North American Logistic & Manufacturing Symposium was closed on Thursday in Laredo, a city built up along the Rio Grande River, a narrow but lengthy waterway that flows for nearly 2,000 miles and forms part of the border separating the United States and Mexico.

A sprawling metropolis of about 250,000 people, Laredo is hardly known as a desirable convention destination, but because of its location it could become a key battleground in terms of trade tension.

More than 557 billion U.S. dollars in imports and exports passed through the city in 2017, according to the Laredo Economic Development Corporation. Mexico was the top trading partner of all those goods, and China was second.

With the United States in disputes with a number of countries over trade deals, including The North American Trade Agreement, or NAFTA -- a trade arrangement between the United States, Mexico and Canada that's been in force since 1994, U.S. President Donald Trump is threatening to cancel the agreement.

He claims that NAFTA killed jobs by encouraging automakers and other manufacturers to open up plants in Mexico, while shuttering U.S. facilities. The president also finds fault with Canada's tariffs, including its tariff on dairy products, which puts U.S. producers at an economic disadvantage.

Trump has repeatedly blasted NAFTA, including calling it a "very unfair NAFTA deal" as he spoke at the inaugural meeting of the President's National Council for the American Worker on Monday.

"It was a terrible deal for this country for many years between Mexico and Canada. It was a horrible deal. We lost thousands of businesses and millions of jobs. And that's not going to happen any more," the president said.

Just days later at the Laredo symposium, the speakers -- mostly veterans of international trade and commerce -- pushed for a toning down on the rhetoric and a peaceful resolution to the escalating trade friction.

One of the speakers was Eric Miller, who heads up Rideau Potomac Strategy Group, a firm that describes itself as a cross-border consultancy that advises clients on government affairs, trade issues, technology and geopolitical developments.

Miller urged negotiators to resolve the NAFTA disagreement with a trilateral agreement. That is a deal with the United States that would include both Mexico and Canada, as opposed to just a bilateral agreement, which would include only Mexico.

"You get additional benefits from having a trilateral agreement that you simply don't get from having a bilateral agreement," Miller told Xinhua, adding "so fundamentally the authority that the president has from the Congress, which is called trade promotion authority, essentially says that he must go about the process of pursuing a trilateral agreement."

Though the first U.S. tariffs, which included a 25 percent tariff on steel and 10 percent tariff on aluminum, only initially targeted a handful of countries in July, they were later expanded to include Canada and Mexico. Canada responded by imposing matching tariffs on July 1.

Miller, who has also served as vice president of policy, North America and Cybersecurity at the Business Council of Canada, which represents the CEOs of the 150 largest companies in Canada, described the tariffs on Canadian steel and aluminum as a "travesty." And despite the matching tariffs imposed by Canada, he claims Canadian officials have been "calm about the U.S. threats."

The result of the increased tariffs, according to Miller and others at the symposium, will end up hitting U.S. consumers in the wallet, while also hurting certain industries, especially the auto industry.

"You are dealing with massive impacts in terms of global trade," Miller said. "In addition, the prices of vehicles are estimated by the Center of Automotive Research to go up between 1,700 and 7,000 U.S. dollars in the United States."

Meanwhile, with negotiators still trying to reach a new NAFTA deal, during a panel discussion, one of the speakers said changes in political leadership typically has an impact on future trade talks.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-09-21 02:05:15|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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LUSAKA, Sept. 20 (Xinhua) -- A World Bank economist said Thursday Zambia is not in debt distress but warned that the country could plunge into one if its debt continues growing.

World Bank Economist Ziv Chinara said the current debt situation in Zambia is within manageable levels and that the government needs to put a cap on borrowing to avoid getting into distress situation in the near future.

In remarks delivered during the bank's launch of its 11th economic brief on Zambia, the economist urged the government to show serious commitments in implementing austerity measures announced earlier this year aimed at dealing with the debt problem as well as fiscal consolidation.

Chinara said disclosure of debt figures is vital to avoiding misinformation and to assuring investors and other stakeholders on the current debt situation.

On Wednesday, Minister of Finance Margaret Mwanakatwe said the government will start making quarterly reports on the country's debts to avoid speculations.

Zambia's debt has become a thorny issue in recent months, with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) suspending its talks with the government for a possible financial aid package.

According to government figures, the country's foreign debt stood at 9.37 billion U.S. dollars as of June 2018, which is 34.7 percent of GDP, below the internationally agreed threshold of 40 percent.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-09-21 02:20:18|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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NICOSIA, Sept. 20 (Xinhua) -- A boatload of immigrants arrived in Cyprus just a day after Cypriot President Nicos Anastasiades told EU leaders that the eastern Mediterranean island has reached its limits in tackling the pressure from refugee influx, a statement said on Thursday.

A police communique said they intercepted a boat with 65 people on board, 23 men, 18 women, two of whom are pregnant and 24 children, and led it into a fishing port next to a popular tourist resort on the southeastern coast of Cyprus.

The pregnant women were taken to hospital as a precaution and the other passengers were interviewed at a police station to establish their identities as most of them did not carry any documents.

Their arrival highlighted an appeal by President Anastasiades on Wednesday night to EU leaders holding an informal summit in Salzburg, Austria, for more solidarity by other EU members in sharing the burden of refugee arrivals.

Anastasiades told them that asylum applications in the first eight months exceed 4,500, marking an increase of 55 percent over 2017, when arrivals also increased by 56 percent over the previous year.

An official statement issued in Nicosia said on Thursday that EU leaders promised support to Cyprus to manage the refugee influx problem, though no specific measures were listed.

"The President expects the practical and general measures that the (European) Commission and the European Council intend to provide to Cyprus in order to address this issue in the most effective way", the statement said.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-09-21 02:55:26|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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Wang Yang, a member of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and chairman of the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), hears work reports of the CPC regional committee and regional government of Ningxia in Yinchuan, capital of northwest China's Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, Sept. 20, 2018. Wang led a central delegation to attend activities marking the 60th anniversary of the region's founding. (Xinhua/Zhang Ling)

YINCHUAN, Sept. 20 (Xinhua) -- China's top political advisor Wang Yang on Thursday called for full implementation of major policies issued by the Communist Party of China (CPC) in Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, to build a new Ningxia where people enjoy economic prosperity, ethnic unity, beautiful environment, and a wealthy life.

Wang, a member of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee and chairman of the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), made the remarks while hearing work reports of the CPC regional committee and regional government of Ningxia.

Leading a central delegation, Wang was in Ningxia for activities marking the 60th anniversary of the region's founding.

On behalf of the CPC Central Committee, the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress, the State Council, the CPPCC National Committee, and the Central Military Commission, Wang extended warm congratulations to the autonomous region and expressed greetings to cadres and people from all ethnic groups in Ningxia.

Over the past 60 years of hard work, local people have turned the backward and impoverished Ningxia into a new one that is open, progressive, prosperous and harmonious, Wang said.

Such achievements were made as the autonomous region has been staunchly and resolutely safeguarding the authority of the CPC Central Committee, promoting bold reforms, as well as effectively improving ethnic unity and people's livelihood, he said.

Wang attributed the progress to the firm leadership of the CPC Central Committee, joint efforts by cadres and people of all ethnic groups, and strong supports from people across the nation.

China's ongoing development of its western parts and the Belt and Road construction have brought fresh opportunities to Ningxia, Wang said, urging high-quality development and further efforts to eliminate poverty.
View of cars at the Volkswagen plant in Puebla, Mexico, on Aug. 27, 2018. (Xinhua/AFP)

by John S. Marshall

LAREDO, the United States, Sept. 20 (Xinhua) -- As the drumbeats of a trade war grew louder, a group of business leaders and executives met in a dusty Texas border city to discuss international trade and its future direction as the United States seems increasingly at odds with a number of nations.

The two-day annual North American Logistic & Manufacturing Symposium was closed on Thursday in Laredo, a city built up along the Rio Grande River, a narrow but lengthy waterway that flows for nearly 2,000 miles and forms part of the border separating the United States and Mexico.

A sprawling metropolis of about 250,000 people, Laredo is hardly known as a desirable convention destination, but because of its location it could become a key battleground in terms of trade tension.

More than 557 billion U.S. dollars in imports and exports passed through the city in 2017, according to the Laredo Economic Development Corporation. Mexico was the top trading partner of all those goods, and China was second.

With the United States in disputes with a number of countries over trade deals, including The North American Trade Agreement, or NAFTA -- a trade arrangement between the United States, Mexico and Canada that's been in force since 1994, U.S. President Donald Trump is threatening to cancel the agreement.

He claims that NAFTA killed jobs by encouraging automakers and other manufacturers to open up plants in Mexico, while shuttering U.S. facilities. The president also finds fault with Canada's tariffs, including its tariff on dairy products, which puts U.S. producers at an economic disadvantage.

Trump has repeatedly blasted NAFTA, including calling it a "very unfair NAFTA deal" as he spoke at the inaugural meeting of the President's National Council for the American Worker on Monday.

"It was a terrible deal for this country for many years between Mexico and Canada. It was a horrible deal. We lost thousands of businesses and millions of jobs. And that's not going to happen any more," the president said.

Just days later at the Laredo symposium, the speakers -- mostly veterans of international trade and commerce -- pushed for a toning down on the rhetoric and a peaceful resolution to the escalating trade friction.

One of the speakers was Eric Miller, who heads up Rideau Potomac Strategy Group, a firm that describes itself as a cross-border consultancy that advises clients on government affairs, trade issues, technology and geopolitical developments.

Miller urged negotiators to resolve the NAFTA disagreement with a trilateral agreement. That is a deal with the United States that would include both Mexico and Canada, as opposed to just a bilateral agreement, which would include only Mexico.

"You get additional benefits from having a trilateral agreement that you simply don't get from having a bilateral agreement," Miller told Xinhua, adding "so fundamentally the authority that the president has from the Congress, which is called trade promotion authority, essentially says that he must go about the process of pursuing a trilateral agreement."

Though the first U.S. tariffs, which included a 25 percent tariff on steel and 10 percent tariff on aluminum, only initially targeted a handful of countries in July, they were later expanded to include Canada and Mexico. Canada responded by imposing matching tariffs on July 1.

Miller, who has also served as vice president of policy, North America and Cybersecurity at the Business Council of Canada, which represents the CEOs of the 150 largest companies in Canada, described the tariffs on Canadian steel and aluminum as a "travesty." And despite the matching tariffs imposed by Canada, he claims Canadian officials have been "calm about the U.S. threats."

The result of the increased tariffs, according to Miller and others at the symposium, will end up hitting U.S. consumers in the wallet, while also hurting certain industries, especially the auto industry.

"You are dealing with massive impacts in terms of global trade," Miller said. "In addition, the prices of vehicles are estimated by the Center of Automotive Research to go up between 1,700 and 7,000 U.S. dollars in the United States."

Meanwhile, with negotiators still trying to reach a new NAFTA deal, during a panel discussion, one of the speakers said changes in political leadership typically has an impact on future trade talks.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-09-21 03:10:29|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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BEIJING, Sept. 20 (Xinhua) -- "Multilateralism and free trade have been the guarantee and will be the future of global development," Estonian President Kersti Kaljulaid said in an exclusive interview with Xinhua on Thursday.

Kaljulaid is on her first visit to China. During the two and a half days' stay, she met with Chinese President Xi Jinping and Premier Li Keqiang, and participated in the Summer Davos in north China's coastal city of Tianjin.

"The thing that impresses me most is China's economic development," the president said.

As an active participant of China-proposed Belt and Road Initiative and a member of the "16+1" cooperation between China and the Central and Eastern Europe Countries (CEEC), Estonia has seen plenty of cooperation outcomes under the Initiative and the CEEC platform with China, Kaljulaid said, adding she has learned that many countries that she visited lately also appreciate the initiative.

She hoped Estonia could reinforce cooperation with China under the Initiative in such areas as e-commerce, logistics, interconnectivity projects, and agriculture, as the Baltic country has rich resources like forestry and dairy.

Benefitting from the good geographical location, Estonia could serve as an excellent gateway for China to enter the European market, she said. "I believe this is an extremely good opportunity for the beneficial cooperation between our two countries because Estonia is tiny but still a footstone in the market."

Applauding China's significant role in global affairs, Kaljulaid said Estonia hopes to closely communicate and coordinate with China in multilateral affairs and jointly safeguard international rules and order.

She also expressed willingness to further people-to-people exchanges with China, highlighting that the two countries have made steady progress in cultural cooperation.

Kaljulaid recalled how Estonian people including herself were moved by a dance gala presented by the Shanghai Opera House in the 2018 Saaremma Opera Festival in Estonia's largest island in July. "It was absolutely wonderful and unique," she said.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-09-21 03:30:34|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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ISTANBUL, Sept. 20 (Xinhua) -- A lawmaker from the main opposition Republican People's Party, who was sentenced to more than five years in prison for leaking state information, was released on Thursday after a court order, state-run Anadolu Agency reported.

Earlier in the day, Turkey's Supreme Court ruled that the sentence given to Enis Berberoglu is suspended, Anadolu said.

The lawmaker was accused of providing the Cumhuriyet daily with a video which shows trucks, allegedly owned by Turkey's intelligence agency, transporting weaponry and ammunition to Syria.

The Turkish government claimed that the trucks were carrying humanitarian aid to Turkmens in Syria, saying the stop and search of the vehicles was ordered by the U.S.-based Turkish cleric Fethullah Gulen who was accused by Ankara of being behind a failed coup in Turkey in 2016.

Berberoglu initially received 25 years in prison for espionage in 2017, becoming the first lawmaker from the main opposition to be jailed, but his sentence was commuted later to more than five years.

He was re-elected to the parliament in the elections in June.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-09-21 03:30:34|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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BEIJING, Sept. 20 (Xinhua) -- A cross-Strait forum on new economy, jointly organized by Xinhuanet.com, the website of Xinhua News Agency, and Taiwan-based Commercial Times, was held in Beijing Thursday.

The forum was supported by Xinhua News Agency and Taiwan-based Want Want China Times Group.

More than 100 people, including entrepreneurs and scholars of finance and economics from the Chinese mainland and Taiwan, attended the forum and discussed issues about new opportunities for cross-Strait economic and trade cooperation in the new era.

While addressing the event, Xinhua President Cai Mingzhao said the two sides of the Taiwan Strait are of an inseparable community with a shared future. He stressed that the economic and trade cooperation between both sides is in line with the hope and interests of cross-Strait compatriots.

He said Xinhua News Agency is willing to keep performing new functions to promote peaceful development of the cross-Strait relations and mutually beneficial cooperation between the two sides.

Ning Jizhe, deputy head of the National Development and Reform Commission and head of the National Bureau of Statistics, Long Mingbiao, vice head of the Taiwan Work Office of the Communist Party of China Central Committee and the Taiwan Affairs Office of the State Council, and Tsai Eng-Meng, chairman of Want Want China Times Group, also made speeches at the forum.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-09-21 03:35:35|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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Chinese Vice Premier Han Zheng (2nd L) and Singaporean Deputy Prime Minister Teo Chee Hean (2nd R) attend the signing ceremony of bilateral cooperation documents in Singapore, Sept. 20, 2018. Han and Teo on Thursday co-chaired the 14th China-Singapore Joint Council for Bilateral Cooperation Meeting, the 19th China-Singapore Suzhou Industrial Park Joint Steering Council Meeting, the 10th China-Singapore Tianjin Eco-City Joint Steering Council Meeting, and the second China-Singapore (Chongqing) Demonstration Initiative on Strategic Connectivity Joint Steering Council Meeting. (Xinhua/Yan Yan)

SINGAPORE, Sept. 20 (Xinhua) -- China and Singapore on Thursday set priorities for future cooperation and agreed to promote cooperation under the Belt and Road Initiative.

The pledge came out of a series of high-level cooperative meetings co-chaired by Chinese Vice Premier Han Zheng and Singaporean Deputy Prime Minister Teo Chee Hean in the island city-state.

The meetings include the 14th China-Singapore Joint Council for Bilateral Cooperation Meeting, the 19th China-Singapore Suzhou Industrial Park Joint Steering Council Meeting, the 10th China-Singapore Tianjin Eco-City Joint Steering Council Meeting, and the Second China-Singapore (Chongqing) Demonstration Initiative on Strategic Connectivity Joint Steering Council Meeting.

The meetings reviewed the implementation of consensus reached by the leaderships of the two countries and the process of bilateral cooperation in several areas.

Both sides had in-depth discussions on issues such as the Belt and Road construction, economic transition, financial cooperation, cultural exchanges, and inclusive and sustainable development, setting priorities for future cooperation.

Both sides hailed the new progress on exploring high-level opening up and innovation and promoting green and sustainable development and connectivity in the three major cooperative projects, namely the Suzhou Industrial Park, the Tianjin Eco-City and the Chongqing Demonstration Initiative on Strategic Connectivity, reaffirming both governments' support for the three projects and the Sino-Singapore Guangzhou Knowledge City.

Both agreed that the Belt and Road cooperation has brought great opportunities to the development of China-Singapore ties, calling for efforts to enhance top-down planning and speed up Belt and Road cooperation from a strategic height and long-term perspective.

Both sides also called for better connectivity, financial support and third-party cooperation, pledging to make the construction of China-Singapore land and maritime corridor and third-party cooperation as new highlights of bilateral cooperation.

The two countries announced the launching of negotiations of Treaty on Criminal Judicial Assistance so as to provide legal assurance to the Belt and Road cooperation.

After the meetings, Han and Teo attended the signing ceremony of agreements on innovation, experience sharing, personnel training and culture and people-to-people exchanges.

Han arrived in Singapore on Wednesday for a three-day visit. He is scheduled to meet Singaporean President Halimah Yacob and Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong respectively on Friday.
PHOENIX, Sept. 20, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Dajin Resources (TSX-V:DJI) (OTCQB: DJIFF) (Dajin Resources Corp.) popped up on Stock Day host, Everett Jollys, radar just a few months ago. Today he chatted with Dr. Catherine Hickson, Director and Chief Operating Officer of Dajin Resources about the overall outlook for her industry.



Lithium is a hot commodity these days, according to Dr. Hickson. She says her company is in a great position to make its way in the industry. We have extensive experience in the kinds of environments where lithium brines are found. We are already in Nevada and Argentina.

She told Jolly that lithium exploration is very much like oil and gas exploration. Jolly then asked about uses for her product, like lithium batteries.

We are an exploration company, so we develop the lithium up to a point. We will likely partner with one of the up and coming processing companies. Just like oil and gas, it must be refined.

Jolly then asked about Dajin Resources major projects. She explained that they are advanced on their Teels Marsh Valley project in Nevada and are in the process of getting ready to drill in that basin.

Weve got a very good and strong following in the U.S. I think that is partly because we have good U.S. projects. She also added that those robust U.S. projects, Teels Marsh and Alkali Lake, also in Nevada, are an advantage to investing in Dajin Resources. Dr. Hickson highlighted that the U.S. is a great place for this type of mining project and says the government has noted that lithium is of strategic importance to the U.S.

For more on Dajin Resources outlook on lithium, listen to the full podcast here: https://upticknewswire.com/featured-interview-coo-dr-catherine-hickson-of-dajin-resources-corp-otcqb-djiff/

About Dajin Resources Corp.

Dajin is an early stage lithium brine exploration company. Through its interest in Dajin Resources S.A. (Dajin S.A.), it holds concessions or concession applications in Jujuy Province, Argentina that were acquired in regions known to contain brines with Lithium, Potassium, and Boron values. These land holdings exceed 93,000 hectares (230,000 acres) and are primarily located in the Salinas Grandes and Guayatayoc salt lake basins. Dajin S.A. is partnered with LSC Lithium Corporation (LSC) as operator and has agreed to spend $2,000,000 to earn a 51% interest in Dajin S.A. Lithium properties. Exploration of the 4,400 hectares (10,873 acres) in San Jose/Navidad minas has commenced where 25 shallow brine samples were taken returning concentrations ranging from 281 mg/l to 1,353 mg/l averaging 591 mg/l Lithium.

Dajin holds a 100% interest in 403 placer claims covering 7,914 acres (3,202 hectares) in the Teels Marsh valley of Mineral County, Nevada. These claims are known to contain Lithium and Boron values and are adjacent to the birthplace of US Borax Corp's first borax mine.

Dajin also holds a 100% interest in 278 placer claims covering 5,591 acres (2,262 hectares) in the Alkali Lake valley of Esmeralda County, Nevada, located 7 miles (11 kilometers) northeast of Albemarle's Silver Peak Lithium brine operation in Clayton Valley.

For information go here: http://www.dajin.ca/en/home

About Dr. Catherine Hickson

Director and Chief Operating Officer, Dr. Catherine Hickson is a globally recognized geoscience expert with more than 30 years experience in science management and integration, green field exploration, international relations, program development and project management, corporate social responsibility, public education, community communication, exploration techniques, geothermal energy, hazard and risk assessments, quaternary surface processes, volcanism, and regional mapping. Hickson has a proven track record of delivering technical expertise and organizational enhancements that elevate corporate value. She began her career at the Government of Canada as a Research Scientist with NRCAN  Geological Survey of Canada  quickly progressing to the executive-level based on solid achievements and delivery of results. In 2008, she joined the private sector as Vice President Exploration and Chief Geoscientist for a global energy company. Her career has spanned continents with significant experience in Latin America, including Argentina where Dajin operates. This skill set coupled with South American experience and contacts will greatly assist Dajin with its permitting process, moving forward. Hickson has been recognized with a number of awards, including the prestigious C.J. Westerman Memorial Award presented by the APEGBC, and the Head of the Public Service Award, given by the Clerk of the Privy Council.

Contact:

Dr. Catherine Hickson

Dajin Resources Corp.

Suite 450 - 789 West Pender Street, Vancouver BC, Canada V6C 1H2

604.681.6151 info@dajin.ca

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/

SOURCE:

Uptick Newswire https://upticknewswire.com
Source: Xinhua| 2018-09-21 04:35:45|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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MINSK, Sept. 20 (Xinhua) -- Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko left for Russia's Sochi on a working visit, the press service of the head of state said Thursday.

Belarus-Russia highest-level talks involving government members of the two states will be held in Sochi on Sept. 21. Lukashenko and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin will hold a one-on-one meeting.

The agenda features topical issues of bilateral relations. The parties are to discuss a broad range of issues, including cooperation in agriculture, manufacturing, trade, economy, finances, oil industry, as well as integration-related matters.

The previous meeting of the presidents of Belarus and Russia took place in Sochi on Aug. 22.
Photo taken on Sept. 17, 2018 shows a general view of the Bedouin community of Khan al-Ahmar, located between the West Bank city of Jericho and Jerusalem. Khan al-Ahmar is a Bedouin community of some 200 people, which was built without permission, according to the Israeli authorities. The Israeli High Court reached on May 24 a verdict to raze the Bedouin village of Khan al-Ahmar. (Xinhua/Mamoun Wazwaz)

UNITED NATIONS, Sept. 20 (Xinhua) -- European Union members of the UN Security Council on Thursday called on Israel to reconsider its decision to demolish Khan al-Ahmar, a Palestinian village in the West Bank.

"As repeatedly stressed, the consequences of a demolition of this community and the displacement of its residents, including children, would be very serious and would severely threaten the viability of the two-state solution and undermine prospects of peace," the EU countries said in a joint statement.

"We therefore call upon the Israeli authorities to reconsider their decision to demolish Khan al-Ahmar."

Khan al-Ahmar is located in a sensitive location in Area C, of strategic importance for preserving the contiguity of a future Palestinian state, noted the statement, read by Dutch ambassador to the United Nations Karel van Oosterom to the press.

Israel's settlement policy in occupied Palestinian territory is illegal under international law, said the statement.

"We, as member states of the European Union, will not give up on a negotiated two-state solution with Jerusalem as future capital of both states," said the statement, endorsed by Britain, France, the Netherlands, Sweden, Poland -- the current EU members of the Security Council -- and Belgium, Germany and Italy.

Belgium and Germany will become Security Council members next year. Italy split a two-year council term with the Netherlands.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-09-21 05:00:51|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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KIEV, Sept. 20 (Xinhua) -- The Ukrainian parliament on Thursday has elected 14 new members of the Central Electoral Commission (CEC), the parliament's press service said in a statement.

The Ukrainian government-run Ukrinform news agency said that representatives of all parliamentary factions, except for the Opposition Bloc, became the members of the CEC.

One seat in the CEC remains vacant after the voting in the parliament, the agency said.

Earlier in the day, the parliament has dismissed 13 members of the CEC, whose term in the office has expired, while two other commission's members retained their posts.

On Sept.18, the parliament adopted a law increasing the number of seats in Ukraine's CEC from 15 to 17, which is aimed at enabling each parliamentary political force to have its representative in the commission during the elections.

The establishment of the balanced election commission is one of the recommendations for Kiev made by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) to ensure the smooth run of the elections.

The presidential election in Ukraine is scheduled for March 31, 2019, while parliamentary elections have been set for Oct. 27, 2019.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-09-21 05:10:52|Editor: Liangyu

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TRIPOLI, Sept. 20 (Xinhua) -- UN Support Mission in Libya (UNSMIL) on Thursday warned against attacks on residential areas in the capital Tripoli, as warring parties continue fighting.

The UNSMIL issued the warning in a statement, where it reminded the warring parties of the signed binding cease-fire agreement, and that exposing civilians to harm is prohibited by international Humanitarian Law.

Violent clashes continued in southern Tripoli between forces allied with the UN-backed government and the "7th Brigade" militia from the city of Tarhuna, some 80 km southeast of Tripoli, despite a recent UN-brokered cease-fire agreement.

The cease-fire agreement ended fighting that at least killed 78 and injured 210 others, mostly civilians, before it resumed four days ago.

Libya has been suffering insecurity and escalating violence since the fall of former leader Muammar Gaddafi's regime in 2011.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-09-21 05:40:59|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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RABAT, Sept. 20 (Xinhua) -- Morocco thwarted at least 54,000 attempts to smuggle illegal immigrants into Europe in the first eight months of 2018, the government spokesman Mustapha El Khalfi said Thursday.

The figure testifies to the intense efforts made by the Moroccan authorities to fight illegal immigration networks, El Khalfi said during a press briefing following the weekly cabinet meeting.

The number of illegal immigration attempts between January and August in 2017 stood at 39,000, he noted.

According to the spokesman, Moroccan illegal immigrants represented 13 percent of the total number of illegal immigration attempts foiled by the end of August, compared to 20 percent a year earlier.

He said Moroccan authorities will continue their efforts to crack down on smuggling networks.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-09-21 05:56:01|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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HELSINKI, Sept. 20 (Xinhua) -- Candles were lit outside Finnish National Museum in Helsinki on Thursday night to observe the national day for extinct languages.

Niko Partanen, a senior specialist at the Finnish governmental institute for languages spoken in Finland, defined the risk of demise for small languages as "an issue of our era".

Talking to Xinhua, he underlined the importance of teaching at schools: "The future gets risky when a language becomes voluntary in local schools."

The national day for extinct languages 2018 marked the 29th anniversary of the death of the last speaker of Kamassian, a language distantly related to Finnish.

Marking the day on its website, the institute noted that Kamassian has been preserved in the archives in Finland and researchers will continue analyzing the language for decades. "But many languages die in silence, and leave no traces."

Finnish belongs to the Fenno-Ugric language group. The best known and most widely spoken languages in the family are Finnish, Hungarian and Estonian.

Talking to Xinhua, researcher Susanna Virtanen at the University of Helsinki said only tens of people are able to speak some Fenno-Ugric samoyed languages now. "With them, the time is close to running out," she said.

The candle vigil was arranged by Friends of related languages, a Finnish non-governmental organization.

At the official level, a World Congress of Fenno-Ugric languages meets every four years. A plenary meeting took place in Lahti, Finland some years ago and an interim meeting will be arranged in Estonia this autumn, Partanen said.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-09-21 06:06:03|Editor: Shi Yinglun

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Smoke rises during an airstrike on mlitary base controlled by Houthi forces in Sanaa, Yemen, on Sept. 20, 2018. A Saudi-led coalition airstrike hit a Houthi-controlled military base in Yemen's capital Sanaa on Thursday, residents said. (Xinhua/Mohamed al-Azaki)

SANAA, Sept. 20 (Xinhua) -- A Saudi-led coalition airstrike hit a Houthi-controlled military base in Yemen's capital Sanaa on Thursday, residents said.

The strike targeted Maintenance Base in al-Nah'da quarter, nearly 1 km northeast of the Information Ministry, the residents said.

There were no reports of casualties.

The attack was the latest in a series of airstrikes targeting the rebel-held Sanaa by the Saudi-led coalition.

On Sunday, a coalition airstrike killed four employees at a radio station in the country's Red Sea port city of Hodeidah, which is also still under rebel's control.

The Yemeni internationally recognized government, backed by the coalition, resumed military operations against the rebels in Hodeidah and other northern rebel-held cities following the collapse of the UN-hosted peace talks in Geneva on Sept. 8 as the Houthi rebel delegation did not show up.

Yemen has been locked into a civil war since the Houthi rebels overran much of the country militarily and seized all northern provinces, including Sanaa, in 2014.

Saudi Arabia is leading an Arab military coalition that intervened in Yemen in 2015 to support the government of President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi after the Houthi rebels forced him into exile.
Members of a delegation of the European Parliament speak with Palestinian children during a visit to the Palestinian Bedouin village of Khan al-Ahmar, in the occupied West Bank Sept. 19, 2018. (REUTERS Photo)

UNITED NATIONS, Sept. 20 (Xinhua) -- Palestinian Permanent Observer to the UN Riyad Mansour on Thursday commended the EU members of the Security Council for defending Khan al-Ahmar, a Palestinian village that Israel plans to demolish.

At a press encounter outside the council chamber, Mansour expressed appreciation for "the principle and strong position" which called on Israel to reconsider its decision to demolish the village in the West Bank.

The envoy expressed hope that the international community would rally behind the position, as well as the position of the UN secretary-general, to stop "the Israeli occupying power" from demolishing the community.

Also at the encounter, Kuwaiti Permanent Representative to the UN Mansour al-Otaibi stressed Israel has to comply with resolution 2334, which demands it stop settlement activities on the occupied Palestinian territory.

"We will do our utmost to see the council trying to push Israel to implement all Security Council resolutions," he said.

Before Mansour spoke, the EU members of the Security Council called on Israel to reconsider its decision to demolish Khan al-Ahmar.

"As repeatedly stressed, the consequences of a demolition of this community and the displacement of its residents, including children, would be very serious and would severely threaten the viability of the two-state solution and undermine prospects of peace," they said in a joint statement.

Khan al-Ahmar is located in a sensitive location in Area C, of strategic importance for preserving the contiguity of a future Palestinian state, it said.

The statement was endorsed by Britain, France, the Netherlands, Sweden, Poland -- the current EU members of the Security Council -- and Belgium, Germany, and Italy.

Belgium and Germany will become council members next year. Italy splits a two-year council term with the Netherlands.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-09-21 06:31:09|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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MONTEVIDEO, Sept. 20 (Xinhua) -- Uruguay's government will not back down on tough anti-smoking policy, President Tabare Vazquez said on Thursday.

His remarks came after a judicial decision suspended a presidential decree mandating plain tobacco packaging, which forces manufacturers to market cigarettes in neutral or generic boxes with none of the usual bright colors, images or logos.

"No tobacco company should think that this government is going to backtrack," Vazquez told reporters, after British American Tobacco filed a successful motion to block the decree.

"Public health interests are above commercial interests," said the president, adding that "the government is going to continue to categorically defend the health of the population."

While the government "respects" the resolution, it has filed a motion of its own to continue its anti-smoking policies, said Vazquez, who is a trained oncologist.

British American Tobacco alleged it was "impossible" to implement the plain packaging in the six-month period granted by the decree.

A bill mandating plain packaging has stalled in Congress.

Since Uruguay has stepped up its anti-smoking drive during Vazquez's first term as president (2005-2010), smoking has fallen from 35 percent to 21 percent of the population.

Last year, the International Center for Settlement of Investment Disputes dismissed a lawsuit brought against Uruguay by tobacco giant Philip Morris, which alleged the anti-smoking policies were harming revenue.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-09-21 06:46:13|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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CHICAGO, Sept. 20 (Xinhua) -- China General Chamber of Commerce-U.S.A Chicago (CGCC Chicago), in partnership with the World Business Chicago, hosted the CGCC Chicago 2018 Annual Gala here this week, aiming to promote the business and trade developments and cultural communications between the United States and China.

The gala, themed "Connection," held at Fairmont Chicago Millennium Park on Wednesday.

President of Chinese Academy of Social Sciences Xie Fuzhan, Governor of the State of Kansas Jeff Colyer, former United States Treasury Secretary and Chairman of Paulson Institute Henry Paulson, former Mayor of Chicago Richard M. Daley, CEO of World Business Chicago Andrea Zopp, President of Wangxiang Group Ni Pin attended and delivered remarks at the event.

Commercial and business affairs officials from the Chinese Consulate in Chicago, business officials from U.S. federal government, Midwest state governments and the city government of Chicago, as well as 30 mayors from different cities of Guangdong Province of China, 40 representatives from 8 cities of China and a delegation of more than 300 Chinese business leaders participated the annual gala.

It was particularly noteworthy that, as one the two special features of this year's Annual Gala, CGCC Chicago was honored to invite the experts of think tank from Chinese Academy of Social and Sciences to hold the press conference with the American and Chinese media, discussing the strategic corporation and cultural communication between U.S and China.

Meanwhile, the CGCC Chicago also invited some of start-up companies, which mainly founded by Chinese people in U.S., to set up their booths at the event, offering those companies the great opportunities to communicate with political and business leaders from U. S. and China, as well as the chance to gain more and more public recognition.

Three Chinese and U.S. companies were awarded at the gala for the recognition of their excellent performances in business developments and corporate social responsibilities. The three companies are CRRC Sifang America, Inc., CW Bearing USA, Inc. and Bank of China.

At the highlight of this year's Gala Dinner, the CEO of Greater Chicago Food Depository Kate Maehr announced the launch of 2018 -2019 CGCC Chicago Social Responsibility Review and Prospect Volunteering Program at the end of the dinner.

China General Chamber of Commerce-U.S.A. (CGCC) is a nonprofit organization representing Chinese enterprises in the United States.

CGCC Chicago covers nine states in the U.S. Midwest - Colorado, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, and Wisconsin. During the period of 2000 to 2017, Chinese companies have invested over 20.3 billion U.S. dollars and created over 45,000 local jobs in the above nine states.

Chinese Ambassador to the United States Cui Tiankai, and American Ambassador to China Terry Branstad have sent their congratulation letters to the annual gala.
NEW YORK, Sept. 20, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Digital Asset Monetary Network, Inc. or DigitalAMN ( OTCMKTS: DATI ), a specialized tech accelerator leveraging the Public Accelerator-Incubator (PAI) model, has added Bitfence, Inc. to its client-company roster for an increase in revenue and potential add to the Companys equity portfolio of high-valued, fast-growth tech startups and development stage companies.



BitFence is a cybersecurity company that prevents and retaliates against digital threats by uniquely leveraging Blockchain. Bitfence has completed the onboarding process for a Reg. CF Offering with CryptoLaunch (the NEW security token-focused vertical of truCrowd, Inc. ).

BitFence creates a sting operation in the cloud, whereby community members mine hackers by running honeypot nodes that attract threats. Once hackers are trapped, the BitFence community members are rewarded HNY Tokens. When hackers or other malicious actors attempt to access these honeypot nodes, their information is stored on a blockchain platform. From there, BitFence correlates information and provides 0-day threat feeds to customers who can purchase a subscription with HNY tokens.

With hundreds of thousands of companies, organizations, and government agencies around the globe facing an ever-increasing number of cybersecurity threats, people are looking for answers on how to keep their IP and digital assets safe, said Ajene Watson, CEO of Digital Asset Monetary Network, Inc. We are excited to play a role in the development of BitFence as a company and believe that their technology could change how enterprises and governments discover, monitor, prevent and fight back against cyberthreats in the future.

DigitalAMN management anticipates ultimately adding Bitfence to is equity portfolio of startups through both its Angels+ and Invest+ programs.

To participate individually in the BitFence CryptoLaunch offering, check for the offering at http://dati.be/15 .

ABOUT BitFence

BitFence is an advanced cybersecurity solution that proactively identifies hackers and distributes their profile information to the blockchain community. By leveraging an extensive network of honeypots, BitFence will allow blockchain participants access to protection on 0-day threats. Because all threats are stored on a highly secure and distributed blockchain platform, BitFence will be able to establish an in-depth list of the worlds security threats and help to disarm them.

ABOUT Digital Asset Monetary Network, Inc.

Digital Asset Monetary Network, Inc. ( OTCMKTS: DATI ) is the first company to utilize the Public Accelerator-Incubator (PAI) model, with the intent to follow the global success of accelerators and incubators around the world, adding niche opportunities to both the microcap and startup communities. As a PAI, Digital Asset Monetary Network will develop and acquire innovations that solve problems through digital platforms and other electronic applications.

Twitter: https://twitter.com/OTC_DATI

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/digitalamn/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/digitalamn/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/DigitalAssetMonetaryNetwork/

For investor and general information, please email info@DigitalAMN.com

ABOUT truCrowd, Inc. (owner and operator of truCrowd.com and CryptLaunch)

Located in the heart of the financial district of downtown Chicago, truCrowd is a FINRA member equity crowdfunding portal operating under Regulation Crowdfunding (Title III of JOBS ACT); connecting startups and emerging businesses with non-accredited and accredited investors. Built on the belief that not all businesses and investors are alike, we pride ourselves on delivering a personalized and professional funding experience through industry-leading technology.

Website: https://cryptolaun.ch/ https://us.trucrowd.com/ https://www.fundanna.com/

Forward Looking Statements

Statements in this press release that are not statements of historical or current fact constitute "forward-looking statements." Such forward-looking statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other unknown factors that could cause the Company's actual operating results to be materially different from any historical results or from any future results expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. In addition to statements that explicitly describe these risks and uncertainties, readers are urged to consider statements that contain terms such as "believes," "belief," "expects," "expect," "intends," "intend," "anticipate," "anticipates," "plans," "plan," to be uncertain and forward-looking.

Contact:

Public Relations Answering Center

(718) 285-6378 EXT 401

info@DigitalAMN.com


Source: Xinhua| 2018-09-21 03:50:37|Editor: Liangyu

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President of European Council Donald Tusk (C) attends a press conference after the European Union's (EU) Informal Summit in Salzburg, Austria, Sept. 20, 2018. European Council President Donald Tusk said Thursday that Britain's Brexit proposals "will not work" as it may risk undermining the EU single market. (Xinhua/Ye Pingfan)

SALZBURG, Austria, Sept. 20 (Xinhua) -- European Council President Donald Tusk said Thursday that Britain's Brexit proposals "will not work" as it may risk undermining the EU single market.

Tusk made the statement at a press conference following a two-day informal summit partly focusing on Brexit talks in the Austrian city of Salzburg.

Regarding British Prime Minister Theresa May's Chequers plan for Brexit, Tusk said that "the suggested framework for economic cooperation will not work, not least because it risks undermining the single market".

May defended her Chequers proposal for Brexit on Wednesday when arriving in Salzburg by saying that "It's the only credible and negotiable plan on the table that delivers no hard border in Northern Ireland and also delivers on the vote of the British people".

According to the proposal, frictionless trade in goods between Britain and the EU could be maintained through a new free trade area.

Tusk hoped that substantial progress over Brexit talks with Britain could be made in October this year.

"The moment of truth for Brexit negotiations will be the October European Council (summit)," Tusk said.

"In October we expect maximum progress and results in the Brexit talks. Then we will decide whether conditions are there to call an extraordinary summit in November to finalize and formalize the deal,"he added.

Should the extraordinary summit take place, it would be on November 17-18, according to Tusk.

In addition, the 27 EU leaders reconfirmed that "there will be no Withdrawal Agreement without a solid, operational and legally binding Irish backstop".

"We continue to fully support (EU chief negotiator) Michel Barnier in his efforts to find such a model," the president said.

The negotiation of Brexit could be tough in October as EU and Britain are both defending their positions.

"It must be clear that there are some issues where we are not ready to compromise. Firstly, of the four fundamental freedoms, the single market, this is why we remain skeptical of Chequers," Tusk said.

"The Irish question remains our priority too and for this, we need not only goodwill, which we feel, the atmosphere was better than two or three weeks ago, but the Irish question needs something more than good intentions," he noted.

If an agreement is to be finalized by March 29, May and other EU members states leaders need to find an acceptable compromise for a solution in coming weeks so parliaments have enough time to ratify the agreement.

However, the gaps between Britain and EU is not easy to be bridged while time is running short.

"We need to compromise on both sides," Tusk noted. The decisive phase would be the Oct. 18-19 summit in Brussels, where Tusk wants a substantial breakthrough.

There is actually the risk of failing to get the deal ratified by parliaments before Brexit Day.

After two-day summit, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said "it was clear today that we need substantial progress by October and that we then aim to finalize everything in November."
The body of a tourist who jumped off the Chain Bridge two weeks ago has been found, tabloid Blikk reports. Update: The body was recently identified as William Sinclair, 48, grandson of UK Liberal party leader. He'd lived with prostitute dominatrix Natalie Rowe, aka Mistress Pain, who he had a child with before his life took a darker turn.

Budapest Police told the daily that the body of the young man was found a few days after the jump.

Blikk also reported on the basis of an eyewitness account that it is unlikely that a suicide had been committed.

The tourist had arrived with friends in Budapest and they a took video of him as he climbed up the bridge.

More:

How did the body of Etonian hedonist who introduced George Osborne to dominatrix Mistress Pain end up in a Budapest river?
Tourism is adding more and more to Hungarys GDP, Peter Szijjarto, the foreign affairs and trade minister, said on the sidelines of the Dubrovnik ministerial conference on cooperation between China and 16 central and eastern European countries.

It is therefore in Hungarys economic interest to increase its tourist turnover perpetually, he added. This growth should be linked to countries from which tourists are high-spending, and the Chinese are among the most affluent tourists in the world, he said on Wednesday, adding that last year Chinese tourists spent 258 billion US dollars worldwide.

So its good news that Chinese tourism in Hungary is fast expanding. Last year, 227,000 Chinese tourists arrived in Hungary, 34% more than a year earlier. In the first half of this year, there were 140,000 Chinese tourists visiting the country, an increase of 11%, he said.

Chinas national tourism agency has set up its central European regional centre in Budapest, which also hosts the 16+1 co-operation centre.

Further, visa applications can be made in 14 Chinese cities and permits for travel to Hungary are released within 48 hours, the minister added.

Szijjarto noted the importance of continually developing transport connections between the two countries in order to boost tourist numbers.

Next summer, besides a Budapest-Beijing direct flight, another China-Hungary flight corridor will be established, he said. We have reached the final phase of negotiations with China Eastern Airlines on the establishment of a Shanghai-Budapest direct airline connection, he said.

He added that it is important that Chinese tourism to Hungary should not only target Budapest, but also Lake Balaton, the wine regions and various thermal baths around the country.

MTI Photo: KKM
The Hungarian Helsinki Committee has turned to the Constitutional Court and the human rights court in Strasbourg over a new law in Hungary that could lead to a prison sentence for anyone who helps asylum seekers.

The government is increasingly angrily attacking independent civil society organisations, leaving aside the norms of the rule of law, the NGO said.

The NGO is challenging criminal laws that threaten people who help asylum seekers with jail time. Not only are staff at the Helsinki Committee in danger, but so is any well-intentioned citizen who tries to help a migrant, the statement said.

The new provisions in the criminal code are vague, giving the authorities wide scope to apply them arbitrarily, the NGO said.

Regarding the special tax on organisations that help migrants, it is only possible to challenge the tax in the Strasbourg court since the government has stripped Hungarys top court of the powers to consider the matter, the statement said.

The Helsinki Committee also claims the 25% tax complicates the work of civilians and the rules governing it are deliberately vague so as to put off potential financial backers.
Hungarys foreign ministry has summoned the Spanish ambassador over the Spanish foreign ministers recent critical remarks concerning Hungary.

Foreign ministry state secretary Levente Magyar told reporters that Josep Borell, the foreign minister of the far-left Spanish government, launched an insulting and violent outburst against Hungary at a public forum on Tuesday.

The two countries can disagree on certain matters, and in this turbulent European political climate, certain countries may face criticism, Magyar said. But the tone of these criticisms, he added, mustnt overstep the framework of honesty and fair cooperation, especially if Hungary is not there to respond to them.

Magyar said Borell had accused Hungary of xenophobia at the forum in question and said that the country lacked a separation of powers and press freedom. He also called Hungary and other countries in the region pseudo-democracies, Magyar added.

Hungary rejects the ministers claims, the state secretary said, adding that everyone can see for themselves that Hungary has a free press, separation of powers and that Hungarians are not xenophobic.

He said it was understandable that after Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbans meeting with Italian Interior Minister Matteo Salvini last month and the European Parliaments approval of the Sargentini report last week, Hungary had become a focal point of European political discourse, with every government reacting to Hungarys policies in some way.

But the Hungarian government, Magyar said, cannot accept a tone like the one used by Josep Borell. The state secretary added, at the same time, that Hungary and Spains relations were on the up, noting that Borell is due to visit Budapest at the end of October.

MTI Photo: KKM
Hungary will not withdraw its Stop Soros package of laws or its related constitutional amendment, according to the governments response to the European Commission regarding the infringement procedure launched over the legislative packages, a justice ministry official said.

The EC launched an infringement procedure against Hungary over the Stop Soros laws and the constitutional amendment in July this year. EC experts raised serious objections about their compatibility with EU laws.

The government sent its response to the EC on Wednesday, state secretary Pal Volner told a press conference. Hungary finds it objectionable that the EC continues to represent an openly pro-migration position instead of being the guardian of the treaties, he said, stressing that the government will not withdraw the laws protecting the country and Europe.

Hungary also objects to the EC getting involved in political activities and attacking migration policy measures that promote border protection, he said. Efforts to use Frontex for withdrawing countries right to guard their own borders represent the latter, he added.

After the approval of Stop Soros and related constitutional amendments, the Open Society Foundations which is the top organisation in the Soros network turned to the EC which launched an infringement procedure against Hungary within four weeks, which Volner said was exceptionally quick.

The EC will most probably not find Hungarys response sufficient and a reasoned opinion will be sent, he added. In response to a question regarding Frontex, he said the organisations representatives have been in Hungary as observers for three years and they raised no criticism about the Hungarian border guard service.

If the EC wants to take over border protection tasks, the reason is that they want to interpret the rules differently and they would operate a reception service which can decide who is allowed to enter the country and who isnt, he added.

Experience from the past three years has shown that EU officials have a much more liberal approach regarding border protection and that is a very bad precursor for us to trust them, he said.

It is fine that those member states that do not have proper border protection, such as Italy and Greece, could use Frontexs help but it should not be forced on those that can take care of border protection for themselves, Volner added.

In response to a question regarding the Sargentini report, he said Hungary has two months to turn to the court and the government has already started preparing its arguments.

Photo: kormany.hu
A pro-government columnist contends that emigration trends are reversing and an increasing number of Hungarians are returning home. The leading online financial journal suggests that Hungarys migration balance is still negative.

Addressing the board meeting of Fidelitas, the youth organization of Fidesz, Minister of Finance Mihaly Varga said that the governments policies targeting young Hungarians have been successful.

He said youth unemployment is below 10 per cent, and emigration trends have reversed. Minister Varga added in the past year, 20,000 Hungarians have returned from abroad to find jobs in Hungary.

In Magyar Idok, Gergely Kiss finds it peculiar that the Left blames emigration on the government.

The pro-government commentator recalls that liberals and social democrats in the 2000s complained about the immobility of young Hungarians, and while in government, they tried to facilitate the temporary employment of Hungarians abroad.

As opposed to the Left, he writes, the Fidesz government helps families and young Hungarians, and as a result, more and more Hungarians return home.

Hungarys migration balance is still negative, Portfolio comments on Minister Vargas calculation. The leading online financial journal points out that in the absence of proper statistics, it is close to impossible to asses the exact number of Hungarians who work abroad as well as the number of returning migrants.

Citing the data of the National Statistical Office, Portfolio acknowledges that the number of registered emigrants declined by 20 per cent year on year in early 2018, but while the gap is closing, more Hungarians are leaving than returning, Portfolio concludes.

This opinion does not necessarily represent the views of XpatLoop.com or the publisher. Your opinions are welcome too - for editorial review before possible publication online Click here to Share Your Story
Celebrate the Birthday Party Of Buddha-Bar Budapest with DJ Papa from Buddha-Bar Monte-Carlo on 29th September  Saturday 9 pm.

Buddha-Bar Budapest celebrates its 6th birthday and you are invited! Join the celebration and party through the night to amazing music and let them entertain you with special programmes, live music and other surprises.



The special guest of the night, DJ Papa - The #1 DJ of Buddha-Bar Monte-Carlo - is bringing the unique casino atmosphere to Budapest for this celebratory event only. Buddha-Bar Budapest resident, DJ Mada is also joining the party to make your night even more memorable.



Ticket types & Pricing:



Walking Tickets -  10 / person

-Granted access to the dance floor area and a welcome drink by Absolut Elyx



Standars table reservation -  150 / table for 2-4 persons

-Granted access and table at the event for max. 4 persons

-1 bottle of beverage from the following selection, served with 10 bottles of soft drinks or Red Bull

Absolut Vodka (1 l), Beefeater Gin (1 l), Havana Club Rum (1 l) or Jameson Whiskey (1 l)



VIP table reservation -  250 / table for 2-4 persons

-Granted access and VIP table (for max. 4 persons) situated in a prime position

-1 bottle of premium beverage from the following selection, served with 10 bottles of soft drinks or Red Bull

Absolut Elyx (1 l), Belvedere (0,7 l), Russian Standard Imperia (0,7 l), Beefeater 24 (0,7 l), Tanqueray 10 (0,7 l), Hendricks (0,7 l), Gin Mare (0,7 l), Havana Club 7 yrs (0,7 l), Chivas Regal 12 yrs (0,7 l), Glenlivet 12 yrs (0,7 l), Nikka All Malt (0,7 l) or Makers Mark (0,7 l)

-Buddha-Bar Bites



VVIP table reservation -  1 000 / table for 6-8 persons

-Granted access and VVIP table (for max. 8 persons) situated in the best place

-VVIP hostess and private waiter

-1 bottle of Moet & Chandon Champagne

-2 bottles of premium beverage from the following selection, served with 20 bottles of soft drinks or Red Bull

Absolut Elyx (1,5 l), Beluga (0,7 l), Kauffman Hard / Soft (0,7 l), Monkey 47 (0,5 l), Beefeater Burroughs Reserve (0,7 l), Jinzu (0,7 l), Havana Club Seleccion de Maestros (0,7 l),

Zacapa 23 yrs (0,7 l), Chivas Regal 18 yrs (0,7 l), Ardbeg Single Malt Scotch (0,7 l) or

Don Julio (0,7 l)

-Exclusive Buddha-Bar Sushi Selection and Buddha-Bar Bites



More information & Table reservation: Karoly Bosznai - Event Director via e-mail:

event.director@buddhabarhotel.hu

Click here to visit Buddha-Bar Hotel Budapest Klotild Palace online

1052 Budapest, Vaci utca 34.
VANCOUVER, British Columbia, Sept. 20, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- SouthGobi Resources Ltd. (TSX: SGQ, HK: 1878) (SouthGobi or the Company) - The Company announces that Inner Mongolia SouthGobi Energy Co., Ltd. (IMSGE), a subsidiary of the Company, has received a court summons (the Summons) from the Ejinaqi Peoples Court of Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region of China (the Ejinaqi Court) dated September 13, 2018 in relation to a dispute over certain coal sales contracts with Jiayuguan Xiyuan Trading Co., Ltd. (Xiyuan), a former customer of IMSGE.



According to the Summons, Xiyuan has applied to the Ejinaqi Court claiming that IMSGE should repay a sum of RMB 19.4 million (or approximately USD $2.8 million) to Xiyuan, comprised of RMB 19.1 million of coal prepayments and RMB 0.3 million of interest. Xiyuan also claimed Ejinaqi Fulemeng Energy Industry Co., Ltd. for joint liability of the above sums as it was alleged as an agent for IMSGE to receive coal prepayment and deliver coal on behalf of IMSGE.

A court hearing has been scheduled on October 10, 2018 regarding this matter.

The Company firmly believes that it has a strong defense on the merits and will retain independent Chinese litigation counsel to vigorously defend itself against these claims. However, due to the inherent uncertainties of litigation, it is not possible to predict whether IMSGE will be successful in defending itself in these proceedings.

The Company will provide further updates on the status of this matter as appropriate.

About SouthGobi

SouthGobi, listed on the Toronto and Hong Kong stock exchanges, owns and operates its flagship Ovoot Tolgoi coal mine in Mongolia. It also holds the mining licences of its other metallurgical and thermal coal deposits in South Gobi Region of Mongolia. SouthGobi produces and sells coal to customers in China.
Black Friday 2021 - profita de reducerile de pe Esteto.ro

Perioada Black Friday 2021 a inceput pe Esteto.ro inca din data de 1 noiembrie si ofera reduceri semnificative la mii de produse, atat la cele vandute din depozitul propriu, cat si cele vandute de catre firmele partenere. Black Friday 2021 va asteapta cu foarte multe promotii la produse [citeste mai departe]
VANCOUVER, British Columbia, Sept. 20, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Body and Mind Inc. (CSE: BAMM, US OTC: BMMJ), (the Company or BAM) announces the Companys wholly-owned subsidiary, Nevada Medical Group LLC (NMG) has recently submitted four dispensary license applications in the State of Nevada. The dispensary license application process has been limited to current cannabis license holders in good standing with the State of Nevada.



The State of Nevada opened the application period for new dispensary licenses on September 7th, 2018 and the period closes on September 20th, 2018. The Nevada Department of Taxation is anticipating awarding new provisional dispensary licenses to successful applicants on or around December 5th, 2018.

The company initiated the application process many months ago and has submitted Nevada dispensary license applications within the City of Las Vegas, Clark County, City of North Las Vegas and the City of Reno.

Robert Hasman, BAM director commented, We are delighted to submit four applications for retail licensing in the State of Nevada which was a culmination of efforts by our management team and in-state partners. Our strategy was to target underserved, high-traffic areas where competition is limited. We believe this is consistent with the mandate of the state. We also believe that the state will look to level the playing field for those who do not yet have vertical integration. Beyond Ohio and Nevada, and combined with what we believe to be a favourable share structure, we continue to look for grass roots licensing opportunities to create significant value for our shareholders in a low-cost organic manner.

NMG has submitted the four Nevada dispensary applications with a local in-state partner group and a number of other individuals (the Applicant Group), all of whom provided the necessary experience and bonding for the applications. The Applicant Group, which includes two BAM directors acting in their own capacity, will co-fund the application as well as construction and development pending successful applications. In their capacity as directors of BAM, and where applicable regarding the license applications, both BAM directors abstained from voting to avoid any conflict of interest. Upon the issuance of one or more provisional dispensary license(s), NMG will formally apply to transfer 24.5 % of the license(s) to the in-state partner group, subject to state approval. Additionally, and only upon successful receipt of a provisional dispensary license(s), BAM has also agreed to pay to three individuals of the Applicant Group CAD $62,500 as a gross fee as fair value for their contributions to the applications and to settle the gross fee by way of the issuance of an aggregate 125,000 restricted shares of common stock in the Company to the three individuals within ten days upon the Applicant Group being awarded and receiving one or more of the Dispensary Licenses.

Ohio Dispensary and Production Progress

BAM and its strategic in-state investment partners are rapidly moving forward with construction and state approvals for the recently awarded dispensary to NMG Ohio LLC located in Elyria, Lorain County, Northeastern Ohio (see news release dated June 7, 2018). The Company maintains a 30% ownership interest in NMG Ohio LLC. NMG and its strategic in-state investment partners have also recently been awarded a medical cannabis production license (see news release dated September 19, 2018).

Architect drawings for the new dispensary interior are complete and local and state authorities have provided construction approval. The Ohio state authority has approved various advertising and marketing materials and the Company is working to engage and educate local patients during the construction phase.

The Ohio medical marijuana program provides access to medical cannabis products such as edibles, oils, patches and vaporizers to authorized and approved patients having one or more of 21 medical conditions. Medical marijuana patients and their caregivers will be required to register with the Ohio Board of Pharmacy to receive patient identification cards necessary to buy medical marijuana from licensed dispensaries. Patients and their caregivers will be allowed to possess up to a 90-day supply.

Neither the Canadian Securities Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the Canadian Securities Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

For further information regarding Body and Mind Inc . please contact:

Michael Mills 778-389-0007

mmills@bammarijuana.com

About Body and Mind

Body and Mind is a publicly traded company investing in high quality medical and recreational cannabis cultivation and production. Our wholly owned Nevada subsidiary was awarded one of the first medical marijuana cultivation licences and holds cultivation and production licenses. Body and Mind products include dried flower, edibles, topicals, extracts as well as GPEN Gio cartridges. Body and Mind marijuana strains have won numerous awards including the Las Vegas Hempfest Cup 2016, High Times Top Ten, the NorCal Secret Cup and the Emerald Cup. Body and Mind continues to expand operations in Nevada and Ohio and is constantly reviewing accretive expansion opportunities.

For more information please visit our web site at www.bammarijuana.com

Safe Harbor Statement

Except for the statements of historical fact contained herein, the information presented in this news release constitutes forward-looking statements as such term is used in applicable United States and Canadian laws. These statements relate to analyses and other information that are based on forecasts of future results, estimates of amounts not yet determinable and assumptions of management. Any other statements that express or involve discussions with respect to predictions, expectations, beliefs, plans, projections, objectives, assumptions or future events or performance (often, but not always, using words or phrases such as expects or does not expect, is expected, anticipates or does not anticipate, plans, estimates or intends, or stating that certain actions, events or results may, could, would, might or will be taken, occur or be achieved) are not statements of historical fact and should be viewed as forward-looking statements. Such 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 future results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. Such risks and other factors include, among others, the actual results of activities, variations in the underlying assumptions associated with the estimation of activities, the availability of capital to fund programs and the resulting dilution caused by the raising of capital through the sale of shares, accidents, labor disputes and other risks. 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 not to be as anticipated, estimated or intended. There can be no assurance that such statements will prove to be accurate as actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such statements. Accordingly, readers should not place undue reliance on forward-looking statements contained in this news release and in any document referred to in this news release.

Certain matters discussed in this news release and oral statements made from time to time by representatives of the Company may constitute forward-looking statements. Although the Company believes that the expectations reflected in such forward-looking statements are based upon reasonable assumptions, it can give no assurance that its expectations will be achieved. Forward-looking information is subject to certain risks, trends and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those projected. Many of these factors are beyond the Companys ability to control or predict. Important factors that may cause actual results to differ materially and that could impact the Company and the statements contained in this news release can be found in the Companys filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The Company assumes no obligation to update or supplement any forward-looking statements whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise. This press release shall not constitute an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to buy securities.
Joncarl Lackman taking his coffee at The Dutch in Pennsport in 2016. Read more

Chef Joncarl Lachman will take over part of the Washington Square West landmark More Than Just Ice Cream after it closes next week.

Lachman, who coowns the hit Euro BYOB Noord with Bob Moysan, will call it Winkel, focusing on Euro-style breakfast and lunches, with a potential of dinner service. Opening at 1119 Locust St. is being targeted for November.

To focus on Winkel, he has ceded his interest in the Pennsport bruncherie The Dutch to business partner Lee Styer of Fond in an amicable parting. The Dutch continues with Kevin Waters in the kitchen and Becca Prawlucki out front.

Lachman enjoys letting his Dutch roots show. "I've always wanted to do a place called Winkel [which means "store"], but people made fun of the name. It was almost Noord's name," he told me. That was in 2012, before Lachman's homecoming from successful restaurant gigs in Chicago.

"Now," he said. "I can get away with it."

Menu will not be the same as The Dutch's.

Among options will be the shakshuka that was popular at Neuf, his now-closed North African-themer in the Italian Market, as well as Dutch pancakes  not Dutch babies but sweet and savory Amsterdam-style pancakes (blackberry and bacon, perhaps), and "interesting" omelet fillings such as fried oysters.

Besides Noord, Lachman consults at Restaurant M at the Morris House.

Winkel will take only the kitchen side of More Than Just Ice Cream, whose finale will be Sept. 27.
Marijuana 'flower' went on sale Aug. 1, 2018 at about 16 cannabis dispensaries. One of the most popular strains was Terrapin Pennsylvania's 'Princess Leia,' seen in this photo. Read more

The problem-plagued software that forms the backbone of the medical marijuana industry in Pennsylvania may soon be getting a serious tune-up.

MJ Freeway, the Denver-based company that provides the state's mandatory seed-to-sale software, announced Thursday that it had completed a $10 million Series C financing round. A company spokeswoman said the financing would go to improving MJ Freeway's Leaf Data Systems software to handle increased complexity, functionality, and data security.

The company was awarded a five-year, $10.4 million contract by the Pennsylvania Department of Health in 2017 to trace all of the state's medical cannabis commerce. The software tracks every plant that is grown, every sale that is recorded, and every patient and medical practitioner who participates in the program. MJ Freeway operates a similar system in Washington state, and provides enterprise software for cannabis transactions in dozens of other states and 11 countries.

The Pennsylvania and Washington systems have been hobbled by hacks, hiccups, and grinding slowdowns. MJ Freeway, which was first on the market with the tracking software in 2010, has several competitors, which also have been similarly hit with chronic and debilitating glitches. With the funding, MJ Freeway plans to regain market dominance.

As the marijuana industry catches fire on stock markets, and Canada approaches full legalization on Oct. 17, cannabis companies in the United States are gearing up for rapid expansion. Every state requires seed-to-sale software as a rampart against illegal diversion. Adult recreational use is allowed in nine states and medical marijuana is available in some form in 30 states.

MJ Freeway's latest fund-raising round was led by Batu Capital Investments and Cresco Capital Partners. A previous Series B investment round in 2015 raised $8 million, according to a news release.
AutoNation CEO Mike Jackson speaks during a presentation at AutoNation headquarters in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., in 2011. Read more

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. (AP)  Mike Jackson is stepping down after almost two decades leading AutoNation, the largest dealership chain in the United States.

Jackson, 69, steered AutoNation through the economic crisis and shares have increased fourfold since he took over in 1999, though he will relinquish his role as CEO next year with auto sales waning across the industry.

Jackson has become an outspoken personality in regular appearances on the business channel CNBC.

He earned a reputation as an innovator and, last year, entered a multiyear partnership with Google to provide maintenance for its self-driving auto division, Waymo.

He took over the struggling business in 1999 at a time when many doubted that a centralized chain could supplant local dealers that had deep ties to their communities. Under his leadership, the chain continued to acquire dealers, and in 2013 it scrapped the local names and rebranded most of them as AutoNation.

As auto sales peaked in 2016, Jackson shifted the chain toward used vehicles, opening several stand-alone used vehicle showrooms and selling its own brand of replacement parts.

Today AutoNation has 325 U.S. locations, and the chain has sold more than 11 million vehicles.

Jackson will continue as CEO while AutoNation looks for a successor, and will hold onto the title of executive chairman until 2021.

AutoNation Inc., based in Fort Lauderdale, said Wednesday that it is considering internal and external candidates.
Comcast Corp. opened the doors to its new high-rise in Center City on Thursday, and it smelled just like a new car.

Calling it a "sneak peek," chief executive Brian Roberts gave the first tour of the $1.5 billion Comcast Technology Center, taking the whisking Swiss-designed elevators to several floors of the city's tallest building, pointing out the commissioned art with Philadelphia ties adorning the walls, standing desks for employees, local chef Greg Vernick's coffee bar in the public lobby (not open to the public yet), and a 200-foot herb green wall along glass windows in the two-story company cafeteria with seating for 900.

"A lot of the heart and soul [of Comcast] is in this building, in this town," said Roberts, who was trailed by a dozen local reporters and Comcast executives for an hour. "No one has tried to build a technology center in the heart of an East Coast city," he added.

Roberts, who will own an apartment in the 60-story building, mused about legendary director Stephen Spielberg or Microsoft founder and billionaire Bill Gates staying in the Four Seasons hotel that will top the new tower.

Roberts has said that his vision is to create an urban campus that could rival those in Silicon Valley, with no offices and an "open-floor plan." The Comcast Center and the Comcast Technology Center will be connected by an underground concourse that's not yet open. Eight thousand people will work in the two buildings, and the amenities will include several restaurants, two company cafeterias, a full-floor gym (44th floor in the new building), on-site medical services, and the hotel that will open next year.

Some have compared it to Rockefeller Center in New York.

Though still under construction, Comcast has been relocating employees to the new building. The 1,000th employee will take up a desk there on Monday, and all 4,000 should be there by late December, Comcast officials said. Photographers weren't allowed to take photos on Thursday because of unfinished areas.

Comcast announced the construction of the new tower in January 2014, after it had been discussed for at least a year. Comcast held a competition of international architects for the right to design it, won by Norman Foster of the United Kingdom who also designed Apple Inc.'s new headquarters in Silicon Valley.

At the time, Comcast agreed to add 1,500 jobs in the city, bringing its Philadelphia payroll to about 6,300 employees. Comcast executives cautioned that this was a conservative estimate. Indeed, the company now employs 8,000 to 9,000 in the city. In addition to the Comcast Center and the Comcast Technology Center, the company leases floors in three other downtown buildings: One Logan Square, Two Logan Square, and 1500 Market St.

"Before you ask, I am not planning on building another building," Roberts said.
After years of fits and starts, Philadelphia Gas Works is moving forward yet again to get a liquefied gas facility off the ground.

PGW announced Thursday that it has signed a deal with a private partner to build a new LNG facility at its Passyunk Plant. LNG is a liquid form of natural gas that is in demand as fuel for ships, trucks, trains, and remote power plants.

Liberty Energy Trust, a Conshohocken firm that has shown an interest in PGW since it bid unsuccessfully to buy the utility from the city in 2014, would build the plant and share profits with PGW. The utility projects that it would generate $4 million in additional annual revenue.

The public-private proposal, submitted to the Philadelphia Gas Commission on Thursday, is much less ambitious than the $120 million plan PGW officials envisioned two years ago when they floated the idea of a larger plant of their own in Port Richmond.

The new proposal requires the private entity, Passyunk Energy Center LLC, to put up all the capital, reducing the risk to PGW and its customers.

According to the filing with the Gas Commission, the $60 million project would produce 120,000 gallons of liquefied natural gas a day. LNG is produced by supercooling natural gas to 260 degrees below zero, transforming the gas into liquid.

PGW has produced LNG at its Port Richmond complex for more than 40 years, storing the material in two 120-foot-high, white-domed tanks on Delaware Avenue. LNG is converted back into gas to supply customers on peak winter days.

Without the LNG storage, the pipelines serving the city would be unable to deliver enough gas to meet demand on the coldest winter days. PGW says the plant has saved its customers $3 billion since 1973.

PGW began selling surplus LNG in 2013 to commercial buyers and says it has earned $6 million in three years, which it says helps reduce rates for other customers. The added revenue whet its appetite for a bigger LNG market share.

Under its proposal, the private company will build the liquefaction facility and then lease it back to PGW for a nominal fee.

PGW will operate the new plant and sell LNG production services to PEC for a fee. PGW will also store the liquefied gas at an existing insulated storage tank at Passyunk for a fee. PGW expects about $1.3 million to $1.5 million in fees a year.

The private company will market the liquefied gas and split revenue evenly with PGW.

"This project takes PGW's decades of LNG experience and expertise and puts it to new use on behalf of our customers and the city," Craig E. White, the utility's president and chief executive, said in a statement.

Liberty Energy Trust did not respond to a request for comment Thursday.

The firm, headed by Charles E. Ryan and Boris Brevnov, was an unsuccessful bidder to develop the Port of Philadelphia's Southport project in 2016, and bid unsuccessfully this year to build and operate the Wilmington Port.

Previous coverage

2016: Philadelphia Gas Works is moving forward on a plan to expand its liquefied natural gas plant in Port Richmond to produce fuel for nonutility customers, exposing the city-owned utility to potential profits  and perils  of competitive business markets.

On Tuesday, PGW will seek proposals from companies to buy and market LNG produced from a $120 million expansion at its plant. The utility believes there is a growing demand for LNG to fuel long-haul trucks, trains, marine vessels, and remote power-generation facilities.

The utility's leaders are confident that sales of LNG will generate enough revenue to cover estimated annual debt service of $7 million for the new project and also provide rate relief for customers. PGW has sold 2,000 truckloads of surplus LNG from the plant in recent years, earning millions for its ratepayers.

"We believe LNG is a fertile opportunity for us," said Craig White, PGW's chief executive.

http://www.documentcloud.org/documents/4912138-DOCCENTER-PGW-Seeks-Plans-to-Buy-Market-Its.html

2015: Now that the dust has settled over the failed privatization of Philadelphia Gas Works, the city-owned utility is exploring a new business venture that may take it into uncharted commercial territory.

PGW announced last week that it was accepting nonbinding proposals from buyers of liquefied natural gas, taking aim at potentially lucrative markets for off-system sales of LNG.

The utility produces LNG at its Port Richmond plant, where the fuel is stored and converted back into gas to supply customers on peak winter days. It began selling surplus LNG in 2013 and earned $4 million last year.

http://www.documentcloud.org/documents/4912137-DOCCENTER-at-Gas-Works-LNG-Is-Sparking-Interest.html

2014: If the deal to sell Philadelphia Gas Works dies, the city has several opportunities it can pursue to increase earnings from its gas utility.

One of the more alluring alternatives: Liquefied natural gas, or LNG.

The city utility's most valuable asset is a four-decade-old industrial plant on the gritty Port Richmond waterfront that converts natural gas into liquid form. The utility built the LNG plant to store gas for peak winter days. After the city's population diminished, it now has excess capacity.

http://www.documentcloud.org/documents/4912136-DOCCENTER-PGW-Could-Focus-on-LNG-Plant.html
A federal court judge on Tuesday threw out the state's ban on political contributions from principals in casinos. THe suit was brought by a shareholder in the Sands Casino Resort Bethlehem. Read more

A federal court has overturned the state's ban on political contributions from people involved in the gaming industry, ruling that the law aimed at curbing the influence of casino interests was too broad.

The suit was brought by Pasquale "Pat" Deon Sr., a Bucks County businessman and chairman of the SEPTA board who is also a major shareholder in the Sands Casino Resort Bethlehem. Deon was joined by Maggie Hardy Magerko, an owner of 84 Lumber, who is a beneficiary of the trust that owns Lady Luck Casino Nemacolin in Fayette County.

U.S. District Judge Sylvia H. Rambo, sitting in Harrisburg, ruled Wednesday that the Pennsylvania Gaming Act of 2004 unconstitutionally abrogates the First Amendment rights of Deon and Magerko and "those similarly situated" by banning them from making political contributions.

The suit named the Pennsylvania Gaming Control Board and Attorney General Josh Shapiro as defendants. The PGCB denied the allegations and claimed the burden the ban placed on Deon and Magerko was minimal.

Rambo, in the summary judgment, said the state's ban was too broad, preventing any principal, key employee, or licensee of a gaming operation or supplier from making any contribution to a candidate or a political action committee.

"The stated purpose of the law is legitimate and commendable to the extent it seeks to prohibit corruption or the appearance of corruption, yet a laudable purpose is not dispositive as to the law's constitutionality," she wrote.

The judge suggested that the legislature may explore ways to restrict political contributions of gaming industry principals by more strictly defining who is subject to the ban, or by rewriting the law to limit aggregate contributions."

"The court holds only that the ban in its current form goes much further than necessary to achieve its stated purpose of eliminating corruption and the appearance of corruption," Rambo wrote in a 32-page memorandum.

A spokesman for the gaming control board declined to comment while the board was reviewing the opinion. The state could appeal the decision to the Third Circuit Court of Appeals.

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court threw out the state's ban in 2009, which initially outlawed large campaign contributions from key parties in the gaming industry. The legislature responded by banning all contributions.

Deon, who is also a member of the Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission, is significantly involved in the management of the Sands property, but Magerko does not have any direct involvement with the industry, Rambo noted in her decision.

"Yet, the law makes no distinction between the two when it comes to banning political contributions," she said.

The courts have reached conflicting decisions on restrictions in several states on political contributions from gaming officials. New Jersey prevents casino managers and corporate owners from making direct or indirect campaign donations. Maryland law prevents donations from any shareholders with a 5 percent or greater interest in a casino.
Pedestrians cross the walkway at 16th and Chestnut Street while automobies wait for the light at rush hour. Read more

A new class of traffic enforcement officer is expected to be proposed Thursday in City Council to tackle gridlock afflicting Center City.

The officers would not carry firearms or have the power to arrest people, said Council President Darrell L. Clarke, but would be able to assist in managing traffic flow in the city.

"It is really problematic," Clarke said. "We've got to get a handle on traffic."

If approved by Council and signed by the mayor, the measure  an amendment to the City Charter  would appear as a ballot question in May. If voters pass it, the new officers could be appointed within six months, according to the ordinance.

The proposal is already facing opposition from police, who say giving traffic duties to non-sworn personnel isn't legal in Pennsylvania. Civil service rules and concerns about racial profiling are also likely to be raised as obstacles as Council considers the ordinance.

The combination of Philadelphia's population growth, the increase in truck traffic serving local businesses and delivering orders from online shopping, and the popularity of ride sharing in the city are contributing to a traffic nightmare. Narrow travel lanes can be made virtually impassible by one vehicle stopped to make a delivery.

A report from the Center City District earlier this year found the time needed to drive between Broad and 23rd Streets on Chestnut, Sansom, or Walnut Streets increased by 10 percent to 20 percent between 2013 to 2017. Public transportation was even slower, with those same trips by bus taking 25 percent to 40 percent longer.

Clarke's proposed ordinance would also task the new officers with enforcing quality-of-life crimes and code violations, and assisting with special events, along with regulating traffic flow. The ordinance, however, leaves many matters unaddressed, including what enforcement powers these officers would have.

John McNesby, president of the Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 5, said Wednesday that he would oppose Clarke's ordinance.

"They can propose whatever they want, but it's a job that's historically and traditionally been the job of police officers," McNesby said.

Clarke's office said it doesn't consider state law an obstacle. Firefighters, police auxiliary officers, and school crossing guards all play roles in traffic enforcement in Pennsylvania, said Jane Roh, a spokesperson for Clarke.

Special officers are not uncommon in other big cities. Chicago, Baltimore, Washington, and New York all use some form of traffic control officers. In New York, increased manned traffic enforcement coincided with a reduction in traffic deaths for four years straight, according to the New York philanthropic organization TransitCenter. Street redesign and red light cameras may have also played a significant role, though.

Clarke said he did not coordinate the crafting of his ordinance with the city's Office of Transportation and Infrastructure Systems (OTIS), which has been spearheading the city's safe streets initiative, Vision Zero. Clarke said he didn't think it was a problem that his efforts weren't being made in conjunction with their larger safe streets plans. "Vision Zero only works if you have enforcement," he said.

City officials have said there is a need for more traffic enforcement in Center City, though they have said creating a new class of officers could create challenges with the civil service system.

"Enforcement is key to managing congestion and traffic safety, and any ideas on how to bolster enforcement are welcome," Kelly Cofrancisco, a spokeswoman for OTIS, said Wednesday. "We're looking forward to discussing the Council president's idea in more detail and to better understand its benefits and costs as well as examine any labor ramifications."

The special officers would be civil service employees, but it wasn't clear what agency would hire them. Clarke envisions them being under the authority of the Police Department, and likely department employees. The ordinance did not state how many public safety enforcement officers would be needed. But in earlier conversations, Clarke had discussed the need for about 100 officers.

The specifics, he said, should be determined by the city administration and Police Department, with the mayor having the final authority on how many officers to hire. The city authorized an additional $20 million annually for the next five years for Police Department hiring, and Clarke proposed some of that money could go toward these special officers.

Police officials did not return calls for comment Wednesday.

The Police Department is at full strength for the first time in years, McNesby said, and there are ample officers to enforce traffic.

Traffic enforcement has not been high on the department's priorities recently. As of 2017, the department has been steadily issuing fewer traffic citations every year for the past five years.

Clarke argued that using some money to hire these special officers would free sworn officers to pursue criminal investigations.

"We can't be a city that has over 300 homicides a year," Clarke said, "and yet we're utilizing police officers to do traffic."

Human traffic enforcement also brings with it the possibility of bias and profiling, something advocates are keen to avoid in their efforts to make streets safer.

Clarke said that he trusted the training special officers would go through and that the worsening traffic issues required action.

"We used to manage decline in this city," he said. "Now we've got to figure out a way to manage growth."
The former Frankford Carpet Mill on Huntington Street and Trenton Avenue in South Kensington will be converted into 39 affordable apartments. Read more

A mere four years ago, the Oxford Mills apartments felt like the edge of the gentrified world. The sprawling 19th-century dye works at Philadelphia's Front and Oxford Streets was bordered by empty lots, shuttered factories, and a sprinkling of auto mechanics. There was no Honeygrow, no Suraya, no Evil Genius Beer Co., no City Fitness, and definitely no suit-wearing brigades striding down Front Street.

That made the brick buildings perfect for subsidized housing in the view of Greg Hill and Gabe Canuso, two Philadelphia developers with a do-good streak. By cobbling together a variety of federal tax credits, they were able to turn a historic industrial relic into a mixed-used development and offer 90 loft apartments at a serious discount. Today, Oxford Mills is an island of affordability in a sea of $500,000 homes. The neighborhood now goes by the name "Olde Kensington."

Hill and Canuso immediately decided they wanted to repeat the model, so they went hunting for a similar industrial building farther up the Market-Frankford El corridor. They found the Frankford Carpet Mill in 2015 at Huntingdon Street and Trenton Avenue, a block south of Lehigh Avenue and Kensington's notorious heroin encampments.

The pair plan to start construction on their next batch of affordable apartments this fall, but this time the conditions are very different. Gentrification arrived before they could even get started.

From the upper windows of the old carpet factory, you can see the distinctive plywood framing of new rowhouse construction dotting the landscape. Five new houses across the street are selling for north of $400,000. A coffee-and-comics shop has planted its flag down the block. "If I hadn't bought this building three years ago, I could never afford to do this project," Hill told me.

Gentrification used to creep up on Philadelphia neighborhoods imperceptibly over the span of a decade or two. These days, it's moving at warp speed, especially through the river wards served by the El. It took just four years to spread two stops, from Berks to Huntingdon Station, and now the march of development is poised to make the leap across Lehigh Avenue into Kensington proper.

While those neighborhoods need affordable units more than ever, good development sites are getting harder to come by, says Felix Torres-Colon, who runs the nonprofit New Kensington Community Development Corp. His group opened the 51-unit Orinoka Civic House across from Somerset Station last year and plans a companion building on its remaining land.

After that? "We have about 10 rowhouse-size sites in Fishtown," where the group could build discounted, for-sale houses. They would probably end up selling for $250,000 to $325,000  a relative bargain, but beyond the reach of many low-income families.

Anyway, it's affordable rentals that are in short supply. In 2000, 45 percent of the apartments in New Kensington's service area, which stretches from Girard Avenue to the Frankford Creek, rented for less than $500. Today, just 7 percent are in that price range, according to a market study by the development corporation.

Hill and Canuso are an unlikely duo to come to the rescue. Their resume is dominated by blue-chip projects like the Ayer condos on Washington Square, The Bridge in Old City, and million-dollar-plus Mode7 houses in Logan Square. But after the 2007 recession, which their company barely survived, they vowed to devote more of their time to socially conscious projects, what the industry calls "impact development."

Hill and Canuso still do the high-end work, but mainly to pay the bills so they can concentrate on developing affordable housing and office space for nonprofits. "I wanted to do something meaningful with my skills," Hill said. It's a labor of love, he added, noting that if he simply sold the carpet factory to another developer, he would make more than he will turning it into affordable housing.

The old carpet factory is a perfect place to replicate the Oxford Mills project. The high-ceilinged, brick buildings also were erected in the late 19th century, during the "loom boom" when Kensington was the epicenter of American carpet manufacturing. Designed by William Steele & Sons, the engineer-architects responsible for many of Philadelphia's great loft buildings, the buildings have big open floor plans that make conversion to apartments easy. ISA is doing the architecture and has added a new stair tower to make access easier.

Hill and Canuso aren't just interested in building cut-price apartments. They also use their projects to create communities. With Oxford Mills, they built a social network around education. Teach for America rents the lion's share of the office space, and their recruits get priority on the apartments, which are priced 25 percent below market rate. Both buildings are designed around generously landscaped courtyards with outdoor seating and fire pits to encourage socializing.

The new project, which is being called Huntingdon Mills, will bring together people involved in health care and social services. Low-income social workers, therapists, and nurses will get first crack at the 39 subsidized apartments. Given the proximity to Kensington, Hill believes many of his future tenants will be serving the local population.

The developers already have lined up an early learning center for the ground floor. But given all the development in the neighborhood, they're also making space for a cafe and gym.

When I asked Hill and Canuso how long they can stay one step ahead of gentrification, they sighed. They haven't found their next building yet. Maybe something in Port Richmond. They had better hurry.
ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations Philadelphia Field Office Director Simona L. Flores at her desk in Center City Read more

Let's start with a simple fact: No foreigner has a right to visit or settle in the United States without permission from the federal government. No governor, no mayor, no "welcoming" sanctuary city can grant "permission" to stay. "Protecting" those here illegally undermines U.S. law and is dangerous.

First, it creates disrespect for law. Second, criminals and terrorists are among those who come here illegally. Five of the 9/11 mass murderers had overstayed their visas.

Immigrants, both legal and illegal, have lower crime rates than the native born, but they do commit crimes. Of the 11 million people estimated by the New York Times to be here illegally, the newspaper reported, 820,000 have been convicted of a crime  300,000 of a felony. Those are not insignificant numbers. There are many more.

A recent column of mine focused on a child rapist enabled by Philadelphia. The column listed eight other foreign felons in Philly.

When Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a division of the Department of Homeland Security, removes an undocumented foreigner, it is enforcing U.S. law. ICE staffers are amazed and hurt when people call them Nazis, as some protesters did in Portland, Ore., in July.

"It's offensive," says Simona L. Flores, director of ICE's enforcement and removal operations in the Philadelphia office, and a 30-year veteran of federal immigration enforcement.

"We try to enforce the laws as humanely and professionally as possible," says David O'Neill, assistant field office director.

It's not just the loony left. Some Trump wingnuts believe the FBI is a cancer. We are spitting on our sworn protectors.

Flores, who is new to Philadelphia, was surprised by what she calls a "lack of cooperation from the mayor's office."

Until recently, Philadelphia did cooperate, although minimally, by allowing ICE access to the Preliminary Arraignment Reporting System, which is how Philadelphia logs information about people arrested. Mayor Kenney canceled the access, putting ordinary Philadelphians at risk by shielding convicted foreign felons from deportation.

Whatever the good intentions, sanctuary cities such as Philadelphia thwart federal law, and misguided Democratic leaders gloat about it. Or do infantile celebratory dances.

One poll says that most Americans oppose sanctuary cities, which were criticized by then-Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. But nothing dents self-righteous Kenney's missionary zeal to shield lawbreakers.

ICE critics sometimes call it a "deportation force," but ICE also fights terrorism, as well as human and drug trafficking.

When ICE issues a detainer to get custody of a removable alien, Philly usually ignores it. The city can turn over prisoners if it wants to, but creates obstacles.

A 2016 Kenney executive order said the city would cooperate only with suspects convicted of first- and second-degree felonies that involve violence, but spokesman Mike Dunn says that is no longer operative. The city still deviously insists on a criminal warrant, knowing ICE can't get criminal warrants unless an immigration-related crime also has been committed, and that's usually not the case.

The previous stipulations were good news to Jose Palermos, convicted in 2013 of sexual assault on a 7-year-old girl, a third-degree felony. The city turned him loose instead of handing him to ICE for deportation. How can you defend that?

The city's criminal-warrant requirement is legally brilliant but morally bankrupt. Why does Philadelphia devote so much effort to noncitizens who don't belong here in the first place?

I asked the mayor's office for a one-paragraph justification of its sanctuary city policy.

I got several paragraphs, including the circular reasoning that not enforcing the law encourages immigrants to cooperate with law enforcement, but the nub is that "our policy affirms Philadelphia's place as a welcoming city open to all seeking the American Dream." Even those arriving illegally. Once you arrive, the city believes, you are immune from punishment.

The ICE managers I met with in their Center City office were mystified by walls erected by the city.

Those who would abolish ICE without replacing it with another agency with a similar mission would create open borders. And if we had open borders, we could be swamped by more than 150 million arrivals, according to a Gallup poll.

Those numbers would crack our economy like a walnut. How exactly would that improve America?
If you only get your political news from Twitter (spoiler alert: bad idea), you can be slightly forgiven if you bet your life's savings on the notion that progressive upstart Cynthia Nixon  former star of TV's "Sex and the City"  was going to oust New York's two-term governor Andrew Cuomo in a Democratic primary earlier this month.

This Nixon seemed like The One for capturing the supposed zeitgeist of 2018  merging a Trumpian type of high-def celebrity with boldly left-wing or even socialist stances on a range of policy issues. And she faced the perfect foil in Cuomo  the heir to the rich Democratic legacy of his father Mario who many saw as the epitome of that party's decline: Ineffective (New York City's failing subways), corrupt (with a top aide convicted on a felony rap) and weak (cutting a deal with Republicans to save him from signing progressive laws that might hurt his presidential ambitions).

But in the end, nearly two out of every three New York primary voters went with the old-school Democrat, warts and all. Hundreds of thousands of voters in New York City's outer boroughs  heavily black or Latino, working class folks who are making ends meet and not spending 12 hours a day on Twitter  delivered Cuomo his 30-point margin.

Nixon's landslide defeat came as no surprise to a lifelong Democrat we'll call Mignon (her middle name)  a 48-year-old black woman who now lives in northern California but grew up in Buffalo and wrote a Twitter essay the morning after the primary about how her parents were two enthusiastic voters who supported the Democratic establishment and what a New York Daily News headline writer would call "Status Cuo-mo."

"Progress for my parents did not happen until a Democrat, and that was Lyndon Johnson"  who signed the 1965 Voting Rights Act that propelled dreams of African-American political empowerment, Mignon told me when I reached her this week by phone. She talked about her mom, who fled strife-torn Alabama in 1964 for a better life up North, and dad, a 74-year-old union steelworker  their loyalty to the Democratic Party, their political pragmatism, and their lack of use for "pie-in-the-sky ideas" of progressives like White House hopeful Sen. Bernie Sanders, who refuses to become a Democrat.

Mignon said her parents saw Andrew Cuomo as an heir to his popular late father Mario, New York's governor from 1983 to 1995. "Mario always had a plan," she said, adding that her parents "like plans, incremental steps." And she added that  unlike young left-wing voters flocking to Sanders or future congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez  voters like her parents are not ashamed to consider themselves capitalists.

There is a huge disconnect within the Democratic Party right now  a rift that was critical to 2016's shock election of President Trump. The re-emergence of the one modern Democrat who could glue many of these broken pieces together  Barack Obama, who brings his energetic push for the party's 2018 candidates to Philadelphia on Friday  and a looming midterm election in which anger over an autocratic president can be channeled into state and local races are likely to paper over this Democratic family feud  for now.

But when voters wake up on November 7, they'll hear the gong to start the sure-to-be-insane national election of 2020, with as many as 20 or more candidates from delusional billionaires to congressmen you've never heard of prepared to yank hard on every gaping fault line within the party of Andrew Jackson, FDR and JFK. Those cleavages could give Trump a second term in much the same unlikely way that he won his first one. And yet when you put your ear to the ground and listen to the Democratic rumblings, the various sides still don't understand each other, or even know how to talk to each other without yelling.

Here's a quick field guide to the three Democrats you meet on Twitter, or in the voting booth  or sitting on their couch when they should be voting:

The Bernie Sanders Democrat

The Bernie Sanders Democrat very often doesn't even call himself or herself a Democrat, preferring terms like progressive or democratic socialist or, increasingly, registering as an independent, as Sanders himself does. Although you find them everywhere, this species of left-of-center voter predominates among the under-30 electorate, in cities and especially in gentrifying neighborhoods; it tends to be somewhat more male than female. Animated by the holy trinity of Medicare-for-all, free college and the $15 minimum wage, they are leftists who may engage in Democratic politics but spend most of their time complaining about Democrats, or at least Democratic elites, as too tied to big corporations and big donors and too happy to bend over for Wall Street.

The Hillary Clinton Democrat

The Hillary Clinton Democrat, a cohort that is overwhelmingly female, tending to be white, suburban, and middle or even upper-middle-class, often with a college degree. Some of them even voted Republican back in the 1980s or '90s for the low taxes  but started drifting away after Anita Hill in 1991 or as they saw the GOP get more Southern and then more crazy. These voters felt existential shock and despair when they saw America (technically, the Electoral College) reject a qualified woman  whose life struggles mirrored their own  in favor of a man whose non-stop lying and admission of sexual assault was now their worst nightmare in the Oval Office. Their profound sense that the world has betrayed them has made them the backbone of the so-called Trump Resistance.

The John Lewis Democrat

The John Lewis Democrat, in honor of the 1960s civil-rights icon still in Congress, although you could also call them Andrew Cuomo Democrats or Dianne Feinstein Democrats, since their votes tend to keep these establishment figures in power, despite the derision from the far left. Tending to be older and often (but not exclusively) non-white, this group reflects the growing conventional wisdom that the real base of the Democratic Party is older, church-going African-American women. These are the Democrats who  quite unlike the Bernie Sanders crowd  are proud to identify as Democrats, having grown up revering tales of FDR or JFK. They tend to prefer politicians who can cut deals and win resources for their communities over those with lofty but impractical ideas. And they cherish their right to vote and show up at the polls religiously, which is what gives them such outsized influence.

There's many caveats. Millions of Democrats don't easily fit these boxes (and I'll probably get angry emails from every one). These groups can also overlap and often their interests align, as when the majority of the John Lewis Democrats supported Clinton in 2016 and joined those suburban women in delivering her the nomination. But often they're figuratively at each other's throats. A lot of Hillary and John Lewis Democrats are still furious at Sanders and his supporters, insisting their apathy in the fall of 2016 put Trump in the White House. The Berniecrats still think establishment Dems are addicted to Wall Street money. Post-Trump, some core Democrats have looked at the suburban "resistance" with a jaundiced eye, wondering why these women weren't "woke" to America's flaws before 11/8/16.

These fissures help explain why Obama is such a significant figure  both in 2008 and again today, as he reappears in Philadelphia and elsewhere seeking to whip up enthusiasm and bring some unity ahead of November. It's easy to forget that back in 2007, Obama was basically the candidate of the far-left dreamers, including many who'd migrate to Sanders eight years later, while Hillary Clinton started out with substantial black support among voters who'd adored her husband. (Indeed, John Lewis himself endorsed Hillary at first, then switched.) When white voters delivered the Iowa caucus to Obama, many African-Americans realized that Obama could be the fulfillment of LBJ's 1965 Voting Rights Act. That's how Obama bridged the deepest divides among the Democrats, and it's hard to see who will repeat that.

The other night, MSNBC's Chris Hayes hosted a "town hall" event in Flint, Michigan that spotlighted four young voters who didn't show up or went third-party on Election Day 2016. These voters insisted that they weren't apathetic but that between Clinton and Trump they just "couldn't vote for the lesser of two evils." With his approval rating drifting below 40 percent, Trump's 2020 re-election strategy hinges less on turning out his right-wing base and a lot more on increasing the number of these discouraged voters, to persuade them their vote won't make a damn difference.

The Democrats' best hope of countering that is probably the rise of a figure who can do the unlikely thing that Obama did in 2008, and somehow find the right mix of policy and biography to unite factions of the party that two long years after the Trump debacle still seem much more focused on what divides them. Somewhere  maybe in the current quasi-candidates, maybe not  is a leader brimming with new ideas that will excite the Berniecrats, yet able to convince the party's faithful, like those black women in Queens who just turned out for Andrew Cuomo, that she or he is the rightful heir to FDR, JFK, LBJ  and Obama. Especially Obama.

If that candidate doesn't come out to see the shadows of Democratic greatness, the forecast calls for six more years of Trumpian winter.
September 20, 2018

Akzo Nobel N.V. (AKZA; AKZOY) has acquired Xylazel S.A. (Xylazel), a 100% subsidiary of Pharma Mar S.A. (PHM).

With this acquisition AkzoNobel strengthens its business and becomes a leader in the decorative paints market in Spain. It also means the company is now the leader in the country's woodcare segment and has strengthened its position in metal care. The transaction marks the 45-year anniversary of AkzoNobel on the Spanish market.

Xylazel has about 100 employees, with one production facility in Porrino. Revenue for 2017 totaled approximately 20 million.

Thierry Vanlancker, CEO of AkzoNobel, said: "As a part of our transformative strategy, we continue to focus on leading market positions delivering leading performance. This couples organic growth with strategic bolt-on acquisitions on top of operational excellence and continuous improvement. By acquiring Xylazel, we will be able to further grow our business in the region and strengthen our position as the leading paints and coatings company in Europe."

Ruud Joosten, COO of AkzoNobel, added: "We are proud to add the leading brands Xylazel and Oxirite to our portfolio. Xylazel has a 43-year-old heritage on the Spanish market and a leading position in DIY, professional and industrial sectors of wood protection. This will strengthen our position in Spain and will allow us to offer our customers a wider portfolio of innovative and sustainable products."

Jose Maria Fernandez Sousa-Faro, CEO of PharmaMar (PHM), said: "We are happy to have found a good home for Xylazel with AkzoNobel. The activities of Xylazel are complementary to the business of AkzoNobel in Spain and we see a strong match in the combination."

About AkzoNobel

AkzoNobel has a passion for paint. We're experts in the proud craft of making paints and coatings, setting the standard in color and protection since 1792. Our world class portfolio of brands - including Dulux, International, Sikkens and Interpon - is trusted by customers around the globe. Headquartered in the Netherlands, we operate in over 80 countries and employ around 35,000 talented people who are passionate about delivering the high performance products and services our customers expect. The sale of our Specialty Chemicals business is expected to be completed by the end of 2018.

About AkzoNobel Specialty Chemicals

Industries worldwide rely on our essential chemistry in the manufacture of everyday products such as paper, plastics, building materials, and personal care items. Building on the dedication of our 9,500 employees and our shared commitment to safety, sustainability, and open innovation, we have established a world-class business and built strong partnerships with our customers. We operate in over 80 countries around the world and our portfolio of industry leading brands includes Eka, Dissolvine, Trigonox, and Berol.

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Safe Harbor Statement

This press release contains statements which address such key issues such as AkzoNobel's growth strategy, future financial results, market positions, product development, products in the pipeline and product approvals. Such statements should be carefully considered, and it should be understood that many factors could cause forecasted and actual results to differ from these statements. These factors include, but are not limited to, price fluctuations, currency fluctuations, developments in raw material and personnel costs, pensions, physical and environmental risks, legal issues, and legislative, fiscal, and other regulatory measures, as well as the separation of Specialty Chemicals. Stated competitive positions are based on management estimates supported by information provided by specialized external agencies. For a more comprehensive discussion of the risk factors affecting our business please see our latest annual report, a copy of which can be found on our website: www.akzonobel.com.
Dancers rehearse their performance, "Bury Our Weapons, Not Our Bodies!" at the William M. Reilly Memorial, behind the West Entrance of the Philadelphia Museum of Art September 19, 2018. Read more

In the Quaker City of Brotherly Love, men and women, boys and girls, have been gunned down everywhere.

They've died on the streets of Center City and West Philadelphia and all other neighborhoods.

People have left their peaceful metropolis to die in the valleys of Afghanistan and the rubbled cities of Syria. They have died in the Battle of Ap Bac, the Battle of Bloody Ridge, the Battles of D-Day, the Battle of Belleau Wood, the Battle of Gettysburg, and back and back in time to the battles of Germantown, Brandywine, Trenton, and before.

So many deaths.

For Israeli-born artist Yael Bartana, the tens of thousands of deaths have a cold finality. But they also represent, perhaps, a beginning. What if the men and women and boys and girls said, "Enough!" What if the guns and the rifles were dispatched and the whole apparatus of killing was itself entombed? What if?

Bartana's Bury Our Weapons, Not Our Bodies! enacts this utopian idea in a performance that invites participation. Beginning at 1 p.m. in Washington Square on Saturday, 40 dancers and 70 volunteer performers will gather and wend their way to Independence Mall, arriving at 2 p.m.

The dancers will carry prop guns, the volunteers will carry black and white shields that double as masks. Anyone can join the funeral procession and carry a white flag.

At Independence Mall, speakers, including war veterans, will deliver personal statements on the meaning of the life of violence and the death of violence.

The performance will then shift to the Philadelphia Museum of Art's Reilly Memorial, on the river side of the great neoclassical building, where a funeral will be held at 4 p.m.

Dancers will move down the steps in ritual coordination. Coffins will be arrayed at the bottom. Each performer will shout the name of his or her doomed weapon  "AR-15!" "AK-47!" "Shotgun!"  and lower it into a coffin.

The weapons will then be dispatched to Laurel Hill Cemetery, where they will be buried in the historic graveyard, near the tombs of Union Gen. George Meade and Confederate Gen. John C. Pemberton, famous masters of state-sanctioned killing.

The performance is inspired by the work of Israeli dance composer Noa Eshkol (19242007), particularly Eshkol's 1953 performance at Kibbutz Lohamei HaGeta'ot (the Ghetto Fighters' Kibbutz), commissioned in memorial of the 10th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. The movements are composed by Mor Bashan and Ruti Sela of the Noa Eshkol Chamber Dance Group.

Bartana sees the funeral for weapons, with its ritualistic cadences and movements, as an echo of military burial ceremonies, or as "an act of protest."

It is also a "what if" concept that directly relates to the history of Philadelphia as "the birthplace of democracy."

The area of Independence Mall is "supercharged," she said, crammed with "many different histories, many different graveyards." The ghosts of violence hover everywhere, and the bones of the dead lie beneath Washington Square and Independence Mall, quite literally.

"It makes sense to communicate with the ghosts of violence," Bartana said.

Bartana's film trilogy, And Europe Will Be Stunned, also opens at the Art Museum Saturday. The three films chronicle the rise and death of the Jewish Renaissance Movement in Poland, a fictional group with the radical vision of a Jewish return to Poland.

Amanda Sroka, the Art Museum's assistant curator of contemporary art, elaborated on the notion of fictional alternative realities, an idea in the air in the United States in recent times.

"With the [film] trilogy, you did this moment of what if," Sroka said to Bartana as the two sat chatting in the cafeteria of the Art Museum, shortly before a Wednesday evening performance rehearsal.

"With the performance, it's 'What if we buried these weapons, what if we all buried our weapons in the ground? What if, in the case of the [film] trilogy, 3.3 million Jews returned to Poland?' These questions really challenge us through  political imagination  they kind of jerk us into another reality."

Bartana said there is a "culture of reenactments" in America  re-creation of events and figures from U.S. history.

"I'm interested in pre-enactments," she said, "something that did not happen. We are creating a possible future of the U.S. when everybody is burying their weapons."

The film trilogy will be on view in the Perelman Building through Jan. 1. The art museum and the Walker Center of Art in Minneapolis have acquired the films.

Both the performance and film trilogy use and manipulate symbols, obviously, whether the symbol is the ritual of the military funeral or the literal symbols of the Zionist movement.

But all returns to what if.

"We are creating a utopian moment," Bartana said.
Sarah Weinman first read Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita when she was 16. Like many readers, she found it "disturbing." The story  of an older man obsessed with a girl, and of deeper perversities therein  is famously disturbing. Plus, she says, "it was something new to read a book in which you couldn't trust the narrator": Humbert Humbert, who tells his tale to make himself seem reasonable, to cover up his moral monstrosity.

She and Lolita were not done with each other. Ottawa-born Weinman, an accomplished writer, editor, and journalist, now lives in Brooklyn. In her latest, The Real Lolita, she tells of the 1948 Camden abduction of Sally Horner, 11, and how Nabokov used that story as a source of Lolita. Weinman's research took her, among other places, to Camden and to the Inquirer's archives. She's just as concerned with the real Sally, a preteen who spent 21 months wandering the United States in thrall to a pedophile, as she is in how Nabokov "strip-mined" Sally's story "to produce the bones of Lolita."

Over breakfast at the Urban Farmer on Logan Square, Weinman discussed her search for Sally, why Nabokov downplayed her role in his writing, and how crimes reflect their cultural settings.

What led you to Sally Horner?

As early as 2013, I was already starting to establish my beat, the intersection of crime and culture. I am especially fascinated in mid-to-post-World War II through the '70s. One night, while online, I came upon Alexander Dolinin's essay "Whatever Happened to Sally Horner?," looking at Sally's life and Lolita. And I asked myself: Had anyone reported out Sally's story? No one had. No one seemed interested in her as a person. Were there people still around who remembered her? Were there court documents? Were there any houses, locales left I could visit? And it began.

Talk a little more about "the intersection of crime and culture."

So often, when researching a crime, I'm struck by what that crime says about its context. So much about Sally's story  the broken circumstances of her working-class Camden family; the obscure background of her abductor, Frank La Salle; how he could command such obedience from her; how she was treated when she escaped and came back home  speak of what Camden was like, what the country was like, relations between men and women, adults and children, attitudes toward sexuality.

Sally is lonely, in search of friendship. And she is powerless.

For a long time she never questions that La Salle is what he says he is: an FBI agent. She really fears that he will send her to a reformatory if she doesn't do what he says.

I was amazed that, during the abduction, La Salle sends her to a local school  and she goes.

She's afraid of what La Salle will do if she tries to escape. When she finally makes the phone call that leads to her rescue, her first thought is what he will do when he finds out.

It's so moving when you portray her day at a Catholic school in Baltimore, again during the abduction. You imagine her taking communion, and wondering whether what is happening with La Salle is a mortal sin.

I was very hesitant; I really didn't want to fill in the blanks that way. But my editor encouraged me: "In order to convey your authority, you need to convey what you don't know." It freed me to explore the picture I had of her. Sally did take communion, because all students were required to go to Mass first thing in the school day. And I don't know exactly what she was thinking, of course, but thoughts such as these are more than plausible.

You hit real researcher's gold when you contact Carol Taylor, her dear friend.

I was so glad I could talk to her. She exclaimed, "You mean that my friend Sally Horner was the basis for Lolita?" She spoke of her as a formative influence, "a real lady" who taught her how to use a knife and fork. And the grief of Sally's death was still very vivid. Carol died in 2016 and so didn't live to see the book.

Speaking of Nabokov, why do you think he played down the role of Sally's story in Lolita?

He did try to obscure his source. To be fair, he was, as many writers are, concerned primarily with the novel's status as art. His controlled narrative had no place for the real Sally.

Knowing about her, however, helped him finish the book. As of 1950, he's really having trouble with it. When Sally is killed in the car accident [in 1952, two years after her rescue], Nabokov sees the rest of his arc. From then on, he is in a writing fever.

Would Lolita have existed without Sally?

He'd been working on this obsession for years. So, yes, he would have written the novel in some form. I feel it's responsible for authors to acknowledge that their stories involve real people with their own stories and feelings. I'm not here to judge. I'm just a conduit for the story, and I hope it opens up a conversation.
Adult actress Stormy Daniels will detail her ongoing legal battle with President Donald Trump in a book to be released next month. But now, Daniels' story gets animated, thanks to a Philly-based comic book artist.

TidalWave Productions has released Philadelphia artist Joe Paradise's take on Daniels biography with "Political Power: Stormy Daniels," which is now available via Amazon. Written and illustrated by Paradise, the comic is part of the TidalWave's "Political Power" series, which has featured stories about political figures like Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, Barack Obama, and others in past editions.

Paradise's Daniels comic will detail some of the biggest recent news stories featuring the adult film actress, including her alleged affair with Trump, as well as the hush money scandal that developed earlier this year. According to a release, the book will show Daniels' "journey from scrappy opportunist to unlikely feminist icon."

"Between the ludicrous denial of the Daniels affair and the accounts of what's contained in the Steele dossier I started to think there might be something else going on," Paradise said.

To date, TidalWave has featured more than 60 political figures in its biographical "Political Power" series. Most recently, Paradise illustrated an issue dealing with Jeb Bush back in 2015.

Daniels autobiography, Full Disclosure, is scheduled to be released Oct. 2 via St. Martin's Press. News of the book has generated significant controversy, as it will follow Daniels' life "from a rough childhood in Louisiana onto the national stage," as well as "the events that led to the nondisclosure agreement and the behind-the-scenes attempts to intimidate her," according to a release.

The adult film actress made headlines again earlier this week for the book, which reportedly contains a detailed description of President Trump's genitalia, according to a copy obtained by The Guardian. In the book, the Guardian reports, Daniels writes that Trump "knows he has an unusual penis," which she compared to the character Toad from the video game Mario Kart.

"It may have been the least impressive sex I'd ever had, but clearly, he didn't share that opinion," Daniels reportedly wrote.

"Political Power: Stormy Daniels" is available via Amazon in Kindle, paperback, and hardcover versions. Prices start at $5.99.
In Fahrenheit 11/9, a woman facetiously asks director/showman Michael Moore if he'd like to buy her home in Flint, Mich.

It's a rhetorical question, aimed not at Moore but at people who say that folks in failing cities should just move. It's a question that Moore should take seriously, though  Flint brings out the best in him.

The most engaging passages in the scattershot Fahrenheit 11/9 address the water scandal in Flint, a city that was also the memorable setting of his debut documentary, Roger & Me. That film will turn 30 next year, and remains astonishingly prescient about outsourced manufacturing and the awful consequences for Flint and similar cities.

The Roger & Me scenario repeated itself in factory towns all over the country  a deflationary spiral of declining jobs, plummeting home prices, a shrinking tax base, depleted infrastructure. It continued unmitigated for three decades in the Rust Belt, leading to a revolt against both major political parties that played a significant role in the election of President Trump  the event that opens Fahrenheit 11/9 (the first images are of Philadelphia, and Hillary Clinton's election-eve rally).

Moore uses archival footage to recapture the giddy mood of overconfident Democrats, their devastation at defeat, and the opening rehash  even with Moore's wisecracks  is a dispiriting reminder of our ugly national mood. One that Moore shares. He's angry, and throws haymakers at Trump, but also a few at centrist Democrats and the Clintons  lambasting Bill for cutting welfare, expanding the industrial prison complex, deregulating Wall Street, and signing NAFTA. That latter move, in Moore's eyes, doomed Hillary Clinton in places like Michigan.

Moore talks to West Virginia voters who shed tears when recounting how candidate Bernie Sanders won every single county in the state's Democratic primary, only to have their votes overruled by superdelegate party procedures that assigned the state to Clinton.

So far, so depressing. And borderline stale. Yet the movie rouses itself when Moore returns to Flint, where Moore remembers that he's not just another media figure with a grievance and a forum, but a surrogate for workers and a truth-to-power burr in the saddle to powerful people like GM Chairman Roger Smith, or Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder, who used emergency power provisions to take over the administration of Flint, and tried to cut city water bills with a scheme that ended up sending corrosive Flint River water into city homes, leading to severe lead contamination and a shameful cover-up.

This is an outrage worthy of Moore's famous dudgeon, and though he overplays his hand with stunts, he also shows us the simple testimony of Flint residents, and it's deeply affecting. As is the example of Flint citizens who mobilize, demanding and achieving a measure of change and accountability (investigations are ongoing). Moore then links this activist surge to the West Virginia teacher strikes, a movement that itself spread to other red states. His film also stops in Florida, where students who survived the Parkland school shooting demand gun-law changes in the Florida legislature.

It's an inspiring look at the effectiveness of civic engagement. So it's jarring when Moore closes his movie with a dirge, a warning about a neo-Nazi takeover, and solemn pronouncement that our democracy is broken.

He's already shown us it isn't. It's eminently possible, if not easy, to build a vibrant and broad coalition around issues like safe water, safe schools, decent pay for teachers. One theme emerges strongly  the rank and file have a drive sometimes missing from cautious party and labor leadership. How much drive? That's hard to measure. We'll know more 11/10.

Fahrenheit 11-9. Directed by Michael Moore.

Running time: 120 minutes

Parents guide: R (language)

Playing at: Ritz East
What's the best candy to get at Shane Confectionery? Who was the hot dog vendor who came up with the idea for a cheesesteak? And did you know Fante's Kitchen Shop in South Philly is the oldest cookware shop in the country?

Unique Eats and Eateries of Philadelphia, a book by local author and publicist Irene Levy Baker, details the backstories of more than 90 bars, restaurants, bakeries and more. Published Aug. 22 by Reedy Press, it's a food lover's companion to Levy Baker's 2016 book 100 Things to Do in Philadelphia Before You Die.

In addition to historical tidbits and lesser-known facts, the book also serves as a guide for navigating some of the city's best-loved dining establishments, including menu highlights and tips for getting reservations.

McGillin's Olde Ale House, one of the places mentioned in the book, is hosting a launch party Sept. 25 at 1310 Drury St. from 6 to 8 p.m. It is free and open to the public.

"Unique Eats and Eateries of Philadelphia," $20.95 where you buy books; uniqueeatsphilly.com.
A few years ago, Kimberly Washington moved back to Philadelphia's Frankford neighborhood, where she grew up, and began helping give away trees to her neighbors to plant in their yards. The city's TreePhilly program has been a hit there, she said.

"We just did a tree giveaway this spring and gave away 50 trees that went very fast," said Washington, a 37-year-old lawyer and executive director of the Frankford Community Development Corp. "I think in an urban environment, where you don't see too many green spaces, giving neighbors free trees means that they help bring their neighborhoods up at no cost. There are the benefits that come with an increased tree canopy, the energy efficiency trees provide to homes, the air efficiency.  Trees touch on so many things."

Since starting in 2012, TreePhilly has become increasingly popular, distributing 21,500 oaks, poplars, sweetgums and other species for residents to plant. Now, with the next giveaway planned for Sept. 29 through Nov. 17, officials want to expand their reach.

The goal is to increase the tree canopy to 30 percent of all neighborhoods to combat the urban heat island effect as well as the impact of climate change. In some neighborhoods, summer temperatures can get much higher than the city average  as much as 20 degrees  because they lack tree cover. Hunting Park in North Philadelphia, Point Breeze in South Philadelphia, and Cobbs Creek in West Philadelphia are a few examples of communities with lots of rowhouses but little greenery. They stand in stark contrast to neighborhoods such as Chestnut Hill and Mount Airy in the Northwest, and Somerton in the Northeast, all of which boast tree-lined streets and shady parks.

Officials announced Thursday that TD Bank has pledged about $1.13 million for the program over three years starting in 2019. The gift will cover more trees and allow the city to plant them strategically along streets that need them, and organize large-scale tree plantings in parks. The TD Bank pledge comes on top of more than $7 million in funding for TreePhilly from the city, state and the Fairmount Park Conservancy over the same three-year period.

"It's a really huge monetary support for TreePhilly and allows us to expand the work we are doing," said Erica Smith, manager of the program.

Trees will be targeted to neighborhood parks, she said, but money will also go to support efforts in Wissahickon, Pennypack, Cobbs Creek, Tacony, Fairmount, FDR and Poquessing Creek Parks.

"Those we consider our natural lands parks," Smith said. "The goal there is to increase the capacity of our staff to restore those areas and increase tree plantings and community engagement work there." She said deer have taken their toll on trees so money will also go toward fencing.

"The last element is that we're going to be planting more trees in our neighborhood parks as well as those like Clark Park, Hunting Park and any of the large landscaped parks that have lawns and not as many trees."

TreePhilly will also work with the city's Office of Sustainability's Beat the Heat program designed to help residents in some areas adapt to high heat.

Here's a breakdown of where the money is going:

Yard Trees: TreePhilly will continue to give away trees for residents to plant on their properties. But, instead of being distributed directly by the city, 9,000 trees will be given out through community grants and community-based giveaways. Officials believe community groups will give them broader access to residents.

Street Trees: In many neighborhoods, there are few or no yards and planting trees there is not an option. So TreePhilly will help plant 3,000 trees in those areas to develop "green corridors."

Natural Lands: Over 60 percent of the city's parks are not actively managed. The expanded program will allow the Parks and Recreation Department to plant 6,000 shrubs and 8,000 trees. Money will also go toward the city-owned Greenland Nursery, which grows plants for use by the city.

Park Plantings: 375 trees will be planted at parks and recreation facilities and neighborhood parks.

A portion of the money will also help pay for staff for the TreeKeepers program. The crew, comprised of ex-offenders, prunes trees, removes invasive vines, weeds and maintains storm-water planters at parks and recreation programs.
Unidentified victims and families and sexual abuse victims sit on the stage as Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro releases the findings of a two-year grand jury investigation into clergy abuse at six of the stateOs Roman Catholic Dioceses, leading a news conference at the Capitol in Harrisburg on Aug. 14, 2018. DAVID SWANSON / Staff Photographer Read more

HARRISBURG  Top Roman Catholic leaders in Pennsylvania covered up decades of child sex abuse involving more than 1,000 victims and hundreds of priests, according to a long-awaited grand jury report released Tuesday.

Capping what may be the most comprehensive examination yet of clergy sex abuse across a single state, the nearly 900-page document accuses church officials in six Pennsylvania dioceses of routinely prioritizing their institution over the welfare of children in their care.

The allegations stretch back to the 1940s, detailing child rapes and groping that mirrored the reports that have roiled the church worldwide. But the document includes several uniquely disturbing accounts of its own  including one of a 1970s pedophile and child pornography ring in Pittsburgh among priests who whipped their victims and took photos of one boy as he posed naked as if on the cross.

One priest in Southwestern Pennsylvania is said to have sexually abused a boy in a confessional. Another, from Allentown, allegedly forced a boy to give him oral sex and then cleansed the child's mouth with holy water. Two priests impregnated teens; one urged an abortion, the other arranged a secret marriage.

In all, more than 300 priests were singled out  though some names remain redacted amid legal wrangling over the fairness of the investigation and the public report. Dozens of church superiors  including some now in prominent posts nationally  were also named as complicit.

"All of [the victims] were brushed aside, in every part of the state, by church leaders who preferred to protect the abusers and their institutions above all," the report says. "Priests were raping little boys and girls, and the men of God who were responsible not only did nothing: They hid it all."

More coverage

These 9 accused priests had postings around Philadelphia | Will report lead to change in Pa.'s statute of limitations? | Mike Newall: If the Church doesn't change now, time to walk away | Grand jury: A child porn ring in Pittsburgh diocese | Report says cover-up began at the top | Read the full report | Dozens of pages shielded from public | Maria Panaritis: Thank the law, not the Men of God

The abuse "was rampant and widespread," Attorney General Josh Shapiro said at a news conference in the state Capitol. "It touched every diocese, and it is horrifying."

Many of those accused  including bishops implicated in alleged cover-ups  disputed the findings in responses attached to the report.

The panel's assertions are likely to fuel long-simmering battles in Harrisburg, including debates over the fairness of the state's grand jury system and stalled legislation that would allow childhood victims to sue their abusers and others decades after an assault.

The report also comes amid a new wave of accusations that have upended Catholic congregations worldwide and resulted in the resignation of Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, formerly the archbishop of Washington.

Among those named by the Pennsylvania grand jury was McCarrick's successor in Washington, Cardinal Donald Wuerl, a longtime Pittsburgh bishop and one of Pope Francis' prominent U.S. advisers.

Wuerl, who took over the Western Pennsylvania diocese in 1988, was faulted by the grand jury as failing to protect children from predators and withholding key information from parishioners during his two decades there.

Wuerl denied the claims Tuesday. His spokesman, Ed McFadden, called the investigation a "flawed process" steered "unwaveringly toward a predetermined result"  a statement that echoed concerns raised by nearly two dozen other clergy members who have disputed the report's accuracy in court and fought to have their names, at least temporarily, redacted.

"In factual ways large and small, the Attorney General's Office was more concerned with getting this report out than getting it right," McFadden said.

One woman, the report says, tried to commit suicide days after her testimony and later, from her hospital bed, urged grand jurors to finish their investigation.

Shapiro said he stood by the findings, the result of a two-year investigation by his office.

Despite the wide-ranging criminal behavior the attorney general outlined Tuesday, no new prosecutions are expected to emerge.

Two priests were indicted at earlier stages of the investigation. Many of the accused are either dead or long since removed from ministry, their offenses now beyond the state's statute of limitations for sex crimes. Some had previously been prosecuted, or the accusations against them made public years ago.

Still, in its scope and breadth, the grand jury's report was remarkable. The investigation drew upon testimony from dozens of witness and "secret archives" of priest abuse complaints obtained from the Dioceses of Pittsburgh, Harrisburg, Allentown, Scranton, Erie, and Greensburg  together home to more than 1.7 million Roman Catholics.

Pennsylvania's other dioceses  Philadelphia and Altoona-Johnstown  were not included because previous grand juries had already scrutinized their handling of clergy sex-abuse claims.

>> FROM 2005: Grand jury says cardinals hid priests' abuse of children, but panel recommends no new criminal charges

But the state's largest city and only archdiocese weren't completely absent. Some of the accused priests at one point in their careers made stops in Philadelphia; one allegation recounted a boy being abused at one priest's family home in the city.

Several names fleetingly referenced in the report  including the late Cardinal Anthony J. Bevilacqua and his former aide Bishop Edward Cullen  were church leaders in Philadelphia before or after service in other dioceses.

In many respects, the tactics described Tuesday mirrored those of the 2005 report that assailed the Philadelphia Archdiocese during their tenures here.

Priests preyed on vulnerable children, and their superiors either ignored or hid allegations while shuffling abusers from parish to parish. Lawsuits filed by accusers often ended in strict confidentiality agreements, ensuring their silence for years.

Problem priests were cycled through church-owned treatment centers  including the St. John Vianney Center in Downingtown. Tuesday's report dismissed the therapy at such facilities, saying it largely existed to "launder accused priests" and "provide plausible deniability to the bishops and permitted hundreds of known offenders to return to ministry."

In Allentown, grand jurors accused Msgr. Anthony Muntone of discounting a plea from a priest reporting he had molested a 12-year-old in 1982 and asking for help. Instead, the panel said, Muntone concluded "the experiences [would] not necessarily be a horrendous trauma to the victim" and allowed the priest to remain in active ministry for two decades.

In a response to the report's findings, Muntone denied he ever put children at risk and said all actions he took came after consultation with the diocese legal counsel.

In Erie, grand jurors assailed Bishop Donald Trautman for lauding the Rev. Chester Gawronski for his "many acts of kindness" and "deep faith" even after he admitted to fondling at least 12 boys during what he described as "cancer checks."

Trautman, in a statement, characterized many of the accusations against him as false.

And in the Pittsburgh Diocese, the report suggests, church officials weren't the only ones out to avoid public embarrassment. Former Beaver County District Attorney Robert Master told the grand jury that he proactively shut down an investigation into an accused priest in the 1960s, hoping to "prevent unfavorable publicity" and win support for his political career.

>> READ MORE: Stolen Childhoods: Decades later, the damage from one Philadelphia predator priest still torments a generation of victims

Response from church leaders began even before the report's release. Bishop Ronald W. Gainer of Harrisburg and Bishop Lawrence Persico of Erie sought to blunt the impact this month by opening their own archives and releasing names of all priests against whom there were "credible claims of abuse." Other dioceses followed suit Tuesday.

All the bishops noted that most of the accusations predated their tenures by decades and stressed steps their diocese had taken to improve, including instituting a zero-tolerance policy in investigating abuse allegations.

But their responses to specific allegations varied. Bishop David Zubik in Pittsburgh asserted that "he knew of no cover-ups in his three decades" there.

Meanwhile, Persico  the lone bishop to testify before the grand jury  insisted that "apologies and policies  are not enough."

"We are committed to publishing the abuses of the past and to being transparent with our decisions going forward," he said.

As church leaders were grappling with how to address their congregations, state lawmakers were gearing up for a battle over the report's recommendations  including suspending laws barring victims from suing their abusers decades after their assaults occurred.

Senate President Pro Tempore Joe Scarnati (R., Jefferson) reiterated his support for a bill he authored to eliminate the civil and criminal statute of limitations for child sex abuse in some cases, saying it "takes a crucial step forward to help protect victims."

But Scarnati has been opposed to making any change to the statute retroactive, arguing that such a move would be unconstitutional and could lead to hundreds of lawsuits against the church.

House Majority Leader Dave Reed (R., Indiana) said he expects to schedule a vote on Scarnati's bill this fall, but indicated that discussions over its provisions are ongoing.

Even with that fight ahead, accusers and their advocates described Tuesday's win  exposing abuse kept secret over decades  as victory enough for now.

"I knew the truth would come out eventually," said James Faluszczak, a former priest from the Erie Diocese who says he was abused by a priest as a child, and who cried as Shapiro described the report. "I thank God, like, I think, all the other victims, that we've had this opportunity to have our voice finally heard."

Staff writers Tricia L. Nadolny, Chris Palmer, William Bender, Jessica Calefati and Craig R. McCoy contributed to this article, along with Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reporters David Templeton, Shelly Bradbury, and Julian Routh.
A Philadelphia rapper who successfully appealed his conviction in a 2010 murder by arguing that prosecutors had unfairly introduced his violent lyrics to jurors was again convicted Wednesday of the killing  this time by a jury that didn't see or hear his songs.

The verdict against Ronald "Hollow Man" Thomas came just hours after the jury got the case. Common Pleas Court Judge Sandy L.V. Byrd then sentenced Thomas, 33, to a mandatory term of life without parole, the same outcome of his first trial in 2013. Byrd also sentenced Thomas to 8 to 17 years for three firearms convictions.

Thomas, a member of the North Philly underground rap scene who once appeared in Philly rapper Beanie Sigel's "In the Ghetto" music video, was arrested days after the April 22, 2010, slaying of Anwar Ashmore, 23. Both were members of Team A, a crew of rappers and drug dealers who frequented the Strawberry Mansion section of North Philadelphia.

According to court testimony, Thomas killed Ashmore for his role in the 2009 theft of a brick of cocaine worth $40,000 from a stash house controlled by Thomas.

In September of that year, Thomas, as Hollow Man, released the mixtape "Ear Bleed," which included the lyrics: "Half a brick missing, and it's one of my [N-word], can't point fingers because I don't know who did it. But soon as I find out, I swear that [N-word] finished."

Months later, Ashmore was gunned down near the corner of Stanley and Huntingdon Streets in front of a handful of Team A members, according to trial testimony.

During Thomas' 2013 trial, city prosecutors introduced the song as evidence  and a jury convicted him of murder. A Superior Court panel overturned the verdict in October 2015 after Thomas argued the lyrics were prejudicial and should have not been shared with jurors.

William Ashmore, the victim's father, said Wednesday that he was not surprised that a second jury found Thomas guilty.

"I expected it. It's nothing new to me.  I wish it didn't have to happen, but it is what it is," said Ashmore, 61.

While conceding his son was one of three men who stole drugs from Thomas, Ashmore called senseless both the slaying and the high crime rate in North Philadelphia.

"The sad part is, I knew all of those guys," he said. "So, when it happened, everybody ran to me and said, 'Hollow Man just killed your son.' " After the killing, William Ashmore said, Thomas "had the nerve to go downtown the next day to order up some rest-in-peace T-shirts."

Ashmore said he regrets that his son did not listen to him about staying away from drugs, and that he left behind a daughter, now 9 years old. "I knew what he was about," the father said. "He was about the streets, and I couldn't get through to him."

Cameron Kline, a spokesman for the District Attorney's Office, said, "The verdict speaks for itself. And, as always, we thank the jury for its hard work."
State Police investigate the scene on Vermont Lane in West Bradford Twp., where Bruce Rogal crashed his car into the home of his ex-wife. Read more

It was another tragedy seemingly rooted in domestic turmoil: An elderly couple killed Wednesday night by their son after he attempted to murder his ex-wife, with the man enraged by his divorce from her, according to investigators.

In a story with grim echoes of many before it, a man shot at a woman who had once taken out a protection-from-abuse order against him, then went on to kill members of his family. Bruce Rogal, 59, ended his Wednesday rampage by crashing his car into his ex-wife's Downingtown home, which the couple had previously shared. He was killed while exchanging gunfire with police.

This summer saw domestic slayings that included the deaths of 7-year-old Kayden Mancuso, killed by her father in an apparent murder-suicide; a City Hall worker slain by her estranged husband, who also killed himself; and a toddler whose mother was accused this week of poisoning him with Vicodin.

Advocates say these and other domestic-violence incidents have brought the issue "front and center," and in Pennsylvania, several bills have been introduced aimed at protecting potential victims.

"This really does underline the need for legislative reform," said Julie Bancroft, a spokesperson for the Pennsylvania Coalition Against Domestic Violence.

Advocates hope one bill that would tighten rules requiring convicted domestic abusers to relinquish their weapons might pass in the Pennsylvania House next week.

"People are just saying, 'Enough. Let's take a look at our laws,'" said Rep. Marguerite Quinn (R., Bucks), who introduced the bill and expects it to pass in a vote next week.

The proposal would require those convicted of a domestic violence misdemeanor to turn over their weapons to law enforcement within 48 hours  instead of giving them 60 days and the option to surrender the weapons to family or friends. A companion bill passed unanimously in the Senate in March. Both versions also would also make it mandatory for people under final protection-from-abuse orders to give up their weapons, though the House bill covers only certain types of such orders whereas the Senate bill covers all, Bancroft said.

The Rogals' divorce proceedings had dragged on for three years, and his wife got a protection-from-abuse order against Rogal in June 2015 after an altercation in which they accused each other of physical abuse. The order did require him to relinquish weapons, but it was not clear whether he owned any at that time. It expired in 2017.

"Yesterday's incident was tragic," Quinn said of the double slaying. "It would not have been prevented by this [legislation], but it poignantly illustrates the danger of a firearm being in the hands of someone who has a propensity towards domestic violence."

Another Senate bill, aimed at helping domestic violence victims in public housing relocate, may get a vote next week, too. A bill known as Tierne's Law, which secures a judge's ability to use a risk assessment tool when setting bail, was passed earlier this year and signed by Gov. Wolf in April.

Statewide, 117 people were killed in domestic violence-related incidents last year. Two-thirds of such homicides in Pennsylvania were shootings, the highest number of domestic-violence deaths by firearm in the state in the last decade, according to the Pennsylvania Coalition Against Domestic Violence.

Domestic killings of the elderly are less common; in 2017, nine victims over 65 were killed in domestic incidents in Pennsylvania.

Nationwide, just more than half of all mass shootings between 2009 and 2016 involved victims who were either partners or close family members of the gunman.

In the Pulse nightclub, Las Vegas concert, and Sutherland Springs, Texas, shootings, each of the gunmen had been accused or convicted of domestic violence. The gunman in the high school shooting in Parkland, Fla., was said to have stalked a girl and been violent at home.

"With the #MeToo movement and all of these recent mass shooting incidents like Parkland those things have definitely raised awareness, but haven't necessarily translated to legislative action," Bancroft said. "I think we still have a long way to go in terms of  looking at the needs of victims in a way that is not partisan and in a way that is not crowded by gender bias."

Rogal's rampage recalled the 2014 Montgomery County shooting spree by Bradley Stone, who killed his ex-wife and five members of her family as he moved from house to house on a December night.

"If there's a violent crime in suburban Philadelphia more often than not, it's domestic violence, and it's the number-one thing that communities like ours look out for," said Downingtown Mayor Josh Maxwell, who has worked in domestic-violence issues with initiatives including a law that required police officers to be trained on the domestic-violence center resources available to victims. "It's the most serious crime that happens in communities like ours."

Staff writers Vinny Vella and Katie Park contributed to this article.
President Trump shakes hands with FEMA Administrator Brock Long as Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen watches after visiting areas in North Carolina and South Carolina impacted by Hurricane Florence, Wednesday, Sept. 19, 2018, at Myrtle Beach International Airport in Myrtle Beach, S.C. Read more

MORRISVILLE, N.C.  With his home state flooded and the death toll rising, FEMA Administrator William "Brock" Long was on the verge of quitting this week.

On Sunday, his bitter feud with Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen seemed as though it would abate. The two agreed to a truce so that the Trump administration's response to Hurricane Florence would not be further overshadowed by the deepening acrimony between them since the disclosure of an internal investigation into Long's use of government vehicles to travel between Washington and his home in North Carolina.

Nothing would happen to Long in the near term, Nielsen assured him, according to three senior government officials familiar with the conversation. Let's just get through the storm, she said.

About 24 hours later, as Long's plane landed in North Carolina, he learned that the DHS Office of Inspector General had referred his case to federal prosecutors for a possible criminal investigation. He felt devastated and betrayed, according to the three government officials, who had knowledge of Long's reaction.

"It was FEMA personnel who convinced him not to quit," said one congressional aide briefed on the matter. A senior administration official confirmed the account.

The political upheaval surrounding Long now threatens to undercut the nation's top disaster official at the moment he's needed most, his allies say. State and local officials in North Carolina have praised the Federal Emergency Management Agency for its response to the storm. But the discord has sparked worry and some level of panic within FEMA and DHS as they prepare for what is forecast to be a hectic hurricane season, and as FEMA seeks to rehabilitate its image amid renewed criticism of its handling of Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico last year.

Long called his relationship with Nielsen "professional and functional." But behind the scenes, he and other FEMA officials have told colleagues they think she has her mind set on ousting him.

Long spoke briefly with The Washington Post on Wednesday as he was driven in an SUV to a helicopter waiting to take him to greet President Trump, who had arrived with Nielsen in North Carolina to assess the federal response. "We both understand what needs to be done," he said of himself and Nielsen, "and we will continue to work together."

Long said he has not seen the inspector general's findings nor retained an attorney. He would not discuss the investigation except to say that "what's being put out there, it's far from the reality." He has repeatedly denied doing anything improper.

Tension between Nielsen and Long dates back to summer 2017, when Nielsen was chief of staff to Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly, said an administration official who has observed their interactions. It deteriorated further once she took over at DHS in December, this official said.

Nielsen was irritated with Long for not attending early-morning meetings with top-level DHS staff, and she disapproved of his absences from Washington, an official said. As homeland security secretary, Nielsen is Long's boss, but the FEMA administrator directly advises the president during disasters. This competing chain of command has contributed to the friction between Nielsen and Long, current and former administration officials said.

On Sunday, things boiled over. Within hours of their phone call establishing a truce, Long's aides learned that Nielsen was preparing to visit North Carolina to speak with emergency responders, four officials said. No one had told FEMA of her plans. Long and his aides scrambled to get there as well.

A senior administration official familiar with the planning contested that account. The official said senior FEMA staff were told Friday that Nielsen was considering a trip, but her travel plans weren't finalized until midday Sunday during a meeting with Long.

A FEMA spokeswoman declined to comment. A DHS spokesman did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Though Long's future with the administration remains in question, officials acknowledge the situation presents a dilemma. He is considered highly competent and, perhaps as important, Trump appears to like him. The president praised Long  and Nielsen  during a media appearance Wednesday.

But Long's personal relationship with the president may have contributed to what one administration official called "creeping hubris," notably as he used government vehicles for his trips home even after Nielsen chided him for it. Several officials who have worked with Long in the past say he is highly skilled and experienced at emergency management but not adept at the political dynamics of Washington.

It was unclear whether Trump and Long discussed his future during the president's visit to North Carolina.

The inspector general's investigation centers on Long's travel to Hickory, North Carolina, where his wife and two young sons live. Investigators surveilled Long during those trips, which occasionally included other FEMA staffers, raising questions internally about his use of government resources, two administration officials said.

Nielsen promised to give Long a copy of the investigation's preliminary findings in recent days but has not followed through, said the three government officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to offer their candid assessment of the rift. Nielsen and others at DHS have known for weeks that the inspector general was preparing to refer the matter to the Justice Department for possible prosecution, according to one of those officials.

Another administration official familiar with the investigation challenged those claims, and said the DHS inspector general is independent of the secretary and therefore Nielsen would not be able to share the investigation's findings with Long. "It is not her report," the official said.

A spokesman for the Justice Department declined to comment.

Long and others at the agency thought his use of the vehicles was justified, current and former officials said, because the FEMA administrator is responsible for the agency's National Continuity Programs, which requires the country's leaders to maintain secure communications in the event of a catastrophe. Much of the NCP plans are classified, officials said, but it requires Long to be on call around the clock with access to secure equipment that allows the president to talk to him within minute's notice.

Officials familiar with Long's schedule said his trips home were not as prolific as his detractors have suggested and that he has tried not to waste taxpayer money, using public transportation to commute to and from his residence in Washington.

In his interview with The Post, Long said: "I took the Metro to work. I ride an electric scooter to work. I walked to work. I've been bitten by a dog walking to work."

Florence's path through North Carolina has, in some ways, proved fortuitous for Long. He has been able to leverage his lifelong knowledge of the state and relationships forged with disaster management officials there as he has toured stricken areas and sought to assure those in distress that the federal response would be robust and sustained.

"It's important for me to be on the ground," he told The Post, describing his visit to a shelter where he talked to storm survivors and made personal calls to responders to adjust their plans.

Local officials say that Long has been highly effective and praised FEMA's response to the crisis thus far. Nearly 20,000 federal and military personnel have been involved. More than 3,000 people have been rescued from the floodwaters, and 2 million meals have been delivered to those in need across North and South Carolina, according to federal officials.

In North Carolina, leaders said they've benefited, too, from an innovative program that embeds FEMA workers in the state before disasters strike. Long launched the program there in April and plans to spread it across the country.

Long is widely liked and respected across FEMA's sprawling staff and among those staffing the emergency operations center in Raleigh, North Carolina's capital. Many have expressed anxiety at the prospect of Long's ouster and what it could mean for the agency.

FEMA's No. 2 position has been vacant for nearly two years, and Trump's current nominee, Peter Gaynor, still awaits Senate confirmation. The third in command  Daniel Kaniewski, a close friend and onetime housemate of Nielsen, according to three current and former colleagues  could take over, at least on an interim basis, if Long were to leave. But his background in policy and academia, and his lack of hands-on emergency management experience, has generated concern inside and outside FEMA.

"That's what freaks us out. You see what Rex Tillerson did at the State Department, taking a machete to their staffing and budget," said one current FEMA staffer, referring to the former secretary of state who met stiff resistance internally as he sought to restructure the department. "Nobody knows who Trump could pick to replace Brock. And that's petrifying when you're talking about the agency at the heart of this country's disaster response."

One high-ranking employee posted a picture of himself with Long on social media with the hashtag "#teambrock." Others have posted memories of working with him over the past year through several difficult disasters.

Because of the storm, some staffers have been working 16-hour days, far past their paid hours and to the point of exhaustion. Before Long's troubles, many felt stung by public criticism of FEMA's response to Hurricane Maria last year. And some saw Florence as their agency's chance to prove its competency.

"The people we're helping now, that's the whole reason we get into these jobs. It's the reason we endure all the other stuff because we want to make a difference," said one staffer.

In an interview, Thomas Bossert, the president's former homeland security adviser, praised Long's performance and said he knew him to be extraordinarily ethical, even as he said he respected the inspector general's work. "He is as good as you could want in the job," said Bossert, who has known Long since 2003.

Long has worked in emergency management for almost 20 years. First, as a school safety coordinator for the Georgia's emergency management agency; then as FEMA's hurricane program manager for southeastern states. From 2008 to 2011, he was director of Alabama's emergency management.

"I came to D.C. to serve my country," he told The Post. Those close to him say the past week has taken a heavy toll on his family, and Long said he would return to North Carolina when his time leading FEMA eventually ends. "I look forward to simplicity and helping my dedicated wife raise our two beautiful boys," he said. "God knows they are truly serving their country right now too  probably even more than I am."

At the moment, Long said, FEMA is in the shortest and most dramatic stage of emergency management. After the rescues comes the longer and often most frustrating phase: helping the victims return to some sense of normalcy.

"People are about to get frustrated," Long acknowledged.

Was he also frustrated? "Yes," the embattled FEMA chief said. Then he turned, opened the SUV door and stepped out to shake hands before boarding a helicopter to meet the president.

William Wan, Josh Dawsey, and Nick Miroff reported from Washington.
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Founded in 2008, Casino Essentials offers an online course library of over 100 titles in categories such as AML compliance, cage and credit operations, IT and security, customer loyalty, food and beverage, HR compliance, safety, and leadership. All courses are customized to meet casino compliance requirements and regularly updated to meet Federal regulations. ICGIP, the Institute for Certified Gaming Industry Professionals, was founded by Casino Essentials in 2017 to coordinate casino industry efforts to ensure compliance and operational competencies.

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As with all Vector Solutions brands, Casino Essentials offers an easy-to-use learning management system (LMS) which allows clients to train, test, and track their staffs education in one integrated solution. Through its combined offering of online courses, an LMS platform, AML certification, and educational conferences, Casino Essentials helps its clients meet federal mandates that require casinos report certain currency transactions to help uncover money laundering activities and other financial crimes.

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Despite expectations that the state takeover of Atlantic City, imposed nearly two years ago by then-Gov. Chris Christie, would end under Gov. Murphy, New Jersey officials said Thursday the takeover will likely last the full five years called for in legislation designed to rescue the city from financial chaos.

Citing "chronic challenges" faced by the city, attorney Jim Johnson, whom Murphy appointed to review the transition to local control, recommended the opposite. "Atlantic City has a number of challenges that will only be resolved with significant direction from and partnership with the state," he wrote in a 64-page report.

State oversight should last the full five years authorized by the 2016 Municipal Stabilization and Recovery Act unless the city's reliance on state aid has been "substantially reduced or eliminated" and its municipal workforce is on "strong footing," the report said.

Johnson, Murphy, and Lt. Gov. Sheila Oliver, who oversees the state's Department of Community Affairs, were in Atlantic City for a state Democratic convention and held a news conference at the Richmond Avenue School to release the report.

"We are thrilled to welcome this much-needed road map to a much brighter future for Atlantic City," Murphy said at the news conference, also attended by Mayor Frank Gilliam. He called the report a "plan to rebuild faith in Atlantic City's leadership." It joins a half-dozen other reports commissioned by Christie and others in recent years that were also heralded as blueprints to solve Atlantic City's problems.

In a statement, Gilliam said: "The citizens of Atlantic City deserve to have their local elected officials control their destiny." He said he had "waited patiently for this day," which he called "a huge step in the right direction."

The recommendations in the report were "still under review by the administration," according to a summary released by the state.

The takeover, which gives the state control over the city's workforce, payroll, and assets, was fiercely fought by Atlantic City officials, including then-Mayor Don Guardian, amid fears that the legislation would lead to state seizure of assets, such as the city's Municipal Utilities Authority water works.

Those fears have largely eased under the new administration, and finances have stabilized, but the city's police and fire unions continue to fight pay and staffing cuts unilaterally imposed by the Christie administration. The takeover law suspended civil service benefits for the city's public unions.

Murphy also ended the role of former U.S. Sen. Jeff Chiesa, a Christie ally, who billed $400 an hour and whose law firm has collected more than $4 million for its work in Atlantic City. That work has continued despite the reduced role. Johnson, by contrast, was hired by Murphy at a salary of $1 a year.

Among the recommendations in the report:

 The city has failed to "foster or reward" its municipal employees. That, combined with its history of corruption among public officials, has led to a compromised "municipal infrastructure." Johnson recommends increased training for senior managers, new technologies for data management and collection, and "movement back toward civil service benefits for city employees."

 Beefing up the city's planning functions, including a new master plan for the city (one exists that was created by the state), consolidating planning functions now undertaken by the city and the Casino Reinvestment Development Authority, which oversees the Tourism District. The report suggests physically moving the two planning overseers to the same space. The plan further recommends a review of permitting regulations and a focus on "catalytic strategic projects, such as a food market," a shift to "neighborhood-based investments," and support for families facing foreclosure.

 An increased emphasis on public health issues, including "significant disparities in care and outcomes" between African American and white residents.

 Concerning public safety, the report recommends reviewing staffing levels, providing "implicit bias and de-escalation" training, standardizing internal affairs investigations, and creating a Citizens Advisory Board.

Johnson also recommended a task force to review recent casino closings (five since 2014, though two have since reopened, and a third reopened as a non-casino hotel) and expanding the city's efforts to promote itself. Much of the money that went toward marketing the city was redirected by the state takeover legislation to bolster the city's coffers.

Concerning economic development, Johnson recommended shifting the focus to "millennials and young entrepreneurs," and developing strategies to "enhance commuter access" to Atlantic City. Under Murphy, NJ Transit recently suspended rail service to Atlantic City until January amid outcry from local officials.

Johnson further recommended new initiatives for the under-18 population, which is particularly affected by the city's 30 percent poverty rate. He recommended expanding high-quality summer and after-school programs and redirecting the CRDA, which has focused on real estate development and casino projects in recent years, to invest in Atlantic City's youth.

"Let's keep in mind there are 10,000 children who live in Atlantic City," Murphy said as he unveiled the report. "We see them, and we will not forget them."

As for the city overall, he said: "Atlantic City has been counted out time and time again. I don't want to see this historic city on the ropes ever again."


Pedro Ramos speaks at a news conference in the Rick Nichols Room at Reading Terminal Market, where he announced this year's On the Table Philly event, on Sept. 20, 2018. Read more

One day last year, Pedro Ramos ate seven meals in a matter of hours.

It didn't matter what was served, the president and CEO of the Philadelphia Foundation recalled Thursday. What mattered were the conversations with strangers taking place throughout the city at more than 300 locations, where people discussed issues that matter most to them.

Now he's looking forward to chowing down once again with Philadelphians of various ages, cultures, and neighborhoods.

On Thursday, he helped the Philadelphia Foundation and the Knight Foundation, two of the event's presenting sponsors, host a kickoff event at Reading Terminal Market to talk about last year's success and introduce the 2018 program, which begins Nov. 8.

The Inquirer is also a presenting sponsor. Philadelphia Media Network, which publishes the Inquirer, the Daily News, and Philly.com, is owned by the Lenfest Institute for Journalism, which operates under the auspices of the Philadelphia Foundation.

On the Table Philly is a citywide event hosted by Philadelphians on the same day in various spaces  from private homes to office buildings  that allows strangers to have dialogue for 90 minutes over breakfast, lunch, or dinner about topics that matter most to their communities and build bridges across societal barriers. The Knight Foundation sponsors On the Table events in 10 other cities. The first was in Chicago, which Ramos said served as a model for Philadelphia's program.

"We're living in a time now where everywhere you look, every headline, whether it's in print or radio or television, suggests we have simply lost the ability to talk to one another," said Anuj Gupta, manager of the market.

Hosts from last year's On the Table Philly event said Thursday that sharing a meal with a table of strangers solves that problem.

"That whole theory that when you get in front of people  it's a lot easier to understand, and you can have more empathy for [people's] positions," said Jennifer Lynn Robinson, a 2017 host and president of women's advocacy group FemCity Philadelphia. "It's different when you're breaking bread with people at a table."

Some hosts already have chosen topics to chew over during their On the Table discussions. The Rev. Ruben Ortiz, director of national programs for Esperanza in the Hunting Park section of the city, said he will host a conversation about intergenerational faith. Robinson wants to discuss how the #MeToo movement affects the networking relationships between men and women. Mika'il Abdul-Karim, a personal trainer at Diverse Body Sculpturing in East Mount Airy, will host three sessions about nutrition, health, and men's egos.

Ramos said more than 2,000 Philadelphians attended last year's events, two-thirds of which were outside Center City. He said he's confident this year's On the Table event will draw more than 3,000 participants.

As a bonus, this year's event will offer mini-grants to attendees who are "on the verge of being able to do something from their conversation," Ramos said. The grants will be for a few hundred dollars, and details will be released closer to the event.

"The idea is to continue to make this a more day-to-day thing, not a once-a-year thing," Ramos added.
After three bitter years of divorce proceedings, Bruce Rogal's marriage of 24 years ended Tuesday with a formal ruling from a Chester County judge.

The next day, for reasons that were still unclear Thursday, he grabbed a gun and stalked his now ex-wife, firing indiscriminately as he chased her away from the Downingtown home they once shared, a $200,000 property that played a key role in the dissolution of their marriage. He then drove for 20 minutes to the retirement community where his parents lived, and gunned them down in a violent outburst that betrayed the love  and financial support  they had provided him for years.

Hours later, he was found dead from a gunshot wound outside his former home. It was not known whether Rogal took his own life or was killed by state troopers whom he had engaged in a car chase.

Chester County District Attorney Tom Hogan said the divorce had "set [Rogal] off," particularly a judge's decision to grant his ex-wife sole ownership of their home. As investigators continued to unravel Rogal's chaotic final hours, the filings in the divorce case provided a window into his life.

Rogal and his wife, identified in the paperwork as Catherine Christian, married in 1990. They have one son, Walter, now 27.

Neighbors on Vermont Lane, where the couple lived, said they watched in shock as Rogal confronted Christian around 5:30 p.m. Wednesday as she stood in her driveway changing the oil in her car. He chased her with a gun that witnesses said looked like a rifle with a shortened barrel, firing at her as she ran.

Ultimately, neither Christian or anyone else on the block was injured. Rogal fled after Christian sought refuge in a neighbor's house, driving to Bellingham, the retirement community in East Goshen Township where his parents lived, killing them inside their apartment.

Kay Warner, 81, who said she lives directly across from William and Nancy Rogal's apartment, said she never heard gunshots, even though their units are separated only by a hallway, and didn't know anything had happened until police knocked on her door.

"They just came in and searched around with their guns drawn," she said. They told her there was a suspicious person on the property. "Then they came back and explained it to me, and that people were killed."

Warner said Nancy Rogal ran the retirement community's art department.

A manhunt for Rogal began almost immediately after his parents' slaying, with investigators in several states and counties searching for his silver Honda Odyssey.

Around 1 a.m. Thursday, a Pennsylvania state trooper spotted Rogal's minivan, authorities said, and things quickly escalated into a police chase back to the home the couple had shared on Vermont Lane. Rogal's minivan crashed into the side of the home.

James Oley, who lives a few yards away, said he heard the rapid-fire hail of gunshots from police who had been tailing Rogal. Afterward, Oley said, he received a text advising people to stay inside, and soon another that declared the scene safe.

"Everyone is still in disbelief, just soaking it in," Oley said. "But I think we all feel pretty fortunate nobody on our street was harmed, given those bullets were found from his weapon on both sides of the street and a couple houses were hit."

Rogal worked for years as a radio and television producer, later switching careers to general contracting. He had been out of work since 2013, due to "a back injury and bladder condition," according to the filings in the divorce case. He underwent "major back surgery including a lumbar fusion" in 1992, court records show.

He had applied for Social Security disability benefits, but had been denied because he had not made sufficient contributions into the federal system, the judge said in his final ruling.

Since his separation from Christian in May 2015, Rogal had lived in a variety of apartments, most recently at the James Mobile Home Park in Glenmoore.

For the last two years of their marriage, Christian was the sole breadwinner, working two jobs, as an accountant for Karr Barth Associates and a part-time pharmacy technician at a local CVS.

She filed for divorce in June 2015, a month after the two had gotten into a physical altercation at their home. Court records in Chester County show that each filed criminal complaints against the other, with Rogal accusing Christian of hitting him over the head, and she accusing him of slapping her across the face. Both were later found not guilty by a district judge.

Christian also was granted a protection-from-abuse order against Rogal around the same time the divorce was filed. It expired two years later, in June 2017, records show.

The divorce complaint suggests that an extramarital relationship led to the marriage's dissolution. Rogal, 59, had started seeing another woman in 2011, court filings show, and Christian alleged that her husband had spent $18,000 on the woman since that time, including paying her rent for a year at an apartment in West Chester. Rogal told arbitrators the woman had paid him back for the rent.

He had also taken her on vacations in Key West, Fla., and New Orleans, spending hundreds of dollars on hotels, dinners and motorbike rentals, according to financial statements filed in the divorce papers.

Christian's attorney, Steven H. Rubin, wrote that Rogal "has been in a relationship with his girlfriend for years and has spent considerable money for this relationship, instead of contributing those funds to the expense incurred by the parties during their marriage."

Christian said she had spent $154,000 in inheritance she received from her mother in 2005 on family expenses, including a new roof on their home and student loans for their son. Meanwhile, Rogal told arbitrators he had money from a separate account and was able to support himself.

Throughout the divorce proceedings, the couple disputed the wording in the proposed settlement, with Rogal refusing to sign it. The case was finally resolved this week with a judge's ruling that Christian would retain ownership of the couple's home.

Some of Rogal's money apparently came from his parents.

In the mid-1990s, the family had purchased a four-acre vacation property in upstate New York, and Rogal received $160,156 in "gifts of an interest in the property" over seven years, court records show. When the property was sold by the family for $1.1 million in 2012, Rogal received, $262,572 from the sale.

Nancy Rogal was a painter, and more than 60 of her paintings were featured in a 2008 exhibit at the Chester County Art Association. The exhibit, called For the Love of Lake George, focused on Lake George in upstate New York, where she often spent summers.

Maria Tesone, education program coordinator at the art association, worked with Nancy Rogal to promote the exhibit. Tesone on Thursday remembered her as a sweet woman who seemed to love the outdoors, often showing up in casual wear such as jeans and a Columbia jacket.

"She always looked like she was just about ready for anything," Tesone said. And Nancy Rogal felt passionate about Lake George, she said. "You could tell when she talked about it, she loved going there."

In a post on its website Thursday, the management at Bellingham, where the elder Rogals lived, said it was "deeply saddened by the incident that occurred last evening, and our hearts and most sincere condolences go out to the family."

"The safety and well-being of our residents and staff are our primary concern, and grief counselors are onsite today to support our community," the statement said. "We appreciate everyone's support as we mourn this great loss at our community."

Colleen O'Neill, whose mother lives in an apartment in Bellingham, said that when she pulled into the retirement community on Thursday morning, there were more visitors than usual arriving to check on their loved ones. But aside from that, it was "business as usual," she said. A few hours into her visit, O'Neill said, employees began going around to residents' rooms, telling them counseling was available and there would be a community meeting later in the day.

Frances O'Neill, her mother, said Nancy Rogal had happened to sit at her dinner table a few nights before she was killed. O'Neill had never spent time with Rogal before, but knew she was busy, helping to decorate the building with beautiful art. "I was really impressed with what a nice woman she was," O'Neill said. "I remember thinking, 'Gee, she's a nice lady.'"

Staff writer Patricia Madej contributed to this article.
Quetcy Lozada embraces her aunt Elisa DelValle after two weeks as a volunteer with the Salvation Army in Puerto Rico Tuesday October 31, 2017. Read more

CAGUAS, Puerto Rico  As she drove the mountain road leading to her relatives' home, slowing to avoid craters where the street had collapsed, Quetcy Lozada went quiet.

For two weeks, in crushing humidity, she had walked streets lined with wrecked homes, yelling out that her team had food and water. She had laughed and cried with the people who came out.

Something about seeing the devastation here, though, made her still.

"Oh my God. Look at that," Lozada whispered as she passed a neighborhood recreation center, the domed roof blown off leaving only the metal frame like the bones of an animal carcass.

She was based at a Salvation Army post less than 20 minutes from here, yet hadn't had time to visit her family.

They had told her on the phone they were fine.

But countless others she had met said the same, showing an inconceivable optimism, and then went back to homes with no electricity and no water, some with no roofs or no walls, having no idea when anything would get better.

As she drove to her family's home Tuesday, she carried the question that had weighed on her for weeks: Were they really OK?

Lozada's parents left Puerto Rico for Philadelphia when they were children, brought by their parents for the same reason so many leave the island today: the promise of a better life.

Puerto Rico was struggling before Hurricane Maria barreled through on Sept. 20. The island has a bankrupt government $70 billion in debt, an unemployment rate hovering around 10 percent, and more than 43 percent of people living in poverty.

Since 2004, Puerto Rico has lost 400,000 residents, its population falling to 3.4 million. Many have settled in Philadelphia, which today about 134,000 Puerto Ricans call home.

Lozada grew up in that community but said she didn't have a strong connection to her roots. She pushed back on speaking Spanish at home, like any teenager wanting to fit in with her friends.

"I never wanted to be Puerto Rican," she said. "I was like, I'm an American."

With age, she came to appreciate her heritage, especially when she started working at Concilio, a nonprofit that serves and advocates for the Latino community. Ten years ago, that position led her to a job as chief of staff for Philadelphia City Councilwoman Maria Quinones-Sanchez, herself Puerto Rican with a home on the island.

Lozada said that when Hurricane Maria hit, there was no question she would come.

"I saw my parents, that they were worried, that they were worried for their family members that were here, that they were worried for the family they had not heard from," she said. "And I felt like I needed to bring them some relief, but also I needed to kind of see for myself that the island wasn't as bad as it seemed on the news."

By Tuesday, she had spent 13 straight days volunteering. It was Halloween, and the crews planned to quit early, giving her a window to see her family before her flight out the next day.

In the caravan that morning, she was behind Desastre, the slowest truck in the fleet, nicknamed after the Salvation Army slogan written in Spanish on the back, translating to "Where there is a disaster, we are there."

Loaded with food and water, Desastre could barely push 35 m.p.h., so the caravan moved slowly, the lead driver calling out over the radio to avoid "potholes on the left," "potholes on the right," or "potholes everywhere." They'd blown at least four tires in the last two weeks.

Once in Cayey, a town about an hour south of San Juan, they unloaded the supplies into minivans, then set off door-to-door. Everywhere, there were piles of debris that once made up homes: dresser drawers, colorful floor tiles, slats of wood and metal roofs, frayed couch cushions, a clock with the image of Santa Claus as its face.

One home set into a hill looked from the facade to have been spared. Yet through the windows were blue skies, the roof ripped clear off.

At another down the street, the second floor seemed to have vanished, the only sign it ever was there a few feet of railing and a refrigerator standing upright.

A few blocks away, Marie Lynn Cartagena stood in the center of her father's home, which was awash in blue light filtered through the tarp overhead. There was nothing below but the wooden studs and a concrete floor.

"This is the only thing my father had," Cartagena said through a translator. "This is where we were raised."

She is living with a neighbor, and her father is staying at a nursing home as they wait for word from FEMA on when and how they can rebuild.

Benedicta Santiago, who lives nearby, credits the grace of God that her home was spared.

Her bedroom window broke during the storm, destroying her closet and everything in it. Somehow, none of the dozen rosaries she hung from nails on the opposite wall were disturbed.

"It was a miracle," she said.

Down the street, Lozada heaved water and food from the back of an open minivan into people's arms, sweat dripping down her face.

"Are you strong enough?" she asked an elderly man. "It's heavy."

"Of course," he said, laughing.

"May your blessings multiply," the next man said to her.

Others had blessed her too, like the 96-year-old woman she met the day before.

Dona Gullermina, as Lozada calls her, leaned out of her small wooden home to say she was out of water. The rain pounded down that day, and as Lozada brought the boxes up, Dona Gullermina pulled back the bedsheet that served as her front door.

Inside, there was little more than a chair and a bed. Yet the woman's only worry was that Lozada would catch a cold. She pushed the drenched curls out of Lozada's face, then offered her umbrella, only to realize it was broken.

Every day, Lozada has worried that she missed someone like Dona Gullermina, someone unable to come out to get the food and water when the van drives by.

"We may have a lot," Lozada said. "But it's never enough."

The home appeared around a bend in the road. A light rain had started to fall, and as Lozada got out of her car and clutched her aunt, she was overcome with tears unlike any she had cried over the last two weeks.

The two women rocked gently in the rain. After a long while like that, everyone was shepherded onto the porch.

Lozada's aunt, Elisa Rioz DelValle; uncle, Chris Rioz; and cousin, Anna Jimenez, all have lived in Philadelphia at some time in their lives. And all decided Puerto Rico was home.

They live together in a light-blue house with a wide wrap-around porch that looks out on the mountains and downtown Caguas. On New Year's Eve, they can see fireworks bursting over the town.

A plaque from the Philadelphia Fire Department hangs in the living room, bearing the name of Jimenez's husband, Alfredo A. Morales, who she said died in 1995 at age 36 of injuries sustained while battling a blaze.

The home smelled of spices, a beef stew simmering, and the sweet scent of steaming white rice.

They have a gas stove, so they have been able to cook since the storm. They use their generator sparingly, mostly at night so they can watch the news. They get water from a community well.

"You know we are survivors," Jimenez told Lozada, holding her in her arms as they looked out at the mountains. "When we told you we were fine, we meant it."

The rain had picked up; a stream that curves behind the house was stained orange with mud. The ground, brown and barren after the storm, had turned green again. But the trees were still jagged and thin, and the women pointed out the house that previously had been hidden from their view.

"It's sad in one way," Jimenez said. "But in another, I can see things I didn't see before."

This trip stirred something in Lozada, a love for this island deeper than what had been there before. It's difficult to put into words, she said, but she felt the ache when she thought of leaving the next day.

"It's inside," she said, her hand on her chest. "There's just something inside that doesn't want to go."
Scott Wagner, the Republican nominee for governor of Pennsylvania, in 2017. Read more

Scott Wagner, the Republican nominee for governor of Pennsylvania, on Thursday defended his recitation of a letter that Democrats condemned as racist.

After PennLive reported Wagner's remarks, Democrats seized on the issue, sending a video of the speech to reporters and declaring Wagner unfit for public office.

Wagner, a former state senator running against Gov. Wolf, was defiant. "I've always said that if you want the perfect candidate who is politically correct, then you shouldn't vote for me," he said in a statement.

At issue was Wagner's telling of what he called "the raccoon story," which is popular among some supporters of President Trump.

The story was told in a letter published in March 2016 by an anonymous 80-year-old Trump supporter, who compared immigrants to raccoons and warned that the country was being "invaded" by "illegal aliens" and Muslim refugees. The writer said he was attempting to explain why "so many Americans have boarded the Trump Train."

The letter was published on the conspiracy website InfoWars, which is notorious for promoting the false ideas that the 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut was a hoax and that the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks were an inside job.

It has since circulated among some Trump supporters, including the former deputy mayor of Mendham, N.J., who resigned after facing fierce public backlash for sharing the story.

News of Wagner's speech came as he has tried to broaden his appeal, making numerous trips to the Philadelphia area. On Tuesday, he pitched a plan to help "struggling cities" and declared that Wolf and other Democrats had taken urban areas for granted.

Speaking at a campaign event in Wilkes-Barre last week, Wagner didn't explicitly mention immigrants or refugees, saying he was going to "tone it down a little bit."

In the letter posted on InfoWars, the writer uses a metaphor about raccoons: "You've been on vacation for two weeks, you come home, and your basement is infested with raccoons. Hundreds of rabid, messy, mean raccoons have overtaken your basement. You want them gone immediately. You call the city and four different exterminators, but nobody could handle the job."

The writer says Trump, though, could get the job done.

"You don't care if the guy smells," the story continues, "you don't care if the guy swears, you don't care how many times he's been married, you don't care if he was friends with liberals, you don't care if he has plumber's crack.  You simply want those raccoons gone!"

It goes on to say: "This country is weak, bankrupt, our enemies are making fun of us, we are being invaded by illegal aliens and bringing tens of thousands of Muslim refugees to America, while leaving Christians behind to be persecuted."

It bemoans that "we are becoming a nation of victims" and that "we don't even recognize the country we were born and raised in."

Wagner, who posted a video of his remarks on Facebook, omitted the language about immigrants, refugees, and Christians. However, he repeated almost verbatim the account of "raccoons" overtaking a basement, and a supposed inability to "recognize the country" anymore.

Before he began reading the story, Wagner said that he, like the president, had recognized a "swamp" that needed to be drained.

"You've been on vacation for weeks. You come home and your basement is infested with raccoons," Wagner told the audience in Wilkes-Barre, reading from notes and repeating the language about a city's failure to get rid of them.

"You simply want the raccoons gone. You want the problem fixed, he's the guy, he's the best, period. That's the raccoon guy," Wagner said.

Wagner added, "This country is weak, bankrupt, our enemies are making fun of us. We are being invaded." He didn't say who was invading.

"We are becoming a nation of victims," he continued, saying there are so many groups with "special rights" that "we don't even recognize the country we were born with and raised in."

"We just want it fixed, and Trump is the only guy who seems to understand what the people want," he said.

In his statement, Wagner said the raccoon tale was "an analogy that illustrates voters don't really care what types of flaws their leaders have, as long as they are getting things done for the people they serve."

"The raccoons do not represent any type of person  they represent the problems," he said. "And the voters want someone who can solve their problems. That is how I will approach my governorship."

Campaign spokesperson Andrew Romeo said Wagner had not been aware of the InfoWars article, but had read a different account in an email that had been sent to him.

Romeo also pointed to an opinion article Wagner wrote last year in which he said he abhorred racism and discrimination.

Multiple public polls have shown Wolf leading by double digits.
President Trump (left) appears at a campaign rally for U.S. Rep. Lou Barletta at the Mohegan Sun Arena in Wilkes-Barre in August. Although the White House keeps returning to Pennsylvania, outside Republican groups haven't invested much in the top of the ticket. Read more

On the surface, the races for governor and U.S. Senate in Pennsylvania look like a big national draw.

President Trump held a rally in Wilkes-Barre last month for Rep. Lou Barletta, the Republican Senate candidate. Vice President Pence held fund-raisers here over the summer.

On Friday, Trump's eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., attended the state GOP's fall dinner, and former President Barack Obama campaigned in Philadelphia on behalf of Sen. Bob Casey and Gov. Wolf, both Democrats.

And yet: National Republican groups that spend tens of millions of dollars in key races appear to be writing off the top of the ticket in the Keystone State, where polls show double-digit leads for the Democratic incumbents and Trump's approval ratings under 40 percent.

As of this week, groups such as the Republican Governors Association, the Senate GOP's campaign committee, and the super PAC aligned with Senate Republicans had not spent a dime on television ads in Pennsylvania or reserved airtime here, according to a review of federal filings and interviews with media buyers who track the races.

That's in contrast with Republican outside groups' heavy spending in Pennsylvania House races that will help determine which party controls Congress after the November midterm elections. For example, the National Republican Congressional Committee and the Congressional Leadership Fund, a super PAC aligned with Speaker Paul Ryan, have spent more than $1 million trying to boost Republican Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick over Democrat Scott Wallace in the Bucks County-based First District.

"If they feel they have a shot at victory, they will invest. If there's not a path to victory," they won't, said Rob Jesmer, former executive director of the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC).

"It's usually incumbent on the in-state campaign to make that case," he said.

The NRSC and Senate Leadership Fund political action committee have spent a combined $34 million on independent expenditures and electioneering in eight states this year, according to data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics.

The top Democratic outside groups aren't spending on the top of the ticket, either, betting that the candidates don't need their help.

After racking up big wins in governors races during the Obama administration, the GOP is defending 26 incumbents and Republican-held offices that are now open. They're also competing in such Democratic states as Connecticut, where outgoing Gov. Dan Malloy's poor approval ratings have created an opening for Republicans.

There are tough fights in such traditional swing states as Ohio and Florida, and Republicans are also trying to rescue Gov. Scott Walker, who is seeking a third term in Wisconsin. Even deep-red Kansas is a battleground with the ascendance of Trump ally Kris Kobach, a controversial figure who made his name on unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud.

In addition to being squeezed by the national political terrain, GOP nominee Scott Wagner has struggled to raise cash from traditional Republican power brokers in Pennsylvania who have chafed at his Trump-like approach.

One outside group backing Wagner is Americans for Prosperity, the free-market group financed by the billionaire Koch brothers.

In a video posted on Facebook two weeks ago, Wagner said he needed to raise at least $7 million over the next month "to be able to battle Tom Wolf and his socialist allies: Tom Steyer, George Soros, the public-sector unions."

"The money," he said, "is pouring into Tom Wolf's bank account a million dollars at a time."

Wolf is the only Democratic governor running for reelection in a state Trump won in 2016.

A Wagner campaign spokesperson said Wagner would "continue to make grassroots fund-raising appeals throughout the remainder of the campaign in order to raise as much money as possible."

RGA spokesperson Jon Thompson said, "If we see an opportunity to make an impact or to get involved in a way that could move the needle, we will."

"This is when you're starting to consolidate on top states you can win, because some of them are looking really dangerous," said Colm O'Comartun, former executive director of the Democratic Governors Association. "This is not a time where you start to invest in a state that looks like it's long gone in order to try to make it viable."

In Washington, Republicans are clinging to a slim 51-49 majority in the Senate. The map is considered favorable to the GOP, as the party tries to knock out Democrats in states that Trump won in 2016, and where the president remains popular, such as West Virginia and North Dakota. They're playing defense in swing states such as Nevada but also in more conservative ones such as Arizona and Tennessee, where Republican retirements have left open seats.

Trump is even heading to deep-red Texas, where Republicans have declared a political emergency to stave off Democratic Rep. Beto O'Rourke's challenge to Sen. Ted Cruz.

So Barletta, an immigration hard-liner and early supporter of Trump's, is largely on his own against Casey, a two-term incumbent with high name recognition and a $10 million war chest. Barletta had $1.5 million in his campaign account as of June 30.

The Barletta campaign said that the White House was committed to the congressman and that as the race "continues to tighten, we fully anticipate further investment in Pennsylvania."

One political headwind facing Pennsylvania Republicans: Polling by Franklin and Marshall and NBC News/Marist shows that fewer than 40 percent of registered voters in the Keystone State approve of Trump's job performance. Fifty-three percent disapprove, according to the NBC August survey.

Obama's ratings were similar at this point in 2010, when Republicans won the governor's office and a U.S. Senate seat. Another advantage for incumbents such as Wolf and Casey: Voters are more optimistic about the direction of the state now than they were in 2010 or 2014, and Democrats also have an edge in voter enthusiasm, according to Franklin and Marshall.

A plurality of voters approve of the two incumbents.

Democratic resistance to the president has helped fuel the party's strong performance in special elections, including in Pennsylvania, since Trump took office.

John Brabender, a Republican consultant and admaker advising the Barletta campaign, said national Republican groups typically hit the airwaves closer to Election Day in Pennsylvania, because it's a big state with expensive media markets.

"They know if they go up in late August/early September, they're not going to be able to run very much," Brabender said. "They'd much rather come in at the end of the race when voters are paying the highest level of attention."

He added that Trump's rally in Wilkes-Barre, which attracted plenty of media exposure, was worth about $1 million in advertising.

Strategists in both parties agree that Pennsylvania is expensive, but they privately doubt that outside groups will spend much, if any, on the race unless the polls tighten.

"I don't see anything that would say the Senate race is competitive," said Jesmer, the former executive director of the Senate Republicans' campaign arm.

Even so, Trump and his surrogates continue to show up.

"As far as 2020 goes, they can't afford to lose a handful of House races and expect to still be competitive in that state, when he's on the ballot again," said Jennifer Duffy, an analyst at the nonpartisan Cook Political Report.
(Left to Right) Patty Fortney-Julius, Teresa Miller, Carolyn Fortney, and Lara McKeever, shown here in Hummelstown, PA, Tuesday September 12, 2018. The Fortney sisters, five siblings from the same family, four of the sisters shown here in this photo, were abused by the same catholic priest. Read more

The stories revealed by this summer's grand jury report on clergy abuse in Pennsylvania have been disturbing, to say the very least. Now one family is stepping forward to tell theirs, one that stands apart in its effect on five sisters over four decades. Their incredible bravery is on full display in reporter Tricia Nadolny's retelling of the history they're still living. In other news, this morning we have details on the shooting that rocked a Chester County retirement community last night; the shooter has been found dead.

Reading this online? Sign up here to get this newsletter delivered to your inbox every morning.

 Aubrey Nagle (@aubsn, morningnewsletter@philly.com)

When the sweeping Pennsylvania grand jury report uncovered abuse by 301 predator priests across six of the states dioceses, one story stood apart.

It was that of Father Augustine Giella whose crimes thoroughly devastated a single family. He sexually abused five sisters nearly four decades ago but only recently has the family been able to tell their truth  to the public and to each other.

Now the Fortney sisters are stepping forward to tell reporter Tricia L. Nadolny their harrowing tale.

If youve ever been to the Academy of Natural Sciences along the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, you know you cant help but notice its vivid historic dioramas.

The 38 dioramas were installed in the 1930s and most were not touched for decades. But this year, two were cracked open and rejuvenated  everything from the animals to the leaves and snail trails.

Go behind the scenes of the process with photographer Tom Gralish's stunning photo essay and dig into the details thanks to reporter Stephan Salisbury's story.

Lifestyle columnist Elizabeth Wellington is tired of the myth that there is no good shopping in Philadelphia.

Don't believe her? To prove it to you, she visited dozens of women's boutiques and specialty stores in the region and created a master list of fashionable finds.

Sorry in advance  your shopping list is about to get much longer.

What you need to know today

Through Your Eyes | #OurPhilly

Great advice, @shaynemalcolm. 

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

"Theirs is the quintessential immigrant story: strivers who take a chance for a better life in a new country, contribute to the U.S. workforce, and pay taxes that outstrip any benefits they may have received."  Columnist Trudy Rubin on the immigrant couple whose wedding she attended this weekend.

Did you know Philadelphia City Council once adopted a resolution to consider giving people free crack? Decades later, Temple professor Jillian Bauer-Reese and geographer and ACT-UP member Sterling Keith Johnson write, it's time to bring it back.

As many rush to believe the woman accusing Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of sexual assault, Michelle Malkin of CRTV.com writes that "believe women" is perilous baloney.

What were reading

Your Daily Dose of | Happiness

Want to be happy in old age? Our readers suggest turning off the TV and getting out of the house, for starters.
Giulio John D'Angio, 96, of Swarthmore, a Philadelphia radiation oncologist who was a pioneer in the treatment of children's cancers, died Friday, Sept. 14, at his residence on Rittenhouse Square.

Dr. D'Angio, known as "Dan," contributed to many advancements in pediatric oncology, publishing nearly 500 research papers in peer-reviewed journals. He was a professor of radiation oncology at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania beginning in the mid-1970s, his family said.

At Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, where he treated many of his patients and collaborated on medical research, he was held in such esteem that the Giulio D'Angio Chair in Neuroblastoma Research was created. Neuroblastoma is an aggressive cancer of the nerves.

"He was an icon. He was amazing," said Dr. Joel Goldwein, his former protege, now director of medical affairs at Elekta, a radiation equipment firm. "He touched so many lives both directly, via what he did for his patients, and indirectly, via the many hundreds of his students whom he taught the craft and art of pediatric radiation oncology."

In the early days of cancer research, he was among the first to think of combining different cancer treatments for maximum effect.

To combat Wilms' tumor, a cancer of the kidneys, he suggested that instead of the then-accepted surgery followed by radiation, low doses of radiation be combined with chemotherapy as a follow-up to surgery. The survival rate during his career rose from 40 percent to 90 percent.

"It's one of the most satisfying things I've ever done," he told a 1999 meeting of the American Society for Therapeutic Radiation Oncology. He suggested that treatments being given for adult cancers could be harmful to children, and that separate treatments needed to be tailored to the young.

He pioneered the idea of cooperation among groups conducting clinical trials at various locations, and convinced his medical colleagues that it was important to look ahead and consider how medical treatments given to patients as children might affect them as adults.

His advances helped children with cancers such as Wilms' tumor, leukemia, medulloblastoma (a pediatric brain tumor), and neuroblastoma, according to the American Society for Therapeutic Radiation Oncology.

But his concern for children went beyond their physical ailments; he also helped introduce the notion of total care, or looking out for a child's overall needs, the society wrote in 1999.

While working with Sidney Farber, founder of the Children's Cancer Research Foundation, Dr. D'Angio learned that a physician seeing a sick child is actually seeing a sick family. He believed that the doctor must consider how a child's illness changes the family, how suffering is handled, and how expenses mount, said a 2017 article in a Harvard Medical School bulletin, the Environment.

"When parents would bring in their sick child with their other children, D'Angio says he would make a point of addressing the siblings first, complimenting them or showing an interest in something they were wearing or playing with," the article said. "He would also thank them for helping their parents care for their sick sister or brother."

Dr. D'Angio grew up in Brooklyn and Westchester County, N.Y., and graduated from Columbia University and Harvard Medical School. He trained at Boston City Hospital and Boston Children's Hospital, and later set up a practice in Philadelphia. He traveled widely to medical conferences, many of which he convened.

Son-in-law Greg Hinson said Dr. D'Angio was a warm, welcoming man. "He brought me into the family, as if I was just another child," Hinson said. "There were so many people that considered him a father figure, personally and professionally."

Dr. D'Angio's first wife, Jean Terhune D'Angio, died in 2004. In 2005, he married Dr. Audrey Evans, who survives. He is also survived by sons Carl T. and Peter D.; a brother; two grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.

A memorial service will be held at 11 a.m. Saturday, Sept. 22, at St. Mark's Episcopal Church, 1625 Locust St. He donated his body to science. Burial will be private.

Memorial donations may be made to St. James School, 3217 W. Clearfield St., Philadelphia, Pa. 19132.
President Donald Trump's Supreme Court nominee, Brett Kavanaugh readies his papers before he testifies before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Capitol Hill in Washington, Thursday, Sept. 6, 2018, for the third day of his confirmation to replace retired Justice Anthony Kennedy. Read more

The scheduled testimony by Judge Brett Kavanaugh, responding to Christine Blasey Ford's accusation of sexual assault in the early 1980s, raises a central question: With respect to that accusation, who has the burden of proof?

The answer might turn out to be decisive to Kavanaugh's prospects for confirmation.

Invoking the standard used in criminal law, some people have said that Kavanaugh should be presumed innocent. Others say that senators should avoid any presumption and ask instead: Who is more credible? Who is the most likely to be telling the truth?

It's not so simple.

To ensure political neutrality and to cool emotions, let's try to put the current controversy to one side. Let's insist on bracketing any judgments about Kavanaugh in particular, and about what might or might not have happened several decades ago.

Instead, let's ask a more general question: How should officials deal with an accusation that a potential Supreme Court justice has committed a violent crime? To make things simple, let's stipulate (without necessarily agreeing) that if the individual did commit that crime, he or she would be disqualified.

Suppose that a president, considering a large number of possible nominees, concludes that there is a 30 percent chance that an accusation against an otherwise superb contender is true. No president would be likely to nominate such a candidate. Apart from the inevitable political fight, no president is likely to think that of dozens or hundreds of highly qualified people, the very best choice for such an important position is someone who might well have committed a violent crime.

We could make the case harder by lowering the probabilities. Suppose that a president thinks that guilt is 20 percent likely, or 10 percent likely, or 5 percent likely. If the number approaches zero, a president might proceed to nominate the individual in question, thinking: I am not going to make my decision on the basis of unfounded accusations. But if the president believes that the likelihood of guilt is significant, another candidate will be chosen.

That brings us to the key question: Is the U.S. Senate any different?

Suppose that senators believe that the allegations are probably false, but 30 percent likely to be true. There is a strong argument that confirmation would be a terrible idea. Why should the Senate consent to a Supreme Court appointment for someone who might well have committed a disqualifying act?

There are two countervailing considerations. First, a refusal to confirm a nominee is a pretty hostile act  especially if it is based on an accusation of criminal behavior. It is far more personal, and much more of a negative stain, than a president's decision not to nominate someone in the first instance. Reasonable senators might well be reluctant to vote against a nominee on the basis of an accusation that they do not, on balance, believe to be true.

Second, the Senate owes the president a degree of deference. We can argue about how much. But the president's job is to select the very best person for the job, which means that he has discretion to decide against potential nominees for any number of reasons. The Senate's job is much narrower. It is to decide whether the president's choice is unfit for the job.

These considerations suggest that senators might think that if a nominee to the Supreme Court has been accused of a disqualifying crime, the question is: Is it more likely than not that he did it? That's not crazy, but on reflection, it's probably wrong.

The Senate isn't a court of law. Senators are entitled to vote against confirmation of a Supreme Court nominee if they conclude that there is an undue risk that a nominee would be careless with the law, unfair to litigants or some kind of extremist.

If senators conclude that there is a significant chance that a nominee committed a crime of violence, they are entitled to oppose confirmation  even if they think it more likely than not that the nominee is innocent.

Cass Sunstein is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. He is the author of The Cost-Benefit Revolution and co-author of Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness.
Philadelphia unions rally outside Federal Court in Philadelphia, PA on June 27, 2018. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled Wednesday on Janus vs. AFSCME, a challenge to the rights of public unions to collect money from people who don't want to be members. This landmark decision could weaken both unions and a financial pillar of the national and state Democratic parties, upending politics. DAVID MAIALETTI / Staff Photographer Read more

Much attention has rightfully been paid to Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh's stance on abortion and women's health, which will face even more scrutiny now that accusations of sexual misconduct have been levied against him. However, the judicial nominee also has an equally distressing record on workers' rights. This should sound alarm bells for union members and all hard-working Pennsylvanians in the wake of the Janus decision, which prevented unions from receiving dues from workers that they represent.

Before Janus, workers' rights were balanced with the right of individuals to not pay for the political activities of unions if the individual disagreed with them. Public sector workers had no requirement to join unions, but in waving membership, they also waved the union's representation. Janus creates a scenario in which employees can choose whether they want to pay for these services but still receive them for free. Essentially, public sector unions could quickly face a funding nightmare that will jeopardize their ability to fight for workers.

Kavanaugh's fate as a Supreme Court justice will be decided in the coming weeks. Regardless of the outcome, though, voters in Pennsylvania have a choice of vision on workers' rights this November. Several of Pennsylvania's GOP representatives in Harrisburg have introduced bills since Janus that will further decimate the ability of unions to protect themselves.

Look no further than Rep. Kate Klunk (R., York County), whose H.B. 2157 would effectively codify the Janus decision into state law by making amendments to the Public Employee Relations Act. Additionally, the legislation would require employers to send notification to workers each pay period that being in a union and paying dues is not a requirement of employment and prevent payroll deductions for voluntary contributions by non-union members.

When we have strong unions, wages go up. It's as simple as that. Look at the graph of real wages since the 1950s . During the 1930s and '40s, when unions were very strong and membership was high, real wages are high. Since then, real wages have decreased in near straight-line fashion.

Janus strikes a blow at unions by depriving them of resources while stripping them of their power to collect dues from members who benefit from their collective bargaining. In a post-Janus era, other workers within a public sector union would be able to form competing unions or represent themselves individually, giving employers an upper hand at the bargaining table and creating a divide-and-conquer scenario that diminishes workers' power to get fair terms and conditions of employment, such as a 40-hour workweek, full health care, and pensions.

While Republican House members in Pennsylvania have abandoned workers, Democrats in the House can and will continue to push for legislation that other states have already put on the books. In California and New York, recent bills have given unions the opportunity to communicate with employees during orientation. Further, if Janus becomes codified in Pennsylvania, the legislature should consider ensuring unions have what is seemingly a basic right: the ability to refuse representation to workers who don't pay dues.

Efforts to strip unions of their power will continue, and the biggest battle over so-called "right to work" legislation is likely just around the corner in our Commonwealth. In the meantime, voters should be wary of taking unions for granted. That means paying attention to who represents them and making their voices heard loud and clear this November at the ballot box. Now is the time workers should unite and demand higher wages. The data clearly show that the rich have been getting richer while the poor and working class of our country have less money in their pockets year after year. We unite by standing in solidarity with each other, and when we fight, we win.

Joe Hohenstein is a lifelong resident of Frankford. He is the Democratic nominee for State Representative in Pennsylvania's 177th District, covering lower Northeast Philadelphia and the river wards.
EL SEGUNDO, Calif., Sept. 20, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Phoenix Software International, a systems software development company, today announced that Donna Hudi is joining the executive team as Chief Marketing Officer. Hudi brings 20+ years of technology and financial service experience spanning multiple industries. Leveraging extensive business and technical knowledge, Hudi has been instrumental in assisting firms in implementing marketing strategies and business process improvements to support global growth.



I am very excited to be joining the Phoenix Software International team, said Hudi. The opportunity to partner with such talented and passionate people to further the companys goals of delivering exceptional products is a dream come true. Having played a leadership role within similar organizations, I am confident that we can build and execute a strategy to take Phoenix Software to the next level.

Most recently, Hudi served as the Executive Director and Chief Operating Officer for SHARE Association, the first and largest independent technology association user group. Hudi worked directly with leadership to create and implement cost-effective, creative and efficient strategies that succeeded in driving growth and maintaining their presence within the industry. Prior to joining SHARE, Hudi served in various leadership positions where she provided a widerange of strategic, technology and operational guidance and support.

I've known Donna for a number of years. She is tireless, well-organized, and thinks outside the box, said Ed Jaffe, Chief Technology Officer at Phoenix Software. I'm proud to welcome her to the Phoenix Software family and I'm certain she'll make a tremendous, positive impact here!

Fred Hoschett, President of Phoenix Software, remarked, We are delighted to have Donna join our team. Her strong relationship with the technology community as well as her leadership expertise add significant value and will improve our companys ability to deliver products that streamline customers' workflow, increase performance and reduce costs.

About Phoenix Software International

Phoenix Software International, Inc. ( www.phoenixsoftware.com ) is a systems software development company providing software solutions to enterprises around the world. Phoenix offers a wide range of products for the mainframe platform as well as Windows- and Web-based workstation platforms.

Media Contact

Amy Gilbert

Manager, Marketing Publications

(310) 338-0400
Incoming Haverford College freshman Matthew Dodds, left, from Princeton, NJ, gets help from Haverford professor Zachary Oberfield, center, in filling out his voter registration form on the first day check-in for freshman at Haverford on August 29, 2018. Haverford College has been seeking a polling place on its campus, but thus far has not been successful. Students have to travel less than two miles on roads without sidewalks and no lighting to get to the polling place, which isn't even in the same voting precinct. MICHAEL BRYANT / Staff Photographer Read more

Delaware County is giving students at Haverford College a lesson in voter suppression. For years, students have asked for a polling place on campus, but the county's Bureau of Elections has been blowing them off with lame excuses, saying suggested sites didn't have enough parking or had too much traffic.

About 590 students are registered to vote at the college, but they don't even have a polling place in their voting precinct. They must vote at an elementary school in the neighboring precinct, which is about a half-hour walk from campus. Students have a solution: The college will provide a polling place at no cost to the county.

This should be a no-brainer when the election bureau meets Monday to consider the students' petition  but it's not clear what will happen. Discouraging youth voting is happening around the country, report staff writers Susan Snyder and Holly Otterbein. Florida tried to ban early voting on campuses, but fortunately in July, a federal judge ruled it was unconstitutional. In Baltimore, authorities told students they'd lose their scholarships if they registered at their campus address. In Michigan, first-time voters aren't allowed to vote on campus.

In Pennsylvania, former Gov. Tom Corbett tried to enforce a voter ID law, which would have made it more difficult for the elderly, the poor, and young people to vote because they didn't have driver's licenses. Wisely, the court threw it out four years ago.

Experts don't know much about the political behavior of post-millennials (born after 1997), because they are just now reaching voting age. But, clearly, the old guard is worried. A good clue to post-millennials' political leanings comes from the 2016 University of California's poll of students entering college, the latest available survey. More than 36 percent defined themselves as left of center, and 22 percent put themselves on the right.

It is not known whether they will vote in large numbers in the upcoming midterm elections. If they do, younger voters could wipe out the influence of Baby Boomers and older generation voters on Nov. 6. According to a June Pew Research study, there will be 135 million voters aged 53 and younger verses the older generations' 93 million voters. Pew looked at voter behavior in 2014, the last round of midterm elections,and found that older voters outran younger voters by 21 million votes.

There is certainly far more voter excitement leading up to the 2018 general election than there was in the sleepy 2014 cycle. Additionally, young voters are energized by the survivors of the massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, in Parkland, Fla. The survivors have made gun control an election issue.

Like every generation before them, post-millennials will put their mark on our national politics as they come of age. Instead of trying to marginalize young voters, Delaware County leaders have a chance to show them that the job of a county election bureau is to make sure as many voters as possible can cast ballots. That's what a strong democracy looks like.
BHOPAL: A six-year-old boy was seriously injured after being attacked by a group of street dogs in Madhya Pradesh's capital Bhopal on Wednesday.

According to ANI, the minor was playing outside his home when he was attacked by the street dogs.

He was immediately rushed to a nearby hospital.

Boy's parents have held the city's civic body responsible for the shocking incident.

''MCD is responsible for this. They get Rs 2 crores to take care of the street animals. It is their responsibility to take care of such things,'' they alleged.

Street dogs allegedly attacked a 6-year old boy in Bhopal. Victim's currently admitted in a hospital. Parents say,'MCD is responsible for this. They get Rs 2 crores to take care of the street animals. It is their responsibility to take care of such things' #MadhyaPradesh(19.9.18) pic.twitter.com/VvtVr6a5Uh  ANI (@ANI) September 20, 2018

Surjeet Singh Chauhan, chairman, Bhopal Municipal Corporation, has expressed shock over the incident and ordered necessary action in this regard.

''This is a matter of concern. I will direct the concerned authorities to take action in this matter. We will ensure that people of Bhopal are safe,'' Chauhan said.
NEW DELHI: Delhi Police Assistant Commissioner of Police (ACP) Ramesh Dahiya has been booked for allegedly raping a woman on the pretext of marriage, molesting her minor daughter, and kidnapping her son. The woman had filed an initial complaint of rape against him last month.

A case has been registered against him in connection with the complaint and investigation is underway.

Dahiya was recently promoted to the ACP rank. He was earlier sent on leave when the complaint against him was filed initially in July.

She was reportedly married to a criminal but got in touch with the ACP after her husband's death. The woman reportedly lives in Sadar Bazar in Delhi with her three children.

On September 17, the woman again filed a complaint at the office of the senior police officer.

The accused police officer has claimed that the woman had taken a huge amount of loan from him and when he asked her to repay the amount, she got a case filed on the basis of false allegations.
JAMMU: The last rites of BSF head constable Narendra Singh, who was hacked to death by the Pakistani forces along the International Border near Jammu, was performed at his residence in Haryana's Sonipat on Thursday.

Thousands of people, officials of the local administration and Army officers attended the last rites of the slain BSF jawan.

Haryana: Last rites ceremony of BSF head constable Narendra Singh, in Sonipat. He had gone missing after an exchange of fire with Pakistan in Jammu's Ramgarh sector on September 18 & was later found dead. pic.twitter.com/U6P2u15YP4  ANI (@ANI) September 20, 2018

Singh had reportedly gone missing after an exchange of fire with Pakistan in Jammu's Ramgarh Sector on September 18 and his body was later by the Indian security forces later.

The slain BSF jawan's throat was slit by the Pakistani troops, a government official was quoted as saying by PTI.

Mortal remains of BSF head constable Narendra Singh arrives at his residence in Haryana's Sonipat. He had gone missing after an exchange of fire with Pakistan in Jammu's Ramgarh sector on September 18 & was later found dead pic.twitter.com/VMtwj35Fvs  ANI (@ANI) September 20, 2018

After the ''brutal'' and "unprecedented" incident, the security forces issued a "high alert" across the entire IB and the Line of Control (LoC).

The Border Security Force has lodged a strong complaint with its counterparts - the Pakistan Rangers.

Official sources said the body of Head Constable Narender Kumar also bore three bullet wounds and it could only be retrieved from a spot ahead of the Indo-Pak fence after over six hours as the Pakistani side "did not respond" to the calls to maintain the sanctity of the frontier and ensure that the BSF search parties were not fired upon.

The Pakistan Rangers, the sources said, was asked to take part in a joint patrolling to trace the missing jawan, but they only came up to a point and cited water-logging issues in the area that prevented them from undertaking a coordinated action.

The BSF then waited for the sun to set and launched a "risky operation" to bring the jawan's body back to the post.

Officials in the security establishment said the incident of brutality with the jawan, probably a first at the IB, was taken "very seriously" by the Government and the Ministry of External Affairs.

The Director General of Military Operations (DGMO) is also expected to take up the issue with its Pakistani counterparts.

They said since the BSF patrol party that went ahead of the fence to cut the tall "sarkanda" grass to clear the field was first fired upon at 10.40 AM on Tuesday, hectic phone calls and communication exchanges went on throughout the day from the Indian side to across the border in order to locate the body of the jawan, who was first declared missing.

Interestingly, Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman had on Monday said that the heads of Pakistani soldiers are being cut-off, but they are not being displayed.

"Kaat to Rahe Hain, Display Nahin Kar Rahen (heads are being cut off, but are not being displayed)," she said.

Sitharaman made these remarks during an interview to a television news channel.

The terrorists are not allowed to infiltrate into the country. They are being eliminated right at the borders, she added.

However, this was not the first time that the Pakistani forces had given an ''inhuman and barbaric treatment'' to the Indian soldiers.

Last year, the Pakistani forces had killed two Indian soldiers and mutilated their bodies after a targeted attack on frontier posts in Jammu and Kashmir - an act which was described as ''despicable'' by the Indian Army.

The slain soldiers were identified as Naib Subedar Paramjit Singh, a junior commissioned officer (JCO) with the Armys 22 Sikh Regiment, and Head Constable Prem Sagar of the BSFs 200 Battalion.

The 42-year-old Singh was from a village in Punjabs Tarn Taran district, while Sagar was a native of Deoria in Uttar Pradesh.
NEW DELHI: Hours after reports emerged of Imran Khan writing to his counterpart in India PM Narendra Modi, Pakistan has said that its Prime Minister has responded to India in a positive spirit. Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Pakistan said that they are awaiting a formal response from India.

"Pakistan PM has responded to PM Modi, in a positive spirit, reciprocating his sentiments. Lets talk and resolve all issues. We await a formal response from India," Mohammad Faisal, Ministry of Foreign Affairs Pakistan Spokesperson said.

In the letter to PM Modi, Khan said: "I endorse your sentiment that the only way forward for our two countries lies in "constructive engagement." It was in this spirit that hot Pakistan's Minister of Law & Information attended the funeral of Mr Atal Bihari Vajpayee in New Delhi. Mr Vajpayee contributed in trying to bring a positive change in our bilateral relations and was also a major proponent of a strong SAARC for building bridges and developing lies."

Imran's letter is in response to PM Modi's earlier communication with his Pakistani counterpart. PM Modi had called Imran after the latter took oath of office last month.

In the said letter, Imran Khan called for a meeting between Minister of External Affairs Sushma Swaraj and her Pakistani counterpart Shah Mehmood Qureshi on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) in New York scheduled later this month.

"Building on the mutual desire for peace between our two countries, I wish to propose a meeting between Foreign Minister, Makhdoom Shah Qureshi and the External Affairs Minister Ms Sushma Swaraj, before the informal meeting of the SAARC Foreign Ministers at the sidelines of the upcoming UN General Assembly in New York. They can explore the way forward, especially the holding of the SAARC Council of ministers followed by the SAARC Summit in Islamabad. The summit will offer an opportunity for you to visit Pakistan and for us to restart the stalled dialogue process," the letter states.

As per reports, no separate meeting between the two foreign affairs ministers has been scheduled as yet. The foreign ministers of SAARC member countries are likely to have an informal meeting on the sidelines of the UNGA.
NEW DELHI: The Supreme Court has completed the hearing and reserved its order in the Bhima-Koregaon raids case against five activists.

The activists will continue to remain in house arrest until then.

The top court, while reserving its order on petitions filed by historian Romila Thapar and others challenging the arrest of activists, also asked parties to file their written notes by Monday, September 24.

On Wednesday, historian Romila Thapar told the SC that the case against five activists was framed in the name of Saibaba, a former Delhi University Professor, who is serving life sentence for Maoist links.

Wrapping up their submissions, Maharashtra government lawyer Tushar Mehta claimed that Prakash Chetan and GN Saibaba are names of one person. He not only knows Hindi but can deliver speeches in Hindi, said Mehta.

He added the letter seized by law agencies mention several conspiracies.

Harish Salve, the advocate of complainants, argued that the system is robust enough to free them in case of no evidence.

Democratic institutions should be robust enough to accommodate opposition and that a distinction has to be drawn between an opposition, attempt to create a disturbance or overthrow the government, the SC said earlier.

Observing that the liberty could not be stifled at the altar of conjecture, the bench of Chief Justice Dipak Misra, Justice A.M. Khanwilkar and Justice D.Y.Chandrachgud said: "our institutions should be robust enough to accommodate opposition either to the system or even to this court. We will look at this case with a hawk`s eye."

Maharashtra Police, on August 28, had arrested five activists, claiming they had links to the outlawed Communist Party of India (Maoist). The raids triggered strong criticism against the police, leading the cops to defend and claim that they had strong evidence against the arrested activists.
New Delhi: There were "serious differences" between Hindustan Aeronautics Ltd (HAL) and Dassault Aviation for production of Rafale jets in India when the UPA government was negotiating the deal with the French company, official sources said Thursday.

The previous UPA government in 2012 started negotiations with Dassault Aviation to buy 126 Medium Multi-Role Combat Aircraft (MMRCA). The plan was for Dassault Aviation to supply 18 Rafale jets in fly-away condition while 108 aircraft were to be manufactured in India by the company along with HAL. However, the deal could not be sealed.

The sources said the HAL in a letter dated October 11, 2012, to the defence ministry brought out various disagreements pertaining to the work share between HAL and the Dassault Aviation, the makers of Rafale jets.

Subsequently, in July 2014, HAL in its letter to the ministry has also highlighted one major unresolved issue regarding responsibility sharing between Dassault Aviation and HAL for licence manufacture of the aircraft, the sources said. They said observations by experts that the HAL was capable of manufacturing Rafale jets was incorrect.

"There were serious differences between HAL and Dassault Aviation when the UPA government was negotiating the deal with the French company," a source said.

Last week, Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said negotiations for procurement of 126 Rafale jets under the UPA government fell through as HAL did not have the required capability to produce the jets in India in collaboration with Dassault Aviation.

After rounds of negotiations with Hindustan Aeronautics Ltd (HAL), Dassault Aviation felt that the cost of the Rafale jets will escalate significantly if they were to be produced in India, she said.

The Congress has demanded answers from the government on why HAL was not involved in the new deal.

In 2016, the Modi government signed a government-to-government deal with France for purchase of 36 Rafale jets at a cost of Rs 58,000 crore. The Congress has been alleging irregularities in the deal.
NEW DELHI: Away from the politics over the deal to procure Rafale jets from France, the Indian Air Force Deputy Chief of Air Staff Air Marshal Raghunath Nambi Nambiar on Thursday took a test flight of the fighter aircraft.

As per a report by defence website LiveFistDefence, the IAF Deputy Chief completed a front-seat sortie in a Rafale at the Istres air base in France. He flew a Dassault-owned Rafale testbed sporting the India-specific software and system enhancements, separate from the first Rafale for India.

Amidst political storm, IAF deputy chief Air Marshal Nambi Nambiar to front-seat fly a Rafale tomorrow in France. Nambi well known as being among first test pilots on the LCA Tejas program & flying precision strikes on Tiger Hill during the 1999 Kargil conflict. pic.twitter.com/26x0pJGA0T  Livefist (@livefist) September 19, 2018

Nambi is well known for being among first test pilots on the LCA Tejas programme and flying precision strikes on Tiger Hill during the 1999 Kargil conflict.

Earlier this month, three Rafale jets had landed at the Maharajpur air base in Gwalior. The French pilots had made a layover while returning from Exercise Pitch Black 2018, the multilateral air training exercise that concluded recently in Australia. During the exercise in Australia, the IAF pilots had got a first-hand experience of the Rafale jet when an Indian pilot was onboard the fighter aircraft.

Amid allegations from Congress and other opposition parties, the IAF has recently been defending the Rafale jet.

Nambiar had recently said that Rafale is being discussed for the wrong reasons and once it is inducted into the IAF, it would 'revolutionise airpower in the sub-continent'. "The Rafale gives us full spectrum capabilities to a large extent and would revolutionise airpower in our sub-continent having capabilities which do not exist," he had said earlier this month.

Justifying the procurement of the jets, Air Chief Marshal Birender Singh Dhanoa, Chief of the Air Staff, had also said that IAF needs to strengthen its fleet to match the neighbours who have been modernising their military at a rapid pace.

Air Force Vice Chief Air Marshal SB Deo had also said that the IAF is waiting for the aircraft while adding that the allegations are being made about the deal by people who do not know the facts. "We're waiting for the aircraft. Rafale is a beautiful and capable aircraft. I shouldn't comment but I can tell you all this discussion and all these things going on in Rafale..because we know a lot about how everything went, we find that, people dont have the information," the Vice Chief of Air Force had said.
Jammu: The Jammu and Kashmir unit of the BJP on Thursday released the first list of 380 candidates for urban local bodies (ULB) elections scheduled to be held in four phases in October.

The list of the candidates included 120 women activists of the party covering municipal corporations, municipal councils and municipal committees of Jammu region, a spokesman of the party said. He said the BJP state election committee headed by its state president Ravinder Raina finalised the first list of the candidates at a meeting after discussions.

He said, before finalising the list, the state election committee discussed the names of candidates with concerned legislators, respective district presidents and district in-charges.

The state unit also conducted the ward-wise and polling booth-wise survey to select the "effective" candidate for this election, the spokesman said.

Meanwhile, BJP spokesperson Balbir Ram Rattan hit out at state Congress president G A Mir over his assurance to the people that his party would safeguard the Article 35A of the constitution, and said "this is another evil attempt of the Congress to mislead the people just for the sake of getting votes".

Article 35A gives special rights and privileges to the Jammu and Kashmir natives. "How can the Congress state with such a certainty about the future of Article 35A when the case has yet to heard by the Supreme Court and give its final judgment? The statement of the state Congress president amounts to the contempt of the apex court," Rattan said in a separate statement here.

He said while the National Conference (NC) and the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) are using 35A to boycott the upcoming elections, the

Congress is trying to "play with the emotions of the people" of the state, especially Kashmiris, on the issue. "The Congress is the root cause of all the problems being faced by the state of Jammu and Kashmir, yet it is unwilling to accept the same and continues to mislead the people under the false belief that it can undo the past by playing with their emotions," he said.

He said the people of the state are not gullible and they fully understand the game plan of the Congress and will teach it a lesson in the forthcoming elections.
VANCOUVER, British Columbia, Sept. 20, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Cozy Holding Corp. best known for its vacation rental platform, Cozystay , is announcing that its property management company, Cozy Living has secured an investment from Sweetome. Sweetome is Tujias offline property management group.



This investment follows Cozystays recent announcement that it would integrate blockchain into its platform by way of a partnership with Singapore-based Share Everything Lab Pte. Ltd. (SEL) .

Tujia is Chinas biggest short-term property rental firm, and thought of by many as Chinas AirBnB. In late 2017 Tujia raised $300 million from investors, valuing it at more than $1.5 billion. Sweetome accounts for approximately 40,000 properties throughout Asia and 20%-25% of all Tujias transactions.

This investment provides Cozystay with additional fuel to grow our customer base and to advance our technology, while also providing us with increased access to the Chinese market. Both Tujia Sweetome and the Cozy brands are known and trusted in their regions and this will help both to continue to grow, said Galen Cheng, Founder and CEO of Cozystay.

The integration of blockchain is set to improve various aspects of the vacation rental experience, including:

Eliminating double-bookings by providing a single source of truth without data being scattered across various rental platforms

by providing a single source of truth without data being scattered across various rental platforms Improving security and reducing fraud by offering robust data protection and identity verification

by offering robust data protection and identity verification Increasing the quality of reviews by verifying reviewers and ensuring reviews cannot be changed

by verifying reviewers and ensuring reviews cannot be changed Decreasing fees by providing funds transfer via blockchain without third party markups

This investment provides Sweetome with increased access to the North American market, as well as access to the Share Everything Lab blockchain platform which has the potential to improve the customer experience of the vacation rental and property management industry significantly, said Justin Luo, Co-Founder/CEO of Tujia.

Cozystay has 60,000 users, 200,000 listings worldwide and offices in both Vancouver, Canada and Beijing, China. The company serves a large number of Chinese-speaking hosts and the platform itself can be used in Chinese.

There has been an enormous increase in the number of Chinese tourists globally, growing from 10.5 million overseas trips by Chinese tourists in 2001, to 145 million in 2017. Chinese travellers tend to have different expectations than Western travellers including a desire for an increased level of service . Companies such as Tujia and Cozystay are tailored to satisfy these unique needs.

About Cozystay Holdings Inc.

Cozystay Holdings Inc. is a vacation rental platform targeting global Chinese vacationers. Incorporated in January, 2015, the company is headquartered in Vancouver, B.C., with a sales and technical office in Beijing, China. Cozystay runs a subsidiary property management company, Cozy Living Suites Inc.,that manages vacation rental properties in Vancouver, Seattle, Los Angeles and Toronto. Learn more: www.cozystay.com

About Tujia

Tujia.com, Chinas leading lodging-service sharing and booking platform, has been devoted to offering guests diversified and distinctive lodging services since its launch on 1 December 2011. With its headquarters in Beijing, Tujia has expanded its lodging-service network to over 345 domestic and 1,037 overseas destinations with over 1,200,000 online residential houses, including apartments, homestays, and villas as well as traveling services that can cater to various accommodation needs. Guests can book a range of lodging services by using the Tujia website, mobile app, official WeChat or 24/7 customer call center. Sweethome is Tujias offline property management group.
In a remark that drew ire of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), Karnataka Chief Minister H D Kumaraswamy on Thursday warned BJP to be restrained in its speech about his father former prime minister H D Deve Gowda and his family, adding that he can even ask people to rise in revolt if it continued to disturb his government.

Targetting BJP state unit chief and former chief minister B S Yeddyurappa over his remark, an angry Kumaraswamy asserted that the government was under his command. Kumaraswamy lost his cool over Yeddyurappa's alleged statement in Hubballi, where he reportedly said his sole objective was to "finish off father-sons (Deve Gowda and his sons)."

"If you dig too much (into our affairs), then we too have many things at our disposal. Government is in our hand. Don't I have the authority to do whatever I can? I caution him to be careful. Mind you. You are sitting in a glass house. Exercise restraint while talking. Seriousness is expected from a person of your age. This is my sane advice. I want to convey to him in clear terms that he should avoid landing in trouble by giving such statements," Kumaraswamy said.

"He (Yeddyurappa) gave a statement in Hubballi that his sole objective is to finish off father-sons and sending them to jail is his aim. Finally what happened? Who went to jail?" added Kumaraswamy.

Kumaraswamy, who is heading the Congress-JDS coalition government, alleged that BJP was attempting to topple his ministry and luring the MLAs of both parties. Kumaraswamy was further irked after reports that the BJP had approached JD(S) MLA from Nagamangala constituency Suresh Gowda asking him to pack his baggage to leave for Mumbai as already 18 dissident MLAs were with the BJP and ready to join them.

"Suresh Gowda was asked to have a meeting in Bengaluru. Another MLA Shivalli was approached and offered Rs 5 crore," the chief minister said.

Hitting back angrily, Yeddyurappa said he knew his limits but it was Kumaraswamy who had crossed lines of decency.

"As a former chief minister and the state president of anational party, I know my limits. It is you who crossed thelines of decency while speaking.

Why are you silent till nowon (former minister) A Manju's allegations that your family grabbed government land? What is your reply?"

Yeddyurappa sought to know from the chief minister. He alleged that the number of land scams Deve Gowda's family were involved in, nobody could ever achieve it and the chief minister knew all of them.

Yeddyurappa charged Kumaraswamy with resorting to politics of vendetta and reminded him that the post of chief minister was not permanent.

"In our five years of rule, we never indulged in politics of vendetta. You are trying to create confusion by indulging in the politics of vendetta," Yeddyurappa charged.

Soon after the chief minister's statement went viral, Congress and JD(S) activists staged a demonstration outside Yeddyurappa's house raising slogans against him for his alleged attempts to topple the coalition government.

The BJP condemned the demonstration saying that the state government was trying to muzzle the voice of opposition, which showed its "anti-democratic face." They also alleged police intentionally did not act against the demonstrators.

with PTI inputs
The Vatican on Thursday temporarily relieved Franco Mulakkal, the Bishop of Jalandhar Diocese and accused in the rape of a nun, of his pastoral responsibilities, according to the Catholic Bishop Conference of India. The announcement comes just days after the Bishop had written to the Vatican, expressing his desire to step down temporarily from Church responsibilities.

The Pope appointed Bishop Emeritus of the Archdiocese of Bombay Agnelo Rufino Gracias as the Apostolic administrator of the diocese of Jalandhar with immediate effect, a CBCI statement said.

This comes even as the senior Catholic priest is being questioned by the Special Investigation Team for the second day in Kochi on Thursday.

Earlier on Monday, Mulakkal had handed over a letter to the representative of Pope, stating that he needed more time to travel to Kerala and fight the case against him.

Bishop Mulakkal requires to spend more time to fight his case, travel to Kerala and expressed willingness to absolve himself from responsibilities of the diocese temporarily and has handed over a letter to the representative of the Pope, seeking permission for the same, the Diocese of Jalandhar had informed.

Mulakkal had stepped down as Bishop of the Jalandhar Diocese on Saturday, September 15, handing over temporary charge of the diocese to Father Mathew Kokkandam.

A Kerala nun has accused the 54-year-old Bishop of repeatedly raping her between 2014 and 2016. Five other nuns of the congregation have supported her claim and along with a section of the laity are holding a protest at Kochi, which continued for the ninth day on Sunday.

An FIR was registered against the Bishop, with the nun and other convent inmates giving detailed statements running into 114 pages.

Jalandhar police on Saturday served a notice to Mulakkal to appear for interrogation on September 19.

A criminal case has been registered against Missionaries of Jesus for publishing a letter as well as a photo of the victim nun," Kottayam Superintendent of Police Harishankar told ANI.

Mulakkal has denied wrongdoing and termed it a "conspiracy" against him.
NEW DELHI: The Supreme Court will on Thursday resume hearing on the plea challenging the arrest of five Left-wing activists in connection with the Bhima-Koregaon violence which left 1 person dead and several injured last year.

The matter will be taken up by a top court bench of Chief Justice Dipak Misra and Justices AM Khanwilkar and DY Chandrachud.

The top had on Wednesday extended the house arrest of the activists by a day till Thursday, saying it would look into the case with a hawks eye as liberty cannot be sacrificed at the altar of conjectures.

The top court told the Maharashtra Government that there should be a clear-cut distinction between opposition and dissent on one hand and attempts to create disturbance, law and order problems or overthrow the government on the other.

"Our institutions must be robust enough to accommodate any dissent or opposition to the system or even to this court. We cannot sacrifice liberty at the altar of conjectures," top court bench said.

The apex court extended till Thursday the house arrest of the five rights activists -Varavara Rao, Arun Ferreira, Vernon Gonsalves, Sudha Bharadwaj and Gautam Navlakha - at their respective homes.

During the hearing, it asked the Maharashtra government to place before it the "best documents available" as most of the material referred by it were "more like conjectures."

Additional Solicitor General Tushar Mehta, appearing for Maharashtra government referred to the various stages of investigations in the case and the materials which led to the arrest of the five activists.

"As a nation, we should be concerned at this. It is too serious a matter. I request the court to form an opinion only after hearing the matter in full," Mehta said.

To this, Justice Chandrachud said "Yes, we will do that, but our mind is human" and added, "we will look at this case with a hawk's eye".

"You have to make a clear-cut distinction between dissent and opposition and attempts to create disturbance, law and order problem, overthrow elected government," it said.

Senior advocate Harish Salve, appearing for complainant Tushar Damgude, said, "the court should hear the matter in full as what can be simple today may be complex tomorrow and what is complex today may be simple tomorrow".

The bench asked the state government regarding the presence of the independent witnesses, who are employees of the Pune Municipal Corporation, during the search operations conducted at the homes of the activists.

"Why did you have to carry two clerks from Pune Municipal Corporation to Maharashtra Sadan to act as 'panch' (independent) witnesses? The allegation of petitioners is that they were stock witnesses who were present during searches," the bench asked Mehta.

The ASG said he will explain everything and the police will file an affidavit to clarify the position.

The bench, while referring to the documents submitted by the state government, pointed out that it has been said that students of a reputed university were at the site. "Your documents name a reputed university and a prominent social science institute."

It said there are institutes and universities which keep sending students and scholars for research work in affected areas, which does not mean they are involved with any unlawful organisation.

Mehta said one of the letters written on April 18, 2017, by an arrested accused Rona Wilson to one Comrade Prakash reveal that there was systematic plan to create chaos and law and order problem.

He said this letter was recovered from the computer of Wilson during the search and investigation has revealed that Prakash was the chief communicator of the central committee of CPI (Maoist).

Mehta alleged that the activists had planned to organise an international seminar for creating an opinion and systematically create chaos in the society.

At this, the bench said, "our system should be robust enough to deal such international seminars."

Mehta also alleged that former Delhi University professor G N Saibaba, who was convicted and sentenced to life by a trial court last year, has changed his name from Prakash to Chetan.

Senior advocate A M Singhvi, appearing for petitioner Romila Thapar and others said this case is "cooked up" as the police has based its entire case on 13 letters, of which 6-7 were written to or received by Comrade Prakash.

"If Comrade Prakash is G N Saibaba who is in jail since March 7, 2017. Then how can he receive or write a letter even after his conviction", he said, adding that all intrinsic evidence is being cooked up in the name of a person who is in jail.

He said that a supervisory court-monitored SIT should be formed to look into the entire spectrum of the case.

Singhvi also questioned the presence of the 'panch' witnesses during the searches and arrests of the activists.

Senior advocate Anand Grover, Ashwini Kumar and advocate Prashant Bhushan also alleged that the entire case was cooked up and adequate safeguards should be provided to protect the liberty of five activists.

The hearing remained inconclusive and would continue Thursday.

The apex court had on September 17 said it may order an SIT probe if it found that the evidence has been "cooked up".

The plea by Thapar and economists Prabhat Patnaik and Devaki Jain, sociology professor Satish Deshpande and human rights lawyer Maja Daruwala has sought an independent probe into the arrests and the immediate release of the five activists.

(With PTI Inputs)
NEW DELHI: A separate wing set up under the National Investigating Agency (NIA) to probe funding of Naxals has claimed that the money extorted by these home-grown rebels are being pumped into real estate companies.

The report further states that the Naxals are investing the extortion money into the real estate firms through their trusted agents who have been former cadres.

These real estate agents invest money into their business and return it to the Maoist when needed.

In its report, the special wing of the NIA claimed that the extorted money is also being used for the higher education of the children of top Naxal leaders.

It may be recalled that the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) had recently formed a dedicated wing to check the funding of Naxals, which is said to be over Rs 125 crore.

The NIA report, accessed exclusively by Zee News, has revealed that the Naxals groups have been extorting money from individuals as well as business houses.

Their main source of funding is extortion from the tendu patta (leave) contractors and levy from businessmen and corporate houses.

A case registered by Jharkhand Police in November 2016 and, later by NIA this year, had revealed the modus operandi of the Naxals.

According to the NIA report, the extorted money is first deposited in bank accounts of some bogus shell companies and, from there, it is transferred to bank accounts of family members of the Naxal leaders.

The NIA investigation into the killing of former Jharkhand MLA Ramesh Singh Munda revealed that the Naxalites, who were involved in the crime, also looted a cash van in 2008 and decamped with Rs 5 crore in cash and gold.

The Naxals collected Rs 5 crore for killing Ramesh Singh from his rival and distributed Rs 22 Lakhs to different platoons towards their monthly expenditure.

They also purchased one vehicle for their group from the money.

In one such case, it came to light that the members of Tritiya Prastuti State Committee (TSPC) - a Maoist splinter group - used to extort money from big Coal traders.

TSPC reportedly charged Rs 40 per ton of coal production, which is collected through committee operatives or directly by the conduit of the power company.

This money is primarily used by TPSC leaders for investment into the real estate business.

The Naxals also used middlemen to collect money in some cases, which was evident after the seizure of money from CPI-M (Maoist) which revealed that Naxal leaders from Jharkhand Sudhakar and Madhvi used contractors as middlemen for sending the extorted money to their families which reside in Hyderabad.

It is suspected that the Maoists had concealed the extorted money and explosives in the forest areas of Parasnath Hills and Lalu Pahad of Jharkhand.

It has been also revealed that a major chunk of this money is being transferred to top leaders in the Naxal hierarchy and a small portion is spent on prisoners.

A portion of this money was used for purchasing explosives, walkie-talkies and uniforms for Naxal cadres.

The Home Ministry recently gave its approval for setting up the dedicated wing in the NIA in view of the agency's extensive terror funding probe against Kashmiri separatists which led to several arrest of the Hurriyat leaders and others, including the son of Hizbul Mujahideen chief Syed Salahuddin and the son-in-law of separatist leader Syed Ali Shah Geelani.

This year in February, the Enforcement Directorate (ED) had attached properties worth Rs 86 Lakhs of a Jharkhand-based Naxal commander Sandeep Yadav.
Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan has written to his Indian counterpart Prime Minister Narendra Modi saying that two countries have an undeniably challenging relationship. "We, however, owe it to our peoples, especially the future generations, to peacefully resolve all outstanding issues, including the Jammu & Kashmir dispute, to bridge difference and achieve a mutually beneficial outcome. Siachin and Sir Creek also need close attention to move towards resolution," he said in the letter dated September 14.

In the letter, Khan also said that he shares PM Modi's sentiment that the only way forward for our two countries lies in "constructive engagement." "It was in this spirit that hot Pakistan's Minister of Law & Information attended the funeral of Mr Atal Bihari Vajpayee in New Delhi. Mr Vajpayee contributed in trying to bring a positive change in our bilateral relations and was also a major proponent of a strong SAARC for building bridges and developing lies," he said.

Here is the full text of Imran Khan's letter to PM Modi

Dear Modi Sahab,

I wish to thank you for your warm greetings and best wishes on my assumption of charge as the Prime Minister of Pakistan.

I endorse your sentiment that the only way forward for our two countries lies in "constructive engagement." It was in this spirit that hot Pakistan's Minister of Law & Information attended the funeral of Mr. Atal Bihari Vajpayee in New Delhi. Mr. Vajpayee contributed in trying to bring a positive change in our bilateral relations and was also a major proponent of a strong SAARC for building bridges and developing lies.

Pakistan and India have an undeniably challenging relationship. We, however, owe it to our peoples, especially the future generations, to peacefully resolve all outstanding issues, including the Jammu & Kashmir dispute, to bridge difference and achieve a mutually beneficial outcome. Siachin and Sir Creek also need close attention to move towards resolution.

Pakistan remains steady to discuss terrorism.

Discussions on trade, people to people contacts, religious tourism, humanitarian issues are also important.

Building on the mutual desire for peace between our two countries, I wish to propose a meeting between Foreign Minister, Makhdoom Shah Qureshi and the External Affairs Minister Ms Sushma Swaraj, before the informal meeting of the SAARC Foreign Ministers at the sidelines of the upcoming UN General Assembly in New York. They can explore the way forward, especially the holding of the SAARC Council of ministers followed by the SAARC Summit in Islamabad. The summit will offer an opportunity for you to visit Pakistan and for us to restart the stalled dialogue process.

I look forward to working with you for the benefit of the people of both our countries.

Please accept, Excellency, the assurances of my highest consideration.
Washington: The Donald Trump Administration on Wednesday praised India for its significant counter-terrorism actions and said Pakistan-based terrorist groups continued their terror attacks in the country.

In its annual 'Country Report on Terrorism', as mandated by the Congress, the State Department said the Indian leadership expressed resolve to prevent terrorist attacks domestically and to bring to justice the perpetrators of terrorism, in cooperation with the US and other like-minded countries.

The parts of India seriously impacted by terrorism in 2017 included Jammu and Kashmir, the northeast Indian states, and parts of central India in which Maoists remain active, it said.

"India continued to experience attacks, including by Pakistan-based terrorist organisations as well as tribal and Maoist insurgents. Indian authorities blamed Pakistan for cross-border attacks in the state of Jammu and Kashmir," the report said.

India, the report said, continued to apply sustained pressure to detect, disrupt and degrade terror operations within its borders.

Over the course of 2017, India sought to deepen counter-terrorism cooperation and information sharing with the US, including through the first-ever Designations Dialogue held in Delhi in December, it said.

In the same year, India and the US pledged to strengthen cooperation against terrorist threats from groups, including Al-Qaida, ISIS, Jaish-e-Mohammad, Lashkar-e-Tayyiba and D-Company, it said.

During a June 2017 summit, President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Narendra Modi directed officials to establish a new mechanism for cooperation on terrorist designations.

The report further said the Indian government closely monitored the domestic threat from transnational terrorist groups like ISIS and Al-Qaida.

The State Department praised India for its significant counter-terrorism actions.

Citing an example of a significant counter-terrorism law enforcement action by India, it said the police arrested Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB) leader Mohammad Idris from a hideout in Kolkata on March 8.

Idris was allegedly involved in the July 2016 Holey Artisan Bakery attack in Bangladesh capital, Dhaka.
In an attempt to honour slain Hizbul Mujahideen terrorist Burhan Muzaffar Wani, Pakistan released special 'commemorative' postal portraying him as a freedom fighter.

Calling him a 'victim of atrocities by Indian troops in Kashmir', the Pakistan Post released the postal stamps, reported TOI. They were issued by Philately Bureau in Karachi on Kashmir Martyrs Day on July 8, 2016.

The report further stated that the stamps were available on online e-commerce site e-bay for $6.99 (approximately Rs 500). In Pakistan, but the stamps were being sold at 8 Pakistani Rupees.

Apart from Wani's stamp, the postal agency released 19 other stamps including 'Braid chopper', 'Human Shield', 'Over 100,000 Kashmiris Martryed' and so on, under the series 'Victim of atrocities by Indian troops in Kashmir'.

Wani, a resident of Tral, was gunned down on July 8 during a raid of terrorist hideout by Indian security forces in Kokernag area of southern Anantnag.

Wani, who was quite active on social media, was allegedly involved in recruiting young Kashmiris in the name of jihad.

His death sparked off a series of unrest in the Kashmir Valley, leading to the loss of at least 85 lives.

This is not the first time Pakistan has tried to glorify the Mujahideen terrorist.

In 2017, Pakistan Army Chief Gen Qamar Javed Bajwa praised Wani, stating that his death "infused a new spirit in the struggle for freedom" in the Kashmir Valley.

Pakistan has been under tremendous pressure from the United States and other nations to stop supporting terrorist outfits in recent times.
NEW DELHI: External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj will be meeting her counterpart in Pakistan Shah Mehmood Qureshi on the sidelines of the upcoming United Nations General Assembly in New York. Confirming the development, Ministry of External Affairs spokesperson Raveesh Kumar said: "I can confirm that on the request of the Pakistani side, a meeting between EAM and Pakistani foreign minister will take place on the sidelines of the UNGA at a mutually convenient date and time."

"This is just a meeting, not talks or resumption of dialogue," the MEA spokesperson added.

The announcement of a meeting comes hours after a letter by Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan for Prime Minister Narendra Modi was reported. In the letter, the Pakistani PM had called for a meeting between the foreign ministers of the two countries to improve ties between the neighbouring countries.

"Building on the mutual desire for peace between our two countries, I wish to propose a meeting between Foreign Minister, Makhdoom Shah Qureshi and the External Affairs Minister Ms Sushma Swaraj, before the informal meeting of the SAARC Foreign Ministers at the sidelines of the upcoming UN General Assembly in New York. They can explore the way forward, especially the holding of the SAARC Council of ministers followed by the SAARC Summit in Islamabad. The summit will offer an opportunity for you to visit Pakistan and for us to restart the stalled dialogue process," Imran said in his letter.

On whether the issue of opening the Kartarpur corridor will come up for discussion in the talks, Kumar said that the issue will be raised. "Even now after so many years, we don't have any official communication from Pakistani government that they're willing to consider this matter. EAM will therefore raise this issue in her meeting with the Pakistan Foreign Minister," he said.

India has been demanding to open a corridor to Pakistan to allow pilgrims to visit the Gurdwara Darbar Sahib at Kartarpur in Pakistan's Narowal district. Punjab Minister Navjot Singh Sidhu had after his recent visit to Pakistan said that Pakistan Army Chief General Qamar Javed Bajwa had told him that they are considering to open Kartarpur corridor on the occasion of 550th birthday anniversary of Guru Nanak Dev. However, Pakistan on Wednesday said that no such formal proposal is under its consideration.
(Reported by Pooja Mehta)

At least one student was killed and 14 others were injured when a mob clashed with the police over the entry of newly-appointed Urdu teachers in a school in West Bengal's North Dinajpur district on Thursday, police said.

The students the Darivit High School in Islampur were agitating against the newly recruited teacher for Urdu subject, demanding teachers recruitment for other subjects. The agitation had begun since Monday but on Thursday when the students prevented the new teacher from entering the school, police escorted the teacher.

Immediately, the students clashed with the police. They allegedly pelted stones at the police.

In retaliation, the police reportedly fired tear gas shells and resorted to a lathi-charge. This clash resulted in the death of one student, whose identity is yet to be ascertained.

Policemen attacked us, there were no women constables on the campus. They abused us and manhandled us. What were we doing that they had to resort to a lathi-charge? We were just protesting against something, said a student of Darivit High School.

On the other hand, Shankar Chakraborty, BJP district president said that police should not have resorted to a lathi-charge on students on campus. What was the police doing on campus? Even if the students were agitating, there are ways to deal with the situation. What they did was not right. You can never enter campus and attack students, said Chakraborty.

Meanwhile, the parents of the deceased student had rushed to the Islampur hospital. The others injured in the incident are undergoing treatment.
Bengaluru: Karnataka Chief Minister HD Kumaraswamy would meet the public at his home-office in the city centre only once in a month, instead every week, an official said on Thursday.

"Doctors have advised him to meet people once a month," an official from the Chief Minister`s Office (CMO) told IANS here.

Kumaraswamy, 58, who underwent a heart surgery in 2017, was meeting at least 3,000 people every week during the `Janata Darshan` (public interface) to listen to their grievances.

"The Chief Minister was developing fever and respiratory issues after the meetings which last over 12 hours and the doctors have advised him to hold them once a month," the official added.

Besides the Janata Darshan, started on September 1, at least 150 people are lining up outside the Chief Minister`s home-office every morning since he took office on May 23, seeking his intervention on various issues.

In July, about 250 unemployed youth from across the state were offered jobs after a special team from the CMO tied up with various companies to provide employment on Kumaraswamy`s directions.

Several poor people also come to the Chief Minister seeking help with housing, pension and other benefits from the state.
VANCOUVER, CANADA, Sept. 20, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- QUEST WATER GLOBAL, INC. (OTC Pink: QWTR) ("Quest" and/or the "Company"), an innovative water technology company and developer of the solar-powered AQUAtap water purification, desalination, and distribution technology and WEPS WaterMaker Atmospheric Water Extraction and Purification System, announced today an update on current business activities and ongoing operations.



Financial Reporting Requirements and Continuous Disclosure Obligations

On April 23, 2015, the British Columbia Securities Commission (the BCSC) issued a cease trade order (the CTO) against the Company that applies to investors in Canada. On October 12, 2016, the Company obtained a partial revocation of the CTO in order to complete a private placement financing, raising sufficient funds to prepare and file all of its outstanding disclosure documents including quarterly and annual reports. Although it has taken longer than expected to complete the financing, the Company continues to work diligently towards achieving compliance with its financial reporting requirements and continuous disclosure obligations in both the U.S. and Canada, which will eventually allow the Company to obtain a full revocation of the CTO.

Cape Town, South Africa

The City of Cape Town is currently experiencing its worst drought since 1904. In order to ease the pressure placed on the water supply, municipalities across the Western Cape continue to implement water restrictions. These restrictions heavily impact commercial and industrial users who are required to reduce their water use by 45%. The failure to comply constitutes an offence under the Citys water by-laws.

In response to this, Quest has partnered with a Cape Town organization to market the Companys products to commercial, industrial, and institutional customers throughout the Western Cape. Together with its partner, the Company recently submitted several proposals allowing businesses to become water independent by installing and implementing various configurations of the Companys cost-effective AQUAtap system utilizing ground water and seawater sources.

Additionally, the Company recently shipped a WEPS WaterMaker Atmospheric Water Extraction & Purification system to Cape Town for demonstration purposes. The Company and its partner intend to launch a marketing campaign of the WEPS WaterMaker product within the Western Cape, including a website committed solely to this product.

Colombia, Ecuador, Panama and Cuba

Quest recently appointed a new distributor in Colombia to market and sell the Companys full line of products. The distributor was granted exclusivity in Colombia based on a pre-paid initial order and on a non-exclusive basis in Ecuador, Panama, and Cuba. The initial order of WEPS WaterMaker systems has shipped and is expected arrive in Bogota in October 2018. The distributor is developing several sales opportunities, especially within the vicinity of the Caribbean coast of Colombia.

Republic of Haiti

Further to the Companys press release dated September 8, 2016, Quest is making significant progress with its Build-Own-Operate Business Model. Together with its Haitian partner, the Company is in the process of completing the registration of a new joint venture company in the Caribbean nation. This company plans to supply, install and operate 50 AQUAtap systems for the provision and vending of purified drinking water in rural communities within Haiti. Quests executives met with and submitted a comprehensive proposal to the Government of Haiti in February 2018 for the formation a Public-Private Partnership (PPP) which will assist in the execution of this undertaking. The Company is now negotiating the terms of the PPP to supply clean water to 200,000 people within marginalized rural communities.

In addition, the Company recently shipped a WEPS WaterMaker Atmospheric Water Extraction & Purification systems to Haiti for demonstration purposes.

Democratic Republic of Congo

The Company recently received an opportunity to sell AQUAtap water purification & distribution systems into the Democratic Republic of Congo in partnership with a large corporation in the capital city of Kinshasa. Quest, together with its proposed partner, is working on the initial pilot project which proposes the installation of one, 80,000 liter per day freshwater AQUAtap within a rural community close to the capital city. Once the pilot project is deemed a success, this opportunity has the potential to see further AQUAtap installations throughout the country.

Republic of Ghana

The Company, together with its local partner in Accra, are in the submission stage of a proposal to the Government of the Republic of Ghana through The Water Resources Commission and the Ghana Water Company (formerly Ghana Water and Sanitation Corporation) to supply, install, and operate 50 AQUAtap systems for the provision and vending of purified drinking water within rural communities of the country.

Canadian First Nations

The Company is working closely with Chief Gibby Jacob & Associates (CGJA) to introduce Quests entire line of products to First Nations communities across Canada, representing more than 1.3 million indigenous people. CGJA currently works with corporations and First Nations offering solutions for positive change. These solutions are necessary to build First Nations communities capable of thriving into future generations. CGJA recently launched their corporate website, www.chiefgibbyjacob.com , which will be utilized to promote their partners technologies including those of the Company. Quest Water and CGJA are working towards finalizing a partnership agreement which will strengthen their mutual interests.

Advisory Board

Further to the Companys press release dated September 29, 2016, Quest continues to strengthen its Advisory Board. The Company now features a 6-person Advisory Board that spans many segments of business, indigenous affairs, and the water industry. The newest addition and contributor to the Board is S k w x wu7mesh Uxwumixw (Squamish Nation) hereditary Chief Gilbert Gibby Jacob. Chief Jacob is one of the most influential First Nations leaders in Canada and was twice recognized as a significant member of society receiving both the Queens Diamond Jubilee Medal in 2012 and the Senate 150 Anniversary Medal in 2018.

Chief Gibby Jacob helped broker the deal that established the Squamish Lil'wat Cultural Centre in Whistler, British Columbia as well as the Olympic land legacy. Chief Jacob represented Indigenous Peoples on the Vancouver Organizing Committee's Board of Directors for the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games.

About Quest Water Global Inc.

Quest Water Global Inc., through its wholly-owned operating subsidiary Quest Water Solutions Inc., is an innovative water technology company that provides sustainable and environmentally sound solutions to water scarce regions. We use proven technologies to create economically viable products that address the critical shortage of clean water in water-scarce regions and developing nations. Quests goal is to address the vital issue of water quality and water supply by providing an alternative, sustainable source of pure water at the smallest possible environmental cost, while becoming a leading provider of decentralized, turnkey solutions using alternative energy for the production, purification, desalination, and distribution of clean, potable water. For more information, visit our website at www.QuestWaterSolutions.com .

Notice Regarding Forward Looking Statements

This press release contains projections and forward-looking statements, as that term is defined under applicable securities laws. Statements in this press release, which are not purely historical, are forward-looking statements. These statements are only predictions and involve known and unknown risks which may cause actual results and the Company's plans and objectives to differ materially from those expressed in the forward-looking information, including: negative results from the Company's operations; the effects of government regulation on the Company's business; risks associated with the Company's ability to obtain and protect rights to its intellectual property; risks and uncertainties associated with the Company's ability to raise additional capital; loss of management; and other factors beyond the Company's control. Although the Company believes that the expectations reflected in the forward-looking statements are reasonable, it cannot guarantee future results, levels of activity or performance. Further, any forward-looking statement speaks only as of the date on which such statement is made, and, except as required by applicable law, the Company undertakes no obligation to update any forward-looking statement to reflect events or circumstances after the date on which such statement is made or to reflect the occurrence of unanticipated events. New factors emerge from time to time, and it is not possible for management to predict all such factors and to assess in advance the impact of such factors on the Company's business or the extent to which any factor, or combination of factors, may cause actual results to differ materially from those contained in any forward-looking statement. Readers should also refer to the risk factor disclosures and other disclosures outlined in the Company's periodic reports filed from time-to-time with the Securities and Exchange Commission on EDGAR at www.sec.gov and with the British Columbia Securities Commission on SEDAR at www.sedar.com .

Source: Quest Water Global, Inc.
PATNA: A principal and clerk of a school in Phulwari Sharif in Patna have been arrested for allegedly raping a class 5th student for a period of over 9 months. The girl also allegedly got pregnant during the period. The girl was allegedly raped by the two repeatedly in the school premises.

The clerk allegedly filmed the act and blackmailed the victim. He has also been taken into custody.

The incident came to light after the victim came back from school and started vomiting and her family took her to a doctor. Upon examination, the doctor told her that she was two months pregnant.

The girl later revealed that she was sexually exploited by the principal and the clerk following which her parents filed a complaint in the matter. Patna senior superintendent of police (SSP) Manu Maharaaj confirmed the incident and said that the investigation in the matter is underway.

The girl will be taken for a medical examination on Thursday. A case under the Prevention of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act has been filed and the principal and his accomplice were arrested on Wednesday.
A woman armed with a handgun opened fire on Thursday at a Maryland distribution centre for the Rite Aid drug store chain, killing three people and wounding others before the suspect was arrested after apparently trying to kill herself, according to authorities and news reports. "I can confirm multiple wounded and multiple fatalities," Harford County Sheriff Jeffrey Gahler told reporters at a news briefing, without offering a specific number. "The lone suspect for this incident is in custody and is in critical condition."

Gahler provided no details regarding the suspect`s identity or possible motive. A law enforcement source told Reuters that the shooting was believed to have been sparked by a work-related grievance. It occurred shortly after 9 a.m. EDT (1300 GMT) in the town of Perryman, about 34 miles (55 km) northeast of Baltimore.

NBC News and other media outlets, citing law enforcement sources, reported that the assailant was a woman, an unusual circumstance in and of itself as the overwhelming majority of mass shootings in the United States are committed by men. A number of news outlets, including the Baltimore Sun, reported that three people were killed in the shooting.

The suspect used a single handgun and no shots were fired by law enforcement officers. Gahler declined to respond to a reporter who asked whether that suggested the suspect`s injuries were self-inflicted. CNN reported the suspect tried to take her own life.

The Rite Aid centre, situated among warehouses in an industrial park, has nearly 1,000 employees, company spokesman Pete Strella said. The centre processes products, including pharmaceuticals, for delivery to more than 2,500 stores. "Our prayers are with all those impacted, including our first responders," Governor Larry Hogan wrote on Twitter. "The State stands ready to offer any support."

Agents from the Baltimore offices of the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) and the FBI also responded, the agencies said. The shooting occurred a day after a man shot and wounded four people, including a police officer, at a Pennsylvania court building before he was killed by police, according to Pennsylvania State Police.
The politicians are already actively preparing for the future elections. We should also prepare.

The Central Election Commission is, as a rule, the key and one of the most discussed elements of each election campaign in Ukraine.

The topics of the discussion could be different, - from votes counting (as it was in 2004), to discussions around the change of members of the commission (2018).

The tasks though remain the same.

The quality of holding the elections depends a lot on the Central Election Commission. As well as the elections in general.

This is what we need to know about the commission.

What is the Central Election Commission?

The official formulation is as follows:

CEC is the permanent collective body acting in accordance with the Constitution of Ukraine and the laws of Ukraine.

It is empowered to organize the presidential elections, elections of MPs, deputies of local and village councils, city mayors, heads of communities, as well as organizing all-Ukrainian and local referendums in the order and within the limits defined by law.

The CEC is also officially empowered to organize the elections to the Verkhovna Rada of the Autonomous Republic of Crimea, but for some well-known reasons, it does not perform these duties currently.

The CEC was established in November 1997. The first session of the commission was held on November 13, 1997.

Composition of the CEC

Previously, the CEC was composed of 15 members. On September 18, the Verkhovna Rada voted to increase the number of members of the Central Election Commission from 15 to 17 people.

The author of this legislative initiative, Parliament Speaker Andriy Parubiy grounded this decision by the need to unblock the process of renewal of the electoral commission.

What is with the renewal process?

According to the law on the CEC, a member of the Central Election Commission is elected for 7 years.

Then there is a certain legal conflict (let's call it so). In the current composition of the CEC, there are only two members out of the 15, whose term of office has not expired.

The term of office of 12 out of the 15 members has ended on June 1, 2014. The powers of another member ended on February 3, 2017. However, as you know, this did not prevent the current CEC members from holding the elections.

Now it is decided to change the membership. The head must also change.

Who has been running the CEC during the independence period?

The current head of the Central Election Commission is Mykhaylo Okhendovsky. He entered the CEC in 2004 and on July 6, 2013 he was appointed a chairman.

Before him, Volodymyr Shapoval headed the CEC from 2007 to 2013.

From 2004 to 2007, Yaroslav Davydovych was the chairman of the Central Election Commission and before that, in 2004 Serhiy Kivalov held that position.

And also:

1997  2004  Mykhailo Ryabets

1993  1997  Ivan Yemets

1992  1993  acting head Oleksandr Lavrynovych

1989  1992  Vitaly Boyko

How does the CEC work?

It organizes the preparation and holding of the elections, so it:

- announces the start of the elections

- heads the system of electoral commissions formed to conduct the elections, directs and controls their activities

- forms territorial election districts (territorial election commissions)

- controls the use of funds allocated from the state budget for the elections

- establishes the forms of election documents, approves ballot boxes for voting and seals of electoral commissions

- registers candidates for president, their trustees and authorized representatives

- establishes the form and approves the text of the ballot paper, ensures the production of ballots

- appeals to the High Administrative Court to cancel the registration of a candidate on the grounds defined by law

- establishes and officially announces election results

- after taking the oath, it presents the newly elected President with the certificate of the President of Ukraine

- exercises other powers in accordance with the law.

How are the votes counted?

As you know, elections are organized and conducted by three key structures: the Central Election Commission, district election commissions and ballot commissions.

The powers of the district election commission extend on the respective territorial election district, and the powers of the ballot commission - on a specific polling station.

After the end of the election (the closure of polling stations), the ballot commission immediately joins the "game" by launching the "data communication chain": ballot commission - district election commission - Central Election Commission.

At first, the CEC accepts electronic data from each district electoral commission, processes it, and inputs into the base.

However, the official results of the elections, according to law, are established by the CEC based on the records of the electoral commissions in paper form (wet-seal protocols).

In December 2017, the CEC initiated an experiment on the transfer of information about counting the votes from the electoral commissions directly to the CEC. This innovation should accelerate the process of counting votes, which is rather slow today.
Open source

Over the current day, from 7 a.m. through 6 p.m., the militants violated ceasefire regime five times. The press office of the Joint Forces reported this on Facebook.

Yet the militants opened aimed fire from 82mm mortars, anti-tank missiles systems, grenade launchers, heavy machine guns, and small arms.

In particular, the positions of the Armed Forces of Ukraine were shelled from 82mm mortars near Vodiane. The anti-tank missiles and mounted grenade launchers were used near Luhanske. The positions near Novotoshkivske were shelled from grenade launchers, Nevelske from heavy machine guns. In addition, the defenders of Krymske were shelled from grenade launchers and small arms. One Ukrainian serviceman was injured during the hostilities.
It is noted that the expenses from the common fund increased in comparison with 2018 for $43,000

Open source

The Cabinet of Minister of Ukraine plans to increase the financing of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) by $43 million up to $335 million as the draft state budget-2019 reported.

Thus, the expenses in the sum of $335 million are provided in the draft state budget-2019 for the SBU, including $327 million of the common fund and $7 million of the special fund. The expenses from the common fund were increased by $43 million.

Also, the Cabinet of Ministers offers to increase the financing for the training of the cadets, postgraduate students, doctoral students, skills development and refresher training of the SBU officers for $217,000. The expenses are provided in the sum of $2.3 million.

For the provision of the events in the state security sphere and activity of the bodies of the SBU system, $318 million can be allocated and for the provision of the events by the special units on the fight against organized crime and corruption, $1.4 million can be allocated.

Also, $509,000 can be allocated for the coordination of the activity on the prevention of the terrorist actions and fight against terrorism in Ukraine in 2019. $8.2 million can be allocated for the medical and health-resort treatment for the military men and SBU officers, provision of the activity of children's kindergartens and $4.2 million for the building of the apartments for the SBU officers.

Earlier we reported that the draft budget for 2019 includes expenses for the network development and maintenance of public roads in the amount of $460 million.

Also, the draft budget $589 thousand financial assistance for the families of those who died and suffered on Maidan and those who sustained body injuries, beatings, torments during the protests.

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We need to grow. And grow at a fast pace. 3% of GDP growth in 2018 is the minimum for our country. However, there is a key question: what are the reasons for growing of the Ukrainian economy? Leading local and foreign experts are convinced that such economic growth can be ensured only through direct domestic and foreign investment. And we need the dynamics of such investments in the fixed assets of Ukrainian plants and factories. After all, on the vast majority of state-owned enterprises, fixed assets are worn out by more than 80%, and there are no long-term investment funds for their technical re-equipment and modernization.



True, in the ranks of our ruling elite there have always been strong enemies of the denationalization of large state property. And the current stage of its large-scale holding in 2018-2020 is not an exception. But I would not praise this factor so much, as it is impossible to continue living without risk management, and officials and professional participants of the capital market need to look not at opponents of privatization and market conditions but at their national personnel potential. After all, intrigues of opponents are not so terrible, as well as production and management mistakes of the privatized facility leadership. It is much worse when we face corruption and insolent fraud of top managers of state enterprises.



These days the Chamber of Accounts has published the following impartial and alarming figures: for 9 months of 2017 only 14 state enterprises showed profit as a result of financial and economic activity, 20 - satisfactory work, 49 - inefficient. In fact, everything can be much worse, since the financial and economic indicators of each second state enterprise are completely absent. At the same time, if the State Property Fund of Ukraine is going to put up the maximum number of objects for sale in order to get as much money as possible, it is unlikely that it will be able to implement such a plan.



Of course, the topic of big privatization is very complex for amateurs, and understandable and predictable for professionals. I do not want to get involved in a long account of the causes and consequences, but the fact is that from privatization in 2018 the state budget actually received for January-July of this year only 49.9 million UAH. It shows the failure of the new law on privatization and the inability of people's deputies to predict the expected effect of the adopted legislative acts, and secondly, the new leadership of the State Property Fund, widely spreading the supposedly unique significance of the new advisers, did not extract bitter lessons from the failure of their predecessors.



So what exactly should we do? First of all, it is necessary to change the plans for privatization of large corporatized state enterprises, envisaging at the first stage the sale of blocks of shares on stock exchanges with the passage of the listing procedure, thereby attracting not only strategic investors to trading platforms, but portfolio and qualified investors. And, of course, we urgently need to pass draft law No. 7055 "On Capital Markets and Regulated Markets" for the legislative consolidation of the activities of professional participants in the capital market and, first of all, for investment firms that could underwrite corporations with or without the sale of their stakes. Well, now our authorities are showing an unprofessional organization of large-scale privatization.



Or was it originally intended? After all, there must be a principled policy of the Cabinet of Ministers, and most importantly - a detailed and clear answer to the key question: why does the government conduct large-scale privatization of 2018-2020? For example, many Ukrainian and foreign investors are convinced that now is the time to build a real private market economy in Ukraine. And objects of privatization are not put on tenders and auctions to sell them or temporarily solve some social problems.

No, a large-scale privatization should not be conducted for such purpose. According to experts, the process of denationalization is necessary in order to create a solid foundation for an effective market economy with a predominance of private property. And yet, how to make all this real?  we have enough competence and political will? Plus, I repeat, this process has many powerful enemies and no fewer powerful supporters "at the top." I know many of them personally, because since 1994 I have managed the privatization of about 1000 state-owned enterprises, including the Mariupol metallurgical plant Azovstal. I also know those who yesterday were ardent supporters of the strengthening of state enterprises and companies, and today they suddenly stand for their denationalization.



Lately, we heard counterarguments in the government offices: why should we sell privatization objects, when the market has very low prices for Ukrainian assets? Maybe we should wait until better times, when the upward trends begin? To be honest, the opponents of these voices can be understood. We have already delayed the implementation of economic reforms and waited for better times. The time has come for us to hurry; we have to catch it, while in the world there is one technological zone, only the United States of America. But instead of benefiting from this, Groysman's Cabinet continues to report the losses and with even greater zeal begs for new loans.



At the same time, the Cabinet has not achieved a balanced industrial policy at the state level. True, it is fair to admit that some necessary decisions have recently been made, but their implementation is going quite slowly. This applies to infrastructure companies and agribusiness. Yes, here we make some right decisions, but all this requires systematic work, encouraging foreign investors to come to Ukraine. In a word, the right steps in a number of ministries and the State Property Fund are being made, but they must be put in a single system. And in this process effective and transparent privatization of objects of state property can help significantly. Otherwise, we definitely will not get the proper effect from the new economic model our government being created.



Finally, it is important not to be late. After all, large-scale privatization programs are being prepared in China, India and many other countries, which means that competition for investors only increases.
The first large-scale increase in wages for Ukrainian servicemen occurred in January 2016. Then the amount of money provided to servicemen increased by an average of 1.5-2 times. In 2017, the amount for certain categories of servicemen (sergeants, servicemen on the contract, servicemen of the Highly Mobile Airborne Forces and the Marine Corps of the Navy) was increased. In particular, this happened due to the increase in the size of the monthly bonuses, reported the press service of the Ministry of Defense: "Now the amount of money for the sergeant and sergeant-major of the military service is not less than 7,3 thousand UAH per month (without taking into account payments for participation in Joint Operation in Donbas)".



Since 2014, the fees for direct participation in JFO were 100% of the monthly cash supply, but not less than 3 thousand UAH per month. Rewards were paid in proportion to the number of days of participation in the Joint Forces Operation. Also since 2015, additional remuneration has been established. So, for the successful performance of a combat mission, money is paid to a separate military unit in the amount of 61 to 365 thousand UAH. For direct participation in hostilities - 1 thousand UAH per day of fighting with the enemy. Remuneration for the destruction (capture) of enemy combat equipment is paid to the unit, crew or individual in the amount of 12 to 243 thousand UAH, depending on the type of destroyed equipment.



In 2016, the amount of remuneration for direct participation in the JFO was raised to UAH 4,200 per month on the battle collision line and UAH 1.2 thousand - in other locations within a certain area of the operation.



Since January 1, 2017, payments have been raised to 6 thousand UAH and 2,4 thousand UAH per month, respectively. From April 1, 2017 - up to 7,5 thousand UAH and 3,5 thousand UAH per month, and from August 1, 2017 and up to date, the fee for participation in the ATO (JFO in Donbas) is 10 thousand UAH per month in lines of combat collision and 4,5 thousand UAH in other locations.



But if at the beginning of 2016 the minimum level of financial support for the serviceman averaged 7 thousand UAH (excluding bonuses and awards) and was equal to 5 minimum wages and almost 1.6 average monthly wages in the country. After raising social standards from January 1, 2017, it declined. In particular, it became equal to only 2.2 of the minimum wage. "This led to a decrease in the competitiveness of salaries for servicemen compared to the civilian sector," the press service of the Defense Ministry said.



To increase the motivation for entering the military service, the social and legal protection of servicemen was strengthened, the age of stay in the reserve was increased, as well as the age limit for admission to higher military educational institutions (up to 30 years). In addition, it became possible to conclude perpetual and short-term contracts for up to 6 months, told the press service of the Defense Ministry: "An important motivational factor for entering the contract was the preservation of the place of work and average wages for the period until the termination of the untimely contract (special period.) Also there is the retention of a pension for a period for persons who were accepted for military service on contract during a crisis situation. "



Among other things, from 2018, a one-time monetary reward was introduced for the conclusion of the first contract in such amounts: soldiers - 8 subsistence minimums (14.1 thousand UAH), sergeants - 9 subsistence minimums (15.8 thousand UAH), officers - 10 subsistence minimums (17.6 thousand UAH). The size of the minimums is determined by the corresponding subsistence minimum for the working population, the Ministry of Defense press service specified.



Officers leave the army

Despite all the measures taken, regular personnel officers are leaving the army, including due to insufficient money supply. Early in the summer, in a letter to the Cabinet published in the media, the Minister of Defense Stepan Poltorak said that from January to June 11,000 officers and contract soldiers with combat experience left the army (they had the right to discharge from military service), and by the end of the year the dismissal of another 18 thousand is possible. According to the results of the survey of those who plan to resign, a third can do so due to insufficient money supply. The situation could be corrected by the increase of the minimum cash supply from October 1, 2018, as was said in the text of the letter.



The Ministry of Defense did not confirm the authenticity of the letter published in the media, but it was not denied either. In response to the request of 112.ua, the press service of the Ministry of Defense reported: "Studies conducted in the Armed Forces demonstrate that the provision of money for servicemen must ensure competitiveness in the labor market, taking into account the workload, the risk to life and other factors that occur during the military service, and it should also increase while social standards in the state are increased, thereby encouraging military men to conclude contracts for military service," the press service of the Ministry of Defense said.



The figure, cited with a reference to the letter of the Ministry of Defense, gave reason to Internet bloggers to talk about this problem. According to them, officers of particular relevance represent the carriers of actual knowledge and have real combat experience. Officers who for a long time go to the reserve quickly lose their qualifications, for example, as a doctor who changed the job, does not attend training seminars, does not get acquainted with information about new medicines and methods of treatment (for the military this is possession of weapons, special skills, methods of conducting fighting and so on).



Donbas conflict participants recall that officers called up from the reserve in 2014, used to have much less experience and knowledge than those who for a few months really fought. Naturally, this did not add either credibility or trust. There were problems with coordination in military divisions. The loss of every officer with combat experience is a serious problem.



It should be noted that the Ministry of Defense denies that the problem with the dismissal of contract officers is large. "The indicators of the admission of Ukrainian citizens to military service on a contract basis (officers) make it possible to compensate for the retirement of officers from the service. The main problem is that military personnel who have combat experience are being fired," stated the press service of the Defense Ministry.



Separately, the press service noted that "the main sources of completion of officer positions are graduates of higher military educational institutions and military educational units of universities." But there are other sources - particular, for the purpose of promptly completing officer positions in 2014-2016. six stages of partial mobilization were conducted. Now an operational reserve has been formed and prepared with a total number of more than 160,000 servicemen from among those who have combat experience. "The manning of officer posts in the Armed Forces, including in the area of Donbas, is kept at the level ensuring the fulfillment of assignments and meeting the numbers indicated by Ukrainian legislation. The dismissal of officers from military service is carried out in regular intervals for all types of troops (forces) in proportion of their number, "112.ua was assured in the press service of the Defense Ministry.



As of September 2018, 20.5 thousand people were accepted for military service under the contract for the posts of soldiers and sergeants, including 2.5 thousand people. - after passing the military service. In general, the trend corresponds to 2017, the press service of the Defense Ministry noted.



The opposite point of view is shared by some deputies and experts. "The problem of the outflow of officers is quite large, it is a direct consequence of insufficient money supply, and it is also necessary to increase the provision of military personnel in Donbas that are in the high-risk zone," confirmed the secretary of the Committee for National Security and Defense Ivan Vynnyk. He refused to tell the exact number of officers who intend to resign from the army, noting: "If we do not raise the salaries of servicemen, this will pose a threat to national security."
Recently, Palestinian ambassador in Russia assumed his country could recognize Crimea as part of Russia

Open source

The Ukrainian Parliament should turn to President Petro Poroshenko, regarding the issue of moving the embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. The respective draft bill No.9107 has been registerted by MP Hanna Hopko, the head of the Parliamentary Committee for Foreign Affairs.

The text of the draft document is not available at the moment.

Recently, Abdel Hafiz Nofal, the Palestinian ambassador in Russia assumed his country could recognize the annexed Crimea as part of Russia. Due to that fact, Ukraine's Foreign Ministry summoned the Plestinian ambassador to clear the matters in this regard.

In late 2017, U.S. President Donald Trump officially recognized Jerusalem the capital of Israel. The U.S. embassy in Israel opened there in May 2018, amidst the protests.

The EU recently claimed that Brussels would like to see Jerusalem the capital city of Israel and Palestine at the same time.
375 MPs are registered in the session hall, Ukraines Prime Minister Volodymyr Groysman with ministers are present in the Verkhovna Rada now

Ukraines President Petro Poroshenko delivers his annual address at the Ukrainian Parliament

375 MPs are registered and are present in the hall of the Verkhovna Rada. Ukraines Prime Minister Volodymyr Groysman with ministers, the representatives of the executive and judicial power, international guests.

As it was reported earlier, today the Parliament is to vote a draft law on amendments to the Constitution of Ukraine concerning the foreign policy towards EU-NATO among others. In 2017 the Ukrainian parliament passed a law restoring the country's course towards NATO membership as a strategic goal of foreign and security policy.
SANTA CLARA, Calif., Sept. 20, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Hitachi Vantara , a wholly owned subsidiary of Hitachi, Ltd. (TSE: 6501), today announced the availability of Hitachi Digital Evidence Management (HDEM), an integrated solution to address the challenges of digital evidence management in modern policing.



The exponential increase of digital evidence from an ever-greater number of sources has challenged law enforcement with the complex and time-consuming task of identifying and organizing digital evidence needed for investigation and prosecution. Law enforcement officials are challenged by compliance policies and procedures such as evidence disclosure rules. They are also hampered by antiquated manual processes that can introduce delays and mistakes from the initial collection of evidence within existing pools of information to its ongoing management throughout an investigation. These growing challenges can limit the ability of law enforcement to manage the collected evidence efficiently and ensure that it is available when required.

The HDEM solution provides an opportunity for law enforcement to meet these challenges and set new standards for using evidence in todays digital world.

Hitachi Digital Evidence Management is highly scalable, permitting the collection of data from any digital source so it can be placed in context for an investigation or prosecution. This includes body-worn and car video cameras, mobile phones, documents, closed-circuit television (CCTV) and other digital information sources. Using HDEM, law enforcement can identify and associate evidence with a particular case, and secure, analyze, clip, redact and handle it according to the guidelines of police information management in the local jurisdiction. Measures to enable GDPR compliance are built into the application together with security and user provisioning to assist law enforcement in building criminal cases and gaining further intelligence from the collected digital evidence.

By automating the discovery, processing, analysis, organization, storage and sharing of information that is retrieved from multiple evidential sources, HDEM is data-agnostic, meaning that it even works with dissimilar data formats from multiple sources. This capability allows law enforcement to paint a comprehensive and integrated evidential picture and supports prosecution efforts, helping law enforcement lead criminal cases to more efficient and effective closure.

HDEM also manages evidential continuity and integrity issues to prevent challenges to its validity. The solution allows seamless delivery of evidence packages to the prosecuting authorities for both pre-charging decisions and case progression. The core HDEM platform ingests data from the repositories of existing endpoint devices such as body-worn video and has web portals available for the public and partners to upload possible evidence directly into the solution. Additional modules are available, including live facial matching for greater insight from the collected digital evidence.

Hitachi Digital Evidence Management is available initially for police and law enforcement agencies within Abu Dhabi, Australia, Canada, Denmark, Dubai, India, Singapore, Sweden and the United Kingdom. HDEM will be expanded into other countries and localized for additional use cases in the future. HDEM is available on a price-per-officer subscription basis.

Supporting Quotes

It can be challenging and time-consuming to collect and manage all of the diverse types of digital evidence we require for effective policing, said Andrew White, assistant chief officer at Lincolnshire Police. Hitachi Digital Evidence Management are working with Lincolnshire Police to prove there is a solution to manage, secure, share and analyse all the digital evidence we acquire helping us to ensure that investigations are conducted efficiently, and evidence is disclosed in the right manner at the appropriate time. In turn, this will help us to provide effective policing by being able to focus our resources on solving crimes and have a positive impact on our communities.

We are collecting more and more information from digital sources every day in separate silos and are faced with the challenges of scale, privacy and security, says Mike Barton, chief constable, Durham Constabulary. Hitachi Digital Evidence Management delivers a scalable evidence platform that will help us protect our citizens privacy while allowing us to prevent crime and apprehend and prosecute criminals more effectively. The people of County Durham and Darlington can be confident that we will deploy innovation in policing that makes our communities safer by using Hitachi Digital Evidence Management.

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Hitachi Vantara, a wholly owned subsidiary of Hitachi, Ltd., helps data-driven leaders find and use the value in their data to innovate intelligently and reach outcomes that matter for business and society. We combine technology, intellectual property and industry knowledge to deliver data-managing solutions that help enterprises improve their customers experiences, develop new revenue streams, and lower the costs of business. Only Hitachi Vantara elevates your innovation advantage by combining deep information technology (IT), operational technology (OT) and domain expertise. We work with organizations everywhere to drive data to meaningful outcomes. Visit us at www.HitachiVantara.com .

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About Hitachi, Ltd.

Hitachi, Ltd. (TSE: 6501), headquartered in Tokyo, Japan, delivers innovations that answer societys challenges, combining its operational technology, information technology, and products/systems. The companys consolidated revenues for fiscal 2017 (ended March 31, 2018) totaled 9,368.6 billion yen ($88.4 billion). The Hitachi Group is an innovation partner for the IoT era, and it has approximately 307,000 employees worldwide. Through collaborative creation with customers, Hitachi is deploying Social Innovation Business using digital technologies in a broad range of sectors, including Power/Energy, Industry/Distribution/Water, Urban Development, and Finance/Social Infrastructure/Healthcare. For more information on Hitachi, please visit the company's website at http://www.hitachi.com .

HITACHI is a trademark or registered trademark of Hitachi, Ltd. All other trademarks, service marks, and company names are properties of their respective owners.

MEDIA CONTACTS

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Amanda.Lennon@HitachiVantara.com

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U.S. leader Donald Trump put his signature on the decree about the increased sanctions pressure against Russia - for the ongoing aggression in Ukraine. The White House's press service reported that on Thursday evening.

The document enhances the sanction mode, yet it does not impose any additional limitations.

The decree envisages blocking the property and assets. as wel as the ban on any financial operations with the individuals that are close to the Russian government.

Previously, Ukrainian president Poroshenko held the annual speech at the Parliament, where he stressed that there's a risk of easing of anti-Russian sanctions. The Head of the State said it during the annual speech in the Parliament. According to him, Ukraine did everything to prevent such scenario. 'Its essential that the sanctions against Moscow are now connected not only with Ukraine. It means that we clearly understand that Russia is not just our problem, that its a threat to the whole civilized world. We will gradually counterwork the attempts to weaken sanction regime against Russia. Kremlins tactical task is to lift the sanctions in January next year as allegedly Ukraine did not fulfil Minsk Agreements; I think that we have to destroy this scenario. We wont the lifting happen. But, know that there is a risk of easing,' the President said.
The President of Ukraine Petro Poroshenko claimed a risk of easing of anti-Russian sanctions. The Head of the State said it during the annual speech in the Parliament. According to him, Ukraine did everything to prevent such scenario.

Its essential that the sanctions against Moscow are now connected not only with Ukraine. It means that we clearly understand that Russia is not just our problem, that its a threat to the whole civilized world. We will gradually counterwork the attempts to weaken sanction regime against Russia. Kremlins tactical task is to lift the sanctions in January next year as allegedly Ukraine did not fulfil Minsk Agreements; I think that we have to destroy this scenario. We wont the lifting happen. But, know that there is a risk of easing, the President said.

On September 13, the EU prolonged anti-Russian sanctions for a half a year. It includes several Russians and legal entities involved in the actions against Ukraines territorial integrity.
The European Parliament plans to consider the issue, as the Kremlin exceeds the norms of the international maritime law

The European Parliament intends to look into the issue of Russian blockade in the Sea of Azov. Dariusz Rosatti, the co-head of the Parliamentary Committee of the EU-Ukraine Association said this at the briefing in the Ukrainian Parliament, RBC Ukraine wrote.

'We are very concerned about the situation in the Sea of Azov, where Russia breaks the common practice, detaining and checking vessels. Russia detains them for two or three days', he said.

Russia has been abusing the norms of the international maritime law, which allow to check the vessels, the official said.

'According to the statistics, 120 vessels that flown the EU flag were detained since April. We will consider this issue in the European Parliament, and we will demand to stop this', Rosatti said.
The President urged to adopt the draft amendments to the Constitution which excludes the permission to use military bases in Ukraine

The President of Ukraine Petro Poroshenko urges the Verkhovna Rada to exclude the norm on deploying of Russian Black Sea fleet in Sevastopol, so that after Crimea returns to Ukraine, the Russian base would not be there. The President said it during his annual speech in the Parliament, broadcasted by 112 Ukraine.

On Monday, I put into force the decision of the National Security and Defence Council  not to prolong the Treaty on the so-called Friendship with Russia. The Foreign Ministry will send a note to Moscow, and I will submit a relevant bill to the Parliament. It is proposed to exclude from Constitution a norm which allows the deploying of Russian Black Sea fleet in Ukraine. After we return Crimea, there will be no Russian base in Sevastopol, Poroshenko said.

Earlier, the presidential bill of amendments to the Constitution on the Euro-Atlantic direction of Ukraines policy was registered on September 3. The text was published on the Parliaments website.
It is also planned to consider renaming Dnipropetrovsk and Kirovohrad regions

Ukraines President Petro Poroshenko is delivering his annual speech at the Ukrainian Parliament. It is planned to direct to the Constitutional Court the draft amendments to the Constitution, In particular, concerning the entrance to the European Union and NATO. In the afternoon, the deputies intend to renew to composition of the Central Election Commission.

This was stated in the agenda of the Verkhovna Rada published on the website of the parliament.

The plenary day will start from the address of the president who will speak of the interior and external situation of Ukraine.

After that, the deputies plan to vote for directing to the Constitutional Court the draft amendments to the Constitution concerning foreign policy.

The next draft is from the leader of the Radical Party Oleh Lyashko. He proposed to add to art.41 of the Constitution sentence The basis of the agrarian structure of Ukraine is farming.

Further is the works on drafts suspending parliamentarian immunity.

At 16:00 the deputies will consider the issue of renewal of the membership of the Central Election Commission.

The agenda includes the bill amending the state budget for this year. Later, the initiatives on renaming Dnipropetrovsk and Kirovohrad regions.

It is also planned to appoint the judges of the Constitutional Court.

As it was reported earlier, Poroshenko delivers his annual address at the Ukrainian Parliament on September 20. 375 MPs are registered and are present in the hall of the Verkhovna Rada. Ukraines Prime Minister Volodymyr Groysman with ministers, the representatives of the executive and judicial power, international guests.
According to him, such legislative initiative will not harm civilian society, media, or freedom of speech

The mass media "occupied" by the aggressor, Kremlin agents work in Ukraine, so we need a law on the registration of the agents of influence of the Russian Federation. President of Ukraine Petro Poroshenko expressed such position during the annual speech at the parliament as 112 Ukraine reported.

"The network of the Russian agency still works in Ukraine. It takes mass media under control, breeds "independent public organizations"; they are really independent  from Ukraine and controlled by Kremlin, stirs up anti-Ukrainian, anti-European, anti-American attitudes. I support the idea of the draft law on the registration of the law on the agents of influence of the state-aggressor Russian Federation.

He expressed the conviction that this law will not influence the civilian society, media, or freedom of speech.

"I share the opinion of the chairman of the Verkhovna Rada that at the period of election the issue of the information security is one of the most important. Part of our information field is also occupied, as the part of the Ukrainian sovereign territory. I am glad, that the parliament also realizes the depth of this problem, however, someone is not interested in it," the leader noted.

Earlier Poroshenko claimed that there are a lot of people in the West who want to "gaze into Putin's soul or I do not know where else" after all aggressive actions of Russia.

Also, Poroshenko claimed about the risk of easing of anti-Russian sanctions during his speech at the Verkhovna Rada.

Related video:
Open source

The Verkhovna Rada adopted a draft regulation on including the draft amendments to the Constitution concerning foreign policy into the agenda. 321 peoples deputies voted for. 112 Ukraine broadcasted the parliamentary session.

The relevant bill provides for the amendments in the Constitutions preamble. In compliance with this, the Verkhovna Rada confirms Ukraines European identity and inconvertibility of the European and Euro-Atlantic policy.

The 85th article proposes to prescribe that the Verkhovna Rada is empowered not only to define the basis of the internal and foreign policy, but also to implement its strategic course towards Ukraines full membership in the European Union and NATO.

The President of Ukraine is the guarantor of the implementation of the countrys strategic course towards the full membership of Ukraine in the EU, the 102nd article says.

In its turn, the Cabinet of Ministers, provides the implementation of the strategic course of Ukraine towards full membership of Ukraine in the EU and NATO.

The norm, which allows foreign military units to temporary use Ukraines military bases, is excluded from the transitional requirements.

The amendments to the Constitution is a long process. The referral to the Constitutional court is the first step.

The next one is the conclusion of Ukraines Constitutional Court concerning whether the bill complies with the Constitution.

Then, the parliament can preliminary support the bill with at least 226 votes.

The bill can be fully adopted with 300 votes of the peoples deputies on the next session.

Then, as usually, the Speaker and President sign it, the document is published and come into force.

Reportedly, on September 3, Petro Poroshenko submitted a bill to the Verkhovna Rada on the amendments to the Constitution on Ukraines foreign policy. Later, the steering committee recommended the Parliamnet to send the document to the Constitutional Court to receive the conclusion on its compliance with the Constitution.
According to the President, questions of sovereignty, territorial integrity cannot be the matter of the compromise

Ukraine is urged to find a compromise with the aggressor, but peace is possible only under Russian conditions. And the questions of sovereignty, territorial integrity can not be the subject of the compromise, as Petro Poroshenko, the President of Ukraine, said in his annual speech in the Verkhovna Rada, broadcasted by 112 Ukraine.

And meanwhile, our country is stick around with billboard which urges us to find a compromise with the aggressor. Doves of peace flocked almost every pole. Yet, their shadow, the doves, is like from a two-headed (eagle - 112.international). And may it not deceive us with a calming cooing. As in their nibs these doves they have seeds of peace under Russian conditions. Peace is a nice and attractive cover, which can have anything behind it, Poroshenko said.

The President is convinced that the aggressor came not for Crimea and not for Donbas.

The empire is impossible without Ukraine. So, where will we put the border of the so-called compromise? Along Donets? Dnipro? Or, maybe, along Zbruch? the Head of the State asked.

According to him, some issues can not be the matter of the compromise.

The questions of the sovereignty, territorial integrity of Ukraine and our civilizational choice is not and will not be a matter of the compromise. Otherwise, we will disappear, or we wont be ourselves, or the soldiers of another state will stand here, Poroshenko said.

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Technically, he was punished for the non-observance of the dress code, he was already released

Open source

Ukrainian political prisoner Oleksandr Kolchenko, who is kept in Chelyabinsk prison, spent three days in a punishment cell for non-observance of the dress code, as Kolchenkos mother Larysa said, Hromadske reports.

His mother also stated that shortly before the detention in the cell he wrote an appeal on the meeting with the Ukrainian Consul and Ombudsman.

Technically  for the non-observance of the dress code, but shortly before that, he wrote an appeal in which he asked for a meeting with a Ukrainian Consul and Ombudsman. He is now released, Larysa Kolchenko said.

According to Oleksandr Kolchenko, he lost weight by ten kilograms in a week with the growth of 190 centimeters he weighs 50 kilos.

Reportedly, Kolchenko declared a hunger strike on May 31, requiring the release of Oleg Sentsov. He had to suspend the strike, as he got very weak.

Kolchenko and Sentsov were detained by Russian intelligence services in Crimea in May 2014. They were accused of the organization of a terrorist act on the peninsula. Kolchenko was sentenced to 10 years of the colony, Sentsov to 20 years. Both are denying their guilt.

Related video:
According to the President of Ukraine havent yet felt better quality of living

We failed to end the war, the fight with corruption had no expected effect, Ukrainians havent yet felt better quality of living. The President of Ukraine Petro Poroshenko said that in today's speech of his annual address to the Ukrainian Parliament.

Id like to honestly note that a big part of our society is discontented  we failed to end the war and restore territorial integrity of Ukraine. 20% of the countrys industrial potential was lost due to the aggression. Of course, this caused a domino effect for the entire economy  due to the aggressive shutdown of Russian markets for Ukrainian goods, which led to the profound social crisis. We survived and revived economic growth. However the majority of Ukrainians have not yet felt better quality of living, Poroshenko said.

He underlined that the living standards are being slowly restored and irregularly  in different regions, among different social and age groups, retired persons remain among the most disadvantaged groups.

We created anticorruption infrastructure, massively invested taxpayers resources in new bodies, however, as a President, I am not satisfied with the degree of their efficiency. The society is not disappointed with the dynamics of the anti-corruption fight, their complaints are reasonable, the Head of the State noted.

He paid attention to the high level of immigration from Ukraine.

Unfortunately authorities made miscounts in human resources management and the ambitious experiments proved ineffective. The pace of reforms is totally different, as well as the speed we projected at the beginning. The problems turned out to be deeper, the resistance  stronger, the decisions  more complicated, the President said.
GRIMSBY, Ontario, Sept. 20, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Andrew Peller Limited ADW.A/ADW.B (APL or the Company) announced the final voting results from its 2018 annual meeting (the Meeting) of shareholders held on September 12, 2018.



The total number of Class B Voting Shares represented by shareholders present in person or by proxy at the Meeting was 40, representing 72.7% of the 8,202,733 voting shares issued and outstanding as of the record date.

Election of Directors - The following seven nominees were elected to serve as directors. The nominees and respective term limits were listed in the Companys management information circular dated July 31, 2018:

Nominee # Votes For % Votes For # Votes

Withheld % Votes

Withheld Shauneen E. Bruder 5,396,209 99.1 % 45,259 0.8 % Mark W. Cosens 5,396,309 99.1 % 45,159 0.8 % Michelle E. Mallett DiEmanuele 5,396,309 99.1 % 45,159 0.8 % Perry J. Miele 5,396,309 99.1 % 45,159 0.8 % A. Angus Peller MD 5,396,309 99.1 % 45,159 0.8 % John E. Peller 5,396,309 99.1 % 45,159 0.8 % Francois Vimard 5,396,309 99.1 % 45,159 0.8 %

Appointment of Auditors  PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP was reappointed as the auditor of the Company (and the directors were authorized to fix their remuneration) by proxies as follows:

# Votes For % Votes For # Votes

Withheld % Votes

Withheld 5,400,009 99.2 % 45,159 0.8 %

Andrew Peller Limited is one of Canadas leading producers and marketers of quality wines and craft spirits. The Companys award-winning premium and ultra-premium Vintners Quality Alliance (VQA) brands include Peller Estates, Trius, Thirty Bench, Wayne Gretzky, Sandhill, Red Rooster, Black Hills Estate, Tinhorn Creek, Gray Monk Estates, Raven Conspiracy and Conviction. Complementing these premium brands are a number of popularly priced varietal offerings, wine based liqueurs, craft ciders and craft spirits. The Company owns and operates 101 well-positioned independent retail locations in Ontario under The Wine Shop, Wine Country Vintners, and Wine Country Merchants store names. The Company also operates Andrew Peller Import Agency and The Small Winemakers Collection Inc., importers and marketing agents of premium wines from around the world. With a focus on serving the needs of all wine consumers, the Company produces and markets premium personal winemaking products through its wholly-owned subsidiary, Global Vintners Inc. (GVI), the recognized leader in personal winemaking products. More information about the Company can be found at www.andrewpeller.com.

Andrew Peller Limited common shares trade on the Toronto Stock Exchange (symbols ADW.A and ADW.B).

For more information, please contact:

Mr. Steve Attridge, CFO and EVP Information Technology

(905) 643-0187 E-mail: steve.attridge@andrewpeller.com
Open source

Roman Sushchenko, a Ukrainian journalist, convicted in Russia, is allowed to make six phone calls and meet with his relatives, as the public defender Mark Feigin told Ukrinform.

Today I visited Roman Sushchenko. I can say that he received an appellate decision (of Russian Supreme Court). Another important  Roman got the right to make six phone calls. Also, he can meet with his relatives before prison transfer. He really wants to see his wife and both of the kids, Feigin said.

Ukrainian Roman Sushchenko, the reporter of Ukrinfiorm news agency, was detained in Moscow in September 2016 and accused by the FSB of espionage. For this, he faced 20 years in prison. Ukraine has appealed to Russia with a demand to release the Ukrainian journalist multiple times. Moscow City Court of Russia has sentenced Roman Sushchenko, the citizen of Ukraine to 12 years in the hard labor colony for the espionage. Russias FSB believes that Sushchenko came from Paris to Moscow to visit his cousin in September 2016 to collect information on Mariupol attack. The court session against Sushchenko took place in the closed regime and the court announced only introductory and resume parts of the decision.

Relate video:

Ukraine news on 112.international
The issue is about the criminal proceeding opened by Kyiv Police due to the abuse of power and violence toward the worker of the prosecutor's office

Open source

The criminal proceeding due to the events near the building of the Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor's Office (SAPO) was passed for the investigation by the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) as the press service of Kyiv Prosecutor's Office reported on Facebook.

"The Prosecutor's Office of Kyiv made a decision on the pass of the materials of the criminal case opened due to the events that took place on September 19, 2018, near the SAPO building at address Sholudenko Street 1-B, Shevchenkivsky district police department in Kyiv for the holding of further pretrial investigation," the message said.

As we reported Shevchenkivske Police Department of Kyiv registered a criminal proceeding on a stretch of authority due to the incident which occurred on Wednesday between the officers of National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU) and Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutors Office (SAPO).

According to the police it was about a conflict connected with the car of SAPO Head. Nazar Kholodnytsky, SAPO Head, and Artem Sytnyk, NABU Head, signed complaints to the police concerning these events.

Yesterday, on September 19, Sytnyk did not attend the session of the Anti-Corruption Committee in the Parliament, where he was invited earlier. Later, media informed that the reason Sytnyk did not come was the disclosure of information about another wiretapping of Kholodnytsky: State Security Service Administration found a wire cable which was set from Okhmadet to the SAP building.

Then, there was a crash near SAPO, which led to a car accident. SAP driver got injured, he is in the hospital with a broken arm.

Related video:
The brand removed the picture of clothes with Soviet symbols from its official websites

One of the biggest chains in the world Walmart stopped selling clothes with USSR symbols at the request of the Lithuanian Foreign Ministry, as Vakaru Ekspresas reports.

Rolandas Krisciunas, Lithuanian Ambassador to the U.S., received a written answer of Walmart administration with a promise to stop selling goods with Soviet symbols soon, the message says.

The statement of the Lithuanian Ambassador to the Head of the chain says that Walmart leadership did not want to offend the Baltic States. Yet, Krisciunas noted that the clothes with the symbols of mass murders has to be immediately removed from the market.

The politicians and diplomats of three Baltic states have appealed with a similar request to Walmart already.

Moreover, Adidas presented a new line with USSR emblem. Due to this, the Ukrainian Institute of National Remembrance sent a complaint and reminded about the liability for distribution of the goods with banned symbols of the communist totalitarian regime on Ukraine.

As a result, the brand removed the picture of clothes with Soviet symbols from its official websites.
Courtesy of Lynnette Haozous

Art is a language, and it ought to communicate to the largest number of people possible, artist Amanny Ahmad said in a recent interview. It is that democratic view on art and its capacity to powerfully express ideas, experiences and feelings that words don't quite manage to sum up that informs many who choose to do their creative work in the public sphere. Artist and activist Lynnette Haozous carries similar ethics with her as she approaches the many blank walls that she has covered with her vibrant mural work.

I am really interested in art that is about social change, Haozous said over the phone from Santa Fe, where she had just begun a three-month residency at the Santa Fe Art Institute during which time she will produce work on the theme of truth and reconciliation. My whole art philosophy is using art as a weapon, to bring social justice to Indigenous communities especially. I use my art as a weapon and as activism.

Combining her two passions for social justice and creative expression may seem like a natural fit for Haozous, but the path to arriving there wasn't easy. Haozous had always been an artist, but fell into going with what society wanted me to do, she describedmeaning getting a degree and a 9 to 5. Haozous received a Bachelor's in social work and continued her work in that sphere, but that left considerably less time for art-making I just wasn't happy, she said. Several years ago, after returning to New Mexico from Standing Rock, she described, realizing a lot of truths about this world, and so she became more fearless. I said, you know whatI'm going to do what I want to do, what speaks to me and lights my fireand I believe that is art.

For the last three years, Haozous has tireless pursued this singular passion, working in multiple mediums to challenge and inspire. During this time she has become increasingly recognized for her pubic artwork, namely murals, creating eight distinct pieces around the state in the last two years alone. Throughout the next several weeks she will create yet another piece in conjunction with Mural Fest, Albuquerque's three-week long celebration of public art that aims to beautify and unify the city, while showcasing artistic talent against the unique backdrop that Albuquerque offers. This year's artists, in addition to Haozous, include locals like Jodie Herrera and Joeseph Arnoux and artists from farther afield like Puerto Ricos Sofia Maldonado, Colombia's Felipe Ortiz and Pakistan's Naveen Shakil. Murals that speak to this year's theme of When Nature Calls, will be created in every corner of the city.

Courtesy of Lynnette Haozous

What I like about doing murals is that they speak directly to the community; they're readily available. You can speak directly to the people about these social issues that are impacting them in their own neighborhoods and communities, Haozous said of what continually inspires her public arts practice. And maybe I can just plant the seed of a thought. Maybe create some dialogue that starts that ripple effect that creates change. Her mural for the Fest, which kicks off on Sept. 22 and runs through Oct. 13 with various events along the way, will be created at Emerson Elementary School (620 Georgia St. SE).

While still in the process of creating sketches and finalizing her design for the expansive front entrance of the school, Haozous described her vision for the project. What I'm focusing on is water is life, she began. That water is a lifeline for New Mexico residents  depicting water as a literal lifeline within my mural. On the opposite side [of the wall], depicting the oppositehow it is being threatened now, like how fracking is impacting our water and soil. Haozous imagines young people that attend the school, and any visitors, as positioned within that landscape. They receive a visual education by way of the mural, and then, moving out into the world or into this place of education, she asks Which way are you going to go as you're walking forward? What are you going to do?

There's an exchange that happens tooit's not just the artist posing questions, but Haozous intentionally puts herself into dialogue with community members. That often happens during the designing of the mural as she considers what's impacting certain neighborhoods and communities, and occurs as happenstance during the actual painting process. She described creating the mural on the facade of OT Circus in downtown Albuquerque (709 Central Ave. SW) in collaboration with Joeseph Arnoux, for example, where people stopped to ask questions, just to talk or even share food with Haozous as she worked. Doing mural work has helped me grow as an artist because you are forced to interact with the community versus being in your own studio with a canvas, she described. You put yourself out there to talk, face-to-face, to interact. That's a beautiful thing that is sometimes missing from our daily livesthat's community building.

That thought underlines the mission of Mural Fest in conception and in practicebridging gulfs between artists and other community members, between businesses and nonprofits, neighborhood associations, local government and other organizations, to celebrate all that Albuquerque is and help to forge the path onward to a bright future.

Art is very powerful, Haozous said. It can cause revolutionsit has been known to. Her conviction in the power of art surfaces in the work that she creates and her conscientious approach to designing and executing it. Keep an eye out for her latest muralfull of depth and charged with the spirit of activismin the coming weeks at Emerson Elementary. During that interval of time, she will also be creating a mural for the Albuquerque Peace and Justice Center (202 Harvard Dr. SE) depicting Honduran activist Berta Caceres. Find out more about Mural Fest by visiting muralfest.com for a complete list of participating artists and events. And stay tuned to Santa Fe Art Institute's website, sfai.org, for events happening in conjunction with Haozous' residency there.

As we discussed the list of projects she's working on, and the catalog became ever longer, I commented on how busy she must feel. Honestly, I love what I do, she laughedand summed it all up tidily, I just want to make my family and my community proud.
PRINT | EMAIL | PERMALINK Found Objects Blackout this Weekend After allit's your last chance to catch Blackout Theatre's wild sketch comedy series, The Legend of Juan Tabo at CNM's Coal Avenue Theater (1977 Coal Ave. SE). If you've been thirsting for weird re-takes of stories and figures that could only land in New Mexico, this troupe has you covered. From the yore of Juan Tabo to purported biscochito gangs and La Llorona's daycare service, you'll definitely be entertained by Blackout's latest. Closing on Saturday, Sept. 22, but playing this Thursday and Friday as well (that's Sept. 20 and 21) at 8pm$10 general admission and $5 for students is well worth this night of strangeness. View in Alibi calendar

The Right Moves Zahra Marwan Aritst Zahra Marwan captures movement beautifully in a small solo exhibition hosted by Maple Street Dance Space (2415 Central Ave. NE). The exhibit of hand drawn and painted work is titled Reflections on Dance, and examines the artist's own history and observation of the practice of dance. Stop in at the opening reception on Saturday, Sept. 22 from 7 to 9pm. View in Alibi calendar

Designing the Future The latest in UNM's School of Architecture and Planning's Monday Night Lecture series this time offers a talk from Pennsylvania School of Design's Professor Frederich Steiner on Making Plans: How to Engage with Landscape, Design, and the Urban Environment. Steiner is a master of design, with a handful of books under his belt, he teaches on ecological planning, preservation and designing with the environment in mind. Take in some of the wisdom that he brings to campus George Pearl Hall (2401 Central Ave. NE) on Monday, Sept. 24 from 5:30 to 7:30pm. View in Alibi calendar
PLEASE NOTE!

Due to the March 23, 2020 NM DOH Public Health Order, These Event Listings Are Not Accurate!

All non-essential businesses are closed, public gatherings are prohibited!

(One day some of these events will be rescheduled or will resume, but they are not happening now!)
Thursday 20

Dead Lucky (Sundance Now) Sundances streaming video on demand service adds this Australian drama about two feuding detectives hunting down a cop killer. Rachel Griffiths (Six Feet Under) stars.

Friday 21

Dragon Pilot: Hisone and Masotan (Netflix streaming anytime) A bumbling young female pilot joins Japans Air Self-Defense Force only to learn that her high-flying new mecha is actually a dragon wearing armor.  Yup, its an anime.

The Good Cop (Netflix streaming anytime) Tony Danza and Josh Groban (what???) star in this remake of an Israeli cop dramedy.

Maniac (Netflix streaming anytime) This dark comedy spins the story of two sad sacks who volunteer for an experimental pharmaceutical treatment which promises to cure every mental illness or heartbreak with no complications or side-effects whatsoever. Good luck with that. Novelist Patrick Somerville (The Bright River) and director Cary Fukunaga (True Detective) are behind the camera while Emma Stone and Jonah Hill are in front of it. Impressive.

Saturday 22

Truly, Madly, Sweetly (Hallmark 7pm) This sound-alike rom-com features 100 percent less Alan Rickman than Truly, Madly, Deeply. But it does have two strangers (a food truck owner and a finance manager) who each inherit half of a once-famous bakery. I mean, I cant even imagine how such a crazy situation would work itself out.  Unless they fell in love with each other. But that seems unlikely, right?

Sunday 23

Anne of Green Gables: Fire and Dew (KNME-5 7:30pm) Anne fans, rejoice in a made-for-TV sequel to L.M. Montgomerys beloved coming-of-age novels. Seems plucky young orphan Anne Shirley has moved away from Prince Edward Island to attend classes at teachers college. (They grow up so fast.)

Monday 24

Magnum P.I. (KRQE-13 8pm) Jay Hernandez (Suicide Squad, Scandal) takes over for Tom Selleck as Thomas Magnum. Im OK with that. Also, Higgins is a hot British woman. That one kinda weirds me out.

Manifest (KOB-4 9pm) In this Lost-like sci-fi mystery, a plane loaded with passengers lands at an airportfive years after it vanished off the radar. For everyone on board, though, no time has passed. As they try to reintegrate into society, the passengers begin to experience strange phenomena.

Tuesday 25

FBI (KRQE-13 8pm) I wonder if Trump will start tweeting about how this show is just a low-rated, deep state conspiracy to drive The Apprentice off the air?

New Amsterdam (KOB-4 9:01pm) Hunky young doctor clashes with profit-driven hospital administrators to save patients. Also, some romance. Now thats innovative TV!

Mr. Inbetween (FX 12:30am) In this Australian drama, a deadpan hitman (Scott Ryan, who wrote, directed and starred in the 2005 movie this is based on) navigates his deadly businessplus his friendships, parental responsibilities and a fledgling romance.

Wednesday 26

A Million Little Things (KOAT-7 9pm) Weepy ensemble drama about friends, family and death. So basically This Is Us, but on ABC.
Eric Williams Photography

When my friend Daddy Gee rolled into townafter a long summer and a hatful of both hope and heartbreak for us and for many in our mutual circlewe decided it would be best to keep it simple. That meant visiting a local joint that would be slow in the mid-afternoon, a place where other humans we might encounter could well be known entities of a small town where we were both awfully comfortable. Besides that, I told Gee, Ive got a meeting at AirDance ArtSpace at 3:30 and am never late to such business affairs.

He understood the gravity of my situation and so we settled on finding an eatery on Isleta Boulevard, in the heart of the South Valley. Although classic joints like Chicharroneria Orozco and Allsups (hey they still serve a fearsome and gorgeous green chile and cheese chimichanga that the patriots of Aztlan might have died for) came and went out of our purviewthe former is now closed, sadlywe settled on Kathys Carry Out and made a beeline for that location.

Back in the day, Kathys was housed in a tiny drive-up painted in the manner of the southlandsthat is, in bright, contrasting, thick coats of latex paintand served every manner of quickly made Nuevo Mexicano delicacy. When I did student teaching at Ernie Pyle Middle School then got a gig at Rio Grande High School guiding the sites formidable collection of misfits, Kathys was a quick way to make lunch seem to last forever.

The rico flavor, the doughy texture of Kathys homemade tortillasgrilled and then filled with freshly made refritos laced with just enough locally grown green chile to cause hysteric, mouth-borne eruptions of joymade my daily trip down to el valle a time for happy reflection about what I had at home in New Mexico.

In the aughts, Kathys moved to a new building two doors down and just a little closer to the turn on Isleta that veteranos call Dead Mans Curve. The new restaurant is where we landed on Thursday afternoon, on the way to meet Jeff Hartzer of the aforementioned Duke City dance company.

Though the drive-up business seemed a bit backed up, inside there was only one other eater. He was a fellow I happened to know from UNM. El viejo had grown up in Silver City where he had worked as a projectionist when they still used two projectors and carbon rods to make light.

After he came to El Duque, he ended up at CNM, administering this program and that. Now he was retired and waiting for a burrito at his favorite local hangout, which was as clean and sparse as usual, with the strains of authentic Mexican radio blowing steam passionately in the kitchen behind the service area.

We exchanged pleasantries. He grabbed a paper sack full of goodness from the cashier and disappeared back into the bosques edge. I looked squarely at the stout woman taking orders and asked for a red enchilada plate ($6.99) with onions and a tortilla on the side ($1.25) Daddy Gee ordered the inimitable Kathy Burger ($7.95), which is like a green chile cheese burger with bacon, but granderit includes two huge patties of Angus beef held together with a chile relleno, if youd like, for Crissakes!

After what seemed an interminable waitthe emphasis in the kitchen is still very much in drive-up orders and it really wasnt that bad considering the radio played La Adictiva Banda San Jose de Mesillas whilst we waitedour food was ready.

The enchiladas were served in the style typical to central New Mexico, filled with sharp cheddar cheese, rolledafter being lightly fried in lardand then slathered in a red chile that might have extraterrestrial origins; how else one accounts for its bitter beauty, nearly luminescent color and sustained fire upon the tongue must have mysterious origins, I began to believe after sampling the sauce thoroughly.

The side dishes served with this plato were competent accompaniments. The beans were just as I remembered, creamy yet decidedly not liquid, smoky and fresh with just a hint of bacon and cumin. The rice, dry like a fried rice and lightly seasoned with cilantro, garlic and onion was also served in the classic Burque style, sans tomato flavoring, a Southern variation of the dish that I still find gustatorily garish.

Daddy Gee reported that his burger was the utmost, it was keen and ginchy at the same time, yielding a cooked meat flavor he considers sublime. The fact that such is supplemented with the sharp deliciousness and hot, vegetable urgency of a chile relleno mixed into this traditional lunch favorite is fine and flavorful. Fresh green chile adds to any meal but seems to be a really potent ingredient in the foods Americans treasure most, from pizza to pasta, burgers included. Making the chile into a relleno is yet another delicious variation on that practice.

Gee got a sopaipilla with his order. He didnt want it. I have to report that the flatbread was nearly perfect; it wasnt greasy or sweet, but rather crispy and almost flaky. Say it with me, kids: just like mom used to make.

As we were done and began to make ready for the rest of our journey along a road that used to be El Camino Realfor realz homies, I wish I had told you about this sooner, its like historic out here in the South Valley!a young woman pulled up next to our troca. She looked at me, smiled brightly and said, Ive been, like, waiting all day to come to Kathys and get a burrito but mijos been sick. I finally got my mom to take him; you gotta have Kathys burritos if youre a mom in Burque, que no?

I smiled and nodded; Daddy Gee did too, slowly driving away while the lady who wanted a burrito ran for the door. Im pretty sure I knew her from somewhere.
courtesy of the candidate

While America used to mythologize its future, brightly, unboundedly or cynically as well as bleakly, Im sure many citizens currently wonder where our nation is goingin whatever terms, poetic or profane they are comfortable adopting. That questioning of the current order is good for the republic. We must consider the path the US took, though were nearly two years into the journey. And citizens must make corrections as necessary. By voting.

Here at Alibi HQ, thats our ultimate aim. We urge you to take a look at the candidates and issues from local races to national ones. Yet, it follows that we will support the Democratic party in this election. We certainly are not a mouthpiece for the Democrats and we will always be transparent about our praise as well as sharp in our criticism.

But the fact remains. The Republican pParty supports a president whose fitness many citizens question. In order for substantive oversight from the legislative branch to come into play regarding this and related matters, Democrats need a majority in the US House of Representatives. So voting in that race, here in US Congressional District 1, is very important. But so are all the other races. Voting blue in November 2018 means that you feel enough is enough, that youre mad as hell and you arent going to take it anymore. And you are going to be part of the solution that sees the Trumpian nerds booted from office by voting.

With that agenda in mind, Weekly Alibi offers its readers insight into another of the important local races. Recall that mastering local political structures allows the progressive agenda to get roots, grow and flourish at a variety of levels from your local school board to the White House.

In New Mexico House District 20a region of our town that comprises Four Hills and adjacent areas, Carnuel, N.M. and a chunk of the far Northeast Heights near Supper Rock (think Copper and Tramway)Abbas Akhil, a former Sandia Labs engineer and energy expert, is running an insurgent campaign against Republican Jim Dines, whose website, clean as a whistle, fails to mention or even refer to three very large elephants in the room.

This election should rightly be a referendum on the failures and dangers of the Republicans currently in charge of things. Susanna Martinez, Donald Trump and the GOP itself all represent those failures and dangers, but from his online presence youd never even guess that Dine is a fellow traveler in that circus.

With those very issues in mindfrom the current cultural vibe to specific progressive policy proposalsWeekly Alibi met with candidate Akhil last week. Heres a transcript, voters.

Weekly Alibi: Why do you feel uniquely qualified to run for the state Legislature?

Abbas Akhil: I moved to Albuquerque almost 40 years ago. My wife and I raised our children here. Ive lived in District 20 for over 30 years. One of the reasons I really got involved now is because, in the last eight years, under Susanna Martinez, we really havent seen too much progress in our state. I feel that I can bring a different skill set to the legislative process. Im an engineer by background; Ive always worked on solving problems and finding solutions. If you look at the state legislature now, there is really no engineering expertise in the body. And if you look at the issues, moving forward into the future, we need someone with scientific expertise to help move us all forward.

What are those issues to which you refer?

Creating infrastructure for renewable energy options, creating and sustaining living-wage jobs in the technical sector, improving public school, vocational and college education; those are some of the topics on which Im focused. My own experience was that my own children had trouble finding jobs in the state. Thats a fear many parents here have when their children become educated but still have to move on from the city or state to find careers. We have the potential to create a solid work-force.

Do you have any specific proposals about how we might address the issues you brought up?

When we talk about jobs, I think the conversation has been too narrowly focused. We need to expand that conversation. We have resources in this state, but there isnt enough vocational training going on in New Mexico. Weve been emphasizing college education. It shouldnt be a one size fits all solution. Not every child needs to go to college. We need to balance our approach to education, offer vocational training programs to grow our states workforce.

What about companies that come to New Mexico, how do they fit into the picture?

Only 43 cents out of every dollar generated by such companies stays in New Mexico. Why doesnt the state Legislature act on the idea that more of the profits should be invested in New Mexico. Why not reinforce the idea that at least 50 percent needs to remain here. This is one of those cases where we are impoverished, despite the resources we have. As it stands, there are large groups of investors that want to do work here, but lets not sell off our resources to the cheapest bidder; this particularly applies to renewable energy resources.

Senator Martin Heinrich thinks that a lot of these future jobs will be in building solar infrastructure and wind power infrastructure, something which will also provide a means for this state to manifest the future. Whats your thinking on that subject?

That is certainly a major part of the equation. But the other part isfor example the blades for wind turbines are manufactured out of statebuilding and maintaining our own production facilities. New blades must be regularly replaced. We shouldnt have to import these items from Texas. Blade manufacturing is not unapproachably high-tech. If our state incentivizes such activities, if we manufacture some of the components in state, it will enrich our economy. As that industry grows, and we foster it, we support it with a trained workforce and tax incentives, we could start a whole trend. We dont want to just train technicians, but to take a broader view. We should own this industry. We could and should be exporting our renewable energy products to other states.

Why do some people in the state, notably Republican gubernatorial candidate Steve Pearce, still think oil and gas revenue can make a sustainable impact on New Mexicos economy?

Americans are used to certain fuel sources. The fact is, that while oil and gas has been good to our state, it has also been really bad. Right now we are in the boom part of the cycle. But the market will inevitably change. We need to balance that. Im not saying we should completely eliminate oil and gas revenue, or that we should only rely on renewables. But if we strike a balance, then citizens wont have to go through the perpetual boom and bust economy associated with fossil fuels.

What other kinds of incentives could be provided to get folks turned onto a new energy source, to renewable energy?

Mayor [Martin] Chavez had a program where users could park a hybrid vehicle anywhere in the city for free. Why have small incentives like that gone away? Its a great idea and an affirmation by those in charge. We have two national labs in the state but our leaders are still taking a retroactive view on energy. If citizens want alternatives to oil and gas, wind power will be good for the state. At the same time, cities and counties should look at what they can do to encourage greater use of renewable resources. There are small things, like the state didnt use to charge an excise tax for electric vehicles.

What happens in the nightmare scenario where Pearce gets elected?

He wont, first of all. But there would be broken relationships with mayors in our two big cities; if Grisham gets elected, and if citizens elect forward-thinking members to the state Legislature, the government will finally be in sync and we can finally start addressing the issues we need to address to get New Mexico back on track.

How will improving education services in the state help with that process?

One problem we have now is that we are teaching to the test [per the N.M. Department of Education]. Thats detrimental to the educational process in many ways. But it also reflects on teachers evaluations; were evaluating teachers on how students do on the test! Thats wrong. One solution to the latter problem could be averaging several years worth of test scores to get a real idea of teacher performance. We also need to develop STEM education to be competitive with the rest of the world. Early childhood education is also a must for any progressive society. That appreciation for those types of education have not been a priority during the past eight years [under Governor Martinez]. My opponent voted against more early childhood education, against next generation science standards. There is something disturbing about the anti-intellectual feel of the Republican party, about the denial of science. But when youve got a good vision for education in the state, progress will surely follow. Thats the real difference between Republican and Democratic thinking.
N.M. Teacher Performance Improving An evaluation of the state's public school teachers has found an increase in the number of educators receiving high performance ratings. The New Mexico Public Education Department released its annual teacher evaluations last week and announced that there are over 1,000 more teachers that were rated Highly Effective or Exemplary than there were in 2015. There were also nearly 1,000 fewer teachers labeled Minimally Effective or Ineffective this year. According to Education Week, 34 percent of the state's teachers received the 2 highest ratings and around 75 percent of teachers were graded as effective or better. The education department also reports an increase in the number of economically disadvantaged students being taught by Highly Effective or Exemplary teachers. A press release from the department says over 30 percent of these students are now being taught by the highest ranked teachers, compared to about 17 percent between 2014 and 2015. Education Secretary Christopher Ruszkowski says the number of highly rated teachers has steadily risen since the evaluation system was introduced in 2013.

Court Blocks Straight-Ticket Option The New Mexico Supreme Court blocked an attempt to add a straight-ticket voting option to November's general ballot. Earlier this month, Secretary of State Maggie Toulouse Oliver announced the return of the straight-ticket option, which would have allowed voters to cast a single vote for their chosen party and apply it to all the races. However a lawsuit was filed against Toulouse Oliver, claiming she didn't have the authority to reintroduce the option, which was removed in 2001. Questions were also raised about the timing of the decision, considering Toulouse Oliver will be running for reelection in two months. Last week the state Supreme Court unanimously decided against including the option on the ballot, saying only the Legislature had the power to reverse the 2001 change.
Dublin, Sept. 20, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The "PV Industry Directory 2018" directory has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering.



This database is the most valuable database throughout the PV industry. The information is acquired through the following steps:

As the world's most popular solar website, a large number of companies are attracted to submit themselves on the website.

Solar industry news is reviewed each day to find mentions of new solar companies.

Exhibitor lists of the key solar exhibitions are carefully checked to discover new companies.

As database experts check manufacturer sites, they gather information on their distributors. Also as the experts then check the distributor sites they collect details on all new manufacturer brands that are discovered.

Company lists are found through government organisations and general deep web searching techniques.

Advanced scanning software automatically checks key companies for updates and flags up changes for experts to check. Further automated internet scans watch the whole database for signs that companies have ceased trading.

Email addresses are checked through direct emails to all companies in the database.

In order to filter out-dated information, database experts continuously recheck companies to ensure their information is still current.

Updates and additions are quality checked by others in the team to ensure the highest quality levels.

Reasons to Buy

The report actively invests time in finding new companies. Many other website directories wait for companies to come to them and submit themselves, which means they rarely get more than 50% of companies in a particular category.

This report checks the details of new companies who submit their details. A small trading company may decide that they get more sales leads by 'accidentally' submitting themselves as manufacturing many types of PV products. Spotting the discrepancy while other websites will simply automatically list the company as submitted.

The report is rechecked and refreshes data on a regular basis. Companies regularly expand their activities or change their contact details, but they usually forget to update these details on 3rd party internet sites. Through manual rechecking of all companies in our database we keep our data much fresher than other sources.

Key Topics Covered:



Company

Country

Address

Phone

Fax

Website

Email

Staff Number

Parent Company

Key Customers

Distributors

Detailed products information (panel technology, power range, production number)

For more information about this directory visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/bch8wl/global?w=12




BOCA RATON, Fla., Sept. 20, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Cleartronic, Inc. (OTCMARKETS: CLRI) through ReadyOp Communications, Inc., its wholly-owned subsidiary, released a new application for first responders and hospitals for patient tracking and mass casualty events. Working with the health departments of multiple states, hospitals, law enforcement, fire rescue, and other first responder agencies, ReadyOp developed and now released a new capability for identifying and tracking patients.



ReadyOp Scan app solves the issue of lost time and efficiency during response actions when multiple patients and multiple agencies are involved. Even in a mass casualty situation, responders will be able to quickly scan identifying tags for patients using their cellphones. The information is then quickly uploaded to the regions ReadyOp site along with the GPS location, pictures and other information entered by the responding personnel. From the regions ReadyOp site, authorized personnel can immediately review the information and coordinate the response actions and direct the transfer of patients to the proper facility, as well as inform the facility of the inbound patients.

We are excited to offer this app because we know it will help save time, and most importantly lives. We worked closely with multiple agencies to get the best ideas and then tested the app with our clients to ensure simplicity, efficiency, and effectiveness. This app has great potential and solves an issue that has been missing in response actions for many years, says Marc Moore, CEO of Cleartronic, Inc.

Recently, this new Ready Op Scan application was tested in a multi-day exercise by the Kentucky Department of Public Health with excellent results.

About Cleartronic, Inc.

Cleartronic, Inc., a diversified holding Company, creates and acquires operating subsidiaries with the goal of manufacturing and selling products, services, and integrated systems to government agencies, business enterprises, and the general public. In addition to its ongoing research and development projects, Cleartronic currently has two operating subsidiaries, ReadyOp Communications, Inc. and VoiceInterop, Inc.- www.cleartronic.com , www.voiceinterop.com and www.readyop.com.

Safe Harbor Statement

This news release contains statements that involve expectations, plans or intentions (such as those relating to future business or financial results) and other factors discussed from time to time in the Company's Securities and Exchange Commission filings. These statements are forward-looking and are subject to risks and uncertainties, so actual results may vary materially. You can identify these forward-looking statements by words such as "may," "should," "expect," "anticipate," "believe," "estimate," "intend," "plan" and other similar expressions. Our actual results could differ materially from those anticipated in these forward-looking statements because of certain factors not within the control of the company. The Company cautions readers not to place undue reliance on any such forward-looking statements, which speak only as of the date made. The Company disclaims any obligation subsequently to revise any forward-looking statements to reflect events or circumstances after the date of such statements or to reflect the occurrence of anticipated or unanticipated events.

Contact and Inquiries for Investor Relations:

Larry Reid

561-939-3300 Ext 143

A photo accompanying this announcement is available at http://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/2408b9b3-a3ab-43a6-83a8-83656379de81
ROME AND BOSTON, Sept. 20, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Enel Green Power (EGP), the Renewables division of the Enel Group, has appointed Georgios Papadimitriou as its Head of Enel Green Power North America, Inc. to oversee EGPs renewables portfolio and business in the US and Canada. He will replace Rafael Gonzalez, who was appointed as Head of Renewables for EGP in Spain.



Georgios Papadimitriou has been serving as EGPs Head of Rest of Europe and Middle East since 2016. Prior to that, he held various roles within Enel including Head of Business Development in Latin America, Head of Business Development Europe and Country Manager France.

Prior to joining Enel in 2008, Mr. Papadimitriou worked in the energy sector at the international level, in companies such as ScottishPower, Fortum, Nuon, Gazprom, and ContourGlobal, based in various countries and with a variety of roles, ranging from risk management, power plant commercial management, business development and electricity trading.

Enel Green Power North America, part of the Renewable Energies division of the Enel Group, is a leading owner and operator of renewable energy plants in North America with projects operating and under development in 24 US states and two Canadian provinces. The company operates around 100 plants with a managed capacity exceeding 4.3 GW powered by renewable hydropower, wind, geothermal and solar energy. The company is currently the largest wind operator in Kansas and Oklahoma.

Enel Green Power, the global renewable energy business line of the Enel Group, is dedicated to the development and operation of renewables across the world, with a presence in Europe, the Americas, Asia, Africa and Oceania. Enel Green Power is a global leader in the green energy sector with a managed capacity of over 42 GW across a generation mix that includes wind, solar, geothermal, and hydropower, and is at the forefront of integrating innovative technologies into renewable power plants.

Media Relations



Krista Barnaby

T +978 965 0062

Northamericamedia@enel.com



enelgreenpower.com
Washington, DC, Sept. 20, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The United States Hispanic Chamber of Commerce (USHCC) is proud to announce that the Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services (RAICES) received the 2018 Ohtli Award, presented by the Consul of Mexico at the 2018 USHCC National Convention in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

The Ohtli Award is given annually by the USHCC to an individual or group that has aided, empowered, or positively affected the lives of Mexican nationals in the United States and other countries. It is one of the highest recognitions given by the Mexican government.

This year, the USHCC is honored to extend this award to RAICES, a nonprofit agency that promotes justice by providing free and low-cost legal services to underserved immigrant children, families, and refugees in Texas. In 2017, RAICES staff closed a staggering 51,000 cases at no cost to the client. Most recently, the organization has been instrumental in reunifying families that were separated under the Administrations zero-tolerance policy.

As America grapples with a humanitarian crisis, we are thankful for organizations like RAICES that are dedicated to protecting the livelihoods of Hispanic immigrants, said Fernand Fernandez, USHCC Interim President & CEO. The staff at RAICES has demonstratedand continues to demonstratepowerful compassion and an unbending commitment to justice. The USHCC is honored to be celebrating their important work at our 2018 National Convention.

RAICES is humbled to be recognized in front of the United States Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, its distinguished leadership, members, speakers and guests, said Mayra Jimenez, Childrens Program Director for RAICES. We thank the Mexican Embassy for this great honor in naming us the recipient of the Ohtli Award.

About USHCC

The USHCC actively promotes the economic growth, development, and interests of more than 4.37 million Hispanic-owned businesses, that combined, contribute over $700 billion to the American economy every year. It also advocates on behalf of 260 major American corporations and serves as the umbrella organization for more than 200 local chambers and business associations nationwide. For more information, please visit ushcc.com. Follow us on Twitter @USHCC.

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IRVINE, Calif., Sept. 20, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Sperry Commercial Global Affiliates, LLC today announced that LT Commercial Group, a commercial real estate company based in Austin, Texas has joined as the companys first affiliate in the region. Led by CEO Lezlie Tram Le, LT Commercial Group specializes in commercial, investment, and retail real estate.



Sperry Commercial Global Affiliates has a highly regarded reputation, said Jodie Huynh, chief operating officer of LT Commercial Group. Their experience and ethics are unmatched in the industry. Joining Sperry Commercial feels like family. Theyve been very supportive of us as an affiliate. Were excited to help with their expansion throughout the Austin region from Waco to San Antonio.

Lezlie Tram Le has more than 15 years of experience as a business owner. She serves the growing Asian community in the Austin and San Antonio areas and has a primary focus on investments, multifamily, and landlord/buyer/tenant representation. Lezlie specializes in market research, site selection, due diligence, analysis of alternatives, and the negotiation of transactions. She is the 2020 President Elect for AREAA, Commercial Chair of the Asian Real Estate Association of America and a member of IREM, ICSC, and the Greater Asian Chamber of Commerce.

Were excited to have LT Commercial Group as an affiliate, said Rich Enderlin, chief operating officer at Sperry Commercial Global Affiliates. Lezlies commitment to excellence has served her well. She will be a great asset as we expand in Texas.

About Sperry Commercial Global Affiliates, LLC: Sperry Commercial Global Affiliates, LLC offers the highest level of commercial real estate services available through thoughtful, cooperative, and ethical practices. The firm is headquartered in Irvine with more than 200 sales professionals and 37affiliate operations across more than 39 offices throughout the United States. Unique to Sperry Commercial Global Affiliates, LLC are a system of tools for affiliates that include a comprehensive real estate intranet and transaction management platform named Sperry CENTRAL and a custom designed marketing support software system called SperryLINK, among other immediate industry advantages. For more information, visit www.sperrycga.com .

Contact

Sherri Walkenhorst

(801) 373-7888

Sherriw@connectmarketing.com
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., Sept. 20, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- FogHorn , a leading developer of edge intelligence software for industrial and commercial Internet of Things (IoT) solutions, today announced that FogHorn Chief Technology Officer (CTO) Sastry Malladi will lead a session,  Machine Learning in Fog Environments , at FogWorld Congress. The session will take place at 1:30 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 2, at the event in San Francisco. FogWorld Congress brings together thought leaders to provide industrial insights and research findings which will explore the technological solutions, as well as challenges and opportunities in the deployment of fog computing and networking.



During the presentation, Sastry will discuss the benefits of processing data locally with embedded edge intelligence. He will outline how industrial companies can leverage fog computing, informed by machine learning and artificial intelligence, to maximize real-time insights and implement iterative learning models to adjust to constantly changing operating conditions.

By embedding edge intelligence at the source of the data, industrial users can tap the power of their data and unlock its true potential for ROI, said Sastry Malladi, CTO of FogHorn. As industrial and commercial systems continue to get smarter and produce more data, edge intelligence adds a valuable layer by enabling deriving actionable insights in real-time for mission-critical systems and processes, enhancing operational efficiencies, improving staff safety and increasing ROI.

True edge intelligence requires data processing through a combination of machine learning and streaming analytics using a powerful complex-event-processor to derive real-time insights. When coupled with the cloud, edge intelligence enables an iterative closed loop edge-to-cloud machine learning solution that continually applies the latest data and analytics to improve outcomes and processes and reduce overall costs.

Visit booth 214 to meet with a FogHorn representative at FogWorld Congress. To learn more about Malladis panel or the capabilities true edge intelligence enables, visit www.foghorn.io .

About FogHorn Systems

FogHorn is a leading developer of edge intelligence software for industrial and commercial IoT application solutions. FogHorns software platform brings the power of advanced analytics and machine learning to the on-premises edge environment enabling a new class of applications for advanced monitoring and diagnostics, machine performance optimization, proactive maintenance and operational intelligence use cases. FogHorns technology is ideally suited for OEMs, systems integrators and end customers in manufacturing, power and water, oil and gas, renewable energy, mining, transportation, healthcare, retail, as well as Smart Grid, Smart City, Smart Building and connected vehicle applications. FogHorn and Lightning are trademarks of FogHorn Systems. The names of actual companies and products mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners.
Washington, DC, Sept. 20, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Oceana, the worlds largest international organization dedicated solely to ocean conservation, announced today that it had received a new grant from UK-based Arcadia, a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin.

The new $10.5 million grant will support Oceanas campaigns to protect and restore marine life and ecosystems in biodiverse areas, preserve key habitat, stop overfishing and protect vulnerable marine life. The grant will be distributed over seven years.

We are grateful to Arcadia for their commitment to Oceana, said Andy Sharpless, Oceana CEO. Arcadia has been one of Oceanas most dedicated supporters, and they have empowered us to win policy victories that have protected more than 4.5 million square miles of ocean habitat. The extended duration of this new grant shows that Arcadia expects Oceana to continue winning these sorts of victories for years to come. We look forward to working with them to restore healthy oceans and protect biodiversity around the world.

Oceana has established a consistent track record as an effective campaigner for the oceans. We are pleased to be able to continue supporting their work and hope Oceana will continue to expand their area of influence, said Arcadia Funds Lisbet Rausing.

With Arcadias generous support, Oceana will continue campaigning for science-based policies that safeguard critical marine habitat; protect sharks, sea turtles, marine mammals and other ocean species; establish science-based, sustainable management of fisheries while deterring illegal fishing; and reduce ocean pollution.

Since 2001, Oceana has won over 200 victories that have helped protect and restore healthy oceans in the United States, the European Union, the Philippines, Chile, Mexico, Peru, Brazil, Canada and Belize. Arcadia has supported Oceana since its first grant of $5.25 million in 2007, with renewals in 2010 and 2013.

Founded by Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin, the Arcadia Fund supports charities and scholarly institutions to preserve cultural heritage, protect the environment, and promote open access. Since 2002, the Arcadia Fund has awarded more than $500 million in grants to projects around the world. For more information please see www.arcadiafund.org.uk.
English French

20 September 2018

Societe du Grand Paris, in agreement with Ile-de-France Mobilites, selects Alstom to supply trains for lines 15, 16 and 17 of the Grand Paris Express

Following a negotiated procedure, preceded by a tender launched in 2014, Societe du Grand Paris, in agreement with Ile-de-France Mobilites, has selected the rail manufacturer Alstom to develop and supply the trains for metro lines 15, 16 and 17 of the Grand Paris Express.

The contract, which is fully financed by Ile-de-France Mobilites, is worth a total amount of up to 1.3 billion Euros and covers the development and supply of a maximum of 1,000 cars (183 trains), to be deployed in two versions of different train lengths, 3 and 6 cars.

On 11 July 2018, the Board of Directors of Ile-de-France Mobilites approved a first tranche of 680 million euros to cover the necessary expenses to acquire the first 53 trains of the Grand Paris Express. The firm part of this contract awarded to Alstom covers the delivery of 150 cars (25 trains of 6 cars each) for a total amount of over 280 million Euros.

These new, high-capacity, steel-wheeled metros will be able to circulate at speeds of up to 110 km/h in automatic driverless mode, taking the form of six-car trains on line 15 and three-car trains on lines 16 and 17.

The first trains will leave the factory from 2022 onwards and initial entry into commercial service is scheduled for 2024.

Ile-de-France Mobilites will be making these trains available to future operators, thus giving them access to new-generation material that benefits from the latest technologies and offers a high level of performance. The travel experience will combine comfort and speed.

Valerie Pecresse, President of the Ile-de-France Region and of Ile de France Mobilites, says: "With air conditioning, video protection, USB plugs and efficient tools for providing onboard information, the new trains for Ile-de-France Mobilites will provide users of Ile de France's new metro lines with high levels of comfort and safety, something I insist on for all orders of new material, metros as well as trains, RERs, buses and trams. These metros will also symbolise the modernity and dynamism of Europe's leading economic region."

"The acquisition of the trains destined to run on the lines of the Grand Paris Express represents the accomplishment of one more step in implementing the new metro. It follows the award of a series of important civil engineering contracts and paves the way for the first contracts for the systems that will equip these infrastructures. This is good news for companies who are seeing their order books fill up, as well as for the residents of Ile de France, for whom the Grand Paris Express is taking more shape every day." Thierry Dallard, President of the Board of Directors of Societe du Grand Paris

"We are very proud of the renewed confidence of Ile-de-France Mobilites and the decision of Societe du Grand Paris to award this new contract to us. We are also particularly pleased to contribute, through this new project, to the government's determination to double the Paris metro network over the next 15 years," says Henri Poupart-Lafarge, Chairman & CEO of Alstom.

A new experience in public transport travel

The new metros for lines 15, 16 and 17 are open throughout the entire length of the train, providing passengers with a sociable, roomy, comfortable space. Thanks to the 3 large doors on each side, they increase fluidity in the exits and entrances, as well as facilitating passenger movement during travel. The equipment has been designed for high levels of comfort, notably thanks to the air conditioning, lighting and seats. It will also offer connectivity to passengers with USB charging points for mobile phones. Finally, the end of the train is structured to provide a panoramic opening with a wide windscreen.

Based on the solutions of Alstom's Metropolis range and further improved by feedback from its customers, the new metros for lines 15, 16 and 17 will guarantee the highest levels of availability, reliability and security. Each train will be able to transport up to 500 passengers in its three-car version (54 metres), and up to 1,000 passengers in its six-car version (108 metres). Particular attention has been given to optimising maintenance. The onboard diagnostic system will provide information on the condition of the train equipment and give maintenance personnel an overview of the fleet's condition, making it easier to plan corrective maintenance tasks between commercial services. Alstom has also extended the maintenance sequence of the new metros, permitting significant cost reductions throughout the lifecycle of the trains.

Numerous innovations guarantee the new material's environmental performance, which is an undeniable asset for operation. Traction and auxiliary converters will benefit from the very latest technology developed by Alstom, guaranteeing optimised energy consumption. Special attention has been paid to noise emissions, vibrations and atmospheric emissions. Brake particle emissions will be minimised by electric braking right up to a very low speed, limiting brake disc use. Furthermore, the recovery of braking energy will play a role in charging the batteries or supplying power to the general electricity network. Last but not least, the train has a recyclability rate of more than 96% and, in line with current European standards, a recovery rate of over 98%.

In total, 350 Alstom employees in France, including 150 experienced engineers, will be working on this vitally important project to ensure its successful implementation. More than 1150 jobs will be secured in France for the French rail sector as a result of the project. Alstom, a solidarity-based enterprise, will also reserve significant volumes of work on its French sites in terms of manpower hours planned for this contract for people experiencing particular social or professional difficulties.

The trains will be designed and manufactured by six of Alstom's sites in France. The site of Valenciennes Petite-Foret will be in charge of project management, studies, development, production, assembly and validation. Five other Alstom sites in France will develop and produce the components: Le Creusot for the bogies, Ornans for the engines, Tarbes for the traction systems, Villeurbanne for the on-board electronics and the remote maintenance system and Saint Ouen for the design.

Press contacts:

Ile-de-France Mobilites: Sebastien Mabille - 01 47 53 28 42 - sebastien.mabille@iledefrance-mobilites.fr

SGP : Xavier Bossaert - 06 19 41 50 18 - xbossaert.quai3@societedugrandparis.fr

Martin Albert - 06 98 82 79 40 - malbert.quai3@societedugrandparis.fr

Alstom: Samuel Miller - Tel. + 33 1 57 06 67 74 - samuel.miller@alstomgroup.com

Alstom Investor Relations:

Selma Bekhechi - Tel. + 33 1 57 06 95 39 - Selma.bekhechi@alstom.com

Julien Minot - Tel. + 33 1 57 06 64 84- Julien.minot@alstom.com
VANCOUVER, British Columbia, Sept. 20, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Radius Gold Inc. (TSX-V: RDU) is pleased to announce that two drill rigs have arrived at the Amalia property and drilling has commenced at Radiuss high-grade gold-silver Amalia Project located in Chihuahua, Mexico. The drill program is operated by Radius and funded by Pan American Silver, under a joint venture agreement. Radius plans to drill test several high-grade gold and silver epithermal targets at Amalia in the coming months.



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. Radius and Pan American Silver plan to drill test multiple targets, including Campamento, Guadalupe and Dulces.

Amalia Drill Targets

An initial 2000m diamond core drill program at Amalia is planned 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. Drilling has targeting 100m to 250m below Campamento where mineralization is expected to transition to andesite host where higher grade sulphide rich breccias are 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 Americans drilling will target high grade mineralization at depth below the Campamento silica zone and at the Guadalupe and Dulces targets (Figure 1).

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.

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.

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

Tel: 604-801-5432; Toll free 1-888-627-9378; Fax: 604-662-8829

Email: info@goldgroup.com

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; 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; 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 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.

A photo accompanying this announcement is available at http://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/02433323-ac83-4ba4-90b7-b65928da6b3f
Fort Collins, CO, Sept. 20, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Green Sun Medical LLC., a medical device company specializing in scoliosis bracing, announced today that it has been selected by Orthopedics This Week to receive the Spine Technology Award during the 2018 National Association of Spine Surgeons (NASS) meeting in Los Angeles, CA. Green Sun Medical has developed a comfortable, dynamic brace which applies continuous corrective pressure to the spine of adolescent patients with scoliosis. The brace will provide physicians and patients with real-time performance metrics utilizing a cloud-based health platform developed by Mindset Medical LLC.

Commenting on the companys latest award, CEO Jamie Haggard said, Winning the Spine Technology Award is the dream of every entrepreneur who works in the spine industry. Our goal is to provide a transformative scoliosis treatment experience for children. Creating a better quality of life and clinical outcome is now one step closer for adolescents who are coping with this disease.

To meet our goal, Green Sun Medical has assembled a team of the worlds thought leaders in scoliosis treatment. The company is executing a carefully planned clinical study beginning at the National Scoliosis Center and continuing at the Shriners Hospital for Children in Sacramento, CA.

About Green Sun Medical:

Green Sun Medical, LLC is based in Fort Collins, CO. Founded in 2015, the company has developed a connected dynamic scoliosis brace. It has won numerous prestigious awards including; the FDA sponsored Pediatric Device Symposium, SXSW Pediatrics Device Competition and a $200,000 prize for best medtech innovation from the Medtech Innovator. www.greensunmedical.com

Attachments
CALGARY, Alberta, Sept. 20, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- On Friday, September 21, the Alberta Medical Association will honour Albertans who have dedicated their lives and their careers to improving the health care and wellness of Albertans. The evening awards presentation will take place during the AMAs Annual General Meeting and Representative Forum at the Hyatt Regency in Calgary. The AMAs Medal of Honour and Medal for Distinguished Service represent the highest honours bestowed by the AMA. The AMA Award for Compassionate Service will also be presented.



The AMA Medal of Honour is presented to non-physicians who have made a significant personal contribution to ensuring quality health care for the people of Alberta. Our recipients this year are Carol E. Cass, PhD, and the Price family.

During her 41-year career at the University of Alberta, Carol Cass produced award-winning and groundbreaking cancer research and provided vital academic leadership as the inaugural chair of the Department of Oncology in the Faculty of Medicine and Dentistry, in addition to her clinical leadership as associate director of research and then as the first non-physician (and the first female) director of the Cross Cancer Institute, Edmontons tertiary care cancer hospital. At the Cross Cancer Institute, she led efforts to create state-of-the-art multiuser research facilities, such as the first cell imaging facility in Alberta. As director, she expanded the institutes clinical trials capacity and activity, providing cancer patients in Alberta with earlier access to novel treatments and improved outcomes of standard treatments. Her leadership was key to preserving the culture of the Cross Cancer Institute that underpins its reputation for excellent and compassionate care. Dr. Cass has played a leading role in Canadian cancer research and she was a trailblazer for women in the sciences.

Greg Price, a previously healthy young man, only 31 years old, died just months after being diagnosed with testicular cancer, and he died unnecessarily after multiple breaks in the health care system. Since then, the Price family  Chad, Dave, Isabelle, Joanna, Matt and Teri  has worked in his name to improve the health care system that failed him. Theyre efforts extend to many health care organizations across Canada where theyve shared Gregs story and its implications for the health care system. They worked to facilitate production of a CBC radio documentary White Coat, Black Art, which tells the story of Gregs life and death, and the film Falling through the Cracks: Gregs Story, which has received multiple awards and has been used to promote medical education and health care change. The Price familys ongoing efforts demonstrate a continued commitment to making the system work better, to better serve patients like Greg, to make his unnecessary death a catalyst for change.

The Medal for Distinguished Service is awarded to physicians who have demonstrated an unwavering commitment to their community and passion for their work. Each of this years three recipients have made outstanding contributions to the medical profession and to the people of Alberta.

Dr. Norman Kneteman, has devoted his life and his career to liver and organ transplantation. He is recognized internationally for his contributions to transplantation, including the humanized liver chimeric mouse model and the Edmonton Protocol for Islet Transplantation. He is a passionate and effective advocate for organ donation, giving talks and interviews and making media appearances to raise public awareness of the need for donation and of the lifesaving benefits of transplantation. Dr. Kneteman established the Liver Transplant Program in Edmonton, which has become the premier transplant program in the country. As its director, he has assembled a superb team that has refined and developed the Edmonton Protocol, established the living liver donor program, and provided crucial support to the Edmonton Multi-organ Transplant Program. His collaborative research with Dr. Locksley McGann, Dr. Ray Rajotte, and Dr. James Shapiro established the basis of islet isolation and cryopreservation for the Edmonton Protocol. His American Society of Transplant Surgeons accredited fellowship program has trained surgeons all over the world.

Dr. John Kortbeek has been repeatedly honoured for his work as a teacher, as a surgeon and as a clinician in the areas of trauma, surgery and critical care. His career has been dedicated to the care of patients and their families, to continuously raising the standards of care in surgery, and to teaching and training young physicians and surgeons. He has led many improvements in the organization and processes of care in Alberta, including developing and implementing trauma center standards; establishing a trauma system with adult and pediatric tertiary trauma centers in Edmonton and Calgary and five provincial regional trauma centers; and introducing trauma system accreditation standards across Canada. His influence has been felt across the country  indeed, around the world. The Advanced Trauma Life Support Program he developed is now taught in over 60 countries and has enrolled over one-million physicians since its inception in 1980. He has personally taught and lectured in over 30 countries. Dr. Kortbeek is in demand as a visiting lecturer and professor across the country.

Patients with cystic fibrosis and caregivers who support them have benefited from Dr. Harvey Rabins dedicated care, his passionately pursued research program, and his public advocacy. The changes he has fought for, by redefining disability to include chronic illnesses that are prolonged, severe and irreversible, have the potential to benefit many people living with a variety of illnesses across the country. He has served many organizations, with special dedication to Cystic Fibrosis Canada in a variety of leadership positions, guiding the development of medical and clinical policies; helping to shape medical protocols in Alberta, across the country and beyond; and playing a key role in developing Cystic Fibrosis Canadas Strategic Plan to END CF. Dr. Rabin founded the Adult Cystic Fibrosis Clinic at the U of C Medical Clinic, where he has brought together health care professionals dedicated to improving the lives of adults with cystic fibrosis. The clinic is also a specialized teaching resource for medical students, postgraduate medical residents, and specialist colleagues, ensuring that Dr. Rabins work will continue to benefit patients and their families for many years to come.

The AMAs Award for Compassionate Service is given to physicians who have demonstrated outstanding compassion, dedication and extraordinary contributions to volunteer or philanthropy efforts to improve the state of his or her community.

Our recipient this year is Dr. Bonnie Larson. Dr. Larson works primarily with homeless Calgarians, and she works with them where they are at  on the streets, in the alleys, by the river. She provides compassion and care to people who have been underserved or completely forgotten by the larger society in which they live. With the coming of the opioid crisis, her advocacy and her care have become even more passionate and more necessary. Dr. Larson also worked with the Calgary Refugee Health Program and with Indigenous communities at the Elbow River Healing Lodge and Siksika First Nation Health Centre. She helped set up Calgarys Allied Mobile Palliative Program, or CAMPP, which works to improve end-of-life care for the vulnerably housed. She founded StreetCCRED, short for Street Community Capacity in Research, Education and Development. StreetCCRED brings together community members, front-line service providers, academics, social programs, and agencies to fill in gaps in the current landscape of care for vulnerable people and populations. Her work in StreetCCRED has been tireless and completely voluntary, born of her deep compassion for the people she serves.

For more information or to request an interview, please contact:
CALGARY, Alberta, Sept. 20, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The Alberta Medical Association will install its president for 2018-19 on Saturday, September 22, during its Annual General Meeting and Representative Forum at the Hyatt Regency in Calgary. The AMA president serves a one-year term, in addition to one year each as president-elect and immediate past president.



Dr. Alison M. Clarke will officially assume the role of AMA president at the end of the Representative Forum meeting on Saturday afternoon.

Dr. Clarke is a family physician who has practiced for over 20 years providing care to patients and their families in the rural community of Strathmore, Alberta. She is also an admitting physician for acute and long-term care for Strathmore District Health Services. Dr. Clarke has been involved with primary care networks since the PCN concept was first established and participated in the original planning and implementation in the Strathmore medical community. She has been the medical director of the Calgary Rural PCN since 2014. Dr. Clarke has also written columns for Vital Signs magazine focusing on the practice of medicine from a rural perspective.

She has served in leadership roles including president of the Rural Medical Staff Association and chief of staff of Strathmore District Health Services. She is a member of the Health Services Support Task Group under the direction of the Secretariat of the Calgary Zone PCNs with specialty groups to facilitate and stream referral processes.

During the Annual General Meeting, current AMA President Dr. Neil Cooper will reflect on some of the highlights of his year as president and comment on the events and issues that have defined his term.

Dr. Cooper will also officially welcome to Alberta the Canadian Medical Associations 151st President, Dr. Gigi Osler. Dr. Osler became CMA president in August at the CMAs Annual General Meeting, held this year in Winnipeg.

Dr. Osler is head of the Section of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery at St. Boniface Hospital and is an assistant professor with the Department of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery at the University of Manitoba. When working at St. Boniface Hospital, she is actively involved in the teaching of medical students and residents.

Dr. Osler is a dedicated advocate for global surgery and the promotion of safe, accessible surgical care. She volunteers annually on surgical missions to low and lower-middle income countries. She was a member of Canadian Helping Kids in Vietnams medical mission to Long Xuyen, Vietnam, in 2011. The missions goals were to educate Vietnamese doctors and nurses, deliver donated medical equipment and supplies, and present bicycles to deserving schoolchildren.

For the last several years Dr. Osler has been volunteering in Mbarara, Uganda. Working with members of the Canadian Society of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery, the group collaborates with Mbarara University of Science and Technology to improve the quality of local health care through education, training and mentorship to surgeons, residents and medical students.

A passionate advocate for physician health, Dr. Osler serves as chair of the Physician Health and Wellness Committee for Doctors Manitoba. The committee oversees the Physician and Family Support Program and creates events to promote physician wellness. In 2017, she received their Health or Safety Promotion Award in recognition of her efforts to develop and implement programs to support the health and well-being of doctors.

At the Lunch with the CMA President on Saturday, Dr. Osler will officially install Dr. Clarke as the AMA president, address Representative Forum delegates and present the CMA Honorary Membership awards to Alberta physicians.

The Representative Forum is the governing body of the AMA. It includes representatives of all sectors of the profession  specialty sections, zones, students, residents, past presidents and deans of medicine. The RF meets at least twice a year to establish policy and set direction.

For more information, or to request an interview, please contact:
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OAKBROOK TERRACE, Ill., Sept. 20, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Learning communities can provide a rich, collaborative environment that supports the adoption of health care innovations and motivates organizational change. A new study in the October 2018 issue of The Joint Commission Journal on Quality and Patient Safety details how three learning communities sponsored by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) focused on adopting health care innovations were established and supported.



The study,  Using Learning Communities to Support Adoption of Health Care Innovations , by Deborah Carpenter, RN, MSN, CPHQ, CPPS, PMP, senior study director, Westat, Rockville, Maryland, and co-authors, describes how the learning communities focused on three high-priority areas: advancing the practice of patient- and family-centered care (PFCC) in hospitals, promoting medication therapy management for at-risk populations, and reducing non-urgent emergency services.

Members of each learning community worked collaboratively in facilitated settings to adapt and implement strategies featured in the AHRQ Health Care Innovations Exchange. The Innovations Exchange was a web-based repository of more than 900 evidence-based service delivery and policy innovations, as well as 1,500 tools for improving quality and reducing disparities.

All three learning communities achieved significant improvements:

Learning Community 1 (Advancing the Practice of PFCC in Hospitals): The PFCC Learning Community consisted of 11 Florida-based acute care hospitals that worked together over an 18-month period to establish or enhance a patient and family advisory council (PFAC). The number of participating hospitals with a PFAC increased from 4 to 11, and the total number of active patient and family advisors increased from 56 to 129.

The PFCC Learning Community consisted of 11 Florida-based acute care hospitals that worked together over an 18-month period to establish or enhance a patient and family advisory council (PFAC). The number of participating hospitals with a PFAC increased from 4 to 11, and the total number of active patient and family advisors increased from 56 to 129. Learning Community 2 (Promoting Medication Therapy Management for At-Risk Populations): Spring Branch Community Health Center, Texas, enrolled 57 at-risk patients into the MyRx pilot program and retained 38 of those patients throughout the entire 6-month pilot test period. During the program, pharmacists provided more than 230 interventions. Patients who received one-on-one counseling from a pharmacist had greater changes in blood glucose levels compared to those who did not.

Spring Branch Community Health Center, Texas, enrolled 57 at-risk patients into the MyRx pilot program and retained 38 of those patients throughout the entire 6-month pilot test period. During the program, pharmacists provided more than 230 interventions. Patients who received one-on-one counseling from a pharmacist had greater changes in blood glucose levels compared to those who did not. Learning Community 3 (Reducing Non-Urgent Emergency Services): A protocol was developed to enable Detroit emergency medical services (EMS) personnel to make real-time referrals to community organizations; identify and work with the top 25 EMS users; and intervene at local hot spots where there was significant EMS activity. In a 12-month period, EMS made 288 referrals to community organizations and preliminary results showed fewer 911 calls and shorter EMS response times.

The improvements indicate that the learning community model of group learning can serve as an effective method to support dissemination and implementation of innovations, as well as achieve desired outcomes in local settings.

The learning communities brought additional resources to the systems, including support staff serving as a lead facilitator, a knowledge integrator, and an assistant to help with communications and logistics. They also provided connections to subject matter experts and some financial support for clinics with limited resources, notes Shivan J. Mehta, MD, MBA, MSHP, assistant professor, Penn Medicine, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, in an accompanying editorial .

The study and editorial are available in open access through October 17. Also featured in the October 2018 issue:

For more information, visit The Joint Commission Journal on Quality and Patient Safety website.

Note for editors

The article is Using Learning Communities to Support Adoption of Health Care Innovations, by Deborah Carpenter, RN, MSN, CPHQ, CPPS, PMP; Susan Hassell, MS, MPH; Russ Mardon, PhD; Shannon Fair, RN, MPH; Maurice Johnson, Jr., MPH; Sari Siegel, PhD, CPHQ; and Mary Nix, MS, PMP. The article appears in The Joint Commission Journal on Quality and Patient Safety, volume 44, number 10 (October 2018), published by Elsevier.

The editorial is Scaling and Spreading Innovation in Health Care Delivery, by Shivan J. Mehta, MD, MBA, MSHP. The article appears in The Joint Commission Journal on Quality and Patient Safety, volume 44, number 10 (October 2018), published by Elsevier.

The Joint Commission Journal on Quality and Patient Safety

The Joint Commission Journal on Quality and Patient Safety (JQPS) is a peer-reviewed journal providing health care professionals with innovative thinking, strategies and practices in improving quality and safety in health care. JQPS is the official journal of The Joint Commission and Joint Commission Resources, Inc . Original case studies, program or project reports, reports of new methodologies or the new application of methodologies, research studies, and commentaries on issues and practices are all considered.

Media Contact:

Katie Looze Bronk

Corporate Communications

(630) 792-5175

kbronk@jointcommission.org

View the multimedia news release
FREMONT, Calif., Sept. 20, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- This month, Pony.ai debuts its latest self-driving system: PonyAlpha. The release of PonyAlpha marks a significant milestone for Chinas autonomous driving industry, representing the countrys first ever product-ready autonomous vehicle system. PonyAlpha, a full-stack self-driving solution, has achieved levels of stability and performance capable of sustaining a consumer ride-hailing fleet, which has been expanding steadily in Guangzhou since February this year.



PonyAlpha features meaningful improvements across hardware and software from Pony.ais earlier generation prototype vehicles. In terms of hardware, the new system includes increased sensor coverage provided by additional LiDARs, radars, and cameras. In order to support these additional sensors, PonyAlpha also features a more highly optimized hardware platform, resulting in a tightly integrated full-stack system. This sensor suite and configuration is a product of extensive testing across varied US and China environments. Altogether, the full sensor suite can see distances of roughly 200 meters, enabling a wider variety of driving scenarios at even greater speeds.

A photo accompanying this announcement is available at http://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/2472b857-4bc3-4e38-a55a-633106bbdb8b

The most notable change in PonyAlphas algorithms comes from its deep and adaptive sensor fusion module. Due to the multi-sensor approach (LiDAR, radar, camera), sensor fusionthe blending together of disparate data from multiple sensorsis an indispensable piece of autonomous driving technology, yet there is a natural tradeoff between amount of data collected and system simplicity. Pony.ais sensor fusion technology is able to intelligently use the most reliable sensor data depending on different environmental or driving scenarios. Thus, Pony.ai vehicles have a comprehensive and accurate understanding of the surrounding environment while maintaining a highly effective on-vehicle process. The end result is not just a system that is highly accurate and efficient, but also one that delivers a smoother and more human-like driving experience.

I am incredibly proud of what we have accomplished, says Co-founder & CEO James Peng. In less than two years, we are now announcing our third-generation self-driving system. PonyAlpha is a product of truly extensive testing in challenging environments, culminating to a safer and more stable system that we look forward to sharing with all of you.

A photo accompanying this announcement is available at http://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/59bd4d49-fa0d-42b6-b424-11046ba40c65

However, building and operating an autonomous ride-hailing fleet takes more than just strong technology. Successful deployment and scale relies on an entire set of supporting infrastructure. In addition to rolling out PonyAlpha, the Pony.ai team has been working on several other critical fleet capabilities: the Pony.ai Vehicle Control Center and its in-vehicle interface PonyHI (Pony Human Interface). The Pony.ai Vehicle Control Center enables centralized management, tracking, and dispatching of all vehicles in its fleet.

For passengers, the launch of PonyHI gives them a direct window into the brain of the vehicle. Passengers are able to follow along the vehicles every move and decision as it identifies, classifies, and plans based on its surrounding environment. On screen, passengers can expect to see road agents such as vehicles, cyclists, or pedestrians as well as transportation infrastructure such as road signs or lane markings. As these objects appear and move on screen, passengers can also observe the driver take accurate and timely action, thus establishing transparency and trust between human and machine.

A photo accompanying this announcement is available at http://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/9b845d30-530b-4826-a502-e8b719ae8880

But dont just take our word for it. At this years inaugural World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC) in Shanghai, Pony.ai has been offering demo rides to conference-goers (Sep. 17  19) and the general public (Sep. 20  23). All Pony.ai vehicles onsite are equipped with PonyAlpha and PonyHI, and the team is incredibly excited to deliver this unique experience to the public.

A photo accompanying this announcement is available at http://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/44743576-3fca-42d1-b7a0-21691deaead8

About Pony.ai

Founded in late 2016 by former Baidu Chief Architect James Peng (CEO) and programming legend Tiancheng Lou (CTO), Pony.ai aims to revolutionize the future of transportation by building the safest and most reliable self-driving technology. Pony.ai develops its software algorithms and infrastructure fully in-house, including its own operating platform  PonyBrain. Pony.ai is backed by top investors such as Sequoia China, IDG Capital, Morningside Ventures, and others. Most recently, Pony.ai announced a $102M Series A plus round led by ClearVue Partners and Eight Roads (the proprietary investment arm of Fidelity Investments Ltd.), bringing the A round total to $214M and making it the most valuable autonomous driving startup in China. Pony.ai is a privately held company co-headquartered in Guangzhou, China and Silicon Valley, USA.

Contact

media@pony.ai

A video accompanying this announcement is available at http://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/abb7af2e-47e2-4613-9bd7-a9fe450f918f
FREMONT, Calif., Sept. 20, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- With continuing advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and the plausible opportunities it promises to provide, a number of leading technology visionaries have expressed their concerns over its far-reaching risks. During Fog World Congress 2018 , Luciano C. Oviedo , researcher at the Warwick Business School and Arizona State University, will address this issue head on as he moderates the panel session: The Social Impact of Emerging IoT/Fog/AI-enabled Technologies .



The panel will address one of many hot topics at Fog World Congress, October 1-3, 2018 in San Francisco. Other highly anticipated presentations and sessions include autonomous robotics, smart buildings and manufacturing, security, blockchain, testbeds and fog standards.

Elon Musk warned us that AI is far more dangerous than nukes. So, what happens now that AI is quickly converging with fog computing, IoT, 5G, blockchain and other highly anticipated technologies? said Oviedo. This panel will explore latest thinking on crucial topics such as: Who owns and controls passenger data generated in an autonomous vehicle? Who is responsible for security to prevent it from being hacked? Who is liable if there is a breach? Who chooses what decisions the algorithms make in life-threatening situations? Well discuss how organizations can get their brains around questions aimed at promoting benefits of these technologies while mitigating their risks.

The topic proved to be so popular at last years Fog World Congress that it will be delivered in two back-to-back sessions this year. Joining Oviedo on this panel to explore the opportunities and challenges from different perspectives are:

Jonathan Fox , Director Strategy & Planning, Chief Privacy Office, Security & Trust Organization, Cisco;

, Director Strategy & Planning, Chief Privacy Office, Security & Trust Organization, Cisco; Brian Green , Director, Technology Ethics Santa Clara University;

, Director, Technology Ethics Santa Clara University; Ashwin Krishnan , CEO Ashwin Krishnan; and

, CEO Ashwin Krishnan; and Sotirios Paroutis , Professor of Strategic Management & Head of Strategy and International Business Group, Warwick Business School.

Register here to attend the session and the conference.

In addition to a full slate of exciting speakers and keynotes , Steve  Woz  Wozniak, Apple co-founder and inventor of the world's first personal computer, will participate in a fireside chat with Helder Antunes, Chairman of the OpenFog Consortium and Senior Director, Cisco, to discuss AI, IoT, fog and other exciting technology topics.

Fog World Congress is the largest gathering of fog computing leaders and edge influencers worldwide. It is produced by the OpenFog Consortium in collaboration with IEEE Communications Society . Attendees include technologists, data scientists, application developers, educators, researchers, analysts, VCs and investors, service providers, government agencies and enterprises representing a wide variety of industries. The event provides a platform to showcase fog computing use cases, architecture, standards, developments and research. Topics range from: Intelligence on the edge, machine learning, infrastructure-as-a-service, smart grid, intelligent IoT services, 5G, security, AI, smart city, network/messaging, software infrastructure, mobile edge computing, the OpenFog Reference Architecture and more. The event culminates with Fog Tank , which showcases leading innovators in fog technologies and applications as they take the center stage with investors and VCs.

Another exciting addition this year: autonomous mapping robots will be traversing and mapping the venue floor in real-time for conference attendees. It will serve as a live , proof-of-concept demonstration to validate how fog systems belonging to different domains can communicate with each other. These proof-of-concept robots are designed based on the OpenFog Consortium OpenFog Reference Architecture , which has been adopted in the IEEE standard for fog computing.

About OpenFog Consortium

The OpenFog Consortium was founded to accelerate the adoption of fog computing and address bandwidth, latency and communications challenges associated with IoT, 5G and AI applications. Committed to creating open technologies, its mission is to create and validate a framework for secure and efficient information processing between clouds, endpoints and services. OpenFog was founded in November 2015 and today represents the leading researchers and innovators in fog computing. For more information, visit www.openfogconsortium.org ; Twitter: @OpenFog ; LinkedIn: /company/openfog-consortium .

About IEEE ComSoc

IEEE is the worlds largest technical professional organization dedicated to advancing technology for the benefit of humanity. Through its highly cited publications, conferences, technology standards, and professional and educational activities, IEEE is the trusted voice in a wide variety of areas ranging from aerospace systems, computers, and telecommunications to biomedical engineering, electric power, and consumer electronics. The IEEE Communications Society is a leading global community within IEEE comprised of a diverse group of industry professionals with a common interest in advancing all communications technologies. Learn more at http://www.ieee.org .

About IoT Evolution

IoT Evolution combines the power of live conferences with a robust news site, global online communities, webinars, a magazine, and white papers to educate, inform and connect thousands of IoT stakeholders from across the globe. The IoT Evolution brand is the go-to resource for anyone innovating and leading the way in the IoT space. For more information, contact Scott Kargman at Scott@crossfiremedia.com .




Likewise, he said, there is nowadays a strong focus on how to: build a country, serve the population, as well as balance territorial management with national policies.





"() We still have to incorporate a territorial perspective that would help us better understand each part of the territory," he expressed.





Given the Inca country's diversity, regional management models should be developed in order to meet the areas' specific needs while relying on a territorial development approach.









"The good thing is that in these few months, we've been part of the administration, we have been undertaking efforts to decentralize investments (and) travelling to regions . However, that is not enough," Villanueva stressed.





"We have to look for mechanisms that, as a permanent policy, can be applied to the decentralization process," he added.





Remarks were made during the inauguration of the Regional Development Agencies' International Seminar "Creating Development from the Regions."





(END) FHG/DTK/MVB
VANCOUVER, British Columbia, Sept. 20, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Dajin Resources Corp. (Dajin) (TSX-V: DJI) (OTC: DJIFF) (Germany: C2U1) is pleased to report that the Phase two near-surface exploration program on the San Jose  Navidad minas located on the Salinas Grandes salar in the province of Jujuy, Argentina, has been completed. This Phase consisted of drilling and sampling seven holes. The Lithium brine samples taken have been forwarded to Alex Stewart Argentina (ASA) laboratories in Jujuy, Argentina. In addition to the brine samples, seven core samples for relative brine release measurements were taken and have been sent to Daniel B Stephens & Associates laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA. The highly prospective San Jose  Navidad minas are part of a 93,000 hectares (230,000 acres) land package controlled by Dajin and being explored by LSC Lithium Corporation (LSC). To fulfill the terms of an earn-in agreement (51%) LSC must complete CDN$2,000,000 in exploration expenditures. LSC is the operator of the project.



Dajins Phase one surface exploration program consisted of 25 shallow brine auger samples covering an area of 550 hectares (5.5 km2) in the northwestern corner of the 4,300 hectare (43 km2) San Jose/Navidad mina. Brine concentrations ranged from 281 mg/l to 1,353 mg/l, averaging 591 mg/l Lithium. Click here to see Geochemical Map

Dajin Resources S.A. and LSC Lithium Corporation control most of the Salinas Grandes salar.

The San Jose  Navidad minas have not been explored previously for Lithium bearing brines, but results from earlier exploration programs in adjacent parts of the salar reported Lithium brine sampling from 1 meter-deep pits. The seven closest pit samples, taken between 0 to 200 meters from both the north and west sides of the mina yielded Lithium concentrations that ranged from 279 mg/l to 987 mg/l, averaging 551 mg/l. Pit samples taken within 1 km of the property boundary assayed up to 1,122 mg/l Lithium. The highest reported assay value in Salinas Grandes salar exceeded 3,000 mg/l Lithium.

Exploration Methodology Used

The seven sample points were pre-planned on a 1,000m grid, located in the field with a hand-held GPS unit. At each sample site a Vibracore drill machine was used to extract HQ diameter cores to an average depth of 7.8 m. Thereafter, a bailer was used to extract brines from the lithological units. The bailed brine was then decanted into three sterilized plastic litre size bottles and sealed without any air being trapped in the bottle. Thereafter, the samples were delivered to the laboratory for analyses.

Sampling and QA/QC

Brine sampling involved collection of brines from the drill holes by a bailer and decanted into an approximately 13.5 litre bucket, which was flushed with fresh brine several times prior to collection of the sample. Brine was poured into 1-litre sample bottles which had been previously flushed with fresh brine from the bucket several times. Sample bottles were filled to the top to eliminate the inclusion of air and sealed with a leak-proof lid. Samples were labelled and labels covered with clear tape to prevent erasure of sample information. All samples remained in the possession of the site geologist until delivery to Alex Stewart Laboratory (ASA) in Jujuy, Argentina.

The technical information in this press release has been prepared in accordance with the Canadian regulatory requirements of National Instrument 43-101 and has been reviewed and approved on behalf of Dajin Resources Corp. by Dajin Directors, Dr. Catherine Hickson, P. Geo and Dr. Mark Coolbaugh, CPG, the Qualified Persons.

About Dajin: ( www.dajin.ca )

Dajin, is an early stage Lithium exploration company. Through its interest in Dajin Resources S.A. (Dajin S.A.), it holds concessions or concession applications in Jujuy Province, Argentina that were acquired in regions known to contain brines with Lithium, Potassium, and Boron values. These concessions exceed 93,000 hectares (230,000 acres) and are primarily located in the Salinas Grandes and Guayatayoc salt lake basins. Dajin S.A. is partnered with LSC Lithium Corporation who has agreed to spend $2,000,000 to earn a 51% interest in Dajin S.A.s Lithium properties while building a significant presence in Argentina.

Dajin also holds a 100% interest in 403 placer claims covering 7,914 acres (3,202 hectares) in the Teels Marsh valley of Mineral County, Nevada. These claims are known to contain Lithium and Boron values and are adjacent to the birth place of US Borax Corps first borax mine. Dajin also holds a 100% interest in placer claims in the Alkali Lake valley of Esmeralda County, Nevada, located 7 miles (11 kilometers) northeast of Albemarles Silver Peak Lithium brine operation in Clayton Valley.

ON BEHALF OF DAJINS BOARD OF DIRECTORS

Brian Findlay For further information please contact Dajin:

President & CEO 604-609-6151 or info@dajin.ca

The TSX Venture Exchange has not reviewed and does not accept responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.
YEREVAN, SEPTEMBER 20, ARMENPRESS. President of Artsakh Bako Sahakyan has sent a congratulatory letter to the President of the South Ossetian Republic Anatoly Bibilov on the country's Independence Day.

Below is the letter addressed to President Bibilov, as reported by Sahakyans office:



On behalf of the Artsakh Republic people, authorities and personally myself I extend my cordial congratulations to You and the fraternal people of South Ossetia on the Day of Independence.

September 20, 1990 has become a turning point in the ancient history of Ossetia. The South Ossetian people made an important decision and proclaimed the independence of their Homeland, expressing readiness to master their own destiny themselves.

Over these years the Republic of South Ossetia-State of Alania has passed a thorny, but glorious way, frequently standing up for the defense of its independent statehood, honor and dignity.

Presently fraternal South Ossetia is an established and dynamically developing state confidently looking into the future. We are sincerely glad for all your achievements and successes.

I once again congratulate You, respected Mr. President, wishing You and all the people of South Ossetia-Alania peace, happiness, new successes and achievements.
YEREVAN, SEPTEMBER 20, ARMENPRESS. Syrias President Bashar al-Assad has extended condolences to Russian President Vladimir Putin over the downing of the IL 20 plane over the Mediterranean, according to SANA.

On behalf of the Syrian people and by my name, we express our deep condolence over the fall of the Russian jet on the Mediterranean, causing the martyrdom of the Russian heroes who were doing their noble duties along with their colleagues of the Russian military forces in the fight against terrorism in Syria, the President said in the cable, according to SANA.

The cable also noted that the regrettable incident was a result of the Israeli usual [rivalry] which always uses the dirtiest means to achieve its low purposes and carry out its aggression in our region.

We are confident that such painful acts would not affect you and us to continue fighting terrorism, the cable said.

The Russian defense ministry said earlier that on September 17 at about 23.00 Moscow time, radar contact with a Russian Ilyushin Il-20 warplane, which was flying back to the Russian air base Hmeymim, was lost over the Mediterranean at a distance of 35 kilometers off the Syrian coast, TASS reported.

There were 15 Russian troops aboard the plane. Then, the Russian Defense Ministry said that the Il-20 disappeared off the radars during airstrikes delivered by four Israeli F-16 fighter jets on the Syrian targets in Latakia province.

Later, the defense ministry informed that the Il-20 was shot down by Syrian air defense systems because Israels F-16 fighter jets used it as cover.

The Israeli command centers and the F-16s pilots could not but see the Russian plane, which was approaching the runway from an altitude of five kilometers. Nevertheless, they deliberately staged this provocation, Russian Defense Ministry Spokesman Maj.-Gen. Igor Konashenkov said, adding that Israels actions are considered in Russia as hostile.

Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu held a telephone conversation with his Israeli counterpart Avigdor Lieberman on Tuesday, stating that Israel is solely to blame for the downing of Russias Ilyushin Il-20 aircraft over the Mediterranean Sea. The irresponsible actions by the Israeli Air Force led to a tragedy, which claimed the lives of 15 Russian military personnel, he said.

Later in the day, the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) released a communique expressing sorrow for the death of the Il-20 crew members.



Edited and translated by Stepan Kocharyan
YEREVAN, SEPTEMBER 20, ARMENPRESS. The Armenian Apostolic Church has dismissed rumors on an alleged agreement between the incumbent government and Catholicos Garegin II on the latters abdication. A local newspaper has claimed that Garegin II, the 132nd Catholicos of All Armenians, serving since 1999, has reached a secret agreement with the government that he himself will step down under the false pretext of having health problems. In the past few months a group of protesters have been demanding the resignation of the Catholicos.

Priest Vahram Melikyan, director of the Mother Sees Informational System, has said on Facebook that the rumors are false.

We find it necessary to state that during the 27-year history of the Third Republic, all governments without exception have displayed proper respect towards the Holy Armenian Apostolic Church and namely the Catholicoi, and have valued the unique role of the Armenian Church and the Catholicos of All Armenians in the development of our statehood, national unity and maintenance of solidarity, Melikyan said.

Edited and translated by Stepan Kocharyan
YEREVAN, SEPTEMBER 20, ARMENPRESS. National Security Service (NSS) Director Arthur Vanetsyan has held a meeting with Ambassador of Kazakhstan Timur Uruzayev.

During the meeting Director Vanetsyan presented the main and targeted functions of the NSS, and addressed the mutually beneficial work and the formed practical firm ties between the two countries.

The ambassador thanked for the reception and expressed conviction that the existing relations between the two countries will further contribute to productive and organized work.

The sides expressed willingness to deepen cooperation between the law enforcement agencies of the two countries.

Edited and translated by Stepan Kocharyan
YEREVAN, SEPTEMBER 20, ARMENPRESS. Today, the National Assembly of Armenia (parliament) is marking its 100th anniversary of foundation.

A gala evening will take place today in the seat of parliament in Yerevan, with nearly 600 guests expected. All lawmakers, former and incumbent, have been invited to the event.

The parliament of the first Republic of Armenia, declared on May 28, 1918, was convened on August 1. A government was established, mainly comprised of Dashnaktsakans. Mr. H. Kajaznuni was appointed Prime Minister. In hard historical-political times, the Republic of Armenia, existing only two and a half years, was a country governed by parliamentary principles. The parliament was unicameral and had standing committees and a council of elders. The Government of the Republic was accountable to the legislative body - parliament.

During its existence, the Parliament functioned with four organized Governments - headed by Prime Ministers Mr. H. Kajaznuni, Mr. Alexander Khatisyan, Mr. Hamo Ohanjanyan and Mr. Simon Vratsyan. The Parliament was presided over Mr. A. Sahakyan (August 01. 1918 - August 01. 1919), Mr. A. Aharonyan (August 01.1919 - November 04.1920), and Mr. H. Kajaznuni (November 04.1920-December 02.1920).

Four political parties were functioning in a parliament founded on democratic principles - Armenian Revolutionary Federation (ARF), Social -Democratic Hnchakyan Party (SDHP), Social Revolutionaries and Peoples Party of Armenia, which formed parliamentary factions. The Armenian Revolutionary Federation was a ruling party, with a parliamentary plurality, while the others were in opposition.

The Armenian parliament, during its existence, adopted more than 1000 laws and legal documents, having the force of law relating to the inner and foreign policies of the Republic.

Notable are the legislative steps made relating to many big or small but essential issues such as declaring Armenian as a state language, establishing a State University, schools, libraries, museums, increasing pensions, salaries of workers and immigrants, organizing education for the children of victims who perished fighting for freedom, assigning material aid to Armenian authors, scientists, allotting scholarship for the youth, studying abroad, etc.

On November 24, 1920, the Government of Mr. H. Ohanjanyan resigned. The same day a new Dashnaktsakan Government was formed, headed by Mr. S. Vratsyan. On November 30, RSFSR Plenipotentiary Representative to Armenia, Mr. B Legran, proposed the Dashnaktsakan Government to transfer the government in a peaceful way to the Revolutionary Committee. The Government accepted that proposal and on December 2, 1920, in Yerevan, an agreement was signed between the RSFSR and the Republic of Armenia, according to which Armenia was declared a Socialist Republic  history as reported by the official website of the National Assembly.

Edited and translated by Stepan Kocharyan
YEREVAN, SEPTEMBER 20, ARMENPRESS. At the beginning of todays Cabinet meeting, Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan congratulated minister of energy infrastructures and natural resources Arthur Grigoryan on his birthday.

We congratulate Mr. Grigoryan and wish him good luck in his work, his family and everywhere, and certainly in the energy field, the PM said.

Grigoryan turns 49 years old today.

Edited and translated by Stepan Kocharyan
YEREVAN, SEPTEMBER 20, ARMENPRESS. Hijackers in Turkey have attacked an Armenian cargo truck en route from Armenia to the Netherlands, Turkish media reported.

The incident took place when the truck was passing through Kocaeli. The vehicle was carrying 20 tons of molybdenum.

The hijackers posed as police officers to make the driver exit the vehicle. The attackers then subdued the driver and stole the cargo.

Four of the seven-man hijacking team have been arrested.

According to the report, at the time of the arrest the gang had already sold a part of the cargo for 800,000 dollars.

The hijackers included citizens of Georgia, among others.

No other details were available at the moment.

It is unclear if the driver suffered injuries.

Edited and translated by Stepan Kocharyan
YEREVAN, SEPTEMBER 20, ARMENPRESS. NATO is reiterating its support to the peaceful settlement of the Nagorno Karabakh conflict, NATO Deputy Secretary General Rose Gottemoeller told reporters in Baku, Azerbaijani media reported.

NATO expresses its support to the OSCE Minsk Groups work and the efforts of the conflicting parties aimed at a peaceful solution of the conflict, she said.

Edited and translated by Stepan Kocharyan
YEREVAN, SEPTEMBER 20, ARMENPRESS. The Armenian ministry of foreign affairs has expressed condolences over the downing of the Russian Il-20 aircraft.

We express our deepest condolences to the families and friends of the 15 Russian servicemen who died as a result of the tragedy with the Il-20 aircraft over Syrian skies, the foreign ministry said on Facebook.

The Russian defense ministry said earlier that on September 17 at about 23.00 Moscow time, radar contact with a Russian Ilyushin Il-20 warplane, which was flying back to the Russian air base Hmeymim, was lost over the Mediterranean at a distance of 35 kilometers off the Syrian coast, TASS reported.

There were 15 Russian troops aboard the plane. Then, the Russian Defense Ministry said that the Il-20 disappeared off the radars during airstrikes delivered by four Israeli F-16 fighter jets on the Syrian targets in Latakia province.

Later, the defense ministry informed that the Il-20 was shot down by Syrian air defense systems because Israels F-16 fighter jets used it as cover.

The Israeli command centers and the F-16s pilots could not but see the Russian plane, which was approaching the runway from an altitude of five kilometers. Nevertheless, they deliberately staged this provocation, Russian Defense Ministry Spokesman Maj.-Gen. Igor Konashenkov said, adding that Israels actions are considered in Russia as hostile.

Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu held a telephone conversation with his Israeli counterpart Avigdor Lieberman on Tuesday, stating that Israel is solely to blame for the downing of Russias Ilyushin Il-20 aircraft over the Mediterranean Sea. The irresponsible actions by the Israeli Air Force led to a tragedy, which claimed the lives of 15 Russian military personnel, he said.

Later in the day, the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) released a communique expressing sorrow for the death of the Il-20 crew members.

Edited and translated by Stepan Kocharyan
English French

TORONTO, Sept. 20, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The Investment Funds Institute of Canada (IFIC) today announced mutual fund net sales and net assets for August 2018.



The combined assets of Canadas mutual fund industry totalled $1.54 trillion. Assets increased by $8.6 billion or 0.6% compared to July 2018.

The mutual fund industry recorded net sales of $299 million and year-to-date net sales of $15.5 billion.

Sales Highlights:

Long-term fund net sales were $43 million in August and year-to-date net sales were $14.5 billion. Year-to-date long-term fund net sales were 61.0% lower than year-to-date, 2017.

Balanced fund net sales were $146 million in August and year-to-date net sales were $7.5 billion. Year-to-date balanced fund net sales were 64.8% lower than year-to-date, 2017.

Equity fund net redemptions were $24 million in August and year-to-date net sales were $4.6 billion. Year-to-date equity fund net sales were 6.1% lower than year-to-date, 2017.

Bond fund net redemptions were $405 million in August and year-to-date net sales were $280 million. Year-to-date bond fund net sales were 96.9% lower than year-to-date, 2017.

Money market fund net sales were $257 million in August and year-to-date net sales were $989 million. Year-to-date money market fund net sales were 517% higher than year-to-date, 2017.

Net Sales ($ Millions)

Asset Class August 2018 July 2018 August 2017 YTD 2018 YTD 2017 Long-term Funds Balanced* 146 519 939 7,503 21,321 Equity -24 45 -148 4,602 4,900 Bond -405 33 769 280 9,072 Specialty 325 345 156 2,146 1,942 Total Long-term Funds 43 941 1,715 14,531 37,235 Total Money Market Funds 257 -169 127 989 -237 Total Industry 299 772 1,843 15,520 36,998

Net Assets ($ Billions)

Asset Class August 2018 July 2018 August 2017 December 2017 Long-term Funds Balanced* 788.2 785.0 736.3 766.1 Equity 516.4 512.0 451.6 484.3 Bond 188.3 187.9 185.8 187.7 Specialty 17.2 16.9 13.0 14.7 Total Long-term Funds 1,510.1 1,501.8 1,386.9 1,452.8 Total Money Market Funds 25.5 25.3 24.1 24.2 Total Industry 1,535.7 1,527.1 1,410.9 1,477.1

* Balanced funds include funds that invest in a mix of stocks and bonds as well as funds that invest in a mix of separate stand-alone funds.

IFIC makes every effort to verify the accuracy, currency and completeness of the information; however, IFIC does not guarantee, warrant, represent or undertake that the information provided is correct, accurate or current.

About IFIC

The Investment Funds Institute of Canada is the voice of Canadas investment funds industry. IFIC brings together 150 organizations, including fund managers, distributors and industry service organizations, to foster a strong, stable investment sector where investors can realize their financial goals. By connecting Canadas savers to Canadas economy, our industry contributes significantly to Canadian economic growth and job creation. The organization is proud to have served Canadas investment funds industry and its investors for more than 50 years. To learn more about IFIC, please visit www.ific.ca .

For more information please contact:



Lisa Hall

Senior Manager, Communications and Public Affairs

lhall@ific.ca

416-309-2317
YEREVAN, SEPTEMBER 20, ARMENPRESS. The process of organizing a meeting between Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan and US President Donald Trump is ongoing and it will reach its solution, foreign minister Zohrab Mnatsakanyan told reporters after the Cabinet meeting.

The process for a Pashinyan-Trump meeting requires time, we are working with our American partners, this issue will reach its settlement. Soon we will hear about meetings of different level officials of the two countries, which will lead to this meeting. At this time it is not possible for a hasty meeting to take place, he said.

Asked if a Pashinyan-Trump meeting is expected during the UN General Assembly, the FM said: At this time we dont expect a meeting in New York.

Edited and translated by Stepan Kocharyan
YEREVAN, SEPTEMBER 20, ARMENPRESS. Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan today personally walked into a crowd of protesters rallying outside the government headquarters in Yerevan to hear out their complaints.

The protesters are a group of IDPs from Artsvashen, the Armenian exclave which is occupied by Azerbaijan since 1992.

The demonstrators are demanding their compensation which had been approved by the government nearly 10 years ago.

I suggest you to form a 5-man group and meet me, the PM told the crowd.

According to the protesters, the government had approved a 6 billion dram compensation for the IDPs, but only 10% has been paid in 2011.

Before the Prime Minister personally went out to speak to the demonstrators, the situation was getting tense as police were trying to prevent them from forcefully entering the government headquarters.

Edited and translated by Stepan Kocharyan
YEREVAN, SEPTEMBER 20, ARMENPRESS. The European Court of Human Rights has released its judgment over the Saghatelyan versus Armenia case, and held that the Armenian government was to pay Saghatelyan 15,600 euros (EUR) in respect of nonpecuniary damage and EUR 5,000 in respect of costs and expenses.

The case of Mushegh Saghatelyan v. Armenia (application no. 23086/08) concerned an opposition activists allegation of a politically motivated crackdown on 1 March 2008 following a wide-scale protest against the presidential elections. He complained in particular that he had been ill-treated by the police, that his arrest had been unlawful and that the entire criminal case then brought against him had been fabricated. He had eventually been convicted for assaulting two police officers and illegally carrying a knife, the ECHR said in a press release.

The court ruled that there have been violations of the following four articles of the Convention:

Article 3 (inhuman and degrading treatment)

Article 5  1 (c), 2 and 3 (right to liberty and security)

Article 6 (right to a fair trial)

Article 11 (freedom of association)

Edited and translated by Stepan Kocharyan
YEREVAN, SEPTEMBER 20, ARMENPRESS. Swiss President Alain Berset has congratulated Armenian President Armen Sarkissian on the Armenian Independence Day.

On behalf of the Federal Council and on my own behalf, I offer my warmest congratulations to Your Excellency and the Armenian people on the National Holiday of the Republic of Armenia, as well as on your countrys Independence Day.

I wish your country happiness and prosperity, as well as robust health and every success to you. I would like to reiterate my countrys commitment to developing mutual trust and friendship with the Republic of Armenia.

Taking the opportunity, I would also like to thank you for the invitation to attend the 17th Francophone Summit in Yerevan, which I accept with great pleasure.



Switzerland attaches great importance to the International Organization of La Francophonie, the members of which have undertaken to promote democracy, peace, human rights, as well as cultural and linguistic diversity.

The Summit will help our countries further strengthen their privileged ties in the years ahead, President Berset said in a cable, according to Sarkissians office.

On September 21st, Armenia will celebrate its 27th anniversary of Independence.

Edited and translated by Stepan Kocharyan
YEREVAN, SEPTEMBER 20, ARMENPRESS. Armenian Speaker of Parliament Ara Babloyan has held a meeting on September 20 with his counterpart from Artsakh Ashot Ghulyan.

During the meeting Speaker Babloyan praised the level of partnership between the parliaments of Armenia and Artsakh.

He assured that the peaceful settlement of the NK conflict is constantly in the focus of the Armenian parliament, and that lawmakers are protecting the interests of Artsakh and its people in all international platforms.

Speaker Ghulyan congratulated his Armenian counterpart on the 100th anniversary of the foundation of Armenias parliament.

The sides discussed a number of issues relating to parliamentary diplomacy and attached importance to continuous meetings of parliamentary committees and organization of inter-parliamentary joint sessions.

Edited and translated by Stepan Kocharyan
YEREVAN, SEPTEMBER 20, ARMENPRESS. President of China Xi Jinping has sent a congratulatory cable to Armenian President Armen Sarkissian on the 27th anniversary of Independence Day.

I attach great importance to the development of the Chinese-Armenian relations and I am ready to make efforts together with you in order to increase the bilateral relations and mutual cooperation to a new level, and that the results achieved during the joint implementation of the One Belt One Road initiative bring greater benefit to our countries and peoples, Xi Jinping said in the cable, according to Sarkissians office.

Edited and translated by Stepan Kocharyan
YEREVAN, SEPTEMBER 20, ARMENPRESS. The father of 16-year-old Umut Ali Ozmen, the Turkish boy who had crossed the Armenian-Turkish border on July 24, is appealing to the Government of Armenia and the Prime Minister with a request to return his son.

In an interview to Armenias Public TV, the boys father Mustafa said that his son had crossed the border accidentally.

My son had no intention to cross the border. He has no friends here, since we are in a field, in a village, he was feeding the livestock with his mother, and there is no border demarcation line in that area. And he didnt understand that he had crossed the Armenian border. He was just curious on what is there across, and he walked up the hill to look from above, Mustafa said.

Russian border guards had arrested the 16 year old shepherd on July 24. The boy is still in Armenia.

As soon as he climbed up the hill soldiers arrived on a vehicle and took him. My boy wouldnt do anything wrong, because he has numerous certificates at the college, he treats everyone with respect, but still they took him. Now the schools are open, all children are going to school, but not my son. And his mother is seeing the children going to school every morning and is crying sadly, he said.

The Turkish villager is appealing to the Government of Armenia with a request to return his son.

I am begging the government of Armenia and the countrys leader to release my child as soon as possible, to return him to his family in Turkey, so he returns to his usual life as soon as possible: school, college. His mother is begging to help return our boy. She is in a very bad health condition from this anxious state, Mustafa said. He said that it is their dream to return the boy home.

On September 17, former lawmakers, chairman of the Return Foundation Aragats Akhoyan met the 16-year-old boy in the juvenile detention center. Akhoyan has denied Turkish media reports which claimed that the detention conditions of Ozmen are poor.

It is a child who has accidentally crossed the border. I met him, a conversation took place, he felt warmth, he telephoned his parents and told them he is all right, Akhoyan said.

Akhoyan said he has contacted officials about the boys fate.

Edited and translated by Stepan Kocharyan
YEREVAN, SEPTEMBER 20, ARMENPRESS. Facebook and Twitter face sanctions unless they comply with European consumer rules by the end of the year, the EU said as its regulators continue to their crackdown on U.S. social media giants over privacy concerns, Reuters reports.

Seven months after being told to bring their user terms in line with EU regulations, both Facebook and Twitter have yet to fully address all the issues, the European Commission said on Thursday.

In contrast, Airbnb made the necessary changes after being told to do so three months ago, European Justice Commissioner Vera Jourova said, confirming a Reuters story on Wednesday.

If we dont see progress, the sanctions will come, she told a news conference. This is quite clear. We cannot negotiate for ever, we need to see the results.

Twitter should also make the necessary changes by year-end, a Commission spokesman said.

Any sanctions would be imposed by national consumer bodies.

The Commission has previously said it was worried about the companies liability and how users are informed about content removal or contract terminations.

Facebook said it had already made a number of changes and would continue to cooperate with the authorities.

We updated Facebooks terms of service in May and included the vast majority of changes the Consumer Protection Cooperation Network and the European Commission had proposed at that point, the company said in a statement.

Our terms are now much clearer on what is and what isnt allowed on Facebook and on the options people have.
YEREVAN, 20 SEPTEMBER, ARMENPRESS. The Central Bank of Armenia informs Armenpress that today, 20 september, USD exchange rate down by 1.18 drams to 482.44 drams. EUR exchange rate down by 0.99 drams to 564.60 drams. Russian Ruble exchange rate up by 0.06 drams to 7.28 drams. GBP exchange rate down by 0.25 drams to 637.06 drams.

The Central Bank has set the following prices for precious metals.

Gold price up by 2.55 drams to 18664.15 drams. Silver price down by 0.93 drams to 220.02 drams. Platinum price up by 15.65 drams to 12672.33 drams.
YEREVAN,SEPTEMBER 20, ARMENPRESS. Prime Minister of Armenia Nikol Pashinyan today received Dr. Eric Esrailian, a closest friend of Armenias National Hero, great philanthropist Kerk Kerkorian, famous American physician, co-manager of the Medical College after David Gefen at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), co-producer of The Promise film, which tells the story of the Armenian Genocide, and UCLA Chancellor, biologist, Academician Gene Block, ARMENPRESS was informed from the official website of the Prime Minister of Armenia.

Welcoming the guests to the Government of the Republic of Armenia, the Premier hailed the development of cooperation between Armenian higher educational institutions and the University of California, Los Angeles, which in turn may contribute to the deepening of Armenian-American educational ties.

Nikol Pashinyan touched upon the democratic changes underway in Armenia, noting that what happened in our country was not only a political event, but also a cultural and educational revolution which opened up vast opportunities for the launch of drastic reforms in the field of education

The Prime Minister stressed that education is one of the cornerstones of democratic development and economic progress, and considering Armenias huge innovational and IT potential, the Government of Armenia seeks to convert Armenia into a technological country.

Eric Esrailian and Gene Block wished the Government every success on the way to implementing its reform agenda, including the educational reform. They expressed readiness to support this process through the development of entrepreneurship, technology, engineering, exchange of experience and academic programs. Eric Esrailian advised that the University of California is going to open a center of Armenian studies in the near future.

Edited and translated by Tigran Sirekanyan
Amended Offer of $0.845 per Iron Bridge share has unanimous support of Iron Bridges Board of Directors and largest shareholders



Shareholders urged to tender their shares ahead of the deadline on September 24, 2018. at 5:00 p.m. Toronto time. Shareholders are reminded that most financial intermediaries have earlier expiry deadlines for processing tenders.

Shareholders can tender today by contacting Kingsdale Advisors at 1-866-879-7650 or by e-mail at contactus@kingsdaleadvisors.com.

CALGARY, Alberta, Sept. 20, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Velvet Energy Ltd. (Velvet, we, us or our) is reminding shareholders of Iron Bridge Resources Inc. (TSX: IBR) (Iron Bridge) that Velvets all-cash offer to acquire all of the issued and outstanding common shares of Iron Bridge will expire at 5:00 p.m. (Toronto time) on September 24, 2018. Shareholders are, however, cautioned, that most brokers and financial intermediaries will have an earlier cut-off time. All Iron Bridge shareholders who have not yet tendered their common shares are urged to do so today.



THE CONSIDERATION

On September 10, 2018 we announced that Velvet and Iron Bridge agreed to terms on a friendly transaction whereby Velvet modified its May 22, 2018 offer (the Original Offer) to increase the cash consideration payable for each Iron Bridge common share from $0.75 to $0.845 (the Amended Offer). The Amended Offer was filed with the Alberta Securities Commission on September 12, 2018 under a Notice of Change and Variation.

The Amended Offer is fully-supported by the Iron Bridge Board of Directors and Officers and is receiving growing and significant support from Iron Bridge Shareholders. Based on this support, Velvet is confident the Amended Offer will exceed the Minimum Tender Condition.



REASONS TO ACCEPT THE OFFER

The Revised Velvet Offer is the best alternative currently available. Iron Bridge and its financial advisor conducted an extensive process seeking alternative proposals. No alternatives emerged that are superior to the Amended Offer. Moreover, with Iron Bridges financial challenges, the Amended Offer is a superior alternative to the going concern risks of continuing to operate independently.





Iron Bridge and its financial advisor conducted an extensive process seeking alternative proposals. No alternatives emerged that are superior to the Amended Offer. Moreover, with Iron Bridges financial challenges, the Amended Offer is a superior alternative to the going concern risks of continuing to operate independently. Increased cash consideration for Shareholders compared to the Original Offer. The Amended Offer represents a 13% increase in cash consideration for Iron Bridge common shares over the Original Offer and a significant 78% premium to the closing price of Iron Bridge common shares on the TSX on May 11, 2018, the last trading day prior to Velvet submitting its original $0.75 offer letter to the Iron Bridge Board of Directors.





The Amended Offer represents a 13% increase in cash consideration for Iron Bridge common shares over the Original Offer and a significant 78% premium to the closing price of Iron Bridge common shares on the TSX on May 11, 2018, the last trading day prior to Velvet submitting its original $0.75 offer letter to the Iron Bridge Board of Directors. Certainty of value and immediate liquidity for shareholders in the face of volatile and challenging conditions. The Montney geological formation, accessible from Iron Bridge landholdings, is challenging, both from a geological and a technical perspective, and requires a significant commitment of capital. Given the current investment environment for the Canadian oil and gas sector, there is significant uncertainty as to the availability or cost of that capital for Iron Bridge and its shareholders.





The Montney geological formation, accessible from Iron Bridge landholdings, is challenging, both from a geological and a technical perspective, and requires a significant commitment of capital. Given the current investment environment for the Canadian oil and gas sector, there is significant uncertainty as to the availability or cost of that capital for Iron Bridge and its shareholders. The Amended Offer has the unqualified support and recommendation of the Iron Bridge Boards of Directors. All Iron Bridge Directors, Officers and certain shareholders, who together own approximately 36% of the outstanding Common Shares, entered into support agreements with Velvet committing their common shares to the Amended Offer.

TENDER YOUR SHARES TODAY

Iron Bridge shareholders can tender their shares immediately by contacting Kingsdale Advisors, Velvets Depositary and Information Agent, by telephone toll-free at 1-866-879-7650 within North America and at 1-416-867-2272 outside of North America or by e-mail at contactus@kingsdaleadvisors.com.

Advisors

Velvet has retained BMO Capital Markets as its exclusive financial advisor and Bennett Jones LLP as its legal advisor. Kingsdale Advisors is acting as strategic communications advisor and its Information Agent and Depositary.

Information Agent

For additional information, including assistance in depositing Iron Bridge shares to the offer, Iron Bridge shareholders should contact Kingsdale, toll-free in North America at 1-866-879-7650 or call collect outside North America at 1-416-867-2272 or by email at contactus@kingsdaleadvisors.com.

About Velvet

Velvet Energy Ltd. is a privately-held, full-cycle exploration and production company. Focused in the liquids-rich gas and light oil window of the Deep Basin of Alberta, the Company executes an organic growth business plan, including early land capture, technical evaluation, exploration and development of internally generated prospects. Headquartered in Calgary, Velvet has current production of approximately 26,000 boe per day and a focused land position consisting of over one million net undeveloped acres spanning from its core liquids-rich Ellerslie development in the greater Edson area to early phase Montney light oil exploration at Gold Creek.

Important Notice

Certain statements contained in this news release constitute forward-looking information within the meaning of applicable securities laws. Forward-looking information can be generally identified by the use of words such as anticipate, continue, estimate, expect, expected, intend, may, will, project, plan, should, believe and similar expressions. Specifically, forward-looking information in this news release includes statements respecting the offer, including the benefits, results, effects and timing of any such transaction and the completion thereof, if at all. Forward-looking statements in this news release describe the expectations of Velvet as of the date hereof. These statements are based on assumptions and involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause actual results or events to differ materially from those anticipated in such forward-looking statements for a variety of reasons, including without limitation, the ability to obtain regulatory approvals and meet the other conditions to any possible transaction. Although Velvet believes the expectations reflected in these forward-looking statements and the assumptions upon which they are based are reasonable, no assurance can be given that actual results will be consistent with such forward-looking statements, and they should not be unduly relied upon.

For further information:

Ken Woolner

President and Chief Executive Officer

(403) 781-9134

Chris Theal

Chief Financial Officer

(403) 781-9162

Peter Henry

Vice President, Finance

(403) 781-9133

Media Contact:

Kingsdale Advisors

Ian Robertson, 416-867-2333

Executive Vice President, Communication Strategy

irobertson@kingsdaleadvisors.com

Cell: 647-621-2646
YEREVAN,SEPTEMBER 20, ARMENPRESS. President of Armenia Armen Sarkissian continues receiving congratulations on the Independence Day of Armenia from different Heads of State.

As ARMENPRESS was informed from the press service of the Armenian Presidents Office, President of Ukraine Petro Poroshenko expressed confidence in his letter that the implementation of the potential existing in the bilateral relations of the two countries, as well as the centuries-old friendly relations between the two peoples will foster the strengthening of the dialogue based on mutual respect.



President of Belarus Alexander Lukashenko mentioned in his letter that Belarus continues being a reliable partner for Armenia and is ready to take all the necessary steps for developing interstate dialogue.

President of Moldova Igor Dodon expressed confidence that the historically friendly relations between the two states and peoples create firm grounds for future effective cooperation.

President of Turkmenistan Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedow expressed confidence in his congratulatory message that the high level partnership and mutual understanding between the two states is a firm ground for future constant development of relations and strengthening of mutually beneficial ties.

Chairman of the Executive Committee and Executive Secretary of the Commonwealth of Independent States Sergei Lebedev also sent congratulatory message to President Armen Sarkissian.

President of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan, UAE Vice President, Prime Minister, Ruler of Dubai Emirate Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Prince of Abu Dhabi, Deputy Supreme Commander-in-Chief of the UAE Armed Forces Mohammed Bin Zayed Al Nahyan also sent congratulatory messages to the President of Armenia.



President of Syria Bashar al-Assad also extended congratulations and best wishes to President Armen Sarkissian and the Armenian people. Governor-General of Australia General Sir Peter John Cosgrove also congratulated President Sarkissian on Independence Day.

Edited and translated by Tigran Sirekanyan
YEREVAN,SEPTEMBER 20, ARMENPRESS. The Speaker of the National Assembly of Armenia and the Prime Minister have an agreement to meet at least twice a month to discuss various issues, ARMENPRESS reports parliament speaker Ara Babloyan told the reporters.

As the head of the legislative I have always supported the idea of meeting with the PM more frequently. We have reached the agreement that we should have at least two working meetings every month to discuss the questions that we have to answer as leaders, Babloyan said.

Referring to the announcement of PM Pashinyan, saying that the Republican Party should no longer talk about the expediency of early parliamentary elections, Babloyan noted that different political forces have their own positions.

As the Speaker of the National Assembly I think that different political parties and forces can have their own approaches and can reach an agreement based on joint discussions. We have created all the opportunities for that, working groups are set up over the amendments in the Electoral Code, after which we can discuss the issue of how to go on with that process, Babloyan emphasized.

As refers to the issue of possible dissolution of the parliament, Babloyan noted that it cannot be decided by one person.

It cannot happen based on the opinion or wish of one person. It can be a result of discussions of political forces. If they reach a joint agreement, we will take that step. The parliament has been elected by legitimate elections. The parliament operates in line with the Constitution and I, as the head of the parliament, have to ensure its normal functioning, Ara Babloyan emphasized.

Edited and translated by Tigran Sirekanyan
YEREVAN,SEPTEMBER 20, ARMENPRESS. Prime Minister of Armenia Nikol Pashinyan receives congratulatory messages from heads of various states on the occasion of Independence Day of Armenia.

As ARMENPRESS was informed from the official website of the Prime Minister of Armenia, President of Russia Vladimir Putin sent a congratulatory message to Nikol Pashinyan, which runs as follows,

Honorable Nikol Vovayevich,

Please, accept my sincere congratulations on the occasion of Armenias National Holiday  Independence Day. The relations between our countries are based on good traditions of friendship, mutual respect and spiritual closeness.

I am confident that with joint efforts we will be able to ensure the future development of allied relations and multilateral cooperation, as well as partnership in the sidelines of Eurasian integration processes. This is undoubtedly in the interests of the peoples of Russian and Armenia and is for the benefit of the strengthening of regional security and stability.

I wish you, honorable Nikol Vovayevich, good health and successes, and welfare and prosperity to all your compatriots.

Edited and translated by Tigran Sirekanyan
YEREVAN,SEPTEMBER 20, ARMENPRESS. President of the USA Donald Trump has sent a congratulatory message to Prime Minister of Armenia Nikol Pashinyan on the occasion of Independence Day.

As ARMENPRESS was informed from the official website of the Prime Minister of Armenia, the letter runs as follows,

Honorable Mr. Prime Minister,

On behalf of the people of the USA I congratulate you and the people of Armenia on the occasion of the 27th anniversary of independence.

This year Armenia has various reasons for celebration. The peaceful, popular movement brought a new era in Armenia and we are ready to work with you to help to bring into life the will of your people to eradicate corruption, to establish representative and accountable administration based on independent judiciary, political and economic competition.

We thank you for your resolve partnership on various platforms, particularly your participation in NATO activities and for generously accepting Syrian refugees.

In the upcoming months opportunities will emerge for the settlement of Nagorno Karabakh conflict, which can open new opportunities for the Armenian-American partnership. As a member of the OSCE Minsk Group, the USA is ready to work with you for finding a lasting and peaceful settlement to the conflict.

This year also marks the 100th anniversary of the first Armenian republic and the centennial of Armenian-American friendship. I hope our partnership that started 100 years ago will further strengthen. On the occasion of this unique jubilee year I extent my best wishes to you and the Armenian people.

Edited and translated by Tigran Sirekanyan
YEREVAN,SEPTEMBER 20, ARMENPRESS. Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland has sent a congratulatory message to Prime Minister of Armenia Nikol Pashinyan on the occasion of Independence Day. As ARMENPRESS was informed from the official website of the Prime Minister of Armenia, the letter runs as follows,

I am very glad to extent my congratulations to Your Excellency on the occasion of your National holiday, particularly this year, when Armenia marks the centennial of the establishment of the first republic, and my best wishes, wishing the Armenian people successes and happiness this year. This is a good chance to recall the close historical ties between our countries and I expect that our friendship and cooperation will continue.

Edited and translated by Tigran Sirekanyan
Trump hasn't read the classified Russia documents he wants released to the public

President Donald Trump admitted Tuesday he has not read classified documents related to the Russia investigation that he recently ordered to be released to the public.

"I have had many people ask me to release them," Trump told Hill.TV. "Not that I didn't like the idea, but I wanted to wait, I wanted to see where it was all going."

Trump's decision alarmed national security experts, who cautioned that the declassification of some of the materials could endanger the lives of confidential sources.

Mark Warner, the ranking member on the Senate Intelligence Committee, has read the documents Trump wants released, and issued a stark warning following the White House's announcement.

Sign up for the latest Russia investigation updates here 

President Donald Trump told Hill.TV during a Tuesday interview that he is convinced the sensitive Russia documents that he ordered to be declassified will prove that the Russia investigation is a "hoax."

There's one caveat, according to The Hill: the president has not read the materials he wants released to the public.

"I have had many people ask me to release them," Trump said. "Not that I didn't like the idea but I wanted to wait, I wanted to see where it was all going."

He said his goal was to let the public ultimately decide, adding, "All I want to do is be transparent."

On Monday evening, the White House announced that Trump had directed the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Department of Justice (DOJ) "to provide for the immediate declassification" of parts of the FBI's June 2017 application to surveil former Trump campaign aide Carter Page, as well as FBI reports of interviews connected to Page and DOJ official Bruce Ohr.

The president also asked the FBI and the DOJ to release, without redaction, all text messages pertaining to the Russia investigation from former FBI director James Comey, former deputy FBI director Andrew McCabe, former FBI agent Peter Strzok, FBI lawyer Lisa Page, and Department of Justice official Bruce Ohr.

Story continues

The move marks the latest escalation in Trump's broadsides against the FBI and DOJ after Comey confirmed last year that the FBI was investigating whether the Trump campaign colluded with Moscow to tilt the 2016 race in his favour.

Trump's decision alarmed national security experts, who cautioned that the declassification of some of the material Trump wants released could endanger the lives of confidential sources and harm the US's relationship with its foreign allies.

Congressional Democrats also decried Trump's move, accusing him of interfering in an active investigation into him and his associates, and of using the country's law-enforcement agencies for his own political motives.

Republicans, meanwhile, applauded the president for what they described as an effort to promote full transparency.

Adam Schiff, the ranking member on the House Intelligence Committee, revealed Monday that FBI director Chris Wray and deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein had told him that the release of such sensitive documents related to the Russia probe and the FBI's sources and methods would breach a "red line."

Mark Warner, the ranking member on the Senate Intelligence Committee, has read the underlying documents that Trump wants released, and he issued a stark warning following the White House's announcement: "Be careful what you wish for."
A woman has spent the night fighting for her life and remains in a critical condition this morning at a Mackay hospital after being attacked by a shark which bit a chunk out of her leg and torso.

The Brisbane Times reports that the woman, 46, suffered significant injuries when she was attacked where she was swimming near a yacht in Cid Harbour, just off Whitsunday Island on Wednesday around 5pm.

She was pulled from the water and was bleeding profusely. A local doctor adiministered first aid on board the boat, and she was quickly airlifted by rescue helicopter to hospital about 8pm.

View this content at Business Insider

"The people on scene who got her onboard that yacht and quickly packed the gaping wound to help stem the haemorrhaging undoubtedly saved her life," RACQ CQ rescue crewman Ben McCauley told Fairfax Media.

"Given how serious her injuries were and how far from shore and from medical help they were, without the rescue helicopter I don't think she would have made it back to the mainland alive," McCauley said.

The area is a popular spot on the Great Barrier Reed for people who take sailing trips from Hamilton Island.

The woman was on holidays from Tasmania.

The Brisbane Times has more.


The man accused of murdering his Brazilian girlfriend in suburban Sydney has faced court for the first time in Rio De Janeiro.

Mario Santoro sat handcuffed as detectives dropped a startling revelation.

They claim he confessed to killing Cecilia Haddad, then taunted her family with messages to cover up what he did.

Mario Santoro allegedly sent chilling messages to Cecilias mother (pictured with Cecilia, right) after her death. Source: 7 News

Cecilia Haddads body was found in Lane Cove River on April 29. Source: 7 News

Dr Fabio Cardoso, of the Rio Homicide Squad, testified that, in an informal meeting, Santoro admitted to strangling Ms Haddad because he felt rejected when she ended their relationship.

He told the court Santoro left Ms Haddad, then returned two hours later, using a mattress or sack to cover her and put her in a car.

The court heard Santoro used his ex-girlfriends own diving weights to sink her in the Lane Cove River.

Then, prosecutors say he devised a callous cover-up.

Using Ms Haddads dead finger to access her phone, they claim he taunted her family, messaging her mother: Dear Milu, my WhatsApp is not working right.

Hes not here. He left his keys and hes returning to Brazil on Tuesday. He misses his daughters.

Im going to spend some time in the mountains.

Police allege Ms Haddad was already dead, and that Santoro threw her keys off the Gladesville Bridge on his way to flee home to Brazil.

Police allege Santoro threw Haddads keys off the Gladesville Bridge on his way to flee home to Brazil. Source: 7 News

But Santoros legal team is already casting doubt on any confession.

He made Santoro feel comfortable and maybe seduced him into saying things, defence lawyer Mauricio Mayr said.

We dont even know if this conversation happened.

Defence lawyer Dr Anderson Rollenberg said: Cecilia used dating apps to meet new people, so whos the criminal?

Maybe a psychopath, maybe her ex-husband that was in a legal battle with her?

A Brazilian court heard Santoro used his ex-girlfriends own diving weights to sink her in the Lane Cove River. Source: 7 News

However, NSW Police say her ex-husband was not in New South Wales when she died.

When the case goes to trial, the judge will decide if the media is allowed to record the court proceedings.

Ultimately, seven jurors will determine Santoros fate inside a Brazilian courtroom.

Brazilian police hope when they return to court in a month, Australian detectives will join them.
Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez on Thursday acknowledged an "error" in a book of his which reportedly reproduces parts of a diplomat's speech without referencing him, just a week after being accused of plagiarising his thesis. "There was an error in a reference which will be corrected in a new edition," Sanchez told reporters in Salzburg in Austria, where EU leaders were gathered. The news comes as a Madrid university is embroiled in a "Mastergate" scandal that has seen several high-profile politicians, including the head of the opposition Popular Party, accused of being gifted degrees without attending lecturers. Spanish daily El Pais reported that the book written by Sanchez and another economist in 2013 reproduced, without quotation marks or any reference, entire pages of a speech made by a Spanish diplomat even including a mistake in the original text. The Spanish government told the newspaper it was an "involuntary mistake" and that the authors would correct it. The book -- "The Spanish economy's new diplomacy" -- includes Sanchez's 2012 doctoral thesis as well as additions which include the diplomat's speech. Last week Sanchez, Pedro Sanchez, a former economics professor, was forced to fight back against allegations he plagiarised the thesis with paragraphs from an article by fellow economists and from a government presentation. He threatened to take legal action against media that published the claims and made his thesis public online. In Salzburg, Sanchez said he was willing to go to the Senate to give explanations but warned that "being in the opposition isn't about making noise". Pablo Iglesias, leader of far-left party Podemos and an ally of Sanchez, said the prime minister should explain himself. Spain's Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez is accused of plagiarism
Alibaba founder Jack Ma said his ambitious pledge to create one million jobs in the US had been scuppered by the trade row between Beijing and Washington, Chinese state news reported Thursday. The billionaire owner of China's largest online shopping portal made the headline-grabbing promise to Donald Trump last year, as Beijing courted the then-newly elected president. But Ma told official news agency Xinhua his vow had been made on the basis of continued cooperation and trade growth between the US and China, and would now be difficult to fulfill. "The current state of affairs has already destroyed the premise the promise was made on," Ma said in an interview on Tuesday. "There is no way to fulfill the promise, but we will not stop our hard work to promote the healthy development of China-US trade." Ma's bold promise following his January 2017 meeting at Trump Tower was greeted with scepticism by analysts at the time, who said the move was more about good PR than substance. One million jobs would be close to one percent of all jobs in the United States -- meaning that successfully delivering would make Alibaba one of the country's largest private employers. Ma in April doubled down on his pledge, claiming 10 million jobs could be created "if China and the US maintain good trade relations". But the dispute between the world's top two economies has swiftly escalated since Trump took office, with a series of tit-for-tat tariffs imposed on billions of dollars' worth of goods by both countries. This week Trump said he would press ahead with 10 percent levies on $200 billion of imports -- on top of $50 billion already targeted -- prompting Beijing to target another $60 billion of US goods with five to 10 percent taxes. Ma pointed to business opportunities in other regions such as Europe, South America, Russia and Africa, Xinhua said. "There are still many things that Chinese companies should and can do. They still have many opportunities despite the trade frictions between China and the US," Ma said. "Trade is not a weapon and cannot be used for wars," he added. "Trade should be the propeller of peace." Ma announced this month he would step down as head of the pioneering Chinese e-commerce giant next year, handing over to CEO and anointed successor Daniel Zhang. He has expressed a desire to follow in the philanthropic footsteps of Microsoft founder Bill Gates. "I'm just 54, and I still have at least 16 years to do something new," Ma told Xinhua. "It's exciting to have more than a dozen years to take on a new career." Jack Ma, the billionaire owner of China's largest online shopping portal Alibaba, made a headline-grabbing promise to create a million US jobs
TORONTO, Sept. 20, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- HARTE GOLD CORP. (Harte Gold or the Company) (TSX: HRT / OTC: HRTFF / Frankfurt: H4O) is pleased to announce it has received all necessary operating permits from the Government of Ontario to start commercial production at the Sugar Zone Mine. Harte Gold is now fully permitted to mine, process ore and pour gold on site.



Stephen G. Roman, President and CEO of Harte Gold, commented, We are very pleased to announce the completion of commercial permitting and the beginning of full-scale operations at the Sugar Zone Mine. Mining operations are currently expected to run for 12 years and will support further resource expansion drilling in the immediate vicinity of the mine and the ramp up of property-wide exploration programs. This is an important milestone for the Company and I would like to thank Vice President Tim Campbell and our team for their dedication and persistence over the past number of years.

Tim Campbell commented, The permitting of the Sugar Zone Mine has been a lengthy process with many moving parts, the success of which is due to a concerted team effort. The mine will employ close to 200 people and provide significant economic benefits to the immediate area and the province as a whole. We would like to thank those who played a role in making it happen, including our engineering and environment consultants, Netmizaaggamig Nishnaabeg (Pic Mobert) First Nation, Biigtigong Nishnaabeg (Pic River) First Nation, the Town of White River, and the provincial government for moving this project forward.

"This is great news for the people of White River and Northern Ontario. Mining helped shape our province's economic history - and under our government's watch it will continue to play an important role in our future. Harte Gold's Sugar Zone mine will employ hundreds of northern workers through direct and indirect jobs," said Premier Doug Ford. "As Ontarios first high-grade gold mine in over ten years, this project proves that Ontario's North is open for business."

Operational Readiness

Full commissioning of the mill complex is nearing completion. Testing of the crushing and conveyance system is complete and water has been successfully circulated through the mill. The power line has been built to site and all electrical equipment has been delivered and installed. The Company will connect to the Grid and energize the entire Sugar Zone Mine site and Mill complex this week.

Underground development work continues to exceed targeted rates. For the month of July, 254 metres of development was completed, or 8.2 metres per day. Development completed to-date has opened up several areas in the Sugar Zone Deposit, particularly in the near-surface Upper Zone area, to provide early high grade stopes. The Company continues to review and refine its mine plan to optimize operations.

About Harte Gold Corp.

Harte Gold is focused on the exploration and development of its 100% owned Sugar Zone Mine where it has completed a 70,000 tonne Advanced Exploration Bulk Sample, mined 30,000 tonnes under a Phase I Commercial Production Permit, permitted and built an 800 TPD processing plant. Harte Gold received operational permits to start full commercial production September 2018. The Sugar Zone Mine is located 80 kilometres east of the Hemlo Gold Camp in Ontario. Using a 3 g/t Au cut-off, the Mineral Resource Estimate dated February 15, 2018 contains an Indicated Mineral Resource Estimate of 2,607,000 tonnes grading 8.52 g/t for 714,200 ounces contained gold and an Inferred Mineral Resource Estimate of 3,590,000 tonnes, grading 6.59 g/t for 760,800 ounces contained gold. Harte Gold also holds the Stoughton-Abitibi property on the Destor-Porcupine Fault Zone, east of Timmins, Ontario adjacent to the Holloway Gold Mine.

QA/QC Statement

The Company has implemented a quality assurance and control (QA/QC) program to ensure sampling and analysis of mine and exploration work is conducted in accordance with industry standards. Drill core is sawn in half with one half of the core shipped to Actlabs Laboratories located in Thunder Bay, ON, while the other half is retained at the Companys core facilities in White River, ON, for future verification. Certified reference standards and blanks are inserted into the sample stream on a regular interval basis and monitored as part of the QA/QC program. Gold analysis is performed by fire assay using atomic absorption, gravimetric or pulp metallic finish. The Mineral Resource Estimate was prepared in compliance with NI 43-101 guidelines. Robert Kusins, P. Geo., Harte Golds Senior Mineral Resource geologist, is the Companys Qualified Person and has prepared, supervised the preparation, or approved the scientific and technical disclosure in this news release.

For further information, please contact:

Stephen G. Roman Shawn Howarth President and CEO Vice President, Corporate Development Tel: 416-368-0999 Tel: 416-368-0999 Email: sgr@hartegold.com E-mail: sh@hartegold.com

The Toronto Stock Exchange has not reviewed and does not accept responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.
Leading figures in Nigeria's aviation industry voiced shock and anger Thursday after plans to relaunch a national airline, 15 years after the collapse of a former flag carrier, were placed on hold. The government in July announced at a glitzy presentation at Britain's Farnborough Airshow that Nigeria Air would begin operation at the end of the year. The new airline was to replace Nigeria Airways, which collapsed in 2003 as a result of government interference, inefficiency, mismanagement, debts and corruption. But on Wednesday Aviation Minister Hadi Sirika said the plan had been suspended for strategic reasons, without giving details. A presidency official who asked to remain anonymous told reporters the delay was due to funding. "The Economic Management Team (EMT) chaired by the vice president (Yemi Osinbajo) did not give the go-ahead," the official said. "(The) EMT recommendation is that government should not set up a national carrier with public funds. EMT wants the ministry of transportation to instead accelerate the search for a strategic investment partners who will finance and manage the new airline." He said there was no provision for the project in this year's federal budget. "In the absence of a borrowing plan for government participation, the president ruled against spending money that is not in the budget," he added. Online, Nigerians reacted angrily to what they perceived as waste of money on launching the project, which the government had said would be "private sector-driven". The government pledged to cover start-up costs of $300 million (256 million euros). Many commentators demanded to know how much had already been spent on the launch and branding at a time when the economy is recovering from recession. - Industry disappointment - In the last 35 years alone, more than 40 airlines that have actually got off the ground have gone bust in Nigeria while domestic travel is dogged by delays and cancellations. Foreign airlines dominate the most popular international routes to Europe, North America and the Gulf. The general secretary of the National Union of Air Transport Employees, Olayinka Abioye, described Wednesday's suspension as "very sad" and "unfortunate". "An airline flying our flag would have been a symbol of national pride and prestige. It would have created jobs for our people and brought in needed foreign investment," he said. "The initial concern was that the private sector which was to be the driver of the project was not carried along," he said, saying it was wrong to have launched the project overseas. Supo Atobatele, editor-in-chief of Air Transport Quarterly and a former spokesman of the Nigerian Airspace Management Agency, said a national carrier was still necessary. "Nigeria is a regional aviation hub because of its huge population, leaving a yawning gap in air travel," he said. "The coming of a national carrier will boost competition, improve services and reduce air costs." He said rather than being the financier, government should partner tested local and foreign investors to manage the proposed airline. Bids should be advertised for investors and the process should be fair and transparent, he said. "The mistakes of the past should be avoided. We should not go back to those things that caused problems for Nigeria Airways." Nigeria's last flag carrier was Nigeria Airways, which collapsed in 2003 under a mountain of debt
A confidential report by Belgian investigators confirms that British intelligence services hacked state-owned Belgian telecom giant Belgacom on behalf of Washington, an official said Thursday. The admission by Belgium is one of the consequences of the myriad revelations made in 2013 by whistleblower Edward Snowden and risks fraying ties between the close allies. The report, which summarises a five-year judicial inquiry, is almost complete and was submitted to the office of Justice Minister Koen Geens, a source close to the case told AFP, confirming Belgian press reports. Snowden, a former contractor for the US National Security Agency, spectacularly uncovered the extent of snooping by the US intelligence services and has been living in exile ever since. Snowden's trove of data also exposed the NSA's close cooperation with other agencies, such as Britain's GCHQ, which is responsible for collecting electronic intelligence. The Belgian probe focused on GCHQ thanks to about twenty slides among Snowden's document trove that expose the targets of GCHQ's hacking. These include the Belgian company's BICS unit, which handles huge volumes of phone and data traffic in Africa and the Middle East, as well as European customers that included European Union institutions. The matter will now be discussed within Belgium's National Security Council, which includes the Belgian Prime Minister with top security ministers and officials. Contacted by AFP, the Belgian Federal Prosecutor's Office and the cabinet of Minister Geens refused to comment. In the summer of 2013, when the scandal broke, Flemish newspaper De Standaard said BICS was central to the spying operation in order to access communications with phone numbers from Middle Eastern countries, including Syria and Yemen. The then Belgian prime minister, Elio di Rupo, promised in September 2013 to take "the appropriate steps" if the "high-level involvement" of a foreign country was confirmed. State-owned telecom giant Belgacom, whose headquarters are seen in Brussels in 2014, was hacked by British intelligence on behalf of the US, according to a confidential report
Brazil looks to be charging headlong into a two-horse presidential race between the far right and the left in what has been an at times surreal and unpredictable campaign. But while right-wing Jair Bolsonaro and leftist Fernando Haddad head opinion polls, they're also the most hated candidates, something that analyst Thomaz Favaro believes could pose a problem for the next president's credibility. "The fact that these options generate so much rejection can have serious consequences for the country," said Favaro, from Control Risk consultancy. "It brings a problem of legitimacy for the next government which will struggle to implement its reforms... whoever wins, he'll come up against a lot of resistance in Congress." In the latest opinion poll by Ibope, Bolsonaro led with 28 percent while Haddad climbed to second on 19 percent just a week after polling a mere eight, directly after his nomination by the Workers' Party (PT) as their replacement candidate after former president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva was barred from standing because he is serving a 12-year prison sentence for corruption. But 42 percent of respondents said they would never vote for Bolsonaro -- a figure that has remained consistent amidst accusations of racism, sexism and homophobia against the ex-army captain over some controversial comments -- while 29 percent similarly reject Haddad. In a further twist, should those two get through the October 7 first round to the run-off second round three weeks later, Ibope's poll says they would finish level with 40 percent each. A reader who wrote in to the economic newspaper Valor summed up the mood with this comment: "I will never forgive Bolsonaro for forcing me to vote PT." - Lesser of evils? - When it comes to the second round of voting it may well be a case of who voters hate the least rather than like the most. "Unless someone (else) bounces back, we will have an election like 1989 when Fernando Collor, a politician from an insignificant party, fought a duel with Lula," and won, said Lincoln Secco, an analyst and historian at the University of Sao Paulo. The uncertainty of an election in which the initial frontrunner was languishing in jail while his main opponent recovered in hospital, shows no sign of abating. The Lula soap opera was a long drawn-out affair and while the 72-year-old premier from 2003-2010 refused to give up on his bid to stand in the election, his conviction for accepting a seaside apartment as a bribe eventually ruled him out of the running. Even while he tried to exhaust every appeal process available to him, Bolsonaro's fate took a dark turn as he was stabbed earlier this month by a leftwing activist while out on the campaign trail. He has had two operations and remains in hospital recovering, with his ability to return to the campaign trail even before the October 28 second round vote looking increasingly unlikely. - Untainted by graft - There's nothing new about right versus left presidential races, particularly in Brazil, but the main protagonists are not what the country is used to. On the one hand, Bolsonaro has openly expressed admiration for the much-hated military dictatorship from 1964-85 and its use of torture, while Haddad, 55, is a virtual unknown outside of Sao Paulo, where he was once the mayor. Another advantage for Bolsonaro and Haddad is that they haven't been tainted by the wide-ranging corruption scandal that brought down Lula and saw his hand-picked successor as president, Dilma Rousseff impeached. Bolsonaro, for his part, has been seducing his supporters with videos taken from his hospital bed. The 63-year-old has also "capitalized on his anti-establishment discourse, capturing voters who view the traditional parties as compromised," said Favaro. His "tough line on crime has also won him many votes amongst those worried about security." "The conciliatory language of the traditional right and pragmatic center have lost their popular appeal," Secco told AFP. And that can only benefit those at the extremes. Fernando Haddad's numbers in opinion polls are rising rapidly, just over a week after he was named as the Workers' Party candidate in place of the iconic Lula Many are repulsed by Jair Bolsonaro's discourse, branded racist, sexist and homophobic by some, but he commands a loyal support base
Leftist ELN guerillas freed a teenager on Wednesday who was kidnapped two weeks before in northwestern Colombia, the country's ombudsman said. The rebels handed the girl over to a commission from the ombudsman's office, after abducting her on September 7 from her home in Orupa, in the jungle region of Choco. A National Liberation Army (ELN) rebel fighter by the name of Comandante Uriel, who heads the regional guerrillas, said in a message sent to journalists on Saturday that the teen was kidnapped because she was "an armed forces informant," and that she would be released after "routine procedures." The government believes the ELN -- Colombia's last guerrilla force with about 1,500 fighters -- is holding around 10 hostages. President Ivan Duque, who took office on August 7 promising to take a hardline against the ELN guerrillas, maintains that in order to resume peace talks the rebels must release all their hostages and end "all criminal activities." The ELN is seeking a deal similar to the peace arrangement reached with much larger Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) rebels in 2016 under Duque's predecessor, Juan Manuel Santos. A member of the "Omar Gomez" Western War Front of the National Liberation Army (ELN) in a camp on the banks of the San Juan River, Choco department, Colombia
There is "almost unanimous" backing among European Union leaders for Britain to hold another referendum on Brexit, Maltese Prime Minister Joseph Muscat said Thursday. "We would like the almost impossible to happen, that the UK has another referendum," Muscat told BBC radio. "I think most of us would welcome a situation where there is the possibility of the British people putting things into perspective, seeing what has been negotiated, seeing the options, and then deciding once and for all." Muscat's stance was reiterated by Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babis, who said he would support Britain holding another vote on EU membership. Babis added he had been "shocked" by Britons' June 2016 decision to leave the bloc -- now scheduled to happen in March next year -- which has added to Europe's growing list of problems. "I'm very unhappy that (the) UK is leaving so it would be better maybe to make another referendum and maybe the people in the meantime they could change their view," he told the BBC. "Because then we will solve the problem quite quickly." Six months ahead of Britain's planned EU departure, calls have been growing for a second referendum -- backed by an expanding list of centrist politicians. The campaign for another poll has also attracted hefty financial backing, including from Hungarian-US billionaire George Soros, with a series of events staged across Britain over the summer to drum up support. But the government is opposed to another referendum, while the main opposition Labour Party is not supporting the calls but also not ruling out the prospect. The pro-EU Best for Britain group said the Maltese and Czech leaders statements showed "there is still time for the UK to check with the people if Brexit is what they still want." Its chief Eloise Todd added: "It's time to give the people -- not politicians -- the final say on Brexit." Malta's Prime Minister Joseph Muscat speaks to the media as he arrives in Salzburg, Austria on September 19, 2018 prior to a dinner as part of the EU Informal Summit of Heads of State or Government Czech Republic's Prime Minister Andrej Babis said had been "shocked" by Britons' June 2016 decision to leave the EU
EU leaders called Thursday for more intense talks with Egypt and other North African countries to take further steps against illegal migration to Europe, particularly by fighting those who smuggle and traffic them. Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz said leaders meeting in the Austrian city of Salzburg backed the plan and noted that Egypt, at least, is "ready to intensify talks with the European Union". "I believe that this will be an important further step in the fight against illegal migration, but above all also in the fight against the business of traffickers," Kurz told reporters. Egypt's foreign ministry confirmed Thursday it has proposed hosting a joint summit of EU and Arab leaders to tackle a range of issues, including migration. EU sources said the summit could be held in February. The Cairo-based Arab League includes North African countries Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco as well as those in the Middle East and Gulf. The EU has previously struck cooperation deals with Turkey and Libya that helped to cut migration to Europe sharply since a 2015 peak, but the bloc wants to expand work with all north African countries. The 28-nation bloc is increasingly focusing on less controversial plans to bolster its external borders as sharp divisions persist over redistributing asylum seekers who make it to Europe. Summit host Kurz said the leaders proposed during an opening dinner on Wednesday "that talks be opened with Egypt but also with other North African states." "This proposal has been supported by all," Kurz added. Kurz, whose country holds the EU's six-month rotating presidency, said he and Donald Tusk, the European Council president who chairs summits, will now reach out to the north African countries. He said the signs were encouraging from Egypt, which EU officials said Kurz and Tusk visited on Sunday to discuss deeper cooperation. Following his return to Brussels, Tusk called for a summit of EU and Arab League leaders. - Migration 'political crisis' - Kurz said Egypt has been "efficient" in the last two years in preventing boats from leaving its shores or forcing them back when they did. EU sources told reporters that Egypt has set an example in fighting traffickers and smugglers, which could be followed by other North African countries. They said Tusk will meet for more talks on fighting illegal migration with Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in New York later this month. Tusk called the informal summit in a bid to defuse simmering tensions over migration. Since the summer, Italy has repeatedly turned away rescue ships carrying hundreds of African migrants to force other EU member countries to share responsibility for them. The migrants were finally relocated to member states and non-member Albania on an ad-hoc basis, but EU countries have so far found an overall solution elusive. They have yet to work out ways to implement proposals agreed at a June summit to set up centres in Europe and North Africa to separate genuine refugees from economic migrants who could be deported. EU sources said the idea would not be to set up a disembarkation centre in Egypt, which Cairo is on record as opposing. No other North African country has agreed to host such a centre. Kurz, whose government takes a harder line on migration, said more EU leaders realise that tougher external borders rather than "sharing refugees" were the solution. The EU is still confronted with the refusal of Hungary and other former communist eastern countries to admit migrants, particularly from Muslim countries. But Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte said frontline countries like Italy have not given up on a scheme to redistribute the asylum seekers who arrive on their shores among other bloc members. Luxembourg's Prime Minister Xavier Bettel argued that migration is now only a "political crisis," unlike in 2015 when Europe faced a real logistical and humanitarian emergency with the biggest movement of asylum seekers since World War II. Kurz said the EU leaders meeting in Salzburg had backed the plan
The European Court of Human Rights ruled against Poland on Thursday for exhuming the bodies of victims of a 2010 plane crash which killed the country's president, saying it violated their families' right to privacy. Polish officials began the controversial exhumations in 2016 as part of their bid to prove that the crash in Smolensk, western Russia, was not an accident but the result of foul play. The crash, which claimed the lives of president Lech Kaczynski and 95 others, mostly senior Polish statesmen, was attributed by Polish and Russian investigators to human error and bad weather. That conclusion has been fiercely contested by Kaczynski's twin brother Jaroslaw Kaczynski, who dominates Polish politics as head of the governing rightwing Law and Justice party. He has long claimed there was a cover-up by Russian officials, alleging the "high probability" of an explosion and that Russian air controllers deliberately misdirected the plane at landing. The Polish delegation was on its way to a ceremony in Russia's Katyn forest, where thousands of Polish army officers were killed by Soviet secret police in 1940 -- a massacre the Kremlin denied until 1990. Prosecutors ordered the exhumations to test for traces of explosives or combustion. Opinion polls at the time found that just 10 percent of Poles were in favour of digging up the bodies. Ewa Maria Solska and Malgorzata Ewa Rybicka, the widows of two of the victims, filed their case with the rights court after unsuccessfully contesting the exhumations, saying they were carried out last May without their consent. The court ruled that since Polish law did not provide any way for the women to appeal the decision, they had been deprived of a minimum degree of protection concerning their rights to privacy and family life. "The applicants objected to the exhumations, writing letters to the prosecutor general, lodging interlocutory appeals and seeking an injunction in the civil courts, all to no avail," the court said. It ordered the government to pay each woman 16,000 euros ($18,700) in damages. Poland's Justice Minister Zbigniew Ziobro denied that the ruling was an indictment of the actions of the Polish authorities. "We can see this ruling as a fiasco of the prosecution when the Civic Platform liberals (a Polish party previously led by current EU Council President Donald Tusk) were in power," he told reporters, accusing it of "not doing its job". He repeated the government's contention that the exhumations were necessary because no autopsies were carried out on the victims' bodies when they brought back to Poland. A memorial stone with a plaque which reads in Russian and Polish "To the memory of 96 Poles headed by Polish Republic President Lech Kaczynski, who died in the air disaster near Smolensk on April 10, 2010" at the site of the crash is seen April 2011
Eight European countries at the United Nations including five Security Council members on Thursday called on Israel to reverse its decision to demolish a Palestinian village in the West Bank. Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Sweden, Belgium, Poland and the Netherlands warned that the demolition of the village of Khan al-Ahmar "would severely threaten the viability of the two-state solution". "We therefore call upon the Israeli authorities to reconsider their decision to demolish Khan al-Ahmar," the countries said in a joint statement released ahead of a council meeting on the Middle East. On September 5, Israel's supreme court upheld an order to raze the village on grounds that it was built without the proper permits. The community of roughly 200 people is located in a strategic spot near Israeli settlements and along a road leading to the Dead Sea. There have been warnings that continued Israeli settlement construction in that area could divide the West Bank in two and cut it off from Jerusalem, killing off the prospect of amassing contiguous land for a viable future Palestinian state. Activists sleep in Khan al-Ahmar in the Israeli occupied West Bank, where they are protesting against plans to demolish the village
Dozens of farmers and local officials stormed out of a meeting with France's new environment minister on Thursday as he confirmed two more bears would soon be released into the Pyrenees mountains. Around 40 brown bears currently roam the range between France and Spain after France began importing them from Slovenia in 1996 after the native population had been hunted to near-extinction. But the move to increase their numbers has infuriated farmers who have long complained about them killing sheep and other livestock. The addition of two more females was announced by former environment minister Nicolas Hulot in March as part of a 10-year "Bear Plan" to increase their numbers to some 50 sexually mature bears. There are just two males in the area. Environmental activists say the bears are integral to preserving a fragile ecosystem, and are emblematic of the government's plan announced in July to shore up biodiversity which is under threat from human activity and climate change. Following Hulot's shock resignation last month -- on grounds President Emmanuel Macron's government was not taking enough action on green issues -- opponents of the plan had been hoping the plan might be sidelined. But after meeting with around 60 farmers and officials in the southwestern city of Pau, new minister Francois de Rugy told journalists the bears would be released "by early October". "Lots of lawmakers are against it," he acknowledged, "but at some point we have to decide, which is what I've done." - 'Get rid of them' - The news prompted most of those at the meeting to walk out. "What good is talking if the decision has already been made? We left," said Etienne Serna, the mayor of Aramits who acts as spokesman for an anti-bear association. Meanwhile, around 200 shepherds and farmers who had refused to meet with Rugy held a protest in Asasp-Arros, a neighbouring village at the foot of the Pyrenees. "Using all possible means, we will refuse the re-introduction of bears on our land, where they have no place," said Olivier Maurin, president of a local anti-bear group. "We don't want these predators, and we will get rid of them," he said next to a teddy bear hanging from a noose with the words "Wanted: Dead or Toothless". - Livestock deaths - The battle over the bears echoes the controversy over policies encouraging the comeback of wolves across the Pyrenees starting in the 1990s. Rugy said despite the protests he would push ahead with a visit to a summering pasture to meet with shepherds herding the flocks not far from the Spanish border. "I believe in dialogue," he said, but "if we wait, we would never decide anything," adding that it was necessary to "get out of this stalemate." The government compensates farmers for any livestock deaths from bear attacks, though that has failed to ease their ire. They point to an incident in July 2017 when more than 200 sheep died after running over a cliff while being chased by a bear. But environmentalists hailed the decision as a sign of shifting mentalities, pointing to recent elections of pro-bear mayors in several towns. The WWF called Rugy's decision as "a strong signal of the government's determination to halt the disappearance of species on French territory." Jean-David Abel of France Nature Environment (FNE) said the re-introductions should include measures to help farmers, such as training in the use of guard dogs. Brown bears were hunted to near extinction in the Pyrenees but there are now around 40 roaming the mountain range Francois de Rugy, seen on the right, said the plan to release two more female bears on the Pyrenees would go ahead as planned French shepherds have held a number of protests over plans to bring bears to the French Pyrenees from Slovenia, with the demonstrations generally featuring teddy bears Farmers in the Pyrenees are furious at plans to increase the number of bears in the mountain range between France and Spain
Amazon Announces ADT Pulse as Professional Installation and Monitoring Solution for Alexa Guard



Alexa Guard Deepens Amazons Marketing and Distribution Relationship with ADT

BOCA RATON, Fla., Sept. 20, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- ADT Inc. (NYSE: ADT), the leading provider of monitored security and interactive home and business automation solutions in the United States and Canada, today announced a new strategic initiative with Amazon.

Starting later this year, ADT will support integration of Amazons new Alexa Guard feature with the ADT Pulse security system, helping ADT customers enhance their homes security capabilities by detecting specific sounds via the customers Echo device when theyre away from home. Once available, ADT professional installation and monitoring solutions will be offered to customers through the Alexa Guard website and Amazon mobile app.

ADT worked closely with Amazon to seamlessly integrate Alexa Guard with ADTs Pulse security system and professional monitoring to enhance ADT customers security when theyre away from home. When a customer enables Alexa Guard on their Amazon Echo device and says Alexa, Im leaving, Alexa will notify the customer if she detects the sound of smoke alarms, carbon monoxide alarms or breaking glass while the customer is away. These notifications, called Smart Alerts, are delivered to a customers smartphone to let them know which sound was detected, and provide an audio clip of that event. Customers with an ADT Pulse system using Alexa Guard can choose to forward Smart Alerts to ADT monitoring professionals to help determine if additional action should be taken, including dispatching first responders if needed.

In 2018, ADT set out to redefine security with innovative products and services, such as ADT Go and Digital Security. The integration of Amazons Alexa Guard with ADTs Pulse security system and professional installation and security monitoring services is an exciting next step on our innovation roadmap and our successful collaboration with Amazon, said Jim DeVries, current President and incoming CEO of ADT. Amazons vision to simplify the smart home experience through voice-enabled action matches perfectly with ADTs passion for security and customer service, making us natural collaborators to ensure our customers smart home is a safe home. Todays announcement will extend our footprint in the security and automation space, open new eCommerce sales and marketing channels for our products and services, and further expand our leadership in the category. We look forward to continuing to work alongside Amazon to provide innovative security solutions to our customers and broader audiences.

Customers love using Alexa to help make their daily lives easier, and we continue to build new voice-first experiences to make customers homes even smarter, said Daniel Rausch, Vice President, Amazon Alexa. ADT has over 140 years of experience in the professional security installation and monitoring business. Were so excited to team up with them for the launch of Alexa Guard. Since ADT brought the simplicity of Alexa voice control to their home security systems, weve heard from customers that they enjoy the added convenience and peace of mind they have using the ADT Pulse skill. Now, with Alexa Guard were making that experience even better for customers. When Alexa Guard is enabled, customers can choose to have their Echo devices detect the sounds of smoke alarms, carbon monoxide alarms, or breaking glass when theyre away from home. When the selected sound is detected, customers with ADT Pulse will be able to forward their Smart Alerts to ADT, offering an extra layer of security.

Later this year, ADT will offer new Echo devices directly to new and existing customers, assisting with product set-up and additional support for those who purchase the device through ADT. Additionally, ADT and Amazon are working together to provide offers and promotions to Amazon customers for ADT services and solutions, creating eCommerce opportunities for ADT while enabling customers to have enhanced home security options nationwide.

About ADT

ADT is a leading provider of security and automation solutions in the United States and Canada, protecting homes and businesses, people on-the-go and digital networks. ADT delivers same-day service and live answer within seconds in customer operations, making security more accessible than ever before, backed by 24/7 support, helping customers feel more safe and empowered. ADT is headquartered in Boca Raton, Florida and employs approximately 17,500 people throughout North America.





Media Relations

Jason Shockley

tel: +1 561.322.7235

jshockley@adt.com
France is to give movies made by women a special subsidy bonus in a bid to counter sexism in the film industry, its culture minister said Wednesday. Francoise Nyssen, who helped launch the 50/50 pledge on gender equality earlier this year that has since shaken Hollywood, said productions that are "exemplary" on equality will get an extra 15 percent subsidy. The new bonus will work on a points system, Nyssen said, with productions given one point for a female director, scriptwriter or chief technician. A film will have to get eight points to qualify for the extra cash. "When things do not change themselves or change too slowly, we have to change them ourselves," the minister said as she announced the experiment, which will initially last for a year. "We cannot wait any longer," Nyssen added. "The figures oblige us to act. As it stands, only one film in six would qualify for this subsidy." Nyssen and her Swedish counterpart launched a new international fund to get more women behind the camera at the Cannes film festival in May. She also pressured the world's biggest festival into signing up to the 50/50 for 2020 charter, in what was hailed as a historic coup by campaigners. Many stars at the Venice film festival earlier this month wore 50/50 badges and lapel pins to support the movement. The new French measures are specifically targeted at opening up technical positions to women, which have remained an almost exclusively male preserve. Subsidies are a key motor for the film industry, particularly in Europe, with many movies relying on seed cash and tax write-off schemes. - Gulf in earnings - The minister is also forcing the French film council, the CNC, to demand that producers hand over detailed information on the gender balance of their movies, and how much men and women earn. Nyssen has been a vocal supporter of the #MeToo and Time's Up movements that were sparked by the downfall of Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein. She has also made the campaign against sexism and the underrepresentation of women in the film industry a priority. "We cannot let the wave that rose up last year fall away," she told a meeting of a special commission of filmmakers she assembled to tackle gender equality in the cinema. "We cannot go back to how it was, as if Weinstein never existed -- as if it was only him, that equality on paper also meant an equal chance in reality." The minister was a key player behind a red carpet demonstration by Hollywood stars and women directors at Cannes calling for equality. The 50/50 gender parity pledge which came out of that unprecedented protest has now been adopted by most of the world's leading film festivals including Venice, Toronto and earlier this week San Sebastian. France is home to Europe's biggest film industry, with around a quarter of films made by women directors. That is much better than many other major European players such as Britain (12 percent) and Spain (10 percent). But it remains far behind women directors in Scandinavian countries who enjoy relative equality, with 43 percent of Finnish films made by women. In terms of pay, French women directors are still paid on average 42 percent less than their male colleagues, according to a recent CNC study. Brigitte Rollet, an expert on women in cinema, told AFP that female directors "often have less money, are more limited in the genre of films they can make and have more trouble getting a second film made." Nyssen said that she believed that "quotas and financial incentives" could spark change. "It is cinema's job to open people's eyes and change mentalities," said Frederique Bredin, the head of the CNC. French Culture Minister Francoise Nyssen, seen here on the right, says France will give a major cash bonus to films in which women play a key production role
The German authorities on Wednesday suspended an operation to evict protesters, holed up in forest treehouses to block the expansion of an open-pit coal mine, after the death of a journalist. The man, "most likely a journalist" according to the police, died on Wednesday after falling from a bridge that connected two of the treehouses. "We simply cannot continue as if nothing has happened," North Rhine-Westphalia Regional Minister Herbert Reul told a press conference. A website of the forest activists said that "a friend who has accompanied us as a journalist for a long time in the forest, fell today from a suspension bridge over 20 meters high in Beechtown and died". Police officers have faced fierce resistance since the middle of last week while attempting to clear the demonstrators from Hambach Forest near the border with Belgium and the Netherlands. On Sunday, nine environmental activists were injured and 34 detained as part of the operation to remove dozens of treehouses, some as high as 25 metres (80 feet) off the ground. The occupation began in 2012 and had until now been quietly tolerated. But local authorities have now ordered the woods to be cleared immediately, citing fire hazards. The death of the journalist was a "tragic accident" and not "related to the ongoing evacuation work," said the police. The activists, who are protesting the expansion of energy giant RWE's open-pit lignite mine, one of Europe's largest, had called for a mass mobilisation by supporters to prevent the forest from being cleared. The battle has intensified since RWE announced plans to clear half of the forest's remaining 200 hectares (500 acres) from mid-October. RWE owns the forest and is legally allowed to cut down trees to access the brown coal, or lignite, in the ground during the annual logging season. It says the clearing is necessary to ensure energy supply, including of nearby power plants in Germany's most populous state, North Rhine-Westphalia. Activists oppose the use of the cheap but polluting fuel, and say the forest is home to protected species such as Bechstein's bat and century-old beech and oak trees. Police erected a screen after a man fell from the trees in Hambach forest on Wednesday
Israel's air force commander was set to lead a delegation to Moscow on Thursday to share the military's findings on the Syrian downing of a Russian warplane following Israeli air strikes. Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has blamed Israel for the incident, which was the worst case of friendly fire between Moscow and his regime since Russian forces intervened in the war-torn country in late 2015. The Russia-bound delegation, led by Major General Amikam Norkin, will "present the situation report... regarding all aspects" of the incident, the Israeli army said in a statement on Wednesday. It will also provide information on "Iranian attempts to transfer strategic weapons to the Hezbollah terror organisation and to establish an Iranian military presence in Syria", the statement said. Syrian air defences shot down the Russian military plane on Monday, killing all 15 soldiers aboard, after Israeli missiles had struck the coastal region of Latakia. Israel has vowed to stop its arch-foe Iran, which backs the Assad regime, from entrenching itself militarily in neighbouring Syria. Earlier this month, it acknowledged having carried out more than 200 strikes in Syria over the past 18 months, mainly against Iranian targets. After Monday's incident, the Russian military accused Israeli pilots of using "the Russian plane as a cover, exposing it to fire from Syrian air defences". Israel denied the allegations, saying its jets were already back in its airspace when Syrian forces launched the missiles that hit the Russian plane. In a letter to his Russian counterpart on Wednesday, Assad offered his condolences for the deaths after the plane was downed by Syria's Russian-made S-200 air defence system. "This unfortunate incident was the result of Israeli arrogance and depravity," the Syrian leader said. "We are determined that such tragic events will sway neither you nor us from continuing the fight against terrorism," he added in the letter published by the official Sana news agency. - 'Tragic accidental circumstances' - Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu expressed his "sorrow" to Russian President Vladimir Putin in a phone call on Tuesday, offering to assist Moscow in the investigation. However, he insisted the Russian plane had been felled by "extensive and inaccurate Syrian anti-aircraft (fire)". Putin had said the incident was the result of "tragic accidental circumstances," warning Netanyahu against carrying out such operations in the future. He also pledged to beef up security for Russian forces in Syria, which three years ago stepped in to support Assad whose grip on power had been weakened by rebels and jihadist fighters. Israel has admitted to striking Syria to prevent what it says are deliveries of advanced weaponry to Lebanon's Hezbollah, an armed movement backed by Iran and which fights alongside Syrian troops. On Wednesday, Hezbollah's leader Hassan Nasrallah said the Shiite movement would stay in Syria "until further notice". "We will remain there even after the Idlib accord," Nasrallah said, referring to a Russia-Turkey deal to prevent a Syrian regime offensive on the country's last rebel-held stronghold. Israel is seeking to defuse tensions after Syrian air defences mistakenly downed a Russian military plane Syrian air defences shot down the Russian military plane on Monday, killing all 15 soldiers aboard, after Israeli missiles had struck the coastal region of Latakia Israel has sought to ease tensions after a Russian Il-20M military aircraft was mistakenly shot down by Syrian air defences The Syrian regime has received Russian military assistance in its bid to defeat rebels and jihadists
Israel's air force commander held a "transparent discussion" with Russian officials in Moscow on Thursday, the Israeli army said, after a Russian warplane was downed by Syria earlier in the week following Israeli air strikes. Major General Amikam Norkin led a delegation to the Russian capital to share the military's findings on the incident, which Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has blamed on Israel. "The meetings were held in good spirits and the representatives shared a professional, open and transparent discussion on various issues," the Israeli army said in a statement after the visit by Norkin. "Both sides emphasised the importance of the states' interests and the continued implementation of the deconfliction system," the army said, referring to information exchanged between Israel and Russia to reduce the risk of air incidents. Syrian air defences shot down the Russian Il-20 military plane on Monday, killing all 15 soldiers aboard after Israeli missiles struck the coastal region of Latakia. The incident was the worst case of friendly fire between Moscow and Assad's regime since Russian forces intervened in the war-torn country in late 2015. Afterwards, the Russian military accused Israeli pilots of using "the Russian plane as a cover, exposing it to fire from Syrian air defences". Israel denied the allegations, saying its jets were already back in its airspace when Syrian forces launched the missiles that hit the Russian plane. In a letter to his Russian counterpart on Wednesday, Assad offered his condolences for the deaths after the plane was downed by Syria's Russian-made S-200 air defence system. "This unfortunate incident was the result of Israeli arrogance and depravity," the Syrian leader said. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Thursday that he had sent Norkin to Moscow to "preserve cooperation between our two countries". Netanyahu expressed his "sorrow" to Russian President Vladimir Putin in a phone call on Tuesday but insisted the Russian plane was shot down by "extensive and inaccurate Syrian anti-aircraft (fire)". Putin has said the incident was the result of "tragic accidental circumstances," but also warned Netanyahu against carrying out such operations in the future. According to Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, Putin held talks with his Security Council on Thursday. "The strengthening of the security of the Russian military in Syria after the disaster of Il-20 was on the agenda," Peskov said, quoted by news agency Ria Novosti. Israel has vowed to stop its arch-foe Iran, which backs the Assad regime, from entrenching itself militarily in neighbouring Syria. Earlier this month, Israel acknowledged having carried out more than 200 strikes in Syria over the past 18 months, mainly against Iranian targets. A photo showing a Russian Il-20 plane landing at an unknown location, the same kind of plane shot down by Syrian air defences on Monday
Malta's prime minister on Thursday signalled unexpected support from EU leaders for a second referendum on Brexit in Britain, boosting a growing campaign for a new poll despite the British government's trenchant opposition. Speaking to BBC radio on the sidelines of an informal European Union summit in Salzburg, Joseph Muscat said there was "almost unanimous" backing among its leaders for a vote. "We would like the almost impossible to happen, that the UK has another referendum," Muscat said. "I think most of us would welcome a situation where there is the possibility of the British people putting things into perspective, seeing what has been negotiated, seeing the options, and then deciding once and for all." EU Council President Donald Tusk has previously said "our door remains open" if Britain changes its mind about leaving the bloc. But, asked about support for another referendum, an EU source said on Thursday: "The EU certainly does not have a position on that". A French presidency source also said: "It is not up to us to express a preference on what might happen in Britain. It is a sovereign choice for the British people". But Muscat's stance was reiterated by Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babis, who said he would support Britain holding another vote on EU membership. Babis added he had been "shocked" by Britons' June 2016 decision to leave the bloc -- now scheduled to happen in March next year -- which has added to Europe's growing list of problems. "I'm very unhappy that (the) UK is leaving so it would be better maybe to make another referendum and maybe the people in the meantime they could change their view," he told the BBC. "Because then we will solve the problem quite quickly." - 'There will be no second referendum' - Six months ahead of Britain's planned EU departure, calls within the country have been growing for a second referendum -- backed by an expanding list of centrist politicians. The campaign for another poll has also attracted hefty financial backing, including from Hungarian-US billionaire George Soros, with a series of events staged across Britain over the summer to drum up support. But the government is opposed to another referendum and experts believe the prospect is highly unlikely. May reiterated her position in a speech to EU leaders in Salzburg on Wednesday. "We all recognise that time is short but delaying or extending these negotiations is not an option. "I know that for many of you Brexit is not something you want but it is important to be clear that there will be no second referendum in the UK," she said. "The public has delivered its verdict and I as prime minister will deliver upon that," she added. Pro-EU and pro-Brexit supporters reacted to the Maltese and Czech leaders' comments. The Best for Britain group said their statements showed "there is still time for the UK to check with the people if Brexit is what they still want." Its chief Eloise Todd added: "It's time to give the people -- not politicians -- the final say on Brexit." But pro-Brexit firebrand Nigel Farage responded on Twitter saying: "EU bosses want us to have a second referendum, quelle surprise." Malta's Prime Minister Joseph Muscat speaks to the media as he arrives in Salzburg, Austria on September 19, 2018 prior to a dinner as part of the EU Informal Summit of Heads of State or Government Czech Republic's Prime Minister Andrej Babis said had been "shocked" by Britons' June 2016 decision to leave the EU
A state government in Mexico has fired a prosecutor over a spectacle in which a fetid-smelling tractor trailer carrying 273 bodies was driven around aimlessly for lack of room in the morgue. "I am not willing to tolerate this kind of mistake, which shocks and horrifies public opinion," said the governor of western Jalisco state, Aristoteles Sandoval, as he fired prosecutor Raul Sanchez. The state's chief coroner was fired earlier in the week over the sad drama in the state capital, Guadalajara. The bodies were in the refrigerated truck because the morgue in Mexico's second-largest city was full. Officials originally put the number of bodies at 157 but on Wednesday they raised it to 273. The truck was parked for two weeks at a warehouse in a downtrodden neighborhood on the city outskirts until residents complained of the stench and the flies it attracted. The authorities then moved the truck to an empty lot in another poor neighborhood far from the city center, until residents there protested Saturday. Officials then moved it to a prosecution storage facility in the city center, where it remains parked for now. News outlets broadcast footage Wednesday of the open trailer of the truck, with piles of bodies in black bags and a man in white boots stepping on the bags. Officials have said the bodies were of victims of violent crime, so under Mexican law they cannot be cremated. Authorities said they were looking for a longer-term solution. The coroner who was fired over this case, Luis Octavio Cotero, said the state government was working on a site to bury 800 bodies outside Guadalajara. The number of murder victims in Mexico has exploded in recent years. Since the government deployed the army to fight the country's powerful drug cartels in 2006, Mexico has been hit by a wave of violence that has resulted in more than 200,000 murders. Last year, the country registered a record 28,702 homicides. Mass graves are regularly discovered containing dozens or even hundreds of unidentified bodies. Nearly 4,000 such corpses have been found since 2007, according to the National Human Rights Commission. Some of the highest-profile violence has been in Jalisco, home to the brutal Jalisco New Generation Cartel. Other states hit hard by cartel violence have also struggled with overflowing morgues in recent years, including Veracruz in the east, Guerrero in the south and Chihuahua in the north. The truck was parked for two weeks at a warehouse in a downtrodden neighborhood on the city outskirts until residents complained of the stench and the flies it attracted
Indiana Jones's signature fedora fetched more than half a million dollars at a blockbuster London auction of rare memorabilia from some of the most iconic movies of the past 40 years. But the star attraction -- the sleek jacket worn by the loveable Star Wars scoundrel Han Solo in "The Empire Strikes Back" -- failed to clear the 500,000 ($665,000, 563,000 euros) reserve and went unsold. Organisers said they had "a number of post-auction enquires" about the space-travelling jacket and were hoping to strike a deal in the coming days. More than 600 costumes and props from much-adored films and television series went under the hammer on the banks of the River Thames. The memorabilia seller Prop Store has held the annual event since 2014 and expected to collect a record 3.5 million. That figure might not be initially met with the jacket setback. Organisers were hoping it would get up to a 1 million. The auction was halted with bids at 450,000 -- just short of the minimum price set by the undisclosed seller. The jacket oozes cool and appeared in the scene in which Solo dodged asteroids and shot at Darth Vader in "Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back". "It is a relatively simple jacket," said Prop Store's chief operating officer Brandon Alinger He said "Star Wars" creator George Lucas wanted workaday-looking clothes rather than flashy costumes that might distract attention. "There's some very cool stylised elements, like this triple-stitch banding on the sleeves." - Hoverboards and Wonka bars - Ford's fedora in the Indiana Jones franchise debut "Raiders of the Lost Ark" beat Prop Store's expectation to sell for 393,600 ($522,255). The price includes a buyer's premium paid to the auctioneer. The hat cost 320,000 when the winning bid was placed and the hammer struck. One of the most recognisable hats in film since Charlie Chaplin's black bowler is signed on the inner sweatband by Ford himself. The fedora was "sat upon, wrung repeatedly and treated with bleach and dust" ahead of filming to achieve a worn look, according to the auction catalogue. Another hot item is the neon pink and green hoverboard ridden by actor Michael J. Fox's character Marty McFly in the "Back to the Future" trilogy. It was sold at the auction price of 30,000 -- the lower end of what Prop Store had hoped. Items from the "James Bond", "The Godfather", "Harry Potter", "Batman", "Aliens", "Star Trek", "Blade", "Tomb Raider" and "Men in Black" series were also up for grabs. Other classic movie items sold include the robe worn by Brad Pitt's Tyler Durden character in "Fight Club", a Wonka bar from "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory" and Johnny Depp's unique costume in "Edward Scissorhands". Prop Store acquires its wares from movie studios, crew members and other collectors around the world. It is due to announce the amount it raised from the auction on Friday. Han Solo's jacket from "The Empire Strikes Back" was expected to fetch up to 1 million at Thursday's auction
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Thursday Israel will defend itself against Iran, after a friendly fire incident in Syria this week linked to Israeli strikes on Iranian targets there. Syria accidentally downed a Russian plane late Monday, killing all 15 people on board, the same evening Israel launched strikes in the war-torn country. Israel says it was targeting a Syrian military facility where weapons manufacturing systems were "about to be transferred on behalf of Iran" to Lebanese Shiite group Hezbollah. "We do not want war, but if it is imposed on us, we will act with all our force," Netanyahu said during a ceremony in Jerusalem marking the 45th anniversary of the Yom Kippur war. He said Iran "openly calls for the destruction of Israel." "We will continue to defend ourselves in the face of this danger," said Netanyahu. The incident on Monday was the worst case of friendly fire between Moscow and Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's regime since Russian forces intervened in the conflict in 2015. It also risked harming relations between Israel and Russia, which established a hotline three years ago to avoid accidental clashes in Syria, but the leaders of both countries have since sought to move past the incident. Israel sent its air force commander to Moscow on Thursday to share the military's findings on what happened. Israel has vowed to stop its arch-foe Iran, which backs the Assad regime, from entrenching itself militarily in neighbouring Syria. Earlier this month, it acknowledged having carried out more than 200 strikes in Syria over the past 18 months, mainly against Iranian targets. The 1973 Arab-Israeli war saw Egypt and Syria carry out a surprise attack on Israel on Yom Kippur, the most solemn day in the Jewish calendar. Despite its victory, Israel lost more than 2,500 soldiers in the war that it was not considered prepared for. "The lessons of this war are rooted in us and we are constantly alert to the dangers that threaten us," Netanyahu said. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel is "constantly alert to the dangers that threaten us"
CHICAGO, Sept. 20, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- NCSBN has awarded a multiyear contract extension to Pearson VUE for the global delivery of its NCLEX-RN and NCLEX-PN Examinations. This extension will run through 2024.



The NCLEX-RN and NCLEX-PN Examinations are nationwide examinations designed to measure entry-level nursing competence utilized in both the U.S and Canada as part of the licensing process. Recognized globally as preeminent nursing examinations, the exams are constantly and rigorously evaluated to keep pace with the rapidly evolving health care environment.

As part of this new agreement, NCLEX test development will transition to NCSBN directly in January 2020. Additionally, Pearson VUE and NCSBN will explore advanced alternatives for assessment types and test delivery through research and development activities. Our agreement with Pearson VUE will continue driving the industry and NCSBNs exam and assessment programs forward, comments Philip D. Dickison, PhD, RN, NCSBN chief officer, Operations and Examinations.

The NCLEX examinations will continue to be delivered at the Pearson Professional Centers located throughout the U.S. and its territories. For candidates abroad pursuing domestic nurse licensure in the U.S. and its territories, the NCLEX is available at Pearson Professional Centers in Australia, Canada, Hong Kong, India, Japan, Mexico, the Philippines, Taiwan and the United Kingdom.

About NCSBN

NCSBN marks its 40th anniversary milestone in 2018 with the inspiring theme of Regulatory Excellence Surging Toward the Future. Founded March 15, 1978, as an independent not-for-profit organization, NCSBN was initially created to lessen the burdens of state governments and bring together boards of nursing (BONs) to act and counsel together on matters of common interest. It has evolved into one of the leading voices of regulation across the world.

NCSBNs membership is comprised of the BONs in the 50 states, the District of Columbia, and four U.S. territories  American Samoa, Guam, Northern Mariana Islands and the Virgin Islands. There are three exam user members. There are also 28 associate members that are either nursing regulatory bodies or empowered regulatory authorities from other countries or territories.

NCSBN Member Boards protect the public by ensuring that safe and competent nursing care is provided by licensed nurses. These BONs regulate more than 4.8 million licensed nurses.

Mission: NCSBN provides education, service and research through collaborative leadership to promote evidence-based regulatory excellence for patient safety and public protection.

The statements and opinions expressed are those of NCSBN and not the individual member state or territorial boards of nursing.

Contact: Dawn M. Kappel

Director, Marketing and Communications

312.525.3667 direct

312.279.1034 fax

dkappel@ncsbn.org


Four young children from a Dutch daycare centre were killed on Thursday when a train smashed into their electric cart at a crossing, in an accident described as the "worst nightmare of any parent". Another child and the woman driving the vehicle were critically injured in the accident in Oss, a town near the German border around 110 kilometres (65 miles) southeast of the capital Amsterdam. Police said they were investigating reports that the brakes had failed on the wagon, which was taking children from daycare to school, as it approached the level crossing. Two of the children who were killed were aged four, while the others were aged six and eight, ANP news agency said. Two of the dead youngsters and the injured child, who is 11, come from the same family. "Today, every family is hit, and the accident leaves a big gap in families, the daycare centre and school," said Wobine Buijs, the mayor of Oss. The electric cart, known as a Stint, features a Segway-type standing area for the driver at the back and a large plastic box at the front where children sit. - 'Screamed for help' - Reports in Dutch media said the 32-year-old woman driving the wagon had screamed for help after somehow ending up between the closed barriers of the level crossing, and that children's rucksacks could be seen flying in the air when it was hit by the train. The cart had just dropped some children off at a local school and was on its way to another when the crash happened. Local police chief Dianne van Gammeren refused to confirm that the driver had tried to stop but the brakes did not work, saying: "I cannot comment on that at the moment, which is part of the inquiry". Edwin Renzen, the founder of the Renzen company that makes the Stint wagons, was quoted by NOS broadcaster as saying that "this is the worst nightmare of any parent." "This is incomprehensible. We are parents and spent years developing the Stints ourselves. I don't know what I can do, but I just have to go to Oss," he was also quoted as saying by the ANP news agency. Around 3,000 Stints are in use throughout the Netherlands to transport around 60,000 children weekly, according to Renzen. They are used by many daycare centres to ferry children around towns in the Netherlands, which has a huge network of bicycle paths that they can take. Officials had earlier said that the children were on a cargo bike, which is similar but smaller and relies on pedal power. The train, which was carrying 57 passengers from the eastern town of Nijmegen to nearby Den Bosch, was equipped with a front-mounted video camera that will be used in the investigation, officials said. - 'Heavy loss' - Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte tweeted from an EU summit that he was "deeply affected by the incredibly sad news from Oss where four young children have died in a horrible accident. "I wish everyone involved much strength with this heavy loss," Rutte said. Queen Maxima of the Netherlands said she and King Willem-Alexander "have no words" and that their "thoughts go out to all families who have lost their children" The head of the Dutch rail infrastructure firm Pro Rail said it was a "day of mourning and sadness." "This is a rare blow. There will be a thorough investigation, and we will do our utmost to never let this happen again." It was the sixth such accident at the crossing since 1975, ANP said. In July the Dutch safety board OVV slammed as "unacceptable" the fact that 11 people die in accidents on level crossings every year on average. It said that "the Netherlands is the only country in Europe with a high volume of train traffic and a large number of level crossings -- two features that do not go well together." Members of the emergency services investigate the scene of the disaster in Oss


A monthly training session for a police dive team has turned into a recovery operation after officers made a morbid discovery.

During the drill the team had been looking for a mannequin in the Pawtuxet River, in the US state of Rhode Island, but instead found a human body on Wednesday (local time), local media reports.

According to the Providence Journal, authorities have said the body was found under a bridge in Pawtuxet Village.

The diver who found the mans body initially thought it was the mannequin they were looking for during the drill, ABC 6 reports.

The dive team had been looking for a mannequin when they made the morbid discovery. Source: AAP, File image

One woman who lives nearby told the news outlet she thought it was a frightening coincidence.

Mustve been scary for the [divers] too, Kim Cadden told ABC 6.

Theyre not expecting that. Theyre looking for a dummy and they find the real thing.

The dive team was conducting a routine exercise when they found the body in Pawtuxet River. Source: ABC 6

The death is not being treated as suspicious and police believe the man is a 55-year-old local resident.

It is thought the body had been in the area for less than a day before it was discovered.

Authorities said they were not releasing further detail until next of kin had been notified.

If you are concerned about the mental health of yourself or a loved one, seek support and information by calling Lifeline 13 11 14, Mensline 1300 789 978, or Kids Helpline 1800 551 800
Pope Francis will start a Baltic tour in Lithuania on Saturday during which he will pay homage to the history of a region that still bears the scars of its Nazi and Soviet occupations. His four-day stay will come in radically different circumstances to the last papal visit a quarter of a century ago, with the Church currently reeling from a string of clerical child abuse scandals. The pope will tour Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania as they celebrate 100 years since declaring independence following World War I. The trip will also take him geographically close to Russia, where Vatican diplomats have been trying for years to arrange a papal visit. The last century was marked by the Nazi invasion -- which wiped out almost all of the Baltic region's Jews -- and then decades of Soviet occupation during the Cold War. "The visit reflects the pope's idea of visiting the periphery rather than established centres of power or wealth," Lithuanian publicist Donatas Puslys told AFP. Behind the Iron Curtain, the Catholic Church played a key role in the non-violent anti-Soviet resistance, especially in Lithuania, the only Catholic-majority country of the three. "The Church was a fortress for all dissidents, not only Catholics. It strongly resisted Sovietisation and defended the rights of believers," historian Terese Birute Burauskaite told AFP. As a result, it was persecuted during that time, with both priests and bishops targeted in crackdowns by the authorities. The pope will also visit a museum in the former KGB building in the Lithuanian capital Vilnius. And he will pray at a memorial to the victims of the Holocaust. - Estonian saint - After spending the weekend in Lithuania, the pope will travel on to Latvia on Monday and Estonia on Tuesday. The late Polish-born pontiff Saint John Paul II visited all three Baltic states in 1993, two years after they regained independence. Since then, the three have thrown their lot in with the West, turning away from Moscow's orbit by joining NATO and the European Union. While that has led to solid economic growth, it has also meant social inequality and emigration to the richer western European countries. While the Baltic states have a similar 20th-century history, their religious identities differ substantially. According to the Vatican, nearly 80 percent of the Lithuanian population identifies as Roman Catholic, against only 21 percent in Latvia and less than one percent in Estonia, one of Europe's least religious countries. Estonian Catholics hope the papal visit will help them in their quest to make Eduard Profittlich, a Roman Catholic bishop who died in a Soviet prison in 1942, Estonia's first Catholic saint. As for Lithuania, religion is ever-present in its countryside, with crosses evident in most towns and villages. The Church also plays an important role in policy-making. It has been among the leading voices against the ratification of the Council of Europe's Istanbul Convention fighting violence against women. They object that it promotes "gender ideology" that would undermine the traditional family. The church's influence also explains why Latvia and Lithuania are among only six EU countries not to have recognised same-sex partnerships. ? Abuse scandal ? But the Catholic Church is under increasing scrutiny because of the escalating worldwide sex abuse crisis. Scandals in Australia, Europe, and North and South America have involved widespread claims of abuse -- and cover-ups -- by clergymen and lay members. Nor has the Baltic region been free from the scandal. Earlier this month, a Latvian Catholic priest was arrested on allegations that he raped a mentally handicapped victim of human trafficking. And in March, the Lithuanian church admitted to a sexual abuse case in the 1970s after an internal two-year investigation. In August, Pope Francis declined to comment on a claim that he ignored sexual abuse allegations against a senior clergyman in the United States. "No doubt these events will cloud the pope's visit to Lithuania because the Catholic Church is not a local but a global community," sociologist Milda Alisauskiene told AFP. "However most Lithuanian believers will probably focus more on their personal emotions and feelings as they meet the pope." Pope Francis will tour Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania as they celebrate 100 years since declaring independence
Former rap mogul Marion "Suge" Knight pleaded no contest to voluntary manslaughter on Thursday and will serve 28 years in prison for running over and killing a man three years ago. Knight's plea, which was unveiled in a Los Angeles courtroom, came just days before he was to stand trial for the death of 55-year-old Terry Carter, who was run down outside an LA restaurant in 2015 following a dispute over the movie "Straight Outta Compton." The 53-year-old rap music icon has been held behind bars since January 2015 when he was arrested and charged with murder, attempted murder and hit-and-run after ramming his pick-up truck into Carter and another man in the driveway of a fast-foot restaurant in Compton. His lawyers had argued that he did not intend to harm the victims -- one of whom survived -- and was trying to drive away after a gun attack in broad daylight. The incident, which was captured on surveillance video, took place following an argument over "Straight Outta Compton," a biopic about the pioneering rap group NWA. Prosecutors said Knight was upset over not being paid for the use of his likeness in the film. Knight, who co-founded Death Row Records along with hip-hop music king Dr Dre in the early 1990s, had been facing up to life in prison in the case. Under the plea deal, he is set to be sentenced to 28 years in state prison on October 4. Death Row Records launched stars such as Snoop Dogg and Tupac Shakur but collapsed in 1996 when Knight was jailed for violating a probation order by beating up a rival in Las Vegas. He again served a 10-month jail stint in 2003 after getting into a fight outside a Hollywood nightclub. Former rap mogul Marion "Suge" Knight -- shown at a pretrial court hearing in May 15, 2018 in Los Angeles -- will serve 28 years in prison for voluntary manslaughter following a plea deal
Twelve people were killed and dozens missing after a landslide unleashed by monsoon rains struck in the central Philippines Thursday, inflicting more misery on the already storm-battered nation. The new tragedy comes just days after 2018's most powerful storm, Typhoon Mangkhut, pounded the nation's north with heavy winds and rain, sparking a separate landslide that left dozens dead. Emergency workers in helmets and locals with shovels rushed to search for survivors of the new disaster, which happened in the village of Tina-an on the popular tourist island of Cebu. Days of heavy monsoon rains caused a steep slope of crumbly limestone and soil to collapse into at least 10 homes early Thursday when many people would still have been in bed. "Even four-storey houses are buried," said witness John Rhay Repuesto Echavez, who also saw the human toll of the slide. "(My neighbour) was crying right in front of her sister's house. There was nothing left, not even the rooftop was visible," he told AFP. "Her sister's whole family was buried." Injured survivors were wheeled into the back of ambulances and the dead were laid on pews at a local church. "We have 12 dead now," civil defence spokesman Julius Regner told AFP, adding at least 50 people were still believed missing. "There are more than 100 rescuers on the site. They are using backhoes (excavators) and other heavy equipment," he added. Civil defence officials in the region said landslides are fairly rare on Cebu, an elongated island with low hills that did not take a direct hit from Mangkhut. As Thursday's search for survivors unfolded, efforts continued in the hunt for bodies in the mining area of Itogon in the mountainous north of the Philippines, which was the area worst hit by the typhoon. Most of those killed in the storm died in landslides in the Cordillera range, which includes Itogon and other towns in a region known for gold mining. Police said on Thursday that the death toll rose to 88, primarily due to corpses recovered from the Itogon slide. Mangkhut swamped fields in the nation's agricultural north and smashed houses when it tore through at the weekend. Itogon is one of the country's oldest mining hubs, with known gold panning activity stretching back to before the 17th-century Spanish colonial conquest. Thousands of people from all over the country still flock to the upland town seeking their fortune in largely unregulated mining, which is accompanied by periodic deadly accidents. Days of heavy monsoon rains caused a steep slope of limestone and soil to collapse into at least 10 homes in Tina-an Map of the Philippines locating landslide in Tina-an village, near Cebu city People weep next to the bodies of victims of a landslide in Naga City, on the popular tourist island of Cebu
On a patch of grass beside a mountain track, eSwatini parliamentary candidate Alec Lushaba makes one final push for votes -- addressing an audience of five women and four children. Electioneering is a low-key affair in the country formerly known as Swaziland, which goes to the polls Friday in a ballot that has thrown light on a unique, and much criticised, version of democracy. Lushaba is dressed in a traditional robe which leaves his shoulders and legs bare, and which is emblazoned with birthday wishes to King Mswati III, the absolute monarch who rules over the tiny African kingdom. Lushaba dismissed criticism that the vote is undemocratic because of the king's unlimited powers -- and a law that bars political parties from taking part in elections. "No, this election is the best example of direct representation," Lushaba, 46, told AFP. "There are no parties to get between the people and their representatives," said Lushaba, who is running for the first time as a candidate. "It is rooted in local communities, who choose who they want to represent them." Parliamentary candidates stand as individuals and are selected by small "chiefdom" districts in a first round of voting, then compete in the main election to win in one of 59 constituency races. "People know their members of parliament and judge them on their performance," Lushaba said on Wednesday, the last day of campaigning. - A loyal parliament - "The country has problems, but this process means we have collective decision-making. The majority view wins -- not the majority party," he said. Among the daunting issues confronting eSwatini is that 63 percent of the population live below the poverty line, as well as having the world's highest adult HIV prevalence rate at 27.2 percent. The lower house to be elected on Friday -- plus 10 lawmakers chosen by the king -- is expected again to be studiously loyal to the monarch and is constitutionally unable to pass any law he disagrees with. But not all of the country's 1.3 million citizens support the election system, which is often criticised as undemocratic by rights activists and donor nations. "The election is a waste of money and time," Zakhele Ngwenya, 24, told AFP outside a remote shop as cattle roamed on steep slopes tended by subsistence farmers. "We are all jobless, the roads are rough dirt, and transport is bad. What has voting done to help?" But Ngwenya still plans to vote on Friday, saying: "They tell us that maybe we will never get a job if they know that we didn't vote." Two hours' drive away, candidate Micheal Musuku also held his last meeting of the campaign -- talking to 30 voters sitting on the floor of a community hall on a windy hilltop. Dressed in a smart suit and red tie with matching pocket handkerchief, Musuku vowed to use the entrepreneurial skills developed running his restaurant business to help voters. Musuku failed to win a seat in the last election in 2013, but hopes to win the Mkhiweni constituency, in the central region, against four other candidates. "The key local issue here is lack of water," he said. "I want to help them build dams. "In parliament, we can advise the king, he thinks about these matters and can speak to people who are experts." - Pride, and criticism - After listening to Musuku, voter Esther Mhlanga, 66, did not reveal whether he had won her support, but said she was proud of eSwatini's election system. "It comes from our hearts," she said. "We choose without anyone telling us." Outward signs of campaigning have been scarce, with just a few posters of candidates and an occasional vehicle with loudspeakers driving through the streets. The Southern African Development Community (SADC) bloc and African Union have deployed election observers, but the EU and Commonwealth have not, after issuing critical reports following the last election. The EU said that "the main principles for a democratic state are not in place" in eSwatini, a landlocked country surrounded by South Africa and Mozambique. Tensions within the country have been seen this week with riot police using water canon and tear gas to break up protests organised by trade unions over low public sector wages. After Friday's national assembly election, the king will select the prime minister and cabinet. The upper house is formed by 20 members appointed by the king and 10 elected by the assembly. Often accused of extravagance and waste, Mswati III famously chooses a new wife each year at the colourful Reed Dance, when thousands of bare-breasted virgins dance for him. He exercised his absolute authority this year by changing the country's official name from Swaziland to eSwatini ("Land of the Swazis"). The new name has been gradually taken up at home and internationally. With about 540,000 registered voters, early results are expected Saturday. Electioneering is a low-key affair in the country formerly known as Swaziland, which goes to the polls Friday in a ballot that has thrown light on a unique, and much criticised, version of democracy Candidate Michael Musuku addressed 30 voters at a community hall, vowing to use the entrepreneurial skills developed running his restaurant to help voters. "The key local issue here is lack of water," he said. "I want to help them build dams" Tensions within the country have been seen this week with riot police using water canon and tear gas to break up protests organised by trade unions over low public sector wages
EU leaders met Thursday to prepare for the final stretch of Brexit negotiations, after public clashes with Britain over who should give ground but signs of a shift on both sides over the key issue of Ireland. After pitching her Brexit plan to the other European Union leaders over dinner on Wednesday, British Prime Minister Theresa May will leave them to discuss their next steps without her on Thursday. The meeting in Salzburg, Austria, is the first of three summits in successive months, which Brussels hopes will end with agreement on the terms of Britain's withdrawal from the bloc set for March 29 next year. The Alpine summit began with a warning from EU Council President Donald Tusk that Britain's offer on post-Brexit trade ties and Ireland -- the two sticking points in the talks -- must be "reworked". May, who is under intense pressure from Brexiteers back home, retorted that she had already made compromises and it was now Brussels' turn. She told EU leaders that their proposal to "carve away" Northern Ireland from the rest of the United Kingdom, to avoid checks on the border after Brexit, was "not credible". "The approaches remain very different," Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz told reporters as he arrived for Thursday's talks. "Away from the discussion in the media, behind closed doors, I have the impression that both sides are aware that a solution can only be found if both sides make a move towards one another. "It will nevertheless still be a difficult process." Luxembourg Prime Minister Xavier Bettel added: "It is an agreement, so we both have to find a compromise." - Irish talks - French President Emmanuel Macron insisted Britain must still explain how it intends to avoid physical border checks in Ireland after leaving the EU's single market and customs union. Both sides have pledged to avoid a "hard" frontier in Ireland, amid fears it could disrupt trade and upset the fragile peace on the island. Britain has put forward a proposal as part of its Chequers plan for post-Brexit trade ties, but accepts that some fallback plan is needed until this can be agreed. The EU version of the so-called "backstop" would see Northern Ireland alone continue to follow many EU trade rules and regulations -- but London says this would undermine the integrity of the UK. May held one-on-one talks on Thursday with Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar, who had earlier told the BBC: "I don't think we're any closer to a withdrawal agreement than we were in March." But there were signs of some movement, after the EU's chief Brexit negotiator, Michel Barnier, this week suggested any checks between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK could be away from the border. May welcomed his willingness to "find a new solution", and conceded that some checks were already carried out in the Irish Sea, on agricultural products. A senior British government official also said it would bring forward a backstop proposal for regulatory checks on goods crossing into and from Northern Ireland, raising the possibility of a breakthrough. However, May repeated her warning that Britain would never agree to any "legal separation of the United Kingdom into two customs territories". - New Brexit vote - Both sides had been aiming for an October EU summit as the deadline to reach an agreement, to allow time for the deal to be ratified by British and European parliaments before Brexit in March. But with the talks deadlocked, Kurz confirmed Thursday there would be a final summit in November to clinch the deal. Over dinner on Wednesday, May had her first opportunity to present to fellow leaders her plan for the post-Brexit trading relationship, which was published in July. Her proposal to follow EU rules on trade in goods has provoked a fierce backlash among eurosceptics in her Conservative party, renewing speculation of a challenge to her leadership. The political turmoil has sparked growing calls in Britain for a re-run of the 2016 Brexit vote -- calls echoed by both the Maltese and Czech leaders in Salzburg. However, May warned fellow leaders it would not happen, nor would Britain consider delaying Brexit to allow more time for negotiations. "The UK will leave on March 29 next year," she said over dinner, adding: "The onus is now on all of us to get this deal done." Britain's Prime Minister Theresa May hopes her Brexit plan could form the basis of a political agreement on trade Both sides had been aiming for an October EU summit as the deadline to reach an agreement Chief Brexit Negotiator Michel Barnier has been deeply critical of May's Brexit plan
TORONTO, Sept. 20, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The Renewable Energy Alliance (REAO) is concerned that todays introduction of legislation to repeal the Green Energy Act may deny Ontarians the opportunity to benefit from low-cost renewable power generation in the future. Keeping our bills low, ensuring that communities support energy projects in their communities, and supporting jobs and suppliers here in Ontario should be the bedrock of the governments approach on energy.



Renewable energy is now cost-competitive with other forms of generation, harnessing naturally occurring and abundant wind, sun, and water resources. It is also supported by many municipalities and Indigenous communities, enabling farmers to gain supplementary income and neighbours to help lower their electricity bills. The renewable energy industry welcomes initiatives that encourage private sector competition, and those that will make for a more reliable, community-accepted, and affordable energy system.

The Independent Electricity System Operator (IESO) has recently identified an energy capacity shortfall of 1,400 MW starting in 2023  enough energy to power over 900,000 homes during hot summer days. Ontario can benefit greatly from competitively-sourced zero fuel cost renewable energy  as long as opportunities exist to harness these resources. Falling back into relying on dirty, expensive technologies is the wrong approach.

We believe that, as more energy resources will be needed in the future, renewable energy can provide low cost solutions to achieve greater affordability for customers, said Mike Gallagher, Business Manager IUOE Local 793. Green energy is a low-cost healthy alternative to traditional forms of energy generation. The Green Energy Act removed barriers and provided opportunities that allowed the renewable energy sector to flourish, bringing good jobs in construction and maintenance and investment into the province. We hope that similar opportunities are not lost in the future, and that the province remains open to renewable energy.

"Ontario has benefited, both economically and environmentally, from the development of renewable energy projects," said Kim Jarvi, Senior Economist, Registered Nurses' Association of Ontario (RNAO). "Investing in renewables has improved air quality across the province. An independent assessment conducted by Toronto Public Health in 2014 suggests that improvements in Ontario's air quality have translated into significant health benefits for Ontario residents, reducing air pollution-related premature deaths by 23 per cent and hospital admissions by 41 per cent in Toronto alone."

The price of renewable technologies has declined significantly in recent years. For example, the weighted average cost of recent procurements of wind energy in Alberta was 3.7 cents/kWh  significantly less than other sources of supply in Ontario. Solar prices are meeting grid parity, with new technologies such as storage declining in cost and increasing in efficiency to provide the quality of power Ontario requires.

Studies have indicated that adding 1,000 MW of wind energy between now and 2030 would create 7,000 full time jobs. Furthermore, by 2030 wind energy will have stimulated more than $14 billion in economic activity, including $650 million flowing directly into local economies. The industry employs thousands of Ontarians, who work as project managers and engineers, technicians, tradespersons, service providers, and advisors. If renewable energy is used to meet future power needs, rather than the province relying on antiquated assets and expensive imports that benefit other jurisdictions, Ontario could maintain and create thousands of new jobs in communities right across the province.

Indeed, harnessing and supporting advancements in renewable technologies is a significant competitive advantage for Ontario. Dozens of companies across the province are actively working on innovation and processes that will create jobs and new export opportunities for Ontario-based companies to access markets around the world. Renewable energy generation and product manufacturing are important aspects of Ontarios economy and should be further leveraged for continued growth and prosperity.

Todays green energy projects are making significant contributions to Ontarios economy. They are providing long-term, stable pricing for Ontario ratepayers and are an important source of sustained revenue for municipal and Indigenous partners, said Brandy Giannetta, Ontario Regional Director, the Canadian Wind Energy Association (CanWEA). Ontario is going to need new non-emitting electricity generation in the 2020s and renewable energy is the best option for ensuring that generation is affordable, reliable and clean, while attracting jobs and investment and helping local communities thrive.

The Renewable Energy Alliance of Ontario (REAO) is a broad coalition of employers, labour and industry groups dedicated to working with the Ontario government to ensure renewable energy continues to play a vital role in Ontarios energy mix. At present membership includes the following organizations:

The International Union of Operating Engineers

Registered Nurses Association of Ontario

Laborers International Union of North America

Canadian Solar Industries Association

The Ontario Crane Rental Association

The Canadian Wind Energy Association The Aboriginal Apprenticeship Board of Ontario

Rankin Construction

Pumpcrete

Surespan Wind Energy

Fengate Capital Management

Ridge National

For additional information contact:

Communication Representatives

1-905-469-9299

Danny Celia, ext. 2116 | Kathryn Peet, ext. 2219
At least 58 people were killed during ethnic violence at the weekend on the outskirts of Ethiopia's capital, an Amnesty International researcher told AFP on Wednesday. And another source involved in the investigation, who saw and counted the corpses, told AFP a total of 65 people had been killed, mostly in the city's western suburbs. The figures are more than twice that given by state media which on Monday said the death toll from violence in and around Burayu stood at 23. Fighting broke out last week in Burayu, a western suburb of Addis Ababa, and continued through the weekend, forcing hundreds to flee and sparking protests that paralysed the city on Monday during which police killed five people. Speaking to AFP on condition of anonymity, the investigation source said most of the deaths had occurred in the city's western suburbs although others were killed in the centre. "The 65 cases are from Burayu, Ashewa Meda, Kolfe and Kirkos," the source said, referring to three areas in the west and Kirkos in the centre. Some of the victims had been stabbed while others died after being beaten with sticks and rocks. None had been shot and the toll does not include five alleged looters killed by police on Monday. - Targeted by Oromo mobs - Fisseha Tekle, a Nairobi-based researcher with Amnesty International, said he had compiled a similar tally of 58 dead. Residents told Amnesty International they saw "eight dead bodies on Friday, 21 on Saturday," he said. "On Sunday they saw about 11 people and on Monday the number of dead bodies they've seen was 18." Government spokesmen could not immediately be reached for comment. Burayu lies on the outskirts of Addis Ababa but within the Oromia region that surrounds the capital and which is home to the Oromo people, Ethiopia's largest ethnic group. People who fled the clashes told AFP they were targeted by Oromo mobs because they are members of minority ethnic groups. - Police failings - Fisseha said the government must investigate the conduct of the Oromia and federal police, whom he accused of failing to quell the violence. "They have to investigate why they have not responded on time, why they have failed to protect the vulnerable communities there," Fisseha said. The violence began last week in the run-up to Saturday's return of the once-banned Oromo Liberation Front, a rebel group that returned to Ethiopia following a string of radical political reforms pushed through by Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed. An Oromo himself, Abiy took power in April and has won popularity for his aggressive reform agenda which has seen him freeing jailed dissidents and overhauling the security services, who have long been accused of violating human rights. He has also pushed through a landmark peace deal with Eritrea, which was signed in July, ending two decades of enmity sparked by a border conflict. But bloody ethnic clashes have broken out repeatedly since his inauguration, with the worst clashes occurring in the south where fighting between the Oromo and Gedeo minority has displaced nearly one million people. Askale Adacha, 63, weeps as she speaks about fleeing the violence on the outskirts of the Ethiopian capital The weekend violence brought people onto the streets of Addis Ababa on Monday in protest The violence began ahead of Saturday's highly-anticipated return of rebels from the once-banned Oromo Liberation Front
President Donald Trump piled pressure Wednesday on the woman accusing his Supreme Court pick of sexual assault by insisting that she testify next week if she wants to be heard. Trump echoed Republican leaders in suggesting that time is running out for Christine Blasey Ford, the California psychology professor whose allegation that she was assaulted as a teenager threatens to derail confirmation of conservative Judge Brett Kavanaugh to America's highest court. Ford has backtracked from earlier statements that she is ready to face a grilling in the Senate Judiciary Committee. Instead, she is calling for an FBI probe into her allegation that Kavanaugh pinned her to a bed and muffled her cries as he tried to pull off her clothes when she was 15 and he was 17. Kavanaugh, now 53, denies any such incident took place and no other direct witnesses have come forward. Trump told journalists at the White House that he retained full faith in the judge, saying it was "very hard for me to imagine that anything happened." He urged Ford to take her chance at the committee hearing set for Monday, where Kavanaugh is likewise invited to explain his side of the story. Trump indicated that his patience is wearing thin, even telling political website The Hill that the scandal resembles what he called "the witch hunt" by a special prosecutor into allegations his campaign colluded with Russia to bring about his surprise 2016 election. "We continue to give her a lot of time. We've held up the whole hearing," Trump told reporters. The Republican chairman of the Senate committee, Chuck Grassley, wrote to Ford's lawyers, ruling out any FBI role and saying that the sole venue for airing the allegations would be the Senate hearing. "You have stated repeatedly that Dr Ford wants to tell her story. I sincerely hope that Dr Ford will accept my invitation to do so, either privately or publicly, on Monday," Grassley said. Late Wednesday, a lawyer for Ford, Lisa Banks, was quoted by The Washington Post saying that the "rush to a hearing is unnecessary and contrary to the Committee discovering the truth." But Susan Collins, a Republican senator seen as potentially voting against party lines, also said that Ford needed to testify. "I think it's not fair for Judge Kavanaugh for her not to come forward and testify," she said. - Ultimate goal - Until last week, Kavanaugh looked almost certain to win confirmation in the Senate in a victory for Trump that would tilt the Supreme Court to conservative rulings, potentially for decades to come. The scandal, erupting just before the Senate Judiciary Committee had been due to vote on Kavanaugh, ignited an uproar fueled by the #MeToo movement against sexual harassment. For Democrats hoping to hurt Trump before November congressional elections, when they hope to retake at least one house of the Republican-dominated Congress, the row is a godsend. And Trump -- who faces a raft of serious allegations of sexual impropriety and was once caught on tape boasting of being able to "grab" women's genitals whenever he wanted -- has had to tread a fine line. Instead of the real estate tycoon's usually no-holds-barred combative style, honed during decades of cutthroat business deals, he has been careful to speak about Ford with respect. However, he has at the same time repeatedly insisted on Kavanaugh's "unblemished" record. On Wednesday, Trump made clear that his main goal is shifting the Supreme Court to the right. "When I first decided to run, everybody said the single most important thing you do is the Supreme Court justice," he said. - Call for FBI involvement - Lawyers for Ford, 51, say now that they want a broader FBI investigation first, rather than a one-day hearing which Democrats say will be used by Republicans as fig leaf before going ahead with Kavanaugh's confirmation vote. In a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee, the lawyers said she has faced "vicious harassment and even death threats" since going public with her allegations on Sunday. "As a result of these kind of threats, her family was forced to relocate out of their home," they added. Some on the left believe that Ford could become a new icon of the #MeToo campaign against the sexual harassment of women by powerful men. However, with her yet to appear in public, it remains uncertain what level of grassroots anger is being stirred. A GoFundMe campaign for aiding Ford's costs had raised $135,542 of its $175,000 goal in less than 24 hours Wednesday, although another campaign had raised only around $5,000 after two days. Until last week, Judge Brett Kavanaugh looked almost certain to win confirmation to the Supreme Court in a victory for President Donald Trump Donald Trump has repeatedly insisted on Brett Kavanaugh's "unblemished" record and suitability for the lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court
Turkey's top appeals court on Thursday ordered the release of an opposition lawmaker convicted last year of leaking classified material to the press, state media reported. Republican People's Party (CHP) MP Enis Berberoglu was sentenced in June 2017 to 25 years in jail, but an appeals court in February reduced it to five years and 10 months. Now the Court of Cassation, known as the Yargitay, ruled that Berberoglu should be released from jail and his sentence postponed for as long as he remains an MP, the state-run Anadolu news agency said. Berberoglu was re-elected to parliament in elections in June this year. He is expected to walk free from his Istanbul prison in the next hours. His conviction for espionage was quashed but in February he was found guilty and jailed for the charge of "revealing information that should remain secret for the state's security, domestic and international reasons". Berberoglu was the only lawmaker from the CHP -- established by modern Turkey founder Mustafa Kemal Ataturk -- to be jailed in the crackdown which followed the July 2016 failed overthrow of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. However former CHP lawmaker Eren Erdem was arrested in June over alleged links to the group blamed for the attempted coup. Berberoglu's case relates to the 2015 publication by the opposition Cumhuriyet newspaper of images purportedly showing the Turkish intelligence service seeking to transport arms over the border to Syria. Berberoglu was accused of giving images to Cumhuriyet's former editor-in-chief Can Dundar, who himself fled to Germany after himself being convicted. The MP's sentence prompted CHP leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu to undertake a 450-kilometre (280-mile) march from Ankara to Istanbul, where he was joined by thousands of people to call for justice in Turkey under Erdogan. The march was the opposition's biggest action in Turkey since countrywide demonstrations against Erdogan's rule in June 2013, known as the Gezi Park protests. Former co-leaders of the Pro-Kurdish Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP), Selahattin Demirtas and Figen Yuksekdag, and 10 other MPs were jailed in November 2016. Demirtas and Yuksekdag remain in jail on terror charges over alleged links to Kurdish militants. Under a two-year state of emergency which ended in July, tens of thousands of people were arrested, including politicians and journalists, raising concerns over eroding freedom of speech and the judiciary's independence in Turkey. A court has ordered the release of Turkish opposition lawmaker Enis Berberoglu, pictured in June 2017
Ugandan pop star turned opposition MP Robert Kyagulanyi returned from medical treatment abroad on Thursday to be met by police who forcibly escorted him to his home in the capital Kampala. Since entering parliament last year, Kyagulanyi, 36, and better known as pop star Bobi Wine, has emerged as a leading critic of President Yoweri Museveni, a 74-year-old former rebel leader in charge since 1986. Kyagulanyi has become an opposition firebrand, commanding widespread support among Uganda's youthful, urban population, earning him the government's ire. He faces treason charges, alongside more than 30 others, after Museveni's motorcade was stoned by opposition supporters during a by-election in the northwestern town of Arua last month. Kyagulanyi claims he was beaten and tortured in custody after being arrested, and sought medical care in the US. His rough treatment at the hands of the government sparked street protests and on Thursday security forces took no chances. Riot police and soldiers were deployed in the city, and access to the airport at Entebbe, 40 kilometres (25 miles) away, was tightly controlled with checkpoints and road closures. In the past, Museveni's returning opponents have been greeted by large crowds that turned into an slow hours-long procession towards the capital marked by clashes between police and supporters. Upon arrival, Kyagulanyi was separated from other passengers and bundled into a police vehicle without explanation. His wife, Barbie, told AFP "security surrounded him and took him away". - A new challenge - Kyagulanyi's international lawyer, Robert Amsterdam, condemned his client's "illegal detention" which he said was "based on the fear of the power of the people". But Uganda's police chief, Martin Okoth Ochola, said officers were merely providing a safe escort service. "What we have done is to escort him from Entebbe airport to his home," Ochola said. Police had earlier banned "unlawful rallies, processions and assemblies". But outside his house, officers watched as Kyagulanyi stood on the roof of a car to address a crowd which had gathered to welcome him. "It's great to finally be home," he said to cheers. "So many police officers grabbed me from the plane, they searched me took away my passport and all the documents," he said, but did not allege any mistreatment this time. Speaking to AFP afterwards, Kyagulanyi was unbowed. "To the youths and underprivileged of Uganda, this is your struggle and I am ready to take the leadership role," he said. "Uganda is ready for change and this is not the time to let down that call." Nicknamed "His Excellency the Ghetto President" during his pop star days, when he blended lyrics on social justice and poverty with catchy Afrobeat rhythms, Kyagulanyi is rare among a political class dominated by older Ugandans. His relative youth and broad popularity represent a new challenge to Museveni's long rule. In power for more than three decades, Museveni is the only president most citizens have ever known, in a country where the median age is less than 16. He has had the constitution amended twice, to remove term and then age limits, clearing him to run for a sixth term in 2021. Kyagulanyi addressed cheering supporters outside his home as the police looked on Kyagulanyi is nicknamed 'His Excellency the Ghetto President'
British foreign minister Jeremy Hunt on Thursday called for justice on the Rohingya crisis after his visit to Myanmar's Rakhine state, telling embattled leader Aung San Suu Kyi the world "won't let it rest". Hunt's rallying cry for accountability comes at the end of a busy two-day visit during which he visited Rakhine -- the epicentre of a brutal military campaign that drove out more than 700,000 Rohingya Muslims -- and met with Suu Kyi. "Burma needs to know the international community won't let it rest," said Hunt using Myanmar's former name. Myanmar has set up an "independent" commission to address the army's crackdown against the Rohingya, rejecting the UN probe and calls for the International Criminal Court to investigate. "If we don't see that process happening, we will use all the tools at our disposal to make sure there is justice... the world is watching," Hunt said after the meeting, which he said was "lively" and "frank". The British foreign minister's visit came the same week UN investigators released a damning and meticulous report detailing why six Myanmar generals should be prosecuted for genocide against the Rohingya Muslim minority. The Rohingya fled to neighbouring Bangladesh, where they joined about 300,000 already in cramped refugee camps, carrying accounts of extrajudicial killings, extreme sexual violence and arson. The evidence warrants the charges of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes, UN investigators said. Hunt also brought up with Suu Kyi his "concerns" on the jailing of two Reuters journalists, Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo, who were sentenced earlier this month to seven years each under the state secrets act. The pair had uncovered the extrajudicial killings of 10 Rohingya men in the Rakhine village of Inn Din -- something the army has since acknowledged. Suu Kyi, who endured a total of 15 years of house arrest under the previous junta-led regime, said last week Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo's sentencing upheld the rule of law. "She said she would look into it," Hunt said Thursday. - Tightly-managed tour - Before the meeting, the foreign minister was led on a three-hour, tightly-managed tour of Rakhine via helicopter, which included the Taung Pyo Letwe returnee reception centre, opened to receive the refugees even though virtually no Rohingya have come back. Bangladesh and Myanmar signed an agreement last year to repatriate the Muslim minority but it has stalled as they fear returning to Rakhine without their safety and rights guaranteed. In each of the three other locations Hunt was shepherded to, he found a pre-selected group of locals waiting to speak to him. At Pan Taw Pyin village, the final stop, he walked off to try to speak with nearby residents about their experiences despite the heavy security presence. The military has consistently denied nearly all wrongdoing, insisting that its campaign was justified to root out militants, and Myanmar's ambassador to the UN on Tuesday slammed the UN probe as "one-sided" and "flawed". Suu Kyi, a former pro-democracy icon, has seen a sharp fall from grace internationally due to her failure to address the Rohingya crisis. Her supporters say her hands are tied by a still powerful military, which controls a quarter of parliament's seats and three ministries. UN investigators say her government's "acts and omissions" contributed to the "atrocity crimes" in the crisis. Hunt will head to New York next week for the UN General Assembly, where he will chair a foreign ministers' meeting Monday on Myanmar. Suu Kyi will not be travelling to New York for the UN top meeting. Hunt arrived in Yangon on Wednesday and said he wanted to see "first-hand" the humanitarian crisis faced by the Rohingya British foreign minister Jeremy Hunt meets local residents in Rakhine state. He was led on a three-hour, tightly-managed tour of Rakhine via helicopter
The decision by a fiercely pro-Western region of Ukraine to ban Russian-language arts, from songs to books and films, prompted widespread condemnation on Thursday even as it remained unclear how it would be implemented. Lawmakers in Lviv's regional parliament on Tuesday overwhelmingly backed an open-ended moratorium on the public use in any form of Russian-language "cultural product". The regional assembly said the moratorium would last until the end of Russia's "occupation" of Ukraine, referring to Moscow's annexation of Crimea and support for separatist regions in eastern Ukraine. The move has prompted ridicule from Moscow and Western diplomats and even a member of Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko's ruling party. Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova told journalists on Thursday that "we regret that officials in Ukraine are fighting a war on language too, and this is a war with their own people." Oleksiy Goncharenko of Poroshenko's party wrote on Facebook that the deputies were apparently going to absurd lengths due to upcoming legislative and presidential elections. "The closer the elections, the more absurdity," he said, stressing that Russian is used by many Ukrainian writers and Ukrainian filmmaker Oleg Sentsov, who is currently on hunger strike in a Russian penal colony. - 'Just plain dumb' - Canadian and British ambassadors to Ukraine also strongly criticised the move. The terms of the Lviv region's ban are "narrow-minded, discriminatory and #justplaindumb," Canadian Ambassador Roman Waschuk wrote on Twitter. "C'mon Lviv (region), you?re better than this," British Ambassador Judith Gough wrote, adding the hashtags #tolerance and #diversity. Ukraine already has a nationwide ban on films judged to glorify Russia's military. It has imposed entry bans on Russian pop stars who have backed the annexation of Crimea and travelled there directly from Russia. The regional body that voted for the ban is dominated by the party of President Poroshenko and the pro-Western Samopomich party. But it also has members of the Svoboda nationalist party including the bill's author, a former national parliament deputy speaker. The Soviet Union occupied western Ukraine at the outbreak of World War II in 1939 and anti-Russian sentiments have traditionally been very strong there. Lviv is a popular tourist destination with its Central European-style architecture and cafe culture. The region borders Poland in the European Union. The Ukrainian language is already used much more than Russian in the region, but many Ukrainians use both languages in daily life. A copy of the bill published on the parliament's website says that it aims to "protect the Ukrainian information space from the hybrid influences of the aggressor state and overcome the consequences of prolonged linguistic Russification". The decision will affect cafes, restaurants and any public transport playing Russian-language music, two deputies from Svoboda nationalist party told AFP on Thursday, on condition of anonymity. It will also affect books, films and public readings, they said. But the decision, whose wording was drawn up by Svoboda party, was "advisory in nature" and "does not specify any time limits or the mechanism of implementation and punishment," they added. Ties between Kiev and its former master Moscow were shredded after Russia annexed Crimea in 2014 and supported a separatist uprising in east Ukraine, a conflict that has claimed more than 10,000 lives. Ukraine and its Western allies have accused Russia of funnelling troops and arms across the border, but Moscow has denied the claims despite evidence to the contrary. The Ukrainian town of Lviv, where regional lawmakers voted to ban Russian-langauge arts such as books, films and songs September 19, 2018, is seen in December 2017
The United States hit a Chinese military organization with punishing financial sanctions for buying Russian fighter jets and missiles as it stepped up pressure on Moscow over its "malign activities." It was the first time the Trump administration targeted a third country with its CAATSA sanctions, designed to punish Russia for its seizure of Crimea and other activities. The State Department said it was applying the 2017 legislation against the Equipment Development Department of the Chinese Ministry of Defense for its purchase of Russian Sukhoi Su-35 fighter jets and S-400 surface-to-air missiles. At the same time, the State Department also announced it was placing 33 Russian intelligence and military-linked actors on its sanctions blacklist under the CAATSA rules. "The ultimate target of these sanctions is Russia," a senior administration official told journalists, insisting on anonymity. "CAATSA sanctions in this context are not intended to undermine the defense capabilities of any particular country. They are aimed at imposing costs on Russia in response to its malign activities." CAATSA, or the Countering America's Adversaries Through Sanctions Act, was passed in 2017 as a tool that gives the Trump administration more ways to target Russia, Iran and North Korea with economic and political sanctions. With regard to Russia, CAATSA arises from the country's "aggression in Ukraine, annexation of Crimea, cyber intrusions and attacks, interference in the 2016 elections, and other malign activities," the State Department said. "We will continue to vigorously implement CAATSA and urge all countries to curtail relationships with Russia's defense and intelligence sectors, both of which are linked to malign activities worldwide," it said. The senior official said EDD and its director, Li Shangfu, were hit with sanctions because of the purchases made from Rosoboronexport, Russia's main arms export entity already on the CAATSA blacklist for its support of the Assad regime in Syria. The sanctions freeze any of EDD's and Li's assets in US jurisdictions. They restrict EDD's access to global financial markets by blocking foreign exchange transactions under US jurisdiction or any transactions in the US financial system. The Russians named for CAATSA blacklisting have all been named previously under other US sanctions regimes. They include private paramilitary contractor PMC Wagner, and Russian Defense Ministry procurement group Oboronlogistika, and KNAAP, Russia's largest aircraft manufacturer. They also include 25 Russians and three Russian companies who were indicted over the past year by Russia collusion investigator Robert Mueller for their involvement in political meddling and hacking during the 2016 election. In addition, the chief of the Russian military intelligence body GRU, Igor Korobov, and deputy chief Sergey Gizunov, were also hit with the CAATSA sanctions. The US sanctions a Chinese military organization for buying from Russia S-400 surface-to-air missiles and Sukhoi Su-35 fighters, like this one landing at a Russian base in Syria
Washington's ambassador in Berlin has been pressuring German firms "daily" to comply with American sanctions on Iran, a spokeswoman said Thursday, even as European governments look to shield their companies from US ire. Diplomats' acknowledgement of the squeeze on firms followed envoy Richard Grenell's claim that he had struck a deal with car giant Volkswagen to implement the punitive measures, which VW declined to confirm when contacted by AFP. "US Ambassador Grenell has been speaking to CEOs and industry leaders for quite some time urging them to comply with US sanctions," embassy spokeswoman Christina Higgins told AFP. "The ambassador has worked daily with the embassy team to do follow-up with individual companies to ensure that CEOs' commitment is implemented," she added. President Donald Trump has re-imposed a trade squeeze after withdrawing from a 2015 agreement that relaxed sanctions in exchange for Iran freezing its nuclear weapons programme. Grenell told Bloomberg News Thursday that he had reached a detailed agreement with Volkswagen this week for the Wolfsburg-based group to abide by the US sanctions. Even under full compliance, VW will still be able to do some business in Iran under a "humanitarian exception", Bloomberg reported. But a source familiar with the talks told AFP that VW and the US government had not yet reached an accord. Meanwhile, a spokesman for the carmaker told AFP it was sticking to its position that it "obeys all national and international laws as well as export regulations". "We are also taking into account possible effects related to the reintroduction of US sanctions," he added. The auto behemoth had announced in July 2017 that it would begin selling its own-brand cars in Iran for the first time in 17 years. - Battle to save Iran deal - Grenell -- known for stirring up controversy in his host country with public sallies on business and politics -- this month also tweeted to celebrate chemicals heavyweight BASF and reinsurance giant Munich Re saying they would comply with the trade squeeze. A spokesman for BASF told AFP Thursday that it "will continue to do business in Iran and obey all legal rules and regulations". He added that "around half" the 80 million euros ($93.5 million) in revenue BASF earned in Iran last year came from sectors -- energy, automobiles and petrochemicals -- affected by American sanctions. The Ludwigshafen-based group's business with the country represents a tiny fraction of its 64.5 billion euros in annual turnover. Meanwhile Munich Re has said it would withdraw from Iran in case of sanctions so as not to jeopardise its much larger US activities. European governments are battling to find ways for their firms to continue trading with Iran, hoping to keep Tehran from renewing its pursuit of nuclear weapons. Last week, the German government confirmed to AFP that Berlin, Paris and London were considering a scheme that would allow Iran to ship goods to European Union countries and receive others in return -- without transferring money through international financial channels vulnerable to US sanctions. Unusually outspoken for a diplomat, ambassador Grenell irked his German hosts immediately following his arrival in Berlin earlier this year. On his first day on the job, he tweeted that "German companies doing business in Iran should wind down operations immediately". In one of his first interviews, he also pressured German firms to withdraw from business with Iran and said he aimed to "empower" anti-establishment conservatives around Europe -- drawing accusations of meddling in his host country's politics. burs-tgb/fz/gd On his first day as US ambassador to Germany earlier this year, Richard Grenell tweeted that "German companies doing business in Iran should wind down operations immediately" Even under full compliance with US sanctions, VW will still be able to do some business in Iran under a "humanitarian exception", Bloomberg reported Reinsurance giant Munich Re has said it would withdraw from Iran in case of sanctions so as not to jeopardise its much larger US activities


A woman has been stabbed to death during her evening run just one week after she got engaged and started planning her wedding.

Wendy Martinez, 35, was jogging through 11th Street NW in Washington DC at 8pm on Tuesday when she was attacked and stumbled into a nearby restaurant for help.

Customers at Tommy Wus restaurant desperately tried to save Ms Martinez, but she was pronounced dead at a nearby hospital.

I saw her fall down, and then I see a hole in her neck from the stab wound. My customers were screaming, and there was blood all over her face and neck, Mr Wu said.

Ms Martinez had just got engaged to her partner Daniel Hincapie a week before the attack.

Wendy Martinez, 35, was jogging in Washington DC at 8pm on Tuesday when she was attacked. Photo: DC Police

[She was] everything you hope that a daughter and a friend could be. She was also excited to be planning her upcoming wedding to her fiance Daniel Hincapie. They were engaged just last week, a family statement read.

A knife was recovered near the crime scene, but Police Chief Peter Newsham, who was among the first to respond to the scene Tuesday night, declined to describe the weapon believed to have been used in the attack.

Chief Newsham said police are searching for a black male wearing a mustard-coloured shirt, dark sweat pants rolled up to his ankle and white sandals with white socks.

Police released security vision of a man they wish to speak to over the attack. Photo: DC Police

The description is based on a grainy surveillance video from the Chinese restaurants security camera.

Ms Martinez worked as chief of staff for FiscalNote, a Washington, D.C.-based software company.

On Wednesday, FiscalNote released a statement saying it is shocked and deeply saddened to learn of Ms Martinezs death.

Help us identify the person responsible for the murder of Wendy Martinez. She was stabbed to death last night in the 1400 block of 11th St, NW. Click the link for additional details and video. https://t.co/Ybce195sqs Have info? Call 202-727-9099/Text 50411 pic.twitter.com/9LjLavquPZ  DC Police Department (@DCPoliceDept) September 19, 2018

Wendy was an invaluable member of our team and a vibrant member of the community. Our thoughts and prayers are with Wendys family and friends, the statement said.

Police are offering a US$25,000 reward for information leading to an arrest.


A Canadian teenager who won more than half a million dollars in a local lottery has lost half his jackpot prize after a family feud that made international headlines.

Tyrone MacInnis, 19, and his aunt Barbara Reddick, from Nova Scotia, an island of Canadas east coast, won the top prize in the Margaree Chase the Ace lottery on July 12.

Both names had been written on the winning ticket, so lottery organisers split the jackpot down the middle, awarding each person AU$615,000.

But then Ms Reddick took her nephew to court, saying she had never agreed to split the money with the teenager.

Tyrone MacInnis, 19, lost half his lottery winnings after his aunt disputed his win. Source: Facebook/Tyrone MacInnis

Instead, she claims she transferred $100 to her nephew to buy the tickets on her behalf and asked him to include his name on the ticket for good luck, according to The Telegraph UK.

When it was revealed that the duo had won, they were photographed by reporters holding a giant novelty cheque with both their names written on it.

In the picture, Tyrone is grinning widely, but his aunt doesnt look so happy.

When the cameras stopped clicking, Ms Reddick turned to her nephew and said: See you in court.

The pair then engaged their lawyers  and engaged in a nasty public feud.

Just moments after this photo was taken, Barbara Reddick turned to her nephew and said, See you in court. Source: Facebook/Margaree Chase the Ace

I bought the ticket, Ms Reddick told Canadian news network CBC.

Now hes trying to lie and say I said split the winnings.

I put his name on the ticket for good luck because hes like a son to me  he was.

He was lucky, but not for half a million dollars. Tyrone is getting nothing from me.

Hes dead to me.

In August, a judge froze Tyrones share of the winnings while the dispute was mediated out of court.

The family reached an agreement that Tyrone would receive $373,507  less than half the original amount awarded to him  while his aunt would pocket the lions share of approximately $931,000.

While the pair are reportedly happy with the outcome, many of those following the story took to social media to slam the teenagers aunt as greedy and shameful.

Money ruins families, one person tweeted. Greed and entitlement ruins families. Shameful behaviour.

She chose the love of money over her own nephew, wrote another. Very sad!
TORONTO, Sept. 20, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- On behalf of the Board of Directors of Grand Challenges Canada (GCC), Chair Guylaine Saucier today announced that Ms. Jocelyn Mackie and Dr. Karlee Silver have been appointed as co-Chief Executive Officers. Their appointment is effective immediately.



Innovation is the defining DNA of Grand Challenges Canada and we have opted for an innovative approach in both the model and the individuals we have selected to lead this organization forward through its next stage of growth and transformation, emphasized Mme Saucier. In Dr. Silver and Ms. Mackie, we have chosen two strong leaders who combine an incomparable knowledge of GCCs operations with a detailed plan for change and growth. In presenting their shared vision for a co-CEO model, the board was struck by the ambition, pragmatism and dynamism of their plans for GCC.

As co-CEOs, Ms. Mackie and Dr. Silver are being handed a mandate to build on GCCs success by leading a new era of scaling in global health innovations, and catalyzing innovations within humanitarian settings and among Canadas Indigenous communities, as well as fortifying the financial, operational and external-facing profile of the organization over the long-term. Their appointment distinguishes GCC as one of the few research and impact-investor organizations worldwide to be led by women  at both the executive and board level.

The opportunity to take Grand Challenges Canada into its next stage of maturity and growth is one that we approach with energy and confidence, stated Ms. Mackie and Dr. Silver. Supporting Bold Ideas with Big Impact remains the essence of what GCC will do in the future. Working together, we have a clear vision for how to build on established success and pursue this success in new areas  in pursuit of helping to accelerate the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals through innovation

The Boards decision comes after an extensive and competitive open search and review process, led by the Boards CEO Search Committee and administered by an international executive search firm.

Please see attached for biographic information about Dr. Silver and Ms. Mackie.

ABOUT GRAND CHALLENGES CANADA: Grand Challenges Canada is dedicated to supporting Bold Ideas with Big Impact. Funded by the Government of Canada and by other partners, Grand Challenges Canada funds innovators in low- and middle-income countries and Canada. The bold ideas Grand Challenges Canada supports integrate science and technology, social and business innovation  known as Integrated Innovation. One of the largest impact-first investors in Canada, and with a feminist investment approach, Grand Challenges Canada has supported a pipeline of over 1000 innovations in more than 80 countries. Grand Challenges Canada estimates that these innovations have the potential to save up to 1 million lives and improve up to 28 million lives by 2030. Grand Challenges Canada is hosted in Toronto at the Sandra Rotman Centre at the University Health Network.

In the past year, Grand Challenges Canada has initiated two new Grand Challenges including Creating Hope in Conflict: a Humanitarian Grand Challenge in partnership with USAID and DFID UK, and the Indigenous Innovation Initiative in partnership with the McConnell Foundation and Johnson & Johnson.

BIOGRAPHIES

Dr. Karlee Silver DPhil

Co-Chief Executive Officer

Karlee Silver is Co-CEO of Grand Challenges Canada, giving leadership and oversight to all aspects of the organizations activities together with Co-CEO Jocelyn Mackie.

Prior to being appointed co-CEO, Dr. Silver was VP Programs where she set strategy for development and humanitarian innovation initiatives, and enabled the programs, investments, and knowledge management teams to source, support, and transition to scale promising innovations for social impact in low- and middle-income countries. She represents Grand Challenges Canada in the International Development Innovation Alliance (IDIA) and in the Grand Challenge network, and advises on a range of global initiatives aligned with womens and childrens health and development and global mental health. She is the Chair of the Every Woman Every Child Innovation Marketplace Steering Committee.

Dr. Silver has been with Grand Challenges Canada since it launched, and led the process of selecting the organizations prioritized grand challenges. Prior to joining Grand Challenges Canada, Dr. Silver trained in the laboratory of Dr. Kevin Kain at the Sandra Rotman Centre in Toronto where she helped to identify host responses of malaria infection in pregnant women to harness for diagnostic and therapeutic purposes.

Dr. Silver received her doctorate in 2006 from the University of Oxford, where she attended as a Rhodes Scholar and trained in genetics and immunology. An accumulation of inspirations, including traveling through southern Africa after Oxford, led to a refocus towards global health. Witnessing both the strength of women to sustain their families and communities, and the vulnerability of these same women to the consequences of poverty inspired Dr. Silver to apply herself to empowering women and girls.

In her spare time, Dr Silver explores the outdoors with her dog, practices yoga, and studies wine tasting.

Ms. Jocelyn Mackie MSc, JD

Co-Chief Executive Officer

Jocelyn Mackie is Co-CEO of Grand Challenges Canada, giving leadership and oversight to all aspects of the organizations innovation platform, together with Co-CEO Karlee Silver.

Prior to being appointed co-CEO, Ms. Mackie was Vice President Operations & General Counsel at GCC where she led the Finance, Operations, Legal, and Communications teams, providing leadership and oversight on the organizations operations, funder relations, deal structuring and negotiations (on grant and non-grant financing deals), financial accountability and risk mitigation management, as well as providing legal and compliance oversight.

Prior to joining GCC, Ms. Mackie provided legal and strategic advice to pharmaceutical and technology companies at a boutique law firm with offices in Toronto, Washington and New York. She specialized in intellectual property law and litigation, as well as lobbying for legislative change in Washington and Ottawa. Ms. Mackie started her academic pursuits studying languages and international development, and spent time digging latrines and helping to set up a self-sustaining micro-enterprise for rural women in Honduras.

Ms. Mackie has a MSc from the University of Toronto, where she jointly authored a book on ethical decision-making and corporate social responsibility in the bioscience industry. She has a JD from the Faculty of Law, University of Toronto, and an honours business degree (HBA) from the Richard Ivey School of Business, University of Western Ontario. She is called to the Ontario Bar and the New York State Bar.

When not focused on saving and improving the lives of the most vulnerable, Ms. Mackie spends time with her entrepreneurial husband, three children and two step daughters (aged newborn to 18) at their home in Toronto, family cottage and cattle farm. In her spare time, she stays grounded by taking dance classes, and is active in her community church and childrens school.
A leading national business organization and the political arm of a group representing the manufacturing industry in central New York are supporting U.S. Rep. John Katko in the 24th Congressional District race.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Manufacturers Association of Central New York Political Action Committee endorsed Katko, R-Camillus, during an event Thursday at Air Innovations, an environmental control systems manufacturer in Cicero.

It's the second consecutive election the two groups have jointly endorsed Katko for another term in Congress. The Chamber and MANUPAC also supported the GOP congressman in 2016.

Stephen McAllister, senior manager of U.S. Chamber of Commerce's Eastern region, lauded Katko for his work as a lawmaker.

"Katko has earned a reputation as an independent leader who continues to get things done  from cutting excessive red tape on small businesses, to spearheading legislation to fix our broken roads and bridges, to creating a tax environment for job creators to hire and grow," McAllister said. "We're honored to highlight his record and endorse him here today."

Katko received a 93 percent mark last year in the U.S. Chamber of Commerce's annual "How They Voted" scorecard. The group reviewed 14 votes in the House and Katko sided with its position 13 times. The votes scored by the Chamber included his support of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, a major tax overhaul Congress passed in December.

Since taking office in 2015, Katko has a career 96 percent score in the Chamber's "How They Voted" assessment.

For the Manufacturers Association, the reason for supporting Katko extends beyond his voting record.

Nathan Andrews, chairman of MANUPAC, praised Katko for the "terrific working relationship" they have with the congressman and his staff.

"When John has had significant votes come up, he has done exactly what we want in a representative of our region: he reaches out to those who it will impact, including us, asks for our input, and then thoughtfully makes a decision on how to vote that will best serve his district and our needs," Andrews said.

Katko is seeking a third term representing the 24th district. His opponent is Democratic challenger Dana Balter.

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SYRACUSE  With less than 50 days to go until the election, a high-ranking House Democrat joined congressional candidate Dana Balter for a Latino business roundtable discussion Wednesday.

U.S. Rep. Linda Sanchez, vice chair of the House Democratic Caucus, visited central New York to appear alongside Balter, the Democrat challenging U.S. Rep. John Katko in the 24th Congressional District.

For nearly an hour and a half at a building being redeveloped on the city's Southside, Balter and Sanchez, a California Democrat, gathered feedback from Syracuse business leaders on how the federal government can better assist Latino entrepreneurs.

One reason Balter, D-Syracuse, wanted to hold the roundtable discussion is to highlight the need to address the soaring poverty rate among Latinos in Syracuse.

The U.S. Census Bureau reported that the poverty rate among Latino residents of Syracuse increased from 40.5 percent in 2016 to 58 percent last year. That's much higher than the poverty among Latinos statewide (21.8 percent) and in the U.S. (19.4 percent).

"That makes these issues of economic opportunity and business development and access to the resources and supports that make that possible so critically important for this city," Balter said. "It gives an even more urgent context."

The panelists agreed that one way to enhance business opportunities for Latinos is through inclusion. Rickey Brown, executive director of the Upstate Minority Economic Alliance, noted how there's a lot of construction activity in the region, but the workforce at these sites is not diverse.

Brown revealed that there has been one person of color in the city of Syracuse who has received a master license in the trades.

"We don't control the trades and therefore we don't control the labor," he said.

Balter said in her conversations with Syracuse-area union representatives she has been exploring ways to boost apprenticeship programs. Her goal would be to provide opportunities to those who traditionally lack access to the job training initiatives.

One way to do that is by forming partnerships between the apprenticeship programs and local schools. By doing that, Balter said students would be exposed to various career paths.

A concern for residents of the 24th district, Balter explained, is accountability. She acknowledged comments from Brown and other panelists about not being included in discussions about business development and economic revitalization in the region.

If she's elected to Congress, she stressed that there will be a "seat at the table" for the panelists and other local leaders.

"My hope is that I'm hearing from you and from all of the other people I'm talking to during this campaign on a regular basis," she said. "It's not a solo sport. It's a team effort to get these things done."

At the end of the 90-minute-long meeting, Sanchez praised Balter. It wasn't long ago that House Democrats were supporting Juanita Perez Williams in the 24th district race. The Congressional Hispanic Caucus  Sanchez is a member of the group  endorsed Perez Williams through its political action committee.

Balter defeated Perez Williams in the primary by 25 points. Since then, Democrats have united behind Balter in her bid to unseat Katko, a two-term Republican.

"I know Dana is very committed to being a public servant," Sanchez said. "I hate the term politician because the good ones are public servants. We're in it to try to help uplift our communities and improve quality of life and make local communities a better place to live and work. I know Dana is committed to that."

Online producer Robert Harding can be reached at (315) 282-2220 or robert.harding@lee.net. Follow him on Twitter @robertharding.

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PORT BYRON  The town of Mentz Zoning Board of Appeals made no ruling on a controversial proposed manure lagoon Wednesday, deciding instead to seek legal advice and further consider new information.

The board convened to discuss an appeal from town resident Jessica Marks on the town zoning officer's ruling for construction of an approximately 10-million-gallon manure storage lagoon being built by CH4 Generate Cayuga off of Maiden Lane Road.

Marks, an administrator of the Facebook group Mentz Opposed to Manure Lagoon, which had 244 members as of Wednesday, up from 60 in late July, provided the board with numerous documents, ranging from excerpts from town and state law, non-profit and academic research, information on the project from the state Department of Environmental Conservation and more.

In particular, Marks cited a section of the town's Agriculture and Farm Protection Plan that reads says farm operations must be "conducted in a manner that does not constitute a threat to public health and safety or cause injury to the health or safety of any person."

Marks argued that the potential for the lagoon, which is located on a hill, to overflow and contaminate the drinking water wells of nearby residents constituted such a threat.

"This is not a friendly farm operation," Marks said. "Our community has been taken advantage of."

Zoning board member Robert Warrick largely agreed with Marks, particularly her dissatisfaction with guarantees from Hourigan Farms, which agreed in late August to own, operate and maintain the lagoon, that the lagoon would be designed to withstand any potential dangers.

"Nothing's failproof," Warrick said.

Several board members as well as town residents in the audience said they were also not satisfied by promises from the DEC to take action if the farm were found to be responsible for any issues in violation of its permit.

At a public meeting on the project in August, AJ Wormouth, the farm's manager, told audience members that he was just as concerned about the environment as anyone, and that the farm couldn't survive if they were reckless with the land.

There is a lot of assumption in these questions that its going to leak and there is going to be contamination, Wormuth said at the time. In the event that something did happen  in the extremely rare event that the lagoon would leak  we would be responsible  bottom line.

Warrick noted any action taken after, for example, the contamination of wells, would be too little too late. Resident Todd Thomson, meanwhile, said despite the promises from farm management, any business could be expected to extensively litigate any issue rather than paying out.

"You think CH4, in California, gives a crap about Maiden Lane Road?" Thomson said.

Thomson later added, to the audible agreement of those gathered, that his opposition was not "an anti-farm thing" but rather an "anti-bad water thing."

At times, the board seemed unsure about what authority they had over the project and whether or not they could put a stop to it if they even desired to do so.

Ultimately, the board decided to meet again, possibly as soon as next week, to go over the information provided by Marks with the assistance of the town attorney.

Staff writer Ryan Franklin can be reached at (315) 282-2252 or ryan.franklin@lee.net. Follow him on Twitter @RyanNYFranklin.

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LIVONIA, Mich.BoyFun has signed 19-year-old Jake Olsen as an exclusive model.

Jake Olsen is our first official exclusive model, so we are extremely excited to make this move, said a site spokesman. We have the super stud Jared Shaw and Colombian twink under contract for hardcore only shoots, but Jake is our first full fledged exclusive model under the launch of the BoyFun.com brand.

Family tradition led Slovakian twink Jake Olsen into adult when he turned 18: his father was a performer as well.

A bisexual top, Olsen has an 8.5-inch uncut cock, and he loves to use it.

Twink Republic director Michael Burling, who directs all Boyfun scenes said, Jake Olsen has the bloodline, and the X factor we look for, when searching for that special twink, that has the ability to be a BoyFun exclusive model. He is just a sweet and humble guy, that loves to perform for his fans.

For more information, go to BoyFun.com.
WASHINGTON, D.C.As the Republican-led Federal Communications Commission last year steamed toward a December vote at which the FCC ultimately repealed Obama-era net neutrality regulationsrules the shielded internet traffic from being blocked or slowed by big internet service providersthe Commission's website was flooded by millions of comments, many supporting the repeal of the rules.

But as it turned out, about two million of those comments were fake, sent from accounts using stolen identities of actual Americans, including at least two United States senators.

The FCC has so far refused to produce any documentation that could show where the phony comments actually came from, but that is about to change. A federal judge on the Washington, D.C. District Court last week ordered the FCC, led by Donald Trump-appointed chair Ajit Pai, to release at least some of that data to an independent journalist, according to the tech news site TechDirt.

Freelance reporter Jason Prechtel filed a Freedom of Information request with the FCC in June of last year, requesting the data on the fake comments. When the FCC gave him the runaround, refusing to release any of the data, Prechtel sued.

Now, about 10 months after the journalist filed his lawsuit, federal judge Christopher Cooper ordered the FCC to turn over a list of email addresses that were used to submit the comments in bulk, according to Broadcasting & Cable.

The email addresses were used to submit .CSV files, which are essentially spreadsheets which contain large amounts of datain this case, multiple net neutrality comments. Using the .CSV files, whoever was attempting to game the system with fake comments was able to post hundreds or even thousands of comments in a single submission.

"In addition to enabling scrutiny of how the Commission handled dubious comments during the rulemaking, disclosure would illuminate the Commission's forward-looking efforts to prevent fraud in future processes, Cooper wrote in his 24-page ruling. It is surely in the public interest to further the oversight of agency action to protect the very means by which Americans make their voices heard in regulatory processes.

Prechtel, in a blog post on Tuesday, noted that, I didnt get everything I asked for. The judge ruled against my request for logs from the FCCs servers that would provide further details about which specific email addresses posted which bulk .CSV comments to their system.

The freelance journalist also noted that he currently has no set date for receiving the files, and the court ordered that he meet and confer with the FCC about how to receive the .CSV filesif the commission actually still possesses them.

Photo by Slowking/Wikimedia Commons
MIAMI, Fla.It appears that the long saga of Bryan Deneumostier, the man who posed as a woman on Craigslist and enticed straight men to come to his hotel room to have sex, which he secretly filmed and posted on his website StraightBoyz.com, has come to an end. Deneumostier pled guilty today to two counts of 18 U.S.C. 2511, "Unlawful Recordings of Individuals," which accused Deneumostier of "us[ing] any electronic, mechanical, and other device, including an Apple iphone [sic] and ipad [sic], to intercept any oral communication, as detailed below, when defendant knew, and had reason to know, that such device and any component of such device had been sent through the mail and transported in interstate and foreign commerce" in May and July of 2015. In entering his plea, Deneumostier struck a deal with prosecutors to dismiss the other crimes for which he was indicted: three violations of the federal record-keeping and labeling law, 18 U.S.C. 2257.

Law enforcement officials arrested Deneumostier on July 17 in his hotel room, where he was in the process of having sex with an underage boy, and his plea deal does not cover the state charge of having sex with a minor. However, the plea does mean that Deneumostier won't face any charges related to the 80 men who fell for Deneumostier's claim on Craigslist of being susanleon3326, a "real, heterosexual female," went to various hotel rooms and were blindfolded by Deneumostier, who told the men that "Susan" would be along shortly to service them. However, it was Deneumostier himself who provided the sexual services, and apparently the men were none the wiserunless, of course, they happened to surf over to StraightBoyz.com, where Deneumostier posted more than 150 videos of the men he serviced, none of whom had given their consent to be recorded or to have those recordings put on the Internet.

And it's not as if Deneumostier did the postings for free. The owners of StraightBoyz.com, which is based in Madrid, paid Deneumostier $3,000 per month for continually posting such content.

But of course the reason the Deneumostier case has been of interest to the adult community is that it represented one of the very few times that someone was actually charged with a 2257 offenseand no wonder: It's not as if Deneumostier was interested in keeping records of his "conquests"records that, if discovered by law enforcement officials, could have tied him to the illegal videos he was creating.

It's long been known that the government has tacked 2257 charges onto child porn producers essentially as a bargaining chip: Plead guilty to the primary offense of creating sexually explicit content with a minor, and the crime of failure to keep ID records of the victims would go away. The government has made just this sort of deal in dozens of child porn cases. It's rare, however, for a 2257 charge to be made against a non-child porn producer, though it appears that Deneumostier was charged with the records offenses as part of a similar scheme to gain guilty pleas on the more important crimes.
PAHRUMP, NVSome may believe the move is a bit premature, but a group of sex workers from a legal brothel near Las Vegas, Nevada are speaking out against the rise of sex doll brothels across the planet. Licensed prostitutes from Sheris Ranch are concerned about the negative impact sex doll brothels will have on their profession, should these establishments be allowed to flourish in North America and the United States.

Allissa, a sex worker at Sheris, said that she became concerned about the negative implications of promoting sex with inanimate dolls resembling women when she learned that at least one sex doll rental business, Kinky S Dolls , has been open in Canada for over a year, with plans on expanding to the United States. In fact, Los Angeles has its own doll rental agency, Vivant Dolls.

Its dehumanizing, Allissa said of sex doll brothels. Sex workers offer more than just a simulation of a woman, we offer authentic intimacy and two-way affection that our clients deeply crave and sincerely benefit from.

Offering sex dolls as a substitute for human sex workers is not only an insult to sex workers," she continued, "but its also an insult to the millions of clients that seek genuine sexual and emotional connections with professional women like me every day.

Allissa believes that sex doll brothels promote an unhealthy view of sex, and that engaging sexually with a doll can warp a mans ability to interact with a real woman.

When a client sees a human sex worker, he has a real, two-way experience with a woman that gives him feedback and enhances his ability to be intimate with other women in his current or future life, Allissa said. A man who becomes comfortable with a sex doll is alienating himself from healthy sexual experiences with real women, and distancing himself from any possibility of a healthy sex life.

Roxanne Price, another sex worker a Sheris Ranch, believes that in addition to promoting an unhealthy sex life, sex doll brothels lead to a more violent attitude toward sex workers and women in general.

The idea that women should be like dollsunresponsive and lethargic during sexis downright dangerous, Price said. I feel that sex doll brothels support the idea that sex workers are mere objects, devoid of agency, to be used and abused by their patrons.

Sex dolls are rape-fantasy objects that men can mistreat and abuse without consequences, Price said. Men should not be using sex dolls as training wheels for seeing a human sex worker.

Red Diamonds, a sex worker who has worked in Nevadas legal brothel industry for over ten years, agrees that sex doll brothels are not a substitute for a real client-courtesan experience.

Its a red flag for the sex work industry that doll brothels are becoming popular, Diamonds said. Its an epidemic that will plague the sex industry if we allow these places to proliferate.

In a legal, regulated brothel like those in Nevada, sex workers are empowered women that determine what types of activities we wish to engage in, she added. We never perform any service against our will and all of our clients respect our personal boundaries.

Real sex, especially real sex with a sex worker, is a consensual situation where all parties respect and appreciate their lovers. Sex doll brothels encourage disrespect toward women and promote a lack of empathy in sexual interactions.

Thats not only unhealthy, Diamonds said, its dangerous.

Pictured, l-r: A sex doll, and Karli Brooks, sex worker at Sheri's Ranch
LOS ANGELES  Justin Hunt has three new scenes available. First, this weekend saw the release of MILF Catches The Hunters on RealityKings.com MILF Hunters niche site. Justin has his friend come over with a camera so they can catch his hot new stepmom, Rachel Starr, walking around naked. Little do they know Rachel is just waiting to put on a show. She invites Justin into her room, so she can really put on a show just for him.

Justin continues to please the MILFs with two recent releases for Brazzers.com. First, Justin knew he recognized his new stepmom, Kaylani Lei, in The Model Stepmom. Justins been a fan of Kaylanis online videos for a while, so she decides its time he experienced the real thing. Next, Justin is once again the lucky stepson in Have Your Cock And Eat It Too with Nina Elle. Nina isnt getting the respect she deserves from Justin, so she makes sure she proves her worth with cookies, blowjobs, and lots of banging.

Elle commented, Justin is a great performer. Ive worked with him a few times now, and each time we have more fun than the last! I think we have great chemistry together.

Justin Hunt is represented by 101 Modeling, and is available for B/G scenes. To get him on set, please contact 101 Modeling at 818-835-9802.

Keep up with Justin Hunt via his Twitter.
TORONTO, Sept. 20, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- CompTrak, is pleased to announce the appointment of Bob Lupmanis to the role of Global Head of Sales.



Bob will be responsible for driving global sales growth, business development, building strategic customer relationships and overseeing the sales and marketing teams. Prior to joining CompTrak, Bob held the position of Head of Partnerships, at Thomson Reuters Canada, a leading information and content provider to the financial services industry. In this role, he was accountable for structuring, building and executing global and local partnerships aligned with company growth initiatives and was a key member of the leadership team. His previous experience includes serving as Vice President, Sales at Reuters Canada, where he was responsible for managing a national sales team.

Bob has over 25 years experience in the financial services industry and has extensive knowledge and expertise in financial services, market data, business development, and strategy.

The addition of Bob to our team builds on our strategy to expand the CompTrak footprint to a global market while strengthening our leadership team says Perry Doody, Co-Founder of CompTrak.

About CompTrak

CompTrak is a comprehensive solution that is transforming the way incentive, equity and merit review compensation plans are managed today. CompTrak allows companies to innovate, customize, manage multiple compensation plans and ensure that they are linked to corporate strategic goals while eliminating the need for spreadsheets and dependency on legacy systems. CompTrak utilizes a highly secure cloud-based infrastructure and can be implemented within weeks to support corporate incentive plans.

To learn more, visit CompTrak.com or contact

Perry Doody, Partner

416-520-2502

perry.doody@comptrak.com




Barry Callebaut has bought Burtons Biscuit Companys chocolate production site and entered into a long-term supply agreement with the biscuit manufacturer.

Zurich-based Barry Callebaut will supply more than 12,000 metric tons of chocolate and compound a year to Burtons after acquiring the manufacturing assets of its facility in Moreton, near Liverpool. All Moreton employees will transfer to Barry Callebaut when the deal completes.

The acquisition will enable Barry Callebaut to expand its manufacturing capacity in the UK, which is seen as an important growth area for the company.

We are delighted to strengthen the collaboration with our longstanding customer Burtons and to further support a great British brand, said Barry Callebaut Group CEO Antoine de Saint-Affrique.

This transaction is an excellent example of the power of long-term partnerships and outsourcing. It is also a clear sign of our commitment to support the growth of our business in the UK market.

Burtons CEO Nick Field said Barry Callebaut shared his companys passion and motivation for baking the best-quality products for customers and consumers.

This new partnership, with their larger network and enhanced capabilities, directly supports our intent and commitment to maintain and enhance our industry-leading chocolate biscuit offering, he added.

Two years ago, Maryland and Jammie Dodgers owner Burtons ended a 30-year licensing deal with Cadbury chocolate owner Mondelez International, selling the licence to Mondelez for around 200m.

Headquartered in St Albans, Burtons operates manufacturing sites in Blackpool, Edinburgh and Llantarnam.
In recent years, the media has given us dire warnings about the "crisis of the humanities." In article after article, one reads about falling enrollments in college English departments and funding cuts. Inside Higher Ed, a popular website that covers higher education, reports that English majors have declined 20 percent since 2012 . History programs have seen a similar decline in degrees awarded. Across the political spectrum, pundits tell us that the humanities are under attack.But there is one point of contention: the diagnosis for the decline. The left tells us that the problem is capitalism. According to them, the business model of higher education requires that academic programs must be cut unless they turn a tidy profit. Commentators on the right tell us that declining enrollments are a symptom of rot in the university. After years of professors spouting politically motivated social theory, students in the humanities have finally abandoned the classrooms of the "tenured radicals." But what if both narratives are misleading?The actual answer lies in a trend that transcends any single college and that predates the culture wars of the 1980s: There has been a massive shift in student attitudes since the 1960s toward vocationalism. As student goals shift, so do their choices of majors.There are a lot of reasons to mistrust these two explanations from the left and the right. There is no reason to think that a modern capitalist society rejects the humanities. A skeptical reader on the left might be shocked by these claims, but the evidence is all around us. We live in a world with an abundance of creative work. Anyone can visit YouTube and see nearly every Shakespeare play without paying a single penny. A website called "Philosophy Index" offers complete online versions of classic philosophy. Every year, billions of dollars are spent on books and the business data website Statista estimates that the global book market will increase from $113 billion in 2015 to $123 billion in 2020. Roughly speaking, that means the average person on earth is spending about $17 per year on books, which includes novels and popular history.If capitalism isn't killing off the humanities, then why do people keep saying there is a crisis in the humanities? Observers often conflate two very different things: humanities broadly understood and college programs in the humanities. The world of novels, film, and art are growing; we live in a golden age of the living humanities. In contrast, academic programs are reeling from declining enrollments.Similarly, the explanation from those on the right is off the mark. To them, the decline of the humanities comes from the vagaries of the academy. They say that students are being driven away by the apostles of postmodernism. And, truth be told, there are humanities instructors who exemplify the worst stereotypes. See, for instance, the scandal around Avital Ronell. Her colleagues accuse her of subverting the traditional curriculum of the NYU German department in favor of Continental theory such as deconstruction. Still, that is only part of the story. Most English departments still offer Shakespeare, most philosophy departments still teach Aristotle, and most history departments teach traditional American history. In my own university, and in many others, these courses are often quickly filled. Universities continue to offer courses on the canonical humanities and students still sign up for these courses. If this is the case, then why are departments losing students?Simply put, college students today are less likely to say that they are attending school for the sake of knowledge. Instead, they are more likely to say that they want a college education to get a job.We know about this increased concern for jobs from the annual College Freshmen Survey , conducted annually by the Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA. The survey began asking a sample of American college freshmen what they valued in an education. In 1970, approximately 50 percent of respondents said that they were attending college to make more money. By 1994, that jumped to over 80 percent. The survey also asked respondents to choose which idea they valued-"develop a meaningful philosophy of life" or "be very well off financially." In 1966, "meaningful philosophy" beat "well off financially" 95 percent to 45 percent. By 1996, the situation was reversed-"meaningful philosophy" had dropped to about 45 percent while "well off financially" jumped to 80 percent. Recent surveys show that things haven't changed much in the early 21st century.Additionally, the landscape of higher education has profoundly changed over the last fifty years, pushing the humanities programs to the side. In the mid 1950s, colleges only offered a handful of majors-various types of humanities such as history, modern and classical languages, and philosophy; physical and biological science; and a handful of social sciences.Now, the situation is reversed. The number of fields of study has multiplied and much of the growth is centered around vocational and quasi-vocational fields. Most research-oriented institutions now offer degrees in business, education, and health sciences. Many also offer engineering and applied science. These fields offer intellectually vibrant topics along with the promise of future employment. It is not surprising that many of the 21st century's most popular college majors are vocational in focus such as business, nursing, or engineering, or have a close tie to business, such as economics or computer science.The humanities, on the other hand, have not kept pace with a vocational focus. We often hear stories of the enterprising English student who encountered the curmudgeonly postmodernist and then tuned out literature from her life. But this vivid anecdote does not reflect the more profound and fundamental shift in American higher education, a transformation so massive that it has redefined the spirit of the university. While curmudgeonly postmodernists still exist, they are not the major cause of declining student interest in the humanities. Innovation and reform in education matter more. Starting in the late 1800s, American educators reformed the university so that students would no longer be forced to read four years of Latin and Greek. Instead, they brought in a system of election and a confederation of academic departments, each dedicated to its own pursuit of knowledge.Until the mid-20th century, this system worked as intended. It provided a foundation for a university where students could immerse themselves in core ideas of the humanities and sciences. But the system eventually transformed itself into the system that we have today, which is oriented toward job-seeking and income attainment. It is no small question whether, in this world of the modern university, the humanities will regain their former glory.What does the future hold for the humanities? In terms of creative work, we will continue to see enormous growth and innovation. We live in a world of great novelists like Haruki Murakami, Jonathan Franzen, and Toni Morrison. The internet provides low-cost access to the intellectual treasures of our culture. There is little reason to doubt that this will change.College humanities programs, though, are in a different position. They have not constructively engaged with the massive wave of vocationalism that has changed the university. These academic programs no longer have an exclusive claim on critical thinking and many students no longer think their services are pertinent to the modern workforce. The response is not to double down on esoteric theory, or endlessly focus on social justice. The response may be simpler. Accept that the university has changed but specialize in providing only what the humanities can offer: a lifelong engagement with ideas.
Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein has come under heavy fire from both sides of the aisle for her handling of the unsubstantiated accusation against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh about an alleged sexual assault dating back 36 years, when the accuser and Kavanaugh were both in high school. Feinstein only ramped up the pressure on herself on Tuesday with a comment she is now scrambling to walk back.Speaking to Fox News Tuesday, Feinstein said she "can't say everything's truthful" about the accusation from California professor Christine Blasey Ford.Ford, said Feinstein, isFox's Chad Pergram reports.Feinstein added.Feinstein also told Fox that she knows that Fordwhich isbut the situation was taken out of her control. Asked what will happen if Ford decides not to testify Monday, Feinstein said,stressing that the handling of the hearing is in Republicans' hands.Within an hour of her "truthful" comments causing a stir among media outlets on the left and right, Feinstein "clarified" that she believes the accuser is "credible."Feinstein'ssaid Feinstein, CBS News' Alan He reports.From colleague Connor Marley. Feinstein on Ford. Says FordAmong the strong critics of Feinstein is the editorial board of The Wall Street Journal, which blasted her in an editorial Monday for herrole in the accusation against Judge Kavanaugh:The role of Senator Dianne Feinstein is also highly irregular and transparently political. The ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee knew about Ms. Ford's accusations in late July or early August yet kept quiet. If she took it seriously, she had multiple opportunities to ask Judge Kavanaugh or have committee staff interview the principals. But in that event the details would have been vetted and Senators would have had time to assess their credibility.WSJ isn't the only outlet asking Feinstein hard questions. The Daily Beast's Michael Tomasky is also wondering, "What in the hell were you thinking?"First of all, what in blazes was Dianne Feinstein thinking? It was late July when she got that letter from a female constituent alleging that Brett Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her when they were in high school. And only this week did she bother to share it with her Democratic Judiciary Committee colleagues?And not only that. According to Ronan Farrow and Jane Mayer's explosive New Yorker piece posted Friday morning, those colleagues got wind of the letter's existence and had been asking her to share it with them "for several days"? What did she say? My dog ate it?Mind-boggling. Here we were, in late July, two weeks after Donald Trump nominated Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. Mitch McConnell had yet to announce the confirmation hearing dates, which he announced on Aug. 9. But obviously, in late July, the Democrats were well aware that they had the fight of their lives on their hands; that they were outnumbered and would need something huge. And here is Feinstein, the ranking member of the committee, holding that something in her hands.
Once upon a time there was a former banker who decided he would run for a public office. He changed is registration from Democrat to Republican so he could win in Beaufort County. He spread the word far and wide that he would not vote to raise taxes. He promised to fix whatever was wrong with those pesky county commissioners. He promised his Democrat buddies in eastern Beaufort County that he would help them with their goal of shutting down the Belhaven Hospital. He promised and he promised and he promised.Upon his election Fake Frankie Waters also known as King Frankie and Zip Code Waters learned that the government did not work at all like those banks he had slaved for those many years. The Banks had to make a profit, the government did not. The banks had limited funds, they guarded them closely and only loaned money to those whom they thought would pay them back and with interest. Government was different, there was an unlimited supply of money and it did not have to be paid back regardless of how willfully it was wasted.If Fake Frankie made a bad loan for the bank, he had to recover whatever he could to reduce the losses. That meant using the law, bankruptcy, foreclosure. and fraud laws. Before he did all of that, he had to explain to several of his bosses how he had made the bad loan mistake and promise never to do it again under pain of losing his job. The government is different, it gives the customer nothing, and it tells them what to pay it. If they do not pay us, we set the tax collectors, and lawyers on them to raid their bank accounts, stock accounts, garnish their wages and if all that fails we sell the property at the court house door. They always pay one way or another. The police power o the state is a wonderful thing for big spenders. Fake Frankie can spend all this money, raise taxes to high heaven and no one can do anything. Fake Frankie is protected by the law.Fake Frankie was like a child in a candy shop. His eyes must have been as big as saucers. In this candy shop he did not have to pay, he only had to decide what he wanted and they handed it over the counter. This was like heaven to a liberal like Frankie.It got better. There was 25 million dollars in the Beauforrt County savings account. Fake Frankie and his merry band spent 10 million of that during the past four years. We are now down to 15 million in savings. Let's see, 20 percent tax increase in taxes and spent ten million in savings and added 90 new employees. What could possibly go wrong?Fake Frankie has also voted to borrow another 8 million dollars within the past year. 3.5 from destroying the hospital trust fund and 4.7 for water meters. Fake Frankie loves to borrow money because he does not have to pay it back. He just raises taxes and you make the payments.Fake Frankie had discovered taxes and taxpayers. You are his fantastic funding machine.Fake Frankie wanted a lot of things and he soon discovered there were others who wanted a lot of things too. They joined together so everyone could get what he wants. Fake Frankie became the leader of the pack. He joined with Commissioner Buzzeo and made a deal with the Democrats to get the four votes he needed to become chairman. That deal made Jerry Langley, a Democrat, Vice Chairman. Fake Franked pulled this off with a super majority of Republicans sitting on the board.There are five Republicans and two Democrats on the board. Well, four of those so called Republicans are RINOs (Republican In Name Only). The vote for Fake Frankie to be chairman was six to one. The RINOs outside the pack saw the light, they joined in because they had things they wanted too.And that, boys and girls, is how your taxes went up 12 percent this year.Fake Frankie is also known as King Frankie because he will make a false statement and then use his position as chairman to deny debate.He is known as Zip Code Waters because he ran for office telling people he would represent the interest of the East side of Beaufort County. Just as Obama promised change but did not say what the change would be, Fake Frankie promised representation but did not say what the representation would be.Fake Frankie worked for the destruction of the Belhaven Hospital and the 50 high paying jobs that went with it. This helped raise Blue Cross insurance rates in Eastern North Caroling (announced two weeks ago) by twenty percent. Fake Frankie represented you to the tune of a twenty percent tax increase over four years. Can you stand another four years?Frankie had created a problem for himself with the closing of the Belhaven Hospital. If someone showed up at the Vidant facility in Belhaven with an emergency, Vidant would not treat you. They would call 911 to take you to the emergency room in Washington. That additional 30 minutes could be really bad for a heart attack. Fake Frankie sat in a commissioners meeting said that he would rather have a paramedic come to his home than to have an emergency room in Belhaven. He said that is why we needed to have county wide EMS service. Frankie was not thinking about your health or taxes, he was voting for his personal wellfare.Fake Frankie was Chairman of the Board of Tri County Telephone for several years. When he finished with Tri County it now exists only as a name on a telephone book cover. Tri County has only one representative serving on a board of directors that is 200 miles away.Fake Frankie served on the board of the Beaufort County Hospital. Vidant now has this hospital.Fortunately county governments cannot go bankrupt and be owned by someone else. But, high taxes can certainly bankrupt you.Can we afford four more years of Frankie Waters and his "Fantastic Funding Machine"?
NEW YORK, Sept. 20, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Faruqi & Faruqi, LLP, a leading national securities law firm, reminds investors in CV Sciences, Inc. (CV Sciences or the Company) (Other OTC:CVSI) of the October 23, 2018 deadline to seek the role of lead plaintiff in a federal securities class action that has been filed against the Company.

If you invested in CV Sciences stock or options between June 19, 2017 and August 20, 2018 and would like to discuss your legal rights, click here : www.faruqilaw.com/CVSI. There is no cost or obligation to you.

You can also contact us by calling Richard Gonnello toll free at 877-247-4292 or at 212-983-9330 or by sending an e-mail to rgonnello@faruqilaw.com.

CONTACT:

FARUQI & FARUQI, LLP

685 Third Avenue, 26th Floor

New York, NY 10017

Attn: Richard Gonnello, Esq.

rgonnello@faruqilaw.com

Telephone: (877) 247-4292 or (212) 983-9330

The lawsuit has been filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Nevada on behalf of all those who purchased CV Sciences common stock between June 19, 2017 and August 20, 2018 (the Class Period). The case, Smith v. CV Sciences, Inc. et al, No. 18-cv-01602 was filed on August 24, 2018, and has been assigned to Judge Jennifer A. Dorsey.

The lawsuit focuses on whether the Company and its executives violated federal securities laws by failing to disclose that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (the USPTO) rejected the patent for CVSI-007, the Companys lead drug candidate for the treatment of smokeless tobacco addiction.

Specifically, on August 20, 2018, Citron Research reported on Twitter that the Company had failed to disclose that the USPTO rejected its patent for CVSI-007 on December 14, 2017.

Following the report, CV Sciences share price fell from $6.61 per share on August 17, 2018 to a closing price of $4.21 on August 20, 2018a $2.40 or a 36.31% drop.

The court-appointed lead plaintiff is the investor with the largest financial interest in the relief sought by the class who is adequate and typical of class members who directs and oversees the litigation on behalf of the putative class. Any member of the putative class may move the Court to serve as lead plaintiff through counsel of their choice, or may choose to do nothing and remain an absent class member. Your ability to share in any recovery is not affected by the decision to serve as a lead plaintiff or not.

Faruqi & Faruqi, LLP also encourages anyone with information regarding CV Sciences conduct to contact the firm, including whistleblowers, former employees, shareholders and others.

Attorney Advertising. The law firm responsible for this advertisement is Faruqi & Faruqi, LLP (www.faruqilaw.com). Prior results do not guarantee or predict a similar outcome with respect to any future matter. We welcome the opportunity to discuss your particular case. All communications will be treated in a confidential manner.
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".
On 25 August  1 September 2018, BHL representatives from around the world traveled to Dunedin, New Zealand to attend the joint Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections (SPNHC) and Biodiversity Information Standards (TDWG) conference. Hosted by the Otago Museum and the University of Otago, the conference represented several firsts, including the first joint meeting of these two organizations plus the first SPNHC meeting in the Southern Hemisphere.

With the theme Collections and Data in an Uncertain World, the conference was an opportunity for bioinformatics and natural science collections professionals to exchange ideas and expertise as they explored the myriad intersections between collections and the data generated from them. BHL, an institutional member of TDWG, was proud to be a conference partner for this important event.

Explore the full conference program.

Keynotes

In addition to over seventy sessions featuring multiple speakers in several concurrent tracks, the conference also included many fascinating keynote addresses (including one from Dr. Elycia Wallis, Member representative for BHL Australia).

Explore the abstracts for each keynote address below:

BHL Symposium

BHL hosted a symposium at the conference, Strategies for Improving Research Efficiency and Delivering Biodiversity Data through Digital Library Collections, organized by Carolyn Sheffield (BHL Program Manager, Smithsonian Libraries) and moderated by Constance Rinaldo (Librarian of the Ernst Mayr Library, Harvard and Chair of the BHL Executive Committee).

The Symposium consisted of four talks, covering topics including citizen science, linking specimen records to literature, DOIs, and recent efforts to improve search efficiencies in BHL, from full text search to extracting georeference data. Explore the abstracts for each talk in the links below:

The Symposium was attended by about 100 people and was well-received. The session stimulated lively discussion regarding the lack of regulations around assigning DOIs to legacy literature, the ethics of publishers assigning DOIs to versions of out-of-copyright publications locked behind paywalls, and the need for museums to release collections-related data and images openly so that they may be reused for citizen science or on such platforms as Wikipedia (a point eloquently emphasized by Siobhan Leachman as part of a memorable Q&A exchange that was heralded and much-discussed throughout the remainder of the conference).

Conference Impact for BHL

As a conference partner, BHL hosted a table during the event, which provided a valuable opportunity for representatives to talk with attendees. While most had already heard of BHL, the library was still new to some. The BHL brochure and cards were also very popular, with all supplies of each (including over 250 cards) being distributed by the end of the conference.

Rinaldo also presented a poster, Museum, Library and Archives Partnership: Leveraging Digitized Data from Historical Sources, with co-authors Linda S. Ford (Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard) and Joseph deVeer (Ernst Mayr Library, MCZ, Harvard) discussing projects to digitize specimen ledger pages/cards and field books and link them to relevant specimen records in order to enhance discoverability of hidden data and promote cross-discipline research with interrelated historical resources. In particular, the poster highlighted work to digitize ornithologist William Brewsters notebooks and correspondence, make these available via BHL, and ultimately cross-link the data with the related specimen records. You can see the poster via Dropbox.

The conference also enabled representatives to learn more about BHLs impact on research. Many attendees shared examples of how BHL has empowered their own research, with several agreeing to share their experience as part of the BHL User series (so be sure to follow the series to learn more!).

Several attendees were also inspired to explore ways that they could contribute to BHL, such as by uploading field notes from their institution, working with the API to add literature links to collections databases, or encouraging their institutions to join BHL.

Excursions

BHL representatives had a chance to enjoy New Zealands amazing landscapes, culture, and wildlife through a variety of excursions.

Costantino enjoyed a tour of the Otago Peninsula, where she saw New Zealand sea lions (Phocarctos hookeri), believed to be the worlds rarest sea lion, and yellow-eyed penguins (Megadyptes antipodes), an endangered species endemic to New Zealand.

Several BHL representatives also enjoyed a visit to the Orokonui Ecosanctuary, which is home to a wide variety of New Zealand flora and fauna, including kiwis, jewelled geckos, fungi like stinkhorns, New Zealand pigeons (kererus), kakas, tuataras, and takahes.

About TDWG

Biodiversity Information Standards, also known as the Taxonomic Databases Working Group, is a not-for-profit scientific and educational association that is affiliated with the International Union of Biological Sciences. TDWG was formed to establish international collaboration among biological database projects. TDWG promoted the wider and more effective dissemination of information about the Earths heritage of biological organisms for the benefit of the world at large. Biodiversity Information Standards (TDWG) now focus on the development of standards for the exchange of biological/biodiversity data.

About SPNHC

The Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections (SPNHC) is an international society whose mission is to improve the preservation, conservation and management of natural history collections to ensure their continuing value to society.

Post with contributions from Carolyn Sheffield, Constance Rinaldo, Siobhan Leachman, and Nicole Kearney.
Not for distribution to U.S. news wire services or for dissemination in the United States



TORONTO, Sept. 20, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Avante Logixx ("Avante" of the "Company") (TSXV: XX) is pleased to announce the results of its annual general and special meeting of shareholders held on September 19, 2018 (the "Meeting").

The Company put forward the following resolutions to be voted on by shareholders at the Meeting, all of which were approved: (i) to set the number of directors at seven (7); (ii) to appoint BDO Canada LLP as auditor of the Company for the 2019 fiscal year; (iii) the election of directors; (iv) the ratification of the Company's Stock Option Plan; and (v) the approval of a consolidation of all of the Companys issued and outstanding common shares (the "Common Shares") at a ratio of up to eight (8) to one (1) (the "Consolidation").

I would like to thank the directors that did not stand for re-election for their service to Avante. said Craig Campbell, CEO and Director of Avante Logixx. I would also like to thank the remaining and new directors for their guidance, mentorship and contribution as Avante continues to execute against its strategic plan of organic growth, integration of announced acquisitions and new M&A in the security services space.

Each of the directors elected at the Meeting, being Craig Campbell, Leland Verner, Joseph Leeder, Andrew Coles, Stewart Lyons, Carol Osler, and Elizabeth Cynthia Tripp, will hold office until the next annual meeting of the Company or until their earlier resignation or removal.

Following the approval by the shareholders of the Company at todays Meeting, the Companys board of directors approved the implementation of the Consolidation on the basis of one (1) post-Consolidation Common Share for every five (5) pre-Consolidation Common Shares. The Consolidation remains subject to regulatory approval, including the approval of the TSX Venture Exchange. Further information with respect to the Consolidation, including the effective date of the Consolidation, will be provided by the Company in a subsequent news release.

The board of directors of the Company believes that the Consolidation will improve marketplace liquidity by bringing the price of the Common Shares into a range that is accessible to a broader group of potential investors. Further, the board of directors believes that the Consolidation better supports potential financing opportunities and future acquisitions by the Company.

A total of 63,588,006 Common Shares of the 104,082,885 Common Shares of the Company that were outstanding as at the record date were voted at the Meeting, representing 61.09% of the Common Shares.

Further information with respect to the matters considered at the Meeting can be found in the management information circular dated August 10, 2018, which is available under Avante's issuer profile at www.sedar.com

Further Information on the Acquisition of Veridin Systems Canada Inc.

Further to the Companys press release dated September 18, 2018, the Company announces that, pursuant to the share purchase agreement dated September 17, 2018 ("Agreement") with 1245893 Ontario Inc. ("1245893") and Vision Dynamics CCTV Inc. ("Vision" and together with 1245893, the "Vendors"), the total consideration paid to the Vendors for all of the outstanding shares of Veridin Systems Canada Inc. was $2,430,823 (subject to a post-closing working capital adjustment in accordance with the Agreement) of which $500,000 was satisfied by the issuance of 1,190,476 Common Shares to 1245893.

About Avante Logixx Inc.

Avante Logixx Inc. (TSXV: XX) is a Toronto based provider of technology enabled security solutions. We acquire, manage and build industry leading businesses which provide specialized, mission-critical solutions that address the needs of our customers. Our businesses continuously develop innovative solutions that enable our customers to achieve their objectives. With an experienced team and a proven track record of solid growth, we are taking steps to establish a broad portfolio of security businesses to provide our customers and shareholders with exceptional returns. Please visit our website at www.avantelogixx.com and consider joining our investor email list.

Avante Logixx Inc.

Craig Campbell

CEO

(416) 923-6984

craig@avantelogixx.com



For media inquiries, please contact:

Kevin Wright

LodeRock Advisors

(647) 459  0423

Kevin.wright@loderockadvisors.com



Forward-Looking Information

All statements in this press release, other than statements of historical fact, may constitute forward looking information with respect to Avante within the meaning of applicable securities laws. Forward-looking information is often, but not always, identified by the use of words such as seek, anticipate, plan, continue, planned, expect, project, predict, potential, targeting, intends, believe, potential, and similar expressions, or describes a goal, or a variation of such words and phrases or state that certain actions, events or results may, should, could, would, might or will be taken, occur or be achieved. This forward-looking information includes statements with respect to, among other things, discussions of future plans and forecasts and statements as to managements expectations and intentions with respect to the proposed Consolidation and its potential effects on the Company, its business and the Common Shares.

Forward-looking information is subject to a variety of known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that could cause actual events or results to differ from those expressed or implied by the forward looking information, including, without limitation, the Company not obtaining the regulatory approvals required to effect the Consolidation in a timely manner or at all, the Company maintaining its projected growth, general economic conditions or conditions in the financial markets and the risks identified in Avantes Management Discussion & Analysis, Annual Information Form and other continuous disclosure, which list is not exhaustive of the factors that may affect any of Avantes forward-looking information. In connection with the forward-looking statements contained in this and subsequent press releases, Avante has made certain assumptions about its business and the industry in which it operates and has also assumed that no significant events occur outside of Avantes normal course of business. Although management believes that the assumptions inherent in the forward-looking statements are reasonable as of the date the statements are made, forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance and, accordingly, undue reliance should not be put on such statements due to the inherent uncertainty therein. Avantes forward-looking information is based on the beliefs, expectations and opinions of management on the date the statements are made, and Avante does not assume any obligation to update forward-looking information, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, other than as required by applicable law. For the reasons set forth above, readers should not place undue reliance on forward-looking information as there can be no assurances that the Consolidation will be completed on the terms described in this news release or at all.

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.
NPR reporters poked around in Maria Butina's social media world, looking at the accused Russian agent's thousands of social media friends and reaching out to over 200 individuals. The resulting investigative report paints a portrait of Butina's life, from Siberia, to the tight-knit Moscow pro-guns shooting community, to D.C, Las Vegas, Washington state, and South Dakota.

Maria Butina, the Russian woman accused of working as an unregistered foreign agent, encouraged pro-gun demonstrations in the U.S. as early as 2014, according to messages provided to NPR. Butina's work has been linked to Russia's attack on the 2016 election, but people who know her say she began trying to make her mark inside America years before. NPR examined thousands of people who make up Butina's Facebook network, and reached out to a sample of more than two hundred individuals. Her connections included National Rifle Association officials, gun lobbyists, a Justice Department staffer, a congressional aide, the top organizer of the National Prayer Breakfast and an executive with the Outdoor Channel. She was even friends with the top senior enlisted leader at the Navy's West Coast center for handling nuclear weapons. Her collection of Facebook friends told the story of a woman who has been working for years to change minds on gun rights first in her home country and then in the U.S.

Maria Butina is in jail today, waiting for her trial on charges of conspiracy and serving as a foreign agent. Prosecutors argued she poses too great a flight risk, and a federal judge agreed.

Russian agents were observed outside the courtroom by journalists, presumably ready to whisk her off.

"Neither the Justice Department nor Butina's lawyer could comment for this story because of a gag order imposed by a federal judge."

Go read the entire piece, or listen to it, it's full of fascinating first-person details.

Some tweets from Tim Mak below. Follow him on Twitter, he is awesome.

Butina's network included NRA officials, gun lobbyists, a DoJ staffer, the top organizer of the National Prayer Breakfast and an Outdoor Channel exec. Was even friends with the top senior enlisted leader at a naval center for handling nuclear weapons.https://t.co/zMx27BkQti  Tim Mak (@timkmak) September 19, 2018

The testimony of her friends suggest someone who has been passionate about guns for years; and who in Moscow was seen as pro-libertarian, pro-2A, and pro-American. https://t.co/zMx27BkQti pic.twitter.com/naxMJVaa0p  Tim Mak (@timkmak) September 19, 2018

New detail about Butina: She pushed for gun protests in US as early as 2014, well before prosecutors allege she began any scheme. "I think you need to hold demonstrations!" Butina told a gun rights activist, according to the messages shared with NPR.https://t.co/zMx27B3f4I pic.twitter.com/dVh0K82EC2  Tim Mak (@timkmak) September 19, 2018

In 2015, Maria Butina was not only privately supporting Wisc Gov. Scott Walker, but also talking him up publicly at the Las Vegas political conference where she first popped up by asking Trump a question about Russia sanctions. https://t.co/UXIYeHuGFM  Tim Mak (@timkmak) September 19, 2018


Citigroup Stands to Win From Mexico Trade Deal



By Andrew Bary





Investors have seen Citigroups international exposure as a negative this year. Photo: Callaghan OHare





Citigroup (ticker: C), owner of the second-largest bank in Mexico, stands to gain from the U.S.-Mexico trade accord that President Donald Trump announced Monday.



The stock closed up $1.72, or 2.4%, at $72.39, leading a strong banking sector. The group was up about 1%, as measured by the KBW index of 24 bank stocks.



Wells Fargo Securities analyst Mike Mayo wrote in a client note that Citis shares have been depressed this year by tension over trade between the U.S. and Mexico. Mondays agreement should improve sentiment on Citi stock, which is down about 3% this year, making it one of the worst performers in the KBW index, he said.



At a minimum, any new trade deal could reflect the absence of a negative and, on the upside, new potential growth opportunities, Mayo wrote. Citi is Mayos top pick in the sector; he has assigned the company an Outperform rating, with a $100 price target.



In terms of deposits and branches, Citigroups Citibanamex is the No. 2 bank in Mexico, ranking behind BBVA Bancomer, a unit of Spains BBVA Group (BBVA). The Citi unit has $72 billion of assets and almost 1,500 branches, accounting for about 20% of Citis global consumer bank, Mayo says.



Mayo wrote that Citi is spending about $1 billion to upgrade its Mexican branch network. The Mexican unit has significant growth potential; the bank projects that annual revenues can expand 10% annually in the coming years, partly because the Mexican consumer banking system is less developed than the U.S. system.



Citi shares trade for one of the lowest valuations among major banks. They fetch about 11 times projected 2018 earnings of $6.56 a share and around 1.2 times tangible book value, a conservative measure of shareholder equity that excludes goodwill and other intangible assets. By contrast, Wells Fargo (WFC) and JP Morgan (JPM) trade for about twice tangible book value.



Citis lower valuation reflects a weaker return on equity than several of its main rivals. Citi shares yield about 2.5%.



Citi, which gets about 40% of its consumer-banking revenues from outside the U.S., has the most international exposure among its peers, with franchises in Asia and Latin America. While that global footprint sets the bank apart from its counterparts, it has been viewed as a negative this year. Investors have favored U.S-centric institutions, given the relatively strong American economy and international trade tensions.

Reduced trade friction between the U.S. and Mexico would bolster the case for investing in Citi, an argument that already includes improving returns, ample stock buybacks. and its low valuation.











Citi got regulatory approval in late June to repurchase as much as $17.6 billion in stock over the 12 months ending in June 2019. That could result in the repurchase of almost 10% of its shares outstanding if fully executed, marking one of the most aggressive share buybacks in the industry.




In 2013, Deputy Luis Ortiz was the "school resource officer" at Etiwanda Intermediate in San Bernardino County, California, when he arrested a group of 12- and 13-year-old girls, cuffing them and taking them to jail in a police vehicle; at the time and afterward, Ortiz said he arrested them "to prove a point" because he felt they were "unresponsive and disrespectful" and in his belief, introducing them to the criminal justice system would make them "mature a lot faster."



The girls had been involved in "ongoing incidents of bullying and fighting." Ortiz had been called in to "mediate the conflict." When he decided he couldn't tell who the victims were and who the bullies were, he arrested all of them, "within minutes."





Ortiz is the subject of lawsuits over his conduct, and he has been seeking to use "qualified immunity" (which protects individual officers from civil liability for actions taken in the course of their duties) to escape the suit.





The Ninth Circuit Appeals Court just told him to go fuck himself. The lawsuits will continue.

At the time of the students' arrest, it was clearly established that a police seizure at the behest of school officials must, at a minimum, be "reasonably related to its purpose, and must not be 'excessively intrusive in light of the age and sex of the student and the nature of the infraction.'" Defendants do notand indeed, cannotmeaningfully contest Deputy Ortiz's motivation for the arrests, which he stated multiple times. No reasonable officer could have reasonably believed that the law authorizes the arrest of a group of middle schoolers in order to prove a point. Defendants claim that the students' behavior in the classroom justified the arrest because there was reason to believe the students would engage in imminent fights. That assertion is belied by the audio record of the encounter, which "quite clearly contradicts the version of the story told by" the officers. The students were mostly silent, only speaking to respond to the questions posed to them. But even taking at face value Deputy Ortiz's claim that the girls were being disrespectful to him, and whispering among themselves, this conduct in no way rose to the level of probable cause that could have justified their arrests.

Ninth Circuit Says No, You Fucking May Not Arrest A Bunch Of Middle School Students To 'Prove A Point' [Tim Cushing/Techdirt]

(Image: Etiwanda.org)


Since the US conquered Puerto Rico in the Spanish-American war, it has treated the island as a playground for the rich, with all kinds of sweetheart tax-deals and regulatory exemptions that lured some industry and some rich people to the island, but which kept it from ever developing its economy and infrastructure to American mainland standards.

The latest iteration of this was the 2012 Act 20 and Act 22, which lowered the tax rate for "service-exporting companies" (finance, basically) to 4% and which exempts individuals from tax on capital gains, interest and dividends  the way that rich people earn their money.





This has made Puerto Rico into a playboy's paradise, full of luxury resorts and gate-guarded communities where native Puerto Ricans can find the odd job as a servant or administrator.





Meanwhile, the island groans under the largest debt crisis in municipal bond history, with more than $100 billion in debts and unfunded liabilities, created by the structural inequities of colonial rule and engineered by the finance industry, and its democratic government is now subservient to presidentially appointed administrators charged with keeping bondholders whole, by any means necessary, including cuts and sell-offs that left the island terribly vulnerable to hurricanes and other disasters.

3,000 funerals later, Puerto Rico is a symbol of looter capitalism, where lethal incompetence, deliberate blindness, crony capitalism, and ethnic cleansing are the only official response to natural disasters that plunged American citizens into months of darkness, the second-longest power-outage in human history.





For a good, rounded overview of the connection between colonialism, finance and the looting of Puerto Rico, don't miss this week's Intercepted podcast, which also highlights the island's long history of resistance.





The Act 20/22 tax-dodgers living the high life on Puerto Rico are quite a bunch, as profiled by Jesse Barron in GQ. Thanks to governmental indifference, they easily dodge the minor regulatory burdens they are supposed to endure in exchange for their tax holidays, while partying, being waited on hand and foot, bloviating about the "moral duty" to avoid taxes, and enjoying all kinds of perks, like living in a $2.6M mansion that is taxed at $4000/year because the Puerto Rican government hasn't reassessed its luxury property since 1957.



Tenenbaum's lunch date was a scout from a hedge fund who was here to meet with the Puerto Rican authorities about the government's bond debt. Most of the people who spoke with me for this article seemed unsure of how to talk to a reporter, and it was not uncommon to spend a relaxed afternoon with a person and receive several urgent messages the next day. Marc Bejarano, who works at a local start-up incubator, spoke to me on the phone for an hour, then texted to ask if we could "collaborate" on this article because, he explained, "it'll be hard to write a piece with this subject matter in such a way as to not lead the reader to draw certain conclusions." This scout belonged to a different stratum of financial player. No sooner had the car door closed than she asked, "Are we on record?" When I said we were, she smiled, touched her sunglasses, and stared silently out the window. I tried to imagine the city through the eyes of this scout and her hedge-fund clients. As soon as I did, Robb Rill and Mark Gold and even the acts themselves began to seem like a sideshow to what was really happening in Puerto Rico. There were forces operating here that had no interest in the property taxes at the Ritz or which pool you swam in on Saturdays. The real money talked directly to the government about the power grid and the outstanding debt, issues that could make or break the entire economy. The acts only reflected reality: Government is a business, and its most important customers are the rich. "At some point soon, we're going to have 10,000 individuals," Jose Perez-Riera, the government secretary who first conceived of the acts, told me. "Just imagine the amount of development. This is the beginning of the story, if you will."

How Puerto Rico Became the Newest Tax Haven for the Super Rich [Jesse Barron/GQ]





(via Kottke)
Science writer Ed Yong has an amazing whodunit at The Atlantic on how genetic science can help stop elephant poaching.

Smuggled ivory is on the rise. Over 40 tons of ivory are seized each year.

Ed's wonderful article focuses on the work of University of Washington biology research professor Samuel Wasser, who with his team figured out that by grinding up samples of tusk and dung for DNA, they could match elephant populations with seized contraband ivory on ships headed to China and other lucrative markets.

Organized crime is no match for DNA science, because DNA never lies.



Elephant poaching really took off during the last decade, and it's estimated that 111,000 individualsup to a fifth of the full African populationhave been killed since 2006. The slaughter is a local problem, but it eventually ties into organized crime networks that ship the plundered ivory around in huge containers that weigh half a ton or more. Once they leave port, these shipments are very hard to find. "There are so many containers on cargo ships that even the most sophisticated ports can inspect just 1 to 2 percent of them," Wasser says. "If you're a transnational criminal, you really just have to get your contraband into a container on a ship, and there's a very low chance someone will find it in a search. We need to stop the trade before it enters into transit." To do that, Wasser first needed to find out where the ivory is coming fromand he began with poop. By collecting elephant dung from across Africa, and extracting DNA from them, he and his colleagues created a genetic map of the continent's pachyderms. By cross-referencing the DNA from an unknown tusk to this map, Wasser can pinpoint the tooth's source to within 200 miles. In this way, he showed that almost all the ivory that's been seized in the last decade has come from just two poaching hotspotsone that includes Gabon and the Congo, and another centered in Tanzania. But even with that knowledge, "poachers are very hard to catch," says Wasser. "They work in very large areas, they know those areas very well, and they sometimes pay off rangers. And if you do catch them, there are ten other poachers waiting to take their place." So, rather than targeting poachers, he says, it's far more efficient to go after their customers. Poachers sell their ivory to a pyramid of middlemen, who gradually consolidate it up to large export cartels, who then ship it out of Africa by the ton. It's likely that these same cartels are funding poachers in the first place. "It costs between $25 and $30 for a bullet to kill a single elephant, so where are these poachers getting enough bullets to kill 1,000 animals?" says Wasser. It's the cartels, "who are giving them purchase orders and quotas to fill." To him, these cartels aren't just the core of the elephant poaching problem, but also its greatest vulnerability.

The Three Major Cartels Behind the Downfall of Africa's Elephants [The Atlantic, image: Shutterstock/WWF]
A trio of men were arrested on multiple charges of operating a Ponzi scheme, the funds from which the gentlemen used to buy nine homes, 26 luxury cars, a boat, jewelry, and a share in a private jet, all the while telling their clients/victims that the money was being used to buy consumer debt portfolios.

Kevin B. Merrill (53), Jay B. Ledford (54), and Cameron R. Jezierski (28) face decades in federal prison if they are found guilty.

From a statement issued by the United States Attorney's Office in the District of Maryland:

According to the fourteen-count indictment, beginning in January 2013, the defendants perpetrated a Ponzi scheme to defraud investors of more than $364 million. The scheme was revealed with the arrests and unsealing of the indictment. Specifically, the indictment alleges that Merrill and Ledford invited investors to join them in purchasing consumer debt portfolios. "Consumer debt portfolios" are defaulted consumer debts to banks/credit card issuers, student loan lenders, and car/truck financers which are sold in batches called "portfolios" to third parties which attempt to collect on the debts. The defendants falsely represented to investors that they would use the investors' money to buy consumer debt portfolios and make money for them by (1) collecting the payments that people made on their debts or (2) selling the portfolios for a profit to third party debt buyersin a practice called "flipping." According to the related complaint filed by the SEC, the victim investors included small business owners, restauranteurs, construction contractors, retirees, doctors, lawyers, accountants, bankers, talent agents, professional athletes, and financial advisors, located in Maryland, Washington, D.C., Northern Virginia, Las Vegas, Texas, and elsewhere. The indictment alleges that in order to induce investors to participate, the defendants falsely represented who they were buying the debt portfolios from and how much they were paying for the portfolios; whether they were investing their own funds, and their track record of success. At times, according to the indictment, there was no underlying debt portfolio purchased with the investors' money. To conceal the truth, the defendants created imposter companies with names similar to actual consumer debt sellers or brokers and opened bank accounts in the names of those imposter companies. In addition, to lend credibility to the transactions, the defendants created false portfolio overviews, sales agreements which used the names and forged signatures of actual employees of the sellers, created false collections reports, and falsified bank wire transfer records and bank statements. Further, the indictment alleges that the defendants falsely represented that the monies they paid to investors were "proceeds" from collections and/or flipping debt portfolios, when in fact, the proceeds were paid from funds provided by other investors. The indictment alleges that Merrill, Ledford, and Jezierski personally enriched themselves and concealed their diversion of $73 million of investors' funds to purchase and renovate high end homes in Maryland, Texas, Nevada, and Florida, purchase luxury automobiles, jewelry, boats, and a share in a jet plane, gamble $25 million at casinos, and support a lavish lifestyle. The indictment seeks to forfeit nine properties, 26 luxury cars, one boat, interest in an aircraft, a life insurance policy, seven and nine carat diamond rings, and a 23 carat diamond bracelet, which were allegedly purchased with proceeds of the scheme to defraud.

Image: US Attorney's Office
In Northern Virginia, a distraught woman yelled at Social Security Administration workers, then hit a security guard in the head with her fanny packwhich held a small pigeon inside. She then pulled a knife on the security agent.

She has been arrested and charged with attempted unlawful wounding, police said, for attempting to attack the guard with a knife. She may face other charges related to the bird, officials said.

The pigeon will be "returned to the wild after the investigation is complete," said police.

From the Washington Post:

Fairfax County Police said the incident unfolded around 10:24 a.m. Tuesday at the Social Security Administration office on Waples Mill Road in Fairfax, not far from Fair Oaks Mall and Interstate 66. Police were called when the woman assaulted a security guard in the facility and yelled at employees there. When the guard tried to approach her, she hit him in the head with her fanny pack, police said. Once the security guard escorted her outside, she pulled a knife and threatened him, they said. He closed the door to the facility and police arrived. A police officer found the woman  who was later identified as Laurie Weaver, 56, of New York  nearby. She was arrested without incident. Officers checked her fanny pack and found the pigeon inside. The pigeon was taken to a local animal shelter and was not harmed, officials said. No one was hurt during the incident.

[PHOTO: Top, The pigeon found inside Laurie Weaver's fanny pack. Below, Ms. Weaver's mugshot. She was charged with hitting a security guard at a Social Security Administration office with the bag, then pulling a knife on him. Via Washington Post, courtesy of Fairfax County Police.]
- Joe Buthelezi is the dad of the quintuplets born in Ekurhuleni recently

- Claims have surfaced that he was allegedly engaged to another woman

- The woman's relatives claim that he has dumped her, but he denies they were in a relationship

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Joe Buthelezi, the dad of the quintuplets born in Ekurhuleni recently, was allegedly engaged to be married to another woman.

As Briefly.co.za reported, South Africans welcomed the Buthelezi quintuplets on 6 September. Their mom was identified as Prudence Dlangisa.

However, Sowetan reports that another woman was shocked to learn that Joe was the dad because they were allegedly engaged.

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The publication quoted the woman's relative who claimed that the woman was Joe's fiancee and that they had been planning their wedding.

The source further claimed that Joe allegedly kicked out the woman from his home in May this year after a disagreement.

However, they resolved their differences and resumed their alleged wedding preparations, the unnamed source claimed.

READ ALSO: KZN girl, 16, creates thriving skincare product while still in school

Sowetan quoted the source:

He paid lobola for her in 2014. I used to visit them all the time. The family was preparing for a wedding.

However, Joe has disputed these allegations. He admitted to paying lobola in 2014, but insisted that he and the woman ended their relationship a while back:

I had paid lobola during the year indicated, but I am not in a relationship with her anymore. There were no plans for a wedding. I am devoting my life and energy to the mother of my five kids.

READ ALSO: Durban businessman goes on a rant, calls Ramaphosa the k-word

Watch 5 "miracles" by African pastors in the video below from our Briefly - South Africa YouTube channel.

Do you have a story to share with us? Inbox us on our Facebook page and we could feature your story.

To stay up to date with the latest news, download our news app on Google Play or iTunes today.

Source: Briefly.co.za
News / National

by Staff reporter

ZIMBABWE'S consulate in South Africa has advised locals with pending Zimbabwean Exemption Permit (ZEP) applications in the neighbouring country to apply for new passports to have their permits processed.South Africa's Home Affairs department has set October 31, 2018 as the deadline for processing of all pending ZEP applications.ZEP allows Zimbabweans to stay in SA for a maximum of four years.According to the consulate, the number of Zimbabweans with expired passports and with pending ZEP applications is over 1 000."The Department of Home Affairs of South Africa (DHA) has informed us that it wants to finalise the processing of all pending ZEP by October 31. The process, however, cannot be finalised because the Zimbabwean passports with the pending applications have expired."All Zimbabweans with pending ZEP applications at the DHA are, therefore, advised to apply for new passports and submit them to [Visa and Permit Facilitation Centres] VHS," the Zimbabwe consulate office said."Adherence to the above is very important because the Department of Home Affairs South Africa has indicated that should applicants fail to submit to them new passports before the end of October 2018, the pending ZEP applications will be rejected."Only people with valid Zimbabwean Special Permits (ZSP) issued in 2014 are eligible for the ZEP  a permit for documented Zimbabweans in the neighbouring country to avoid deportation.Zimbabweans were issued with the renewable permits to legalise their stay in South Africa under the Zimbabwe Documentation Project.SA has been introducing a raft of strict measures to regulate foreigners' stay in that country.Zimbabweans and other foreign nationals who overstay in South Africa are now banned from entering the neighbouring country for a period ranging between one and five years.Over-stayers were all along allowed to re-enter South Africa and apply for permits and visas after paying fines.First and second-time offenders who overstay for less than 30 days are banned for one and two years respectively, while those that overstay for a period exceeding 30 days are banned for five years.
News / National

by Staff reporter

A COUPLE from Bulawayo appeared in court on Friday for assaulting their two children who vomited and cried when their parents proceeded to the dock in court.Lance West (39) and Janette West (27) reside at Carruthers Avenue, Northend. Lance is employed at Calbro Transport Belmont, Bulawayo and Janette is self employed.Prosecuting, Mr Nkathazo Dlodlo said: "Someday in May this year, Lance arrived home drunk, confronted his step son and started assaulting him with a crutch several times all over his body."The court heard their son sustained injuries on his left eye.Lance and Janette pleaded guilty to assault before Bulawayo magistrate Mr Tinashe Tashaya who fined each of them $30.He also sentenced them to three months imprisonment which was wholly suspended on condition that they do not commit a similar offence in the next five years.As the couple proceeded to the dock, their son vomited and their daughter shed tears.Lance told the court that he assaulted his son because he had hit his car light intentionally and hurt his daughter with the door as he was trying to unlock a room she had locked herself in.Janette told the court that her children are stubborn and lacked discipline."Your worship we have tried to discipline them even taking them for counselling but all efforts have been to no avail," she said."I would like to believe that our children have anger issues because when we try to discipline or talk to them they lock themselves in the bathroom."Our daughter has even jumped more than twice from a moving car".The magistrate asked the couple if they knew that they had no right to assault their children in the manner they did.Both of the accused persons admitted that they acted unlawfully and asked for forgiveness from the court.
News / National

by Staff reporter

President Emmerson Mnangagwa has arrived in New York for the 73rd session of the United Nations General Assembly.President Mnangagwa who will make his maiden appearance as Head of State at the UN General Assembly was received at JFK Airport by Zimbabwe's permanent representative to the United Nations Mission in New York Ambassador Frederick Shava and embassy staff.The President is accompanied by the Minister of Finance and Economic Development Professor Mthuli Ncube and Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe governor Dr John Mangudya.President Mnangagwa is expected to address the UN General Assembly in this year's general debate on Wednesday.
By Adam Jourdan and Ben Hirschler WUXI, China/LONDON (Reuters) - With smart cancer diagnostics, one-stop-shop diabetes kits and AI systems to improve ambulance pick-ups for patients with chest pain, AstraZeneca aims to move from simply supplying drugs to become a broad healthcare provider in China. Tech tie-ups with the likes of Alibaba and Tencent <0700.HK> will not directly lift the British group's drug sales, since they are not specific for any one company's products and in many cases will be low-cost or free. But it will expand the overall market and represents a soft power play that dovetails neatly with Beijing's support for Internet-based healthcare systems to alleviate a lack of doctors, overcrowding and poor grassroots healthcare. "Down the line we benefit, our products benefit, because we have better relationships with doctors and hospital managers and also because we diagnose more patients and they get better treated," Chief Executive Pascal Soriot told Reuters. Surrounded by the latest gizmos at the World Internet of Things Exposition in Wuxi, eastern China, Soriot says he wants to use the power of artificial intelligence, robots and apps to help transform diagnosis and disease management. AstraZeneca has been on a tear in China, more than doubling its sales since 2012, helped by regulatory reforms to fast-track new drugs, and today generates 18 percent of revenue in the country -- a far higher proportion than rivals. Yet Soriot is anxious to do more to keep doctors and government officials on-side in the world's second-biggest drugs market, as soaring demand strains the state insurance system and squeezes medicine prices. The company's underlying conviction is that it has the right medicines across chronic diseases like cancer, diabetes and respiratory disorders to win in China. Soriot believes that can keep AstraZeneca growing in a pivotal market in the coming years, even though annual growth is likely to slow to nearer 15 percent from the breakneck 33 percent seen in the first half of 2018. The company has moved quickly to exploit China's new-found willingness to use innovative Western drugs. Last year it won a record-fast approval for lung cancer pill Tagrisso, which is designed for patients with a genetic mutation that is particularly common in China. It hopes to get a green light before the end of 2018 -- well before U.S. approval -- for a new anemia drug called roxadustat being developed with FibroGen . China-first approvals for drugs like roxadustat and Elunate, a colorectal cancer treatment from Eli Lilly and Hutchison China MediTech , mark a reversal of the historical pattern of Chinese patients getting new drugs years after their launch in the West. There is, however, a trade-off. Multinationals that relied in the past on selling older drugs at premium prices in China are seeing prices slashed. AstraZeneca took a 50 percent haircut last year on the price of Iressa, its predecessor to Tagrisso. "The government wants to give access to better medicines to more people," said Soriot, who admitted that pressure on prices had come sooner than he expected. "To some extent the economy is growing so there is more money to do that, but there is not enough money ... They have to make room in the budget for innovation." "UNMET NEEDS" With 1.4 billion people, around 18 percent of the world's population, China has more cases of cancer and diabetes than any other nation, fueled by fast food, smoking and pollution, global health data show. "There are enormous unmet medical needs in China, particularly in oncology, and 30 percent of the world's cancer patients are in China," Christian Hogg, Chief Executive of Hutchison China MediTech, told Reuters. "There is almost an inevitability that the Chinese pharmaceutical industry is going to grow to be the largest in the world in due course." The firm, also known as Chi-Med, is working with AstraZeneca on a novel oncology drug targeting kidney, lung and stomach tumors. AstraZeneca is bolstering its sales force to meet this growing demand. It has around 7,500 sales staff in China and is looking to push into smaller cities -- boosting volume and helping offset lower prices. It aims to get more drugs onto a list of medicines covered by basic insurance schemes -- the national drug reimbursement list -- and onto fast-track approvals, Soriot said. The list was most recently updated last year after an eight-year hiatus. A drug joint venture, Dizal Pharmaceutical, backed by the China State Development & Investment Corporation, will promote Chinese-discovered drugs -- another priority for Beijing. "It's the first time a government fund works with a foreign company in researching new drugs for Chinese patients," Leon Wang, AstraZeneca's China head, said in an interview at the firm's Shanghai headquarters. "So we like that." Wang added there were still many patients who went undiagnosed or untreated, and that the firm's aggressive expansion, even to "village clinics", was helping make the difference against rivals tapping growing demand. "Chronic disease, oncology drugs, specialty care, rare disease, these will all explode I think," he said. (For a graphic on 'Booming China sales' click https://tmsnrt.rs/2pbCLGo) (Reporting by Adam Jourdan in WUXI and Ben Hirschler in LONDON; Editing by Catherine Evans)
By Colin Packham SYDNEY (Reuters) - Australia plans to increase the maximum jail term to 15 years for anyone convicted of contaminating foodstuffs, Prime Minister Scott Morrison said on Wednesday, as a scare over needles found in strawberries and other fruits gripped the country. Police are investigating more than 100 reports of needles found in fruit. Needles, first found in strawberries produced by one supplier in the northern state of Queensland, are now turning up around the country. On Tuesday, police in New South Wales said they were investigating incidents involving an apple and a banana. Nobody has sustained serious injury yet, and a senior Australian minister said many of the cases would turn out to be hoaxes. But with demand plunging, strawberry farmers have been forced to dump produce, casting a shadow over an industry worth A$160 million ($115.84 million). Responding to the scare, Morrison said his government would seek to increase the maximum jail term to 15 years from 10 years for anyone convicted of tampering with food. The government will also move to criminalize hoax claims before parliament rises for a two-week holiday on Thursday, Morrison said. "It's not funny, putting the livelihoods of hard-working Australians at risk," the prime minister told reporters in Canberra. "If you do that sort of thing in this country we will come after you and we will throw the book at you." Australia's Attorney-General Christian Porter said that the government was looking at introducing a maximum 10-year jail sentence for hoaxers. While farmers welcomed the government action, many said they face financial ruin if demand does not recover quickly. "It is costing us a lot of money. On our own farm, (it costs) about $35,000 per day to harvest just the fruit we are dumping," said Gavin Scurr, a strawberry grower in Wamuran, 64 KM (39 miles) north of Brisbane. Australia's banking industry said it is willing to offer financial assistance to affected farmers. ($1 = 1.3812 Australian dollars) (Reporting by Colin Packham; Editing by Simon Cameron-Moore)
(Reuters) - Canada's transport minister said on Wednesday his department would require stronger tank cars for transporting crude oil and other dangerous goods far sooner than previous deadlines, bolstering safety rules as crude by rail exports have hit record levels. Transport Canada will now require all unjacketed CPC 1232 tank cars that carry crude oil be phased out by Nov. 1 this year, 17 months earlier than a prior deadline. Unjacketed CPC 1232 and older DOT 111 cars that carry condensate - a volatile light hydrocarbon - will be phased out by January 1, 2019, well ahead of a previous 2025 deadline. Phasing out the "least crash-resistant tank cars as soon as possible" will enhance the safety of communities along rail lines and help ensure the reliable transport of goods and commodities, Canada's Minister of Transport Marc Garneau said in a statement. The move comes one month after the head of Canada's Transportation Safety Board told Reuters that stronger rail cars for moving flammable liquids ought to be required sooner than the initial deadlines. Canada and the United States both introduced new safety standards for crude by rail, including the phase out of certain cars, after a runaway train carrying oil exploded in the Quebec town of Lac Megantic in 2013, killing 47 people. DOT 111 cars, involved in that accident, were phased out for crude usage in Canada in November 2016. The latest phase outs come as Canada's exports of crude by rail have hit historic levels, surpassing 200,000 barrels per day (bpd) in June and expected to rise sharply through 2019. The increase comes as oil output from Western Canada has outstripped pipeline capacity, prompting producers to sign transport deals with Canada's two largest railways. An industry group representing Canada's oil producers said the government had consulted with industry on the changes and the new timelines would have a "limited impact" on Canada's rising crude by rail exports. "I think the transition of this fleet to safer cars, and making sure this product is transported in the safest cars possible, is everybody's shared goal," said Brad Herald of the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers. (This story has been refiled to change to minister from ministry in first paragraph) (Reporting by Julie Gordon in Vancouver and Shanti S Nair in Bengaluru; Editing by Shounak Dasgupta and Bill Berkrot)
The police presence in Quebec City and at La Malbaie during the G7 leaders meeting in June is once again being denounced by human rights groups for being excessive and intimidating.

A report released Wednesday by Amnesty International and the Quebec nonprofit Ligue des droits et libertes found there was a disproportionate number of police officers compared to protesters in the city during the summit, which was held in the Charlevoix region.

The Ligue said the number of officers and level to which they were armed hindered people's ability to protest.

"The protests took place amid a climate of fear and intimidation and that climate prevailed during the whole summit," Nicole Fillion, a spokesperson for the Ligue, told Radio-Canada.

Fillion and Genevieve Paul, who heads Amnesty International's French-language division, presented the report at a joint news conference in Montreal Wednesday.

They said the intimidation by police during the summit follows a worldwide trend of attempting to dissuade protests from happening during meetings held by state officials.

"Political and police authorities completely flouted their obligation to protect and encourage the exercise of civil liberties, including the right to protest, during the G7," Fillion said.

Darren Calabrese/Canadian Press

The two organizations have requested meetings with Martin Coiteux, provincial public security minister, and want police to follow a series of measures to increase transparency.

The report follows one released last month by a group of independent observers, which said the excessive presence of police could have had a chilling effect on freedom of expression and peaceful assembly.

Protesters outnumbered

Wednesday's report was drafted with the accounts of about 40 observers commissioned by Amnesty International as well as from witnesses and protesters who were in Quebec City and La Malbaie during the summit.

There were about two to three times more police officers on the ground in Quebec City compared to the number of protesters at any given time, said Paul.

Story continues

The extent of the police presence did not decrease after the first day of protests, Paul said, when it became clear the anti-G7 demonstrations would be small and tame. Less than 200 people protested on the first day.

"Peaceful protesters faced a police presence that was completely excessive and disproportionate," she said.

Police kettled groups of protesters at least three times, she added, a tactic she called abusive and uncalled for, given the demonstrators' lack of violence.

Officers also pointed cameras toward the protesters, and conducted searches and asked for identification as protesters exited demonstration areas, Paul said.

Those actions could have a chilling effect on people's desire to protest in the future out of fear of being targeted for having been present during the summit demonstrations.

Arrested protesters held up to 60 hours

The report also denounces the conditions faced by the 10 protesters who were arrested during the summer.

It claims they were denied access to a telephone while in custody, violating their right to access a lawyer. They were detained for the duration of the summit.

Some were held for up to 60 hours, which the report says is a disproportionate amount of time for the charges they faced of participating in an illegal protest.

The report also takes issue with the fact the protest was only deemed illegal because no itinerary was provided beforehand.

CBC reached out to all three levels of police present  Quebec City police, Quebec provincial police and the RCMP  but none were immediately able to provide comment.

Quebec City police said it would be reviewing the report.
A packed public hearing to determine whether Vancouver should enable duplex use in the city's single family home neighbourhoods got underway Tuesday night.

The event, which was so crowded that security was required to chaperone 20 people in at a time, would have been the final council meeting of Gregor Robertson's decade-long tenure as mayor of Vancouver.

But with a whopping 73 speakers signed up to speak, the meeting was scheduled to carry over to Wednesday, with a vote to take place Wednesday evening.

City council first asked staff in June to explore how amendments could be made to enable duplex use in most Vancouver neighbourhoods. In July, Robertson amended a motion so that staff could also look at "[allowing] triplexes, quadplexes and other multi-unit forms" in neighbourhoods across the city, though any vote on that issue would not take place until 2019.

If approved, the rezoning measure would be Robertson's most far-reaching housing policy, coming in the waning days of his time as mayor.

A divided room

Speakers who patiently lined up to make their case were divided into two camps  those who felt that rezoning areas to allow for more density would provide housing options that Vancouver desperately needs, and those who expressed concern that rushing such vast changes through would come with undue risks.

Among those who did support the rezoning, most did not feel it went far enough.

"It's an extremely, extremely small step but it's also a step in the right direction," said Stuart Smith, a member of volunteer advocacy group Abundant Housing.

"If it is not time for Point Grey, Shaughnessy and Dunbar to 'make room,' when will it be?"

"I would like to have seen something that was more robust and more progressive," said Jake Fry, who nonetheless voiced his support.

City of Vancouver

Hilary Reid, who said she has two adult sons who are unable to afford houses in Vancouver, said she was against the proposal due to concerns around the loss of character homes and green space.

Story continues

"There is a huge risk that most of the character homes in Vancouver will still be torn down to make way for new builds, as developers deem new construction more profitable," she said.

"This could destroy the charm and uniqueness of many single family home neighbourhoods of the city."

Reid also said she worried about a lack of accountability and follow through on any decision, given that Vancouverites will be going to the polls in just over a month.

'Are you even listening to me, Gregor?'

As the meeting progressed late into Tuesday night, many speakers expressed frustration with the process, saying they were not properly consulted, or that the meeting, held at 3 p.m. on a weekday, was not accessible to most working people.

"You've lost touch. Are you even listening to me, Gregor?" said Breton Crellin, as he argued that townhouses would not necessarily lead to affordability.

"This will just lead to an increased supply of unaffordable homes."

But speaker Reilly Wood said the argument that duplexes won't be affordable enough doesn't add up.

"That's like a starving person saying 'one spoonful won't fill me up, so I may as well not eat.'"

Of 73 speakers, 33 did not get the chance to have their say as of 10 p.m. PT.

The meeting will reconvene on Wednesday at 1 p.m. PT.

Read more from CBC British Columbia
Four children and a bus driver were sent to hospital with non-life-threatening injuries after a transport truck rear-ended a school bus north of Vankleek Hill, Ont., Wednesday morning.

It happened around 9 a.m. on Highway 34, which connects the eastern Ontario community with Hawkesbury, Ont.

The students were headed to Pleasant Corners Public School, near the scene of the crash, according to the Upper Canada District School Board (UCDSB).

OPP said the bus driver was airlifted to hospital in Ottawa, while four kids were taken to a local hospital by ambulance.

All had non-life-threatening injuries, according to police.

Nineteen other children were taken to hospital in another bus as a precaution.

People in two other vehicles involved in the crash were not injured.

Buses home unaffected

Photos from the scene show damage to the rear of the bus, which came to rest off the road.

Children can also be seen huddled at the side of the road, surrounded by first responders and other adults.

The UCDSB said all parents of the children have been contacted and are at the hospital, along with school staff.

Route 34 is closed between Borris and Pleasant Corner roads, the OPP said in a tweet.

The school board said there will be regular school bus transportation at the end of the day and the roads should be open again by 1 p.m.

- with files from Giacomo Panico
Provincial police officers continue to ignore appeals to remove a symbolic red band from their uniforms which Indigenous witnesses have told two separate inquiries into their treatment they perceive as "intimidation and provocation."

Officers in Val-d'Or, in northwestern Quebec, started wearing the bands two years ago, after eight colleagues were suspended following a Radio-Canada investigation into the mistreatment of Indigenous women.

Police officers attached the bands, inscribed with "144"  the number of the Val-d'Or detachment  to the top of their Surete du Quebec vests, just above their name tags.

Michele Audette, an Innu commissioner on the inquiry into murdered and missing Indigenous women and girls (MMIWG), told CBC News that Surete du Quebec officers are "spreading division" by wearing the bands.

The former president of Quebec Native Women, who grew up in Schefferville and in Uashat-Maliotenam, said continuing to wear the bands is inappropriate and does nothing to encourage Indigenous women to have confidence in police.

Emelie Rivard-Boudreau/Radio-Canada

"They don't want to call 911, or they don't want to get involved with the police because the trust is not there anymore," said Audette. "[Either] it's never been there, or it's broken."

Nearly three months ago, at MMIWG hearings in Regina on June 28, Audette told SQ Capt. Paul Charbonneau, who is in charge of discipline and legal services in the provincial police service, that the wearing of the red bands was not helping to promote reconciliation and that he should speak to his superiors about banning them.

Provincial judge also deplores bands

Catou Mackinnon/CBC

Justice Jacques Viens, the retired judge presiding over Quebec's separate inquiry into the treatment of Indigenous people, raised the same issue at hearings in Quebec City last week.

"I have hoped that at some point this practice would be abandoned," said Viens.

He said witnesses have told him the bands are perceived as intimidation and provocation, especially when officers wear them while visiting First Nations communities.

Story continues

Viens was responding to a comment by David Coderre, the lawyer representing the provincial police union at the provincial inquiry.

Questioning the current president of Quebec Native Women, Coderre said the red band was "never created to support the alleged treatment of Indigenous women, but to contest the administrative measures against those officers."

'Somebody should be putting their foot down'

The Surete du Quebec has declined to be interviewed about the practice while the two inquiries continue their work.

"Something has to be done about it," said Ghislain Picard, the Quebec regional chief of the Assembly of First Nations, when asked about the bands by CBC News.

"It's very offensive. It's really provocation."

Public Inquiry into the treatment of Indigenous Peoples

Picard said he plans to raise the issue with the provincial security minister as soon as the next government is in place.

Picard said he's been told the bands are the "initiative of a few individuals," but he finds it "absurd" that the provincial police union and top brass at Surete du Quebec haven't stepped in.

"These officers are accountable to someone, and somebody should be putting their foot down," said Picard.
HANOI (Reuters) - (Corrects this Aug. 22 story throughout to show defendants were convicted for attempting to overthrow the state (not found guilty of terrorism or masterminding bomb attacks). The original story and a previous correction had misrepresented the nature of the charges.) A Vietnamese court sentenced two Vietnamese-Americans to 14 years in prison on Wednesday for "attempting to overthrow the state", a court official told Reuters. James Nguyen and Angel Phan were convicted, along with 10 accomplices who received shorter jail terms, after a two-day trial. The defendants all faced the same charge. Phan and Nguyen were accused of running a network of underground operatives in Vietnam, some of whom were given titles in a shadow government such as "governor of Saigon", or "commander of national defense guards," the Ministry of Public Security's official news website reported on Wednesday. The pair assigned "counter-revolutionary" missions to the group's members in Vietnam, the report said, including a plan to broadcast anti-government propaganda from local radio stations, organize protests, and deface an image of former president Ho Chi Minh. "The remaining 10 defendants in the same trial received prison terms of between five and 11 years," an official at the Ho Chi Minh City People's Court told Reuters by phone. Phan and Nguyen will be deported after serving their jail term, Voice of Vietnam radio reported. According to state media, the pair were acting on behalf of the "Provisional National Government of Vietnam", a California-based organization run by Vietnamese-Americans still loyal to the now defunct state of South Vietnam. The U.S. organization, which was listed as a "terrorist" group by Hanoi in January this year, dispatched Phan and Nguyen to Vietnam in February 2017 to carry out their alleged activities on Vietnamese national holidays, according to the Ministry of Public Security's official news website. In June, a court in Ho Chi Minh City upheld prison sentences against 15 members of the group it said were guilty of planting bombs in the international terminal of Tan Son Nhat airport in April last year. In another case last month, police said it had arrested seven people from a separate group over the bombing of a Ho Chi Minh City police station in June. That incident, in which two small explosive devices were detonated, injured three people in what police said was a "terrorist case against the people's government". The Provisional National Government of Vietnam did not respond to a request for comment made via its website. The U.S. Embassy in Hanoi was not able to provide immediate comment. (Reporting by Khanh Vu and James Pearson; Editing by Simon Cameron-Moore)
An editor at The New York Review of Books has parted ways with the prestigious literary publication amid controversy over his decision to publish a personal essay by disgraced former radio host Jian Ghomeshi.

A publicist for the magazine confirmed Wednesday that Ian Buruma, who was appointed as editor in late 2017, no longer works for the publication.

It's unclear whether Buruma's departure is related to the piece, which sparked online backlash from those who argued Ghomeshi shouldn't have been given such a prestigious platform.

All I know is that he was acquitted and he is now subject to public opprobrium. - Ian Buruma to Slate Magazine

Ghomeshi was acquitted in March 2016 of four counts of sexual assault and one count of choking involving three complainants. In May 2016, he apologized to a fourth complainant and signed a peace bond that saw another count of sexual assault withdrawn.

In the essay, titled Reflections from a Hashtag and published online Friday, Ghomeshi details his post-trial life and expresses "deep remorse" for the way he treated some people, but said he cannot confess to accusations he maintains are "inaccurate."

"I've become a hashtag. One of my female friends quips that I should get some kind of public recognition as a #MeToo pioneer," he writes in the roughly 3,400-word essay.

"There are lots of guys more hated than me now. But I was the guy everyone hated first."

On Wednesday, the magazine posted a lengthy note atop the online version of Ghomeshi's piece that said the article "should have included acknowledgement of the serious nature and number of allegations that had been made against the writer."

It describes the allegations made against Ghomeshi, the charges he faced, the outcome of his eventual criminal trial and the out-of-court settlement he subsequently reached with a CBC co-worker. The note ends by saying: "Substantial space will be devoted to letters responding to this article in the next issue."

Story continues

In an interview with online publication Slate on Friday, Buruma defended his editorial judgment, saying Ghomeshi provided "an angle on an issue that is clearly very important and that I felt had not been exposed very much."

Buruma said he was not in a position to know the exact nature of Ghomeshi's alleged actions, nor was it really his "concern," given that he was acquitted in court.

"All I know is that he was acquitted and he is now subject to public opprobrium and is a sort of persona non grata in consequence," he told Slate.

"The interest in the article for me is what it feels like in that position and what we should think about."

With files from CBC News
I am very sorry but  as you may know, many university departments have pledged an academic boycott against Israel in support of Palestinians living in Palestine. This boycott includes writing letters of recommendation for students planning to study there. I should have let you know earlier, and for that I apologize. But for reasons of these politics, I must rescind my offer to write your letter. Let me know if you need me to write other letters for you, as Id be happy.

Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blog spot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook which has additional pieces of interest besides that which is posted on the blog. Also check-out This Ongoing War by Frimet and Arnold Roth. An excellent blog, very important work.

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..JNS.org..17 September '18..A teacher writing a letter of recommendation for a student is a commonplace event. Teachers refusing such requests may also be common, but when it happens, we assume it is because the student is asking for an endorsement they dont deserve. But what are we to think about a refusal that is based in prejudice, rather than lack of merit?Thats the upshot of a disturbing incident at the University of Michigan that was revealed this week.John Cheney-Lippold, an associate professor working in Michigans Department of American Culture, had promised a student (who chose not to reveal her identity) that he would write a reference required for her to take part in a semester-abroad program in Israel. But a few weeks later, Cheney-Lippold wrote back to tell the student that he had changed his mind.Rather than having misgivings about her qualifications or worthiness for the program, the professor said his refusal was about what he termed politics.He wrote her:Is he within his rights to act in this manner?
Photo - Oi Oi Oi by Margaret Pearce to be hung in Laguna Quays Respite

The Whitsundays Laguna Quays Respite coordinated by Well-Being Australia for missions in its seventh year has proven to be a lovely break away for a wide range of those in Christian service.

Additional art has now been purchased for the respite cottage. These art works were from the Basil Sellers Midge Point Art Prize a few weeks back  then after a months display at the Point Tavern they will be kept in storage until November when they will be hung.

This two 2 min video is of its ministry for missionaries, home missions, church full time personnel is remarkable.

Laguna Quays Respite

It is a joy in the Lord seeing so many wishing to visit. The respite cottage is situated a fifteen minute drive south of Proserpine airport and a stone's throw from Midge Point. These missionaries and their families along with school chaplains, home missions of all shapes and varieties, church ministry personnel.

Opened in 2011, Well-Being Australia developed this mission respite ministry after my wife Delma and I had ministered respite to Australian Institute of Sport elite athlete "respite" in both Moruya (Basil Sellers Moruya) and Tweed Heads (Basil Sellers Tweed) since 1992.

The Laguna Quays Respite facility was a dream of ours to serve our mission community with a no-cost rest and recuperation experience and the Whitsundays provides many such opportunities for relaxation.

Photo - Three of the Art Prize winners  Jill Liepertz winner 2013, 16 and 17; Betty Moxham 2018 and Margaret Pearce 2015

Arrival

Upon arrival they can collect a heavily discounted AVIS rental vehicle under a special arrangement between Well-Being Australia and AVIS for mission people visiting the respite cottage.

There is no charge for the Laguna Quays Respite cottage yet visitors are welcome to leave a gifting to help with its functioning costs. Over these six years mission people have visited the Laguna Quays Respite facility from such missions and denominations as:

SIM, CMS, WEC, OMS, SU, TEAR, BCS, UCA, OMF, YM, Wycliffe, BCA, YWAM, MAF, AFES, CM, ASEF, Japan Missions, International Inter-Serve, NZ Missions, Global Interaction, independent missions, school chaplains and Ministers and pastors from many denominations.

Photo - Cheeky Posom by Ann Campbell to be hung in Laguna Quays Respite

Who can visit Laguna Quays Respite?

Missionaries, home mission personnel, school chaplains and professional church personnel needing respite and rest. It is specifically designed and dedicated to such mission personnel.

Over these past five years many family groups have visited in school holiday periods  it is a three bedroom beach house cottage  but they squeeze in somehow. Many missionary families have had family stays before they leave for overseas. Many are simply tired and need rest.

It has also been a wonderful solace for pastors and specialist ministry personnel who need timeout to relax their head space and for those wanting to seriously reflect as their prepare significant messages or writing designations. It is a broad church.

The local community are remarkable in their willingness to help in this missions project.

Enquiries are welcome for bookings - missionaries / home missions / school chaplains / pastors - to contact us for your respite visit to the Whitsundays  timeout@bushorchestra.com 0419 917 713

Laguna Quays Respite web site also host this video. http://www.bushorchestra.com/respite

Photo - Swan Lake by Betty Moxham to be hung in Laguna Quays Respite

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
Photo - Young writer Jesse Moore

Research has come to light that a handsome man when spruiking investment opportunities gets a far greater response than a 'pretty' (lovely) woman engaged in the same business enterprise. The Banking Royal Commission has also illustrated something of this.

Photo: Young writer Matthew Thornton

This recent News.com article claimed that the findings from the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, also showed backers preferred business presentations that were given by men.

Their study revealed that investors are more likely to back an idea if a handsome man is pitching it. However, pretty women were no more likely to be successful pitchers than their less attractive counterparts.

From real investment pitches in real dates and time with real investors covering 60 experienced investors and on 90 different occasions these investors were asked to rate the pitchers looks, and this was compared to how well each did in what was considered a contest.

The article cited Dr Alison Brooks, of Harvard Business School, who said: We find investors prefer entrepreneurial pitches presented by males ... even when the content of the pitch is the same. Many women found that good male looks made the pitch more persuasive.

20th Century American Evangelism

When the late Billy Graham hit the evangelism scene in the late 1940's after WWII and as his Gospel proclamation notoriety grew with film and late television, several observations were repeatedly made.

Billy Graham had a way with words, his communication was brilliant and beyond reproach, his tone and elocution out of this world (so to speak), his organisational team left no quarter untendered, his personal and ministry integrity was spotless and over and over again, his handsomeness was highlighted.

Photo - Young writer Sam Gillespie

Whichever which way, the Billy Graham phenomenon gave a set of principles for would be evangelists which has lasted the test of time. Whomever has popped up on the international and national evangelism scene since has certainly made an enormous effort to look good!

Take the mega churches anywhere in the world today, none have been initiated or sustained by any of what might loosely be termed, Mr Ugly's. Grooming does play an important part of training.

Moreover there is this attitude of confidence that is inaudibly expressed by a man who is speaking the light of truth from the Scriptures as the Holy Spirit engages the listeners as Romans 10 exhorts those immortal words, who will hear without a preacher!

This is the rub. It is not the looks (yes helpful), it is not the grooming (yes helpful), it is not the neat trousers and collarless shirt or tailor cut suit (that may help), rather it is the Holy Spirit that convicts the sinner to repentance and Salvation.

Down through the centuries

The New Testament tells us very little about the physical appearances or grooming of the early evangelists however we go get a glimpse of this from the stories written about John Chrysostom nicknamed Golden Mouth who preached against the Emperor's illicit affairs in the 4th century in the city of Constantine. He was everything! The full 'male' package.

Similarly we have sketches and etchings and paintings of a host of evangelists down through the centuries  such luminaries as Francis of Assisi, Luther, Zwingli, Erasmas, Melanthon, Tyndale, John and Charles Wesley, Whitcliff, Jonathan Edwards, Billy Sunday, Charles Spurgeon to name just a few were all unique if not a rugged handsomeness.

Photo - Young writer Roydon Ng

None but none of them played on any emphasis on their physical maleness, rather it was purely Gospel and a calling to repentance unto Salvation. Here the sole issue for such matters was that of the Holy Spirit.

Sexual Pulpit Drama

The falling of so many preachers across the centuries to sexual sin outside marriage or fornication to willing and sexually provocative enthusiastic women is not the issue of this article. The question at hand is whether a handsome physical appearance and disposition is an advantage to Kingdom evangelism.

We have discussed how the Billy Graham phenomenon was deemed by commentators that this 'awe factor' played then and since an important role in evangelism. We have also seen how down through the ages it was the Holy Spirit message rather than the rugged handsomeness of the messengers that saw the hearts of men and women change toward God.

On a personal note, having been an evangelist all my 41 years in Christian ministry and travelling the world preaching the message of the Salvation of Christ, as strange as this might seem, my stammer has been more beneficial than any which way I may have dressed or any expression of manliness.

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
I recently read an article that states that the Australian competition watchdog, the ACCC (Australian Competition and Consumer Commission), has launched an urgent investigation into allegations of fake honey in the Australian honey industry.

Tests carried out by German laboratory QSI, of a number of samples of well known Australian brands of honey, revealed that most of the samples were adulterated and unwittingly being sold as pure. Another article explains that adulterated means that the samples had been mixed with something other than nectar from bees.

I enjoy a great cup of honey and ginger tea. So you can imagine my disappointment when I discovered that the brand of honey I purchased from the supermarket was among those samples tested that failed the authenticity test. I couldn't accept that even I had been duped into believing that the honey I was consuming was pure and real. I felt cheated.

What's fake and what's pure?

These days, distinguishing between what's real or fake has become quite confusing and challenging. We live in a world that is ruled by lust, deception, greed and will do anything to achieve it's goal.

Some companies make profit by questionable means and with little regard for the well being of people. They will cheat the system, lie about their products and market their goods so cleverly that whatever they claim appears to be true. With rampant money scams, fabricated news, fake food, corrupt politicians and the list could go on, it's no wonder it can be hard to know what's true.

Easily deceived

As I reflected on this article, it reminded me of how easily we can be deceived. It took me back to the book of Genesis in the bible that tells the story of Eve who bought into a clever deceit that masqueraded as the truth. She and her husband Adam, both new that God forbid eating the fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil.

However, the serpent [Satan] who was the shrewdest of all the wild animals, led her to believe that eating the fruit from that tree would be beneficial and that she wouldn't die. Adam and Eve then chose to disobey God by eating the fruit, which gave birth to sin, death and separation from God [Genesis chapter 3 verses 1 to 23].

False teachings

As I further reflected on the counterfeit honey, it made me think about the prevalent false gospel and counterfeit teachings that exist today. Sadly, so many people are being led astray by false teachers.

These cunning teachers cleverly teach destructive heresies and even deny Jesus Christ as the only way to God the Father. They create confusion and cause people to sin. In their greed, they cook up clever lies to get hold of people's money and are just out for self-interest and cause harm and destroy people [2 Peter chapter 2 verses 1 to 22]. Some are so good at their craft that it can be so difficult to realise their true destructive intentions.

But in such confusing circumstances, how do we as Christians separate the truth from a lie? Who can we rely on to reveal the truth to us?

Ask for discernment

The Word of God is an incredible gift that we as Christians should never take for granted. It is full of wisdom and teaches us what is true and reveals what is wrong in our lives. It corrects and teaches us to do what is right and equips the church to do every good work [2 Timothy chapter 3 verse 16]. If any of us lacks wisdom, all we need to do is ask God and he will give it to us [James 1 verse 5]. Let us not be deceived.

The bible also tells us to be on the lookout for false prophets. In Matthew chapter 7 verse 15, Jesus warns us to beware of false prophets who come disguised as harmless sheep but are really vicious wolves. We are to test the spirits to see if they're from God [John 4 verse 1]. We can determine the false prophets by their fruit (the way they act and the fruit they produce). A bad tree will not produce good fruit.

When we continually rely on the Holy Spirit to teach and guide us, we come to a point were we'll no longer be immature in our faith. We won't be tossed about by every wind of new teaching. Neither will we be influenced by people that trick us with lies so clever they sound like the truth [Ephesians 4 verse 14].

The world can make it difficult to differentiate a lie from the truth. But I thank God that he has given us the bible and the Holy Spirit that guide us in our daily living. It is my prayer that as I read God's word, it will daily renew my mind so I can learn God's will for me - which is good, pleasing and perfect.

Kandima Awendila was born in Mozambique and lives and works as an IT Service Desk Engineer on the Gold Coast. She is passionate about the Word of God and hopes her life testifies of the amazing love of Jesus Christ.

Kandima Awendila's archive of articles may be viewed at

www.pressserviceinternational.org/kandima-awendila.html
THURSDAY, Sept. 20, 2018 (HealthDay News) -- You might feel squeaky clean after that morning shower, but you carry an invisible cloud of bacteria, viruses, fungi and chemicals every day.

That's one of the lessons from the first study to take a deep dive into the human "exposome" -- the collection of microbes, plant particles and chemicals that accompanies people as they move through the world.

In fact, if your personal exposome was visible to the naked eye, the researchers said, you'd look like the "Peanuts" character Pig-Pen.

In the study, a small group of volunteers wore monitors with a special filter that trapped particles from the air around them as they went about their normal day.

When researchers did a genetic analysis of those samples, they found that each person carried a diverse cloud of bacteria, viruses, fungi, plant particles, chemicals and even "microscopic animals."

But the exact makeup of that exposome varied substantially from person to person -- even though they lived in a fairly narrow geographic region (the San Francisco Bay area).

"This is a very interesting study," said Dr. Aaron Glatt, chief of medicine at South Nassau Communities Hospital, in Oceanside, N.Y.

It's no secret that humans live in a world chock-full of invisible organisms and chemicals, said Glatt, who is also a spokesperson for the Infectious Diseases Society of America.

But this study offers a detailed look at individual exposomes, he said. And that could be a first step toward understanding the ways in which various environmental exposures affect human health, Glatt suggested.

"That's what we believe," agreed senior researcher Michael Snyder, chair of genetics at Stanford University School of Medicine, in California.

"Health is totally dependent on genes and environment," Snyder said. But it's clear that genes explain only a portion of a person's vulnerability to various diseases, he added.

There is still a huge amount to be learned about the effects of environmental exposures, Snyder said.

As an initial step, his team gathered detailed information from 14 people who wore matchbook-sized monitors on their arms for anywhere from a week to a month. Snyder, himself, wore the device for two years.

The devices contained filters that captured particulate matter from the surrounding air. Those samples were brought back to the lab for genetic analyses and chemical "profiling."

In general, Snyder's team found, people's exposomes were diverse in the types of micro-organisms and chemicals they contained -- although the chemical DEET, an insect repellent, was ubiquitous.

"It was everywhere, which kind of surprised me," Snyder said.

Otherwise, the makeup of the exposome seemed to depend on factors like weather, travel, pets and household chemicals, for instance.

Snyder said his own home exposures turned out to be "very fungal, rather than bacterial."

He connects that to the use of "green" paint in his house. The paint lacks a substance called pyridine, which seems to keep fungus levels down. Snyder also discovered he was exposed to eucalyptus in the early spring -- which, he said, offers some clues to the culprit behind his seasonal allergies.

Several known carcinogens turned up in most of the chemical samples, according to the researchers. However, they only know the chemicals were present -- and not the amount of exposure.

If the idea of carrying around a cloud of bacteria, fungi and chemicals makes you cringe, Glatt made this point: Many of those exposures would be harmless or even beneficial.

It's known, for instance, that while some bacteria make people sick, many are "good" and necessary for human health.

Snyder agreed. For the most part, no one knows yet which components of the exposome are "good" and which are not, he said. And that may vary from one person to another, he added.

Complicating matters, a person's exposome is not static. It is "dynamic," Snyder said, and constantly shifting over a lifetime.

That will make it challenging to study the ways in which the exposome affects human health, Snyder said. "But I also think it can be done," he added.

He said his team plans to study larger groups of people in more-diverse environments. They also want to simplify the technology used in the study so that one day, people might be able to use the devices themselves, to track their own exposures.

The findings were published online Sept. 20 in Cell.

More information

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has more on the human exposome.
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Journalists are being imprisoned at record numbers around the world. They are regularly threatened, attacked, and killed, which undermines not only their own fundamental human rights, but also the publics right to receive and impart information. The past two years have seen record numbers of journalists imprisoned for their work, yet there has been little pushback and few countries have been held to account for their repressive and regressive practices. Countries undergoing ostensible transitions to democracy are chief among these.

The Committee to Protect Journalists will hold a panel discussion during the U.N. General Assembly to highlight global press freedom challenges, with an emphasis on Myanmar, Bangladesh, Egypt, and Kyrgyzstan as countries where journalists are imprisoned for their work and denied due process. The cases of Reuters reporters Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo are emblematic: they were set up by Myanmar police, falsely arrested, convicted under Myanmars Official Secrets Act, and sentenced to seven years of hard labor, all in a protracted effort to silence their truthful reporting.

September 28

Panel Event with Q&A 11:00 a.m.-12:30 p.m. Trusteeship Chamber (ECOSOC) United Nations

Featuring:

Joel Simon, Executive Director of the Committee to Protect Journalists

Amal Clooney, Barrister

Stephen J. Adler, President and Editor-in-Chief of Reuters

This will be the first time that Ms. Clooney, who is representing Reuters and the two reporters, is speaking on the case. Mr. Adler will speak about Reuters perspectives on the case and how it impacts Reuters global newsroom. Mr. Simon will discuss the cases of blogger Alaa Abdelfattah who is imprisoned in Egypt; photojournalist Shahidul Alam, jailed in Bangladesh; and journalist Azimjon Askarov, who is serving a life sentence in Kyrgyzstan.

#FreeThePress

#FreeWaLoneKyawSoeOo

This is a ticketed event. You must RSVP here no later than Sept. 25. Media wishing to film must be accredited by the UN. A video recording will be available from Reuters following the event.

Media contacts:

Bebe Santa-Wood

Communications Associate

press@cpj.org

212-300-9032
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Nairobi, September 20, 2018Police in Uganda detained at least eight journalists covering the return of opposition MP Robert Kyagulanyi, also known as Bobi Wine, from the U.S, according to media reports and local journalists. The arrests are the latest incident of Ugandan security personnel assaulting, harassing, or arresting journalists covering political tension in the past month, often connected to Kyagulanyi and his supporters.

These detentions and the unrelenting crackdown on press freedom are making Uganda a hostile environment for journalists, said CPJ Sub Saharan Africa Representative Muthoki Mumo. Ugandas security personnel should stop treating journalism like a crime and ensure that the press can work without fear of harassment or retaliation.

Police arrested at least six of the journalists at Entebbe International Airport, detained them for about four hours, and confiscated their equipment, Henry Lubulwa, a journalist from Uganda Radio Network who was among those arrested, told CPJ. Lubulwa, who is also the secretary general of the press rights group Human Rights Network for Journalists-Uganda, identified the other journalists as Diana Kibuuka from CBS Radio, Eve Muganga from Daily Monitor, Charles Katabalwa from Radio Sapientia, Luwamba Julius from New Vision, and Emmanuel Nkata, from Prime Radio. Sirajje Kiberu, with the privately owned KTV, said in a Facebook post that he was arrested on his way to the airport. Sematimba Bwejjire, of the privately owned Radio Simba, told CPJ that he was reporting near the airport when police officers confiscated his phone, and held him for about two hours. All were released without charge.

In a statement today on the return of Kyagulanyi, Uganda police spokesperson Emilian Kayima denied that media personalities were arrested. Kayima said that some were questioned in accordance with the set guidelines.
India and Morocco have signed revised Air Services Agreement between two countries enabling greater air connectivity through modernized agreement. The agreement will enable code sharing with airlines of other party. It will also provide greater freedom in mounting direct flights. In long term this agreement will enable people of each country to travel to other country leading to better economic and cultural ties.

Background

The revised Air Services Agreement is outcome of three meetings of delegation from two countries who had worked towards liberalization of markets between two countries and updating of existing agreement. During these delegation meetings, both countries had cleared legal and technical difficulties and agreed to modern new text for Air Services Agreement. Thereafter, the agreed text of revised Air Services Agreement was approved by respective governments.
Ask a Reporter is an occasional series about civic engagement in and around the city. Do you have a question about how you can make a difference in your neighborhood, city or state? What about voting, the elections or navigating civic life in New York? Ask us! We want to help you get involved by answering your questions.

Q: I saw races for county committee on my primary ballot. What is a county committee? And how can I get involved?

A: With the primary election behind us, most people are turning their attention to the general election in November. Turnout was up this cycle, way up, but based on the questions we've been getting in this series, folks want to do even more.

And its a good time to be asking about county committees because things are about to go DOWN.

Take Queens. As local Democrats gear up to meet tonight, some have expressed outrage at Representative Joe Crowleys re-election as chairman of the Queens Democratic Party.

Unreal that the Queens Democratic District Leaders met this morning and voted to keep @repjoecrowley as Chair of the Party. The full Committee doesn't meet until this Thursday. Love that they get no say. https://t.co/lRi2EyLjpo  macartney (@macartney) September 17, 2018

As the New York Post reported, the election by executive committee members only happened by voice vote at a diner. This, after Crowley lost the Congressional primary in June to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Bronx County Democrats also meet tonight and will potentially discuss judicial nominees. Many of you have asked how nominees for judgeships end up on the ballot. The answer is complicated, but county committees play a central role.

The Post also reported that now outgoing State Senator Jeff Klein  who lost his primary bid to newcomer Alessandra Biaggi  is being eyed for a judgeship.

Well Zack, once again your sources fail you. The judicial convention is open to the public, feel free to come see Zach proved wrong. Were proud of the diverse group of qualified candidates elected by elected judicial delegates from all corners of the Bronx. #respecttheprocess https://t.co/QDpj5zqPvh  Marcos Crespo (@MarcosCrespo85) September 17, 2018

Then, theres Brooklyn.

Kings County Democrats hold their major organizational meeting on September 27, in a rather remote corner of the borough, as noted in this snail mail invitation to committee members.

Though no agenda has been posted, this is the once-every-other-year meeting where members elect leadership and executive committee members can make appointments to fill vacant seats.

These committees have key powers. As a basic responsibility, the county committees set the rules for political parties, elect leadership and determine the local partys budget.

They also choose which candidates to run in a special election. This is incredibly important considering that one-third of state Assembly members were first sent to Albany through a special election, according to a 2017 report by Citizens Union. In the state senate, 19 percent of lawmakers were initially elected this way.

The local parties also have a say in which judicial candidates to run on Election Day. In addition, they decide basic operational things like whether to have a website with the names of the party leadership clearly posted.

Thats why new reform groups, and people like Ben Yee, the secretary of the Manhattan Democrats, are trying to get more people participating in county committees. Yee spends time traveling around the city giving talks on civics and local party politics.

People don't feel like the system reflects them, Yee said. One of the reasons is because they're not participating in a full system.

A recent opinion piece in Gotham Gazette also called out the Brooklyn Democratic Party for exploiting ambivalence. A column in AMNY explained how machine politics and the apparent hoarding of political power keeps half of the seats empty on the Queens Democratic County Committee. Last month, the New York Times found nearly two dozen Queens residents who were unaware they were running for seats on the committee.

(Yee also narrated WNYCs animated explainer on the hurdles to getting involved in the committee system.)

So how does one actually get involved in county committees?

To become a member of a committee, you have to run. That means you have to petition to get on the ballot (an art form in and of itself, given the specific rules around this). Then, you have to get elected.

The other way you can become a member is to be appointed by a district leader (the party has two district leaders within each Assembly district). The best chance for an appointment is to be an active member of a local Democratic club, and to be in touch with the district leader. (Back in 2016, WNYCs Brigid Bergin gave a close-up view of machine politics at work when she followed a candidate running for district leader, a high-ranking committee position.)

It's kind of shocking how untransparent and arcane the county committee is  they up until very recently did not even have a website, said Maisie Wilhelm, who just became a brand new general member of the Brooklyn Democratic County Committee with help from the Brooklyn Young Democrats.

The group helped Wilhelm find out which Election Districts had empty seats. It also helped her petition (she needed at least 35 signatures to get on the ballot) by making sure all of the paperwork was filled out properly. The group gave her a list of addresses in her South Williamsburg neighborhood of registered Democrats, so that door-knocking would be easier. The Young Democrats even connected Wilhelm with a Spanish-speaking volunteer who could help translate.

There are also groups like the New Kings Democrats that have taken it upon themselves to master locating which Election Districts (which make up Assembly Districts) have empty committee seats. They also have a good FAQ about how the whole county committee thing works in general. This is not information made readily available by the county parties or the New York City Board of Elections.

In short, hooking up with an outside organization actively working to bring new participants to these governing bodies is your best bet for getting involved. This goes for both Democrats and Republicans.

And this is even the advice of the Brooklyn Democratic Party itself. Jonathan Harkavy, their deputy director, noted in a phone call (for what its worth, I just called the number listed on partys website and he answered) that people trying to get involved in party politics should get in touch with local Democratic clubs, or with your local district leader or assemblyperson.

The whole purpose of the county committee is to really be the eyes and ears of the community, said Brandon Washington, president of the Brooklyn Young Republicans. He added that committee members need to be versed in the local issues of the district, like housing, homelessness, potholes and more.

Washington said the Republican party in Brooklyn, along with his Young Republican group, actively recruits new membership. He noted that with Republicans comprising a tiny minority of voters in Kings County, the party has to be inclusive and bring in fresh perspectives.

The next opportunity to participate in local party politics, for Democrats at least, is actually right now, at the upcoming county committee meetings.

For Democrats in Queens or the Bronx, the full committees meet tonight.

The Queens meeting is closed to the public, but the Bronx meeting is open and will be held at Eastwood Manor Caterers, at 3371 Eastchester Road, starting at 6:00 p.m.

Brooklyn Democrats will hold their first committee meeting of the new term next week, on September 27, at the Leon M. Goldstein Performing Arts Center of Kingsborough Community College, located at 2001 Oriental Boulevard. It starts at 6:00 p.m.
The verdict of Mehrdad, who was sentenced to imprisonment and paying blood money (Diya in Islam) on the charge of murder at the age of 17, was rejected by the Supreme Court and this time he was sentenced to death.





According to Javanonline website, the Criminal Court of Tehran has issued a verdict for Mehrdad for the 3rd time and this time he is sentenced to death.





The defendant was sentenced twice at the Criminal Court of Tehran for a murder that was committed on April 22, 2014, and, based on Article 91, he was sentenced to imprisonment and paying blood money because he was a minor.





Mehrdad had earlier explained the cause of murder, "3 years ago I was invited to a birthday party where I passed out after drinking alcohol and was sexually harassed by a guy named Soheil. That was why I decided to kill him."





He continued, "I met Soheil in a park and stabbed him. Later that night I went to the location to hide the body but I was arrested".





The Convention on the Rights of the Child, which Iran has signed, clearly bans execution and life imprisonment of juveniles.





In 2017, at least five juvenile offenders were executed in Iran.





Furthermore, at least three juvenile offenders were executed in January 2018 in Iran.





Iran is one of the few countries that execute juvenile offenders, although, based on Article 91 of the new Islamic Penal Code, approved in 2013, judges can potentially deny issuing a death sentence for juveniles who do not understand the nature of their crime.

 | Report an error, an omission, a typo; suggest a story or a new angle to an existing story; submit a piece, a comment; recommend a resource; contact the webmaster, contact us: deathpenaltynews@gmail.com



Opposed to Capital Punishment? Help us keep this blog up and running! DONATE!





"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,

but by the punishments that the good have inflicted." -- Oscar Wilde
ANZ Vietnams profits fell 75 percent in the first half of this year following the sale of its retail arm to Shinhan Bank.

The bank's financial report shows its after-tax profits were VND41 billion ($1.76 million), down from VND171 billion ($7.33 million) in the same period last year.

Net interest income and net income from its foreign exchange business saw the biggest declines: 40 percent and 15 percent.

ANZ Vietnam was one of the few lenders in the country to report negative credit growth, with loans outstanding edging down to VND12.6 trillion ($540 million) at the end of the second quarter.

In the first half return on equity was only 25 percent of the rate a year earlier.

But the poor performance notwithstanding, at the end of the first half its assets increased by 16 percent against the beginning of the year as deposits with the State Bank of Vietnam went up by VND320 billion ($13.72 million) and deposits with and loans to other credit institutions increased by VND4.15 trillion ($178 million).

South Koreas Shinhan Bank last year acquired ANZs retail business in Vietnam. The latter had around 125,000 individual customers, more than $231 million in loans outstanding and more than $578 million in deposits.

According to the General Department of Taxation, the bank was the 156th biggest taxpayer in the country last year.
Bergen County Sheriff Michael Saudino has reportedly been caught on tape recapping New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy's inauguration speech in derogatory, racist terms. The audio, which WNYC obtained Wednesday night, prompted Murphy to ask for Saudino's resignation, pending confirmation that the voice on the recording is his.

On the tape, Saudino allegedly goes after Attorney General Gurbir Grewal, the country's first Sikh AG, attributing his election to "the turban." He also spends some time on a portion of Murphy's speech discussing marijuana legalization, which the state is poised to enact:

"He talked about the whole thing, the marijuana, sanctuary state...better criminal justice reform," the voice, which a "source in the room" told WNYC belongs to Saudino, says. "Christ almighty, in other words let the blacks come in, do whatever the fuck they want, smoke their marijuana, do this do that, and don't worry about it. You know, we'll tie the hands of cops." (To be clear, research shows that people of all races use marijuana at more or less the same rates.)

The recording below contains the turban reference:

That wasn't all Saudino had to say, though. The man in the recording goes on to praise a government aide's "cute" and "good-looking" daughters, and to wonder if New Jersey's Lt. Gov. Sheila Oliver is gay, "because she's never been married."

In a statement to WNYC, Oliver called Saudino "ignorant" and "a relic of an era gone by." Murphy, meanwhile, called the comments "appalling."

"Anyone using racist, homophobic, and hateful language is unfit for public office," he said. "If indeed that is Sheriff Saudino's voice on the recording, he must resign." Saudino, who oversees roughly 600 people, is currently serving his third term, and up for reelection in November 2019.

Saudino, meanwhile, did not respond to the station's request for comment. The allegedly damning audio comes in the wake of a WNYC report from last week, alleging that immigrants whom ICE has detained at the Bergen County Jail are barred from physical contact with their loved ones. Responding to those allegations, Saudino pointed to the potential for contraband exchange. "We just don't want that headache in here," he said. "It's compromising the safety of my officers, and I'll have no part of that." Non-immigrant jail occupants are not subject to the same ban on "contact visits."

I have now listened to the recording obtained by @WNYC. If thats in fact Sheriff Saudino's voice, then he should resign immediately.  Gurbir S. Grewal (@GurbirGrewalNJ) September 20, 2018

On Thursday, Grewal stated on Twitter that he had listened to the recording, and echoed Murphy's conditional call for the sheriff's resignation. "The comments about our African-American community are wrong, racist, and hurtful," he wrote. "The comments about our Lieutenant Governor are inappropriate and homophobic. New Jersey and Bergen County deserve better."

Ive got thick skin and I've been called far worse. But the comments about the African-American community are wrong, racist, and hurtful. The comments about our Lieutenant Governor are inappropriate and homophobic. New Jersey and Bergen County deserve better.  Gurbir S. Grewal (@GurbirGrewalNJ) September 20, 2018

Speaking to WNYC, Grewalwho has been working with Saudino for yearssaid: "You may expect it from people who don't know you, and don't know your credentials, and don't know how hard you work in this space, and what you've done in this space and what you've accomplished...that's the disappointing part it, to hear from someone who knows first-hand what I've done."

Read more on WNYC.

UPDATE: Bergen County Sheriff Michael Saudino announced his resignation on Friday, one day after he was caught on tape making racist and homophobic remarks. Four other undersheriffsGeorge Buono, Robert Colaneri, Brian Smith, and Joseph Hornyaksubmitted their resignations as well. You can read more at WNYC.
Aircraft and transit buses are seen at Noi Bai Airport in Hanoi. Photo by AFP/Hoang Dinh Nam

Two damaged runways at the major airports in Hanoi and HCMC could be closed on safety grounds.

The Ministry of Transport has called for the restoration and maintenance of aviation infrastructure assets at the Tan Son Nhat International Airport in Ho Chi Minh City and Noi Bai International Airport in Hanoi.

It said that overload has caused visible cracks and deformations on runway 07L/25R at the Tan Son Nhat airport. Airplane wheel marks are also visible on the surface.

The situation is not better with runway 1B in Noi Bai airport. The runway has several cracking, peeling spots, and material is falling off from the expansion joints between concrete slabs. Some slabs have subsided.

Despite the degradation, the airfield system in Noi Bai and Tan Son Nhat continues to face overload.

According to the Airport Corporation of Vietnam (ACV), runway 07L/25R at Tan Son Nhat had undergone renovation and was put into use in June 2013.

The runway can support B777-300 ER aircraft or equivalent with a capacity of 55,100 landings and takeoffs over 10 years. However, the total number of landings and takeoffs on this runway had reached 126,000 in April 2018.

Similarly, runway 1B in Noi Bai, in operation since 2003, was designed to accommodate B747-400 aircraft with 10,500 landings and takeoffs in 20 years. However, as of April 2018, this number had already soared to 284,200.

Without timely renovations, the ongoing overload could threaten flight safety, forcing the two runways to close down, said ACV chairman Lai Xuan Thanh.

The Ministry of Transport has estimated that the runway renovation cost would amount to around VND4.5 trillion ($193 million).

To ensure smooth operation of the airports, the Ministry of Transport has suggested that the Finance Ministry allows ACV to use revenues generated from the operations of aviation infrastructure to carry out immediately repairs.

The airports are administered by the central government. If the renovation task is handed over to ACV, they could use their development funds to carry it out.

Thanh noted that revenue from landing and takeoff at the airports is estimated at over VND1 trillion ($42.8 million) a year.

Vietnam's aviation industry has experienced rapid development in recent years. The nation served more than 53 million air passengers in the first half of 2018, a 14 percent up from last year.
The British Royal Navy fleet flagship, HMS Albion, which sailed close to China-claimed Paracel Islands before arriving in Ho Chi Minh City on September 3, 2018. Photo by Reuters

Vietnam respects navigation freedom conferred by international laws, Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Le Thi Thu Hang said Thursday.

She said at a press conference that Vietnams position on freedom of navigation in the East Sea, internationally known as South China Sea, has been consistent.

"Vietnam respects the rights to freedom of navigation and overflight of other countries in the East Sea in accordance with international laws, particularly the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS)," she said.

Hang also reiterated that Vietnam has full legal basis and historical evidence to assert its sovereignty over the Paracel (Hoang Sa) and Spratly (Truong Sa) Islands in accordance with international laws. She called for other countries to contribute "practically and responsibly" to the maintenance of order, peace and the rule of law in the East Sea.

Hang was responding to questions regarding recent activities by the British and Japanese navies in the waters.

The British Royal Navy's amphibious warship HMS Albion sailed close to the Paracel Islands on its way to Saigon Port in Ho Chi Minh City for a visit on September 3, as part of a freedome of navigation operation to challenge China's "excessive claims" in the South China Sea, Reuters reported.

China seized the Paracel Islands from South Vietnam by force in 1974, and has since been illegally occupying the archipelago. Its claims virtually the entire waterway, including waters close to Brunei, Malaysia, the Philippines and Vietnam.

The Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Force's submarine JS Kuroshio also took part in a naval drill in the South China Sea last week, before docking at Cam Ranh Port in central Vietnam on Monday for a four-day visit.

Japanese submarine Kuroshio docks at Cam Ranh Port in central Vietnam. Photo by the Vietnam News Agency

This marked the first time a Japanese submarine has taken part in a drill in the waters, and is part of the Japanese fleet's month-long trip to other Asian countries such as India, Indonesia, the Philippines, Singapore and Sri Lanka.

"Japan is responding to Chinese assertiveness by pushing back," Carl Thayer, an Australia-based longtime analyst of regional security, told VnExpress International in an email.

He said all maritime powers have a national interest in the maintenance of freedom of navigation and overflight over the high seas, and the sea lanes that pass through the South China Sea are vital to sustain the global economy. Some $3 trillion of ship-borne trade passes the waters each year.

"The Japanese submarine is an important demonstration of naval power and adds risk and uncertainty to China's military posture in the South China Sea," he said.
Members of the dog theft gang stand in court on Wednesday. Photo by VnExpress/Duc Hung

A court in Vietnams central province of Ha Tinh has sent two dog thieves and a man who bought their dogs to jail.

Pham Dinh Quy, 33, the leader of a gang of dog thieves, got 18 months while Le Duc Thien, 28, his accomplice, got nine months.

Five other ring members received suspended sentences of five to 12 months.

In its verdict Wednesday the court said the gang carrying stun guns, knives and other weapons would regularly go on motorbikes around Duc Tho District at midnight and later to snatch dogs.

If anyone tried to stop them, they were willing to use their weapons, it said.

The gang has stolen thousands of dogs since 2017, it said.

The scene at the den of a gang of dog thieves in Ha Tinh Province last June. Photo courtesy of Ha Tinh Police

It stole more than 10 dogs every night on average and sold them to Doan Van Loc, 64, who was also sentenced to 15 months in jail for harboring or consuming property acquired through the commission of crime by other persons.

He was a middleman who sold the dogs to restaurants.

Last June hundreds of police officers launched a predawn raid on the powerful gang, found hundreds of dogs held in tiny cages, and confiscated many sharp weapons.

Dog theft is rarely treated as a criminal offense in Vietnam unless a stolen animals is valued at more than VND2 million ($86).

There has been a public outcry against dog stealing and many lynchings of suspected thieves.

Vietnam consumes an estimated five million dogs a year, second only to Chinas 20 million.

Many of the dogs that make it to the frying pan are stolen pets sold to small, unregulated abattoirs and killed in brutal ways.

Recently, the Hanoi Peoples Committee has called on residents stop eating cats and dogs since the killing and selling of dogs and cats for human consumption has undermined its image in the eyes of international tourists and expats.
Hoan Kiem Lake (Sword Lake) is one of the major scenic spots in Hanoi. Photo by VnExpress/Ho Ha

On September 30, Shenzhen Airlines will launch daily direct flights between Hanoi and Chinese cities of Shenzhen and Guangzhou.

The first daily flights opened by the Chinese carrier aim to meet growing travel demand for short holidays and business trips between the three destinations.

Operating once a day, the return flights will take around two-three hours each.

For the Shenzhen-Hanoi route, flights will take off at 4:20 a.m. from Hanoi and arrive at 6:55 a.m. in Shenzhen. The return trip will depart from Shenzhen at 0:55 a.m.

Flights to Guangzhou will leave Hanoi at 3:30 a.m. and land at the Guangzhou Baiyun International Airport at 6:15 a.m., and the return trip will take off at 0:40 a.m.

China has continued to dominate foreign arrivals to Vietnam, with nearly 3.4 million in the first eight months of this year, a year-on-year surge of 28.2 percent.

A representative of Shenzhen Airlines Holiday, a travel agent of Shenzhen Airlines, said the flights will take tourists to many popular tourist destinations in Chinas two major tourism hubs including wedding-themed parks, the Splendid China Folk Village and the Window of the World Safari Park.

Visitors to Hanoi will be able to enjoy visits to ancient pagodas, temples, historic relics and a scattering of picturesque lakes like the Sword Lake, West Lake, Ngoc Son Temple, Tran Quoc Pagoda and Long Bien Bridge, the source added.

Nguyen Quy Phuong, head of the Vietnam National Administration of Tourisms travel department, said the direct flights will attract more foreigners to Vietnam.

Earlier, national carrier Vietnam Airlines had cooperated with China Southern Airlines to open the Hanoi-Shenzhen and Hanoi- Guangzhou routes, given that Chinese tourists were Vietnams biggest feeder market now.

Vietnam is enjoying a tourism boom, with 12.9 million foreign visitors arriving in 2017, a rise of 29.1 percent against the previous year.

A report published in June by the United Nations World Tourism Organization ranked Vietnams tourism growth at seventh in the world, and the country was the only destination in Southeast Asia to make the top 10.

Tourism is expected to contribute 10 percent to Vietnams GDP by 2020, when the country hopes to welcome up to 20 million foreign visitors and earn $35 billion in tourism revenues.
South Korean President Moon Jae-in and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un acknowledges the audience after watching a performance in Pyongyang, North Korea, September 19, 2018. Photo by Pyeongyang Press Corps/Pool via Reuters

The United States said it was ready to resume talks with North Korea after Pyongyang pledged on Wednesday to dismantle key missile facilities.

U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said he had invited North Koreas foreign minister to meet in New York next week, with the aim of completing its denuclearization by January 2021, after a Pyongyang summit between the leaders of the two Koreas.

The United States appeared eager to seize on commitments by North Korean leader Kim Jong Un at his talks with South Korean President Moon Jae-in even as critics said the steps did little to put Pyongyang on a course for irreversible denuclearization.

North Korea will allow experts from concerned countries to watch the closure of its missile engine testing site and launch pad at Dongchang-ri, Moon said at a joint news conference with Kim after their meeting in the North Korean capital.

North Korea will also take additional steps such as closing its main Yongbyon nuclear complex if the United States undertook unspecified reciprocal measures, Moon added.

The sudden revival of diplomacy followed weeks of doubts in U.S. President Donald Trumps administrations about whether North Korea was willing to negotiate in good faith after a June summit between Trump and Kim yielded few tangible results.

The January 2021 completion date was the most specific deadline set in what is expected to be a long process of trying to get the North to end its nuclear program, which may threaten U.S. allies South Korea and Japan as well as the U.S. homeland.

In addition to inviting North Korean Foreign Minister Ri Yong Ho to meet when both are in New York next week for the annual U.N. General Assembly gathering of world leaders, Pompeo said Washington invited Pyongyangs representatives to meet the U.S. special representative for North Korea, Stephen Biegun, in Vienna at the earliest opportunity.

Pompeo cited Kims decision to complete the previously announced dismantlement of the (Dongchang-ri) site in the presence of U.S. and international inspectors as a step toward the final fully verified denuclearization of North Korea.

Skepticism

Some U.S. officials were deeply skeptical. Speaking before Pompeos announcement, two senior U.S. officials involved in U.S.-North Korea policy voiced fears that Kim was trying to drive a wedge between Washington and Seoul.

At the summit, the two Koreas agreed on plans to resume economic cooperation, including working to reconnect rail and road links. They agreed as well to restart a joint factory park in a border city and tours to the Norths Mount Kumgang resort.

U.S. officials suggested Kim was trying to ease the economic pressure on him to curb his nuclear programs and to undercut the rationale for U.S. troops being based in South Korea by improving relations between Pyongyang and Seoul.

The United States has some 28,500 U.S. troops in South Korea to deter North Korean attack. Pyongyang has long sought their withdrawal and Trump has questioned their rationale and cost.

There is nothing the North has offered so far that would constitute irreversible movement toward denuclearization, however you define that, by January 2021 or any other time, or even a reduction of the military threat it poses to the South and the region, said a U.S. intelligence official.

Everything thats out there now is conditional on U.S. actions that would reduce the pressure on the North to cooperate or (is) filled with loopholes and exit ramps, added the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

U.S. officials said the ambiguity about what Washington was supposed to do for the North to close its nuclear complex at Yongbyon gave Kim room to argue that Washington had not done enough for North Korea to follow through on its pledges.

Trump: 'He's calm, I'm calm'

Even if North Korea were to shut down Yongbyon, officials and experts believe it has other secret nuclear facilities.

South Koreas national security adviser, Chung Eui-yong, said the reciprocal U.S. steps could include an end-of-war declaration. South Korea and the United States remain technically at war with North Korea because the 1950-53 Korean War ended in an armistice and not a peace treaty.

Despite the doubts of U.S. officials and outside analysts, North Koreas pledge at the summit with the South Korean president drew an enthusiastic response from Trump.

In late August, Trump abruptly canceled Pompeos planned trip to North Korea, publicly acknowledging for the first time that his effort to get Pyongyang to denuclearize had stalled since he met Kim in Singapore.

Satellite images and other evidence in recent months have suggested North Korea is continuing to work on its nuclear program clandestinely.

Speaking before Pompeos comments, Trump welcomed Kims pledges, calling them part of tremendous progress with Pyongyang on a number of fronts, and hailing very good news from the summit between the Koreas.

Hes calm, Im calm - so well see what happens, Trump, who last year threatened to destroy North Korea, told reporters.

Theatrical promises'

Speaking in Pyongyang, the two Korean leaders agreed to turn the Korean peninsula into a land of peace without nuclear weapons and nuclear threats.

Kim pledged to work toward the complete denuclearization of the Korean peninsula during two meetings with Moon earlier this year and at his summit with Trump.

But discussions over how to implement the vague commitments have since faltered and North Korea has consistently refused to give up its nuclear arsenal unilaterally.

Washington has demanded concrete action, such as a full disclosure of North Koreas nuclear and missile facilities, before agreeing to Pyongyangs key goals, including an easing of international sanctions and an official end to the Korean War.

While North Korea has stopped nuclear and missile tests in the past year, it did not allow international inspections of its dismantling of its Punggye-ri nuclear test site in May, drawing criticism that its action was for show and could be reversed.

The day after the June 12 Trump-Kim summit, Pompeo said he hoped to achieve major disarmament by North Korea by the end of Trumps first term in January 2021.

His latest statement that the process should be completed by January 2021 may be a signal Washington will not wait forever.

The statement clearly implies that inter-Korean summits and theatrical promises to dismantle the odd facility simply cant substitute for a negotiating process on the nuclear issue, said the Asia Society Policy Institutes Daniel Russel.

Invoking the end of Trumps term in January 2021 is another way of saying to the North that American patience is not unlimited and that Kim Jong Un wont be able to sidestep denuclearization indefinitely, Russel added.
An uptick in demand could bring greater balance to the market in the coming weeks.

Ukrainian corn sank to a nine-month low Monday, down $4.50/mt on the day to assessed by S&P Global Platts at $168.50/mt, amid thin demand and forecasts of a large new crop.

Demand from destinations in Europe, the Middle East and North Africa has been slow due to solid coverage, while good soil moisture has led to forecasts of a bumper crop, S&P Global Platts reported.

Looser fundamentals have contributed to a monthly fall of $27.50/mt since Ukrainian corn reached its two-month high in mid-August on fears of a wheat shortage.

However, as wheat supply fears subsided, owing to better yield results than expected, wheat demand dissipated, injecting downside into prices.

Read alsoUkraine expects record maize harvest, rising sales to China

This subsequently knocked corn demand for animal feed end-users in Europe, who had been forward buying corn in anticipation of extremely firm feed wheat prices.

Despite prices sliding, market participants said they expect an increase in offers in the coming weeks as the harvest progresses, which could indicate a more bearish trend for market prices.

Indeed, global competition from the US, where the USDA WASDE report recently revised its production level up over 6 million mt Wednesday, is also weighing on prices.

However, there are signals from the Middle East and North Africa, particularly from Egypt, Syria and Libya, that short positions need covering.

An uptick in demand could bring greater balance to the market in the coming weeks.
Brett Kavanaugh is currently being evaluated for a lifetime appointment as Donald Trump's hand-picked Supreme Court nominee. His character is expressly of interest as to whether he is fit for such a prestigious, elevated joband a Supreme Court position is still a job, regardless of the honorwhich is why reports that he sexually assaulted a woman in high school are so disturbing and relevant, despite the amount of time that has since passed (the timeline argument is a particular ghastly talking point for certain Republicans).

Now, there are new reports pertaining to his character, and his general attitude toward women, stating that it was "not an accident" that Kavanaugh's female law clerks all "looked like models." That information even came from one of Kavanaugh's biggest supporters.

The Guardian reports today that Yale professor Amy Chua, who wrote the bestselling book on hardcore parenting Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, made those comments privately to a group of law students last year. Chua, who wrote a piece for the WSJ earlier this year publicly endorsing Kavanaugh as a "mentor to women," was instrumental in providing Kavanaugh with many of the judge's clerks over the years. But the advice she and her husband, fellow Yale professor Jed Rubenfeld, gave also made some law students uncomfortable with their emphasis on looks.

One source said that in at least one case, a law student was so put off by Chuas advice about how she needed to look, and its implications, that she decided not to pursue a clerkship with Kavanaugh, a powerful member of the judiciary who had a formal role in vetting clerks who served in the US supreme court. In one case, Jed Rubenfeld, also an influential professor at Yale and who is married to Chua, told a prospective clerk that Kavanaugh liked a certain look. He told me, You should know that Judge Kavanaugh hires women with a certain look, one woman told the Guardian. He did not say what the look was and I did not ask.

The source says that Chua invited a group of students that she mentored to a bar last year to catch up and discuss their plans for clerkships, which led to a discussion about #MeToo and allegedly abusive and harassing behavior by another judge, Alex Kozinski, who was forced to retire from the bench last year after more than a dozen women accused him of harassment.

The conversation then turned to Kozinskis protege and good friend Kavanaugh, who one source said was a familiar name even though he had not yet been nominated to the high court. Chua allegedly told the students that it was no accident that Kavanaughs female clerks looked like models. Student reacted with surprise, and quickly pointed out that Chuas own daughter was due to clerk for Kavanaugh. A source said that Chua quickly responded, saying that her own daughter would not put up with any inappropriate behaviour.



Jed Rubenfeld and Amy Chua in 2017 (Rob Latour/Shutterstock)

An unnamed Yale Law School student, possibly the same one who spoke to The Guardian, told HuffPost the same story, adding that she considered it a yellow flag."

Rubenfeld took care to warn her about two judges in particular: First, Alex Kozinski, then a judge on the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, was known to sexually harass his clerks, he told her. (Kozinski retired in December amid accusations of harassment.) The other was Kavanaugh. Though the judge was known to hire female clerks who had a certain look, Rubenfeld told her, he emphasized that he had heard nothing else untoward. He did not say what the certain look was. I did not ask, the woman said. It was very clear to me that he was talking about physical appearance, because it was phrased as a warning  and because it came after the warning about Judge Kozinski.

The woman added that she was not sure if Chua was giving this advice to others, but, "she did, however, say that she offers members of her small group the opportunity to send her photos so she can help them figure out what to wear for interviews. Chua did not deny any of the report in her response to HuffPost, saying that, For the more than ten years Ive known him, Judge Kavanaughs first and only litmus test in hiring has been excellence."

Chua has cancelled her classes at Yale this semester and has been hospitalized for an unidentified illness. The Guardian notes that Rubenfeld is currently the subject of an internal investigation at Yale focused on his conduct, particularly with female law students. They add, "Students have also raised related concerns to Yale authorities about Chuas powerful influence in the clerkships process."

(In a statement regarding the internal investigation, Rubenfeld said, "For some years, I have contended with personal attacks and false allegations in reaction to my writing on difficult and controversial but important topics in the law. I have reason to suspect I am now facing more of the same. While I believe strongly that universities must conduct appropriate reviews of any allegations of misconduct, I am also deeply concerned about the intensifying challenges to the most basic values of due process and free, respectful academic expression and exchange at Yale and around the country.")

As Jezebel put it, "its clear Chua was suggesting women show off their 'assets' in the hopes of receiving a clerkship with Kavanaugh. Its yet more proof that women can be complicit in and prop up dangerous systems that allow predatory behavior to become the norm."

But this isn't the only story about Kavanaugh and Yale to emerge today: the Yale Daily News reports that while Kavanaugh was a student there, he was part of a fraternity, Delta Kappa Epsilon, "notorious for disrespecting women."

In today's Yale Daily News: what Brett Kavanaugh was up to back in his school days, when he belonged to a secret society known as "tit and clit". Motto: No means yes. Yes means anal. pic.twitter.com/ft4JXIGaJY  joyce maynard (@joycemaynard) September 20, 2018

As more and more of these types of stories come out, it lends added credence to critics' questions about Kavanaugh's credibility. The Washington Post gave "three Pinocchios" to Kavanaugh for waving off questions about his use of stolen Democratic memos. Senators like Claire McCaskill say they won't vote for him because of his bias against limits on campaign donations. "Judge Kavanaugh will give free reign to anonymous donors and foreign governments through their citizens to spend money to interfere and influence our elections with so-called 'issue ads,'" she wrote.

And this all comes as the toxic rhetoric around his accuser, Christine Blasey Ford, reaches new heights of absurdity: Washington Post columnist Kathleen Parker wrote a piece seriously wondering if Kavanaugh had a doppelganger in high school who sexually assaulted Ford (...and also hung out with Kavanaugh's friends? It makes no sense). Accused pedophile Roy Moore has come to Kavanaugh's defense, while false viral rumors meant to discredit Ford are being spread around the Internet.

Last night's statement by Grassley's Chief Counsel that he's "determined" to "confirm judge Kavanaugh" is also notable in light of Grassley setting Friday as the deadline for Ford to respond.



Gee, I wonder why she might suspect this process is a sham. https://t.co/s20WHFmYYk  Adam Jentleson  (@AJentleson) September 20, 2018

Dr. Ford passed a lie detector test and asked for an FBI investigation. Will Judge Kavanaugh do the same?  Elijah E. Cummings (@RepCummings) September 20, 2018

Republicans and Democrats continue to debate when (or whether) Ford should be able to testify about her accusation, while Ford has been forced to go into hiding as she has been bombarded with death threats and harassment thanks to Twitter and Reddit trolls doxxing her.
Residents complain: My house is old, I have no gas, no water, I live like a crow (video)

At the moment, the residents of the Artsvashen community demand a meeting with Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan in front of the Government building. Artsvashen resident Ararat Iskandaryan told "A1 +" that 7 billion AMD was allocated to their community during the former government, but the village did not receive it: "We only received 70 million. When we spoke to former Minister David Lokyan about our issue, he said that there was no money. Artsvashen residents assure that Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan will be able to solve their problems. "They promised after every election, but they did not do it. We just want to meet with the prime minister," the residents protest. Gagik Dallakyan noted that if the prime minister does not come down, they will stay in front of the government building: "My house is old, I have no gas, no water, I live like a crow," said the resident.
A Queens Councilman is suing the city and the NYPD, accusing them of flouting a new law requiring the city to reveal detailed demographic information about everyone arrested or summonsed for fare evasion.

Councilmember Rory Lancman, who sponsored the fare evasion data legislation that became law last year, believes the data will confirm that the NYPD's enforcement of fare evasion disproportionately impacts black and Latino men.

Starting this year, the NYPD is required by law to publish quarterly reports breaking down fare evasion-related arrests and summonses by subway station, transit bureau district, and race, sex, and age. Those reports should have been published on January 30th, April 30th, and July 30th, but the NYPD has thus far kept the data to itself. The lawsuit, filed today by Lancman along with the nonprofit Community Service Society of New York [CSSNY] claims the NYPD has provided "no explanation beyond vague assertions that disclosure of the required data could create a risk to public safety."

"The NYPD's excuse for failing to comply with the City Law is incomprehensible, and the balancing of the public safety, anti-discrimination, and transparency interests inherent in the City Law is not for the NYPD to decide," the lawsuit alleges. "The City Council and the Mayor make the laws of New York City, and the NYPD, like every other New Yorker, is bound by those laws."

.@TMLuongo @LegalAidNYC: it is mind blowing that NYPD has taken the position to violate a law. All of us should ask why. pic.twitter.com/WE6ytEguCP  (((Rory Lancman))) (@RoryLancman) September 20, 2018



The NY Times reports that police arrested nearly 56,000 people for sneaking onto public transitwhether by hopping turnstiles, entering through open exit doors, or using the back door on the busin 2016, according to state data. City Hall argues that fare evasion deprives the MTA of needed funding, but activists say the continual ratcheting up of fares prices low-income people out of the transportation system, which many New Yorkers rely on to get to work, school, pretty much everywhere.

Although the city recently agreed to subsidize half-priced MetroCards for people whose income puts them below the federal poverty line, that measure won't extend to every low-income rider. And research shows that NYPD enforcement of fare evasion continues to disproportionately focus on minorities.

According to research by the Marshall Project, subway arrests dropped off between 2014 and 2017, yet the proportion of black and Latino riders arrested remained unchanged. Subway stations located in communities of colorparticularly impoverished communities of colortend to see the highest numbers of arrests.

De Blasio has expressed skepticism at the idea that poverty drives fare evasion, but we know that people of color are disproportionately the targets of low-level arrests. If the NYPD were to publish more detailed information on who gets taken into custody for turnstile jumping, it seems reasonable to expect we'd see that trend played out once again.

In a statement, City Hall said officials are "working quickly to reach an agreement that satisfies the intent of the legislation without posing a threat to public safety." The mayor's office did not respond to our request for an explanation as to how, exactly, these demographic details would threaten public safety, but we will update if they elaborate.
Recognizing the One-Year Anniversary of the Ceasefire Declaration Between Armenia and Azerbaijan

They should not be positioned near civilian communities neither in Armenia nor in Artsakh

Humanitarian and human rights protection needed following the 2020 outbreak of hostilities between Armenia and Azerbaijan over Nagorno-Karabakh

Galaxy Group of Companies expands its activities in Belarus: a new TIME and Pandora store launched

Google Ad

I think its a good moment to invest in Armenia. Head of Markets at Symbiotics Vincent Lehner

Ameriabank has Raised USD 17.5M Tier 2 Capital

UNIGHT TO UNITE. UCOM CELEBRATED ITS REBIRTH

Ameriabank and HSBC Armenia to provide their customers access to each others ATMs without additional fees

Ameriabank. 62.5% Growth in Taxes YOY

Mikayel and Karen Vardanyans have provided 300 million AMD to overcome the infertility in Armenia

UCOM has officially launched the sale of IPHONE 13

Six servicemen were wounded by the attack of the Azerbaijani armed forces in Artsakh, two of them in critical condition

S&P Improved the Outlook on Ameriabank to Positive

Ararat Mirzoyan to visit to Minsk

Foreign Minister of India visits the Memorial of Armenian Genocide

1217 new cases

Google Ad

Global Finance Names Ameriabank the Safest Bank in Armenia

Statement by the Co-Chairs of the OSCE Minsk Group

At UCOM only: Tv sets at 10% discount + 1 month free UMIX package + 4k tv channel

Ameriabanks Special Offer for New Clients of Hrazdan Branch

"Fall forward": Gurgen Khachatryan, the Co-Founder of the Galaxy Group of Companies, addressed a message to young people in Armenia

UCOM hosted interns of Russian CBOSS corporation for a month

The 20-episode Bloody bet thriller to be broadcast on Ucom's Armenia Premium TV channel

Statement by the Co-Chairs of the OSCE Minsk Group

UCOM offers affordable gadgets at bigger discount

Foreign Minister of Armenia Ararat Mirzoyan will pay a working visit to New York

Governments preventing publication of Haykakan Zhamanak newspaper during state of emergency

UCOM prolongs the unlimited internet offer for the level up 4700 and level up 5500 subscribers

Ucom employees received recognition for their services to the homeland
Minister of Education and Science: The rector's resignation is not discussed, first of all, it is about responsibility (video)

Minister of Education and Science Arayik Harutyunyan refuses to comment on his resignation. "Education is the sphere where the results are seen after 1-2 years," the minister said to journalists after a cabinet meeting. He also did not comment on the rumors that he had ambitions to become YSU rector. "I have already commented on this. If you are careful, you will see how many fake news there are," says Arayik Harutyunyan and suggests follow his Facebook page posts. The Minister is responding to the news about the Yerevan State Institute of Theatre and Cinematography (YSITC). "Within the jurisdiction, we will try to take measures and understand what the rector Davit Muradyan has to do with all this, and there is a very serious responsibility here." According to the minister, the rector's resignation is not discussed, first of all, it is about responsibility. "Even if he is not involved in corruption schemes, it is a fact that these corruption schemes have taken place in his organization. Any leader, who has such problems at his institution, is responsible for them," Arayik Harutyunyan says.
Recognizing the One-Year Anniversary of the Ceasefire Declaration Between Armenia and Azerbaijan

They should not be positioned near civilian communities neither in Armenia nor in Artsakh

Humanitarian and human rights protection needed following the 2020 outbreak of hostilities between Armenia and Azerbaijan over Nagorno-Karabakh

Galaxy Group of Companies expands its activities in Belarus: a new TIME and Pandora store launched

I think its a good moment to invest in Armenia. Head of Markets at Symbiotics Vincent Lehner

Ameriabank has Raised USD 17.5M Tier 2 Capital

UNIGHT TO UNITE. UCOM CELEBRATED ITS REBIRTH

Ameriabank and HSBC Armenia to provide their customers access to each others ATMs without additional fees

Ameriabank. 62.5% Growth in Taxes YOY

Mikayel and Karen Vardanyans have provided 300 million AMD to overcome the infertility in Armenia

UCOM has officially launched the sale of IPHONE 13

Six servicemen were wounded by the attack of the Azerbaijani armed forces in Artsakh, two of them in critical condition

S&P Improved the Outlook on Ameriabank to Positive

Ararat Mirzoyan to visit to Minsk

Foreign Minister of India visits the Memorial of Armenian Genocide

1217 new cases

Google Ad

Global Finance Names Ameriabank the Safest Bank in Armenia

Statement by the Co-Chairs of the OSCE Minsk Group

At UCOM only: Tv sets at 10% discount + 1 month free UMIX package + 4k tv channel

Ameriabanks Special Offer for New Clients of Hrazdan Branch

"Fall forward": Gurgen Khachatryan, the Co-Founder of the Galaxy Group of Companies, addressed a message to young people in Armenia

UCOM hosted interns of Russian CBOSS corporation for a month

The 20-episode Bloody bet thriller to be broadcast on Ucom's Armenia Premium TV channel

Statement by the Co-Chairs of the OSCE Minsk Group

UCOM offers affordable gadgets at bigger discount

Foreign Minister of Armenia Ararat Mirzoyan will pay a working visit to New York

Governments preventing publication of Haykakan Zhamanak newspaper during state of emergency

UCOM prolongs the unlimited internet offer for the level up 4700 and level up 5500 subscribers

Ucom employees received recognition for their services to the homeland
PM Pashinyan receives Eric Esrailian and Gene Block

Prime Minister of Armenia Nikol Pashinyan today received Dr. Eric Esrailian, a closest friend of Armenias National Hero, great philanthropist Kerk Kerkorian, famous American physician, co-manager of the Medical College after David Gefen at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), co-producer of The Promise film, which tells the story of the Armenian Genocide, and UCLA Chancellor, biologist, Academician Gene Block, the official website of the Prime Minister of Armenia informs. Welcoming the guests to the Government of the Republic of Armenia, the Premier hailed the development of cooperation between Armenian higher educational institutions and the University of California, Los Angeles, which in turn may contribute to the deepening of Armenian-American educational ties. Nikol Pashinyan touched upon the democratic changes underway in Armenia, noting that what happened in our country was not only a political event, but also a cultural and educational revolution which opened up vast opportunities for the launch of drastic reforms in the field of education The Prime Minister stressed that education is one of the cornerstones of democratic development and economic progress, and considering Armenias huge innovational and IT potential, the Government of Armenia seeks to convert Armenia into a technological country. Eric Esrailian and Gene Block wished the Government every success on the way to implementing its reform agenda, including the educational reform. They expressed readiness to support this process through the development of entrepreneurship, technology, engineering, exchange of experience and academic programs. Eric Esrailian advised that the University of California is going to open a center of Armenian studies in the near future.
President of Armenia continues receiving congratulations on Independence Day of Armenia

President of Armenia Armen Sarkissian continues receiving congratulations on the Independence Day of Armenia from different Heads of State. The press service of the Armenian Presidents Office informs, President of Ukraine Petro Poroshenko expressed confidence in his letter that the implementation of the potential existing in the bilateral relations of the two countries, as well as the centuries-old friendly relations between the two peoples will foster the strengthening of the dialogue based on mutual respect. President of Belarus Alexander Lukashenko mentioned in his letter that Belarus continues being a reliable partner for Armenia and is ready to take all the necessary steps for developing interstate dialogue. President of Moldova Igor Dodon expressed confidence that the historically friendly relations between the two states and peoples create firm grounds for future effective cooperation. President of Turkmenistan Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedow expressed confidence in his congratulatory message that the high level partnership and mutual understanding between the two states is a firm ground for future constant development of relations and strengthening of mutually beneficial ties. Chairman of the Executive Committee and Executive Secretary of the Commonwealth of Independent States Sergei Lebedev also sent congratulatory message to President Armen Sarkissian. President of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan, UAE Vice President, Prime Minister, Ruler of Dubai Emirate Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Prince of Abu Dhabi, Deputy Supreme Commander-in-Chief of the UAE Armed Forces Mohammed Bin Zayed Al Nahyan also sent congratulatory messages to the President of Armenia. President of Syria Bashar al-Assad also extended congratulations and best wishes to President Armen Sarkissian and the Armenian people. Governor-General of Australia General Sir Peter John Cosgrove also congratulated President Sarkissian on Independence Day.
National Energy Company Ukrenergo is heading to the final stage of corporatization and the end of this process is expected approximately in the middle of November, Ukrenergo CEO Vsevolod Kovalchuk has said.

"The process was delayed because the reorganization commission had no evaluation. Now it is completed, a positive review from the State Property Fund has been received," he told Interfax-Ukraine on the sidelines of the YES Conference organized by the Victor Pinchuk Foundation in Kyiv.

Kovalchuk said that the commission should approve the audit of the balance to be transferred, for which the necessary materials were sent to the ministries. According to him, the next week or in two weeks the answers will be received, after which the process will reach the formal final stage: the charter will be approved and registered. The draft charter has long been developed. After that, Ukrenergo will be transferred to the State Property Fund with the subsequent return to the ownership of the Energy and Coal Industry Ministry.

"This process will be completed in full before the middle of November," the head of the company said.

He added that synchronously to the process the supervisory board is being approved. "The selection (of four independent members of the supervisory board] was completed two and a half or three months ago, but there is no decision on the appointment yet. I hope that this issue will be resolved in a week or two, and this will open the way for further transformation of the company, and the corporate governance reform will be completed," Kovalchuk said.

He found it difficult to name the size of the charter capital of Ukrenergo following the results of corporatization, since it is necessary to approve the audit of the balance of payments to take into account the remarks, if any, on including or excluding certain assets or ownership rights into or from the charter capital.
The measures to increase the investment attractiveness of Ukraine taken earlier have had their effect, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko has said.

"Foreign investors finally believe in the prospects in Ukraine and are creating jobs here. Once, several global consumer brands come out one by one to our market, probably in anticipation of the growth of Ukraine's purchasing power," he said, addressing the people's deputies with the annual message on external and internal situation in the country on Thursday.

The president said that among the steps that could increase the investment attractiveness of Ukraine are in particular, the adoption of exit capital tax bill, concession bill, the bill improving the bankruptcy rules, the bill about the business ombudsman and the bill strengthening the personal responsibility of representatives of supervisory agencies.

"Even before the elections, we could pass the exit capital tax bill, which supports the Ukrainian producer. However, to be honest, it would be more correct to call it the law on the tax on the withdrawal of capital. Do not withdraw, invest in Ukraine," the president said.

He also said the importance of adopting the bill on the National Financial Security Bureau: "Finally, the bill about the National Financial Intelligence Bureau is very important. Unfortunately, in the parliament it was put under the cloth because it allegedly expands the powers of the president. I thank you for such a positive evaluation of my political prospects six months before the elections, but it is a different matter: we must remove barriers for business and stop the pressure of a whole army of law enforcement agencies."

He said that he does not lose hope that the deputies will adopt the bill about the National Financial Security Bureau.
Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko has urged employers to offer competitive salaries, as this is the only way to solve the problem of a lack of workforce in Ukraine.

"At my regular meetings with the government and law enforcement agencies, with business associations, employers are increasingly complaining about labor shortages, not the pressure. No one will impose the iron curtain on the border, as in the Soviet era. Dear employers, there is one way out: increase wages," Poroshenko said from the parliamentary rostrum, speaking with an annual message on Thursday.

Ukraine is becoming part of the single labor market, which means competition, he said.

"If you want the Ukrainians not to go abroad, but work for us, you have to be competitive in the salary market," the president said.
Windkraft Ukraine LLC (Skadovsk, Kherson region) by the end of this year plans to bring the installed capacity of its wind farms in Kherson region to 170 MW and the company is mulling the next project to boost them by another 150-170 MW, Windkraft Ukraine Director Carl Sturen has said.

"By the end of the year there will be 170 MW: 100 MW have been added," he told Interfax-Ukraine on the sidelines of the recent YES Conference organized by the Victor Pinchuk Foundation in Kyiv, commenting on the development of the company in 2018.

Sturen said that this year the company used its own funds and bank loans. According to him, to implement plans for further expansion, Windkraft Ukraine will consider various financing options.

The director said that while the company, using its own resources, began to build a substation that will allow increasing the capacity. He said that the new sites are not far from the already developed ones.

Asked why Windkraft Ukraine remains committed to wind farms, not solar power plants, which are more popular among investors due to a higher tariff and lower investment, Sturen said that he considers the windfarm business more sustainable. "The wind is more sustainable: it is more complicated, but it fits better with the energy system and is better for the consumer," the director said.
Ukraine raises electricity exports by 6.6% in eight months

Ukraine in January-August 2018 increased electricity exports by 6.6% (by 248.9 million kWh) compared to the same period in 2017, to 4.034 billion kWh, the Ministry of Energy and Coal Industry has told Interfax-Ukraine.

The supply of electricity from the Burshtyn TPP energy island towards Hungary, Slovakia and Romania increased by 15.5% (by 336.8 million kWh), to 2.517 billion kWh.

Export of electricity to Poland increased by 28.1% (by 202.3 million kWh), to 922.1 million kWh.

Electricity supplies to Moldova amounted to 595.1 million kWh, which is 32.8% (290.2 million kWh) less than in January-August 2017.

Ukrainian electricity was not exported to Belarus and Russia in January-August 2017 and January-August 2018.

At the same time, in August 2018 export of Ukrainian electricity amounted to 407.947 million kWh, which is 53.4% more than in August 2017 (265.976 million kWh).

In addition, Ukraine for the eight months of this year imported 22.337 million kWh of electricity.
The general strategy of state banks is not implemented fast enough, First Deputy Head of the National Bank of Ukraine (NBU) Yekateryna Rozhkova has said.

"The general strategic document approved by the Cabinet of Ministers is being implemented not qualitatively and effectively enough," she said at the annual Ukrainian Financial Forum organized by ICU Investment Group in Odesa.

According to her, first of all, this is due to a lack of properly formed supervisory boards in state-owned banks.

"If to talk about PrivatBank and Ukrgasbank, this issue has been settled, we see real results. If to talk about Oschadbank and Ukreximbank, corporate governance there is not sufficient," she said.
Russian-led forces have opened fire at the positions of the Ukrainian Armed Forces 24 times over the past 24 hours, wounding a Ukrainian serviceman in a combat clash, the headquarters of the Joint Forces Operation (JFO) has said on Facebook.

"Occupation forces opened fire at the positions of our troops 24 times. The enemy used four times weapons banned by the Minsk agreements [...] One Joint Forces serviceman was injured in fighting," the JFO HQ said in a report early on Thursday.

Militants shelled Ukrainian positions near Krymske, Novotoshkivske, Troitske, Luhanske, Svitlodarsk, Pisky, Nevelske, Maryinka, Novomykhailivka, Berezove, Pavlopil, Hnutove, Vodiane, Lebedynske, and Shyrokyne.

According to Ukrainian intelligence, one militant was killed and three more were injured in the past day.

On Thursday, the enemy violated the ceasefire twice, firing at the positions of the Joint Forces near Krymske and Chermalyk from grenade launchers, heavy machine guns and small arms.

"There are no losses among the personnel of the Joint Forces," the press center said.
The Solomiansky district court in Kyiv has decided to arrest property of Ukrainian Infrastructure Minister Volodymyr Omelyan suspected of unlawful enrichment, the press secretary of the court Yana Kvitchenko has told the Kyiv-based Ukrayinska Pravda media outlet.

According to the media outlet, two petitions seeking to arrest the minister's property arrived to the court. One of them was fully satisfied and another one  partially.

Kvitchenko did not disclose the details of the petitions, as she was not present at the hearing.

Omelyan told the Ukrayinska Pravda that he also does not know the details, as he had learnt about the arrest from the news.

Later the press secretary of the infrastructure minister Maryna Tomko wrote on her Facebook page that according to the unconfirmed information, the court decided behind the closed doors that the following property of Omelyan was arrested: an apartment (60 square meters) and a car of the minister's brother.
Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko has said only integration into the Euro-Atlantic space guarantees the country's security, independence and prospects for raising the standard of living.

"We have escaped multidirectional labyrinths. We jumped out of the deadly trap of non-alignment, and since 2014 we are firmly following our path to the European Union and NATO. Only Ukraine's integration into the Euro-Atlantic space guarantees us peace and security, independence and prospects for raising the standard of living," Poroshenko said on Thursday morning.

He was speaking from the rostrum of the Verkhovna Rada, delivering his annual message about the internal and external situation of Ukraine.

Poroshenko did not rule out that in recent years the authorities made many tactical mistakes, for which he personally bears responsibility.

"But I am sure we made no errors on strategy issues! Making Ukraine a strong and successful integral part of Europe without any prospect of returning to the zone of Russian influence is our goal, our ambition, our mission," he said.

Speaking about what was achieved by Ukraine in recent years, the head of state mentioned the revival of the country's Armed Forces, the process of granting Ukraine's Orthodox Church autocephaly and strengthening the position of the Ukrainian language.

"We have built an efficient army. We are giving the Ukrainian Church a worthy place in world Orthodoxy. We affirm the Ukrainian language as a component of the strength and success of our people, and in the future we will take effective measures to strengthen its state status, strengthen and spread it in all spheres of public life," the president said.

"The army, language and faith are not a slogan. This is the formula of Ukraine's modern identity. The army defends our land, the language protects our heart and the church protects our soul," Poroshenko said.
Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko has said that he is almost confident that the sanctions against the Russian Federation will not be lifted, but there is a risk of their easing.

"Of course there is an unpleasant after-taste, but on the other hand, it is extremely important that sanctions against Moscow are now connected not only to Ukraine. Why? This means that there comes an absolutely sober understanding that Russia is not only our problem. It is a threat to the entire civilized world," he said on Thursday morning from the rostrum of the Verkhovna Rada, addressing the parliament with an annual message about the internal and external situation in Ukraine.

At the same time, he said: "We will be persistent in resisting attempts to easing sanctions pressure on Russia."

According to him, the tactical task of the Kremlin is the lifting of sanctions in January next year under the pretext of allegedly not fulfilling the Minsk accords by Ukraine.

"And I think that we should destroy this scenario. I am almost convinced that we will not allow sanctions to be lifted, but you should know that there is a risk of easing them," Poroshenko said.
Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko believes that Ukraine successfully opposes Russia's attempts to destroy an international coalition in support of Ukraine.

"Deeply mistaken are those who think that Russian aggression allegedly provides us with automatic support in the West. We need to fight for support every day. Over the past four and a half years we have managed not only to create and maintain a powerful transatlantic coalition in support of Ukraine, but also to expand and strengthen it considerably," he said in an annual message to the Verkhovna Rada on the internal and external situation in Ukraine.

Poroshenko said he was convinced that the principle "Nothing about Ukraine without Ukraine" had become an axiom of international policy. He also criticized those Western politicians who want to "look into Putin's soul."

"What do you want to see there? [..] The Russian Federation supports the right and left-populist movements, incites Euro-skepticism, meddles in elections and referendums, as was the case in the Netherlands. Thus the Kremlin is promoting its alternative agenda and values, hoping that it will be harder for the West to maintain a single position towards Moscow," he said.
Poroshenko to speak at UNGA about need to deploy UN peacekeepers to occupied Donbas, including on state border with Russia

Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko has stressed the need for progress in resolving the conflict in the Donbas by deploying a UN-led peacekeeping contingent throughout the entire territory of the occupied part of the region and intends to raise this issue at a session of the UN General Assembly.

"Real progress in the settlement [of the conflict in the Donbas] should be demonstrated, and its main indicator is the coordination of parameters for the deployment of a peacekeeping mission under the auspices of the United Nations in the Donbas, necessarily throughout the entire territory of occupied areas, necessarily with its exit to the Russian-Ukrainian border," he said from the rostrum of the Verkhovna Rada on Thursday morning, while addressing the parliament with an annual message on the internal and external situation of Ukraine.

The head of the Ukrainian state said he intends to raise this issue personally at the UN General Assembly.

According to Poroshenko, this will create conditions for the implementation of the security clauses of the Minsk agreements, including the withdrawal of Russian troops from Ukrainian territory.

"If this does not happen, the law on the special order of local self-governance will not start working. All responsibility for disrupting the Minsk process will lie with Russia," Poroshenko said.
Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko has said he sees threats of authoritarianism and revenge in context of the upcoming presidential election scheduled for 2019. He pledged to guarantee democratic elections at all levels.

"The spectre of authoritarianism is not the only challenge associated with the upcoming elections. The threat of revenge is also topical," Poroshenko said on Thursday morning from the rostrum of the Verkhovna Rada, addressing the parliament with an annual message about the internal and external situation of Ukraine.

He said that in the Ukrainian political discourse proposals that promote "manifestly undemocratic models" are categorically unacceptable.

"Some openly advocates 'educated authoritarianism,' while others camouflage it as 'parliamentarianism of the Chancellor type.' If you read the content, and not the title, the chancellor has more powers than the Kaiser, and there is essentially a one-party system in the Reichstag. A regime of individual power has never led to anything good for Ukraine - this is a lesson that everyone should remember," Poroshenko said.

The president said there is a "fifth column" in Ukraine, on the basis of which there are tendencies to form a powerful pro-Russian opposition in the new parliament.

"They are trying to gather their different ranks into a bunch, taking advantage of democracy Our task is extremely difficult - to repulse them without violating the norms of European democracy. I see my role in the power of law and the power of persuasion to give no chance to those who could question our own path, the path of independence, the path of European and Euro-Atlantic integration, "the president said.

Poroshenko said he shares the opinion of the Verkhovna Rada speaker that during the elections the issue of information security in Ukraine should be paramount.

"I am glad that the depth of this problem is also realized in the parliament," he said.

"As a president, I guarantee free, fair and democratic elections for the head of state, the new parliament, local self-government bodies. The process of expression of will must meet our European strategy and reaffirm Ukraine as the leader in respecting the standards of democracy in the post-Soviet space," Poroshenko said.
The Verkhovna Rada has included in the agenda of its session and sent to the Constitutional Court a presidential bill (No. 9037) on the introduction of constitutional amendments to strengthen Ukraine's strategic course for membership in the European Union and NATO.

According to an Interfax-Ukraine reporter, 321 MPs voted for the measure at a parliament meeting on Thursday. All parliamentary factions and deputy groups, except for the Opposition Bloc, supported the decision.

According to the procedure, the bill on amendments to the Constitution of Ukraine may be considered by the Verkhovna Rada only if there is a conclusion of the Constitutional Court regarding the compliance of the initiative with the requirements of Articles 157 and 158 of the main law.

After obtaining conclusions from the Constitutional Court, the parliament may preliminarily approve (adopt at first reading) such a bill by at least 226 votes. After this, at the next regular session, the parliament can vote for it for adoption as a whole. This will require at least 300 votes of parliamentarians. Such a procedure is established by the Constitution of Ukraine.

According to the proposed changes, the powers of the Verkhovna Rada will include "the implementation of the strategic course of the state to gain full membership of Ukraine in the European Union and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization."

The president of Ukraine will be the guarantor of the implementation of the state's strategic course for membership in the EU and NATO. The Cabinet of Ministers, in turn, will have to ensure the implementation of the strategic course for Ukraine's membership in these organizations.

At the same time, the preamble to the constitutional amendments proposes to affirm that the Verkhovna Rada confirms "the European identity of the Ukrainian people and the irreversibility of the European and Euro-Atlantic course of Ukraine."

In addition, the head of state proposes excluding from the transitional provisions of the constitution the clause that "the use of existing military bases on the territory of Ukraine for the temporary stay of foreign military formations is possible on lease terms, in the manner prescribed by the international treaties of Ukraine ratified by the Verkhovna Rada."

In this context, speaking earlier on Thursday to the parliament with an annual message on the internal and external situation of Ukraine, Poroshenko noted that the bill that he proposed "suggests excluding from the constitution the clause that allows the stationing of the [Russian] Black Sea Fleet in Ukraine."

"After we return Crimea, there will no longer be a Russian base in Sevastopol!" Poroshenko said.

The presidential bill was registered in parliament on Monday, September 3.
Kyiv has managed to build an effective relationship with the new United States administration following the election of Donald Trump, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko said.

"We have been learning pragmatism in foreign policy and have been finding the most optimal way for us to continue playing, even in the most difficult games. This approach has given us, among other things, an opportunity to build effective relations with the new American administration. Just take the U.S. president's decision to supply defensive lethal weapons to Ukraine. Such cooperation will continue," Poroshenko said in his annual address to the Verkhovna Rada on Thursday.

On September 18, the U.S. Senate approved the Pentagon's draft budget for 2019, which includes $250 million for Ukraine to help bolster its security, Poroshenko said.

"This is the best proof that there is a high level of trust between Kyiv and Washington," the president said.
Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko has said Russia is again trying to convince the European community of Ukraine's inability to extend the law on the special status of local self-government in occupied Donbas. He said this should not be allowed.

"Last year, the unpleasant surprise for the Kremlin was the fact that Ukraine's parliament extended the law 'On the Special Status of Local Self-government in Certain Areas of Donetsk and Lugansk Regions.' It was you, dear people's deputies, who knocked the trump card out of Putin's hands," Poroshenko said on Thursday, delivering his annual message about the internal and external situation of Ukraine.

The president said Russia was forced to adjust its tactics, but has again "pulled out this beaten map."

"The Kremlin and its henchmen are once again trying to convince the European community that the Ukrainian side is not ready to extend the law, which, according to Russia, is proof of Ukraine's inability to meet its obligations. That's their argument for why sanctions should be lifted. It would be a criminal mistake to give Moscow a chance to blame Ukraine for failing to comply with the agreements and ease sanctions pressure. I'm absolutely sure that this is definitely not a Ukrainian scenario," Poroshenko said.

The president said the risk of mitigating EU sanctions against Russia exists, but the fact that Russia is so aggressively fighting sanctions only testifies to the fact that they are working.

"Because the ruble is falling even with the growth of oil prices, because the Russian government is forced to raise the retirement age and value-added taxes. This is the price of aggression," Poroshenko said.
Lviv City in the near term has no plans to buy government domestic loan bonds, as the city does not have surplus funds, Lviv Mayor Andriy Sadovy told Interfax-Ukraine on the sidelines of the YES Conference recently organized by the Victor Pinchuk Foundation in Kyiv.

"Why should we do this [purchase of government domestic loan bonds]? We do not have an extra resource. Every hryvnia is targeted and has its own purpose. We, on the contrary, are looking for money," the mayor of Lviv said.

He also criticized government officials who blame local authorities for placing budget funds into short-term deposits.

"I consider this criticism to be the peak of incompetence. We have clearly planned expenses for each month, but if I have to pay some money in two months, why should they lie "naked" in my account and not work? We put them on deposit," Sadovy said.

According to him, the cities do not have "extra" money.

He recalled that in 2018, Lviv issued bonds for UAH 440 million to cover a small shortage that has arisen. "We have always done this - we issued municipal bonds. I offer all cities to use this tool," the mayor said.

Sadovy said that the issue of municipal bonds by Lviv in 2019 will depend on the results of the implementation of the city budget this year and the budget for next year: whether it will have a deficit and how it will be financed. The mayor said that at present, the city has good support from the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) and good cooperation with the European Investment Bank is on the horizon.
Kyiv's Mayor Vitali Klitschko will speak at the 10th Trade Day conference in Germany, Klitschko's press service has reported.

"Kyiv mayor Vitali Klitschko will address the 10th Forum on foreign trade of North Rhine-Westphalia, which will be held in the German city of Aachen on September 20," it was said on Facebook page of Kyiv mayor on Wednesday.

It says that the largest event in the foreign trade of North Rhine-Westphalia, which this year will gather for the tenth time, will be attended by about 1,000 participants. Representatives of more than 50 industrial and commercial chambers of Germany, leading German companies that carry out foreign trade activities, as well as market experts will be among them.

"The topic of the forum is "World Trade in Changing World." There will be panel discussions and seminars such as: "Customs 4.0," "Quo Vadis China business?", "Brexit: The Countdown,"etc.," it says.
The Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine has established an expert group on language policy issues to study problem issues in the implementation of public policy in this sphere.

The corresponding decision was made at a government meeting on Wednesday, an Interfax-Ukraine correspondent reported.

The Expert Group on Language Policy is a temporary advisory body under the Cabinet, which is created to study problem issues related to the implementation of the state language policy.

The main tasks of this expert group are: conducting a comprehensive analysis of modern language policy and cultural policy, defining mechanisms for monitoring the language and cultural situation on an ongoing basis; preparation of proposals on the solution of problems connected with language policy.

The deputy premier was appointed as the head of the expert council, the minister of culture - the first deputy head, the deputy minister of culture - the deputy head, the director-general of the directorate of the language policy of the Culture Ministry - its secretary. Deputy ministers of education and science, youth and sport, foreign affairs and finance, as well as heads and deputy heads of other institutions and central executive bodies are also included in the group.
State could attract at least $15-20 bln of investment using its land bank

Ukraine needs foreign direct investment (FDI) to provide stable growth, and one of the fastest instruments for attracting at least $15-20 billion could be the offer of state-owned agricultural land estimated at 10 million hectares, Managing Partner of ICU Investment Group Makar Paseniuk has stated.

"Land reform would be a huge driver for the further development of our country, as it can be done quickly and it will quickly attract FDI," he said at the Ukrainian Financial Forum organized by ICU in Odesa.

Paseniuk said that the total area of agricultural land in Ukraine is estimated at 20-25 million hectares, of which about 10 million hectares still belong to the state. According to him, the average rent rate is $140-150 per hectare a year, which, taking into account the conservative estimate of a 10% rate, entails the cost of land of $1,500-2,000 per hectare.

"Thus, the cost of all state farmland is $15-20 billion, which can be compared with the existing IMF program in the amount of $17.5 billion or more, which twice as much as the NBU's net reserves of $6.8 billion," the expert said.

He urged the state to actively offer large investment projects in other sectors.

"I cannot name an economically viable project in which a private investor can now invest $1 billion," Paseniuk stated.
Canadian Ambassador to Ukraine Roman Waschuk has criticized legislation passed by the Lviv Regional Council on imposing a moratorium on the public use of "Russian-language cultural products" in the region's territory.

"The Lviv oblast ban as formulated is narrow-minded, discriminatory and #justplaindumb. And I say this as a diasporic native speaker of Ukrainian, and consistent advocate of affirmative action for cultural products in that language - but also #diversity," Waschuk wrote on Twitter.

United Kingdom Ambassador to Ukraine Judith Gough shared Waschuk's opinion.

"I couldn't agree more. C'mon Lviv oblast, you're better than this... (And I say this as a fan/student of both the Ukrainian and Russian languages)," Gough wrote on Twitter.

It had been reported that 57 of the 84 members of the Lviv Regional Council voted on September 18 "to impose a moratorium on the public use of Russian-language cultural products in any form in the territory of Lviv region until the complete termination of the occupation of Ukrainian territory."
Newly created Briorson Motors to produce 500 ambulance cars based on Hyundai in 2019

Briorson Motors has started production of ambulance vehicles in Ukraine on the basis of a Hyundai H350 minibus, according to a press release of the company.

"By the end of this year it plans to produce 80 ambulances," the company said.

"The main goal of our company is to create a quality product for providing medical assistance in any climatic zones and in off-road conditions. Our vehicles cope with their tasks both in urban conditions and on bad roads in remote rural areas," Briorson Motors representative Vladyslav Kotliarenko said.

According to him, the production plan for 2019 is 500 special vehicles.

The company told Interfax-Ukraine the production facilities of Briorson Motors are located in Cherkasy.

According to the state register, Briorson Motors LLC with a charter capital of UAH 100 is registered in Kyiv in November 2017. Its core business is production of vehicles.

The owner of the company is Kolares LLC (Kyiv), the ultimate beneficiary is Vadym Kotliarenko. Andriy Honcharenko has been its head since August 2018.
LONDON, Sept 20 (Reuters) -

Iran hit back at a U.S. offer of negotiations on Thursday, saying Washington had violated the terms of the last big deal they agreed, the 2015 nuclear accord.

U.S. President Donald Trump pulled out of that nuclear accord - which curbed Iran's atomic activities in return for sanctions relief - in May, saying it did not go far enough.

The U.S. special envoy for Iran, Brian Hook, said on Wednesday that Washington now wanted to negotiate a treaty that included Tehran's ballistic missile program and its regional behavior.

Hook said the new deal that Washington hoped to sign with Iran, would not be a "personal agreement between two governments like the last one, we seek a treaty."

Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif took to Twitter to dismiss the characterisation of last deal as a "personal agreement", saying it was "an int'l accord enshrined in a UN (Security Council resolution)".

"U.S. has violated its treaty obligations too... Apparently, U.S. only mocks calls for peace," he added in the message that was attached to a video of a protester who took to the stage after Hook's speech, shouting that sanctions were hurting Iranian people.

The five other world powers that signed the 2015 accord with Iran - France, Germany, Britain, China and Russia - have been trying to salvage it, saying it offers the best chance to stop Iran developing a nuclear bomb. Tehran says its nuclear work is for electricity generation and other peaceful purposes.
Iranian Judiciary, intelligence and security organizations as well as the country's police force have refused to cooperate with the Rouhani administration's "Freedom of Information Access" (FOIA) database.

The Guardian Council and Expediency Council are among other bodies that deny citizens' right to access unclassified information.

President Hassan Rouhani's administration has set up the FOIA in July 2017 in a bid to make the government's activities transparent.

However, critics say that the information available in the database are outdated and insignificant.

"There is some burnt-out information there, and very little up-to-date data," Says MP for Rasht, Gholamali Jafazadeh Imanabadi, adding that "many people in the government fear transparency."

Although the site is accessible from abroad, but it may not be possible to sign up.

The Rouhani administration has set up the database "only to tick a box," outspoken Imanabadi told reporters in Tehran, adding that "nobody checks to see if it really works."

It took the Majles eight years to ratify the Freedom of Information Law, a legislation that gives ordinary Iranians access to unclassified information about the government's performance and activities. FOIA was supposed to put the law into practice.

However, as Imanabadi has observed, the database currently contains some minimal information including official statistics, government regulations, contracts and procedures, the authorities and responsibilities of various organizations as well as guidance about how to complain if something does not work.

Reports say that less than half of the governments executive organizations and only certain parts of the legislative body are linked to the database and contribute to it. Out of the 11 organizations comprising the Judiciary, only one is linked, and out of 427 other government, religious and military institutions only around 40 provide information to the database.

For instance, some of the most significant and influential institutions such as the Guardian Council, Expediency Council, the Friday Prayers Headquarters, the Supreme Council of National Security, the Army and the IRGC have refused to ingest their information into the system and have ignored the Rouhani administration's call for registering their unclassified information with the database.

On the other hand, the information currently available in the database includes a list of the names of all the deceased people between 1989 and 2006, a list of international games Iranian athletes have taken part in, samples of insurance policy of pilgrims to religious sites in Iraq, Mehr Housing Project purchase contracts, the texts of some laws such as the Press Code, and Municipal Taxes Law, as well as 25 samples of government correspondences.

The total number of Iranians who have signed up with the database from the country's 31 provinces during the past year is 5,100.

While the database has been operational, some 2000 Iranians from the Tehran Province have signed up with the database which contains information about 379 government organizations. During the past year, they have made 359 inquiries, mainly asking for the text of contracts with the government.

The smallest number of applicants are from Sistan and Blauchestan (43) and Ilam Province with only 20 applicants to sign up with the database.

According to Iranian media, during the past year the site received 305 complaints from citizens about the performance government organizations. Most of the complaints came from Hormozgan Province in the south.

The government has only responded to 130 inquiries with an average processing time of 48 days for each inquiry.

Some organizations such as the State Audit Organization have not responded to any of the inquiries.

Nevertheless, the site's assessment of the government organization's accountability was positive as it gave them "good" and "acceptable" ratings.

None of the inquiries or answers to them have been made public on the database's site, although the results of an assessment made by the site's administrators indicate that users have rated the Interior Ministry and Central Bank's responses to inquiries as the "least satisfactory".
After 29% annual growth in 2017, net oil export revenues of OPEC members are expected to rise again by 30% to $736 billion in 2018, the US Energy Information Administration (EIA) estimated.

However, the figure will fall to $719 billion next year due to slightly lower OPEC production and exports, the report said on September 18. No major oil price increase is forecast, as Brent benchmark price is expected to increase by $1 to $74/barrel next year.

Iran gradually increased its oil exports in 2016 and 2017 after its nuclear deal with world powers was implemented in January 2016 and its oil (including gas condensate) export revenues increased by 45% year-on-year in 2017, higher than the OPECs average.

However, EIAs short-term energy outlook report says Irans oil exports declined by 19% (about 0.5 million barrels per day) in August. Bloomberg tanker tracking data also indicates 30% decline since April and further shrinkage is expected for coming months as oil-related sanctions US sanctions are scheduled to be implemented soon.

US pulled out in May from Irans nuclear deal, called the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action or JCPOA and resumed financial and industrial sanctions on the country in August and the additional oil-related sanctions would be imposed on November 4.

Last year, Iran exported a monthly average of 2.5 mb per day, including 2.1 mb/d of crude oil and 400,000 b/d of gas condensate.

The majority of OPECs overall revenue fall next year is due to Irans expected export plunge, while OPECs statistics show some other members, especially Irans Arab neighbors have been raising production and Libya is resuming the output rapidly.

Irans net crude oil and gas condensate export revenues (billion $):

Source: EIA

OPECs latest monthly report estimated a decline of 235,000 b/d in Irans oil production in August, compared to May. Venezuelas production also declined by 153,000 b/d during the same period.

But the reduction in Iranian and Venezuelan production, the cartels total output increased by 437,000 barrels, as other members filled the void.

Saudi Arabia, Iraq, United Arab Emirates, Kuwait and Qatar have increased production by a total of 794,000 b/d during May-August, half of which came from Saudi Arabia.
LONDON/JERUSALEM, Sept 20 (Reuters) -

Iran asked the United Nations to condemn what it described as Israeli nuclear threats against it on Thursday, while Israel said it was stepping up security around its atomic sites as a precaution against threats from Tehran and its regional allies.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu used a visit to a secretive Israeli atomic reactor in August to warn the country's enemies that it has the means to destroy them, in what appeared to be a reference to its assumed nuclear arsenal.

"The United Nations' members should not turn a blind eye to these threats and must take firms actions to eliminate all Israeli nuclear weapons," Iran's ambassador to the United Nations, Gholamali Khoshrou said in letters to the U.N. secretary general and the security council, was quoted as saying by Fars news agency.

Khoshrou asked the United Nations to force Israel to join the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and bring its nuclear program under supervision of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), a U.N. atomic watchdog.

The director general of Israel's Atomic Energy Commission said on Tuesday that Iran and Syria posed significant proliferation threats to the region and called for U.N. action at the 62nd General Conference of the International Atomic Energy Agency now taking place in Vienna.

In a statement on Thursday, director general Zeev Snir said: "We cannot ignore the repeated and explicit threats, made by Iran and its proxies, to attack Israel's nuclear sites. These outrageous threats, require Israel to take immediate action and continue to protect and defend its nuclear facilities."

Israel, which is outside the NPT, neither confirms nor denies having a nuclear arsenal, a decades-old "ambiguity" policy.

It is trying to lobby world powers to follow the United States in withdrawing from the 2015 deal with Iran that capped the Islamic Republic's nuclear capabilities in return for lifting of sanctions.

The Israelis say the agreement does not do enough to denying their arch-foe the means to eventually build a bomb. Tehran, which is a signatory to the 1970 nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), denies wanting to so.

Netanyahu gave details in April of what he said was evidence of a secret Iranian nuclear weapons program. Iran called the documents fake.

Snir said the IAEA must conduct a robust verification of Iran's "clandestine activities" and also of an undeclared, secretive military nuclear reactor that he said Syria has built at Dair Alzour.

Since its 1979 Islamic Revolution, Iran has called for Israel's destruction. Tehran backs the Lebanese militia Hezbollah and the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas. Its reinforcement of Damascus during Syria's civil war is seen by the Netanyahu government as a further Iranian deployment on Israels borders.

Israel has been a member of the IAEA since its establishment in 1957, and Iran since 1958.
CAIRO, Sept 20 (Reuters) -

Washington's Gulf Arab allies should be included in proposed treaty negotiations with Iran over its ballistic missile program and regional behavior, a senior Emiriati official said on Thursday.

Brian Hook, U.S. special envoy for Iran, said on Wednesday the United States is seeking to negotiate a treaty with Iran to include Tehran's ballistic missiles and its regional behavior.

Iran has rejected U.S. attempts to hold high-level talks since President Donald Trump tore up a nuclear deal between Tehran and six world powers earlier this year.

Anwar Gargash, United Arab Emirates Minister of State for Foreign Affairs, described Hook's comments as "important".

"It is essential that the Gulf Arab states be a party to the proposed negotiations. It is prudent for Tehran to avoid sanctions and to take these proposals seriously," he tweeted.

The UAE, Saudi Arabia and Bahrain swiftly backed Trump's decision in May to withdraw from the nuclear accord and reimpose sanctions on Tehran. The Sunni Muslim-ruled states are at loggerheads with Shi'ite Iran, fighting a proxy war that has influenced conflicts in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Yemen.

The Gulf Arab states were not party to the nuclear accord, and while they were consulted by Western powers during the talks that led up to it, they played no direct role in those negotiations.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo listed a dozen demands in May that he said could make up a new agreement, although Hook referred to a treaty, which would have to be approved by the U.S. Senate.
The U.S. ambassador to Germany has told Bloomberg News that automaker Volkswagen has agreed to comply with U.S. sanctions and suspend most of its operations in Iran.

"We are pleased with this decision because Iran diverts its economic resources away from its people to spread violence and instability across the globe," Ambassador Richard Grenell said on September 19.

Bloomberg said Volkswagen officials did not respond to requests for comment. Reuters said the White House also did not comment.

U.S. officials and Volkswagen finalized the details of the pullout on September 18 following weeks of talks, Grenell said.

The German automaker will still be allowed to conduct some business in Iran under a humanitarian exception, the ambassador added.

In May, U.S. President Donald Trump withdrew from a 2015 nuclear deal that Iran signed with six world powers and began reimposing some of the sanctions that had been eased in return for curbs on Tehran's nuclear programs.

Trump complained that the deal did not do enough to prevent Iran from eventually developing the capacity to produce a nuclear weapon.

He also alleged that Iran was violating the spirit of the accord by financing militant activity in the region, an allegation Tehran has denied.

The reimposition of sanctions has weakened the Iranian economy, with the countrys currency, the rial, falling sharply against hard currencies in recent months.

Britain and France, along with other European nations, have said they want to protect European companies that continue doing business in Iran.

However, international companies including French oil firm Total, German carmaker Daimler, and Deutsche Telekom have pulled out of the country since the U.S. decision to withdraw from the nuclear deal, fearing they will be targeted by secondary sanctions.

With reporting by Bloomberg and Reuters
Baku, Azerbaijan, Sept. 20

Trend:

The Consul General of Azerbaijan in Yekaterinburg Ilgar Iskenderov thanked the leadership of the Tyumen region for the invitation to participate in the 9th Tyumen oil and gas forum, TASS reported.

"This invitation and my participation are very significant. The good long-term relations between Azerbaijan and the Tyumen region most visibly embody the life and work in this region of Western Siberia of my countryman Farman Salmanov  the legendary discoverer of Tyumen oil", the diplomat said in an interview with TASS during the forum.

The consul general said the forum is held under the sign of consensus  we all face new challenges, a lot of issues that require joint solution in the context of progressive globalization.

"At the plenary meeting, we listened to the opinions of leading representatives and senior officials of both the Tyumen region and the oil and gas industry, he said.

Today, the security of our states, and not only energy security, is mainly based on hydrocarbons. Their production and transit, development of new fields, development and implementation of new ideas and technologies in this area are important for collective discussion  both at the national and international level," he added.

The following trend is becoming increasingly important - it is becoming easier to transport oil than to produce it, and discussion at the forum of ideas and technologies that contribute to production growth is important for both countries, the consul noted.

The science is moving forward, new technologies and developments are emerging, and the cooperation in the oil and gas sector in the future is a priority for us, because the country's economy is based on this sector," Iskenderov said.

He noted that today Azerbaijan can provide its friends in the Russian Federation, in particular in the Tyumen region with the opportunity to consider the possibility of cooperation in the area of both transit transportation of hydrocarbons and development of prospective oil and gas fields.

"Scientists of the National Academy of Sciences of Azerbaijan are working in this direction. The status and development of the industry is constantly monitored by the leadership of our country. Therefore, we attach great importance to this level and agenda of mutual relations, and today we can say: we have had, have and will have concrete, clear, long-term plans for cooperation and development in the oil and gas industry", he said.

Iskenderov said the oil and gas forum also raises certain humanitarian aspects.

"Here we meet with representatives of the leadership of the Tyumen region. Although our economies are based on the oil and gas industry, we all need to develop non-oil projects as well, he said.

We have many contacts in the scientific and other spheres. For example, we discuss the development of cooperation in the field of tourism, in the agro-industrial complex  we are rich in fruits and vegetables, and Tyumen is rich in grain, which we do not have in sufficient quantity", the diplomat said.

He also recalled the joint activities in education, and in almost all humanitarian spheres.
Details added (first version posted on 09:15)

Baku, Azerbaijan, Sept. 20

By Leman Zeynalova - Trend:

NATO reiterates importance of the peaceful settlement of the Armenia-Azerbaijan Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, NATO Deputy Secretary General Rose Gottemoeller told reporters in Baku Sept. 20.

She said that the organization supports the work of the OSCE Minsk Group and the efforts of the parties to find a peaceful solution to the conflict.

Gottemoeller noted that NATO is very happy to have such a partner as Azerbaijan, adding that they are working together on projects that meet the interests of Azerbaijan.

She also emphasized joint work in the development of institutions in the defense sphere in Azerbaijan.

NATO believes that by these projects it can help Azerbaijan in the countrys further development as a key player in the region, she said.

She also highly appreciated the active support of Azerbaijan for the NATO mission in Afghanistan. In particular, Gottemoeller stressed the increase in the number of the military contingent of Azerbaijan as part of the NATO mission in Afghanistan.

NATO is also grateful to Azerbaijan for providing transit opportunities as part of this mission, she noted, adding that Azerbaijan participates very effectively in NATOs activity in the fight against terrorism.

---

Follow the author on Twitter: @Lyaman_Zeyn
Baku, Azerbaijan, Sept. 20

Trend:

Over the past 24 hours, Armenian armed forces have 90 times violated the ceasefire along the line of contact between Azerbaijani and Armenian troops, the Azerbaijani Defense Ministry said Sept. 20.

Armenian armed forces were using heavy machine guns.

The conflict between the two South Caucasus countries began in 1988 when Armenia made territorial claims against Azerbaijan. As a result of the ensuing war, in 1992 Armenian armed forces occupied 20 percent of Azerbaijan, including the Nagorno-Karabakh region and seven surrounding districts.

The 1994 ceasefire agreement was followed by peace negotiations. Armenia has not yet implemented four UN Security Council resolutions on withdrawal of its armed forces from the Nagorno-Karabakh and the surrounding districts.
Baku, Azerbaijan, Sept. 20

By Leman Zeynalova - Trend:

Of more than one million Azerbaijani refugees and internally displaced persons, more than 400,000 are women and more than 300,000 are children, the chairman of the State Committee for Family, Women and Children Affairs Hijran Huseynova said on Sept. 20.

She mentioned that the genocide committed by Armenia against Azerbaijanis in Khojaly has been so far recognized by ten countries.

During the conflict period, Azerbaijan achieved the release of 1114 people who were held hostage, and among them there are 223 children, 363 women, Huseynova added.

"Rehabilitation work is very important for their integration into society. Some 29 children, 98 remain hostages. Their fates are still unknown and we are very worried about it," she said.

Huseynova appealed to civil societies and international organizations to pay special attention to this issue.

The conflict between the two South Caucasus countries began in 1988 when Armenia made territorial claims against Azerbaijan. As a result of the ensuing war, in 1992 Armenian armed forces occupied 20 percent of Azerbaijan, including the Nagorno-Karabakh region and seven surrounding districts.

The 1994 ceasefire agreement was followed by peace negotiations. Armenia has not yet implemented four UN Security Council resolutions on withdrawal of its armed forces from the Nagorno-Karabakh and the surrounding districts.

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Follow the author on Twitter: @Lyaman_Zeyn
Baku, Azerbaijan, Sept. 20

By Leman Zeynalova - Trend:

Azerbaijan urges the Armenian leadership not to repeat the mistakes of their predecessors, Deputy Foreign Minister of Azerbaijan Khalaf Khalafov said at the 39th Session of the UN Human Rights Council.

The deputy FM mentioned that the fundamental rights and freedoms of Azerbaijani refugees from Armenia and IDPs from the occupied territories of Azerbaijan have been violated for 30 years, seriously challenging the UN and its human rights mechanisms.

In this regard, Azerbaijan calls on the Human Rights Council, as well as its special mechanisms and the High Commissioner for Human Rights to make effective efforts to restore the violated rights of Azerbaijani refugees and IDPs as required by the relevant resolutions of the UN Security Council and the General Assembly, he added.

"We, in turn, continue to work for improving life standards of refugees and IDPs. I would like to mention that, in general, over the past 25 years more than $8 billion have been allocated for the social protection of this vulnerable group of people. Some 150 houses, school buildings, a kindergarten, medical institutions and other social facilities have been built in Jojug Marjanli village of Jabrayil district, which was liberated from the Armenian occupation in April 2016," Khalafov said.

Armenia continues to ignore the relevant resolutions of the UN Security Council and the General Assembly, Khalafov added.

"Unfortunately, latest statements of Armenia's new leadership, in fact, undermine the peace negotiation process and they are aimed at consolidating the occupation of Azerbaijani territories, thereby putting the region face to face with new threats. We reiterate that all responsibility for disruption of the negotiation process and escalation of tensions in the region lies entirely on the Armenian leadership," the deputy minister added.

"We urge the Armenian leadership not to repeat the mistakes of their predecessors and take a constructive stance on the issue of resolving the conflict on the basis of unconditional liberation of all the occupied Azerbaijani territories. We call on them to respect the sovereignty, territorial integrity and inviolability of internationally recognized borders of states," Khalafov said.

The conflict between the two South Caucasus countries began in 1988 when Armenia made territorial claims against Azerbaijan. As a result of the ensuing war, in 1992 Armenian armed forces occupied 20 percent of Azerbaijan, including the Nagorno-Karabakh region and seven surrounding districts.

The 1994 ceasefire agreement was followed by peace negotiations. Armenia has not yet implemented four UN Security Council resolutions on withdrawal of its armed forces from the Nagorno-Karabakh and the surrounding districts.

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Follow the author on Twitter: @Lyaman_Zeyn
Baku, Azerbaijan, Sept. 20

Trend:

Azerbaijans defense minister, Colonel General Zakir Hasanov checked the combat readiness and combat capability of military personnel, military equipment, aviation, rocket and artillery mounts of military units stationed in the field conditions in exercise areas, Azerbaijans Defense Ministry said in a message.

In line with the plan of large-scale exercises, the minister visited command and control posts and training points at various training ranges established in accordance with conditions close to the combat ones, and gave relevant instructions in connection with participation of troops, weapons and military equipment in exercises, as well as with accurate implementation of tasks and military orders.

The exercises continue.

In accordance with the plan approved by President of Azerbaijan, Supreme Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces Ilham Aliyev and under the supervision of Azerbaijans defense minister, Colonel General Zakir Hasanov, Azerbaijan started large-scale operational-tactical exercises with participation of various military branches of troops and formations on Sept. 17.

The exercises that will last until Sept. 22 involve more than 20,000 military personnel, more than 200 tanks and other armored vehicles, more than 120 rocket and artillery mounts of different calibers, multiple launch rocket systems and mortars, up to 10 fighters and bomber aircraft, as well as up to 20 army aviation units.
Baku, Azerbaijan, Sept.20

By Leman Zeynalova  Trend:

In 2017, Azerbaijan was a strong counterterrorism partner to the United States, the US State Department said in its Country Reports on Terrorism 2017.

Azerbaijans government actively worked to detect and defeat terrorist efforts to move people, money, and materials across its land and maritime borders and within the South Caucasus, said the report.

The State Department noted that Azerbaijani law enforcement and security services conducted operations to disrupt and prevent terror attacks, arrested and prosecuted suspected terrorists.

Azerbaijan also continued supporting North Atlantic Treaty Organization counterterrorism initiatives as one of the Alliances Partnership for Peace countries. Azerbaijan continued efforts to improve Afghan security and stability by co-chairing the Heart of Asia-Istanbul Process; as its co-Chair, Azerbaijan hosted senior officials meetings and a Ministerial Conference, said the report.

Azerbaijan also hosted a working group meeting that highlighted the role of narcotics traffickers in financing terrorism, said the State Department.

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Follow the author on Twitter: @Lyaman_Zeyn
Baku, Azerbaijan, Sept. 20

Trend:

Azerbaijans State Security Service has disseminated archival documents proving the terror attacks of Armenian Dashnak forces.

The State Security Service declassified some of the materials stored in its archives.

By signing the Treaty of Gulistan in 1813 and the Treaty of Turkmenchay in 1828, the division of Azerbaijans historical lands wasnt completed. On the contrary, the process of exclusion of the Azerbaijani territories by force under the patronage and direct participation of enemy forces became systematic and continued.

The process of purposeful resettlement of Armenians living in many neighboring countries to Azerbaijani lands began. A separatist administrative territorial division under the name Armenian region emerged on the historical lands of Azerbaijan. Then the propaganda of the dream of Greater Armenia began, and for this purpose various Armenian organizations based on fear and terror emerged. Thus, the foundation of a more insidious and purposeful policy of the Armenian-Dashnak forces to eliminate the Azerbaijani people and seize its lands started.

The ideology of terrorism and fascism became an integral part of state policy in Armenia. This ideology is the basis of territorial claims to neighboring states, the policy of ethnic cleansing against Azerbaijanis, Turkic and other peoples. The Armenian terrorist Dashnak forces used the dirtiest methods all the time to achieve their insidious goals, and even couldnt restrain themselves from opposing the tsarist and Soviet Russia, which sheltered them and allowed them to move to the historical lands of Azerbaijan.

When examining the weighty evidence of the atrocities committed by Armenian executioners as part of fascist military formations during the Second World War, the consequences of these atrocities are terrifying.

Today in Armenia, no matter which forces came to power, chauvinism, extremism, military violence, annexation are always propagated and encouraged in the most extreme form, the younger generation is being brought up in the spirit of hatred and intolerance towards neighboring nations, and is being inculcated with a heroic image of Armenians who committed crimes against humanity.

Azerbaijans State Security Service, in the course of researching documentary materials stored in the archives, found numerous factual confirmations of the brutal actions of the Armenian terrorist Dashnak forces, including the Dashnaktsutyun party, which bears the ideology of terrorism, as well as Armenians who were particularly cruel against humanity during the Second World War.

Given the scientific and historical significance of materials from the point of view of protecting the world from terror and the consequences of fascism, the urgency of informing the international community about the results of the policy of annexation and political aggression being pursued by Armenia against Azerbaijan, the need to refer to primary sources in exposing this policy, the State Security Service found it expedient to declassify some of the materials and make them available to the general public.

It was decided to post these materials on the official website of the Service:
Baku, Azerbaijan, Sept. 20

Trend:

Bulgaria shows great interest in the global projects being implemented by Azerbaijan.

This statement was made in Baku on Sept. 20 during the meeting between Azerbaijani Prime Minister Novruz Mammadov and Chairperson of the National Assembly of Bulgaria Tsveta Karayancheva, who is on a visit to the country to participate in the solemn event on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the Azerbaijani parliament.

Azerbaijan and Bulgaria have strong friendly relations, Mammadov said, adding that these relations have reached the level of strategic partnership.

"Currently, political relations between Azerbaijan and Bulgaria are at a high level, he said. Our countries are also successfully cooperating within the international organizations. Of course, interparliamentary cooperation also plays an important role in expanding our relations."

The prime minister touched upon the trade and economic cooperation between Azerbaijan and Bulgaria and stressed that the trade turnover between the two countries has greatly grown during the eight months of this year.

Mammadov also said that a number of important issues are planned to be discussed at the next meeting of the intergovernmental commission on economic cooperation between Azerbaijan and Bulgaria in Sofia.

Chairperson of the National Assembly of Bulgaria Tsveta Karayancheva congratulated Mammadov on his appointment to the post of prime minister and expressed gratitude for the invitation to participate in the solemn events on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the Azerbaijani parliament.

Karayancheva said that the mutual activity of the parliaments of the two countries plays an important role in the development of relations between Azerbaijan and Bulgaria.

The commissioning of the Baku-Tbilisi-Kars railway is an important event, she said, adding that Bulgaria shows great interest in this project.

The special significance of the "Southern Gas Corridor" project was stressed during the conversation. The views on the construction of the Interconnector Greece-Bulgaria were exchanged.

During the meeting, the sides discussed the possibilities of cooperation in the field of agriculture, food industry, tourism, investments and implementation of joint infrastructure projects, as well as in other areas of mutual interest.
Details added (first version posted on 17:33)

Baku, Azerbaijan, Sept. 20

Trend:

President of the Republic of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev has received President of the National Assembly of the Republic of Djibouti Mohamed Ali Houmed, Chairman of the State Council of Oman Yahya bin Mahfouz Al Munziri, speaker of the National Assembly of the State of Kuwait Marzouq Al-Ghanim, Chairman of the Senate of Pakistan Muhammad Sadiq Sanjrani, Speaker of the National Assembly of Bulgaria Tsveta Karayancheva, Chairman of the Jogorku Kenesh of Kyrgyzstan Dastanbek Djumabekov, President of the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly George Tsereteli, and first deputy speaker of the House of Representatives of the Egyptian Parliament Al-Said al-Sherif, who are visiting Azerbaijan to attend a solemn meeting marking the 100th anniversary of the Azerbaijani parliament.

The president stressed the importance of the event on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the establishment of the Azerbaijani parliament, and thanked the guests who arrived in Azerbaijan to attend this event.

Describing the participation of representatives of friendly countries in this event as indicative of partnership, President Aliyev recalled his visits to these countries.

The president hailed Azerbaijan`s relations with these countries, adding that they cover a variety of areas. President Aliyev said that the visit will give the guests a good opportunity to get acquainted with the country and also contribute to the expansion of interparliamentary cooperation.

Speaker of the Kuwait National Assembly Marzouq Ali Al-Ghanim conveyed Emir of the State of Kuwait Sabah Al-Ahmad Al-Jaber Al-Sabah`s greetings to the president.

Marzouq Ali Al-Ghanim noted that he participates in the event on the instructions of the Emir of the State of Kuwait. Saying that it is his first visit to Baku, the Kuwaiti speaker added that they were deeply impressed by the beauty and development in the capital.

He expressed confidence that such events contribute to the development of interparliamentary cooperation and bring other countries and nations closer to Azerbaijan.

The Kuwaiti guest extended best wishes to President Aliyev and the people of Azerbaijan. He expressed hope that they will visit Azerbaijan again.

President Aliyev pointed out that Azerbaijan maintains active cooperation on the international arena and the number of the country`s friends is increasing day by day.

The president thanked for the Emir of the State of Kuwait`s greetings and asked Marzouq Ali Al-Ghanim to extend his greetings to Sabah Al-Ahmad Al-Jaber Al-Sabah.
Baku, Azerbaijan, Sept. 20

Trend:

The 71st anniversary of the US Air Force was celebrated in Baku, the US embassy in Baku said in a message on Sept. 20.

Military attache of the embassy, Colonel Adam Kavlick greeted the guests and spoke about the military cooperation between the US and Azerbaijan.

Representatives of the Azerbaijani Air Force also attended the celebration.

The US intends to continue the important cooperation with Azerbaijan in such areas as activities in Afghanistan, combating global terrorism and ensuring regional security, Kavlick said.
Baku, Azerbaijan, Sept. 20

By Ali Gasimov - Trend:

Over 75 percent of the work, including engineering, construction and supply work, have been completed as part of the Trans Adriatic Pipeline (TAP) project, SOCAR President Rovnag Abdullayev said in an interview with Azerbaijans Khalq Gazeti newspaper.

At the beginning of 2020, TAP will be connected to the Trans-Anatolian Natural Gas Pipeline (TANAP) and 10 billion cubic meters of Azerbaijani gas will be delivered to European markets per year, he said. To ensure the functionality of the pipeline, construction of two compressor stations started in Greece (Kipoi) and Albania (Fier) in the first half last year and the work continues on schedule.

Abdullayev expressed confidence that the TAP project will soon be completed and Europes biggest infrastructure project - the Southern Gas Corridor, which requires investments worth $40 billion, will be fully implemented.

This historic achievement will give us the opportunity to deliver rich gas reserves of Azerbaijan to the markets of Turkey and Europe by the shortest and safest way, he added.

TAP worth 4.5 billion euros is a part of the Southern Gas Corridor (SGC), which is one of the priority energy projects for the European Union. The project envisages transportation of gas from Azerbaijan's Shah Deniz Stage 2 to the EU countries.

The pipeline will connect to the TANAP on the Turkish-Greek border, run through Greece, Albania and the Adriatic Sea, before coming ashore in Italys south.

TAP will be 878 kilometers in length (Greece 550 kilometers, Albania 215 kilometers, Adriatic Sea 105 kilometers, and Italy 8 kilometers).

TAPs shareholding is comprised of BP (20 percent), SOCAR (20 percent), Snam S.p.A. (20 percent), Fluxys (19 percent), Enagas (16 percent) and Axpo (5 percent).

The SGC is one of the priority projects for the EU, and it provides for the transportation of 10 billion cubic meters of Azerbaijani gas from the Caspian region through Georgia and Turkey to Europe.

On May 29, Baku hosted the launch ceremony of the first phase of the SGC project, and on June 12, the opening ceremony of TANAP pipeline was held in the Turkish province of Eskisehir with the participation of the presidents of Azerbaijan - Ilham Aliyev, Turkey - Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Ukraine - Petro Poroshenko and Serbia - Alexander Vucic.

Thus, the first gas from the Azerbaijani Shah Deniz field coming out of the Sangachal terminal expanded for Shah Deniz-2 project and passing through the expanded South Caucasus Gas Pipeline, has already gone through the first segment of the Southern Gas Corridor. The next stage was the commissioning of the TANAP gas pipeline, through which the gas will enter the territory of Turkey and will pass on further to Europe.
Baku, Azerbaijan, Sept. 20

By Azad Hasanli  Trend:

The World Bank (WB) recommends Azerbaijan to strengthen measures on the development of human capital, Head of the WB Baku Office Naveed Hassan Naqvi said in an interview with Trend.

"There are only two resources that Azerbaijan has - oil and people," he said. "The oil resource is depleting. Oil production reached the peak in 2010-2011. I think it was more than 1.1 million barrels per day, now its less than 700,000 and it is going down. Of course, some gas discoveries have led to an additional source of revenue, and the WB was at the forefront of getting the TANAP pipeline build and finance, but that will not fully replace the oil revenues."

Regarding the second resource, the population, Naqvi said that Azerbaijan is the only country where the population is growing and young population is also increasing.

"If you look across the region in neighboring countries the population is declining," he said. "In Georgia from 1991, its gone from 5 million people to 3.7 million people now. The similar decline is in Armenia."

"But now we have to make sure that these people are given quality education, quality healthcare, and an environment in which they can start businesses and create jobs," he noted. "So the next step for Azerbaijan is to make this hard investment. Thats because unlike roads, where if you put money in it, next year you will see the road, for education or healthcare, you have to start investing now and you will see benefits in a few years."

"I know that the government is doing a lot on improving the Doing Business indicators," he said, adding that a more systemic and holistic approach is needed to improve the human capital in Azerbaijan.

Azerbaijan joined the WB group in 1992.

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Follow the author on Twitter: @AzadHasanli
Details added (first version posted on 10:07)

Baku, Azerbaijan, Sept. 20

By Ilkin Shafiyev - Trend:

The Southern Gas Corridor (SGC) project will be able to meet about 40-50 percent of the needs of the Balkan countries in natural gas, Azerbaijani Energy Minister Parviz Shahbazov said Sept. 20 during the 7th International Caspian Energy Forum Baku-2018.

Speaking about the strategic significance of the project, it should be taken into account that the project is aimed at Eastern Europe, a sensitive region from the point of view of energy security, he noted.

The SGC project will be able to meet up to 30-35 percent of the gas needs in Bulgaria and Greece, and, initially, about 10 percent of the total needs of Italy, and at the second stage it will turn into a gas hub for this country. With the help of interconnectors, the project will be able to meet about 40-50 percent of the needs of the Balkan countries.

He stressed that in the future, the volumes of gas supplies through the SGC may increase.

In the future, gas will be exported along the SGC not only as part of the Shah Deniz Stage 2 project, but also from other fields, the minister said.

The SGC is one of the priority projects for the EU, and it provides for the transportation of 10 billion cubic meters of Azerbaijani gas from the Caspian region through Georgia and Turkey to Europe.

On May 29, Baku hosted the launch ceremony of the first phase of the Southern Gas Corridor project, and on June 12, the opening ceremony of TANAP pipeline was held in the Turkish province of Eskisehir with the participation of the presidents of Azerbaijan - Ilham Aliyev, Turkey - Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Ukraine - Petro Poroshenko and Serbia - Alexander Vucic.

Thus, the first gas from the Azerbaijani Shah Deniz field coming out of the Sangachal terminal expanded for Shah Deniz-2 project and passing through the expanded South Caucasus Gas Pipeline, has already gone through the first segment of the Southern Gas Corridor. The next stage was the commissioning of the TANAP gas pipeline, through which the gas will enter the territory of Turkey and will pass on further to Europe.

The TANAP pipeline has been laid from the Georgian-Turkish border to the Western border of Turkey. The TANAP pipeline together with another  Trans-Adriatic - gas pipeline is part of the "Southern Gas Corridor" project, which provides for the transportation of gas from the Azerbaijani "Shah Deniz" field to Europe.

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Follow the author on Twitter: @IlkinShafiyev
Ashgabat, Turkmenistan, Sept. 20

By Huseyn Hasanov  Trend:

A meeting with the delegation of the Iranian Fisheries Corporation was held in Ashgabat, the Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs of Turkmenistan (UIET) said in a statement.

At the UIET, the parties discussed possibility of establishing a partnership. The sides exchanged views on the prospects of cooperation in the issues of aquaculture technologies, the creation of joint ventures for the production and processing of fish.

The parties stated that the expansion of contacts between Turkmen and Iranian fishermen is required for the favorable formation of business ties, the message says.

The delegation of the Islamic Republic of Iran intends to visit the complex for breeding sturgeon, production of fish, caviar and fish products on the Turkmen coast of the Caspian sea and other fisheries of the country.

It was reported in March that in Turkmenistan, the enterprises of the State Committee for Fisheries caught 555 tons of fish since the beginning of the year, which exceeded the volume of last year's catch for the same period.

In addition, information about the announcement of an international tender for the construction of a complex for artificial sturgeon breeding and production of fish products in the Guvlymayak village of the Balkan region of Turkmenistan, as well as a fish canning shop at the "Balkanbalyk" state enterprise at the expense of foreign investors was disclosed.

Turkmenistan - its Western region, along with Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Russia and Iran is washed by the Caspian sea, rich in biological resources. "Balkanbalyk" is a leading enterprise in the country, which produces fish in the Caspian sea and is engaged in the processing of fishery products.

Turkmenistan has adopted a program for the development of fisheries until 2030.
Baku, Azerbaijan, Sept. 20

By Ilkin Shafiyev - Trend:

The Azerbaijani Agency for Development of Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises (SMEs) and Caspian European Club have signed a memorandum of cooperation.

The signing ceremony took place at the VII International Caspian Energy Forum 2018, on Sept. 20.

The document was signed by the Executive Director of Caspian European Club Telman Aliyev and the Chairman of the Board of the Agency for Development of SMEs Orkhan Mammadov.

While speaking at the forum Orkhan Mammadov named the tasks of the agency.

According to Mammadov, the agency will closely cooperate in all areas with entrepreneurs, investors, government agencies and international organizations.

"In order to increase the role of SMEs in the national economy and bring the management system up to modern requirements, the head of state has signed relevant decrees. Several strategic initiatives are currently being implemented within the framework of the tasks set before us by these documents," Mammadov said.

Mammadov also talked about the functions of SMEs houses created in the country.

"In these houses of the agency, transparent and operational services will be provided by the principle of "single window". All measures to support entrepreneurs will be provided. At the same time, provision of services will be provided in a single form via an electronic platform. I am confident that these houses will be presented as an innovative brand of the country," Mammadov added.

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Follow the author on Twitter: @IlkinShafiyev
Details added (first version posted on 15:32)

Baku, Azerbaijan, Sept. 20

By Anvar Mammadov - Trend:

Azerbaijans State Customs Committee has nearly completed the first stage of reforming the countrys customs sphere, Deputy Chairman of the Committee Igbal Babayev said Sept. 20 during the 7th International Caspian Energy Forum Baku 2018.

He said that in general the reforms are implemented in three directions - the development of ties between customs and businesses, between customs and government, as well as among various customs structures.

We plan to implement reforms in several stages, and it is safe to say that the first stage is almost complete, he noted. First of all, it is necessary to note the transformations that completely changed the structure of the Committee. Major rotations were carried out and the number of managers was reduced, the number of employees was increased. Fifty customs posts were created, which replaced customs administrations. Of them, which 31 are border posts and the remaining 19 are internal posts. Five customs bodies were created - Baku, Sumgait, Northern, Southern and Western major territorial customs administrations.

Babayev added that at the next stage the State Customs Committee will proceed to improve the human resources and increase the skills of its employees.

Touching upon cooperation with other customs bodies, Babayev said the State Customs Committee intends to improve the exchange of customs information with other countries.

We have already signed the relevant agreements with Georgia, Ukraine, Iran, Russia, Turkey, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, Babayev added. A test project with Ukraine is presently being implemented. The State Customs Committee will continue to actively cooperate with its partners.

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Follow the author on Twitter: @Anvar_Mammadov
Details added (first version posted on 10:17)

Baku, Azerbaijan, Sept. 20

By Anvar Mammadov - Trend:

Azerbaijan and the entire Caspian region are important partners of Europe in the energy sector, European Commission Vice-President for Energy Union Maros Sefcovic said in his video appeal to the participants of the 7th International Caspian Energy Forum Baku-2018 on Sept. 20.

Azerbaijan is the main participant of the Southern Gas Corridor project, which will allow Europe to diversify energy sources and improve the regional geopolitical balance, Sefcovic said.

The first volumes of Azerbaijans gas will reach Europe in 2020, he noted.

This will be a historic event, which can be called the culmination of political and economic efforts of both states and private sectors of the participating countries, he added.

The gas will not only allow European countries to achieve their energy goals, but will also benefit the non-EU countries, he said.

In addition, the success of SGC can be used in cooperation in other areas, such as alternative energy, environmental issues and so on, he noted.

The SGC is one of the priority projects for the EU, and it provides for the transportation of 10 billion cubic meters of Azerbaijani gas from the Caspian region through Georgia and Turkey to Europe.

On May 29, Baku hosted the launch ceremony of the first phase of the Southern Gas Corridor project, and on June 12, the opening ceremony of TANAP pipeline was held in the Turkish province of Eskisehir with the participation of the presidents of Azerbaijan - Ilham Aliyev, Turkey - Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Ukraine - Petro Poroshenko and Serbia - Alexander Vucic.

Thus, the first gas from the Azerbaijani Shah Deniz field coming out of the Sangachal terminal expanded for Shah Deniz-2 project and passing through the expanded South Caucasus Gas Pipeline, has already gone through the first segment of the Southern Gas Corridor. The next stage was the commissioning of the TANAP gas pipeline, through which the gas will enter the territory of Turkey and will pass on further to Europe.

The TANAP pipeline has been laid from the Georgian-Turkish border to the Western border of Turkey. The TANAP pipeline together with another  Trans-Adriatic - gas pipeline is part of the "Southern Gas Corridor" project, which provides for the transportation of gas from the Azerbaijani "Shah Deniz" field to Europe.

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Follow the author on Twitter: @Anvar_Mammadov
Baku, Azerbaijan, Sept.20

By Leman Zeynalova  Trend:

More than 90 percent of pipes for construction of the Trans Adriatic Pipeline (TAP) are already in the ground in Greece and Albania (around 700km out of 765km in total), TAP AG consortium said in a message.

Fine soil is placed around the pipe to act as padding, protecting the pipeline. Then the trench is backfilled and compacted with the subsoil and original topsoil, said the message.

TAP worth 4.5 billion euros is a part of the Southern Gas Corridor, which is one of the priority energy projects for the European Union. The project envisages transportation of gas from Azerbaijan's Shah Deniz Stage 2 to the EU countries.

The pipeline will connect to the Trans Anatolian Natural Gas Pipeline (TANAP) on the Turkish-Greek border, run through Greece, Albania and the Adriatic Sea, before coming ashore in Italys south.

TAP will be 878 kilometers in length (Greece 550 kilometers, Albania 215 kilometers, Adriatic Sea 105 kilometers, and Italy 8 kilometers).

TAPs shareholding is comprised of BP (20 percent), SOCAR (20 percent), Snam S.p.A. (20 percent), Fluxys (19 percent), Enagas (16 percent) and Axpo (5 percent).

The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) is considering allocation of 500 million euros loan for TAP project. Aside from EBRD, the European Investment Bank (EIB) will also discuss the allocation of 1.5 billion euros loan for TAP in February.

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Follow the author on Twitter: @Lyaman_Zeyn
Details added (first version posted on 08:53)

Baku, Azerbaijan, Sept. 20

By Ali Gasimov - Trend:

Over 75 percent of the work, including engineering, construction and supply work, have been completed as part of the Trans Adriatic Pipeline (TAP) project, SOCAR President Rovnag Abdullayev said in an interview with Azerbaijans Khalq Gazeti newspaper.

At the beginning of 2020, TAP will be connected to the Trans-Anatolian Natural Gas Pipeline (TANAP) and 10 billion cubic meters of Azerbaijani gas will be delivered to European markets per year, he said. To ensure the functionality of the pipeline, construction of two compressor stations started in Greece (Kipoi) and Albania (Fier) in the first half last year and the work continues on schedule.

Abdullayev expressed confidence that the TAP project will soon be completed and Europes biggest infrastructure project - the Southern Gas Corridor, which requires investments worth $40 billion, will be fully implemented.

This historic achievement will give us the opportunity to deliver rich gas reserves of Azerbaijan to the markets of Turkey and Europe by the shortest and safest way, he added.

TAP worth 4.5 billion euros is a part of the Southern Gas Corridor (SGC), which is one of the priority energy projects for the European Union. The project envisages transportation of gas from Azerbaijan's Shah Deniz Stage 2 to the EU countries.

The pipeline will connect to the TANAP on the Turkish-Greek border, run through Greece, Albania and the Adriatic Sea, before coming ashore in Italys south.

TAP will be 878 kilometers in length (Greece 550 kilometers, Albania 215 kilometers, Adriatic Sea 105 kilometers, and Italy 8 kilometers).

TAPs shareholding is comprised of BP (20 percent), SOCAR (20 percent), Snam S.p.A. (20 percent), Fluxys (19 percent), Enagas (16 percent) and Axpo (5 percent).

The SGC is one of the priority projects for the EU, and it provides for the transportation of 10 billion cubic meters of Azerbaijani gas from the Caspian region through Georgia and Turkey to Europe.

On May 29, Baku hosted the launch ceremony of the first phase of the SGC project, and on June 12, the opening ceremony of TANAP pipeline was held in the Turkish province of Eskisehir with the participation of the presidents of Azerbaijan - Ilham Aliyev, Turkey - Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Ukraine - Petro Poroshenko and Serbia - Alexander Vucic.

Thus, the first gas from the Azerbaijani Shah Deniz field coming out of the Sangachal terminal expanded for Shah Deniz-2 project and passing through the expanded South Caucasus Gas Pipeline, has already gone through the first segment of the Southern Gas Corridor. The next stage was the commissioning of the TANAP gas pipeline, through which the gas will enter the territory of Turkey and will pass on further to Europe.
Baku, Azerbaijan, Sept. 20

By Ali Gasimov  Trend:

Azerbaijan's Energy Minister Parviz Shahbazov will take part in the 10th meeting of the Joint OPEC+ Ministerial Monitoring Committee, which will be held on September 23 in Algeria, the ministry said in a statement Sept. 20.

The information on the development trend of the oil market will be provided, and the presentation of the Joint Technical Committee on oil production in August will be conducted at the meeting, OPEC announced.

The issue of redistribution of quotas in accordance with the decision taken on June 23 this year at the fourth meeting of the ministers of OPEC and OPEC+ countries regarding the total increase in oil production by one million barrels per day will also be considered.

The meeting of the Monitoring Committee established with the participation of Russia, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Venezuela, Algeria and Oman, takes place every two months.

In December 2016, at a meeting of oil producers in Vienna, 11 non-OPEC member countries, including Azerbaijan, agreed to cut oil production by a total of 558,000 barrels a day. The agreement was concluded for the first half of 2017 and was extended until the end of the first quarter of 2018 at a meeting on May 25, 2017.

At the last OPEC meeting in Vienna, the agreement was extended again until the end of 2018. Azerbaijan supported the decision, and later supported the new agreement of OPEC and OPEC+ countries to return to 100 percent implementation of the deal, that is, to an increase in production by one million barrels per day.
Baku, Azerbaijan, Sept. 20

Trend:

On September 19, Uzbekistans Uzbekenergo JSC and South Koreas KT Corporation signed an additional agreement to implement the Automated System for Accounting and Control of Electricity Consumption project, Uzbek media reported.

The project is being implemented in Bukhara, Jizzakh and Samarkand regions of Uzbekistan with the financing of the Asian Development Bank.

The signed additional agreement will create conditions for the implementation of the project throughout Uzbekistan.

The implementation of the project Automated System for Accounting and Control of Electricity Consumption will lead to reduction in losses during electricity supply and prevention of the growth of arrears for electricity supplied to consumers.

The signing ceremony was attended by Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary Ambassador of South Korea to Uzbekistan Kwon Yong-u, the management of the KT Corporation, State Committee for Investments of Uzbekistan and the Uzbekenergo JSC.
Oil prices slipped on Thursday after U.S. President Donald Trump called on OPEC to get prices down now! ahead of a meeting of major oil exporters in Algeria this weekend, Reuters reports.

Brent crude oil LCOc1 was down 40 cents at $79.00 a barrel by 1225 GMT. U.S. light crude oil CLc1 was unchanged at $71.12 a barrel after rising nearly 2 percent on Wednesday.

The North Sea benchmark has been trading close to $80 a barrel, near its highest for almost four years, on expectations that U.S. sanctions against Iran, OPECs third biggest producer, will reduce supply in world markets.

The U.S. sanctions were imposed by Trump in response to Irans nuclear program, which the White House says is designed to produce weapons, an allegation Tehran denies.

The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and other producers, including Russia, meet on Sunday in Algeria to discuss how to allocate supply increases to offset the loss of Iranian barrels.

The meeting is unlikely to agree an official rise in crude output, although pressure is mounting on top producers to prevent a spike in prices.

U.S. President Donald Trump weighed into the debate via Twitter on Thursday, urging OPEC to cut prices.

The OPEC monopoly must get prices down now!, Trump said.

We protect the countries of the Middle East, they would not be safe for very long without us, and yet they continue to push for higher and higher oil prices! We will remember.

Despite the presidents intervention, market sentiment remained fairly bullish with many traders and analysts expecting Brent to move above $80 soon.

Brent is definitely fighting the $80 line, wanting to break above, said SEB Markets chief commodities analyst Bjarne Schieldrop. But this is likely going to break very soon.

The market remained bullish after news of another fall in U.S. crude inventories.

U.S. crude oil stockpiles fell for a fifth straight week to 3-1/2 year lows in the week to Sept. 14, while gasoline inventories also showed a larger than expected draw on unseasonably strong demand, the Energy Information Administration said on Wednesday.

Crude inventories fell by 2.1 million barrels, compared with expectations for a decrease of 2.7 million barrels.

U.S. sanctions on Irans oil exports come into force on Nov. 4 and many buyers have already scaled back Iranian purchases.

It is unclear how easily other producers, such as Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Russia, can compensate for lost supply.
Baku, Azerbaijan, Sept. 20

By Huseyn Veliyev - Trend:

Azerbaijan's communication operator in Baku - "Baku telephone communication" LLC has dissolved the department responsible for the operation of the CDMA network, a source in the telecommunication market of the country told Trend.

As a result of structural changes in the company, a new department will be established, which will be responsible for the functioning of CDMA, LTE and "Public Wi-Fi" networks, the source said.

The number of CDMA subscribers of the operator has decreased by almost 4.3 percent from the beginning of the year, and now their number reaches about 6,700 people, the source said.

The downward trend is observed against the background of expansion of LTE and fixed telephony service coverage in settlements where previously the subscribers mostly used CDMA. Another reason is the lack of opportunity for arrangement of CDMA-based high-speed broadband services.

The number of CDMA base stations used in the network of the capital citys communication operator amounts to 24 units. The network covers the city of Baku and the Absheron Peninsula.

The communication services within the CDMA standard are provided by the indices "511" and "555". According to the agreement with Aztelekom LLC, the domestic roaming is used to provide communication services to subscribers of "Baku telephone communication" LLC at the regional level.

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Follow the author on Twitter: @h_veliyev
Baku, Azerbaijan, Sept. 20

Trend:

The President of Uzbekistan Shavkat Mirziyoyev held on September 19 a meeting dedicated to the analysis of the work in the information and communication technology sector, "Podrobno.uz" reported.

"The information and communication technologies contribute to the accelerated development of all spheres, create convenience for people. The tasks defined at the beginning of the year for the development of this sphere have not been fully implemented. The status of attracting investments into this sector, exporting services and ready software products is absolutely unsatisfactory," Mirziyoyev said.

Therefore, it became necessary to replace the leadership of the ministry, the president said.

"The new minister and his deputies should draw appropriate conclusions and organize their work in a completely different way. It is necessary to quickly eliminate the existing problems and accelerate the development of the industry, dramatically increase the volume of investments and exports, the most important thing is to ensure positive changes in the system as soon as possible," the president said.

Also the task to increase the volume of investments, especially direct ones, to $200 million this year and $500 million in 2019 was set at the meeting.

The head of state gave instructions to increase the credibility of the "Uzbektelecom" company, to develop national mobile operator "UzMobile".

"The low quality of telephony and Internet access services provided to users, as well as the fact that only 27 percent of the existing communication networks are built on fiber-optic lines, the rest  on copper lines were criticized. Instructions were given to improve the speed of internet connection, to completely replace communication networks with fiber-optic lines," the press service of the head of state noted.

The special attention was paid to strengthening of information security. It was noted that there is a shortage of personnel in this industry, in the Tashkent University of Information Technologies and its branches, the teachers with scientific potential account for just 21 percent of the total number of teaching staff.

In this regard, the need to increase the scientific potential of teachers and to expand the scope of research work at the University was noted.

Mirziyoyev instructed to develop a national program scheduled for five years and intended for the development of information and communication infrastructure of the country on the basis of in-depth study of foreign experience.
Baku, Azerbaijan, Sept. 20

By Huseyn Valiyev  Trend:

Nazim Shukurov has been appointed the director of the High Tech Park of the Azerbaijan National Academy of Sciences (ANAS), a source in the High Tech Park told Trend Sept. 20.

Earlier, Elkhan Bayramov, deputy director for general issues at the High Tech Park of the ANAS, was the acting director of the park.

Shukurov replaced Vugar Babayev, who is presently director general of the Agrarian Science and Information Consulting Center of Azerbaijans Agriculture Ministry.

The High Tech Park was created in November 2016. It aims to support innovative ideas, fully implementing and selling them in the future.

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Follow the author on Twitter: @h_veliyev
Baku, Azerbaijan, Sept. 20

By Huseyn Veliyev - Trend:

Azerbaijan's Bakcell LLC plans to install about 400 LTE base stations until the end of 2018, the company's CEO Nikolai Beckers told Trend on Sept. 20.

According to Beckers, the vast majority of the stations will be installed in the districts of Azerbaijan.

"Presently, the number of Bakcell's base stations supporting the fourth generation network is 1,328. The total number of stations of the operator is about 7,000," Beckers said.

Bakcell's fourth generation (4G) network covers Baku, Absheron Peninsula and over 30 districts of Azerbaijan.

Beckers said Bakcell has prepared a broad investment program, according to which the whole territory of Azerbaijan will be covered by the LTE network.

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Follow the author on Twitter: @h_veliyev
Baku, Azerbaijan, Sept. 20

Trend:

A meeting of the management of Uzbekistan Airways with Dubai National Air Transport Association (Dnata) Senior Vice President of Business Development Derek Swan and Vice President for Commercial and Business Development Kevin Ennis took place at the company's directorate, UzDaily reported.

During the negotiations, the Dnata representatives made a presentation about their company, its structure, activities, which include a wide range of aviation services  from on-board catering to air cargo transportation, and the implemented projects.

Readiness for further cooperation with the Uzbek airline was noted by the Dnata representatives.

The Uzbekistan Airways management, in turn, provided information on the international intermodal logistics center Navoi, its potential for reception and storage of goods, its favorable geographical location.

The Dubai National Air Transport Association, Dnata, operates in 83 countries on six continents and is one of the world's largest providers of air services offering ground handling, freight, travel and on-board services.
Baku, Azerbaijan, Sept. 20

Trend:

The ASIA AUTO plant in Ust-Kamenogorsk City of Kazakhstan is starting to manufacture the new LADA Granta cars, the Kazakh media reported Sept. 20.

"LADA retains the status of an anchor brand in Kazakhstans automotive industry. This is the most popular brand among residents of the country: since the beginning of the year, almost a quarter of buyers of new cars in Kazakhstan preferred LADA vehicles. In the first eight months of this year their number increased by 70 percent. Today, the LADA vehicles account for the main share of output of the Kazakh automobile industry. Since the beginning of the year, 51 percent of all cars have been manufactured in Kazakhstan under this brand," President of ASIA AUTO JSC Erik Sagymbayev said.

The Kazakh citizens can already order the new cars, the media reported. The first new Granta cars will arrive in the 19 branches of BIPEK AUTO LLP in November.

The LADA Granta cars of the second generation will retain their place among the leaders of affordability in the market of Kazakhstan. The prices for these cars will start from 2,945,000 tenge. The universal Granta SW with an automatic transmission is offered at the price of 3,950,000 tenge.

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(361.94 KZT = 1 USD on September 20)
Baku, Azerbaijan, Sept. 20

By Huseyn Veliyev  Trend:

The construction of metallurgical plants for the production of high-alloy, high-strength steel is necessary in Kazakhstan, the chairman of the board of the Kazakhstan Engineering Union, Meyram Pshembayev said at a press conference held in the Governments residence, Kazinform reported.

"The mechanical engineering industry is the main consumer of metallurgical products. Today, we import mainly from the Russian Federation the special types of steel: high-alloy, high-strength and automotive steel," Pshembayev said.

The chairman of the board of the Kazakhstan Engineering Union stressed that the issue of construction of metallurgical plants for the production of high-alloy, high-strength steel is very important for the country today.

"We have to produce domestically at least 100,000 tons of steel per year. Given the growth rate of the automotive industry in the coming years, this issue will become highly important," Meyram Pshembayev added.

In turn, the first Vice-Minister for investments and development of Kazakhstan Roman Sklyar said that the production of the countrys own steel for mechanical engineering industry will be provided for in the currently elaborated program for the development of mechanical engineering sector during 2019-2030.
Baku, Azerbaijan, Sept. 20

Trend:

Russia's Transmashholding (TMH) JSC has bought from Kazakhstan Railways (KTZ) almost 100 percent of shares of the Tulpar-Talgo LLP specializing in the production of passenger cars.

The heads of the companies signed the relevant agreement at the InnoTrans exhibition, TASS reported.

In addition, TMH reached an agreement with KTZ on the delivery of 1,200 passenger cars to Kazakhstan.

As reported previously, the passenger cars will be delivered in a period from 2018 to 2026.

KTZ and Transmashholding already have experience of cooperation in railway engineering. In particular, Transmashholding is a shareholder of KTZs plant for production of diesel locomotives of the Evolution series, as well as a partner in the joint venture for production of the KZ8A electric locomotives.

Transmashholding JSC is the largest manufacturer of railway equipment in Russia. The company consists of 17 Russian factories producing passenger and freight electric and diesel locomotives, freight and passenger cars, cars for commuter trains and metro, as well as diesel engines for locomotives, generators and other railway equipment.
Baku, Azerbaijan, Sept. 20

Trend:

Issues of development and deepening of regional economic cooperation were discussed in Dushanbe city at the meeting of ministers of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) member states, Sputnik Tajikistan reported citing TajikTA news agency.

Representatives of India, Kazakhstan, China, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, as well as the SCO Secretariat took part in the meeting, the Tajik government said in a message.

The meeting was chaired by Minister of Economic Development and Trade of Tajikistan Nematullo Hikmatullozoda.

During the meeting, the parties exchanged views on the state and prospects of trade, economic and investment cooperation in the SCO region.

The heads of delegations considered the draft report of the SCO Secretariat on the implementation of the program of multilateral trade and economic cooperation of the SCO member states and recommended its submission in accordance with the established procedure for approval of the next meeting of the SCO Council of Heads of Government to be held Oct. 11-12 in Dushanbe.

Following the meeting of the ministers, the heads of the delegations of the SCO member states signed a protocol.
Ashgabat, Turkmenistan, Sept. 20

By Huseyn Hasanov Trend:

Representatives from Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan participated in an OSCE-supported regional seminar Combating financing of terrorism: best practices within the OSCE region in Ashgabat, the OSCE said in a message.



The seminar organized by the OSCE Center in Ashgabat aimed to share international standards and best practices in the area of combating the financing of terrorism.

The participants also discussed further strengthening of international and interagency cooperation among the relevant state authorities.



Experts from Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan presented their countries experiences in combating the financing of terrorism and foreign terrorist fighters, highlighting the importance of the relevant legislative framework and of conducting national risk assessments related to the financing of terrorism.

The participants also shared best practices in interagency interaction in the detection of cases of the financing of terrorism and foreign terrorist fighters and stressed the role of international cooperation in the detection of transboundary financial flows.



The OSCE calls on its participating states to apply a coordinated approach to combating terrorism at all levels while promoting interagency and interstate cooperation as well as interaction with relevant international and regional organizations, said Natalya Drozd, head of the OSCE Center in Ashgabat.

An international expert touched upon the distribution schemes to finance terrorism and foreign terrorist fighters and best practices in the detection of transboundary financial flows.

The seminar also addressed analytical methods to detect suspicious transactions and funding sources in the area of the financing of foreign terrorist fighters.



During the practical exercises, participants worked in groups to review cases related to the investigation of terrorist financing cases by financial and criminal intelligence units.
Georgias digital potential, regional projects and cooperation opportunities have been discussed by Prime Minister of Georgia Mamuka Bakhtadze and Head of Expansion and Capture of Amazon John Brennan in Washington D.C yesterday, Agenda reported.

Brennan presented Amazons priorities and plans in terms of improvement of its services.

The parties have pointed out Georgias outstanding potential regarding the development of digital technologies especially in a regional context. They have also discussed the Digital Silk Road initiative and areas in which Georgia could effectively use Amazons services.

PM Bakhtadze has emphasised that the development of a digital economy has high importance for Georgia and the government.
Volkswagen AG (VOWG_p.DE) will end almost of all its operations in Iran, Bloomberg reported on Wednesday, citing a US official who led the discussions with the carmaker.

The Trump administration persuaded Volkswagen to comply with US sanctions on Iran, Bloomberg said. (bloom.bg/2Nmr3XX)

The White House and Volkswagen were not immediately available for comment on the report.

In May, 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.

According to the Bloomberg report, US Ambassador to Germany Richard Grenell led the talks with the Wolfsburg-based company.

Volkswagen will be able to conduct some business in Iran on humanitarian grounds, the report said.
Jack Ma, co-founder of Chinese e-tech giant Alibaba Group Holding Ltd, said on Thursday that people should make preparations for 20 years of China-U.S. trade frictions, Reuters reports.

The economic situation is not good, and that could last for a long time, Ma said at the World Economic Forum in Tianjin.

Ma has already cautioned the trade war between the worlds two biggest economies could last decades, and China should focus on exports on the modern-day Silk Road that spans Africa, Southeast Asia and Europe.

Alibaba can no longer meet its promise to create 1 million jobs in the United States due to the trade tensions, Ma told Chinese news agency Xinhua on Wednesday.
The European Union must end the blame game on migration and instead focus on working more with foreign countries and further strengthening its border to bring down arrivals, the chairman of the blocs leaders said, Reuters reported.

The 28 EU leaders are meeting in the Austrian city of Salzburg to tackle migration, an issue that has badly damaged their unity in recent years.

They will seek more ways of reducing immigration and, right before chairing the talks, European Council President Donald Tusk said progress had been made since the 2015 peak in Mediterranean arrivals. Fewer than 100,000 migrants have reached Europe without necessary documentation this year.

Instead of taking political advantage of the situation, we should focus on what works ... We can no longer be divided into those who want to solve the problem of illegal migrant flows and those who want to use it for political gain, Tusk said.

More than a million refugees and migrants arrived from the Middle East and Africa in 2015, stretching public services and leading to a rise in anti-immigrant parties challenging liberal democracies around the EU.

The EU has since struck deals with countries from Turkey to Lebanon to Libya, offering them money and aid in exchange for keeping a tighter lid on migration to Europe. It has also fortified its borders and made it harder to win asylum.

The leaders will discuss a plan to raise the number of guards at the EUs border agency Frontex to 10,000. It faces some opposition from member states such as Italy that fear an EU body would be able to overrule them on their own borders.

Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz, a backer of the proposal, hoped it could be agreed by the end of the year.

As far as sovereignty is concerned one can be very much flexible and we can also make changes ... to the Commission proposal, Kurz said.

But... in some countries there is also the concern that more Frontex could also lead to more registration and it could therefore become harder to wave migrants through, he said of practice for which frontline states like Italy and Greece have often been criticised by others in the EU.

While the EU states sitting on the Mediterranean have felt overrun and left by their EU peers to cope on their own, the wealthier countries like Germany and the Netherlands - where many of the arriving people want to go - complain people still reach their soil without being stopped and identified properly on first arriving in the EU.

This is another migration-related issue that has divided the bloc, though the most bruising row has long been around the ex-communist countries on the EUs eastern flank refusing to host any of the new arrivals to ease the burden on others.
Europes justice chief gave U.S. social media giant Facebook (FB.O) until the end of the year to comply with EU consumer rules or face sanctions, Reuters reports.

European Justice Commissioner Vera Jourova also said on Thursday that Airbnb had made the necessary changes after being told to do so three months ago, confirming a Reuters story on Wednesday.

My patience has reached its limit. While Facebook assured me to finally adapt any remaining misleading terms of services by December, this has been ongoing for too long, Jourova said in a statement.

It is now time for action and no more promises. If the changes are not fully implemented by the end of the year, I call on consumer authorities to act swiftly and sanction the company, she said.

Jourova had in February told the company and other social media platforms to toe the line.
Hungary will set up a new system of administrative courts by January 2020 and will pass legislation that sets out the framework for the system this year, Justice Minister Laszlo Trocsanyi said on Thursday, Reuters reports.

Trocsanyi told reporters on the sidelines of a judicial conference that there would be eight regional courts and a new high administrative court.

We would like to set up a very effective administrative court system, he said.

Trocsanyi rejected concerns that the government would pack the new court with judges loyal to Prime Minister Viktor Orbans government.
British Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt said on Thursday the government was confident parliament would back a Brexit deal agreed by Prime Minister Theresa May and the European Union, Reuters reports.

Many lawmakers in Mays ruling Conservative Party have voiced strong objections to her Brexit proposals, raising suggestions that even if she strikes a deal with EU leaders, the agreement will be rejected by parliament.

We are confident if we can get the support of the European Union, ultimately it would get through parliament, Hunt told the BBC in Myanmar, adding there would be no second plebiscite on Brexit.

People will be very angry indeed if we had a second referendum and its certainly not the governments policy, he said.
The Ukrainian parliament on Thursday took the first step toward including into Constitution Ukraine's intention to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the European Union (EU) as the lawmakers voted to send the corresponding draft law to the Constitutional Court.

The move was supported by 321 votes in favor, surpassing the minimum of 300 required, according to a statement on the parliament's website.

If the draft law on the constitutional amendments is approved by the Constitutional Court, it would be put on the final vote in the parliament.

The draft legislation on adding into the Constitution Ukraine's aspirations to join NATO and the EU was submitted to parliament by Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko earlier this month.

Iryna Lutsenko, the Ukrainian president's representative in the parliament, said that the draft legislation envisages amending the Constitution's preamble, three articles, and transitional provisions.

In 2014, when pro-West authorities came to power in Ukraine, Kiev abandoned its multilateral policy and set a course toward European integration. Furthermore, the parliament revoked Ukraine's non-aligned status, paving the way for its membership in military blocs.

Over the past four years, Ukraine has strengthened cooperation with the EU and increased interactions with NATO, but neither organization has promised Kiev near-term membership prospects.

Legislation can be enshrined in the Ukrainian Constitution with the support of at least 300 lawmakers in the 450-seat parliament.
After countless delays, the Jerusalem fast rail link is set to begin operations today, Globes reports.

The first train will leave Jerusalem's Navon station (opposite Binyanei Ha'Uma) at 12.30 pm on what is being billed as a special test run rather than the official launch. The train won't make it as far as Tel Aviv's Haganah Station as planned but only as far as Ben Gurion airport because electrification on the section between the airport and Tel Aviv has not been completed. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Minister of Transport Yisrael Katz will attend the ceremony in Jerusalem as the firs train leaves the station.

"Globes" also revealed last week that Israel Railways has not yet received the required safety approval from the Independent Safety Assessor (ISA) international institute.

Optimistic estimates say it will take another 3-6 months before the line is fully operational. In the first stage there will be only one train per hour between Jerusalem and Ben Gurion airport station where passengers will change to a diesel train. When fully operational there will be one train every 15 minutes.

For the time being Jerusalem residents can travel for free on the train, if they book in advance by Internet. However, no booking is yet available on the Internet, so it is unclear when services will actually begin.

The cost of the high-speed train to Jerusalem, the Ministry of Transport's largest-ever project, is estimated at NIS 7 billion. The line is designed to connect Israel's capital to the Greater Tel Aviv metropolitan area and the central region and relieve traffic congestion. Travel time from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, the last stop on the line, is meant to be 28 minutes.

The project was first started in 2001, but following a series of managerial missteps, the completion date was postponed from 2008 to 2017 and then to March 2018. The line is 57 kilometers long, including 32 kilometers on a new segment from Kfar Daniel to Jerusalem containing nine bridges, and five tunnels totaling 19 kilometers.
Israel said on Thursday it would not halt strikes on Syria but would do more to deconflict them with Russian forces, after Moscow accused it of irresponsible and unfriendly actions that led to Syrian ground fire mistakenly downing a Russian plane, Reuters reports.

Fifteen Russian crew were killed when the IL-20 surveillance plane crashed near Latakia in northern Syria on Monday. Russia has said Syria shot the plane down shortly after Israeli jets hit the area, and accused Israel of creating the dangerous conditions by failing to give sufficient advance notice.

Although Russian President Vladimir Putin initially described the downing as tragic chance, Moscow has made its anger clear.

Moscow views as irresponsible and unfriendly actions of Israeli Air Force, which exposed Russian Il-20 aircraft to danger and led to death of 15 servicemen, the Russian embassy in Tel Aviv said on Twitter in English, adding that Russia would take all necessary measures to eliminate threat to life and security of our military fighting against terrorism.

Israel has struck Syria scores of times during its seven-year civil war to prevent what it says are transfers of weapons to Hezbollah fighters and other Iranian allies. Russia has largely overlooked the sorties, which the Israelis say pose no direct threat to Moscows ally, President Bashar al-Assad.

Israel dispatched its air force chief to brief Moscow about the incident on Thursday. Expressing regret at the loss of life, Israel denied wrongdoing and blamed what it called wanton Syrian anti-aircraft fire after its jets had withdrawn back over the border.

Speaking to Army Radio, Defence Minister Avigdor Lieberman made clear that Israel would not halt attacks in Syria.

We will do whatever is necessary to safeguard the security of Israels citizens ... and we will not hold these discussions over the airwaves, he said.

Naftali Bennett, another member of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahus security cabinet, said deconfliction mechanisms would be improved, referring to a Russian-Israeli hotline designed to avoid inadvertent clashes with forces Moscow sent to Syria as part of a military intervention mounted in 2015.

We will of course strengthen these mechanisms. We will do everything so as not to harm anyone we do not intend to, God forbid, Bennett told Army Radio in a separate interview.
Baku, Azerbaijan, Sept. 20

Trend:

His Holiness Pope Francis will visit Lithuania on September 22-23, the Committee in charge of the preparations for the visit of Pope Francis to Lithuania said in a message.

It will be the second Papal visit in the history of the country  Pope John Paul II visited Lithuania back in 1993, just after Lithuania had regained its independence.

During this visit, we will welcome His Holiness to the country that marks the 100th anniversary of re-establishment of the Lithuanian State and celebrates its connectedness with the rest of the world, the message said. Connectivity describes Lithuanias past and its present. In 1989, Lithuanians connected hands with Latvians and Estonians in the Baltic Way to form a 675 km long human chain in hope to overturn the Soviet oppressor.

Once hope became reality, connectivity gave us faith to build a modern Northern European state, which celebrates 100 years of restored statehood in 2018, reads the message. Today, Lithuanians at home and abroad are not only connected through their unique language and cultural heritage, but also take pride in their Catholic traditions.

The Popes visit allows us not only to share our spiritual connection with the rest of the world and highlight the resilient nature of our people, but also to celebrate our centenary, the committee said.

In 2018 Lithuania also marks the momentous anniversary of the visit of Pope John Paul II.
Baku, Azerbaijan, Sept. 20

By Rufiz Hafizoglu - Trend:

The Turkish-American relations will be strengthened through trade, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said following a meeting with the heads of American companies held in Ankara, the Turkish media wrote Sept. 20.

Erdogan noted that Turkey pays special attention to the growth of foreign investment in the country's economy.

"Turkey has opened its doors to all foreign investors and has implemented large-scale economic reforms over the past 16 years," Erdogan said.

President Erdogan held a meeting with 30 heads of American companies in Ankara Sept. 19.

After the deterioration of relations between the US and Turkey, President Erdogan urged foreign companies to invest in the country's economy.

The relations between Washington and Ankara have deteriorated recently, in particular due to the case of the American pastor Andrew Brunson, detained by the Turkish authorities in 2016.

After that, President Donald Trump said that he authorized a double increase in duties on aluminum and steel exported from Turkey to the United States, to 20 and 50 percent, respectively. This decision caused the collapse of the Turkish lira to a historical minimum.

The court of the Turkish city of Izmir refused again on August 17 to release from house arrest the American pastor accused of aiding terrorists.

On August 1, the US Treasury Department imposed sanctions against the Minister of Internal Affairs of Turkey Suleyman Soylu, and Minister of Justice, Abdulhamit Gul due to the fact that Ankara did not allow Brunson to return home.

The Turkish Foreign Ministry condemned the US decision and urged to abandon it.

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Follow the author on Twitter: @rhafizoglu
KYODO NEWS - Sep 20, 2018 - 13:27 | All, Japan

The Okinawa prefectural government on Thursday submitted to the local assembly a bill proposing a referendum on the controversial plan to relocate a key U.S. military base within the southern island prefecture.

The bill is likely to be approved in the prefectural assembly, where a majority of members are opposed to the transfer of the U.S. Marine Corps Air Station Futenma, the long-stalled plan pushed by Tokyo and Washington.

Many Okinawa residents want the base moved outside the prefecture rather than transferring it from a crowded residential area of Ginowan to the less populated coastal district of Henoko in Nago.

The move came after a civic group seeking to establish an ordinance to hold a referendum collected about 93,000 signatures and filed a direct petition with the prefecture earlier this month.

Jinshiro Motoyama, who heads the citizen's group, said in the assembly meeting, "Forcing through construction work (for the relocation) without convincing explanations is problematic."

He demanded the assembly swiftly approve the bill and set up the ordinance so a referendum can be held quickly.

Deputy Okinawa Gov. Moritake Tomikawa, who is now acting governor following the death of Takeshi Onaga last month, said, "I believe that (the bill) manifests the will of Okinawa people to reflect the result of the referendum in local politics."

The prefectural government earmarked around 550 million yen ($4.9 million) to hold the plebiscite.

The assembly was convened for the first time since the Aug. 8 death of Onaga, who was a staunch opponent of the base relocation plan and unafraid to confront the central government on the issue.

His successor will be chosen in the Sept. 30 gubernatorial election. The base transfer is a key issue in campaigning for the contest.
KYODO NEWS - Sep 20, 2018 - 14:31 | All, Japan

Emperor Akihito and Empress Michiko postponed to Friday their visit to Ehime and Hiroshima prefectures to meet victims of July's torrential rains that triggered deadly flooding and landslides in western Japan, the Imperial Household Agency said Thursday.

The imperial couple had planned the trip for Thursday, but bad weather in the affected region forced them to push back their schedule, the agency said.

During the day trip on Friday, the emperor and empress are expected to console people living in temporary housing in the city of Seiyo in Ehime before moving to the city of Kure in Hiroshima to speak to victims at temporary shelters.

Widespread flooding and landslides inundated and destroyed many homes, killing more than 200 people, mainly in Hiroshima, Okayama and Ehime prefectures.

In Seiyo, the couple will view the areas affected by the disaster before being briefed by the mayor. A meeting with victims and volunteers is planned at a park where temporary accommodation is located.

The emperor and empress will then travel to Kure on a Ground Self-Defense Force helicopter to visit victims there before returning to Tokyo in the evening.

Their visit follows a trip last week to flood-hit Kurashiki, Okayama Prefecture.
By Tomoyuki Tachikawa, KYODO NEWS - Sep 20, 2018 - 12:30 | World, All

South Korean President Moon Jae In's visit to Pyongyang is the latest manifestation of rapidly thawing relations between the two Koreas, but pessimism persists over the prospects for progress on denuclearization in negotiations between North Korea and the United States.

In two days of summit talks with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, Moon may have failed to convince him to show a clear roadmap to abandoning his nuclear weapons, as demanded by Washington.

[Pyeongyang Press Corps]

At the same time, uncertainty lingers over the future course of U.S. President Donald Trump's policy toward North Korea given the midterm congressional elections in November, which could swing the balance of power on Capitol Hill and affect the pace of denuclearization talks.

Moon has pledged to work as a "broker" between the United States and North Korea.

After their first-ever summit talks in Pyongyang on Wednesday, Kim and Moon signed a joint declaration including North Korea's promise to permanently dismantle its major nuclear complex in Yongbyon in the country's northwestern region, albeit conditionally.

North Korea will shut down the site if the United States takes reciprocal actions based on the agreement reached at their summit in June, the declaration said, with Pyongyang eager to win rewards for each step it takes in the denuclearization process.

At their June 12 summit in Singapore, Trump and Kim agreed that Washington will provide security guarantees to Pyongyang in exchange for "complete" denuclearization.

But U.S.-North Korea talks have been at a standstill since then, as Washington has complained that Pyongyang has not made enough efforts to achieve the agreement.

Kim might believe his latest commitment to closing the key nuclear complex is an adequate development to reopen negotiations with Trump, political experts say.

"A lack of progress at the inter-Korean talks would lessen the prospect of a second summit with the United States, and Kim Jong Un understands this," said Troy Stangarone, a senior director at the Korea Economic Institute in Washington.

The Pyongyang summit was "successful," which could help facilitate a second Trump-Kim meeting "before the end of this year," Stangarone said.

Later Wednesday, Trump tweeted the outcome of the Pyongyang summit was "Very exciting!"

Pyongyang has also adopted a conciliatory approach to Washington recently. At a military parade on Sept. 9 in its capital, North Korea did not display intercontinental ballistic missiles that can target the United States.

Earlier this month, the White House said Kim sent a letter to Trump to request a follow-up summit.

Other analysts, however, are skeptical about whether denuclearization negotiations will move forward, given that North Korea appears not to be serious about giving up its nuclear arsenal.

(Pyeongyang Press Corps)

"North Korea would want to keep discussions of denuclearization limited to the U.S.-North Korea track while trying to get economic benefits and movement on a peace agreement," said Malcolm Cook, a senior fellow at the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute in Singapore.

"I do not think U.S.-North Korea relations will change," Cook said.

Indeed, the divergence in views over denuclearization between the United States and North Korea has shown no signs of receding.

The Rodong Sinmun, North Korea's most influential newspaper, said Tuesday, "The U.S. is totally to blame for the deadlocked DPRK-U.S. negotiations," referring to the country by its formal name of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.

"The U.S. is stubbornly insisting on the theory of 'dismantlement of nukes first' which was rejected in the past DPRK-U.S. dialogues," the newspaper of the ruling Workers' Party of Korea said.

"For implementation of the DPRK-U.S. joint statement, the U.S. which is the other side should adopt a sincere approach," it added.

Some pundits, meanwhile, pointed out that the domestic political situation in the United States would prevent denuclearization talks from advancing.

"The midterm elections are an important factor" to gauge the outlook of U.S.-North Korea negotiations, said Stephen Nagy, a senior associate professor of politics at International Christian University in Tokyo and a fellow at the Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada.

"President Trump is likely to lose the House and possibly the Senate. Both would weaken him politically, making it much less likely that Trump can pursue quick denuclearization process with North Korea," Nagy added.

On Tuesday, Moon became the third South Korean president to visit North Korea. He is also the first foreign head of state or government to enter Pyongyang since Kim became the supreme leader following the death of his father Kim Jong Il in December 2011.

Moon, who took office in May 2017, was warmly welcomed, with thousands of citizens lining the streets holding pom-poms and flags.

A diplomatic source in Beijing warns that a sharp improvement in inter-Korean relations could have the adverse effect of delaying the denuclearization process.

South Korea may be willing to offer economic support to the North, whose economy has been sluggish against a backdrop of international sanctions aimed at hampering its development of nuclear weapons and delivery vehicles, the source said.

If Kim gets what he desires from Moon on that score, North Korea could "lose its motivation" to move forward with denuclearization, the diplomat added.

North Korea's Kim Jong Un vows to scrap key nuclear complex if U.S. acts

Trump expresses excitement over latest inter-Korean summit
For the first time in the history, climate change was raised as an adjournment motion in the Kerala Assembly on Wednesday.
The news of Ranbir Kapoor and Alia Bhatt's relationship have been heading at B-Town for the last few days. The couple's family members are also very happy in the couple's relationship. After Rishi Kapoor and Mahesh Bhatt recently, Alia Bhatt's mother Soni Rajdan also said about the relationship between the two, that Ranbir is a good boy and he respects her daughter's independence. The interesting news that is coming in the midst of this time is that Ranbir Kapoor is specially inducted for the party to be held on Mahesh Bhatt's 70th birthday.

Mahesh Bhatt is going to celebrate his 70th birthday on 20th September. Mahesh Bhatt is planning to give his close ones a party to make his birthday memorable and Ranbir has been invited to participate in this. Alia and Ranbir are shooting 'Brahmastra' in Bulgaria. Mahesh Bhatt's birthday party is being organised keeping in mind about Alia shooting schedule and Ranbir has been specially invited for it.

Mahesh Bhat himself has personally invited Ranbir to join the party by making a personal call, and we are sure he will not be able to refuse this proposal. Well, this is the first time Ranbir will be seen at the party with the Bhatt family. Bhatt family is specially preparing for this celebration.

Soni Razdan and Mahesh Bhatt are very impressed with Ranbir. Both of them have praised Ranbir for the past few days. In both families, there is a very good relation. If the news is to be believed, Alia and Ranbir can be tied in marriage as well. Well, now we are eagerly looking forward to the pictures and news coming out of this party.
Government News 20/9

Criteria for socialist-oriented market economy discussed

Criteria of the socialist-oriented market economy in Vietnam were discussed from both theoretical and realistic angles at a workshop held in Hanoi on September 19.

The event was held by the Economic Commission of the Communist Party of Vietnam Central Committee (CPV CC), the Central Theoretical Council and the Communist Review.

In opening the function, member of the CPV CCs Politburo and head of the Economic Commission Nguyen Van Binh stressed that the Party has always defined economic reform and development as a central task with utmost importance. At the core of the task is to shift from the centrally-planned model to the socialist-oriented market economy, and gradually develop the socialist-oriented market economy in conformity with each development stage of the country.

He said building a set of criteria for the socialist-oriented market economy will assist with the implementation of the Resolution of the 12th National Party Congress and the resolution of the fifth plenary session of the 12th Party Central Committee on perfecting the socialist-oriented market economy.

Participants agreed that such a set of criteria is of utmost importance and necessity to the unity in awareness and ideology within the Party and society about the socialist-oriented market economy.

The set of criteria will help enhance the effectiveness of management and governance work and serve the communication campaigns for the recognition of Vietnams market economy, they said, stressing that the criteria must clearly demonstrate that the socialist-oriented market economy fully follows the rules of the market economy while ensuring the socialist orientation.

Papers and opinions at the workshop analysed criteria of the market economy as defined by several countries and international organisations, which can serve as reference when building the criteria for Vietnams socialist-oriented market economy.

A number of criteria were proposed for some aspects of the socialist-oriented market economy, such as ownership, economic sectors, the organisation of management and regulation of the economy (the role of the Market and the State), mechanisms for mobilization and allocation of resources and distribution of gains from economic activities, market factors and types of markets; factors that ensure the socialist orientation of the economy, and international economic integration.

The workshop also looked into proposals on criteria on the States interference into the economy, trade liberalization and market participation, transparency, healthy competition, monopoly, price manipulation and dumping.

Vietnam, Malaysia promote friendship, cooperation

The Vietnam - Malaysia Friendship Association (VMFA) under the Vietnam Union of Friendship Organisations (VUFO) hosted a friendship exchange in Hanoi on September 19 as part of activities to mark the 61st anniversary of Malaysias National Day.

At the event, Vice President of the Vietnam Fatherland Front (VFF) Central Committee cum Chairman of the VMFA Ngo Sach Thuc sent his congratulations to Malaysian Ambassador to Vietnam Zamruni Khalid, and asked the diplomat to convey his best wishes to Malaysian leaders and people on the occasion.

While expressing his joy at great achievements across fields of Malaysia, stressing that Malaysia has enjoyed high economic growth of about 5 percent. The countrys economic growth in 2018 is likely to reach 5-5.5 percent.

The country also recorded positive development in terms of culture, education, science-technology and social security, while the local peoples living conditions have been improved, and the nations position and international prestige has been raised.

Over the last 45 years, the Vietnam-Malaysia friendship and multifaceted cooperation have been bolstered across fields from politics, trade, security-defence, culture, labour and tourism.

As the key forces in promoting the friendship between the two countries people, the VUFO, the VMFA and Malaysian partners have made positive contributions in recent years.

Many practical activities such as exchange and art performance have been organised by the two organisations, contributing to enhancing mutual understanding between the two people, thus promoting the bilateral relations.

Thuc hoped for closer coordination and more effective support of one another between the VMFA and the Malaysian Embassy in Vietnam in the coming time, contributing to pushing the friendship and cooperation between the two nations.

For his part, Malaysian Ambassador Zamruni Khalid was pleased to announce that Vietnam and his country have reached important milestones in economic ties, especially in investment, trade and tourism cooperation.

Malaysian is the seventh largest investor in Vietnam with a total investment of 12.2 billion USD. Malaysian firms mainly invest in real estate, production, banking and oil and gas sectors.

Two-way trade between Vietnam and Malaysia hit over 11 billion USF in 2017. Vietnams key exports to Malaysia are mobile phone, electronic products and rice.

Regarding tourism links, over 480,000 Malaysians visited Vietnam in 2017, ranking tenth among the largest tourism markets of Vietnam.

Ambassador Zamruni Khalid said with the increasing number of flights between the two countries, the number Malaysian tourists to Vietnam will increase.

He believed that the Vietnam-Malaysia Strategic Partnership would be closer in the time to come.

ASSA 35: members share experience in social, health insurance

The 35th ASEAN Social Security Association (ASSA) Board Meeting continued on September 19, with members sharing practical outcomes in carrying out social and health insurance policies.

Delegates from Indonesia, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand, Cambodia, the Philippines and Vietnam presented their views and lessons drawn from the implementation of the policies.

A representative from the Lao National Social Security Fund talked about the countrys method to improve coverage of voluntary social insurance. Accordingly, Lao citizens aging between 18 and 60 and capable of working are eligible to join voluntary social insurance. The premiums are equivalent to nine percent of their monthly salaries and can be paid via banking applications or at the insurances office. Benefits under the voluntary social insurance are more diverse than those in Vietnam.

Many ASSA members reported that they took advantage of information and technology in reforming social welfare procedures. For example, Thailand has employed a smart phone application that allows users to select and change hospitals for their health insurance, and manage insurance payments and claims. The method has helped cut time and cost for insurance participants.

At the session discussing health insurance, ASSA members praised Vietnams achievement in developing an assessment and multiple-level payment system. The assessment database, which connects all medical facilities covered by health insurance with the Vietnam Social Security (VSS) via the internet, was put into use in 2016. The database consists of more than 81 million profiles of insurance card holders and hundreds of millions of health records needed to be accessed annually. The system has helped the VSS increase its management of health insurance fund, and prevention of fund abuses.

The session also delved into difficulties in expanding the coverage of social and health insurance in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, among others.

The ongoing 35th ASSA Board Meeting, hosted by the VSS, opened on September 18 in Nha Trang, the resort city of Khanh Hoa in central Vietnam. It brought together about 170 delegates, including the ASSA President, leaders of national social security institutions and diplomats from ASEAN member states.

The events main theme is the challenges and opportunities of ASEAN social security institutions in the context of the 4th Industrial Revolution and free flow of labour.

The ASSA was found in 1998 following the signing of a Memorandum of Agreement in Bangkok, Thailand on February 13 that year, involving heads of social security institutions from five countries - the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand. Representatives from Laos and Vietnam also attended the signing ceremony as observers. Later the year, the VSS became a member of ASSA.

ASSA members now comprise 19 social security institutions from ten ASEAN nations.

This is the fifth time the VSS has chaired the ASSA Board Meeting. It undertook the chairmanship during the 2002  2003 term and successfully organised the ASSA Board Meeting in 1999, 2002, 2005 and 2010.

General Secretary of the Communist Party of Vietnam (CPV) Central Committee Nguyen Phu Trong chaired the Politburos meeting in Hanoi on September 18-19 to acquire feedback on schemes to be submitted to the eighth meeting of the Party Central Committee (12th tenure).

They include a review of 10-year implementation of the Resolution adopted by the fourth meeting of the Party Central Committee (10th tenure) on Vietnams maritime strategy until 2020; the socio-economic performance in 2018 and plan for 2019; and regulations on the responsibility of officials and Party members, firstly Politburo members, members of the CPVs Secretariat and CPV Central Committee, for setting good examples; and other important issues.

Speaking at the event, the Party chief said lauded the Governments Party Committee and Party Central Committees commissions for thoroughly preparing for schemes. He asked agencies to prepare schemes to gather opinions of Politburo and Secretariat members as well as feedback from ministries, agencies and sectors concerned to continue refining them to submit to the coming eighth meeting of the CPV Central Committee (12th tenure).

NA Standing Committee applauds improvement in Govt performance

The ongoing 27th meeting of the National Assembly Standing Committee





The National Assembly Standing Committee has commended the improvement in the Governments handling of issues raised in the NA resolutions and Question-&-Answer (Q&A) sessions.

The committee examined reports of the Government, the Supreme Peoples Court and the Supreme Peoples Procuracy on their implementation of the NA resolutions on specialized supervision and Q&A sessions from the beginning of the NAs 14th tenure to its 4th session.

The resolutions required the Government to intensify work to improve food safety, accelerate reform of the State administrative apparatus, and solve problems in industry-trade, natural resources-environment, education-training, home affairs, agriculture-rural development, culture-sport-tourism, health care, planning-investment, finance-banking, information and communication.

The NA also required the Government to instruct the enhancement of inspection quality and crime control, especially in serious corruption and economic cases.

Head of the NA Ombudsman Nguyen Thanh Hai said all Government members, from the Prime Minister, Deputy Prime Ministers to ministers, have paid attention to issues raised in the NA resolutions.

It is noteworthy that Government members have showed responsibility in keeping their promises during Q&A sessions, with almost 100 percent of voters questions collected before and after the NAs 5th session receiving replies from relevant ministers, Hai said.

The Governments report said the Prime Minister and other Cabinet members had worked out specific plans and assigned concrete tasks, thus creating uniformity and transparency in responsibility.

Minister-Chairman of the Government Office Mai Tien Dung added that all replies to questions of NA deputies and voters made by the Government and ministries are published on the Government portal. The Government Office and ministries have coordinated with the NA to conduct regular review of the handling of issues raised by the NA, voters and enterprises.

The report admitted unsolved shortcomings including lower-than-expectation quality of institution building, slow issuance of documents guiding the implementation of laws and decrees, ineffective coordination among ministries and sectors, and inefficient management in some sectors.

A report of NA agencies on the Governments implementation of the NAs Resolution 43/2017/QH14 on promoting food safety noted that the decentralization of power in the field has become more rational, inspection work has been intensified and educational activities have been promoted, resulting in reduction in the trading of goods of poor quality and obscure origin. However, the control of fake and low quality food products still shows limitation, with cross-border food smuggling remaining a complicated problem. The forgery of licences by authorized food quality control agencies is still prevalent.

Regarding the implementation of Resolution 56/2017/QH14 on reforming the State administrative apparatus, the report said the Government had made drastic instructions on the work, but the streamlining of the apparatus workforce had mainly focused on quantity with little attention paid to job performance and work quality.

On the fields under the management of the Supreme Peoples Court and Supreme Peoples Procuracy, reports of NA agencies acknowledged that the Supreme Peoples Court had paid special attention to building documents guiding the implementation of laws and resolutions. Major cases, particularly those involving corruption and serious economic crimes, have been handled in an urgent manner, with drastic measures taken to recover assets for the State. Argument has received more attention during trials. The number of civil cases settled through Peoples Courts at all levels has increased, with fewer sentences annulled or corrected.

Nevertheless, the transfer of documents by some Peoples Courts has failed to meet time requirements, and the trial of administrative cases continues to face many difficulties. The ratio of annulment and correction among administrative sentences has dropped but still failed to meet target set by the NA.

NA agencies also took note that the Supreme Peoples Procuracy had taken many measures to meet requirements set by the NA resolutions, such as enhancement of prosecutions role in investigation and combination of prosecution and investigation. The quality of investigation and the control of investigation and prosecution continue to be improved.

However, the NA agencies pointed to limitations in the practice of public prosecution and control and supervision of justice activities in criminal matters. There are still a large number of cases where files were returned for further investigation.

President hosts Chinese Chief Justice

President Tran Dai Quang (R) receives Chief Justice of the Supreme Peoples Court of China Zhou Qiang in Hanoi





President Tran Dai Quang hosted a reception for Chief Justice of the Supreme Peoples Court of China Zhou Qiang in Hanoi on September 19.

The President highlighted the rapid and comprehensive growth of Vietnam-China cooperation in all fields, which has been mutually beneficial for people of both sides.

The senior leaders of the two nations have regularly met and signed several cooperation agreements, laying the legal foundations for long-term partnership between the two sides, he noted.

The President held that the affiliation between the Supreme Peoples Courts of Vietnam and China has been reinforced, bringing about specific and practical benefits to the development of each nation as well as further tightening the traditional cooperation between Vietnam and China.

Throughout Vietnams socio-economic development, judicial reform has been a key task for its relevant agencies. During the process, agencies and the Supreme Peoples Court must stay in close coordination to share experience with courts around the world, including the Supreme Peoples Court of China, he said.

He also lauded the signing of a memorandum of understanding on judicial cooperation between the Supreme Peoples Courts of Vietnam and China during Vietnamese Chief Judge of the Supreme Peoples Court Nguyen Hoa Binhs visit to China last May, which marked a new milestone in the partnership between the two agencies.

He stressed that the deal is a foundation for the courts to continue sharing experience and information on court organisation, operation, and management as well as judge training.

He affirmed that the Party and State of Vietnam will continue to support the two courts in deepening their collaboration, stressing his hope that the Supreme Peoples Court of China will share more experience with Vietnam in judicial reform, thus enhancing its peoples access to justice, while also making court operations more transparent and open.

For his part, Zhou Qiang expressed his admiration of Vietnams socio-economic growth, as well as the comprehensive development of bilateral partnership, including the ties between the two court sectors.

He briefed his host on the outcomes of his talks with his Vietnamese counterpart Nguyen Hoa Binh, during which both sides agreed on the need to further bolster collaboration in personnel training, IT application, legal precedent research, and mutual judicial support.

State audit agencies of Vietnam, Kazakhstan seek stronger ties

Deputy Auditor General of the State Audit Office of Vietnam (SAV) Nguyen Tuan Anh has voiced his hope that Vietnam and Kazakhstan will increase the sharing of experiences in auditing in the coming time.

The plenary session of ASOSAI 14 in Hanoi on September 19





Deputy Auditor General Anh expressed the wish during a meeting with his Kazakh counterpart Talgat Zhakan on the sidelines of the 14th Assembly of the Asian Organisation of Supreme Audit Institutions (ASOSAI 14) in Hanoi on September 19.

Anh briefed his guest about the SAVs apparatus and outstanding activities in the recent past, saying that it has well performed auditing tasks assigned by the National Assembly, focusing on public audit, and budget spending of ministries, sectors and localities.

During the process of international integration, the SAV has joined organizations such as the International Organisation of Supreme Audit Institutions (INTOSAI), ASOSAI, and the ASEAN Supreme Audit Institutions (ASEANSAI), he said, adding that the SAV has also exchanged experiences with State Audit Institutions (SAI) and sent auditors to go abroad to study advanced auditing models, especially IT and environmental auditing models.

Zhakan said the Accounts Committee of the Republic of Kazakhstan were admitted to INTOSAI and ASOSAI in 2000 and became a member of the European Organisation of Supreme Audit Institutions (EUROSAI) in 2003.

In addition, it has also cooperated with supreme audit institutions in the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU), the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) and the Economic Cooperation Organisation Supreme Audit Institutions (ECOSAI), he said.

The Accounts Committee has already signed memoranda of understanding (MOU) with many ASOSAI members and it hoped to ink a similar agreement with the SAV in order to improve the quality of auditing activities of both nations, Zhakan said.

He also expressed his hope that the SAV would support the Accounts Committees candidacy for a seat in the ASOSAI Audit Committee for the 2018-2021 term.

Anh promised to support and recommend the Accounts Committee of Kazakhstan to the post through the vote at ASOSAI 14.

Vietnam, China court sectors enhance collaboration

The talks between Chief Justice of the Supreme Peoples Court of Vietnam Nguyen Hoa Binh and his Chinese counterpart Zhou Qiang in Hanoi on September 19

Chief Justice of the Supreme Peoples Court of Vietnam Nguyen Hoa Binh held talks with his Chinese counterpart Zhou Qiang in Hanoi on September 19.





The leaders of the two countries court sectors informed each other of their agencies achievements in judicial reform and judgment experience.

They expressed their delights at the great attainments recorded in judicial reform in each nation as well as the development of the judicial collaboration between the two countries over the past time.

Binh said that the visit by the high-raking delegation of the Supreme Peoples Court of China helps further tighten the affiliation between the two countries court sectors, actively contributing to deepening the Vietnam-China solidarity and friendship.

On the basis of the signed memorandum of understanding, the two sides should enhance cooperation in various judicial areas such as personnel training, information technology application, legal precedent research, and mutual judicial assistance.

For his part, Zhou said he is impressed at Vietnams socio-economic development as well as the comprehensive development of bilateral ties, affirming that the relationship between the two courts will further develop in the future.

The two sides agreed to strengthen cooperation in judge training, set up and promote partnership between the Vietnam Court Academy and the China National Judicial Academy, and share experience in IT application and smart court building.

Vietnam-France ties thrive: ambassador

The year 2018 holds special significance for Vietnam  France relations, Vietnamese Ambassador to France Nguyen Thiep said during a ceremony in Paris on September 19 marking the 73rd anniversary of National Day of Vietnam (September 2).

He said 73 years since President Ho Chi Minh delivered the Independence Declaration on September 2, 1945, Vietnam has become an active member of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), with a 91 million population and an average income per capita of more than 2,000 USD each year.

Vietnam has established diplomatic ties with most UN member states and maintained economic and trade ties with nearly 230 countries and territories. This year, Vietnam and France mark the 45th anniversary of bilateral diplomatic ties and the fifth anniversary of their strategic partnership, playing a key role in promoting relations between ASEAN and the EU.

Highlighting the importance of France visit by Party General Secretary Nguyen Phu Trong last March, Thiep said it had created a strong driving force for the development of bilateral ties across politics, economy, culture, education, healthcare and national defence.

Vietnamese officials also paid working trips to France, including those by Minister-Chairman of the Government Office Mai Tien Dung in April, Health Minister Nguyen Thi Kim Tien and Chairman of the municipal Peoples Committee Nguyen Duc Chung in June and Defence Minister Ngo Xuan Lich in September with the signing of a Joint Vision Declaration on defence cooperation for 2018-2028.

Secretary of State to the Minister for Europe and Foreign Affairs of France Jean-Baptiste Lemoyne arrived in Hanoi in January to chair a Vietnam  France economic dialogue. The first Vietnam  France dialogue on security and defence strategy recently held in Paris also opened up opportunities for collaboration.

Major Vietnamese firms such as Viettel, FPT and Vietnam Airlines are also present in France.

On the occasion, the ambassador noted Vietnam will join the Paris Motor Show in October for the first time, presenting VinFast automobiles manufactured by Vietnams Vingroup.

Cultural and art activities are planned to celebrate the 45th anniversary of bilateral diplomatic ties throughout the year.

ASOSAI 14: Environmental theme strongly supported

Delegates to 14th ASOSAI Assembly





Delegates from regional and international audit institutions expressed their strong support for the environmentally focused theme that Vietnam selected for the ongoing 14th Assembly of the Asian Organisation of Supreme Audit Institutions (ASOSAI) in Hanoi.

The event, hosted by Vietnam for the first time, has been held under the theme Environmental Auditing for Sustainable Development.

With this in mind, participants are expected to make suggestions on how to use environmental auditing as an efficient tool for sustainable development, thus introducing important and useful policies, solutions and efficient tools to solve environmental problems.

In an interview granted to the Vietnam News Agency, Archana Shirsat, a representative from the INTOSAI Development Initiative, highlighted environmental protection as part of the 2030 UN Agenda for Sustainable Developments key goals.

The theme reflects ASOSAI members commitments and contributions to the UNs pursuit of sustainable development in general and global environmental protection in particular, she said.

Shirsat also stressed the need for supreme audit institutions (SAIs) worldwide to respond to emerging issues, such as the technological revolution and digital destruction that is happening to the environment.

SAIs would need to adopt innovative audit approaches to address such issues as environmental protection and sustainable development, she said.

Hu Zejun, head of China SAI, praised the events theme, saying that it is not only significant for sustainable development in Asia, but also for the protection of the global eco-system and sustainable development of humankind.

Zejun, Auditor General of Chinas National Audit Office, who is also in charge of the ASOSAI Secretary General for 2018-2021, stated that the Chinese Environmental Audit Institution was established in 1998 to enforce the Governments policy on environment protection and ensure a sustainable economic development.

China SAI is willing to share with Vietnam its experience in organising methods to ensure synchronous implementation at all levels, technology application in the field and enhancing staff capacity in environmental auditing, Zejun said.

Being neighbouring countries, Vietnamese and Chinese SAIs have developed a comprehensive cooperation and continue to share information with each other in all fields, said Hu Zejun.

Likewise, Sirin Phankasem, vice head of Thailand SAI and a member of the ASOSAI Governing Board, expressed his belief that the 14th ASOSAI Assembly will be a success, particularly with the key agenda focusing on green issues.

According to Phankasem, Thailand has been carrying out numerous water auditing activities. The country also has great experience in environmental auditing training.

Thailand is willing to provide support for Vietnam in audit capacity training and activities of the ASOSAI in Vietnams chairmanship term, said. Phankasem.

ASOSAI gathers 46 member organisations with diverse legal statuses, culture, politics, and development level, leading to varying viewpoints on public auditing and generating interest among members.

The ASOSAI Assembly, which is held every three years, is the venue for all heads of ASOSAI member supreme audit agencies to discuss and decide on major issues, necessary documents, regimes, and policies to achieve the associations objectives and further its development.

It will also serve as a forum for sharing experience in the field of state audits.

This years event sees the largest ASOSAI gathering to date, with the participation of around 250 delegates from 46 supreme audit institutions in Asian countries.

Representatives from the International Organisation of Supreme Audit Institutions (INTOSAI) and a number of other international organisations are also attending as observers.

Vietnamese officer receives Russian, Lao guests

Major General Ngo Minh Tien, Deputy Chief of Staff of the Vietnam Peoples Army (R) and Russias Sverdlovsk Oblast led by Major General Iuri Dmitrievich Sudakov (Source: http://www.qdnd.vn)





Major General Ngo Minh Tien, Deputy Chief of Staff of the Vietnam Peoples Army on September 18 hosted a reception for a delegation of veterans from Russias Sverdlovsk Oblast led by Major General Iuri Dmitrievich Sudakov.

During the reception, Major General Tien expressed his gratitude for the friendship and support given by the people and military of the former Soviet Union and the current Russia to Vietnam in its struggle for independence.

Generations of Vietnamese people are grateful for the precious help of the Russian people, he said, asserting his commitment to making the relations stronger.

For his part, Major General Sudakov said the delegation is glad to return to Vietnam and witness the countrys renewal and development.

He expressed his belief that under the leadership of the Communist Party of Vietnam, the Southeast Asian nation will develop even further.

In the same days afternoon, Major General Tien received a delegation from the Military Science and History Department under the Lao Ministry of Defence, led by its General Director Major General Viengsay Somvichith.

Tien affirmed the Vietnamese Ministry of Defence appreciated the results of science research projects performed by the Military History Institute of Vietnam and Laos Military Science and History Department, including the Ho Chi Minh trail in Laos project.

These projects have contributed to educating young people of both countries, and assisting the scientific research on war history in the two nations.

Tien suggested the two sides continue to consult the two defence ministries in the field, while underlining the need for them to promote exchange of delegations and enhance cooperation in personnel training and science research.

Somvichith said he hopes Vietnam will support Laos in searching for war materials, thus helping the Military Science and History Department perform the task assigned by the Lao Ministry of Defence.

US vows to deepen ties with Vietnam

An overview of the ceremony in Washington DC

US Deputy Secretary of State John Sullivan on September 18 (local time) affirmed his countrys commitment to deepening relations with Vietnam.

Speaking at a ceremony in Washington DC held by the Vietnamese Embassy in the US to mark the Southeast Asian nations 73rd National Day (September 2), Sullivan congratulated Vietnam on its achievements during the renewal and international integration process.

He appreciated development of the US-Vietnam Comprehensive Partnership in bilateral aspects and in regional and international issues of mutual concern.

He noted the two countries still hold much potential for development cooperation, especially in trade, security and defence.

Vietnamese Ambassador Ha Kim Ngoc highlighted the significance of National Day to Vietnamese people.

Ngoc confirmed that since bilateral diplomatic ties were set up in 1995, relations have developed strongly on the basis of mutual understanding and respect for each others independence, sovereignty, territorial integrity and political institutions.

The establishment of the comprehensive partnership in 2013 has contributed to deepening cooperation both bilaterally and multilaterally, he added.

The diplomat also expressed his belief that bilateral ties will grow further, for the benefits of the two peoples and for peace, stability, cooperation and development in the region and the world.

On the same day, the Vietnamese Embassy in Germany also hosted a gathering to celebrate Vietnams 73rd National Day.

VN and Bulgaria to boost trade co-operation









Deputy Prime Minister Vuong Dinh Hue, right, receives Bulgarian Minister of Economy Emil Karanikolov in Ha Noi.

Viet Nam and Bulgaria should promote co-operation in trade and investment, especially in hi-tech agriculture, enabling Vietnamese products to access the Bulgarian market, said Deputy Prime Minister Vuong Dinh Hue in Ha Noi on Tuesday.



Speaking at a meeting with Bulgarian Minister of Economy Emil Karanikolov, who is on a working visit to Viet Nam from Monday to Friday, Hue said the two countries trade co-operation was developing but two-way trade had only reached about US$100 million a year.



Hue also asked Bulgaria to support the implementation of the EU-Vietnam Free Trade Agreement (EVFTA) and organise the 24th session of the Viet Nam-Bulgaria Inter-Government Committee on Economic and Scientific-Technical Cooperation, working on specific measures on trade and industry policies in order to boost economic co-operation in the future.



Minister Emil Karanikolov said the Bulgarian Government attached great importance to the socio-economic achievements made by Viet Nam over the past 30 years (1986-2016), the period of Viet Nams doi moi (renewal).



With the co-operation mechanism between the two countries, the minister said Bulgaria wanted to be a gateway for Vietnamese goods to enter Europe.



On the same day, Karanikolov also attended the Viet Nam  Bulgaria Business Forum in the capital. More than 20 Bulgarian businesses and Vietnamese enterprises attended the event to exchange experiences and seek co-operation opportunities to develop businesses in the two countries.



At the meeting, Karanikolov said Bulgaria was willing to support specific initiatives for business and co-operation with Vietnamese enterprises to promote trade and investment between the two countries.



He said Bulgaria was positioned as a strategic gateway connecting the European market to the Mediterranean and Asian countries. Therefore, it would create best conditions for Vietnamese enterprises to open warehouses and develop exports in Bulgaria before reaching out to the EU market.



Bulgaria is considered one of the most attractive destinations for trade and investment in Europe, with tax rates and operating costs at the lowest level in the EU. Vietnamese businesses should take advantage of these opportunities, said the minister.



According to Deputy Minister of Industry and Trade Cao Quoc Hung, 2017 trade turnover between the two countries reached $109.16 million, of which Viet Nams exports to Bulgaria reached $38.36 million.



In the first eight months of 2018, two-way trade turnover reached over $55 million, of which Viet Nams exports to Bulgaria reached $21.6 million.



In investment co-operation, Bulgaria ranks 65th out of 129 countries and territories investing directly in Viet Nam, with nine FDI projects in operation and total registered capital of $30.99 million.



These results in trade and investment are modest and do not match the potential and expectations of the two sides, said Hung.



Karanikolov said Bulgaria would help Vietnamese businesses to invest in information technology, agriculture, services, transportation and tourism, especially in the countrys industrial parks and high-tech zones.



On the day same, the Bulgarian delegation worked with the Minister of Industry and Trade Tran Tuan Anh and leaders from Ha Nois Peoples Committee and the Viet Nam Oil and Gas Group and achieved many positive results to develop co-operation and investment.

Social security needs to change ahead of the Industry 4.0





Deputy Prime Minister Vu uc am tells the 35th ASEAN Social Security Association Board Meeting in Nha Trang on Tuesday the social security mechanism will have to be changed as the fourth industrial revolution and free movement of labour have led to new kinds of jobs and ways of working.





Social security mechanism and regulations will have to be changed since the fourth industrial revolution and free movement of labour have led to new kinds of jobs and ways of working, Deputy Prime Minister Vu uc am has said.

Speaking at the two-day 35th ASEAN Social Security Association (ASSA) Board Meeting that opened on Tuesday in Khanh Hoa Provinces Nha Trang City, he said employment has become less stable because more and more people do seasonal and short-term jobs.

Viet Nam has 200,000 freelancers, the Deputy PM said.

With a computer and the internet, people can work online for companies in other countries without travelling there.

The rate of self-employment has increased, he said.

These things require regulations, duties of employers and employees and co-ordination between relevant agencies relating to social security to be changed, am said.

The fourth industrial revolution is changing the world. Our responsibility is to make the changes become better. We should pay attention to solving problems the revolution brings about to develop better based on a goal which considers people as the centre of development.

Many countries like Viet Nam are incorporating this goal into development policies to ensure no one is left behind, he added.

ASSA chairman Suradej Waleeittikul said advances in IT and digitisation have had profound impacts across industries, changing the nature of work and affecting the provision of social security.

The disruptive environment of globalisation has forced workers to become unemployed or look for jobs elsewhere. Many choose to work in the informal economy.

The resulting mobility of workers requires governments to ensure their welfare, and the fundamental issue is having social security provisions which guarantee their rights and entitlements, even across borders, he said.

For us, social security administrators, it creates both challenges and opportunities. As we develop policies and deliver services to the countrys labour force, new strategies are required to adapt to these emerging trends.

In many countries, e-services have been introduced to simplify the administration and increase transparency.

There is also the need to create a legal framework that can adapt continuously to globalisation. We have to keep up the leadership and understanding of these rapid changes in order to adapt and survive.

According to Nguyen Thi Minh, director general of the Viet Nam Social Security, ASSA needs to have a creative approach and long-term vision to fully use the experience and technology of the members.

ASSA should work together as one for sustainable social security for all in the ASEAN Community.

Assoc Prof Dr Tran inh Thien, former head of the Viet Nam Institute of Economics, said the country should formulate a digital transformation strategy and manage it intelligently.

The country should develop digitally-linked infrastructure and cyber security and create digital human resources.

Gobal digital connections, through the web and smart tools, are bringing great opportunities for people to increase their general income though high risks are not unavoidable.

The need for renovating social insurance activities would become vigorous and urgent, he added.

Jens Schremmer of the International Social Security Association said non-standard work is fast emerging because of the revolution.

Digital platforms are enabling new services, he said.

But the status of platform workers is often unclear. What are they: Employees? Self-employed? Or new categories? Why does it matter?

Labour market transformations and social impacts create challenges for social security, he said.

Social security institutions will make the difference.

International exchanges between social security institutions would play a key role, he added.

Robert Palacios of the World Bank said traditional social insurance coverage based on payroll tax deductions from formal sector workers would lose the race with populations ageing.

The approach of subsidising health insurance premiums for the poor, informal sector is helping increase the health insurance coverage and shows the way forward.

Emerging technologies can help us differentiate those in the formal sector that have more capacity to save or contribute so we can use limited resources more efficiently.

The line between social assistance and social insurance would increasingly be blurred to achieve universal social insurance coverage that is affordable, he added.

Can Tho, Australia cooperate in sustainable energy and agriculture





A safe vegetable farming model in Can Tho City.





Can Tho seeks to cooperate with Australia in many fields, especially in sustainable energy and agriculture, said the vice chairman of Can Tho Citys Peoples Committee at a meeting with Australian Consul General last weekend in Can Tho.

Vice Chairman Truong Quang Hoai Nam pledged to continue improving the business climate to attract more investment, especially from Australia.

Karen Lanyon, Consul General of Australia in HCM City, said that Austalian investors were seeking long-term strategic parternships with Can Tho, the economic hub of the Mekong Delta.

She said she hoped the city and Australia would mutually benefit by giving priority to agriculture, renewable energy, environmental protection and climate-change response.

The Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research (ACIAR) has sent agronomists to the city to conduct studies and seek feasibility plans to resolve challenges in agriculture.

The plans focus on food safety, climate change, land-quality improvement and tree nutrition, market connectivity, and value increase for agricultural products and aquaculture.

ACIAR will also support Can Tho in applying cutting-edge technologies to high-tech agriculture, and attracting investment from the private sector, with the aim of helping the poor in both rural and urban areas to benefit from advanced farming models.

The centre also aims to improve the capacity of Can Tho farmers, agriculture officials and scientists from research and training establishments.

Under the co-operation plan, Can Tho will work with ACIAR to enhance agricultural product output and quality, protect land and water resources, and ensure food safety and hygiene.

As for renewable energy, the Australian Energy Regulator (AER) will conduct a full and detailed report on the potential of wind power, solar power and biomass energy, and propose suitable policies.

AER will also help the city develop a pilot project on renewable energy in hi-tech agriculture and aquaculture processing.

The project could then spread to other cities and provinces in the southwest, making Can Tho a pioneer of clean energy development in the Mekong Delta.

In addition, Can Tho and Australia will also cooperate in clean air, greenhouse gas emissions, water drainage management and wastewater treatment projects.

The clean air project will target inner Can Tho areas, including Ninh Kieu and Binh Thuy districts, and Tra Noc 1 and Tra Noc 2 industrial and processing zones, focusing on monitoring air quality, reviewing greenhouse gas emissions and building an action plan.

In addition, Australian experts will study water drainage in the locality and work out proper solutions.

ASSA 35: members share experience in social, health insurance









INTOSAI President: State Audit of Vietnam active member









President of the International Organisation of Supreme Audit Institutions (INTOSAI) Harib Al Amimi



President of the International Organisation of Supreme Audit Institutions (INTOSAI) Harib Al Amimi has praised the State Audit of Vietnam (SAV) for its active participation in INTOSAI activities and its contribution to the organisation.



Dr. Harib Al Amimi told the Vietnam News Agency that the cooperation between the SAV and the INTOSAI and the Asian Organisation of Supreme Audit Institutions (ASOSAI) will develop strongly in the future, particularly in building capacity and exchanging knowledge.



According to him, Vietnam will have a chance to learn and expand their knowledge in different audit fields from their counterparts and peers while helping enrich the ASOSAI region with its experience.



I think this is a golden opportunity for both of us to learn from each other and facilitate the knowledge transferring among our members, said Dr. Harib Al Amimi.



Harib Al Amimi, who is also President of State Control Office of the United Arab Emirates, highlighted the cooperation between INTOSAI and ASOSAI, saying that there are many fields in which the two sides can cooperate, including knowledge sharing.



I understand that ASOSAI is very active in professional aspect with its potential and experience. So this experience can be shared among two organisations, he said.



The INTOSAI President also expressed his impression of audit training in ASOSAI region.



Fortunately, I have chances to visit many training institutions and academies in ASOSAI region, and I was very impressive about regional audit training conditions, he said.



He expressed his belief that ASOSAI 14 will benefit all member supreme audit institutions in terms of training and improving their professional levels.



The SAV is only 24 years old, relatively young in comparison with other hundred-year-old ASOSAI members. Hosting ASOSAI 14 means that the SAV becomes the Chairman of ASOSAI for the 2018-2021 term and maintains its membership on the ASOSAI governing board for the three successive terms from 2015 to 2024.



According to State Auditor General Ho Duc Phoc, taking charge in a new role will be a chance for the young SAV to lead the development of the organisation, while enhancing its capacity and expanding relations with other regional and international supreme audit institutions.



ASOSAI gathers 46 member organisations with diverse legal status, culture, politics and development level, leading to varying viewpoints on public auditing and interest among the members.



The ASOSAI Assembly, which is held every three years, is the venue for all heads of ASOSAI member supreme audit agencies to discuss and decide on major issues, necessary documents, regimes and policies to achieve the associations objectives and further its development. It also serves as a forum for sharing experience in the field of state audits.



This years event, held for the first time in Vietnam, sees the largest ASOSAI gathering to date, with participation of around 250 delegates from 46 supreme audit institutions in Asian countries. Representatives from the INTOSAI and a number of other international organisations are also attending as observers. ASOSAI 14 milestone in Vietnam audits history: Top legislator

Vietnams legislative leader said on September 19 that it is a great honour for Vietnam to host the 14th Assembly of the Asian Organisation of Supreme Audit Institutions (ASOSAI), adding that the event marks a milestone in the history of the State Audit of Vietnam. Chairwoman of the Vietnamese National Assembly Nguyen Thi Kim Ngan made the statement at the opening ceremony of the 14th ASOSAI Assembly that will run in Hanoi until September 22. The legislative leader updated delegates on Vietnams significant socio-economic development over the past 30 years, saying that Vietnam, from a underdeveloped nation, now has become a medium-income country with increasingly close-knit links with the Asia-Pacific region as well as other regions worldwide. She also highlighted the intensive and extensive international integration Vietnam has made in tandem with its comprehensive reform. Being an active and responsible members of multilateral mechanisms, Vietnam has made effective contributions to and hosted numerous important international events, including the 132nd Assembly of the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU132) in 2015, APEC Vietnam 2017, the 26th Annual Meeting of the Asia-Pacific Parliamentary Forum (APPF-26) in January and the latest World Economic Forum on ASEAN this year. ASOSAI 14 is considered to be a significant diplomatic event in Asia, Ngan said. The ASOSAI has been playing a great role in enhancing the capability of member supreme audit institutions in particular and the development of each nation and the improvement of the region in general. She also expressed her delight at the proactive participation of the State Audit of Vietnam (SAV) in ASOSAI activities and the ASEANSAI. Addressing the opening ceremony, State Auditor General Ho Duc Phoc said the State Audit of Vietnam is proud to be a member of ASOSAI, particularly in the new role as Chairman for 2018-2021. The SAV is well aware of its responsibility in working with other members to promote its gained achievements and the cooperation among ASOSAI and INTOSAI members, thus enhancing the solidarity, capability and the development of the supreme audit community, Phoc said. Chairwoman of ASOSAI 13, Madinah Binti Mohamad, head of Malaysia SAI said the Assembly is an excellent forum for discussing and deliberating upon issues and developments in the field of public audit, learning from each others experiences and reinforcing the importance of value and benefits of supreme audit institutions across the Asian region. She highlighted the history of ASOSAI and its growth and changes with the emergence of new perspectives of its members. So many things have already been accomplished since the inception of ASOSAI, particularly in enhancing the capacities of member SAIs through trainings and knowledge sharing as well as fostering professional and technical cooperation with other regional groups, she said. According to her the real impact of ASOSAI will depend on its ability to respond quickly to the needs of member SAIs and to deliver on priority tasks. It is our role to not only shed light on public management by analyzing and verifying but also assessing its impact on public finance, anticipating risks and suggesting improvements, she said. Also addressing the opening ceremony, President of INTOSAI Harib Al Amimi, said INTOSAI has benefited substantially from the formation of its regions over the past 50 years. With a combination of countries of different sizes, languages and cultures, ASOSAI has emerged as an active professional body and has managed to thread together the global initiatives into the regional context, he said. According to him, the strategic planning, capacity development and training initiatives of ASOSAI have evolved tremendously over the past 40 years. INTOSAI has created professional standards and practice over the past decades. This has resulted in the INTOSAI Framework for Professional Practices. Our responsibility is for SAIs to now implement these standards, he said. He also expressed his belief that the mission will only be possible through support networks that can be enabled by ASOSAI and its sub-regional partners. ASOSAI now stands as a professional and effectively governed organisation that has committed to develop and support its member SAIs and enable them to benefit from knowledge sharing and capacity building initiatives in order to enhance their contribution to the Asian nations, he said. ASOSAI gathers 46 member organisations with diverse legal status, culture, politics and development level, leading to varying viewpoints on public auditing and interest among the members. The ASOSAI Assembly, which is held every three years, is the venue for all heads of ASOSAI member supreme audit agencies to discuss and decide on major issues, necessary documents, regimes, and policies to achieve the associations objectives and further its development. It also serves as a forum for sharing experience in the field of state audits. This years event, held for the first time in Vietnam, sees the largest ASOSAI gathering to date, with participation of around 250 delegates from 46 supreme audit institutions in Asian countries. Representatives from the International Organisation of Supreme Audit Institutions (INTOSAI) and a number of other international organisations are also attending as observers. Friendship association marks Vietnam-Japan diplomatic ties



Politburo member and President of the Vietnam-Japan Friendship Parliamentarians Group Pham Minh Chinh. The Vietnam-Japan Friendship Association (VJFA), the Japan-Vietnam Friendship Association and the Japanese Embassy in Vietnam held a ceremony to mark the 45th anniversary of diplomatic ties between the two countries in Hanoi on September 18.



Addressing the event, Politburo member and President of the Vietnam-Japan Friendship Parliamentarians Group Pham Minh Chinh said Vietnam and Japan established diplomatic ties on September 21, 1973, but their relationship started long ago in history via cultural and commercial exchanges.



Since the establishment of diplomatic ties, bilateral relations have developed through regular high-level meetings, dialogue mechanisms, cooperation between ministries, agencies and localities and people-to-people exchange, he said.



Chinh said friendship and high political trust have created a firm foundation for cooperation between the two countries, as well as new drivers for the relations to thrive.



Along with state diplomacy and people-to-people exchange, parliamentary diplomacy has been reinforced, Chinh said, noting that the Vietnam-Japan Friendship Parliamentarians Group, founded in 1995, has served as a bridge promoting the friendship and collaboration between localities, Governments and legislatures of the two countries.



Japanese Ambassador to Vietnam Umeda Kunio said to mark the 45th anniversary of diplomatic ties, Japan has established an organisation committee with the participation of his embassy, Government agencies, the Japan Business Association in Vietnam and Vietnam-Japan University.



Meanwhile, Vietnamese Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc has instructed the building of a plan on holding celebrations in localities, he said, stressing that more than 120 events have so far been held in the two countries to mark the anniversary, and more than 50 others are scheduled from now till the end of this year.



The ambassador noted various celebration activities slated for September such as a concert performed by Japans leading symphony orchestra NHK, the Japan-Vietnam friendship festival and a workshop on Japans human resources development policy during the Meiji Restoration.



Japan-Vietnam relations are at their highest peak, he said, attributing the result to the close coordination between the two governments through cooperation projects in all realms, along with contributions of many Japanese and Vietnamese individuals and organisations to bilateral cooperation in culture, social affairs, arts and education.



VJFA President To Huy Rua reported that more than 260,000 Vietnamese are working, studying and living in Japan and nearly 20,000 Japanese are working in Vietnam.



They are peoples ambassadors who have contributed to enhancing mutual understanding and trust, he said, adding that up to 37 pairs of Vietnamese and Japanese localities have signed cooperation agreements, creating a foundation for bilateral collaboration, especially trade-investment and technology transfer. ASOSAI 14 - opportunity to affirm State Audit of Vietnams prestige



At the 52nd meeting of the ASOSAI Governing Board on September 18

Taking the role as the Chair of the Asian Organisation of Supreme Audit Institutions (ASOSAI) for 2018-2021 tenure is a vivid illustration for the growth of the State Audit of Vietnam (SAV), participants said on the sidelines of the 52nd meeting of the ASOSAI Governing Board on September 18. Nepalese Auditor General Tanka Mani Sharma, who is also a member of the ASOSAI Governing Board, hoped that in the new position of ASOSAI Chair, Vietnam will promote its leading role in the development of auditing community, not only in ASOSAI but also in the International Organisation of Supreme Audit Institutions (INTOSAI). As a Supreme Audit Institution (SAI) with considerable experience, Nepal will help Vietnam build auditing capacity, thus further bolstering mutual understanding and experience sharing, he said, adding the country wants to sign a bilateral auditing cooperation deal with Vietnam. Speaking highly of Vietnams meticulous preparations for the 14th Assembly of the ASOSAI, Takya Kato, a representative of the Board of Audit of Japan, wished that the audit institutions in Vietnam and Japan will enhance cooperation in the future. Other participants said that SAV should capitalize on knowledge and international experience as well as resources from ASOSAI and its members to improve capacity and operation efficiency. According to Dao Xuan Tien, SAV Deputy Auditor General, Vietnam is facing a big challenge in how to lead the ASOSAI members and make further contributions to the organisation. The 52nd Governing Board meeting offers an opportunity for us to study and share experience in the field of public audit. As the Chair of ASOSAI for 2018-2021 tenure, SAV will do its utmost to lead 46 members, and leave good impression and prestige within ASOSAI, he said. Earlier, SAV successfully hosted a line-up of significant events of ASOSAI, and received lavish praises from the audit community, including the 42nd meeting of the ASOSAI Governing Board in Hanoi in August 2010. SAV became a member of the International Organisation of Supreme Audit Institutions (INTOSAI) in 1996, and joined the Asian Organisation of Supreme Audit Institutions (ASOSAI) in 1997. The 14th Assembly of ASOSAI is underway in Hanoi from September 19-22. Established in 1979 with 11 members, ASOSAI now has 46 members. The ASOSAI Assembly is held every three years. President Tran Dai Quang welcomes heads of delegations to ASOSAI 14

President Tran Dai Quang (R) welcomed heads of delegations to the 14th ASOSAI Assembly in Hanoi on September 19

President Tran Dai Quang received heads of delegations to the 14th Assembly of the Asian Organisation of Supreme Audit Institutions (ASOSAI 14) in Hanoi on September 19. ASOSAI 14 is taking place in Hanoi from September 19-22 under the theme Environmental Audit for Sustainable Development, and has attracted 46 supreme audit agencies in Asia and 15 international organisations. At the meeting, Auditor General of the State Audit Office of Vietnam (SAV) Ho Duc Phoc informed President Quang on ASOSAI 14s agenda, adding that foreign delegates highly valued Vietnams preparations for the triennial assembly, as well as its agenda and theme. President Quang welcomed foreign delegations to Hanoi for the event, which also coincides with the 40th anniversary of the ASOSAI Charter. He spoke highly of the development of ASOSAI, which has developed from 11 initial members to 46 members over the last 40 years and become one of seven regional organisations of the International Organisation of Supreme Audit Institutions (INTOSAI). ASOSAI has always taken the lead in public audit and public governance, as well as greatly contributed towards the development of supreme audit institutions (SAIs) in the region and the world, President Quang said. The President thanked ASOSAI for entrusting the SAV with the hosting of the 14th assembly and the chairmanship of ASOSAI for the 2018-2021 term. President Quang also appreciated the organisations active and effective assistance to Vietnam and valued the increasingly important role of SAIs in the sustainable development of each country and the region. He added that the role of SAIs in supervising the management and use of resources will thereby help to ensure transparency and improve the effectiveness of budget and public asset use in member nations. According to the State leader, in Vietnam, the SAV has made major contributions to the public finance examining and monitoring system. Its legal status is clearly regulated in the 2013 Constitution and in line with the Lima Declaration of INTOSAI. The SAV has proved useful in helping the National Assembly to supervise the management and use of the budget and public asset. President Quang also took this occasion to ask INTOSAI, ASOSAI, and member agencies to enhance cooperation in order to realise initiatives and solutions towards stable and sustainable public finance, to promote efforts in the direction of sustainable development goals, and to boost initiatives on environmental auditing. He also called on them to increase the sharing of information and experience, especially in training auditors, and to help the SAV to fulfil its role as the ASOSAI Chair for 2018-2021.



The 35th ASEAN Social Security Association (ASSA) Board Meeting continued on September 19, with members sharing practical outcomes in carrying out social and health insurance policies.Delegates from Indonesia, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand, Cambodia, the Philippines and Vietnam presented their views and lessons drawn from the implementation of the policies.A representative from the Lao National Social Security Fund talked about the countrys method to improve coverage of voluntary social insurance. Accordingly, Lao citizens aging between 18 and 60 and capable of working are eligible to join voluntary social insurance. The premiums are equivalent to nine percent of their monthly salaries and can be paid via banking applications or at the insurances office. Benefits under the voluntary social insurance are more diverse than those in Vietnam.Many ASSA members reported that they took advantage of information and technology in reforming social welfare procedures. For example, Thailand has employed a smart phone application that allows users to select and change hospitals for their health insurance, and manage insurance payments and claims. The method has helped cut time and cost for insurance participants.At the session discussing health insurance, ASSA members praised Vietnams achievement in developing an assessment and multiple-level payment system. The assessment database, which connects all medical facilities covered by health insurance with the Vietnam Social Security (VSS) via the internet, was put into use in 2016. The database consists of more than 81 million profiles of insurance card holders and hundreds of millions of health records needed to be accessed annually. The system has helped the VSS increase its management of health insurance fund, and prevention of fund abuses.The session also delved into difficulties in expanding the coverage of social and health insurance in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, among others.The ongoing 35th ASSA Board Meeting, hosted by the VSS, opened on September 18 in Nha Trang, the resort city of Khanh Hoa in central Vietnam. It brought together about 170 delegates, including the ASSA President, leaders of national social security institutions and diplomats from ASEAN member states.The events main theme is the challenges and opportunities of ASEAN social security institutions in the context of the 4th Industrial Revolution and free flow of labour.The ASSA was found in 1998 following the signing of a Memorandum of Agreement in Bangkok, Thailand on February 13 that year, involving heads of social security institutions from five countries - the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand. Representatives from Laos and Vietnam also attended the signing ceremony as observers. Later the year, the VSS became a member of ASSA.ASSA members now comprise 19 social security institutions from ten ASEAN nations.This is the fifth time the VSS has chaired the ASSA Board Meeting. It undertook the chairmanship during the 2002  2003 term and successfully organised the ASSA Board Meeting in 1999, 2002, 2005 and 2010.
SEATTLE - New high-resolution maps pinpoint areas across Africa with concentrations of child deaths from diarrhea and show uneven progress over 15 years to mitigate the problem.

"Diarrhea is highly preventable, and tens of thousands of child deaths from diarrhea could be averted each year if interventions targeted mortality hot spots across Africa," said Dr. Bobby Reiner, lead author and Assistant Professor of Health Metrics Sciences at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington. "However, stakeholders need to recognize the uneven distribution of diarrhea within countries means national strategies will be much less effective than focused, local interventions."

The study, covering 2000 to 2015, maps the entire African continent in 5x5 square kilometer units and was published today in The New England Journal of Medicine. National and provincial maps of diarrhea in Africa often mask inequalities at the local community level, according to IHME researchers.

This precision health mapping helps clinicians and policymakers identify communities where children are most vulnerable to dying from the disease and tailor appropriate interventions.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation funded the study, part of a five-year grant that enables IHME researchers and collaborators globally to map a range of health metrics in 5x5 square kilometer units. The research is part of the Local Burden of Disease project at IHME and led by Dr. Simon I. Hay, Director of Geospatial Science at IHME and Professor of Health Metrics Sciences at the University of Washington.

Accounting for more than 330,000 child deaths in 2015, diarrhea was the third leading cause of death and disease in children in Africa. The vast majority of diarrheal diseases are attributable to preventable causes. Established interventions include rotavirus immunization; ensuring access safe drinking water; sanitation and hygiene programs; and minimizing exposure to contaminated food.

The study examines prevalence and incidence of diarrhea and diarrhea-related mortality for children under age 5. Diarrhea is defined as three or more abnormally loose or watery stools within the previous 24 hours in a child younger than 5 years of age. Study findings cover 52 of 54 countries in Africa, excluding the island nations of Mauritius and Seychelles.

Researchers found more than half of all diarrhea-related deaths among children occurred in 55 of 782 total first-level administrative subdivisions (i.e. states, provinces, or regions) across Africa; these jurisdictions are home to 35% of the total population of Africa.

While many countries reduced their diarrhea child mortality burden uniformly at the local level, others saw divergent trends emerge. In Nigeria, for example, mortality rates were improving in some local areas at the same time as they were worsening in others. As a result, in 2015, child mortality rates among Nigerian states differed six-fold, with estimates ranging from 1.6 deaths per 1,000 children in Bayelsa state in the southwest to 9.5 deaths per 1,000 in Yobe state in the northeast.

Despite mortality reductions across nearly all locations in Africa over the 15-year period, several countries saw increases at the local level in certain parts of the Central African Republic, Gabon, Ivory Coast, Nigeria, and Zimbabwe.

"We observed diarrhea mortality declines across nearly all locations, but several areas across Africa with persistently high mortality from 2000 through 2015 are at risk of falling even further behind," said Reiner. "Our precision public health maps are critical tools for calling attention to areas where diarrhea-related child mortality is stagnating or worsening, despite proven interventions."

Additional findings include:

Ninety percent of first-level administrative subdivisions (i.e. states, provinces, or regions) saw declines in diarrhea-related child mortality between 2000 and 2015, with several locations achieving substantial reductions: Timbuktu, Mali: 19.25 child deaths per 1,000 in 2000 to 4.08 in 2015 Gao, Mali: 16.23 in 2000 to 3.48 in 2015 Luanda, Angola: 13.78 in 2000 to 1.76 in 2015 Benguela, Angola: 13.63 in 2000 to 2.11 in 2015 Cuanza Sul, Angola: 13.05 in 2000 to 1.99 in 2015 Uige, Angola: 12.75 in 2000 to 1.85 in 2015 Cabinda, Angola: 12.46 in 2000 to 1.62 in 2015 Huambo, Angola: 12.54 in 2000 to 1.78 in 2015 Kuanza Norte, Angola: 12.32 in 2000 to 1.73 in 2015 Maradi, Niger: 13.87 in 2000 to 3.11 in 2015



Some areas in northeastern Nigeria, southeastern Niger, and southern Chad saw their high diarrhea-related child mortality rates change very little over the 15-year span. For example, eight regions in Chad with high mortality rates in 2000 also had rates higher than six deaths per 1,000 children in 2015:

1. Hadjer Lamis: 8.73 in 2000 and 6.69 in 2015

2. Kabia: 9.14 in 2000 and 6.43 in 2015

3. Logone Occidental: 9.45 in 2000 and 6.32 in 2015

4. Logone Oriental: 9.38 in 2000 and 6.03 in 2015

5. Mayo-Boneye: 8.90 in 2000 and 6.33 in 2015

6. Mont De Lam: 9.31 in 2000 and 6.09 in 2015

7. Tandjile Est: 9.51 in 2000 and 6.23 in 2015

8. Tandjile Ouest: 9.76 in 2000 and 6.46 in 2015



Many of the concentrated areas of diarrhea-related child mortality in 2015 were found in Nigeria, Ethiopia, and Niger. For example, three states in Nigeria - Yobe, Bauchi, and Gombe - accounted for six percent of all diarrhea-related deaths in Africa, while encompassing only one percent of the population at risk.



The first-level administrative subdivisions (i.e. states, provinces, or regions) with the highest diarrhea-related child mortality rates in 2015 were the following:

1. Yobe [Nigeria]: 9.51 deaths per 1,000 children, increased from 8.05 in 2000

2. Bauchi [Nigeria]: 8.25

3. Gombe [Nigeria]: 7.86, increased from 7.68 in 2000

4. Hadjer Lamis [Chad]: 6.69

5. Tandjile Ouest [Chad] 6.46

6. Kabia [Chad] 6.43

7. Borno [Nigeria]: 6.35

8. Jigawa [Nigeria]: 6.34

9. Mayo-Boneye [Chad]: 6.33

10. Logone Occidental [Chad]: 6.32

###

The study, "Variation in Childhood Diarrheal Morbidity and Mortality in Africa, 2000-2015," is available online at IHME's website, http://www.healthdata.org.

Media contacts:

IHME: Kelly Bienhoff, +1-206-897-2884 (office); +1-913-302-3817 (mobile); kbien@uw.edu

IHME: Dean Owen, +1-206-897-2858 (office); +1-206-434-5630 (mobile); dean1227@uw.edu

About the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation

The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) is an independent global health research organization at the University of Washington that provides rigorous and comparable measurement of the world's most important health problems and evaluates the strategies used to address them. IHME makes this information widely available so that policymakers have the evidence they need to make informed decisions about how to allocate resources to improve population health.

About the Local Burden of Disease project

The Local Burden of Disease project at IHME aims to produce estimates of health outcomes and related measures that cover entire continents, but to do so at a very fine, local resolution. Such estimates allow decision-makers to target resources and health interventions precisely, so that health policy decisions can be tailored for local areas rather than entire countries. Combining local detail with broad coverage - producing 5x5 kilometer estimates for entire continents and, eventually, the world - would give health officials everywhere the tools to make locally informed decisions and, in the process, help all people live longer, healthier lives. The Local Burden of Disease project is led by Dr. Simon I. Hay, Professor of Health Metrics Sciences at the University of Washington and Director of Geospatial Science at IHME.
Two sheriff deputies left two women to drown in the back of a police transport van in South Carolina on Tuesday when the van was overcome by flood waters from Hurricane Florence, a local ABC affiliate, WPDE reported.

The two women were described in news reports as mental health patients at Loris Hospital and Waccamaw Center for Mental Health in Horry County, and were on medical transport. The women, who have been identified as 45-year-old Windy Newton, and 43-year-old Nicolette Green, were being transported to McLeod Health, a nearby medical facility. The incident is under investigation by the State Law Enforcement Division.

A statement from the Horry County Sheriffs Office claims that the deputies tried to free the women from the back of the van as it was flooded by fast-rising waters, but they were unsuccessful, The Cut reported. According to the report, the two deputies climbed to the top of the van and were rescued by a high water team. The women remained chained in the van.

Tonights incident is a tragedy, said Horry County Sheriff Phillip Thompson, according to local reports. Just like you, we have questions we want answered. We are fully cooperating with the State Law Enforcement Division to support their investigation of this event.

Marion County Coroner Jerry Richardson told the Associated Press early Wednesday that the van was still underwater. They were trying to negotiate through fast-running water, and it just didnt work out, Richardson told AP about the incident.

Others had questions about the incident. If that road is in an area where it is a flood risk, why were they driving on that road anyway? asked State Rep. Justin Bamberg, a trial attorney in South Carolina who has represented families in cases of police killings, according to the AP. People need to know exactly how it happened. It makes it seem like someone took a very unnecessary risk.
FILE - In this May 23, 2018, file photo, Paul Manafort, President Donald Trump's former campaign chairman, leaves the Federal District Court after a hearing, in Washington. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana, File)

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Robert Mueller has been busy.

In just the last two weeks, the special counsel has secured the cooperation of President Donald Trump's former campaign chairman, dispensed with the case of the campaign aide who triggered the Russia probe and signaled he's squeezed all the information he needs out of former national security adviser Michael Flynn.

All that activity has not gone unnoticed by Trump.

The president has continued to wage a public-relations war on Mueller, casting his investigation into Russian election interference and possible coordination with Trump associates as a politically motivated witch hunt. In his latest move, Trump is again using his executive power to declassify documents in the Russia probe that he says build a case that the investigation was tainted from the start by bias in the Justice Department and FBI.

And in an interview with The Hill , Trump said he hopes his effort to root out what he sees as corruption in the FBI and Justice Department will go down as one of his "crowning achievements," a move he likened to exposing "something that is truly a cancer in our country."

Here's where things stand:

___

DECLASSIFYING RUSSIA DOCUMENTS

Urged on by a small group of House Republicans, the president on Monday ordered the public release of any Russia investigation-related text messages of several FBI and Justice Department officials, including former FBI Director James Comey and former acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe. He also declassified a portion of materials used to obtain a secret warrant to monitor the communication of former Trump campaign foreign policy adviser Carter Page.

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Trump, who told The Hill he hasn't read the documents he's declassifying, said Tuesday he made the decision because he wants "total transparency."

Trump and his allies believe the documents will show improprieties during the early days of the Russia investigation. They say the 21 pages show top Justice Department officials abusing the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act process, particularly through the use of information gathered by former British spy Christopher Steele. His Democrat-funded research into Trump ties to Russia was included in the FISA applications and later compiled into a dossier that was published in January 2017.

FISA applications and warrants are some of the most secret documents in the government. The warrants are supposed to be used to gather intelligence on people suspected of being agents of a foreign power.

Democrats and some former national security officials have criticized the declassification move, saying it could jeopardize intelligence-gathering sources and methods. They also say the president is abusing his power to serve his own interests.

It's unclear when the documents will become public.

___

MANAFORT FLIPS

Paul Manafort held out through multiple indictments, months in jail and even a conviction on eight criminal counts  all until last week.

On Friday, the man who led Trump's campaign for several crucial months pleaded guilty to two more felony charges and agreed to cooperate "fully, truthfully, completely and forthrightly." Manafort's deal came as he was facing a second trial that was to explore his efforts to secretly lobby in the U.S. for Ukrainian interests and to conceal the millions of dollars he funneled through offshore accounts as part of that work.

The focus now turns to what he knows.

Manafort, an eyewitness to a June 2016 meeting at Trump Tower with a Russian lawyer, could detail the actions of Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and Trump's eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., who was told in emails that it was part of a Russian government effort to help his father's campaign.

Manafort also headed the campaign while, court papers say, the Russian government was actively trying to influence the election. And his ties to prominent Russian and Ukrainian businessmen also offer prosecutors a wealth of information they can use for not only the Russia probe but also potentially other investigations.

That includes continued government scrutiny of law firms and Washington lobbying shops, such as Skadden Arps, Mercury Public Affairs and the now-defunct Podesta Group, which took part in Manafort's unregistered lobbying work.

With Manafort's deal, Mueller has now secured six guilty pleas and a trial conviction and has pending indictments against three companies and 26 individuals including 12 Russian intelligence officers. Two other investigations that Mueller referred to other U.S. attorneys have also resulted in guilty pleas. That includes a probe of longtime Trump fixer Michael Cohen.

___

JAIL TIME FOR PAPADOPOULOS

While Manafort is just beginning his cooperation, former Trump foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos wrapped up his.

And prosecutors weren't too happy with him. They recommended jail time because he didn't provide "substantial assistance" and only begrudgingly helped them after his 2017 arrest. They also argued that Papadopoulos' lies during the early days of the FBI's Russia investigation irreparably damaged it.

Those false statements involved Papadopoulos' contacts with Russian intermediaries during the 2016 campaign.

Before Russian hacking of Democratic organizations became public, one of the intermediaries, a Maltese professor, told Papadopoulos that the Russians had "dirt" on Democrat Hillary Clinton in the form of thousands of emails. But when FBI agents confronted him in January 2017, Papadopoulos lied, and, prosecutors say, that deception resulted in them missing an opportunity to interview professor Joseph Mifsud while he was in the U.S. He hasn't returned since.

A federal judge ultimately sentenced Papadopoulos , whose Russian contacts triggered the Russia probe, to 14 days' incarceration.

___

DONE WITH FLYNN?

After months of delay, Mueller's team says they're ready for a judge to sentence Trump's first national security adviser as early as Nov. 28.

Flynn, a retired U.S. Army lieutenant general and a senior Trump campaign surrogate, has been waiting for the government's signoff since he pleaded guilty in December 2017 to lying to the FBI about his contacts with Russian officials during the presidential transition.

Flynn has been seen as a key cooperator in Mueller's investigation. But prosecutors have yet to say what he shared and whether it has led to possible criminal charges against others.

And a court filing Monday suggests the public will have to wait a little longer. Prosecutors are asking a federal judge to set a schedule that would keep the specifics of Flynn's cooperation from becoming public until after the midterm elections.

___

Follow Chad Day on Twitter: https://twitter.com/ChadSDay
Apple Has Paid the $14.3 Billion It Owes the Irish Tax AuthoritiesBut the Check Hasn't Cleared Yet

Apple has handed over 14.3 billion ($16.7 billion) to the Irish government, representing the taxes it owed under a 2016 ruling by the European Commission, plus interest.

A couple years back, the Commissions competition directorate decided that Apple had benefited from 13 billion in illegal state aid from Ireland, and told the Irish authorities to recover the money.

Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager has been going after the extremely low tax rates paid by some multinationals in the EU as a competition issue, based on the fact that some giants get them but smaller competitors do not.

In the case of Apple and Ireland, Apple aapl was paying an effective corporate tax lower than 1%, thanks to deals struck with the authorities there in 1991 and 2007. The standard corporate tax rate in Ireland is 12.5%though on the other hand, Apple provides thousands of jobs in Ireland, which is its international base.

Vestager confirmed Tuesday that Ireland had received the sum in full, after payments began in May.

Today Irish Minister of Finance @Paschald confirmed the full recovery of 14 bn of illegal aid to Apple (unpaid taxes). Good. So we can close the Court action on recovery.  Margrethe Vestager (@vestager) September 18, 2018

The money isnt in the Irish tax authorities coffers just yet, though. Apple is still appealing the Commissions decision, so its in an escrow account until that case is over.

Meanwhile, the Commission said Wednesday that it was dropping a similar case involving McDonalds mcd and Luxembourg. Vestagers department took three years to probe the fast food chains tax arrangements in the tiny European country, but she said the reason for double non-taxation in this case is a mismatch between Luxembourg and U.S. tax laws, and not a special treatment by Luxembourg.

Vestagers directorate has decided the other way in a few other cases involving Luxembourg, including one about Amazon.
Audi unveils its first production all-electric vehicle, the e-tron sport utility vehicle at an event in Richmond, California, U.S. September 17, 2018. REUTERS/Joe White

By Joseph White

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - German luxury car brand Audi on Monday staged the global launch of a new electric sport utility vehicle on the home turf of rival Tesla Inc (TSLA.O), and highlighted a deal with Amazon.com Inc (AMZN.O) to make recharging its forthcoming e-tron models easier.

The Audi e-tron midsize SUV will be offered in the United States next year at a starting price of $75,795 before a $7,500 tax credit. It is one of a volley of electric vehicles coming from Volkswagen AG (VOWG.DE) brands, as well as other European premium brands including Daimler-owned (DAIGn.DE) Mercedes-Benz, BMW (BMWG.DE), Volvo Cars and Jaguar Land Rover.

All aim to expand the market for premium electric vehicles and also to grab share of that market from Palo Alto, California-based Tesla, which has had the niche largely to itself.

"I want Audi to be the number-one electric vehicle seller in America over the long term," Audi of America President Scott Keogh told Reuters in an interview on Monday.

Audi dealers, particularly those from California where Tesla has made significant inroads, cheered the e-tron at Monday night's crowded event. Analysts on Tuesday expressed concern that the vehicle's driving range may not measure up to the Tesla Model X.

Audi officials said they do not have official range estimates for the e-tron SUV under U.S. testing procedures. They said the vehicle should achieve a range under less rigorous European testing standards of roughly 250 miles or 400 km.

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Keogh told attendees at Monday's event that an e-tron had made a 175-mile journey over the mountains east of San Francisco with range to spare. He also emphasized that the e-tron is designed to recharge more rapidly than rival electric vehicles.

UBS analyst Patrick Hummel said in a note on Tuesday that the e-tron "fails to set new benchmarks in the premium EV segment, even though we consider it better than the Mercedes EQC." The EQC is a rival electric SUV the Daimler AG (DAIGn.DE) brand plans to launch in 2020.

The e-trons 95 kWh battery has less capacity than the 100 kWh battery used in the Tesla Model X 100D model, but more than the base Model X 75D.

The Model X 100D is rated at 295 miles (475 km) of range by the U.S. government.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who is also head of rocket company SpaceX, marked the e-tron launch by staging a SpaceX event in Los Angeles at roughly the same time on Monday evening as Audi's unveiling. At the SpaceX event, the company named its first private passenger on a planned voyage around the moon in 2023.

RECHARGING

Audi and parent Volkswagen are using the U.S. launch of the e-tron SUV in mid-2019 to take aim at one obstacle to expanding electric vehicle sales - the lack of convenient ways to recharge their batteries.

Audi will partner with online retailer Amazon to sell and install home electric vehicle charging systems to buyers of the e-tron, the companies said on Monday. Amazon will deliver the hardware and hire electricians to install them through its Amazon Home Services operation.

Amazon's partnership with Audi to provide home charging systems is the first time the online retailer has struck such a deal with an automaker, and signals a new front in Amazon's drive to expand its reach into consumers' homes beyond the presence of its Alexa smart speakers in living rooms and kitchens.

"We see charging installation as a very important business," Pat Bigatel, director of Amazon Home Services, told Reuters at Audi's launch event in San Francisco's Bill Graham Civic Center.

Audi executives said home charging stations would cost about $1,000, depending on the home's electrical system.

Tesla offers wall connectors for home charging at a $500 list price, and will arrange for installation, according to the company.

At the same time, Electrify America, a company funded by Volkswagen as part of its settlement of U.S. diesel emission cheating litigation, plans to launch next year the next round of installations of public charging stations, Electrify America executives told Reuters.

Tesla has developed its own network of Supercharger charging stations with more than 11,000 chargers in North America. Electrify America plans to have 2,000 chargers installed by mid-June next year. Those will be open to any vehicle, and customers can swipe a credit card to recharge.

"We want to work with all" automotive brands, said Giovanni Palazzo, Electrify America's chief executive.

LIFTING THE CURTAIN

Audi has been heralding the launch of the e-tron SUV for some time, but until Monday it had not shared many details of the vehicle.

The e-tron is electric, and has two electric motors - one in the front and one in the rear - driving all four wheels. The Hungarian factory building motors for the e-tron will start with a production pace equivalent to 200 vehicles a day, Audi officials said.

In Europe, the vehicle will use cameras instead of conventional mirrors to give drivers a view to the rear. That feature is still not approved by U.S. regulators.

However, in many other respects the e-tron is a conventional, mainstream luxury SUV. It offers seating for five, and its length and wheelbase position it in the center of the market for midsize, five-passenger luxury SUVs such as the BMW X5. The e-tron is 5 inches (13 cm) shorter than the Tesla Model X, and it has conventional doors. The Model X uses vertically opening "falcon wing" doors.

The e-tron will have an advanced cruise-control system that can keep the car within a lane and maintain a set distance behind another vehicle, but the system will be designed so that drivers must keep hands on the wheel.

(Reporting by Joe White in San Francisco; Editing by Matthew Lewis)
Australia ICOs Crypto

Australias financial regulator and watchdog is ramping up its scrutiny into misleading or deceptive initial coin offerings (ICOs) and crypto-asset funds targeting retail investors.

The Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) has confirmed it has identified consistent problems to ultimately shut down several initial coin offerings aimed at soliciting funds from retail investors.

A radical new form of digital fundraising powered by cryptocurrencies like bitcoin and ethereum, ICOs are a source of capital for startups and companies who offer custom cryptographic tokens with an inherent benefit in exchange to investors. ICOs arent banned in Australia and while there is no ambiguity about their legal status, they are largely unregulated.

The use of misleading or deceptive statements in sales and marketing materials, running an illegal registered managed investment scheme without possession of an Australian financial services licenses were, in particular, highlighted by the ASIC as consistent problems found among the targeted ICOs, leading to significant risks for investors.

The regulators commissioner John Price said:

If you raise money from the public, you have important legal obligations. It is the legal substance of your offer  not what it is called  that matters. You should not simply assume that using an ICO structure allows you to ignore key protections there for the investing public and you should always ensure disclosure about your offer is complete and accurate.

Furthermore, the regulator also revealed it blocked ICOs from raising capital in five separate matters since April 2018 due to their lack of investor protection measures. All five ICOs are on hold while some are restructuring to comply with the mandated requirements, the ASIC said.

ICO operators who have completed their token issue are also seeing the ASICs scrutiny. A crypto investment fund dubbed the New Dawn Fund was slapped with a final stop order on its Product Disclosure Statement issued by Investors Exchange Limited (IEL) after the regulators concerns. IEL has since consented to the final stop order, the ASIC added.

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The regulator has previously identified fundamental concerns in the structure, status of the offeror and the whitepaper offered in specific ICOs in the past, putting the brakes on the issuance before its launch.

A year ago, nearly to the day, the ASIC released guidelines on ICO fundraising to remind operators of their obligations before a token issuance.

The regulator said at the time:

ASIC recognises that ICOs have the potential to make an important contribution to the options available to businesses to raise funds and to investment options available to investors.

In April, ASIC commissioner Price confirmed the ICO space will be a key focus area for the regulator going forward. He stressed that the regulator will keep an open mind to new financial innovations but not at the expense of basic consumer protection policies.

Featured image from Shutterstock.



The post Australias Financial Watchdog Cracks Down on Misleading ICOs & Crypto Funds appeared first on CCN.


Chobani founder Hamdi Ulukaya said while he isnt against taking his billion dollar Greek yogurt company public, he does think twice about the move after watching the drama Elon Musk has gone through, especially in recent weeks.

While speaking at Recodes Code Commerce conference Tuesday, Ulukaya said he would consider an IPO if its going to give [him] the tools to be able to [expand], but the situation at Tesla has made him hesitant.

I think sometimes maybe not, he said.

Over the last year, Musk has become one of, if not, the most active of CEOs who tweet.

His tweet last month that said Am considering taking Tesla private at $420. Funding secured has sparked investigations by the Securities and Exchange Commission and the DOJ, according to reports.

Musk partly blamed the tweet on the pressure he gets from short sellers, who have been betting against Tesla since it went public in 2010 at $17 per share. They are desperately pushing a narrative that could possibly lead to Teslas demise. "They're not dumb guys, but they're not super smart," Musk said in an interview with the New York Times following the uproar that created extreme volatility for Tesla shares.

While that drama has made Ulukaya, who has grown his strained yogurt company into an empire generating over $1 billion in annual revenue in less than 13 years, gun-shy about an IPO, he isnt totally against the idea.

The only thing that he would never do, is sell his company to a big food conglomerate.

What happens is all these little brands, these good brands, as they grow, because of the financial structure, 99 percent of them become part of larger organizations, he told Recode. When they become part of a larger organization, its the end of their promise.

He said from day one he vowed to never go down that road because a big part of the companys mission is to diversify its workforce. More than 30 percent of the brands current employees are immigrants or refugees. In 2016, Ulukaya made headlines when he gifted a majority of employees 10 percent of the company.

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A spokesperson for Chobani declined to comment on the company's IPO future.

Related Articles
Japan Crypto Theft





When Tokyo-based Mt. Gox got hacked to the tune of 650,000 bitcoin in 2014, Japan learned early on the tough lessons of cryptocurrency theft. Yet, to this day, despite the countrys ongoing efforts to educate investors and ramp up oversight of crypto exchanges, it still feels the sting of hackers.



On September 20, 2018, on the heels of the Osaka-based Zaif heist, which amounted to $60 million in losses, the countrys National Police Agency (NPA) issued a report of cryptocurrency thefts involving exchanges and individual crypto wallets for the first half of 2018. Japanese news outlet Asahi Shimbun was the first to report on the information.

According to police authorities, during the first six months of 2018, cyber thieves made off with a startling $540 million (60.503 billion yen) in cryptocurrency. Of the stolen money, $58 million came from exchanges, while the remaining $22 million was taken from individual crypto wallets.

During this time period, there were 158 instances of theft  triple the number for the same period last year. In fact, the entirety of 2017 saw 149 breaches, amounting to losses of only $6 million.

NEM coin accounted for the share of the hacked funds, with the majority being taken in the Coincheck breach earlier this year. Bitcoin losses of $7.66 million resulted from 94 breaches. Ripple (XRP) accounted for $13.5 million of the losses and 42 instances of theft.

Finally, 14 cases of theft involved ether, the native cryptocurrency of the Ethereum platform, totalling losses of about $542,000.

Sixty percent (102 incidences) of the 158 total reported incidences were due to individuals using the same ID and password for their cryptocurrency accounts as they did for email and online shopping  a no-no for anyone trying to safeguard online assets.

Lessons were learned in the Coincheck heist. After the rattling event, Japans financial watchdog, the Financial Services Agency (FSA) kicked up efforts to bring exchange operators in line with newer security measures, brought on by laws that went into effect in April 2017.

Story continues

Between January 2018 and March 2018, 76 percent (120 cases) of crypto thefts were reported. After that, due in part to the NPA encouraging people to use better passwords, the number of crypto thefts dropped. And between April 2018 and June 2018, only 38 cases were reported.

Tech Bureau Corp, the company that operates Zaif cryptocurrency exchange, received two warnings from the NSA this year for its lax security measures and is likely to receive another, as regulators do their utmost to reduce cryptocurrency losses in the country.





This article originally appeared on Bitcoin Magazine.
(This story is part of a multimedia series on climate change. Full coverage: https://tmsnrt.rs/2xvdzOS)

By Alister Doyle, Elizabeth Culliford and Lucas Jackson

GREENLAND, Sept 19 (Reuters) - Flying over eastern Greenland, the NASA scientists stared down from a Gulfstream jet as it followed the precise course they had flown in previous years - using radar to map the loss of ice.

In the tube, flight engineer David Elliott said as the team locked into their route over the ice sheet covering 80 percent of the worlds largest island. Out the window, massive chunks of broken ice looked like salt flakes on the water.

The March mission was part of NASAs Oceans Melting Greenland (OMG) project, a five-year, $30 million effort aimed at improving sea level rise projections by understanding how warming oceans are melting ice sheets from below - the most ambitious research on the subject to date.

Rising seas threaten low-lying cities, islands and industries worldwide. But projections for how high and how soon the rise will come vary wildly in part because scientists lack clarity on how fast warming oceans are melting polar ice sheets. The uncertainty confounds the preparations of governments and businesses and fuels the arguments of climate-change skeptics.

(For additional stories, graphics and videos from the Project Greenland interactive series, see: https://tmsnrt.rs/2xvdzOS )

A draft report by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), for example, predicts that seas are likely to rise between 33 centimeters and 1.33 meters by 2100 - a wider range than the 28-to-98 centimeters estimate in the last IPCC assessment from 2013.

The IPCC projections, which were reviewed by Reuters, have not been previously reported.

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Until now, most glacier research has focused on how warming air melts ice sheets, but warming oceans play a crucial role, said OMGs principal investigator, Josh Willis.

Its not just an ice cube and a hair dryer, he said, offering an oft-used metaphor for how warmer air melts glaciers. Were really just beginning to grapple with how these ice sheets are going to behave in a warming world.

The OMG project aims to clarify how Greenland itself contributes to rising seas, but also to apply that knowledge to the study of the much larger region of Antarctica, which has far more ice and could ultimately play a much bigger role in sea-level rise. And while most of Greenland's ice is on land above sea level, large parts of the Western Antarctic ice sheet are below sea level, making them more vulnerable to warming oceans.

Melting ice in Greenland currently adds 0.8 millimeters of water to global ocean levels annually, more than any other region, according to NASA. Thats enough water to fill 115 million Olympic-sized swimming pools.

Scientists authoring the IPCC study, expected to be the most authoritative sea-level assessment to date, declined to discuss the preliminary findings on the record. Hans-Otto Poertner, a leader of the IPCC report, said the document will be subject to review and further revision before its planned release in September 2019.

The forecast range for sea-level rise, however, is unlikely to get more precise, one scientist working on the draft said on condition of anonymity.

The range for sea level rise is getting wider, the scientist said.

HOLES IN THE DATA

Better projections would be invaluable to governments worldwide. Britains Environment Agency, for instance, foresees upgrades to a barrier on the Thames River to protect London against 90 centimeters of sea level rise by 2100, but could modify the plans to account for a catastrophic 2.7 meters.

One 2017 study published by U.S. scientists in a journal of the American Geophysical Union estimated a rise of 50 centimeters by 2100 would submerge land that is now home to about 90 million people, mainly in China, Vietnam and Bangladesh. A rate of 1.5 meters would swamp the homes of more than 150 million people worldwide, the study estimated.

A 2016 study published in a journal of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences predicted that an event comparable to Superstorm Sandy, which flooded large swaths of the New York region in 2012, would be up to 17 times more likely by 2100 if seas rise by 1 meter.

Higher seas are already creating more dangerous storm surges, the IPCC says, exacerbating flooding or coastal erosion from the U.S. Gulf Coast to the Maldives to China. Some low-lying island nations, such as Fiji and Vanuatu, have moved some coastal communities to higher ground.

The IPCC draft says that the rate of sea level rise in 2100 will depend heavily on the effectiveness of governments in reducing fossil fuel pollution, which the U.N. panel says has been the dominant cause of global warming since the mid-20th century.

But holes in scientists' understanding of ice sheet dynamics also make it difficult to predict how glacier melt will contribute to rising seas, said David Holland, a New York University oceanographer who has studied Greenlands glaciers for 12 years.

The modeling of it is like Swiss cheese, Holland said. Its getting into the more challenging projections and unknown physics.

DEEPER, WARMER WATERS

Some of Greenlands glaciers are disappearing more rapidly than others, and understanding why is a key goal of NASAs mission.

New NASA data on water temperature, depth and salinity has helped explain why the rate of ice loss at northwestern Greenlands Tracy glacier is almost four times the rate of the nearby Heilprin glacier. Thats because the fresh water flowing from Tracy, which sits on deeper bedrock, is mixing with a layer of warm, salty water off Greenlands coast, accelerating the melting process, the researchers found.

Many more Greenland glaciers are in similar trouble. Researchers discovered last year that 67 glaciers were connected to the warmer, deeper layer at least 200 meters below sea level  at least twice as many as previously known.

In June, an iceberg four miles wide broke away from Greenlands Helheim Glacier and cracked into pieces in a process called calving, an event that can be caused by warming oceans. Scientists worry that calving will happen on a disastrous scale in Antarctica, where the much larger Thwaites glacier, for instance, is believed to be a linchpin holding back the West Antarctic ice sheet.

If the Thwaites was to behave in the way of Helheim, we have no idea" how fast it could erode, said Robert DeConto, who is a professor of geosciences at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and a member of the IPCC team producing the sea-level rise report expected next year.

The IPCC draft suggests that Antarctica alone could contribute up to half a meter of sea level rise this century and cites increasing evidence that the process may be irreversible.

SOUNDING THE ALARM

The importance of glacier change for global sea-level rise this century was not widely grasped in the scientific community until recently. In 1995, the IPCCs second assessment said little change in the extent of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets is expected over the next 50100 years.

By 2007, it said new data showed losses from the ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica have very likely contributed to sea level rise over 1993 to 2003 but did not factor in future ice-sheet melt because of a lack of published research.

In the beginning people thought, lets just assume that those things are stable, said climate scientist Gavin Schmidt, who directs the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies. Even today, he said, there are very few climate models that have a credible simulation of any kind of dynamic ice sheet behavior at all.

The scientific uncertainty is a political problem, said Tad Pfeffer, a professor at the University of Colorado and former IPCC author. Skeptics including U.S. President Donald Trump attack the science of climate change as an unproven and politically motivated attack on fossil fuel industries, and Trump last year said he would pull the United States out of the 2015 Paris climate agreement that includes almost 200 nations.

"The public, especially if they are getting nudged by anti-science views, take uncertainty as saying, These scientists don't know what theyre doing'," Pfeffer said. (Reporting by Alister Doyle in Oslo, Norway, Elizabeth Culliford in New York and Lucas Jackson in Greenland Additional reporting by Travis Hartman in Greenland and Christine Chan in New York Editing by Richard Valdmanis and Brian Thevenot)
Attention dividend hunters! China Resources Land Limited (HKG:1109) will be distributing its dividend of CN0.13 per share on the 12 October 2018, and will start trading ex-dividend in 4 days time on the 24 September 2018. Should you diversify into China Resources Land and boost your portfolio income stream? Well, keep on reading because today, Im going to look at the latest data and analyze the stock and its dividend property in further detail.

View our latest analysis for China Resources Land

5 checks you should use to assess a dividend stock

If you are a dividend investor, you should always assess these five key metrics:

Does it pay an annual yield higher than 75% of dividend payers?

Has it consistently paid a stable dividend without missing a payment or drastically cutting payout?

Has the amount of dividend per share grown over the past?

Is its earnings sufficient to payout dividend at the current rate?

Will it be able to continue to payout at the current rate in the future?

SEHK:1109 Historical Dividend Yield September 19th 18

Does China Resources Land pass our checks?

The company currently pays out 24.5% of its earnings as a dividend, according to its trailing twelve-month data, which means that the dividend is covered by earnings. Going forward, analysts expect 1109s payout to increase to 35.0% of its earnings, which leads to a dividend yield of around 5.3%. Moreover, EPS should increase to CN3.53. The higher payout forecasted, along with higher earnings, should lead to greater dividend income for investors moving forward.

When assessing the forecast sustainability of a dividend it is also worth considering the cash flow of the business. Companies with strong cash flow can sustain a higher payout ratio, while companies with weaker cash flow generally cannot.

If dividend is a key criteria in your investment consideration, then you need to make sure the dividend stock youre eyeing out is reliable in its payments. Whilst its per-share payments have increased during the past 10 years, there has been some hiccups. Shareholders would have seen a few years of reduced payments in this time.

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In terms of its peers, China Resources Land has a yield of 3.6%, which is on the low-side for Real Estate stocks.

Next Steps:

Considering the dividend attributes we analyzed above, China Resources Land is definitely worth keeping an eye on for someone looking to build a dedicated income portfolio. Given that this is purely a dividend analysis, I urge potential investors to try and get a good understanding of the underlying business and its fundamentals before deciding on an investment. There are three key aspects you should further research:

Future Outlook: What are well-informed industry analysts predicting for 1109s future growth? Take a look at our free research report of analyst consensus for 1109s outlook. Valuation: What is 1109 worth today? Even if the stock is a cash cow, its not worth an infinite price. The intrinsic value infographic in our free research report helps visualize whether 1109 is currently mispriced by the market. Other Dividend Rockstars: Are there better dividend payers with stronger fundamentals out there? Check out our free list of these great stocks here.

To help readers see past the short term volatility of the financial market, we aim to bring you a long-term focused research analysis purely driven by fundamental data. Note that our analysis does not factor in the latest price-sensitive company announcements.



The author is an independent contributor and at the time of publication had no position in the stocks mentioned. For errors that warrant correction please contact the editor at editorial-team@simplywallst.com.
Investing in cannabis is 'a great hedge' for alcohol and drug companies, Tilray CEO says

Tilray CEO Brendan Kennedy shares his take on the future of medical and recreational marijuana with CNBC's Jim Cramer.

Kennedy tells the "Mad Money" host that drug and alcohol makers should turn their focus to companies like his.

Pharmaceutical companies have to start thinking about partnering with cannabis companies as a "hedge" against the burgeoning marijuana industry, Tilray TLRY CEO Brendan Kennedy told CNBC on Tuesday.

"They have to hedge this," Kennedy told " Mad Money " host Jim Cramer in an exclusive interview. "Cannabis is a substitute for prescription painkillers, prescription opioids, and so if you're an investor in a pharmaceutical company or you're a pharmaceutical company, you have to hedge the offset from cannabis substitution."

The CEO said the same goes for alcohol manufacturers, some of which, namely Constellation Brands , have already begun to invest heavily in marijuana plays.

"I think all the alcohol companies need to enter this industry. It's a great hedge for them," Kennedy told Cramer. "Whether you're an alcohol or an investor in an alcohol company, this is a global opportunity."

In March, Tilray formed a "strategic alliance" with a division of Novartis called Sandoz to help the Swiss drugmaker build this kind of hedge. In return, Novartis will help Tilray co-market and co-develop its products.

But if partnership interest were to arise from companies like Anheuser-Busch InBev ABI-BE , the maker of Budweiser, Kennedy wasn't too keen on its potential.

"We don't want to partner with ABI. We want to build ABI," he said. "Our intent is to build a company that dominates part of this $150 billion industry. I think you'll see multiple hundred-billion-dollar companies."

On Tuesday, shares of Tilray surged nearly 29 percent to a new 52-week high after the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency said it would allow the Canada-based marijuana cultivator to ship its product to the United States for medical research.

Story continues

The rally made Tilray larger, on a market-capitalization basis, than 93 companies in the S&P 500 index , including old-line plays like Macy's M and Ralph Lauren RL .

Yet, even with full legalization coming to Canada in October, Kennedy was focused on the bigger picture.

"There's a clear global growth opportunity when it comes to medical cannabis," he said. "With Canada, we're about to see 100 percent growth: one country, Uruguay, to two countries, Canada. What intrigues me is country three, four, five and six."

And the rest wouldn't take long, the CEO said.

"I think you'll see the third country within 12 months of October, and that's where the real opportunity is," he told Cramer. "It's not about Canada, it's about all the countries that follow."

Shares of Tilray are up more than 600 percent since the company's U.S. trading debut in July. The stock ended Tuesday's trading session at $154.98 a share.

Watch Brendan Kennedy's full interview here:

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Call Cramer: 1-800-743-CNBC

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More From CNBC


Japan bitcoin cryptocurrency

Barely before the ink had dried on the news that Japanese cryptocurrency exchange Zaif had been hacked and slightly less than US$60 million stolen, the National Police Agency (NPA) of Japan has released a report highlighting the vulnerability of Japans crypto space.

According to the NPA, the number of incidents involving the theft of funds from cryptocurrency exchanges and individual accounts tripled in the first half of this year compared to a similar period last year. Initially reported by The Asahi Shimbun, the amounts stolen so far this year are far in excess of what was looted last year.

During the entire 2017, a total of 149 cases were reported and more than 660 million yen was stolen but so far this year more than 60 billion yen has been stolen with the reported incidents in the years first half reaching 158. Most of the cryptocurrency holdings stolen this year were seized in the hacking of the cryptocurrency exchange Coincheck which lost about 58 billion yen to hackers in January this year.

Poor Security Safeguards

In the cryptocurrency thefts targeting individual accounts, over 60% of the incidents involved the use of similar login details across online accounts and platforms, according to the National Police Agency. With regards to the cryptocurrencies stolen, XRP was among the most targeted digital asset with 1.52 billion yen worth of the digital stolen seized in 42 cases.

Bitcoin was also highly targeted as 94 incidents were reported where 860 million yen worth of the flagship cryptocurrency was stolen. In the Coincheck hacking, the NEM cryptocurrency was the main target as CCN reported earlier in the year.

After the Coincheck incident in January the industry regulator Financial Services Agency (FSA) intensified efforts aimed at disciplining cryptocurrency exchanges. Though it remains to be seen, the hacking of Zaif is likely to have an impact on the ongoing regulatory review of the sector by the FSA. This is especially so in light of the fact that earlier this year regulators had slapped Tech Bureau Corp, Zaifs parent company, with two business improvement orders.

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Hot Wallet Vulnerability

And just like in the case of the Coincheck theft, Zaif is also understood to have kept the affected cryptocurrency holdings in a hot wallet. Most of the digital assets that were stolen belonged to clients  worth around 4.5 billion yen while less than half of that (worth about 2.2 billion yen) belonged to the cryptocurrency exchange. After the hacking Tech Bureau Corp revealed that Fisco Ltd, a company listed on the JASDAQ, would be acquiring a majority stake in the firm for approximately 5 billion yen.

We will prepare measures so that customers assets will not be affected, said Tech Bureau Corp in a statement.

Featured image from Shutterstock.



The post Japan Cryptocurrency Theft Cases Tripled in H1 2018, $530 Million Stolen: Police appeared first on CCN.


FILE PHOTO: Canadian Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland takes part in a news conference in Washington FILE PHOTO: Canadian Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland takes part in a news conference at the Embassy of Canada in Washington, DC, U.S., August 31, 2018. REUTERS/Chris Wattie/File Photo

By David Ljunggren

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Canada and the United States showed scant sign on Thursday of closing a deal to revamp NAFTA, and Canadian officials made clear Washington needed to withdraw a threat of possible autos tariffs, sources said.

The administration of U.S. President Donald Trump wants to be able to agree a text of the three-nation North American Free Trade Agreement by the end of September, but major differences remain.

"We discussed some tough issues today," Canadian Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland told reporters after meeting with U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer.

Freeland, who has visited Washington four weeks in a row to discuss NAFTA, gave no further details.

Market fears over the future of the 1994 pact, which underscores $1.2 trillion in trade, have been regularly hitting stocks in all three nations, whose economies are now highly integrated.

While multiple deadlines have passed during the more than year-long negotiations to renew NAFTA, pressure on Canada to agree to a deal is growing, partly to push it through the U.S. Congress before Mexico's new government takes office on Dec. 1.

Canada says it does not feel bound by the latest deadline. Asked whether time was running out, Freeland said her focus was getting a deal that was good for Canadians.

Trump came to power last year vowing to tear up NAFTA unless major changes were made to a pact he blames for the loss of U.S. manufacturing jobs.

Trump struck a side-deal on NAFTA with Mexico last month and has threatened to exclude Canada if necessary. He also said he might impose a 25 percent tariff on Canadian autos exports, which would badly hurt the economy.

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Jerry Dias, president of Unifor, Canada's largest private-sector union, who was briefed on the talks by Canada's negotiating team, said Ottawa insisted that the tariff threat be withdrawn.

"Why would Canada sign a trade agreement with the United States ... and then have Donald Trump impose a 25 percent tariff on automobiles?" Dias told reporters.

"That for us is a deal breaker. It doesn't make a stitch of sense. ... We are a small nation, we're not a stupid nation," added Dias.

Freeland said she would return to Canada on Thursday ahead of a two-day meeting of female foreign ministers she is co-hosting in Montreal. Early next week she will be in New York for a United Nations session.

Ottawa is under pressure from some sectors to abandon its insistence that a bad NAFTA is worse than no NAFTA.

Jim Wilson, the trade minister of Ontario - Canada's most populous province and heart of the country's auto industry - met federal negotiators on Wednesday and tweeted on Thursday, "It is imperative that the feds reach a deal."

The Globe and Mail newspaper on Thursday reported that U.S. negotiators want Ottawa to agree to capping its auto exports to the United States at 1.7 million vehicles a year, something that Canadian industry sources dismissed as unacceptable.

Separately, a Canadian source directly familiar with the negotiations said, "We have not discussed a cap."

Reuters and other outlets reported in August that a side letter with Mexico would cap tariff-free or nearly duty-free Mexican imports to the United States at 2.4 million vehicles.

U.S. automakers privately question why the United States would seek to cap Canadian exports to the United States, given that companies are unlikely to expand production in Canada compared with lower-cost Mexico.

(Reporting by David Ljunggren in Washington; Additional reporting by David Shepardson in Washington, Dave Graham in Mexico City and Allison Lampert in Montreal; Editing by Susan Thomas and Leslie Adler)
Elon Musk, the billionaire CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, is reportedly facing a criminal probe by the Justice Department into Musk's Aug. 7 tweet about taking Tesla private. The investigation is just the latest piece of bad news for Tesla and Musk, who has faced growing criticism over his recent behavior.

But, at least Musk has Neil deGrasse Tyson on his side. The famed astrophysicist recently had some strong words for Musk's critics.

"Can they leave him alone?" Tyson asked in a recent interview with TMZ , posted on YouTube Sept. 12. Tyson was referring to the criticism that has been heaped upon Musk, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, after he was filmed drinking alcohol and smoking marijuana during a podcast interview with comedian Joe Rogan in early September.

"Let the man get high if he wants to get high," Tyson said to TMZ about Musk.

With regard to the regulatory investigation of Musk's tweet, however, the scientist Tyson noted that, as the CEO of a public company, Musk must be held accountable to federal financial laws. "He's got to obey the SEC, clearly  there's an accountability to the public trust," Tyson told TMZ.

Marijuana is legal in California, where Musk was filming the podcast, but critics said the incident was the latest example of erratic behavior from the billionaire. Tesla board members have reportedly expressed concerns in the past about Musk's use of recreational and prescription drugs, according to The New York Times . Now, as CNBC previously reported , Musk may have violated Tesla's business conduct policy by imbibing alcohol and marijuana while representing the company during the podcast.

Meanwhile, Musk has also made negative headlines recently by insulting a British cave diver who helped rescue boys trapped in a Thailand cave, and the CEO is also facing an SEC investigation into his August tweet suggesting he might take Tesla private.

However, Tyson still supports Musk amid the recent wave of criticism of the billionaire. Tyson even compares the Tesla CEO and SpaceX founder to one of America's greatest innovators.

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"Count me as Team Elon " Tyson says in the interview. "He's the only game in town. He's the best thing we've had since Thomas Edison."

Tyson, who is the Frederick P. Rose Director of the Hayden Planetarium at the Rose Center for Earth and Space in New York City, previously defended Musk in a live interview with CNBC . Tyson told CNBC that Musk should be allowed to be himself, arguing that people should "let the man be an individual."

Musk, also CEO and founder of aerospace company SpaceX, announced Monday the first passenger on a private space flight around the moon will be Japanese billionaire fashion magnate Yusaku Maezawa, who is rock musician and art collector as well.

Given Musk's interest in space travel and Tyson's knowledge, TMZ also asked the scientist for his thoughts on whether it's possible (or advisable) to smoke marijuana in space.

"The problem is, in space now many things will kill you. So, if you do anything to alter your understanding of what is reality, that's not in the interest of your health," Tyson told TMZ. "So, if you want to get high in space, lock yourself in your cabin and don't come out. Because you could break stuff... inadvertently."

Good to know.

Don't Miss:

Meet SpaceX's first passenger  a billionaire rock musician who got his start selling CDs via snail mail

Elon Musk: Starting SpaceX and Tesla were 'the dumbest things to do'

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BTSE Exchange





The crypto world is welcoming its newest digital currency exchange. Known as BTSE, its a platform designed primarily to look after markets and OTC trading. The system is unique in the sense that it offers multiple currencies through one book, and entities like the U.S. dollar, the euro and the Japanese yen all share the same liquidity pool.



Co-founder Jack Li spoke with Bitcoin Magazine about how the exchange works and what its overall purpose is in offering a multi-currency platform.

Even though there has been some consolidation amongst the existing exchanges, the industry is still largely fragmented and localized, he commented. Our goal in offering a multi-currency platform looks to address some of these issues through the aggregation of liquidity.

Upon registering with BTSE, a user can select their base currency from a list of 18, which includes USD, EUR, KRW, MYR, PHP and many others. Users can then transfer any currency to the platform or trade in their base currency for crypto, while all liquidity is sourced from the same USD orderbook.

Other exchanges that offer multiple books often struggle with liquidity in their secondary books, Li stated. This innovation aims to resolve that issue. If a deposit is sent in a currency we do not yet support, it will automatically be covered at system rate.

BTSE also has a marketplace where verified merchants can offer their services and users can choose to engage directly. Li says this provides faster turnaround times for deposits and withdrawals while empowering users with greater flexibility. Users can also engage in bilateral transactions amongst themselves.

At launch, we aim to offer a fully escrowed DVP [delivery versus payment] functionality where users can determine the terms of their transactions (prices, quantities, types of assets or currencies, etc.), and well take care of the settlement within our highly encrypted and trusted environment, Li said.

At press time, the company is in the process of applying for a VFAA (Virtual Financial Assets Act) class 4 cryptocurrency exchange license from the Republic of Malta and has already received principle approval to operate within their sandbox environment. Furthermore, BTSE has been granted a general commercial trading license and a payment services provider license from the Dubai government in the United Arab Emirates.

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As a platform tailored towards fulfilling the needs of professional traders and institutional investors, usability and reliability are at the core of BTSEs ethos, Li said. Some of the features you will find on our platform include hidden orders, index pegged orders, and of course, our very own BTSE 5 (core coin), BTSE 10 (altcoin), and the BTSE Single Token indexes, which cover prices for currencies like bitcoin, ether, bitcoin cash and litecoin. In the future, we also plan to offer full-fledged capital market services, as well as structured products once the relevant licenses are in place.

BTSE 5 is an index covering the values of the top five largest cryptocurrencies, while the BTSE 10 index does the same for the industrys top 10 performing altcoins.





This article originally appeared on Bitcoin Magazine.
Space debris has become a huge problem, and if not cleaned up, could hinder future missions to the moon or Mars, according to the CEO of Astroscale, Nobu Okada.

"Even the small particle caused by the collision has enough power to blow up a satellite," said Okada.

The company is trying to develop technology that could potentially go up to orbit to identify large objects that pose a threat to spacecraft and bring them down to the atmosphere to burn.

Space debris has become a huge problem. Their accumulation in Earth's orbit has become a hindrance and can endanger future missions to the moon or Mars, according to the chief of a company that's trying to solve the issue.

A surge in aggressive space ventures in recent years has seen a build-up of space junk, and they are set to grow exponentially, Nobu Okada, founder and CEO of Astroscale, told CNBC at the World Economic Forum's Annual Meeting of the New Champions in Tianjin, China .

"Over the last 5 to 7 years, we saw (about) 2,000 space ventures in the world. Their plans are so aggressive, they're going to launch 10,000 to 20,000 satellites over the next 5 to 10 years," he said. "We see the exponential growth of objects in space."

There are more than 500,000 pieces of junk floating around Earth's orbit, including defunct satellites, rocket boosters, nuts and bolts, all of which pose a substantial threat to astronauts and spacecraft, according to U.S. space agency NASA. The European Space Agency said that as of January 2018, there are about 29,000 objects larger than 10 centimeters, around 750,000 objects that range between 1 cm to 10 cm and about 166 million objects between 1 millimeter to 1 cm in size.

Okada said that pieces of debris fly around the Earth throughout the day, and there are plenty of near-miss situations where two objects almost collide. When they do hit each other, those collisions end up creating even more debris.

"Even the small particle caused by the collision has enough power to blow up a satellite," he said. "If we continue the chain reactions of the collisions, we won't be able to put our space assets into space. So it's now (that) we have to remove large objects from space."

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There are objects in orbit that move at about 8 kilometers a second which means, potentially, debris the size of a marble can be devastating to a satellite, David Ball, CEO of Australia-based Space Environment Research Center, told CNBC in August.

Okada said his company is developing technology that can go up to orbit to identify large objects that pose a threat to spacecraft and bring them down to the atmosphere to burn. While the projected cost of removing debris is somewhere between $100 million to $500 million for a single removal, according to Okada, Astroscale is trying to significantly lower that cost.

But Astroscale isn't the only company that's looking at ways to clean up space debris. The University of Surrey Space Centre already has a spacecraft in orbit, with debris-removing technologies such as a harpoon, a net and a drag sail, to carry out experiments, according to reports .

One particular challenge lies in being able to accurately detect the smaller pieces of debris that also pose significant threats. The Space Environment Research Center was studying ways to accurately identify smaller objects in orbit and alert satellite operators, Ball told CNBC.

The debris has actually made a "debris zone around the sphere," Okada said. "When we go to the moon, or Mars, we have to go through this debris band. To securely bring something to the moon and Mars, we have to clean up the space debris."

WATCH: This harpoon could solve Earth's space junk problem





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Spirit Airlines (SAVE) to Strengthen its Base in Florida Spirit Airlines (SAVE) is constantly looking to broaden its network. The latest initiative is aimed at strengthening the company's base in its home state.

In a bid to expand further, Spirit Airlines, Inc. SAVE has decided to operate nonstop flights connecting Jacksonville International Airport (JAX) to Chicago OHare International Airport (ORD) and Detroit Metro Airport (DTW). The new flights will start operating from Dec 20, 2018. Once operational, Jacksonville will become the 69th destination for this Miramar, FL-based ultra low-cost carrier.

Backed by this new service, Spirit Airlines aims to strengthen footprint in its home state. The carrier already serves Florida destinations such as Orlando, Fort Lauderdale, Fort Myers, Tampa and West Palm Beach. While Spirit Airlines has decided to offer direct flights from Jacksonville, another carrier  Silver Airways  will reportedly end services to the same destination on Nov 4, 2018.

Spirit Airlines expects its decision of adding flights connecting Jacksonville to Chicago and Detroit to benefit the company, augmenting its top line. In fact, Spirit Airlines is constantly looking to broaden its network. To achieve its objective, the carrier recently announced its decision to operate nonstop flights connecting Cali with Fort Lauderdale. While flights from Fort Lauderdale to Cali will take to the skies from Dec 20, 2018, the return flight will start operations a day later.

In the event of the plan receiving government approval, Cali will be the fifth destination in Colombia to be served by Spirit Airlines. In the same vein, the company announced its decision to launch routes from Orlando to Latin America and the Caribbean, earlier this year.

Spirit Airlines, Inc. Price

Spirit Airlines, Inc. Price | Spirit Airlines, Inc. Quote

Zacks Rank & Key Picks

Spirit Airlines carries a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold). Some better-ranked stocks in the broader Transportation sector are SkyWest, Inc. SKYW, Trinity Industries, Inc. TRN and Old Dominion Freight Line, Inc. ODFL. While SkyWest and Trinity sport a Zacks Rank #1 (Strong Buy), Old Dominion carries a Zacks Rank #2 (Buy). You can see the complete list of todays Zacks #1 Rank stocks here.

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Shares of SkyWest, Trinity and Old Dominion have rallied more than 40%, 21% and 54%, respectively, in a years time.

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About 15,000 workers at plants owned by ArcelorMittal voted on Tuesday to go on strike as contract disputes drag on, USW International says.

This follows another strike by 16,000 U.S. Steel workers that was approved earlier this month. A strike this big could hinder what Trump calls a "thriving" industry in the U.S.

President Donald Trump 's U.S. steel resurgence might be thwarted as more workers go on strike.

About 15,000 workers at plants owned by ArcelorMittal voted on Tuesday to go on strike as contract disputes drag on, USW International said.

"The flexibility of our contracts and world-class efficiency and productivity of this particular group of steelworkers enabled ArcelorMittal to survive floods of unfairly traded and illegally dumped foreign imports that brought about the harshest market conditions our industry has faced in decades," said Leo Gerard, president at USW International, in a statement.

"Now that the company is generating enormous  even historic  amounts of cash, it is an insult that bargaining progress has been hindered by management's unrealistic concessionary demands and unfair labor practices," Gerard said.

This follows another strike by 16,000 U.S. Steel X workers that was approved earlier this month. Collectively, U.S. Steel and ArcelorMittal account for about 25 percent of the country's overall steel production . A strike this big could hinder what Trump calls a "thriving" industry in the U.S.

Trump tweeted on Monday that the U.S. steel industry is "is the talk of the World," adding it has been "given new life."

Tweet

Trump's tweet comes months after the U.S. slapped tariffs on all steel and aluminum imports, including those from key allies like Canada, Mexico and the European Union.

The administration has said repeatedly that protecting the country's steel industry is a matter of national security. Trump said in a proclamation in May that "steel mill articles are being imported into the United States in such quantities and under such circumstances as to threaten to impair the national security of the United States ."

Story continues

Steel and aluminum producers initially cheered the administration's measures, but now workers want to reap some of the benefits.





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A team of seniors from the Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering outside of Boston collaborated with Mitsubishi Electric to use technology to encourage older adults to cook together remotely. Users can share recipes and techniques, in part through networked wristbands that let them demonstrate to one another their special touch for whisking eggs or flipping crepes.

Students farther west at Worcester Polytechnic Institute have helped an Australian not-for-profit collect data on microplastic pollution in the ocean, which lawmakers can use to help create policy for a cleanup effort.

And undergraduate business students at Bucknell University in central Pennsylvania have designed play areas for a local children's museum that teach about concepts like air and gravity, which they have presented to the museum's board.

Each of these activities is a class or project incorporating two key elements that many undergraduate institutions are increasingly building into their engineering and business curricula. First, the work combines technical study in preprofessional fields with approaches often associated with the liberal arts, such as nurturing big-picture thinking and developing analytical and writing skills.

In addition, colleges are asking students to apply their efforts to real-world needs, working in teams and with actual clients just as they will after they graduate.

Engineering and business are common "get-a-job" college program choices, with about 1 in 5 college graduates in 2016 majoring in business and 5 percent earning degrees in engineering, according to federal data. The fields also command some of the highest average starting salaries, according to the National Association of Colleges and Employers.

But many such programs have traditionally centered around teaching the technical nuts and bolts of business and engineering. Now, as automation, new technology and other forces transform the global workforce, many schools are responding to the demands of employers who are putting a premium on graduates who have both technical know-how and creative and communication skills.

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[Read: College Programs Offer a Path to Professional Degrees.]

Emily Gross, a 2018 Bucknell grad who was part of the children's museum play-area design project, says it helped her break out of her comfort zone and gain confidence in her creative abilities. She worked closely with the museum's board and staff, and had to juggle conflicting feedback -- giving her a taste of real business settings.

"Even if you have the most beautiful design and model, your idea won't be chosen unless you can communicate clearly and persuasively to your client," she says.

Madison Healey, a senior mechanical engineering major at WPI who was in the group that went to Australia to study microplastic pollution, also found the project sharpened her communication skills and ignited her passion to pursue a career in environmental sustainability. Healey was expecting primarily to solve math problems in her college program, just as she had in high school, so she was a little surprised that most of her engineering courses have included writing reports and making presentations.

"Professors are always saying how the industry values writing and people skills as much as the technical skills we are learning," she says. Plus, emerging evidence shows that integrating the STEM fields of science, technology, engineering and math -- plus medicine -- with the arts and humanities at the higher ed level can improve problem-solving, communication and teamwork skills, according to a report released in May from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

Indeed, through partnerships with and feedback from employers, many schools are increasingly recognizing that, while narrowly focused technical curricula may help students get that first job, they will need broader skills to move up, to start their own businesses or to blaze an unconventional career path.

At Franklin and Marshall College, a liberal arts institution in Pennsylvania, business is approached more as a cross-disciplinary social science than as a preprofessional major, which helps to develop students' big-picture thinking, says Bryan Stinchfield, associate professor of organization studies and former chair of the school's Business, Organizations and Society department.

"Students want a program that's going to allow them to blend their intellectual curiosities with their passions, and business education at a liberal arts school really allows that," he says. Every course in the department, even statistics, involves plenty of writing, and class sizes are capped at 16 to 25 to allow faculty time to provide feedback and individualized help.

Bucknell's management majors take the same core liberal arts classes as English majors, and they also must complete at least three writing-intensive courses in the management school or elsewhere in the university, says Raquel Alexander, dean of Bucknell's Freeman College of Management.

[Read: Find an Undergrad B-School That Helps You Stand Out.]

Innovative engineering programs often encourage students to apply their skills as they acquire them instead of making them achieve a certain level of overall mastery before they're let loose in the lab or the workshop.

"Students are tired of the math-science death march: two years of courses when what they really want to do is make stuff," says Khanjan Mehta, vice provost for creative inquiry at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania, which offers a variety of ways to pursue integrated studies among its three undergraduate colleges: arts and sciences, business and engineering. The overall objective is to steep students in ideas like design thinking, global citizenship and evidence-based problem-solving.

Lehigh's Mountaintop Initiative has repurposed a former Bethlehem Steel research facility into a 120,000-square-foot space where students can pursue such cross-disciplinary projects as making and testing 3D printed concrete or developing a Facebook widget that measures the political polarization of a user's news feed.

"When you work on real projects and see why your knowledge is relevant, it makes you learn your math and science better," Mehta says.

Many engineering programs, including Olin, WPI and Rochester Institute of Technology in New York, are taking their cues from the National Academy of Engineering's Grand Challenges Scholars Program, a combined curricular and co-curricular effort designed to prepare students to address 14 global issues for the field, such as securing cyberspace, making solar energy economical and developing better medicines.

More than 50 undergraduate engineering schools have a program approved by the NAE, and dozens more are in development. They're allowed to execute in any way they see fit -- as long as the work is multidisciplinary, multicultural and designed to promote creativity, original research, social consciousness and entrepreneurship.

The multidisciplinary component is especially key, says Karen Oates, a professor of biology and immediate past dean of arts and sciences at WPI. "None of these problems will be solved just by an engineer, so we are interested in combining the very best of engineering and the very best of liberal arts and science."

Rather than creating new interdisciplinary courses as some institutions do, WPI incorporates social context directly into its existing engineering curriculum, and pairs engineering and other faculty -- for example, a biomedical engineer and a political scientist -- to participate in one another's courses.

Their joint course might cover the technical aspects of producing large amounts of a vaccine and a device for dispensing it, but also the social implications of getting it out to the populations that need it and providing it at a reasonable cost.

Robert Martello, associate dean for curriculum and academic programs at Olin, estimates that roughly 15 to 25 percent of the school's classes combine liberal arts with technology in some form.

"Engineering for Humanity," co-taught by an engineer and an anthropologist, has students devise solutions for the challenges of specific people: for example, designing measuring cups and a cutting board for use by a woman with macular degeneration who has lost the center of her field of vision, or creating videos and learning aids for new immigrants learning English.

Mary Martin, a 2018 Olin grad who was part of the remote cooking capstone project, was attracted to the school's holistic approach and the freedom it offered to design her own education. That led her to projects like creating a laser maze that players had to navigate without breaking the beams and setting off an alarm.

The exercise gave her five-person team a technical workout and tested their design and budgeting skills. "It's been a great conversation starter at networking events," says Martin, who joins Bose Corp.'s new business development lab this fall as a mechanical engineer.

RIT has 30 students involved in the first year of its NAE Grand Challenges Scholars Program, and the school is providing funding to help them cover the costs of design projects and international trips. Among the ways that RIT has integrated the liberal arts is a general education course for incoming freshmen that links engineering and other disciplines.

The current iteration is called "Clean Water," and it brings together engineering and philosophy faculty to explore water management -- both the technical, like removing salt from ocean water, and the ethical, like how to address the lead-tainted water system in Flint, Michigan, or allocate scarce water in the American Southwest.

Such courses are just the start of a multiyear, cross-disciplinary curriculum that culminates in senior design projects like medical centrifuges for places without electricity or 3D printing of prosthetics.

Even many large public universities, where students sometimes have to apply to be a part of business or engineering majors, are looking to broaden their preprofessional programs to include the development of critical thinking and writing.

San Francisco State is working to increase the breadth of its business offerings and researching a minor in sustainability to complement current undergrad business electives, says Denise Kleinrichert, director of the university's Center for Ethical and Sustainable Business.

[Read: Business Schools Give Undergraduate Programs a Liberal Arts Twist.]

The University of Wisconsin--Madison is exploring ways to incorporate cross-disciplinary content across a school of about 31,000 undergrads, says Suzanne Dove, assistant dean for academic innovations at the university's Wisconsin School of Business.

Recently the B-school used the common text from a universitywide reading program -- the book "Just Mercy" by Equal Justice Initiative executive director Bryan Stevenson -- to spark first-year business undergrads to create visual representations of some of its civil rights and justice themes.

"One of our students said, 'Gosh, I thought I was going to have to give up my artistic side when I went to be a business major!'?" Dove says. "It was great news for the students to know that we value all of these aspects of their personalities and want them to bring those out."

This story is excerpted from the U.S. News "Best Colleges 2019" guidebook, which features in-depth articles, rankings and data.







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The Swiss Minister for Finance Ueli Maurer recently visited Israel along with State Secretary for International Financial Matters Joerg Gasser, citing their goal as gaining bank access to Israeli markets to allow Swiss banks to trade there.

Reuters reports that the two nations have now agreed to collaborate on financial technology, cryptocurrency, and blockchain regulation following their discussion with the Israeli government.

Gasser also stated that Gasser said he was preparing a report blockchain regulation methods and factors and would be submitting recommendations by the end of the year with the aim that parliament could approve in 2019 and the new regulations could be implemented the following year.

Switzerland has long been at the forefront of blockchain innovation, welcoming startups and researchers from far and wide with their blockchain-friendly regulation. Switzerland is home to Zug, a small Alpine town turned blockchain hub which is now often referred to as Crypto Valley in a nod to Californias Silicon Valley tech hub. ShapeShift exchange and the Ethereum Foundation are both headquartered in Zug along with many other companies.

While the regulatory climate is welcoming in Switzerland, the central bank has been less so. CCN reported in July that organizations in the country were trying to stem the flow companies leaving for other nations after encountering difficulty opening bank accounts over central bank concerns regarding the opaque nature of crypto-crowdfunding.

After the government launched an investigation into the possible use case of an e-franc state cryptocurrency, the central bank shot the idea down, stating that crypto technology was not good enough. However, a new Zug-based startup named ROCKZ is now working on a stablecoin based on the Swiss franc, highlighting to an extent that crypto-technology is progressing with or without the support of the banks.

While one could be forgiven for assuming that Swiss regulators are bringing more to the table in their information exchange, Israel is also a major tech hub. Its the source of most Intel processor chips, and Bitcoin mining rig giant Bitmain has announced that its tripling its development center in western Israel to increase ASIC manufacturing. Last year the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu even suggested that the era of traditional banks and banking was coming to a close altogether and that cryptocurrency may be the turning point saying:

Story continues

Is the fate of banks that they will eventually disappear? Yes. The answer is Yes. Does it need to happen tomorrow? And do we need to do it through Bitcoin? Thats a question mark.

Featured image from Shutterstock.



The post Switzerland and Israel Collaborate on Cryptocurrency & Blockchain Regulation appeared first on CCN.


* August orders +7.1 pct y/y, matching Reuters poll forecast

* Orders from U.S. +14.9 y/y vs. 8.4 pct in July

* China orders +7.3 pct y/y, down from July's +12.5 pct

* Value of orders from Apple is 'high' - government official

* Ministry says expect Sept order growth of 5.0-7.1 pct y/y

TAIPEI, Sept 20 (Reuters) - Taiwan's export orders grew at a steady clip in August, including a surge for those from the United States, reflecting continued solid demand for electronic gadgets despite concerns about global growth due to the Sino-U.S. trade war.

Orders for trade-reliant Taiwan, which rose 8.0 percent in July, increased 7.1 percent in August from a year earlier to $43.68 billion, Ministry of Economic Affairs data showed on Thursday.

In a Reuters poll, analysts had forecast 7.10 percent growth in August, compared to a government forecast of 2.5-5.0 percent.

Taiwan's export orders are a leading indicator of demand for Asia's hi-tech gadgets and other shipments, and typically lead actual exports by two to three months.

The island heavily relies on tech-related exports to fuel domestic growth. Exports are traditionally stronger in the second half of the year due to product launches before Christmas.

In August, export orders from the U.S. rose 14.9 percent from a year earlier, nearly double that of July. Orders from China expanded only 7.3 percent, from 12.5 percent in July.

"We don't exclude the possibility that this is the effect of some orders switching from China to Taiwan," Carl Liu, an analyst at KGI Securities said.

APPLE'S NEW PRODUCTS

Last week, Apple Inc. launched new smartphone models including the iPhone XS and XS Max, and introduced a lower-cost iPhone XR.

Taiwan companies are key suppliers for Apple.

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"The price for Apple's new smartphone orders is rather high, so the value of orders is high," ministry official Lin Li-chen said.

Liu of KGI said that thanks to Apple's new models, August export orders for information communication products and electronic products grew 10 percent and 9.6 percent respectively, "which is higher than the overall export orders' year-on-year growth".

The economics ministry said it expects Taiwan's September export orders to grow in the range of 5.0-7.1 percent from a year earlier.

"The peak for export orders will be in October-November," Lin predicted.

The latest round of tariffs imposed on imports from China announced this month, encompassed some tech components, including computer servers and networking gear that power "cloud" data centers.

One major Taiwan supplier, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. saw August sales slightly decrease by 0.9 percent year on year. (Reporting by Liang-sa Loh and Jeanny Kao; Writing by Jess Macy Yu; Editing by Richard Borsuk)
Texas cryptocurrency

The Texas State Securities Board has issued an emergency action to halt the deceitful offerings of investments in three cryptocurrency related schemes.

The agency entered a cease and desist order against Coins Miner Investment Ltd, DigitalBank Ltd, as well as Ultimate Assets, who is charged for offering Texans misleading ROIs and promising to grow an initial investment of $1,000 into $10,000 in three weeks.

Coins Miner Charged for CyberFraud

According to the emergency order, Coins Miner was found to have used emails and manipulating online media to solicit funds from Texas residents by pretending to represent Coinbase, a San Francisco-based company that operates an online platform for buying, selling, and storing digital currency.

Ana Julia Lara, an affiliate of Coins Minter who crafted the fake email, is also accused of claiming to be a vice president of CoinTelegraph Media Group.

The organization is also accused of fabricating photographs to show its state-of-the-art office, as well as using stock photos to portray its employees. A video featuring stock footage of its servers, facilities, and financial professionals was also cited.

ICO Scam

ICO Initial coin offering

The regulators second cease and desist letter was targeted towards DigitalBank for claiming to be building an external wallet called Photon Encrypted Ledger Key and raising capital for an illegal initial coin offering (ICO). Also, DigitalBank was found to be offering shares issued by the company and the issuance of a utility coin, called DBGK, set for an ICO next year.

According to the order, the company told likely investors to purchase DGBK at a price of $0.50 and sell it for $10.00 during the ICO. With these terms, a $5,000 investment would rise to $100,000 in the ICO period.

The Texas Securities Board, however, concluded the offering was deceptive, as it misled investors on the profitability of the company, while hiding key information needed to make unbiased decision.

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Additionally, DigitalBank is also being charged for misleading people with multiple videos featuring President Barack Obama, used for describing the Photon Encrypted Ledger Key. The videos, according to the Securities Board, are misleading as they were created at the 2016 SXSW festival, several years before DigitalBanks inception.

Misleading Numbers

The third cease and desist letter from the Texas State Securities Board was issued to Ultimate Assets, which deceitfully guaranteed investments with a 900 percent ROI in Bitcoin and Forex trading.

Daniel Dishmon and John Jason Woodard are named for publishing the advertisements for fraudulent investments that target Texas residents.

Also, Ultimate Assets told potential investors that they would be able to provide excessive returns. For example, an original investment of $500 would yield a $5,000 return, a $1,000 investment would yield a $10,000 return, and so on. The company further stated that its trading platform involved no risk and that returns were always guaranteed.

Images from Shutterstock



The post Texas Regulators Shut Down Three Cryptocurrency Scams appeared first on CCN.


Trump will visit the areas affected by the hurricane, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Tuesday, though it wasn't immediately clear which specific areas Trump planned to visit.

Some North Carolina residents began to return to the towns they had fled in advance of the storm, which had strengthened to a Category 4 storm with wind speeds as high as 140 miles per hour before slowing down by the time it made landfall late last week.

The hurricane claimed at least 32 lives, officials said, including 25 in North Carolina. Some measures of the storm's damage are estimated $2.5 billion in total insured losses alone.

President Donald Trump on Wednesday will travel to North Carolina in the aftermath of the massive flooding and destruction caused by Hurricane Florence.

Trump will visit areas affected by the hurricane, White House press secretary Sarah Sanders said Tuesday, though it wasn't immediately clear which specific spots are on the president's list. Sanders told CNBC that more details would be forthcoming.

Some North Carolina residents have begun to return to the towns they fled in advance of the storm. Florence had strengthened to a Category 4 storm with wind speeds as high as 140 miles per hour before slowing down by the time it made landfall late last week.

But days after the wind and rain had subsided, water levels continued to rise in some areas of the state, putting more homes and lives at risk.

The hurricane has claimed at least 32 lives, officials said, including 25 in North Carolina. Some measures of the storm's damage are estimated at $2.5 billion in total insured losses alone.

North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper said Monday that "catastrophic flooding and tornadoes are still claiming lives and property."

Trump has used his Twitter account to focus mainly on the hurricane in recent days, largely avoiding other issues such as special counsel Robert Mueller's Russia investigation and the upcoming midterm elections.

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trump tweet





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FILE PHOTO: Storage tanks are seen at Ecopetrol's Castilla oil rig platform, in Castilla La Nueva, Colombia June 26, 2018. Picture taken June 26, 2018. REUTERS/Luisa Gonzalez/File Photo

By Jessica Resnick-Ault

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Oil prices eased on Thursday, slowing an upward surge that had pushed the market toward four-year highs, after U.S. President Donald Trump called on OPEC to "get prices down now!"

Brent crude oil was down 50 cents at $78.90 a barrel by 11:32 a.m. EDT (1532 GMT). U.S. light crude was down 9 cents at $71.03 a barrel after rising nearly 2 percent on Wednesday.

Global benchmark Brent has been trading just below $80 a barrel, near its highest in almost four years, on expectations that U.S. sanctions against Iran, OPEC's third biggest producer, will reduce global supply.

"We're stuck in a range here," said Tariq Zahir, managing member at Tyche Capital Advisors in New York, with prices supported by sanctions on Iranian supplies and pressured by the potential Chinese demand could wane.

U.S. sanctions were imposed by Trump in response to Iran's nuclear programme. The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and other producers, including Russia, meet on Sunday in Algeria to discuss how to allocate supply increases to offset the loss of Iranian barrels.

The meeting is unlikely to agree to an official rise in crude output, although pressure is mounting to prevent a spike in prices.

Trump weighed into the debate via Twitter, saying "The OPEC monopoly must get prices down now!"

"We protect the countries of the Middle East, they would not be safe for very long without us, and yet they continue to push for higher and higher oil prices! We will remember."

In the range-bound market, Trump's tweets may drive prices down slightly, said Tyche's Zahir, predicting that such tweets would probably continue with U.S. midterm elections approaching.

"The last thing that he is going to want to have happen is diesel prices and oil prices hitting highs when people are going to the voting booth," Zahir said.

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Still, many traders and analysts expect Brent to move above $80 soon.

"Brent is definitely fighting the $80 line, wanting to break above," said SEB Markets chief commodities analyst Bjarne Schieldrop. "But this is likely going to break very soon."

U.S. sanctions on Iran's oil exports come into force on Nov. 4. Many buyers have already scaled back Iranian purchases, and it was unclear how easily other producers, such as Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Russia, can compensate for lost supply.

BNP Paribas oil strategist Harry Tchilinguirian told Reuters Global Oil Forum: "$80-per-barrel Brent is a psychological level, and unsurprisingly, as we approach it, it gets sold into as some market participants take profit."

"As more evidence gathers that Iranian oil exports are heading sharply down, the more emboldened the oil market is likely to be to test, and breach this level."

(Reporting by Christopher Johnson in London, Aaron Sheldrick and Osamu Tsukimori in Tokyo; Editing by David Gregorio and David Evans)
Kevin Hassett, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, said on Thursday that American businesses should look to alternative suppliers as U.S. tariffs on foreign goods continue to rise.

If a tariff makes it so that you cant buy something from China, then you can just buy it from some other country or from our own country, Hassett said during Yahoo Finances All Market Summit event in New York. Theres a lot of demand thats sort of swinging around the world right now because of these tariffs.

The U.S. tacked on an additional $200 billion in tariffs on Chinese imports earlier this week, catalyzing China to retaliate with announcements of intentions to impose tariffs on $60 billion of U.S. goods. The U.S. tariffs, which will take effect on Sept. 24, will begin at a rate of 10%, and could jump to 25% on Jan. 1.

Hassett added that the tit-for-tat, which has escalated since the summer, will continue to have a greater impact in China than in the U.S. Markets in the U.S. rallied Thursday as the S&P 500 and Dow both climbed to record highs despite ongoing trade tensions.

The actions weve taken against China have had a big negative effect on their markets and their economy, but very little effect  here in the U.S, Hassett said.

Kevin Hassett, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, speaks during the daily press briefing at the White House, Monday, Sept. 10, 2018, in Washington. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

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But business owners and economists have largely expressed concern over the tariffs and their impact on costs of imports and loss of access to overseas markets. A Yahoo Finance survey of business operators conducted Sept. 18 found that 23% of those polled felt tariffs will have an extremely negative effect on their businesses, with an additional 13% expecting a somewhat negative impact.

Hassett conceded that U.S. agricultural suppliers have been among those targeted by Chinas tariff retaliations, citing soybean and almond farmers in particular. Were aware that those short-run disruptions are what are the costs of pursuing this long-run reform, Hassett said. The Trump administration announced over the summer $12 billion in emergency relief for farmers hit by the ongoing trade war.

The goal is for Americas major trade partners to open their markets and provide access thats just like the access we give them to ours, Hassett said. The basic principle that the presidents talked about all the way back to the campaign is that we need fair and reciprocal trade.

But the administration is willing to crack down if compromises cant be made, he added. Hassett called Sept. 30 a hard deadline for reaching an agreement with Canada over the North American Free Trade Agreement, echoing sentiments that House Majority Whip Steve Scalise made earlier in the week.

Were prepared to move ahead with Mexico by itself, Hassett. We have a great deal with Mexico  we love it, Mexico loves it.

Emily McCormick is a reporter for Yahoo Finance.

More from the Yahoo Finance All Markets Summit:

Larry Fink: The market will be higher in 10 years

Larry Fink: The new trade deals will be good, but will potentially come at a great cost
STORIES YOU MIGHT LIKE
Reporter

Stephanie Earls is a news reporter and columnist at The Gazette. Before moving to Colorado Springs in 2012, she worked for newspapers in upstate NY, WA, OR and at her hometown weekly in Berkeley Springs, WV, where she got her start in journalism.
With indications pointing to a substantial increase in Hispanic students in coming years, Pikes Peak Community College is preparing for the regions shifting demographics, officials said Tuesday at a school kickoff to mark Hispanic Heritage Month.

Colorados largest and fastest-growing ethnic group is the Hispanic and Latino population, said former Lt. Gov. Joe Garcia, president of the Colorado Community College System.

The bad news is their (educational) success rates are still low, he said.

PPCC, which has three campuses in Colorado Springs with about 18,600 students in certificate and associate degree programs, is working toward becoming a Hispanic Serving Institution.

The designation comes from having a Hispanic enrollment of 25 percent. PPCCs is currently at 18 percent, and leaders have set a goal of bumping it to a quarter of the student body by 2022.

Its doable, said PPCC President Lance Bolton, during a panel discussion Tuesday at the main Centennial campus.

About 30 percent of students currently attending PPCCs two largest feeder school districts, Colorado Springs School District 11 and Harrison School District 2, is Hispanic, he said.

Were looking at approximately one-third of future PPCC students being Hispanic, and we need to be bilingual and culturally competent so they feel welcome, and theres an expectation they feel they can be successful here, Bolton said.

Hispanic Serving Institution status would enable PPCC to apply for Title V federal grant funding to develop specific assistance to meet Hispanic students needs, such as tutoring, faculty development, counseling and other services.

Three community colleges in Colorado already qualify  Pueblo Community College, Trinidad State Junior College and Otero Junior College, Garcia said.

But its about more than about the numbers, Bolton said. The work now and in the future will focus on how to best serve Hispanic students and help them attain success in their education and their lives, he said.

Among the challenges, many Hispanic students are first generation, meaning they are the first in their family to attend college, and many live in low-income households, officials said.

The misperception that Hispanic parents do not care about education is not true, Garcia said.

Every poll being conducted shows Hispanics overwhelmingly recognize the value of a higher education, he said. They often are more likely to not have an education themselves, so cant provide direction and support.

The odds are currently against Hispanic students.

Of any given 100 Hispanic ninth graders in Colorado, 67 will graduate from high school in four years, and of those, 28 will enroll in college for the following fall semester, Garcia said.

Of the 28, Most will need remedial education, and only 20 will come back for a second year of college, he said.

And fewer than 10 of the group will graduate from college in four years.

Its not enough to sustain our economy, Garcia said. Its not enough to protect our community. Its not what we owe the young people of today.

We have to do better.

PPCC aims to improve those statistics with initiatives already underway, including diversifying the faculty. For the 2017-18 academic year, about 11 percent of the faculty were of a minority, compared with 35 percent of students. Four percent of faculty were Hispanic.

To make sure were recruiting and serving our students well, diversifying our workforce is a key goal, Bolton said.

Sylvia Garcia, director of retention services at PPCC, said for every student who comes into her office, Theres someone who looks like that student, meaning employees have different skin colors, which serves as a model for the entire school.

We have a long way to go, said Keith Barnes, who was hired in 2016 as PPCCs executive director of diversity, equity and inclusion. Our faculty and staff dont reflect the community we serve.

A task force is forming to examine how the school can recruit and develop a sense of values pertaining to culture, he said.

Progress has been made. This week, PPCC announced its the only college in the Pikes Peak region, one of four colleges in the state and one of five community colleges in the nation to receive the 2018 Higher Education Excellence in Diversity Award from Insight Into Diversity magazine.

The annual award recognizes U.S. colleges and universities that demonstrate an outstanding commitment to diversity and inclusion.

Christine Mendias, who teaches sociology classes at PPCC, including Intro to Chicano Studies, said just learning that people identify differently is important to note. The word Hispanic originated in America during the Nixon administration to mean of or pertaining to Spain, and They put a bunch of us under that, she said. Mendias identifies as Mexican-American or Chicana.

The current generation, however, often prefers identifying as LatinX, a gender-neutral reference.

Maria Rodriguez Moreno, who graduated from PPCC in May, is now studying immigration law and is a LatinX Union Leader, said shes about representation.

If youre not out there getting involved, youre not representing your culture, she said, adding that action is necessary to instigate change.

Contact the writer: 719-476-1656
Government data released Thursday confirmed what the outdoor recreation industry has known all along: It is indeed a force.

The U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis reports that hikers, cyclists, anglers and off-road enthusiasts pump $412 billion into the nations gross domestic product, accounting for 2.2 percent of the economy.

Those are figures based on 2016, a year in which the federal analysts found the outdoor recreation industry to have grown by 1.7 percent, slightly outpacing that of the overall economy by hiring and paying workers more. The study found the industry produced more than $734 billion in U.S. gross output, the value of the sectors goods and services.

All of this data underscores that outdoor recreation is a significant and growing contributor to the U.S. economy  we strongly encourage members of Congress to invest in public lands as these numbers demonstrate the return on investment, Amy Roberts, executive director of the Outdoor Industry Association, said in a statement.

The report comes after the Boulder-based association lobbied two years ago for the Outdoor REC Act, passed with the help of U.S. senators, including Colorado Republican Cory Gardner. He wrote that act, because its important that Congress has a clear understanding of how much of a major economic driver outdoor recreation is for communities across the country, he said in a statement.

Outdoor advocates flooded the political stage last year when President Donald Trump shrunk Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments, opting for the Utah land to be set aside for oil and gas exploration. When the industrys premier trade show, Outdoor Retailer, debuted in Denver last winter, the clarion call was to save public lands.

The Outdoor Industry Association is urging lawmakers to ensure funding for annual reports by the Bureau of Economic Analysis, hoping eventually for the studies to show regional data.

The association in April released a first-of-its kind report breaking down the industrys impact on congressional districts.

Residents of the 5th Congressional District, including the Pikes Peak region and the Arkansas Rivers headwaters, annually spend $2.14 billion to play outside, according to that report.
A Fort Carson brigade will go from shoe leather to wheels in a shift that will add about 200 soldiers to the post.

The posts 2nd Brigade Combat Team will transition from ground-pounding infantry to eight-wheeled Stryker vehicles after it returns from Afghanistan early next year. The shift will boost the brigade from 4,200 soldiers to about 4,400 as the unit adds hundreds of the 18-ton armored vehicles to its inventory.

Its not the shift that locals expected. The unit had been on the block to shift to a fully armored unit with 72-ton tanks. Along with that change came the possibility of Fort Carson losing the unit as the Army examined relocating it to bases in Texas and Kansas.

We dodged a bullet there, said Colorado Springs Republican U.S. Rep. Doug Lamborn, who serves on the House Armed Services Committee.

In the end, the Army found a solution that leaves everybody but Kansas happy. The Infantry unit at Carson gets Stryker vehicles and a Stryker unit at Fort Bliss, Texas, gets tanks.

Lamborn said the decision to grow the Armys footprint in Colorado Springs shows the Pentagons continuing love for the region.

This shows that Fort Carson remains a high priority at the Pentagon, Lamborn said. It solidifies and entrenches Fort Carsons position.

For the Army, it means two brigades that are better-equipped for a high-stakes war against foes like Iran or North Korea.

The Army leadership determined that we needed to convert two brigade combat teams to armor and Stryker in order to deter our near-peer adversaries or defeat them if required, Maj. Gen. Brian J. Mennes, the Armys director of force management, said in an email.

The change also means that Fort Carsons 4th Infantry Division is no longer the weirdest division in the Army. Usually, Army divisions are made up of either infantry troops, mechanized infantry or armor.

The 4th Infantry had all three. For wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that was a good thing. The mix of capabilities made the Fort Carson division the Armys Swiss Army knife, because it could be called on for almost anything.

But as the Army switches back to great power competition  the newfangled phrase that translates roughly to Cold War  the Army might have to fight with full divisions.

That made the 4th Infantry formation a freaky one, with one brigade chewing up the battlefield in tanks, another rolling along in Strykers and a third, miles behind, running in boots in an attempt to catch up.

Strykers arent tanks. Their thick armor can stop rifle fire but not much more. But they do beat walking.

The Strykers also carry a growing set of weapons, ranging from 105 mm weapons and 120 mm mortars to a new experimental version that carries a laser to knock down enemy missiles and drones.

The vehicles are also quick, hitting freeway speeds even on rough terrain, making them ideal vehicles on large battlefields such as those in the 1991 Persian Gulf War.

And Strykers can do things that tanks cannot. The vehicles are road-worthy, complete with turn signals, meaning that the Stryker brigade can get to where it needs to go without loading it onto trucks or trains.

This was demonstrated in Colorado in 2017, when the posts 1st Brigade Combat Team sent 1,200 vehicles  including the units Strykers  in a 140-mile convoy to the Pinon Canyon Maneuver Site outside Trinidad.

Lt. Gen. Joe Anderson, a former Fort Carson commander who now handles planning for the Army as an deputy chief of staff at the Pentagon, said the Strykers ability to drive to Pinon Canyon was a key factor in putting them in Colorado Springs.

Anderson said another advantage of having the Strykers at Fort Carson is that the post will now have two similar units. That means they can trade personnel and parts as needed when one of the unit has to deploy in a hurry.

It makes sense, he said.

The change announced Thursday, along with the addition of a 800-soldier security force assistance brigade announced in May, will push the population of the post to about 26,000 soldiers.

Contact Tom Roeder: 636-0240
Republican gubernatorial candidate Walker Stapleton unveiled health care proposals Tuesday designed to promote better mental health services, reduce spending on Medicaid and let Coloradans buy cheaper insurance plans.

Stapleton, a two-term state treasurer, said he plans to ask the federal government for a waiver under the Affordable Care Act to make different types of coverage available to state residents  including shorter-term plans and catastrophic insurance for healthier customers. Under the law, the new plans would still have to cover pre-existing conditions, allow young adults to stay on their parents coverage and offer options for maternity coverage.

The proposal comes a day after his Democratic opponent, U.S. Rep. Jared Polis, released his 100-day roadmap outlining the initial steps he says hell take to expand coverage, improve quality and, most of all, reduce costs if he takes office in January.

While Polis didnt address moving the state toward a single-payer plan  something hes supported for years and embraces as a long-term goal  Stapleton nonetheless sharply criticized his rival for it.

Congressman Polis and I have drastically different approaches when it comes to tackling Colorados health care challenges. While Congressman Polis wants to implement government-run, one-size-fits-all health care, I want to create more affordable options for Coloradans, Stapleton said in a statement. Although our current system is not perfect, moving to single-payer will hurt Coloradans and destroy Colorados economy. Instead, we should fix what is wrong with Colorado health care and work together to lower costs and improve the quality of care.

Noting that care for patients suffering from concurrent physical and mental health conditions accounts for 30 percent of health care spending, Stapleton says he wants to integrate mental health care better with preventive and primary care programs.

Among his suggestions are encouraging providers to create one-stop shops for families and making use of long-distance medical practices.
A Widefield High School student was arrested Wednesday on suspicion of planning a threat to the school, the El Paso County Sheriffs Office said Thursday.

The 16-year-old was cited with inciting destruction of life or property, a felony, and remains in custody at the Spring Creek Youth Services Center, sheriffs spokeswoman Natalie Sosa said. The office routinely does not release the name of juveniles.

The threat reportedly was made Wednesday and was brought to the attention of the school resource officer. Widefield School District 3 spokesman Samantha Briggs declined to discuss what the threat entailed but said it never rose to the level where it disrupted school activities.

There no longer is a valid threat to the school, Sosa said.

We strongly encourage parents to have a conversation with their children about the seriousness of charges they could be facing should they make a threat towards students, faculty, or school as a whole, Sosa said.

Contact the writer at 719-636-0362 or find her on Twitter: @njKaitlinDurbin.
When the New York Times launched an ad campaign after Trumps inauguration proclaiming truth is  more important now than ever, we rolled our
VANCOUVER, British Columbia, Sept. 12, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Kaneh Bosm BioTechnolgy Inc. (CSE:KBB)(FWB:8K51)(OTC:KNHBF)(Kaneh Bosm or the Company) is pleased to announce that it has engaged Volare, a leading Lesotho based infrastructure and development consultancy firm. Volare will assist the Company with local development support, as well as the acquisition of land earmarked for Cannabis cultivation, storage and manufacturing facilities. Volare has identified a portfolio of key land parcels that are well suited for agriculture and manufacturing development. The identified parcels are equipped with the necessary onsite utility resources and are located in close proximity to transportation hubs.



Kaneh Bosms portfolio company CanAfrica, holds licenses for medical Cannabis cultivation, manufacturing, distribution, transport, research and import/export in the Kingdom of Lesotho (see Kaneh Bosms news release dated June 20, 2018). In 2017, Lesotho became the first African Nation to issue licenses for medical Cannabis operations. Lesotho is a favourable jurisdiction for Cannabis cultivation due to its rich soils, ideal climate, skilled agricultural workforce, low cost labour, and access to key infrastructure. Lesotho has also signed numerous international trade agreements. These trade agreements permit the unencumbered export of Lesothos Cannabis products to various jurisdictions worldwide. It is anticipated that Lesotho will act as a staging ground for access to larger African markets that may yield greater demand potential.

Kaneh Bosms Chief Executive Officer, Eugene Beukman, states, "Kaneh Bosms African developments mirror industry peers such as Canopy Growth Corporation, Supreme Cannabis Company Inc. and Aphria Inc. Earlier this year Canopy acquired Daddy Cann Lesotho PTY Ltd. for $28.8 million. Daddy Cann and Kaneh Bosms CanAfrica have been awarded identical medical cannabis licences by the Kingdom of Lesotho. In March of 2018, Supreme Cannabis invested $10 million for a 10 percent stake in Lesothos MediGrow Holdings PTY Ltd. Kaneh Bosm would like to also mention Aphria Inc.s recently announced Joint Venture with Lesotho based Verve Dynamics. The Company believes that it is well positioned to capitalize on its flagship African asset while maximizing shareholder value.

Kaneh Bosm also pleased to announce that Company representatives have visited the Kingdom of Lesotho to initiate development efforts and advance regional relationships. The Company continues to complement its existing African cultivation and distribution footprint. Most recently the Company acquired South African based Aricannabis BioTech Corp (see Kaneh Bosm news release dated August 26, 2018). Aricannabis works on an exclusive basis with NuCare Health to provide Cannabis products to over 2,800 independent and corporate pharmacies across South Africa. South Africa has a population of 55 million people and have announced plans through the Medicines Control Counsel for medical Cannabis distribution to South African patients.

The Company looks forward to providing additional updates on its Lesotho initiatives in the coming months.

On behalf of the Board of Directors of Kaneh Bosm Biotechnology Inc.

Michael Martinz

Michael Martinz

President, Director

mmartinz@kanehbosmbiotech.com

THE CSE HAS NOT REVIEWED AND DOES NOT ACCEPT RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE ACCURACY OR ADEQUACY OF THIS RELEASE.

This news release includes certain statements that may be deemed forward-looking statements. The use of any of the words anticipate, continue, estimate, expect, may, will, would, project, should, believe and similar expressions are intended to identify forward-looking statements. Although the Company believes that the expectations and assumptions on which the forward-looking statements are based are reasonable, undue reliance should not be placed on the forward looking statements because the Company can give no assurance that they will prove to be correct. Since forward-looking statements address future events and conditions, by their very nature they involve inherent risks and uncertainties. These statements speak only as of the date of this News Release. Actual results could differ materially from those currently anticipated due to a number of factors and risks including various risk factors discussed in the Companys disclosure documents which can be found under the Companys profile on www.sedar.com
ANDREW GREENE | Australian Broadcasting Corporation | Extract

Read the complete story here

CANBERRA - Australian soldiers could soon begin regular military rotations to Papua New Guinea as anxiety over China's growing influence in the Pacific region continues to rise.

The ABC has learned planning for short-term troop deployments to the former Australian territory is well advanced, similar to the current army training rotations at Malaysia's Butterworth Air Force base.

About 30 Australian army officers are already embedded with the PNG Defence Force (PNGDF), but that number is down significantly on past decades.

A senior Defence department official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Australia had "taken its eye off" PNG during the long Afghanistan war but was now "refocusing on its close neighbour".
Named after legendary dairy-industry icon Stephen Babcock . . . Babcock Hall, which facilitates some of the worlds most cutting-edge dairy product research, will be reborn. Not only will Babcock Hall receive a full renovation, the Center for Dairy Research (CDR) will obtain modern dairy plant manufacturing and processing facilities in the process. Its CDR that co-administers the Wisconsin Master Cheesemaker Program.

Of course, Stephen Babcock is not only a dairy pioneer in Wisconsin, but throughout the dairy world. After all, it was his famed Babcock test that standardized milk testing and milk pricing. Babcock, who left his Cornell research position in the late 1880s, came to Wisconsin and helped birth the idea of Americas Dairyland with Governor W.D. Hoard.

Like that duos innovative work over a century ago, this $47 million investment into dairy product research stands to transform dairy product innovation for generations to come. The joint facility housing the University of Wisconsin-Madisons Food Science Department and CDR is slated to open in 2020.

On September 7, the collective dairy industry came together to celebrate this new dawn for Babcock Hall in a groundbreaking ceremony.

A grand partnership

The Center for Dairy Research (CDR) and Babcock Hall project is unique for a few reasons, shared University of Wisconsin Chancellor Rebecca Blank. Whats unique about this project, first, Id say its been too long, six years in the planning. Thats long, even by Wisconsin state standards. But our patience has paid off, she said.

The facility is going to be one of the premier dairy research and education centers in the nation. And most importantly, its going to be a hub for discovery and innovation for Wisconsins dairy industry . . . working closely with our faculty and our students.

The second reason the project is unusual is that its the result of one of the largest partnerships weve ever created for putting a building together, said the leader of Wisconsins flagship campus. Nearly 200 individuals and organizations gave $16 million in just eight months to make this dream a reality.

Eventually, an additional $2 million was donated by industry partners to bring the total to $18 million.

This is a great example of a public-private partnership that has worked in the past, and I hope will work in the future, said Keith Ripp, assistant deputy secretary of the Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection. This will certainly ensure that the University of Wisconsin-Madison will have a world-class dairy research facility for years to come, said Ripp, who also is a dairy farmer. He added this project had a high level of importance to Wisconsin.

When the Governors Dairy Taskforce met earlier this month, the importance of technology and research was certainly at the forefront, said the ag leader of Governor Scott Walkers most recent dairy initiative.

There are so many people who have worked so hard to bring this project to reality, noted Kate VandenBosch, who is dean of the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. With that, she recognized the donors who collectively gave one of the largest gifts to the college.

Cheese and innovation in the forefront

This new facility provides pilot plant spaces and the new equipment necessary for us to reach this goal of a top-class research and training program, said John Lucey, director of the CDR. I am delighted that the dairy industry had substantial input into the design of the facility.

In terms of program areas that will be new in our building . . . I am very proud to recognize a couple of key areas, said the dairy specialist who previously studied in Ireland and New Zealand. Specialty cheese is a big thing here in the state of Wisconsin, and we will have nine individual ripening rooms that will allow us to make any cheese that the industry wants to do or we want to research on.

This is a big deal, reinforced Lucey. We never had any specialty ripening rooms previously.

We also will have very different styles and types of new cheese vats that will help us train the cheesemakers, said Lucey. This will also help us develop new award-winning products for the future.

We also will install a new spray dryer to help produce new types of ingredients and maximize the value of dairy co-products, he said to the audience of donors and industry shareholders. So, across the entire dairy spectrum, we see a lot of new opportunities.

A long time coming

I recently moved offices, and in the process of cleaning out old files, I found a flyer for the renovated Babcock Hall . . . that was in 1951, said Scott Rankin, chair of the Department of Food Science in comments that drew laughter from the audience.

The construction process actually began at a department committee meeting nearly a decade ago, said Rankin in a more serious tone. Frustrated with the scope of renovations, my then department colleague, Dr. Rusty Bishop, now with Schreiber Foods, stated something that I imagine was on all of our minds, We need a new facility!

With that statement, coupled with the growing programs of the Center for Dairy Research, we began to craft and design a campaign that has finally . . . finally . . . come to this groundbreaking event, added Rankin.

Finally has meaning

We did it! exclaimed John Umhoefer, executive director of the Wisconsin Cheese Makers Association. It was Umhoefer who helped drive the private donations.

When this opens in 2020, as you said Scott (Rankin), we will celebrate a decade that started with inspiration, moved to your generosity, paused with perspiration, and ended with cooperation, he said. That perspiration that Umhoefer spoke of involved snags and intense discussions on how to balance the needs of industry and the university  Food Science and CDR.

For those of you who work every day to make this university better . . . and you have a sense of the agricultural industry . . . for us, this is big news. This is the biggest news that could be happening in Wisconsin right now, Umhoefer pointed out. We churn $43 billion of economic activity in this state in the dairy industry. Now we have a new focal point for our future, he said, giving a nod to the dire economic conditions faced by the dairy sector.

When the Babcock Hall project is completed, it will rank among the worlds very best dairy product research and innovation centers.

To comment, email your remarks to intel@hoards.com.

(c) Hoard's Dairyman Intel 2018

September 10, 2018




IceViking strongly condemns physical attacks and harassment directed towards them.





They are also often victims of the Islamic idea. This is true when it comes to the cruel and tragic treatment of Muslim women and children when it is in accord with the Koran, the example of Mohammed and Islamic law, Sharia, which may be applied regardless of where a Muslim male may find himself in the world, whether in a Muslim or non-Muslim country.





However, in no way, shape or form should one judge all Muslim men because of what is in Islamic scripture and what constitutes the Islamic law, Sharia.





"Race", ethnicity or basically anything that you are "merely" born with should never be a basis for bigotry and discrimination.





Apostates from Islam have been executed for 1400 years in accord with the Koran and the words and actions of the Islamic prophet Mohammed and Islamic law, Sharia.





They should be lovingly helped.





Furthermore, approximately as many as 11,000,000 Muslims may have been killed by other Muslims since 1948.





To quote the website The Religion of Peace (TROP), edited by Glen Roberts:





While it may be safe to say that a true Muslim would not intentionally kill another true Muslim ( 4:92-93 ), the Quran places no such value on the life of a Muslim who is not true. Consider verse 9:73 :

Strive hard against the disbelievers and the hypocrites, and be harsh against them, their abode is Hell.

The Arabic for strive hard uses the same root as Jihad - and the context in this sura is holy war (see v. 86 and 91). Thus, there are two distinct classes of people that a true Muslim is to target with harshness: disbelievers and hypocrites.



A disbeliever obviously refers to a non-Muslim, so a "hypocrite" must be a Muslim of some sort. In fact, hypocrites are those who say they believe, but do not act as they should. In other words, they are "Muslims", but not true Muslims. They will go to hell just as unbelievers do, and so, according to the verse, their lives matter for naught.



The same sura says that a hypocrite can be recognized not just by lack of piety (reluctance to follow Sharia), but by fear of death ( 9:56 ), reluctance to fight ( 9:44-45 ) and even friendliness toward non-believers ( 9:67 ). A true Muslim would thus be a pious person who relishes martyrdom, is eager to fight, and shuns non-believers.



Even the Quranic passage that warns against killing "believers" ( 4:88-94 ) is more complicated than it first appears. It never says that a true Muslim is incapable of killing another Muslim, just that it should not be done. In fact, it makes exceptions for the unintentional killing of "believers" in war and mandates the killing of "hypocrites."



Verse 17:33 says, "Do not kill anyone which Allah has forbidden, except for a just cause" . The greatest cause of all is that Islam be superior ( 9:33 ), which is exactly what Islamic terrorists say is their goal. Thus believing Muslims are allowed to be collateral damage in the war on unbelievers.









There is sadly a phenomena that I`ve noticed in Sweden and elsewhere of people using true facts about Islamic doctrine and history as a cover for all sorts of irrational targeting of Muslims, ranging from xenophobia and racism to verbal abuse and physical attacks.





This is strongly condemned by this website and does not in any way serve serious criticism of orthodox Islam and other important work.





It`s also important that one tries to express oneself in a civilized way. Words matter.





In this bloggers humble opinion the root cause of the problem is the ancient doctrine of orthodox Islam.













In simple terms a non-Muslim is a Kafir.





" The Koran defines the kafir and kafir is not a neutral word. A kafir is not merely someone who does not agree with Islam, but a kafir is evil, disgusting, the lowest form of life."





An exact quote, as stated in the writings of Dr. Bill Warner in the article "Kafir" at http://www.politicalislam.com/kafir .





In the perfect Koran (Allah`s direct and literal word as revealed to Mohammed through the angel Jibril), Muslims are told 89 times to emulate Mohammed in all ways (see Koran 33:21 for instance).





Mohammed`s example, the Sunna, is found in the Hadith (stories of what Mohammed said and did) and the Sira (biographies of Mohammed).





Islamic law, Sharia , is directly derived from these unchanging scriptures. It is based on the Koran`s numerous commands to obey Allah and obey the Messenger, that is Mohammed (see Koran 4:59 for instance).









Islam is Sharia. Sharia is Islam.





It is a capital crime for Muslims to deny Sharia in any way.





A Muslim is someone who submits to Islam and submitting to Islam means obeying the Sharia of Allah.





Sharia law includes pronouncements for both Muslims and non-Muslims (Kafirs).









Islam is a "complete way of life", a "complete code of life", a "complete system of life".





Islam is not just a religion but also a comprehensive ideology.





Islam is a supremacist ideology.





Islam is a totalitarian and imperialistic ideology akin to Communism and Nazism.





Islam is a civilization.

Islamic law, Sharia, is a manual for a civilization.





Islamic law, Sharia, governs every aspect of life.

It has a say about every conceivable human act .





Non-Muslims are morally and legally inferior in Islam. Women are morally and legally inferior in Islam.

























The History of Jihad: From Muhammad to ISIS by Robert Spencer is the first one-volume history of jihad in the English language and a great book on the topic.





Allah guarantees Paradise to those who "kill and are killed" for him (Koran 9:111).





A hadith depicts a Muslim asking Muhammad: "Instruct me as to such a deed as equals Jihad (in reward)." Muhammad replied, "I do not find such a deed." (Bukhari 4.52.44)





Muhammad himself said:

I have been commanded to fight against people so long as they do not declare that there is no god but Allah, and he who professed it was guaranteed the protection of his property and life on my behalf except for the right affairs rest with Allah. (Sahih Muslim 30)









Freedom of speech, human rights, democracy, science and human lives are all at stake in the fight against the Islamic Jihad.




Classroom workers, known as paraprofessionals, work difficult jobs at low wages. Many could become teachers if barriers to certification were addressed.

Like most states, Illinois is struggling with a severe teacher shortage. And, also like most states, that shortage is felt most profoundly in the area of special education. There is, however, an army of teacher assistants already on the job. Could they help relieve this shortage?



Decades ago, when these assistants were known as teachers aides, they Xeroxed worksheets or ran them through the mimeograph machine, and they could be hired with only a high school diploma or a G.E.D. Nowadays, they need 60 hours of college credit or a certain score on a certification test, and their work is harder than clearing jams from the copy machine. Most administrators refer to them as paraprofessionals.

Courtesy of the Students Family Yolanda Harrington walks one of her students into Barkstall Elementary in Champaign. Harrington, who had dreams of becoming a teacher, makes $18 an hour and works a second job. She has been a paraprofessional for 19 years.

MaryFran Wessler has worked as a parapro at Peoria High School since 2003.Many kids in my district are dealing with very tough situations  trauma, stress, addiction, family instability, food insecurity. Theyre coming into our classrooms and very often, the para is the main contact, she says. We have to have the strategies to get them to the place where they can feel safe and learn.Terry Kays works for the Kaskaskia Special Education District, which serves a three-county area in southern Illinois. Shes been a parapro since 2004, and this year works with high school students who have autism. Her colleagues help students who are diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, oppositional defiant disorder or intermittent explosive disorder. Like Wessler, she says shes learned to deal with her districts most challenging students. Yes, absolutely. Believe me, weve been through some, Kays says.Yolanda Harrington works as a parapro in a Champaign elementary school.I dont think they realize the wear and tear that our job has on us physically and mentally, she says. I mean, there are kids that get aggressive with us, there are kids we have to pick up, theres diapering, theres feeding, theres kids running away from us. We do the whole gamut.I dont think they realize how much we really do, and how much we really, really care about the kids.Harrington, Wessler, Kays  and other parapros I talked to  arent complaining about those students; they say the kids are the best part of their job. Because in many districts, paraprofessionals have another, unspoken duty: Theyre the workers school districts use to balance the budget.Paraprofessionals are paid anywhere from $8.25 to about $33 per hour. But on average, even parapros with more than eight years of experience generally make around $14 an hour. Their benefits vary from district to district. Some offer health insurance, and maybe even cover vision. Others offer health insurance, but at a price so high that a parapros entire paycheck goes to cover that cost. Some districts limit parapros to 30 hours a week  specifically to avoid having to provide health insurance.And its not uncommon for school districts to lay off (or RIF) parapros every June, then rehire them when school starts a few months later.After one such layoff, in 2012, Kaskaskia Special Ed re-called parapros under a new contract that wiped out seniority and past pay raises. Kays, who had been making $26,000 a year, saw her salary cut in half. Most of her paraprofessional colleagues were able to find other work and rejected the districts offer. But Kays, who was in her late 40s, couldnt find another job, and was told she was to lose unemployment benefits if she turned it down.So all the extras went out the window, she says. Since 2012, theres been no internet service, no TV service, none of that, in my home.She drives a 1996 Jeep Cherokee without a functioning A/C. I just say, Keep running, baby.Superintendents say the reason paraprofessionals tend to get cut is because many of their positions rely on grants that have to be renewed every year (the Individuals with Disabilities Act provides funds for special ed staff; Title I and Preschool For All fund support services for at-risk learners). Over the past decade, as state funding for schools declined, administrators felt it was safer to cut staff loose before the annual RIF (reduction in force) deadline than risk having to squeeze money out of their tight budget if a grant fell through.For the paraprofessionals like Wessler  who says annual layoffs were a way of life in her Peoria district  this strategy meant summers spent in purgatory.You would get RIFfed every spring and hired back, hopefully, before school started in the fall, but every year you had to deal with that uncertainty. And I will tell you, as someone who came very close to being pink-slipped several years when I first started, that it was nerve-wracking to think that you might not have a job the next year, she says. It shows a lack of respect and a lack of understanding to the value a good para brings to the team.The line between duties that require a certified teacher and tasks that can be handled by parapros may be clear on paper, but in the classroom, things get a little fuzzier. As a rule of thumb, teachers present lessons, or new information. Then paraprofessionals meet in smaller groups with the students who are struggling, and reteach content the teacher has presented.Some parapros assist students who have behavioral disorders stay focused on learning, rather than disrupting the classroom. Harrington, for example, currently acts as the rescue squad for one child who has oppositional defiant disorderThe minute I hear it on the walkie-talkie, I immediately leave the class that Im in and go to see whats up, she says. If its something that I can fix really quickly and he can stay in there, great. But if its something that Ive got to talk him off the ledge, that takes a little more time.

These intense, intimate and even crisis interactions give paraprofessionals a special role in students lives that teachers  who have to worry about test scores, report cards and getting through curriculum  may not always have the bandwidth to manage. But is their role a lesser skillset? Or do parapros have abilities that could be turned into teaching?Bob Chikos, a special ed teacher in Crystal Lake, calls the paraprofessionals he works with my eyes, ears and arms in a classroom, saying they do everything from helping physically disabled students use the toilet to simply noticing when a student doesnt have a pencil. There always has to be a teacher present, by state law, but a paraprofessional can do a lot of the duties just as a teacher.Chikos has done extensive research on the teacher shortage, and he suggests that districts could use parapros like a farm team, cultivating the best ones to become certified teachers. But theres one major problem: Even if paraprofessionals could take courses to earn an advanced degree in their spare time, theyd still be required to serve one semester as a student teacher  for free.But were talking about people who didnt get paid a whole lot to begin with, and then expect them to take four months off from a job, unpaid, to student teach, like, thats going to eliminate a lot of people from moving up, Chikos says.Meanwhile, whatever experience theyve acquired while working as a parapro earns zero credit toward a teaching certificate.Dan Cox, superintendent of Staunton schools, says that doesnt make sense. In his district, one of the services paraprofessionals provide is Tier 3 interventions, working in small groups with the students who are furthest behind academically. Thats important, intensive stuff that we have these people doing, and we spend a lot of time training them to help provide these services to the kids. Its something that translates well to the classroom, Cox says.Tony Sanders, the CEO of the states second largest school district, U-46 in Elgin, agrees there should be some way to harness the experience of those workers.It would really help school districts across the state if there was a way of utilizing our current talent, investing in them and having them then transition from a paraeducator into a teaching role, Sanders says.Chikos believes finding a way to make that happen could help Illinois start to solve its teacher shortage on multiple levels.Then you have maybe a lot of people who dont go into being a paraprofessional because they think its a dead-end job, theyre worried that it doesnt lead anywhere, he says. So I think it would really help both our special ed (teacher) shortage, and our paraprofessional shortage.Of course, not all parapros want to be teachers. After all, unlike teachers, parapros dont have to make lesson plans or take stacks of essays home to grade. But some, like Yolanda Harrington, have given it a shot. While working as a parapro in Champaign, she enrolled in Eastern Illinois University, taking education courses with the goal of becoming a certified teacher. But upper level education classes are off-limits to students who havent passed the Pearson Test of Academic Proficiency, known as TAP. Harrington took the five-hour test  twice  and says both times she fell a few points short.And so since I had been going part-time for so long, I just got burnt out. She graduated with a bachelors degree in general studies.Now, with almost 20 years of experience as a parapro, Harrington earns $18 per hour. She supplements that salary with a second job, working nights at the Champaign YMCA.The State Board of Education recently released a 27-page report meant to address the teacher shortage. It includes several ideas for lowering licensure requirements, including eliminating that TAP test that discouraged Harrington. But none of the recommendations specifically addressed smoothing the path for paraprofessionals to become teachers. The board is accepting public comments via email at TeachIllinois@isbe.net through Oct. 2.
Wayward Motel joins the Wolf Crick Boys on Saturday, Sept. 22 at Bar None.

Lets first pay our respects to a recently departed friend of the local music scene and fan of all the cool music out there. Keith Perks passed away a few weeks ago from natural causes due to recent health issues. We miss his smiling face and cordial company as well as his compelling interest in live music. When the music was being made, Keith was there, cheering on the musicians not just with unbridled enthusiasm but also a deep knowledge of where the sounds originated and how the music fit together to unite us human souls. Join friends and family from 1 to 5 p.m. on Saturday afternoon (Sept. 22) at the VFW on Old Jacksonville Road for some live music, food, drinks and companionship as we celebrate the life of Keith. Also in memoriam theres a John Brillhart Memorial Music Festival held all day in town on Saturday, with details on the events Facebook page.



The main focus of our upcoming scene surely swirls around the 17th Annual International Route 66 Mother Road Festival held in lovely downtown Springfield this weekend. With streets blocked off for a couple of days, the getting in and out aint easy, but the reward of a sprightly uptown happening could be worth the walk. During the day on Saturday catch Stuart Smiths Revelators in front of Recycled Records from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. You can rest assured that the Kesslers will keep the venerable store open late on Friday and Saturday to be in the middle of the festivities as they have been for so many years as mainstays of the downtown community and beyond. The official Mother Road event music space, called the Hot Rod Stage and parked near Sixth and Washington, hosts several local bands that fit into the classic car genre in some form or another. All in all, expect a bunch of live music reverberating amidst the burnouts, rev ups and other organic sounds a car show makes while in progress.

In downtown nightclub action Craft Beer Bar runs the table with the samba sounds of Julie Jules & Co. on Thursday, the mighty music making of Jones & Chase on Friday night, and the solo serenading of Silas Tockey on Saturday. Boones brings in Purple Stardust (Prince and Bowie covers) on Saturday as Michael Burnett takes his Suns to the Brewhaus. Bar None keeps up the onslaught of good music gone better with The Complaint Line, Dead End Lights and Telephone Junkies rocking the house on Friday, plus Wolf Crick Boys and Wayward Motel during a sweet double bill on Saturday.In something that fits in quite well with the theme of the week but away from downtown, check out the live music and other stuff at Route 66 Motorheads Bar, Grill & Museum out on the west side of Route 66/Interstate 55 on Toronto Road. The spot just opened up in May of 2018 and features live music regularly, including the Halls Summer Thunder Tour on Friday with Mike Burnett & the Suns, plus the Mojocats blues-ing it up on Sunday.In unrelated classic car news, on Saturday Last Acre (the daughter-father folk-duo of Molly and Mark Mathewson) perform a Paris-Belle House concert while Old Friends Bruce Horn and Jerry Erickson get to make up once again at Its All About Wine. Be sure to check out the Sunday gigs; things are hopping on our supposed day of rest.Reminder: Best of Springfield voting ends at midnight on Monday, Sept. 24.
Gov. Bruce Rauners campaign-reset speech last week has been described as contrite, a mea culpa and even an apology.



I actually do believe, as Rauner claimed, that hes grown in office. He had to be dragged kicking and screaming into it, but hes grown some.



After losing the budget and tax hike veto battle last year, Rauner eventually found a way to accept a win by signing a historic education funding reform bill. And then he agreed to his very first budget this year, which spent every dime of that 2017 tax hike and more.

Rauner said leaders must be willing to accept incremental improvements, and thank goodness he finally mouthed those words. As former President Barack Obama said at his recent Illinois speech: Better is good  Thats the history of progress in this country. Not perfect. Better.The governor said he now finally understands that there are different points of view, different priorities and approaches, even when we share the same goal of wanting to improve Illinois.As former Gov. Jim Edgar said during the impasse, Rauner should look for ways to accomplish his goals in a more doable manner. Rauner and the Chicago Tribune editorial board absolutely hated that doable talk. For whatever insane reasons, theyd convinced themselves that doable was an abomination. It was their way or no way. At least one person now says that was a mistake.I know the budget impasse was painful, Gov. Rauner admitted. It kept me up at night worrying about the disruption that many families experienced. All of us elected officials let you down in that struggle.While Im glad he finally confessed that he was at least a part of a group that let the state down, he bragged more than once during the impasse about how my wife tells me she hasnt seen me this happy in 20 years, including right up to late June of 2017  just days before a bipartisan supermajority in the General Assembly finally put an end to the monstrous impasse despite his vetoes.Passing a budget with higher taxes over a gubernatorial veto wasnt easy for most legislators. And while it wasnt great legislation, it was the best they could do under trying circumstances, and Rauner did everything he could to stop them and went on to berate and bully them for months.It takes wisdom to listen to those who disagree with you, Rauner said, wisdom that can be gained only through years of tough political fights.Sorry, but that simple lesson couldve been learned without years of unnecessary brutality. Most normal people practice this wisdom in their own lives every day.The governor seemed to use that line to imply that his politically inexperienced opponent hadnt yet faced a trial by fire like Rauner has and therefore wasnt yet ready to be governor. And just a few hours after he delivered his speech, the governor received yet another reminder that Illinois voters understand what Gov. Rauner only now claims to have discerned.A mere 27 percent of Illinoisans say theyll vote for the governor come November, according to a poll conducted for the Illinois Broadcasters Association. Just 24 percent said they have a favorable view of Rauner. The governor trails Democrat J.B. Pritzker by 17 points.This is the third poll since June where the governor scored 30 points or less.We know from the end of his speech that the governor truly believes his opponent is the worst thing that could possibly happen to the state  which kinda negates a lot of the stuff he said at the beginning about being so open-minded.He couldve ended on a high note but chose to drive right back into the ditch. He might be the only person in Illinois who doesnt think corruption is a problem, Rauner said of Pritzker.But, hey, its politics. Both men are going to wage a bitterly negative fight to the end no matter what the polls say or how much one of them promises to change.
Jeffrey Dozier, a Logan Correctional Center employee, was arrested this week on suspicion of sexual misconduct involving inmates.

Officials at Logan Correctional Center in Lincoln have ignored sexual misconduct involving guards and other employees, according to three lawsuits filed since last November.



Two of the lawsuits, including one filed this week, are buttressed by criminal charges filed against accused employees. Furthermore, in an apparently unrelated case, Jeffrey Dozier, a prison employee assigned to food services at Logan, was arrested Monday on suspicion of custodial sexual misconduct, according to a report aired Tuesday by WAND television. Sangamon County jail records confirm that Dozier, 54, was arrested on a warrant by Springfield police. The warrant was issued in Logan County, where the womens prison is located. Jonathan Wright, Logan County states attorney, could not be reached for comment.

In the lawsuit filed Monday, a former inmate identified as Jane Doe says that she was sexually assaulted last year by Milo Ziemer, a prison electrician who was charged in December with five counts of custodial sexual misconduct.Ziemer has pleaded not guilty. His employment status isnt clear. He last received a state paycheck in March, according to the comptrollers office. Corrections officials did not immediately respond to questions.Two of the criminal charges pending against Ziemer, 63, stem from alleged sexual assaults against the plaintiff described in the lawsuit filed Monday in U.S. District Court in Springfield, according to the lawsuit and Louis Meyer, the womans attorney. Meyer says he doesnt believe the other woman allegedly victimized by Ziemer has sued.Under the law, inmates are incapable of consenting to sex with prison employees. Another former inmate, also identified as Jane Doe, sued in August, claiming that Richard Macleod, a Logan counselor, forced her to have sexual relations in 2016 and 2017. No criminal charges have been filed against Macleod in Logan County.Last November, Jacqueline Farris, who is now on work release, sued, claiming that she was raped in a laundry room at Logan by Erik Kohlrus, a guard who was charged with two counts of custodial sexual misconduct in May, six months after Farris sued. Kohlrus, 37, last received a state paycheck on Aug. 26, according to the comptrollers office. Farris says that several other guards witnessed the assault, which occurred in 2015.Her rape occurred under the noses of several correctional staff who saw the sexual assault and did nothing, attorneys for Farris wrote in her lawsuit. In fact, there is a widespread practice at Logan Correctional Center of failing to intervene to prevent sexual assaults and sexual harassment against prisoners at Logan, a practice which emboldened plaintiffs rapist.The plaintiff in the lawsuit filed this week says the maintenance department at Logan where she worked as Ziemers assistant was rife with custodial sexual misconduct. According to the lawsuit, Illinois State Police shut down the maintenance department and conducted an investigation in June of last year.Some of the maintenance department employees would routinely bring contraband into Logan in exchange for sexual acts from inmates, attorneys wrote in the lawsuit filed Monday. These allegations were well known to inmates and staff at Logan, yet nothing was done for months, if not years.The woman who sued this week says that Ziemer forced her to perform oral sex on him in a bathroom and also harassed and fondled her. She also says that Ziemer once held a birthday party for her, complete with cake, balloons and hair straightener for a gift, all of which are contraband. Meyer, the womans attorney, said that someone should have noticed such items being brought into the prison.Milo was bringing gifts and contraband in to entice them  it wasnt just this particular worker, Meyer says.The maintenance department was suited for sexual misconduct because the building had no cameras, Meyer said, and both staff and inmates knew it. Furthermore, he said, employees assigned to the maintenance department were allowed to pick which inmates would work as assistants. According to the lawsuit, there was no policy that prevented employees in the maintenance department from working alone with inmates. Its the ideal place for this to happen, Meyer said.In all three lawsuits, plaintiffs say they were punished after disclosing misconduct. Farris says that she was placed in isolation alongside suicidal inmates and eventually accepted anti-anxiety drugs offered by prison staff. In the other two lawsuits, the plaintiffs say they were transferred out of Logan against their will.They get punished, even though its not their own behavior, said Meyer, who in 2016 won a $1.5 million verdict for Ashley Robinson, who said that she was raped by Timothy Ware, a guard, at Decatur Correctional Center. Ware never was charged with a crime.The state is not named as a defendant in the two most recent lawsuits, which name prison employees, including the warden and internal affairs investigators, as defendants who knew or should have known that inmates were being sexually assaulted. In addition to employees, Farris has sued the Illinois Department of Corrections.Alan Mills, director of Uptown Peoples Law Center in Chicago, says that charges filed against three prison employees in less than a year for sexual contact with inmates is extraordinarily unusual.The number of criminal charges suggests either an increase in sexual assaults or an increased willingness to take allegations seriously, said Mills, whose organization litigates on behalf of inmates, including the woman who sued in August. Mills speculated that its the latter.Im glad to see the department is taking it seriously, he said.
Glenwood High School senior Clare Farnsworth, 18, became interested in political activism after witnessing news reports of the shooting at Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, in February, where 17 were killed and several more injured. Taking her cue from the Parkland survivors who became high-profile activists for gun regulation, she got involved with Action Illinois, helping to organize Springfields version of the national March for Our Lives demonstration the following month.



After March for Our Lives we all decided we wanted to stick together and continue to do things like this, said Farnsworth. This resulted in the formation of Youth Activists for Action Illinois (YAAI) which will be hosting The Day of YAAI on Saturday, Sept. 22, at University of Illinois Springfield. We knew the next big project should be a big advocacy summit where we would start fresh and get new people involved. Saturdays event will include booths staffed by area groups such as Black Lives Matter SPI, Students Demand Action, Springfield Immigration Action Network and others. Speakers for the event will include Democratic congressional candidate Betsy Dirksen Londrigan, Action Illinois co-president Jennifer Lee and senior director of public policy for Springfield Planned Parenthood, Brigid Leahy.



Putting the event together was hectic, said Farnsworth. Its been hard to get everyone on the same page but it has also been fun and educational for us to learn how to organize. In light of the current election season, a major focus of the event will be getting people involved in voting, including topics such as how to be an active participant in the voting process before the age of 18 through volunteering, why people should care about midterm elections and why people should care about local elections.

Representatives of the Cheri Bustos and Betsy Dirksen Londrigan campaigns will be at the event running a version of Bustos Build the Bench candidate training program to teach participants about voting, how to run for office and how to be active in the democratic process. Participants will then canvass for Bustos and Dirksen Londrigan.Farnsworths passion for activism began at home. I have a twin brother who is profoundly affected on the autism spectrum. That is why I was first introduced into activism and the idea of being a voice for people who dont have one, she said. I am very interested in being a good ally and a good advocate.Saturday, Sept. 22, at UIS10-11 a.m.: Check-in and community fair11-11:30 a.m. : Why were here11:30 a.m. -12 p.m.: Civics: Why you should care12:00-12:45 p.m.: Women in Leadership panel with guests Betsy Dirksen Londrigan, Brigid Leahy, Veronica Espina, Jennifer Lee, Anna Cianciolo, and Sunshine Clemons12:45-2 p.m.: Build the Bench2:15 p.m.: Canvassing begins
A hat that purportedly but not provably belonged to Abraham Lincoln is off the display list at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum pending review of the artifacts provenance that has been in question for years.





The announcement by the museum that the hat, which is not on regular exhibition, wont be taken out for public viewing until provenance is reviewed comes in the wake of a Wednesday report by WBEZ radio in Chicago, which revealed that the private foundation that owns the hat engaged in secret efforts to prove that the hat is authentic. The efforts, which involved DNA analysis by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and top historians from the Smithsonian Institution and the Chicago History Museum, failed to verify that the hat is real.

What we learn, no matter what it says about the hats origins, will be shared with the public, Alan Lowe, ALPLM executive director, wrote in a prepared statement announcing that provenance will be reviewed by the museum.

Chris Wills, ALPLM spokesman, said that the museum already has started research efforts to determine whether the hat is real. Its something thats been taking place, as time permits, at least for a couple of months, Wills said. The general idea is, were conducting new research doing a new review of all the evidence to come to as solid a conclusion as we can. Until that happens, it wont be displayed.

According to the WBEZ report, the private foundations verification efforts began in 2013 and were kept secret from the public institution, although ALPLM curator James Cornelius was in the know. When federal agents visited the museum to collect DNA samples from the hat and other Lincoln artifacts in 2015, Cornelius encouraged them to present themselves as a "news crew" upon arrival, according to the stations reporting.





"I think there was just a level of secrecy by our foundation, helped by at that point by a member of our staff, to do that DNA testing that just seemed...very, very strange to me," Lowe told the Chicago station.



The foundation told WBEZ that it summarized authentication efforts for museum officials and the governor's office when asking for state funding to retire a $9.7 million debt incurred in 2007, when the private group borrowed more than $20 million to buy the hat and more than 1,500 artifacts from a member of the foundation board. The governor's office last spring declined the request for money, saying it wanted to see a business plan from the foundation.





Cornelius was terminated on Wednesday. Wills declined comment when asked why. Cornelius could not be reached for comment. The curator had been on administrative leave since last spring. The museum has refused to release records showing why he was put on leave and why he was suspended last year for insubordination. Illinois Times, which had previously been granted Cornelius disciplinary records, sued the ALPLM in July under the state Freedom of Information Act to obtain the records. The lawsuit remains pending.

Its the second time since 2016 that the paper has sued the institution after being denied records. After the paper filed suit two years ago, the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency, which then ran the ALPLM, turned over records memorializing efforts to obtain grants for the Papers of Abraham Lincoln project, which aims to digitize and put online every document read or written by Lincoln.

The WBEZ report has set off something of a firestorm that has been building since the foundation went public earlier this year with pleas for state funds to retire its debt for artifacts, which the foundation has said might have to be auctioned if a bank loan due next year isn't paid.

Concerned about the foundations finances and penchant for secrecy, State Rep. Jeanne Ives, R-Wheaton, in recent months has said that private foundations formed to support public institutions should be required to follow the requirements of the state Freedom of Information Act and the Open Meetings Act. On Wednesday, State Rep. Tim Butler, R-Springfield, called for legislative hearings on the private groups finances and the hats provenance. Historians who prepared the 2013 report for the foundation that included a suggestion that the hat not be presented as an ironclad Lincoln relic should testify, Butler told the State Journal-Register, and so should someone from the FBI. According to the WBEZ report the FBI insisted on secrecy and performed the testing at no charge. Its not clear why the federal agency would perform free testing at the request of a private group.

Controversy over the hat, which the state has valued at $6.5 million, erupted in 2012, when the Chicago Sun-Times reported questions about provenance which, it turned out, had been raised by an appraiser before the sales agreement was reached five years earlier.

After Illinois Times published a 2013 story in which DNA experts suggested that dandruff or some other material could definitively link Lincoln to the hat, the IHPA board discussed tests but took no action. Cornelius was against the idea, at one point interrupting then board member Tony Leone, who favored testing. This is a dead issue, Cornelius asserted. This is a non-issue. Dandruff, bone, hair  its not there."





Nine months later, the private foundation received the report from historians from the Smithsonian and the Chicago History Museum stating that proof is insufficient to present the hat as undeniably having belonged to Lincoln. Eight months after the report was written, Wayne Whalen, then chairman of the foundation board, told Illinois Times that the foundation was conducting an internal review of provenance. He did not mention the report from outside experts stating that the hat could not be proved authentic. "I'll wait and see what the committee has to say," Whalen said when asked why an outside group hadn't been asked to evaluate provenance.





In his written statement released Thursday, Lowe said that the ALPM only learned "over the past months" that the private foundation had arranged for DNA testing of the hat, and he acknowledged strained relations.





"The Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum needs a strong partnership with a private foundation to fully pursue our mission, so it is troubling to see difficulties in our relationship with the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library Foundation," Lowe wrote. "The foundation should always provide prompt, complete information to the presidential library."

Contact Bruce Rushton at brushton@illinoistimes.com.
As of August 26th, 2021 Yahoo India will no longer be publishing content. Your Yahoo Account Mail and Search experiences will not be affected in any way and will operate as usual. We thank you for your support and readership. For more information on Yahoo India, please visit the FAQ
College students across the state are scrambling for options after Harrison College closed its doors Friday, with no warning. The college enrolled more than 1,300 students across its nine Indiana campuses.

One of these students is Ashlyn Bryant. She was slated to graduate from Harrisons medical assistant program this March and learned of the schools closure on Facebook.

I have to find another option 'cause it seems like other schools I have to drive an hour away, or go to class every day," Bryant says. "And I cant work and go to school that much.

The Indiana Commission on Higher Education posted a list of schools for students to contact for a possible transfer. But these students may struggle to transfer their credits because Harrison College was not regionally accredited, and many schools wont accept the credits for transfer.

Marian University announced Wednesday morning that it will offer scholarships ranging from $1,000 to $14,000 for Harrison College students. Spokesperson Mark Apple says Marian will consider students, regardless of Harrisons overall accreditation status.

"Were going to look at each student on a case by case basis to determine what exactly they studied and where, and make a determination from there as to which credits will transfer," Apple says.

Ivy Tech and Indiana Wesleyan University have also agreed to work with former Harrison students to possibly transfer credits.

In a press release, Harrison College listed their "preferred transfer institution" as National American University. The Argus Leader newspaper in South Dakota has reported that NAU is being sued for defrauding the U.S government for millions in student loans.

Bryant monitors a Facebook group for former Harrison College students. She says one of them has already transferred to NAU. She says some students are applying elsewhere, while others are just cutting their losses.

But she says she'll still pursue an education.

"I put in so much time and dedication to this school. And they just, ya know, they dont care about us. They didnt care about our education," Bryant says. "They just wanted our money basically and then shut the doors."

No one from Harrison College could be reached for this story.
The couple were found to be in possession of 500 grams of TAPT, an explosive that is favoured by terrorists, as well as a detonator. They were posing as supporters of the PMOI / MEK.

Tens of thousands of people gather at the event every year, including many Iranians from around the world, and dozens of politicians, human rights activists, officials, members of parliament, and other distinguished guests and speakers.

The day after the couple were arrested, a man named Assadollah Assadi was arrested by German authorities while he was on his way to Austria.

Authorities reported that Assadi was the one who ordered the couple to carry out the terrorist attack near Paris. He is a third consular at the Iranian regimes embassy in Vienna and has diplomatic immunity there. He also provided the couple with the bomb.

The French ambassador to Iran left during the summer and they have not yet been replaced. A French presidential source has said that there is a dialogue taking place between Iran and France on the subject but France is taking into consideration what happened with the foiled attack.

The source said that an ambassador has not been appointed because of the terrorist plot alone, but they did confirm that Iran will be supplying France with facts that will move the matter forward. For now, however, the process of appointing a new ambassador remains suspended.

The Foreign Ministry in France told its diplomats last month that non-essential travel to Iran should be cancelled for now. An internal memo indicated that the reason for this is the hardening of Irans attitude to France.

However, France has been taking great efforts, along with other European countries, to persuade U.S. President Donald Trump to lessen the sanctions on Iran. They have tried to salvage business deals between Iran and European companies, but to no avail. Trump refused to soften his stance and companies have pulled out of Iran for fear of getting caught in the crosshairs.

The PMOI / MEK has revealed much information about the true nature of the regime and has exposed facts and provided much intelligence. The PMOI / MEK has a huge network of people inside and outside the country and it is instrumental in the fight for freedom, human rights, equality and democracy in Iran.

The PMOI / MEK also has a huge following in the country and it has been on the receiving end of major misinformation campaigns. Nevertheless, it has international support as witnessed every year in Paris at the Free Iran gathering.
The struggling economy has been a major headache for the regime because not only is it causing financial issues, it is also one of the main reasons for the widespread unrest in which the people of Iran are demanding regime change.

The people are openly criticising the regime, the government and even the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Criticising the countrys leadership is nothing shocking in itself when you consider its behaviour and the widespread corruption it is responsible for, but in Iran the people who voice dissent risk arrest, torture, imprisonment and even execution.

President Trump announced that crippling sanctions would be put back in place and it has already started to show some effects. The sanctions on the oil sector that are due to take effect at the beginning of November are already having a remarkable impact. Countries are drastically reducing their imports of Iranian oil.

Even European countries that have voiced strong opposition to U.S. President Donald Trumps measures are taking steps to cut their oil imports and it is expected that by next month they will already be down to zero. They do not dare risk being excluded from the powerful U.S. financial system.

The Iranian regime has regarded itself as indestructible over the past few years and this is largely because of the Obama administrations treatment of Iran during his time in office. These years became known as the golden years because the Iranian regime was on the receiving end of numerous concessions and the administration turned a blind eye to most of the regimes belligerence.

After years of getting away with murder, literally, the regime is now being held accountable by the U.S. administration. It is no longer benefiting from feelings of invincibility.

As well as feeling pressure from the United States, there are other goings-on that are holding Iran accountable.

For example, several social media companies have been criticised for allowing fake accounts to spread powerful propaganda. Twitter and Facebook have both taken steps to stop this from happening in the future.

Iran uses techniques like this on social media and it has lobbies that spread messages in the regimes favour. There was a huge undertaking to influence social media users when Trump announced that sanctions were to be re-imposed.

The Iranian regime, of course, and predictably, denied all knowledge of this and then tried to turn the worlds attention elsewhere. It said that Saudi Arabia, Israel and opposition groups abroad have been campaigning to overthrow the regime.

However, it needs to look closer to home. The Iranian people overwhelmingly support regime change because it is the only alternative to the miserable existence that is being inflicted upon them.

The people of Iran are battling to restore the great nation of Iran to something that it can be wholly proud of again. The regime is their only obstacle.
The move was an attempt to restore the peoples confidence in the government after the economic troubles and the dramatic drop in the value of the Rial, the countrys official currency.

However, the people of Iran will never be able to trust the current leadership ever again. They are fully aware that corruption is rife in the country; it is found at all levels of leadership. Former chief Seif was corrupt and has been involved with money laundering and sanction evasion in the past.

Ironically, or perhaps typically, he has been replaced by another person that has a history of corruption. Hemmati has an extensive history of going against U.S. sanctions as well as money laundering.

The Central Bank of Iran has a mammoth task after decades of corruption.

But the institution itself has to deal with certain constraints on top of this. Former chief Seif was sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury Department earlier this year along with members of his staff because of their role in money laundering.

Seif was using an Iraqi bank to launder money to the Quds Force, the special overseas branch of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), and to the Lebanese Hezbollah. Both entities have been designated as terrorist organisations.

Back in 2012, the Central Bank of Iran was sanctioned by the Obama administration for circumventing sanctions. Obama alluded to Irans refusal to comply with its anti-money laundering regulations and highlighted that the Iranian regime is a risk in terms of the international financial system.

The fact that Hemmati has been brought in to help restore the publics faith in the system is laughable.

For a decade he was the chief of two banks that have been sanctioned by the European Union and the United States for supporting the Quds Force and for its role in facilitating the proliferation of weapons. He is also on the board of the Future Bank that was sanctioned by the United States in 2008.

He was also personally sanctioned for his role at the Sina Bank in 2011. He was in charge of the bank that was evading sanctions.

Now that the Trump administration has announced that from the 5th November onwards, transactions being carried out through the Central Bank will be sanctioned, Hemmatis role will no doubt be to circumvent the transactions  something that he has had plenty of experience doing.

However, hopefully the United States, and the European Union for that matter, will realise that Hemmati is not the reformer that the Iranian regime is trying to make out that he is.

Widespread corruption in Iran has destroyed the economy and the people want regime change because they know that this is the only way they will ever have a chance at freedom, democracy, equality and human rights.
- Katrina Halili and Kris Lawrence broke up years ago

- They reunited in order to celebrate their daughter Katies birthday

- The former couple also wrote heartwarming messages for their beloved child

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Former couple Katrina Halili and Kris Lawrence put their differences aside for their beloved daughter Katie.

KAMI learned that Katrina and Kris got together to celebrate their childs 6th birthday.

Happy birthday to this bundle of joy!

Anak, you're growing up too fast!! Wait lang! Ang bigat bigat mo na...

Anyway, i just want you to know that i love you very very much and papa will be home later ha. Enjoy and be good my little one papa loves you, Kris wrote.

Katrina also sent a message to her daughter:

Wonderful birthday to our adorable little princess. You have been the most precious and generous blessing that God has sent into our lives. ILoveYouSoMuch, she posted.

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KAMI previously reported that a video of Katrina showing that she is an expert in driving speedboats went viral.

Katrina and Kris started their relationship after the actress controversy with Dr. Hayden Kho broke out. They called it quits in 2014.

The Kapuso actress gave birth to Katie on September 18, 2012.

Philippines social experiment: can you answer these tricky questions? Today we are going to ask Pinoy strangers some very funny Tagalog tricky questions! Do you think you can answer them correctly? Check it out  on KAMI HumanMeter YouTube channel!

Source: Kami.com.ph
- Actress Anne Curtis could not hold her tears in one of the segments of Its Showtime

- She was embarrassed after mispronouncing a word regarding frogs

- Her co-hosts just made fun of the moment and also commented hilariously

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Kapamilya actress Anne Curtis just could not avoid being in tears when she was hosting one of the segments of the noontime show, Its Showtime.

KAMI learned that the actress made a mistake in the midst of hosting which caused her to apologize to her co-hosts and to madlang people.

The incident happened when hosts Ryan Bang, Amy Perez, Mariel Padilla, Vice Ganda, and Anne were sharing experiences about exotic food.

Ryan opened up that he already tried eating a frog dish that was made in Pampanga.

He also shared that eating frogs can help boost energy especially of men.

However, Vice and Mariel rebutted that frogs are feared by many because of the skin problem that their urine can cause to people.

Anne, on the other side, defended Ryan and expressed that there are frogs that are clean and really edible.

The audience and the hosts burst out of laughter when the Sid and Aya star mistakenly pronounced the name of the frog that she was referring to.

Instead of palakang bukid, Anne mentioned a word that sounded like the informal term for the private part of women.

The actress instantly corrected herself but the studio was already filled with laughter which caused her great embarrassment.

Because of her hilarious error, Anne could not hold her tears that she needed to turn her back to the camera just so she could not be seen by the audience.

Her co-hosts just made fun of Annes error and commented hilariously on the term that the actress accidentally mentioned.

Kinabahan ako! Amy exclaimed.

Ano kaya ang amoy ng palakang yon? Vice mocked.

Here is the video:

In a previous article by , the actress became surprised when Jhong Hilario mentioned about her rumored pregnancy on air.

Born on February 17, 1985, Anne is a Filipina-Australian actress, television host, and model. She married restaurateur Erwan Heussaff on November 12, 2017 in Queenstown, New Zealand.

POPULAR: Read more news about Anne Curtis!

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Imagine that youre walking down streets of the Philippines, thinking of your work, friends, and family. Suddenly a man walking in front of you drops his wallet. He continues walking, without realizing that he has just lost all his money. What would you do in this situation? Social Experiment: How Honest Are People Around You?  on HumanMeter!

Source: Kami.com.ph
- Taguig City PNP arrested Brunei-based businesswoman Kathy Dupaya

- The arrest was in relation to the libel case filed by businessman Joel Cruz

- Kathy is now detained in the headquarters of Taguig Police

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Brunei-based businesswoman Kathy Dupaya got arrested by Taguig City PNP for a case filed by the Lord of Scent, Joel Cruz.

KAMI learned that the said businesswoman is now facing a libel-connected case called Grave Oral Defamation.

Grave Oral Defamation is a case against someone who makes false, derogatory statements regarding an individual's character, reputation, morals, business practices, or financial status.

By virtue of the Warrant of Arrest issued by Judge Andy De Vera of the Manila Municipal Trial Court Branch 28, Kathy was arrested and is now detained in the headquarters of Taguig City Police Station in Tuktukan, Taguig.

It can be remembered that in June, Joel filed a Php20-million libel complaint against the businesswoman because she accused him of selling expired perfumes.

Kathy even insisted that the Lord of Scent has deficiencies in proper government documents.

All of these accusations were bravely denied by Joel.

Aside from the cases filed by the owner of Afficionado, Kathy is also facing an Estafa complaint filed by actress Sunshine Cruz because the businesswoman allegedly did not pay the actress the amount of Php40 million.

In a previous article by , Kathy responded to the allegations of Joel, Sunshine, and other actresses who got involved in their business deal.

According to Philnews.com, Kathy is tagged as the lady who brings stars to Brunei. She is also branded as the luckiest person in the world because she won the lottery for three times already.

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Imagine that youre walking down streets of the Philippines, thinking of your work, friends, and family. Suddenly a man walking in front of you drops his wallet. He continues walking, without realizing that he has just lost all his money. What would you do in this situation? Social Experiment: How Honest Are People Around You?  on HumanMeter!

Source: Kami.com.ph
Govt continuing discrimination against Madhes: Thakur

Rastriya Janata Party Nepal (RJPN) Coordinator Mahantha Thakur has accused the government of continuing discrimination against the marginalised groups.
One killed in Sunsari as assailants open fire near Nepal-India border

A person was killed after two unidentified persons opened fire in broad daylight at Bhutaha bazaar, near the Nepal-India border, in Harinagra Rural Municipality-2 of Sunsari district on Thursday.
Aint Too Proud  The Life and Times of the Temptations Comes to Los Angeles

Center Theatre Group presents a musical about the Motown singing group, the Temptations here in Los Angeles before heading to Broadway in the Spring.

Aint Too Proud, a musical about the life and times of the iconic singing group the Temptations, will be playing in downtown Los Angeles at the Ahmanson Theatre until Sunday, Sept. 30.

The musical takes us from the very beginning when Otis Williams was just a teenager in Detroit, trying to find the right sound and most importantly, the right group. Throughout the show, we see his journey in meeting Melvin Franklin, Eddie Kendricks, Paul Williams and David Ruffin. It tells the story of their brotherhood, music, families, health and more. Audience members go through a range of emotions as the musical takes us through all of the high and low-points of the Temptations.

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If you think that you know everything about the Temptations, you might be surprised. There are such intense scenes and the way this is written, its like dinner and you eat it to be nourished, said James Harkness, who plays Paul Williams. The songs are so funky, the choreography is fire and the audiences are great. Weve had fantastic audiences all the way through and it seems like they just get better as they go.

Aint Too Proud made its first appearance at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre last year, in Aug. 2017. From that first run, it has received great reviews and opportunities to tour around the country. The musical has been performed at The Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., here in Los Angeles at the Ahmanson Theatre and is set to go to Toronto, Canada next and to New York City on Broadway after. The actors are performing to sold out crowds all over and our Los Angeles audiences have brought out some Hollywood celebrities. Debbie Allen, John Legend, Berry Gordy and more have come out to support. Shelly Berger, who was the manager of the Temptations, along with Otis Williams, the only living original member of the Temptations, have also been in attendance at the Ahmanson.

This crowd are true Temptations fans and they come with the nostalgia, and knowing thats Melvin, thats Eddie, thats David. And they will tell you exactly if you were on or off, you cant fake the funk with them, said Jawan M. Jackson, who plays Melvin Franklin.

Theres no need to fake the funk as each actor naturally embodies some aspects the characters played. For Jawan M. Jackson, he relates to Melvin Franklin through his friendly and outgoing personality, while Ephraim Sykes relates to David Ruffin in them both being sons of preachers. Derrick Baskin, who plays Otis Williams, and James Harkness, who plays Paul Williams, both noticed that they have similar outlooks on work and entertaining to their characters. Jeremy Popes familiarity, however, came from meeting Eddie Kindricks daughter and other people close to him. Along with meeting people who knew the Temptations, the Temptations very own, Otis Williams, was very instrumental in mentoring the actors. They were able to text and call him for any information or tips.

It was amazing talking with Otis and hearing stories about his life. Theres no better source when playing someone than the person themselves, said Baskin, who plays Otis. Hes really been helpful with all of us learning the connection that the five of them had and creating our own connection with each other.

Having similar personalities is a plus, but the actors also had to do major preparation. All five said that dancing and singing as well as the Temptations was the hardest part of preparing for their roles. The Temptations sung with soul where you could hear the emotion behind the lyrics. Then in their upbeat songs, they would dance with every movement on beat and synchronized with knee drops, splits and more. One move that David Ruffin does was a must for Ephraim Sykes to learn.

David was a smooth mover. One of the first things that Otis told me when meeting him at the first workshop was, Man youre good as David, but theres one thing that he could do that I never seen any other artist do. Hed take the microphone and throw it up in the air and hed turn around and catch it, do a split, come back up and keep singing. said Sykes, who plays David. He said, If you can do that, you can be David, and I told him, I got you Otis.

The musical takes audiences through hits like My Girl, Papa Was a Rollin Stone, and even a few songs from the Supremes and other Motown artists. It also tackles racial injustice and the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. with a chilling performance of, I Wish it Would Rain.

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This story is a major part of our American History. These men were such a big part of the civil rights era music and aside from that, its a really great time, said Pope, who plays Eddie. We dance, we sing, and we really get in to the connections and relationships that they had.

For more information about tickets to Aint Too Proud, visit www.ahmansontickets.com or www.centertheatregroup.org.
Black Women of Los Angeles Represent at this Years Congressional Black Caucus in Washington, D.C

This years conference uplifted women, millennials and Los Angeles made its mark.

The Congressional Black Caucus Foundation, Inc. (CBCF) recently held its 48thConference in Washington D.C. For the first time in the foundations history, two senators  Senator Cory Booker (New Jersey) and Senator Kamala D. Harris (California) served as honorary co-chairs for the 48th Annual Legislative Conference (ALC). Historically, co-chairs have been members of the U.S. House of Representatives.

The premier conference, which takes place at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in Washington, D.C., attracted nearly 10,000 people from around the world and is the only event of its kind in the United States. The conference offered more than 90 forums on public policy issues affecting Black Americans.

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This year California Rep. Karen Bass announced exclusively with the Sentinel that she is running for Caucus chair. She gave us the announcement live on Facebook. Rep. Maxine Waters held her annual Young, Gifted and Black panel with hip-hop artist Common and the room could be heard chanting, Auntie Max.

Los Angeles African American Womens Public Policy Institute (LAAWPPI) and Los Angeles African American Women Political Action Committee (LAAAWPAC) joined forces this year and held its first panel at this years convention. Presenters included: Celestine Palmer, founder of both organizations, Ingrid Palmer, Joy Adkinson, Patrice Marshall, Tammy Tumbling, Barbara Young Ph.D. and was moderated by Jacquelynn Hawthorne. The presentation encouraged the audience to be civically engaged and provided tools on how to advocate on issues and support candidates.

LAAWPPI alumni Barbara Perkins who started the International Black Womens Public Policy Forum held her 10thAnnual Policy forum, which focused around leadership in a global Black womens movement. Perkins kicked off CBC week with a reception at the Haiti Embassy where she honored media mogul Cathy Hughes.

Other highlights included the Black Millennium Political Convention who held activities for the first time around the D.C. area. The group members include some of the youngest African American elected and appointed officials in the nation.

During the five-day conference, attendees had the opportunity to delve into important conversations with industry leaders from across the globe on public health, gender equality, social mobility, LGBTQ rights and environmental sustainability, among many other topics. Other popular panels included Trump Impeachment and The Negative Effects of Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

The Annual Legislative Conference, over nearly five decades, has brought together some of the countrys greatest leaders, innovators, and job creators to address the most pressing issues facing Black America, said Senator Kamala D. Harris. This year is no exception. I look forward to confronting these issues head on, and working to create solutions that will lead to lasting change.

The ALC is the leading policy conference on issues impacting African Americans and the global Black community. Lawmakers, celebrities and concerned citizens attend the conference to partake in a plethora of forums on health, education, economic empowerment, the environment, civic engagement and more. The ALC is the largest platform in which the CBCF delivers against its mission to eliminate the disparities in the global Black community.
Camille Cosby Appears at Judicial Conduct Review Board

Camille Cosby has filed an official complaint about her husbands judge to the Judicial Conduct Review Board of Pennsylvania.

One week before iconic comedian Bill Cosby faces sentencing in his assault case and just a week after defense attorneys filed a motion asking for Judge Steven T. ONeill to recuse himself, Camille Cosby arrived in Harrisburg, Pa., seeking relief.

The public, and Mr. Cosby, were entitled to know about Judge ONeills bias before the judge made these rulings, Camille Cosby said.

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That this judge would hide his bias and decide that his rival, the former D.A., could not be trusted to give truthful testimony, shows that the judge let his own personal feelings override Mr. Cosbys right to a fair trial. If a judge would do this in a case as high-profile as this one, then he cannot be trusted to be a fair judge for anyone else either.

The former D.A. Bruce Castor told NNPA Newswire that he was disgusted by the prosecution of Cosby after himself promising the legend years ago that if he sat for a deposition and waived his right to remain silent, his words could never be used against him by any future D.A.

The current D.A., Kevin Steele, ran an election campaign on the grounds that he was going to get Cosby, and received the support of Cosby accuser Andrea Constand in his campaign bid.

What is happening to Cosby, as bad a man as he undoubtedly is, should never happen to anyone in America, Castor said.

Im 36 years in the justice system, much of it at a pretty high level and Im disgusted that any citizen entitled to the presumption of innocence has been treated this way, Castor said.

Legal experts also have expressed concern that ONeill refused to rule on whether the 12-year statute of limitations in the case expired, thus avoiding any prosecution of Cosby. Instead, he sent the matter to jurors, who didnt appear to consider it.

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Last week, Cosbys attorney Joseph Green filed a motion aimed at getting ONeill to recuse himself and appoint another judge to consider the case. Green argued that the case has to go back to when it started in early 2016 when Cosby repeatedly sought to get the charges thrown out and the judge to step down. ONeill repeatedly denied his motions.

Green said recently uncovered facts suggest ONeill was biased against Cosby from the beginning due to a long-standing political feud with Castor that the judge failed to disclose after he was assigned the case.

The feud stems from a late-1990s political campaign between Castor and ONeill in which Castor supposedly engineered a campaign dirty trick that damaged ONeills professional reputation, Cosbys motion asserts.

This colored ONeills rulings against Cosbys motions, Green argued because Castor was an important witness who testified about why he decided not to prosecute Cosby on the Constand accusations in 2006.

During the hearing, Judge ONeill actually took over the direct examination of Mr. Castor, questioning him at some length before issuing a ruling that rejected Mr. Castors sworn testimony and wrongfully allowed the case to proceed, the Cosby lawyers said in a statement.

There is no way to view the judges conduct in this case as being consistent with the constitutional right to a fair trial, the statement said.

Judge ONeill must fully disclose the facts of that feud now. There is no other way to correct the injustice that has been done.

A number of legal experts from Philadelphia, Delaware, Washington and as far away as Sacramento, San Francisco and Winnipeg, Canada, said ONeill should recuse himself or at least postpone the Sept. 24 and Sept. 25 sentencing hearings hes scheduled.

Camille Cosbys appearance at the Judicial Conduct Review Board isnt insignificant.

According to Pennsylvania rules,When the Board receives a complaint, the Boards staff makes a preliminary inquiry. During this stage, you and other witnesses may be interviewed, and documents other than those provided with your complaint may be reviewed. Once there is sufficient information to conclude the preliminary inquiry, the full Board will review the complaint.

At this stage, the Board generally chooses to:

Dismiss the complaint because it is clear that the allegations do not warrant disciplinary action against the accused judge; or

Authorize a full investigation to determine if there is clear and convincing evidence of misconduct that warrants disciplinary action against the accused judge

After a full investigation has been conducted, the Board makes another choice:

Dismiss the complaint because there is not clear and convincing evidence of judicial misconduct; or if the Board believes that there is clear and convincing evidence of judicial misconduct, it may file formal charges against the accused judge with the Court of Judicial Discipline.

When asked today why shes filing the complaint, Cosby said shes filing it not only on behalf of Bill Cosby, but for all citizens who may one day find themselves in ONiells corrupt courtroom. This judge must be held accountable for his unethical behavior.
Check with Voter Registrar  Are You Still on the Rolls?

U.S. citizens across the country soon will vote on all 435 seats in the House of Representatives, for 35 U.S. senators and three dozen governorships. The House of Representatives and possibly the Senate are up for grabs.

Given the high stakes, voters would do well to check at least a month ahead of time with their local board of elections to see if theyre still registered to vote. This is especially true for people of color.

The reason is that millions could find their right to vote challenged or taken away under suspicion that theyre trying to vote more than once, largely due to 26 states using the Interstate Voter Crosscheck system, which compares lists of voters in different states and challenges the registration of those whose names come up more than once.

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For the 1,166,000 people in the country who share the surname Garcia, this could be a problem. Likewise for the Rodriguezes (1,094,924), Jacksons (708,099), Washingtons (177,386), Kims (262,352), Patels (229,973), Lees (693,023) and Parks (106,696).

Crosscheck, developed in 2005 by Kansas Secretary of State Ron Thornburgh as a free service for participating states, promised to detect voter fraud by comparing peoples names, social security numbers and birthdates. Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa and Missouri first implemented it in 2006.

During his tenure as Kansas secretary of state, current GOP gubernatorial candidate Kris Kobach expanded Crosscheck to 15 states by 2012 and 29 by 2014 and in 2017 was appointed to a leading role in the White Houses short-lived Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity.

In 2017, of 98 million voting records Crosscheck analyzed, it deemed 7.2 million potential duplicates, although Crosscheck has yet to produce its first voter fraud conviction. Eight states that originally signed on have since dropped out, citing unreliable data. Nonetheless, its still in use in dozens more. Eight of those state have Senate seats up for a vote this year in contests that are expected to be close: Arizona, Nevada, Indiana, Missouri, West Virginia, Tennessee, Ohio and Michigan. And 19 Crosscheck-using states are voting on their governor for the next four years.

In a 2015 named The Health of State Democracies, the Center for American Progress, a nonprofit funded in part by the Gates Foundation, Wal-Mart, Ford Foundation and many others, concluded that the voters Crosscheck tagged for review are disproportionately non-White.

States participating in the Interstate Crosscheck system risk purging legally registered voters with a significant oversampling from communities of color, it said, citing the work of journalist Greg Palast, whos been studying the U.S. voting system since 2000, for the BBC, al-Jazeera America, Rolling Stone magazine and others and produced a film about it, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy.

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Working with data analyst Mark Swedlund, Palast found that among states using Crosscheck, one in six Hispanics, one in seven Asian Americans and one in nine African Americans landed on its list of suspect voters.

The outcome is discriminatory against minorities, Swedlund says.

The chief explanation for the racial inequity is that ethnic communities are more likely to share a surname, such as Washington, Lee, Patel or Kim, Palast told Ethnic Media Services.

Swedlund and Palast found that the Crosscheck system seems satisfied that if two people share a common first and last name, theyre suspect. Differences in their birthdate, middle initial, Social Security numbers or suffixes such as Jr. and Sr. dont keep registered voters off Crosschecks lists.

Not all 7 million people whose names appear on Crosschecks lists will be denied a vote, though. For one thing, only 36.4% of the people who were registered to vote even showed up at the polls in 2014. In one survey of elections between 1960 and 1995, the United States ranks dead last in the democracies of the world, with an average turnout of 48%.

Would-be voters whose names are missing from the lists of registered voters will be given whats called a provisional ballot, to be tallied if the voter is ultimately found to have been wrongly left off the lists. Palast, however, skeptical that many provisional ballots are ever counted, refers to them as placebo ballots.

Voters eager to cast genuine ballots, then, might want to call their local board of elections well in advance of Nov. 6 to be sure that theyll be allowed to vote.

In 2018s highly charged political environment, individual votes may count more than ever. Take, for example, the recent special election for the vacant seat representing Ohios 12th congressional district.

In that still undecided Aug. 7 race, 1,200 votes separate Republican Troy Balderson and Democrat Danny OConnor at press time.

Ohio has removed almost 200,000 voters from the rolls because they appeared on the Crosscheck lists.

The margin of victory in the states 12th District race may ultimately be found among the 5,048 absentee ballots not yet tallied and the still uncounted 3,435 provisional ballots.

No matter which of the candidates is awarded Ohios vacant 12th District Congressional seat based on the August election, voters will get another chance to decide between Balderson and OConnor in November.

Thats why voters who want to have their voices heard Nov. 6, in Ohio and elsewhere, should call local officials ahead of time to see if any problems have come up with their registration.
Climate Change is a Public Health Crises: Blacks Mostly Absent From The Conversation

Governor Jerry Brown and his team gathered more than four thousand people from around the world in San Francisco for three days last week to sound the alarm: Climate Change is a public health issue!

Hundreds of people protested and disrupted this gathering of environmentalist, policymakers and business executives because  wait for it  the Governor hasnt done enough to decarbonize California and reduce fossil fuel energy use. This, despite his recent signing of Senate Bill 100, which declared California only use clean, renewable energy by the year 2045.

The summit was organized to raise awareness of the need to reduce fossil fuel and coal-fired energy from our economy and continue the worldwide plan to reduce global greenhouse gasses agreed upon during the Paris accord in 2015.

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Reducing carbon, fossil fuel energy and greenhouse gasses is a big deal because scientist, global leaders, and the World Health Organization declare climate change as a public health crisis.

Scientists contend we are living in the hottest days ever. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association, the average temperature across the worlds land and ocean surfaces was 58.69 Fahrenheit, or 1.69 degrees above the 20th-century average of 57 degrees and the continued rise of heat on the planet is causing extreme weather patterns, unusual fire episodes, and poor air quality.

Because of the rising heat on earth, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) released an exhaustive report detailing adverse health effects on impoverished communities from around the world and people of color at the top of the list of poor health outcomes due to climate change.

Theres an old saying in the Black community, When white folks catch a cold, Black folks get pneumonia.

There are few studies analyzing the effects of climate change focusing specifically on the African American community, however, Norris McDonald, president of the African American Environmentalist Association (AAEA) has logged exhaustive reports concluding, Two things are certain: African American advancement and health are inextricably tied to economic development and a clean environment.

The historic gathering in San Francisco did not provide any specific plenaries or focus on African Americans; however, there was significant detail on impoverished communities around the world, which included people of all melanin type.

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Dr. Aparna Bole, co-chair of Health Care Without Harm (HCWH) in Cleveland, Ohio showed images of coal-fired plants in the Midwest. She made a case to be more cognizant of protecting people of color and people living in poor communities. Air pollution from fossil fuel combustion affects the health of my patients every day, she warned, Particulate air pollution from coal fire power plants can cause exasperated chronic lung conditions like asthma, contribute to morbidity from cardiovascular disease, contribute to premature birth and low birth weight and neurological disorders. One out of five of my patients has asthma. Thats twice the prevalence of pediatric asthma nationwide and reflects the fact that African American and Latino children suffer disproportionally in Cleveland and communities around this country.

Dr. Bole went on to tell a story about a young boy who was overweight and suffering from asthma felt good enough to go outside but she felt obligated to let him know he should check the air quality and may need to reconsider going out to play due to his poor health condition.

While Blacks were mostly absent from most of the plenaries and with very few African American delegates, McDonald and the AAEA provide insight into the concerns of the Black community in relation to the entire global effort.

McDonald writes, Empirical evidence demonstrates that humankinds emissions lead directly to smog, acid rain, dirty water and negative human health consequences in Americas urban, suburban and rural areas. A measured response to our atmospheric climate management is prudent.

Kaiser Permanente, Salesforce, Hyundai Motor Company, and other primary business interests lined up to tell their story about using renewables as their source of energy.

Bernard Tyson, chairman, and CEO of Kaiser announced with prideful exuberance, Earlier this week we announced that we now have put additional agreements in place to achieve our commitment of being carbon neutral by the end of 2020.

Summit protestors remain skeptical of Californias pledge to eliminate fossil fuel use as they disrupted traffic and blocked one of the entrances at the Moscone Center and criticized Governor Browns effort. They point to the unintended consequence of the states cap and trade program, proclaiming its a license to pollute and a series of new oil drilling permits his administration recently approved.

For his part Brown defiantly said, We have a plan to phase out oil, to bring in total clean technology. If they have a better one, let me know.
Community Women Vital Voices and E-Central Credit Union Celebrate Gerald Freeny

Community Women Vital Voices in association with E-Central Credit Union hosted Community Celebration for Gerald Freeny, 2019 Tournament of Roses president, was a resounding success. The event which took place on Sunday, September 9, 2018 celebrated Mr. Freenys achievements and him becoming the first African American president in the Tournament of Roses 123 year history. It was a historic occasion for members of the community to enjoy.

Pasadena Mayor Terry Tornek; Vice Mayor John J. Kennedy; City Councilmen Tyron Hampton; and Andy Wilson, Congresswomen Maxine Waters and Judy Chu, State Senator Steve Bradford, State Assemblymen Chris Holden, Mike Gibson and Reggie Jones Sawyer; Hon. Linda Wah, PCC Board of Trustees; Jonathan Veitch, president Occidental College; Dr. Terrence Roberts, Little Rock Nine; Dr. Soray Coley, president, Cal Poly Pomona; and Danny Bakewell, Sr., owner of The Bakewell Company, were among the host of dignitaries and community leaders who honored Mr. Freeny at E-Central Credit Union Pasadena headquarters. Over 300 community-minded individuals were in attendance and enjoyed scrumptious food, jazz music performed by Nolan Shaheed Quintet and the Pasadena Symphony, Violinists.

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Trina Freeny, wife of Gerald Freeny, accepted a Special Award from Mark A. Garmus, E-Central Credit Union Chairman of the Board. She also received Congressional Certificates, California State and Assembly proclamations and many other accolades on behalf of her husband. Mr. Freeny did not attend the event due to illness.

E-Central was delighted to partner with Community Women Vital Voices in honoring Mr. Freenys many years of service and volunteerism, said Michael Theodore, President/CEO E-Central Credit Union. We sincerely appreciated participating in this historic event, he added.

Chaired by Ron Carter and Lena Kennedy, as well as many Community Co-Hosts, the event brought together several diverse groups from the Pasadena and Los Angeles County communities. It also signaled the progress the Tournament of Roses has made in its leadership ranks in recent history.
Data Reveals Poorest Communities in L.A. County Endure Heavy Indecencies of Oil Drilling

An analysis of data recently collected by the South Coast Air Quality Management District team revealed that some of the poorest communities in Los Angeles County are enduring some of the heaviest incidences of oil drilling. About 15 zip codes, in which oil companies used the most chemicals known to cause serious health problems (air toxics) include several areas of Long Beach, South L.A. County and the Westside, revealed the data which was organized by analysts at the Center for Biological Diversity. CBD scientist John Fleming (who conducted the analysis) and other environmental justice advocates are urging Governor Jerry Brown, via their Browns Last Chance campaign to demand that he halt new oil and gas extraction and devise a just transition plan to phase it out entirely.

To date more than 800 organizations have signed on. Meanwhile, eleven of the 15 zip codes, CBD analysts said, include neighborhoods like Wilmington that are considered disadvantaged by the California Environmental Protection Agency.

Oil companies are using massive amounts of chemicals that make people sick in communities already suffering high rates of asthma and other health problems, said Fleming.

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State regulators give out drilling permits like theyre candy, and here in Los Angeles we see how it hurts people of color and vulnerable residents the most.

An earlier analysis of air district data revealed that oil companies have used more than 98 million pounds of chemicals known to cause serious health problems in L.A. County since 2013, Fleming said.

These air toxics were often used dangerously close to homes, hospitals and schools.

Over 80 percent of air toxics usage involved just 12 chemicals, including carcinogens like crystalline silica and formaldehyde. Hydrochloric acid, one of the most frequently used air toxics, is a corrosive gas that can cause suffocation or irreversible lung damage at high concentrations.

 [This] analysis underscores the disproportionate harms of Californias oil extraction on vulnerable communities

The massive proliferation of dirty drilling under Governor [Jerry] Brown isnt just hypocritical, its horribly unjust, said Shaye Wolf, CBD spokesperson via a statement released in August.

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Because of Browns refusal to rein in Californias oil extraction, thousands of wells operate dangerously close to homes and schools in vulnerable communities already suffering from some of the dirtiest air in the nation.

Californias Division of Oil, Gas and Geothermal Resources approved 21,397 new wells between Jan. 1, 2011 and April 14, 2018. Of the 16,554 of those wells with available geographic information, 76 percent are located in communities with above-average poverty rates for California, while 67 percent are located in communities of color.

Frackers have a long history in the Golden State. By 1930 California was producing nearly one quarter of the worlds oil output.

This was the wild west of oil extraction, with an abundance of easily accessible oil, minimal regulation, and no understanding of the health or environmental impacts to create a true free-for-all, according to members of Stand Together Against Neighborhood Drilling, an environmental justice advocacy group in Los Angeles.

L.A.remains the largest urban oil field in the country. Thousands of active oil wells in the Greater L.A. area are located amongst a dense population of more than 10 million people.

Though conventional oil reserves have dwindled, oil drilling in L.A. still remains pervasive. Oil rigs dot the city but are often hidden from sight through the use of tall fences, clandestine structures or by drilling in Los Angeles often overlooked low-income neighborhoods.

California is one of the nations top oil-producing states, extracting among the dirtiest and most carbon-intensive crude in the world. Three-quarters of the oil produced in California is at least as carbon-intensive as Canadas tar sands crude, according to the CBD.

Fossil fuel dependence is a disease, and environmental injustice is one of its nastiest symptoms, Fleming said. Thats why Governor Brown should tackle the root of this problem by planning an end to Californias incredibly dirty oil extraction.

Editors Note: Title was updated from original published/printed title. There was an error in the title.
David Alan Grier Continues His Comedy Takeover

David Alan Grier wears multiple professional hats. He has appeared in Broadway plays, performed stand-up comedy shows and starred in a plethora of movies. He continues to push his creative endeavors in his recent film, Arizona. The In Living Color actor spoke to the Los Angeles Sentinel Newspaper about his upcoming role.

Los Angeles Sentinel: You seem to be all around the place. What has been some of your favorite moments this year?

David Alan Grier: Thats a tough one. I have so many. Im working on a new show called Cool Kids. Martin Mule is in it. I met him in high school as a fan. He was the first famous guy I ever met. He was really nice. To be doing a show with him years later is really exciting.

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LAS: Whats the show about?

GRIER: The best way to describe it is like The Breakfast Club with old dusty people! We get high school petty about everything.

LAS: You have a lot of versatility as a performer. Most people only know you as a comedian. Why do you feel more people dont know about your versatility as an artist?

ALAN: The reason they dont know about it is because of the diversity. I remember one time a Broadway fan came and saw me. They expected to see me to just do stand-up. I surprised them when I began to belt out some songs. I feel that I have fans of different elements of my career. A lot of times people dont go outside their backyard. If your thing is theater, thats where your going to stay.

LAS: Thats true. Most people stay in their own bubbles.

GRIER: Exactly. As long as Im successful doing it, then Im good. Itll be bad if they said, wow I didnt know you stunk at Broadway too!

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LAS: I want to talk about Arizona. It definitely is a darker movie. What was your favorite moment in filming?

GRIER: Without ruining it for your audience, there is a dramatic scene with my character. I even joked about it on my Instagram months ago. They will have to watch and see. Once they see that scene, they will know why I loved shooting it.

LAS: Arizona is a dark comedy, which is something you rarely see. Do you enjoy stretching comedy to its limit?

GRIER: I love stretching anything to its limit. I love doing drama just as much as I enjoy comedy. I just did Native Son directed by Rashid Johsnon. I know him from collecting his work. This is a dramatic role that is heavy and beautiful. There are no chuckles in this bad boy! It was a small role but such an important beautiful script. Once I read it, I couldnt put it down.

LAS: Speaking of scripts, Im sure you receive plenty. What makes a good script in your professional opinion?

GRIER: One element is how much the script stays with me. If Im reading a script and I cant put it down, then I know its good. I read an in interview once with Samuel L. Jackson. He was speaking about the first time he read the Pulp Fiction script. He said he read it, flipped it over again, and read it some more. In other words, it was so deep that he had to read it multiple times. Thats an indication of a good script.

LAS: Recently, Jim Carrey said he was onboard for an In Living Color remake? What are your thoughts?

GRIER: They tried it before but due to scheduling conflicts and contracts, it seems unlikely. Jim has been down for it since last time. I hope they hurry quickly because I dont want to be all old and busted doing it! We will see.
Fulfilling Our Mission: Leaving a Legacy of Struggle

This is again a sankofa revisiting and reviewing of the constant and consistent work weve done and the righteous and relentless struggle weve waged over half a century as an organization so that we, as a people, could truly be ourselves and free ourselves and honor the awesome legacy and obligation we inherited from our revered ancestors. What we have endured and overcome has been a test and template for all time revealing the metal out of which we were made and the strength we developed and deepened in the heat of struggle. This is not said in any boastful way, but rather to honor those who sacrificed so much to bring us to this point which so many other organizations larger, better financed and more favored were not able to reach.

We came into being as the organization Us in the wake and heavy weight of the martyrdom of Min. Malcolm X and in a wave of resistance that culminates in the Watts Revolt, in the year 1965, self-consciously assuming varied and interrelated roles as Saidi, self-affirming lords of our own lives and audacious agents of our own liberation as persons and a people; Muminina, faithful defenders of the people and conscientious keepers of the tradition; and Simba Wachanga, Young Lions, soldiers and servants of our people. It is a noteworthy narrative, not yet truthfully or fully told; one of struggle, sacrifice, service, work, and institution-building.

We stood up and stepped forward September 7, 1965, and have not stopped or sat down since, in spite of suppression, setbacks and the continued and calculated falsification of our history and current work. It was a life vocation we chose, a dangerous and difficult struggle to uplift and liberate our people. Imbued with the spirit and special disregard for danger and difficulty for which youth are known, we talked and acted as if victory was not only certain but also imminent. But in our most thoughtful moments, especially as government forces began their varied programs to discredit, disrupt, detain, destroy and otherwise neutralize Us and the Black movement as a whole, we knew it would be a long as well as dangerous and difficult struggle. And we realized the awesome and exacting truth of Amilcar Cabrals classic teaching concerning the liberation struggle, i.e., that we should mask no difficulties, tell no lies and claim no easy victories.

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We called ourselves Us to affirm and remind ourselves that our work and struggle and our very lives are first and foremost for us, our people, Black people, African people, for their uplift and liberation. The name Us was chosen too to draw a clear and uncompromising line between Us and them, between our people and our oppressor in our vision and values and in our struggles and strivings upward. And Us also was selected to stress our commitment to communitarian, i.e., community focused and collective, thought and practice in the way we relate, remember, reason, accept responsibility, work, struggle and understand and assert ourselves in the world.

It was a time of great turning and testing, revolt and revolution, of liberation struggles almost everywhere. And we accepted Min. Malcolms teaching that we were living in an era of revolution and the revolt of the (African American) is part of the rebellion against oppression and colonialism which has characterized this era. Moreover, Malcolm stressed the role of young people in the liberation struggles, the Simba, our namesake, in the Congo and youth in other parts of Africa, and in Asia and Latin America. And he challenged us to think for ourselves and to choose to act in the interest of our people and the oppressed and struggling peoples of the world.

Frantz Fanon taught us that each generation must discover its mission and either fulfill or betray it. But even before reading Fanon, our fathers and mothers had taught us in words similar to the Odu Ifa which says when it becomes your turn to take responsibility for the world, you should do good for the world. And, of course, this should start with our people, or the race, as they called themselves, then, without deference to deconstructionist definitions or post-racial reasoning.

It was clear to all that our people were oppressed, and restricted and restrained in life-conditions and life-chances and that we had not only the unalienable right, but also the unavoidable responsibility to struggle to end our oppression. And so, standing up we dared to declare both our organizational and generational mission: to leave a legacy of revolution. Indeed, we declared, We are the last revolutionaries in America. If we fail to leave a legacy of revolution for our children, we have failed our mission and should be dismissed as unimportant.

Thus, following the teaching of our philosophy, Kawaida, we committed ourselves to the cultural revolution within and the political revolution without. The first is to radically transform ourselves; the second is to radically transform society. Such a dual and radical transformation, we argued, requires cultivating, reinforcing and sustaining a culture of struggle so that revolution and liberation are acts of culture, i.e., processes and practices which are called into being and even compelled by the nature, needs and self-understanding of the culture.

To leave a legacy of revolution, we reasoned, is, above all, to leave a legacy of radical and relentless struggle. For revolution rightly read is a not a single event of storming the gates, rallies in the public square and forcing a dictator to step down. Nor is it a matter of simply changing presidents, parliaments and flags or even simply seizing power from one group by another. Rather, its radical self- and social transformation, an overturning of ourselves as well as society, uprooting and rebuilding in more humanly expansive and historically promising ways.

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Clearly, the country and world have changed dramatically since we stood up in the 60s and liberation struggles pervaded and engulfed the world. It is surely a different time when CIA-sponsored revolts are accepted as revolutions; occupiers and oppressors are given immunity from criticism and accountability for their acts; freedom fighters are routinely called terrorists; and oppressors are accorded moral status equal and superior to the oppressed. There is also the decline and crisis of the Left, the nationalist, socialist and Marxist Left, and the aggressive rise of the Right, riding roughshod over the poor and vulnerable at home and globalizing White supremacy and bold-faced banditry abroad.

Certainly, it is sad to say and sadder to see that very few radical or self-defined revolutionary organizations are left from the Sixties. Almost all have folded tent and taken up talking like reformed and redeemed religionists eager to denounce their former wicked ways, which were learned and lived in the sinful sixties. Others have found new faiths and make only episodic public appearances to rant and rave against former rivals and to leave lists of whom to hate.

But regardless of how things have changed since we began, enduring human problems and the need to struggle to solve them remain. For still the oppressed want freedom; the wronged and injured want justice; the people want power over their destiny and daily lives; and the world wants peace. So, for Us, the struggle continues in various forms and fields of battle, directed toward carving out of the hard rock of reality a new history of humankind, free of oppression and full of human flourishing and of social miracles made by the masses, themselves, in their awesome thrust upward and onward in the world.

Dr. Maulana Karenga, Professor and Chair of Africana Studies, California State University-Long Beach; Executive Director, African American Cultural Center (Us); Creator of Kwanzaa; and author of Kwanzaa: A Celebration of Family, Community and Culture and Essays on Struggle: Position and Analysis, www.AfricanAmericanCulturalCenter-LA.org; www.OfficialKwanzaaWebsite.org; www.MaulanaKarenga.org.
Botten warned that Chinas increasingly heavy investment there risks Australia missing out on PNG's rapid development.

Oil Search chief executive Peter Botten said China had been investing in Australias nearest neighbour as part of its global $1.4 trillion Belt and Road infrastructure building program, involving hundreds of infrastructure projects co-funded and mostly built by China in 70 or more countries.

SYDNEY - Chinese signs on Port Moresby bus stops are one indication of Beijing's growing influence and investment in the country and should be a wake-up call for Australia, warns the head of a major oil and gas company.

China has stepped up their support and this has been welcomed by the Papua New Guinean government. Theyve built new roads and schools, theyve spent substantially. Its a new dynamic in the country, Botten said.

This is a reasonable wake-up call for Australia, and they should look at how they can help Papua New Guinea to develop.

This time last year, Chinese investments in PNG reached more than $2.64 billion. Beijing recently committed about $US4 billion to build a road network connecting PNGs capital Port Moresby to its economic hub Lae. This is critical as there is currently no significant road connection between these cities.

Papua New Guinea signed up to China's Belt and Road inititative in June this year, and the country owes China nearly $2 billion arising from concessional loans, according to the ABC - nearly a quarter of its total debt.

While Australia is still the number one provider of foreign aid providing $546 million in 2017, a recent Deakin University paper noted that Papua New Guineans viewed Chinese aid as more effective.

Australia needs to recognise reality: China is rising, the paper stated.

This was supported by the Lowy Insitutes Pacific Islands project director, Jonathan Pryke, who said Australia needed to reassess its relationship with PNG, which was a former colony of Australia.

Whereas in Australia the perception of our relationship with PNG has been a challenge, China is viewing it as an opportunity, Pryke said.

The role China is playing in PNG is creating a sense of urgency in the Australian government.

A Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade spokeswoman said the government "welcomes the role played by all investors, including from China, to support sustainable development in PNG".

Botten said China had made itself very conspicuous in its investments.

Theyve made their presence very obvious and are very good at demonstrating their presence, he said.

One example is the bus stops around Port Moresby, they have the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation logo on them and the Chinese Aid insignia. Theyre good at highlighting what theyre doing.

PNG is a very exciting place to be at the moment, and people are underestimating whats going on in the country.

China has definitely woken up to the power of branding, the Chinese aid insignia now rivals the Australian kangaroo in the Pacific, Pryke said.

We need to have a close look at how we can do better in the country.
Julian Jackson has written the definitive biography of the mythic general who refused to accept the Nazi domination of France. De Gaulle draws on unpublished letters, memoirs, and papers in the newly opened de Gaulle archives that show how this volatile and inspiring leader put his broken nation back at the center of world affairs. We asked Professor Jackson about de Gaulle and his process in writing the book.



Its been more than 25 years since a major biography of de Gaulle has been written. Why has he been ignored for so long? Why is now a good time to take a new look at this titanic figure?

The last major biography of de Gaulle was published in French in 2002 but since then the de Gaulle archives have been opened. While the English speaking world has been far less interested in de Gaulle than in Churchill, it is certainly not true to say that he is ignored in France: books come about him literally every week, of varying quality. In France he is a figure revered on an even greater scale than Churchill in Britain.

It is a good time to re-visit de Gaulle for many reasons. One of these is that many of the questions he posed are still relevant today, and indeed possibly more relevant than ever: He governed at the height of the Cold War but was convinced that the Cold War would not last and that it was necessary to work to achieve a stable and balanced post-Cold War order, and we are still trying to achieve that; he was seen as anti-American but in reality he was looking forward to a time when the US would not necessarily see its interests bound up with those of western Europe and NATO, and felt that Europe must organize its own affairs and its defense. In the era of Donald Trump that seems more relevant than ever. For the British, who are in the process of leaving the EU, de Gaulles views about Britain and Europe seem prescient in the extreme, as do his comments on the consequences for the Middle East of Israels occupation of the territories it conquered in 1967.

That is not to say de Gaulle was always right but the questions he posed still matter today. For me the interests in reading about him lies in exceptional nature of his career. He led a truly fascinating life at every level.

De Gaulle was, with FDR and Churchill, one of the three great leaders of the second world war. Both FDR and Churchill found him deeply difficult to work with and their opinions of him  as aloof, egotistical, prickly to a fault  have largely defined his reputation in the English-speaking world. Is that fair? Or was Churchills de Gaulle a terrible caricature?

De Gaulle was indeed a prickly and aloof personality who found it hard to show his feelings. But this was exacerbated during the Second War by his sense of humiliation at the defeat of France and by his ambition to re-assert Frances role as a great power. One way of doing this was to be almost obsessively vigilant in defense of Frances interests even if this meant opposing his own allies. He often bit the hand that fed him because he wanted to show that France still had teeth. In this way, he turned his own personality into an instrument of policy.

In the case of Roosevelt, de Gaulle felt justifiably bitter that the Americans continued to gamble  mistakenly  that the collaborating Vichy regime would in the end rally to the Allies. De Gaulle said this would not happen; and he was proved right. He was not an easy personality but in the end Roosevelts attitude towards him was almost unhinged whereas for all their quarrels Churchill did appreciate de Gaulles stature. I am a great admirer of Roosevelt but his treatment of de Gaulle was not one of the more glorious or perspicacious aspects of his career.

You write that during his thirty years in politics, de Gaulle was brutally divisive. Why and how?

De Gaulle found himself at the heart of two bitter civil wars and for this reason it was inevitable that he would be seen as divisive: civil wars are by their nature divisive. His ambition was in fact to unite the French  it was his obsession  but this was simply not possible.

The first of those civil wars occurred between 1940 and 1944 over whether or not to collaborate with, or resist, the Germans. Some people afterwards reproached de Gaulle for creating a national myth that all the French had resisted except for a few traitors. He knew this was false but he invented the myth to bind the French together again. The second conflict was over the independence of Algeria: de Gaulle was never forgiven by the one million white Europeans in Algeria for conceding that Algeria would be independent. It is true that de Gaulle moved towards Algerian independence in a rather zig-zag manner which led many of these people to feel he had betrayed them. But however he had done this he would have faced their bitter hatred  leading to several assassination attempts against him. One of the guiding mantras of all his political action was the need to accept reality, however painful. But these were people living in a denial of reality. De Gaulle had tried to be a teacher but they were unwilling to listen to his lesson.

What did previous biographers get right, what did they get wrong, and what new revelations does your book introduce?

Previous biographers have tended to oversimplify de Gaulle whereas my biography shows his complexity and ambiguity. There are some new documents revealed in my biography: for example, an amazing telephone conversation between him and his ministers negotiating with the Algerian independence fighters. The conversation, which I cite in its entirety, shows de Gaulles desperation to end the Algerian conflict at almost any price. But overall my book is not offering lots of new revelations  the basic facts of the story are confirmed by my research in the de Gaulle archives  but more about offering a more nuanced and complex interpretation. Good history is not about scoops but about explaining and interpreting the past.

De Gaulle is perhaps most famous in France today for his decision to pull out of Algeria. Tell us about that decision. As the leader of the Free French, he had called on the French empire to support the resistance. Was that a difficult decision for him? Why did he do it? What do you think he would make of the Iraq waror the war in Syria?

The decision to leave Algeria was a painful one for him because it represented a defeat for France even if he tried to dress it up as a decision that he had taken of his own free will. He did it because he believed that the Algerian war was poisoning French politics and that decolonization was a necessity. He could see that the war was also turning France into a pariah in the Third World and impeding his ambition to give France a role of moral leadership against the United States. That is why he decided that Algerian independence was necessary.

There was also a rather cynical side to this. The defenders of so-called French Algeria argued for what they called integration: that Algeria should be fully integrated into France and its Muslim population become fully French citizens. This was a bit hypocritical on the part of Europeans who had done all to deny rights to Algerian Muslims for decades. But de Gaulles objection was a pragmatic (one might even say racist) one. As he put it once to one of his Ministers: Have you seen the Muslims with their turbans and their djellabas? You can see that they are not French. Try and integrate oil and vinegar. Shake the bottle. After a moment they separate again. The Arabs are Arabs; the French are French. Do you think that the French can absorb ten million Muslims who will tomorrow be twenty million and after tomorrow forty? If we carry out integration, if all the Berbers and Arabs of Algeria were regarded as French, how would one stop them coming to settle on the mainland where the standard of living is so much higher? My village would no longer be called Colombes-les-deux-Eglises but Colombey-the-two-Mosques.

But de Gaulle came to his views about the Empire slowly. In 1940 he did indeed hope that the Empire would rally to him, and was disappointed when it did not. He did all he could to hold on to the Empire after 1945 and part of his resentment against the British was that he believed (wrongly) they were trying to oust the French from the Middle East. He had tried to hold on to French Indo-China after 1945 and was opposed when French forces pulled out. In other words, he was not really, as he later claimed, a prophet of decolonization, but he was ultimately a realist.

It is dangerous to try and make any historical figures speak from the grave and I cannot say what de Gaulle would think about the current Syrian situation. But one thing is certain: he would not have allowed France to be dragged into the Iraq War in the wake of the United States. He would have seized the opportunity to assert Frances independent policy. When the French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin went to the United Nations in 2003 and refused any French participation in the Iraq War he sounded almost like de Gaulle speaking from the grave. De Gaulle could also have moments of really prophetic intuition which came from his deep immersion in history. This is what he said about Iraq in 1964: The Sunnis with the Shias and the Kurds. These are countries destined to be divided because they contain altogether different peoples who do not have the same religion, the same past.

(This is the first of a two-part interview)
Kaiser Permanente Baldwin Hills-Crenshaw Medical Celebrates One-Year Anniversary

It seemed like not too long ago, the Kaiser Permanente Baldwin Hills-Crenshaw Medical (KPBHC) facility celebrated its topping off, which was in Nov. 2016. The facilitys opening to the public came equally as fast in Sept. 2017. On Friday, Sept. 14, KP officials, staff and community members gathered to celebrate KPBHCs one-year anniversary serving the community.

Its great, its fantastic, were one-year in and were seeing a lot of improvements, said Erique E. Emel, M.D., physician in-charge at KPBHC. Patients are happy about ittheyre ecstatic about what were doing here.

The providers, the doctors have now been here a year so their used to working in this new, next generation, clinic.

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The KPBHC facility is a cutting-edge, four-story medical office building complete with LEED Gold certification. The 100,000-square-foot building includes a conference room and outdoor event space which is available to local community groups.

Some of the services for KPBHC include a full range of primary care and specialty services, including: Adult Primary Care, Pediatrics, Pharmacy, Diagnostic Imaging, Laboratory, Obstetrics/Gynecology, Ophthalmology, Behavioral Health, Dermatology, Nurse Clinic, Physical Therapy, Optometry, Vision Essentials (contact lens & eyeglass wear), Health education classes and more.

Its amazing to think that weve already been here for a year, said Summer Downing, director of operations at KPBHC. Were super excited to see all of the responses from the community.

Very happy to be here one year later, said Elita Fielder, director of media relations for Kaiser Permanente Southern California. Extremely grateful and appreciative that Kaiser Permanente put this center in this community.

The facility is home to world class providers, technologically advanced exam rooms, equipped with the ability to conduct real time virtual consults with other Kaiser Permanente providers throughout the region. In keeping with a healthy community, the grounds have incorporated 2.5 acres of green space, including a contiguous, two-mile walk path. Community leader and health advocate, Avis Ridley-Thomas attended the celebration and stated that she walks the grounds for a workout.

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Every Thursday at eleven [oclock], I encourage our fellow retirees to walk with me, said Ridley-Thomas. Anybody who wants to comeI invite them, I remind them that Im going to be here regardless.

She continued, Im so glad that Kaiser is here and Im glad to be a part of this celebrationand I really do hope there are many, many more.

We will be able to celebrate a lot in using this facilityand I expect to be here, helping, in those celebrations as well.

Charles Slay is an electrician and was involved in the construction process of KPBHC through 2nd Call, a nonprofit community program thats helps people rebuild their lives. He shared his thoughts on seeing his hard work one year later.

It feels amazing just to see the work in itself but being that I was a part of this communityI lived over here for several years and did more than my share of wrong, said Slay. To be in a position to, not rectify, but to turn that around and to do some of my share of rights, that is an amazing feeling.

Were here to take care of people, said Emel. As we transition into our second year, were going to have many more community activities in the building.

Were going to have cooking, dance [and] educational classes here at this [facility] and you dont need to be a Kaiser Permanente member to take advantage of those so were going to be able to interface and interact with the community more so than ever.

Some of the upcoming activities include line dancing coming in October, farm stands offering fresh produce and ready-made entrees, Zumba classes and healthy eating programs.

The community is grateful, said Fielding. Ive talked to members that have expressed their joy of having it here, how they can receive their services locally, how they feel cared about and its had a great impact on the community.

The celebration of the one-year anniversary included a tour of the facility which included beautiful views of South L.A. from the fourth floor and local artwork, which is displayed throughout the medical facility. The celebration concluded with an impressive cake which showcased a before and after image of the KPBHC.

Its so much more than us being a facility that popped up in a deserving community, said John E. Chew, MPH, assistant medical center administrator. Its about the people and the connections that we can bring and the passion that we have for the community.

He continued, Im just so excited that we are following our dream of making a difference for the lives of people in this community.

Were here for you, said Downing.

For more information, please visit kp.org/baldwinhillscrenshaw. For general information, please visit https://thrive.kaiserpermanente.org.
L.A. Elected Leaders Convene Hundreds of Community Leaders for a National Discussion on Gentrification in Washington D.C.

On Thursday, September 13, 2018, Los Angeles City Councilmember Marqueece Harris-Dawson and Congressmember Karen Bass convened over 200 community leaders to discuss gentrification and displacement of African American communities across U.S. cities at the Congressional Black Caucus Annual Legislative Conference in Washington D.C. L.A. City Councilmember Harris-Dawson moderated a panel discussion with Newark, New Jersey Mayor Ras Baraka and subject matter experts Dr. Mindy Fullilove, Tracey Ross and Nerfertitti Jackmon.

The Black population in Los Angeles continues to decline and as we studied the issue we realized rapid displacement was happening in every big city across the country, said Councilmember Harris-Dawson. I wanted to convene this discussion because this is a national crisis and we need a national discussion to identify concrete solutions.

It is inspiring to see the leadership on the panel committed to finding solutions, said Congressmember Karen Bass. We need to build more coalitions of government, community and academics to address this critical community issue.

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Mayor Ras Baraka shared initiatives he has launched in the City of Newark, New Jersey including, Newark 2020 which leverages new economic investments to cut unemployment rates in Newark in half by the year 2020.

We believe long-time residents should be able to take part in any economic growth that takes place in the city, said Mayor Baraka. Newark 2020 is based on the idea that as these corporations grow in our city, they should hire Newark residents and invest in Newark businesses. We have a community development plan that aims to redistribute investment dollars across the city, including areas that are in desperate need of economic development.

Dr. Mindy Fulillove, author of Root Shock: How Tearing Up City Neighborhoods Hurts America and What We Can Do About It offered a historical analysis of gentrification.

Gentrification is not a problem of neighborhoods, rather we have to understand we are in a national housing crisis and it can only be averted by assertive action by federal, state and local levels of government, said Dr. Fulillove.

Tracey Ross the Associate Director of the All-in Cities Initiative at Policy Link, a national research and action institute, shared promising practices being utilized in communities participating in Policy Links Anti-Displacement Network, including efforts to implement inclusionary zoning, community land trusts and increased legal representation to ensure just cause evictions.

Ross emphasized, there isnt one magic bullet, but there also hasnt been enough investment in these strategies over a long period of time to see the real impact. She went on to say, It is critical we create tables for diverse stakeholders to develop equitable development models that reflect what communities want in the areas where development is needed the most.

The panel also included Nefertiti Jackmon the Vice Chair of the Austin Anti-Displacement Task Force and the Executive Director of the nonprofit Six Square, which preserves and celebrates the historic legacy of the African-American community in Central East Austin. Community organizing is critical to preserving and protecting our communities, said Jackmon.
LA-Lusaka Sister City Committee- 50 Years and Trending

Director, Ms. Lidia Mongerie-Brown was honored on September 8, 2018 at the home of the Los Angeles City Stentorians in Los Angeles. Joined by the Honorable Curren D. Price, Jr. Councilmember, the New 9th District, Committee Members, and other guests with African focused interests, Lidia was presented with a Resolution by Councilmember Price on behalf of the Los Angeles City Council. Ms. Mongerie-Brown also received the highest accolade of the Los Angeles-Lusaka Sister City Committee presented by Dr. Todd Roberts with Dr. Earnestine Thomas-Robertson, Chair of the Committee.

Between 2011 and 2018 Ms. Mongerie-Brown served four terms as Project Director for four major developments in Lusaka, Zambia on behalf of the LA-Lusaka SCC: The Micro finance Project for Women, Clean Water Project for Families, Youth To School Project for Children, and the Mobility for All Project for Seniors ( which is still in the development phase).

During the four terms, Ms. Mongerie-Brown implemented the Womens Empowerment Micro Finance Project starting with the Lusaka Ten, the first Micro finance group in 2011 to be funded by Los Angeles-Lusaka Sister City Committee to either develop and or improve their businesses in 9 contiguous areas of Zambia. This number has now exceeded fifty women and four men in areas such as Chaisa, Mateo, Mongu, Copperbelt, and Kanakantepa.

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An original of the Lusaka Ten, Ms. Joyce Kausa is one of the Committees most outstanding entrepreneurs whose Kantemba (Grocery Store funded in 2011) is located in Kanakantepa. Joyce started at 18 and is now 25 years of age. Along with her husband and two children she has developed an amazing grocery store business. The business has significantly increased brand offerings, product inventory and profits since inception. Another outstanding entrepreneur is Ms. Hellen Chanda. Ms. Chandas initial business was a Food Stand at the Tuesday Market Place in Lusaka. LA-Lusaka SCC and the American Women for International Understanding (AWIU) augmented Hellens resources in 2016 enabling her to broaden the base of her business to include products from Tanzania and South Africa such as apparel, handbags, ginger and garlic. The latter two products are used by local and diverse markets and restaurants.

In partnership with the American Women for International Understanding (AWIU), LA-Lusaka SCC funded a successful Layer Chicken farm, a struggling Goat Farm, several successful agribusinesses, and two very skilled Seamstresses to name a few. With capital paid back from 2016 projects, LA-Lusaka SCC funded its first 80 year old entrepreneur. The Committees historical age range of individual micro finance entrepreneurs now spans 18 to 80 years of age.

The celebration honoring Lidia also highlighted the implementation of the Chaisa Compound Clean Water Project, funded in 2013 by the LALusaka SCC. This project continues to provide clean water for a number of families in Chaisa Compound. It was designed to ensure that residents had clean water to drink (as opposed to collecting water from a sewage dump and dipping water from wells where the risks of contamination are higher). In 2013 Lidia also carried two small water units to Zambia that are used for small agribusinesses we fund. The next phase of the LA-Lusaka SCC Water Project will usher in a Water Reservoir under the leadership of Dr. Todd Roberts. Water will be provided for more people, create jobs in Lusaka, and integrate the provision of clean environmental considerations such as water, waste treatment measures, irrigation and disease reduction.

On her recent tour Lidia brought the entrepreneurial spirit to Kumwanza Community School, a remotely located school with open space classrooms where nearly 600 students attend. Five of the young teachers earn 5 Kwacha (less than $10.00 a month). To get them started LA-Lusaka SCC invested in the collective of five young teachers. Lidia purchased sufficient nutritional items for a popular/healthy snack product that the five teachers can prepare and sell during breaks throughout the day. The money from sales will go to augment the Teachers salaries. That loan will be paid back in two years, meanwhile new self-determined young teacher-entrepreneurs will improve their quality of life.

Prior to leaving Zambia, Lidia met and conferred with Christine Glidden, President/CEO of Women 2 Be, an organization based in Santa Fe, New Mexico, regarding their endeavor to manufacture products for women that could have great implications for the Seamstresses funded by the LA-Lusaka SCC. This potentially means jobs for our Seamstresses, an important step toward keeping young women in school and spin off businesses for women and men in Lusaka. Women 2 Be has enjoyed success in Nepal, and we believe, in collaboration, we can find similar success in Zambia.

Since 2013, LA-Lusaka SCC covered the cost of school tuition/uniforms and supplies for Four Youth we sponsor. Also covered are costs and provisions for the students daily enchima breakfast meal for each school year. One Kantemba owner funded by LA-Lusaka SCC carries the enchima product and makes a profit from the consistent monthly transaction. LA-Lusaka SSC has created yet another entrepreneur in Lusaka, Zambia while achieving six different objectives simultaneously.

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Representing Dr. Earnestine Thomas-Robertson, Chair of the LA-Lusaka SCC, Ms. Mongerie-Brown met with the First Lady of the Republic of Zambia, Her Excellency Esther Lungu, in 2016 and 2018 to advance conversations regarding LA-Lusaka SCC and the Los Angeles Fire Department (LAFD) endeavor to facilitate the potential donation of Fire Apparatus; and also to affirm LA-Lusaka SCC commitment to fund a Water Reservoir in 2019/2020. Such endeavors bode well for great relations, cultural ties, business and economic development and hopes for stronger relations as envisioned and solidified in 1979 by two great Statesmen, the late Mayor of the City of Los Angeles, Honorable Tom Bradley and Founding President of Zambia, His Excellency Kenneth Kaunda.

The Honorable Curren D.Price, Jr. visited Zambia as a college student some years ago. He has been consistently supportive of the Los Angeles-Lusaka Sister dating back to the 1990s. Lidia was thrilled by the Resolution presentation signed by the Los Angeles City Council President, Herb Wesson and all Councilmembers of the City of Los Angeles. The Los Angeles-Lusaka Sister City Committee is especially proud of the work Ms. Mongerie-Brown has devoted to our Sister City. Her work has been genuinely joyful with tireless enthusiasm enabling transformative development projects in our Sister City of Lusaka, Zambia, the First and Oldest African Sister City to the City of Los Angeles.
NNPA Leadership Awards Honors Legendary Poll Worker and Esteemed Legislators

The National Newspaper Publishers Association (NNPA) 2018 National Leadership Awards Reception provided what one might expect when California Democratic Rep. Maxine Waters, Texas Democratic Rep. Al Green, and South Carolinas Jim Clyburn make up one-third of the recipients.

We are here to recognize our brothers and sisters who are truly national leaders and who stand for freedom, justice and equality not when its popular, but when its not so popular to be freedom fighters, said NNPA President and CEO Dr. Benjamin F. Chavis Jr.

In her typical fiery but still eloquent way, Waters spoke passionately about she and other Democrats mission to impeach President Donald Trump  though, like all of the recipients, she never mentioned the president by name only referring to him as Number 45.

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My friend Jesse Jackson said if you fight, you can win. If you dont fight, you will never know if you can win, said Waters, who also took time to heap praise upon NNPA National Chairman Dorothy R. Leavell, the publisher of the Crusader newspapers in Gary, Indiana and Chicago.

For those who insist that Vice President Mike Pence might turn out as a worse Commander in Chief than Trump, Waters scoffed, I say knock off the first, and go after the second, she said, as the sold-out crowd inside the grand ballroom of the Marriot Marquis roared its approval of her fiery award acceptance speech.

Green, the veteran civil rights advocate whos serving his seventh term in Congress, picked up where Waters left off. I promise that I have not given up on impeachment, Green said. We have a president who is not only unfit for the presidency, but a man who is unfit for any office in the United States of America.

Clyburn, who arrived in Congress in 1993 and is the third-ranking Democrat, followed his colleagues and helped to drive home their impeachment argument. I learned early what it means to challenge the system. I learned from my dad what it means to have the power of the almighty vote, Clyburn said. If the [midterm] election goes the way it seems like it is, you will have the best years of your lives going forward.

Waters, Green and Clyburn were among the nine national leaders and activists honored by the NNPA on Friday, Sept. 14. A trade organization representing Americas more than 220 African American-owned newspapers  with more than 22 million weekly subscribers, the NNPA began the Leadership Awards in 2014. The awards honor individuals who are national leaders in their specific fields and whose actions have helped to improve the quality of life for African Americans and others.

The producers of the NNPA Leadership Awards Reception decided that the best time to host such an awards reception would be during the Congressional Black Caucus Foundations Annual Legislative Conference, a weeklong event thats held each September.

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The CBC ALC week is the largest annual gathering of its kind in the United States, featuring 15,000 to 20,000 African American leaders and influencers.

The underlying combined objective of the CBC ALC and the NNPA National Leadership Awards Reception is to network, collaborate and strategize collectively for the advancement and empowerment of Black America.

Counted among the sponsors and supporters of the NNPA Leadership Awards Reception were General Motors, Ford Motor Company, Pfizer Rare Disease, RAI Reynolds, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, AT&T, Southwest Airlines, Northrop Grumman, Volkswagen, Wells Fargo, AARP, Aetna, Koch Industries, Comcast, Ascension Health, Comcast, and Compassion & Choices.

Awardees included National Teacher of the Year Jahana Hayes, Capstone Development Founder Norman K. Jenkins, E-Commerce Leader Arsha Jones, Dr. Wally Smith, Television Personality Kellee Edwards and legendary poll worker Laura Wooten.

At 97, Wooten is the longest continuously serving poll worker in America. Immediately upon graduating from Princeton High School in 1939, Wooten was recruited to work the polls by her great uncle, Anderson Mitnaul, who was running for Justice of the Peace. More than seven decades later, Wooten is still working the polls and her 79-year streak remains intact.

Voting is important, Wooten told the audience who saluted her with a prolong standing ovation. We need to engage young people to get out to vote. I hope we can do better this year. On November 6, get out and vote, she said.
Race Has Always Mattered

Second of two parts

The institutionalization of racial difference codified white peoples refusal to grant Blacks such basic democratic rights as citizenship, access to the legal system and the right to vote. Ironically, formalized white resistance to the participation of racially defined minorities also strengthened the organization and consolidation of excluded minorities of color. Because it had so comprehensively externalized racial others, white racism helped strengthen their resistance and opposition.

Sociologist Howard Winants racial dualism (Black/white), was in part an adaption, a resistance strategy of the oppressed, the excluded and the terrorized under the conditions of racial war. The modern Black movement transformed the American political universe, creating new organizations, new collective identities and new political norms. This challenged past racial practices and stereotypes and ushered in a wave of democratizing social reform. In transforming the meaning of race and racial politics, the Black movement shifted the rules of participation and organizing principles of American politics itself.

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Once racial politics had taken a new form, once basic political rights had been achieved, racial dualism ceased to be an exclusively Black or minority response to white supremacy. By the mid-1960s, popular support for the main principles of the civil rights revolution had been secured and legislation passed. A framework to deal with the archaic principles of overt white supremacy had been institutionalized in legal terms, something that could be described as equality had been developed-but no more than that.

Equality had not, and still has not been achieved. White supremacy had not vanished. As soon as civil rights legislation and equal opportunity policies were initiated, they started to erode under reactionary pressures. Neo-white supremacists sought to reinterpret the movements victories, to strip it of its more radical implications, to rearticulate its vision of a substantively egalitarian society in conservative and individualist terms.

The seeds of racial reaction were already present in the ideological choices available in the 1960s, i.e., modern tendencies that espoused integration and color-blind racial policies and radical positions that advocated Blackor Brown, Red or Yellowpower, in other words, racial nationalism. While each of these positions had merit, none was sustainable by itself and no synthesis between them seemed possible.

The rise to power of neo-conservatism, which inherited and rearticulated the moderate tendencies that emerged from that movement was also ironic. Most whites came to support a conservative and individualistic form of egalitarianism, advocating a supposedly color-blindbut actually deeply race-conscious political position. This was the white politics of difference. This synthesis acquired particular force as job losses and stagnating income cut into whites sense of security. It gathered strength as the lower strata of Black and Latino communities were plunged into deeper poverty by massive cutbacks in welfare programs, education and federal assistance to cities. When the inevitable moral panic about crime, drugs, etc., ensued, it fueled white flight to the right. In a thorough corporate culture, no countervailing arguments (against corporate greed, for example) acquired so much as a foothold in the mainstream political discourse.

Blacks, as well as other racially-defined minority groups, were further agitated by new conflicts over group identity. Class divisions and strains of resurgent cultural nationalism faced the Black community, driving both elite and ordinary folks in strongly conservative directions. Latinos, Native Americans and Asian Americans experienced different but parallel schisms. The point is, that a new racial paradigm, tension-ridden, uncertain and unstable, came into being. This paradigm combined the pre-World War II inheritance of white supremacy, which survived in significant measure with the legacy of the 1960 movements- themselves based on centuries-long tradition of resistance of conquest, enslavement and racial oppression.

From the 1960s to the present, not only Black people, but the nation at large has been driven by a deep-seated struggle; the antagonistic existence, the contradiction of the forces of white supremacy on the one hand and the movement for racial and social justice on the other. It is this convergence, this contradiction that constitutes racial dualism in the 21st century.

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As U.S. politics plunged to the right, as the aspirations of the activists of the 1960s movement weakened, as indeed the legacy of those struggles is twisted into an obstacle to the achievement of real social and racial justice, the attempt to imagine a greater democracy, racially inclusive as well as egalitarian, almost seem almost utopian. It is this daunting task that remains most relevant and requires new thought commitment and concrete action today.

The right wing has understood the challenge of redefining race and has clearly articulated a vision of the meaning of race in a conservative, democratic society. This is the concept of color-blindness. Undeniably, this vision has a certain appeal, not only as a cover for the perpetuation of white supremacy, but as a plausible reinvention of fundamental elements of national ideology: individualism and opportunity, not entitlement.

Our dire political situation demands that we reinvent coalition politics as an alternative to the politics of indifference. There is room for the kinds of anti-racist alliances now emerging in parts of the country, alongside exclusively Black, Native American, Latino or Asian organizations.

Howard Winants concept of racial dualism suggests political possibilities that have always been shut down and/or criticized by whites as vague, impractical or utopian. Hopefully, Black Lives Matter and its cohorts foretell a sustainable Black United Front on issues of importance to the Black community.)
Wendys WindowMOVING STORIES: Human Migration  Causes, Consequences and Community Responses

The International Visitors Council of Los Angeles (IVCLA) mission is to create international understanding and cooperation between the Los Angeles region and the rest of the world. Starting on Thursday, September 27th, they will be kicking off Global Awareness Day right here in our own backyard at the historic Watts Labor Community Action Committee Center (WLCAC). Janet Elliott, president of IVCLA joined with IVCLA board member Tim Watkins, president WLCAC to bring together this amazing day. The theme is MOVING STORIES: Human Migration  Causes, Consequences & Community Responses. The community forum will offer a comprehensive, interactive look at the critical global issue of human migration. By sharing the stories and lived experiences of the people and communities impacted by this issue, they hope to build awareness and foster a more compassionate approach to addressing the fundamental human experience of migration.

The International Visitors Council, WLCAC, and the West Coast Turkish American Chamber of Commerce are partnering organizations whose hope is that the day will bring more understanding around the issues of migration. MOVING STORIES will explore:

The reasons people around the world are forced to flee their homes

The challenges people face when they leave home

The response of communities around the world to forced migration

The impact of forced migration on host countries and communities

The actions Los Angeles is taking to welcome new families and help them resettle

The economic and cultural contributions immigrants and refugees bring to the L.A. area

The luncheon will be provided by TIYYA Foundation. They will showcase the culinary talents of chefs from Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia and Syria. The luncheon will include a discussion with TIYYA Foundation co-founder Meymuna Hussein-Cattan and interviews with refugees who have resettled in the L.A. area. The afternoon will also feature an interactive exhibit hall with videos, displays and desserts from around the world.

The world has become increasingly smaller and smaller due to technology. The Internet has allowed us to connect with people across the globe, but if we dont know how to stop and connect with people face to face, right where we live, what good is it? People dont care how much we know until they know how much we care. Lets start in our own communities. To learn more visit www.ivcla.org.

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Healing Without Hate: Its a choice. Its a lifestyle. Pass it on!
West Angeles and CDU Partner to Increase Physicians in Underserved Communities

Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science and West Angeles collaborate to provide preferred admission, financial aid workshops and more to congregation and surrounding community

Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science (CDU) signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with West Angeles Church of God in Christ (COGIC) on September 11, as part of the universitys continuing efforts to increase enrollment, especially through local community pipelines.

The MOU will solidify the mutual commitment between CDU and West Angeles COGIC to work together to create more pathways to health professions education in medically under-resourced neighborhoods throughout South Los Angeles.

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CDU President and CEO David M. Carlisle, MD, PhD, highlighted the importance of aligning with local organizations.

This MOU is an essential component of both our community roots and our growth plans. By establishing relationships with esteemed organizations such as West Angeles Church of God in Christ, we are opening pathways for young people to access higher education and become healthcare professionals, particularly in underserved communities, he said.

Deacon John H. Wilson III, Education and Enrichment Program Director at West Angeles echoed Dr. Carlisles sentiments, citing West Angeles dedication to providing the community access to education and resources in the face of rising education costs.

Affordable, excellent education is essential in our communities. We need [an institution] in our communities that will nurture [students and teach them] to become health professionals, he said.

Bishop Charles E. Blake Sr., senior pastor at West Angeles and presiding prelate of the Church of God in Christ, spoke of his excitement regarding the MOU.

The agreement will solidify CDUs commitment to educating West Angeles parishioners on careers in medicine and health, establishing scholarship initiatives for West Angeles parishioners that enroll at CDU and conducting workshops on federal and state financial aid eligibility requirements. In return, West Angeles leadership will promote and recommend CDU pipeline and college programs to the congregation, said Blake.

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Located in the Watts-Willowbrook area of South Los Angeles, CDU has graduated, since its inception, more than 575 physicians, 1,200 physician assistants and over a thousand other health professionals, as well as training over 2,700 physician specialists through its sponsored residency programs. Its School of Nursing has graduated over 1000 nursing professionals, including over 600 family nurse practitioners. CDU is a leader in health disparities research with a focus on education, training, treatment and care in cancer, diabetes, cardiometabolic and HIV/AIDS.

For information, visit cdrewu.edu or call (323) 563-3669.
William Funderburk  A Champion for the People

William Funderburk appears quiet and unassuming, but his actions belie that notion. In fact, his defining leadership as a LADWP commissioner will positively impact communities of color for generations to come.

Funderburk, a nationally recognized environmental attorney, stepped down as commissioner this past June. But before leaving, he dedicated thousands of volunteer hours to ensuring that the agency can numerically track its array of services to determine if they are available to all citizens, regardless of income.

His work and effort resulted in the groundbreaking LADWP Equity Metrics Data Initiative, which provides geographic and demographic data to indicate how its resources are being distributed and utilized throughout the city.

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The equity metrics has focused renewed attention on funding additional customer engagement, policy development and outreach to increase participation in rebates, explained Funderburk. We changed the rules forever for every person in L.A. and its up to the community to take advantage of the changes and rules.

Currently, the 15 metrics being measured are in four main categories  the Water & Power Infrastructure Investment, which includes tracking water quality complaints and other operations; Customer Incentive Programs/Services such as turf removal rebates and the refrigerator exchange program; Procurement, which assesses the departments purchases and engagement with small and minority-owned businesses through its SBE/DVBE Program; and Employment, which gauges hiring and promotion demographics.

DWP began reporting on the metrics in 2017 and Funderburk said about 35 more areas will be considered in the future as LADWP invests billions in aging infrastructure and renewables and clean energy mandates. The tracking of how these dollars are spent and the goal of insuring that every community benefits from these investments can create groundbreaking benefits for historically underserved communities.

DWPs power system and grid are undergoing tectonic change  more in the next five years than in the past 50 years. Making sure that the small guy is not left behind is now an embedded priority, said Funderburk.

The small guy and left-out are disproportionately Black and Latino, even though the cohort includes poor Whites, single moms, certain Asian groups, the elderly and indigenous [people].

Doing things fair and equitably doesnt have to be a social, charitable giveaway. It can be economically beneficial, just as diversity is more beneficial, because youre increasing the available pool of the workforce or supply chain and you can get more for what you end up paying for, whether its labor or goods or services, he noted.

Funderburks deeply held belief in fairness, equity and economic empowerment stems from his family history of people with similar principles. His parents, grandparents and other relatives played a significant role in shaping his commitment to social justice. Also, he was very close to his late uncle, the Rev. Dr. James Hargett, a renowned civil rights advocate who served 11 years as pastor of the Congregational Church of Christian Fellowship in Los Angeles.

Uncle Jim was Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.s west coast convener of SCLC and he was active in the Civil Rights Movement from 1958 to 1969. My cousin, Mario Cooper, was a leading AIDs/HIV activist and the White House Gay and Lesbian Task Force leader through the 1990s, Funderburk said.

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His cousin, Algernon Johnson Cooper, Jr., managed Sen. Robert Kennedys presidential campaign headquarters in Watts and became the first Black mayor of Pritchard, Ala. Another cousin, Peggy Cooper Cafritz, co-founded the Duke Ellington School for the Arts in Washington, D.C.

My people were always rich in spirit and in soul, but never rich in money. But, they encouraged me, they motivated me, they gave me the inspiration to do things in my own way and DWP gave me the opportunity, the bridge to my past, said Funderburk.

At DWP, I met so many people connected with my family and realized, not just how connected I am, but how connected we all are. It was through my work at DWP that I connected more deeply with people who knew my family.

It was also through his DWP tenure that Funderburk led a range of efforts to improve the agency and the city through his stewardship of the Owens Valley dust control project, his support for opening the La Kretz Innovation Campus, which focuses on clean technology development, and his push to accelerate local storm water capture projects to reduce reliance on imported water.

Mayor Eric Garcetti and Funderburks DWP colleagues acknowledged his environmental leadership at the June 26, DWP Commission meeting. While his intelligence was lauded, his passion for fairness and equity was praised as well.

You pushed all of us to be more inclusive, more aware and at the same time, you are a responsible and admirable leader, the mayor wrote in a letter.

Bill exemplifies the most important values in life. Hes a champion of the underdogand personifies social justice. He is always fighting for the little guy or gal. He throws himself into whatever he does with great passion and wisdom. I cant think of anyone Id rather have my back, said Commission President Mel Levine.

Commissioner Jill Banks Barad added, Bill is so principled. He does things for the right reasons. He doesnt showboat or promote himself. He has humility. He was there for the underserved communities throughout Los Angeles.

Summarizing his time as a commissioner, Funderburk said, I was glad to be able to empower people who otherwise normally wouldnt be empowered such as Betty Radcliff in Reseda, who lives on a fixed income; Matt Shorty, who is with the Watts Neighborhood Council, and people with coalitions that largely represent under-resourced communities.

I tried to balance the needs of the community with the needs of companies. I tried to do it full throttle. It was a great experience. I wouldnt trade it for anything!
Winners Announced in the I Got Bank Essay and Art Contest

Officials at One United Bank said they are proud to announce the recent winners of the I Got Bank Essay and Art Contest. The ten awardees, ages 12 and under, each received a $1000 savings account for submitting a winning essay or piece of art on financial literacy. The contest is part of One Uniteds larger initiative to educate youth and adults about smart money management.

OneUnited Bank also recently launched its Financial Education Center with online playlists on Financial Basics, Major Life Decisions, Starting a Career, Small Business and Preventing Elder Fraud.

The winners were: Dontaye Ball Jr., 11, San Francisco, CA, Ziontaye Ball, 11, San Francisco, CA, Evan Corgain, 10, Brocton MA, Jaedin Feaster, 8, Roxbury, MA, Layla Gaston, 8, Havre de Grace, MD, Ryder Noell, 11, Stuttgart, AR, Aaliyah Omitogun, 12, Suitland MD, Michelle Oppong, 9, Los Angeles, CA, Obi Owusu-Bonsu, 12, Los Angeles, CA and Cierra Yoakum, 10, Los Angeles, CA, who contest officials said, impressed the judges with how well their submissions expressed their journey with money in a very personalized way.

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The panel of judges included Teri Williams, president and CEO of OneUnited. The idea for the contest sprang from a book Williams wrote while holding financial literacy workshops with a group of financial educators, in adopted schools.

We wanted to adopt some schools in our community to teach financial literacy, Williams recalled during an interview with the Sentinel earlier this year.

We wanted to identify some books for a curriculum that we could use. We looked at books that were available. We looked online we looked in bookstores and really couldnt find anything that talked about the issues that our community has to deal with.

There were more books that talked about kids having lemonade stands in front of white picket fences, things like that. They didnt include anything about things that we see in our community like check cashers, check systems records, bad credit scores etc

Williams initially set out to write a pamphlet for her students, but the story of a boy named Jazz became a 60 page book called I Got Bank. The story follows 9 year old Jazz Ellington who managed to save $2000 but has a mom, brother and sister too eager to help him spend it. In the book, the boy struggles with the need to protect his savings, while helping his family at the same time.

Issues like that, said Williams, are a reality for children in low income communities across the country.

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An issue that [families of color] often experience is that there are one or two people in the family who are doing okay, Williams said.

And people in the family are more like youve got all this, why dont you help me So, how do you move forward while at the same time help your family. How do you deal with the guilt, how do you deal with the anger and at the same time the love that you have for your family?

Williams began offering her book at no cost to libraries and middle schools across the U.S. and to date, more than 3,000 copies have been donated in 37 states. The contest urges participants to keep with the books theme of financial literacy and stability, while creating an art project or writing a 250 word essay. Winners were announced August 31. For more information on the contest visit oneunited.coms financial literacy blog.
The Indian government has approved a measure to help enforce a top court decision on a centuries old Muslim custom. The approval came after the government failed to get Parliament to act on the decision.

A year ago, the high court ruled against the custom of triple talaq. The court found that it was unlawful for Muslim men to end a marriage by simply saying a single word three times. It ruled this violated the constitutional rights of Muslim women.

Many of Indias 170 million Muslims follow the Muslim Personal Law for family disputes. The laws include giving men permission to end their marriages by saying the Arabic word for divorce - talaq - three times. The word can be said anytime and anywhere, even as part of a telephone call or text message.

The government will have another six months to get parliaments approval for the new ordinance to become law. For now, Indian officials can use the measure to take legal action against suspects.

Law Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad said that nearly 22 countries, including Pakistan and Bangladesh, have banned the custom. He appealed to the opposition to approve the Muslim Women Protection of Rights on Marriage Bill.

Indias Muslim Law Board had told the court that they did not like the custom, but it opposed any court interference in religious issues. The boards members asked that the subject of triple talaq be left to the Muslim community. But several Muslim activists condemned the position of the Law Board.

After the Supreme Court decision, Prime Minister Narendra Modis government proposed a bill that would criminalize the custom. The bill was approved in December by the lower house of Parliament, where Modis party has a majority. But it has yet to be approved by the upper house, where the opposition has the majority.

The main opposition Congress party is opposing the bill because of the three-year prison sentence for the offenders. It wants a less severe sentence. It also wants a parliamentary committee to discuss the issue to find a compromise.

In India, triple talaq has continued because of laws that give Muslims, Christians and Hindus permission to follow religious laws in marriage and other family issues.

While most Hindu personal laws have been changed over the years, Muslim laws have been left to religious leaders and are rarely changed.

Im Susan Shand. The Associate Press reported this story. Susan Shand adapted the AP story for VOA Learning English. George Grow was the editor. _____________________________________________________________

Words in This Story

instant - adj. becoming something very quickly

ordinance  n. a regulation made by the government

divorce - n. the ending of a marriage

triple  adj. three times
The Armenian branch of the World Wildlife Funds (WWF) has donated three Mitsubishi V6 Pajeros to Armenias Environmental Protection and Mining Inspectorate, in order to increase the effectiveness of the agencys monitoring capabilities.

If you found a typo you can notify us by selecting the text area and pressing CTRL+Enter
United States Senators will hold public hearings next week to hear from a Supreme Court nominee and a woman who has accused him of sexual assault.

The Senate Judiciary Committee completed confirmation hearings for nominee Brett Kavanaugh on September 7. Then, a week ago, the Intercept online news site reported on a letter containing possibly damaging information about Kavanaugh.

On Monday, a university professor in California said she was the writer of the letter. Christine Blasey Ford told the Washington Post newspaper that Kavanaugh assaulted her in 1982, when they were both in high school.

She said he forced her into a bedroom at a party at a home near Washington, D.C. She said he groped her and tried to remove her clothing. She also said Kavanaugh put his hand over her mouth when she tried to shout for help.

Ford told the Post, I thought he might inadvertently kill me.

Kavanaugh has denied remembering anything about that reported party. He said he has never attacked any woman.

Senator Chuck Grassley, a Republican from Iowa, is chairman of the judiciary committee. He said Monday the committee would hold a public hearing early next week to provide ample transparency.

Kavanaugh has said he would appear at that hearing.

But Ford's lawyers have called for a federal investigation of her claims before she speaks to the Senate. The lawyers argue that some senators appear to have already decided that they believe Kavanaugh instead of Ford.

On Wednesday, Grassley released a statement saying, Nothing the FBI [Federal Bureau of Investigation] or any other investigator does would have any bearing on what Dr. Ford tells the committee, so there is no reason for any further delay.

The statement again extended an invitation to Ford to speak to the committee.

Fords lawyers say she has received death threats and other danger since going public with her story.

Republicans on the committee had hoped to hold a vote as early as Thursday of this week to move Kavanaugh's nomination forward.

President Donald Trump spoke about the issue Wednesday morning. He said it was "very hard for him to imagine that Kavanaugh had acted as Ford has described. But, he said he hopes Ford will appear at the hearing.

"I really want to see her, to see what she has to say," Trump said.

Im Ashley Thompson.



VOA News reported this story. Caty Weaver adapted it for Learning English. Ashley Thompson was the editor.

___________________________________________________________

Words in This Story

assault -n. a violent physical attack

grope -v. to touch (someone) in an unwanted and unexpected sexual way

inadvertently -adv. not purposefully or as planned; accidentally

ample -adj. having or providing enough or more than enough of what is needed

transparency -n. the quality that makes something obvious or easy to understand

further -adv. to a greater degree or extent
The leaders of North and South Korea say they have agreed to turn the Korean peninsula into a land of peace without nuclear weapons and nuclear threats.

The agreement was announced Wednesday on the second day of talks between North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and South Korean President Moon Jae-in. They spoke to reporters after meeting in Pyongyang.

At the meeting, North Korea announced plans to invite international observers to watch the closing of its missile testing center and launch area at Dongchang-ri.

North Korea also offered to close its main nuclear center at Yongbyon, but on one condition. In exchange, the North said it was seeking corresponding measures from the United States. It is not yet clear what those measures would be.

South Korean President Moon traveled to the North Korean capital on Tuesday for his third meeting this year with the North Korean leader. Moon is seeking to break an impasse in negotiations to end the Norths nuclear weapons program.

The two leaders signed a joint statement on Wednesday. In addition, military representatives signed a document stating steps to ease military tensions between North and South. That document called for, among other things, setting up buffer zones in places where the two militaries could come into conflict.

Also, Kim Jong Un said he would visit Seoul in the near future. Moon said the visit is expected to take place before the end of 2018.

In Washington, U.S. President Donald Trump expressed approval of the latest developments, calling them Very exciting! on Twitter.

Concerns over sanctions

North and South Korea have announced a number of joint economic projects, including plans to build roads and railways. However, some Korea watchers believe that some of the new agreements could violate United Nations sanctions on North Korea.

Days before the meeting in Pyongyang, the U.S. government ordered sanctions to punish a company based in China, its top official and a company linked to Russia.

The goal of the economic restrictions is to force the North Korean government to negotiate an end to its nuclear weapons and missile programs. The U.S. and Japan say those programs are a direct threat to them.

Members of the U.S. Congress and some experts say there has been no clear sign that North Korea plans to denuclearize.

Harry Kazianis is an expert in defense studies at the Center for National Interest in Washington, D.C. He said the sanctions remain in place and are a major issue. But first, Kim needs to make major progress toward denuclearization, he said.

President Moon will travel to New York next week for the United Nations General Assembly. Moon said he looked forward to North Korea and the United States resuming their dialogue. He is expected to meet with President Trump on September 24.

Moon added that South Korea would continue its part in supporting talks between the U.S. and North Korea. The aim, he said, is that the sides will hold another summit as soon as possible and find a middle ground to reach an agreement.

Also on Wednesday, the two Koreas announced that they would seek to jointly hold the 2032 Summer Olympic Games. They also said they would work closely together in preparation for the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo.

Im Mario Ritter.

Mario Ritter adapted this for VOA Learning English. His report was based on reports from VOA News, the Associated Press and Reuters. George Grow was the editor.

We want to hear from you. Write to us in the Comments section, and visit our Facebook page.

_____________________________________________________________

Words in This Story

peninsula n. a piece of land that is almost entirely surrounded by water and but is attached to a larger land area

corresponding adj. having the same characteristics as something else; matching something else

impasse n. a situation in which no progress seems possible

buffer zone n. an area that keeps two things separated

sanction n. an action taken to force a country to obey international laws by limiting or stopping trade with that country

resume v. to begin again after stopping

dialogue n. a discussion or series of discussions that two groups or countries have in order to end a disagreement

summit n. a meeting or series of meetings between the leaders of two or more governments
South Korean President Moon Jae-in says North Korean leader Kim Jong Un hopes to meet again with United States President Donald Trump.

The South Korean president spoke in Seoul after returning from a three-day visit to North Korea.

Moon told reporters that he will carry a private message from Kim to Trump about nuclear issues. He again promised to facilitate dialogue between North Korea and the United States.

The U.S. and South Korean leaders plan to meet in New York City next week during the United Nations General Assembly meeting.

Trump and Kim met in Singapore last June. At those talks, the North Korean leader promised to end his countrys nuclear weapons program.

The Associated Press reported that Moon said he would convey Kims desire to formally end the Korean War by the end of the year.

Moon also said he hopes that U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo will visit North Korea soon for nuclear talks. Pompeo had been expected to meet with North Korean officials last month. But Trump cancelled the meeting, noting a lack of progress in negotiations.

On Wednesday, North Korea agreed to close down its nuclear center at Yongbyon. It also offered to take apart its missile launching center at Dongchang-ri. In return, the North said it was seeking corresponding measures from the U.S.

North Korea currently faces international sanctions that limit almost all of its exports and strongly limit imports from its few trading partners. The United States, South Korea and Japan also have set their own economic restrictions on North Korea.

Pompeo welcomed Wednesdays agreement and invited North Korean foreign minister Ri Yong Ho to meet him in New York City. The two are expected to meet during the U.N. General Assembly next week.

On Wednesday, the South Korean president said Kim had agreed to visit Seoul before the end of the year.

Visit to Mount Paekdu

On the final day of Moons trip to North Korea, Kim, Moon and their wives visited the top of Mount Paekdu. The group had pictures taken at the mountains summit.

The ancient volcano is considered a sacred place in North Korea and is linked to the Norths ruling Kim family. It also holds importance to both countries as the birthplace of the storied ruler of the first kingdom of Korea.

Mount Paekdu, which has a lake near its summit, also is the highest point on the Korean Peninsula.

Im Mario Ritter.

Mario Ritter adapted this story for VOA Learning English from VOA News and AP stories. George Grow was the editor.

We want to hear from you. Write to us in the Comments section, and visit our Facebook page.

_____________________________________________________________

Words in This Story

facilitate  v. to make easier; to help cause something to happen

dialogue  n. a discussion or series of discussions that two groups or countries have in order to end a disagreement

convey  v. to take or carry something from one place to another

corresponding  adj. alike; having the same relationship as something else

sanctions  n. actions usually taken by one or more nations to punish another country for violating international law

summit  n. the highest point of a mountain

sacred  adj. holy; connected with God
After graduating from high school, many young people are excited to go off to college. But not all. Some may want to skip college and jump right into a business.

That was the case with John Cronin from Long Island, New York. He did not dream of going to college. He dreamed of going into business with his father. But they did not know what kind of business.

John Cronin told Money magazine that he thought about starting a food truck. But, there was one problem. Neither he nor his father can cook.

After some thinking, the father-son team decided to go into business making a product the younger Cronin loves: socks!

Mark, Johns father, says his son has always loved colorful, wild socks. So, they created Johns Crazy Socks Company.

The younger Cronin explains what he loves about his work.

"I want to sell crazy socks. Why socks? Because it's fun; it's colorful. I like to be creative, and I want to see wonderful things here.

(Mark) "You're a talented guy!"

(John) "Yes, I am."

John was born with Down Syndrome, a genetic disorder that causes learning disabilities and developmental delays. But that has not stopped him from gaining major success in the business world.

Since launching John's Crazy Socks, father and son have been crazy busy making crazy money. But their business also helps others with disabilities.

We've been able to create 35 jobs 18 of those are held by people with differing abilities. We've raised over $135,000 for our charity partners.

The father and son divide the duties of the business.

John works on sock design but he is also the face of the company. This means he represents the company on its advertising used to help sell the product and on the packaging of the product. Mark takes care of the books, managing money, supplies and hiring.

John and Mark try to make each sock purchase personal. So, they hand-carry orders to customers in the Long Island area. But for those who live farther, John sends a personal note with each order he sends.

(Mark) "What's our mission?"

(John) "Our mission is to spread happiness."

(Mark) "Our customers are happy. We have over 10,000 online reviews  96 percent of those are five-star reviews  and we've done a lot of work, a lot of business. We've shipped over 115,000 orders and earned over $4 million in revenue."

Five percent of John's profits goes to the Special Olympics. The company also gives to the National Down Syndrome Society and the Association for Children with Down Syndrome.

John Cronin is living his dream; spreading happiness, one pair of crazy socks at a time.

Im Anna Matteo.





Faiza Elmasry reported this story for VOA News. Anna Matteo adapted it for Learning English. Caty Weaver was the editor.

________________________________________________________________

Words in This Story

skip  v. to pass by or leave out

sock  n. a knitted or woven covering for the foot usually worn under shoes and extending above the ankle and sometimes to the knee

crazy  adj. very strange or unusual : very much : with a lot of energy and speed

talented  adj. a person or group of people with a special ability to do something well

charity  n. the act of giving money, food, or other kinds of help to people who are poor, sick, etc.

mission  n. a task that you consider to be a very important duty

review  v. an act of carefully looking at or examining the quality or condition of something or someone : examination or inspection

revenue  n. money that is made by or paid to a business or an organization
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The Harman Kardon Invoke is the first (and still only) smart speaker to include baked-in support for Microsofts Cortana voice assistant. When it launched last year for $200, the Invoke was more expensive than a $129 Google Home or $100 Amazon Echo. But it didnt take long for retailers to start selling it for half price.

Now Best Buy is going one step further and selling the Invoke for $50 during a 1-day sale. Even if you have no interest in using the Cortana functionality, thats not a bad price for a decent Bluetooth speaker.

Here are some of the days best deals.

Smart speakers

Laptops, tablets, and other hardware

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You can find more bargains in our daily deals section.

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A crowd of several hundred demonstrators attempted to enter the Government Building in Yerevan today while Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan was chairing a cabinet meeting inside.

The demonstrators, a diverse lot with a number of complaints, banged on the buildings windows, demanding to be let inside.

After the cabinet session ended, Pashinyan went out to address the protesters and was welcomed with a chorus of Nikol, Nikol chants.

Some of the protesters traveled to Yerevan from the Armavir community of Yeghegnout, demanding that their former mayor be appointed to fill the post left vacant when Republican Party of Armenia mayor Razmik Margaryan quit the post.

Yeghegnout residents say the Armavir Provincial Governor is a Prosperous Armenia Party (PAP) member who will appoint a PAP member as community mayor.

Pashinyan assured the protesters that the process to fill the post would be transparent and by the book.

Other protesters were from the border community of Artzvashen in Gegharkounik Province.

They were demanding financial assistance in order to renovate their apartments. Pashinyan told them hed set up a working group that will meet with them on October 2.

There were some in the crowd who showed up to tell Pashinyan about their personal problems. They pushed their way to the front, wanting to take a selfie with the prime minister.

When asked by reporters on the scene to comment on the attempt by demonstrators to force their way into the building, Pashinyan replied, Its their door. If they want, they can hit it.
The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) today found in favor of Yerevan resident Mushegh Saghatelyan in a suit he brought against the government of Armenia that dates to the post-presidential protests of March 2008.

During the March 1, 2008 protests, according to ECHR documents:

Mr Saghatelyan was formally arrested later in the evening and charged on 3 March with planning the violent overthrow of the Government and publicly insulting officials. On 4 March he was brought before a judge who ordered his detention for two months. His appeals against his detention were dismissed.

Five months later the charges against him were dropped, mostly for lack of evidence. New charges were, however, brought, accusing him of assaulting two police officers and illegally carrying a knife.

He was convicted as charged in October 2008. The courts accepted the polices account that they had gone to the protest camp to carry out an inspection for weapons following intelligence they had received that demonstrators had been planning to instigate mass disorder. As concerned Mr Saghatelyan in particular, they relied on police testimony that he had attacked two police officers and illegally carried a knife. His appeal was dismissed in December 2008. He was sentenced to five years imprisonment, of which he served half before being released in November 2010.

Throughout the proceedings, Mr Saghatelyan alleged before the courts that the case against him had been fabricated, and that he was being prosecuted for his active participation in the demonstrations rather than for committing any criminal offence. He also testified that the police had kicked, punched and hit him with rubber batons when he was apprehended and that the beating had then continued at the police station. The authorities never officially investigated his complaints, considering that he must have been injured during the clashes.

In todays judgment, the European Court of Human Rights held, unanimously, that there had been: two violations of Article 3 (prohibition of inhuman or degrading treatment/investigation); a violation of Article 5  1 (right to liberty and security) of the European Convention concerning Mr Saghatelyans arrest; a violation of Article 5  3 (entitlement to trial within a reasonable time or to release pending trial) as concerned the authorities failure to properly justify Mr. Saghatelyans detention; a violation of Article 6  1 (right to a fair trial); and a violation of Article 11 (freedom of assembly and association).

The Court held that Armenia was to pay Mr. Saghatelyan 15,600 euros (EUR) in respect of nonpecuniary damage and EUR 5,000 in respect of costs and expenses.
Bless our families and our children,

and choose from our homes those who you desire for this holy work.

Heavenly Father,your divine Son taught usto pray to the Lord of the harvestto send laborers into His vineyard.We earnestly beg youto bless our Diocese and our worldwith many priests and religiouswho will love you fervently and gladlyand courageously spend their livesin service to your Son's Church,especially the poor and the needy.Teach them to respond generouslyand keep them ever faithfulin following your Son Jesus Christ,that under the guidance of the HolySpiritand with the inspiration ofSaint Damien and Blessed Mariannethe Good News of redemptionmay be brought to all.We ask this through Christ our Lord.
Banco Nacional Ultramarino (BNU) has collaborated with UnionPay to officially launch the UnionPay QR code payment service, which is compatible with the EMVco QR Code Specification for Payment Systems.

According to BNU CEO Carlos Alvares, the collaboration opens up doorways for UnionPay credit/debit cardholders from Macau, Mainland China and other global destinations to make purchases using a simple scan-and-go method.

In the first phase, the service will be available to merchants that want to accept transactions from UnionPay QR code users.

Merchants that adopt this payment method are not required to install or arrange extra QR code systems or scanning devices.

In a second phase, BNU UnionPay cardholders will also be able to use this payment service.

Currently, this payment service has a single transaction limit of MOP1,000 and daily transaction limit of MOP5,000.

Conrad to hold pink inspired charity lunch

Conrad Macao, Cotai Central will host its Pink Inspired charity lunch on October 11 to raise funds for breast cancer awareness.

This is the fifth year the hotel has hosted the event, the hotel notes in a statement.

Ticket prices are MOP480, which includes a direct donation of MOP100 to the Hong Kong Cancer Funds Pink Revolution campaign and a three-course lunch with a glass of Perrier-Jouet Blason Rose Brut NV Champagne, and gift bag for each guest.

Special guests joining the event this year include the popular Hong Kong television actor and doctor Marcus Kwok acting as emcee, and founding director of the charity New Sight Eye Care, and the 2012 winner of the Excellence in Ophthalmology Vision Award Dr. Joyce Samoutou-Wong as guest speaker.

Conrad Macao will partner with the International Ladies Club of Macao to host the Pink charity lunch.
Wynn Resorts Ltd. and its former chief executive, Steve Wynn, were sued by a Massachusetts racetrack operator for allegedly rigging the application process to win a license to run the Boston areas only casino.

In the lawsuit, filed this week, Sterling Suffolk Racecourse claims that construction of the casino at its Suffolk Downs location, as proposed by its partner, Mohegan Sun Casino, wouldve increased the value of the racetrack location. The racetrack operator accused Wynn Resorts of violations of the federal Racketeer Influenced Corrupt Organization Act and seeks more than USD1 billion in damages. Under the racketeering law, that number could triple.

In addition to Wynn Resorts and Steve Wynn, the suit names as defendants Chief Executive Officer Matthew Maddox and former General Counsel Kim Sinatra. The suit also names FBT Everett Realty and Paul Lohnes, one of FBTs owners. FBT sold the Boston Harbor casino site in Everett, Massachusetts, to Wynn Resorts.

The suit, the latest in a series involving the casino operator, comes as the Massachusetts Gaming Commission is preparing to announce whether it will permit Wynn Resorts to operate the $2.5 billion facility nearing completion in Everett, near Boston.

The company initially won the rights in 2014, but the gaming commission put them on hold after allegations of sexual misconduct against Steve Wynn led to his resignation in February. Wynn has denied the accusations. After the claims were disclosed, Wynn Resorts took the companys name off the project, renaming it Encore Boston Harbor.

Steve Wynn, FBT Everett Realty and Lohnes didnt immediately respond to requests for comment. The Massachusetts Gaming Commission, through spokeswoman Elaine Driscoll, declined to comment.

This lawsuit was brought by Richard Fields, an unsuccessful applicant for the license awarded to Wynn Resorts. His claims are frivolous and clearly without foundation, Wynn Resorts said in a written statement. Fields heads Coastal Development LLC, a major investor in Sterling Suffolk Racecourse.

Sterling Suffolk Racecourse alleges that the proposed casino site had been endorsed by Bostons mayor and that its application was superior to that of Wynn Resorts. But it claims that Wynn Resorts committed several illegal acts to win the rights to build on the contaminated industrial site in Everett that Sterling Suffolk Racecourse says was formerly owned by associates of La Cosa Nostra.

Those acts by Wynn Resorts allegedly included committing extortion to suppress voter turnout for a Suffolk County casino referendum, lying about its knowledge of ties between FBT and organized crime figures and making campaign contributions during the application period, in violation of the states gaming law.

The Wynn defendants should have been denied a license for each of those reasons and would have been denied the license but for the misconduct alleged herein, the suit says. Neil Weinberg, Bloomberg
The Institute for Tourism Studies (IFT) yesterday launched the Greater Bay Area Tourism Talent Exchange Cooperation, which saw industry representatives gather to discuss the development of tourism in the region. The event ends tomorrow, September 21.

Leaders from the Macao Government Tourism Office (MGTO) joined experts and scholars from IFT and the University of Macau, as well as representatives of TripAdvisor, to attend discussion sessions.

Topics included the promotion of deeper cooperation across the Greater Bay Areas tourism industry, and how to produce strong tourism brands in the region.

IFT President Fanny Vong said there is high demand in the Greater Bay Area for training in hotel and travel agency services. She added that Macau and IFT will expend more effort to offer such training opportunities in these areas, where Macau already possesses existing advantages.

The event, which was organized by three government departments and nine local tertiary institutions, is a key project under the Framework Agreement on Deepening Guangdong- Hong Kong-Macau Cooperation in the Development of the Bay Area.

Prior to the event, Macau had already launched several projects targeting the exchange of talent among cities in the Greater Bay Area. These include the Greater Bay Area Macau Youth Internship Program in June 2018, which sent 22 young locals for month-long internships with companies in Guangzhou.
Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. co-founder Jack Ma cautioned Chinas business and political leaders to prepare for the trade war with the U.S. to last longer and have a bigger impact than most people think.

Chinas richest man said the dispute could last 20 years and persist beyond the presidency of Donald Trump, as the worlds two strongest economic powers battle for global supremacy. China needs to strengthen its economy to deal with the conflict and shift trade relations from the U.S. to regions like Southeast Asia and Africa, Ma said during a speech at the companys investor day conference in Hangzhou.

Short term, business communities in China, U.S., Europe will all be in trouble, Ma said, pacing a stage in an open white dress shirt and punctuating his remarks with forceful jabs. This thing will last long. If you want a short-term solution, there is no solution.

His comments came just hours after China vowed to retaliate against U.S. plans to levy tariffs on about USD200 billion in Chinese goods. Ma said Alibaba will also be affected by the rising tensions, given its wholesale business allows American merchants to source products from China. But he also said the trauma will offer unprecedented opportunities for companies that can take advantage of them.

MDT/Bloomberg
The leaders of North and South Korea announced a wide range of agreements yesterday which they said were a major step toward peace on the Korean Peninsula. But the premier pledge on denuclearization contained a big condition, with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un stating hed permanently dismantle his main nuclear complex only if the United States takes unspecified corresponding measures.

Compared to the vague language of their two summits earlier this year, Kim and South Korean President Moon Jae-in agreed in their second day of meetings to an ambitious program meant to tackle soaring tensions last year that had many fearing war as the North tested a string of increasingly powerful weapons.

Kim promised to accept international inspectors to monitor the closing of a key missile test site and launch pad and to visit Seoul soon, and both leaders vowed to work together to try to host the Summer Olympics in 2032.

But while containing several tantalizing offers, their joint statement appeared to fall short of the major steps many in Washington have been looking for  such as a commitment by Kim to provide a list of North Koreas nuclear facilities, a solid step- by-step timeline for closing them down, or an agreement to allow international inspectors to assess progress or discover violations.

It also was unclear what corresponding steps North Korea wants from the U.S. to dismantle its nuclear site.

The question is whether it will be enough for U.S. President Donald Trump to pick up where Moon has left off. Trump, tweeting about the Korean leaders agreements, said, Very exciting!

Declaring they had made a major step toward peace, Moon and Kim stood side by side as they announced the joint statement to a group of North and South Korean reporters after a closed-door meeting Wednesday morning. They took no questions.

We have agreed to make the Korean Peninsula a land of peace that is free from nuclear weapons and nuclear threat, Kim said at the guesthouse where Moon is staying. The road to our future will not always be smooth and we may face challenges and trials we cant anticipate. But we arent afraid of headwinds because our strength will grow as we overcome each trial based on the strength of our nation.

Kim and Moon earlier smiled and chatted as they walked down a hallway and into a meeting room to finalize the joint statement, which also said that the leaders would push for a Korean Peninsula without nuclear weapons and to eliminate all the danger of war. Moon and Kim planned to visit a volcano sacred to the North on Thursday, the last day of Moons visit.

This weeks summit comes as Moon is under increasing pressure from Washington to find a path forward in efforts to get Kim to completely  and unilaterally  abandon his nuclear arsenal.

Trump has maintained that he and Kim have a solid relationship, and both leaders have expressed interest in a follow-up summit to their meeting in June in Singapore. North Korea has been demanding a declaration formally ending the Korean War, which was stopped in 1953 by a cease-fire, but neither leader mentioned it Wednesday as they read the joint statement. AP
The head of the Los Angeles Times Beijing bureau has resigned four months after the newspaper suspended him following sexual harassment complaints brought by two women.

Jonathan Kaiman has left the newspaper, Los Angeles Times spokeswoman Hillary Manning confirmed yesterday [Macau time].

Kaiman was suspended last May after the Times launched an investigation into the allegations made by a former Wall Street Journal editor and a former roommate of his.

I can confirm that the Los Angeles Times completed its investigation into the matter and that Jonathan Kaiman resigned, Manning said in an email to The Associated Press. She added she could provide no further information, citing a personnel matter.

Kaiman, who has maintained that his relations with Felicia Sonmez were consensual, vigorously denied the allegations in an email yesterday, adding they had driven him to the brink of suicide.

I am saddened and, quite frankly, horrified that a group of professional journalists would unquestioningly take her version of events as absolute truth before hearing [or, in most cases, even asking for] my side of the story, he told The Associated Press.

Sonmez, who worked in China for The Wall Street Journal and Agence France-Presse, said she was giving an intoxicated Kaiman a ride home on her scooter from a Foreign Correspondents Club of China party when he lifted up her dress and sexually touched her despite her repeated demands that he stop.

Later, she said, they had sex at his home.

I am devastated by the fact that I was not more sober so that I could say with absolute certainty whether what happened that night was rape, she said when she brought the allegations last May.

Laura Tucker, a former roommate of Kaimans, had said in an online post in January that he pressured her to have sex with him in 2013.

Kaiman, who was president of the correspondents club at the time, resigned and apologized.

I am genuinely sorry that Ive caused Laura and Felicia pain  I had considered them very close friends and would never intend to hurt them, Kaiman said Tuesday, adding neither accused him of violence or coercion.

Yet they have irrevocably destroyed my reputation, my professional network, my nine-year career in journalism, and any hope for a rewarding career in the future, he said.

Sonmez, who now lives in Washington, D.C., said she was grateful the Times had taken her allegations seriously but disappointed the newspaper did not reveal the results of its investigation. She also praised Tucker for coming forward first.

The voices of women are a crucial part of the equation when it comes to combatting sexual misconduct, she said. But the response of institutions is another essential part. AP
Next Monday is the Chinese  (fifteenth of the eighth month), better known as the Mid- Autumn Festival,  (Chong Chao). Last year, I wrote about the story of Chang-o, the beautiful wife of Hao Yi who took the immortal elixir and ascended to the moon, and the story of the eternally regenerating laurel tree. The story of Chang-o and Wu Kong chopping the laurel tree on the moon is the most popular legend about Chong Chao, but there are a couple of other stories that are well known for the festival. To welcome the arrival of Chong Chao, lets revisit some Mid-Autumn Festival stories.

Aside from Chang-o and Wu-Kong, who are trapped on the moon eternally, there is a third being on the moon. This is the Jade Rabbit. Legend has it that the gods in heaven needed someone to brew the immortal elixir. Knowing that human beings are cunning and wanting to prevent the elixir from falling into the hands of mortals, the gods decided to choose an animal to prepare the elixir.

Three immortals went down to earth disguised as poor and hungry old people. A fox, a monkey and a rabbit arrived and took pity on the immortals. The fox and the monkey quickly found some food to offer them. However, the little rabbit was unable to offer any food, so it jumped into the fire and offered itself instead. Seeing the selflessness of the rabbit, the Jade Emperor (or Heavenly King) turned the rabbit into an immortal, after which it ascended to heaven and was given the name of Jade Rabbit.

Jade Rabbit lived in heaven and was responsible for making the immortal elixir. One day, the Heavenly Queen approached the Jade Rabbit to ask for more elixir. Jade Rabbit explained that each immortal can only have one elixir each year. The Queen got angry and bullied the rabbit into giving her more. She took the elixir and gave it to Hao Yi, but it was his wife Chang-o who took the elixir and ascended to the moon. The Jade Emperor was angry at Jade Rabbit for not guarding the elixir well but, knowing his wifes temper, he did not punish the Jade Rabbit severely but allowed the rabbit to choose its punishment.

Knowing that it was responsible for Chang-o being stuck on the moon, Jade Rabbit offered to stay on the moon forever to accompany her. The Jade Emperor thought it was a good idea and that being on the moon would prevent other immortals from approaching Jade Rabbit for more elixir. So that was how Jade Rabbit joined Chang-o on the moon and continued making immortal elixir there.

Aside from appreciating the moon with ones family during Chong Chao, another thing we have to do is eat mooncakes. The tradition of eating mooncakes on Chong Chao started at the end of the Yuan Dynasty. The Han people were against the Mongols rule, and many rebelled. However, the government prevented communication between the Han people, especially those they suspected of planning an uprising. The strategist of Zhu Yuanzhang (the first emperor of the Ming Dynasty) came up with the idea of hiding a note that said eighth month fifteenth in cakes and had them delivered to different resistance groups. The messages got through, and on the day of the mid-autumn festival, the resistance groups joined forces and attacked the government. The uprising was very successful and started at the end of the Yuan Dynasty, leading to the beginning of the Ming Dynasty. To commemorate the day of the uprising, Zhu Yuanzhang sent mooncakes to all his fellow resistance armies the next year. Since then, it has become a custom to give each other mooncakes and to eat them on Chong Chao.
A Russian reconnaissance aircraft was shot down by Syrian forces responding to an Israeli airstrike, killing all 15 people aboard, in what President Vladimir Putin said was a chain of tragic accidental circumstances.

The downing of the Il-20 highlighted the dangers posed by the conflicting interests of various powers in the crowded skies over Syria and threatened the close security ties between Russia and Israel.

In an effort to maintain that relationship, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu quickly called Putin to express sorrow over the death of the planes crew, blamed the planes loss squarely on Syria and offered to send Israels air force chief to Moscow to share information about the incident.

The Russian military said the plane was hit 35 kilometers (22 miles) offshore late Monday night as it was returning to the Russian air base in Syria.

The incident triggered testy exchanges of blame between Israel and Russia.

The Israeli military said its fighter jets were targeting a Syrian military facility involved in providing weapons for Irans proxy Hezbollah militia, noting that it warned Russia of the coming raid in line with de-confliction agreements. It said the Syrian army launched the missiles that hit the plane when the Israeli jets were already inside Israeli airspace.

But the Russian Defense Ministry said the Israeli warning came less than a minute before the strike, leaving the Russian aircraft in the line of fire. It pointedly accused the Israeli military of deliberately using the Russian plane as a cover to dodge the Syrian defenses and threatened to retaliate.

The Israeli pilots were using the Russian aircraft as a shield and pushed it into the line of fire of the Syrian air defense, said Russian Defense Ministry spokesman Maj. Gen. Igor Konashenkov.

Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu called his Israeli counterpart, Avigdor Lieberman, to declare that the Israeli side bears full responsibility for the planes downing and to warn that Russia reserves the right to retaliate.

But Putin took a more cautious tone, describing the incident as a chain of tragic accidental circumstances. At the same time, he said Russia will respond by taking additional steps to protect our servicemen and assets in Syria.

It will be the steps that everyone will notice, he said without elaboration.

Netanyahu, who has maintained warm personal ties with Putin and frequently traveled to Russia for Syria-focused talks, noted the need for Russia and Israel to continue coordinating their action in Syria. At the same time, he emphasized Israel would not tolerate the Iranian military presence in Syria.

Putin told Netanyahu that the Israeli raid violated Syrias sovereignty and breached the Russian-Israeli de-confliction agreement. He urged the Israeli side not to allow such situations to happen again, according to the Kremlin.

Israel has refrained from taking sides in the Syrian civil war, but it has carried out scores of airstrikes against archenemy Iran and its Shiite proxy Hezbollah.

Israel has acknowledged attacking Iranian targets some 200 times, and Israel and Russia have maintained a hotline to prevent clashes between their forces in Syria. Israeli military officials have previously praised its effectiveness.

Until now, Russias armed forces have granted Israeli jets the freedom to strike targets in Syria at will, on the condition that a sufficiently early warning is provided to Russia, said Charles Lister, a Syria expert with the Washington-based Middle East Institute. The glue binding this gentlemans agreement  the Putin-Netanyahu personal relationship  will likely tide this issue over for the time being.

Moscow has played a delicate diplomatic game of maintaining friendly relations with both Israel and Iran. In July, Moscow said that it struck a deal with Tehran to keep its fighters 85 kilometers from the Golan Heights to accommodate Israeli security concerns.

In response to Israeli worries, Russia also has shelved plans to arm Syria with sophisticated air defense assets, such as the long-range S-300 systems that could pose a significant threat to Israeli aircraft.

The downing of the plane could change that.

Sima Shine, a former senior Mossad official and ex-deputy director-general at Israels Strategic Affairs Ministry, told Israel Army Radio that the incident could have strategic implications for Israels freedom of action in Syria.

I think it will impose very serious restriction on Israels freedom of activity, she said.

Some Russian lawmakers and retired military officers called for a forceful response, saying Russia should provide Syria with the S-300 air defense systems and other sophisticated weapons to prevent any further strikes.

Shoigu, the defense minister, warned his Israeli counterpart that we wont leave such action without response.

Russias dramatic entry into the Syrian civil war in September 2015 to support Syrian President Bashar Assad after a year of airstrikes by the U.S. and its allies against the Islamic State group increased the possibility of dangerous confrontations over Syria.

The downing of a Russian warplane by a Turkish jet in November 2015 put Moscow and Ankara on the verge of military confrontation, but they later negotiated a series of de-escalation agreements for Syria together with Iran.

The implementation of de-escalation across Syria a year ago introduced a new reality to Syria, in which foreign states are now actively competing to assert their own influence over overlapping territorial space, Lister said. Though appropriate measures have been put in place to manage this, the risk of state-on-state conflagrations like we saw overnight has never been higher. With a meaningful political settlement in Syria an increasingly far-fetched objective, this could well be the new reality we live with for years to come.

The U.S. also expressed sorrow over the Russian deaths, with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo saying it was a reminder of the need to find permanent, peaceful, and political resolutions to the many overlapping conflicts in the region and the danger of tragic miscalculation in Syrias crowded theater of operations.

President Donald Trump, appearing at a White House news conference with Polands president, called it a very sad thing and said it was not a good situation.

But Trump also said that the United States has done a tremendous job battling the Islamic State group in Syria. He went on to suggest that the nations mission there was very close to being finished.

U.S. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said the shootdown complicates relations between Assad and the Russian government but has no effect whatever on the U.S. campaign to defeat Islamic State fighters in Syria.

Before the latest incident, Russia had lost at least seven warplanes and seven combat helicopters in Syria and also had seen dozens of troops killed in ground combat.

And there have been other Syria-related deaths of Russians.

A Russian passenger plane carrying tourists from Egypts Sharm el-Sheikh resort crashed over the Sinai in October 2015, killing all 224 people aboard. The Sinai affiliate of the Islamic State group said it blew up the plane with a bomb smuggled on board.

And in December 2016, a passenger jet carrying members of the Red Army Choir to a New Years concert at a Russian military base in Syria crashed in the Black Sea minutes after takeoff from Sochi in southern Russia, killing all 92 people aboard. The investigation of that crash is continuing, but officials have indicated that pilot error was the likely cause. Vladimir Isachenkov, AP
Brent oil traded near the highest level in a week after Saudi Arabia was said to be content with the global benchmark crude breaking above USD80 a barrel.

Futures in London were little changed near $79 a barrel after a 1.3 percent gain Tuesday. The worlds biggest crude exporter believes it may no longer be possible to avoid higher prices as U.S. sanctions on Iranian exports crimp supply, according to people familiar with Saudi Arabias view. Meanwhile, an industry report Tuesday showed U.S. crude stockpiles increased 1.25 million barrels last week, defying expectations for a decline ahead of government data.

Prices have traded mostly below $80 over the past few months on fears trade tensions between the U.S. and China could damp global demand. Still, concerns remain that supplies could tighten as a November deadline for American sanctions on Iranian oil approaches. Investors are also turning their focus to Sundays OPEC meeting with allies for clues on whether the group will boost output again after President Donald Trump called on the cartel to rein in prices.

Investors are currently assessing the Saudis mixed message on oil prices versus its earlier pledge to increase output, said Hong Sungki, a commodities trader at NH Investment & Securities Co. in Seoul. But U.S. pressure will come into play and its more likely that OPEC producers and allies will decide on a production boost later this week.

Prices in New York and London both rose as much as 2.2 percent in the previous session after Saudi Arabia was said to be comfortable with higher crude prices, at least in the short term, as the market adjusts to the loss of Iranian supplies. Oil exports from the Persian Gulf nation have plunged about 35 percent since April, the month before Trump exited from the diplomatic deal with Tehran and announced new oil sanctions.

While Irans exports have moved in Trumps favor, the president faces the predicament of wanting oil prices to come down before U.S. midterm elections on Nov. 6. Trump sent several tweets stating that prices are too high after Brent rose to a three-year high in May. Saudi Arabia, Russia and other major producers are scheduled to meet in Algiers on Sunday to review their strategy after the group agreed to increase production in June.

Meanwhile, American Petroleum Institute data showed that crude stockpiles increased last week, while those in the storage hub at Cushing in Oklahoma fell. A Bloomberg survey of analysts forecasts a 2.5-million-barrel decline in nationwide inventories. MDT/Bloomberg
Dr. Arina ten Cate-Hoek, , Maastricht, Limburg, Netherlands. Credit: Maastricht Universitair Medisch Centrum

People with deep-vein thrombosis (DVT) can substantially cut their risk of potentially debilitating complications by starting adequate compression therapy in the first twenty-four hours of DVT therapy (known as the acute phase of treatment), suggests a study published today in the journal Blood.

DVT occurs when a blood clot forms in a deep vein, commonly in the legs. DVT affects as many as 900,000 people in the United States, and the condition carries a high risk of recurrence, death, or chronic debilitating symptoms such as pain and swelling.

The largest study to track outcomes from compression therapy in the acute phase of DVT to date, this research examined if immediate compression therapy could prevent residual vein occlusion and post thrombotic syndrome. Residual vein occlusionwhen clots persist in veins with or without symptomsis thought to be a contributing factor in the development of post thrombotic syndrome, a collection of persistent and often debilitating symptoms that can greatly diminish a person's quality of life, including pain, swelling, and discoloration and scaling in the affected leg.

Researchers prospectively studied nearly 600 DVT patients in the Netherlands who received compression therapy that began within 24 hours of diagnosis compared to patients that started compression therapy at a later point in time. Compression therapy was randomly administered using multilayered bandaging or compression hosiery until edema were reabsorbed, at which time all patients wore fitted compression stockings. In addition to compression, patients also received anticoagulants.

Patients who received immediate compression therapy were 20 percent less likely to develop residual vein occlusion and 8 percent less likely to suffer post thrombotic syndrome compared with those who did not receive immediate compression.

"We found little reason for those treating DVT not to use compression therapy as a prevention measure against future complications," said senior study author Arina J. ten Cate-Hoek of Maastricht University in the Netherlands.

Compression therapy was not associated with any adverse side effects. Patients with a blood clot lower in the leg appeared to benefit from compression to a greater extent than those with a blood clot higher in the leg, a result that is consistent with previous studies, according to researchers.

Patients with DVT are typically treated with clot-busting medications to dissolve the clot and blood thinners to prevent the formation of new ones.

"Although the use of compression stockings after DVT is routine across much of Europe, it is less common in the United States, where guidelines emphasize compression primarily for patients who complain of ongoing symptoms," said Dr. ten Cate-Hoek.

According to Dr. ten Cate-Hoek, compression therapy is thought to improve blood flow by reducing the diameter of veins so that blood is pushed through them more forcefully, helping to clear clot material.

"I think we can infer from our findings that this improved blood flow certainly helps prevent complications like residual vein occlusion and post thrombotic syndrome after DVT," she said. "Given these outcomes, and that compression stockings are fairly easy to self-administer, relatively inexpensive, and minimally intrusive, compression therapy offers a clear benefit for all patients with DVT."

Explore further Study examines whether compression stockings can prevent post-thrombotic syndrome

More information: Elham E. Amin et al, Residual vein occlusion in relation to immediate compression and postthrombotic syndrome in deep vein thrombosis, Blood (2018). Journal information: Blood Elham E. Amin et al, Residual vein occlusion in relation to immediate compression and postthrombotic syndrome in deep vein thrombosis,(2018). DOI: 10.1182/blood-2018-03-836783
PET scan of a human brain with Alzheimer's disease. Credit: public domain

Researchers at King's College London have discovered a vicious feedback loop underlying brain degeneration in Alzheimer's disease which may explain why so many drug trials have failed. The study also identifies a clinically approved drug which breaks the vicious cycle and protects against memory-loss in animal models of Alzheimer's.

Overproduction of the protein beta-amyloid is strongly linked to development of Alzheimer's disease but many drugs targeting beta-amyloid have failed in clinical trials. Beta-amyloid attacks and destroys synapsesthe connections between nerve cells in the brainresulting in memory problems, dementia and ultimately death.

In the new study, published in Translational Psychiatry, researchers found that when beta-amyloid destroys a synapse, the nerve cells make more beta-amyloid driving yet more synapses to be destroyed.

"We show that a vicious positive feedback loop exists in which beta-amyloid drives its own production," says senior author Dr. Richard Killick from the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience (IoPPN). "We think that once this feedback loop gets out of control it is too late for drugs which target beta-amyloid to be effective, and this could explain why so many Alzheimer's drug trials have failed."

"Our work uncovers the intimate link between synapse loss and beta-amyloid in the earliest stages of Alzheimer's disease," says lead author Dr. Christina Elliott from the IoPPN. "This is a major step forward in our understanding of the disease and highlights the importance of early therapeutic intervention."

The researchers also found that a protein called Dkk1, which potently stimulates production of beta-amyloid, is central to the positive feedback loop. Previous research by Dr. Killick and colleagues identified Dkk1 as a central player in Alzheimer's, and while Dkk1 is barely detectable in the brains of young adults its production increases as we age.

Instead of targeting beta-amyloid itself, the researchers believe targeting Dkk1 could be a better way to halt the progress of Alzheimer's disease by disrupting the vicious cycle of beta-amyloid production and synapse loss.

"Importantly, our work has shown that we may already be in a position to block the feedback loop with a drug called fasudil which is already used in Japan and China for stroke." says Dr. Killick. "We have convincingly shown that fasudil can protect synapses and memory in animal models of Alzheimer's, and at the same time reduces the amount of beta-amyloid in the brain."

The researchers found that in mice engineered to develop large deposits of beta-amyloid in their brains as they age, just two weeks of treatment with fasudil dramatically reduced the beta-amyloid deposits.

Researchers at King's College London are now seeking funding to run a trial in early stage sufferers of Alzheimer's to determine if fasudil improves brain health and prevents cognitive decline.

Professor Dag Aarsland from the IoPPN said "As well as being a safe drug, fasudil appears to enter the brain in sufficient quantity to potentially be an effective treatment against beta-amyloid. We now need to move this forward to a clinical trial in people with early stage Alzheimer's disease as soon as possible."

More information: Christina Elliott et al, A role for APP in Wnt signalling links synapse loss with -amyloid production, Translational Psychiatry (2018). Journal information: Translational Psychiatry Christina Elliott et al, A role for APP in Wnt signalling links synapse loss with -amyloid production,(2018). DOI: 10.1038/s41398-018-0231-6
Credit: Medical Research Council

New drugs that lower levels of triglycerides (a type of fat) in blood could further reduce the risk of heart attack when added to statins. These new drugs, which are in various stages of development, could also reduce blood glucose levels and the risk of diabetes, according to a new genetic study from the Medical Research Council Epidemiology Unit at the University of Cambridge.

MRC scientists behind the research, published today in JAMA Cardiology, suggest these new drugs  lipoprotein lipase enhancers  could be paired with statins, the current gold standard for high cholesterol treatment, or other cholesterol lowering agents. Their findings, which stem from a type of genetic study which aims to simulate a clinical trial, hold promise for clinicians and pharmaceutical companies that are considering testing the efficacy of these novel drugs.

Dr Luca A. Lotta, Senior Clinical Investigator at the MRC Epidemiology Unit, said: "Our study suggests that these new triglyceride-lowering agents could give additional benefits to patients with heart disease when added to statins. This combination could prevent more heart attacks as well as reduce the risk of developing type 2 diabetes."

Heart disease is a significant problem in the UK, tied to more than a quarter of all deaths in the country, according to 2018 estimates. One of the major factors leading to heart disease is high levels of low-density lipoprotein or LDL cholesterol, often referred to as "bad cholesterol".

Statins are widely prescribed to lower LDL levels and are effective at preventing heart disease. Some people who are treated with statins will still encounter heart attacks, which has been partly linked to raised levels of triglycerides in their blood.

Normally, our bodies can break down triglycerides with a protein called lipoprotein lipase or LPL. In recent years, scientists and drug developers have tapped into this, developing several new agents that enhance the activity of this enzyme. However, these drugs are still in pre-clinical or early clinical stages of development.

In theory, these new heart drugs could be used in combination with statins and other cholesterol-lowering agents, but there hasn't been a large-scale trial to show their efficacy. MRC scientists used genetic data to gain insights into their likely efficacy and safety in advance of a large-scale trial.

The new research studied the genetics of some 400,000 people from the UK Biobank, EPIC-InterAct, and EPIC-Norfolk studies. Scientists used an approach called Mendelian randomisation, which uses naturally occurring genetic differences to simulate the effects of a clinical trial, to study the likely effects of statins and these novel LPL-enhancing drugs.

Some people have variation in their DNA that naturally increases the effectiveness of LPL, mimicking the effect that would be observed if the LPL-enhancing drugs were used.

In this study, people who carried both triglyceride-lowering DNA variants in the LPL gene and cholesterol-lowering variants in several other genes (simulating the protective effect of statins) had a lower risk of heart disease compared with people with only one of either of these sets of DNA variants.

The researchers believe these drugs could mitigate some of the potential side effects of statins, too. For some people, statins can increase the risk of developing type 2 diabetes  50 to 100 new cases for every 10,000 patients treated. The scientists found that those with LPL gene variants had a lower risk of type 2 diabetes in all study groups, suggesting that these new drugs may improve blood glucose control when paired with statins.

Dr Lotta said: "We're using genetics to gain insight and help to predict the likely result of future trials. Studies that simulate clinical trials are invaluable because large-scale trials are expensive, take years to conduct and considerable resources  scientists need strong evidence of a drug's likelihood of success before it gets to the trial stage."

Clinical trials are costly endeavours but emerging findings indicate the odds of successful drug development are increased when knowledge about these novel agents is bolstered by genetic studies. To empower these studies, the MRC, pharmaceutical companies, and other funders have invested in large genetic resources including the recent announcement of a consortium of companies to sequence the DNA of all participants of the UK Biobank, a study of 500,000 people from the general UK population.

Explore further New medications for diabetes management have additional heart benefits, study finds

More information: Lucca Lotta et al. Association of Genetically Enhanced Lipoprotein LipaseMediated Lipolysis and Low-Density Lipoprotein CholesterolLowering Alleles With Risk of Coronary Disease and Type 2 Diabetes. JAMA Cardiol. Published online September 19, 2018. Journal information: JAMA Cardiology Lucca Lotta et al. Association of Genetically Enhanced Lipoprotein LipaseMediated Lipolysis and Low-Density Lipoprotein CholesterolLowering Alleles With Risk of Coronary Disease and Type 2 Diabetes.. Published online September 19, 2018. DOI: 10.1001/jamacardio.2018.2866
Preoperative and postoperative brain MRI (left panel), tumor H&E (right upper panel) and GFAP immunohistochemical (right lower panel) staining images from a patient with ganglioglioma (GG231) carrying the BRAFV600E mutation. The white arrow and the black arrowhead indicate the brain tumor and a dysplastic neuron, respectively. Credit: KAIST

Pediatric brain tumors are characterized by frequent complications due to intractable epilepsy compared to adult brain tumors. However, the genetic cause of refractory epilepsy in pediatric brain cancer has not been elucidated yet, and it is difficult to treat patients because the tumors do not respond to existing antiepileptic drugs and interfere with children's development.

A Korean research team led by Professor Jeong Ho Lee of the Graduate School of Medical Science and Engineering at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) has recently identified a neuronal BRAF somatic mutation that causes intrinsic epileptogenicity in pediatric brain tumors. Their research results were published online in Nature Medicine on September 17.

The research team studied patients' tissue diagnosed with ganglioglioma (GG), one of the main causes of tumor-associated intractable epilepsy, and found that the BRAF V600E somatic mutation is involved in the development of neural stem cells by using deep DNA sequencing. This mutation was carried out in an animal model to reproduce the pathology of GG and to observe seizures to establish an animal model for the treatment of epileptic seizures caused by pediatric brain tumors.

Using immunohistochemical and transcriptome analysis, they realized that the BRAF V600E mutation that arose in early progenitor cells during embryonic brain formation led to the acquisition of intrinsic epileptogenic properties in neuronal lineage cells, whereas tumorigenic properties were attributed to a high proliferation of glial lineage cells exhibiting the mutation. Notably, researchers found that seizures in mice were significantly alleviated by intraventricular infusion of the BRAF V600E inhibitor, Vemurafenib, a clinical anticancer drug.

The authors said, "Our study offers the first direct evidence that the BRAF somatic mutation arising from neural stem cells plays a key role in epileptogenesis in the brain tumor. This study also showed a new therapeutic target for tumor-associated epileptic disorders."

Explore further V600E BRAF mutation tied to worse survival in CRC liver mets

More information: Hyun Yong Koh et al, BRAF somatic mutation contributes to intrinsic epileptogenicity in pediatric brain tumors, Nature Medicine (2018). Journal information: Nature Medicine Hyun Yong Koh et al, BRAF somatic mutation contributes to intrinsic epileptogenicity in pediatric brain tumors,(2018). DOI: 10.1038/s41591-018-0172-x
Public Health England (PHE) has failed to learn the lessons over its partnership with the drinks industry, warn public health experts in The BMJ today.

Last week, Ian Gilmore, a senior government adviser on alcohol policy, stepped down from his role at PHE after the agency partnered with Drinkaware, an alcohol education charity that receives funding from industry, for a new campaign encouraging middle aged people to have more alcohol-free days per week.

In an editorial for The BMJ, Gilmore and colleagues John Britton and Linda Bauld point out that voluntary agreements with the tobacco industry in the second half of the 20th century served to "undermine, dilute or constrain measures designed to curtail their activities."

By entering into a voluntary agreement with Drinkaware, "PHE appear to have fallen victim to the delusion that a new partnership with the alcohol industry will somehow avoid the same fate," they write. "In so doing they tread a path that, at least to those who have worked in tobacco policy, is depressingly familiar," they add.

They question the campaign's two alcohol-free days per week target as "a somewhat modest interpretation of current UK Chief Medical Officers advice, which refers to 'several' alcohol-free days each week."

And they note that the campaign is badged as part of the broader One You campaign, which includes advice on smoking, physical activity and other 'lifestyle' determinants of health, "thus linking an alcohol industry-funded body with wider health messaging."

Finally, they point out that senior PHE managers do not appear to have asked themselves why the alcohol industry is happy to fund a campaign that ostensibly aims to reduce alcohol consumption. Had they done so, they say the answer would be because it thinks the campaign will be ineffective, or will divert attention from other more effective policies to reduce alcohol consumption that the industry fears more, such as minimum unit pricing.

More importantly, however, through Drinkaware, "the alcohol industry gains valuable engagement with PHE, establishes working relations with PHE staff, and may even secure a seat at the table when other alcohol harm initiatives are planned and executed," they explain.

It is right that the alcohol and other harmful commodity industries pay to prevent and treat harm caused by their products, they say, but payment "must be made through statutory levies, not voluntary agreements."

This new campaign backed by high profile individuals telling drinkers to drink less "is all well and good," says Tony Rao, Visiting Researcher at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience, King's College London, in a linked article. "But skirting around and dumbing down the specifics of existing guidelines does not bode well for providing a consistent health message to the public."

He warns that, if we cannot maintain our government to observe the principle of being at 'arm's length' from the drinks industry, "we wander into a storm that has the potential to capsize public health and all that it represents."

Explore further Two-thirds of alcohol sales are to heavy drinkers

More information: Editorial: Public Health England's capture by the alcohol industry Editorial: Public Health England's capture by the alcohol industry www.bmj.com/content/362/bmj.k3928 Opinion: Calling time on dumbing down our drinking culture blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2018/09/20/t  ur-drinking-culture/
(HealthDay)On average, hospitals mark up drugs by 479 percent of their cost, according to a report from The Moran Company, commissioned by the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA).

Researchers from The Moran Company examined hospital markups for separately paid drugs using data from the Healthcare Provider Cost Reporting Information System. Hospitals with a full year of cost report data were included from 49 states and the District of Columbia.

According to the report, hospitals charge 479 percent of their cost for drugs nationwide on average. Eighty-three percent of hospitals charge patients and insurers more than double their acquisition cost for medicine, marking up medicines 200 percent or more. Fifty-three percent of hospitals mark up medicines by an average of 200 to 400 percent. Seventeen percent of hospitals charged seven times the price of medications, so that a medication costing $150 would have a charge of $1,050; 8 percent had an average markup of more than 1,000 percent.

"Hospitals receive billions of dollars every year in negotiated and mandatory discounts from biopharmaceutical companies while simultaneously increasing the price of these medicines to insurers and patients," Stephen J. Ubl, president and chief executive officer of PhRMA, said in a statement. "In order to make medicines more affordable for patients, we must address the role hospital markups play in driving up medicine costs."

Explore further Markups for oncology services vary at the hospital level

More information: More Information

Copyright  2018 HealthDay. All rights reserved.
In a case study published online last week in Academic Medicine, an international team of researchers led by the University of Cambridge and Johns Hopkins Medicine looked at what prevented employees from raising concerns. The study identifies measures to help health care organizations encourage their employees to speak up and recommends a systematic approach to promoting employee voice that appears to have already made a positive impact at Johns Hopkins.

"It's not enough just to say you're committed to employee voice. Health care staff must genuinely feel comfortable speaking up if organizations are going to provide safe, high-quality care," says Mary Dixon-Woods, D.Phil., M.Sc., a professor at the University of Cambridge, director of THIS Institute (The Healthcare Improvement Studies Institute) and the study's lead author. "Even when reporting mechanisms are in place, employees may not report disruptive behaviors if they don't feel safe in doing so and don't think their concerns will be addressed."

Health care workers often are reluctant to raise concerns about co-workers and unsafe behaviors, so leadership at Johns Hopkins Medicine sought to encourage employee voice in the organization by first identifying barriers. The research team interviewed 67 administrators and front-line staff members about raising patient safety issues at The Johns Hopkins Hospital. The researchers found that some staff members said they didn't know how to report their concerns, and others said that reporting processes were difficult to navigate. More generally, employees reported a culture of fearthey worried about hostile or angry responses, retaliation, or being labeled a bad team player. Even when employees did speak up, they reported, nothing seemed to happen in response. A particular concern for many employees was a small number of senior staff members who engaged in poor conduct with apparent impunity. Quietly referred to by many as the "untouchables," their behavior was regarded as unacceptable, but they were so powerful that many felt that raising concerns would go nowhere.

To address the issues raised in these interviews, Johns Hopkins leaders developed, implemented, and in some cases expanded a series of interventions from fall 2014 through summer 2016. These interventions included clear definitions of acceptable and unacceptable behavior, well-coordinated reporting mechanisms, leadership training on having difficult conversations, and consistent consequences for disruptive behaviors. Safe at Hopkins, a program dedicated to addressing and investigating concerns, was designed, researchers say, to make everyone feel comfortable and safe. It means that instead of relying on individual accounts that could be disputed, Johns Hopkins Medicine leadership now investigates an entire clinical unit. During the period studied, 382 individual reports of disruptive behavior were made that led to 55 investigations in which a whole clinical unit was interviewed.

"Once Safe at Hopkins came into units where there was disruptive behavior, people started to speak up and make reports," says Janice Clements, Ph.D., professor of molecular and comparative pathobiology, the vice dean of faculty at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and an author of the study. "Although there is a lot more work to be done to formally evaluate and refine this program and all the other interventions we have put into place, I think it's safe to say that giving people a 'safe' way to speak up can be done."

With further testing in different contexts, Dixon-Woods says the interventions used at Johns Hopkins could be applicable to other health care organizations looking to promote employee voice and improve how they respond to transgressive behavior. "Though the importance of giving voice to employeesand the difficulties in doing soare widely known, the two-stage approach of diagnosis and intervention that we undertook for this study demonstrated some intriguing promise in remaking norms in health care organizations."

Explore further Set of specific interventions rapidly improves hospital safety 'culture'
(HealthDay)You might feel squeaky clean after that morning shower, but you carry an invisible cloud of bacteria, viruses, fungi and chemicals every day.

That's one of the lessons from the first study to take a deep dive into the human "exposome"the collection of microbes, plant particles and chemicals that accompanies people as they move through the world.

In fact, if your personal exposome was visible to the naked eye, the researchers said, you'd look like the "Peanuts" character Pig-Pen.

In the study, a small group of volunteers wore monitors with a special filter that trapped particles from the air around them as they went about their normal day.

When researchers did a genetic analysis of those samples, they found that each person carried a diverse cloud of bacteria, viruses, fungi, plant particles, chemicals and even "microscopic animals."

But the exact makeup of that exposome varied substantially from person to personeven though they lived in a fairly narrow geographic region (the San Francisco Bay area).

"This is a very interesting study," said Dr. Aaron Glatt, chief of medicine at South Nassau Communities Hospital, in Oceanside, N.Y.

It's no secret that humans live in a world chock-full of invisible organisms and chemicals, said Glatt, who is also a spokesperson for the Infectious Diseases Society of America.

But this study offers a detailed look at individual exposomes, he said. And that could be a first step toward understanding the ways in which various environmental exposures affect human health, Glatt suggested.

"That's what we believe," agreed senior researcher Michael Snyder, chair of genetics at Stanford University School of Medicine, in California.

"Health is totally dependent on genes and environment," Snyder said. But it's clear that genes explain only a portion of a person's vulnerability to various diseases, he added.

There is still a huge amount to be learned about the effects of environmental exposures, Snyder said.

As an initial step, his team gathered detailed information from 14 people who wore matchbook-sized monitors on their arms for anywhere from a week to a month. Snyder, himself, wore the device for two years.

The devices contained filters that captured particulate matter from the surrounding air. Those samples were brought back to the lab for genetic analyses and chemical "profiling."

In general, Snyder's team found, people's exposomes were diverse in the types of micro-organisms and chemicals they containedalthough the chemical DEET, an insect repellent, was ubiquitous.

"It was everywhere, which kind of surprised me," Snyder said.

Otherwise, the makeup of the exposome seemed to depend on factors like weather, travel, pets and household chemicals, for instance.

Snyder said his own home exposures turned out to be "very fungal, rather than bacterial."

He connects that to the use of "green" paint in his house. The paint lacks a substance called pyridine, which seems to keep fungus levels down. Snyder also discovered he was exposed to eucalyptus in the early springwhich, he said, offers some clues to the culprit behind his seasonal allergies.

Several known carcinogens turned up in most of the chemical samples, according to the researchers. However, they only know the chemicals were presentand not the amount of exposure.

If the idea of carrying around a cloud of bacteria, fungi and chemicals makes you cringe, Glatt made this point: Many of those exposures would be harmless or even beneficial.

It's known, for instance, that while some bacteria make people sick, many are "good" and necessary for human health.

Snyder agreed. For the most part, no one knows yet which components of the exposome are "good" and which are not, he said. And that may vary from one person to another, he added.

Complicating matters, a person's exposome is not static. It is "dynamic," Snyder said, and constantly shifting over a lifetime.

That will make it challenging to study the ways in which the exposome affects human health, Snyder said. "But I also think it can be done," he added.

He said his team plans to study larger groups of people in more-diverse environments. They also want to simplify the technology used in the study so that one day, people might be able to use the devices themselves, to track their own exposures.

The findings were published online Sept. 20 in Cell.

Explore further We are bombarded by thousands of diverse species and chemicals, study finds

More information: Michael Snyder, Ph.D., professor and chair, genetics, Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, Calif.; Aaron Glatt, M.D., spokesperson, Infectious Diseases Society of America, and chief, medicine, South Nassau Communities Hospital, Oceanside, N.Y.; Sept. 20, 2018, Cell, online Michael Snyder, Ph.D., professor and chair, genetics, Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, Calif.; Aaron Glatt, M.D., spokesperson, Infectious Diseases Society of America, and chief, medicine, South Nassau Communities Hospital, Oceanside, N.Y.; Sept. 20, 2018,, online The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has more on the human exposome. Journal information: Cell

Copyright  2018 HealthDay. All rights reserved.
Mgr. Iva Bajtlerova conducting a speech and language therapy session with 5-year old Andrea, assisted by Agata the dog. Credit: Josef Ruzicka.

Therapy assisted by a dog could be more effective than standard speech and language therapy for children with communication impairments, suggests a new study published in the journal Anthrozoos.

The study found children with the condition developmental dysphasia, which affects the ability to communicate and form words, were more likely to be able to mimic communicative signals in a therapy session where a dog was present.

Researchers observed that the children in the group with the therapy dog also seemed more motivated and open to communicating. Additionally, the children displayed authentic, natural expressions during their interactions with the dog.

Lead author Kristyna Machova from Czech University of Life Sciences in Prague commented, "The presence of the dog improves the relationship with the therapist, as it distracts from the fear of therapy in children and provides them with a form of support during the practice."

In this study, researchers at Czech University conducted the first long-term randomized study of its kind, with a control and an experimental group, involving 69 nursery-school children (52 male and 17 female) participants diagnosed with developmental dysphasia. The aim was to understand if undergoing speech therapy accompanied by a dog improved results.

For both groups, the initial examination of each child involved evaluating their skills at baseline, with a follow-up scheduled for 10 months later. The control group received traditional speech therapy, while the experimental group had animal assistance therapy sessions with a female middle-aged Peruvian hairless dog named Agata.

Despite the promising findings from this study, as this is the first of its kind and there were improvements found in both groups, the authors have stated that further research would be needed to consolidate the findingsespecially those involving a larger group of participants.

However, they do agree that there is great potential in the approach to complement and aid the current conventional approach, as canine-assisted therapy has been found to be more effective than more standard forms of delivery in many other disciplines.

Developmental dysphasia, or specific speech impairment, is a common disorder whereby sufferers struggle to formulate words verbally and rank significantly below their non-verbal intellectual level. It is widely thought that the ability to improve communication skills in sufferers would also help to improve quality of life which strongly supports funding more research into this area.

Explore further Study finds therapy dogs effective in reducing symptoms of ADHD

More information: Canine-assisted Speech Therapy for Children with Communication Impairments: A Randomized Controlled Trial, Canine-assisted Speech Therapy for Children with Communication Impairments: A Randomized Controlled Trial, DOI: 10.1080/08927936.2018.1505339
Also, thanks in part to Donald Trump's massive tax cut for America's corporations and wealthy individuals, interest rates on US Treasury Bonds are heading towards 3% pa and beyond.

The aim is to carefully defuse the world's enormous debt bomb without causing an explosion.

After years of quantitative easing (lets call it printing money), the world's central banks are slowly but surely beginning the tricky process of pulling excessive liquidity out of the world economy.

ADELAIDE - The post global financial crisis era (Americans call it the great recession) of virtually free money is drawing to a close.

This is widely regarded in the world of high finance as a tipping point, where capital in search of a combination of a reasonable return and a safe haven will begin to flow. This is, in fact, exactly what is happening.

This leaves penurious states like Papua New Guinea bidding for finance from a rapidly diminishing pool of money. Because PNG's bonds are correctly rated as "junk", the interest charged will be much higher than that charged by, say, the IMF or the World Bank.

PNG cannot borrow from these sources because the conditions of the loan will require the government to actually manage its financial affairs in an accountable, open and transparent way.

Of course, there is always Chinese money but that too comes with strings attached. These strings will be more subtle but arguably far more onerous in the long run.

Eventually, a lot of economic chickens are going to come home to roost in PNG and elsewhere besides. Australia will not be exempt.

What is certain is that this will not be a happy process for ordinary citizens.

Taxpayers have already bailed out the world's financial system once and there is a very real prospect that we will all be doing so again in the not so distant future.

Sadly, while I do share his evident anger, I cannot share Phil Fitzpatrick's hope that regime change can rescue PNG.

It is all far too late now: we have collectively made ourselves hostages to fortune and consequently must endure the inevitable suffering to come with stoic fortitude.

This latter quality exists in considerable abundance in PNG, but I fear rather less so in Australia.
York, PA - A man was arrested at a Pennsylvania fair for using a dog leash to walk his wife, who has late-stage dementia, police said.

Walter William Wolford Sr., 66, of Hagerstown, was charged with one count of simple assault at the York Fair on Saturday, after a witness told police they saw Wolford leading his wife, Catherine Wolford, around the fairgrounds with a red nylon dog leash about 8 feet long, the York Daily Record reports.

At one point, Wolford was spotted yanking the leash, causing his wifes head to move backwards and for her to sustain red marks around her throat area, according to charging documents.

Responding cops noted Catherine Wolfords condition as she was being treated by medical personnel at the fair.

She was very disoriented, did not know where she was, her own name, and spoke in gibberish, West Manchester Township police said in a report.

Wolford told police he took his wife to the fair last year without a leash but she wandered away from him, prompting the idea to restrain her.

Walter told me that he originally placed the leash around her waist, but somehow it had moved up around her neck and when she walked away from him and all of the slack became taut, he gently tugged on the leash so she would stop, police said.

Wolford said his wife suffers from late-stage dementia. A doctor gave her two years to live about five years ago, he said. Shes no longer taking medication for dementia because they dont make any medication that works for that, Wolford told police.

Investigators also got in touch with the Wolfords son, Walter Wolford Jr., who told police he believed his father was not abusive to his mother.

Wolford was released from custody after posting $5,000 unsecured bail, according to the newspaper. Hes due to return to court on Oct. 18, court records show.

Wolford maintained he never meant any harm to his wife.

I really dont know what I did wrong, Wolford told The Post on Wednesday. I was trying to keep track of my wife. She is three times faster than I am. Thats part of her dementia  she simply runs away.

Wolford said Saturday marked the third time he had used the leash on his wife.

The first time, she didnt like it so I didnt do it again, he said. But then six months later, I tried it on her at a carnival and it worked OK. This was the third time and I was just trying to keep her from running away from me. Thats all.

Wolford insisted hes not the monster some at the fair claimed he was.

I dont really like using it but it was either that or not take her, Wolford said. I love my wife more than anything in the world but its very difficult to take care of someone with severe dementia. Theyre making me out to be a monster, but hurting my wife is the last thing I wanted to do.
MyBroadbands forum community recently rated their fibre and ADSL Internet service providers (ISPs) based on value-for-money, network quality, and general service satisfaction.

MyBroadbands forum is visited by over a million South Africans each month and recently passed 12 million posts by its members.

Its strong IT community has made the forum an extremely valuable platform to find help on tech-related problems and to gain insight into the local ICT market.

It is for this reason that MyBroadband decided to ask this community for their views on their ISP  to see which provider offers the best service.

The ratings revealed that Cool Ideas is the top-rated ISP, followed by Vox and Axxess.

Top-rated ISPs

The table below provides an overview of the ISP ratings from MyBroadband forum members.

It should be noted that these ratings were taken at 14:00 on Wednesday 19 September, and the ratings may have changed with new votes from members.

To see the latest votes, you can click on an ISPs name in the table below.
Standard Bank customers recently reported spotting a new fee on their credit card statements.

The line item on their statements was listed as Intl. Trans Fee, and was linked to payments made in US dollars or to international companies.

These fees started in April and May 2018.

Standard Bank told MyBroadband that it has has always charged a fee for international transactions, which was previously known as the Currency Conversion Fee.

This is charged at a rate of 2.5% or 2.75%, dependent on card type, of the transaction amount.

The International Transaction Fee is charged in cases where the merchants/stores/service providers are located and/or acquired in geographies outside of South Africa, said Standard Bank.

In the past, the fee amount used to be included as part of the transaction amount that would reflect on the statement of the account. Now the International Transaction Fee is split out of the transaction amount to ensure ease of reconciliation and transparency for our cardholders.

To find out what South Africas other banks charge users, we contacted the financial institutions.

Nedbank

Chris Wood, Nedbank Executive: Card Issuing and Payments, told MyBroadband the bank does charge a currency conversion fee on international transactions of 2%.

Part of this fee is used to cover the costs incurred by Nedbank via the associations  Mastercard, Visa, and American Express, said Wood.

We are committed to transparency in our pricing, and this fee is disclosed on our pricing schedules.

For transactions where the amount is billed in rand, but the merchant is acquired internationally, Wood said there are two scenarios.

Nedbank issues cards from three associations, namely Visa, Mastercard, and American Express. For American Express, there is no fee charged, as they do not bill us a cross-border fee for these transactions.

We therefore do not charge our clients a fee. For the other associations, they bill us a fee for these transactions.

Wood said that as Netflix moves to rand-based pricing, clients using any of their American Express issued cards  such as the Greenbacks American Express card  will not be charged any additional fee.

Absa

Cowyk Fox, Managing Executive: Unsecured, Absa Retail, and Business Banking at Absa, said the only fee charged is a currency conversion fee.

The only fee that is levied is the currency conversion fee of 2.75%. For instance, based on a rand transaction value of R100  after converting from US Dollar to ZAR  the applicable transaction fee will be R2.75, said Fox.

This applies to dollar purchases and subscriptions.

The fees are charged to cover the costs associated with the conversion of the original currency to rand.

If a rand subscription fee is paid to an international company like Apple, however, no currency conversion fees will be levied.

FNB

FNB said it does not charge transactional-level fees.

The bank charges a currency conversion fee of 2.75%, which is embedded in the transaction value, said FNB.

This fee only applies to foreign currency transactions, but is not applicable to international transactions charged in rands.

Capitec

Capitec does not charge any currency conversion fees on international purchases. Furthermore, no transaction fees are charged when paying with your Capitec credit card, said the bank.
Former FNB CEO Michael Jordaan announced in January they plan to launch Bank Zero in South Africa in the beginning of 2019.

Bank Zero will be app-driven, and promises to offer clients lower fees, richer functionality, transparency, and better control.

The bank will not have branches, but customers can use ATMs locally and internationally to access cash.

In a recent interview, Jordaan said they are in the final stages of getting their licence from the South African Reserve Bank.

After they receive it, Bank Zero will start the integration process into the various payment systems in South Africa.

This is needed to ensure that you can draw cash as ATMs, use debit orders, make payments to other banks, and that your card will be accepted at POS machines.

Free electronic transactions

Jordaan said the biggest feature of Bank Zero is its low cost base, which is partly possible through reliable open-source software which can be used to build the banking platform.

This lowers the financial barrier-of-entry to new banks, and these savings can be passed on to consumers.

Jordaan said the name Bank Zero hints at what they believe the price for banking could be in the mobile and digital space.

We think electronic transactions should be free and that would be a big benefit to South African consumers and business, he said.

He added that South Africans pay far too much for their electronic banking fees, which is what Bank Zero plans to change.

Free credit card swipes

In response to questions about credit card fees from MyBroadband, Jordaan said they cannot reveal their features or pricing until they launch  for fear of being copied.

He did, however, say that when individuals swipe their debit or credit cards locally, there is usually no fee attached.

In the case of business debit or credit cards, though, an additional fee per swipe is often charged.

We hope to compete away this anomaly, Jordaan said.

We also hope to similarly attack fees when it comes to digital, mobile payments  but you will have to wait for launch to see exactly what this means.

Excellent security features

Jordaan said Bank Zero will be an app-based service, which will rely on a fairly-advanced smartphone.

The reason is that they want to offer cutting-edge security features, including facial recognition, fingerprints, voice recognition, and location-based services.

He explained that modern smartphones have many security features which online banking does not have, and they want to use these features.

Making banking easier

Jordaan said they also looked at all the banking processes which irritate consumers and made them as easy as possible.

Although Bank Zero will still adhere to all regulatory requirements, he said there are clever ways to use technology to make it easier for a customer to use.

We want to make the bank account opening and switching process as easy as possible for new customers, he said.

We have also come up with 13 new features which we have not seen banks in the rest of the world adopt.

Bank Zero will therefore not only offer lower fees, but new functionality too.
Amazon.com Inc. risks following in the footsteps of Google after the European Unions antitrust chief said regulators are asking how the online retailer is treating smaller rivals trading on its own website.

After fining Google billions of euros, the EU is checking how Amazon gathers information on sales made by competitors on Amazon Marketplace and whether that gives it an edge when it sells to customers, EU Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager told reporters at a press conference in Brussels.

While she stressed that the EU investigation of Amazon is at a very early stage, she said her team is trying to understand this issue in full.

The question here is about the data Amazon collects from smaller merchants on its site, Vestager said. Do you then also use this data to do your own calculations, as to what is the new big thing, what is it that people want, what kind of offers do they like to receive, what makes them buy things? That has made us start a preliminary investigation, she said.

Online Giants

Amazon.com shares fell as much as 1.9 percent and were down 1.5 percent at 12:45 p.m. in New York, while the S&P 500 Index was little changed.

The power of online giants that provide a platform to other businesses has attracted fierce criticism on both sides of the Atlantic and prompted EU draft rules to ensure platforms behave fairly. Google was ordered last year to offer equal treatment to smaller search rivals for ads it shows on top of its results.

The trend is clear that the EU is starting to see internet platforms as an indispensable service that must treat others fairly, said Pablo Ibanez Colomo, a law professor at the London School of Economics. You are required to treat rival services on equal footing even though rivals are basically using your platform to get exposure.

Its a plausible claim that Amazon is dominant, a legal finding that would force it to take care not to harm rivals, he said.

The EU hasnt yet opened a formal investigation or made any decision on whether Amazon is dominant. Regulators have sent quite a number of questionnaires to companies to gather information on Amazons dual purpose as a retailer and a host to others, Vestager said. The data collection may be completely legitimate in helping Amazon improve its service to other sellers, she said.

Amazon declined to comment on Vestagers comments. She already hinted at the preliminary probe last week, without naming the company. The preliminary probe comes out of feedback retailers gave in a wider EU antitrust inquiry of online sales in the region, she said.

U.S. President

Amazon is a frequent target of U.S. President Donald Trump who spoke of a very antitrust situation with the retailer, Google and Facebook Inc. last month. Hes also accused the company of crushing small businesses, dodging taxes and taking advantage of the U.S. Postal Service.

The online retailer isnt as strong in Europe, where just 55 percent of adults bought online in 2016, according to an EU study last year. Amazon only runs sites that target customers in five EU countries  the U.K., Germany, Italy, Spain and the Netherlands  although customers elsewhere can buy from those sites, sometimes with additional delivery fees.

The company was previously probed by the EU over its tax arrangements with Luxembourg. It escaped fines in a 2016 EU settlement over e-books contracts with publishers.

The EU is separately pushing ahead with new legislation that aims to prevent web firms from offering unfair terms to small businesses that sell or promote their services on the platforms. Under the new rules, platforms would also have to provide more transparency about how they rank businesses in search results. A final draft hasnt yet been agreed.
The 2018 MyBroadband Conference and Expo will take place at the Gallagher Convention Centre on 18 October and is the one ICT event which all South African ICT decision makers must attend.

It is the premier IT and telecoms event in South Africa, with speakers and exhibitors from South Africas top ICT companies.

Speakers at the conference include Vodacom CEO Shameel Joosub, Liquid Telecom CEO Reshaad Sha, MTN SA CEO Godfrey Motsa, and Telkom CSB CEO Serame Taukobong.

Delegates will also hear from Nokia Softwares Raghav Sahgal, Vodacom innovation head Jannie van Zyl, and SqwidNet CEO Phathizwe Malinga.

Great deals for businesses

South Africas top telecommunications and IT companies have partnered with MyBroadband as exhibitors for the event.

All conference delegates will receive a voucher booklet with special deals on telecommunications and IT products in the business market from these exhibitors.

Delegates can also interact with these companies to find out what the best IT or telecoms solution is for their business.

If you want to see which new ICT products are available in the local market, or find the best ICT solution for your business, you cannot miss this conference.

Register now

The conference costs R1,995 to attend, but MyBroadband readers can receive a big discount on the normal rate using the special voucher code below.

Conference website: 2018 MyBroadband Conference and Expo

Special voucher code: MyBroadbandVIP

The tickets cover all aspects of the event, including access to the expo and conference, lunch, and refreshments.
Gov. Jerry Brown on Wednesday set the stage for higher PG&E utility bills by signing legislation to ease the impacts from the shutdown of the Diablo Canyon facility, Californias last remaining nuclear power plant.

San Francisco-based PG&E intends to phase out the reactors of its Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant in San Luis Obispo County when their operating licenses with the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission expire in November 2024 and August 2025.

In August, PG&E conceded that the legislation would wind up increasing monthly power bills for PG&E residential customers.

The prospect of a rate increase runs counter to promises made in 2016 by PG&E executive Geisha Williams, now the embattled utilitys chief executive officer, that higher monthly bills wouldnt result from its plans to shut down Diablo Canyon, which is perched on a scenic stretch of the Central California coast.

When PG&E announced its original proposal in June 2016 for the shutdown of Diablo Canyon, Williams, at the time president of electric at PG&Es utility subsidiary, stated, There is no need for a cost increase from our customers.

Now, however, it turns out that the combined effect of the newly approved law and of prior action by the state Public Utilities Commission related to the plants shutdown potentially could produce a 1.2 percent increase in PG&E customers monthly bills.

The legislation approved by Gov. Brown directs the PUC to approve an $85 million payment to San Luis Obispo County, some cities in the area and a local school district to ease the loss of economic benefits that the plant contributes. This provision was criticized by some consumer groups because it means PG&E customers would be obliged to make up for the loss of some property taxes when the plant closes.

The new law also directs the PUC to authorize complete funding of a $350 million employee retention program.

On Aug. 21, PG&E spokesman Blair Jones conceded that rates would in fact be rising

The programs in the bill would result in a small, short-term increase of about 0.2 percent to the average customers monthly bill, Jones said at the time. The increases would likely terminate in 2026.

PG&E thanked the governor and others for supporting the legislation, which was authored by state Sen. Bill Monning (D-Carmel).

This combined effort will help California meet its clean energy goals, Jones said.

PG&E has become tangled in an array of controversies  some with fatal consequences  in recent years.

In 2016, PG&E was branded a convicted felon for crimes the utility committed before and after a fatal explosion that killed eight and destroyed a San Bruno neighborhood in 2010.

This year, state fire investigators determined PG&Es equipment caused several of a slew of lethal infernos that scorched the North Bay Wine Country and nearby regions in October 2017.

The replacement of Diablo with lower cost, zero carbon alternatives will more than offset the near-term costs, Peter Miller, Natural Resources Defense Council western energy project director, wrote in a blog post on Wednesday.

Yet the Natural Resources Defense Council, one of the supporters of the Diablo Canyon measure, acknowledged PG&E customers must shoulder more costly monthly payments due to the new law the governor signed.

When spread across customers bills over the collection period from 2018 through 2025, the additional payments will increase the average PG&E households bill by at most 18 cents per month, Miller wrote in the blog post.

Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
Champagne may suggest a celebration, but you know its a real party when the sabers come out.

At an anticipated moment during ZD Wines 50th anniversary weekend on Sept. 7-9, owners Robert and Brett deLeuze raised glinting Champagne swords to the necks of a ZD sparkling wine specially made for the occasion. The brothers were flanked by their similarly armed winemaking team. With multiple cracks and pops, corks were soon flying across the crush pad at the Rutherford winery.

It was a fitting tribute to one of Napa Valleys longer-lived labels. If the mood was festive when the day began, by 3 p.m., it had turned downright Game of Thrones wrap party.

ZD isnt the oldest wine estate in the Valley or the first to pull off a big event. But as more 70s-era wineries get set to celebrate half-century milestones in the next few years, they can take a cue from the deLeuze family on how to do it the right way  with a combination of enthusiasm, generosity and imagination to infuse a lively, three-day shindig.

Our staff have been working their tails off for almost a year to meet the expectations here today. Theyve done a terrific job, ZD President Brett deLeuze said on the recent Saturday morning as he welcomed about 45 guests to the winery. Theyd gathered for a special tasting of Cabernet Sauvignons and a lunch afterward prepared by Yountville chef Chris Kollar. Theyre going to continue to be a part of everything that we do here, and theyre the reason youre going to feel as we do about the success.

The last 50 vintages have, indeed, been a successful run for ZD Wines. Brett and Robert are partners in the winery founded in 1969 by their parents, Norman and Rosa Lee deLeuze, and Normans fellow aerospace engineer, Gino Zepponi (thus the ZD, which, in a convenient twist, is the engineering acronym for zero defects and is the winery mantra).

The two men worked rocket propulsion day jobs in Sacramento while they and Rosa Lee created a wine brand from scratch at their original facility, a rented farm building in Carneros. Their efforts paved the way to acquisition of the Rutherford property a decade later.

Today, ZD is a high-profile, 30,000-case winery with organically farmed estate vineyards in both Rutherford and Carneros. From upstairs at the Rutherford facility, the newly renovated Vineyard View Room provides visitors with a sweeping vista across the Valley. With the tasting room downstairs about to go through its own redesign, its an important piece to ZDs hospitality program, especially to longtime Retail Sales Director Barbie Jamieson.

Longtime vineyard manager

The ZD Carneros Estate just south of Napa is less accessible to visitors. A painstakingly restored 1897 colonial home is set among 30 acres of certified organic Pinot Noir and Chardonnay vines that have been worked since the early 1980s by Rafael Llamas. When Norman and Rosa Lee bought the property in 1996, the Jalisco native came over to ZD as vineyard manager. He has been one of the winerys key people ever since.

From that time, 1996 to right now, Im working with them, Llamas said a few days after the anniversary, pointing out sections of the vineyard from the homes elevated porch. Its really amazing, the change when I started working with Norm. He showed me how to be a better person, because he said, Were going to be different. Now were going to be organic. We arent going to use any other things that arent organic.

Llamas son, Rafael Raf Jr., grew up in Carneros and has worked at ZD since high school. He proudly backed up his fathers expertise.

I think hes been here for so long because hes been doing something that has been working for ZD, especially with the Chardonnay and the Pinot Noir programs, he said. I mean, this is our baby, and theres nobody who knows the property as well as my dad.

While the Carneros vineyard contributes significantly to the winerys production, the stately home is only used for special events. To date, none have been more important to the deLeuze family than the anniversary weekend. It was an opportunity to bring ZDs guests  among them charity auction winners, distributors from around the U.S., and longtime friends  up to speed on the current state of the winery and vineyards.

Three-day celebration

The three-part event began Friday evening at the Carneros Estate and was capped the next night in downtown Napa with a party for 500 on CIA at Copias picturesque back lawn. St. Helenas Chris Cosentino was guest chef that night. He has been friends with Brett deLeuze for several years and goes back even further with the ZD wines.

A long line of guests waiting to sample his pork and duck pate en croute kept Cosentino at his table throughout the evening, but the Acacia House chef nonetheless observed everyone enjoying themselves.

There was great music, tons of people, and it was a beautiful space, he said.

As a complement to his rustic dish, he added that ZDs wines represent the vintage and the grape  which is similar to our philosophy and approach to the food at Acacia House.

The evenings most meaningful moment came when the deLeuze Family Foundation presented checks totaling $100,000 to benefit three charities, including the UC Davis deLeuze Family Professorship for a Non-Toxic Cure for Lymphoma. In the early 2000s, Norman developed a close relationship with his UC Davis Cancer Center oncologist, Dr. Joseph Tuscano, while battling lymphoma. Several months before he passed away from the disease in 2007, he and his family created the Professorship. The deLeuzes continue to support it through yearly ZD-driven fundraisers.

I mean overall, I think that it went really well, CEO Robert deLeuze said in a call a week later. Taking a break from harvest preparations, the head of winemaking at ZD shared that it was really nice that we had the fantastic response from our partners in the business and from our customers who attended.

We were basically oversold on every event, and it made it a little more challenging. But also, you know, its rewarding. Weve got some people out there who appreciate what were doing, and thats nice to know. I think there are always challenges with events like that. So we kind of overcame, and it all went well. I think a lot of people had a lot of fun.

This included the Saturday morning tasters. To their delight, Robert and Brett pulled four vintages of ZD Reserve Cabernet from the winery library, going back to the great 1987, and added the rare 10th and 20th bottlings of ZDs standalone red wine, Abacus.

Dont screw up!

Senior winemaker Chris Pisani was tasked with introducing the lineup to an enthusiastic audience. He explained over a microphone that we really look to have our wines made in such a way, with really good balance, that, when theyre first bottled, they should taste amazing, and the way we made them, they should last 30 years, no problem.

Pisani works closely with Roberts son, Brandon, his associate winemaker. When it came time to introduce the signature red wine  ZDs unique, multi-vintage bottling of reserve Cabernet  the younger deLeuze was amusingly humble.

I was asked to talk about Abacus, Brandon announced, barely concealing a smile. Usually my dad does this talk. And what he said is, Brandon, its really hard to describe Abacus, and its going to take a long time. Dont screw up! If his fathers advice reminded him at that moment of the zero defects mantra, it probably wasnt an accident.

Back in his office after the big weekend, Brett reflected on ZDs past half-century. But he was mainly excited about the present and future.

Theres been a great transition in our winemaking as we move forward, he said over the phone, and from a sales perspective, theres also been a great transition.

He described the next generation at ZD: not just Brandon, but also his niece, Jill deLeuze, and her husband, Scott Billeci, the winerys regional sales manager. Raf Llamas and Hospitality Director Dustin Moilanen also figure into Bretts equation for future success.

From an extended family perspective, theyre all pushing us hard! he said with a laugh. I mean, beyond being just a winemaker, Brandons very focused on quality, which comes from his dad. My dad was a little more casual about certain things. But from our winemaking and marketing perspective, they all care about the details  down to everything.

A toast to the future

The anniversary weekend showed that ZDs sales channels and relationships have stood the test of time. Brett built this infrastructure alongside his mother, who passed away in April, and their 20-year Vice President of Sales, Teresa DAurizio. To help guide the next generation, he and DAurizio can trace the arc of ZD as a national wine brand.

For our story moving forward, I totally wish my mom and dad were still here, he said. Theyre sorely missed. But you know, we move on. I got used to saying that there are three generations of us working together. Its two now, unfortunately, as of April. But their legacy is huge.

During the sparkling wine ceremony on the crush pad, Robert briefly choked up recalling this important legacy. It was the only time the sabers would come out. ZDs Anniversary Cuvee, a blanc de blancs produced from the Carneros Estate, will only be released, and sabered, once  at least until the next milestone.

Everyone was served a portion of this precious ZD wine, and Robert raised his glass.

As I always do, I would propose that this year we make better wines than we have ever made, and that we have fun doing it, and that we do it safely, he said. Cheers.
This year, 38 studio locations throughout Napa, Yountville, St. Helena and Calistoga will open from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sept. 22-23 and 29-30.

Over the two weekends that artists invite the public to their work spaces, live demonstrations will take place in many of the studios.

These will include painting, drawing, photography, ceramics, glass, fiber, printmaking, jewelry design and sculpture.

The Open Studios Napa Valley directory and map indicates which artists will be giving demonstrations and whether they are handicapped accessible and open if raining.

All artists, whether they are giving demonstrations or not, are happy to share how and why they do what they do and give visitors personal insight into the world of the artist.

The popular art event is a collaborative effort by the participating artists of the Art Association of Napa Valley.

The program has endured for over three decades because local artists believe in the importance and value of opening their studios to visitors.

Volunteers have contributed hundreds of hours and sponsors have contributed financial support to ensure Open Studios Napa Valley continues to be an important event.

In gratitude for the support they receive from the community, the art association contributes a portion of revenues to local high school and junior college scholarships.

The 2018 Open Studios Napa Valley artist directory and maps are downloadable at www.OpenStudiosNapaValley.com

Copies of the 2018 Open Studios Napa Valley artist directory and map are available free of charge throughout Napa and the valley at Napa Tourist Information Center, 1331 First St.; Napa Valley Art Supplies and Cartons and Crates, 3250 California Blvd.; Napa Library, 580 Coombs St.; Art Gallery Napa Valley, 1307 First St.; and Upper Valley Calistoga Pottery.1001 Foothill Blvd. Jessel Gallery and select locations.

Most studios will also have extra directories to pass out.

Also visit www.facebook.com/napavalleyopenstudios for daily updates.
Ellie Goetze just got her first job. At 17, shes now balancing her last year of classes at Valley Oak High School with a working life at the Meritage Resort and Spa, where she finds herself five days a week for seven-hour shifts in the South Napa hotels kitchen.

As a prep cook and cafeteria attendant, shes a helping hand for tasks like banquet orders and preparing meals.

But for Goetze, chopping asparagus for 200 people or making tuna salad for the cafeteria is more than an after-school job.

I always wanted my job to be something that I could live up to, she said. I was not looking forward to working in like, a Baskin Robbins  Im just so lucky, I cant believe it.

For eight weeks this summer, Goetze was part of a new bid by the Napa Valley Unified School District and a pair of Napa resorts to get area high schoolers considering jobs in Napas chronically understaffed hospitality industry.

Spearheaded by Amber Cleveland and Stephanie Solberg, the school district this year launched Resorting to Opportunity, a resort-oriented offshoot of Fields of Opportunity, their internship team-up with the Napa Valley Grapegrowers that placed area high school students in winery and vineyard jobs for the summer.

As with the motivation behind Fields of Opportunity, Solberg, a vocational specialist with the school district, pointed to a labor shortage plaguing not only the local wine industry, but area hotels and restaurants. In the face of closures like that of Terra in St. Helena due to a lack of workers, Solberg offered the new program as a win-win for the school district and hospitality employers.

Cleveland, a work-based learning coordinator with the school district said, The resorts are really struggling to get employees, to keep employees and keep them locally. Because its so expensive to live here, a lot of the employees struggle to stay.

For Resorting to Opportunity, Goetze and 11 other Napa high school students were split between Meritage and Silverado Resort and Spa, the programs first hotels to participate. Students cycled through four departments within each resort, moving between food and beverage, spa, housekeeping and guest services. With a mentors help, the interns came away with a taste of entry-level jobs in each area, as well as the entry-level wages for the work they did.

At Meritage, students interviewed with Tami Pacho, director of human resources. Of the program, Pacho explained, It kind of lets them test-drive a position and make sure its something that theyre going to enjoy.

After an orientation, Goetze and her fellow interns cycled through a stint in guest services, seeing the bell team and front office team at work before moving on to shadow workers in each of the hotels departments.

Throughout her eight weeks at Meritage, Goetze was a room attendant, a spa attendant, shadowed a restaurant host and took part in working banquets, among other roles. After spending a week in a department, Goetze was sure each time it was the one she would officially apply for.

Then the next department would come and Id be like, Oh, I love this one so much. It was hard deciding, she said. But once I had experience in the kitchen I just fell in love with it. The energy, the people and obviously the food; I just felt I belonged there.

At the Meritage, all of the eight interns finished the program. Three landed jobs with the resort, one as host, another as a spa attendant and Goetze, as a chef. At Silverado, three of the resorts four interns finished the program, while the fourth left for a higher-paying job in construction.

Overall, the program is being deemed a success in its first year, Solberg and Cleveland said, and plans now are to bring it back again next summer. When the internships kicked off this year, organizers already began receiving calls from other resorts wanting in on the program, they said. With that interest, hopes are the number of resorts taking part next year could jump from two to four or five.

Count Meritage among those that will be returning, Pacho said. Were going to do it probably bigger next year. And take on more students; anybody that wants to learn about hospitality.

But while the partnership with the school district is already yielding a slightly larger local workforce for the hotels, persisting still are the issues at the root of the industrys labor dilemma.

Solberg and Cleveland acknowledged that for those living on hospitality industry wages, finding affordable housing here remains a major pitfall.

The only problem is that its such a slow-moving process and it is going to take a lot of people, a lot of time and a lot of money really to change that, Cleveland said. Its such a big monster to tackle that I think were starting here and doing what we can.

Solberg added that beyond housing issues, hospitality workers often have to cope with a public transportation system in Napa that runs on hours not ideal for evening and overnight shifts.

But being on the education side of things, she said, were trying to just teach our students how to have Plan B when the bus isnt running when youre working. Or what are your housing options within your family? Or how can you save and invest your money so you can afford to live in the Napa Valley?

These are the big, big questions about becoming independent and becoming an adult, which is kind of unique to our valley because of the extraordinary expenses to live here.

For now, Goetze is weighing the options for her future.

After high school, her sights are set on Napa Valley College, though shes unsure what she might study. One path could be medicine. Since I was 7 or 6, I wanted to be a doctor, she said. But I thought that was too high of an expectation, so I kind of narrowed it down.

A future in anesthesiology has appealed to her. But now, so does the Meritages offer to reimburse her for tuition if she pursues classes that would help her move up in her position at the hotel.

After entering this program and going into the hotel, I just want to see where I can go with this, she said.

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NapaLearns has received a grant from the Napa Valley Community Foundation (NVCF) to further support math and robotics curriculum for middle and high school students.

One of 14 grant recipients, NapaLearns was awarded $5,000 from NVCF, plus another $2,500 from an anonymous donor, that will bolster student math performance through the implementation of the UC Davis C-STEM program incorporating robotics and coding into middle school and high school algebra and geometry courses.

In 2017, NapaLearns invested more than $155,000 in the expansion of the C-STEM program into schools in Napa County. With the help of the NVCF award and other donations, it plans to invest that amount again this year.

The C-STEM program, covering computers, science, technology, engineering and math, is in the middle of a three-year pilot study that includes nine teachers from six schools in Napa Valley Unified School District.

Our students need an alternative to traditional math programs, which up to now havent been able to adequately prepare them, said Peg Maddocks, executive director of NapaLearns.

C-STEM, or math with coding and robotics, provides students with a more engaging, hands-on approach that makes math more practical and relevant, she said. In addition to improving their math skills, these students are being prepared for future careers in coding and robotics, at a time when jobs in these fields are growing faster than the job market overall.

Teachers using the program saw impressive growth in math achievement among students, according to a NapaLearns press release. In the 2017-2018 school year, 94 percent of students in two classrooms where the pilot was taught were performing at or above grade level, compared to a California statewide average of 38 percent of students meeting or exceeding math standards in the same year.

We are encouraged by the math performance results that we are seeing in our pilot classrooms so far, said NVUSD Superintendent Rosanna Mucetti. While not every job requires coding skills, learning to code helps students to develop problem-solving skills and to think logically and creatively. The C-STEM program holds great promise and were looking forward to more positive outcomes.

NapaLearns plans to use some of the grant money to directly pay for the purchase of equipment, software licenses, and textbooks required for students.

It will also send nine teachers to the 8th Annual Conference on Integrated Computing and STEM Education Conference at UC Davis on Nov. 8, and pay for fees and transportation for more than 80 students to compete at the annual UC Davis Roboplay competition.

This past spring, there were 19 NVUSD middle and high school teams at the competition, where they earned 20 awards out of the 46 distributed.
Jerry Brown publicly denies harboring thoughts of the legacy of his record 16 years as Californias governor.

When a reporter asked Brown about it in January, Brown replied, with a characteristic smirk, Can you tell me the legacy of Goodwin Knight? Or Gov. (Frank) Merriam. Or (George) Deukmejian? Governors dont have legacies. Thats my No. 1 proposition.

Brown pointedly excluded his father, Pat Brown, from his list of legacy-bereft predecessors. And its quite obvious that Brown yearns to match his father by being remembered as the governor who made Californiaat least in his minda global leader in fighting climate change through reduction of carbon dioxide emissions.

Just before hosting a global climate-change conference in San Francisco last week, Brown signed a bill decreeing that Californias electrical energy will be 100 percent from renewable or carbon-free sources by 2045.

Simultaneously, he issued an executive order that California be carbon neutral by the same date.

This bill and the executive order put California on a path to meet the goals of Paris and beyond, Brown declared, referring to the international climate agreement. It will not be easy. It will not be immediate. But it must be done.

The legislation, Senate Bill 100 by state Sen. (and U.S. Senate candidate) Kevin de Leon, a Los Angeles Democrat, expands the current 2030 goal for electric power of 60 percent.

Both pieces of state paper, however, are more statements of lofty intent than quantifiable policy.

The technology to achieve 100 percent carbon-free electric power doesnt yet exist because the main sources, solar panels and windmills, require the sun to shine and the wind to blow. Making them dependable would require enormous banks of batteries or some other form of reliable storage.

The legislation slyly backtracks on previous policy by, in effect, allowing large hydropower reservoirs to be counted as renewable sources. Even so, some means would have to be found to reliably replace the nearly 50 percent of Californias power now generated by natural gas, coal or nuclear reaction.

And then theres the cost of such a conversion, even if its technically feasible. Opponents of SB 100 noted that California already has some of the nations highest utility rates.

Dorothy Rothrock, president of the California Manufacturers and Technology Association, said, for instance, We do know that middle-class manufacturing jobs will disappear as ever-higher electric rates divert resources from expansions, modernization, wages and product development.

Browns carbon neutrality order, if seriously implemented, would be even more difficult to achieve.

While electric-power generation is a major source of carbon emissions, the biggest one, by far, is the automobile.

Californians drive more than 300 billion miles a year. Achieving carbon neutrality would require most, if not all, of that travel to shift into electric-powered transit systems and electric-powered cars. However, public transit accounts for only about 10 percent of travel now. And while California leads the nation in the sales of zero-emission vehicles or ZEVs, they still are tiny fraction of Californians cars and current auto purchases, and motorists are not rushing to buy more.

The auto dilemma illustrates the conundrum posed by Browns efforts to make California a carbon-neutral state. Although polls, including a new one from the Public Policy Institute of California, indicate that Californians support carbon reduction in principle, theyve not been fully told what it would take to reach the goal, or what financial sacrifices they would bear to reach it.

Those issues will be confronted, if at all, long after Brown has moved into his carbon-neutral retirement home in the Colusa County foothills.

CALmatters is a public interest journalism venture committed to explaining how Californias state Capitol works and why it matters. For more stories by Dan Walters, go to calmatters.org/commentary.
Nearly every day in the Register, we see articles about the lack of housing and its costs to Napa. You can help build affordable housing in Napa by voting Yes on Proposition 1 in November.

Ana and her three young children came to Napa Valley Community Housing after they lost their home to foreclosure and were living with relatives in a two-bedroom condo in a neighborhood plagued with gang activities. As a self-employed single mom, the overcrowded condo was all she could afford. Her youngest son Luis began skipping school, his grades plummeted and he started rebelling and running away from home.

When Ana saw an advertisement for our new apartment complex in Yountville, she was the earliest in line to apply. She said, For the first time in a long time, theres hope for my family.

Ana gives credit to her clean, safe affordable apartment for helping get Luis out of trouble. After living there for a few months, Luis received his first As on his report card and was named Student of the Month at Vintage High. He has plans for the future and attends Napa Valley College.

Finding an affordable home is a challenge in Napa where rent and housing costs are some of the steepest in the nation. Its families like Anas that Prop. 1 on our statewide November ballot is focused on helping hardworking families, veterans and the many other Californians who are being crushed by the states housing crisis and pushed out of our communities.

Prop. 1 is the only measure on the ballot that builds and provides affordable homes for veterans, working families, seniors, people with disabilities, Californians experiencing homelessness, victims of domestic violence and other in need of a stable home.

According to the National Low Income Housing Coalition, a minimum wage worker needs to work 119 hours a week to afford a modest two-bedroom rental home in California. This means many hardworking people, such as grocery clerks, nurse aides and teaching assistants, need to earn more than double their annual incomes to afford a modest two-bedroom apartment in most areas of the state.

As working families are being priced out of communities where they work and hope to raise their children, Californias children are paying a high price too. Nearly one in five children in California lives in poverty and much of that is due to housing costs.

Meanwhile, the affordable housing crisis has magnified the homelessness crisis on our sidewalks and streets. California has 24 percent of the national veteran population that is homeless  the largest share of any state.

Prop. 1 is also expected to build at least 50,000 housing units for children and working families, seniors and people with disabilities who need an affordable home. It will create 137,000 jobs and pump $23.4 billion into Californias economy.

The statewide investment under Prop. 1 relies on successful local partnerships  like Napa Valley Community Housing uses with our private and public partners  and pairs the money with federal and local funding, maximizing housing opportunities for people right here in our community.

We all benefit when we help families like Anas access affordable housing. Together, we can stem the flow of children and families who are at risk of becoming homeless and turn to overwhelmed shelters in our neighborhoods or are forced to live in their cars.

We can help make sure seniors who have worked their entire lives can live their final years with dignity in a safe, affordable home. And we can make sure we honor veterans with stable housing when they return from service.

The choice is simple on Nov. 6: Vote yes on Prop. 1.

Kathleen Reynolds, CEO

Napa Valley Community Housing
Wine Enthusiast magazine is awarding Warren Winiarski its Wine Star for American Wine Legend at this years Wine Star Awards held in January 2019.

The award recognizes Winiarskis legacy in the wine industry as well as his many contributions to the land preservation, philanthropy and to reinforcing the culture of wine as an American tradition.

Each year, Wine Enthusiast honors individuals and companies that have made outstanding achievements in the wine and alcohol beverage world. The winners will be announced in Wine Enthusiasts special Best of Year December 31 issue, and honorees will be presented their Wine Stars at a black-tie awards dinner gala on Jan. 28, 2019, at Miamis Nobu Eden Roc.

The Wine Legend Award is reserved for our most influential people that have contributed to more than the wine industry. Warrens dedication to elevating the status of American wine and contribution to the Napa Valley has been monumental, says Adam Strum, editor and publisher of Wine Enthusiast magazine.

Winiarskis contributions since he arrived in Napa Valley 54 years ago transcend the California wine industry. He has surpassed his first titles as grape grower, winemaker, and vintner to become a mentor, preservationist, and California Hall of Fame Inductee in 2017.

His commitment to the Napa Valley has influenced other endeavors from land conservation to legacy support, while his example and mentorship have changed the lives of both native-born and immigrant Americans. He has left his mark not only on California, but on the United States and the global community.

In 1964, Winiarski moved to the Napa Valley to follow his dream of becoming a winemaker. He began his career as an apprentice working with Lee Stewart at Souverain Cellars before moving on to be the first winemaker at Robert Mondavi Winery in 1966.

In 1970, he planted his first Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon vineyard in a former prune orchard. Six years later, Winiarskis Stags Leap Wine Cellars Cabernet Sauvignon won the Judgment of Paris, a blind tasting of California wines against venerated French classics.

The Judgment of Paris is widely credited with putting Napa Valley on the global wine map and liberating winemakers around the world to aim for the stars. A bottle of Winiarskis victorious 1973 Stags Leap Wine Cellars Cabernet Sauvignon now resides in the Smithsonians National Museum of American History, and Robert Kurin, the Smithsonians Under Secretary for History, Art, and Culture, included the bottle in his book The History of America in 101 Objects alongside Neil Armstrongs space suit, Charles Lindbergs Spirit of St. Louis, and Lewis & Clarks compass.

Winiarskis contributions to the wine industry go beyond winemaking. Upon arriving in the Napa Valley, Winiarski recognized it needed to be protected from urbanization and development.

He was a key supporter of the Napa Valley Agricultural Preserve, which celebrates its 50th anniversary in 2018. Winiarski went on to become the first in Napa Valley to place vineyard land under a conservation easement to ensure it would remain in agricultural use forever, and he has since donated to the Land Trust of Napa County more than 200 acres of vineyard and open space.

In 1996, Winiarski and his wife, Barbara, initiated the Smithsonian Institute National Museum of American Historys American Food & Wine History Project. The project uses food and wine history as a lens for understanding American history by tracing the long and diverse history of wine in the United States.

Over the years, the Winiarskis have donated significant funding to the Smithsonian for the conservation of wine and food history research, collecting wine and food objects, public events, as well the Annual Winemakers Dinners. For the future, Winiarski has proposed endowing a permanent position at the Smithsonian to enhance and grow the American Food & Wine History Project, continuing to raise public awareness about our American food and wine culture.

Winiarski, through his family foundation, has given the U.C. Davis Shields Library $3.3 million to create the first Wine Writers Collection. Broadly defined, wine writers include wine book authors, editors, wine journalists and critics, wine columnists, bloggers, and other editorial wine content creators. Winiarski has helped to secure the papers of renowned international wine writers Hugh Johnson, Jancis Robinson and Robert Thompson.

Winiarski has also been a crusader for wine quality, appearing frequently in symposia around the world and publishing articles in many wine journals. In 2001, he was president of the London-based International Wine & Spirit Competition, whose Cabernet Sauvignon trophy he has sponsored since 1986. He was also instrumental in the founding of Colorados vinifera wine industry.

Recognized for his global efforts to showcase and uphold the quality and history of California wine, Winiarski was inducted into the California Hall of Fame by Gov. Jerry Brown in 2017. The 11th class of inductees was honored for its exemplary contributions to the spirit of California.

While his initial claim to fame may have been his Cabernets victory over the French, his devotion has matured from making exceptional wine to reinforcing the culture of wine as an American tradition and preserving his beloved Napa Valley.
What comes first, the story or the wine?

If you are lucky, you get them both at once, tasting one against another.

This is how I met the Antigal One: On a chilly November night at Coles Chop House in Napa, surrounded by a genial group of wine people, led by Gary Ramona, a veteran of the wine industry in Napa Valley now vice president of sales for from Bodega Antigal in Mendoza, Argentina.

While we drank the rich, elegant Malbecs (and one Cab from 2013), I heard stories about Antigal and One, its flagship wine.

Heracio Piero bought one of the oldest wineries in Mendoza in 1999. Six years and $17.5 million later, hed built a state-of-the-art winery inside the 1897 facade. Its gravity-flow platform system allows for a largely hands off approach to wine making eliminating the need for forceful pumps and crushers, Ramona said.

Antigals vineyards include three up above 3,000 feet in altitude where the average rainfall is seven inches a year, and the vines are irrigated with wells and reservoirs fed by snow melt from the Andes mountains.

La Dolores, at 3,937 feet, is planted mostly to Malbec (48 acres) but also Syrah (13 acres), Sauvignon Blanc (6.5 acres) Chardonnay (6.5 acres) and Viognier (6 acres).

At Dona Angeles at 3,445 feet above sea level, 75 acres planted to Malbec, (21 acres), Tempranillo (18 acres) and Cabernet Sauvignon (18 acres) with smaller amounts of Cabernet Franc (9 acres), and Sauvignon Blanc (8 acres).

La Lomas Vineyard, at 3,610 feet in altitude, has 40 acres of Malbec Cabernet Sauvignon (37 acres), Merlot (18 acres) and Chardonnay (20 acres).

La Dolores is the highest and the best, Ramona said, low-yielding vineyards, Ramona said, and they drop two-thirds of of their fruit. One vine yields one bottle he said.

When Antigal was ready to release its first vintage Ramona said, they were considering names and someone harkened back to the notion of one bottle, one wine, and it was their first vintage too. It became and remained Antigal One.

In 2007 Antigal hired Miriam Gomez as winemaker. A native of Mendoza, Gomez has undergraduate degrees in food science and enology and post-graduate degrees in viticulture and enological quality. She teaches enological microbiology at her two alma maters, Universidad National de Cuyo and Universidad J.A Maza. Shed worked in the Cotes-du-Rhone in France and at harvests in Napa Valley, and as well as at Nieto Senetiner in Argentina before she joined Antigal.

A second tasting

The second time I tasted Antigal was on a hot summer day at Morimoto in Napa, and the rich malbec tasted just as fine with ishi yaki buri bop as it had with Coles fabled steaks.

And I heard more stories.

Gary Ramona said he became involved with Antigal on the recommendation of the late, great Harvey Posert, the public relations mastermind at Robert Mondavi, with whom Ramona had worked for many years. Principals from Antigal approached Posert, then retired, to ask who would could help them get their wines to the world. Posert recommended Ramona.

They said to me, Were small but we want to open up, Ramona said.

Ramona came on board to help with marketing and introducing Antigal wines to the U.S. Antigal is now in all 50 states.

Ramona said Mendozas growing wine industry reminds him of the Napa Valley he found when he came here in 1969 and went to work for Mondavi.

A different world then, it was characterized by a shared goal and driving energy to improve wines. We wanted to rub shoulders with the best in the world, he said.

It was also a time when labor and land prices were more affordable for aspiring winemakers.

I remember back when people would come to Robert Mondavi in Oakville and $15.50 for a bottle of wine was expensive, he said.

In Mendoza where land is still $5,000 or $6,000 an acre and labor costs are low, he said, there is also that same sense that recognizes the potential of a great wine region.

Its why were able to sell great wines at a great price, he said. (A sample of Wine Searcher prices for Antigal One range from $10.99 for Antigal One Malbec 2009 to $20 for Antigal One Malbec 2006.)

Today, Antigal is in all 50 states, and Americans have embraced us, Ramona said.

In addition to what is inside the bottle, Ramona said their distinctive bottle has helped them stand out.

He explained, back to when they were first launching Antigal One, one of the winery staff got an idea to make the letter one for each bottle by stamping it out of a barrel ring.

Ramona said that the metal letter even caught the eye of Mel Dick, who spent six decades helping build Southern Wine and Spirits into a powerhouse distributor,

Even Mel Dick  and hes seen everything  said, Now thats different.

And a third time

I tried Antigal One once more, this time without great company and great food and the great ambiance of a restaurant. I opened a bottle of a 100 percent Malbec from the La Dolores Vineyard (2009) sitting alone in my backyard, contemplating my weeds and a fence that needed replacing? And still the wine, rich and elegant, evoked some faraway place, remote vineyards watered by the mighty mountains.

It could be because Id heard the stories. Or because it was quite a fine wine.

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Former Bhutan Prime Minister Tshering Tobgay offered prayers at Shivalaya Mandir in Samtse of Bhutan on Thursday morning.

Tshering Tobgay, the president of Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), was ousted as the Bhutan PM in the first round of the countrys parliamentary election on September 15, 2018.

In his Twitter handle on Thursday, Tobgay stated that he offered prayers in Shivalaya Mandir, which is a beautiful temple in Bhutan, for the king, the country and the people of the nation

Tobgay tweeted: Offered prayers for King, Country and People at Samtses beautiful Shivalaya Mandir this morning.

In a major upset verdict in the first round of polls in Bhutan, Tobgays PDP was ousted from the race, and will not run in the second and final round next month. Instead, the Druk Nyamrup Tshogpa (DNT) headed by Dr Lotay Tshering, and the Druk Phuensum Tshogpa (DPT) will face off on October 18. The DNT won the highest number of votes.

However, PDP president Tobgay, who has met his party members in different parts of the country so that they dont feel discouraged after the defeat in the polls, said though they have been defeated in the parliamentary polls of the country recently, they have not lost their spirit.

We have lost the elections, but not our spirit!  Mon Bahadur Chhetri echoes the sentiments of the entire PDP family. Had a lovely time in Samtse interacting with fellow PDP members, tweeted the former Bhutan PM.

Bhutan will witness a close fight between one of its oldest political parties  Druk Phuensum Tshogpa (DPT)  and Druk Nyamrup Tshogpa (DNT), a new party that has gained popularity in the recent past in the second and final round of parliamentary polls on October 18, 2018.

Tobgay, who turned 53 on September 18, 2018, celebrated his birthday among thousands of people at Thimphu, the national capital of Bhutan.
The Bangladesh Meteorological Department in Dhaka of Bangladesh has issued a cautionary signal No 3 after a well-marked low pressure developed over the east-central Bay of Bengal and adjoining areas.

The depression was centred at about 635 km southeast of Chattogram port, 575 km south-southeast of Payra port, the Met office stated in its special bulletin on Wednesday.

According to Met officials, gusts and squalls from 40 kmph to 50 kmph have been sustained within 44 km of the centre of the depression.

Maritime ports of Chattagram, Coxs Bazar, Mongla and Payra have been advised to hoist local cautionary signal No 3.

The low-pressure area over the Bay of Bengal has become well-marked, and the latest outlook indicates that it would go on to become not just a depression but will develop further into a deep depression, according to the bulletin.

It is likely to move in a northeast direction and intensity and under its influence steep pressure gradient persists over the North Bay and adjoining areas.

Fishing boats and trawlers in the North Bay area, the system is expected to intensify and move north-northwest. They are advised not to venture into the deep sea.

This depression is likely to cause moderate to heavy rainfall across the Northeast India and very heavy rains are predicted across Tamil Nadu.
Border Security Force (BSF) arrested three persons along with a truck loaded with huge quantity of dry marijuana from Ambassa in Dhalai district of Tripura on Thursday.

Based on specific information by Field G team of the BSF about the movement of a truck bearing registration number HR-38-U-5420, the quick reaction team (QRT) team of 130 battalions of BSF, intercepted the truck at Ambassa. The truck was going towards Guwahati from Agartala.

After thorough checking of the truck in presence of the magistrate 81 packets of dry marijuana weighing around 957 kgs were recovered. The market value of the seized contraband item is estimated at Rs 48.50 lakh.

Three persons have been arrested in this connection. They have been were identified as Arif Khan, Md Shoukin and Ranjit Debbarma. Arif Khan and Md Shoukin hail from Mewat Haryana while Ranjit Debbarma hails from Lefunga in West Tripura.
The Customs Preventive Force of Moreh in Manipur under the supervision of its superintendent arrested a 32-year-old individual along with Rs three crore worth of World is Yours (WY) tablets from Chikim Veng, near Moreh oil pump, along Asian Highway Imphal-Moreh road, sources said on Thursday.

The arrested individual has been identified as David Doungel of N Chajang village under Saikul subdivision in Manipurs Kangpokpi district.

The seized 30,000 number of WY tablets weighing around three kilograms were displayed before media persons at the office of the Assistant Commissioner of Customs Division in Imphal on Wednesday afternoon.

According to Assistant Commissioner, RK Darendrajit of Customs Division in Imphal, the officers of Customs Preventive Force of Moreh, led by its superintendent, based on specific information, intercepted and detected illegal transportation of 30,000 amphetamine tablets having the trade mark 881 and weighing around three kilograms from David Doungel, at around 10:30 am at Chikim Veng, near Moreh petrol pump along Imphal-Moreh National Highway 102 on Wednesday.

The Customs officer said that during preliminary investigation the arrested individual revealed that the seized amphetamine tablets were of Myanmar origin and he was trying to transport the same to Imphal from Moreh.

A case has been registered under ND&PS Act 1985 against the arrested individual, the officer added. Further investigation is going on.

In June this year, the Tengnoupal battalion of 26 Sector Assam Rifles recovered 9,800 WY tablets worth Rs 49 lakhs from a Jungle track near Khudengthabi, Tengnoupal district in Manipur.

Earlier, in one of the biggest drug hauls in 2018, Manipur Police seized a huge number of contraband WY tablets and heroin worth more than Rs three crore in the international market in January from a truck carrying sands in Imphal.
8 kids hospitalized in Yerevan on suspicion of food poisoning in satisfactory condition

Gyumri man, 32, dies in hospital without regaining consciousness after falling from 4th floor

1 more person dies of coronavirus in Artsakh

Karabakh village man, 72, commits suicide by hanging himself

Parliament factions: Artsakh Armenians living safely in homeland is possible only in case of Artsakh recognition

Natural gas fees to not increase in Armenia on January 1

Water tariff to increase for most Armenia consumers?

9 kids from Yerevan child development center hospitalized on suspicion of food poisoning

Los Angeles City Hall is illuminated in Armenia flag colors

1,675 new cases of COVID-19 confirmed in Armenia

Artsakh state minister delivers lectures at Fletcher School, Harvard University

Mayor of Armenias Kasakh village to be arrested

Biden-Xi virtual meeting could take place next week

US concerned about meeting between UAE FM and Syria President

Newspaper: Criminal cases against Armenian ex-military officials making no headway

Newspaper: Armenia parliament opposition calls PM Pashinyan to legislature

Japan ex-nurse who killed 3 patients gets life sentence

Azerbaijanis open fire at tractor in Khachik village of Armenia's Vayots Dzor Province while it was moving

US Department of State condemns violence that caused death of Armenian civilian near Shushi

Polish authorities believe situation on Poland-Belarus border will escalate

UN says it is ready to help solve issues of migrants on Poland-Belarus border

ARF-D representative: If House of Lords adopts Armenian Genocide bill, it will become a law for the government

EU Special Representative: We remember all who were killed and suffered during more than 30 years of conflict

Lavrov discusses Nagorno-Karabakh issue with Paul Gallagher

UK House of Commons adopts Armenian Genocide bill in first reading

OSCE Chairperson-in-Office Personal Representative: Certain changes made in actions after hostilities in 2020

Israeli Members of Knesset submit bill to recognize Armenian Genocide

Russia Ambassador: There won't be deals behind Armenian people's back when communications with Azerbaijan are unblocked

NEWS.am daily digest: 09.11.21

Baku not refuting attack on peaceful civilians in Artsakh, but putting blame on Yerevan

Gor Abrahamyan: Armenia Prosecutor General hasn't applied to Russia's competent authorities for citizenship

Armenia legislature committee approves draft state budget for 2022

Azerbaijani soldier dies after falling down from multi-story parking lot in Turkey

Persons suspected of murder of businessman Hayk Harutyunyan arrested in Moscow

Armenia Deputy PM receives newly appointed UNDP Resident Representative

Armenia is elected UNESCO General Conference 41st session vice-chair (PHOTOS)

Armenia MOD ex-press secretary is appointed expert to parliament committee

Armenia MOD leaves for Moscow

Russian MFA on anniversary of agreements of Russia, Azerbaijan and Armenia leaders on ceasefire in Karabakh

Armenia FM to head for Paris

Dollar loses value in Armenia

Turkey attempting to drive wedge between Armenia and Armenian diaspora

Online intimidation of Artsakh people by Azerbaijan special services gains new momentum

9-year-old Armenian boy dies after being run over by car

Kremlin comments on prospect of Russia, Armenia, Azerbaijan leaders meeting over Karabakh

Armenia 2nd President and Karabakh ex-President also bid farewell to Serzh Sargsyan's mother

Armenia former President Kocharyan, ex-deputy PM and now lawmaker Gevorgyan court session pushed back 1 week

Peskov: Karabakh conflict statement signed last year by Russia, Armenia, Azerbaijan is extremely important

Turkey defense minister: Opening of Zangezur corridor does not pose threat to any side

Azerbaijan threatens Armenia defense minister

President pays tribute to martyrs of recent Artsakh war

Saakashvili's supporters holding protest near Justice Ministry building in Tbilisi

Turkey defense minister stubbornly does not see Azerbaijan provocations

Armenian historian: Armenia needs to establish refugee settlement in Yerevan for those displaced from Artsakh

Armenia opposition MP not elected legislature defense committee deputy chair for 11th time

Armenia PM spokesperson resigns

Armenia parliament speaker: We have paid very high price for our mistakes

Armenia premier appoints new deputy FM

1,121 new cases of COVID-19 confirmed in Armenia

Karabakh MFA: Artsakh will never be part of Azerbaijan

Russia peacekeepers patrol Karabakh line of contact

Women in the Police System training program kicks off in Armenia

Investigative Committee: Azerbaijan soldier entered Artsakh, fired at waterline repairmen (PHOTOS)

Newspaper: 114 soldiers and civilians are returned so far from Azerbaijan to Armenia

US State Department issues statement on 1-year anniversary of Karabakh ceasefire declaration

Armenia ruling power MPs visit Yerevan military pantheon

Newspaper: Ex-police chief continues knocking on opposition Armenia Blocs door

Armenia MFA: Realities created by use of force against Artsakh cannot create basis for Karabakh conflict settlement

Newspaper: Russia army Southern Military District deputy commander coming to Armenia on special mission

Armenia ruling power MPs visit Yerevan military pantheon

Reporters are allowed into Yerevan military pantheon only after PM motorcades departure

Armenia PM is at Yerevan military pantheon

Erdogan congratulates Aliyev

Armenia 2nd President: We're going to get rid of these authorities through barricades or elections

Russia, Azerbaijan FMs discuss trilateral statement signed on November 9, 2020

Armenia FM strongly condemns Azerbaijan's provocations during phone talks with Russian counterpart

armlur.am: Armenia ex-police chief: I support Robert Kocharyan, he can help get country out of this situation

Council of Armenia's Tegh village: Horse that crossed over to Azerbaijani side has returned

Russian and Armenia FMs continue to exchange views ahead of anniversary of adoption of trilateral statement

Armenia MFA issues statement strongly condemning Azerbaijan's gross violation of ceasefire regime

Armenia ruling party representative appointed Shirak Province governor

Ex-deputy chief of Armenian army's General Staff Tiran Khachatryan attends opposition's rally

Armenia 2nd President: Demarcation with border of Azerbaijan will predetermine status of Nagorno-Karabakh

Armenia 2nd President presents 4 facts about 44-day war

168.am: Armenia ex-defense minister Vagharshak Harutyunyan to be appointed Ambassador to Russia

Armenia defense minister pays working visit to Karabakh and then visits Sev Lake territory of Syunik Province

Young Armenians hold demonstration in defense of Armenia and Artsakh in Athens

Opposition 'Armenia' Alliance adopts declaration at end of rally at Freedom Square in Yerevan

One of civilians injured in Shushi is in severe condition, 2 persons' condition is of medium severity

NEWS.am daily digest: 08.11.21

Armenia police apprehend female participant of rally at Freedom Square

Armenian FM receives outgoing UN Resident Coordinator in Armenia

Traffic stopped at intersection near Karabakh's Shushi after gunshots fired by Azerbaijanis at water company employees

Opposition 'Armenia' alliance holding rally at Freedom Square in Yerevan

Police troops deployed at Freedom Square in Yerevan and nearby streets

Opposition Armenia parliament faction leader: This unblocking will lead to deeper blockade

Armen Sarkissian: Armenia could become a base country for Russia for development of certain directions

Two of three civilians injured in Artsakh are undergoing surgeries, condition is stable but grave

Sarkissian: Armenia's relations with a third country are theorem but those with Russia are axiom

Hulusi Akar: Turkey expects Armenia to discuss 3+3 platform proposal
US President Donald Trump escalated his attacks on Attorney General Jeff Sessions, saying, I dont have an attorney general, AP reported.

Trump, in a Hill.TV interview released on Wednesday, said that hes so sad over Jeff Sessions, whom he has repeatedly denounced for recusing himself from the Russia investigation.

He was the first senator that endorsed me. And he wanted to be attorney general, and I didnt see it, Trump said in the Oval office interview. And then he went through the nominating process and he did very poorly. I mean, he was mixed up and confused, and people that worked with him for, you know, a long time in the Senate were not nice to him, but he was giving very confusing answers. Answers that should have been easily answered.

The president softened his stance slightly when talking to reporters on the White House lawn hours after the interviews publication, saying, Im disappointed in the attorney general for numerous reasons, but we have an attorney general.
WASHINGTON, DC -The Armenian National Committee of America (ANCA) has called upon the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to facilitate the launch of non-stop flights from the United States to the Republic of Armenia  easing transit for tourists, speeding up business travel and cargo movement - while deepening the bilateral ties between two friendly nations.

In a letter shared on the eve of Armenian Independence Day, ANCA Chairman Raffi Hamparian encouraged Acting FAA Administrator Dan Elwell to engage with Armenias civil aviation authorities on concrete steps toward this powerful new connection between the American and Armenian peoples.

Travel to Armenia marked double-digit growth over the past year, with the demand for flights from the United States to Armenia continuing to grow - driving tourism as a major engine of Armenias prosperity. Currently, travelers from the U.S. need to purchase tickets using connecting flights on foreign carriers, often with long layovers. This effort is intended to create an effortless, convenient and speedy connection in getting from one country to the other.

The ANCA is leading the effort to establish non-stop flights from the United States to Armenia, shared longtime ANCA leader Zanku Armenian, who has years of professional experience in aviation matters. The time is ripe for the FAA and Civil Aviation Authorities in Armenia to create a favorable legal and regulatory environment and foster engagement with commercial stakeholders  empowering the private sector to initiate profitable non-stop flights. With a concerted effort by both governments, we are optimistic that a private air carrier will step forward to launch non-stop flights from Los Angeles or New York to Yerevan. The demand for air travel from the United States to Armenia is strong and growing. While this is an ambitious initiative by the ANCA that was started well before the recent positive changes in Armenia, the timing now is particularly favorable to establish a new dimension to the bonds between our two countries, added Armenian.

Once government hurdles are cleared, the private carrier that steps forward to establish this new non-stop route will enjoy the long-term business benefits by being a first-mover on such an opportunity. This is why the ANCA has been initiating dialogue with various U.S. federal, state and local authorities and private sector parties to advocate for this game-changing idea.
The European Court of Human Rights has published a judgment in the case of Mushegh Saghatelyan v. Armenia.

As it is mentioned on the ECHR website, the case concerned an opposition activists allegation of a politically motivated crackdown on 1 March 2008 following a wide-scale protest against the presidential elections.

The European Court of Human Rights held, unanimously, that there had been:

two violations of Article 3 (prohibition of inhuman or degrading treatment/investigation) of the European Convention on Human Rights. The Court was not convinced that the injuries recorded on Mr Saghatelyans head and body had occurred during clashes between the police and protestors, which was the official explanation, and concluded that they had been the result of ill-treatment. Moreover, there had never been an official investigation to specifically look into Mr Saghatelyans allegations that his injuries had been caused by police brutality;

a violation of Article 5  1 (right to liberty and security) of the European Convention concerning Mr Saghatelyans arrest, which had not been lawful because it had not been formally acknowledged for the first 16 hours and had gone 12 hours over the time-limit under domestic law for bringing a suspect before a judge;

a violation of Article 5  3 (entitlement to trial within a reasonable time or to release pending trial) as concerned the authorities failure to properly justify Mr Saghatelyans detention;

a violation of Article 6  1 (right to a fair trial) because the criminal proceedings against him, taken as a whole, had been unfair. In particular, the courts had relied on police testimony to convict him, while summarily rejecting both his allegations of inconsistencies in the case and his requests to call defence witnesses;

and, a violation of Article 11 (freedom of assembly and association). The Court found that the dispersal of the protest, which had been peaceful, and the subsequent rounding-up and detention of activists, such as Mr Saghatelyan, had been disproportionate and unnecessary. In fact, it seemed that he had been initially detained and prosecuted simply because he had participated in the protest, while his eventual conviction had been handed down without a proper examination by the domestic courts. Not only had this breached his Convention right to freedom of peaceful assembly, but it could also discourage him and others from participating in demonstrations in the future.

The Court held that Armenia was to pay Mr Saghatelyan 15,600 euros in respect of nonpecuniary damage and 5,000 euros in respect of costs and expenses.
YEREVAN.- Armenian PM Nikol Pashinyan received on Thursday Dr. Eric Esrailian, a closest friend of Armenias National Hero, great philanthropist Kerk Kerkorian, famous American physician, co-manager of the Medical College after David Gefen at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), co-producer of The Promise film, which tells the story of the Armenian Genocide, and UCLA Chancellor, biologist, Academician Gene Block, the PM's office reported.

Greeting the guests, the PM hailed the development of cooperation between Armenian higher educational institutions and the University of California, Los Angeles, which in turn may contribute to the deepening of Armenian-American educational ties.

Nikol Pashinyan touched upon the democratic changes underway in Armenia, noting that what happened in our country was not only a political event, but also a cultural and educational revolution which opened up vast opportunities for the launch of drastic reforms in the field of education.

The Prime Minister stressed that education is one of the cornerstones of democratic development and economic progress, and considering Armenias huge innovational and IT potential, the Government of Armenia seeks to convert Armenia into a technological country.

Eric Esrailian and Gene Block wished the Government every success on the way to implementing its reform agenda, including the educational reform. They expressed readiness to support this process through the development of entrepreneurship, technology, engineering, exchange of experience and academic programs. Eric Esrailian advised that the University of California is going to open a center of Armenian studies in the near future.
British architects are leading international calls for the now-abandoned Zvartnots airport in Armenia to be saved from the wrecking ball, the Daily Mail reported.

It looks like a monolithic space-city straight out of science fiction, but in reality it was one of the jewels in the Soviet crown.

After it was built in the 1970s, more than 2,500 passengers crowded through the country's most modern airport terminal every hour.

Leading British architect Tim Flynn says the airport is an outstanding piece of architecture. His London-based international practice has had an office in Yerevan for 14 years.

And he hopes that the new, more democratic government in Armenia which came to power after May's Velvet Revolution will decide Zvartnots is a historical building worth preserving. And yet he warns the longer it's left to crumble away, the chances of saving it diminish.

'I realise the new prime minister has a lot on his plate, but I hope his conscience will lead to a change of plan. Whatever you think of the old Soviet Union, the buildings from this period were extraordinary and adventurous, a piece of history.'

The owners want to demolish more of the old airport to make way for a multi-million pound expansion of the new international terminal. But they are being fought by the daughter of the original airport architect. Anahit Tarkhanyan believes the airport still has huge potential and that many don't realise what they're giving up. She says land-locked Armenia could benefit from a new renovated airport which could become the centre of a network of regional airports. Now Anahit is running for mayor of Yerevan, with a mission to fight the demolition.
Human Rights Watch (HRW) posted the Universal Periodic Review (UPR) report on Azerbaijan and noted that the government accepted numerous broad recommendations in a wide range of areas, including the Sustainable Development Goals, promoting human rights education, and equality. The government accepted recommendations regarding freedom of speech and association, particularly those that implied approval of its current measures in these areas.

"It is disappointing that the government relegated for further study a series of recommendations on the need to protect LGBT people from discrimination, to reform restrictive regulations governing the registration and financing of nongovernmental organizations, and reforming criminal libel legislation.

Of the few recommendations the government rejected most relate to politically motivated prosecutions. This too is disappointing, if unsurprising.

Azerbaijan has a persistent record of using bogus charges to imprison government critics, routinely manipulating or fabricating evidence. Many cases show that authorities had motivation to retaliate against critics. When authorities detain these critics, they focused on the critics political or journalistic work as much as the alleged infraction. In some cases, such as Afgan Mukhtarli, the journalist who was kidnapped from Georgia and brought illegally across the border to Azerbaijan in May 2017, the authorities allegations simply do not meet even minimum threshold of credibility. Also among these cases was Ilgar Mammadov, whose prosecution the European Court of Human Rights found to be in retaliation for his political activities. It took the government more than four years after the courts first ruling to free him, and he still faces a suspended sentence, a travel ban and restrictions on his activities. But several dozen critics, like Mr. Mukhtarli, remain behind bars. The very small cohort of lawyers who represent them is shrinking because the Bar association has either disbarred them or suspended their licenses.

The Azerbaijani government should immediately free the many bloggers, political activists and other critics who are wrongfully imprisoned in retaliation for their legitimate activities. It should allow lawyers to perform their work without undue government interference. And it should reform laws and regulations on NGOs and their access to funding, in accordance with recommendations from the Council of Europes Venice Commission," HRW noted.
Concerts, workshops and classes coming to 2018 Guitar Festival

by Hannah Erickson

CARBONDALE, Ill.  For the fifth consecutive year, music enthusiasts will be charmed and inspired by the unique Guitar Festival hosted by the music department at Southern Illinois University Carbondale.

The festival fits with the many activities planned for Hispanic Latino Heritage Month at SIU, and is scheduled for Sept. 28-29. From classical to electric, bass and jazz, this event touches on all the things that make guitar music special.

Festival to feature unique artists from around the world

The weekend will be headlined by bass guitarist, composer and recording artist Aldemar Valentin. A beloved Puerto Rican musician, Valentin offers a unique perspective to the world of guitar music. Coming by way of Xalapa, Mexico, where he teaches jazz at the Universidad Veracruzana, Valentin has worked with jazz giants such as Miguel Zenon and Danilo Perez.

Isaac Lausell, artistic director of the festival and assistant professor of music, sees the event as an opportunity to hear from some of the best in the field.

The headline artist we are bringing in is Puerto Rican, Aldemar Valentin, and he has had a great impact on the jazz field, Lausell said.

Cultural exchange program brings Aldemar Valentin to SIU

Valentins contribution is part of a cultural exchange program SIU has with the Universidad Veracruzana. Lausell and Richard Kelley, associate professor of music, will both travel to Xalapa to perform at a conference next month.

Tim Steis featured at opening gala

The opening gala concert will feature classical guitarist and luthier, Tim Steis. Steis is the protege of the world renowned Bruce Holzman, from Florida State University. The promising musician brings a deep understanding of how to build a guitar and will offer a unique element to the festival.

Although he [Steis] is an American player, he plays classical guitar, which is the most emblematic musical instrument in the Spanish culture, Lausell said. We thought both concerts would be a good opportunity to promote that side of the Latino culture, the arts and the music.

The final special guest is also a doctoral student in the school of engineering at SIU. Arash Asadollahi will be presenting both a lecture and a recital about the Persian Setar and its culture.

Activities and events for all audiences

The festival begins Sept. 28 with a variety of events:

12:30 p.m. Late registration table opens. This will be held at the back entrance of Altgeld Hall, towards room 112.

1  2 p.m. Persian Setar lecture/recital with Arash Asadollahi. Located in Altgeld Hall room 112.

2:30  4 p.m. Jazz composition workshop with Aldemar Valentin. Located in Altgeld Hall room 110.

4  7:30 p.m. Evening break

7:30 p.m. Opening gala concert with classical guitarist, Tim Steis. Located at the Old Baptist Foundation Recital Hall.

The festival starts up again the morning of Sept. 29.

10 a.m. Jazz improvisation master class with Aldemar Valentin.

1  3 p.m. Classical guitar master class with Tim Steis. Located in the Old Baptist Foundation Recital Hall.

7:30 p.m. Jazz recital with the Aldemar Valentin, featuring Richard Kelley, Isaac Lausell and Jay Contrino. Located in Altgeld Hall room 112.

Registration open now

A variety of ticket options are available to the public:

Two-day pass plus opening Gala  Includes admission to all the concerts, lectures and master classes during the entire festival - $50.

One-day pass - Includes admission to all the concerts, lectures and master classes for the festival on either Sept. 28 or Sept. 29 - $25.

Single event pass  This is good for a single admission to a master class, a lecture or a recital. $12 general audience/$6 students.

All events are free to students, faculty and staff of the SIU School of Music.

Aldemar Valentins recital on Sept. 28 and his master classes on Sept. 28 and Sept. 29 are free to students, faculty and to the staff of SIU Carbondale with an SIU ID. Community members are required to pay admission.

To register, checks may be written to Southern Illinois University with a memo for SIU Guitar Festival. A registration form must also be completed and mailed to Betty Johnson, Southern Illinois University  School of Music, 1000 S. Normal Ave., Carbondale, IL 62901.

The last day for registration is Sept. 27. Late registration for the two-day pass is $60 and $30 for the one-day pass. Late registration is available at the offices in Altgeld Hall and on site during the festival.

Special rates are available for schools and non-profit organizations. Contact Isaac Lausell for more information at lausell@siu.edu.
President Donald Trumps latest round of tariffs on about $200 billion worth of imports from China has made headlines across the globe  but not in China.

Print, online and television news outlets in China have largely stayed silent following Trumps Monday evening announcement because of government censorship. Peoples Daily, the state-run media mouthpiece for the Chinese government, didnt dedicate any coverage to the major development. At 7 p.m. Tuesday local time in Beijing, Xinwen Lianbo, a flagship daily news program produced by China Central Television with a viewership of over 100 million, thoroughly covered President Xi Jinpings whereabouts but made no mention of Trumps tariffs and Chinas plan to retaliate.

Dont touch the issue, the government told other domestic media, Yahoo Finance learned. They have also been ordered to avoid writing about the recent market meltdown and other issues that suggest an economic recession.

(Carlos Barria | Reuters)

About the trade war  no one mainstream Chinese media has reported what happened on earth? one user asked on Weibo, Chinas Twitter. Some users complained they were not able to post content containing the word trade war. For social media accounts operated by foreign news outlets, including the Wall Street Journal, the comment and repost feature for any trade-related posts have been disabled.

It was a stark contrast from months back, when media coverage on the trade tension was intense and state-run outlets were using an aggressive and hawkish tone to fuel the nationalistic sentiment, with headlines like Never retreat and Hit America where it hurts. Xinhua, the state-run news agency was promoting hashtag fanji maoyizhan, which translates to fight back in the trade war. But since July, the government has been trying to calm the public down and put restrictions on media coverage that include messages such as, Dont attack Trumps vulgarity, according to censorship-monitoring site China Digital Times.

Story continues

Chinas shift of tone

(Photo: KEI)

The media silence doesnt stop Chinas market from feeling the pinch from the escalating trade war. The Shanghai Composite Index fell to its lowest close in nearly four years Monday after trade threats. And the exchange rate of the Chinese currency renminbi, weakened 45 basis points against the U.S. dollar on Tuesday.

On Tuesday morning, after China announced the decision to retaliate by imposing 10% tariffs on $60 billion worth of imports from the U.S., local media outlets were finally allowed to cover the issue by publishing the government statement.

Gary Hufbauer, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, sees a change of tone now that Chinas trying to tamp down the escalation. Previously the statement is they would go tit-for-tat, but $60 billion is a very measured response, Hufbauer told Yahoo Finance. Chinas leaders, especially President Xi, realize that tit-for-tat escalation is not in Chinas interest. They want to damp nationalist fervor calling for stern measures against the American imperialists.

So far, China hasnt dropped plans to negotiate with the U.S later this month, despite Trumps tariffs.

Foreign investment in China will be a more important contributor to growth. I think the Chinese authorities recognize that they dont want to discourage them from coming in, said Hufbauer, who believes the negotiation between Washington and Beijing will resume before January, when Trumps threatened 25% tariffs come into effect.

Krystal Hu covers technology and economy for Yahoo Finance. Follow her on Twitter.

Read more:

El-Erian: Trump has a 75% chance of winning the trade war

Why the $375 billion US-China trade deficit can be totally misleading

How Chinas tariffs on soybeans fueled the US GDP bump
Bye, fucker

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This makes me happy. itswhathedeserves.gif

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die thanks

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the nerve of him to not only write this but to refer to belittle the metoo movement as well is astounding

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Good. Bye, asshole.



I haven't read the essay either, but part of me can't believe Ghomeshi had the gall to portray himself as the victim. The other part isn't surprised, he's an asshole

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during his trial he kept trying to act like everyone was ~opressing him because he's into bdsm. he'll never get it and i hope he gets kicked down a flight of stairs.

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L O R D

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I mean the reason he was fired by the CBC was when he heard the allegations he actually pulled up a video of him hitting a woman and showed it to them as proof that everything was consensual and the video was so graphic and disturbing they fired him.



He is not normal.

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Having known him since I was 16? I read it because I wanted to respond and be sure that I was right in all the points I chose to make.



And I was absolutely correct in my assumption about what the piece was going to be: a self-congratulatory yet self-pitying diatribe about how hard it is to be Jian after he was acquitted of doing shitty things to women and how the world has the audacity to take so long to give him a second chance.



Nah, fuck this guy.

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I'm honestly not surprised at all.

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I wish more of these people would show their asses. it's depressing to think about so many of these men are heading all these forms of media/publications

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Yeah, that Slate interview was really great because the interviewer pushed him both on his lax attitude towards Ghomeshi as well as his abysmal lack of inclusion of pieces written by women. There is an obvious connection of disrespecting women in ways both big and small and I'm glad the interviewer went there.

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good riddance!

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Ha. I hope Nicole Cliffe can find a place for the piece by an assault survivor next.

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Stuff like this makes me want less and less to be a published author and just stick to the world of writing stuff that I enjoy and can read by myself over and over again...



I love the NYRB classic / translation reprints. I read Happy Moscow not too long ago and loved it.

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OMG yes I love NYRB classics such a genius imprint, I've literally never read a bad book from them.

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just googled that and Aickman and Kristensen popped up, noice

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Completely agree - the further away I am from the book industry the happier I am.



NYRB Classics is great. I love their book club, I get it for my husband for Christmas every year. I also got the NYRB review for a little while but it was terrible.

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So many men love nothing more than to perch on their tower and pontificate on grey areas, truth, forgiveness, etc. when it comes to rape. Not other topics, just rape. They're pathetic and have small minds. I genuinely believe women as a sex are smarter than men because men never bother to think from any other fucking perspectives.

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I hate when men insist on "playing devil's advocate" and act like they're intellectuals or something

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"playing devil's advocate" if actually voicing an unpopular opinion can have some value I guess--but these idiots do it while literally expressing the opinion that is the norm and has been forever lmao. like "what if.... women lied about rape?" as if that's an original thought. they're seriously so dumb.

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everyones the devils adocate when u live in hell

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EXACTLY

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Hooooey I love this comment!

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I agree with everything you've said here.

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fuck them both. I'm glad Ghomeshi's attempted comeback is flopping.

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My goodness... I feel like literally everything

you can think of bad happens to him.

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Ugh poor guy. This is also why I dont trust hospitals. Pretty sure the hospital was the reason my Dad passed sooner then he should have.



Side note: Has anyone been listening to Dr. Death? Holy crap, its terrifying. Talk about medical malpractice...



Edited at 2018-09-20 12:34 am (UTC)

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I am! I immediately thought of Dr. Death too. It's so freaking terrifying. All of those doctors that covered for him & the fact that he was basically try to or flat out murdering people unchecked.

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i just cant figure out how dr death got through all his programs or what exactly his motivation is. hes not like a normal serial killer? i guess just such gross incompetence coupled with an insane ego, substance abuse and no remorse?

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yes!! has the last ep been released yet? i caught ep5 yesterday

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The idea of having a needle in me that many times, I feel physically ill. I feel so bad for him.

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I didn't even know so much shit has been happening to him. That's horrible.

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technicians could not find his vein and stuck him 40 times with a dirty needle



Ugh..

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Oh wow, that's awful. He's been through a lot. I remember the post where he survived that plane crash. I just checked when it happened and it was 10 years ago today. Holy shit.

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Hes been through so much. I completely empathize with him about chronic pain. Chronic pain is a nightmare.

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It's really something you can't begin to grasp until it's you, and even then it's a process.

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mte. My sister has been dealing with it since 2012 and it's sucking the life out of her. It's the worst.

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Shit, poor guy. He has been through so much.

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I think it was multiple technicians.

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I believe him, but I also feel like there is something missing. This place isn't actually a hospital I don't think, but you'd think they'd still have some sort of official policy related to IV insertion. And I don't know anyone that would ever even consider using the same needle for a repeat attempt after the first one failed.



That being said, nerve damage IS one of the more extreme & rare potential side effects of a peripheral IV & it can happen without it being malpractice. It's why certain areas are usually avoided unless it's literally the last option.

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The phlebs where I work will stick a patient 2-3 times if needed and then TCD (tech can't draw) if they can't get the patient for the RNs/Drs/PAs to draw.



Never heard of a phlebotomist anywhere sticking a patient 40 times to get blood.

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Maybe the phleb was digging around for the vein? I don't know. There's no reason to stick a person that many times. Find someone else to try.

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Our policy for IV insertion is the first person gets two attempts and has to find someone else if he/she fails. If the second person fails after one, then you have to contact the vascular access team (or if they aren't there, someone in the ICU that can use the ultrasound viewer). Obviously, in an actual emergency this is ignored OR you get a physician to put in a jugular line OR you put a line into the bone.



**i think its similar with lab draws, minus the jugular/bone access, but blood draws are easier than IVs

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was the needle dirty to start out with or did it become dirty while they tried to find a vein?

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Jesus, just in case surviving a plane crash wasnt enough trauma...that was just the start for this guy.



My roommate had blood drawn and they hit a nerve and she had sharp pain for a couple months afterward, and her fingers kept curling into her hand. The clinic kept telling her it was probably temporary (and luckily it was) but they were super dismissive of her and she was understandably concerned.

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Now I'm forever terrified to get my blood drawn because of this story and to make matters worse, I have to get it done every few months because of my thyroid. D:

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Lol Im sorry bb, I get mine done every three months too and I just go in looking worried and say I know everyone says they hate this, but just so you know I reeeeally dont do well and I have a history of passing out and people have always treated me real gentle so far!



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Damn this guy's in his own Final Destination moive

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Him and Post malone

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Bless the fact that my veins are always super easy to find and it's always one quick jab... Cuz i do not do well with needles.

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Same. Im super pale so my veins are really obvious to see.

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I'm pale af and my veins are visible but apparently not the one used to draw out blood so the fact I'm pale and have to be pinched several times just leaves me with a huge ass bruise lol

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I'm about to start my rewatch of season 5 (not so drunk this time edition)



Edited at 2018-09-20 03:28 am (UTC)

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[ Spoiler (click to open) ] Princess Carolyn be a great mother to her tiny porcupine baby girl. Who I hope she names Amelia. OR RUTHIE. I finished season 5 the other night and OMG. I can see why people think it would be a good series ender, but I want to see

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omg shut your mouth about it being a series ender, I will never have enough of this show

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people posted about starting writing for season 6 so i don't think it's actually the ender

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I agree, I want nothing but the best for Princess Carolyn.

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[ Spoiler (click to open) ] Isn't there a new season? It JUST went into syndication on Comedy Central, so I'd be shocked if it were the end.

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I finished season 5 today and it made me more emotional than I thought it would. All the seasons have been heavy but this one, given the topics, and what's in the news day to day, it hit hard. This show is brilliant. I need season 6 now.

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Op you reminded me to go finish the season I'm two episodes away. There are so many people on this show, I always have to pause and imdb the episode bc I'm like hmm I know that voice.

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Hes gonna be a white Latino just like Rick Sanchez 





Woooo representation!



Edited at 2018-09-20 03:34 am (UTC)

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lmao i always forget rick is "latino"

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Xtinas impact lives on!

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I always questioned whether or not he would be Latino or Hispanic or not. I figured he'd be a descendant or white Spaniards because of Sanchez. Did they, the writers and other behind-the-scenes people, say this? I would believe it or they did.

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Justin Roiland confirmed that hes Hispanic.

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Most fucked up show ever. I kind of love it.

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This show is sucha_comfort blanket. Ngl, what Diane did on set SHOOK ME TO THE CORE.





Also, I totally forgot Allison Brie did her voice (lol, awful)



Im on the episode where they wrapped up the show BoJack is on so I think theres a couple of episodes left.

Pickles is so cute tbh.

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man that season really packed a big punch. and it really does play with the roller coaster concept of people doing good things and bad things/, being self destructive and trying to improve yourself.



so happy about princess caroline.

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I've only watched the first few eps so I'm not gonna read the comments, but I'm praying for nothing as heavy as last season's "Time's Arrow" episode.

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it's fun to have dreams isn't it?? :)))))))))

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Yeah.....it might be even more intense this year.

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Idk if anything this season exceeds the devastation of Times Arrow imo

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I'm loving this season so far. I saw a ton of reviews raving about the monologue episode, but I actually fell asleep during it because I was so bored. It was also 1am so maybe I need to rewatch it lol

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Same, I couldn't get through that one. My attention span was like see ya!!!

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I didn't like the monologue. Mainly because I like PC and Diane more than Bojack.

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Yeah, I felt like that was the worst episode of the season.

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My mind was definitely wandering when I felt the writers were saying hey, this is a SPECIAL episode. Idk it was broadcast in a way that felt artificial. Compared to Ruthie or even The Dog Days Are Over, Free Churro fell a little short. There are some good bits in there and Arnetts performance is fantastic tho

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Honestly, I loved it when I watched it but I skip it on re-watch. I also skip the underwater episode when I rewatch because I do think they are amazing episodes but it's not what I want to watch when I'm just lazily sitting around the house.



I do think that ep was fucking great though, I didn't even realize it was their "very special" episode until like 10 minutes in because I was so enthralled with what he was saying.

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i thought it was just gonna be the story about the free Churro, and that would be that, but it kept going. I like that every season has a weird episode like this (like the fish one)

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noo, u gotta rewatch! That was my favorite episode!

I loved that it was the entire episode!

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diane's episode made me cry.

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Nobody is impressed by white Latinos and lol @ them patting themselves in the back for their asexual PSA.

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yeah it was soooo boring to me but there was kind of a gut punch at the end so im glad i at least watched. i can't imagine rewatching it though, it had absolutely no entertainment value at all.

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one does not SKIP a bojack episode.

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Loved this season. Free Churro was my favorite episode. I didn't cry as much as I have in past seasons.

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yes. Just finished the season. Best ep!

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Yeah the trailer got quite the reactions from people saying she didn't smile enough to Samuel L. Jackson spoke more than her (even though he's like Marvel's narrator) which actually fits the narrative of the trailer.



All this reaction for a teaser trailer.



Edited at 2018-09-20 08:28 pm (UTC)

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That thread about Jackson speaking more than Brie is such a joke, lol. It's a TEASER TRAILER and an established character that has been around since the beginning is introducing us to a brand new, mysterious character. He's also what connects her to Infinity War and A4. It's the most ridiculous outrage.

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Yeah, people were mentioning her voice being monotone, too high-pitched, and her facial expression in the ONTD post... I felt very 'hm' about those comments when reading it.

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call me by my name sis lol



but i stand by saying that she sounded monotone. there is a way to sound serious without coming off as bland which she did imo and i say that as someone who wants brie to do well in the movie.

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ONTDers being misogynistic? I'm shocked! /s

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I don't think monotone is the word i'd use but watching the trailer i felt like there was a weird dissonance between her voice and expression/vibe. It was like watching a hitwoman talking in a teenager's voice.

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Like she just fell out of space to earth and is obviously dealing with memory loss and probably brain washing, she ain't gonna be happy.

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lmao, this women have to smile~ bullshit is so annoying & the comparison with wonder woman makes no sense, since she did not smile in the trailers either?!

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Right? Diana in the trailer either looked like Brie in this one or straight up pissed. They're comparing a character they got to see more fleshed out to a minute of a character they're being introduced to in a trailer with a serious tone.

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Yeah, the idiot making that comparison used the Justice League trailer conveniently. How is the team up movie trailer equivalent to the solo outing one hmm?



Also, your icon is amazing. <3

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Its wild to me that his current network is happy to have him AND all white hosts as their main source of news centered info. https://t.co/LjDsbu3RX1  Joelle Monique  (@JoelleMonique) September 20, 2018



...why are you patting yourself on the back for being called for making a really sexist comment that's so overtly, obviously, pathetically so you'd think a 70-year-old man made it 20 years ago?  Alicia Lutes (@alicialutes) September 5, 2018



Burn him to the ground!! Burn him to the ground!!

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Jeff Sneider and the all the dudebros on Collider are irritating.



I hate the Clarke Wolfe and Rachel Cushing have anything to do with them.

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I miss the AMC days with Alicia Malone, Amirose, Miri, Ashley, Chrisly, and Sinead. Now a days its a white sausage fest.

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i fucking hate Jeff Snider with fury.





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"Carol gets back up because Fuck you."



This is awesome.

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The photoshopped pics of her smiling look like "I fucked up my lines now I'm trying not to laugh" outtakes not scenes from a trailer.



W/E the trailer got me hyped and can't wait for the movie.

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I'm looking forward to the movie, but I can't say the trailer...*increased* that level of excitement or left me feeling pumped. But it is just a teaser trailer. I think some people were expecting too much. Like that dumb comment of counting the number of lines.

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the smiling thing is super weird to me... honestly none of the other marvel heroes smile all that much, definitely not in the posters, but not in the movies themselves either.



my only complaints are the hair (so boring compared to the styles in the source material) and her voice did sound higher pitched than i expected. but neither of these things make me uninterested in the character or her movie. the trailer overall got me even more excited than i already was for this movie.

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I keep thinking this would have been cool [ Spoiler (click to open) ]







or this



or this IA about her hair, they should have at least done something cool when she was in space.I keep thinking this would have been cool

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yes! both of these are great, i really love the first one! i was actually hoping for a pixie cut but i always knew it wouldn't happen. can't believe they gave her the rachel... i get it, it's set in the 90s... but come on.

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This is the problem people are having???? Lmao The trailer was a little boring imo, but I did enjoy the part where she was getting up from a little girl to an adult. The only thing that bothers me is her costume, the way it has been translated in film looks..idk cheap to me. Maybe it will be better in motion.

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I love ha.

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imagine carol danvers smilling and having a bubbly tone.

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Lawd what does she have to smile about in the trailer, she fell through blockbuster, doesnt remember who she is, if she was grinning shed look insane. The shopped pics of her already look like charlton Heston planet of the apes level of crazy.



the 3 of Tony Steve and strange are straight up fucking psycho looking



It reminds me of my old work where my boss actually marked me down on a review because I wasnt smiling when I was moving boxes of books on hold. He was such a fucking douchenugget

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I had a long convo about this with a friend last night. People were comparing it unfavorably to the WW trailer but honestly do people forget that opened on a shot of Diana and Steve on the beach lol? And Diana barely had any lines in her first trailer either!



I feel like a lot of dudes are acting idiotic over this trailer is because shes not smiling, she doesnt have the camera lingering over her face, her costume doesnt have an unnecessary zipper thats halfway done up, and because shes shown as being a self motivated person. Plus theyre all pressed that Feige and SLJ and the Russos have all said shes the most powerful superhero in the MCU.

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Agreed on why some guys are losing their damn minds over this. I've seen a couple admit they like WW better because she "shows more skin", so I guess at least they're being honest instead of using coded language to not sound like such pigs. And boy, the power level thing is really getting to them as well, since I've noticed men are the ones who are obsessed over power levels, so there's going to be blowback over that for sure. I was talking to a troll-y co-worker yesterday and he's already calling her a Mary Sue. I rolled my eyes and told him he doesn't even know what one is and then he started going on about Rey being one as well.



Guys being upset with her costume pleases me greatly so I'm glad they're pressed about it. Personally I love it and how not objectifying it is, and it seems like she has flat boots as well (maybe a tiny hidden heel but nothing like women usually get in these movies), which is also amazing because I hate having action women run around in goddamn platform heels, ugh.

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And it's wild because in "Wonder Woman" there's nothing sexual about Diana showing a lot of skin. She's shot in a loving way, like there are beauty shots of her face and her hair is always amazing and she has glamour moments like in that blue dress, but she's not shot in a male gazey way (in "Justice League" tho...fuck you Joss Whedon) at all, and I love that. And Brie is gorgeous, but there's something so no-nonsense about Carol and her look and the way she's shot in closeups that I also love. Plus like you mentioned, there are no boob plates on her costume which is such a nice change for once.



When I saw the trailer I fell in love with the vibe Carol gave off. Like "I am doing what is right, damn everything else." And yep I noticed men lose their shit over "overpowered" female characters. I think the day before or after the trailer came out Watch Mojo or one of those YT pages made a list of "overpowered" superheroes and Carol was the thumbnail. I want to go back in time and stop the term "Mary Sue" from every entering the cultural lexicon.

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Can i just get a shot of chewie in the next trailer please? 



Anyone read the new life of capt marvel issue that came out yesterday???

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Hydrogen is seeing support grow in Europe as an alternative to oil and gas, and over renewable energy such as wind and solar.

On Tuesday, 25 European nations backed a measure to increase hydrogen use to power factories, drive vehicles, and heat homes. A non-binding agreement was signed in Linz, Austria, that delved into increasing research into the technology and using existing gas grids to distribute hydrogen.

The coalition sees it as an alternative to fossil fuels to cut the continent's carbon emissions, and to solve the problem for electricity generation caused by fluctuating supply of renewable energies.

Advocates of the "hydrogen economy" have been pushing the fuel for decades. Yet support has been slow and instead, lawmakers have backed other technologies like electric vehicles. Oil and gas continue to be dominant in power plants, vehicles, and heating systems. Natural gas continues to grow as a cleaner and safer fuel over coal and nuclear for electric power, and is seeing more support for liquefied and com-pressed natural gas technologies in commercial vessels and vehicles.

Hydrogen fuel cell vehicles and hydrogen as an alternative power source does have growing business and government support in Europe, the U.S., Japan, and China. While fuel cell passenger vehicles are much smaller than even electric vehicles in sales, hydrogen is gaining global support for energy production and storage, heating systems, and fuel cell vehicles in the transport and public transit sectors.

Miguel Arias Canete, the European Union's top climate and energy official, said hydrogen could help Eu-rope meet its obligations to cut carbon emissions under the 2015 Paris accord. Canete told reporters it could also contribute to energy security by reducing imports of natural gas, much of which is shipped from Russia and countries outside of Europe. Related: Just How Low Can Irans Oil Exports Go?

Hydrogen advocates say that using more of it can stabilize energy prices and supply that can be erratic from fluctuating supplies of wind, solar, hydro, and other renewable energies. Converting electricity gen-erated by renewables into hydrogen means the energy can be stored in large tanks and released again when necessary.

They say hydrogen fuel cell vehicles become just as clean as EVs, which need large lithium-ion battery packs to store their energy. Fuel cell vehicles generate power on board, taking away the range restrictions EVs face; and the fueling can be done in less than five minutes versus a half hour or more for recharging an EV.

Trains and transit buses are seen as a growth area, but it is at an embryonic phase. The world's first com-muter train service using a prototype hydrogen-powered train began in northern Germany on Monday.

Sources of hydrogen vary from fueling station to station, coming from techniques such as electrolysis and hydrolysis, and gases such as methane. Japan continues to lead the world in hydrogen fueling stations, and aims to have 160 of these stations opened by March 2021 to support a fleet of 40,000 fuel cell vehicles. That beats out California, which aims to have 50 of these stations in place by 2020. Japan expects to see the number of hydrogen stations grow to 900 by 2030, supporting a fleet of 800,000 FCVs.

Europe has about 80 hydrogen fueling stations in operation, and China is only just starting to deploy sta-tions.

California (and eight other U.S. states backing Californias policy) and China support hydrogen stations and fuel cell vehicles through their zero emission vehicle mandates.

Japan sees it as part of its economic growth, with two of its local companies, Toyota and Honda, leading the charge. Much of the appeal in Japan came forth out of the Fukushima disaster in 2011. The country has shut down almost all its nuclear reactors since that time, and has been importing hydrogen, oil, coal, and liquefied natural gas since then. Related: Ex GM Boss: Tesla Headed For The Graveyard

Toyota continues to lead the fuel cell passenger car market with its Mirai sedan. Along with Toyota, other global automakers have made commitments and vehicle launches in fuel cell vehicles  including Honda, Hyundai, Audi, BMW, General Motors, and Mercedes-Benz.

The Japanese automaker also sees commercial trucks as a viable channel for sales growth supporting city government efforts to bring in more low-emissions trucks capable of driving through crowded city streets and pulling into restricted cargo storage yards. Toyota has made a deal with Seven-Eleven Japan to bring small fuel cell trucks into the retail chains distribution system.

During the summer, Toyota revealed a new prototype of its Project Portal fuel cell electric truck while hinting at future commercialization. The Beta test truck is built on a glider version of the Kenworth T680 tractor. It can go 300 miles on a tank of hydrogen, and is about 10 percent more powerful than the Al-pha prototype that Toyota unveiled last year, according to the company.

Toyota has remained silent on the fuel cell trucks future production plans, but sees it as more commercial-ly viable than its past efforts. The company continues to remain committed to its broad, across-the-board strategy in vehicle technology and fuel. That covers fuel cell vehicles, hybrids, electric vehicles, gasoline-powered light-duty vehicles, and gasoline- and diesel-powered medium duty trucks through its Hino Trucks subsidiary.

By Jon LeSage for Oilprice.com

More Top Reads From Oilprice.com:
Canada is requiring stronger tanks cars for transporting crude oil ahead of previously set deadlines, the countrys transport minister said on Wednesday.

Transport Canada, the government department responsible for developing regulations, policies and services of transportation in Canada, will now require all unjacketed CPC 1232 tank cars that carry crude oil to be phased out by November 1 - some 17 months earlier than a prior deadline. Unjacketed CPC 1232 and older DOT 111 cars that carry condensate (a volatile light hydrocarbon) will be phased out by January 1, 2019, well ahead of a previously set 2025 deadline.

Canadas Minister of Transport Marc Garneau said that phasing out the least crash resistant tank cars as soon as possible would enhance the safety of communities along rail lines and help ensure the reliable transport of goods and commodities.

Canadas move and continued push for safer tank cars comes with the Lac Megantic crude-by -rail disaster still fresh in mind. The crash occurred in the town of Lac-Megantic, in the Eastern Townships region of Quebec, on July 6, 2013, when an unattended 74-car freight train carrying Bakken Formation crude oil rolled down a 1.2 percent grade from Nantes and derailed in downtown Lac Megantic, resulting in the fire and explosion of multiple tank cars. Forty-seven people were confirmed dead as a result of the accident.

In the past five years, both Canada and the U.S. have introduced new safety standards for crude by rail cars, including the phasing out of certain car types. DOT 111 cars involved in the Lac-Megantic accident were phased out for crude oil usage in Canada in November 2016.

Canadian oil exports

Canadas quicker timeline for strong tank cars that carry crude also comes as the countrys crude oil exports to the U.S. increase. In 2017, Canada was the largest foreign supplier of crude oil to the U.S., accounting for 43 percent of total U.S. crude oil imports and 2 percent of U.S. refinery crude oil intake. Canada exported 3.3 million barrels per day (bpd) to the U.S. in 2017, amounting to 99 percent of all Canadian crude oil and equivalent exports, according to Natural Resources Canada. Related: Germany Blinks First In Ongoing European Gas War

Moreover, Canadian crude exports to the U.S. since last year have continued to spike. Canadas National Energy Board (NEB), its energy regulator, said in August that Canadian oil transports by rail so far this year has nearly doubled since 2017.

For the last week in June, Canadian crude exports to the U.S. were up 11.8 percent from the same time last year. The four-week moving average for that week was 12.2 percent higher year-over-year. The NEB reported total crude oil exports by rail for June averaged 204,558 bpd, an 87 percent increase from last year.

Bearish prices for Canadian oil

The quandary for Canada is that it still exports the bulk of its oil exports to the U.S. by pipeline, a cheaper and safer alternative. However, more pipelines need to be brought online to prevent bottle necks, with a knock-on effect of pushing Canadian crude prices down by as much as $30 per barrel compared to U.S. oil benchmark West Texas Intermediate Crude (WTI).

"With western Canadian pipelines full, greater volumes crude by rail volumes will continue to grow into the fall. We expect movement to average between 200,000 to 300,000 barrels per day for the year, Kevin Birn, the director for regional energy projects at consultant group IHS Markit said last month. Related: Is This A Turning Point For Electricity Sales?

Most Canadian crude exported to the U.S. heads to the Gulf Coast, where oil storage facilities, refineries and export terminals are concentrated.

This increase in Canadian crude exports also come in-spite of the U.S. shale oil boom still raging. The NEB says the U.S. still wants to buy Canadian heavy crude because many of its refineries are configured to process it and it is a cheaper feed-stock than light oil.

Going forward, there are more headwinds for Canadian oil. Despite Julys all-time high for Canadian oil exports, analysts are claiming that its still not high enough to clear out the glut of oil in Western Canada. Canadian oil production is expected to reach 4.7 million bpd by the end of 2018, compared to 4.5 million bpd at the end of last year, according to a NEB forecast.

By Tim Daiss for Oilprice.com

More Top Reads from Oilprice.com:
Hoping to push back against Russia and prevent president Trump from changing current policy, the Senate has produced two new sanctions bills: the Defending Elections from Threats by Establishing Redlines (DETER) Act and the Defending American Security from Kremlin Aggression Act (DASKAA). Both would create a new set of harsh sanctions designed to significantly increase pressure on Russias economy, namely firms in the energy and metals sectors given their central role in providing tax revenues and employment in Russia. But the bills energy sector provisions as currently written threaten national interests rather than advance them.



DASKAA is the larger of the two current bills in committee. The bill in its current form would automatically place sanctions on any American energy firm working with a Russian parastatal  a state-owned or private firm advancing state interests on a project worth more than $250 million located outside of Russia. Firms will be frozen out of countless international projects if Russian firms participate. The DETER Act would block U.S. firms from using railway carriers in Russia that supply energy projects in countries such as Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan.

Unfortunately for U.S. policymakers, it would be difficult to convince the European Union (EU) to commit to similar measures. Theres little need, given the effectiveness of existing sanctions and Europes energy needs. Production of natural gas in the EU is structurally declining. While U.S. LNG exports may increasingly flow to Europe, Russia will remain a key trade partner; liquefied natural gas is more expensive than piped gas. Europes import dependence is only going to grow, but the EU has been largely successful in limiting the risks posed by Russias attempts to politicize European gas markets.

The U.S. Treasury sanctions imposed in 2014 and those implemented by Congress last summer are effective precisely because they focus on altering the Russian energy sectors long-term ability to produce tax revenues for the Kremlin. Russian firms now face considerable pressure internationally as a result. Their lack of access to Western energy technology, difficulty raising loans from western banks, and generally worse corporate standards make them less competitive. The technology gap continues to grow, making Russian firms less able to enter technologically demanding projects or else developing their own shale production domestically. Nikolai Patrushev, the head of Russias National Security Council, admitted to news service Interfax in early August that technology sanctions were taking a heavy toll on Russias energy sector. Related: The Biggest Risk In Todays Oil Markets

Russian firms collectively relied on imports for up to 70 percent of their technological needs when sanctions were put in place in 2014. So far, Russia hasnt adequately replaced imports at home or with gear made elsewhere. Even a few years delay in investments or the adoption of technology has large structural effects on the Russias oil output since its largest fields are aging. Gas production is steady, but much less lucrative.

Evidence shows firms like Rosneft and Lukoil arent terribly rosy about their long-term plans within Russia. A 2016 report from the Russian energy ministrys projections showed that Russian oil production will begin to decline structurally by the early 2020s. The question is by how much. Per the same, companies suggested Russian production would drop nearly 50 percent by 2035. Though Russias oil production has been resilient the last four years, newer deals with China are also beginning to strain its ability to maintain its share of the market in Europe while increasing its sales to China and the Asia-Pacific.

Though its production looks strong for the long-term, Gazprom in particular has seen its bargaining power in Europe erode due to legal decisions, business negotiations, and the EUs energy strategy. Congress attempts to exert greater pressure will stoke divisions with key partners while creating unintended, negative consequences for U.S. foreign policy.

By forcing companies out of any project with the participation of a Russian parastatal worth more than $250 million, firms like Rosneft, Lukoil, and Gazprom can do their best to bid for even insignificant stakes to freeze out western competition from important finds. Firms like Saudi Aramco, CNPC Indonesias Pertamina, and even privately-owned firms from elsewhere can then coordinate with Russian firms to exploit DASKAA. They could then acquire large stakes in strategically important projects. Instead of restricting Russia, these proposals ironically create a new means to pressure the West and enable Russian firms to compete despite their limitations.

Denying U.S. firms the ability to import needed equipment for projects in Kazakhstan will threaten tens of billions of dollars of existing investments in an important market. Chinese and Russian companies would be able to supplant American businesses, reducing Astanas ability to play off different interests. That would increase Kazakhstans dependence on Russia and China, and weaken Washingtons role in Central Asia. Neither is a net positive for the U.S. Related: Oil Prices Inch Higher On Crude, Gasoline Draw

The reality is that the U.S and EU have gone as far as possible sanctioning Russias energy sector without damaging transatlantic relations. Rather than add sanctions, Washington would be wiser to rely on the competitiveness of Western companies. Enhancing western energy ties with Russias neighbors and partners across the Asia-Pacific is a more effective means of countering Russias energy strategy. Natural gas prices are expected to slowly converge between different regions by the 2030s as more gas is traded globally. Gazprom is losing its political power over prices as well as market access over time.

Current sanctions have already had a significant impact on Russia. Allowing Western businesses to continue to compete with their Russian counterparts from an advantageous position would be better than handing Russia a means of explicitly undercutting U.S. oil and gas interests abroad using its parastatals. There are limits to sanctions. Washington needs to better learn them.

By Nicholas Trickett for Oilprice.com

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So far, 2018 has been a good year for Gazprom. The Russian state-owned company is the biggest investor in oil and gas projects in the world with $160 billion worth of investments. With the price of hydrocarbons rising, the companys earnings have received a significant boost. Most importantly, however, Gazprom has seen an end to its legal battles with the European Commission.

The Russian energy giant is investing in additional pipeline infrastructure to the east and west. The construction of Nord Stream 2 is continuing despite frictions between the U.S. and its ally Germany, and opposition from Eastern Europe. The first phase of Turk Stream for the domestic Turkish market has been completed while the second pipeline for the European market is under construction. In the east, the highly publicised Power of Siberia pipeline to north-eastern China is on schedule to be completed on time. The three projects are supposed to start operations at the end of 2019 or at the latest in 2020. The pipelines will provide access to the fastest growing gas market in Asia, China, the biggest economy in Europe, Germany, and, despite recent setbacks, the OECD country with the highest economic growth figure, Turkey.

Furthermore, Gazproms profit has increased significantly. Rising demand and higher prices have boosted earnings. Extreme weather in Europe during the winter has raised Russian exports of natural gas in 2017 to record levels. Gazprom exported 197 bcm last year and is set to increase volumes even further this year. Next to this, European companies are still struggling to replenish depleted storages for the coming winter period. Natural gas prices have hit three-year highs and are set to rise even further. Also, unplanned maintenance on the Norwegian gas network for four weeks further strengthens Gazproms position as the largest exporter of natural gas to Europe.

Arguably the end of the legal battles with the European Commission is the most important development for the Russian energy giant in 2018. Gazprom had been fighting the unbundling legislation of the EU and defending itself against unfair pricing allegations since 2014. In the pricing case, Gazprom has settled. Concerning the unbundling legislation, the European Commission got its way for most of the cases due to the ruling of the WTO. Gazprom, however, expressed satisfaction despite the limited result of its legal actions. Related: Just How Low Can Irans Oil Exports Go?

The Commission accused Gazprom of breaking anti-trust rules in 2015 leading to higher prices in Central and Eastern European countries. The Russian giant limited the reselling of gas and manipulated the isolated position of some countries in order to set higher prices. Gazprom accepted significant concessions in order to avoid major fines. Eastern European countries, such as Poland, expressed disappointment as they believed that the culprit was escaping its punishment. The Commission, however, defended the deal as it would lead to lower prices to the benefit of millions of consumers in Central and Eastern Europe. Gazprom can no longer manipulate the market as customers are able to resell gas and demand lower prices when it diverges from major benchmark prices such as the Dutch TTF.

The WTO ruled on a case filed by Gazprom in 2014, claiming the EUs Third Energy Package unfairly discriminated against the company. The Russian side argued that the European legislation concerning the unbundling of gas transmission assets and production supply assets, is against international trade rules. The legislation was the result of the EUs fear of Gazproms activities in Europe. The state-owned company was buying up assets across the continent and increasing its influence. Related: Why WTI Could Crash In The Coming Weeks

However, the WTO did rule in favour of Gazprom in some cases. It upheld the complaint about the exemption for Germanys OPAL pipeline where Gazprom could only fill 50 percent of the capacity. The WTO also agreed that Croatia, Lithuania, and Hungary discriminated against the Russian company by requiring security of supply assessment for foreign but not domestic pipeline operators.

Despite settling or losing most legal cases this year, Gazprom should be satisfied that all major cases have now come to an end. This comes at a time when the construction of Nord Stream 2 is facing pushback from within Europe as well as overseas from Washington. The relatively low-prices Gazprom is able to charge its customers compared to LNG suppliers, provide the state-owned company with an advantage to dominate the European market. Showing willingness of complying to European legislation potentially provides the Russian company with the necessary goodwill in Brussels to maintain its market share without seeming to harbour malign intentions.

By Vanand Meliksetian for Oilprice.com

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Oilfield service providers suffered the heaviest blows from the 2014 oil price meltdownthere is little question about that. And the situation was particularly grave in Canada, and continues to be grave despite the recovery in prices. There are basically no major new field developments or infrastructure projects in the Canadian oil industry. There is, however, one gas megaproject that is awaiting its final investment decision in the next few weeks.

LNG Canada, a project led by Shell, will cost US$30 billion to build and will produce some 26 million tons of superchilled natural gas at peak capacity. It would also create thousands of jobs, Bloomberg reports, in infrastructure as well as in natural gas production. These are jobs that the industry desperately needs.

As of August, there were 74 gas rigs in Alberta and British Columbia, Bloomberg notes, citing data from RS Energy Group. Thats down from 180 at the beginning of 2015. If LNG Canada gets the nod of the consortium behind it, each new rig added could create up to 140 direct and indirect jobs, according to the head of a local industry player, Precision Drilling Corp. And thats just the rigs for producing the gas. There are also liquefaction trains to build and operate, and an export terminal, and a network of pipelines.

Yet Canadian oil and gas service providers are probably biding their time: the FID on LNG Canada has not yet been made, and it has been delayed for two years already. The local services industry has already seen one LNG megaproject fall through, after last year Malaysias Petronas quit a US$27-billion project, the Pacific NorthWest LNG, because of the low LNG price environment. Yet this year, Petronas bought a 25-percent stake in LNG Canada, which was widely taken as a signal of renewed optimism about the future of LNG in Canada.

LNG prices have recovered partially from the lows hit in late 2015, but are far below 2014 highs. That might cast a shadow over the LNG Canada FID, but the shadow may not be all that wide because another factor has been added into the mix. The escalating trade conflict between the United States and China could benefit Canadian LNG after Beijing included U.S. LNG in the latest Chinese retaliatory tariff list of U.S. goods. Related: The Biggest Risk In Todays Oil Markets

According to a recent story in the Financial Post, the 10-percent tariff on U.S. LNG could delay U.S. export capacity projects and boost the competitiveness of LNG Canada, helping Shell and partners make the FID.

There are still some clouds remaining on the horizon. The West Coast Environmental Law Association is trying to cancel a pipeline that will feed natural gas from northeastern B.C. to the coast, in Kitimat, where the LNG Canada liquefaction and export facility will be built. The US$3.7-billion Coastal GasLink pipeline has already been approved by the B.C. government, but the organization claims that the province has no jurisdiction over it, and it needs approval from the federal National Energy Board.

These particular clouds, however, are likely to soon disperse: everyone in B.C. seems to want this particular pipeline, unlike the Trans Mountain expansion. TransCanada earlier this week said it had secured the approval of all First Nations living along the route of the Coastal GasLink, and with the backing of the provincial government, it is ready to go. The last thing remaining is the starting pistol: the consortiums final investment decision on LNG Canada.

By Irina Slav for Oilprice.com

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ExxonMobil, Chevron, and Occidental Petroleum are joining the Oil and Gas Climate Initiative (OGCI), becoming the first U.S. companies in the CEO-led voluntary alliance of some of the worlds biggest oil and gas companies that aims to step up initiatives to mitigate climate change.

The two U.S. supermajors and Occidental will become official members of the initiative on September 24, in one of the strongest signs yet that investor pressure over Big Oil to set carbon emission goals and curb their own greenhouse gas emissions has reached the likes of Exxon and Chevron.

With the addition of the three U.S. companies, OGCIs 13 members now represent around 30 percent of the worlds oil and gas production and supply nearly 20 percent of primary energy consumption in the world.



The new OGCI members are aligned with the OGCI collective goals, including recognition and support of the Paris Agreement and collective reporting; they will also reinforce the capacity of OGCIs work programs. In addition, each will commit $100 million dollars to the OGCI Climate Investments fund, OGCI said in a statement on Thursday.

It will take the collective efforts of many in the energy industry and society to develop scalable, affordable solutions that will be needed to address the risks of climate change, said Darren Woods, chairman and chief executive officer of ExxonMobil.

Exxon announced earlier this year initiatives to lower greenhouse gas emissions associated with its operations by 2020, including reducing methane emissions 15 percent and flaring by 25 percent.

The OGCI initiative is now made up of BP, Chevron, CNPC, Eni, Equinor, ExxonMobil, Occidental, Pemex, Petrobras, Repsol, Saudi Aramco, Shell, and Total.

Earlier this year, large global investorsrepresenting a combined US$10.4 trillion worth of assets under managementurged oil and gas companies to start acting responsibly by tackling climate change.

Investors are embracing their responsibility for supporting the Paris agreement. It is time for the entire oil and gas industry to do the same, sixty large investors wrote in May in an open letter to the Financial Times.

By Tsvetana Paraskova for Oilprice.com

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Crude oil exports from southern Iraq are close to a record-high so far in September, averaging 3.6 million bpd as of yesterday, Reuters reports, citing sources in the know who had tracked shipping data to come up with the number. If the rate stays unchanged or rises, it will beat Iraqs previous record of 3.58 million bpd hit last month.

Its safe to say that Iraq, OPECs second-largest producer, was only too happy to boost oil production after the June 22 meeting of the cartel when members decided to start reversing their production cuts agreed in late 2016. Iraq never really managed to reduce production to its assigned quota anyway, and it was vocal against the quotas because of its heavy dependence on oil revenues as its economy is still in ruins after the war and the fight with Islamic State.

Whats more, the export rate data suggests that civil unrest, which has been rife since the summer, has not affected oil production. Indeed, any intentions on the part of protesters to try and cause production outages at oil fields have been quickly thwarted.

Besides the export growth, Iraq is also understandably eager to increase its oil production. However, according to at least one analyst, this will be difficult to achieve. IHS Markits Christopher Elsner, as cited earlier this week by Arab News, Iraq faces serious challenges in its quest for boosting its production, ranging from the current political and economic problems to lack of funds to invest in new production capacity development.

There is a lot of investment in getting wells out of the ground. And theres a lot of investment in exporting that oil. But the connections between the oil fields and the storage farms in the south and the export points have been what has really led to the bottlenecks in Iraq, Elsner explained.

By Irina Slav for Oilprice.com

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Japanese refiners have stopped buying Iranian crude ahead of the November 4 deadline set by Washington to all countries doing business with Iran before economic sanctions return. Reuters quoted today the head of the Petroleum Association of Japan as saying, It is my view that each firm is taking the same stance and temporarily suspending (the loading) and watching the situation carefully.

Japan is one of Irans largest oil importers, but it is also the United States staunchest ally in Asiaand the combination of the two has not worked to Tokyos advantage. While the government has been trying to secure a waiver from the U.S. State Department, the Japanese economy seems to be dependent enough on U.S. lending to make local refiners extra-cautious.

Reuters confirmed the sentiment by noting many Japanese refiners had resigned themselves to the reality that they must stop importing Iranian crude and instead, look for feedstock elsewhere. Iran currently accounts for 5 percent of Japans crude oil intake, and as per PAJs chief, Takashi Tsukioka, Tokyo will try to maintain a good relationship with Tehran despite the sanctions. How realistic this is remains to be seen.

The last time Iran was the subject of sanctions, Japan curbed its imports of Iranian crude. It did not, however, shut them down completely. Now, it seems like it might have to, unless Washington grants Japanese refiners a waiver. So far, U.S. officials have been guarded about the possibility of granting sanction waivers, although the possibility remains, on a case-by-case basis, as per an earlier statement from the State Department.

Although Japan, along with South Korea, is an important buyer of Iranian crude, which Tehran has done its best to keep on its books by deepening its sales discounts, China is the country that Tehran has pinned most its hopes on. If China . . . buys Irans oil, we can resist the U.S., one Iranian analyst told the Financial Times in July, amid reports of import cuts among Irans Asian clients. China is the only country which can tell the US off.

By Irina Slav for Oilprice.com

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FILE PHOTO: President Rodrigo Roa Duterte. Image courtesy of PCOO/ROBINSON NINAL JR.

MANILA, Philippines  President Rodrigo Duterte signed on Wednesday, September 19, the executive order (EO) returning the National Food Authority (NFA) under the supervision of the Department of Agriculture (DA).

Aside from the N FA, Agriculture Secretary Manny Pinol said the Philippine Coconut Authority (PCA) and the Fertilizer and Pesticides Authority (FPA) were also returned to their mother agency.

Signed by the President on September 17, 2018, and released by Malacanang on Wednesday, September 19, Executive Order No. 62 also reorganizes the NFA Council and assigns the Agriculture Secretary as its chairman while the NFA Administrator is the vice chairman.

The order came amid problems hounding the NFA, particularly the non-stop increase in rice prices and budget issues, and shortly after Jason Aquino requested to be relieved from the position of NFA administrator as revealed by President Rodrigo Duterte.

In 2014, former president Benigno Aquino III placed the three agencies under the Office of the President through EO No. 165.

In 2016, they were then placed under the Office of the Cabinet Secretary by President Duterte.  Marje Pelayo (with reports from Rey Pelayo)

The post Duterte signs EO putting NFA under DA amid rice woes appeared first on UNTV News.
Singapore has suspended a maid employment agency's licence and threatened to prosecute the company over "undignified" online ads offering Indonesian helpers for sale, after the postings sparked fury. Singapore is home to almost 250,000 maids, mostly from poor parts of Indonesia or the Philippines, who head to the tiny but wealthy city-state to earn higher salaries than they can back home. Conditions for Indonesian maids in tightly-regulated Singapore are generally regarded as better than in other places, such as Malaysia or parts of the Middle East, but the ads on online marketplace Carousell sparked a rare flare-up of tensions over the issue. The adverts under the user name "maid.recruitment" reportedly offered the services of several helpers from Indonesia, while some ads indicated maids had been "sold". The postings triggered an outcry in Indonesia, with NGO Migrant Care slamming them as "unjust and demeaning", and they were later removed from the site. Singapore's labour ministry said in a statement late Wednesday the employment agency SRC Recruitment LLP's licence had been suspended, meaning it can no longer place maids with employers, and authorities were investigating them with a view to filing charges. "We strongly condemn the advertising of foreign domestic worker services in an undignified manner," said Kevin Teoh, commissioner for employment agencies. Advertising foreign maids on an internet platform meant for trading goods "is completely inappropriate and unacceptable", he said, adding that this is an offence. The ministry said it told Carousell, which operates in several Asian countries, to take down the offending posts immediately after it was informed about them on September 14. In a separate Facebook post, Minister for Manpower Josephine Teo said she was "deeply disturbed" by the adverts. "To many of us, our foreign domestic workers are a part of the family... It is a given that we should treat them with respect," she said.
Turkey's top appeals court on Thursday ordered the release of an opposition lawmaker convicted last year of leaking classified material to the press, state media reported. Republican People's Party (CHP) MP Enis Berberoglu was sentenced in June 2017 to 25 years in jail, but an appeals court in February reduced it to five years and 10 months. Now the Court of Cassation, known as the Yargitay, ruled that Berberoglu should be released from jail and his sentence postponed for as long as he remains an MP, the state-run Anadolu news agency said. Berberoglu was re-elected to parliament in elections in June this year. He is expected to walk free from his Istanbul prison in the next hours. His conviction for espionage was quashed but in February he was found guilty and jailed for the charge of "revealing information that should remain secret for the state's security, domestic and international reasons". Berberoglu was the only lawmaker from the CHP -- established by modern Turkey founder Mustafa Kemal Ataturk -- to be jailed in the crackdown which followed the July 2016 failed overthrow of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. However former CHP lawmaker Eren Erdem was arrested in June over alleged links to the group blamed for the attempted coup. Berberoglu's case relates to the 2015 publication by the opposition Cumhuriyet newspaper of images purportedly showing the Turkish intelligence service seeking to transport arms over the border to Syria. Berberoglu was accused of giving images to Cumhuriyet's former editor-in-chief Can Dundar, who himself fled to Germany after himself being convicted. The MP's sentence prompted CHP leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu to undertake a 450-kilometre (280-mile) march from Ankara to Istanbul, where he was joined by thousands of people to call for justice in Turkey under Erdogan. The march was the opposition's biggest action in Turkey since countrywide demonstrations against Erdogan's rule in June 2013, known as the Gezi Park protests. Former co-leaders of the Pro-Kurdish Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP), Selahattin Demirtas and Figen Yuksekdag, and 10 other MPs were jailed in November 2016. Demirtas and Yuksekdag remain in jail on terror charges over alleged links to Kurdish militants. Under a two-year state of emergency which ended in July, tens of thousands of people were arrested, including politicians and journalists, raising concerns over eroding freedom of speech and the judiciary's independence in Turkey.
Credit: CC0 Public Domain

We are all exposed to a vast and dynamic cloud of microbes, chemicals and particulates that, if visible, might make us look something like Pig-Pen from Peanuts.

Using a re-engineered air-monitoring device, scientists from the Stanford University School of Medicine have peered into that plume and discovered a smorgasbord of biological and chemical minutia that swirl in, on and around us. Their findings show, in unprecedented detail, the variety of bacteria, viruses, chemicals, plant particulates, fungi, and even tiny microscopic animals that enter our personal spacea bombardment known as the human "exposome."

"Human health is influenced by two things: your DNA and the environment," said Michael Snyder, Ph.D., professor and chair of genetics at Stanford. "People have measured things like air pollution on a broad scale, but no one has really measured biological and chemical exposures at a personal level. No one really knows how vast the human exposome is or what kinds of things are in there."

That curiosityto see, for the first time, what a person's exposure looks like at an individual level and how much it varies among peoplewas what motivated the study, Snyder said. But studying the exposome also provides an opportunity to clarify environmental influencers of human health that are otherwise obscure, he said. For example, rather than simply blaming pollen, those with seasonal allergies would be able to identify exactly what they're allergic to by monitoring their exposome data and symptoms throughout the year.

The study's findings also reveal information about geographic- and household-chemical spikes and weather-related patterns, and likewise show the wide range of chemical and biological particulates that can be found between individualseven within a relatively small geographic region, such as the San Francisco Bay Area.

The study will be published online Sept. 20 in Cell. Snyder is the senior author. Postdoctoral scholar Chao Jiang, Ph.D.; research scientist Xin Wang, Ph.D.; research associate Xiyan Li, Ph.D.; and postdoctoral scholars Jingga Inlora, Ph.D., and Ting Wang, Ph.D., are co-lead authors.

'About 70 billion readouts'

For two years, the scientists collected data from 15 participants who traversed more than 50 different locations. Some people were monitored for a month, some for a week, and one (Snyder) for two full years. To capture bits of each individual's exposome, a small device that straps snuggly to the participant's arm "breathes" in tiny puffs of airabout one-fifteenth the volume of an average human breath.

The device, about the size and shape of a large matchbox, accompanies participants everywhere and is equipped with a sub-micron filter that traps particulate matter in the device. The databacteria, viruses, chemicals, fungi and anything else sucked up by the deviceis brought back to Snyder's lab and extracted for DNA and RNA sequencing, as well as chemical profiling to identify all the collected organisms and chemicals that the person is exposed to.

This ideato siphon up bits of an individual's exposome and systematically categorize what's in itis quite novel, Snyder said. And it required Jiang to stitch together an entirely new database.

"Scientists had assembled separate bacteria, viral or fungi databases, but to fully decode our environmental exposures, we built a pan-domain database to cover more than 40,000 species," Jiang said. It includes information on bacteria, viruses, fungi, animals, plants and more, all organized in a single searchable database.

"We sequenced these samples in incredible detail," said Snyder, who is also the Stanford W. Ascherman, MD, FACS, Professor in Genetics. "No one has ever done a study this deep before. We ended up with about 70 billion readouts."

Parsing particulates

Between participants, Snyder and Jiang found that exposomes could be vastly different, even in a reasonably tight geographic regionin this case, the San Francisco Bay Area. Snyder cited an especially well-controlled portion of the study, in which four participants, including Snyder, were closely monitored over one month, as a case in point.

Each person lived in a distinct region of the San Francisco Bay Area: Palo Alto, Sunnyvale, Redwood City and San Francisco (though the person who lived in Redwood City commuted across the bay to his job). "It turns out, even at very close distances, we have very different exposure profiles or 'signatures,'" Snyder said. These personal signatures are essentially traces of specific fungi, plants, chemicals and bacteria that are consistently seen on or around a single person, but that vary between people. Many environmental aspects contribute to this microscopic amalgampets, household chemicals, flowers in bloom and even rain.

"The bottom line is that we all have our own microbiome cloud that we're schlepping around and spewing out," Snyder said.

Specific and unique signatures were captured for every individual (although Snyder added that DEET, an insect repellant, along with several carcinogens were found in just about every chemical sample). For example, the resident from San Francisco showed high rates of "sludge bacteria," or bacteria typically found in wastewater and sewage treatments. Snyder had consistently high fungal exposures at home due to what he suspects is the use of "green" paint. "The guy who painted my house was a really environmentally friendly, green person. And he avoided using paints with a substance called pyridine in it," Snyder said. Pyridine, which used to be a popular additive to house paints, has an inverse relationship with fungus, meaning the less pyridine, the more fungus.

Snyder's profile was the most diverse, as he took the device everywhere he went, both nationally and internationally, for two years, swapping out its filters for every new location. Outside his pet exposures (Snyder has a cat, a dog and a guinea pig), his signature also showed evidence of eucalyptus in the early spring months, providing some nuanced information about what might be causing his April allergies.

Connecting it to human health

Besides the four highly controlled participants, a dozen participants were added during different times of the year, helping Snyder capture exposures brought by weather, seasons and location.

"There are a lot of findings that haven't been descried beforeall kinds of fungal, bacterial and plant seasonal patterns," Snyder said. The device can even pick up viral/bacterial signatures and carcinogenic particulates in the air. Although the devices picked up potential pathogenic viral and bacterial sequences, it can be tricky to distinguish a threatening pathogen to humans from one of its harmless close cousins, he said.

As for the carcinogens, it's also more complicated than simply detecting them in the device. "We're measuring individual exposures, not absolute levels," he said. "So at this point the data isn't generalizable enough to make broad claims."

But that's not to say that one day it won't be. Snyder said that this study is just scratching the surface of human exposome data and how it relates to health, and his team's future goals center on better understanding the exposome as it relates to human health. "We want to measure more people in more diverse environments," Snyder said. "We also want to simplify the technology, ideally to the point that everyone can be out there measuring their own personal exposuresperhaps something like an exposome-detecting smartwatch."
Credit: CC0 Public Domain

Schools and other institutions such as churches and children's sport clubs have limited knowledge about how to deal with children growing up in rainbow families. According to a new doctoral thesis from the University of Gothenburg, the task of informing about and explaining non-normative sexuality, transgender identity and queer family ties is instead left up to the children themselves.

"Children who grow up in rainbow families navigate and negotiate their family relations in a large number of contexts. They are forced to explain themselves and educate other people in a wide range of situations, such as when they talk about their families in school," says Per Norden, the author of the doctoral thesis.

Norden interviewed 28 individuals born 1975-1997, which made them 15 to 37 years old at the time of the interviews. All 28 persons had grown up with one or several homosexual, bisexual or transgender parents in Sweden. Even though this group of children has always existed, the Language Council of Sweden did not give them an official name until 2006: "regnbagsbarn," or "rainbow children."

Since then, the Swedish legislation surrounding adoptions, insemination and sex reassignment has been subject to multiple revisions. However, despite the social and political changes, few studies have been carried out from the children's perspective. In his doctoral thesis, Norden explores the rainbow children's experiences regarding family, education and leisure activities in depth.

A central feature of the interviewed individuals is that all of them have had to deal with their queer family background in various ways. Some have faced violence, some have been forced to defend themselves in other ways, and others have chosen to be silent. Norden also shows how several of the subjects have experienced homophobia, or what he calls heterosexism and transnegativity, due to their queer family structures. However, not everyone claims to have experienced serious problems.

"The aim of the Swedish school system has been further developed and clarified multiple times over the years, but has always focused on the importance of children's ability to complete their compulsory education. By interviewing persons who grew up in rainbow families, it became clear that the family structures of children in this group can have social implications for their education," he says.

"One subject said nearly every single social studies class in upper secondary school ended with a heated discussion about whether homosexual people should be allowed to parent a child, something that implied a direct and repeated questioning of the student's family structure." In another case, the child was sent to the school counsellor because she was part of a large group of girls who were known to cause problems. At the counsellor's office, she was asked whether she was a troublemaker because she was afraid of becoming a lesbian like her mother.

"Although I did expect these types of situations to appear during the interviews, I was surprised by how common they were," says Norden. Outside of school, it is much easier for children to actively choose with whom to interact, and many of the interviewees had good experiences of friendship and social life in, for example, church groups and sport teams. But there were some exceptions.

"I remember in particular one person who, as a teenager, was asked to go home and pray for her homosexual father to be healed. She left the congregation and therefore also her social context, her choir and her faith in God."

Explore further Are your children overdoing it? Too many extracurricular activities can do more harm than good

More information: The doctoral thesis is available online at The doctoral thesis is available online at hdl.handle.net/2077/56458
The nations aim to develop more viable alternatives to plastic packaging, to work towards a goal of all plastics being recycled and reused by 2040

Coca-Cola, Walmart and other big multinationals pledged on Thursday to help reduce plastic pollution in the world's oceans in support of a campaign by five of the G7 industrialized nations.

Britain, Canada, France, Germany and Italy, along with the European Union, signed the Ocean Plastics Charter at a leaders summit in Canada's Charlevoix region in June.

The United States and Japan abstained but non-G7 nations Norway, Vietnam, Jamaica and the Seychelles are also backing the plan to ensure 100 percent of plastics are recyclable by 2030.

The nations aim to develop more viable alternatives to plastic packaging, to work towards a goal of all plastics being recycled and reused by 2040.

On the second day of a G7 ministerial meeting in Canada's Atlantic port city of Halifax, Canadian Environment Minister Catherine McKenna announced "a new partnership with businesses" to reduce plastics waste.

Backers include Loblaws, Walmart, Nestle Canada, IKEA, Dow Chemicals, the Coca-Cola Company, BASF Canada and A&W Canada.

Unilever also announced that it was launching a non-profit entity to reduce consumer and business waste, while Volvo upped its target to make 25 percent of the plastics in its cars recyclable by 2025.

Explore further UK corporate giants sign pact to cut plastic waste

 2018 AFP
Credit: CC0 Public Domain

The latest report from the Commission's Joint Research Centre (JRC) on forest fires shows the need to tackle climate change "to leave a healthier planet for those that follow," as President Jean-Claude Juncker highlighted in his latest State of the Union Address. The report calls for stronger measures to prevent wildfires.

Today, the JRC published its annual report on Forest Fires in Europe, the Middle East and North Africa for 2017.

It shows that last year, wildfires destroyed over 1.2 million hectares of forests and land in Europe  more than the total surface area of Cyprus.

They also claimed the lives of 127 civilians and fire fighters and caused economic damage estimated at almost EUR 10 billion.

Karmenu Vella, Commissioner for Environment, said: "Extreme weather conditions  long lasting droughts and heat waves  exacerbate wildfires and make firefighting more difficult. Over 90 percent of all wildfires are started by human activities, which is why the EU is working closely with Member States on prevention, ensuring that citizens and decision-makers are more aware of the causes and risks of wildfires. We also need to invest much more in forest management to ensure best practice throughout the EU. As the summer of 2018 has shown us again, much work is needed on prevention and Europe must remain at the forefront in the fight against climate change."

Tibor Navracsics, Commissioner for Education, Culture, Youth and Sport, responsible for the Joint Research Centre (JRC), said: "JRC scientists are continuously monitoring wildfires in Europe through the European Forest Fire Information System. The data from the past couple of years shows that fires are increasing in number and severity. I am proud that, by collecting and analysing this data, the JRC helps us better understand the changes and provides a basis for national authorities to improve both prevention and firefighting preparedness."

Europe faces more and more severe fires

The latest report shows a clear trend towards longer fire seasons compared to previous years, with fires now occurring well beyond the dry and hot summer months (July- September). In 2017, the most critical months were June and October, when deadly fires swept through Portugal and Northern Spain.

The Mediterranean region remains the most affected area. However, unusually dry summers in central and northern Europe have recently led to large fires in countries such as Sweden, Germany and Poland, which have historically seen very few.

Finally, in 2017, over 25 percent of the total burnt area lied within the Natura2000 network, calling for increased efforts of EU countries to restore and manage protected habitats and their ecosystem services, including for the sake of forest fire prevention.

Wildfires can be prevented

Like in previous years, in 2017, most wildfires were caused by human activity. Unsustainable forest management practices, the degradation of ecosystems, as well as the planting of very flammable forest tree species facilitate fire ignition and favour the spreading of wildfires.

Prevention is thus key in tackling wildfires. Adequate forest management and land use practices can reduce fire risks and make forests more resilient to fires. In addition, the report shows that awareness raising and training of local communities, policy makers and stakeholders will increase their preparedness.

Member States and the EU institutions should continue to work hand in hand in providing guidelines on how to act in case of wildfires and how to increase our resilience, building on national experience and best practices.

2017 Annual Forest Fire Report

The report "Forest Fires in Europe, Middle East and North Africa 2017" drawn up by the Joint Research Centre (JRC), the in-house science and knowledge centre of the European Commission, provides a detailed analysis of the wildfires in 2017, including country-specific reports. The report combines data from the European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS), managed by the JRC, and the statistics and information provided by EU Member States and neighbouring countries.

EU support during the 2018 summer forest fire season

In 2018, the EU Civil Protection Mechanism was activated 5 times to respond to forest fires in Europe. Substantial support was provided to the countries in need, namely Sweden and Greece. In total, 15 planes, 6 helicopters and over 400 firefighters and crew were mobilised this summer. The European Union has funded 1.6 million in transportation costs to mobilise support to the affected countries. Furthermore, over 139 Copernicus satellite maps on forest fires were produced on the request of Member States. In addition, a prevention and preparedness mission took place in Portugal to help boost the country's capacity to deal with forest fires.

Strengthening EU civil protection capacities

The Commission has proposed to strengthen the European civil protection capacities through rescEU, so that when multiple disasters hit, Member States are better prepared. rescEU is based on two fundamental pillars: prevention and preparedness and greater response capacities, including the creation of European reserve capacities to act as a safety net when national capacities are overwhelmed. The rescEU proposal is a central part of President Juncker's agenda for a Europe that protects.

More information: Forest Fires in Europe, Milddle East and North Africa 2017. Forest Fires in Europe, Milddle East and North Africa 2017. ec.europa.eu/jrc/en/publicatio  nd-north-africa-2017 European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS). effis.jrc.ec.europa.eu/ rescEU: a new European system to tackle natural disasters. europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-17-4731_en.htm
The Golden Orchid blooms (left) and J. tokunagai on the flower. Credit: Takuto Shitara

A species of seed-feeding fly is critically damaging the seed production of multiple orchid species, as revealed by a group of Japanese researchers. If the damage caused by this fly is occurring long-term and across Japan, these already-endangered orchid species could become unable to reproduce using seeds, and their dwindling numbers will take a large hit.

The survey was carried out by Project Associate Professor Kenji Suetsugu (Kobe University Graduate School of Science), Shigeki Fukushima (Head of the Chiba Prefectural Agriculture and Forestry Research Center) and Masahiro Sueyoshi (Principal Investigator at the Forestry and Forest Products Research Institute). The findings will be published on September 21st in the online edition of Ecology.

With over 20,000 species classified, orchids are one of the most diverse groups of flowering plants, and the unique shape of their flowers has entranced people for many years. Unfortunately, this popularity has led to orchid overharvesting. Combined with loss of habitat caused by development, this means that over 70 percent of Japan's native orchid species are classified as endangered by the Ministry of the Environment.

From the perspective of genetic diversity, it is better for endangered species to reproduce via seeds than cloning. This means that to save these orchids, researchers should identify the insects that pollinate them and the parasites that prevent seed-based reproduction. Therefore, Professor Suetsugu's research team has been collecting information on organisms related to orchid reproduction.

At a glance this fruit looks healthy, but it has been infested by J. tokunagai. The brown area indicated by the arrow is fly pupae. When the fruit is dissected, we can see that there are no seeds left. Credit: Kobe University

During a survey to identify the pollinators of orchid species, the team found that in pollinated fruit that should be able to produce seeds under normal circumstances, a seed-feeding fly known as Japanagromyza tokunagai was destroying the seeds of multiple orchid species (see figure 1).

When orchids bloom, J. tokunagai lays its eggs in the young fruit, and the insect young grow up eating the seeds in the fruit. They become pupae inside the fruit, and when they hatch into their winged forms, they make a hole in the fruit in order to exit. Fruit that is parasitized by these flies grows to the same size as normal fruit, so at a glance, it looks healthy. This means that researchers have probably underestimated the damage caused by these flies. In many cases, fruit parasitized by the flies produces no seeds at all (see figure 2). Scientists have known about the damage caused by seed-feeding flies since the 1980s, but they do not know the impact on seed production in concrete terms.

In this study, after artificially pollinating five species of orchids in Japan's Kanto region, the team covered some specimens with bags to prevent the J. tokunagai from entering, and left others uncovered. Afterward, they compared the quality and amount of the seeds produced by each plant. This is the first study to quantify the reduction to orchid seed production caused by J. tokunagai. Results showed that in all five species, damage caused by J. tokunagai reduced seed production by over 95 percent. It is not yet clear whether this is occurring across Japan or over an extended time period. However, if this situation continues, the affected orchid species will become unable to reproduce via seed production, threatening their already dwindling numbers.

It is also possible that damage caused by J. tokunagai may be intensifying in recent years. This could be for two reasons: First, the flies are non-native species that have been introduced into areas where they lack natural enemies; second, the orchid populations have become fragmented, also reducing the population size of natural enemies.

Professor Suetsugu says, "Going forward, we want to shed more light on the damage caused by J. tokunagai. We plan to do this by quantifying the damage in other areas of Japan, and by testing the theory that J. tokunagai is a non-native species through genetic analysis."

Explore further Mechanism behind orchid beauty revealed
Dickinsonia fossil. Credit: The Australian National University (ANU)

Scientists from The Australian National University (ANU) and overseas have discovered molecules of fat in an ancient fossil to reveal the earliest confirmed animal in the geological record that lived on Earth 558 million years ago.

The strange creature called Dickinsonia, which grew up to 1.4 metres in length and was oval shaped with rib-like segments running along its body, was part of the Ediacara Biota that lived on Earth 20 million years prior to the 'Cambrian explosion' of modern animal life.

ANU Ph.D. scholar Ilya Bobrovskiy discovered a Dickinsonia fossil so well preserved in a remote area near the White Sea in the northwest of Russia that the tissue still contained molecules of cholesterol, a type of fat that is the hallmark of animal life.

Lead senior researcher Associate Professor Jochen Brocks said the 'Cambrian explosion' was when complex animals and other macroscopic organismssuch as molluscs, worms, arthropods and spongesbegan to dominate the fossil record.

"The fossil fat molecules that we've found prove that animals were large and abundant 558 million years ago, millions of years earlier than previously thought," said Associate Professor Jochen Brocks from the ANU Research School of Earth Sciences.

"Scientists have been fighting for more than 75 years over what Dickinsonia and other bizarre fossils of the Edicaran Biota were: giant single-celled amoeba, lichen, failed experiments of evolution or the earliest animals on Earth. The fossil fat now confirms Dickinsonia as the oldest known animal fossil, solving a decades-old mystery that has been the Holy Grail of palaeontology."

Mr Bobrovskiy said the team developed a new approach to study Dickinsonia fossils, which hold the key between the old world dominated by bacteria and the world of large animals that emerged 540 million years ago during the 'Cambrian explosion'.

"The problem that we had to overcome was finding Dickinsonia fossils that retained some organic matter," said Mr Bobrovskiy from the ANU Research School of Earth Sciences.

"Most rocks containing these fossils such as those from the Ediacara Hills in Australia have endured a lot of heat, a lot of pressure, and then they were weathered after thatthese are the rocks that palaeontologists studied for many decades, which explained why they were stuck on the question of Dickinsonia's true identity."

Palaeontologists normally study the structure of fossils, but Mr Bobrovskiy extracted and analysed molecules from inside the Dickinsonia fossil found in ancient rocks in Russia to make the breakthrough discovery.

"I took a helicopter to reach this very remote part of the worldhome to bears and mosquitoeswhere I could find Dickinsonia fossils with organic matter still intact," Mr Bobrovskiy said.

"These fossils were located in the middle of cliffs of the White Sea that are 60 to 100 metres high. I had to hang over the edge of a cliff on ropes and dig out huge blocks of sandstone, throw them down, wash the sandstone and repeat this process until I found the fossils I was after."

Scientists from The Australian National University (ANU) have discovered molecules of fat in an ancient fossil to reveal the earliest confirmed animal in the geological record that lived on Earth 558 million years ago. Credit: The Australian National University

Associate Professor Brocks said being able to study molecules from these ancient organisms was a gamechanger.

"When Ilya showed me the results, I just couldn't believe it," he said.

"But I also immediately saw the significance."

ANU led the research in collaboration with scientists from the Russian Academy of Science and the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry and the University of Bremen in Germany.

The research is published in Science.

Explore further Earth's oldest animals formed complex ecological communities

More information: I. Bobrovskiy el al., "Ancient steroids establish the Ediacaran fossil Dickinsonia as one of the earliest animals," Science (2018). I. Bobrovskiy el al., "Ancient steroids establish the Ediacaran fossil Dickinsonia as one of the earliest animals,"(2018). science.sciencemag.org/cgi/doi  1126/science.aat7228 R.E. Summons el al., "Chemical clues to the earliest animal fossils," Science (2018). science.sciencemag.org/cgi/doi  1126/science.aau9710 Journal information: Science
A farmer uses a buffalo to plow a rice field in rural Thailand. Credit: Shutterstock

For more than 20 years, a movement has been building that recognizes the vital role that small-scale farmers, fishers and harvesters, women, traditional knowledge and appropriate technologies will play in transforming our unsustainable and inequitable food system.

While the chemical- and carbon-intensive practices of industrial agriculture play a role in feeding people across the globe, they are a major contributor to the degradation of land, water and ecosystems, climate change, labour inequality and the diminishing health of the Earth and its population.

Agribusiness corporations that increasingly control food and seeds are getting bigger and more powerful, while the small-scale farmers that produce 70 per cent of the world's food are increasingly impoverished.

These were the concerns on the minds of more than 150 people who gathered in Ottawa in late August for the Canadian Agroecology Field School and Research Summit hosted by the FLEdGE research network, Just Food, USC Canada and a number of other partners.

Participants included small-scale family farmers, civil society organizations, researchers and Indigenous leaders who came together to share knowledge and experiences, and to map out a direction for healthier, more equitable and sustainable food systems in Canada and beyond.

From the three days of farm visits, demonstrations and discussions, it was clear that listening carefully to researchers and practitioners involved with agroecology offers promise and possibility for feeding global populations with a mix of science and time-tested knowledge.

Easy, cheap to implement

Evidence from around the world shows these opportunities can be implemented fairly easily and at a low cost.

While the term agroecology has no fixed definition, it is best described as a science, practice and movement. As a movement, agroecology is a call to action for a food system driven by the world's food providers small-scale farmers, fishers, livestock keepers, Indigenous peoples and other movements like the global peasant movement La Via Campesina, whose members include 200 million small-scale food producers and harvesters from around the world.

As a science, agroecology encompasses knowledge that uses time-tested scientific principles, natural processes and materials to replace synthetic fertilizers and herbicides that destroy our soils, waters, biodiversity and pollinators.

Through farmer-led research and innovation, agroecology aims for resilient, biodiverse ecosystems. As a practice, agroecology has been developed through experience and field observation by farmers, Indigenous peoples and food providers, and spread out around the world. Farmer-to-farmer learning and knowledge sharing are at the heart of agroecology.

Local seeds

Over the first two days of the Agroecology Summit on farms in Ottawa and Gatineau, the group observed and discussed many agroecological practices.

They included rotational livestock grazing, farmer-led participatory research and breeding of vegetables, the selection of hardy, locally adapted seed varieties, agroforestry, the practice of adding value to crops through on-farm processing, establishing cooperatives to lease otherwise unaffordable farmland and selling food directly to consumers.

On the third day, a keynote presentation from Peter Rosset, a researcher from the Center of Studies for Rural Change in Oaxaca, Mexico, on the evolution of agroecology through La Via Campasina kicked off two keynote panels. The first focused on Indigenous perspectives on agroecology, and the second on the future of agroecology in Canada. Both included researchers, farmers and Indigenous leaders from across the country.

From the three days of farm tours, demonstrations and discussions, one thing was clear: Agroecology is a growing movement around the world.

Fuelled by a rising public appetite for more ecologically and socially sustainable approaches to food production and the push to do things differently, agroecology offers practical solutions for a new generation of farmers who can learn from more experienced growers while connecting to a global social movement.

Building a different food system

With the rejection of an outmoded and unfair model of agriculture, the Agroecology Summit highlighted a mission that's about more than just changing our agricultural methods. It's also about being part of a global movement that is actively building a food system based on a different set of values working with nature, valuing food producers and the spiritual nature of food.

The benefits of agroecology are already being appreciated in other places.

For example, those benefits meet most of the United Nation's Sustainable Development Goals: Reduced hunger and poverty, enhanced biodiversity, sustainable livelihoods, the empowerment of women and youth and climate resilience. The combination of innovation, scalable practices and system-wide benefits has attracted governments, international organizations and donor agencies alike.

France, the champion of climate-friendly agriculture and host to the 2015 Paris Climate Summit, has shown leadership that can inspire other countries. For example, France has a Minister for Ecological Transition, something sure to be on the agenda as the French take over from the Canadians as the next G7 president.

The Agroecology Fund, a U.S.-based philanthropic foundation, provides funding to civil society organizations for agroecology. What's more, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has become a leading proponent of agroecology. At the International Agroecology Symposium in April 2018, FAO Director General Jose Graziano da Silva called for a transformation in the way we produce and consume food, and towards a new future of agriculture.

Women's rights

Canada's new Feminist International Assistance Policy has taken a cue from the international agroecology movement that puts women's rights and smallholder farmers' rights at the centre of development strategies.

A strategic investment in agroecology is a highly effective way to advance Canada's objectives of women's empowerment, environment and climate action, human dignity and economic growth that works for everyone.

The challenge ahead for the Canadian government, and society as a whole, is to actively support this groundswell of research, energy and innovation through funding and policy support, and to move faster towards more equitable and sustainable food futures. The transition to agroecology will make for a harvest that is both bountiful and sweet.

Explore further UN food agency urges 'agroecology' to fight famine

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Hookworms exploit a live fast/die young strategy in their South American fur seal pup hosts, report Morris Animal Foundation-funded researchers at the University of Georgia. As a result, they often kill their host, rather than finding a happy equilibrium. Scientists are concerned that this type of hookworm infection could eventually pose a risk to critically endangered populations of fur seals.

The research, recently published in the International Journal for Parasitology: Parasites and Wildlife, showed that by adapting to the seals' breeding cycles, this Uncinaria species has evolved to live only 30 to 65 days in the pups' intestines. This forces the worms to feed at a constant rate before they produce eggs and die. The result is high levels of anemia in pups, with more than 20 percent dying of parasitic infections every year.

"Usually we find that most parasites will try and find an equilibrium with a host, so they will extract just enough resources for their own transmission and their own reproductive success," said Dr. Mauricio Seguel, a research fellow at the University of Georgia. "What we found is a very unusual relationship, but one that is well synchronized to a short window of time."

The team studied a reproductive colony of about 3,000 South American fur seals on Guafo Island, in southwestern Chile. During the 2014 and 2015 birthing seasons, the team measured, weighed and took blood and fecal samples from the same randomly selected newborn pups every five to 10 days for 10 weeks. The sampling allowed researchers to follow infections beginning at initial transmission, as well as monitor the pups' health status.

The study showed hookworms feed from their hosts at a constant rate, regardless of how many other hookworms are in the intestine. Further, despite reaching high within-host densities, female hookworms do not decrease egg output. Pups with a higher burden of parasites experience anemia and mortality and release more hookworms into the soil through their feces.

Fur seal pups acquire hookworms during their first days of life, through their mothers' colostrum. Before this, larvae live in the soil, then penetrate a female's skin and live in her subcutaneous tissue until she is pregnant, when they migrate to her mammary glands.

Researchers believe the hookworms' short lifespans have evolved to synchronize with the fur seals' reproductive cycles. Due to the harsh environment on Guafo Island, hookworm larvae survival time in the soil is very limited as storms will wash many to sea. During birthing season, though, fur seals congregate in large groups on the beach. If hookworms can produce as many eggs as possible, as soon as possible, during this time, they provide greater the chances for their larvae to find a female's skin to penetrate.

"This study really allows us to know our enemy. Now that we better understand how these parasites live, we can begin to learn how to control the problem to avoid the worst consequences," said Dr. Kelly Diehl, Morris Animal Foundation Interim Vice President of Scientific Programs. "This particular population is stable, but other populations of fur seals are critically endangered. If they were infected with this disease, we now know when we could potentially intervene to protect fur seal pups and increase survival."

More information: Mauricio Seguel et al, The life history strategy of a fur seal hookworm in relation to pathogenicity and host health status, International Journal for Parasitology: Parasites and Wildlife (2018). Mauricio Seguel et al, The life history strategy of a fur seal hookworm in relation to pathogenicity and host health status,(2018). DOI: 10.1016/j.ijppaw.2018.07.003

Provided by Morris Animal Foundation
Credit: NASA/Naval Research Laboratory/Parker Solar Probe

Just over a month into its mission, NASA's Parker Solar Probe has returned first-light data from each of its four instrument suites. These early observations  while not yet examples of the key science observations Parker Solar Probe will take closer to the sun  show that each of the instruments is working well. The instruments work in tandem to measure the sun's electric and magnetic fields, particles from the sun and the solar wind, and capture images of the environment around the spacecraft.

This image shows the first-light data from Parker Solar Probe's WISPR (Wide-field Imager for Solar Probe) instrument suite. The right side of this imagefrom WISPR's inner telescopehas a 40-degree field of view, with its right edge 58.5 degrees from the sun's center. The bright object slightly to the right of the image's center is Jupiter. The left side of the image is from WISPR's outer telescope, which has a 58-degree field of view and extends to about 160 degrees from the sun. It shows the Milky Way, looking at the galactic center. There is a parallax of about 13 degrees in the apparent position of the sun as viewed from Earth and from Parker Solar Probe.

Explore further NRL's sun imaging telescopes fly on NASA Parker Solar Probe
VineScout day and night. Credit: Asociacion RUVID

Grapes must be picked at the exact point of maturation, and its plant must have the appropriate intake of water during development so that the wine ends up with desired properties. Controlling those parameters is complicated and expensive, and few can afford to use pressure chambers that measure water potential.

"This prevents the vine-grower and winemaker from having access to complete and reliable information during the grape's growth and maturation cycles on a regular basis and in real time. Thus, a majority of producers don't use data that could help them optimise the handling of their vineyard and, ultimately, influence the quality of the wine they produce," explains Francisco Rovira, head of the Laboratory of Agricultural Robotics (ARL) of Valencia's Polytechnic University (UPV).

To solve this deficiency, a European research consortium headed by the UPV is working on an automated robot for vineyard monitoring in the framework of the VINESCOUT project. The end goal is to help wine producers measure key parameters of their vineyards, including water availability, the temperature of the leaves and plant robustness.

After almost two years of work, they showed off the newest prototype in Portugal in late August. "Our robot enables intensive sampling, going from the 20 measurements per hour that the traditional method allows, to more than 3,000 pieces of data per hour without the user having to make an effort to get these measurements. At the end, the producer obtains a map of his plot of land with data that gives them an idea of when to activate the watering systems if they have one installed, or of the harvest date, as well as the most productive plant distribution for their vineyard," says professor Francisco Rovira, coordinator of the European project.

As well as the UPV, the Televitis research group from the Universidad de La Rioja (televitis.unirioja.es/) is taking part, as well as French company Wall-Ye SARL, the British Sundance Multiprocessor Technology Ltd and the Portuguese Symington Family Estates.

Among the novelties of the new prototype are an improvement in autonomous navigation, which makes the system more robust by combining 3-D with LiDAR and ultrasound sensors (sonar). The built-in artificial intelligence has also been improved, resulting in more accurate handling when guiding it through the vineyard and turning to change row.

"The autonomous navigation system has improved a lot, which means the vehicle can move faster and more safely through the vineyard rows, while maintaining the same data collection ability," says Veronica Saiz, researcher of the Laboratory of Agricultural Robotics of the UPB and project manager of this project.

The robot can also generate maps at night, thus broadening its work capacity. This option, automated nighttime navigation, was tested this summer during field tests in the Portuguese vineyard. "We have verified that the robot operates the same at night and during the day, and is able to generate automated maps of the thermal status," says Saiz. Furthermore, the robot also includes a multispectral camera to measure robustness through various vegetative indicators.

More compact, agile and with more energy

The external appearance has also been modified compared to the previous prototype. "Now, the robot is more compact and agile, and has more protection from a hostile environment such as these fields. Furthermore, it has lithium batteries instead of lead, like the previous model, which are lighter and therefore more easily interchangeable, and guarantee enough energy for an entire working day," explains Andres Cuenca, fellow researcher at the UPV's ARL.

"We already have the first automated temperature and plant robustness maps; they are generated by the robot in real time with an infrared sensor and a multispectral camera. The next step is to check whether these maps have good correlations with those obtained with manual methods; if this is so, we will have a much more effective and practical automated monitoring system for vine-producers and winemakers," adds Francisco Rovira.

Explore further A robot to help improve wine production
Ryanair was hit by several strikes over the summer

Ryanair shareholders delivered a blow to the no-frills airline's chairman on Thursday amid widespread strike action by European staff that has rattled confidence in the company.

Chairman David Bonderman was re-elected but only with 70.5 percent of the vote at the annual general meetinga dip on last year's assembly where he garnered a 89.1 percent endorsement.

The company's flamboyant chief executive Michael O'Leary was re-elected with 98.5 percent of the voteand lent his voice in effusive support of the chair.

"We have been very fortunate to have David Bonderman as chairman for the last 22 years," he told the roughly 90 shareholders present.

The Local Authority Pension Fund Forum (LAPFF), a shareholder, had earlier recommended that members vote against Ryanair's report and accounts and block Bonderman's re-election.

"Ryanair has failed to adequately address concerns about the company's troubled relationship with its employees and the potential impact on its business," LAPFF chair Ian Greenwood said in a statement.

"The company faces more strikes, and allegations of poor working conditions continue to emerge", Greenwood said.

"Questions about the company's business model and governance now pose a threat to shareholder value."

One more shareholder group indicated during the meeting that they would vote against the re-election of the chairman if there was no "clear progress" on their succession by the next annual general meeting.

"Excessive tenure calls into question an individual's independence and objectivity", said Alison Kennedy, investment director at Aberdeen Standards Investments, who claimed to represent clients holding 11 million shares0.9 percent of the issued share capital.

"Given the challenges the company faces, for example in union and labour relations, it is clear that governance needs to evolve."

Other shareholders had concerns over the budget airline's treatment of customers, with extra charges on top of the initial airfare a common practice.

"I think now it's becoming a low fare, high blood pressure airline", Dublin shareholder Donald O'Mara, 79, told AFP as he arrived.

'Banning all the media'

Ryanair had faced criticism in the Irish press and from workers' groups for announcing that media would be blocked from the meetingheld at a four-star motorway-side hotel in Gormanston near Dublin.

But with just minutes before the meeting was to begin the press were granted access.

"We thought there was going to be mass protests or demonstrations outside the hotel," O'Leary admitted during a briefing following the meeting.

"We thought the best way to puncture that would be to say we were banning all the media, therefore all the whistleblowing, flag-waving, would have no reason to be here. I think we successfully achieved that."

Last week cabin crew in Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy, Spain and Portugal announced a 24-hour strike for September 28a stoppage unions said will be the biggest strike in the Irish carrier's history.

It follows from industrial action last month which saw pilots from five European nations holding their first-ever simultaneous walkout, causing around 400 flight cancellations and travel chaos for 55,000 passengers.

The airline has since struck an "in principle" deal with Italian staff, which according to unions will allow crews to work with contracts composed under Italian law rather than Irish legislation and make provisions for salary increases and a pension scheme.

Explore further Ryanair cabin crew in five countries to strike Sept 28

 2018 AFP
The analogue astronauts using the ScanMars radar in the Dhofar region, Oman during AMADEE-18. Credit: OEWF  Austrian Space Forum

Analogue astronauts have successfully tested a radar that could help future Mars explorers identify where to dig for water. ScanMars is an Italian experiment that was used to identify subsurface water features in the Mars-like Dhofar region of Oman during the AMADEE-18 analogue mission in February 2018. The results will be presented by Alessandro Frigeri of the Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica (INAF) at the European Planetary Science Congress (EPSC) 2018 in Berlin.

The ScanMars ground penetrating radar has been developed by a group of Italian scientists from INAF's Istituto di Astrofisica e Planetologia Spaziali and the University of Perugia. The radar has an appearance similar to a metal detector, with a pack of instrumentation pulled along the ground at the end of a pole. The radar investigates the subsurface by transmitting and receiving radio-wave impulses into the ground. Regions with different geological characteristics react in different ways to the radio-waves, and enable an image of the subsoil structure and boundaries to be built up from the reflected signals.

Led by the Austrian Space Forum, the AMADEE-18 mission aimed to prepare for future human exploration of Mars by conducting experiments in different fields ranging from engineering to astrobiology and from geophysics to life sciences. After being trained on how to use ScanMars at the Austrian Space Forum's facilities in Innsbruck, analogue astronauts tested the radar over four areas in Dhofar with different geologic characteristics. In total, they collected a total of about 70,0000 radar echoes and 1.4 kilometres of profiles to a depth of 5 metres.

The analogue astronauts using the ScanMars radar in the Dhofar region, Oman during AMADEE-18. Credit: OEWF  Austrian Space Forum

"The innovative element of ScanMars with respect to common radar fieldwork is that the data was acquired by the analogue astronauts and not the scientists," said Dr. Frigeri. "This means that the astronauts' training has become a key part of the experiment."

Among all the data collected during the AMADEE-18 expedition, the instrument successfully recognised the typical signal of a dry riverbed, or wadi.

"The data quality is very good and, even if we are not yet able to distinguish unambiguously the presence of water, we can find alluvial structures that could guide future astronauts to dig where they are most likely to find water," said Dr. Frigeri. "In view of the recent discovery of liquid water beneath the surface of Mars, it's very timely to look ahead to the development of techniques that future explorers could use to analyse the Martian subsurface."

The analogue astronauts using the ScanMars radar in the Dhofar region, Oman during AMADEE-18. Credit: OEWF  Austrian Space Forum

The ScanMars radar has a range of applications on Earth and has been used by the University of Perugia to analyse the fault zone involved in the Italian earthquake of Amatrice- that took place in August 2016.

The ScanMars experiment also represents a successful demonstration of collaboration between a scientific team, an operations team and a field crew.

"Our mission embraced different aspects of scientific exploration and implemented new strategies and workflows for the members," said Dr. Frigeri. "Getting these collaborations right will be extremely precious for future human planetary missions."

"The georadar experiment, as part of a carefully designed workflow called the exploration cascade, was a remarkable demonstration of the potential of this method. The exploration cascade determines the sequence of when and which instrument to deploy during a human Mars mission. For future analogue missions, and for the actual first human missions to Mars, this was an important demonstration in a high-fidelity proving-ground environment," said Dr. Gernot Gromer, Administrative Director of the Austrian Space Forum.

The analogue astronauts using the ScanMars radar in the Dhofar region, Oman during AMADEE-18. Credit: OEWF  Austrian Space Forum

Explore further Image: Radar footprints over buried Mars lake

Provided by Europlanet
Credit: CC0 Public Domain

Species are going extinct all over the world: Scientists believe that Earth is losing between 200 and 2,000 species every year. That number is squishy, partly because there are so many species for which they lack good dataparticularly those living in the oceans, which are difficult to track but still critically important to ecosystems and livelihoods. Even the most comprehensive evaluation of extinction riskthe international Red List of Threatened Specieshas only spotty data for many species around the globe.

A new study from University of Chicago scientists offers a tool to predict extinctions for hard-to-count species. Their method takes advantage of the fact that while some species are hard to monitor while alive, many of them leave extensive fossil records.

"Today's extinction work tends to focus on animals like usmammals and other vertebrates that live on land," said Katie Collins, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Chicago and first author on the paper. "But most things that live on the planet don't have a backbone, and a huge part of the world's biodiversity lives in the sea, where our picture is really incomplete. It's much harder to get a handle on extinction there."

Collins and David Jablonski, the William R. Kenan Jr. Distinguished Service Professor of Geophysical Sciences, along with a team of researchers at UChicago, the Smithsonian and the University of California, San Diego, wanted a way to estimate extinction risk for species that are short of directly measured data.

A key part of the puzzle came when they realized that the fossil record could help. Jablonski has been building a database of fossils of marine bivalvescreatures like scallops, mussels and oystersfor many years. That database allowed them to review the history of extinctions and develop a set of predictors about which species are most likely to go extinct.

"Fossils give you a bird's-eye view of lineages. You can see the first and last occurrences for different species, and it can also tell you how often these lineages split into new species, how often they go extinct, and where they were when they did," Collins said.

How likely a species is to go extinct depends on a lot of factors, but there are a few key predictors. One is range size. If the species can only live in a small part of the Gulf of Mexico, a single oil spill could wipe out the entire population. Temperature tolerance matters too: If it can survive under a wider range of temperatures and conditions, its chances are better. "Some widespread species can also handle wide temperature changes, but a huge number of warm-water species are actually tracking a narrow band of temperatures," Jablonski said. "That means that a geographically widespread species can still get clobbered if the temperature changes beyond its ability to cope."

They built these predictors into a metric they called PERIL, or Paleontological Extinction Risk In Lineages. The first step was to test it, by winding the clock back two and a half million years, to the end of the Pliocene epoch. They had the tool "predict" the fates of species living in two widely separated ecosystems: off the coasts of California and New Zealand. The result: "It does a very good job of predicting who's going to live and who's going to die out," Collins said.

From there, they applied the metric to the present day, mapping out the oceans on a scale from high to low risk of extinction.

"This gives us a new, global picture of extinction risk in this economically important marine group, far beyond what's available from the Red List," said Jablonski. For example, Collins said, "There's nearly 6,000 species of bivalves in the ocean; the Red List has only been able to assess 29 of them, and of those, 15 are marked 'data-deficient.'"

A couple of hot zones jumped out immediately, the scientists said: The coast of Southeast Asia is precarious; so are areas in the Antarctic, the Caribbean and New Zealand. "There are some scary situations where key foodstock species live in very fragile areas," Jablonski said.

Though they tried it with marine bivalves, the process could be repeated with any group of living things with a reasonable fossil record, the scientists said.

"Our goal is to produce a method that can be used alongside the Red List, and provide assistance for conservationists dividing up limited resourceswhere to get the biggest bang for your conservational buck, so to speak," Jablonski said. "The PERIL metric is a new tool for pinpointing species and places that would benefit most from protection and management."

More information: K. S. Collins et al. Extinction risk in extant marine species integrating palaeontological and biodistributional data, Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences (2018). Journal information: Proceedings of the Royal Society B K. S. Collins et al. Extinction risk in extant marine species integrating palaeontological and biodistributional data,(2018). DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2018.1698
Credit: Thomas Norrby

A new European initiative is working to identify the vital ingredients for developing rural entrepreneurship and successful business models in high potential sectors such as food and agriculture, bio-based value chains and services. We spoke with Thomas Norrby, senior extensionist at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU) to get a flavour.

What are the key assets and challenges for entrepreneurship in rural areas today?

As stated in the Cork Declaration 2016 on "A better life in Rural Areas," we need to recognise the economic, environmental and social diversity that characterises rural Europe. We need to better distinguish and respond to the different needs of peripheral areas with very low population density and 'commuter accessible' peri-urban areas. Different ruralities face different challenges. Having said this, the major challenges facing rural Europe are not considerably different to the global challenges facing society at large. We need to find a sustainable future and wiser use of resources of all kinds: natural, social, cultural, economic, or other.

Finding a new sustainable way of life will require innovation at all levels of society at large, in businesses, associations and in public administration. Those innovations will come about as a result of entrepreneurial actions, regardless of sector, perceiving and tying resources together in new ways to increase the value of the resources generating a positive income stream to the rural areas. Bridging sectors to open up and making use of existing assets is a key.

How can new business models and entrepreneurship bring about the necessary change to a sustainable, circular economy?

Entrepreneurship is per definition how change comes about. Someone identifying a need or opportunity, trusting their own ability to act and, not least, acting to make a difference. A "Business Model" is a way to describe the value a company brings to its consumers and how it is realised. Thus it has a market side and a production side, it describes on one hand how this value reaches the customer and on the other, how the value is produced and which resources that it draws upon.

RUBIZMO is identifying viable business models that include sustainability at every step of the way: sustainability in the market approach, as well as the sustainability in the use of natural, social or economic resources. An entrepreneur would in many cases have a gut feeling or intuition for this model, but the only constant in life is change, thus there is a need to continuously review, rethink and revise the business. Applying the concept of a business model to a business, the entrepreneur may explore in a much better way the sustainability in every step of the way, improving also the management capacity as we go along. In the Swedish context, we see new business models evolving, some of them originating from entrepreneurial consumers, like new "Food circles," tying producers and consumers together via social media.

In your opinion, is there a recipe for business success in rural areas and if so, what is your favourite ingredient?

A recipe by definition includes both several ingredients (resources) and a description of how to do things (processes). Success in business requires many different skills, but if there is one key component in a recipe for business success, I would say the balancing and interplay between imaging and acting. The ability to visualise where one wants to go, and an ability to formulate a story about this that involve others, requires an ability to perceive the world around you with curiosity and creativity. That ability does not "take you there," but without it you never get there To get there, you need a great deal of GRIT, the constant and energetic engagement with your everyday tasks that makes you get up and greet every morning with a smile.

But, that said, developing and running a sustainable rural business requires a supportive context. Today, this requires high-speed connectivity, a supportive regional strategy and with knowledgeable and entrepreneurial bureaucrats as well as a local culture allowing and embracing both failures and successes.

Explore further How to boost sustainable and resilient agriculture?
Dan Ward is 27 and lives in Pittsburghs Garfield neighborhood. He is mostly vegan, rides his bike to work and walks in the park as often as he can. He also vaped for several years, using an electronic cigarette to satisfy a need to have one vice to balance my otherwise healthy lifestyle.

Diane Lavsa is a very happy smoker. The 39-year-old, who lives in Etna, smoked cigarettes for 18 years and is not shy about explaining why. I loved smoking. I love the taste of it. I dont mind the smell of it. She, too, turned to e-cigarettes, trading in clouds of smoke for a faint burst of fruity nicotine-laced vapor as she tries to distance herself from the tobacco she so enjoys.

Vaping has gained a foothold in American culture after decades of steadily falling cigarette smoking rates, worrying public health experts that its popularity could rekindle a craving for tobacco, particularly among adolescents and teens.

In September, the Food and Drug Administration declared that teen use of e-cigarettes has reached an epidemic proportion and gave Juul and four other major manufacturers of e-cigarettes 60 days to prove they are keeping the products out of the hands of minors or else they may pull the products off the shelves.

E-cigarettes are popularly seen as a safer alternative to cigarette smoking and an aid to smokers trying to quit that lacks many of the harmful chemicals that burning tobacco emits, such as tar. The health benefits and risks of vaping, however, are not well understood. And most e-cigarettes contain nicotine, which is addictive and harmful to fetuses and developing adolescent brains.

Cigarette smoking in southwestern Pennsylvania is down 25 percent since 2011. But adults in the region are vaping at a rate thats 53 percent higher than the national average, according to U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention health survey data.

I think we were on a trajectory that could have seen the end of smoking. Attitudes had completely changed, said Dr. Brian Primack, professor of medicine, pediatrics, and clinical and translational science at the University of Pittsburgh. The e-cigarette phenomenon is a boon to the industry because theyve been able to change attitudes. People no longer think of nicotine as a bad thing. Instead, young people say, If its available in mango and it doesnt have all the bad stuff in it, it must be OK, right?

Loosening tobaccos grip

The decline of cigarette smoking is traced to a number of developments, such as greater public awareness of its health risks, heavy taxes on tobacco products, anti-smoking campaigns, tighter regulations on the industry and its marketing and restrictions on where smokers can smoke.

Nationally, about 15.5 percent of adults smoked in 2016, according to CDC data. Rates have even fallen in the seven-county Pittsburgh Metropolitan Statistical Area, where smoking has historically been higher than the national average. Smokers account for 17.4 percent of adults in the region, down from 23.31 in 2011.

The good news is the trend is going in the right direction, said Dr. Karen Hacker, director of the Allegheny County Health Department. Theres a lot of evidence out there that the two things that do the most to really pull your smoking rate down are bills like the Indoor Clean Air Act and other regulations, and the cost of cigarettes and tobacco taxes.

Taxes on cigarettes hit local smokers hard. Pennsylvania has the 11th highest state tax at $2.60 per pack of cigarettes, well above the national average of $1.71 per pack.

But many of Pittsburghs peer regions benchmarked by Pittsburgh Today have stronger indoor smoking laws, which allow them to more strictly limit where people can smoke in public. In Allegheny County, there are 437 establishments exempt from the Indoor Clean Air Act. While we have public spaces that are no smoking, you can smoke in many bars. You can smoke in a casino, you can smoke in a club, Hacker said.

More people are vaping as well. Its something 4.9 percent of the regions population say they do regularly, compared to 3.2 percent of all Americans, according to CDC data.

New industry rising

Americans have been looking for a safer smoke since the 1960s, when the U.S. surgeon general began linking cigarette smoking to lung, heart and other serious diseases. The tobacco industry responded with light cigarettes, marketing their lower tar and nicotine content as safer. E-cigarettes embrace the same image with some justification.

E-cigarettes dont burn tobacco, but heat chemical juices to produce vapor. A National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine report released earlier this year concluded that e-cigarette vapor contains fewer numbers and lower levels of harmful chemicals than burning tobacco.

Most e-cigarette vapor, however, contains nicotine. In addition, e-cigarette production is unregulated; levels of nicotine and other chemicals in e-cigarette vapor vary and are hard to determine and scientists are only in the beginning stages of investigating their health effects.

At the moment, the percentage of U.S. adults whove turned to vaping is small. But its much more popular among adolescents and teenagers.

A 2017 study by the CDC found that 50 percent more high school and middle school students vape than smoke. In Allegheny County, 20 percent of teens had tried e-cigarettes and nearly 10 percent were vaping in 2014, a Health Department survey found.

When you look at traditional tobacco products, you see a decline in usage. But when you add e-cigarettes, you see a slight increase in the youth who are using tobacco and part of that is marketing, said Brittany Huffman, program coordinator for Tobacco Free Allegheny, a tobacco-use prevention nonprofit. Theyre using the same kind of marketing tactics they successfully used with traditional cigarettes: If you use this product, youll be sexy. Youll be glamorous. If you dont, look at the great time you are missing out on.

And there is a coolness factor in some corners of the vape subculture. Vape cloud competitions have popped up across the country and on YouTube, in which competitors try to exhale the largest and most creative cloud of vaporwaves, orbs, rings, etc. Teens post videos and images on social media of their own vape tricks to gain followers and influence.

Thats less of a turn-on for some older users and even young adults such as Ward. He smoked cigarettes for about five years before giving them up to vaping. He quit vaping after a couple of years, in part, because he felt it had become uncool.

The subculture that was growing was not appealing to me, he said. I was ashamed to use it in public sometimes. Not because people would shame me, but because Id feel like an idiot. It got to a point where I would only do it at home or when I was walking by myself.

Cessation aid or gateway drug?

E-cigarettes helped Ward quit tobacco, but research into their effectiveness as a smoking cessation aid is inconclusive.

Vaping, for example, might be as effective as nicotine patches in helping people quit smoking for at least six months, according to a 2013 study published in the medical journal Lancet. But a 2017 study in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine found smokers who also use e-cigarettes were only half as likely to give up tobacco as smokers who never vape at all.

E-cigarettes have not been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to be sold as a smoking cessation product, such as patches and gum. We know that those products when used as directed can be used to quit smoking, Huffman said. They have studies behind them. The concern with e-cigs is that they arent regulated. You dont really know the amount of nicotine youre getting when you use an e-cigarette.

And the nicotine factor is critical, public health officials say. The truth is, nicotine is one of the most addictive substances we know of, Primack said. Its damaging to the adolescent brain by itself. And we found in our research that being exposed to it in teenage years makes one much more likely to take up regular cigarette smoking later on.

He was the lead author of a 2017 study published in the American Journal of Medicine that found young people who vape to be more than four times more likely to start smoking tobacco cigarettes within 18 months compared to those who dont vape.

The truth is, nicotine is one of the most addictive substances we know of. Its damaging to the adolescent brain by itself.

Brian Primack, MD, professor of medicine, pediatrics, and clinical and translational science at the University of Pittsburgh

Another recent study in the journal JAMA Pediatrics also found e-cigarette use raises the risk of graduating to cigarettes, and this years National Academy of Sciences study reports substantial evidence that youth and young adults are more vulnerable. Moreover, the number of teens and young adults who graduate from vaping to cigarettes is much greater than the number of adults who use e-cigarettes to quit smoking, according to a new study published by the Public Library of Science.

When the data come out and there is an FDA approval that vaping is a strategy for quitting smoking, we are happy to support that strategy, Hacker said. On the other hand, there is ample evidence out there that if youre a young person and you start with e-cigarettes you are likely to move on to cigarettes. We do not want to see that.

Last year, Allegheny County began prohibiting the use of e-cigarettes and vaping in indoor public places where cigarettes are already prohibited. We dont want to change how people are currently experiencing smoke-free environments, and thats important to how young people would visualize this as well, Hacker said.

For Lavsa, vaping has been an effective, but unsatisfying alternative to cigarettes. She still takes smoke breaks at work, but vapes in her off-hours. She fell in love with a non-smoker and picked up vaping to survive a weekend with his family where she had to hide the fact that she smoked.

But the transition hasnt been easy for the former pack-a-day smoker. There are still those moments when Ive just had a big cup of coffee or Ive just had a big meal and I want a cigarette. That hasnt gone away. Theres an urge to have a cigarette in your mouth. Vaping doesnt have that feeling or that taste in your mouth or the smoke. But what I love so much is I can go to Kennywood and, if Im jonesin, I can take a puff of a vape and people arent turned off by it.
1 hour ago

With high-profile backers, EV startup Rivian goes public

SILVER SPRING, Md. (AP)  Shares in Rivian Automotive are set to trade publicly on Wednesday, and the world should get a better idea of just how hot investors are for the electric vehicle market. Rivian, the EV startup backed by Amazon and Ford, raised at least $10.5 billion in its public offering to help it ramp up production of its trucks, vans and SUVs.

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Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) colleagues picked up the pace at the 2018 Teribear charity run in Prague, running and walking more than 1,200 km over the course of ten days from September 6-15 to raise money for disadvantaged children in the Czech Republic.

RFE/RL finished in 52nd place out of 600 teams, raising a total of 38,000 Kc (1,742 USD) and surpassing their 2017 distance by 400 km.

I ran more than 100 km over 7 days and collected 3,000 Kc (140 USD) for charity while getting to know colleagues better--what could be better than this? said Koba Liklikadze, a journalist for RFE/RLs Georgian Service.

RFE/RL's top three performers were

In its ninth year, the event drew over ten thousand runners and walkers from all corners of Prague to the citys famous Vitkov hill, where sponsors donated 30 Kc (1.40 USD) for each loop of the 1.5 km track completed.

The Teribear charity run is organized by Czech model Tereza Maxovas Foundation in aid of underprivileged children in the Czech Republic. Altogether this years Teribear participants covered 320,812,50 km and raised over 9 million Kc (413,000 USD) for projects supporting families and children. Initiatives focus on reuniting children in institutional care with their families, helping children who are placed in care, and supporting single mothers in need.
It is hardly a surprise that existing and future shareholders in the mining industry are predominantly concerned about returns on their investments. Regardless of whether investors are seeking a capital appreciation of their stock portfolio or plan to grow their money through dividend payments, or a combination of both, they typically make money when a company does.

Mining companies that provide a competitive and sustainable rate of return to their shareholders are highly sought-after targets for investors.

A companys financial indicators, such as revenue and expenses, cannot always tell a reliable and comprehensive story about its financial performance. For instance, growing revenue, at a first glance, is usually considered to be a positive sign of a companys financial health, but expenditures that outpace improving revenues can smudge the overall performance picture and will surely disappoint shareholders.

When it comes to the evaluation of a companys financial health, net profit margin is one of the most important and powerfulyet simpleindicators to be taken into an arsenal of any group of investors in the mining and metals industry.

Net profit margin is equal to net income (or profit) divided by total revenue and represents how much profit each dollar of revenue generates.

Intuitively, net profit margin can be interpreted as an indicator of whether a companys profitability is secure or not. Indeed, lets consider a case where a company reported a USD$100 billion dollar in revenue but just a 3 percent net profit margin. While on paper this looks like the company is doing well, the low net profit margin means that this company is in a very vulnerable position; even an insignificant downward move in commodity prices, slightly lower ore grades, unfavourable exchange rates, or minor operational disruptions could push the previous years net profits into a net loss the following year. A high net profit margin provides a company with a solid buffer against even major negative events. Related: How Climate Change Is Impacting Global Hunger

The following is the list of active mining companies compiled from data at Mining Intelligence that ranks by miners' net profit margins yielded in 2017 and measured in percentages. Companies that generate a majority of their revenues outside of mining/mineral processing operations have been excluded from this ranking. The research focus was on net income earned from ongoing operating activities and not from one-time sources of accounting income such as debt restructuring and impairment reversals. The threshold net income level for companies considered for this analysis was set at USD$400 million.

(Click to enlarge)

Data from Mining Intelligence

As can be seen, the top companies generating the highest net profit margins are from across the mining spectrum; from major gold producers such as Polyus and Goldcorp to potash behemoth Uralkali, and big diversified companies such as Rio Tinto and Teck Resources.

Related: Debunking The A.I. Productivity Myth

Common themes that contributed towards high net profit margins for these companies were expansions of mining operations, improved commodity market conditions, higher ore grades and higher metal recoveries, as well as successful implementation of portfolio optimization and cost reduction strategies.

Major contributors to decreased margins were losses on unfavourable currency exchange rates; production disruptions due to environmental, geopolitical and technical risks and challenges; lower ore grades; and negative price dynamics for a number of commodities.

What all the high net profit margin companies have in common is a decent margin of safety. This will help them weather even a significant storm on the mining markets and deliver competitive and secure shareholder returns in situations where other companies will struggle to survive.

By Mining.com

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Its time to cut and run on U.S. equities, andthough the prevailing currency crises might not seem like a good place to park your cashthe bank says its time to shift some of that money over to emerging markets.



Why? Because Trumps tax cuts arent going to be doling out much more love and the U.S. is poised to see its stellar economic growth slow down.



The large U.S. fiscal boost this year, as well as the delayed positive impact of weak USD and low rates from last year created a sugar high for U.S. assets this year, JPMorgan Chase wrote in a note to clients, as reported by Bloomberg.



We expect convergence of macro fundamentals between U.S. and international markets in the coming quarters; with equity markets tending to price forward fundamentals by six to 12 months, the time for the rotation may be now.

Morgan Stanleys Lisa Shalett has issued a similar warning recently, though shes recommending investors divest some of their equities in favor of a position in  drum roll, please  gold.

But the message is the same: Investors have grown complacent, and Morgan Stanley doesnt see U.S. equities continuing to outperform that much longer. Shalett also doesnt see the U.S. economy continuing to grow at its current pace. Related: How Climate Change Is Impacting Global Hunger

The relative outperformance of U.S. assets this year and this past decade is now at extremes. While that alone is not reason to question the durability of the trend, complacency is, Shalett recently noted.

And complacency in the middle of an intensifying trade dispute is a huge risk. When the impact of tariffs isnt immediately felt, the market shoves it under the rugbut that doesnt mean it wont hit hard.

In fact, should the latest round of tariff threats become a reality, JPMorgan thinks that we could see a $10 loss in combined per-share earnings for S&P 500 companies. So now is the time to weigh that risk and hedge bets on a correction.

We gradually trim exposure to U.S. stocks and dollar assets, as they acted as a trade war safe haven so far, but investors may ultimately rotate into more attractive foreign assets if trade concerns ease, JP Morgan wrote. The trade war and asset outflows already impacted foreign assets, creating an FX advantage and attractive valuations.

Its a tough pill to swallow when the S&P 500 is so delightful. On Wednesday, it was up again (along with the Dow) boosted by rising Treasury yields and an oddly relaxed outlook on the trade war.

And it doesnt help when Bank of America Merrill Lynch is saying things such as: The direct impact of the latest round of tariffs on the economy is likely to be minimal.

But Bank of America isnt alone in the bull ring, or in thinking that the trade war is nothing but hot air.

There may be some tariff fatigue, Bucky Hellwig, senior vice president at BB&T Wealth Management, told Reuters. The worry factor that investors had early in this negotiation process seems to have waned a little bit. China is running out of bullets.

By Michael Kern for Safehaven.com

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The CEO of Danske Bank has resigned over hundreds of billions in money from Russia and former Soviet states allegedly laundered through its small branch in Estonia.

Its a sum that is likely to draw significant attention from Washington amid calls for new sanctions on Russia, which could threaten to cut the bank out of the global financial system.

Nor would it be the first time: When the U.S. accused a Latvia bank earlier this year of covering up money laundering, the bank was denied U.S. dollar funding for transactions and it collapsed shortly afterward. For Danske, the situation is slightly different because it does not have a U.S. banking license, but still, it is a correspondent bank and we might be seeing its final days in the global financial network.

Only the specter of U.S. involvement over the past six months leading up to Wednesday had shaved one-third off the banks value as investors cut and run.

Now that the results of the investigation have been revealed, the banks shares are in free fall:

(Click to enlarge)

As for the CEO, he hasnt been directly implicated.

Even though I was personally cleared from a legal point of view, I hold the ultimate responsibility. There is no doubt that we as an organization have failed in this situation and did not live up to expectations, Reuters quoted Borgen as telling a press conference.

Borgen will remain in his position until a new CEO is appointed. Related: Hacks, Bugs And Exploits: Growing Pains For The $4 Billion Blockchain

But Europe definitely has a Russian money-laundering problem that it cant get out in front of.

According to a recent case study by Allan & Associates, the European Central Bank has been grappling with this for the past decadeto little success.

The influence of the Russian-linked criminal funds in peripheral EU states is now exposing the ECBs limitations in this regard, the report said.

The Latvian case stands out as an embarrassing reminder of this state of affairsand it went beyond Russia and into North Korea.

In February, the ECB ordered the closure of ABLV, the third-largest bank in Latvia. But it wasnt due to ECB effortsit was the U.S. Treasury Department stepped up the heat on this, leaving the ECB no choice but to close the bank down over money laundering, including violations of international sanctions on North Korea.

According to Allan & Associates, even the Latvian authorities had fined two banks prior to this for violating sanctions, but the ECB dialed to step in, pushing the responsibility fully on its member states. More to the point, the ECB said it didnt have the investigative powers to uncover such deficiencies.

Related: Is A Market Meltdown Looming?

Nor is it just Latvia and now Estonia. Last year, the FBI was investigating a Cypriot bank for money laundering on behalf of wealthy Russians. The bank is now shut down. Malta is also constantly under scrutiny for lack of transparency.

And the most famous case was that of Russian auditor Sergei Magnitsky who was arrested in Russia on dubious tax evasion charges in 2008 while investigating state-sanctioned money-laundering through Cyprus and Latvia. He then died in prison. This incident prompted the U.S. Congress in 2012 to sign the Magnitsky Act, which is used to block targeted Russian government officials and businessmen from entering the U.S., freeze their U.S. assets and ban their use of the U.S. banking system.

This Act itself is the most telling witness to the European Central Banks impotence when it comes to money-laundering and cross-border crime.

By Fred Dunkley for Safehaven.com

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This report was compiled by Lisa Andre. You can reach her at landre@leecentralcoastnews.com. Follow her on Twitter @LAndreSYVNews
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Education Reporter

Mathew Burciaga is a Santa Maria Times reporter who covers education, agriculture and public safety. Prior to joining the Times, Mathew ran a 114-year-old community newspaper in Wyoming. He owns more than 40 pairs of crazy socks from across the globe.
Issues relating to homelessness were back at the forefront last week for the Lompoc City Council, which gave its approval for the city to decl
How to comment

Individuals wishing to make a comment on whether chlorpyrifos should be designated a toxic air contaminant can submit written comments to dpr18002@cdpr.ca.gov.

In addition, the California Department of Pesticide Regulation will hold a hearing to receive oral comments on this issue on Thursday, Nov. 8, at 2 p.m. The hearing will be located at the California Environmental Protection Agency headquarters, 1001 I Street, Sacramento CA.

The public comment closes on Nov. 9.
" " So, what is the difference between climate and weather, anyway? john finney photography/Getty Images

You might remember when in 2015, Republican Sen. James Inhofe of Oklahoma set out to refute the "hysteria" over global warming by tossing a snowball around inside the U.S. Capitol. The obvious implication: How could the climate be changing that radically from humans burning fossil fuels and pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, since we still have snowfall and chilly temperatures on a winter day?

But even if you're not a U.S. Senator from an oil-producing state, you might be wondering how it is that scientists can predict climate trends over many years, but can't predict what the weather will be three weeks from today?

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As NASA and other scientific organizations have been explaining for years, the reason is that weather and climate are two very different things. Basically, weather is what happens today or tomorrow or this week, while climate happens over many years.

"Weather is the day-to-day variation in meteorological conditions," Jonathan Martin, a professor of atmospheric and oceanic sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, explains. "Climate is the aggregate of weather events, resulting in a long-term average."

Scientists look at climate in terms of fixed 30-year periods, Martin says. Right now, for example, scientists compare the daily temperature to the period that started in 1981 and ended in 2010. In 2021, they'll shift forward by 10 years, and start comparing temperatures to the period between 1991 and 2020, and so on. Scientists rely on 30-year periods because it's an amount of time that's long enough to produce meaningful comparisons, but just short enough that any changes that occur will be subtle, though not necessarily imperceptible. "Over a 50-year period, in comparison, you would notice a bigger change," Martin says.

Those 30-year periods help us to put the weather on a particular day in the right context. As Martin explains, comparing the temperature on Dec. 5, 2018 to the same day 100 years ago wouldn't provide that much useful information, because the climate was too different then. But comparing it to the average of the temperature readings for every Dec. 5 between 1981 and 2010, when the climate conditions were pretty much constant, makes it possible to say whether it's an unusually cold or warm day.

"We're trying to compare apples to apples," Martin says.

When it comes to prediction, weather and climate also are very different. Weather forecasting, Martin explains, is based upon observation of conditions that already are occurring in real time in the atmosphere. Because those conditions only exist for a short time, weather can be reliably forecast only over relatively short periods of 10 to 14 days at most. "That's theoretical  my confidence ends at day eight," Martin says.

Envisioning climate, in contrast, is much more low-resolution  scientists are trying to project what the trend will be over a long period, not what the weather will be like on a specific day 50 or 100 years from now. That involves gathering and crunching huge amounts of data in powerful computers and doing modeling.

"In one sense, climate does not affect weather; it is a description of the weather over a long period, " explains Jeffrey S. Dukes, director of the Climate Change Research Center at Purdue University. "You could turn that around and say that climate provides you with information about how likely you are to get a given type of weather at a given time of year, but historically the climate has been determined by the weather over long periods. In another sense, though, climate for a given location is determined by a bunch of factors such as the latitude and position on the planet, which affects how it is influenced by the circulation of the atmosphere and oceans, and the daytime heating of continents. Climate is also influenced by the composition of the atmosphere, the transport of water from soil to air by plants, and other factors.

"On a given day, the sum of all these influences determines the weather, but as some of these larger-scale factors change over time, they will drag the weather and the climate along with them."

In recent years, some of the sharp distinction between weather and climate has blurred slightly, as scientists have used increasingly sophisticated models and accumulated knowledge in an effort to figure out the extent to which specific weather events  say, a hurricane, a heat wave, or a monster snowstorm  is actually a function of climate change driven by humans pumping greenhouse emissions into the atmosphere.

By running thousands of computer simulations, "we can run all kinds of 'what if' experiments," Martin says. "We can say, this is how the atmosphere will behave if you take out one factor."

While such analysis is still a work in progress, Martin thinks that eventually, it will be possible to determine the extent to which specific weather events are influenced by climate change.

Now That's Interesting: The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration presented a paper on Dec. 13, 2017 in which they concluded that three extreme weather events in 2016  that year's record global heat, extreme heat over Asia and unusually warm waters in the Bering Sea  would not have been possible without human-caused climate change.
SINGAPORE (Sept 17): In the past year and a half, the issue of the 99-year leases on Housing & Development Board (HDB) flats has triggered much debate. Now might be a good time to step back and examine what exactly has changed as a result of this debate and what the broader implications are. In fact, this issue could be a major game changer in many areas. Certainly, housing market dynamics will change, there could be shifts in savings behaviour and we are also likely to see major policy changes over time. These are big changes and it is important that Singaporeans have a clear understanding of these implications.

What has changed?

In March last year, the government clarified that when the 99-year lease on an HDB flat ends, the flat will revert to the HDB with zero value left for the owner of the lease. You might think that this was stating the obvious, but to many people it seemed to be a bit of a surprise. Clearly, the market in Singapore is not perfect, since it appears that there was a degree of myopia in how many Singaporeans viewed the HDB lease. This myopia had also been evident in the case of the 60-year leases on some houses in Geylang: When the government advised owners that the lease would run out in 2020 and the properties would revert to the government, some owners were taken aback. So, the first change is that this widespread misunderstanding about the lease has been resolved: Lease owners know what to expect and must therefore change their economic behaviour accordingly.

The second change is that the government has signalled that there is not much it can do to somehow magically create value for owners of the lease as it reaches its expiry date. National Development Minister Lawrence Wong explained that the Selective En-bloc Redevelopment Scheme was only practicable for a tiny fraction of all HDB flats. So, SERS, which many had assumed would be extended to most HDB flats to help overcome this fall in lease value to zero, is now known clearly to not be a solution.

Read more on The Edge Singapore.

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Undocumented OFWs who availed the amnesty program of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) | Department of Foreign Affairs

The Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA) on Wednesday brought home 109 overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) from Dubai.

The agency has now repatriated a total of 838 OFWs since the amnesty program began in August.

The Office of Migrant Workers Affairs shouldered airline tickets, exit fines and other penalties of the returning OFWs.

Each of the repatriates were given financial assistance of P5,000 as part of the governments all-out support for the returning OFWs.

Your presence here today demonstrates the kind of care and compassion President Duterte has for our overseas workers, Undersecretary for Migrant Workers Affairs Sarah Lou Y. Arriola said

She also reminded all Filipinos who are seeking employment overseas to make sure that they go through the proper application process and follow the rules and regulations of the Philippine Overseas Employment Administration (POEA).

Undocumented Filipinos who wish to return to the Philippines under this program will be assisted by the Philippine Consulate General in Dubai and the Philippine Embassy in Abu Dhabi.

Consul General Paul Raymund Cortes encouraged qualified Filipinos to take advantage of the UAEs amnesty program before the 31 October 2018 deadline, to give the Embassy and the Consulate General ample time to process the necessary documents.

(Source: DFA)

The post 109 undocumented OFWs return home from Dubai appeared first on UNTV News.
Bitcoin and other digital currency worth around 6.7 billion yen ($60 million) has been stolen in Japan following a hacking attack, a virtual exchange operator said on Thursday. Osaka-based Tech Bureau, which operates virtual currency exchange Zaif, said its server had been illegally accessed and money transfered. "We decline to comment on the details of how this illegal access occurred, as it is a crime and we've already asked the authorities to investigate," Tech Bureau said in a statement. It added that the virtual currencies stolen were bitcoin, bitcoin cash and monacoin. "We will prepare measures so that customers' assets will not be affected" by the hack, it said, adding it would receive financial support from major shareholder Fisco Group. The current management team will step down after returning the lost assets to customers, Tech Bureau said. Japan's financial services agency on Thursday began on-site inspections into the company, Jiji Press reported. Japan is a major centre for virtual currencies and as many as 50,000 shops in the country are thought to accept bitcoin. Earlier this year, Japan-based exchange Coincheck suspended deposits and withdrawal for virtual currencies after it had been hacked, resulting in a loss worth half a billion US dollars of NEM, the 10th biggest cryptocurrency by market capitalisation. Japanese authorities later ordered two cryptocurrency exchanges to suspend operations as part of a clampdown following the hack.
China urges Pakistan to help maintain trust after new government hints at rethink over economic corridor

China has urged Pakistan to help maintain mutual trust and ensure the smooth development of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, a project that has been criticised in the South Asian nation for the levels of debt it has incurred as a result.

President Xi Jinping made the comments in a meeting with General Qamar Javed Bajwa, the Pakistani armys chief of staff, following reports that Pakistan might rethink the US$62 billion project.

China and Pakistan should  firmly support each others core interests, Xi said to Bajwa.

Bajwa started a three-day trip to Beijing on Wednesday, making him the first senior Pakistani official to visit since the inauguration of a new government in August.

The economic corridor consists of a series of Chinese-funded infrastructure projects  including the expansion of Gwadar port, roads and railways linking Chinas restive western province of Xinjiang to the Arabian Sea  and a number of power plants and industrial development plans.

Pakistans new Prime Minister Imran Khan has established a nine-member committee to evaluate the projects, and his commerce adviser Abdul Razak Dawood has questioned whether the deals worked to Pakistans advantage.

Last week, China and Pakistan agreed to invite third-country investors to be part of the economic corridor project, a move which was seen by observers as a way of easing concerns about China pushing Pakistan into high levels of indebtedness.

The Financial Times quoted Dawood  the Pakistani member of cabinet responsible for commerce, textiles, industry and investment  as saying that companies from Pakistan had been put in a disadvantaged position, but Beijing denied Islamabad was seeking to delay or alter the project.

Xi and Bajwa also called on the two militaries to work together to fight terrorism and guarantee the security of the economic corridor.

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The Pakistani military, which has a history of staging coups and remains a powerful influence on domestic politics, has always maintained a solid alliance with China, according to Wang Dehua, a South Asian expert at the Shanghai Municipal Centre for International Studies.

Khan and his PTI party in the election for the first time ever defeated the established political dynasties of Pakistan. They have to rely on the support from the military, he said.

And the Pakistani military has always being a supportive force of the China-Pakistan relations.

This article China urges Pakistan to help maintain trust after new government hints at rethink over economic corridor first appeared on South China Morning Post

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Chinese investors are going to find it difficult to replicate their investment approach in Southeast Asia

With Alibaba, JD.com and Tencent investing in and acquiring Southeast Asia-based startups like Lazada, its no secret that the region has become the new theatre of war for Chinese tech giants; for Chinese investors, Southeast Asia companies gives them a new avenue for bountiful returns  and at lower buy-in when compared to their home market.

At a panel discussion at SWITCH (Singapore Week of Innovation & TeCHnology), VCs from Southeast Asia-based firms went in depth about the impact of growing Chinese interest in the region, and whether Chinese investors are adopting the right approach.

The panel was moderated by Nic Lim, Founder and Managing Partner, 8Capita, and featured the following panellists:

Jefrey Joe, Co-founder & Managing Partner, Alpha JWC Ventures

Chua Wee Liang, Partner, Cowin Capital

Chua Kee Lock, Group President and CEO, Vertex Venture Holdings Ltd

Here are some key takeaways from the panel discussion:

It isnt just the BAT guys who are interested in Southeast Asia

While investments by the star players Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent (BAT) have been grabbing headlines, there are Chinese firms trying to address the Southeast Asia market, but they do so under the radar. Chua Wee Liang said that he is currently helping a Chinese drone company expand into the region.

According to Joe, in Indonesia, there has been an influx of Chinese companies, some of which are consumer-facing applications. They are testing the market to see whether it is viable to do business in the country.

For Chinese investors, they are attracted to the startups low valuations and small fundraising rounds. In China, a Series A round could go for around US$80 million while in Southeast Asia, these rounds typically range from US$2 to 10 million. So for Chinese investors, such deals are a bargain.

China and Southeast Asia are two very different markets and thus require different strategies

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Southeast Asia, unlike China, is a complex and fragmented region, comprising different cultures, traditions and languages. Even putting country differences aside, Indonesia is itself a fragmented market: a company in Jakarta may operate differently from one in Bali, for example.

According to Chua Kee Lock, the region has 3 main markets: Singapore, which receives around 50 per cent of funding deals in Southeast Asia (many companies like to incorporate there due to its business-friendly environment); Indonesia, where there is a vast population and addressable market; the third one would either be Malaysia or Thailand (both healthily growing ecosystems).

If Chinese VCs and startups try to replicate their business or investment model in Southeast Asia, they would face a lot of pushback from the market. Chinese companies who intend to do so should be reminded that the US was met with strong barriers when they wanted to expand into their backyard, simply because the Chinese market is unique and different  and so it goes the same for Southeast Asia.

For example, while most people in China rely on online services like e-commerce platform Taobao for purchases, in Indonesia, the participation of the offline economy is still crucial. Joe said that more than 95 per cent of the population in the country still participate in this offline form (for example, topping up of phone credits via retail outlets).

So while pumping in money can help a company with growing and scaling operations, the participation of this market segment is absolutely crucial for businesses in Indonesia to stay relevant.

Chinese companies who buy over Southeast Asia-based startups and then operate them should also take time to thoroughly study and familiarise themselves with their new environment. Jefrey Joe says that Lazadas new boss, Alibaba, may have had brought in their own leadership team, but in terms of traction and growth, there is still not much change on that front. So it will take some time for the team to adjust and process new learnings to adapt to the market.

Also Read: Taiwans first ever political donation in Bitcoins

Companies who focus on creating Southeast Asia-based copies of platforms or applications that were successful elsewhere should also be wary of wanting a quick exit (hint: Rocket Internet). While millions of Chinese money have been poured into buying such companies, Chua Kee Lock cautions that we could see a winding down of such voracious appetites in the next 12 to 18 months due to the trade war between US and China; Chinese companies may turn their attention back to their home market.

But this bodes well for Southeast Asia because it means that there will be less of a momentum play, which would mean that Southeast Asia startups valuations will be more realistic and entrepreneurs will be more grounded and focus on good products.



The post Do Chinese companies understand Southeast Asias tech ecosystem well enough? appeared first on e27.
Search engine giant Google has a sister company called Verily, a life sciences and healthcare firm that recently teamed up with the National Environment Agency (NEA) to help combat the spread of mosquito-borne diseases in Singapore.

And how are they doing so? Enter Project Wolbachia, the Artificial Intelligence-driven undertaking to release sterile male mosquitoes into the wild to prevent breeding. A literal debugging, really.

Male mosquitoes infected with the Wolbachia bacteria are sterile and do not bite or spread diseases. When they mate with female mosquitoes, the eggs fail to hatch, hence reducing the population of the bugs and also the possibility of spreading diseases such as dengue, Zika, and yellow fever. According to a Debug Project blog post by Verily, the AI and computer vision algorithms come into play when sorting the male from female mosquitoes that have been bred  only the males will be released into the wild through an automated release system.

The method has been proven a success too. Earlier this year, Verily assisted the Australian government with a similar project trialed in Queensland. The programme managed to help stop the spread of dengue fever in the region.

The post Googles sister company is helping Singapore crack down on mosquitoes with AI and algorithms appeared first on Coconuts.
Israel's air force commander was set to lead a delegation to Moscow on Thursday to share the military's findings on the Syrian downing of a Russian warplane following Israeli air strikes. Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has blamed Israel for the incident, which was the worst case of friendly fire between Moscow and his regime since Russian forces intervened in the war-torn country in late 2015. The Russia-bound delegation, led by Major General Amikam Norkin, will "present the situation report... regarding all aspects" of the incident, the Israeli army said in a statement on Wednesday. It will also provide information on "Iranian attempts to transfer strategic weapons to the Hezbollah terror organisation and to establish an Iranian military presence in Syria", the statement said. Syrian air defences shot down the Russian military plane on Monday, killing all 15 soldiers aboard, after Israeli missiles had struck the coastal region of Latakia. Israel has vowed to stop its arch-foe Iran, which backs the Assad regime, from entrenching itself militarily in neighbouring Syria. Earlier this month, it acknowledged having carried out more than 200 strikes in Syria over the past 18 months, mainly against Iranian targets. After Monday's incident, the Russian military accused Israeli pilots of using "the Russian plane as a cover, exposing it to fire from Syrian air defences". Israel denied the allegations, saying its jets were already back in its airspace when Syrian forces launched the missiles that hit the Russian plane. In a letter to his Russian counterpart on Wednesday, Assad offered his condolences for the deaths after the plane was downed by Syria's Russian-made S-200 air defence system. "This unfortunate incident was the result of Israeli arrogance and depravity," the Syrian leader said. "We are determined that such tragic events will sway neither you nor us from continuing the fight against terrorism," he added in the letter published by the official Sana news agency. - 'Tragic accidental circumstances' - Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu expressed his "sorrow" to Russian President Vladimir Putin in a phone call on Tuesday, offering to assist Moscow in the investigation. However, he insisted the Russian plane had been felled by "extensive and inaccurate Syrian anti-aircraft (fire)". Putin had said the incident was the result of "tragic accidental circumstances," warning Netanyahu against carrying out such operations in the future. He also pledged to beef up security for Russian forces in Syria, which three years ago stepped in to support Assad whose grip on power had been weakened by rebels and jihadist fighters. Israel has admitted to striking Syria to prevent what it says are deliveries of advanced weaponry to Lebanon's Hezbollah, an armed movement backed by Iran and which fights alongside Syrian troops. On Wednesday, Hezbollah's leader Hassan Nasrallah said the Shiite movement would stay in Syria "until further notice". "We will remain there even after the Idlib accord," Nasrallah said, referring to a Russia-Turkey deal to prevent a Syrian regime offensive on the country's last rebel-held stronghold.
Malta's prime minister on Thursday signalled unexpected support from EU leaders for a second referendum on Brexit in Britain, boosting a growing campaign for a new poll despite the British government's trenchant opposition. Speaking to BBC radio on the sidelines of an informal European Union summit in Salzburg, Joseph Muscat said there was "almost unanimous" backing among its leaders for a vote. "We would like the almost impossible to happen, that the UK has another referendum," Muscat said. "I think most of us would welcome a situation where there is the possibility of the British people putting things into perspective, seeing what has been negotiated, seeing the options, and then deciding once and for all." EU Council President Donald Tusk has previously said "our door remains open" if Britain changes its mind about leaving the bloc. But, asked about support for another referendum, an EU source said on Thursday: "The EU certainly does not have a position on that". A French presidency source also said: "It is not up to us to express a preference on what might happen in Britain. It is a sovereign choice for the British people". But Muscat's stance was reiterated by Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babis, who said he would support Britain holding another vote on EU membership. Babis added he had been "shocked" by Britons' June 2016 decision to leave the bloc -- now scheduled to happen in March next year -- which has added to Europe's growing list of problems. "I'm very unhappy that (the) UK is leaving so it would be better maybe to make another referendum and maybe the people in the meantime they could change their view," he told the BBC. "Because then we will solve the problem quite quickly." - 'There will be no second referendum' - Six months ahead of Britain's planned EU departure, calls within the country have been growing for a second referendum -- backed by an expanding list of centrist politicians. The campaign for another poll has also attracted hefty financial backing, including from Hungarian-US billionaire George Soros, with a series of events staged across Britain over the summer to drum up support. But the government is opposed to another referendum and experts believe the prospect is highly unlikely. May reiterated her position in a speech to EU leaders in Salzburg on Wednesday. "We all recognise that time is short but delaying or extending these negotiations is not an option. "I know that for many of you Brexit is not something you want but it is important to be clear that there will be no second referendum in the UK," she said. "The public has delivered its verdict and I as prime minister will deliver upon that," she added. Pro-EU and pro-Brexit supporters reacted to the Maltese and Czech leaders' comments. The Best for Britain group said their statements showed "there is still time for the UK to check with the people if Brexit is what they still want." Its chief Eloise Todd added: "It's time to give the people -- not politicians -- the final say on Brexit." But pro-Brexit firebrand Nigel Farage responded on Twitter saying: "EU bosses want us to have a second referendum, quelle surprise."
The crowd of 60,000 people were screaming when they saw me walk up to Brandon Flowers. I could not stop smiling! I knew I had many friends in the crowd including teachers from the school, and most importantly, my two brothers and my dad. The rest as they say, is history.

The life of a little drummer boy named Kapil Bhuta changed forever at Singapore Grand Prix.

Holding up a banner asking The Killers to let him come up and play drums for For Reasons Unknown, Kapil indeed got what he asked for on Saturday at The Padang stage.

We speak with Kapil Bhuta about the sights and sounds while playing onstage with The Killers, his music influences and how this opens up a whole new world for his drumming dreams.

POPSPOKEN: Hey Kapil! Introduce yourself!

Kapil: Hi! My name is Kapil Bhuta and I am 18 years old.

I currently study at The Australian International School, Singapore. I was born in Sydney and have lived in Singapore for over 8 years.

PS: How did you come up with the idea to have a banner asking The Killers to let you up and play drums? Did you actually think it would happen?

K: I have seen YouTube videos of The Killers pulling fans from the crowd to play For Reasons Unknown. Knowing this, I decided that I would give it a try. To be honest I did not hold much hope of actually being selected. Deep down i was of course hoping that I would. I rehearsed the song on my own at home just in case I did get selected.

I would have never thought I would have been pulled up! It was only when Brandon Flowers asked me if I could play and if I knew all the stops, when I realised that this actually might be happening.

Walking up on the back of the screaming crowd and actually turning around and seeing the flood of people cheering was the most exhilarating moment of my life  a moment that will be frozen in the pages of my mind forever.

The crowd of 60,000 people were screaming when they saw me walk up to Brandon Flowers and I could not stop smiling! I knew I had many friends in the crowd including teachers from school, and most importantly, my two brothers and my dad. The rest as they say, is history.

Story continues

PS: Could you tell us more about how you felt from going on stage, to hugging the band members, to actually playing for the crowd?

K: There was a fair amount of people that had signs put up asking to play the song and when Brandon Flowers looked at my side I got all of my friends and people around me to start screaming! We got his attention and he asked me if I knew the songs and all the stops  I screamed yes! I went up on stage and couldnt believe what was happening.

As soon as I sat down on Ronnie Vannuccis kit Brandon Flowers started to sing, which did not really give me much time to think at all  which is good in a perverse way as it stopped me from over-thinking.

I think I was in a daze when I walked up. I actually dont think I had time to think per se  The song started and I just started playing.

There was one moment in particular when I realised I had this covered  this was right at the beginning when Ronnie Vannucci was standing in front sort of motioning me what to do. When he realised I had it covered, he simply smiled and walked away. That was the best endorsement  not that I had had time to think as I was completely focused on the song.

As I was playing drums I looked out to the crowd and it was a phenomenal sight  something I will never forget. Seeing the crowd that did not end was a dream come true -and really exciting. I was really enjoying the moment playing to the screams of the crowd. There was a point where I did a drum fill and Brandon Flowers started to smile; I think he was surprised that I knew the song!

After I played, Ronnie and Brandon both gave me a hug and they said I killed it! I got to keep Ronnies drum sticks, too. Additionally, Brandon Flowers said that I had ice water in my veins, which was just incredible to hear, especially from someone who you look up to.

Instagram Photo

PS: When did you first learn drums?

K: I started playing drums when I was 12 years old. I actually started playing guitar first, but have grown to love drums more than anything in the world.

I have played around Singapore at a couple of bars although I usually play at events hosted by my school.

After I finish my final year of high-school I plan to find gigs around Singapore and just properly start to get my name out there whilst pursuing a university degree.

PS: You seem very familiar with songs by The Killers, do you spend lots of time practicing their songs? What other artists do you usually drum to?

K: The Killers are one of my favourite bands. I remember first listening to Mr. Brightside when I first started out on drums and thinking to myself how awesome it would be to play this on drums.

I knew For Reasons Unknown due to the fact I used to listen to it on repeat for a while!

I drum to a wide variety of artists and genres, from Led Zeppelin to The Beatles, from Dave Brubeck to Rush  I even drum to a lot of the new emerging Indie artists.

Instagram Photo

PS: Who / what are your musical inspirations, and why?

K: Music is my absolute life and my passion. I live and breathe music and have done so since I was a little boy.

Over the years I have had a number of musical inspirations, it started with Michael Jackson and progressed from there. It is impossible to mention all of my inspirations, but I listen to literally all kinds of genres which benefit me as a drummer / musician!

I love the simplicity of Mac Demarco and Courtney Barnett, the groove in Stewart Copelands drumming for The Police and even Jordan Rakei. Anderson Paak and Green Day come to mind when thinking of my inspirations due to their energy.

I am inspired by a plethora of amazing artists. I have recently performed Led Zeppelins Moby Dick with my brother for my Higher Level music course at school.

PS: Lastly, how do you wish to proceed with your love for drumming?

K: I have always wanted to be a musician and do what I love for a living, so I really hope that this transpires into something wonderful that will get my name out there and open doors for me.

I am only 18, and as my dad says, the world is my oyster now more so than ever before because of what transpired on Saturday!

Instagram Photo

The headlining acts at Formula 1 2018 Singapore Airlines Singapore Grand Prixs Padang Stage included (in order of appearance) Jay Chou, Liam Gallagher (ex-Oasis), The Killers, Dua Lipa and Martin Garrix.

Cover Photo: Rob Loud (@robloud)

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This article Meet Kapil Bhuta: The 18-Year-Old Fan Who Drummed With The Killers At The Singapore F1 Grand Prix appeared first on Popspoken.
More than 150 works by American artist Alexander Calder, including his famous mobiles, will go on display starting Friday at Montreal's Museum of Fine Arts, Canada's first retrospective dedicated to the influential sculptor. New York's Guggenheim and the Centre Pompidou in Paris, museums in two cities the artist called home, contributed works to the exhibit titled "Alexander Calder, Radical Inventor," which is set to run until February 24. The show dedicated to the artist who "made sculpture move" includes some two dozen of the mobiles that launched Calder to fame. Once a day, a museum attendant will set the delicate works, which will be suspended from the ceiling, into motion. A collection of the artist's sculptures, paintings and jewelry will also be on display. Trained as an engineer, Calder used a wide variety of media to make more than 22,000 works before he died in 1976. Montreal is home to Calder's monumental sculpture "Trois disques," known colloquially there as "Man." The massive work of abstract public art insinuating human and technological progress stands 22 meters (72 feet) high and was installed in the city's Parc Jean-Drapeau for the 1967 World's Fair. The monumental work is comprised of overlapping arches of stainless steel -- and as a "stabile," the opposite of a mobile, the sculpture is stationary while creating plays of shadow and light that depict movement.
Masjid Jamae one of the earliest mosques in Singapore located in Chinatown. Muslims praying. Salat. Singapore. (Photo: Pascal Deloche / Godong)

Singapores Muslim scholars and religious leaders declared their support for Section 377A of the Penal Code on Wednesday (19 September), a day after the Catholic Archbishop of Singapore stated his position against repealing the law, which criminalises sex between men.

The Singapore Islamic Scholars and Religious Teachers Association (Pergas) said in a media statement posted on its Facebook page that it does not support the attempt to repeal the law, as it could threaten the importance of the traditional family unit as the foundation of a society.

It added that the purpose of a family unit is to give birth to the new generation, as well as to protect the existence of mankind. To achieve these objectives, Islam emphasises the formation of a family through legal marriage between a man and a woman.

Pergas also believes that, if the law is repealed, another negative implication is that it would normalise the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender and queer (LGBTQ) lifestyle.

This conflicts with the Governments policy of building strong family units to strengthen the fabric of society, it said. It is also in contrast with the majority Singaporeans who still hold on to traditional family values, as according to the survey done by Ipsos only 12 per cent opposed Section 377A.

The group also noted, It may also cause confusion among the younger generation regarding morality and traditional values.

Despite its stance on Section 377A, Pergas asked Muslims to uphold the values of humanity when interacting with others, including those from the LGBTQ community.

Our relationship with those from the LGBTQ community, just as how we interact with others, should be filled with mercy (rahmah) as we extend kindness to all, it said.

Pergas sincerely hopes that members of society, especially the Muslim community, maintain good manners and act wisely in discussing this issue. Avoid insulting others, nor belittling others, as well as their opinions.

Story continues

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Section 377A should not be repealed now: Singapore Archbishop William Goh

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Thousands back petition to maintain Singapores gay sex ban
Malaysias former deputy prime minister Anwar Ibrahim giving a talk titled Leadership in the 21st Century: Winds of Change at the 10th Ho Rih Hwa Leadership Lecture Series on 20 September, 2018. (PHOTO: Dhany Osman/Yahoo News Singapore)

It is up to Singaporeans to decide whether they want to pursue vibrant democratic reform in their country, said Malaysias former deputy prime minister Anwar Ibrahim on Thursday (20 September).



Speaking at the 10th edition of the Ho Rih Hwa Leadership Lecture Series held at the Singapore Management University, Anwar was responding to an attendees question on the possibility of political reform in Singapore in light of the Pakatan Harapan (PH) coalitions historic victory in the recent Malaysian general elections (GE).

The president of the Parti Keadilan Rakyat (PKR) and de facto leader of PH, stressed that it is not right to compare Singapores political situation with that of Malaysia.

Anwar described Malaysia as being in a post-normal state following PHs unexpected victory in the GE, which saw the Barisan Nasional (BN) coalition lose control of power for the first time in Malaysias history.

The attendee who asked the question had compared BNs domination of Malaysias political scene with the Peoples Action Partys longstanding position as Singapores ruling party.

To be fair, Singapores issue or problem cannot be compared to the fiasco in Malaysia. Nobody talks about endemic corruption or discrimination as you see in (Malaysia), he said. (Malaysia) was in a state, if not handled (properly)we would certainly go down the drain.

SMU Chairman Ho Kwon Ping (left) and Anwar Ibrahim on 20 September, 2018. (PHOTO: Dhany Osman/Yahoo News Singapore)

Mahathir not an unfriendly leader

The 71-year-old former political detainee was released from prison in May after receiving a royal pardon and is set to succeed Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad in two years, as agreed upon by PH leaders prior to the GE.

On his predecessor and former mentor, Anwar said that the common view of Mahathir being an unfriendly leader is inaccurate.

He has strong views about some deals which he believed to be incorrect or that we are not in the position to implement due to costs, he added.

Anwar stressed that despite several prickly issues  such as the water agreement  the relationship between Singapore and Malaysia is not problematic.

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In May, Mahathir had also pledged to scrap the Kuala Lumpur-Singapore High-Speed Rail deal that was signed with the previous administration, citing the need to reduce Malaysias RM1 trillion (S$337 billion) debt.

To me, (the issue such as water) is not a problem that should cause tensions. There are issues that must be resolved as friends and as good neighbours in the interest of both countries, said Anwar, before playfully thanking a 1,200-strong crowd consisting of students from different schools, SMU stakeholders and faculty members in Japanese.

He added that Mahathir has, in fact, encouraged his ministers to visit Singapore, to a point where there has been an unprecedented number of exchanges between the two countrys leaders over the last four months.

(I) myself has come to Singapore twice this week, said Anwar, referring to the Singapore Summit event he attended last Saturday. Thursdays SMU appearance marked Anwars second public appearance in Singapore since being released from prison.

Regarding Singaporean politicians, he noted that the nations leaders are smart, competent but too serious at times. By comparison, Malaysias leaders tend to be a bit kawan-kawan (Malay for friends) and practise a lot of give and take, he said, drawing laughter from the crowd.

On a more serious note, he said that Singapore-Malaysia relations should be cultivated and maintained on a personal level, beyond the structured context and governance.

Incorrigible optimist

Describing himself as an incorrigible optimist, Anwar also spoke at length about the qualities of leadership needed in the 21st century. Beyond leading by example, modern leaders should also demonstrate compassion and forgiveness, he added.

Leaders cannot live in such opulence with all the diamonds in the world and yet ask the common people to sacrifice for the sake of the country, he said.

With his trademark candour, Anwar also spoke briefly about his stint in prison  where books were the only friends who kept him company.

(You meet) mosquitoes and cockroaches. You dont meet people, said Anwar. Mr George Yeo sent a book he autographed when I was in prison. I was able to finish the book. If he sent it to me now, I will take months.

He even weighed in on the touchy subject of the Singapore-Malaysia chicken rice rivalry.

Chicken rice belongs to Malaysia and Singapore  giving an objective answer, rice from Malaysia, no question, chicken from both Malaysia and Singapore, he quipped.

Other Singapore stories:

Book review  Anwar Returns: The Final Twist

Charges against me were part of malicious prosecution: Anwar Ibrahim

3 activists who met Mahathir ask PM Lee to probe MP Seah Kian Pengs highly irresponsible comments

Singapore shouldnt over-react to every articulation by Mahathirs government: Ng Eng Hen
Poland might not yet be ready for a permanent US military base, the head of the US Army said Wednesday, the day after Polish President Andrzej Duda offered to host "Fort Trump." Duda went to the White House on Tuesday to reiterate Poland's long-standing desire for a permanent US troop deployment to the eastern European country -- a contentious move some worry would anger Russia and draw US troops away from long-established bases in Germany. But US Army Secretary Mark Esper told AFP that when he visited Poland in January, it appeared there was not enough space on offer to fulfill the training requirements for US soldiers. "It was not sufficient in terms of size and what we could do in the manoeuver space and certainly on the ranges," Esper said. "You need a lot of range space to do tank gunnery, for example." He added that, in many cases, the terrain was "maybe not robust enough to really allow us to maintain the level of readiness we would like to maintain." Defense Secretary Jim Mattis on Tuesday expressed similar concerns, saying there was a "host of details" that need to be studied alongside the Poles before any decision is made. "It's not just about a base," Mattis told reporters. "It's about training ranges, it's about maintenance facilities at the base, all these kinds of things." Trump said Poland is offering to pay Washington at least $2 billion to help meet the costs of the base, which Duda said could be called "Fort Trump," and that the US is "looking at it very seriously." Duda said Russian military expansion, starting with a takeover of rebel areas of neighboring Georgia and more recently the annexation of Ukraine's Black Sea Crimea region, was part of "constant violation of international law." Poland has been angling for a permanent US troop presence since at least a decade ago, when it was in talks with president George W. Bush's administration to host a missile-defense complex. That deal eventually fell through under president Barack Obama, but Poland in March signed a $4.75 billion contract to purchase a US-made Patriot anti-missile system. NATO last year opened a counter-espionage hub in Poland aimed at expanding the alliance's intelligence-gathering capabilities amid tensions with Russia. The US-led alliance has also bolstered its forces in eastern Europe with four international battalions acting as tripwires against possible Russian adventurism in the region. Esper is set to visit Europe next weekend, traveling to Germany, Bulgaria and France, where he will attend the Meuse-Argonne American Cemetery for a commemoration 100 years after World War I.
The PropTech industry in Singapore is heating up, indeed.

Today, PropTech marketplace Ohmyhome announced that they have just raised S$4 million Series A funding, led by Golden Equator Capital.

Launched in September 2016 by sisters Rhonda and Race Wong, Ohmyhome sets out to make housing transactions simpler, faster, and more affordable by facilitating DIY transactions, agent services at fixed rates, and on-demand mortgage and legal services.

According to the press release, Ohmyhome was named Singapores No.1 HDB app in January 2017.

Said Rhonda Wong, CEO and co-founder of Ohmyhome, After seeing a strong adoption for our services, our focus now is to further drive growth in Singapore and expand into the neighbouring markets.

Added Race Wong, COO and co-founder, As other industries embraced innovation, we saw a gap in the real estate market where transactions are carried out in a traditional manner. [] That was why we founded Ohmyhome to create a one-stop solution to make housing transactions simpler, faster, and affordable for all homeowners and home seekers.

The Ohmyhome team

Daren Tan, Managing Partner at Golden Equator Capital shared:

The market average selling time for property in Singapore is 120 days. At Ohmyhome, the fastest selling time is in one day and average of 33 days.

Currently, Ohmyhome has offices in Singapore and The Philippines, and with its fresh round of funding, plans to deepen its presence in Singapore and plans to expand into Malaysia and Thailand.

Also Read Balancing Motherhood And Startup Life  The Sporean Sisters Of Ohmyhome Show Us How Its Done

The post Spore Property Marketplace Ohmyhome Raises S$4M  Eyes Msia And Thailand Expansion appeared first on Vulcan Post.
Eliminating dead-but-toxic cells occurring naturally in the brains of mice designed to mimic Alzheimer's slowed neuron damage and memory loss associated with the disease, according to a study published Wednesday that could open a new front in the fight against dementia. The accumulation in the body of "zombie cells" that can no longer divide but still cause harm to other healthy cells, a process called senescence, is common to all mammals. Scientists have long known that these dead-beat cells gather in regions of the brain linked to old age diseases ranging from osteoarthritis and atherosclerosis to Parkinson's and dementia. Prior research had also shown that the elimination of senescent cells in ageing mice extended their healthy lifespan. But the new results, published in Nature, are the first to demonstrate a cause-and-effect link with a specific disease, Alzheimer's, the scientists said. But any treatments that might emerge from the research are many years down the road, they cautioned. In experiments, a team led by Tyler Bussian of the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota used mice genetically modified to produce the destructive, cobweb-like tangles of tau protein that form in the neurons of Alzheimer's patients. The mice were also programmed to allow for the elimination of "zombie" cells in the same region. "When senescent cells were removed, we found that the diseased animals retained the ability to form memories, and eliminated signs of inflammation," said senior author Darren Baker, also from the Mayo Clinic. The mice likewise failed to develop Alzheimer's signature protein "tangles", and retained normal brain mass. - Keeping zombies at bay - A closer look revealed that the "zombies" belonged to a class of cells in the brain and spinal cord, called glia, that provide crucial support and insulation to neurons. "Preventing the build-up of senescent glia can block the cognitive decline and neuro-degeneration normally experienced by these mice," Jay Penney and Li-Huei Tsai, both from MIT, wrote in a comment, also in Nature. Bussian and his team duplicated the results with pharmaceuticals, suggesting that drugs could one day slow or block the emergence of Alzheimer's by keeping these zombie cells at bay. "There hasn't been a new dementia drug in 15 years, so it's exciting to see the results of this promising study in mice," said James Pickett, head of research at Alzheimer's Society in London. For Lawrence Rajendran, deputy director of the Dementia Research Institute at King's College London, the findings "open up new vistas for both diagnosis and therapy for neurodegenerative diseases, including Alzheimer's." Up to now, dementia research has been mostly focused on the diseased neurons rather than their neighbouring cells. "It is increasingly becoming clear that other brains cells play a defining role," Rajendran added. Several barriers remain before the breakthrough can be translated into a "safe, effective treatment in people," Pickett and other said. The elderly often have lots of harmless brain cells that look like the dangerous senescent cells a drug would target, so the molecule would have to be good at telling the two apart. Worldwide, about seven percent of people over 65 suffer from Alzheimer's or some form of dementia, a percentage that rises to 40 percent above the age of 85. The number afflicted is expected to triple by 2050 to 152 million, according to the World Health Organization, posing a huge challenge to healthcare systems.
Twelve people were killed and dozens missing after a landslide unleashed by monsoon rains struck in the central Philippines Thursday, inflicting more misery on the already storm-battered nation. The new tragedy comes just days after 2018's most powerful storm, Typhoon Mangkhut, pounded the nation's north with heavy winds and rain, sparking a separate landslide that left dozens dead. Emergency workers in helmets and locals with shovels rushed to search for survivors of the new disaster, which happened in the village of Tina-an on the popular tourist island of Cebu. Days of heavy monsoon rains caused a steep slope of crumbly limestone and soil to collapse into at least 10 homes early Thursday when many people would still have been in bed. "Even four-storey houses are buried," said witness John Rhay Repuesto Echavez, who also saw the human toll of the slide. "(My neighbour) was crying right in front of her sister's house. There was nothing left, not even the rooftop was visible," he told AFP. "Her sister's whole family was buried." Injured survivors were wheeled into the back of ambulances and the dead were laid on pews at a local church. "We have 12 dead now," civil defence spokesman Julius Regner told AFP, adding at least 50 people were still believed missing. "There are more than 100 rescuers on the site. They are using backhoes (excavators) and other heavy equipment," he added. Civil defence officials in the region said landslides are fairly rare on Cebu, an elongated island with low hills that did not take a direct hit from Mangkhut. As Thursday's search for survivors unfolded, efforts continued in the hunt for bodies in the mining area of Itogon in the mountainous north of the Philippines, which was the area worst hit by the typhoon. Most of those killed in the storm died in landslides in the Cordillera range, which includes Itogon and other towns in a region known for gold mining. Police said on Thursday that the death toll rose to 88, primarily due to corpses recovered from the Itogon slide. Mangkhut swamped fields in the nation's agricultural north and smashed houses when it tore through at the weekend. Itogon is one of the country's oldest mining hubs, with known gold panning activity stretching back to before the 17th-century Spanish colonial conquest. Thousands of people from all over the country still flock to the upland town seeking their fortune in largely unregulated mining, which is accompanied by periodic deadly accidents.
(L-R) Members of the Select Committee on Deliberate Online Falsehoods K. Shanmugam, Charles Chong, Janil Puthucheary and Pritam Singh address reporters at a press conference on Thursday, 20 September 2018. PHOTO: Dhany Osman/Yahoo News Singapore

UPDATE: This story has been updated to include the governments in-principle acceptance of the Select Committees recommendation for a multi-pronged approach to combat deliberate online falsehoods

Authorities in Singapore must be empowered to act against the perpetrators of deliberate online falsehoods, from disrupting the flow of ad revenue to imposing criminal sanctions, said a government-appointed committee on fake news.

Almost six months after a series of often combative public hearings on fake news, the Select Committee on Deliberate Online Falsehoods (DOFs) released its recommendations in a 317-page report on Thursday (20 September). The report was submitted to Parliament on Wednesday.

One of the recommendations of the 10-member panels wide-ranging  sometimes vaguely worded  list was that the government should have the powers to swiftly disrupt the spread and influence of online falsehoods.

The committee also advised that legislation be passed to enable authorities to act against the purveyors of DOFs and to regulate tech giants such as Facebook and Twitter to be more accountable about the spread of fake news on their platforms.

The panel also urged the government to consider putting in place a framework for public education that would, among others, provide a curriculum for schools on the motivations and agendas of disinformation agents and their techniques and strategies.

Speaking at a press conference at Parliament on Thursday, committee member Janil Puthucheary noted that it was a very hefty report that addressed a live and serious threat for Singapore that threatens our national security.

Dr Puthucheary, who is a Senior Minister of State for Transport and Communications and Information, said strong measures were necessary as falsehoods travel further and faster and are much harder to dislodge. These sorts of problems can creep up on us unnoticed until it is too late, he added.

The report was issued after considering 170 written representations and 65 oral representations, as well as a seven-week public consultation. It addressed, among others, how DOFs have been used to sow discord and affect election outcomes, Singapores vulnerabilities in this arena and how countries like Germany and France have dealt with the issue.

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The report also included a 13-page addendum on the committees exchanges with Human Rights Watch and Reporters Without Borders, which ultimately declined to appear before the Select Commitee, as well as historian Thum Ping Tjin.

Thum, who had accused the ruling Peoples Action Party of being the main purveyor of fake news in Singapore, was questioned for six hours by the committee in March.

Falsehoods can be defined

Home Affairs and Law Minister K Shanmugam addresses reports at a press conference by the Select Committee on Deliberate Online Falsehoods on Thursday, 20 September 2018. PHOTO: Dhany Osman/Yahoo News Singapore

All 10 members of the committee were present at the press conference, including Home Affairs and Law Minister K. Shanmugam. Pressed several times on when the government would respond to the committees recommendations, he would only say it was not appropriate for the committee to comment, and that the government would give its response in due course.

Asked if the panel had deliberated on what the definition of a falsehood should be, Shanmugam was emphatic: The Select Committee has been quite clear: falsehoods are capable of definition, they have been defined in legislation, they have been defined in the courts and the Select Committee is quite comfortable that it can be defined. Shouldnt be an issue.

But the minister also stressed that the committee was clear on the difference between publicly circulated communications and that which was private and personal and do not have a wide circulation. He noted, Whether its an open platform or a closed platform, if youre a sending a message to somebody and it doesnt have a wider circulation and its a purely private message about your family, then we should be careful about intervening in that.

Given that tech companies have been vigorously opposed to regulation, was the government concerned that this might put them at odds with the tech giants? Puthucheary responded that the authorities would continue engaging these companies. It is about what is the right approach to regulationthis engagement and negotiation has been going on, and we hope that it will lead to a positive outcome for them.

Governments response to Committees report

The government said it has accepted in-principle the committees recommendation for a multi-pronged approach to combat DOFs.

In a joint statement issued by the Ministry of Communications and Information and the Ministry of Law, the government said it will study the Committees report closely and work with stakeholders to roll out the non-legislative and legislative measures recommended by the Committee over the next few months.

Commending the committee for its comprehensive and thoughtful report, the government acknowledges the committees findings on the serious challenges and real risks posed by DOFs to the international community, including how they can harm national security and undermine a nations sovereignty. The committee has also found that DOFs could affect a countrys social cohesion, incite public unrest and violence, and that Singapore is not immune to this grave threat, the government said.

Related stories

Thum Ping Tjin lied to Select Committee, concludes fake news panel

Fake news could cause people to be disillusioned: Shanmugam

Facebook concerned about rush by Singapore to introduce law to combat fake news

K Shanmugam presses Facebook on lack of transparency over Cambridge Analytica saga

COMMENT: Truths, half-truths and the Singapore story
While this donation is largely symbolic, blockchain does present an opportunity to make political donations more transparent

For the first time in Taiwans lively democracy, a political donation has been made in bitcoins.

Hsiao Hsin-chen, a candidate for Taipei City Council with the minority New Power Party, announced on his Facebook page that he had received a handful of anonymous donations in bitcoins with a total value of US$325 (NT$10,000.)

Hsiao, who announced on Facebook in August that he was open to accepting donations in this cryptocurrency, said the development had political as well as technological implications.

Bitcoin donations, he declared, could help keep Taiwans political system clean.

Accepting bitcoins as a political donation is more symbolic than the act appears, Hsiao said.

Bitcoin has a transparent nature. Each transaction is recorded publicly using blockchain technology, making it difficult to counterfeit. This could lead to more transparency when politicians accepted political donations, he said.

Generally in Taiwan if a political donation exceeds a government limit or the donor sets additional conditions on how the money will be used, it is considered a bribe.

Also Read: Havent seen token that qualifies as security, says Singapore official

In 2014, the U.S. Federal Elections Commission issued rules about how bitcoins could be used as political donations. Each U.S. citizen can donate bitcoins with value of no more than US$100. After these regulations were issued, many American political candidates have received donations in this cryptocurrency.

Taiwan is yet to formulate regulations on political donations in cryptocurrencies

Taiwans government, however, hasnt formulated similar regulations. The Ministry of Interior currently classes bitcoins as non-cash political donations.

Taiwans recently-amended Political Donations Act, does state anonymous donors may give no more than US$325 (NT$10,000.) Even if an anonymous donation is in bitcoins, the value should be no more than this figure.

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Bitcoins value, however, always floats. It could be 1 bitcoin to US$6,450 on one day and 1 bitcoin to US$7,230 the next day. This means that although a donation in bitcoins may not exceed the government limit of US$325 at the time of donation, a few days later, its value could soar much higher.

The Political Donations Act aims to pursue transparency, said the Control Yuan,a watchdog agency that monitors other branches of Taiwanese government, in a statement.

Also Read: Singapores proptech marketplace Ohmyhome raises US$2.9M to expand into Malaysia, Thailand

The Control Yuan, suggested, candidates should maintain full and accurate records of political donations.

If the value exceeds government limits, candidates should return the excess amount to the donor. If political candidates cannot find donors owing to anonymity, they should give the excess amount to the Control Yuan.



The article Taiwans First Ever Political Donation in Bitcoins first appeared on BusinessNext.

Photo by Andrew Haimerl on Unsplash

The post Taiwans first ever political donation in Bitcoins appeared first on e27.
Toronto, Canada and Lima, Peru have made their debut on the 2018 edition of the World's 50 Best Bars list, which released the bars ranked 51-100 on Wednesday ahead of the gala event next month.

New this year, Toronto's Bar Raval and Lima's Carnaval made their first appearances on the influential list, placing 70th and 68th respectively.

Overall, the second half of the ranking features watering holes from 28 cities across 19 countries, with the US leading the charge at 12 bars, seven of which are located in New York City.

Interestingly, long-time New York favorites like PDT and the posh Aviary bar seem to have fallen out of favor, taking up spots towards the bottom of the list: PDT ranks 96th and the Aviary 89th.

Perhaps the most notable performer is The Sober Company in Shanghai, which made its debut at No. 51 -- also the highest-ranked bar on the list.

After the US, Asia landed 13 addresses, including three each from Singapore, South Korea and China; two from Japan; and one each from Thailand and Indonesia.

South and Central America landed six bars between them, and the UK is represented by five addresses.

Click here for the full list of 51-100: https://www.worlds50bestbars.com/worlds-50-best-bar-2018_51-100/
China is expected to team up with Japan on infrastructure investment in Southeast Asia, a sign that Beijings escalating trade war with Washington is pushing the two Asian rivals closer, according to diplomatic observers and sources.

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is likely to visit Beijing next month, where the agenda is expected to include cooperation on agriculture, innovation and infrastructure projects in other countries, particularly along Thailands Eastern Economic Corridor, according to sources familiar with Japan-China relations.

The two nations have long had a strained relationship, with historical animosities stemming from Japans wartime occupation of China and an ongoing territorial dispute over a group of islets in the East China Sea, called the Senkakus by Japan and the Diaoyus by China.

As Washington turns up the trade war heat on China, however, Beijing and Tokyo have been warming to each other, most notably with the resumption of high-level dialogue.

In May, Chinese Premier Li Keqiang visited Tokyo, the first such trip by a Chinese premier in eight years. Late last month, high-level Japanese delegations travelled to Beijing, where Toshihiro Nikai, secretary general of Japans ruling Liberal Democratic Party, met Chinese Vice-President Wang Qishan.

Abes trip, the first to the Chinese capital by a Japanese prime minister since 2011, is likely to take place around October 23  the 40th anniversary of the China-Japan treaty of peace and friendship taking effect  and would involve a Japanese delegation of 500 people from a range of business sectors, the source said.

The trade war with the US has provided more incentives for China to improve relations with Japan, said the source, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorised to disclose details of the visit.

The Chinese side has become more active and eager to discuss wide-ranging cooperation with Japan in preparation for Prime Minister Abes visit.

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The source said Beijing had raised the idea of working with Tokyo on Thailands Eastern Economic Corridor,and that Chinese officials had become more open than in the past to discussing transparency, openness, economic viability and fiscal sustainability of projects related to President Xi Jinpings signature Belt and Road Initiative.

The Thai government has been seeking international investors to support its flagship development project, which aims to turn Thailands eastern seaboard into a leading economic zone in Southeast Asia through expansion of ports and airports, and new railway links.

Japan has been ahead of China in terms of its investments in Thailand for many years, but by cooperating with Japan and learning from its experience, China will be able to strengthen its economic presence in Southeast Asia, said Natee Taweesrifuengfung, a specialist on international relations at the Panyapiwat Institute of Management in Thailand.

As China looks to Japan to diversify its markets as a hedge against its trade war with the US, the two countries are also likely to discuss expanding Chinas imports of Japanese agricultural products, according to the source.

Ahead of Abes visit, Japanese officials had also been appealing to China to ease or lift an import ban on food from 10 Japanese areas including Tokyo, the source added.

Meanwhile, Japan is seeking to diversify its export channels to ease the potential impact after a free-trade agreementsigned with the European Union in August, as well as the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership, which would bring an influx of European and Asia-Pacific agricultural products into the Japanese market, raising competition for Japanese producers.

Trump: we probably have no choice but to put tariffs on all Chinese goods



China is potentially a big export market, because demand for Japanese food has been rapidly on the rise in China, the source said.

For Japan, the shift in attitude towards Chinas belt and road projects would add momentum to its rapprochement with Beijing at a time of uncertainty caused by US President Donald Trump over the US commitment to a presence in Asia and its alliance with Japan, Liu Weidong, a specialist from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing, said.

But Liu also said China and Japan remained rivals, in particular on the security front.

On Monday, Japans Ministry of Defence announced that a Japanese submarine had for the first time joined a naval drill in the South China Sea, in an expansion of Japanese activity in the disputed waters claimed by China and other nations.

Chinas foreign ministry has warned that Japan should act with caution and not in a way that could damage peace and stability in the region.

How close China and Japan can be depends on Trumps attitude towards the US alliance with Japan, Liu said.

Both China and Japan have been under pressure and are forced to reconcile, he said. But having such rapprochement doesnt represent a fundamental change to the two countries dynamic, and Japan will have to balance its relations between China and the US.

This article Trade war pushes rivals China and Japan closer  on imports, talks and overseas infrastructure first appeared on South China Morning Post

For the latest news from the South China Morning Post download our mobile app. Copyright 2018.
The queue for iPhone XS and iPhone XS Max at the Apple store in Orchard Road. (PHOTO: Abdul Rahman Azhari/Yahoo Lifestyle Singapore)

It seems that iPhone fans in Singapore are determined to get their hands on the latest iPhone models, despite the sky-high prices.

Yahoo Lifestyle Singapore saw about 350 people queueing to buy the new iPhone XS and iPhone XS Max at Apples flagship Orchard Road store on Thursday afternoon (20 September), ahead of the launch of sales of the smartphones the next day.

Apple announced its latest products last Wednesday, which included a new Apple Watch as well as iPhone XS, iPhone XS Max and iPhone XR.

The iPhone XS costs $1,649 (64GB), $1,889 (256GB) or $2,199 (512GB) in Singapore depending on its memory capacity, while the larger-sized iPhone XS Max costs $1,799 (64GB), $2,039 (256GB) or $2,349 (512GB).

The cheaper iPhone XR, which will be available for pre-orders on 19 October and will begin sales on 26 October, costs $1,229 (64GB), $1,299 (256GB) or $1,469 (512GB).

Among those queueing was Indian national Piyush Lakhwank, 26, who said that money does not matter when it comes to purchasing the latest iPhones.

As high as the prices go, we dont mind. The iPhone is superb. iPhone XS Max is very good so we will purchase it, said the retail professional.

Piyush Lakhwank (left) and Nirav Nanda. (PHOTO: Abdul Rahman Azhari/Yahoo Lifestyle Singapore)

Lakhwanks friend, 28-year-old business professional Nirav Nanda, who was also in the queue, shared a similar sentiment.

The prices are a little bit high, but we are the crazy ones to use this phone, so well buy it, he said.

As for Linh Lai, 30, he is intent on buying the upcoming iPhone models as they are worth the money.

Apple has a long reputation of (producing) good quality products, said the student. I dont care about the price anyway, because I like the product and the simplicity of the iOS. Now, you can use the phone for two to three years. You are paying for something for everyday use, so its not very much.

Apple customers sleeping in the queue for the latest iPhones at the Apple store in Orchard Road. (PHOTO: Abdul Rahman Azhari/Yahoo Lifestyle Singapore)

Vietnamese national Le Thang, 20, who is the first in line, said that he came to Singapore just so that he could purchase the iPhone XS Max. He will be returning to Vietnam on Friday night.

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The iPhone is special and beautiful. I love Apple products. They are very fun, he said.

Another Vietnamese, 17-year-old Johnni Ramsey, said that he was hired to purchase iPhones for an Apple store in Vietnam.

They pay $100 for each iPhone I take back (to Vietnam). They hire people in Singapore to queue here, to bring back iPhones, said the student, adding that there were other such hired shoppers from Vietnam who were in the queue as well.

Follow Yahoo Lifestyle Singapore on Facebook.

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The United States has ordered two Chinese state-backed news organisations to register as foreign agents, a move one US official said went beyond trade to reflect Beijings lack of give on media access.

Both Xinhua News Agency and China Global Television Network (CGTN), the English-language arm of Chinese state broadcaster CCTV, have been told to clearly label their affiliation with Beijing and disclose budget and ownership structure information under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg reported this week.

Chinas foreign ministry responded on Wednesday by calling on all countries to take on an open and inclusive spirit in promoting the role of the media, and to avoid politicising media activities.

As far as I know, China and the US have communicated on this issue, ministry spokesman Geng Shuang said. But what I want to say is, we hope that the relevant party will facilitate rather than obstruct the regular work of media outlets.

He added that Beijing would continue to help foreign media conduct unbiased reporting in China.

A senior US official did not directly confirm the move, but said it reflected US grievances about Chinas lack of reciprocity in areas beyond trade, including restricted access for American media outlets in China.

We are now seeing that in Washington, the tolerance and patience is gone ... and you will see more of that in other aspects [besides trade], the official said. China needs to be held accountable.

The US Department of Justices requests under the law  enacted in 1938 to counter German propaganda efforts  come amid rising concerns about foreign influence in the US, including alleged Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. It also follows appeals by US senators and an advisory body to the US Congress to require Chinese state media to register under FARA, as four Russian state-funded outlets have done since last year.

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US President Donald Trump on Tuesday accused China of meddling in the US midterm elections by taking aim at his political base in their escalating trade war, but Geng rejected the claim, saying China would not interfere in the domestic affairs of other countries.

After the Chinese media outlets register as foreign agents, they will be have to report to the government twice a year and submit copies of reports within 48 hours of publication.

Representatives from Xinhua and CCTV said on Wednesday that they were unaware of the US government requests, and did not respond to follow-up queries by phone and fax.

Foreign media require foreign ministry approval to operate in China, and are subject to tight controls.

Overseas journalists working in the country say reporting conditions are becoming more hostile, with threats to revoke their visas as a form of coercion, according to the Foreign Correspondents Club of China. The websites for US outlets such as The New York Times and CNN are also inaccessible on the mainland.

In the United States, there are 20 registered foreign agents from China, including state-controlled media outlets China Daily, the overseas version of Peoples Daily, and most recently the Xinmin Evening News, according to the Department of Justice.

While registration under FARA does not prevent the media outlets or other entities from influencing US policies, laws, or public opinion, it does require them to be transparent about the foreign entity for which they work.

But after Russias Kremlin-backed TV channel RT registered as a foreign agent last November, it was also stripped of its media access to the US Congress. The authority that controls the official press credentials for the Congress said it could not accredit media applicants that were employed by foreign governments or their representatives. Xinhua and CCTV both had congressional press access, according to the latest accreditation list.

Chinese media outlets have expanded their presence in the United States in recent years.

Xinhua, an official mouthpiece for the Communist Party, has leased a prominent LED sign in Times Square in New York, previously airing coverage of Beijings disputed claims to the South China Sea. Meanwhile, CGTN rebranded itself in 2016 to better cater to global audiences, with a broadcast centre based in Washington.

Additional reporting by Catherine Wong and Jun Mai

This article United States takes swipe at Chinas media curbs with foreign agent orders on CGTN and Xinhua first appeared on South China Morning Post

For the latest news from the South China Morning Post download our mobile app. Copyright 2018.
Where are the working-class stories and talent in UK cinema culture today? asks Danny Leigh in the cover story of our October issue. Rewind to the Woodfall era of the 1960s, and working-class actors and directors were revitalising British filmmaking. But over 50 years on, Leigh finds their equivalents struggling to take hold in the industry.

Meanwhile the subject of class has been ignored in many of the debates around privilege and identity in cinema. Leigh explores those working-class filmmakers and stories that have made an impact, the ones that should have made more and explores what needs to change. Meanwhile Anna Coatman argues that since the 90s, women have been key to reimagining the scope of working-class cinema beyond social realism.

Continuing the class theme of the issue, Matthew Sweet talks to Mike Leigh about his new film Peterloo, the first fiction feature to be made about the 1819 massacre of peaceful protesters demanding parliamentary reform: I grew up a 15-minute bus ride from where this happened, says Leigh. But we didnt know about it. And loads of folk working on the lm, who were from up north, had never heard of it. Sweet surveys how Leighs work has work has already shown us the future to which Peterloo leads while the director tells of his battles against cliche and his own revolt against suggestions to change his working methods.

As cinemas marmite provocateur Gaspar Noe takes on the dance movie with Climax, Anna Bogutskaya talks to him about his bacchanalian frenzy of sex and violence and how he wants Rainer Werner Fassbinder to be proud of him.

Carrie Rickey revisits the remarkable career of Elaine May, the overlooked comedienne, director and screenwriter who skewered male vanity with relish.

With LGBTQ+ rights in the US increasingly under threat by the Trump administration, Desiree Akhavan discusses her timely 1990s-set tale of a woman sent to a rural gay conversion therapy centre The Miseducation of Cameron Post with Anna Coatman.

Few recent films capture the spirit of place as deeply, or as idiosyncratically, as Columbus, posits Jonathan Romney as he talks to the films director, Kogonada. S&S readers will know Kogonada from his various video essays; his debut feature is a love letter to the serene elegance of modernist architecture.

A number of Jackie Chans films being released on Blu-ray provides the perfect excuse for Nick Pinkerton to revel in the astonishing courage, lunatic stuntwork and sheer fun of the action maestros best films.

Also this issue: Catherine Wheatley reassesses the career of Angela Schanelec; Hannah McGill takes aim at Peter Biskinds musings on film and extremism; Chloe Zhao talks about The Rider; Bart Layton discusses American Animals; a preview of the BFI London Film Festival; a report from the Locarno film festival; reviews of Faces Places, The Little Stranger, A Northern Soul, Wajib; and much more.
Thursday, September 20, 2018 Debate Analysis: Pearce Shrinks From MLG Corruption Charge And She Takes The Win, Plus: Yvette Vs. Xochitl Has Pollsters Parting Ways



(Complete video



And what Pearce wouldn't say is what his primary



Veteran political analyst and attorney Greg Payne, a Dem, sums it up this way:



Pearce did not step up and press his negative attacks against Lujan Grisham over Delta Consulting. If you can't say it in a debate when your opponent is sitting across the table from you, no one is going to think your negative ad is credible--no matter how much money you spend on it.



A longtime GOP consultant said it appeared Pearce's handlers do not want to risk unwinding the positive, friendly image he built over the summer with TV ads that showcased a friendly uncle-like figure who gets along with just about everyone. His take:



Pearce didn't do badly on the issues. Dems watching would agree with Michelle and R's watching would go with Pearce and everyone runs to their corner. But he did not dent her on the character/corruption issue that could cause second guessing among her supporters. And with only 7 percent of the electorate undecided and him trailing 50-43 (in the ABQ Journal poll) he needs to dent her. By not taking that risk, he handed her the victory.



Many of those chiming in agree with this Pearce sympathizer on what went wrong:



MLG was the more articulate and nimble debater--a result of having gone through a contentious primary, which Pearce did not. . . She was prepared to use Pearces record in the Legislature and in Congress against him with specifics. She seemed prepared for everything Pearce said. Pearce wasnt quite so nimble  perhaps because he hasnt had to debate anyone in ages. He seemed to avoid attacking her on some of her most controversial votes or statements. He was too nice and didnt try to throw her off her base.



SHORT TAKE STEVE



Another veteran politico, independent Steve Cabiedes, scored it for MLG with this reasoning:



There was no knockdown or knockout by Steve which he needed.



BOYD'S BARBED ATTACKS



The tone of the debate was what caught the attention of the Journal's



In a remarkable change in tone, Michelle Lujan Grisham and Steve Pearce seized on their first televised debate Wednesday as a chance to sharply question each other and trade barbed attacks over whose vision is right for New Mexico.



NEXT TIME







Next time, Pearce needs to aim more directly at her. If hes going to charge her with corruption in his ads, he needs to say it in debates and forums and prosecute her on the spot. He also needs to challenge her policy positions, specifically on CYFD and crime.



Furthermore, by using her own words against her, he should create a split between progressive Democrats and conservative Democrats--things that might cause progressives to stay home and conservative Dems to support him. Pearces number one goal: convince everyone that MLG is corrupt and unworthy of the office of governor. Second to this, he should also portray MLG as an unreasonable and far left liberal with no record of reaching across the aisle.



NO, STEVE WON



The political experts may have thought Pearce lost the debate because he failed to carry his corruption message about MLG to the public, but his campaign touted



EVEN MORE ANALYSIS



Back to our stable of analysts and this Dem Senior Alligator:



Lujan Grisham needed to stay the course and she did. Pearce didnt really do much to weaken Grisham with direct attacks, and probably could have done better to differentiate himself from his opponent.



Both talk like pedantic, Potomac River politicos reciting whatever is popular these days in DC. With Grisham 58 and Pearce now 70, they are both doing very little to capture the energetic, new style we see around the country in this years election. How about some new ideas? Some alternative takes on the topics du jour? A little inspiration, perhaps, please? Their unimaginative approach on the tremendous issues we face doesnt bode well for whats to come in Santa Fe. Someone needs to light a fire under these people.



That Gator wasn't the only one who thought the debate discussion flew right over the heads of most voters:



If the public was turned off or lost quick interest in this debate, one of the reasons is that neither of the candidates were speaking to real people. They were using the phrases and short-hand of the political, consulting and media class. I mean, what on earth was Lujan Grisham talking about when she kept going on about the CLIFF effect? And then there was Pearce wanting his hypothetical addict who also hypothetically stole his car to be on heroin, instead of meth. If someone steals your car, who cares what they're on? Neither one of these candidates seem to live in the same world the rest of us do.



YVETTE VS. XOCHITL



Yvette & Xochitl Things just keep getting more interesting in the race for the open southern congressional seat. Now the New York Times pollsters



NM-2, final: D+1, Torres-Small (D) 46, Herrell (R) 45 This is the first Democratic lead we've found in a district rated as "lean Republican" Torres-Small has a strong 33/17 fav rating, and she's running well ahead of the R+7 generic ballot here.



The difference in the polls is the turnout assumption. The Journal and pollster Brian Sanderoff do not see new Dem voters surging in the southern CD and the Times does. For example, the Times survey agrees with the Journal's that Herrell has a healthy lead among people calling themselves "certain voters" but says among voters who did not vote in both the '16 and '18 elections Torres Small has a lead of 15 points.



We think we may be ahead of the crowd and we're sticking by our "likely Republican" rating for the race because for decades turnout in Las Cruces--the home base of Torres Small--has been notoriously difficult to spike in a mid term elections. In the past we've seen Democratic efforts to take this seat turn into a head fake come October. That means we think the electorate will mostly be those certain voters. But we could be wrong--that because of Trump newbie voters this year will flood the polls. All of this makes for an interesting race--for now. We look forward to the debates.



P.S. The GOP National Congressional Committee has now joined the race with attack ads on Torres Small. The Dem Congressional Committee has been on the tube pounding Herrell.



THE BOTTOM LINES







Albuquerque International Sunport came in eighth among medium-sized North America airports, notching up a few slots from last year, in a new passenger satisfaction study by J.D. Power. Based on a 1,000-point scale, J.D. Power ranked Albuquerques airport at 797 in a grouping of 21 medium-hub airports. Buffalo Niagara International Airport took the No. 1 spot in the segment, with a score of 814.



We're surprised it doesn't rank even higher.



And on that positive note and as the negative campaigns prepare to rain down, we thank you for joining us today.



This is the home of New Mexico politics.







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( c)NM POLITICS WITH JOE MONAHAN It's not what Steve Pearce said, it was what he didn't say that cost him a win to Michelle Lujan Grisham. That was the consensus of our political experts avidly watching last night's first televised gubernatorial debate on Fox New Mexico.(Complete video here .)And what Pearce wouldn't say is what his primary TV spot says: That Democrat Lujan Grisham is a corrupt politician who will be an unethical leader and who will reward her cronies from the state treasury.Veteran political analyst and attorney Greg Payne, a Dem, sums it up this way:A longtime GOP consultant said it appeared Pearce's handlers do not want to risk unwinding the positive, friendly image he built over the summer with TV ads that showcased a friendly uncle-like figure who gets along with just about everyone. His take:Many of those chiming in agree with this Pearce sympathizer on what went wrong:Another veteran politico, independent Steve Cabiedes, scored it for MLG with this reasoning:The tone of the debate was what caught the attention of the Journal's Dan Boyd There will be two more TV debates and this GOP Alligator has some advice on how Pearce can recover:The political experts may have thought Pearce lost the debate because he failed to carry his corruption message about MLG to the public, but his campaign touted a flash poll that KRQE-TV conducted after the face-off that showed him winning 54% to 46% among over 700 respondents. So take that, Brian Sanderoff.Back to our stable of analysts and this Dem Senior Alligator:That Gator wasn't the only one who thought the debate discussion flew right over the heads of most voters:Things just keep getting more interesting in the race for the open southern congressional seat. Now the New York Times pollsters have weighed in and unlike the ABQ Journal, which had GOP State Rep. Yvette Herrell beating Democrat Xochitl Torres Small by a margin of 48 to 41 , the Times survey has Torres small favored by one point--46-45. It was apparently enough for the noted Cook Political Report to move the race from "lean Republican to "toss up." That's after we moved it from "lean Republican" to likely Republican based on Herrell's strength in the survey of likely voters. Here's what the Times said:The difference in the polls is the turnout assumption. The Journal and pollster Brian Sanderoff do not see new Dem voters surging in the southern CD and the Times does. For example, the Times survey agrees with the Journal's that Herrell has a healthy lead among people calling themselves "certain voters" but says among voters who did not vote in both the '16 and '18 elections Torres Small has a lead of 15 points.We think we may be ahead of the crowd and we're sticking by our "likely Republican" rating for the race because for decades turnout in Las Cruces--the home base of Torres Small--has been notoriously difficult to spike in a mid term elections. In the past we've seen Democratic efforts to take this seat turn into a head fake come October. That means we think the electorate will mostly be those certain voters. But we could be wrong--that because of Trump newbie voters this year will flood the polls. All of this makes for an interesting race--for now. We look forward to the debates.P.S. The GOP National Congressional Committee has now joined the race with attack ads on Torres Small. The Dem Congressional Committee has been on the tube pounding Herrell.One thing ABQ can agree on in these often politically polarized times is that we have a great airport--convenient to all, exceptionally clean, efficient, good parking and a terrific maintenance staff that keeps it humming. The news We're surprised it doesn't rank even higher.And on that positive note and as the negative campaigns prepare to rain down, we thank you for joining us today.This is the home of New Mexico politics. E-mail your news and comments. (jmonahan@ix.netcom.com) Links HOME

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According to the Washington Posts data on school shootings, more than 215,000 students have experienced gun violence since the killings at Columbine High School in 1999. And that number doesnt even include teachers and other school workers. To understand what its like to survive a school shooting and then return to the classroom as an adult, I spoke with three educators who have experienced gun violence in their schools.

Heather Martin is currently a high school English teacher in Aurora, Colorado, but on April 20, 1999, she was a senior at Columbine High School, where 13 people were shot to death. The shooting began while she was in choir class.

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Mary Ann Jacob was a library clerk at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, when 20 children and six adult staff members were fatally shot in 2012. It was a Friday morning, and Mary Ann remembers that those mornings were often reserved for short dance parties to celebrate the end of the week. As she prepared for a library class with a group of fourth-graders, she heard noises coming over the schools intercom.

Ken Yuers is a fourth- and fifth-grade teacher at Rancho Tehama Elementary School in Northern California. He recalls that the shooting spree began on Nov. 13, 2017. The gunman ultimately fled the school and later shot and killed himself as police closed in on him.

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Listen by clicking the arrow on the audio player below, or via Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Google Play, Overcast, or TuneIn. An edited transcript of the conversation follows.

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The Stories

Heather Martin: A student ran up through the doors and just said, Someone has a gun downstairs, and theyre shooting. We all kind of immediately jumped up, probably out of shock, and the teacher yelled at us, Get down. So we kind of sat down, and then the gunfire erupted right outside the doorway.

So a bunch of people scattered. I did not scatter. Im not really sure why. I think I just was in shock and didnt want to overreact. Definitely not thinking that this could happen at my school. Theres a chance I went outside to investigate what was happening. A friend of mine says that we went outside the door where we saw Mr. Sanders take a bullet. I dont have any memory of that, but we did come back into the choir room and eventually barricaded ourselves into the teachers office. We put the two desks in front of the door. There were about 60 of us barricaded in there for three hours. So we heard the gunfire happening in the library, which is where most of the murders took place. And after three hours, we heard a knock at the door, and we all looked at each other like, what should we do? One of the students was like, Who is it? Denver SWAT team, open the door. So we moved the desks and came flying out the door. We couldnt get out of there fast enough.

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From there, they did question us and search us. And then led us out of the school in groups of 10. The gunman had a lot of pipe bombs that they had set off throughout the building. So the fire alarm was going off; the sprinklers were on. I remember walking through water, and when I was walking through the commons, that was very surreal. It was empty, but there were water and backpacks and paper plates floating on the water. It was eerily quiet. I often think about theI dont know why it reminds me of this, its kind of gruesomebut the scene in the movie Titanic, with all the bodies sort of just like floating in this water.

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It wasnt bodies, it was backpacks and things. There were chairs that were melted because of the bombsand then they hadnt covered the bodies yet. So we did see the bodies on the way out.

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Mary Ann Jacob: I thought, What are they doing in the office? Could they have hit the button by mistake while theyre fooling around having their Dance Party Friday? So I got up and walked over to the circulation desk and picked up the phone and called down there to let them know we could hear them  and I start hearing some loud noises, but its not really making any sense. And from under her desk, one of the school secretaries picks up the phone and says, Theres shooting. And I hung up the phone without even responding. Yelled to Yvonne Cech, who is our librarian, Lockdown, and I ran out into the hallway to the two classrooms across the hall from us and yelled Lockdown in their doors, and slammed their doors shut. And when I got back to the library, Yvonne was ushering the kids to the spot along the wall that backed up to the hallway, in between two bookcases where we had practiced our lockdown drills, and there were two other adults in the room.

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I said, What happened? And she said to me: Its the worst thing this countrys seen since Columbine.   Mary Ann Jacob, Sandy Hook Elementary

We put some bookcases around us and waited, looking at each other, the adults. We were sort of spread out among the 19, 18 kids looking at each other like were thinking, What is going on? I mean, clearly, at that point we could tell they were gunshots. It was, Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. And even hearing all that, the reality of it just wasnt sinking in.

A few minutes go by, and we thought we had locked all our doors. There were five separate doors in the library. We hear a door open, and I look up, and I see the barrel of a shotgun come around the corner. And honestly, we all thought it was the gunman but very quickly realized it was the first policeman whod come in the building. His head came around the corner.

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He looked at me and said something, and I said something in response, I dont know what. And he put his finger to his lips to tell us to be quiet and turned around and left. And Yvonne went over to check the door again, and we realized it wasnt locking properly. Were still thinking were in grave danger. So we instruct the kids to crawl along the floor to a closet. And then we closed the door and pushed two filing cabinets in front of it and waited.

So we heard a guy yell, Police, so we made him shove his badge under the door and then we pulled the file cabinets out of the way, and I opened the door. And standing outside the room where we were in was a room full of police in riot gear, and I sort of crumpled at that moment thinking, Oh my God, its real. Whatevers going on is really bad.

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And I said to the police, What do you want us to do? And theyre like, We want you to come out two by two, and an adult will take each child in each hand and well exit the building. And I remember thinking that I had to compose my face before I turned around to face the kids, and so I did and said to them, OK guys, the police are here, theyre ready to take us out. When we emerged from the library, the hallway was lined with police in riot gear with their guns drawn, like there was a very present danger. And we ran out of the building.

I remember getting to the firehouse, which was adjacent to our school, and the kids just sort of melted out of my hands. I dont remember what happened to them, and the first selectman and some people were standing there, and I said, What happened? And she said to me: Its the worst thing this countrys seen since Columbine.

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Ken Yuers: This man in our community of 1,500 people had murdered his wife the evening of the 13th and, wed come to find out later, cut open up the floorboards of his home and put her body in there, and he had been feuding with his neighbors. So the next morning, about 7:51 a.m., he shot a couple and stole a truck and began a rampage in the community.

So for me, I was at the school office, trying to arrange a meeting with a parent, and then I was on my way toward the classroom. I was between the quad in my classroom, and I stopped to talk to the head of yard duty, Patty Smith, and we were talking, and we heard a series of gunshots, about a quarter mile away, rapid fire, and Patty said to me, We may need to get these kids inside.

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I did my best army crawl toward the phone and said, Lord, forgive me for my sins, because the phone was right by the ramp where the shooter was.  Ken Yuers, Rancho Tehama Elementary School

I proceeded westward toward my classroom. I was walking very fast, just heightened alert, and we got them lined up. I got the door open. A couple of kids looked really scared, and I was getting them inside. And [I said], Hey, did you see someone? He said, I saw a guy with a gun. And then the gate crashed and not all the students were in the door yet, some of them were on the ramp. They looked, and they saw this guy with a gun, and they let out a bigyou could just hear an audible gasp. And I kept standing there at that door, Come on, get inside. And they did. And, Get under your desks. They knew what to do. They were experienced with a lockdown. And then I did my best army crawl toward the phone and said loud enough, Lord, forgive me for my sins, because the phone was right by the ramp, and I picked it up, and I called 911, and I couldnt get out.

So I called my daughters grandmother, and I told her, Hey, we have an active shooter at Rancho Tehama Elementary. Call 911, active shooter at Rancho Tehama Elementary, call 911, and hung up the phone. And the kids were whimpering. I just repeated, Our eyes are our ears, we need to remain calm. Fortunately, Mr. May and Mrs. Smith and the custodian and the teachers were now getting out too, and the secretary, everybody got those kids inside. So by the time he came around the corner, they were all inside, which was pivotal because this man went around shooting at the quad area.

He started in Room 1 where Ms. Bauman was.  Her Lock Blok was malfunctioning, so she was holding it with her body trying to pull that door closed with all of her strength. And then Room 2, where Mrs. Almand and Mrs. Smith and Mr. May were. And then he continued on toward the office. Just opened up on there where the secretary and the custodian were, and then continued on toward the eastern part of the quad, the library, shot the kindergarten and first-grade classrooms where a bullet did get a student, a 6-year-old. And a lot of the students were injured by flying glass, but we were lucky. According to the school officials, he fired off about a hundred rounds on that campus. We were extremely lucky. God help that community. I mean, five people died, but the shots going off were enough to alert us to get those kids inside.

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The Conversation

Dahlia Lithwick: Hearing these stories provides a jarring look at what we ask of teachers in America. They also remind me of a piece I wrote for Slate back in 2013 about active shooter drills in our nations schools and their unintended consequences of making children anxious and worried. My own son, during an active shooter drill at his school, was told to run like a pack of wild dogs is chasing you. Do you think lockdown drills are a good thing, or not?

Mary Ann Jacob: Whats happening today, just five years later than what happened in Sandy Hook, is different. When we did lockdown drills before 2012, we would say to the kids, This is in the event that theres a stray dog or a bear, so were just making sure that were safe. Today, its all about an active shooter, and every kid in America knows that.  Were traumatizing kids today in a vastly different way who havent actually experienced gun violence themselves but are acutely aware of how much danger theyre in. I mean, school has always been a safe haven for kids, and its not anymore.

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Ive got my plan, and Ive got my backup plan, and I have a backup plan for my backup plan. And part of being a survivor is really going through those what-ifs.  Heather Martin, Columbine High School

Dahlia Lithwick: Heather, you actually are teaching protocols. I know that you clearly feel that its better to be forearmed with knowledge and a plan than to just be shocked. How do you finesse it when you teach it so that youre not essentially terrifying the kids youre trying to protect?

Heather Martin: Well, there are a couple factors here. One is: I teach seniors, so theyre 17, 18 years old, so I think its really different talking to those students than it would be talking to younger students. Im very upfront and honest about my story, and I tell my story to my students every year. And with my students, many of them have experienced gun violence in their lives. Theres a lot of gang activity. And I also have a lot of students who are refugees who are fleeing civil war. So the trauma from a red lockdown, well, they hear my story, and they can sort of  they can imagine it happening.

I dont notice that my kids are that impacted by the drills. As a matter of fact, even the real lockdowns that we hadwe had a student shot outside, and then we had a student with a gun in the building. For me, I do like to be prepared given what Ive been through. Ive got my plan, and Ive got my backup plan, and I have a backup plan for my backup plan. And part of being a survivor is really going through those what-ifs.

Mary Ann Jacob: I do the same thing. I mean, I have a lot of plans for emergency situations, and they go well beyond what the school has put together, because we know that sometimes what the school puts together is inadequate.

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Ken Yuers: I am onboard with that. Ive prepared thinking about what could happen, not only at the school but when Im away from school after going through November.

Dahlia Lithwick: One thing that we keep hearing after events like this is just how much confusion there is in the momentfrom confusion around the number of shooters, confusion about who the victims are, their names, what happened. It seems like all these years after Columbine we would be better on these communications and protocols.

Heather Martin: I think sort of to your question is law enforcements response. When we were first busted out of that room, and we came flying out of there, we were cussed at. We were searched, and not nicely, and they were yelling, and it was loud. Its a very high-stress situation. I also learned that when they saved us, they thought that there were still four gunmen on the loose. Because, again, initial reports were that there were six. They did find two in the library. Obviously, they were deceased then. The two on the roof were the air conditioning repair guys, so theyre still thinking that there are two gunmen on the loose. When they cleared our room, they searched us.

Im sort of circling the issue here, but I think we do learn stuff from every situation, and I know that at least the law enforcement conferences that Ive been to and that Ive spoken to, theyre really working on their response to these things. Not just tactically but also how to minimize the trauma of the people who are going through these situations.

Dahlia Lithwick: Youre all describing, I think, PTSD, right? Some version of, The way I make sense of this and go forward in the world is to just be hyperaware of the world around me. Part of whats so difficult is that I guess all of your students in the aggregate have some version of that, too, right?

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Ken Yuers: It made for a very surreal year because this happened in November. It was the first one-third of the year. We had two-thirds of the year left to finish. Theres the combination of [having a] class of traumatized kids, and also youre an educator. Youre there to help kids advance and learn, be successful in life, be part of their community locally, nationally, and here you are just now focused, and the district backed us on this, on their mental health. That had to come first. And you have to keep reminding yourself these kids have to start rebuilding their mental health. It just made for a very, very different year trying to process it all.

Heather Martin: I just wanted to commend you guys for that because, as a senior, I know it was different because we graduated and sort of moved on, but one of my biggest struggles was not having that system of support as I went off to college. I did try college. I dropped out. There was a fire alarm, and I lost it. So its really nice to hear that your district was supportive.

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Ken Yuers: And we have a great staff. Every teacher, and staff, they didnt have a sick day the rest of the year, which to me is justwe were there for the kids because thats, as you know, thats why we do what we do.

It was an exhausting year.  Sometimes before I went in that classroom, I would be in that staff room just trying to get myself together.  Ken Yuers, Rancho Tehama Elementary School

Mary Ann Jacob: The adults were just so traumatized, too, but nobody could imagine allowing the kids to go back without being there for them, because they needed us as much as we needed to be with each other. But the amount of learning that went on the rest of the year was far below what would have occurred, and every day you encountered something with a student that you were wholly unprepared to deal with. And I remember sitting at my computer one day and swiping a girls ID to check out a book, and her picture came up. She said, Oh, that was before Ms. Soto died, who was her teacher who died. I said, I know, honey. Thats so hard. Because we had 11 children, 6-year-olds, who survived in the two classrooms where the shooters were, who ran by him when he was killing their classmates. It meant, again, putting aside our own grief and trauma every day. I mean, Ken, you were probably exhausted the rest of the year, Im guessing.

Ken Yuers: Yes, it was an exhausting year, but, as I said, we were there for the kids. And sometimes before I went in that classroom, I would be in that staff room just trying to get myself together before Id leave to go do it, and thats where the support from other staff members was great, because everybody could relate to what you had gone through. You werent alone in the experience.

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Dahlia Lithwick: And two of you have talked about having to kind of compose your face and compose your voice and what it feels like in this moment of extreme crisis to have to almost put on a mask. When youre reliving this and thinking about it, this question of, How did I hold it together for these kids?that must be such a huge part, something you probably didnt think you had in you, right?

Ken Yuers: Oh, yeah. Its surreal. And yes, I didnt know I had it in me. I didnt know I had it in me when all of it was going down, when the perpetrator was out there shooting. You know, inside, you just want to scream and use a bunch of bad language, but I have a classroom full of 18 kids, and theyre turning to you, and they do turn to you. And its a form of therapy for myself.  You cant help but grow closer to these kids after going through such an experience.

Mary Ann Jacob: One of the things that I think we didnt do a great job of as a school community was take care of the adults in the school. The focus was on getting the kids back into a normal routine, and that was so important that it was done at the expense of the adults in the classroom, and in the building, who were basically told, If you cant keep it together, well get somebody else to come in. And it was a year before there was help in the building for the adults.

Dahlia Lithwick: Im so glad you said that, Mary Ann, because as I was listening to Ken, I was thinking: Its so easy to construct a story in which everybodys a hero in these moments. We need to focus on heroes because it makes us feel better. But I love what youre saying, because what youre saying is, the minute you start calling teachers heroes, youre taking away a little bit of the possibility of them being in trauma and grieving themselves, right?

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Mary Ann Jacob: Yeah, and you know, it was interesting because, a lot of the people in the community, and in the nationI mean there was so much attention on us, like there was after Columbine  the first responders are getting awards and these people are getting awards and these people, while those of us who are going to school every day, like Ken, you know, going back to the school every day and teaching those kids, it was like: What about them? They were the first responders. We were the first responders. We protected those kids every day in and out, and nobody wanted to be a hero, but we wanted people to understand that, as a community, we needed their support. And I think people felt like we must have been getting that support, because of who we were. But, in fact, we werent necessarily getting the kind of support we needed.

I remember even my own physician saying to me, Well, youve been through a terrible trauma, you need to get help. And I can remember driving away from her office that day thinking, That was not helpful. Because people who are most traumatized are least equipped to help themselves.

Dahlia Lithwick: I guess that leads to the post-Parkland conversation, which must break your hearts, because youve had this conversation a thousand times before. Maybe we should arm teachers, and maybe we should hire veterans. Is there anything of utility here?  What do you do when we have these conversations for the thousandth time?

Mary Ann Jacob: Frankly, I think the only person having the conversation about arming teachers is the NRA leadership and the president. I think regular people, in general, think thats a ridiculous idea. Because on a practical basis, its almost unmanageable. And its also the extreme. You know, most schools in this country have about a hundred things they can do between nothing and arming teachers that are very effective for safety and security of their students. So, there are a lot of things we should be doing to make our schools safer. Thats not one of them, in my opinion.

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Dahlia Lithwick: Heather, Ken, I want to give you an opportunity, if youre proponents of arming teachers, to rebut what Mary Ann just said, or just to reflect on what you think would be measures that would make a difference, instead of this incredibly tedious thoughts and prayers conversation.

Ken Yuers: There are a lot of things that could be done, I agree, and unfortunately, a lot of it requires funding, and here in California, theyre trying to do some things to make schools safer.

A local assemblyman, [James] Gallagher, he tried to get it where every school had an armed security guard, which, thats an outrageous amount of money, no way its gonna happen.

Speaking to the day of Nov. 14, for me, I was a military policeman, so I carried a sidearm for three and a half years. Im not a guy who goes out and shoots for fun. Ive never hunted, Im not a member of the NRA. But in Northern California, in a rural area, there is a little more Second Amendment type of thinking, so, because of where I live, I do have a concealed weapon permit. I never really thought about being armed so much at school, but I will say that morning, I wouldnt have thought about using the gun, but I did, once I got that Chromebook cart slid up against the door, I was thinking, Gosh, if I had my sidearm on me, this would be a good way to set up a defensive posture, with the police so far away.

I think at that exact moment, we have a rare exception where, if youre in a rural area and there are no other protections already in placeplease, get those protections in place, but in the meantime, you know, I think it should be something at least considered. I dont think itll happen in California. Im a member of the California teachers union here, and theyre supporting Gov.he will probably be our governor[Gavin] Newsom, hes lieutenant governor right now, and they asked him what he thought about arming teachers, and he had a one-word response: ludicrous.

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And I get what hes saying. You know, teachers, we want to bond with our students, build a rapport; we dont want to be thinking about a gun. But, if theres gonna be an exception, I dont think any teachers should be forced to have to carry  it could be strictly voluntary, with intense training. And, when I was going to get my permit, the instructor told me, every bullet you potentially fire has a liability lawsuit attached to it. Anyhow, I dont want to come across as a gun nut. I dont think I am.

Dahlia Lithwick: Youre not.

Ken Yuers: OK. And I heard about some knucklehead whos supposed to be a police reserve or something firing off a gun in a classroom in the past year, and just, there should be no gun unholstered ever in a school unless youre trying to save someones life. Anyways, thats my thought on that.

Heather Martin: Well, I think as a teacher, when were talking about arming teachers, I personally would not like to carry a firearm, mainly because my what-if scenarios are all the things that could go wrong, and my what-if is, What if I accidentally shoot one of my kids? What if the gunman is a student, and then I have to shoot one of my kids? What if the police come looking for the gunman and here I am holding a gun? There are so many what-ifs in that scenario.

I would not feel comfortable carrying a weapon. And then, you know, I appreciate what Ken said just about, you know, mandating it. If somebody mandated that I carry a gun, I want to be like, Um, I was at Columbine? Like, why would you want me to have a gun? There are teachers out there that maybe shouldnt have scissors, I dont know.

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But I would be very careful with, you know, mandating that and making teachers carry guns, because, again, especially in the community where I work, people in authority with weapons, thats not always a good thing.

Mary Ann Jacob: I also come from a home that has guns. My husband and sons actually spent Fathers Day at the shooting range doing skeet shooting, and my husband grew up in the Midwest where the first day of hunting season was a day off from school, and, you know, my family has always respected the Second Amendment and considers gun ownership a privilege that comes with great responsibility.

That being said, Im not anti-weapons in school, but I think, you know, in Connecticut, for example, we have a law that you can have a school security  its called an SSO, and that position was created by the state Legislature. Its part of the police department, its a part-time position that is a retired police officer, and they belong to the police department, so they work under the authority of the police department with all the same training, and our schools have those in some of our communities. I think thats perfectly acceptable. They man the front doors and they protect the internal community.

In Kens community, this doesnt sound superpractical from a financial standpoint, so there may be something else that has to happen. But, you know, in many communities there are other solutions other than arming teachers, I think. Teachers need to focus on what they do for a living, which is teach kids.

This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Rabbit Holes is a recurring series in which writers pay homage to the diversity and ingenuity of the ways we procrastinate now. To pitch your personal rabbit hole, email humaninterest@slate.com.

Once a week, when I should be writing, I search for a new apartment. I look through listings on the internet and services like Zillow, trying to find something spacious and affordable in an area with sidewalks where I can run. My new apartment needs to allow dogs. It absolutely must have a washer-dryer set, though I can live without a dishwasher. I save apartments in Orlando, Brooklyn, Miami, and Prague. In each new city, I imagine a new life for myself. I make up new friends and new habits. I find coffee shops, bookstores, and parks. I create whole new lives for myself. In another city, I could be someone else.

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In Orlando, Florida, Im finally close to my friends. Ill live in Lake Baldwin (which, OK, Ill admit it, is technically in Winter Park). My townhouse is two stories tall with black shutters and dormer windows. The sidingis it clapboard? pseudoclapboard?is painted white. A service keeps the grass trimmed and the hedges squared off at just the right angles.

In Lake Baldwin, everything is just so. I imagine myself getting up every morning while fog still hangs over the lake. Ill run with my black lab. I come back and drink a green smoothie. I will never procrastinate. Ill get right to work. Because in Lake Baldwin, Im a morning person, and my dog, somehow, is no longer 11 years old and arthritic.

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After my morning workout, I make the trek to Austins Coffee, my favorite graffitied hole in the wall, where the Wi-Fi password is buysomething, if that gives you a sense of its character. I make plans with my friend who lives down the street. Except shes a doctor and never has time. Really, well probably end up spending just as much time (i.e., not much) together as we do now. Plus, the public transit in Orlando isnt the best. Its a driving city, and Im sick of driving.

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New YorkNew York would be the place to go. Then my friends would want to come visit me. I have plenty of acquaintances in New York, bookish people, people I have only talked to on Twitter. I imagine sharing a cup of coffee with them, talking aboutI dont know, Karl Ove Knausgaard? Ill probably have to read his books before I move to NYC.

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In New York, I am a flaneuse. I take walks on the dingy streets, thinking. I am artistic and cultured. I go out at night to dimly lit bars and talk about political theory and the novel I havent finished yet. People know of me, but they dont really know me. In New York, I am definitely not a morning person.

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I look up apartments in Brooklyn and cringe at the prices. My one-bedroom in Boynton Beach, Florida, costs a little over a thousand dollars a month. The equivalent in Brooklyn looks like itll run three or four times that. No wonder the New York version of me is a nihilist. It would literally be cheaper for me to live in Florida and fly to New York City once a month.

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Besides, there are places in Florida more cultured than where I am right now. I have driven to Coral Gables before just to go to Books & Books, a bohemian bookstore wrapped around a courtyard cafe. Very cool, old-school South Florida. So I look up apartments in Coral Gables. These arent Brooklyn prices, but they still make me wince. (Sometimes I cant believe my first apartment in Daytona Beach only cost $650 per month.) When I find a place, a Spanish-style condo with a red-tiled roof, I cant believe its in my nonhypothetical price range, and I close the window. Any condo that perfect and that cheap has to be some sort of scam.

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Miami is too close, anyway. In Miami, I would still be the current version of me. I want a new scene. Maybe I could live abroad. I could visit Prague again, maybe. Or Spain. But why do I need to go there? Why do I have to leave to be somebody else?

Before last year when I moved to Boynton Beach, I only ever really lived in Volusia County, Florida. I was a teacher, and every time I went out, a student would recognize me. Theyd yell, Miss Renner! and Id jump out of my skin. When you live in a small town and everyone knows you, its hard to change. You become a character, a set version of yourself. In Volusia County, I was the bookish one. I was sensible. I was, maybe to some, even boring.

But the real version of me likes to travel, to take chances. She makes friends with strangers and goes on adventures. Thoroughly planned adventures, but adventures nonetheless. The longer I live outside of my hometown, the braver I think I can be. Nothing is holding me back anymore. I could move anywhere. I can be whoever I want, in theory.

Too bad moving is such a pain in the ass.
As soon as Christine Blasey Ford came forward as the woman accusing Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of sexually assaulting her when both were in high school, it felt like we were hurtling toward something women in this country have wanted for decades: a chance to fix what had gone so horribly wrong during the disastrous Anita Hill hearings of 1991. Statements from Senate Republicansamong them Jeff Flake, Susan Collins, and Lindsey Grahamforced Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley to grant Ford a public hearing. Grassley sent invitations to both parties involved, and we waited.

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Kavanaugh almost immediately expressed his willingness to participate, while also categorically denying that the event in question had ever happened. On Tuesday night, Fords lawyers released the letter they sent back to Grassley. It is neither a definitive acceptance or rejection of his invitation. Rather, it states that their client requests that, before she agrees to testify, her claims be investigated by the FBI. (This, as it happens, is the same move Sen. Dianne Feinstein requested last week before Ford stepped forward.) Republicans see this as nothing more than a stalling tactic. Graham tweeted on Wednesday that an FBI investigation of a 36 year old allegation (without specific references to time or location) before Professor Ford will appear before the Judiciary Committee is not about finding the truth, but delaying the process till after the midterm elections. Grassley has essentially affirmed that view, giving Ford a take-it-or-leave-it deadline of 10 a.m. on Friday to decide if she wants to participate in the hearing.

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Given the stakes of this fight, its difficult to see these requests and counter-requests as anything but political maneuvering. But we should try to understand why Ford would want an independent investigation of her allegationsand what it means that its unlikely it will be granted.

First, its worthwhile to look back at the specific failures of the Hill hearings. Writing in the New York Times on Tuesday, Hill herself dispensed advice on How to Get the Kavanaugh Hearings Right:

Select a neutral investigative body with experience in sexual misconduct cases that will investigate the incident in question and present its findings to the committee. Outcomes in such investigations are more reliable and less likely to be perceived as tainted by partisanship. Senators must then rely on the investigators conclusions, along with advice from experts, to frame the questions they ask Judge Kavanaugh and Dr. Blasey. Again, the senators fact-finding roles must guide their behavior. The investigators report should frame the hearing, not politics or myths about sexual assault.

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Who might this neutral investigator be? An op-ed published in the Washington Post on Wednesday made the case that local law enforcement in Maryland, where the alleged attack occurred, ought to investigate the complaint. But given that any investigation would need to coordinate with the nomination process, and given the extremely high-profile nature of the task, it seems preferable to task the countrys top law enforcement agency with the job. Indeed, Hills own allegations were investigated by the FBI before she was called to testify in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee. President George H. W. Bush directed the bureau to carry out that investigation in 1991, and President Donald Trump would need to do the same now. Trump, it seems, will not be making that request.

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It is incredible that a woman alleging sexual assault in 2018 has to fight to match the consideration Anita Hill received in 1991.

Speaking to reporters on Wednesday morning, the president justified the lack of an investigation by saying, Well, it seems that the FBI doesnt really do that.  Theyve investigated six times before, and it seems that they dont do that. We all know by this point that the president doesnt know how the government works, so a reporter chimed in to note that the FBI could do it if the president directed it to, to which Trump replied that the senators are doing a very good job. Then, in a letter back to Fords lawyers that was released Wednesday morning, Grassley noted that the Senate has no power to commandeer an Executive Branch agency into conducting our due diligence. He followed that up with a letter to Democrats on the committee denying their request that the hearing be delayed until an independent investigation could be completed. Basically, this has turned into a game of sexual assault investigation hot potato, and given that the executive branch is currently led by a man who brags about assaulting women and the Senate is held by the party thats enabled him, Fords request for an independent arbitrator will go unheeded.

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As others have noted, it is incredible that a woman alleging sexual assault in 2018 has to fight to match the consideration Anita Hill received in 1991. Rather than course-correct for those hearings, it seems increasingly likely that this case will lower the bar. At the same time, its understandable to be skeptical that an independent investigation is so essential. If Kavanaugh isnt going to be held criminally liable for his alleged actionsand he shouldnt bewhy does the FBI have to be involved? Wont we find out the same information in a public hearing? Indeed, wouldnt an immediate public hearing be preferable if the ultimate decision in this matter will be made by the U.S. Senate?

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It is not, and the reason has nothing to do with politics. Theres a clear reason why Ford, who researches trauma as an academic, would hold on to her request for a neutral arbitrator. Survivors of sexual assault often experience trauma. As trauma therapist Betty Teng wrote in Slate in February, a traumatic experience can cause an unmooring from truth that requires substantial effort to rebuild. That is why we have the maxim believe women, which doesnt mean were obligated to believe every single thing any woman says, but is instead a shorthand to remind us that vocalizing abuse is difficult and victims deserve to be heard when they do so.

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Ford is clearly in trauma. This is, Dahlia Lithwick noted earlier this week, a fact that helps contextualize her decision not to come forward immediately. When she did choose to disclose her identity, the account Ford gave to the Washington Post was consistent with what we understand about how people process trauma. In the letter requesting the FBI investigation, Fords lawyers reference their desire to protect her mental health, writing that Ford is being asked to relive this harrowing and traumatic incident and concluding by requesting a meeting so the involved parties can discuss reasonable steps as to how Dr. Ford can cooperate while also taking care of her own health and security.

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One of the challenges were all facing in the wake of #MeToo is how to balance the imperative to care for victims while still upholding our innocent-until-proven-guilty standard of criminal justice and our if-your-mother-says-she-loves-you-check-it-out standard of journalism. A commitment to fact-finding and verification is essential no matter how terrible the traumait is only by establishing a fair process for both the accuser and the accused that we can create a system that supports accusers and protects the rights of the accused. Our institutions, be they journalistic or jurisprudential ones, cant be guided by the same principles that guide trauma therapists. They should, however, take our understanding of trauma into account. At the moment, they barely even attempt to do so.

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Christine Blasey Ford has spoken up against an extremely powerful man who is at the center of an intensely bitter political fight. She has asked that, before she is questioned on live television by senators with inherently political interests, she be afforded the opportunity to tell her story to a neutral body that can assess it outside such a circus. She is not asking to be believed on principle. She is asking for a fair shot at neutrality. That it wont be granted should tell you everything you need to know about how far we still have to go when it comes to adjudicating cases of sexual violence.
Whether or not you believe Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh committed a violent sexual assault in his high school days, Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Chuck Grassley wants you to know there is at least one unambiguous victim in this scenario: Chuck Grassley.

In a series of letters he sent on Wednesday, the Republican senator from Iowa laid out all the ways hes been slighted, ignored, and hassled since Christine Blasey Ford went public with her allegations against Kavanaugh. His generous offers of a public hearing for Ford have been rebuffed. His request for an original copy of Fords letter of allegations has gone unanswered. And Democrats neglected to mention the allegations until Ford herself came forward in the Washington Post, forcing Grassley to schedule an extremely tiresome fifth day of hearings. I cannot overstate how disappointed I am in this decision, he wrote in his letter to committee Democrats. The poor guy cant catch a break!

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The thinly veiled frustration in Grassleys letters befits a man whose only worry vis-a-vis confirming a Supreme Court justice with an alleged history of sexual violence is that he wont be able to do it quickly enough. Grassley and his fellow Republican senators see the sexual assault allegations against Kavanaugh as nothing more than a politically motivated attack on a future Supreme Court justice. That limited scope of understanding of sexual violence may be why Grassley voted to impeach Bill Clinton on the grounds that the presidency is preeminently a place of moral leadership but found himself able to defend Donald Trump after the Access Hollywood video came out because theres only a few saints who have been president of the United States.

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Grassleys letters are the prose equivalent of a sulk and stamping feet. Had Dr. Ford not made her allegations public via the Washington Post over the weekend, I still would not know her identity, Grassley wrote to Feinstein. It has caused me to have to reopen the hearings for the fifth day of testimony, when we easily could haveand should haveraised these issues before or during the first four days of the hearing. It is remarkable to watch a man who has the power to control Senate proceedings claim procedural victimhood in the adjudication of a sexual assault allegation. Of the leak that made Fords then-anonymous allegations public, Grassley wrote to Senate Democrats, This is but the latestand most seriousof your sides abuse of this confirmation process. These Democrats arent just subjecting Grassley to inconvenience and delays. Theyre perpetrating abuse.

Grassleys stance aligns with the worldview, widely held among conservatives, that men are the true victims of the #MeToo movement. They are held to ever-changing, increasingly stringent standards of behavior, forced to answer for acts they allegedly committed decades ago, and denied positions of power and financial gain. Women, meanwhile, must only endure a little horseplay, which their allies exaggerate and draw out to make Chuck Grassleys life difficult. Truly, its just not fair.
When the National Solar Observatory in Sunspot, New Mexico, was evacuated and remained closed mysteriously for 10 days in September, many amateur investigators could think of but one answer: aliens.

After all, the observatory, deep within Lincoln National Forest, is just two hours from Roswell. The curious who attempted to visit the observatory came up against a guarded entrance taped off with crime-scene tape. And federal authorities did little to quell the speculation, remaining so silent on the matter that local law enforcement had no idea what was going on.

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But now, the theorists have some fairly disappointing answers, if theyre willing to accept them. In newly released FBI records, including a search warrant affidavit, an agent explained she was investigating someone who had been using the observatorys Wi-Fi to download and distribute child pornography.

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The man under investigation was a janitor, who, according to the affidavit, was the only person who had access to the observatory during the time the laptop was downloading the pornography. The janitor has not yet been arrested or charged with a crime.

After the FBI traced child pornography to the observatory, the chief observer at the facility told the FBI he had found a laptop containing the porn and running in relatively hidden locations around the facility. The FBI seized the laptop, and not long afterward the janitor was spotted leaving the office where the laptop had been found, according to the documents. He asked the chief observer if anyone else had been in the office, explaining that cleaning supplies he left were missing. He later claimed someone had been entering the Observatory at night, in order to steal the wireless Internet service, according to the Washington Post.

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It was not the FBI, however, that decided to evacuate the observatory. That direction came from the observatorys management, which became worried that the janitoracting increasingly agitated since the FBI seized the laptopmight become dangerous. According to the Post:

Aside from continuing to feverishly search the facility, the documents state that the janitor said, it was only a matter of time before the facility got hit, and that he believed there was a serial killer in the area, and that he was fearful that the killer might enter the facility and execute someone.

An FBI spokesman told Reuters that the investigation is still ongoing. The observatory reopened on Monday, and conspiracy theorists will presumably continue to search for alternative answers.
Donald Trump Jr. is, unofficially, his fathers liaison to crude, internet-based alt-right Trump supporters. In this role, he made the following Instagram post about the letter that Christine Blasey Ford sent to Sen. Dianne Feinstein accusing Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of sexually assaulting her when they were in high school:*

Ha ha ha!

One person whos not amused is Republican Sen. Jeff Flake:

This is sickening. No one should make light of this situation. pic.twitter.com/G7rlT3IKTQ  Jeff Flake (@JeffFlake) September 19, 2018

Flake is still probably going to vote to confirm Kavanaugh if Ford doesnt agree to the Republican-led Judiciary Committees request that she appear at a hastily scheduled hearing that wont involve an impartial outside investigation into her allegation. So he is not necessarily taking the strongest position in defense of sexual assault victims here. But sometimes, here in Crazytown (gestures at all of America), its refreshing to hear someone speak the obvious truth.
A professor in a high-profile murder trial in Hong Kong has been found guilty of murdering his wife and daughter by poisoning them with a carbon monoxide-filled yoga ball.

On Wednesday, a jury concluded that Khaw Kim-sun, an anesthesiology professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, had intentionally placed the deadly yoga ball in the car three years ago, killing his wife, Wong Siew-fing, 47, and daughter Lily Li-ling Khaw, 16. Khaw, 53, had been having an affair with a student at the time.

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According to the New York Times, Khaw and the student had been working on an experiment to test the effect of carbon monoxide on rabbits at the time. He was seen filling two yoga balls with the lethal gas, and one of the balls was found, still inflated, under his desk, according to the Times.

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He later told the police he had brought one yoga ball home to kill rats in his house. He argued that his daughter, aware of its deadliness, used it to kill herself. His defense attorney argued in court that the pressure she had been under academically drove her to suicide. Prosecutors, who argued that the whole experiment had been a cover-up and that Khaw stood to inherit his wifes share of several properties, called it cold-blooded murder, and the jury agreed.

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The 21-day trial captivated Hong Kong as details of the familys personal lives were aired in the courtroom. The maid testified to the strained relationship between the husband and wife, the latter of whom was aware of the formers affair. Khaws eldest daughter, May-ling Khaw, 22, portrayed her father as a heartbroken man but also as one who pushed her and her siblings academically to the point of suicidal thoughts. Her two younger siblings showed up to support their father, according to the South China Morning Post.

Prosecutors, who maintained Khaw had plotted to free himself of his wife, said they believed it was unlikely he wanted to kill his daughter. He allegedly told her to stay at home to complete her homework, according to the BBC. Khaw was sentenced to life in prison.
Christine Blasey Ford, through her attorneys, has suggested that the FBI should conduct an investigation into her allegation of sexual assault against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh before she makes any kind of appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee. On Wednesday afternoon, Judiciary Committee Chairman and Republican Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley argued in a public letter that the committee is solely responsible for investigating the allegations. Wrote Grassley: I certainly understand and respect Dr. Fords desire for an investigation of her allegations. That is precisely what the Senate is doing.

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On Wednesday night, the Judiciary Committees chief counsel for nominationswho served as a political staffer in the George W. Bush administrationtweeted this:

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According to Davis LinkedIn page, he leads a team of attorneys that advises Chairman Chuck Grassley and other senators on presidential nominations and Senate confirmations of federal judge.

Indeed, why wouldnt Ford or her attorneys trust this gentleman to fairly investigate her allegation, aside from him having announced its outcome in advance, in public?

Update, 11:30 a.m.: Davis Twitter account, which was locked on Thursday morning, is back up. The tweets above have been deleted, with the following explanation:

To clear up any confusion, I was referring to Democrats partisan political attacks and their refusal to take part in the committees thorough and fair investigation. I deleted the tweet to avoid any further misinterpretation by left wing media as so often happens on Twitter.  Mike Davis (@mrddmia) September 20, 2018

Its not clear, of course, how the statement We will confirm Judge Kavanaugh left any room for interpretation, left-wing or otherwise, about Davis goal.

Read more from Slate:

 Republicans Would Love a Hearing Without Ford. Democrats Might Gift It to Them.

 The Kavanaugh Accusation Has Men More Afraid Than Ever

 Ford Wants Full Scrutiny of Her Claims. The GOP Should Support That.

 Brett Kavanaugh Is the Culmination of a Political Movement Devoted to the Status Quo
Bergen County Sheriff Michael Saudino did not think highly of the inauguration of Phil Murphy as governor of New Jersey.

He talked about the whole thing, the marijuana, sanctuary state  better criminal justice reform. Christ almighty, in other words, let the blacks come in, do whatever the fuck they want, smoke their marijuana, do this, do that, and dont worry about it. You know, well tie the hands of cops, he said on a tape recording from January obtained by WNYC. Murphy ran on a platform that included legalizing marijuana.

Murphys swearing in was not the only one to outrage Saudino that day. There was also Murphys hand-picked attorney general, Gurbir Grewal, who had previously been a prosecutor in Bergen County and worked with Saudino. Grewal is the first Sikh attorney general in America. [Murphy] didnt do that because of Bergen County; he did that because of the turban, Saudino said on the tape.

Murphy said in a statement to WNYC, If indeed that is Sheriff Saudinos voice on the recording, he should resign.
Last summer, union steelworker and congressional hopeful Randy Bryce became a progressive folk hero with the help of his mother, who starred in his viral opening campaign ad. Now the man known as Iron Stache is on the defense because of another family member: his brother James Bryce, a Milwaukee police officer.

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Oof.

James never utters his brothers name in his 30-second testimonialthe on-screen graphics do that work for himbut its nonetheless a brutal blow. I dont think people want to be represented by someone whos shown contempt for those in law enforcement, James tells the camera before endorsing his brothers Republican opponent in Wisconsins 1st Congressional District, which is currently represented by retiring House Speaker Paul Ryan. Thats one of the many reasons Im voting for Bryan Steil for Congress.

The attack ad, unveiled Tuesday, was the second in as many days from the Congressional Leadership Fund, a Paul Ryanaligned super PAC that recently reserved $1.5 million worth of air time to support Steil, a former Ryan staffer. Both ads highlight the fact that Randy Bryce has been arrested nine times, including for drunk driving. And both also conveniently leave out the important detail that most of those arrests were for either petty crimes or civil disobedience: Three were for driving with a suspended license following his 1998 DUI arrest, for example, and another two were related to taking part in political protests more recently, including in March of this year when he and other activists blocked traffic near one of Ryans district offices while demanding the speaker act to protect Dreamers. Similarly, James accuses Randy of using cop-hating rhetoric, an apparent reference to this six-year-old tweet:

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When police become the terrorists -The Two-Pronged Assault on Dissent in Wisconsins Capitol | The Progressive http://t.co/VnLSa66f  Randy Bryce (@IronStache) September 16, 2012

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Bryces primary opponent also tried to make his arrest record an issue, but Bryce nonetheless went on to easily claim the Democratic nomination last month. And the very next day, the CLF began airing a minutelong radio attack ad, complete with a dramatic re-enactment of the arrest. Its the messenger more than the message, then, that makes this latest attack stand out.

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Randy and James mother, Nancy, is calling for Steil to disavow the ad and for the super PAC to take it down. My family deserves better than this, she wrote in an open letter. All families deserve better than this. Randy, meanwhile, released a new ad of his own on Tuesday. In it, Bryce owns up to making mistakes in the past but argues that its not about whos the more perfect person to represent youits about who understands the hardships that youre going to face.

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The fact that the CLF is ready to spend seven figures on this race is notable by itself. Wisconsin Republicans redrew the district in 2010 to make life easier for Ryan, who was then the chairman of the House Budget Committee and a rising star in the party. With Ryan on the presidential ticket in 2012, Romney won the district by 5 points, despite losing Wisconsin by 7 points, and four years later, Trump won the district by 10 points while winning the state by less than a single point. That built-in GOP advantage was on display yet again this spring, when a GOP-backed candidate for the state Supreme Court carried Ryans district by 5 points despite losing the statewide race by 11.

Bryces early viral fame, though, had Democrats dreaming of winning the seat even before Ryan dropped out. After the speaker announced his retirement, the nonpartisan handicappers at the Cook Political Report reclassified the race from Likely Republican to Lean Republican, signaling they saw a legitimate opening for Democrats despite the districts GOP tilt. Whether or not Bryce can overcome this tremendous disadvantage as a Democrat could depend on how he confronts these aggressive tactics from a powerful conservative force.
No official numbers yet exist about how the COVID-19 pandemic and related economic factors have affected homelessness, but according to May 2020 analysis conducted by Columbia University Economics Professor Brendan OFlaherty, the United States could see a 40 to 45 percent jump in homelessness as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent unemployment and evictions.

This is no surprise to banking security professionals, many of whom have noted a significant increase in the number of trespassing incidents in branches, particularly where enclosed shelters such as ATM vestibules are open to users after business hours.
Deepak Thapa has been a fortnightly columnist with The Kathmandu Post since 2009, writing on a range of topical social and political issues.
It all makes sense once you realize they want to kill us, by Mike Whitney - The Unz Review : 'It is now apparent that these products in ...
Bishop denies misconduct allegations

The case was repeatedly revealed in the recording of a TV program.

Greek-Catholic Bishop Milan Chautur reportedly sexually harassed a woman when she was a child.

The case was described by theologian Miroslav Kocur in an interview with the Dennik N daily where he referred to the incident at the end of last year when an unnamed Catholic bishop in Slovakia met with the woman during the filming of a TV program, during which she accused him of harassment.

Even though Kocur did not mention any names, Chautur commented on the meeting on Facebook and the official website of the Eparchy, denying the accusations. Chautur is currently the highest-ranking Catholic Church official in Slovakia, the Sme daily reported.

Police became involved

Back in November 2017, a visit to the Greek-Catholic Eparchy in Kosice was announced, with the purpose of congratulating Chautur on his anniversary. The meeting was to be recorded by the public-service broadcaster RTVS.

He met with two sisters who asked him whether he knew why he was invited, Kocur said in an interview. When he could not say, one of them told him that she had been harassed as a small girl, he continued.

After Chautur heard the accusation, he reportedly became angry and by the time the TV staff returned to Bratislava, he had allegedly called their boss asking him how he dared do this, Sme reported.

Meanwhile, the Kosice Eparchy claims that the whole meeting was a set-up. Not only believers, but also a woman with a cameraman came and the recording was not intended for the TV program. Both the TV program and the network outcomes were different than agreed, the statement claims, without mentioning any names.

Moreover, Chautur denies the accusations.

Since the woman has turned to the police, the bishop has been investigated, the Eparchy informed in a statement, as reported by Sme.

Responding to the case, RTVSs spokesperson Erika Rusnakova told Sme that nobody contacted the broadcasters director in connection with the case.

One priest sentenced for harassment

The Slovak Bishops Conference (KBS), whose members are Greek-Catholic bishops, declined to acknowlege whether they knew about the case. Its spokesperson Martin Kramara sent Sme the same statement as the Greek-Catholic Eparchy, without further comment.

Neither priests addressed by Sme nor church analyst Imrich Gazda knew about any case of a priest or bishop harassing a child in Slovakia, apart from the one from Nevidzany (Nitra Region), which dates back to 2015 when a Roman-Catholic priest was conditionally sentenced for sexual harassment of a 11-year-old girl.

However, Roman-Catholic priest Marian Prachar from Bratislava, Gazda and former Trnava archbishop Robert Bezak, agreed that if such a case appears in Slovakia, the Catholic Church should deal with it transparently, Sme reported.

20. Sep 2018 at 12:53 | Compiled by Spectator staff
British ambassador will award writer Feldek

His work makes British classical culture more visible, most notably through his translations of Shakespeare, the British ambassador said.

Poet, dramatist and translator Lubomir Feldek will receive an award from the British Ambassador to Slovakia, Andrew Garth, on September 20.

Feldek has translated 16 works of the English poet and playwright William Shakespeare.

Mr Feldek contributed to making the best of our classical culture more visible and spreading it in Slovakia, Garth said, as quoted in a press release. His translations of Shakespeare enrich theatres repertoires and amuse all generations of Slovaks.

Two more received the award

The Ambassadors Award will be granted on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of establishing diplomatic relations between the United Kingdom and Slovakia.

Garth has so far awarded two figures who have contributed to these relations and represent a strong bond between the two countries.

The first was Doctor Monika Gullerova, who is working at the University of Oxford as an expert whose DNA research helps the treatment of cancer patients.

The second award was granted to Major General Ivan Schwarz in memoriam, who served as Royal Air Force pilot during World War II and was one of the most successful Czechoslovak pilots.

20. Sep 2018 at 12:55 | Compiled by Spectator staff
The Bettors Delight mare Lifetime Trust worked out a perfect second-over trip for driver George Brennan, in for an afternoons work at Harrahs Philadelphia, then tipped wide and proceeded on to an in-hand 1:53 win in the $17,000 feature for distaff pacers on Wednesday at the suburban Philadelphia oval.

The winner of $168,415 was away fourth for Brennan as race favourite Reign On Me took over the lead from Big City Betty nearing the :27.4 quarter. Just before the :56.2 half, Brunhilda moved first-over from third, with the winner right on her bumper through the 1:24 three-quarters and around the turn before being tipped wide by Brennan. The final margin was only a length over Big City Betty, Reign On Me and Brunhilda, noses apart in that order at the wire, but the victory was measured from mid-stretch as Lifetime Trust won for trainer Richard Ringler and the Ringler Stable LLC.

Thursday (Sept. 20) at Harrahs, two-year-old fillies on both gaits will contest three $30,000 divisions of the Liberty Bell stakes series. Many of the entrants are well-known to area fans, who have seen them in Sire Stakes and Stallion Series action throughout the summer, both live and via simulcast.

(PHHA / Harrahs Philadelphia)
Shanghai (Gasgoo)- Chinese e-commerce titan Alibaba Group announced on September 19 that it will set up a brand new semiconductor company to deepen the group's layout in chip making filed. The new company's name, Pingtouge Semiconductor Company, cites a Chinese nickname for the honey badger.

According to Alibaba's chief technology officer Zhang Jianfeng, the group will integrate businesses of Hangzhou C-SKY Microsystems Co., Ltd, a chip company wholly acquired by Alibaba in April, and the chip R&D team of Alibaba DAMO Academy into the new semiconductor company.

The new chip company's first product will be the neural network chip dubbed Ali-NPU, which was announced by DAMO Academy in April. Alibaba said the Ali-NPU chip could be used in image and video analysis and machine learning. The chip is set to be launched in the second half of 2019 and will be first employed in such cloud data scenarios as the Alibaba data center, the City Brain and autonomous driving, etc.

Alibaba has previously made several investments in chipmakers. Jack Ma, founder of Alibaba, revealed that the group has invested in 5 semiconductor firms in the past 4 years, namely, Cambricon, Barefoot Networks, DeePhi Tech, Kneron and ASR Microelectronics.

Alibaba takes chip development as one of its most important research topics. The group intends to plow a total of RMB 100 billion within 3 years in various AI sectors, such as quantum computing, machine learning, basic algorithm, visual computing, natural language processing, next-generation human-machine interaction, chip making and sensor technologies.

Aside from AI chip, the R&D of quantum computing is another priority for DAMO Academy. Zhang Jianfeng disclosed that DAMO Academy will complete a quantum computing lab soon and is expected to deliver a standard quantum chip over the next two or three years.
Authorities to monitor traders

The Department of Supplies Management (DSM), in association with the Kathmandu Metropolitan City (KMC), Kathmandu Chief District Office and other stakeholders, is set for an aggressive festival-oriented monitoring starting next week for the upcoming Dashain.
Centre to fund local governments

The federal government will provide funds up to 70 percent of the cost to construct administrative office buildings for local governments.
Collapse of deal calls for serious soul-searching

The formation of a three-member task force to prepare a modality for the development of West Seti Hydroelectric Project on Tuesday formally closed the chapter of China Three Gorges International with the multi-billion project.
Dahal and Chinese Vice President hold talks

Former Prime Minister and Co-chair of the ruling Nepal Communist Party Pushpa Kamal Dahal held talks with Chinese Vice President Wang Qishan on Wednesday.
Binod Ghimire covers parliamentary affairs and human rights for The Kathmandu Post. Since joining the Post in 2010, he has reported primarily on social issues, focusing on education and transitional justice.
Law of the land

The constitution is an evolving document and can be amended
Issues of concern to people who live in the west: property rights, water rights, endangered species, livestock grazing, energy production, wilderness and western agriculture. Plus a few items on western history, western literature and the sport of rodeo... Frank DuBois served as the NM Secretary of Agriculture from 1988 to 2003. DuBois is a former legislative assistant to a U.S. Senator, a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Interior, and is the founder of the DuBois Rodeo Scholarship.
Mountain Shadows in Wayanad is just the place for a dreamy vacation
NCP preparing to move impeachment motion against SC Justice Joshee

The ruling Nepal Communist Party (NCP) is preparing to move an impeachment motion against senior Supreme Court Justice Deepak Raj Joshee, who was rejected by the Parliamentary Hearing Committee (PHC) for the top judiciary position.
PM Oli dismisses dissent, calls for unity in speech

Expressing displeasure over protests and uprising across the nation, Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli on Wednesday said that it is not acceptable to make the state a guinea pig in the name of civil liberties.
Sam Newman has announced he is leaving The Footy Show.

Newman, looking tired or possibly nervous, delivered an ad-lib monologue to camera.

This station wont or cant tell us if this show will be on next year, either in this format or in some other format. And they cant tell me if Ill be part of the show next year if its on or if Ill be part of a different show, if its on.

Newman, who is the only original cast member to have survived across 25 seasons, said this year could well be the last in-house Footy Show at Nine.

I will not be continuing its opportune that I end my association with this show and the network on the off-chance that this is the final show that we do. Next week we look forward to a great grand final show, he continued.

Newman acknowledged the shows successes, past cast members and his own transgressions, but said Nine had backed him on each occasion.

Ive probably been the most criticised and traduced person in the media in Australia for probably 2 decades. I wouldnt have it any other way. You are what you are, I know who I am, I know what I am, he said.

I take it with a grain of salt. People have a right to say whatever they like about me or this show or the people on it.

But he also took aim at critics in the media and those who maligned Street Talk segments.

I dont think you realise how hard it is to do Live television without some transgressions. Were not on delay and Ive said some pretty inappropriate things, and Ive had to apologise for them. But this station has been as loyal and committed to me as you could ever find.

To loyal viewers he added, I want to thank you for putting up with me, or enjoying me. I probably marginalised most people. Probably thats a bonus. Probably its not. 

Following his speech Nines studio audience gave him a standing ovation.

The Footy Shows future remains in the balance amid falling ratings, after Sevens Front Bar has usurped its crown.

Updated: On 3AW today he told Neil Mitchell he was bemused people misconstrued his words:

Neil: Will The Footy Show be there next year?

Sam: I have no idea and that was the basis of what I said last night.

Neil: If The Footy Show is there, will you be on it?

Sam: I have no idea and that was the basis of what I said last night.

He indicated he would retire if The Footy Show did not return but would be open to renegotiations if a new show was offered. Clear?
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US President Donald Trump has recently urged the Spanish government to solve the migration crisis by building a wall across the Sahara desert. This is similar to Trumps plan to build a wall to stop Mexican illegal immigrants from entering the USA.

Spains foreign minister Josep Borrell revealed the information at a lunch event in Madrid this week, saying Trump ignored Spanish diplomats scepticism over the suggestion, who had informed the US President that the Sahara Desert spans a distance of around 3,000 miles. Trump brushed this off, saying the border with the Sahara simply cant be longer than their border with Mexico.

Donald Trump and the famous wall

During the 2016 presidential campaign, Trump promised voters that he would build a wall across the border with Mexico, an area about 2,000 miles in length. However, even if Spain agreed to build a wall across the Sahara, plans would be complicated as there are only two small Spanish enclaves in northern Africa  Melilla and Ceuta. This would mean that the wall would have to span foreign territory bordering the Sahara Desert.

Trump is thought to have made his frontier recommendation when Borrell accompanied King Felipe and Queen Letizia to the White House in June. https://t.co/ottxMp7I8b  Nikola Edison (@public_cointel) September 20, 2018

Borrell revealed the information at a lunch in Madrid earlier this week and it was soon all over the Spanish media.

However, speaking to The Guardian newspaper, a spokesman for Borrell said they can confirm that the Foreign Minister said that, but that they wouldnt be making further comment on the issue of the Sahara wall.

Spanish royal visit to the White House

According to The Hill, it is believed Trump made the wall suggestion when the foreign minister accompanied King Felipe VI and Queen Letizia on an official visit to the White House in June this year.

RT from @realDonaldTrump

Yesterday, @FLOTUS Melania and I were honored to welcome King Felipe VI and Queen Letizia of Spain to the @WhiteHouse! I love the good Hispanics! Enjoy my video: pic.twitter.com/s1n5KbgfEd  Triumph  s   Headquarters (@TriumphICDHQ) June 20, 2018

Tens of thousands of migrants have travelled across the Mediterranean to Spain, seeing the country receiving more than Greece and Italy.

While some countries are turning migrants away, Spain is accepting them. Spains new Prime Minister, Pedro Sanchez was praised for saying the country would take the 630 migrants on the Aquarius rescue ship after Italy and Malta turned them away.

When the only tool in your toolbelt is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. https://t.co/8EjRRarVWx  Aunt Crabby calls Bullshit  (@DearAuntCrabby) September 20, 2018

Reports by Europa Press and El Pais quoted Borrell as saying Spain has fixed its economic problem but said the migrant situation is an emotional problem which cant be fixed with money. He went on to explain that most European societies are not structured to take in over a certain percentage of the migrants, especially is those migrants are Muslims.

He said Spains problem does not involve mass migration, and that the problems of Middle Eastern countries taking in Syrian refugees dwarfs Spains migration problems.
South Africa's highest court passed a law on Tuesday legalising possession of the drug. Although opposed by the government, the Constitutional Court ruled in favour of full decriminalisation for adults. However, it will still be illegal to smoke in public places, and the police can still arrest people suspected of selling cannabis.

The move comes after Pro-Cannabis campaigners Jeremy Acton, and Garreth Prince bought the case to the court asking for it to consider legalising Marijuana across the country.

The appeal stated that the ban on cannabis violated section 14 of the national constitution which states that all citizens have a right to privacy.

On the 18th September, the court agreed that the drug should be legal, although with some limitations.

South Africa's constitutional court has ruled that the private use of marijuana is legal. This has the potential to free up lots of police resources, to reduce police corruption, and to reduce unnecessary conflict between police and the public. #marijuana #dagga @SAPoliceService pic.twitter.com/GgVl6Fh3pH  Andrew Faull (@AGFaull) September 18, 2018

The BBC reported, Deputy Chief Justice Raymond Zondo as saying, "It will not be a criminal offence for an adult person to use or be in possession of cannabis in private for his or her personal consumption."

Celebrations as South Africa legalises marijuana

Pro-Cannabis campaigners celebrated both inside and outside the court when the ruling was passed, with users smoking pipes and marijuana 'joints' in celebration in the streets.

The move comes after the establishment in 2009 of 'The Dagga Party,' a political movement whose main aim was the legalisation of the drug.

Known locally as 'dagga,' cannabis grows around the country with many South Africans regular users of the drug.

Meet the man whose legal case led to the decriminalisation of marijuana's private consumption and cultivation in South Africa  https://t.co/svmid5Vlqf #Dagga pic.twitter.com/E43daeJ5rg  BBC News Africa (@BBCAfrica) September 18, 2018

According to the BBC, Jeremy Acton, leader of The Dagga Party, criticised the move saying the new laws don't go far enough and that the sale of cannabis should be included in the move.

However, the court has given the government 24 months to adjust legislation in line with the move, meaning users of the drug could also eventually consume cannabis in public.

YOUR VIEWS: What do you think about legalising marijuana's consumption? Today the Constitutional Court of South Africa has ruled that it is legal for adults to smoke dagga at home, but several government ministers are against it  https://t.co/DrEk32FlpI pic.twitter.com/cx8Cy8Dz0h  BBC News Africa (@BBCAfrica) September 18, 2018

The growth of legal marijuana

The move makes South Africa only the second country in the world after Uruguay where the possession of cannabis is not an arrestable offence.

Cannabis is decriminalised in many countries including the Netherlands, Portugal and Switzerland, and legal in several American states including California and Colorado.

In April this year, Zimbabwe passed a ruling that legalised medical cannabis. Many countries on the continent and globally rule marijuana as an illegal substance; its use is often tolerated.

Although many greeted the move with elation, there are still many who oppose the court's ruling including public health officials and police departments.
Provincial ministers join rallies to protest charter

Six provincial ministers of Province 2, who assumed office after taking the oath of office and secrecy as per the constitution of the country, attended protest rallies organised to mark Constitution Day as black day on Wednesday.
The Hornsea Offshore Wind project - Chris Ratcliffe

Danish wind power giant rsted has sold a stake in its Hornsea offshore wind farm at a bumper price of 4.5bn to a New York based investment fund.

Global Infrastructure Partners (GIP) will pay a third more than analysts expected for a 50pc stake in the Grimsby-based project which is guaranteed a revenue stream of almost three times the current market price.

Analysts at RBC Capital said the bumper price is probably around 33pc above market expectations and could fuel a dividend bonanza for shareholders of the Copenhagen-listed business.

The multibillion pound windfall echoes warnings from the National Audit Office which said energy companies stand to reap excessive profits as a result of the way ministers handed out its first contracts for offshore wind contracts.

Under the heavily criticised bilateral deal government ministers agreed to pay rsted 140 for every megawatt hour of power produced for the first 15 years of the projects life from customer bills.

Under the current regime offshore wind developers must compete in an auction, which has helped to drive costs for the newest wind projects to less than 60/MWh.

rsteds share price climbed by over 2pc after it unveiled its landmark transaction to the Danish media, saying it will create substantial value for its shareholders.

The company will begin to rake in revenue from 2020 when Hornsea becomes the worlds largest offshore wind farm to produce power.

Ole Kjems Srensen, head of rsteds M&A team, said: This is our third partnership with GIP, and we are delighted to have one of the worlds largest infrastructure funds as a partner, in what will be the worlds largest offshore wind farm.

The Hornsea 1 farm down is a landmark transaction which will create substantial value for our shareholders and reduce single asset exposure, he added.
By Jacob Gronholt-Pedersen and Teis Jensen

COPENHAGEN (Reuters) - Danske Bank's chief executive Thomas Borgen resigned on Wednesday after an investigation revealed payments totalling 200 billion euros (177.82 billion pounds) through its small Estonian branch, many of which the bank said were suspicious.

The Danish bank detailed compliance and control failings amid growing calls for a European Union crackdown on financial crime after a series of money laundering scandals which have attracted the attention of U.S. authorities.

"Even though I was personally cleared from a legal point of view, I hold the ultimate responsibility. There is no doubt that we as an organization have failed in this situation and did not live up to expectations," Borgen, who will stay on until a new CEO is appointed, told a press conference.

Borgen, 54, was in charge of Danske Bank's international operations, including Estonia, between 2009 and 2012.

While the report shed some light on the bank's activities in Estonia, investors are concerned whether the United States, which has placed sanctions on Russia, will punish it.

"As this is the largest money laundering scandal in European history, and Danske Bank is a major bank that sends dollars around the world, I imagine that this will certainly get the attention of the U.S. authorities," Bill Browder, the founder and CEO of Hermitage Capital Management who has campaigned against corruption in Russia, told Reuters.

Danish politicians were critical of Danske Bank for not revealing exactly how much money was allegedly laundered and not saying who was legally responsible for the lapses.

"It is deeply embarrassing that for so many years there have been transactions that should not have taken place. Much of it is expected to be money laundering, and that is simply not good enough by Danske Bank," business minister Rasmus Jarlov, who oversees Denmark's banking sector, told a press conference.

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Danske Bank said in its summary of a report covering around 15,000 customers and 9.5 million payments between 2007 and 2015 that Borgen, Chairman Ole Andersen and the board "did not breach their legal obligations".

Andersen said the bank had made an assessment of whether it violated U.S. laws but declined to share its conclusion when asked at a press conference.

The Estonian non-resident portfolio's around 10,000 customers were registered in 90 different countries, with Russia, Britain, the British Virgin Islands and Finland the main ones, Danske Bank said, adding that around a third of them became clients of the branch in 2007.

Danske Bank, whose already battered shares fell by nearly 8 percent, said some 6,200 customers had been examined and it expected "a significant part of the payments to be suspicious".

Shares in Danske Bank had doubled in value from when Borgen took over in 2013 to July 2017, but have since lost more than a third as allegations of suspicious transactions increased and Denmark and Estonia began criminal investigations.

The bank said it had taken action including "warnings, dismissals, loss of bonus payments and reporting to the authorities" against current and former staff, as well as overhauling systems found to have failed.

In an indication of the costs such lapses can have, Dutch bank ING agreed to pay 775 million euros ($900 million) this month after admitting criminals had been able to launder money through its accounts.

And earlier this year U.S. authorities accused Latvia's ABLV of covering up money laundering, leading to the bank being denied U.S. dollar funding and its swift collapse.

While Danske does not have a banking licence in the United States, banning U.S. correspondent banks from dealing with it would amount to shutting it out of the global financial network.

SERIOUS SHORTCOMINGS

The report found that Danske Bank failed to take proper action in 2007 when it was criticised by the Estonian regulator and received information from its Danish counterpart that pointed to "criminal activity in its pure form, including money laundering" estimated at "billions of roubles monthly".

And when a whistleblower raised problems at the Estonian branch in early 2014 the allegations were not properly investigated and were not shared with the board, Danske said, adding that measures to get its business there under control had been insufficient.

Danske Bank also said the Estonian branch did not employ its anti-money laundering procedures because it had not migrated its Baltic banking activities onto the bank's IT platform as this would have been too expensive.

"The report describes serious shortcomings in the organisation of Danske Bank, where risk-appetite and risk control were not in balance," the head of Estonia's FSA financial regulator Kilvar Kessler said in a statement.

Danske Bank, which cut its forecast for annual net profit to 16-17 billion Danish crowns, from a previous 18-20 billion, has successfully overcome previous traumas.

The government had to step in when international markets froze in 2008 and in 2012 it was criticised for an advertising campaign that sought to improve its image, borrowing symbols linked to anti-establishment movement Occupy Wall Street.

Prior to the money laundering scandal, Borgen had managed to improve the bank's image and earnings in part by cutting costs, shifting its focus to wealthier clients and expanding in Sweden and Norway to rival the Nordic region's biggest bank, Nordea.

(Reporting by Jacob Gronholt-Pedersen and Teis Jensen, additional reporting by Emil Gjerding Nielson; editing by Jason Neely and Alexander Smith)
(Adds BP's response, background)

Sept 20 (Reuters) - North African-focused oil and gas company SDX Energy (Berlin: 76S1.BE - news) on Thursday confirmed that it was in discussions with BP Plc to buy a package of assets in Egypt.

London-listed SDX said the acquisition would constitute a reverse takeover. (https://reut.rs/2OFTxs2)

SDX said its shares have been suspended from trading on London's junior market, AIM, with immediate effect and will remain suspended until an admission document has been published or the company confirms that a deal is not proceeding.

A spokeswoman for BP declined to comment on the talks with SDX.

Reuters reported earlier in the year, citing banking sources, that BP is seeking buyers for its stake in a 50-year-old oil and gas business in Egypt, then estimated to be worth around $500 million.

It was not immediately clear which assets SDX was in talks with BP over.

Earlier in the day, oil and gas explorer and producer SOCO International said it signed a deal to buy privately-owned Merlon Petroleum El Fayum Company for about $215 million. Merlon holds the operated working interest onshore El Fayum in Egypt. (Reporting by Muvija M in Bengaluru and Shadia Nasralla in London; Editing by Emelia Sithole-Matarise and Elaine Hardcastle)
Police in the Netherlands said four children were killed and two people were injured following a collision between a train and a cargo bike in Oss on the morning of September 20.

The incident occurred at a railway crossing in the city. The incident involved a Bakfiets cargo bike, which have a large wooden container on the front.

Local reports said the children were travelling with a staff member from their day care center and were on a school run with the incident occurred. Credit: Kristian Westerveld via Storyful
GUATEMALA CITY (AP)  Thousands marched Thursday to protest President Jimmy Morales' decision to end the work of a U.N. anti-corruption commission that has helped lead high-profile graft probes targeting dozens of powerful Guatemalans, including one involving Morales.

Students, farmers, clerics, academics and others turned out in the streets of Guatemala City as well as plazas and highways outside the capital to demand Morales allow the commission, known as CICIG for its initials in Spanish, to stay.

"Jimmy and Sandra resign, because you are part of the mafia," read some banners, referring to the president and his foreign minister, Sandra Jovel.

"It is a general feeling of rejection of a government that has not been able to run things well," said opposition lawmaker Paul Briere, who took part in the march.

Morales announced at the end of August that he would not renew the mandate of the commission for another two-year term, giving it until the end of its current mandate next September to wind down its activities and transfer them to Guatemalan institutions.

He then barred CICIG chief Ivan Velasquez, a Colombian national, from returning to Guatemala from a work trip to the United States, calling him "a person who attacks order and public security in the country."

The Constitutional Court overruled that decision, but it was not immediately clear whether Velasquez would be able to return.

Also Thursday, U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres reiterated during a news conference that Velasquez enjoys his full confidence and he sees no reason for that to change.

Guterres added that the United Nations consulted with Morales' government about appointing a deputy to Velasquez responsible for "coordinating CICIG's actions" in the country.

Friction between Morales and the commission began in January 2017, when CICIG and Guatemalan prosecutors sought arrest warrants for the president's brother and son on graft charges. Both are currently being prosecuted.

In a subsequent case, Morales is suspected of having received more than $1 million in undeclared campaign financing. He denies any wrongdoing and is immune from prosecution as a sitting president. A request to lift that protection is before lawmakers for a decision.

Previous corruption investigations brought by CICIG and prosecutors have ensnared politicians, public officials and businesspeople and led to the resignation and imprisonment of former President Otto Perez Molina.
LAFD crews fought a major emergency structure fire at a warehouse on E Pico Boulevard in Boyle Heights on September 19.

Huge plumes of black smoke rose from the blaze as firefighters worked on defensive measures to keep the fire from spreading to adjacent buildings.

Public Information Officer Erik Scott tweeted that mayday was declared, indicating at least one firefighter was in an emergency situation, according to the LAFD. Credit: Los Angeles Fire Department via Storyful
VELVA, N.D. (AP) -- Some residents of central North Dakota community would welcome a Dollar General store, but city officials want no part of it.

The Velva City Commission recently rejected the lone bid on a land sale after learning the developer planned to lease the property to Dollar General, the Minot Daily News reported. The retailer has about 14,000 stores nationwide.

Velva officials declined the developer's offer of $100,000 for nearly 1.4 acres (0.6 hectares) on the city's west side.

Commissioner Mary Liz Davis said officials didn't want Dollar General to threaten existing businesses in Velva, particularly its grocery and drug stores. She said area businesses are already dealing with a worker shortage and a Dollar General would bring more employment competition to the area.

Davis acknowledged that the developer may find another property for the store.

"It's not like we are stopping it," Davis said. "We just don't want to be a part of the process."

Velva resident Lori Foley thinks Dollar General would benefit the community by attracting travelers off the highway and giving locals another shopping option. She presented a petition in support of the store to the commission, which wasn't swayed.

"They are more concerned about protecting each other or their friends instead of doing what's right for the city of Velva, and that's what bothers me the most," Foley said. "They weren't looking at the big picture of how much revenue it brings into Velva. They are giving up the opportunity of what Dollar General will do for our community."

___

Information from: Minot Daily News, http://www.minotdailynews.com
By Jeff Mason

CONWAY, S.C. (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump warned South Carolina on Wednesday "water is coming your way" from more floods as the death toll from Hurricane Florence rose to at least 36 after a sheriff's van was swept away killing two women.

"Over the next couple of days, it's going to get rough in South Carolina... Whatever you need from Washington, we are there," Trump told an official briefing in Conway, South Carolina.

"Now it looks nice, but it's really the calm before the storm," he said referring to water draining into rising rivers after Florence's epic deluge over the weekend.

Trump visited a neighbourhood in Conway where residents were loading moving vans in anticipation of more flooding.

Florence has killed at least 36 people, including 27 in North Carolina, eight in South Carolina and one in Virginia. Two of the South Carolina victims were mental health patients who drowned on Tuesday when a van carrying them was swept away by floodwater.

More than 15,000 people remain in shelters and more than 200,000 customers are without power across North Carolina because of Florence, according to state officials.

Although the storm is long gone, river flooding still poses a danger. The Cape Fear River was expected to crest at 61.5 feet (19 meters), four times its normal height, on Wednesday in Fayetteville, North Carolina, a city of 200,000 near the Fort Bragg Army base in the southern part of the state, according to the National Weather Service. Floodwaters have disrupted efforts to restore power, clear roads and allow evacuated residents to go home.

Wilmington, just down the coast, remains almost completely cut off by flooding from the Cape Fear River and earlier storm surges from Florence.

ENVIRONMENTAL TOLL

At least 16 rivers remained at a major flood stage, with three others set to crest in the coming days in North Carolina, the state said.

The toll of environmental damage was also mounting as human and animal waste gets swept up in the roiling floodwaters.

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North Carolina is one of the leading U.S. hog-producing states and the floodwaters have caused 21 hog "lagoons," which store waste from pig farms, to overflow, creating a risk of standing water contaminated with bacteria like salmonella, according to the state's Department of Environmental Quality.

Trump promised North and South Carolina would have strong federal support. "We're going to be there 100 percent," Trump told officials at a briefing shortly after arriving at the Marine Corps Air Station Cherry Point in Havelock, North Carolina.

Trump, who has been criticized for his handling of Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico last year, also thanked first responders for their work since Florence made landfall on Friday.

He was accompanied by Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, Federal Emergency Management Agency chief Brock Long, Senators Richard Burr and Thom Tillis of North Carolina and Senators Lindsey Graham and Tim Scott of South Carolina.

Trump visited a church in New Bern, a town of 30,000 located at the confluence of the Neuse and Trent rivers that was hit especially hard by flooding, and joined volunteers in passing out boxed meals to locals in a drive-through line. He also walked through a neighbourhood lined with discarded wet furniture, hugging residents and posing for pictures.

Thousands of rescues have taken place in the Carolinas. Fire and rescue crews were waiting to go into many areas to assist with structural damage resulting from Florence, which dumped up to 36 inches (91 cm) of rain in parts of North Carolina.

(Reporting by Jeff Mason and Ernest Scheyder; Additional reporting by Roberta Rampton in Washington, Bernie Woodall in Miami; Brendan O'Brien in Milwaukee; Jessica Resnick-Ault and Barbara Goldberg in New York; and Anna Mehler Paperny in North Carolina; Writing by Bill Trott; Editing by Bill Tarrant and Lisa Shumaker)
Chandan Kumar Mandal is the environment and migration reporter for The Kathmandu Post, covering labour migration and governance, as well as climate change, natural disasters, and wildlife.
FILE PHOTO - Liviu Dragnea reacts during an interview with Reuters, in Bucharest, Romania, May 23, 2018. Inquam Photos/Octav Ganea via REUTERS

BUCHAREST (Reuters) - Three former allies of the leader of Romania's ruling Social Democrats called on him to resign on Wednesday, saying his criminal convictions have become the party's largest vulnerability ahead of elections in 2019 and 2020.

Liviu Dragnea was barred from becoming prime minister because of his conviction but holds a tight grip on the party, which swept into power last year and has since tried to weaken anti-corruption legislation in one of the European Union's most corrupt states.

The letter from the party vice presidents is the strongest attack against Dragnea from his own ranks. The party's executive committee will meet on Friday. Dragnea has refused to comment until then.

"Party leader Liviu Dragnea's vulnerable legal situation has become the party's major vulnerability, the opposition and civil society's main attack element, a constant source of mistrust domestically and abroad," the open letter from Deputy Prime Minister Paul Stanescu, lawmaker Adrian Tutuianu and Bucharest mayor Gabriela Firea said.

It is also "the reason why the correctness of any Social Democrat Party attempt to reform the judiciary is being questioned", it said.

Attempts to decriminalise several corruption offences last year via emergency decree triggered the country's largest street protests in decades.

Changes made this year in parliament to the country's criminal codes also have prompted criticism from magistrates, centrist President Klaus Iohannis and the European Commission, which keeps Romania's justice system under special monitoring.

Dragnea has a conviction in a vote rigging case. Earlier this year, he was also sentenced to three and a half years in prison in a separate abuse of office case. His appeal will start on Oct. 8.

He is also under investigation in a separate case on suspicion of forming a criminal group to siphon off cash from state projects, some of them EU-funded. He has denied all wrongdoing.

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The trio urged their party president Dragnea to resign and suggested Prime Minister Viorica Dancila replace him as interim party leader until a countrywide congress in early 2019.

Stanescu, Tutuianu and Firea said opinion polls showed the party now had 25-30 percent support, sharply down from the 47 percent of votes it won in a December 2016 parliamentary election. Romania has a presidential election next year and parliamentary polls in 2020.

Dancila is seen as a close ally of Dragnea, who propelled her political career.

(Reporting by Luiza Ilie; Editing by Alison Williams)
ANKARA (Reuters) - A Turkish court ordered the release of a jailed opposition lawmaker on Thursday who had been sentenced to more than five years for disclosing government secrets, the state-run Anadolu news agency said.

Enis Berberoglu was the first lawmaker from the main opposition Republican People's Party (CHP) to be jailed amid government purges following a failed military coup in 2016.

Berberoglu was initially sentenced in June 2017, to 25 years for espionage on charges that he gave an opposition newspaper a video purporting to show Turkey's intelligence agency trucking weapons into Syria. He denied the charges.

In a retrial in February, Berberoglu's jail sentence was cut to five years and 10 months in jail. [nL8N1Q31RH] In Turkey's snap parliamentary election in June, Berberoglu was re-elected to parliament from behind bars.

Turkey's court of appeals ruled on Thursday that Berberoglu's sentence should be suspended and it freed him for the remainder of his term as a CHP lawmaker, Anadolu said.

The court of appeals was not immediately available for comment.

The opposition Cumhuriyet daily published its original report about the alleged weapons shipment to Syria based on a video that allegedly came from Berberoglu.

Two of the newspaper's journalists, Can Dundar and Erdem Gul, were sentenced to at least five years in jail over the report, but were later released pending an appeal process.

Dundar, who for critics of President Tayyip Erdogan's post-coup security clampdown has become a symbol of press freedom, has since left Turkey and is now being tried in absentia. Gul remains in the country and free while his appeal is in process.

More than 50,000 people have been detained and more than 150,000 have been sacked or suspended from their jobs since the abortive coup in July 2016. Around 150 media outlets have also been shut down, while 160 journalists have been jailed.

In April, a Turkish court sentenced 14 staff of Cumhuriyet to prison on terrorism charges and acquitted three, in a case that sparked global outrage over press freedom under Erdogan.

(Reporting by Tuvan Gumrukcu; Editing by Gareth Jones)
Eco Atlantic Oil & Gas acquired Pan Africa Oil Namibia on Thursday after the AIM-listed firm picked up the last 10% of the outfit's shares not already in its possession.

In order to fund the acquisition of Pan African from Amis Oil and Gas, Eco will issue 300,000 common shares to Amis.

As a result of the acquisition, Pan African will become a wholly-owned subsidiary of Eco, giving the firm an 80% working interest in the Tamar License, with the remaining 20% being divided equally between the National Petroleum Corporation of Namibia and Spectrum Geo.

The Tamar License is expected to be drilled by Chariot Oil and Gas and AziNam in October.

Eco Atlantic chief executive Gil Holzman, said: "We are very pleased to announce the completion of this transaction, which simplifies our corporate structure, bringing all of our subsidiaries under Eco Atlantic's sole and wholly owned ownership."

"This transaction further simplifies our corporate structure, and aligns all stakeholders into the ultimate parent company thus enables us to better manage each of our subsidiaries and their respective held licenses in preparation for future potential developments and transactions."

As of 1000 BST, Eco shares had picked up 1.90% to 50.64p.
Chief of the European Council Donald Tusk, said on Thursday that Theresa May's proposed new economic partnership with the EU "will not work" as it risks undermining the EU's single market.

Theresa May told EU leaders over dinner in a summit in Salzburg that she refuses to delay the date of Brexit despite lacking a deal and urged them to consider her plans for the divorce.

She pressed the point that both sides are still very far apart on a trade agreement and the Irish border issue, saying: We all recognise that time is short but extending or delaying these negotiations is not an option.

Some countries, led by Netherlands and Belgium and backed by Donald Tusk, president of the European Council, believe that it is the EUs turn to grant concessions, The Times reported, while others including France and Germany still see major sticking points in Mays blueprint.

The UK is set to present new proposals on the Irish border in the coming weeks. The EU insisted that unless acceptable proposals are presented, Northern Ireland will have to stay aligned with the EU post-Brexit to avoid a hard border on the island.

Although a deal is still a possibility, Jean-Claude Juncker, president of the European commission, and Tusk, said that an agreement was still far away and the UKs proposals needed to be reworked and further negotiated.

"For this to work we need not only good will, which we feel today - it's the atmosphere today and yesterday was much better than two or three weeks ago - but the Irish question needs something more than good intentions.

"We need tough, clear and precise guarantees.

"This is why we need more time but our hope is we will be ready with this in October."

Further summits have been arranged for November as both sides want to reach an agreement before December so there is enough time to get the deal signed by the UK and the European parliament.

Even if May manages to get the Chequers plan approved by the EU27 it still faces strong criticism back home from the Tory Brexiters, who claim it goes against what the people voted for in the 2016 referendum.

Former minister from the Conservative Party Mike Penning said the Chequers plan was as dead as a dodo and that it was delusional to think that the eurosceptics in the party would back her proposals.
The focus at the end of the week will be on the government's finances for the month of August, with ONS set to release public sector borrowing data at 0930 BST.

Across the Channel, all eyes will on IHS Markit's Eurozone Purchasing Managers' Index for September.

Consensus is for the so-called composite PMI to edge down by just one tenth of a point to 54.4, with resilience in service sector activity helping to offset weakness in manufacturing.

After the close of markets in London, investors will also be keeping tabs on sovereign debt rating announcement from Standard&Poor's on Spain and from Moody's on Greece.

Homebuilding materials specialist SIG is among the companies that are set to update markets.

Given that the company had already reported on its first half revenues, analysts at UBS expected the focus this time around to be on the group's outlook for the second half of the year and on how it was progressing on its efforts to deleverage.

The Swiss broker's forecasts were calling for "broadly flat" operating earnings on an EBITA basis of 35.0m despite a drop in the company's margins from 2.7% to 2.5%, as a result of weakness in the UK, where margins were seen decreasing by 130 basis points.

UBS also expected guidance for pre-tax profits to be unchanged at 82m for the 2018 financial year, implying "significant catch-up" in the back half of the year as substantial cost benefits come through.

Smiths Group is also scheduled to update markets with its full-year figures, with Deutsche Bank anticipating a below-forecast turnout from Medical and slightly slower growth in financial year 2018 at Detection, offset to an extent by faster growth at John Crane.

On the potential for a tie-up between Smiths Medical and US rival ICU Medical, the broker said it favoured an exit from that line of business altogether.

Nevertheless, they saw an agreement with ICU as a potential catalyst for the shares.

Friday September 21

INTERIM DIVIDEND PAYMENT DATE

Anglo American, Baronsmead Second Venture Trust, Baronsmead Venture Trust, Capital & Counties Properties , Clarkson, FDM Group (Holdings), Henderson Opportunities Trust, Hikma Pharmaceuticals, Hostelworld Group , Ibstock , Low & Bonar, Marshall Motor Holdings, Mobeus Income & Growth Vct, National Express Group, Polypipe Group , Rotork, Stock Spirits Group , Ultra Electronics Holdings, Vesuvius, Virgin Money Holdings (UK)

QUARTERLY PAYMENT DATE

Alpha Real Trust Ltd., BlackRock World Mining Trust, BP, Brunner Inv Trust, UIL Limited (DI)

FINALS

Smiths Group

ANNUAL REPORT

Redrow

SPECIAL DIVIDEND PAYMENT DATE

Quilter

EGMS

AXA Property Trust Limited

AGMS

Byotrol, Fusion Antibodies , Mercia Technologies , Sirius Real Estate Ltd., Sysgroup, Tungsten Corporation

UK ECONOMIC ANNOUNCEMENTS

CBI Industrial Trends Surveys (11:00)

Public Sector Net Borrowing (09:30)

FINAL DIVIDEND PAYMENT DATE

Best of the Best, Creightons, Dixons Carphone , FIH Group , JPMorgan Brazil Inv Trust , Miton UK Microcap Trust, Northgate, SSE, Superdry
There had been opposition from a number of shareholders and groups over the reappointment of Bonderman, who has been on the board for 22 years, and Kyran McLaughlin, who has occupied his non-executive director role for 17 years, contrary to the nine years suggested by the UK corporate governance code.

Bonderman received 70.5% of votes in favour of his re-appointment, markedly down from 89.1%, with McLaughlin getting 66.8% support, which was significantly lower than the 99%-plus received for some other directors.

The Local Authority Pension Fund Forum, whose members oversee about 230bn in pension fund assets, recommended that its members vote against Bondermans re-election and the Irish airline's annual report and accounts. The results were approved by 98.7% of votes.

Attending the AGM outside Dublin, LAPFF chair Ian Greenwood, said: It is encouraging that more shareholders have voted against Mr Bonderman this year. Mr Bonderman has been chairman for too long and there are significant doubts about his independence. He has not taken a lead on employee relations or making sure customers have received adequate service during the continuing strikes.

Ryanair has failed to adequately address concerns about the companys troubled relationship with its employees and the potential impact on its business. The companys employment issues highlight long-standing concerns about its governance and in particular Mr Bondermans ability and willingness to oversee the board and influence the CEO, Michael OLeary.

We hope Mr Bonderman and the board will heed the message shareholders have sent today and announce plans for him to step down. Ryanair should recruit an independent chairman who will strengthen the board to provide greater oversight and challenge to Mr OLeary.

Ahead of the AGM, Aberdeen Standard Investments investment director Alison Kennedy called for Ryanair to set out its succession planning for the two longstanding directors.

She said: "Given the challenges the company faces, for example in union and labour relations, it is clear that governance needs to evolve.

"We expect that there will be clear progress on succession for these two key board positions by the time of the AGM next year. If not, we will vote against the re-election of Mr Bonderman, Mr McLaughlin and the other members of the Nominations Committee."
Workers from Wetherspoons , McDonalds and TGI Fridays have taken unexpected action to fight poverty wages and are set to strike together next month.

The strike set for 4 October includes staff from a number of McDonalds and Wetherspoons branches in London and Brighton.

Workers, many of them newly unionised and of a young age, are calling for 10 an hour pay and union recognition.

Wetherspoons staff are asking to bring forward an annual pay rise from April 2019 to November 2018. Currently the minimum starting rate for bar staff over 18 is 8.05 an hour while kitchen staff receive 8.25 an hour and team leaders are on 8.65.

Earlier on this year the TGI Fridays was fined for failing to pay workers the minimum wage.

Workers from The Bright Helm and The Post & Telegraph Wetherspoon pubs in Brighton told the Guardian that securing the wage rise was crucial to alleviate the mounting personal debt that the workforce is in due to poor wages and lift them out of near poverty conditions.

A JD Wetherspoon spokesperson said the pub chain was moving to the same pay rate for 18-21s as we already have for over 21s from November this year, as well as lifting rates of pay. In the company's recent quarterly results the company said it had spend around 20m last year on pay for bar staff, and was planning to invest a further 27m from November.
French Connection was under the cosh on Thursday as the fashion retailer said losses widened in the first half amid difficult trading in the UK.

In the six months to 31 July, losses before tax widened to 15.1m from 5.9m in the same period a year ago as revenue fell 2.4% to 58.1m. On an underlying basis, however, losses narrowed to 5.5m from 5.9m the year before as it benefited from store closures.

The company said continued growth in wholesale, where revenues were up 6.2% to 30.8m, was offset by a reduced store portfolio and tough retail trading in the UK. Retail revenues dropped 10.5% to 27.3m, with a like-for-like sales decline of 7% for the UK and Europe. Meanwhile, licensing income was flat at 2.6m.

The group said it was on track to return to profitability at the year end.

Chairman and chief executive Stephen Marks said: "I am pleased that the changes we have made around the business over the last couple of years continue to move us forward.

"There is no doubt that progress has not been helped by the trading conditions in which we operate in the UK, although we can take great confidence from the performance of the wholesale business and the stability of the licence income.

"The order books we have provide a clear outlook for the second half of the year in wholesale although retail continues to be challenging. We remain on target to return the business to profitability this year and we will be doing everything we can to ensure that happens."

Numis left its forecasts for the company unchanged and said it continues to expect the business to achieve breakeven for FY19. "We remain confident in the growth prospects for the French Connection brand and retain our positive stance," it said.

"Accelerated by the Toast disposal, we note that French Connections business is increasingly weighted towards its wholesale operations (now nearly 60% of revenue), such that even a -7% H1 Retail LFL result has seen our FY profit before tax estimate unchanged."

French Connection sold its 75% stake in fashion brand Toast to Danish fashion company Bestseller back in April.

At 0920 BST, the shares were down 5.6% to 47.29p.
Shanghai (Gasgoo)- Alibaba Group plans to build a smart expressway by virtue of the Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) technology, the e-commerce giant announced on the 2018 Computing Conference.

As an important part of Alibaba's automotive upgrading strategy, the new program will be jointly implemented by several business units, including AliOS, Alibaba Cloud, DAMO Academy, AutoNavi, Alipay and Banma Tech, etc.

The V2X is the key to achieve the smart expressway. Under Alibaba's scenarios, the smart expressway will endow drivers with clairvoyance and clairaudience, fully supporting the running of different kinds of vehicles, such as traditional cars, Internet cars and autonomous cars.

The construction of the smart expressway will be processed from three technical levels, namely, the cloud control platform, the intelligent sensing base station as well as the collaborative computing system. To be specific, the sensing base station developed by DAMO Academy will be applied in road tests. AliOS is responsible for the R&D of car sensors and collaborative computing. Besides, the cloud control platform will act as a cloud brain.

Alibaba began to develop its car operating system from 2014. The group claimed that it has currently built the world's largest Internet car platform based on the AliOS-based Banma operating system. In addition, Alibaba said its new car strategy will be provided with such technical supports as autonomous driving technologies, high-precision location-based services and HP map from DAMO Academy, Qianxun SI and AutoNavi respectively.

The Chinese tech titian also formed an industrial alliance involving many prominent companies and public institutions, such as State Grid Corporation of China, China Unicom, FAW Group, Roewe, Intel, Ford Motor, Datang Telecom Group and Research Institute of Highway Ministry of Transport, to jointly promote the implementation of the smart expressway.
Suitor attacked sisters with acid after older girl spurned him

The recent acid attack on two teenag girls in Rautahat was a result of unrequited love, police investigation has shown.
The Boar's Head-Corps Alumni Weekend is returning to the University of North Georgia (UNG) for its third installment Sept. 28-30 on UNG's Dahlonega Campus.

Organized by the North Georgia Corps of Cadets Association (NGCCA), the weekend seeks to offer cadets mentoring and networking opportunities provided by Corps of Cadets alumni.

NGCCA Chairman Alan Ware '77, a career aviator, retired as a Navy Reserve captain and has worked as a pilot for FedEx for more than 33 years. He said there's nothing like the shared cadet experiences, from Freshman Recruit Orientation Group (FROG) Week to commissioning.

"It bonds people forever," Ware said. "NGCCA represents those memories."

Retired U.S. Army Maj. Jeff Struecker will be the "First Call" guest speaker at 7 p.m. Friday, Sept. 28, in the Convocation Center. Struecker was part of the Army's Elite 75th Ranger Regiment that fought in the 1993 Battle of Mogadishu in Somalia, which inspired the movie "Black Hawk Down." He later became a chaplain and commissioned officer before retiring from the Army in 2011. Struecker is the lead pastor of Calvary Baptist Church in Columbus, Georgia. Greystone Power Corp. is the presenting sponsor of Struecker's talk.

Saturday morning, Sept. 29, meetings by NGCCA (annual membership meeting) and the Corps Advisory Council (quarterly meeting) will conduct alumni business in support of the Boars Head Brigade.

Networking and mentoring sessions are scheduled for 1-5 p.m. Saturday, Sept. 29, at various locations on the Dahlonega Campus. The sessions are led by alumni in specific career areas designed to give future graduates additional knowledge about the pathways and pitfalls of their chosen pursuits.

"The current cadets feed off the energy of alumni talking about future careers," Ware said. "When the kids see the energy in us, they tend to warm up and want to learn more."

The Distinguished Military Student (DMS) Banquet at 6 p.m. Saturday, Sept. 29, in the UNG Dining Hall Upper Banquet Room, wraps up a busy Saturday as DMS awardees and their parents are treated to the recognition dinner in honor of their accomplishments. The banquet is co-hosted by the UNG Alumni Association.

The DMS Review is slated for 2 p.m. Sunday, Sept. 30, on the Gen. William "Lipp" Livsey Drill Field. The DMS Review honors high-achieving senior cadets.

To earn DMS recognition, a cadet must be in the upper half of the academic class at UNG, the upper third of the ROTC class, and the upper third of UNG's Order of Merit List, established by the professor of military science.

Phil Collins, development officer for the Corps of Cadets, said alumni go on to be successful in a wide array of careers. Their experience is important to share with cadets in case they don't pursue a military career or seek a second career after retiring from the armed forces.

"You should have options. You should have an idea of other pathways you can take," Collins said. "If you're smart, you want to be able to have this information as you enter your college career."

Ware is hopeful this event will help the NGCCA grow its membership, particularly by attracting more recent graduates. The group considers itself "The Fraternity of the Corps."

Ware and Collins are grateful for the alumni who volunteer their time to help cadets and to UNG President Bonita Jacobs, University Relations and especially to UNG Alumni Relations for their support in staging the weekend.

"It's all about building the camaraderie of the cadets and reinforcing the glue that binds the experience of lifelong membership in the Corps of Cadets," Collins said.

Registration is required for all events except the DMS Review, which is open to the public. For more information, to register, or to see who's attending, visit the NGCCA website.
Laurel A. Miner has joined Virginia Techs Office of the Vice President for Research and Innovation as its chief of staff.

Miner joins Virginia Tech after serving since 2012 as a senior analyst in the Office of the Under Secretary for Standards and Technology at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in the U.S. Department of Commerce. Prior to that position, Miner served as a science advisor in the Office of the Under Secretary for Science at the U.S. Department of Energy.

Miner will support Theresa Mayer, vice president for research and innovation, in developing, communicating, and implementing a plan to enhance the infrastructure for the next doubling of the universitys research portfolio and impact. In this role, she will interface with senior leaders across Virginia Tech to support the universitys strategic planning process. Miner will also lead initiatives that have promise to expand, diversify, or strengthen the universitys research enterprise.

Since coming to Virginia Tech in July, Miner has taken on several key initiatives for the office. She currently coordinates the development of the Commonwealth Cyber Initiative blueprint, which will outline a plan for a $25 million investment by the commonwealth to support research, innovation, and commercialization of cybersecurity technologies and development of the cyber workforce. Nearly 50 organizations, including business and industry, government and nonprofits, and higher education institutions are participating in the project.

The blueprint will be submitted to the Virginia Research Investment Committee by Dec. 1. A retreat of the CCIs advisory council is scheduled for Sept. 21 to review preliminary recommendations.

Engaging diverse groups to reach consensus around important ideas is critical to rapid growth and progress in research, Miner said. Im drawn to the opportunity of working at an institution like Virginia Tech where the breadth and depth of expertise is matched only by the dedication and enthusiasm of its faculty, staff, and students.

While at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, Miner led a process to develop a 10-year strategic vision for the institute. She was responsible for all aspects of the plans development, including facilitating discussion among senior leadership to agree on priorities including engineering biology, the internet of things, quantum science, and data analytics. She further led efforts that sought feedback from staff and advisory boards and developed a process for the plans implementation and oversight.

Laurel has demonstrated leadership abilities that Virginia Tech needs to introduce a comprehensive strategic plan for research and innovation, which will allow us to align and coordinate our resources for maximum impact, said Mayer. She will play a critical role in ensuring that our many stakeholders are working together to develop and achieve our shared goals in research and innovation.

Miner graduated from the College of William & Mary with a bachelors degree in physics. She earned her masters and doctoral degrees from the University of North Carolina  Chapel Hill.

Her appointment represents one of several important appointments within the Office of the Vice President for Research and Innovation to the office, including Lisa Lee to direct the new Division of Scholarly Integrity and Research Compliance and Brandy Salmon as associate vice president for innovation and partnerships.
Women and the welfare state

The second class treatment that women feel they are getting should be eliminated
World Bank okays $100m grant for energy sector

The World Bank has approved $100 million under the Nepal Energy Sector Development Policy Credit programme, which aims to implement key policies and regulatory and institutional measures. This is the first loan that the multilateral lending organisation has approved in the countrys energy sector.
Yeti Airlines adds new ATR aircraft

Yeti Airlines has added a third ATR72-500 aircraft to its fleet. The aircraft with registration 9N-ALN arrived on Tuesday, flying from France via Muscat to Kathmandu.
Jayne Anne Phillips at Laphams Quarterly:

The so-called Hog Trial took place against a background of bitterness regarding Cline-McCoy loss of land in West Virginia. Its hard not to recognize the hardships of the postwar decades in the mountains, particularly for the less affluent McCoys, for whom the butchering of a hog could mean the difference between eating or going hungry for some weeks. Fencing the steep land wasnt practical, and livestock wandered between homesteads; farmers notched the ears of their animals as a form of branding. McCoy saw his notch on Floyd Hatfields hog and filed suit. Floyd, Anses cousin, lived on the Kentucky side of the river and was related to both families. Some say Randall McCoys actual motivation was anger that Floyd worked for Anses profitable timber operation. The local justice of the peace, Preacher Anse Hatfield, cousin to Devil Anse, impaneled a jury that was half Hatfield men, half McCoy men. McCoy juror Selkirk McCoyson of Asa Harmon McCoy, the Union soldier murdered thirteen years beforeworked, with two of his sons, among the thirty-five to forty men on the Hatfield timber crew. He apparently valued the present more than the past, and voted against Randall McCoy. No violence ensued, but the betrayal fueled resentment among the families. McCoy, a subsistence farmer and sometime ferryboat operator, was unable to provide economic stability or social or political status for his clan, while Hatfields success protected his family and employees from the economic decline endemic to the Tug Valley. The McCoy family was understandably frustrated, even furious, at the seemingly undefeated Hatfields.

more here.
The federal government has noticed: Teenage use of e-cigarettes, FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb, M.D., said in a Sept. 12 statement, has reached "an epidemic proportion of growth."

"Epidemic" is a strong word, but Horowitz agrees. "Absolutely, no question about it," he told AAFP News.

"We have a new form of nicotine delivery marketed to youth in a way that allows the young people to initiate use of the drug without having to deal with the noxious flavor of the drug," he said.

The cartoonish array of flavors associated with vaping reminds Horowitz of the mentholated cigarettes that were advertised heavily in the East Harlem neighborhood where he completed an adolescent-medicine fellowship in the mid-1980s.

Adolescence, Horowitz said, is "a time of risk-taking and impulsive behavior, when kids think they're indestructible and being part of a cool group is important." These factors have always fueled teen smoking. What's different now, he says, is that the teenage patients he sees don't equate vaping with smoking.

"The way I take a history from a young person has changed, specifically with regard to substance use," he says. "We have a method of nicotine delivery that's flavored -- tooty-fruity JUULs -- and it means young people don't think they're smoking."

Because "the youth risk is paramount," as Gottlieb put it in his statement, the clock is now ticking for five major e-cigarette manufacturers, including the dominant JUUL Labs. The FDA has notified the companies -- JUUL, Vuse, Blu, Logic and MarkTen -- of a 60-day deadline to lay out how they plan to decrease underage vaping.

If the companies fail to reverse the youth-use trend, Gottlieb said, the FDA may move to take flavored products off the market. He also called attention to what he called an enforcement "blitz" aimed at brick-and-mortar and online retailers selling e-cigarettes to minors.

Critics of the agency, including a litigant in a lawsuit accusing the FDA of dragging its feet on implementing a rule regarding the regulation of new tobacco products, say these latest efforts still aren't enough.

Robin Koval, CEO and president of the anti-tobacco nonprofit Truth Initiative, said in a Sept. 13 statement, "The FDA's request that five e-cigarette manufacturers come up with plans to tackle the youth e-cigarette problem within the next 60 days is the equivalent of asking the fox to recommend plans for guarding the hen house."

For his part, Horowitz is lobbying his teenage patients one at a time.

"On first contact with a young person, by and large, they're completely in denial," he said. "I may say, 'Hey, there's stuff you're vaping that's not safe for you,' and they're probably thinking, 'Give me a break, doc.' But the degree to which I get through increases with time. My chances get better on subsequent visits."

Related AAFP News Coverage

ENDS Not Effective as Tobacco Cessation Method, Says Study

(7/31/2018)

MMWR Report: Fewer Youth Say They Use Tobacco Products

(7/3/2018)

AAFP Voices Support for FDA Tobacco Regulation

Academy Comments on Tobacco Flavors, Cigars, Nicotine in Cigarettes

(6/26/2018)

More From AAFP

Tobacco: Preventing and Treating Nicotine Dependence and Tobacco Use (Position Paper)
With both teams ranked and in title hunt, USD vs. SDSU never been bigger
Australian Securities and Frankfurt Stock Exchange cross listed iSignthis Ltd ( ASX:ISX ) ( FRA:TA8 ), the leading payment and identity technology company, is pleased to announce that it has signed an agreement with Prasos, Finland's largest cryptocurrency service provider, for the provision of payment processing and identity verification services.Highlights- Paydentity(TM) to process identity verification and payments for Finland's largest cryptocurrency broker service- Prasos received more than EUR140m in deposits last financial year- Visa, Mastercard and shortly JCB to be available as payment optionsPrasos received more than EUR140m in deposits for purchase of cryptocurrency last financial year, and the company's trading volume in the main broker services exceeded EUR220m during the same fiscal year.The partnership with iSignthis supports Prasos' growth plans as they expand their product offerings and allows Prasos to meet the AML KYC and transaction monitoring requirements.iSignthis(R) Paydentity(TM) will be utilised by Prasos for the digital identity verification of their customers, in order to meet upcoming AML compliance requirements, whilst rapidly onboarding customers from anywhere in the world. Paydentity(TM) allows Prasos to accept, monitor and process payments from all major card schemes, and a variety of alternative payment methods for the complete onboarding experience.Prasos will very shortly also accept JCB Cards, to complement the Visa and Mastercard facilities available via Paydentity(TM).Digital Currency Exchanges in Australia are regulated by AUSTRAC and thus already subject to Anti-Money Laundering requirements. The European Union has proposed legislation that will similarly regulate digital currency service providers.About PrasosPrasos specialises in cryptocurrency exchange services and asset management. The company was founded in Finland (Jyvaskyla) in 2012 and currently it has over 60 000 clients in Europe. Prasos is one of the leading cryptocurrency service providers in the Nordics and it operates under the following main brands: Coinmotion.com, Bittiraha.fi and Denarium.- Coinmotion.com is a cryptocurrency investment platform that allows to buy, sell and store cryptocurrencies safely.- Bittiraha.fi is the leading bitcoin news portal in Finland. It also allows simple bitcoin trading options and additional services for bitcoin users.- Denarium.com is one of the leading physical bitcoin producers in the world. The physical bitcoins allow end users to store bitcoins in a safe cold storage.For more information, please visit http://www.prasos.fi About iSignthis LtdiSignthis Ltd is a hybrid monetary financial institution and also a RegTech leader in remote identity verification, payment authentication with deposit taking, transactional banking and payment processing capability. iSignthis provides an end-to-end on-boarding service for merchants, with a unified payment, electronic money and identity service via our Paydentity(TM) and ISXPay(R) solutions.By converging payments and identity, iSignthis delivers regulatory compliance to an enhanced customer due diligence standard, offering global reach to any of the world's 4.2Bn 'bank verified' card or account holders, that can be remotely on-boarded to meet the Customer Due Diligence requirements of AML regulated merchants in as little as 3 to 5 minutes. Paydentity(TM) has now onboarded and verified more than 1.5m persons to an AML KYC standard.iSignthis Paydentity(TM) service is the trusted back office solution for regulated entities, allowing merchants to stay ahead of the regulatory curve, and focus on growing their core business. iSignthis' subsidiary, iSignthis eMoney Ltd, trades as ISXPay(R), and is an EEA authorised eMoney Monetary Financial Institution, offering card acquiring in the EEA, and Australia.ISXPay(R) is a principal member of Mastercard Inc, Diners, Discover, (China) Union Pay International and JCB International, an American Express aggregator, and provides merchants with access to payments via alternative methods including SEPA, Poli Payments, Sofort, PRZ24 and others.Probanx Solutions Ltd, a wholly owned subsidiary of iSignthis Ltd, provides API based access to CORE Banking solutions, SEPA Core, SEPA Instant and SEPA business scheme, for neobanks, banks, credit unions and emoney institutions, and provides a bridge to the Eurosystem's Central Bank of Lithuania's CENTROLink service.

Contact iSignthis Ltd

T: +61-3-8640-0990

F: +61-3-8640-0953

E: investors@isignthis.com

WWW: www.isignthis.com iSignthis LtdT: +61-3-8640-0990F: +61-3-8640-0953E: investors@isignthis.comWWW: www.isignthis.com
On 14 June 2018, DroneShield Ltd ( ASX:DRO ) ( OTCMKTS:DRSHF ) ("DroneShield" or the "Company") advised the market that it had received a $3,200,000 order for 70 DroneGuns(TM) for use by a Middle Eastern Ministry of Defence. The announcement stated that the Company's ability to fulfil the order was subject to approval by the relevant U.S. regulator, and that there were no guarantees that the approval for that particular order would be granted. The Company is pleased to advise that the relevant U.S. governmental approval has now been granted.- U.S. regulator has granted an approval for sale of 70 DroneGun Tactical(TM) units for use by a Middle Eastern Ministry of Defence, as announced in June 2018.- Deposit for the order received.- DroneShield is preparing shipment for despatch to the customer.For clarity, only some of the Company's potential orders require such approval since sales of some of the Company's products do not require regulatory approval, and sales the Company's restricted products to a number of countries allied with the United States do not require such approval.This approval is for the largest order for the Company's products to date, and for the largest known order for tactical drone mitigatioin products globally in the short history of the drone security industry.DroneShield has received a deposit in relation to the order, is currently in the process of manufacturing the products for this order, and expects to deliver the first batch of DroneGuns(TM) to customer by the end of September.Oleg Vornik, DroneShield's CEO, commented "This regulatory approval represents an important step in DroneShield's history with a green light to deliver on our first multi-million dollar order. With the company's near term pipeline containing multiple multi-million dollar potential orders, this clearance gives us and our customers the confidence that we will be able to deliver our industry-leading products to a wide range of qualified end-users."To view figures, please visit:About DroneShield LtdDroneShield Ltd (ASX:DRO) (OTCMKTS:DRSHF) is an Australian publicly listed company with its head office in Sydney and teams in the US and UK. We specialise in RF sensing, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, Sensor Fusion, Electronic Warfare, Rapid Prototyping and MIL-SPEC manufacturing.Our capabilities are used to protect Military, Government, Law Enforcement, Critical Infrastructure, Commercial and VIPs throughout the world.Through our team of primarily Australian based engineers - we offer customers bespoke solutions and off-the-shelf products designed to suit a variety of terrestrial, maritime or airborne platforms.DroneShield is proudly exporting Australian capability to customers throughout the world and supporting Australia's defence, national security and other organisations protect people, critical infrastructure and vital assets.

Contact Oleg Vornik

CEO and Managing Director

Email: oleg.vornik@droneshield.com

Tel: +61-2-9995-7280 Oleg VornikCEO and Managing DirectorEmail: oleg.vornik@droneshield.comTel: +61-2-9995-7280
1. Yes. Losing daily service to Houston could be just the first in a series of service cutbacks.

2. Yes. Being less competitive with Austin and D-FW will hurt the airport in the long run.

3. No. The airport has seen strong passenger numbers. Good marketing can keep it going.

4. No. The airport is still pursuing other service, including a Denver route. Its still a solid asset.

5. Unsure. Its hard to say without knowing future airline and travel industry trends.

Vote

View Results
Correction: This story has been updated to reflect that the NSF, NSO and AURA decided to evacuate the observatory without advisement or assistance from the FBI.

Mystery solved.

Authorities say it wasnt aliens, but a janitors unsavory tastes that ultimately led to the closure of an observatory in southern New Mexico.

The Sunspot Observatory was evacuated when that same janitor made veiled threats against the facility after federal agents seized a laptop he used to access child pornography.

The closure on Sept. 6 sparked international attention since authorities refused to release any details, while news outlets and conspiracy theorists filled in the blanks with rumors of geomagnetic storms, alien sightings and apocalyptic asteroids.

According to a search warrant filed in U.S. District Court in Las Cruces, the FBI began investigating after a wireless signal at the observatory, located on Sacramento Peak in the Lincoln National Forest, accessed child porn multiple times since January.

During an interview on Aug. 21, the facilitys chief observer told agents he had found a running laptop with child porn on it in an empty office several months before.

Agents say the chief observer believed the laptop belonged to a research student and didnt report it at the time because he was distracted by an urgent matter within the facility.

The chief observer told agents that only one person had access to the facility around the time of the child porn being accessed: a janitor who started working at the facility a year ago and cleans for a couple of hours a day. The janitors parents own the janitorial contract for the observatory.

Agents say the janitor has a key and unlimited access to the building.

According to the search warrant, agents seized the laptop.

Agents say that when the janitor returned the next morning, unaware of the seizure, he claimed to be missing some cleaning supplies and asked if anyone had been in the office.

The chief observer told agents the janitor began complaining about lax security at the facility and claimed someone was breaking into the facility at night to steal internet service and toilet paper.

As time went on, agents say the janitors actions grew increasingly frantic and he continually approached the chief observer with questions and comments about missing items.

(The janitor) had continued to look feverishly through the facility and continued to make comments about the lax security, an agent wrote in the search warrant.

Agents say the janitor mentioned that decoy security cameras were a joke and it was only a matter of time until the facility got hit.

The agencies that oversee the observatory, National Science Foundation, National Solar Observatory and Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, decided to evacuate and close the facility after the janitor spoke of a serial killer in the area and was fearful that the killer might enter the facility and execute someone.

While authorities maintain their silence, the observatory reopened Monday.

Sunspot is now open, and were ready to show you all the great science and public outreach we do at this fantastic facility! says a statement on the facilitys website.
Public comments on a request by the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant to the state to change how the volume of nuclear waste in the underground is calculated are due by 5 p.m. Thursday.

The New Mexico Environment Department is accepting comments pertaining to a requested permit modification that, if approved, would make the southeast New Mexico repository 1/3 full, instead of the current volume at half full.

Federal law limits the maximum volume of transuranic waste at WIPP to 6.2 million cubic feet.

Comments may be submitted to NMEDs WIPP Project Manager Ricardo Maestas at ricardo.maestas@state.nm.us with subject line WIPP Draft Permit.
The Albuquerque Public Schools Board of Education is asking lawmakers to exempt the school district from revealing names of future superintendent applicants.

Under current public record law, APS has to disclose the name of anyone applying for superintendent. The district wants to reveal only the finalists.

In a resolution approved Wednesday night, APS formally asked lawmakers for legislation that would exempt New Mexico public schools superintendent candidates from the Inspection of Public Records Act, or IPRA, until the candidate pool has been narrowed to three applicants. The draft resolution originally said the final five candidates would be named, but the board decided to lower that to three, saying thats the more common policy in other states.

Board president David Peercy said that once those finalists were chosen, forums would be held and everyone would know everything about them.

The New Mexico Foundation for Open Government says the proposed change is anti-transparency. Melanie J. Majors, executive director of NMFOG, said the organization strongly opposes the resolution.

Majors said the public has an interest in who applies and not just who is a finalist, saying access to all candidates ensures all qualified people are fairly considered.

Peercy said at the meeting that transparency is important but its the boards responsibility to hire a superintendent and not necessarily anyone elses.

The resolution, which passed with a unanimous vote, says the goal is to get the most qualified candidates to apply.

Open records of all applicants  for superintendent positions discourages some qualified candidates from applying for positions in New Mexico schools, the approved resolution says.

Majors disputed the assertion, saying theres no real evidence to back that up. She said APS has been able to attract qualified candidates with an open process thus far.

The resolution pointed to a similar exemption afforded the University of New Mexico. State law allows public higher education institutions to conceal the names of presidential candidates during the hiring process, as long as finalists are named.

Peercy said APS isnt setting the standard, since 35 states have some exemption in open records requirements in searches for top-level executives at public schools or universities.

APS plans to send the resolution to the governor, the Public Education Department, the Legislative Education Study Committee, the Legislative Finance Committee and the New Mexico School Boards Association, according to the resolution.

State Sen. Mimi Stewart, an Albuquerque Democrat and chairwoman of the Legislative Education Study Committee, said she has never seen this issue brought up by a school district before.

This is the first time Ive heard about it, she said.

But ultimately, she said, its too soon to say if the LESC will support it and both she and the committee need to hear more from APS.
CHICAGO  A mere two months ago, President Trumps White House declared the War on Poverty largely over and a success. The administration argued few Americans are truly poor anymore  it estimated the poverty rate was only about 3 percent  and the economys rising tide would continue to lift the boats of those who remained poor.

Millions of Hispanic and black infants and toddlers would beg to disagree, if only they could.

Last week, the U.S. Census Bureau released its 2017 annual report on poverty, and theres no question that the numbers were, in the aggregate, positive.

The national poverty rate declined from 14.8 percent in 2014 to 12.3 percent in 2017, marking the third successive drop.

But the devil is in the details.

The same data set reveals that one in five children up to 2 years old were poor, 19.9 percent  a number almost identical to the 2016 rate. In fact, infants and toddlers represented the age group most likely to live in poverty, according to an analysis by Child Trends, a nonprofit, nonpartisan research center.

Child Trends underscores the enormity of the problem by highlighting that in 2017, nearly one in three black infants and toddlers, 32.7 percent, and more than one in four Hispanic infants and toddlers, 27.3 percent, lived in poverty, compared with approximately one in nine, 11.8 percent, white, non-Hispanic infants and toddlers.

In fact, the younger and more vulnerable the kids, the worse off theyve become.

While the overall percentage of infants living in poverty significantly increased between 2016 and 2017 from 17.2 percent to 20.2 percent, the largest increases were among black and Hispanic infants, for whom the poverty rate rose by 6 and 8 percentage points  28.5 to 34.4 percent and 20.7 to 28.4 percent, respectively, Child Trends noted on its blog.

There is also the potential for the situation to get bleaker if the economy starts cooling down. And expect that Hispanic children would be among the hardest-hit if the president gets his way and sees to it that the Medicaid, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and federal rental subsidies are cut.

Already, the Trump administration has moved to limit access to green cards and/or naturalization to lawfully present immigrants if they  or anyone living in their household  have ever used childrens health insurance (CHIP), Obamacare, SNAP or other social safety-net benefits. This is scaring off the parents of U.S.-born Hispanic children.

After news of the limits first spread in late August, health providers across the country started getting emotional phone calls from lawfully present and undocumented immigrant families pleading to be dropped from the Women, Infants and Children (WIC) federal nutrition program for pregnant women and kids, according to Politico. Agencies in at least 18 states say theyve seen drops of up to 20 percent in enrollment, and they attribute the change largely to fears about the immigration policy.

The target of Trumps most dehumanizing policies has been immigrants, specifically poor ones, even though immigrants who are living in this country unlawfully are absolutely not eligible for any public-assistance benefits. And of those who are lawfully present and eligible, working households headed by an immigrant without a high school degree use fewer welfare services than their native household counterparts.

It hardly matters. For the Trump administration, babies, toddlers and other young children are apparently expendable, disposable and unworthy of any kind of mercy if theyre Latino  regardless of whether they are U.S. citizens or refugees seeking asylum at the border.

Yet its not just a Hispanic issue.

There are 4.2 million black immigrants living in the U.S. as of 2016   up from just 816,000 in 1980, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of Census Bureau data. About 85 percent of them are lawfully present, as refugees or asylees or due to Temporary Protected Status because their home countries experienced catastrophic disasters.

Even if they exist below the radar, theyre no less vulnerable to being scared away from government child benefits that their U.S.-born kids are legally entitled to.

Lets be clear: If the War on Poverty is over, its being replaced by a war on black and brown children, regardless of their immigration status.

Email estherjcepeda@washpost.com, Twitter: @estherjcepeda. (c) 2018, Washington Post Writers Group.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services announced Wednesday it is sending a combined $11,031,786 in opioid-related funding to help New Mexico combat the crisis.

That money is part of more than $1 billion awarded to all states.

Addressing the opioid crisis with all the resources possible and the best science we have is a top priority for President Trump and for everyone at HHS, said Secretary Alex Azar in a news release.

The money awards, administered by the Health Resources and Services Administration and the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, support HHSs strategy, launched last year, according to the news release.

A SAMHSA award of $5,307,273 to New Mexico will help to increase access to medication-assisted treatment using the three FDA-approved medications for the treatment of opioid use disorder.

An HRSA award of $5,724,513 to New Mexico is directed at community health centers and/or academic institutions and rural organizations to expand access to integrated substance use disorder and mental health services.

Admiral Brett Giroir, assistant secretary for health and senior adviser for opioid policy, said this new money will allow states, tribes and communities across America  to continue making progress against this crisis.

From January 2017 through August 2018, the amount of opioids prescribed in America has dropped by 21 percent, officials said. In the same time period, the number of prescriptions filled for naloxone has increased 264 percent, while the number of prescriptions for buprenorphine, one form of medication-assisted treatment for opioid overdose, has risen 16 percent.
Copyright  2018 Albuquerque Journal

Albuquerque voters are giving Mayor Tim Keller high marks for his first 10 months in office, according to a new Journal Poll.

The poll shows 61 percent of likely voters in Albuquerque approve of Kellers job performance, while only 16 percent disapprove. The rest have mixed feelings, dont know or wouldnt say.

Brian Sanderoff, president of Research & Polling Inc., which conducted the poll, said that ratio of approval to disapproval is a very good ratio for any elected official.

He is in a honeymoon period, Sanderoff said. Hes been in office for less than a year, but regardless, these are very good numbers. A mayor can get into trouble with voters pretty fast, but were finding thats not the case here.

In his first months in office, Keller has proposed programs addressing the citys crime rate and other challenges through his One Albuquerque initiative. His agenda has included plans for spurring economic development, promoting volunteerism, reducing the number of homeless people in the city and increasing recreational opportunities for youths. Residents have yet to see whether those programs will yield results.

For the poll, 319 likely voters were asked: Overall, do you approve or disapprove of the way Tim Keller is handling his job as mayor of Albuquerque?

The poll also shows that Keller maintains similar approval ratings across different genders, ethnicities, age groups and education levels.

Kellers approval rate is 60 percent among men, with disapproval at 17 percent, and 63 percent among women, with 16 percent disapproval.

Among Hispanic respondents, Kellers approval rate is 59 percent, with 18 percent disapproving of his performance. His approval rate among Anglo voters is 63 percent, with 15 percent disapproval.

Respondents with a high school diploma or less gave Keller a 53 percent approval rate and 24 percent disapproval, according to the poll. He has a 54 percent approval rate among college graduates, and a 71 percent approval rate among respondents with graduate degrees.

For elected officials, oftentimes you find big differences between men and women or Anglos and Hispanics, younger people to older people or people with different education attainment levels, Sanderoff said. Generally, across the board, were seeing a broad base of support, regardless of ones gender, race, age and, to an extent, education attainment level.

Not surprising in this era of political polarization, the survey shows that Kellers performance is more highly rated by Democrats than Republicans and independents. Keller is a Democrat, though Albuquerque city government is technically nonpartisan and party labels dont appear on the ballot.

The mayors performance approval rating among Democrats is 76 percent, with disapproval at 7 percent, according to the poll. He has 40 percent approval among Republicans, with 33 percent disapproval. His approval rating is 58 percent among independents, with 11 percent saying in the poll they disapprove of his performance.

Keller served as the Democratic state auditor from 2015 to 2017 and was a Democratic member of the New Mexico Senate, representing District 17 in the International District from 2009 to 2014.

Hes off to a good start, with high approval ratings, Sanderoff said. This mayor has remained quite visible in his first 10 months in office. Oftentimes, you see him holding press conferences throughout the city. He has a strong presence on television, trying to get his message across regarding his policy initiatives.

Some mayors take a back-seat approach or stay behind the scenes, Sanderoff said, but not Keller.

This mayor is out there, upfront, getting his share of publicity, trying to get across his message of what his political policy agenda is for the city, he said. That appears to be paying off.

About the poll

The Journal Poll is based on a scientific sample of 319 registered voters who cast ballots in the 2014 and 2016 general elections, and said they were very likely to vote in this years election.

The poll was conducted Sept. 7-13. The voter sample has a margin of error of plus or minus 5.4 percentage points. The margin of error grows for subsamples.

All interviews were conducted by live, professional interviewers, with multiple callbacks to households that did not initially answer the phone.

Both cellphone numbers (67 percent) and landlines (33 percent) of proven general election voters were used.
Copyright  2018 Albuquerque Journal

SANTA FE  Witnesses in a Santa Fe court hearing Wednesday described the horrors of living with Thomas Ferguson, who they say subjected household members to savage beatings and even forced them to beat one another.

It was hard, said a 13-year-old girl who was part of a household in Nambe where her elder brother was killed last year. It was not fun. He was always angry and was always being mean to everyone in the house. He would take his anger out on all of us. He would hit us or hit the dogs.

Her testimony included a firsthand account of how her brother, Jeremiah Valencia, was killed in November at age 13. The testimony came during a hearing that ended with Judge Matthew Wilson determining that Fergusons son, Jordan Nunez, 20  now the prime suspect in Jeremiahs death  is a danger to the community and will be held in jail until his trial or his charges are otherwise resolved.

Jeremiahs mother, Tracy Ann Pena, 36, also faces several charges of child abuse, tampering with evidence and conspiracy for Jeremiahs killing and the disposal of his body. But she was not in court Wednesday. District Attorney Marco Serna has confirmed that a plea deal is in the works for Pena.

Ferguson, Penas boyfriend at the time of Jeremiahs death, also faced charges and was previously pegged as the individual who carried out the killing. But he committed suicide at age 42 in the Santa Fe County jail in April.

Jeremiahs sister, nearly a year younger than her brother, said in court Wednesday that Nunez killed Jeremiah on Nov. 26 by flipping several times a dog crate that the boy was locked in.

Court documents have said the boy was tortured with various implements and forced to stay in the dog cage wearing a diaper.

Documents say Ferguson forced Nunez and Pena to help bury the body in a shallow grave off N.M. 503 near Nambe. Santa Fe County deputies learned of the killing when Pena spoke about it while being held in the Santa Fe County jail in late January on unrelated charges.

On the day in late November that Jeremiah died, the girl said, she and Ferguson were about to pick Pena up from jail when Ferguson got angry at Jeremiah and locked him in a dog cage. Pena was being held for failure to make a court appearance on one of her almost routine minor criminal charges.

Jeremiah eventually fell asleep, she said, and Nunez began flipping the cage to wake him up. She said that Nunez pulled Jeremiah out of the cage and that Jeremiahs head was kind of dangling. He never woke up.

The girl said Jeremiah, who had allegedly been tortured with brass knuckles, a homemade spear, a 5-pound hammer and a shock collar, was in bad shape the day he died.

He was really skinny, and all his cuts were infected. He had a black eye, and his tooth was knocked out, she said.

The teen said that she had previously been forced to watch as Ferguson poked Jeremiah with the spear in Fergusons bedroom. She also said Ferguson made Pena abuse her son when he didnt want to do it.

The girl said Ferguson also made her take part in the abuse. He would just tell me to do it, she said. I was too afraid to tell him no. 

She said Ferguson would hit her if she talked back to him, but said that didnt happen often because she was scared of him.

She said she has a hard time remembering her time at the Nambe house. I tried to put it away, she said.

Amanda Nunez, Jordan Nunezs mother, also testified. She said she married Ferguson when she was 14 and was with him for 16 tumultuous years.

He was abusive, and I was an obsession, she said. I wasnt even a person. I was just his thing he liked to beat on. When we had kids, it got even worse. It wasnt something I could stop.

Amanda Nunez said three pregnancies failed because Ferguson beat her so badly and that he almost left me for dead several times.

She said that, after they no longer lived together, she changed her sons name from Julian to Jordan so that Ferguson couldnt find him. For a period, a police officer went home with her every night to check underneath beds and in closets before she went in, to make sure Ferguson wasnt there. Court documents indicate Ferguson formerly lived in Texas.

Amanda Nunez said Ferguson didnt believe Jordan was his son because of Jordans skin tone and said Ferguson punched Jordan in the chest when he was only two months old.

He said he wished the little son of a bitch would die, she said, fighting back tears.

Ferguson would make Jordan and his siblings hit one another, she said.

He told her to beat the kids, as well or she would be hit even worse, she said. But she was more willing to be beaten by Ferguson than to hit her kids.

Amanda said Jordan is quiet and is nothing like his father. Hes a really good kid, she said. Hes the type of kid wholl give you the shirt off his back. Hes always tried to help.

Although Judge Wilson acknowledged that Jordan Nunez was controlled and manipulated by Ferguson, he still found that he was a threat to the community, because he abused Jeremiah, helped dispose of the body and threatened to kill Pena if she told anyone about the murder.
FARMINGTON  Navajo Nation President Russell Begaye vetoed a resolution to place a referendum that would have asked voters to decide whether to increase the annual salary for the tribes president and vice president.

Begaye vetoed the resolution on Saturday and it was returned to the Office of the Speaker with no veto message on Monday, according to the presidents office.

The Navajo Nation Council passed the resolution on Sept. 7 and recommended the referendum be included on the Nov. 6 general election ballot.

Begaye previously stated the president and vice president should not be singled out in receiving raises and such proposals should include delegates.

The overall salary for delegates needs to be addressed and there needs to be more transparency in terms of what delegates are actually paid. A salary increase is not a big concern of mine and it hasnt been. In coming into the presidency, I knew what I signed up for and it wasnt about money or salary, Begaye said in a statement released by his office.

He added annual earnings should not dictate productivity or addressing the tribes needs.

The Commission on Navajo Government Development recommended the referendum after a report by the Office of Navajo Government Development examined the salaries.

The report stated that there has never been a cost of living adjustment for either position and the earnings are significantly lower than salaries for governors in New Mexico and Arizona.

Edward Dee, executive director for the government development office, called Begayes action undemocratic and it tinkers with the peoples right to determine such proposals.

It was a simple up and down vote to give to the people, he said on Tuesday then added he thinks Begayes action was in retaliation for losing a re-election bid.

In May 2014, a council delegate requested the commission and the office examine salary increases, Dee said adding the examination took time to complete due to changes in office personnel and rebuilding the commission membership.

The council can override the veto. Such action must be approved by a two-thirds vote of the 24-member council, according to tribal law.

Tribal law mandates that the override be done before the councils next regular session, which is in October.

Dee said if an override were proposed, it would need to take place before the Navajo Election Administration orders ballots for the general election.

Ballots need to be ordered by Sept. 26, according to the election administration.

Noel Lyn Smith covers the Navajo Nation for The Daily Times. She can be reached at 505-564-4636 or by email at nsmith@daily-times.com.



2018 The Daily Times (Farmington, N.M.)

Visit The Daily Times (Farmington, N.M.) at www.daily-times.com

Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
A pathology software company could receive up to $600,000 in state Local Economic Development Act funding for a project that will bring up to 58 new jobs to Albuquerque, Gov. Susana Martinez announced Thursday.

Indica Labs provides digital pathology software and other technology services to pharmaceutical, biotech and health care organizations. The company, currently based in Corrales, will spend $3 million on a new headquarters located at 8700 Education Place in northwest Albuquerque, according to the New Mexico Economic Development Department.

The LEDA package has yet to be approved by Bernalillo County, which would act as the fiscal agent for the funds.

Were proud to see another great employer expand in New Mexico as we continue to grow our thriving science and technology sector, said Gov. Martinez in a statement.

Indica Labs CEO Steven Hashagan said in the release that the LEDA funds would be used to support the companys growing analytical software business as well as a continued investment in the local economy and workforce.

County Commissioner Lonnie Talbert said approval of the LEDA award would mean Indica labs will continue to be an integral software source for companies worldwide . . . and bring additional jobs to the Bernalillo County marketplace.

Indica Labs currently has 16 employees, according to information provided by the state.
RIO GRANDE CITY, Texas  A South Texas police officer has been shot following a pursuit and struggle with a suspect who authorities say was known to smuggle people across the border into the U.S.

Starr County District Attorney Omar Escobar Jr. tells The Monitor newspaper that the Rio Grande City officer was shot Wednesday while on assignment with a task force that targets drug-trafficking.

Escobar says investigators began pursuing the suspect in Jim Hogg County and followed him into Starr County where his vehicle struck another and came to a stop.

It appears the officer was shot with his own handgun when it discharged as he was on the ground struggling with the suspect. Escobar says the suspect was attempting to take the gun.

The officer was taken to a hospital and is expected to recover.

Charges were pending against the suspect.

___

Information from: The Monitor, http://www.themonitor.com
Copyright  2018 Albuquerque Journal

Enrollment at the states largest university has taken an unexpectedly hard hit this fall and will force a campus that has already weathered years of cuts to reckon with another major shortfall.

The University of New Mexico this week said its fall semester enrollment slid more than 7 percent, meaning student tuition and fee revenue will come in $9.7 million lower than expected.

The institutions chief academic official warned in a campuswide email Wednesday that the university faces some hard decisions both in the short and long term, though UNM would do what it could to insulate programming central to the academic mission.

Richard Wood, interim provost and executive vice president for academic affairs, said the university will use about $4 million in reserves to help plug the hole. Budget cuts will help bridge the remaining gap, but he said the institution will take a strategic approach rather than slashing all areas equally.

Continued investment in areas such as student success initiatives and research remain critical despite the financial challenges, he said.

Weve taken enough cuts over the last 10 years, we believe many, many units are just down to the bone. To do across-the-board cuts (would) debilitate the university, Wood said in an interview. Were going to do some more strategic thinking and measuring (for) how we go about this.

Years of declining enrollment and state funding reductions have financially strained UNM. Although the state provided a small boost this fiscal year, state support remains below 2015 levels.

The universitys Academic Affairs operation has had to absorb more than $25 million in cuts over the past decade, according to Wood, who said any additional trimming must be done with care and deliberation.

He said the campus budget leadership team, which convenes each fall to help draft plans for the next fiscal year, began meeting Thursday and will play an active part in helping UNM reconcile the present years shortfall. The teams more than 20 members represent the administration, faculty, staff and student government.

Attendees include Becka Myers, president of the Associated Students of UNM, who said she wants to work with the administration to get the best outcome for students.

Were at an important crossroad as a university, and Im hopeful that we can move forward together through this challenge with students at the decision-making table, she said in a written statement.

UNM had anticipated an enrollment drop this fall  just not on this scale. UNMs student population is now 24,393, down from 26,278 in 2017  a slide of 7.2 percent.

The student population had fallen the past five years for a cumulative drop of 9.3 percent from 2012 to 2017.

The university projected a 2.5 percent dip in 2018 and built the current year budget around that assumption.

But officials say a number of factors led to nearly triple the impact.

This is a very exceptional occasion to be this far off on the targets, Terry Babbitt, vice provost of enrollment management and analytics, said in an email to the Journal.

UNM has not publicly released an enrollment report showing the number of freshmen versus returning students or breakdowns by gender, ethnicity and college.

But Babbitt said lighter freshman enrollment and higher attrition, particularly at lower levels, appear to have contributed to the steeper-than-expected drop.

The university this year implemented a campus living requirement for freshmen, which Wood said may have played a small part in the light freshman class but was not a major factor.

Instead, he cited an improving local economy  which prompts young men in particular to choose jobs over college  and New Mexicos population stagnation. Competition is another issue, though even nearby Central New Mexico Community College is reporting losses. A CNM spokesman said the current head count is 3.6 percent below the same time last year, but numbers are not considered official until the end of the semester.

With UNM experiencing its sixth straight year of shrinking enrollment, it is forming a new enrollment task force, which Wood said aims to turn people from across campus into ambassadors for the university.

Its kind of all hands on deck, he said. We just cant rely on a growing population and students naturally coming; were going to need everybody in every unit, from advisers and faculty to staff and students out there telling our story.

Pamela Pyle, president of UNMs Faculty Senate, said she would be part of the task force.

We need to do a good job of getting out to the public the importance of a college education,she said. As we continue to do that, I think well see our enrollment numbers climb back up.
COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo.  A 23-year-old Colorado woman has pleaded guilty to felony child abuse after her 6-week-old son starved to death

Donica Mirabal of Colorado Springs entered her plea Wednesday and faces eight to 32 years in prison when she is sentenced on Nov. 30.

Zayden Ostrander was found dead on Feb. 28, 2017. The coroner found the baby had no fat in his body.

KRDO-TV reports Mirabals mother told investigators she called the Department of Human Services. A caseworker reported that five days before Zaydens death he appeared to be alert and had good color in his face.

The boys father, John Ostrander, is serving a 32-year prison term after pleading guilty to child abuse resulting in death.

Both parents initially faced murder charges.
Copyright  2018 Albuquerque Journal

SANTA FE  It was while the Santa Fean was an exchange student living in China that Daniel Chamberlain Lehman, then 16, decided he was going to attend West Point.

His mother, Laurie Chamberlain Lehman, remembers her son telling her about his plans to attend the military academy when she went to visit him at Christmastime during his school year abroad.

When Daniel made up his mind, and planned something, he was going to do it, she recalled Tuesday.

Army Capt. Daniel Lehman, 28  who did graduate from West Point, with a double major in nuclear physics and philosophy  was killed in Colorado Springs over the weekend. His body was found early Saturday.

Police believe Lehman was shot near a downtown intersection between 1:55 and 2 a.m. Saturday. Colorado Springs police spokesman Howard Black could provide no additional information about the shooting Thursday but pointed out the narrow time frame for when the shooting apparently took place.

If anyone saw him in the downtown business district in any of our lounges, we want to be notified of that, said Black.

Lehman, who grew up in Santa Fe, had been stationed in Fort Carson, just outside Colorado Springs. Hed been back in the U.S. for several months after returning from a recent tour in eastern Europe, according to his mother. Before that, Lehman had served in Afghanistan.

Lehmans obituary, posted by French Funerals of Albuquerque and written by his mother, called the slaying a senseless act of violence. Her son, she wrote, was a true world citizen.

He was doing so well and accomplished so much, and he was such a wonderful person, Lehmans father, Danny Lehman of Santa Fe, told the Journal on Thursday. He described his sons death as a loss for not only the family, but for the country he served.

Capt. Lehman, who served in military intelligence, was born in Los Angeles but moved to Santa Fe with his family as an infant.

His father, a travel photographer, used to take the family to places such as Peru and Mexico when on assignments for outlets including National Geographic. This exposure to different cultures when he was young probably influenced his sons worldview, Danny Lehman said.

He cared a lot about the United States, but I also think he cared about the United States and its relationship with other countries, other cultures, other things, he said. He saw (the countrys) appreciation of other cultures and places as an important part of having stability here.

Capt. Lehman graduated from St. Michaels High School in Santa Fe a decade ago. A recommendation from U.S. Sen. Tom Udall helped him get into West Point. He also was accepted into the Naval and Air Force academies.

His obituary noted several of Lehmans other talents. He was fluent in Mandarin and Spanish, a champion high school chess player in school, won awards as a trumpet player and wrote essays and poetry.

His mother described her outgoing son as an avid reader of everything from current events to New Mexico historical fiction. He always had a book in his hand, she said.

Danny Lehman also remembers his son as a lover of language and culture. One morning that sticks out in his memory was when his teenage son had pulled an all-nighter. He initially thought the boy maybe stayed up too late playing video games. But that wasnt it.

He was studying Portuguese all night, he recalled.

It was different in that way, he said. Most kids dont do things like that.

Capt. Daniel Lehmans burial will take place at Arlington National Cemetery, in Virginia.
Albuquerque-based Boomtime is marketing new social media-based recruiting tools intended to help law enforcement agencies nationwide expand their ranks.

Two new interactive websites and apps went live in August to boost New Mexico State Police and Bernalillo County Metropolitan Detention Center efforts to connect with a younger generation of potential recruits. Now, the company is using those platforms as a model for other agencies across the country.

Its designed to drive a younger generation to learn more about the career opportunities open to them, said Boomtime marketing strategist Justin Butler. Were bringing police into the modern era of communications to meet and connect with people where they are accustomed to interacting today  through social media.

State Police Captain Jesse Williams said Boomtimes tools are opening a new channel of communication to help resolve a chronic labor shortage that keeps the force well below the 704 officers authorized by the Legislature.

We have 650 officers now with 17 recruits in the academy, Williams said. With retirements, resignations and terminations, we lose three to four officers every month, so were just treading water.

The new website and app highlight the benefits and personal rewards of police work that are often obscured through bad publicity, Williams added.

Its a challenge to show the positive things we do, Williams said. The website helps us humanize the police force to show that officers are normal guys and gals. They wear uniforms, but theyre people with heartbeats behind the badges.

The site includes video interviews with officers, shows the range of career options and location assignments and guides visitors step-by-step through the financial benefits and application process.

A mobile app draws users into the website through interactive emails.

The Metropolitan Detention Center site is built on the same platform but is customized to its needs.

Recruiters can pull up the website right on their phones, or someone at home thinking about becoming a corrections officer can pull it up and get a wealth of information, said MDC spokeswoman Candace Hopkins.

For Boomtime, a venture-backed web design and software-as-a-service firm, the new platform expands its products and markets beyond its traditional focus on sales-oriented websites for small businesses to agencies focused on recruitment, said CEO Bill Bice.

Theres a huge market opportunity, Bice said. With the exception of Bernalillo County and Beverly Hills, we havent found one police force to date without a marketing problem.
Exxon Mobil said Thursday it was joining a corporate coalition working toward the goals of Paris climate change agreement, the boldest move yet by the oil giant that has faced criticism for past attempts to cast doubts about climate change.

The Irving-based company is one of the newest members of the Oil and Gas Climate Initiative, described as a CEO-led initiative which aims to lead the industry response to climate change.

Houston-based Occidental Petroleum and San Ramon, Calif-based Chevron also announced their memberships on Thursday. Founded in 2014, the coalition now includes 13 of the largest oil and natural gas companies representing 30 percent of the worlds oil and natural gas production.

Until now, the group did not include any firms based in the U.S., currently estimated to be the worlds largest producer of crude oil.

It will take the collective efforts of many in the energy industry and society to develop scalable, affordable solutions that will be needed to address the risks of climate change, Exxon Mobil Chairman and CEO Darren Woods said in a statement. Our mission is to supply energy for modern life and improve living standards around the world while minimizing impacts on the environment.

The importance of the Oil and Gas Climate Initiative is heightened since these are the companies responsible for a large percentage of greenhouse gas emissions.

Fossil fuel combustion accounts for nearly 94 percent of U.S. carbon dioxide emissions, according to data from the Environmental Protection Agency. Oil and natural gas production, as well as abandoned wells, contribute nearly one-third of U.S. methane emissions.

The nonprofit CDP, formerly known as the Carbon Disclosure Project, calculated that 25 companies are responsible for 51 percent of industrial greenhouse gas emissions.

The Oil and Gas Climate Initiative says on its website that its members are committed to the direction set out by the Paris Agreement on climate change. We support its agenda for global action and the need for urgency.

The group is also working toward zero methane emissions, according its website. Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas that contributes to man-made climate change.

Exxon Mobil officials announced in May that they had set a goal of reducing methane emissions by 15 percent in the next two years. It also set a 2020 deadline to reduce flaring of natural gas by 25 percent.

Although this coalition predates President Donald Trumps administration, it does reflect a broader pushback against the U.S. decision to withdraw from the Paris Agreement. Individual companies, including Exxon Mobil, and other corporate coalitions have announced action to combat climate change.



2018 The Dallas Morning News

Visit The Dallas Morning News at www.dallasnews.com

Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

-

PHOTO (for help with images, contact 312-222-4194):
California-based computer technology refurbishment company 2NDGEAR opened a 37,000-square-foot facility in Albuquerque this summer, and its now ramping up its local workforce.

The company hired its first 16 New Mexico residents in August, with another 15 ready for hire in October, said John Ford, CEO and Board Chair of Insight Investments LLC, 2NDGEARs parent firm.

We expect to have 45 to 50 people by the end of the year, Ford told the Journal, following a speech Thursday at Albuquerque Economic Developments quarterly luncheon at the Convention Center Downtown. Well scale up to at least 100 employees in the next four to five years.

2NDGEAR is one of string of success stories in AED efforts this year to recruit new businesses from other states and help existing businesses expand their operations. In the Downtown area, for example, four companies have announced plans to either open new offices or grow their current operations there, adding more than 1,000 jobs in the citys core, AED President Gary Tonjes told the luncheon crowd.

That includes new operations by California-based customer support service company TaskUS and Texas-based Carenet Healthcare Services, plus expansions by software and data analytics companies Lavu Inc. and Resilient Solutions 21.

About $150 million in new payroll is coming to Downtown over the next five years, Tonjes said. Theres new energy in Albuquerque with new announcements by employers.
The suspect shot and killed by a Las Cruces police officer last week had a knife in his hand and a slip-knot ligature wrapped around his mothers neck when officers entered the home according to a preliminary investigation.

An officer fired two rounds at Gary Daniel McKinney, 47, in the kitchen of the home when he refused to step away from his mother. McKinney was pronounced dead at the hospital.

The Las Cruces Police Department revealed more details of the fatal shooting in a news release on Thursday.

A multi-agency investigation found McKinney was armed with a kitchen knife wrapped in a glove affixed to his right hand. His other hand held a ligature that was fastened around his mothers neck. Video from the officers lapel camera shows McKinneys 63-year old mother was holding onto the ligature with one hand in an apparent attempt at prevent it from being tightened.

Officers responded to an emergency call at the home last week from McKinneys teenage daughter who said her father threatened to shoot her and her grandmother. The girl said she had never seen her father with a gun although he mentioned to her he had one according to the investigation.

The officer who fired the fatal shot is an 11-year veteran of the Las Cruces police force. He is on administrative leave pending the outcome of the investigation which is standard protocol.

The multi-agency Officer-involved Incident Task Force investigating the shooting includes the New Mexico State Police, Las Cruces Police, the Dona Ana County Sheriffs Office and New Mexico State University Police. Upon completion of their investigation, their findings are forwarded to the Third Judicial District Attorneys Office.
The impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on the future of jobs is usually discussed in theoretical terms. Reports and opinion pieces cover the full spectrum of opinionfrom the dystopian landscape that leaves millions unemployed, to new opportunities for social and economic mobility that could transform society for the better.

But the impact of AI on jobs is not just theoretical anymoreits very much part of our present. The World Economic Forums The Future of Jobs 2018 takes a look at how todays jobs are being transformed by the introduction of new technologies. Data on the skills that millions of members report on LinkedIn can give us additional insight into how AI is impacting different industries and job functions globally. Our research into emerging skills around the world shed light on a few growing trends:

AI skills are among the fastest-growing skills on LinkedIn and saw a 190% increase from 2015 to 2017.

Industries with more AI skills present among their workforce are also the fastest-changing industries.

The countries with the highest penetration of AI skills are the United States, China, India, Israel, and Germany.

Findings suggest that while changes driven by AI technologies may still be in their infancy, we are already seeing their impact across the global labor market.

Building momentum across industries

In 2017, the number of LinkedIn members adding AI skills to their profiles increased 190% from 2015. When we talk about AI skills, were referring to the skills needed to create artificial intelligence technologies, which include expertise in areas like neural networks, deep learning, and machine learning, as well as actual tools such as Weka and Scikit-Learn. LinkedIn data shows that all types of technical AI skills are growing at a rapid pace around the world.

As culture and tastes change and new technologies are created, industries and jobs evolve accordingly. One of the ways to measure these evolutions is by how the skills needed for different jobs are changing. These changes propagate through occupations and industries in different ways. In some cases changes are driven by the nature of jobs or tasks changing, such as, say, an accountant focusing more on human-centric customer service tasks and less on routine tasks which have been automatedor a marketing specialist focusing on search engine optimization (SEO) to make their companys blog content easier to discover via a Google search. In other cases, specific skills become more important to a job as they bring productivity gainssuch as a data specialist using new programming and machine learning skills to more effectively target clients and ultimately generate revenue. When we compare all the different skills held by an industrys workforce in 2015 vs. 2017, its clear which industries have changed the most by how much their overall skills makeup has changed.

As it turns out, the industries with the most AI skills present in their workforce are also the industries that are changing the fastest. If we consider change to be a proxy for innovation, then this indicates that the presence of AI skills correlate strongly with innovation within an industry. It also means theres an opportunity for many industries to invest more heavily in their AI capabilities.

When we zoomed in from the industry level to the skill level, we found that many of the changes were due to a rise in (1) data and programming skills that are complementary to AI, (2) skills to use products or services that are powered by data, such as search engine optimization for marketers, and (3) interpersonal skills. Its a compelling illustration of how technology affects an industry. Directly getting incorporated into products is part of the impact, but the bigger impact is through complementary products and services.

Still Niche...or Universal?

Researchers predict that AI will have applications across nearly every sectorfrom construction to financial services and beyond. To understand the extent to which AI skills have spread beyond the software industry, we took a look at year-over-year growth of these skills across industries. While the software industry does continue to stand out as the top field for professionals with AI skills, growth is also strong in sectors like education and academia, hardware and networking, finance, and manufacturing.

When it comes to volumes, in particular, the education sector stands out as the industry where the second-highest numbers of core AI skills were added by members in 2017suggesting that the growth of AI is correlated with more research in the field.

Human and machine, everywhere

Artificial intelligence technologies are more ubiquitous than many people realizeand thats true on a global level. The United States, China, India, Israel, and Germany rank as the countries with the highest penetration of AI skills among their workforce.

This growing ubiquity raises philosophical questions on the nature of how we relate to our work on a human level. As AI skills become increasingly relevant, we wanted to better understand whether typically human skillse.g., those related to personal characteristics, interpersonal communication and cognitive skillsare on the rise as well. Our findings may not come as a surprise: at least for now, interpersonal skills arent going anywhere.

In the World Economic Forums The Future of Jobs 2018, we found that a number of human-centric occupations fall into the top ten most emerging occupationsi.e., occupations which have seen the most growth in hiring over the past 5 years. Globally across all industries, top emerging occupations include Marketing Specialists and Managers, Human Resources Specialists and Consultants, and User Experience Designers. These roles require an understanding of human behaviors and preferencesa skill set which fundamentally cant be automated.

In addition, a number of highly automatable jobs fall into the top ten most declining occupationsi.e., occupations which have seen the largest decreases in hiring over the past 5 years. These occupations include Administrative Assistants, Customer Service Representatives, Accountants, and Electrical/Mechanical Technicians. As the OECD notes, the risk of automation increases if educational attainment and skill levels for a role are generally low, and roles such as food preparation assistants, cleaners and helpers, and labourers in mining, construction, manufacturing, and transport are at highest risk of automation.

As the world continues to invest in AI technologies, well continue to assess their externalities and impact on the workforce, especially as it relates to opportunities for more effective reskilling and education initiatives. As new skills emerge, governments, educational institutions, and employers should consider how they are creating learning programs to equip people with the new and changing skills that are needed to keep up with the modern economy.
By Ssebuliba Samuel.

The inspector general of police has denied circulating allegations indicating that police arrested the Kyadondo East Member of Parliament upon his arrival ate Entebbe.

Latest report show that as soon as he arrived at Entebbe airport from America where he has spent three weeks on medication police grabbed him and whisked him to unknown destination.

However in a tweet massage, the Inspector General of Police Martin Okoth Ochola said that police is simply escorting him to his home to avoid commotion in the city

Earlier yesterday police had issued strict guidelines stopping all activities organized to welcome him at Entebbe airport.
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Hundreds and hundreds more people could be hired at Plant Vogtle within the next year and a half, according to Michael McCracken, a Southern Nuclear communications coordinator.

On Thursday, during a Citizens for Nuclear Technology Awareness breakfast forum in Aiken, McCracken discussed the future of both nuclear energy and Vogtle, including the ongoing construction of nuclear units 3 and 4.

"In fact, the last thing I heard  we were expecting to hire another 1,500 craft workers in the next year and a half," McCracken said. "Another 1,500. Electricians and pipefitters, thats what theyre saying."

The additional jobs are needed to sustain the workload, according to McCracken.

"I mean, the largest components are there, theyre in, you know, theyre ready to be put in.  We are pulling cables, right, and that takes a lot of people and a lot of connecting of equipment and things like that," he said. "So theres a lot of the, you know, hands-on commodity-type work that is going to require a lot of people."

The Vogtle plant is right across the river from Aiken  it's situated southeast of Augusta.

The electric generating plant is co-owned, and Southern Nuclear handles operations.

Two nuclear facilities at Vogtle are, and have been, up and running. Another pair is currently being built. Approximately 900 people oversee the existing plant operations.

Unit 3 is expected to be operational come November 2021, and Unit 4 is expected to be operational come 2022, according to McCracken.

Vogtle's expansion, though, has come under a wave of political and financial pressure, which McCracken acknowledged.

Twenty Georgia lawmakers recently urged Vogtle's co-owners to cap costs in the face of an over-budget $27 billion price tag, a Jacksonville utility has attempted to back out of its Vogtle energy deal, and, as McCracken said Thursday, the project timeline has been pushed back.

"A couple years ago it was 2019, 2020," he said.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission issued construction and operating licenses for the tandem project in 2012.

ICYMI: Top 10 Stories of Sept. 2018 Here are Aiken Standard's top 10 stories from the month of September, including highlights like Hurricane Florence, royal visits, and retail d
A group of art insiders descended on the Le Gray hotel in downtown Beirut to celebrate the beginning of the Beirut Art Week, which runs Sept. 18-25 with a multifaceted program dedicated to contemporary art and design. Together with Lebanese Culture Minister Ghattas Khoury, the group was taken on a 16-stop tour of public art installations by Lebanese and international artists throughout the citys galleries and open spaces.

The walk curls from the Le Gray hotel at Martyrs Square down through the Beirut Souks and back into the popular neighborhood of Gemmayzeh for its last stop. Beyond just showcasing public artworks, the tour intends to highlight the cultural heritage and architecture of the city through exhibits like Building With Fire held in the old L'Orient-Le Jour building and a "cine-concert" combining archival footage with live performances on the terraces of the Opera Gallery.

This rich and visually stimulating tour set the tone for the ninth edition of the Beirut Art Fair, which opens Sept. 19-23 at the expanded Seaside Arena  formerly the Beirut International Exhibition and Leisure Center, known as BIEL. The Beirut Art Fair was founded by director Laure dHauteville in 2010 and has steadily grown over the past eight years, establishing itself as a landmark event in the MENA region. With the number of attendees predicted to rise to 32,000 from 28,000 in 2017, the space allocated for the event has increased by 45% this year.

This years event boasts a range of works by 250 established and emerging contemporary artists with some 1,600 pieces in 33 returning galleries and 18 new booth exhibitors from 20 countries. For the first time, the Beirut Art Fair team has assigned renowned architect and urban planner Patrick Boustani to recreate the city of Beirut within the exhibition space itself.

What sets this fair apart from others is that while it focuses exclusively on the MENASA region, its appeal is international in scope  even Brooklyn-based sculptor KAWS has work shown at the fair. The founder, French-born art expert Laure dHauteville, who has called Beirut home for over two decades, shared with Al-Monitor her attraction to the city as a base for a regional art fair: What you have in Lebanon unlike other countries is this constant creation. In every Lebanese family you have an art collector, an artist, a painter, an author or fashion designer, she says. Art and creation is everywhere in the country. All the best designers in the Middle East used to create everything in Beirut because it was the place to be.

Each year, the fair puts on a major exhibition. This years flagship, Across Boundaries, is a panorama of Lebanese photography from 1880 to the present. Curated by avid photography collector Tarek Nahas, the Fair's artistic director Marine Bougaran and its artistic adviser Laurence Nahas, the exhibit is the culmination of a two-year research project that aims to lift the curtain on an opaque chapter of the countrys artistic heritage.

We set out to explore three themes, Bougaran told Al-Monitor, noting Nahas' meticulous research, selection and compilation throughout the entire process. They're decidedly comprehensive: war documentation, territory and intimacy. The curators sourced and borrowed over 100 works from 30 private and public collections (both the American University of Beirut and Universite Saint Joseph contributed). The photographs on display belong to generations of Lebanese artists, some of them unknown but whose passion projects were unearthed decades later. Others have had established artistic careers, like Nadim Asfar, Manoug Alemian, Randa Mirza, Gilbert Hage, Ziad Antar and the Lebanese painter, Ayman Baalbaki.

This unprecedented focus on the Lebanese photographic scene provides visitors with a clear lens into the rich culture of the region, as well as insight into the history behind Lebanese photography and how it has evolved in the last century.

Elsewhere, visitors can expect two sections dedicated to emerging talent, including an award for photography presented by Byblos Bank. Lebanon Modern has also curated a commemorative retrospective of written artifacts and video installations for the 25th anniversary of the passing of the great Lebanese-Armenian painter Paul Guiragossian. This richness in archival material is by design, said DHauteville, who pointed out that some of the documents and photographs are on display to the public for the first time. Were doing this because its very important for people here to understand the role of foundation and explain how archives are important to understand the present, she said.

Although government officials, economists and bankers have expressed concern that Lebanon is in an economic crisis and the situation is worsening, creativity in the country is booming. Lebanons culture minister announced this summer that there would be $280 million in investment over the next five years into culture-related initiatives. With new museums underway in downtown Beirut and Tyre and restorations to the UNESCO Palace, the organizers are hopeful at the prospect of collaborating closely with the government.

Smaller art galleries particularly benefit from this open-arm policy, including young art enthusiasts like Hind Ahmad, who founded the Artual Gallery in November 2017. Her online space has been the driving force behind several major international art initiatives from London to Abidjan and her gallery is participating for the first time in the Beirut Art Fair.

Artual Gallery represents 12 contemporary artists from all over the world, including two Lebanese artists, Yazan Halwani and Fadia Ahmad. Her broad roster of established and emerging artists reflects her passion for diversity. In order to progress its important to be exposed to be different cultures and know whats going on around the world, she told Al-Monitor.

As the city cements its place in the region as a bastion of freedom of expression and creativity, for a second consecutive year, the Beirut Art Fair coincides with the Beirut Design Fair, adding to a burgeoning design scene.

Guillaume Tasle dHeliand, the design fair's founder and director, told Al-Monitor that he met last year with over 150 designers in Lebanon to understand the community and its needs. The Beirut Design Fair emerged from these conversations, with a strong conviction that Beirut was developing a viable marketplace for design. Beirut is a major design pole in the Mediterranean, with lots of cultural exchanges, he said. Its history and geographical location account for the creativity, curiosity, culture and the discerning flair of the Lebanese.

Tasle DHeliand hopes the fair will encourage more local designers and craftsmen to collaborate in the future. There is a know-how and a way of doing things and we want to rejuvenate this activity, he said.

DHautevilles long-term goal is changing perspectives about art in Lebanon and the Middle East. I want [visitors] to leave with a sense of hope because they discovered something they didnt know, or didnt think possible before, she said. Its as important for us as the future generations.
When Syrian Kurdish-led forces declared victory against the Islamic State in Raqqa last October, a group of women fighters unfurled a giant banner amid ululating and cheering. The canary yellow cloth was emblazoned with a portrait of Abdullah Ocalan, the imprisoned leader of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), whose fate is of growing concern for Kurds worldwide. The move sparked furor in Ankara, casting a pall over celebrations to mark the collapse of the so-called capital of the IS caliphate.

How is the US going to explain this, growled Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Was the United States still going to pretend that its Syrian Kurdish allies, the Peoples Protection Units (YPG), have nothing to do with the PKK? The PKK, the rebel outfit that oversaw the establishment of the YPG, has killed thousands of Turkish soldiers, targeted hundreds of civilians and has been designated a terrorist organization by the US Department of State.

The Pentagon hastily rebuked the YPG, but the groups' members displayed no regrets. The writings and the philosophy and the influence of Abdullah Ocalan, were very, very decisive in motivating the soldiers with an ideology of peace and democracy that allowed this liberation to be possible, intoned a YPG fighter in a videotaped statement.

Until recently, Erdogan and his conservative Justice and Development Party (AKP) government might have agreed. With its enigmatic spy chief, Hakan Fidan, in the lead, Ankara had been steeped in peace talks with Ocalan, universally known to millions of doting Kurds as Apo, Kurdish for uncle. The two-and-a-half-year effort to end more than three decades of mutual bloodletting, however, collapsed in 2015 under the weight of Erdogans domestic political calculations, Turkish fears of the PKKs expanding heft in Syria and deeply ingrained mutual distrust. Turkish authorities have since restricted access to Imrali, the prison island off the coast of Istanbul where Ocalan has been held since his capture by Turkish special forces in Nairobi on Feb. 15, 1999.

The last time Ocalan was publicly heard from was Sept. 11, 2016, when his brother Mehmet was granted a visit to Imrali. The official reason was the occasion of Eid al-Adha, the Muslim Feast of Sacrifice, but the real reason was to quash rumors that Ocalan was dead. Since then, the government has rebuffed family requests to visit him, including on the eid last month.

Kurdish lawmakers in Turkey have stepped up calls for the isolation of Ocalan to end. Pro-PKK groups in Europe have organized Free Ocalan demonstrations and are lobbying Western politicians for support. Ocalans fate matters, to Kurds and to Turks alike.

The 70-year-old political science dropout remains the uncontested leader of the PKK. Even his most-bitter rivals acknowledge that he is the only figure who can credibly broker a deal on his fighters behalf. The cult of personality that Ocalan himself diligently constructed  he even claimed that his writings were of greater importance than Karl Marxs Das Kapital  is now being perpetuated by a global network of media outlets, civic associations and a panoply of armed and political groups that confer on him demigod status.

A cabinet minister in the Iraqi Kurdistan Regional Government speaking on the condition of anonymity resorted to hyperbole to explain the adulation Ocalan inspires. If Ocalan asks his fighters to stand on their heads, they will stand on their heads. No question, he said.

Frederike Geerdink, a Dutch journalist who recently spent a year embedded with the PKK in Iraqi Kurdistan to write a book, told Al-Monitor, Whenever I asked a young fighter about something, they would often begin their answer with Our leader [Ocalan] said.

Ibrahim Bilmez, one of the scores of lawyers offering Ocalan pro bono services, said his legal team had sought and had been denied access to him at least 770 times since July 2011. That was the last time Ocalans attorneys saw him. We are deeply concerned about his well-being, and until we have credible proof that he is alright, our worry can only grow, Bilmez told Al-Monitor.

The Committee to Prevent Torture (CPT), the Council of Europes watchdog, which carries out impromptu visits to prisons, published its most recent findings on Imrali in March. They pertained to an April 2016 visit to the island. The CPT observed that conditions of detention for Ocalan had significantly improved and that it had formed a favorable impression of the establishments healthcare services. But the situation regarding the prisoners contact with the outside world has further deteriorated. A total ban on telephone calls to all four prisoners on the island, all of them from the PKK, had been imposed.

Despite the governments radio silence on the matter, the consensus within the PKK leadership is that Ocalan is still alive. We sense this from the manner in which the Kurdish question is discussed by Turkish officials, an authoritative member of the PKKs political wing currently based in northern Syria, who spoke to Al-Monitor on the condition of anonymity, said. Their strategy is to bury him behind a wall of silence, but they will fail.

Selim Curukkaya, a former PKK member and now a diehard Ocalan critic, agrees that his bete noire isnt dead. The Turkish state has put Ocalan into the deep freeze for now, Curukkaya told Al-Monitor. If and when it suits their agenda, they will wheel him out again.

Mehmet Ocalan reported following their 2016 encounter that his brother was in fine physical health, though at times agitated, blaming the failure of the peace talks on the Turkish state and its lack of sincerity. The PKK leader had, nonetheless, offered to resume jaw-jawing, provided that the state is ready to end the conflict that has claimed at least 40,000 lives, mostly PKK members', so far.

The Syria-based source asserted, Mr. Ocalan knows what he wants. He is wedded to his ideals, but at the same time he is infinitely rational. He is capable, even within the current circumstances, to establish alliances and policies that would secure the Kurds concrete gains.

Asked if the PKK would still go along with his demands, the source responded, For the PKK, Mr. Ocalans word is of the essence. His word is final.

Turkey, however, gets to decide if Ocalan gets to be heard. Right now Ocalan has no impact, said Aliza Marcus, author of Blood and Belief and the Kurdish Fight for Independence. Hes incommunicado, so he is more of a symbol. Marcus also told Al-Monitor that overall, however, He retains influence for sure but only to the extent that he is allowed to speak.

On the domestic front, there seems little incentive for Erdogan to permit him to do so. Marcus explained, The government doesnt want a peace process, so letting him speak only creates a reminder that there is a potential partner to make peace with. By not allowing him to speak, its also easier for the government to portray the PKK as intractable militants  or as Turkey calls them, terrorists  who can only be dealt with militarily, not politically.

The conventional wisdom is that unless Erdogan believes he would be better served by the support of Kurdish voters who sympathize with Ocalan  such voters currently account for roughly half of the Kurdish electorate  he wont alter his course. The last time Erdogan weighed the matter was in 2015.

The new climate of openness created by the AKP had eased the meteoric rise of Selahattin Demirtas, the now-imprisoned former co-chair of the Peoples Democratic Party (HDP), the largest Kurd-friendly bloc in the parliament. Pious Kurds who had traditionally voted for the AKP defected to the HDP in droves. At the same time, the AKPs nationalist base was infuriated by Erdogans dovish stance and left for Devlet Bahcelis Nationalist Movement Party (MHP). The army as well was deeply unhappy with the governments overtures to the PKK.

The result was that in the June 2015 elections, the AKP lost its parliamentary majority for the first time. Erdogan, with his obsession for polling, had likely suspected this possibility, and thus decided to end the peace talks before the elections. His first move was to bar all contact between Ocalan and the HDP. The last time the party's lawmakers were permitted to see him was on April 5, 2015. Erdogan then set about demonizing the HDP and reigniting the war with the Kurds, with plenty of help from the PKK. The strategy worked: The AKP regained its majority in November 2015 snap elections.

Erdogan has since cemented his alliance with Bahceli, securing the nationalists backing in parliamentary and presidential elections held on June 24 of this year. Erdogan recently said he would like to field joint candidates with the MHP in municipal elections scheduled for March. Regardless, electoral politics, and therefore Kurdish support, no longer matter as much now that Erdogan has concentrated power in his own hands after narrowly winning a tainted referendum on scrapping Turkeys parliamentary democracy for an executive presidency. The government has set about dismissing any evidence of taking a laissez-faire approach. Public manifestations of Kurdish identity, be they statues of Kurdish philosophers or signposts in the Kurdish language, have been removed.

Until recently, the slightest hint of any ill befalling Ocalan would have triggered collective hunger strikes among PKK inmates and mass protests. Should Ocalan die in prison while incommunicado, the conspiracy mill will work overtime in claiming that he was killed. For now, however, the AKPs harsh authoritarian turn, jailing thousands of Kurdish politicians, and its brutal suppression of a reckless PKK-led insurrection that raged across towns and cities in the mainly Kurdish southeast in 2016, are keeping Kurds off the streets.

With the charismatic Demirtas behind bars for the foreseeable future, the HDP looks rudderless and its strategy unclear. This leaves Syria as the other immediate incentive for the government to seek Ocalans cooperation. With a showdown looming in Idlib between Syrian President Bashar al-Assads army and opposition rebels, might Turkey feel compelled to co-opt the Kurds before the Syrian strongman does? The YPG has hinted that it might help the regime tackle al-Qaeda-backed militants in Idlib in exchange for the regime helping it drive Turkey and its Free Syrian Army allies out of Afrin.

Turkey captured the Kurdish-dominated enclave of Afrin with Russias blessings in March, dealing a severe blow to the retreating YPGs morale and prestige. The group is waging a low-intensity counter-insurgency in Afrin amid allegations that the Turkish army is overseeing ethnic cleansing and abuse of local Kurds by its proxies. The YPGs victims are mainly FSA rebels, however, which can only sharpen the Kurdish-Arab divide. As ever, the Syrian regime benefits the most.

Turkey gains as well, and pressure remains its favored approach. It may be no coincidence that Erdogan is threatening to revive the death penalty, which was slapped on Ocalan at the end of his courtroom trial but later commuted in line with Turkeys now-stalled bid to join the European Union. Some wonder whether the intent is to strong-arm Ocalan and the PKK into getting the YPG to submit to Turkeys will, a tactic attempted (unsuccessfully) during the last round of peace talks. In practice, this means a full withdrawal of all PKK fighters from Turkey and leaving their weapons behind. The other Turkish hope is for the YPG to disavow the PKK  even as Ankara insists, with some merit, that they are one and the same  and to share power with Turkey-backed Syrian Kurds in the Iraqi Kurdistan-based Kurdistan National Council.

Ocalan and the PKK refused to go along then, and for the very same reasons, they are just as unlikely to do so now. For one, Turkey has always balked at any constitutional changes allowing the Kurds greater autonomy, which would be the baseline for a comprehensive peace. Not a single such change has been legislated to date.

Cynics claim that the PKK would not, in any case, be interested in a deal that would rob it of its relevance. Some go as far as to suggest that the PKK sabotaged the peace talks in part to undercut Demirtas growing popularity. A Western diplomat with intimate knowledge of the region echoed this view, asserting, The PKKs main purpose is to ensure the survival of PKK Inc.

The notion that US mediation can somehow fix things is fanciful at best. The Kurds dizzying territorial gains since the start of the Syrian conflict in 2012, and above all, the YPGs partnership with the US-led coalition against IS, reignited Turkish paranoia about supposed Western plans to establish an independent Kurdish state. This prompted Turkeys August 2016 military intervention in Syria to clear IS from its borders, but more importantly to limit the YPGs westward push to link up with Afrin.

At most, the United States can continue to stave off Turkish attacks against the YPG, and vice versa, in the areas under its control. As viewed from Ankara and Qandil, that is not enough to stop their war. The US shield is temporary. US troops are unlikely to stay in Syria indefinitely as Donald Trump administration officials now claim. Moreover, even as the Pentagon continues to arm and train the YPG, it also continues to provide actionable intelligence to Turkey on the PKK in Iraq. This makes the United States more of a duplicitous, self-serving interlocutor than an honest broker.

Mazlum Kobane, commander of the YPG-led Syrian Democratic Forces, acknowledged in a September 2017 interview with Al-Monitor that US assistance had come at a price. Kobane, better known as Sahin Cilo, his nom de guerre from his years in the PKK, said, Until the Americans came here in 2015, our relations with Turkey were good. Our politicians used to travel to Ankara to meet with Turkish officials.

Minutes of all the meetings held between Ocalan and HDP lawmakers, published in November 2015 in book form, are a treasure trove of information on how deep the peace effort delved. They reveal that not only did Syrian Kurds meet with Turkish officials in Turkey, but that Turkish officials met with Cilo in Syria at least once. In a Feb. 4, 2015, meeting with Ocalan, Pervin Buldan, now HDP co-chair, says that Turkish officials had raised the possibility of opening a border crossing with Afrin during their assignation with Cilo. Now Cilo is on Ankaras list of most wanted terrorists.

So what will it take for Turkey to resume talks with Ocalan, if ever? A wave of PKK attacks targeting civilians and sowing chaos in big cities as Turkey grapples with its worst economic crisis in over a decade, as some analysts suggest? It's unlikely, not because the United States would find it that much harder to justify its continued dealings with the YPG, but because the PKK knows that acts of urban terror are reviled by the Kurds themselves.

If the people stop supporting the PKK, they will be done, Geerdink remarked. The most obvious reason why Turkey should reach out to Ocalan is that once he dies, ending a conflict that continues to claim lives on both sides will be much tougher. Yet, for as long as peace is not the end goal, there can be none. Peace, Geerdink concludes, is the magic word among the people.
By Ruth Naderah.

The Holy Catholic Father Pope Francis will re-visit Uganda next year in July.

The Pope accepted the invite extended to him by a bloc of African Catholic bishops, the Symposium of Episcopal Conferences of Africa and Madagascar (SECAM) which will converge in Uganda to celebrate fiftieth anniversary.

Episcopal Conference (UEC), confirming the receipt of SECAMs letter and also forwarding a written reply of Popes acceptance.

Yes we have a letter from Vatican confirming to us that the holy Pope will be with us next year, an official of Episcopal Conference who wished to be anonymous said.

The Media understands that upon receiving a response from Vatican, the catholic leadership in Uganda has written to President Yoweri Kaguta Museveni notifying him of the Popes second visit and the details of the event.

State House has already received this letter, added an official.

However, we couldnt confirm if the President has personally read it.

We have also learnt that the Catholic leadership will at a later time meet President Museveni over this matter.

SECAM was born out of the will of young African Bishops during the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965).

The Theme of this event is Church, Family of God in Africa, Celebrate your Jubilee! Proclaim, Meet and Welcome Christ your Savior.

No top official of the Episcopal Conference was willing to speak on this development when reached.
Iranian activist and physician Farhad Meysami marked the 50th day of his hunger strike, causing alarm among activists and social media users about his health.

Meysami was arrested July 31 by the Intelligence Ministry for creating and distributing buttons expressing opposition to mandatory veiling. After a period in solitary confinement, where he began his hunger strike, Meysami has since been held in section 209 of Tehran's Evin Prison, which is run by the ministry. The buttons he produced stated, I am not in favor of compulsory veiling, and I protest compulsory veiling. They became a popular symbol among Iranians opposed to and protesting the countrys laws on the practice.

Compulsory veiling became a hotly contested issue in Iran when in December last year women began taking off their head coverings in public and holding them aloft, often on sticks, in protest. That these protests happened to coincide with the start of nationwide demonstrations over the poor economic situation increased their significance.

Meysami's buttons thus became a matter of concern to the Intelligence Ministry. According to Reza Khandan, husband of the well-known activist Nasrin Sotoudeh, ministry officials interrogated everyone who had had contact with Meysami on Instagram and had inquired about the buttons. Khandan said that Sotoudeh, currently imprisoned for her activism, wore her button during her court appearances. Also according to Khandan, Meysami does not have a lawyer, because he refused to select one from among those approved and appointed by the judiciary.

Sedighe Pishnamaz, Meysamis mother, told the US-based Center for Human Rights in Iran that her son's cellmates have been able to contact her and have updated her on his condition. Meysami has reportedly refused to be transferred to a hospital because of prison officials' insistence that he be transferred to the hospital in a prison uniform and handcuffs.

Meysami is a biology teacher and a well-known instructor for college entrance exams. He has been active in campaigning for human rights and against mandatory veiling. When authorities raided his home after his arrest, they reportedly confiscated books about nonviolent protest in addition to the buttons against veiling.

Pictures of Meysami went viral on Twitter to mark his 50th day of refusing food, with many tweets including comparisons of how prisoners are treated differently for various crimes in the Islamic Republic. One user noted that Saeed Mortazavi  a former judge guilty of corruption while at the Social Security Organization and responsible for the torture and deaths at Kahrizak prison of protesters arrested after the 2009 elections  is currently free, on temporary release, while Mesyami is fighting for his life. One of the accompanying photographs was of Mortazavi participating in a recent Muharram procession.

During the holy month of Muharram, this year Sept. 11 through Oct. 9, Shiites honor the third Shiite imam, Hussein, who rose up against injustice and was killed. The irony has not been lost on social media users that a government that constantly emphasizes the sacrifice of Hussein cannot see the current injustice under its leadership whereby those loyal are rarely punished while those who rebel are harshly punished. One Twitter user noted about the authorities in Iran, They cannot even sustain the facade of [Mortazavi's] prison sentence. Other social media users tweeted with the hashtag #FreeFarhad to raise awareness about Meysami's arrest and ongoing detention.
Since its inception at the start of the 20th century, Israels kibbutz movement has symbolized the pioneers revolt against Jewish tradition and religion. For most kibbutzim (communal farms), Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement when religious, traditional and even secular Jews fast and flock to Israels synagogues, was just another day.

This week, however, as Israelis marked Yom Kippur on Sept. 18, dozens of kibbutzim throughout the country held prayer services for the holiest day of the Jewish year. The prayers were part of an initiative by Panim El Panim (Hebrew for face-to-face), an organization whose goal as helping to quench the growing thirst among the Jews of Israel for a deeper understanding of identity and purpose  and to deepen the connection between all parts of the nation. Its Hebrew-language web site calls on kibbutz members to take part in a unique, once-in-a-lifetime experience and to mark a different, special Yom Kippur along with all the people of Israel.

According to its site, the organization operates throughout the country, in high schools and colleges, on military bases, in kibbutzim and collective farms (moshavim). It runs programs in over 70 non-religious high schools and 45 army bases and meets annually with some 30,000 students.

The fact is that today, more people want to hook up with Judaism and family tradition, explained the organizations deputy director Yair Gantz in an interview two years ago with Channel 7, a media outlet of the religious right. In the name of linking them to Judaism and tradition, the organization and others like it link secular Israeli Jews to Jewish religion and beliefs.

Panim El Panim is headed by, among others, Col. (res.) Geva Rapp and Rabbi Eli Edler, both of Machon Meir, an institute of Jewish studies specifically geared to non-religious Jews seeking to deepen their ties to Judaism. Its declared aim is to spread the word of Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook, the spiritual father of the Gush Emunim settlement movement and of modern messianic Judaism.

A survey conducted by Haaretz in early September ahead of the Jewish high holidays indicates that 54% of Israelis believe in God and an additional 21% believe in a higher power, while 37% of Israeli Jews do not believe in the theory of evolution. Over half of Israeli Jews are convinced that the right of the Jewish people to the land of Israel stems from a divine promise, and 56% believe Jews are a "chosen nation."

In 1997, at an audience with the venerated Kabbalah scholar Rabbi Yitzhak Kaduri, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu whispered in his ear that the leftists "have forgotten what it means to be Jewish." Netanyahu was not sorry that his comment was caught on an open mike and repeatedly aired by the media. The message that placed the leftist minority beyond the pale was intended to strengthen the affinity between the conservative right and the countrys Jewish majority, the same people who believe in God and an afterlife and regard the biblical pledge to Abraham as a real estate contract for a Jewish state between the Mediterranean Sea and the River Jordan.

Netanyahu's campaign for passage of the nationality law, the bill adopted by the Knesset in July that anchors Israels nature as a Jewish state, is a modern-day version of the leftists have forgotten they are Jews. The months-long campaign in favor of the law placed its authors on the side of the Jewish majority that believes in God and in the divine promise.

In doing so, Netanyahu sidelined the (secular) leftist and centrist parties into the social and political margins reserved for the Arabs and other Israel haters, those who protested Israels definition as the nation-state of the Jewish people. That way, Netanyahu managed to blur for many Israelis the affinity of the center-left parties to the 1948 Declaration of Independence, in which the linkage between the Jewish people and the land of Israel is followed by commitment to equality for all the citizens of the state.

It seems that for many Israelis nowadays, "Jewish" is synonymous with "religious." So by advancing a "Jewish state," Netanyahu and his associates transformed the objections to the law into objections to the Jewish religion itself.

The future does not bode well for the center and left. The Haaretz poll shows that the young generation is actually more religious than their parents. Several findings point in that direction: the rate of young Israelis aged 18-34 who fast on Yom Kippur is significantly higher than of older Israelis  84% compared to 66%, and to 67.5% among those aged 55 and older.

Two elements undermine the prospects of a resurgence by the left and secular centrists: demographics and the school system. The birth rate amid Israeli religious Jews is significantly higher than that of secular Israelis, and the number of ultra-Orthodox and religious schools keeps rising. At the same time, the Jewish activism of national-religious HaBayit HaYehudi, the party led by Education Minister Naftali Bennett, does not stop at the Orthodox school system. Reports of growing religious influence on secular schools surged in 2018. On Sept. 14, Haaretz reported that a state school in the suburban Tel Aviv town of Ramat Gan organized an event in April 2017 for 12-year-old girls marking their Bat Mitzva to instruct them in the Jewish ceremony of hafrashat challah, in which women separate a chunk of dough for the challah bread eaten on the Sabbath from regular dough. At an after-school program in the town of Ness Ziona, second-grade pupils were taught the Jewish grace prayer recited after meals and asked to say it.

In a bid to sever the link between religious faith and conservatism, the leader of the center-left Zionist Camp Avi Gabbay never leaves home without a kippa in his pocket. The leader of the centrist Yesh Atid party visited the Western Wall, Judaisms holiest site, wrapped in a prayer shawl. For now, there is no indication that such gestures will get the job done. In order to stem the tide carrying Israelis to the right, the leaders of these parties must look them in the eye and tell them that if they keep believing that only supporters of the Greater Land of Israel are good Jews, even God will not save the country from plunging into an abyss of apartheid, violence and isolation.
MOSCOW  The downing of the Russian Il-20 transportation jet by Syrian air defense systems over what Moscow described as Israeli provocation is probably the single most important crisis Russia has experienced in Syria since the killing of dozens of its mercenaries in Deir ez-Zor at the hands of the US military in February. The downed plane carried 15 people and fell in Latakia province.

The first analogy that popped up immediately after the incident was Turkey's downing of a Russian jet in November, 2015. The similarity looked even more menacing just hours after Russia survived its stress test with Turkey over Idlib.

Russian Defense Ministry was quick to announce that the plane disappeared from radar after sudden Israeli strikes on Syria and was eventually hit by Syrian S-200 anti-aircraft systems targeting Israeli jets. Israel was thus named responsible for the incident.

The guilt for the downed plane lies fully with the Israeli party, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu told his Israeli counterpart Avigdor Liberman in a phone conversation following the incident. Shoigu stressed that Moscow had repeatedly warned Israel against strikes on Syria via different channels.

We consider these provocative actions by Israel to be hostile. The 15 Russian military service members died because of the irresponsible actions of the Israel military. It's absolutely contrary to spirit of Russian-Israeli partnership. We reserve the right to respond appropriately," the Russian Defense Ministry stated.

Russias initial complaint was two-fold: Israel violated the bilateral de-escalation agreement that helped prevent incidents in the past by warning Moscow of the attack on Idlib only a minute before first strikes were launched, leaving the Russians unable to withdraw the plane from a dangerous zone. The Israeli move was unfriendly as its jets used the Russian plane as cover from Syrias air defense systems.

As a result, the Il-20, which has an effective reflective surface an order of magnitude greater than that of the F-16 [which Israel used in the attacks] was hit by an S-200 missile, commented the Defense Ministry's Igor Konashenkov.

One of Russias most authoritative military experts, Mikhail Khodarenok, argued that the French too bear a share of responsibility for the downed plane. He told RIA Novosti, The French frigate 'Auvergne' contributed negatively to the situation in the skies over Syria by creating complications for Syrian combat units operating anti-aircraft systems. It was in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Russian airspace control systems registered missile launches from a French frigate in the Mediterranean Sea on Sept. 17 around 8 p.m., prompting Moscow to initially blame Paris for the incident.

The immediate reaction by Russian decision-makers was mixed but strong. Senator Alexey Pushkov, who is on the US sanctions list and chairs the temporary Committee on Information Policies and Engagement at the Russian Council of the Federation, took a cautious stance, saying, The degree of the intent by the Israeli party must be precisely defined at this point and it will be done via closed channels.

Backlash from his colleagues in the Senate and the Duma, however, varied from calls for hard talk with Israel over the incident to imposing sanctions and breaking diplomatic ties.

Military options presented to the Kremlin by policy-makers and experts in first few hours after the incident included deliveries of more advanced air defense systems to Syrians to guard from future Israeli attacks and sealing off the skies over Syria to any foreign power, including Israel, with Russias own S-400 missile system.

Few in either circle wondered about Syria's responsibility in the incident. What is under discussion is the Syrian armys own ability to properly handle the advanced Russia-made anti-aircraft systems as well as whether they knew about the Russian plane before the Israeli attacks or saw it on their radar screens as they opened fire. If so, was there a decision to continue shooting the missiles, aware of potential risks for the Russian crew, or was it just a fatal mistake caused by an indiscriminate missile launch  the theory propagated by the Israeli military?

Russian President Vladimir Putin commented, Its a different situation, when asked whether Russia will retaliate against Israel as it did against Turkey in 2015. Back then, the Turkish jet deliberately targeted our aircraft. Here, rather, it appears to be a chain of tragic situational circumstances because Israeli jets didnt hit our [plane], Putin explained at a press conference with Hungarys President Viktor Orban.

He added, Our attitude to the tragedy is outlined in the Defense Ministry statement, which was fully coordinated with me. Regarding our retaliation measures, they will be first and foremost aimed at providing additional security to our servicemen, our [military] objects in Syria. And those will be steps that everyone will notice.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called Putin later that day to express condolences on the death of Russian servicemen and to promise a thorough investigation into the incident, the results of which will be brought to Moscow personally by the Israeli air force commander.

According to the Kremlin, Putin reminded Netanyahu that such operations by the Israeli military are conducted in violation of Syrian sovereignty and that in this particular case, Russian-Israeli agreements on the prevention of dangerous incidents were not observed.

Mr. Putin called on the Israeli party to prevent such situations from happening in the future, read the press release.

The Israeli forces went into crisis-management mode, communicating with Moscow about the initial inquiry findings. While some commentators in Russia continue to insist that Israel is playing a dangerous game, the general backlash in Moscow and on social media gradually turned toward criticism of the Russian government itself for its failure to prevent the killing of its servicemen. Putin was accused of growing too cozy with Bibi, which allegedly emboldened Israel, and blamed for Russias inability to act upon the Israeli strikes on Syria as they began. Military experts questioned the effectiveness of communication channels between both the Russian and Syrian militaries and between Russia and the Israelis.

The attack came at a bad time for the Russian president, whose ratings have been shaken by the unpopular pension reform. Pressure is on Putin to manage the crisis with Israel in a swift and convincing manner for his domestic constituency as more start questioning the meaning of the Russian presence in Syria  doubt that sprouts up every time Russia suffers human loses in the campaign.

The incident also came as a wake-up call for Moscow to rethink the security of its personnel that over the course of the Syrian campaign suffered loses from Turkish, American and now Syrian forces, not to mention terrorist and opposition militants. In a broader sense, the tragic incident exposed that no matter how effective the de-confliction channels that Moscow established with major stakeholders operating in Syria, they cannot perfectly prevent potential collisions when there are far too many military actors operating in a relatively small terrain and air space.

We should have seen it coming, a Russian diplomat speaking not for attribution told Al-Monitor, adding, When you have that many forces that close to one another the risk of an accidental mistake is high. You think the war is coming to its end but parties are acting in an even more uncompromised way and we, sadly, may end up seeing more of such incidents.
While moving military reinforcements to the Syrian border amid lingering tensions over Idlib, Turkey conducted an intriguing intelligence operation. On Sept. 12, Ankara announced that Yusuf Nazik, the accused mastermind of a 2013 twin car bombing in Reyhanli that claimed 53 lives, had been captured in the Syrian province of Latakia and brought to Turkey by the National Intelligence Organization (MIT).

Public broadcaster TRT initially claimed that Nazik, a Turkish national, had been captured in a joint operation with Syrian intelligence. The channel removed the claim from its ensuing bulletins, while the state-run Anatolia news agency emphasized that the operation was accomplished entirely with national resources.

In a confession video released to the media, Nazik said he received the order for the Reyhanli attack from the Syrian intelligence service, known as the mukhabarat. He said he then brought the explosives from Syria and had them planted in the vehicles. He made the following appeal: Im calling on my fellows in Syria to turn back while they still can. The Turkish state, our own state, will take care of us. I'm calling also on the Syrian state: The Turkish state is a great state and it will certainly bring you to account.

During the 2014 trial over the Reyhanli attack, Nazik was indicted in absentia along with eight other suspects. In the final hearing on Feb. 23, nine out of 33 defendants were sentenced to life in prison, while 13 others got jail terms of up to 15 years. Yet, questions over the attack, stirred by some testimonies during the trial, lingered after the convictions. Who was really behind the carnage? And why did the security forces fail to prevent the attack when they had advance intelligence?

The No. 1 suspect, Nasir Eskiocak, claimed that Nazik, who was involved in smuggling activities, had frequently communicated with two MIT operatives and then-Justice Minister Sadullah Ergin via a special telephone line. Eskiocak  captured by the Free Syrian Army in Syria and handed over to Turkey  told the court, We discussed things with Yusuf Nazik and the two MIT members in his company. I was told that narcotics would arrive by sea and that I should load them on cars and take them to Reyhanli. The two MIT members gave me assurances that nothing would happen to me. I did not know that those were explosives.

Some defendants claimed they fell into a trap set by Heysem Topalca, a Turkmen commander in the Free Syrian Army who allegedly collaborated with MIT in delivering weapons to militants in Syria. The defendants argued that they had made hidden storage spaces in the minivans for smuggling, unaware they would be used to conceal explosives. In remarks to journalists while in Syria, Nazik also blamed Topalca for the bombings.

Topalcas name had previously been embroiled in another controversy: the November 2013 seizure of a truck in Turkeys southern province of Adana that turned out to belong to MIT. He also had links to the Islamic State militants involved in the deadly 2014 attack on Turkish security forces on a road in Nigde. According to a Turkish police report, Topalca entered and exited Turkey 873 times from 2011 to 2014.

Among those who followed the Reyhanli trial closely was Refik Eryilmaz, then a main opposition deputy for Hatay province, where Reyhanli is located. He called for the creation of a parliamentary inquiry commission to uncover who orchestrated the attack and to expose any officials whose negligence allowed the assailants to strike on May 11, 2013. His appeal remained unanswered, although negligence on behalf of the security forces was obvious.

According to the indictment, the Hatay police received a tip about the plot on May 8, 2013, three days before the attack. Judicial procedures began the following day. MIT was able to identify the suspects as well as the license plates of the two minivans laden with explosives. MIT passed that information to the police on May 10. The security forces began to surveil Eskiocak and wire-tapped Nazik, who had already been monitored in 2012 after a similar tip. Roadside checkpoints in the region were set up on May 8, but were halted inexplicably on May 11, the day of the attack. Despite MITs May 10 intelligence notice, regional police units received no wireless alert. In short, the circumstances laid out in the indictment suggest that the security forces failed to stop the attack even though the suspects and the explosive-laden vehicles were identified. Moreover, it turned out that the polices security cameras in Reyhanli were out of order at the time of the attack.

The prosecutor of the case, Ozcan Sisman, is now in jail as part of a crackdown on followers of US-based cleric Fethullah Gulen. Ankara holds the Fethullah Terrorist Organization, or FETO, responsible for the 2016 coup attempt, among other crimes. In a written response to questions by Cumhuriyet from prison in 2015, Sisman said an MIT official came to him three days before the attack, asking him to launch an operation. But Sisman questioned why the intelligence organization did not use its own prevention authorities. He claimed that MITs May 10 intelligence notice was casually left with the policeman on guard at the gate of the police department, without any warning of urgency. Eventually, the negligence charges, along with the case over the arms-laden MIT trucks, turned into a probe into FETO, in which two police officers were convicted and a third officer remains on trial.

The Reyhanli probe proceeded in a climate of pressure emanating from Ankaras Syria policy. Government officials blamed Damascus right off the bat, and President Recep Tayyip Erdogan described the dead as 53 Sunni citizens of ours, targeting Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad, whose Alawite identity Erdogan has often highlighted. Later, pro-government media and Justice and Development Party officials frequently referenced the Reyhanli attack in calls for military intervention to topple the Assad regime.

The Nazik operation comes amid disagreements with Russia over the prospect of a large-scale offensive on Idlib. Ankara apparently sees its military observation posts in Idlib as a shield to armed groups based in the region. The presence of Turkish soldiers there is probably the only guarantee to prevent any major assault because the Russian jet fighters and the regime ground forces cannot afford attacks while Turkish soldiers are there, presidential spokesman Ibrahim Kalin wrote in a Sept. 8 opinion piece in the Daily Sabah. Amid the military buildup at the Syrian border, the resurfacing of the Reyhanli file makes one question whether the Turkish people are being psychologically prepared for a possible adventure in Idlib.
It may not be the big city, but the amount of new restaurants and businesses opening in Homewood, and specifically SoHo, may have you fooled. From healthy options like smoothies and salads to not-quite-as-healthy treats like donuts and biscuits, Homewood's new kids on the block are fitting right into the tight-knit community of eateries and their hungry supporters.

Photo courtesy of We Have Doughnuts.

We Have Doughnuts

Homewood has doughnuts. Well, they already have doughnuts (hello, Hero Doughnuts), and now they have even more because We Have Doughnuts has taken up shop inside longtime favorite bakery, Savage's. The two businesses are family-owned--by the same family! Owners Van Scott and his daughter Elizabeth decided to convert half of Savage's space into a permanent spot for the former pop-up-only doughnut business. After a grand opening at the end of June, the old-fashioned cake-style doughnuts have been flying out of the display case. Go early to get your fill with flavors like Brown Butter, Chocolate Oreo, and, of course, the original Buttermilk.

2916 18th St. S. | 205.871.4901 | wehavedoughnuts.com

Photo courtesy of Big Bad Breakfast.

Big Bad Breakfast

There's nothing bad about the breakfast at Big Bad Breakfast. The same can't be said for "big," though. Chef John Currence, of Oxford's City Grocery, first brought his breakfast concept to Birmingham in 2013 when he opened the second location of the famed Oxford joint. Now, Homewood is getting in on the fun with their own location. The extensive menu includes creative offerings like the Breakfast Crumble (crumbled biscuits, bacon, grits, tomato gravy, and poached eggs) and the Lowcountry Skillet (scrambled eggs, andouille, shrimp, potatoes, tomatoes, onions, peppers, and cheese). Don't forget to order a side of BBB's special spicy bacon and ask for the homemade jam to go with your biscuits--you won't be sorry.

1926 29th Ave. S. | 205.666.7099 | bigbadbreakfast.com

Ashley Mac's

Ashley Mac's returns to its roots with a new cafe in Homewood--where the business started 10 years ago out of Ashley and Andy McMakin's home kitchen. The couple now owns four locations in the Birmingham area where they offer catering, meals to go, and lunch and dinner service. The new space, part of the former Do-Di-Yos building, can accommodate 100 diners inside and 40 more on the large patio. Go for the signature chicken salad sandwich (and make it a melt), or one of their fresh salads. And it'd be an absolute shame not to end the meal with a slice of the famous strawberry cake.

1831 28th Ave. S., Suite 101 | 205.582.0062 | ashleymacs.com

Photo courtesy of Little Donkey.

Little Donkey Mexican Restaurant

OK, so it's not technically new, but after six years as a Homewood staple, Little Donkey is hitting the refresh button on their menu, branding, and interior. The new Little Donkey is focused on blending authentic Mexican food with Southern soul, with new dishes like the Albondigas Sandwich with pork and beef meatballs, roasted tomato broth, Jack cheese, crema, queso fresco, and pickled onions; and tamales filled with smoked pork or brisket. In other big news, the restaurant is jumping on the brunch train, and will offer weekend brunch from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. with offerings like Breakfast Tacos, Huevos Rancheros, and of course, the Famous Fried Chicken. Don't forget happy hour, seven days a week from 3-6 p.m. with $2 tacos, $2 Frito bags, and $4 draft beer, wine, and frozen margaritas.

2821 Central Ave., Suite 101 | 205.703.7000 | thelittledonkey.com

Photo courtesy of Kale Me Crazy.

Kale Me Crazy

It's easier than ever to eat healthy now that this new superfood cafe is open. The restaurant and juice bar uses fresh, organic, and raw ingredients to create quick and nutritious options for diners. Salads, wraps, poke, acai bowls, smoothies, toasts, and cold-pressed juices all are on the menu. Hint: Don't miss the Avocado Toast that's served on Ezekiel bread. For an extra boost to your immune system, try a Wellness (ginger, oil of oregano, garlic extract, turmeric, cayenne, lemon) or Painkiller (ginger, lime, turmeric, raw honey) Shot. All smoothies are made with house-made almond milk, and cold-pressed juices are bottled for easy transport. Bonus: They're truly as healthy as they are tasty.

1831 28th Ave. S., Suite 106 | kalemecrazy.net

This story appears in Birmingham magazine's September 2018 issue. Subscribe today!
Aldi is teaming with Instacart to offer online grocery delivery nationwide.

The German grocery chain had offered online ordering via a test program in four cities  Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas and Los Angeles. It's now being expanded to 35 states, going live by Thanksgiving in over 5,000 zip codes.

"ALDI is a pioneer and a leader in creating a shopping experience that works with people's busy lives," said Jason Hart, CEO of ALDI. "Out partnership with Instacart and the expansion of our commerce options are more ways we are meeting the growing needs of today's shopper, who wants high quality food at unbeatable prices."

Once the program goes live, customers will fill their virtual carts by visiting Instacart.com/aldi or downloading the Instacart app. At checkout, customers can choose a delivery window anywhere from an hour or up to a week later.

To celebrate the new program, ALDI is offering $10 off customer's first order of $35 or more with the code ALDILOVE.

The company will also test curbside pickup in November. The service will allow customers to order groceries online and then come to the store where they will be loaded into their cars.
The Department of Justice awarded today a grant of over $700,000 to One Place Metro Alabama Family Justice Center.

The DOJ's Office of Violence Against Women gave One Place $700,593, officials from One Place and the U.S. Attorneys Office for the Northern District of Alabama announced Thursday at a press conference. One Place, a facility where domestic or sexual abuse victims can go to receive comprehensive legal and social services, is the only agency in the state to get this type of grant from the Office of Violence Against Women this year.

The grant will "further advance our services and reduce barriers for so many," Vice President of One Place's Board of Directors Julie Wall said.

The founding agencies at One Place include the Birmingham Police Department, the Jefferson County District Attorney's Office, the YWCA Central Alabama and the Crisis Center, Inc. At One Place, victims and survivors of domestic violence and sexual assault can get help from a multi-disciplinary team, working together in one location. One Place offers services ranging from counseling to filing a police report and legal help.

The money will allow One Place to hire a full-time SANE, or sexual assault nurse examiner, to perform examinations on sexual assault victims 14 or older at the facility. The funds will also allow One Place to have a lawyer from the YWCA onsite, provide trauma-informed training for medical advocates and law enforcement, and host quarterly events to promote community awareness for the center.

"We are honored to all work together to break the cycle of violence," Wall said. "Four years ago, this was all a dream, but now it's reality."

She continued, "I'm hopeful because today represents a significant moment... because today signals there is great momentum."

Yolanda Sullivan, CEO of YWCA Central Alabama, and Meg McGlamery, Executive Director of the Crisis Center, also spoke at the press conference. "Can you imagine what it's like?" Sullivan said, talking about how before One Place, victims had to go to different locations to have a medical exam, to file a restraining order, and to seek legal help. "All while fearing for your life and the safety of your children?"

"I'm so moved by today," McGlamery said. "We've been dreaming about this for years."

While the Crisis Center has a 24/7 SANE on duty, McGlamery said the SANE at One Place is needed to manage the volume of rape and assault cases. She said since the Crisis Center's SANE service opened in 2002, they have seen over 5,000 patients.

The SANE at One Place will be available during normal business hours Monday through Friday, beginning next week. For victims who want to have an examination performed after hours or on the weekends, the Crisis Center SANE will be available.

One Place Executive Director Allison Dearing said, "The awarded funds will allow One Place to expand its current on-site resources to offer increased support for survivors of domestic violence and sexual assault...[it] affirms and advances the mission of our collaboration -- which is to make the process less intimidating and more efficient for the survivors we serve."

McGlamery said, "Whether it happened that very day, or 90 years ago, we're here to support survivors."
Just days before they were set to face a capital murder trial, two of three suspects pleaded guilty in the Huntsville drug-deal killing of 21-year-old Jerry Caudle.

Shaquille Hyter and Jimmy Leslie on Wednesday each received 20-year sentences, split to spend five years in prison and another five on probation.

Both men had been charged with capital murder in the fatal shooting of 21-year-old Jerry Lamarlo Caudle Jr.. But as part of a plea agreement, prosecutors reduced their charges to manslaughter. Circuit Judge Chris Comer said he was concerned about the "significant departure" from the capital charge to a Class B felony.

If convicted of capital murder, 23-year-old Hyter and 22-year-old Leslie would have been sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. The maximum sentence for manslaughter is 20 years.

Madison County Deputy District Attorney Maggie Wallace said prosecutors reached the plea deal with the defendants because they were concerned about the risk of taking the case to trial. Wallace said the trial witnesses would include convicted felons who are currently imprisoned.

"It's just not a risk that us or the victim's family are willing to take," Wallace said.

The killing happened on Holmes Avenue the night of May 19, 2015. Huntsville police found Caudle lying in the street and suffering two gunshot wounds. He was declared dead at Huntsville Hospital.

Prosecutors said Hyter and Leslie met the with Caudle that night for a drug transaction. When a scuffle broke out at the home on Holmes Avenue, Caudle was shot. He ran away and at some point fired a weapon of his own, according to the authorities. Caudle was shot a second time, but prosecutors haven't said which defendant fired at him.

At the request of prosecutors, Comer on Thursday dismissed the case against a third defendant, Lakesha Dyer. Her felony murder case was set for trial Monday, but that has now been canceled.

Patrick Tuten, a defense attorney who represented Leslie, said prosecutors didn't have a strong case. But his client wasn't willing to risk a life without parole sentence.

"The ultimate disposition is reasonable under the circumstances," Tuten said outside the courtroom.

Hyter's lawyer Bruce Gardner said there was evidence to support both sides of the case.

"We reached a really fair resolution," he said.

The plea deal requires both men to pay a $1,000 fine, plus court costs and fees for their appointed lawyers. The judge ordered both men to avoid all contact with the victim's mother.

Both men are receiving credit for time already served in jail. Because Leslie has been held without bail since Dec. 9, 2015, he already has served nearly three years of his five-year prison term. Hyter has served about 16 months.

Updated Sept. 20, 2018 to show the case against Lakesha Dyer has been dropped. The judge this morning approved a dismissal filed by prosecutors.
Cody Wilson, the owner of a controversial Austin business that distributes blueprints for untraceable 3-D printed guns, fled to Taiwan after he was tipped off about a police investigation into sexual relations between him and a 16-year-old girl, police said.

He faces a charge of sexual assault of a child in Austin.

"Before he left, he was informed by a friend of the victim that she had spoken to police, and police were investigating him for having sex with a minor," said Austin Police Commander Troy Officer. Officer said it was unclear when Wilson left for Taiwan, or why exactly he went there, but he didn't board a return flight to the United States.

Austin police are now working with international law enforcement agencies to extradite Wilson back to Travis County for prosecution.

Court records obtained by MySA.com say the victim told the Center for Child Protection on Aug. 27 that she met Wilson through SugarDaddyMeet.com, which requires users to be at least 18 years old to become members.

Wilson, who went by the username "Sanjuro," told the victim he was a "big deal" and identified himself as "Cody Wilson," according court records. The victim later told investigators that "Sanjuro" sent her pictures of his penis and that she responded with nude photos of herself, authorities said.

They exchanged phone numbers and on Aug. 15, they met at the parking lot of Bennu Coffee in the 500 block of South Congress Avenue, records show. Wilson arrived in a black Ford Edge SUV with a license plate that matches one registered to Wilson's business, Defense Distributed, according to his arrest affidavit. The two then went to the Archer Hotel in the 3100 block of Palm Way, the affidavit says.

Security cameras recorded Wilson and the victim using the hotel's valet service at about 8:30 p.m. Then then took an elevator to the seventh floor and entered a room, where the victim said they had sex, according to the affidavit. Wilson then paid her $500 in cash, authorities said.

They were recorded leaving the elevator at about 9:20 p.m. According to the affidavit, Wilson dropped off the victim at a Whataburger on West Slaughter Lane.

In the affidavit, Austin Police Officer Shaun Donovan, notes the victim's statement to authorities has been thoroughly corroborated by security camera footage and that Wilson was the sole registered guest of the hotel room the night of the assault.

"This is really a cautionary tale," Officer said. "Whether it's a child or an adult, if you pay for sex it's illegal."

Officer deflected questions from reporters about SugarDaddyMeet.com's age limit, saying only that it is illegal to have sex with a minor in Texas.

Officer added investigators said that if anyone mistook the victim's age it "would be because they think she's younger, not older than 16."

After news of the charges against Wilson broke on Wednesday, many social media users openly wondered whether he had been set up in some sort of sting operation. Officers said there's no evidence that he was set up, but prosecutors will investigate that possibility.

Sexual assault of a child is a second-degree felony punishable by up to 20 years in prison.

(c)2018 the San Antonio Express-News. Caleb Downs wrote this story.
In a story Sept. 20 about a critic of an Alabama city being found guilty of trespassing, The Associated Press reported erroneously that a 2015 letter from a Northport city official to John Earl detailed past incidents between Earl and the city. The letter said Earl is not a Northport resident or business owner and warned him not to trespass on city-owned properties.

A corrected version of the story is below:

Critic banned from city property found guilty of trespassing

A critic of an Alabama city has been found guilty of trespassing to attend a city council meeting

NORTHPORT, Ala. (AP) -- A critic of an Alabama city has been found guilty of trespassing to attend a city council meeting.

The Tuscaloosa News reports 71-year-old John Earl was found guilty Tuesday for attending a Northport City Council meeting in 2015 despite being banned from city property. Earl testified that his then-lawyer told him to attend.

A 2015 letter informing Earl of the ban and three encounters with city officials were discussed during the trial. They included Earl taking photos of vehicles at city hall, using a councilwoman's passcode to enter a restricted area, and asking a police officer about the city's concealed weapons policy. Earl says he took a photo of a car thought to be driven by a council member and was helping the councilwoman with research. He testified he was just asking about the weapons policy.

Earl's attorney, Bill Dawson, says these aren't "serious breaches of public safety."
A former Wetumpka police officer on Thursday was found guilty of criminally negligent homicide in a January 2016 crash that left a woman dead, according to local news reports.

Criminally negligent homicide is a Class C felony when a vehicle is involved, according to Alabama law.

In July 2017, an Elmore County grand jury indicted the officer, Andrew Bass, on a charge of manslaughter in the crash, court records show.

Bass was responding to an emergency call in October 2016 when he crashed into another car, killing 52-year-old Elaine Merritt.

Officials said Merritt was in the median of Highway 231 waiting to merge when Bass drove down the median, striking her car, WSFA 12 News reported. Records show Bass was driving about 90 mph without his emergency lights on when the crash occurred, WSFA reported.

Bass will be sentenced in October.
U.S. District Judge Myron Thompson has suspended a hearing to consider whether Alabama Department of Corrections officials should be held in contempt of court for not meeting deadlines on expanding the mental health staff in the state's prisons.

Thompson's order does not set a date for the hearing to resume. It says the hearing was put on hold "pending mediation and resolution of the monitoring issue."

Attorneys representing inmates had asked Thompson to hold the state in contempt and appoint a monitor to oversee compliance with the court's orders. Thompson ruled last year that the DOC's mental health care was "horrendously inadequate" and violated the prisoners' constitutional rights. The staff increases are part of efforts to find a remedy.

Attorneys for the DOC said the prison system's new health care contractor, Wexford Health Sources, Inc., was making extensive efforts to recruit more staff but had faced difficult circumstances in meeting the hiring goals Thompson ordered in February. The DOC's attorneys say they still expect hiring targets to be met by early next year.

Thompson scheduled the hearing for the DOC to show why it should not be held in contempt. The hearing started on Tuesday, with DOC Associate Commissioner for Health Services Ruth Naglich testifying for most of the day.

Southern Poverty Law Center Attorney Maria Morris, who is representing the inmates, said the question of how to monitor the DOC's compliance with the judge's orders is ongoing and will be the subject of an upcoming hearing that was already planned before the contempt issue came up.

Bill Lunsford, an attorney representing the DOC, said the agency is seeking clarification on the court's orders regarding mental health staffing. Lunsford said the court will hold a a hearing on that motion on Thursday.

"ADOC expects that the Court will issue an opinion on the ADOC's motion to clarify at some point in the near future," Lunsford said in an email. "After the Court rules on ADOC's pending motion for clarification, the parties have agreed to return to mediation to discuss how ADOC and its mental health vendor will continue to fill vacant mental health positions."

The Legislature boosted the DOC's funding by $80 million over two years, with much of that money intended to increase mental health staff and correctional staff. Thompson found that staff shortages were on overarching issue in the mental health care problems.

Updated at 8:51 p.m. with statement from DOC attorney Bill Lunsford.
Lassiter, Cunningham and Harwell

A potential leadership change on the Birmingham-Jefferson County Transit Authority Board of Directors was the impetus for the last-minute postponement of Wednesday's board meeting, according director Kevin Powe.

"They knew we were going to go in a different direction," he said. "We're tired of the chaos and confusion."

Voting on new officers was one of the items slated to be on the meeting's agenda, several board members confirmed.

On Monday, director Ruby Davis sent an email to each of the board's nine members nominating the slate of Ted Smith (chair), LeDon Jones (vice chair) and Powe (secretary).

Current officers are chairman Darryl Cunningham, vice chair Johnnye Lassiter and secretary Don Harwell.

The consensus among board members reached on Wednesday is that the slate of Smith, Jones, and Powe has the support of a majority of the board.

"They knew they didn't have the votes," Powe said. "But you can't postpone it forever."

"I'm probably not going to be an officer anymore," said Harwell,

Cunningham, who was voted to the position in April, did not respond to an email or telephone call from AL.com.

Board members were informed of the postponement on Tuesday evening; a public notice was posted on Facebook and Twitter on Wednesday morning.

Good morning,

The BJCTA Board of Directors meeting scheduled for today is POSTPONED until further notice. #maxtransit pic.twitter.com/hutl7f6gma  MAX Transit (@BJCTAMAX) September 19, 2018

Most either said they did not know why the meeting was postponed or would not comment.

"We need to be more consistent," said director Martin Weinberg.

The board's regular meetings are scheduled for the fourth Wednesday each month, with the Committee of the Whole meeting on the third Wednesday. The board meeting due to be held on September 26th, however, was rescheduled for Sept 19 because board members will be attending the American Public Transit Association's annual meeting in Nashville this Sunday through next Wednesday.

Last Friday, according to board members, Cunningham appointed a nominating committee led by director Patrick Sellers and including Harwell and Powe.

Davis' email nominating a new slate sparked a flurry of conversations, according to several board members, that ultimately resulted in Tuesday's postponement.

Also on the agenda were resolutions changing the agency's by-laws to address conditions laid out by Birmingham mayor Randall Woodfin in April when he threatened to withhold BJCTA funding because of its flurry of embarrassments, including allegations of financial improprieties, excessive spending, power struggles and high turnover among board leadership.

Cunningham is the BJCTA's fourth board chair in five months.

To receive its funding, Woodfin said the agency must develop a "leadership stability plan attributed to a timeline," require 12 hours of governance training for board members and establish rules and procedures for the length of terms for board leadership.

After a standoff with the city of Birmingham and rampant concern that withholding funding would severely disrupt service for the city's transit riders, the board last month voted 4-3 (two members were absent) to approve a contract with the city to receive $10 million in quarterly installments during fiscal 2019, provided the agency meeting specific stipulations, including creating monthly ridership reports and conducting a forensic audit.

Harwell said the postponement was "more of a question of not having enough time to get everything on the agenda.

"We're trying to do everything we can to please mayor Woodfin," he added. "Sometimes, it takes longer than people want."

As of this writing, no new date was set for the postponed meeting.
Tuscaloosa Mayor Walt Maddox, Democratic candidate for governor, doubled down this week on his criticism of Republican Gov. Kay Ivey, a line of attack the governor's campaign says is riddled with misunderstandings and lies.

Maddox's campaign has argued that Ivey should not allow a state trust fund to continue making payments to support the legal fees of former Gov. Robert Bentley.

So far, according to the Alabama Department of Finance, $337,687 has been paid out of a state trust fund to defend against a wrongful termination lawsuit filed last year by former Alabama Law Enforcement Agency Secretary Spencer Collier.

That amount includes $238,462 to Maynard, Cooper & Gale. The Birmingham-based law firm is defending both Bentley and former ALEA Secretary Stan Stabler in the matter.

Ivey's campaign fired back, arguing that the governor has little say on the matter and that Maddox is attempting to distract voters with falsehoods.

"Governor Ivey should end this fiasco immediately," said Chip Hill, spokesman with the Maddox campaign. "The state's only legitimate legal interest in the Bentley case is to get out of it and leave the former governor to defend himself."

Ivey's campaign spokeswoman Debbee Hancock said: "Maddox's attempt to distract voters from his liberal agenda with lies and false information is wrong and irresponsible."

Exclusions or necessary

The latest dispute ahead of the November 6 governor's contest focuses on different interpretations of a 1984 law that established the state's self-insured General Liability Trust Fund (GLTF), which is administered by the Alabama Department of Finance's Risk Management division.

According to the law, all state employees and public officials are entitled to legal representation paid for by the GLTF whenever they are sued in their individual capacity for damages arising out of job-related performance.

Ivey's campaign, and her gubernatorial staff, have said that they have no choice but to OK payouts to Bentley, the former governor who resigned in April 2017 while faced with ethics violations and impeachment proceedings resulting from a political scandal involving allegations of an affair with a top aide.

The Maddox camp, however, said there is a provision for exclusions, which would not require a payout. They said the exclusion list, which is issued through the Treasurer's Office, includes references that could be applied to an ongoing lawsuit Bentley is battling in Montgomery County Circuit Court against his former law enforcement secretary, Spencer Collier.

The Maddox campaign believes that case, which returns to court for a motion hearing on Oct. 4, no longer grants Bentley the ability to dip into the GLTF to pay for his legal bills because the only issues remaining are based Bentley's personal misconduct occurring "outside the line and scope of the governor's official duties."

Immunity questions

The Maddox campaign points to a judge's Nov. 9, 2017, ruling tossing out Collier's claim that he was wrongfully terminated in 2016, right before going public with explosive details about Bentley's alleged affair with advisor Rebekah Mason.

According to the judge, the dismissal was based on the governor's "absolute immunity" to fire an employee who serves at his pleasure.

But that same ruling denied Bentley's motion to dismiss Collier's claims of defamation, invasion of privacy and conspiracy. In this scenario, the judge ruled that the governor is not entitled to absolute immunity.

To the Maddox campaign, Bentley's remaining legal defense issues - and all defense matters since the Nov. 9, 2017, ruling -- are based on personal, not official, conduct and should not be subject to GLTF payouts.

"Bentley should be required to defend himself like the rest of us would, availing himself of any personal liability insurance he may have," Hill said.

Ivey's office says that the court has previously ruled it is "premature" to dismiss the remainder of the case noting that Bentley could return to court and seek a summary judgement declaring that he is entitled to immunity.

Daniel Sparkman, Ivey's official spokesman, said the "non-political, experienced career merit system employees" within the Division of Risk Management have told the governor's office they are "obligated, by law, to continue providing coverage" until the court finds that Collier "can prove these allegations."

"Governor Ivey will not interfere, for political purposes, with the decisions of the Division of Risk Management," Sparkman said.

Bentley's lawyer, John Neiman, also said the GLFT payments to his client should not be political.

"The provision of a legal defense to current and former state employees for these sorts of lawsuits is not a political decision," Neiman said. "It is a non-political decision made by professional, non-political state employees. So far, the career, non-political professionals who administer this fund have concluded that the defense of this lawsuit is covered by the fund, and they are right."

Neiman, who is employed with Maynard, Cooper & Gale, said that his law office has billed the GLTF a total of $257,000 for its legal work, which is split between its work with Bentley ($116,000), and with former ALEA Secretary Stabler ($141,000). Stabler is listed as a co-defendant in Collier's lawsuit.

Neiman, in echoing Sparkman's comments, said that Bentley could still prevail "if he shows that acts he is being sued for occurred in the line and scope of his employment."

Said Neiman: "The former governor intends to show that this is the case, and he also intends to show that the material allegations being made against him in this case are not fair and not valid. So it is not true to say that the court has definitely ruled that the claims involve conduct outside the line and scope of employment, and it is right for the state self-insurance fund to continue to provide coverage of this lawsuit."

'Remain silent'

The Maddox camp, meanwhile, is taking Ivey to task for not finding ways to thwart a payout to a disgraced former governor.

Hill, Maddox's spokesman, cited a 2010 Alabama State Supreme Court ruling in which former Gov. Bob Riley, in a legal tussle with former Attorney General Troy King, was granted authority to control a task force on illegal gambling.

Said Hill, "The court ruled the governor controlled the state's legal interests as the CEO of state government even if the attorney general objected. The governor is the chief official and the ultimate legal official in the state of Alabama."

The Maddox campaign argues that the governor has state constitutional authority over various departments including the Finance Department which oversees the GLTF, but has done little to change a system that is providing taxpayer money for Bentley's legal defense.

"Even if you decide to give Kay Ivey the benefit of the doubt about why she approves of paying Robert Bentley's attorneys ... (she) should have fully disclosed the payments that were going to Bentley's attorneys and gone to the Legislature and taken steps to end it," Hill said. "But just as with (former House Speaker and convicted criminal) Mike Hubbard's corruption convictions and throughout the entire Bentley scandal, Kay Ivey has chosen to remain silent."

Said Hancock, the governor's campaign spokeswoman: "Walt Maddox is desperate because his liberal agenda isn't gaining steam, and he's fallen flat. We've lost track of the number of lies Maddox and his team have told this week, and we aren't going to waste any more time responding to them."
Nearly seven years before 19-year-old Rosa Lee Maldonado and her mother were fatally stabbed - allegedly by Rosa Lee's younger sister - one of their family members was murdered by yet another relative.

Rosa Lee and her mother, 44-year-old Rosa Aminta Maldonado, were found dead at their mobile home in the Lester area of Limestone County early Wednesday morning, the sheriff's office said. One of the women called 911 as they were being stabbed, sheriff's spokesman Stephen Young said.

When deputies arrived on scene, they found Rosa Lee's 15-year-old sister stabbing herself in the head and neck with a butcher knife. Investigators say the 15-year-old killed her mother and sister before trying to take her own life.

No charges have been filed in the double homicide which occurred about a year after the Maldonado family moved to Alabama from Albion, New York.

It was there that another of Rosa Lee's teen sisters was strangled to death by her brother-in-law in January 2011.

Rosa Lee's sister Katherine Sanchez was 15-years-old when she disappeared, according to local media reports from the time.

Sanchez was strangled and buried in an apple orchard just south of Lake Ontario. Her brother-in-law Carlos Cardenas has since been sentenced to 25 years in prison.

The deaths of Rosa Lee and Rosa Aminta Maldonado have again shocked and stunned the small town of Albino--much like what happened when Katherine was killed, according to an article by The Daily News in Batavia, New York.

"It's absolutely a tragedy," Orleans County, New York District Attorney Joseph Cardone told The Daily News after hearing about the Maldonado murders in north Alabama. Cardone prosecuted the Sanchez murder case. "It's disconcerting when a family goes through something this horrible," Cardone told the news outlet. "It makes you wonder how one incident impacts another. There's an unfortunate ripple effect this has on a family. I'm speechless."

Katherine Sanchez was a student at Albion High School when she disappeared. Rosa Lee graduated there in 2017.

"She (Rosa Lee) was a very pleasant, polite young lady with a beautiful smile," Michael Bonnewell, the superintendent of the Albion school district in New York, told AL.com. "The world unfortunately is going to lose someone who cared for others."

Bonnewell said that since the news of Rosa Lee's death reached their small town, the community has been reminiscing about her life. "Teachers and students noted she's really best remembered for her friendship," Bonnewell said. "She built bonds and had great care for those who were her friends."

Albion is a small village in Orleans County, New York. It sits about halfway between Rochester and Buffalo. Bonnewell said the farming community is located on the Eerie Canal. It's surrounded by farms and is home to many buildings that are more than 100 years old.

Bonnewell said because the village and school district are so small, many current students were friends with Rosa Lee.

It's not clear why the family moved to Alabama. Efforts to reach family have not been successful.

A violent year for north Alabama

It's been an unusually violent year in typically-quiet Limestone County and its largest city, Athens. The Maldonados are among at least nine people who have been killed in domestic-violence homicides. Six of those victims were killed by someone who took his own life.

Authorities haven't released the name of the 15-year-old who is accused of stabbing to death Rosa Lee and her mother. The teen suspect was at a hospital being treated for self-inflicted stab wounds.

The sheriff's office said the investigation is ongoing.

The teen suspect was a student at West Limestone High School, which is about half a mile from the mobile home where her mother and sister were slain early Wednesday. The teen enrolled at the school about six weeks ago, officials said.

Limestone County Superintendent Tom Sisk said counselors were available to students since the murders happened. He said the district has asked mental professionals to investigate whether there were "red flags" that the school system missed.

"We want to make sure we didn't miss anything," he said. "Did we miss any red flags? If so, how?"

Stephen Young, a spokesman for the Limestone County sheriff's office, said deputies have been called to the Maldonado home multiple times during the past few. Authorities haven't provided details about the nature of those calls.

"Domestic-violence situations escalate," he said. "If people are silent out of fear or embarrassment for their family, they run a great risk."

Crisis Services of North Alabama provides assistance and resources for domestic-violence victims. The crisis services help line number is 256-716-1000 or 1-800-691-8426.
Straight-ticket voting, which allows a voter to cast all his votes for one party with a single mark on the ballot, has been eliminated in many states but remains popular in Alabama.

Leaders of Alabama's Democratic and Republican parties say they don't hear any calls for ending the practice.

In Alabama's last two general elections with a race for governor on the ballot, almost half of the voters who participated did so with a straight-ticket vote.

Mitchell Brown, a professor in the political science department at Auburn University, said straight-ticket voting is popular where it's still allowed because it's fast and convenient for party loyalists.

"People who are strong partisans still use it because they're only going to vote for people in their party, so why should they bother going down and checking off the candidates individually," Brown said.

An argument used against straight-ticket voting is that it can have undue influence on low-profile races, Brown said.

"The idea being that, particularly if at the top of the ticket you had a very popular candidate, then the straight-ticket voting option then gave an unfair advantage to the down-ballot candidates at the local level who were aligned with the popular candidate at the top of the ballot."

Ryan Williamson, an assistant professor in the political science department at Auburn, said the availability of the straight-ticket voting option probably has minimal effect on the races at the top of the ticket, like the governor's race in Alabama this year.

"It's more a matter of the governor's race having an impact on down ballot races," Williamson said.

Williamson said straight-ticket voting can result in a consequential lack of attention to down-ballot races.

"Straight-ticket voting, to a certain degree, makes sense when we're talking about the president or the governor or a seat in Congress because we generally know where candidates fall on a number of important issues that those offices are going to tackle," Williamson said.

"When you're talking about a lot of lower level, local offices, where we're talking about economic development and land usage, those issues don't neatly fit into a left vs. right argument. So, you could end up with a situation where straight-ticket voting, you have voters actually voting against their best interests because perhaps they would be better off selecting a more qualified candidate who maybe does happen to better align with their views on the less partisan issues."

Williamson said a potential benefit from straight-ticket voting is that it increases participation because of the convenience. For parties, it also helps offset the cost of trying to mobilize voters for the down-ballot races, Williamson said.

In Alabama's 2010 general election, 48 percent of the almost 1.5 million voters who participated did so with a straight-ticket vote, according to the secretary of state's office. That included 357,525 straight-ticket votes by Democrats, 353,037 by Republicans and 540 for the Constitution Party.

In the 2014 general election, 49.5 percent of participants cast a straight-ticket vote. That included 316,551 Republican voters and 273,655 Democratic voters.

Fourteen states have abolished straight-ticket voting since 1994, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

Last year in Texas, Republican legislators passed a bill to eliminate straight-ticket voting over the opposition of most Democrats and Republican Gov. Greg Abbott signed it into law.

In the 2016 election, almost 64 percent of participating voters in the 10 largest counties in Texas used straight-ticket ballots, according to The Texas Tribune.

The Texas ban takes effect with the 2020 election. That will leave just seven states allowing straight-ticket voting, Alabama, Indiana, Kentucky, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina and Utah.

Michigan's abolishment of straight-ticket voting in 2016 led to a federal court challenge over whether the move disproportionately affected African-Americans, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. A district court temporarily issued a preliminary injunction to block the law, but an appeals court ordered it to take effect and the U.S. Supreme Court denied a request to keep straight-ticket voting for the 2018 election.

There's no indication Alabama will be the next state to ban straight-ticket voting.

"It seems to be a matter of convenience for a lot of voters," state Republican Party Chairwoman Terry Lathan said. "They seem to like it a lot."

Lathan said she knows of no effort to do away with straight-ticket voting.

"It hasn't come up in the party, at all," Lathan said. "And I haven't heard any chatter from any legislators about it."

Alabama Democratic Party Chairwoman Nancy Worley said she believes Alabama voters are generally independent thinkers who vote for the person, not the party. She said she's heard no call for eliminating straight-ticket voting as an option.

"My personal position is to support the current system and allow the voter to choose the best candidate for the position," Worley said in an email.

Williamson said there are reasons that Democrats, despite having only one statewide officeholder, Sen. Doug Jones, want to keep straight-ticket voting. The state still has pockets where Democrats can dominate.

"It doesn't surprise me too much in the sense that there is still a sizable number of people at least in certain counties -- Jefferson County and Montgomery County -- where there is a large number of Democrats," Williamson said. "They benefit from straight-ticket voting within those individual areas.

"Being able to get your voters to support all your candidates, whether or not you're in the majority or the minority party, it really offsets the cost of campaigning.

Straight-ticket voting helps both major parties in one way. Williamson said it effectively boxes out third-party candidates and that's likely one reason some states adopted it. For example, it works against a third party that recruits a handful of candidates to run in selected down-ballot races.

"Their efforts are for naught for every voter that shows up and just straight-ticket votes Republican or Democrat," Williamson said.

Brown said some argue that eliminating straight-ticket voting would lead to a more informed electorate. But she doubts it would make much difference.

"One of the arguments for getting rid of it is that if people have to think about who they're voting for and who they're casting a ballot for that the electorate as a whole, if they're no longer allowed to use the straight-ticket option, that they'll spend more time preparing for the election and become more informed voters," Brown said. "I happen to be a little cynical. I don't think that's real in any plausible way. Strong partisan voters are going to vote for their party's candidates, period."
Slocomb police are searching for a man who hasn't been seen since he left to run errands Tuesday.

Police said 63-year-old Johnny Frank Thompson was last seen at a home on Lewis Road in Slocomb Tuesday just before he left to run some errands then travel to Dothan.

Thompson may suffer from a condition that may impair his judgement, according to the Alabama Law Enforcement Agency.

He was reported missing Wednesday. Police said he may be driving a 2001 silver Ford Mustang GT with Alabama tag number 34AV461.

Thompson is a white male with brown hair and brown eyes. He weighs about 153 pounds and stands 5-feet-9-inches tall. He was last seen wearing a white T-shirt and blue jeans.

If you have information about Thompson's whereabouts, contact Slocomb police or your local law enforcement agency.

Updated at 9:45 p.m. to include additional information from the Alabama Law Enforcement Agency.
Former Alabama U.S. Senate candidate Roy Moore called on Republicans to "take a stand" and support suggested U.S. Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh following the sexual misconduct allegations levied against him, adding that he believes the Democrats are using Kavanaugh's accuser as a political pawn.

Moore is no stranger to such allegations. He was accused by nine women of sexual misconduct that allegedly occurred during the 1970s - allegations that surfaced about a month before the December special election between Moore and Doug Jones. Moore denied the allegations, although he conceded to dating young women at the time.

The former Alabama Supreme Court urged Republicans to continue their support of the Supreme Court nominee.

"I think they need to take a stand. I think they need to do what their conscience dictates. They know what's happening," Moore told One America News in an interview posted Wednesday. "It's so obvious that these tactics are used just days before a very important event ...but these come up right before an election or a confirmation, and I think the Republicans need to take a stand. I think a lot of them don't. They don't like criticism."

Moore said Democrats are motivated by what they would gain politically by investigating the claims than getting to the truth.

"I think they don't care about transparency, they just use it because its effective," he said. "They know that on the one hand you offend women if you believe somebody that says they weren't guilty of sexual misconduct. On the other hand, if you don't believe them, you're condemning the person accused of guilt to prove his own innocence. It's a Catch-22."
President Donald Trump has identified the remains of the first 2 soldiers returned home from North Korea.

The remains are those of Army Master Sgt. Charles H. McDaniel 32, of Vernon, Indiana and Army Pfc. William H. Jones, 19 of Nash County, North Carolina.

Army Master Sgt. Charles H. McDaniel, 32, of Vernon, Indiana, and Army Pfc. William H. Jones, 19, of Nash County, North Carolina, are the first American remains from...  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 20, 2018

...North Korea to be identified as a result of my Summit with Chairman Kim. These HEROES are home, they may Rest In Peace, and hopefully their families can have closure.  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 20, 2018

The soldiers were among 55 cases of remains of U.S. service members killed during the Korea War recovered from North Korea in July.

According to the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, McDaniel was a medic with the 8th Cavalry Regiment Medical Company, supporting the regiment's 3rd Battalion. The unit was engaged with enemy forces of the Chinese People's Volunteer Forces southwest of the village of Unsan, and east of Hwaong-ri, North Korea. He was reported missing in action on Nov. 2, 1950, when he could not be accounted-for by his unit.

Jones was a member of the Company E, 2nd Battalion, 24th Infantry Regiment, 25th Infantry Division, engaged in attacks against the CPVF near Pakchon, North Korea. On Nov. 26, 1950, after his unit made a fighting withdrawal, he could not be accounted for and was reported missing in action.

Both men's names are recorded on the Courts of the Missing at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Honolulu, along with others who are missing from the Korean War. A rosette will be placed next to their names to indicate they have been accounted for.



Identification efforts for the other remains continues.
An Alabama-made missile shot down a simulated ballistic missile in a test off the coast of Hawaii last week.

The Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force and the U.S. Missile Defense Agency completed the successful test of the Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense intercept flight test on Sept. 11. The test included the destroyer Atago using its Aegis Combat System and a Redstone Arsenal-made Standard Missile-3 interceptor to shoot down an incoming target.

"This successful test is a major milestone verifying the capabilities of an upgraded Aegis BMD configuration for Japan's destroyers," said MDA Director Lt. Gen. Sam Greaves. "This success provides confidence in the future capability for Japan to defeat the developing threats in the region."

The SM-3 and Standard Missile-6 are produced at Raytheon's $75 million integration facility at Redstone.
This is an opinion column.

As gubernatorial debates go, Governor Kay Ivey isn't interested. That has been her stance for this entire election cycle, and she's sticking to it.

She has often cited two reasons for her indifference--that Alabama voters are apathetic about debates and that she's busy governing.

While both of her reasons are extremely flippant, let's focus on her second reason of being just so daggum busy.

As voters, we aren't naive. We understand that white collar workers, such as governors and large-city mayors, work off the clock sometimes. Nevertheless, those jobs are based on 40 hour-per-week work schedules.

Ivey is not an exception. She gets paid based on 40 hours of work per week to a tune of $10,077.98 per month. However, let's be generous and accept that Ivey likely works 50 hours per week.

Even at that pace, Ivey still has her nights available. She still has her weekends available. And if we want to get peculiarly stringent, she has her daily lunch breaks available too.

If we assume Ivey has 6 free hours on a weekday and 24 free hours on a weekend, then she has 30 free hours per week or 1560 free hours per year.

Are we truly supposed to believe that Ivey can't spare 3 hours of her free time to share her values and policy ideas with honest, hard-working Alabama voters?

Are we really supposed to believe that Ivey can't give 0.19 percent of her free time to publicly debate on important issues affecting our state?

Like all people, Ivey's calendar shows what she values the most. In her case, she doesn't value debate. And by proxy, she likely doesn't value Alabama voters either.

Only time will tell.

Ben Baxter is a Tuscaloosa dweller, a Dothan native, an experienced engineer, and a regular contributor for personal finance and career development topics. He's also a frequent voice on race and faith.
London  Why is it that one person can smoke a cigarette occasionally and another will stop only when the pack is in ashes?

Is the brain of a person who plays the odd bingo game different from another who doesnt leave a slot machine until their paycheque is lost?

These are some of the questions addressed at the inaugural show at the Science Gallery London.

Hooked: When Want Becomes Need opens on Friday.

The gallery is part of Kings College Londons outreach programme and the universitys strong scientific research underpins the art.

Tall and lean in his pistachio-green cloak shot through with black waves, Barbadian artist Mark King told me his installation of small, vibrant patterns came from working closely with an addiction expert at Kings.

The project  Look On Me And Be Renewed (on Instagram as @L_O_M_A_B_R)  encourages people to be more aware of their surroundings. People who are addicted to drugs can often think of nothing else but their next fix. When they get a craving psychologists, teach them to slow down, dont immediately call their drug dealer. Pause look around and consider an alternative course.

People who are addicted to drugs can often think of nothing else but their next fix [Al Jazeera]

The show expands the traditional idea of addiction to include self-harm, screens, social media and consumer behaviour.

The Dutch artist who goes by the name Atelier 010 sculpted a table from white, caster sugar and then doused it in coffee until it collapsed, porcelain teacups clanking to the floor where they shattered and mixed with the crumbled sugar.

Buyers rush to have cheap consumer stuff. Why is it socially unacceptable not to have the latest phone, said Atelier 010. Its like sugar it leaves you feeling good for a short time.

Neuroscientist Mitul Mehta was on hand, pouring visitors cups of espresso; some were caffeinated, others de-caff. Theyre studying the placebo effect. After 15 minutes, do visitors feel the effects, even if there is no perky chemical.

Mehta said technological advances like detailed scans allow researchers to look at how drugs impact the brain.

There are impairments in function in people with addiction, so they have impaired executive function that involves planning and thinking carefully about things.

There are impairments in inhibiting your urges, dysregulation of the reward system and one of the big questions is  is that caused by drug use or was that there before and the answer is both, Mehta explained.

The Kings College professor told me about a large European study of 14-year-olds. Their brains were scanned before they had any exposure to alcohol.

They were followed up and then some became heavy alcohol users and some hardly used alcohol, Mehta said. Then you could go back in time and see what their brains looked like as adolescents and there were differences. Amazing. 

In the future, doctors may be able to routinely scan a brain and tell the patient if they are more likely to become addicted to a substance or a behaviour.

Brain pictures have also found that even for those with the most entrenched, long-term, deep addictions there is hope.

There have been some great studies that show under conditions of abstinence  The brain adapts, recovers. Not immediately, but does progressively return to where they were before, to normal if you like, said John Marsden, Kings College professor of addiction psychology.

The show runs until January 6 and is aimed at 16-25-year olds. Organisers hope theyll come away with something more than increased knowledge about addiction.

That is an age that people are making choices about their lives and too often people are ruling out science in their life as a career, Deborah Bull, Kings College vice president told me.

We are trying to open up science as a route to young people to study and as a potential career alongside arts and creativity and whats brilliant here is that it really is a marriage of science and art.
As Yemens brutal conflict enters its fourth year, the sound of air attacks remains the daily wake up call for many families. Attacks on homes, hospitals and schools are the new normal across the country. The violence has forced over three million people from their homes. More than 60,000 Yemenis have been killed or injured since the conflict started in 2015.

Cuts in salaries, hikes in food prices and the recent devaluation of the Yemeni currency have added to an already toxic mix that has left millions of people without the means to survive.

Recent United Nations efforts to bring conflict parties to the negotiations table and secure peace have been unsuccessful, leaving millions of people without any hope that the war will end soon.

The conflict in Yemen is not a Yemeni problem alone. Multiple nations are engaged in the war, from financing fighting factions to providing arms that enable the killings to continue. The United Kingdom, United States, France, Iran and all power players in Yemens man-made war can use their influence to bring about an end to the violence.

But until they do, ordinary families continue to bear the brunt of the violence.

This photo essay is provided by the Norwegian Refugee Council.
Roman Dobrokhotov is a Moscow-based journalist and civil activist. He is the editor-in-chief of The Insider.

On September 5, the UK named two agents of the Russian military intelligence (GRU) as the main suspects in the Skripal poisoning case.

The two are accused of depositing a nerve agent in the Salisbury home of Sergei Skripal, a former Russian double agent, which poisoned him and his daughter in March this year.

The British authorities released the photos, personal details and even the route the two agents allegedly took to accomplish their mission. Russia, of course, has denied everything, but with the amount of evidence uncovered, it will have a hard time convincing the international community of its innocence.

There have been some observers who have expressed their doubt that Moscow is responsible for the Skripal poisoning, arguing that it could not have acted so clumsily, especially after the Litvinenko case. Why would Russia want another such scandal  the argument goes.

They are partially right: Russia really doesnt need such a scandal right now. Yet, we should not be surprised about its intelligence agencies undertaking such a mission and failing in it. As the popular saying goes: Never attribute to conspiracy that which is adequately explained by incompetence.

For some reason, there is a general perception that unlike other state institutions in Russia, the intelligence agencies are quite professional and capable. Perhaps Hollywood should be blamed for this misconception. To garner interest and sell its films, the US movie industry tends to feature unrealistic depictions of Russian spies as dangerous and highly skilful men and women, who fight it out with their Western counterparts.

But if one is to shoot a realistic film about the GRU, it would probably have to be a comedy. In fact, the last few years of Russian intelligence blunders provide plenty of material for the script.

Poison spies

A lot of people seem surprised about the fact that the attempted Skripal assassination failed and the agents left so many clues behind. But if you look at how Alexander Litvinenko was assassinated in 2006, that should not be surprising.

The two agents, Andrey Lugovoi and Dmitry Kovtun, who were allegedly tasked with killing Litvinenko, had to try twice before succeeding. On October 16, they made their first attempt to poison him in a sushi bar but that night Litvinenko vomited and survived.

Then they tried again two weeks later and managed to slip the poison into Litvinenkos tea. On both of their trips to London, the two left behind a massive radioactive trace that the police were able to track afterwards. Polonium traces were found in the hotels where they stayed, in the restaurants and cafes they visited, and even on the shisha they smoked.

Traces were also found on the British Airways plane they took back to Moscow after their second mission. The highest concentration of the poison was found in the bathroom plughole of Lugovois hotel room, which made the investigators believe that he poured out the rest of it into the sink.

If the two agents had just stabbed Litvinenko in some dark side street, the murder might have remained unresolved. But polonium leaves behind traces for a long time which exposed Lugovoi and Kovtun. According to the investigators, it is possible the two did not even know what poison they were using and they were actually lucky that they did not get exposed to a deadly dose of radiation.

Is it then surprising that in the Skripal case, the two agents also left behind traces of the chemical agent in their hotel room?

If you think that the GRU rarely leaves behind so much incriminating evidence, you are wrong. Here are a few more examples.

Hacker spies

For many years, the international cybersecurity community has been hunting for two hacker groups known as Fancy Bear and APT28. Around 2014, experts came to the tentative conclusion that the Russian intelligence agencies could be behind these groups, but had no direct evidence to support it.

Then Fancy Bear hackers started targeting Western political and intuitions and Russian opposition activists and human rights defenders. One of these attacks targeted the email server of French politician Emmanuel Macrons election campaign. The attack failed to find a kompromat in the contents of the server and Macron ended up winning the French presidential elections.

The hackers, however, made the mistake of leaving behind files with metadata that exposed them. Thus, the name of Georgiy Petrovich Roshka came to be known.

The Russian press soon uncovered that a man by this name was a speaker at an IT conference in Russia in 2016. His affiliation was listed in the brochure as Military Unit 26165, which focuses on cryptoanalysis.

Earlier this year, Special Counsel Robert Mueller accused and named 12 GRU hackers of interference in US elections, a good number of them also being part of this unit.

Rocket spies

Another recent journalistic investigation identified Oleg Ivannikov, a GRU officer, as one of the key suspects in the international investigation of the downing of Flight MH17 in 2014.

The Russian authorities declared that he was not on active duty with the military. That would have been believable if an open source investigation hadnt uncovered that in 2017 Ivannikov had made an order from an online shop to the address of the GRU headquarters in Moscow instead of his own address.

Money spies

On October 16, 2016  a day before the Montenegrin elections  Prime Minister Milo Djukanovich announced that a coup plot had been foiled. A group of men from Montenegro and Serbia had planned to overthrow the government and hand over power to the Democratic Front, a pro-Russian, anti-NATO party.

During the investigation, two GRU agents who dealt with the financing of the plot were uncovered. One of them, Eduard Shishmakov, used to work under diplomatic cover in Poland from where he was expelled after he tried to recruit a Polish officer.

After this failed mission, Shishmakov got a new passport with a different surname and without making an effort to change his appearance, went to Serbia to recruit locals for a coup plot in Montenegro. He gave cash and later sent money through Western Union from Russia  leaving behind a paper trail the Montenegrin investigators were able to pick up.

It is possible that one of the reasons for such unprofessional behaviour of Russian military intelligence officers is that they do not feel the need to cover up their trail.

The Russian government has always denied any allegations of its agents being involved in special operations abroad, even when the facts were clear. Yet, it very much enjoys all the publicity it gets with each new spy scandal.

After all, if your aim is to scare off other countries, then the more hysteria there is about your special ops abroad, the better, even if they are failed ones.

The views expressed in this article are the authors own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeeras editorial stance.
Plans to deepen EU ties with Cairo over migration crisis would turn a blind eye to human rights abuses, critics say.

European leaders agreed to enter talks with Egypt in a bid to reduce the number of migrants entering the European Union from Africa.

The move raised eyebrows among human rights campaigners because of Egypts many well-documented abuses.

Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz, whose country currently holds the 28-member blocs rotating presidency, announced the plan for in-depth cooperation with Cairo on Thursday at an informal EU summit in Salzburg, Austria.

Egypt and the North African countries can be important partners for us in preventing ships heading to Europe and after their rescue being brought back, in other words to the countries of transit, Kurz said.

Only in this way can we reduce illegal migration, can we destroy the business model of the smugglers, and stop drownings in the Mediterranean.

Setting an example

The announcement came after Kurz and EU Council President Donald Tusk visited Cairo over the weekend for talks with Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, the former top army general who seized power in a coup.

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Weve got to ensure that as few people as possible leave northern African countries for Europe. If they do, the situation should be dealt with as close to the African coast as possible, said Kurz.

On Thursday, Kurz said Egypt was efficient and praised Sisi for providing an example when it comes to illegal migration and people smuggling.

Tusk, meanwhile, said he will meet Sisi this weekend to take talks forward, and confirmed a EU-Arab League summit will be held in Cairo next February.

Migration talks with other north African countries will also be launched, he added.

Embryonic proposal

Al Jazeeras Laurence Lee, reporting from Salzburg, said the plan for cooperation with Egypt was at an embryonic stage, with neither Kurz or Tusk providing significant detail on Thursday about the specific shape of any future arrangement.

[But] its the philosophy that counts and the philosophy says its better to protect the Schengen free-movement zone inside the EU, not to allow them to come into the bloc in the first place, and thats a pretty hardline approach by any means, he said.

The Schengen Agreement  signed by 26 European countries, including 22 EU states  abolished many of the EUs internal borders, allowing for passport-free movement throughout most parts of the bloc.

Giulia Lagana, a senior analyst at the Brussels-based Open Society European Policy Institute, said the EUs move to win Egyptian assistance on migration would likely require the bloc to make significant concessions to Cairo.





I would tend to think those are not just financial but would also include closing an eye to the human rights abuses being perpetrated in Egypt, Lagana told Al Jazeera.

It would be very difficult to put into practice and of course if it does happen in some form it would be extremely dangerous from a human rights point of view.

Critics prison

Under Sisi, Egyptian authorities have clamped down on freedom of speech and dissent, prompting Amnesty International to label the country an open-air prison for critics.

The EUs look for help from the Egyptian leader comes as the number of migrants arriving in Europe is down significantly compared with 2015, when more than a million people entered the continent, most fleeing conflict in Syria and Iraq.

About 77,555 migrants and refugees have entered Europe by sea so far this year, according to the International Organisation of Migration (IOM), down from 131,884 arrivals by a similar point last year and 298,663 for the same period in 2016.

Leonard Doyle, a director for the IOMs media division, called on the bloc to put saving migrants lives and respecting migrants rights at the front and centre of everything.

I would be wary of looking at one silver bullet to solve a very, very complex, massive problem that is affecting people from right across the subcontinent of Africa and indeed other places, Doyle told Al Jazeera.
Austria seeks to block refugees, migrants from entering

Austria wants to reduce the number of asylum seekers crossing its border to zero.
Shanghai (Gasgoo)- Shanghai unveiled its second batch of public roads for the ICV (Intelligent-connected vehicle) road tests at the 2018 World Autonomous Vehicle Ecosystem Conference on September 18.

There are a total of 12 public roads that will be used for ICV testing, covering the urban arterial roads, the urban secondary trunk roads and the industrial park's arterial roads. Up until now, Shanghai has extended the length of roads for ICV tests from 5.6km to 37.2km.

Shanghai has been acting as a pioneer in ICV development in China. Hot on the heels of Beijing, Shanghai became the second city in China to issue road testing regulations for self-driving cars on February 28 this year.

Since Shanghai issued China's first batch of ICV road test licenses from March 1, a total of 3 automakers, namely, SAIC Motor, NIO and BMW, have by far been given go-ahead to test their autonomous vehicles on public roads. The three auto companies have accumulated over 100,000 km of road tests with no traffic accident.
Europe migration: EU eyes Egypt to help cut numbers

EU leaders consider new North African partnerships as they meet in Austria.
The chance of Britain exiting from the European Union without an agreement on future relations appeared to rise on Thursday as European leaders attacked key demands in UK Prime Minister Theresa Mays Brexit plan.

At an informal EU summit in Salzburg, Austria, European Council President Donald Tusk said important aspects of Mays so-called Chequers plan were unacceptable.

There are some issues where we are not ready to compromise, Tusk said. The suggested framework for economic cooperation will not work, not least because it risks undermining the single market.

With six months to go before the UKs exit, Tusk said the moment of truth in negotiations would come at a European Council meeting scheduled next month. The October summit will be the last chance to get a soft Brexit deal done.

French President Emmanuel Macron, Irish leader Leo Vardakar, and German Chancellor Angela Merkel also expressed serious concerns over Mays plan.

Brexit liars

Macron reiterated Tusks comments and heightened the Brexit rhetoric.

We all agreed on this today, the proposals in their current state are not acceptable, especially on the economic side of it. The Chequers plan cannot be take it or leave it, Macron said.

The French president also had harsh words for those in the UK who orchestrated Brexit in the first place.

Those who explain that we can easily live without Europe, that everything is going to be alright, and that its going to bring a lot of money home are liars, Macron said.

Its even more true since they left the day after so as not to have to deal with it, he added, referring to top Brexit proponents.

Irish Prime Minister Varadkar said time is running short for the UK.

Ireland is a country that obviously wants to avoid a no deal scenario. We want to avoid a no deal Brexit, [but] we are preparing for that. We are hiring extra staff and officials, putting in IT systems. Were ready for that eventuality should it occur, he said.

Preparing for no

In response, May said Britain was preparing to leave the bloc without an agreement on the terms of its departure unless there is a proposal it deems acceptable.

If there is no agreement on a deal that is acceptable to the United Kingdom, then were preparing for no deal, May said.

There is no counter proposal on the table at the moment that actually deals, delivers on what we need to do and respects the integrity of the United Kingdom and respects the result of the referendum, she added.

May has sought to keep some part of trade between the UK and the EU in the blocs single market  but not others. The EU has insisted the single market cannot be cherry-picked like that.

The UK is due to leave the EU on March 29, 2019, nearly three years after 52 percent of Britons voted in favour of ending the countrys 43-year membership of the 28-member bloc during a deeply divisive referendum in June 2016.

The International Monetary Fund warned earlier this week that Britain should expect substantial costs to its economy if it fails to agree on transitional arrangements before leaving the bloc.
Momen Abu Ayadeh was shot and killed late on Wednesday during routine protests against Israeli blockade.

A Palestinian teenager has been shot dead by an Israeli soldier in the southern Gaza Strip during a demonstration, Gazas Ministry of Health and family members said.

Momen Abu Ayadeh, 15, was shot in the head by an Israeli sniper on Wednesday night near the fence east of Rafah, the spokesperson for the health ministry Ashraf al-Qidra said.

An Israeli military spokeswoman said soldiers had come under attack on the fence, with stones and firebombs thrown at them. Live rounds were fired according to open-fire regulations, she said.

No Israeli casualties were reported.

According to Momens family, he was protesting for an end to the 12-year Israeli blockade and for the right of return of Palestinian refugees as part of the Great March of Return rallies that began on March 30.

His father, Ibrahim Abu Ayadeh, told Al Jazeera that Momen attended the protests religiously.

Momen cared deeply about the march of return protests, the 46-year-old said. He was deeply affected by the injustice of daily life in the Gaza Strip, from the ongoing blockade and the difficult living situations.

The teen, along with his friends, were members of a newly formed youth-led unit of the popular protests called Irbak al-Leili, or nocturnal disturbance. Members protest near the fence from early evening until midnight and participate in a number of unarmed tactics such as pointing laser lights at Israeli snipers stationed behind the fence.

Another tactic includes blasting national songs on loudspeakers, as well as sending vocal messages to settlers in the vicinity of the besieged coastal enclave with the message that they are living on stolen Palestinian land.

Momen, his father said, was shot directly in the head by a snipers bullet at around 11:30 pm (20:00GMT).

My son was protesting peacefully in a peaceful popular movement, he said, adding that the Israeli occupation has normalised the targeting of women, children and elderly.

We have a right as Palestinians to protest against the blockade in any way, he continued.

If the siege was lifted, then there would be no more protests. But we want our rights, and the protests will not stop with the killing of my son.

At least 173 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces since the start of the protests five months ago, with 18,000 others wounded.

Additional reporting by Maram Humaid
Guatemalan protesters march against Moraless decision to end the work of a UN-backed anti-corruption body.

Santa Cruz del Quiche  Thousands took to the streets in several major cities and small towns in Guatemala on Thursday, demanding the resignation of dozens of legislators and officials, including President Jimmy Morales.

The protests were prompted by Moraless decision last month to not renew the UN-backed International Commission Against Impunitys (CICIG) mandate, which is set to expire in September 2019. He also barred CICIGs head commissioner from re-entering Guatemala.

Were tired of so much corruption, Luz Emilia Ulario told Al Jazeera, who marched with about 1,000 others in Santa Cruz del Quiche, 129km northwest of Guatemala City.

Were here protesting the injustices the government commits against the people, said Ulario, who is part a community development organisation in the Quiche department. The president of the republic has never been on the side of the people. Hes always defending the countrys oligarchy.

Government defies court ruling

For more than a decade, CICIG has helped bring down high-profile officials for corruption. Under the tenure of head commissioner Ivan Velasquez, the commission has helped Guatemalan prosecutors investigate and prosecute dozens of judges, executives and officials, including former president Otto Perez Molina.

Elected in 2015, President Morales initially supported CICIG, but soon became the subject of investigations into illegal campaign financing. He has denied wrongdoing. Moraless party and relatives have also come under fire for alleged corruption.

People hold a banner depicting CICIG commissioner Ivan Velasquez during a march called by university students to demand the resignation of President Morales in Guatemala City [Johan Ordonez/AFP]

Moraless decision to end the work of CICIG and ban Velasquez from the country set off a flurry of protests and legal challenges. Last week, the Constitutional Court issued an injunction against the ban of Velasquez, ordering Morales to permit the commissioner back into the country.

The government responded by saying the ruling did not apply to Velasquez because he was not specifically named in the ruling. It gave the UN 48 hours to suggest a replacement.

On Wednesday, the UN said Velasquez will stay on as commissioner. The Constitutional Court also clarified its ruling to specifically name Velasquez and order Morales to abstain from making statements and taking out measures against the commissioner.

Attack on the democracy

Thursdays protests were organised in small towns, as well as urban centres, including in Quetzaltenango, Guatemalas second-largest city where civic groups organised marches through the city.

Parts of the largely indigenous highland department of Quiche were shut down due to Thursdays actions.

The people of Guatemala are demanding that Morales submits himself to the law and that he not end CICIGs presence in the country, Miguel de Leon, the indigenous mayor of Nebaj, Quiche and member of the traditional Ixil Maya Ancestral Authorities, told Al Jazeera.

De Leon and other residents Nebaj blocked the highway that passes through their region as part of the actions against Morales. Neighbouring communities established similar roadblocks across the northern regions of the department.

We utterly reject the actions the government is taking, de Leon told Al Jazeera. Their actions are an attack on the democracy that they claim to protect. The government itself is causing the destabilisation that they speak of.

University students were also among the groups who organised the protests.

In Guatemala City, AEU, the student association of the University of San Carlos of Guatemala (USAC), initially called a march, but the university governing council and student groups from other universities are now backing the action.

A demonstrator holds up a poster of Guatemala President Jimmy Morales as a prisoner, during a protest against Moraless decision to not renew the mandate CICIG [Luis Echeverria/Reuters]

AEU president Lenina Garcia told Al Jazeera that the support of the USAC governing council is an important development, as is the unity among students, workers and faculty across universities in the face of the presidents refusal to respect the Constitutional Court ruling and UN agreement.

We think were already experiencing a coup detat, she said, from Guatemala City.

Thursdays national day of protest is in preparation for a nationwide shutdown, Garcia added.

Were committed to continue making statements and organising actions until the rule of law and human rights are restored in the country.
The leader of Lebanese armed group Hezbollah said it has attained precision-guided missiles in spite of Israeli attempts to keep hi-tech weapons out of its hands.

Hassan Nasrallah made the comments on Thursday during his traditional televised speech commemorating Ashoura, an important commemoration for Shia Muslims.

Nasrallahs comments were broadcast on a large screen to supporters in Beiruts majority Shia suburb of Dahiya.

I tell [Israel] no matter what it did to cut the route, it is over. It has already been achieved, Nasrallah said, adding Hezbollah now possesses precision missiles and non-precision weapons capabilities. He did not elaborate.

The Israeli military has said Hezbollah has between 100,000 and 120,000 short-range missiles and rockets, as well as several hundred longer-range missiles.

Hezbollah also has thousands of fighters in Syria supporting President Bashar al-Assads forces in the countrys bloody civil war, now into its eighth year.





Hezbollah fighters will continue to be deployed in Syria and will not leave until Assad asks them to, Nasrallah said in another speech on Wednesday.

Increased tensions

Tensions between Israel and Syria, whom have technically been at war since Israel was established in 1948, recently increased after Syria accidentally shot down a Russia military aircraft that Israeli fighter pilots were using for cover, according to Moscow.

All 15 Russian crew members died.

Israel has regularly targeted what it says are weapons transfers between Iran, another Israel adversary on the side of Assad, and Hezbollah.

Tel Aviv has said it is working to stop Iran from entrenching its military in Syria, and to keep Hezbollah from acquiring sophisticated arms. It recently acknowledged carrying out more than 200 air attacks over the past 18 months in Syria.

On Wednesday, Nasrallah said Israeli claims that it targeted a shipment of hi-tech arms to Hezbollah in Syrias Latakia province earlier this week were lies.

He also threatened Tel Aviv over any action taken against Hezbollahs main base.

If Israel imposes a war on Lebanon, Israel will face a destiny and reality it didnt expect, Nasrallah said.

He also urged supporters to rally behind Iran during his speech, saying its facing hard times as more US sanctions take effect in November.

Nasrallah accused the United States of going to all the worlds capitals in a bid to besiege Iran, as Washington seeks support for its measures against the country.
A Hungarian appeals court confirms throwing stones at police can be ruled as terrorism.

A Hungarian court rejected the appeal of a Syrian refugee and upheld his 2016 conviction for terrorism, but reduced his seven-year sentence, in what a rights group called an abuse of anti-terrorism laws.

The appeals court handed down the decision on Thursday in the southern city of Szeged to uphold the conviction while reducing Ahmed Hs sentence to five years.

Eda Seyhan, Amnesty Internationals counterterrorism campaigner who was in the courtroom, said in a statement to Al Jazeera, this judgement comes as a blow for Ahmed, his wife and his two young daughters.

The charges stem from an incident on the Hungarian-Serbian border in 2015, at the height of Europes refugee crisis.

Ahmed H  as hes identified in court documents, who had already been granted protected status and lived in Cyprus with his wife and children  was attempting to escort his elderly parents on their journey from Syria to Europe.

A confrontation occurred between a large group of asylum-seekers attempting to cross into Hungary and police. Ahmed H was caught on tape throwing stones in the direction of police.

Seyhan said Thursdays ruling was his final appeal.

The court counted the three years he has already served in a Hungarian prison towards his sentence. He will be eligible for release in early 2019.

Demonisation

Seyhan said throwing stones is not terrorism and the verdict rides roughshod over the law.

She added the conviction plays into the hands of the Hungarian authorities demonisation of refugees, migrants and those seeking to protect them.

Awful. Just awful. Throwing stones is not terrorism. https://t.co/1nCYgoSGt4  Eda Seyhan (@eda_seyhan) September 20, 2018

Asked about Amnestys criticism of Ahmed Hs ruling, the Hungarian governments International Communications Office told Al Jazeera the fact the group isnt willing to accept the decision of the independent Hungarian court speaks for itself.

The European Parliament voted in favour of disciplinary action against Hungary on September 12, citing the countrys flouting of the EUs democratic norms.

A report authored by Dutch Greens MEP Judith Sargentini  to explain why disciplinary action should be used  admonished Hungary for its attacks against media plurality, academic freedom, and treatment of migrants and refugees.

Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto called the vote nothing less than the petty revenge of pro-immigration politicians.
Former Malaysian PM charged with four counts of abuse of power, 21 counts of money laundering over transfer of funds.

Malaysias former Prime Minister Najib Razak has been hit with 25 new corruption charges linked to the 1MDB scandal.

The new charges include four counts of abuse of power and 21 counts of money laundering over hundreds of millions of dollars of funds received in his personal bank account.

Najib was detained by Malaysias anti-corruption agency on Wednesday, for allegedly transferring $681m into his personal bank account, as part of investigations into the 1MDB state investment fund.

The former leader was questioned by police and then appeared in court in the capital, Kuala Lumpur, on Thursday. Najib pleaded not guilty to all charges after they were read out in court.

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The money laundering charges include nine counts of receiving illegal proceeds, five counts of using illegal funds and seven counts of transferring the proceeds to other entities, Deputy National Police Chief Noor Rashid Ibrahim said on Thursday ahead of the court hearing.

The latest charges bring the total number against Najib to 32.

He has previously been charged with money laundering, criminal breach of trust and abusing his position over claims he pocketed some $10m from SRC International, a subsidiary of 1MDB. Najib has consistently denied any wrongdoing in relation to those charges and his trial is due to start next year.

These new charges are significant because prosecutors allege the money flowed directly from 1MDB, the state investment fund that Najib had set up, said Al Jazeeras Florence Looi, reporting from Kuala Lumpur.

They will involve a much more complex investigation, she added. Investigators believe that front companies as well as foreign offshore entities were used to siphon the money from 1MDB and eventually into Najibs personal bank account.

1MDB scandal

Officially called the 1Malaysia Development Berhad, the 1MDB state fund is the subject of a sweeping international investigation by at least six countries, including the United States, Singapore and Switzerland, over alleged money laundering and corruption by high-level officials.

The 1MDB scandal first became public in 2015 when leaked documents showed that $681m was transferred into Najibs bank account, leading to massive street rallies calling on him to resign.

The US Department of Justice estimates officials misappropriated $4.5m in total from the fund.

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The scandal was a key factor in Najibs shock defeat in the May elections.

The new government  a coalition of opposition parties headed by Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad  reopened investigations into corruption at 1MBD that were stifled while Najib was in office and set up a special task force.

Najib was released on a 1 million ringgit ($250,000) bail by a Kuala Lumpur court after his first arrest in July.

He and his wife, Rosmah Mansour, who has also been questioned in the scandal but has not been charged, are barred from leaving the country.

Cash, jewellery, luxury handbags and watches worth an estimated 1bn ringgit ($250m) were seized by investigators from multiple Najib-linked private residences in May as part of the probe.

Malaysian police have also issued an arrest warrant for businessman Low Taek Jho, often called Jho Low, in connection with the 1MDB investigation, Al Jazeeras Looi reported.

He is alleged to be a key figure and the mastermind of this complex scheme to defraud the Malaysian government, she said.
Far-right French politician shared images of atrocities carried out by ISIL with the caption Daesh is this.

French far-right politician Marine Le Pen was ordered by a court to undergo psychiatric evaluation for tweeting atrocity photos from the armed group ISIL.

According to court documents posted on Twitter by the leader of the National Front party, the psychological tests are to be carried out as soon as possible to establish whether she is capable of understanding remarks and answering questions.

A lawyer, Le Pen, 50, called the court order dated September 11 crazy on Thursday.

Le Pen, who lost the presidential election to Emmanuel Macron in last years vote, shared the tweets in December 2015, several weeks after ISIL members killed 130 people in attacks in Paris.

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I thought I had experienced everything, but no! For having denounced the horrors of Daesh, the court has ordered me to undergo a psychiatric evaluation, Le Pen wrote on Twitter.

This country is really starting to scare me.

C'est proprement HALLUCINANT. Ce regime commence VRAIMENT a faire peur. MLP pic.twitter.com/WCX6WBCgi4  Marine Le Pen (@MLP_officiel) September 20, 2018

The images of violent acts carried out by Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also known as ISIS) included photos of the lifeless body of American James Foley.

Foley, a journalist, was beheaded by the armed group after he was captured in Syria.

Le Pen said she tweeted the images in response to a French journalist who drew a comparison between ISIL and her far-right National Front party.

Another photo showed a man in an orange jumpsuit being run over by a tank, and a third showed a Jordanian military pilot being burned alive in a cage.

Le Pen later deleted the tweet with Foleys body after his family requested the removal.

After she sent the images, she was charged with circulating messages that incite terrorism or pornography or seriously harm human dignity, and was stripped of her parliamentary immunity.

If Le Pen is convicted in court, she faces up to three years in prison and a fine of about $87,000.

The far-right politician has denounced the case, which falls under a law punishing violent or sexual images that can be viewed by a minor, saying it is a violation of her freedom of expression.
US secretary of state says he has invited North Korean foreign minister for talks on sidelines of UN General Assembly.

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo says he wants to restart nuclear talks with North Korea at the earliest opportunity in the wake of new agreements reached between the two Koreas at a summit in Pyongyang.

The move comes after North Korean leader Kim Jong-un pledged at the historic summit with South Korean President Moon Jae-in to dismantle its key missile facilities and suggested it would close its main Yongbyon nuclear complex if Washington took unspecified actions.

Pompeo welcomed Wednesdays agreement between the two Koreas to denuclearise the peninsula.

This will mark the beginning of negotiations to transform US-DPRK relations through the process of rapid denuclearisation of North Korea... Mike Pompeo, the US secretary of state

This will mark the beginning of negotiations to transform US-DPRK relations through the process of rapid denuclearisation of North Korea, to be completed by January 2021, as committed by Chairman Kim, and to construct a lasting and stable peace regime on the Korean Peninsula, Pompeo said in a statement, using the initials of the countrys official name, the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea.

The US secretary of state said on Wednesday he had invited North Korean Foreign Minister Ri Yong-ho to meet in New York City next week on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly to discuss the aim of completing North Koreas denuclearisation by January 2021.

Pompeo also said Washington invited Pyongyangs representatives to meet the US special representative for North Korea, Stephen Biegun, in Vienna.

The January 2021 completion date was the most specific deadline set so far in what is expected to be a long process of trying to get the North to end its nuclear programme, which may threaten US allies South Korea and Japan as well as the US mainland.

The sudden revival of diplomacy comes amid doubts expressed by US President Donald Trumps administration on North Koreas willingness to negotiate in good faith after a June summit between Trump and Kim yielded few tangible results.

Al Jazeeras Rosiland Jordan, reporting from Washington, DC, said: The Trump administration believes that this is an opportunity to try to move ahead and try to improve the relations with the country which it says was not too far off from being at war with the United States.

She also said it was not clear whether the expected talks in Vienna would be held under the auspices of the United Nations, which typically is involved in similar denuclearisation efforts.

There is also the question of whether UN Security Council resolutions will have to be reversed in order for closer diplomatic and economic ties to take place between the two countries, she said.

Reactions

China, North Koreas closest ally, said it warmly welcomed the agreement reached in Pyongyang and strongly supported it.

We absolutely cannot let this hard to come by opportunity for peace slip away once again, the Chinese governments top diplomat, State Councillor Wang Yi, said in a statement.

Some US officials were deeply sceptical. Speaking before Pompeos announcement, two senior US officials involved in US-North Korea policy voiced fears Kim was trying to drive a wedge between Washington and Seoul.

At the summit, the two Koreas agreed on plans to resume economic cooperation, including working to reconnect rail and road links. They agreed as well to restart a joint factory park in the border city of Kaesong and tours to North Koreas Mount Kumgang resort when conditions are met.

US officials suggested Kim was trying to ease the economic pressure on him to curb his nuclear programmes and to undercut the rationale for US troops being based in South Korea by improving relations with Seoul.

Washington has about 28,500 US troops in South Koreato deter a North Korean attack. Pyongyang has long sought their withdrawal and Trump has questioned their rationale and cost.
Incident comes a day after separate shootings at a Wisconsin workplace and outside a Pennsylvania court.

A woman killed three people in the United States at a warehouse in northeast Maryland before taking her own life, police said on Thursday.

Harford County Sheriff Jeffrey Gahler told reporters on Thursday that police responded to the shooting at about 9:06 local time (13:06 GMT) at a Rite Aid distribution centre in the town of Aberdeen, which is about 56km north of Baltimore.

Gahler said there was no longer a threat at the site and an investigation was under way.

The sheriffs office identified the suspected assailant as a 26-year-old woman. Gahler said investigators have not yet determined a motive, but a law enforcement source told the Reuters news agency the shooting was believed to be have been sparked by a work-related grievance.

In a tweet, Maryland Governor Larry Hogan said his office is monitoring the situation in Aberdeen and that the state stands ready to offer any support.

Maryland state police block the road that connects the industrial business park, where several people had been shot, in Harford County [Jose Luis Magana/AP Photo]

Thursdays shooting comes less than 24 hours after police said three individuals were wounded when a gunman opened fire outside a crowded courtroom in southwestern Pennsylvania. The suspect, Patrick Dowdell, was shot and killed by police.

Also on Wednesday, at least four people were wounded when a software worker shot his fellow employees at a business near Madison, Wisconsin, officials said. The suspect, who police identified as 43-year-old Anthony Tong, died after being shot by police responding to the incident. Three people remain in serious condition.
At least 44 people killed in incident on Lake Victoria as number of passengers on-board the ferry remains unknown.

At least 44 people have died in Tanzania when a passenger ferry capsized in the south of Lake Victoria, local officials said.

The death toll was expected to rise on Friday with rescue operations set to resume at dawn.

Regional governor John Mongella told The Associated Press that 37 people were rescued before operations were suspended for the night, though some of the survivors were in a very bad condition.

According to reports that President John Magufuli has just received from the authorities in Mwanza, the toll now stands at more than 40 dead, Gerson Msigwa, the presidents spokesman, said on state television.

MV Nyerere sank on Thursday afternoon near Ukara Island, according to Tanzanias Electrical, Mechanical and Services Agency. In a statement, the ferry operator said it was unknown how many passengers were on-board the vessel.

Accidents like these are not uncommon on Lake Victoria and overloading is often to blame.

Reuters news agency reported it was difficult to establish a number because the person dispensing tickets drowned in the incident.

George Nyamaha, head of Ukerewe district council, said more than a hundred passengers were on board when the ferry sank while local media reported numbers as high as 400 to 500.

Al Jazeeras Catherine Soi, reporting from Nairobi in neighbouring Kenya, said the boat was also carrying cargo when it went down.

What we also know from witnesses that the ferry appeared to be overloaded. It has a capacity of 100 people, she said. The ferry was affected by bad weather as well.

In 1996, a ferry disaster on Lake Victoria in the same region killed more than 500 people.

In 2012, 145 people died in a ferry disaster in Tanzanias semi-autonomous archipelago of Zanzibar, in the Indian Ocean, on a vessel that was overcrowded.
Yemen commander Aidarous al-Zubaidi says Hodeidah offensive launched by UAE-Saudi coalition will not stop again.

The campaign to drive rebels from Yemens main port city of Hodeidah will not be stopped again until it is captured from the Houthis, a militia commander said.

Aidarous al-Zubaidis remarks on Thursday came as his 20,000 fighters amassed near Hodeidah, providing the major ground force led by the United Arab Emirates, which is trying to capture the main gateway for imports of relief supplies and commercial goods.

The Houthis have held the strategic city since 2014.





UAE-led troops launched a major offensive in Hodeidah in June, but suspended it after several weeks when UN-sponsored peace talks between the internationally recognised government and Houthi rebels began talks.

The campaign, also led by Saudi Arabia, resumed in September after peace talks failed.

On Wednesday, Zubaidis Giants Brigade said it was reinforcing its lines in Hodeidah, sending more men, armoured vehicles and heavy artillery.

The escalation has raised international alarm because of the threat to civilians, both from fighting in the city and from potential disruption to crucial supply lines to more than eight million desperate Yemenis.

War is not over

The civilian lives are very precious and all the coalitions operations in the air and sea are taking into consideration the civilian casualties, but the military operation has begun and there will be no going back, Zubaidi told the Reuters news agency in an interview in the UAE capital, Abu Dhabi.

In all the wars across the world, there is always humanitarian suffering. But we are looking beyond the liberation of Hodeidah, which will be in the interests of the citys population.

The battle of Hodeidah is continuing and the war is not over.

Zubaidis soldiers  who want a separate country in the south  have occasionally fought alongside forces loyal to President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi, who was driven out of the capital, Sanaa, in 2014 and now heads a government based in the southern port city of Aden.

Hadi lives in exile in Riyadh and has a close relationship with Saudi Arabia, while Zubaidis UAE-backed Southern Transitional Council maintains its headquarters in Abu Dhabi.





The UAE has been financing and training armed groups in the south of the country who answer to Zubaidi, a 50-year-old militia leader who emerged from relative obscurity in late 2015 after helping purge the Houthis from Aden.

Huge toll

The UAE entered Yemens war in March 2015 as part of a Saudi-led coalition after Houthi rebels, traditionally based in the northwest of the country, overran much of the country, including Sanaa in 2014.

Nearly three years on, Saudi Arabia has said it wants out of the war, but the UAE has become more involved in the conflict, indicating a divide in the two countries agendas.

The coalition has so far failed to achieve its stated aims as Houthi rebels continue to hold Sanaa and much of the north.

The war has taken a huge toll on the Arab worlds most impoverished country millions of Yemenis at risk of famine amid a massive cholera outbreak.
The customer demand will change so much faster than the industrial processes, and I think that to be early might
A DC Tale of Mugs, Tariffs, and Oikos

I finally visited Made in D.C. when my mom came to town. I had been meaning to go for months, but I never get around to fun stuff until company comes and demands it. We perused the home-grown everything: plants, candles, mugs, jewelry, greeting cards, you name it. Each table of wares had a corresponding portrait and biography of the creator, who was a D.C. resident. What first caught my eye was Comarca Lagunera's "Postcards from Washington, D.C." His work was born from "a self-imposed challenge to gaze at this amazing city, one illustration a week." My mom bought me a wheelthrown mug made by museum specialist Kate Hardy. She had, we read, made all her creations at Hollow Work studio in D.C.'s northeast quadrant, a twenty-minute walk from where I live. I bought a pair of earrings created by Mallory Shelter, the creator and designer of Mallory Shelter Jewelry, who realized her love of mixing gemstones and metals ONLY when she moved to D.C. and trained under a local goldsmith. We left the shop happy not only with our purchases, but also with ourselves. We had put some money in our neighbors' pockets. A fellow D.C.-er could perhaps treat herself to coffee because of us. We had done some good.

I think this is a sentiment easily felt by many folks, regardless of political persuasion. But perhaps it ought to be not only felt, but understood  by conservatives especially. In How to Be a Conservative, published by Bloomsbury in 2014, Sir Roger Scruton wrote that "those things that we truly value are precisely the things, such as life, love and knowledge, that we are reluctant to price. Value begins where calculation ends, since that which matters most to us is the thing that we will not exchange." I value my home and the people I share it with; I value my neighborhood and neighbors; and I value my city, the beautiful, big-skied, brick-pathed hub of Washington, D.C. I naturally value its residents more than I value the residents of Nepal or Tokyo. The slightly higher price of their goods and wares is not a deterrent to me, because for them, I feel a kinship that transcends the marketplace, a kinship I am not willing to price. There are libertarians and neo-conservatives who are either incapable of understanding or unwilling to understand this sentiment. Scruton writes how economists establish their "empire over the human imagination by pricing everything that human beings might want, need, admire or value, so replacing the great questions of human life with the abracadabra of experts." The question of value  which relates inevitably to questions of life, love, and the idea of the human person  is reduced to a toy at the mercy of equations. "For the economist," Scruton writes, "value and price are indistinguishable." Here's an example. On September 10, I went to the Heritage Foundation's first event in its "Free Markets: The Ethical Economic Choice" speaker series. Dr. Walter E. Williams gave a (mostly) excellent lecture titled "The Role of Government in a Free Society," which compared the Founders' ideas to progressive liberals' ideas on the role of government. A conservative myself, I was mostly in agreement with Dr. Williams, until he proposed that the market be free from cumbersome tariffs. I remembered my excursion to Made in D.C. and wondered how such a market, though free from tariffs and economically efficient in the short term, could account for not only the preference, but the duty I felt for shopping local and eschewing foreign goods. I therefore asked Dr. Williams if he thought tariffs could ever be justified. Not a one, said he. Dr. Williams informed me, and the rest of the audience, that he believes in "peaceable, voluntary exchange." If Canada imposes heavy tariffs on our dairy products, and America retaliates by imposing heavy tariffs on Canadian wood, then consumers of both nations are simply "getting screwed." It is as if two people are in a rowboat at sea, he said, and after one person shoots a hole in his end of the boat, the other retaliates by shooting a hole in his side of the boat. It's "just foolishness." When exchanges traverse national borders, Dr. Williams would have us believe we are wrong to consider these exchanges instances of countries trading with countries; he would rather have us think these exchanges are individuals trading with individuals. But conservatives know that none of us is merely an individual. We are daughters and sons, mothers and fathers, each of us belonging to the certain town or city in which we grew up, the school we attended, the company we work for, the church in which we worship. We are also citizens of cities; of states; and, yes, of countries. These privileges of membership confer, along with honors and rights, various duties and responsibilities. In a deep, real sense, we belong to our country, just as surely as our country belongs to us. I wished Dr. Williams would have said that, at their best, tariffs benefit and motivate creators like Cormaca Lagunera, Kate Hardy, and Mallory Shelter. They are not always "just foolishness." They are a way for governments to distinguish and favor creators of the homeland. There are things in our marketplace that have been made by people we know and love; there are things in our marketplace that have been made by people with whom we share a home. There are also those things that have been made by people far away from us, who do not live like us, think like us, or care for us. It is more than understandable for a government to want its own people to do well in their own marketplaces, and if such a government decides to do what it can to benefit the endeavors of its own people and not the endeavors of foreigners, who will cast the first stone? Dr. Williams, apparently. Levying a tariff is wrongly conceived as a purposeless way to burden the high-functioning, high-power consumer. It is rightly conceived as a way of uniting, motivating, and showing patriotic preference for one's own. And why not? We are animated, Scruton writes, by "oikophilia: the love of oikos, which means not only the home but the people contained in it." I make life decisions based not merely on convenience, low cost, and what is good for me, but also on reality, beauty, and what is good for everyone around me. This is the way I act in all realms of life, including the marketplace. Economists, who see no factors in the equation of human action except minimum input and maximum output, can never hope to understand the oikos to which their economics owes its Greek etymology  oikos, "house," and nemo, "distribute, allocate." Ironically, they are the poorer for it. I sip my coffee from my forty-dollar wheelthrown mug, knowing that it connects me to a life both of and beyond my own. Economists, I gather, sip their coffee from cheap, foreign, factory-made cups, complaining about politics and thinking only of themselves.
She released only selected portions of her therapist's notes  what would Democrats call that? Oh yeah, "cherry-picking," just as many Democrats have described what Trump is choosing to declassify with respect to the Carter Page FISA Court applications.

In a letter to Senator Dianne Feinstein and an article in the Washington Post, Christine Blasey Ford has accused Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh and Georgetown Prep classmate Mark Judge of sexually assaulting her. She claims that this happened somewhere around 1982 when she was 15 years old and consisted of Kavanaugh groping her while holding her down with his hand over her mouth so she couldn't scream while both 17-year-olds laughed maniacally. As corroborating evidence of the assault, she provided partial notes from couples' therapy she attended with her husband in 2012.

Her therapist's notes describe an attempted sexual assault, but neither Kavanaugh nor Judge is mentioned. In addition, her therapist's notes say there were four boys present "from an elitist boys' school," whereas in the Feinstein letter, she claims only two assailants (Kavanaugh and Judge). Both have categorically denied the allegations, with Judge calling the accusation "absolutely nuts."

Blasey Ford says the therapist made a mistake in his notes. Her claim is that a therapist, who by definition and job description must rely heavily on his notes to delineate and document needed therapy, made a mistake. Yet, though he was incompetent enough to make an error of fact, he was still sufficiently competent to save his notes for six years.

In addition to the discrepancy, also note the term "elitist," a word that was not commonly used in 1982 to describe a private school, especially by a private school girl. In the hyper-class-conscious world of 2012, however, it was in broad usage. To me, this shows that her memory had at least to some extent been adjusted by her later political indoctrination.

The corroborating (at least, to her, her lawyer, and the media) therapist's notes, apart from being incomplete and listing the wrong number of assailants, also do not mention Kavanaugh, whose name came up only in discussions she had with her husband in 2012. In the Washington Post article, her husband told the author, "he recalled that his wife used Kavanaugh's last name and voiced concern that Kavanaugh  then a federal judge  might one day be nominated to the Supreme Court."

This is another political aspect of her accusation; she sees her alleged assault through the prism of Kavanaugh's politics and potential Supreme Court nomination.

In the letter to Feinstein, she calls the get-together a "gathering," and it has been described elsewhere as a "party." This is easy to understand since either one sounds a lot better than saying she went to a house to hang out with four boys to drink and smoke pot.

Her attorney's later addition of another female to the group should be taken the same way. It sounds better that she went with another girl than alone to a "party," "gathering," or "hangout." I would also note that while it's possible to forget the names of the male attendees, the location of the party, and the year of the hangout, were there another girl present, I would think she not only would remember that girl's name, but probably would have told her what happened as well.

Another "elitist" classmate, Patrick J. Smyth, had this to say: "I understand that I have been identified by Dr. Christine Blasey Ford as the person she remembers as 'PJ' who supposedly was present at the party she described in her statements to the Washington Post[.]" Smyth has also said (in a letter to the Judiciary Committee), "I am issuing this statement today to make it clear to all involved that I have no knowledge of the party in question; nor do I have any knowledge of the allegations of improper conduct she has leveled against Brett Kavanaugh."

She claims that she never told anyone contemporaneously, and for 30 years, she repressed the memory, recovering it only during her 2012 therapy. Weren't there a whole bunch of people who went to prison as the result of repressed and recovered memories, only to be later exonerated? No matter; they can be trusted this time as reason enough to ruin a man's life, reputation, and career.

Were one to accept her story as true, it would be understandable why she would not tell the authorities or her parents. It would be embarrassing to admit she went with four boys to hang out, drink, and smoke pot. In addition, being roughly fondled, however wrongly, probably would not have been considered a sexual assault in 1982.

It is also understandable how she wouldn't know the location of the house or its owner. Presumably, she was with people she trusted (or she wouldn't have gone) and didn't require it. At 15 years old, she would have been driven there and probably was not paying attention, perhaps because she was conversing with those in the car. One would think, though, she would remember those in the car. But it's still somewhat believable that she might not remember getting there or where it was.

But...

How did she get home? According to her story, she had been so traumatized that she claimed in the Feinstein letter she "received medical treatment." She provided no evidence of this because hospitals in 1982 presumably didn't keep records, or perhaps she was referring to her therapy, or merely being hyperbolic. In any case, after a traumatizing assault, she would surely be terrified and looking to get out of there as soon as possible.

Who took her home?

Whoever did take her home would have been her savior and thus at the very least someone she would remember vividly, or at the minimum, his name. This, to me, is most damning. Everyone remembers his savior.

As Conrad Black says:

Kavanaugh denies it, no one corroborates it, no illegality is alleged, no subsequent claimants of like behavior have come forward, and scores of women who have known the judge for decades have attested to his irreproachable behavior and character.

From Andrew C. McCarthy:

This has all the hallmarks of a set-up. If the Democrats had raised the allegation in a timely manner, its weakness would have been palpable, it would have been used for what little it's worth in examining Kavanagh [sic] during his days of testimony, it would be put to rest as unverifiable, and we'd be on to a confirmation vote. Instead, we're on to a delay  precisely the Democrats' objective. They want to slow-walk Kavanaugh's confirmation vote until after the midterms, in the hopes that they swing the Senate in their favor and have the numbers to defeat the nomination.

Also from McCarthy:

I don't know if something awful really happened to Ford when she was 15. None of us will ever know. Apparently, Ford herself does not know basic facts either, since she cannot tell us where and when the alleged assault happened, and what she did in the aftermath. Giving her the benefit of the doubt that it happened as she claims it happened, she hasn't come close to establishing that Brett Kavanaugh, as opposed to some other kid she has forgotten, was her assailant; that is, she has not established that her memory of the assailant can be trusted when she cannot recall other rudimentary details. We can feel sympathy for her while nevertheless inferring that she does not want to testify because she cannot explain the oddities of her account. Or we can justifiably suspect that the whole thing is a partisan stunt.

In my opinion, she should have stayed "anonymous." We know how much the left likes "anonymous" allegations.
Putin and Xi Are Not Embracing Each Other (Yet)

The Vostok-2018 war games are underway. Understandably, the world is watching with grave concern. After all, it is the largest military exercise between the Russian and Chinese (and Mongolian) militaries since the Cold War. The exercises themselves involved nearly 300,000 troops, 1,000 aircraft, 80 warships, and 36,000 armored vehicles, according to Bill Gertz of The Washington Times. Many strategists in the West worry that Vostok-2018 is a portent of a new strategic alliance between two of the largest powers in all of Eurasia against the United States. This would be the nightmare scenario. The landmass known as Eurasia encompasses a majority of the world's natural resources  potable water, oil, natural gas, metals  and is home to most of the world's population. For much of its history, though, Eurasia has been defined more by its regional divisions than its similarities. Many attempts at creating either a regional hegemon or a concert of powers to dominate this rich region have failed.

Changing Times There are seismic shifts occurring in the global political order. Since the 1990s, foreign policy thinkers such as Joseph S. Nye, Jr. have warned American leaders about the dawn of a multipolar world order. Other thinkers, such as the historian Paul Kennedy, have worried that the United States is a power in relative decline suffering "imperial overstretch." The leaders of Russia, China, and various European states (like Germany and France) have pined for the birth of a multipolar world order where there are many centers of power, as opposed to only Washington, D.C. Since the Great Recession of 2008, while the United States has recovered economically, long running negative trends in both the economic and military realms have undermined America's once unquestionable global dominance. For the duration of the Obama administration, American elites spoke openly about managing America's relative decline. Countries like China have worked to build the "new silk road" aimed at linking as much of Eurasia together under Chinese control as possible. It was a policy designed to empower Beijing and weaken American influence in the region. Analysts, such as Michael Pillsbury of the Hudson Institute, have warned of China's plan to become the world's hegemon by 2049 (the hundredth-year anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party's victory in the Chinese Civil War), thereby replacing the United States. The Vostok-2018 military exercises have been followed on by announcements from Beijing that the Chinese are preparing to ask the World Trade Organization to sanction the United States for anti-dumping duties that Washington has imposed on Chinese goods. Moscow reportedly supports Beijing's request to the WTO in order to "protect global trade." For its part, the WTO settlement dispute body is set to take up Beijing's request on September 21, just four days after the Sino-Russo-Mongolian Vostok-2018 exercises conclude. What's more, both China and Russia have renewed discussions to move away from the U.S. dollar as being the world's reserve currency. Recently, Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov met with his Turkish counterpart (Turkey is upset over the Trump administration's sanctions imposed that country for its unfair treatment of an American pastor) and announced that Turkey would be joining with Russia, Iran, and China in relying on their own national currencies to conduct international trade (as opposed to using the U.S. dollar). This comes a year after China got Saudi Arabia to allow for a small amount of oil to be traded on China's currency as opposed to the U.S. dollar. The limited trade went gangbusters for investors. There will be greater levels of such trades conducted over the next five years, according to Beijing. This is not the first time that both China and Russia have attempted to undermine the U.S. dollar as the world reserve currency. During the 2008 Great Recession, Moscow attempted to get Beijing to dump their combined shares of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in an attempt to devastate the American economy. China refused only because the economic blowback on China would have been great. After 2008, Beijing argued that the world's overreliance on the U.S. dollar is what precipitated the Great Recession. Until 2010, both Moscow and Beijing  as well as a litany of European states  wanted to create a new international reserve currency to conduct global trade. All of these agitations for a new world reserve currency went away after the Obama administration made an historic nuclear arms limitation agreement with Moscow. While Obama's New START weakened America's nuclear posture relative to Russia's, it did have the salutary effect of redirecting Moscow's attention away from the West and toward its east (at least until Russian president Vladimir Putin became convinced that Washington was trying to prevent his return to the Kremlin in the highly corrupt Russian presidential election of 2012). Trump should, therefore, make a deal with Russia. The More Things Change, the More They Stay the Same There is no doubt that Russia, China, Turkey, France, Germany, and a host of other powerful countries are looking to limit what they view as the damage of the Trump administration's "America First" trade and foreign policies. Plus the advent of the Chinese Belt-and-Road Initiative has prompted many of these countries to begin working closer together than ever before. Yet, for all of the rhetoric about a new Eurasian anti-American alliance, nothing truly substantive has changed geopolitically. And large gaps exist in China's proposed "new silk road." Most states will realize they need the U.S. for trade more than any other country. China still relies on the United States for a disproportionate level of trade; Russia remains skeptical about Chinese intentions along its eastern border; Germany and France remain concerned about Russian revanchism in Eastern Europe. As secretary of defense James Mattis commented to Bill Gertz about the Vostok-2018 military exercises: there "is little in the long term that aligns Russia and China." Similarly, financial analyst Charles Wallace has written in Forbes that the ubiquity of the U.S. dollar as a reserve currency means that no alternative will be crafted anytime soon. While Putin likes being seen with China's President Xi Jinping, he understands that China's ultimate goal is to cleave the Russian Far East away from Moscow and place it under Chinese control. Both China and Russia are looking for better deals from Washington. President Trump must continue with his efforts to deal with Russia, while standing firm against China on trade. Trump can win in separating Russia from China. In fact, Russia is begging for a better deal from the United States. In poker terms, Beijing is running a full house off a pair on trade. Or, in the words of Allianz corporations chief economic adviser Mohamed El-Erian: One of the upside risks [to the trade war] is that you may end up changing the global landscape in a way that favors the U.S. Because countries will realize, if we slip into a trade war, while everybody suffers, [the] U.S. does better in relative terms. The rest of the world is less solid than the U.S. Despite appearances to the contrary, the Sino-Russian alliance is not solidified. Moscow and Beijing just want a better deal from Washington.
The most recent State Department report on international religious freedom notes that between 2010 and 2017, more than 600 Christians were imprisoned solely for the practice of their faith. The same report points to an upsurge in anti-Christian sentiment within Iranian state media, accompanied by more frequent and aggressive raids on home-based churches.

Every year, without fail, the Islamic Republic of Iran is ranked as one of the worst countries in the world for religious freedom. Persecution of religious minorities is rampant and deeply ingrained in government institutions, and Christians are high on the list of those at risk, especially Christians who have converted from Islam.

International human rights groups can naturally be counted on to back up the State Department's findings and to push for activism on behalf of at-risk individuals and populations in the Islamic Republic.

This goes to show how deeply Islamic extremism is ingrained into the identity of Iran's theocratic regime. Every time that regime prosecutes someone for national security crimes on the basis of membership in a religious minority, it is effectively admitting that the regime cannot survive in the presence of religious freedom. As such, the mullahs tacitly admit this fact almost every single day.

There is no sensible reason for any modern, democratic government to dispute that fact. Yet the previous White House did just that when it joined the European Union in pursuing negotiations with the Iranian regime on the expectation that this would promote "moderation" among the leadership. More than three years after the signing of a nuclear deal that was supposed to usher in this moderation, the naivete of this view has been clearly exposed.

As was revealed recently, some of the Obama administration officials have not given up hope for keeping this deal afloat. John Kerry, for instance, has met with his Iranian counterparts and advised the ayatollahs to wait until the Trump administration is out. His conduct is hard to fathom, and it is very damaging to U.S. national security imperatives as well as prospects for promoting religious liberty in the Middle East.

Fortunately, the current presidential administration has no such impulse to turn away from systematic violations of religious freedom and other human rights while waiting for Tehran to correct its own behavior.

In fact, the Trump administration has commendably made religious freedom a major focus of its foreign policy. This was demonstrated in July, when the State Department hosted its first ever Ministerial to Advance Religious Freedom. It will be demonstrated again this week when secretary of state Mike Pompeo attends the Values Voter Summit to participate in a discussion of international religious liberty. None of his predecessors in the office has done the same.

The significance of these gestures is amplified, particularly where Iran policy is concerned, by the fact that the Trump administration has repeatedly affirmed its commitment to assertive foreign policies that will actually hold Tehran and other repressive governments accountable for violations of the rights of Christians and other minorities. The U.S. is now in the midst of re-imposing the sanctions that were suspended in the wake of shortsighted international negotiations, and this is being done with the express purpose of compelling the Iranian regime toward a comprehensive change of behavior.

To complement its correct policy, the White House should publicly recognize that there is a viable alternative to the clerical regime, which has already specified unqualified religious freedom as part of its vision for Iran's democratic future. The 2018 Iran Uprising Summit to be held later this week will echo this message.

The National Council of Resistance of Iran, the coalition of Iranian opposition movements with the People's Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI/MEK) at its core, is that alternative. The longstanding pro-democratic Resistance has made itself known in recent months as the driving force behind a far-reaching protest movement that speaks for the economically disenfranchised, for the wrongfully imprisoned, for persecuted minorities, and so on.

In January, the supreme leader of the Iranian regime credited the MEK with facilitating the rapid spread of the protests and used that fact to spur a more aggressive crackdown on the group. But even after 8,000 arrests and 50 deaths, the Iranian public remained ready to take to the streets again, and the protest movement showed a significant resurgence in March, following a message from NCRI president Maryam Rajavi calling for "a year full of uprisings" in pursuit of "final victory" over the Iranian regime. In August, protests erupted in more than two dozen cities and towns. Anti-government protests have become a new feature of the Iranian political landscape.

The Trump administration has done something admirable by giving international religious freedom a place of prominence in its foreign policy. But it can truly follow through on its commitment to that principle only if it partners with local actors who share the same commitment.

Although Iran is presently one of the world's most troubled areas in terms of religious liberty and human rights, it is also home to one of the most active, organized, and well established movements in favor of Western-style values and democratic governance. There is no better or more obvious way of promoting those values in Iranian society than by endorsing and supporting the MEK and its allies. President Trump presiding over the U.N. Security Council session on September 26 provides a unique opportunity for the U.S. to make a stand for universal values including religious freedoms and to make a clear case for greater multilateral pressure on Iran.

Ken Blackwell advises the Family Research Council and serves on the board of First Liberty Institute. He was formerly a U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Human Rights Commission.
In his speech, Ma said the trade war is "going to be a mess" and, regarding its potential duration, that it could last for "maybe 20 years."

As the latest salvos were fired in the growing trade war between the United States and China, concerns continue to mount in the business community about just how long the conflict might endure. Alibaba group founder and China's richest man Jack Ma recently spoke to an investor summit in Hangzhou, China regarding his thoughts on the direction the trade war may take.

Ma went on to compare the current trade dispute with the U.S. trade actions conducted against Japan in the 1980s, as Japan looked to be a potential challenger to the United States' economic ascendancy.

Ma theorized that the U.S is now setting its sights on China because China has become the world's second largest economy, stating: "This kind of thing happens. It's very natural."



Jack Ma (file photo via Flickr).

What makes this trade war different from other trade disputes in the past?

Normally, trade war negotiations are extensively defined by the national interests of the two countries involved in the dispute. This motivates the two parties to act quickly on behalf of industry and employees in their respective countries, to settle the dispute to both sides' mutual satisfaction.

In this instance, the trade war is not just between China and the United States; it is a conflict that is also defined by the personalities and the domestic interests of Chinese president Xi Jinping and U.S president Donald Trump.

As Jack Ma correctly pointed out, this trade war is not just about unfair trade practices or an imbalance in tariffs. It's about the rise of China into an economic landscape that the United States has used its influence to effectively dominate for decades.

Journalists and policy analysts have mused that the current trade war is a modern example of a Thucydides trap. A Thucydides trap is a theory based on the work of the ancient Greek historian of the same name, which states that a rising power causes fear in an established power, which escalates toward conflict.

In this instance, the role of the rising power is a resurgent China challenging the dominant superpower in the form of the United States. What are some reasons why the trade war may continue to drag on?

Xi Jinping and the Chinese government are unlikely to back down

Xi is not likely to make any sort of major back-down without equally large concessions from President Trump and the United States. Considering that Xi has now been declared "leader for life," he can ill afford a publicly humiliating back-down as he continues to consolidate his power, especially to someone like President Trump.

President Trump's actions in the trade war enjoy an element of bipartisan support

President Trump's actions against China are one of the few policy moves of his administration that gain any level of approval from those on the other side of the aisle.

Senate minority leader Democrat Chuck Schumer, who has long pressed Trump to crack down on China, applauded the tariffs.

"The president's actions on China are on the money," Schumer said. "China is our real trade enemy, and their [sic] theft of intellectual property and their refusal to let our companies compete fairly threatens millions of future American jobs. While we await further details on this trade action, President Trump is right on target."

This type of support from a senior member of the Democratic Party likely only strengthens Trump's resolve that the U.S. can endure the economic pain and come out on top in this conflict.

Trump is not a traditional politician or seasoned political operator

Normally, in modern tit-for-tat tariff conflicts, political leaders are forced to the bargaining table by political and business leaders on both sides. President Trump, on the other hand, is a maverick who believes he can achieve the best possible outcome for the American people in this trade conflict and is ultimately acting in the best interest of the United States.

President Trump has a tendency to heavily back his own viewpoint, rather than relying solely on a team of advisers. This creates difficulty for the Chinese trade delegation, which is more accustomed to dealing with lifelong political operators and diplomats.

So where does that leave the trade war?

Both Xi and Trump have a large amount of domestic political skin in this particular high-stakes game. Any major back-down for either side will be humiliating and damaging to that leader's domestic political standing.

The reality for observers and analysts of this trade conflict is that we don't know the exact reasons why it began. If it were solely about unfair trade practices and tariff imbalances, then predicting the outcome would potentially be a great deal simpler.

However, the possibility that this conflict has arisen out of an attempt by the United States to maintain its economic ascendancy makes predictions about the trade war's outcome and duration a great deal more complicated.

If China and the United States continue to fail to find common ground on which a mutually acceptable trade deal can built, Jack Ma's prediction that the trade war could continue for years to come may end up being prophetic.

Tarric Brooker is a freelance journalist and free speech advocate. He also runs a political and current affairs website at avidcommentator.com.
Back in the Occupy days, "free education for all" was the daily socialist battle cry. And sure enough, New York's Gov. Andrew Cuomo eventually handed it to them in a much ballyhooed rollout, of free scholarships to all New York residents, to any state school, in 2017. Free stuff! The protesters won!

Some free stuff, and don't imagine there aren't lefties who will praise this as it is, typically in office, while other lefties, such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, are calling for more of it in other areas. It's a characteristic of socialism, actually  and yet the Ocasio-Cortezes amazingly just keep getting elected, despite the students rightfully not liking it. Call it a disconnect. Because this is what free stuff looks like.

Chalk it up to another signature shortage of socialism, based on regulatory control, which includes a rather amazing socialist desire to control not just kids' college lives, but kids' post-college lives, given the requirements to live and work in New York. The requirements follow them wherever they go.

So the short story here is that any kid who has to work for room and board, or to buy schoolbooks, pretty well gets no free stuff, being rich and all from all those part-time jobs. Only the kids who don't have to pay for those things and who can carry a 30-unit load through the year can get the free tuition, which oftentimes at state schools isn't the biggest expense. No surprise, most kids don't qualify.

Applicants are also required to live and work in New York when they leave school for the number of years they received the scholarship money. If they don't, they have to pay the money back.

Applicants are also required to live and work in New York when they leave school for the number of years they received the scholarship money. If they don't, they have to pay the money back.

The scholarship money can be used only for tuition, not for living expenses or books.

The scholarship money can be used only for tuition, not for living expenses or books.

Their annual family income must be less than $110,000.

Their annual family income must be less than $110,000.

In order to qualify for the free tuition program, students must graduate in four years.

In order to qualify for the free tuition program, students must graduate in four years.

As in any regime of bureaucratic socialism, there were requirements, precise requirements, and only the relatively rich  about 20,000 kids, or 3.2% of the enrollees in New York's SUNY and CUNY universities  could meet them. Eighty-three percent of the kids got turned down for not having enough units, because, well, they were working part-time or more. The richer kids got the free stuff, the poor kids got shut out, and New York's governor said all was hunky-dory. According to Fox News :

Turns out the free rides weren't so free, actually. Seventy percent of New York's students got rejected for them, and not because they couldn't read or something.

While states like California and Georgia have comprehensive grant and scholarship programs for four-year college as well, New York's is the nation's only truly universal program  with no requirements other than residency and income, and no caps on the amount [sic] of residents who can receive full tuition.

The income cap will increase to $110,000 in 2018 and $125,000 in 2019.

The state's Excelsior Scholarship program will be rolled out in tiers over the next three years, starting with full coverage of four-year college tuition this fall for students whose families make less than $100,000.

New York will be the only state in the country to offer universal public college tuition coverage for working- and middle-class residents after the program was included in the budget package approved Sunday night.

Back in the Occupy days, "free education for all" was the daily socialist battle cry. And sure enough, New York's Gov. Andrew Cuomo eventually handed it to them in a much ballyhooed rollout, of free scholarships to all New York residents, to any state school, in 2017. Free stuff! The protesters won!

Here's what NBC reported at the time:

New York will be the only state in the country to offer universal public college tuition coverage for working- and middle-class residents after the program was included in the budget package approved Sunday night. The state's Excelsior Scholarship program will be rolled out in tiers over the next three years, starting with full coverage of four-year college tuition this fall for students whose families make less than $100,000. The income cap will increase to $110,000 in 2018 and $125,000 in 2019. While states like California and Georgia have comprehensive grant and scholarship programs for four-year college as well, New York's is the nation's only truly universal program  with no requirements other than residency and income, and no caps on the amount [sic] of residents who can receive full tuition.

Turns out the free rides weren't so free, actually. Seventy percent of New York's students got rejected for them, and not because they couldn't read or something.

As in any regime of bureaucratic socialism, there were requirements, precise requirements, and only the relatively rich  about 20,000 kids, or 3.2% of the enrollees in New York's SUNY and CUNY universities  could meet them. Eighty-three percent of the kids got turned down for not having enough units, because, well, they were working part-time or more. The richer kids got the free stuff, the poor kids got shut out, and New York's governor said all was hunky-dory. According to Fox News:

In order to qualify for the free tuition program, students must graduate in four years.

They have to carry 30 credits per year.

Their annual family income must be less than $110,000.

The scholarship money can be used only for tuition, not for living expenses or books.

The GPA requirement varies depending on the major.

Applicants are also required to live and work in New York when they leave school for the number of years they received the scholarship money. If they don't, they have to pay the money back.

So the short story here is that any kid who has to work for room and board, or to buy schoolbooks, pretty well gets no free stuff, being rich and all from all those part-time jobs. Only the kids who don't have to pay for those things and who can carry a 30-unit load through the year can get the free tuition, which oftentimes at state schools isn't the biggest expense. No surprise, most kids don't qualify.

Chalk it up to another signature shortage of socialism, based on regulatory control, which includes a rather amazing socialist desire to control not just kids' college lives, but kids' post-college lives, given the requirements to live and work in New York. The requirements follow them wherever they go.

Some free stuff, and don't imagine there aren't lefties who will praise this as it is, typically in office, while other lefties, such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, are calling for more of it in other areas. It's a characteristic of socialism, actually  and yet the Ocasio-Cortezes amazingly just keep getting elected, despite the students rightfully not liking it. Call it a disconnect. Because this is what free stuff looks like.

Image credits: Michael Fleshman via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0; Paul Reynolds, FEE, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0.
The left's attempted destruction of Kavanaugh is obscene

The overwrought hysteria among the Democrats who are pretending to take seriously Christine Blasey Ford's ridiculous accusation that Brett Kavanaugh groped her 36 years ago is disgraceful. It is an all too obvious ploy to keep Kavanaugh off the SCOTUS. That she has suffered emotional problems stemming from what she describes as an assault is ridiculous as well. That she may be emotionally unstable is believable; no person of sound mind would do what she has done, when she did it. Is this conclusion defamatory? Not remotely, given what the left is doing to Kavanaugh. This is all one shabby set-up, right out of their oft-used playbook. The members of the left who are participating in this are thoroughly without shame and thus have no business being in Congress. The members of the media who have joined in the attacks on Kavanaugh as if this woman's claim had validity are equally reprehensible. All the usual suspects have jumped on board: Todd, Tapper, Matthews, O'Donnell, Camarota, Stephanopoulos, Sciutto, etc., along with virtually all the anchors at CNN, MSNBC, ABC, and CBS. What they are doing is so beyond the pale that it is difficult to find the words to describe the insanity of the left's intention to destroy a good man for politics and power.

The American left, which is now wholly radical, thinks the American people are dimwitted and easily manipulated. This is why the mainstream media spend so much time delivering fake news, with carefully chosen derisive words to demonize President Trump and his supporters. To Hillary, we are all deplorable. To Biden, we are the "dregs of society." Biden said that when it comes to this type of accusation, all men should be considered guilty until proven innocent. Biden was a senator and vice president and has not even a basic grasp of the Constitution! So stupid are we, they believe, that we will fall for this outrageous stratagem to keep Kavanaugh off the Court. They all have their roles to play. Scandalized feminists, the all-white-men-are-pigs women, men like Biden who can't keep his hands off any female within his arm's reach no matter her age  all are right there, accepting Ford's claim as legitimate and leaping to the conclusion that Kavanaugh is another Harvey Weinstein. They are all running to every TV camera they can find to join in this witch trial. It is all an abomination, perpetrated on Kavanaugh and the citizens of this country by a gang of Democrats who would most likely run over their own mothers if it would serve their political agenda, especially to preserve abortion on demand. These are all the same people, by the way, who defended Bill Clinton against his accusers and mocked his victims mercilessly. Happy to light a blaze of controversy under the Kavanaugh confirmation, Ford apparently did not expect to have to tell her tale in public, face the man she has maligned, or be given the opportunity to testify before the Judiciary Committee. She demands that the FBI investigate her 36-year-old complaint when she has offered no details, not even the year when this groping occurred. The woman is clearly troubled. All these members of Congress are using this horrific smear to defend a woman none of them has met or spoken to. They have only read her vague letter with no substantive details. Each and every one of them  Feinstein, Blumenthal, Gillibrand, Hirono, etc.  the lot of them should all be sued for defamation. They should all lose their seats for their crime against Kavanaugh and the citizens of this nation. It is a safe bet that the Democrats mounting this calumny know that Ford's accusation is a lie and that she is an activist enlisted to be the instrument of Kavanaugh's undoing. They certainly know that it is unprovable; that is their ace in the hole. They are trying to take Kavanaugh out with scuttlebutt. Bottom line? The Democrats in Congress who have jumped on this stomach-turning bandwagon have shown their true colors. They have demonstrated for all to see exactly who and what they are. It is not a pretty picture. Loathsome is not a strong enough word to describe Feinstein and her cohorts in this crime.
In short: Theres now an entirely new way for Alexa-enabled smart devices to be built far outside of the speaker or display categories with Amazons recent introduction of the Alexa Gadget Toolkit. The overall goal is to extend Alexa into robotics and further home products by giving developers a framework that allows for those interactions. To that end, the new toolkit includes a variety of interfaces all centered around Alexa API. Among the examples Amazon provides for its use, meanwhile, are products intended to bring the AI assistant to users of all ages. In fact, with early adopters like Hasbro, WowWee Group Limited, Gemmy Industries, Baby Plus, TOMY International, Novalia, and iHomes eKids already signed on, some of those are set to arrive before the years end.

Background: As already mentioned, the new developer tools build on API that Amazon has already been put in place with its own Echo-branded speakers and speaker-enabled displays. The online retail and shipping giant has been leading in that particular arena since the first devices were brought to market and in the smart home market in general. This move appears to be a continuation of the companys drive to keep that momentum going and dominate new segments that Amazon is intent on effectively creating for itself. For example, wake word detection is going to play a big role with the new products since it will allow devices such as robots to physically respond when spoken to. Similarly, the API pertaining to alarms, timers, reminders, and notifications will enable lights, motors, sound chips, and other components to react based on a given set of manufacturer-set requirements. Beyond that, Amazon says its toolkits text-to-speech features allow for something as complex as synchronicity with a pair of robotic lips. Music features will be added in the future as well.

Impact: In a very real sense, Amazon is looking to completely change the AI smart home game again, just as it did with its Echo Show and Echo Spot. This time around, however, the company is moving into interactive robotics and real-world physical responses, in addition to physical interactions. Some of the products described for children, for instance, include an Alexa-enabled electric toothbrush, a rubber duck called Waddles the Smart Duck, and a touch-sensitive dinner mat. Simultaneously, Gemmy Industriess Big Mouth Billy Bass is getting an Alexa-flavored update and dancing plush toys are also said to be in the works with the new toolkit. That will undoubtedly lead to a wave of new innovation in the connected devices that collectively make up the IoT.
In short: Samsung has recently filed a new trademark that seems to be intended for use alongside either its mobile Game Launcher or for new game software. Specifically, the company has trademarked the term Magichestra with several world patent offices. That name doesnt necessarily give too much away but in each instance, the trademark is noted as applying to downloadable computer game software explicitly for use on a mobile or cell phone. It is also classified as being applicable to VR gaming software, or maintenance of a computer game.

Background: Speculatively, the new trademark could apply to any number of new developments. The company has taken a deep interest in promoting digital gaming and bringing those games to its mobile platforms in the past. That includes its recent partnership with Epic Games which saw the popular shooter and building title Fortnite receive a timed exclusive on Galaxy handsets. However, it also includes Samsungs long-running Game Launcher, which is an all-in-one inclusive game center for the companys smartphones that can fine-tune various settings for individual Android games. So Magichestra could be intended as a rebranding for that tool or as a replacement. The term appears to be a combination of the words magic and orchestra. Looking past the unlikely possibility that Samsung is developing some sort of music-related game, it could be a reference to Samsungs orchestrating or arranging games or aspects of games. That would fit in neatly with Game Launcher and its typical use. Beyond that, the newly trademarked word could point to an entirely new feature for Samsung devices or to a new development platform for any of its mobile-associated platforms. The smartphone manufacturer is also rumored to be working on a dedicated gaming smartphone. So the announcement could be related to a feature found only in that handset as well.

Impact: The only real information currently available is the trademarked name, Magichestra, and its categorization as a word associated with gaming and mobile devices. So its impossible to say with any certainty what that might be, or how the term Magichestra will be used. With the growth of AI, it isnt out of the question that Samsung plans to implement some magical automation into its Game Launcher. The name Magichestra would seem to fit under those circumstances, at least as easily as any other.
In short: Google has now confirmed the launch of its Emergency Location Service (ELS) for Android in the US. The ELS is designed to ensure more accurate location information on Android device owners is shared with emergency services as and when needed. As part of the announcement, Google confirmed which companies are helping with the US rollout, as well as detailing what security and privacy- safeguards are in place to protect device owners.

Background: In spite of US support for this service only now going live, the service has been a long time in the making. For example, ELS started its rollout in Europe back in 2016. Since then it has slowly expanded to more areas and regions with Google confirming today that its already operational in fourteen countries, and has already proved its use in improving response times. In terms of the US, Google has confirmed T-Mobile and RapidSOS are assisting with the service, while residents in the US Virgin Islands are being covered through a partnership with West. While this evidently means T-Mobile customers are now covered by their carrier, that does not necessarily mean non-T-Mobile customers are not covered. As RapidSOS is an IP-based solution and will account for any individual device owner who falls within a RapidSOS-covered area, regardless of carrier.

Impact: Needless to say, the idea here is to ensure lives can be saved, and assistance provided when needed more quickly than before. This is not only in terms of seconds faster (which can be the difference), but also to account for less obvious situations, like for example when people are struggling to relay their whereabouts due to the ongoing situation, or those who might find it difficult to provide their location due to language difficulties. Its also important to note this service does not require any action on the users part with Google confirming 99-percent of Android devices support the feature at the device level. As a result, when (and only when  one of the privacy-focused protections) an emergency call is made, the device will transmit a more precise location to the emergency service by not only drawing on GPS, but also mobile networks, Wi-Fi data, and even device sensors. With Google likening the process to that currently used by Google Maps. As part of the privacy safeguards, Google also confirmed the data is not stored or even shared with Googles servers. It also just happens between the device and the emergency services, and again, only when the device recognizes an emergency call has been initiated.
In short: Huaweis first Android smartphone with 5G support will also feature a foldable display, the companys rotating Chairman Ken Hu said at the latest iteration of the World Economic Forum. The handset in question will be introduced in mid-2019, though the official didnt clarify whether the product will also end up launching as Huaweis very first bendable phone.

Background: Huawei is said to have considered trying to beat Samsung in the foldable handset race by releasing such a device as early as this fall, though Mr. Hus newest statement may imply those plans have been delayed. With Samsung reportedly planning to debut its first phone with a bendable screen this November, Huawei likely doesnt have enough time to finalize development so as to announce its own offering beforehand. Despite its likely November announcement, Samsungs Galaxy F or however the device ends up being called isnt expected to become available for purchase before early 2019. Huaweis foldable handset is rumored to feature an 8-inch screen from Chinese panel maker BOE and attempt to combine the smartphone and tablet form factors, whereas Samsung is said to have specifically focused on delivering an offering that isnt just a more portable tablet, though details on both products remain slim.

Impact: Despite likely delaying the release of its premier foldable handset to mid-2019, Huawei is still likely to be among the first manufacturers to commercialize such a product. Combined with 5G connectivity and the phone-to-PC platform first introduced with last years Mate 10 lineup, the company may have a shot at convincing some consumers to replace their laptops with bendable handsets, which is its current goal, as CEO Richard Yu explained in an interview earlier this month. Due to the sheer number of innovative technologies its set to feature, Huaweis first foldable mobile device is likely to sport a price tag well above $1,000.
In short: Several of South Koreas large smartphone and component manufacturers are now calling for greater government protections against IP and trade secret theft that they claim is perpetrated at large by Chinese companies. Speaking at the 3rd IP Strategy Forum: Strategies for Responding to Industrial Technology Disclosure from IP Perspective, Samsung Electronics, SK Hynix, LG Chemical, and several others allege that the current laws are simply not strong enough to prevent that from happening. Moreover, the group claims that mergers and partnerships are being used as weapons in the thefts. Chinese companies are said to be utilizing those in order to gain access to business technology IP, supply chains, and human assets. Those are, in turn, being used to steal away the technologies and trade secrets in question.

Background: This isnt the first time Chinese firms have been called out for stealing trade secrets or other technology. In fact, even the worlds second largest Android manufacturer, Huawei, has been accused of and paid out for related accusations in the past. However, claims relating to that variety of theft are notoriously difficult to prove in a court. Companies need to prove that a theft has occurred and that the secrets stolen were guarded with a reasonable amount of forethought and effort. After that, courts need to be shown exactly how much damage has been done and how that was calculated. The companies argue that those aspects of the current laws unduly burden the victim company and dont protect companies during mergers or acquisitions. Since Chinese companies are gathering funds with the express goal of leaching IP and trade secrets, the group asserts, that creates a serious problem compounded by weak laws for enforcing theft.

Impact: The group points to the US as a country from which guidelines for creating new laws could stem. In particular, the regions merger and acquisition laws are much stronger than those they currently work with, the companies claim. Samsung takes things further by claiming that at least some of the problem could be solved by including core technologies under Industrial Technology Protection Law. That would, it says, enable further government oversight on exported technologies and a direct investment from the authorities with regard to how those are protected.
HMD Global is reportedly working on a mid-range smartphone which may go official in the coming weeks as the Nokia 7.1 Plus. A high-resolution render of the handset leaked earlier today, revealing its design language and main camera setup. The Android smartphone can be seen sporting a notched display with a thick bottom bezel, a design choice that is reminiscent of other recent Nokia devices. Toward the back, a reflective glass surface is visible, indicating a glass sandwich design, along with a pair of cameras with ZEISS lenses and a fingerprint sensor placed below the camera housing. The inclusion of ZEISS optics in a Nokia phone isnt surprising at all given their exclusive partnership and the fact that many recent smartphones from the Finnish company came equipped with ZEISS-made camera lenses.

The side profile of the handset shows a metal frame with chamfered edges and its worth noting that the rear cameras are almost flush with the phones back. Like it is the case with almost every Nokia-branded smartphone, the Nokia 7.1 Plus is also expected to be a part of the Android One program ensuring timely firmware and security updates. Back in May, the Nokia X6 debuted in China as the first device under the X series, which was later rolled-out globally as the Nokia 6.1 Plus. HMD Global is rumored to follow a similar naming scheme and market this phone as Nokia X7 in the Asian market while itll be called Nokia 7.1 Plus in other international markets. Earlier this week, the front panels of the alleged Nokia X7 had leaked showing a notch-less display, which opposes todays leak. There is a possibility of them being two separate smartphones but nothing can be said for sure; an official announcement by HMD Global can only clear the air.

As per the previously leaked information, the Nokia 7.1 Plus will be fueled by an octa-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 710 chipset which brings considerable improvements to the table especially over the Snapdragon 660 processor found inside the Nokia 7 Plus. The smartphone is said to include 6GB of RAM and 128GB of internal memory along with the support for 18W fast charging. Being a part of the Android One program, Android 9 Pie may be pre-installed on the mid-range smartphone when it goes official. The availability and pricing details of the device also arent known yet.
In short: Googles Home Hub screen-enabled smart home speaker appeared in an FCC listing spotted by AndroidHeadlines earlier today. Specifically, the listing is for an interactive video streaming device that features several connectivity options including Bluetooth Low Energy. Wi-Fi 802.11 a/n/ac protocols were also tested in both the 2.4GHz and 5GHz frequencies in combination with Bluetooth. A DC adapter is shown for the power source and a label said to be situated on the bottom of the device shows identifies it as featuring the model number H1A. Receiving certification from the FCC is the final hurdle the Google Home Hub needs to clear before being ready for a commercial release.

Background: All of that seems to match up with a new device in the Google Home family and more directly with a recently reported set of images purported to show an as-yet-unannounced screen-enhanced Google Home Hub. Historically, Googles Home-branded devices have also been listed with the same A4R shown in the new listing and the other specifications shown seem to line up cleanly with those previous leaks. So, unless Google has plans to release a second-generation of its original Google Home, which may not make sense given the 1A designation, this appears to be an entirely new device. Adding some weight to that, the shape of the device shown in that label diagram is remarkably similar to the base of the leaked Home Hub and the underside of the base is traditionally where Google places those labels.

The upcoming gadget is expected to be a direct competitor to Amazons Alexa-enabled Echo Show and feature similar specs. Namely, it will reportedly bear a 7-inch display and be driven by a Google Assistant-enabled build of Android Thing. That would allow users to utilize the device as a central control point for their smart home integrations while the dual-wireless connectivity would allow for seamless video calling and streaming.

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Impact: If speculation surrounding that device bears out and the latest FCC listing does turn out to point to the Google Home Hub, the device will likely hit the market priced to undercut Amazons listing. That wouldnt be too surprising, given the level of competition between the two companies in that sphere of the IoT market, but could give Google a way to start eating at Amazons market share. As for availability, more information will almost certainly be revealed at the upcoming Google hardware event scheduled to take place on October 9 in Paris.
In short: OnePlus surpassed half a million users in the United States earlier this summer, extrapolated data obtained by AndroidHeadlines reveals. OnePlus Launcher, the default OxygenOS launcher thats updated via the Google Play Store since last year and cant be easily removed from OnePlus handsets, is currently present on approximately 0.5-percent of all active Android devices in the country, SimilarWeb estimates. As numerous industry trackers reckon the number of Android gadgets in the U.S. already surpassed 100 million two years ago, a conservative extrapolation would suggest OnePlus currently has no fewer than half a million American customers. SimilarWebs figures are also supported by digital insight firm App Ape whose own platform provides similar performance estimates for OnePlus Launcher, as verified by AndroidHeadlines.

Background: The Chinese smartphone manufacturer previously disclosed it had over 1.3 million smartphone users around the world in 2017 and that the OnePlus 6 alone sold a million units in its first three weeks of availability earlier this year, thus becoming the firms fastest-selling device to date. Over the last twelve months, the company managed to increase its American user base by a factor of five, as suggested by the same extrapolation method based on SimilarWebs app data. Every third U.S. owner of a OnePlus device is female and nearly 90-percent of them arent using a third-party launcher but are instead sticking with the default OxygenOS option, App Ape estimates.

Impact: Between the increased commitment to marketing and the fact that OnePlus now secured its first distribution agreement with a U.S. carrier  T-Mobile  the upcoming OnePlus 6T is likely to more than double the firms stateside customer base in spite of an incremental price increase its expected to introduce. Being a BBK Electronics-owned company with no direct ties to Beijing, OnePlus may also manage to avoid regulatory issues with Washington that have been preventing Huawei and ZTE from doing large-scale business in the country so far, with both of those firms being repeatedly labeled as a national security threat.
BarcelonaTxell Bonet, the partner of Jordi Cuixart, believes that if imprisoned political leaders and activists are convicted, there should be a "stoppage of the country such as that of the 3-Oct, demonstrations and, on the judicial front, appeals in the Constitutional Court and with the European Court of Human Rights. "The Catalan population, as it has demonstrated, can rally and can take to the streets to protest the sentence. There could be a new general stoppage such as on October 3 [last year] if a guilty verdict is handed down", notes the partner of Omnium Cultural president Jordi Cuixart, who remarked that she was speaking in a personal capacity. "Rejecting the sentence means to not keep quiet, to do something, and in doing it in parallel, everything will come together", she added, also highlighting the need to appeal to the TC and to Strasbourg.

In an interview with the CNA (Catalan News Agency), Bonet admits that she is expecting the "worst" but trusts that the testimony of the defendants or the possible presence of "international observers" during the trial may serve to "accuse the State of all the violations of human and fundamental rights that have occurred". "Jordi always tells me: when you see that they add up all the sentences and a three-digit number appears in the newspapers, don't be scared," explained Bonet.

During the interview with the CNA, Bonet stated that her partner should not request a pardon in the event of a conviction because he is not "guilty." According to her, "it's someone else's job" to suggest a pardon, but would not rule out accepting it if it is offered. "If you are not guilty don't ask for it, but that does not mean you shouldn't accept it," she said.

The Jordis, "mediators" on 20-S

A year after the searches of public buildings in Barcelona and protests at the Ministry of Economy, Bonet said that the pre-trial imprisonment of Jordi Cuixart and Jordi Sanchez for sedition on October 16, 2017 was the result of "an attempt by the highest levels of the Spanish justice system to criminalize citizen mobilization." According to her, Spains judicial authorities "believe that by locking away the leaders of civil society in prison the Catalan population will be afraid of taking to the streets."

About September 20 last year, Bonet also emphasized that Sanchez and Cuixart only participated in the "spontaneous" protest as "mediators" and not as "organizers." Bonet also claimed that "some biased media" used the photo of the two leaders on top of the police car as proof of "alleged violence", and at the same time called for someone to produce "evidence" of the alleged "injured" of 20-S.

Txell Bonet also denied any preferential treatment towards the politicians jailed in Catalan prisons, following recent accusations from Xavier Garcia Albiol, leader of the PP in Catalonia. According to her, the rules for the jailed politicians are the same as for the other inmates; that is, "40 minutes behind a glass partition and the conjugal visits that apply in each situation," as well as institutional visits, which "were very difficult to sort out" in the Madrid prisons.
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Do it yourself if you can We accept  in principle  that private equity can deliver (somewhat) excess returns over most other asset classes. But there are a lot of qualifications attached to that, and most of them are very relevant to whether and how pension funds should invest in private equity.
Fire crews lived for weeks in tents in El Jebel as they fought the Lake Christine Fire. Many officials who worked on the blaze are scheduled to attend three forums this month on the changing nature of wildfires.
Komgo has the potential to transform the way trade and commodities financing takes place and is a tangible example of how blockchain technology can reimagine and refashion old and inefficient processes, said Murphy. We look forward to supporting them with legal advice and services as they establish themselves and grow.

Saudi Arabia to see surge in foreign investment

International law firms can expect to see new levels of business involving clients investing in Saudi Arabia following changes to the business and legal landscape.

The Saudi Ministry of Justice said on Thursday that it expects foreign direct investment to surge amid legal and regulatory reforms that have made it easier to obtain business licenses, relaxed restrictions on foreign ownership, and strengthened employment and commercial court systems.

"The Ministry has taken several steps to ensure reliable, pragmatic legal processes are in place to serve the continued prosperity of the nation, the Ministry said. The strides forward we have taken in our labour and commercial courts, and our introduction of enhanced efficiencies across the legal system, will likely encourage a wave of foreign investment and a surge in employment.

Bayer unit asks court to toss $289 million verdict

Lawyers have requested the dismissal of a jury verdict concerning allegations that certain weed-killer products have caused cancer.
She brings international experience to the firm, having begun her legal career in the UK as assistant solicitor at Pinsent Masons and DLA Piper. She has also served as a partner at Halliwells, director at DWF, and partner at Keoghs. In 2012, she moved to Australia and joined Wotton + Kearney as a senior associate. She joined Curwoods Lawyers in 2014.

Algie, who also brings some international experience to Carter Newell, is focused on general liability disputes and professional negligence claims involving the health profession, the firm said.

As the firms eastern seaboard practice grows, the addition of these experienced lawyers enables us to continue to deliver strong results for our clients, said Sydney partner Michael Bath.

Bowker and Algie join an insurance practice that acts for major insurance companies, Lloyds syndicates, underwriting agencies, captive insurers, affinity groups, self-insureds and insurance brokers across Australia and overseas, including London and Singapore.

In July, the firm welcomed two senior lawyers to the partnership, and promoted a new special counsel. In April, the firm promoted a new partner and welcomed another from a national rival.
Williams, who was the firms head in Aberdeen, Scotland, recently relocated to Perth. The office opened last year with a four-partner team hire from another global law firm.

Scott, who was a partner at Herbert Smith Freehills in Singapore for the last seven years, brings more than 15 years experience in M&A and transactional work across the Asia-Pacific region, with a focus on the oil and gas sector. Pinsent Masons said that he will work alongside colleagues across the region and in the firms key oil and gas hubs of Aberdeen, Dubai, London, and Singapore.

Brian's appointment represents another step in the firm's development of a leading transactional practice across Australia and Southeast Asia, where oil and gas is a particular focus for us due to the prevalence of strategically important oil and gas hubs such as Perth and Singapore, said Andrew Masraf, partner and head of transactional services. Perth is the principal commercial and technical base for one of the largest collections of gas basins in the world. Brians wide-ranging experience across different jurisdictions will also boost the firms wider global proposition for clients in corporate transactional work.
A majority of Americans believe Bob Woodward's book and the anonymous NYT op-ed  both of which warned of internal resistance to President Trump  but there's no evidence that they've changed Americans' opinions of him, according to a new Axios/SurveyMonkey poll.

Why it matters: Everything is partisan. If two major news bombshells warning of White House chaos don't change things, it's further evidence that Americans' opinions of Trump are set in stone, whether they like him or not.

Between the lines: Although 51% think the Trump administration is not competent at managing the federal government, and only 46% believe it is competent, that's actually slightly better than similar SurveyMonkey polling in October and November 2017  when 41% said the administration said the Trump administration is competent and 57% said it's not.

The voter subgroups Axios is tracking are split on this. White suburban women and #NeverHillary independents are narrowly divided on the administration's competence, rural voters are solidly behind the administration, and millennials and African American women are convinced it's incompetent.

Americans' views are significantly swayed by their opinions of Trump: 81% of those who already disapprove of Trump believe the reports of "significant resistance" within the White House, but 73% of those who approve of him disbelieve those claims.

Their views on impeachment are virtually identical to those in an Axios/SurveyMonkey poll last month: 45% say Congress should begin the impeachment process, 52% say it shouldn't.

to those in an Axios/SurveyMonkey poll last month: 45% say Congress should begin the impeachment process, 52% say it shouldn't. There was a marginal decline in Trump's overall approval compared to SurveyMonkey's weekly tracking poll. (It's down to 42%, compared to the 44-46% range between April and August.)

The bottom line: There's very little that can change people's opinions of Trump at this point, and it's going to take more than a book and an op-ed to change that.

Methodology: This analysis is based on SurveyMonkey online surveys conducted Sept. 12-13, 2018 among 2,173 adults in the United States. The modeled error estimate for the full sample is plus or minus 3 percentage points. Sample sizes and modeled error estimates for the subgroups are as follows:

African-American Women (n=172 +/- 8.5), Millennials Age 18 - 34 (n=409, +/- 6), White Suburban Women (n=366 , +/- 7), NeverHillary/Independent voters (n= 121, +/- 12), Rural (n= 525, +/- 6). Respondents for this survey were selected from the more than 2 million people who take surveys on the SurveyMonkey platform each day. More information about our methodology here. Crosstabs available here.
If Brett Kavanaugh's nomination sinks, Democrats would turn the midterms into a referendum not just on President Trump but also womens rights, abortion and the future of the Supreme Court, sources tell Axios.

Why it matters: In what Republicans believe is an increasingly unlikely scenario where Kavanaugh tanks, Dems believe they can juice turnout  already hitting record levels  by playing off the huge public attention to the court, and Roe v. Wade in particular.

They envision President Obama and Michelle Obama locking arms with the Clintons, the Bidens, and Democratic congressional leaders to crank up a presidential-election-sized campaign.

President Obama and Michelle Obama locking arms with the Clintons, the Bidens, and Democratic congressional leaders to crank up a They feel confident every rich liberal in America would help fund this effort.

If Democrats downed Kavanaugh, the White House would be inclined to nominate someone at least as conservative, or even more vocally so  perhaps Judge Amy Coney Barrett of Chicago, a Catholic conservative.

Brian Fallon, executive director of the progressive court group Demand Justice, said such a choice "would simultaneously electrify evangelicals on their side, and animate progressives on our side."

executive director of the progressive court group Demand Justice, said such a choice "would simultaneously electrify evangelicals on their side, and animate progressives on our side." "There wasnt anybody else on the short list who has more pronounced positions against abortion and Obamacare," Fallon said. "It wouldnt take a lot to explain the urgent threat to progressives."

Be smart: Matt Miller, a former aide to Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer, told me that a court opening during the stretch run of midterms would "convince Democrats all around the country, many of whom have been afraid that nothing matters anymore, that some things still do matter."

But Republicans, panicked as the week began, are increasingly confident that Kavanaugh will be confirmed next week:

A top Democrat close to the negotiations tells me it now looks unlikely that Dr. Christine Blasey Ford will testify on Monday.

close to the negotiations tells me it now looks that Dr. Christine Blasey Ford will testify on Monday. Smart brevity ... Jeffrey Toobin on CNN: "If she refuses to testify on Monday, Kavanaugh is getting confirmed." (hat tip: Brian Stelter)

Jeffrey Toobin on CNN: "If she refuses to testify on Monday, Kavanaugh is getting confirmed." (hat tip: Brian Stelter) The top Democrat said Republicans may "win the battle of confirmation, but could lose the war of public opinion" if the accuser looks railroaded.

A source involved in the process tells Jonathan Swan: "There is certainly some level of unity [between Senate Rs and the White House] that its bizarre [that] after offering to testify, it now appears she doesnt want to."
A new study of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet's response to past warm periods has unsettling implications for the magnitude and timing of sea level rise as global warming continues. Until recently, most of scientists' concerns were about the instability of Greenland and the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, but that is starting to change.

Why it matters: The study, published Wednesday in the journal Nature, reveals the history of ice retreat and expansion in the Wilkes Subglacial Basin, in the southeastern corner of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet. The fate of the Antarctic Ice Sheet represents one of the largest uncertainties in climate science.

How they did it: An international team of scientists drilled into the ocean floor off the coast of the Wilkes Subglacial Basin to obtain sediment cores. They then analyzed the chemical composition and other properties for clues about past glacial behavior.

Glaciers carve out and drag sediment from rocks as they flow into the sea over time, leaving a historical record of their ebb and flow buried under layers of the ocean floor.

The researchers unearthed this sediment from the deep and examined how this part of East Antarctica responded to warming during the late Pleistocene Interglacial periods, between ice ages in the past 450,000 years.

What they found: The study concludes that a sustained, moderate amount of warming, on the order of 2C, or 3.6F, would cause significant melting of the interior ice that lies below sea level in this region. This could raise global sea levels by 3 to 4 meters, or up to 13 feet.

What they're saying: "Over the last few years, a picture has started to emerge of [the] vulnerability of low-lying areas of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet to temperatures only a few degrees warmer than today," study lead author David Wilson, a researcher at Imperial College London, told Axios.

"What we are now demonstrating... is that this region of Antarctica is even more sensitive to regional warming than previously recognized."

 David Wilson, Imperial College London

Wilson said gaining a better understanding of glaciers' historical movement will help researchers accurately project future sea level rise.

Richard Alley, a climate scientist at Penn State who was not involved in the new study, told Axios via email that the new study improves our understanding of East Antarctica's fragility.

"There is a long way to go to combine this new evidence with other research to improve estimates of future sea-level rise from different levels of warming, but it does add to the growing body of evidence that we could soon commit to large sea-level rise," he said.

Isabella Velicogna, a professor at the University of California at Irvine, told Axios that this paper fits the theme of other studies coming out of East Antarctica, all showing it's "less stable than we have thought." She was not involved in the new study.

"The importance of this study is that it calls for more attention for East Antarctica."

 Isabella Velicogna, University of California at Irvine
The recent surge of right-wing populist movements in Europe has become a dominant narrative in international media, but the actual election performance of nationalist parties suggests that the scale of their growing influence may be overblown  and that their rise may be rooted in social forces besides migration.

Expand chart Data: National election commissions and statistical offices. Get the data. Chart: Harry Stevens/Axios

The big picture: An Axios analysis found that in the last two election cycles, right-wing populist parties, as defined by the Foundation for European Progressive Studies, experienced gains (>0.05%) in 15 out of the 27 countries that will vote in next year's European Parliament elections. But a number of these parties were already growing prior to the 2015 refugee crisis  often cited as the main factor in the rise of the far-right  while others lost support after the crisis, despite vowing to cap immigration.

The details: Because EU countries all have distinct voting calendars, the election years referenced in the data stretch anywhere from June 2009 (Luxembourg) to September 2018 (Sweden).

The two most dominant right-wing parties in Europe are Hungary's Fidesz-KDNP and Poland's Law and Justice . Their illiberal policies  including, in both cases, a crackdown on the independent judiciary  have made them the only two countries to ever be censured by the European Parliament for undermining democratic values.

and . Their illiberal policies  including, in both cases, a crackdown on the independent judiciary  have made them the only two countries to ever be censured by the European Parliament for undermining democratic values. The party that has made the largest gains is Italy's League , which saw a 13.3% increase in vote share in an election held earlier this year. The party is led by Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini, an immigration hardliner who has closed Italy's borders to refugees and called on Europe to share the burden of migration.

, which saw a 13.3% increase in vote share in an election held earlier this year. The party is led by Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini, an immigration hardliner who has closed Italy's borders to refugees and called on Europe to share the burden of migration. While the migrant crisis has undoubtedly fueled parties like League, others like Latvia's National Alliance and the Sweden Democrats  which just had their best electoral performance ever  were already growing. Meanwhile, parties like France's National Front and Finland's Finn Party actually performed worse after the migrant crisis had begun.

In an interview with The Globe Post, populism expert Cas Mudde called the refugee crisis "at best a catalyst, not the main cause" of growing nationalism. He said that while no Western democracy is naturally immune to the far-right, its electoral success is instead largely driven by dissatisfaction with mainstream parties and elements of the media that overplay migration failures and underplay successes.

The bottom line: The EU is comprised of 28 (soon to be 27) distinct countries and cultures, and the rise of right-wing populism  while strengthened by broader European crises  is rooted in structures unique to each society.

Go deeper:
Some of Americas most powerful U.S.-based oil companies  ExxonMobil, Chevron and Occidental Petroleum  are joining a global consortium of oil and gas producers seeking to address climate change, Axios has learned.

Why it matters: The companies are the first U.S.-based members of the group, called the Oil and Gas Climate Initiative. This is one of the strongest signs yet of how Americas biggest oil companies, under pressure from investors and lawsuits, are joining most other U.S. corporations in working to reduce greenhouse gas emissions despite President Trump reversing Americas course on the matter.

Driving the news: CEOs of most of the groups 13 member companies, including Saudi Aramco, Shell, BP and Occidental, are scheduled to speak at an event Monday in New York City hosted by the group and facilitated by Columbia Universitys Center on Global Energy Policy, led by former Obama officials.

It will take the collective efforts of many in the energy industry and society to develop scalable, affordable solutions that will be needed to address the risks of climate change.

 Exxon CEO Darren Woods, according to a draft release viewed by Axios

By the numbers: The groups companies represent 30% of the worlds oil and gas production, and 20% of the planets primary energy consumption. Their clout is now truly global, with the addition of American companies, which had been a notable omission since the groups founding four years ago. Government-owned oil companies other than Aramco are also members, including Chinas CNPC and Mexicos Pemex.

What they're saying: Spokespeople for companies involved declined to comment, as did Columbia University. CEOs of Exxon and Chevron likely cant make Monday's event due to prior obligations, along with CEOs of one or two foreign-based companies, people familiar with the planning say.

The groups purpose is twofold:

Work toward cleaner operations, particularly in the area of emissions of methane, a potent greenhouse gas thats the primary component of natural gas. These efforts are continuing and growing despite Trump repealing methane regulations. Investment in new technologies, for which members contribute to a $1 billion investment fund. The primary goal is to commercialize technologies that capture carbon dioxide, but also include ones like reducing methane emissions, lowering transportation sector pollution and improving energy efficiency. The new member companies will contribute $100 million to the fund, according to a press release issued after publication of this story.

The other side: Environmentalists and others skeptical of the industry say commitments by oil companies to address climate change ring largely hollow absent more aggressive action urging governments to price carbon emissions. The groups mission is expressly not geared toward influencing any government policy.

Between the lines: CEOs of several major, publicly traded oil companies say they support carbon taxes and back a separate group writing a proposal for one. But the companies are not actively lobbying Congress to embrace the policy. That disconnect will grow harder to reconcile as their public commitments to address climate change, such as through groups like this, grow.

Go deeper: Big Oil teeters between enemy and ally in climate fight

Editor's note: This piece has been updated with new information on monetary contributions.
Objections to Googles possible re-entry into the Chinese search market are uniting Republicans, Democrats and some of Google's own employees in a rare alignment against the company.

Why it matters: Google abandoned China in 2010 rather than censor its search results according to the Chinese government's wishes. Any effort by the company to return to this gigantic market stirs up ethical questions raised by that history.

The big picture: Some Google controversies, like its role in Russian election interference in 2016, have upset lawmakers. Others, like a company contract with the Defense Department, have outraged employees. This one has done both.

At the Googleplex: Employee discontent has burst into public view since a report this summer that Google was pursuing a project under the name Dragonfly to look at creating a censored version of its search engine for China.

A list of employees who have quit over the matter is circulating internally, per BuzzFeed News has spoken publicly

On Capitol Hill: Lawmakers wrote a letter about Dragonfly to Google last month, and frustrations with the company are high because it wouldnt send a senior enough executive to a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on election meddling.

I think the employees should be critical, Intelligence Committee Vice Chairman Mark Warner (D-Va.) said, adding that creating "a censored search engine, doing joint research with AI when most of the companies in China are totally co-opted by the Chinese government" doesn't seem to meet the company's "standards."

This is just one of several controversies over which Google faces growing pressure.

Some lawmakers are also frustrated at Googles decision not to renew a contract with a Defense Department program known as Project Maven. Some employees had protested against that project.

Instead of consciously compromising American ideals and values, Googles executives should reject Beijings repressive censorship and reconsider their decision to stop working with the U.S. military on Project Maven, said Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) in a statement.

What Google is saying: Reached Wednesday, a Google spokesperson said in a previously-released statement that work on Chinese search has been "exploratory" and it is "not close to launching a search product in China.

It has looked to calm Congress fears. We are approaching these issues deliberately, and whether we would or could release a search service in China remains unclear, chief executive Sundar Pichai said in a letter responding to lawmakers last month.

The bottom line: Increasingly, it's looking like Googles moment in the D.C. hot seat. With Congress's eye on China thanks to concerns about cyber-espionage and heightened trade tensions, Google's new China moves can only raise the temperature.
A new report shows that a military contractor has likely sold spyware to repressive regimes. But the study's authors and other experts differ on how to stop the problem.

The big picture: That study, released Tuesday by the University of Toronto's Citizen Lab, found that 36 surveillance networks used commercial militarized spyware made by the Israeli NSO Group.

Many countries operated more than one network, and six of the suspected countries  including Bahrain, Kazakhstan and Saudi Arabia  had histories of using spyware to target dissidents, journalists and other civil targets.

Some uses veered toward the petty: One cluster of infections hit supporters of a soft drink tax in Mexico.

NSO is far from the only spyware maker that sells its tools to countries that might be repressive.

It happens often enough that companies follow the same script. They say, We only sell to law enforcement. Were self-regulating,'" says Bill Marczak, the author of the Citizen Lab report. "But if this wasnt being used to target civil society, it would never cross our desks.

We can't get rid of the industry altogether. Lots of countries use commercial spyware for legitimate purposes. The study's list includes the U.S. and Canada, and the new U.S. strategy for military cybersecurity released earlier this week calls for more use of "off-the-shelf" hacking tools.

Citizen Lab's solution: regulation. The best step to keep the tools in line would be a process of export controls with humanitarian restrictions rather than just defense and national security ones, says Marczak.

Yes, but: The security industry is still stinging from the last time a powerful group of countries tried to do just that.

The nations of the Wassenaar Arrangement, an arms export pact that includes the U.S., EU and others, tried to use that agreement to slow the spread of commercial malware to repressive regimes in 2013.

The move was ultimately a disaster. Poor definitions in the agreement inadvertently applied limits not just to spying tools, but to research into spying tools, security testing software and other products that might need to replicate something bad to accomplish something good. Researchers  and Congress  rebelled.

Katie Moussouris, a cybersecurity expert brought in by the State Department to renegotiate the Wassenaar Arrangement, says, "Weve already seen for 20 years that export controls on software have been hard to do with surgical precision."

Moussouris, the CEO of Luta Security, says better alternatives might include sanctions against misbehaving countries or intervention under the military's new cyber strategy.

The bottom line: There are no easy fixes.
South Korean President Moon Jae-in told reporters Thursday that North Korean leader Kim Jong-un would like a second summit with President Trump "at the earliest convenience in order to speed up the denuclearization process," reports the Washington Post.

The big picture: Moon just returned from a three-day summit with Kim in North Korea, during which they announced several agreements, including a pledge by Kim to allow international verifiers into the country and dismantle a key nuclear site if the U.S. takes "corresponding steps." Kim also requested that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo visit North Korea and called for an official end to the Korean War by the end of the year.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo decided to continue support for the Saudi-led coalition in Yemen  over the objections of some State Department staffers  due to a potential loss of billions of dollars in weapons sales to allies in the region, per the Wall Street Journal.

The big picture: Pompeo certified to Congress last week that he believes Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates were working to reduce civilian casualties in Yemen, despite concerns from State specialists on the region. State's Bureau of Legislative Affairs was the only internal group to argue for Pompeo's full support of the Saudis, according to the WSJ report, claiming that "failure to certify may also negatively impact future foreign military sales and direct commercial sales to the region." State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert told the Journal that while "our Saudi and Emirati partners are making progress, we are continuing discussions with them on additional steps they can take to address the humanitarian situation."
The war of words between Nikol Pashinian and his coalition partners continued on Thursday when a leading member of Gagik Tsarukians Prosperous Armenia Party (BHK) accused the Armenian prime minister of blackmail.

Pashinian launched verbal attacks on his nominal allies following the start of campaigning for the September 23 municipal elections in Yerevan He claimed last week that political forces portraying themselves as guardians of the revolution are secretly collaborating with the former ruling Republican Party (HHK) in a bid to get more votes.

The allegations were rejected by top representatives of the BHK and Republic, another party represented in the Armenian government.

Republic leader Aram Sarkisian said on Tuesday that Pashinian is alienating political groups that helped him come to power. He warned that they might stop supporting Pashinians plans to force snap parliamentary elections in the months ahead.

Such polls are critical for the political future of the premier, who fully controls only a handful of seats in the current Armenian parliament.

Pashinian doubled down on his rhetoric at an election campaign rally held late on Wednesday.He again claimed that unnamed forces tried to cut election-related deals with the HHK. He also warned them against blocking the fresh general elections.

The decision to hold pre-term parliamentary elections was not made by me, it was made by the people, Pashinian told the rally. He who goes against that decision will face a political demise in Armenia.

Those forces that say they could vote against fresh elections must get no votes in these elections because they are against the people, he declared.

Naira Zohrabian, the BHKs mayoral candidate in Yerevan, angrily denounced Pashinians remarks as she campaigned in the citys Erebuni district on Thursday. Enough with threatening us with the people, enough with constantly blackmailing us with the people, she told RFE/RLs Armenian service.

Whatever decision we make [on snap elections] it will be our decision, it will not be made under pressure from anyone or as a result of any blackmail, said Zohrabian.

Earlier this week, the BHK accused Pashinian loyalists of conducting, through online and social media, a smear campaign against Zohrabian. The Pashinian camp denied the accusations.
By Trend

Over the past 24 hours, Armenian armed forces have 90 times violated the ceasefire along the line of contact between Azerbaijani and Armenian troops, the Azerbaijani Defense Ministry said Sept. 20.

Armenian armed forces were using heavy machine guns.

The conflict between the two South Caucasus countries began in 1988 when Armenia made territorial claims against Azerbaijan. As a result of the ensuing war, in 1992 Armenian armed forces occupied 20 percent of Azerbaijan, including the Nagorno-Karabakh region and seven surrounding districts.

The 1994 ceasefire agreement was followed by peace negotiations. Armenia has not yet implemented four UN Security Council resolutions on withdrawal of its armed forces from the Nagorno-Karabakh and the surrounding districts.

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By Rashid Shirinov

From more than 1 million Azerbaijani refugees and internally displaced persons, over 400,000 are women and more than 300,000 are children, Hijran Huseynova, Chairwoman of Azerbaijan State Committee for Family, Women and Children Affairs, said on September 20.

She noted that during the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict Azerbaijan achieved the release of 1,114 people who were held hostage and captive by the Armenian side.

There are 223 children, 363 women and 224 old people among them. Rehabilitation work is very important for their integration into society, Huseynova said.

The chairwoman added that 29 children, 98 women and 112 old people still remain hostage.

Their fate is still unknown, which we are very worried about, Huseynova said. She appealed to civil societies and international organizations to pay special attention to this issue.

The chairwoman also reminded that the genocide committed by Armenia against Azerbaijanis in Khojaly was recognized by ten countries of the world.

The bloody war, which flared up in the late 1980s due to Armenias territorial claims against Azerbaijan, led to occupation of 20 percent of Azerbaijans territory, including Nagorno-Karabakh and seven surrounding regions by Armenian armed forces. In a brutal war, more than 20,000 Azerbaijanis were killed and over 1 million were displaced as a result of the large-scale hostilities.

Armenia repeatedly refused to submit information regarding the fate of thousands of Azerbaijanis who went missing or were taken hostage during the war.

Azerbaijan has many times declared its readiness to begin negotiations with Armenia to free the captives and resolve the long-standing Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. However, the Armenian side keeps ignoring all attempts of Azerbaijan and international organizations, thereby disrespecting the international law and hindering the settlement of the conflict.

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Rashid Shirinov is AzerNews staff journalist, follow him on Twitter: @RashidShirinov

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By Trend

The World Bank (WB) recommends Azerbaijan to strengthen measures on the development of human capital, Head of the WB Baku Office Naveed Hassan Naqvi said in an interview with Trend.

"There are only two resources that Azerbaijan has - oil and people," he said. "The oil resource is depleting. Oil production reached the peak in 2010-2011. I think it was more than 1.1 million barrels per day, now its less than 700,000 and it is going down. Of course, some gas discoveries have led to an additional source of revenue, and the WB was at the forefront of getting the TANAP pipeline build and finance, but that will not fully replace the oil revenues."

Regarding the second resource, the population, Naqvi said that Azerbaijan is the only country where the population is growing and young population is also increasing.

"If you look across the region in neighboring countries the population is declining," he said. "In Georgia from 1991, its gone from 5 million people to 3.7 million people now. The similar decline is in Armenia."

"But now we have to make sure that these people are given quality education, quality healthcare, and an environment in which they can start businesses and create jobs," he noted. "So the next step for Azerbaijan is to make this hard investment. Thats because unlike roads, where if you put money in it, next year you will see the road, for education or healthcare, you have to start investing now and you will see benefits in a few years."

"I know that the government is doing a lot on improving the Doing Business indicators," he said, adding that a more systemic and holistic approach is needed to improve the human capital in Azerbaijan.

Azerbaijan joined the WB group in 1992.

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By Laman Ismayilova

A press conference dedicated to the first ever festival Fantazia has been held in Baku.

The festival will take place in Azerbaijan's capital on November 1-10 as part of the Year of Cultural Heritage in Europe.

The head of the EU Delegation to Azerbaijan, Ambassador Kestudis Jankauskas, the first adviser to the EU representation in Azerbaijan Denis Danilidis, the heads of the diplomatic missions in Azerbaijan Aurelia Buschez (France), Onno Kervers (Netherlands), Marek Janusz Tsalka (Poland), Victor Shederkenyi (Hungary) , Andrea Syuhl (Germany), Rodrigo Labardini (Mexico), the head of the Office of the State Historical and Architectural Reserve "Icherisheher" Riad Gasimov, the head of the Department of International Relations of the State Agency ARISING Tourism Jamil Talibzade, director of Azerbaijan Carpet Museum Shirin Melikova, artist Sabina Shikhlinskaya and others attended the press conference.

A video of the festival was presented at the event. The speakers noted that various concert programs, seminars, excursions, film screenings, exhibitions and a number of other events will be organized within the framework of the festival.

It was stressed that Azerbaijan is one of the important partners of the European Union and the state pays special attention to the preservation and propaganda of the national, historical and cultural heritage.

The festival received its name from the architectural landmark of Baku - the Fantazia bathhouse, which was built at the end of the 19th century, and it closely intertwined Eastern and European traditions.

2018 is declared the Year of Cultural Heritage in Europe. The slogan for the year is: "Our heritage: where the past meets the future".

During this year, projects are underway in Europe devoted to a diverse cultural heritage, both at the level of the European Union and at the national, regional and local levels. The aim of the European Year of Cultural Heritage is to encourage more people to discover and engage with Europe's cultural heritage, and to reinforce a sense of belonging to a common European space.

The cultural heritage forms our identity and determines the course of our daily life, according to the speakers.

We can see it in big cities, small towns of Europe, natural landscapes and archaeological sites. It also manifests itself in literary works, art, folk crafts, passed down from generation to generation. This legacy comes to life in our stories told to the children; in food, which we share with friends, and in films in which we learn ourselves.

It is important to preserve the cultural heritage and pass it on to future generations. We are used to treating the cultural heritage as something static, something related only to the past. In fact, the cultural heritage is developed through our interaction with it. It is also important to understand that our heritage plays a significant role in building the future of Europe.

The festival is held by the European Union Delegation in Azerbaijan in cooperation with the Embassies of Germany, France, Greece, Poland, Croatia, the Netherlands and Hungary, with the participation of the diplomatic missions of Mexico, Moldova and Morocco and the support of United Cultures.

The official partners of the festival are the State Tourism Agency, Administration of the State Historical-Architectural Reservation Icheri Sheher, Azerbaijan Carpet Museum, Maksud Ibrahimbeyov Creative Centre, Yarat Contemporary Art Center, Ca Foscari University of Venice, ADA University, Azerbaijan National University of Culture and Arts, The Landmark Hotel and Baku Business Center.

Media partners of the event are Azernews.az, Trend.az, Day.az, Milli.az.

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Laman Ismayilova is AzerNews staff journalist, follow her on Twitter: @Lam_Ismayilova

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By Laman Ismayilova

Russian New Life Brass quintet performed at International Mugham Center on September 19.

The concert was held as part of the 10th Uzeyir Hajibeyli International Music Festival.

New Life Brass - brass musical ensemble, was formed in 2009 by students of the Gnesin Academy of Music (the second year of study). The ensemble gathered musicians from different countries (Russia, Kazakhstan, Belarus) and different nationalities.

The world-renowned quintet consists of wind instruments. New Life Brass participates in various international competitions and festivals. The repertoire of the musicians includes works of classical and jazz genres.

The Baku audience welcomed the quintet with great interest.

The 10th Uzeyir Hajibeyli International Music Festival once again brings together the world-renowned musicians from Azerbaijan, Russia, the U.S., Turkey, Italy and Slovakia.

The Festival, scheduled for September 18-26, is taking place in Baku.

The birthday of legendary composer Uzeyir Hajibeyli (September 18) is celebrated as National Music Day in Azerbaijan since 1995. The International Music Festival is organized yearly to honor creativity of the world-famous composer.

According to tradition, annually on this day outstanding performers, orchestras from many countries gather in Baku to demonstrate their skills, performing in the best concert halls of the capital.

The festival is supported by the Heydar Aliyev Foundation and the Ministry of Culture.

The event program is incredibly diverse and includes not only concerts of famous music groups, but also creative evenings, conferences and much more.

Uzeyir Hajibeylis outstanding musical talent started a revolution in the Azerbaijani musical timeline. He was the very musician to introduce an extraordinary innovation in the nation's music culture, to constantly refresh it, and adjust to modern tastes. He was a founder of an opera genre not only in Azerbaijan, but the East and created the first Muslim opera in the Islamic world.

His unique synthesis of Oriental and Western music significantly promoted the classical music traditions in the East and opened a page of classical music patterns.

The unique composer was brave enough to explore blending two incompatibly different cultures at root and achieve an unprecedented synthesis.

History recognizes Hajibeyli as an innovator as well as the first to establish a professional music school and Orchestra for Traditional Folk Instruments, to compose the Muslim worlds first opera and operetta, to introduce a woman on stage, to write the countrys national anthem (which is the official anthem of Azerbaijan today), to be awarded the highest artistic title of the Soviet Union.

Through his music as well as work as a journalist, teacher, and translator, Hajibeyli played a vital role in the fight against illiteracy and helped usher in a cultural shift, launching a period of enlightenment that transcended Azerbaijans borders and reached many others in the Eurasia region.

"Arshin Mal Alan" or The Cloth Peddler was the latest and one of the most popular operettas of the eminent composer. The comedic and romantic operetta premiered in Azerbaijan in 1913, thus becoming the first operetta in the entire Muslim world.

It become one of the most well-known and dearly-loved stories among Azerbaijanis. The operetta has been successfully performed in a plethora of languages in over 60 countries of the world, including in U.S, Austria, France, China, Greece, India, Russia, and Turkey.

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Laman Ismayilova is AzerNews staff journalist, follow her on Twitter: @Lam_Ismayilova

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By Lamana Ismayilova

The French band Trio Initiatives will perform at Rotunda Jazz Club on October 20.

The concert will be held as part of Baku International Jazz Festival. The event starts at 20.00.

The Trio Initiatives includes Jean-Christophe Schole (piano), Gildas Bocklen (double bass) and Simon Bernieden (drum). Almost 15 years ago, the band with the name "Trio" appeared on the French music scene. At first there were only three musicians.

Further, the trio turned into a quartet. The Trio Initiatives defines its musical style as "acoustic reggae". The musicians perform guitars, percussion flute, a clarinet or an accordion, but no electronics.

Reggae style, born in Jamaica in the late 1960s, the Trio group combined with the traditions of the French chanson.

The French reggae band released its first album in 1998.

The concert is organized by the Embassy of France in Azerbaijan, Institut Francais dAzerbaijan and Baku International Jazz Festival. The event is supported by Turkish Airlines.

The Baku Jazz Festival is a forum and musical festival including education (seminars, master classes), competition ("Best Jazz Performer"), a "Kids jazz day", art and photo exhibitions, jam sessions and jazz concerts with the participation of best performers of the world of jazz.

The festival has become a member of the Europe Jazz Network, which bring together 115 members from 34 countries.

The revival of jazz in the Land of Fire started in 1960s, thanks to the active efforts of great national composers such as Gara Garayev, Tofig Guliyev, Rauf Hajiyev and Niyazi.

The "flowering" of Azerbaijani jazz is associated with the names of giants such as Rafig Babayev and Vagif Mustafazade, who experimented creating unrepeatable compositions, becoming the founders of a new jazz trend jazz-mugham. This unique genre assembles both a traditional Azerbaijan music and a classic American jazz.

Today, Azerbaijani jazz performers are winners of many international jazz festivals and competitions.

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Laman Ismayilova is AzerNews staff journalist, follow her on Twitter: @Lam_Ismayilova

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By Trend

NATO reiterates importance of the peaceful settlement of the Armenia-Azerbaijan Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, NATO Deputy Secretary General Rose Gottemoeller told reporters in Baku Sept. 20.

She said that the organization supports the work of the OSCE Minsk Group and the efforts of the parties to find a peaceful solution to the conflict.

Gottemoeller noted that NATO is very happy to have such a partner as Azerbaijan, adding that they are working together on projects that meet the interests of Azerbaijan.

She also emphasized joint work in the development of institutions in the defense sphere in Azerbaijan.

NATO believes that by these projects it can help Azerbaijan in the countrys further development as a key player in the region, she said.

She also highly appreciated the active support of Azerbaijan for the NATO mission in Afghanistan. In particular, Gottemoeller stressed the increase in the number of the military contingent of Azerbaijan as part of the NATO mission in Afghanistan.

NATO is also grateful to Azerbaijan for providing transit opportunities as part of this mission, she noted, adding that Azerbaijan participates very effectively in NATOs activity in the fight against terrorism.

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By Rashid Shirinov

Azerbaijan urges the Armenian leadership not to repeat the mistakes of its predecessors, Deputy Foreign Minister of Azerbaijan Khalaf Khalafov said at the 39th session of the UN Human Rights Council.

He noted that for 30 years already the fundamental rights and freedoms of Azerbaijani refugees from Armenia and internally displaced persons (IDPs) from the occupied territories of Azerbaijan have been violated, posing a serious challenge to the UN system and its human rights mechanisms.

In this regard, Azerbaijan calls on the Human Rights Council, as well as its special mechanisms and the High Commissioner for Human Rights to make effective efforts to restore the violated rights of Azerbaijani refugees and IDPs, as required by the relevant resolutions of the UN Security Council and the General Assembly, the deputy minister said.

Azerbaijan, in turn, continues to work to improve the social situation of refugees and IDPs, he added.

Over the past 25 years, more than $8 billion have been allocated for the social protection of this socially vulnerable group. As many as 150 houses, school buildings, kindergarten, medical institutions and other social infrastructure facilities were built and put into operation in the Jojug Marjanli village of Jabrail region, liberated from the Armenian occupation in April 2016 as a result of repelling the offensive of Armenian troops on the frontline settlements, Khalafov noted.

The deputy minister stressed that Armenia continues to ignore the implementation of the relevant resolutions of the Security Council and the UN General Assembly.

Unfortunately, the latest statements of the new leadership of Armenia, in fact, undermine the peace negotiation process, and they are aimed at consolidating the occupation of Azerbaijani territories, thereby putting the region face to face with new threats, Khalafov said.

He emphasized that the full responsibility for the failure of the negotiation process and the escalation of tension in the region lies entirely with the Armenian leadership.

We call on the Armenian leadership not to repeat the mistakes of its predecessors and to take a constructive position in the settlement of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict based on unconditional liberation of all occupied territories of Azerbaijan, respect for and observance of sovereignty, territorial integrity and inviolability of internationally recognized borders of states, Khalafov said.

The Nagorno-Karabakh conflict 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 regions. More than 20,000 Azerbaijanis were killed and over 1 million were displaced as a result of the large-scale hostilities. The 1994 ceasefire agreement was followed by peace negotiations.

Until now, Armenia controls fifth part of Azerbaijans territory and rejects implementing four UN Security Council resolutions on withdrawal of its armed forces from Nagorno-Karabakh and surrounding regions.

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Rashid Shirinov is AzerNews staff journalist, follow him on Twitter: @RashidShirinov

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By Trend

Azerbaijan's President Ilham Aliyev has signed an order to award The honorary diploma of the President of the Republic of Azerbaijan to Mikhail Yefimovich Shvydkoy for his fruitful services rendered to the development of cultural relations between the Republic of Azerbaijan and the Russian Federation.

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By Trend

Azerbaijans defense minister, Colonel General Zakir Hasanov checked the combat readiness and combat capability of military personnel, military equipment, aviation, rocket and artillery mounts of military units stationed in the field conditions in exercise areas, Azerbaijans Defense Ministry said in a message.

In line with the plan of large-scale exercises, the minister visited command and control posts and training points at various training ranges established in accordance with conditions close to the combat ones, and gave relevant instructions in connection with participation of troops, weapons and military equipment in exercises, as well as with accurate implementation of tasks and military orders.

The exercises continue.

In accordance with the plan approved by president of Azerbaijan, Supreme Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces Ilham Aliyev and under the supervision Zakir Hasanov, Azerbaijan launched large-scale operational-tactical exercises on Sept. 17.

The exercises that will last until Sept. 22 involve more than 20,000 military personnel, more than 200 tanks and other armored vehicles, more than 120 rocket and artillery mounts of different calibers, multiple launch rocket systems and mortars, up to 10 fighters and bomber aircraft, as well as up to 20 army aviation units.

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By Naila Huseynli

Individuals and legal entities engaged in beekeeping will be granted with subsidies.

The subsides will be given for each bee family that they keep in accordance with the degree signed by Prime Minister Novruz Mammadov. This decision is valid for five years, including 2018.

Recently, the Azerbaijan Beekeepers Association, together with the countrys Ministry of Economy and Ministry of Agriculture, has prepared a new state program on development of beekeeping. The state program is designed for 2018-2022 in order to eliminate existing shortcomings in this area.

Head of Azerbaijan Beekeepers Association, Badraddin Hasratov also informs that this year slight increase in honey production is expected in Azerbaijan.

He said that these are preliminary predictions, because the filtration of honey in some regions has not yet been completed.

We expect that this year honey production will be about 3,000 tons or more. But this is still the preliminary forecast Hasratov told Trend.

Speaking of forecast reduction, Hasratov emphasized that this problem was related to the weather conditions in some regions. Previously, the Association predicts that 5,000 tonnes of honey will be produced in 2018.

In some mountainous and foothill regions, especially in north-west and northern regions, the productivity was low. This is because of the cold spring, and later sudden warming. As a result, the flowers could not give enough pollen. But in some regions and south of the country, high productivity was recorded. In some places, up to 50 kilograms of product was harvested from a bee family. Therefore, productivity remained at the previous level. Last year, about 20 kilograms of product was harvested from each bee family in these regions. Significant increase in this area was recorded, concluded the head of the association.

The rich climate of subtropics, the riotous diversity of flora and the valuable qualities of local bees - these are the favorable natural conditions of Azerbaijan, which contributed to the maintenance of the centuries-old tradition of beekeeping in Transcaucasia.

During the excavation in The Azokh Cave, where one of the most ancient settlements of the primitive man was discovered, a bowl with the bee depicted on it was found, which once again proves that beekeeping has deep roots in Azerbaijan.

From 1990 to 1999, beekeeping in the country decreased by 45 percent. There were many reasons for that. Most apiaries were destroyed in the area of military operations.

At present, Azerbaijan exported honey, as well as dairy products, eggs and other kinds of food products of animal origin worth $4.71 million, and imported products worth $66.45 million in January-June 2018.

Exports increased by 23.6 percent, and imports - by 11.54 percent in January-June 2018, compared to January-June 2017.

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By Trend

In 2017, Azerbaijan was a strong counterterrorism partner to the United States, the US State Department said in its Country Reports on Terrorism 2017.

Azerbaijans government actively worked to detect and defeat terrorist efforts to move people, money, and materials across its land and maritime borders and within the South Caucasus, said the report.

The State Department noted that Azerbaijani law enforcement and security services conducted operations to disrupt and prevent terror attacks, arrested and prosecuted suspected terrorists.

Azerbaijan also continued supporting North Atlantic Treaty Organization counterterrorism initiatives as one of the Alliances Partnership for Peace countries. Azerbaijan continued efforts to improve Afghan security and stability by co-chairing the Heart of Asia-Istanbul Process; as its co-Chair, Azerbaijan hosted senior officials meetings and a Ministerial Conference, said the report.

Azerbaijan also hosted a working group meeting that highlighted the role of narcotics traffickers in financing terrorism, said the State Department.

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By Naila Huseynli

It is a snake bites season and the Clinical Medical Center of Toxicology warns people to watch their steps while doing outdoor activities.

In this regard, head of Toxicology Department, Azer Magsudov reported that 115 cases of snake, yellow scorpion, steppe spider bites were reported.

He says that since April, 71 people were hospitalized in the Clinical Medical Center of Toxicology with a diagnosis of snakebites, 18 people with steppe spider, 26 people with yellow scorpion.

Magsudov mentioned that the appeals to the hospital with complaints of yellow scorpion and steppe spider bites were recorded by the residents of suburban areas of Baku.

Head of the department stated that according to statistics appeals with complaints snake bites were admitted to the hospital mostly from Shirvan and Hajigabul, Yevlakh, Barda, Kurdamir, and Gabala regions.

In order to protect themselves from snakes, people should repair cracks in homes, as much as possible restrict access to the cellars, which are their favorite places of residence.

Yellow scorpion (Leiurus quinquestriatus ), also known as deathstalker is a species of scorpion, a member of the Buthidae family. They are 3077 millimetres (1.23.0 in) long, with an average of 58 mm (2.3 in). A deathstalker scorpion's sting is extremely painful and also causes paralysis, an inability to move or feel part of the body.

Steppe spider, sometimes known as the Mediterranean black widow is a species in the genus Latrodectus of the widow spiders. Black widow has a very painful bite. In order to avoid getting bitten it is best to avoid dark, hidden spots such as piles of rocks, leaves or wood.

From April 15 up to June 30, as many as 42 incidents were recorded. Most of these were caused by poisonous snake bites. 12 wounded were in serious condition and four of them were children. Death incident was not recorded.

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By Trend

Nazim Shukurov has been appointed the director of the High Tech Park of the Azerbaijan National Academy of Sciences (ANAS), a source in the High Tech Park told Trend Sept. 20.

Earlier, Elkhan Bayramov, deputy director for general issues at the High Tech Park of the ANAS, was the acting director of the park.

Shukurov replaced Vugar Babayev, who is presently director general of the Agrarian Science and Information Consulting Center of Azerbaijans Agriculture Ministry.

The High Tech Park was created in November 2016. It aims to support innovative ideas, fully implementing and selling them in the future.

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Call 281-422-8302 or email david.bloom@baytownsun.com to wish someone a happy birthday. We will print your birthday wish on Page 2 of The Sun.

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By Trend

Azerbaijans State Security Service has disseminated archival documents proving the terror attacks of Armenian Dashnak forces.

The State Security Service declassified some of the materials stored in its archives.

By signing the Treaty of Gulistan in 1813 and the Treaty of Turkmenchay in 1828, the division of Azerbaijans historical lands wasnt completed. On the contrary, the process of exclusion of the Azerbaijani territories by force under the patronage and direct participation of enemy forces became systematic and continued.

The process of purposeful resettlement of Armenians living in many neighboring countries to Azerbaijani lands began. A separatist administrative territorial division under the name Armenian region emerged on the historical lands of Azerbaijan. Then the propaganda of the dream of Greater Armenia began, and for this purpose various Armenian organizations based on fear and terror emerged. Thus, the foundation of a more insidious and purposeful policy of the Armenian-Dashnak forces to eliminate the Azerbaijani people and seize its lands started.

The ideology of terrorism and fascism became an integral part of state policy in Armenia. This ideology is the basis of territorial claims to neighboring states, the policy of ethnic cleansing against Azerbaijanis, Turkic and other peoples. The Armenian terrorist Dashnak forces used the dirtiest methods all the time to achieve their insidious goals, and even couldnt restrain themselves from opposing the tsarist and Soviet Russia, which sheltered them and allowed them to move to the historical lands of Azerbaijan.

When examining the weighty evidence of the atrocities committed by Armenian executioners as part of fascist military formations during the Second World War, the consequences of these atrocities are terrifying.

Today in Armenia, no matter which forces came to power, chauvinism, extremism, military violence, annexation are always propagated and encouraged in the most extreme form, the younger generation is being brought up in the spirit of hatred and intolerance towards neighboring nations, and is being inculcated with a heroic image of Armenians who committed crimes against humanity.

Azerbaijans State Security Service, in the course of researching documentary materials stored in the archives, found numerous factual confirmations of the brutal actions of the Armenian terrorist Dashnak forces, including the Dashnaktsutyun party, which bears the ideology of terrorism, as well as Armenians who were particularly cruel against humanity during the Second World War.

Given the scientific and historical significance of materials from the point of view of protecting the world from terror and the consequences of fascism, the urgency of informing the international community about the results of the policy of annexation and political aggression being pursued by Armenia against Azerbaijan, the need to refer to primary sources in exposing this policy, the State Security Service found it expedient to declassify some of the materials and make them available to the general public.

It was decided to post these materials on the official website of the Service:

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Laman Ismayilova is AzerNews staff journalist, follow her on Twitter: @Lam_Ismayilova

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By Trend

Azerbaijan's Energy Minister Parviz Shahbazov will take part in the 10th meeting of the Joint OPEC+ Ministerial Monitoring Committee, which will be held on September 23 in Algeria, the ministry said in a statement Sept. 20.

The information on the development trend of the oil market will be provided, and the presentation of the Joint Technical Committee on oil production in August will be conducted at the meeting, OPEC announced.

The issue of redistribution of quotas in accordance with the decision taken on June 23 this year at the fourth meeting of the ministers of OPEC and OPEC+ countries regarding the total increase in oil production by one million barrels per day will also be considered.

The meeting of the Monitoring Committee established with the participation of Russia, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Venezuela, Algeria and Oman, takes place every two months.

In December 2016, at a meeting of oil producers in Vienna, 11 non-OPEC member countries, including Azerbaijan, agreed to cut oil production by a total of 558,000 barrels a day. The agreement was concluded for the first half of 2017 and was extended until the end of the first quarter of 2018 at a meeting on May 25, 2017.

At the last OPEC meeting in Vienna, the agreement was extended again until the end of 2018. Azerbaijan supported the decision, and later supported the new agreement of OPEC and OPEC+ countries to return to 100 percent implementation of the deal, that is, to an increase in production by one million barrels per day.

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LUKOIL-Azerbaijan is increasing the number of petrol stations (PS) in its network. In Baku, the company opened its 58th petrol station under LUKOIL brand name. According to the director of CJS LUKOIL-Azerbaijan Eduard Mukhametov, more than 80 thousand people in Azerbaijan are regular daily customers of LUKOIL petrol stations.

This is a highly competitive market, and each customer is important for us. This is why LUKOIL-Azerbaijan continuously monitors the quality of fuel on its petrol stations, constantly expanding its range of services and improving their quality, as well as upgrading its equipment in due time, noted Mukhametov.

Technological equipment installed at the companys petrol stations complies with the existing technical requirements in the Republic of Azerbaijan. LUKOILs fuel dispensers in Azerbaijan are regularly tested for accuracy of distribution of oil products with engagement of public corporation Azerbaijan Institute of Metrology. Fuel dispensers that pass the inspection receive number seals that exclude any non-authorized adjustments. All fuel dispensers at LUKOILs petrol stations in Azerbaijan are also equipped by reverse valves which rule out formation of air locks in the dispensing hose.

Mukhametov noted that each customer is able to check the volume of dispensed fuel at any petrol station using the special equipment available. For any questions related to the quality of service, customers are welcome to contact the round-the-clock hotline.

Since the beginning of the year, we have received 125 complaints, in 113 cases the violations mentioned were not confirmed, which was later accepted by our customers as well. However, 12 appeals provided grounds for disciplinary proceedings against five petrol station employees, seven more employees had to be dismissed  pointed out the Director,  we have no illusions that we have achieved perfection, LUKOIL continuously improves its services at petrol stations to meet expectations of customers. In addition to the hotline and the book of suggestions, we are also focused on modern means of communication, namely social networks which allow us promptly respond to our customers appeals.

PJSC LUKOIL-Azerbaijan operates in the country since 1993. The company manages 58 petrol stations and an oil depot, which ensures transfer of 320.000 tons of oil per year. This helped LUKOIL to become a reliable supplier of diesel fuel and gasoline motor fuel, as well as lubricants to international and Azerbaijani companies operating in the local market.

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By Trend

Representatives from Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan participated in an OSCE-supported regional seminar Combating financing of terrorism: best practices within the OSCE region in Ashgabat, the OSCE said in a message.



The seminar organized by the OSCE Center in Ashgabat aimed to share international standards and best practices in the area of combating the financing of terrorism.

The participants also discussed further strengthening of international and interagency cooperation among the relevant state authorities.



Experts from Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan presented their countries experiences in combating the financing of terrorism and foreign terrorist fighters, highlighting the importance of the relevant legislative framework and of conducting national risk assessments related to the financing of terrorism.

The participants also shared best practices in interagency interaction in the detection of cases of the financing of terrorism and foreign terrorist fighters and stressed the role of international cooperation in the detection of transboundary financial flows.



The OSCE calls on its participating states to apply a coordinated approach to combating terrorism at all levels while promoting interagency and interstate cooperation as well as interaction with relevant international and regional organizations, said Natalya Drozd, head of the OSCE Center in Ashgabat.

An international expert touched upon the distribution schemes to finance terrorism and foreign terrorist fighters and best practices in the detection of transboundary financial flows.

The seminar also addressed analytical methods to detect suspicious transactions and funding sources in the area of the financing of foreign terrorist fighters.



During the practical exercises, participants worked in groups to review cases related to the investigation of terrorist financing cases by financial and criminal intelligence units.

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By Trend

Kazakhstan intends to invest in African states, Kazakh media reported citing FM Kairat Abdrakhmanov's speech at a briefing after his meeting with a delegation of the Foreign Ministry of the Gambia.

"The future is in Africa. It is no coincidence that nowadays all the world's largest investors are investing in various areas of the economy of African countries. And Kazakhstan will not lag behind either and will work to ensure that Africa takes a worthy place not only in our foreign policy, but also in the foreign economic agenda," Abdrakhmanov said.

Development of bilateral relations between Kazakhstan and the Gambia were discussed at the meeting.

"In political terms, our positions coincide on almost all issues on the agenda, not only in the UN Security Council, but also in other organizations. Probably, more attention should be focused on issues of trade and economic cooperation," the minister said.

The Kazakh foreign minister mentioned that in October, the Sixth Congress of Leaders of World and Traditional Religions is planned to be held in Astana and more attention should be paid to close cooperation between countries in development of inter-ethnic and inter-religious dialogue throughout the world.

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By Trend

A French official said Emmanuel Macron will hold talks with his Iranian counterpart Hassan Rouhani in New York.

Negotiations between Paris and Tehran will continue, the official, speaking on conditions of anonymity, said, Fars news agency reported on September 19.

He added that Macron and Rouhani are scheduled to hold a meeting on the sidelines of the 73rd session of the UN General Assembly (UNGA 73).

The session opened on September 18 and runs until September 30.

Iran and the remaining parties to the JCPOA (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action) are expected to hold talks on the sidelines of the event.

Maria Fernanda Espinosa Garces, president-elect of the 73rd session of the UN General Assembly, announced in July that the theme of the general debate will be "Making the United Nations Relevant to All People: Global Leadership and Shared Responsibilities for Peaceful, Equitable and Sustainable Societies."

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By Trend

Russia's largest producer of aqueous polymer dispersions - "Akrilan" company (a portfolio company of "Rusnano" Group OJSC) will supply products worth more than 130 million rubles (nearly $2 million) to three manufacturers of paints and varnishes in Kazakhstan, the press service of "Rusnano" company said in a statement, TASS reported.

The agreements were signed during the 25th International Building and Interiors Exhibition KazBuild, where the "Akrilan" LLC presented the entire range of products and technological innovations, as well as held meetings with partners.

"According to the signed agreements, "Akrilan" LLC expects the total volume of supplies in the amount of 2,000 tons, which will amount to more than 130 million rubles in monetary terms," the "Rusnano" company said in a statement.

General Director of "Akrilan" LLC Oleg Kuzin explained that the company's strategy provides for strengthening its positions in foreign markets, primarily in the CIS countries, while maintaining a leading position in the domestic market.

"Kazakhstan is one of the most promising markets, where we see a serious potential for sales growth and already receive positive feedback from customers. The new contracts will allow for significant strengthening of the companys positions in this direction of activity, which started in 2017 with the supply of the first 500 tons of products", Kuzin said.

The Akrilan LLC is Russia's biggest producer of aqueous polymer dispersions with a market share of 22 percent. The production activity began in Vladimir city in 2009, and in 2012 the "Rusnano" OJSC state corporation joined the Akrilan LLC shareholders.

The company offers a wide range of paint, non-woven and adhesive materials. The company's clients are Russian and international manufacturers of coatings, including Tikkurila and Henkel. "Akrilan" LLC began the first export deliveries to the countries of the Eurasian Economic Union (EEU) in 2016.

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By Trend

The Turkish-American relations will be strengthened through trade, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said following a meeting with the heads of American companies held in Ankara, the Turkish media wrote Sept. 20.

Erdogan noted that Turkey pays special attention to the growth of foreign investment in the country's economy.

"Turkey has opened its doors to all foreign investors and has implemented large-scale economic reforms over the past 16 years," Erdogan said.

President Erdogan held a meeting with 30 heads of American companies in Ankara Sept. 19.

After the deterioration of relations between the US and Turkey, President Erdogan urged foreign companies to invest in the country's economy.

The relations between Washington and Ankara have deteriorated recently, in particular due to the case of the American pastor Andrew Brunson, detained by the Turkish authorities in 2016.

After that, President Donald Trump said that he authorized a double increase in duties on aluminum and steel exported from Turkey to the United States, to 20 and 50 percent, respectively. This decision caused the collapse of the Turkish lira to a historical minimum.

The court of the Turkish city of Izmir refused again on August 17 to release from house arrest the American pastor accused of aiding terrorists.

On August 1, the US Treasury Department imposed sanctions against the Minister of Internal Affairs of Turkey Suleyman Soylu, and Minister of Justice, Abdulhamit Gul due to the fact that Ankara did not allow Brunson to return home.

The Turkish Foreign Ministry condemned the US decision and urged to abandon it.

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By Trend

The ASIA AUTO plant in Ust-Kamenogorsk City of Kazakhstan is starting to manufacture the new LADA Granta cars, the Kazakh media reported Sept. 20.

"LADA retains the status of an anchor brand in Kazakhstans automotive industry. This is the most popular brand among residents of the country: since the beginning of the year, almost a quarter of buyers of new cars in Kazakhstan preferred LADA vehicles. In the first eight months of this year their number increased by 70 percent. Today, the LADA vehicles account for the main share of output of the Kazakh automobile industry. Since the beginning of the year, 51 percent of all cars have been manufactured in Kazakhstan under this brand," President of ASIA AUTO JSC Erik Sagymbayev said.

The Kazakh citizens can already order the new cars, the media reported. The first new Granta cars will arrive in the 19 branches of BIPEK AUTO LLP in November.

The LADA Granta cars of the second generation will retain their place among the leaders of affordability in the market of Kazakhstan. The prices for these cars will start from 2,945,000 tenge. The universal Granta SW with an automatic transmission is offered at the price of 3,950,000 tenge.

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By Trend

The President of Uzbekistan Shavkat Mirziyoyev held on September 19 a meeting dedicated to the analysis of the work in the information and communication technology sector, "Podrobno.uz" reported.

"The information and communication technologies contribute to the accelerated development of all spheres, create convenience for people. The tasks defined at the beginning of the year for the development of this sphere have not been fully implemented. The status of attracting investments into this sector, exporting services and ready software products is absolutely unsatisfactory," Mirziyoyev said.

Therefore, it became necessary to replace the leadership of the ministry, the president said.

"The new minister and his deputies should draw appropriate conclusions and organize their work in a completely different way. It is necessary to quickly eliminate the existing problems and accelerate the development of the industry, dramatically increase the volume of investments and exports, the most important thing is to ensure positive changes in the system as soon as possible," the president said.

Also the task to increase the volume of investments, especially direct ones, to $200 million this year and $500 million in 2019 was set at the meeting.

The head of state gave instructions to increase the credibility of the "Uzbektelecom" company, to develop national mobile operator "UzMobile".

"The low quality of telephony and Internet access services provided to users, as well as the fact that only 27 percent of the existing communication networks are built on fiber-optic lines, the rest  on copper lines were criticized. Instructions were given to improve the speed of internet connection, to completely replace communication networks with fiber-optic lines," the press service of the head of state noted.

The special attention was paid to strengthening of information security. It was noted that there is a shortage of personnel in this industry, in the Tashkent University of Information Technologies and its branches, the teachers with scientific potential account for just 21 percent of the total number of teaching staff.

In this regard, the need to increase the scientific potential of teachers and to expand the scope of research work at the University was noted.

Mirziyoyev instructed to develop a national program scheduled for five years and intended for the development of information and communication infrastructure of the country on the basis of in-depth study of foreign experience.

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By Kamila Aliyeva

Kazakhstan harvested 12.7 million tons of grain as of September 20, Kazinform reported.

According to the Kazakh Ministry of Agriculture, as of the reporting date, agricultural producers harvested yield from about 10 million hectares, or 66.6 percent of the total harvesting area in the regions. The average yield was 12.7 centners per hectare.

In 2017, 13.5 million hectares, or 88.4 percent of the total harvesting area was covered by this time. Last year, about 17.6 million tons of grain was harvested and the average yield was 13 centners per hectare.

According to the data of the Statistics Committee of the Ministry of Economy of Kazakhstan, in 2018, the area sown with agricultural crops amounted to 22.0 million hectares, which is 0.83 percent more than in 2017 (21.84 million hectares).

Of the total area under crops, 15.1 million hectares (68.8 percent) were sown with cereal and legume crops. Last year, this figure amounted to 15.3 million hectares.

The main part of the areas under cereal and legume crops falls to the share of Akmola region  4.3 million hectares (28.5 percent), Kostanay region  4.1 million hectares (26.8 percent), North Kazakhstan region-2.8 million hectares (18.5 percent).

The forecast of grain consumption in Kazakhstan for the coming season is 9.9 million tons. This year, the volume of use is estimated at 0.4 million tons higher.

Products of Kazakhstan agricultural producers are exported mainly to Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan and Iran. As of July 20, Kazakhstan has shipped 4.2 million tons of grain for export, which is 1.6 times higher than the same indicator in 2017.

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Kamila Aliyeva is AzerNews staff journalist, follow her on Twitter: @Kami_Aliyeva

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By Kamila Aliyeva

Uzbekistans state-owned Uzbekenergo and South Korean company KT Corporation have signed an additional agreement on the implementation of the project Automatic system control and accounting energy (ASCAE) Podrobno.uz reported.

The signing ceremony was attended by Korean Ambassador to Uzbekistan, Kwon Yong Woo, the management of the South Korean company, representatives of the State Committee for Investments and Uzbekenergo.

The project is being implemented with the financing of the Asian Development Bank (ADB). Initially, its implementation was envisaged in Bukhara, Djizak and Samarkand regions. The signed supplementary agreement will create conditions for the implementation of the project throughout the country.

The introduction of ASCAE will lead to a reduction in losses in the supply of electricity and preventing the growth of debt for electricity supplied to consumers.

The Asian Development Bank in 2011 allocated $ 150 million to install 1 million electricity meters in three regions of the country - Bukhara, Jizzakh and Samarkand. The project worth $ 207.4 million was planned to be realized by the end of 2018.

In addition, the Board of Directors of ADB in 2015 approved the granting to the Government of Uzbekistan of an additional loan of $ 300 million for the implementation of ASCAE in Andijan, Fergana, Kashkadarya, Namangan and Surkhandarya regions.

The $ 490 million project involves the purchase and installation of 3.1 million electricity meters.

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Kamila Aliyeva is AzerNews staff journalist, follow her on Twitter: @Kami_Aliyeva

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By Rashid Shirinov

The policy of Azerbaijan on developing the tourism industry and attracting more and more tourists every year is yielding great results. This is evident in the growing number of people staying in the hotels of Baku and other cities of the country.

As many as 756,800 people were accommodated in hotels and hotel-type enterprises in Azerbaijan in January-June of this year, the State Statistical Committee told Trend on September 20. The number of overnight stays amounted to 1,288,900.

Thus, this year the number of persons accommodated in hotels increased by 25.8 percent, the number of overnight stays  by 19.3 percent, and the income increased by 22.3 percent compared to the same period of 2017.

As many as 62 percent of overnight stays were registered in Baku, 9.7 percent  in Gabala, 5.1 percent  in Gusar, 4.5 percent  in Naftalan, 3.6 percent  in Guba, 3.4 percent  in Nakhchivan Autonomous Republic, 1.5 percent  in Khachmaz, 1.1 percent  in Agstafa, and 9.1 percent  in the hotels of other regions.

The State Statistical Committee noted that 935,200 overnight stays in Azerbaijan in the reporting period accounted for foreigners and stateless persons, and this is 72.6 percent of the total number of overnight stays. As many as 14.3 percent of them accounted for the UAE nationals, 14.1 percent  citizens of Russia, 6.6 percent  of Iran, 4.5 percent  of Turkey, 4.3 percent  citizens of Saudi Arabia.

The committee also noted that the revenues of hotels in the first half of this year amounted to 167 million manats ($97.95 million), 66.3 percent of which were received from the provision of room services, 23.8 percent  from the food sale services, including beverages, 3.8 percent  from treatment and health services, and 6.1 percent  from other services.

Presently, Azerbaijan is engaged in the efforts to diversify the non-oil economy, and tourism industry is one of the promising sectors to contribute to the achievement of this ambitious goal. Tourism in Azerbaijan is developing rapidly, since the government carries out comprehensive activities to support the flow of foreign visitors.

Thanks to the wonderful climate of Azerbaijan, its culture, cuisine, nature, attractions, and diversity, more and more tourists visit the country every year. Also, hospitality of Azerbaijani people, the capital with its super modern and ancient buildings draw the attention of all tourists visiting this South Caucasus country. The tourists mainly visit the most popular destinations  Baku, Sheki, Gabala, Guba and many other cities.

As for the tourism infrastructure, currently there are hundreds accommodation facilities operating in Azerbaijan. They are of any price range, starting from just $6-7 per night in hostels and $25 in hotels.

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Rashid Shirinov is AzerNews staff journalist, follow him on Twitter: @RashidShirinov

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Isabella Lake toxic algae

In late June government testing of the water at Isabella Lake showed record-high levels of blue-green algae, also called cyanotoxins. Samples taken two months later showed the risk had diminished greatly.

LATE JUNE SAMPLING

At Paradise Cove, the toxin microcystin was found at 399 milligrams per liter, or 20 times the level considered dangerous. The same toxin was found at an even higher concentration  483.9 milligrams per liter  at Kissack Cove. A much lower level, albeit still-detectable, was found at French Gulch.

LATE AUGUST SAMPLING

While microcystin was not detected at Isabella Lake in samples taken last month, tests did find detectable and, therefore, cautionary levels of the cyanotoxin known as anatoxin-a. The levels did not rise to the warning level, which is 20 milligrams per liter; the concentration deemed dangerous is 90 milligrams per liter.

At French Gulch, August testing found anatoxin-a concentrations of 0.48 milligrams per liter. At Kissack Cove, the level was slightly lower, at 0.47 milligrams per liter. The reading was 0.13 at Paradise Cove, while at Old Isabella Road Recreational Site the toxin was detected at a very low level. The reading was 0.15 at Keysville Slippery Rock in the Kern River.
A former Beaumont parole officer pleaded guilty to using her position as a law enforcement official to take bribes from parolees, the U.S. Attorney's office announced on Wednesday.

Ashley Haley, 33, pleaded guilty to federal violations before U.S. Magistrate Judge Keith F. Giblin and faces up to 20 years in federal prison when sentenced.
A South Carolina congressman kicked off an election debate Thursday with a joke - which got a few laughs inside the room, but drew condemnation from observers across the state and country who didn't find it funny at all.

"Did y'all hear this latest late-breaking news on the Kavanaugh hearings?" Rep. Ralph Norman, R, asked the audience at a Kiwanis Club in Rock Hill, South Carolina, referring to the confirmation hearings of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. "Ruth Bader Ginsburg came out saying she was groped by Abraham Lincoln."

At 85 years old, Ginsburg is the oldest Supreme Court justice and its preeminent liberal dissenter.

The comment from Norman, who's running for reelection in November, comes at the height of the controversy surrounding sexual assault allegations against Kavanaugh, who has denied the accusations. Elsewhere, Republicans have taken a cautious approach to commenting on the allegations, wary of the potential political fallout if their party is seen as dismissive of Kavanaugh's accuser.

Norman's off-color attempt at humor drew swift criticism, and many felt the congressman was making light of women who come forward to talk about their experience with sexual violence.

ALLEGATIONS AGAINST KAVANAUGH Kavanaugh accuser won't testify Monday but open to doing so later next week

"Ralph Norman just proved he may be rich but he doesn't have any class," tweeted Trav Robertson, chairman of the South Carolina Democratic Party.

The Twitter account for the party elaborated, writing that the joke is sexist and disgusting.

A spokesperson for Norman's campaign did not respond to a request for comment.

Norman, who won his seat in a 2017 special election and describes himself as a "pro-family conservative," has been in the national spotlight before. He made headlines in April when he pulled a loaded gun at a meeting with constituents. He said he wanted to make a point about gun safety, according to news reports,and refused to apologize.

"I'm not going to be a Gabby Giffords," Norman told the Post and Courier, referring to the 2011 shooting of an Arizona congresswoman during a public appearance. "I don't mind dying, but whoever shoots me better shoot well, or I'm shooting back."

In an interview with the Post and Courier week later, Norman remained defiant.

"I have a message for the liberals," Norman said, while, according to the paper, he smirked. "An unloaded gun doesn't do you any good."

Norman was criticized across the political spectrum.

However, Norman's Democratic opponent, Archie Parnell, is not without his own set of controversies. As the Post and Courier reported, Parnell has faced allegations that he physically abused his ex-wife, which, according to the paper, he has not denied.

Despite the allegations, and the loss of state and national party support that followed, Parnell managed to soundly defeat his opponents in the Democratic primary.

Parnell didn't immediately respond to Norman's comments but, after the debate, he issued a statement to the Post and Courier: "My opponent apparently thinks sexual assault is a joke. It is not," Parnell said in the statement. "But I guess that's the best we can expect from someone who pulled a loaded gun on his own constituents."

FiveThirtyEight gives Parnell just a 1 in 50 chance of beating Norman in November.

Norman was the second GOP lawmaker to draw criticism Thursday for tone-deaf comments about Christine Blasey Ford's allegation that Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her at a party in the 1980s when the two were teenagers.

Sen. Dean Heller, R-Nev., said that the accusations against Kavanaugh represented a mere "hiccup" and that the judge would soon be confirmed and sitting on the Supreme Court.

Over the weekend, Donald Trump Jr. posted a meme to his Instagram account that appeared to mock Kavanaugh's accuser before she was named. The picture featured a grade-school love letter, written in crayon with words misspelled, that asked "will you be my girlfriend" and was signed "love, Bret." The picture was captioned with the words "Judge Kavanaughs sexual assault letter found by Dems."

The Washington Post's Amber Phillips has a running list of "the most egregious things politicians have said about the Kavanaugh allegations so far," which begins:

- - -

Is it too much to ask that politicians handle an extremely delicate national debate about sexual misconduct, the credibility of women accusing powerful men and the foundational American value of one's right to a fair trial with sensitivity and care?

Seems like it.
Saudi Arabia brokered a new peace agreement between Ethiopia and Eritrea aimed at stabilizing the Horn of Africa region, Foreign Minister Adel Al-Jubeir said.

Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed and Eritrean President Isaias Afwerki signed the so-called Jeddah Peace Accord on Sunday in the presence of King Salman bin Abdulaziz and United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres. It's the second peace deal the two states have made since they ended decades of enmity in July.

The deal is "a historic milestone for the peoples of Ethiopia and Eritrea and will contribute to strengthening security and stability in the region at large," Al-Jubeir said in a statement on Twitter.

The agreement comes after "extensive Saudi back-channel diplomacy" to maintain stability and development in one of the world's most strategic locations, Saud al-Sarhan, secretary-general of the King Faisal Center for Research and Islamic Studies, said by email from Riyadh. Eritrea is located near the near Bab el-Mandeb, a shipping choke-point on the Red Sea used by oil tankers and other cargo vessels en route to Europe and the U.S. through the Suez Canal.

The accord can also be viewed as Riyadh "moving forward on a key element" of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman's so-called Vision 2030, which aims to make Saudi Arabia a global logistical and shipping hub, al-Sarhan said.

This "can only be realized if the Horn of Africa is at peace," al-Sarhan said. "Hosting the signing of the Ethiopian-Eritrean peace agreement in Jeddah is an important sign of Saudi Arabia's commitment to regional peace, security, and the freedom of navigation in the Red Sea."

Eritrea and Ethiopia declared peace in July and agreed to reestablish economic links after an unprecedented summit between the neighbors' leaders ended decades of enmity. The states fought a 1998-2000 border war that claimed as many as 100,000 lives and left thousands of Ethiopian and Eritrean families divided. The two sides have clashed sporadically in the years since and accused each other of supporting rival rebel groups.
WASHINGTON - The State Department released a report Wednesday identifying Iran as the leading state sponsor of terrorism with a "near-global reach" and accusing it of sending suspected operatives to the United States.

The annual Country Reports on Terrorism for 2017 said Iran and the proxy groups it finances were responsible for attacks or attempted attacks in the Middle East, Europe, South America and Africa.

"It brings to its terrorist activities the resources of a state," Nathan Sales, the coordinator for counterterrorism, said in a call with reporters.

"Iran uses terrorism as a tool of its statecraft," he added. "It has no reservations about using that tool on any continent."

The Iranian mission to the United Nations issued a statement denying it supports terrorists and accused the United States of destabilizing the region.

"Iran has fought ISIS, al-Qaida, their various associate and affiliated terror groups and other terrorist groups in our region for decades," the statement said. "The U.S., meanwhile, has destabilized the region at every turn by invading countries under false pretenses, supporting brutal invasions and occupations by its proxy states, and by supporting terrorists across the region."

Since President Donald Trump withdrew from the 2015 nuclear deal in May, the administration has taken an increasingly tough stance on Iran. In November, it will reimpose oil sanctions, which were suspended under the deal in exchange for curbs on Iran's nuclear program.

In anticipation of the sanctions, U.S. officials have been pressuring other countries to halt or drastically reduce their purchases of Iranian oil, the chief source of foreign revenue. They have threatened to impose secondary sanctions on businesses and countries that keep buying oil from Iran.

After abandoning the nuclear deal, the administration seeks to negotiate a treaty with Iran that will cover both its ballistic missile and nuclear programs, said Brian Hook, the special envoy for Iran.

In a speech at the Hudson Institute on Wednesday morning, Hook said the goal is to reach a "new deal" with Iran that ends in a treaty.

Hook acknowledged that Iranian leaders have shown no interest in talks with U.S. officials, although both Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo have said they would be willing to meet with Iranians.

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani and Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif are expected to be in New York next week for the annual meeting of the U.N. General Assembly. The Iranians are not scheduled to meet with U.S. officials.

Iran has been designated as a state sponsor of terrorism since 1984. It is one of four countries on the list, along with North Korea, Syria and Sudan.

As evidence that Iran intended to potentially launch an attack in the United States, the report cited the arrest last summer of two men in Michigan and New York suspected of being undercover operatives for Hezbollah. Iran provides financial support to the Lebanese militant group.

Overall, terrorism declined last year, Sales said. The total number of attacks dropped 23 percent, and fatalities decreased by 27 percent. Though many countries saw a decline in violence, Sales said, the decrease was primarily due to fewer deaths and attacks in Iraq.

Almost 6 in 10 attacks occurred in Afghanistan, India, Iraq, Pakistan and the Philippines. And 7 in 10 deaths were in Afghanistan, Iraq, Nigeria, Somalia and Syria.

Though the Islamic State has lost most of the territory it held in Syria and Iraq, the report said the terrorist group continued to encourage sympathizers to strike against soft targets and in public spaces. It said al-Qaida remains a formidable threat and last year expanded its membership and operations.

"Al-Qaida is a determined and patient adversary," Sales said. "They have largely remained out of the headlines in recent years. They were content to let ISIS bear the brunt of the international response. But we shouldn't confuse a period of relative quiet with al-Qaida's abandonment of its capabilities and its intentions to strike the United States and its allies."

The report said fighting terrorism has grown more complex, as groups such as the Islamic State and al-Qaida have adapted to counterterrorism pressure.

"They have become more dispersed and clandestine, turning to the Internet to inspire attacks by distant followers, and, as a result, have made themselves less susceptible to conventional military action," it said. "Further, the return or relocation of foreign terrorist fighters from the battlefield has contributed to a growing cadre of experienced, sophisticated, and connected terrorist networks, which can plan and execute terrorist attacks."

Also Wednesday, Trump renewed an emergency proclamation first issued after the 2001 terrorist attacks, extending what was supposed to be a temporary state of national emergency for another year, the White House said in a statement.

The extension of Proclamation 7463 gives the president powers to mobilize the military.

Trump published a notice in the Federal Register extending the emergency, explaining that terrorism continues to pose a threat to the national security, foreign policy and economy of the United States.
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Alabama elementary school student brings gun to school, shoots himself in hand! CyberDan

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User ID: 192030

09-20-2018 01:27 AM



Posts: 3,414









Post: #1 Alabama elementary school student brings gun to school, shoots himself in hand!

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The student, who has not yet been identified, is reportedly a second-grader at Blossomwood Elementary School, AL.com reported. The student, who reportedly brought the gun to the Huntsville school on Monday, was showing the weapon to some of his classmates in a bathroom in the school gymnasium when it went off."



http://www.foxnews.com/us/2018/09/19/ala...olice.html



UNREAL! He was a 2nd grader!!! "A student at an Alabama elementary school shot himself in the hand after bringing a gun to school, police said.The student, who has not yet been identified, is reportedly a second-grader at Blossomwood Elementary School, AL.com reported. The student, who reportedly brought the gun to the Huntsville school on Monday, was showing the weapon to some of his classmates in a bathroom in the school gymnasium when it went off."UNREAL! He was a 2nd grader!!! (This post was last modified: 09-20-2018 01:28 AM by CyberDan .) D3VILSR3J3CT

...

User ID: 462394

09-20-2018 01:31 AM



Posts: 15,604









Post: #2 RE: Alabama elementary school student brings gun to school, shoots himself in hand!

Silly little pup. LoP Guest

lop guest

User ID: 463154

09-20-2018 01:32 AM











Post: #3 RE: Alabama elementary school student brings gun to school, shoots himself in hand!

BAN GUNS!

It is the only solution. LoP Guest

lop guest

User ID: 408320

09-20-2018 01:32 AM











Post: #4 RE: Alabama elementary school student brings gun to school, shoots himself in hand!

Was this another protest against Trump? LoP Guest

lop guest

User ID: 463154

09-20-2018 01:33 AM











Post: #5 RE: Alabama elementary school student brings gun to school, shoots himself in hand!

LoP Guest Wrote: (09-20-2018 01:32 AM) Was this another protest against Trump?

https://shrinktheweb.snapito.io/v2/websh...lice%2Bsay CyberDan

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User ID: 192030

09-20-2018 01:37 AM



Posts: 3,414









Post: #6 RE: Alabama elementary school student brings gun to school, shoots himself in hand!

I remember when I was in elementary school 45 years ago, they would allow you to bring water guns to school to play with at recess outside and shoot water at each other. (This post was last modified: 09-20-2018 01:37 AM by CyberDan .) LoP Guest

lop guest

User ID: 449124

09-20-2018 01:38 AM











Post: #7 RE: Alabama elementary school student brings gun to school, shoots himself in hand!

'I told you I could catch the bullet' LoP Guest

lop guest

User ID: 461925

09-20-2018 01:39 AM











Post: #8 RE: Alabama elementary school student brings gun to school, shoots himself in hand!

PRICE OF FREEDUMB! Paint it black

Registered User

User ID: 443843

09-20-2018 01:41 AM



Posts: 1,233









Post: #9 RE: Alabama elementary school student brings gun to school, shoots himself in hand!

should have known better. I would have been outraged at the stupid parents, till I read the average age of a 2nd grader in Alabama is 15.should have known better. LoP Guest

lop guest

User ID: 463175

09-20-2018 02:13 AM











Post: #10 RE: Alabama elementary school student brings gun to school, shoots himself in hand!

when i was in school half the class brought guns to school to hunt before and after school and never from 7 th to 12 th grade did ever here of anyone even scratching there hand or bumping there head on a gun.

We actually weee taught howe to use them and respect them i remember 3 classe's in scouts , school, and FFA oh and another one just so we had a reason to target practice. CyberDan

Registered User

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09-20-2018 02:30 AM



Posts: 3,414









Post: #11 RE: Alabama elementary school student brings gun to school, shoots himself in hand!

I learned how to shoot a rifle in ROTC in my freshman year in high school.







Never had any problems with guns 35 years ago! CyberDan

Registered User

User ID: 192030

09-20-2018 02:31 AM



Posts: 3,414









Post: #12 RE: Alabama elementary school student brings gun to school, shoots himself in hand!

LoP Guest Wrote: (09-20-2018 02:13 AM) when i was in school half the class brought guns to school to hunt before and after school and never from 7 th to 12 th grade did ever here of anyone even scratching there hand or bumping there head on a gun.

We actually weee taught howe to use them and respect them i remember 3 classe's in scouts , school, and FFA oh and another one just so we had a reason to target practice.

Times have changed! Times have changed! GrimShaw

Asinus Asinum Fricat

User ID: 447734

09-20-2018 02:32 AM



Posts: 32,551









Post: #13 RE: Alabama elementary school student brings gun to school, shoots himself in hand!

Great parents of that one LoP Guest

lop guest

User ID: 434473

09-20-2018 02:42 AM











Post: #14 RE: Alabama elementary school student brings gun to school, shoots himself in hand!

LoP Guest Wrote: (09-20-2018 01:32 AM) BAN GUNS!

It is the only solution.

The kid's father is an ex-con. Ex-cons are already banned from owning guns.



Surely now we have to ban the ex-cons who are banned from owning guns but own them anyway because banning things doesn't work. The kid's father is an ex-con. Ex-cons are already banned from owning guns.Surely now we have to ban the ex-cons who are banned from owning guns but own them anyway because banning things doesn't work. LoP Guest

lop guest

User ID: 463154

09-20-2018 02:44 AM











Post: #15 RE: Alabama elementary school student brings gun to school, shoots himself in hand!

LoP Guest Wrote: (09-20-2018 02:42 AM) LoP Guest Wrote: (09-20-2018 01:32 AM) BAN GUNS!

It is the only solution.

The kid's father is an ex-con. Ex-cons are already banned from owning guns.



Surely now we have to ban the ex-cons who are banned from owning guns but own them anyway because banning things doesn't work.

The only solution then is to ban Democrats and their gun-free cities where the most shootings happen.

https://wgntv.com/2017/06/20/chicago-not...new-study/ The only solution then is to ban Democrats and their gun-free cities where the most shootings happen. Advertisement


















As the Houston areas foreign-born population continues to grow, diversify and participate in the regional economy, the area is becoming a national bellwether on how recent immigration policies are negatively impacting immigrant communities, according to a new report.

Entitled A profile of Houstons diverse immigrant population in a rapidly changing policy landscape, the report was released Thursday by the Migration Policy Institute, a Washington-based immigration think tank. It was commissioned by the Houston Immigration Legal Services Collaborative, a coalition of organizations providing legal services to low-income immigrants.

Houston is like a model case in the country to look at how national immigration policy changes are affecting immigrant and the cities (nationwide), because it has such a large population of foreign-born, its close to the border and has a new state law facilitating that the (local) police work with ICE, said MPI researcher and study co-author Randy Capps, referring to federal agents with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

These arent good times for immigrants in Houston. Many families who have been living here for decades with American kids are being affected, said Raed Gonzalez, of the Gonzalez Olivieri immigration firm. When you have immigrants who are citizens coming to ask you if they are at risk of deportation, you understand how much the policies are affecting these communities in distress.

The report provides a detailed look at the population and socioeconomic characteristics of immigrants in the Houston metro area, home to 1.6 million of immigrants ranging from high-skilled professionals to working-class families to international students.

The report analyzed the foreign-born populations of Harris County and the extended metro area of 11 surrounding counties comprised of Fort Bend, Montgomery, Brazoria, Galveston, Liberty, Waller, Matagorda, Wharton, Austin, Chambers and Colorado. It found that three-quarters of this population is located in Harris County, though immigrant populations are growing rapidly in outlying counties.

Among the most significant trends identified in the study is that Mexican migration is decreasing while Cuban, Venezuelan and Nigerian populations grow the fastest, Capps said.

Although Mexico remains the top country of origin among foreign-born immigrants with a population of 612,000 - or 30 percent of the total - their growth is slowing significantly. Their influx into the region increased 2 percent from 2010 and 2017 but fell by 4 percent in the last year of that period, the report concludes.

By contrast, Cubans and Venezuelans, many of whom are seeking asylum, are the fastest-growing groups, more than tripling in the first seven years of this decade. Immigrants from Cuba swelled from a population of about 11,000 in 2010 to 36,000 in 2017, while Venezuelans in the region grew from 10,000 to 33,000 during the same time.

African immigrants came next with a growth rate of 80 percent in that period, with Nigerians in the top spot.

Central Americans immigrants from the Northern Triangle that includes El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala represent 15 percent of the foreign-born population, a combined total of 240,000 individuals in 2017. Salvadorans continue to comprise the largest group from this region, but they have grown only 22 percent since 2010 while Hondurans multiplied fastest at a rate 59 percent, followed by Guatemalans with a 42 percent increase, the study found.

Asians still represent a quarter of the total foreign-born with 410,000 inhabitants in the area, but with a lesser increase of 29 percent since 2010, The leading senders of immigrants from Asia are India, Vietnam and China.

Contrary to popular belief, only 30 percent of the foreign-born immigrants are not authorized to be here, the study found. In the Houston region through 2016, 33 percent are naturalized citizens, while 32 percent have legal permanent residency and the remainder are here legally on non-immigrant visas.

And there are indications the immigrants are assimilating.

We also noticed that this immigrant population is improving in education and English (language) attainment compared to MPI previous analysis, Capps said.

The study found there are still low levels of English fluency among some groups, particularly the undocumented immigrants and permanent residents. Half of the immigrants 25 years old or older in both these groups have not completed high school education. Only 23 percent of naturalized citizens are in this case, but its still more than the 10 percent of the native immigrants in the area.

However, more than a quarter of undocumented and permanent resident immigrants have some college education as well as 59 percent of naturalized citizens, 66 percent of the native-born and 80, of those with non-immigrant visas, many of them graduated students and high-skilled workers.

Economic force

Data from the report, however, indicates that deficiencies in formal education doesnt prevent skilled workers from filling Houstons labor demands. The foreign-born men, and in particular those with unauthorized status, have the highest labor-force participation rate of any adult 16 years-old and over living in the region at 88 percent. In comparison, the percentage is a lower 72 percent among U.S. born men working in the metro area.

A third of the metro area workers are foreign-born and 10 percent of the active labor force are unauthorized immigrants. Almost half of all workers in the construction industry are unauthorized immigrants or non-citizens with legal status.

They also constitute more than 30 percent of all workers in Houston in the industries such as administrative, support and waste management; accommodation and food services, agriculture, forestry, fishing and hunting; and other non-public administration services.

Several analyses have estimated the economic output of Houstons immigrant population near or over 100 billion dollars. Another report by the Stanford Graduate School of Business released at the Houston Hispanic Chamber of Commerce Hispanic Impact Summit last week said that Latino immigrants alone in this city have a spending power of 55 billion dollars, which doesnt account for production and tax contributions. Of the small businesses in the area, 38 percent are owned by Hispanic immigrants, many of which belong to unauthorized people.

SEE ALSO: Houston Hispanics' economic power is on the rise

Among foreign-born residents in the metropolitan area, 56 percent live in owned homes, paying property taxes that contribute to public services such as education, as do 41 percent of those living here without authorization.

Adverse trend

In spite of the contributions that foreign-born immigrants have provided to make Houston a diverse and prosperous city, many of them are facing an uncertain future due to new immigration policies that could ultimately hamper the success of the region.

Houston's economy continues to excel, generating more new jobs in 2017-18 than any other U.S. metro area except New York and Dallas.

However, this continued labor demand could be jeopardized, considering the large number of immigrants whose legal status is in limbo while harsher immigration policies are resulting in more deportations.

One of them is Maria Guadalupe Juarez.

An immigrant from Mexico who came to Houston when she was a minor with her parents with a legal visa that expired, Juarez is now one of the thousands of immigrants protected by DACA, an Obama administration program that has allowed her to work and avoid deportation.

Juarez, who works in the car insurance industry, said she is anguished by the thought of being deported if she loses DACA and doesnt obtain a permanent residence, a process she initiated years ago that was complicated by legal missteps by her previous lawyer.

DACA, with approximately 36,000 beneficiaries working and studying in Houston, was suspended by President Donald Trump and is facing a court battle with uncertain outcomes. Juarez is anxious about possible deportation.

This uncertainty about the future is too much. I am worried for my kids, they will suffer so much if something happens and we have to leave, said the now-single mother of three American-born children who are 7, 2 and 10 months old.

Additionally, more than 20,000 immigrants in Houston from Latin America, Africa and Asia who are set to lose their legal status as the Trump administration canceled a Temporary Protected Status that sheltered them from deportation and provided work permits. The protections are set to expire beginning this month.

The government also narrowed the chances for asylum seekers, potentially affecting 27,000 cases pending with the Houston asylum office or in the area immigration court.

In addition, changes in immigration policy could affect about 80,000 people currently with legal status and asylum seekers in Houston, not counting similar numbers their U.S.-born children and family members.

While more people are potentially affected by these policies, a new show-me-your-papers Texas law known as SB-4 enacted last year forces local law enforcement agents to comply with immigration requests and made it easier to identify unauthorized immigrants.

Immigrant arrests in Houston increased five percent during the last two fiscal years, but local advocates believe that the Immigration and Customs Enforcement has ramped up detention activities more recently.

Leaders of FIEL Houston, an immigrant advocacy organization, said that many people are being arrested during the weekend and almost immediately moved from county jails to immigration detention centers.

Cesar Espinosa, director of FIEL Houston, said that more immigrants are contacting them seeking help than ever before. We have families who are American-born citizens coming to us and even teachers asking for advice to help their students.

The Chronicle recently published a story suggesting that school districts in the region are losing students from densely populated Hispanic neighborhoods this academic year, which could affect educational funding.

For Norm Adams, co-founder of the nonprofit Texans for Sensible Immigration Policy, the changing landscape can have serious implications for the economy of Houston, he said.

Adams, who owns an insurance business that works with builders and other trades, said that the construction businesses in the state and Houston are scrambling to find workers.

They dont want to get rid of good workers. These (policies) dont make any sense. What we need is a sensible immigration reform instead of spending more money detaining people and impacting businesses, Adams said.

olivia.tallet@chron.com

Twitter.com/oliviaptallet
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Jayam Krishna Iyer, MD, 66, pleaded guilty to one count of healthcare fraud Sept. 18, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Middle District of Florida.

Here's what you should know:

1. Dr. Iyer owned and operated Clearwater, Fla.-based Creative Medical Center, a pain management clinic.

2. Dr. Iyer is accused of falsely billing Medicare for face-to-face visits with patients who never visited her office or underwent examinations from July 2011 through December 2017. She allegedly falsified EMRs to make it seem like those patients did visit the office.

3. She also reportedly wrote illegal prescriptions in the beneficiaries' names and gave them to the patients' family members. The prescriptions included ones for Schedule II controlled substances like oxycodone.

4. Prosecutors allege Dr. Iyer submitted at least $51,500 of false and fraudulent Medicare claims.

5. Dr. Iyer faces up to 20 years in federal prison. Under the plea deal, she will forfeit her DEA registration number and her Florida medical license, and be permanently excluded from Medicare and Medicaid programs.

More articles on anesthesia:

Anesthesiologist faces up to 10 years in prison for alleged healthcare fraud, denies accusations  5 takeaways

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It's never been easy to be a surgical patient. First, there's the anxiety related to undergoing a procedure. Even for routine, outpatient surgical care, there are always safety risks. Then, there are all the other stressful  and sometimes uncomfortable  issues tied to surgery, such as preparation, post-operative side effects, physical therapy and follow-up care, coordinating transportation to and from the facility, taking time off work and arranging for support at home.

But another challenge has recently emerged that has added to this already stressful experience  and for some patients quite greatly: financial responsibility. It wasn't long ago that $50 co-pays and $250 deductibles were commonplace. Now such low figures are rare, if not unheard of.

How concerned are consumers about healthcare costs? According to a Consumers for Quality Care survey, Americans are more worried about these costs along with their increasing financial responsibility than the costs associated with retirement, higher education, housing and child care. Furthermore, Americans are more concerned about premiums, deductibles and co-pays than about access to care or quality of care. And, as the survey notes, that's despite the fact that more people in the United States have health coverage than ever before.

The good news is that these trends and concerns have not gone unnoticed by service providers. In recent years, we've witnessed the emergence of innovative patient financing options developed to provide critical assistance regarding treatment costs.

One option receiving increased attention from and adoption by ambulatory surgery centers (ASCs) is the provision of a secured loan to patients that covers their surgical costs. The model works as follows: When ASCs offer this option and patients choose to take advantage of it, patients receive a loan package designed to meet their budget. After a patient undergoes a procedure(s), the ASC receives a payment covering the patient's balance, with the lender managing collections activities.

The model significantly benefits ASCs as they can more effectively collect higher patient balances and receive payments in an expedited manner. The model also greatly benefits patients  so much so that ASCs offering the option are likely to witness increased patient satisfaction.

Here are 3 of the reasons why.

1. Out-of-pocket costs known in advance. For many patients, even a little uncertainty concerning their financial responsibility for care received is enough to keep them from pursuing treatment. Consider that one survey showed that 90% of consumers want to know their payment responsibility prior to a procedure.

Through this model, patients know exactly how much they will owe for their care prior to treatment. This removes the uncertainty and gives patients the ability to effectively plan for their payments.

2. Removes financial stress. In addition to providing certainty concerning what patients will owe for their care, this model also eliminates the financial stress associated with needing to make a single, large payment to cover a high deductible. Patients can choose a plan designed to help accommodate their ability to pay.

Since payments are made over an extended period, the amounts are smaller and much easier to budget. This can help patients avoid exceeding their credit limit  yet another stress associated with needing to make a substantial payment.

3. Provides an alternative to traditional lenders. Patients faced with looming medical payments have often sought the services of traditional lenders, such as banks, to help them cover expenses. Unfortunately, such an option can prove quite risky.

It is estimated that roughly 40% of patients seeking credit from top healthcare lenders are denied. Applying for a loan can be a difficult, document-intense process. Loan decisions can take a long time, delaying the scheduling of treatment and adding stress. If a loan is approved, it can include pre-payment penalties, post-interest balloon fees and other charges that can rapidly inflate what patients owe. Such loans also tend to have an impact on the borrower's credit.

With the new model, these risks are often avoided. Pre-qualification tends to be a very fast process, with loan decisions usually made instantly without impacting an applicant's credit score. Secured loans typically offer extremely competitive approval rates and, as previously mentioned, low monthly payment options. And since the loan program was developed with surgical patients in mind, options such as loans that cover multiple procedures performed over multiple visits may be available.

Randy Bishop (rbishop@surgicalfunds.com) is a partner with Surgical Funds, which facilitates patient financing solutions to supplement out-of-pocket expenses for ASC procedures.
The Physicians Foundation and Merritt Hawkins released the 2018 Survey of America's Physicians Practice, which offersinsight into the state of healthcare.

The organizations collected 8,774 responses and 2,472 written comments.

Here are 10 insights from the survey:

1. Fewer physicians independently own practices. In 2012, 48.5 percent of physicians said they were independent.Today, that number is 31 percent.

2. In general, physicians are working fewer hours and seeing fewer patients. However, employed physicians work more hours and see fewer patients than practice owners.

3. Eighty percent of physicians said they're either at full capacity or overextended.

4. Concerning the state of the industry, 62 percent of physicians said they're pessimistic about the future.

5. In light of the opioid crisis, physicians are drastically scaling back pain medication prescriptions. About 69 percent now prescribe fewer pain medications.

6. Burnout remains a problem, affecting 78 percent of respondents.

7. Physicians said 23 percent of their time is spent on nonclinical paperwork.

8. Forty-six percent of physicians said they plan to change career paths.

9. On the state of health insurance, 26 percent of physicians favor a single-payer health system, 35.5 percent favor a single-payer health system with a private insurance option and 27 percent favor a market-driven system.

10. Eighty-eight percent of physicians said their patients' health is seriously threatened by their social circumstances.
Four of the top vendors hospitals use to participate in the Medicare EHR Incentive Program are Allscripts, Cerner, Epic and Meditech, according to June 2018 ONC data.

Here are 16 hospitals and health systems that posted job listings during the past two weeks seeking EHR and IT expertise:

Editor's note: This is not an exhaustive list. Job listings were compiled from job seeker websites.

Allscripts

1. Bethany Medical Center (High Point, N.C.): Seeks a medical billing specialist

2. Drexel University College of Medicine (Philadelphia): Seeks a billing coordinator

3. Hendrick Health System (Abilene, Texas): Seeks an interface analyst

4. Skagit Regional Health (Mount Vernon, Wash.): Seeks a payer contracting and revenue integrity director

Cerner

1. Christiana Care Health System (Newark, Del.): Seeks a senior ambulatory EMR systems analyst

2. Lubbock (Texas) Heart & Surgical Hospital: Seeks an IT manager

3. Providence Health & Services (Renton, Wash.): Seeks a senior applications analyst

4. Virginia Mason Medical Center (Seattle): Seeks a health information services project manager

Epic

1. Northwest Community Healthcare (Arlington Heights, Ill.): Seeks an IT applications manager

2. Parkland Health & Hospital System (Dallas): Seeks an IT app system team manager

3. Providence Health & Services (Renton, Wash.): Seeks a senior applications manager

4. Skagit Regional Health (Mount Vernon, Wash.): Seeks a payer contracting and revenue integrity director

Meditech

1. Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (Boston): Seeks a senior systems engineer

2. Heywood Hospital (Gardner, Mass.): Seeks a senior systems administrator

3. St. John's Episcopal Hospital (Far Rockaway, N.Y.): Seeks an IT applications and informatics manager

4. Tidelands Health (Georgetown, S.C.): Seeks a CIO
Medicare spending per fee-for-service beneficiary is likely to be lower in counties where people have the highest well-being  defined as physical, mental and social health  as well as access to basic needs, according to a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association Network Open.

The study  led by Carley Riley, MD, a physician at Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center  found that Medicare spent $992 more per fee-for-service beneficiary in counties with the lowest well-being than in counties with the highest well-being. Researchers said the association continued after accounting for population characteristics, including median household income, as well as factors such as urbanicity and healthcare system capacity.

Among well-being components, access to basic needs, such as food, healthcare and shelter, was associated with the largest difference in Medicare spending: Medicare spent $1,233 less per fee-for-service beneficiary in counties with the greatest access to basic needs compared with those with the lowest access.

Dr. Riley, along with researchers from Yale University and Tivity Health, examined 2,998 U.S. counties to compare Medicare fee-for-service spending per beneficiary with well-being data from the Gallup-Sharecare Well-Being Index in 2010.

In a prepared statement, Dr. Riley said the study suggests that investing in interventions that improve people's access to basic resources, including healthcare, or improve people's social connection and emotional health, may lead to increased well-being and reduced healthcare spending.

"In this U.S. national study, the overall well-being of a geographically defined population was inversely associated with its healthcare spending for people 65 years and older," she and the other authors concluded. "Identifying this association between well-being and healthcare spending at the population level may help to lay the foundation for further study to first illuminate the mechanisms underlying the association and to study interventions aimed at creating greater well-being and lower healthcare spending at the population level."

More articles on healthcare finance:

Change Healthcare, Amazon partner on cloud-based claims and payments network

Massachusetts hospitals, union clash over cost of nurse staffing ballot issue

5 must-reads on coding, ICD-10
After launching a GoFundMe campaign and asking the community for donations to prevent the facility from closing, Pauls Valley (Okla.) Regional Medical Center raised enough money to make payroll and stay open  for now, according to a News OK report.

While the hospital still faces financial hurdles, it received an outpouring of pledges on its Facebook page and a few donations through GoFundMe, enough to meet payroll this week and extend the life of the hospital for a few more days.

The rural hospital needed $243,000 to make payroll by Tuesday, and it needs another $430,000 to pay overdue costs for employee health benefits, according to the hospital's CEO Frank Avignone. After employee benefits are funded, the hospital is looking to secure $1.5 million more in donations to keep it afloat as it works through a legal battle.

Although rural hospitals across the country are struggling financially, Pauls Valley Hospital's situation is a bit different. Due to a legal tie up, Pauls Valley won't receive any revenue for the care it provides until it pays off its debt to the hospital's previous owner.

The previous owner, Austin, Texas-based NewLight Healthcare, claims Pauls Valley owes it $2.3 million in management fees and loans it never repaid before transitioning ownership. Pauls Valley claims NewLight Healthcare caused about $2 million in damages through mismanagement and establishing poor relationships with community physicians.

Mr. Avignone said he has no immediate plans to close the hospital

If the hospital does shut down, the nearest hospital would be 30 miles to 40 miles away, according to the hospital's GoFundMe page.
Frontier Airlines Chairman Bill Franke and his wife, Carolyn, are donating $25 million to the Mayo Clinic School of Medicine in Scottsdale, Ariz., the Phoenix Business Journal reported.

Most of the money  $20 million  will reportedly go toward scholarships. The rest will go toward operations, such as faculty development and curriculum.

The $25 million donation marks the largest gift to the Mayo Clinic School of Medicine in Scottsdale since Mayo Clinic's Arizona campus opened last year, according to the Phoenix Business Journal. Mayo Clinic's medical school in Scottsdale welcomed its first class of students on July 18, 2017. According to the report, the medical school has 100 students, including 50 first-year students.

Mr. Franke, who also is managing partner of private equity firm Indigo Partners, told the Phoenix Business Journal the $25 million gift will help ensure scholarships are available to students in need.

"Students face years of commitment at a significant financial cost," he said. "As a family, we are focused on making that journey less onerous in the hope that qualified, talented and in need students are not discouraged by the financial burden. We want them focused on the medical education that Mayo Clinic School of Medicine can provide."

The Mayo Clinic Education Center at Mayo Clinic's campus in Phoenix reportedly will be named the Mayo Clinic Franke Education Center in recognition of the gift.

More articles on healthcare finance:

Change Healthcare, Amazon partner on cloud-based claims and payments network

Massachusetts hospitals, union clash over cost of nurse staffing ballot issue

5 must-reads on coding, ICD-10
Employees of Ellwood City (Pa.) Hospital, which has been facing financial challenges for months, said the hospital failed to pay them or that their checks from the institution bounced during the past few days, according to the Ellwood City Ledger.

Here are three things to know:

1. Grant White, CEO of Fort Lauderdale, Fla.-based Americore Health, which owns and manages Ellwood City Hospital, said Sept. 18 the payment issue was the result of a technology glitch that has since been resolved.

"Everyone has been paid current. It is an unfortunate thing to have happen," Mr. White said, adding that the issue "has nothing to do with the state of the hospital in any shape or form. The hospital is self-sufficient."

2. Mr. Grant told the publication an issue stemmed from an internal wiring of money from an account that did not go through. Once hospital officials determined the cause, the issue was fixed and the deposits were made. He also added the issue is not uncommon for a health system.

3. Ellwood City Hospital has faced numerous financial challenges during the past few months. Last fall, about 25 percent of the institution's employees were laid off after the hospital struggled to make payroll.

To access the full report, click here.
Novo Nordisk, a Denmark-based multinational pharmaceutical company, will slash 400 jobs in its research and development unit, Reuters reported.

The company, which specializes in making diabetes drugs, said the layoffs in China and Denmark will allow it to focus on biological and technological innovation investment.

"This is not a cost-cutting exercise," Novo's chief science officer Mads Krogsgaard Thomsen told Reuters. "Our analysis shows that we have a surplus of manual labor and are lacking competences in the digital sphere, informatics, data science, artificial intelligence and automations."

Novo plans to create four new "biotech-like units" this year in Denmark, the United Kingdom and the U.S. as it seeks biological and technological innovation, according to the report. The company said its other plans include increasing investment in automation and digital capabilities.

Novo announced in June that is was considering layoffs amid an "uncertain and unpredictable" U.S. insulin market.

More articles on leadership and management:

AHA, CHA leaders fire back at emergency room cost op-ed

Healthcare executives rank top challenges for next year

Vermont hospital has first honor walk to celebrate organ donors
A law signed by Democratic California Gov. Jerry Brown Sept. 19 requires California physicians put on probation for sexual misconduct, among other behaviors, to disclose that information to their patients, according to The San Francisco Chronicle.

Here are four things to know:

1. The law, authored by state Sen. Jerry Hill, D-San Mateo, requires physicians to notify patients of a probation for drug abuse, criminal conviction involving patient harm, inappropriate prescribing resulting in patient harm or sexual misconduct.

2. The California Medical Board only puts a small number of California's 140,000 physicians on probation for these offense. Physicians under probation are still allowed to practice.

3. A physicians' probation notification to patients must be made in writing or given to patients before their first appointment. They must also notify their hospital employer and malpractice insurer if they have been placed on probation. The state medical board will also disclose the information on its website.

4. The law applies to any physicians placed on probation on or after July 1, 2019.

More articles on integration and physicians issues:
Here are seven hospitals, health systems and private practices expanding spine and neurosurgery programs.

Greenwich (Conn.) Hospital is constructing a new neurosciences center.

Philadelphia-based Rothman Institute continued its growth this year by adding five New York-based surgeons to its soon-to-open practice location in Montvale, N.J.

Hillsboro, Ohio-based Highland District Hospital broke ground on a 39,000-square-foot expansion project.

University of Cincinnati College of Medicine's neurosurgery department Chairman Joseph Cheng, MD, recruited six neurosurgeons and plans to add more faculty.

The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center in Columbus received a $10 million gift from the Belford Family Charitable Fund to establish a spinal cord injury research center.

Orlando (Fla.) Health unveiled its fetal spina bifida surgery program.

Port St. Lucie, Fla.-based Martin Health System is seeking $30 million to develop a neuroscience building next to Traditional Medical Center in Port St. Lucie.
The cost of staying overnight in a hotel in Belfast has increased by an average of 5 to reach 80 in the past year, a new report from business advisers PwC has found.

Despite a boom in new hotels creating more competition and pushing occupancy rates down, Belfast is now the fifth most expensive city in the UK to book a room.

Last week a report from agents Lambert Smith Hampton (LSH) found that 1,170 new rooms had been added to the city centre this year.

The hotels which opened this year include the Grand Central, the Maldron, Hampton by Hilton, Easyhotel, the AC Marriott and the Flint Hotel.

The PwC Hotels Forecast 2019 suggests that the average daily rates (ADR) in the city increased by 5.5% from 75.67 in June 2017 to 79.80 now. The rise is considerably higher than the UK average (0.8%), making it the third fastest-growing rate of 22 cities.

LSH's report suggested the average rate has risen even higher to 81.65.

PwC assesses the financial performance of hotels by using the revenue per available room (RevPAR) measure. The average UK hotel room generated 67.63 in the last year (+1%), whereas Belfast's rooms garnered 62.28. However, that RevPAR rate represented a 4.6% rise from last year's 59.56 figure.

The Hotels Forecast found that increased competition in Belfast contributed to a 0.9% fall in occupancy rates. However, the city's 78% occupancy rate remains well above the UK average of 75.2%. The report predicted that Northern Ireland and other UK regions are unlikely to experience any growth in occupancy to the end of next year.

Nonetheless, the building boom is continuing in Belfast with new hotels and major extensions construction. A number of projects include the former Crumlin Road Courthouse by Signature Living, which also wants to open a hotel on Waring Street, and McAleer and Rushe's bid to build a 250-bedroom hotel on Corporation Street.

Martin Cowie (left) from PwC said: "The influx of high-quality rooms to the market have driven and continue to support improved RevPAR and ADR for the city.

"Though the full impact hasn't been realised with Signature Living's new hotels in Waring Street and Bedford Street due to open by the end of the year, and the Crumlin Road Courthouse which just received planning permission, demand continues to be driven by inbound tourism, domestic holidays and events.

"Hoteliers can look forward to the 148th Open being held in Portrush in July 2019, the biggest sporting event ever to be held here, which will bring a surge of visitors."
Northern Ireland's airports could be losing out on 11 direct routes to locations from Morocco to Munich because of air passenger duty (APD), a report has found.

Trade body Airlines UK argues that routes such as Belfast International to Dusseldorf in Germany, Lisbon in Portugal, Rome and Marrakech in Morocco would be viable were APD to be abolished.

And it maintains that the same routes would also be viable from George Belfast City Airport if APD - which is payable on short haul flights out of Northern Ireland - was removed.

The research commissioned by Airlines UK identified 66 potential new connections across the UK that could be more viable if the tax was abolished.

The study, carried out by consultancy Frontier Economics, also found that several routes dropped by airlines for financial reasons in recent years could have been viable if APD had been abolished.

Airlines UK said that "APD at 13 for each leg of a journey can account for as much as half the price of an off-peak short-haul ticket (from the UK to Poland) and 44% of the price of an off-peak long-haul ticket (from the UK to Israel)".

The rate of APD from the UK for long-haul passengers is 78 in economy and 156 in premium seats, with short-haul trips charged at 13 in economy and 26 in premium.

However, Northern Ireland has abolished APD on long-haul flights although campaigners in the industry have been calling for all forms of APD to be cut.

Belfast International boss Graham Keddie has said that if APD was scrapped, airlines were queuing up to add the equivalent of a million seats each year.

Airlines UK chief executive Tim Alderslade urged the Government to "get rid of this damaging tax".

He said levying the "world's highest rate of tax on air travel" is incompatible with creating the right conditions for post-Brexit economic success.

He added: "APD is putting the brake on the UK's economic growth with dozens of potential services - including long-haul connections outside of London - unviable under current conditions.

"The removal of APD will leave airlines in a position to respond with more routes, greater frequency and better connectivity for the whole of the UK."

DUP Strangford MP Jim Shannon said: "This is yet more compelling evidence that the current high level of UK APD is damaging the overall UK economy.

"We're particularly hard hit in Northern Ireland as we share a land border with a country with no equivalent aviation tax.

"Every extra route means more quality jobs and increased growth.

"Northern Ireland needs action on this tax, and so does the rest of the UK; action to boost jobs and trade. My colleagues and I will be pushing hard for this in the upcoming budget."

Chancellor Philip Hammond launched a consultation on abolishing APD and introducing a lower rate of VAT for the province's tourism industry in March.

EasyJet chief executive Johan Lundgren said that removing APD would allow airlines to provide "more routes and lower fares", while Virgin Atlantic boss Craig Kreeger called on the Government to show it is "serious about helping us to connect to international markets".
Undated Handout Photo of the new Ford KA+ Active. See PA Feature MOTORING Road Test. Picture credit should read: Handout/PA. WARNING: This picture must only be used to accompany PA Feature MOTORING Road Test.

The hatchback-turned-rugged SUV is one of the biggest trends amongst car manufacturers right now, and Ford is looking to lead the way with its recently introduced Active range of machinery.

First came the Fiesta Active, with the new Ford Focus to follow soon. In the meantime, there's the Ka+ Active. It's never been a tremendously memorable car. While by no means a bad machine, it's fair to say the success of the Fiesta and general buyer focus towards more premium machinery means the city car hasn't captured imaginations in the way the 1996 original did, but could the Active treatment change that?

What's new?

Calling Active just a trim level for the Ka+ would be doing it a disservice - there's a lot of depth to it. Most noticeable is the rugged look on offer, which comes thanks to redesigned body panels, roof rails and a raised ride height. Alongside a Ka+ facelift, there's also a new engine line-up, with two petrols and a diesel available, while a host of new equipment also joins the fray.

What's under the bonnet?

Powering our test car WAS a 1.2-litre three-cylinder petrol engine, producing 84bhp and 112Nm of torque, which is sent to the front wheels via a five-speed manual gearbox. As for fuel economy, Ford claims it can manage 49.6mpg while emitting 129g/km of CO2 emissions.

For town driving, it's powerful enough, with a flexible clutch making for surprisingly easy stop/start movement - a must for any city car. The shifter also has a surprisingly satisfying feel to it for a car built cheaply and allows for quite a bit of fun behind the wheel.

What's it like to drive?

The Ford Ka+ Active is an impressively amusing thing to drive. It's a sprightly machine around corners, thanks to its compact dimensions and responsive handling.

Of course though, this is a car primarily intended for town use and that's where it works best. It's easy to manoeuvre as a result of its light steering and tiny stature, and parking can be done fairly easily.

How does it look?

Ford has angled the Ka+ Active as a more rugged machine and it has made a number of aesthetic tweaks to try and add to this. These include the introduction of beefier bodywork, a raised ride height and roof rails. It is, however, a fairly interesting looking vehicle. Perhaps the bolder look loses some of the cute charm offered by the base Ka+, but the Active does manage to stand out.

What's it like inside?

Expand Close Undated Handout Photo of the new Ford KA+ Active. See PA Feature MOTORING Road Test. Picture credit should read: Handout/PA. WARNING: This picture must only be used to accompany PA Feature MOTORING Road Test. PA / Facebook

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Whatsapp Undated Handout Photo of the new Ford KA+ Active. See PA Feature MOTORING Road Test. Picture credit should read: Handout/PA. WARNING: This picture must only be used to accompany PA Feature MOTORING Road Test.

Stepping inside the Ka+ Active, plastics are hard and plentiful. Space is respectable. Despite being smaller than the Fiesta, you can fit the same number of people in - five - and probably end up with equal room. As for boot space, that remains identical to the regular Ka+, totalling 270 litres.

What's the spec like?

There's a respectable amount of kit when you consider the car's 13,245 starting price.

For that, you don't just get a spacious city car, but also automatic headlamps, rain-sensing wipers, cruise control and Ford's Sync 3 infotainment system displayed on a 6.5-inch touchscreen.

Sure, there's no navigation on offer, but there is support for Apple CarPlay and Android Auto, allowing for the use of arguably more superior mapping technology than the manufacturer offers in the rest of its vehicles.

Verdict

The Active tag proves to be more than just a trim level. It brings a funky, fresh edge to this city car and offers just as much room for the cost as the larger, more loved Fiesta.

It is well-equipped, especially for the everyday abuse town driving will offer. If a Fiesta is just out of your price range, then this could well be a perfect bargain buy.

Expand Close Undated Handout Photo of the new Ford KA+ Active. See PA Feature MOTORING Road Test. Picture credit should read: Handout/PA. WARNING: This picture must only be used to accompany PA Feature MOTORING Road Test. PA / Facebook

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Whatsapp Undated Handout Photo of the new Ford KA+ Active. See PA Feature MOTORING Road Test. Picture credit should read: Handout/PA. WARNING: This picture must only be used to accompany PA Feature MOTORING Road Test.

Facts at a glance

Model: Ford Ka+ Active

Price: 13,245

Engine: 1.0-litre turbocharged three-cylinder

Power (bhp): 84

Torque (Nm): 112

Max speed (mph): 115

0-60mph: 13.3 seconds

MPG: 49.6

Emissions (g/km): 129
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Page: 1 2 3 4 Donald Trump urged Spain to 'build the wall'... across the Sahara LoP Guest

lop guest

User ID: 463100

09-20-2018 10:02 PM











Post: #31 RE: Donald Trump urged Spain to 'build the wall'... across the Sahara

Advertisement

Who is going to pay for it? How is Trump's wall going?Who is going to pay for it? LoP Guest

lop guest

User ID: 461998

09-20-2018 10:03 PM











Post: #32 RE: Donald Trump urged Spain to 'build the wall'... across the Sahara

Maybe Don was talking about this wall.







LoP Guest

lop guest

User ID: 459426

09-20-2018 10:04 PM











Post: #33 RE: Donald Trump urged Spain to 'build the wall'... across the Sahara

Mexicant Wrote: (09-20-2018 09:28 PM) Meanwhile stable genius asks twitter where's da money?



Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump



I want to know, where is the money for Border Security and the WALL in this ridiculous Spending Bill, and where will it come from after the Midterms? Dems are obstructing * Law Enforcement and Border Security. REPUBLICANS MUST FINALLY GET TOUGH!



1:43 PM - 20 Sep 2018



* Never mind that the GOP controls ALL branches of the US government.





The GOP LOVES playing the victim. The GOP LOVES playing the victim. singing spider

terrarising the 'hood

User ID: 463266

09-20-2018 10:04 PM



Posts: 21,364









Post: #34 RE: Donald Trump urged Spain to 'build the wall'... across the Sahara

LoP Guest Wrote: (09-20-2018 09:51 PM) singing wilbury spider Wrote: (09-20-2018 09:48 PM) a wall to keep people coming from Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Libya out?





somebody should tell your businessman in chief that you can't walk to Europe from Africa

they come by boat



Melilla border fence



The Melilla border fence forms part of the MoroccoSpain border in the city of Melilla, one of two Spanish cities in north Africa. Constructed by Spain, its stated purpose is to stop illegal immigration and smuggling. Morocco has objected to the construction of the barrier, since it does not recognise Spanish sovereignty in Melilla. Melilla's border and its equivalent in Ceuta, also bordering Morocco, are the only two land borders between the European Union and an African country

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melilla_border_fence

still they are coming in boats

and now and then they storm the fence

ever been there? I was still they are coming in boatsand now and then they storm the fenceever been there? I was

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=92i5m3tV5XY



nobody starts at point zero LoP Guest

lop guest

User ID: 461925

09-20-2018 10:05 PM











Post: #35 RE: Donald Trump urged Spain to 'build the wall'... across the Sahara

LoP Guest Wrote: (09-20-2018 09:58 PM) LoP Guest Wrote: (09-20-2018 09:56 PM) Melilla is a tiny Spanish enclave on the Mediterranean coast, far away for Sahara



Spain, not the EU, build a FENCE around it, not a WALL .



Everyone has the right to be stupid; you seem to have abused that privilege.



So replace the fence the climb with a wall doesn't make sense?

Firstly, you have as much clue about geography as the Orange Shitgibbon



Secondly, no, it makes no bork bork sense to replace a fence with a wall. None at all. Firstly, you have as much clue about geography as the Orange ShitgibbonSecondly, no, it makes no bork bork sense to replace a fence with a wall. None at all. LoP Guest

lop guest

User ID: 463347

09-20-2018 10:06 PM











Post: #36 RE: Donald Trump urged Spain to 'build the wall'... across the Sahara

LoP Guest Wrote: (09-20-2018 10:02 PM) How is Trump's wall going?

Who is going to pay for it?

Do you realize how investments work?

And how you can make someone pay for something without a cent being exchanged?



Do you realize the wall will pay for itself by keeping moochers from raping our country? Medical bills, legal bills... all being paid for by Americans, not like yourself as you probably don't have a job, and therefore do not pay taxes. Do you realize how investments work?And how you can make someone pay for something without a cent being exchanged?Do you realize the wall will pay for itself by keeping moochers from raping our country? Medical bills, legal bills... all being paid for by Americans, not like yourself as you probably don't have a job, and therefore do not pay taxes. LoP Guest

lop guest

User ID: 461925

09-20-2018 10:06 PM











Post: #37 RE: Donald Trump urged Spain to 'build the wall'... across the Sahara

LoP Guest Wrote: (09-20-2018 10:04 PM) Mexicant Wrote: (09-20-2018 09:28 PM) Meanwhile stable genius asks twitter where's da money?



Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump



I want to know, where is the money for Border Security and the WALL in this ridiculous Spending Bill, and where will it come from after the Midterms? Dems are obstructing * Law Enforcement and Border Security. REPUBLICANS MUST FINALLY GET TOUGH!



1:43 PM - 20 Sep 2018



* Never mind that the GOP controls ALL branches of the US government.





The GOP LOVES playing the victim.

+ 1



Right wingnuts are addicted to victim-playing. + 1Right wingnuts are addicted to victim-playing. LoP Guest

lop guest

User ID: 463347

09-20-2018 10:08 PM











Post: #38 RE: Donald Trump urged Spain to 'build the wall'... across the Sahara

LoP Guest Wrote: (09-20-2018 10:05 PM) LoP Guest Wrote: (09-20-2018 09:58 PM) So replace the fence the climb with a wall doesn't make sense?

Firstly, you have as much clue about geography as the Orange Shitgibbon



Secondly, no, it makes no f*cking sense to replace a fence with a wall. None at all.

Did you know Israel replaced sections of fence with walls?

They seem to work well for them.

If you hate it so much here, prove that you renounced your citizenship, and you will receive a ticket to any place on the globe you want to live. Did you know Israel replaced sections of fence with walls?They seem to work well for them.If you hate it so much here, prove that you renounced your citizenship, and you will receive a ticket to any place on the globe you want to live. LoP Guest

lop guest

User ID: 463347

09-20-2018 10:08 PM











Post: #39 RE: Donald Trump urged Spain to 'build the wall'... across the Sahara

LoP Guest Wrote: (09-20-2018 10:06 PM) LoP Guest Wrote: (09-20-2018 10:04 PM) The GOP LOVES playing the victim.

+ 1



Right wingnuts are addicted to victim-playing.

Like Mrs. Ford?

Like Ms. McDougal?

Like HILLARY CLINTON? Like Mrs. Ford?Like Ms. McDougal?Like HILLARY CLINTON? LoP Guest

lop guest

User ID: 463347

09-20-2018 10:10 PM











Post: #40 RE: Donald Trump urged Spain to 'build the wall'... across the Sahara

singing wilbury spider Wrote: (09-20-2018 10:04 PM) LoP Guest Wrote: (09-20-2018 09:51 PM) Melilla border fence



The Melilla border fence forms part of the MoroccoSpain border in the city of Melilla, one of two Spanish cities in north Africa. Constructed by Spain, its stated purpose is to stop illegal immigration and smuggling. Morocco has objected to the construction of the barrier, since it does not recognise Spanish sovereignty in Melilla. Melilla's border and its equivalent in Ceuta, also bordering Morocco, are the only two land borders between the European Union and an African country

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melilla_border_fence

still they are coming in boats

and now and then they storm the fence

ever been there? I was

I lived in Fez and Casablanca for work. I lived in Fez and Casablanca for work. singing spider

terrarising the 'hood

User ID: 463266

09-20-2018 10:12 PM



Posts: 21,364









Post: #41 RE: Donald Trump urged Spain to 'build the wall'... across the Sahara

LoP Guest Wrote: (09-20-2018 09:55 PM) LoP Guest Wrote: (09-20-2018 09:52 PM) someone should tell this poster it's better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and to remove all doubt

Ceuta border fence



The Ceuta border fence forms part of the MoroccoSpain border [1] at Ceuta, a city on the North African coast. Constructed by Spain, its purpose is to stop illegal immigration and smuggling. Morocco objected to the construction of the barrier since it does not recognize Spanish sovereignty in Ceuta.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ceuta_border_fence

maybe this map helps you to understand







see those tiny specks on the long coast?

that's the fenced areas maybe this map helps you to understandsee those tiny specks on the long coast?that's the fenced areas

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=92i5m3tV5XY



nobody starts at point zero LoP Guest

lop guest

User ID: 461925

09-20-2018 10:12 PM











Post: #42 RE: Donald Trump urged Spain to 'build the wall'... across the Sahara

LoP Guest Wrote: (09-20-2018 10:08 PM) LoP Guest Wrote: (09-20-2018 10:05 PM) Firstly, you have as much clue about geography as the Orange Shitgibbon



Secondly, no, it makes no f*cking sense to replace a fence with a wall. None at all.

Did you know Israel replaced sections of fence with walls?

They seem to work well for them.

If you hate it so much here, prove that you renounced your citizenship, and you will receive a ticket to any place on the globe you want to live.

The West Bank wall didn't solve anything, but no wonders that you agree with the Zionist policy.



FYI, I'm a EU citizen and I love it being here, in the EU. The West Bank wall didn't solve anything, but no wonders that you agree with the Zionist policy.FYI, I'm a EU citizen and I love it being here, in the EU. LoP Guest

lop guest

User ID: 461925

09-20-2018 10:15 PM











Post: #43 RE: Donald Trump urged Spain to 'build the wall'... across the Sahara

singing wilbury spider Wrote: (09-20-2018 10:12 PM) LoP Guest Wrote: (09-20-2018 09:55 PM) Ceuta border fence



The Ceuta border fence forms part of the MoroccoSpain border [1] at Ceuta, a city on the North African coast. Constructed by Spain, its purpose is to stop illegal immigration and smuggling. Morocco objected to the construction of the barrier since it does not recognize Spanish sovereignty in Ceuta.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ceuta_border_fence

maybe this map helps you to understand



link to image: https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/1024/media...7be098.gif



see those tiny specks on the long coast?

that's the fenced areas





For the Trump cultists: Sahara starts, roughly, south of the map. For the Trump cultists: Sahara starts, roughly, south of the map. singing spider

terrarising the 'hood

User ID: 463266

09-20-2018 10:18 PM



Posts: 21,364









Post: #44 RE: Donald Trump urged Spain to 'build the wall'... across the Sahara

LoP Guest Wrote: (09-20-2018 10:10 PM) singing wilbury spider Wrote: (09-20-2018 10:04 PM) still they are coming in boats

and now and then they storm the fence

ever been there? I was

I lived in Fez and Casablanca for work.

well, then you should know that they are going to Spain by boat for decades

smugglers and illegals in search of work well, then you should know that they are going to Spain by boat for decadessmugglers and illegals in search of work

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=92i5m3tV5XY



nobody starts at point zero LoP Guest

lop guest

User ID: 461925

09-20-2018 10:18 PM











Post: #45 RE: Donald Trump urged Spain to 'build the wall'... across the Sahara

LoP Guest Wrote: (09-20-2018 10:02 PM) 1) How is Trump's wall going?

2) Who is going to pay for it?

1) It doesn't look good for Donnie



Mexicant Wrote: (09-20-2018 09:28 PM) Meanwhile stable genius asks twitter where's da money?



Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump



I want to know, where is the money for Border Security and the WALL in this ridiculous Spending Bill, and where will it come from after the Midterms? Dems are obstructing * Law Enforcement and Border Security. REPUBLICANS MUST FINALLY GET TOUGH!



1:43 PM - 20 Sep 2018

2) Mexican'ts?



1) It doesn't look good for Donnie2) Mexican'ts? Advertisement


















Undated handout images issued by Four Colman Getty of Anna Burns with the cover of her novel Milkman, which has been longlisted for the 2018 Man Booker Prize. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Issue date: Tuesday July 24, 2018. See PA story ARTS ManBooker.

Northern Ireland author Anna Burns has been shortlisted for The Man Booker prize for her novel Milkman.

Milkman is set during the Troubles in the late 1970s and tells the story from the perspective of an 18-year-old-girl.

Authors Esi Edugyan, Daisy Johnson, Rachel Kushner, Richard Powers and Robin Robertson are also up for the prestigious literary gong, the winner of which will be announced on October 16.

Announcing the shortlist at a press conference in London, the chair of this years judging panel, Kwame Anthony Appiah, said: All of our six finalists are miracles of stylistic invention. In each of them the language takes centre stage. And yet in every other respect they are remarkably diverse, exploring a multitude of subjects ranging across space and time."

Heres what reviewers thought of the books on the shortlist

Washington Black by Esi Edugyan (Serpents Tail)

Canadian author Esi Edugyans vast, brutal, intricate and searching novel sees its eponymous hero, Washington Black, escape slavery via a cloud cutter. The work of a bumbling Englishman, the clumsy airplane plucks Washington from the trauma and violence of the Barbados plantation he grew up on, and nudges him into a world of international travel and exploration. He paints on river banks on the Canadian frontier, chats with solitary ship captains and dives for octopus, all the while trying to unlatch himself from the past and his English patron. It is an epic adventure, pinned to a scaffold of jeopardy. Edugyans descriptions of slavery  and the pained love between Washington and Big Kit, who tries to take care of him  are ferocious and terrifying, yet elegantly wrought. The pacing feels a little off at times (leaping from continent to continent can be wearying), and if the mythical doesnt enthuse you, you may find yourself skim-reading passages. But this is a bold, determined and often fascinating saga that will sit with you for days.

The Overstory by Richard Powers (William Heinemann)

The Overstory brings together the stories of nine strangers. The one thing uniting them is their experiences with trees, and together, they are forced to unite and prevent the destruction of the USAs last remaining forest.

Everything Under by Daisy Johnson (Jonathan Cape)

Gretel, a lexicographer, has been reunited with her estranged mother Sarah, 16 years after being abandoned as a teenager. Now battling dementia, Sarah struggles to explain her erratic behaviour and Gretel must temper her desire for answers with care for an almost-stranger. Seeping through their fraught household is the half-memory of their life on a narrowboat, when a strange boy called Marcus stayed with them. With Sarah unable to fill in the gaps, Gretel seeks out Marcus family, only to uncover yet more questions in this commendable retelling of the classical Oedipus myth. Johnsons first book, Fen, was a celebrated collection of short stories that evoked the unsettledness of the shifting marshlands of East Anglia. Everything Under continues that sense and explores femininity, family and identity with a timeline and narrators that eddy and clash like sticks thrown into a river. Its a difficult read at first, but like a current, it soon carries you away.

Milkman by Anna Burns (Faber & Faber)

Milkman is set during the Troubles in the late 1970s, and centres around an 18-year-old woman. Names of people and places are deliberately kept vague to cultivate a feeling of uncertainty and universality as the woman tries to navigate her way through a dangerous time. Despite her best efforts, her encounter with Milkman is noticed and rumours start to swirl. This is a complex read full of convoluted language, and builds up a dark, yet at times comic, picture of Northern Ireland.

The Mars Room by Rachel Kushner (Jonathan Cape)

Rachel Kushners second novel The Flamethrowers  a macho tale of motorcycle racing and 1970s political activism  scorched the book charts and divided critics. In her follow-up, the Oregon-born writer restricts her gaze to the drab walls and iron bars of a womens prison in contemporary America  but Netflix comedy drama Orange Is The New Black this is not. Kushner went undercover in a maximum security facility in order to better embody The Mars Rooms main character, Romy, who is serving a double life sentence for murder. Our sympathies shift to and fro as the details of her crime  and those of her cellmates  are skilfully revealed and Kushner takes every opportunity to expose the frailties of the justice system. At times a visceral portrait of prison life, the novel also paints a picture of a seedy outside world which can stealthily suck poor and unfortunate souls into lives of crime.

The Long Take by Robin Robertson (Picador)

Robert Robertson is predominantly a lyric poet and has used this background to create a mix of verse and prose in The Long Take. It follows a young Canadian called Walker who has just fought in World War II and is struggling with post-traumatic stress disorder. Commentators describe the book as having an epic feel to it, as it tracks Walkers travels through post-war America as he struggles to face up to what hes witnessed.

The winner of the 50,000 prize will be announced on October 16
Thea Green has been thinking about millennials a lot recently. "There's such an amazing movement in that women can do absolutely everything - it's another level of girl power," says the entrepreneur and MBE, who founded the hugely successful Nails Inc empire of salons and nail products when she was just 23.

This is the ethos behind her new beauty and lifestyle brand, My Mood, which has been heavily influenced by the new generation of beauty-lovers who are no longer bound to the restrictions of the pre-internet age.

"We grew up in an environment where we had four TV channels - but they're able to access thousands, millions of different people and learn a little bit about everything," Green explains. "They're incredibly educated [about] what's going on around them."

My Mood is not only aimed at teens and 20-somethings, it was developed by them too, with focus groups helping to decide everything from the product line-up - which encompasses bathing, make-up and tech accessories - to the packaging and names.

Mum-of-three Green says: "The girls that hang out in my house that are 14 years old are not wearing dodgy blue eyeliner and pale pink lipstick.

"They're wearing amazing contour or incredible highlighter they've learnt to do through YouTube - and they're doing it brilliantly."

After the success of Nails Inc, off-shoot make-up brand INC.redible and now My Mood, it's clear the 42-year-old knows a lot about cosmetics and still gets excited about discovering new products, not just developing them.

If she had to narrow her beauty selection down to the bare essentials, what would make the cut? Here's what she had to say...

1. Philip Kingsley Elasticizer, 32

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Seeing a big difference to her hair when she uses this pre-shampoo treatment, Green swaps weekly between Elasticizer and Olaplex No. 3 Hair Perfector, 32, lookfantastic.com. "It's amazing in terms of strength and condition," she says. "I can see a bigger difference from using them alternately rather than using them singularly."

2. Aesop Coriander Seed Body Cleanser, 17, Cult Beauty

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"When I run out, I'm depressed," says Green of her go-to shower gel, which promises to cleanse, calm and warm the skin. She alternates between this scent and Geranium Leaf: "I don't know which one I like the most."

3. By Terry Cellularose Brightening CC Serum Sunny Flash, 61, Space NK

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In her search for perfect dewy skin, the entrepreneur swears by this serum: "It's got a little bit of bronze in it, so I use moisturiser and then that on top."

4. My Mood Smile Everyday Smoothing Lip Balm, 6, Boots

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This 6 lip balm, according to Green, "feels like an incredible luxury product. It's exactly what My Mood stands for. It's a little piece of happiness that makes you feel good when you use it."

5. Byredo Gypsy Water Fragrance, 105 for 50ml, Space NK

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A new favourite, this scent, which she describes as "natural and clean", tops her list of go-to products. In a move towards what she calls "modern fragrance companies" such as Byredo and Le Labo, Green says she "could almost never go back to traditional perfume brands - it's a different level".

6. Nails Inc Girl King Nail Polish Duo, 15

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One of the latest launches from Nails Inc. is their Girl King duo, from which 5% of sales go to charities focused on the education of women around the world and ending period poverty. "It has a millennial pink in there and then it has a khaki green as the sort of Girl King army," Green explains. "I'm wearing the khaki today, I love the khaki."
Theresa May remains wedded to her Brexit plan despite being told it will not work at a summit of European Union leaders, setting up a tense month of negotiations as time runs out to reach a deal.

The Prime Minister said the Chequers blueprint is the only proposal on the table as the deadline approaches, with the next leaders meeting in October set to be a moment of truth.

But Mrs May indicated the UK will unveil new measures on the future status of the Northern Irish border in a bid to break the deadlock.

Speaking at the end of a two-day EU summit in Austria  during which she had a meeting with Irish counterpart Leo Varadkar  Mrs May said the UK will shortly come forward with new proposals on the so-called backstop arrangements for implementation at the border if no long-term solution is found.

Mrs May, who also held frank face-to-face talks with European Council president Donald Tusk at the informal Salzburg summit, insisted Chequers is the only serious and credible proposition for an overall deal.

But Mr Tusk said the 27 other EU leaders had agreed the plans need to be redrawn.

Moment of truth for #brexit talks will be October #EUCO. We expect maximum progress and results by then. https://t.co/MTtoEYpVTB pic.twitter.com/GwXBg2HARA  Charles Michel (@eucopresident) September 20, 2018

Everybody shared the view that while there are positive elements in the Chequers proposal, the suggested framework for economic co-operation will not work, not least because it is undermining the single market, he said at the conclusion of the two-day meeting.

Individual leaders of EU nations were equally blunt:

 German Chancellor Angela Merkel said substantial progress is needed over the next four weeks.

 French President Emmanuel Macron said leaders of the Brexit campaign who told British voters it would be easy were liars and leaving the EU was not without costs.

 Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte said his country is better prepared for a no-deal Brexit than Britain and an agreement is not easy because of Mrs Mays red lines.

The next major milestone in the Brexit process is fast approaching, with the October 18 summit labelled a moment of truth by Mr Tusk.

An additional Brexit summit could be held in November, but only if a deal is within reach.

Mr Tusk said: In October we expect maximum progress and results in the Brexit talks and then we will decide whether conditions are there to call an extra summit in November to finalise and formalise the deal.

At a news conference at the conclusion of the summit, Mrs May struck a defiant tone, saying she had always expected negotiating tactics to be used during the course of the Brexit process.

She has flatly rejected a European Commission backstop proposal for Northern Ireland to remain within the EU customs area after Brexit, arguing this would draw a border down the Irish Sea.

Speaking after her meeting with Mr Tusk, the PM said: We both agree there can be no withdrawal agreement without a legally-operative backstop. But that backstop cannot divide the United Kingdom into two customs territories, and we will be bringing forward our own proposals shortly.

On the economic partnership, there is no solution that will resolve the Northern Ireland border which is not based on the frictionless movement of goods.

Briefed by @MichelBarnier on state of Brexit negotiations at informal European Council meeting in Salzburg. Progress made, but still a lot to do. Also discussed internal security: more coordination and better cooperation needed. Read more: https://t.co/uIF18WWsSW pic.twitter.com/JVDLf55s3J  Mark Rutte (@MinPres) September 20, 2018

Our White Paper remains the only serious and credible proposition on the table for achieving that objective.

With the Chequers plan facing resistance from the EU and a bitterly divided Conservative Party, a no-deal Brexit remains a potential outcome.

Mrs May said: Let nobody be in any doubt: as I have always said, we are preparing for no deal, so that if we get to the position where its not possible to reach a deal then the British people can be confident that we will have done what is necessary to ensure we make a success of leaving the EU, regardless of the terms on which we do so.

Mr Tusk insisted that despite the EUs reservations about the Chequers plan, he is a little more optimistic about the prospect of a positive outcome.

But unfortunately we cannot at this stage exclude a no-deal  it depends on both sides of negotiations.

Earlier, the leaders of the Czech Republic and Malta had suggested a second referendum should be held to give the British people the chance to rethink Brexit.

Maltese Prime Minister Joseph Muscat said there is almost unanimous support among EU leaders for Britain to hold a second vote.

EU leaders are "almost unanimous" that the UK should hold a 2nd Brexit referendum, according to Prime Minister of Malta, @JosephMuscat_JM #r4today pic.twitter.com/wqvv27Zvil  BBC Radio 4 Today (@BBCr4today) September 20, 2018

But Mrs May restated her position: We are going to leave the European Union, we will leave on March 29, 2019 and there will be no second referendum.

She received support from controversial Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who claimed that while some EU leaders want to punish the UK for its choice, he wants a fair Brexit deal.

Jacob Rees-Mogg, leader of the influential European Research Group of pro-Brexit Tories and a prominent critic of the Prime Ministers plan, summed up events in Salzburg by tweeting Chequers goes pop with the hashtag #ChuckChequers.

Shadow Brexit secretary Sir Keir Starmer said: It has been clear for weeks that Theresa Mays Chequers proposals cannot deliver the comprehensive plan we need to protect jobs, the economy and avoid a hard border in Northern Ireland.

With just weeks to go until a deal must be struck, the Prime Minister cannot keep ignoring this reality.

Nigel Dodds, deputy leader of Mrs Mays DUP minority government allies, said: Salzburg represents more evidence of the unreasonable and inflexible approach of the EU to negotiations.

The UK Government must demonstrate a resolute determination not to be bullied.

Mr Dodds reiterated the DUP wants to preserve the political, constitutional and economic integrity of the UK, describing this as an absolute priority.
Belfast loyalist David 'Dee' Coleman has been handed a three year sentence after admitting to UDA membership and possessing a document bearing an oath of allegiance to the organisation,

Sending Coleman to prison, Judge Geoffrey Miller said the evidence presented to the court suggested the 32-year old's responsibility within the UDA was at a "local level" as opposed to a him being a "directing figure."

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The judge also described the UDA as an illegal organisation steeped in "brutal thuggery, extortion and drug dealing, which offers nothing to the community it leeches off".

Coleman, a father of one from The Green in Holywood, was charged with two terrorist offences following searches of properties connected to him last summer, namely belonging to the UDA on dates between November 6, 2016 and October 18, 2017, and of possessing a document likely to be useful for terrorism.

Despite initially denying the offences, Coleman - who Belfast Crown Court heard was originally from the Shankill area of Belfast - subsequently pleaded guilty to the charges, and was handed a three-year sentence.

He was told he will serve 18 months in custody, followed by 18 months on licence when he is released.

Before passing sentence, Judge Miller was told by a Crown prosecutor that a number of items were seized during searches of properties linked to Coleman on June 19 last year.

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In one property, police saw a black UFF flag flying at the front of the house, while a mobile phone was located in a second house.

The prosecutor revealed that a deleted text was sent to multiple recipients from the phone, which said (SIC): "Lads the more ya look around the more ya realise were defo back on our feet and it feels gd when the world put us down and laughed at us not to many laughing now is there but always keep our feet on the floor we don't show of or act big lads we dont need to and its done us wonders no fighting or shit we any of were coming togeather building abit at a time it a team effort it cant work we out team work and our teams gd and were doing things that ppl said couldnt d done well the last two years say it all the future lads togeather and go forward watp qs 2nd batt c coy." One person responded by writing "QS bro."

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The prosecutor said it was the Crown's case that the text was linked to the UDA - especially Coleman's use of 'watq' for 'we are the people' and 'QS' for 'Quis Separabit'. He also revealed that images were found on the phone, including pictures of Coleman at UDA/C Company murals on the Shankill.

The court heard further searches were carried out, and on October 17 last year police recovered a document used to swear an oath of allegiance to the UDA and which bore Coleman's fingerprints. The prosecutor said: "Also recovered was a great deal of material indicative of membership."

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The prosecutor added Coleman's criminal record - which includes offences for rioting, robbery and carrying an imitation firearm - was a "significant aggravating factor."

Defence barrister Charles MacCreanor QC said Coleman's plea should be welcomed by the Crown, as there would have been difficulties in prosecuting the case as a majority of the evidence against his client was "hearsay and circumstantial."

Pointing out Coleman's plea indicated an acceptance of responsibility, Mr MacCreanor spoke of the mundane nature of the texts, which he said were "certainly not organising criminal activity."

The barrister also addressed Coleman's criminal record, telling the court he was charged with disorderly behaviour at 14, and rioting at 15 and again at 16 - around the same time Coleman was expelled from school, with the barrister telling the court Coleman "fell in with what is often described as negative peers."

Detective Superintendent Bobby Singleton, from the Paramilitary Crime Task Force, said: Todays conviction and sentencing marks a significant success for the Paramilitary Crime Task Force. It clearly demonstrates the tangible impact of our work, and that of the wider action plan, to remove paramilitarism from all our communities across Northern Ireland.

He added: "As well as the incriminating communications police recovered a plethora of supporting evidence, including a document containing the organisations oath for swearing in and a substantial amount of paramilitary paraphernalia including UDA ties, scrim net scarves (typically used to mask the face during paramilitary displays), three sets of body armour, a cash counting machine, a UDA cup, a UDA long service medal, a UDA flag and an axe, knuckleduster and machete."
The DUP have confirmed that North Antrim MP Ian Paisley's suspension from the party has been lifted.

The party have said that Mr Paisley's suspension was lifted on Tuesday September 18 - before the result of the recall petition was revealed in the early hours of Thursday morning.

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A DUP spokesperson said that Mr Paisley will be subject to a number of conditions including a ban on holding office within the party for twelve months.

He was suspended by the DUP in July after a parliamentary watchdog found that a year after receiving luxury holidays, Mr Paisley lobbied then prime minister David Cameron not to support a UN probe into alleged Sri Lankan human rights abuses.

As well as not declaring the holidays, the MP was found to have broke Commons lobbying rules.

The petition of recall process opened after Mr Paisley was given a 30 day ban from the Commons, the longest on record for any MP.

In North Antrim 7,099 people signed the recall petition over the past six weeks - 9.4% of the electorate and 444 short of the required number. Fourteen of the papers lodged were deemed void or rejected for uncertainty.

Ten percent of the North Antrim electorate was required. That was 7,543 voters.

The DUP spokesperson confirmed that the party investigation into Mr Paisley's conduct had now finished.

"Mr Ian Paisley MP was suspended from membership of the party on 24th July 2018, by the Party Officers, following publication of the report of the House of Commons Committee on Standards and pending further investigation into his conduct," the spokesperson said.

"The internal processes surrounding these matters have been completed. On Tuesday 18th September Mr Paisley was readmitted to membership of the party following a suspension of fifty-seven days and upon re-admission he is subject to a number of conditions including a ban on holding office within the party for twelve months.

"The Party will be making no further comment on these matters."

Ian Paisley said he was delighted by the "unwavering support" of his constituents.

Speaking to the Press Association in Ballymena, Mr Paisley said: "I was asked to make an apology, I gave that apology, and I believe that 90.6% of the electorate who had the opportunity to say we don't accept that apology, I believe they said we do accept that apology, and we are prepared to move on.

"I must say I am delighted with that, delighted with the unwavering support I have received from my constituents, hopefully now we can move on and get on with the real job I am elected to do."

Mr Paisley also confirmed he has made complaints to the PSNI about three people over allegations they broke the electoral law.

"A number of people have breached section 124 of the election law and I have raised at least three specific complaints about individuals with police," he said.

"It's up to police now to take that forward. I know if I had breached the law in that way, the same people would be asking questions."

Sinn Fein Vice President Michelle O'Neill slammed the DUP for not sacking Mr Paisley.

She said: "He displayed a gross lack of integrity in public office through these actions. Despite this, there was no hint of an apology from the DUP to either the people of North Antrim or the Tamil population.

Instead, he has been welcomed back into the DUP fold.

That represents another failure on behalf of the DUP and is an effective endorsement of his actions.

The DUP is very fond of pontificating to others but when it came to dealing with its own wrongdoing, it failed to take the appropriate action, which would have been to sack Ian Paisley.
A DUP councillor has criticised Alliance for proposing that a civic building should be lit up in Pride colours - even though a party colleague supported the move.

Alan Graham's comments came after fellow DUP member of Ards and North Down Borough Council Tom Smith voted to light up Newtownards town hall in rainbow colours at future Pride events.

Mr Graham said his colleague had been motivated by the horror of a mass shooting in June 2016 when 49 people were killed in a gay nightclub in Florida.

The town hall in Conway Square was previously lit up in bright colours as a tribute to those killed in Orlando.

Mr Graham said: "Tom was very moved following the terrible terror attack in Florida where it appears that the gay community was deliberately targeted. He is genuine in his belief that nobody should be isolated or victimised because of their sexual orientation.

"While I share his sympathetic outlook, I simply don't agree that dividing people into categories does anyone any good. True equality doesn't care about labels."

The motion, proposed by Alliance councillors Gavin Walker and Andrew Muir at a corporate affairs committee meeting, passed by six votes to five, and now needs to be ratified at a full council meeting next Wednesday.

Mr Graham said that while he too wanted to see "a unified borough where everyone was respected", he didn't believe identity politics was the way to achieve it.

He also slammed the timing of the vote, which comes less than three months after Arlene Foster attended a Pink News event in Stormont.

"This is an attempt to drive a wedge between people after Arlene reached out to the LGBT+ community," he claimed.

He said the Alliance Party of today was far removed from its "past desire" to bring people together.

"The party used to be about uniting the community and removing divisions but now they are committed to exploiting differences and bringing about some kind of apartheid based on sexuality," he said.

It is not the first time that Mr Smith has broken ranks with his party on the issue. In 2017 he expressed support for PSNI officers participating in the Belfast Pride parade for the first time.

Posting on Twitter, he also disclosed he had gay friends who had not disclosed their sexuality out of fear of the "persecution and abuse" they will face.

The DUP's Robert Gibson, who missed the committee due to a family commitment, refused to indicate which way he intended voting. "I was not at the meeting or part of the debate, so I am not willing to comment," he said. Mr Smith could not be reached for comment, and the DUP did not respond to questions.

Ulster Unionist Mark Brooks, a gay councillor in Ards and North Down, voted in favour of the proposal.

He said: "Councillor Smith is one of two 'diversity champions' on the council and it would have been a surprise if he had voted against the motion given his previous work in that area.

"DUP leader Arlene Foster made comments about embracing diversity and reaching out, and that's something I've known councillor Smith to do.

"I can't comment on the other DUP members who voted against. I'll wait and see what direction the vote goes when it comes to full council next Wednesday night.

"It will be interesting to see if they are whipped to vote a certain way."

However, he was also critical of Alliance.

"Ards and North Down is an area where diversity is embraced already and that does raise a question as to why this motion had to be brought forward in the first place," he said.

"I have to question whether this motion was brought forward for some sort of political gain. What difference is this really going to make? We can't legislate or change anything. This is not the sort of thing councils need to get involved with."

But Mr Muir, who in 2013 became the first openly gay mayor here, said there was a "need to learn to respect and celebrate the diverse identities that exist in Northern Ireland".

"The motion passed makes a simple and basic affirmation that LGBT people be accepted and valued as equal citizens, with Ards town hall illuminated just one day in a year in colours which positively reflect the diverse nature of modern society where people are free to choose their own identity," he said.
Ian Paisley has held on to his Westminster seat after Parliaments first ever recall petition fell just short of the threshold required to force a by-election.

Mr Paisley would have been ousted as an MP if 10% of the electorate in his North Antrim constituency  7,543 voters  signed the petition. In the event 7,099 people signed it (9.4%).

The petition device, created following the Westminster expenses scandal, was initiated after Mr Paisley was banned from the House of Commons for 30 sitting days for failing to declare two 2013 family holidays paid for by the Sri Lankan government.

A parliamentary watchdog found in August that a year after the luxury holidays, Mr Paisley lobbied then prime minister David Cameron not to support a UN probe into alleged Sri Lankan human rights abuses.

The long-standing Democratic Unionist, whose late father the Reverend Ian Paisley founded the party, is currently suspended from the DUP pending its own internal investigation into his conduct.

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Whatsapp Chief Electoral Officer for Northern Ireland Virginia McVea announces that the recall petition has not passed the threshold to trigger a by-election (Liam McBurney/PA)

Three centres were opened in North Antrim for the last six weeks to give voters the opportunity to sign the petition. Constituents were also able to put their name to the petition via post.

Northern Irelands Chief Electoral Officer Virginia McVea announced the outcome in Belfast around 1.25am on Thursday morning after a count that commenced at midnight.

The petition has not been successful, she said.

Ms McVea communicated the outcome to Speaker John Bercows office in London before making the announcement. Mr Paisley, who was not there in person, was informed by text message.

Afterwards Ms McVea rejected criticism that has been levelled at her by Sinn Fein for only opening three centres where people could sign the petition, when the maximum permitted was 10.

She said there had been unprecedented access afforded, with the longest ever electoral period in the region and voters able to access postal ballots on demand.

There has never been access to an electoral event like that before, said told the Press Association.

BREAKING. @ianpaisleymp holds onto his seat...just. Petition falls 444 votes short of the 7543 required to force a by-election in North Antrim.  David Young (@DavidYoungPA) September 20, 2018

And the three designated places were the three hubs within the North Antrim constituency. Legislation allows for one up to a maximum in any constituency of ten across the UK and we decided on three.

Ulster Unionist leader Robin Swann said it was clear there was no public appetite for a by-election.

I respect that outcome, he said.

However I would caution Ian Paisley not to see this as some sort of victory or endorsement of his actions in acting as a paid advocate for a foreign government and bringing North Antrim and the House of Commons into disrepute.

Rather I would urge him to use the time that he has been suspended from Parliament and the DUP, to reflect on the severity of what he has done and the embarrassment he has brought on Northern Ireland. He should demonstrate some humility.

Expand Close A total of 7,099 constituents signed the recall petition (Liam McBurney/PA) PA Wire/PA Images / Facebook

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Whatsapp A total of 7,099 constituents signed the recall petition (Liam McBurney/PA)

Mr Paisleys Commons ban has left current Prime Minister Theresa May shorn of one of her 10 DUP MP confidence and supply allies during a period that could witness several crucial Brexit votes.

It has also given the DUP another headache at a time when the party is under intense scrutiny at public inquiry hearings in Northern Ireland examining its handling of the botched green energy scheme that brought down Stormont powersharing.

An investigation by the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards found the cost of the hospitality afforded Mr Paisley and his family may have been significantly more than his 50,000 estimate.

It found the Sri Lankan holidays included business-class air travel, accommodation at first-class hotels, helicopter trips and visits to tourist attractions for the North Antrim MP and his wider family.

The trips also included meeting with Sri Lankan governmental figures.

Mr Paisleys threshold for registering such hospitality in 2013 was around 660.

In March 2014, Mr Paisley wrote to Mr Cameron to lobby against a proposed United Nations resolution setting up an international investigation into alleged human rights abuses in Sri Lanka.

In the wake of the watchdog report, Mr Paisley apologised for what he described as an unintentional failure to declare the holidays.

In the 2017 general election, Mr Paisley retained his North Antrim seat with a landslide 20,000-plus majority, securing nearly 59% of the vote.
Ian Paisley has updated his Twitter biography to include the result of the North Antrim recall petition.

The MP added "90.6% support from recall petition" after he narrowly avoided a by-election in the first ever recall petition for an MP.

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Mr Paisley lists the result alongside his spells as North Antrim MP, his return to the Commons with the highest recorded vote in Northern Ireland in 2017 and his Freedom of the City of London.

In North Antrim 7,099 people signed the recall petition over the past six weeks - 9.4% of the electorate and 444 short of the required number. Fourteen of the papers lodged were deemed void or rejected for uncertainty.

Ten percent of the North Antrim electorate was required. That was 7,543 voters.

The petition of recall process opened after Mr Paisley was given a 30 day ban from the Commons, the longest on record for any MP.

A parliamentary watchdog found in July that a year after receiving luxury holidays, Mr Paisley lobbied then prime minister David Cameron not to support a UN probe into alleged Sri Lankan human rights abuses.

As well as not declaring the holidays, the MP was found to have broke Commons lobbying rules.

In a statement to the Press Association, Mr Paisley said the electorate had spoken.

In July I apologised for a mistake made almost six years ago.

Expand Close Ian Paisley updated his Twitter bio to include the recall petition result / Facebook

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Whatsapp Ian Paisley updated his Twitter bio to include the recall petition result

The electorate was asked to pass judgment. 90.6% have accepted my apology.

The electorate has clearly spoken.

I would like to thank my true friends, family, the electorate who have stood by me with unwavering support. Hallelujah.
The Free Derry Corner gable wall in the centre of the Bogside

Internet search giant Google has carried out an investigation into why Free Derry Corner was appearing on their maps as 'Free Londonderry Corner' - something that had enraged republicans.

Yesterday, anyone searching for directions in the Bogside area on Google Maps saw the usual landmarks - such as the Museum of Free Derry, the Derry Walls and the Gasyard Centre.

But what angered republicans was the branding of the iconic historical monument that served as a focal point during the Battle of the Bogside and Bloody Sunday as Free Londonderry Corner.

Free Derry Corner is a freestanding gable wall in the centre of the Bogside.

It has the words 'You Are Now Entering Free Derry' painted on it.

The slogan was painted on the wall in 1969 to signpost the mainly nationalist Bogside area of the city and declare that the area was a security force free zone.

It has been used in the decades since as a focal point for protests and demonstrations of republicans.

Derry City and Strabane District independent councillor Gary Donnelly said the error was a "gross insult to republicans" and called on Google to update its maps.

"Free Derry Corner is an iconic monument symbolising resistance against British rule and civil rights abuses - things associated with the British state in Ireland," he said.

"It is a focal point for that resistance and for protests, white line pickets and the like.

"It's unbelievable that Google would have got this wrong.

"They have got the name of the Derry Walls right, which are right beside the monument.

"But yet for some reason they have the monument listed on their maps as Free Londonderry Corner.

"I think it is absolutely ridiculous and so wrong in so many ways.

"I would call on Google to update their maps.

"This is an insult to the republican and nationalist community.

"People are shocked and think it is unbelievable that this could even happen.

"It has never been known as anything other than Free Derry Corner.

"It's almost as if it's a wind-up, a late April Fool's joke.

"It is an absolute insult to anyone who has resisted British rule, who has spoken out against civil rights abuses and human rights abuses associated with it."

A spokesperson for Google said last night that it had updated the map and the correct title for the monument should be visible to users in Google Maps now.

He asked that anyone who spots an error on Google Maps report it directly using the 'Report a Problem' tool, found at the bottom right corner of the map.
The sister of a mentally disturbed man who stabbed his neighbour to death has said she has no regrets about turning him in to police.

James Devine (44), a violent schizophrenic, confessed to Margaret Lamelas that he "couldn't stop" stabbing James Hughes in Belfast's Divis Tower despite the 62-year-old begging for his life.

She immediately informed the police of her brother's whereabouts, and last week Devine was handed a minimum eight-year jail sentence after admitting manslaughter due to diminished responsibility.

In an emotional interview Margaret, from Ballymoney, admitted that giving her brother up was the hardest thing she's ever had to do.

However, she also stressed that it was undoubtedly the right decision.

She said that she can't stop thinking about the anguish Mr Hughes' relatives went through after his death, but added that some of the responsibility must lie with Northern Ireland's "woeful" mental health services, which were aware of Devine's propensity for violence.

The 42-year-old domestic cleaner, who is separated from her Portuguese husband and lives with her three daughters Roisin (16), Isabella (9) and Emily (7), said she is still haunted by her brother's shocking admission to the attack on Mr Hughes, a former psychiatric nurse who had been trying to help his troubled friend.

Up until Devine arrived at his sister's home on November 6, 2016, Margaret said it had been "just a normal Sunday".

Their mum Mary (63) had been staying with her for the weekend and her daughters were at home.

"My brother called my mum to say that Seamus - that's what he used to called James Hughes - was dead," Margaret said.

"Then he landed down that evening, handed me a wad of cash and said: 'Where I'm going, I'm not going to need it'.

"After dinner we got the girls out of the way and I turned to him and said: 'What have you done?' He said: 'I've stabbed Seamus. I've killed him.' I told him I'd have to ring the police.

"I told them that my brother confessed to killing someone in Belfast. Making that call was the hardest thing I've ever had to do. I've never been in a situation like that before.

"At that point I didn't know for sure that he'd killed anyone, but there was a part of me that believed he had done something because of his history of violence

"The police didn't take long arriving. An officer soon had my brother on the doorstep on his knees, handcuffed.

"It was all so surreal. That arrest has scarred me mentally. I have nightmares over what my brother told me he'd done to James; he said the man was pleading for his life but that he just couldn't stop stabbing him."

She also said she had flashbacks over the arrest, which happened while her daughters were upstairs, and admitted that she can still see her brother's face as he was being taken away by police.

"Sometimes when I close my eyes all I see are my brother's eyes looking in at me through the front window," she recalled.

"My eldest daughter is aware of what happened, but I told the younger ones that sometimes the police have to come and take sick people away for their own safety. They're too young to know the truth."

Margaret said it's unclear how her brother ended up in Divis flats. Before moving to Belfast he had lived in Londonderry, the Republic, and he had also spent six months living with her family in Ballymoney.

He was diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic in 2006, but his family knew he was ill long before then.

"My brother and I were both in foster care at a young age because my mum had a mental breakdown," she explained. "I was brought back home within a month but my brother didn't come back until he was a teenager.

"He was into drugs and drink; he was very hard to work with. I can remember him never being happy.

"He wouldn't talk, he was very secretive, and I saw a violent streak in him. One time we were carrying on and he dragged me along the floor by the hair, and once he smacked our father Paul and gave him a bloody nose.

"He nearly killed a boy in Ballymoney; he stabbed him in the chest and did time in Maghaberry Prison for that in 2002, and again for assaulting two men in Divis in 2010."

Margaret, who has previously battled depression, believes her brother was let down by the authorities.

"At one point he admitted to his psychiatrist that he had thoughts about killing my mum," she said.

"He actually confessed to my mum that he had thoughts about doing that. She did live in fear of him.

"He should have been in hospital a long time ago. When he was diagnosed back in 2006 they should have done something. To a certain extent we were shaded from his mental health because me and my mum weren't informed about his condition."

She added: "Mental health services in Northern Ireland are woeful. More money needs to be invested.

"It's one thing to cry for help, but what if you do cry and no one is there to hear you? That's what seems to be happening here."

She revealed that, prior to Mr Hughes' brutal death, she "feared something really bad was going to happen".

"I knew my brother was a violent type but in the last couple of years he had started to get even worse," she said.

"We didn't realise the conditions he was living in the flat in Belfast - there was human faeces on the floor and food rubbish lying halfway up his walls. It was in really bad shape. The toilet was blocked. But he wouldn't let me go and clean it.

"In the last two years, when my brother was spending his time between Ballymoney and Belfast, he started stealing my mum's medication. He was doped up all the time. He was a volcano waiting to erupt."

Margaret said the Hughes family are in her thoughts every day. Last week the victim's brother Michael told the Belfast Telegraph that he forgives Devine for the anguish and grief he brought them.

"When I found out what had happened, I cried for Michael and his family," she added.

"I've thought about how horrendous it was for them to have a loved one taken away like that. I saw James Hughes' photo and he looks like such a lovely man."

She added: "After he'd got to know my brother, James Hughes spoke to my mum on the phone and even sent her presents. She never got to meet him, but he sent her two or three lovely scarves.

"One time he sent her money for her birthday. His kindness was lovely."

The mother-of-three, who lost her 60-year-old father to bowel cancer in 2010, suffered a marriage breakdown in 2014 and also helped her mum through breast cancer, said life had become "an ordeal" even before her brother killed his neighbour.

"I am very angry at my brother for what he did to James Hughes," she said.

"I know he's not well but I still get annoyed. I'd be honoured to meet James' brother Michael, I'd meet him tomorrow.

"The first thing I would do is - and I don't know if it's what he would want - but I'd reach out to hug him. Just to tell him how sorry I am for the loss he's had in his life.

"And there's not a day goes by that I don't think about him and his family for what they're suffering. Nobody should not feel safe in their own home. I love my big brother, but I look at this and see it for the reality it is."

Margaret has been to visit her incarcerated brother three times, twice alone and lastly, in June, with her mum.

"He has told us that he's sorry for what he put us through but I'm not ready to accept that apology yet because I have to deal with my own feelings," she said.

"I've told my mum that her and I are victims in all this too.

"She cries because she thinks she's never going to see her son again, but also because of what her son has done.

"I've told her he's in a place where he's safe and where he's not going to hurt anybody else or himself."

However, she believes that prison is not the best place for her brother, who is currently housed in the Knockbracken facility in Co Down prior to a possible transfer to an English prison that specialises in mentally disturbed inmates.

She added: "If he went into prison like he did the last time he'd come back out, but he's not safe on the streets, for other people's sake and for his own sake."

Mental health care is being improved

Responding to criticisms of mental health provision, a Department of Health spokeswoman said:

"The focus is on achieving parity of esteem for mental health services through the provision of early intervention and support in primary care, the development of specialist mental health services including perinatal mental health services and trauma services, partnership-working and co-produced design and delivery of mental health services which fully involves people using these services, and support for carers.

"Funding has continued to increase year on year with spend on mental health services rising to over 267m in 2016/17."

The spokeswoman said work was under way on a new five-year plan and that the Regional Mental Health Care Pathway (2104) redefined how mental health services are shaped, "to create an environment which builds hope, supports recovery and restores a person's sense of control".

She added: "There is now an increased focus on community care and treatment; with early intervention crisis response, home treatment and the increased use of evidence-based psychological therapies keeping people out of acute settings."
North Antrim MP Ian Paisley has made three complaints to police over allegations electoral law was broken in the failed recall petition to oust him.

He has claimed electoral law was broken in Westminsters first ever recall petition which was triggered after Mr Paisley was suspended from the House of Commons for failing to declare two family holidays paid for by the Sri Lankan government.

Northern Irelands chief electoral officer Virginia McVea warned a Sinn Fein MLA over a video he posted to social media which appeared to comment on the state of the poll in a recall petition attempting to oust Mr Paisley from parliament.

Expand Close Mr Paisley thanked constituents for their support (Brian Lawless/PA) PA Wire/PA Images / Facebook

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Whatsapp Mr Paisley thanked constituents for their support (Brian Lawless/PA)

There are strict rules over what can be said or published during the six weeks the petition is open, which if proven to be broken can carry potential fines and prison terms.

Mr Paisley told the Press Association on Thursday that he has made at least three complaints to the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) over allegations electoral law was broken.

A number of people have breached section 124 of the election law and I have raised at least three specific complaints about individuals with police, he said.

BREAKING - @ianpaisleymp has thanked the voters of North Antrim for their "unwavering support" after Westminster's first ever recall petition fell short of the threshold required to unseat him. In a statement to @PA , Mr Paisley said: pic.twitter.com/rkdY5hQrMr  David Young (@DavidYoungPA) September 20, 2018

Its up to police now to take that forward. I know if I had breached the law in that way, the same people would be asking questions.

Speaking to the Press Association in Ballymena on Thursday morning, Mr Paisley said he was delighted the recall petition failed.

I was asked to make an apology, I gave that apology, and I believe that 90.6% of the electorate who had the opportunity to say we dont accept that apology, I believe they said we do accept that apology, and we are prepared to move on, he said.

I must say I am delighted with that, delighted with the unwavering support I have received from my constituents. Hopefully now we can move on and get on with the real job I am elected to do.

Expand Close The recall petition failed to attract enough signatures (Brian Lawless/PA) PA Wire/PA Images / Facebook

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Whatsapp The recall petition failed to attract enough signatures (Brian Lawless/PA)

Mr Paisley said he felt humbled and privileged and also hailed his family and true friends for sticking by him after he narrowly avoided a by-election.

He would have been ousted as an MP if 10% of the electorate in his North Antrim constituency  7,543 voters  signed the petition. In the event, 7,099 people signed it (9.4%).

Speaking on Wednesday, Sinn Fein MLA Philip McGuigan said he found the warning from Ms McVea incredible.

He said: I do not believe there was anything in the post that predicted the outcome of the petition.

The petition device, created following the Westminster expenses scandal, was initiated after Mr Paisley was banned from the House of Commons for 30 sitting days for failing to declare two 2013 family holidays paid for by the Sri Lankan government.

Pro BREXIT MP will be back in Commons after electors reject petition for a by election. Trust EU Council and Commission get this message from Northern Ireland.  Lord John Kilclooney (@KilclooneyJohn) September 20, 2018

A parliamentary watchdog found in July that a year after the luxury holidays, Mr Paisley lobbied then prime minister David Cameron not to support a UN probe into alleged Sri Lankan human rights abuses.

The long-standing Democratic Unionist, whose late father the Reverend Ian Paisley founded the party, is suspended from the DUP pending its own internal investigation into his conduct.

Three centres were opened in North Antrim for the last six weeks to give voters the opportunity to sign the petition. Constituents were also able to put their name to the petition via post.

Sinn Fein campaigned vociferously to unseat Mr Paisley and afterwards Mr McGuigan said more centres should have been available.

Ms McVea announced the outcome in Belfast around 1.25am on Thursday morning after a count that commenced at midnight.
The petition of recall to unseat MP Ian Paisley has failed by 444 votes.

In the early hours of Thursday morning it was announced 7,099 people signed the petition over the past six weeks - that was 9.4% of the electorate and 444 short of the required number. Fourteen of the papers lodged were deemed void or rejected for uncertainty.

Ten percent of the North Antrim electorate was required. That was 7,543 voters.

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Mr Paisley did not attend the announcement. He was informed of the result by text message.

The petition of recall process opened after Mr Paisley was given a 30-sitting day ban from the Commons - the longest on record for any MP.

A parliamentary watchdog found in July that a year after receiving luxury holidays, Mr Paisley lobbied then prime minister David Cameron not to support a UN probe into alleged Sri Lankan human rights abuses.

As well as not declaring the holidays, the MP was found to have broke Commons lobbying rules.

Three centres were opened in North Antrim for the last six weeks to give voters the opportunity to sign the petition. Constituents were also able to put their name to the petition by post.

Chief Electoral Officer Virginia McVea declared the results on Thursday morning just after 1am.

Ms McVea communicated the outcome to Speaker John Bercow's office before announcing it at the electoral office's Belfast headquarters.

Expand Expand Previous Next Close The recall petition was triggered by Ian Paisleys suspension from the House of Commons (Liam McBurney/PA) PA Wire/PA Images A sample of the recall petition which opened at the Joey Dunlop Leisure Centre in Ballymoney (Niall Carson/PA) PA Wire/PA Images / Facebook

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Whatsapp The recall petition was triggered by Ian Paisleys suspension from the House of Commons (Liam McBurney/PA)

"The petition has not been successful," she said.

In a statement to the Press Association, Mr Paisley said the electorate had spoken.

In July I apologised for a mistake made almost six years ago.

The electorate was asked to pass judgment. 90.6% have accepted my apology.

The electorate has clearly spoken.

I would like to thank my true friends, family, the electorate who have stood by me with unwavering support. Hallelujah.

Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Previous Next Close The Paisley family at home in 1988. From left to right Ian Junior, Cherith, Rhonda, Kyle. Pic Pacemaker Ian Paisley hurdles a fence during canvassing for 2010 election. Pic Charles McQuillan Pacemaker Ian Paisley with Donald Trump. The North Antrim MP has supported the US president. Ian Paisley and Ian jnr eating buns in the campaign trail in March 1982. Ian Paisley at the Seven Towers Leisure Centre in Ballymena after retaining his seat in the 2015 general election Kevin Scott / Presseye Ian Paisley junior left pictured with his father during the Drumcree stand off in 1996. PACEMAKER BELFAST 15/04/98 Ian Paisley MP at a Remembrance Day commemoration in Kenya Pacemaker Belfast - Archive Ian Paisley Jnr with "Justice for the UDR Four " at his Ravenhill office. 19-12-90 1053-90-BWC Ian with Arlene Foster after she was made DUP party leader 9 / 6 / 17 PACEMAKER PRESS Ian Paisley Jr celebrates with his son Matthew and wife Fiona after winning his seat for North Antrim in the UK Parliamentary Elections. PICTURE MATT BOHILL PACEMAKER PRESS Ian Paisley Jnr, whose father founded the DUP in 1971, says, 'everybody hates us but we've got the cash' [Photo: Marc McKormick, www.independent.co.uk] Ian Paisley with his late father. Credit: Stephen Davidson/Pacemaker Press PACEMAKER BELFAST. Ian Paisley and Ian Junior in Studio. 16/8/94. 704/94/bwc PACEMAKER, BELFAST, 14/1/2011: Ian Paisley Junior pictured at the Adelaide Racer awards at the Ramada hotel PICTURE BY CHARLES MCQUILLAN Paisley with Miss North West 200 Jillian Frew 3/5/2010. PACEMAKER BELFAST. IAN PAISLEY JR POSES FOR THE OFFICIAL ELECTION ARTIST, SIMON ROBERTS WHILST CANVESSING IN THE COUNTRYSIDE OUTSIDE BALLYMENA THIS AFTERNOON. PICTURE CHARLES MCQUILLAN/PACEMAKER. Pacemaker Press Belfast 22-03-2013: Ian Richard Kyle Paisley, Jr, MP is the Member of Parliament for North Antrim and member of the Northern Ireland Assembly for the Democratic Unionist Party and an author. He is the son of the DUP's founder and former leader, Ian Paisley. Picture By: Arthur Allison. Ian Paisley Jr met Amari Wijewardene, the Sri Lankan High Commissioner, in Parliament to discuss a post-Brexit trade deal PACEMAKER, BELFAST, 11/7/2018: North Antrim MP, Ian Paisley at motorcycle racer William Dunlop's funeral at Garryduff Presbyterian church outside Ballymoney. Dunlop was killed in a crash during practice for the Skerries 100. PICTURE BY STEPHEN DAVISON PACEMAKER BELFAST 20/04/2017 Ian Paisley speaks to the Irish Times at Stormont Hotel in Belfast, about his father. Photo Colm Lenaghan/ Pacemaker Press Ian discusses the legacy of his father Photo Colm Lenaghan/ Pacemaker Press Ian Paisley Getty Images Pacemaker Belfast 18-06-2007: Junior Minister Ian Paisley Junior pictured at photocall at Stormont where ministers were encouraging people to cycle to work. PACEMAKER BELFAST. Copy pics from the book about the early years of the life of Ian Paisley. 13/8/86. 1197/86/bw PACEMAKER, BELFAST, 8/5/2015:DUP's Ian Paisley celebrates his victory in the North Antrim constituency count in Ballymena . PICTURE BY STEPHEN DAVISON A picture posted by Ian Paisley (right) of Arron Banks (second left), Sammy Wilson (second right) and Leave.EU campaigner Andy Wigmore Pacemaker press 21/4/15 The Democratic Unionist Party MP Ian paisley Junior launches election manifesto at Wrightbus in Co Antrim. Picture Mark Marlow/pacemaker press Paisley with Melania Trump Ian Paisley Junior PACEMAKER, BELFAST, 8/5/2015:DUP's Ian Paisley celebrates his victory in the North Antrim constituency count in Ballymena . PICTURE BY STEPHEN DAVISON DUP's Ian Paisley celebrates victory in the North Antrim constituency count in Ballymena in the May 2015 General Election. Picture Stephen Davison Pacemaker 8/5/2015. PACEMAKER BELFAST. Ian Paisley and Ian Jnr. PACEMAKER, BELFAST, 8/5/2015: DUP's Ian Paisley celebrates his victory in the North Antrim constituency count in Ballymena by singing the National Anthem. PICTURE BY STEPHEN DAVISON PACEMAKER, BELFAST, 8/5/2015: Ian Paisley arrives at the North Antrim constituency count in Ballymena with his wife, Fiona. PICTURE BY STEPHEN DAVISON 9 / 6 / 17 PACEMAKER PRESS Ian Paisley Jr celebrates winning his seat for North Antrim in the UK Parlimentary Elections. PICTURE MATT BOHILL PACEMAKER PRESS 3/5/2010. PACEMAKER BELFAST. IAN PAISLEY JR AND IAN PAISLEY SR IN HARRYVILLE, BALLYMENA. PICTURE CHARLES MCQUILLAN/PACEMAKER. Pacemaker Press 8/5/2017 DUP's Ian Paisley Jnr during the Launch of the DUP's General election campaign launch at the Castlereigh Hills Golf in East Belfast on Monday, ahead of the election on the 8th of June. Pic Colm Lenaghan/Pacemaker PACEMAKER, BELFAST, 8/5/2015:DUP's Ian Paisley celebrates his victory in the North Antrim constituency count in Ballymena . PICTURE BY STEPHEN DAVISON Pacemaker Press: 22th December 2017: Ian Paisley Jr pictured with his new and old Passport Picture By: Arthur Allison. Ian Paisley Pacemaker Press Belfast 31-03-2014: Launch of North-West 200 road races at Titanic Belfast . Pictured at the launch Ian Paisley, Jr. and Arlene Foster, MLA Minister of Enterprise, Trade and Investment. PICTURE BY: STEPHEN DAVISON Pacemaker Press Belfast 31-03-2014: Launch of North-West 200 road races at Titanic Belfast .Pictured at the launch Ian Paisley, Jr. and Arlene Foster, MLA Minister of Enterprise, Trade and Investment. PICTURE BY: STEPHEN DAVISON 9 / 6 / 17 PACEMAKER PRESS Ian Paisley Jr celebrates winning his seat for North Antrim in the UK Parlimentary Elections. PICTURE MATT BOHILL PACEMAKER PRESS / Facebook

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Whatsapp The Paisley family at home in 1988. From left to right Ian Junior, Cherith, Rhonda, Kyle. Pic Pacemaker

Reacting North Antrim MLA Philip McGuigan said: "Disappointing result but certainly no endorsement of Ian Paisleys actions.

"The issues raised by this scandal are not going away and neither are the questions for the DUP leadership."

Ulster Unionist Party Leader, Robin Swann MLA said public confidence in politics had collapsed.

"I respect that outcome," he said.

"However I would caution Ian Paisley not to see this as some sort of victory or endorsement of his actions in acting as a paid advocate for a foreign government and bringing North Antrim and the House of Commons into disrepute.

Rather I would urge him to use the time that he has been suspended from Parliament and the DUP, to reflect on the severity of what he has done and the embarrassment he has brought on Northern Ireland.

"He should demonstrate some humility."

Mid and East Antrim SDLP Councillor Declan OLoan said that many people declined to sign the petition because they believed Mr Paisley would win any by-election.

It would have been a better outcome for democracy and political progress here if the outcome had been different," he said.

"The weak support from unionist parties for the petition is further evidence of our divisions - they felt that going against Paisley would ultimately rebound on them.

"Unfortunately we have to rely only on the sanction imposed by the House of Commons to demonstrate that Ian Paisleys conduct was unacceptable."

In the Commons in July Mr Paisley it was with profound personal regret and deep personal embarrassment that he had to make a statement over the report's findings.

But he denied he had any ulterior motive for that genuine mistake in 2013, adding that he accepted his total failure and offered another unreserved apology without qualification.

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He will now return to the Commons in November when his ban ends.

He, however, remains suspended from the DUP as it conducts its own investigation into the matter.
Ian Paisley has thanked the voters of North Antrim for their unwavering support after Westminsters first ever recall petition fell short of the threshold required to unseat him.

The MP also hailed his family and true friends for sticking by him after he narrowly avoided a by-election.

Mr Paisley would have been ousted as an MP if 10% of the electorate in his North Antrim constituency  7,543 voters  signed the petition. In the event 7,099 people signed it (9.4%).

The petition device, created following the Westminster expenses scandal, was initiated after Mr Paisley was banned from the House of Commons for 30 sitting days for failing to declare two 2013 family holidays paid for by the Sri Lankan government.

A parliamentary watchdog found in July that a year after the luxury holidays, Mr Paisley lobbied then prime minister David Cameron not to support a UN probe into alleged Sri Lankan human rights abuses.

In a statement to the Press Association, Mr Paisley said the electorate had spoken.

In July I apologised for a mistake made almost six years ago.

The electorate was asked to pass judgment. 90.6% have accepted my apology.

The electorate has clearly spoken.

I would like to thank my true friends, family, the electorate who have stood by me with unwavering support. Hallelujah.

NI Chief Electoral Officer Virginia McVea announces the outcome of Westminsters first ever recall petition. pic.twitter.com/UZ9HIoiga4  David Young (@DavidYoungPA) September 20, 2018

The long-standing Democratic Unionist, whose late father the Reverend Ian Paisley founded the party, is currently suspended from the DUP pending its own internal investigation into his conduct.

Three centres were opened in North Antrim for the last six weeks to give voters the opportunity to sign the petition. Constituents were also able to put their name to the petition via post.

Northern Irelands Chief Electoral Officer Virginia McVea announced the outcome in Belfast around 1.25am on Thursday morning after a count that commenced at midnight.

The petition has not been successful, she said.

BREAKING - @ianpaisleymp has thanked the voters of North Antrim for their "unwavering support" after Westminster's first ever recall petition fell short of the threshold required to unseat him. In a statement to @PA , Mr Paisley said: pic.twitter.com/rkdY5hQrMr  David Young (@DavidYoungPA) September 20, 2018

Ms McVea communicated the outcome to Speaker John Bercows office in London before making the announcement. Mr Paisley, who was not there in person, was informed by text message.

Afterwards Ms McVea rejected criticism that has been levelled at her by Sinn Fein for only opening three centres where people could sign the petition, when the maximum permitted was 10.

She said there had been unprecedented access afforded, with the longest ever electoral period in the region and voters able to access postal ballots on demand.

There has never been access to an electoral event like that before, said told the Press Association.

And the three designated places were the three hubs within the North Antrim constituency. Legislation allows for one up to a maximum in any constituency of ten across the UK and we decided on three.

Ulster Unionist leader Robin Swann said it was clear there was no public appetite for a by-election.

I respect that outcome, he said.

BREAKING. @ianpaisleymp holds onto his seat...just. Petition falls 444 votes short of the 7543 required to force a by-election in North Antrim.  David Young (@DavidYoungPA) September 20, 2018

However I would caution Ian Paisley not to see this as some sort of victory or endorsement of his actions in acting as a paid advocate for a foreign government and bringing North Antrim and the House of Commons into disrepute.

Rather I would urge him to use the time that he has been suspended from Parliament and the DUP, to reflect on the severity of what he has done and the embarrassment he has brought on Northern Ireland. He should demonstrate some humility.

Mr Paisleys Commons ban has left current Prime Minister Theresa May shorn of one of her 10 DUP MP confidence and supply allies during a period that could witness several crucial Brexit votes.

It has also given the DUP another headache at a time when the party is under intense scrutiny at public inquiry hearings in Northern Ireland examining its handling of the botched green energy scheme that brought down Stormont powersharing.

An investigation by the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards found the cost of the hospitality afforded Mr Paisley and his family may have been significantly more than his 50,000 estimate.

It found the Sri Lankan holidays included business-class air travel, accommodation at first-class hotels, helicopter trips and visits to tourist attractions for the North Antrim MP and his wider family.

The trips also included meeting with Sri Lankan governmental figures.

Mr Paisleys threshold for registering such hospitality in 2013 was around 660.

In March 2014, Mr Paisley wrote to Mr Cameron to lobby against a proposed United Nations resolution setting up an international investigation into alleged human rights abuses in Sri Lanka.

In the wake of the watchdog report, Mr Paisley apologised for what he described as an unintentional failure to declare the holidays.

In the 2017 general election, Mr Paisley retained his North Antrim seat with a landslide 20,000-plus majority, securing nearly 59% of the vote.

Sinn Feins North Antrim Assembly member Philip McGuigan said: Ian Paisleys party leadership have yet to condemn these actions or to confirm whether or not he still has their support as MP for North Antrim.

That is a failure of leadership.

They need to come out of their hiding place and address the very serious issues at the heart of this scandal.
A Northern Ireland woman is charged with procuring abortion pills for her teenage daughter.

A landmark legal challenge to a Northern Ireland woman being charged with procuring her teenage daughter's abortion has been put on hold.

Judges in Belfast adjourned proceedings for the Public Prosecution Service (PPS) to provide more information on how it reviewed the case following a Surpreme Court verdict on the region's termination laws.

Specific focus is to be placed on the potential impact on the human rights of the woman's daughter.

Re-listing the hearing for two days in November, Lord Chief Justice Sir Declan Morgan said: "For us to deal with it in the absence of an understanding of the PPS response to the judgment of the Supreme Court would be entirely inappropriate."

Lawyers for the mother and daughter are seeking a judicial review amid claims that subjecting the older woman to criminal proceedings is inhuman.

They also contend that the PPS decision breaches privacy rights in a case involving an unwanted pregnancy from an allegedly abusive relationship.

Outside court, Jemma Conlon of Stephen Chambers Solicitors, said: "My client is a devoted mother who, along with her daughter, has had to constantly relive a traumatic and private family matter under the weight of this prosecution.

"This has caused them immense distress and anguish which has been constant over the past five years."

Reporting restrictions have been imposed to protect the identities of both mother and daughter.

Abortions are currently only legal in Northern Ireland if the pregnant female's life or long-term health is at serious risk.

In 2013, the then-15-year-old girl fell pregnant after being involved in a relationship which was said to be both physically and verbally abusive.

Feeling unable to travel to England for a termination, her mother purchased abortion pills online.

The parent now faces two charges of unlawfully procuring and supplying drugs with intent to procure a miscarriage, contrary to the 1861 Offences Against the Person Act.

But according to the family's legal team compelling the girl to continue with her pregnancy would have breached rights to protection from inhuman and degrading treatment.

Prosecuting her mother for enabling her to access medication to obtain an abortion also violated those entitlements and rights to privacy and family life, it is contended.

Further issues have been raised about the disclosure of information from a GP and child and adolescent mental health services as part of the police investigation and subsequence decision to prosecute.

The case was due to get underway at the High Court in Belfast today.

However, Sir Declan questioned counsel on the impact of a ruling from the Supreme Court in June.

In that case the justices dismissed an appeal over the legality of Northern Ireland's abortion law.

But a majority held that the existing regime was incompatible with human rights law in cases of fatal foetal abnormality and sexual crime.

"I don't see in the affidavits that there's any indication of whether the PPS has formed a view as to whether the Article 8 rights of the second applicant (the daughter) have been breached by the unavailability of termination and the prosecution in relation to that," he said.

Tony McGleenan QC, for the PPS, confirmed no formal review took place following the Supreme Court decision, but said his client had looked at the issue in preparation for the case.

Karen Quinlivan QC, representing the mother and daughter, insisted: "Our basic case is that bringing a prosecution breaches Article 8 and Article 3 (of the European Convention on Human Rights)."

Following discussions with his judicial colleague Sir Ronnie Weatherup, Sir Declan announced the case as being put on hold.

Directing the PPS to provide a response within two weeks, he also disclosed that a third judge will be brought in due to the significance of the challenge.

"I'm sorry we haven't been able to proceed, but this is an extremely important case and its quite complex," he added.

As the hearing was adjourned Ms Conlon insisted her client was being criminalised for helping her daughter in a harrowing situation.

"An innocent family has effectively been punished for being open and honest with medical practitioners and police," she said outside court.

"We hope the court will take the view that the prosecution of my client is wrong and contrary to their human rights.

"We want them to be allowed to move on with their lives in the privacy of their own family unit."
A man and woman arrested in Dungannon on Thursday after police seized an estimated 60,000 of suspected cocaine have been released on bail pending further enquiries.

A man aged in his 20s and a woman in her 40s were arrested on suspicion of drugs related offences, including importation of Class A controlled drugs and attempted possession of Class A drugs with intent to supply.

A number of electronic devices were also seized during the operation. Both remain in custody assisting police with their enquiries.

A search was carried out at a house in the Lambfield Drive area this morning following the seizure of suspected cocaine with an estimated value of 60,000. The seizure was a joint operation with colleagues from the UK Border Agency, which took place in June this year in the greater Belfast area," Detective Inspector Keith Gawley said.

The PSNI is committed to making Northern Ireland a hostile environment for those in our community who are involved in serious drug crimes. We will seek to identify them, arrest them and place them before the courts.

Anyone with any information about drugs or any illegal activity should contact police by calling 101. Information can also be passed anonymously to the independent charity Crimestoppers on 0800 555 111.
Northern Ireland Water has been fined a total of 80,000 after admitting polluting two rivers in Co Down

Northern Ireland Water has been fined a total of 80,000 after admitting polluting two rivers in Co Down.

A 20,000 penalty was imposed over an incident in October 2016 when chemicals were washed into a river close to Newcastle, killing "a minimum" of almost 2,000 fish.

Two fines of 30,000 were imposed for two more incidents in January and March 2017 when "sewage fungus" was spotted at the same discharge pipe.

The fines were issued by Judge Piers Grant at Downpatrick Crown Court yesterday.

At an earlier hearing NIW, with offices at the Old Westland Road in Belfast, pleaded guilty to offences of causing polluting matter to be discharged into a river and two of breaching conditions of water sewage legislation.

The judge said samples taken from the river, parts of which were "foul smelling", showed "about a mile of river was affected in the March 2017 incident".

He told the court that while it was to the credit of NIW they had pleaded guilty to each of the three offences across the two indictments and had taken significant remedial work to prevent any further incidents, "regrettably and unfortunately the defendant company have a number of previous convictions of a similar type" stretching back to 2009.

Samples taken from the river, which was affected over a four and a half mile stretch, indicated the presence of chemicals which were harmful to fish life.

The judge added that while the carcasses of 1,905 trout and 23 salmon were recovered from the river, "clearly that's the minimum loss of life because its almost impossible, in these circumstances, to trace every carcass and every fish killed".

Northern Ireland Environment Agency (NIEA) investigations uncovered the pollutant materials had gotten into the water way when a chemical spillage at the water treatment plant had been power hosed away.

Turning to the second indictment, Judge Grant described how an off duty NIEA official spotted "coloured discharge" in the Blackwater River near Killinchy and reported the matter.

"Emergency measures were taken" and investigators noted a "foul smell" with a significant amount of "sewage fungus" with samples taken indicating that there were materials which would be harmful to fish life.

Yesterday Judge Grant noted defence requests to keep in mind that NIW was not a commercial operation and that any financial penalty might take away from "additional necessary resources".

Judge Grant said it was clear that NIW are a "well-resourced organisation" and while it may well be that profits are handed back to government, "that doesn't prevent the defendant company from taking proper and reasonable steps".

Afterwards, NIEA said the fines sent out a "very clear messages to all sectors in Northern Ireland" that the must comply with environmental laws.
The High Court will today hear a judicial review of the decision to prosecute the woman over the incident (stock picture)

A mother from Northern Ireland who purchased abortion medication for her teenage daughter has said she has been put through "five years of agony".

The High Court will today hear a judicial review of the decision to prosecute the woman over the incident.

The mother was charged after police seized her daughter's confidential medical records without her consent.

She is being prosecuted under the 1861 Offences Against the Person Act (OAPA), which has been the focus of intense parliamentary debate over recent months. Reporting restrictions prevent the identities of both women being published.

In 2013, the then-15-year-old fell pregnant after being involved in a relationship which was both physically and verbally abusive. Feeling unable to travel to England for a termination, her mother purchased abortion pills online.

Abortions are currently only legal in Northern Ireland if the pregnant female's life or long-term health is at serious risk.

In 2015 the High Court ruled the failure to provide exceptions to the near-blanket ban for cases of fatal foetal abnormalities and victims of rape or incest breaches human rights legislation.

Lawyers are seeking to judicially review the PPS for pursuing a prosecution against the woman over procuring the abortion. They want the court to find it was wrong to prosecute and potentially criminalise the mother for behaviour that would be lawful in other parts of the UK.

Last year, they cleared the first stage in their challenge by establishing they had an arguable case. Judges were told the woman was faced with a situation where she believed her teenage daughter could not cope with the pregnancy.

If this legal challenge fails, the woman could face a criminal trial and up to five years in prison.

Speaking out for the first time about the case, she said that she has been put through "five years of agony", adding how "painful" it has been to have the prosecution hanging over her head "every single day" of her life.

"The fear and pain of it all. I feel like I am not allowed to move on. I try for the sake of my family to keep my head above water," she added.

The hearing will take place over the next two days and a ruling is due in the coming months.

A Supreme Court judgment in June found the current abortion law in Northern Ireland is in breach of human rights legislation, resulting in emergency parliamentary debates on repealing parts of the OAPA in England, Wales and Northern Ireland.

This autumn, Labour MPs Diana Johnson and Stella Creasy are planning parliamentary bids to repeal the relevant sections to prevent future prosecutions.
A Northern Ireland woman who took to Twitter in anger after a friend described her dog as ugly has been overwhelmed by support from pet lovers across the world.

Sharon Grant from Dundonald took along her beloved pooch Shane when she went to meet her friend who was visiting from England.

Keen to show off her new pup, Sharon was horrified when her friend told her he was the ugliest dog he had ever seen.

Still miffed after returning home, Sharon posted a picture of Shane on her Twitter account asking people if they would take offence if someone insulted their dog.

More than 1,000 people replied, many sharing photos of their own dogs.

Sharon said she never expected the vast response.

"I couldn't believe it, I had more than 1,600 replies to my tweet, 264 people retweeted it and nearly 5,000 people liked it," she added.

"I thought maybe 20 or 30 people might have liked the post but the number just kept going up and up. It was so lovely that so many people posted pictures of their dogs too.

"I tried to reply but in the end there were just too many.

"It has completed overwhelmed me though, and I was delighted to see that I wasn't wrong about Shane being far from ugly."

One replied to say: "He is one of the most beautiful dogs I've ever seen!"

Sharon sent some replies to her friend, adding: "He knows now how many other people actually think Shane is gorgeous."

Shane arrived at the Grant family home at the start of the summer after Sharon's previous dog Daisy passed away aged 12.

She continued: "After Daisy died, I didn't want another dog at first but I was so down in the dumps my mother actually suggested getting another dog would help me, so I started looking for one.

"I saw Shane and at first I couldn't make up my mind if I should get another dog or not, but my mum persuaded me to go ahead.

"I went and got him because he was so adorable and he has just changed my life."

According to Sharon, Shane has quickly made a big impression.

She added: "He has become such an important part of our family already.

"If I am having a down day, he seems to know and snuggles up to me.

"Shane is really sensitive and he seems to know whenever a cuddle is needed.

"I just love him and think the world of him which is why I was so annoyed when my friend said he was the ugliest dog he had ever seen.

"I actually thought he was joking at the start but when I realised he was serious, I was shocked.

"I think Shane is the cutest and nearly 5,000 agree with me - so I must be right."
A new dementia cafe is being launched in Co Londonderry today.

The cafe is being launched at Milesian Manor Care Home in Magherafelt ahead of World Alzheimer's Day on Friday.

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The new-concept care home was inspired by the Sterling University International Design Conference, it is a first-of-its-kind in Northern Ireland providing older people with a lifestyle-inspired home in which to fully enjoy their formative years.

The home focuses on providing residents with a collection of specially created spaces reflecting the activities they would have enjoyed previously along with a full programme of daily activities, encouraging independence and a life full of enjoyment ensuring the experience provides a positive one, not only for the residents but their relatives too who are encouraged to play a big role in their older relations lives.

It will take place monthly and provide support and education to families and carers who are caring for those living in the community with Dementia.

Expert nursing staff from Milesian Manor and Dementia NI representatives will be on-hand to help raise awareness, explain signs and symptoms, whilst Dementia NI members will share their first-hand experience about what it is like to live with the condition and how the local community can help.

Around 850,000 people live with dementia in the UK. Latest figures from the Alzheimer's Society show that nearly 20,000 of these live in Northern Ireland. Across the UK, the vast majority (almost 95%) of those living with dementia are over the age of 65.6 there are, however, 42,325 people under 65 who have dementia.

In attendance at the event was Martin Murtagh from Dementia NI.

Martin has been outspoken in the past about his battle with dementia and experience with the Personal Independence Payment (PIP) system.

Cara Macklin, Director at Milesian Manor explained the concept behind the dementia cafe.

Expand Close Cara Macklin (Milesian Manor), Mid Ulster Councillor Sean McPeake, Ashleigh Davis (Dementia NI), Lauren Shivers (Milesian Manor) and Martin Murtagh (Dementia NI) at the launch of the Dementia Cafe. / Facebook

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Whatsapp Cara Macklin (Milesian Manor), Mid Ulster Councillor Sean McPeake, Ashleigh Davis (Dementia NI), Lauren Shivers (Milesian Manor) and Martin Murtagh (Dementia NI) at the launch of the Dementia Cafe.

We wanted to be caring towards our local community and feel that the expertise we have in our home could be utilised further," she said.

"Many people are not at the stage of needing full time care but still need a little extra help and guidance  often a loved one can feel under a lot of pressure having to support or care for someone living with Dementia, it can be stressful and upsetting and our Dementia Cafe is somewhere they can come to get support and advice, along with a cup of tea and meet experts in the field, but equally importantly they will get to meet other people in their own community who are going through a similar experience.

Ashleigh Davis, Empowerment Officer,from Dementia NI said social gatherings were essential to people suffering from dementia.

Dementia NI members meet on a regular basis at Empowerment Groups throughout Northern Ireland to enable people with dementia to have a voice, remain active and part of their community," she said.

"Members meet in suitable venues to offer each other support through friendly social gatherings and raise awareness about what it is like to live with the symptoms of dementia.

Dementia NI members help influence and inform how people can still live well with dementia. Through training and education, the members tell others what it is like to live with dementia, as well as challenge the stigma attached to a diagnosis by raising awareness."

Chair of Mid Ulster District Council, Councillor Sean McPeake, said the project would be an important addition to the local community.

Caring for someone with dementia can be a challenging and emotional experience and it can also be very isolating," he said.

"This new dementia cafe is not only a place of respite where family members can meet other people to share their experiences, but also benefit from advice and support.

"This is a far-sighted project by Milesian Manor and my congratulations go to the staff for developing the cafe."
The judge said that if any member of the panel felt they may be prejudiced or have any sympathies, they should bring it to his notice (stock photo)

A jury has been selected in the trial of a PSNI sergeant facing charges arising out of the death of a man in custody.

Brian McKenna is due to go on trial at Belfast Crown Court tomorrow.

No details surrounding the death of David McGowan (29) in 2014 were given during the jury selection process.

However, Belfast Recorder Judge David McFarland revealed he died while in the police custody suite at Lisburn PSNI station.

The Recorder said the trial would last for at least a month.

The jury panel of seven men and five women were also told they would be hearing evidence from Alexander McAllister, a former prison officer who at the time worked as a civilian detention officer at Lisburn PSNI station.

In addition Judge McFarland informed the panel that the case involved "three institutions - the PSNI, the Prison Service and the Police Ombudsman's Office, which carried out the investigation".

The judge said that if any member of the panel felt they may be prejudiced or have any sympathies, they should bring it to his notice.

One jury member, who would have been the jury foreperson, did make an indication. Following a private discussion with the Recorder, that person was excused from sitting on the jury, whose selection was then completed.

Before releasing them, the judge warned the jury not to discuss the case with anyone and said it would be "entirely wrong" to conduct any internet searches about the case.
More staff are needed to tackle cancer waiting times, Cancer Research UK have said.

A leading cancer charity has warned that a lack of healthcare staff in Northern Ireland is putting lives at risk through longer cancer waiting times.

The latest waiting time figures show that between April and June 2018 only 68.6% of patients in Northern Ireland with an urgent GP referral for suspected cancer started treatment within 62 days.

The target of 95% was missed by all Trusts during this period. The target, set in 2009, has never been met across Northern Ireland.

Cancer Research UK said that early detection is essential as it "gives patients a better chance of survival".

The group's Public Affairs Manager for Northern Ireland Margaret Carr called for a cancer strategy to address staff shortages.

In June only 70.4% of patients started treatment within 62 days following their urgent referral. This was an increase on 67.3% in May 2018 and 69.1% in June 2017

Of the 107 patients waiting longer than 62 days for treatment in June 2018, over 35.5% were diagnosed with cancer.

The target was also missed for the 31 day waiting period of 98%.

In June, 95.1% of patients were treated within 31 days compared with 93.2% in May 2018 and 94.6% during June 2017.

The target was achieved by the Southern and Western Trusts.

Of the 40 patients waiting longer than 31 days in June 2018, 32.5% were diagnosed with cancer.

The target for urgent breast cancer referrals was also missed.

In June, 94.1% of patients were first seen within 14 days, compared with 96.3% in May 2018 and 85.4% during June 2017

Trusts aim to have 100% of urgent breast cancer referrals seen within 14 days.

Mrs Carr said that staff were trying their best but that targets continued to be missed.

Healthcare staff in Northern Ireland are working harder than ever to diagnose and treat people with cancer. But despite their best efforts, the 62 day target continues to be missed," she said.

To diagnose cancer earlier and give patients a better chance at survival, we need to carry out more tests and this requires more staff. A cancer strategy which includes action to assess and address staff shortages is desperately needed in Northern Ireland if patients are to be seen more quickly.

Waiting is an anxious time for anyone potentially facing a cancer diagnosis and its important this wait is minimised as much as possible.
Scene in Claddaghduff in Galway where a caravan was blown into the sea

Trees down in the Old Crumlin Road area of Belfast

A man in Co Armagh was one of two people killed in Ireland as the full force of Storm Ali struck yesterday with winds reaching almost 100mph.

Around 27,000 electricity customers in Northern Ireland were without power last night after winds as high was 91mph were recorded at Killowen in Co Down  the strongest September gust since records began.

A man in his 20s died and another in his 40s suffered injuries after a tree fell on them, while a Swiss tourist in her 50s was killed after her caravan was blown off a cliff in Co Galway.

The Armagh victim, an engineer working with an NI Water contractor at a pumping station, died near the entrance of Slieve Gullion Forest Park outside the village of Meigh.

NI Water said last night: NI Water is currently working closely with the emergency services, the Health and Safety Executive and the PSNI and will do everything possible to assist.

Our thoughts are with the families of those involved at this time.

Sinn Fein MLA Megan Fearon said: The local community is shocked and saddened at the news that a man was tragically killed and another man injured.

I extend my condolences to the family and friends of this man at this difficult time.

SDLP MLA Justin McNulty also extended his condolences to the deceaseds family.

It is extremely upsetting to hear that a man has lost his life as a result of todays weather conditions, he said.

It is sometimes too easy to forget the danger workers face to keep the public safe during adverse conditions.

In the west of Ireland a woman died after her caravan was blown onto a beach at Claddaghduff, near Clifden in Co Galway, yesterday morning.

Garda said the body of the woman was found after a search on the beach.

Almost 100,000 properties here suffered power cuts after Storm Ali rolled in off the Atlantic.

NI Electricity said last night it was continuing to face extremely challenging conditions.

It said more than 68,500 customers had their power restored, but there could still be more faults and hundreds of staff had been brought in to cope with the demand.

NIE Networks said its teams would be working into the night to restore power to homes and businesses still without electricity.

We are expecting that the vast majority of customers affected will have power restored during Thursday, however some small, isolated pockets of customers are likely to be without power for longer, it said.

We are dealing with over a thousand individual faults on our network and our crews are working as quickly as possible to deal with them, but the damage is extensive.

Rail passengers travelling between Belfast and Dublin were stuck on the Enterprise for more than eight hours because of the disruption.

Glyn Roberts, chief executive of Retail NI, was on the train that left Belfast at 10.30am and said Translink did not offer any alternative services when they were first stopped at Lisburn for two hours, and then Newry.

We were stopped the first time at Lisburn and they said there was fallen trees on the tracks, he said.

At Lisburn we were not offered any alternative routes to Dublin, there was no offer of a bus substitution service.

We were told there were trains back to Belfast and that was it. The only alternative was to wait, so we waited.

Mr Roberts said the train was stopped again at Newry due to trees on the track.

I fully appreciate the emergency services are working very hard, he added, but in nearly eight-and-a-half hours on this train we have been offered one free cup of tea and no food.

The staff have disappeared and we got extremely poor information.

I understand there is not a lot you can do about storms, but the customer service has been appalling.

The line was finally cleared and reopened after 7pm.

Translink said a number of trees had fallen along the route on both sides of the border.

We had numerous crews working hard to remove trees and debris from the railways throughout the day, across our network, it said.

In the case of the Enterprise, each time a tree was removed and the train proceeded, further trees came down on the track due to the high winds.

When the Enterprise was at Lisburn and other stations along the route, passengers were given the opportunity to either remain on board or disembark and return to Belfast. If the train was stopped between stations, there was no road access or safe disembarkation area for customers.

We apologise to passengers for this inconvenience which was a result of the stormy weather.

Translink said it would offer affected customers a gesture of goodwill.

They should contact feedback@translink.co.uk, providing booking or ticket details.

In Magherafelt pupils at Sperrin Integrated College were evacuated after a tree fell and damaged a gas pipe. Emergency services attended and the school will remain closed today.

More than 60 roads were forced to close due to fallen trees.

In Osborne Park in south Belfast the driver of an oil tanker had a lucky escape when a tree fell on his vehicle. The man in his 40s was taken to hospital by ambulance.

Firefighters were also called after a roof blew off a building onto a main road in Warrenpoint, and in Donaghadee two empty oil tanks had to be safely removed from a flat roof using specialist equipment.

A Ryanair flight from Milan-Bergamo to Belfast International had to be diverted to Liverpool due to high winds. Belfast International Airport is advising passengers to check with their airline ahead of travelling.

Belfast Zoo and the Giants Causeway also closed for safety reasons.
A man died after being hit by a tree at Slieve Gullion forest park in County Armagh during Storm Ali (Brian Lawless/PA)

Tributes have been paid to a man who died when a tree fell on top of him in south Armagh during Storm Ali.

Matthew Campbell, who was in his 20s, was working as a contractor for Northern Ireland Water at Slieve Guillion Forest Park when tragedy struck on Wednesday.

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Another man, in his 40s, was injured and is being treated in the Royal Victoria Hospital.

Mr Campbell's former principal at Royal Belfast Academical Institute, speaking to the BBC, described him as a "genuine and thoroughly decent young man" whose life "ended far too soon."

Expand Close Emergency services and a forensic officer at Slieve Gullion forest park in Co Armagh, where a contractor working for Northern Ireland Water died after he was hit by a falling tree as Storm Ali wreaked havoc across Ireland. Brian Lawless/PA Wire PA / Facebook

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Whatsapp Emergency services and a forensic officer at Slieve Gullion forest park in Co Armagh, where a contractor working for Northern Ireland Water died after he was hit by a falling tree as Storm Ali wreaked havoc across Ireland. Brian Lawless/PA Wire

Janet Williamson said: "When he left school, in 2012, the school established an award for attendance, which as of the 20 September 2018 is renamed 'The Matthew Campbell Award for Outstanding Attendance' and will be rewarded each year, in his memory.

"Matthew loved Inst and he embraced its spirit of being involved, of engaging in his learning and of supporting others.

"As a school community our thoughts are with his fiancee, family and friends."

It is understood the men were working for Lagan Construction Limited on behalf of NI Water when the incident happened.

In a statement, a Lagan Construction Ltd spokeswoman said: "Lagan Construction Limited can confirm that two of its employees were involved in a serious incident at Slieve Gullion Forest Park yesterday whilst working on behalf of NI Water.

"We are deeply saddened to confirm that one of our employees has passed away as a result of their injuries and that another employee has been seriously injured and is currently being treated in Hospital.

"Our thoughts and prayers are with the two families at this time.

"We are offering support and counselling services to colleagues and we continue to work closely with the statutory authorities."

NI Water chief executive, Sara Venning said: Our deepest sympathy goes out to the family and friends of this young man. This was a tragic incident and NI Water will continue to work with the statutory authorities and the contractor as they carry out their investigations.

A death notice published online read: "Devoted son of Mark and Pamela, dearly loved fiance of Robyn, cherished brother of Ashley and fiance Kyle, uncle of Baby Zara, grandson of Jack and Beryl, Fred and Isa."

Mr Campbell's funeral will take place in Ballyclare on Monday September 24.
Henry (Harry) Munn waves from the cockpit of the societys Down Spitfire

The funeral will take place today of a Lisburn joiner who became a key member of the Ulster Aviation Society.

Henry Munn, known as Harry, died of a suspected heart attack at his home on Sunday at the age of 70.

After his wife Anne passed away, Mr Munn decided to join the Ulster Aviation Society (UAS) 10 years ago.

His natural enthusiasm for aircraft and practical skills soon made him invaluable, helping to restore and maintain many planes over the years, including a Second World War Grumman Wildcat and a Spitfire replica.

Today, the close friends he made at the society have offered to carry his coffin.

He is survived by his mother Eileen, sister Lilian and brother-in-law Robin.

UAS chairman Ray Burrows said Mr Munn was "a lovely and gentle man".

His last day alive was spent helping to move the 'Down' Spitfire at Aldergrove.

The replica has the Belfast Telegraph Spitfire fund logo on its side, referencing a wartime fundraiser in which readers of this paper donated money to build 17 of the famous fighters.

"We'd never done that in one day before, taking the wings and blades off before assembling it again, which is pretty good going," said Mr Burrows.

"We then went back to the hangar at our Maze site, Harry left at 6pm and said 'I'll see you Tuesday'.

"We were supposed to pick up the Spitfire, but sadly he was found dead on Sunday afternoon on his armchair with his overalls still on.

"Obviously, he came back from the hangar, put his feet up and that was it."

Mr Munn had been looking forward to an airshow in Duxford in Cambridgeshire this weekend.

"When his wife died I think Harry was at a bit of a loss as to what to do," said Mr Burrows.

"He came to visit the hangar and he realised this was something he could take part in and from day one he just loved it and he became a really important member of the team."

Although he wasn't a pilot, Mr Burrows said his passion for restoration work "shone out like a bright light".

"He was always the first to volunteer for trips to places like Poland, Frankfurt and Paris."

Around the society's Maze hangar, the work of Mr Munn is everywhere to be seen from the planes to displays and door frames.

"Everywhere you look there's a part of him there," said Mr Burrows.

Mr Munn's funeral service takes place at 10am today at Ronnie Thompson's Funeral Church in Lisburn followed by committal in Lisburn (Blaris) New Cemetery.
The families of victims murdered during some of the worst atrocities in Northern Ireland have come together to call for support from the Irish Republic in their search for justice.

Representatives from the Bloody Sunday families as well as Miami Showband survivor Stephen Travers said they want the backing of people from the Republic in their quest for answers.

They also raised concerns over new Garda Commissioner Drew Harris, who is a former Deputy Chief Constable of the PSNI.

Speaking at a meeting in Dublin last night, Kate Nash (69), whose brother William was murdered and father Alex wounded on Bloody Sunday, said now is an important time to get support from across the island of Ireland.

Ms Nash (above) said: "We are pursuing justice for my brother Willie and for my father because he suffered a lot. We need to get justice. I'm almost 70 now and I have this great fear, not of death, but that I die before I see British soldiers in court.

"If we get those soldiers in court, I hope they will talk."

Miami Showband massacre survivor Mr Travers said that he will ask Mr Harris to hand over information into the 1975 murders carried out by the UVF.

There have been allegations of collusion between the authorities and loyalist terrorists in the lead-up to the massacre after State Papers revealed that British intelligence agency MI5 had supplied the UVF with detonators.

Mr Travers (67) said that, as Garda Commissioner, Mr Harris can hand over "vital information" into the killings.

He said he was "suspicious of Mr Harris' recent appointment because of his previous roles in the PSNI and RUC", adding: "We will ask for his assistance in uncovering information that we were looking for and I can't see how he will refuse that."
North Antrim MP Ian Paisley has said that the failure of the recall petition against him was a vote of confidence from his constituents.

Mr Paisley said that he believed constituents had accepted his apology and were ready to move on following his suspension from the House of Commons.

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A parliamentary watchdog found in August that a year after receiving luxury holidays, Mr Paisley lobbied then prime minister David Cameron not to support a UN probe into alleged Sri Lankan human rights abuses.

As well as not declaring the holidays, the MP was found to have broken Commons lobbying rules.

He was handed a 30 day ban from the Commons, the longest on record for any MP.

In North Antrim 7,099 people signed the recall petition over the past six weeks - 9.4% of the electorate and 444 short of the required number. Fourteen of the papers lodged were deemed void or rejected for uncertainty.

Ten percent of the North Antrim electorate was required. That was 7,543 voters.

Speaking on BBC Radio Ulster's Talkback programme Mr Paisley said that his constituents had the chance to remove him, but chose to keep him in place.

"I've accepted the report, I've put my hands up, I've apologised for it, more than anyone else now this has been put before 75-76,000 people," the North Antrim MP said.

"The people who put me in the House of Commons said 'naw we're keeping you there, we've accepted that apology'.

"I have to humbly accept that is their will and I think most people were expecting there was going to be a by-election and they were going to give me a bloody nose and the electorate actually decided something different.

"Whenever you analyse that vote Sinn Fein couldn't even muster 50% of their own supporters."

The long-serving DUP member, son of party founder Ian Paisley Sr., said that he believed his absence would not affect key Brexit votes.

"I have been punished with a thirty day suspension, I've been docked my salary for that period and am facing a very severe financial penalty," Mr Paisley said.

"I'm still doing my job as an MP and I'm still on call but I can't go into the chamber and can't vote.

"Votes in the chamber on crucial matters are called by the party of Government and I believe Theresa May will sensibly make sure any votes take place when she has her full cadre of supporters there to vote on issues to do with Brexit."

Mr Paisley was asked if his response to the petition might be seen as "arrogant".

"I can't win in terms of my personality, some people will take the view that the confidence and self assurance that people want in their public representative is portrayed by others as arrogance," he replied.

"The vast majority of the people in this constituency who meet me, who know me, who support me, had the oppourtunity to kick me out and 90.6% of them said 'we're keeping you big fella, we like you'."

Mr Paisley rejected the claim that he was often in the media in a negative context.

"I can't help the reasons why I get in the news, I could be a shrinking violet and not try to achieve things and not try to support things. I am not prepared to do that," he said.

"I think it's very clear that this has had an impact on me. I am truly sorry for how this happened and I believe today the chapter has turned and people have accepted that apology and moved on."

The North Antrim MP said that his DUP future was in the hands of party officers.

"I want to say a huge thank you to my true friends, to my supporters, to my constituents, it's in adversity that you find friendship and it's all of those people who have been in contact with me, my church group but most of all to my family who had to go through this with me," Mr Paisley said.

"I've been a member of the DUP for 36 years, boy and man, I've been in the DUP when it's extremely difficult to be in the DUP and so be it.

"I'm disappointed that I was suspended, disappointed by the reasons that caused it. The party officers have made that statement, it's up to them to change that and I will await their decision."
Three Madonna-featured lots are up for auction for Prince Albert II of Monaco Foundation on Wednesday 26 September.

This year the foundation will hold its second Monte Carlo Gala for the Global Ocean, in the heart of Monte Carlo and will feature some of the most amazing live auction items ever offered - including these three Madonna lots.

Horseback Riding With Madonna On The Beach In Portugal

Madonna recently moved to Portugal and as part of this priceless opportunity invites the winning bidder to join her in Portugal for an afternoon of riding horses through the forest and the beach. The winning bidder and up to five guests will join the superstar for one of her favorite past times. You will spend an afternoon exploring the natural scenery on horseback with Madonna as your guide.

Portrait Sitting With Famed Photographer Steven Klein While Art Directed By Madonna

A truly unique and extraordinary opportunity to sit for a portrait by this legendary photographer in New York and to have the bragging rights of your photo shoot directed by Madonna herself!

Private Album Preview With Madonna In Her Recording Studio In London

Madonnas next album will be coming out soon, and before its release, she invites the winning bidder and up to three guests to join her in her London recording studio to preview some of the songs from the album with her.

This years auction will be held this month at the Terraces of the Opera of Monte Carlo. There will be live performances by Gloria Gaynor, Nile Rodgers, and Chic. Madonna will be one of the many celebrities chairing the event. Other celebrities include Li Bing Bing, Orlando Bloom, Adrien Brody, Pierce Brosnan, Gerard Butler, Robert Davi, Andy Garcia, Goldie Hawn, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Olga Kurylenko, Eva Longoria, Diane Lane, Kelly Slater, Robin Thicke and Chris Tucker.

The live auction is www.montecarlogala2018.com
Almost 30% of shareholders did not back the re-election of Ryanairs chairman during its annual general meeting in Dublin (Niall Carson/PA)

Almost 30% of Ryanairs shareholders have voted against the chairmans re-election.

The budget airline held its annual general meeting near Dublin on Thursday after a year in which it has been buffeted by pilot strikes which have grounded hundreds of flights.

Chairman David Bondermans re-election was secured by 70.5%.

Chief executive Michael OLeary was returned by 98.5%.

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The budget carrier has faced industrial action by pilots across Europe.

Last month Ryanair and Irish pilots union Forsa reached an agreement, the trade union said, and the threat of job losses was averted.

It was the first collective agreement the airline has reached in the Republic and represented the reversal of a 32-year policy.

It agreed to recognise unions last year.

The dispute between the airline and some of its Irish pilots involved annual leave, base transfers and promotions.

It caused five days of strike action by about 100 of Ryanairs 350 Irish-based pilots.

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In August there was a 24-hour strike involving staff in Holland, Belgium, Germany, Sweden and Ireland and 400 flights were cancelled.

Ryanair cabin crew in Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, Italy and Belgium are expected to strike on September 28.

The firms ultra-efficient low-cost model has seen it become one of the biggest and most profitable airlines in the world.

The mismanagement of pilot rosters last year led to the cancellation of thousands of flights.

The resulting fall out culminated in union recognition and the recent industrial relations strife, which the airline says has affected relatively few flights.
Britain is set to unveil new proposals on the future status of the Northern Irish border, in a bid to break deadlock in Brexit negotiations.

Speaking at the end of a two-day EU summit in Austria, at which Brexit was high on the agenda, Theresa May said the UK would shortly be coming forward with new proposals on the so-called backstop arrangements for implementation at the border if no long-term solution is found.

Her announcement came as European Council president Donald Tusk told the Prime Minister she will have to rethink her Chequers blueprint for Brexit, saying the plan will not work in its present form.

Following a working lunch of the remaining 27 EU states at the informal summit in Salzburg, Mr Tusk said that while there were positive elements in the Chequers plan, they could not accept any proposal which threatened the single market.

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Everybody shared the view that while there are positive elements in the Chequers proposal, the suggested framework for economic co-operation will not work, not least because it is undermining the single market, he said.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel said that the EU27 were agreed that, in the matter of the single market, there can be no compromises.

After what she described as a frank meeting with Mr Tusk, Mrs May  who was not present at the lunch  insisted that the plan drawn up at her country residence in July remains the only serious and credible proposition on the table for resolving the issue of the Irish border.

She has flatly rejected a European Commission backstop proposal for Northern Ireland to remain within the EU customs area after Brexit, arguing that this would draw a border down the Irish Sea.

Unfortunately we cannot at this stage exclude a no-deal  it depends on both sides of negotiationsDonald Tusk

Speaking after her meeting with Mr Tusk, the PM said: We both agree there can be no withdrawal agreement without a legally-operative backstop. But that backstop cannot divide the United Kingdom into two customs territories, and we will be bringing forward our own proposals shortly.

On the economic partnership, there is no solution that will resolve the Northern Ireland border which is not based on the frictionless movement of goods.

Our White Paper remains the only serious and credible proposition on the table for achieving that objective.

Mrs May acknowledged there was a lot of hard work to be done to secure agreement on the withdrawal agreement and a political declaration on future trading relations.

But she said: If the political will is there on the other side, Im confident we will reach a deal and to do so is in the EUs interests as well as the UKs.

Mr Tusk said the moment of truth in the negotiations would now come at the next full European Council meeting in October, when it will be decided whether to hold a special summit in November to finalise the withdrawal agreement.

In October we expect maximum progress and results in the Brexit talks and then we will decide whether conditions are there to call an extra summit in November to finalise and formalise the deal, he said.

He added: Today I am a little more optimistic when it comes to a positive outcome of our negotiations.

Unfortunately we cannot at this stage exclude a no-deal  it depends on both sides of negotiations.
EU leaders have warned Theresa May she will have to rethink her Chequers blueprint for Brexit, saying the plan will not work in its present form.

Following a working lunch of the remaining 27 at the informal summit in Salzburg, European Council president Donald Tusk said that while there were positive elements in the Chequers plan they could not accept any proposal which threatened the single market.

Everybody shared the view that while there are positive elements in the Chequers proposal, the suggested framework for economic co-operation will not work, not least because it is undermining the single market, he said.

Unfortunately we cannot at this stage exclude a no-deal  it depends on both sides of negotiationsDonald Tusk

Mr Tusk said the moment of truth in the negotiations would now come at the next full summit in October.

In October we expect maximum progress and results in the Brexit talks and then we will decide whether conditions are there to call an extra summit in November to finalise and formalise the deal, he said.

He added: Today I am a little more optimistic when it comes to a positive outcome of our negotiations.

Unfortunately we cannot at this stage exclude a no-deal  it depends on both sides of negotiations.
Ryanair chief executive Michael OLeary has warned of a rising risk of a no-deal Brexit and claimed the Irish border backstop was undeliverable.

Mr OLeary predicted potential political chaos in Britain and said if the UK crashed out, flights would need to be cancelled a month in advance of next Marchs withdrawal.

He said: We are selling tickets between the UK and Europe  on flights that may not take place.

Ireland believes last Decembers agreement in principle between the UK and EU will keep Northern Ireland within the EUs regulatory arrangements if negotiations fail.

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Mr OLeary focused his comments on Britains role in the negotiations, rather than Irelands.

The outspoken Ryanair chief has been strongly critical of Brexit.

He thought a deal would be done eventually but reiterated that there was a real danger of no-deal by omission.

Risk factors included if Theresa May was replaced as Prime Minister, or a general election was called.

There is a rising risk, if the deal is not done by about November then, frankly, it will not get done at all.

Doing a deal is going to be very difficult.

Mr OLeary expressed concern about the Irish border.

The backstop agreement is undeliverable, there is no way you can deliver a frictionless border if you are leaving a common market  it is not deliverable.

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He added: There are going to be real and serious consequences, both in the UK economy and in the European economy.

From my narrow perspective all I want to see is a continuation of open skies and free flights, cheap flights.

The British cannot deliver what they have proposed unless they have a border down the Irish Sea, he said.

It is not Leo (Varadkar), it is not the Irish Governments challenge to come up with a resolution, it is the British Governments.

Mr OLeary addressed other challenges ahead for the airline  including costs.

He said: Oil is still going to be the most significant cost for every airline, but I would like to see oil prices go higher this winter because I think it would speed up the inevitable bankruptcy of a number of other European airlines.

It would create more opportunity for us to grow.
Theresa May answers questions when arriving at the informal EU summit in Salzburg (Kerstin Joensson/AP)

Theresa May ruled out any delay to the Brexit process as she told European Union leaders that her Chequers plan was the only credible route to a deal.

The Prime Minister set out a blueprint to her 27 counterparts over dinner in Salzburg after being told by EU chiefs that significant elements of it would have to be reworked.

However, at the gathering in Austria, Mrs May told them there would be no delay beyond the UKs March 2019 departure, no second referendum and therefore the onus was on the continents leaders to find a solution if they wanted to avoid a no-deal Brexit.

European Council president Donald Tusk said the Prime Ministers Chequers blueprint was a welcome evolution in the UKs approach but major issues remained to be resolved including avoiding a hard border in Ireland and the future trading relationship between Britain and the EU.

Warning that there was less and less time to reach a deal before the UKs March 29 2019 exit date, Mr Tusk confirmed he would propose an emergency EU Brexit summit in November.

Arriving at the meeting in Salzburg, Mrs May said Chequers was the only credible and negotiable plan on the table that delivers no hard border in Northern Ireland and also delivers on the vote of the British people.

She added: If we are going to achieve a successful conclusion then, just as the UK has evolved its position, the EU will need to evolve its position too.

Her comments came just hours after Mr Tusk said that on key issues the UKs proposals will need to be reworked and further negotiated.

UK Government sources revealed that Mrs May was using the dinner to acknowledge the difficulties and that she had never pretended Brexit would be easy or simple.

But she made clear the high stakes of the negotiations over the coming weeks if a deal is to be struck this autumn in time for ratification ahead of March 29, 2019 Brexit day.

A senior UK official said her message to them was we all recognise that time is short but delaying or extending these negotiations is not an option.

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She said: I believe that I have put forward serious and workable proposals.

We will, of course, not agree on every detail but I hope that you will respond in kind. The onus is now on all of us to get this deal done.

The domestic difficulties facing Mrs May  which EU leaders are all too aware of  were further illustrated as it emerged her former Brexit secretary David Davis has described Chequers as a non-starter.

In extracts of a speech he plans to deliver in Munich on Thursday, Mr Davis said the PMs plan crossed all of her own negotiating red lines.

He said: Chequers is devoid of democracy altogether. This is why many of us will shortly be presenting an alternative plan which will outline a more ambitious vision.

Ahead of the summit in Austria, the EUs chief negotiator Michel Barnier said he was ready to come forward with a new offer on the Irish border.

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However, Mrs Mays DUP allies poured cold water on the suggestion and the Prime Minister stressed she would not be prepared to accept anything that resulted in Northern Ireland effectively being carved away from the rest of the UK.

In order to de-dramatise the main obstacle to a withdrawal deal, Mr Barnier suggested arrangements could be made to conduct the majority of checks on imports and exports away from the border itself.

The Democratic Unionist Party, which props up Mrs Mays minority administration in Parliament, dismissed Mr Barniers proposals as unpalatable, because they would involve a customs border between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK.

It still means a border down the Irish Sea although with different kinds of checks, said the partys deputy leader Nigel Dodds.

Mrs May said: I welcome the fact that Michel Barnier is recognising the need to find a new solution because the original proposal put forward by the European Commission was unacceptable to us.

We have always recognised that there are unique circumstances that apply in Northern Ireland  for example in relation to checks for some

agricultural products.

But what we cannot accept is seeing Northern Ireland carved away from the UK customs territory because regardless of where the checks would be, what that would mean would be that it would be a challenge to our constitutional and economic integrity.

The relationship between the UK and the EU will change profoundly with Brexit, but I am determined that we should still have the strongest possible economic and security partnership. https://t.co/l6en9VzxWR  Theresa May (@theresa_may) September 19, 2018

The Salzburg meeting came as campaigners in the UK published a roadmap setting out how MPs could force the Prime Minister to accept what they call a Peoples Vote on her deal, with the option of remaining in the EU.

Despite Mrs May insisting the choice was between her deal or no deal, Treasury minister Mel Stride appeared to suggest that a second poll was still a possibility.

But Mrs May slapped down any suggestion that her government could hold a so-called Peoples Vote.

I want to be absolutely clear, this government will never accept a second referendum, she said.

The British people voted to leave the European Union and we will be leaving on March 29, 2019.

She challenged the Labour leadership to rule out the prospect of support for a second referendum  something that is likely to be a hot topic as Jeremy Corbyns party gathers for its conference in Liverpool starting on Sunday.
Theresa Mays 27 European counterparts will consider the next stage of the Brexit process after she told them her Chequers plan was the only credible route to a deal.

The Prime Minister set out her blueprint over dinner with fellow leaders in Salzburg after being told by EU chiefs that significant elements of it would have to be reworked.

However, at the gathering in Austria, Mrs May insisted there would be no delay to the UKs March 2019 departure, no second referendum and therefore the onus was on the continents leaders to find a solution if they wanted to avoid a no-deal Brexit.

Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon has reportedly written to UK opposition leaders calling for them to back an extension to Article 50 if no deal is reached and warned the PM against taking the country off the Brexit cliff edge.

In Mrs Mays absence on Thursday, the 27 other EU leaders will discuss issues including the UKs future relationship with the EU and how to resolve the problems around the Irish border.

If we are going to achieve a successful conclusion then ... the EU will need to evolve its position too

European Council president Donald Tusk identified both as areas where the UKs proposals would need to be reworked.

But Mrs May said Chequers was the only credible and negotiable plan on the table that delivers no hard border in Northern Ireland and also delivers on the vote of the British people.

She added: If we are going to achieve a successful conclusion then, just as the UK has evolved its position, the EU will need to evolve its position too.

UK Government sources revealed that Mrs May used Wednesday nights dinner to acknowledge the difficulties and that she had never pretended Brexit would be easy or simple.

She made clear the high stakes of the negotiations over the coming weeks if a deal is to be struck this autumn in time for ratification ahead of March 29, 2019 Brexit day.

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A senior UK official said her message to them was we all recognise that time is short but delaying or extending these negotiations is not an option.

She said: I believe that I have put forward serious and workable proposals.

We will, of course, not agree on every detail, but I hope that you will respond in kind. The onus is now on all of us to get this deal done.

In a signal that the UK would not deviate from its course, Mrs May stressed there would not be a fresh vote on the Brexit process.

I want to be absolutely clear, this government will never accept a second referendum, she said.

The British people voted to leave the European Union and we will be leaving on March 29, 2019.

Ms Sturgeon warned that it would be reckless for Britain to leave the EU without a deal in March and has written to opposition leaders urging them to back a delay if no agreement has been reached.

Taking the UK off the Brexit cliff edge without knowing where it lands would be the most irresponsible thing any prime minister has done in a very, very long time, she told the BBC.

Thats why I think if thats the situation we end up in (then) extending Article 50 is a far better way of proceeding.

The Prime Minsiter will hold talks with both Irish premier Leo Varadkar and Mr Tusk in the margins of the Salzburg summit.

Mrs Mays approach to the Brexit negotiations received fresh criticism at home while she was in Austria from one of her former supporters.

Sir Mike Penning, a former defence minster who voted Leave before backing Mrs May for the party leadership in the aftermath of the referendum, told the Telegraph she had treated Tory MPs like children who belong on the naughty step.

The former soldier told the paper he was joining the hardline Brexiteer European Research Group (ERG), saying: Ive come to the conclusion that this put up, shut up attitude of the Prime Ministers  its Chequers or nothing  you do as youre told or else, is a massive insult, not only to my colleagues but also to the voters.

She is playing a game of Russian Roulette with the country which is frankly an insult to the referendum result and all those people who voted, no matter how they voted.
Jeremy Corbyn has said he is not ruling out giving consent for a second referendum on Scottish independence if he were to become prime minister.

The Labour leader said he would decide on the issue at the time, but insisted that another vote on independence is not a good idea.

Mr Corbyn made the comments in an interview with BBC Scotland ahead of his partys conference, which gets under way in Liverpool this weekend.

Jeremy Corbyn 'not ruling out' indyref2 consent https://t.co/rlHPD7BVfY pic.twitter.com/IUavfb9O14  BBC Scotland News (@BBCScotlandNews) September 20, 2018

Scottish Conservatives have described the remarks as a gaffe, while the Liberal Democrats branded Mr Corbyns stance extraordinary.

The SNP said it would be a democratic outrage for any prime minister to block giving Scots a choice over their future.

The independence referendum in September 2014 was held after the Scottish and UK governments signed the Edinburgh Agreement, allowing the vote to take place and committing both sides to respect the result.

Asked what he would do if First Minister Nicola Sturgeon were to seek the power to hold a second vote on independence, Mr Corbyn told the broadcaster: We would obviously decide at the time.

He said a Labour government would invest in Scotland through a 20 billion transformation fund and a 3 billion increase in revenue spending and predicted that a Labour government in Westminster would be an ally to Scotland.

Pressed on whether he was ruling out giving the Scottish Government consent for the holding of a referendum, he told the BBC: Im not ruling out  Im just pointing out the reality of it.

We dont want another referendum, we dont think another referendum is a good idea, and well be very clear on why we dont think its a good idea.

We think whats more important is dealing with child poverty, housing problems and lack of investment in Scotland  200,000 more children going into poverty has to be dealt with. A referendum will not solve that.

Responding to Mr Corbyns latest comments, Scottish Conservative constitution spokesman Adam Tomkins said: Every time Jeremy Corbyn talks about Scotland he gives yet another concession to the SNP.

Its more proof that Labour are utterly weak when it comes to Scotlands place in the UK.

Jeremy Corbyn does not care about Scotland, and has no interest in standing up to the nationalists, as this latest gaffe proves.

Jeremy Corbyn has a careless attitude towards the UK. pic.twitter.com/P2nukKdY8H  Willie Rennie (@willie_rennie) September 20, 2018

Scottish Liberal Democrat leader Willie Rennie described Mr Corbyns position as extraordinary, as he reiterated his partys opposition to another divisive referendum.

So many people with moderate and progressive views will be horrified by this careless attitude towards the UK, he said.

The case against independence is even stronger since the SNPs Growth Commission admitted what we said about independence in 2014 was right.

The SNP was elected on a manifesto that said the Scottish Parliament should have the right to hold another referendum if there is a significant and material change in the circumstances that existed in 2014.

SNP depute leader Keith Brown said: We already have the democratic mandate to give the people of Scotland a choice over their future  a position backed by the Scottish Parliament. For any prime minister to stand in the way of that would be a democratic outrage.

Of course, it used to be the case that Labour thought the people of Scotland were sovereign and should determine their own future. Now, apparently, its down to the whim of the MP for Islington North.
RMT members at South Western Railway are to stage two strikes next month (Victoria Jones/PA)

Workers at two rail companies are to stage fresh strikes in the long-running dispute over the role of guards on trains.

Members of the Rail, Maritime and Transport union (RMT) at South Western Railway (SWR) will walk out on October 5 and 6, causing more disruption to passengers on routes including to and from London Waterloo.

The union has also called strikes on Arriva Rail North (Northern) on October 6, 13 and 20.

South Western Railway said it was disappointed by the decision.

The union accused SWR of refusing to engage in serious talks.

Our members have stood rock solid and it's down to the company to get out the bunker and get serious talks under wayMick Cash, RMT union

Northern was accused of failing to give assurances on the guarantee of guards on its services.

Talks between the RMT and Northern ended without agreement on Wednesday.

RMT members at SWR recently renewed their support for industrial action in a ballot.

Union general secretary Mick Cash said: The company has continued to fail to provide any offer that comes close to resolving this dispute and their latest attempts at delaying talks has not gone unnoticed.

Before the result of the re-ballot, I sent a letter to the company asking them to make the necessary arrangements for a meeting to take place.

I never received a response from the company and they have made no attempt at trying to resolve this dispute since.

It would appear that once again the company were riding their luck in the desperate hope that we would not be successful in another re-ballot.

However, our members have stood rock solid and its down to the company to get out the bunker and get serious talks under way.

Theres a simple solution to this dispute and it means SWR stop playing with words and negotiate the guard guarantee that reflects the best safety practice elsewhere in the industry.

That is the package we have successfully negotiated in both Wales and Scotland and on a number of English franchises.

It defies belief that we are being denied the same positive outcome on the South Western Railway routes.

Mr Cash said the Northern dispute would have been entirely preventable if the company had listened to the unions deep-seated safety concerns.

In spite of the collapse of this weeks talks, RMT will not be deterred in its efforts and will continue to campaign both industrially and politically to ensure passengers using Arriva Rail North Train Services are afforded the respect they deserve and are provided with a continued and guaranteed safe, secure and accessible railway.

A South Western Railway spokesman said: We are our extremely disappointed that yet again the RMT has decided to disrupt the lives of customers and employees rather than participate in constructive talks to help resolve this matter for their members.

Contrary to the RMTs claims of rock-solid support for a mandate to strike, the fact is that when factoring in non-RMT members and those RMT members who did not vote, only around half of our total number of guards voted for strike action.

We have offered a framework for talks which would guarantee the rostering of a second person with safety critical competencies on all our trains, and our plans mean more guards, not fewer.

We urge the RMT to call off these unnecessary strikes which are hindering, not helping, progress on this issue.
The United Filipino Seafarers, a globally-recognized union of maritime professionals with 57,000 members, expressed concern over the declining number of Filipino seafarer deployments. Data from the Philippine Overseas Employment Agency showed there were only 387,072 sea-based workers deployed in 2017, down by almost 65,000 from 442,820 deployments in 2016. You look at these figures and think of what it really meansthat there are 64,748 seafarers who used to have jobs but no longer. Thats tens of thousands of families whose livelihood are at risk. This is alarming, said UFS president Nelson Ramirez. Ramirez, a seasoned seafarer himself, said industry analysts were predicting more of this drop over the next few years amid the slowdown in global shipping. We can expect to see thousands more seafarers loitering in Kalaw, as we lose more principals and shipowners, he said. Ramirez likened the phenomenon to the dearth of employment opportunities experienced by Filipino registered nurses in 2016, amid the huge gap between demand and supply. Ramirez said that in addition to the international economic turmoil and the swelling of unemployed maritime graduates each year, the proliferation of corrupt practices such as ambulance chasing severely aggravated the situation.Ambulance chasing is a case where a complainant seeks compensation based on fictitious or frivolous claims of injury, disappointing and disheartening foreign shipowners from continuing to hire Filipino seafarers. Compensation claims are determined by arbitrators of the National Labor Relations Commission or National Conciliation and Mediation Board both under the Department of Labor and Employment. Claims decided in favor of the complainant are immediately settled after judgment; refusing to pay means that shipowners and/or manning agencies financial accounts can be garnished. It also leaves little or no recourse for recovering the amount paid to the complaining party even though in some cases, the arbitrators judgment may be overturned by the Court of Appeals or the Supreme Court. Claims can be awarded as much as $250,000 depending on the injury. However, the seafarer rarely gets to enjoy the award, as ambulance chasers always find a way to grab the lions share of the money. Ramirez, who also sits as an NCMB arbiter, said ambulance chasing was hurting the maritime industry. As a union leader, he has spent the last two decades in advocating for reforms that will make it more difficult for ambulance chasers to exploit seafarers and manning agencies alike.
Hundreds of shoppers queued up as Tescos first new Jacks discount stores opened for business.

The store in Chatteris, Cambridgeshire, was unveiled on Wednesday and opened its doors to the public on Thursday alongside a second store in Immingham, north-east Lincolnshire.

Britains biggest retailer launched the store format as it attempts to take the fight to German discounters Aldi and Lidl.

Shopper Delia Fernandez, 41, arrived at 3am to be first in line at the Chatteris store, which opened at 10am with a ribbon cutting and a shower of confetti.

I wanted to see the different bargains that theyve got and to have a good look, she said.

She said she usually shops at Aldi but could be persuaded to change, adding: Prices, it all depends on the price and quality of the product.

Expand Close Delia Fernandez (centre front) who queued from 3am for the opening (Joe Giddens/ PA) PA Wire/PA Images / Facebook

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Jeevan Gunaratnam, 48, who emerged with a trolley full of shopping, lives in London but decided to visit Jacks as he was in the area.

The medical sales worker said: I occasionally shop in some of the other German stores like Lidl and Aldi so I was curious as I was nearby and thought I would just have a look, and I was really impressed.

I think prices are good, I think the whole package Tesco has put together for Jacks is really good and I think it will be a really good addition to the high street.

Expand Close The store is named after Tesco founder Jack Cohen (Joe Giddens/ PA) PA Wire/PA Images / Facebook

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He said he usually shops at Tesco, Lidl and occasionally Waitrose, but added if he had a local Jacks store I think it would influence me to go and buy some things.

Obviously theres not the full range but I think for the stuff you need day-to-day its got some really good lines, he said.

Retired mechanic Mark Burton, 48, of Chatteris, said: Its more competition, bringing in better prices for the town.

Expand Close A ribbon was cut and there was a shower of confetti as the store opened in Chatteris (Joe Giddens/ PA) PA Wire/PA Images / Facebook

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Up to 15 of the stores, named after Tesco founder Jack Cohen, will open over the next year.

Most products will be Jacks own brand and the chain will have 2,600 lines.

Retired builder William McPherson, 72, of Chatteris, said: Theres a good selection of goods there.

Expand Close Up to 15 Jacks stores will open over the next year (Joe Giddens/ PA) PA Wire/PA Images / Facebook

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He added prices were comparable with Aldi and he liked the layout  theres plenty of room so youre not crammed up.

The launch of Jacks is part of Tescos centenary celebrations which will see the business mark 100 years in 2019.

Jack Cohen founded Tesco 99 years ago in 1919.
The impasse over Julian Assange could be resolved immediately if the UK Government gave an assurance that he would not be extradited to the US if he leaves the embassy where he has been living for more than six years, one of his legal team said on Thursday.

Jennifer Robinson told a conference in Barcelona that the WikiLeaks founder had been under some form of restrictions on his liberty for almost eight years without ever being charged.

He has been living in the Ecuadorian embassy in London since 2012, fearing he will be extradited to the United States for questioning over the activities of WikiLeaks if he leaves.

This is and has always been about the risk of US extradition. This case could be resolved tomorrow if the UK would give this assuranceLawyer Jennifer Robinson

Ms Robinson, of Doughty Street Chambers, said: It is difficult to see how this is going to be resolved because of the politics, though the solution is simple.

We have used every legal avenue available to us, in the UK and at the UN, to challenge this situation.

This is and has always been about the risk of US extradition. This case could be resolved tomorrow if the UK would give this assurance.

Speaking at the World Ethical Data Forum, she continued: For more than eight years we have been fighting a number of landmark cases, in multiple jurisdictions, to protect something we thought was sancrosanct, that perhaps too many have taken for granted: the right to freedom of speech and the freedom of publishers to publish information in the public interest.

These included the ongoing criminal investigation in the US, which she said was of unprecedented size and scale, and the risk of US extradition for Mr Assange, especially as the current US Attorney-General has said prosecuting him was a priority.

She also spoke of the financial blockade, under which the worlds major credit card companies and payment transfer services banned WikiLeaks, cutting it off from the donations the organisation depends on to operate and to fight its legal battles.

The new and current challenge of the civil suit filed by the Democratic National Committee (DNC) accusing WikiLeaks of conspiracy and publishing trade secrets for having received information about the DNC and published it in the context of a US election. 

She raised concerns that the DNC is seeking to set a precedent with sweeping ramifications for all media, which strikes at the heart of the role of the press in a democracy.

She added that any prosecution of Mr Assange will be used as a precedent against other media organisations.

The attacks on WikiLeaks have not just been legal attacks  there has also been a vilification campaign of the WikiLeaks project and of Julian personally by prominent politicians and the mainstream media, and a counter-intelligence operation, openly stated by the director of the CIA last year.

The Ecuador government cut off Mr Assanges phone and internet access earlier this year and banned people visiting him.

Weekly vigils are still held outside the embassy and in cities in other countries including his native Australia.
European leaders have ramped up the pressure on Theresa May to change course on Brexit after she told them her Chequers plan was the only route to a deal.

The Prime Minister insisted the UKs March 29 2019 departure from the European Union would not be delayed, and with time running short the onus was on the blocs leaders to find a solution  or face the prospect of a no-deal scenario.

But Mrs May faced calls to hold a second referendum amid warnings about the risk of a no-deal Brexit as leaders gathered in Salzburg to discuss the EUs next move in the negotiations.

Starting second day at #SalzburgSummit by meeting @theresa_may with @HMcEntee for #Brexit update. Then busy day of meetings with @EuropeanCouncil leaders on internal security and more Brexit talks pic.twitter.com/ioHYUUXgOU  Leo Varadkar (@LeoVaradkar) September 20, 2018

With the issue of how to avoid a hard border between the UK and Ireland after Brexit still to be resolved, Taoiseach Leo Varadkar said time is running short to reach a deal.

Maltese prime minister Joseph Muscat has said there is almost unanimous support among EU leaders for Britain to hold a second referendum on membership of the union.

On BBC Radio 4s Today he said any deal would be sub-optimal to continued membership and it wont be as easy as yesterday to trade between the two sides.

Czech prime minister Andrej Babis said: We hope that finally we will reach a deal but basically I am very unhappy that the UK is leaving, so it would be better maybe to make another referendum and maybe the people in the meantime could change their view.

Luxembourgs prime minister Xavier Bettel said: I know that the Chequers plan is something that was not easy for Theresa May to pass through in her own Government.

I am convinced that we will find an agreement, but time is getting short. We both need to find a compromise.

The Netherlands Mark Rutte said: As long as there is no deal, there is the risk of no-deal.

The Prime Minister set out her plans over dinner with her EU counterparts on Wednesday night.

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European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker said the presentation was interesting, adding: It was polite, it was not aggressive, she was doing her job.

Mrs May said Chequers was the only credible and negotiable plan on the table that delivers no hard border in Northern Ireland and also delivers on the vote of the British people.

She added: If we are going to achieve a successful conclusion then, just as the UK has evolved its position, the EU will need to evolve its position, too.

UK Government sources revealed that Mrs May used Wednesday nights dinner to acknowledge the difficulties and that she had never pretended Brexit would be easy or simple.

She made clear the high stakes of the negotiations over the coming weeks if a deal is to be struck this autumn in time for ratification by March next year.

Despite the comments from Mr Muscat and Mr Babis, the Prime Minister showed no intention of giving ground on the issue of a so-called Peoples Vote when asked about it at the summit on Wednesday.

I want to be absolutely clear  this Government will never accept a second referendum, she said.

Thursdays agenda in Salzburg involves the leaders discussing internal security matters before talks over lunch  in Mrs Mays absence  about Brexit.

A blind Brexit with little or no detail on terms of future EU/UK relationship would be no more acceptable than a no deal Brexit. If thats the choice, Article 50 should be extended to allow all alternative options for Scotland and UK to be considered. https://t.co/6TLOJjKgTw  Nicola Sturgeon (@NicolaSturgeon) September 20, 2018

The Prime Ministers domestic difficulties over Brexit also continued, with criticism from a senior Tory and a call from Scotlands First Minister Nicola Sturgeon to delay the UKs departure from the EU.

Sir Mike Penning, a former defence minister who voted Leave before backing Mrs May for the party leadership, told the Telegraph she had treated Tory MPs like children who belong on the naughty step.

The former soldier told the paper he was joining the hardline Brexiteer European Research Group (ERG), saying: Ive come to the conclusion that this put up, shut up attitude of the Prime Ministers  its Chequers or nothing, you do as youre told or else  is a massive insult, not only to my colleagues but also to the voters.

She is playing a game of Russian Roulette with the country which is frankly an insult to the referendum result and all those people who voted, no matter how they voted.

Ms Sturgeon has written to opposition leaders at Westminster arguing that if the UK fails to agree a deal with the EU, the timetable for talks must be extended.

If the choice we face is between no deal and no detail, then an extension to the Article 50 negotiation period must be on the table as the only way to avoid an economic cliff edge, and allow all alternative options to be considered, she said.
Sub-Saharan migrants aiming to cross to Europe take shelter in a forest overlooking the neighbourhood of Masnana, on the outskirts of Tangier, Morocco (Mosaab Elshamy/AP)

Austria has urged its European Union partners to enter talks with Egypt to help stem the flow of migrants entering Europe from Africa, amid deep divisions over how to manage the challenge.

Mr Kurz, whose country currently holds the EUs rotating presidency, and EU Council President Donald Tusk visited Cairo over the weekend for talks with President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi, a top army general who took office in 2014.

Both men have praised him for stopping people from leaving its coast bound for Europe.

Egypt has proven that it can be efficient, Mr Kurz told reporters at an EU summit in Salzburg, Austria.

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Since 2016, it has prevented ships sailing from Egypt to Europe or, when they have sailed, it has taken them back.

Mr Kurz said Egypt is now prepared possibly to deepen cooperation with us in talks. We should use that.

He also said EU leaders support the idea of entering into talks with other North African countries as well.

In dealing with the migrants crisis of the past few years, the EU has been creative, willing to part with billions to secure deals around the Mediterranean with leaders with autocratic leanings.

The bloc lauds the deal it struck with Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan for slowing migrant arrivals to a trickle over the last two years, in exchange for up to six billion euros in aid for Syrian refugees there and other incentives.

Read the remarks by @FedericaMog upon arrivals at the informal meeting of Heads of State or Government https://t.co/80Ibm0LDrQ  European External Action Service - EEAS  (@eu_eeas) September 19, 2018

Italy alone paid billions to former Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi to stop African people from leaving his countrys shores.

Thousands were transported from Libyas coast to its southern border.

Beyond keeping tight control over Egypts coastline, Mr Sissi could have important influence with the military and militias in lawless, neighbouring Libya; a main departure point for migrants trying to enter Europe through Italy.

Already, Mr Tusk is lobbying to hold an EU-Arab League summit in Cairo in February.

The call comes after a summer in which Italys anti-migrant government closed its ports to NGO ships, and even its own coast guard, carrying people rescued at sea.

Hundreds of migrants spent unnecessary days at sea or aboard boats while EU countries bickered over who should take them.

Expand Close Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah El-Sissi is seen by EU leaders as a key player (Evan Vucci/AP) AP/PA Images / Facebook

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Looking for help from Mr Sissi is a new sign of the EUs determination to outsource the migrant challenge, even though arrival numbers are barely a trickle compared to 2015, when well over a million people entered Europe, mostly fleeing conflict in Syria and Iraq.

EU countries are studying plans to create disembarkation platforms in northern African countries, where people rescued at sea could be dropped off for screening.

No African country has expressed interest in hosting one so far.

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The EUs inability to balance responsibility for the migrants and share the burden of hosting them has been a vote-winner for far-right parties across the 28-nation bloc.

EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini warned that Africa is not keen at the moment.

If we take the approach of: we dont take them, you take them, that doesnt fly, she said.

But this doesnt mean that North African countries would not be ready to cooperate with us, and with the UN, to have a reasonable, sustainable solution.
Shinzo Abe acknowledges applause from party members after fending off a leadership challenge (Koji Sasahara/AP)the LDP lawmakers shortly after his name was called as the winner of the ruling party presidential elections at its headquarters in Tokyo, Thursday, Sept. 20, 2018. Prime Minister Abe was re-elected Thursday to a third term as leader of the ruling party, paving the way for him to serve as prime minister for up to three more years. (AP Photo/Koji Sasahara)

Japans prime minister Shinzo Abe was re-elected as head of his ruling Liberal Democratic Party in a landslide, paving the way for up to three more years as the nations leader and a push toward a constitutional revision.

The decisive victory may embolden Mr Abe to pursue his long-sought amendment to Japans US-drafted pacifist constitution, although the hurdles remain high and doing so would carry political risks.

Its time to tackle a constitutional revision, Mr Abe said in Thursdays victory speech.

Mr Abe said he was determined to use his last term to pursue his policy goals to sum up Japans post-war diplomacy to ensure peace in the country.

Expand Close Japans Prime Minister Shinzo Abe shouts Banzai (Koji Sasahara/AP) AP/PA Images / Facebook

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Lets work together to make a new Japan, he said.

Mr Abe, who has been prime minister since December 2012, has cemented control of his party and is poised to become Japans longest-serving leader in August 2021.

He has several policy challenges, including dealing with Japans ageing and declining population, a royal succession in the spring, and a consumption tax hike to 10% he has already delayed twice.

Amid international effort to denuclearise North Korea, Mr Abe seeks to meet with Kim Jong Un to resolve their disputes, including the decades-old problem of Japanese citizens abducted to the North.

He faces Chinas increasingly assertive activity in the region, and intensifying trade friction with the US that could shake his friendly relations with President Donald Trump.

Mr Abe said he will meet with Trump next week in New York, where they attend the annual UN assembly, to discuss bilateral trade and the roles Japan and America should play in establishing global trade rules.

Expand Close The Japanese surrender at Tokyo Bay with Admiral Bruce Fraser signing on behalf of the UK. Japans current constitution was imposed after the Second World War. (Cross W G/PA) Press Association Images / Facebook

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Whatsapp The Japanese surrender at Tokyo Bay with Admiral Bruce Fraser signing on behalf of the UK. Japans current constitution was imposed after the Second World War. (Cross W G/PA)

Mr Abe renewed his commitment to push for a revision to the US-drafted 1947 constitution, a decades-old pledge of the Liberal Democratic Party since its foundation in 1955 and a goal that none of Mr Abes predecessors has been able to achieve.

Many conservatives see the constitution as a humiliation imposed on Japan following its Second World War defeat.

Among them was Mr Abes grandfather, Nobusuke Kishi, who served as prime minister between 1957-1960.

Mr Kishi was imprisoned as a suspected war criminal during the US occupation.

We'll have to walk on a thorny pathShinzo Abe

Constitutional revision is divisive and it is unclear whether Mr Abe could get enough votes for passage.

For the public, the constitution is a lesser concern than issues such as pay, education and the high cost of child care, surveys show.

If a revision is rejected in a national referendum, Mr Abe would likely have to step down.

Its a goal that would be difficult to achieve, Mr Abe told a news conference later Thursday.

Well have to walk on a thorny path.

Mr Abe and his party want to rush a revision while their ruling coalition still holds two-thirds super majority in both houses, a requirement to propose a revision.

Expand Close Liberal Democratic Party President Shinzo Abe, right, waves with former defence minister Shigeru Ishiba after the vote result was called (Koji Sasahara/AP) AP/PA Images / Facebook

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Whatsapp Liberal Democratic Party President Shinzo Abe, right, waves with former defence minister Shigeru Ishiba after the vote result was called (Koji Sasahara/AP)

The next parliamentary election is due next summer.

Mr Abe seeks to submit a draft constitution revision to a parliamentary session later this year.

He is proposing to add a clause to Article Nine, which bans the use of force in settling international disputes, to explicitly permit the existence of Japans military, now called the Self-Defence Force.

In Thursdays leadership vote, Mr Abe defeated his sole challenger, Shigeru Ishiba, a former defence minister.

Mr Abe won 553, or about 70%, of 807 votes.
South Korean President Moon Jae-in has returned home from a three-day summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, saying that Mr Kim wants the US secretary of state to visit Pyongyang soon for nuclear talks.

Mr Kim also hopes for a quick follow-up to his June summit with Donald Trump and that a formal end to the Korean War can be agreed, his southern counterpart revealed.

Mr Moon told reporters in Seoul that he will carry a private message from Mr Kim for Mr Trump on the nuclear standoff when he meets with the US president in New York next week on the sidelines of the UN general assembly session.

Both Mr Trump, who has repeatedly spoken of his good relationship with Kim, and the North Korean leader have expressed a desire to meet again, but there are worries among observers about whether Mr Kim is as committed to denuclearisation as he claims.

Mr Moon faces increasing pressure from Washington to find a path forward in efforts to get Mr Kim to completely, and unilaterally, abandon his nuclear arsenal.

There are things that the United States wants us to convey to North Korea, and on the other side there are also things that North Korea wants us to convey to the United States, Mr Moon said at a press centre in Seoul where reporters watched parts of his summit with Mr Kim on video huge screens that occasionally showed live streams from Pyongyang.

I will faithfully serve that role when I meet President Trump to facilitate dialogue between North Korea and the United States.

Expand Close South Korean President Moon Jae-in speaks after returning from North Korea (Lee Jin-man/AP) AP/PA Images / Facebook

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Mr Moon, who set up the June summit in Singapore between Mr Trump and Mr Kim and is eager for another to happen, also told reporters that he will convey to Mr Trump his and Mr Kims desire to get a declaration on ending the Korean War by the end of this year.

The war still technically continues because it ended with a ceasefire, not a peace treaty.

Such a declaration would be the first step toward a formal peace treaty, but many in the United States are worried that it could result in Mr Kim pushing for the removal of US troops stationed in South Korea to deter the North.

Earlier Thursday, Mr Kim and Mr Moon took to the road for the final day of their summit, hiking to the peak of Mount Paektu, which is considered sacred in the North, their hands clasped and raised in a pose of triumph.

Expand Close South Korean protesters vent their anger at the North (Ahn Young-joon/AP) AP/PA Images / Facebook

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Their trip to the mountain on the North Korean-Chinese border, and the striking photo-op that will resonate in both Koreas, followed a day of wide-ranging agreements on Wednesday they trumpeted as a major step toward peace.

However, their premier accord on the issue that most worries the world, the Norths pursuit of nuclear-tipped missiles capable of striking as far as the US mainland, contained a big condition: Kim stated that he would permanently dismantle North Koreas main nuclear facility only if the United States takes unspecified corresponding measures.

Photos showed the leaders smiling broadly as they posed at the summit of Paektu, their wives grinning at their sides, a brilliant blue sky and the deep crater lake that tops the volcano in the background.

They also toured the shores of the lake, and Mr Moon and his wife filled bottles with its water.

We have agreed to make the Korean Peninsula a land of peace that is free from nuclear weapons and nuclear threatKim Jong Un

Members of the Kim family are referred to as sharing the Paektu bloodline, and the volcano is emblazoned on North Koreas national emblem and lends its name to everything from rockets to power stations.

Many South Koreans also feel drawn to the volcano, which, according to Korean mythology, was the birthplace of Dangun, the founder of the first ancient Korean kingdom, and has long been considered one of the most beautiful places on the peninsula.

Not everyone was pleased, though.

Expand Close Residents of Pyongyang, North Korea gather in a plaza to watch the news (Eric Talmadge/AP) AP/PA Images / Facebook

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About 100 anti-North Korea protesters rallied in central Seoul to express anger about the summit and displayed slogans that read, No To SK-NK Summit That Benefits Kim Jong Un.

The leaders are basking in the glow of the joint statement they signed on Wednesday.

Compared to the vague language of their two earlier summits, Mr Kim and Mr Moon seem to have agreed on an ambitious programme meant to tackle soaring tensions that caused many to fear war last year as the North tested a string of increasingly powerful weapons.

Mr Kim promised to accept international inspectors to monitor the closing of a key missile test site and launch pad and to visit Seoul soon, and both leaders vowed to work together to try to host the Summer Olympics in 2032.

But while containing several tantalising offers, their joint statement appeared to fall short of the major steps many in Washington have been looking for  such as a commitment by Kim to provide a list of North Koreas nuclear facilities, a solid step-by-step timeline for closing them down, or an agreement to allow international inspectors to assess progress or discover violations.

It also was unclear what corresponding steps North Korea wants from the US to dismantle its nuclear site.

The question is whether it will be enough for Mr Trump to pick up where Mr Moon has left off.

Mr Trump told reporters on Wednesday that the outcome of the summit was very good news and that were making tremendous progress with North Korea.

He did not indicate in his brief remarks whether the US would be willing to take further steps to encourage North Korean action on denuclearisation.

We have agreed to make the Korean Peninsula a land of peace that is free from nuclear weapons and nuclear threat, Mr Kim said on Wednesday as the two leaders announced their agreement.

I now propose that we completely eliminate the hostility of the past 70 years and take a big step forward in peace so that we can become one againMoon Jae-in

The road to our future will not always be smooth and we may face challenges and trials we cant anticipate.

But we arent afraid of headwinds because our strength will grow as we overcome each trial based on the strength of our nation.

Mr Moon urged unity for all Koreans in a speech he gave Wednesday night to the crowd gathered for North Koreas signature mass games.

He said: I now propose that we completely eliminate the hostility of the past 70 years and take a big step forward in peace so that we can become one again.

According to a statement signed by the countries defence chiefs, the two Koreas agreed to establish buffer zones along their land and sea borders to reduce military tensions and prevent accidental clashes.

They also agreed to withdraw 11 guard posts from the Demilitarised Zone by December and to establish a no-fly zone above the military demarcation line that bisects the two Koreas that will apply to planes, helicopters and drones.

Other agreements aimed at removing some longstanding irritants from their relations, such as allowing more contact between families divided by the Korean War.

Mr Moon also appeared to be making good on his proposals to help build up the Norths infrastructure and open cross-border rail links.
A power crisis is expected to occur in Iloilo City and nearby towns if the franchise of an existing utility operator is not renewed and given to an applicant that has yet to put up the needed infrastructure for electric distribution utility, according to the umbrella organization of private power distributors. The Private Electric Power Operators Association issued this warning as it questioned the franchise application of a new applicant contesting the renewal bid of current distributor Panay Electric Co. We are shocked to learn of the hasty approval of the franchise application of More Minerals Corp. to the detriment of the incumbent distribution utility Panay Electric Company, the Private Electric Power Operators Association said in a letter to Rep. Franz Alvarez, chairman of the House legislative franchises committee on Sept. 19. This development is deeply concerning to us as it puts a highly urbanized city like Iloilo at risk, the letter stated. PEPOA president Ranulfo Ocampo alleged the MMC was primarily a mining company, and hence, did not have the technical capability to operate and maintain a power distribution utility. Even if MMC were to change its primary purpose into power distribution, no company can get the required experience and qualifications in just a few days, Ocampo said. Ocampo, a lawyer by profession, said MMC did not have the track record nor the experience in running an electric distribution utility.He said Peco has been in the business for 95 years and belonged to the top performers in the country, as public records showed that its system average interruption frequency index was among the top in the country. They [Peco] are among the top 15 percent in terms of positive reliability performance compared to the other 146 electric distribution utilities in the country, the PEPOA leader said. He also brushed aside allegations of mounting consumer complaints about erroneous billings against Peco, saying official records at the Energy Regulatory Commission indicated that such complaints comprised a negligible 0.01 percent of Pecos more than 60,000 customers. This is not something new to the industry and is certainly not sufficient basis for withholding the franchise renewal of Peco, Ocampo said. He said that renewing Pecos franchise would guarantee a stable power supply in Iloilo City. Ocampo said Peco has been in partnership together with the immense economic growth of Iloilo City over the last five years. Because of this, the city of Iloilo brings in high economic returns to the Philippines and continues to do so. It does not make sense at all to change that economic growth negatively by approving the electric distribution franchise of MMC, Ocampo said.
Taiwan has said it is looking for the owner of a Texas company that makes blueprints for untraceable 3D printed guns who is wanted on an arrest warrant tied to an accusation that he had sex with an underage girl and paid her 500 dollars afterwards.

The National Immigration Agency and Criminal Investigation Bureau confirmed that Cody Wilson was in Taiwan after arriving on the island earlier this month.

Division director Kan Yen-min was quoted by the official Central News Agency as saying the bureau has yet to receive intelligence from the US regarding Mr Wilson, but will continue seeking more information about the case.

Taiwan and the US do not have an extradition treaty but co-operate extensively on legal and security matters.

Austin, Texas, police commander Troy Officer has said that his department is working with national and international law enforcement agencies to find Mr Wilson, whose last known location was Taiwans capital, Taipei.

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Mr Officer said it was unclear why Mr Wilson went to Taiwan, but he is known to travel extensively.

He said before Mr Wilson flew there, a friend of the 16-year-old girl informed Mr Wilson that police were investigating the accusation that he had sex with the youth.

Mr Wilson is identified in the affidavit as the owner of Austin-based Defence Distributed.

After a US federal court barred Mr Wilson from posting the printable gun blueprints online for free last month, he announced he had begun selling them for any amount of money to US customers through his website.

Nineteen states and the District of Columbia sued to stop an agreement that the US government reached with Defence Distributed, arguing that the blueprints for how to print plastic guns could be obtained by terrorists and other criminals.
We the People ... that is the opening phrase of the preamble to the United States constitution. It is also the title of a recent BBC television programme exploring and explaining the influence of the Scotch-Irish in the making of modern America. The programme was supported by the Ulster-Scots Broadcast Fund (USBF) and, in truth, without the support of that fund it would probably not have been made.

It was therefore a reminder of the importance of the USBF, which has supported the production of some really good television programmes.

Having negotiated the creation of the USBF in 2010 during the Hillsborough Castle talks, I continue to take a particular interest in it as a member of the USBF committee. An Irish Language Broadcast Fund had been operational since 2005 and the development of a parallel Ulster-Scots fund was a small step towards cultural equity.

The contributors to the programme were significant and included several academic historians, former Senator James Webb, a Democratic Party strategist, and Frances Stead Sellers, senior writer at the Washington Post.

There was perhaps an over-reliance on the perspective of Sellers, which may have given some viewers the impression that all the Scotch-Irish in America were supporters of Donald Trump.

That is certainly not the case, and indeed another contributor commented on the diversity of the Scotch-Irish.

However, there were important lessons to be learned from the programme and the story that it sought to tell.

David Mudcat Saunders, a colourful political strategist for the Democratic Party, said: Democrats go after class, Republicans go after culture, and culture wins every time.

Im not sure about the Democratic-Republican part of that statement but the second part is right, culture wins every time.

It is a point that is often acknowledged in America as culture is upstream from politics.

Moreover, it can be understood as referring to cultural worldviews or to cultural traditions, but it has a very immediate relevance to the current political situation in Ulster.

Sinn Fein has certainly grasped the truth that culture is upstream from politics and anyone who negotiates with it needs to understand thoroughly both the culture and the argument.

A second lesson is that the Scotch-Irish in America took with them from their Ulster-Scots roots a sense of justice, freedom and equality.

Webb, author of Born Fighting, said: If you look at what the Scotch-Irish did, you see it most importantly in the form of government that Andrew Jackson and people who succeeded him in office brought  what we call frontier democracy, which actually came right out of the Scottish kirk.

Unionists must start to reclaim issues such as equality and rights, which have for too long been hijacked by Irish nationalists and the Left.

The truth is that the forefathers of todays Ulster-Scots were to the fore in advancing these concepts.

It was certainly good to hear historians speak unashamedly and unequivocally about the Scotch-Irish and the Ulster-Scots.

Warren R Hofstra, Professor of History at Shenandoah University in Virginia, was especially warm in his reflections.

Our local universities have a long way to go in accepting and embracing Ulster-Scots culture, heritage, language and identity in a similar manner.

Those who emigrated from Ulster had a profound influence on the making of America, and as one contributor said: Their cultural footprint is enormous.

This year is the 300th anniversary of 1718, the year when a trickle of Ulster-Scots emigration became a flood as a result of religious discrimination and economic hardship.

The narrator said of the Scotch-Irish that they can trace their roots to Ulster and the people we call the Ulster-Scots.

When you have a statue of Andrew Jackson outside the White House and a portrait of Andrew Jackson on the wall of the Oval Office, then surely we can do more here in Ulster, and especially around Carrickfergus, to highlight Jacksons Ulster roots.

The very least should be a statue of Jackson in Carrickfergus.

In the meantime, what about a large American flag flying at the Jackson Centre at Boneybefore for all those American tourists to see as their cruise ships come sailing up the lough?

It would a good way to mark that 300th anniversary.
Ian Paisley and the DUP will have breathed a collective sigh of relief as the petition of recall failed.

The last thing that either the politician or the party wanted was to have to fight a by-election.

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While the North Antrim MP was odds-on favourite to have retained his seat in any new poll, details of his two undeclared luxury holidays would have been played over endlessly in the media during an election campaign.

Evidence at the RHI Inquiry is inflicting substantial damage on the DUPs reputation. The party did not want to face the electorate with those details fresh in the public memory.

Sinn Fein, the SDLP and Alliance were the only parties which registered to campaign during the recall petition, and only Sinn Fein had any consistent presence on the ground.

But the party did not even manage to get all its own vote out  7,099 people signed the petition and 7,878 voted for Sinn Fein in last years Westminster election.

The failure of the TUV and Ulster Unionists to become involved in formally campaigning  despite their leaders supporting the recall petition  assisted Mr Paisley enormously.

The MPs undoubted popularity in the constituency has also helped. The vast majority of his constituents were either supportive of him despite the undeclared holidays, or certainly not angry enough to vote to unseat him.

Expect stringent criticism today from Sinn Fein of the Electoral Offices decision to open only three polling stations in the constituency.

Hours before polling closed Sinn Fein sources privately predicted there would only be a few hundred votes in it. That wasnt a case of spinning in order to get the vote out. This was truly a case of knife-edge.

Mr Paisley remains suspended from the House of Commons and the DUP. His parliamentary ban ends in November, and expect the DUP suspension to be lifted after a respectable period. The party certainly wont be getting rid of him now.

Mr Paisley held his seat by the skin of his teeth  a 10% vote was needed to topple him and only 9.4% was secured  but the margin wont matter a jot to him. He will just be relieved its all over and hes still there.

Like his father before him, Ian Paisley is proving to be the great survivor of Northern Ireland politics.
Surendra Kumar Sinha, Bangladeshs former chief justice, talks with reporters in front of his home before leaving for Australia, Oct. 13, 2017.

Bangladeshs former Supreme Court chief justice was forced to leave the country and resign after refusing requests by Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina and other senior government officials to change a key ruling, according to a memoir published online this week.

Surendra Kumar Sinha, 67, left Bangladesh in October 2017 and resigned as chief justice a month later for personal reasons, according to government officials at that time.

The book, Sinhas first official statement about the events that led to his abrupt resignation, also alleges that military intelligence officers abducted one of his friends to pressure him to resign.

Sinha describes how military officers presented him with a resignation letter that he was supposed to sign at an airport in Singapore last year, and handed him a phone where he was astonished to hear the voice of his friend, businessman and diplomat Aniruddha Roy, who had gone missing 81 days.

I heard Roys voice telling me, Sir, looking at the face of my autistic son please sign the letter in the language of the officer, Sinha wrote, describing how he finally gave in to pressure to resign following a months-long standoff with Hasina over a constitutional amendment that he had ruled against.

Unidentified men abducted Roy in front of a bank in Dhaka on Aug. 27, 2017, according to his driver. In November, his wife told reporters that he was back home, but she declined to disclose details about his captivity or exactly when he was released.

The events recounted by Sinha followed an unprecedented incident three months earlier when the presidents military secretary had summoned him to what turned out to be a four-hour meeting with the prime minister, law minister, attorney general, and president.

Using both flattery and threats, the four of them urged him to rule in a pending case in favor of the 16th amendment to the constitution, in a move that would empower lawmakers to dismiss Supreme Court justices.

The prime minister requested me to somehow give the verdict in favor of the government, Sinha said in his book.

When I was unmoved, the prime minister lost her temper. Then abruptly she expressed her dissatisfaction towards me stating that she had all information regarding me, he said. Her only object was how to control the Supreme Court for coming to power in the next election.

It is not our job to threaten anybody

Obaidul Quader, general-secretary of the Awami League, Hasinas party, described Sinhas allegations as fictitious.

Everyone knows about the circumstances that led to him becoming a former chief justice. Now he is writing fiction out of envy while being abroad, Quader told reporters in Dhaka on Thursday.

Why did he not have the courage to say the things he is claiming now? His claims have no relevance whatsoever and the people of the country have no reason to believe any of it.

Brig. Gen. Ahmed Tanvir Mazhar Siddiqui, spokesman of the militarys intelligence wing, DGFI, said he was trying to obtain a copy of Sinhas book.

However, on behalf of the organization, I can say it clearly that it is not our job to threaten anybody, he told BenarNews. DGFI never does it.

Khondker Mahbub Hossain, former president of the Supreme Court Bar Association and vice chairman of main opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party, said Sinhas book made it clear that he was forced to resign and deliver verdicts that were favorable to Hasinas government.

By doing such thing, the government wanted to give a signal to all the judges of the country that they will have to embrace a same fate if they do anything against the intention of the government, he told Benar. It is an ominous sign for the judiciary.

Sinhas resignation surprised many in Bangladesh because he was due to retire as chief justice in January 2018. It came just months after the Supreme Court ruled that giving the legislature or executive branch the power to remove justices from the courts bench would hamper the constitutions basic structure, which requires equal separation of powers among the three branches of government.

The threat of impeachment proceedings would subject judges to exploitation by politicians, Sinha said in his July 2017 ruling.

The Bangladeshi constitution, which was established on Dec. 16, 1972, provided a parliamentary form of government and conferred power on parliament to amend the constitution through a two-third majority. Since then, according to political observers, amendments have been used to serve the interests of the countrys ruler or the ruling party.

Before leaving Dhaka last year, Sinha told reporters that he was doing so to preserve the integrity of the judiciary, but officials alleged that he had tendered his resignation as he faced corruption and money-laundering charges.

In his book, however, Sinha denied the corruption allegations and rejected government claims that he was ill with cancer.

After traveling from Bangladesh to Australia, Sinha said he went on to Canada, where one of his daughters lives, and then moved to Paterson, New Jersey, a 20-minute bus ride from New York City.
Indonesian police present suspects in a human-trafficking case during a news conference at the National Police headquarters in Jakarta, Sept. 13, 2018.

After arresting four suspects in June, Indonesian authorities are hunting for additional members of a suspected human-trafficking ring that allegedly sent at least a dozen women and girls to China, a police official said Thursday.

Brig. Gen. Dedi Prasetyo, spokesman of the national police, said the four people, including a Chinese national, were arrested in June after a woman escaped from an apartment building in Jakarta where victims were kept before being flown to China.

We are tracking down this ring, including how long they have been operating and where their victims are, he told BenarNews.

The woman told investigators she was subjected to violence by people who abducted her, Dedi said.

The suspects told investigators they had lured 12 women by offering them jobs as waitresses and shop attendants in China. After arriving, the women were sold to Chinese men for sham marriages, Dedi said.

Police continue to search for other members of the syndicate, Dedi said.

We are trying to find out who helped them, including those who helped lure the families of the women into allowing them to travel to China, he said. Some of the victims are underage.

Indonesian police are working with Interpol, Chinese police and the Chinese Embassy in Jakarta, as well as the International Organization for Migration to track down the other women who are believed to be in China.

We have received information some of them have escaped, but we have not received details on where they are now. We hope they can report to the Indonesian Embassy, Dedi said.

The Agency for the Placement and Protection of Indonesian Workers (BNP2TKI) urged Indonesians to be cautious about job offers.

Dont be fooled by offers of big salaries. Those who want to work overseas have to have skills and necessary documents, BNP2TKI chairman Nusron Wahid told BenarNews.

Other cases

Police arrested five people last week who allegedly trafficked a 16-year-old girl from West Java to Malaysia. The suspects could face 15 years in prison if found guilty of human trafficking.

The girl was lured by a Facebook post that promised a job in Malaysia with a salary of 7 million rupiah (U.S. $473) per month. Once she arrived, she was forced to work long hours and was not given food by her employer, investigators said.

Malaysia, a Muslim-majority nation of more than 32 million people, relies heavily on foreign domestic helpers from neighboring countries, such as Indonesia.

Meanwhile, police in Aceh province last week rescued two women, ages 24 and 20, and arrested a woman suspected of being involved in a ring that sent women to Malaysia to become sex workers.

At least 101 human-trafficking cases involving 1,417 victims, mostly women, have been reported to police since 2011. Since then, more than 170 people have been arrested on charges of labor trafficking, sex trafficking and organ harvesting, according to police records.

The human trafficking networks do not necessarily link to each other. Some are related, they know each other, but some are not, said Panca Putra, deputy director of the national police General Criminal Investigation division.

Since last year, the government delayed issuing more than 10,600 passports for people suspected of planning to work illegally overseas or were victims of trafficking, according to Zaeroji, director of immigration enforcement and monitoring at the Law and Human Rights Ministry.

We hope that in the future the system will be connected online to the Population and Civil Registry Office so we can verify immediately if information in passport applications is true or not, said Zaeroji, who like many Indonesians uses one name.
Former Prime Minister Najib Razak waves to reporters while arriving at the Kuala Lumpur court complex to face 25 charges of money laundering and power abuse, Sept. 20, 2018.

Updated at 1:15 p.m. ET on 2018-09-20

Former Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak pleaded not guilty Thursday as a court charged him with 25 new counts of corruption, money laundering and abuse of power in connection with the alleged theft of billions of ringgit from the scandal-hit state fund 1MDB.

The Kuala Lumpur Sessions Court charged Najib with 21 counts of various alleged offenses under the countrys Anti-Money Laundering and Anti-Terrorism Financing Act 2001. Najib arrived at the courthouse after he was formally arrested on Thursday in connection with the latest charges, and after spending the night in the custody of the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission (MACC).

The Sessions Court later released Najib after allowing him to post 3.5 million ringgit (U.S. $845,900) in bail in four installments  as requested by Najibs defense team  starting with a payment of 1 million ringgit ($241,700) on Friday. Najib had until late next week to pay the bail in full, the court said.

The bail is to be paid, starting from tomorrow 1 million ringgit, and subsequently, 500,000 ringgit in installments until Friday, Sept. 28, Sessions Court Judge Azura Alwi said.

The new charges included nine counts of receiving illegitimate proceeds, five counts of using illegitimate funds, and seven counts of transferring illegitimate proceeds to other entities.

He was also charged with four counts of abuse of power in relation to 2.3 billion ringgit ($556.23 million) of money from the 1Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB) fund allegedly deposited into his personal bank accounts when he served as prime minister.

The new charges bring to 32 the total counts that Najib faces after he was charged twice earlier with money-laundering and abuse of power as part of a MACC investigation into 1MDB, a sovereign wealth fund that he established in 2009 during his twin role as PM and finance minister.

He has pleaded not guilty to all the charges and is scheduled to stand trial in February 2019.

Najib, who wore a dark suit, arrived at the courthouse at 1:48 p.m., escorted by police and MACC officers. He smiled wearily as he waved to his supporters, who were barred from entering the court compound.

Earlier in the day, Deputy Inspector-General of Police Noor Rashid Ibrahim announced that Najib was arrested outside the Federal polices Commercial Crime Unit headquarters in Kuala Lumpur, with the consent of the Attorney-Generals Chambers.

Later, Najib reiterated that he was not a thief and that the charges were aimed at tarnishing his reputation.



This court case will give me the chance to clear my name now, the 65-year-old former prime minister told reporters at the Kuala Lumpur Court Complex lobby after emerging from Thursdays hearing.

His court appearance on Thursday over criminal allegations was the third for Najib, the former president of UMNO party and Barisan Nasional coalition, since the bloc that ruled Malaysia for nearly 61 years was upset in the May 9 general election.



The earlier charges were related to allegations that 42 million ringgit ($10.3 million) were illegally funneled electronically into his private bank accounts from SRC International, a former 1MDB subsidiary.



In addition, his lawyer Shafee Abdullah was charged last week with money laundering and tax fraud involving 9.5 million ringgit ($2.3 million) that he had allegedly received from Najib. Shafee called the charges politically motivated and baseless.

International scandal



The probe into 1MDB reopened after the new government of Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad came to power in early May. Apandi Ali, the attorney general under Najib, cleared the then-prime minister of wrongdoing in the case.



United States prosecutors filed a series of lawsuits alleging that at least $4.5 billion (18.6 billion ringgit) was stolen from 1MDB and diverted through acquisitions of real estate, artwork and luxury properties by associates of Najib. Switzerland and France also are investigating 1MDB.



Malaysian authorities are pursuing businessman-turned-fugitive Jho Low, whose real name is Low Taek Jho, and his father after both were charged in absentia in August.



Low, who was identified as a close associate to Najib, was charged with three counts of receiving funds and five charges of transferring funds totaling 1 billion ringgit ($261 million) under the Anti-Money Laundering and Anti-Terrorism Financing Act.



Low's father, Larry Low Hock Peng, who is also a fugitive, was charged with transferring money to his son under the same act, authorities said.

House searched

While Najib was being charged in court, the federal police's commercial crime investigation team raided the house of his mother, Rahah Noah.

The raiding party of 14 entered the house at 4 p.m. and spent about 90 minutes there, but left empty-handed, a police source told BenarNews.

Rahah, the widow of former Prime Minister Abdul Razak Hussein, was home when the investigators arrived.

Very mean of them to scare the poor lady and they found nothing in her house, Najib attorney Shafee said, confirming the search.

Meanwhile, MACC Deputy Chief Commissioner Azam Baki told reporters that the 1MDB investigation would continue.

More to be charged in the case. MACC will cooperate with police in the investigation and we are focusing on tracking money and assets belong to 1MDB in other countries, Azam said.

Ali Nufael in Kuala Lumpur contributed to this report.
Police dig through debris as they search for villagers buried by a landslide triggered by Typhoon Mangkhut, in Itogon, northern Philippines, Sept. 19, 2018.

A landslide buried more than 20 houses and left at least a dozen people dead and scores missing in the central Philippines on Thursday, officials said, as search-and-rescue teams kept digging through an avalanche of mud that hit a northern mining community.

The side of a mountain at a quarry site in the city of Naga in Cebu province gave way after two days of incessant rain, burying houses that belonged to a community of informal settlers, said Supt. Samuel Tadeo, chief of the Philippine Bureau of Fire Protections rescue unit.

More than 20 to 25 houses were buried here, Tadeo said, adding intermittent rains were hampering search efforts.

Rescuers had earlier evacuated residents in the area before Typhoon Mangkhut slammed the countrys northern region on Saturday, leaving a trail of destruction.

So far, the death toll from Mangkhut  locally known as Ompong  has reached 81 victims, excluding the new casualties from Naga. Sixty-six were recorded in the northern Cordillera mountain range, which includes the town of Itogon, where a landslide buried the local mining community under tons of debris. Fifteen others were killed in Manila and elsewhere.

The toll is expected to rise as rescuers in the mountainous area of Itogon were persevering with digging in search of survivors or the bodies of more victims.

The focus of the search operation, however, shifted to Naga on Thursday, where a saturated portion of a mountain collapsed on houses built out of light materials.

Tadeo described the operations in the area as dangerous, with rescuers having requested heavy equipment such as a backhoe to help in the effort.

Gerry Cabotaje, a local official designated as spokesman for the rescue effort in Naga, said the toll as of Thursday afternoon had reached 12, with eight others rescued. About 50 to 60 people were believed to be missing.

The search-and-retrieval operations are continuing, Cabotaje said, describing the land that gave way as private property owned by Apo Land and Quarry Corp.

The Philippine environment departments mines and geosciences bureau had inspected the area in August and found cracks in the slopes, local officials said.

Chito Maniago, an Apo Land spokesman, told local television stations the firm had yet to begin its quarry operations at the site that collapsed.

The mines bureau had informed the quarry company of the crack, but Apo Land had earlier told people there to leave, he said.

A rescuer walks past body bags and caskets at a command center in Itogon, Philippines, Sept. 19, 2018. [Luis Lawanag/BenarNews]

Governmental review ordered

In Itogon, on northern Luzon island, rescuers believe that up to 60 people who had sought shelter in an old mining bunker and a church were buried there.

As search-and-retrieval operations continued in separate areas, the government was contemplating repealing a law that liberalized the mining industry.

We have a problem with the mining industry. It has not contributed anything substantial to the national economy, President Rodrigo Duterte said Tuesday. That mining thing has really contributed a lot of heartaches for the Filipino people.

Reacting to Dutertes order, Environment Secretary Roy Cimatu earlier this week ordered a review of all applications for the state-run Peoples Small-Scale Mining Areas, or sites across the country that allow independent miners to operate under strict governmental oversight.

The bureau would be stricter in granting licenses and approving small-scale mining sites, he said.

Duterte also directed the bureau to provide safe shelters for the small-scale miners and their families. Their homes should be far enough from identified geo-hazard areas, Cimatu said.

Up to 10 associations of small-scale miners had been granted temporary mining contracts in Itogon, where the mines were once controlled by Benguet Corp.

Cimatu had ordered the revocation of all the temporary contracts in the wake of the Itogon disaster and called for an immediate stop to all small-scale mining operations in the northern region.

Karl Romano, in Dagupan City, Philippines contributed to this report.
Melvin Jefferson was last seen on the evening of Sept. 19.
MWSS Administrator Reynaldo V. Velascoa

In a determined effort to improve Metro Manilas overall sewerage coverage and wastewater management system, the Metropolitan Waterworks and Sewerage System has signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the Daegu Metropolitan City in a special ceremony at the Korea International Water Week in Daegu Exco last Sept. 12, 2018.MWSS Administrator Reynaldo V. Velasco signed the MOU with Daegu City Mayor Young Jin Kwon calling for mutual cooperation to meet head on challenges and opportunities that threaten the water supply system in the two metropolitan cities. The MOU signing was part of the 2018 Korea International Water Week hosted by Daegu Metropolitan City where Velasco also served as one of the featured speakers at the 2018 International Water Business Workshop where he talked about water security and wastewater management as well as the relevance of the MWSS-Daegu tieup. Both leaders acknowledged the need to form an intercity network by developing the best solutions for common water problems and integrated water management. Daegu is South Koreas third largest city and the MOU is a welcome development for the Philippine water supply industry, particularly MWSS, following close bilateral relations forged during the June 2018 visit of President Rodrigo Duterte to Korea. The MOU calls for the two parties to work together to develop technical solutions to address water resources related challenges; develop the water industries in MWSS service areas as well as in Daegu; and, strengthen cooperation among water institutions in cities and municipalities covered by MWSS and in Daegu. Based on mutual trust, the two parties have agreed to collaborate and support efforts to  Promote mutual cooperation to achieve the sustainable goals of MWSS and Daegu;  Demonstrate leadership for water-centered urban development;  Strengthen cooperation networks between water-related businesses, universities, research institutes, and water industry cluster-related organizations;  Jointly select, develop and implement regular cooperation programs such as workshops, seminars, and conferences for mutual exchange of information, policies, and strategies necessary for water industry development; Encourage mutual participation in water-related events of MWSS and in Daegu;  Strengthen information exchange and network between cities and institutions in order to cope with global water problems by developing integrated water resources management and seeking best solutions for water problems; and,  Cooperate to pioneer new markets and share strategic technologies in relation to the two cities water and sewerage system. The MOU will be automatically renewed annually. Meanwhile, the MWSS chief expressed optimism for improved sewerage and wastewater management system in Metro Manila and the agencys other serviced provinces following a formal meeting with Daegu Environmental Corporation Dr. Hyung Shin Kang and top DEC officials including actual on site visitation on the 10-hectare sewerage and wastewater treatment plant. With the MOU with Daegu City, MWSS can now tap DEC to help and serve as third-party consultant in assessing the overall sewerage and wastewater management system in Metro Manila which still stands at 14 percent by both the two concessionaires Manila Water and Maynilad, Velasco said. He added that government-to-government cooperation will bolster support for advanced water technology demand area; improvement of operation of water purification plant and sewage treatment plant; and, improper sewage discharge system improvement. Daegu hosts the Korea International Water Week annually along with the World Water Forum held simultaneously where the MWSS chief along with Maynilad President Ramoncito Fernandez and Manila Water President Ferdinand dela Cruz served as resource speakers in September last year. MWSS concessionaires, Manila Water, and Maynilad, though, are committed to achieve full coverage by the end of their concession agreements in 2037.
Five years ago, Pope Benedict XVI (91) resigned.

The abuse scandal sheds a new light on this surprising step. Now shocking letters written by the retired Pope have surfaced that will be highly interesting to church historians.

The letters  which are available to BILD  show that Benedict XVI is deeply concerned about the state of the Church.

The correspondence goes back to November 2017. The letters are addressed to a German cardinal. In an interview, the cardinal had made critical remarks about Benedicts stepping down.

His main criticism was that the Church had allegedly entered a major crisis because of the Popes resignation. Moreover, a resignation by a Pope was unprecedented in Church history and had done serious harm to the Church.

The retired Pope reacted with an angry letter. To the cardinal who had criticized him, he wrote: I can very well understand the deep-seated pain that the end of my papacy has inflicted on you and many others. However, for some people and  it seems to me  also for you, the pain has turned into an anger that no longer merely concerns my resignation, but increasingly also my person and my papacy as a whole.

Auch Interessant



By this, a papacy itself is now being devalued and melted into the sorrow about the situation in which the Church currently finds itself. He severely reprimanded the cardinal: If you know a better way (referring to the resignation, ed.) and therefore think that you can judge the one chosen by me, please tell me."

There had indeed been papal resignations in the past, Benedict wrote. One example was Pope Pius XII (1876-1958) who, in 1944, aimed to avoid being arrested by the Nazis by stepping down. What is interesting is the comparison to a Pope threatened by the Nazis. Who did Benedict feel threatened by?

Pray for me that I may not flee for fear of the wolves, Benedict XVI said at his inauguration. Who are the wolves?

Professor of Philosophy and Vatican expert, Armin Schwibach (53), told BILD:

By the wolves, he probably meant the network of high-ranking Church dignitaries who have created a system of power, and abuse of power, in the Vatican, and whom he felt unable to cope with.

Was Benedict even concerned about being poisoned by henchmen of this network? The Spiegel reported in May 2015 that, in October 2012, the president of the Bavarian State Office of Criminal Investigations allegedly travelled to Rome to review gaps in the food preparation for the Pope. Even more interesting: When, given the bewildered state of the Church following the Popes resignation, the cardinal criticized by the Pope wrote back: May the Lord help his Church, Benedict replied once more  and with a remarkable sentence.

He wrote: Let us rather pray, as you did at the end of your letter, that the Lord will come to the aid of his Church. So did the former Pope think that the Church had entered a crisis under his successor, and that only praying would help in this crisis?

Excerpt from the letter to the cardinal from November 2017, signed Benedict XVI

Benedicts successor, Pope Francis, is currently facing accusations of having supported a powerful US cardinal despite knowing that Benedict had punished him for sexual offences.

The editor-in-chief of the Katholische Nachrichtenagentur (Catholic News Agency, KNA), Ludwig Ring Eifel (58), told BILD: The letters allow for fascinating insights into Benedict XVIs thinking  he is obviously very concerned about the state of the Church. Benedicts private secretary, Arch Bishop Georg Ganswein (62), did not want to comment on the letters to BILD. He recently chose to compare the situation of the Church  shaken by abuse scandals and systematic cover-ups  to the terror attacks of September 11 in New York. The Church, he said, is currently experiencing its own 9/11.
Plus, Bill's Message of the Day, the truth about kids and the COVID-19 vaccine.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The United States and the Philippines have reaffirmed their commitment under the Mutual Defense Treaty of 1951 during the official visit of Defense Secretary Delfin Lorenzana to the US Department of State in Washington, D. C. on Wednesday. US State Department Spokesperson Heather Nauert disclosed that Lorenzana met with US State Secretary Michael Pompeo where the two officials tackled cooperation on addressing regional security challenges, including the militarization of the South China Sea. Nauert said that Pompeo has assured Lorenzana of the US readiness to continue its support for the modernization of the Armed Forces of the Philippines. Secretary Pompeo and Secretary Lorenzana discussed cooperation on addressing regional security challenges, including the militarization of the South China Sea and the threats posed by terrorism and efforts to achieve denuclearization in North Korea, Nauert said, in a statement released by the US State Department via US East Asia and Pacific Media Hub. During the meeting, Pompeo also conveyed to Lorenzana that the US will provide assistance in humanitarian relief efforts in the areas devastated by Super Typhoon Ompong. Secretary Pompeo also expressed condolences for the destruction and loss of life caused by Typhoon Ompong and offered U.S. assistance in humanitarian relief efforts, Nauert said. Lorenzanas visit to Washington came after three members of the President Donald Trumps cabinet had sought a dialogue with Malacanang about the countrys plan to procure defense equipment. Last month, President Rodrigo Duterte revealed that he received a letter from the Secretary of State, Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross and Secretary of Defense James Mattis reaffirming US strongest support for the effort to modernize the AFP.The letter from the three US officials came after visiting US Assistant Secretary of Defense for Asian and Pacific Security Affairs Randall Schriver advised against buying Russian weapon system and platforms after Manila expressed the possibility of buying Russian arms. The US Cabinet officials said the special relationship between the Philippines and the United States will only grow stronger by increasing our dialogue and cooperation especially on security. We hope to partner in all the significant defense procurement, the U.S. officials said in the letter to President Duterte. We hope to partner in all the significant defense procurement, the US government letter added. Under the MDT 1951, the US and the Philippines are bound to defend themselves against external armed attack, so that no potential aggressor could be under the illusion that either of them stands alone in the Pacific area. The treaty also provides that an armed attack on either of the Parties (US, Philippines) is deemed to include an armed attack on the metropolitan territory of either of the Parties, or on the Island territories under its jurisdiction in the Pacific Ocean, its armed forces, public vessels or aircraft in the Pacific.
PR Newswire

PHILADELPHIA, Sept. 20, 2018

Names 17 New Citation Laureates from USA, EU, Asia

PHILADELPHIA, Sept. 20, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Clarivate Analytics, the global leader in providing trusted insights and analytics to enable researchers to accelerate discovery, today named 17 world-class researchers as Citation Laureates - researchers whose work is deemed to be, 'of Nobel stature', as attested by markedly high citation tallies recorded in the Web of Science citation index.

Each year since 2002, analysts at Clarivate Analytics have drawn on Web of Science publication and citation data to identify influential researchers in the research areas recognized by Nobel Prizes: Physiology or Medicine, Physics, Chemistry, and Economics. Again this year, individuals whose research reports have been cited at high frequency - typically in the top .01% - and whose contributions to science has been transformative, even revolutionary, have been selected to join the hall of Citation Laureates.

On October 1st, 2018, the Nobel Assembly will vote to confer sciences' highest honor and whilst this annual rite inspires worldwide speculation, Clarivate Analytics is the only organization to use quantitative data to make annual forecasts of potential Nobel Prize recipients. To date, 46 Citation Laureates have gone on to receive a Nobel Prize, 27 within two years of being listed.

Authors of extremely highly cited papers (to be cited 2,000 times or more is a rarity indeed) are usually members of their national academies of sciences, hold high appointments in universities and other research institutes, or have received many top international prizes in their fields. They often go on to receive Nobel honors. While peer review remains the principal method to recognize research excellence, a parallel approach of appraising the citation record often provides important corroborating evidence to supplement peer review.

This year 11 of the 17 honorees are based at leading North American academic institutions; others come from the UK, France, Germany, Spain, Japan and South Korea. Two of the 17 are women.

The 2018 Citation Laureates are:

Physiology or Medicine

Napoleone Ferrara, University of California, San Diego, CA, for the discovery of vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF), a key regulator of angiogenesis, the process in which new blood vessels are formed, both in healthy tissue and in cancerous cells. Ferrera's work has led to the development of drugs that inhibit blood-vessel growth in cancer and in blinding eye disorders such as age-related macular degeneration.

Minoru Kanehisa, Kyoto University, Kyoto, Japan, for contributions to bioinformatics, specifically for his development of the Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG). This database of protein pathways involved in gene expression allows genomicists and other researchers to collect, compare, and interpret data on cellular processes  for example, those that underlie disease.

Solomon H. Snyder, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, for his identification of receptors for many neurotransmitters and psychotropic agents, including brain receptors associated with opiates. His insights have been applied in the development of many common prescription drugs, such as compounds for pain control.

Physics

David Awschalom, University of Chicago, IL, and Arthur C. Gossard, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA, for observation of the spin Hall effect in semiconductors. This insight into how electrons behave under the influence of magnetic fields promises application in many areas, including quantum computing.

Sandra M. Faber, University of California, Santa Cruz, CA, for pioneering methods to determine the age, size and distance of galaxies and for other contributions to cosmology, including work on the "cold dark matter" believed to constitute the universe's "missing" matter.

Yury Gogotsi, Drexel University, Philadelphia, PA, Rodney S. Ruoff, IBS CMCM Center and Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology, South Korea, and Patrice Simon, Universite Paul Sabatier Toulouse III - CNRS, Toulouse, France, for discoveries advancing the understanding and development of carbon-based materials including for capacitive energy storage and understanding the mechanisms of operation of supercapacitors.

Chemistry

Eric N. Jacobsen, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, for contributions to catalytic reactions for organic synthesis, especially for the development of Jacobsen epoxidation.

George M. Sheldrick, Georg-August-Universitat Gottingen, for his enormous influence in structural crystallography through the introduction and maintenance of the SHELX system of computer programs.

JoAnne Stubbe, MIT, Cambridge, MA, for her discovery that ribonucleotide reductases transform ribonucleotides into deoxyribonucleotides by a free-radical mechanism. These deoxyribonucleotides, in turn, are fundamental to the synthesis and repair of DNA.

Economics

Manuel Arellano, CEMFI, Madrid, Spain, and Stephen R. Bond, Oxford University, UK, for contributions to panel data analysis, especially the Arellano-Bond estimator. This method exploits time patterns in panel data to estimate the economic response to a change in a policy or other variable, while controlling for permanent unobserved confounding variation.

Wesley M. Cohen, Duke University, Durham, NC, and Daniel A. Levinthal, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, for their introduction and development of the concept of absorptive capacity (i.e., the ability of firms to evaluate, assimilate, and apply external knowledge) and its contribution to advancing our understanding of the innovative performance of firms, industries and nations.

David M. Kreps, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, for contributions to dynamic economic phenomena, in choice theory, finance, game theory, and organization theory.

David Pendlebury, Citation Analyst at the Institute for Scientific Information at Clarivate Analytics said: "Science not only gives rise to new technologies but depends on them too. This year we are naming as Citation Laureates two scientists who have helped fellow researchers significantly. They have made an impact beyond what any one person or team could do alone. Congratulations to Professor Minoru Kanehisa and Professor George Sheldrick for providing the research community with KEGG and SHELX, respectively, which provide data and software that have accelerated discovery for many. The importance of their contributions is reflected in the citation record  both have garnered tens of thousands of citations. While past Nobel Prizes have highlighted methods and tools with revolutionary impact, the importance of databases and software has yet to be acknowledged. Our citation data reveal the enormous influence and impact of this type of scientific contribution. We are making an observation, but perhaps we are also making a suggestion that research achievement comes in many forms today and should not be overlooked."

Learn more about the methodology of the list here and view our Hall of Citation Laureates https://clarivate.com/hall-of-citation-laureates/

About Clarivate Analytics Clarivate Analytics is the global leader in providing trusted insights and analytics to accelerate the pace of innovation. Building on a heritage going back more than a century and a half, we have built some of the most trusted brands across the innovation lifecycle, including Web of Science, Cortellis, Derwent, CompuMark, MarkMonitor and Techstreet. Today, Clarivate Analytics is a new and independent company on a bold entrepreneurial mission to help our clients radically reduce the time from new ideas to life-changing innovations. For more information, please visit clarivate.com.

About Web of ScienceWeb of Science is the world's most trusted and largest publisher-neutral citation index, powering global discovery and citation analytics across the sciences, social sciences and art & humanities. With over 1.4 billion cited references going back to 1900 and millions of users per day  from leading government and academic institutions and research-intensive corporations  the Web of Science citation network serves as the foundation for the Journal Impact Factor, InCites and other powerful and trusted citation-impact measures. The Web of Science helps researchers, research institutions, publishers and funders discover and assess the citation impact of over a century of research publications found in the most prestigious books, conference proceedings and journals.

About the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI)ISI is the 'university' of the Scientific & Academic Research group at Clarivate Analytics. It maintains the knowledge corpus upon which the Web of Science (WoS) and related information and analytical content, products and services are built; it disseminates that knowledge internally through reports and recommendations and externally through events, conferences and publications; and it carries out research to sustain, extend and improve the knowledge base.

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Former Health secretary Janette Garin

FORMER Health secretary Janette Garin has filed a criminal complaint against her successor, Paulyn Jean Ubial, accusing the latter of involvement in the deaths of school children inoculated with the controversial Dengvaxia vaccine. Garin is facing preliminary investigation before the Department of Justice on charges arising from the deaths of at least 17 children who had been inoculated by the Dengvaxia vaccine. The former health secretary, who already denied charges of reckless imprudence resulting in homicide under the Revised Penal Code and violations of Anti-Torture Act and Consumer Act, asked the DoJ to prosecute Ubial for alleged violation of Article 365 of the Revised Penal Code.Garin alleged that Ubial should be the one prosecuted by the DoJ because she was the one who decided to shift the dengue immunization program from being school-based to community-based contributed to alleged reported deaths among immunized children. According to her, such shift to community-based immunization weakened the screening and monitoring mechanisms that were set supposedly set in place during her tenure. Community-based immunization is prone to abuse by local politicians who use it as a political tool to facilitate access to free vaccines for their constituents who are unqualified, Garin said, in the complaint. Garin stressed the expansion of the immunization program during Ubials term ran counter to the recommendation of the World Health Organization that it should only be school-based for better monitoring, better compliance, and better screening. She said Ubial continued with the community-based implementation of the vaccination program for more than a year, issued Philippine National Drug Formulary exemptions, expanded the program to Region 7 and to cover members of the Philippine National Police, and issued orders to implement it in three more regions.Garin lamented it was during Ubials term that the second and third doses were administered to the over 400,000 students. It is unfortunate that several complaints were filed against me and other DOH officials when in truth only Secretary Ubials negligence contributed to the alleged reported deaths because of her hasty approval, launch, and implementation of her Community-Based Dengue Immunization Program, she said. Aside from expanding the program, Garin alleged hat Ubial was also liable for relaxing the protocol on securing prior consent by authorizing immunization on an implied consent basis. Secretary Ubial considered as implied consent the mere act of a parent bringing his or her child in the community center for immunization, even without a written consent from the parents, Garins complaint said. The complainant also accused Ubial of not complying with baseline and serial serotyping because of the absence of a commercially available testing kit. Garin served as health chief from December 2014 to June 2016, followed by Ubial, who was in the post from July 2016 to October 2017.
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The International Peoples Tribunals conviction of President Rodrigo Duterte is a sham and useless piece of propaganda, the Palace said Thursday after the international court found the President guilty of crimes against humanity. Thats a sham decision. It has no official sanction. The validity of the findings will depend on the credibility of the tribunals, Presidential Spokesman Harry Roque told reporters. He said the IPT appeared to be a propaganda body of the international left. Therefore, we set it aside as being a useless piece of propaganda against the government, Roque said. He said in the field of international law, even if it was not official, the ruling could have a bearing depending on the stature of the individual sitting in the court. For instance, for comfort women, we had a comfort women tribunal here in Asia, but the people who sat there as judges include really individuals who later on were appointed to the international court of justice because they had the highest qualification, Roque said. One who was a prosecutor for the UN war crimes tribunal for former Yugoslavia, another was appointed the high commissioner for human rights. Its like that. But when I looked at the roster, I dont really know them. Its really just the leftists who happened to be white and sympathetic to the Philippine left. IPTs ruling, handed out by a jury, convicted Duterte for gross human rights abuses covering the Presidents deadly war on drugs and the implementation of martial law in Mindanao, among other things.We heard the summary testimonies of witnessesmany of them heart-wrenching, traumatic and horrificexperts and resource persons, as well as the digests of the wealth of data, information, facts, analyses and other evidence presented and submitted before us, the jury said in its decision. The abundant evidence adduced before us leads to the indubitable conclusion that indeed Defendant Dutertes policy pronouncements, statements, and actions are in brazen violation of a slew of peoples rights. Meanwhile, National Union of Peoples Lawyers president Edre Olalia called the tribunal a legitimate people-initiated platform for looking for justice. Its biggest value is its strong moral suasion and political push that would complement the overall efforts from all sources in the ultimate search for justice, Olalia said in a statement. It delivers a message and a lesson to leaders, governments and institutions that they cannot simply get away with their responsibility and accountability to the people by using the very rules to oppress, exploit and repress them. The Presidents co-defendants, such as United States President Donald Trump, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the World Trade Organization, and unidentified transnational corporations and foreign banks doing business in the Philippines did not participate in the proceedings. Bagong Alyansang Makabayan and Karapatan presented the case against the President to the IPT this week. The verdict will then be forwarded to the International Criminal Court where the President faces two sets of charges for alleged extrajudicial killings.
Agriculture Secretary Manny Pinol said Thursday he would seek a ban on the importation of fancy varieties next year, now that the National Food Authority is under his supervision. What is happening is, instead of bringing down the price, [we have] imported fancy riceasmine, long grains[which] are actually being sold at as much as P58 per kilo. So where are the low prices? Pinol said in Filipino on UNTV. Next year, the importing of fancy rice should be disallowed. Lets let local farmers plant the fancy rice and sell these at a good price. Our imported rice should fill the supply gapand this should not be fancy rice, he continued. Pinol said he check on the price of commodities at the Commonwealth Market Thursday, and found that traders have complied with the price ceiling on several vegetables, such as onions. Red and white onions now sell at P50 to P60 per kilogram from the previous P100 to P120 per kilo, he said. However, he expressed dismay over the price of well-milled rice, still stands at P55 per kilo. Pinol said his priority as the new chairman of the NFA Council is to solve the rice mess and lower the price of the grain by increasing the volume of NFA rice in the market. The only way we could address this problem is to flood the market with NFA rice, he said. This is the only way we can control the price manipulation of the traders and middlemen in the market. Pinol said he already has President Rodrigo Dutertes go-signal to push through with more imports to fill up all NFA rice outlets in the country, noting that the NFA still has P12 billion to use. The Palace said the President expects the Department of Agriculture to be efficient, following his executive order transferring supervision of the NFA, Philippine Coconut Authority, and Fertilizer and Pesticide Authority from the Office of the President. Presidential Spokesman Harry Roque said the Palace expects closer coordination among the agencies, now that the DA is in control. We are expecting that the Department of Agriculture will be efficient in determining when the country needs to import rice because they have the data themselves, Roque said in a Palace press briefing Thursday. [They know] how much the local farmers have produced, and how much we need to import to supply the demand of the market, he said. The agencies were separated in a time when Senator [Francis] Pangilinan needed a job, Roque said, referring to the Aquino administrations transfer of supervision of the NFA to a food czar.The NFA needs a seamless importation of rice as we need to have an ample supply of it. We need to have a balance and enough supply, but not to the extent that it will affect the earnings of our... farmers, he said. On Monday, Duterte signed Executive Order No. 2, stating that the supervision over the NFA, PCA, and FPA is hereby transferred to the DA. He then ordered the reorganization of the NFA Council, making the Agriculture chief and the NFA administrator as its chairman and vice chairman, respectively. Senate President Pro Tempore Ralph Recto said putting the NFA under the control and direction of the Agriculture secretary was the right move, saying there should not be two conductors and two separate orchestras when it comes to rice. It should be one symphony under the baton of one conductor, he said. I hope that this move will make rice policies and programs clear, cohesive and complementary. Meanwhile, in his sponsorship speech on Senate Bill No. 1998: Replacing Quantitative Import Restrictions on Rice with Tariffs, Recto said the rice tariff rates balance the interest of the farmer and the consumer. He said the gradations are essential because a one-rule for all does not apply, and some policy nuances are needed. For the Minimum Access Volume (MAV) committed by the Philippines to the World Trade Organization, the rates are as follows: * For ASEAN Member States, 35 percent or the import duty rate commitment of the Philippines for rice importation, pursuant to the ASEAN Trade in Goods Agreement or ATIGA; and; * For non-ASEAN states, 50 percent or the tariff equivalent calculated in accordance with the WTO agreement on agriculture upon the expiration of the waiver relating to the special treatment for rice of the Philippines, whichever is higher. The President may impose a lower applied tariff rate when a shortage looms or the buffer dips dangerously. On the other hand, he said it provides for a special rice safeguard duty to protect local growers from sudden or extreme price fluctuations.
The Justice department said Thursday its prosecutors had recommended the indictment of Ozamiz City police chief Jovie Espenido for six counts of homicide in connection with the June 2017 police raid that resulted in the death of several people. The police claimed that the slain men were members of the Martilyo [Hammer] robbery gang operating in Ozamiz. In a resolution dated July 30 but was only released to reporters on Thursday, the prosecutors said they had found probable cause to hold Espenido, SPO4 Renato Martir Jr. and PO1 Sandra Nayag criminally liable for the death of the six suspects. The department made its statement even as the Philippine National Police said Espenido had all the legal recourse to defend himself in court on the homicide charges filed against him. Police spokesman Benigno Durana said they will be extending legal assistance to Espenido and two of his subordinates to defend themselves. The case arose from the complaint filed by Carmelita Manzano, wife of Francasio Manzano who was one of those killed in the police operation. Also killed in the operation are Manzanos son Jerry, son-in-law Victorino Mirs Jr., nephew Lito Manisan, nephew-in-law Romeo Libaton and Alvin Lapena. Espenido and his co-accused earlier denied the charges and asked the Justice department to dismiss the complaint against them on the ground that what happened was a legitimate police operation. They said those killed were alleged members of the Martilyo robbery group involved in a series of robbery and shooting incidents in Ozamiz. But the prosecutors led by Assistant State Prosecutor Loverhette Jeffrey Villordon said their admission that they killed the victims were adequate to warrant the filing of homicide charges against them. Unfortunately for the respondents, their admission of killing the herein victims is, on its own, sufficient to establish probable cause for the crime of homicide, the prosecutors said.They also cited a Supreme Court ruling that claims of lawful performance of duty were not compelling enough to overcome a finding of probable cause. In the same resolution, the prosecutors dismissed the complaints for murder and arbitrary detention filed against Espenido and the other respondents for lack of probable cause. Villordon said the qualifying circumstances needed to establish a case for murder, such treachery, and cruelty, were not present in the crime. Besides, neither the complainant nor the witnesses actually saw the killing of the victims, the prosecutors said. It must be noted that neither the complainant nor any of her witnesses actually saw the killing. As such, there is no basis to qualify the charge of murder, the prosecutors said. They also said they found no probable cause for the arbitrary detention case filed by the complainant who said she was held for up to six days from June 1 to June 7 inside the Ozamiz City Police Station and that she was only released after she signed an affidavit. However, the department said Espenido and the other respondents were able to prove that there was ground for the complainants detention as she was the subject of a case for illegal possession of firearms.
Recovery efforts continued Thursday in areas hit by landslides in the wake of Typhoon Ompong. Police counted 88 confirmed fatalities and said 64 were missing. Of the total deaths, 72 were from the Cordillera region. In the town of Itogon, Benguet alone, 57 people remained trapped under the mud, where a landslide buried bunk houses for miners, Mayor Victorio Palangdan said on radio dzMM. As the grim search continued, House Speaker Gloria Macapagal Arroyo expressed support for the total prohibition of open-pit mining to prevent the further degradation of mountains and waterways. At a congressional hearing of the House committee on ways and means, Arroyo proposed the inclusion of a provision in House Bills 442 and 7994 that would explicitly disallow open-pit mining. The two bills seek to establish a fiscal regime for the mining industry. Our bill will specifically, will explicitly prohibit open-pit mining as defined and give a grace period to be determined by the [Department of Environment and Natural Resources] during which they pay the tax that you say will kill the industry, Arroyo said. At the same time, Arroyo also pressed for a clear definition of open-pit mining as the House has yet define what it is. Arroyo also urged the mining sector to confer with the Department of Finance on the sectors proposal regarding the tax on mining. She gave the DOF three days to submit their suggestions on her proposed provision. If none are received, the House would continue to draft the bills, she said. Arroyo set the deadline after learning from Gloria Tan Climaco, a member of the board of trustees of the Chamber of Mines, that it was not the DOFs priority to implement a fiscal regime in the mining industry.So I suggest that the industry submit the paper to him (Finance Secretary Carlos Dominguez), since he has not yet sent a communication that says, notwithstanding the Presidents statement, it is not his agenda, because that is what I am asking for, Arroyo said. In the meantime, we presume it is his but we are not going to wait forever. Send it today, and if we do not hear from him in three days, then we will make our own committee report, she added. In his last State of the Nation Address, President Duterte warned the mining industry to improve its operations as the government will be imposing new mining policies. To the mining industry, I say this once again and maybe for the last time: Do not destroy the environment or compromise our resources, Duterte said. Repair what you have mismanaged. Try to change management radically because this time you will have respective policies. The prohibition of open-pit mining is one, he added. As the death toll from Ompong rose, Queen Elizabeth II sent the Philippines her condolences. In her message to President Duterte dated Sept. 18, the Queen said: I was deeply saddened to learn of the loss of life and the devastation caused by Typhoon Mangkhut. Prince Philip and I send our sincere condolences to all the victims, to those who have lost loved ones, and to those who have seen their homes and property destroyed. My thoughts and prayers are with all those affected by these tragedies, she added. Earlier, the Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA) thanked the foreign states and international organizations that offered aid in its recovery and relief efforts following the onslaught of Ompong. Australia, France, Canada, China, Israel, Japan, New Zealand, Singapore, South Korea, Switzerland, Thailand, the United Kingdom, and the United States were among those that offered humanitarian assistance to the victims, Foreign Secretary Alan Peter Cayetano said. As of Thursday, the National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Council reported that the number of Filipinos affected by the typhoon had risen to 1.43 million, at least 139,609 of whom were being housed inside and outside evacuation centers.
Foreign mercenaries, mainly from Columbia and Nepal, fighting on the side of the Saudi Arabia-UAE-led coalition in the conquest of Houthi-controlled Al-Hudaydah port were recruited by former Palestinian Fatah official Mohammed Dahlan who oversaw their training in Israel, Al-Khaleej Online reports citing unidentified sources.

Hundreds of mercenaries of various nationalities are taking part in the attack on Al-Hudaydah, with the aim of taking control over it from the Houthis who have shown fierce resistance, the media quoted some informed but unnamed sources as saying.

The sources according to the media are close to the US Congress Intelligence Committee.

The port located on the Red Sea has been since June the theater of fierce fighting between Iran-backed Houthi rebels who control it and Saudi Arabia-UAE coalition that is backing the Yemeni army.

The coalitions efforts to dislodge the rebels turned out fruitless but last week the Yemeni army managed to cut off the main road connecting Al-Hudaydah to Sanaa which the Iran-backed rebels also control.

The sources told Al-Khaleej Online that foreign fighters have been involved in the fight for the port conquest.

The fighters among whom Colombians and Nepalese have been recruited by former Palestinian commander Mohammed Dahlan, who now serves as personal security adviser to Abu Dhabi Crown Prince, Mohammed bin Zayed (MbZ), the media reports citing the sources.

Dahlan also oversaw the mercenaries training by Israeli army commanders in the Negev desert, South of Israel. The former Palestinian official and now MbZs protege according to the sources, visited on several occasions the training camps hosting the paid fighters.

The Negev desert the sources told the media was chosen because the climate, the desert environment and the tribal structure that characterises the Negev desert are very similar to those in Yemen.

Israel and the UAE have no official diplomatic relations but it has been reported that the two countries have been engaged in covert cooperation in several areas, including security, and against Iran.
The province announced Tuesday that it will be sending October employment and income assistance cheques early to avoid delays in the face of a potential postal strike on Sept. 26.

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This article was published 19/9/2018 (1148 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

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The province announced Tuesday that it will be sending October employment and income assistance cheques early to avoid delays in the face of a potential postal strike on Sept. 26.

The move to send out cheques early was surprising because traditionally the union has worked to ensure people expecting government-issued cheques are able to have them delivered, said Todd Jarema, Canadian Union of Postal Workers (CUPW) Prairie Region education and organization officer.

He saw no reason why this would not happen again in the face of a strike.

Our beef is not with the public, its with our employer. Those folks need access to those cheques, they depend on those cheques. Weve always reached out to make arrangements to provide that service, Jarema said.

The last disruption of postal service was in 2011, when employees were locked out by Canada Post.

Canada Post and CUPW have been at the negotiation table since November 2017.

The first offer was not made until Sept. 7. Jarema said the offer that was made was a combination of surprising and disappointing.

Its been quite a tumultuous round of bargaining, (and) there hasnt been a lot of movement on the major issues for us, Jarema said.

While it is tough to say how negotiations will work out, but said a counter offer has been made by the CUPW, Jarema said.

At this point, its really tough to say, Jarema said. At this point as far as I know if there is no significant movement at the table, I think it is a possibility we may be out first thing on the 26th.

Chief among these concerns raised by CUPW during negotiations has been the pay equity disparity and equality between rural and urban workers, along with the low wages offered to employees beginning with the company or working as temporary employees.

These practices have also resulted in an overburdening of workers, Jarema said.

He said that geographically remote and small rural areas have been affected the most by these changes because it has increased the strain on postal workers. He cited how temporary workers start with a low wage and have no guarantee of hours.

Its quality-of-life stuff, Jarema said.

Another issue of concern is Canada Posts failure to account for parcel delivery, focusing instead on letter delivery. About two out of every three parcels in the country are delivered by Canada Post employees, and Jarema said that the number of deliveries has been increasing exponentially over time.

The volume of parcels being delivered is putting a strain on employees physically, and as a time-consuming process is often pushing them into over time hours, Jarema said.

As part of the negotiations, CUPW is pushing for an expansion of the services offered by Canada Post to better suit the needs of the rural communities they serve.

Ideas include the installation of a postal bank, internet provision, health-care checks and more aimed at creating a better quality of life for those in rural spaces.

Canada Post and CUPW are currently waiting on an arbitrator for the negotiation.

Its things that wouldnt really require huge financial outlays to accomplish, Jarema said. A large portion of that infrastructure is already there.

 ckemp@brandonsun.com

 Twitter: The_ChelseaKemp
Italian navy authorities have opened an investigation after the discovery of 700 kg illegal cigarettes in one of its vessels that was returning from a mission in Libya aimed at helping Libyan coastguard stop migrants to take to the sea.

The probe according to the website of TV program Le Iene, has been launched in connection with the discovery of 3,600 packets weighing 700 kg, in Caprera ship; a vessel operating under the Italian navy.

The vessel had spent three and a half months in the port of Tripoli on an assistance mission with the Libyan coastguard to intercept and rescue migrant boats in the Mediterranean, the website said.

A complete search of the ship upon its return to the southern Italian base of Brindisi in mid-July revealed the presence of the contraband haul of cigarettes.

The navy, in a statement Wednesday, said legal action and internal investigations have been launched.
A British man residing in the UAE and wanted in India in connection with a bribery case of officials in a $500 million helicopter-deal could be handed over to New Delhi, reports say.

A court in the Gulf country, where 54-year old Christian James Michael has been living but on bail following his detention, has reportedly ordered his extradition to Indian authorities.

Michael was detained in June and released on bail.

His extradition was, according to press reports, rubber-stamped early this month by judge Eisa Al Sharif of the Dubai Appeal Court. The move according to the Dubai court official is in line with extradition terms between the two countries.

The British businessman is wanted in India for bribing some officials to endorse, back in 2007, a deal for the purchase of 12 luxury choppers by New Delhi from British-Italian firm AgustaWestland.

Michael brokered the $500-million deal, according to Indian news outlets.

The deal was scraped in 2014 following the arrest in Italy of Giuseppe Orsi, the CEO of AgustaWestland parent company Finmeccanica, on charges that he paid bribes to Indian officials.

The British citizen is among 14 people wanted by Indian authorities under an arrest warrant issued last year in relation with the bribery case.

Michael who in July denied the charges against him can appeal the court decision.
Juno McEnroe and Fiachra OCionnaith

The Government has denied Ireland has been asked to cave into EU corporate tax reforms in exchange for support from member states in the Brexit negotiations.

Tanaiste Simon Coveney flatly denied there was a quid pro quo yesterday or that the EU would only take the Irish position if Dublin agrees to drop its veto over tax reforms for the bloc.

There is no linkage on that issue and the pressures on Ireland linked to Brexit where we have strong solidarity, Mr Coveney told RTE radio.

The comments were made in the wake of international reports that some EU members want Ireland to drop opposition to a proposed digital tax across the bloc. Brexit solidarity cannot come for free, EU officials were quoted as insisting.

In June, EU president Jean-Claude Juncker, while supporting Irelands position on Brexit, also urged Dublin to drop its opposition to the digital tax plans. These are being driven by France.

Any new tax proposals, which would see technology firms face fresh levies, would need the support of all members. The Government says Ireland is one of many members opposed to the tax.

Nonetheless, senior government figures have been forced on the defensive over the issue, after reports on the tax.

Addressing the reports, Mr Coveney told RTE: That is, in my view, verging on irresponsible journalism in my opinion.

I have spen t a lot of time, as the Taoiseach has, travelling around EU capitals ensuring that people understand why the Irish issues are so important on Brexit, why Ireland is so vulnerable and exposed to a potential bad outcome linked to Brexit. And why that outcome, if we dont have our backstop in place, could potentially create frictions that undermines the peace process.

Those issues are serious issues, this is not some kind of bargain whereby the EU shows solidarity with Ireland in exchange for putting some kind of pressure on Ireland on tax. Im in the meetings with decision makers. There is no linkage between the two.

The foreign affairs minister said EU chief Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier, Mr Juncker as well as EU council president Donald Tusk and EU leaders had all not made any linkage with the tax and Brexit.

What happens on taxation is what has been happening on taxation for 20 years, whereby there are some EU countries that want to see a more common approach towards the setting of tax rates and taxation across the EU.

But there is no linkage on that issue and the pressures on Ireland linked to Brexit where we have strong solidarity. It is not a quid pro quo, stressed Mr Coveney.

Finance Minister Paschal Donohoe said Irelands tax policies would not be tweaked, saying:

Our corporate tax policy will be fully protected over the coming period, the treaties of the EU recognise the ability of nation states to make decisions in terms of their rates. This is well understood by all member states and at all times in the Brexit negotiations the European Commission have offered full support to Ireland.

EU Affairs Minister Helen McEntee equally denied there was bargaining around tax policies: It has never been brought up. That is not the case.
By Geoff Percival

More than 80% of business leaders want Minister Donohoe to widen the tax base and bring more people into the tax net in the October budget.

A pre-Budget survey of public and private company CEOs, by PwC, shows that almost 80% of bosses agree that moving the Government finances into a surplus is the right course of action.

However, as many as 84% are concerned about the rising cost of business, with more than half worried about the changing international tax environment.

Only a little over a quarter of respondents viewed the Governments planned rainy day fund, to buffer the country against future economic shocks, as being a key priority.

Instead, the number one priority for Budget 2019, according to the vast majority, is further investment in national and public infrastructure including roads, broadband and the health service.

Reducing the high personal tax burden, dealing with the housing supply crisis and boosting Irelands overall competitiveness also ranked highly.

More than 60% of respondents said Brexit represents a bigger threat to Irish exports than US protectionist policy.

Maintaining Irelands competitiveness is critical in the light of Brexit and other geopolitical uncertainties and the survey highlights the rising cost of doing business, available talent and residential housing as key concerns, said PwCs head of tax, Joe Tynan.
By Padraig Hoare

The Central Bank has said it is confident in its procedures to combat money laundering in the Republic, after the boss of Danish bank Danske resigned following a 200bn scandal, the largest in European history.

The financial watchdog pointed to a review by the Financial Action Task Force, the international standard setters, which found that Ireland has a generally sound legislative and institutional framework when it comes to anti-money laundering and countering terrorism financing.

The bank said:

We are empowered to take measures that are reasonably necessary to ensure that credit and financial institutions comply with the provisions of legislation. This includes enforcement proceedings when firms are found not to be compliant. It is worth noting that combating money laundering and terrorist financing is done on an inter-agency basis in Ireland.

Danske chief executive Thomas Borgen resigned after an investigation revealed payments totalling 200bn through its small Estonian branch, many of which the bank said were suspicious.

The Danish bank detailed compliance and control failings amid growing calls for an EU crackdown on financial crime after a series of money-laundering scandals which have attracted the attention of US authorities.

Even though I was personally cleared from a legal point of view, I hold the ultimate responsibility. There is no doubt that we, as an organisation, have failed in this situation and did not live up to expectations, said Mr Borgen, who will stay on until a new CEO is appointed.

Danish politicians were critical of Danske for not revealing exactly how much money was allegedly laundered and not saying who was legally responsible for the lapses.

Additional reporting Reuters
Update 10.50am: Almost 30% of Ryanairs shareholders have voted against the chairmans re-election.

The budget airline held its annual general meeting near Dublin on Thursday after a year in which it has been buffeted by pilot strikes which have grounded hundreds of flights.

Chairman David Bondermans re-election was secured by 70.5%.

Chief executive Michael OLeary was returned by 98.5%.

Ryanair Chairman David Bonderman (Niall Carson/PA)

Last month Ryanair and Irish pilots union Forsa reached an agreement, the trade union said, and the threat of job losses was averted.

It was the first collective agreement the airline has reached in the Republic and represented the reversal of a 32-year policy.

It agreed to recognise unions last year.

The dispute between the airline and some of its Irish pilots involved annual leave, base transfers and promotions.

It caused five days of strike action by about 100 of Ryanairs 350 Irish-based pilots.

Irish Ryanair pilots during their strike (Aoife Moore/PA)

Ryanair cabin crew in Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, Italy and Belgium are expected to strike on September 28.

The firms ultra-efficient low-cost model has seen it become one of the biggest and most profitable airlines in the world.

The mismanagement of pilot rosters last year led to the cancellation of thousands of flights.

The resulting fall out culminated in union recognition and the recent industrial relations strife, which the airline says has affected relatively few flights.

- Press Association

Earlier: New members welcomed to Ryanair board at AGM

Update 9.25am: Ryanair shareholders approved all resolutions at the company's 2018 AGM by large majorities.

Former board members Charlie McCreevy and Declan McKeon chose not to seek re-election at the AGM.

Chairman David Bonderman thanked both Charlie and Declan for their substantial contribution over the last eight years and welcomed both Emer Daly and Roisin Brennan as new members of the board.

Digital Desk

Earlier: Ryanair AGM takes place in Meath

Update 7.26am: Ryanair's Annual General Meeting takes place in Co Meath this morning.

Michael O'Leary is expected to remain at the helm of the company despite calls from some pilot unions and shareholders to oust him.

A rebellion against the board is expected, with shareholders due to vote on re-electing directors.

It comes as the airline faces one of the biggest strikes in its history next week as unions representing cabin crews in Belgium, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal and Spain are staging a 24 walk-out on Friday week over contracts.

The media is banned from attending today's event.

Digital Desk
Small businesses could be missing out on millions of euro in sales because their online presence isn't good enough.

Online sales in Ireland are now worth over 12 billion.
Do you ever find yourself missing your furry friend on a night out?

Or feel the pangs of guilt as those puppy dog eyes watch you put your coat on?
Campaigners are calling for the Health Minister to approve a life-changing drug for people suffering from a rare muscle disease.

Irish sufferers of Spinal Muscular Atrophy (SMA) are meeting with TDs in Leinster House today to make the case for the drug called Spinraza.

Spinraza is the first drug that can alleviate the muscle wasting condition. Although classified as rare, SMA is the leading genetic cause of death of infants and toddlers.

Jonathan O'Grady from SMA Ireland says the drug can transform the lives of children with the condition.

"A patient who previously could only lie on the floor and roll could now potentially stand and maybe even take a step," he said.

"A patient who before could only sit up straight might now be able to crawl."

Spinraza is now available in 19 EU countries but not in Ireland.

"There are 19 countries in the EU who have already approved Spinraza for general release," Mr O'Grady said.

"If I lived in Spain today I'd have this drug. If I lived in Italy today I'd have this drug.

"But because I live in Ireland there's a question mark. We want that question mark removed."

Families from the #SpinrazaNOW campaign are to make a public appeal at Leinster House today.

"Spinraza is more than a drug. It brings hope to people who have never had hope before," said Sinead Perez, the mother of 10-year-old Jordan from Sixmilebridge, Co Clare.

"Until now it's been a slow march downwards, watching someone fight with their own body as it fails them more and more.

"Without Spinraza Jordan's condition will continue to deteriorate. He's losing muscle function every day that passes. Spinraza will help maintain him at his current level or even help Jordan to regain some of the muscle function he's lost.

"It may give him back some of his independence taken from him by this deadly disease, like the ability to feed himself, scratch his head or lift a cup, simple everyday tasks we take for granted.

"It will give Jordan the chance at a longer and higher quality of life by helping to slow down, stop or even reverse the progression.

"This is the hope it brings, and more, it also brings the hope that Jordan will have the chance to grow up. To make it to adulthood, where he can use his talents to contribute to society like everyone else. What mother would want anything less?"

Digital Desk
The African Union has launched an advocacy campaign to encourage more countries to ratify the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA)

A business guide, developed by the International Trade Center (ITC), was launched on Tuesday to help stakeholders to better understand and navigate the agreement.

The Business Guide, which was formally presented to the African Union Commissioner for Trade and Industry Albert Muchanga during the World Export Development Forum (WEDF), captures the current state of play of the provisions and protocols of the agreement.

The guide also provides insights into the business implications of AfCFTA with a view to equip stakeholders to both anticipate and influence policies.

According to Albert M. Muchanga, African Union Commissioner for Trade and Industry, The Business Guide to the AfCFTA will help ensure that the private sector  especially our MSMEs, women and youth entrepreneurs take full advantage of the agreement.

So far, Kenya, Rwanda, eSwatini, Chad, Niger, Guinea and Ghana have ratified the AfCFTA, while three countries  Egypt, Kenya and Uganda  have ratified the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (Comesa), Southern African Development Community (SADC) and the East African Community (EAC) Tripartite Free Trade Area.

Other countries are on the way towards ratification. This is the case of Mauritania, whose government adopted at the end of last June a bill authorizing the ratification of the agreement.

Yet, six months after the signing of the agreement, it is almost certain that the 22 ratifications needed for its entry into force will not be reached by tomorrow, September 21.

As many countries were reluctant to ratify the agreement, Nigers president, who leads the economic integration component of the African Union, proposed July 2019, the date of the AU ordinary summit, to be held in Niamey, as a new deadline to make the AfCFTA effective, and potentially make of the continent the largest trading bloc in the world.
A Kerry County Councillor has refused to apologise for comments blaming Travellers for anti-social behaviour on a beach in the county.

Fianna Fail Cllr Michael Cahill raised a motion at the recent monthly meeting of Kerry County Council calling for a permanent beach officer on Rossbeigh beach.

Cllr Cahill says this follows instances of anti-social behaviour and intimidation by Travellers, which he was told about but did not witness personally.

Kerry Traveller Health and Community Development Project has called for the councillor to apologise for his comments.

Cllr Cahill told Radio Kerry he has no notion of apologising for telling the truth.

"I'm just saying that it was one group of Travellers that came to Rossbeigh, were very disrespectful to the playground, to the equipment, to the beach-goers," he said.

"They [the beach-goers] were intimidated and their visit was made very unpleasant, to be honest about it.

"I have no apology. It's the truth and I can't apologise for telling the truth"

Manager of Kerry Traveller Health and Community Development Project, Brigid Quilligan says they would support a motion to appoint a beach officer.

File photo of Rossbeigh beach

However, Ms Quilligan says it is more than one community that takes part in anti-social behaviour.

She told Radio Kerry, Mr Cahill's statement damages the reputation of all Travellers.

"We in no way condone any kind of littering or anti-social behaviour, but what we don't condone either is sweeping allegations to a whole community of people," she said.

"The councillor should apologise and he should be more responsible in what he is saying and he should know the impact of what he's saying.

"When he makes a comment about Travellers, people associate that with a whole group of Travellers.

"Traveller children going into school today and tomorrow whose parents might have heard this on the radio, that might be thrown in their face, something they had nothing to do with."

Digital Desk
Gordon Deegan

The Commissioner of An Garda Siochana, Drew Harris, today announced that he has cut discretionary and administrative overtime across the force.

Commissioner Harris has made the cuts as new figures show that to the end of August, the garda overtime bill had spiralled to 84.7m.

The total approved overtime garda budget for the year is 100m showing a remaining budget of only 15.3m for the final four months of the year.

In a statement this, evening, Commissioner Harris said: Regrettably, An Garda Siochana will significantly exceed the budget this year. This is not a sustainable position."

He said: To minimise the impact on policing and security activity, while reducing the excess spend before the end of the year, I have cut discretionary overtime and administrative overtime.

Commissioner Harris said: Overtime will still be available for specific policing / security operations, but only with the approval of the relevant Assistant Commissioner following discussion with Deputy Commissioner, Policing and Security.

He said: An Garda Siochana must work within the annual budget provided to it by Government. This has been stressed continually to garda managers at all levels throughout 2018."

Drew Harris

In a written Dail reply on the issue, Minister for Justice, Charlie Flanagan confirmed the 84.7m overtime spend to the end of August.

He told Deputy John Curran (FF): I have already discussed the financial position with Commissioner Harris. We are agreed that it is essential that value for money is achieved with the resources at his disposal and insofar as the emerging overrun in 2018 is concerned, he will be working with his senior management team to identify any measures that can be taken to ameliorate the situation.

Minister Flanagan separately told Deputy Donnchadh O Laoghaire (SF) in a written Dail reply said: I understand from the Garda authorities that a comprehensive review of Garda overtime commenced this month.

Minister Flanagan said that it is intended for the review to identify a range of measures to prioritise, target and control overtime to ensure that Garda resources are used in the most efficient and effective way possible and having regard to operational needs.

Charlie Flanagan

Communications Director with the Garda Representative Association (GRA), John OKeeffe said that the garda directive cancelling all discretionary expenditure across a range of areas will impact on the capacity of all Gardai on the frontline to do their job  particularly those involved in the investigation of crime gangs in the capital.

He said: This is an extraordinary development. As overtime is only ever incurred where necessary and must be approved in advanced."

Mr OKeeffe said: Where the requirement continues to exist, it is clear evidence of a resourcing issue. Overtime is essential if our members are to provide an effective policing service to the general public in Dublin and across the country."

While excessive overtime is part recognition that frontline gardai do not have adequate policing resources, regardless, overtime will always be a feature of policing, due to the nature of the job and the varying demands it makes on officers. This is not an Irish but a global policing phenomenon.

Mr OKeeffe said that the GRA was now calling on Government to immediately sit down with Commissioner Drew to show their bona fides in his first weeks in office.

He said: The agreed overtime must now be reinstated if we are to keep our streets safe in the lead up to Christmas.

Mr OKeeffe said that Government needs to be especially conscious of the signal this Directive sends to the criminal fraternity  particularly in the lead up to Christmas.

He said: The GRA asks, what does this say to the public and the business community?
Paul Murphy

A 42-year-old Dublin man who disappeared from his home in Co Cavan in 2011 and whose body was discovered in a bog in Co Meath three years later was unlawfully killed, an inquest in Trim, Co Meath was told today.

Gerard Anthony Daly, originally from Cavan, was living in Bailieboro with his partner and three children.

He was last seen on June 26, 2011 and his disappearance was reported to the gardai on June 29 that year.

His body was recovered at Oristown Bog, Co Meath on September 11, 2014. The body was discovered during searches of the bog for one of the IRA's so-called Disappeared.

At today's inquest, Superintendent Fergus Traynor, who was a detective inspector at the time of Mr Daly's disappearance, said that hundreds of enquiries had been made, and hundreds of statements had been taken and a number of searches conducted.

He said that the garda investigation into the death had since been concluded and there had been no prosecution in the case.

He said that it was suspected that one person was present at the time of the death but that there may have been others. He said that it was possible that Mr Daly died on the day after his disappearance.

Garda Sergeant Paul Carroll, a crime scene examiner, told the inquest that it was likely that Mr Daly had been killed at Oristown bog.

He added that it would appear from investigations that Mr Daly was killed on the evening of June 26, 2011 or early the following morning.

Experts from Forensic Science Ireland, Dr David Casey and Mr Edward Connolly gave evidence of establishing the deceased's identity through DNA.

State pathologist Dr Marie Cassidy described various injuries to the body, some of which might have been caused by excavation at the bog but others not.

She said that there had been four significant blows delivered to Mr Daly's head caused by a blunt instrument and there was also trauma to the larynx which might indicate that Mr Daly was held forcefully by the neck.

She said the cause of death was blunt force trauma to the head.

The jury returned a verdict that death was caused by unlawful killing.

Meath coroner Nathaniel Lacy, expressing condolences to the family, said that he could only imagine what the last few years had been like for them.

A spokesperson for the family said that they were "happy and sad" at the verdict, sad that they had lost Gerard but happy that there had been closure for them.

"Today's verdict was very much what we expected. It has been a long seven years", the spokesperson said.
Councillors on South Dublin County Council have voted not to nominate a candidate for the Presidential election.

Earlier this evening, the council heard from presidential hopefuls Gemma O'Doherty, John O'Hare, Sarah Louise Mulligan, and Marie Goretti Moylan.
Ghana and Burkina Faso have agreed to improve their trade relations during a two-day visit of Burkina Faso President Roch Marc Christian Kabore in Ghana.

Kabores visit sought to bolster bilateral ties and explore opportunities where the two nations can collaborate for the good of their people, as well as solidify some decisions that were taken by the two governments last year.

The two countries have also agreed to expedite the establishment of the Joint Commission for Cooperation that would speed up agreements in the areas of rail and road transport, agriculture, water management, trade and energy.

During a joint press conference after their meeting, President Nana Addo disclosed that the two countries were in talks to find a lasting solution to the annual spillage of the Bagre Dam in Burkina Faso, which often has disastrous consequences for communities downstream, especially in the northern part of Ghana.

Another outcome of the talks between the two heads of state is an agreement on quarterly ministerial meetings to address issues of mutual concern.

The two leaders have also agreed to collaborate with the support of ECOWAS to establish a joint border post to facilitate trade and free movement of their people, goods and services.

They also decided to work together in support of the establishment of the Continental Free Trade Area (CFTA) under the auspices of the African Union.

President Nana Akufo-Addo conferred Ghanas highest honour, Companion of the Order of the Star, on President Roch Marc Christian Kabore, in recognition of his distinguished leadership and commitment to the progress of his country, Burkina Faso, West Africa and Africa at large.

He is one of the outstanding figures of modern Burkinabe history, President Akufo-Addo said during the ceremony.
Marijuana Business in Georgia  who will have right to produce?

By Levan Khutsishvili

On September 13, Parliament of Georgia published the draft law on Controlling Cannabis and list of the laws where changes will appear regarding the initiated draft law. According to the draft law, a special agency will be established in the Ministry of Environment Protection and Agriculture, aiming to regulate and regulate activities related to cannabis legal turnover.The Government of Georgia establishes the rule of direct issuance of the license, and the rules for determining and remitting the initial price for issuing a license on the auction, are prescribed by the principles of the Law on Licenses and Permits. The license will be issued only for 5 years.Draft law says that planting, harvesting, and cultivation of the plant can only be done in closed buildings (supposedly in greenhouses) with respective licensing. Processed marijuana or products containing marijuana should also be stored in a closed building.The law sets the standards for making and cultivation of marijuana. Cultivation and preservation of the production will be permitted only in a building that will meet the safety standards set out by the government of Georgia, including building facilities should meet with security standards like light-sound alarms, daily protection, and video surveillance system as internal, also on the periphery.An important part of the draft law is the system of licensing, as initiators declared 10 licenses will be issued for medical marijuana business - production and export and each license will cost 25 000 GEL.1.The license for seeding, harvesting, and cultivation for medical purposes - 25 000 GEL;2. License for seeding and cultivation of cannabis for industrial purpose - 25 000 GEL;3. Cannabis processing license for medical purposes - 25 000 GEL;4. Cannabis processing license for industrial purpose - 25 000 GEL;5. The shipping license of cannabis / refined cannabis and/or its products - 25 000 GEL;6. Perfumery-cosmetic production license containing cannabis - 25 000 GEL;7. The license of production of cannabis pharmaceutical products - 25 000 GEL;8. License for pharmaceutical products containing cannabis and/or cannabis processed for medical purposes - 25 000 GEL;9. The export license of perfumery-cosmetic products containing cannabis and/or cannabis for industrial purposes - 25 000 GEL;10. License for the import of hemp seeds and/or saplings for industrial and/or medical purposes - 25 000 GEL.As stated in the draft law, the license holder can produce and cultivate marijuana for only perfumery-cosmetic purposes. According to the draft law, the domestic quota, the permissible territories and their selection criteria for seed planting, planting or cultivation of the plant will be determined by the decree of the Government of Georgia.It turns out the Cannabis can appear important business for some people in Georgia, according to the official datas global legal marijuana market size was valued at USD 9.3 billion in 2016 and Georgia will try to find its place among the exporter countries. Though some important question marks appeared after the Government started speaking about the initiative. First and most important question is who will have a license; will there be monopolization? some experts and politicians believe that marijuana business is in interests of former Prime Minister of Georgia  Bidzina Ivanishvili. According to the information of Rustavi 2, Bidzina Ivanishvili has more than 251 000 shares of one of the largest US corporations Goldman Sachs. The company is interested in the marijuana business and helps those investors who are trying to develop it. But the politicians from the ruling party believe that talks about the monopolization of the business are the provocation from the opposition parties and it is false information."On the contrary, we are talking about avoiding monopolization. All speculations should be completed. I'm telling you directly about 150 types of licenses will be held and it is the guarantee that there will be no monopolization, "  said Akaki Zoidze.Prime Minister of Georgia Mamuka Bakhtadze also underlined that this initiative is only for implementation of the strong regulations for marijuana production, so another question mark that opposing part has (how it will influence the youngsters?), is answered by the Government, as they say that production and export of marijuana will be strongly controlled and once the law goes into effect, the Ministry of Internal Affairs will have a strong tool to deal with difficulties that can appear in the process of decriminalization.
Rio Tinto has pushed the button on a $US3.2 billion ($4.4 billion) share buyback primarily focussed on its Australian-listed shares. The latest round of returns will be funded with the proceeds from Rio's sale of its last remaining Australian coal assets, all of which the miner negotiated to exit in 2018 at prices considered very strong by observers. Rio said it would conduct an off-market share buyback for up to 41.2 million of its Australian-listed shares, worth about $A2.7 billion, as well as on-market purchases of its London-listed stock. Rio will return the proceeds of recent coal sales to shareholders via a share buyback. Credit:Ian Waldie The $A4.4 billion to be returned to shareholders comes from the sale of the Hail Creek and Valeria, Winchester South and Kestrel coal assets in March.

Further returns to Rio shareholders are also on the cards, with the miner's $US500 million sale of the Aluminium Dunkerque smelter in France still to be completed. Returning $3.2 billion of coal disposal proceeds demonstrates our commitment to capital discipline and providing sector leading shareholder returns," Rio Tinto chief executive Jean-Sebastien Jacques said. The tender period opens on October 9 and closes on November 9. Rio said the last day shares can be acquired on the ASX for investors to be eligible to participate in the buyback and be eligible for franking credits in respect of the buyback, was September 24. We continue to focus our portfolio on those assets which provide the highest returns and growth. Jean-Sebastien Jacques - Rio Tinto chief executive officer Rio declared cash returns to shareholders for 2017 totalling $US9.7 billion. Shares in Rio jumped 3.6 per cent on Thursday, to close at $78.10. Rio said the timing and form of shareholder returns to be funded by asset disposals not yet completed would be announced with its 2018 full year results.
Australia is at least a decade behind on planning for a changing global economy and needs a review of industrial relations law to catch up, according to the head of the Senate's inquiry into the future of work.

The Senate's report, published on Wednesday night after a year-long inquiry, recommends reviewing the definition of "casual" workers, broadening the definition of "employee" to include those in the gig economy, and creating a licensing scheme for labour hire businesses.

The head of the Senate committee, Murray Watt, says the most concerning thing to come from the inquiry is that "we don't have a plan" for tackling the changing nature of work in Australia. Credit:AAP

The select committee was established in October to investigate future job security issues as well as the effectiveness of Australias industrial relations laws to deal with new types of work, like the gig economy.

More than 160 submissions were made from participants in the union movement, labour market experts, academics, startups and technology giants.
Chef Shannon Martinez (left) and business partner Mo Wyse bring old-fashioned comfort food to Melbourne vegans and plan to expand. Credit:Benn Wood

In the tiny kitchen of her popular Melbourne vegan restaurant Smith & Daughters, Shannon Martinez is training vegan chefs of the future. But they are not stir frying bean shoots and boiling lentils. Rather, they are creating delicious vegan versions of Italian dishes and attending trade school where they bone fish and tackle cuts of meat.

I am doing that because I cannot teach them the meat component. I believe it is important for a chef to learn what foods do, not just the vegan food, training for a chef is important, says Martinez.

She opened the restaurant in 2014 and Smith & Deli across the road in 2015 with her vegan business partner Mo Wyse. Classically trained, Martinez began her career at age 15 in the banquets kitchen of Melbournes Sofitel Hotel, then at the Richmond Hill larder with Melbourne food doyenne Stephanie Alexander.

Martinezs trainees use their skills to make the vegan versions she creates in her home test kitchen, first cooking a non-vegan dish, then working out what to add and what to leave out to make it vegan. In the deli and restaurant, which changed from a Spanish menu drawing on Martinezs heritage in early 2018, there is everything from comfort food such as shepherds pie, tuna pasta bake and raspberry chocolate brownies to kung po chicken, squid with saffron rice and garlic prawns.
What we're seeing now  a variety of hairstyles and textures on the red carpet  has not come without effort. In Johnson's estimation, change has been five years in the making and an uphill battle. "It takes brave women, like Wanda Sykes, who was my first celebrity who would wear her natural hair, to basically say, 'I'm comfortable with who I am,'" she said. "I was able to take Wanda's natural hair and make it look glorious  really pretty. After that, other women with curly hair jumped on board, because they saw how you could do beautiful things with their own texture." Loading 'Let's take it to a place that's real' Natural hair texture and diverse skin tones have been "in" before. (Recall the 1960s Diana Ross and the '70s runway shows of Yves Saint Laurent.) So is this all something that passes, or is it more lasting?

Sam Fine, a make-up artist known for working with Naomi Campbell, Iman and Queen Latifah, is skeptical. He has been in the industry since 1991 and has seen cosmetics collections developed for women of colour come and go. "There was Revlon, when they released ColorStyle, and also Maybelline Shades of You  where are they now?" Fine said. "Make-up brands have had this relationship with women of color that is very trend based. If they signed on a Veronica Webb or Tyra Banks as a face, they'd suddenly release a collection for them." One size doesn't fit all for actresses of colour, such as Lupita Nyong'o. Credit:Pascal Le Segretain Fine saw more permanent change in the '90s with the rise of makeup-artist brands  especially MAC, Nars and Bobbi Brown. "They really started to bridge the gap," he said. "MAC, particularly, embraced people of colour with its wide range." Still, he sees further need for improvement. "We're stuck in a place that is politically correct," he said. "Let's take it to a place that's real and lasting. For example, every brand is launching 40 foundation colours now because it's the trendy thing to do. But is the brand actually doing the work  the initiatives and outreach? It's not just about putting a black model next to Gigi Hadid. The stock needs to be there, and not only 40 shades at your Times Square store. The people at the counter need training."

'Photographers play a big, big role' Even if a hair and makeup team nails a beauty look for a woman of colour, she can still appear on camera with a gray, shiny complexion (or worse, overly lightened skin) and dull hair. That's because a crucial part of the image-making machine relies on photography. Game changer ... Rihanna's Fenty Beauty line has helped make diversity the new normal. Credit:AP "Photographers play a big, big role, and many of them have no idea how to light a woman of colour or how to retouch someone other than white," said Vernon Francis, a hairstylist who worked with Lupita Nyong'o for her 12 Years a Slave press and awards season run. Alexi Lubomirski, who photographs magazine covers and beauty campaigns and recently shot the Meghan Markle and Prince Harry wedding portraits, has seen lighting issues turn into a battle of aesthetics. "Some creative directors are afraid of highlights on darker skins because they feel it is not representative of the natural colour of the girl's skin," he said.

"I happen to like the highlights and the range of dark to light on skin," said Lubomirski, who is also the author of Diverse Beauty. "For me, that is part of the beauty of darker skin, that it has this depth of color that naturally shows lighter and darker areas." Stylists point out that beauty ideals are created, or reinforced, over a celebrity's press cycle, especially on the all-important red carpet. Loading "When Lupita is standing on the red carpet, she's being shot by a white flash that's meant for someone like Jennifer Aniston," Francis said. "It's disrespectful. Because this is what people are seeing at home, and this is maybe why somebody is thinking, 'I want to look like Jennifer Aniston' and why maybe they're not thinking the same of Lupita and Viola Davis. This is where the vying for beauty campaigns, and whether so-and-so can sell beauty products, starts."

Barose noted that lighting is an issue across the entire celebrity circuit. "If I have a client who is appearing on The View, I know she's going to look amazing because that crew knows how to light for a range of skin tones," he said. "But there are some shows that light for maybe only the white hosts. That's when issues with make-up can happen even if I did the look beautifully." 'Textured hair is not difficult' Lacy Redway, a hairstylist who works with Ruth Negga and Tessa Thompson, said that behind the scenes, at photo shoots and backstage on fashion runways, the prevailing opinion is that textured hair is difficult. Redway said there are models who show up for shoots already prepped because they're afraid the stylist won't know what to do with their hair. "So many stylists are intimidated by textured hair that they don't even know what it's supposed to look like, so they also don't know when it looks wrong," she said. But Redway is generally upbeat that change is happening. She wants to make the discussion more open and less intimidating. ("It can be such a sensitive topic that people are scared to talk about it," she said.) And part of supporting the movement requires adopting better vocabulary.
The ACT government has been urged to overhaul the territory's entire rates and land system after a lengthy inquiry into how changes to land valuation calculations hit Canberra's unit owners.

ACT Legislative Assembly Public Accounts committee chairwoman Vicki Dunne tabled on Thursday the committee's 186-page report of its inquiry into the government's controversial changes to the way land values were calculated for units last year.

Canberra Liberals member for Ginninderra Vicki Dunne, Opposition Minister for Health. Credit:Sitthixay Ditthavong

Mrs Dunne told the Assembly the territory government had not kept faith with the ACT's unit owners about their rates and land tax bills, saying they had bought into the market on one set of assumptions, which were abruptly changed in 2017.

Mrs Dunne said the bipartisan committee's six recommendations were unanimous, with the most important recommendation a call for government to devise a new method of calculating rates an land tax for unit title properties.
A man approached an 18-year-old student on her way to school in Wanniassa on Thursday morning, ACT police have said.

The student was walking to school on McBryde Crescent when she was approached by a man in a white 4WD.

ACT Policing has released face fit images of suspects in recent child approach incidents across Canberra. Credit:ACT Policing

He got out of his car and spoke to the girl but left when another car approached.

He is described as Caucasian, 180cm tall and slim.
The former University of Canberra law lecturer Arthur Hoyle lost an appeal on Thursday against his convictions and sentence for raping and sexually assaulting students.

His defence had pointed in part to the fresh evidence of Hoyle's mental impairment, which they argued was a possible defence to some of the allegations.

But a full bench of the ACT Court of Appeal dismissed the appeal in a 40-page judgement handed down by Chief Justice Helen Murrell.
Firefighters have declared a Canberra high school safe after a gas leak saw the school evacuated.

Staff and students self-evacuated from Melrose High School in Pearce about 12.15pm and notified the Emergency Services Agency.

Two ACT Fire and Rescue pumpers and a commander were dispatched to the school, along with a HAZMAT crew.

Firefighters conducted atmospheric testing before declaring it safe and have since left.

ActewAGL then arrived to determine the source of the leak.
A media company covering regional Queensland has been ordered by the Federal Circuit Court to repay about $300,000 to underpaid young journalists.

Touchpoint Media company director Laurence Bernard Ward will pay back 23 staff after they were underpaid over a 17-month period.

Young journalists were underpaid at Touchpoint Media. Credit:Jessica Shapiro.

The Fair Work Ombudsman also penalised the company $264,924, after an investigation sparked by workers' requests for help.

Inspectors found Touchpoint Media had frequently underpaid or failed to pay for duties performed at the company, with the largest underpayment of wages and entitlements being $48,217.
Vandalism and riots at Queensland's youth detention centres have cost taxpayers over a quarter of a million dollars over the first half of this year.

Incidents at the Cleveland youth detention centre in north Queensland cost $129,954 between January and May 2018, while incidents at the Brisbane youth detention centre cost $123,376 over the same period.

Opposition leader Deb Frecklington blamed the Labor government for not cracking down on violence in the centres.

"This is absolutely shocking, to think that we're spending $50,000-a-month to repair TVs and air conditioners for these thugs, it's got to stop," Ms Frecklington said.

"Why should we have a good kid sweltering in a Brisbane classroom because they don't have air conditioning and yet the bad kids in juvie can wreck their air conditioner and get it replaced?"
Zugdidi Mayor, Charged with Corruption, Says he is Victim of Provocation

By Gvantsa Gabekhadze

Elected Mayor of Georgias western Zugdidi town Lasha Gogia has dismissed corruption charges and said that he is a victim of provocation.Gogia, who was in the Czech Republic when he was charged with alleged corruption, says that he would not have returned to Georgia if he had committed a crime.He also said that he remains in the Georgian Dream ruling party team, despite the party's statement that Gogias case indicated the partys intolerance to any possible illegalities by the party representatives or high-ranking people.The mayor was charged by the State Security Service after Rustavi 2 private broadcaster released a video footage, in which a businessman allegedly asks Gogia for his money back.My goal is to prove the truth. I quit the post to avoid any question marks and I myself arrived for interrogation as soon as I returned from Czech, Gogia said.Gogia and his deputy Gia Gulordava quit their posts on September 12 as the Georgian State Security Service launched an investigation concerning the corruption case.Recently question marks have arisen regarding a possible crime committed by elected officials of Zugdidi municipality, which must be answered. The investigation is in progress, the Georgian Dream ruling party official webpage reads.The Georgian Dream has many times proved that everyone is equal before the law, says the statement.If Gogia fails to prove his innocence he will have to spend several years in prison.
South-east Queensland residents were forced to flee their homes on Thursday as fire crews battled to contain two separate out-of-control blazes.

The Queensland Fire and Emergency Service warned crews may not be able to protect every property as fires burnt forced the closure of the Brisbane Valley Highway, north-west of Brisbane.

Dark smoke blankets areas north-west of Gympie in the Wide Bay region. Credit:Kara Christian - Supplied

One bushfire continued to burn in the area, about 100 kilometres north-west of Brisbane, on Thursday night.

As conditions worsened, an updated QFES warning at 8pm told residents to evacuate before it was too late.
Brent Moresco will see his family "on the other side" after being sentenced to three years detention for a drunken nightclub assault that left another young man blind in one eye.

The 20-year-old was told off by Judge Christopher Ryan for snickering as he was sentenced in the County Court to three years in youth detention on Thursday.

Brent Morseco is facing three years in youth detention. Credit:Jason South

Co-accused Bradley Elmore-Jeffries, 22, was sentenced to three years in adult prison and will be eligible for parole after 21 months.

The pair, both from Wonthaggi, pleaded guilty to recklessly causing serious injury to environmental scientist Elliot Harvey at a Brunswick nightclub in May 2017 after snide remarks were made about Mr Harvey's car.
A woman who wants to conceive a child using donor sperm has launched a court challenge to existing laws that bar her from accessing IVF without her estranged husband's consent.

The Victorian woman, known to the court as LR, says she is being discriminated against on the basis of her marital status.

The woman is still legally married, but separated and estranged from her husband, the Federal Court in Melbourne heard on Thursday.

She intends to divorce him when the 12-month waiting period is over, and wants to undergo in-vitro fertilisation to become pregnant, using her own eggs and donor sperm.
A young woman who stabbed a Melbourne man in the name of the Islamic State has lifted her niqab veil in court to plead guilty to intentionally engaging in a terrorist act.

Momena Shoma, 25, refused to stand in the dock when Supreme Court Justice Elizabeth Hollingworth entered the court on Thursday, but lifted her facial covering when the judge asked to confirm her identity.

Momena Shoma leaves court after pleading guilty on terror charges. Credit:Jason South

Shoma then pleaded guilty to engaging in a terrorist act, after she stabbed Roger Singaravelu on February 9, as he napped next to his five-year-old daughter in the rumpus room of his Mill Park home.

Mr Singaravelu woke when he felt piercing pain in his neck and was able to wrestle the kitchen knife off Shoma, before he dashed out of the room with his daughter and got help in the street.
A Perth luxury car dealer and salesman have both been banned from operating as a consignment business in WA after action was brought against the company for misleading customers and failing to pass on profits to car owners.

PAG (WA) Pty Ltd, trading as Xoticar, specialised in selling vehicles on a consignment but faces restrictions on its license due to the charges.

An Xoticar dealership. Credit:Facebook

Director Myhung Ngyuen and salesperson Zeljko Grujin face sixteen charges regarding Xoticar's operation.

The charges include accepting a car on consignment without a written agreement, failing to deposit the proceeds of consignment sales into a trust account no later than the next business day, and failing to pay the net proceeds of the sale to the owner within two business days of receiving payment.
The ACT's environment commissioner has recommended a minimum price for plastic bags, as plastic use creeps back to pre-ban levels.

The capital's plastic bag ban has stopped 1132 tonnes of plastic going in landfill since 2011, Commissioner for Sustainability and the Environment Professor Kate Auty found in her long-awaited review of the policy.

Judy McMillan, pictured shopping at the Fyshwick markets, says she has never found it hard to refuse the offer of plastic bags at the checkout. Credit:Karleen Minney

This year alone, the ban has stopped 55 million bags ending up in landfill.

However, Professor Auty warned that if the ban is left as is, plastic consumption will return to pre-2011 levels.
Lawyers acting for Liberal Democratic Party senator David Leyonhjelm say his "stop shagging men" comment was "much more likely" to benefit Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young's re-election prospects than to damage her reputation, as he fights a defamation case filed against him in the Federal Court.

Senator Hanson-Young is suing the Liberal Democrat for defamation over a series of interviews he gave between June 28 and July 2 on Sky News, the ABC's 7.30 program and Melbourne radio station 3AW, along with a media statement posted on Medium.com.

David Leyonhjelm and Sarah Hanson-Young are set to face off in the Federal Court. Credit:Fairfax Media

During the interviews, Senator Leyonhjelm elaborated on his "stop shagging men" comment, which was directed at Senator Hanson-Young and made on the sidelines of a heated Senate debate in June about violence against women.

In a defence filed on Tuesday, Senator Leyonhjelm's lawyers say his comments outside the Senate are more likely to benefit the Greens senator politically than to hurt her reputation and it was her "own words" in response to his comments that damaged her reputation.
Some national leaders cant resist the urge to get in the drivers seat of a big powerful truck and masquerade as real-life truckies. All that power. All those childhood fantasies.

Donald Trump made it something of an art form back in March when he climbed into the cabin of a Mack truck and pulled all sorts of absurd faces.

He lacked only the brmmm brmmm noises because the truck was parked on the White House lawn. The images hurtled around the world - and at one point, found an echo in pictures of North Korea's Kim Jong-un, another leader who likes big seats in big rigs.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison in a truck on Thursday morning and US President Donald Trump earlier this year. Credit:Fairfax Media

Scott Morrison has been Prime Minister for less than a month, but he couldnt help himself when faced with a giant Mack truck near Canberra on Thursday.
Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton has rushed into parliament a bill which would grant the WA Police Force and Corruption and Crime Commission broad powers to force technology companies to give it access to encrypted communications.

This is despite the public consultation on the wide-ranging powers only closing 10 days ago.

The new laws would give the WA law enforcement agencies the ability to force technology companies to give them access to "available information" or to compel them to "develop and maintain a capability to respond to agency requests".

Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton in Question Time on Thursday after introducing a bill to expand the interception powers of federal and state law enforcement agencies. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen

Although the government denies this will permit security and intelligence agencies to build "back doors" into encryption software, digital rights organisations are concerned the security of computer systems will be compromised.
Dublin: A woman has died after high winds blew her caravan off a cliff in Ireland and a man died in Northern Ireland as storm Ali grounded flights and left more than 200,000 people without electricity.

Strong winds whip sand across the seafront road at Troon Beach in Northern Ireland on Wednesday. Credit:PA/AP

Irish police said the body of the woman, who was in her 50s, was recovered on a beach in the village of Claddaghduff in the western county of Galway.

Police in Northern Ireland said an engineer in his 20s working for the Northern Ireland Water utility was killed when a tree fell on him near Newry in County Down.

Another worker, in his 40s, was injured in the same incident and taken to hospital.
PM Bakhtadze: We share President Trumps view that dialogue with foes is far preferable to conflict

By Levan Khutsishvili

On September 16, The Hill published the letter of Prime Minister of Georgia  Mamuka Bakhtadze, where he speaks about the achievements and difficulties that Georgian Government faces. Prime Minister also underlines the importance of US-Georgian cooperation and stresses the idea that US-Georgian relations have never been so important than it is now, and especially for a peaceful solution of the Georgian-Russian conflict.The Georgia-U.S. partnership is as solid today as it has ever been, and it continues to strengthen under the Trump administration. I believe that America has a direct interest in a peaceful, just resolution of the Georgian-Russian conflict , - is said in the article.As Prime Minister declares, Georgia is trying to deal with occupation case with peaceful actions and as he believes, the solution is in diplomacy and economic development of the country, but as Mamuka Bakhtadze says, so far, Georgian side has not received any relevant response from the Russian side.We share President Trumps view that dialogue with foes is far preferable to conflict. Georgia stands ready to help America find solutions to the regions seemingly intractable problemsIn the face of ongoing occupation, we seek neither conflict nor confrontation. We continue to work towards a peaceful and practical solution to Russias ongoing occupation of our lands. We are trying our best to de-escalate tensions, but, to date, the Russian government has not responded to our appeals to find a satisfactory solutionWe believe a strong and prosperous Georgia is in Russias national interest and should not be viewed as a threat. Moreover, Moscow should not view Georgia in the context of confrontation with the West ,  said Mamuka Bakhtadze.To analyze the pathos of Bakhtadze's letter, it can be said that the Georgian government is actively trying to create the ground for strengthening the relations with Russia, but at the same time not losing the support from US and western world. Thats why, probably, Bakhatdze is not very harsh in assessments while speaking about Georgian-Russian war, mostly blaming former President Mikheil Saakashvili and his government for the war. Most of the politicians from the ruling party share the approach. Salome Zurabishvili, president candidate supported by Georgian Dream, made statements that blame Georgia for starting the war. Prime Minister of Georgia believes that without the involvement of the US, Georgian-Russian conflict cannot be solved, and he also believes that finding a peaceful solution should be in the interests of both countries  Russia and USA.Successful U.S. engagement in resolving this conflict would stand as a model for the rest of the world and demonstrate the power of diplomacy.Today, Georgia is poised to reach greater economic heights as a key hub for global trade and foothold for U.S. businesses in Eurasia. Georgia facilitates the stability of its region through good governance, economic development, and cooperation with neighbors.I am confident that a free and unified Georgia will serve as a linchpin for advancing our two nations shared interests of peace and prosperity in a challenging neighborhood and around the world.  said Mamuka Bakhtadze.
Paris: French President Emmanuel Macron's closest security officer, fired after video showed him beating May Day protesters, defended himself before a Senate inquiry on Wednesday, saying he was neither a police officer nor a genuine bodyguard.

Former President Macron's security aide Alexandre Benalla, left, appears before the French Senate Laws Commission in Paris. Credit:AP

Alexandre Benalla, whose case erupted into a political scandal, with accusations of unchecked abuses of power in the presidential palace, was questioned for more than two hours about the nature of his job as Macron's security shadow.

Speaking under oath, the neatly dressed former logistics aide at the Elysee was not questioned about the beatings in Paris, but rather his very rapid ascent within Macron's inner circle and how he had gained the right to carry a firearm.
Latest News MFAA responds to AFCA broker expulsion notices Peak body raises concerns with regulator about unpaid bills

Buying a home with Bitcoin and where property and blockchain meet Everything brokers need to know about buying a home with Bitcoin, crowd-investing deposits and decentralised financing

A mortgage broking firm has announced a new partnership with a real estate agent group to streamline the home buying process and offer competitive home loans to customers.

Starr Partners, which has 31 offices across New South Wales, will begin referring clients with financial needs to Shore Financials team of more than 50 home loan specialists.

Established in 2013, Shore Financial has a team that includes a centralised processing team, a legal department, risk and general insurance specialists, commercial lending specialists, and car and asset financing lenders.

With a portfolio of more than 30 different banks and lenders, the finance firm manages more than $200million in applications a month, totalling $2.8billion a year.

The company was set up to integrate with real estate networks such as Starr Partners, to enable agents to meet the full suite of their clients needs.

It is hoped the strategic partnership will streamline the home buying process for property buyers and help landlords build and create wealth through property more efficiently.

Douglas Driscoll, CEO of Starr Partners, said, Residential mortgage broking services is another value-added offering weve integrated this year to improve the customer journey for our clients, from introducing new technologies to enhance their listings, to now meeting all of their financial real estate needs.

After a year researching the market to find the best fit for third-party home loan referrals, Shore Financial was a clear stand-out. Its their dedication and commitment to negotiating competitive rates and offering the best financial advice to meet the needs of their customers, and their experience working with real estate industry professionals, that sets them apart as the leading mortgage broking service.

Theo Chambers, CEO of Shore Financial, said, We love working with bigger real estate networks, and Starr Partners is a respected brand, with a strong presence in key markets in Sydney and the Hunter Region. Weve been liaising with a few of their offices, but saw the opportunity to extend the partnership across the full agency network.
Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs of Belarus A.Dapkiunas meets the Ambassador of Saudi Arabia

20-09-2018

On September 20, 2018 the Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Belarus, Andrei Dapkiunas, met with the Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of Saudi Arabia to the Russian Federation, Riyadh Khalid Krimly.

The Deputy Minister received the copies of the Credentials of the Ambassador and wished him successful work as a plenipotentiary representative of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in Belarus.

During the meeting, the sides discussed a number of issues regarding bilateral cooperation and defined perspective ways of promotion of Belarusian-Saudi interaction.

Belarusian and Saudi diplomats shared their views on possible schedule of bilateral interstate contacts at the high level, primarily between the Ministries of Foreign Affairs of the two countries. The Deputy Minister and the Ambassador discussed the issue of holding the next session of the Joint Belarusian-Saudi Committee for Cooperation in Ryadh and noted the importance of exchange of visits of delegations of business circles of both countries.

The Deputy Minister emphasized that the economies of the two states are complementary and asked the Saudi party to pay more attention to the prospects of supplying competitive Belarusian products of mechanical engineering, food, chemical, pharmaceutical and woodworking industries to the Saudi market.

The parties also touched upon issues of more rapid approval of a number of pending bilateral draft agreements.

   

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The software as a service (SaaS) industry in Chennai, the SaaS hub of the country, is currently generating a revenue of over a billion dollars and employing over 10,000 employees.

The sector has raised over $500 million in funding so far, while many companies are relying more on revenue for future growth, said an industry official. There are over 20 companies in the SaaS sector in Chennai and they are growing their business across the world. "The largest player, Zoho Corp, itself, is over $500 million and Freshworks is around $100 million in annual recurring revenue. ...
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Mert & MarcusUnlike some of Taylor Swift's previous relationships with celebrities, she's managed to keep her current one with British actor Joe Alwyn on the down low -- the very down low. She's never spoken publicly about him at all, in fact. But Joe has now given his first comment on the relationship, though it's not much.

Speaking in the October issue of British Vogue, Joe -- who's starring in the new movie The Favourite -- says of his and Taylor's romance, "Im aware people want to know about that side of things. I think we have been successfully very private and that has now sunk in for people.

He adds, But I really prefer to talk about work.

News of Joe and Taylor's relationship broke in May of 2017 but they were reportedly dating a few months prior to that. Since then, he's attended a number of her concerts, and they've been photographed together on vacation in Turks and Caicos, and holding hands in London.

Joe reportedly inspired a number of the songs on Taylor's album, Reputation, but since she hasn't done any interviews to promote the disc, we don't know for sure.

Copyright  2018, ABC Radio. All rights reserved.




All but two of the 75 Republicans in the Florida House have signed a letter calling for the U.S. Senate to confirm Brett Kavanaugh to the U.S. Supreme Court, calling his life and career "a model of civic virtue."

The letter, originated by House Speaker-Designate Jose Oliva, R-Miami Lakes, went to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and three other senators Wednesday in advance of a key hearing set for next Monday.

The GOP lawmakers called on senators "and in particular, Sen. Bill Nelson, to confirm Judge Kavanaugh and allow him to begin his service as quickly as possible.

"Judge Kavanaugh is unquestionably qualified to be on the nation's highest court," the letter said, calling him "intelligent, qualified (and) respected."

The House Republicans' letter referred to attempts to portray Kavanaugh as an extremist, but made no mention of an accusation by a California woman, Christine Blasey Ford, that Kavanaugh attempted to sexually assault her while they were at a high school party in Maryland in the 1980s.

Kavanaugh has emphatically denied Ford's allegation.

"Recognize the truth, unify the country, confirm Judge Kavanaugh and show the American people that their government in Washington is not as broken as they fear," the letter ended.

Every House Republican signed the letter except for two, both from Tampa Bay.

Rep. Shawn Harrison, R-Tampa, who faces a strong challenge from Democrat Fentrice Driskell in a competitive district, said it was an oversight that he didn't sign and it should not be interpreted as a sign that he opposes Kavanaugh's confirmation.

"I just never got to it and no one (in the House) ever followed up on it," Harrison told the Times/Herald. "Let it play out and let's see what happens on Monday."

Rep. Chris Latvala, R-Clearwater, issued a statement to the Times/Herald that said: "While I believe Judge Kavanaugh should be confirmed and the timing of this accusation is suspect, I think it's important to gather all the facts. That said, my focus as an elected state representative remains on working in a bipartisan fashion to protect our environment, improve our education system, address the opioid crisis and keep our taxes low."

Latvala's father, former Sen. Jack Latvala, R-Clearwater, resigned last November amid charges that he sexually harassed a Senate staff member. A special master found probable cause that harassment occurred and a Florida prosecutor declined to file public corruption charges against him.

Among the Republicans who signed the letter supporting Kavanaugh's confirmation are Rep. Jeanette Nunez, the GOP candidate for lieutenant governor; Rep. Matt Caldwell, R-Lehigh Acres, the GOP candidate for agriculture commissioner and Rep. Blaise Ingoglia, R-Spring Hill, the chairman of the Republican Party of Florida.
Sandwiched between Building 20 and Building 21 in the heart of Facebooks campus, an approximately 25-foot-by-35-foot conference room is under construction. Thick cords of blue wiring hang from the ceiling, ready to be attached to window-size computer monitors on 16 desks. On one wall, a half-dozen televisions will be tuned to CNN, MSNBC, Fox News and other major networks. A small paper sign with orange lettering taped to the glass door describes whats being built: War Room. Although it is not much to look at now, as of next week the space will be ...
Five passengers, who suffered nose and ear bleeding Thursday after the crew failed to turn on a switch that controls cabin air pressure, were suffering from "mild conductive deafness", according to a hospital.

The five were taken to Dr Balabhai Nanavati Hospital, while the rest were attended to by doctors at the Mumbai airport.

As per their preliminary examination by ENT doctors, the five passengers suffered "barotrauma" of ear, which is caused due to a change in air pressure, said Rajendra Patankar, chief operating officer of Dr Balabhai Nanavati Hospital.

"The five patients, all males, have mild conductive deafness, a temporary condition which is likely to take a week or 10 days to heal. They are advised not to fly till then," Patankar told reporters here.

"They are under observation and are stable.

It seems there is no need for their admission in hospital. They are undergoing all required tests," he said.

The Mumbai-Jaipur flight was carrying 166 passengers and five crew members on board.

"During climb, the crew forgot to select bleed switch due to which cabin pressurisation could not be maintained. As a result, oxygen masks got deployed," the official at aviation regulator, (DGCA), said.

The Boeing 737 aircraft returned to Mumbai due to "loss of cabin pressure" and the pilots have been taken off duty pending investigation, a spokesperson said.

Citing initial information, the official said few passengers have nose bleeding.

"Out of 166 passengers on board, 30 passengers are affected... some have nose bleeding, a few have ear bleeding and some are complaining of headache," he added.
The Ministry of Civil Aviation (MoCA) has sought a report from the over the incident wherein loss of cabin pressure caused a scare on board flight 9W 697 earlier on Thursday.

Taking cognisance of the matter, the MoCA said that the crew members who were on duty for the particular flight are being de-rostered on account of the incident.

Earlier, the DGCA, in a statement, said that the Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau (AAIB) has started an investigation into the matter.

The Jaipur-bound flight was turned back to Mumbai after several passengers suffered ear pain and nose-bleeds, during take-off due to loss in cabin air pressure.



Subsequently, Oxygen masks were deployed for the passengers on board.

The Mumbai-Jaipur flight with 166 passengers and five crew members on board landed safely in Mumbai and all the passengers were deplaned.

Of the 166 people who were on board, 30 were affected and have been given treatment.

The flight took off for Jaipur from Mumbai at 10.15 am.
With WhatsApp giving no assurance to the government regarding tracing of the origin of fake messages, the Centre is likely to issue another notice to the Facebook-owned company next week.

This will be the third notice to the messaging platform regarding the contentious issue of fake messages. People in the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology with knowledge of the matter said the intent is to keep WhatsApp engaged while asserting its demand that a solution be provided. We are asking WhatsApp to do it (provide the solution) as it will become mandatory once guidelines ...
Breaking the ice in bilateral relations, Foreign Ministers of and will meet on the sidelines of the (UNGA) session that begins later in September -- the first such interaction after a long hiatus.

"I can confirm that the two foreign ministers will meet on the sidelines of the At this stage we have just agreed to the meeting," (MEA) spokesperson told the weekly media briefing here.

"The permanent missions of and will work out the date of the meeting," he said, indicating it is not a resumption of dialogue.

This follows a letter written by Pakistani Prime Minister to Prime Minister seeking resumption of dialogue and suggesting a meeting between and Shah Mehmood Qureshi on the sidelines of UNGA, and a letter written by Qureshi to Swaraj.

Replying to questions, Kumar said this is just a meeting and there is nothing much to be read into this at this stage.

"This meeting is taking place at the request of the Prime Minister (of Pakistan). We have not analysed details, we have just taken note of the letter written by Khan to Modi."

Kumar also revealed that has confirmed that it would attend a meeting of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (Saarc) foreign ministers.

"The existing policy on the Saarc process will continue. I don't think there is any change in it," said the MEA spokesperson.

Asked whether the foreign ministers meeting in is the beginning of a dialogue process, he merely repeated that they requested for a meeting and we have not discussed details.

On reports of brutality on a (BSF) jawan who was killed in firing from the Pakistani side, he said it was a barbaric incident and the BSF has written a strong communication to its counterparts in

"It is a serious issue and we will take it up Pakistan."
Delhi-based Choudhary Aviation Facilities Ltd had bought two helicopters of fugitive business tycoon in an e-auction conducted by the (DRT-II) here, a company official said on Wednesday.

"Our company bought the two personal copters of Mallya for Rs 87.5 million at the price of Rs 43.7 million each in the electronic bidding conducted by the DRT in Bengaluru," Choudhary Aviation Director Satyendra Sehrawat told IANS from Delhi on phone.

The Tribunal held the e-auction on behalf of a consortium of 17 banks which filed the case in 2013 against Mallya and his defunct Ltd for defaulting on loans borrowed from 2007-2012.

"Though the 5-seater Airbus Eurocopter B155 choppers are 10-year-old, they are in a serviceable condition, with a good dual engine and are currently parked at Juhi airport in Mumbai," said Sehrawat.

Three firms participated in the auction, held with minimum bid price of Rs 17.5 million for each copter of model 2008, last flown in 2013.

"We want to make use of the choppers for commercial activity, including chartered service," Sehrawat noted.

The 3-year-old firm also provides ground operations and air ambulance service to hospitals in the capital region (NCR).

The Tribunal, however, did not inform the media about the e-auction.
Walmart-backed will offer its employees an opportunity to cash in on part of their stockholding in the company at $126-128 per share, according to an e-mail to staff.

The e-mail, which follows the $16-billion deal of to buy majority holding in the Indian major, said eligible staff members will be allowed to liquidate part of their employee stock ownership plans (ESOPs) at $126-128 per unit.

This would translate into a total sum of about $800 million (around Rs 57.55 billion).

In a recent filing to the US SEC, had said it has "reserved 11,947,026 company ordinary shares for issuance under the company option plans, of which options to purchase 6,242,271 company ordinary shares are outstanding as of the agreement date".

When contacted, a spokesperson said the ESOP repurchase programme is part of its "continuing efforts to thank and reward our employees for their service".

" has a strong culture of fairness and does acknowledge that employees are an invaluable asset. We take immense pride in being the employer of choice and believe in rewarding employees by making them partners in the organisation's success," the spokesperson said.

In December last year, Flipkart had bought back ESOPs worth over $100 million from over 3,000 current and former employees of the company as well as its other units like Myntra, Jabong and PhonePe.

The mega deal, which saw buying 77 per cent stake in Flipkart, was announced on May 10 this year.

With festive season around the corner in India, the major is also gearing up to tap into newer users with the introduction of 'Cardless Credit' as a new payment option.

This facility will enable millions of customers to get an instant credit line of up to Rs 60,000 to make purchases.

"This is aimed at millions of credit worthy yet underserved customers who the traditional banks are not able to serve / underwrite credit for," it said.

Stating that only an estimated 20 million people have a credit card, Flipkart said cardless credit is a step in the direction to make more inclusive and help customers with small ticket credit line.




Via @TavelJimena

Republican gubernatorial candidate Ron DeSantis visited Florida International University to speak about his education platform Thursday morning, and after the event told the press he is not responsible for the most recent racial controversy surrounding his campaign.

Politico reported Thursday a Republican activist who donated more than $20,000 to DeSantis had recently tweeted racist remarks. In a Sept. 8 tweet, Steven M. Alembik called former President Barack Obama, a F---- MUSLIM N----. Alembik told Politico hes absolutely not a racist.

Totally disavow the tweet, DeSantis said at FIU. Im not in any way  not responsible for it, reject it.

DeSantis spoke to about 35 people at the event organized by the universitys College Republicans. He was there with his pick for lieutenant governor, Jeanette Nunez, whos a Miami native and state representative. Nunez, an FIU alumna, said shes always fought for her alma mater and plans to continue to do so if she gets to the governors mansion.

DeSantis said he wants to create partnerships between industries and high schools to help students gain vocational skills and work in trades, rather than heading to college after graduation.

He also said he'll be an advocate for more affordable college tuition and to protect parental choice programs. And he talked about a need to improve civic education in Florida schools. If immigrants are required to take a test before becoming citizens, he doesnt see why it would be different for native Americans, he said.

This is the fourth time DeSantis has spoken in South Florida this month. Similarly to past appearances, DeSantis pledged to back up Latin Americans in Miami-Dade and accused his opponent Andrew Gillum of socialist ideas, which he said would be a disaster for Florida.

He also denounced on Thursday the Salt Bae for serving steak to Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro.

Im standing with the people of Venezuela, DeSantis said.
The government has advanced the launch of Ayushman Bharat, renamed Pradhan Mantri Jan Arogya Abhiyan (PMJAY), by two days as Prime Minister Narendra Modi is learnt to have a packed day on September 25  the scheduled roll-out date. With just two days to go for the Sunday launch, there seem to be many loose ends that need to be tied up.

The PM will travel to Jharkhand to inaugurate what is being seen as the biggest health care scheme. ALSO READ: From broom to pills: Modi's journey from Swachh Bharat to Ayushman Bharat Sources indicated that the standard ...
The (NDB) of the countries has approved a $525-million loan to for infrastructure projects, it said on Thursday.

The Board of Directors of the on Wednesday approved a $350-million loan for the Major District Roads Project II of and $175 million for building and upgrading 350 bridges.

The loan will be used by the for on-lending to the government for rehabilitating major district roads with a total length of about 2,000 km to improve the connectivity of the rural interior with the national and state highway networks, a press release issued by the Shanghai-based said.

The project will improve the road conditions and enhance the transport capacity, which will lead to a less travel time, reduced vehicle-operating cost, reduced emissions and improved road safety, it added.

The positive impacts of the project also include promoting an inclusive development of the rural communities in Madhya Pradesh and stimulating regional economic development through improved connectivity, enhanced accessibility and increased job opportunities, the release said.

The will also provide a $175-million loan to the Madhya Pradesh Bridges Project, under which 350 bridges will be built or upgraded.

The board also approved a non-sovereign loan of $300 million to SIBUR Holding of for environmentally-sustainable infrastructure development related to the Zap SibNefteKhim project.

The NDB was set up by the (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) nations to promote green and infrastructure projects in the member countries.
India will settle payments for Iranian oil using rupees through local banks starting in November as US sanctions will make it difficult to settle trades through European banks, two industry sources said on Thursday. In May, US President Donald Trump withdrew from a 2015 nuclear accord with Iran and ordered the renewal of U.S. sanctions. Some sanctions took effect from Aug. 6 while those affecting the oil and banking sectors will start from Nov. 4. "We are bracing up for any eventuality we have to make a payment and we don't want to default on making payments," one ...
@alextdaugherty

One year ago, Hurricane Maria made landfall in Puerto Rico, leaving over 3 million people without power. Read the Miami Herald's Forgotten Island Series, published with support from the Rockefeller Foundation.

Read the series, here. And read some of the stories related to the Maria's effect on housing, healthcare, education, energy and the U.S. response below.

And here is the series in Spanish.
India's government is planning to ask state oil firms to lock in their crude futures purchase prices, a government source said on Thursday, anticipating a spike when US sanctions on Iran snap back again in November. The move would be another step to tackle a slide in the rupee, as oil prices are putting pressure on India, which imports some 80 per cent of its crude demand. Its currency has fallen sharply this year against the US dollar, amid a wider sell-off in emerging markets. "The futures should be locked in when crude price is down," said the source, who is ...
US President Donald Trump resumed his criticism of Opec, saying on Twitter that the cartel "must get prices down now!" Trump's fresh intervention in the oil market comes before a meeting of ministers from the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries and its allies in Algeria on Sunday. His complaint follows signals from Saudi Arabia that it was content to see prices climb above $80 a barrel.

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Business Standard has always strived hard to provide up-to-date information and commentary on developments that are of interest to you and have wider political and economic implications for the country and the world. Your encouragement and constant feedback on how to improve our offering have only made our resolve and commitment to these ideals stronger. Even during these difficult times arising out of Covid-19, we continue to remain committed to keeping you informed and updated with credible news, authoritative views and incisive commentary on topical issues of relevance.

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There is almost unanimous backing among European Union leaders for Britain to hold another referendum on Brexit, Maltese Prime Minister Joseph Muscat said on Thursday. We would like the almost impossible to happen, that the UK has another referendum, Muscat told BBC radio. I think most of us would welcome a situation where there is the possibility of the British people putting things into perspective, seeing what has been negotiated, seeing the options, and then deciding once and for all. Muscats stance was reiterated by Czech Prime ...

Dear Reader,

Business Standard has always strived hard to provide up-to-date information and commentary on developments that are of interest to you and have wider political and economic implications for the country and the world. Your encouragement and constant feedback on how to improve our offering have only made our resolve and commitment to these ideals stronger. Even during these difficult times arising out of Covid-19, we continue to remain committed to keeping you informed and updated with credible news, authoritative views and incisive commentary on topical issues of relevance.

We, however, have a request.



As we battle the economic impact of the pandemic, we need your support even more, so that we can continue to offer you more quality content. Our subscription model has seen an encouraging response from many of you, who have subscribed to our online content. More subscription to our online content can only help us achieve the goals of offering you even better and more relevant content. We believe in free, fair and credible journalism. Your support through more subscriptions can help us practise the journalism to which we are committed.



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The Trump administration persuaded Volkswagen AG to comply with sanctions on Iran and end almost all of its business in the country, according to a US official, a symbolically charged step in undercutting European Union efforts to keep the 2015 nuclear deal alive. The US and Volkswagen hammered out the final details on Tuesday after weeks of talks, according to US Ambassador to Germany Richard Grenell, who led discussions with the Wolfsburg-based company.

Dear Reader,

Business Standard has always strived hard to provide up-to-date information and commentary on developments that are of interest to you and have wider political and economic implications for the country and the world. Your encouragement and constant feedback on how to improve our offering have only made our resolve and commitment to these ideals stronger. Even during these difficult times arising out of Covid-19, we continue to remain committed to keeping you informed and updated with credible news, authoritative views and incisive commentary on topical issues of relevance.

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Former Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti on Thursday said that Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan's gesture of proposing a meeting between India and Pakistan's Foreign Ministers was "a welcome step."

Taking to her official Twitter account, Mufti said, "Accepting peace overtures of Pakistan's PM Imran Khan by agreeing to a meeting between India and Pakistan's Foreign Ministers is a welcome step. Even though it has come towards the fag end of NDA's tenure, better late than never."

In a letter addressed to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Khan proposed a meeting between India's External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj and her Pakistani counterpart Shah Mehmood Qureshi on the sidelines of the 73rd United Nations General Assembly.

"Building on mutual desire for peace between our two countries, I wish to propose a meeting between Foreign Minister, Makhdoom Shah Mahmood Qureshi and External Affairs Minister, Ms. Sushma Swaraj, before the informal meeting of the SAARC Foreign Ministers at the sidelines of the upcoming UN General Assembly in New York. They can explore the way forward, especially the holding of the SAARC Council of Ministers followed by the SAARC Summit in Islamabad. The summit will offer an opportunity for you to visit Pakistan and for us to restart the stalled dialogue process. I look forward to working with you for the benefit of the people of both our countries," Khan's letter read.

The Ministry of External Affairs, however, clarified that no agenda has been set for the proposed meeting.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Congress leader Manish Tewari on Thursday criticised the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) for accepting Pakistan's proposal for a foreign ministers meet.

The meeting between Pakistan Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi and External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj will take place on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA).

"From 2004-2014, the BJP kept screaming from every rooftop that they find in the country that terror and talks cannot go hand in hand. From 2014-2018, they misled the country that they are talking to Pakistan about terror," Tewari told ANI.

"On a day, when a BSF jawan has been mutilated in the most depraved manner possible, which defies every international standard operating procedure of engagement even between adversarial armies, you insensitively go and announce that you will have Biryani with the Foreign Minister of Pakistan in New York? Are these the people, who claimed that their chest is '56 inches'? Are these the people who used to give all those ballistic statements on security? The country should seriously introspect that the people they voted for in 2014 have totally mortgaged the security of this country," he added.

The body of the BSF Head Constable, Narendra Singh, who went missing after an unprovoked firing by Pakistan in Jammu's Ramgarh sector on September 18, was found with multiple bullet injuries on his torso, even on his neck, on Wednesday.

India on Thursday announced that it has accepted Pakistan's proposal for a meeting between Swaraj and Qureshi.

Ministry of External Affairs spokesperson Raveesh Kumar said the two leaders will meet at a mutually convenient date and time.

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Daman Congress President Ketan Patel has been booked and arrested under extortion charges informed VK Singh, Deputy Inspector General of Police, Daman and Diu.

As per the senior police official, Patel was extorting money from a Daman based company since 2017.

Sharing the details of the case, DIG Singh said, "An First Information Report (FIR) was registered on 11 September regarding the case. A famous company of Daman had registered an extortion case in which the main accused is Ketan Patel, Daman Congress President. As per details since June 2017, the accused has been extorting money from the complainant. After the complaint, we started looking for the accused and conducted several raids."

Informing about the arrest, the DIG further added, "On Wednesday, we received information that he is hiding somewhere in Mumbai. A team from here went there and conducted a raid to pick him up. He was brought to Daman and after preliminary investigation, he was put under arrest. We are interrogating about other members of the gang and the modus operandi."

Singh, further informed that there is another FIR registered against the leader for the allegedly misusing his contacts in the Ministry of Home Affairs.

"Another case is also registered, in which he had a vehicle on which he had placed a fake sticker of Home Ministry. This is a serious issue and we are trying to find out where it was printed and how the accused got hold of the same. Such sticker can be misused in many ways. We are investigating if the sticker has been used in any criminal or anti- activity", he added.

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Son of the Border Security Force (BSF) jawan Narender Singh who was brutally killed by Pakistani forces on Thursday, sought assistance from Home Minister Rajnath Singh and concerned authorities.

Speaking to ANI, Mohit Kumar Dahiya said that he was proud that his father laid down his life for the nation. "It is a proud moment for us; not everybody gets the honour of being shrouded in the tricolour but my father did," he said.

The body of the BSF Head Constable, who went missing after an unprovoked firing by Pakistan in Jammu's Ramgarh sector on September 18, was found with multiple bullet injuries on his torso, even on his neck, on Wednesday.

"We are proud now but what would happen after two or three days, when we don't get any help? My brother and I are unemployed. I want my family to be treated with dignity. My father was the sole breadwinner; my father laid down his life while serving the nation. I want the authorities to provide us with whatever help we need," he added.

He further requested the Home Minister to assure his family of help. "I ask Rajnath Singh ji, who was present in Jammu on Monday, to release a statement condemning the incident and assuring that we will get our due. Provide us all the help. Don't make us beg," he said.

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Ministry of External Affairs spokesperson Raveesh Kumar in a press briefing here on Thursday confirmed that External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj will raise the issue of Kartarpur corridor with her Pakistan counterpart Shah Mehmood Qureshi during their meeting on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA).

Kumar said, "Even now after so many years, we don't have any official communication from the Pakistani government that they're willing to consider this matter."

Kumar further said that the issue has been taken up with the Pakistani side several times in the past and present.

"You are aware that there is a 1974 Protocol between India and Pakistan on the visit to religious shrines. Kartarpur Saheb does not form part of this list. During the visit of the then Prime Minister Shri Vajpayee to Lahore in 1999, the issue was raised to consider a visa-free visit to the shrine but there was no response from the Pakistani side," he said.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on a request from Punjab CM Prakash Singh Badal announced on the eve of 400th anniversary of Prakash Utsave on 1st September 2004 at Amritsar the provision of the corridor to Kartarpur Saheb. Following this, on 4th September 2004, during the FS level talks, we requested that Kartarpur Saheb be included in the list under Protocol. This was not agreed to by the Pakistani side. In 2005, Pakistan agreed to allow the visit to three shrines with visas including to Kartarpur but did not include it in Protocol," he said.

Kumar said that in 2008, the then-EAM had also raised the issue with the then-Pakistan Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi but since then there has been no official response from the Pakistani side.

"It may be noted that all political parties have taken up this matter. Recently, as you are aware, Minister Harsimrat Kaur Badal ji also wrote to EAM on this matter to which EAM has replied that she will raise this issue with the Pakistani Government," he said.

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An FIR has been registered against Additional Commissioner of Delhi Police Ramesh Dahiya for allegedly raping a woman on the pretext of marriage.

Last month, the woman lodged a rape complaint at Sadar Bazar Police station against Dahiya, claiming that the cop had developed physical intimacy with her and promised to marry her when he was the Station House Officer at Sadar Bazar. They allegedly also have a son.

The victim also alleged that Dahiya molested her minor daughter, and kidnapped the son born of Dahiya.

Deputy Commissioner of Police (North) Nupur Prasad said, "A complaint has come to Sadar Bazar police station regarding rape and molestation against an ACP. A case has been registered under 376, 328, 506, 363 of IPC and the POCSO Act. The case has also been transferred to the crime branch.

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After creating hype with its trailer last week, the makers of 'Badhaai Ho' have now released the first song from the quirky comedy.

Tilted 'Badhaiyaan Tenu', the song is a package of groovy beats in which lead actor Ayushmann Khurrana aptly describes his plight and embarrassment owing to his parents' active sex life and the consequences of it.

Sung by Brijesh Shandailya, Romy and Jordan, the lyrics of the song have been penned by Vayu.

The trailer of Ayushmann- Sanya Malhotra starrer promised a fun ride with some rib-tickling comedy with the big news about the pregnancy of Ayushmann's mother, played by actor Neena Gupta.

'Dangal' star Sanya Malhotra will play the 'Vicky Donor' actor's love interest in the film. It also stars Surekha Sikri, Gajraj Rao and Sheeba Chaddha in pivotal roles.

The comedy, which is helmed by 'Tevar' director Amit Sharma, is slated to release on October 19.

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The Free Balochistan Movement (FBM) will organise a protest demonstration on September 24 during the 73rd United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) in New York City against Pakistani and Iranian terrorism in Balochistan.

On September 24, Monday, the UNGA will hold a high-level plenary meeting on global peace in honor of the centenary of the birth of Nelson Mandela, known as the Nelson Mandela Peace Summit. The plenary will adopt a political declaration negotiated by the member states.

The FBM, however, will protest outside the UN headquarters on the same day to expose Pakistani and Iranian state terrorism against Baloch people and the involvement of both fundamentalist Jihadist states in crimes against humanity in Balochistan.

FBM activists will also highlight the China-Pakistan nexus, wherein both states are involved in the exploitation of Balochistan's natural resources in the name of China Pakistan Economic Corridor.

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Women in Aviation International, India Chapter and Lockheed Martin India, in association with Airport Authority of India (AAI) today celebrated Girls in Aviation Day at Goa Airport. With the vision to encourage girls to take up STEM subjects and explore career opportunities in related industries, the initiative is aimed at showcasing opportunities in the aviation and aerospace sectors. This initiative also aligns with the Government of India's Skills India initiative.

As part of the program, Women in Aviation International (India Chapter) invited 60 students from various schools for a tour of Goa Airport. Visiting students were given an opportunity to explore, learn, and discover the various aspects of and roles in aviation and aerospace such as air traffic controller, airline dispatch, pilot, aviation maintenance technician, aeronautical engineer or aviation management. In addition, the girl students were given a tour of the ATC Tower, Airside, Terminal Building and AOCC and all their queries and questions were answered by the officials working in the respective departments.

Radha Bhatia, President, Women in Aviation International (India Chapter) shared," This is the third year that the WAI India Chapter is celebrating 'Girls in Aviation Day' and we are delighted to host the same at Goa. This day is celebrated for the young girls to encourage them to choose aviation as a viable career opportunity. World over India has the maximum number of female pilots but there are many other avenues within aviation that are still unknown. With this celebration, our aim is to see girls from the state of Goa explore exciting careers available to them as engineers, air traffic controllers and dozens of other jobs within aviation."

"We will continue our endeavour to introduce young girls to role models and educate them in a fun and supportive atmosphere. We are very fortunate to be able to partner with Lockheed Martin India and Airport Authority of India for this event. Their efforts in leading youth into STEM careers is truly commendable." added Bhatia.

Phil Shaw, Chief Executive, Lockheed Martin India Private Limited said, "Lockheed Martin is delighted to support the Girls in Aviation Day initiative and see it grow from strength to strength. We are passionate about encouraging young ladies to broaden their horizons and consider pursuing an in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) and consequently, careers in aerospace and technology. Lockheed Martin views as a crucial investment for both and society, and looks forward to helping develop the next generation of engineers, explorers and scientists in India."

Post the airport tour, the students were given a presentation about the industry and its intricacies. Also, an impromptu quiz competition added to the delight of the students who won small tokens as prizes. Students were given an opportunity to interact with Mridula Sinha, Governor of Goa and chief guest for the event, as well as Radha Bhatia, President Women in Aviation International (India Chapter), BCH Negi, Airport Director, Goa Airport, Phil Shaw, Chief Executive, Lockheed Martin India. Students also interacted with several other founding members from Women in Aviation International (India Chapter).

Since its inception in 2015, Women in Aviation International (India Chapter) has reached out to over 1500 young girls to encourage them to undertake STEM subjects and explore career opportunities in aviation-related industries.

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A shooter went on a rampage at a software office in Middleton town in Wisconsin, injuring three persons before the police fatally wounded him on Wednesday.

Middleton Police spokesperson Keith Cleasby said that the suspect was rushed to a local hospital, but succumbed to his injuries. The motive of the shooting is unknown, CNN reported.

Middleton Police Chief Charles Foulke said that the building, where the shooting took place, was cleared and secured. He confirmed that no other suspects were being sought while also informing that the injured have been rushed to a local hospital for medical treatment.

Around 50 police cars and officials from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) initially responded to the shooting.

Middleton Mayor Gurdip Brar expressed sadness over the incident, saying, "My heart goes out to the people involved in the shooting. You never would think this type of thing would happen in your city. Really, so sad that this happened here."

This is the second shooting incident reported on Wednesday.

A person was killed and four others injured in a shooting incident at a magistrate's office building in Pennsylvania, officials said. Authorities said that one person was reportedly killed in the attack. However, it is unclear whether a shooter was among those shot.

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After a day of hiatus, petrol price witnessed a 6 paise per litre hike in three metropolitan cities - Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata on Thursday. The price was increased by 7 paise per litre in Chennai.

After the revision, the petrol price has been increased to Rs.82.22 per litre in Delhi and, Rs. 84.70 per litre in Kolkata. In Chennai, petrol is being retailed at Rs 85.48 per litre, while in Mumbai it touched a new height of Rs.89.60 per litre.

However, the rates of diesel remained unchanged in all the four cities today.

The fuel price has been witnessing a steep rise since the past few weeks. Earlier, Union Petroleum and Natural Gas Minister Dharmendra Pradhan had blamed international factors for the hike in the prices of petroleum products.

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India on Thursday announced that it has accepted Pakistan's proposal for a meeting between Pakistan Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi and External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA).

However, the government clarified that the meeting between the two ministers does not imply resumption of dialogue or talks with Pakistan.

Ministry of External Affairs spokesperson Raveesh Kumar said the two leaders will meet at a mutually convenient date and time.

"I can confirm that on the request of the Pakistani side, a meeting between EAM and Pakistani Foreign Minister will take place on the sidelines of UNGA at a mutually convenient date and time," said Kumar. "This is just a meeting, not talks or resumption of dialogue," he added.

This comes after Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan wrote a letter to his Indian counterpart Narendra Modi in which he called for the resumption of the comprehensive bilateral dialogue between the two countries.

In the letter, Khan had proposed a meeting between Swaraj and Qureshi, on the sidelines of the UNGA.

The foreign ministers of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) countries will meet on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA), as per sources.

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Union Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad has said that India wishes to help Afghanistan with the Knowledge Network (NKN) programme, an initiative that will allow educational institutes in the war-torn country to connect using high-speed internet.

During a civic reception organised for Afghanistan President Ashraf Ghani by a think tank, India Foundation, the Union Minister told Ghani, "We have got a Knowledge Network (NKN). We have connected 1668 universities and institutes in India on high-speed internet. I wish to offer NKN in universities of your country too."

He further said that some of the Indian programmes such as e-hospitals, e-scholarship, digital literacy initiative can be extended to neighbouring country Afghanistan.

During his one-day visit to India, Ghani and Prime Minister Narendra Modi reviewed the progress of the multi-faceted India-Afghanistan strategic partnership.

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Vice President M. Venkaiah Naidu on Thursday hailed the contribution of the Indian diaspora in Romania, saying they are playing a key role in promoting Indian values in the country.

Addressing a group of the Indian community here, Vice President Naidu said, "Each one of you has become a part of Romania's unique fabric and its progress. There is a strong interest in Romania about Indian culture. All of you are playing important role in promoting Indian values."

The Vice President added that the Indian diaspora is acting as a bridge between the two countries to facilitate people-to-people ties.

He stated, "You have become a bridge between 2 countries and our people. The way of life, tradition, food, Ayurveda and yoga are playing a valuable contribution to our people-to-people ties between India and Romania."

Stressing on the bilateral relations, Vice President Naidu said that the ties have been warm, cordial and multi-faceted and that the common values of democracy, rule of law, freedom and economic complementarities make the two countries as natural partners.

Underlining the importance of his visit to the European country, the Vice President said, "This visit is a milestone due to the 70 years of the establishment of diplomatic ties between India and Romania and it also overlaps the centenary year of Romania, which is being celebrated with fervour."

Vice President Naidu further informed the community of the reforms taken by the Indian government in the last four years to give a new purpose and clarity of vision for inclusive development and setting new standards of governance in the country.

He elucidated, "We are working towards becoming a five trillion dollar economy by 2025. India has been ranked third in Economic Forum list of most trusted governments. India has climbed 42 places in ease of doing business rankings last year. The digitalisation of economy and taxation reforms like Goods and Services Tax (GST), which is a transformational revolutionary taxation system we have adopted. There were some hiccups initially, but GST is now doing wonders. Government's revenue is increasing and it is being used for spending on development and welfare of the people."

Vice President Naidu underscored that the establishment of business companies by India and Romania and their investment and employment opportunities are contributing to socio-economic progress between the two nations.

Delving into the key measures taken by the government to improve the diaspora outreach, the Vice President said, "We have taken steps to enhance your role in connecting and developing your ties with us. We have taken key measures to eliminate barriers of your connect with India so that our government are connected to you at all times. The world's engagements with India is at a new level. The entire is keen on India's growth story and happenings in the country. We are a diverse country and people, irrespective of caste or religion are living together harmoniously."

He added that the Indian community are not only cultural ambassadors but also playing a key role in influencing the policies of the government.

Vice President Naidu pledged to the diaspora to follow the rules and regulations of one's country, but not to forget the cultural ethos. He said that Prime Minister Narendra Modi has initiated several programmes such as Clean India, Skill India, Start-up India, demonetisation and GST to change the mindset of the people.

Vice President Naidu went on to say that if the current growth rate is maintained, then a New India, that is free from hunger, corruption, fear and poverty would be realised in the next five to ten years.

After the address, Vice President Naidu then emplaned for India after completing a week-long visit to Serbia, Malta and Romania, in an effort to strengthen bilateral cooperation with these countries. He is scheduled to reach New Delhi on Friday morning.

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North Korean leader Kim Jong-un and South Korean President Moon Jae-in on Thursday undertook a joint excursion to Mount Paektu, a volcanic mountain located on China-North Korea border.

The two leaders left Pyongyang's Sunan International Airport after 7 am for Samjiyon airport, the location of the mountain, Yonhap News Agency reported.

President Moon and Kim are set to drive up to the Mount Paektu's peak if weather conditions are favourable, officials said. The two Korean leaders are also slated to reach Chonji, the mountain's well-known crater.

President Moon and Kim are scheduled to return to Pyongyang later in the day, following which the former will return to South Korea.

Earlier on Wednesday, North and South Korea signed a joint military agreement and a joint statement to heighten peace and denuclearisation talks. Additionally, the two sides agreed to take "additional step" to achieve the process of denuclearisation.

President Moon and Kim also proclaimed the end of the state of war, a South Korean presidential spokesperson confirmed.

As a part of the agreement, the two Koreas agreed to cease large-scale artillery exercises and military flights near the demilitarized zone to prevent incidents from November 1.

On the other, Kim agreed to permanently dismantle a key nuclear facility in Yongbyon in return for corresponding steps from the US. The North Korean leader added that he would visit South Korea in the near future.

On Tuesday, President Moon arrived in Pyongyang, which was the first visit by a South Korean head of state to attend the third bilateral meeting with Kim.

The South Korean president is scheduled to visit the United States next week and meet President Donald Trump.

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Macedonia has officially selected Iscelitel (Secret Ingredient) as its entry for the 'foreign language film' category at the 91st Oscars.

Directed by Gjorce Stavreski, the story revolves around a series of dramatic events triggered by a therapeutic cannabis cake, reported The Hollywood Reporter.

The film mixes drama and comedy perfectly and it shows an underpaid train mechanic giving his father a cake made of stolen marijuana to relieve and calm his cancer pain. However, he is soon cornered by criminals making it hard for him to escape as they are searching for their drugs and the nosy neighbours who want a recipe for the secret healing cake.

'Secret Ingredient' is Macedonia's 15th entry in the 'foreign language film' category in the Oscar race since 1994.

Milcho Manchevski's 'Before the Rain' was the first submission, and the only one to have earned an Academy Award nomination.

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Ministry of External Affairs on Thursday informed that no agenda has been set for the meeting between External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj and Pakistan Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi which will take place on the sidelines of United Nations General Assembly (UNGA).

"There is nothing much to read into this meeting at this hour. We have not finalised the agenda of this meeting," MEA spokesperson Raveesh Kumar said while addressing reporters here.

Kumar further commenting on the alleged political crisis looming over Maldives said, "We are following upcoming presidential election process closely. We hope the election process in the Maldives will happen in free, fair and credible manner."

Kumar also took the occasion to confirm that Pakistan has not issued any official statement in regard with opening the Kartarpur corridor and said, "EAM will therefore raise this issue in her meeting with the Pak Foreign Minister on sidelines of UNGA."

He further commented on the extradition of the British middleman in the AgustaWestland chopper scandal, Christian Michel, and saying, "We haven't received any official intimation from UAE government about this case. There are possibilities that there could be internal developments within the system, but we react only when we're officially intimated by the government of the day.

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The school principal, accused of raping a class 5 student in the institution's premises, has rebutted the allegations levelled against him.

"I have not done anything and medical examination will establish the fact," he told ANI.

The principal of the school in Patna's Phulwari Sharif town, and a clerk were arrested on the charges of repeatedly raping the minor girl for a period of over nine months, during which she also got pregnant.

Patna's Senior Superintendent of Police (SSP) Manu Maharaaj informed that the two accused have been charged under Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) and relevant sections of Criminal Procedure Code (CrPc) Act.

The SSP further said that they will ensure a speedy trial in the matter.

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A Mumbai-based model-turned-television actress has accused a 25-year-old man of raping her on the pretext of marriage in Alwar's Neemrana on September 4.

The Alwar Police has filed a complaint against the accused under various sections of the Indian Penal Code, after they received a zero FIR from Oshiwara police station, Mumbai.

In her complaint, the woman has stated that she met the accused while they were studying in a Mumbai college in 2014 and re-established contact this year through a social media platform.

The friendship between the two deepened, following which they decided to meet up in August when the woman flew from Mumbai to Delhi.

The man introduced her to his family members and friends, after which they decided to travel to Neemrana in Rajasthan on September 04, where the crime allegedly took place.

Speaking to ANI, Incharge of Neemrana Police Station, Sanjay Punia informed, "The victim, who hails from Uttar Pradesh, had flown to New Delhi to meet the accused. The accused along with his friends hired a cab and reached Nimrana where they booked rooms for night stay. The accused then allegedly raped the victim in one of the rooms."

He further said that an investigation into the matter has been initiated and the police will soon record the statement of the victim.

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Vice President Venkaiah Naidu on Thursday said that the growing outreach of Romania and India's political leadership has created a fertile ground for the economic development.

Addressing the Prahova Chamber of Commerce and Industries in Romania, Naidu said, "The warm outreach of the two nations' political leadership has created a fertile ground to reap the fruits of economic development. I am confident that sustained efforts will take our bilateral relations to greater levels."

The Vice President further said that he had a series of productive meetings with Romanian President Klaus Iohannis, Prime Minister Viorica Dancila and President of Senate and Chamber of Deputies yesterday.

He also expressed his elation at Prahova Chamber's existing agreements with Indian business entities such as CII, FICCI, All India Association of Industries and Federation of Indian Export Organization.

"These chambers are working together to generate business on both sides. Today, ASSOCHAM has also signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) of cooperation with Prahova Chamber. This is a welcome development. I am told that many Indian companies are already doing business in Prahova county. Prahova county hosts the Oil and Gas University of Ploiesti which has signed a Memorandum of Understanding yesterday with Pandit Deendayal Petroleum University in Gujarat," Naidu added.

He stressed that Indian investment in Romania is increasing and that the government is fully committed and working towards supporting these trends.

"India is experiencing transformation on an unprecedented scale. India is the fastest growing, major economy in the world, with a growth rate of 8.2 per cent in the last quarter. India is moving towards a knowledge-based society, which aims to build a five trillion dollar economy by 2025. This will make us the third largest consumer market in the by 2025," the Vice President said.

Concluding his speech, he said, "I wish to warmly invite you all to partner us in India's exciting and transformative journey which is going to usher in a new era in India-Romania ties. I wish the Prahova Chamber of Commerce all the very best in all its future endeavours.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The Sindhi Congress held a protest in front of the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) accusing Pakistan of violating human rights in the Sindh province.

The protest held during the ongoing 39th session of UN Human Rights Council was joined by Baloch, Pashtun and activists from Pakistan occupied Kashmir.

The Secretary-General of Sindhi Congress Lakhu Luhana said that the Human Rights situation worsens every time with every issue.

While talking to ANI, Luhana said that several issues including extra-judicial killing, enforced abduction and killing of religious minorities continue unabated. He called the dam construction a matter of life and death.

"The Human Rights situation worsens every time. There are several issues including extra-judicial killing, enforced abduction and killing of religious minorities continue unabated. Now, CPEC continues and now they have decided to build dams without consultation of any legal, historical, international laws on River Indus, dams which have already destroyed Sindh," he said.

Referring to the statement by Pakistan Supreme Court Justice where he said that anyone who opposes the dam construction is traitor, Luhana said, "They want to eradicate the Sindhi people from the face of the earth."

The Sindhi Human Rights Activist, Naveed Basheer shed the light on the demands of the Sindhi community. He said that Sindhi are protesting against discrimination, mass hatred, water scarcity and enforced disappearance in the province.

"Sindhis fighting for their rights are called Indian agents and are arrested. Everyone arrested is sent to military torture cells. People are kept there and several died."

Calling it a phenomenon, Basheer said that the people are tortured in order to get them to confess to being Indian agents.

"Nationalist movement in Sindh is getting stronger. They want to pressurize Sindhis," he asserted.

Talking to ANI about the water crisis in the Sindh province, Basheer said, "They want to build dams in Sindh. All the dams are made on the Indus River. That region has an agricultural area as well as desert. Taking water from the river would cause a problem as we don't have water in downstream."

The protesters also raised slogans against the multi-billion dollar China Pakistan Economic Corridor and demanded the Pakistan government to stop constructing dams in Sindh, Balochistan and Gilgit Baltistan.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Optical retailer Vision Express recently opened their 167th store in India at Dwarka in New Delhi. The store launch, which marks the brand's 15th retail outlet in the city, was inaugurated on 17 September 2018 by the Vision Express Sales Director, Vishal Gaurav.

Spread over 450 sq. ft., the Dwarka store will house all the exclusive brands of Vision Express along with the latest range of sunglasses. The store offers a curated collection of styles to delight the fashion conscious consumers of Delhi NCR.

On the happy occasion, the CEO of Vision Express, Mr. Gurpreet Singh Bhatia, said "We are pleased to add another store in Delhi through which our service can touch more lives. This is our second new store in the city in the last few months and the beginning of a new phase for the region.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Congress spokesperson Randeep Surjewala on Thursday made a sharp attack at Prime Minister Narendra Modi on the brutal killing of a Border Security Force (BSF) jawan Narendra Singh by Pakistani forces.

Speaking to ANI, Surjewala said, "First Hemraj, and now Narendra Singh, has been tortured, tormented and murdered by Pakistan yesterday. Soldiers are the souls of our nation. Our nation's soul was tortured for nine hours yesterday. Where is Modi ji today? Does it not shock your conscience Modi ji? Where is your 56-inch chest?"

The body of the BSF Head Constable, who went missing after an unprovoked firing by Pakistan in Jammu's Ramgarh sector on September 18, was found with multiple bullet injuries on his torso, even on his neck, on Wednesday.

Last year, the Pakistani forces had killed two Indian soldiers and mutilated their bodies after carrying out unprovoked rocket and mortar firing on two forward posts on the Line of Control in the Krishna Ghati sector. The deceased soldiers were identified as junior commissioned officer (JCO) Naib Subedar Paramjit Singh with the Army's 22 Sikh Regiment and Head Constable Prem Sagar of the BSF's 200 Battalion.

Earlier in January 2013, the Pakistani troops had beheaded the head of Lance Naik Hemraj in the same sector.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
There is a need for testing food products in order to ensure that it complies with domestic standards as well as international standards for exports, a top government official said at an Interactive Session on Swachhata Action Plan 2018-19 held in Gurugram.

There is also a need for testing of all imported food products to ensure that they are of the requisite standard and food products not permitted for manufacture domestically. Apart from this, the level of contaminants, additives, and pesticide residues in food items is required to be monitored regularly, said Mr Ashok Kumar, Joint Secretary, Ministry of Food Processing and Industries at an Interactive Session on Swachhata Action Plan 2018-19- Hygiene in Food Processing Sector summit held in Gurugram.

In order to develop food safety and quality Assurance infrastructure in the country MOFPI has been extending financial assistance in setting up and up gradation food Testing Laboratories in the countries and setting up of HACCP/ISO standards to improve the overall quality of Food Safety and hygiene in the country, said Mr. Kumar.

HACCP, ISO Standards are necessary condition for improving the overall quality of food safety & hygiene in the country and also to increase India's share in global food trade. The main objective of the scheme is to motivate the food processing industry for adoption of food safety and quality assurance mechanisms such as TQM including ISO 9000, ISO 22000, HACCP, GMP, GHP, highlighted Mr.

Kumar.

This will enable adherence food processors to the stringent quality and hygiene norms thereby protecting the health of consumers, enhancing product acceptance by buyers, both domestic & overseas and keep Indian industry technologically abreast of international best practices, said Mr. Kumar.

Food processing industry is one of the largest industries in India. The country's food processing industry ranks fifth in terms of production, consumption and exports.

Strategic geographic location and proximity to food importing nations benefit India in terms of exporting processed foods. Hence Swacchata in food Processing Industry is a high scale consideration, noted Joint Secretary.

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A gunman who opened fire in a courthouse building in the US state of Pennsylvania and injured four people, has been shot dead by the police, authorities said.

The gunman entered the Masontown Borough Municipal Centre at around 2 p.m. on Wednesday and began firing, CNN quoted Lt. Steve Dowlin of the Pennsylvania State Police as saying to the media.

The four victims included a sergeant from the Masontown police department. Their injuries are not life-threatening, Dowlin said.

The suspect had a restraining order against him related to a choking case that was to be heard on Wednesday afternoon, Fayette County District Attorney Richard Bower said.

The suspect had been charged with strangulation, aggravated assault, extremist threats and simple assault as a result of a domestic matter several weeks ago, Bower added.

The motive behind the attack and the gunman's identity remains unknown.

Masontown is in southern Pennsylvania, about 55 miles from Pittsburgh and 20 miles north of Morgantown, West Virginia. The town has about 3,300 residents.

--IANS

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At least 30 passengers of a Jet Airways suffered ear and nose bleeding due to low cabin pressure early on Thursday during the aircraft's ascent here, following which the government ordered a safety audit plan for airlines, officials said.

Jet Airways later said it has derostered the cockpit crew concerned, who will remain off duties pending investigation.

Several passengers on the Mumbai-Jaipur flight 9W-697 -- carrying 166 persons and five crew on board -- complained of severe headache and pain in the ears after take-off around 6 a.m. from the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj International Airport (CSMIA),

The flight was forced to return soon after, a Jet Airways spokesperson said.

The ailing passengers were deboarded and rushed to the terminal building where they were administered first aid by doctors.

Airport sources said that the incident could be a result of the crew's alleged failure to activate what is called a 'bleed switch' before take-off, leading to disturbance in the cabin pressure and forcing use of oxygen masks.

Taking serious note of the incident, Civil Aviation Minister Suresh Prabhu ordered the Director-General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) to prepare a comprehensive safety audit plan involving safety parameters on all airlines, airports, flying training schools and MROs immediately.

He also directed that the safety audit must start forthwith and the report submitted to him within 30 days and corrective action taken immediately on deficiencies found during the audit, an official said.

The Ministry said that ordered investigation and filing of report on the matter immediately.

Furious passengers vented their ire via the social media and accused the airline of completely ignoring their plight.

"Panic situation due to technical fault in the flight. Flight returns to Mumbai after 45 minutes. All passengers are safe, including me," tweeted Darshak Hathi.

He claimed that after the take-off, the air-conditioning malfunctioned, after which the air pressure system too malfunctioned and oxygen masks dropped down.

Another passenger Amit Relan said that the flight was on the runway for 20 minutes without ventilation that led to suffocation, and "don't know if will make it".

Other passengers complained that they were forced to sit in the aircraft for long, with no breakfast and no information from the airline.

"We emergency-landed. Now what? Ground staff has no answers. Kya karein?" rued Prashant Sharma.

Other passengers like Melissa Tixeira and Gravina Pereira, besides many more onboard, posted short video clips on the harrowing experience.

--IANS

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Delhi Police on Thursday arrested six persons, including a domestic help, for assaulting, robbing and holding captive the wife and daughter of a former Chief Justice of the Delhi High Court here.

"The accused have been identified as Dinesh, Dheerender, Upender Rai, Ram Swaroop, Deepak and domestic help Sandeep. They were arrested from different areas of their native state Jharkhand," said Deputy Commissioner of Police Chinmoy Biswal.

The incident occurred on Monday night when their recently hired domestic help Sandeep called the other accused to the former Chief Justice Dalip Kapoor's residence in New Friends Colony.

The accused allegedly assaulted and held captive wife and daughter of the former Chief Justice of Delhi High Court and later escaped with jewellery and cash, Biswal said.

"Reeba Kapoor,78, wife of former Chief Justice of Delhi High Court Dalip Kapoor, in her statement to the police had said Sandeep, along with accomplices, assaulted her and her daughter Sheeba, 45. They then tied them with ropes and escaped with jewellery and cash worth lakhs of rupees," the officer added.

--IANS

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Activists from various upper caste organisations on Thursday protested against the amended SC/ST Act.

The protesters expressed their anger towards the Central government and staged protests in front of Bharatiya Janata Party and its ally Janata Dal-United headquarters here.

Hundreds of upper caste activists belonging to Akhil Bhartiya Bhumihar Brahmin Mahasabha, Bhumi Gsb Brahmin Adhikar Manch, Swarn Ekta Manch, Swarn Sena and Swarn Morcha and Arakhshan Nayay Andolan, took to streets and demanded the withdrawal of the amended SC/ST Act .

During the protest they shouted slogans against Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar.

Earlier in September, normal life was affected in the state due to a nationwide shutdown called by dozens of upper caste groups to protest against the amendment to the SC/ST Prevention of Atrocities Act restoring the provision for the immediate arrest of the accused on the basis of any complaint without any preliminary inquiry.

--IANS

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Two of the 16 Congress legislators in Goa flew abroad on Thursday amid the ongoing power game between the BJP and the Congress in the state.

Congress legislators Jennifer Monserrate and Filipe Neri Rodrigues, both among the party MLAs paraded before Governor Mridula Sinha this week, left for China and Europe respectively amid media reports quoting BJP leaders that several Congress MLAs were willing to switch over to the BJP.

The ruling party is in the process of finding an alternative to ailing Chief Minister Manohar Parrikar and is under pressure from alliance partners for a bigger share in power.

State Congress President Girish Chodankar, however, said: "Rodrigues and Monserrate have gone out of station with the knowledge of the party as per pre-scheduled programmes. They will be in Goa at 48-hour notice whenever the party needs them."

The Congress is the single largest party in the 40-member Goa Assembly with 16 MLAs, while the BJP with 14 MLAs is supported by three members each of Goa Forward Party and the Maharashtrawadi Gomantak Party, the lone Nationalist Congress Party legislator and three Independents.

What queers the pitch in the numbers game, however, is the health condition of three BJP MLAs -- Parrikar and Urban Development Minister Francis D'Souza who are being treated for cancer, and Power Minister Pandurang Madkaikar who is bed-ridden after suffering a brainstroke some months back.

--IANS

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India as well as other Asian countries are vulnerable to the risk of cyber threats from "Balkanisation" in cyber space, warned Russia-based global cybersecurity firm Kaspersky Lab on Thursday.

Presenting key cybersecurity issues, Kaspersky's top researchers and executives made the possible threat announcement to an audience of journalists from 11 countries across the region at the firm's 4th Asia Pacific (APAC) cybersecurity annual summit.

The threat is "due to fragmentation of the world wide web", they said at the four-day event, with the theme of "Balkanisation".

Stressing the need to be more cautious about the threat, they said the "security should not be in isolation" and highlighted the possible perils of de-globalisation of the Internet.

Emphasising that "Balkanisation" and the advent of protectionism being displayed by nations around the world, they said it will "benefit no one but the cybercriminals".

Echoing the warning of Kaspersky's CEO and founder Eugene Kaspersky, Managing Director of the firm's APAC region Stephan Neumeier said: "We can clearly see that the utopia of a borderless digital global village is coming to an end.

"With different countries building their local web fences, the initially free Internet is turning into divided and independent patches of online states, which may benefit individual countries to some extent, but will surely be an ace card for criminals aiming to unleash worldwide cyberthreats."

Demystifying the future of the Internet based on his 13 years' experience in analyzing malware and the current laws and trends that transform the cyber security landscape around the world, Kaspersky's Director of GReAT in APAC, Vitaly Kamluk said the "volume of new malware we detect daily has been increasing year-on-year in number, in sophistication, and in reach".

"The future of the Internet is fragile and, as nations scramble to beef up their defences, we're giving birth to 'Balkanisation'.

"However, fragmentation is not the armor we need to face the menace of the Internet of tomorrow. Remember, a divided world is easier to conquer. We need cooperation, collaboration, and mutual trust to effectively thwart these cybercriminals who acknowledge neither geopolitics nor borders," warned Kamluk.

He said that the Kaspersky's CEO noted in an article how countries like Brazil and Germany are considering, or may have already kicked off their independent sectors of the Internet which involve building parallel networks, isolated from the Internet, for highly confidential communication exchanges.

Aside from this, Kaspersky's researchers said, several countries are also crafting policies requiring global tech giants like Google and Facebook to shift their data centres to local locations to curb foreign spying and overseas data intrusions.

In addition to the important debate on the future of the Internet, Kaspersky's Korea-based senior security researcher, Seongsu Park, explained the sophisticated and infamous online adversary of APAC countries: the Lazarus group.

Park zeroed in on the operations of this notorious, Korean-speaking advanced persistent threat (APT) which has launched fake supply chain attacks in delivering malware to Windows and even "MacOS devices".

Suguru Ishimaru, security researcher in Kaspersky Global Research and Analysis Team, shared how the methods were used to analyse Android malware and said the recent activities of the mobile malware dubbed as "Roaming Mantis", a money-motivated attacker, was able to successfully infect Android smartphones in South Korea, Bangladesh, and Japan through DNS hijacking earlier this year.

(Rajnish Singh can be contacted at rajnish.s@ians.in)

--IANS

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The CBI on Thursday arrested four persons including an Assistant Director of the Social Welfare Department in Bihar in connection with its ongoing investigation into the shelter home rape case in Muzaffarpur of the state.

The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) said that the agency has arrested Rosy Rani, Assistant Director, and three others -- Santosh, Guddu and Vijay -- from Muzaffarpur and Sonepur of Bihar.

Rani, who was responsible for carrying out inspection at the shelter homes, is being investigated for abetment under the POCSO Act. "The girls shared their ordeal with Rani but she didn't take any action," the official said.

The other three are staffers of main accused Brajesh Thakur. The agency has also frozen 20 bank accounts of Thakur, he added.

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 that mentioned incidents of rapes of minor girls.

--IANS

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The Competition Commission of India (CCI) on Thursday said it has no objection to ArcelorMittal's and JSW Steel's proposed bids to acquire debt-ridden Essar Steel and Bhushan Power, respectively.

"CCI India finds no appreciable adverse effect on competition in respect of ArcelorMittal and Nippon Steel and Sumitomo Metal's proposed acquisition of Essar Steel," the fair trade regulator tweeted.

ArcelorMittal-led consortium including Nippon Steel and Sumitomo Metal has offered Rs 42,000 crore for Essar Steel, which is significantly higher than Rs 37,000 crore bid submitted by Numetal, a consortium led by Russia's VTB Bank.

The financial creditors claim on bankrupt Essar Steel, currently undergoing insolvency proceedings, is to the tune of Rs 50,000 crore. Third company in the race for Essar Steel is Vedanta Resources.

In another tweet, the regulator said, "CCI India finds no appreciable adverse effect on competition in respect of JSW Steel's proposed acquisition of Bhushan Power & Steel Limited."

Earlier last month, the CCI cleared Tata Steel for proposed acquisition of Bhushan Power saying it will not impact competition in the sector.

--IANS

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The centre is in the process of preparing a perspective plan for the chemicals and petrochemicals industry in order project the demand-supply scenario in the future, an official said on Thursday.

"We are in the process of preparing a perspective plan for the industry. It will concentrate on the demand-supply scenario in future and also outline the gaps in the sector," Department of Chemicals and Petrochemicals Secretary Raghavendra Rao said here.

The growth potential of the chemicals and petrochemicals sector is the maximum in the east as the per capita consumption in the eastern states is less as compared to that of western region, he said at an industry meet ahead of 'India Chem 2018' to be held in Mumbai during October 4-6.

He said the contribution of the industry to India's manufacturing sector could touch 25 per cent in a decade or so from about 10 per cent now.

--IANS

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After a long delay and cost spillover, China is set to start commercial operations of the world's first next-generation AP1000 nuclear reactor.

The No. 1 reactor at the Sanmen power plant, designed by Westinghouse Electric Company, is expected to be ready for commercial operations on Friday after completing a 168-hour test-run, Shanghai-listed China National Nuclear Power Company said in a statement to the stock exchange on Thursday.

According to the South China Morning Post, it did not say when the unit, in east China's Zhejiang province, will officially enter commercial power production.

China's drive for cleaner energy has been a bright spot for a nuclear industry beset with cost overruns and stricter regulations in the wake of Japan's 2011 Fukushima disaster.

The Sanmen start-up may help advance the country's ambitions to almost double nuclear capacity by 2020 as the approval of new reactors is seen as being dependent on the successful start of so-called third-generation reactors.

"It's a landmark event for China's nuclear power industry," Snowy Yao, a Hong Kong-based analyst at China Securities International Finance Holding Company, was quoted as saying by the Post.

"It's safe to say China is now one of the leaders in the world's civil nuclear power industry."

(Gaurav Sharma can be contacted at gaurav.s@ians.in)

--IANS

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The war of words between the BJP and the Congress over the Rafale deal and bank NPAs got uglier on Thursday with Finance Minister Arun Jaitley calling Congress President a "clown prince" and in turn getting dubbed a "court jester" by the grand old party.

Countering Congress' relentless attack on the Narendra Modi government over the France-made jets and bad loans of banks, Jaitley took to the social media to accuse Gandhi of "concocting lies" on the twin issues and blamed him for "polluting" public discourse.

"His strategy is simple, concoct a lie and repeat it as many times as possible," said Jaitley dismissing as false Gandhi's claims of Prime Minister Modi waiving off Rs 250,000 crore of 15 industrialists.

"The world's largest democracy must seriously introspect whether public discourse should be allowed to be polluted by the falsehood of a 'clown prince'," he wrote.

Jaitley said the amount referred to by Gandhi was lent by the banks prior to 2014 during the UPA regime, which then "kept rolling over the loans to conceal them (as) loans despite the default".

"The truth is that your government allowed the banks to be looted," alleged Jaitley.

The Congress lost no time in getting back at the Finance Minister.

"Jaitley is desperate in his attempt to stay relevant as a court jester to Modi Sultanate. Abuse, diversion and deception are the desperate tools of a 'Lying -Jait-LIE'," Congress spokesperson Randeep Singh Surjewala said in a statement.

The Congress demanded Jaitley to coherently answer politically-relevant issues instead of "hiding behind the cloak of expletives for the opposition".

It posed 10 questions to Jaitley on the "Rafale scam" that include as to why Hindustan Aeronautics Ltd (HAL) was "superseded" for Rs 30,000-crore contract to benefit cronies, why transfer of technology was "sacrificed" and why "national security was compromised" by reducing the number of aircraft from 126 to 36.

"Since your answers to the 10 questions are zero, cuss words are your only refuge," said the party which has been gunning for the Modi government over the Rafale deal which according to the party has caused "loss" to the exchequer and "endangered" national security.

Besides approaching Comptroller and Auditor General of India (CAG) Rajiv Mehrishi for a special and forensic audit and demanding a Joint Parliamentary Committee (JPC) probe into the deal, the Congress has also sought the resignation of Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman over the issue.

Alleging Modi government's "collusion with bank looters", the Congress also posed five questions on the issue of surging bank NPAs (non-performing assets).

Countering Jaitley assertions of NPAs being a UPA legacy, the Congress pointed to Finance Ministry's July 2018 reply in Parliament claiming "NPA's stood at Rs 2,51,054 crore when demitted power and they have increased to a whopping Rs 9,61,962 crore by March 2018. NPA's now stand at Rs 12,00,000 crore".

Wondering if Jaitley lied in his blogpost or in Parliament, the Congress dared him to publicly state the amount of loans given in the last 52 months of the Modi government along with details as to how much of those loans have become NPAs.

"How much worth of loans were ever-greened and restructured. How much worth of loans became defaults and wilful defaults. How many wilful defaulters escaped from India and with how much amount of money during 52 months of Modi government?" the party said.

"How many economic offenders, defaulters and looters did you bring back to India and jailed?" the party said yet again attacking Jaitley over his "meeting" with now fugitive liquor baron Vijay Mallya.

--IANS

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Congress President Rahul Gandhi on Thursday took a dig at Prime Minister Narendra Modi, saying that his party will not make false promises like putting Rs 15 lakh in every citizen's bank account.

"You have listened to these false promises... I want to ask you -- did you receive Rs 15 lakh in your bank accounts? Yes or No? We will not make these false promises like Modi did," Gandhi said at a party rally here.

"But whatever the strength of the Congress, it will be used for the uplift of the people of Rajasthan," he said.

Rajasthan Assembly elections are due by the year-end.

Gandhi was referring to Modi's promise ahead of the 2014 general elections to bring back black money stashed abroad and deposit Rs 15 lakh each in the bank accounts of people out of that money.

The Congress leader also criticised the Centre for its flagship schemes like 'Make in India', claiming that "everything in India is made by China".

"We want to hear that the products in India are also made in Dungarpur...," Gandhi said.

Comparing the employment rates in China and India, Gandhi blamed the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance government for the conditions in this country. "Only 450 jobs are given in India, whereas China creates 50,000 jobs a day."

Referring to Modi's 'Mann ki Baat' monthly radio address, Gandhi said: "The Prime Minister only talks of his 'Mann ki Baat'... he is not interested in our 'Mann ki Baat'."

He said that the strength of India lies in listening to the views of each and every citizen, irrespective of their religion, caste or status in society.

--IANS

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The Congress on Thursday demanded Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman's resignation accusing her of "misleading" the country after former HAL chief T.S. Raju refuted her claim that the defence undertaking did not have the capability to build Rafale fighter jets.

Leading the charge, Congress President Rahul Gandhi earlier in the day tweeted: "The RM (Rafale Minister) tasked with defending corruption has been caught lying again.

"The former HAL chief, T.S. Raju, has nailed her lie that Hindustan Aeronautics Limited didn't have the capability to build the Rafale. Her position is untenable and she must resign."

Subsequently former Union Minister Manish Tewari citing Raju's assertions made to a national daily, reiterated the demand for the Defence Minister's resignation.

He said the Modi government's "web of lies" surrounding the controversial defence deal has been demolished.

Besides asserting that the Bengaluru-headquartered Hindustan Aeronautics Limited's (HAL) capability of building the French fighter jets, Raju also claimed that Dassault and the state-owned aerospace and a defence company had signed a mutual work-share contract and given it to the government.

"Raju, who retired on September 1, has absolutely demolished the entire case that the Modi government has tried to build in the last few months.

"He has not only asserted HAL's capability but also revealed about the signing of a mutual work-share contract with Dassault Aviation (the French aircraft manufacturer of the fighter jet at the centre of the controversy).

"In the light of clear and unequivocal statement of facts by the former head of HAL, we demand the resignation of the Defence Minister on the charge of misleading the people of the country," Tewari told the media here.

He also endorsed Raju's call for the Modi government to make public the files concerning the deal.

Targeting both Prime Minister Modi and Sitharaman, Tewari reiterated the Congress' demand for a Joint Parliamentary Probe into the deal announced in 2015.

The fresh attack against the Modi government came a day after the Congress on Wednesday approached Comptroller and Auditor General of India (CAG) Rajiv Mehrishi seeking a special and forensic audit into the deal which has caused "loss" to the exchequer and "endangered" national security.

--IANS

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An Assistant Commissioner of Police (ACP) in Delhi has been booked on the charge of rape on the complaint of a 38-year-old woman, police said on Thursday.

While the woman complained on Tuesday that she was sexually assaulted last year, the case was registered on Wednesday.

Accused Ramesh Dahiya is presently posted as ACP (Security). When the crime was committed, he was posted as SHO of Sadar Bazar police station.

Deputy Commissioner of Police (North) Nupur Prasad said that the case has been transferred to the Crime Branch.

"The woman said that she got acquainted with the accused as he was known to her husband," the officer said.

--IANS

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Partnership on developing world-class skill centres is on the cards as High Commissioner of Australia to India Harinder Sidhu called on Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal here on Thursday.

During the meeting, Kejriwal and his Deputy Manish Sisodia informed Sidhu about the World Class Skill Centres in Delhi and the excellent results achieved in the last three years.

"She was also told about the understanding with the Singapore Government on the first Skill Centre. The Chief Minister also told her that Delhi was soon going to open 25 more skill centres," Kejriwal's office said.

The CM's office informed that Kejriwal and Sisodia sought an understanding with Australia for the upcoming skill centres to which the "High Commissioner answered in affirmative" and asked for a detailed proposal to be sent to be taken further.

The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) leaders also discussed "cooperation and understanding over Incubation centres" to which the High Commissioner said that similar partnership already exists between institutions in India and Australia and expressed willingness over understanding with Delhi's incubation centre.

Another major area which came up for discussion was Research and Development (R&D).

"R&D is one of the most important aspects and we should look at partnership opportunities in the area also," Kejriwal said.

After the meeting, Kejriwal said: "Look forward to collaboration with Australia especially in the fields of skilling, incubation centres and R&D".

"The High Commissioner briefed the Chief Minister and the Deputy Chief Minister on the 10 key sectors on which India and Australia could collaborate and partner with education being the flagship sector," Kejriwal's office said.

--IANS

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Dozens of protesters took to the streets of central Seoul to voice their opposition to the third inter-Korean summit held in Pyongyang that concluded on Thursday.

South Korean President Moon-Jae in was returning to Seoul Thursday following the summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, in which both countries furthered the rapprochement process and pledged to take measures to reduce military tensions along their border, reports Efe news.

While many, including US President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, have welcomed the results of the summit, conservative and nationalist elements in South Korea have viewed the peace process with North Korea with scepticism.

Around 100 mostly conservative demonstrators shouted anti-North Korean slogans and held aloft signs reading "No to SK-NK summit that benefit(s) Kim Jong Un".

Moon and Kim signed a joint declaration on Wednesday, in which Pyongyang pledged to close a nuclear development site, and a deal was penned to reduce tensions along the border.

The summit is the latest development in the rapprochement process between the two neighbours, who have technically been at war for over 65 years.

Trump and Pompeo welcomed the result of the inter-Korean summit, and said that they looked forward to resuming denuclearization talks with Pyongyang.

Moon is scheduled to travel to the US for a meeting with Trump on September 24, before the start of the UN General Assembly.

--IANS

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A United Arab Emirates (UAE) court has favoured extradition of British national, Christian Michel James, one of the key middlemen wanted by the Indian investigative agencies in connection with its probe into Rs 3,600 crore AgustaWestland VVIP chopper deal case.

A translation of the Dubai court's four-page order, from arabic, indicates that it had rejected all the contentions raised by Michel's counsel opposing the extradition plea by the Indian authorities.

However, the investigating agencies have not yet received any communication from the UAE authorities on the court order.

There has been considerable confusion in the media about the actually order of the Dubai court, with some reports stating the order had supported extradition while others said the opposite.

The ruling was given by a bench presided over by Judge Eissa Mohamed Sherif with member judges Rashid Mohamed Al Sumairi and Ashraf Mohamed Al Shawadfi presiding on September 2.

According to wording of the court order, Michel's counsel had argued that he may be "exposed to inhuman treatment" and that the case against the accused was "political" in nature.

The translated order of the court, however, said that "the extradition request had no objectives -- political or racial or religious, but rather the purpose of which is to prosecute him for a criminal offense." and, therefore... "do not prevent the Court from surrendering as long as it appears from the file of restitution that the extradition request is not related to reasons other than the crime committed by the wanted person."

Michel had also urged the court to hear a security officer named Walid, who had allegedly witnessed the meeting between him and the Indian authorities -- in order to prove that the case was 'political'. However, the court observed that request was "invalid as the name of the person did not fully show his rank or his work".

His counsel had also argued, according to the court order, against extradition because the accused would be subjected to "inhumane treatment" and in the absence of "any guarantees" to him. Rejecting this contention, the court said that the accused could be handed over to the "competent authorities of the Republic of India."

Michel's counsel had also opposed the extradition request on the grounds that he stood exonerated by British courts and Swiss tribunals. The court, however, pointed out that "the verdict of the Italian courts in the case number 357/13 based on criminal FIR 2246/12 registered against him and other two Giuseppe Orsi and Spaglini Bruno, found him guilty."

According to Indian government officials, the UAE government had approached the court late last month asking if Michel, a British national, could be extradited to a third country -- India.

In January this year, the Enforcement Directorate (ED) had lodged a request with the UAE authorities for extraditing Michel. Both the ED and the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) had filed chargesheets in bribery cases in Indian courts and non-bailable warrants had been issued against the accused.

Last year, a red corner notice (RCN) was issued against Michel by the Interpol on a request by the CBI. RCNs were also issued against two Italians involved in the case -- Carlo Gerosa and Guido Haschke.

According to Indian investigative agencies, Michel had received at least Rs 235 crore for ensuring that the chopper contract went to AgustaWestland.

On January 1, 2014, India cancelled the contract with Finmeccanica's British subsidiary AgustaWestland for supplying 12 AW-101 VVIP choppers to the IAF, over alleged breach of contractual obligations and on charges of paying kickbacks amounting to Rs 423 crore.

The CBI, which registered an FIR in the case on March 12, 2013, had alleged several persons had received kickbacks from AgustaWestland to help it win the contract.

--IANS

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Film: "Equalizer 2"; Director: Antoine Fuqua; Cast: Denzel Washington, Pedro Pascal, Ashton Sanders, Bill Pullman, Melissa Leo, Jonathan Scarfe, Orson Bean; Rating: ***

This vigilante film is a sequel to the 2014 released The Equalizer which was originally based on the 1980s Television serial with the same name.

It is about a retired CIA agent Robert McCall, who plays a lone ranger delivering justice to the abused, the defenceless and the oppressed.

The film opens with an elegant scene on-board a speeding train of the Turkish Railways some 400 km away from Istanbul.

Robert McCall dressed as an Arab swiftly disposes of thugs who kidnap a young girl, just to harass her mother. The incident feels so insignificant yet, serves as a reminder that McCall was created to offer help to random people on everything."

Back in Boston, McCall works as a driver for a company called Lyft which is akin to Uber and he seems sincerely dedicated to those in need of help.

But when his only friend and former CIA handler, Susan Plummer is murdered, he stumbles upon that she is done with for investigating the case of multiple murders of upscale officials at their homes, how he solves the mystery and delivers her justice forms the crux of the tale.

The story is simple and the main plot is juxtaposed with other subplots that in turn dive into an abstract universe.

The plot takes a bit long to get into gear. There is a break in the narrative, perhaps because it seeks a reflexive vision, and that together with the naturalness in the staging, results in a frankly strange and evasive film.

The dreamlike detail in which the director uses to teleport McCall to events such as a crime scene or projects him in a place of his past or the type of mental musing he uses to psychoanalyse the supposed murders, serve as good examples.

Also, one of the main peeves is that the story never shows you that McCall is in real trouble. The whole conspiracy he faces feels very light and casual, as if it does not matter.

The climax that takes place in an evacuated town hit by a storm, offers an interesting and unusual setting but there are moments that could be termed as preposterous.

But the camera undertakes an emotional journey from the locales to the fine nuances of the characters, which produces an excellent symbiosis between the character and environment. It makes us witness the lone fighter in a rigid and focussed manner.

And before we complain about Denzel's performance as McCall, he tells us: "There are two kinds of pain. Pain that hurts and pain that alters."

And you witness the change with an open heart. Reuniting with Director Antoine Fuqua for the fourth time, after 'Training Day', 'The Equalizer' and 'The Magnificent Seven', Denzel plays the unusual action hero with elegance and intelligence.

He is aptly supported by Melissa Leo as Susan Plummer, Pedro Pascal as Dave his one-time operational partner, Aston Sanders as the local kid Miles who McCall saves from getting sucked into the underworld and Orson Bean as the Holocaust Survivor. They all add flavour and gravitas to the narrative.

Overall, despite keeping you hooked for nearly two hours, the film lacks the excitement of the cat and mouse chase between the bad men and the vigilante.

--IANS

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Fan manufacturers on Thursday said they have sought a further reduction in goods and services tax (GST) to bring it to 12 per cent from 18 per cent. They also urged the Centre not to club the product with luxury items.

"The Association has submitted representations to the GST Council to reduce the GST rate on electric fans to 12 per cent from the declared rate of 18 per cent.

"Initially, the rate was 28 per cent. Fans are a basic necessity in a tropical climate like India for people from all strata of the society, living in urban and rural areas and should not be clubbed with air conditioner in the luxury category," Indian Fan Manufacturers Association's Vice Chairman Atul Jain said here on the sidelines of its 18th Annual General Meeting.

Manufacturers had been advised by the GST Council that their representation has been forwarded to the Fitment Committee for their views and reconsideration, he said.

Acknowledging that the government was addressing the teething problems in the roll-out of the indirect tax, the fan makers said difficulties still existed in the filing of online returns.

However, the industry remained bullish on registering growth in sales as well as production.

During 2017-18, the organised manufacturers achieved a consolidated production of 54.44 million fans, registering a growth of 4.19 per cent over the previous year while unorganised players produced about 20 million fans.

"In domestic production, our members had clocked 52.30 million fans, registering a growth of 4.38 per cent. About two million fans were exported last year," Jain said.

He said the overall production in both organised and unorganised is expected to post about 5 per cent growth this year.

With the rising disposable incomes and evolving consumer aspirations along with rural electrification programme, they are expecting a significant growth in the sales of premium, high-end fans. While ceiling fans account for a major chunk of domestic demand, the last couple of years have witnessed a steady increase in the demand for table, pedestal and wall fans.

"The industry, during this fiscal, is expected to grow about 5-6 per cent over last year. Sales were higher in the first quarter, over the corresponding period last year," he said.

Ceiling fans still account for 70 per cent, Jain said. The demand for energy efficient fans is on the rise and the industry too is focusing on this aspect.

Leading fan manufacturers have been constantly working with the Bureau of Energy Efficiency (BEE), Energy Efficiency Services Ltd (EESL) and Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS) to develop a sustainable road map for manufacturing better energy efficient fans, he said.

The Star Labelling programme is expected to not only give an opportunity to all end users to make informed choices at the time of purchase, but also result in savings of approximately 30,000 MW of electricity over the next few years, as fans account for nearly 30 per cent of the total power consumption, fan makers added.

--IANS

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With India and Australia both slated to hold general elections next year, the process of signing a bilateral free-trade agreement could see a slowdown, a senior Australian envoy said here on Thursday.

However, Australian Deputy High Commissioner Rod Hilton declared that his country would continue to give priority to concluding the FTA with India.

"Trade agreements are complicated. Both India and Australia have elections next year so there might be a slowdown in the process (of signing FTA)," Hilton said at an interactive session organised by the Bengal Chamber of Commerce and Industry.

In India, the Lok Sabha polls slated to be held in the first half of next year. Australia is also scheduled to hold its next federal election in 2019.

Hilton said active negotiations to improve trade ties between New Delhi and Canberra would continue despite the probable slowdown in inking the FTA.

He also underscored that FTA was not the sole route to intensify trade relationships, and a lot of other avenues were open between the two countries to "deepen and diversify" bilateral relationships through negotiations.

Negotiation for the pact, christened Comprehensive Economic Cooperation Agreement (CECA) between India and Australia, was started in 2011.

India's exports to Australia reached $4 billion in 2017-18, while the import figure was close to $14 billion.

Hilton said efforts were on diversity the product basket with regards to Australia's exports to India which was too much dependent on coal and natural gas.

Turning to West Bengal, the diplomat said the Australian government has identified it as one of the top ten states of particular interest to Canberra.

There was much room to enhance trade between Bengal and Australia, with the former now receiving only one per cent of the around USD 10.3 billion pumped into India by the Oceanian nation.

--IANS

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The number of deaths and attacks attributed to terrorism significantly decreased in 2017, according to a new report by the US State Department.

"The total number of terrorist attacks worldwide in 2017 decreased by 23 per cent" compared to 2016, while "the total deaths due to terrorist attacks decreased by 27 per cent", CNN quoted the Department's Coordinator for Counterterrorism, Nathan Sales, as saying on Wednesday.

Sales said the "overall trend was largely due to dramatically fewer attacks and deaths in Iraq", where a US-led military coalition has helped eject the Islamic State (IS) terror group from much of the country.

However, despite these battlefield successes, US officials have warned that the IS was still well positioned to make a comeback in the region.

The report also warned that terror groups were beginning to become more "dispersed and clandestine" and have made themselves "less susceptible to conventional military action".

While Sales said that some 100 countries experienced terrorism in 2017, the vast majority of those attacks took place in a relatively small number of nations.

"Fifty-nine per cent of all attacks took place in five countries. Those are Afghanistan, India, Iraq, Pakistan and the Philippines," Sales said while adding that "Seventy per cent of all deaths due to terrorist attacks took place" in Afghanistan, Iraq, Nigeria, Somalia and Syria.

The annual congressionally-mandated report once again labels Iran as the lead state sponsor of terrorism, with Sales saying that Iranian-backed Lebanese Hezbollah has been linked to attacks and weapons stockpiles in Europe and South America, reports CNN.

The report also said that in 2017 Pakistan had not done enough to curb terrorism, saying that Islamabad "did not restrict the Afghan Taliban" and other affiliated terrorist groups like the Haqqani Network "from operating in Pakistan-based safe havens and threatening US and Afghan forces in Afghanistan".

It said the Pakistani government also "failed to significantly limit" two other terrorist organisations, Lashkar e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammad, "from openly raising money, recruiting and training in Pakistan".

--IANS

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A Delhi High Court bench on Thursday recused from hearing the plea seeking a stay on a state government's circular that directs the city schools to collect Aadhaar and voter ID details of students and their family members.

The bench of Chief Justice Rajendra Menon and Justice V. Kameswar Rao transferred the matter to another bench and listed it for further hearing on September 26.

The public interest litigation has been filed by the Government School Teachers Association through advocate Kamlesh Kumar Mishra.

The association has challenged the Directorate of Education's September 11 circular. In the circular, the government has asked all the schools to collect Aadhaar and voter ID details of the students and their family members.

The association has requested the court to issue a direction that data (if any) already collected by the schools in Delhi be destroyed immediately.

The plea said that such exercise would be an unnecessary burden on the students, teachers and the entire machinery and the collection and subsequent digitisation of the documents would cause a huge financial burden on the government exchequer.

--IANS

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The Himachal Pradesh High Court on Thursday decided to declassify the documents lying with it relating to the CBI and state police probes into the gang rape and murder of a schoolgirl and the subsequent custodial death of an accused.

Disposing of a Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) petition, a division bench led by acting Chief Justice Sanjay Karol said: "Eventually, we hold that the affidavits be made available to all parties."

"Equally it shall be open for the applicant to take all steps, as may be required, in law for unearthing the truth in relation to both the incidents of crime, should the need so arise after perusing the same."

The judges said the charge sheet filed by the CBI in both cases is not before them.

"Why should truth be not made known to all? Obviously investigation carried out, at least with respect to one FIR, by one of the agencies was misdirected. Is it required to be examined as to whether subsequent investigation can be faulted for the very same reason or not is, for the prosecutor and the trial court to examine?"

"But it would not mean that we lack any jurisdiction or authority, which, if required, we would not hesitate to do so," said the 45-page judgment, which was reserved on September 14.

"We clarify that the affidavits were taken on record only for ensuring that the officers not only fully cooperate but also disclose all such facts, which were well within their knowledge, to the investigating agency. After all, one of the accused had died in police custody," they said.

The high court ordered to open the sealed envelope(s) having affidavits in the presence of the counsel for the parties on September 24.

Both the gang rape and murder cases and that pertaining to the subsequent custodial death of an accused were monitored by the high court. Both cases are now being investigated by the CBI.

The police said the schoolgirl was offered a lift in a vehicle by the accused on July 4 last year while she was returning home from school in Kotkhai town, 56 km from here.

On the way, the accused and his associates raped and murdered her in a nearby forest. Her naked body with injury marks was found two days later.

However, there was a new twist in the case after an accused was murdered by another in the police lock-up on July 19.

After the CBI took over, nine policemen, including Inspector General of Police Z.H. Zaidi and former Shimla Superintendent of Police D.W. Negi, were arrested on the charge of custodial death. They are in judicial custody.

Zaidi was head of the Special Investigation Team (SIT) set up to probe the case before the CBI took over.

--IANS

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Breaking the ice in ties, External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj will meet her Pakistani counterpart Shah Mehmood Qureshi on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly (UNGA) session that begins later this month -- the first such high-level interaction between the neighbours after three years.

"I can confirm that on the request from the Pakistani side a meeting between the two foreign ministers will take place on the sidelines of the UNGA at a mutually convenient date and time.

"We have just agreed to the meeting. The Permanent Missions of both India and Pakistan will together work out the details. Till then, what will be discussed in the meeting, we will have to wait till the meeting takes place," External Affairs Ministry (MEA) spokesperson Raveesh Kumar told the weekly media briefing here.

Replying to questions, Kumar suggested that the coming meeting was not resumption of the dialogue process.

This follows a letter written by Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan to Prime Minister Narendra Modi seeking resumption of dialogue and suggesting a meeting between the two foreign ministers on the sidelines of the UNGA, and a letter written by Qureshi to Sushma Swaraj.

When pressed further, Kumar said this is just a meeting and there is nothing much to be read into this at this stage.

Kumar also revealed that India has confirmed that it would attend a meeting of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (Saarc) foreign ministers.

"The existing policy on the Saarc process will continue. I don't think there is any change in it," said the MEA spokesperson.

External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj had met the then Pakistan's Advisor on Foreign Affairs Sartaj Aziz in Islamabad in 2015 and two decided to resume the comprehensive dialogue process.

This was followed by an unscheduled visit of Prime Minister Narendra Modi to Lahore on the Christmas Day. But the bilateral ties took a severe beating after the terror attack on the Pathankot airbase on January 2, 2016.

Asked whether the foreign ministers meeting in New York is the beginning of a dialogue process, he merely repeated that they requested for a meeting and we have not discussed details.

On reports of brutality on a Border Security Force (BSF) jawan who was killed in firing from the Pakistani side, he said it was a barbaric incident and the BSF has written a strong communication to its counterparts in Pakistan.

"It is a serious issue and we will take it up Pakistan."

--IANS

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Asserting that terror and talks cannot go together, India on Thursday rejected new Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan's proposal for holding a Saarc Summit in Islamabad. India, however, accepted Islamabad's request for a meeting of the foreign ministers on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly session later this month.

Responding to a question during a media briefing here, External Affairs Ministry spokesperson Raveesh Kumar said India's stand the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (Saarc) "has been very clear and consistent".

"Time and again we have said that the atmosphere in the region is not conducive for this Summit," Kumar said.

"This is not only India which has felt in this manner," he stated.

"There are a number of other countries in the region that have accordingly felt that under the shadow of terrorism and cross-border terrorism, it is difficult to hold the Saarc Summit which is to be hosted by Pakistan."

Earlier, in his briefing, Kumar announced that Sushma Swaraj and Qureshi will meet at the UN, the first foreign minister-level meeting between the two South Asian nuclear neighbours in nearly three years.

India will also participate in an informal meeting of Saarc foreign ministers on the sidelines of the UNGA session.

In a letter to Prime Minister Narendra Modi that was received on September 17, Imran Khan sought to hold the 20th Saarc Summit in Islamabad.

"The Summit will offer an opportunity for you to visit Pakistan and for us to re-start the stalled dialogue process," he wrote.

Following a cross-border terror attack from Pakistan at an army base in Jammu and Kashmir in September 2016 that killed 17 Indian soldiers, the Saarc Summit that was to be held in Islamabad later that year had to be cancelled as other member states of the bloc joined India in boycotting it.

--IANS

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An Indian-origin doctor has pleaded guilty to a healthcare fraud in the US, the Justice Department said.

Jayam Krishna Iyer, 66, from Clearwater, Florida, pleaded guilty to one count of the healthcare fraud earlier this week and faces a maximum penalty of 10 years in federal prison, or 20 years, if her offence involves serious bodily injury, the Department said in a press release.

As part of the plea on Tuesday, Iyer agreed to surrender both her Drug Enforcement Administration registration number that she used to prescribe controlled substances, her Florida medical licence, and to a permanent exclusion from the Medicare and Medicaid programmes.

According to officials, Iyer owned and operated Creative Medical Centre in Clearwater that functioned as a pain management clinic.

She billed Medicare and Medicaid for office visits, tests and services provided to patients using her National Provider Identification number, as well as wrote prescriptions for controlled substances.

Beginning as early as July 2011 and continuing through December 2017, Iyer executed and carried out a scheme to defraud Medicare by billing for face-to-face office visits with Medicare beneficiaries, when, in fact, certain patients did not go to her centre and were not examined by her on the claimed dates.

Instead, family members of the patients went to her with notes requesting her to issue and provide prescriptions.

Officials said that she thereby violated a law requiring doctors to perform an in-person office visit and examination of each patient before issuing controlled substance prescriptions.

Iyer also falsified her electronic medical records to make it appear that the patient was present in her office. She submitted at least $51,500 in these types of false and fraudulent Medicare claims, the release said.

The case was investigated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Office of Inspector General at the Department of Health and Human Services, the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Florida Office of Attorney General's Medicaid Fraud Control Unit.

It is being prosecuted by Assistant US Attorney Kelley Howard-Allen.

--IANS

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Infosys is partnering with the US-based Trinity College to create educational programmes that prepare liberal arts students and its techies for the digital workplace, said the software major on Thursday.

"The multi-year collaboration will establish a Trinity-Infosys applied learning initiative to provide learning opportunities for Trinity College students, engage faculty and alumni, and offer training for our employees," said the city-based IT firm in a statement from Hartford in Connecticut.

The partners will also co-develop content, building on Trinity's strengths in the liberal arts while developing capacities in technology and innovation that draw on digital content and real-world case studies from Infosys.

"Our partnership with the liberal arts college will leverage Trinity's space at Hartford, showcasing technology and blending personalized learning with our virtual learning platform -- Infosys LEX," noted the statement.

The collaboration will also explore learning for Infoscions and Trinity's alumni, a summer bridge programme for liberal arts students of Trinity to acquire skills in innovation and jointly design and pilot digital technologies for liberal arts

Infosys president Ravi Kumar said building a hybrid talent pool, which draws on liberal arts foundations and promotes cognitive diversity, would add value to the technology consulting industry and address an important skills gap for the 21st century.

"We need people with human-centered skills who can approach problems in new ways, not just solve them and contribute to out-of-the-box thinking in a digital age," said Kumar.

Trinity president Joanee Berger-Sweeney said the tie-up with Infosys would serve as a model for leveraging liberal arts in creating the future of work.

"We will provide our students with unique advantages, complementing their liberal arts with technological skills and applied learning to position them in the digital workplace,a Sweeney added.

--IANS

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The insurance coverage for Ayurveda treatment is expected to give further boost to the ancient Indian form of medicine, says a leading Ayurvedic specialist.

Saji D'Souza believes that the insurance coverage coupled with the other initiatives of the Central and state governments would help encourage Ayurveda.

The Ministry of AYUSH has published the guidelines for insurance coverage to Ayurvedic treatment and settlement of claims on the basis of benchmark rates for various interventions.

Following this, the Insurance Regulatory Development Authority (IRDA) issued clarifications to general and health insurance companies and Third Party Administrators (TPAs) to provide coverage to Ayurveda and other systems of medicines under AYUSH.

Since then, insurance companies like ICICI, Cholamandalam, Apollo Munich, HDFC, Star Health and all public-owned service providers have started embracing the change while extending coverage for Ayurveda and other alternative systems through both reimbursement claims and cashless claims, said D'Souza, Chairman & Managing Director, KSAC Hospital on Thursday.

He told reporters here Ayurveda has emerged into a strong means of healthcare globally and is playing a key role in improving the healthcare indices worldwide.

Ministry of AYUSH was instrumental in signing the agreement with WHO in 2016 to promote research and bring recognition to Ayurveda besides making efforts to sign the pacts with countries like Singapore and Mauritius. AYUSH organized the first-ever international conference and exhibition in Dubai in 2017 to globalize Ayurvedic research, education and practice to unravel the horizons of integrated medicine.

"Both union and state government agencies are encouraging government employees to avail Ayurvedic treatments at government empanelled Ayurvedic hospitals and such medical expenses are reimbursed like any other modern scientific systems of medical treatments through ESHS and CGHS schemes," he said.

Given the stringent standards and investment barriers, there are not more than 50 Ayurvedic hospitals accredited by National Accreditation Board for Hospitals and Healthcare Providers (NABH) in the country.

KSAC Hospitals at Bangalore is NABH-accredited besides an empanelled hospital with Karnataka government. Its newly opened 50-bedded facility in Hyderabad is at the pre-accreditation entry-level stage with NABH, besides being empanelled with governments of Telangana and Andhra Pradesh.

--IANS

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A Japanese cryptocurrency operator revealed on Thursday that hackers had accessed its systems last week and stole about 6 billion yen ($60 million).

Tech Bureau Corp said in a statement that the unauthorised breach from abroad took place for two hours on September 14 but it was only detected on Monday and the damage was not discovered until Tuesday, reports Efe news.

67 per cent of what was stolen were assets of the firm's clients, while the rest were funds of a cryptocurrency exchange company integrated with Tech Bureau Corp, Zaif.

The theft affected three cryptocurrencies, but 89 per cent was in (BTC) and the rest in the MonaCoin (MONA) and Bitcoin Cash (BCH), in amounts not yet accurately calculated, since the investigation is still underway.

The company said that the server is being thoroughly reviewed to prevent further damage, adding that it has requested financial assistance from one of its subsidiaries to cover the damage caused.

The damage suffered by this firm is less than a similar incident in January, when the Japanese operator Coincheck said its system was hacked and some $534 million were stolen.

These incidents forced the Japanese authorities to tighten controls on the cryptocurrency markets.
Karnataka Chief Minister H.D. Kumaraswamy would meet the public at his home-office in the city centre only once in a month, instead every week, an official said on Thursday.

"Doctors have advised him to meet people once a month," an official from the Chief Minister's Office (CMO) told IANS here.

Kumaraswamy, 58, who underwent a heart surgery in 2017, was meeting at least 3,000 people every week during the 'Janata Darshan' (public interface) to listen to their grievances.

"The Chief Minister was developing fever and respiratory issues after the meetings which last over 12 hours and the doctors have advised him to hold them once a month," the official added.

Besides the Janata Darshan, started on September 1, at least 150 people are lining up outside the Chief Minister's home-office every morning since he took office on May 23, seeking his intervention on various issues.

In July, about 250 unemployed youth from across the state were offered jobs after a special team from the CMO tied up with various companies to provide employment on Kumaraswamy's directions.

Several poor people also come to the Chief Minister seeking help with housing, pension and other benefits from the state.

--IANS

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Six people died and at least 20 houses were buried on Thursday after a landslide in Philippines' Cebu province.

The authorities recovered the bodies, including that of a four-year old, while carrying out search and rescue work in the area, police spokesperson Roderick Gonzales was cited as saying by Efe news.

While the exact number of people trapped was unknown, between 20 and 25 houses were completely buried by the landslide, caused by recent heavy rainfall.

Gonzales said that rescue operations were at a crucial phase because there were still chances of finding people alive. Around 300 families were evacuated from the area.

Typhoon Mangkhut lashed the northern part of the country on Saturday, bringing heavy rainfall and strong winds, causing landslides in several places -- especially the mountainous Cordillera region -- where 72 of the total 88 typhoon-related deaths occurred, according to authorities.

--IANS

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The Malaysian Election Commission on Thursday set October 13 as the date for a key by-election that will be contested by the country's former Deputy Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim for his return to active

He will contest the by-election for the Port Dickson parliamentary seat, vacated by Danyal Balagopal Abdullah, a lawmaker from Anwar's People's Justice Party who had resigned in August to make way for his party chief's return to Parliament, Efe news reported.

Danyal had won the seat in the parliamentary elections in May with a big margin of 36,225 votes, garnering almost double the number of votes than his closest rival.

In the May elections, an opposition-coalition led by current Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad had toppled the ruling alliance of former Premier Najib Razak, which had governed the country since independence in 1957.

Anwar could not contest the elections as he was serving a sentence on charges of sodomy at the time. He was freed later following a royal pardon after his party came to power.

The 93-year-old Mahathir, who had served as the Prime Minister of Malaysia between 1981 and 2003, had said he will hand over the presidency to Anwar within two years.

The by-election date was announced hours after Najib was charged with 21 counts of money laundering in the 1MDB embezzlement scandal.

--IANS

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Malaysian prosecutors on Thursday charged former Prime Minister Najib Razak on 25 counts, including charges related to money laundering and abuse of power, in the corruption scandal related to the state-owned investment fund 1 Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB).

Najib, who was arrested on Wednesday, pleaded not guilty to the four charges of corruption and 21 charges of money laundering, reports Efe news.

The 65-year-old leader was the Prime Minister of Malaysia from 2009 until May this year, during which he established and headed the 1MDB fund.

Najib was released on bail on July 4 after he was formally charged with criminal breach of trust and abuse of power in connection with funds from SRC International, a former subsidiary of IMDB.

The former leader has been accused of diverting around $681 million to his private accounts from 1MDB.

Najib has denied the allegations, saying the money was a donation from a Saudi Arabian prince, and he was cleared by Malaysian authorities while in power.

The case was reopened in May after Najib lost the election in a stunning defeat to Mahathir Mohamad who has banned him and his wife Rosmah Mansor from leaving the country.

Six other nations, including the US, Switzerland and Singapore, have opened judicial investigations into the 1MDB scandal.

--IANS

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Filmmaker Anurag Kashyap on Thursday expressed angst after three scenes -- two involving Sikhs smoking -- were deleted from his latest movie "Manmarziyaan", apparently without his knowledge.

"Hereby all problems of Punjab are solved and Sikh youth have been saved. Happy to be back in La la land again. Next time you are threatened by a film please call Kishore Lulla directly... Eros knows how to solve matters in minutes," Kashyap tweeted in response to a post featuring a censor copy mentioning the deleted scenes.

Dated September 18, the censor copy mentioned the three scenes that were "voluntary deletions made by the applicant after the certification". The scenes include one featuring Abhishek Bachchan's Robbie smoking and one with Taapsee Pannu's Rumi smoking. The third scene had the two of them enter a Gurudwara as bride and groom while Rumi thought about her past with Vicky Kaushal's character.

Members of the Sikh community in Ambala had reportedly expressed displeasure over the smoking scene. According to media reports, a petition was also filed in the Jammu and Kashmir High Court on Tuesday by a Sikh organisation objecting to a scene in which Abhishek's character smokes a cigarette after taking off his turban.

Kashyap's angry reaction also mentioned the contact number of Kishore Lulla, Chairman, Eros International, the presenter of "Manmarziyaan", but Twitter took down the tweet later.

Filmmaker Vikramaditya Motwane, the movie's co-producer, tweeted: "The one time the censor board showed maturity and our spineless studios shat and ran. What a terrible precedent to set."

"Manmarziyaan", an Amritsar-set drama, is produced by Phantom Films and Aanand L. Rai's Colour Yellow Productions.

An official statement from Eros International said: "Colour Yellow is the creative producer on 'Manmarziyaan'. We have the deepest respect for all communities and it is our intention to maintain neutrality and never intentionally hurt or disrespect any religion or community.

"We have the greatest respect for the law of the land and follow and implement all guidance of the censor board which is the supreme authority for film content in the country."

The controversy has made Taapsee question the logic behind the objections to the smoking scenes, as well as a scene in which her character -- a bride -- thinks about her past as she enters a Gurudwara for her wedding.

"I am sure this edit will assure that no Sikh will ever smoke and no woman will ever think about anyone else while getting married in a Gurudwara. This surely will make Waheguru proud and assures that my religion is the purest, most righteous and peaceful! Proud," tweeted Taapsee.

On Wednesday, Kashyap had addressed the issue raised by some Sikhs.

"'Manmarziyaan' is a story of three individuals and not their religion. I am sorry if anyone feels genuinely hurt, but I would also request that please don't make this unnecessary political because it's not.

"I have always put out things the way they are without an agenda. Technology does not allow us to cut a scene and it affects the storytelling. So, I definitely cannot do that now. To those whose hurt is genuine, I offer a genuine apology, that wasn't my intention.

"And for those who are doing it for attention, I am glad you have got the attention," he had tweeted.

--IANS

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British Prime Minister Theresa May's proposed new economic partnership with the EU "will not work", the head of the European Council has said.

Donald Tusk said the plans risked undermining the EU's single market, BBC reported on Thursday.

He was speaking at the end of an EU summit in Salzburg where leaders of the 27 remaining member states discussed Brexit.

May said her proposals were the "only serious credible" way to avoid a hard border in Northern Ireland.

She said she had held "frank" talks with Tusk, adding: "Yes, concerns have been raised and I want to know what those concerns are."

There was "a lot of hard work to be done", she said, but added that the UK was also making preparations in case no deal could be reached.

May reiterated that she would not accept the EU's "backstop" plan to avoid a hard border in Northern Ireland, and said the UK would shortly be bringing forward its own proposals.

The UK is due to leave the EU on March 29, 2019, and both sides are trying to reach a deal in time.

There is still no agreement on some issues, including how to avoid new checks on the Northern Ireland-Republic of Ireland border.

At a press conference, Tusk said there were some "positive elements" in the UK's blueprint for future relations with the EU, which was agreed by ministers at Chequers in July.

But, he added: "The suggested framework for economic cooperation will not work."

Tusk added that October would be the "moment of truth" for reaching a deal, and that "if the conditions are there" an additional summit would be held in November to "formalise" it.

The EU leaders had been discussing the UK's plans, which were presented to them by May on Wednesday evening.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel said "substantial progress" was needed on the UK's withdrawal agreement by the next European Council meeting in October, with "still a large piece of work" on the separate issue of future trade relations with the UK.

The 27 remaining EU members were "united that, in the matter of the single market, there can be no compromises," she said.

French President Emmanuel Macron said Brexit had been "pushed by certain people who predicted easy solutions".

He added: "Brexit has shown us one thing - and I fully respect British sovereignty in saying this - it has demonstrated that those who said you can easily do without Europe, that it will all go very well, that it is easy and there will be lots of money, are liars.

"This is all the more true because they left the next day, so they didn't have to manage it."

--IANS

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South Korean President Moon Jae-in and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un embarked on a historic trip on Thursday to the summit of Mount Paekdu, a sacred mountain on the country's border with China, at the end of their three-day bilateral summit.

Kim and Moon, together with the respective first ladies Ri Sol-ju and Kim Jong-sook, took off in their presidential jets from Sunan airport in Pyongyang and landed about an hour later at the Samjiyon airfield the mountain, reports Efe news.

A vehicle then took the two leaders to the foothills of the mountain, an inactive volcano, and they are expected to reach Chonji, the famous crater considered the greatest national symbol in both the North and South of the Korean peninsula.

The highest mountain on the peninsula, Mount Paekdu is believed to be the place where the Korean people were born, according to traditional folklore.

Very few South Koreans have managed to climb the crater from the South Slope, located in North Korea, due to the prolonged conflicts between the two countries.

In the framework of the three bilateral summits that have been held this year, Moon, who was born in the South and is the son of North Korean refugees fleeing the war, had expressed to Kim his wish to visit Mount Paekdu from the North Korean side.

Thursday's visit shows again the good harmony between the two leaders as well as the growing rapprochement between the two countries, as on Wednesday Kim and Moon signed a joint declaration to strengthen bilateral ties and a treaty to reduce military tensions.

The statement on Wednesday also reflects that North Korea is willing to dismantle more nuclear facilities in exchange for the US promise to implement what was agreed at the summit in Singapore in June, mainly in terms of guaranteeing the survival of the North Korean regime.

One of the main objectives of this summit was to get North Korea and the US to resume their stagnant dialogue on denuclearization which was initiated in June.

Moon's mediation and Kim's commitment at the summit have so far satisfied Washington, as US President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo welcomed the result of the inter-Korean meeting.

Moon on Thursday will fly directly back to Seoul from Samjiyon and will meet Trump on September 24 in the US to discuss the summit in detail.

--IANS

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North Korean leader Kim Jong-un is ready to accelerate denuclearization in exchange for security guarantees from Washington and wants to hold a second summit with US President Donald Trump at an early date, South Korean President Moon Jae-in said on Thursday.

"Chairman Kim expressed his wish to finish complete denuclearization at an early date and focus on economic development," Moon said of his meeting with Kim in Pyongyang.

Moon, who returned to South Korea after a three-day bilateral summit with Kim, said Pyongyang also wanted US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to visit again, Yonhap news agency reported.

Pompeo said earlier he was ready to restart negotiations, stalled since the first Trump-Kim summit in June. He said the aim was denuclearising North Korea "by 2021".

Moon said his government seeks to declare a formal end to the Korean War before the year ends and that he will bring up the issue when he meets Trump in New York next week.

The two Koreas technically remain at war as the 1950-53 Korean War ended only with an armistice, not a peace treaty.

Moon said he also had an additional message from Kim for Trump. "Among what we discussed, there are items that we did not include in the joint declaration," he said, referring to his joint declaration with Kim issued on Wednesday in Pyongyang.

"I plan to deliver such messages in detail to the US side if I visit the country and hold a summit again with President Trump in the future," he added.

Moon will visit New York next week to attend the UN General Assembly. His office said he and Trump will hold a bilateral summit on Monday.

The items discussed with Kim but not laid out in the Pyongyang declaration included an agreement to hold talks between the countries' Parliaments, Moon said.

The South Korean leader's trip to Pyongyang was aimed at breaking a deadlock in denuclearization talks between the US and North Korea that came after Trump called off a North Korea trip by Pompeo.

Moon said he and Kim dedicated nearly the entire first day of his three-day trip to discuss ways to completely denuclearize the Korean Peninsula and restart the stalled North Korea-US dialogue.

"However, specific ways to denuclearize and corresponding measures basically are an issue that need to be discussed between the North and the US," he said, apparently renewing his call for an early resumption of the US-North Korea talks.

In his summit with Moon, Kim agreed to permanently dismantle his country's only missile engine test facility and launch pads in Dongchang-ri in the presence of international experts.

Kim also offered to dismantle the country's key nuclear facility in Yongbyon, provided the US takes corresponding measures.

Moon stressed the need for the US to take reciprocal measures for Pyongyang's denuclearization steps. He has already invited Kim to visit Seoul before the year ends. The North Korean has accepted the invitation.

--IANS

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Projecting India as an attractive investment destination and its booming economy, expected to touch $5 trillion mark by 2025, Vice President M. Venkaiah Naidu on Thursday invited Romanian investors to be part of the growth story.

Addressing the India-Romania Business Forum Meeting here, Naidu called for further scaling up of the already robust annual bilateral trade that has risen to $810 million in 2017-18.

"Our annual bilateral trade has risen to $810 million in 2017-18, a 40 per cent increase over last year ($575 million). This is a huge development in our bilateral economic relations. We need to sustain this momentum to scale it up even higher," he said.

He said that India's recent economic transformation presents fresh opportunities in multiple sectors for Romanian investors and added that with a growth rate over 8 per cent, India is one of the fastest growing large economies in the world.

India has managed a positive swing in stock market indices, foreign exchange reserves, and public investment in infrastructure and welfare measures. Government investment in infrastructure development has increased exponentially and it is already visible in the improved railways, roads, airports and shipping infrastructure in our country, he said.

Naidu said India is the most attractive FDI destinations in the world with one of the best regulated financial systems. He also said that with demonetisation and successful implementation of the GST, India has emerged as a transparent, modern and unified market.

He also enumerated the benefits derived from the Narendra Modi-led government's flagship programmes such as the Jan Dhan Yojana and asserted that there exists greater ease of doing business and harmonsied tax rates.

"Our economies have significant complementarities which can be leveraged for mutually beneficial cooperation.

"I had meaningful discussions with Prime Minister Madam Dancila, on taking forward India-Romania multifaceted relations, with special emphasis on our economic ties. We are both convinced that there is immense potential to take the relationship to a higher level," he added.

--IANS

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The NIA will produce Nashidul Hamzafar, an alleged Islamic State (IS) sympathiser who was deported from Afghanistan to India on Tuesday, in a Kerala court later on Thursday, an official said.

The National Investigation Agency (NIA) will seek Hamzafar's custody for questioning, the official said.

Hamzafar was arrested by the NIA after his deportation and produced in a Delhi court on Wednesday.

According to the NIA official, the alleged IS sympathiser had travelled to Afghanistan along with 21 others to join the terror organisation.

He was arrested by the counter-terror probe agency after he landed at the Indira Gandhi International Airport here from Kabul after his deportation.

In 2017, Hamzafar a resident of Wayanad district in Kerala, was detained by the Afghan security agencies for illegally entering the country to join his associates in the IS.

This is the first extradition of an alleged IS sympathiser from Afghanistan.

A Special Court here where Hamzafar was produced on Wednesday granted the NIA a two-day transit remand.

Hamzafar will be produced before the Special NIA Court in Ernakulam in Kerala that had earlier issued a non-bailable warrant against him.

According to the NIA, the case relates to a criminal conspiracy hatched by the accused from Kasaragod district, along with his associates, since Ramadan 2015 with the intention of joining and furthering the objectives of the Islamic State terror group.

At least 14 accused persons from Kasaragod had left India for their work places in the Middle East between mid-May and early-July in 2016 before travelling to Afghanistan, where they joined the IS.

Hamzafar was part of the conspiracy as he interacted with the other absconding accused like Abdul Rashid Abdulla and Ashfak Majeed through encrypted social media messages.

Abdulla and Majeed were known to Hamzafar through his college mates Shihas, Firoz Khan and Bestin Vincent, a NIA official said requesting anonymity.

According to the NIA this is a big breakthrough in the case as earlier the agency had only second hand information about the Kerala youth group which had gone to Afghanistan to join the IS.

This arrest would reveal much more about who all were involved in radicalising the youths in the state. The NIA said that Hamzafar was in touch with the leaders of the group.

The official said that Hamzafar had left India on October 3, 2017 and travelled to Muscat, Oman before going to Iran and then reached Kabul where he was detained.

--IANS

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The National Law University-Delhi (NLU-D) on Thursday withdrew an advertisement it had issued a day earlier inviting applications for the position of Research Fellows for the 'Office of Chief Justice of India', apparently after it received complaints of discriminatory eligibility criteria.

"The notification (posted on September 18) for walk-in-interview for Research Fellows stands withdrawn. The walk-in interview to be held on September 24, 2018 are also cancelled till further notification," the Registrar of the university said in a notice uploaded on its website.

In the original advertisement, the university had scheduled interviews for September 24 for two Research Fellows to work on contractual basis with the Chief Justice of India under the guidance of Ravindra Maithani, Secretary General of the Supreme Court of India.

The advertisement was withdrawn, apparently after the university was approached by a few law graduates who complained of a "prejudiced approach" in the eligibility criteria which asked for law graduates with only a "five-year LL.B. programme" and barring those who have done the three-year law course after graduation.

The complainant, in his letter to the university, also took exception to preferring of "candidates with an LL.M./SPILS/BCL or a higher qualification from a prestigious university outside India" -- as was mentioned in the advertisement -- arguing that the term "prestigious" was without a definite meaning.

"Also questionable is the point that the NLU Delhi is giving more weightage to an applicant having a higher degree from outside India, thereby clearly establishing a fact that whatsoever the level of degree being obtained in India, even from Institutes of Excellence/NAAC 'A' accredited, it would always have low or no value... as compared to those obtained from foreign institutions," read the complainant's letter.

University's Registrar or the Deputy Registrar could not be contacted for comment and the Vice Chancellor was out "on tour", his office said.

There are two modes of getting a law degree in India. One is by doing a three-year LL.B. course after graduation and another is a five-year degree programme which one is eligible to enrol in after class 12.

All NLUs admit students under five-year law programmes. Delhi University, Banaras Hindu University, Aligarh Muslim University, and Osmania University are a few of those institutions which allow for a three-year law degree programme.

(Vishal Narayan can be contacted at vishal.n@ians.in)

-- IANS

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Returning Arun Jaitley's jibe of calling a "clown prince", the on Thursday dubbed the Finance Minister a "court jester" who is "desperate to stay relevant".

Amid the relentless trading of charges between the and Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) over the Rafale deal, on the day took to to accuse of "concocting lies" on the deal for the made fighter jets and the bad loans of banks.

He said the Congress was "polluting" public discourse.

Hitting back, Congress spokesperson Randeep Singh Surjewala, in a tweet, called the BJP a "court jester" and demanded answers on the Rs 410 billion Rafale "scam".

"And yes 'Jait-LIE' ji (sic), the desperate quest to stay relevant of a 'court jester' by wasteful blogs continues.

"Please reply: Why hide behind abuse when trapped in Rafale maze? Why supersede HAL for Rs 30,000 crore contract? Why no answer on Rs 410 billion loss in Rafale Scam," said Surjewala in his response to Jaitley's tweets.

The Congress has been gunning for the Narendra Modi-led government over the Rafale deal. Besides approaching of (CAG) for a special and forensic audit and demanding a Joint Parliamentary Committee (JPC) probe into the deal, the party has also sought the resignation of over the issue.

The Modi-led government and the BJP have been dismissive of all the charges by the Congress.
The Kerala Police on Thursday began questioning Bishop Franco Mulakkal accused of raping a nun for the second consecutive day.

On Wednesday, the bishop of the Roman Catholic Diocese in Jalandhar, Punjab, was questioned for seven hours near here at the Crime Branch office. He was asked to return on Thursday for further questioning.

Accompanied by his counsel and a few priests, Mulakkal arrived at the Crime Branch office around 11 a.m., even as demands for his arrest grew. Nuns have been protesting in Kochi for 13 days.

The bishop spent the night at a plush hotel in Kochi.

He dodged a large media contingent waiting outside the hotel as he slipped away in a different car while the vehicle used on Wednesday was kept parked outside the hotel.

Like on Wednesday, Inspector General Vijay Sakhre, Kottayam Superintendent Harishankar and his deputy K. Subhash held a meeting at the IG office in Kochi ahead of the interrogation.

The Kerala High Court has already agreed to hear Mulakkal's anticipatory bail plea on September 25.

A Kerala nun has accused Mulakkal of repeatedly sexually abusing her between 2014 and 2016.

An FIR was registered against the bishop and a 114-page detailed statement was taken from the nun and other inmates of the convent.

Mulakkal was questioned by the police team led by Subhash in August at his Jalandhar office and has denied all the charges levelled against him by the nun.

--IANS

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In a first, the government on Thursday came out with a National Database on Sexual Offenders (NDSO), containing a list of 4.5 lakh convicts with photos of about 3.5 lakh of them available.

The offenders face charges of rape, gangrape and eve-teasing.

The database, which was rolled out by the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) along with Women and Child Development Ministry (WCD) here, will be maintained by the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB).

The NDSO which is accessible only to law enforcement agencies will assist in effectively tracking and investigating cases of sexual offences and employee verification.

The registry which was approved by the Cabinet in April 2018 makes India the ninth country in the world to set up and maintain a national database of sexual offenders.

According to MHA, the state police have been requested to regularly update the database from 2005 onwards. The database includes name, address, photograph and fingerprint details for each entry. However, the database will not compromise any individual's privacy.

MHA has already released a grant of Rs. 94.5 crore to states/UTs for establishing cyber forensic-cum-training laboratories to strengthen cybercrime investigation and conduct training programmes to enhance capabilities of police officers, public prosecutors and judicial officers.

According to the WCD ministry, the sex offenders listed in the database will be classified on the basis of criminal history to ascertain if they pose a serious danger to the community.

"It is a matter of great pride and joy as two initiatives that my Ministry (WCD) and I had been pursuing for three years have been executed. The launch of National Registry of Sexual Offenders and Cybercrime Reporting Portal is one more step taken by our government for the safety of our women and children," Union WCD Minister Maneka Gandhi said.

Another web portal, "Cyber Crime Prevention Against Women and Children (CCPWC)", an initiative under the Nirbhaya Fund was also launched which will enable complainants in reporting cases without disclosing their identity.

"Government has taken several measures to check crime against Women and Children, including provision of stringent punishment and creation of modern forensics facilities to improve investigation, creation of the Women's Safety Division in the MHA and launching of Safe City projects for Women's Safety," Union MHA minister Rajnath Singh said.

The complaints registered through this portal will be handled by police authorities of respective State/UTs and complainants can also upload the objectionable content and URL to assist in the investigation by the state police.

The NCRB will proactively identify such objectionable content and take up with intermediaries for its removal. For this NCRB has already been notified as the Government of India agency to issue notices under the IT Act.

"A positive aspect of this portal is the provision for anonymous reporting, which will encourage more people to come forward with such complaints. This portal comes as a relief by providing time-bound solutions to a huge number of women and children who are being exploited in cyber space," Gandhi added.

--IANS

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Punjab Chief Minister Amarinder Singh on Thursday assured former Afghan President Hamid Karzai that his government would extend greater strategic support and cooperation to the war-torn nation.

The Chief Minister conveyed this to Karzai when the latter called on him at his official residence here.

Karzai thanked the Chief Minister for inviting him to the Kisan Mela being held at Punjab Agricultural University in Ludhiana city as the chief guest.

Afghanistan and Punjab share close cultural ties and could benefit through mutual cooperation and exchange of technical know-how in the fields of agriculture and horticulture, an official statement quoted Karzai as saying.

The visiting dignitary called for further cementing the traditional bonds of peace and brotherhood between Afghanistan and India, particularly Punjab.

The Chief Minister said since Afghanistan and India shared warm and friendly historical relations, Punjab would be happy to provide all the possible assistance for the development of Afghanistan.

The Chief Minister, who presented Karzai with a set of books authored by him and a shawl as a token of love and affection, also invited him to visit his hometown Patiala on his next visit to see the rich heritage of the historic city.

The former Afghanistan President was accompanied by former Foreign Minister Zarar Ahmad Osmani, his Education and Cultural Advisor Zalmani Hewadmai and Gautam Sabharwal.

--IANS

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Ten maulanas from various mosques in Goa conducted Quran Khawani, a ritualistic reading of the Quran, for quick recovery of ailing Chief Minister Manohar Parrikar, an official said on Thursday.

"We had called the maulanas from all over Goa to conduct the Quran Khawani, which invokes the good grace of Allah, at the BJP's South Goa headquarters to pray for the quick recovery of our Chief Minister Manohar Parrikar," BJP's Minority Morcha President Shaikh Jina told IANS.

Jina said that Parrikar, who is currently being treated at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) for advanced pancreatic cancer, had resolved several issues related to the Muslim community in Goa.

"He has resolved several outstanding issues related to our community which includes making Goa the embarkation point for Haj travel, building of a Haj House in the education sector," Jina said.

Several public prayers in temples and the central church in the state capital of Panaji were also conducted ever since Parrikar was diagnosed with advanced pancreatic cancer in February.

Since then Parrikar has been admitted to hospitals in Goa, Mumbai, New York and New Delhi's AIIMS. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its allies are now contemplating an alternative leader to replace the ailing Chief Minister.

--IANS

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Calling him a "clown prince", Finance Minister Arun Jaitley on Thursday accused Congress President Rahul Gandhi of "concocting lies" on the Rafale fighter jets deal and the bad loans of banks. The Congress leader was "polluting" public discourse, Jaitley said.

In a Facebook post, he said Gandhi first "lied" on the Rafale deal and was now lying on the non-performing assets (NPAs) claiming that the BJP government had waived loans of 15 industrialists amounting to Rs 2.5 lakh crore. Not a single rupee of any debtor had been waived, he said.

"His (Gandhi's) strategy is simple, concoct a lie and repeat it as many times" as possible, Jaitley said and wondered whether a person with a "temperament to concoct facts" deserved to be a part of the public discourse.

"The world's largest democracy must seriously introspect whether public discourse should be allowed to be polluted by the falsehood of a 'clown prince'," he added.

Referring to Gandhi winking at his party men after hugging Prime Minister Narendra Modi in the parliament, the BJP leader said the public discourse was a serious activity, not a laughter challenge, and that it could not be reduced to a "hug, a wink or repetition of falsehood".

"In mature democracies those who rely on falsehood are considered unfit for public life. Many have been banished from political activity because they were caught lying. But this rule obviously can't apply to a dynastic organisation like Congress party," he said.

"If the Rafale concoctions were the first big lie, the second one stated repeatedly is that Modi waived of Rs 2.5 lakh crore of 15 industrialists. Every word of that sentence repeatedly uttered by Rahul Gandhi is false," he added.

Jaitley said the amount being referred to by Gandhi were lent by the banks prior to 2014 when the UPA government was in power, which then "kept rolling over the loans to conceal them (as) loans despite the default".

"The truth, Mr. Rahul Gandhi, is that your government allowed the banks to be looted. The loans were inadequately securitized. Your government was in complicity... By repeating a lie on several occasions, you can't change that reality," he said.

The Finance Minister said while the UPA leaders claimed that when they went out of power, the NPAs were only Rs 2.5 lakh crore. The truth was that NPAs were actually Rs 8.96 lakh crore and were hidden under the carpet as revealed by an asset quality review conducted by the Reserve Bank of India.

He said no effective steps were taken by the UPA to recover or reduce the NPAs and post 2014-15, they increased not because more money was lent but because interest was mounting on the overdue amounts.

"The only effective move which has taken place in this regard is the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code (IBC). It has changed the debtor-creditor relationship in India."

He said the Reserve Bank of India had identified the twelve major defaulters who jointly owed about Rs 3 lakh crore to various banks.

"The banks under UPA took no steps to recover these loans. They did not prosecute a single major debtor who had siphoned off money. It is the NDA government which through IBC, changed the debtor-creditor relationship and enabled the banks to effectively pursue the recovery," Jaitley said.

--IANS

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Bahujan Samaj Party chief Mayawati on Thursday accused the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) of being anti-minority, anti-Dalit and anti-Constitution, saying it was trying to divert people's attention from the failures of BJP government at the Centre and in various states.

In a statement issued by her party, the four-time Uttar Pradesh chief minister said the three-day RSS programme in Delhi reflected the "tension" in the top echelons of BJP's mentor organization as the ruling party's popularity has dipped.

"The RSS has put everything at stake for the BJP and now that the discontent against the Modi government at the Centre is at its peak, the RSS is also jittery," the Dalit leader said.

The BSP supremo said she disagreed with RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat about Muslims' "participation" in the construction of Ram temple in Ayodhya and its linkage with communal harmony. "The relations between Muslims and Hindus cannot improve as long as the narrow-minded 'sanghi' approach continues," she said.

The basic thought process of the RSS was against freedom of expression and freedom to practise one's religion, Mayawati said, adding the people by now have understood the diversionary tactics of saffron parties and affiliates.

She also termed the ordinance making triple talaaq a criminal offence a politically inspired move. "If the BJP was indeed serious about the women's rights among Muslims, they would not have hastily brought the ordinance but would have allowed discussions on the matter and would not have skirted the demand of the opposition parties to send the matter to a parliamentary committee," she said.--IANS

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The RSS would never accept the Muslims even if they agreed to build not just the Ram temple in Ayodhya but many other temples, Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) supremo Mayawati said on Thursday.

She also slammed the Narendra Modi government's move on the 'triple talaq' ordinance, calling it "politically motivated".

Reacting to Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) chief Mohan Bhagwat's observation on Wednesday that if the Muslims themselves build the Ram temple in Ayodhya in Uttar Pradesh it would help mitigate the animosity between the Hindus and Muslims, she said she did not agree with this.

"We don't agree with this logic. Even if the Muslims make many more temples the narrow-minded Hindus will never mend fences with the Muslims because their basic mentality is anti-Muslim, anti-Dalit and anti-minorities," Mayawati said in a statement.

Warning people to guard against the RSS and BJP leaders' efforts to divide society on religious lines, the Dalit leader said that "they say one thing and do another".

She alleged that the RSS' "communal and casteist" face had come to the fore after the BJP came to power at the Centre and in many states.

The former Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister said that Bhagwat's three-day outreach programme was a ploy to distract public attention from the burning issues of poverty, hunger, price rise, unemployment and corruption.

"The RSS has put everything at stake for the BJP. Now that the discontent against the Narendra Modi government is at its peak, the RSS is also jittery," the Dalit leader said.

She said that had the Sangh's ideology been so humane, pro-people and respecting the Constitution of India, the organisation would not have faced a ban thrice after Independence.

On the 'triple talaq' ordinance cleared by the Union Cabinet, Mayawati said: "The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is doing on such sensitive issues to deflect public attention from its failures. Had it not been a politically motivated move, the government would have agreed to send the triple talaq bill pending in the Rajya Sabha to a Select Committee for comprehensive discussion."

--IANS

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At least 90 rural activists, who work under the National Rural Health Mission (NRHM), called on Prime Minister Narendra Modi here on Thursday to thank him for the increase in their incentives, an official statement said.

Under the NRHM, the government provides villages with a trained female Accredited Social Health Activist or ASHA.

According to the release, the Prime Minister recalled his interaction with the ASHA and Anganwadi workers across the country via video conference and appreciated them for sharing their experiences and personal accounts.

"Today, ASHA activists shared some more accounts of how they had been instrumental in saving lives of poor mothers and children through timely intervention," it said.

The Prime Minister appreciated ASHA workers for their skill and dedication and recalled that even Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation had praised their efforts towards eradication of diseases such as Kala Azar, a severe parasitic disease.

The Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs (CCEA) on Wednesday gave its approval to the benefit package with effect from October 2018 (to be paid in November 2018). The package covers the expenditure till 2020.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Amid the raging controversy over the Defence Ministry's procurement of the fighter from French firm Dassault Aviation, a senior Swedish official has said that his country's firm Saab, in its Gripen aircraft, has the requisite experience to contest for the upcoming Indian deal for manufacturing 110 new fighter jets under the Make in programme.

"I know that is interested, they want to be a part of this procurement," Teppo Tauriainen, Director General for Trade in the Swedish Foreign Ministry, told IANS in an interview here.

"They think they have something good to offer that will be of interest to India," Tauriainen said.

"They, of course, know what the expectations of the government is in terms of local production and cooperation with a local partner."

is expected to select by the end of this year one fighter that will be manufactured by the private sector under the Make in programme for supply to the

The Gripen will be contesting with the likes of the Russian MiG 35, Dassault Rafale, Eurofighter Typhoon, F/A 18 and for the upcoming deal.

While MiG has already said that it will have state-owned Hindustan Aeronautic Limited (HAL) as its local partner, Indian companies like Tata, Reliance Defence, and are in the fray for local partners in the project that is expected to be worth over $20 billion (Rs 1.44 trillion).

Tauriainen said that for Saab, contesting for the deal will be nothing new as it has signed a similar deal for Gripen with the Brazilian government with as its local partner.

"I have myself visited the Brazilian partner, Embraer, and seen there are a lot of spin-offs locally in the Brazilian economy from this fighter jet deal," he said.

"So, I think for Saab, as a company, it won't be unusual to do it the way the wants it to happen."

During his visit to in April this year, Prime Minister had said that defence and security have emerged as an important pillar of the India- bilateral partnership.

" has been a partner of India in the defence sector for a long time. I am confident new opportunities for cooperation in this sector will arise in the future, especially in defence production," Modi said.

During that visit, an India-Sweden Partnership was also announced with a fund of 50 million Swedish kronor (around $5.6 million) for innovation cooperation in the fields of smart cities and sustainability.

Asked what steps have been taken in this connection, Tauriainen said that the dialogue for these projects has started though none of these projects have started operating.

"But we have come quite far to identify areas where we think there is a potential to do cooperation," he said.

He said that sustainable technology is a broad area and is very much related to how cities are built in terms of transport, energy, waste and waste water.

"There we have some interesting experiences and I hope that is of relevance to India," Tauriainen said.

"Some technologies we have already tested in Sweden. Other technologies will have to be adapted to Indian conditions," he added.

In Sweden, waste is actually used to generate power and only one per cent of the waste goes to the landfill.

Asked about the presence of around 180 Swedish companies in India and their role in the Indian economy, Tauriainen said these are doing good business despite "some limitations".

"They wouldn't mind if those limitations are taken away. But they are interested in the Indian market and most of them are interested in expanding," he said.

(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.)
Samsung Electronics on Thursday joined the smartphone camera war, launching the affordable Galaxy A7 that comes with a powerful rear triple camera system.

The Galaxy A7 -- to be priced below the Rs 30,000 price segment for India -- will be available in select European and Asian markets from this fall and other markets in the near future, the company said in a statement.

The triple camera system has a 24MP AF lens, an 8MP "Ultra Wide" lens (F2.4) and a 5MP "Depth" lens.

With the 24MP lens and Depth Lens, the Galaxy A7's "Live Focus" feature lets users control the depth of field by allowing them to adjust the "bokeh" effect for better photos.

"Samsung is committed to delivering meaningful innovation to all consumers across the Galaxy family, no matter who they are or where they are in the world" said DJ Koh, President and CEO of IT and Mobile Communications Division at Samsung Electronics.

The Galaxy A7's 8MP Ultra Wide Lens at the rear is placed at the same viewing angle as the human eye. The device ensures clear photos in both bright and low-light conditions.

"We're excited to introduce innovative new features to the A series with the Galaxy A7, a practical but powerful device that is built to help make your everyday both convenient and extraordinary," he added.

The device with 6.0-inch Super AMOLED display comes in three variants: 4GB RAM and 64GB internal storage with a MicroSD Slot (up to 512GB); 4GB RAM and 128GB internal memory and 6GB RAM and 128ROM.

It runs Android 8.0 OS and houses a 3,300mAh battery.

Samsung is set to launch another "Galaxy A" series smartphone with a four rear-camera system device called A9 in Malaysia on October 11 that will be a premium device (above the Rs 30,000 price segment).

The company is refreshing its mid-price segment smartphones with flagship premium features for the rest of the year.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Saudi-led coalition involved in a war in Yemen announced on Wednesday the interception of a missile shot towards border city Jazan.

The coalition spokesperson, Col. Turki Al Maliki, said in a statement on Saudi Press Agency that with the fresh attack, the number of missiles shot by Houthis militias towards the kingdom reached 198. Most of those missiles targeted the cities on the south border of Saudi Arabia, Xinhua reported.

He said that the Saudi air forces intercepted and destroyed the missile that was shot from Saada governorate in Yemen without reporting any injuries. He renewed his accusations of the involvement of Iran in such attacks by supplying the Houthi rebels with weapons and missiles.

--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 Thursday refused to entertain a plea against Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan. Madhya Pradesh Congress spokesperson K.K. Mishra had filed the petition challenging a High Court order pertaining to a criminal complaint against Chouhan for his alleged role in the "dumper scam."

While a bench of Justice A.K. Sikri and Justice Ashok Bhushan was dismissing Mishra's petition, senior advocate Kapil Sibal, appearing for the Congress leader, said he wanted to withdraw the plea.

"The petition is dismissed as withdrawn," the Court said in its order.

"We know the election is coming, go and contest the election," Justice Sikri remarked.

The dumpers were allegedly purchased by the Chief Minister and his wife despite showing a meagre income in poll affidavits.

The Congress leader has claimed that according to the declaration, the Chouhans had Rs 2.3 lakh in their bank accounts which was insufficient to purchase the heavy vehicles amounting to approximately Rs 2 crore.

In January 2018, the Madhya Pradesh High Court had dismissed Mishra's revision plea challenging the dismissal of the complaint against Chouhan, saying the plea had no merit and substance.

In the top court, Mishra had challenged the High Court order on the grounds that sanction under Section 19(1) of Prevention of Corruption (PC) Act arises at the time of cognizance and not at the time when the complainant is being examined upon oath and presents the evidence before the competent court under Section 200 of CrPC.

During the hearing, Sibal contended that Mishra be allowed to record his statement before the magistrate and present all documentary evidence he had against Chouhan.

In the election affidavit dated April 4, 2006, Chouhan disclosed assets and liabilities belonging to him and his wife Sadhana but a month later, Chouhan's wife purchased four heavy vehicles despite having insufficient funds, alleged Mishra.

It was further alleged that the dumpers were allegedly bought in Sadhana's name and her husband's name was shown as S.R. Singh -- a resident of J.P. Nagar Plant, Rewa --, adding that the husband's name was misleading and the address false.

--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 Thursday extended by three months the deadline given to CBI and ED to complete their investigation in all 2G spectrum cases and related cases arising out of it, including the Aircel-Maxis deal.

A bench of Justice A.K. Sikri and Justice Ashok Bhushan granted three more months to investigating agencies to complete the probe after the counsel appearing for the Enforcement Directorate (ED) and the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) sought time as they needed to confront some accused through e-mails.

The ED and the CBI are investigating Karti Chidambaram's alleged role in getting Foreign Investment Promotion Board (FIPB) clearance for the Aircel-Maxis deal in 2006 when his father was the Union Finance Minister.

The investigative agencies have questioned former Finance Minister P. Chidambaram and his son Karti in the Aircel-Maxis deal.

On March 12, the apex court had given a deadline till September 12 to the two central agencies to complete probe in the alleged irregularities in FIPB approval to the Aircel-Maxis deal.

On December 21 last year, the trial court had acquitted DMK leaders Kanimozhi and A. Raja and 15 other accused in the 2G court for lack of evidence.

The court had also dropped charges against former Telecom Minister Dayanidhi Maran and others accused in the Aircel-Maxis case.

Now, the pending investigation includes one by the CBI into the role of Malaysian accused T. Ananda Krishnan and Ralph Marshall in the Aircel-Maxis deal, and by CBI regarding FIPB approval.

The issue had surfaced in course of investigation into the 2G spectrum allocation-related cases.

On July 19, 2018, the CBI had filed a supplementary charge sheet before a special court against the Congress leader and his son for alleged irregularities and criminal conspiracy in the Aircel-Maxis deal case. The CBI had also named 10 individuals, including public servants, and six companies as accused in the case.

--IANS

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When it comes to Cloud adoption, state governments in India are quickly shifting their workloads to the platform -- even faster than the US state governments, a top executive from Amazon Web Services (AWS), online retail giant Amazon's Cloud business arm, has stressed.

According to Teresa Carlson, Vice President, Worldwide Public Sector at AWS, in just about two years', there has been a significant change on Cloud adoption in the public sector in India.

"When I first visited India in 2016, people, although tech savvy, were not much exposed to Cloud computing and capabilities it brings in. Startups were always enthusiastic but within the government circles, the buzz around Cloud was just shaping up," Carlson told IANS during a free-wheeling interview here.

"On my second India visit, I am glad to see the transformation. They are now clearly aware about Cloud computing and immense benefits associated with it," she emphasised.

"India I am kind of excited about as state government are moving really faster on adopting Cloud than the US state governments when they were exposed to the Cloud computing eight years back," added Carlson who reports directly to AWS CEO Andy Jassy.

Realising the immense potential of moving operations to scalable, agile and secure AWS Cloud from physical data centres, the state governments in the country are now getting rid of the ageing IT infrastructure.

"We started Cloud in 2010 in the US and we now see them moving fast. India is already on the move within just two years," said Carlson who was among "D.C.'s Top 50 Women In Tech List 2016" by leading US tech company FedScoop.

Since launching AWS' public sector business in 2010, Carlson has seen the client list growing from state, local and central governments to educational institutions, ed-tech companies and non-profit organisations.

To help improve citizen services in India is something she is bullish on.

"Citizens today have greater voice via various online platforms. They can now reach policymakers and elected representatives to register their grievances. This is an area where India has great potential to empower its billion-plus citizens," Carlson told IANS.

Maharashtra, for example, is leveraging AWS Cloud to improve its citizen services.

"MahaOnline is using AWS capabilities. The data-sets are huge and they can scale up or down their requirements as per the coming traffic as our system is automatically scalable. Millions of citizens are going to be empowered via this initiative," Peter Moore, Regional Managing Director, Public Sector-Asia Pacific at AWS, told IANS.

MahaOnline is facilitating the digitisation of information technology in various state departments. With MahaOnline portal, thousands of citizens are daily reaping the benefit of online services.

AWS is the first Global Cloud Provider (GCP) in the country to achieve full empanelment by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) for delivering Cloud services to government customers.

The company launched AWS Asia Pacific (Mumbai) Region with two availability zones in 2016 and has seen stupendous growth in adding new customers in the region.

During her second India visit, Carlson met several top government officials in New Delhi, including from the National Skill Development Corporation (NSDC) and the citizen engagement platform MyGov, exploring ways how to help in skilling and empowering Indian citizens.

According to her, India is on the right trajectory as the state governments now have quick access to buying Cloud capabilities.

"They are also aware about the lack of right skill-sets which is the concern among governments around the world who are struggling to find skilled workforce for Cloud computing, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML)," Carlson noted, adding that AWS is already performing a big role in skilling young talent globally, including in India.

(Nishant Arora can be contacted at nishant.a@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.)
Time is running out for a Brexit deal, leaders of European countries warned on Thursday as they began an informal summit in the Austrian city of Salzburg to discuss the bloc's most pressing issues, including migration and strengthening external borders.

There was still no agreement on issues including how to avoid new checks on the Northern Irish border, the BBC reported.

For British Prime Minister Theresa May, the meeting here provided her one of the final occasions to seek consensus on her country's withdrawal from the bloc and, at a dinner late Wednesday, she urged her counterparts to focus on sealing a Brexit deal within two months.

She stressed her "serious" proposals for future co-operation would ensure a "shared closed relationship" and warned that she would not extend negotiations. However, the leader still faced questions about the future of the Irish border.

European Commission chief Jean-Claude Juncker described May's 10-minute presentation as "interesting". "It was polite, it was not aggressive, she was doing her job," he said on the second day of talks.

Later on Thursday, the other EU leaders were expected to discuss Brexit in May's absence, focusing on the differences over the Irish border and how detailed a "political declaration" for future relations needed to be.

French President Emmanuel Macron stressed the EU's "very clear principles" about preserving the "integrity" of its single market, something that Maltese Prime Minister Joseph Muscat described as a "big fat red line".

May's team met the Indian-origin Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar on Thursday morning.

Varadkar said that Ireland evidently wanted to avoid a no-deal Brexit, but that it was preparing for all eventualities. "We need to redouble our efforts over the next couple of weeks to make sure that we have a deal," he said.

Luxembourg's Prime Minister Xavier Bettel said time was "getting short". The Netherlands' Mark Rutte warned of a failure to reach agreement, saying: "As long as there is no deal, there is the risk of 'no-deal'."

Muscat and his Czech Republic counterpart Andrej Babis told the BBC that they hoped the UK would hold another referendum on Brexit in a bid to reverse the 2016 result.

Muscat said most of his counterparts would like the "almost impossible" to happen, while Babis added he hoped the British people might change their minds.

However, May said there was no question of the UK seeking to extend its EU membership.

The UK is due to leave the EU on March 29, 2019, and both sides have been trying to reach a deal in time, with a crunch summit specially convened in mid-November.

May's proposal for the UK to sign up to a common rule book for trade in goods and a combined customs territory with the EU is unpopular with many in her own party, who believe it will erode British sovereignty and is not what people voted for when they backed Brexit in the 2016 referendum.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
A number of Muslim organisations on Thursday slammed the triple talaq ordinance, calling it politically motivated and "unacceptable".

Jamat-e-Islami Hind President Maulana Syed Jalaluddin Umari in a statement said that if the government is sincere about the welfare of Muslim women, it should hold discussion with 'ulema' (Islamic scholars) and experts of Islamic jurisprudence over the entire talaq-e-biddat (triple talaq) issue.

The Union Cabinet cleared the ordinance on Wednesday, and it was promulgated by the President. The ordinance prescribes up to three years jail and/or fine for the man who divorces his wife through triple talaq or instant divorce.

"The ordinance is against the Constitution of India that gives every citizen liberty to practise one's religion and personal laws. The ordinance contravenes the Shariah laws," said Maulana Umari.

Jamiat Ulema-e-Hind General Secretary Maulana Mahmood Madani said the ordinance was not going to favour the divorced women in any way and would instead harm their cause for justice.

Law Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad on Wednesday called the promulgation of Ordinance as "constitutional urgency." Madani responded by saying that 201 incidents of talaq in two years or 100 cases per annum in 16-crore Muslim community "does not warrant such a hasty ordinance".

"It is a clear instance of dictatorship. The government did not even feel the need to consult the community," he said.

All India Muslim Majlis-e-Mushawarat (AIMMM) President Navaid Hamid said the move was nothing but a "diversionary tactic" by the Modi government to deflect attention from its own failures and burning issues such as rising fuel prices and corruption.

"We should not even react to such provocations. I reckon the Modi government's sole aim with this ordinance is to incite Muslims so that BJP can give it a communal colour and deflect attention from real issues," Hamid told IANS.

"If the government is so sincere about the welfare of Muslim women, it should tell us what it is doing for the Muslim widows whose husbands have been killed in lynching cases over the last four years," he added.

--IANS

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Under full glare, Uttar Pradesh police on Thursday shot dead two criminals, accused of murdering six persons including two Hindu priests, in Aligarh district.

Local journalists and television crew were formally invited as the policemen, wearing bulletproof vests, were seen aiming their guns at the criminals, later identified as Naushad and Mustakeem, who were hiding in an abandoned building.

Senior Superintendent of Police (SSP) Aligarh, Ajay Sahni, said the criminals were passing through a police checkpoint on a bike and when they were asked to stop. The criminals however tried to escape. Policemen chased them for about five kilometres.

The duo fired at the police which retaliated, resulting in an encounter. Additional police force was summoned to deal with the situation.

The district police chief added that five more persons had been arrested for their involvement in these six murders that took place in one month.

Police added that the two criminals were trying to intimidate a police witness and were planning to kill him.

The police and the state government have been under fire from human rights organizations and under the lens of the judiciary as around 1,000 encounters have taken place in the state since the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) came to power.

Sixty-six criminals and four policemen have been killed in these gun battles so far.

Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath has defended these encounters saying criminals cannot be allowed to endanger the lives of innocent and peace-loving people.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The US has reiterated that Moroccos autonomy plan for the Sahara region is "realistic" and "credible" and a "potential approach to resolving the Sahara issue".

"We maintain that it (the autonomy plan) is serious, realistic and credible and that it is able to satisfy the aspirations of the populations of the Sahara to manage their own affairs in peace and dignity," said Pablo Rodriguez, an official at the State Department, in a statement to Morocco's MAP new agency in Washington.

The US said the autonomy plan would also help satisfy the aspirations of the people of the Sahara region "to manage their own affairs in peace and dignity".

Washington's reaction came in the wake of the working visit paid by Moroccan Foreign Minister Nasser Bourita to the US. Bourita had held talks at the State Department with Secretary of State Michael Pompeo, President Trump's National Security Advisor John Bolton, and other senior officials.

During the meetings it was also agreed to convene the next session of the Morocco-US strategic dialogue in 2019 in Washington.

In June, US Deputy Secretary of State John Sullivan had backed Morocco's plan for autonomy in the Sahara region as "serious and credible" during a visit to Rabat.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Secretary of State on Wednesday set a deadline by which must denuclearise, saying that the process must be completed by January 2021, when President Donald Trump's current term would end.

In a statement, Pompeo also expressed his desire to meet with his North Korean counterpart, Ri Yong-ho, next week in New York during the United Nations General Assembly, Efe reported.

"This morning, I invited my counterpart Foreign Minister Ri Yong Ho to meet in New York City next week where we are both already scheduled to be in attendance at the United Nations General Assembly meeting," said Pompeo in his statement.

"This will mark the beginning of negotiations to transform US- relations through the process of rapid denuclearization of North Korea, to be completed by January 2021, as committed by Chairman Kim," he added.

Pompeo made reference to the June 2018 at which Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un signed a declaration opening the door to denuclearisation by in exchange for US guarantees regarding that regime's survival, although concrete time periods for achieving those objectives were not set forth.

In recent weeks, the bilateral dialogue between and has stalled due to differences on how to move the denuclearisation process forward.

has demanded progress on signing a peace treaty with South Korea that would put an end to the technical state of war on the in exchange for taking concrete steps to dismantle its nuclear arsenal, as demanded by the White House.

In a gesture to Washington, Kim on Wednesday offered to permanently close Yongbyon, where the North Korean regime produces enriched uranium for its atomic bombs, in exchange for the US taking measures corresponding to those agreed to by the two countries at the

Kim made the announcement at the third summit between the two Koreas held so far this year after the North Korean regime elected to try and break out of its diplomatic isolation in January.
The Bangladesh government on Thursday signed a $50 million grant financing agreement with the World Bank to improve the country's services to cater to the health, nutrition and family planning needs of the Rohingya refugee population.

The agreement was signed by Kazi Shofiqul Azam, Senior Secretary of Bangladesh's Economic Relations Division and Qimiao Fan, World Bank Country Director for Bangladesh, Nepal and Bhutan, on behalf of the government and the World Bank respectively, at the Economic Relations Division here.

The additional financing to the existing Health Sector Support Project will help provide essential health and nutrition services to the Rohingya people in Cox's Bazaar, some 292 km southeast of the capital, Xinhua news agency reported.

The financing will cover maternal, neonatal, infant, child and adolescent health, nutrition and psychosocial services as well as reproductive health care, said the World Bank in a statement.

"Nearly 1 million Rohingya live in congested camps, including the Kutupalong camp, the world's largest refugee camp. They face risks of disease outbreaks and suffer from high rates of child malnutrition. Their healthcare needs are enormous," said Fan.

"This grant financing will help the government plan and manage health, nutrition and population services for the Rohingya people while the existing project will continue to provide healthcare to the local population."

This is the first in a series of projects financed by the World Bank to support Bangladesh in dealing with the Rohingya influx, said the World Bank.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
In a significant development, Ericsson, Telstra and Qualcomm have successfully completed the worlds first 2Gbps capable 4G data call using the live commercial network in Queensland, Australia.

"Together with technology partners Ericsson and Qualcomm Technologies, Telstra has made the world's first 2Gbps capable 4G data call using our mobile network in the regional centre of Toowoomba in Queensland," Channa Seneviratne, Executive Director, Network and Infrastructure Engineering -- Telstra Operations, said in a statement on Wednesday.

This call follows the 2Gbps speed demonstration at the Mobile World Congress (MWC) in February and the further testing in Sweden in June.

"This is the first time the technology has been taken out of the lab and deployed using a real commercial network," Seneviratne said.

The live call was achieved using Qualcomm Technologies' mobile test platform powered by the Snapdragon X24 LTE modem -- an Ericsson Radio System base-station Ericsson's Network Software and Ericsson core network.

Success in 5G will depend on a strong underlying 4G network, and this LTE data call over Telstra's live commercial network is an important step forward in the development of 5G.

"We expect to deploy 2Gbps enabled 4G technology in select locations later in 2018," informed Seneviratne.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
There were "serious differences" between (HAL) and for production of Rafale jets in India when the UPA government was negotiating the deal with the French company, official sources said Thursday.

The previous UPA government in 2012 started negotiations with to buy 126 Medium Multi-Role Combat Aircraft (MMRCA).



The plan was for to supply 18 Rafale jets in fly-away condition while 108 aircraft were to be manufactured in India by the company along with HAL. However, the deal could not be sealed.

The sources said the HAL in a letter dated October 11, 2012, to the defence ministry brought out various disagreements pertaining to the work share between HAL and the Dassault Aviation, the makers of Rafale jets.

Subsequently, in July 2014, HAL in its letter to the ministry has also highlighted one major unresolved issue regarding responsibility sharing between Dassault Aviation and HAL for licence manufacture of the aircraft, the sources said.



They said observations by experts that the HAL was capable of manufacturing Rafale jets was incorrect.

"There were serious differences between HAL and Dassault Aviation when the UPA government was negotiating the deal with the French company," a source said.

Last week, Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said negotiations for procurement of 126 Rafale jets under the UPA government fell through as HAL did not have the required capability to produce the jets in India in collaboration with Dassault Aviation.



After rounds of negotiations with (HAL), Dassault Aviation felt that the cost of the Rafale jets will escalate significantly if they were to be produced in India, she said.

The Congress has demanded answers from the government on why HAL was not involved in the new deal.

In 2016, the Modi government signed a government-to-government deal with France for purchase of 36 Rafale jets at a cost of Rs 580 billion. The Congress has been alleging irregularities in the deal.
Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) chief Mayawati on Thursday announced that her party will have no alliance with the Congress for the forthcoming assembly elections in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh (MP), and Chhattisgarh. She said her party will have an alliance with former chief minister (CM) Ajit Jogi-led party in Chhattisgarh.

Elections to these three states, as also Mizoram and Telangana, are due in December. Mayawatis decision is a jolt to the Congress, which had hoped for an alliance with the BSP at least in MP to end the 15-year rule of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in the ...
The carcasses of 11 lions were found in Gujarat's Gir forest, prompting the state government to order an inquiry, officials said Thursday.

All the dead lions were found in Gir (east) division, mainly from Dalkhaniya range in the last few days, an official said.

"We have found carcasses of 11 lions from Gir east forest range," said P Purushothama, the Deputy Conservator of Forest, Gir (east). For administrative purpose, the Gir forest has been divided in east and west parts.

A carcass of a lioness was found in a forest near Rajula of Amreli district Wednesday, while three more lions were found dead the same day in Dalkhaniya range area in the Gir forest, a senior official said.

Carcasses of seven other lions were found in the last few days, he said.

"We have collected viscera samples of the dead animals and sent them to the Junagadh Veterinary Hospital and are waiting for the postmortem report," he added.

Additional chief secretary of the Forest and Department Dr Rajiv Kumar Gupta said the state government has ordered an inquiry which would be conducted by the principal chief conservator of forest (wildllife).

"Primary information shows that eight deaths have occurred due to infighting. For the rest three, postmortem reports are awaited," Gupta added.

PCCF wildlife A K Saxena, who rushed to the Gir forest, told PTI that most of the deaths are due to infighting and resultant injuries.

"Most of the deaths are due to infighting and injuries caused thereby, mainly affecting cubs and females. This trend is being noticed over a period of three to four years. No foul play or suspicion is suspected," Saxena said.

As per the 2015 census, Gir is home to 520 lions.

Rajya Sabha MP Parimal Nathwani said on Thursday that a probe must be conducted to see if the deaths occurred due to electrocution, poisoning or poaching.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
A record number of 12 Indian-Americans are in the fray for the November 6 mid-term Congressional elections.

Three among them -- Hiral Tipirneni and Anita Malik from Arizona and Pramila Jayapal from Washington State -- are women.

The first Indian-American woman to enter the US House of Representatives, Jayapal, is seeking re-election from the seventh Congressional district of Washington State. Her victory is considered to be a cake walk, given her popularity and that she represents a Democratic stronghold.

Along with Jayapal, three other Indian-Americans -- Raja Krishnamoorthi from Illinois, Ro Khanna and Dr Ami Bera from California -- are seeking re-elections this year. Bera, who was declared winner after recounting of votes in the last three elections, this time faces a tough opponent, Republican Andrew Grant.

He was first elected to the US House of Representatives in 2012, making him the third ever Indian-American to enter the House after Dalip Singh Saund from 1957 to 1963 and Bobby Jindal in 2004.

In 2016, three Indian-Americans -- Krishnamoorthi, Khanna and Jayapal -- joined Bera in the House of representatives, which led to the creation of the so called 'Samosa Caucus'. This year, Krishnamoorthi is pitted against Indian-American Jitender Diganvker of the Republican Party in the eight Congressional District of Illinois. Notably both of them were elected unopposed during the primaries.

Khanna is pitted against Republican Ron Cohen in the 17th Congressional District of California, which is essentially India-American dominated Silicon Valley. Political pundits expect all four of them to sail through this November.

Indian-Americans are giving a tough fight to their opponents in some of the key Congressional districts.

Prominent among them being emergency room physician Hiral Tipirneni in the eighth Congressional District of Arizona and former diplomat Sri Preston Kulkarni in the 22nd Congressional District of Texas.

Running an aggressive campaign, that has caught national attention, Tipirneni seeks to tip the balance in her favour by defeating the Republican incumbent Debbie Lesko, who won the special elections early this year.

Kulkarni resigned from US foreign service to run for the Congress and is giving a tough fight to Republican Pete Olson, who has been one of the proponents of India-US relationship.

Richard Verma, the former US Ambassador to India, Thursday endorsed Kulkarni for the Congress.

"Today more than ever, we need leaders like Sri who will champion diplomatic solutions and put country over politics," Verma said.

Kulkarni represented the US for 14 years as a Foreign Service Officer with overseas tours in Iraq, Israel, Russia, Taiwan and Jamaica. He then served as a foreign policy and defense advisor on Capitol Hill assisting Senator Kirsten Gillibrand on the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Young Indian-American Aftab Pureval, who is the first person of Tibetan origin to run for the Congress, has received shot in his arm after the recent endorsement by former US President Barack Obama. Pureval is the current Hamilton County Clerk of Courts.

In the eight Congressional District of Florida, incumbent Bill Posey is experiencing a tough fight from Democratic opponent Sanjay Patel. Anita Malik faces Republican incumbent David Schweikert in Arizona's 6th Congressional District in metro Phoenix.

Harry Arora is the second Indian-American Republican candidate to run for the Congress. Pitted against Democrat Jim Himes, who has been representing the fourth Congressional District of Connecticut, he has a tough challenge at his hand. Arora has raised more than USD 700,000, which is less than half the funds raised by Himes.

Independent Shiva Ayyadurai is the only Indian-American in the race for the US Senate seat from Massachusetts. While he has caught national attention and some media space because of his innovative campaigning skills, it would be nothing less than a miracle if Ayyadurai defeats Democratic incumbent Elizabeth Warren in the Senate election from Massachusetts. Warren is a Democratic Party star and is seen as a strong contender for the party's presidential ticket in 2020.

It is believed that at least half-a-dozen contenders will sail through next January when lawmakers would be sworn in for the 116th Congress.

In addition to these 12 contestants in the race for the US Congress, there are scores of Indian-Americans running for local elections, including State and County.

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As many as 27 states and Union Territories are ready to join the ambitious healthcare scheme Pradhan Mantri Jan Arogya Yojana after its launch on Sunday by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, a member said.

Over 15,000 hospitals, both public and private, across the country have expressed their willingness to be empanelled for the scheme which aims to provide 107.4-million poor families health insurance, member V K Paul, who is the chief architect of the scheme, told in an interview.

"The Prime Minister will launch the scheme on September 23 but effectively it will become operational from September 25 on the birth anniversary of Pandit Deendayal Upadhyay," he said, adding that in the current fiscal, the burden on the Centre is likely to be around Rs 3,500 crore.

"With the launch by the prime minister, 26-27 states and UTs are likely to immediately commence the PMJAY," Paul added.

The member said that five or six states have not signed, so obviously the scheme will not be implemented in those states till they come on board.

"Remaining states that have signed (MoUs with the Centre) should hopefully be in the process of actual launch of (PMJAY) in the next 2-3 months," he noted.

Paul also said that the government expects thousands of new hospitals to come up in the next five years in tier 2 and tier 3 cities.

"We have received applications from 15,000 hospitals for being empanelled ... Out of this half, that means 7,500 applications for empanelment are private hospitals," he said, adding that in some states process for empanelment is yet to start.
Three civilians wounded when a gunman opened fire outside a crowded courtroom have been released from hospital, officials said Thursday.

The three were taken to Ruby Memorial Hospital in Morgantown, West Virginia, following Wednesday's shooting in southwestern Pennsylvania's Fayette County.

The two men, ages 35 and 47, and a 39-year-old woman were all released Wednesday night, the hospital said.

The gunman, Patrick Dowdell, 61, of Masontown, was shot and killed by a German Township police officer. Another officer who was wounded, Masontown police Sgt R Scott Miller, was being treated for non-life-threatening injuries.

Dowdell entered the lobby in Masontown around 2 pm Wednesday with a handgun drawn and opened fire, authorities said.

He had been due in court on charges related to domestic violence.

Miller first encountered Dowdell and was injured when he exchanged gunfire with the shooter. When Miller took cover, Fayette County prosecutor Richard Bower said, the gunman fired shots injuring the two men and one woman.

Dowdell had been arrested August 25 and charged with aggravated assault, terroristic threats, strangulation, simple assault and harassment.

It wasn't clear whether any of the wounded civilians were connected to that domestic violence case.

Miller, who was shot in the hand, is expected to make a full recovery.

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Almost 59 per cent of all attacks in 2017 took place in five Asian countries, including and Pakistan, a US report said Thursday.

The other three countries include Afghanistan, Iraq and the Philippines.

The total number of attacks worldwide last year decreased by 23 per cent. Similarly, the total deaths due to violence decreased by 27 per cent, according to the report.

The decline in terrorist violence was largely due to dramatically fewer attacks and deaths in Iraq, Nathan Sales, State Department coordinator of counterterrorism, said during a conference call with reporters Thursday.

"Although took place in 100 countries in 2017, they were concentrated geographically. Fifty-nine percent of all attacks took place in five countries. Those are Afghanistan, India, Iraq, Pakistan, and the Philippines. Similarly, 70 per cent of all deaths due to took place in five countries, and those are Afghanistan, Iraq, Nigeria, Somalia, and Syria," he said.

The annual State Department Country Report on Terrorism, he said, notes a number of major strides that the United States and its allies made to defeat and degrade terrorist organisations in 2017.

"We worked with allies and partners around the world to expand information sharing, improve aviation security, enhance law enforcement and rule of law capacities, and to counter terrorist radicalisation with a focus on preventing recruitment and recidivism," Sales said.

However, despite these many successes, the terrorist landscape grew more complex in 2017, he said. "ISIS, al-Qaida, and their affiliates have proven to be resilient, determined, and adaptable," Sales added.

He said foreign terrorist fighters were heading home from the war zones in Iraq and Syria or travelling to third countries to join branches there.

"We also are experiencing an increase in attacks by homegrown terrorists that is, people who have been inspired by but have never set foot in Syria or Iraq. We've seen ISIS-directed or ISIS-inspired attacks outside the war zone on soft targets and in public spaces like hotels, tourist resorts, and cultural sites," Sales said.

"We've seen this trend in places as far as Bamako, Barcelona, Berlin, London, Marawi, New York City, Ouagadougou, and many others," added the top counter terrorism official from the State Department.

Iran, he alleged, remains the world's leading "state sponsor of terrorism" and is responsible for intensifying multiple conflicts and undermining US interests in Syria, Yemen, Iraq, Bahrain, Afghanistan and Lebanon. Sales said Tehran uses a number of proxies and other instruments such as Lebanese Hizbollah and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corp's Quds Force.

The threats posed by Iran's support for terrorism are not confined to the Middle East; they are truly global, he asserted.

"We have seen Iran's and its proxies' terrorist-related activities across the globe. There are active fundraising networks in places as far afield as Africa, in South America. We've seen weapons caches planted around the world," he said.

Al-Qaida, he said, was a determined and patient adversary.

It has largely remained out of the headlines in recent years as it has been content to let bear the brunt of the international response, but one shouldn't confuse that period of relative quiet with al-Qaida's abandonment of its capabilities or intentions to strike the US and its allies, Sales said.

"That is why we are continuing to keep the pressure on al-Qaida, its affiliates, and its individuals. The report details a number of efforts that we've taken to designate and I mentioned in my opening remarks efforts that we have taken to designate affiliates in Syria, in Mali, as well as individuals who are associated with the group," he said.

"So, although ISIS has gotten the headlines, we remain focused and determined to confront wherever we find it," Sales added.
The Supreme Court Thursday made it clear that newly-appointed acting Director General of Police of Jammu and Kashmir Dilbag Singh will continue in office till the UPSC scrutinises and provides a panel of three police officers for regular appointment of the police chief.

A bench headed by Chief Justice Dipak Misra granted the interim relief to the state government, saying acting DGP Singh, who replaced S P Vaid, shall continue to operate.

The bench, also comprising Justices A M Khanwilkar and D Y Chandrachud, asked the state government to provide within five days the requisite documents to the Union Public Service Commission (UPSC) about senior police officers.

The UPSC, in turn, would examine various aspects, including merit and seniority of these officers, and short-list within four weeks three names. The state government may then appoint an officer from the list as a regular DGP, it said.

Advocate Prashant Bhushan, appearing for former DGP Prakash Singh on whose PIL the judgement on police reforms had come in 2006, alleged that the appointment of the acting DGP was in J and K was in violation of the judgement on various counts, including that Singh was the seventh in the seniority list.

"They have removed a DGP without following the procedure devised by the Supreme Court" and the government should have appointed the senior-most person as acting DGP, he said, adding that his plea seeking contempt against the state government be listed for hearing.

Attorney General K K Venugopal and lawyer Shoeb Alam, representing the state government, opposed Bhushan's submission and said the law and order and the ground situation of Jammu and Kashmir was different from the rest of the country.

Venugopal said the person shifted out from the DGP post had "no problem" and no other police officer has aired any grievance, but Bhushan who has filed the PIL has a problem. "The ground situation in Jammu and Kashmir is not normal," he said.

"We should not forget that this is Jammu and Kashmir. The law and order and security situation in unique and no other state has similar security requirements," Alam also said.

The state government had on September 6 appointed Dilbagh Singh as the acting police chief, replacing S P Vaid who was posted as the transport commissioner.

Earlier, the state government had moved the court seeking modification its order that made it mandatory for all states to send a list of three senior-most IPS officers to the UPSC for clearance before appointing the DGP.

The apex court had earlier passed a slew of directions on police reforms in the country and restrained all states and union territories from appointing any police officer as acting DGPs to avoid favouritism and nepotism.

It had said that all states were required to send their proposals in anticipation of the vacancies to the UPSC well in time, at least three months before the date of retirement of the incumbent on the post of DGP.

The J and K government, in its plea, has said: "It may be pointed out that in view of the complex security concerns of the state, the peculiar ground situation prevailing therein, the upcoming panchayat and local body elections, insurgent and terror related activities, the unique law and order requirements, it is essential to have a head of the police force in the State of Jammu and Kashmir at all times.

"As such, as a purely ad-interim measure, the State Government has been constrained to appoint the Director General, Prisons of State of Jammu and Kashmir, Dilbagh Singh... as the In-Charge Director General of Police 'till a regular arrangement is made,'" it said.

The state government also said that the apex court guidelines, which envisages the role of the UPSC prior to the appointment of a DGP in a state, could not be followed as the "present case is not that of an 'anticipated vacancy' which would have enabled the state to forward a panel to the UPSC and comply with the other rigors of the applicable procedure."



It said that in view of the guidelines, the state government has now already approached the UPSC and forwarded a panel of senior-most officers from the state.

The apex court, while deciding the PIL filed by two former DGPs Prakash Singh and N K Singh in 2006, had issued several directions, including that state police chiefs will have a fixed tenure of two years.

It had said the appointment of DGPs and police officers should be merit-based and transparent and officers like DGPs and Superintendents of Police should have a minimum fixed tenure of two years.

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Afghan Ambassador to India Shaida Abdali has resigned from the post, saying he wants to serve the people of his country who are facing challenging situation.

Abdali has submitted his resignation letter on Wednesday when Afghan President Ashraf Ghani was on a day-long visit to India.

In his resignation letter, Abdali, who served in Delhi for six years, said he wanted to go back to Afghanistan and work with the people for development, peace and national unity.

"The exceptional warmth, hospitality and friendship extended to me during my tenure will remain a hallmark in my political career for which I'm deeply grateful to the friendly people and govt. of India," he said on Twitter.

"Serving my country for years in India, I felt the need to return and serve my country from within. During my tenure, I have had the honour of witnessing our relations going from strength to strength," he said.

It is not immediately known whether his resignation has been accepted or not.

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An Afghan official says the Taliban have carried out a series of coordinated attacks in central Ghazni province, killing five members of the security forces.

Arif Noori, a spokesman for the provincial governor, said three security outposts in Ab Band district were attacked by insurgents in coordinated raids on Thursday morning.

Two policemen were wounded in the attacks that lasted several hours as security personnel and insurgents exchanged gunfire.

Noori said six Taliban fighters were killed and four were wounded before the attacks were repelled.

Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said in a statement that the Taliban captured a district in Ghazni. Insurgents often exaggerate their battlefield gains.

Also on Thursday, police officer Amin Jan said a roadside bomb wounded five people in eastern Nangarhar province.

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The All India Muslim Personal Law Board (AIMPLB) has expressed "displeasure" over the ordinance to ban the practice of instant triple talaq, saying it will soon formulate its strategy to protest it.

The board will soon decide whether to move the Supreme Court against the ordinance or coordinate with the Opposition to block the bill in the Rajya Sabha when it is brought there to ratify the ordinance, AIMPLB general secretary Maulana Wali Rehmani told PTI Thursday.

"The board was expecting such an ordinance, but it will be in force for six months only," said Rehmani, referring to the maximum life of an ordinance.

He said though the government has made some improvements in the ordinance compared to the provisions in the original bill on triple talaq, it is "still erroneous constitutionally".

"The board's lawyers might approach the Supreme Court against it," said Rehmani.

"The second option is that when a bill to replace the ordinance comes in the Rajya Sabha, the board will approach the Opposition with its arguments to prevent its passage. The board will soon decide in its meeting which way to go," he said.

Claiming that the Narendra Modi government is confusing Muslims on the instant triple talaq issue, Rehmani said, "It's an attempt to malign the image of the community. It's the policy of the government to lead a campaign against Shariat laws with some Muslim women on their side."



"The government wants that such women rise in number so that it can openly claim that they are working for betterment of the Muslims," said Rehmani, suggesting that this law would shut all avenues of reconciliation for the Muslim women after triple talaq.

"The government is trying to take political mileage of this by ignoring Shariat provisions on triple talaq," he said.

Claiming that Union Law Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad's data on triple talaq was "false", Rehmani said, "There is no listing of triple talaq cases."



Darul Uloom Deoband too expressed its concern over the ordinance.

"The Indian Constitution gives religions freedom. The issue of talaq and nikah are religious and no government should interfere in it. It's against the soul of the Constitution," said Maulana Abdul Qasim Nomani of the Islamic institution.

The Union Cabinet Wednesday approved an ordinance to ban the practice of instant triple talaq, stating that there was a "compelling necessity" to bring the measure as instances of 'talaq-e-biddat' continued unabated despite the Supreme Court striking down the provision.

Under the ordinance, giving instant triple talaq will be illegal and void and will attract a jail term of three years for the husband.

Seeking to allay the fears that the law could be misused, the government has also included some safeguards in it such as providing for bail to the accused husband.

These amendments were cleared by the Cabinet on August 29.

All India Majlis-e-Ittehad-ul Muslimeen (AIMIM) chief Asaduddin Owaisi Wednesday said the ordinance was "anti-Muslim women" and would do them more injustice.

Owaisi claimed the ordinance was to divert the people's attention from the issues like rising fuel prices and dwindling rupee.

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Rajya Sabha member Amar Singh targeted Samajwadi Party (SP) president Akhilesh Yadav and alleged that he had "deceived" all those who were close to him.

Talking to reporters here Wednesday evening, the Independent MP, who was once an SP leader, said, "There is no one who has not been deceived by Akhilesh...It is in his nature to hurt people."



Alleging that the Samajwadi Party was pursuing of appeasement, Singh also lashed out at party MP Ram Gopal Yadav, a confidant of Akhilesh Yadav.

Recalling his contribution in Akhilesh Yadav's life, Singh said that he had gone to Australia for his education, got him party ticket and made him president.

Reiterating his charges against senior SP leader Azam Khan, the Rajya Sabha MP said that party was patronising a person who had a "wrong mindset" and makes indecent comments.

"Azam Khan has made indecent comments against my wife and daughters and a CD recording his remarks has been handed over to Governor Ram Naik and Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath...I am awaiting for action against him..if it is not done from here I will lodge an FIR in Delhi. I have confidence that the Narendra Modi-led government will do justice with me," Amar Singh added.

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Dalit leader Prakash Ambedkar, who has announced an electoral tie-up with the All India Majlis-e-Ittehad-ul Muslimeen (AIMIM), met Maharashtra Congress leaders Thursday to discuss a possible alliance.

A Congress source, however, said the party is in a quandary as it wants alliance with Ambedkar but not with the AIMIM.

Ambedkar, who heads Bharipa Bahujan Mahasangh, met Congress leaders at the official residence of Leader of Opposition in the Assembly Radhakrishna Vikhe Patil here.

Former state Congress chief Manikrao Thakare was also present at the meeting, a Congress source said.

Ambedkar told Vikhe Patil and Thakare that he is keen on alliance with both the Congress and AIMIM, said the source.

"Congress does not consider AIMIM as a like-minded party. It has communal image, which helps the BJP. Vikhe Patil and (state Congress chief) Ashok Chavan will discuss Ambedkar's proposal with the central leadership," the source said.

Earlier in the day, Ambedkar told reporters here that he wants alliance with the Congress, but has reservations about the NCP, its ally.

"I have joined hands with the AIMIM and now kept the doors open for a tie-up with Congress. But I am not comfortable with the NCP, as its Lok Sabha member from Satara talks in favour of Sambhaji Bhide," he said.

NCP's Satara MP Udayanraje Bhosale has been vocal about his support to Bhide, a pro-Hindutva leader who is facing a police case for allegedly inciting violence at Koregaon Bhima near Pune in January this year.

Ambedkar also claimed that though NCP chief Sharad Pawar is secular, "his party is not".

A Congress leader said on the condition of anonymity that like-minded parties need to project solidarity to take on the BJP in the state in the next year's Assembly and Lok Sabha polls.

"In a multi-party polity like in Maharashtra, coalitions have become a situational compulsion since none of the parties have capable candidates for all constituencies. Congress and NCP are the main parties in Opposition and they have to accommodate smaller outfits," the leader said.

Congress and NCP, which have declared that they will fight the polls together, have approached farmer leader Raju Shetti, Kapil Patil of the Loktantrik Janata Dal and the CPI and CPM for alliance, he said.

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In an atmosphere of anger and gloom, a huge gathering Thursday bid a tearful adieu to BSF jawan Narender Singh, who was brutally killed by Pakistani troopers along the international border (IB) near Jammu.

The mortal remains of BSF Head Constable Narender Singh were cremated with full state honours at his native Thana Kalan village in Haryana's Sonipat district.

Slogans of 'Bharat Mata ki Jai', Narender Singh Amar Rahe'rent the air as the body, wrapped in a tricolour, reached the village in the morning.

Several villagers chanted slogans against Pakistan. Family members and locals demanded that Pakistan should be taught a lesson for the "barbaric" act.

Pakistani troops had slit the throat of a BSF jawan after fatally shooting him along the international border (IB)near Jammu on Tuesday, according to reports.

The 52-year-old BSF jawan is survived by two sons and his wife.

The funeral pyre was lit by his elder son Mohit.

"We are proud of our father for laying down his life for the nation. His death should be avenged," said a teary-eyed Mohit.

"Not everyone gets a chance to be draped in the tricolour...But we just cannot keep feeling proud. We will feel proud again, when another death takes place. We demand action against Pakistan," he said.

He also demanded that the concerned authorities provide whatever help the family needs. Other family members also appealed to the Centre to act tough against Pakistan.

Several prominent persons inlcuding Haryana minister Krishan Bedi, Congress leader Randeep Singh Surjewala and senior officials of BSF were also among the mourners.

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An angry Karnataka Chief Minister H D Kumaraswamy Thursday warned BJP to be restrained in its speech about his father former Prime Minister H D Deve Gowda and his family, saying he can even ask people to rise in revolt against it if it continued to disturb his government.

Asserting that the government was under his command, Kumaraswamy targeted BJP state unit chief and former chief minister B S Yeddyurappa in a no-holds-barred attack.

Kumaraswamy, who is heading the Congress-JDS coalition government, alleged that BJP was attempting to topple his ministry and luring the MLAs of both parties.

"If you dig too much (into our affairs), then we too have many things at our disposal. Government is in our hand.

Don't I have the authority to do whatever I can? I caution him to becareful," a visibly upset chief minister told reporters.

"Mind you," Kumaraswamy told Yeddyurappa, "you are sitting in a glass house. Exercise restraint while talking. Seriousness is expected from a person of your age.

This is my sane advice."



"I want to convey to him in clear terms that he should avoid landing in trouble by giving such statements," Kumaraswamy said.

Kumaraswamy lost his cool over Yeddyurappa's alleged statement in Hubballi, where he reportedly said his sole objective was to "finish off father-sons (Deve Gowda and his sons)."



"He (Yeddyurappa) gave a statement in Hubballi that his sole objective is to finish off father-sons and sending them to jail is his aim. Finally what happened? Who went to jail?"The chief minister called Yeddyurappa "the father of percentage wise commission (bribe) system" and said he had standardised bribery in the government.

Another reason that irked Kumaraswamy was reports that the BJP had approached JD(S) MLA from Nagamangala constituency Suresh Gowda asking him to pack his baggage to leave for Mumbai as already 18 dissident MLAs were with the BJP and ready to join them.

"Suresh Gowda was asked to have a meeting in Bengaluru. Another MLA Shivalli was approached and offered Rs 5 crore," the chief minister said.

Hitting back angrily, Yeddyurappa said he knew his limits but it was Kumaraswamy who had crossed lines of decency.

"As a former chief minister and the state president of anational party, I know my limits. It is you who crossed thelines of decency while speaking.

Why are you silent till nowon (former minister) A Manju's allegations that your family grabbed government land? What is your reply?" Yeddyurappa sought to know from the chief minister.

He alleged that the number of land scams Deve Gowda's family were involved in, nobody could ever achieve it and the chief minister knew all of them.

Yeddyurappa charged Kumaraswamy with resorting to of vendetta and reminded him that the post of chief minister was not permanent.

"In our five years of rule, we never indulged in of vendetta. You are trying to create confusion by indulging in the of vendetta," Yeddyurappa charged.

Soon after the chief minister's statement went viral, Congress and JD(S) activists staged a demonstration outside Yeddyurappa's house raising slogans against him for his alleged attempts to topple the coalition government.

The BJP condemned the demonstration saying that the state government was trying to muzzle the voice of opposition, which showed its "anti-democratic face."



They also allegedpolice intentionally did not act against the demonstrators.

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"Manmarziyaan" has landed in fresh controversy over the deletion of three smoking-related scenes with director Anurag Kashyap expressing a strong displeasure over the move, implying that he was not consulted about the decision.

The scenes in question had upset a certain section of the Sikh community and Kashyap, who is out of the country, had on Wednesday issued a "genuine" apology to those who were hurt genuinely.

The makers had apparently approached the censor board to chop off the alleged objectionable scenes from the film, starring Taapsee Pannu, Abhishek Bachchan and Vicky Kaushal.

Kashyap vented out his anger against the move on Twitter, calling out Eros International, who are the presenters of the film.

"Before my tweet is taken down - Congratulations. Here by all problems of Punjab are solved and Sikh youth have been saved . Happy to be back in LaLa land again. Next time you are threatened by a film please call Kishore Lulla directly... Eros knows how to solve matters in minutes," he tweeted.

The director had posted Lulla's number in an earlier tweet but it was deleted as it was found in violation with Twitter's privacy policy.

In a statement, Eros, without addressing Kashyap's grievances, said Colour Yellow Productions, run by director Aanand L Rai, was the creative producer.

"Colour Yellow is the creative producer on 'Manmarziyaan'. We have the deepest respect for all communities and it is our intention to maintain neutrality and never intentionally hurt or disrespect any religion or community.

"We have the greatest respect for the law of the land and follow and implement all guidance of the Censor Board which is the supreme authority for film content in the country," Eros said in its statement.

"Manmarziyaan" producers deleted three scenes from the film after members of the Sikh community objected to a scene where Abhishek Bachchan's character, a Sikh in the movie, is shown smoking after removing his turban.

The producers approached the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC) regarding the deletion of the scenes.

According to a censor copy, the three deleted scenes include a 29-second smoking sequence of Abhishek, a minute long scene featuring Taapsee Pannu and Abhishek entering a gurudwara and an 11-second scene where Taapsee is shown smoking.

Taapsee also took to Twitter and lashed out at the move.

"I am sure this edit will assure that no Sikh will ever Smoke and no woman will ever think about ANYONE else while getting married in a Gurudwara. THIS surely will make Waheguru proud and assures that MY religion is the purest,most righteous and peaceful ! #Proud" Taapsee tweeted.

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An Arab Israeli woman jailed for five months for incitement to violence and support for a terrorist organisation in online poems and other social media posts was released from prison Thursday.

Dareen Tatour posted a video clip of herself reading her poem "Resist, my people, resist them," in October 2015, accompanied by pictures of clashes between Palestinians and Israeli forces, according to authorities.

The posts on YouTube and Facebook came as a wave of Israeli-Palestinian violence was erupting, including Palestinian knife attacks.

The 36-year-old Israeli citizen was sentenced in July.

She was released on Thursday due to time served before her conviction, she and a prison spokesman said.

"Freedom is something so sweet that I can't even describe it," Tatour told AFP after her release.

She added that she planned to publish a collection of poems and a novel on her experience in prison.

International writers' group PEN defended Tatour's actions.

She was "convicted for doing what writers do every day -- we use our words to peacefully challenge injustice", the group said.

The offending verses were quoted in Hebrew in the charge sheet, but according to an English translation on the Arabic literature site ArabLit, they contained the following: "For an Arab Palestine, I will not succumb to the 'peaceful solution,' Never lower my flags, Until I evict them from my land, Resist the settler's robbery, And follow the caravan of martyrs."



Prosecutors said that on October 4, 2015 she also quoted a statement by Islamic Jihad calling for "continuation of the intifada in every part of the West Bank", alleging it showed her support for the outlawed militant group.

Tatour, from the Arab village of Reineh near Nazareth, was arrested a week later.

Arab Israelis are descendants of Palestinians who remained on their land following the creation of Israel in 1948.

They account for some 17.5 per cent of Israel's population and largely support the Palestinian cause.

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Assam government would bear the two per cent premium for farmers to help them reap rich dividends from the Prime Minister Fasal Bima Yojana (PMFBY), Chief Minister Sarbananda Sonowal said on Thursday.

The PMFBY is an actuarial premium based scheme under which a farmer has to pay a maximum premium of 2% for Kharif, 1.5% for Rabi food & oilseed crops.

The state government will provide the premium to enable full insured amount to the farmers against crop loss on account of natural calamities, the chief minister said while chairing a meeting of agricultural department officials here.

He directed the agriculture department to ensure complete implementation of Pradhan Mantri Krishi Sinchayee Yojana, an irrigation scheme, to ensure improved farm productivity and better utilisation of the resources in the state.

Sonowal also directed the department to carry out the registration process of all the farmers of the state and issue them identity cards.

Eight progressive farmers of the state will be appointed as brand ambassadors so that they can carry forward their success stories in the field of agriculture to other places of the country and outside, he said.

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Strides Pharma Science Thursday said the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) has decided not to oppose the merger of generic pharma companies Arrow and Apotex, after finding the transaction would not substantially lessen competition in any market.

In May 2018, Strides Pharma Science Ltd, which runs its business under the Arrow brand in Australia, and Canada's Apotex Inc., announced their intention to merge Arrow Pharmaceuticals and Apotex Australia into a new company.

"Strides and Apotex today welcomed the ACCC's decision to clear the merger of Arrow Pharmaceuticals and Apotex Australia," Strides Shasun said in a BSE filing.

"Combined, they will supply around half the market for generic prescription pharmaceuticals to pharmacies in Australia. However, after market inquiries and analysis of documents and data, the ACCC considers that the transaction will not substantially lessen competition in any market," it added.

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An Azeri businessman was killed in his office in Istanbul by a former Azeri ex-police chief who was detained by Turkish police a few hours later, local media reported on Thursday.

Etimat Ismayilov, the son of former prosecutor-general Ilyas Ismayilov in Azerbaijan during the Soviet era who also later served as a former minister of justice, was shot in the head and heart, according to Hurriyet daily.

The suspect had come to Ismailov's office for a meeting but the two men began arguing and it became an "armed fight" late on Wednesday, the DHA agency said.

The reason for their argument was not known.

The former police chief, believed to be a retired colonel and businessman with



Turkish and Azerbaijani investments, then fled as the businessman was taken to hospital where he was pronounced dead.

The suspect was then detained by police a few hours later.

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Gareth Bale scored as Real Madrid moved on from the departures of Cristiano Ronaldo and Zinedine Zidane with a 3-0 win over Roma on Wednesday to confidently launch their pursuit of a fourth successive Champions League title.

Isco curled in a terrific free-kick just before half-time at the Santiago Bernabeu, with Bale powering in a second and Mariano Diaz striking late as Real made a convincing start to their Group G campaign.

"I thought the performance was very good tonight; the only disappointment was that we didn't score more," said Bale, who struck for the fourth time in five matches.

"Real Madrid will always be Real Madrid, no matter who leaves. We keep on trying to win, keep on trying to score goals."



Julen Lopetegui fielded 10 of the 11 players who began the 3-1 victory over Liverpool in last season's final, with Bale -- the two-goal hero after coming off the bench in Kiev -- taking the place of the departed Ronaldo.

Keylor Navas was selected in goal ahead of close-season signing Thibaut Courtois, while Roma boss Eusebio Di Francesco handed a senior debut to 19-year-old midfielder Nicolo Zaniolo.

Last season's semi-finalists quickly found themselves subjected to sustained pressure, as Bale drilled narrowly wide of Robin Olsen's left-hand post within the opening five minutes.

Sweden international Olsen, the replacement for Alisson following his move to Liverpool, stuck out a strong hand to deny Isco after he was slipped in by Luka Modric, the UEFA Player of the Year.

Dani Carvajal should have done better with a header when left unmarked at the far post, while Olsen tipped over from Sergio Ramos from a corner as Real asserted their dominance.

An Isco snapshot forced Olsen to turn behind, but the Spain midfielder put Real ahead on the stroke of half-time when he majestically whipped a free-kick over the wall from 20 yards.

Turkish winger Cengiz Under went close to an equaliser early in the second half after a darting run and stinging shot drew an excellent stop from Navas.

Bale then saw a deflected effort bounce back off the crossbar, but the Welshman doubled Real's lead on 58 minutes with an angled low finish after he was released into space down the left by Modric.

Aleksandar Kolarov's vicious strike from distance drew another smart stop from Navas, with Olsen pulling off an even better save to keep out a left-footed effort by Toni Kroos.

Mariano, wearing the number seven shirt vacated by Ronaldo, rounded out the win in stoppage time with a searing shot into the top corner from the edge of the box in his first game back at Real since rejoining from Lyon.

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Bishop Franco Mulakkal, who was questioned by Kerala police for the second day over rape charges by a nun, has been temporarily relieved of his pastoral responsibilities by Pope Francis, the Catholic Bishop Conference of India (CBCI) said Thursday.

The decision was welcomed by the group of nuns staging a protest here for the past 13 days seeking justice for their fellow nun. They said it was their "first victory" in the struggle against the Bishop.

The Pope appointed Bishop Emeritus of the Archdiocese of Bombay Agnelo Rufino Gracias as the Apostolic administrator of the diocese of Jalandhar with immediate effect, a CBCI statement said.

The announcement came even as the senior Catholic priest is being questioned by the Special Investigation Team for the second day here Thursday.

The Pope took the decision in response to Mulakkal's September 16 letter offering to "step aside temporarily" as the Bishop of the Jalandhar diocese, Kerala Catholic Bishops Council Spokesman Fr Varghese Vallikkattu told PTI.

He wrote the letter after Kerala police summoned him to appear before it for questioning in the case.

According to the statement issued by CBCI president Cardinal Oswald Gracias, "The Holy Father has received the request of Bishop Franco Mulakkal to be temporarily relieved of his pastoral responsibilities in the diocese of Jalandhar."



"Having considered all circumstances the Holy Father has accepted this request of Bishop Mulakkal and has appointed Bishop Agnelo Rufino Gracias, Auxilary Bishop Emeritus of the Archdiocese of Bombay as Apostolic Administrator of the diocese of Jalandhar... with immediate effect," it said.

"Our prayers accompany Bishop Gracias as he takes on his responsibility," the CBCI president said.

A Jalandhar diocese release had said the Bishop expressed his desire to step aside in the background of what it claimed was the Kerala High Court's "opinion in favour of Bishop Franco which says, there is lack of adequate evidence for the Bishop's arrest indicating his innocence."



"He decided on his own to make his request to Holy Father. He is confident that his request will be accepted by the Vatican," the diocese said.

The bishop had earlier handed over administrative responsibility of Jalandhar diocese to Msgr Mathew Kokkandam in his absence ahead of his Kerala visit.

The group of nuns staging a protest here along with various various Catholic reform organisations seeking Mulakkal's arrest and justice for the nun, lauded the Pope's decision.

"We are very happy..the Vatican has finally heard our prayers. It is the first victory in our struggle against the Bishop," a nun said.

Bishop Mulakkal has been accused of repeated rape by the Kerala-based nun of Missionaries of Jesus Congregation of the Jalandhar diocese. He has denied the charges.

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Wiper Party leader Kalonzo Musyoka has thrown his weight behind a proposal by President Uhuru Kenyatta to reduce VAT on fuel from 16 to 8 percent.

In a statement on Wednesday, the former Vice President also backed a statement from the National Super Alliance (NASA) parliamentary group released on Tuesday supporting the 8 percent levy.

Kalonzo further urged Wiper parliamentarians to accord President Uhuru unequivocal support especially on the reduction of VAT on fuel.

I call upon all WDM-K parliamentarians to give their unequivocal support to the proposals by President Uhuru Kenyatta, and particularly the reduction of the fuel tax from 16 to eight percent, said Kalonzo.

He described this as a step towards supporting the building bridges initiative that brought the ruling Jubilee and NASA coalitions together.

The NASA co-principal also noted that he is aware of the suffering of a majority of Kenyans through harsh economic times saying the struggle is real. And the burden is heavy.

He, however, observed that the government has to strike a balance between catering for the welfare of our people and meeting our development needs through the Budget.

I think many of you will appreciate that we have to strike a balance between catering for the welfare of our people and meeting our development needs through the Budget. And the balance is truly a delicate one. On one hand, we as leaders must endeavor to ensure that mwananchi is not overburdened with taxation even as we strive to meet our development goals and targets, said Kalonzo.

While attributing Kenyas economic woes to the rampant corruption, Kalonzo called on the government to re-energize its war against corrupt individuals and cartels.

We know that part of the reason Kenya is struggling is because of rampant graft. This must stop if we are to survive as a country, Kalonzo said.

Kalonzo concluded by calling on the three East African governments to harmonize their taxation regimes to ensure citizens do not feel oppressed.
US based fintech firm Biz2Credit is digitally enhancing its operations in India and is targeting Rs 100 crore topline over next two years.

Biz2Credit is an online lending resource and platform for small and medium-enterprises (SMEs).

"The company has partnered with Tata Capital and Tally Solutions and is talking to several banks and NBFCs for partnership. We are targeting Rs 100 crore revenue over the next two years and digitally enhance our operations in India," Biz2Credit president Ramit Arora said in a statement here.

The recent alliance with Tata Capital expands loan offerings on online marketplace and gain access to a full range of Biz2Credits offerings including data and risk analytics through the patented BizAnalyzer Score to innovatively fund small businesses transactions.

The company has also tied up with India's biggest DSA Andromeda and is looking to strengthen its portfolio and expand its reach across the country. The recent tie-up will allow the company to cater to the base of borrowers in India across 16 cities where Andromeda operates, Arora said.

The platform will enable borrowers to complete all documentation pertaining to the loan application steps digitally. Also, loan approval will become much faster owing to the seamless integration with a growing list of lenders already integrated on the platform. In addition, borrowers receive real-time updates on the status of their applications through the online dashboard.

The fintech industry is growing at a compounded rate of 22 per cent annually and is set to become a USD 73 billion industry by 2020.

To sustain this expansion the company is also looking to increase the number of employees by 25 per cent. Currently it has 250 employees which includes underwriters, IT and operations, Arora said.

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The merger of Bank of Baroda, Vijaya Bank and Dena Bank by the government poses short-term challenges like spurt in bad assets, but will be beneficial over a longer term, a report said on Thursday.

Slippages may increase in the short-term as recognition of non-performing assets is harmonised and accelerated, said in a note.

Stating that it may take appropriate rating actions after the merger proposed earlier this week gets a formal approval, it said the combined entity will require "significant bandwidth" in the management for business growth and NPA resolutions.

Dena Bank's lower capital buffers are offset by Vijaya Bank's higher capital buffers, it said, adding that the merged bank may need additional tier 1 capital depending on internal accruals for FY19.

However, from a longer-term perspective, the merger will be positive with benefits like reducing combined operating costs, lower funding cost and strengthened risk management practises, it said.

The asset-liability mismatch issues at smaller (Vijaya and Dena) can be better addressed at the consolidated level, it said.



A successful merger can also impact the capital requirements for the government as internal accruals can go up with efficiencies, it said, pointing out that this may act as a roadmap for further consolidations in the public sector banking space.

The product offerings of the three are "largely homogeneous" and 50 per cent of the combined entity advances are to the corporate segment, followed by 25 per cent to retail.

The combined entity's 16 per cent branches are in the top 12 banked districts of the country (which account for 42 per cent of deposits and 55 per cent of advances).



There is a "moderate" scope to decrease branches in Mumbai, Thane, Ahmedabad and Pune, while Gurugram and Chennai offer a "limited scope" for branch consolidation.

However, there is significant scope of branch rationalisation in Gujarat, Karnataka, Maharashtra, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh, it said, adding that 65 per cent of the combined entity's branches are concentrated in these states.

In the present form, the smaller size Vijaya Bank and Dena Bank may have had to compromise on margins in order to lend to better-rated corporates, it said pointing out that a merger strengthens lending ability for the



In a surprise move, the government announced a merger of the three entities earlier this week, which will create the country's third-biggest lender.
Nine people were killed and nine others injured when Boko Haram fighters raided two villages in northeast Nigeria, the civilian militia said on Thursday.

Jihadists in pickup trucks attacked Kalari Abdiye and nearby Amarwa, some 20 kilometres (12 miles) from Borno state capital Maiduguri, on Wednesday evening. "The gunmen, who were obviously Boko Haram fighters, killed nine people and injured nine more in the attacks," Ibrahim Liman, from the Civilian Joint Taskforce (CJTF) told AFP.

"They attacked the villages around 8:30 pm (1930 GMT) when it was raining and people were indoors." Frightened residents rushed out of their homes but when they did so they were shot "indicriminately", said another CJTF leader, Babakura Kolo.

"The two villages were completely burnt by the attackers," he added, giving a similar toll.

Both villages are in Konduga, a district of Borno state that has suffered repeated attacks in a nine-year insurgency which has left more than 27,000 dead. Last December six people were killed in a suicide attack on a crowded market in Amarwa, while 10 people lost their lives in April when two female suicide bombers attacked the village.

It was not clear which of the two Boko Haram factions was behind the attacks and there was no claim of responsibility.

Fighters loyal to the group's long-time leader, Abubakar Shekau, have indiscriminately targeted civilians, particularly using suicide bombers and hit-and-run raids.

A separate faction backed by the Islamic state group and known as ISWAP (Islamic State West Africa Province) has focused more on attacking military and government targets.

But more radical elements are said to have taken over the ISWAP leadership, prompting fears of an upsurge in violence against the local population. On Monday, ISWAP killed a Red Cross health worker who had been kidnapped with two of her colleagues in a raid six months earlier, stoking fears for the other hostages being held.

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November 03, 2021, Wednesday

The COP26 is being held from October 31 to November 12 under the presidency of the UK which is partnering with Italy for the
The BSF has registered a strong protest with its Pakistani counterpart over the killing and slitting of throat of one of its jawans in Jammu and has told the Pak Rangers that the act was "unsoldierly", official sources said Thursday.

They said the atmosphere along the border areas was "tense" and a high alert is in place along this region of the Indo-Pak international border.

The sources said the Pakistani side, which spoke to the Border Security Force officials in the noon over phone, "denied any hand" in the killing of Head Constable Narender Singh on September 18.

The Indian side termed the act as "unsoldierly".

It was informed that Pakistani troops "shot and killed" the BSF trooper, they said.

They added that on getting this response, the BSF told the other side that any future misadventure on the India-Pakistan border will be the responsibility of the Pak Rangers.

"A brief phone call talk took place between the two sides this noon. When it was brought to the notice of Pakistan that they had killed the jawan by resorting to unprovoked fire, they flatly refused any hand of their troops in the incident," a senior official said.

This was the second round of protest that the BSF registered with their counterparts in the last over three days over the killing and throat slitting of their jawan who along with seven others had gone beyond the border fence in the Ramgarh sector as part of a elephant grass (sarkanda) cutting patrol.

The official said the force has issued a "high alert" to all its forward locations on the 192-km-long frontier in Jammu in the backdrop of this incident which is suspected to be "handiwork of a probably a pair of troops from the other side".

The force, they said, has also observed the movement of helicopters and drones in the forward locations across the border in Jammu and hence border posts and patrols have been asked to remind extra vigilant, they said.

The force has also sought, they said, for a sector commander-level (Deputy Inspector General rank level) talks between the two sides in Jammu to thrash out issues but has not received any positive response.

They added that various field formations of the force have been receiving 'spoof calls' from across the border where people masquerading as government intelligence operatives or journalists are wanting to seek details about the incident.

Over a dozen calls have been received over the last two days on the personal and official numbers of field officers and it is suspected that the calls are being made from across the border, they said.

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Bahujan Samaj Party today said that the BSP will not participate in upcoming urban local bodies (ULB) elections in Jammu and Kashmir as the situation was "not conducive for the polls" in the state.

"BSP high command has decided not to contest the municipal elections to respect the sentiment of the majority of the people who are not in favour of the polls at this moment," state president of the party Som Raj Majotra told reporters here.

He said the atmosphere in the state was not conducive for holding elections.

"Conducting elections in such circumstances is likely to aggrevaite the situation in the state," Majotra said claiming "the BJP has failed bitterly on all fronts and is working in a dictatorialway ignoring democratic norms".

The BSP leader suggested the Governor Satya Pal Malik to postpone the elections and work for normalisation of the situation.

National Conference (NC) and Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) have also boycotted the polls.

He accused the BJP-RSS combine of forcing elections on the people of the state against their wishes.

BJP-RSS know their support base has dwindled and want a free run for their candidates in the absence of main players as they love power more than anything else, he claimed.

Asked about the stand of the party on the Panchayat elections scheduled to be held in November-December, he said the party would take a decision on it later after taking into account the ground situation.

The urban local body elections will be conducted in four phases starting October 8, whereas the panchayat polls will be held in nine-phases from November 17.

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The Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) has said that the government's claim of Gujarat being 'Open Defecation Free' (ODF) appears to be wrong, as many rural households were found to have no toilets.

In a survey conducted in eight districts, nearly 30 per cent of houses were found to have no toilets, said the CAG report tabled in the state Assembly on Wednesday.

The Union government had informed the Lok Sabha in February this year that 11 states including Gujarat have been declared as ODF under the Swachh Bharat Mission (SBM).

"The state government declared all the districts of Gujarat as ODF by October 2, 2017. However, information provided by 120 test-checked Gram Panchayats under eight selected District Panchayats for the period of 2014-17 revealed that 29 per cent households still did not have access to toilets (individual or public)," the CAG report said.

"Therefore, the claim of the state government that all the districts of Gujarat were ODF did not appear to be correct," it said.

The survey was conducted in the districts of Dahod, Banaskantha, Chhotaudepur, Dang, Patan, Valsad, Jamnagar and Junagadh.

Of the total of 54,008 households in eight districts, 15,728 households had no access to toilets, the CAG said.

"Audit observed that the administration had declared all the districts as ODF on achieving the targets set out in the baseline survey conducted in 2012," noted the CAG.

"However, this list was not updated after 2012 and therefore, a number of households did not have any access to toilets and they remained uncovered," said the report.

When the issue was raised with the state government in March 2018, the authorities claimed that all the villages are now ODF, as more toilets were built later "through CSR (corporate social responsibility) initiative".

However, the CAG noted, auditors observed that people were still not able to use toilets due to various reasons.

In 41 out of the total 120 test-checked villages, the toilets constructed under the Swachh Bharat Mission could not be used as there was no water connection, it said.

In 15 villages "toilets were not being used either due to non-availability of water and soak pits or they were incomplete", the report said.

In tribal-dominated Kaprada tehsil of Valsad district, over 17,400 toilets were found to be "defunct", it said.

In his response to the CAG, the Assistant Commissioner (SBM-Gramin) stated that "2,529 of 17,423 defunct toilets had been newly constructed and put to use as of March 2018."



But the CAG said the reply was "not tenable as a significant number of households were either without toilets or not able to use them due to non-availability of water or incomplete structure".

It recommended that the government cover all the "individual households left out...to ensure that everyone has access to toilets".

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Management of sustainable tourism from economic, social, cultural and environmental perspectives was needed, a US expert on sustainable tourism Kathleen Pessolano said Thursday.

A power-point presentation on 'Sustainable Tourism in Puducherry' was made by Pessolano at a function organised here jointly by the US Consulate General in Chennai and the Territorial Department of Tourism.

The field of sustainable destination management was relatively new with ever-increasing domestic and international destination tourists to South India, she said.

Hence, it was essential for communities to establish policies and systems, she said.

The policies and systems were necessary to thrive while promoting tourism in the years to come, said Pessolano, who is the destination programme director for the UN-backed Global Sustainable Tourism Council(GSTC).

Also, private-publicpartnership was required to pool in resources to address shared challenges and generate mutual benefits across various sectors, she said.

Cultural affairs officer of the US Consulate General in Chennai Moulik Berkana made introductory remarks.

Pessolano is visiting Chennai, Kolkata and Mumbai under the aegis of the US Department of State connecting US experts with institutions in India through lectures, workshops and seminars, a press release of the US Consulate General said.

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Dalit leader Prakash Ambedkar said on Thursday that he is open to alliance with the Congress but not with the NCP, claiming that the Sharad Pawar-led party is not "secular".

Ambedkar announced earlier this week that his party, Bharipa Bahujan Mahasangh, would join hands with Asaduddin Owaisi-led AIMIM in the coming Lok Sabha and Assembly elections.

"I have joined hands with the AIMIM and now kept the doors open for a tie-up with Congress. But I am not comfortable with the NCP, as its Lok Sabha member from Satara talks in favour of Sambhaji Bhide," Ambedkar said, speaking to the media here.

Bhide, a pro-Hindutva leader, is facing a police case for allegedly inciting violence at Koregaon Bhima near Pune in January this year.

NCP's Satara MP Udayanraje Bhosale has been vocal about his support to Bhide.

"We are ready to forge alliance with Congress even on the last day for submission of nominations for elections," Ambedkar said.

Asked further about his reservations about the Sharad Pawar-led party, Ambedkar said, "Congress should assure us that NCP will not align with the BJP, then we will decide.

"Pawar himself is a secular leader but his party is not," he said.

"After the 2014 (Maharashtra) Assembly elections, Shiv Sena was not keen on extending support to the BJP. But because of pressure from his MLAs, Pawar supported the BJP for a month. Therefore we cannot join hands with the NCP," Ambedkar said.

Commenting on RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat's statements during his lecture-series in Delhi, the Dalit leader termed them as an attempt to mislead voters.

"These statements are a distraction and an attempt to portray that RSS is changing. It is trickery and nothing else," he said.

Former RSS supremo M S Golwalkar's book "We or Our Nationhood Defined" is "as good as Gospel" for the Sangh, Ambedkar said.

"The thoughts and ideas propagated in the book are not acceptable to us," he said.

"The RSS has no regard for the Constitution....The book upholds the idea that Hinduism will remain the primary religion at the national level and other religions will remain secondary," Ambedkar claimed.

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The Director of Public Prosecution (DPP) Noordin Haji wants the case against Patel Dam owner Perry Mansukh Kansagara and eight others transferred from Naivasha to Nairobi.

According to Haji, there have been attempts to interfere with witnesses and tamper with evidence, hence the need to move the trial to Nairobi.

DPP Noordin Haji wants the trial of Perry Mansukh & 8 others in Solai case transferred from Naivasha to Nairobi on grounds that scene of crime had been interfered with, there was attempt to tamper with witnesses and that security of prosecutors wasnt assured, the DPPs office said in a tweet on Wednesday.

This comes after State counsel Catherine Mwaniki, in an affidavit, accused the Patel coffee estate owners in Naivasha and WARMA officers of tampering with the scene of the crime.

Ms Mwaniki alleged that some of the key witnesses had been transferred and others threatened, with the assistance of the local administration.

She said the situation has made it hard for the Witness Prosecution Agency to access them.

Perry Mansukh Kansagara and his co-accused are charged with causing the deaths of 47 people who perished after the Patel Dam in Solai, Nakuru County broke its banks.

In July, Mr. Mansukh, Vinoj Kumar (Patel farm General Manager) and Nakuru County Director of Water Johnson Kamau Njuguna were arraigned in a Naivasha Court and charged with manslaughter, neglect of official duty and failing to prepare an environment impact assessment report.

The three pleaded not guilty before Naivasha Principal Magistrate Joseph Karanja and were released on a Sh2.5 million cash bail.
"True Detective" helmer Cary Fukunaga has been announced as the replacement of Danny Boyle for the upcoming James Bond movie.

The was shared by producers in a statement posted on Twitter, saying that the 41-year-old filmmaker, best known for directing films such as "Jane Eyre" and "Beasts of No Nation", will start shooting for the project in March next year with a release date of February 14, 2020.

"We are delighted to be working with Cary. His versatility and innovation make him an excellent choice for our next James Bond adventure," said Michael G. Wilson and Barbara Broccoli in the statement.

Boyle had last month dropped out of the project, which will mark Daniel Craig's last outing as the famed British spy, over creative difference with the producers. He was supposed to start shooting in December.

The director had boarded the project along with his "Trainspotting" co-writer, John Hodge, but they both have now exited it.

Last week, screenwriters Neal Purvis and Robert Wade, who have co-written six James Bond films from "The World Is Not Enough" to "Spectre", were hired to write a new script for the film.

Fukunaga's name comes as a surprise to many as he was not even in contention for the coveted job. Directors like Christopher McQuarrie, Denis Villenueve, Yann Demange and David Mackenzie were leading the race for the director's chair.

Fukunaga is best known for helming the first season of HBO's crime series "True Detective", for which he rightfully won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Directing for a Drama Series in 2014.

His most recent project is Netflix series "Maniac", which is set to premiere on Thursday on the streaming giant's platform.

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Central government employees can fly to Jammu and Kashmir, Northeast region and the Andaman and Nicobar Islands while availing leave travel concession (LTC) allowance for two more years till September 2020, according to an official order issued Thursday.

The employees get reimbursement of tickets for to and fro journey, besides paid leaves, when they avail LTC allowance.

They are also allowed to travel in any private airline to these places, the order issued by the Personnel Ministry said.

The Centre had in September 2014 relaxed the LTC rules to allow government staff to travel by air to Northeast region, Jammu and Kashmir and the Andaman and Nicobar Islands.

The relaxation is being extended time to time. It was last extended for two years in 2016.

The scheme allowing government servants to travel by air to Northeast region, J-K and the Andaman and Nicobar Islands is extended for a further period of two years, till September 25, 2018, the ministry said.

The facility of air journey to non-entitled government staff is also extended for the same period.

There are about 48.41 lakh central government employees.

The Personnel Ministry has also warned employees against misuse of LTC rules.

"Efforts should be made by the government servants to book the air tickets at the cheapest fare possible. All the ministries or departments are advised to bring it to the notice of all their employees that any misuse of LTC will be viewed seriously and the employees will be liable for appropriate action under the rules," it said.

In order to keep a check on any kind of misuse of LTC, all departments are advised to randomly get some air tickets, submitted by the officials, verified from the airlines concerned with regard to the actual cost of air travel vis-a-vis the cost indicated on the air tickets submitted by the officials, said the Personnel Ministry's order, issued to secretaries of all central government departments.

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Union minister Kiren Rijiju has assured Arunachal Pradesh government that an inter-ministerial team will be visiting East Siang district soon to assess the damages caused by the recent floods, an official release said here Thursday.

Siang river, which originates in Tibet, was in spate in August and September due to heavy rain in China.

Over 1,000 families living in the catchment areas of East Siang district were affected in the flood.

Arunachal Pradesh Disaster Management Secretary Bidol Tayeng called on Rijiju in New Delhi Tuesday to apprise him of the situation in the district, the release said.

Stressing the need for "flood protection" along Siang river, the secretary pressed for early visit of a central team to inspect the district and assess the losses, it said.

The Union minister of state for home affairs, on his part, said he was yet to receive a requisition letter from the state government in this regard.

However, he promised to send an inter-ministerial team for assessment at the earliest.

"The team of experts will be visiting the district and file a report, based on which plans will be made to tame the Siang river," the official release said quoting Rijiju.

Meanwhile, the All Arunachal Pradesh Students' Union (AAPSU) here has expressed "deep concern" over the issue of large-scale siltation on Siang river bed and erosion of catchment areas.

AAPSU general secretary Tobom Dai said people had to flee their homes after the "marauding" flood waters of Siang entered into the villages.

In a statement Thursday, Dai said the river water is turning muddier and its flow more turbulent with time, adding to anxieties in the minds of people in the Siang valley.

"The alleged apathy of the governments, both in the state and at the Centre, in providing a concrete solution to the problem has created confusion and a sense of deprivation in the minds of affected people," Dai added.

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A central team would tour various parts of Kerala from Friday to assess the damage caused by the recent devastating floods.

The 11-member inter-ministerial team, headed by Special Secretary of the Home Ministry, B R Sharma would be in the state till September 24, and undertake on-the-spot assessment of damage and additional requirement of funds, an official release said.

The state government had sent a memorandum seeking Rs 4,700 crore as compensation for the damage caused due to rains and floods, considered to be worst in a century.

Besides this, the government has also sought a comprehensive package to rebuild Kerala, which had suffered a damage estimated to be more than Rs 40,000 crore.

The team would visit 12 districts, that were badly affected in the recent flood mayhem, it said.

Additional Chief Secretary, P H Kurian, various district collectors would inform the team about the destruction caused in the floods, the worst in the last 100 years.

The team would also be holding talks with Chief Minister, Pinarayi Vijayan on September 24 before returning to Delhi.

The Union government had released Rs 600 crore to 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.

This was in addition to Rs 562.45 crore already made available in the State Disaster Relief Fund of Kerala.

Meanwhile, a cabinet sub committee which met here today, said families of 331 people who lost their lives in the floods, were given financial assistance till now.

The sub committee, chaired by Industries minister E P Jayarajan, decided to complete by September 29 the process of disbursing Rs 10,000 each to the affected.

So far, the amount has been handed over to 5.52 lakh people, another press release said.

At least 493 people have died in Kerala due to the rains and subsequent floods during the South West Monsoon.

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Minister Thursday ordered a safety audit of all scheduled airlines and airports, amid recent incidents related to the safety of passengers.

The development assumes significance as it comes on a day when at least 30 passengers on a from Mumbai to Jaipur suffered nose and ear bleeding after the crew "forgot" to turn on a switch that controls cabin air pressure.

The minister has also ordered a probe into the incident, which is being investigated by the Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau (AAIB), an official statement said.

In recent times, there have been incidents of mid-air engine failures, involving the Pratt and Whitney (P&W) engine-powered Airbus A320 neo planes being operated by domestic budget carriers IndiGo and GoAir.

The minister has directed officials concerned to prepare a comprehensive safety audit plan, which involves assessment of safety parameters of all scheduled airlines, aerodromes, flying training schools and MROs (Maintenance, Repair and Overhaul Organisations) immediately, the statement said.

This comes weeks after the aviation regulator conducted a comprehensive financial audit of and Jet Airways along with special safety audit of scheduled commuter airlines and

"Minister has further directed that safety audit should be commenced forthwith and a report to this effect should be submitted for his perusal within 30 days," the statement added.

Last month, Prabhu asked the to submit a report on the status of these planes after IndiGo grounded five of its A320 neos due to non-availability of spare P&W engines.

At that time, he had asserted that the security of passengers is of paramount importance and it should not be compromised at any cost.

On the other hand, Jet Airways has reported as many as three incidents, including the one that took place Thursday, involving its pilots.

On August 6, the suspended flying licence of two of its pilots pending investigation after the commander attempted a take-off from a taxiway at Riyadh airport.

This resulted in the Boeing 737 aircraft, with 141 passengers on board, exceeding the the taxiway on to the unpaved area and ending up close to the exit of the taxiway.

ALSO READ: Income tax department conducts survey operation at Jet Airways

On August 25, a Jet Airways Boeing 777 flight which was taxiing for take off for London from Delhi reportedly came to a sudden halt as the pilot did not have the ATC clearance.

Subsequently, both of its pilots were taken off from flying duties till investigations were completed.
Actor Claire Foy, who bagged Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series at the recent Primetime Emmy Awards, was almost denied entry to the TV Academy's official after party.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, Foy, 34, was making her way to Governors Ball when the actor was stopped by security personnel as her ticket was ripped.

However, Jonathan Van Ness, the star of Netflix's "Queer Eye", came to her rescue and explained the situation to the security.

The THR reporter also posted about the incident on Twitter.

"Just witnessed crazy #EMMYS moment: Queen almost couldn't get into Governors Ball. Claire Foy, best actress in drama winner, denied entry because of ripped ticket that prevented her team from entering back entrance until @jvn came to rescue after gushing over how much he loves her," the reported wrote.

Foy and Van Ness had met moments earlier and he had even recorded a message for the actor's sister Gemma, who she said is a big fan of "Oueer Eye".

"Be fabulous, be yourself," Foy directed Van Ness, to which he responded, "I'm mildly freaking out. I want to be British, too, I love you so much.

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British Deputy High Commissioner of Kolkata Bruce Bucknell has advocated for community engagement and coordination between authorities to address social evils such as human trafficking.

Speaking at a district-level meeting at Barasat in North 24 Parganas, around 25km from here, Bucknell said Wednesday he was pleased to see administration officials engaging in dialogue with NGO workers to end the menace.

Assistant Superintendent of Police, North 24 Parganas, Avijit Banerjee, the chairman of West Bengal State Commission for Protection of Child Rights, Ananya Chakraborti, and Deputy Commander of Border Security Force, Nizammudin, were among those who attended the meeting.

The British diplomat expressed hope that events, such as the one held Wednesday, will empower people to work with authorities in addressing the issue of human trafficking.

"All members of the community need to come together to end human trafficking and exploitation," Bucknell said.

The coordination meeting, organised by NGO Jabala, also saw exchange of experiences between victims, government officials and police officers.

"The young and the vulnerable are often tricked and misled into believing that they will have access to better job opportunities and education elsewhere. At times they are simply abducted by force," a spokesperson of the NGO said.

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The Congress on Thursday demanded Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman's resignation for allegedly "misleading" the people on the Rafale deal and said the government's arguments have been "demolished" by the statement of a former chief of the state-run Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL).

Congress spokesperson Manish Tewari cited the remarks of former HAL chief T Suvarna Raju to attack Sitharaman over the issue of HAL's capability to build the Rafale aircraft.

Tewari hit out at Sitharaman for alleging that the UPA did not extend support to HAL when the state-run company was engaged in talks with French firm Dassault Aviation for the manufacturer of Rafale jets in India under the offset agreement.

He said the former HAL chief had made certain "extremely pertinent points" that "absolutely demolish" the entire case that the NDA government has been trying to build on the Rafale issue.

Tewari said that Raju had made it clear in his statement that HAL and Dassault had signed the mutual workshare contract and given it to the government.

The first question that arises is that did the defence minister of India intentionally tried to mislead the people of India, the Congress leader said.

"We demeand the resignation of the defence minister on the charge of misleading the people of India. After the disclosure which has been made today by the former head of HAL, the defence minister has no moral authority or no moral right to continue even for a second," he said.

He also reiterated the Congress demand of a Joint Parliametary Committee (JPC) probe into the Rafale deal.

The Congress spokesperson also cited that Raju had stated that HAL would have built Rafale jets, had the government closed the original contract for 126 Medium Multi-Role Combat Aircraft (MMRCA).

Therefore, the government's argument that because HAL and Dassault could not come to an agreement and so the 126 MMRCA contract had to be scrapped does not hold, he said.

"What has happened today has really blown the defence minister's assertion out of the water," Tewari said.

He also cited Raju's remarks that HAL had built a 25-tonne Sukhoi-30, a fourth-generation fighter jet that forms the mainstay of the Air Force, from raw material stage, and maintained the Mirage-2000 aircraft, manufactured by Rafale maker Dassault Aviation, to highlight the public sector undertaking's capability.

"The nailer is that he (ex-HAL chief) says that if the 126 MMRCA contract would have gone through, India would have been self reliant in so far as the fighter aircraft platform is concerned," Tewari said.

"What happened to Make in India. Make in India seems to have gone out the window," he said.

Citing that the former HAL chief said that everything with Dassault had been sorted, Tewari slammed the government for stating otherwise.

"He (Raju) says everything had been sorted out. It completely and absolutely demolishes the web of lies and insinuations which this government has been trying to construct over the past six months," Tewari said.

He also demanded that the government should make all the files related to the issue public as demanded by the HAL chief.

In 2016, the Modi government signed a government-to-government deal with France for purchase of 36 Rafale jets at a cost of Rs 58,000 crore. The Congress has been alleging irregularities in the deal, saying the UPA had finalised the price of each aircraft at Rs 526 crore while the NDA was buying the same jet at Rs 1,670 crore.

The government has been maintaining the cost of the Rafale aircraft was nine per cent less than what was negotiated during the UPA regime.

Last week, Sitharaman said negotiations for 126 Rafale jets under the UPA government fell through as the government did not support HAL to which the Congress alleged that the NDA completely kept away the state-run company from the project.

"Dassault and HAL could not go together. The agreement did not happen during UPA, so is not it obvious that the interests of HAL could have really been taken care of," Sitharaman had said.

The Congress has demanded answers from the government on why HAL was not involved in the new deal.

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The Congress on Thursday demanded a detailed probe into the death of Kartik Thakur, a pilot in the Air Force, who belonged to Lahla village in Mandi district of Himachal Pradesh.

In a statement issued here, Himachal Pradesh Congress president Sukhvinder Singh Sukhu urged Chief Minister Jai Ram Thakur to write to Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh requesting him to order a high-level inquiry into the pilot's death.

Kartik (23) was posted at Hyderabad and had gone to Kolkata for training where he died in an accident, an official had earlier said.

He became a pilot three years ago after clearing his Combined Defence Services (CDS) examination, Sukhu said, adding that the people here want to know the exact cause of his death.

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A 25-year-old man died Thursday, a day after he committed self-immolation accusing his in-laws of separating him from his wife in view of their inter-caste marriage, police said.

Srikanth set himself ablaze here Wednesday midnight and was immediately shifted to a hospital, where he succumbed around 2 PM Thursday, police said adding he suffered 90 per cent burns in the incident.

In a video taken before committing self-immolation, Srikanth accused his father-in-law, and other members of his wife's family of harassing him and his family by filing false cases against them and taking his wife away last year on the pretext of delivery, they said.

"They all are responsible for my death," he is purportedly seen saying in the video.

He further alleged that his in-laws forced his wife to abort the unborn child.

This is the second death of a dalit man following inter-caste marriage in Telangana.

A Dalit Christian man was allegedly killed in Nalgonda district last week in an incident suspected to be honour killing and police had arrested seven people including his father-in-law, who was opposed to the marriage.

Srikanth and the woman, belonging to different castes were in love and got married in 2015.

They lived together till 2017 after which the woman has been staying with her parents, they added.

As many as four cases were registered against Srikanth in Nalgonda district, by his in-laws.

Alleging that false cases were registered against his family members by Shanmukhachary, Srikanth's father sought stern punishment for the accused.

Police said a case of abetment to suicide was registered in this connection and investigation is on.

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Tripura Chief Minister Biplab Kumar Deb has sought special assistance of Rs 1500 crore from the Centre to offer salary to government employees at par with the recommendations of 7th central pay commission, an official said on Thursday.

Deb, who is currently in New Delhi, met Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley on Wednesday and sought the assistance for two lakh employees and pensioners of the state, said officer on special duty to the chief ministers secretariat Sanjoy Mishra here.

Deb said the union finance minister had taken the matter positively.

The previous government, he said, had left a burden of Rs 1200 crore as loan making it difficult to carry forward the development projects and meet the peoples aspirations.

Deb also sought Jaitleys intervention to ensure speedy release of Rs 358.70 crore to complete 81 ongoing projects. Jaitley assured him that he would look into the matter.

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The Delhi government announced Thursday it will open 25 more skill centres and sought Australia's cooperation in the fields of skilling, incubation centres and research and development.

According to a statement released by the Delhi government, skill and incubation centres were among the three areas that were discussed at a meeting between Australian High Commissioner to India Harinder Sidhu, Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal and his deputy Manish Sisodia.

"Look forward to collaboration with Australia especially in the fields of skilling, incubation centres and R &D (sic)," the chief minister tweeted after the meeting.

Kejriwal and Sisodia informed the high commissioner about the world class skill centres at Delhi and the excellent results achieved in the last three years, while Sidhu talked about the understanding with the Singapore government on the first skill centre.

"The chief minister also told her that Delhi was soon going to open 25 more skill centres. He and the deputy chief minister have sought an understanding with Australia for the upcoming skill centres. The high commissioner answered in an affirmative and asked a detailed proposal to be sent to be taken further," the statement said.

They also discussed cooperation and understanding over incubation centres and the high commissioner said that similar partnership already exists between institutions in India and Australia and expressed willingness over understanding with Delhi's incubation centre, it said.

Kejriwal emphasised on looking at partnership opportunities in the area of research and development.

Sidhu said India and Australia could collaborate and partner in ten key sectors, including the flagship area of education. The Delhi government listed its priorities as education and health, added the statement.

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An assistant commissioner of police has been booked for allegedly raping a woman and molesting her minor daughter, police said Thursday.

ACP Ramesh Dahiya, posted in the Delhi Police's security wing, has been sent on leave after allegations surfaced against him, they said.

The officer claimed he had lent money to the woman and when he asked her to repay the amount, she levelled allegations of rape against him.

The officer was posted as the station house officer at the Sadar Bazar Police Station here. He was recently promoted to the ACP rank.

The woman had filed a complaint against the officer in July, claiming that she came in contact with him after the death of her husband, who was a criminal, they said.

The woman filed a second complaint on September 18, accusing the officer of raping her, molesting her minor daughter and kidnapping her son, police said.

An FIR was registered on Wednesday and the case transferred to the Crime Branch since it was a sensitive matter and required thorough investigation, they said.

"We received a complaint on Tuesday and a case was registered under relevant sections of the Indian Penal Code the next day. The case has been transferred to the Crime Branch," Deputy Commissioner of Police (North) Nupur Prasad said.

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Six men, including the domestic help, were arrested in connection with a robbery case at the residence of former Chief Justice of Delhi High Court in southeast Delhi's New Friends Colony, police said Thursday.

The accused were identified as Sandeep (25), Dheerender Rai (32), Upender Rai (33), Ram Swaroop (30), Deepak (40) and Dinesh, they said.

On Monday, the wife of a former chief justice of the Delhi High court was held hostage at her residence allegedly by her domestic help and accomplices who decamped with cash and valuables worth lakhs of rupees, police said.

Former chief justice Dalip Kumar Kapur, at whose residence in southeast Delhi's New Friends Colony the incident took place, passed away in 2000 due to brain haemorrhage, they said.

The incident was reported to police by the daughter of the former judge who was also at home at the time of the incident.

In her statement to police, Riba Kapur, the 78-year-old wife of the former judge, alleged that she and her 45-year-old daughter who lives with her were held hostage by the domestic help and his accomplices, a police officer said.

In the complaint, Riba Kapur had said that her daughter was hit by an iron rod by the accused, the officer said.

The domestic help was hired just four days before the incident, police said, adding that a case was registered and efforts are on to recover the stolen cash and jewellery.

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E-commerce companies will from October 1 have to deduct 1 per cent tax collected at source (TCS) before making payments to their suppliers.

The Finance Ministry Thursday notified TCS at the rate of 0.50 per cent of the net value of intra-state taxable supplies made through the e-commerce portals by other suppliers in the Central Tax law.

States too would follow suit and notify levy of 0.50 per cent SGST on intra-state supplies.

In the case of inter-state supplies by the e-commerce companies, Integrated GST (IGST) at the rate of 1 per cent would be deducted in the form of TCS while making payments to suppliers.

The ministry had last week notified October 1 as the date for implementation of the TCS provision under the Goods and Services Tax (GST) law. The law provided for levy of up to 1 per cent TCS.

EY Tax Partner Abhishek Jain said, "As the law had provided a levy up to 1 per cent, the e-commerce industry was awaiting this release of the exact rate of TCS --essentially to configure it into their system."



The GST, which subsumed over a dozen local taxes, was rolled out from July 1, 2017. However, to make it simpler for businesses in the initial months of rollout, TDS/TCS provisions of GST laws were kept in abeyance till June 30. Later on, it was deferred till September 30, 2018.

TCS provision would increase compliance burden for e-commerce companies but help government in checking tax evasion.

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The police have made elaborate security arrangements for Friday's mourning processions of Muharram in the city and elsewhere in the state, officials said Thursday.

Police officers would be posted at various crucial points, especially near mosques and alongside the city roads where mourning processions were scheduled, a Kolkata Police officer said.

"Around 6,000 police personnel will be deployed on the streets of the city to monitor tomorrow's processions so that no untoward incident take place," the IPS officer said.

Besides, Kolkata Police's Quick Response Team (QRT), Flying Radio Squad (FRS) and mobile patrolling vans would also be posted on Friday in connection with the processions.

"Muharram processions is scheduled to begin at 9 am and there will be traffic restrictions at certain roads. Traffic will be diverted and there will be police posting along with the processions," an officer of Kolkata Traffic Police said.

The city police was also keeping a close watch on social media to keep a check on the spread of any fake or rumour in connection with Muharram processions, the officer said.

"That's a challenge for us. We are keeping an eye on social networking sites so that no fake news, photographs or hate messages lead to communal commotion here. Anybody found forwarding such rumours will attract strict action," he said.

A senior officer of state police said precautionary measures have been taken in connection with the Muharram procession.

"We have taken every possible measures to avoid any unwanted incident during tomorrow's Muharram's processions. We will not allow anyone to create disturbance in the state," he said.

"We have alerted the administration and asked them to take necessary measures to ward off any problem during the processions anywhere in the state. We want absolute peace during Muharram processions," state Education Minister Partha Chatterjee told reporters at the secretariat.

He said the administration has been asked to keep a note on the spread of hate messages to disrupt peace in the state.

"There is no dearth of people for spreading hate messages inciting others in communal passions," said Chatterjee, also the secretary general of the ruling Trinamool Congress.

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Former Punjab chief minister Parkash Singh Badal Thursday described the conduct of Wednesday's zila parishad and panchayat samiti polls in the state as "brutal and broad daylight murder of democracy."



He said the wanton lawlessness and criminality witnessed yesterday during the polls should finally open the eyes of those who thought that the SAD's fears of poll violence were just a "ruse."



Badal said September 19, 2018 will be remembered as "one of the darkest days" for democracy in Punjab when the Congress made the state look like Bihar during the latter's worst period.

The former CM said it was "extremely painful and regrettable" that the state election commission completely abdicated its constitutional responsibility yesterday.

"Both the state machinery and the state election commission functioned as an extension of the Congress party during the entire poll process," he said in a statement here.

Badal said not only the mammoth and unprecedented response of Punjabis to the SAD-BJP rally at Faridkot and earlier at Abohar, but also its strong Punjabi and Panthic character had unnerved the Congress and its stooges.

"For these stooges hiding behind Panthic cloaks, yesterday was repayment time for the favours they continue to receive from the Congress government. They carried out poll violence at the behest of the Congress which is keeping them politically afloat for its ultimate anti-Sikh agenda.

The Congress is providing political cover to the forces inimical to peace and communal harmony. As in the eighties, this nexus is pushing Punjab into the jaws of violence," he said.

Badal said the SAD is their prime target because "our party has always articulated the Sikh and Punjabi cause in a peaceful and democratic way."



"Peace and democracy is at stake in Punjab. The non-performance of the state government and its betrayal to the people of Punjab on the promises made to them by Amarinder Singh by holding Gutka Sahib (religious book) in hand has completely isolated the Congress from the people," he said.

The Congress now is using its old card of dividing Punjabis and conspiring to push the brave Sikh community into a fratricidal civil war, he said



Badal said the SAD is determined not only to expose the nexus and its conspiracies but also to save Punjab and the Sikhs from these evil designs.

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Two persons, evading arrests in separate criminal cases for the last five years, have been nabbed by the Jammu and Kashmir police, an official said Thursday.

Absconders Banny Sotra of Bagh-e-Bahu and Ashiq Ali of Hiranagar were arrested following raids by separate police teams in Jammu and Samba districts, said the police spokesperson.

He said Sotra, wanted by police for allegedly beating a man in Gandhi Nagar police station area in 2013, was arrested Wednesday.

Ali was apprehended this morning, the spokesperson said, adding he had been declared a proclaimed offender in a case lodged at Samba police station same year.

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: FCA India, which has sold 27,000 units of Jeep Compass in the country since the launch in August 2017, has rolled out of a new variant of its only locally made model in the country, Jeep Compass, with 'Limited Plus', which is an upmarket variant.

FCA has so far sold more than 25,000 units of the Compass in the country in the first 10 months of the launch, which has been developed fully in the country and launched commercially in August 2017.

Including the top-of-the-line Limited Plus variant, the entire Compass range is now available between Rs 15.35 lakh and Rs 22.85 lakh, said the company, which reportedly has already recovered its entire investments of around USD 250 million with the Compass sales alone.

"We have manufactured over 37,000 Compass units and exported 10,000 of them since the launch 13 months ago. We have now extended our export commitment to 13 right-hand drive markets, with more markets planned in the near future," said FCA India president and MD Kevin Flynn said. ****** SBI inks pact with QCI for quality certification for MSMEs *



The State Bank has become the first bank to sign an agreement with the Quality Council of India to offer 'zero defect, zero effect (ZED) certification scheme of the MSME ministry.

As a part of this agreement, SBI has decided to offer concessions in pricing/processing charges for MSMEs having better ZED ratings. SBI is also considering incorporating ZED rating as a parameter in its internal rating system.

The ZED certification scheme for MSMEs is aimed at enhancing their global competitiveness on quality and environment aspects in their systems and processes. So far over 20,000 MSMEs have registered for ZED and many states are also incorporating ZED in their industrial policies. ******* Siyaram ropes in Ranveer Singh as brand ambassador *



Siyaram Silk Mills has roped popular Hindi actor Ranveer Singh as its new brand face.

Siyaram's association with Ranveer comes at a time when the brand is growing rapidly and evolving to make its presence felt in the textile industry all over the world.

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The ongoing Ganesh festival has become a public outreach opportunity for city-based politicians, who are eyeing blessings of both Lord Ganesh and his devotees ahead of an election year.

As both the Lok Sabha and Maharashtra polls are due in 2019, political leaders, especially ticket-aspirants, are making it a point to visit people in their constituencies who have installed Ganesh idols at home, apart from going to several pandals that dot the city during the 11-day festival.

"The idea is just to be seen with voters," said a worker of a political party in suburban Ghatkopar.

Mumbai has six parliamentary constituencies and 36 Assembly segments.

"During festival period, politicians sometimes reach out to people, sometimes they don't. But now, since this festival season comes ahead of next year's polls, leaders are ensuring that they meet people," said BJP MP Gopal Shetty, who represents the Mumbai North constituency.

Former Rajya Sabha MP and veteran journalist Bharat Kumar Raut said among festivals in Mumbai and Maharashtra, Ganesh festival and Gokulashtami (Dahi Handi) get more political patronage from politicians ahead of elections.

"Plus, Ganesh festival and Dahi Handi are celebrated in public, outside homes. So for local corporators, MLAs and MPs these are important occasions," Raut said.

The ruling parties are normally more aggressive during such periods in reaching out to people and festival organisers, he observed.

"One remarkable thing this time is that the BJP has overtaken its ally Shiv Sena. How much, it will reflect in voting, but the BJP has taken a lead in campaigning in this way," Raut said.

A Shiv Sena leader said he visited at least 50 houses in a day to offer prayers to the Ganesh idols installed by people in his constituency.

"I will keep visiting Ganesh pandals till the festival gets over," he said, requesting anonymity.

Legislators work for people and mingle with them throughout their terms, but "it is more important to be seen with them now", he said.

"The festival period this year has proffered the right opportunity to carry out public relations exercise," he said.

An NCP leader, who is eyeing a party ticket, said politicians need not embark on explicit campaigning when they visit people's homes.

"The polls are still some months away, so we need not speak to people on political issues right now. But the festival helps us interact with people in an informal way, gauge their feelings and work out our campaign strategies accordingly," he said.

A Congress leader said several Ganesh mandals, and before them the Dahi Handi organisers, had sought funds from politicians to put up their banners.

"It is not possible to reach every nook and cranny of a parliamentary constituency in the limited festival period. So hoisting banners/ hoardings is another way to ensure that people see the politician during the festival time," he said.

Ganesh festival will be followed by Navratri, which too is celebrated with enthusiasm across Mumbai and its surrounding areas, and it will offer a similar "public relations" opportunity to leaders, he added.

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The Madhya Pradesh Forest department has rescued a herd of elephants that entered the state's Sidhi district from neighbouring Chhattisgarh, an official said Thursday.

The elephants had entered Sidhi district, over 500 kilometres from here, on August 4 after crossing the Mawai River and had first halted in the jungles near Kundaur village of Sanjay Tiger Reserve (STR), the official informed.

"They vandalised huts in the vicinity of the village, rummaged through foodgrain stocks and destroyed standing crops. The Sanjay Tiger Reserve authorities had to install solar lights on the border of the village to halt their march into the village," the official informed.

The elephants had reached within 15 kilometres of the Sidhi district headquarters, he said.

"The elephants also killed two people. Round the clock vigil was maintained on the route the elephants were taking. The state's forest department roped in experts from West Bengal to drive away the elephants. Villagers en route were warned through different media about the presence of the pachyderms," the official said.

A rescue plan was chalked out and a team comprising officers and staff of the Bandhavgarh Tiger Reserve (BTR) and STR, seven elephant-mahout pairs, Tiger Protection Force personnel among others was deployed, he said.

The operation began on September 7 and the team rescued a bull elephant on September 9, a calf on September 12, two cow elephants on September 15 and the last one on September 16, he said.

The translocation process of these elephants to Bandhavgarh Tiger Reserve (BTR) in the state's Umaria district is in progress, a Public Relations Department official said Thursday.

This is, possibly, the first successful rescue operation of elephants anywhere in the country, the official claimed.

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The Centre Thursday told the Supreme Court that it was in the process of framing guidelines for keeping foreign nationals in detention centres across the country.

The government told a bench comprising Justices Madan B Lokur and Deepak Gupta that the process would take around three months.

"We are of the view that three months is too long," the bench said, adding "this matter requires some urgency. We expect the detention manual to be prepared within two months."



The bench was dealing with issues relating to the condition of detention centres in Assam.

Additional Solicitor General (ASG) A N S Nadkarni, appearing for the Centre, told the bench that the Ministry of Home Affairs has issued circulars to all the states laying down the guidelines with respect to the detention centres.

ASG Tushar Mehta, appearing for Assam government, said that an older jail premise in Guwahati cannot be converted into a detention centre as the building was not in a proper condition.

He said 20 acres of land near Goalpara district in Assam has been earmarked for making a new detention centre in the state which would be constructed within a year.

When the bench said the process of construction of the detention centre should be completed soon, ASG Mehta said they would expedite it.

Mehta also said that the process of uniting the families of some of the foreign nationals, who are kept in detention centres in Assam, has also started.

Advocate Prashant Bhushan, appearing for Harsh Mander who has filed a separate plea in the matter, said the condition of foreign nationals kept at the detention centres in Assam was not good.

"The larger issue is can these people be permitted to be detained indefinitely just because they are not Indian citizens," he said, adding that they were being treated as "illegal aliens".

Bhushan referred to a US Supreme Court judgement and said it had held that the government cannot keep the foreign nationals in detention indefinitely.

The bench issued notice to the Centre and the Assam government on Mander's plea and asked them to respond to it within four weeks.

It also asked the state government to file an affidavit indicating the condition of detention centres and jail in Goalpara district and about the facilities provided to the inmates lodged there.

The apex court had on September 12 expressed displeasure that foreign nationals kept in detention centres in Assam were "separated" from their families and had asked the state government to look into the issue with urgency so that the families are "not broken up".

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The Goa Forward Party (GFP), an alliance partner of the ruling BJP, said Thursday it does not favour leadership change in Goa, but the ailing Chief Minister Manohar Parrikar should delegate powers to other ministers.

"We have never stressed leadership change. We are the ones who installed Parrikar as chief minister and we are with him always," GFP chief and state minister Vijai Sardesai said.

Parrikar (62), who is admitted to the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) in Delhi, spoke to Sardesai over telephone this afternoon to discuss a certain administrative matter, an official said.

Sardesai said that as Parrikar holds major portfolios, his illness has affected the administration.

"If he delegates powers to other ministers, people will get justice and those who are talking about break-down of administration will stop," the GFP leader said.

Earlier in the day, Health Minister and BJP leader Vishwajit Rane ruled out leadership change in the state.

"Where is the question of leadership change? We have our chief minister. He is undergoing treatment, but that does not mean we should replace him," Rane said.

The government is functioning very well and all alliance partners are firmly behind Parrikar, he said.

After Parrikar was hospitalised, the BJP had sent three observers to the state last week.

Rane claimed the issue of leadership change was not discussed during their visit.

The Opposition Congress has claimed that the BJP-led government is now in a minority as its alliance partners and some of BJP's own MLAs are not happy with the current situation.

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Maulanas from across Goa Thursday held a "Quran Khawani" here for the speedy recovery of Chief Minister Manohar Parrikar who is admitted in the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) in Delhi.

Parrikar (62) is admitted at the old private ward under Dr Pramod Garg, professor of gastroenterology, and is under observation.

According to hospital sources, the Goa chief minister had undergone a series of tests at the premier health institute.

"We invited ten maulanas from different parts of Goa to the BJP state headquarters where they performed Quran Khawani for one hour and dua (pleading) for half an hour invoking Allah's blessings for Parrikar's recovery," Sheikh Jinah, president, BJPs State Minority Morcha told PTI.

Jinah said that Parrikar has helped the Muslim community in the state in various ways including aiding educational institutions and providing support to construct the Haj House.

He said that, recently, when Goa was falling short of the mandatory number of Haj pilgrims, Parrikar invited pilgrims from neighbouring Karnataka to fly from here.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
India's biggest digital payments company Paytm has flagged concerns over rival Google Pay's privacy policy, saying it allows collection and disclosure of users' personal data with group companies.

The Alibaba and SoftBank-backed company also alleged that Google's privacy policy allows the American giant to utilise a user's personal data for advertising and promotional purposes, without any additional consent from the user.

"This is a clear disregard for a consumer's need for privacy," Paytm said in a recent letter to the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI).

As the battle to capture market share in the booming Indian digital payments space intensifies, One97 Communications owned-Paytm has alleged violation of basic privacy norms in the tech titan's policy.

In its two-page letter, Paytm said Google Pay's privacy policy allows it to access user's navigation, logs and correspondence data while also reserving the right to collect, store, use and read user's communication.

When contacted, a Google spokesperson said the company does not use any individual UPI transactions data for any monetisation purpose, including advertisements.

"Google Pay shares user data as may be required for the purpose of processing transactions or providing Google Pay Services with our authorised partners... Sharing of this information is in accordance with the applicable laws and requisite consent obtained from the user and in conformity with standard industry practice," the spokesperson said.

These partners, the spokesperson said, include banks, banks on UPI infrastructure, bill aggregators, merchants on the Google Pay for Business programme and others with whom the user transacts.

Interestingly, Google and Paytm have taken contrarian views on the data localisation issue.

While Paytm has been in favour of storing and processing critical data like payments within India, Google's stance has been to allow free flow of data.

"...Google Pay...has the scope of using their customer's data for their monetary gains with complete disregard of the user's need for privacy," Paytm argued.

It alleged that critical payments data collected by Google "is being processed and stored outside of India which can have severe security implications in case of a data breach as their policy states that this data is also being disclosed with advertisers and third parties".

It hoped that NPCI "would re-visit the payments policy of Google Pay for India". A copy of the letter has also been marked to IT Secretary, Ajay Sawhney.

Paytm has also written to industry body IAMAI emphasising its stance that India has taken a bold step in strengthening data sovereignty through dynamic measures like data localisation.

It has asked the Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI) to incorporate Paytm's views in the final submission to IT Ministry on the draft Personal Data Protection Bill.

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David Benioff and Dan Weiss, the showrunners of "Game of Thrones", explained why the eighth and final season of the show is taking a long time, saying it was the "biggest thing" they have ever done.

The writer-producers said though the last installment of the HBO series has only six episodes, the fans will soon get to know why it took them forever to shoot, reported EW.

"The final season's taking a long time because it's the biggest thing we've ever done. It was nearly a full year in Belfast either prepping it or actually shooting it.

"I think when people see it they're going to understand why it took so long. The last season is far beyond what we've ever attempted before, Benioff told reporters backstage at Primetime Emmy Awards.

"GOT" bagged its third Emmy for Outstanding Drama Series Monday after winning in 2015 and 2016. The show won total nine trophies, the highest, at the award ceremony, including a third win for Peter Dinklage in the Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama Series.

Author George RR Martin added that he wanted the series to go longer.

We could've gone 11, 12, 13 seasons. David and Dan have been saying for like five seasons that seven seasons is all they would go. We got them to go to eight but not any more than that.

"There was a period like five years ago when they were saying seven seasons and I was saying 10 seasons and they won, they're the ones actually working on it," Martin told Variety.

"GOT" recently wrapped filming its final season after getting underway late last year. Part of the extra time was for a battle sequence, which is being touted as by far the most elaborate the show has ever filmed.

The show is expected to premiere in the first half of next year.

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A range of medical devices, old or new, will soon have an 'Indian standard' and nearly 1,000 products are presently being benchmarked, a top government official said Thursday.

member V K Paul, in his address at a conference here, said the standardisation is expected to be completed in the next two months.

"We don't have any Indian standards (for medical devices). As we speak, about 1,000 products' standards are being completed, and the deadline for that is about two months from now.

"And, from old devices to new, most of the important devices will carry Indian standardisation from the BIS," he said.

The (BIS) is the national standards body of working under the aegis of the Ministry of Consumer Affairs, Food & Public Distribution.

The conference MedTekon 2018 -- MedTech Vitalsing Ayushman Bharat, organised by Medical Technological Association of (MTaI) was also attended by Swedish envoy Klas Molin.

Molin said Sweden, both at government and company-level, would like to engage with when it comes to health and life sciences.

Paul, a key architect of the Centre's flagship health scheme -- Ayushman Bharat, also urged the to partner with the country in this mission and asked the private companies of India to be "catalyst of change" in this "revolution waiting to happen".

Prime Minister will inaugurate the scheme nationwide on September 23 from Ranchi.

Under this scheme, 107.4 million families of the country will get free medical facilities up to Rs 500,000.

The 'Ayushman Bharat' scheme aims to holistically address health (covering prevention, promotion and ambulatory care) at primary, secondary and tertiary levels.

MTaI welcomed the move by the government to bring Indian standardisation, but cautioned that it should not "dilute the existing" global standards that companies adhere to.

At a press conference held on the sidelines of the conference, MTaI Chairman Pavan Choudhary and other members said that several Indian med-tech firms are already following global best standards.

"The new standards would help bring into those players who do not confirm to such standards. But, the Indian standards once they are brought in will need a lot of harmonising with the existing global norms," said Probir Das, director of MTaI.

(National Health Protection Mission) Indu Bhushan spoke on the importance of quality patient outcomes in the context of universal health coverage programmes.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi said Thursday that his government will continue to take tough decisions and expressed hope that the size of the Indian economy will double to USD 5 trillion in the next five-seven years.

The contribution of manufacturing and agriculture would be USD 1 trillion each, he said, while laying the foundation stone of India International Convention and Expo Centre (IICC) here.

Modi travelled by the Airport Express Metro to reach the venue of the foundation stone laying ceremony at Sector 25, Dwarka.

"I want to assure you that in the public interest, we have taken tough decisions and this will continue," he said, adding India's economy is gaining strength despite global challenges.

The economy, he added, is growing at over 8 per cent and in the "next five-seven years, size of the economy will touch USD 5 trillion and will rise further to USD 10 trillion in the next decade".

Modi further said that the government has recently taken a decision to merge Dena Bank, Vijaya Bank with the Bank of Baroda.

"What is the need of dozens of public sector banks. We have been listening to this debate for years but no one took steps in that direction," the prime minister said, adding the government has also merged banks with SBI and has now decided to merge three more state-owned banks.

Referring to the government's Make in India initiative, he said India has become a hub of mobile phone manufacturing, which has provided employment to 4-5 lakh youth in the last four years and has helped the country save Rs 3 lakh crore foreign exchange.

The government, Modi said, is preparing district-level plans to promote ease of doing business so that they can increase their contribution to the national gross domestic product.

Tourism sector too has recorded healthy growth and has created job opportunities for youth, he added.

Talking about the Rs 25,703-crore convention centre, the prime minister said it would help create jobs for 5 lakh youth.

He said that several countries have emerged as a hub for conference tourism but in India, nobody has thought in this direction.

Now, the government is working in this direction and developing this convention and expo centre with a sitting capacity of 10,000 people, he said, adding this centre would reflect India's economic progress and rich cultural heritage.

He also said it is a part of the government's vision which gives importance to world-class infrastructure, and ease of doing business.

He added that this government has built the longest tunnel, the longest gas pipeline, the largest mobile manufacturing unit, and electricity to every household among many others projects.

The centre would help in promoting startups, industries, improve ease of living for people and the MSME sector.

The facilities provided at the centre will be at par with the best in the world in size and quality, offering setting for international and national events, meetings, conferences, exhibitions and trade shows.

The project is planned over an area of 221.37 acres at Sector 25, Dwarka, here at an estimated cost of Rs 25,703 crore.

The IICC will be an integrated complex with facilities like exhibition halls, convention centre, open exhibition spaces, mixed-use commercial spaces like star hotels (5, 4 and 3 stars), retail services and high-end offices.

The convention centre would accommodate up to 11,000 persons, would have five exhibition halls, 1-kilometre long foyer, multi-purpose arena with a retractable roof.

It will be developed in two phases. Phase-I and II will be completed by December 2019 and December 2024, respectively.

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Gujarat chief minister Vijay Rupani Thursday declared Kutch as 'scarcity hit district' after it received just 26.51 per cent rains this monsoon.

Besides Kutch district, tehsils which have received less than 125 mm of rainfall have also been declared scarcity hit with effect from October 1, a state government release said.

"We held an extensive review and it has been decided that Kutch district, which has received only 26.51 per cent rains this monsoon, should be declared scarcity hit from October 1," Rupani told reporters after chairing a meeting to review the state's water situation.

He added that the district would get subsidies as per government rules and norms.

"We have also decided to declare all other tehsils of the state, where rainfall is less than 125 mm this monsoon, as scarcity hit," Rupani said, without giving number of such tehsils.

"Subsidies would be given to gaushalas (cow shelters) and panjrapoles (animal shelters) and new panjrapoles would be opened in the affected areas," he said.

Drinking water will be provided to the district from the Sardar Sarovar Dam on Narmada river, Rupani said.

He said that drinking water pipeline projects worth Rs. 296 crore for Kutch district would be taken up on war footing.

Gujarat is staring at water scarcity as it has received just 73.87 per cent of rainfall this monsoon, a state government release said..

It added that Kutch has received just 26.51 per cent of average rainfall so far, while north Gujarat got 42.93 per cent, central Gujarat 66.83 per cent, Saurashtra 72.20 per cent and south Gujarat got the highest of 94.79 per cent.

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The Gujarat government on Thursday doubled the monetary assistance given to a farmer or his kin in case of death or disability caused by an accident under the state-run Farmers' Accident Insurance Scheme.

If a farmer suffers a permanent disability or dies in an accident, he or his relatives would now get Rs 2 lakh instead of the present provision of Rs 1 lakh, said Deputy Chief Minister Nitin Patel in Gandhinagar.

A farmer will also be entitled to get Rs 1 lakh instead of Rs 50,000 if he loses one eye or one limb in an accident, he said.

The insurance scheme covers over 2.5 crore farmers who own agricultural land in the state.

Patel also announced that the government will pay the entire premium of the scheme -- around Rs 70 crore -- on behalf of farmers.

The scheme covers accidents which take place in the course of agriculture-related activities, such as electrocution, falling into a well or an attack by wild animals, he said.

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The Congress on Thursday sought immediate intervention of Governor Satyadev Narayan Arya on "increasing atrocities and rape incidents" in Haryana and said the state has become the crime capital.

A Haryana Congress delegation led by state party chief Ashok Tanwar presented a memoranda to Arya here.

Attacking the Manohar Lal Khattar-led government, Tanwar said law and order in Haryana has totally collapsed.

"During the last year over 1,500 rape cases were reported in Haryana, it means three such incidents a day. This is a very grim situation," he told reporters here.

He said though senior police officers are transferred, nothing worthwhile is being done for the security of girls and women.

Tanwar claimed that the women police stations had not started working effectively in the last three years.

Incidents of rape and gang rape are being reported from all corners of the state but the Khattar government is sleeping, he said.

"It looks like Haryana has become the crime capital," he said.

The Congress leader said there are about 2.5 lakh millet farmers in Haryana but a software of the Haryana government for their registration showed only 40,000.

"It shows that the BJP-led state government is going to commit a scam of one thousand crore rupees in the purchase of millet," Tanwar alleged.

The Congress delegation also handed over a memorandum to Arya for President Ram Nath Kovind, asking for an inquiry into the alleged Rafale fighter jets deal scam.

Tanwar said in the memorandum the party requested Kovind that Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman appear before a Joint Parliamentary Committee and all records of the Rafale deal be examined to expose the scam.

The memorandum requested Kovind to intervene immediately to affix the responsibility of the prime minister and other public and private persons in the Rafale scam.

Tanwar said the country had incurred a huge loss because Modi unilaterally decided to purchase 36 Rafale fighter jets by "ignoring all principles and without inviting any tenders".

He said the Indian Air Force requires 126 operational fighter planes but the Modi government has endangered the country's security by purchasing only 36.

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The Uttarakhand High Court on Thursday ordered the closure of all illegal slaughter houses in the state "within 72 hours", besides directing the authorities to ensure that there is no culling of animals in the open.

A bench comprising Acting Chief Justice Rajiv Sharma and Justice Manoj Tiwari issued the order on a public interest litigation by Haridwar resident Parvez Alam, who placed before the court pictures of animals being slaughtered brutally.

It was contended in the petition that illegal slaughtering of animals openly on roads and outside authorised slaughter houses is prevalent in the state.

The bench observed that the pictures were disturbing and pricked the conscience of the court.

"How can the authorities permit the slaughtering of animals in the streets, in villages and towns, is beyond our comprehension. Animals also have constitutional legal rights. The authorities cannot remain mute-spectators towards the slaughtering of animals, that too, in a very beastly manner," the court said.

It is the duty cast upon the statutory authorities, including police, to ensure that no illegal slaughtering takes place and the Slaughter House must conform to the standards laid down by the State Pollution Control Board and the Pollution Controlling Committees, it said.

Kartikey Hari Gupta, the advocate for the petitioner, pointed out that there are no proper facilities in slaughter houses.

There is no proper flooring, water supply or ventilation in the slaughter houses. The slaughter houses do not install pollution control devices, he alleged.

He said as per sample registration system baseline survey of 2014 conducted by the government, 74% Of the population of Uttarakhand consumes non vegetarian items.

As such the quality of such food items can only be kept in check through a proper system of slaughter houses.

The court directed that "all illegal slaughter houses in the state of Uttarakhand are ordered to be sealed within 72 hours from today".

The court further directed the Secretary (Home) to ensure that no animal is slaughtered on the streets or open spaces forthwith.

"The state government is also directed to constitute a Committee for Slaughter Houses as per the letter dated 26.04.2012 issued by the Ministry of and Forest, if not already constituted, within a period of seven days from today," the court said.

"It is the duty cast upon all the Executive Officers of the Local Self Government, Municipal Corporations, Municipalities, Nagar Panchayats and other Panchayats to ensure that no animal is slaughtered in the public and at open spaces, open to public gaze," it said.

The court directed the state government to ensure that no slaughter house is permitted to run without complying with the Food Safety and Standards under Licensing and Registration of Food Businesses Regulations.

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The Allahabad High Court Thursday sought a status report on the ongoing vigilance probe into the building of various Dalit memorials, including statues of BSP founder Kanshi Ram and the party's poll symbol 'elephant' during the Mayawati regime between 2007 and 2012.

A bench of Chief Justice D B Bhosale and Justice Yashwant Varma asked the Uttar Pradesh government to apprise it of the status of the probe into the alleged scam by September 27.

The bench sought the report on a plea by state native Shashi Kant alias Bhavesh Pandey and slated his petition for next hearing on September 27.

The state government headed by erstwhile Chief Minister Mayawati had built the memorials, statues and parks at a cost of over Rs 2,600 crore at Lucknow, Noida and elsewhere in the state.

UP Lokayukta had earlier indicted Mayawati's two Cabinet colleagues - Nasmeedunin Siddiqui and Babu Singh Kushwaha, besides 12 BSP MLAs and several others for alleged 'wrong-doings' in the purchase of sandstone for the memorials.

On Lokayukta's report, an FIR too had been lodged against them in 2014.

The other persons against whom the case was registered included more than 100 engineers and officers of the UP Rajkiya Nirman Nigam, Public Works Department and New Okhla Industrial Development Authority (NOIDA).

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Himachal Pradesh may experience heavy rainfall in the next four days from September 21 to 24, the Meteorological Centre, Shimla, has predicted.

The department has issued warning of heavy rain in the entire Himachal Pradesh in general and in Shimla, Kangra, Mandi and Chamba in particular from Friday to Tuesday, the Met centre director Manmohan Singh said.

Meanwhile, no rainfall occurred in the state in the last 24 hours. However, Keylong remained the coldest place in the state with lowest temperature recorded at 6 degree Celsius here, he added.

Una was recorded as the hottest place in the state with 35.2 degree Celsius.

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Lebanon's Hezbollah said Thursday it had acquired "precision missiles" despite extensive efforts by neighbour and foe Israel to prevent the Shiite movement developing this capability.

"It has been done. The resistance now owns precision missiles" as part of its weaponry, Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah said in a televised address during the key Shiite commemoration of Ashura.

Israel this month acknowledged carrying out more than 200 strikes over the past 18 months in war-torn Syria, where Hezbollah fights alongside Israel's arch-foe and Shiite powerhouse Iran in support of the Damascus regime.

Israel has said it is working to stop Iran from entrenching itself military there and to keep Hezbollah from acquiring sophisticated arms.

"Attempts in Syria to block the way towards this (missile) capability" have failed, Nasrallah said.

"If Israel imposes a war on Lebanon, it will face a fate that it never would have expected." Israel has fought several conflicts against Hezbollah, the last in 2006.

The Israeli military believes Hezbollah has between 100,000 and 120,000 short-range missiles and rockets, as well as several hundred longer-range missiles.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Nasrallah should not think twice but "at least 20 times" before deciding whether to attack Israel.

"If he seeks conflict with us, he will receive a blow he cannot even imagine," Netanyahu said in a statement.

Late Monday, an Israeli raid hit Syria's coastal province of Latakia to prevent what it said were deliveries of materials for advanced weaponry to Hezbollah.

The same evening Syrian air defences downed a Russian military plane by mistake, killing all 15 on board.

Russia backs Syria's government militarily and it was the worst case of friendly fire between the two allies since Moscow intervened in the conflict in 2015.

On Tuesday, Netanyahu said his country was "determined to stop Iranian military entrenchment in Syria, and the attempts by Iran, which calls for the destruction of Israel, to transfer to Hezbollah lethal weaponry (to be used) against Israel".

Nasrallah accused the Israelis of trying to kill him "day and night". He has lived in a secret location for decades and rarely appears in public.

The Hezbollah chief also reiterated his support for Iran, after the United States withdrew from a landmark nuclear deal in May.

Washington reimposed sanctions on the Islamic republic last month, and a new round of even harsher sanctions targeting Iran's vital oil sector is set to go into effect in early November.

"It is our duty today to stand by Iran, who in a few weeks' time will face a dangerous deadline -- the start of American sanctions," he said.

Nasrallah accused the United States of "going to all the world's capitals in a bid to besiege" Iran, as Washington seeks support for its measures against the country.

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Researchers at IIT Kharagpur have developed a new statistical model which can be used to predict variability and trends in rainfall over different climate regions of India.

The model, developed by researchers of the Centre for Oceans, Rivers, Atmosphere and Land Sciences (CORAL), takes into consideration both local and remote factors causing weather changes, an IIT-KGP statement said Thursday.

Many of these, local and remote, factors that affect weather conditions have been known to the scientific community, the statement said, adding, most weather forecast models typically consider local factors or a single factor that affects rainfall or use of statistical models of correlation to establish the impact of various factors.

Because of this, there used to be significant uncertainties in such predictions as each independent factor has a certain impact, which may not match with actual conditions, it said.

"Our study finds that the summer monsoon rainfall variability is governed by the surface temperatures of the Eastern Pacific, Central Pacific, Atlantic and the north Indian Oceans, and equatorial zonal winds," the statement said quoting Prof Jayanarayanan Kuttippurath.

However, the winter monsoon rainfall variability is largely controlled by the surface temperature of the North Atlantic and extratropical oceans, Kuttippurath said.

"In our model we have used a technique which removes the impact of individual factors to find the trends in rainfall. The model can be used to find the contribution of individual factors to rainfall and can be applied to estimate the trends and variability of rainfall," Dr Prijitha J Nair, the lead researcher, who conceived and coordinated this study, was quoted as saying in the statement.

The model can predict any type of weather conditions, anywhere in the world only by changing the relevant factors affecting the changes, he explained.

The model, which has been developed by using data over a period of 38 years, has predicted significant changes in Indian rainfall in the perspective of global climate change.

The data analyses conducted during the study revealed significant positive trends (0.43mm/day/dec) in the north-west for summer rainfall during the period 19792017.

"There are scientific evidences of major climate shifts over centuries. These do not happen overnight but through gradual changes in weather conditions over time," Professor Arun Chakraborty, who supervised the research, was quoted as saying in the statement.

"The data shows there has been an incremental shift of Indian monsoon from east to west. However, this would require further studies," Chakraborty said.

The novelty of the model has been reported through a research paper 'The local and global climate forcings induced inhomogeneity of Indian rainfall' in the much-coveted Scientific Reports by the Nature, the IIT statement said.

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In a setback to the Congress, BSP supremo Mayawati today announced an alliance with Ajit Jogi's Janta Congress Chhattisgarh (JCC) for Chhattisgarh elections and declared him the chief ministerial candidate.

The Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) will contest 35 seats and the Janta Congress Chhattisgarh 55 in the 90-member Assembly.

"We have decided to forge an alliance with the Janata Congress Chhattisgarh. Ajit Jogi will be the chief ministerial candidate," Mayawati said at a press conference here.

"My views on alliance with other parties are clear. We will go for an alliance if our party gets a respectable number of seats and if the ideologies match," she said.

Mayawati said the BSP and the JCC will soon launch a joint election campaign and a plan for conducting rallies will be finalised soon.

Replying to a question, she said, "Both the parties are capable of stopping the BJP in the state. If some other regional parties want to join us, we will take their help."



She alleged that the BJP government in Chhattisgarh did nothing for the state in the past 15 years and that a "strong regional representation" was necessary to ensure that it is not neglected.

In Chhattisgarh, the Dalit population plays an important role in determining election results in regions such as Janjgir-Champa, Raigarh and Bastar.

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The ongoing Free Trade Agreement (FTA) negotiations between India and Australia may slow down due to the coming general election in 2019, Australian Deputy High Commissioner to India Rod Hilton said Thursday.

Both the countries are committed to the FTA to expand trade relations and all trade agreements take time to finalise due to complexities involved, he said.

But with elections round the corner, there may be a temporary slowdown of the negotiations, Hilton told reporters on the sidelines of an interactive session with the Bengal Chamber of Commerce and Industry.

The negotiations for the pact, dubbed as Comprehensive Economic Cooperation Agreement (CECA) between India and Australia started in 2011.

Several rounds of negotiations have been completed for liberalising trade and services regime, besides removing non-tariff barriers and encouraging investments. But, the two sides have yet to resolve issues pertaining to goods and services, officials said.

Australia was trying to realign its exports basket that is highly overweight on coal which accounts for 65-70 per cent of its total exports to India.

"We want to realign the export basket. Hope the negotiations for FTA will help towards that goal," he said.

According to Hilton, West Bengal has received only one per cent of Australia's total investment of around USD 10.3 billion into India in 2017. However, there is a scope to enhance trade investments into the state.

The Australian government identifies West Bengal as one of the top 10 states which is likely to be of 'particular interest' for Australian businesses, he said.

The Australian government also decided to reopen a consulate in Kolkata which was closed a few decades back owing to trade union issues, Rod said.

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Foreign ministers of India and Pakistan will meet on sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in New York, the government announced Thursday, the first such high-level engagement since suspension of dialogue between the two nations after the Pathankot air base terror attack in 2016.

Announcing the meeting between External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj with her Pakistani counterpart Shah Mahmood Qureshi, MEA Spokesperson Raveesh Kumar, however, made it clear it is not a resumption of the Indo-Pak dialogue and India agreed to the meeting following a request from Pakistan.

He also insisted the decision doesn't change the country's position on cross-border terrorism.

During the meeting, likely to take place next week, India is expected to strongly raise the issue of terrorism emanating from the Pakistani soil.

The Swaraj-Qureshi meeting will be the first engagement at this level since January 2016 when New Delhi halted the dialogue with Islamabad in the aftermath of Pathankot terror attack, for which India holds Pakistan-based groups responsible.

Indo-Pak ties have nose-dived since then in view of a number of terror strikes by Pakistan-based groups, which India retaliated by carrying out 'surgical strikes' in September 2016 across the LoC. India has been maintaining that terror and talks cannot go together.

"I must distinguish between a meeting and dialogue. This does not indicate any change in policy as far as our stand on terrorism and cross-border terrorism is concerned," the MEA spokesperson said at a media briefing.

The last meeting between the two foreign ministers was held during Swaraj's visit to Islamabad in December 2015 to attend the Heart of Asia Summit, where she had met he then Pakistan foreign minister Sartaj Aziz.

After the meeting, the two sides had announced resumption of Indo-Pak dialogue under the comprehensive bilateral format, but the initiative did not take off after Pakistan-based terror groups attacked the Pathankot air base.

Kumar said Swaraj will also attend the SAARC foreign ministers' meeting on the sidelines of the UNGA.

India has been maintaining that there cannot be any comprehensive dialogue with Pakistan till it stops cross-border terrorism.

India agreed to Swaraj-Qureshi meeting following a letter to Prime Minister Narendra Modi by his Pakistani counterpart Imran Khan seeking a ministerial interaction on the sidelines of the UNGA.

Separately, the Pakistan Foreign Minister has also written a letter to Swaraj reiterating Khan's proposal for a meeting. Both the letters were handed over to India on September 17 by Pakistan High Commissioner, Kumar said.

The date for the meeting was being finalised by the permanent missions of the two countries in New York, he said adding the agenda for the meeting is yet to be finalised.

Swaraj is scheduled to leave for New York on September 22 morning and return on September 30.

Khan, who was sworn in as Pakistan prime minister last month, has been favouring resumption of talks between the two sides.

In his letter to Modi, Khan also indicated Pakistan's willingness to discuss terrorism.

Asked about Pakistan's push for a SAARC summit, Kumar said the atmosphere in the region is not conducive.

"There are number of other countries in the region who also felt that under the shadow of terrorism, it (SAARC summit) will be difficult to hold," said Kumar.

Kumar said Swaraj will also raise the issue of Kartarpur Sahib during the meeting. The Kartarpur Sahib shrine in Pakistan is revered by Indian Sikhs, who have been seeking permission for easier access to go there for pilgrimage.

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India is likely to resist the American pressure on complying with the reimposed Iranian sanctions as it has been a traditional policy of New Delhi to enforce only UNSC-authorised sanctions, a Congressional report has told lawmakers.

The Trump administration has threatened entities and countries with consequences if they do not bring down their import of Iranian oil to zero by November 4.

India, one of the biggest importers of Iranian oil, is unlikely to do so given its huge energy needs. The Trump administration is currently in talks with India on issues related to Iranian sanctions.

"India's position has generally been that it will only enforce sanctions authorised by UN Security Council resolutions, rendering it likely that India will resist US efforts to compel it to comply with reimposed US sanctions such as those that mandate cuts in oil purchases from Iran," the independent Congressional Research Service (CRS) said in its latest report on Iran.

In its report meant for US lawmakers to take informed decision, the CRS said India and Iran have overlapping histories and civilisations, and they are aligned on several strategic issues.

Tens of millions of India's citizens are Shiite Muslims. Both countries have historically supported minority factions in Afghanistan that are generally at odds with Afghanistan's dominant Pashtun community, said the report dated September 11.

According to the CRS, as international sanctions on Iran increased in 2010-2013, India sought to preserve its longstanding ties with Iran while cooperating with the sanctions regime.

In 2010, India's central bank ceased using a Tehran-based regional body, the Asian Clearing Union, to handle transactions with Iran. In January 2012, Iran agreed to accept India's local currency, the rupee, to settle nearly half of its sales to India, it said.

During 2011-2015, India reduced its purchases of Iranian oil, at some cost to its own development, in order to receive from the US administration exemptions from sanctions, the CRS said.

India has increased oil purchases from Iran to nearly pre-2012 levels after sanctions were lifted, and in May 2016 India agreed to transfer to Iran about USD 6.5 billion that it owed for Iranian oil shipments but which was held up for payment due to sanctions, it said.

The CRS said some projects that India has pursued in Iran involve not only economic issues but national strategy.

"India has long sought to develop Iran's Chabahar port, which would give India direct access to Afghanistan and Central Asia without relying on transit routes through Pakistan," the report said.

Noting that India had hesitated to move forward on that project because of US opposition to projects that benefit Iran, the CRS said. India has said that the implementation of Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) sanctions relief in January 2016 paved the way for work to begin in earnest on the Chabahar project.

India, Iran and Afghanistan held a ceremony in May 2016 to herald the start of work on the port based on an Indian pledge of USD 500 million investment in it, with Iran to provide the remaining USD 500 million.

Work was slowed by the difficulty equipment suppliers had in obtaining financing for the project, a consequence of hesitancy among banks about whether the US might still try to sanction the project.

The CRS report said that during a visit to India in June 2018, US Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley said the Trump administration might consider providing exemptions to US sanctions to enable the Chabahar work to continue because the project is vital to Afghanistan's development and reducing its dependence on Pakistan.

India has already begun shipping wheat to Afghanistan through this new port. During Iran President Hassan Rouhani's visit to India in February 2018, he and India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi signed memoranda outlining future expanded energy cooperation, the report added.

The US, which is renewing sanctions on Iran, reimposed some of the financial sanctions from August 6, while those affecting Iran's petroleum sector will come into effect from November 4.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
6 questions you can ask a loved one to help screen for suicide risk

A UF professor of psychiatry poses screening questions that even laypeople can use to help stem the alarming increase of death by suicide.

Death by suicide isnt always related to depression. Relationship, job and legal problems can give rise to feelings of hopelessness. Six screening questions may help. PHotograhee.eu

Suicide rates in the United States have increased by 25-30 percent since 1999. This is particularly true for youth ages 12-24, with increases of approximately 30 percent over the same period. In Alachua County, Florida, where I teach and practice at the University of Florida, the base rate for suicides among youth ages 12-17 had been about five per 100,000 for many years, below the base national rate of 13 per 100,000. However, in the year 2017 that rate of completed suicides increased to 27 per 100,000, and for 2018 we are at a pace that will likely equal 2017.

While we mental health professionals know that depression and other mental and emotional disorders contribute to deaths by suicide and having thoughts or plans for suicide, life stressors are more often listed as causes, especially since most people do not access mental health services. These include such things as relationship problems, job and financial problems, substance abuse and life crises. Suicides also take approximately twice as many lives as homicides, which garner much more attention.

Our society is now aware that we are facing a national epidemic. The challenge is to identify and serve individuals who are at risk of attempting and completing suicide before that tragic outcome. I have been part of important work over the past few years that offers hope for early identification and prevention, including at a population level.

Curbing a heartbreaking trend

Health care organizations have established a national patient safety goal of reducing suicide as part of receiving health care, particularly in hospitals, promoted by The Joint Commission, a nonprofit that certifies health care programs and professionals.

While at Reading Hospital and Medical Center in Reading, Penn. as chair of psychiatry from 2006 until 2011, I was approached by the nursing leadership about tools and processes for suicide screening for patients being admitted, consistent with that national safety goal. Searching the literature, I identified the Columbia Suicide Severity Rating Scale (C-SSRS) as a possible tool. It had been primarily developed Dr. Kelly Posner as a tool to screen for suicidality in medication research trials. It is now mandated by the FDA for psychiatric, neurological and endocrinological trials. This came after concerns about suicidal thoughts and at-risk behaviors being associated with the use of such medications.

The Columbia Suicide Severity Rating Scale was unique in having predictive value for future suicide attempts, but I found it was cumbersome to administer as a brief screener. Being convinced of the potential for the tool, I approached Dr. Posner about developing an abbreviated screening version. She agreed to the proposal, and my research assistant, Udema Millsaps, and I proceeded to develop a brief, six-item version. Five questions that relate to having ideas about suicide and one question on prior suicidal attempts met Dr. Posners approval.

In 2009, we went on to implement the first screening C-SSRS, embedded in the initial nursing assessment within the electronic medical record, for all patients being admitted to Reading Hospital. We also developed a response algorithm for either referral to mental health services or urgent safety precautions and psychiatric response during the hospitalization. We also trained over 600 nurses on its administration, with the assistance of Dr. Posner. The results, including both feasibility and outcomes, were very encouraging, including reliability of administration and effective identification of patients at risk, and we presented them at national meetings.

Since that time, I similarly worked with nursing leadership at Cooper University Hospital during the years 2011-2013 in implementing systematic suicide screening using the screening C-SSRS as part of the initial nursing assessment, much as was the case with Reading Hospital. By that time, Dr. Posner had done further work on the scoring of the screening C-SSRS and had developed a new official version, which we happily adopted. Both Reading Hospital and Cooper University Hospital were early adopters of this novel approach to suicide prevention.

However, the team at Columbia has gone much further in promoting the implementation of the screening C-SSRS, now recommending it for broad use in many settings, including our military as well as by the general public. There is now a community version that is recommended to be used by concerned friends and family members if they identify someone close to them as having some risk for suicide.

The six questions

The first five questions are about a persons feelings over the past month. These questions can be asked of people ages eight and older. They need to be included within an emphathic conversation indicating concern for the person, and asked in a nonalarming, matter-of-fact manner.

Have you wished you were dead or wished you could go to sleep and not wake up? Have you actually had any thoughts about killing yourself? If the loved one answers yes to question 2, ask questions 3, 4, 5 and 6. If the person answers no to question 2, go directly to question 6. Have you thought about how you might do this? Have you had any intention of acting on these thoughts of killing yourself, as opposed to you have the thoughts but you definitely would not act on them? Have you started to work out or worked out the details of how to kill yourself? Do you intend to carry out this plan? Always ask question 6: In the past three months, have you done anything, started to do anything, or prepared to do anything to end your life?

Examples you could mention would be: Have you collected pills; obtained a gun; given away valuables; written a will or suicide note; held a gun but changed your mind; cut yourself; tried to hang yourself.

The potential of this work has only touched the surface of this critical problem, and it has many broader applications and opportunities for implementation. These include combining the screening C-SSRS with training on risk surveillance for implementation by teachers, counselors and student organizations, ranging from middle school through the college levels. This especially includes minority and culturally diverse populations, where there have also been major increases in numbers of suicide attempts.

I am currently pursuing such opportunities to make this tool as well as awareness about suicide widely available with the ultimate goal of saving young lives.

If you are having thoughts of suicide, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255 (TALK). The website is National Suicide Prevention Lifeline.

Andres Pumariega, Professor of Psychiatry, University of Florida

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
An Indian-American lady doctor has pleaded guilty to a healthcare fraud in the US, the Justice Department has said.

Dr Jayam Krishna Iyer from Florida faces a maximum penalty of 10 years in federal prison, or 20 years, if her offence involves serious bodily injury.

As part of the plea on Tuesday, the 66-year-old doctor has agreed to surrender both her Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) registration number that she used to prescribe controlled substances and her Florida medical licence, and to a permanent exclusion from the Medicare and Medicaid programmes, the department said in a press release.

Iyer owned and operated Creative Medical Centre, a pain management clinic located at Druid Road East in Florida's Clearwater area.

She billed Medicare and Medicaid for office visits, tests and services provided to patients using her National Provider Identification (NPI) number, and wrote prescriptions for controlled substances, the release said.

Between July 2011 and December 2017, Iyer executed and carried out a scheme to defraud Medicare by billing for face-to-face office visits with Medicare beneficiaries, when, in fact, certain patients did not go to her office and were not examined by her on the claimed dates.

Instead, family members of the patients went to Iyer's office with notes requesting her to issue and provide prescriptions, including for controlled substances like oxycodone, a pain killer.

Iyer used to issue those prescriptions, thereby violating a Florida law that required doctors to perform an in-person office visit and examination of each patient before issuing controlled substance prescriptions.

She also falsified her electronic medical records, including vital statistics, to make it appear that the patient was present in her office.

Iyer submitted at least USD 51,500 in these types of false and fraudulent Medicare claims, the release said.

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A former Indian-origin city councillor in South Africa has been arrested for allegedly making derogatory racist comments against President Cyril Ramaphosa in a video posted on Facebook.

In the viral video, former Durban councillor Kessie Nair, who was earlier sentenced to six years in prison for fraud in 2005, called Ramaphosa a "kaffir" -- a derogatory term used against black people during the racist apartheid era.

In the video, Nair said that he is prepared to take a bullet or go to prison for the rest of his life.

"I... do hereby call for that kaffir state president Mr Cyril Ramaphosa, yes I mean the kaffir state president Cyril Ramaphosa, to be charged for frauding [sic] this nation, for oppressing this nation, for high treason, for failing and he's the source to all crime violence poor healthcare, poverty that prevails in a so-called true democracy," he said in the nearly five minute-long rant.

"I'm ready to go to jail for the rest of my life or take a bullet, I just want to say that the truth will hurt."



In 2005, Nair was sentenced to six years in prison for fraud. He said that it took 13 years of introspection to release the video, News24 reported.

"Nobody wakes up one morning and makes a statement and a video like that on social media," Nair had told News24.

He was arrested on Wedenesday in Durban and was charged with incitement of public violence and crimen injuria or injuring a person's dignity.

Nair the nephew of late struggle stalwart Billy Nair has received widespread condemnation from various quarters including the provincial ANC community and religious organisations as well as the presidency.

His family has distanced themselves from his utterances. They issued a statement urging South Africans to forgive him and promising to do their best to "make amends".

"We have a history of being in the trenches fighting apartheid and being involved in the struggle for the liberation of this country from the shackles of the nationalist government" said his brother Krishnan Nair.

Krishnan added that his brother suffered from a chronic illness and "needs immediate medical care and attention."



Presidential spokeswoman Khusela Diko said that the rant did not deserve attention and that Nair needed support from friends and family.

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An Indian-origin fraudster arrested by Scotland Yard as part of an anti-fraud operation has pleaded guilty to a credit card scam amounting to nearly 227,000 pounds at a court in London.

Ashley Dominic Singh was arrested from an east London address and charged last week after an appeal by officers from Operation Falcon, the Metropolitan Police's fraud and cyber crime team.

Between March and October 2016, Singh reportedly stole numerous credit cards and mobile phone SIM cards to enable him to take control of victims' bank accounts.

Once accessed, fraudulent transactions totalling GBP 227,000 were made on high-value goods such as jewellery, designer labels and electronics.

"He appeared at Inner London Crown Court on September 12 and pleaded guilty to all the charges against him, namely: conspiracy to commit fraud, transferring criminal property and possessing articles for use in fraud, the Met Police said in a statement this week.

Singh, 34, has been remanded in custody to appear for sentencing at the Inner London Crown Court on October 8.

Scotland Yard detectives from Operation Falcon had released an image of Singh, who they said was wanted in connection with a series of fraud offences across London and the south east of England.

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Indian-origin parliamentarians in the UK would be happy to assist India to bring back the mortal remains of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose from Tokyo, a British lawmaker of Indian descent said here Wednesday.

There are more than 20 Indian-origin lawmakers in the UK parliament.

"It is very important that we recognise the significance of having the ashes back in India where they truly belong," Keith Vaz said here during a discussion at The Nehru Centre on the book 'Laid to Rest: The Controversy over Subhas Chandra Bose's Death' written by NRI journalist Ashis Ray.

Replying to a question from the moderator, Mihir Bose, a biographer of Bose, Vaz said that the Indian-origin MPs would be very happy to assist the process of bringing back Netaji's ashes from Tokyo.

However, a request for such intervention has to come from Delhi, he said, adding, "Then we will be very happy to assist. I will try and get my colleagues to support this and it would be an easy task".

Commenting on the book, the senior-most member of parliament of Indian descent in the House of Commons said, "Not only is he (Bose) laid to rest, but the conspiracy theories are also laid to rest by this exceptional book."



Also in the panel of speakers was Dr Sarmila Bose, a lawyer and niece of Netaji.

"Ashis has done a great public service. He has written the book in a very accessible manner and it should further the cause to put an end to the controversy (over Netaji's death)," she said.

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A woman Indian IT professional in New Zealand was allegedly duped by three men who took 33,000 dollars from her in return for work visas for jobs that did not exist, and is now facing deportation for violating visa norms, according to a media report Thursday.

Damanpreet Kaur said she paid two men over 18,000 dollars for a work visa and job last year and later 15,000 dollars to a Hamilton man for the same, Radio New Zealand (RNZ) reported.

She said that she had received a one-year open work visa after completing an IT course in Auckland in March 2016, but after it expired she had trouble getting a two-year work visa.

Kaur, in March 2017, was approached by two men who offered her an IT job in an internet cafe in Tauranga if she paid them 50,000 dollars. They said the job would get her a work visa and help her to eventually get a residence visa.

Tauranga is most populous city in the the Bay of Plenty region of the North Island of New Zealand. It is the country's fifth largest city.

A company was set up specifically to employ her in the internet cafe with the wife of one of the men named as the company's director and owner, Kaur was quoted as saying in the report.

She paid the two Tauranga men 18,000 dollars and a Hamilton man 15,000 dollars in installments, but later discovered that the internet cafe had no working computers and there was no job.

In both cases, Kaur said she received a two-year work visa that restricted her to employment by the company named on the visa, but found there was no job, the RNZ report said.

A "depressed" Kaur, wanting justice served on the men, had provided New Zealand's immigration authorities details of her claims in the hope that it will allow her to stay in the country.

Her immigration adviser, Tuariki Delamere, urged the New Zealand government to crack down on the group, who he described as "parasites".

Kaur has sent the Associate Immigration Minister Kris Faafoi a statement detailing the allegations, the report said.

According to RNZ, the Tauranga men denied the allegations while the Hamilton man didn't return phone calls.

Kaur said immigration officials had told her she could be served with a deportation notice because she was not working for the company specified on her current two-year work visa.

She said she was surviving by depending on money from her parents in India and support from her friends in New Zealand.

Kaur admitted to have broken immigration rules by paying for a job.

"It's my mistake, I apologise... But I need one last chance from immigration," she was quoted as saying in the report.

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The Indore district court has sentenced a 38-year-old man to life imprisonment for raping his minor daughter.

The 14-year-old girl, a Class 8 student, got pregnant after being repeatedly raped by her father and had to drop out of school.

Additional Sessions Judge Varsha Sharma convicted the accused (identity not disclosed) on Wednesday for rape under section 376 (rape) of the IPC and also under the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act.

The accused shall stay in jail till death, the court said.

"Normally, a father is expected to protect his minor offspring from all problems faced in the society. In spite of this, the convict continued to rape his 14-year-old daughter by crossing all limits," the court noted.

As a result, the victim gave birth to a child at an age when she should be playing. This could have proved fatal for her, it added.

The judge also slapped a fine of Rs 50,000 on the accused.

She directed that the amount be given to the victim as compensation.

The offence came to light in March this year when the girl complained of stomach ache and was found to be pregnant.

She could not abort the child as doctors said it could threaten her life.

The girl told the court that she did not complain about the rape because her mother suffered from low blood pressure, a prosecution officer said.

If she revealed what was going on, she feared it would affect her mother's health, the victim said in her statement.

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Union Textile Minister Smriti Irani Thursday slammed Congress president Rahul Gandhi for his comments on Prime Minister, saying he is desperate to attract attention.

Earlier in the day, Gandhi had said at a public meeting in Dungarpur district that people now thought that the country's watchman is a thief.

Irani said Gandhi has no regard for the prime minister's post, which he respected only when a member of his own family held it.

I think that the desperation of the clown prince, as Mr Jaitley calls him, is to attract attention to himself at the cost of the prime minister's name, she told reporters on the sidelines of an Carpet Export Promotion Council event here.

"One needs to ask Rahul Gandhi what is his vision for the country. National building is not something that Rahul Gandhi is keen on," she said.

"People of the country know that Rahul Gandhi lacks vision, she added.

At his rally in Dungarpur, Gandhi had referred to the Rafale fighter deal with France and mocked Modi's assertions on tackling corruption.

He said people were now heard saying that the country's watchman is a thief.

Galli galli mein shor hai, Hindustan ka chowkidar chor hai, Gandhi had said.

Irani's reaction came on the sidelines of an interaction with Jaipur-based exporters.

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Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was re-elected as head of his ruling Liberal Democratic Party in a landslide Thursday, paving the way for up to three more years as the nation's leader.

The decisive victory may embolden Abe to pursue his long-sought revision to Japan's US-drafted pacifist constitution, although the hurdles remain high and doing so would carry political risks.

"It's time to tackle a constitutional revision," Abe said in a victory speech. "Now the fight is over." Abe said he's determined to use his last term to pursue his policy goals to "sum up" Japan's postwar diplomacy to ensure peace in the country.

"Let's work together to make a new Japan," he said.

Abe, who has been prime minister since December 2012, has cemented control of his party and received support from conservatives for bringing stability and continuity to economic and diplomatic policies. With a third term as party leader, Abe is poised to become Japan's longest-serving leader in August 2021.

Still, he faces several challenges, including dealing with Japan's aging and declining population, a royal succession in the spring, and a consumption tax hike to 10 percent he has already delayed twice.

He faces security concerns stemming from North Korea's nuclear and missile threats, and China's increasingly assertive activity in the region, as well as intensifying trade friction with the US which could shake his friendly relations with President Donald Trump.

Abe has said he is determined to push for a revision to the U.S.-drafted 1947 constitution, a decades-old pledge of the Liberal Democratic Party since its foundation in 1955 and a goal that none of Abe's predecessors has been able to achieve.

Abe has said he hopes his party could submit a draft constitution revision to a parliamentary session later this year ahead of a national referendum. Abe is proposing to add a clause to Article 9, which bans the use of force in settling international disputes, to explicitly permit the existence of Japan's military, now called the Self-Defense Force.

Many conservatives see the constitution as a humiliation imposed on Japan following its World War II defeat. Among them was Abe's grandfather, Nobusuke Kishi, who served as prime minister 1957-1960. Kishi was imprisoned as a suspected war criminal during the US occupation.

Constitutional revision is divisive and it's unclear whether Abe could get enough votes for passage.

Abe and his senior party members want to rush a revision while their ruling coalition still holds two-thirds super majority in both houses a requirement to propose a revision. The next parliamentary election is due next summer.

For the public, the constitution is a lesser concern than issues such as pay, education and the high cost of child care, surveys show.

If a revision is voted down in a national referendum, Abe would likely have to step down Abe has survived a series of scandals, including cronyism allegations against him and his wife. Despite attacks from opposition parties and criticism in the media, he has seen his support ratings bounce back to about 40 percent, considered high for a Japanese leader after nearly six years in office.

An extended term for Abe is generally seen as good for stability and continuity.

"A stable government under a strong leader is good for the economy and diplomacy, and Prime Minister Abe has established a rather significant presence in diplomacy," said Yu Uchiyama, a University of Tokyo professor.

But his long and strong leadership has caused a lack of political competitiveness, Uchiyama said.

"The biggest concern about Japanese is how to restore competition in and reactivate democracy," Uchiyama said.

In Thursday's leadership vote, Abe handily defeated his sole challenger, Shigeru Ishiba, a former defense minister. Abe won 553, or about 70 percent, of 807 votes.

Abe took 80 percent of parliamentarian votes, while support from regional rank-and-file party members was at 55 percent, though it fell within projections. Experts see the margin of victory in regional member votes as a more accurate indicator of general public sentiment than the parliamentarian votes.

Abe's softer showing there means he will have to be more mindful of voices coming from outside parliament.

Abe's dominance has been bolstered by the strengthening of the Prime Minister's Office, allowing him and his party executives to monopolize decisions over policies and personnel affairs, experts say. The system has accommodated Abe's long reign, as many lawmakers are primarily interested in getting Abe and other senior lawmakers' backing in elections.

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Five Jet Airways passengers, who suffered nose and ear bleeding Thursday after the crew failed to turn on a switch that controls cabin air pressure, were diagnosed with "mild conductive deafness" and later discharged from hospital, officials said.

The five passengers -- Anveshan Ray (39), Mukesh Sharma (31), Vikas Agarwal (31), Damodar Das (37) and Ankur Kala (38) -- were examined by ENT specialists at the Dr Balabhai Nanavati Hospital, a civic official said.

Nanavati Hospital's chief operating officer Rajendra Patankar said their health condition was stable and they did not require admission.

As per their examination by ENT doctors, the five passengers suffered "barotrauma" of ear, which is caused due to a change in air pressure, Patankar told reporters here.

"The five patients, all males, have mild conductive deafness, a temporary condition which is likely to take a week or 10 days to heal. They are advised not to fly till then. They are undergoing all required tests," he said.

"Whatever medication is required for the treatment of mild deafness, has been advised," Patankar said.

After the five passengers were examined and provided treatment, they left the hospital, the civic official said.

The other passengers were attended to by doctors at the Mumbai airport.

Ankur Kala, who suffered nasal bleeding in the incident, alleged that the flight crew members were like "trainees" who did not know how to handle the situation.

"As soon as we took off, the air conditioners were not working. It was suffocating inside. I came to know (later) from the media they had forgotten to switch on the cabin pressure machine," said Kala, who works for a jewellery firm and was going to Jaipur after coming here from Bangkok.

Recounting the ordeal, he said about 15 to 20 minutes after the takeoff, the oxygen masks got deployed from the overhead compartments but there was no instructions on whether to use it or not.

"There was no announcement from the pilots or crew whether we were going ahead or landing. The crew members panicked more than the passengers," he claimed, while talking to reporters outside the hospital.

"Suddenly, we smelt like a wire was burning. The pressure was so high that we were covering our ears and holding the oxygen mask with our hands but it was still intolerable. Still, there was no announcement from pilots or crew members as to what exactly was the problem," Kala said.

He further said that during landing, there was extreme pressure in the flight and he kept covering his ears and holding the mask, and fell unconscious for 10 to 15 seconds.

"When I removed my mask it was full of blood. I told my co-passengers that I am bleeding and waved to the air hostess, but she told me to remain seated and that all is normal," Kala said.

He said after landing, there was no proper medication at the airport and that there were two compounders who cleaned the injuries with cotton.

"We were brought to the airport, saying we will be boarding the next flight. We were around 30 people who suffered injuries, of them 20 were sent to Jaipur by another flight without proper treatment," he claimed.

"But I kept insisting that I won't go ahead if I am not given proper medication and declared fit by doctors to fly again," he said, adding that after two hours, he reached the Nanavati Hospital from the airport.

The Mumbai-Jaipur flight was carrying 166 passengers and five crew members on board.

Several passengers on the flight from Mumbai to Jaipur suffered nose and ear bleeding after the crew "forgot" to turn on a switch that controls cabin air pressure, officials said.

"During climb, the crew forgot to select bleed switch due to which cabin pressurisation could not be maintained. As a result, oxygen masks got deployed," the official at aviation regulator, Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA), said.

The Boeing 737 aircraft returned to Mumbai due to "loss of cabin pressure" and the pilots have been taken off duty pending investigation, a Jet Airways spokesperson said.

Citing initial information, the official said few passengers have nose bleeding.

"Out of 166 passengers on board, 30 passengers are affected... some have nose bleeding, a few have ear bleeding and some are complaining of headache," he added.

Civil Aviation Minister Suresh Prabhu ordered a safety audit of all scheduled airlines and airports.

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The country's first indigenously developed 500-megawatt (mw) prototype fast breeder reactor at Kalpakkam in Tamil Nadu is expected to achieve criticality next year, a senior official said.

The project, which was earlier expected to be commissioned in 2012, has missed several deadlines.

"Our indigenously developed prototype fast breeder reactor of 500 mw is now under going sodium commissioning. We expect criticality next year," Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) secretary Sekhar Basu said at the 62th General Conference of International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) held in Vienna.

Achieving criticality means that the reactor is fully operational and safe.

The design of the country's first fast breeder reactor, called Prototype Fast Breeder Reactor (PFBR), was done by the Indira Gandhi Centre for Atomic Research (IGCAR).

Bharatiya Nabhikiya Vidyut Nigam (Bhavini), a public sector company under DAE, has been given the responsibility to build the fast breeder reactors in the country.

In a statement issued by the DAE, Basu said that India's plans to build 21 reactors by 2030 was well on track.

"I am glad to inform that the implementation of this programme is well on track. In addition, our discussions with foreign partners for bringing different technology is on," he told the gathering.

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Global cyber security firm Kaspersky said it expects India to become the top market in terms of mobile consumers in the Asia Pacific region in the next 5-10 years, driven by a sharp increase in usage of handsets and tablets.

From mobile Internet perspective, India is one of the close markets for the company, Stephan Neumeier, Managing Director APAC (Asia Pacific region) Kaspersky Lab told PTI in an interview.

"Probably India can become number one market in terms of mobile consumers in the next 5-10 years in Asia Pacific and may be in the world," Neumeier said.

A lot of young consumers are moving directly to mobile phones and tablets and are not focussing much on personal computers or laptops, he explained.

Besides, the Indian government is investing massively on creating infrastructure for the a greater Internet penetration that will bolster the prospects for consumer business.

"Today we have much faster Internet speed in bigger cities, connectivity is more or less available everywhere today. With that, consumers will obviously consume data in a much better and faster manner than they used to be," Neumeier said.

However, he said there is a need for raising awareness about cyber security among younger generation as securing devices from potential cyber threats is not one of their top priorities while purchasing mobile phones or tablets.

There is limited understanding of protecting the devices and that is why Kaspersky is cooperating with telecom operators so that the can bundle the cyber security products along with the mobile internet subscription, the official said.

Without sharing any name, he said one contract is in the making with one of the telecom companies to bundle Kaspersky products with the consumers mobile subscription.

Talking about the market share in the APAC region, he said India constitutes about 15 per cent of its business and expects to grow it to 20 per cent within two years.

On asked about how the company is engaging itself with the Indian government in an increasingly global environment of cyber threats and data vulnerability, Neumeier said the focus is on creating awareness, educating the consumers and creating the infrastructure.

He said today it is very important that governments and companies not only have foresight in having the right technology in place to protect their systems and controls but also to gauge what threat might come in order to predict in future.

The Russia-based company has been banned to work with the US government on allegations of spying for the Kremlin.

On asked how it is going to affect Kaspersky's business elsewhere, Neumeier said there is no impact in the APAC region including in India and China.

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The two Korean leaders took to the road for the final day of their summit Thursday, heading to a beautiful volcano considered sacred in the North and used in its propaganda to legitimize the Kims' three generations of rule. Their trip followed a day of wide-ranging agreements they trumpeted as a major step toward peace on the Korean Peninsula.

However, their premier accord on the issue most fascinating and worrisome the North's pursuit of nuclear-tipped missiles that can accurately strike the U.S. mainland contained a big condition: Kim Jong Un stated he would permanently dismantle North Korea's main nuclear complex only if the United States takes unspecified corresponding measures.

Kim and South Korean President Moon Jae-in flew separately to an airport near Mount Paektu on Thursday morning where they met up and drove to the mountain on the North Korean-Chinese border. Members of the Kim family are referred to as sharing the "Paektu Bloodline." The volcano topped with a deep crater lake is also emblazoned on the national emblem and lends its name to everything from rockets to power stations.

Moon plans to return to South Korea later Thursday, but the leaders are still basking in the glow of the joint statement they settled Wednesday.

Compared to the vague language of their two earlier summits, Kim and Moon seem to have agreed on an ambitious program meant to tackle soaring tensions last year that had many fearing war as the North tested a string of increasingly powerful weapons.

Kim promised to accept international inspectors to monitor the closing of a key missile test site and launch pad and to visit Seoul soon, and both leaders vowed to work together to try to host the Summer Olympics in 2032.

But while containing several tantalizing offers, their joint statement appeared to fall short of the major steps many in Washington have been looking for such as a commitment by Kim to provide a list of North Korea's nuclear facilities, a solid step-by-step timeline for closing them down, or an agreement to allow international inspectors to assess progress or discover violations.

It also was unclear what "corresponding steps" North Korea wants from the U.S. to dismantle its nuclear site.

The question is whether it will be enough for President Donald Trump to pick up where Moon has left off. Trump told reporters Wednesday that the outcome of the summit was "very good news" and that "we're making tremendous progress" with North Korea. He didn't indicate in his brief remarks whether the U.S. would be willing to take further steps to encourage North Korean action on denuclearization.

Declaring they had made a major step toward peace, Moon and Kim stood side by side Wednesday as they announced their agreement.

"We have agreed to make the Korean Peninsula a land of peace that is free from nuclear weapons and nuclear threat," Kim said. "The road to our future will not always be smooth and we may face challenges and trials we can't anticipate. But we aren't afraid of headwinds because our strength will grow as we overcome each trial based on the strength of our nation."



Moon urged unity for all Koreans in a speech he gave Wednesday night to the crowd gathered for North Korea's signature mass games. "We have lived together for 5,000 years and lived in separation for 70 years. I now propose that we completely eliminate the hostility of the past 70 years and take a big step forward in peace so that we can become one again."



Historians say the 5,000-year timeline of Korean history is a groundless claim that became part of South Korea's official narrative after being inserted in school textbooks during the rule of former dictator Chun Doo-hwan.

This week's summit comes as Moon is under increasing pressure from Washington to find a path forward in efforts to get Kim to completely and unilaterally abandon his nuclear arsenal.

Trump has maintained that he and Kim have a solid relationship, and both leaders have expressed interest in a follow-up summit to their meeting in June in Singapore. North Korea has been demanding a declaration formally ending the Korean War, which was stopped in 1953 by a cease-fire, but neither leader mentioned it Wednesday as they read the joint statement. In the meantime, however, Moon and Kim made concrete moves of their own to reduce tensions on their border.

According to a statement signed by the countries' defense chiefs, the two Koreas agreed to establish buffer zones along their land and sea borders to reduce military tensions and prevent accidental clashes. They also agreed to withdraw 11 guard posts from the Demilitarized Zone by December and to establish a no-fly zone above the military demarcation line that bisects the two Koreas that will apply to planes, helicopters and drones.

Though not directly linked to security, the leaders' announcement that they would seek a joint Summer Olympics was a significant move in terms of easing tensions and building trust. It also flows from the North's decision to participate in the Pyeongchang Winter Games in February, which was regarded as a success for both sides.

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Members of the Koli Mahasabha on Thursday demanded a CBI inquiry into the death of RTI activist Kedar Singh Jindan.

Over 200 members of the Koli Mahasabha were joined by activists of the Balmiki Sabha and the Sant Ravidas Mahasabha for a protest march here on Wednesday.

They assembled at the Hindu Ashram here and took out the protest march, which went up to the office of deputy commissioner, Sirmour.

A delegation of the protesters submitted a memorandum in the name of the governor of Himachal Pradesh through the deputy commissioner.

Jindan's family members had claimed that he was killed and then the body was crushed under a jeep to make it look like an accident. They had also demanded a CBI inquiry into the matter.

The investigation of the case was immediately handed over to a Special Investigation Team (SIT) headed by Sirmour Additional Superintendent of Police V S Thakur.

The police claimed to have solved the murder case by arresting three assailants.

Jindand had unsuccessfully contested Himachal Pradesh Assembly polls thrice on BSP and NCP tickets from Shillai seat.

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Historian Romila Thapar and the Maharashtra government Thursday traded charges in the Supreme Court over the arrest of five rights activists in the Koregaon-Bhima violence case, with her accusing the police of "cooking up" the probe and the agency countering by terming her a "stranger" to the litigation.

A bench headed by Chief Justice Dipak Misra reserved its verdict on a plea by Thapar and others seeking the immediate release of the rights activists and an SIT probe into their arrest, after a battery of lawyers from both sides concluded their submissions.

The bench, also comprising Justices A M KHanwilkar and Dy Chnadrachud, asked the Maharashtra police to submit its entire case diary pertaining to the probe by September 24. All parties will also have to submit their written submissions by then.

Terming the entire probe as "cooked up", senior advocate A M Singhvi, appearing for Thapar and four others, referred to three letters and said these were used to "incriminate" the activists.

Moreover, the two FIRs strangely did not contain the allegation that there was a "Rajiv Gandhi-like plot" to assassinate the Prime Minister, he said.

Additional Solicitor General Tushar Mehta, appearing for Maharashtra government, referred to the evidence collected by the agency in its ongoing probe and vehemently urged the court not to interfere with the criminal proceedings and that too, at the behest of the "strangers" in a public interest litigation (PIL).

"No interference should be allowed in criminal matters in the garb of PIL. At the behest of strangers, the present petition cannot be entertained," he said, adding that the plea should be dismissed and the accused asked to join the probe which is at a "premature" stage.

He said all materials including the letters have been recovered from the laptops and computers of the arrested accused during the probe, which was being carried out "impartially" and "diligently".

"The PIL under Article 32 of the Constitution cannot be entertained to seek relief under section 438 (provision for bail) under the Code of Criminal Procedure," he said, adding that moreover, the writ of habeas corpus (bring the person) would not lie when the accused is in the judicial custody.

"The petition deserves to be dismissed. The status quo ante (position before the litigation) be restored and the five accused be asked to surrender for the investigation," the law officer said.

Senior advocate Harish Salve, appearing for complainant Tushar Damgude, said he was not aware of the materials seen by the court which in any case would look at them with "hawk's eye", but there was a distinction between free speech and unlawful activities.

"Unlawful activities cannot be permitted. You can have any ideology," he said, "I am suggesting the contours where free speech ends and unlawful activity begins".

He said the issue was whether the probe be allowed to continue and if it led to any unlawful activities, then "this investigation must continue".

If any person is wrongly roped in, then he or she has a remedy and the apex court was here and the fact is that "our judiciary is robust".

He assailed the prayer for an SIT probe into the case, saying it was a "cut-paste template prayer" and such a probe can be ordered only when there was apprehension that fair probe was not possible.

Salve gave the example of the 2G case and said there a minister was a suspect and the government agency was probing the case. "If their prayer is accepted, it would mean we cannot trust anybody the police, NIA and the CBI," he said.

When Singhvi, during his rejoinder submissions, referred to the three letters used to "incriminate" the accused, Salve objected to it and said the petitioners should file on affidavit as to how they had accessed the letters.

Singhvi countered saying that the letters were available on the websites of two channels and referred to the transit remand application of the police to highlight the point that it was based the Koregaon Bhima violence and there was no mention of the three letters.

He also referred to the press conference held by the Additional Director General of Police of Maharashtra and said these letters, which have been referred to be very sensitive, were flashed in the presser.

Senior advocate Anand Grover alleged that the letters, attributed to Rona Wilson and Sudha Bharadwaj, had words in Marathi which only "Maharashtrians could have written".

The five activists --Varavara Rao, Arun Ferreira, Vernon Gonsalves, Sudha Bharadwaj and Gautam Navlakha-- are under arrest at their respective homes since August 29.

The plea by Thapar and economists Prabhat Patnaik and Devaki Jain, sociology professor Satish Deshpande and human rights lawyer Maja Daruwala has sought an independent probe into the arrests and the immediate release of the five activists.

The Maharashtra police had arrested the rights activists on August 28 in connection with an FIR lodged following a conclave -- 'Elgaar Parishad' -- held on December 31 last year that had later triggered violence at Koregaon-Bhima village.

The apex court had said on September 19 that it would look into the case with a hawk's eye as liberty cannot be "sacrificed at the altar of conjectures". It had earlier said that it may order an SIT probe if it found that the evidence has been "cooked up".

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The Supreme Court Thursday reserved its verdict on a plea by historian Romila Thapar and others seeking the immediate release of five rights activists in connection with the Koregaon-Bhima violence case and an SIT probe into their arrest.

A bench headed by Chief Justice Dipak Misra, reserved the judgment after counsel for both parties including senior advocates Abhishek Manu Singhvi, Harish Salve and Additional Solicitor General Tushar Mehta concluded their submissions.

The bench, also comprising Justices A M Khaniwlkar and D Y Chandrachud, asked the Maharashtra police to file their case diary pertaining to the ongoing investigation in the case by September 24. It also asked the parties to file their written submissions by then.

The five activists --Varavara Rao, Arun Ferreira, Vernon Gonsalves, Sudha Bharadwaj and Gautam Navlakha-- are under arrest at their respective homes since August 29.

The plea by Thapar and economists Prabhat Patnaik and Devaki Jain, sociology professor Satish Deshpande and human rights lawyer Maja Daruwala has sought an independent probe into the arrests and the immediate release of the five activists.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The BJP government in Chhattisgarh shunted out a senior police officer Thursday following a lathi-charge on Congress workers in Bilaspur town two days ago.

Additional Superintendent of Police Neeraj Chandrakar has been shifted to the police headquarters in Raipur, Chief Minister Raman Singh said.

"A magisterial enquiry has been ordered. Bilaspur ASP Neeraj Chandrakar has been attached (posted) to the police headquarters till the probe gets over," Singh told reporters in Surajpur district.

Seven Congress workers were injured in a lathi-charge on Tuesday following a protest by party workers outside Urban Administration Minister Amar Agrawal's house. The protest was against Agrawal allegedly calling Congress "Kachra" (garbage).

During the protest, Congress workers allegedly threw garbage inside the minister's house. Later, 52 Congress workers were arrested from the party's local office.

The party alleged that police used lathi-charge for no reason while making the arrests, while the police said that some police personnel were manhandled by Congress workers.

Congress leader P L Punia said Prime Minister Narendra Modi will be shown black flags during his visit to Janjgir-Champa district on September 22 if Agrawal does not resign and a police case is not lodged against Chandrakar.

"The state government should register an FIR for attempt to murder against Chandrakar instead of just shifting him....instead of a magisterial probe, the incident should be probed by a sitting judge of the high court," he said.

Punia, the party's in-charge for Chhattisgarh, was speaking to reporters after a meeting of the executive committee of the state Congress in Bilaspur.

State BJP spokesperson Shivratan Sharma said the opposition party is trying to derive political mileage from the issue.

"Taking serious note of the incident, the government immediately ordered magisterial probe and removed ASP Chandrakar from the district.

"Despite such prompt action, Congress, in a bid to take political advantage, shifted the venue of its executive meeting from Raipur to Bilaspur," he alleged.

On the Congress's warning about protest during Modi's visit, Sharma said the party should not forget that its national leaders will also visit the state in future.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Opposition Congress in the Uttarakhand Assembly vehemently raised the issue of "collapsing law and order situation" Thursday, saying girls were "not safe anywhere in the state".

Citing the recent gang rape of a minor at a city school, the Congress members said girls in the state were safe neither at school hostels nor in shelter homes.

Leader of Opposition in the state assembly Indira Hridayesh said law and order has "totally collapsed" in Uttarakhand where heinous crimes such as murder, loot, and rape are being committed with impunity.

Initiating a debate on the issue under an adjournment motion in the House, Hridayesh said the gang rape of a minor girl at a school on the outskirts of the city and the rape and murder of another in Dunda area of Uttarkashi confirm "there is no authority to ensure the safety of our daughters".

"The appalling condition of girls at the city's shelter homes is also not hidden from anyone," she said.

"Perpetrators of such crimes are never punished. The newspapers carry reports for a few days and the matter is forgotten. This has emboldened criminals," she said.

Citing data which reflected a rise in crime against women, Congress MLA and PCC president Pritam Singh said as many as 340 cases of rape have been reported in the state in just eight months.

"The chief minister talks about bringing investors to the state but no investor will come with a law and order scenario like this," Singh warned.

Replying on behalf of the state government, Parliamentary Affairs Minister Prakash Pant said cases of crime against women show a rising trend but that is because more cases are being registered now "unlike during the previous government".

As Pant tried to explain using a comparison of records of criminal cases registered during the previous regime and now, Opposition members in the House noisly protested, saying they were looking for solution and not data.

After the intervention of Speaker Prem Chand Aggarwal, Pant began again. Pant said "there is no place for criminals" in the state.

"Acting against criminals is our commitment and we are doing exactly that. Immediate action was taken in all the cases cited by the Opposition colleagues. The accused were booked and put behind bars. Our effort is to ensure that such incidents are not reiterated and Devbhoomi's name is not tainted," he said.

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Lok Sabha Speaker Sumitra Mahajan visited ailing Goa Chief Minister Manohar Parrikar at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) here on Thursday.

Sixty-two-year-old Parrikar is admitted at the old private ward under Dr Pramod Garg, professor of gastroenterology, and is under observation.

According to hospital sources, the Goa chief minister had undergone a series of tests at the premier health institute.

Parrikar was flown to the national capital owing to his declining health on Saturday.

He had returned from the US in the first week of September, days after which he was admitted to a hospital at Candolim in north Goa.

Earlier this year, he had undergone a three-month-long treatment in the US.

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A 26-year-old man has been arrested for allegedly molesting a student from Manipur while she was travelling in a local train in Mumbai, a police official said Thursday.

The accused, Ayaz Sattar Qureshi, a resident of Mankhurd suburb here, was nabbed from the Kurla railway station on Wednesday, he said.

The police managed to trace the accused with the help of his photograph clicked by the 22-year-old victim and analysing CCTV footages of various railway stations, he said.

The woman, studying at a renowned research institute here, was molested on September 11 while she was commuting with her European colleague in the local train between Vashi and Govandi stations on the suburban Harbour Line, a police official said earlier.

She had complained that the man touched her inappropriately, taking advantage of the peak hour crowd in the general compartment of the train, he said.

While she and her colleague tried to nab the man, other passengers remained mute spectators and the accused managed to flee, the complainant had said.

The victim had narrated her ordeal on social media on Saturday.

A case was registered against the accused under IPC section 354 (molestation), the police added.

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A 49-year old man who carried out a savage attack on his daughter and her husband for marrying without his consent has been arrested even as the young woman whose forearm was nearly severed while trying to save her spouse was in a critical condition at a hospital, police said.

A video of the incident, which occurred on Wednesday close on the heels of an alleged honour killing in which a 23-year old Dalit Christian man was hacked to death in Telangana's Nalgonda district, has gone viral. The incidents have triggered public outrage. Police have now asked TV channels not to show videos of the two incidents, saying they are "likely to provoke violence".

V Manohar Chary had fled the scene after brutally attacking his newly wed 20-year old daughter Madhavi and son-in-law Sandeep (21), belonging to different castes, with a sickle at Erragadda here Wednesday but was arrested within hours, police said.

Police also said the man was in an "inebriated" state when he attacked the couple.

Madhavi suffered severe injuries on the left side of her face while the chopped left forearm was hanging by some skin. Her husband was injured on the jaw and has been discharged after treatment.

Doctors attending to the woman said the forearm was cut and they were fixing and rejoining the nerves.

"Her condition remains critical.... She is responding to treatment, but is on ventilator support," a doctor said.

They said she would continue to remain under observation for next 2-3 days and only after that they will be able to say if she was out of danger.

In his complaint to police, Sandeep said he was in love with Madhavi since 2013 and they got married on September 12 at a temple here to which their parents had objected.

Police had called their parents and counselled them, but Madhavi's parents refused to accept the marriage, he said.

On September 16, Madhavi's parents had gone to Sandeep's house and requested their daughter to come home which she refused, Deputy Commissioner of Police (West Zone) A R Srinivas told reporters Wednesday night.

The accused had asked the couple to come to Erragadda on Wednesday afternoon, saying he wanted to talk to them.

When Sandeep and Madhavi were about to leave on their two-wheeler, Chary suddenly drew the sickle and attacked his son-in-law even while his daughter tried to prevent him, the official said.

During interrogation, Chary told the police that he was angry that his daughter married Sandeep without informing him.

When asked if the inter-caste marriage was the motive behind the attack, the police official said the accused was angry that his daughter had married without his knowledge and refused to return home.

"He bore a grudge against his daughter and decided to kill her and Sandeep... he attacked them in an inebriated state," inflicting injuries on both, the DCP said.

With videos of the incident here and at Nalagonda being aired on TV channels, police asked the media to desist from showing them "in the interest of the society".

It asked the channels to adhere to the 'Programme Code' prescribed under Cable Television Networks (Regulation) Act 1995.

"It is observed that certain TV Channels have been telecasting content consisting of gory scenes of violence repeatedly in the name of honour killings, which is likely to provoke violence leading to further such incidents," state Director General of Police M Mahendar Reddy said in a release.

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A 25-year-old man has been apprehended at a Delhi Metro station Thursday for allegedly carrying a country-made pistol and a bullet round in his bag, officials said.

CISF personnel apprehended Govinda, resident of Muzaffarnagar district in Uttar Pradesh, at the Saket station in the noon after the X-ray baggage scanner detected a pistol-like object in his bag, they said.

A live bullet was also recovered from the bag apart from the country-made pistol, they added.

The man was handed over to the local police by the Central Industrial Security Force (CISF) personnel for further investigation, officials said.

Carrying arms and ammunition in the Delhi Metro is banned by the law.

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Union Minister Maneka Gandhi Thursday expressed concern over sexual assaults in children's shelter homes and increasing incidents of NRI grooms abandoning their brides.

She asked the police force to keep a close eye on such crimes and the arrest of culprits.

Speaking at an event, where a national registry of sex offenders was launched by Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh, Gandhi pulled up representatives of the states which did not respond to a letter sent by Women and Child Development Ministry asking how many 'rape kits', a specially-designed kit which helps carry out immediate medical investigation into sexual assault cases, were procured by them.

"Twenty to thirty per cent of sexual assaults take place in shelter homes. In Muzaffarpur in Bihar, the head of a shelter home allegedly sexually assaulted several children, but he was not arrested immediately. There was a tunnel from the shelter home to his residence. That means the crimes must have taken place in his residence. I appeal to all DGPs to keep a close eye on all shelter homes," she said.

Besides Singh and Gandhi, the event was attended by Union Ministers of State for Home Kiren Rijiju, Hansraj Gangaram Ahir, Union Home Secretary Rajiv Gauba and top officials of the ministries of home and women and child development. Top police and civil officers of the states attended the event via video conferencing.

Flagging the increasing incidents of abandonment of brides by NRIs and foreign grooms, Gandhi said initially there was an impression that such incidents took place only in Punjab which was incorrect.

"Such incidents take place across the country. We have reports of eight to ten cases every day where a foreigner comes (here), weds a woman, uses her for a week and then abandon her. Such women are neither married, nor widows. Please keep an eye on such incidents and take action and ensure cancellation of the passports of such men," she said.

The women and child development minister pulled up the representatives of the states, who attended the event through vide conference, saying not a single state responded to a letter written by her ministry some time ago on the issue of procurement of 'rape kits'



"Every police station should have at least three 'rape kits'. But not a single state has responded to our letter and informed how many such kits were procured (by them)," she said.

Responding to Gandhi, Joint Secretary of the Home Ministry Punya Salila Srivastava said as many as 79 lakh rape kits were in the process of procurement and distribution across the country.

The kits were being procured with financial support under the Nirbhaya Fund, which was named after the 2012 Delhi gang-rape victim. The kit comprises essential items which aid in furnishing evidence such as blood and semen samples in sexual assault and rape cases.

These kits also contain instructions on collection of evidence from the crime scene. The kit would be sent to the closest lab and within two months one would have the results.

Earlier in the day, the home minister launched two separate portals to strengthen women's safety. The National Database on Sexual Offenders (NDSO), which is accessible only to law enforcement agencies, will assist in effective tracking and investigation of cases of sexual offences.

The portal 'cybercrime.gov.in' will receive complaints from citizens on objectionable online content related to child pornography, child sexual abuse material, sexually explicit material such as rape and gang rape.

The NDSO is a central database of sexual offenders in the country which will be maintained by the National Crime Record Bureau.

The database is accessible only to the law enforcement agencies for investigation and monitoring purpose. The database will include offenders convicted under charges of rape, gang rape, POCSO and eve teasing.

At present the database contains 4.4 lakh entries. The state police have been requested to regularly update the database from 2005 onwards. The database includes name, address, photograph and fingerprint details of each entry. However, the database will not compromise any individual's privacy, union home secretary Rajiv Gauba said.

The Cyber Crime Prevention Against Women and Children (CCPWC) portal will enable complainants to report cases without disclosing their identity.

This will not only aid the victims and complainants but also help the civil society organisations and responsible citizens to anonymously report complaints pertaining to child pornography, child sexual abuse material or sexually explicit material such as rape and gang rape.

Complainants can also upload the objectionable content and URL to assist in the investigation by the state police. The complaints registered through this portal will be handled by the police authorities of respective states and UTs. There are other features such as a victim or complainant can track his or her report by opting for "report and track" option using his or her mobile number.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Union Women and Child Development Minister Maneka Gandhi Thursday took state representatives and central bureaucrats to task, in the presence of Home Minister Rajnath Singh, over rising number of sexual assault cases in children's shelter homes.

Speaking at the launch of a national registry of sex offenders, Gandhi pulled up representatives of those states which did not respond to a letter sent by her ministry on procurement of 'rape kits', a specially-designed kit which helps carry out immediate medical investigation into sexual assault cases.

How many rape kits have been procured so far? she asked the officials at the function, which was attended by Union Ministers of State for Home Kiren Rijiju, Hansraj Gangaram Ahir, Union Home Secretary Rajiv Gauba and top officials of the ministries of home and women and child development. Top police and civil officers of the states attended the event via video conferencing.

"Twenty to 30 per cent of sexual assaults take place in shelter homes. In Muzaffarpur in Bihar, the head of a shelter home allegedly sexually assaulted several children, but he was not arrested immediately. There was a tunnel from the shelter home to his house, that means the crimes must have taken place in his residence. I appeal to all DGPs to keep a close eye on all shelter homes," she said.

Stating that not a single state responded to the letter sent by her ministry on the issue of procurement of 'rape kits', Maneka said, "Every police station should have at least three rape kits. But not a single state has responded to our letter and informed how many such kits were procured (by them)."



Responding to Gandhi, Joint Secretary of the Home Ministry Punya Salila Srivastava said as many as 79 lakh rape kits were in the process of procurement and distribution across the country.

The kits were being procured with financial support under the Nirbhaya Fund, which was named after the 2012 Delhi gang-rape victim. The kit comprises essential items which aid in furnishing evidence such as blood and semen samples in sexual assault and rape cases.

These kits also contain instructions on collection of evidence from the crime scene. The kit would be sent to the closest lab and within two months the results would be out.

Flagging the increasing incidents of abandonment of brides by NRIs and foreign grooms, Gandhi said initially there was an impression that such incidents took place only in Punjab which was incorrect.

"Such incidents take place across the country. We have reports of eight to ten cases everyday where a foreigner comes (here), weds a woman, uses her for a week and then abandons her. Such women are neither married, nor widows. Please keep an eye on such incidents and take action and ensure cancellation of the passports of such men," she said.

In his speech, the Union Home Minister said the task of creating an emergency response support system on a national level based on the helpline number 112 is rapidly progressing and that the safe city project has been approved in eight cities.

He said works are apace for a national mission for better synergy on the issue of women's safety among central ministries, states and other stakeholders. "This mission will play an active role in setting up 1,023 fast track courts," Singh said.

"Today, we are moving forward in the issue of female security through the national database on sexual offenders and the cybercrime reporting portals. We have made a separate division in MHA, prioritising women's safety," he said and exuded confidence that these online tools will help nail criminals.

Earlier in the day, the home minister launched two separate portals to strengthen women's safety. The National Database on Sexual Offenders (NDSO), which is accessible only to law enforcement agencies, will assist in effective tracking and investigation of cases of sexual offences.

The portal 'cybercrime.gov.in' will receive complaints from citizens on objectionable online content related to child pornography, child sexual abuse and sexually explicit material such as rape.

The NDSO is a central database of sexual offenders in the country which will be maintained by the National Crime Record Bureau.

The database is accessible only to the law enforcement agencies for investigation and monitoring purpose. The database will include offenders convicted under charges of rape, gang rape, POCSO and eve teasing.

The Cyber Crime Prevention Against Women and Children (CCPWC) portal will enable complainants to report cases without disclosing their identity.

Union Home Secretary Rajiv Gauba highlighted the need for time-bound completion of investigation in sexual crimes to deter potential offenders.

While appreciating the progress made by Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh police, he said MHA will monitor progress in all the states and added that the two portals will be extremely helpful to the law enforcement agencies especially in investigation where offenders migrate to other states after committing crimes.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The Meghalaya High Court has dismissed a PIL filed by a group of villagers in East Khasi Hills district against cement major LafargeHolcim observing that it was "totally without merit" and "tainted with ill design".

The PIL, pending since 2007, had alleged that the land bordering Nongtrai and Shella had been illegally acquired by the company for mining of limestone and had not benefitted the villages around the mining area.

A division bench, comprising Chief Justice Mohammad Yaqoob Mir and Justice S R Sen, on Wednesday said the PIL was aimed at jeopardising the progress of the village.

The bench said the PIL was "totally without any merit" and "tainted with ill design" as the Shella Action Committee (SAC) could not produce even one land owner who was affected, after the land was transferred, sold or leased out in favour of the company.

The high court also directed the petitioner, the SAC, to pay a fine of Rs 20,000 within a month, to be donated to flood-affected Kerala.

The SAC had filed the PIL against the then Lafarges Lum Mawshun Minerals Pvt. Ltd, Lafarge Umiam Mining Pvt. Ltd registered in India and Lafarge Surma Cement Ltd, registered in Bangladesh alleging that the companies had denied revenue due to the state besides having flouting mining rules.

They had said in the PIL that it had caused serious loss of revenue and irreparable loss to the indigenous people residing within the sixth schedule area.

After considering the matter, the court said it had arrived at a conclusion that the petitioner had filed the PIL without any substantial basis.

"They may be the residents of village Shella but are stated to have been residing in Shillong and operating from there to the disadvantage of the people of Shella," the bench said in its order.

The court observed that mining operations undertaken by LafargeHolcim and its mining firms have "proved fruitful" for the economic growth and welfare of the people of the area.

It also observed that the company had contributed over Rs 171 crore to the state's exchequer apart from contributing to the economy and the livelihood of the local people at the project sites by way of creating additional direct and indirect employment opportunities, provision of education, skill-development and various measures.

It said that the project contributes Rs 2.6 crore revenue to Nongtrai Village Durbar, adjacent to Shella village, for the mining area. It is a major source of revenue for people of Nongtrai village.

The cement plant in Chattak is dependent on limestones taken via conveyor belt from Nongtrai village.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The Home Ministry is in the process of creating an emergency response support system to check crimes and is implementing a special project in eight cities for women safety, Home Minister Rajnath Singh said Thursday.

Launching two portals on women safety, Singh said a national mission for better synergy among central ministries, states and other stakeholders on the issue will play an active role in setting 1,023 fast track courts.

"The task of creating an emergency response support system at a national level based on a helpline number 112 is rapidly progressing. Safe city project approved in eight cities for women safety is also going on," he said.

The home minister said the government was moving forward towards further reinforcing women security through the national database on sexual offenders and the cybercrime reporting portal.

"We have made a different division in the MHA, prioritising women safety. I am confident that these online tools will help the officer prove successful against criminals and be effective," he said.

Singh said the government has taken several measures to check crime against women and children, including provision of stringent punishment and creation of modern forensics facilities to improve investigation, creation of the women safety division in the home ministry.

He said the two portals launched Thursday are part of efforts in the direction of strengthening security of women and children. However, he said, the field level challenges have to be overcome by police at the ground level to ensure speedy justice to victims.

The home minister urged law enforcement agencies to fully utilise potential of the two portals and update the database regularly for greater effectiveness.

Singh appreciated measures introduced by some of the states to check crimes against women and children and urged them to share the best practices for adoption by others.

Union Home Secretary Rajiv Gauba highlighted the need for time-bound completion of investigation in sexual crimes to instill deterrence among potential offenders.

While appreciating the progress made by Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh Police, he said the ministry will monitor progress in all the states.

Singh said the two portals will be extremely helpful to the law enforcement agencies especially in investigation where offenders migrate to other states after committing the crime.

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A large number of people Thursday bid a tearful adieu to BSF Jawan Narender Singh, who was brutally killed by Pakistani troopers along the International Border (IB) near Jammu.

The mortal remains of BSF Head Constable Narender were cremated with full state honours at his native village Thana Kalan in Haryana's Sonipat district.

Slogans 'Bharat Mata ki Jai', 'Narender Amar Rahe' rent the air as the body of Narender, wrapped in tricolour, reached his native village in the morning.

A huge number of villagers raised 'Pakistan murdabad' slogans. Family members and villagers demanded the Centre to give Pakistan a befitting reply for this barbaric act.

Pakistani troops had slit the throat of the BSF jawan after fatally shooting him along the international border (IB) near Jammu on September 18.

The 52-year-old jawan is survived by two sons and wife. The funeral pyre was lit by his elder son Mohit.

A teary Mohit demanded his father's death be avenged. "We are proud of our father for laying down his life for the nation. His death should be avenged," said Mohit.

"Not everyone gets a chance to be draped in the tricolor... We demand action against Pakistan," he said.

He demanded the concerned authorities to provide all possible help to his family.

Other family members appealed to the Centre to act tough against Pakistan for this inhuman act.

People from all walks of life including ministers, politicians, officers of district administration were present to pay their all respects to the martyr.

Haryana minister Krishan Bedi, Congress leader Randeep Singh Surjewala, senior officials of BSF were among the mourners.

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Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan Thursday announced that a directive will be issued shortly to ensure that the amended SC/ST Act is not misused in the state.

He was replying to a query on the protests in the state against the Parliament clearing the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Amendment Bill, 2018 in August restoring some stringent provisions of the Act.

"The misuse of the (amended) SC/ST Act will not be allowed in MP. Only after a thorough probe, a case will be registered under it. To this end, a directive will be issued shortly," Chouhan Thursday told reporters.

A nationwide bandh called on September 6 by some upper caste gropus against the restoration of some of the provisions of the SC/ST Act had met with a good response in poll-bound MP.

Chouhan has also been targeted by some elements from these groups. On September 2, an organisation opposing these amendments had created ruckus at his public rally in the state's Sidhi district.

Police vehicles in Ujjain were stoned Monday by members reportedly belonging to groups opposed to these amendments.

Speaking about Congress leader Digvijay Singh Wednesday filing a case against him in a Bhopal court in connection with the Vyapam scam, Chouhan called it an act of frustration.

The Vyapam scam refers to irregularities in exams held by the Madhya Pradesh Professional Examination Board, also called Vyavasayik Pareeksha Mandal or Vyapam, for admission of in professional courses and state services.

The Congress was indulging in such things to remain in the news, Chouhan claimed.

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An unidentified assailant opened fire Thursday at a warehouse complex north of the US city of Baltimore, killing and wounding multiple people, authorities said.

A lone suspect was in critical condition at a local hospital, according to Harford County sheriff Jeffrey Gahler.

Police would not confirm reports that the shooter was a woman, but revealed that the suspect had not been shot by police.

"I can confirm multiple wounded and multiple fatalities," Gahler said.

US media reported that three people were killed and two others wounded in the incident, which erupted around 9:00 am (1300 GMT) at a distribution centre for the Rite Aid drugstore chain.

Gahler said the assailant apparently was armed with a single handgun "and no shots fired by any officers responding to the scene."



"We do not believe there is an additional threat anywhere to the Harford County community," he said.

Deadly shootings are common in the United States, where the right to bear arms is protected by the US constitution.

Attacks by women are extremely rare, however, accounting for less than five percent of the total, according to studies.

Thursday's attack came five months after an Iran-born female animal rights activist gunned down three people before killing herself at YouTube's California headquarters.

Maryland made grim headlines around the world in June when five employees of Capital-Gazette newspapers died after a gunman stormed their Annapolis office.

The man police say is responsible had harassed the newspapers' employees for years over an article about criminal stalking charges against him, the Baltimore Sun reported.

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Former world number one Victoria Azarenka thrashed Australian Ashleigh Barty 6-4, 6-2 to reach the Pan Pacific Open quarter-finals Thursday as she seeks a return to the top after giving birth in late 2016.

The Belarusian, who slipped further down the rankings as a result of a lengthy custody battle over baby Leo, will face either top seed Caroline Wozniacki, who is chasing a hat-trick of Tokyo titles, or Italy's Camila Giorgi in the last eight.

Wildcard Azarenka, currently 63rd on the women's WTA rankings, broke for 4-3 with a dipping backhand and clinched the opening set with a fizzing pass that landed on Barty's shoelaces, forcing the seventh seed to dump a forehand into the net.

Azarenka raced to a 4-1 lead in the second set and the two-time Australian Open champion delivered the coup de grace by jamming up Barty with a vicious kick serve into the ribcage on her second match point.

"That makes me feel a little old, but I'm happy to be here," said Azarenka, 29, when informed she had reached the quarter-finals for the first time since 2012.

"Obviously it's been a while since I've played, I'm just trying to look day by day and see what happens. But I'm definitely enjoying my time on court these days."



Earlier, Czech Barbora Strycova won a tempestuous encounter with Estonia's Anett Kontaveit 7-6, 3-6, 7-5 to set up a quarter-final against Japan's newly crowned US Open champion Naomi Osaka.

The Olympic doubles bronze medallist took the first-set tiebreak 7-5 but both players screamed in frustration at their wastefulness in a contest that lasted well over three hours.

Having used all her challenges, Strycova huffily staged a sit-down protest after Kontaveit saved one of eight match points with a passing shot that replays showed missed the line by some margin.

But the Czech returned to her task and closed out the match when Kontaveit whiffed a drive-volley far beyond the baseline.

"I know I will have to play very well to beat Naomi," said Strycova.

"She's a star -- she's just won a Grand Slam, which was such a huge success for her. Playing in Japan the support will be for her but I'll try my best and see what happens.

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Several Muslim clerics and leaders in West Bengal have appealed to the community to refrain from carrying arms during Muharram processions.

Maulana Mohammed Shafique Qasmi, the Imam of Nakhoda Masjid, which is the principal mosque of the city, Thursday said he has appealed to the people of the community to refrain from taking out processions during Muharram on Friday as it is against the tenets of Islam.

"It is not merely about armed processions. We have appealed that processions should not be taken out as it is against the laws of Islam. No where in our Islamic laws is there the mention of taking out armed processions during Muharram," Maulana Qasmi told PTI.

Maulana Rizvi of the Shia community echoed him on carrying arms but expressed a different opinion on taking out processions during Muharram.

"We take out processions because it is the time of mourning. We express our sorrow when we take out the processions. But we (Shia) are not in favour of carrying arms during Muharram processions and neither do we do so," he said.

For the Shias, Muharram is a major religious festival to commemorate the martyrdom of al-Hussein, the grandson of Prophet Muhammad, who died at the Battle of Karbala in AD 680. They take out processions to mark the day.

Sunni Muslims commemorate the day through voluntary fasting.

Trinamool Congress MP Idris Ali too has appealed to the people to refrain from carrying arms in Muharram processions.

Md Kamruzzaman, the general secretary of All Bengal Minority Youth Federation, too urged the people to observe Muharram peacefully.

The state BJP leadership welcomed the appeals made by the Muslim clerics and said it was the effect of Ram Navami celebrations in Bengal for the past few years.

"As Hindus in Bengal are getting united, the TMC is feeling threatened as its government stands on the pillar of vote bank politics. That is why the party's leaders have engaged in damage control," state BJP president Dilip Ghosh said.

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The Supreme Court Thursday termed as "very disturbing" the facts emerging from CBI's probe into the Muzzafarpur shelter home sexual abuse case and asked the Bihar Police to probe the alleged recovery of large quantity of ammunition from former state minister Manju Verma and her husband.

Manju Verma had resigned as the Social Welfare Minister in the Bihar government following the Muzzafarpur case where several women were raped and sexually abused, after it came to light that her husband Chandrashekhar Verma had spoken to prime accused Brajesh Thakur several times between January and June this year.

The apex court, which observed that CBI's probe in the case seemed to be on track, said it was not clear whether illegal arms were also recovered from the possession of the Vermas and the matter needed to be looked into by the local police.

Taking note of the facts emerging from the two status reports filed by the CBI, a bench of Justices Madan B Lokur and Deepak Gupta said that Thakur appeared to be a "very influential" man, as his neighbours were scared to file any complaint against him despite the fact that they had heard screams of girls from the shelter home.

The bench said "it has also come on record that one Chandrashekhar Verma and his wife Manju Verma have been in possession of illegal ammunition of a fairly large quantity. It is not clear whether they were in possession of illegal arms as well. The status report mentions that an FIR has been lodged against Chandrashekhar Verma and Manju Verma."



"The affairs of these two need to be looked into, particularly with regard to their procurement and possession of illegal ammunition and availability of illegal weapons, if any. We request the local police in the state of Bihar to look into this aspect with some degree of seriousness," it said.

The bench took note of the fact that the state's social welfare department had shifted some girls from the shelter home run by Brajesh Thakur in March this year, but the purpose of shifting was not clear.

"The status report also mentions that some girls were transferred on March 20, 2018 by social welfare department from the shelter home, which is the subject matter of present investigation by the CBI," it said.

It is not clear why these girls were transferred out, particularly when the report given by Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS) about the status of the shelter home was known to the state in May, the bench observed.

"The transfer seems to suggest that the social welfare department of the Government of Bihar was aware of certain unsavoury activities in the shelter home and that may have been the reason for transfer of the victim girls," it said.

"The CBI should seize the record of the social welfare department in this regard and carry out the investigation," it said and asked Bihar to file an affidavit indicating the circumstances necessitating the transfer of these girls.

Regarding Thakur, the bench said "it appears that the person in-charge of the NGO 'Sewa Sankalp Evam Vikas Samiti', Brajesh Thakur, is a very influential person and people in the neighbourhood are scared of him and not able to make any complaint against him."



"In fact it has come out that people in the neighbourhood have heard screaming by the girls in the shelter home but they did not bring it to the notice of anybody because of the apparent terror of Brajesh Thakur. The CBI will need to look into the antecedents, connections and influence of Brajesh Thakur,' the bench said.

Referring to the CBI's reports, it said the NGO had received around Rs 4.5 crore worth of funds from the state over a period of 10 years and 35 vehicles were purchased.

"The other assets of the NGO or Brajesh Thakur do not appear to be very clear. It is necessary, in our opinion, that the Income Tax Department should look into the income and assets of Brajesh Thakur and indeed of the NGO Sewa Sankalp Evam Vikas Samiti," it said.

"The CBI team should request the Chief Commissioner/Commissioner having jurisdiction in the area to look into this matter and investigate the affairs of the NGO and of Brajesh Thakur from the income tax angle," it said.

The apex court said that issues concerning the shelter home was of an "extremely serious nature" and requires a "greater in-depth scrutiny" by the CBI.

It also directed the agency to file their next status report of investigation before it in a sealed cover within four weeks.

Earlier during the hearing, the bench said it had perused the two status reports filed by the CBI and the facts indicated that what had happened was "very disturbing".

"There is much more into it, than what meets the eyes," Justice Lokur told Attorney General K K Venugopal.

"It needs to be looked into very, very carefully," it said, adding, "You (CBI) continue with your investigation".

During the hearing, advocate Aparna Bhat, assisting the court as an amicus curiae in the matter, said the National Institute of Mental Health and Neuro Sciences (NIMHANS) was assisting CBI on the psycho-social and rehabilitation issues of the victims and they may be permitted to complete the task by first week of October.

The bench said other agencies like TISS, should allow the CBI and NIMHANS for the time being to carry out their work.

The court has posted the matter for hearing on October 25.

Over 30 girls were allegedly raped at the shelter home run by Thakur and the issue was highlighted in an audit report submitted by TISS to the state's social welfare department.

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The CBI has detained four persons including an official of the social welfare department of Bihar in connection with alleged sexual abuse of minor girls at a shelter home in Muzaffarpur, officials said Thursday.

The sexual assault of 34 girls over a period of time in the government-funded shelter home came to light after a social audit was conducted by the Mumbai-based Tata Institute of Social Sciences.

During her inspections, Rosy Rani, assistant director in the social welfare department between 2015-17, was informed by the victims about the abuse but she did not take any action, they said.

The agency has detained Rani, and staff members Guddu, Vijay and Santosh of prime accused Brajesh Thakur, whose NGO ran the shelter home, they said.

They said the case pertains to The Protection of Children from Sexual Offenses Act and Rani allegedly did not act in spite of receiving complaints from the minor girls who were facing sexual abuse at the centre and hence she may be face charges of abetment of crime.

The three staff members also allegedly visited the shelter home and the agency suspects their involvement in the crime, they said.

The agency has frozen 20 bank accounts of Thakur besides any kind of transaction of his movable and immovable properties, they said.

The Supreme Court Thursday vacated a Patna High Court order restraining the media from reporting on the probe into the Muzaffarpur shelter home case where several women were allegedly raped and sexually abused over a period of time.

After the incident came to light, an FIR was subsequently registered by the Bihar social welfare department and 10 people, including Thakur, were arrested.

Following a huge outcry, the Nitish Kumar government handed over the probe to the CBI.

His social welfare minister Manju Verma had to resign in August after it was disclosed that her husband had spoken to Thakur several times between January and June.

The CBI had carried out searches at her residence in Patna and Begusarai in August, they said.

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Vice President Venkaiah Naidu on Thursday addressed business leaders in Romania and urged them to take advantage of the economic reforms in India by making investments.

Naidu, who is visiting the southeastern European country on the occasion of the 70th anniversary of India-Romania diplomatic relations, said that bilateral trade between India and Romania stands at USD 810 million.

External Affairs Ministry Spokesperson Raveesh Kumar said in a tweet: "Bilateral trade between India and Romania stands at USD 810 million! Vice President @MVenkaiahNaidu addressed Prahova Chamber of Commerce in Bucharest and urged them to take advantage of economic reforms transforming India".

The Chamber of Commerce and Industry Prahova is a non-governmental organization of public use, self-financed, having as fundamental purpose the development of Prahova County's economy and its promotion both on the domestic markets and overseas.

The vice president arrived in Romania on Tuesday on the last leg of his three-nation visit to boost India's ties with the southeastern European country. He will be in Romania from September 18 to September 20.

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"Nawaz Sharif will be in and out of jail," a senior Pakistani minister said Thursday, downplaying the release of the ousted prime minister from jail on bail in a corruption case.

Fawad Chaudhry, Minister of Information in Prime Minister Imran Khan's Cabinet, pointed out that Sharif had only secured bail, not been vindicated of the charges against him.

The Islamabad High Court Wednesday suspended the jail sentences of Sharif, his daughter Maryam and son-in-law Capt (retd) Muhammad Safdar in the Avenfield corruption case and they were released from the Adiala Prison in Rawalpindi.

An accountability court in Islamabad sentenced Sharif, Maryam and Safdar, to 10 years, seven years and one year in jail, respectively, on July 6 in connection with the purchase of four luxury flats in London through corrupt practices.

"Nawaz Sharif will be in and out of jail. The first thing I would like to do is address those people who kept asking why we put the Sharif family's name on the exit-control list (ECL). I guess now they know why we did it: had we not, they could have flown to London yesterday evening, and where would we have looked for them then?"



The information minister also said that Prime Minister Khan does not have a personal feud with the Sharifs, "The government is simply the custodian of the wealth of the Pakistani people and we need to bring the looted wealth back to the country."



"Neither will we let Nawaz and Maryam leave the country nor will we let (ex-finance minister) Ishaq Dar, Hasan and Hussain Nawaz (Sharif's sons) stay abroad for much longer," Chaudhry said, adding that the Sharif family will have to return the Pakistani people's money back to them.

"Those who say that the Prime Minister Khan visited Saudi Arabia to cut a deal regarding the Sharifs don't understand how the Saudis' relationship is with Nawaz Sharif. They don't understand where the Sharif family stands with the Saudis," the information minister added.

Sharif resigned as Pakistan prime minister last year after the Supreme Court disqualified him from holding public office and ruled that graft cases be filed against the beleaguered leader and his children over the Panama Papers scandal.

The Avenfield case was among the three corruption cases filed against the 68-year-old three-time former premier and his children by the NAB on the Supreme Court's orders in the Panama Papers case which disqualified Sharif.

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A day after the massive blaze at Bagree Market in the city was brought under control, West Bengal Education Minister Partha Chatterjee said Thursday the state would order a probe to find out the reason behind major fire breakouts in the city on weekends, not weekdays.

A massive fire erupted early Sunday at Bagree Market in Burrabazar area the commercial hub of Kolkata gutting over 1000 business establishments. The firemen took around 85 hours to douse the flames.

Chatterjee, who is also the chairman of the group of ministers (GoM) formed by Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee to look into the emergencies during her Europe tour, said the stakeholders "should have abided by safety rules and regulations".

"We fail to understand why major fire breaks out on Saturdays and goes out on Sundays. Such breakouts do not happen on Mondays. We must look into this aspect," Chatterjee told reporters at the state secretariat after a GoM meeting, apparently hinting at a sabotage angle in the Bagree blaze.

The minister held the businessmen at Bagree Market responsible for the incident.

"It is unfortunate that the traders completely forgot about the security aspect while setting up businesses at the market," he said.

Meanwhile, a team of forensic experts visited the gutted building in the morning to collect samples from the site for ascertaining the cause of the fire.

"We are looking for the possible source of ignition. We have sampled petrol vapour inside. We need to find out why the fire took such a massive shape," an officer of Kolkata Police forensic department said.

Two major disasters have shaken the metropolis in a span of two weeks.

While three people were killed in a bridge collapse incident in Majerhat, in the southern part of the city, the Bagree Market fire snuffed out businesses worth crores of rupees ahead of the festive season.

State Urban Development minister Firhad Hakim Thursday took stock of the condition of nine arterial bridges and flyovers in the city, including Bijan Setu and Dhakuria Bridge.

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Stressing the need to boost cultural exchanges between India and France, the new French Consul General in Kolkata Virginie Corteval Thursday said the city occupies a special place in her heart.

She expressed fondness for the city and said the first thing she ate after coming to the eastern metropolis was hilsa fish with mustard sauce, a popular Bengali delicacy.

"Kolkata is full of life and France shares a lot in common with the city when it comes to their love for art and films," she said during her first media interaction here at a school, two weeks after she landed in the city.

"I have visited Kolkata earlier, too, on multiple occasions and I have to say that I love the food here," Corteval, who visited the school to give a fillip to a French internship programme running there, said.

Corteval, who succeeded Damien Syed as the French Consul General in Kolkata, said she seeks to boost cultural exchanges between the two countries.

Welcoming the new French Consul General in Kolkata, The New Town School Principal Satabdi Goswami Bhattacharjee said her institute was the "first in the country" to host a French teacher in the European Common framework for languages.

"For the first time, the French consulate and embassy has appointed Melissa Camille Abrantes as teaching assistant for The New Town School for a nine-month course. French is a part of the curriculum for students of Classes V to X," Bhattacharjee said.

Her school will initiate a cultural exchange programme with two French schools from 2019, under which 10 to 15 students would be travelling to France and an equal number will be hosted by families of students here, she said.

Laetitia Lompech, the consulate's linguistic attach confirmed that Abrantes was the first French teacher in a school in India, who was directly engaged by the consulate.

She also said plans were afoot to take the initiative to other academic institutes in the eastern part of India.

Sharing her experience, Abrantes said she had been using innovative ways to connect with the students.

"The nine-month course isn't just about teaching the students French. It is also about giving them an idea about the culture and traditions of the country. I have been using songs and role plays among other media to reach out to the students," she said.

Fabrice Planon, the director of Alliance Franaise du Bengale, said the programme will go a long way in promoting French language and culture among young students.

"School programmes and exchanges will go a long way in giving students an idea about the opportunities available in the country," he said, adding that an fair will be organized in the city on October 3 with the participation of 42 colleges and universities.

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The Supreme Court Thursday said there cannot be a blanket ban on media reporting in the Muzaffarpur shelter home sexual abuse case where several women were allegedly raped and sexually abused over time.

A bench of Justices Madan B Lokur and Deepak Gupta vacated the August 23 order of the Patna High Court which had imposed a ban on media reporting about the investigations in the case.

The apex court however asked both the print and electronic media not to sensationalise incidents of sexual abuse and violence.

When the apex court on September 18 was hearing the matter, it had made reference of the recent Rewari gang rape case and asked as to why no action has been taken against media houses for flouting the law as "everything has been said" about the 19-year-old victim.

The top court had also stayed a Patna High Court order to set up a fresh CBI team to probe the case, saying that such a move would not only be detrimental to the ongoing investigation but also to the victims.

The Patna High Court, which has been monitoring the probe, had on August 23 expressed displeasure over the leak of details of the investigation and asked the media to refrain from publishing it as it could be detrimental to the probe.

A plea was filed against this on September 5 in the apex court seeking a stay on the high court order restraining the media from reporting the investigation.

In the plea filed before the apex court, the petitioner, a journalist, has claimed that there was no material before the high court to come to a conclusion that media reporting may hamper the ongoing investigation in the case.

The apex court, while staying the high court's order directing the CBI's special director to put in place a fresh team to probe the case, had said that there was no reason now to change the existing investigating team which was set up the CBI Director.

The high court had on August 29 ordered that a fresh team of investigators be constituted by the CBI's special director in the case in which incidents of alleged rape and sexual assault of women inmates over a period of time had come to light in an NGO-run shelter home at Muzaffarpur in Bihar.

Over 30 girls were allegedly raped at the shelter home run by one Brajesh Thakur, the chief of a state-funded NGO. The alleged sexual exploitation of the girls was first highlighted in an audit report submitted by TISS to the state's social welfare department.

An FIR was lodged against 11 people, including Thakur, on May 31. The probe was later taken over by the CBI.

The incidents of alleged rape and sexual assault of the women inmates had come to light after a social audit was conducted by the Mumbai-based Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS).

In all, the sexual abuse of 34 of the 42 inmates was confirmed in their medical examination.

The TISS audit report had said that many girls at the shelter home had complained of sexual abuse. A special investigation team was formed to probe the complaints.

The NGO running the shelter home in Muzaffarpur was blacklisted and the girls were shifted to shelter homes in Patna and Madhubani. Women staff members of the shelter home and Thakur were among those who were arrested by the police in connection with the case.

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The External Affairs Ministry Thursday said it has not received any communication from the UAE government about the case related to AgustaWestland chopper deal middleman Christian Michel in a Dubai court.

Some media reports had said a Dubai court court ordered Michel's extradition to India, but sources had later indicated there was no such specific court order.

"We have not received any intimation from the UAE government about the case," MEA Spokesperson Raveesh Kumar said here at a press press briefing.

The CBI had said Wednesday it was awaiting confirmation from the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) on reports about extradition of Michel, who is wanted in India in connection with the AgustaWestland VVIP choppers deal scam, from the UAE.

The External Affairs Ministry had asked its embassy in the UAE to find out all the details relating to the issue.

The Enforcement Directorate (ED), in its charge sheet filed against Michel in June 2016, had alleged he received EUR 30 million (about Rs 225 crore) from AgustaWestland.

Michel is one of the three middlemen being probed in the case, besides Guido Haschke and Carlo Gerosa, by the ED and the Central Bureau of Investigation.

Both the agencies had notified an Interpol Red Corner Notice against him after the court issued a non-bailable warrant.

On January 1, 2014, India scrapped the contract with Finmeccanica's British subsidiary AgustaWestland for supplying 12 AW-101 VVIP choppers to the IAF over alleged breach of contractual obligations and charges of paying kickbacks to the tune of Rs 423 crore by it for securing the deal.

The CBI has alleged there was an estimated loss of Euro 398.21 million (approximately Rs 2,666 crore) to the exchequer in the deal that was signed on February 8, 2010 for the supply of VVIP choppers worth Euro 556.262 million.

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There is "no mechanism" to enforce and implement legal provisions and guidelines on media reporting on rape and sexual abuse cases, the Supreme Court said Thursday while calling for a balance between the criminal justice system and freedom of the press.

A bench of Justices Madan B Lokur and Deepak Gupta, which observed that there cannot be a blanket ban on media reporting of such cases, was told that guidelines and statutory provisions were being "routinely violated" as the press was doing "media trial".

The bench, in the "interest of all victims of sexual abuse and sexual violence", restrained the electronic media from telecasting or broadcasting their images in a morphed or blurred form.

It also asked the media not to interview such victims and said the of the events may be broadcast by the media keeping in mind the interest of the victims, which should be of concern.

"We also request the print media and the electronic media not to sensationalize such events," it said and posted the matter for hearing on October 4.

Senior advocate Shekhar Naphade, appearing for a scribe who has challenged a Patna High Court order banning the media from reporting on the probe into the Muzaffarpur shelter home case, said there were guidelines and statutory provisions under the Indian Penal Code (IPC), Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act and the Contempt of Courts Act.

He said these guidelines and provisions were violated in the sense that a probe was conducted independently by the media, which sometimes also carried out trial and gave its judgement in the form of conclusions arrived at by them.

"It appears that there is no mechanism for enforcement and implementation of the statutory provisions and guidelines," the bench said.

"In the absence of any mechanism, it is possible that there could be some mis-reporting and some persons who are not involved in an offence may be mistakenly taken as accused of an offence by the media. The entire issue needs to be balanced and looked at in the broader view of criminal justice and freedom of the Press," the apex court said.

"For this purpose, we would need the assistance of the Press Council of India, the Broadcasting Standards Authority, the Editors Guild and the Indian Broadcasting Federation. Accordingly, notice be issued to them returnable on October 4," it said.

The court vacated the high court's August 23 order with regard to media reporting in the Muzaffarpur case.

"However, we expect the print and electronic media to be responsible and circumspect in the matter of reporting of the incidents that have taken place in Muzaffarpur as well as the investigations that have been carried out. This is in the interest of the minor victims," it said.

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Fiver members of the notorious 'Baheliya' gang were arrested and cash worth Rs 6 lakh was seized from their possession following an encounter with the Noida police Thursday, officials said.

The gang, which has been involved in a number of robberies in Uttarakhand and Uttar Pradesh, was busted at around 1.30 am near the Cambridge School in Sector 27, a senior official said.

Acting on a tip-off that the gang members would be coming to Noida for a major robbery, the police were on an alert and during checking, the SHO of Sector 20 police station, Manoj Kumar Pant, and his team intercepted the accused persons in a vehicle.

"When gestured to stop for enquiry, the men inside the vehicle opened fire on the police team. An encounter ensued between the two sides, after which the gang members were held," Senior Superintendent of Police Ajay Pal Sharma said.

Those arrested were identified as Shyam Singh, Kalyan Singh (both brothers), Rishipal, Parveen -- all from Amroha, and Satte, who belongs to Bijnor.

Five pistols, 20 bullets, cash worth Rs 6 lakh and a gold chain were seized from their possession while their car was impounded, he said.

The accused persons belong to the 'Baheliya' community and have no fixed base. They would set up small tents along the roadside and called them 'desi davakhanas', Sharma said.

"They would stay around 15 days in one place and then move on to another. They generally targeted areas where they have some relatives or acquaintance living, who helped them in recce of potential targets," he said.

"During the time, the gang and its associates would recce the target and local area, and in the night these men used to effect the robbery. They often barged into houses and tied up the residents, many a time brutally thrashing them up," the SSP said.

"During crime, they used to carry iron rods and batons along with country-made pistols with them," he said, adding that they operated similarly the way the 'Bawariya' gang does.

According to the police, the five accused persons tried to mislead the officials by giving wrong information.

When probed further, they admitted to having made a number of robberies in places such as Haridwar, Noida, Amroha, Bijnor, Moradabad and Ghaziabad, the police claimed.

A case under various sections of the IPC, including for robbery and attempt to murder, has been lodged while they have also been booked under provisions of the Arms Act at Sector 20 police station, according to the police.

Meanwhile, SSP Sharma said the gang was active in the city over the last fortnight and the police have stepped up vigilance on such roadside dwellers and other anti-social elements.

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The charges under the National Security Act (NSA) have been withdrawn against Bhim Army founder Chandrashekhar Azad, who was arrested in connection with the 2017 Saharanpur violence, Uttar Pradesh government told the Supreme Court Thursday.

Azad alias Ravan, who was granted bail on September 14, was in jail since June 2017 for his alleged role in the Saharanpur riots and the NSA provisions were invoked against him almost six months after his arrest.

A bench of Chief Justice Dipak Misra and Justices A M Khanwilkar and D Y Chandrachud considered the submissions of Aishwarya Bhati, Additional Advocate General of the UP government, that the NSA provisions have been withdrawn against the 'Dalit' leader, and disposed of his plea saying it has now become "infructuous".

Azad had challenged the invocation of the stringent provisions of NSA against him on several grounds.

Azad was arrested from Dalhousie in Himachal Pradesh on June 8, 2017 by a Special Task Force (STF) team of the Uttar Pradesh police.

In the incident that occured on May 25 last year, members of two castes had clashed at the Shabbeerpur village in the Saharanpur district of UP after a dispute arose over loud music being played during a Maharana Pratap Jayanti procession.

One man was killed and around 25 houses were burnt in the subsequent inter-caste clashes. Chandrashekhar was then arrested and booked under the NSA.

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The SIT of Kerala police probing the case of alleged rape of a nun by a bishop resumed questioning him Thursday even as the state police chief said a decision on Franco Mulakkal's arrest could be taken in a day or two.

Hours after Mulakkal, accused of repeated rape and sexual assault, appeared before the Special Investigation Team for interrogation, the state's DGP Loknath Behera said the investigating officer will decide on whether to arrest him once the examination got over.

"After examining him only a decision will be taken. Investigating team is examining him. Let us wait. A decision will be definitely taken today or tomorrow after the interrogation," Behera told reporters in Thiruvananthapuram.

He said the investigating officer was free to take a call on the issue.

When asked whether Mulakkal can be arrested before September 25, the day his anticipatory bail plea will come up for hearing in the high court, the top police officer said, "I think, legally there is no problem. There is no such law (that bars arrest during pendency of bail plea). That we will discuss with the legal team."



Citing convention, legal experts had said the priest is unlikely to be arrested before September 25.

Mulakkal, the bishop of the Jalandhar diocese of the Missionaries of Jesus, the congregation to which the alleged victim also belongs, was grilled by the SIT headed by DySP K Subhash for seven hours Wednesday. He was asked to appear before it again today.

The bishop, who recently temporarily relinquished his administrative responsibilities, joined the probe at around 11 am at the crime branch office, where some members of All India Youth Federation, the students front of the CPI, held a protest demanding his arrest. They had also staged a protest Wednesday.

Some people also burnt an effigy of Mulakkal.

Kottayam Superintendent of Police Hari Sankar said the bishop's questioning was likely to be over today.

Meanwhile, police have tightened security in and around the crime branch office.

The nun has accused the senior Catholic priest of sexually assaulting her repeatedly between 2014 and 2016, allegations denied by the clergyman who has pleaded innocence.

Meanwhile, the protest by various Catholic reform organisations and a group of nuns seeking Mulakkal's arrest entered its 13th day Thursday.

The agitation at Kochi's Vanchi Square is a spontaneous expression of outrage by these groups over the alleged assault of the nun.

A protesting nun said they were all waiting for the of the arrest of the bishop so a strong message goes out to those who abuse women.

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The monsoon session of the Odisha Assembly was adjourned sine-die Thursday after adopting a privilege motion against one Abhijit Iyre Mitra who allegedly made derogatory remarks on the Sun Temple in Konark.

Speaker P K Amat adjourned the session for an indefinite period.

The monsoon session, which began on September 4, had 11 working days during which 12 bills, including the Appropriation Bill, were passed, Amat said.

This apart, three resolutions were also passed during the session.

Finance Minister S B Behera also tabled the report of the Comptroller and Auditor General of India for the year ended March, 2017 on General and Social Sector Government of Odisha.

The session remained stormy over scams in agriculture, cooperative and Omfed and derogatory remarks made by Iyre Mitra.

The issue of block grant teachers of 1,500 colleges and 4,000 schools also prominently figured in the House over which the members created a noisy protest.

However, the House was adjourned sine-die before the the problem of teachers could be solved.

The leader of the House and Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik, Leader of Opposition Narasingha Mishra and BJP Legislature Party leader K V Singhdeo thanked all for their cooperation in conducting the House.

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One person was killed and 14 others were injured when a mob clashed with the police over entry of newly-appointed Urdu teachers in a school in West Bengal's North Dinajpur district Thursday, police said.

The students of Dori Bhita High School at Islampur and the locals here stopped the entry of the Muslim teachers saying all vacant teaching posts must be filled, they said.

A police team accompanied the three newly-appointed Urdu teachers to the school on Thursday.

However, the locals did not relent and pelted stones at the policemen, injuring six of them.

To control the situation, the police first baton-charged and then burst tear gas shells to disperse the mob. When the measures failed, the police were forced to open fire, an official said.

A person died of bullet injuries and several of the injured were admitted to Islampur hospital, the authorities at the medical facility said.

The deceased is a local resident, police said.

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The death toll in a bus accident in Himachal Pradesh's Chamba district has risen to three as one more person succumbed to injuries Thursday, police said.

The incident occurred Wednesday after the private bus hit a crash barrier that prevented it from falling into a gorge at Luna vilage in Bharmour, around 420 km from here.

The bus, carrying as many as 50 people, was on its way to Chhatrari village from Palampur hill station, Superintendent of Police Monika Bhutungru said.

Chatro Ram (82), a resident of Niyangal village in Kangra district, succumbed to injuries at Tanda Medical College Thursday, Bhutunguru said, adding three more injured were in serious condition.

Two persons - Kaushalya (50) and Makholi (65) - died and 48 others were injured in the accident on Wednesday.

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Manipur Governor Najma Heptulla Thursday hailed approval of ordinance on instant triple talaq as a "historic moment" as the practise was "anti-Islamic."



Triple talaq is "derogatory and violates the rights of the muslim women", Heptulla told PTI commenting of clearance of an ordinance by the Union cabinet on Wednesday to make instant triple talaq a penal offence.

She thanked Prime Minister Narendra Modi for his initiatives on the betterment of the muslim women.

"It is a historic moment...the practice (of triple talaq) is anti-Islamic...it will provide relief for muslim woman," she said.

She added that most of the muslim nations across the world have also banned it and the country should follow it.

On those who have been objections on clearance of law related to instant triple talaq, Heptulla said that "it should not be opposed as it concerns the welfare of muslim women and those who objects are doing it for political reasons.

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The Public Accounts Committee (PAC) of Parliament has decided to examine the flexi fare system for premier trains -- Rajdhani, Shatabdi and Duronto.

The committee headed by senior Congress leader Mallikarjun Kharge will also look into the development of railway land for commercial use by the Rail Land Development Authority, according to a Lok Sabha bulletin.

The panel has selected a number of subjects to study and examine, including operational readiness of the Indian Air Force and training of officers in the Indian Navy.

The PAC is Parliament's audit watchdog, which serves as a check on the government especially with respect to its expenditure bill. Its primary function is to examine the audit report of the Comptroller and Auditor General after it is laid in Parliament.

According to another bulletin of the Lok Sabha Secretariat, former Union minister Kalraj Mishra has been appointed as Chairman of Parliament's Standing Committee on Defence, replacing former Uttarakhand chief minister B C Khanduri.

Chairmen of various other standing committees -- Veerappa Moily (Finance), P Chidambaram (Home), Shashi Tharoor (External Affairs) -- have been given another term.

Both Moily and Tharoor faced opposition from members in their respective panels over their contentious reports.

The External Affairs committee's report on Doklam stand-off was adopted but the Finance panel's report on demonetisation is still stuck, as the BJP members in the panel are opposing it.

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Saudi Arabia will be the third "strategic partner" of the USD 50 billion China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), a senior Pakistani minister announced Thursday, soon after Prime Minister Imran Khan returned from his first foreign trip to the cash-rich kingdom.

The China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) is the flagship project of the multi-billion dollar Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), a pet project of Chinese President Xi Jinping aimed at enhancing Beijing's influence around the world through China-funded infrastructure projects.

Addressing a press conference here on Khan's two-day visit to Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates (UAE), Minister of Information Fawad Chaudhry said that Pakistan's main interest lies in cooperation with Saudi Arabia on matters of trade and security.

Pakistan has invited Riyadh to join the CPEC as the third "strategic partner", The quoted him as saying.

Saudi Finance and Energy Ministers will visit Pakistan in the first week of October, Chaudhry said.

He said the projects that Saudi Arabia would be investing in the CPEC will be smoothed out during the Saudi delegation's visit.

China has rejected accusations that its financial backing for the CPEC was a "debt trap" that could compromise cash-strapped Pakistan's sovereignty.

The CPEC is the fastest-moving and flagship part of President Xi's global Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).

The CPEC aims to construct and upgrade the transportation network, energy projects, a deep-water port at Gwadar and special economic zones to eventually support Pakistan's industrial development as a manufacturing hub by 2030.

Chaudhry said Prime Minister Khan has assured Riyadh that Pakistan will stand with Saudi Arabia.

"We have also assured the Saudi leadership that we will continue to provide security to their country and provide strategic support wherever needed," he said on the close defence partnership between the close allies.

He also said that a high-level coordination committee has has been constituted [to look into matters of trade and commerce] and it has the complete backing of Saudi King Salman bin Abdul Aziz Al-Saud and Prime Minister Khan.

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Pakistan may view a weak and destabilised Afghanistan as preferable to a strong and unified Afghan state, a latest US Congressional report has said.

It asserted that Islamabad may also anticipate that improved relations with Kabul could limit India's influence in the region.

"Pakistan sees Afghanistan as potentially providing strategic depth against India. Pakistan may also view a weak and destabilised Afghanistan as preferable to a strong, unified Afghan state (particularly one led by a Pashtun-dominated government in Kabul)," the bipartisan Congressional Research Service (CRS) said in its latest report on Afghanistan has said.

According to the report 'Afghanistan: Background and US Policy In Brief', some Pakistani leaders have stated that instability in Afghanistan could rebound to Pakistan's detriment. Pakistan has struggled with indigenous Islamist militants of its own, it said.

"Pakistan may also anticipate that improved relations with Afghan leadership could limit India's influence in Afghanistan," said the report by CRS, an independent research wing of the US Congress.

CRS reports are not an official view of the Congress but are prepared periodically by independent experts on hot topics so that lawmakers can make informed decisions.

"While military officials profess greater optimism about the course of the war in 2018, other policy makers and analysts have described the war against the insurgency (which controls or contests nearly half of the country's territory, by Pentagon estimates) as a stalemate," the report said.

Authored by Clayton Thomas, an analyst in Middle Eastern Affairs, the CRS report, dated September 17, said President Donald Trump in his Afghanistan policy last year has sought a greater role for India in Afghanistan.

"In his speech, President Trump also encouraged India to play a greater role in Afghan economic development; this, along with other administration messaging, has compounded Pakistani concerns over Indian activity in Afghanistan," it said.

"India has been the largest regional contributor to Afghan reconstruction, but New Delhi has not shown an inclination to pursue a deeper defence relationship with Kabul. Afghans themselves may be divided on the wisdom of cultivating stronger ties with India," the CRS report said.

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A Palestinian teenager was shot dead by Israeli fire in clashes near the border in southern Gaza Thursday, the health ministry in the enclave said.

The ministry said Mumin Abu Ayeda, 15, was shot along the heavily-fortified border east of Rafah in southern Gaza.

It said he was part of night time demonstrations which have taken place over months of protests, dubbed the Great March of Return.

There was no immediate confirmation from the Israeli army, which typically highlights the often violent nature of such demonstrations and labels them riots.

At least 184 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli fire in Gaza since the 'Great March' protests began on March 30.

One Israeli soldier was shot dead by a Palestinian sniper.

Protests have lessened in intensity in recent months, though smaller demonstrations continue.

On Tuesday two Palestinians were shot dead during violent protests next to the Erez crossing into Israel.

Demonstrators are calling to be allowed to return to the homes their families fled from in 1948, which are now inside Israel. Israel accuses Gaza's Islamist rulers Hamas, with which it has fought three wars since 2008, of orchestrating the protests as cover for attacks.

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The principal and an accountant of a private school here have been arrested for the rape of a student of class 5 who later became pregnant, police said Thursday.

Raj Singhania, the principal of a private school in Phulwarisharif police station area in the city, was arrested Wednesday along with accountant Ashok Kumar for sexually assaulting the 11-year-old girl, who has become pregnant, police said.

"This is an inhuman act on part of the perpetrators. We have arrested the accused and they would be brought to justice after thorough investigation," Senior Superintendent of Police, Patna, Manu Maharaj told reporters.

The matter came to light when the girl's father lodged an FIR at the women's police station here on Wednesday.

In the FIR, it was alleged that the girl recently complained of some symptoms and upon being taken to a doctor, it was found that she was pregnant.

Upon being queried by parents, she told them that the principal and the accountant had been sexually exploiting her for quite some time and even shot a video which they had threatened to post on social media if she spoke about their acts to anybody, police said.

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The Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) Thursday expressed hope that Prime Minister Narendra Modi will reciprocate the offer of talks made by his Pakistan counterpart Imran Khan, saying dialogue was the only way out of the stalemate.

Khan has proposed a meeting between Pakistan Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi and his Indian counterpart Sushma Swaraj on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in New York this month.

In a tweet on its official handle, the PDP said, "Thank you PM @ImranKhanPTI for your positive gesture. We hope PM @narendramodi will reciprocate your sentiments. Dialogue is the only way out of this stalemate".

PDP, which was a coalition partner of the BJP in Jammu and Kashmir government till its fall on June 19 this year, was reacting to a tweet by Pakistan Foreign Office spokesperson Mohammad Faisal.

"PM (Imran Khan) has responded to PM Modi, in a positive spirit, reciprocating his sentiments. Let's talk and resolve all issues. We await formal response from India," Faisal wrote on Twitter.

Ties between India and Pakistan nose-dived following a spate of terror attacks on Indian military bases by Pakistan-based terror groups since January 2016. Following the strikes, India announced it will not engage in talks with Pakistan, saying terror and talks cannot go hand-in-hand.

Amid heightened tension with Pakistan over Uri terror attack in which 18 soldiers were killed, India had pulled out of the SAARC Summit to be held in Islamabad in November, 2016.

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The Jammu and Kashmir Congress strongly reacted to the killing of a BSF jawan whose body was brutalised by Pakistani troops, saying Prime Minister Narendra Modi should apologise to families of jawans who have lost their lives along the border.

It said the act was "highly provocative and intolerable".

"The barbaric killing of the BSF jawan is highly provocative and intolerable act and the rarest incident on the International Border demonstrates the intensions of Pakistan," Ravinder Sharma, chief spokesperson of Jammu and Kashmir Pradesh Congress Committee, said in a statement here.

He said the barbaric killing of the BSF Jawan and mutilation of his body by Pakistani troops was the worst ever violation of international norms.

Throat-slit and bullet-riddled body of head constable Narendra Kumar was recovered hours after he went missing following firing by Paksitani troops on a BSF party in Ramgarh sector of Samba district on Tuesday.

The Congress leader claimed that the visit of prime minister to Lahore emboldened Pakistan to intensify illegal activities and nefarious designs in the state.

"Such heinous and shameful act of Pakistan are unpardonable and the Modi government is answerable to the nation for its failure to handle Pakistan and deal with it in an appropriate manner.

"The prime minister should apologize to families of martyred jawans immediately and take appropriate measures to control the situation and ensure peace," the Congress leader said.

He said it was unfortunate that Pakistan could not be checked, controlled and forced to cease such type of hostility.

Sharma saluted the sacrifice of the jawan in the service of nation and conveyed heartfelt condolences to the bereaved family.

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Prime Minister Narendra Modi took a ride in the Airport Express Metro from Dhaula Kuan to Dwarka on way to lay the foundation stone of India International Convention and Expo Centre on Thursday.

Metro officials said the ride was completed in 14 minutes.

The India International Convention and Expo Centre will come up at Sector 25, Dwarka.

"Prime Minister Narendra Modi travelled in Delhi Metro's Airport Express Line today. He boarded a metro train at Dhaula Kuan Metro Station at 3:13 pm and travelled up to Dwarka Sec-21 Metro Station, leaving the station at 3:27 pm," a senior DMRC official said.

He also travelled back from Dwarka Sec-21 to Dhaula Kuan station in the metro, boarding at 4:39 pm and deboarding at 4:54 pm," the official said.

In the train, people were surprised to see him and the prime minister obliged many passengers as they took selfies with him.

"Smiles on the Delhi Metro. People interact with PM @narendramodi during the journey from Dwarka, after he laid the foundation stone of a Convention Centre," the PMO India tweeted and shared a few pictures.

Modi has been using the Metro service to reach distant venues to avoid traffic jams which occur during VVIP movement.

Modi and South Korean President Moon Jae-in, during his state visit to India had taken a ride together in the metro to Noida in July, on way to inauguration of a Samsung facility to manufacture mobile phones.

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Commerce Minister Suresh Prabhu has raised the issue of declining export credit with Finance Minister Arun Jaitley, suggesting that loans to exporters should be considered as priority sector lending by the banks.

In a letter to the finance minister, Prabhu said the "sharp decline" in export credit is impacting exporters in general and MSME units in particular.

Citing RBI data, the commerce minister stated that outstanding export credit has come down to Rs 22,300 crore on June 22 this year from Rs 39,000 crore as on June 23 last year.

Similarly, the outstanding export credit which stood at Rs 28,300 crore as on March 30 has come down to Rs 22,300 crore as on June 22 this year, a decline of 21.1 per cent in this fiscal.

Prabhu urged the finance minister to consider "export credit to be included as part of the priority sector lending by banks".

The Federation of Indian Export Organisations (FIEO) has said that even renewal of limits has become problematic for the sector, even in respect of companies having excellent track record.

"I request you to kindly have suitable instructions issued to banks to restore the flow of credit to the export sector to its expected regular levels, based on the required increase over recent peak levels, to factor in export growth currently taking place," Prabhu said in his letter.

He also urged for strict timelines for grant of credit including the renewal of limits.

Since 2011-12, India's exports have been hovering at around USD 300 billion. During 2017-18, the shipments grew by about 10 per cent to USD 303 billion.

Promoting exports helps a country to create jobs, boost manufacturing and earn more foreign exchange.

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The Odisha Assembly Thursday adopted a privilege motion against Abhijit Iyer Mitra for allegedly making derogatory remarks against the state, Konark Temple, Jagannath Temple and the lawmakers, hours later he was arrested in New Delhi.

Iyer Mitra, a friend of former Biju Janata Dal (BJD) MP Baijayant Panda, was however, granted interim bail by a court in Delhi.

The Odisha Police had arrested him on the charge of outraging religious sentiments of the people through his alleged derogatory remarks about the state, Konark Temple and Lord Jagannath on social media, a senior police officer said.

A two-member police team with the help of the Delhi police picked up Iyer Mitra from his residence in Nizamuddin police station area in the national capital, a senior police officer said.

"Iyer Mitra was produced at the Saket court which granted interim bail to him. He has been told to cooperate with the investigating officer and report at the Konark police station by September 28," IGP, Central Range, Soumendra Priyadarshi told PTI.

Iyer Mitra was arrested under section 295-A, (deliberate and malicious acts intended to outrage religious feelings of any class by insulting its religion or religious beliefs), 298 (Deliberate intention of wounding the religious feelings of any person), 153-A (promoting enmity between different groups on grounds of religion, race, place of birth, residence, language) of the IPC and section 66 of the IT Act.

The police on Wednesday had registered a case against Iyer Mitra at Konark police station in Puri district and Saheed Nagar police station in Khurda district. A police team rushed to Delhi and arrested the accused from his residence.

Iyer Mitra had come to Odisha on September 15 allegedly at the invitation of Baijayant Panda. They were taken to Puri, Konark and Chilika in a chopper by Panda after which Iyer Mitra allegedly made some derogatory remarks in video posts on social media insulting the state, its culture and tradition, police said.

Iyer Mitra also allegedly insulted Odisha's legislators and presspersons by making unpalatable remarks, they said.

The Odisha Assembly Thursday adopted a privilege motion and constituted a committee to suggest action against Iyer Mitra for his alleged derogatory remarks.

The privilege motion was moved by Leader of Opposition Narasingha Mishra of the Congress and supported by the members of all the parties, including the ruling BJD and the opposition BJP.

The members cutting across party lines demanded stringent action against Mitra who took to social media to make a series of 'derogatory remarks' against the state, its people, culture and scribes.

The Speaker accepted the privilege motion and announced constitution of a committee to summon the accused.

The six-member committee to be headed by the LoP would also have senior BJD MLA Debi Prasad Mishra, Pramila Mallick, Arun Sahoo, Sanjay Dasburma and BJP legislature party leader K V Singhdeo as members.

The House committee will submit its probe report on the first day of the next session of the Odisha Assembly, the Speaker said.

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The Odisha Assembly Thursday adopted a privilege motion and constituted a committee to suggest action against journalist Abhijit Iyer Mitra, who allegedly made derogatory remarks against the state, Konark Temple, Jagannath Temple and the lawmakers.

Mitra is a friend of former Biju Janata Dal (BJD) MP Baijayant Panda.

The privilege motion moved by Leader of Opposition Narasingha Mishra of the Congress was supported by the members of all the parties, including the ruling BJD and the opposition BJP.

The members cutting across party lines demanded stringent action against Mitra who took to social media to make a series of derogatory remarks against the state, its people, culture and scribes.

As soon as the House assembled for the day, Speaker P K Amat suspended the Question Hour and allowed the Leader of Opposition (LoP) to move the privilege motion. After an hour-long debate, the Speaker accepted the privilege motion and announced constitution of a committee to summon the accused.

The six-member committee to be headed by the LoP would also have senior BJD MLA Debi Prasad Mishra, Pramila Mallick, Arun Sahoo, Sanjay Dasburma and BJP legislature party leader K V Singhdeo as members.

The House committee will submit its probe reports on the first day of the next session of the Odisha Assembly, the Speaker said.

"Remarks of Abhijit Iyer Mitra have disrespected people of Odisha and Odia language, it culture and tradition. He should be summoned to the state and the House should decide on quantum of punishment," Mishra said.

Congress chief whip Taraprasad Bahinipati also demanded stringent punishment against him.

Singhdeo said his party was with the House and condemns the remarks against Odisha.

After hearing views of members from across different parties, the Speaker called an all-party meeting after adjourning the House for about 80 minutes.

Working journalists also submitted a memorandum to Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik, Speaker and Leader of Opposition demanding stringent action against Mitra for his derogatory remarks against the media.

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A 35-year-old property dealer and her driver were shot by four miscreants near Nand Nagar colony here, police said Thursday.

The incident occurred when Nitu Tripathi and her husband Piyush Tripathi were returning home in a Fortuner car on Wednesday night.

Four miscreants fired on the car but the driver, Sumit, did not stop. The assailants chased the car, fired over six bullets on the vehicle and fled the spot.

The bullets injured Nitu and Sumit, they said.

The driver somehow managed to drive the car and reached BHU trauma centre where their treatment was underway, the police said.

A case was registered and a man hunt launched to arrest the accused, they said.

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The Punjab Cabinet led by Chief Minister Amarinder Singh Thursday approved setting up of a ropeway between Sri Anandpur Sahib and Naina Devi ji in public private partnership (PPP) mode to boost the tourism sector in the state.

The ropeway would facilitate lakhs of devotees visiting these two historic, religious sites, said an official spokesperson, who pointed out that Sri Anandpur Sahib in Punjab and Naina Devi ji in Himachal Pradesh were famous pilgrim destinations visited by devotees from across the globe.

The two shrines are located quite far from each other with hilly terrain compounding the problems of the devotees, the cabinet noted.

The Punjab government, with the consent of its Himachal Pradesh counterpart, has decided to set up the ropeway project to ease the travel of visitors, said the spokesperson.

A memorandum of understanding was signed between the governments of Punjab and Himachal Pradesh to set up the ropeway on July 26, 2012.

The Punjab tourism department had acquired 108 kanal and 13 Marla of land for setting up a lower terminal and right of way within the Punjab territory for this purpose.

However, the MoU was cancelled by the Himachal Pradesh government on June 3, 2014.

In February, 2018, a letter from the chief minister of Himachal Pradesh expressed willingness to revive the project, following which the Punjab CM conveyed his consent.

Subsequently, the Punjab tourism department received the approved MoU from the government of Himachal Pradesh on September 5, 2018.

It is proposed that the project will be executed in PPP mode by setting up a special purpose vehicle.

The total paid up equity for the SPV will be Rs 1 crore, with Rs 50 lakh each as share of the two states, the spokesperson said.

As per the MoU, both states will have equal share in the revenue, with concession period of 40 years.

In the initial seven years, no concession fee would be paid by the concessionaire and a time period of three years would be given to set up this project, said the spokesperson.

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The Punjab Cabinet Thursday ratified an agreement signed earlier this month for immediate resumption of work on the Shahpur Kandi dam project.

The agreement was signed on September 8 between the Chief Secretaries of Punjab and Jammu and Kashmir, as well as Commissioner Indus Government of India.

The dam is to come up in Gurudaspur district and the ratification was done at the cabinet meeting chaired by Chief Minister Captain Amarinder Singh, an official spokesperson said.

The project, aimed to be completed in three years, would generate 206 MW (Megawatt) of additional Hydro Power, leading to irrigation and power benefits worth Rs.852.73 crore annually.

With the completion of the project, the Ranjit Sagar Dam in Pathankot would operate its optimum capacity.

It would also help in regulating releases at Shahpur Kandi Dam, thus helping improve irrigation facilities to the command area under Uppar Bari Doab Canal (UBDC).

Jammu and Kashmir would get its share of water from Shahpur Kandi dam project, the spokesperson said.

Notably, an agreement was signed on January 20, 1979 between the chief ministers of Punjab and Jammu and Kashmir regarding Thein Dam project. The new project consists of Thein Dam, which has been renamed as Ranjit Sagar Dam, and was commissioned in 2000.

Work on the main dam and head regulators had commenced in March 2013. The construction was going on in full swing when suddenly, on August 30, 2016, the J&K authorities intervened and stopped the work in J&K territory, citing the enactment of Punjab Termination of Agreements Act 2004, even though the Punjab government had categorically stated that PTAA 2004 was not applicable to riparian states like J&K and Himachal Pradesh.

With the intervention of the Union Ministry of Water Resources, River Development and Ganga Rejuvenation and Prime Ministers Office, an agreement was signed between irrigation secretaries of both the states on March 3, 2017, subject to approval by the respective Government.

It was unanimously agreed that the work on the Shahpur Kandi Dam project would resume as soon as the respective state governments formally approved the decision.

The ambitious Shahpur Kandi dam project on river Ravi is a major irrigation project which will benefit both Jammu and Kashmir and Punjab.

Jammu and Kashmir is entitled to 0.69 MAF (Million acre-foot) of water from Ravi and it is utilizing only 0.215 MAF.

This project will benefit the districts of Kathua and Samba, besides catering to some parts of Jammu district, the spokesperson said.

It will irrigate 32,000 hectares (80,000 acres) of agricultural land in the Kandi areas, upstream and downstream along the Jammu-Pathankot national highway in Samba and Kathua districts.

The project will be completed by the Punjab government in three years and the water is expected to flow to Jammu and Kashmir by the end of 2020, the spokesperson said.

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A special investigation team, probing the rape case of a nun by a Roman Catholic bishop,



Thursday resumed his interrogation.

Bishop Franco Mulakkal, who has been accused of repeated rape and sexual assault by the nun, Thursday appeared before the Kerala police for his interrogation.

The Jalandhar bishop of the Roman Catholic church, grilled by the special investigation team for seven hours Wednesday, was asked to appear before the team again at the crime branch office Thrippunithura at 11 am.

Mulakkal, who had recently relinquished his administrative responsibilities as the bishop of the Jalandhar diocese, joined the probe at around 11 am at the crime branch office.

Before resuming the interrogation, Kottayam Superintendent of Police Hari Sankar said about 50 per cent of the questioning was over and the process is expected to be completed by Thursday evening.

The effort is to reach a conclusion after solving the contradictions in the statements, he said.

The police had earlier said there were contradictions in the statements of the victim, witnesses and the accused.

When asked about the "contradictions" in the statements of the alleged victim, the witnesses and Mulakkal, as claimed by the police earlier, Sankar had said Wednesday, "That's the purpose of the interrogation. The interrogation is not over. We will reflect on it after it is over."



The nun has accused the senior Catholic priest of sexually assaulting her repeatedly between 2014 and 2016.

The clergyman has claimed allegations against him were a "cooked up story to wreak vengeance" for the actions taken by him on various complaints received against the nun.

Claiming innocence, the bishop has said the complaint was "nothing but a fictional story".

As the bishop joined the probe, a protest by various Catholic reform organisations and a group of nuns seeking his arrest entered its 13th day Thursday.

The agitation at Vanchi Square here is a spontaneous expression of outrage by these groups over the alleged assault of the nun.

A protesting nun said they all were waiting for the of the arrest of the Bishop because it could send out a strong message to those who abuse women in the country.

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In a no-hold-barred attack on Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Congress president Rahul Gandhi Thursday said people are now heard saying that the country's "watchman is a thief.

The remark at a public meeting provoked immediate condemnation by the BJP with Union minister Smriti Irani telling reporters it showed that the Congress leader has no respect for the prime minister's post.

Gandhi was referring to the Prime Minister's silence on the Rafale fighter aircraft deal with France and the Modi government's failure to bring fugitive businessman Vijay Mallya to book.

Modi had said he did not want to become the country's prime minister, but its chowkidar' (watchman), Gandhi recalled.

He added now it is heard on the streets that the country's chowkidar' is a thief. Galli galli me shor hai, desh ka chowkidar chor hai, he said in Hindi at a rally in tribal dominated Sagwara of Udaipur district.

Assembly elections will be held in Rajasthan later this year.

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In a no-holds-barred attack on Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Congress president Rahul Gandhi Thursday said people are now heard saying the country's "watchman is a thief.

Gandhi's remark at a public meeting provoked a strong reaction from the BJP with Union minister Smriti Irani calling him the clown prince who had no respect for the prime minister's post.

Rahul Gandhi was referring to the prime minister's silence on the Rafale fighter aircraft deal with France and the Modi government's failure to bring fugitive businessman Vijay Mallya to book.

He said he had asked questions on this in Parliament but got no reply, and took a jibe at Modi's past assertions on tackling corruption.

Modi had said he did not want to become the country's prime minister, but its chowkidar' (watchman), Gandhi recalled.

He added now it is heard on the streets that the country's chowkidar' is a thief.

Galli galli mein shor hai, Hindustan ka chowkidar chor hai, he said in Hindi at a rally in tribal-dominated Sagwara.

He said this is what the people in Rajasthan and elsewhere in the country felt.

Assembly elections will be held in the state later this year, shortly ahead of the Lok Sabha elections in 2019.

Gandhi said people are disappointed with the Bharatiya Janata Party governments at the Centre and in Rajasthan and the Congress is now set to win.

Neither the prime minister and the chief minister, nor their money can stop the change of government in Rajasthan, he said.

Referring to a recent row, Gandhi claimed Finance Minister Arun Jaitley had admitted that Vijay Mallya met him before leaving the country.

The finance minister allowed Vijay Mallya who defrauded banks to tune of Rs 9,000 crore to leave the country but the prime minister did not break his silence, he said.

Mentioning Modi's monthly radio talk, he said the prime minister speaks his mann ki baat' in all his speeches but the Congress wants to hear what the people say.

The Congress chief said the promise to provide employment to two crore youths every year and the Make In India campaign had failed as phones, shoes and clothes carried the Made In China tag.

Gandhi claimed only 450 youths get employment in the country each day while China created jobs for 50,000 people every 24 hours.

He alleged an amount of Rs 2,30,000 crore has been written off as bad loan to 15 or 20 big industrialists, but the government has not helped debt-ridden farmers.

We will make the people of the state secure and focus on providing employment. We want mobile phones with Made in Rajasthan tag, he said.

Gandhi tried to allay speculation over rifts in the state unit of the party by referring to a motorcycle ride that Rajasthan Congress chief Sachin Pilot and former chief minister Ashok Gehlot took together.

The Congress is yet to announce its CM candidate in Rajasthan, unlike the BJP which has said Chief Minister Vasundhara Raje will be nominated again.

The Congress president assured that party workers will decide on the candidates in the coming election.

I can guarantee you that this time not a single parachute candidate will be able to get the ticket. If any such candidate comes, I will cut the rope, he said.

He also asked senior Congress leader Avinash Pandey to find women faces to represent the party.

Gandhi suggested that the BJP was using money from the state exchequer on its campaign meetings. You should know that the posters that you see of the prime minister and the chief minister were made with your money, he said.

Gandhi said the demonitisation of high-currency bank notes and the Goods and Services Tax (GST), which he called the Gabbar Singh Tax', broke the back of common people and the small businessman.

We had proposed a one country, one tax system but the prime minister levied a multiple-layer tax system. The Congress government will change it to a single-layer tax system, if voted to power, he said.

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The Madras High Court Thursday directed the Vice-Chancellor of Tamil Nadu Dr Ambedkar Law University to submit by September 25 a report on action taken to remove unqualified teaching staff and other staff serving in law colleges across the state and in the university.

Justice S M Subramaniam passed the interim order on a plea of a former professor of the university D Shankar seeking a direction to reinstate him.

The judge sought details on verification of the credentials/certificates and other aspects of the teaching staff.

Justice Subramaniam also said the report should have details on the qualifications prescribed by the University Grants Commission for appointment of professor, assistant professor, head of the department, principal of the law colleges and the law universities.

This apart, the court said, the report shall contain the method of selection to be adopted for recruitment of staff by the university.

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The ruling Republican party in the US has apologised to the Hindus after a newspaper advertisement featuring Lord Ganesha to woo the minority community voters in Texas ended up "offending" them.

The advert, on the occasion of the 'Ganesh Chaturthi' festival, included the imagery of Lord Ganesha with the text, "Would you worship a donkey or an elephant? The choice is yours".

The elephant is the party symbol of the Republicans while Democrats have donkey as their party's symbol.

The Indian-American community described the political advertisement of the Grand Old Party in an Indian-American newspaper as "offensive" for featuring Lord Ganesha.

The party's county unit, Fort Bend County Republican Party which published the ad, apologised and clarified that it "was not meant to disparage Hindu customs or traditions in any way".

The ad, with arrows pointing to the body parts of Lord Ganesha, listed out qualities such as 'A BIG HEAD, TO THINK OUT OF THE BOX', 'BIG EYES TO LOOK BEYOND WHAT YOU SEE', 'LARGE EARS TO LISTEN TO OTHERS ATTENTIVELY', 'LARGE STOMACH, TO PEACEFULLY DIGEST ALL THE GOOD AND BAD IN LIFE' among others.

An advocacy group, the Hindu-American Foundation (HAF) of Houston, called on the Fort Bend County Republican Party to apologise for the advert about the celebration of the 'Ganesh Chaturthi' festival.

"While we appreciate the Fort Bend County GOP's attempt to reach out to Hindus on an important Hindu festival, its ad - equating Hindus' veneration of the Lord Ganesha with choosing a political party based on its animal symbol - is problematic and offensive," said Rishi Bhutada, HAF Board Member and Fort Bend County resident.

Using religious imagery in order to explicitly appeal for political support should best be avoided by any political party, he said.

"The implication regarding the worship of animals as gods was also disheartening to the HAF leaders, as that is a common misconception taught in US schools, which frequently ends up becoming a taunt used to bully Hindu students," the HAF said.

Bhutada also called upon the Fort Bend County Republican Party to apologise for the offensive and inaccurate reference, not to run the advert again and for elected officials in the County to send the same message to the Party as well.

Sri Preston Kulkarni, the Democratic candidate for the US Congress from District 22 in Texas, seized on the Republican advert, calling it offensive in a tweet on Tuesday.

"Asking Hindu-Americans if they would rather vote for a donkey or an elephant by comparing Ganesha, a religious figure, to a political party is highly inappropriate. The Fort Bend County Republican party must retract this ad," he said.

Meanwhile, the Fort Bend Republican party responded and said: "The ad was not meant to disparage Hindu customs or traditions in any way. We offer our sincerest apologies to anyone that was offended by the ad. Obviously, that was not the intent".

In a letter, chairman Jacey Jetton, the first Korean-American to lead the Fort Bend County Republican Party said: "The ad was meant to be part of the celebration to acknowledge the 'Ganesh Chaturthi' festival of September 13".

"This ad was created with input from those of Hindu faith so that we could properly pay respect to the sacred festival. This highlights the difficulty in outreach that can be positive for one group but not for another in the same community.

"We offer our sincerest apologies to anyone that was offended by the ad. Obviously, that was not the intent. The ad was not meant to disparage Hindu customs or traditions in any way," Jetton said.

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The Republican majority leadership in the US Senate Thursday refused the postponement of the scheduled Monday hearing of Judge Brett Kavanaugh, who is facing sexual assault allegations, and set a Friday deadline for Christine Blasey Ford to respond.

In a letter to Democratic members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, its chairman Chuck Grassley also opposed the idea of an FBI investigation, a condition set by Ford for her to appear before the committee for testimony, a move which has been supported by Democratic lawmakers.

In the absence of Ford appearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee, the Republicans Thursday said they will go ahead with the confirmation process and the White House said it will fully support Kavanaugh, the US Supreme Court nominee.

Grassley, in his letter, dismissed the demand of FBI investigation.

"Your letter requests that I demand that the FBI conduct an additional investigation into this matter. This request demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of the FBI background investigation process. Before nominating an individual to a judicial or executive office, the White House directs the FBI to conduct a background investigation," he said.

"The FBI compiles information about a prospective nominee and sends it to the White House. The White House then provides FBI background investigation files to the Senate as a courtesy to help us determine whether to confirm a nominee. But the FBI does not make a credibility assessment of any information it receives with respect to a nominee," Grassley argued.

He said he has scheduled the hearing on coming Monday.

Grassley alleged that Senator Dianne Feinstein only informed the FBI of the allegations after they were leaked to the media on the eve of a confirmation vote.

"The proper course of action would have been to investigate Dr Ford's serious allegations as quickly and as thoroughly as possible, as I did as soon as these allegations were made known to me," he said.

The Democrat's request, he said, ignores the fact that Ford has already made her allegations public. The purpose of the background investigation process is to compile information in a confidential manner, Grassley said.

"Confidentiality permits people to speak freely and candidly about the character and qualifications of the nominee. The White House requires the Senate to keep background investigation files private so that people can speak anonymously to investigators if they so desire. Because Dr Ford's allegations are in the public arena, there is no longer a need for a confidential FBI investigation," he said.

Grassley said the Senate Judiciary Committee has offered to hold a hearing with Ford in any format, time and place of her choice.

Senator Lindsay Graham, in a statement, said seeking an FBI investigation into a 36-year-old incident is aimed at delaying the confirmation process.

"Requiring an FBI investigation of a 36-year-old allegation (without specific references to time or location) before Professor Ford will appear before the Judiciary Committee is not about finding the truth, but delaying the process until after the mid-term elections," he said.

"It is imperative the Judiciary committee move forward on the Kavanaugh nomination and a committee vote be taken as soon as possible," Graham said.

White House spokesman Raj Shah said President Donald Trump will not look at naming any replacement nominee unless there is a clear need. The administration is going full steam ahead to support Kavanaugh, he said.

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The is still enduring the effects of a near collision that took place sometime in the past 300-900 million years and set millions of stars moving like ripples on a pond, scientists say.

The European Space Agency (ESA)'s star mapping mission, Gaia, discovered the pattern of movement in stars in the disc -- one of the major components of our

The pattern was revealed because Gaia not only accurately measures the positions of more than a billion stars but also precisely measures their velocities on the plane of the sky.

For a subset of a few million stars, Gaia provided an estimate of the full three-dimensional velocities, allowing a study of stellar motion using the combination of position and velocity, which is known as 'phase space'.

In phase space, the stellar motions revealed an interesting and totally unexpected pattern when the star's positions were plotted against their velocities.

Teresa Antoja from Universitat de Barcelona in Spain said that she was surprised to see a snail shell-like pattern in the graph that plotted the stars' altitude above or below the plane of the against their velocity in the same direction.

Researchers performed many tests on the data to look for errors that could be forcing such shapes on the data. Yet no matter what they checked, the only conclusion they could draw was that these features do indeed exist in reality.

The reason they had not been seen before was because the quality of the Gaia data was a huge step up from what had come before.

"It looks like suddenly you have put the right glasses on and you see all the things that were not possible to see before," said Teresa.

"It is a bit like throwing a stone in a pond, which displaces the water as ripples and waves," she said.

Unlike the water molecules, which settle again, the stars retain a 'memory' that they were perturbed. This memory is found in their motions.

After some time, although the ripples may no longer be easily visible in the distribution of stars, they are still there when you look in their velocities.

From computer simulations, researchers believe that the ripples may have been caused by the Sagittarius dwarf galaxy -- which contains a few tens of millions of stars and is currently in the process of being cannibalised by the

Estimates of Sagittarius's last close encounter with the Milky Way place it sometime between 200 and 1000 million years ago, which is almost exactly what researchers calculated as an origin for the beginning of the snail shell-like pattern.

The scientists plan to investigate this galactic encounter as well as the distribution of matter in the Milky Way by using the information contained in the snail shell shape.
Ryanair shareholders delivered a blow on Thursday to the no-frills airline's chairman amid widespread strike action by European staff.

Chairman David Bonderman was re-elected but only with 70.5 per cent of the vote at the annual general meeting at a hotel in Gormanston near Dublin.

At last year's meeting he garnered 89.1 per cent of the vote.

The company's flamboyant chief executive Michael O'Leary was re-elected with 98.5 per cent of the vote.

The Local Authority Pension Fund Forum (LAPFF), a shareholder, had earlier recommended that members vote against Ryanair's report and accounts and block Bonderman's re-election.

"Ryanair has failed to adequately address concerns about the company's troubled relationship with its employees and the potential impact on its business," LAPFF chair Ian Greenwood said in a statement.

"The company faces more strikes, and allegations of poor working conditions continue to emerge", Greenwood said.

"Questions about the company's business model and governance now pose a threat to shareholder value." Stephen Cotton, general secretary of the International Transport Workers' Federation in a statement to AFP said the choice of venue for Thursday's meeting -- a motorway hotel outside Dublin -- showed "that Ryanair is running scared".

"These are not the signs of a mature company with a sustainable industrial relations model." Last week cabin crew in Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy, Spain and Portugal announced a 24-hour strike for September 28 -- a stoppage unions said will be the biggest strike in the Irish carrier's history.

It follows from industrial action last month which saw pilots from five European nations holding their first-ever simultaneous walkout, causing around 400 flight cancellations and travel chaos for 55,000 passengers.

The Irish airline has since struck an "in principle" deal with Italian staff, which according to unions will allow crews to work with contracts composed under Italian law rather than Irish legislation and make provisions for salary increases and a pension scheme.

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State-owned steel maker SAIL has almost completed its around Rs 72,000 crore modernisation and expansion programme, a top company official said Thursday.

SAIL had undertaken the modernisation and expansion programme to increase its capacity to 21 million tonnes per annum (MTPA).

The financial year 2017-18 witnessed several landmark achievements through ramping up of new facilities and surpassing previous records in physical performance, SAIL Chairman and MD Saraswati Prasad said at the company's annual general meeting (AGM) here.

"SAIL has almost finished its balance modernisation and expansion programme," Prasad said.

During the preceding fiscal, persistent strategic approach to improve operational profitability assisted SAIL to improve the EBIDTA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization) to Rs 5,184 crore, a substantial increase over FY 2016-17.

The improved operational performance was backed by increase in saleable steel production, improved product mix, improvement in productivity, reduction in coke rate and specific energy consumption, reduction in specific wage bill etc, he added.

"In FY18... SAIL achieved its highest ever production of hot metal of 15.983 million tonne (MT), Crude Steel of 15.021 MT and Saleable Steel of 14.071 MT. It also clocked an all-time best performance of continuous-cast (CC) steel production of 12.80 MT with a growth of 9 per cent over previous best of 11.77 MT, achieved in FY17," Prasad said.

On the outlook for global and domestic steel industry, he said that growth in local steel consumption is strongly backed by robust development of India and infrastructure sector.

It is further supported by 7.8 per cent growth in domestic finished steel consumption during the FY 2017-18, as a result of growing activities of steel intensive sectors, Prasad added.

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hopes to resolve 7-8 with an exposure of around Rs 170 billion during the breather given by the till November 11, Chairman said on Thursday.

The has asked the banks to maintain status quo and not to initiate insolvency proceedings against defaulting power companies till November 11, 2018, when it would hear the case again. During this period lenders would be able to resolve stressed assets.

"On my radar there are 7 or 8 projects. We are working only on that. If there is 100 per cent consensus among lenders only then it ( of stressed power assets) would happen," Kumar told reporters when asked whether would be able to resolve any stressed assets during the breather till November 11.

About any resistance from lenders to resolve these stressed assets, he said, "They are all at various stages of approval. So at this stage, it is not the right statement to say that there is resistance. We have to give time to boards and management committees of lenders to take a decision.

" has taken a decision regarding 7 to 8 such projects. We have conveyed that. Some other banks have also conveyed and some other banks are yet to get approval. That is why we need some time."



About the SBI exposure in those assets, he said, "SBI has exposure of Rs 170 billion in these projects."



About the order, he said, "Whatever legal options or whatever is permitted by law and regulation would be done. Right now the Supreme Court has said that maintain status quo (on Feb 12 circular)) in respect of petitions pending in high courts. So everybody is maintaining the status quo."The framework provided for a strict timeline for of these where debt is Rs 20 billion or more. It mandates starting insolvency proceedings in case no plan is provided by the lenders within 180 days of default.

About the steps to check rupee depreciation, he said, "There are some more measures which are coming. But current account deficit needs to be contained. The step taken so far would definitely help the sentiment in favour of the rupee."



On steps taken on containing rupee depreciation by bankers like NRI bonds, he said, "Whatever you do ultimately add to the debt burden of the country. It is not what banks will decide. Ultimately these are the issues or decisions which are to be taken by that how do we manage our external sector. Once those decisions are taken, the banks implement those decisions."



About unveiling of SASHAKT scheme guidelines, he said, "That is what in progress. earlier target was September 30, you can add 10 to 15 days more to that. Banks can invest up to 10 per cent in (alternative investment fund). But it has to carry in mind that 10 per cent carries 150 per cent risk weight. But in AMC (asset management company) we would be participating to the extent of 10 per cent."



Project Sashakt aims to strengthen the credit capacity, credit culture and credit portfolio of public sector banks. It is an Asset Management Company (AMC) resolution approach, under which an independent AMC would be set up to focus on asset turn around, job creation and protection.

Kumar spoke to reporters on the sideline of an event where Hindustan Urvarak & Rasayan Ltd (HURL) signed the Rupee Term Loan (Rs 53.14 billion) agreement for the Gorakhpur fertiliser plant with a consortium of banks led by the SBI as the lead banker and Punjab National Bank, Allahabad Bank, Union Bank of India, Indian Bank, Bank of and Canara Bank.

The HURL is a joint venture company of three Maharatna PSUs -- NTPC, IOCL and CIL -- along with FCIL & HFCL and is currently engaged in implementing three urea projects at Gorakhpur, Sindri and Barauni in the eastern part of the country.

These plants which are being built at an estimated cost of Rs 210 billion shall bring a new lease of life in the economic growth of eastern The GAIL is implementing a natural gas pipeline for supplying gas to these three plants and the total investment by HURL and GAIL amounting to Rs 360 billion.
The Supreme Court on Thursday took note of a recent incident in Bihar where five juveniles escaped from a remand home in Purnea after allegedly killing the caretaker and a fellow inmate, and wondered as to how guns came inside the institution.

"Newspaper reports about the Bihar incident says that gun shots were fired there. Where do all these guns come from?" a bench of justices Madan B Lokur and Deepak Gupta said.

Former senior police officer Amod Kanth, who is associated with an NGO working for child development, told the bench that Purnea incident was "very shocking" and the social audit conducted earlier by the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS) had said that 17 such homes in Bihar were in miserable condition.

He said statutory authorities have to play a pro-active role to deal with the issue.

Meanwhile, advocate Aparna Bhat, assisting the apex court as an amicus curiae in the matter related to exploitation of children in orphanages, told the bench that she, along with joint secretary of Ministry of Women and Child Development, would review different reports on the issue and would come out with recommendations.

Bhat said that the ministry has received reports about condition of children homes running in all the states and the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights' (NCPCR) was also carrying out social audit of these homes.

"We can review all the reports and would then come out with recommendations," she told the bench.

The bench has posted the matter for hearing after four weeks.

The apex court had earlier termed the NCPCR's report on the status of children in shelter homes across India as "frightening".

It had noted that as per NCPCR report, out of the 2,874 children homes audited by them, only 54 have received positive reviews from the body set up under the Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act.

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The Shiv Sena Thursday welcomed the Centre's ordinance banning instant triple talaq and asked the government to take a similar route for the construction of Ram temple at Ayodhya in Uttar Pradesh.

The government should take steps to fulfil "at least one promise" made to Hindus of the country, keeping their sentiments in mind, the Uddhav Thackeray-led party said.

The Union Cabinet Wednesday approved an ordinance to ban the practice of instant triple talaq. Law Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad said there was a "compelling necessity" to bring the ordinance as instances of 'talaq-e-biddat' continued unabated despite the Supreme Court striking it down.

"The government has ensured dawn of freedom in the lives of Muslim women by making triple talaq an offence. Now, it should also ensure rise of the sun of sentiments of Hindus by bugling construction of the Ram temple in Ayodhya," the Sena said in the editorial of party mouthpiece 'Saamana'.

"Bring an ordinance on Ram temple and fulfil at least one promise made to Hindus," said the party, which is an ally of the BJP at the Centre and in Maharashtra.

It noted that promises of bringing uniform civil code, repealing Article 370, that gives special status to Jammu and Kashmir, and construction of the Ram temple could not be fulfilled earlier due to compulsions of running a coalition.

"But now you (the BJP) have governments with complete majority at the Centre as well as in Uttar Pradesh. Why the exile of Lord Ram is still not over then?" it asked.

Noting that the contentious Ram temple-Babri mosque land dispute is pending before court, the Sena said let the judiciary take a call on the matter when it wants to, but the government should find a solution to the issue of sentiments of Hindus.

It welcomed the ordinance on triple talaq, but wondered how much acceptability the move would find among those Muslims who are "blinded by religion" and are hardliners.

"But the married Muslim (women), who are helpless on religious grounds, would get a protection cover through the ordinance and they will be freed from the ill practice," the Marathi daily claimed.

Without naming any party or government, it alleged that no honest efforts were made in India in the past to free Muslim women from such medieval ill practices due to vote bank

"So, the steps taken by the government in this context are really good, but it should not stop there only. The construction of Ram temple in Ayodhya was also promised by those who are claiming credit for banning triple talaq.

"That promise (of the temple) is still unfulfilled...Now the temple should also be constructed (by bringing an ordinance)," the party added.

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A senior leader of the PDP on Thursday joined the JKNPP here, third such instance after the previous ruling party decided to boycott the upcoming local urban bodies and panchayat polls in the state.

Capt (retd.) Anil Gour, chairman of the Ex-Serviceman Wing of the PDP, along with other members joined the JKNPP and were welcomed into the party fold by senior leaders led by chairman and former minister Harsh Dev Singh, a spokesman of the JKNPP said.

He said prominent among others who joined the party included Major (retd.) B D Sharma, Capt (retd.) A S Reen, Bheem Sen Gupta, Krishan Kumar Sharma, S Amarjeet Singh, S Harenderjeet Singh, S Jaswinder Singh and S Harpreet Singh.

A zonal president of the PDP for Gandhi Nagar constituency announced his resignation from the party on Tuesday, while another PDP leader who unsuccessfully contested last Assembly polls on the party ticket from Samba joined the Congress this week.

The JKNPP spokesman said the new entrants expressed faith in the party. He said their foremost reason for leaving the PDP was that after the demise of its founder Mufti Mohammad Sayeed, the party has lost its moorings and strayed away from its ideals.

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Two days after the Congress demanded a special session of the Goa Assembly for conducting a floor test, Speaker Pramod Sawant said the governor can call a session after consulting the government and the Speaker.

With Chief Minister Manohar Parrikar admitted to the All India Institute of Medical Sciences in Delhi, the Congress has said the BJP-led government does not have enough numbers in the Assembly.

Speaker Sawant said Thursday that even if a special session is called, a no-trust motion will need a prior notice.

Further, "Governor convenes the session after taking the Speaker and government into confidence," he added.

The Assembly was in session only one and a half months ago, he noted.

Asked about his stand on the matter, he said he will go strictly by the rule book and the precedents.

The Congress, which met Governor Mridula Sinha Tuesday, claimed it has support of the required number of MLAs to form a new government in the coastal state.

The BJP has ruled out any change in leadership in Goa despite Parrikar's illness.

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BJP president Amit Shah on Thursday expressed the hope that the movement for building Ram temple in Ayodhya will result in "victory for culture", saying people's sentiments always win in democracy.

His remarks at a book release event came as Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS) chief Mohan Bhagwat reiterated his call for constructing the temple at the earliest, saying "justice" needed to be given to society quickly.

Shah described the Ram Janambhoomi movement as the biggest agitation in India since independence, touching all sections of the society.

He said he would not speak much on the issue due to the timing- an apparent reference to the ongoing Supreme Court hearings on the matter.

People's agitation had been going since the temple was demolished in Ayodhya over six centuries ago, and it will continue till the victory for culture is achieved, he said.

"People's sentiments always win in democracy, and I have faith that this agitation will go in a similar direction," he said.

Making a reference to decades-old movement in support of temple at what Hindus believe to be the birth place of Lord Ram, Bhagwat said denying truth and justice, and promoting untruth and injustice causes violence.

People's devotion that existed for centuries was ignored, he said, adding it amounted to inviting trouble.

Bhagwat had yesterday pitched for building the temple at the earliest.

He had said that construction of a temple will end one of the reasons for discord between communities in the societies.

"We have to give justice quickly. It should not be delayed. The society is supreme," he said today.

Speaking at the release of two Hindi books- Ayodhya ka chashmadeed (Eyewitness to Ayodhya) and Yuddh me Ayodhya (Ayodhya in war)- written by Hemant Sharma, a senior journalist, Home Minister Rajnath Singh said it would be satisfying if followers of all religions would work together for building a grand Ram temple.

On the last day of a three-day RSS conclave, Bhagwat had yesterday strongly pitched for construction of a Ram temple "at the earliest", asserting that it will end tension between Hindus and Muslims.

He had also sought to address the unease of minorities, especially Muslims, with parts of a book, Bunch of Thoughts, written by the organisation's second chief M S Golwalkar.

Many of Gowalkar's statements had a context of time and circumstances, he had said.

"His enduring thoughts are in Guruji's Vision and Mission, from which all the remarks with temporary context have been removed. And Sangh is not dogmatic organisation. As time changes and so do out thoughts," he had said.

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President Thursday accused of "lying" on HAL's capability to build and demanded her resignation.

The chief took to Twitter to attack Sitharaman, alleging that her position as the has become untenable as a former chief of the state-run Limited (HAL) has "nailed her lie".

"The RM (Rafale Minister) tasked with defending corruption has been caught lying again. The former HAL Chief, T S Raju, has nailed her lie, that HAL didn't have the capability to build the RAFALE. Her position is untenable & she must resign," he tweeted and tagged of a media report on the former HAL chief's assertion.

The has alleged that the government caused loss of over Rs 410 billion to the exchequer and endangered security by bypassing the state-run HAL in favour of some businessman "friends" for offset contract in the

Under India's offset policy, foreign defence entities are mandated to spend at least 30 per cent of the total contract value in India through procurement of components or setting up of research and development facilities.

Sitharaman had earlier told PTI that it was former A K Antony's unprecedented intervention that led to the deal being cancelled after the price negotiation committee had almost finalised the deal.

The RM (Rafale Minister) tasked with defending corruption has been caught lying again. The former HAL Chief, T S Raju, has nailed her lie, that HAL didnt have the capability to build the RAFALE. Her position is untenable & she must resign. https://t.co/7mKXV5wo8x  (@RahulGandhi) September 20, 2018

The charge has been denied by Antony as false.

Sitharaman had also accused Antony of not supporting HAL in getting the

The Congress has stepped up the attack on the government over the and is seeking to make it a major poll issue ahead of assembly elections in some key states later this year and the parliamentary election in 2019.
The Congress Thursday demanded that Nirmala Sitharaman resign as defence minister for "lying" on the Rafale deal and said her "position has become untenable" as a former HAL chief has "nailed her lie".

Party president Rahul Gandhi took to Twitter to attack Sitharaman and accused her of "lying" on the Hindustan Aeronautics Limited's capability to build Rafale aircraft.

"The RM (Rafale Minister) tasked with defending corruption has been caught lying again. The former HAL Chief, T S Raju, has nailed her lie, that HAL didn't have the capability to build the RAFALE. Her position is untenable & she must resign," he tweeted and tagged a media report on the former HAL chief's assertion.

Congress spokesperson Manish Tewari said Sitharaman should resign for allegedly "misleading" the people on the Rafale deal and said the government's arguments have been "demolished" by the statement of a former chief of the state-run HAL.

He cited the remarks of former HAL chief T Suvarna Raju to attack Sitharaman over the issue of HAL's capability to build the Rafale aircraft.

Tewari hit out at Sitharaman for alleging that the UPA did not extend support to HAL when the state-run company was engaged in talks with French firm Dassault Aviation for the manufacturer of Rafale jets in India under the offset agreement.

He said the former HAL chief had made certain "extremely pertinent points" that "absolutely demolish" the entire case that the NDA government has been trying to build on the Rafale issue.

"We demand the resignation of the defence minister on the charge of misleading the people of India. After the disclosure which has been made today by the former head of HAL, the defence minister has no moral authority or no moral right to continue even for a second," he said.

Tewari said that Raju had made it clear in his statement that HAL and Dassault had signed the mutual workshare contract and given it to the government.

The first question that arises is that did the defence minister of India intentionally tried to mislead the people of India, the Congress leader said.

He also reiterated the Congress demand of a Joint Parliametary Committee (JPC) probe into the Rafale deal.

The Congress spokesperson also cited that Raju had stated that HAL would have built Rafale jets, had the government closed the original contract for 126 Medium Multi-Role Combat Aircraft (MMRCA).

Therefore, the government's argument that because HAL and Dassault could not come to an agreement and so the 126 MMRCA contract had to be scrapped does not hold, he said.

"What has happened today has really blown the defence minister's assertion out of the water," Tewari said.

He also cited Raju's remarks that HAL had built a 25-tonne Sukhoi-30, a fourth-generation fighter jet that forms the mainstay of the Air Force, from raw material stage, and maintained the Mirage-2000 aircraft, manufactured by Rafale maker Dassault Aviation, to highlight the public sector undertaking's capability.

"The nailer is that he (ex-HAL chief) says that if the 126 MMRCA contract would have gone through, India would have been self reliant in so far as the fighter aircraft platform is concerned," Tewari said.

"What happened to Make in India. Make in India seems to have gone out the window," he said.

The Congress has alleged that the government caused loss of over Rs 41,000 crore to the exchequer and endangered national security by bypassing the state-run HAL in favour of some businessman "friends" for offset contract in the Rafale deal.

Under India's offset policy, foreign defence entities are mandated to spend at least 30 per cent of the total contract value in India through procurement of components or setting up of research and development facilities.

Sitharaman had earlier told PTI that it was former defence minister A K Antony's unprecedented intervention that led to the deal being cancelled after the price negotiation committee had almost finalised the deal.

The charge has been denied by Antony as false.

Sitharaman had also accused Antony of not supporting HAL in getting the Rafale deal.

The Congress has stepped up the attack on the government over the Rafale deal and is seeking to make it a major poll issue ahead of assembly elections in some key states later this year and the parliamentary election in 2019.

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Six people were killed and dozens are missing after a landslide unleashed by monsoon rains struck in the central Philippines Thursday, inflicting more misery on the already storm-battered nation.

The new tragedy comes just days after 2018's most powerful storm, Typhoon Mangkhut, pounded the nation's north with heavy winds and rain, sparking a separate landslide that left dozens dead.

Emergency workers in helmets and locals with shovels rushed to search for survivors of the new disaster, which happened in the village of Tina-an on the popular tourist island of Cebu.

Days of heavy monsoon rains caused a steep slope of crumbly limestone to collapse and crash into at least 10 homes early Thursday when many people would still have been in bed.

Injured survivors were wheeled into the back of ambulances and the dead were laid on pews at a local church.

"There are 64 missing. Six are confirmed dead. Nine were injured...these are minor injuries," Civil Defence Spokesman Julius Regner told AFP.

"There are more than 100 rescuers on the site. They are using backhoes (excavators) and other heavy equipment," he added.

Civil Defence officials in the region said landslides were fairly rare on Cebu, an elongated island with low hills.

As Thursday's search for survivors unfolded, efforts continued in the hunt for bodies in the mining area of Itogon in the mountainous north of the Philippines, which was the area worst hit by the typhoon.

Most of those killed in the storm died in landslides in the Cordillera range, which includes Itogon and other towns in a region known for gold mining.

Police said on Thursday that the death toll rose to 88, primarily due to corpses recovered from the Itogon slide.

Mangkhut swamped fields in the nation's agricultural north and smashed houses when it tore through at the weekend.

Itogon is one of the country's oldest mining hubs, with known gold panning activity stretching back to before the 17th-century Spanish colonial conquest.

Thousands of people from all over the country still flock to the upland town seeking their fortune in largely unregulated mining, which is accompanied by periodic deadly accidents.

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Assam Chief Minister Sarbananda Sonowal Thursday called for development of all the 33 districts as per the resources available in each of them to achieve holistic development of the state.

Chairing a meeting of the State Innovation and Transformation Aayog (SITA) here, Sonowal said after demonetization there was an increased need for bank branches in remote areas to transfer government scheme benefits to the beneficiaries.

He also said that the state government entities like Assam State Cooperative Agriculture and Rural Development (ASCARD) Bank must be revived after thoroughly considering its feasibility and outstanding liabilities.

We must develop all the 33 districts of the state as per the resources available in each of those districts. When we focus on the available resources of the respective districts for preparing the budget and roadmap for development then only we can achieve holistic development of Assam", said the CM.

"In this regard, SITA can help us by studying the resource status of the districts, the Chief Minister added.

During the meeting, discussions regarding the proposal submitted by SITAs expert committee for revival of ASCARD bank also came up.

Digital India initiative of Prime Minister Narendra Modi must be implemented to bring in transparency and efficiency in cooperative banking systems and empowering the weaker section of the society, he said.

Reviewing the proposal of SITA to conduct study on Tocklai Tea Research Institute in upper Assam, the chief minister said the research centre must aspire to become one of the best in the world providing cutting edge solutions to the tea industry for increased production and quality maintenance.

He further said the tea sector must also incorporate best practices from around the world from tea producing countries such as Sri Lanka, Kenya, etc., and incorporate those practices to break into newer markets for Assam tea and reclaim the glory of the tea industry here.

The chief minister also directed SITA to find ways to popularise cultivation and consumption of local seasonal fruit varieties for their high nutrient contents.

Referring to Prime Ministers vision to develop Northeast as an organic hub, Sonowal urged SITA to conduct study to develop the organic agricultural fields in the state.

The proposals of conducting study on muga rearing, producing renewable energy and utilising bioengineering technologies to tackle river bank erosion were discussed among others.

Water Resource Minister Keshab Mahanta, Vice Chairman of SITA Dipok Kumar Borthakur, Chief Secretary Alok Kumar, Principal Secretary to the Chief Minister Sanjay Lohia among others were present in the meeting.

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Private airline SpiceJet Thursday announced launch of direct flights from Guwahati to Patna, Hyderabad and Pakyong in Sikkim.

The announcement of the new flights by Spicejet was made in the presence of Assam Chief Minister Sarbananda Sonowal in a programme held at the secretariat here, a government release said.

The daily non-stop flight services on the Guwahati-Patna-Guwahati route and Guwahati-Hyderabad-Guwahati route would commence on October 10, while the Guwahati-Pakyong-Guwahati flight service would be effective from October 16, the release said.

Pakyong is about 30 km from Gangtok.

The chief marketing officer of SpiceJet, Debojo Maharshi handed over the first ticket and boarding pass to the chief minister marking the formal announcement of the launch of the new flight services.

Appreciating SpiceJets initiative, Sonowal termed the development as a golden opportunity for the state and that the new flights would not only boost trade, education and health, but would also facilitate higher footfall of tourists from other states to Assam.

The chief minister informed that during the Advantage Assam: Global Investors Summit this year, SpiceJet CMD Ajay Singh had given assurance to the state government for giving a boost to air connectivity in regional routes from Assam.

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A court here Thursday directed the Delhi Police to hand over some documents to Congress leader Shashi Tharoor in connection with a case against him pertaining to his wife Sunanda Pushkar's death around four years ago in a luxury hotel here.

Additional Chief Metropolitan Magistrate Samar Vishal issued the directions after senior advocate Vikash Pahwa, appearing for the politician, told the court that some of the documents the agency gave were not readable, while many pages were missing.

The documents were filed by police along with the charge sheet.

The court also granted Tharoor exemption from personal appearance for the day after an application was moved by his counsel in this regard.

The court, thereafter, posted the matter for further hearing on October 4.

Pushkar was found dead in a suite of a luxury hotel in the city on the night of January 17, 2014. The couple was staying in the hotel as the official bungalow of Tharoor was being renovated at that time.

The court had directed the Delhi Police to hand over various documents filed along with the charge sheet, including statements of witnesses, to Tharoor on a plea moved by him.

The Thiruvananthapuram MP was granted regular bail by court on July 7 after he appeared before court in pursuance to the summons issued against him.

The court had on June 5 summoned Tharoor, observing there was sufficient ground to proceed against him.

Tharoor has been charged under sections 498A (husband or his relative subjecting a woman to cruelty) and 306 (abetment of suicide) of the Indian Penal Code (IPC), but has not been arrested in the case.

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A meeting will take place between External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj and her Pakistani counterpart Shah Mahmood Qureshi on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly, the Ministry of External Affairs said Thursday.

MEA Spokesperson Raveesh Kumar said at a media briefing that the meeting, however, does not indicate any change in India's policy towards Pakistan.

Kumar said the meeting is taking place on Pakistan's request.

He said the date for the meeting was being finalised by the permanent missions of the two countries in New York.

Responding to a question, Kumar said the agenda for the meeting has not been finalised.

He said Swaraj will also participate in the SAARC foreign ministers' meeting on the sidelines of the UNGA. The first day of the high-level UNGA debate will begin on September 25 and will last for nine working days.

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President Bashar al-Assad Thursday blamed Israel for the downing of a Russian plane, which was accidentally hit by Syrian anti-aircraft fire during an Israeli missile strike.

"This unfortunate incident was the result of Israeli arrogance and depravity," the Syrian leader said, offering his condolences in a letter to his Russian counterpart for the death of 15 Russian crew members killed in the incident over Syria on Monday.

"We are determined that such tragic events will sway neither you nor us from continuing the fight against terrorism," he continued in the letter published by the official Sana agency.

The Russian plane was downed by Syria's Russian-made S-200 air defence system and all aboard were killed.

The Russian military has accused Israeli pilots of using the Russian plane as a cover, "exposing it to fire from Syrian air defences".

Israel said it had targeted a Syrian military facility where weapons manufacturing systems were "about to be transferred on behalf of Iran" to Lebanese Shiite group Hezbollah.

It was the worst 'friendly fire' incident between Moscow and the Syrian regime since Russian forces intervened in the country in late 2015 to support Assad whose grip on power had been weakened by rebels and jihadist fighters.

Russian President Vladmir Putin described the incident as the result of "tragic accidental circumstances," warning Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu against carrying out such operations in the future and pledging to beef up security for Russian forces in Syria.

Netanyahu on Tuesday expressed his "sorrow" to Putin in a phone call, offering to assist Moscow in the investigation.

However he insisted the Russian plane had been felled by "extensive and inaccurate Syrian anti-aircraft (fire)".

In recent months Israel has increased its attacks in Syria against the regime or its ally Iran.

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Taiwan said Thursday it is looking for the owner of a Texas company that makes untraceable 3-D printed guns who is wanted on an arrest warrant tied to an accusation that he had sex with an underage girl and paid her USD 500 afterward.

The National Immigration Agency and Criminal Investigation Bureau confirmed that Cody Wilson was in Taiwan after arriving on the island earlier this month.

Division Director Kan Yen-min was quoted by the official Central Agency as saying the bureau has yet to receive intelligence from the US regarding Wilson, but will continue seeking more information about the case.

Taiwan and the US do not have an extradition treaty but cooperate extensively on legal and security matters.

Austin, Texas, police Cmdr Troy Officer said Wednesday that his department is working with national and international law enforcement agencies to find Wilson, whose last known location was Taiwan's capital, Taipei.

Officer said it's unclear why Wilson went to Taiwan, but he is known to travel extensively.

He said before Wilson flew there, a friend of the 16-year-old girl informed Wilson that police were investigating the accusation that he had sex with the youth.

Wilson is identified in the affidavit as the owner of Austin-based Defense Distributed. After a federal court barred Wilson from posting the printable gun blueprints online for free last month, he announced he had begun selling them for any amount of money to US customers through his website.

Nineteen states and the District of Columbia sued to stop an agreement that the government reached with Defense Distributed, arguing that the blueprints for how to print plastic guns could be obtained by felons or terrorists.

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India's multinational steel-manufacturer, Tata Steel on Thursday celebrated the 100th anniversary of its operations in the Netherlands, the company said.

The Netherlands' King Willem-Alexander joined the representatives of the Tata Steel to officially open the anniversary year celebrations at the company's integrated steel-making plant in the port city of IJmuiden.

The Dutch site was founded in 1918 and it currently employs 9,000 people with an annual production of 7 million tonnes of steel.

The high-quality steel produced in IJmuiden is used across the globe in products ranging from batteries to cars and from food packaging to industrial machinery.

"During its rich history, IJmuiden has stood the test of time and provided the highest quality steel to our customers around the world while meeting broader societal issues such as employment, general welfare and trade policy," said T V Narendran, CEO and Managing Director of Tata Steel.

"In the coming 100 years we will stay committed to serving our communities and continue to develop innovative steel products which help solve major societal challenges such as the transition to sustainable energy and mobility," he said.

The Tata Steel chief also hailed the company's joint venture with German steel major Thyssenkrupp, announced in June and set to create Europe's second-largest steel operations after Lakshmi N Mittal's ArcelorMittal.

"Tata Steel in the Netherlands continues to play a crucial role in European steel-making and will provide a strong foundation as we set out to build an even stronger, long-term sustainable European steel business through a planned joint venture with Thyssenkrupp," Narendran added.

IJmuiden steelworks are a key part of Tata Steel's business in Europe.

The company said it continues to invest in the Netherlands, as well as in the UK, to meet the evolving needs of its customers in a wide variety of industries around the globe.

Hans Fischer, CEO of Tata Steel's European operations, said: "Our exciting journey began a century ago and, even today, steel is part of a very fundamental change in society. The shift towards a sustainable, circular economy, in which raw materials are never wasted but re-used again and again is well under way.

"Our groundbreaking HIsarna project will be an important step towards a circular economy and low-carbon steelmaking.

Tata Steel is one of Europe's leading steel producers, with steel-making in the Netherlands and the UK, and manufacturing plants across Europe.

The company supplies high-quality steel products to the most demanding markets, including construction and infrastructure, automotive, packaging and engineering.

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In this bustling metropolis of Pakistan, taziyas made by Hindus in the courtyards of Hindu temples are a prominent part of the Ashura procession taken out on the ninth and 10th days of Muharram to remember the martyrdom of Hazrat Imam Hussain and his people in Karbala.

In at least two ancient Hindu temples in the old city area of Karachi, the Hindu community has worked with zeal and passion to make taziyas, which are a representation of the tombs of Hazrat Imam Hussain and Hazrat Imam Hasan, the grandsons of Prophet Muhammad, and are an integral part of the Ashura procession.

"We have been making these taziyas for three generations now and it is something we feel proud and passionate about," Rajesh, a Hindu, said in the Hindu-dominated Narainpura area of Karachi.

Rajesh worked day and night in the backyard of the Rama Pir temple with other Hindu youngsters to make the "Dhun Jee Sain" taziya with money collected from donations.

A few miles away on Akbar Road, members of the Hindu community have worked in the courtyard of the 100-year-old Mari Mata temple to prepare an imposing taziya, which will be used in the 10th Muharram procession on Ashura.

"This is known as the Mai Jannat taziya. Our elders have been making it at this very spot since even before partition," Gond Saleem said.

Gond, who practises Hinduism after his Hindu father who married a Muslim woman, is an autorickhsaw driver. He devotes a month to make the taziya every year.

"My mother, Mehmooda, also made it a point to see that the Mai Jannat taziya was prepared every year for Ashura till her death last year," he said, adding, "We carry on our elders' wishes."



An area in the courtyard of the ancient temple is reserved every year for the making of the taziya.

"It takes at least 40 days to complete this taziya at a cost of around one lakh rupees," Gond said.

He added that stickers, shiny vault paper and wood were used to make the taziya.

Jagnath, a Hindu living in the same area, said their elders living in Karachi had always shown respect towards the great sacrifice of Hazrat Imam Hussain and that they were doing the same.

"When these taziyas are prepared near our temple, everyone in our community takes part and helps out. It is a big occasion for us every Ashura," he added.

The reverence and dedication with which the Hindus make the taziyas is a mater of surprise since their living conditions may not even include the basic facilities.

Muharram, which is the first month of the Islamic calendar, is observed with great reverence and solemnity by Muslims with taziya processions taken out to remember the sacrifice of Hazrat Imam Hussain and his people.

In Karachi, like every year, thousands of policemen and paramilitary personnel have been deployed to look after the security of the Ashura processions.

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RJD leader Tejashwi Yadav on Thursday charged BJP MP in the neighbouring Jharkhand state, whose feet was washed by a party worker who later drank that water, with trying to "intimidate people in the media" by getting a case filed against them "through his proxies".

Yadav levelled the allegation against Nishikant Dubey, a resident of Bhagalpur district in Bihar who is a two-time MP from Godda in Jharkhand.

Dubey had landed in a controversy earlier this week when reports surfaced in the media that a party worker - Pavan Sah - had washed his feet in public and gulped down the water.

Sharing screenshot of a case lodged by Sah against heads of major organizations at a Godda court, Yadav tweeted "instead of apologising for his shameful conduct, BJP MP Nishikant Dubey (getting his dirty feet washed by a poor man who then drank that water) is bullying and trying to intimidate people in the media and social media through cases through his proxies".

The RJD heir apparent's post was retweeted by Delhi Chief Minister and Aam Aadmi Party supremo Arvind Kejriwal who remarked "so far the BJP was controlling media by controlling advertisers adn through money. But now it seems it has decided to file police cases against media if it dares to question shameful acts of its MPs".

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There cannot be a "blanket ban" on media reporting on cases of rape and sexual abuse but such incidents should not be sensationalised, the Supreme Court said Thursday.

It made the observations after vacating a Patna High Court order restraining the media from reporting on the probe into the Muzaffarpur shelter home case where several women were allegedly raped and sexually abused over a period of time.

Asking both the print and the electronic media not to "sensationalise" incidents of sexual assaults and abuse and report such cases responsibly so as not to reveal the identity of the victim, a bench of Justices Madan B Lokur and Deepak Gupta issued notices to the Press Council of India, Editors Guild of India, Broadcasting Standards Authority and Broadcasters Association seeking their assistance in the matter.

The bench said it would need the help of these bodies on the issue of media reporting in such cases as it related to the criminal justice system and press freedom.

"In the meanwhile, the blanket order passed by the Patna High Court on August 23 with regard to media reporting (in Muzaffarpur shelter home case) is vacated," it said.

The bench also restrained the electronic media from telecasting or showing the victims of sexual abuse and violence, even in a morphed or blurred form, saying this would be in the interest of such victims.

"We request the media not to interview the victims. The of the event may of course be disseminated," the bench said, adding "we also request the electronic and print media not to sensationalise such events".

Senior advocate Shekhar Naphade, appearing for a scribe who has challenged the Patna High Court order, argued that there were guidelines, including on journalistic ethics, and statutory provisions, but these were being violated as the media was conducting "parallel investigations" and trial.

"It appears that there is no mechanism of enforcement and implementation of statutory provisions and guidelines," the bench observed, adding that "in the absence of any mechanism, it is possible that there could be some person, who is not involved in a case, be mistakenly made an accused by the media."



Naphade said 'media trial' of cases cannot be allowed and they should be asked to do factual reporting.

The bench observed that "there cannot be a blanket ban on media reporting. One of the aspects is how do you prevent disclosure of identity (of victims of sexual assaults). The second aspect is conclusions are drawn by the media,"



"They (media) announce a fellow guilty," it said, adding "there cannot be media trials".

The bench then asked Naphade "where to draw the line and how to check it?"



The senior counsel said the media cannot pronounce a person guilty and conduct parallel investigation. "It is the duty of media to report facts. Somewhere, a line has to be drawn. We have to look into it."



Referring to section 228-A of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) which deals with disclosure of identity of such victims, Naphade said the media was taking a "circuitous route", like interviewing the father of the victim, to do this.

He said that under section 228-A, revealing the identity is a cognisable offence and the police is bound to take action in such cases. "If they (media) do not obey this, it amounts to contempt and also abetment of offence. Police has to be alerted," he said.

However, the bench observed, "Tell us about this. We will prepare some guidelines. We may need the assistance of Press Council of India also."



Naphade referred to the Protection of Children from Sexual Offenses (POCSO) Act and said disclosure of a victim's identity is a 'non-cognisable' offence and the apex court could direct the police chiefs of all the states to nominate an officer who could file complaints in this regard before a magistrate.

The bench asked its registry to issue notices to the PCI, Editors' Guild of India, News Broadcasting Standards Authority and News Broadcasters Association to assist the court and posted the matter for hearing after two weeks.

At the fag end of hearing, lawyer Aparna Bhat, assisting the court as an amicus curiae in the matter, referred to an earlier report of the Law Commission and said the same issue was dealt with in it.

Naphade also referred to the Broadcasting Services Regulation Bill, 2006 and said that it has lapsed.

He said the apex court can pass direction under Article 142 of the Constitution, which deals with enforcement of decrees and orders of the Supreme Court, as was done at the time of Visakha guidelines which dealt with the issue of sexual harassment of women at workplace.

"We cannot become Parliament," the bench told Naphade, who said he would circulate the bill among the parties in the case.

On September 18, the apex court had referred to the recent Rewari gang rape case and asked why no action was taken against media houses for flouting the law as "everything has been said" about the 19-year-old victim.

In the Muzaffarpur case, over 30 girls were allegedly raped at the shelter home run by one Brajesh Thakur, the chief of a state-funded NGO.

The alleged sexual exploitation of the girls was first highlighted in an audit report submitted by Tata Institute of Social Sciences to the state's social welfare department. An FIR was lodged against 11 people, including Thakur, on May 31. The probe was later taken over by the CBI.

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Chinese President Xi Jinping has told Pakistan Army chief General Qamar Javed Bajwa that those who oppose his pet projects - the BRI and the CPEC - will "never succeed" as these are initiatives aimed at fostering peace and development.

The USD 50 billion China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) is the flagship project of the multi-billion dollar Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), a pet project of President Xi aimed at enhancing China's influence around the world through China-funded infrastructure projects.

India has opposed the CPEC project and protested to China as it is being laid through Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK).

General Bajwa, who is in China, called on Xi after his meetings with the top Chinese military officials, including General Zhang Youxia, the vice chairman of China's Central Military Commission.

"While we work for peace, we need to stay strong to thwart designs of all inimical forces challenging our resolve. We greatly value Chinese support...," Bajwa said.

He met Xi on a special invitation and they discussed regional security environment, challenges and way forward, Pakistan military's media wing Inter Services Public Relations (ISPR) said in a statement on Wednesday.

"Those who oppose the BRI or the CPEC shall never succeed as this is an initiative of peace and development not only for China but for region and beyond," it quoted Xi as saying.

Terming Pakistan as "our time-tested iron friend", he said the country had a pivotal role towards this lasting relationship.

He acknowledged the role of the Pakistan armed forces towards regional peace and stability.

President Xi said that China shall continue to support Pakistan as a strategic partner.

Bajwa said that Pakistan understands the importance of peace and has given lot of sacrifices for achieving it.

He said the BRI, with the CPEC as its flagship project, is destined to succeed despite all odds and the Pakistan Army shall ensure security of the CPEC at all costs, the statement said.

Xi said the two sides have been keeping "highly aligned" with each other on major international and regional issues, state-run Global Times reported.

China always places a high premium on China-Pakistan relations, he said, adding that the two sides had maintained a high level of mutual trust on issues of each other's major concerns.

"As long as high-degree mutual trust and concrete measures are in place, the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor construction will succeed and deliver benefits to people of the two countries.

"At present, the international and regional situation is undergoing complex changes and the two countries are supporting each other, helping each other and enhancing mutually beneficial cooperation, which have yielded fruitful outcomes," Xi said, adding that such efforts comply with the trend of the times.

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Tamil Nadu Governor Banwarilal Purohit Thursday attended several events here, including those taken up under the Swachch Bharat initiative, and also received petitions from the people.

The Governor visited a photo exhibition detailing the various initiatives taken up in the district under the Swachch Bharat initiative, a Raj Bhavan press release said.

Later, he administered a pledge to students and others on cleanliness, and gave away equipment and financial assistance to a women's self-help group involved in making cloth bags to replace plastic carrybags, it said.

He was then given a power-point presentation on the developmental activities in the district during a meeting with government officials, the release said.

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Tamil Nadu government would soon invite bids from agro-based investors to set up infrastructure to run primary processing centres and to procure vegetables from farmers and retail in various parts of the state.

A decision to invite the bids was taken at the investors' consultation meet here Thursday.

Accordingly, the agro-based investors would provide the necessary machinery to run the primary processing centres to process the fruits and vegetables in Krishnagiri and Coimbatore districts in the first phase, an initiative between NITI Aayog and the Tamil Nadu government.

Each processing centre would pay 'good prices' to farmers on purchase of agricultural produce and sell them to retail fruits and vegetable shops, an official press release said.

The state agricultural marketing department is implementing a project 'Supply Chain Management of Fruits, Vegetables and other Perishables in Districts of Tamil Nadu", following an announcement by state Chief Minister K Palaniswami.

The Rs 398.75-crore project aims to integrate the farmers with major market centres, processors and consumers and to provide the infrastructure for perishable fruits and vegetables in order to reduce post-harvest losses.

The NITI Aayog selected the project in Tamil Nadu under the 'Development Support Services to States for Infrastructure projects' in November 2017, following a memorandum of understanding it signed with the Tamil Nadu government.

Coimbatore and Krishnagiri districts have been selected in the first phase for the project under the public, private partnership mode since these places have major investments from the state government.

A total of 10 primary processing centres was being established in Krishnagiri district at Rs 136.18 crore and seven in Coimbatore at Rs 40.74 crore, the release said.

The project would be implemented as a "hub and spoke model" in Krishnagiri, Dharmapuri, Coimbatore, Nilgiris, Tiruchirapalli, Dindigul, Theni, Ramanathapuram, Tuticorin and Tirunelveli districts.

While the construction of post-harvest infrastructure in the primary processing centres almost completed in Coimbatore and Krishnagiri districts, it was nearing completion in other districts,the release said.

NITI Aayog joint secretary and advisor Vikram Singh Gaur, agricultural production commissioner and principal secretary Gagandeep Singh Bedi and senior government officials particpated in the investors consultation meeting, the release added.

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District Magistrate Brajesh Narayan Singh on Thursday directed the police and the law enforcement agencies to ensure action against mining, land, parking and liquor mafias active in Gautam Buddh Nagar to restore people's faith in the administration.

The directions were issued by Singh during a law and order review meeting, held at the Collectorate Auditorium in Greater Noida, with district police chief Ajay Pal Sharma in attendance, according to a statement.

Other senior police and administrative officers also attended the meeting.

"For the people to believe in law and order, the administration and police department should conduct fair investigation so that punitive and stringent legal proceedings could be recommended against all types of mafias -- mining, parking, land liquor and those in the IT sector -- in the district," Singh said.

"The chief minister views Gautam Buddh Nagar as a window to Uttar Pradesh and so it is the additional responsibility of the administration and police here to raise the standard of law and order situation so that a positive message goes out about the district," he was quoted as saying in the statement issued by the district information office.

He also instructed the police to ensure immediate action in cases of heinous crimes and directed that an intensive campaign be run to identify and act against the "white-collar" mafia.

"An intensive campaign should be run to identify those mafias engaged in white-collar jobs and business and ensure action against them under the stringent Gangster Act or the Goonda Act," he said.

The district magistrate said the police and the administrative officials should jointly tour their respective areas and take cognisance of even minor incidents and ensure immediate action to control crime.

He told the officials that the mafias who have sold over 100 plots in flood-prone areas of the district have been identified and action against them under the Gangster Act has already been proposed.

Singh also directed all officers to especially ensure action in cases related to Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes and the crimes against women.

Senior Superintendent of Police Ajay Pal Sharma directed all officials, in-charges of various police stations and the circle officers to step up action. He asked the officers to speed up probe and when required, recommend action against criminals under the Gangster Act, or the Goonda Act, or the National Security Act (NSA) in order to check crime in the district.

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The ruling Telangana Rashtra Samiti had no role in getting separate statehood for the region, senior Congress leader Ghulam Nabi Azad claimed here Thursday.

"TRS had no role. It was totally the Congress party, the legislators of the Congress party from Telangana, members of Parliament from Telangana, the party organisation from Telangana who are solely responsible," he told reporters.

The Congress working committee endorsed the recommendation made by the party functionaries from Telangana and the then Manmohan Singh government made the law for formation of separate Telangana, he said.

"We did not make the law or made the state of Telangana on the recommendation of TRS," he said.

The Congress MPs from Telangana, though they were in the ruling party, had staged protests in support of separate statehood even inside Parliament, he said.

Azad, who was a union Minister in the previous UPA government and incharge of Congress affairs in undivided Andhra Pradesh for long, said he did not even consult the TRS during the consultations as the separate state was being formed.

The party MPs and other leaders from Seemandhra (the successor state of Andhra Pradesh) left it to the Congress high command during consultations and they were taken aback when the party actually decided to divide the state, he said.

Indicating that the TRS walked away with the credit for formation of the state, Azad said it is like a farmer sowing seeds, watering the crop and using fertilisers for it to grow and someone else harvesting the crop.

Azad also alleged that the TRS "cheated" the people on the promise of providing 12 per cent reservation for Muslims.

"On reservation, TRS knew that 12 per cent would be rejected. Because, when Congress promised five per cent in 2004... when (YS) Rajasekhar ji (Reddy) became chief minister, he gave five per cent. But, court dismissed it," he said.

However, the then Congress government saw to it that four per cent reservation was given as per a "procedure," he said.

"So, the chief minister (K Chandrasekhar Rao) knew. Court has dismissed five per cent and they will not accept 12 per cent. That's why, intentionally, he knew that court will dismiss it, but still he did it to deceive (people)," he said.

Describing the BJP-led government at the Centre and TRS government in Telangana as "first cousins", he alleged that both made tall promises on employment generation but failed.

He said the TRS supported the NDA government on various issues, including demonetisation, election of President and Vice President, he said.

Azad described the Asaduddin Owaisi-led AIMIM party as a "sarkari party" which is always friendly with the government.

Asked about Congress attacking the TRS for its "family rule" though the latter has accused Congress of being dynastic, Azad said Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi were not appointed by parents which is the case with TRS.

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Turkey's Competition Authority has fined US tech giant Google around USD 15 million for violating competition rules in sales of mobile software.

The Competition Authority (RK) said it was fining Google just over 93 million Turkish lira (USD 14.93 million).

It said that the American company had six months to end the violation and ensure there is fair competition on the Turkish market.

The Turkish fine comes two months after the EU hit Google with its biggest ever fine, imposing a 4.34 billion euro (USD 5.1 billion) penalty on the US firm for illegally abusing the dominance of its operating system for mobile devices.

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Two minor girls were allegedly raped by a man and a 17-year-old boy here on Sunday and one of them died of injuries inflicted during the assault days later, a police official said Thursday.

The two girls, both around 12 years' old and residents of the same locality, went to a temple near their home in Hinjawadi area Sunday afternoon, he said.

The two accused, who also lived in the same locality, lured the girls by offering them chocolates. They then took the girls to an isolated area where they allegedly raped them, the official at Hinjawadi Police Station said.

The accused threatened the girls with dire consequences if they revealed the incident to anyone, he said.

The victims did not inform about the incident to their parents. However, one of them complained of pain and weakness following which her parents rushed her to a hospital, where doctors found out that she was traumatised, he said.

The doctors then informed the police, who approached the girl's family in the hospital on Tuesday, but the victim was not in a condition to speak, the official said.

Her family members told police that one more girl from their neighbourhood was with her on Sunday.

"When we approached the other girl, she narrated the entire incident," the official said.

Based on her statement, a case was registered against the two accused, one of whom has been identified as Ganesh Nikam (22), he said.

Meanwhile, the girl who was undergoing treatment at the government hospital here slipped into coma and succumbed to injuries Wednesday night, he said.

"We are waiting for the postmortem report to ascertain the exact cause of the death and accordingly, relevant sections will be added in the case," he said.

The police have arrested Nikam and detained the boy accused in the case, the official said.

Nikam will be produced in a court Thursday and the minor boy will be produced before the Juvenile Justice Board, he said.

The accused have been booked under IPC sections 376 (rape) and 363 (kidnapping), and relevant provisions of the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act, he added.

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The United States hit a Chinese military organisation with punishing financial sanctions for buying Russian fighter jets and missiles as it stepped up pressure on Moscow over its "malign activities".

It was the first time the Trump administration targeted a third country with its sanctions, designed to punish Russia for its seizure of and other activities.

The State Department said it was applying the 2017 legislation against the Equipment Development Department of the Chinese for its purchase of Russian Sukhoi Su-35 fighter jets and S-400 surface-to-air missiles.

At the same time, the State Department also announced it was placing 33 Russian intelligence and military-linked actors on its sanctions blacklist under the rules.

"The ultimate target of these sanctions is Russia," a senior administration official told journalists, insisting on anonymity.

" sanctions in this context are not intended to undermine the defence capabilities of any particular country. They are aimed at imposing costs on Russia in response to its malign activities."



CAATSA, or the Countering America's Adversaries Through Sanctions Act, was passed in 2017 as a tool that gives the Trump administration more ways to target Russia, Iran and North Korea with economic and political sanctions.

With regard to Russia, CAATSA arises from the country's "aggression in Ukraine, annexation of Crimea, cyber intrusions and attacks, interference in the 2016 elections, and other malign activities," the State Department said.

"We will continue to vigorously implement CAATSA and urge all countries to curtail relationships with Russia's defence and intelligence sectors, both of which are linked to malign activities worldwide," it said.

The senior official said EDD and its director, Li Shangfu, were hit with sanctions because of the purchases made from Rosoboronexport, Russia's main arms export entity already on the CAATSA blacklist for its support of the Assad regime in Syria.

The sanctions freeze any of EDD's and Li's assets in US jurisdictions. They restrict EDD's access to global financial markets by blocking foreign exchange transactions under US jurisdiction or any transactions in the US financial system.

The Russians named for CAATSA blacklisting have all been named previously under other regimes. They include private paramilitary contractor PMC Wagner, and Russian Defence Ministry procurement group Oboronlogistika, and KNAAP, Russia's largest aircraft manufacturer.

They also include 25 Russians and three Russian companies who were indicted over the past year by Russia collusion investigator Robert Mueller for their involvement in political meddling and hacking during the 2016 election.

In addition, the chief of the Russian military intelligence body GRU, Igor Korobov, and deputy chief Sergey Gizunov, were also hit with the CAATSA sanctions.
The US hopes to begin face-to-face negotiations with North Korea next month on terms for resuming on-the-ground searches in North Korea for remains of American servicemen, a senior Pentagon official said Thursday.

Kelly McKeague, director of the Defense POW-MIA Accounting Agency, said the aim is to begin searches at former battlefields next spring if agreement can be reached on areas of current dispute such as the types and amounts of compensation to North Korea for its assistance.

Remains of two American servicemen killed during the Korean War and returned by North Korea two months ago have been positively identified, but McKeague would not disclose their names.

He said the White House wants to do that. The remains were among an undetermined number contained in 55 boxes the North Korean army turned over to US officials on July 27.

McKeague said it was unclear how many individuals are contained in the 55 boxes, but he said it could be dozens more than 55. He described the bones as a "mish-mash" that will require DNA analysis and other extensive study.

The first two identifications came relatively quickly, he said, because the remains included partial skulls with teeth that could be matched to dental records, as well as clavicles matched to military X-ray records.

The remains contained in the 55 boxes had been stored by the North Korean army, probably for decades. Thousands of additional remains are believed to lie on North Korean battlefields and at former POW camps.

McKeague said the Pentagon would like to send search and excavation teams into the country as early as next spring if acceptable arrangements can be negotiated in advance.

North Korea recently submitted proposed terms for follow-on search operations, but McKeague said the offer was rejected. He described the offer as "out of sorts," which he said meant that some elements were unreasonable. He cited as an example a demand that the US provide eight ambulances in addition to other vehicles, fuel, food and other items.

The US is preparing a counterproposal, McKeague said, and has offered to meet with a North Korean negotiating team in a third country in late October.

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Washington's ambassador in Berlin has been pressuring German firms "daily" to comply with American sanctions on Iran, a spokeswoman said Thursday, even as European governments look to shield their companies from US ire.

Diplomats' acknowledgement of the squeeze on firms followed envoy Richard Grenell's claim that he had struck a deal with car giant Volkswagen to implement the punitive measures, which VW declined to confirm when contacted by AFP.

"US Ambassador Grenell has been speaking to CEOs and industry leaders for quite some time urging them to comply with US sanctions," embassy spokeswoman Christina Higgins told AFP.

"The ambassador has worked daily with the embassy team to do follow-up with individual companies to ensure that CEOs' commitment is implemented," she added.

President Donald Trump has re-imposed a trade squeeze after withdrawing from a 2015 agreement that relaxed sanctions in exchange for Iran freezing its nuclear weapons programme.

Grenell told Bloomberg Thursday that he had reached a detailed agreement with Volkswagen this week for the Wolfsburg-based group to abide by the US sanctions.

Even under full compliance, VW will still be able to do some business in Iran under a "humanitarian exception", Bloomberg reported.

But a source familiar with the talks told AFP that VW and the US government had not yet reached an accord.

Meanwhile, a spokesman for the carmaker told AFP it was sticking to its position that it "obeys all national and international laws as well as export regulations".

"We are also taking into account possible effects related to the reintroduction of US sanctions," he added.

The auto behemoth had announced in July 2017 that it would begin selling its own-brand cars in Iran for the first time in 17 years.

Grenell -- known for stirring up controversy in his host country with public sallies on business and -- this month also tweeted to celebrate chemicals heavyweight BASF and reinsurance giant Munich Re saying they would comply with the trade squeeze.

A spokesman for BASF told AFP Thursday that it "will continue to do business in Iran and obey all legal rules and regulations".

He added that "around half" the 80 million euros (USD 93.5 million) in revenue BASF earned in Iran last year came from sectors -- energy, automobiles and petrochemicals -- affected by American sanctions.

The Ludwigshafen-based group's business with the country represents a tiny fraction of its 64.5 billion euros in annual turnover.

Meanwhile Munich Re has said it would withdraw from Iran in case of sanctions so as not to jeopardise its much larger US activities.

European governments are battling to find ways for their firms to continue trading with Iran, hoping to keep Tehran from renewing its pursuit of nuclear weapons.

Last week, the German government confirmed to AFP that Berlin, Paris and London were considering a scheme that would allow Iran to ship goods to European Union countries and receive others in return -- without transferring money through international financial channels vulnerable to US sanctions.

Unusually outspoken for a diplomat, ambassador Grenell irked his German hosts immediately following his arrival in Berlin earlier this year.

On his first day on the job, he tweeted that "German companies doing business in Iran should wind down operations immediately".

In one of his first interviews, he also pressured German firms to withdraw from business with Iran and said he aimed to "empower" anti-establishment conservatives around Europe -- drawing accusations of meddling in his host country's

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Tourist footfalls from the US to India in 2017 has increased by over six per cent as compared to previous year, government said, countering an American report that claimed there was a decline during the period.

The Ministry of Tourism in a statement said foreign tourist arrivals (FTAs) from the United States has never declined since 2010.

"FTAs in India from the USA during the year 2017 have registered a positive growth of 6.17 per cent over the year 2016," the statement said.

A report of National Travel and Tourism Office (NTTO) had recently said the outbound tourists from the USA to India have declined by 7 per cent in the year 2017 as compared to 2016, it said.

According to the said report released by NTTO, traveller volume is based on the US Department of Homeland Security Advanced Passenger Information System wherein all airlines are required to electronically submit passenger data on flights arriving into and departing from the United States.

The ministry said that it was obvious that the source of data for the report is only airlines reporting. In the cases where direct flight between the USA and India is not operating, it is not known whether the final destination or the transit destination is reported as India by the passengers.

Moreover, departures at international check posts other than airports are not captured in the report. Therefore, it may not contain the complete information on the outbound departures from the USA, it said.

On the other hand, the Bureau of Immigration of India (BoI) compiles the data of (FTA) from the records of scanned passport of each person arriving at all the international check posts in India, which include airports, sea ports and the land check posts. The FTAs from USA in India during January - August this year was 9,26,192, 8.8 per cent higher than the corresponding numbers during the same period last year.

NTTO in its recent report had said that the US tourist arrivals in India had dipped for the first time in eight years.

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The Vibrant Gujarat Summit 2019 which will be held between January 18-20 next year will focus on trading, a senior state official said Thursday.

Gujarat has a large trading community.

Ashwani Kumar, secretary to Chief Minister Vijay Rupani, said Thursday that he would lead a delegation of business leaders from leading companies to Sweden, Denmark and Finland and hold roadshows there.

"The difference between earlier Vibrant Gujarat summits and this one is focus. Earlier, we used to focus just on bringing investments. Then, last year the SME sector was given importance. This time we are also going to focus on the trade aspect," Kumar said.

"The objective of the delegation is primarily to interact with companies that have expressed interest in investing in Gujarat or India in general, and provide information on opportunities in Gujarat," he said.

The delegation will hold roadshows in Helsinki, Copenhagen and Stockholm to showcase Gujarat as a solid investment destination with opportunities in sectors such as infrastructure development, urban planning, logistics and financial services, Kumar said.

Over 300 companies from Sweden, Denmark and Finland have business operations in India. These include Volvo, Maersk, Ericsson, ABB, Nokia and Nova Nordsik among others.

Now, other companies such as IKEA, H&M, Vestas and SAAB are keen to increase their presence in India and the delegation will target them for investment in the state.

The 9th edition of the Vibrant Gujarat summit will be held over three days in January next year and Prime Minister Narendra Modi will be present at the event.

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The Jawaharlal Nehru University on Thursday accused the students union of "creating disturbance by disrupting security checks" in the aftermath of the alleged violence between members of the Left and the RSS-affiliated Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP).

The JNUSU, however, alleged that the administration was making "unsubstantiated allegations" and sought immediate retraction of "circulars which ban democratic expressions".

Violence broke out on the JNU campus after a united front of Left student groups Sunday won all four central panel posts in the students union (JNUSU) elections defeating the ABVP, students wing of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), by considerable margins.

While the Left members alleged that ABVP members randomly attacked students, with a former student being "almost lynched" and the new JNUSU president N Sai Balaji being beaten up, the ABVP claimed its activists were attacked by Left supporters and three were injured on Monday.

Following the incidents, the administration had banned protests and gatherings and the campus was made out of bounds for outsiders and mediapersons. Even students of the varsity had to show ID cards to enter hostels and the eateries were closed.

"JNU administration has received reports that the newly elected office bearers of JNUSU or their alleged supporters have been creating disturbance either by disrupting the necessary security checking by wardens or have been disrupting the routine official work of the officer staff or administrative officers of the hostels," the JNU registrar said in a statement.

While it would be appreciated that JNUSU office bearers help the security staff by being vigilant about the miscreants who may intend to cause disturbance, but they must also realise that obstructing varsity officials or its security from doing their duty is not only against the rules, it also damages the ethos which guide the stakeholders of this institution to live in harmony and peace, it said.

"JNU administration advises and appeals to every section of the university to abide by the ethos and principles and rules and regulations. No violations of the rules will be allowed and individuals responsible in causing any disturbance and discomfort to others will be held accountable," the registrar said.

In response, the JNUSU said the administration should have initiated a dialogue with them.

"However, you have instead chosen to make unsubstantiated allegations and statements which erode the trust of the student community upon the JNU administration in the restoration of normal democratic functioning," it said.

The students union said the various security checks are "inimical to the restoration of JNU's democratic ethos".

The JNUSU claimed the students are being harassed by the wardens and security personnel in the name of security.

They said many hostels have conducted general body meetings in a democratic manner and expressed the hope "their mandates are respected".

The JNUSU is also against the "wanton raids" that are taking place across JNU, they said.

The students union demanded an end to checks and security measures and withdrawal of circulars with immediate effect, besides a meeting with the administration at the earliest.

On Saturday, groups clashed ahead of the counting, which was suspended after election authorities cited "forcible entry" and "attempts to snatch away ballot boxes".

Six FIRs have been registered on the basis of cross complaints in connection with the alleged incidents of violence on the JNU campus.

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Educational institutes of West Bengal would celebrate the 150th birth anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi as has been planned by the Central government, state minister Partha Chatterjee said Thursday.

The decision was taken at a meeting convened by Governor Keshari Nath Tripathi, which was attended by vice-chancellors of seven universities of the state.

After the meeting, Chatterjee said the central government has some plans about the sesquicentennial birth celebration of Mahatma Gandhi and the state's educational institutes would take tart in them.

West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee had in May attended the first meeting of a 'national committee' tasked with planning the events to celebrate the 150th birth anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi.

The meeting also discussed issues such as infrastructural development and filling up of vacant posts in the universities of the state.

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More than 13 years ago, a Boeing aircraft crashed in a hilly terrain in Greece snuffing out 121 lives. A year later, investigators concluded that omissions in controlling cabin pressure was a key reason for the crash.

On Thursday morning, the 166 passengers on board a Jet Airways flight might not have been aware about the incident that happened in Greece over a decade ago. But, they faced a similar situation as the cockpit crew "forgot" to control cabin pressure.

At least 30 passengers on the airline's Mumbai-Jaipur flight suffered nasal and ear bleeding and headache as the Boeing 737-800 aircraft returned to Mumbai within minutes of take-off.

Both the pilots -- commander and copilot - have been de-rostered, an investigation has been ordered and the airline has expressed regret over the incident.

According to two senior pilots and regulatory officials, Thursday's incident could be due to human negligence as checking cabin pressure is part of standard checks carried out before operation of a flight.

Nasal and ear bleeding of air passengers due to de-pressurisation of cabin is a rare occurrence, the two senior pilots who are working with two different airlines told PTI.

One of them operates Boeing planes and the other Airbus aircraft.

One of the pilots said that generally, an aircraft is pressurised to 8,000 feet so that the pressure is adequate for the human body.

Normally, a plane flies at an altitude of around 35,000 feet.

A pilot said de-pressurisation could even result in hypoxia for the people on board. Hypoxia or lack of adequate oxygen supply for the human tissues, can cause various problems, including deterioration in a cognitive abilities.

According to a doctor at Dr Balabhai Nanavati Hospital in Mumbai, five Jet Airways passengers who were on board the flight were suffering from "mild conductive deafness".

As per their preliminary examination by ENT doctors, the five passengers suffered "barotrauma" of ear, which is caused due to a change in air pressure, said Rajendra Patankar, chief operating officer at the hospital.

There were 171 people on board, including 5 crew members.

A passenger, who was in the flight, recalled a fellow passenger with bleeding nose.

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An elderly woman and her grandson were killed and one person was injured Wednesday night after a speeding SUV dashed into them, police said.

The driver of the speeding vehicle fled the scene abandoning his car after the incident, which took place in Chandannagar area here at around 7:30pm, and efforts were on to nab him, an official said Thursday.

"Kantabai Sonune (61) and her grandson Nayan Mokale (11) sustained grievous injuries after being hit by the speeding vehicle. They were rushed to a nearby hospital where they succumbed to injuries," said a Chandannagar police station official.

The vehicle also hit two other vehicles in the incident, he added.

He informed that a case has been registered against the unidentified car driver under relevant sections of the Indian Penal Code and Motor Vehicle Act.

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Two persons were arrested for allegedly raping a 30-year-old married woman here in Maharashtra, police said Thursday.

One of the accused, Rajesh Mhaskar (30), called the woman, who works as a labourer, out of her house at Khoni village in Bhiwandi area in the wee hours of Tuesday and allegedly raped her, an official at Nizampura police station said.

The other accused, Lala alias Balaram Kolhe (33), also arrived at the spot and attempted to rape her, he said.

However, the woman raised an alarm and both the accused, who are residents of the same area, fled the spot, he said.

Based on the woman's complaint, the police arrested the accused Wednesday and registered offences against them under IPC sections 376 (rape) and 34 (acts done by several persons in furtherance of common intention), the official added.

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Stock markets mostly advanced Thursday as investors got a grip on their lingering fears of a deepening trade war between the US and China, dealers said.

Key European markets were well in positive territory by the mid-afternoon, although London was held back by a strong pound, and Wall Street also rose at the opening bell.

"US stocks are higher in early action, with global trade uneasiness remaining contained," said analysts at the Charles Schwb brokerage.

But market resilience may well be short-lived, analysts warned, with Joshua Mahony at IG detecting a "hesitant tone" on trading floors.

"The fears over US-China trade are likely to persist for some time yet," he said.

Emerging market currencies held their own after Beijing's pledge not to weaponise the yuan in its trade standoff with the United States.

Markets have been on the rise this week after the latest tit-for-tat tariffs from China and the US were considered lenient and allowed for talks, with observers suggesting a further escalation is unlikely in the near term.

And while China on Wednesday hit back at US President Donald Trump's accusation that it is using the trade conflict to affect November's key mid-term elections, the generally upbeat sentiment continued in Asia and Europe on Thursday.

Emerging market (EM) currencies enjoyed some much-needed buying support, having been beaten down by trade war fears in recent months, as well as concerns of a spillover from crises in Argentina, South Africa and Turkey.

Analysts said that as well as the easing trade tensions, a key boost for the currencies was Premier Li Keqiang's statement that China would not devalue the yuan to fend off the effects of any tariffs.

"China will never rely on the depreciation of the renminbi (yuan) to stimulate exports, because a one-way depreciation of the renminbi exchange rate will have more disadvantages than advantages," he told an economic forum.

"The premier's comments are encouraging as they indicate that China won't actively use its currency as a weapon in its trade scuffle with the US," said Rodrigo Catril, senior forex strategist at National Australia Bank.

However, he added: "As we have seen in recent months this doesn't necessarily mean that China will prevent the yuan from weakening if market forces push the currency lower."



Back in Europe meanwhile, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development warned that ongoing trade tensions were likely to slow down global economic expansion.

Cutting its forecast for global growth, the OECD said that "a further rise in trade tensions would have significant adverse effects on global investment, jobs and living standards".

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British foreign minister Jeremy Hunt on Thursday called for justice on the Rohingya crisis after his visit to Myanmar's Rakhine state, telling embattled leader Aung San Suu Kyi the world "won't let it rest".

Hunt's rallying cry for accountability comes at the end of a busy two-day visit during which he visited Rakhine -- the epicentre of a brutal military campaign that drove out more than 700,000 Rohingya Muslims -- and met with Suu Kyi.

"Burma needs to know the international community won't let it rest," said Hunt using Myanmar's former name.

Myanmar has set up an "independent" commission to address the army's crackdown against the Rohingya, rejecting the UN probe and calls for the International Criminal Court to investigate.

"If we don't see that process happening, we will use all the tools at our disposal to make sure there is justice... the world is watching," Hunt said after the meeting, which he said was "lively" and "frank".

The British foreign minister's visit came the same week UN investigators released a damning and meticulous report detailing why six Myanmar generals should be prosecuted for genocide against the Rohingya Muslim minority.

The Rohingya fled to neighbouring Bangladesh, where they joined about 300,000 already in cramped refugee camps, carrying accounts of extrajudicial killings, extreme sexual violence and arson.

The evidence warrants the charges of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes, UN investigators said.

Hunt also brought up with Suu Kyi his "concerns" on the jailing of two Reuters journalists, Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo, who were sentenced earlier this month to seven years each under the state secrets act.

The pair had uncovered the extrajudicial killings of 10 Rohingya men in the



Rakhine village of Inn Din -- something the army has since acknowledged. Suu Kyi, who endured a total of 15 years of house arrest under the previous junta-led regime, said last week Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo's sentencing upheld the rule of law.

"She said she would look into it," Hunt said Thursday.

Before the meeting, the foreign minister was led on a three-hour, tightly-managed tour of Rakhine via helicopter, which included the Taung Pyo Letwe returnee reception centre, opened to receive the refugees even though virtually no Rohingya have come back.

Bangladesh and Myanmar signed an agreement last year to repatriate the Muslim minority but it has stalled as they fear returning to Rakhine without their safety and rights guaranteed.

In each of the three other locations Hunt was shepherded to, he found a pre-selected group of locals waiting to speak to him. At Pan Taw Pyin village, the final stop, he walked off to try to speak with nearby residents about their experiences despite the heavy security presence.

The military has consistently denied nearly all wrongdoing, insisting that its campaign was justified to root out militants, and Myanmar's ambassador to the UN on Tuesday slammed the UN probe as "one-sided" and "flawed".

Suu Kyi, a former pro-democracy icon, has seen a sharp fall from grace internationally due to her failure to address the Rohingya crisis.

Her supporters say her hands are tied by a still powerful military, which controls a quarter of parliament's seats and three ministries.

UN investigators say her government's "acts and omissions" contributed to the "atrocity crimes" in the crisis.

Hunt will head to New York next week for the UN General Assembly, where he will chair a foreign ministers' meeting Monday on Myanmar. Suu Kyi will not be travelling to New York for the UN top meeting.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Dalian (Reuters) - China's iron ore demand has already peaked and is expected to stay flat, an official of the country's biggest listed steelmaker, Baoshan Iron & Steel Co, said on Thursday.China bought a record 1.08 billion tonnes of the steelmaking raw ingredient last year, the second successive year in which purchases crossed the 1-billion mark."China's steel mills have been focused on the quality of iron ore and that trend will be even more clear," Ji Chao, an assistant to the company president, told an industrial conference. "However, mills still need to consider cost, and hopefully we ...
(Corrects date of senior Chinese diplomat's visit to New York to next week, not this week, paragraph 21)BEIJING (Reuters) - China will not be content to only play defence in an escalating trade war with the United States, a widely read Chinese tabloid warned, as U.S. President Donald Trump was expected to announce new tariffs on $200 billion in Chinese goods as early as Monday.The United States and China have already levied duties on $50 billion worth of each other's goods in an intensifying row that has jolted global financial markets in the past few months. Last week, the U.S. Treasury ...
By Guy FaulconbridgeLONDON (Reuters) - Britain leaves the European Union on March 29, yet little is clear: There is, so far, no divorce deal, rivals to Prime Minister Theresa May are circling and some rebels have vowed to vote against a possible Brexit deal.How will the Brexit finale play out?Following are scenarios:1) DISORDERLY BREXITIf May is toppled, fails to reach an agreement with the EU or parliament rejects her deal, Britain would plunge into crisis. Many opponents of Brexit predict this outcome, as do some supporters of a deeper break with the EU than that advocated by the prime ...
By Conor HumphriesGORMANSTON, Ireland (Reuters) - A significant minority of Ryanair shareholders voted against the re-election of the airline's long-serving chairman on Thursday but they overwhelmingly rejected calls by trade unions to oppose Chief Executive Michael O'Leary. The votes at the company's annual meeting were the first chance for investors to give their verdict on a series of strikes and a year of management mis-steps that have seen the share price fall 17 percent. After a number of shareholders in the lead up to the vote publicly called for Chairman David Bonderman, 75, to step ...
By Ron BoussoLONDON (Reuters) - Exxon Mobil, Chevron and Occidental Petroleum are joining a group of major international oil and gas companies in an initiative aimed at curbing carbon emissions in the sector, they said in a statement on Thursday.The move marks a U-turn for Exxon Mobil and Chevron. The top two U.S. oil and gas producers had resisted joining the Oil and Gas Climate Initiative (OGCI) after its launch in 2014.Exxon and Chevron differ from their rivals on several topics around climate, and in the past have refused to join a call by the European firms for a global price on ...
India is engaged with the United States and other stakeholders to ensure its energy security and national interest, the foreign ministry spokesman said on Thursday, as Washington is set to tighten sanctions on Iran's oil and banking sector. In May, US President Donald Trump withdrew from a 2015 nuclear accord with Iran and ordered the renewal of U.S. sanctions. Some sanctions took effect on Aug. 6, while those affecting the oil and banking sectors will start from Nov. 4. India is closely monitoring the development and assessing the implication of the U.S. sanctions, Raveesh ...
By Hallie Gu and Mayank BhardwajXIAN/NEW DELHI (Reuters) - India has urged China to drop a years-long ban on rapeseed meal imports from the South Asian nation at a meeting with government officials and feedmakers as it aims to boost sales of critical farm goods amid growing U.S.-China trade tensions. The meeting was held at India's embassy in Beijing on Wednesday, according to an Indian government official and an executive who attended and spoke to Reuters on the sidelines of an industry conference here on Thursday.The aim was to lobby China to resume purchases of rapeseed meal, a key ...
India's Chennai Petroleum will stop processing Iranian crude oil from October to keep its insurance coverage once new sanctions by the United States against Iran go into effect, three sources familiar with the issue said. Iran's Naftiran Intertrade Co Ltd, a trading arm for state-owned National Iranian Oil Co, owns a 15.4 per cent stake in Chennai Petroleum, which has two refineries with a total combined capacity of 230,000 barrels of oil per day (bpd). In May, U.S. President Donald Trump pulled out of an international nuclear deal with Iran and announced new sanctions ...
By Christopher JohnsonLONDON (Reuters) - Oil prices steadied on Thursday but the market remained bullish after news of another fall in U.S. crude inventories and on signs that OPEC may not raise production enough to compensate for the loss of Iranian exports hit by U.S. sanctions.Brent crude oil was unchanged at $79.40 a barrel by 0910 GMT, stabilising a little below the $80 mark. U.S. light crude oil was 40 cents higher at $71.52 after rising nearly 2 percent on Wednesday.The North Sea benchmark has been trading below $80 for the past week after conflicting reports of the market views of ...
This is exactly how OnePlus started promoting the yesteryear flagship OnePlus 5T before the launch. With the teaser page out and television commercial featuring on different channels, it is safe to assume that the launch is now only days away. While the teaser on Amazon India does not reveal anything, the television commercial provides some details on the ...

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Hexa Research

Brazil Apparel Market Size, Growth and Trend Analysis, 2015 to 2025



ID: 1541440

The Brazil apparel market was valued at USD 31.44 billion in 2017. It is expected to witness substantial growth over the coming years owing to increasing spending power of consumers coupled with widening base of enthusiastic shoppers in the country.

(firmenpresse) - 20 September 2018, The Brazil Apparel Market is projected to reach USD 42.80 billion by 2025, expanding at a substantial CAGR over the forecast period. Rising disposable income of people and growing consciousness for international fashion trends are the key factors contributing to the growth of the market. Factors such as increasing shift towards international fashion along with spiraling number of retail outlets in the market are anticipated to encourage Brazilian people to adopt fashionable apparel.



Diversified manufacturing activities, digitalization, and proliferation of smartphones are likely to have a positive impact on the sales of apparel in Brazil owing to time saving and convenience factors. Brazil is one of the largest exporters of apparel and fashionable goods. Arab countries are some of the largest importers of apparels and textiles from Brazil. The United Arab Emirates accounted for the highest imports from Brazil, followed by Egypt, Algeria, and Morocco. Advanced techniques used in manufacturing industry items would probably help manufacturers to meet the global demand from various countries.



The country has experienced sluggish growth in the apparel and textile industry owing to its economic downfall. Economic downturn recorded during the year 2015-16 left the apparel industry highly affected. Nevertheless, with the recovering economy, the apparel industry is expected to rebound over the coming years. Heightened interest of the government and private players in country



Rising disposable income coupled with improved fashion trends among young generation is projected to drive the apparel industry. Additionally, widening base of young population and changing trends associated with fashionable goods is playing an imperative role in the development of the market. The Brazilian government is supporting small vendors by providing subsides and large companies by minimizing trade barriers to develop favorable business environment in the country.





The Brazil apparel industry has been reviewed on the basis of type and distribution channel. Based on type, the market is divided into women, men, and children



The market is marked with presence of many small and large companies operating in online and offline business. Some of the key players in the market are Nike; Adidas; Puma; WinCraft; and Tee Spring, Inc. Additionally, local and small retailer dealing in the market contribute more than half of the total revenue generated by the overall manufacturers and sellers in the country, making it a highly fragmented domestic retail apparel industry.



Small manufacturers are merging their companies with large players to increase company profits as this strategy will help them in selling their products under popular brand names. Mergers and acquisitions help companies to expand their product offerings. Wholesalers and manufacturers are focusing on innovative ways of selling their products directly to consumers, which will cut down the middlemen cost and subsequently decreasing the cost of products. Online platforms and channels assist in establishing a strong and direct relationship between wholesalers and consumers.



Hexa Research has segmented the Brazil apparel market report based on type and distribution channel:



Segmentation by Type, 2015 - 2025 (USD Million)









Segmentation by Distribution Channel, 2017 (% share)







Key players analyzed











Hexa Research is a market research and consulting organization, offering industry reports, custom research and consulting services to a host of key industries across the globe. We offer comprehensive business intelligence in the form of industry reports which help our clients obtain clarity about their business environment and enable them to undertake strategic growth initiatives.





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Bereitgestellt von Benutzer: HexaResearchDatum: 20.09.2018 - 10:20 UhrSprache: DeutschNews-ID 1541440Anzahl Zeichen: 4539contact information:Contact person: Ryan ShawTown:Phone: +1-800-489-3075Kategorie:Typ of Press Release: Finanzinformationtype of sending: VeroffentlichungDate of sending: 20.09.2018Anmerkungen:Diese Pressemitteilung wurde bishermal aufgerufen.Die Pressemitteilung mit dem Titel:steht unter der journalistisch-redaktionellen Verantwortung vonBeachten Sie bitte die weiteren Informationen zum Haftungsauschlu (gema TMG - TeleMedianGesetz ) und dem Datenschutz (gema der DSGVO ).
Jack Ma-led Chinese conglomerate Alibaba has backed India's data localisation plan for e-commerce companies operating in the country, saying the company respects "data security and privacy". Alibaba is the first foreign company to openly claim it's ready to accept the data localisation rules, while other prominent companies like Amazon, Microsoft, American Express, Google and Facebook have shown reluctance. Alibaba has invested in homegrown online payments leader Paytm, and other prominent startups like Zomato and BigBasket in India.

The company says it is ready to follow data localisation rules of any country -- be it India or Singapore. "It is our principle. Alibaba respects data security and privacy...We have set up a data centre. We are also building a data team that will help provide big data and AI services to India companies," Simon Hu, President, Alibaba Cloud, told the Business Line.

While US technology giants are lobbying against stringent Indian data localisation requirements, Hu said Alibaba is "different" from other companies, and has no issues with government regulations around data processing. Recently, Google CEO Sundar Pichai wrote to IT Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad, encouraging a free flow of data across borders. He said such a step would encourage global companies to contribute to India's digital economy as well as benefit Indian start-ups looking to expand globally.

Greater internet penetration, better connectivity, and increasing social media use have opened up India as a lucrative market for foreign companies. But security issues around data protection have remained a concern, which has forced the government to frame laws to protect data of Indian people.

Local payments companies like Paytm, MobiKwik and PhonePe have already backed the RBI's decision. Recently, Flipkart-backed online payments platform PhonePe slammed foreign payments companies for making a hue and cry about data localisation, which mandated payments companies operating in India to store data 'only' in India. PhonePe indicated that foreign companies have been avoiding processing data in India as they don't want to pay taxes.

"Today most governments around the world recognise financial data as a massive source of national wealth creation, and are actively plugging regulatory loopholes that would allow foreign companies to exploit local market data without paying fair taxes," the Flipkart-backed startup said.

In its April-6 circular, the RBI had said that to ensure better monitoring, it is important to have unfettered supervisory access to data stored with these system providers. "This data should include the full end-to-end transaction details," it had said. In July, a high-level panel headed by Justice BN Srikrishna submitted its recommendations for the data protection draft bill to the government.

(Edited by Manoj Sharma)
Global private equity major Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co LP (KKR) along with Mumbai-headquartered Radiant will buy 49.70 per cent stake in Max Healthcare from South Africa-based Life Healthcare Group Holdings for about Rs 2,120 crore, Max India said on Wednesday.

Life Healthcare Group Holdings is equal joint venture partner in Max Healthcare Institute Limited along with Max India. KKR-Radiant will buy more than 266 million shares in Max Healthcare at Rs 80 per share. The deal is expected to be finalised by December 2018.

Max India Limited is part of $3 billion Max Group and the holding company for Max Healthcare, Max Bupa Health Insurance and Antara Senior Living. It runs Max Hospitals, India's third largest hospital chain with a capacity of 2,500 beds at 14 facilities. The promoters, Analjit Singh's family, owns 40.97 per cent of the listed Max India.

"The consummation of the proposed transaction is subject to fulfilment of various conditions set out in the intimation given by Life Healthcare to the Johannesburg Stock Exchange," Max India said in a regulatory filing.

The exit of Johannesburg-based hospital chain from Max Healthcare will enable the former to focus on its core operations in South Africa, UK, Poland and Western Europe.

"The company (Life Healthcare) will initially utilise the net proceeds (less estimated costs and taxes) from the disposal to settle debt as well as to invest in growth opportunities in the company's core markets," said the filing which also contains the intimation by Life Healthcare to the Johannesburg Stock Exchange.

Life Healthcare acquired an initial stake of 26 per cent in Max Healthcare in 2012 and subsequently increased its stake to 46.25 per cent in 2014.

Following the acquisition of half of the International Finance Corporation's (IFC) shares in 2017, Life Healthcare increased its stake in Max Healthcare to 49.7 per cent. IFC is the private-sector investment arm of the World Bank.

KKR-backed Radiant had made an unsuccessful bid to buy out cash-strapped Fortis Hospital. Fortis was later bought over by Malaysia-based IHH. Radiant's runs Delhi-based BLK Super Speciality Hospital and the Nanavati Super Speciality Hospital in Mumbai.

In 2016, KKR had acquired 9.95 per cent stake in Max Financial Services for an undisclosed amount. Max Financial Services Limited is the holding company for Max Life, India's largest non-bank, private life insurer.

Earlier this year, KKR had backed Analjit Singh, chairman emeritus of Max group, with a flexible partnership capital of around Rs 2,000 crore.

Edited By Karan Dhar
Danske Bank's chief executive Thomas Borgen resigned on Wednesday after an investigation revealed payments totaling 200 billion euros ($234 billion) through its small Estonian branch, many of which the bank said were suspicious. The Danish bank detailed compliance and control failings amid growing calls for a European Union crackdown on financial crime after a series of money laundering scandals which have attracted the attention of US authorities.

"Even though I was personally cleared from a legal point of view, I hold the ultimate responsibility. There is no doubt that we as an organization have failed in this situation and did not live up to expectations," Borgen, who will stay on until a new CEO is appointed, told a press conference.

Borgen, 54, was in charge of Danske Bank's international operations, including Estonia, between 2009 and 2012. While the report shed some light on the bank's activities in Estonia, investors are concerned whether the United States, which has placed sanctions on Russia, will punish it. "As this is the largest money laundering scandal in European history, and Danske Bank is a major bank that sends dollars around the world, I imagine that this will certainly get the attention of the U.S. authorities," Bill Browder, the founder and CEO of Hermitage Capital Management who has campaigned against corruption in Russia, told Reuters.

Danish politicians were critical of Danske Bank for not revealing exactly how much money was allegedly laundered and not saying who was legally responsible for the lapses. "It is deeply embarrassing that for so many years there have been transactions that should not have taken place. Much of it is expected to be money laundering, and that is simply not good enough by Danske Bank," business minister Rasmus Jarlov, who oversees Denmark's banking sector, told a press conference.

Danske Bank said in its summary of a report covering around 15,000 customers and 9.5 million payments between 2007 and 2015 that Borgen, Chairman Ole Andersen and the board "did not breach their legal obligations". Andersen said the bank had made an assessment of whether it violated U.S. laws but declined to share its conclusion when asked at a press conference.

The Estonian non-resident portfolio's around 10,000 customers were registered in 90 different countries, with Russia, Britain, the British Virgin Islands and Finland the main ones, Danske Bank said, adding that around a third of them became clients of the branch in 2007. Danske Bank, whose already battered shares fell by nearly 8 percent, said some 6,200 customers had been examined and it expected "a significant part of the payments to be suspicious".

Shares in Danske Bank had doubled in value from when Borgen took over in 2013 to July 2017, but have since lost more than a third as allegations of suspicious transactions increased and Denmark and Estonia began criminal investigations. The bank said it had taken action including "warnings, dismissals, loss of bonus payments and reporting to the authorities" against current and former staff, as well as overhauling systems found to have failed.

In an indication of the costs such lapses can have, Dutch bank ING (INGA.AS) agreed to pay 775 million euros ($900 million) this month after admitting criminals had been able to launder money through its accounts.

And earlier this year U.S. authorities accused Latvia's ABLV of covering up money laundering, leading to the bank being denied U.S. dollar funding and its swift collapse. While Danske does not have a banking license in the United States, banning U.S. correspondent banks from dealing with it would amount to shutting it out of the global financial network.

SERIOUS SHORTCOMINGS

The report found that Danske Bank failed to take proper action in 2007 when it was criticized by the Estonian regulator and received information from its Danish counterpart that pointed to "criminal activity in its pure form, including money laundering" estimated at "billions of rubles monthly".

And when a whistleblower raised problems at the Estonian branch in early 2014 the allegations were not properly investigated and were not shared with the board, Danske said, adding that measures to get its business there under control had been insufficient.

Danske Bank also said the Estonian branch did not employ its anti-money laundering procedures because it had not migrated its Baltic banking activities onto the bank's IT platform as this would have been too expensive. "The report describes serious shortcomings in the organization of Danske Bank, where risk-appetite and risk control were not in balance," the head of Estonia's FSA financial regulator Kilvar Kessler said in a statement.

Danske Bank, which cut its forecast for annual net profit to 16-17 billion Danish crowns, from a previous 18-20 billion, has successfully overcome previous traumas. The government had to step in when international markets froze in 2008 and in 2012 it was criticized for an advertising campaign that sought to improve its image, borrowing symbols linked to anti-establishment movement Occupy Wall Street.

Prior to the money laundering scandal, Borgen had managed to improve the bank's image and earnings in part by cutting costs, shifting its focus to wealthier clients and expanding in Sweden and Norway to rival the Nordic region's biggest bank, Nordea.
Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan, in a letter to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, has said Pakistan is ready to restart the stalled talks with India on issues such as trade, religion and terrorism.

Acknowledging challenges in relationships between India and Pakistan, Imran said both the countries owe it to the future generations to peacefully resolve all outstanding issues, including the Jammu and Kashmir dispute.

The Pakistan PM's letter dated September 14 addresses PM Modi as 'Modi Saheb', and calls for discussions on trade, people-to-people contacts, religion tourism, and humanitarian issues.

Both the countries have not engaged in any dialogue since 2015. The newly-elected PM of Pakistan said the country was "ready to discuss terrorism". He said Siachen and Sir Creek also need close attention to move towards resolution.

The Pakistan Prime Minister also proposed a meeting between its Foreign Minister Makhdoom Shah Mahmood Qureshi and External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj before the informal meeting of the SAARC (South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation) foreign ministers on the sidelines of the upcoming UN General Assembly in New York.

"They can explore the forward, especially the holding of the SAARC Council of Ministers followed by the SAARC Summit in Islamabad," said Imran. Inviting the Indian PM to Pakistan, Imran Khan said the summit will offer an "opportunity for you to visit Pakistan and for us to re-start the stalled dialogue process".

He said he endorsed PM Modi's sentiments of seeking "constructive engagement". "It was in this spirit that Pakistan's Minister of Law and Information attended the funeral of Mr Atal Bihari Vajpayee in New Delhi.

Mr Vajpayee contributed in trying to bring a positive change in our bilateral relations and was also a major proponent of a strong SAARC for building bridges and developing ties," he wrote.

After his victory in Pakistan Parliamentary elections and subsequent assuming of Prime Minister's Office on August 20, PM Modi had congratulated Imran and hoped that democracy would take deeper roots in the neighbouring country.

Meanwhile, the Foreign Office (FO) of Pakistan has said Imran's letter to PM Modi was written in a "positive spirit", and that the country awaits a formal response from the Indian side. "PM has responded to PM Modi, in a positive spirit, reciprocating his sentiments. Let's talk and resolve all issues. We await a formal response from India," Pakistan Foreign Office spokesperson Muhammad Faisal tweeted.
The beleaguered Maharajah, reeling under a debt burden of over Rs 48,000 crore and scrambling for cash infusions since the failed disinvestment attempt, has just landed in a fresh mess. According to The Economic Times, Air India, which guzzles fuel worth around Rs 20 crore daily, has been issued an ultimatum by the oil marketing companies (OMCs)-unless the national carrier clears its fuel bill on a daily basis, the companies are threatening to withhold supply.

"Air India has not been regular with payments due to its financial problems," a senior aviation ministry official told the daily, adding that the airline and OMCs are now negotiating. This development follows Air India's attempts to reduce its overall debt burden. The carrier recently used the cash infusions from the government to clear its outstanding dues to foreign and Indian lenders, as well as other vendors.

However, it left out oil companies to whom it owes more than Rs 5,000 crore, including interest. Furthermore, the airline has reportedly not been making its daily fuel payment in full for the past one-and-a-half years. "Air India is a PSU and that's why we are continuing to supply. Had it been a private firm, we could have already stopped the supply," a senior executive at a state-run oil company told the daily. "But Air India must realise that we can't go beyond a point. They have difficulty in paying, but we too have to keep our recoverable in check. We want them to provide us with a firmer plan on how the money is going to come back to us."

Meanwhile, Air India is just about managing to stay afloat on the Rs 30,000 crore bailout package extended by the previous UPA regime in 2012 for a decade. Of that, the airline has already received Rs 29,730 crore.

Earlier this month, the government had infused Rs 980 crore as equity in Air India after it reportedly exhausted the Rs 1,500 crore loan taken from Bank of Baroda in late August, for which the government stood as the guarantor.

But the Maharajah perhaps has one last trump card left to play. Given that the government has granted the airline sovereign guarantee to raise Rs 2,000 crore from banks, it can still raise Rs 500 crore more. Citing a senior Air India official the report added that the carrier can raise this additional amount and pay a part of it to the oil companies.

The buzz is that the government also plans to initiate the strategic sale process for at least four Air India subsidiaries soon, including Airline Allied Services Ltd and Hotel Corporation of India. In additions, plans to sell its Delhi headquarters are on the anvil, along with various other land assets/buildings across the country. The big question is whether these efforts will be enough to keep the national carrier going.

With PTI inputs
Amazon in partnership with Witzig Advisory Services (owned by Samara Capital) has acquired Aditya Birla Retail's Rs 4,400 crore grocery retail business More. While Samara Capital will own 51 per cent of More, the remaining 49 per cent would be owned by Amazon. The American e-commerce giant has been aggressively looking at deals to strengthen its omni-channel presence by picking up stakes in Indian physical retail companies. Its investment arm had picked up a 5 per cent stake in Shoppers Stop last year and Amazon is also eyeing a minority stake in Kishore Biyani's Future Group as well as Spencer Retail. The stake in More will give Amazon's omni-channel aspirations a huge fillip through the 575-odd More stores. There is also news of Google and Alibaba-backed Paytm getting together to pick up stake in Future Retail.

The retail industry is bustling with news reports of global retailers trying to get a share of the Indian consumption pie. But the policies of the land don't allow FDI in multi-brand physical retail, 100 per cent FDI is allowed only in cash and carry retail. The argument of policy makers for not allowing FDI in multi-brand retail is to promote the interests of the home-grown retailers. But the irony is that the home-grown retailers are starved for cash and need capital and at the same time global giants are finding ways of investing in multi-brand physical retail companies. Aren't deals such as Amazon-Samara Capital a slap on the face of policy makers?

"The FDI retail policy is a sham," agrees Arvind Singhal, Chairman of retail consultancy, Technopak. "It consistently reflects lack of understanding about the need of the modern retail sector and how capital plays an important role in modernising it," he adds.

Kumar Rajagopalan, CEO of Retailers Association of India, in an earlier interview with Business Today had said that even though the policy makers claim to give priority to Indian retailers, there is zero focus on enabling them to grow. "What was needed was a clear policy to enable retailers to grow in terms of funding. If you allow for level playing field in terms of funding, it allows retailers to do a lot of things. There should have been schemes for smaller retailers, to allow them to access funds at a much better rate."

Industry experts feel that the government should have told the retailers that they are expected to be globally competitive and it should have supported them to be globally competitive. "Instead of the FDI policy focusing on brands coming from outside of the country, we should have been giving impetus for Indian brands to be able to become global," says Rajagopalan. "China for instance, has consciously given support to their own businesses, allowed them to compete globally. In India, we have done exactly the opposite. We told our retailers that you are poor; we will create protectionism policies for you, which effectively is not protectionism. It was a policy that allowed leakages, it allowed for some guys to come in a round-about manner and create competition at a large scale. We have not allowed for small kids to grow but allowed the outsiders to come and fight with the small kids. That's the unfortunate situation," adds Rajagopalan.

Singhal of Technopak says that instead of disallowing foreign capital the discussions should have focused on how to put in more capital. "They should have spoken to Amazon or Alibaba to help them export much more from India. The conversations should have been on how to increase their buying from India and how could the global biggies support MSMEs in India."
20 Sep 2018, 1:23 PM

Income tax officials inspect books of Jet Airways in Mumbai, Delhi offices

The Income Tax Department on Wednesday swooped down on the premises of Jet Airways in Mumbai and Delhi to carry out an inspection of the books of the crisis-ridden airline for alleged falsification of accounts and siphoning of funds. As many as 50 tax officials are reported to have been pressed into action for the survey operation under Section 133A of the Income Tax Act at the Naresh Goyal-led airline's Andheri and Nariman Point offices in Mumbai. Two of the airline's offices in Delhi are also being covered in the survey which would continue for two days, officials said.

Rana Kapoor to retire as Yes Bank MD and CEO by January 2019

Rana Kapoor will complete his tenure as the Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer of Yes Bank early next year. The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has reportedly asked the private lender to look for a replacement as it extended Kapoor's tenure to January 31, 2019. The Yes Bank board will convene next week to take further decisions in this regard.

AgustaWestland deal: No UAE court order for Christian Michel's extradition to India

There is no order by any UAE court to extradite Christian Michel, the alleged middleman in the AgustaWestland chopper deal, to India, it is learnt, in a twist to the issue of getting the British national to face probe by Indian investigation agencies. Official sources last night said that a Dubai court has ordered for the extradition of Michel in the Rs 3,600-crore AgustaWestland VVIP choppers deal case. The CBI on Wednesday said it was awaiting confirmation from the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) on reports about extradition of Michel from the UAE. It is learnt that there was no court order on extradition of Michel to India as reported.

Samara-Amazon bags Aditya Birla Group's retail chain

About 11 years after it set up the food and grocery retail business, Aditya Birla Group has signed a deal to sell Aditya Birla Retail (ABRL) to home-grown private equity fund Samara Capital and global e-commerce giant Amazon. The Group did not disclose the value of the deal, but sources said it was around Rs 42 billion. The Birlas are likely to end up with losses amounting to Rs 70 billion in the venture. More is the fourth-largest supermarket chain in the country and runs 490 supermarkets and 20 hypermarkets.

Gujarat Assembly increases MLAs' salary by at least Rs 45,000

The Gujarat Assembly passed a bill on Wednesday by which the salaries of the MLAs, ministers, speaker, deputy speaker and leader of opposition will go up by at least Rs 45,000 a month. Accordingly, the monthly salary of the MLAs will be hiked to Rs 1.16 lakh as against the existing Rs 70,727, a rise of about 64 per cent, while those of the ministers, Assembly speaker, deputy speaker and leader of opposition will go up to Rs 1.32 lakh from Rs 86,000, an increase of about 54 per cent.

Global tech firms all set to fight India's planned data law

According to a Reuters report, global tech companies are gearing up to oppose new legislation in India that would require Facebook, PayPal and others to store user data in the country. They fear it will hurt investment and the business models of foreign and domestic firms. In July, a government panel recommended that all "critical personal data" should be processed in India, and presented a draft bill that could affect how global firms store customer data. Their concerns are to be taken up by lobby groups planning a joint effort to pressure New Delhi to reconsider.

Nitin Gadkari blames banks for delaying infrastructure projects

Risk-averse bankers are slowing construction of infrastructure projects in India, Nitin Gadkari, the country's minister for road transport and highways, said while addressing the Bloomberg India Economic Forum. Loans to road contractors and bank guarantees for projects have dried up, threatening to stall India's plans to build more than 84,000 kilometers (52,195 miles) of roads by 2022, Gadkari said.

Alibaba's Jack Ma warns US-China trade war could drag for 20 years

Cautioning businesses in China to be ready for a long drawn trade war with US, Alibaba Group founder Jack Ma said the dispute could drag for 20 years, extending far beyond the presidency of Donald Trump. China needs to strengthen its economy to deal with the conflict and shift trade relations from the US to regions like Southeast Asia and Africa, Ma said during a speech at the company's investor day conference in Hangzhou.
The Income Tax Department on Wednesday swooped down on the premises of Jet Airways in Mumbai and the national capital to carry out an inspection of the books of the crisis-ridden airline for alleged falsification of accounts and siphoning of funds through bogus expenses booked to group entities, according to official sources. As many as 50 tax officials are reported to have been pressed into action for the survey operation under Section 133A of the Income Tax Act at the Naresh Goyal-led airline's Andheri and Nariman Point offices in Mumbai to collect evidence related to financial irregularities. Two of the airline's offices in Delhi are also being covered in the survey which would continue for two days, officials said.

As part of the survey operation, tax officials only visit the business premises of a firm and check its books of accounts. Asked to comment on the issue, a Jet Airways spokesperson admitted to Mail Today that Income Tax officials were conducting a survey at the airline's office. Meanwhile, the tax department is also examining the airline's deal with Godrej Buildcon where Jet is said to have received Rs 1,725 crore as a monetary consideration.

Last month, the Corporate Affairs Ministry had also ordered an inspection of books and papers of Jet Airways. Jet Airways has run into financial problems and was forced to defer its quarterly financial results at the last minute due differences with its auditors, leading to queries by stock exchanges and capital markets regulator Sebi.

The auditors who had raised questions about the airline being able to continue as a going concern did not change their opinion and reiterated that the airline's future was dependent on raising capital and generating sustainable cash flows.

Jet Airways had reported a net loss of Rs 1,326 crore in the April-June quarter of 2018-19. The airline had said last month that it would seek capital infusion and sell its loyalty programme to raise resources. Jet Airways has a net debt of Rs 8,150 crore ($1.2 billion) as of end-March with the bulk of it being U.S. dollar denominated.

Airline profits in the Indian aviation market are taking a big hit due to rising fuel prices, a weaker rupee and a raging fare war in a fiercely competitive market. Jet Airways had run into turbulence with the airline's pilots going on the warpath in August as the top management wanted to slash salaries to tide over a lean financial phase. Jet Airways insiders said the management had told the staff that unless cost cutting measures are implemented, which include a reduction in salaries, the airline might be left with revenues only to operate for 60 days.

However, Jet Airways CEO Vinay Dube issued a statement saying reports about the sustainability of the airline were not only factually incorrect, but also malicious. The airline would also like to deny any conjecture of a stake sale.
Yes Bank will have a new CEO as early as next year as the RBI has asked the private lender that incumbent Rana Kapoor may remain at top post only till January 31, 2019. Rana Kapoor's term was given three-year extension by the bank shareholders in June, but the central bank had not specified the exact period of his tenure.

"Reserve Bank of India has vide letter dated September 17, 2018 received today, intimated that Shri Rana Kapoor may continue as the MD&CEO till 31 January 2019, and the Board of Directors of the Bank are scheduled to meet on September 25, 2018 to decide on the future course of action," Yes Bank said in a regulatory statement.

Earlier this year, the RBI had turned down the re-appointment of Axis Bank CEO Shikha Sharma for three years, despite the fact that it was endorsed by the bank's board. The CEO of another major private lender, ICICI Bank's Chanda Kochhar, is under probe in the Videocon loan case. According to experts, the latest move by the RBI will worry other private banks too. They'll fear the original promoters may be asked to either pare down their control or told to step aside from the top post.

Rana Kapoor, who co-founded the bank with Ashok Kapoor in 2004, established the private bank's credentials and led it to rise above expectations. Its shares have seen a 25-fold rise in the past 13 years and have generated compound annual growth return of around 28 per cent, data from Bloomberg shows. In the past 14 years of existence, Yes Bank's share has surged from Rs 12.5 in 2005 to Rs 318.50 apiece now. As a promoter, Kapoor and his family own a 10.66 per cent stake in the bank. He has been the bank's CEO since 2004.

The banking sector has seen increased regulatory scrutiny over the last two years as the RBI has tried to push for appropriate recognition of bad loans. Last month, the RBI rejected Kotak Mahindra Bank's use of preference share allotment route to reduce promoter Uday Kotak's shareholding from 30 per cent in the bank. As part of the RBI's guidelines for new bank licences released four years ago, the Kotak Bank promoters were asked to reduce their stake from 30 per cent to 20 per cent by December 2018, 15 per cent by 2020, and then 10 per cent.

(Edited by Manoj Sharma)
Samsung unveiled its first triple camera smartphone out of the blue, and it has been placed in the mid-range segment. The Samsung Galaxy A7 2018 has been announced by the Korean tech giant today, with other points of interest being a Super AMOLED Infinity Display, a 24MP selfie camera, Dolby Atmos sound and side-mounted fingerprint sensor.

The triple camera setup on the Samsung Galaxy A7 2018 features a 24MP primary sensor with f/1.7 aperture and auto focus, an 8MP sensor under 120-degree ultra wide lens, and a 5MP sensor for capturing depth information. The rear camera on the Galaxy A7 comes with a Live Focus feature which allows users to adjust the bokeh effect in an image.

The 24MP sensor on Samsung Galaxy A7 automatically combines four pixels to form a bigger one, allowing for better quality images in low-light conditions. The triple camera setup on the Galaxy A7 has been equipped with Scene Optimizer, which categorises the subject and adjusts the colour, contrast and brightness to optimise image quality.

The 24MP selfie camera up front comes with adjustable LED flash, selfie focus for portrait selfies, Pro Lighting Mode, and AR emojis.

The screen on the Samsung Galaxy A7 is a 6.0-inch Super AMOLED Infinity Display with FullHD+ resolution (1080x2220 pixels). For audio output, Samsung has employed Dolby Atmos sound technology in the Galaxy A7. The fingerprint sensor has been placed at the side and the back comes with a premium glass design.

The insides of the Galaxy A7 feature an octa-core chipset clocked at 2.2GHz, coupled with 4GB or 6GB of RAM and 64GB or 128GB of internal storage. The 4GB/64GB variant will support memory expansion up to 512GB via microSD. Connectivity options include Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac, VHT80, Bluetooth 5.0, NFC (optional), GPS, Glonass, BeiDou, and USB Type-B.

The Galaxy A7 will run Android 8.0 out of the box and support Bixby, Samsung Pay and Samsung Health. It will be available in blue, black, gold, and pink.

The smartphone will be officially launched at an event in Malaysia on October 11, where pricing and availability details are likely to be clarified. Samsung has announced that the Galaxy A7 will be available in select European and Asian markets by this fall, which means it could come to India right after its launch in Malaysia.

"Samsung is committed to delivering meaningful innovation to all consumers across the Galaxy family, no matter who they are or where they are in the world. That's why we're excited to introduce innovative new features to the A series with the Galaxy A7, a practical but powerful device that is built to help make your everyday both convenient and extraordinary," said DJ Koh, President and CEO of IT & Mobile Communications Division at Samsung Electronics.

Edited by Vivek Punj
Nokia 6.1 Plus will be going on sale today on Flipkart. Currently, HMD Global is only selling the 4GB RAM, 64GB storage variant in India at a price of Rs 15,999. On Flipkart, the original price is quoted as 17,600 but the company is providing an extra discount of Rs 1,601 on the device.

The device is available in three colours; black, blue and white. The company is offering an extra 5 per cent off on the use of Axis Bank Buzz Credit Card. Airtel will be offering a cashback of Rs 1,800 in the form of 36 coupons and up to 240GB data in the form of 20GB per recharge every month on Rs 199, Rs 249 and Rs 448 recharge.

Nokia's Android One device is placed in the mid-range segment. The Nokia 6.1 Plus also comes with a premium glass sandwich design which helps it stand out from the mid-range crowd.

The biggest competitor of the Nokia 6.1 Plus will be another Android One smartphone, Xiaomi Mi A2. While the Nokia 6.1 Plus is powered by Snapdragon 636, the Mi A2 comes with a slightly more powerful Snapdragon 660. However, Nokia 6.1 Plus races ahead in terms of design language. The device also comes with a notch on top.

Nokia 6.1 features a 5.8-inch full display with 1080x2280 pixel resolution, with 2.5D Gorilla Glass 3 protection and 19:9 aspect ratio. The device has a screen to body ratio of 81.5 per cent.

The device comes with Android 8.1 Oreo out of the box and is assured to get the Android Pie update as soon as it starts rolling out to other Android One devices.

The device uses a dual-SIM (Nano) smartphone with a 3060mAh battery and Quick Charge 3.0. The smartphone boasts a dual rear camera setup, with one 16-megapixel sensor and another 5-megapixel monochrome sensor, with f/2.0 aperture. There is also a 16-megapixel front camera with the same f/2.0 aperture. The Nokia 6.1 comes with 64GB of inbuilt storage which can be expanded via microSD card (up to 400GB). In terms of build, the Nokia 6.1 has an aluminum body with a 93 per cent glass surface at the front.
Xiaomi's Mi A2 Red Edition will go on sale today. The company will add a new Red colour to the current colour options available. The Mi A2 Red Edition was teased by company chief Manu Kumar Jain on Twitter where he also declared the time for the first sale.

The Mi A2 Red Edition will go on sale at 12pm and will be made available via mi.com and Amazon India's website. Three colours are already up for grabs on the Amazon website. However, one can expect the Red Edition to go out of stock soon.

The device is second in the series of Android One smartphones launched by Xiaomi. Xiaomi has priced the smartphone at Rs 16,999 for the 4GB RAM, 64GB storage variant. Other than the Red colour, the device has been launched in four colours Black, Lake Blue, Rose Gold and Gold.

Xiaomi Mi A2 comes a display with 18:9 aspect ratio which gives a considerable screen real estate to play with. Mi A2 is powered by Qualcomm's Snapdragon 660 coupled with Adreno 512 GPU. The octa-core processor comes with four 2.2 GHz Kryo 260 cores and four 1.8 GHz Kryo 260 cores.

The Mi A2 comes with a dual camera setup on the rear with one 12 megapixel sensor and another 20 megapixel sensor. Both sensors come with a relatively wide aperture of f/1.75.

The front camera also comes with a 20-megapixel sensor with an f/2.2 aperture. Both sensors use a technology called pixel binning which helps with sharper low-light images.

Being an Android One device, Xiaomi Mi A2 will get all the latest updates shortly after Google launches them. With the Android Pie being officially unveiled, the company has announced that Mi A2 will be one of the first devices to receive Google's latest update.
Ryanair shareholders expressed their frustration at management on Thursday by re-electing the company's chairman by a significantly narrower margin than last year after a year overshadowed by the company's worst-ever industrial action.

Chairman David Bonderman was re-elected with 70.5% of votes, compared to 89% who voted in favour last year.

But Chief Executive Michael O'Leary secured overwhelming re-election to the board with 98.5% of the vote, down from 99% last year.

"In every case we have substantial majorities," O'Leary told the meeting. "The overwhelming majority of our shareholders are supportive [of Bonderman] ... and we should be very appreciative."

O'Leary said he had been asked by the company's remuneration committee to extend his contract beyond 2019 and that he intended to do so.

Several investors, including Royal London Asset Management and Britain's Local Authority Pension Fund Forum (LAPFF), had announced publicly that they would oppose Bonderman's re-election.

Some investors cited the company's treatment of staff and the need for renewal on the board for their opposition to Bonderman.

Bonderman, who is a founder of private equity firm TPG Capital, resigned from the board of Uber in 2017 after an ill-judged joke that more women on the board means "more talking".

Ryanair had initially banned media from the meeting, but at the last minute allowed journalists to attend. (Reuters)

Source: www.businessworld.ie
Chinese peer-to-peer lender X Financial begins trading on the New York Stock Exchange at the opening bell on Wednesday. Photo: VCG

An investor frenzy met Chinese peer-to-peer (P2P) lender X Financial on its first day of trading in New York on Wednesday, with its American depositary shares jumping by 26% to close at $11.97.

In a raucous first day of trading, during which its stock price nearly doubled at one point, the Shenzhen-based X Financial became the latest Chinese tech company to have a wild debut on the U.S. market.

X Financial, which boasts that it is the biggest P2P lender in southern China, raised $104.5 million, pricing its initial public offering (IPO) at $9.50 per share  the lower end of the $9-to-$11 price range put forth in the companys prospectus.

The company had initially planned to raise $250 million, but later lowered its fundraising target. It followed in the footsteps of Qutoutiao Inc., the developer of a popular news aggregation app, and electric-vehicle maker Nio Inc., both of whose shares also went through wild swings on their first days of trading.

Founded in 2014, X Financial makes most of its money by facilitating peer-to-peer loans, offering small unsecured loans, and selling wealth management products. As of the end of June, X Financial had facilitated 19.9 billion yuan ($2.90 billion) of outstanding loans, earning a net profit of 443 million yuan.

However, the companys promising profits have been overshadowed by the central governments regulatory campaign to exert more control over the online-lending industry, which includes P2P lending and microloans.

An increasing number of P2P platforms on the Chinese mainland have closed as they ran into liquidity problems under a national financial deleveraging campaign. Further, it appears that the governments recent financial easing measures will not apply to the troubled P2P lending industry in the near term.

Under the campaign, thorough onsite checks on P2P lenders will be carried out nationwide by the end of this year, and all qualified platforms will have to be registered with local financial authorities by no later than mid-2019, according to previous regulatory notices.

Kevin Zhang, X Financials chief financial officer, told Caixin that regulatory uncertainties always linger before companys formal registration with the local financial office, but hes optimistic about the firms capability to survive.

Zhang said that X Financials key competitive feature is its strategic partnership with ZhongAn Online P&C Insurance Co. Ltd., which offers credit insurance on investors principal.

The insurance serves as a buffer for investors, Zhang said, making X Financials offerings more competitive than cash-equivalent products such as banks structured deposits and money market funds.

Less than 3% of online consumer finance companies in China were offering such insurance protection as of Dec. 31, according to a report by consultancy Oliver Wyman.

Still, X Financials business faces several risks, including a rising nonperforming-loan ratio, a shrinking customer base in the first half, and an ongoing lawsuit in the U.S. involving its founder and chairman, Tang Yue.

The percentage of X Financials loans overdue by 31 days to 90 days increased to 1.98% as of June 30, up from 1.46% at the end of 2017 and 0.36% at the end of 2016. Over the first six months of 2018, the number of active investors on the platform shrank to 140,614 from 148,391 as investors fled the P2P market because of its perceived risks.

Zhang shrugged off concerns about the companys client base, citing rebounding investor numbers in August and September. He also played down the impact that the lawsuit, which is between Tang and another company, might have on X Financial.

On the fundraising side, X Financial plans to devote the majority of the IPOs proceeds to salaries and upgrading its technology, Zhang said, without elaborating.

Contact reporter Leng Cheng (chengleng@caixin.com)
Li Nan now takes the subway instead of hopping into a taxi. Chen Yaojia makes her own coffee at work, and no longer goes to Starbucks. Wang Ting still goes on vacations  but to neighboring Thailand, not the Maldives. Welcome to the consumption downgrade ( xiaofei jiangji), in which Chinas burgeoning middle class is drinking beer instead of cocktails, cooking at home instead of dining out, and simply giving up on buying avocados, luxury bags and designer shoes. You may find it hard to sympathize. But the spending habits of up to 400 million people have global significance.

While the downgrade has no official definition, its generally understood as an increase in the share of total consumer spending going on essentials such as food and rent, with proportionally less spent on high-end products. The idea has resonated with many anxious Chinese families, particularly in Beijing and Shanghai, who say they feel increasingly squeezed between rising property prices and sluggish income growth. Instant noodles, pickles, and erguotou  a fiery $2 liquor beloved of blue-collar workers  are symbols of the downgrade. Many of the brands that sell these basic foods and drinks saw their sales rapidly decline from 2014 to 2017 but reported unexpectedly strong sales growth in the first half of 2018.

Government officials and some economists are more optimistic. They say that China, overall, is still seeing a consumption upgrade (xiaofei shengji), with the quality and amount of goods consumed on the increase nationwide. The shift the government wants to see in Chinas economy  from relying on investment and exports to drive growth, to consumption  is still on track, they say. This might not square with Wangs budget vacations, or Chens do-it-yourself approach to her caffeine habit. But maybe that doesnt matter: some analysts say that both an upgrade and a downgrade might be happening at the same time in different parts of the country.

Contact reporter Charlotte Yang (yutingyang@caixin.com)
Rather than try to psychoanalyze Donald Trump, China may want to concentrate its efforts on becoming the best citizen of the world trading system that it can be. Photo: VCG

After months of harsh rhetoric from the Trump administration, followed by tariffs imposed by the U.S. government on Chinese imports, and then retaliatory tariffs imposed by China on U.S. imports, the situation looks bleak for U.S.-China trade relations. Each side has now imposed tariffs on $50 billion worth of imports from the other, and, the Trump administration is targeting another $200 billion Chinese imports for a 10 percent tariff, with the tariffs to be raised to 25 percent next year. China has announced that it will retaliate with new tariffs on $60 billion of U.S. goods (link in Chinese), and there have been indications that it has restricted the issuance of licenses for U.S companies to operate in China.

This new development has put in limbo a recently announced plan for U.S. Treasury Secretary Mnuchin to sit down with his Chinese counterparts for negotiations. China is currently reviewing the plan to meet, and the meeting may or may not happen.

Trade policy experts have spent months trying to get into the heads of the Trump administrations trade team in order to understand what their goals are, and look for ways to pull the two countries back from a trade war. Chinese government officials have probably been doing the same. There have been discussions on different ways for China to retaliate, but ultimately what China wants is trade peace. Unfortunately, the path to it remains unclear. There doesnt seem to be a politically workable solution to these trade tensions in the face of the Trump administrations demands.

Rather than try to psychoanalyze Donald Trump or adviser Peter Navarro, looking for clues as to how to assuage them, China may want to concentrate its efforts on becoming the best citizen of the world trading system that it can be. By doing so, it can both improve its own economic well-being and improve relations with its other trading partners. If the Trump administration responds with a more-positive approach to negotiations, that would be a bonus.

On many occasions recently, China has criticized protectionism, and has presented itself as a defender of the principles of free trade and the multilateral trading system. But China must match its actions to its rhetoric. China has benefited from being part of the multilateral trading system and global supply chains, and now China needs to demonstrate its support for the rules-based system. China liberalized a great deal as part of its WTO accession, but it is much wealthier now, and needs to be more proactive about engaging in additional market opening.

Here are three ways that China could show its dedication to liberalization and its support for the trading system, and ultimately, its readiness for a leading role in international economic affairs.

First, China should unilaterally open up its markets to the greatest extent possible, as a sign of its good faith. This includes tariff reductions, an easing of regulations for imports of goods and services, and fewer conditions imposed on foreign investors. As an example, on July 1, Chinas National Development and Reform Commission published the new negative list for restricted foreign investment. The number of items on the negative list was cut to 48 from 63 in the previous version from last year. It has broadened market access in finance, transportation, logistics, professional services, manufacturing, infrastructure, energy and agriculture. This is a positive development and shows China is moving in the right direction. However, some of the sectors, such as finance and manufacturing, still have a several-year phase-out period, which will have a limited impact on market opening. China should shorten or remove these phase-out periods. China should also increase the transparency of the administrative procedures for new applications.

Second, some issues that the United States and others have complained about, such as the non-commercial behavior of state-owned enterprises (SOEs), may be too sensitive for China to act on alone. As a rising power that wants to take a more proactive international role, China could propose multilateral negotiations on these issues within the WTO regime. In this context, China could make further concessions on SOEs in exchange for treatment in anti-dumping proceedings that is equivalent to how other countries are treated.

Third, China should try to resolve the WTO complaints the United States and other countries have brought in good faith. For example, both the United States and European Union recently brought complaints related to Chinese intellectual property protection. In addition, the United States has several other pending WTO cases, on Chinas subsidies, administration of tariff rate quotas, and export restrictions. China should try to resolve these issues through consultation, rather than use litigation to delay. If the parties cannot reach an agreement, and the cases go through the full litigation process, China should comply with the WTO Dispute Settlement Bodys rulings quickly, in good faith.

For its own sake, and the rest of the world as well, China should take a proactive approach instead of simply responding to U.S. actions. To defend against the current aggressive tactics employed by the Trump administration, China needs to take the initiative and act quickly, in the ways noted above. If it does so, China may be able to avert a trade war, and can establish itself as a valued member of the trading system.

Simon Lester, a trade policy analyst, and Huan Zhu, a research associate, are with Catos Herbert A. Stiefel Center for Trade Policy Studies.
news, act-politics

Health Minister Greg Hunt says the Morrison government will not reconsider its position on pill testing, while dodging questions about a Commonwealth agency's refusal to allow the service at an upcoming Canberra music festival. Former AFP commissioner Mick Palmer was among those who signed a letter urging all Australian governments to look at pill testing at events where there's a risk of drug overdoses, after two people died after attending the Defqon.1 music festival in Western Sydney on the weekend. The letter came after the National Capital Authority said there was no legal framework for pill-testing to happen at the Spilt Milk Festival at Commonwealth Park in November, and the federal government would not facilitate changes needed for the service to be offered. This was despite a successful pill testing pilot at another Canberra festival earlier in the year, on land controlled by the ACT government. "The government does not support decisions to use illicit drugs, and does not in-principle support pill testing, as it could imply that illicit drugs are safe," the NCA told Fairfax Media, and referred further questions about pill testing onto Mr Hunt. However Mr Hunt's office dodged questions on whether the minister or a member of the Coalition government directed the National Capital Authority not to allow pill testing on federal land, handballing them back to the NCA. The National Capital Authority is responsible for matters that occur on Commonwealth land within the Parliamentary triangle and I refer you to them," a spokesperson for Mr Hunt said. His office also would not answer whether the pill testing pilot in Canberra earlier in the year changed Mr Hunt's views on pill testing, or whether he was open to a discussion about it with the ACT's Chief Health Officer or members of the STA-Safe consortium. "On the matter of pill testing, this is not Commonwealth policy and we have no plans to change this," the spokesperson said. Other members of the Liberal party previously denied there had been intervention in the NCA's decision. Canberra Liberals legal affairs spokesman Jeremy Hanson said he had not made any approaches to his federal counterparts since the letter he sent last year, alerting them to the pill testing trial planned for Spilt Milk 2017. Liberal senator for the ACT Zed Seselja told ABC Radio the NCA was an independent body who made their own judgements, although he thought they'd made the right call.

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news, latest-news

An independent review has brushed aside concerns about reporting the salaries of top public service executives, recommending that reporting executive remuneration of government agencies in annual reports be made compulsory. It has also revealed that last month Secretary of Prime Minister and Cabinet Martin Parkinson and Finance Secretary Rosemary Huxtable have again requested government entities report their executive remuneration on their websites. Despite the request now being made three times, "a number of entities have still not complied with this request," the report said. CSIRO chairman David Thodey and Medibank Private chair Elizabeth Alexander have handed down their final report on the Public Governance and Accountability Act, making 52 recommendations on transforming how performance and accountability is measured across the public service. After the draft report said executive remuneration should be reported in government agencies' annual reports in the same way as companies listed on the Australian Securities Exchange, some departments made submissions citing concerns with the proposal. "Some entities have concerns about publishing information at an identifiable level, citing privacy and other issues, including cultural sensitivities, but these are not shared widely," the report said. Reporting executive remuneration of individuals, including bonuses and allowances, as well as the number and average remuneration of other senior executives and highly paid staff in annual reports would be compulsory if the report's recommendations were adopted. The report also recommended it become the only form of reporting executive remuneration, replacing reports made voluntarily on government entity websites. "There is no reason to report Commonwealth executive remuneration arrangements in multiple formats and locations. This hardly helps transparency and accountability," the report said. Increasing transparency of top level pay in the public service and government business enterprises has been on the agenda since the controversy surrounding the pay packet of former Australia Post boss Ahmed Fahour. Finance Minister Mathias Cormann wrote to government owned businesses in February last year asking that they reveal executive remuneration in the same way as listed companies, which they did at the time. In May last year a similar request was made by Mr Parkinson to departmental secretaries, asking that both the departments and agencies within their portfolios do the same. Only half complied with the request, the report said. A joint request to disclose the information was then made in September last year by Mr Parkinson and Ms Huxtable. The report said a third request had still been ignored by some entities. The recommendation had previously been resisted by the Australian Bureau of Statistics on the basis that it could mean senior public servants ask for more money and costs would go up across the public service. The Fair Work Ombudsman and Treasury raised privacy concerns and SBS said it could lead to recurring embarrassment for staff who had their salaries published. The Central Land Council said reporting executive pay would cause significant hardship to Indigenous executives for cultural reasons. A spokeswoman for Finance and Public Service minister Mathias Corman said the government welcomed the report and its recommendations. "It also welcomes the emphasis in the review recommendations on improved transparency, reporting and public management practice," the spokeswoman said. "Having just received the final report, the Government will consider the report and its 52 recommendations through its normal processes. That consideration will be informed by the views of the Joint Committee of Public Accounts and Audit, which has made a significant contribution to the Public Governance, Performance and Accountability Act since its inception."

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[September 20, 2018] WalkMe Secures $40 Million Series F Funding to Accelerate the Growth of Its Digital Adoption Platform SAN FRANCISCO, Sept. 20, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- WalkMe, the world first Digital Adoption Platform and one of the fastest-growing software companies globally, today announced it has raised $40 million in Series F financing, led by Insight Venture Partners, with participation from WalkMe's first institutional investor, Mangrove Capital Partners. WalkMe has raised $207.5 million to date. WalkMe enables leading enterprise organizations to achieve a successful digital transformation by maximizing the use of their digital assets. By engaging users and providing an optimal user experience, WalkMe ensures that companies of all sizes gain unprecedented productivity improvements for employees and customers using artificial intelligence, real-time analytics, and automation technologies. The latest round of financing will allow WalkMe to continue its hyper-growth worldwide and continue to dominate the digital adoption category it created. WalkMe is looking to expand and localize its offerings in new markets such as Asia Pacific and Europe, while continuing to invest in securing multinational customers. WalkMe has nearly 2,000 customers worldwide, including over 30 percent of the Fortune 500. WalkMe also plans to further invest in expanding its solution offering through additional technology acquisitions. WalkMe has made three acquisitions to date to support its vision - machine learing company DeepUI in June 2018, visual analytics company Jaco in April 2017, and native mobile AI company Abbi in January 2017. "Digital transformation holds great promise, which is why most organizations today are highly engaged in their efforts. While the potential is huge, expectations are not met due to a reality of poor user adoption. Our customers are leveraging WalkMe's Digital Adoption Platform to ensure their business transformation goals and expectations are met and exceeded," said Dan Adika, co-founder and CEO of WalkMe. "This latest round of funding will help us grow at an even faster rate globally, while ensuring our leadership position in creating and forging the digital adoption category." The company has close to 660 employees located in seven offices worldwide in the U.S., Europe and APAC. WalkMe's recent expansion into a larger office in Raleigh, North Carolina, underscores the company's rapid growth as it continues to pioneer the digital adoption space for high-growth customers. WalkMe has recently been recognized in Forbes' Cloud 100 list, and as one of the "Hot 100" privately-held software companies by JMP Securities. "WalkMe pioneered and developed the Digital Adoption Platform, with a bold vision of transforming the way users interact with technology, just like navigation systems (GPS) changed the way we drive. With WalkMe, users no longer need to learn or recall how to use any software, application or website," said Roy Saar, partner at Mangrove Capital Partners. "Although we are traditionally an early stage investor, we decided to take part in WalkMe's growth round because we are witnessing how more and more of WalkMe's customers see WalkMe as a strategic enabler of their digital transformation. We look forward to continuing our partnership with WalkMe as they continue to revolutionize the future of work." About WalkMe WalkMe pioneered the Digital Adoption Platform (DAP) to transform the user experience in today's overwhelming digital world. Using artificial intelligence, engagement, guidance and automation, WalkMe's transparent overlay assists users to complete tasks easily within any enterprise software, mobile application or website. Founded in 2011, WalkMe software is used by nearly 2,000 enterprises globally, including 30 percent of Fortune 500 companies. For more information, visit https://www.walkme.com/. Media Contact Frances Baze

Gravitate PR

frances@gravitatepr.com

Phone: +1-408-933-8952 View original content to download multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/walkme-secures-40-million-series-f-funding-to-accelerate-the-growth-of-its-digital-adoption-platform-300716026.html SOURCE WalkMe

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Photo: Contributed Maryland state police block the road that connects the industrial business park, where several people had been shot, in Harford County, Md, Thursday, Sept. 20, 2018.

UPDATE 1 p.m.

An employee at a Rite Aid warehouse opened fire at work Thursday, killing three people before taking her own life, authorities said. Several other people were wounded.

The suspect was a 26-year-old temporary employee at the Rite Aid distribution centre in northeastern Maryland, Harford County Sheriff Jeffrey Gahler told a news conference. She had been taken into custody in critical condition that morning. Her name was not immediately released.

It appears only one weapon, a handgun, was used and no shots were fired by responding law enforcement officers, Gahler said.

Krystal Watson, 33, said her husband, Eric, works at the facility and told her told her that the suspect had been arguing with somebody else near a time clock after a "Town Hall meeting."

"And she went off," she said.

Watson said her husband told her the shooting started in a break room.

"She didn't have a particular target. She was just shooting," Watson said as she drove away from a fire station where relatives tried to reunite with loved ones.

"She didn't aim. She just shot," Watson said.

Area hospitals reported receiving five patients from the incident.

Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center in Baltimore said it was treating four patients with gunshot wounds. Two were in stable condition and two who were seriously injured.

A spokesman for a health system that includes Christiana Hospital in Newark, Delaware, said one patient was being treated there. Christiana Care Health System spokesman Hiran Ratnayake said the person was in serious condition.

Gahler said the call about shots fired came in at about 9:06 a.m. and deputies and other officers were on the scene in just over five minutes.

UPDATE 11:45 a.m.

Three people were killed Thursday morning in a shooting at a Rite Aid distribution centre in northeast Maryland, officials said.

A law enforcement official with knowledge of the shooting stressed that the number of dead is based on preliminary information. The official wasn't authorized to discuss details by name and spoke on condition of anonymity to The Associated Press.

A suspect was taken into custody and was in critical condition, Harford County Sheriff Jeffrey Gahler told a news conference.

It appears only one weapon, a handgun, was used and no shots were fired by responding law enforcement officers, Gahler said. He also said multiple people had been killed and wounded in the shooting, without giving any other details on casualties.

A Baltimore hospital said it had received four patients with gunshot wounds from the shooting. Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center spokeswoman Monica Stone said in an email Thursday that she was unable to provide details about the patients' conditions.

Gahler said the call about shots fired came in from the Rite Aid distribution centre at about 9:06 a.m. and deputies and other officers were on the scene in just over five minutes.

"We are so preliminary in this investigation," Gahler said. "It's so important that we deal in facts." He said authorities don't want to "make it worse" for the families involved by giving out incorrect information.

Mike Carre, an employee of a furniture logistics operation next to the distribution centre where the violence erupted, says he helped tend to a wounded man.

Carre locked the doors of his workplace after the injured man came hobbling in, bleeding from his leg. He called 911 from a bathroom before helping colleagues wrap the man's blood-soaked jeans above his injury to cut off blood flow.

UPDATE 9:50 a.m.

Three people were killed Thursday morning in a shooting at a Rite Aid distribution centre in northeast Maryland, officials said.

A law enforcement official with knowledge of the shooting stressed that the number of dead is based on preliminary information. The official wasn't authorized to discuss details by name and spoke on condition of anonymity to The Associated Press.

A suspect was taken into custody and was in critical condition, Harford County Sheriff Jeffrey Gahler told a news conference.

It appears there was only one weapon, a handgun, that was used and there were no shots fired by responding law enforcement officers, Gahler said. Gahler also said multiple people had been killed and wounded in the shooting, without giving any other details on casualties.

Gahler said the call about shots fired came in from the Rite Aid distribution centre at about 9:06 a.m. and deputies and other officers were on the scene in just over five minutes.

"We are so preliminary in this investigation," Gahler said. "It's so important that we deal in facts." He said authorities don't want to "make it worse" for the families involved by giving out incorrect information.

The attack came nearly three months after a man armed with a shotgun attacked a newspaper office in Annapolis, Maryland, killing five staff members. Authorities accused Jarrod W. Ramos of attacking The Capital Gazette because of a longstanding grudge against the paper.

The FBI described the Aberdeen incident as an "active shooter situation" and said its Baltimore field office was assisting.

ORIGINAL 7:38 a.m.

Authorities say multiple people have been shot in northeast Maryland in what the FBI is describing as an "active shooter situation."

The Harford County Sheriff's Office tweeted that there was a shooting Thursday morning in the Perryman area that involves "multiple victims." They warn that the situation is still fluid and ask people to avoid the area.

The FBI's Baltimore field office tweets that it is responding and assisting the sheriff's office with an active shooter situation. The Baltimore field division of the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives tweets that its special agents are responding too.
However, before a dinner in the Austrian city of Salzburg, some of those leaders said key elements of the "Chequers" plan that May was aiming to sell to them needed reworking.

BMW announced yesterday that it would be closing the Oxford Mini factory for "several weeks" immediately after Brexit to preempt any component-supply disruptions if a no-deal agreement is reached between Britain and the EU. "I'm confident that, with goodwill and determination, we can agree a deal that right for both parties".

Just 24 hours earlier Jaguar Land Rover - which had last week warned about the scale of the costs a no deal would bring - said it was to move production workers at its Castle Bromwich plant to a three-day week from October.

But the path to the seems far from clear, with the European Council President, Donald Tusk, warning the UK's proposals will need to be reworked.

But the Democratic Unionist Party, which props up Mrs May's minority administration in Parliament, dismissed Mr Barnier's proposals as unpalatable because they would involve a customs border between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK.

While both sides have been making positive noises about the Brexit talks, there has been no deal yet over one of the biggest obstacles - how to meet their aim of keeping an open border between the British province of Northern Ireland and European Union member Ireland.

A government source suggested Britain would come up with other proposals to try to reach agreement on Northern Ireland "in due course", but May has so far been reluctant to move from her Chequers plan, hashed out at her country home in July.

She said Britain's 27 European Union partners would discuss May's concerns without her present on Thursday, and Merkel expressed hopes for "an exit that takes place in a good atmosphere, in great respect for each other and that - in certain areas - very, very close co-operation is possible".

On Wednesday, Tusk announced a special Brexit summit in November, when he hopes a deal will be "finalized".

Mr Stride told Sky News: "When we have a firm deal on the table, I suspect that those to the right of the party - the pro-Brexit wing - will be very concerned that if that deal does not prevail, they will end up in the situation where we could have a second referendum or we could end up not leaving the European Union altogether, so there is a danger of that happening if Chequers does not prevail". "I am still optimistic".

Luxembourg Foreign Minister Jean Asselborn told Reuters that the Irish border question remained fraught: "We have nothing on Ireland". Barnier says that could be done by checking goods destined for Northern Ireland at companies and markets within the UK.

At a dinner in Salzburg, she told her 27 counterparts her priorities are maintaining economic ties and ensuring promises to Northern Ireland are kept.

Mrs May's proposal for the United Kingdom to sign up to a common rule book for trade in goods and a common customs territory is unpopular with many in her own party, who believe it will erode British sovereignty and is not what people voted for when they backed Brexit in a referendum in 2016.

He told LBC that another public vote would leave people thinking democracy was not being respected.

Theresa May says the Conservative government will not permit a second referendum on Brexit.
Multistate Psittacosis Outbreak among Poultry Plant Workers, 2018

At a Glance Laboratory confirmed* cases: 13 States affected: Georgia, Virginia Deaths: 0 *Includes Chlamydia psittaci detected by PCR in lower respiratory tract specimen, nasopharyngeal specimen, or stool specimen

Last updated February 11, 2019; originally posted September 19, 2018

The Virginia and Georgia departments of health investigated a multistate outbreak of psittacosis occurring at two poultry slaughter plants owned by a single corporation. CDC and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) assisted with the investigation. The outbreak is now over, with no new cases being reported since October 2018.

Recommendations

Contact a healthcare professional if you have fever, cough, headache, or muscle aches after working at a poultry slaughter plant involved in the outbreak. Tell your healthcare professional that you may have been exposed to psittacosis. Healthcare professionals can treat psittacosis with antibiotics.

Plant management should implement steps to minimize exposures to bird droppings and respiratory secretions to protect their workers.

Learn how people who work in poultry slaughter plants can prevent psittacosis.

Latest Outbreak Information

The outbreak is now over, with no new cases being reported since October 2018. CDC and the Virginia and Georgia departments of health encourage clinicians to have a high index of suspicion of psittacosis in individuals who have signs/symptoms consistent with psittacosis and who work in poultry slaughter plants.

During AugustOctober 2018, psittacosis cases were reported among workers at two poultry slaughter plants in Virginia and Georgia. A single corporation owns both plants.

Chlamydia psittaci, the type of bacteria that causes psittacosis, was detected by a laboratory test in 13 people. Additional illnesses in workers at the two plants have been identified, although have not been confirmed by the laboratory. The Virginia and Georgia departments of health may report all cases, making their case counts higher than what CDC reports (i.e., CDC is only reporting laboratory-confirmed cases).

No deaths have been reported.

Current evidence indicates that all of the people who had psittacosis worked at poultry slaughter plants in two states: Virginia and Georgia.

The affected plants in Virginia and Georgia voluntarily suspended operations for cleaning. On September 8, 2018, the affected plant in Virginia suspended operations. The plant reopened on September 18, 2018. On September 15, 2018, the affected plant in Georgia suspended operations. The plant reopened on September 19, 2018.

Plant management held town hall meetings in both plants to inform their workers about the outbreak.

How You Can and Cannot Get Psittacosis

The most common way someone gets infected with the bacteria that cause psittacosis (Chlamydia psittaci) is by breathing in dust containing dried secretions (e.g., droppings, respiratory) from infected birds. There is no evidence that these bacteria can spread by preparing or eating chicken meat.

It is rare for psittacosis to spread from person to person. In this outbreak, there were no reports of infection among family members who are not workers at the affected plants.

Symptoms of Psittacosis in People

In general, psittacosis causes mild illness in people. The most common symptoms include:

Fever and chills

Headache

Muscle aches

Dry cough

Psittacosis can also cause pneumonia, a lung infection that may require treatment or care in a hospital. Rarely, psittacosis can result in death.

Most people begin developing signs and symptoms of psittacosis within 5 to 14 days after exposure to the bacteria (C. psittaci). Occasionally, people report the start of symptoms after more than 14 days.

Investigation Details

February 11, 2019

The Virginia and Georgia departments of health investigated a multistate outbreak of psittacosis occurring at two poultry slaughter plants owned by a single corporation. CDC and USDA assisted with the investigation.

CDC and Virginia and Georgia departments of health encourage clinicians to have a high index of suspicion of psittacosis in individuals who have signs/symptoms of psittacosis and who work in poultry slaughter plants. If you become aware of poultry workers with X-ray confirmed or clinician-diagnosed pneumonia or suspected psittacosis, please contact your local health department. CDC can perform confirmatory laboratory testing. Lower respiratory tract specimens (e.g., sputum) are ideal. CDC will also accept other specimen types (e.g., nasopharyngeal/oropharyngeal swabs, whole blood, stool) for psittacosis investigations.
Tajikstan sees cement exports rise 37% in 8M18

ICR Newsroom By 20 September 2018

Tajik cement exports increased to 0.92Mt in January-August 2018, a rise of 37 per cent in average monthly exports when compared with 2017, according to the countrys statistics agency.



In 2017 Tajikistan exported 1Mt of cement. The latest figures mark the countrys switch to being a net exporter.



More than half (0.52Mt) of cement exports in 8M18 was delivered to Uzbekistan. Other key destinations for Tajik exports are Afghanistan and Kyrgyzstan.



In recent years Tajikistan has brought several plants into service and last year some 13 units were operating with a capacity of 4.7Mta. Most facilities were launched with support from Chinese investors.

Published under
In a video posted on social media the day before his trip to the region, Trump praised first responders, offered prayers for victims and declared the storm "one of the wettest we've ever seen from the standpoint of water".

President Donald Trump is pledging to help the people affected by Hurricane Florence as he arrives in North Carolina to survey damage wrought by the powerful storm.

The N.C. Department of Agriculture issued the livestock mortality totals Tuesday, as major flooding is continuing after the slow-moving storm's drenching rains.

Mayor Lawson Battle said that as far as he knew, everyone in the town of about 360 people evacuated as the water first started to invade town Monday.

Among the dead were two detainees who died in a Horry County Sheriff's Office transportation van in SC floodwaters.

President Trump once again told survivors of a killer hurricane to "have a good time, " offering the ill-timed comment on Wednesday, during a tour of storm-ravaged North Carolina. The president made similar comments past year while addressing victims of Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico, a storm over which Trump continues to face criticism in terms of his response. Richard Burr and Thom Tillis, and South Carolina Sens.

"We can attribute that additional rainfall to human-induced climate change", said Kevin Reed, a professor at Stony Brook University's School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences, who contributed to the study.

"You gotta take care of home", Jordan told The Charlotte Observer newspaper. More water vapour means more rain, especially when the storm is a crawler like Florence, which slowed to about 2 miles per hour (1.6 km per hour) after slamming into the North Carolina coast. Much of Lumberton, where the Lumber river flooded mostly lower-income housing, was still inaccessible.

Evacuees from Pender and Brunswick counties should especially not go home due to flooding, he said.

Hog farm buildings are inundated with floodwater from Hurricane Florence near Trenton, N.C., Sunday, Sept. 16, 2018.

The city manager told CNN that 12,000 people were "in harm's way".

Richardson says the incident happened near the Little Pee Dee River, which is one of the bodies of water officials are monitoring for intense flooding following Florence.

Storm deaths: Hurricane Florence is being blamed for at least 37 deaths in three states, and Typhoon Mangkhut has killed at least 81 people in the Philippines and China. The Cape Fear River was expected to crest at 61.5 feet (19 meters), four times its normal height, on Wednesday in Fayetteville, a city of 200,000 near the Fort Bragg Army base in the southern part of the state, according to the National Weather Service.

Thousands of homes are still underwater in the Carolinas and thousands of families have had to be rescued from the floods.

At least 37 people have died in the three states, including two women who were being taken to a mental health facility when the van they were riding in was engulfed by floodwaters from the Little Pee Dee River in SC, authorities said. The utility later agreed to plead guilty to nine Clean Water Act violations and pay $102 million in fines and restitution for illegally discharging pollution from ash dumps at five North Carolina power plants.
FEI: Egypt faces oversupply

ICR Newsroom By 20 September 2018

Cement demand declined in 1H18 to 25Mt, compared with 26Mt in 1H17, according to Noha Bakr, the head of the cement committee of the Federation of Egyptian Industries (FEI).



In 2017 domestic consumption decreased 4.5 per cent YoY despite ongoing mega projects, Mr Bakr said. He added that the main challenge for the industry remains oversupply as stockpiles rose by 2.3Mt in 1H18 to 7.1Mt.

Published under
Honduran president calls for lower cement prices

ICR Newsroom By 20 September 2018

Juan Orlando Hernandez, president of Honduras, has called upon cement producers to lower their prices, according to La Tribuna.



He appealed to the cement companies to enable more investment into concrete roads as the country expands its infrastructure and shifts from asphalt roads to concrete.



At present a 42.5kg bag of cement in Tegucigalpa and surrounding area costs HNL195, but at the start of each year, cement prices usually rise in line with inflation and the depreciation of the lempira against the dollar.

Published under
Russia's Defense Ministry says one of its reconnaissance aircraft with 15 people on board has been brought down by a Syrian surface-to-air missile over the Mediterranean Sea.

However following anger among Russia's military brass and threats of "retaliation", Putin "reminded" Netanyahu that such operations "violated Syrian sovereignty" and said "agreements around the prevention of risky incidents were not observed", according to the Kremlin.

Though the Russian military condemned " these provocative actions by Israel as hostile" and said it reserves "the right to an adequate response", President Putin described the loss of the plane as a likely "chain of tragic accidental circumstances", rather than a deliberate provocation.

Hours after Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu held Syria responsible for the fatal crash of Russia's Il-20 aircraft, President Vladimir Putin tried to defuse the situation by calling the incident a tragic chance event.

"Overnight, IDF fighter jets targeted a facility of the Syrian Armed Forces from which systems to manufacture accurate and lethal weapons were about to be transferred on behalf of Iran to Hezbollah in Lebanon".

"We will remain there even after the Idlib accord", Nasrallah said, referring to a Russia-Turkey deal to prevent a Syrian regime offensive on the country's last rebel-held stronghold.

On Wednesday, the Russians approved Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's proposal to fly air force commander Major General Amiram Norkin to Moscow to present the findings of Israel's investigation into the incident.

Timely released satellite images have revealed the destruction left by IDF air strikes in Syria's Latakia after Israel was forced to make a rare admission to the raid which resulted in the downing of the Russian Il-20 recon plane.

Israel on September 18 said Syrian antiaircraft batteries "fired indiscriminately" and failed to ensure that no Russian planes were in the air during the incident on September 17.

The aircraft, which was on its way back to the Russian-run Hmeimim air base, disappeared from the radar on Monday night at a time when four Israeli F-16 fighters attacked targets in Syria's Latakia province. The irresponsible actions by the Israeli Air Force led to a tragedy, which claimed the lives of 15 Russian military personnel, he said.

"Our presence there is tied to necessity and to the consent of the Syrian leadership", said Nasrallah, whose Hezbollah movement is backing the Damascus regime in the ongoing conflict.

In a statement, however, the IDF denied all responsibility for the downing of the Russian spy plane, saying that Syria, Iran, and Hezbollah were the ones at fault.
The retirement home was placed on lockdown as staff gathered hid from Rogal.

The scene has been shut off as police continue to search for Bruce Rogal, 59, who is suspected of killing his parents at the retirement facility, before fleeing the scene.

Investigators believe Mr Rogal is driving a 2002 silver Hyundai Odyssey, with Pennsylvania number plates ENN3549, and is considered armed and unsafe.

Mike Galczyk, whose daughter Cayley is a server at Bellingham, told NBC 10: 'She's texting us saying she's hiding inside with her team.

Attorney Hogan added: 'The divorce order appears to be what set him off today'.

Hogan says Rogal first went to the house where his ex-wife was staying, shot at her and missed.

A gunman tried to kill his ex-wife before murdering his elderly parents at their retirement home.

Bruce Rogal, 59, is wanted on homicide and attempted homicide charges, and should be considered armed and risky, said District Attorney Tom Hogan of Chester County.

Police say two people were attacked at a Chester County retirement community on Wednesday evening, CBS Philadelphia reports.

The Philadelphia ATF tells CBS3 they are assisting authorities in Chester County with locating a shooter.
"It was inevitable we were going to war in North Korea, and now, . the relationships, I have to tell you, at least on a personal basis, they're very good".

Mr. Trump noted other gains, including North Korea releasing American prisoners, returning remains of US soldiers from the Korean War and stopping its nuclear and missile tests. "It's very much calmed down", Trump told reporters outside the White House.

In a statement, Pompeo said he spoke with his North Korean counterpart on Wednesday morning and invited him to meet in NY next week on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly.

Kim Jong-un: "We adopted a military pact to end a history of brutal and tragic confrontation and hostility, and agreed to make efforts to turn the Korean Peninsula into a land of peace without nuclear weapons and nuclear threats."

President Donald Trump on Wednesday said United States relations with North Korea are making "tremendous progress" from the days before his presidency when the two countries appeared close to "going to war".

South Korean President Moon Jae-in praised the North Korean offer.

But I think experts will say that nothing really has changed, so when he canceled Pompeo's trip, nothing has changed, except receiving a very nice letter from Kim Jong-un and then this positive, though not really any action on denuclearization.

Mr Moon and his counterpart Kim Jong-un watched the display after signing a deal to permanently close the north's Tongchang-ri missile facility.

President Moon will wrap up his final full day in Pyongyang, watching North Korea's spectacular "Mass Games" outdoor propaganda show.
Four years after the Malaysian Airlines Flight MH17 was shot down in June 2014, the Russian military has claimed that the serial number of the missile which struck the aircraft showed it was owned by Ukraine.

In May 2018, the Joint Investigation Team formed by investigators from the Netherlands, Australia, Belgium, Malaysia, and Ukraine said the Buk missile came from the 53rd anti-aircraft missile brigade of the Russian army in Kursk.

The MH17, en route from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, crashed in the conflict zone in eastern Ukraine on July 17, 2014.

The Russian authorities have proposed several theories for the tragedy to explain the causes of the crash, among which the involvement of a fighter aircraft in Ukrainian.

Lt. Gen. Nikolia Parshin, the ministry of defence's chief of the Missile and Artillery Directorate, told reporters that they were able to track down the Buk missile's paper trail using two serial numbers found on fragments of the rocket.

While the worldwide team had pointed to the BUK missile system used as evidence, Russia's Defense Ministry on Monday cited the missile used by serial number, saying it had been in the possession of the Ukrainian military forces since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

According to RIA Novosti state news agency, Parshin said: 'The missile with the serial number 886847379 intended for the BUK missile system on December 29, 1986 was sent by rail transport to military unit number 20152'.

He said that the Russian Defense Ministry made an unprecedented decision to declassify formerly top secret documents registering the production and movement of the missile in question, which were presented at the news conference.

The investigators said however that they had asked Russian Federation for information regarding the serial numbers before but had not received a reply.

"In a statement on September 17, the JIT said it would "meticulously study the materials presented as soon as the Russian Federation makes the relevant documents available to the JIT as requested in May 2018" and required under a UN Security Council resolution".

The Russian army has already rejected several times the conclusions of worldwide investigators, who have identified the missile as from a brigade of anti-aircraft based in Kursk, in western Russia. "They need a reason to aggravate the situation", - said the Ukrainian Minister.

Defense Ministry spokesman Igor Konashenkov also played a recording said to be of "intercepted talks of Ukrainian soldiers".
A Call to Christians: Brett Kavanaugh, Hurricane Florence, and the American Media Whirlwind Christian Examiner Contributor | 20 September, 2018 by Mark Klages

A lot can happen in a week. The last time I wrote to you, we were commemorating the 17th anniversary of the worst terror attack on US soil. Since then, I became a grandfather for the first time, America renewed its fascination withand erected an artificial wall of disgust in games we played as teenagers, and Florence devastated lives while proving once more why most of us no longer trust mainstream media.

Let us dispense with the political fodder first. CNN analyst Stephen Collinson writes in the Monday edition of the CNN political section that we will have "a public reckoning of a woman's courage, a man's character and the capacity of Washington's leaders to show that some things matter more than politics." Really? A teenage girl may have been assaulted by a teenage boy some thirty-five years ago while playing juvenile games at an underage drinking party and the focus is on politics? NYMag's Eric Levits decried conservatives for going soft on teenage crime only when it suits political goals, claiming Republicans are responsible for laws allowing underage murderers and sex offenders to be tried as adults. I am less likely to argue the political ramifications or merit of a 35-year old assault claim from an activist opposing the President than I am our double standard that Senator Feinstein can lie to America about school shootings during the same man's confirmation hearings, yet an alleged crime committed by the 17-year old Kavanaugh is sufficient to derail the 53-year old jurist's career. (During confirmation hearings for Hon. Brett Kavanaugh, Sen. Diane Feinstein (D-CA) claimed since December 14, 2012 that 273 school shootings in the US were attributed to "semi-automatic assault weapons." The actual number is 41 shootings on school property since 1982.) My position may be politically incorrect, but if we are all held to that standard, how many of us are now ineligible for any office (except in California)? Further, when did our elected representatives, elected by the people, for the people, to represent the people, become infallible leaders whose lies or mistakes after taking office matter less than those before election or appointments?

"Here is a trustworthy saying: Whoever aspires to be an overseer desires a noble task. Now the overseer is to be above reproach, faithful to his wife, temperate, self-controlled, respectable, hospitable, able to teach, not given to drunkenness, not violent but gentle, not quarrelsome, not a lover of money. He must manage his own family well and see that his children obey him, and he must do so in a manner worthy of full respect." (1 Timothy 3:1-4, NIV)

For Christians, politics may be unattainable, but is that really a bad thing? If we cannot get elected without compromising our walk with Christ, why would we even try? If the requirements of an elected official in these United States fall below those of an overseer in the Church, what makes politics more enticing than church leadership?

I say it is not more enticing nor is it more respected. I think our elected representatives have forgotten the simplicity that is servant leadership. "Not so with you. Instead, whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant" (Matt 20:26, NIV).

Meanwhile, at the same time our "leaders" in Washington argue the merits of Ms. Ford's accusations, Hurricane Florence decimated the East Coast, causing more than a dozen deaths and billions of dollars in damage as she flooded much of the southeastern seaboard. Near Fayetteville, North Carolina, the Cape Fear River rose to record flood stages, keeping busy over 1,000 search and rescue personnel. The Black River ran a foot higher than record flood stage on Monday night, and as Gov. Roy Cooper toured the devastation, Interstate 40 north of Wilmington looked more like a river than a highway.

Sadly, during this same crisis, the natural devastation was insufficient for the likes Mike Seidel of the Weather Channel. Seidel was caught dramatizing the effects of the wind in Wilmington, NC while a pair sauntered behind him on camera, the same wind having little or no effect. We are reminded of CNN Anchor Anderson Cooper's missteps while covering Hurricane Ike in 2008. The "This is Anderson Cooper" anchor and celebrated son of Gloria Vanderbilt was debunked by Snopes as having doctored the devastation by standing in a ditch, later defending his actions as an attempt to portray the danger while staying out of the path of emergency vehicles. While these anchors' intent may have been garnering more sympathy for those affected by Florence now, and Ike then, their methods further erode the faith Americans have in our media.

My point in all this is that we Christians must be better, and do better, than those around us with "trusted" status. Our elected officials lie to us every year. They make promises they never intend to keep, yet we elect them based on election-year rhetoric, not on their history or proven actions. Similarly, we post and retweet news stories without checking the facts. Both groups have proven, some with dramatic photographic evidence, that they cannot be trusted. Both groups have blackened the eye of many a "Christian" who failed to follow Christ's guidance to test everything, even the prophets (1 Thessalonians 5:21). Both have given us ample evidence to support one of the simplest of the Ten Commandments.

"Do not steal. Do not lie. Do not deceive one another." (Lev 19:11, NIV)

In today's age of 24-hour news where everyone carries a cellphone and camera, I could add, "or else you might be proven a fool."

By the way, my grandson is perfect in every way.

 Mark Klages is an influential contributor, a former US Marine and a lifelong teacher who focuses on applying a Christian worldview to everyday events. Mark blogs at https://maklagesl3.wixsite.com/website under the title "God Provides where Hate Divides," with a heart to heal social, political, relational, and intellectual wounds through God's divine love and grace. Mark can also be found on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mark-klages-04b42511/.
Over 70 Charlotte Churches of All Denominations Join Unity Sermon Series on the Gospel Christian Post Reporter | 20 September, 2018 by Brandon Showalter

Over 70 churches in Charlotte, North Carolina, have come together to declare in a unified sermon series what they are for, as opposed to what they are against.

"This whole thing started for us just out of relationship," said Chris Payne, the senior pastor of two vibrant churches that recently merged to become one congregation, in a phone interview with The Christian Post.

Payne, 41, leads New Charlotte Church, which he and his wife started in their living room eight years ago, and Church at Charlotte, a 50-year-old congregation in the city.

While with a pastor friend whom he goes running with on the weekends, the two ended up discussing the possibility of writing a set of sermons together and spoke of swapping pulpits in a demonstration of unity to the community. They proceeded and put together a simple four-part series and called it "For Charlotte."

"We wanted to let people know what we were for. A lot of times people know what the Church is against, but not really what we are for together."

"And we're for the Gospel; for the Church, capital-C church; we're for each other, our neighbors; and we're for our city."

Originally intended for just their two churches, they started sharing the idea with their respective circles of friends who decided they also wanted to be a part of it too. A local network of pastors and churches, which happens to be called "For Charlotte" also got on board and asked Payne if they, too, could promote the sermon series to their network.

Before long, 74 churches decided to participate and are preaching each of the messages on the first four Sundays in September.

Payne re-emphasized that he wants the whole city to know that togetherness prevails across denominational and racial lines  that despite differences, the church really is unified on common message.

"Sometimes what gets lost in the things that we do stand against is the message that 'well, the reason that we do stand against certain things is because of the things we're standing for."

"And sometimes our preferences get elevated above purpose. We kind of fall in love with our preferences and sometimes, even unintentionally, that becomes divisive and we separate because it," he replied, when asked why he believes the American church on the whole seems plagued with unnecessary divisions.

"We divide over worship styles and preaching styles, programming styles, and we sort of silo ourselves."

Pastors can fall into this trap, he added, and they do not always do a good job of building good friendships and community with other pastors who are different from us, but those relationships are where church unity starts.

He added: "I really would want to encourage pastors [participating in] this series that if they could take anything from it that it would be to reach out to somebody in your city that is not a part of your community and take them to lunch. And just listen, with no ulterior motive than 'I want to know you, and want to be known [by you].'"

Payne's church has also decided that even the community service activities they do will not be done alone; they always cooperate with other churches.

Before the sermon series began earlier this month the participating pastors assembled just to pray. They spent about an hour-and-a-half interceding for the city and for the church together.

Read more about For Charlotte on The Christian Post.
A professor at the University of Michigan is receiving backlash for refusing to write a recommendation letter for a student applying to study abroad in Israel.

Associate digital studies professor John Cheney-Lippold, initially agreed to write a recommendation letter for his student Abigail Ingber, but when he realized that she was applying to study in Israel he rescinded his offer.

In an email to Ingber he wrote, "I am very sorry, but I only scanned your first email a couple weeks ago and missed out on a key detail." He continued, "As you may know, many university departments have pledged an academic boycott against Israel in support of Palestinians living in Palestine. This boycott includes writing letters of recommendation for students planning to study there."

"I should have let you know earlier, and for that I apologize. But for reasons of these politics, I must rescind my offer to write your letter," he added.

Cheney-Lippold concluded the email saying hed "be happy" to write a letter for her under a different circumstance.

A copy of the email was posted on social media by Club Z, captioned, An unbelievable email from a University of Michigan professor, who has refused to write a letter of recommendation for a student because she will be studying abroad in Israel. We hope that the U.S. Department of Education will take note of this case, in light of their recently adopted definition of anti-Semitism, which includes double standard for Israel.

The post went viral, generating a lot of dislike toward the professor.

Facebook user RM Bellerose wrote, absolutely unbelievable. this professor is a miserable excuse for a human being.

Another person Hadassah Vered wrote, Wow, disgusting and shocking!

But the professor also garnered support from many people. Facebook user Filip Fracz said, I think this is a legitimate form of protest against the perpetual occupation of Palestine. Recommendation letters are a favor, not an obligation, and professors can do as they please.

The University of Michigan has spoken out about this issue saying that it rejects boycotts, sanctions, and divestments (BDS) against individual countries and people. In a statement released Monday, the school said, "It is disappointing that a faculty member would allow their personal political beliefs to limit the support they are willing to otherwise provide for our students.

The statement goes on to say, "While members of the University of Michigan community have a wide range of individual opinions on this and many other topics, the university has consistently opposed any boycott of Israeli institutions of higher education.

"No academic department or any other unit at the University of Michigan has taken a stance that departs from this long-held university position," the university added.

Many critics are saying Cheney-Lippolds decision was anti-Semitic, but he is adamantly denying these claims. In an interview with the Michigan Daily, he said, "I follow the idea that people who are being discriminated against or people who need help... I feel compelled to help them. I was following a call by representatives of Palestinian civil society to boycott Israel in a very similar tactical frame as South Africa. The idea is that I support communities who organize themselves and ask for international support to achieve equal rights, freedom and to prevent violations of international law.

CNB reports that the university will be having a "deep discussion [with faculty] to clarify how the expression of our shared values plays out in support of students."

Photo courtesy: Unsplash/Toa Heftiba
Last year an Albuquerque, New Mexico middle school, refused to allow a student to start a pro-life club, and are now facing legal action.

Reportedly, 8th grader Dylan Fredette asked the administration at his middle school numerous times for permission to launch a Students for Life group at Rio Rancho Middle School last year but was consistently denied the right to do so by the school's principal, Linda Kitts.

According to the Thomas More Society, which is representing Fredette, Kitts told the student that she could not allow the club because it would be too controversial and unfair to those who did not agree with him.

"Rio Rancho Middle School currently allows various non-curriculum clubs, including the Fellowship of Christian Athletes Club, Pay It Forward Club, and Chess Club. Kitts' only explanation to Dylan regarding her refusal to allow the club was that the group's message would be too controversial and not 'fair,'" Thomas More Society Special Counsel Joan Mannix noted.

"That basis for denial violates Dylan Fredette's rights under the First Amendment to the United States Constitution and Rio Rancho Public Schools' own policies," she said.

Purportedly, Principal Kitts has no memory of the conversation in November 2017.

CBN Reports, the president of Students for Life of America, Kristan Hawkins, seemed skeptical of the principals claims.

Hawkins said, "It is shameful that Rio Rancho Middle School, a taxpayer-funded school, has been discriminating against pro-life students for almost a full year now.

She continued, "The school has appallingly and disgustingly continued to throw up illegal obstacles in the way of students who want to start a group to reach out to their peers and educate them about the injustice of abortion."

"We strongly support the students who are fighting against their own school for their basic free-speech rights," Hawkins said, adding that the administrators are either "willfully ignorant or deliberately anti-free speech against pro-life students."

Fredettes attorneys have sent a letter to administrators informing the school that their actions are "unconstitutional and must be reversed."

Fredette's younger brother, Isaiah, is now a 7th grader at Rio Rancho Middle School and like his brother is working to start the pro-life club his older brother was denied.

"Should the school deny Isaiah Fredette's renewed request for permission to start Phoenixes for Life, that would similarly violate his constitutionally guaranteed liberties," Mannix said.

Photo courtesy: Pexels/Pixabay
While Andrew Brunson languished under Turkish detention this year, thousands of Iranians had death sentences suspended. A factor in both was international advocacy.

Brunson, an American evangelical pastor in Izmir (biblical Smyrna) for two decades, was arrested two years ago in the aftermath of a failed military coup. The government linked him with a Sufi Muslim network allegedly behind it.

The networks head, Fethullah Gulen, had long resided in Pennsylvania, and Turkey demanded a trade.

Many religious freedom advocates took up Brunsons cause. But White House advocacy brought the pastor to the worlds attention.

If Turkey does not take immediate action to free this innocent man of faith and send him home to America, the United States will impose significant sanctions on Turkey until [Brunson] is free, said Vice President Mike Pence in July at the US State Departments Ministerial to Advance Religious Freedom.

One day earlier, Brunson had been moved from prison to house arrest. It appeared a deal was in the works.

Whichever side reneged, Turkish President Recep Erdogan matched President Donald Trump blow-for-blow in the acrimonious rhetoric and economic sanctions that followed, making the chances for Brunsons near-term release appear remote.

Meanwhile, 5,000 Iranian prisoners have new leases on life. After years of pressure by the United Nations and human rights groups, Irans parliament amended laws demanding the death penalty for low-level narcotics trafficking.

Why did advocacy succeed for the drug dealers but not the pastor? And what should be made of Youcef Nadarkhani, the Iranian house church leader released in 2013 after much international advocacyonly to be ...

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Eight years ago, Francis Chan resigned as senior pastor of Cornerstone Community Church in Simi Valley, Californiathe church he helped grow from 30 people gathered in a living room to a multimillion-dollar ministry. He wasnt burned out. There was no disqualifying moral failure. Hed simply grown convicted over his challenges in steering a large ministry in accordance with biblical values.

Chan sold his house and spent a year traveling through Southeast Asia, visiting churches and interacting with church leaders. Returning to California, he began planting churches in his home and the homes of others in his San Francisco neighborhood. His latest book, Letters to the Church, is a pastoral call for American churches to consider whether their values and practices are consistent with Scripture. Writer and fellow Bay-area resident Rachael Starke spoke with Chan about the blessings that come from recommitting to church life as God designed it.

Your book exhorts churches to recommit to Acts 2 practices like extended prayer, radical love and service, and intimate fellowship within the home. But many of these run counter to the digitized lives we live today, especially in places like San Francisco. How have revolutions in technology influenced American church practices and habits?

Technology is really about speed: doing everything faster and with less effort. Were tempted to want the church to be the same waylet me accomplish what I want in as little time as possible. But the blessing is going to come from the work itself, from the hard work you do to love and serve one another. What could be greater than that?

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Trump administration says Christians in Iraq face genocide; only 18 have been allowed to resettle in America this year.

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Image: csakisti / Getty

A maximum of 30,000 refugees will be allowed to resettle in the United States next fiscal year. The new ceiling imposed by the Trump administration marks a dramatic decrease from this fiscal years 45,000-person cap, which had also been a significant reduction.

For three decades before that, the US resettlement ceiling hadnt dropped below 70,000.

The policy shift was announced by US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Monday; evangelical and Catholic advocates for refugees were quick to push back.

This repeated reduction in the number of refugees allowed into the US is incredibly troubling, said World Relief CEO Tim Breene following Pompeos announcement. Not only is it a continuation of a series of unprecedented attacks on our American values and on the humanitarian nature of the refugee resettlement program, but it falls far short of helping the large number of vulnerable people around the world.

Joe S. Vasquez, chair of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops Committee on Migration, called the decrease deeply disturbing and said it leaves many human lives in danger.

To cut off protection for many who are fleeing persecution, at a time of unprecedented global humanitarian need, contradicts who we are as a nation, he said.

Pompeo, who initially argued to keep the number stable at 45,000, defended the administrations change, asserting it was actually a positive reflection of American values.

Our proposal of resettling up to 30,000 refugees under a new ceiling reflects the United Statess longstanding record as the most generous nation in the world for protection-based immigration and assistance, he said.

The feud over resettlement numbers comes as the number of displaced people worldwide reaches record highs. According to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, there are 68.5 million displaced people in the world today, more than 28 million of whom are considered refugees or asylum-seekers.

Already in the United States, record-low numbers of refugees are being resettled.

Despite a refugee cap of 45,000 for the current fiscal year, which ends September 30, the US is on track to welcome less than 22,000 refugees.

In August, the leaders who make up the Evangelical Immigration Table (EIT)including the presidents of the National Association of Evangelicals, World Relief, and the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC)argued against future cuts.

In a letter to government officials, including Pompeo and ambassador-at-large for international religious freedom Sam Brownback, the EIT expressed deep concern about the impact on international religious freedom of recent changes in the US refugee resettlement program.

Citing the dramatic downward trend in resettlement numbers over the last year, EIT leaders, as well as more than 400 pastors and lay leaders who signed onto the letter, urged the US government to resume refugee resettlement at a level consistent with historical norms. They also recommended returning the refugee ceiling to 75,000.

The SBCs Russell Moore said yesterday the drop should be a shock to the conscience of all Americans.

As a Christian, I am concerned for the well-being of all those in peril, he said. And I stand in solidarity with my brothers and sisters in Christ in the persecuted church, many of whom will be harmed by this closed door.

Scott Arbeiter, EIT leader and president of World Relief, said yesterday the downturn doesnt reflect the capacity or willingness of Americans to welcome refugees and that this decision contradicts the administrations declared commitment to helping persecuted Christian and religious minorities in dangerous and oppressive countries.

The decay of Americas refugee program has proven stark for persecuted Christians and other religious minorities around the world, especially in the Middle East where, in places, they endure genocide at the hands of the Islamic State and face the blockade of President Trumps ongoing travel ban.

During the first six months of 2016, nearly 1,600 Christians from the Middle East were admitted to the United States. In the first half of 2018, only 23 were let in, according to the EIT letter.

In short, cuts to our refugee admission program affect all persecuted religious minorities, the letter reads, but these cuts significantly impact our persecuted brothers and sisters in Christ.

Using the latest State Department data, World Reliefs US director of church mobilization Matthew Soerens analyzed the withering of the countrys refugee resettlement.

As of September 11, the US had let in just shy of 11,000 Christian refugees, he found. During the same period in 2016, more than 27,000 Christian refugees were welcomed. The numbers are even harsher for Muslims, who have seen a 92 percent decline in the number of refugees resettled in the US between 2016 and 2018.

Based on Soerenss analysis, Christian refugee admissions are plunging as only 18 Iraqi, 9 Syrian, and 5 Iranian believers have been accepted into the US so far this calendar year.

Looking at the 11 countries Open Doors USA identifies as those where Christians face the most extreme persecution, only 699 Christians refugees from those nations have been allowed to resettle in the Land of the Free in 2018. Thats a 70 percent decrease from the 2,272 Christians resettled from those countries in the same period in 2016.

During a September 12 press call with the EIT and leading advocates for Americas resettlement programs, Jenny Yang, senior vice president of advocacy and policy for World Relief, spoke out against the shrinking resettlement ceiling for its effect on persecuted peoples around the globe.

The drastic decline in refugee resettlement over the past couple years has meant that far fewer persecuted people, including those persecuted for their Christian faith, have been able to find safety and religious freedom in the US, she said. A further cut to the ceiling for refugee resettlement would harm even more people persecuted for their faith.

Nathan Bult, director of government affairs for Bethany Christian Services, echoed the sentiment. Every refugee has a name, every refugee has a story, and every refugee matters to God  that means every refugee should matter to us, he said.

Many on the call, which came prior to the official ceiling drop, and many others since have called for the president to raise the resettlement ceiling back to 75,000.

Galen Carey, the vice president of government relations for the National Association of Evangelicals, is among them.

Over the past 40 years, American evangelical Christians have opened their hearts and homes to hundreds of thousands of refugees, including many persecuted believers who would otherwise not be alive today, he said. This extraordinary ministry of mercy has nearly ground to a halt as the sharp reduction in refugee resettlement approvals has left tens of thousands of refugees stranded in dangerous refugee camps and settlements. We can and must do much better than this.

In a statement from the Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service (LIRS), its vice president for programs Kay Bellor described the administrations actions as endangering lives when we stand ready to welcome those who seek refuge into our communities.

Pompeo held the line. He said the decision reflects the current administrations desire to see refugees resettled closer to their home countries. He also pointed to the nations larger immigration program, redirecting focus from refugees abroad to asylum-seekers already here.

According to Pompeo, the policy change is also a security decision. He noted the governments duty to responsibly vet refugee candidates to thwart potential threats to the United States.

Looking ahead, scores of Christian leaders and advocates passionate about refugee issues will gather in Sarajevo for the 17th Refugee Highway Partnership, a roundtable happening in February for practitioners and influencers working on behalf of refugees and the gospel.

More than 60 Christian groups will unite to collaborate and press the case of refugees and migrants in the face of mounting political opposition.

CT previously examined how fewer persecuted Christians are finding refuge in the US.
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Conflict is unavoidable. Conflict happens between husbands and wives, parents and kids, brothers and sisters, Democrats and Republicans, employees and supervisors, CEOs and boards, pastors and leaders in the church, people on social media, and a myriad of other ways.

Sadly, conflict is just one click or thoughtless response away.

In this explosive culture in America, motives are challenged endlessly. Trust in relationships is not earned easily. Criticism of others is ruthless. Cynicism is applauded loudly. Leaders are under detailed scrutiny.

With as many conflicts as we endure, one might think people really are not that concerned with it, content to live with fractured relationships and just move on. I do not believe this is the case.

People Want Conflict Resolved, but do Not Know How

A few years ago, I read that eighty-five percent of people surveyed said they wanted to resolve conflict between themselves and others. The percentage may not be this high in America any longer, but I am certain people do not like to live in conflict.

So why do people not resolve conflict? Why do they let their anger simmer into a rage, privately or publicly? I believe this occurs because they just do not know the actions to take to see it resolved.

How to Resolve Conflict in an Explosive Culture

There is no easy way to resolve conflict, but there are some actions we can take to confront it and live through it.

Be Willing to Take Responsibility

We know that people do not want to live in conflict and want to see it resolved. What we see in the media indicates that no one wants to take responsibility for conflict. However, I believe most people live a life that we do not see on television, through social media, or on the Internet.

I believe people want to see their personal conflicts resolved and are at least willing to consider taking full or partial responsibility for it.

Let me encourage you to take responsibility for conflict. It may not be easy and you may have to swallow your pride. If you are honest with yourself, do you really want to continue feeling the way you feel while living in conflict when you could resolve it and live in personal freedom? I know the answer, and I think you do as well.

While the situation or the relationship may never be the same, take responsibility for the conflict. You have to live with yourself for the rest of your life. The situation or relationship may not be life-long, but the effects of unresolved conflict can follow you.

God commends harmony and we should stop minimizing it. Stop letting the politics of today poison you. Refuse to take on the anger that others feel. This is your life to live. Refuse to live your life in conflict. Be willing to take responsibility for it.

Choose to Forgive and Let it Go

When we bear grudges, our ability to lead others down the path of forgiveness is hindered. Do you want your children and grandchildren, your colleagues in business, your brothers and sisters in Christ, to walk in the lane of unforgiveness and bitterness? Do you want this to be your legacy?

We can learn, practice, and teach what the Scripture says about forgiveness. Our offenses against God are far greater than anyone's offenses against us. Jesus Christ forgives us from all our offenses against God and we should forgive the offenses that others may have committed toward us. Let it go.

When we practice forgiveness, we can become conduits of reconciliation with and for others. Because unresolved conflict is so damaging, we as believers should be catalysts to help others.

Encourage others to take their next step and to be willing to take responsibility for conflict. Encourage them to set an appointment to deal with it, through a phone call if appropriate, or in person if needed. If things are difficult, appeal for a third person to help you resolve it.

Just resolve it. Forgive and let it go.

Resolve to Live as a Peacemaker

While America may applaud those who yell the loudest, you are not a television camera that follows the latest conflict somewhere. You are a person. You need to live as a peacemaker.

Jesus said, "The peacemakers are blessed, for they will be called sons of God" (Matthew 5:9, HCSB). Living like a peacemaker exemplifies the gospel and the gospel life so much more than condemnatory or suspicious words, or a social media rant that fans the fire of conflict.

Resolve to live as a peacemaker. This is the gospel way.

Originally posted at ronniefloyd.com
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While the winds of Hurricane Florence howled and the torrents of rain fell, I happened upon Psalm 93:3-4 in my daily reading of Scripture.

"The floods have lifted up, O Lord,

The floods have lifted up their voice;

The floods lift up their waves.

The Lord on high is mightier

Than the noise of many waters,

Than the mighty waves of the sea."

The aftermath of Florence is extraordinary. Thirty-three have died. Nearly 300,000 people are still without power, but that's down from 1.4 million. The Cape Fear River is set to crest at 62 feet. There are 1,100 state roads that remain closed because of the flooding. Eighteen counties have major federal disaster declarations, and still, others are expected to follow. There are 73 states of emergency still active. Seventy-seven shelters remain open with about 10,000 people. Over 5,500 pigs and 3.4 million chickens have been lost to the flood waters. Four hog lagoons have been compromised, while 13 are overflowing and 55 are close to spilling over. Crops of peanuts, cotton, and tobacco have been lost. In some cities, thousands and thousands of gallons of wastewater have spilled into various tributaries, streams, and rivers. Damages have been estimated at around $17 billion. North Carolina's Governor, Roy Cooper, warns that 16 major rivers are at flood stage and that even though the storm has passed, it's far from over.

"The floods have lifted up, O Lord,

The floods have lifted up their voice;

The floods lift up their waves."

Indeed, the flood waters are lifted up, way up! But, adds the Psalmist, "The Lord on high is mightier than the noise of many waters, than the mighty waves of the sea."

It was by his mighty power that the Lord, after the great universal deluge of Noah's day, commanded the waters to go back to their places. It was the Lord who rebuked the Red Sea, and it became dry land. It was the Lord who effortlessly drove back the waters of the Jordan for the Israelites to pass through, and with equal ease can do the same again.

What we have witnessed reminds us that after our many achievements, after our incredible advances in technology, medicine, transportation, communication, and other human endeavors, we are still merely mortals subject to the basest of earth's elements. We are exceedingly small and vulnerable in creation's scheme.

Governor Cooper was right when he recently told the news media, "We'll get through this. North Carolinians are a resilient people."

Nevertheless, let us guard against this becoming an occasion for pride. It is the Lord, and the Lord alone, who "is mightier than the noise of many waters, than the mighty waves of the sea." The monstrous whirlwind ought to teach us humility and lead us to acknowledge that not only is he sovereign over the lash of the storm, the rush of the prodigious rivers, the immense waves that roar, but that he should also be sovereign over our hearts.

In his commentary on Psalm 93 in "The Treasury of David," Charles Spurgeon said that our sin, our rebellion, our unwillingness to submit to Christ's Lordship is also much like a tempest. He eloquently wrote:

"The ungodly are all foam and fury, noise and bluster, during their little hour, and then the tide turns or the storm is hushed, and we hear no more of them; while the Kingdom of the eternal abides in the grandeur of its power."

Pastor Browning Ware once said, "Our worst circumstances may be God's best opportunity to bring new meaning to our lives." God can literally and figuratively calm the storm and flood waters of life, if we will look to him in faith.

We may pass through the storm safely. The sun comes out again and eventually we may recover everything lost in the hurricane. But, if we miss the opportunity the storm gives for seeing the hand of God and experiencing his grace and mercy, failing to recognize his right to benevolently rule over us, we will suffer a loss on the Day of Judgment which can never be recovered, even the loss of our own souls. Natural disasters are only for a season. Death beyond death, cut-off from God forever by the treacherous waters of his wrath, is disastrous beyond compare.

If you will listen carefully, you can hear "the floods have lifted up their voice." There may be many messages in their sound. One message, however, is dominant. The voices from the wind and water instruct:

"You desperately need God. He reigns over everything. All power in heaven and earth belongs to him. Therefore, humble yourself before him. Turn away from your sins. Believe with your whole heart in Christ and follow the Lord. Christ will calm the troubled waters of your spirit, deliver you from the Evil One's temptations when they come in like a flood, and command the waters of affliction not to overwhelm you in this life or the mighty winds of his justice to blow you away like chaff in the next."

Dr. Mark Creech is a North Carolinian and directs the Raleigh-based Christian Action League of North Carolina.
Bono meets the Pope, says he's 'aghast' over sex abuse scandal

U2 frontman Bono was at the Vatican last week for a meeting with the pope during which the two discussed the sex abuse scandal plaguing the Catholic Church.

Bono met the pope during a visit to the Vatican to sign an agreement between his charity, ONE, and the Scholas Occurentes educational charity.

Bono told reporters that some of the issues they discussed during their private meeting included sustainable development and 'the wild beast that is capitalism', the Associated Press reports.

The sex abuse scandal rocking the Church also arose during the meeting and Bono said they discussed his feelings on the matter.

Although he did not disclose the pope's exact comments from the meeting, Bono said 'you can see the pain in his face, and I felt he was sincere'.

He added that Pope Francis was 'aghast' about sex abuse in the Catholic Church.

Bono told reporters: 'I explained to him how it looks to some people like the abusers are being more protected than the victims.'

Nonetheless, Bono said the pope was 'an extraordinary man for extraordinary times'.

The pope has come under fire over his handling of the scandal around abuse and subsequent cover-ups by leaders in the Church. The crisis extends across multiple countries, including the US, Chile, Ireland and Australia.

Some critics feel that the pope has not done enough to address the scandal and one former Vatican official has called for his resignation, claiming that the pope knew of allegations of abuse by a US cardinal.

A new Gallup poll found that the pope's approval ratings have taken a tumble in the past few weeks in the US, where investigations into abuse have dominated recent headlines.

The percentage of Americans who view Pope Francis favourably fell from 66 per cent in August to 53 per cent this month.
Faith leaders urge international action for internally displaced persons

Dozens of faith leaders have urged heads of state not to turn their backs on the world's 40.5 million internally displaced people.

Their call comes ahead of the creation of the new Global Compact on Refugees, an international instrument that will be signed at the United Nations General Assembly in New York this month.

The Compact applies only to people who have been forced to flee across borders. However, according to Christian Aid, the majority of those displaced within their own countries are 'often woefully ignored and abandoned by their countries' leaders'.

Driven from their homes by violence or natural disasters such as floods or earthquakes, they lack the support international law provides for cross-border refugees.

More than 50 leaders from different faiths have signed an open letter challenging UN member governments about the exclusion of the 40.5 million people from the Global Compact. The letter argues that if the world is to realise the UN's Sustainable Development Goals, internally displaced people are neither forgotten nor ignored. Christian Aid's chief executive Amanda Mukwashisaid: 'If not at the United Nations, then where will the voice of internally displaced women, men and children be heard? Where can their issues be dealt with? Who will bring together global efforts and resources so that they are not left behind?'

World Jewish Relief's chief executive Paul Anticoni said: 'World Jewish Relief recognises that there are now unimaginable numbers of people fleeing conflict and persecution, and becoming displaced within their own countries. These people are often hidden, denied access to support and protection, and extremely vulnerable. We join our fellow faith-based agencies in calling for greater support and assistance to prevent, mitigate and respond to this scourge on humanity.'

The letter is being published ahead of the UN Advisory Council on Faith's inaugural meeting tomorrow in New York. Among other signatories are bishops and archbishops of the Church of England and Church in Wales, Baptist, Methodist and ecumenical leaders, and representatives of the All Africa Conference of Churches.
Government launches inquiry after dramatic rise in number of transgender referrals among children

The Government has launched an inquiry into why there has been an over 4,000 percent increase in children seeking to "transition" to the opposite sex.

The available data says that young people referred for "gender treatment" has increased from 97 in 20092010 to 2,510 in 20172018, a 4,415 percent increase in less than a decade, the UK Express reported Sunday.

Equalities Minister Penny Mordaunt has asked officials to investigate the reasons for the skyrocketing rise, particularly the role of social media and its influence over how girls think about the subject.

Girls are more likely to seek to "transition" than boys.

Whereas only 40 girls were referred for such treatment nine years ago, that figure is now 1,806, a 4,515 percent increase. The number of boys rose from 56 to 713 in that same time span. In 20172018, 45 of those children referred were ages 6 or younger, with the youngest at only 4.

"Some educationalists have previously warned that the promotion of transgender issues in schools has 'sown confusion' in children's minds and that encouraging children to question gender has 'become an industry,' the Telegraph reported.

"Dr. Joanna Williams, author of the book Women vs Feminism, has said that schools are 'encouraging even the youngest children to question whether they are really a boy or a girl,' the Telegraph added.

Eight hundred dysphoric children in England were injected with puberty blocking drugs last year, including some as young as 10 years old.

Many doctors and researchers are increasingly concerned about the long-term effects of these chemicals, which include not only puberty blockers but cross-sex hormones, on young people.

Lucy Griffin, a consultant psychiatrist at Bristol Royal Infirmary, admitted she was "extremely worried" about this and has warned that these treatments cause osteoporosis, yield sexual dysfunction, and can render their bodies sterile.

Other experts say the rapid growth of minors seeking hormones and surgery is in part because of a social contagion known as rapid onset gender dysphoria, a phenomenon exacerbated by an internet culture of websites like Reddit and YouTube where other young trans-identified people celebrate and being transgender and all of the social and medical transition processes involved.

Young people who are struggling psychologically with their bodies often find validation online and then self-diagnose as transgender and begin demanding to transition. And some youth are indeed proceeding with it.

The Federalist reported last week that in the United States, girls as young as 13 are undergoing mastectomies for gender dysphoria and that federal tax dollars are being used to fuel ideologically skewed research on the use of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones in children.

In one such study funded by a $5.7 million National Institutes of Health grant, Dr. Johanna Olson of Children's Hospital Los Angeles dismisses the possibility that gender dysphoria might stem from psychological disturbance, insisting that the only relevant "mental health issue" is how "the outside world responds" to the confused youth. Gender dysphoric youth will experience "wrong puberty," she says, unless she and other like-minded people intervene early enough to "put them through the right puberty."

These and related issues are arguably the most bitterly contested matters in contemporary politics in both the U.K. and U.S. Opposition to these medical practices spans the political spectrum.

Meanwhile, academic research counter to the transgender narrative in favor of transitioning minors is subjected to intense pushback.

As The Christian Post reported Aug. 30, Brown University in Rhode Island scrubbed an article from its website following protests from transactivists. The article was about the research of Lisa Littman, a faculty member who published a peer-reviewed study on rapid onset gender dysphoria in a scientific journal.

Littman's research explored the possibility of peer pressure that could contribute to some teens and young adults assuming that they are transgender, and as a result undergo permanent surgical procedures they may regret.

Her study also notes the role of the internet in furthering gender confusion among teenagers, citing parents of dysphoric children who when surveyed described "clusters of gender dysphoria outbreaks occurring in pre-existing friend groups with multiple or even all members of a friend group becoming gender dysphoric and transgender-identified in a pattern that seems statistically unlikely."

The parents in Littman's study reported that excessive social media use and "binge-watching" YouTube videos about transitioning were often the precursor to these outbreaks.

This article was originally published in The Christian Post and is re-published here with permission
'I do not have an enemy': An Israeli pastor's powerful testimony of forgiveness after the death of his son

There's no greater tragedy for a parent than to lose a child. But the blow that struck a pastor and his wife from a village near Nazareth has led to the gospel being shared in a powerful way as their testimonies have gone viral.

Michael and Lubna had one child, their son Jonathan, born after several years of marriage. Aged only 24, Jonathan was living with his parents, who had arrived home after a week's holiday in Sinai. When Jonathan drove home, he became involved in an altercation with some men over parking his car. It escalated into a fight in which Jonathan was stabbed and killed. His parents had to watch him bleed to death.

At the funeral, Michael shared a heartbreaking public prayer in front of his son's body. He thanked God for his goodness and for his perfect will, even though he admitted he did not understand why he had allowed it to happen.

The short video of his prayer was posted on Facebook and shared by many people, who were astonished by the faith of this man.

The story has been told by Bader Mansour, an executive with the Association of Baptist Churches in Israel, for the Come and See website.

He says: 'I was able to visit Michael and Lubna with a group of pastors from the area. We came to pay our condolences and to encourage them. One of the pastors shared about grief, and we all prayed and also sang "He is Lord" and "You are good for all".

'But the real encouragement came from Michael himself, who told us that God's will is perfect even if we can't understand it right now. I hugged him on the way out and told him he is a hero of faith and I promised to continue lifting him up in prayer.'

The story, however, doesn't end there. According to Bader, violence has been increasing in Israel and this is not the first murder in the area this year. In the case of a murder in an Arab village, a ritual of reconciliation called 'Sulha' is followed in parallel with the formal criminal law system. Within days, dignified people from the wider community ('Jaha') will intervene in order to avoid the possibility of riots or revenge erupting, and to work on restoring peace and declaring reconciliation ('Sulha').

The Sulha dignitaries came to meet with Michael a few days after the murder. They had been visiting every murder scene all over the country, trying to restore peace based on this ancient tradition, and they had naturally been exhausted by the pain involved in such cases.

Families who have lost their loved ones in such tragic circumstances usually refuse attempts to reconcile and reserve the right to take revenge. The Jaha put considerable pressure on the families to encourage them seek a path of reconciliation.

The bereaved families may also ask for a large sum of money as a symbolic compensation for their pain, and sometimes ask that the whole family of the murderer be evacuated from the village forever.

When these men arrived at Michael's house, tens of relatives and neighbours gathered in the yard to hear Michael's demand for restoring peace, at the same very spot where his son was slaughtered less than a week ago.

Bader says: 'Michael gave a five-minute speech that shocked many of them. He told the group that he forgave the murderers and has no demands to make of them. He said that he would like to share something with them, and proceeded to speak about the love of Jesus who he follows and serves. He said that he has been walking with the Lord for 38 years and is not going to be shaken because of circumstances, as hard as they might be.

'He then explained that we have all sinned and need to repent. He said, "I do not have an enemy" and that forgave the murderers because this is what his Lord taught him, and that it was not an act of weakness.

'He also approached his extended family in the crowd  some of whom were outraged because of the murder  and asked them to calm down so as not to ruin the testimony that was built over years, and to let the judicial system handle the case.'

Bader continues: 'Suddenly, one of the dignitaries, a Muslim Imam from a large mosque in Acre, came to Michael and said: "This is faith, real faith," kissing him on his forehead as a sign of deep respect. The chairman of the Sulha committee was also astonished by Michael's reaction. He told the audience that he had been visiting bereaved families all over the country from the far north to the deep south, but had not met a man like this.'

The encounter was videoed and shared on social media. Michael has been invited to speak on the radio and on online news websites  and he speaks about Jesus. He talks about when he and Lubna named Jonathan as they did (it means 'God gave') and quotes Job: 'The LORD gave and the LORD has taken away; may the name of the LORD be praised.' He says Jonathan is enjoying eternity with the Heavenly Father. He explains why he has chosen to forgive  a stance, says Bader, uncommon in Israeli society.

And Bader says: 'In a traumatised society that has suffered lately from violence and revenge, Michael sharing the good news has been like "cold water to a weary soul". Suddenly love and forgiveness were recognised as a response to hatred and revenge, and as a cure to the violence in the society. The name of the Lord has been glorified by many as they have seen that it is only through the changing power of Jesus that we are able to love our enemies, as Michael demonstrated.'

Police have apprehended nine suspects and investigations into the killing are ongoing. Meanwhile, Michael is continuing to share the good news of Jesus.

'Because of his stand for Christ and his living testimony, people from different backgrounds want to know more about the reason for the hope that he has, and he has even been able to lead several people to accept Christ as their personal Saviour  in the same place where Christ's earthly ministry took place 2,000 years ago.'
Pakistani Christian killed in acid attack

A young Pakistani Christian has died after an acid attack, according to International Christian Concern (ICC).

Faraz Badar, a hospital assistant administration officer, died in hospital in Lahore on Saturday. He was 26.

Unidentified attackers sprayed acid on him in his home town of Gujranwala, the second time he had been attacked.

His father Badar Masih told ICC: 'A few months back, Faraz was beaten by some men who were covering their faces. However, we did not report it to the police, as Christians are often not heard in police stations.'

He said: 'My son was targeted for his Christian faith. I don't think we, the Christians, are safe in Pakistan. However, it is our country and we love it with our soul and spirit. We won't seek refuge.'

His mother told ICC: 'Faraz often complained that some of his Muslim staff members were unhappy with his excellent performance and they disliked Faraz for his honesty and Christian background.'

She said: 'My son was running my kitchen. He was very gentle to everyone in the vicinity. He had no enmity. He was an active member of the church. However, he was usually not given a day off to go to church for Sunday prayer service.

'We [still] want justice from the government.'

Christians are a tiny minority in Pakistan and face frequent discrimination and assaults.

Social activist Ayube Qaiser told ICC: 'It is sad to note that increasing religious hatred and intolerance manifesting in different incidents is making life unbearable for religious minorities in the country. Their trust in the state as a protected citizen is being damaged badly. Often Christians are not accepted by their Muslim colleagues. They face different false allegations until they are removed from their post...This particular case is simply target killing on account of religious motivation.'
Young woman stabbed to death while jogging in Washington, DC was 'devout Christian'

The family of a young woman stabbed to death while taking an evening jog in Washington, DC are struggling to make sense of what police are calling a random attack.

Wendy K Martinez had just become engaged last week, according to her family. She was jogging close to her home in the Logan Circle area of the city when she was stabbed.

Distressing footage showed her running into a takeaway shop moments after the attack at around 8pm on Tuesday night. Patrons at the carry-out tried to help but were unable to save her.

In a statement, her family praised her as 'the light of our lives' and a 'devout Christian'.

'Wendy Karina Martinez was the light of our lives. Not only was she an avid runner, but she was a devout Christian, a wonderful friend, and a driven professional. Everything you hope that a daughter and a friend could be. She was also excited to be planning her upcoming wedding to her fiance, Daniel Hincapie. They were engaged just last week,' the statement read.

The 35-year-old was chief of staff at the DC-based technology and management company, Fiscal Note, which expressed its shock over her death on Twitter.

'The entire FiscalNote family is shocked and deeply saddened to learn that Wendy Martinez, our Chief of Staff, was killed last night,' the company said. 'Wendy was an invaluable member of our team and a vibrant member of the community. Our thoughts and prayers are with Wendy's family and friends.'

The entire FiscalNote family is shocked and deeply saddened to learn that Wendy Martinez, our Chief of Staff, was killed last night. Wendy was an invaluable member of our team and a vibrant member of the community. Our thoughts and prayers are with Wendys family and friends.  FiscalNote (@FiscalNote) September 19, 2018

A picture posted to the Fiscal Note Twitter page last month showed Martinez and other staff volunteering at the DC Central Kitchen, which provides meals for homeless shelters. The caption posted with the photo was a quote from Martinez on the importance of supporting the local community.

"Supporting the family is a value that extends beyond the @FiscalNote, it means supporting the community in which we live in and are headquartered. Happy to have volunteered today at @dcck " Wendy Martinez, Chief of Staff pic.twitter.com/il5zV9myzS  FiscalNote (@FiscalNote) August 16, 2018

A $25,000 reward is being offered for information leading to an arrest as the suspect remains at large. Police are looking for a man in a yellow shirt seen close to the scene in video footage.

According to local news channel Fox 5, authorities believe it was a random attack and that Martinez was not known to the suspect.

DC Police Chief Peter Newsham said the attack was 'very disturbing'.

'You have a young woman out here exercising... in a very safe neighborhood,' he said. 'You have a lot of people out here, who are enjoying dinner across the street. It's unsettling.'
All the pulsations of a person: Bacons Figure in Movement

Held for 41 years in the prestigious collection of Magnus Konow and offered in London on 4 October, this 1972 painting  shot through with the memory of Francis Bacons muse and lover, George Dyer  is a poignant meditation on the human condition

Executed in 1972, Figure in Movement takes its place among an extraordinary group of works  including the celebrated Black Triptychs  painted in the aftermath of George Dyers tragic death the previous year. Dyer had taken his own life shortly before the opening of Bacons triumphant retrospective at the Grand Palais in Paris. In the decades that followed, his likeness would come to haunt the artists work more powerfully than ever before. With nods to Michelangelo and Muybridge, Figure in Movement transforms Dyers distinctive features into a commentary on the fleeting nature of life. The newspaper, demonstrating the artists early use of Letraset, functions as a memento mori of sorts. As the figures writhing form threatens to dissolve into oblivion, he clasps it to his face, as if desperately trying to remain in the present. Scrambled letters, evocative of Picassos Cubist collages, spill onto the floor beside him, like fragments from a discarded novel.

For Bacon, who devoured literature and mythology, the story of Dyers death was as epic and profound as any of the great tragedies he read. Set against a geometric abyss, the present figure is captured in a state of transition: from the realm of reality to that of fiction, memory and legend. Magnus Konow, a Norwegian collector based in Monaco, purchased Figure in Movement on 5 May 1977  just five years after its creation  and it was to be the first of four significant Bacon canvases that he acquired as a young man during the 1970s.

Dyers spectral likeness is an ode to carnal pleasure: Bacon revels in the act of caressing, deforming and moulding his pigment

Konow had first encountered Bacons work on the cover of Esquire magazine, and was struck by its sense of chaos. His fascination with the artist would ultimately develop into a friendship. Bacon would regularly travel from Paris to visit him in Monaco, where he indulged in his passion for gambling in the casinos of Monte Carlo. Included in Bacons 1983 touring retrospective in Japan, as well as his 2016 exhibition at the Grimaldi Forum in Monaco, Figure in Movement demonstrates the new artistic directions he pursued during the 1970s. The period following Dyers death saw him move away from the portraits of his Soho circle that dominated his practice during the 1960s, gravitating instead towards dark, existential meditations on mortality. Channelling the influence of sculpture, photography and film, his figures took on a new intensity, captured in states of contortion and transformation. In Figure in Movement, Dyers spectral likeness is an ode to carnal pleasure: Bacon revels in the physical act of caressing, deforming and moulding his pigment, as if modelling clay with his bare hands. Piercing flashes of white and pink chart the contours of his body, while swarming passages of black propel his quivering form into three dimensions. While the upper half of the figure exudes the solid presence of a marble bust, his lower half blurs into a dizzying, holographic whirl that flickers like a moving image. In counterpoint with this brushwork, Bacon constructs an abstract chamber from flat, intersecting blocks of colour, creating a complex spatial interplay.

Also from Magnus Konows collection, Francis Bacon (1909-1992), Study for Portrait, painted in 1977. 78 x 58 in (198.2 x 147.7 cm). Sold for $49,812,500 on 17 May 2018 at Christies in New York  The Estate of Francis Bacon. All rights reserved. DACS 2018

The endurance of Dyers form in Bacons art is a testament to the vital, complex nature of their relationship. The pair had met almost exactly eight years previously in a pub in Soho, where the artist was drinking with the photographer John Deakin. A troubled character, Dyer was physically commanding yet emotionally vulnerable, and provided Bacon with a fascinating character study, becoming both his lover and his muse. Their relationship was tempestuous, punctuated by bouts of violence and anger. Towards the end of the 1960s, their affections became increasingly strained: a source of great sadness to Bacon, particularly in the immediate aftermath of Dyers death. Tragically, Deakin also passed away in 1972: another great loss for the artist, who was called upon to identify his body. Bacon had always been fascinated by the camera as a means of engaging with reality, preferring to work from Deakins snapshots rather than from life. Seen in the context of the photographers death, as well as Dyers, Figure in Movement takes on subtle new layers of meaning. The interior apparatus recalls that of a studio, or perhaps the inside of a camera. The space-frame, used throughout Bacons oeuvre, resembles the chinagraph markings used by photographers to indicate areas for enlargement.

When I look at you across the table, I don't only see you but I see a whole emanation which has to do with personality and everything else  Francis Bacon
More than 50 protesters confronted police outside of the Mission police station in San Francisco following the arrest of a Bay Area activist Wednesday who residents said was taken into custody for videoing police mistreatment of a black youth.

Ilyich Sato, a rapper also known as Equipto, and the youth were arrested after 6 p.m. on Valencia Street in a chaotic scene that was filled with tense confrontations between residents and police. Sato was released hours later, as protesters crowded outside the Mission station, shouting at police and accusing them of brutality and unfairness.

It all began, witnesses told The Chronicle, as members of the Black and Brown Social Club were meeting on Valencia Street to discuss police brutality against people of color. During the meeting, participants heard a thud outside and saw police arresting the youth across the street, in front of Everlane, a womens boutique.

Sato said he began videoing the police as they pinned the youth on the sidewalk.

He was handcuffed on his back and he started slightly moving a little, Sato said of the black youth. Thats when Sato said police began getting aggressive with the youth, infuriating bystanders, who began shouting at officers and confronting them about their actions.

Tensions escalated when police arrested Sato and took him down on his stomach, he and witnesses said.

The more I said that I couldnt breathe, the more it was hurting, Sato said after he was released. They had me in a hog-tied position.

Officer Joseph Tomlinson, a public information officer with the San Francisco Police Department, could not say why Sato was arrested. Police did not release information on the arrest of the youth.

Outside the Mission station after his release, Sato told The Chronicle that arresting officers told him that he was detained for resisting arrest, but that officials declined to provide why he was originally placed under arrest.

Kevin Williams, a witness who had been attending the meeting, said he heard Sato say get your hands off of my mother before police arrested him.

Videos posted to social media show the confrontation between residents and multiple officers who were standing around a male who was face-down on the sidewalk on Valencia Street.

Earlier in the night, as Sato was still detained by police, dozens of protesters swelled outside of the Mission station chanting power to the people.

When Sato walked out of the station, he embraced his mother and was welcomed by cheers.

At one point, police closed off Valencia Street in front of the station as the crowd outside grew, with people shouting, Who do you serve? Who do you protect?

Sato has led hunger strikes at the steps of San Francisco police stations in recent years in response to fatal officer-involved shootings and allegations of police brutality in the area.

He called for former San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee to fire then-San Francisco Police Chief Greg Suhr in 2016 after a number of officers were accused of sending racist, sexist homophobic and anti-Semitic text messages.

Gwendolyn Wu and Lauren Hernandez are San Francisco Chronicle staff writers. Email: gwendolyn.wu@sfchronicle.com; lauren.hernandez@sfchronicle.com
A striking 30 percent of parking spots go unused during peak workday times, a new parking study shows.

Dallas-based Granite Properties conducted the study of 23 properties totaling 7 million square feet of space in its office building portfolio in Dallas, Houston, Atlanta, Denver and southern California.

From January through May, property managers studied garage usage every day for two weeks. They chose weeks without holidays and the study ended before the start of summer vacation season.

LISTEN: On the newest Looped In podcast, hear from Houston's own Wreck-It Ralph

While the most common code requirement for parking at office buildings ranges from 3 to 3.5 spaces for every 1,000 square feet leased, the study found tenants only use 2.17 spaces per 1,000 square feet.

"This ratio was strikingly consistent across all of our buildings in all five markets," the company said.

The study found that of the 22,360 parking spots in the surveyed buildings, 6,580 parking spots  or 30 percent  sit vacant every day at peak hours.

RELATED: Longtime Houston Avenue tire shop gets new life

The value of those spots combined is more than $100 million, Granite said.

In Houston, the percentage is even higher. In Granite's local buildings, the parking ratio averages 3.14 spaces per 1,000 square feet, but only 1.96 spaces are used, resulting in a rate of 37.7 percent of spots that sit empty.

"The real estate industry as a whole believes that the change in how people work and get to work is going to make this situation more glaring in the future when flexible work environments, work-from-home, ride-sharing and the reality of driverless cars comes into vogue," the report said.
Northern California is on high alert as red flag warnings fanned out across the region Wednesday, raising fears that a new round of forest fires loom less than two months since the Mendocino Complex became the largest blaze in state history.

The National Weather Service issued a red flag warning for mountainous areas of Napa, Sonoma and Marin counties from 11 p.m. Wednesday to 5 p.m. Thursday. The North Bay mountains, East Bay hills, Diablo Range and Santa Cruz Mountains are expected to experience the worst of the critical fire conditions, officials said.

Wind gusts between 20 to 35 mph gusts, along with 25 to 35 percent humidity, could exacerbate any wildfires that develop. The low humidity levels adversely affect brush, which Cal Fire spokesman Scott McLean said has not recouped necessary moisture.

This is typical for the time of year, said Steve Anderson, a forecaster with the National Weather Service. This is where we enter the highest fire danger for the Bay Area.

Officials warned residents to avoid outdoor burning, and a Sonoma County alert said that downed power lines may lead to new fires that spread rapidly.

State fire officials have blamed faulty Pacific Gas & Electric Company equipment for sparking some of the massive and deadly fires that broke out across wine country last October.

In June, PG&E Corp. announced it would pay $2.5 billion to cover expected losses from the wildfires. State fire officials have still not determined the cause of the Tubbs Fire, the worst of the blazes, which raced across Santa Rosa and resulted in 22 deaths and 5,636 structures destroyed.

Those incidents, in addition to the Thomas Fire in Santa Barbara and Ventura counties last December, underscore the states increasingly long and dangerous fire season.

If there are fires in Southern California around Christmastime, there could be fires in Northern California any time, McLean said.

On Wednesday morning, officials announced that the Ranch Fire, which along with the River Fire makes up the Mendocino Complex, was 100 percent contained.

While the perimeter of the Ranch Fire is now fully under control, crews were working to completely extinguish the flames. Smoke may be visible from within fire lines.

Officials said that fire personnels task now turns to lessening the risk of erosion and repair the 22 miles of fire lines.

The Ranch and River Fires ravaged a combined 508,043 acres northeast of Ukiah this summer. The blazes destroyed 544 structures and killed a Utah firefighter working on suppression efforts. The River Fire was fully contained Aug. 13.

A previous version of this story misstated that faulty Pacific Gas & Electric Company equipment caused the Tubbs Fire. State fire officials have still not determined the cause.

Gwendolyn Wu is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: gwendolyn.wu@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @gwendolynawu
If you happen to be out in the Sugar Land or Richmond area and see a 3-and-a-half foot iguana roaming around, do not approach it.

Owner Michelle Cummings, 13, urges anyone who spots her beloved pet iguana to note the location, take a photo and reach out to her family. The 6-year-old iguana, named Nadia, is a rescue.

Cummings said Nadia is nice to her and her family because they have built trust with her, but strangers could put themselves in danger if they try and capture or approach her.

"Its basically like trust, since she was neglected it's hard to build trust," Cummings said. "She doesn't bite us but with other people we are not sure yet."

Cummings said she rescued the pet iguana about six months ago. Cummings said Nadia has gotten out before and her family was quick to find her, but this time was different.

PARTY ANIMALS: Rescuers raise $500,000 for local animal nonprofits

"We noticed last night at about 7 p.m.," Cummings said. "This time we were gone for a few hours before we noticed, [but] I am optimistic that we will find her."

Cummings said she is not sure how Nadia escaped but thinks she may have scaled her backyard fence.

"They are really good climbers," Cummings said.

Cummings said hiding spots for the iguana are probably somewhere with high grasses or water. She worries the baby iguana might injure herself by eating plants with fertilizer. She said the iguana helps her with her anxiety and that she hopes the public can help her find her beloved pet.

"She is the reason I get out of bed because I need to take care of her," Cummings said. "Whenever I am doing my homework she helps me relax and stuff...[when I have] panic attacks she's really helpful with that. My little brother also misses her a lot."

If you see the baby pet iguana Nadia in the Sugar Land or Richmond area, contact Cummings at 832-714-0106 or her mother Angie at 832-404-4804.

Rebecca Hennes covers community news. Read her on the breaking news site chron.com and the subscriber site, HoustonChronicle.com. | Follow her on Twitter: @beccaghennes.

Text CHRON to 77453 to receive breaking news alerts by text message.


MD Anderson Cancer Center and the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston have joined forces to establish better access to resources for cancer-care treatment in the Bay Area and Galveston County.

MD Anderson League City opened to the public the week of Sept. 17, with plans for an official grand opening in October.

Located at 2240 Interstate 45, the 200,000-square-foot outpatient hospital provides specialized, centralized cancer treatment and care.

It marks a new chapter in our effort to offer high-quality care to patients close to home, said Dr. Peter WT Pisters, president of MD Anderson. Not only will patients receive their care and see their teams in a spacious new building, but they will benefit from a new clinical collaboration between MD Anderson and UTMB.

The building joins MD Andersons Houston-area network of four cancer care centers that serve roughly 16,000 patients annually and include locations in Katy, Memorial City, the Woodlands and Sugar Land.

The staff at MD Anderson League City includes three medical oncologists, six surgical oncologists, two radiation oncologists and a professor in pain medicine.

The new building represents the first collaboration between UTMB and MD Anderson. In 2015, the University of Texas System Board of Regents approved an agreement allowing MD Anderson to lease land to build an outpatient medical facility on the UTMB League City Campus hospital.

MD Anderson is not new to the region. The new building replaces MD Andersons leased 40,000-square-foot space on the campus of Houston Methodist St. John Hospital in Nassau Bay. That MD Anderson facility provided similar outpatient services and specialized cancer care since 2007.

But the new facility marks a significant increase in services and resources for patients. The League City location has 60 beds compared with 37 at the former Nassau Bay space.

More Information MD Anderson League City is projecting to treat 200 patients a day and includes services in: On-site outpatient lab services Rehabilitation therapy Cancer pain management Social work Access to clinical trials Clinical nutrition Genetic counseling Plastics and reconstructive surgery Oncology nurse navigator services Select clinical trials See More Collapse

The new facility is five times larger than the 40,000 square feet that was provided at the Nassau Bay facility.

By collaborating with UTMB, patients in the community will have more convenient, local access to high-quality services, from routine checkups to specialized medical needs, including cancer screenings, treatment and survivorship, said Dr. Richard Ehlers, associate vice president and executive medical director for MD Andersons Houston-area locations

MD Anderson League City will have a network of support systems in place for patients and families, including education and support groups.

Proximity and access, said Ehlers, are key to serving patients who would normally have to drive to the Texas Medical Center in Houston for follow-up visits or specialized tests and treatment.

While there may be times that its medically necessary for patients to visit MD Anderson in the Texas Medical Center, we want to provide a convenient, warm and welcoming environment for patients and families with plenty of natural light, comfortable lobbies and spacious sitting areas, Ehlers said.

For more information on MD Anderson League City, visit https://bit.ly/2xqVl1y.

yorozco@hcnonline.com
A Harris County employee who serves on the Pasadena City Council attended council meetings while on the clock for the county, according to a review by Harris County Attorney Vince Ryan's office.

Council member Cody Ray Wheeler said the discrepancies, which consist of four instances from August 2017 to October 2018, were nothing more than timesheet error mistakes. A statement released Thursday by the Pasadena mayor, Jeff Wagner, called it a criminal investigation.

"This is a fabricated story to distract from a tax increase, corporate welfare and campaign contributions," Wheeler said.

Wheeler serves as a community engagement coordinator in Harris County Commissioner Rodney Ellis' office, a position that pays $65,000 a year.

"I'm not perfect, I made a mistake, we corrected it. I received no added benefit or money," Wheeler said.

"My pay was the same, there was no added monetary value. (Wagner) took a clerical error and turned into a criminal situation. It's completely false. I don't think it's fair to use that language," he said.

Robert Soard, a first assistant attorney with Vince Ryan's office, confirmed that his office does not conduct criminal investigations. He said the office undertook an administrative review.

Soard said his office was tipped off by an anonymous email sent the evening of Sept. 13 with screen shots of Wheeler's time sheets and pictures of him at Pasadena Council meetings that were date- and time-stamped.

He said attempts to reach that GMail account, which bears the name Chandler Nash, were unsuccessful. But Sward and officials at the county were able to verify some of the claims by accessing the official county time system.

"There were instances of overlap that needed to be adjusted," Soard said. "We understand he is filing the corrections, which is the proper thing to do in this situation and there need to be adjustments in his salary based on those corrections."

Soard said he did not yet know the number of minutes or hours that were logged on Wheeler's timesheet while he was acting as a Pasadena councilman. He said the office looked at dates and times beyond the ones alleged in the email and found no other instances.

Wheeler said one occasion was a 19-minute discrepancy on Aug. 31. He said that day and some others were special meetings that he attended that were called by City of Pasadena in response to Hurricane Harvey.

Pasadena Council members receive $300 monthly for their service regardless of the number of meetings they attend, Wheeler said.

In a statement, Wagner he said his office is fully cooperating with the county in the investigation.

"Mayor Jeff Wagner has announced that, in the interest of transparency, his administration is fully cooperating with an ongoing criminal Harris County investigation involving City of Pasadena, District E Councilman and Harris County employee, Cody Ray Wheeler.

Wagner, a retired Houston police officer, was elected last year, succeeding longtime Mayor Johnny Isbell in the first city election since a federal judge ruled that Pasadena officials had enacted an election system that discriminated against Latino voters. Wheeler, one of three Latinos on the council, had previously clashed with Isbell, who is white and who once addressed him as "boy" at a public meeting. Wheeler has expressed disappointment that the Latino community hasn't fared much better under Wagner.

"I went in optimistic, but it feels after a year that it's the same old thing with a new, smiling face in front of it," Wheeler said in July.

Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg's office, which handles criminal claims, said in a statement Thursday that the office has not received "an official complaint from any member of the public on this matter."

Soard said that beyond ensuring the timesheets are corrected, the county attorney will likely take no further action.

Ellis' office said it is taking the matter seriously and requested a third-party review on the issue.

"We are reserving further comment until the review has been completed and we will follow recommendations based on those findings," the statement said.
Former Southwest Airlines employee and Harris County resident Jamel Parker filed a federal lawsuit against the carrier alleging that the airline had a whites-only break room at Hobby Airport, that black employees there found a noose made from bungee cords, and that he was fired for the kind of offense that only resulted in a slap on the wrist for white workers.

"You would think in 2018 it doesn't happen, but it does," Parker said Thursday evening.

RELATED: Houston pilot alleges discrimination at United Airlines

Southwest Airlines declined to comment on the litigation, which was filed Wednesday in federal district court in Houston, but it issued a statement saying it fosters a diverse and inclusive working environment.

"We do not tolerate or condone discrimination of any kind, and we cultivate a workplace that mirrors the customers we serve," the airline said. "Southwest Airlines is an Equal Opportunity Employer and prides itself on an open and inclusive work environment that consistently ranks among the world's best places to work."

Parker, 31, of Pearland, began working for AirTran Airways as a ramp agent in September 2008, and he became a Southwest Airlines employee in 2013 after the two airlines merged. His supervisor at Southwest, also black, warned him about the break room.

"'It's just best to avoid that,' is basically what he said," Parker recalled.

The lawsuit alleges that white employees called this room "WB" for "White Break Room." Parker said there was not a sign on the door, but black employees knew of its existence. The lawsuit also alleges that Southwest Airlines knew about this room. The only reason it no longer exists is because a renovation turned that room into a supervisor office in 2016 or 2017.

Parker was fired from Southwest Airlines in April 2017. He was driving a pushback, a vehicle used to push an aircraft away from a gate, when the tow bar attached to the pushback got caught on a power cable under the jet bridge. Parker did not believe he caused damage, so he didn't report it. He was then fired for causing damage and not reporting it.

Parker said his only write-up before this incident was for not wearing a seatbelt, and he received a letter of instruction, the lowest level of discipline an employee can receive.

Southwest Lawsuit by on Scribd

For comparison, the lawsuit said a white employee hit a belt loader with a baggage cart and only admitted to it after camera footage was reviewed. He was given a letter of instruction.

Another white employee was driving a tug when he hit a different tug. The employee in that other tug reported the incident, but the at-fault employee did not report the accident until confronted about it. He was given a final warning letter, according to the lawsuit.

"Southwest is quick to fire blacks while whites are given lesser discipline and chances to improve conduct," the lawsuit reads.

The noose was discovered at gate 45 of Hobby Airport after Parker was fired. He saw it on a private Facebook group that employees use to trade hours.

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission conducted an investigation but decided to not pursue this litigation. Parker and his attorney, Julie St. John of the Rob Wiley law firm, received an EEOC notice of right to sue and are seeking a trial by jury to recover damages, including lost wages.

RELATED: United revamps policies after dragging incident

John Zavitsanos, managing partner at AZA law firm, has been on both sides of such employment cases. He's represented employees alleging nooses in the workplace and a large oilfield services company with accusations of noose drawings in the workplace.

The vast majority of these cases will get disposed of or settled, he said.

"It's about money," he said, "and so the question is how much is the plaintiff seeking and how much is Southwest willing to pay."

If there's proof, he said the plaintiff should hold out for a lot of money because society should not tolerate this type of discrimination. But if there isn't evidence  and he said corroborations from current employees tend to skew toward their employers  then Southwest should go to trial to clear its name.

Betsy Gelb, marketing professor at University of Houston's C.T. Bauer College of Business, said Southwest should highlight diverse employees and customers who've had above-and-beyond experiences. "Any company with a large number of employees," she said, "have a small number of employees that they, kind of, wish were operating better in almost any context, including inclusiveness."

Parker has been working as an Uber driver to pay his bills since being fired. He wants to resume his job at Southwest. It paid well and offered great benefits, including free plane tickets. And it allowed Parker to work as much or as little as he wanted.

He also wants to be treated fairly, and he hopes this lawsuit will encourage others to fight for fairness.

"If you want something to change," he said, "don't be afraid to fight."
Karen Warren, Staff / Houston Chronicle

Stephen Chazen, the former chief executive of Occidental Petroleum Corp. who earlier this year purchased the Eagle Ford Shale assets of Houston-based EnerVest for $2.7 billion, said he expects to put 40 percent of Magnolia's cash flow toward small acquisitions.

Chazen, who made the EnerVest deal with investment firm TPG Pace Energy, made the comments Thursday morning at the DUG Eagle Ford conference held by Hart Energy in San Antonio.
Students celebrated the 120th anniversary of Harvard Elementary School by learning about the schools past, and free bus tours will teach Houston-area residents about the long, storied history of the Heights community.

Kindergartners and fifth graders gathered in their school cafeteria Sept. 18 as R.W. McKinney, Houston historian and Mister McKinney of Mister McKinneys Historic Houston, painted a verbal picture for them of what their school and community looked like 120 years ago.

The students got a chance to ask questions and interact. McKinney said the event honored a long history of educating students well in the Heights.

Primary schools are so important to the overall growth and vitality of any kind of community, so to have a school like the Harvard School be dedicated for 120 years working with parents, it really was parents that came together along with the founders of the Heights themselves from a commercial aspect to build a quality school, McKinney said.

According to McKinney, the Harvard Street School opened Sept. 18, 1898, at a cost of $604, and he said it was just several blocks away from the Cooley School, which had opened two years earlier. The schools were built in a period of growth in the Heights that McKinney said included the opening of Heights Boulevard, Helms Elementary School, Hogg Middle School and Heights High School. He said the people of the Heights have always valued strong schools and have worked hard to keep them that way.

Theyre valuable, and really, you get what you put into them. So this community has continuously given and put time and attention into growing their school, and the results are there, McKinney said. Harvard is one of the most recognized schools in the district on the elementary level, and it is one of the secrets to why the Heights is such a wonderful place to move to.

Emily Guyre, the new executive director of the Houston Heights Association, attended the program and said the idea of having kinder buddies, or fifth graders matched up with the younger kindergartners, present at the program was symbolic.

There is sort of the elite group thats on their way out, and youve got the new group coming in, Guyre said. So its a good reflection of what were trying to do here in the Heights, to partner our older community members with our younger ones and teach them about what it is to be the historical side of our community and what it is to be a new person.

Alexis Clark, assistant principal at Harvard, said McKinneys presentation made the history relatable to her students.

More Information Houston-area families and residents can take part in the 50-minute Historic Heights Tour events on Friday-Sunday, Sept. 21-23, and Friday-Saturday, Sept 28-29 at 5:30 p.m. and 6:30 p.m. The bus holds 20 people, so reservations are required and can be made at www.MisterMcKinney.com or by following and liking Mister McKinney on social media and filling out the correct information. See More Collapse

I think this is a huge awakening, especially for the students. I dont think they realized the history that surrounded our campus, so being able to highlight just being 120 years old and making a celebration out of it so they can go ahead and connect the experience with what it means is huge, Clark said.

For the past 16 years, McKinney has been leading tours across the Houston area on his Houston History Bus as well as going into schools to teach students about Houstons history. McKinneys October events include the Houston Fire Department History Tour and the Haunted Houston Tour (which he charges for).

The Heights Historic Tour events are slated for the evenings of Friday-Sunday, Sept. 21-23, and Friday-Saturday, Sept. 28-29. Each tour is being sponsored by Boulevard Realty, Farmers Insurance, Fidelity National Title and Texas Loan Star, Inc. McKinney encouraged other businesses interested in having tours of their areas to reach out to him.

If you want Mister McKinneys Historic Houston and the Houston History Bus to feature your area or your neighborhood, lets sit down and talk about it because what Im all about is promoting local history. But it requires communities like these amazing four sponsors who have stepped up and covered all these expenses, McKinney said.

He said he is looking forward to educating residents from the Heights area and beyond about an area that has a rich history.

If you live in the Heights area, the Houston History Bus tour of the area is a must, he said. Im excited that we can connect families and the community with the areas rich past. We only have two weeks of sponsored tours, so its so important to have people take advantage of this promotion. Go to www.MisterMcKinney.com to secure your seat.

tracy.maness@chron.com
Detectives are looking into the euthanizing of 78 animals at the Montgomery County Animal Shelter in August after shelter workers questioned the practices behind the mass killing.

The ordeal began Aug. 17 when the shelter was asked to help facilitate the surrender of 84 dogs and cats from a home in the 18000 Block of Quail Run Circle near Conroe, according to Montgomery County Sheriff's Office Lt. Scott Spencer.

The owner, a 65-year-old woman, had contacted an out-of-state rescue group to surrender her animals, who in turn contacted the shelter to make the initial seizure.

HELP NEEDED: More than 150 Harris County animals adopted, fostered in 48 hours

Animal shelter employees, including shelter Director Aaron Johnson, went to the Conroe-area property and initially took six healthy and "friendly" dogs, who were almost immediately adopted out to loving families, Spencer said.

Then, on Aug. 20, Johnson and his employees returned to the property for the remaining 78 dogs and cats.

Animal control officers took the remaining animals to the Montgomery County Animal Shelter, where each and every one of them were put down, Spencer said.

Days later, a doctor at the shelter notified officials with the Sheriff's Office of the mass euthanizing.

Detectives opened a criminal investigation almost immediately, Spencer said.

It is unclear which, or if, any state laws were broken when the 78 dogs and cats were put down, although Spencer pointed out the investigation is active.

Officials said Johnson and the shelter's Assistant Director Mark Wysocki are on paid leave as the investigation continues.

The operations at the shelter have been under scrutiny since early 2015 when volunteers approached county officials and reported conditions that they said resulted in the deaths of hundreds of animals, according to earlier reports in The Courier of Montgomery County.

Volunteers had claimed the conditions went downhill after commissioners approved the reorganization of Care Corporation in January 2015. Former Precinct 3 Constable Tim Holifield and his wife, Amy, founded Care Corporation in 2012 to provide management for the shelter but sold it shortly before commissioners approved the reorganization in 2015.

Commissioners later terminated the county's contract with Care Corporation and began a search for a third-party vendor to manage the shelter. After rejecting all bids and ending the search, the county took over management of the shelter.

Jackson took over the shelter last November after interim director Todd Hayden quit. Hayden had stepped into the role in March 2016 after his predecessor, Michael White, resigned in February after only one week on the job.

Johnson took over Jackson's role after he suddenly quit in May 2017.

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
Jersey Village High School teacher Kim-Ling Sun won the 2018 Outstanding Teaching of the Humanities award from Humanities Texas, according to a Cy-Fair ISD press release.

The English language learner instructor was given the award after being nominated by former teacher Christine Layton, according to the release.

Humanities Texas, an educational nonprofit based in Austin, provides recognition and funding for teachers in Texas. Sun is the third CFISD teacher to receive this award since 2015, according to the press release.

Along with the award, Sun received a $5,000 reward, and $500 for humanities-based instructional material for Jersey Village High School, according to the press release.

I was very shocked and overwhelmed to learn that I had received this award, she said in the press release. It makes me proud to know that ELL teachers are valued in their contribution to the English field of Humanities.

Sun hopes to use the money for a class field trip to the Renaissance Festival, she said in the press release.

I believe one reason I was awarded this honor is because I am an unabashed advocate for my students in this building, and I teach them to self-advocate, Sun said in the press release.
Courtesy of MCSO

To kick off National Coffee with a Cop Day, the Montgomery County Sheriffs Office welcomes the community to join them for a cup on Oct. 3 at Dosey Doe Breakfast and BBQ in The Woodlands.

MCSO deputies along with community members will have the opportunity to discuss local issues, build relationships and drink coffee on that Wednesday from 7-9 a.m. at the Dosey Doe Breakfast & BBQ located at 2626 Research Forest Drive in The Woodlands.
The Fort Bend County Republican Party came under fire recently for a political ad depicting the Hindu deity, Lord Ganesha, as a cartoon elephant with the message: Would you worship a donkey or an elephant? The choice is yours.

In a statement, the American Hindu Foundation called the ad, which ran Sept. 12 in the Indian Herald as offensive and inappropriate and called upon party leaders for an apology.

While we appreciate the Fort Bend County GOPs attempt to reach out to Hindus on an important Hindu festival, its ad  equating Hindus veneration of the Lord Ganesha with choosing a political party based on its animal symbol  is problematic and offensive, said Rishi Bhutada, HAF Board Member and Fort Bend County resident. The implication regarding the worship of animals as gods was also disheartening to HAF leaders, as that is a common misconception taught in US schools, which frequently ends up becoming a taunt used to bully Hindu students.

VOTER ROLL CONTROVERSY: Quirk in Texas law bars voter registrars from investigating bogus addresses

In the release, Bhutada also called upon the Fort Bend County Republican Party to apologize for the offensive and inaccurate reference, not run the ad again, and for elected officials in the County to send the same message to the Party as well.

Sri Preston Kulkarni, the Democratic candidate running against incumbent Republican Pete Olson for U.S. Congress District 22 in Texas, also spoke out against the ad.

Asking Hindu-Americans if they would rather vote for a donkey or an elephant by comparing Ganesha, a religious figure, to a political party is highly inappropriate. The Fort Bend County Republican party must retract this ad, Kulkarni posted on social media.

Tanya Bhadra Pal, a Sugar Land resident and a Democrat, voiced her concerns while clarifying she didn't believe the ad meant Fort Bend County Republicans meant any ill will toward the Hindu community.

"First of all, you never mix religion and politics. But, it was the question of 'Would you worship a donkey or an elephant?' that I found offensive. To me, it felt insulting and condescending to boil it down to a cartoon-depiction of Lord Ganesha and that one question. It just really minimizes our religion," Pal said. "I think the ad was obtuse but I don't believe there was an ill intent. However, it's really disappointing. I think the ad should be retracted from the same newspaper where it was printed and they should print an apology to the Hindu community."

In a Sept. 19 email to the Houston Chronicle, Fort Bend County Republican chairman Jacey Jetton apologized for the ad.

Q&A: Fort Bend County GOP chairman on party's progress

The Fort Bend County Republican Party placed an ad in the India Herald on Sept. 12 that was meant to be a greeting for Ganesh Chaturthi, a Hindu festival that was celebrated Sept. 13, Jetton wrote. The ad was meant to be part of the celebration and acknowledge the occasion. The ad was not meant to disparage Hindu customs or traditions in any way. As the partys first Korean-American Chairman, I have seen successful party outreach and understand the complexities of those efforts. This ad was created with input from those of Hindu faith so that we could properly pay respect to the sacred festival. This highlights the difficulty in outreach that can be positive for one group but not for another in the same community. We offer our sincerest apologies to anyone that was offended by the ad. Obviously, that was not the intent. It is our goal to build understanding and relationships with all of the different communities in Fort Bend County so that we can best convey our ideas and values. We welcome all those who are willing to be part of that process.

knix@hcnonline.com
A Houston woman was arrested Tuesday morning in the 2016 slaying of Esmeralda Pargas, whose skeletal remains were found stashed on vacant Liberty County property, according to authorities.

Sabrina Olarosa-Garcia, 41, was apprehended around 7 a.m. in Houston and charged with murder, Liberty County Sheriffs Office spokesman Capt. Ken DeFoor said in a statement.
Six parents testified anonymously in Houston federal court Thursday about receiving terrifying calls three years ago informing them their children, ranging from 13 to 40 years old, had been kidnapped. Each described haunting screams and pleas for help from a person they believed was their child, followed by threats from the caller saying he would kill or maim their family members if the parents did not deliver ransom payments immediately.

Calling the scheme heartless and evil, Chief U.S. District Judge Lee H. Rosenthal sentenced Yanette Rodriguez Acosta, 35, a courier for the fake kidnapping and extortion plot, to more than seven years in prison and three years of supervised release for collecting the ill-gotten funds. First, however, Acosta sat at the defense table and listened to victims, dabbing her eyes with a tissue.

A retired Houston police officer identified as Victim No. 7 told Rosenthal he picked up the phone on May 30, 2015, and heard a womans voice screaming.

The sound was as if she was being beaten and she was screaming, Daddy, daddy! Do whatever they ask you, and then I heard her being dragged off, the retired officer, who appeared to be in his late 60s, testified.

Panicked, he said he repeatedly asked to speak to his daughter. The father recalled the man saying, If you ask that one more time, were going to start cutting her up.

He explained that on the police force he learned a warrior mentality, knowing he could die on the job any day.

But the idea that I might be this helpless, unable to save one of my own children from something is  I cant explain the terror that goes through your body, he said.

Four mothers also shared harrowing stories about the elaborate hoax, which investigators believe was perpetrated by a mastermind, Ismael Brito Ramirez, from inside a Mexican prison, with the help of Acosta in Houston and others. In all, prosecutors identified about 80 people in Texas, California and Idaho, including families in The Woodlands and Kingwood, who were emotionally tortured into paying hefty sums to the fake kidnappers. Ramirez has been indicted on a number of serious felony counts.

ARREST: Houston woman arrested in phony kidnapping-for-ransom scheme across three states

One family who could not make it to court Thursday previously told the judge that when they could not find their son at the location the caller mentioned after the ordeal, they began checking inside dumpsters. Other witnesses said the money the defendants demanded was the least of it  they endured ongoing nightmares, fear and panic attacks from the lengthy calls.

Many of the victims said they remained on speakerphone with the caller for hours, while driving to banks, Western Union and MoneyGram offices or making cash drops at locations in Houston.

There are some cases that involve conduct of such a nature that it is persuasive there is evil in the world, Rosenthal said. She said her sentence would take into consideration the perpetrators heartlessness, the willingness to use other people and through their fears profit with absolutely no consideration for the fear and the long-term effects of putting anyone through that experience.

Such virtual kidnapping has become more widespread, according to Laura Eimiller, a spokesperson for the FBI in Los Angeles, which investigated the local scheme along with Immigration and Customs Enforcements Homeland Security Investigations in Los Angeles and the Montgomery County Sheriffs deputies.

Were seeing more and more people targeted by this scheme, Eimiller said. They are targeting people in communities they perceive to be wealthy.

Upon the agreement of the attorneys, the judge sealed the courtroom, banning the public and news reporters from a portion of hearing touching on private or sensitive material.

Acosta, also known as Yanette Patino, was remanded to the custody of the U.S. Marshal. She pleaded guilty earlier this year to wire fraud and money laundering.

She admitted to picking up $28,000 in wire payments at various locations in the Houston area on Sept. 17, 2015, and Sept. 30, 2015. She kept some of the funds and wired the rest to contacts in Mexico, according to court documents.

A family in The Woodlands got a call in September 2015 from a Mexican phone number informing them their daughter saw something she shouldnt have and demanding $15,000 for her release. Nearly two weeks later, another family in The Woodlands received a similar call from a person saying their daughter had witnessed a murder and demanded they pay $15,000.

Gabrielle Banks covers federal court for the Houston Chronicle. Follow her on Twitter and send her tips at gabrielle.banks@chron.com.
Watch live stream above.

After weeks of planning, the debate between Sen. Ted Cruz and Rep. Beto O'Rourke is finally here.

On Friday night, the two Senate candidates will face off in Dallas at 6 p.m. to discuss domestic policy.

In Houston, News KUHF-88.7 FM and KUHT-Ch. 8 will broadcast the debate. The one-hour debate can be streamed online at NBCDFW.com or Dallasnews.com, and will be televised on NBC 5 in Dallas-Fort Worth.

In San Antonio, KLRN will broadcast the debate live starting at 6 p.m.

To get briefed beforehand on where O'Rourke and Cruz stand on the biggest issues, check out the Houston Chronicle's latest article breaking down the candidate's positions on immigration, tax cuts and gun laws.

In recent months, the race between the two candidates has tightened to single digits. Multiple polls averaged together by RealClearPolitics show Cruz leading O'Rourke by 4.5 percentage points.

Read more about Texas' upcoming midterm elections at the Houston Chronicle.

Editor's note: An earlier version of this story incorrectly named some networks that would be airing the debate.

LATEST: Hoping for a blue wave, Texas Democrats instead got smacked this week

Text CHRON to 77453 to receive breaking news alerts by text message.

Fernando Ramirez covers Texas news and politics. Read him on our breaking news site and on our subscriber site. | Fernando.ramirez@chron.com | @fernramirez93




In an effort to help educate the public about the ongoing incorporation studies being done by two consulting firms, officials with The Woodlands Township will be hosting a public incorporation forum on Tuesday, Sept. 25, at The Woodlands Waterway Marriott. The forum is scheduled to begin at 6:30 p.m. and continue until 9:30 p.m.

The incorporation planning studies are being done by two different consulting groups at a cost of more than $875,000 which comes out of the townships incorporation reserve fund. Each month since January, officials with the two firms  Matrix Consulting Group/HR Green and the Novak Consulting Group  have been providing the results of preliminary examinations of a wide range of issues facing the township as officials explore possibly deciding whether or not to put an incorporation vote on the ballot in 2019.

Township board member John Anthony Brown said he believes public engagement is imperative on the incorporation issue.

The 2(forum) is an opportunity to learn, engage and understand the process. The residents feedback are critical to the study and particularly at this meeting for input, Brown said in an email to The Villager. We anticipate this being a large crowd. I was at the previous study when they had it at The John Cooper School and remember it was almost at standing room only.

Brown also said residents who attend the forum will benefit from, first hand information about where we are at with the study, what's next, and have the ability to ask questions.

We are going through great lengths to make this an open and transparent process. Id hope for a little more variety in the residents that would be attending. We have the same three to four active residents who attend these meetings, ask questions and provide feedback, Brown added. Although Im excited that we have participation, I would hope for more interaction from our community. I'm afraid when it comes time to make a decision, one way or another, the community will be misinformed by some of the information that will be communicated.

Fellow township director Bruce Rieser echoed many of Browns comments, adding that he believes attending the meeting is very important for the public in order to become as familiar with the issues surrounding incorporation as the process continues into 2019.

It will be a unique opportunity to interact with the team that is dong the analysis and to provide feedback on the process. We are hosting the meeting at The Marriott in the expectation of a larger crown than we can comfortably accommodate in the township Board Room. We picked the Marriott because the township owns the hotel and the convention center, Rieser said. We are planning to provide the draft reports on pavement management or street conditions, law enforcement and infrastructure which is primarily the Municipal Utility Districts. We will also be providing a schedule for the remainder of the study and looking for valuable feedback from the residents themselves.

Incorporation Planning Study Public Forum When: 6:30-9:30 p.m., Tuesday, Sept. 25 Where: The Woodlands Waterway Marriott, 1601 Lake Robbins Drive. Future incorporation meetings in 2018 All these meetings are hosted at The Woodlands Township Board of Directors chambers. Wednesday, Sept. 26 - 6 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 18 - 4 p.m. Wednesday, Oct. 24 - 6 p.m. Friday, Nov. 16 - 4 p.m. Wednesday, Nov. 28 - 6 p.m. Wednesday, Dec. 5 - 6 p.m. See More Collapse

While some residents who have attended the monthly incorporation studies meetings and seminars claim that not enough residents of The Woodlands are involved in the process, Rieser said he is not disappointed with turnout at the sessions.

This is a very complicated process and there is no off the shelf solution. We are by far the biggest community in Texas  and probably the entire (United States)  to attempt to incorporate and we want the public to see that we are working through this in the most thorough and transparent way possible. The board believes that in providing the highest level of information, more people will become interested and involved and they will feel comfortable in trusting the conclusions that have been reached so far.
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Pink abounds. Pink flowers. Pink balloon arches. Pink couches. Pink triple-decker cakes. Pink cutouts of the number seven. The color's whole spectrum - from cotton-candy to medium-rare steak - is on display.

Life-size cutouts of Barbie, the blond-haired, bleached skin monument of girlhood, stand sentinel on the party grounds, tagged in a social media post as being located in Culiacan, a city in Mexico's northwest Sinaloa region.

CONNECTION: Beauty queen wife visits 'El Chapo' in prison near Texas border

A video captures children running on the grass between a carnival ride and a pink-splashed party room inside as Spanish-language pop music thumps softly in the background. The happy mother who threw the Barbie-themed party for her 7-year-old twins, a dark-haired former beauty queen in high heels, posts images from the event on her Instagram account. "#barbiestyle," she writes.

An over-the-top birthday extravaganza normally would not draw international interest. But the mother throwing the party was not just another loving parent, but the wife of the biggest name in drug trafficking. As first reported by the Los Angeles Times this week, Emma Coronel Aispuro, the wife of alleged Sinaloa Cartel boss Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman, posted the images from the 7th birthday party for the couple's twin daughters.

The images drew the usual social media rubbernecking, but also outrage. Currently awaiting trial in U.S. custody, Guzman is alleged to have run a vicious billion-dollar narcotics empire that had nearly complete control of the American drug supply and left behind a significant body count. But as the alleged kingpin stews in a cell, his wife is hosting parties with the blood money.

"You know that this was not possible without who knows how many deaths and tortures in Mexico, right?" one poster commented in Spanish under Coronel's party pictures.

But the showy display of wealth must be equally frustrating for U.S. officials. Although the Justice Department has filed criminal forfeiture papers seeking to confiscate Guzman's reported $14 billion in assets, the government has failed to pocket any of the alleged drug lord's ill-gotten gains.

The romance between Guzman and Coronel runs straight back to Sinaloa, where Guzman's criminal escapades have made him a folk hero. According to the Daily Beast, the then-17-year-old Coronel was from La Angostura. She signed up for a local beauty contest. Per local custom, the contestant threw herself a party on Jan. 6, 2007. The Beast reported that as the occasion kicked into full gear, armed gunman swarmed the town. Planes touched down at the local airport, bearing more gunmen and Guzman.

FULL SUPPORT: Joaquin 'El Chapo' Guzman's beauty queen wife supports him in court

During the party, Coronel announced she and Guzman were to be married on July 2, 2007 - her 18th birthday. The kingpin and his personal army were gone by the next morning, but Guzman returned a month later after Coronel won the beauty contest. The couple married as planned, then disappeared before a detachment from the Mexican military arrived on orders to arrest the fugitive drug trafficker.

"I would say what won me over was his way of talking, how he treated me, the way we began to get along - first as friends and from that came everything else," Coronel told the LA Times in a rare 2016 interview. "He tends to win over people by his manner of being, of acting, the way he treats people in general."

Coronel described her marriage to Guzman - 32 years her senior - as an ordeal of secret assignations and long separations as the kingpin attempted to evade Mexican authorities. She also countered the image of her husband as a ruthless killer.

"He is like any other man - of course he is not violent, not rude," Coronel told the Times. "I have never heard him say a bad word. I have never seen him get excited or be upset at anyone."

Coronel was born in the U.S. and raised in Mexico. In 2011, when she gave birth to the couple's twins, she traveled to Los Angeles for the delivery. Both girls automatically had American citizenship, despite the fact that their father was wanted by the U.S. government.

Guzman's current incarceration did not appear to dampen the spirits at the Barbie party for the twins. The social media reaction to an alleged killer's family enjoying the spoils of his work, however, has been harsh.

"They have attacked me," Antonio Tizoc, a photographer who shot the Barbie party and posted pictures online, told the Times. "But in Culiacan it's really normal to have parties like this. Rich and poor, we like big parties."
Taiwan is bracing for an onslaught of cyber attacks from mainland China ahead of local elections in November intended to undermine a president who has defied Beijing's efforts to bring the democratically ruled island under its control.

China, along with Russia and North Korea, may be increasingly testing out cyber hacking techniques in Taiwan before using them against the U.S. and other foreign powers, according to the Taiwanese government. The tests involve new malware tools mostly used to target government agencies including Taiwan's foreign and economy ministries, said Howard Jyan, director general of its cyber security department.

"Based on matching patterns, sophistication and other characteristics it's likely that the majority of the cyber attacks come from groups supported by China," Jyan told Bloomberg News. "We believe the number of cyber attacks will rise before the elections. Hackers and organizations will try to intervene."

Since taking office in May 2016, President Tsai Ing-wen and her Democratic Progressive Party have refused to recognize the Beijing government's claim to Taiwan. Beijing considers the island part of its territory, to be unified by force if necessary.

China has responded with a multi-pronged effort to squeeze her administration: Chipping away at the number of its diplomatic partners, ramping up military exercises in the Taiwan Strait, and pressuring foreign airlines and hotels to refer to Taiwan as part of China. China's campaign has also fueled a growing struggle for global influence with the U.S., which maintains informal ties with Taiwan despite moving its embassy to Beijing four decades ago.

"To some extent, Taiwan against China is David against Goliath," said Ben Read, head of cyber espionage analysis at U.S. cyber security firm FireEye Inc. "The volume we see and the resources would be hard for anyone to keep up with."

Taiwan's government endured 360 successful cyber attacks in 2017, Jyan said, possibly compromising sensitive and classified data. But the number of attempts was far greater: Some 20 million to 40 million were carried out each month last year, he estimated. Servers in civil, military and research departments have been targeted, including hospital systems hacked to steal personal health information and other private data.

China in turn has lashed out at Taiwan's intelligence agencies. On Sept. 16 it demanded Taiwan "cease infiltration and sabotage activities against the mainland to avoid further harming increasingly complex and severe" relations, the official Xinhua News Agency reported, citing An Fengshan, spokesman for China's Taiwan Affairs Office. The office didn't reply to faxed questions on Taiwan's accusations.

The Xinhua report was "fake information that sabotages cross-strait relations," said Alex Huang, a spokesman for Tsai's office.

Taiwan this month plans to open a government cyber security training program for companies and NGOs to send their IT personnel, with grants for up to 150 students yearly. Last year, it created a military cyber command. And it has earmarked more than NT$1.6 billion ($52 million) in next year's budget to safeguard websites and databases most targeted by mainland cyber spies, the Taipei Times reported earlier this month.

The National Communications Commission said Tuesday that Taiwanese media could be fined up to NT$2 million if found to disseminate unverified or fake content that hurts the public interest.

The move came after officials blamed fake news shared on social media for the recent suicide of Su Chii-cherng, a senior Japan-based diplomat. Posts identified as originating on the mainland falsely claimed Chinese consular officials were forced to rescue Taiwanese nationals stranded at Osaka's airport during Typhoon Jebi, after Taiwan's representatives failed to act.

President Tsai on Thursday urged governments around the world to beware of Chinese efforts to influence global public opinion by spreading disinformation via the Internet, according to a statement from the Presidential Office. She said Beijing's actions have had a negative impact on democratic countries.

Over the last year, FireEye has seen Chinese hackers target Taiwanese NGOs and its education, telecoms and government sectors. "They see Taiwanese society as part of Chinese society so they really cover all segments," said Read, the firm's head of cyber espionage analysis.

Sixty percent of organizations observed in Taiwan were targeted with advanced cyber attacks in the second half of the previous year -- greater than anywhere else in the world, FireEye said in 2016. Observed organizations were four times more likely to be exposed to an advanced attack than the global average of 15 percent, it said.

Taiwan's cyber defenses are stronger than most in Southeast Asia thanks to its hi-tech expertise in computer manufacturing, according to cyber analysts. But they can't overcome China's drive to isolate Taiwan diplomatically, which has severely hampered its ability to seek help from allies in countering the attacks.

"We need assistance from foreign countries, but the worsening cross-strait relations are making it more difficult for us to seek participation in Interpol," said Tsai Tsang-po, head of Taiwan's Criminal Investigation Bureau.

Interpol's president, Meng Hongwei, is also a high ranking Chinese vice-minister of public security. Taiwan was forced to quit the global police agency in 1984 -- when China joined the organization -- and has since failed to obtain permission to attend its general assembly even as an observer, further squeezing Taiwan's ability to gain the cooperation of cyber investigators in other countries.
The European Commissioner for justice, consumers and gender equality shut down her Facebook account, describing her experience on the social network as a "channel of dirt."

At a press conference in Brussels Thursday, Vera Jourova said that she received an "influx of hatred" on the popular platform and decided to cancel her account as a result.

"I don't want to avoid communication with people, even with critical people," she said, noting that her decision to leave Facebook was not to avoid public criticism. Her mailbox is filled with critical comments, she said, and she responds to those people who don't use vulgar language. "This is my nature, I speak to everybody who wants normal, honest, descent communication." Euractiv earlier reported on Jourova's remarks.

Facebook did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

At the same press conference, Jourova warned Facebook that it faces the prospect of sanctions from European member states if the company does not comply with consumer protection rules.

One issue at hand is the level of transparency Facebook offers users in its terms of service. In a tweet Thursday Jourova said, "I want Facebook to be extremely clear to its users about how their service operates and makes money. Not many people know that Facebook has made available their data to third parties or that for instance it holds full copyright about any picture or content you put on it."

Jourova said that national authorities may begin sanctioning Facebook next year if the company does not comply with the rules.

"I was quite clear that we cannot negotiate forever," she said at the press conference. We need to see the result."
EDWARDSVILLE  Local school districts are benefiting from a new tax distribution schedule implemented by Madison County Treasurer Chris Slusser that accelerates real estate tax distributions.

I came up with the idea after meeting with Dr. Jill Griffin, the Bethalto Schools Superintendent, in August 2017, Slusser said. The distribution schedule now delivers funds sooner than expected. With the state withholding funds during the budget crisis, Bethalto schools were not going to be able to make payroll and unable to open their doors to start the school year.

Slusser said the decision was made to deliver extra distributions to get the property tax funds to the taxing districts sooner than anticipated, which allowed them to make their payroll obligations.

Illinois state law requires the county treasurer to distribute real estate tax funds to the local taxing districts at least once every 30 days while taxes are collected. Traditionally, distributions in the Madison County Treasurers Office were made once every 30 days, as the law required.

However, under the new distribution schedule, additional payments will be made to taxing districts twice per month, allowing the funds to hit the districts accounts just prior to payroll dates.

When we put our distribution schedule together for year, I reached out to some of the school superintendents and asked for feedback, Slusser said. I wanted to be helpful and accommodating to meet their needs.

Griffin said Slusser made a concerted effort to reach out to school districts to ensure the local tax dollars were distributed when they were needed most.

(Slusser) made school districts a priority and worked to determine how he can best serve us, Griffin said. Last school year, when state revenue stopped flowing, Chris and his team met with our district business manager and myself to determine how he could help.

He changed the distribution schedule to allow our funds to arrive sooner and improve our cash flow.

Griffin said Slusser also contacted her to ask about a distribution schedule that would best serve the districts needs.

He was willing to make modifications to the existing schedule and again, working alongside school districts to ensure local dollars were flowing, she said.

Alton Community School District Superintendent Mark Cappel echoed Griffins comments.

Alton school district appreciates the accelerated tax revenue payments received from the Treasurers office, Cappel said. As an entity dependent on local tax revenue, the school district is grateful to receive funds earlier than anticipated. The receipt of the local revenues assists the district in planning and meeting its financial obligations.

Granite City Community School District Superintendent Jim Greenwald agreed.

The additional distributions are working well for us and our district, Greenwald said. We have been frugal through the hard times and what the treasurer is doing to help the schools is much appreciated.

Collinsville Community School District Superintendent Dr. Robert Green said the additional payments improve cash flow, which benefits everyone from teachers to students. After going years with no new revenue, and with uncertainties in state funding, these additional payments have been tremendously helpful, Green said.

Slusser said the additional payments do not mean districts are receiving additional revenue or any advances on future tax revenues.

It simply means they will get their funds sooner rather than later, Slusser said. We can only distribute what weve collected at the time, so were somewhat limited in what we can do in treasurers office.

Slusser said while the law requires a distribution every 30 days; there is nothing that says it cannot be done more than once every 30 days.

We cant control what the state will do, but we can control what my office is doing, Slusser said. We thought it was the least we could do to help our local schools, who are often at the mercy of poor public policy at the state level.

While every taxing district in the county will receive funds on the accelerated schedule, the greatest benefactors are the school districts.

Some politicians reach out to school districts for the photo op, Dr. Barrett Deist, Bethaltos assistant superintendent of finance and operations, said. Chris Slusser reached out to our district to truly see how he could support us and continues to reach out and serve schools across Madison County.

Slusser, a Republican, is being challenged by Democrat Christopher L. Miller on the November ballot.
Amnesty International on Wednesday accused the Egyptian government of mounting a crackdown on freedom of expression.

Launching a campaign called Egypt, an Open-Air Prison for Critics, Amnesty International said it wanted supporters around the world to show their solidarity with Egyptians detained for expressing their views by writing to the Cairo government to end the persecution.

The London-based advocacy group said Egypt has launched the largest crackdown on critics in its modern history in the five years since the military ouster of the countrys first freely elected civilian president Mohamed Morsi.

According to Amnestys North Africa Campaigns Director, Najia Bounaim, it is currently more dangerous to criticize the government in Egypt than at any time in the countrys recent history.

An Egyptian court earlier this month sentenced 75 prominent members and affiliates of the Muslim Brotherhood to death, as part of a mass trial that included 739 people charged after the violent dispersal of a protest camp in support of former Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi.

The court also sentenced the Muslim Brotherhoods supreme leader, Mohammed Badie, in addition to 46 others, to life in prison.

Amnesty said at least 28 journalists were also among those detained since December 2017.
The Democratic Republic of Congo's electoral commission confirmed opposition leader Jean-Pierre Bemba's disqualification from this year's presidential vote.

Bemba's removal excludes two key figures from challenging President Joseph Kabila's anointed successor in the Dec. 23 vote, after businessman-turned-politician Moise Katumbi was prevented from registering for the race. Congo, the world's biggest cobalt miner hasn't had a peaceful transition of power since it gained independence from Belgium in 1960.

Twenty-one of the 26 candidates who registered last month were authorized to run in the election, including Emmanuel Ramazani Shadary, the head of Kabila's political party and the nominee of the ruling coalition. From the ranks of the opposition, the best established contenders are Felix Tshisekedi, leader of Congo's largest opposition party, and Vital Kamerhe, who finished third in the last election in 2011.

"The country will experience its first experience of a civilized handover," Corneille Nangaa, the president of the commission, pledged to reporters at a briefing in the capital, Kinshasa.

Bemba, acquitted of war crimes by the International Criminal Court in June, was excluded by the commission, known as CENI, because of a second conviction by The Hague-based court for witness-tampering. The Constitutional Court upheld that decision on Sept. 4, after an appeal by Bemba's party.

His unexpected return to Congo in August after a decade in detention briefly raised the possibility of him challenging for the presidency. Bemba served as vice president for three years from 2003 before he was defeated by Kabila in a 2006 election. Arrested in Belgium two years later, he was sentenced by the ICC to 18 years in prison for murders and rapes committed in the early 2000s in neighboring Central African Republic by fighters belonging to a Congolese rebel group he then led.

Katumbi, a onetime Kabila ally who has been in self-imposed exile for more than two years, was blocked by Congolese authorities in August from returning to the country to file his bid for the presidency. An opinion poll published in July by New York University's Congo Research Group found Katumbi and Tshisekedi would be the most popular candidates, each gaining 19 percent of the vote, two percentage points ahead of Bemba, who would come third.

Opposition leaders including Bemba, Katumbi, Tshisekedi and Kamerhe said in a Sept. 12 statement Kabila's "regime is aiming to organize a massive fraud to conserve power" and demanded the restoration of "excluded or invalidated candidates." They plan to rally behind a single opposition challenger to maximize their chances of victory, according to the statement.

Kabila's nomination of Shadary, a former interior minister under European Union sanctions for alleged human-rights abuses, ended months of speculation about whether the incumbent would seek to extend his 17-year rule and defy a two-term limit imposed by Congo's constitution.

The election to find Kabila's successor was supposed to take place in late 2016, but CENI failed to organize it on time. The president's choice to remain in power beyond the end of his five-year term sparked sporadic protests, in which security forces killed dozens of people.
This week, the leaders of the two Koreas made progress toward rapprochement, concluding a dramatic summit in Pyongyang. Though President Donald Trump was not in attendance, he sought to take credit for the latest diplomatic gains.

In remarks to reporters Wednesday morning, the president suggested that, before his arrival on the political scene, war on the Korean Peninsula was "inevitable." By the afternoon, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo indicated that the United States was ready to "immediately" restart direct talks with North Korea over its nuclear program.

The mood seems a world apart from the tensions of a year ago, when Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un rattled sabers at each other amid missile tests, atomic explosions and the conspicuous deployments of aircraft carriers. Trump threatened North Korea with "fire and fury" and mobilized an international campaign of "maximum pressure," including stringent new sanctions.

Now, that united front has already cracked. Pyongyang is gaining back its economic lifeline with China, which has reopened its access to both legal and illegal trade abroad. U.S. officials recently bemoaned alleged Russian efforts to secretly transfer oil and other commodities to North Korean ships at sea. Nevertheless, Trump seems happy with the dip in tensions. "It's very much calmed down," Trump said this week. "We're talking. It's very calm. He's calm. I'm calm."

Trump has repeatedly insisted that the "maximum pressure" campaign compelled Kim to come to the table and paved the way for a potentially historic peace. But skeptics point to the dizzying, confused trajectory of White House strategy - which alternated threats and flattery, and insists on a "complete denuclearization" few have faith will ever come to pass - as a sign of an administration without a real plan. Now, Trump appears to be losing what leverage he had.

On Wednesday, Kim and South Korean President Moon Jae-in stood side-by-side, hailing their hope for an "era of peace and prosperity" on the peninsula. The latest round of diplomacy between the two countries had been spurred by Moon's desire to keep the momentum going following the airy agreements made in Singapore.

My Washington Post colleagues sketched the outline of what Moon and Kim agreed: "In a joint statement, North Korea pledged to 'permanently dismantle' a missile engine test site and missile launcher at Tongchang-ri 'in the presence of experts from related countries.' That is a site the North Koreans had already promised to dismantle, although allowing in inspectors would be a step forward. North Korea also 'expressed the will to continue taking further steps like permanent dismantlement' of its main Yongbyon nuclear facility but only if the United States takes 'corresponding steps' based on Trump's agreement with Kim at their June summit in Singapore."

There were some concrete causes for optimism. "Wednesday's developments... included other trust-building measures between North and South Korea, especially in the realm of military affairs," wrote the Wall Street Journal's Jonathan Cheng. "The two Koreas agreed to form a joint military commission, and to halt drills within 3 miles of the military demarcation line that divides the countries, part of a plan Mr. Moon said would 'eliminate all risks that could lead to war.'"

That's no small victory for the South Korean president, a liberal who has staked his presidency on building peace with the North. Moon also announced the possibility of a joint 2032 Olympic bid as well as enhanced economic cooperation between the two countries if Pyongyang makes further confidence-building measures. "Given the great wall of mistrust that Moon and Kim are attempting to tear down and the still fragile North-South relationship, the two leaders are right to adopt an incremental, step-by-step approach," wrote Richard Sokolsky, a nonresident fellow of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

The next big step may include a visit by Kim to Seoul, another historic first. But the specter of Kim's nuclear arsenal will still hover over proceedings. A host of arms control experts and Korea watchers were underwhelmed by the developments, arguing that there's still no evidence indicating Pyongyang's willingness to commit to actual denuclearization - something that Pompeo declared (to the derision of a few wonks) must be completed by January 2021.

"The history of North Korea's nuclear ambitions, the ideological infrastructure that the Kim dynasty has built over the decades, and the regime's own public statements strongly suggest that peace-from North Korea's perspective-is achievable because it has nuclear weapons," noted Jung Pak of the Brookings Institution.

The scholarly consensus is that Kim has little intention of wholly surrendering the stockpile of weapons that brought him face-to-face with the leader of the world's sole superpower in Singapore. Many analysts also point to previous false dawns with Pyongyang, warning that even its current concessions hardly set it on the path to giving up its weapons.

"The world needs to remember that North Korea has other nuclear and missile facilities, and that these concessions will not necessarily limit or end their nuclear or missile programs," said Melissa Hanham, a senior research associate at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, to my colleagues.

"The biggest concession North Korea is hinting at is ceasing producing of fissile material for weapons," tweeted Nicholas Miller, a nonproliferation expert at Dartmouth University. "If this is 'denuclearization,' then the United States has been denuclearized for decades."

"The fact that Kim is milking a single test-site for basically months on end is pretty remarkable," MIT arms control researcher Vipin Narang told NPR, referring to the politicking over the Tongchang-ri facility.

What's unique about this moment, argue some experts, is Trump's personal zeal to score a geopolitical "win." Kim has shifted focus to talks about economic engagement and nonnuclear matters, even as Pyongyang shirks committing to a clear timeline over denuclearization or accepting proper verification of its nuclear capabilities. This suits Moon, for whom diplomacy with North Korea is about much more than nuclear weapons. Trump, too, seems happy to go down the current path.

"While Kim's intentions remain unclear, a key question is whether or not the US is capable of advancing diplomacy," wrote former State department official Michael Fuchs. "While Trump has thrown the U.S. head-first into diplomacy with North Korea - and may be the only top U.S. official who supports the process - he is also uniquely incapable of taking advantage of complicated diplomatic negotiations, and seems only interested in the appearance of success."

In the event that Trump wants to get tough again, it's not clear he has the tools to do so. North Korea's deepening ties and renewed economic links with Seoul belie any maximum pressure campaign. So, too, the current trade battles between the United States and China, the country which retains the greatest influence over Kim. With Trump "hitting China with tariffs, China is less likely to help the president containing North Korea," said Harry Kazianis, of the Center for the National Interest, to the South China Morning Post. "I think we can say the maximum pressure is over."

- - -

Tharoor writes about foreign affairs for The Washington Post. He previously was a senior editor and correspondent at Time magazine, based first in Hong Kong and later in New York.
The wait is nearly over. Gori Julian & Associates, P.C. and Global Brew are hosting the fifth annual Oktoberfest in Edwardsville City Park from 11:00 a.m. until 8:00 p.m. on Saturday, September 29. The event will include local food vendors, a rock climbing wall, an escape room and numerous varieties of beer. Poor Dirty Astronauts will take the stage 11:00 a.m. until 1:00 p.m. followed by Robert Perry Band and the Original Mojos until 4:00 p.m. then UberCool will perform until 8:00 p.m.

The event could not be possible without its generous sponsors. This years sponsors include: Lanier Law Firm as the Black Forest Sponsor; Hurford Architechts, PohlmanUSA Court Reporting and Litigation and Kurowski Shultz, LLC as Brandenburg Gate Sponsors; Town & Country Bank, First Mid Illinois Bank and Trust, Cork Tree Creative and Lucco Brown Threlkeld & Dawson, LLP as Rhine River Sponsors; and Hobson & Bradley, Spencer Gear, Ronald G. Tays Law Office and Bella Milano as Prost Sponsors. Oktoberfest benefits the Mesothelioma Applied Research Foundation (MARF) which works on research for prevention and treatment of mesothelioma.
WASHINGTON - Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., a frequent White House foe, lashed out at Donald Trump Jr. on Wednesday after the president's son appeared to mock the woman who accused Supreme Court nominee Brett M. Kavanaugh of sexual assault.

President Donald Trump has been increasingly vocal in his defense of Kavanaugh since a confidential letter that detailed assault allegations became public, but he has largely stayed away from publicly challenging the accuser's credibility - unlike his eldest son.

Trump Jr. posted a meme to his Instagram account over the weekend depicting a grade school love letter, written in crayon with words misspelled, that asked "will you be my girlfreind" and was signed "love, Bret." The picture was stamped with the words "Judge Kavanaughs sexual assault letter found by Dems."

On Twitter on Wednesday, Flake called Trump Jr.'s comments "sickening."

"No one should make light of this situation," wrote Flake, who is retiring from the Senate at the end of his term. He attached a screenshot of the meme.

In the days since Trump Jr. posted the image, White House counselor Kellyanne Conway showed support for Christine Blasey Ford, who came forward as the author of a confidential letter that detailed assault allegations against Kavanaugh, who has denied the accusations. (Ford had not yet been named publicly when Trump Jr. posted the meme.)

Without directly referencing Trump Jr., Conway said Ford "should not be insulted, and she should not be ignored."

Joe Walsh, a former Republican congressman from Illinois, was less tempered in his criticism.

"I think we all can agree that @DonaldJTrumpJr is an uncaring, narrow-minded idiot," Walsh wrote on Twitter.

It's not the first time Flake and Trump Jr. have tangled on Twitter. Last year, after a gunman in Sutherland Springs, Texas, killed 26 people in a church, the pair bickered over Flake's proposed changes to gun restrictions. Of the shooting, Trump Jr. told Flake, "Govt employees, like you, failed to do their job."

Trump Jr. is often quick to lash out at those critical of his father and his father's political agenda. One Slate blogger wrote that Trump Jr. is, "unofficially, his father's liaison to crude, internet-based 'alt-right' Trump supporters."

As Flake criticized him Wednesday, Trump Jr. took to Twitter to attack Democrats for not pushing for an investigation of the abuse allegations against Keith Ellison, the Democratic nominee for Minnesota attorney general. He also retweeted other accounts accusing liberals and the media of overplaying the allegations against Kavanaugh.

The split between Trump Jr. and Flake illustrates the differing approach that Republicans have taken in addressing Ford's accusations.

On Wednesday, The Washington Post reported that Trump himself is being advised to avoid challenging Ford's credibility:

"Privately, Trump is being cautioned extensively to stay out of the fight over Kavanaugh, according to two White House advisers, and so far has tempered his language. He has told advisers that he is skeptical of Ford's account and the timing of the allegation, these advisers said. He continues to mention Kavanaugh's academic degrees and his intellect."

The Senate Judiciary Committee has delayed Kavanaugh's confirmation vote and invited both Ford and Kavanaugh to testify before the committee Monday about Ford's allegations.

Through her lawyers, Ford said she wouldn't speak to the committee until the FBI investigates the incident, which allegedly occurred while Ford and Kavanaugh were in high school.

The Post's Robert Costa reported Wednesday that Republicans were proceeding cautiously:

"Beyond the Senate, Republicans are bracing for the impact of Monday's scheduled hearing and the political consequences of an unpredictable and likely emotional session that could expand a Senate matter into a defining moment for the party, especially if Grassley or other Republican men aggressively question Ford about her personal life and the alleged assault."

GOP leaders fear a repeat of hearings for then-nominee Clarence Thomas, when Republican lawmakers sparked outrage by confirming Thomas despite Anita Hill accusing him of sexual harassment.

"We just have to be so much better than we've been in the past in recognizing what's appropriate and what's not, in terms of the process," Flake said Wednesday in the Costa report. "Some of us are trying to be fair and do the right thing, to not jam it through, but obviously it's been a challenge."

On Wednesday, Republicans, who have rebuffed Ford's request for FBI intervention, urged Ford to accept their invitation to testify and signaled they'd forge ahead with Kavanaugh's confirmation.

Still Flake, who said previously that "We can't vote until we hear more," and was one of the first Republicans to call for the hearing's delay, is also among those imploring Ford to testify Monday.

This earned Flake harsh criticism from a columnist at his home state newspaper, the Arizona Republic.

"Flake has been talking tough about Trump and about doing the right thing for a long, long time," EJ Montini wrote. "He did it again when the accuser came forward against Kavanaugh. But that's all he did."
Congressional Republicans may be nervous about President Donald Trump's major escalation of trade hostilities with China, but they don't seem ready to do anything about it.

In Congress, "people are in a wait-and-see mode right now," one Senate Republican aide tells me. "That probably leaves any legislative effort to a new Congress, if it happens at all."

Officially, Sens. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., and Pat Toomey, R-Pa., are still looking for an opportunity to advance their bill to require congressional approval of any tariffs imposed in the name of national security, another aide says. That would apply to the metals' tariffs and duties the administration is considering for auto imports.

Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, has his own version of legislation, which hands the power to authorize those tariffs to the Department of Defense. Advocates of a congressional check on Trump agree the prospects for the proposals this year are remote, however. And neither measure touches Trump's tariffs on Chinese imports, which rely on a different legal authority, the so-called Section 301.

Here's why Republicans seem so reticent to do anything: Over the summer, some objected to steel and aluminum tariffs being slapped on allies like Canada and the European Union. But they are currently loathe to confront Trump for taking on China, which they agree has engaged in abusive trading practices, even if they question whether the president's escalating tariffs are the best remedy, according to several GOP aides.

The stand-down by Trump's own party on Capitol Hill all but ensures him an unobstructed path to continue pressing his offensive against Beijing.

Senate GOPers feinted toward restricting Trump's ability to level tariffs over the summer when the administration was waging trade battles with friends and foes alike. But the effort stalled short of passing legislation to tie his hands. Since then, the politics of the issue have shifted significantly.

As the New York Times noted earlier this week, Republican voters are siding overwhelmingly with Trump on tariffs over stalwart free-traders in the congressional GOP. In polling, the Times found that 73 percent of Republican voters support both the GOP tax overhaul and the administration's tariffs, making it harder before the midterms for lawmakers to break with their base.

The rift among Republicans is hurting business interests trying to avert a widening U.S.-China trade war. With lawmakers waving off a legislative response, lobbyists for retailers, manufacturers, farmers and others caught in the tariff crossfire are taking their case to voters, hoping grass-roots opposition will compel the administration to back down.

"Even most business groups would agree that China has been a bad actor on trade policy," says David French, the National Retail Federation's senior vice president for government relations. "Our disagreement isn't over attacking Chinese abusive trade practices. Our concern is that tariffs are the wrong way to do it."

French's group and other organizations that together represent thousands of companies launched a lobbying effort last week called Tariffs Hurt the Heartland aimed at stalling the trade war.

The group is staging town-hall events this week in Chicago and Nashville and will also focus on Indiana, Ohio, and Washington state, coalition spokesman Matt McAlvanah says. "If we create a climate where it's easier for Members to pass bills to curtail the president's authority, then great," he says. "But the shoe-leather lobbying hasn't been as effective as a full-fledged, organized, grass-roots effort."
WASHINGTON - Senate Republicans strongly signaled on Wednesday that they will forge ahead with embattled Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh's confirmation as his accuser called the rush for a public hearing next week unfair.

GOP senators who fretted earlier this week about the prospects for President Donald Trump's pick are now largely pushing for a vote on Kavanaugh, who is accused of sexually assaulting now-professor Christine Blasey Ford when they were teenagers, amid signs that she may decline to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee. And Trump is more convinced he should stand by Kavanaugh than he was two days ago, people close to the White House say.

Publicly, Trump has become more vocal in defending Kavanaugh, telling reporters on Wednesday that it was "very hard for me to imagine anything happened" with Ford, who detailed her allegation extensively with The Washington Post in a report published Sunday.

Ford, through her lawyers, has requested that the FBI conduct an investigation into the alleged incident before she speaks to the committee, and Senate Democrats have lined up behind her. But Republicans have not budged from their view that the FBI does not need to intervene, or from their plan to hear testimony from Kavanaugh and Ford on Monday.

Ford's attorneys have not officially declined the committee's invitation. But they reiterated Wednesday that while Ford is willing to cooperate with the Judiciary Committee, there needs to be a "full, nonpartisan investigation." Her lawyer also said having just two witnesses - Kavanaugh and Ford - was neither fair nor in good faith when there are multiple witnesses who should testify.

"Dr. Ford was reluctantly thrust into the public spotlight only two days ago," attorney Lisa Banks said. "She is currently unable to go home, and is receiving ongoing threats to her and her family's safety. Fairness and respect for her situation dictate that she should have time to deal with this."

But Republicans were increasingly determined to confirm Kavanaugh before the Nov. 6 midterm elections, checking off a major conservative accomplishment and finishing a nomination battle that has been bitterly contentious from the start.

"Requiring an FBI investigation of a 36-year-old allegation (without specific references to time or location) before Professor Ford will appear before the Judiciary Committee is not about finding the truth, but delaying the process till after the midterm elections," tweeted Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., a member of the committee who pushed for a vote "as soon as possible."

Anger grew Wednesday among Democrats who have not forgotten about the GOP's treatment of Merrick Garland, former president Barack Obama's third Supreme Court nominee who was summarily blocked by Republicans just two years ago.

"It's pretty mind-bending hypocrisy that Republicans are all of a sudden interested in expediting Supreme Court nominations," Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., said. "Listen, I get why they're nervous. They were already in trouble electorally and the way they're handling this matter doesn't help for November's purposes."

Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., who is facing one of the most competitive reelection bids this year, announced Wednesday that she would oppose Kavanaugh. But she said her decision was not based on the allegation against him - which McCaskill said was "troubling" - but his past concerns about campaign contribution limits.

Privately, Trump is being cautioned extensively to stay out of the fight over Kavanaugh, according to two White House advisers, and so far has tempered his language. He has told advisers that he is skeptical of Ford's account and the timing of the allegation, these advisers said. He continues to mention Kavanaugh's degrees and his intellect.

Meanwhile, White House aides have begun asking lawyers and others if any more women are likely to come out and make accusations, these officials said.

But Leonard Leo, the influential adviser to the administration on judicial nominations, has told attorneys and people close to the White House that he was increasingly convinced Kavanaugh would be confirmed, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, has asked Ford's attorneys to respond by Friday at 10 a.m. on whether she plans to appear before his panel. His staff has tried to set up interviews with Ford, as well as Mark Judge - a Kavanaugh friend who is alleged to have witnessed the incident - and two other potential witnesses, according to a letter Grassley sent Wednesday to Democrats on the committee.

"I have reopened the hearing because I believe that anyone who comes forward with allegations of sexual assault has a right to be heard, and because it is the committee's responsibility to fully evaluate the fitness of a nominee to the Supreme Court," Grassley wrote to Banks and Debra Katz, another lawyer for Ford. "I therefore want to give Dr. Ford an opportunity to tell her story to the Senate and, if she chooses, to the American people."

Grassley is also willing to send his staff to California to speak to Ford if she prefers, committee spokesman Garrett Ventry said. Ford is a psychology professor at Palo Alto University, located northwest of San Jose in northern California.

Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, a pivotal swing vote on Kavanaugh's confirmation, and Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., a member of the Judiciary Committee, both urged Ford to speak to senators. And Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., who like Flake also pushed the Senate to hit pause on Kavanaugh's nomination until lawmakers heard from the professor, said: "If we don't hear from both sides on Monday, let's vote."

Collins said Wednesday that Ford has a few ways she can detail her story to the committee by Monday, including in a public or private session that would be videotaped; or an interview conducted by congressional investigators.

"I don't think she can reject, having made all of these serious allegations, I don't think that she can reject all those options," Collins said in an interview with WVOM radio in Maine. "Otherwise, there are these very serious allegations hanging over the head of a nominee who has emphatically denied them. And that's just not a good way for us to end."

Grassley left open the possibility that the hearing could occur Monday with only Kavanaugh present. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., believes he has his conference unified behind a plan for a Monday hearing - which includes building extensive timelines on Ford's story and media accounts - with or without her, according to an adviser to the Kentucky Republican.

Even as Ford and Democrats push for an FBI probe, Trump has suggested that a new FBI investigation is unnecessary. But there is precedent for the FBI stepping in late in the process of a Supreme Court nomination. In 1991, when law professor Anita Hill alleged that now-Justice Clarence Thomas had sexually harassed her, the FBI was called in to investigate.

The FBI reiterated Wednesday that it had included information about the allegations in Kavanaugh's background file, and that it is now up to the White House to decide what to do with it. A criminal inquiry is essentially out of the question, because what is alleged does not constitute a federal crime.

The FBI wouldn't compile a report offering an opinion, one way or another, on the credibility of the allegations. Rather, it would provide the White House reports on the interviews and other evidence agents gathered, and again leave it to the White House to decide what to do with Kavanaugh's nomination.

Ford has alleged that while she and Kavanaugh were at a house party in the early 1980s, when the two were in high school, Kavanaugh drunkenly pinned her to a bed, groped her and put his hand over her mouth to stifle her screams as he attempted to take off her clothes.

Rep. Anna Eshoo, D-Calif., whom Ford first contacted with her allegation, detailed to The Washington Post her interactions with Ford, a constituent in her Bay Area district. The two women met for roughly 90 minutes on July 20.

"It was more than obvious to me that she bore the scars of what she had been subjected to," Eshoo said Wednesday. "She doesn't have a political bone in her body. And she obviously was really terrified about what could become of her and her family."

"At the end of the meeting, I told her that I believed her," she added. "In telling her story, you know, there were details to it, and I believed her."

- - -

The Washington Post's Matt Zapotosky, Mike DeBonis and Emma Brown contributed to this report.

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Video: The Fix's Aaron Blake analyzes what to watch for as the Senate Judiciary Committee barrels toward a hearing with Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh and the woman who accused him of sexual assault, Christine Blasey Ford.(JM Rieger/The Washington Post)

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Video: Republicans are already judging the credibility of Christine Blasey Ford before she even speaks to the Senate Judiciary Committee.(JM Rieger/The Washington Post)

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Video: President Trump praised Supreme Court nominee Brett M. Kavanaugh on Sept. 19, and said it would be "very interesting," if his accuser Christine Blasey Ford "shows up and makes a credible showing."(The Washington Post)

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Wilmington, N.C.

Exhaustion and frustration are building in the Carolinas as thousands of people wait to go home days after Hurricane Florence unleashed epic floods blamed for at least 37 deaths, including those of two women who drowned when a sheriff's van taking them to a mental health facility was swept off a road.

President Donald Trump visited the disaster zone, riding through soggy neighborhoods and helping pass out warm meals at a church in the hard-hit coastal town of New Bern.

"How's the house?" Trump told one person. "You take care of yourself."

To the south, daybreak brought a return of floodwaters to Nichols, S.C. The flooding had subsided, only to get worse again.

Mayor Lawson Battle said that as far as he knew, everyone in the town of about 360 people had evacuated. But Battle just couldn't think about that anymore. "I'm focusing on this disaster at hand," he said. "I don't have time to think. I'm just so tired."

Access improved to Wilmington, a North Carolina port city that was cut off for days by high water. But officials said they don't know when evacuees would be able to return home. The Cape Fear River isn't expected to crest at the city until Monday or Tuesday.

North Carolina officials said some 7,800 people remained in shelters, down from about 10,000 on Monday despite Gov. Roy Cooper's plea to stay put.

Some of those who left shelters may have been headed toward the coast on U.S. 421, where a long line of cars, utility crews and trucks loaded with generators sat in a jam.

In South Carolina, two women being taken to a mental health facility died when the van they were riding in was engulfed by floodwaters, authorities said. A Horry County Sheriff's Department spokeswoman said two deputies in the van tried to get the victims out but couldn't. Rescue teams plucked the deputies from the top of the vehicle.
King Mohammed VI has launched 3rd phase of the revamped National Initiative for Human Development (INDH), an ambitious socioeconomic plan destined to close the social gap, combat poverty and reduce social inequalities.

The 3rd phase of the plan, to be carried out over a four-year period (2019-2023), will cost $1.9 billion. It seeks to support programs providing basic social services and related infrastructures to needy people to help them improve their incomes and facilitate the economic integration of youth.

The INDH was launched in 2005 by King Mohammed VI to combat poverty, and social exclusion through the building of community centers, social facilities, training and capacity building, promotion of jobs creation and income-generating activities.

Since the initiatives launch, nearly 40 billion dirhams have been injected in the realization of a total of 58,000 projects that benefited 10.5 million people.

Yet, as King Mohammed VI put it in his latest speech made on the occasion of the 65th anniversary of the Revolution of the King and the People in August, despite the efforts made, the major economic projects launched, and the social programs being implemented, the results achieved do not measure up to my ambitions in this regard.

In a bid to reduce joblessness and address the urgent issue of youth employment, particularly its connection with the education and training system, the Sovereign had called upon the Government and the actors concerned to undertake a comprehensive review of public mechanisms and programs for youth employment so as to make them more effective and to ensure they satisfy more adequately young peoples aspirations and also the job market needs.

In his speech of August 20th, the King had also called for the adoption of a framework agreement, involving the government and the private sector, to give a strong impetus to the re-training of students who drop out of school before earning a diploma so that they may be given a second chance at professional and social integration.

The ceremony was marked by the signing of a partnership agreement between the Interior and Education Ministries meant to support schooling and fight school dropout by kids, especially from poor rural families.

The agreement also provides for supporting preschool education, reinforcing boarding, catering and school transportation services, and promoting extracurricular activities.
There are hunters who go a lifetime dreaming of that big kill. Then there's Simon Hughes, who helped nab a beast of an animal on an East Texas hunt  while still in the first grade. The 5-year-old boy from Goodrich was part of a hunting crew that recently killed an 800-pound, 12-foot-6-inch alligator that has wildlife experts shaking their heads.

The reptile, whose size is at a state record level, is now at the taxidermist waiting to be mounted. Simon's family, meanwhile, is fielding calls from CNN and Good Morning America to feature his exploits.

Simon learned to drive all-terrain vehicles and shoot firearms when he was only 4. So he was primed and ready to go on an alligator hunt this past weekend with his father, Scott Hughes, a sixth-generation rancher, and hunting guide Chuck Cotton.

Simon had a new junior-sized .410-gauge shotgun. His first gun had been too big, having a recoil that opened a small cut below one eye after he fired it.

Neither his father nor mother worry about Simon using firearms, because he has been taught gun safety since he was big enough to walk and stand in a deer blind.

That's the way it is in rural areas, Scott Hughes said. We don't think of guns as playthings or something used in videogames.

By the time of the alligator hunt, Simon could shoot clay pigeons.

Polk County Sheriff Kenneth Hammack, a former Texas Ranger, has been bird hunting with Simon and said he shoots pretty well for his age. Of course, you always keep an eye on children, said Hammack, but he's learned a lot from his father.

Scott had obtained a state permit to kill two of the 40 alligators populating his 5,000-acre spread near Lake Livingston because he knew something real big was out there and driving small alligators from the swampy areas and into his stock ponds.

State law requires alligators be caught on a baited hook or shot with a bow and arrow. So they baited a hook on Saturday with some smelly armadillo roadkill, which apparently alligators adore.

When they returned the next day, the line was taut. Something had been snared and was resting beneath the dark 4-foot-deep waters.

Never afraid for a second'

The hunters soon discovered their catch was an alligator. They attached it to an all-terrain vehicle with a sturdy line, but the gator proved so strong it almost dragged their vehicle into the water.

Finally, the animal, after thrashing and rolling, surfaced a second time, and Simon, poised 5 feet away, fired the first and what proved to be fatal shot. Cotton, just to be sure, fired one more shot at the giant reptile, which had managed to rip the hook out of its mouth.

Simon said he screamed holy moly when he saw the catch of the day. I was never afraid for a second, he said of the gator, which is 20 times his size.

Taxidermist Stephen Moye said the head of the 12-foot- 6-inch reptile weighs 104 pounds by itself.

A state wildlife biologist estimated the gator's weight at more than 800 pounds. Finding an alligator of such size is rare, state officials said. Although the record length for a Texas alligator exceeds Simon's kill by 1 foot and 8 inches, the record weight for a gator killed on state property is only 690 pounds, records showed.

Simon, meanwhile, has shown pictures of the gator to his classmates in Goodrich, near Lake Livingston, but that won't be nearly as impressive as when he can bring the mounted head to show-and-tell and display its ferocious 12-inch bite.

My friends were proud of me, and I was proud of myself, Simon said of the photos that show him standing alongside the monstrous gator. It's humongous!

cindy.horswell@chron.com
An inmate at a federal lock-up in downtown Houston died this week of an apparent suicide after he hanged himself, officials said Thursday.

Mark Adair, who was convicted last month on child pornography charges, was found unresponsive in his cell Tuesday around 1 a.m., according to a news release.
Courtesy of the Texas Office of the Attorney General

The owner of a Harris County bar and 13 patrons have been arrested on drug-related charges after a months-long investigation into drug sales and possible human trafficking, state authorities said Thursday.

The bar, El Condor Pool Hall, 9714 Veterans Memorial Drive, north of Texas 249, is closed and its liquor license canceled, The Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission said.

The owner of the permit, 68-year-old Jose Rosendo Garcia, is charged with possession of a controlled substance, according to court records on the Harris County District Clerk's website.

GLITZY AND OFFENSIVE: Drug cartel king pin's wife throws a birthday party

Garcia and the 13 others were arrested after authorities conducted an arrest warrant for him and a search warrant on the bar on Saturday. It was shut down that day. The Harris County Sheriff's Office, Homeland Security Investigations, the Harris County District Attorney's Office, Harris County Fire Marshals and the Texas Department of Public Safety were part of the investigation.

Authorities seized several grams of narcotics including cocaine and heroin along with more than $6,700 in cash, the TABC said.

STAR POWER: McConaughey appears in ad with AG Ken Paxton to fight human trafficking

Authorities also interviewed 19 women as part of an ongoing investigation into alleged human trafficking. They will be interviewed by members of the Human Trafficking Rescue Alliance and the Department of Homeland Security Investigations.

The bar, which opened in 2008, has twice been cited for operating after hours, most recently in May, according to the TABC. The previous incident was in December 2013. The owners paid a $2,100 fine.
Mari Paz has been a patient at Shriners Hospitals for Children in Houston since she was 3 years old, after she was born with a condition that required a leg amputation and eventually a prosthetic.

Despite the physical disability, the 19-year-old woman from Mexico hasn't let it slow her down. She has become a model in Mexico and an advocate for young people with disabilities and aesthetic differences.

RELATED: Baylor instructor's prosthetic leg evokes memory of Houston schoolyard bombing

Paz has been featured in Shriners Leaders In Care magazine and at least one major modeling project, "Belleza Sin Limites" or "Beauty without Limits." She also is studying education at a university in Mexico and hopes to become a teacher.

Paz, who is undergoing treatment for a new prosthetic leg at the Houston hospital, said she wants to reinforce the self-esteem of kids with disabilities.

"I would love to be able to give them guidance and let them know that nothing is impossible," she said in an email. "It would be great to be able to reinforce a good self-esteem in others and even create an association where we would be able to provide care to some of these kids."

Born in the Mexican state of Nuevo Leon, Paz said she travels to Houston about once a year for treatment. The hospital provides specialized care and inpatient rehabilitation for children all over the United States and Latin America, regardless of a family's ability to pay, hospital spokesman Armand Viscarri said.

"Her condition is known as a proximal femoral focal deficiency and hypoplasia of the upper limb," Viscarri said. "That basically means that she was born with one leg bigger than the other."

LOCAL MODEL: Houston model and Instagram celebrity attacked by shark

Viscarri said Paz has built up confidence through modeling. She used to wear clothing that disguised her prosthetic, but she's now more accepting of her body and herself, he said.

"Her story is one that that represents anti-bullying, overcoming all odds, and finding beauty in all shapes and sizes," Viscarri said in a press release.

Paz's new prosthetic will match her current height, and she plans to continue her modeling career into her 20s.

"People can accomplish anything if they love themselves" she said. "People may view things as taboo, but we need to learn to accept that not everyone in the world is the same."

Text CHRON to 77453 to receive breaking news alerts by text message.

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
Rice University announced Tuesday that it would offer free tuition to middle-income undergraduate students.

The change, affecting families that make between $65,000 and $130,000 a year, is a positive sign in a sea of colleges where tuition and student debt has steadily risen.

To see other colleges that have made notable efforts in making college affordable for the nation's working class, we gathered the best value colleges featured in the latest rankings of education data site Niche.

The rankings, calculated using data from the U.S. Department of Education and student reviews, place price, alumni earnings and student debt above acceptance rates.

That makes them a useful tool for exploring colleges that best benefit middle-income students during and after school.

See above for the best, most affordable Texas colleges for middle-class families.

READ MORE: Rice University announces free tuition for middle-income undergraduate students

Text CHRON to 77453 to receive breaking news alerts by text message.



Fernando Ramirez covers Texas news and politics. Read him on our breaking news site and on our subscriber site. | Fernando.ramirez@chron.com | @fernramirez93




A delegation from the European Parliaments Committee on International Trade (INTA) visited Moroccos southern provinces, the Sahara, where they met officials, local elects, civil society activists and human rights advocates and witnessed on the ground the efforts underway in various fields including agriculture, economy, industry and renewable energy benefiting the local population.

In the report published at the end of their mission, the MEPs who saw first-hand the dynamism of the economic fabric and the impact of the growth and exploitation of the region resources on the local population, highlighted the development efforts being undertaken in the southern provinces and the benefits drawn by the local populations.

The MEPs were in the Sahara early September as part of a fact-finding mission to examine the impact of the extension of preferential trade tariffs to the territory, as proposed by the European Commission and Council.

During the three-day visit, the MEPs learned about the development plan 2016- 2022 for the southern provinces launched by King Mohammed VI in November 2015 providing for projects worth 77 billion.

They were notably briefed by their various interlocutors about the projects launched in the fields of agriculture, fisheries, housing, renewable energies, health, education and women entrepreneurship.

The European delegation visited the French chamber of commerce in Laayoune where they learned about different French investments that aim at promoting employment among the youth, the report said.

In Laayoune, they also made a field trip to the Phosboucraa phosphate production plant, which earmarks a large chunk of its payroll to the southern provinces population.

The delegation also met the Chairman of the National Human Rights Council (CNDH) as well as the Chairman of the Regional Human Rights Council.

The visit was a chance to highlight that the resources of the Sahara are used to develop the region as for every 1 dirham received in the region Morocco spends 7 dirhams.

The MEPs visit came few days after debates at the European Parliament INTA on the renewal of the EU-Morocco Fisheries accord.

EU Commissioner for Economic & Financial Affairs Pierre Moscovici then told INTA members that the new deal is in line with the ruling of the European court of Justice, supports the local development and does not interfere with the UN political settlement process of the Sahara issue.

According to the European Commissioner, 45,000 local jobs depend directly or indirectly on fisheries and 14,000 jobs depend directly on agriculture.

End of July, the EU and Morocco sealed a new fisheries deal, which replaces the one that expired on July 14. Under the new agreement, the financial compensation paid by the EU to Morocco will go up from 40 million a year to 52.2 million.
World leaders have converged on Africa in recent days, but their development plans may do more harm than good. And increasing foreign aid may be their worst proposal yet, writes Ibrahim B. Anoba in a new essay for Actons Religion & Liberty Transatlantic website.

Limiting the power of the government and its cronies, and tempering bureaucratic overreach with a firm respect for individual rights, are prerequisites for economic progress, writes Anoba, acting executive director of the African Liberty Organization for Development.

He gives the background before noting the five ways the West gets African development all wrong:

In the last few weeks, Africa witnessed two major events that could influence the continents economic landscape in the coming decades. First was the visit by British Prime Minister Theresa May and her pledge of $5.1 billion in investments continent-wide, as the UK prepares for life after Brexit. Next followed the gesture of Chinese President Xi Jinping, who offered $60 billion in loans and aid to African leaders at the Forum for China-Africa Cooperation in Beijing. These two offers ironically sum up the status of the continent: Africa is the new economic frontier that needs a tremendous amount of help  and the proper way to help is seldom understood by the West. Unfortunately, what development efforts should promise, and how they should be implemented, are questions both African leaders and their partners have gotten wrong for years. But here are a few things the world must understand about helping Africa.

A seemingly altruistic policy is only truly noble when it is applied with a thorough consideration of all its consequences, he concludes.

Read his full essay here.

(Photo credit: Global Justice. CC BY 2.0.)
LAKE CITY, FL  On Friday, September 21, 2018 the North Florida/South Georgia Veterans Health System will hold its annual Prisoner of War/Missing in Action (POW-MIA) Recognition Ceremonies at the Lake City Veterans Affairs (VA) Medical Center in Lake City and the Malcom Randall Veterans Affairs (VA) Medical Center in Gainesville. This day is to honor all former American prisoners of war, those still missing, and their families who have endured uncommon sacrifices on behalf of the country.

Both programs will begin at 10:00 a.m. in each Medical Center Auditorium.

Guest speaker for the Lake City VAMC Ceremony is retired United States Navy Senior Chief Petty Officer Dennis Pollard. He entered the United States Navy immediately upon graduation from high school in 1977. After completing Hospital Corps School and Field Medicine School he was assigned to the 3rd Marine Division in Okinawa, Japan, and completed assignments with United States Marine Corps infantry, reconnaissance and artillery units. Upon his return, stateside, he completed Aviation Medicine School and was assigned to the Naval Air Station Oceana, Virginia. He was the first Hospital Corpsman to earn the gold wings of a Naval Air crewman while assigned to the Naval Air Station Search and Rescue Team. He works as a Surgical Physician Assistant in the Surgery Department at the Lake City VAMC.

Guest Speaker for the Malcom Randall VAMC Ceremony is United States Marine Corps Veteran Forest Hope. After high school he enlisted in the United States Marine Corps and reported to Parris Island in January 1966. By December he was in Dong Ha, Republic of Vietnam, as a radio operator with the 12th Marines 3rd Division, Artillery. He assisted forward observers with fire missions both in the field and from headquarters. After Vietnam, he came home to a job with the Gainesville Sheriffs office and attended Santa Fe Community College. Forest is a life member of the American Legion, Marine Corps League and Vietnam Veterans of America.

For more information on the Lake City VAMC Ceremony contact Voluntary Services at 386-754-3016, ext. 2135 or 2032; and for the Malcom Randall VAMC Ceremony contact Voluntary Services at: 352-548-6068. Events are open to the Public.

Hosts: North Florida South Georgia Veterans Health System

What: Annual Prisoner of War/Missing in Action (POW-MIA) Recognition Ceremonies

When: Friday, September 21, 2018 @ 10:00 a.m., Auditoriums

Where: Lake City VAMC (619 South Marion Avenue, Lake City, 32025) and Malcom Randall VAMC (1601 SW Archer Road, Gainesville, 32608)
This appears in Thursday's Washington Post:---

Following through on previous threats, President Donald Trump announced on Monday new tariffs on $200 billion worth of imports from China, in addition to levies previously imposed on $50 billion worth of goods. The taxes, which go into effect Sept. 24, were not quite as stiff as Trump initially proposed: 10 percent rather than 25 percent, on a range of goods from which popular consumer items such as bike helmets and smartwatches have strategically been omitted. Still, the tariff will increase to 25 percent by the end of the year unless China agrees to do what the president wants, which, he said, is "to give fair and reciprocal treatment to American companies." Beijing's answer so far: to prepare retaliatory tariffs on $60 billion worth of U.S. goods, despite Trump's threat to respond with yet another round of U.S. levies if it does.

Trump has embarked on a risky course that could leave the United States worse off, despite the validity of his broad complaints against China - that its mercantilist policies systematically force U.S. firms to give up cutting-edge technology as a condition of operating in China; that Beijing protects its domestic market through a series of tariff and non-tariff barriers; and that the Communist-run country envisions using such methods to achieve global dominance in key technologies through a program known as Made in China 2025.

Nevertheless, Trump does enter this latest round of his trade war in a slightly improved position because of his willingness to ease tensions with other U.S. trading partners that he had previously inflamed. He renewed the Korea-U.S. free trade agreement, struck a tentative deal with Mexico and papered over differences with the European Union. Key matters remain unresolved, including U.S. tariffs on imported steel and aluminum, spuriously justified on national security grounds, and the inclusion of Canada in the deal with Mexico. Yet Trump no longer approaches China quite as isolated from the rest of the world as he had previously. And the rest of the world shares many U.S. concerns regarding Chinese policies.

In addition, the huge U.S. trade deficit with China paradoxically aids Trump, at least in the short term, because it means there are many more Chinese exports for the United States to tax than vice versa. Therefore, China's growth stands to suffer more than the United States does, again, in the short term.

The problem, as always, is whether Trump's goal is to accumulate leverage for use in a near-term negotiation or to discourage trade with China permanently as a matter of policy. The former might be a legitimate strategy, the latter a recipe for long-term loss of the benefits that could flow from freer trade - for both countries. At the moment, it looks distressingly as though the president wants to pursue the latter course, because he has left the Chinese guessing as to what sort of agreement he might find acceptable, short of their capitulation. Trump's aides, nevertheless, say they want "serious talks." Now would be a very good time for them to back that claim up.
To rewrite or not to rewrite the legacy system. Its a perennial question for IT organizations and one that weighs heavy with IT budget, talent and operational concerns. Every week I come in contact with CIOs and CTOs trying to determine the best way to upgrade an aging but mission-critical system or application. After years of helping businesses consider and address their upgrade needs, I have determined there are five main factors IT leaders need to carefully consider when determining whether they are going to rewrite what they have or start fresh with a rebuild.

1. Lagging security updates

Businesses are facing cyber-attacks, data breaches fraud and corporate espionage at eye-opening rates. According to the Kroll Annual Global Fraud and Risk report, 84% of companies in 2017 fell victim to fraud over the course of that year. One of the greatest vulnerabilities to an organization is older, legacy systems in which security updates have been forgotten or fallen behind. Sometimes older systems have fewer users and they get less attention. Other times security patches and updates are no longer available.

A key consideration for businesses asking the rewrite or rebuild question has to be security risks. Can the system and all its data be protected with only a rewrite? Will security and updates face any limitations or support issues if the legacy system does not migrate to the cloud or a hybrid cloud solution? Would a rebuild be essential to eliminating vulnerabilities and protecting data, customers and IP?

2. Cost of system failure

Many business leaders assume a rewrite will be less expensive than a rebuild but that is not always the case. Where the system lives and who will maintain it (is it going to the cloud or keeping to a mainframe?) is key to understanding expenses. Sharing infrastructure costs through cloud solutions is one way to reduce costs. However some legacy applications may already have cloud capabilities and infrastructure costs may not be a factor.

The biggest cost risk is of course that of the failure of a legacy system and the resulting business losses. When a network or technology is older and less efficient than other systems and tools it engages, the risk of failure goes up. That incompatibility with more modern systems and tools can cost a business dearly. The question for the business has to be this: Is rewriting this legacy system enough to guard against future failures? Or, is a rebuild necessary to keep pace with the marketplace and all its technologies?

3. Lack of talent to support older systems

Will the skilled professionals who support your legacy systems today still be around a few years from now? A few months from now? As legacy systems start to thin out, so do the IT professionals who work on them. Technology professionals have learned that the best way to advance and stay relevant is to upgrade their skills and advance with technology. That means finding workers who know and stick with legacy technologies is getter harder and even costlier. A business must examine the talent pool for maintaining a legacy system before settling on rewriting rather than rebuilding. A strong talent pool that will endure makes a good case for rewriting. A rapidly shrinking talent pool has to be considered a cost and a vulnerability risk.

4. Customer retention

Customers are king, and another critical consideration is what happens to them with a rewrite versus with a rebuild. If a system rebuild advances your products or services into new infrastructure and/or forces new compatibility requirements, will your customers be willing to adapt? Will you be burdening them with costs and complexities that could harm the relationship? On the other side of the spectrum, are you slowing your customers down? Are they leaving because of the limitations or risks of your legacy tech? Are you unable to acquire new customers because of system limitations? Look carefully at all sides of the customer equations and consider what approach offers the most to your customers today and the customers you want and need tomorrow.

5. Fear of downtime

Time is always a factor when considering a rebuild versus a rewrite. In some cases, the incremental upgrades of a rewrite offer a good strategy for avoiding major downtime at a critical business juncture. In other cases, a larger, comprehensive rebuild must proceed and the disruption accepted because of the business value of advancing the system. The one trap a business cannot fall into is never taking the steps necessary to upgrade effectively because of fear of downtime. Losing time that you can plan for is far better and far less expensive than unplanned, uncontrolled downtime because of a system failure.

Not all technology advancements across a business can and should be full upgrades or rebuilds. Sometimes a rewrite is exactly whats right for customers, budgets and time. Other times, the rebuild is what business and innovation demands. The key is knowing how to read the moment, ask the right questions and advance without missing opportunities or leaving customers behind.
While many companies are well into their digital transformation journey, its been widely reported that relatively few organizations are truly thriving or succeeding. Consultancy Inc.Digital, for example, cites only 18% of organizations as digitally thriving and consultancy ClearPrism has found that fewer than 12% of companies capture more than 85% of economic profit in any industry.

Difficulties in execution aside, digital transformation is clearly an ongoing journey, not a destination, but how many organizations have a truly clear picture of where they want to go? Whats the end game for their transformation? Is it customer obsession, revenue growth, cost reduction, process improvement, greater competitive differentiation, accelerated innovation, increased market share, improved shareholder value, all of the above, or perhaps something more?

As companies continue to work on their digital transformation initiatives and to make steady progress, its vitally important to re-visit goals and objectives along the way. What may have seemed the correct vision and strategy just a couple of years ago, may now be only part of a larger picture that organizations and the C-suite now need to consider and actualize for future success.

Re-thinking customer-centric business models

Many of todays most powerful business models put the customer at the center and drive scale by offering an incredible value proposition thats simply too good to resist. Amazons ecommerce model gives customers the ultimate in price, selection and availability  something Amazon calls the holy trinity and something the company has applied over the years to successfully grow their business and beat out the competition. Ubers ride service gives customers ease of use, convenience and real-time visibility. The same can be said for Airbnb and the list goes on.



While this customer-centric model has built many of the tech giants that we know today, some see growing inequality and a policy failure, and raise the question of whether we have the balance correct for the many stakeholders involved in our business ecosystems and for the broader economy.

Is the exchange of value between all stakeholders proportionate or are these business models skewed in favor of customers and investors at the expense of employees, partners and the social good? This is now part of the larger picture that organizations need to consider and embrace for future success.



Since we live on a planet with finite resources, considerable climate and pollution problems, and with AI continuing its inexorable journey of automation and optimization, it will be vital for corporate business models to be more equitable in the exchange of value for the benefit of society.

Adding purpose to the digital agenda

Theres now a growing number of organizations who are adding purpose to their digital agendas. You can see this reflected in their mission statements. These mission statements have evolved beyond slogans and wishful thinking to tie directly to quantifiable goals and objectives that can be measured and reported on an annual or even quarterly basis, so companies and stakeholders can gauge progress and see real-world results.

As an example, procurement software provider SAP Ariba has incorporated procurement with purpose into its strategy and helps companies look at their suppliers  and at their suppliers and customers  so everyone can see who is doing good, who protects both people and planet, and how far their influence extends.

They achieve this by looking deep into the supply chain of their $2.1 trillion business-to-business ecommerce network which connects over 3 million companies worldwide. The premise around their network transparency is based on the following:

Society : When you know the working conditions of the people who work for your suppliers, you can change those peoples lives.

: When you know the working conditions of the people who work for your suppliers, you can change those peoples lives. Economy : Helping communities thrive while your business does the same is the best practice there is.

: Helping communities thrive while your business does the same is the best practice there is. Environment: Seeing every source along your supply chain, you can make choices that protect our planet and preserve your resources.

By supporting the United Nations Global Compact, SAP Ariba are also joining over 8,000 participating companies who are aligning strategies and operations with universal principles on human rights, labor, the environment and anti-corruption, and taking actions that advance societal goals.

A recent Ernst & Young survey, Purpose-Led Brands, found that two in three respondents from global companies with annual revenues greater than $1B are actively reviewing or working on the UNs Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) which represent 17 aspirational global goals for achievement by 2030.

As awareness for SAP Aribas procurement with purpose platform grows, other global organizations are supporting their mission. This is exemplified by their involvement in an upcoming event in Monaco, The Carlyle Global Partner Summit. Here, Tifenn Dano Kwan, SAP Ariba CMO will share the worldwide movement building around social procurement, women-led businesses and organizations driving todays global economy and community-building relationships with groups like Procurious and Pledgeling  all focused on purpose-focused efforts to drive social impact.

We can drive the purpose agenda as individuals

While corporate progress is promising, as consumers and employees, we have considerable power to drive change as well. We can choose to do business with companies that treat their employees fairly and have robust approaches to corporate social responsibility (CSR) in addition to working with those that offer the most compelling value propositions to us as consumers.

The choice doesnt have to be a binary selection of profit or purpose and the most innovative companies should be looking at how to deliver excellence on both fronts simultaneously.

We can also choose to do business with companies that have a human-focused approach to implementing AI where they never lose sight of the fact that its their employees who are on the front lines of serving and supporting their customers. Rather than being in the people elimination business, companies should focus on how humans and machines can work together.

As consumers, if were brave enough, we can force companies to change by voting with our wallets and taking our business elsewhere, but willing companies can play a large role as well. By focusing on purpose-driven as well as business-driven objectives and by focusing on a well-balanced approach to value exchange in their ecosystems, they can truly help make the world a better place.
The Belgium Federal Commission on the Control and Evaluation of Euthanasia in its most recent report of Belgium euthanasia statistics stated that between January 1, 2016 and December 31, 2017, three children died by lethal injection under the countrys euthanasia law. They were a nine year old with a brain tumor, an eleven year old with cystic fibrosis and a seventeen year old (probably a boy) with Duchenne muscular dystrophy. (1) We know nothing else about these persons. We dont even know whether each of them had involved parents or if one or more had guardians. In both life and untimely death, they are reduced to age and general diagnosis. As individuals, they are given no backstory. They are profoundly anonymous.

It calls to mind that in 1980s America, infants who were denied basic medical care and nourishment due to disability were called Baby Does. (2)

Belgiums euthanasia law, as amended in 2014, allows children of any age to opt for a lethal injection provided certain criteria are met. A doctor must state that the child is in a hopeless medical situation of constant and unbearable suffering that cannot be eased and which will cause death in the short term. Another doctor who is a psychiatrist must opine that the child understands what euthanasia is and is not influenced by a third party. Parental consent must be obtained.

These rules have been characterized as very strict (3) but they implicitly allow the two doctors and the parents to drive the process. A child can be killed if his doctor judges that he is embroiled in hopeless suffering and will die soon, the parents agree that the child would now be better off dead, and the child buys into this enough that the second doctor  who knows the judgment of the first doctor  can attest the child is acting of his own free will. (I call this the domino theory). Did something like this happen to any of the anonymous three? We just dont know.

All the criteria are subjective. For example, what is the dividing line between a child being influenced in her decision and not being influenced? The Conversation Project in the U.S. suggests that one way to elicit a seriously ill childs views on end-of-life care is to discuss heaven. (4) Will bringing up heaven when speaking about options influence a nine year old who may view heaven as Disneyworld? Might an eleven year old be influenced if she reads an article about how much it costs to treat kids like her? Would knowing that your parents would consent to euthanasia if you wanted it influence a seventeen year old? It is enough to make a psychiatrists head spin. What underlines a finding of constant suffering? Would a doctor ever equate the disability associated with a condition with suffering? Would suffering associated with a lack of pain management or with treatment delivered in a needlessly invasive way ever be erroneously attributed to the childs condition rather than to a deficiency in medical practice? Until quite recently, babies were operated on without anesthesia in the United States.

Luc Proot, a member of the Belgian Commission, said in regard to each of the anonymous three, I saw mental and physical suffering so overwhelming that I thought we did a good thing. (5)

Some things are strange about this statement. It suggests that Proot met each of the kids. Instead, as part of his official role, he read the case file on each child after they died  case files written by the doctors involved in the euthanasias and whose identities like the identities of the children were withheld. (6)

Proot said we did a good thing. This seems like an acknowledgment that the children, rather than being beneficiaries of childrens rights and in charge of their destinies, were acted upon.

Lastly, there is no mention of the kids being close to death.

In Belgium, euthanasia is available to a wide swath of the adult population. To be sure, those with terminal illness can request the needle but so can people with two or more incurable conditions, neither of which is life threatening, as well as people with dementia or psychiatric disorders. In 2017 there were 375 cases of reported euthanasia of people whose deaths were not expected in the near future or 16.2% of all cases of reported euthanasia. (7)

With children though, euthanasia is supposed to be restricted to cases where death is near. There is no way to speculate on how far along the 9-year-olds brain tumor was but there is a good chance that the 11-year-old and 17-year-old were not inevitably dying. Today, cystic fibrosis and Duchenne muscular dystrophy are chronic, disabling diseases but with proper medical management, they dont tend to be fatal in childhood. The median life expectancy of a child born in the United States with cystic fibrosis is now 43 years and that doesnt factor in the scientific advances that are likely to occur. (8) Guys with Duchenne often live through their 30s and sometimes into their 40s and 50s. (9) To put this into context, the average life expectancy for men and women in the United States in 1917 was 48 and 54 years respectively and this was before the great influenza epidemic where average life expectancy really plummeted. (10)

Were their special circumstances leading the doctors of the eleven-year-old and the seventeen-year-old to conclude they were both close to death? We just dont know. Had the children had access to reasonable and empathetic care for their condition? We just dont know. Were these instances where the doctors conflated ongoing disability with a terminal state? We just dont know.

Parents usually want the best for their offspring but it is naive to assume that the need for parental consent is a foolproof safeguard. Doctors are authority figures. They steer parents just as parents steer their children. When Stephen Drake was born, the doctor who injured him through improper use of forceps told his parents that the odds were 100 to 1 against him living through the night, and the odds were a million to one against him not being a vegetable if he did survive. Stephen has written, The odds the doctor cited for my survival and recovery were almost certainly made up on the spot and were aimed at getting my parents to accept my death as a good, if not clearly inevitable, thing. (11) Fortunately for us all, his parents rejected the suggestion but there may well have been other cases where this doctor succeeded in using a speculative prognosis to convince the parents to let nature take its course.

In the 1980s, the groups who opposed any legal protections for disabled infants in hospitals -mainly medical groups  argued that parental autonomy was paramount. Nevertheless, one pediatrician told me that as long as she evidenced enough concern for child and family, she could generally get parents to agree to almost anything. She felt that parental autonomy was quite often a sham.

Of course, there have been cases like the Charlie Gard case in Britain where parents have indeed wanted life sustaining care for their child and have been opposed by doctors and hospitals.

Why was parental or guardian consent given for the euthanasia of the anonymous three? We just dont know.

In the last analysis, all that can be said about the fate of the anonymous three is what Charles Lane said in his opinion piece in the Washington Post, the Belgian publics support for euthanasia remains undiminished. The precedent for euthanizing children has been established, and more will almost certainly receive lethal injections this year, next year and the year after that.(12)

As for the Baby Doe controversy, it was never resolved, just submerged. Food, water and antibiotics in hospitals have been redefined as life support and extraordinary care, depending on the circumstances.

As a young professional woman in the 1980s, I had the wind knocked out of me when I learned there was no social consensus about the right of people with disabilities to survive early childhood. I would like to say to the young people with disabilities of today, there is a resistance. Older people with disabilities are working hard to make you safe in medical settings. We will be passing the torch to you.

FOOTNOTES

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/children-are-being-euthanized-in-belgium/2018/08/06/9473bac2-9988-11e8-b60b-1c897f17e185_story.html?utm_term=.0310c1b7da8d
Over the last half-century, a once overwhelmingly rural world has become ever more urban. In 1960, the urbanization rate in the majority of poor countries was less than 10 percent. Just 3 percent of Botswanas population lived in cities, for example, while Kenya was 7 percent urban and Bangladesh (then East Pakistan) was 5 percent urban. Even China had only 16 percent of its people then residing in cities. Nowadays, China is more than 50 percent urban and Botswana more than 60 percent. In those two countries, industrialization and increasing prosperity have accompanied the population shift to cities. Chinas real per-capita incomes have risen 25-fold since the early 1960s, and Botswana is more than 17 times wealthier. This has been urbanizations usual historical pattern. In 1961, a 1 percent increase in urbanization was associated with per-capita earnings growth of 3 percent. And the trend is even stronger today: in 2011, a 1 percent rise in urbanization was associated with a 5 percent boost in earnings.

Yet while urbanization continues to correlate with prosperity, recent years have seen the striking rise of a new phenomenon: urbanizing countries that remain poor. Urbanization has increased from 5 percent to 28 percent in Bangladesh and from 7 percent to 24 percent in Kenya, for example, but prosperity has stood still. The urbanization of these poor nations doesnt take the form of midsize urban centers, like those that sprouted along most of Americas major nineteenth-century waterways, but typically of a single megacity. The Nairobi agglomeration has a population of 3 million; Dhaka has 15 million inhabitants. The Democratic Republic of the Congo is the ultimate example of this new form of impoverished urbanization. Its capital, Kinshasa, has 8.4 million people, while per-capita income in the country is about $250. Haiti is also an extreme case, with an urbanization rate of over 50 percent and a per-capita income under $1,000. Karachi has 13.5 million inhabitants; the per-capita income in Pakistan is about $1,200.

These impoverished big cities are mostly located in poorly governed countries, lacking stable institutions and strong property rights, which helps explain why economic growth hasnt taken off in them. But if these vast urban agglomerations arent providing much economic opportunity, why are rural people still moving to them? And how can such cities, with extremely limited resources, deal with the perpetual demons of density, including contagions, crime, and housing? Can a megacity of almost 9 million people in a country where incomes average $250 a year be anything but a hell on earth? Cholera rages in Port-au-Prince and Kinshasa; hundreds are killed each year by the commuter trains of Mumbai. The awful downsides of urban poverty might seem to support limits on urban growth or a more aggressive focus on rural development. But cities are the present and future of the developing world. The great challenge of our century will be to make them livable.

It might seem that the worlds wealthy metropolises are so different from places like Kinshasa that their experience has little relevance. But the history of New York itself is the story of a city struggling to make itself livable, despite world-class corruption. Developing-world megacities need to learn the lessons of the fight for better urban government, as much as they need technocratic advice and new technologies.

Why has poor-country urbanization become so common when it was once rare? In the broadest sense, it is because the longtime connection between agricultural productivity and urban growth has been broken. From medieval times and for centuries afterward, famine-causing disasters didnt send peasants flocking to the nearest town or citythat path led only to starvation. Staying close to the land offered the best chance of survival. Cities grew only when they could tap vast agricultural surpluses and, crucially, had the means to get that food delivered reliably from their hinterlands.

New York is a good example. Back in 1875, as it crossed the threshold of 1 million inhabitants, the city could easily feed itself with the products of fertile western farmland. Thanks to technological improvements like Cyrus McCormicks mechanical reaper, the farms had begun to produce a lot more food than farmers needed to feed themselves. New transportation infrastructurethe Erie Canal and the Intercontinental Railroadmade it possible to move all that food swiftly to the city. And Gothams entrepreneurial success in finding markets for its relatively sophisticated products, like printed books and refined sugar, gave it the wealth to buy and transport the food, which, in turn, enriched Americas breadbasket. In earlier cities with more than 1 million people, like ancient Rome, military might and bureaucratic competence played the role that entrepreneurship did in New York. Unlike the Iowa farmers shipping wheat to Manhattan for profit, Egypt wasnt willingly emptying its granaries to feed Rome. But the empires sword made sure that the food arrived all the same, efficiently moved over great distances by the Roman legions.

The cities of the poor are expanding without food surpluses or increased agricultural productivity. The rural hinterlands of places like Port-au-Prince and Dakar are still grindingly poor and unproductive. What is feeding these cities is the global economy. Farms in Argentina or Australia or Kansas are providing abundant, inexpensive food to Port-au-Prince and Karachi and similarly poor cities. The Democratic Republic of the Congo doesnt need to feed Kinshasa, and couldnt if it had to rely on its own agricultural output; a caloric river flows into the city from the outside world. To pay for the city calories, the poor countries sell minerals or other commodities or rely on foreign aid. They tend not to export industrial manufactured goods because they dont make any. Almost 50 percent of Liberia is urbanized, for example, but manufacturing of goods that might be exported accounts for only 3 percent of GDP.

For a subsistence farmer in Bangladesh or the Congo, a move to the city, poor as it might be, still makes sense. He often has a better chance of getting food coming off a boat in a city portliving off the scraps of globalizationthan he did getting it out of the ground, left fallow by poor soil and worse organization. When cities can rely on external sources of food, including foreign aid, moreover, they also become refugee magnetsas Dhaka, Port-au-Prince, and Kinshasa have become. Sustained by the vast wealth of the wider world, these struggling megacities can expand without a surge in national prosperity.

Antiurban critics look at agglomerations of the poor like Port-au-Prince and despair at their filth, crime, and dismal living conditionsnegative externalities of density. Over time, developing and developed cities have mitigated these effects with competent government and money, both of which poor cities lack. But sending people back to the even more impoverished countryside isnt a viable option; there is no future in rural desperation.

The most fundamentalbut also the most costlyjob of city government is hygienic: securing safe water supplies. No crime wave can compare in horror with a cholera epidemic. Yes, urban density can help spread airborne epidemics, like the 1918 influenzas, or sexually transmitted plagues, like AIDS. But water is the great repository for bacteria, and waterborne killers are harder to check through quarantines and behavioral responses, like sexual abstinence. If human waste pollutes urban water supplies, the results can be deadly, as they were in London in 1854, when more than 125 people died of cholera near Broad Street over just three days, after drinking from a well contaminated by a sick babys diapers. A similar cholera epidemic ravaged Kinshasa, where sewers are basically nonexistent, just a few years ago, sickening hundreds and killing dozens over a short period of time. Port-au-Prince also has no sewers, which has undoubtedly worsened the cholera outbreak that has killed thousands of Haitians in recent years.

Clean water usually requires serious investment in infrastructure that brings water in from somewhere less dense and that ships out human waste so that it doesnt infect water supplies. Large-scale infrastructure of this kind doesnt just need good engineering; it needs capable government, which can eliminate corruption and incompetence and credibly borrow. During the 1990s, the city-state of Singapore solved its long-standing water-supply problem by creating a system that purified and reused water. Alarmists who are worried about supplies to American cities forget about the worlds salt water, which can be desalinated at a cost of $1 to $1.50 for 1,000 gallonsmore than twice the typical daily use of an American family. At present, Kinshasa and poor cities like it couldnt come close to affording such innovative ways of providing clean water. Looking to nineteenth-century New York City might provide a more practicable approach. Those New Yorkers, like the ancient Romans before them, built sewers to move waste away from the people and aqueducts to bring fresh water to them from a less dense area. Rome moved its waste into the Cloaca Maxima; New York dumped it into the East River. The waste areas were doubtless disgusting. No one had to drink from them, though, because pure water was readily available.

In old New York, the model that worked was a public entitybut one set up to be independent from the morass of corrupt city government. That may be the right model in much of the developing world today, too. New York originally tried to secure clean water by contracting with a private company, founded by Aaron Burr in 1799. The firm agreed to provide the waterif it could do a bit of banking on the side. Burrs Bank of Manhattan Water Company evolved into Chase Manhattan Bank and then JPMorgan Chase, making huge profits in finance, but it never was any good at water provision. Somewhat later, the Water Works Company, another private New York firm with a charter to supply water to the city, failed miserably. It couldnt raise enough funds for the infrastructure it needed to tap the Bronx River and some local ponds and was plagued by charges of financial mismanagement, which spooked its stockholders.

New York eventually solved its water problem with the construction of the 40-mile-plus Croton Aqueduct, completed in 1842, which delivered pure flows from the Croton River southward into the city. The aqueduct was built not by ordinary city government but by an independent group, set up by the state: the Water Commissioners. In a sense, the arrangement prefigured Robert Mosess ambitious New York infrastructure operations in the next century.

This type of entity has some real advantages when city governments are corrupt. Public but independent, its separate, well-defined mission means that it can be held more accountable for its performance, especially if placed under strong individual leadership. Its accounting books, kept separate from those of other city entities, can be more easily audited. And if the entity is long-lived, it can think on a city-building time scale, not from election to election. Such entities have also established a good track record of attracting talented individuals to lead them. The model isnt perfect, its important to add. Moses illustrates both the strengths and weaknesses of this approach, as he was capable and honestbut also prone to ignoring the concerns of many voters. Still, the independent-but-public model worked in providing New York City with clean water. After building the Croton Aqueduct, New York then turned to the expansion and improvement of its sewers.

If the aqueduct was New Yorks signature water-infrastructure project, reversing the flow of the Chicago River was Chicagos even more amazing nineteenth-century feat, ensuring that waste no longer polluted Lake Michigan, the source of the citys drinking water. The work of economic historian Werner Troesken documents the tremendous health gains that came from municipal water provision in the U.S. a century or so ago.

Large-scale public works like these are expensive: Americas cities and towns were spending as much on clean water at the start of the twentieth century as the federal government spent on everything except the post office and the army. Research by David Cutler and Grant Miller suggests that these outlays were possible only because financial markets had come to trust cities enough to lend them millions of dollarsunderscoring again the importance of competent government. But relying on private interests for clean water, which didnt work in nineteenth-century New York, would be even less likely to succeed in the new cities of the poor. First, the truly destitute will rarely pay a premium for fancy water, so private providers are unlikely to make enough money to undertake such a project. And as Yales Eduardo Engel has shown, public-private infrastructure partnerships have worked well in relatively well-off Chile; but in poorer places, they often become an excuse for thefteither by the government of the private firm or by the company of the government.

Corruption undermined New York Citys street-cleaning efforts during its poorer nineteenth-century past. In the days of Boss Tweed and Tammany Hall, the city government would hire private contractors to do the job, but the cleaners did little and kicked some of the money back to corrupt officials, who looked the other way. The streets became dramatically cleaner when the city hired public street cleaners, famously led by the meticulous George Waring.

When governments are more honest, turning to private contractors can make sense. The switch from public to private services in many wealthy, relatively well-functioning cities in recent decades has often produced significant savings, with little or no reduction in service quality (and sometimes service improvement). But if places like Port-au-Prince or Kinshasa are to make their water supplies safer, some kind of public entity will probably have to lead the way in building the required infrastructureand should be encouraged to do so by external pressure. The business will be dirty and costly but not as dirty and costly as recurring waterborne plagues.

If clean water is the first job of city government, then reducing crime is job number two. As the New York Times recently reported, 2013 was Karachis deadliest year ever, with 2,700 people murdered and kidnappings, robberies, and other heinous crimes running equally rampant. Kinshasa is incredibly violent, with a murder rate estimated as high as 112 killed per 100,000 people (New Yorks rate is four per 100,000). Caracass murder rate is also more than 100 per 100,000.

Policing in these cities is ineffective and notoriously corrupt. (Asias poor slums are often comparably safe because they havent lost the nongovernmental sources of safety that urbanist Jane Jacobs described. When you enter a slum in Mumbaia megacity with a booming economy and high levels of povertyyou dont feel threatened, despite the fact that theres not a cop to be seen. You feel the eyes of the neighborhood watching, making sure that you dont pose a threat.) Thankfully, fighting crime doesnt require fancy technology or abundant resources. It can be done on the cheap, even from the highest levels of society, as Singapores history shows. Singapore is known today for its honest public officials and safe streets, but that wasnt the case when a then-poor island became independent 50 years ago. Singapore had a strong leader, Lee Kwan Yew, as prime minister for its first three decades of independence, however, and he early on imposed tough penalties against crime and disorder (including caning, even for nonviolent offenses) and cracked down on corruption, without worrying much about proofany cop with an inexplicably high level of wealth could go to jail. Lees methods would offend any civil libertarian, but they helped transform Singapores culture in ways that fueled the city-states remarkable rise, reminding us that a trade-off can exist between authoritarianism and disorder. I enjoy living in a country where charges against policemen, or anyone else, require solid evidence to convict, but that may be a luxury of an ordered society. If crime and corruption are raging out of control, as they are in some of the cities of the poor, tougher approaches may be necessary.

New York Citys history of crime prevention provides a second lesson for the poor cities. When Theodore Roosevelt was New Yorks police commissioner, the fight was against laziness and corruption. Recent commissioners William Brattons and Ray Kellys terms teach many lessons, but most important may be the imperative of reclaiming public space. In 1993, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and Bratton launched their proactive, data-driven, crime-fighting revolution, which achieved breathtaking gains and eventually made the city the safest big metropolis in America. One aspect of that revolution was shutting down open-air drug markets like the one that operated in Alphabet City in downtown Manhattan. Pushing drug sales off the streets and out of the parks didnt eradicate drug use in New York; in a big American city, its always easy to find a dealer willing to make a private sale. But shifting from public market to private dealer turned out to have a positive effect on the level of violence in the city. Between 1993 and 2012 (with Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Kelly continuing the Giuliani-Bratton policies), the number of murders in New Yorks Ninth Precinct, which includes Alphabet City, fell by a stunning 94 percent. Not all this turnaround resulted from the ending of public drug sales, but the new policy clearly made a significant difference. In recent years, Rio de Janeirostill a violent place, by New York standardsfollowed a similar strategy of pushing drug sales out of public places, and it, too, has become much safer.

To understand what happened in these cases, my sometime coauthor Jose Scheinkmans metaphor about markets and crime is useful. With the dentist model of product distribution, in Scheinkmans formulation, customers have a specialist whom they know and trust to some degreein the case of illegal drug sales, a friend or an acquaintance who also deals. The grocery store model requires customers to come to a specific location, where they know they can buy the productthe old Alphabet City for drugsand they usually dont know or care who is selling to them. From a policing point of view, the two models are completely different. Open public markets where dealers meet anonymous clients are relatively easy to eliminate: the dealers can be arrested, and buyers scare easily when faced with the threat of jail. Eliminating the dentist model of illegal drug distribution is much tougher, requiring a lot more investment of time and resources, because the supply chains are hidden and locations arent fixed.

The grocery-store model also generates far more violence. A rival seizing a known drug market takes over both the turf and its regular businesswhich explains why the gangs of Rio de Janeiros favelas were constantly warring over real estate. By contrast, the killer of a drug specialist, doing his business behind doors, doesnt automatically inherit his customers, so theres not the same incentive to violence. When Rios police adopted the strategy of fighting the grocery stores but leaving the dentists alone, drug trafficking went underground. That may not have had a huge impact on illegal drug consumption in the city, but rival traffickers stopped attacking one another over turf.

For poor cities, the implication is clear: cheap policing can be effective as long as it is smart and doesnt make the perfect the enemy of the good. It isnt going to be cost-effective to try to eradicate the entire drug trade in Kinshasa anytime soon, but targeted interventions against public drug markets dont demand time and resources in the same way.

New Yorks third lesson for the developing world is that urban housing problems need pragmatic government that encourages private-sector solutions over idealistic gestures. Housing becomes affordable when private developers can earn a profit delivering greater density. Yet too many developing-world cities have failed to protect private property from expropriation by squatters and have aggressively regulated the development of new dwellings. Ideological opposition to the development of private property makes it difficult to deliver housing that would materially improve the lives of the worlds urban poor.

In the West, legal protection of land rights long preceded major restrictions on new development. While private contractors didnt do a great job of delivering clean water to New York sewers, their extraordinary successes as developers and builders can be seen in Manhattans aboveground structures. The developers had two powerful legal assets lacking in many developing cities today: their land was well protected from private expropriation by squatters or other parties seeking possession; and their building activities were relatively unhindered.

Historian William Novak reminds us that nineteenth-century America was not a laissez-faire paradise but a place where localities imposed scores of rules on property owners. Typically, these restrictions were motivated by real concerns, such as the fires that can engulf wooden houses. But in New York, unlike in Boston, these early regulations didnt prevent building up. New Yorks landmark 1916 zoning ordinance was in place when the Empire State Building rose on the former Waldorf-Astoria site, but its constraints were minimal: it only required that the building narrow slightly as it rose, so that light could still hit the streets. Today, of course, the city is blanketed with far more intrusive zoning and historic-preservation rules, which would deter anyone seeking to add significantly more height to old Astor properties. (See Preservation Follies, Spring 2010.) These rules cost New York by limiting the supply of real estate and ensuring that prices are higher than they need be, but they were instituted too late to prevent the growth of a great, densely packed city, which had lots of low-cost buildings that could be rebuilt over the years, as people got wealthier and their needs changed. It is that density that makes New York a walking city, where it is easy to stroll to an eatery or meet someone for coffee. Just imagine if Fifth Avenues property owners had managed to get their way a century ago and blocked the redevelopment of Gilded Age mansions into skyscrapers.

Since the protection of property from private theft is so well accepted in the West, its easy to assume that only two choices exist: small-government places, like twenty-first-century Texas and nineteenth-century New York, where property is protected and lightly regulated; and big-government places, like California and New York today, where the government protects land against everyone except itself and imposes extensive limits on what private owners can do with their property. Regrettably, land policies in todays cities of the poor offer a more destructive paradigm: they manage to combine lawlessness with stifling government regulation. In many of these cities, the government does not protect private property against private expropriation. If squatters come to occupy a private landowners property, the government is unlikely to expel them. The political fallout from using force to evict the pooreven those who have illegally occupied private propertyis simply too high. Yet the government often tightly limits what can be built, at least in formal dwellings. For decades, central Mumbai labored under the requirement of a maximum floor-area ratio of 1.33, an extremely intrusive regulation that limits building upward and helps ensure that high-end Mumbai real estate is now among the most expensive in the worlda remarkable fact, given the high level of poverty in the city. The skyscrapers that do exist are surrounded by lots of green space, to satisfy land-use rules, but this means that no one can walk anywhere. All this regulatory intervention is incongruous in a city that cant stop squatters from occupying airport runways.

This combination of overpowering regulation and weak property rights, common in the cities of the poor, ensures underdevelopment. The failure to safeguard private property makes building excessively risky, unless the owners are willing to use violence to clear their land. The risks are compounded by the hoops that the regulators make developers jump through. Development gets skewed toward permanent, defensible spacethe kind that passes muster with every regulation, like expensive gated structures for the wealthyand away from cheap, transitional housing. Populist attempts to regulate developers and protect squatters have the perverse effect of discouraging the construction of these simple dwellingsprecisely the kind that poor cities need. If the poor cities ever begin to grow economically at reasonable rates, then any housing appropriate for their residents in 2014 will be wildly inappropriate for their successors in 2053because incomes should have risen substantially in 40 years. Poor-world cities need low-cost, temporary buildings that can be rebuilt over time, just as the Astor properties were.

These reformsinfrastructure for clean water, effective policing, a sensible system of property rightswould bring huge improvement to the lives of the poor in burgeoning cities like Port-au-Prince or Kinshasa. Their costs would vary from a lot, by poor-city standards (water infrastructure), to a little (changing property rules). But all demand the kind of competent political leadership rare in the worlds new cities of the poor. The history of the West, however, reminds us that cities, as wellsprings of political change and reform movements that curb corruption, are often their own best saviors. We must hope that the political and economic changes that emerge from urban agglomerations will reduce the risks inherent in the worlds rapid urbanization.

Top Photo: Refugees are flocking to Third World cities like Dhaka, where the population has swelled to 15 million inhabitants. (MAJORITY WORLD/UIG/BRIDGEMAN ART LIBRARY)
News organizations would render a valuable service if, whenever they report that someone has taken or proposes to take a polygraph, they reminded readers (or explained to them) that polygraphs are voodoo. Junk science. They are no more reliable than a pack of Tarot cards. Polygraph evidence is inadmissible in court. There is a good reason for that. To check Brett Kavanaughs qualifications for the Supreme Court, Congress would do well to ask him whether he believes Frye v. United States and United States v. Scheffer were correctly decided. This would be far more illuminating (and meaningful) to anyone trying to discern his qualifications for the Court than asking him whether he assaulted Christine Blasey Ford.

Journalists who report that Mike Pence has offered to take a polygraph (to prove that he was not the author of the anonymous New York Times op-ed), or that Ford has taken one, without explaining that polygraphs cannot discern truth from falsehood are wasting an opportunity to educate their readers. If you promulgate the idea that theres a machine that can tell when someone is lying, you shouldnt be surprised to find yourself living in a culture so hostile to science that kids go unvaccinated and measles break out in the First World.

A polygraph measures your heart rate, breathing, and galvanic skin response. There is no evidence that any pattern of physiological responses is unique to deception. Polygraphs are useful to investigators trying to elicit a confession, however: if you convince suggestible people that these measurements are associated with lying, they are more likely spontaneously to confess when you tell them, The machine says youre lying.

It works as follows:

I say, Weve got your endotrygliceride levels from the doorknob youre touching. Well match those up against the steering wheel and thatll tell us the whole story right there. Son, why on earth wouldnt you want us to match up those endotrygliceride levels if youre not involved in this? If youre afraid of what those endotrygliceride levels will tell me, you should sit right back down. If the truth comes out later and youve been wasting my time, I wont be able to help you. I was right. It was the moment. The endotrygliceride levels never lie. Then I tell the suspect he is guilty. Full stop. He is guilty and I know he is guilty. I tell him all the evidence we have against him, piling it up later after layer until he feels entombed by his misdeeds, until the suspect is well-nigh positive he cannot escape.

Thats a fictional scene, from my brothers novel Peacekeeping. But it is exactly how the polygraph works. You cant discern truth or falsehood from endotrygliceide levels. There is no such thing as an endotrygliceride level. Suspects who dont know better can, however, be coerced into confessions by a procedure that purports to be scientific.

The only value of a lie-detector test is as an interrogation toolif youre dealing with someone who believes in it. But its insanity to rely on it. People can be trained not to crack upon interrogation. If the polygraph is administered by someone friendly, there will be no interrogation. Anyone whom Mike Pence or Christine Ford hires to administer a lie-detector test will discover that he or she is telling the truth.

So why, then, does our intelligence community use them? The short answer: they shouldnt. Reposing our countrys security in a tool of no more proven utility than a dowser has is an exceptionally bad idea. No doubt it prompts a few true confessions among the guilty, but the value is outweighed by the harm: that believing in polygraphs, or pretending to believe in themor in astrology, or homeopathy, for that mattermakes us collectively more stupid.

Appeal to the polygraph may help interrogators catch criminals, but it does so in a way that encourages magical thinking in the public. Using polygraph results to make hiring decisions, or pretending that the polygraph is anything but an interrogation tool, is a terrible idea in government. By necessity, it sorts government employees into two categories: those credulous enough to believe in polygraphsthat is, people who are too credulous and scientifically illiterate to be qualified for a significant joband those who know better, who are forced to pretend that they believe in this nonsense to keep their jobs. It thus makes employees who are smart enough to know it is nonsense into liars from their first day at work.

Polygraphs also return false results that prevent qualified people from taking important jobs. They give employers confidence in employees who dont warrant it. Its true that if educated people pretend to believe in the polygraph, then its value is enhanced as an interrogation tool. But the consequences of living in a culture that is profoundly untethered from empiricism and reality are obvious enough.

That Mike Pence has offered to take a polygraph tells us exactly what wed know from studying his horoscopenothing. That he would appeal to the polygraph tells us that he is credulous or cynical. That Christine Ford has passed one tells us what wed know from learning that she is a Virgo whose ascendant is in Libranothing, again. That she is appealing to it tells us that she is suggestible, manipulative, or manipulated. Reporters who discuss her polygraph results uncritically tell us exactly the same thing about themselves. None of this means that theyre lyingit just means that theyre dumb.

Photo: Pefostudio/iStock
In one of the largest upsets of New Yorks Democratic primaries, state Senate candidate Alessandra Biaggi defeated Independent Democratic Conference founder state Sen. Jeff Klein. Klein, long a political powerhouse in Albany, spent over $3 million in an attempt to fend off the challenge, but Biaggi ultimately prevailed. She is one of a slate of progressive challengers, many of whom also unseated former IDC members, who are now expected to shake up Albany in January. In an interview with City & State, Biaggi discussed how she won and what she wants to see done in Albany, as well as the influence of her grandfather, the popular Rep. Mario Biaggi, who was ultimately convicted of corruption. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

How did you win, despite Klein massively outspending you?

The first thing is that we definitely started early enough to be able to build this ship. I got into the race in January officially, but I had been thinking about it for a little while before that. I would say one of the biggest parts, honestly, was the sheer number of grass-roots people and volunteers who not only were with us when we got in, but had been doing the IDC awareness and campaign education almost 18 months prior. So when we got in, we had their support, and then having that really was incredibly helpful.

I think one of the biggest differences between myself and my opponent was that we had over 500 volunteers and people coming from every borough, from different states, to knock on doors, make phone calls, write postcards, send text messages, in ways that were very much authentic and organic. The fact that we were able to come in and really  I mean, it was door by door. There were no shortcuts here. Every single door and every single voter, we brought to them positivity and a different approach from what has been going on previously.

Would you say the progressive movement is perhaps not strong enough to unseat someone like Gov. Andrew Cuomo? It was strong enough to fuel energy in your district and other districts, but statewide, Cynthia Nixon and other progressives lost.

I think that the progressive movement is very strong. (Klein) is an entrenched incumbent, and the fact that I was able to win my primary and that Alexandria (Ocasio-Cortez) was able to win her primary shows that at the grass-roots level, that the progressive movement is alive and well. I think that to the credit of the governor, there are a lot of things that he has done that are progressive. And statewide, people acknowledge that. And when you come down to the district-by-district level, it's certainly different. I'm not running against the governor, I'm obviously running against Jeff Klein, running against someone who quite literally ran as a Democrat and handed power over to Republicans.

Did you expect to win? An anti-IDC strategist told me that initially, six months, eight months before the election, your campaign was viewed more as a way to draw Klein's resources away from other races. Those mindsets changed as confidence grew, but how likely did you personally think your win was?

I always thought it was possible. I believed I could win from the very beginning. But I knew it would take a tremendous, tremendous amount of work, and it would take all of the right things at the right time happening. Did I think that we would win from the very beginning? No, but I believed that we could. And I think there's a difference there. When you believe that you can win, you can win. When you believe that you can't win, you won't win, and that I knew for sure. Obviously, you'll of course have hard days, but making sure that I was steady on the belief allowed everyone else around me to also feel confident that we could do it, and that's how we grew.

When you started your campaign and coordinating with the True Blue Coalition and other anti-IDC movements, was their strategy to draw Kleins resources something they discussed with you?

No. Nobody sat down and said, 'You're going to be the sacrificial lamb.' Even if they said that to me, I would have still said, 'Thank you for sharing, I'm still going forward."

Do you think this progressive movement, the anti-IDC sentiment, your victory, would have happened if Donald Trump had not been elected president?

I don't actually, I really don't, because him winning that election was the catalyst for everyone mobilizing. Even though we all wished that it didn't happen, what we're seeing is a lot of positive that has come out of the loss. There have been so many wins in the loss of Secretary Clinton. If she had won, I don't think I would be running for office.

The talks around how Klein might run for a judgeship has brought back to the forefront the kind of machine politics that are prevalent in the Bronx. How do you plan to participate in county politics?

I think one of the things that I feel proud of is that nobody chose me or anointed me to run for this seat. So that has allowed me to have an independent voice throughout this entire race as well, to stay authentic to who I am. And I think I have a mandate to be independent. And that's pretty remarkable, considering that so much that we see in our systems are these machines. That said, I'm looking forward to working with everybody because I know the most important thing is every single person in the district gets what they need and that our communities continue to rise and are represented by people who actually care about them and put them first.

Do you think more politicians like you and the progressive movement we're seeing will end machine politics in New York City?

I do, but it's less of an ending and more of a transforming. I don't think that the history of politics has been one in which there has been transparency in government. I think that having this progressive movement and having different people run and win means that not only will we change the way that government and politics are done, but we will transform machines as they are. And to be honest, hopefully encourage them to be more transparent and to be more inclusive and more diverse and compassionate, which is what we want ultimately at the end of the day. And that's something I'm committed to doing.

Presuming you're headed to Albany, what are your top legislative priorities?

Women's issues and the Reproductive Health Act. I know women's issues is a very broad subject, but really its very important to me to pass the Reproductive Health Act and codify Roe v. Wade in New York state, as well as the Comprehensive Contraception Coverage Act, affordable child care, pay equity, which is really essential. And then closing the loopholes in our rent laws, making our rent laws stronger, because affordable housing is a crisis. Then public school education. The fact that we are owed $88 million in public school funding in District 34 is scary and it's preventing our children from having a better future.

Is that from the Campaign for Fiscal Equity settlement?

Yeah, that's from CFE. And then health care. The New York Health Act is something I care very much about and I'm looking forward to working on that bill.

The last time Democrats had control of both chambers and the governor's mansion, not much got done in terms of progressive legislation. If Democrats get a Senate majority, do you think this time will be different?

I do. I really do. And I do for a few reasons. Getting the majority again, especially in this political moment, it's incredibly important. It's also critical to protecting New Yorkers. It's my hope that all Democrats will all take seriously a Democratic majority and protect it. In 2010, Donald Trump was not president. And in 2018 and 2019, he is and he will be. So that changes the political calculus significantly in a way that I think puts more pressure on all the members to make sure that we're doing everything that we can to maintain the majority and grow the majority. Even between now and November, I'll just tell you that one of the things that I'm going to be doing is focusing on some of the races where we can flip the seat from red to blue and sending volunteers there because it really matters.

Do you think your own personal name recognition helped on the campaign trail as the granddaughter of Rep. Mario Biaggi?

It depended where I was, but people definitely remembered, the older population definitely remembered. And I have to say that there really wasn't a day that went by, and I mean this, this is not an exaggeration, where someone didn't share a story with me about something my grandpa did to help them. That was not only touching, but it was incredibly motivating because people shared things like, 'One time, he changed my light bulb.' And I thought to myself, wow. No problem was too small or too big and everybody wanted to share those stories with me and the way that he made them feel. It really touched me, and it gave me the surge of energy I needed to keep going on those very difficult days. But I wasn't running on my name.

Did your grandfathers corruption conviction shape how you viewed politics before entering?

Absolutely. I think one of the things that it helps me to do is to understand a few things. The first thing it helps me to do is just understand that you have to be incredibly, incredibly careful. This entire campaign and the way that I will lead will be that way, being very careful not only to understand what all of the rules are, but just to never even think about crossing the line. Unfortunately in Albany, there's a lot of gray areas, which is why one of the things I care about is ethics reform and campaign finance reform because the laws can be stronger there, they can be more black and white where it makes it easier for people to understand. So making sure that I and my staff and everyone around me understand the rules and know what they are is a very big priority of mine.

What would you say to those who might say that your win might hurt the district because Klein was able to bring back resources in a way that a freshman legislator would not?

One of the first things I would say is that not only am I committed to making sure that our district gets what it needs, but I'm going to fight like hell that all of the needs of the district are met. To that end also, making sure we get a Democratic majority will mean actually that the Democrats will have more resources for their districts, much more than what Jeff Klein was able to deliver. So I think what's really important to note here is what he did through the IDC and by empowering Republicans, we in District 34 got crumbs from the Republican plates into the district. What we can get when we have a Democratic majority will exceed that in a very significant way. He chose to have personal power over putting the interests of, quite frankly, all New Yorkers first in a way that cost us.

What did it feel like to topple a political king?

It felt  I'm still feeling it, actually. What it feels like is justice.
In a steady drum beat of allegations getting closer and closer to Gov. Andrew Cuomo himself, the New York Post reported late Wednesday night that Cuomos top campaign brass were aware of an inflammatory mailer sent by the New York state Democratic Party against Cuomos primary challenger, Cynthia Nixon. The document, which implied without credible evidence Nixon is anti-Semitic  in fact, Nixon is raising her children Jewish  drew swift condemnation from across the political spectrum.

Cuomo has consistently denied knowing about it beforehand, but a series of revelations have brought forth evidence that a series of Cuomo associates did know and the controversy keeps getting closer to the governor personally. Below is a chronological timeline of the controversy and the Cuomo camps evolving admissions.

Sept. 8: Immediate Backlash

A rebuttal from Jewish leaders who know Nixon was almost instantaneous after some New Yorkers found the advertisement in their mailboxes on Saturday, Sept. 8. Approximately 7,000 New York City households received the mailer, which accused Nixon of ignoring the rise of anti-Semitism and of being opposed to the state of Israel, while touting Cuomos record on Jewish issues. That afternoon, New York City Councilman Brad Lander tweeted criticism of state Democratic Party for lying about Nixons position. That evening, American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten and her wife Rabbi Sharon Kleinbaum, whose LGBT-friendly synagogue Nixon attends, weighed in on Facebook with a joint post that sharply denounced the campaign literature and defended Nixon.

Cuomo campaign spokeswoman Lis Smith tweeted that Governor Cuomo didnt approve of or have any knowledge of the mailer in question and he disagrees with the language at around 5 p.m.

The state party executive director, Geoff Berman, tweeted, Let me be very clear: This mailer was a mistake and is inappropriate and is not the tone the Democratic Party should set  it will not happen again. Berman denied approving the piece on Twitter but also resisted providing any details as to how it came about. Cuomo would later imply the decision to send out the mailer came from entirely within the organization Berman controls.

Sept. 9: Cuomo, Nixon and others respond

Infuriated, Nixon responded to the news the following day, saying, I am the mother of Jewish children." She demanded a full explanation of how the piece she called a smear campaign was approved. She also called for Berman to be fired and Cuomo to record a robocall for voters apologizing for calling her an anti-Semite.

In a news conference, Cuomo denied responsibility for the mailer. I didnt know about the mailer, he said, but noted that he disapproved of the tone and language. As Cuomo began speaking, Berman tweeted again to announce the party will work with the Nixon campaign to send out a mailing of their choosing to the same universe of people targeted by the initial one.

Sept. 11: The Post received a pitch on the subject from the Cuomo campaign before the mailer

By Tuesday, multiple news outlets were poking holes in Cuomos story. Politico surveyed local campaign experts who cast doubt on the Cuomo campaigns denials. According to one of Politicos sources, Its impossible to imagine Cuomo or his team didnt sign off on this in some way.

But the bigger news was the New York Post reporting they received a story pitch from an andrewcuomo.com email address before the mailer came out for a story about Nixons views on Jewish issues. The Post wrote that the Cuomo aide gave their reporter a hard sell for covering what the aide alleged was Nixons support for the pro-Palestinian Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement against Israel. (To say Nixon supports BDS would be a gross exaggeration, even a misrepresentation, of her specific support for Israeli theater artists who are boycotting one specific theater in the West Bank.)

Cuomos campaign revealed a sliver more about the campaign literatures mysterious origins, identifying the source only as an individual helping the campaign on constituency outreach. Campaign spokeswoman Abby Collins stated, In the future, constituency representatives will not be allowed to draft or participate in the mail program and moving forward, the state party executive director and lawyer must sign off on each peace. Collins declined to elaborate on whether anyone had approved the mailer about Nixon.

In an interview on WNYC's the Brian Lehrer Show, Nixon sounded amused by the offer from the state party to send a follow-up mailing. I wonder when that mailer would go out, said Nixon. Would it perhaps arrive the day after the election or perhaps next week?

Sept. 12: Cuomos right-hand man knew

More bad news for Cuomo emerged on Wednesday, when the Post reported that, according to an anonymous Democratic source, Lawrence S. Schwartz, the former secretary to the governor, was very involved with the mailer and signed off on it. The Cuomo campaign released a statement essentially confirming the Posts reporting. Larry Schwartz who serves on our campaign in a volunteer capacity was reviewing mail pieces in an ad hoc fashion, but he only saw the positive section of the mailer and never saw the negative section, said Cuomo campaign spokeswoman Lis Smith.

The Cuomo campaign named David Lobl, a former special assistant to the governor who was volunteering with the re-election effort, as the actual author of the mailer. According to the Cuomo campaign, Schwartz unintentionally signed off on the flier after it was drafted by Lobl. According to the Posts source, Lobl is the fall guy and the real story is the campaign did this.

Sept. 13: Primary Day and Cuomo claims fully positive campaign

The day of the primary elections, Cuomo claimed he had run a fully positive campaign throughout his Democratic primary race with Nixon. Nixons senior campaign strategist Rebecca Katz later mocked Cuomos claim, saying, Rather than apologize to Cynthia for his false anti-Semitic accusations, or apologize to New Yorkers for repeatedly lying about the mailer, Gov. Cuomo chose to double down on his dirty politics.

Sept. 18: Top Cuomo campaign aides knew

Finally, the New York Post reported on Tuesday the 18th that Cuomos inner circle was emailed the mailer for approval. According to interviews and documents obtained by the Post, campaign manager Maggie Moran was copied on discussions about the campaign literature and her top aide Adam Steinberger was involved in its creation two weeks before the election. Allegedly the governors office was made aware, too: Jill DesRosiers, executive deputy secretary to the governor, was copied on the email.

The Post reported that Schwartz signed off on the mailer despite stating that he was uncomfortable with it in an email exchange from Sept. 3 and Sept. 4.

Cuomos team hasnt released a statement responding to the latest news.
Rejecting recent reports suggesting the Bronx and Brooklyn Democratic county leaders might select recently deposed former Independent Democratic Conference state senators Jeff Klein and Jesse Hamilton as judges at county committee meetings Thursday night, party leaders from both boroughs denied to City & State that judgeships were in the works for the controversial politicians. Nevertheless, proponents of court reform said the fact that judge selection remains largely under the control of party bosses is deeply flawed and undemocratic.

New Yorks political Twitterverse had erupted after the reports.

the Bronx Democratic machine, where your vote really doesn't matter. They'll decide who gets what office for you https://t.co/qme9hbiH5y  Rafa (@MorayBeats) September 17, 2018

In addition to the irony that state legislators just voted out of office could suddenly appear unopposed as judges on voters ballots, both Klein and Hamilton face allegations of misconduct. In January, a former Klein staffer accused him of forcibly kissing her. Klein denied the accusation, which remains under investigation by the Joint Commission on Public Ethics. Then, in June 2018, a state Supreme Court justice found the IDC had engaged in improper campaign financing.

Hamilton, meanwhile, faces questions for improper electioneering over factually false attacks on his opponent Zellnor Myrie that were distributed by a nonprofit closely aligned with the state senator. Hamiltons own nonprofit organization has come under scrutiny as well after his campaign used the nonprofits residential space in his district for a political office, which would appear to be illegal.

But the party bosses insist the outgoing lawmakers will not be joining the judiciary. There was no truth to the reports that we were prepared to offer (Jeff Klein) a judgeship or nominate him. It has not been a consideration for us that we were at any point contemplating, said Assemblyman Marcos Crespo, the chairman for the Bronx Democratic Party who first refuted the report on Twitter. The reports that were put out were inaccurate.

Given the uproar among Democrats in Congress over a sexual assault allegation against U.S. Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, Crespo noted that it would be extremely tone deaf of us to ignore alleged misconduct by Klein and award him a judgeship right now.

Yet Crespo was careful to note that Klein still has significant support in the community after years of representing the Bronx. Despite last weeks impressive turnout for Alessandra Biaggi, Crespo said, Klein still had areas of significant support in the district, including with communities of color. Jeff Klein served a long time. People know him and trust him, Crespo said. At a different time and different circumstances, would he be considered? I would be naive to say he wouldnt be.

Frank Seddio, the county leader of the Brooklyn Democratic Party, said he was not aware of any movement to place Hamilton on the bench either. I have no idea! Seddio said, laughing out loud. There hasnt even been a discussion as far as Im aware of, he added, before joking, Lets put it this way: If someone knows better than me, then they should be the county leader!

Seddio said that he had the greatest regard for Jesse Hamilton, but that he doubted Klein or Hamilton would be picked for judgeships. He explained how the upcoming judicial selection process could theoretically play out: On Thursday night, we select our Supreme Court nominees and once theyre nominated, there will be vacancies. The way theres an opening is if a Civil Court judge moves up to a (state) Supreme Court judge and then you have what we call a backfill. The backfill is picked by the county committee or the executive board, depending on what position it is.

In that case, Hamilton could be placed in one of two civil court judgeships, one in Brooklyn Heights or one in Brownsville, Seddio said. Hamilton would be ineligible for a third countywide vacancy because it requires a judicial vetting process Hamilton did not go through, Seddio said.

For Klein, I dont think theyre going to do it, but it would be a Supreme Court job for him, Seddio said.

Regardless of party leaders intentions for Klein or Hamilton, they could easily make them judges, if they chose to do so. The selection process has all the trappings of democracy but has none of the actual substance, said James Sample, a Hofstra law professor and former attorney in the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice. The voters are given the illusion of playing a role in this process but the choices are all made for them.

Democratic voters elect judicial delegates, chosen by the party, with little or no information about who they are. Then, those delegates gather in what Sample said have proven to be perfunctory conventions where a pre-approved candidate is nominated. In Democratic-majority districts, said Sample, the nomination is everything.

Theres no opportunity for a challenger candidate to petition his or her way onto a primary ballot to compete against the partys chosen candidate for the nomination, Sample said. Thats where the process effectively becomes an appointment.

Sample put the New York judicial selection system on trial in State Board of Elections v. Margarita Lopez Torres. He succeeded in having two lower courts strike down the states system as unconstitutional, but the U.S. Supreme Court overturned those rulings. Still, U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens carefully noted the ruling was not an endorsement of New Yorks judicial election system, quoting Thurgood Marshall: The Constitution does not prohibit legislatures from enacting stupid laws.

The way the system works now, its basically political leaders who choose people loyal to the party that rubber stamp what the political leaders want from the parties, said Dennis Hawkins, executive director of The Fund for Modern Courts, a judicial reform organization. We just dont think thats an approach that will find the best and the brightest.

Hawkins suggested that qualified judicial candidates should have been practicing law in court, have specific knowledge of area of law they are going to serve in and have the temperament to be a judge.

Even if Klein or Hamilton never dons the black robe or holds a gavel, there is only one part of their potential judgeships that is unusual. Very few incumbents lose in New York politics, Sample said. There is, however, a long history of judges chosen in New York who were politicos with checkered records and even serious misconduct allegations and sometimes criminal allegations  that part is not unusual, Sample said.
An MP has labelled JustGiving a disgrace over fees it earned for money fundraised following terror attacks and major incidents, in a letter to Tracey Crouch, minister for civil society.

Referring to 2017s terror attack in Manchester Arena and fire at Grenfell Tower, Neil Coyle, Labour MP for Bermondsey and Old Southwark, wrote that he was very disturbed to learn that JustGiving had retained profit made through fundraising.

He wrote: This is on top of their admin fees and comes from their policy of keeping 5 per cent of all donations made through their platform. I think this policy should be waived in circumstances like terror or tragedy on the scale of Grenfell and it is a disgrace that their corporate profit has been put before the need to ensure they operate ethical policies.

Coyle called on Crouch to ask JustGiving to return 500,000 they picked from the pockets of victims of terror and tragedy last year. He said that this should form part of discussions about explorations of ways to stop digital giving platforms from taking commission from Gift Aid, as first outlined by Treasury minister Robert Jenrick.

In the letter which was also sent to Jerry Needel, president of JustGivings owner Blackbaud, as well as tweeted by Coyle, he added: No member of the public last year could have known that their generous support for families affected could end up in the coffers of an American private equity owned firm.

Seems @JustGiving are refusing to discuss the 500,000 they took from public donations for terror attack & Grenfell victims last year. pic.twitter.com/SeK2p75C4u  Neil Coyle (@coyleneil) September 19, 2018

Writing for LabourList, Coyle said no one disputes the need for JustGiving to charge an admin fee, saying UK taxpayers seeking to donate sums to good causes that would otherwise reach the taxman are also seeing a portion of their would-be tax go to JustGiving, which the Treasury intends to address in the Budget. But said that he dispute the additional 5 per cent taken by the platform, which he said: This allowed them to rake in 200,000 following Grenfell suffering, over 277,000 due to the suicidal murderer in Manchester and almost 17,000 on the back of my own community being attacked.

He added: The idea that JustGiving would not exist without terrorism to raise running costs is an offensive business model and one that cannot be true. It is not quite as offensive a pretence, though, as picking the pockets of terror victims and their families.

JustGiving has previously defended itself from criticism over its payment structure, which it says it reinvests in innovation to ensure charities and individuals can raise as much as possible through the platform.

A spokesperson for JustGiving said: JustGiving allows quick, transparent and secure fundraising, when people are most in need. We are extremely proud of our world-leading platform, which has enabled our online community to support millions of people and causes around the world, including during major incidents.

We are always looking for ways to improve our platform and we are working with the Charity Commission and the Fundraising Regulator to ensure that our community can provide support whenever and wherever it is needed.
On this weeks episode, Pete talks with CJR Digital Editor Nausicaa Renner about the recent decision by both Harpers and The New York Review of Books to publish first-person accounts written by men accused of sexual assault and harassment. (Note: The podcast was recorded before news broke that Ian Buruma was out at NYRB.) Then Lyz Lenz, author of The mystery of Tucker Carlson, calls in from Iowa to talk about her profile of the Fox News anchor.

SHOW NOTES:



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Pete Vernon is a former CJR staff writer. Follow him on Twitter @ByPeteVernon.
That some of the men accused of harassment and abuse would eventually return to the public eye was never in doubt. Months ago, Katie J.M. Baker acknowledged in The New York Times that attempted comebacks were inevitable, and asked, What do we do with these men? The past week has provided examples of what not to do with them, and that includes handing over control of the pages of respected publications to their attempts at rehabilitation.

The decision to publish an essay by disgraced Canadian radio host Jian Ghomeshi in the New York Review of Books appears to have cost the magazines editor, Ian Buruma, his job. Facing intense criticism for putting Ghomeshis Reflections from a hashtag on NYRBs cover, Buruma said in Slate that the mans pastwhich included allegations of sexual abuse and harassment by more than 20 womenwasnt his concern. On Wednesday, Buruma left his position, though it is unclear whether he resigned, was asked to resign, or was fired.

NYRB wasnt alone in getting pushback to such a piece. In its October 11 issue, Harpers will carry an essay by former public radio host John Hockenberry, who was alleged to have carried out a pattern of sexual harassment in the workplace. The magazines publisher, Rick MacArthur, suggested in an interview with the CBC that his staff was supportive of the decision to publish the piece, but recently departed managing editor Hasan Altaf pushed back against that claim, telling HuffPost, No one in editorial was in support of the Hockenberry article.

ICYMI: Outrage after a news article flagged as false on Facebook

The men who feel they have been unfairly treated following accusations of harassment or abuse are entitled to their perspective, but nothing demands that editors turn over the pages of their publications to these figures. It has been less than a year since The New York Times broke the Harvey Weinstein story, opening the floodgates through which hundreds of women have spoken up about their treatment by powerful men. The New Yorkers Jia Tolentino summarized the message that is conveyed when publications decide to highlight the words of those accused: Women have had their moment, their unprecedented time in the spotlight of cultural favor, she writes. The gravitational pull of male power is exerting itself, turning our attention back to the place where it has been trained to linger: the heros journey of men.

CJRs Nausicaa Renner noted the difference in form that allows men accused of harassment or assault to pontificate in personal essays, while women who make allegations are quoted in rigorously reported third-person articles. The confession, when made by men showing a sensitive side, is a literary device to display a newly whole, unified character who is stronger thanks to introspection. Women, however, have the reverse experience: to ensure that their accounts are bulletproof, they are quoted, rather than given space to describe their experience in their own words, Renner writes. Their abuse is not entitled to be literary, only their abusers.

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Writing on the plays for public sympathy by Hockenberry and Ghomeshi, The Washington Posts Erik Wemple argues that, first-person pieces, it turns out, often require more editing, more supervision than conventionally reported pieces, Wemple writes. Dont hand over your publications keys to your essayist. Thats what Medium is for.

ICYMI: Vanity Fair criticized for September cover shoot

Below, more on the reaction to the attempted returns of fallen men.

On the comebacks: Responding to Hockenberrys essay, and the slow reemergence of other #MeToo men, The New York Timess Michelle Goldberg writes, I feel sorry for a lot of these men, but I dont think they feel sorry for women, or think about womens experience much at all. And maybe thats why the discussion about #MeToo and forgiveness never seems to go anywhere, because men arent proposing paths for restitution. Theyre asking why women wont give them absolution.

Responding to Hockenberrys essay, and the slow reemergence of other #MeToo men, The New York Timess Michelle Goldberg writes, I feel sorry for a lot of these men, but I dont think they feel sorry for women, or think about womens experience much at all. And maybe thats why the discussion about #MeToo and forgiveness never seems to go anywhere, because men arent proposing paths for restitution. Theyre asking why women wont give them absolution. Burumas defense: Slates Isaac Chotiner gives a masterclass in aggressive questioning in his interview with Buruma that ran shortly after Ghomeshis piece was published.

Slates Isaac Chotiner gives a masterclass in aggressive questioning in his interview with Buruma that ran shortly after Ghomeshis piece was published. A failure of leadership: What Buruma and the NYRB leadership failed to grasp was that men like Ghomeshi arent entitled to a nicely packaged redemption arc, wrote The Washington Posts Mili Mitra.

Other notable stories:

For Esquire, Ioan Grillo tells the story of Mexican journalist Javier Valdezs vibrant life and tragic death. Valdez, who was killed in May 2017, spent years reporting on cartels. His favored subjects were the unseen faces of the cartel wars: the members of brass bands who played ballads to men in crocodile-skin boots and women with diamond-studded fingernails; children on dirt roads who dreamed of being hit men; crying mothers whose sons had been murdered, Grillo writes.

Billionaire owners of the new Gilded Age may seem like saviors to struggling publications they purchase, writes The New York Timess David Gelles, but there are also fresh concerns, some based on recent experience, that these individuals are assuming an unhealthy amount of influence.

For CJR, D. Victoria Baranetsky, the general counsel at The Center for Investigative Reporting, writes about a question data journalists find themselves regularly asking: Will I go to prison for violating the terms of service? She writes that Silicon Valley companies have failed to create exceptions for journalists who use data scraped from social networks to do their reporting, and that its time for lawmakers to get involved.

BuzzFeed News is cutting back on its podcast ambitions, reports The Wall Street Journals Ben Mullin. The company is cutting its in-house podcast production team and shutting down several of its podcasts as it focuses on video expansion, Mullin writes.

Sean Hannity will interview President Trump Thursday evening in Las Vegas, where Trump is holding a rally.

The New York Timess Jon Caramanica laments the death of the celebrity profile, and argues that whats replaced it isnt satisfying: either outright silence, or more often, unidirectional narratives offered through social media. Monologue, not dialogue. It threatens to upend the role of the celebrity press.

ICYMI: YouTubes secret life as an engine for right-wing radicalization

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Pete Vernon is a former CJR staff writer. Follow him on Twitter @ByPeteVernon.
16 Shots, WBEZs new podcast with the Chicago Tribune about the fatal police shooting of Laquan McDonald, launched on August 29. That day, the Tribune also published a story from a selective and controlled 40-minute interview with Jason Van Dyke, the police officer charged with murdering McDonald, who was later threatened with contempt for speaking with the press.

The interview came in the night before we were putting the podcast out, says 16 Shots host Jenn White, who previously helmed her stations Making Obama and Making Oprah podcasts. It was a very late night, early morning for some people.

ICYMI: Journalisms strained relationship with police

16 Shots, which combines investigative reporting with breaking news updates, is charged with this sort of tension. Along with episodes that dive into the deep history between police and communities of color in Chicago, the journalists behind 16 Shots discuss developments tied to Van Dykes ongoing trial, which began September 5. They make space for breaking newsMayor Rahm Emanuels announcement that he would not seek re-election got its own episodeand provide by-the-minute fact checks. After airing audio of Van Dykes interview with the Tribune, White quickly countered Van Dykes claim that he had no history of misconduct complaints.

One of the reasons I love working in audio is because it gives you a chance to break up the story, said White. In the same way as you would if youre having a conversation with someone and they say something, you can respond, Wait wait wait. What does that mean?

As the Van Dyke lawsuit draws local and national press, I talked with White about the challenges of representing McDonald and Van Dykes stories, the power of journalistic collaboration, and the ramifications of the trial for Chicago and the country. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

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We were able get some insight into the defense strategy we were likely to see in the trial. What questions are they not allowing him to answer?

Why was 16 Shots WBEZs next project?

When we were coming up on the trial, it seemed like a good opportunity to remind people about the circumstances around the shooting because unfortunately we tend to have short attention spans. We had the feeling it would probably draw national attention because its not often police officers in this country go to trial for murder. We wanted to present a more complete picture of what happened, not just the night of the shooting but the months and years that followed.

The first episode starts with a 2015 meeting between Mayor Emanuel and black pastors around maintaining peace following the release of the dashcam footage. Why begin there?

Its compelling tape, and I think it sets the stakes right from the very beginning. You have a mayor calling black pastors to City Hall to say, You have to help fix this and if you dont, dont come to us asking for anything. I think by setting the stakes, were able to go back and say, For a mayor to get to this point, what happened?

That episode sparked controversy for using audio from a recent Chicago Tribune interview with Van Dyke, whose legal team heavily monitored his responses. What went into the decision to include the interview?

We came down to a couple of things. One is, Jason Van Dyke is a central person in this story, and the audio was going to be out there. Were we able to provide context to some of his statements that you may not hear in other places? The answer was yes.

The second thing was we were able get some insight into the defense strategy we were likely to see in the trial. What questions are they not allowing him to answer? You have this moment when he starts to talk about how he was feeling the night of the shooting and the attorney jumps in and cuts him off. That gives us some indication that his emotional state is probably going to come up in the trial.

How has collaboration with the Chicago Tribune aided 16 Shots?

Nobody really works in one medium anymore. If youre a print person who needs to figure out how to expand into audio or video, what are the partnerships you can form to bring your expertise to them, and vice versa? We are fortunate at WBEZ that we have been able to expand and continue to expand our newsroom. But if other newsrooms are shrinking, how do we bolster the work theyre doing and use their expertise to bolster the work were doing? When its all said and done, it is our job to serve the community. If we are falling down on the job because were just competing with one another then were not doing our best work.

Whats the importance of diving into the legal system as part of 16 Shots?

A challenge is really moving beyond the legal terminology and actually explaining what something means. Our criminal justice system is so shrouded in mystery for a lot of people. If youve never had an interaction with the criminal justice system, theres just so much you dont know. You dont know what your rights are. If we are able to pull back the veil on the criminal justice system to say, Wait a second. This is really how things work, I think voters, citizens are able to make more informed decisions about what kind of policies theyre supporting.

How do you avoid the storytelling binary of pitting those who believe Van Dyke is guilty against those who dont?

People who have a history or believe there is systemic abuse by police against black communities are also concerned about gun violence in their communities. Thats not a binary. Its not an either/or. You dont have to have a lack of accountability for police officers in order to lower crime rates A lot of it speaks to having people who have been in the field doing this reporting for a long time and are able to bring the context that theyve reported on and witnessed themselves.

How are you preparing for the potential trial outcomes?

Our plan from the very beginning was to tell the story of what happened the night of the shooting, what happened afterward, provide the trial coverage, and then talk about what happens after a verdict. Thats with the assumption we end up with a verdict.

Its hard to figure out exactly how different communities in the city are going to respond depending on the verdict. Were also in the middle of a mayoral election, and a number of people who are running for mayor have ties to the police. Theres a lot that will be left to be told after the verdict, whatever that verdict is. Were also waiting for a finalized consent decree [concerning police department reform]. What happens in Chicago, with the Chicago Police Department and with some of the changes weve seen since the shooting of Laquan McDonald, those ripples are going to linger longer.

Right now how it plays, your guess is as good as mine. But Ill say, too, working in audio, were fortunate. It makes us nimble. We can put things out as they happen.

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Hannah Steinkopf-Frank is a Chicago-based freelance writer and photographer. Her work has appeared in the Chicago Tribune, Atlas Obscura, Bitch Media, In These Times, JSTOR Daily, and Paper Magazine, among others.
Some Democrats fear voters werent ready for a woman as president in 2016, and wont be in 2020, either. Photo: Rhona Wise/AFP/Getty Images

In the sort of quiet conversations political observers have on an ongoing basis, there is a bit of a jarring note you hear among progressives looking back at 2016 and forward to 2020: a concern that perhaps Americans still arent ready for a woman to serve as president. This represents both a rueful retrospective look back at the various reasons Hillary Clinton lost, and a fearful calculation of the odds that this or that kind of candidate can topple Donald Trump. These concerns are by no means limited to men, or to those championing any particular ideology. Ive heard them from serious feminists who want to break that last glass ceiling with every fiber of their being, but who consider the defeat of Trump a patriotic duty and an ontological necessity, given the threat he poses to everything they care about most.

Theres now some empirical data to support the idea that left-of-center Americans, and particularly women, fear voter sexism. A massive new Pew study of the state of gender and leadership and obstacles for women asked if Americans not being ready to elect a woman to higher office is a major reason why there are fewer women and men in these positions. The gender breakdown in answers to this question is revealing, as is the trend since Hillary Clintons 2016 campaign:

Some 45% of Americans say that voters not being ready to elect a woman to higher office is a major barrier to female political leadership, up from 37% in 2014.

This change has come almost entirely among women. Now, 57% of women say this is a major reason why there are fewer women than men in high political offices; four years ago, about four-in-ten women (41%) said the same. Among men, the share citing voters not being ready to elect women to higher office as a major reason is virtually unchanged from four years ago (32% now and 31% in 2014).

The gender polarization over this question is enhanced when party affiliation is taken into account. Sixty-one percent of Democratic women appear to worry a lot about voter sexism (as compared to 46 percent of Democratic men), while only 18 percent of Republican men (as compared to half of Republican women) share this concern. The questions dont identify specific higher offices, but obviously sexist voters are going to be most discriminating (in both senses of the word) about the presidency.

Now one can harbor fears about voter sexism without succumbing to them; its entirely possible to perceive a candidates gender as a political problem while vowing to challenge and overcome the resistance to a woman as president. But this is an issue that Democratic women (such as Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, and Kirsten Gillibrand) considering a 2020 runand their supporters  should confront openly. Personally, all things being equal, I think it makes more sense for Democrats to prefer a woman as a 2020 nominee, if only because (as we have learned again with Brett Kavanaugh, and before that with Al Franken) any man is going to be potentially vulnerable to a #MeToo revelation that in the heat of a presidential campaign with hundreds of millions of dollars available for opposition research could be devastating, or at least neutralize Trumps own misogyny as an issue. And if a woman does defeat the 45th president, the victory would be all the sweeter for Democrats knowing that Republicans might fear in the future to accept such any more such retrograde, porcine leadership.

More immediately, a victory in the upcoming midterms, in which a pro-Democratic gender gap among women and a record number of women running as Democratic candidates are key factors, could well convince Democratic women and men that a frontlash from voters ready for a woman as president will dwarf any sexist backlash from those who arent. Regardless of party or gender, all feminists should have reason to welcome that development. Of all the indignities Donald Trump has imposed on Democrats since he decided to run for president, the fact that he has convinced many of them they dare not nominate a woman to oppose him is among the worst.
Parents of children in the Roman Catholic Church and survivors of sexual abuse by clergy filed a lawsuit Monday against Pennsylvanias eight dioceses and their bishops asking a judge to compel them to release information about abuse allegations.

The lawsuit filed Monday in Pittsburgh comes a month after a statewide grand jury report detailed sexual abuse allegations against more than 300 priests over decades in six of the states dioceses. The lawsuit alleges the dioceses havent met their obligations to report child sexual abusers under state law.

Benjamin Sweet, an attorney for the lead plaintiffs in the case said they are not seeking money, but instead are asking for public transparency about allegations. Many victims who came forward to talk to the grand jury fall outside the statute of limitations to file a civil personal injury lawsuit. The lawsuit filed Monday doesnt seek damages and doesnt represent solely victims of abuse, so Sweet said it isnt prohibited by any statute of limitations.

From our perspective this is completely about disclosure and coming clean and allowing these predator priests to be named. The concealment of these priests is a continuing slap in the face to these survivors. Its a continuing slap in the face to the parents who trust these churches and institutions to educate these children, he said.

The lawsuit asks for injunctive relief to compel the dioceses to be better mandated reporters for child sexual abuse allegations. It also asks to compel the dioceses to release all information they had given to the grand jury to the public and to provide a mechanism for reporters to review records to make sure their allegations exist, are accurate and have been sent to the proper law enforcement or government officials.

Spokespeople for several of the states dioceses said they could not comment on the lawsuit since they had not seen it. Messages left at several other dioceses Monday were not immediately returned.

Spokesmen for the Greensburg, Pittsburgh and Allentown dioceses reiterated their written responses to the grand jury report, saying all allegations of abuse of minors are reported to law enforcement.

At the Diocese of Greensburg, any and every allegation, regardless of credibility, is immediately called in to Pennsylvania ChildLine and reported to the appropriate district attorney, whether the allegation is minutes old or 70 years old, Greensburg Dioceses spokesman Jerry Zufelt said.

The lawsuit, however, contends that the 20 names of clergy that are still redacted in the grand jury report, along with the fact it says only 10 of the 300 priests named in the report are registered sex offenders under the federal Megans Law, lead parents and survivors to believe the dioceses still have not been transparent.

Clergy abuse survivor Ryan OConnor  one of the lead plaintiffs in the case  realized years after his abuse that he needed his faith to be able to heal. His children attend Catholic school, but OConnor said he would be lying if he said he trusted all of the priests they come into contact with.

This is not about money or seeking damages. This is about transparency; this is about honesty. This is about letting parents know that we are going to take care of this. This is about the church saying we are going to get rid of these bad operators and we are going to no longer protect them, OConnor said. This is about protecting my kids, their classmates and every child who steps foot into a Catholic school or into mass as an altar server.

Copyright 2021 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Lawyers filed a class action lawsuit Tuesday on behalf of people who were forced out of their homes for days when dozens of natural gas explosions and fires ripped through three Massachusetts towns.

The lawsuit is the first of whats likely to be several filed against Columbia Gas and its parent company over Thursdays explosions, which killed one person and injured more than two dozen in Lawrence, Andover and North Andover.

It accuses the utility companies of negligence and seeks compensation for residents of who had to evacuate but didnt suffer injuries or damage to their homes.

Frank Petosa, one of the attorneys who brought the case, said although families were allowed to return to their homes on Sunday, they still dont have gas or hot water and must live in fear that the explosions could happen again.

These individuals have had their lives turned upside down, said Petosa, of Morgan & Morgan.

Columbia Gas officials didnt immediately respond to an email on Tuesday.

About 8,600 customers were affected by the explosions. Many had to evacuate their homes for days and may have to go without gas service for weeks.

A letter sent by the states U.S. senators to executives at Columbia Gas and its parent company, NiSource, on Monday said the pressure in natural gas pipelines was 12 times higher than it should have been.

The federal Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration has reported that the pressure in the Columbia Gas system should have been around 0.5 pounds per square inch (PSI), but readings in the area reached at least 6 PSI  twelve times higher than the system was intended to hold, the letter said.

The pressure spike registered in a Columbia Gas control room in Ohio, the senators said in the letter, which requests a reply by Wednesday.

We write to request that you provide us with information in order to help the American people understand why this terrible disaster occurred, whether the company was sufficiently prepared to respond to an incident of this magnitude, and how we can prevent any similar tragedy in the future, the senators wrote.

The explosions are under investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board. Chairman Robert Sumwalt has said the investigation is partially focused on pressure sensors that were connected to a gas line that was being taken out of service shortly before the blasts.

On Tuesday, Columbia Gas President Stephen Bryant announced that the utility is donating $10 million to an emergency relief fund for people affected by the emergency.

The Greater Lawrence Disaster Relief Fund will help residents of the three communities with food, housing and other short-term needs as they recover, Republican Gov. Charlie Baker said.

Lawrence Mayor Dan Rivera, who has been highly critical of Columbia Gas, said the utility is living up to their corporate responsibility with the donation.

Also Tuesday, Moodys Investors Service said the explosions and fires are likely to damage the finances of Columbia Gas and its parent company.

The Wall Street credit rating firm said the disaster was credit negative for Columbia and NiSource Inc., and may cause the deterioration of each companys financial position.

Copyright 2021 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Navigation apps like Waze are trying to help motorists avoid hurricane flooding. But can people really rely on their smartphones to steer themselves out of a disaster zone?

Amid heavy rain from Florence, some smartphone or in-car map directions in recent days have sent people in North Carolina onto flooded roads and others closed to traffic.

Google-owned Waze said Monday its worked with local governments and its own community of volunteer map editors to mark closures of more than 1,300 roads in North Carolina and hundreds more in South Carolina and Virginia.

But the North Carolina Department of Transportation warned in a tweet on Sunday night that Waze and other travel apps are unable to keep up with Florence-caused road closings.

It is not safe now to trust them with your life, the agency warned after another Twitter user credited Waze for helping her avoid floodwaters during Hurricane Matthew in 2016. This storm, this flooding, these road closings are worse than Matthew, and theyll get even worse. Please stay safe!

GPS-powered mapping systems have come a long way since updating an in-car navigation system required loading a compact disc with the latest geographic data. More cars now come with navigation systems that are updated remotely and automatically. Other drivers rely on apps like Waze, Google Maps or Apple Maps.

It can still be hard to keep up with Mother Nature.

Miguel Melo, 22, said he was trying to drive from North Carolina to Florida to get to a friends house when his SUV stalled out in high water in Lumberton. He was waiting with his stalled car on a service road parallel to flooded Interstate 95.

The GPS brought me here. Its stupid, and its really bad. Im in trouble, said the Raleigh resident, who was parked in a dry spot of road.

State officials had warned in previous days that GPS was taking people down routes where roads had flooded and urged people to check a list of road closures before driving.

A map in a catastrophe is only so good as its ability to capture real-time information either from sensors or people, said Steve Goldsmith, a professor who directs Harvard Universitys Data-Smart City Solutions project.

Goldsmith, a former mayor of Indianapolis and former deputy mayor of New York, said the good news is that the flourishing of map apps has unlocked the ability of people to post information in real time and help their neighbors.

Waze, in particular, relies on a large community of users inputting data about the latest road conditions. Goldsmith said more government agencies are also entering two-way information sharing arrangements that help provide a better picture of whats happening on the ground, both for emergency responders and the travelers themselves.

Individuals themselves will always collectively have more information than governments will, he said. Theyll have more information but less well organized.

After a bridge collapsed last month in Genoa, Italy, map providers such as Google were swift in updating their road maps, said Sam Hind, a researcher at the University of Siegen in Germany who studies navigation technology. But disasters like Florence are trickier, Hind said.

A single incident is obviously far easier to render and change than a general area that is under floodwaters, Hind said. If its a large area with many roads, there has to be some form of labor involved in selecting all those roads and those junctions that are impassable.

Google said in a statement Monday that it uses both algorithmic and manual methods to account for emergency road closures on Google Maps and Waze. And the company said its working with local authorities on the ground, including the South Carolina and North Carolina transportation agencies and several county governments.

Here Technologies, which supplies mapping systems to many carmakers, said its also working with local authorities to update road closures, though there can be a lag time in getting the latest information if the vehicle isnt connected to the service.

Apple and mapping companies TomTom and Garmin didnt respond to requests for comment about their Florence response Monday.

(Associated Press writer Jonathan Drew in Lumberton, North Carolina, contributed to this report.)

Copyright 2021 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
OLMSTED FALLS, Ohio -- Firefighters responded Thursday morning to a massive fire at an Olmsted Falls condominium complex.

The fire broke out around 10:30 a.m. on the 23000 block of Chandlers Lane, according to Olmsted Falls police.

Crews from several departments were still combating the blaze into Thursday afternoon, by which time the fire had spread to all three wings of the three-story apartment complex. The blaze was controlled enough for firefighters to enter the building around 1 p.m.

Fire at Olmsted Falls condominium complex 12 Gallery: Fire at Olmsted Falls condominium complex

There are 48 units in the building, the fire department said.

Officials are doing an inventory to account for all the residents, Olmsted Falls police said. Many residents made it out safely and congregated on a grassy area where tents had been pitched to provide them shade while they figure out their next steps.

The first engine to arrive at the scene got water on the fire and did a search inside the building, the Olmsted Falls Fire Department said. The department ordered all crews out of the building around 11:20 a.m. to keep them safe.

Two firefighters suffered minor injures and were brought to University Hospitals St. John Medical Center in Westlake, fire officials said.

Update on the massive fire at an Olmsted Falls condominium complex. Posted by cleveland.com on Thursday, September 20, 2018

Officials provided a brief update on the scene and said a press conference will be held around 4 p.m.

Cleveland.com is on the scene and will update this story as more information becomes available.
When our future hinged on securing a new, high-tech, four-cylinder engine program for our Ford plant in Brook Park, U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown was there. As a direct result of his actions, we were successful in bringing 1,500 jobs to our plant and secure its future.

Brown also was an early opponent to the N.A.F.T.A. agreement, once again standing up to the special interest groups.

Whether you are a Republican, Democrat or Independent, Brown has always stood up for the people of Ohio.

He is an outstanding senator and deserves re-election.

Mike Gammella,

Brook Park
WILLOUGHBY HILLS, Ohio - The endless war in Willoughby Hills continued this week with a visiting judge ruling in favor of the city's mayor and against city council members.

Mayor Robert Weger sued council in a dispute about who should represent the city in collective-bargaining negotiations. Earlier this year, a judge ruled in his favor in a suit covering that and more broadly, about when and why council can remove the mayor.

Both cases are before Judge David Fuhry, retired from Geauga County Common Pleas Court.

Randy Klammer, the mayor's lawyer, called council's actions a power grab.

In the first case, Fuhry voided four ordinances created by council, calling them "illegal, unenforceable and null and void."

But the judge's May decision affirmed council's right to reject the mayor's appointments.

Klammer said in an email Tuesday night that "Mayor Weger is so very patient and mindful of everyone's opinions, the residents deserve a council that behaves the same.

"This is the second time that two lawyers on council have approved of these absurd legal tactics," he said.

The results of the first suit are awaiting review by the 11th District Ohio Court of Appeals.

John Plecnik, one of the council members with a law degree, said that the latest decision has resulted only in an injunction.

Laura Pizmoht, the other lawyer on council, said by phone Wednesday said the injunction can be challenged in a state trial court, but she said she did not know whether the mayor's opponents would take that action.

Klammer said an injunction is granted on the merits of the case, meaning the likelihood that the party seeking the injunction would prevail in trial. Without a verdict, though, the injunction by itself cannot be appealed.

The legislation in controversy at this time would give council the right to make its president the acting mayor to negotiate union contracts.

Fuhry wrote in his Sept. 17 decision that this case and the previous one "are almost identical." He called the latest legislation "the usurpation of executive authority by the council majority without good cause."
COLUMBUS, Ohio -- A woman has lost her job as a preschool teacher and is facing multiple charges after officials say she encouraged the kids to fight, then posted videos online.

Chavay Williams, 30, of Columbus, a former teacher at Playtime Pre-School, is scheduled to appear in court on Oct. 23 after being charged with 21 counts of endangering children, 10tv.com reports.

The Columbus Dispatch reports that court records show a video of kids fighting in a playground area at the preschool was found on SnapChat in June.

None of the 21 children in the video, ages 3 to 5, was seriously injured.

Investigators say Williams was acting on her own and that the preschool quickly fired her when they learned of the video. Another unidentified teacher also was fired, NBC 24 reports.

According to the Dispatch, Williams told police she recorded the video to show parents how the children were behaving while at the preschool.

Each charge carries a maximum sentence of six months in jail, the Dispatch reports.

To comment on this story, visit Wednesday's crime and courts comment section.
WASHINGTON, D.C. - Nonprofit "dark money" groups that place particular types of political ads will have to disclose their donors as the result of a U.S. Supreme Court ruling in a case filed over a $6 million ad campaign against Ohio Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown in 2012.

On Tuesday, the U.S. Supreme Court denied a petition that would grant an "emergency stay" of a lower court ruling that invalidated a Federal Election Commission decision that let nonprofit groups hide the donors behind their political ads.

This is a real victory for transparency. As a result, the American people will be better informed about whos paying for the ads theyre seeing this election season.



/2  Ellen L Weintraub (@EllenLWeintraub) September 18, 2018

The decision means that effective immediately, anyone who produces more than $250 in ads that tell voters who to vote for in a federal campaign must identify any donor who gave them more than $200 in a single year, said a statement from the watchdog organization that filed the lawsuit after the FEC rejected its complaint about the anti-Brown ads.

"This is a great day for transparency and democracy," said a statement from Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) Executive Director Noah Bookbinder. "Three courts, including the Supreme Court, have now rejected Crossroads' arguments for a stay, meaning we're about to know a lot more about who is funding our elections."

Crossroads GPS, the nonprofit Republican group that mounted the ad campaign against Brown, had asked the U.S. Supreme Court to put a hold on the U.S. District Court ruling while it appealed, but the justices declined.

The decision could still be overturned as the case progresses through the legal system. It will still allow dark money groups to conceal who funds politically oriented "issue ads" that don't expressly advocate the election or defeat of a political candidate. It will require disclosure of future donors to groups that place ads, not past donors.

"While we are disappointed the Supreme Court did not take this opportunity to ensure regulatory clarity for nonpolitical organizations that lawfully engage in election activity, we are confident we can navigate through the current morass and comply with the law, as we always have," said a statement from Crossroads GPS spokesman Chris Pack.

In a statement on Twitter, FEC commissioner Ellen Weintraub, who supports revealing ad donors, said the decision would limit the ability of dark money groups to keep their donor lists secret during the 2018 election.

"As a result, the American people will be better informed about who's paying for the ads they're seeing this election season," Weintraub said.

GOP groups that opposed Brown in 2012 spent more than $40 million to defeat him. Brown played no role in CREW's litigation, but applauded its efforts to increase election transparency.

"Powerful special interests from big Pharma to Wall Street have always tried to replace me because I fight for the people of Ohio and refuse to do the bidding of Washington lobbyists," said a statement from Brown. "If those billionaire special interests want to try and drown out the votes of everyday Ohioans, they ought to have the guts to at least show their faces."
CLEVELAND, Ohio - Court records contradict City Councilman Ken Johnson's earlier claims that he has no connection to two employees of the city's Kenneth L. Johnson Recreation Center, which is named for the councilman.

The records from Cuyahoga County Probate Court show that the two city employees, Darian Johnson and Elijah Johnson, had been among 11 boys whom the councilman took into his home between 1990 and 2016 and became their legal guardians.

The boys, then known as Darian Peters and Elijah Brown, moved into Johnson's house before - or at the time - guardianship was granted by the court, the records state. Johnson also helped them and most of the other boys change their last names to Johnson while they were minors.

The records don't jibe with what Johnson told me last week, when I asked whether he was related to Darian and Elijah and a third man - Ken Johnson, Jr. -- all of whom are listed on the city's payroll as employees of the recreation center.

At the time, Johnson acknowledged that Ken Jr. was his son, but denied having any connection to Darian or Elijah.

The records also conflict with what Johnson told me later, when I confronted him with paperwork in which he identified Darian, Elijah and Ken Jr. as his children.

Johnson then stated that Elijah and Darian were not his "legal" children and had never lived with him. He could not explain why he listed them as his children four separate times between 1989 and 2013 on paperwork he submitted to the Editorial Board of cleveland.com and The Plain Dealer.

Johnson did not respond to my call Wednesday about the court records bearing his signature that state that Elijah and Darian had lived with him.

In court papers filed in August 1997, a social worker wrote for the court that Johnson had said he met Elijah three years prior, when his staff selected the boy to be a City Council page. The social worker said Elijah and Johnson became friends and the boy started referring to Johnson as "dad." The social worker wrote that the boy needed dialysis treatment at home and that Johnson could better monitor his health needs than the boy's mother.

The social worker described Johnson's home as a "spacious, twenty room house" valued at the time at $250,000.

The social worker also wrote that Johnson was previously married and that he had custody of five sons, including one named Darian.

Johnson was granted guardianship of Darian in 1990 because his birth mother was "economically unstable," records state.

The social worker also wrote in the 1997 report that three of Johnson's sons were adults and that two of them worked for the city of Cleveland and the third worked for the city of East Cleveland. The youngest two, including Darian, remained at home, the social worker wrote.

Court papers say that among the boys Johnson was granted guardianship over were three teens from Brisbane, Australia. Court papers list Johnson as the their "great uncle."

Johnson also became guardian to a boy from Puerto Rico and a boy from the Dominican Republic. Court papers list the boy from Puerto Rico as Johnson's nephew and the boy from the Dominican Republic as the nephew of Johnson's sister.

At times, Johnson has featured pictures of some of his wards in his newsletter and has brought some of the boys to City Council meetings.

So, why is he reluctant to talk about them now? I will let you know if he changes his mind.
DAYTON, Ohio - While mostly known as quiet and droll, Republican Mike DeWine and Democrat Richard Cordray were anything but that in the first Ohio governor's debate.

DeWine, the state's attorney general, and Cordray, the former director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, aren't known for their excitable personalities, but from the onset of the debate at the University of Dayton, the two traded barbs for most of the hour.

The tenor of the debate was a sign of what's to come as the Nov. 6 election approaches. In short, the negativity is not likely to subside.

But what once looked like a potentially boring, though important, contest relegated to attack ads between two bookish wonks could prove lively with two debates remaining.

The message each candidate wanted to send Wednesday was clear. Cordray thinks DeWine and the Republican Party represent moneyed interests and an outdated way of thinking - and that the attorney general has failed in the past. Cordray came out in full support of access to abortion and for the legalization of recreational marijuana, both issues that resonate with young voters.

"We wanted to paint the contrast between myself and Mike DeWine," Cordray said at a news conference following the debate. "For 42 years, he has sided with corporate interests and special interests, and I've been somebody who has fought those same interests. There is really a stark divide between us, and we really wanted to make that clear to people."

DeWine, meanwhile, wants to keep building on the Republican plan for the state and thinks Cordray and the Democrats are incompetent. Most of the time, he stuck to the points he's been making in his ads regarding untested sexual assault kits and drug dealers.

"He really did a lot of talking, but there's a real difference between the two of us," DeWine said to reporters after the debate. "You can compare what I did as attorney general and what he did as attorney general. We got the job done."

Perhaps the most contentious issue was the opioid addiction epidemic - which has especially ravaged the Dayton area.

"You've been in charge of this opioid crisis for the last eight years. ..." Cordray said. "That we would listen to you for advice on the drug epidemic would be like listening to the captain of the Titanic."

DeWine also attacked Cordray for his response to drug addiction, repeating a campaign line that Cordray's support for Issue 1 would allow drug dealers to possess enough fentanyl to kill 10,000 people and only face a misdemeanor.

"Absolutely amazing Richard. Absolutely amazing," DeWine said. "When you left the attorney general's office, we already had a drug crisis. You did absolutely nothing."

Despite most polling and Google Analytics data showing health care is the subject at the top of people's minds, the issue scarcely came up, save for the numerous references to opioid addiction.

DeWine did try to head off an impending attack from Cordray on the Medicaid expansion, part of the Affordable Care Act that expanded the program that provides coverage to the poor, disabled and children in the state.

DeWine refused to say during the primary whether or not he would keep the Medicaid expansion - especially after the Republican-run legislature passed a bill to scale back the program. GOP Gov. John Kasich, who instituted the expansion, vetoed that bill.

"We're for the Medicaid expansion. So is Richard. The only difference is he is for the status quo," DeWine said, adding his plan would institute work requirements and focusing on wellness programs.

Cordray, a firm supporter of the Medicaid expansion and the Affordable Care Act, also pointed to protections for people with preexisting conditions. The ACA - more commonly known as Obamacare - bars insurance companies from charging people with preexisting conditions a higher premium.

A lawsuit by 21 states working its way through the federal courts has critics worried a conservative court could rule the entirety of Obamacare unconstitutional, doing away with preexisting conditions.

Multiple state attorneys generals have filed amicus briefs against the lawsuit. DeWine has not, despite having filed briefs numerous times in the past.

"You've had lawyers in the court, and they've been pursuing hobby projects of yours in more than 100 cases, but you haven't been able to get lawyers into the courts to stand up for preexisting conditions in Ohio," Cordray said. "People with asthma and cancer in danger of losing their health care or having their premiums jacked way up because they don't have that protection."

"Richard fully understands that I've always been for coverage of preexisting illnesses," DeWine said. "That is the truth. He doesn't seem to want to admit that."

The antipathy Cordray and DeWine share for each other is not likely to fizzle any time soon, especially with outside interests pouring both money and their support into the state. PACs and the candidates have flooded both the airwaves and digital sphere with attack ads.

Republican President Donald Trump and his predecessor, Democratic President Barack Obama, have both staked their claim in the governor's contest as well, viewing it as an important lynchpin to each party's chances at taking the state in the 2020 presidential election for their respective parties.

The next governor debate is Oct. 1 at Marietta College.
Four people died in the shooting Thursday, including the shooter herself. Photo: Matt Button/TNS via Getty Images

A woman killed three people and wounded three more at a Rite Aid distribution facility in Maryland Thursday. The 26-year-old then turned the gun on herself. She died later at a local hospital.

Identified by police as Snochia Moseley, the shooter was a temporary employee at the warehouse, which is about 30 miles outside of Baltimore in the town of Aberdeen. Harford County sheriff Jeffrey Gahler said she arrived as usual Thursday morning before she began shooting. The first shots were fired outside the building, where Rite Aid employs 1,300 full-time employees and 300 temps. The shooter then moved inside.

Gahler say Moseley used a 9mm handgun in the attack and that law enforcement did not fire any shots. The shooter also had two, perhaps three more clips of ammunition, Gahler said.

Krystal Watson, a 33-year-old who works at the warehouse, told the Associated Press that the shooter fired indiscriminately. She didnt have a particular target. She was just shooting, Watson said. She didnt aim. She just shot.

Mike Carre, who works for another company in the same business park and helped a gunshot victim with his wounds, said Rite Aid employees told him the shooter was a nice person.

She came in in a bad mood, Carre told the Washington Post. The Rite Aid employees he spoke to said the shooter wanted to pick a fight. And then she started shooting. Carre provided Post reporters with video of Rite Aid employees being led away from the warehouse with their hands on their heads.

Heartbreaking scene of employees of Rite Aid minutes after mass shooting. From Mike Carre: She's fine! She's fine!" an unidentified woman can be heard shouting as another woman wails loudly. "Andrew's fine. Bridget's okay. I saw Randolph...I saw Jason." pic.twitter.com/jQ3ciazUsG  justin jouvenal (@jjouvenal) September 20, 2018

Rite Aid issued a statement that said the company is deeply saddened by the events. It also said that the warehouse will be closed and grief counselors will be made available for all employees.

We are deeply saddened by the events that transpired this morning at the Liberty support facility, which is part of Rite... Posted by Rite Aid on Thursday, September 20, 2018

The shooting in Maryland was the third shooting across the country with multiple victims in less than 24 hours. On Wednesday afternoon, four people were injured in a workplace shooting outside of Madison, Wisconsin. Only the gunman, who was shot by police, died. Later in the day, another four people were injured in Pennsylvania when a gunman opened fire at a municipal building.
Wanda C. Jones

As a son of the late Cuyahoga County Treasurer Frank Gaul, Daniel Gaul -- a county Common Pleas Court judge for nearly 28 years -- has a deep pedigree in Cleveland Democratic politics and could be said to come honestly by his sometimes sharp tongue and elevated sense of outrage about those who threaten public safety.

Gaul, 64, originally appointed to the bench in 1991 by then-Democratic Gov. Dick Celeste and elected in 1992 to complete the final years of that term, is now seeking his fifth, and final, full six-year term. Because of Ohio's age limits for judges, he won't be eligible to run again.

He estimates he's presided over more than 40,000 cases in his decades on the bench, and says because of his efficiency in disposing of cases and efforts to provide defendants with second chances through probation, that he gets more than his share of assigned criminal cases.

Of his controversial utterances and actions in a 2007 criminal case that landed him in disciplinary hot water with the Ohio Supreme Court, drawing a stayed suspension in 2010 - allowing him to stay on the bench -- Gaul says, "I am not a potted plant."

No, he's not.

In that case, he threatened to have the defendant "bound and gagged;" summoned the media to his chambers for an "Amber Alert" he said he was issuing for a missing 83-year-old assault victim; and said to the defendant that he'd "bet my life ... that you have been involved in a technical kidnapping" of the woman. The missing victim later said she was just "visiting" with her caregiver but jailhouse recordings led to obstruction charges in an alleged plot to keep her from testifying.

An Ohio Supreme Court panel, however, determined that Gaul, in acting without sufficient legal and evidentiary basis and exhibiting bias, undermined public confidence in the integrity and impartiality of the judiciary, and violated two canons of judicial conduct and a rule of professional conduct.

Gaul argued then and now that his goals are noble -- to save innocent lives, to protect victims and witnesses from reprisals, to do the hard work to watchdog justice in his courtroom. And four prominent local lawyers testified to his generally temperate judicial behavior in that disciplinary case.

Six years ago, our editorial board accepted that framing of the matter in endorsing Gaul for re-election. This year, in a very narrow call, we can't reach that same conclusion, in part influenced by a recent case where Gaul cast doubt on a jury verdict acquitting a defendant of murder, called the African-American defendant "a brother" and said he'd have "busted a cap in you" -- street slang for shooting him - while comparing him to Las Vegas mass murderer Stephen Paddock. That's not being noble. That's being prejudicial, and wrong.

Gaul is being challenged for re-election by Wanda C. Jones, 46, a graduate of Cleveland's Glenville High School and Cleveland-Marshall College of Law, who's been a lawyer barely seven years, who also works as a guardian ad litem.and previously worked as a bank analyst

Jones' legal experience appears limited and her knowledge of Common Pleas Court even more restricted. She's practiced primarily civil and family law.

But she is calm, measured, and ardent about the need for change and for bringing new perspectives to the bench. She seconds Gaul in arguing a major role of a Common Pleas judge is to protect the public from bad actors, but she says the law and the judicial process also must be protected. She is 100 percent correct in that.

Wanda C. Jones appears to have the strength of character, judicial temperament and life knowledge to be an effective and maybe even an excellent judge, with the intellectual ability to get up to speed on criminal law, where she has little current experience. Voters in Cuyahoga County should pass over the familiar and popular name and choose Wanda C. Jones in the Nov. 6 election.

Early in-person and absentee voting for the Nov. 6 election begins Oct. 10. For more resources on judicial races in Cuyahoga County, consult Judge4Yourself judicial ratings from four local bar associations, Judicial Votes Count at the University of Akron and the League of Women Voters' voters' guide.

Longtime Democratic Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Court Judge Daniel Gaul faces a re-election challenge from Republican Wanda C. Jones, of the local law firm Axner & Jones. The two candidates were interviewed by the editorial board of cleveland.com and The Plain Dealer on Aug. 22, 2018, as part of its endorsement process. Listen to full audio of this interview below:

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New University Heights Police Chief Dustin Rogers, left, and new University Heights Fire Chief Robert Perko enjoy a reception held in honor of their swearings-in Monday before the night's City Council meeting commenced.

UNIVERSITY HEIGHTS, Ohio -- Mayor Michael Dylan Brennan said that, after listening to interim Fire Chief Robert Perko and interim Police Chief Dustin Rogers speak at the city's Aug. 1 public safety forum at John Carroll University, he knew he had the men he wanted to hold those positions on a permanent basis.

On Sept. 12, Brennan issued a press release removing the "interim" tag and naming Perko and Rogers as chiefs of the University Heights Fire Department and University Heights Police Department, respectively. At Monday's City Council meeting, Brennan swore in the city's newest chiefs.

Brennan said Monday that, before deciding to name them to permanent positions, he wanted to see Perko and Rogers speak before the community at the public forum, expressing the administration's vision for the future of safety services. Those visions include increased community policing and the formation of a fire prevention bureau, among other things.

"I asked them each to take 20 minutes (to speak)," Brennan said. "They both took more and I didn't cut them off, because I knew the community needed to hear everything they had to say."

When Perko and Rogers were through speaking, Brennan recalled on Monday, "I said, 'These two individuals are not merely keeping the seats warm; both of them are leading their departments and implementing the vision of what our Fire Department and Police Department should be here in the city of University Heights."

The naming of Perko, 35 and a former captain, as interim chief was one of Brennan's first acts as mayor. On Jan. 2, at his ceremonial swearing-in at John Carroll, Brennan announced that he was replacing former Fire Chief Douglas Zook and immediately brought up Perko to speak.

Last year, before Brennan became mayor, firefighters' disagreements with Zook over department procedures led to the submittal of a letter of no confidence in Zook. One of Brennan's first goals was to shore up Fire Department leadership.

Brennan interviewed all three of the department's captains and said he saw in Perko "an opportunity to elevate an exceptional and driven candidate who had accomplished much already in his time here with the city."

On the police side of things, Brennan was forced to take action early on in his tenure as mayor when former Police Chief Steven Hammett retired on March 16.

As he did with the Fire Department, Brennan -- who was at the time on the job for just over two months and was dealing with several other matters -- chose to name an interim chief rather than immediately conduct a wide-ranging search for a new police chief.

The mayor went on to interview the Police Department's entire command structure, meaning all lieutenants and sergeants. He chose Rogers, then a sergeant, as interim chief.

"I believed then, as I do now, that (Rogers) possesses not only the base qualifications to be chief," Brennan said, "but that he has the right demeanor, experience and temperament for the position."

Brennan said he had intended to form a hiring committee to find a new police chief but, he said, "I came to find in both of our interim chiefs incredible aptitude and leadership.

"Looking back on that night," Brennan said of the Aug. 1 safety forum, "I knew then, and I think I really knew even before then, that we had found our chiefs."

Rogers, who joined the Police Department in 2005, said he was excited and grateful for the opportunity to serve as chief.

"I look forward to the opportunities to continue to enhance our law enforcement services while fulfilling our expectations of the community," Rogers said in a city news release. "Regardless of rank or assignment, it has been and always will be truly an honor and privilege to serve the community of University Heights."

Rogers was responsible for revising the Police Department's field training manual, a document that has since been adopted as a model by Northwestern University. Rogers is a graduate of the Northwestern University Center for Public Safety.

In 15 years of firefighting service, Perko has also worked with fire departments in Newburgh Heights and Seven Hills. His father recently retired after 36 years with the Seven Hills Fire Department.

Since Perko has been with the University Heights Fire Department, he has secured more than $1 million in grant money.

"We are doing great things in University Heights," Perko said, "and I am privileged to be a part of it. Henry Ford said it best: 'Coming together is a beginning. Keeping together is progress. Working together is success.'"

A community policing event, Coffee With a Cop, will be held at 10 a.m. Oct. 3 at Jack's Deli, 14490 Cedar Road. Residents are invited to come and informally speak with officers.

Meanwhile, the Fire Department will hold its first open house from 11:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. Oct. 7. The Fire Department is located in the City Hall building, 2300 Warrensville Center Road.
How will the MAGA people react if Kavanaugh turns out to be a loser? Photo: Getty Images

The proximity of a high-stakes midterm election to the suddenly very turbulent Supreme Court confirmation fight over Brett Kavanaugh is entering everyones calculations in how to proceed. Most analysts seem to agree that if Republicans are forced to withdraw this nomination it will have a negative impact on the partys conservative base, which had been told the judge was so incredibly qualified and reasonable that only a nefarious Democrat plot could prevent his confirmation. Sure, the White House could scramble to get another nominee named before November 6, and use that to fire up the troops. But as Jonathan Martin notes, it wouldnt look good:

Of the potential scenarios involving the outcome for Judge Kavanaughs nomination, strategists in both parties agree that his withdrawal would be most politically damaging to Republicans. It would underscore the chaos surrounding Mr. Trump; amount to an acknowledgment that Mr. Kavanaugh is tarnished; and, by bowing to liberals demanding he not be confirmed, infuriate the conservative rank-and-file.

And because Trump and Senate Republicans would be taking the formal step to abandon Kavanaugh, its not like they could easily channel base disillusionment toward Democrats.

Its a trickier proposition to guess how an actual Senate defeat for Kavanaugh would affect Republican voters going into the midterms. Martin thinks the experts differ by party, with each side being fearful of the consequences:

Democrats fear that would enrage Mr. Trump and his supporters, prompting them to show up at the polls to take out their anger on the opposition. But Republicans worry any failure to confirm him will demoralize their base.

The underlying reality is that Kavanaugh cannot be defeated without at least two Senate Republican defections, and those traitors will be the focus of public attention, along with the fecklessness of the White House and Mitch McConnell in maintaining party discipline. The impact might be much like the sag in Republican morale that occurred during and immediately after the failed efforts to repeal and replace Obamacare last year  before enactment of the tax bill showed the GOP government could get something done.

It is possible, of course, that even though they would not have been decisive in taking Kavanaugh down, certain red-state Democrats could still face some voter anger over no votes. And in fact, as Mike Tomasky points out in a New York Times op-ed, Republicans could refuse to throw in the towel on Kavanaugh even if they lose two or three Republicans, delaying the final vote while they bludgeon the most vulnerable Democrats from states where Trump is still popular:

Right-wing money will pour in to their states for pro-Kavanaugh (and pro-Trump) TV ads. Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader in the Senate, will let this play out and may schedule the vote for as late as he can  mid-October, even late October  to make the Democrats sweat.

That will constitute enormous pressure on the red-state Democrats. If they sense their opponents are gaining steam, they may well think: Why should I cast a vote thats going to cost me my seat? Especially when even if we defeat Judge Kavanaugh, were just going to get someone else whos every bit as conservative?

That tack would keep the GOP base engaged in the most crucial states in terms of Senate control, while keeping their anger focused on Joe Manchin or Heidi Heitkamp or Joe Donnelly rather than Susan Collins or Lisa Murkowski or Jeff Flake. It could even turn the tide for Kavanaugh.

In the end this sort of speculation may overestimate the extent to which midterm voters who are on the fence about participating really care about Brett Kavanaugh. Your average SCOTUS-obsessed base voter is far more likely than others to show up and pull the party lever no matter what happens in this or that confirmation fight. You dont get extra votes for being excited or enraged, and you dont lose partial votes for being discouraged or disappointed. A lot of registered voters skip midterms routinely. A lot of midterm voters are either locked into partisan positions that are nearly unshakable, or are simply reacting to their overall perceptions of the president, whose perceived job performance is the single most important variable.

So it may be at the margins, and in very close races, that the fate of Brett Kavanaugh, and who is held responsible for saving, abandoning, or defeating him, matters on November 6. And there are all sorts of possible twists in how this works out. MAGA people may have been convinced by the president and his conservative media pack to ignore every danger sign that might normally draw them to the polls to defend their partys hegemony  you know, since polls, negative media stories, and the enthusiasm of the other party are all fake news phenomena. Perhaps an actual defeat over a Supreme Court nomination will shock them out of their complacency. But its not a possibility youd want to put down as collateral on a loan.
Atal Awarded Fulbright To Teach English in Thailand

September 20, 2018

Recent biological sciences and English graduate Apeksha Atal has been awarded a Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship. In just a few weeks, the Carnegie Mellon University alumna will begin her year of service teaching English in the Thailand province of Nakhon Si Thammarat.

After graduation in May, Atal returned home to India, where she has lived since she was 10 years old. She settled in to her first post-graduate job, working as a marketing and communications associate for the financial tech startup NiYO in Bangalore. The company is helping to digitize payroll and employee benefits for India's salaried employees.

During her senior year, Atal had applied to the Fulbright ETA program and was named an alternate. Exactly one month and one day after starting at NiYO, Atal received an email she said she never thought would come.

"Being selected as a Fulbright Scholar is absolutely surreal," Atal said. "To think that everything I worked toward is actually happening is beyond amazing. I'm mostly proud to make the people in my life proud. So many people believed in me when I doubted myself, and I'm so glad to have proved them right."

Atal is most looking forward to learning from and connecting with Thai people and her students.

"My dad grew up in Thailand, and I've been traveling there my entire life," Atal said. "Thai culture is so warm and rich, and I've never had a chance to immerse myself in another culture the way this program allows one to."

She also plans to learn more about educational policy and reform. In addition to her teaching duties, Atal will undertake an internship during the program, and has her sights set on working with education-centric NGOs or other programs that help improve schools in Thailand.

Atal is ready to bring her own experiences to her students. At Carnegie Mellon, Atal was a dedicated leader and mentor as an Andrew Carnegie Society Scholar, an editor for the Tartan, a head orientation counselor, an EXCEL leader and Student Supervisor and a teaching assistant for Eureka! and biological sciences' lab classes.

"My education at Carnegie Mellon, although a little unconventional, helped me develop key skills that I will be carrying with me to Thailand," Atal said. "My biology major has given me the ability to think critically, objectively and to be able to break down complex concepts into their molecular components. My English major has given me the ability to read beyond the surface and present ideas in more concise, clear and relatable ways."

This will come in handy, Atal said, in figuring out how to make English more accessible and interesting to her students.

"In Thailand, they use a lot of rote memorization techniques, and I feel that, as a native speaker, bringing in conversation to break that monotony will be incredibly helpful to students," she said.

Throughout the process, Atal worked closely with Carnegie Mellon's Fellowships and Scholarship Office, which provides support to students who are interested in applying for nationally competitive fellowships and scholarships.

"Apeksha is a person who has taken full advantage of every opportunity at Carnegie Mellon, participating in the Undergraduate Research Office's SURG (Small Undergraduate Research Grant) program and serving as a leader in Academic Development, Student Senate and the Tartan," said Stephanie Wallach, assistant vice provost for undergraduate education.

"She is well poised to go to Thailand and make important contributions through the Fulbright ETA. It is an exciting next step for Apeksha, and she will be an excellent representative of Carnegie Mellon."

The U.S. Department of State's Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs sponsors the Fulbright U.S. Student Program to "increase mutual understanding between the people of the United States and the people of other countries."
Postmates, the US online food delivery start-up, has raised $300 million in venture capital funding, boosting its financial firepower against well-capitalized competitors including Uber and SoftBank-backed DoorDash.

The latest round led by Tiger Global Management values Postmates at about $1.2 billion, including the new funds, according to a person familiar with the matter, up from $600 million in 2016. It more than doubles the total funding Postmates has raised in its seven-year history.

The US food delivery market is experiencing a flurry of competition and investment as companies seek to capture the loyalty of a growing group of consumers who are opting to eat at home instead of going out to restaurants. Postmates, Uber Eats and DoorDash are battling it out with Amazon, GrubHub and Square's Caviar to become the platform of choice in cities across the country.

"What we've seen in the past couple years and specifically in the last year is a real shift in investor and analyst mindset around the space. There's a growing consensus that the market opportunity is bigger than ride-sharing and the margins are better," said Kristin Schaefer, Postmates chief financial officer.

Postmates reported $1 billion in gross sales volume last year and says it is profitable on a contribution margin basis  a metric that measures the profitability of delivering a service but excludes fixed costs such as salaries  in 90 percent of its markets.

The company is aiming to go public next year and will use the funding to "pour on a little gas" ahead of its listing, Ms. Schaefer said.

Postmates will invest in its engineering team and technology platform and expand its offerings. The service is particularly popular in US southwest cities, including Los Angeles and Phoenix. In addition to "doubling down" in those markets, Ms. Schaefer said, the company will push into new regions. It expects its footprint to grow from about half of US households now to 70-75 percent by year's end.

The company will also build out its subscription service, Unlimited, which gives users free delivery for a $9.99-a-month fee. About a third of deliveries currently come from Unlimited subscribers, a figure Postmates hopes to increase by gaining new subscribers and adding benefits to the service.

"It's a page out of Amazon's book," Ms. Schaefer said, referring to the e-commerce company's Prime membership that includes free shipping and digital video streaming.

The recent uptick in investment in on-demand food delivery follows a difficult few years in which companies struggled to close funding rounds amid doubts over whether they could ever become profitable.

Those difficulties appear to have passed. DoorDash raised $250 million led by Coatue Management and DST Global last month, less than six months after closing a $535 million round led by SoftBank, and is now valued at $4 billion.

Uber Eats is growing at 200 percent year over year and is on track to report annualized revenues of $6 billion this year. Dara Khosrowshahi, Uber chief executive, told the Financial Times he expects to increase investment in the service over the next two to three years.

NYSE-listed GrubHub, which merged with rival Seamless in 2013, has a market capitalization of almost $13 billion after its share price has more than doubled over the past year.

More from the Financial Times:

Tech entrepreneurs see Ukraine as future IT leader

South Korea allots first money from $9bn start-up fund

Ford uses Detroit station revamp to reinvent its future
Unfortunately for Ross Douthat, the anti-abortion movement was suffused with anti-feminist attitudes long before it became identified with Brett Kavanaugh. Photo: Astrid Riecken/The Washington Post/Getty Images

Over the years, Ive had a long-running argument with fellow committed pro-choice writers about the sincerity of the people across the barricades from us in the endless battle over reproductive rights. Because, a long time ago, I was religiously motivated right-to-life activist, I have been prone to argue that many of those who protest at Planned Parenthood clinics and the Supreme Court are truly motivated by a sincere belief in fetal personhood, and a corresponding conviction that legalized abortion is not morally distinguishable from legalized infanticide or euthanasia or for that matter selective genocide. Its safe to say, however, that the prevailing sentiment among abortion rights activists is that the anti-abortion movement is just applied misogyny  a derivative position from a general attitude of patriarchal contempt toward or fear of womens sexuality and autonomy.

So it is interesting and telling that Ross Douthat, one of the more highly placed RTL voices in American political media, is raising the question about the connection between anti-abortion and anti-feminist views from within the ranks of the anti-abortion movement itself:

[T]he allegation of sexual assault against Brett Kavanaugh represents a uniquely dangerous moment for a pro-life movement that has spent decades working toward the goal of a fifth Supreme Court vote to amend or overturn Roe v. Wade 

Even if it wins its long-desired victory at the high court and more anti-abortion legislation becomes possible, a pro-life cause joined to a party that cant win female votes and seems to have no time for women will never be able to achieve those legislative goals, or at least never outside a very few, very conservative states. And having that long-awaited victory accomplished by a male judicial appointee confirmed under a cloud of #MeToo suspicion seems like a good way to cement a perception thats fatal to the pro-life movements larger purposes  the perception that you cant be pro-woman and pro-life.

The anti-abortion movements alliance with anti-feminists obviously existed long before Brett Kavanaughs nomination to the Supreme Court. Yes, Donald Trump has dramatized the GOPs misogynist tendencies in an indelible fashion, but overt anti-feminism has been rampant in that partys dominant conservative wing since at least 1980, when Republicans dropped their ancient commitment to an Equal Rights Amendment from the party platform. By 2012, as Amanda Terkel noted, the GOPs posture on womens rights had all but been reduced to a negative:

Essentially the only mention of womens rights in the 2012 GOP platform pertains to reproductive rights. Theres a whole section on The Sanctity and Dignity of Human Life that expresses the belief that women should not have access to abortion under any circumstances, even in cases of rape and incest.

Even if many individual Republicans  most obviously including Republican women  thought of themselves as pro-woman and pro-life, it has been a long time since there was any party-wide commitment to the first half of that formula.

Over the same period of time, something was happening in the core of the anti-abortion movement that perhaps Douthat, a Catholic, has not fully appreciated: its mass base is now found not among traditionalist Catholics, with their centuries-old teachings against abortion rooted in Aristotelian metaphysics and medieval/early modern biology, but among conservative Evangelical Protestants, who were at most ambivalent about abortion until the late 1970s. Unlike Catholics, Evangelicals have no ancient teaching tradition or Pope, and their sole source of authority, the Bible, has at most indirect and unclear references to abortion. It is hard to avoid the impression that the sudden and near-universal hostility to legalized abortion in Evangelical ranks is just a corollary to a general rule of intense hostility to permissive modern culture, the sexual revolution, and most of all challenges to patriarchal family roles.

The same conservative Evangelicals who are now the heartbeat of the RTL movement do not by and large share Douthats concerns about Donald J. Trumps misogyny. From elites in the pulpit to the rank-and-file in the pews, they are enthusiastic supporters of the man. Perhaps RTLers like Ross Douthat feel they have been driven by circumstances into an accidental, even tragic, alliance with Republican misogynists. But for the bulk of the movement, theres not much of a distinction left to worry about.

The other interesting aspect of Douthats piece is that he takes it for granted that Kavanaughs confirmation to the Supreme Court would be a major step toward the cause of recriminalizing abortion. The entire campaign for Kavanaugh, and his incessantly evasive comments on the constitutional law of reproductive rights, was based on denying or at least obscuring that central fact. This pattern of deception has become habitual among RTLers, who shed crocodile tears for the rare unborn victims of late-term abortions while quietly working to ban the vast majority of abortions that occur during the first trimester of pregnancy, and even some abortifacient birth control methods. And lying about their actual views on reproductive rights is an unwholesome bond they share with Republican politicians who understand that their goal of turning back the clock on both abortion rights and womens rights is very unpopular.

A lot of the deception surrounding Kavanaughs confirmation, of course, was attributable to the need to provide cover for the last two pro-choice Republicans in Congress, Senators Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski, who must now deal with the possibility that getting the judge through this crisis could look like double treason to their own gender. Ross Douthat is right to worry that its getting harder every day to disassociate pro-life from anti-woman views. Its certainly getting harder for me to believe that anti-abortion activists care more about saving embryos than about shackling women.
Applicants at a labour market in Xi'an, China on February 27, 2016. VCG | Getty Images

In Russia, one organization is looking for "long-term, quality employees" from telecommunications providers with the promise of "fair, on-time" pay. Another group promises experienced bankers around $2,000 per month for "one hour of work per day." In Mexico, another ad promises employees from well-known banks high pay with little risk, on the condition of "absolute discretion." This is today's competitive job market for criminal corporate insiders. This week, Amazon said it is investigating claims that company insiders across Asia were making money by selling retail secrets. In their case, corporate insiders may have been trading in proprietary information to help Amazon marketplace sellers based in the region get an unfair sales advantage.

But Amazon is far from the only company facing pervasive insider threats, especially in locations in Eastern Europe, Russia, Asia and North Africa. There, employees can sometimes quadruple their salaries or more by working with a criminal enterprise to sabotage their own employer.

'Employees of any bank needed'

According to Ziv Mador, vice president of research for cybersecurity and compliance management company Trustwave, global corporations are facing this problem more requently, as even trusted employees may find themselves on the receiving end of unwanted solicitations to take part in simple, but illegal, "side work." In monitoring the dark web  parts of the internet accessible only with specific search engines, software or configurations  Mador has observed numerous postings seeking very specific types of employees at big-name employers. Examples shown here come from Russia and Mexico.

"The salaries listed are quite high, sometimes 10 times what the average salary for an average job at a bank would be," he said. Insider threats proliferate, he said, in areas where salaries may below and law enforcement is lax in looking for employees who might be participating in insider crimes. "[Criminal recruiters] are looking for many different tasks: increasing withdrawal limits on bank accounts, getting more information about people who they want to target. They are looking for people who work in tax offices, or in other cases, they look for people who can tell them how to log in and how to connect to certain accounts," Mador said.
The U.S. and China fired their latest billion-dollar shots in the escalating trade war this week.

One market watcher is ready to declare a winner.

"You vote with your dollars and you look at the U.S. markets since the start of the trade war and it's done quite well. China really hasn't," Steve Chiavarone, portfolio manager at Federated, told CNBC's "Trading Nation" on Wednesday.

The and Dow broke records on Thursday, while the Shanghai composite was stuck in a bear market. The Chinese stock market index has fallen 24 percent since its highs set in late January.

The monetary impact of tariffs also tips the trade war in favor of the U.S., said Chiavarone.

"When we add up all the impact of tariffs, they come up to just a fraction of the stimulus being added into the economy in the U.S. and I think the market is really starting to ferret that out," he said.

By Chiavarone's calculation, the sum of tariffs over the next three years amounts to just one-tenth of the effect of stimulus. He estimates that tax cuts, repatriation and government spending should bring in around $2 trillion through to 2020, while this round of tariffs could total $200 billion over the same stretch.

The U.S. winning this trade war is crucial for its standing as an economic powerhouse in the next Industrial revolution, said Chiavarone. He explains that the next revolutionary wave hinges on key technologies such as automation, artificial intelligence, robotics, the internet of things, 3D printing and blockchain.

"If you control the technologies of the next Industrial Revolution, you're going to be the world's pre-eminent economic power. We control those today. The Chinese would like to and therein lies that conflict," said Chiavarone. "Ultimately I think it's something that the market feels is worth us exploring."

Chiavarone expects U.S. stocks to continue to drive higher as the Trump administration makes progress in its other trade deals such as NAFTA.

"The U.S. still remains a very attractive place to invest," said Chiavarone. "We think the trade headlines could get a little bit better and so we remain steadfast on our bullish view on the U.S."

Chiavarone has a 3,100 price target on the S&P 500, implying another 6 percent gain from current levels. He has a preliminary price target of 3,500 for 2019.
American Airlines, the world's largest airline, will charge customers $5 more for the first and second checked bags for travel in the U.S., Puerto Rico, the US Virgin Islands and the Caribbean, the company said Thursday.

The new prices will be up to $30 from $25 for the first checked bag and $40 up from $35 for the second, effective for tickets purchased beginning Sept. 21. Certain AAdvantage members will continue to be eligible for free checked bags.

United Airlines, Delta Air Lines and JetBlue Airways have also raised their fees. JetBlue and Alaska Airlines also increased date-change fees.

Several lawmakers want to include a regulatory provision for federal officials to evaluate fees in a bill to reauthorize the Federal Aviation Administration. This comes after lawmakers asked airlines to explain the reasoning behind some of their fees, including those for checked baggage and seat assignments, earlier this month.
The Kingdom of Bahrain has been receiving more attention from Chinese e-commerce companies as it diversifies its economy away from oil.

There's "growing interest" from China's tech sector, said Simon Galpin, managing director of the Bahrain Economic Development Board, a public agency that helps companies set up and expand their business in the Gulf state.

"Chinese e-commerce companies recognize that the Middle East and the GCC [Gulf Cooperation Council], in particular, are really good markets," he told CNBC's Martin Soong at the World Economic Forum in Tianjin on Thursday.

Like many other Middle Eastern economies, Manama is focusing on building a digital economy in an effort to reduce reliance on revenues from energy.
As battles over Britain's final Brexit proposals continue to cause divisions within Theresa May's government and the U.K. parliament, support for the British prime minister and her leadership is coming from an unlikely source  Europe. Divisions between so-called 'Brexiteers' and 'Remainers' are rife in the U.K.'s parliament, with battle lines drawn between politicians who favor a hard separation from the rest of the European Union, and those that want a "soft" Brexit in which the U.K. stays roughly aligned to Europe in terms of trade and regulations, making a post-Brexit relationship easier. Stuck between these warring factions, Prime Minister May has erred towards the latter, aiming for a softer divorce from the bloc. Outlining her plans for the U.K.'s relationship with the EU after March 2019, May's "Chequers plan" shows her favoring close regulatory alignment with the EU's single market in order to facilitate trade after Brexit.

Tthe President of the European Commission Jean-Claude Juncker embraces the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom Theresa May on June 28, 2018 in Brussels, Belgium. Thierry Monasse | Getty Images News | Getty Images

Setting out such an arrangement is the easy part, however, with the other 27 EU members having to approve any final deal, as well as members of the U.K. parliament having to approve any final Brexit deal, also known as the "withdrawal arrangement." Although a group of Brexiteers have mounted a challenge to May's plan, other members of parliament have rallied around her. For her part, May has said it's her deal, or "no deal." Christopher Peel, chief investment officer at Tavistock Investments, told CNBC that the next few weeks would be critical in the Brexit timeline. "Both sides of the U.K. political divide remain split on their version of Brexit. Theresa May has struggled to find a common ground, but she will probably survive long enough to see out the negotiating process to its conclusion," Peel said Wednesday.

Hard sell

With the clock ticking and the March 29 exit date drawing near, both the U.K. and EU want to have a deal on their future relations in place by the time a two-day summit happens in mid-October. Outstanding issues yet to be resolved include trade and security and  perhaps the biggest stumbling block  the border between Ireland and Northern Ireland that will become the U.K.'s land border with the EU after Brexit. Ironically, May's Brexit plan is turning into a harder sell at home than it is in the EU. Many pro-Brexit politicians at home are rebelling against May's deal, saying it does not allow the U.K. to strike out on its own to forge its own trading relationships with the rest of the world. Many of these MPs are threatening to oppose the Chequers plan in any final vote, as have the opposition Labour party. "May has got in the middle between negotiating on behalf of the U.K. with Europe and her own party, which is basically trying to get rid of her, or threatening to get rid of her at every step, so it's a kind of 'muddle-through' (situation) for Brexit," Kieran Calder, head of Equity Research, Asia at Union Bancaire Privee, told CNBC on Thursday.

Theresa May, U.K. prime minister, left, shakes hands with Jean-Claude Juncker, president of the European Commission, ahead of a meeting at the European Commission building in Brussels, Belgium, on Monday, Dec. 4, 2017. European Union chief negotiator Michel Barnier told European lawmakers that a breakthrough is likely on Monday in Brexit talks as May arrived in Brussels. Dario Pignatelli | Bloomberg via Getty Images

Meanwhile, in the EU, national leaders appear to be aware of how fragile May's position is, and consequently appear to have mollified their position towards her  or at least look like they will try to meet her halfway. All eyes are on Salzburg in Austria where May met her EU counterparts on Wednesday evening and Thursday. Ahead of the summit, May called on EU leaders to drop "unacceptable" demands in the Brexit negotiation. She will need all the goodwill and support she can get from leaders there though several have signaled their willingness to compromise. Nonetheless, the real drama  and battle lines  are at home for May. "While this (the summit in Austria) suggests a focus on the negotiations between the EU and the U.K., the process is by now occupied mainly with selling the eventual deal at home in Westminster," Carsten Nickel, deputy director of research at Teneo Intelligence, said in a note Tuesday. "There is still no serious discussion about the all-important withdrawal agreement in the U.K. Instead, May's Tories continue to fight over the Chequers plan which will, in reality, never see the light of the day. As a result, decades of an intense and mostly theoretical discourse on Europe will come to a head within just a handful of days, once the eventual deal forces every individual MP to decide how to cast their vote," he added. Nickel said that while support for a deal should still be the base case, "the risk of rejection remains very real," at 40 percent.

The Northern Ireland factor

The Northern Ireland border issue is perhaps the most divisive and politically toxic element to Brexit discussions. There is little political appetite to see Northern Ireland treated differently to the rest of the U.K., despite the fact it is set to become the U.K.'s only land border with the EU and there is a strong desire on both sides to keep goods and people moving freely between the countries without a "hard" border.

Traffic crosses the border into Northern Ireland from the Irish Republic alongside a Brexit Border poster on the Dublin road Co Armagh border, between Newry in Northern Ireland and Dundalk in the Irish Republic, on December 1, 2017. PAUL FAITH | AFP | Getty Images
The cannabis craze is hitting Wall Street. Shares of Canadian pot company Tilray have shot up recently during several wild trading sessions, driving more and more investor interest into the global marijuana market.

The ETFMG Alternative Harvest fund, an ETF that tracks the marijuana industry, was up more than 20 percent this month as of Thursday morning.

"Cannabis is one of those great global super-themes," Sean Stiefel, founder of the Navy Capital Green Fund, told CNBC on Wednesday. "We've seen this now in country after country  Israel, Australia, Canada  where people end up voting with their dollars and buying stocks because they are cannabis related."

Stiefel added, "Valuations now have truly gotten ahead of themselves, and the retail investor here is buying air effectively."

Here's what six experts have to say about whether the cannabis craze is worth investors' time.
Workers unloading bags of chemicals at a port in Zhangjiagang in China's eastern Jiangsu province.

China hopes the United States will show sincerity and take steps to correct its behavior, its commerce ministry said on Thursday, after both countries slapped new tariffs on each other's goods this week in an escalating trade war.

China added $60 billion of U.S. products to its import tariff list on Tuesday to hit back at U.S. duties on $200 billion of Chinese goods that go into effect from Sept. 24.

Some analysts and American businesses are now concerned China could resort to other means of retaliation such as pressuring U.S. companies operating in China.

Alibaba's billionaire co-founder Jack Ma, a known advocate for globalization, this week expressed his growing pessimism over the dispute, saying it would be a "mess" for all parties involved.

U.S. President Donald Trump has threatened further retaliation if Beijing takes aim at U.S. agricultural or industrial workers as he accused China of trying to sway U.S. elections by targeting farmers.

"China has been forced to take retaliatory measures, and they are entirely meant to protect China's own interests," commerce ministry spokesman Gao Feng said at a weekly news briefing in Beijing.

"They are also meant to protect global free trade order, and have nothing to do with domestic politics in the United States."

He did not directly reply to questions asking if there will be a fresh round of trade talks between Beijing and Washington, which had appeared to be in the works prior to the latest tit-for-tat tariffs.

The deepening rift between China and the United States has stoked concerns about job losses on both sides of the Pacific as tariffs threaten to erode trade flows and economic growth.

"The current economic situation is indeed not good, and that could go on longer than people think," said Jack Ma, the billionaire co-founder of Alibaba.

"On China-U.S. frictions, people should make preparations for the next 20 years," Ma reiterated at the World Economic Forum in the northern Chinese port city of Tianjin.

Ma met Trump two years ago and laid out Alibaba's plan to bring small U.S. businesses onto its platform to sell to Chinese consumers. The Chinese billionaire also promised to create 1 million jobs in the United States.

Alibaba can no longer meet that promise, Ma told Chinese news agency Xinhua on Wednesday.

"The current situation has already destroyed the original premise. There is no way to deliver the promise," he said.

Chinese firms with factories in the United States would also face higher costs as they ship U.S.-assembled products back home.

Chinese white goods firm Haier Group, which acquired General Electric's home appliances businesses two years ago, has halted plans to sell products made in the United States by the GE Appliances brand in China, Financial Times cited the group's chief executive Zhang Ruimin as saying.
Chipotle Mexican Grill has a new plan to improve its food safety protocols  hire the company that's already doing it for Domino's, KFC and Jersey Mike's.

The burrito chain said Thursday it will deploy Zenput at more than 2,400 restaurants.

Zenput is a mobile platform that helps restaurants, convenience stores and retailers track their operations using a tablet or phone. The software allows managers to assign a checklist of specific tasks to various jobs, like opening or closing the store, food storage or even new menu item roll-outs.

Managers verify that the work has been done and can more easily identify if a step is missed. Chipotle is using the technology to ensure that all of its food safety procedures are being followed.

The fast casual restaurant has endured a number of setbacks as a result of several very public foodborne illness outbreaks at its chains since 2015. While Chipotle is not the only restaurant to struggle with food safety issues, repeated problems have kept them in the news and made investors and customers wary.

Diners looking for upscale, healthier burritos expect quality and have not been as forgiving of Chipotle's numerous food safety mishaps. While sales have been improving, a recent outbreak of Clostridium perfringens at a Chipotle in Ohio has once again caused consumers to question the brand's practices. The foodborne disease occurs when food is kept too warm for too long.

Wedbush analysts say their research shows that sales at the burrito chain were stymied in the third quarter because of this outbreak.

Still, shares of Chipotle are up more than 65 percent since January, likely the result of rebounding confidence in the chain and its new CEO Brian Niccol. The former head of Taco Bell, Niccol plans to woo back customers with new and limited-time menu items as well as faster mobile and online ordering and a new marketing campaign.

He is implementing many of the same tactics he used while running Yum Brand's Mexican chain, hoping that he can turn Chipotle into more than just a restaurant. He wants it to become a lifestyle brand.

Chipotle is about halfway through updating lighting, painting and other fixtures at its locations across the country. The company said it plans to complete the upgrades by the end of the year.

The company has also extended its hours, opening earlier and closing later, and is testing a "happy hour" with snack items and drinks in the afternoon and after 8 p.m.
By taking a risk in 2014 and building a company around a single manmade cannabinoid, drugmaker Corbus Pharmaceuticals is now ahead of its larger peers on a number of key treatments, CEO Yuval Cohen said Thursday.

"We are a tiny company, very nimble, but because we took the risk a number of years ago  whereas big pharma, remember, they're slower, they're more risk-averse  we're actually ahead of the pack," Cohen told CNBC in an interview with .

Though cannabis has largely been seen as taboo by big pharma until recently, some of the larger names are waking up to the medical benefits its derivatives can provide.

Cohen specifically referenced a 2017 deal by Johnson & Johnson subsidiary Janssen Pharmaceuticals with clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company Bird Rock Bio to explore targeting cannabinoid receptors in the liver to treat NASH, or non-alcoholic steatohepatitis. On Tuesday, Tilray CEO Brendan Kennedy told Cramer his cannabis producer struck a deal with a division of Novartis.

But Cohen took special care to distinguish Lenabasum, Corbus' flagship cannabinoid, from the plant-derived treatments many companies are promoting in the heat of the cannabis craze.

Lenabasum is a synthetic compound that targets a network of neurotransmitters in the human body called the endocannabinoid system to temper inflammation and fibrosis. It is currently in clinical trials for dermatomyositis, cystic fibrosis and systemic sclerosis, which affects 90,000 patients in the United States.

"None of our drugs is similar to the plant-derived cannabinoids  they're known as phytocannabinoids. Our drugs are manmade. They're rationally designed," he told Cramer on "Mad Money." "So the one thing they're not, for example, is they're not psychoactive. They don't change your mood or the way you feel."

Earlier Thursday, Corbus announced a deal to buy the rights to 600 endocannabinoid-focused compounds from Jenrin Discovery, a private company funded by BioAdvance that develops cannabinoid compounds to treat metabolic diseases.

But even though Corbus, which receives funding from the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation and the National Institute of Health, did not disclose the cost of the deal, Cohen said the cost shouldn't taper investors' enthusiasm about Corbus.

"Our cash position is strong," he told Cramer. "And one of the nice things about the deal is it's fairly back-ended. In other words, it's very generous towards Jenrin, but more in the later stages rather than the earlier stages. And so we're sharing the risk."

Shares of Corbus ended Thursday's trading session up 53.62 percent at $7.95 a share.
On a very bullish day for the broader stock market, the declines in the retail sector were speaking volumes to CNBC's .

With the trade dispute between the United States and China heating up, the "Mad Money" host figured the weakness stemmed from "a belief that the retailers will have to eat the tariffs, meaning they can't pass on all the price increases to consumers."

"Not only that, but Amazon could always undercut any company that makes goods in China and sells them here," he said on Thursday.

The retail stocks' dip came after the United States and China exchanged tariffs on each other's goods earlier this week. On Thursday, the Chinese commerce ministry said it hoped the United States would correct its behavior in the trade dispute.

But given how vocal leaders in the retail space have been about the unfavorable effects of tariffs on their businesses  and Amazon's growing pricing power  Cramer wondered if they would take the brunt of the trade war's negative effects.

"A combination of the competition from the retail Death Star, and either higher prices or higher costs caused by tariffs, could very well mean that the department stores can't make their numbers," he said. "That's why the stocks were shelled. Makes sense."

Cramer also did some quick math to back up his point. If President Donald Trump follows through with his plan to raise tariffs to 25 percent from 10 percent by the end of 2018 and all of the costs get passed down to consumers, it works out to roughly $1,000 per family per year.

"Not ideal," he admitted, "but it's also highly unlikely. If the tariffs really were going to fall entirely on the heads of consumers, the retail stocks wouldn't have had such a mess today. Plus, we did just get a tax cut [that] more than makes up for the tariff figure every time I do the numbers."

"Now, this may just be one big rotation out of growth into value, with people selling the expensive stocks and swapping into stocks that sell at a discount to the ," the "Mad Money" host said. "But the bottom line is that's a far more sustainable rally than the other way around."

Shares of the SPDR S&P Retail ETF, comprised of retail stocks including Nordstrom, Wayfair and Supervalu, were up a modest 0.33 percent at the end of Thursday's trading session. Department store stocks Macy's and Kohl's sank 1.04 and 3.23 percent, respectively, into the close.

Retail industry experts have warned that tariff escalation could squeeze American consumers, pushing prices higher and sales lower. In June, the CEO of the National Retail Federation told CNBC that tariffs would likely "erase" the positive effects brought on by tax reform.
The graves of Yemeni children killed by a Saudi-led coalition air strike. Photo: AFP/Getty Images

The Saudi Arabia-led war against Houthi rebels in Yemen is the worst humanitarian crisis in the world, according to the European Union. Nearly 17,000 civilians have been killed or injured by the coalitions unrelenting air campaign, and millions more face the risk of starvation and the rampant spread of disease.

None of this has stopped the United States from supporting the efforts though. The U.S. continues to sell arms to Riyadh and provide refueling services to aid the air offensive. But mounting civilian casualties, and high-profile tragedies, such as the bombing of a school bus that killed dozens, have led to dissension in Washington.

Some members of Congress have publicly pushed back against U.S. support for the coalition and, The Wall Street Journal reports, so have experts within the State Department. Like the lawmakers though, State Department staffers have had no luck convincing Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to turn away from the coalition. Not necessarily because he believes the war is just, but because he wants to protect U.S. weapons sales, the WSJ reports:

Mr. Pompeo overruled concerns from most of the State Department specialists involved in the debate who were worried about the rising civilian death toll in Yemen. Those who objected included specialists in the region and in military affairs. He sided with his legislative affairs team after they argued that suspending support could undercut plans to sell more than 120,000 precision-guided missiles to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, according to a classified State Department memo and people familiar with the debate.

According to the WSJ, Pompeo asked State Department experts earlier this month how he should deal with a congressional requirement that the U.S. either cut off refueling aid for coalition planes or certify that the coalition was taking steps to mitigate civilian casualties. The experts said Pompeo should not make such a certification as it would provide no incentive for Saudi leadership to take our diplomatic messaging seriously.

He did it anyway, assuring Congress that the coalition is trying to kill fewer children, but only after the State Departments legislative team pointed out that failing to make the certification will negatively impact pending arms transfers. It also noted that being truthful to Congress and admitting that Saudi Arabia is not doing enough to protect the innocent would negatively impact future foreign military sales and direct commercial sales to the region. Pompeo seems to have found that possibility unacceptable.
As shares of Canadian cannabis producer Tilray continued their wild bout of trading on Thursday, CNBC's doubled down on his declaration that investors are getting carried away with their enthusiasm around pot stocks.

"This whole group has gotten too hot  no argument here," he said. "Is it a bubble? Absolutely."

"People are too excited right now," the "Mad Money" host continued. "It will end badly when the stock market gets flooded with cannabis stocks. I just don't expect it to end quite yet."

Tilray's surge higher came after the company's CEO, Brendan Kennedy, appeared on "Mad Money" on Tuesday, the same day Tilray received approval from the Drug Enforcement Administration to import cannabis to the United States for medical research.

In the interview, Kennedy told Cramer that pharmaceutical and alcohol companies should invest in cannabis as a "hedge" against the inevitable rise of the industry. The CEO pegged the total addressable market for medical marijuana at around $150 billion.

That set off a 90 percent intraday gain in Tilray's stock on Wednesday, with shares eventually closing up 38.1 percent. On Thursday, the volatile ride continued, rising 14 percent in early trading before plunging 22 percent.

Tilray's stock ended Thursday's trading session down 17.62 percent, at $176.35 a share. The stock continued to decline in after-hours trading.

Even so, "Tilray's not the culprit here," Cramer said on Thursday. "When I had CEO Brendan Kennedy on the show two nights ago and I used a $500 billion projection, ... Kennedy didn't endorse it."

The $500 billion estimate came from Brian Athaide, a Procter & Gamble vet who now runs cannabis cultivator Green Organic Dutchman. Cramer admitted he got it from a "reluctant" Athaide at a recent conference when the two spoke about the market potential for oil, pharmaceutical, pet health, edible and drinkable weed products.

"Again, Brendan Kennedy did not endorse that pie-in-the-sky number. He was much more conservative," the "Mad Money" host said.

And while he acknowledged Tilray's various advantages in the cannabis space, including its partnership with Novartis and the green light from the DEA, Cramer again issued a warning to investors about its need for capital.

"Kennedy also admitted that he needed more capital to keep up with demand. He pretty much told you Tilray will have to raise money, and the company selling stock through a secondary offering certainly seems like the most logical and obvious choice to me," Cramer said. "That was a reason for me to tell you to sell the stock, not buy it."

But the problem is the ongoing battle between the short and long positions in shares of Tilray, which have seen notably higher trading volume in the last several days.

"The simple fact is this is one gigantic short squeeze, where there aren't enough shares for shorts to borrow and sell  remember, you can't sell a stock you don't own," Cramer said. "So when regular investors decide they want to own a piece of a company like Tilray, the market just can't handle it. The stock explodes higher."

"Here's where I come down: you need to stay away from the stock of Tilray right now," he advised. "You don't know when they'll offer more stock. You don't know when the battle between the shorts and the longs will be finished. Tilray and many of its compatriots are simply too risky for me to recommend and too thinly traded to be worth betting on."

At the same time, Cramer maintained that Tilray, a recognized leader in its space, didn't create the problem, adding that until more marijuana plays came to the public market, the craze could continue.

"Yes, these stocks are in a bubble, but no, it's not a joke. Tilray and its peers are going to disrupt a host of different industries. I think the boom here is very real, it just might not be as investable at the moment as you'd like," he said.

"If you insist on playing, I want you to buy Canopy, or even go with its top shareholder, Constellation," Cramer recommended. "But otherwise, just be careful out there."
COPENHAGEN  When a whistle-blower alleged that employees of a branch of the Danish lender Danske Bank had been knowingly working with customers who had broken the law, it was not the first time that questions had been raised about that particular office. It would not be the last.

Danske Bank said on Wednesday that its headquarters and its Estonian branch failed for years to prevent suspected money laundering involving thousands of customers. The lender said it was unable to estimate the total amount of the suspicious transactions, but its nonresident operation in the Baltic nation improbably had total flows of 200 billion euros, or $234 billion  nearly equivalent to the size of the Danish economy. The chief executive, who had previously headed the bank's international operations, quickly said he would resign.

In an 87-page report commissioned and paid for by Danske Bank, a Danish law firm, Bruun & Hjejle, found that misconduct took place at the lender's Estonian branch from 2007 to 2015, involving "objectionable" omissions, inaction and faulty processes at all levels of the bank. That meant the lender "was not sufficiently effective in preventing the branch in Estonia from being used for money laundering."

"None of us can grasp that this had been going on," Ole Andersen, Danske Bank's chairman, said in a news conference on Wednesday.

According to the bank, its Estonian branch was serving many nonresident customers, though it should not have done so. Danske Bank said it suspected that some of its employees in Estonia may have helped those customers. At least eight bank employees have been reported to the police. In all, some 6,200 customers have been investigated so far, many of them Russian individuals and Russian-owned companies based abroad, "the vast majority" of which "have been found to be suspicious," the bank said.

Danske Bank said it first received warning of potential misconduct in 2007, when Russia's central bank warned the Danish lender of possible "tax and custom payments evasion" in its nonresident portfolio in Estonia. The Russian authorities also said they suspected "criminal activity in its pure form, including money laundering" estimated at "billions of rubles monthly."

According to the lawyer's report, however, "Danske Bank missed this opportunity."

In 2013, JPMorgan, the Estonian branch's correspondent bank for clearing dollar transactions, ended the relationship because of the American lender's concerns with the nonresident portfolio. That prompted Danske Bank to start a review of its clients, but the review was never concluded.

It was only when a whistle-blower raised concerns with executives in Copenhagen in December 2013 that the bank's board was warned. But it would take almost two years for the bank to get rid of suspicious clients, and a full inquiry did not begin until 2017. By then, the Estonian branch had become the hub of one of Europe's biggest money-laundering operations.

In the meantime, the bank conducted what Bruun & Hjejle said were "insufficient" investigations, whose findings were improperly reported or challenged by top management.

Danske Bank said it did not know exactly how much money laundering had taken place. But Ole Spiermann, a partner at Bruun & Hjejle, said the firm expected "a large proportion" of about 200 billion that passed through the Estonian branch between 2007 and 2015 to be suspicious.

"It's perhaps difficult for us in this room to understand," Mr. Spiermann said at the news conference, "but there was an understanding in the bank that they had this under control."

The fallout for Danske Bank has been considerable. Thomas F. Borgen, the lender's chief executive since 2013, said on Wednesday that he would resign, though he will stay in place until a replacement is hired. The authorities in Denmark, Estonia and the United States are investigating the misconduct. The bank's stock price has fallen about 30 percent this year.

In a statement, the head of Estonia's financial regulatory agency, Kilvar Kessler, said the report "describes serious shortcomings in the organization of Danske Bank, where risk appetite and risk control were not in balance." Denmark's financial regulator said it would use the law firm's report in its own inquiries.
Tit-for-tat trade tariffs between the United States and China are widely expected to hit developing countries hard as they rely heavily on exports to fuel growth. But there's one bright spot, according to one of the world's biggest pension funds.

International trade pressures could eventually force the governments of emerging economies to implement structural changes and long-term reforms, Suyi Kim, senior managing director and head of Asia Pacific at the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board said at the World Economic Forum in Tianjin on Thursday.

That would be highly beneficial for long-term investors such as the CPPIB, Kim told CNBC's Martin Soong.

"We have the luxury of being able to ride out short term volatility," she said, explaining that the fund operates under an investment horizon that spans decades.

The fund's value stood at $366.6 billion at the end of June, out of which 15 percent is dedicated to emerging markets. By 2025, the sector is expected to make up one third of the company's total assets, according to Kim, who called the move "prudent diversification."

"We believe in the long-term expected returns of emerging markets," she explained, adding that China, India and Brazil were among the key heavyweights.
Eric Schmidt, who has been the CEO of Google and executive chairman of its parent company, Alphabet, predicts that within the next decade there will be two distinct internets: one led by the U.S. and the other by China.

Schmidt shared his thoughts at a private event in San Francisco on Wednesday night convened by investment firm Village Global VC. The firm enlists tech luminaries  including Schmidt, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates and Diane Green  as limited partners, then invests their money into early-stage tech ventures.

At the event, economist Tyler Cowen asked about the possibility of the internet fragmenting into different sub-internets with different regulations and limited access between them in coming years. "What's the chance, say, 10 to 15 years, we have just three to four separate internets?"

Schmidt said:

"I think the most likely scenario now is not a splintering, but rather a bifurcation into a Chinese-led internet and a non-Chinese internet led by America. If you look at China, and I was just there, the scale of the companies that are being built, the services being built, the wealth that is being created is phenomenal. Chinese Internet is a greater percentage of the GDP of China, which is a big number, than the same percentage of the US, which is also a big number. If you think of China as like 'Oh yeah, they're good with the Internet,' you're missing the point. Globalization means that they get to play too. I think you're going to see fantastic leadership in products and services from China. There's a real danger that along with those products and services comes a different leadership regime from government, with censorship, controls, etc. Look at the way BRI works  their Belt and Road Initiative, which involves 60-ish countries  it's perfectly possible those countries will begin to take on the infrastructure that China has with some loss of freedom."

The Belt and Road is a massive initiative by Beijing to increase China's political and economic influence by connecting and facilitating all kinds of trade, including digital trade, between China and countries in Europe, Africa, the Middle East and Asia.

Schmidt's predictions come at a time when his successor at Google, CEO Sundar Pichai, has stirred up controversy around the company's strategy in China.

Reportedly, Google has been developing "Project Dragonfly," a censored version of its search engine that could appease authorities in China. The project allegedly included a means to suppress some search results, booting them off the first page, and a means to fully block results for sensitive queries, for example, around "peaceful protests."
TIANJIN, China  The World Economic Forum is looking to China for ideas on how governments can appropriately regulate the technologies of the future.

The organization, which runs the annual conference of world leaders in Davos, Switzerland, announced Wednesday it is launching a hub in Beijing for government officials, businesses and academics to come up with suggestions for future policies on developments such as artificial intelligence.

The group in the communist country will mark the third location of the Center for the Fourth Industrial Revolution, which opened in San Francisco in March 2017. A location in Tokyo launched in July, and another is due to open in Mumbai, India, in October. Areas of focus include blockchain, internet of things technology, and artificial intelligence.

"We can't use 20th century models for 21st century technology," Murat Sonmez, head of the organization's Center for the Fourth Industrial Revolution, said in an interview with CNBC.

"We have a lot to learn from China as well," he said. "China represents a huge opportunity for the rest of the world to see what's coming."

While China is one of the most controlling states in the world, the national government has let some sectors such as internet companies thrive relatively unrestricted. In addition, under a "Made in China 2025" plan, Chinese authorities are investing heavily in technologies such as artificial intelligence in a bid to become a world leader in advanced tech.

A list of those who will participate in the Beijing hub was not immediately available because the group is still in early stages of development. Two Chinese companies are already involved with the center's San Francisco hub: telecom giant Huawei and drone maker DJI.

Sonmez said he hopes the hubs can complete several pilot programs within 18 months to help form guidelines for future policies, such as data privacy, liability for algorithm-generated actions and cross-border data flows.

"There's a potential if you do not have flexible regulation, all these investments will not lead to [a] desired outcome," he said.
Former Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak will face further corruption charges related to money allegedly siphoned off from scandal-plagued state fund 1Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB), the anti-corruption agency said on Wednesday.

Najib has faced intense scrutiny since unexpectedly losing a general election in May to Mahathir Mohamad, who reopened investigations into allegations that billions of dollars were stolen from 1MDB.

In July and August, Najib was slapped with charges of money laundering, criminal breach of trust and abuse of power in relation to 1MDB. The charges relate to funds of about 42 million ringgit ($10.14 million) that allegedly flowed from SRC International, a former 1MDB unit, into Najib's personal bank account. Najib has pleaded not guilty to all charges and has consistently denied wrongdoing.

Najib was arrested on Wednesday in connection with a deposit of 2.6 billion ringgit ($627.79 million) into his personal account and will be taken to court on Thursday, the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission (MACC) said in a statement. Najib would face "several charges" under a section of the MACC Act which deals with using one's office or position for gratification, the agency said.
Gen. Michael Flynn, former national security adviser to US President Donald Trump, leaves Federal Court on December 1, 2017 in Washington, DC.

U.S. President Donald Trump's former national security adviser Michael Flynn, who pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI, will be sentenced on Dec. 18, according to a court filing on Wednesday.

Flynn pleaded guilty in December 2017 to lying to the FBI about his contacts with Russia, in exchange for cooperating with Special Counsel Robert Mueller's probe into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.

A joint filing at U.S. District Court in Washington on Monday by Flynn's lawyers and prosecutors had said Flynn could be sentenced as soon as Nov. 28.

Prosecutors have repeatedly deferred Flynn's sentencing date since his guilty plea, even though Flynn's lawyer Robert Kelner said at a July hearing his client was eager to get the sentencing date on the calendar and put the ordeal behind him.

A sentencing date signals that Flynn's ongoing cooperation with Mueller's office is coming to an end.

Flynn was the first member of Trump's administration to plead guilty to a crime uncovered by Mueller's wide-ranging investigation into Russian attempts to influence the 2016 U.S. election and potential collusion by Trump aides.

Under a plea bargain deal, Flynn admitted in a Washington court that he lied when asked by FBI investigators about his conversations with Russia's then-ambassador, Sergei Kislyak, just weeks before Trump took office.

Trump has denied knowing anything about contact with Russians and his campaign and has called Mueller's probe a witch hunt. Russia has denied U.S. allegations that it interfered in the campaign.
Some manufacturers have said the agency's requirement that any new e-cigarettes must undergo review before entering the market prevents them from introducing new products that could curb youth use, including bluetooth features that could disable them near schools.

Gottlieb last week announced a historic crackdown on e-cigarettes after reviewing unpublished federal data he's reviewed showing teen use has reached "epidemic" levels. The FDA ordered five brands  Juul, British American Tobacco 's Vuse, Altria 's MarkTen, Imperial Brands ' Blu E-cigs and Japan Tobacco 's Logic  to submit plans within 60 days detailing how they will prevent teens from using their products.

The Food and Drug Administration is considering fast-tracking the review process for e-cigarettes that include features that make the products less likely to be used by kids, Commissioner Scott Gottlieb told CNBC on Thursday.

Yet Gottlieb said while companies have talked about these ideas with reporters and politicians, they haven't raised them with the FDA. He said the door is "very open to that kind of discussion."

"I think if someone came to us with a good idea about how a product could be modified to be less appealing to kids or less prone to misuse by children, we'd be very interested in that product, and we'd be very interested in having a discussion around that and how we could put that through an efficient regulatory process," he said.

Juul, the brand that dominates nearly 73 percent of the e-cigarette market, said it "believes technology is absolutely part of the solution." The company plans to launch bluetooth-enabled devices internationally next year, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Products that were on the market before Aug. 8, 2016, were supposed to start undergoing review this year until Gottlieb extended the deadline until Aug. 8, 2022. He said Thursday that the FDA is actively considering reinstating the original deadline, meaning companies may soon be required to submit applications. It may also pull flavored e-cigarette products from the market until those applications are reviewed and cleared.

Critics have scolded Gottlieb for ever giving e-cigarette companies more time. He said it was necessary because it wasn't clear what the FDA wanted from manufacturers. Now, a year later, the FDA has issued some guidelines and plans to soon release more.

If he had kept the original date, companies would have started sending in applications and wouldn't have received a decision until next year.

"What we couldn't anticipate, and what we didn't anticipate, in all fairness, was how fast the youth use would accelerate," Gottlieb said.

In his defense, Gottlieb said, if the agency hadn't done anything differently and kept the original application deadline, the growth of youth e-cigarette use in 2018 still would have happened.

"We'd still be where we are right now, which is having to contemplate what we're going to do to stem that use," he said.



Since last week's announcement, the FDA has started reaching out to the five manufacturers to schedule meetings with Gottlieb and the agency's Center for Tobacco Products. While the companies put together their plans, Gottlieb said, the center will also create a comprehensive set of proposals for addressing youth use.
Twenty-First Century Fox and Comcast are heading for an auction to settle a takeover of British broadcaster Sky.

The bidding process will officially begin on Friday evening and comes to end on the following day, the U.K.'s Takeover Panel said Thursday, with a maximum of three rounds to decide the fate of the deal. Each bid must be made in cash.

In the first round, the company with the lowest bid  in this case Fox  can make an increased bid for Sky. Comcast then has the chance to increase its bid for Sky in the following round. If the auction procedure has not been concluded during that second round, it is then carried on into a third and final round.

Sky, Fox, Comcast and Disney agreed to an auction to settle the bidding war over the British broadcaster, the panel said.

Disney, which has agreed to buy assets of Fox, could gain control over Sky if Fox comes out of the auction process victorious.

In such auctions, bidders submit secret offers to a third-party arbiter. And while this method is relatively common for commercial transactions, it is extremely unusual when it comes to deal-making for such a high-profile public company.

Sky is currently valued at 27 billion, which translates to more than $35 billion. The firm's share price was marginally lower on the news.

"For now, Comcast seems to be in pole position, but it's not a slam dunk," Paolo Pescatore, a tech, media and telecoms analyst, told CNBC via email.

"There's so much to play for and expect both companies to open up the war chest. This represents a great opportunity to own a prized asset which will prove to be a worthy long term investment."
Low-cost carrier Frontier Airlines, which charges passengers for advanced seat assignments and carry-on luggage, is trying a new tack to attract travelers: lowering and in some cases eliminating date-change fees altogether.

The 10th largest U.S. airline by travelers carried, used to charge customers $99 to change their dates. Effective immediately, date changes on Frontier will be free if they're made before 90 days of departure, and $49 if the customer makes the change between 89 and 14 days before the flight, the airline said Thursday. Travelers who need to make last-minute changes will still have to pay the $99 fee if the change is within 13 days of a flight. All passengers will still be responsible for any change in fare.

The move by privately held Frontier makes it an outlier among U.S. carriers, which are increasing fees as they struggle with a surge in fuel costs, generally their second-largest expense after labor.

American Airlines, the world's largest airline, on Thursday said it will start charging passengers $30, up from $25, to check a first bag on flights in North America, starting with tickets purchased on Friday. American's move follows similar fee increases by United Airlines, Delta Air Lines and JetBlue Airways. JetBlue also increased date-change fees, a step Alaska Airlines took earlier this year.

Ancillary revenue from seat selection, baggage and other fees are a cash cow for airlines. These fees are not subject to the same 7.5 percent tax as airfare is and have provided an additional revenue stream to carriers, particularly after fuel prices climbed.

Several lawmakers are seeking that a bill to reauthorize the Federal Aviation Administration includes a provision that would require federal officials to determine whether fees are reasonable. Earlier this month, several lawmakers asked airlines to explain the costs behind some of the fees they charge passengers, including those for checked baggage and seat assignments.

The cheaper change-fee policy is an attempt to get more travelers on board. Frontier carried just under 2 percent of the 965 million passengers carried by U.S. airlines last year, according to the U.S. Department of Transportation. Southwest Airlines, which does not charge customers a fee to change tickets but requires them to pay any difference in fare, flew 157.7 million passengers, more than any U.S. carrier.

Frontier collected $36.5 million in reservation change and cancellation fees last year, just over 1 percent of the $2.9 billion U.S. carriers brought in for those fees, according to the Department of Transportation.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un. Photo: The White House

Kim Jong-uns promise that North Korea will destroy its primary nuclear testing site in exchange for concessions from the U.S. has brought Washington back to the negotiating table. Following Kims summit with South Korea president Moon Jae-in, where President Trump said tremendous progress was made, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has said negotiations with Pyongyang are back on.

On the basis of these important commitments, the United States is prepared to engage immediately in negotiations, Pompeo said in a statement. He also set a January 2021 deadline for North Koreas denuclearization.

Talks between the U.S. and North Korea have stalled in recent weeks after President Trump became uncertain that Kim was following through with pledges made at their Singapore summit in June. I feel we are not making sufficient progress with respect to the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula, Trump tweeted in late August after cancelling a planned trip to North Korea for Pompeo.

Now, the U.S. appears ready to seize on Kims new commitments, even if its unclear how serious he is about them, and talks are back on. Pompeo hopes to get back on track next week at the U.N. General Assembly meeting in New York, to which hes invited the North Korean foreign minister.

Kim is also eager to restart talks and hopes to have a second summit with Trump, President Moon said Thursday. Chairman Kim Jong-un said he wants Secretary Pompeos North Korea visit and a second summit with President Trump to happen at the earliest convenience in order to speed up the denuclearization process, Moon said.
CNBC | Mack Hogan

Counterfeit electronics that reach consumers often come with safety risks. Twelve of 400 fake iPhone adapters tested in a study unrelated to those in Apple's lawsuit were so badly constructed that they posed "a risk of lethal electrocution to the user," U.S.-based safety standards leader UL warned. The study found a 99 percent failure rate on basic tests that check whether the amount of electricity flowing remains within safety limits. The findings alarmed Paul Brown, UL's acting general counsel. "You might think it's harmless to buy a $3 or $4 fake iPhone charger. But clearly that's not the case," Brown said. Apple said it decided to sue after the company bought a number of its power adapters and charging and syncing cables "that were directly sold by Amazon.com  not a third-party seller  and determined that they were counterfeit." After Amazon identified the company that had provided the electronics to the e-commerce giant, Apple said it tested the remaining inventory and "determined that the vast majority of these producers were counterfeit, as well." Not named as a defendant in the lawsuit, Amazon instead was characterized as a witness. Amazon declined to comment. However, the company flagged information about its anti-counterfeiting efforts on its website. Apple declined an interview about the lawsuit and instead issued a statement: "The safety of our customers is our first priority, and our teams are constantly working with law enforcement, resellers and e-commerce sites around the world to remove counterfeit products from the market." Along with the safety hazards they pose, knockoffs also inflict economic damage. Counterfeit products, software piracy and theft of trade secrets take as much as a $600 billion annual bite out of the U.S. economy, according to a 2017 report by the Commission on the Theft of American Intellectual Property, a private watchdog group. Using records supplied by Amazon, Apple traced the origin of the counterfeit electronics identified in the lawsuit to Hong Kong. The company declined to identify the manufacturer based there. More than 90 percent of all counterfeit products offered for sale in the U.S. originate in China or Hong Kong, said Craig Crosby, publisher of The Counterfeit Report, an industry- and corporate-backed website that alerts consumers to fake products. China and Hong Kong ranked first and second, respectively, as the origin for all annual product seizures by federal investigators since 2009 because the items infringed on U.S. trademarks or copyrights, or were subject to exclusion orders.

First stop: Brooklyn

The first U.S. stop for the Apple counterfeits was Brooklyn's Borough Park neighborhood, a quiet section of single and multifamily homes near the elevated D Train subway above New Utrecht Avenue. The area is home to approximately 200,000 people. Many are part of the area's strictly Orthodox Jewish community, families who come and go to work, school, shopping, yeshivas and synagogues. There's no outward sign of an import company  or any business  at an attached residential building on 59th Street. Two of the neatly kept structure's floors have front balconies. A brick planter box that holds shrubs sits alongside the sidewalk. The location is a short walk from 14th Avenue, where Renaissance Ballroom, a catering hall that specializes in kosher celebrations, sits on the corner. In 2011, this stretch of 59th Street was renamed in memory of Zachary Sansone, a renowned New York City social organizer. Starkeys Corp. and SATK Corp., importing companies that business and court records show are managed by Aron Kohn, their sole employee, are based here, Apple alleged. U.S. Customs and Border Protection investigators alerted Apple to at least 58 seizures during a roughly one-year time frame for suspected counterfeit products imported to the companies' shared Brooklyn address, court records show. The equipment included more than 19,000 fake Apple EarPods, MagSafe power adapters, USB power adapters and Lightning cables. Customs and Border Protection declined to discuss seizures of products that copied specific companies' electronics, citing legal restrictions. Starkeys, incorporated in 2012, and SATK, formed four years later, also share a mailing address on 53rd Street, roughly six blocks away. The location is a small first-floor commercial location that houses a bustling Mr. Mailman center with postal supplies and mailboxes. In court responses to the lawsuit, the companies denied "having sold counterfeit or infringing Apple products" but acknowledged that Kohn is their owner. Naomi Gray, an attorney for the companies, did not respond to emailed questions. USA TODAY interviews in the area near the companies' locations found no one who had heard about the firms, or about Apple's allegations. However, Rico Infantino, a 48-year-old Brooklyn resident, said locations selling counterfeit electronic accessories are "commonplace" across New York City. "In Manhattan, every street corner you see someone selling, I guess it's called knockoff Apple equipment or Samsung equipment, or LG," Infantino said.

A New Jersey electronics firm

Starkeys and SATK imports of alleged Apple counterfeits that were not seized by customs made it into the U.S. and went to the Edison, New Jersey, warehouse of DGL Group, the companies' "sole customer" for the products, Apple alleged. Brooklyn-founded in 2001, DGL has offices in Edison, New Jersey, and Shenzhen, China, the company website says. The company is headed by Ezra Zaafarani, a resident of Brooklyn's Sheepshead Bay neighborhood, business records show. Apple alleged that DGL was "a repeat infringer" of its intellectual property. The company sold unauthorized copies of Apple power adapters and cables in 2014 and subsequently agreed to avoid subsequent infringement after the tech giant discovered the counterfeits, Apple said. Starkeys and SATK "exist to facilitate DGL's acquisition of Apple-branded products from China and/or Hong Kong  products which have every indicia of being counterfeit," Apple alleged in its amended court complaint. DGL's website says the company focuses on consumer electronics and has an import-export division that can "meet retailers' needs in consumer electronics through our own brands." DGL also boasts a toy division and lists brand partners that include Disney's Pixar division, Coca-Cola, and Crayola. Those companies did not respond to messages seeking comment on the business relationships. DGL and the company's attorney, Andrew Levine, did not respond to messages seeking comment. The company has been the target of other infringement lawsuits. In 2015, Florida-based Battery on the Go, a producer of portable battery chargers for smartphones, accused DGL of using its PowerBar trademark "to market and sell their own, albeit low quality, and dangerous, portable battery chargers." DGL denied any infringement violations in a counterclaim that asked a federal judge to dismiss the Florida company's allegations. The legal battle ended with a confidential settlement agreement in June. Alejandro Brito, the attorney who represented Battery on the Go, did not respond to a phone message asking whether the company continued to see DGL offering suspected knockoffs of its products. California-based company Cloud B accused DGL of trademark and copyright infringement in 2014 for marketing "Starlight Turtle" toys that were "confusingly similar" to its Twilight Turtle toys. DGL agreed to a permanent injunction that restrained the company from marketing designs "substantially similar" to those owned by Cloud B. Cloud B did not respond to an email asking whether the company continued to find any DGL-made knockoffs of its products.

Mobile Star  Apple and Groupon

DGL sold counterfeit Apple products to Mobile Star, an electronic equipment company based in Metuchen, New Jersey, Apple alleged. Along with being part of the import trail that brought counterfeits to Amazon, Mobile Star also sold Apple knockoffs to Groupon, an e-commerce marketplace, and to an Apple investigator, the tech giant charged. Referring to the preceding stops in the counterfeit trail, Apple said legal discovery in the lawsuit "revealed that Mobile Star's supply chain includes entities that are known counterfeiters and infringers of Apple's intellectual property and source large quantities of Apple-branded products directly from entities based in China." Founded in New York in 2008, Mobile Star is headed by Brooklyn businessman Jack Braha. The company focuses on buying and reselling excess and outdated inventory of accessories for smartphones with much of the transactions carried out via Amazon, Braha said in a November court filing. The company inspects the products it buys and has not found any irregularities or safety problems in its sampling of Apple iPhone accessories, Braha said. "Mobile Star does not knowingly resell counterfeit goods," Braha said in his court declaration. "Indeed, prior to Apple's claims that are at issue here, Mobile Star has never before been accused of doing so." Moreover, Braha said Amazon mixes together similar products from several sales vendors, placing them in the same bin for distribution. That practice would make it impossible for Amazon to identify and accuse the company responsible for marketing and selling the alleged Apple counterfeits. "Any suggestion that Amazon's counterfeit inventory necessarily came from Mobile Star is belied by Amazon's admitted practice of commingling products from all of its suppliers," Braha said in his court declaration. Aaron Moss, a Mobile Star attorney, said the company consistently denied any wrongdoing and was pleased with the court settlement. Contributing: Elizabeth Weise, Eli Blumenthal Follow USA TODAY reporter Kevin McCoy on Twitter: @kmccoynyc

WATCH: Apple iPhone XS and iPhone XS Max review - the best phones you can buy
Workers transport bags of soybean meal in a dockyard in Nantong in east China's Jiangsu province on Aug. 06, 2018.

The executive from one of China's biggest soybean crushers sat on a panel at a Kansas City agricultural exports conference, listening to an expert beside him explain why China would remain dependent on U.S. soybeans to feed its massive hog herds.

When his turn to speak came, Mu Yan Kui told the international audience of soy traders that everything they just heard was wrong. Then Mu ticked off a six-part strategy to slash Chinese consumption and tap alternate supplies with little financial pain.

"Many foreign business people and politicians have underestimated the determination of Chinese people to support the government in a trade war," said Mu, vice chairman of Yihai Kerry, owned by Singapore-based Wilmar International.

The comments echo a growing confidence within China's soybean industry and government that the world's largest pork-producing nation can wean itself off U.S. soy exports  a prospect that would decimate U.S. farmers, upend a 36-year-old trading relationship worth $12.7 billion last year, and radically remap global trade flows.

Just one prong of the strategy Mu detailed  to slash soymeal content in pig feed  could obliterate Chinese demand for U.S. soybeans if broadly adopted, according to Reuters calculations.

Cutting the soy ration for hogs from the typical 20 percent to 12 percent would equate to a demand reduction of up to 27 million tonnes of soybeans per year  an amount equal to 82 percent of Chinese soy imports from the United States last year. Chinese farmers could cut soymeal rations by nearly half without harming hogs' growth, experts and academics said.

Soy meal provides the protein and amino acids that pigs need to thrive, but reducing their use will be easier in China than elsewhere because farmers here have long included more soy than needed to keep their hogs healthy, according to industry experts in China and the United States.

The standard 20 percent ration dates to a recipe promoted by U.S. soybean industry advocates in the 1980s as they entered what was then a newly opened market for foreign investment.

Most Chinese pig farmers have continued to use high levels of soymeal even as their U.S. counterparts reduced soy content after advancing the science of optimizing feed ingredients to provide the best nutrition at the lowest cost.

Major Chinese agriculture firms have recently started adopting the same tactics, but the nation's pork sector remains dominated by smaller operations that  until now  didn't have a strong financial incentive to justify the time and expense required to overhaul feeding systems and formulas, industry experts said.

Now, China's 25-percent tariff on U.S. soybeans  a retaliation against levies by U.S. President Donald Trump on a wide range of Chinese imports  is accelerating the push to slash soymeal rations.

"The Sino-U.S. trade tensions will inevitably promote the wider application of this know-how," said Yin Jingdong, professor in animal nutrition at China Agricultural University.

A feed mill owned by Beijing Dabeinong Technology Group Co, for instance, plans to eliminate imported U.S. soybeans from its feed mix by October, said Zhang Wei, a manager at the mill, one of China's top farmers and feed makers. The firm will replace soy imports with more cornmeal and alternative protein sources, including domestically produced soymeal, which has typically been grown for human consumption.

At the Kansas City conference, held by the U.S. Soybean Export Council, Mu highlighted reduced soymeal rations as part of a broader strategy, including seeking alternative protein sources such as rapeseed or cotton seed; tapping surplus soybean stocks, including a government reserve, and domestically grown soybeans; and continuing to boost soybean imports from Brazil and Argentina.
The dispute over trade and escalating tariffs between the U.S. and China are a "trade skirmish" rather than a trade war, Jamie Dimon, chairman and chief executive officer of J.P. Morgan Chase, told CNBC-TV18 on Thursday. "It's not a trade war, I call it a trade skirmish," he told CNBC-TV18's Shereen Bhan in New Delhi. "The American government, our president, is right to raise the issues (about fair trade practices) with China," he said, although he added that he "may have used a different strategy to go about fixing it." "It's unclear where we're going to get to," he added.

Jamie Dimon speaking at the 2017 Delivering Alpha conference in New York on Sept. 12, 2017. David A. Grogan | CNBC

Dimon's comments came after U.S. President Donald Trump decided to implement further tariffs on Chinese goods. On Monday, he announced a 10 percent tariff on $200 billion worth of Chinese imports. Those duties will rise to 25 percent at the end of the year. In response, China announced tariffs targeting more than 5,000 U.S. products  worth about $60 billion  that will go into effect on September 24. The country has also filed a complaint to the World Trade Organization (WTO) against the U.S. Dimon said the tariffs would not have that many ramifications for the American consumer or economy. "But if you look at tariffs on $200 billion (worth of Chinese goods), and this may all get passed on to American consumers and they have to pay another $20 billion (on Chinese imports), it's a $20 trillion economy, so the actual economic effect is not dramatic," Dimon said. "We can add tariffs to more things and the Chinese can retaliate in other ways and I don't think all that's good. It's not a devastating thing, it's not a war, it's a trade skirmish that can have negative economic effects." Trump appeared to leave the door open for negotiations with China, telling reporters during a visit with Poland's president on Tuesday that the U.S. may make a deal with China at some point and that his country is always open to talking. Dimon said he didn't expect any immediate resolution, however. "There is an effect on the psyche, the mind, if the trade skirmish becomes a trade war but right now it's just trade tit-for-tat and hopefully we'll get to a resolution. I don't expect a trade war but I also don't expect any progress before (U.S. Mid-Term) elections." Dimon's only worry about the trade tensions was whether it could "offset some of the positive effects" that he said had been seen from President Trump's "regulatory reform and tax reform and other pro-business policies."

President Dimon?
TIANJIN, China Jack Ma, the iconic co-founder of Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba, said Thursday that he will not return to run the company after his planned departure next year.

That'll still hold even if his successor is facing difficulties leading the tech behemoth, Ma said, adding that he expected to remain in frequent communication with the company.

"I won't come back, because I don't feel like I have left," Ma said in Mandarin at a World Economic Forum conference in Tianjin, China.

Chief Executive Officer Daniel Zhang will succeed Ma as chairman of the board next September, the company announced earlier this month. Until that time, Ma will remain executive chairman. He plans to stay on the board of directors through the 2020 annual shareholders meeting, while focusing more of his time on philanthropy and education.

Ma said Thursday there are many things he wants to do, including teaching others how to become successful, and appreciating wine.

"I don't want to die in an office," he said.

The tech pioneer also repeated a sentiment he'd expressed earlier this week that companies need to plan for 20 years of trade tensions between the U.S. and China. "Whatever the U.S. would do , we will have our own solutions based on our principles," he said.

"Of course you are in a lousy outlook ... but that is the same case for your competitors," he said, according to a translation provided by the World Economic Forum. "You don't need to do a zillion things, but you need to do something right."

Ma made headlines on Wednesday when he told Chinese news agency Xinhua that his company no longer plans to create the 1 million new American jobs he'd previously forecast due to increased tensions between the world's two largest economies.

Ma did not directly respond to a question during the Thursday event about Alibaba's stock performance, which has dropped about 7 percent this month amid the announcement of his departure. He said he speaks with CEO Zhang every day, but they haven't discussed the share price that much.

He likened Alibaba to a child he had nurtured and who had now grown up, gone to college and must face society's tests alone. "The parent is always there, but the child must experience it himself," Ma said.

"I have planned for the next 15 years what other kids I would have, and maybe these kids are younger, they need me more," Ma said, according to the World Economic Forum's simultaneous translation. "In my 80s or 90s, maybe I'm on the beach, I listen to the radio, and the news says that Alibaba does wonderfully, I will be profoundly happy."
Fed Chairman Jerome Powell has reportedly been making the rounds on Capitol Hill amidst criticism from President Trump that could threaten the central bank's independence.

The same day that the president criticized Powell in a CNBC interview, the central bank chair was stopping by the offices of Democrats Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, and Representative Michael Capuano of Massachusetts, according to a report from Bloomberg News Thursday.

Days earlier, Powell had told radio show "Marketplace" that he was going to "wear the carpets of Capitol Hill" by walking the halls and meeting with members." Making allies in Congress could be seen as a way to protect the Fed's freedom when it comes to monetary policy.

Powell has met or called with lawmakers 48 times in his first six months in office  21 of those were with Democrats, and 27 with Republicans, according to Bloomberg. His predecessor Janet Yellen by comparison had only 17 contacts with lawmakers. Thirteen of those were with Democrats.

The central bank chief has also ordered his congressional-liaison staff to double down on efforts to reach out to both Democrats and Republicans, according to the report. Fellow board member Lael Brainard, a Democrat, recently met Republicans from the House Financial Services Committee, which oversees the Fed.

Trump's criticism of Powell is historically rare, and was taken by many on Capitol Hill and Wall Street as an affront on the bank's independence from political pressure. The president told CNBC he's "not thrilled" with the rate hikes, and reportedly told donors at a fundraiser this summer that Powell had not been the "cheap money" banker he hoped for. On Capitol Hill and Wall Street, those remarks were taken as an affront on the bank's independence from political pressure.

Powell has said he believes the economy is strong enough for the Fed to continue on its path of normalizing rates. The Fed increased rates to a target range of 1.75 to 2 percent in June, and according to projections has two more increases planned for this year.

A massive tax cut ushered through by Republicans last year slashed the corporate rate from 35 percent to 21 percent and lowered marginal rates across the board. The move has added record stock market gains and boosted the economy to grow nearly 3 percent in 2018, above its post-recession rate before he took office.

Read the entire Bloomberg report here.

 CNBC's Jeff Cox contributed reporting.


The Democratic Party will gain a House majority in the midterms, but it will only be by a fraction, longtime Republican supporter and Home Depot co-founder Ken Langone predicted Thursday.

"I believe we may lose the House by a few seats," said Langone, a billionaire businessman and philanthropist, in a "Squawk Box" interview. "I think we'll keep the Senate."

But Langone also expects that Americans' perception of the Republican Party will be more favorable by 2020. That's because he expects President Donald Trump will settle the U.S. trade disputes with China and key trading partners by then.

Trump is attacking what he sees as unfair trade on a number of fronts, including tariffs on steel and aluminum imports. The president's moves have been met with retaliatory measures from the European Union, Canada, Mexico and China.

The vast majority of lawmakers and strategists from both major parties believe Democrats will at least pick up a chunk of Republican House seats in November or take a majority in the chamber.

Langone has previously warned Republicans that they could lose their majorities in the House and the Senate if lawmakers fail to seize on Trump-created opportunities. "We own the next 25 years as a nation [if we act]," he said in March 2017.

The U.S. economy has been booming under Trump. GDP is growing at a 3 percent-plus rate and the unemployment rate is near a 50-year low.

But Trump's rhetoric may not help as the GOP tries to stop Democrats from flipping 23 GOP-held seats and taking a House majority.

In CNBC's interview Thursday, Langone said Trump's economic agenda is fueling a resurgence in the economy that cannot be denied. "This economy is booming," he said. "I think he's made a lot of moves that are constructive to the economy."

When asked how Republicans could lose during the midterms with a roaring economy, Langone said, "You allow your opinion to infiltrate your position on things that are beneficial to your point of view."

"Give this president credit for something," he later said.

Before backing Trump in the 2016 presidential election, Langone first supported Chris Christie, who was governor of New Jersey at the time, and then Ohio Gov. John Kasich. Langone is also founder and CEO of investment bank Invemed Associates, which specalizes in health-care and high-technology companies.

 CNBC's Jacob Pramuk contributed to this report.
US President Donald Trump speaks during a campaign rally at the Florida State Fairgrounds Expo Hall in Tampa, Florida, on July 31, 2018.

"This economy is booming," said Langone, a longtime supporter of GOP candidates who was not always a fan of Trump. "I think he's made a lot of moves that are constructive to the economy."

President Donald Trump 's economic agenda is fueling a resurgence in the economy that cannot be denied, billionaire businessman and philanthropist Ken Langone told CNBC on Thursday.

Since Trump took office, the gross domestic product is growing at a 3 percent-plus rate. The unemployment rate is currently around a 50-year low.

Langone, co-founder of Home Depot, said "every indicator" for the moment is showing a clear path for economic growth.

Transportation companies, often a leading indicator, are doing great, Langone said in a "Squawk Box" interview. "My truck leasing business, we can't get delivery of new trucks until next spring."

The corporate tax cut, championed by Trump and Republicans on Capitol Hill, has certainly been a boon to growth, but wiping business regulations off the books has been the main driver, Langone said.

"Deregulation is having a profound impact of the mindset of businesspeople" who are more willing to invest and grow their companies, which in turn translates into a stronger economy, said Langone, also founder and chief of investment bank Invemed Associates.

Langone also said he agrees with J.P. Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, who told CNBC interview Thursday that the escalating U.S.-China trade dispute is a "skirmish" rather than a trade war.

"Jamie is right. It's a skirmish. It's a tactic," Langone said. "It's in our mutual interest to fix it. China is better off with a revised deal than no deal."

The Trump administration on Monday announced tariffs of 10 percent on another $200 billion worth of Chinese imports, rising to 25 percent at the end of the year.

In response Tuesday, China said it will institute retaliatory tariffs on U.S. goods worth $60 billion.

The question now is whether Trump will follow through on a threat to put tariffs on the rest of Chinese imports, which totaled $505 billion last year, according to federal data. The president has said he wants to prevent China from stealing U.S. technology and he wants to reduce America's trade deficit with China, which was $375 billion in 2017.

"Our leaders for the last 25 or 30 years have had their knickers taken off them by our trading partners," Langone said.

"But here's where not liking a guy [Trump] gets in the way," he continued. "Give the guy credit" for keeping campaign promises to make trade fairer for U.S. companies. "That's unusual for a politician."

Before backing Trump in the 2016 presidential election, Langone supported Chris Christie, who was governor of New Jersey at the time, and then Ohio Gov. John Kasich.
President Donald Trump's former lawyer Michael Cohen walks out of court in New York City, New York, August 21, 2018.

The Wall Street Journal later reported that investigators had questioned Cohen about Trump, including his business dealings with Russia.

Those questions include ones related to Trump's business dealings in Russia, as well as questions about possible collusion by members of Trump's presidential campaign with Russian interference in the 2016 president election, the report said Thursday, citing sources familiar with the matter.

ABC News additionally reported that investigators have asked Cohen whether the president or his associates had discussed a possible pardon for the lawyer, who pleaded guilty last month to federal criminal charges.

In addition to Russian attacks on the election, and possible Trump campaign collusion, Mueller is known to be probing whether Trump has obstructed justice in the investigation. Trump has repeatedly denied collusion and obstruction.

Trump's lawyer, former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, told NBC that "Cohen has a history of lying" in response to ABC's report.

The special counsel's office declined to comment, while the White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Lanny Davis, a lawyer for Cohen, declined to comment.

Later on Thursday, The New York Times confirmed ABC's reporting that Cohen had been interviewed multiple times by Mueller's prosecutors, citing two people with knowledge of those interviews.

Vanity Fair reported last week that Cohen has in recent weeks been talking to investigators in Mueller's office.

The new article by ABC adds details about that reported contact. Among the bylines on the new report is ABC News anchorman George Stephanopoulos, who in July scored the first in-depth interview with Cohen after the lawyer's offices and residences were raided by FBI agents in April.

ABC News said Cohen has spoken to Mueller's team in both Washington and in New York City. The article said he is also cooperating with New York state authorities in an ongoing investigation into Trump's charity and the Trump Organization.

Cohen pleaded guilty to charges brought by federal prosecutors in New York City without having an agreement to cooperate with them or with Mueller.

However, his voluntary cooperation could be used by his lawyers, and prosecutors, to argue to a judge that he deserves leniency when sentenced for tax crimes, and for violating campaign finance laws by paying porn star Stormy Daniels $130,000 right before the election to keep quiet about an alleged affair with Trump. The president has denied that affair, but did reimburse Cohen for the payoff.

Read the full ABC News report here.
Supreme Court nominee Judge Brett Kavanaugh (R) leaves his home September 19, 2018 in Chevy Chase, Maryland. Kavanaugh is scheduled to appear again before the Senate Judiciary Committee next Monday following allegations that have endangered his appointment to the Supreme Court.

The poll was taken from Sunday, when college professor Christine Blasey Ford first made the accusation publicly, through Wednesday. Ford says Kavanaugh assaulted her at a party when they were both in high school. Kavanaugh denies the accusation.

Thirty-four percent of registered voters support his confirmation, while 38 percent oppose it, according to the survey. More than a quarter of respondents said they do not know enough to say. Opposition surged from 29 percent in August, while support stayed nearly unchanged from 33 percent last month.

Opposition to Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh climbed in the past month, following his confirmation hearings and a sexual assault accusation that has stalled his confirmation process, according to an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll released Thursday.

The allegation threw the judge's confirmation into doubt only days before a Senate panel was set to approve him. Senate Republicans have pushed for both Kavanaugh and Ford to testify at a hearing Monday. The accuser's lawyer, as well as many Senate Democrats, have called for a delay until the FBI investigates her claim.

Lawyers for Ford told the Senate Judiciary Committee, which handles federal court nominations, that she would testify next week if it can ensure her safety and a fair hearing, according to multiple reports.

Kavanaugh, President Donald Trump's second pick for the top U.S. court, is the first Supreme Court nominee dating back to 2005 that a plurality of voters opposed in an NBC/WSJ survey. As 28 percent of respondents said they do not know enough to form an opinion about his confirmation, a potential hearing about the assault accusation next week could alter voters' opinions of Kavanaugh  for better or worse.

A handful of pivotal Senate Republicans and Democrats are currently deciding whether to vote for Kavanaugh's confirmation. If two GOP senators and all members of the Democratic caucus oppose him, the judge's nomination will fail.

Most recent polls have showed a plurality of voters oppose Kavanaugh's confirmation. A Reuters/Ipsos poll released Wednesday found only 31 percent of adults wanted him on the top U.S. court, versus 36 percent who did not. That survey was taken from Sept. 11 through Monday, so it only partly gathers reaction to the assault claim.

A Gallup survey also found a plurality of voters is against his confirmation. However, that poll suggests opposition to Kavanaugh increased even before Ford went public with her allegation.

Support for Kavanaugh in the NBC/WSJ poll largely breaks down along party lines. About three-quarters, 73 percent, of Republicans back his confirmation, while 4 percent are against it. Two-thirds of Democrats oppose the judge serving on the Supreme Court, while 8 percent back him. A plurality of independents do not want Kavanaugh on the court, as 37 percent oppose his confirmation and 21 percent back it.

Since August, Kavanaugh lost support among several groups, including independents, women over 50, suburban women and seniors, according to the survey.

The NBC/WSJ poll was conducted Sept. 16-19 of 900 registered voters  reached by both cell phone and landline  and it has an overall margin of error of plus-minus 3.3 percentage points.
Nova Scotia authorities have issued a marine renewable energy permit for a tidal electricity project in the Bay of Fundy.



The permit was issued to Black Rock Tidal Power, Nova Scotia's Department of Energy and Mines said in an announcement Wednesday. It allows the business to test a 280-kilowatt floating platform "for up to six months."



"Developing marine renewable energy here is a key pillar of our clean energy plan," Derek Mombourquette, Nova Scotia's energy and mines minister, said in a statement.



"Projects like this that test technology in the Bay of Fundy's unique marine environment will help spur innovation and competition and help solidify Nova Scotia's position as a leader in the development of tidal technology."



Under the terms of the permit, an environmental effects monitoring plan is required to be in place and adhered to for the duration of the project.



The Bay of Fundy has fast tidal currents that exceed 18 kilometers per hour at peak surface speed, according to the Fundy Ocean Research Center for Energy.



Around the world, efforts are being made to harness the energy of the oceans.



In August, it was announced that a tidal turbine at the European Marine Energy Centre in Orkney, Scotland, had generated record levels of power production in its first year of testing.



The two-megawatt SR2000 turbine produced more than three gigawatt hours of renewable electricity in less than 12 months, Scotrenewables Tidal Power said at the time.



The European Commission has described "ocean energy" as being both abundant and renewable. It's estimated that it could potentially contribute around 10 percent of the European Union's power demand by 2050, according to the Commission.
Trump accidentally called him Justice Kavanaugh three times on Wednesday. Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

When Christine Blasey Ford went public on Sunday with her claim that Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh attempted to rape her when they were in high school, a spokesman for Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley initially dismissed the uncorroborated allegations and indicated that the committee vote on the judge would occur on Thursday as planned. Party leaders only changed their tune after three of their own  Senators Jeff Flake, Bob Corker, and Lisa Murkowski  said the committee vote should be delayed to give Ford a chance to tell her story.

Grassley canceled the hearing, but drew a line in the sand: If Ford wants to testify about the alleged sexual assault, she can do so by Monday. The chairman doubled down on Wednesday evening in a letter addressed to Senator Dianne Feinstein, the committees ranking Democrat, setting 10 a.m. Friday as the deadline for Ford to say whether she will testify. Grassley offered Ford a few choices:

I recognize that testifying in public about sexual assault allegations may be difficult for Dr. Ford, so I have offered her the opportunity to testify in any of four possible venues: (1) a public hearing; (2) a private hearing; (3) a public staff interview; or (4) a private staff interview. I am even willing to have my staff travel to Dr. Ford in California  or anywhere else  to obtain her testimony.

Lisa Banks, Fords attorney, reiterated on Wednesday night that they want an FBI investigation, but she did not rule out Ford testifying without one. The rush to a hearing is unnecessary, and contrary to the Committee discovering the truth, Banks said.

She continues to believe that a full non-partisan investigation of this matter is needed and she is willing to cooperate with the Committee, she continued. However, the Committees stated plan to move forward with a hearing that has only two witnesses is not a fair or good faith investigation; there are multiple witnesses whose names have appeared publicly and should be included in any proceeding.

As Politico noted, while Trump keeps insisting that the FBI cant probe the decades-old claim, thats untrue. But it seems highly unlikely that the bureau will investigate because the GOP senators who stood up for Ford days ago appear to have accepted their colleagues claims that theyve done enough to accommodate her.

During an interview with a Maine radio show on Wednesday, Senator Susan Collins dismissed calls for a further investigation by the FBI, saying that reverses the normal order of things. She said Ford and Kavanaugh both need to testify under oath on Monday.

I dont think she can reject all those options because otherwise there are these very serious allegations hanging over the head of a nominee who has emphatically denied them, Collins said. Thats just not a good way for us to end. So I think she needs to come forward, and we need to provide her with any protection she may ask for herself and her family.

Flake has said repeatedly that he wants to hear from Ford, and he called Donald Trump Jr.s Instagram post mocking the situation sickening. But Flake has also indicated that if Ford doesnt show up on Monday, the vote should proceed. Corker agreed:

After learning of the allegation, Chairman @ChuckGrassley took immediate action to ensure both Dr. Ford and Judge Kavanaugh have the opportunity to be heard, in public or private. Republicans extended a hand in good faith. If we dont hear from both sides on Monday, lets vote.  Senator Bob Corker (@SenBobCorker) September 19, 2018

Murkowski dodged when CNN asked about reopening the background-check process. I think that an allegation has been made by Dr. Ford. I think her story deserves to be heard and the committee process has been made available to her, she replied.

With key Republican senators signaling that theyre satisfied with Grassleys current plan, GOP leaders seemed more upbeat about Kavanaughs prospects on Wednesday. Were very confident, one Republican in touch with the White House told Politico when asked if the judge would be confirmed.

White House Spokesman Raj Shah said the administration is full steam ahead on supporting Kavanaugh, and the president isnt looking at potential replacement nominees. Advisers reportedly told Trump to be cautious in his statements on Fords allegation, and hes been unusually restrained. But on Wednesday he went further in expressing his sympathy for the judge.

I can only say this, he is such an outstanding man, very hard for me to imagine that anything happened, Trump said, adding that he has been treated very, very tough.

While Trump responded to his own sexual misconduct allegations by attacking his accusers, hes refrained from going after Ford, and even said he wants her to testify. While Trump was on message for once, on Wednesday Nevada Senator Dean Heller accidentally suggested that the GOP isnt taking Fords sexual assault allegation all that seriously. During a call organized by the Nevada Republican Party, Heller indicated that hes certain Kavanaugh will soon be confirmed.

We got a little hiccup here with the Kavanaugh nomination, he said. Well get through this and well get off to the races.
The wild ride continued on Thursday for shares of Canadian pot company Tilray.

The stock captivating trading desks across the country rose as much as 14 percent at one point, only to give up that gain and go negative about an hour into trading.

It closed down 17.6 percent. The stock swung in a wide range in the overnight session, down by 19 percent at one point and up by more than 11 percent.

Tilray shares overnight

Source: FactSet

Tilray shares were on fire the previous two days, but with plenty of bumps along the way. In that time period, the stock has shot up 56 percent. The stock was driven 38.1 percent higher on Wednesday after CEO Brendan Kennedy told CNBC's Jim Cramer that global pharmaceuticals must think about partnering cannabis producers as a "hedge" against the space. On Tuesday, the stock surged 28.9 percent after Tilray announced the Drug Enforcement Administration approved it to import marijuana to the U.S. for medical research.

But trading in the stock was halted five times on Wednesday as it failed to hold a more than 90 percent gain. Tilray shares even turned lower at one point before closing up 38.1 percent.

These wild price swings could also be a byproduct of the small number shares of the stock that are available for trading as well as the large number of those shares sold short. Tilray currently has 21.7 million floating shares and 19.5 percent of those are being used to bet against the company, according to FactSet data.

Still, the stock has had a meteoric rise since going public in July. Tilray  which priced its initial public offering at $17 per share  is up more than 1,100 percent since its IPO and nearly 500 percent over the past month.
Sen. Claire McCaskill, facing a tough re-election battle in red state Missouri, said on Wednesday she will vote against confirming President Donald Trump's nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court, Brett Kavanaugh.

In a statement posted on Twitter, McCaskill said her decision is not based on recent allegations that Kavanaugh, currently a federal judge, assaulted a girl in high school, which Kavanaugh denies.

Instead, she said, she will vote against him because of "his positions on several key issues, most importantly the avalanche of dark, anonymous money that is crushing our democracy."

Trump, a Republican, won Missouri in the 2016 presidential election.
The rise of the German brewery start-up Bergmann has been so rapid that co-founder Herbert Prigge jokes he is tired of discussing growth rates and production figures. "Every number I tell you will soon be wrong, anyway," he smiles when we meet at the company's shiny new building south of Dortmund's city center.

Prigge, a business consultant who began to brew beer with his friend Thomas Raphael a decade ago, is not exaggerating. By late this summer, Bergmann's sales were 80 percent higher than at the same stage of 2017. By the time they moved in March, their new brewery was already too small. The unpretentious beer hall, where some special varieties sell for up to 14 a liter, is bustling every night. Brewery tours are already nearly sold out until the end of the year.

As regional retailers badger Bergmann to increase supply further, Raphael, who still works as a self-employed microbiologist, admits: "We are getting overwhelmed by demand. Our biggest challenge is to avoid growing too fast."

It's a problem Germany's more established beer makers would love to have. The country is the world's fifth-largest beer market, with a total consumption more than twice as high as in the UK. This week will see more than six million people start to flock to Munich's legendary Oktoberfest, where they will spend close to 500m in overcrowded beer tents. Yet elsewhere, the German beer industry is in crisis.

Demand is falling in a country where there are more than 6,000 different brands of beer. The theory goes that you could drink a different one each day for more than 16 years without having to taste the same one twice. In fact, today fewer Germans regularly drink beer at all. Since the early 1990s, domestic consumption has dropped by more than a quarter. Consumption per head peaked in 1976 and has been falling ever since. The result has left mass-market brewers suffering from overcapacity and fighting a long-running price war. More than two-thirds of all the beer sold in supermarkets is offered at a discount.

Some big breweries are hurting badly. Warsteiner has cut jobs, while this summer workers at the Holsten brewery in Hamburg went on strike to protest against plans to axe almost a fifth of its jobs. "We are in the midst of a fierce consolidation process that will generate more negative headlines," says Holger Eichele, chief executive of the German Brewers' Association.

Nowhere epitomizes the crisis more than Dortmund, a working-class city on the eastern edge of the Ruhr, Germany's old industrial heartland. Five decades ago, it was the biggest beer town in Europe. Eight breweries were based there, employing 8,000 workers and collectively churning out 10 percent of Germany's beer production.

Today, once-mighty Dortmund beers such as Kronen and Ritter are all owned by Radeberger, Germany's biggest brewery group. "Complacency was at the heart of the decline of Dortmund's beer industry," says Karl-Peter Ellerbrock, a historian heading the city's Westphalian Economic Archive. Brewery owners missed three trends that started in the 1960s, he says: the sharp increase in demand for bottled beer, the decline of the "export" variety, which was crowded out by Pilsner, and the canny marketing that positioned beer as a premium product.

On top of this, times have changed, says Uwe Riehs, chief marketing officer of Krombacher, Germany's largest beer brand. The country has an ageing population and lifestyles are different. "A 64-year-old just drinks less beer than a 44-year-old," he says. "And a 44-year-old today drinks less beer than a 44-year-old did 20 years ago."

As Bergmann's booming business shows, however, a new kind of German brewery is flourishing. With just 10 employees and 1.5m in annual revenue, it is Dortmund's only independent beer maker. Newly relocated next to a retired blast furnace, it seems the very image of a post-industrial start-up. Yet this start-up has a heritage stretching back more than 200 years.

Founded in 1796 by the Bergmann family, the brewery was later acquired by Berlin-based Schultheiss, only to disappear finally in 1972. More than four decades later, it is back. When Thomas Raphael discovered by chance that the Bergmann trademark had expired, he made a snap decision to register it again. "At that point, I had no intention of becoming a brewer," he recalls.

Raphael found it cool to own a historic beer brand but realized he could only keep it if he used it at least occasionally. A first batch of 6,000 liters of Bergmann beer, brewed by a small regional rival, emerged to an enthusiastic reception from a group of 20 friends who committed to buy 300 liters each. Raphael believes their success is partly driven by a general nostalgia for Dortmund's long-gone beer heritage and for its former glory days as a major coal and steel city; as well as being the name of the beer's founding family, Bergmann is also the German word for miner. The reinvigorated brand's slogan "Harte Arbeit, ehrlicher Lohn" ("Hard work, honest reward") taps into this history.

Bergmann is not alone in this. As drinkers crave alternative tastes and authentic, local brands, 200 small, new breweries have been founded over the past decade. By contrast, a blind tasting by German broadcaster ZDF in 2016 showed that very few drinkers can tell the difference between the leading industrial beer brands. Quality, not quantity, is what German beer drinkers want now.

In a remote part of the Black Forest mountain range, deep in Germany's south-west, one man has the luxury of ignoring most of his industry's negative headlines. Christian Rasch, CEO of Rothaus brewery, focuses on what the brewery has been doing for the past 227 years: making one of Germany's best  and most expensive  beers, the iconic "Tannenzapfle" ("small pine cone").

Rasch, a straight-talker who lives in a company mansion next to the brewery, has a very clear view on the discount war that has damaged many German brewing companies. "We just don't participate." Rather than competing over volume, Rothaus has also chosen to reduce the amount of beer it produces. "In the short run, this is surely the harder way of doing business," says Rasch. Yet it's an approach that is paying off.

Since 2010, the strategy has chipped 11 percent off Rothaus's revenues, which in 2017 stood at 75m. But the brewery continues to be eye-wateringly profitable  its operating profit margin exceeds that of giant Heineken. Rothaus is debt-free and recently financed a 30m investment in a new bottling plant out of its own cash flow. "We always expand in small steps," says Rasch.

The brewery's success certainly rests on high-quality beer, a strong brand that has acquired a halo despite its tiny marketing budget. Yet Rothaus also has a patient owner: the German state of Baden-Wurttemberg. It is one of just three breweries in Germany in public hands.

A visit to Rothaus, an hour's drive from Freiburg, is like a journey back in time. "We brew like we did 100 years ago," says Rasch (although the technology is state-of-the-art). This means using only local ingredients made by farmers who often have been supplying the brewery for generations; water from seven sources nearby, and an elongated fermentation and storage process that takes at least double the time of many rivals. Pasteurising the product to extend its shelf life is also a no-no for Rothaus.

Rothaus has not only risen to become market leader in Germany's wealthy south-west; it is also fashionable in the hip clubs of Berlin. "We have no idea how this happened," says Rasch, who only recently hired a salesman for the capital. "For us, selling to Berlin feels like exporting the beer."

"Beer is a cultural good," says Uwe Riehs in a plush, wood-panelled meeting room in Krombacher's visitor center 80km east of Cologne. The brewer, which controls about 11 per cent of the German market, has turned the threats to the industry into an opportunity. As the traditional market for beer shrank, the family-owned company, which traces its roots back to 1803, invested heavily in newer areas including alcohol-free brands and shandies. Bucking the wider trend, its overall beer production is up close to 9 percent since 2010, and revenue over the same period increased by almost a fifth to 639m in 2017.

"We worked on the quality of our alcohol-free beer for so long until we were able to say: now it deserves the name Krombacher," says Riehs. He believes that in Germany alcohol-free beer has been transformed from an unloved surrogate into a lifestyle product for healthy people. It accounts for 6 percent of the beer market, with 10 million Germans drinking it occasionally.

Krombacher is a textbook example of the small- and medium-sized companies that form the backbone of the country's economy  the famous mittelstand. Yet one mittelstand hallmark is missing: global success. The world's biggest brewer, Belgium-based Anheuser-Busch InBev, is 100 times larger than Krombacher, which sells less than 4 percent of its beer abroad. By contrast, Germany's car industry exports four out of five vehicles made.

The failure of German beer makers to go global has contributed to their troubles. The five largest German breweries hold a global market share of just 2 percent between them. How is it that one of the world's biggest export nations fails to woo international drinkers? A country so obsessed with beer quality that, five centuries ago, it introduced a "purity law", decreeing beer must only be made from the three natural ingredients water, hops and malt?

In fact, it was the very popularity of beer in Germany that led to beer makers failing to expand elsewhere. For decades, ambitious brewers such as Krombacher did not have to venture abroad to expand. Brewers in smaller countries such as Belgium (AB Inbev), the Netherlands (Heineken) and Denmark (Carlsberg) had to look elsewhere much earlier; these now dominate the world market. The fall of the Berlin wall in 1989 added to the Germans' quandary, says Riehs. At a time when foreign rivals started to eye the world, "our growth markets were created by reunification". It is only in the past decade that Krombacher started to think strategically about export markets. "In the old days, we just followed the German tourist abroad," says Riehs. As a consequence, Italy and Spain are still its largest export markets.

Back in Dortmund, Thomas Raphael and Herbert Prigge are evaluating the next steps for Bergmann beer. The pair have kept their old jobs and each devotes about 50 per cent of his time to the brewery. Selling out to a large, growth-hungry beer maker is not on the agenda, says Raphael. "So far, nobody has knocked on our door and we are not waiting for this."

Currently, their beer is distributed within a radius of roughly 20km from the brewery, but "one idea is to go to Berlin and open up a sales kiosk in the Bergmannkiez [neighborhood]". For now, though, the brand is racing to meet even local demand. A few weeks after my trip to the brewery, I visit the local supermarket and manage to buy its four last bottles of Bergmann. "They were stocked this morning, and it's all gone again already," says an assistant.
Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., on Wednesday decried a social media post by the president's eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., which mocked sexual assault allegations against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh.

"This is sickening," Flake wrote on Twitter. "No one should make light of this situation."

FLAKE TWEET

On Sunday, the 40 year-old Trump Jr. posted a photo on Instagram which he sarcastically claimed was a copy of the letter that professor Christine Blasey Ford sent to Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., in July.

In it, Ford alleged that Kavanaugh had sexually assaulted her when they were teenagers. Ford later described to The Washington Post what she said was a violent attempted rape by Kavanaugh.

Trump Jr. ridiculed the allegation. "Oh boy... the Dems and their usual nonsense games really have him on the ropes now. Finestein [sic] had the letter in July and saved it for the eve of his vote... honorable as always. I believe this is a copy for full transparency," he wrote.

But instead of posting a letter, Trump Jr. posted an internet meme of a crumpled up love note from a boy named "Bret" to a girl named "Cindy." The photo is titled "Judge Kavanaughs sexual assault letter found by Dems."
It's time to binge on Netflix again.

That's according to TradingAnalysis.com founder Todd Gordon, who says the streaming giant is about to make a comeback. While the stock has given back gains it made on Tuesday thanks to an upgrade by Guggenheim, Gordon says Netflix's earnings report on Nov. 16 will drive the stock higher.

"We've been in a period of underperformance here in Netflix for some time, and I'm thinking that we might now have the catalyst to break this consolidation," Gordon said Wednesday on CNBC's "Trading Nation."

"[I think we will] get through this $375 resistance level, begin to move up and potentially close this gap that exists from around earnings, back at around $390."

To play or a nearer-term move up, Gordon suggests selling the October monthly 365-strike put and pairing that with the purchase of the October monthly 360-strike put for a credit of $2.58, or $258 per options spread. Gordon wants to sell a put spread because implied volatility, or the price of options, is on the rise prior to Netflix's earnings.

If Netflix were to close above $365 on the Oct. 19 expiration of the options, then Gordon would make the $258 credit on the trade. If Netflix were to close below $360 on the expiration date, then Gordon could lose up to $240.

Shares of Netflix closed around $366 on Wednesday, meaning that Gordon is well-positioned in his trade.

Shares of Netflix are still up 91 percent year to date.
As he pushed Senate Republicans to repeal the Affordable Care Act last year, President Donald Trump zeroed in on Sen. Dean Heller.

When the president had lunch with GOP senators in July 2017, the Nevada lawmaker sat directly to his right. A month earlier, Heller had joined Republican Gov. Brian Sandoval in pledging to oppose a GOP version of Obamacare repeal that would phase out Medicaid expansion. That piece of the 2010 health-care law boosted insurance coverage for low-income people in Nevada.

Trump said he "worried" about Heller's vote and nudged him to support repeal. The president turned to Heller and quipped, "He wants to remain a senator, doesn't he?" Days later, Heller supported a different Republican proposal to roll back large parts of the health-care law, which failed on the Senate floor by only one vote.

Now, Heller's vote is the biggest point of contention in Nevada's deadlocked Senate race this year. The Republican's rival, Democratic Rep. Jacky Rosen, has repeatedly hammered Heller over GOP attempts to dismantle Obamacare. Her message embodies a broader effort by Democrats locked in Senate battles to defend a law that hindered the party in elections only a few years ago.

Trump heads to Las Vegas on Thursday for a rally in part meant to boost Heller's re-election bid. A Trump campaign stop puts Heller in a difficult spot as he tries to win a state Democrat Hillary Clinton carried in 2016. The senator will need support from the rural GOP voters loyal to Trump, but the president also risks energizing voters who oppose Obamacare repeal and associate Heller with it.

The president plans to stay overnight in Nevada and attend a fundraiser for a committee benefiting Heller, GOP House candidate Danny Tarkanian, and Republicans' House and Senate campaign arms, according to Jon Ralston, editor of The Nevada Independent news outlet.

Rosen has "absolutely" made health care the top issue in her campaign, said David Damore, a professor and chair of the political science department at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Damore said Heller's vote last year "hurts him," not only because Democrats can criticize him on policy but also because they can cast him as a "political opportunist" or "waffler."

Democrats across the country have tried to motivate voters by casting a GOP majority as a threat to health-care coverage. The party has seized on the Trump administration's support for a lawsuit that would gut pre-existing conditions coverage  litigation GOP senators have tried to distance themselves from with a proposal to shield those protections. Vice President Mike Pence also gave Democrats more ammunition last month when he said Republicans would continue their efforts to repeal Obamacare next year with a GOP majority.
Honor guard from NATO countries participate in a dignified transfer as part of a repatriation ceremony on Osan Air Base, Republic of Korea, Aug. 1, 2018.

President Donald Trump on Thursday identified the names of two U.S. soldiers who served in the Korean War, in what marks the first tangible results to come from June's historic summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

"Army Master Sgt. Charles H. McDaniel, 32, of Vernon, Indiana, and Army Pfc. William H. Jones, 19, of Nash County, North Carolina, are the first American remains from North Korea to be identified as a result of my Summit with Chairman Kim," Trump wrote in tweets Thursday. "These HEROES are home, they may Rest In Peace, and hopefully their families can have closure."

Trump's tweets came a day after Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced a 2021 deadline for denuclearization negotiations with North Korea. The chief U.S. diplomat's statement came a day after South Korean President Moon Jae-in and North Korea's Kim met in Pyongyang to discuss the next steps in their peace process.

In July, the North Korean government handed over what they claim are American remains in 55 boxes. The boxes, draped in United Nations flags, were then flown from the Korean Peninsula to a military laboratory in Hawaii for analysis and identification.
President Donald Trump tweeted on Thursday the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries needs to keep crude prices lower because of the military protection the U.S. provides for the region. "The OPEC monopoly must get prices down now," Trump said in the message. Tweet Futures prices for West Texas Intermediate crude, the U.S. benchmark, dipped slightly following the tweet before recovering and then retreating once again to trade roughly flat. On Wednesday, WTI climbed back above $70 a barrel. The price of oil is up 7 percent in the last month and nearly 18 percent for 2018. The cartel, which includes Saudi Arabia and Iran, will meet this weekend with non-OPEC producers such as Russia to discuss production levels. That will be the last meeting before the November U.S. midterm elections.

Trump has called on OPEC to take action to lower oil prices several times this year. The 15-member cartel, along with the Russia-led producers, has capped output since January 2017 in order to end a prolonged and punishing oil price downturn that bankrupted hundreds of U.S. energy companies and heaped financial pressure on crude exporters. The rebound gained steam earlier this year after production problems in countries like Venezuela and Libya caused the group to cut more deeply than they intended. The Trump administration also boosted prices by restoring sanctions on Iran, OPEC's third biggest producer, and saying it aims to cut the nation's exports to zero by November. OPEC and Russia's alliance of roughly two dozen producers agreed in June to slightly raise output and restore some of the barrels they took off the market, in part to compensate for the loss of the Iranian supplies. Despite that, oil prices have moved back towards four-year highs near $80 a barrel for international benchmark Brent crude and above $70 for WTI. The average cost of gasoline has also remained stuck at multi-year highs at roughly $2.85 a gallon and shows few signs of falling before Americans go to the polls in November. The Trump administration set a deadline for oil buyers to cut imports from Iran for Nov. 4, just two days before the midterm elections.
The worst and the dullest. Photo: Nicholas Kamm/AFP/Getty Images

On Monday, Donald Trump ordered the Justice Department to declassify highly sensitive materials related to an ongoing investigation into his own campaign and administration. Specifically, the president demanded the release of a variety of classified documents related to the FISA warrant application that the FBI submitted to monitor Carter Page; all FBI reports of interviews with senior Justice Department official Bruce Ohr (who communicated with former British spy and dodgy dossier author, Christopher Steele); and every text message that James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Peter Strzok, Lisa Page, and Bruce Ohr ever sent about the Russia investigation. The president stipulated that said text messages were to be made public without redaction, ostensibly ordering the Justice Department to disclose sensitive intelligence sources and methods if that is what full transparency requires.

This was an audacious exercise of Executive authority, even by Trumps formidable standards. Not only was the president interfering in an active investigation (in which he has a blatant conflict of interest), he was also potentially jeopardizing the security of American intelligence assets, and/or the comfort that foreign intelligence agencies have in sharing their secrets with the United States. A wide array of intelligence experts and officials voiced their opposition to the move. The Justice Department  which did not receive advance instructions detailing exactly what it was expected to release  immediately signaled its intention to slow-walk the request.

All of which prompted the question: What explosive revelations had Trump discovered in these documents? After all, the president doesnt need to declassify intelligence in order to access it. So he must have already found something that the public needed to know so desperately, concerns about obstruction of justice and national security were mere afterthoughts. Its not like Donald Trump would release classified materials without first looking into whether the underlying information was important to enough to offset the intelligence communitys concerns  would he?

In an interview with the Hill Tuesday, the president clarified that he would, indeed:

Buck Sexton: Have you reviewed the memos yourself? What do you expect them to show, if so?

President Trump: I have not reviewed them. I have been asked by many people in Congress as you know to release them. I have watched commentators that I respect begging the president of the United States to release them.I have been asked by so many people that I respect, please  the great Lou Dobbs, the great Sean Hannity, the wonderful great Jeanie Pirro.



When fascism comes to America, it will be because a Fox News segment producer took Judge Jeanines Opening Statement a tad too far.
President has called on to keep oil prices low. In a tweet on Thursday, Trump said the "OPEC monopoly must get prices down now."

But according to one oil expert, the cartel and its allies are running out of ways to do that.

"He wants to keep pressure on his key OPEC allies like Saudi Arabia," said Helima Croft, global head of commodity strategy at RBC Capital, on CNBC's "Futures Now" on Thursday. "How much more can Saudi do? How much more can Russia do in the near term?"

Trump "needs Saudi Arabia, he needs Russia, he needs UAE to fill the looming supply gap which is coming on Nov. 4 when the oil sanctions kick back in," Croft said. "This is really pressure on the producers to do as much as they can, but again the question mark is how much more gas is left in the tank for OPEC?"

The cartel's spare capacity, a measure of its ability to cushion price swings, is below 3 percent of total global production, or around 1.84 million barrels per day, according to the Energy Information Administration. A lower percentage means it is less able to quickly raise production to counter spikes in crude prices.

The coming U.S. sanctions on Iran are already proving effective in blocking the country from global markets, producing a knock-on effect squeezing global oil supplies, said Croft.

"There's no signs that [Trump is] backing off at this point and they've signaled so strongly to producers that they're serious about enforcing the sanctions," she said. "Countries like South Korea have already essentially gone to zero at this point. European refineries are winding down their Iranian purchases."

Croft sees a supply squeeze taking Brent oil to the mid-$80s through to the end of the year, an 8 percent increase from current levels. West Texas Intermediate crude should see a smaller rise to the low $70s to mid-$70s.
China's commitment to electric vehicles presents "amazing" growth opportunities in the sector, according to the founder of battery technology start-up, Cadenza Innovation.

New battery technologies can improve the reliability and safety of electric vehicles, while bringing down the total cost, Christina Lampe-Onnerud, a chemist and an entrepreneur, told CNBC at the World Economic Forum in Tianjin, China.

Cadenza doesn't make the lithium-ion batteries that are used in electric vehicles. Instead, its so-called supercell technology focuses on the way those batteries are packaged, making them safer and more cost-effective. The company uses non-combustible ceramic fiber material to make the battery packs less susceptible to catch fire  even if one of the cells suffers a short circuit.

Safety is an important parameter when it comes to lithium-ion batteries. Two years ago, consumer electronics giant Samsung suffered one of the worst technology recalls in recent times when faulty batteries in its Galaxy Note 7 handsets caught fire due to short circuits within the battery cells.

Lampe-Onnerud described that technology as a "Lego block of energy," and explained that companies could potentially choose the shape, size and energy density of battery packs.

Recently, the company signed a deal with Shenzhen-based BAK Battery to manufacture lithium-ion cells and modules in China, using Cadenza's propriety battery pack designs.

"China has for a long time been very committed to electric vehicles and the electrification," Lampe-Onnerud said. "We were here in the initiation of the electric vehicle era and we've seen an enormous commitment to this technology coming forward, and we've been a little piece of the innovation engine for many years."

Electrification refers to the use of electricity to power machines and vehicles instead of using fossil fuels.

"China is absolutely taking the lead on electrification," she said, pointing to the city of Shenzhen as an example of China taking the lead in electrification. Last year, the city said it would have the world's first all-electric public bus fleet by phasing out vehicles that ran on diesel, according to reports.

"It works, people love it, it's quiet and you have a chance to basically transform this world," she said.

Some experts say that China's electric vehicle market is poised for explosive growth in the coming years. Beijing has been aggressively pushing for new energy vehicles as a way to curb air pollution.

Energy storage can also be costly. Some reports say that the current price of commercial battery packs that are used in electric vehicles can range between $200 per kilowatt-hour and $400 per kWh. About 25 percent of that cost is for putting the battery cells together into battery packs.

The goal for electric vehicles is to have battery packs that are below $200 per kWh, Lampe-Onnerud said. The company published a research report this year that showed its supercell technology could potentially reduce the cost of battery packs to less than $125 per kWh.
CEO and President of Wells Fargo & Company Timothy Sloan testifies during a hearing before Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee October 3, 2017 on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC.

Wells Fargo fired back at a report that the bank had approached former Goldman Sachs executive Gary Cohn about potentially replacing Chief Executive Officer Tim Sloan.

"Rumors that Wells Fargo's board of directors reached out to potential CEO candidates are completely false," Betsy Duke, chair of the lender's board of directors, said in a statement. "CEO Tim Sloan has the unanimous support of the board, and this support has never wavered. In his two years as CEO, Tim has driven significant transformational change at Wells Fargo, which is benefiting all stakeholders."

Wells Fargo, the third-biggest U.S. bank, has yet to shake a scandal that emerged two years ago when it announced it was firing employees for creating fake accounts under a high-pressure sales culture. After disclosing that the bank opened millions of unauthorized bank and credit-card accounts, other abuses were revealed, from bogus charges on pet insurance to the improper handling of wealth management and commercial clients.

Cohn, an ex-Goldman Sachs president who left the Trump administration in March after helping pass the U.S. tax overhaul, wasn't interested in joining Wells Fargo, according to the New York Post article. The Wells Fargo directors who approached Cohn may have done so as individuals instead of acting in an official board capacity, the newspaper said. When approached by a reporter, Cohn denied being in active talks with Wells Fargo, the Post said.
Wells Fargo Chief Executive Officer and President Timothy Sloan testifies before the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs on Capitol Hill in Washington, Tuesday, Oct. 3, 2017, during a hearing on Wells Fargo after one year.

Wells Fargo, the third-biggest U.S. bank, plans to lower its employee headcount by 5 percent to 10 percent in the next three years as part of its ongoing turnaround plan, the company announced Thursday.

The bank has 265,000 employees, meaning the reduction would result in a loss of between 13,250 and 26,500 jobs.

"We are continuing to transform Wells Fargo to deliver what customers want -- including innovative, customer-friendly products and services  and evolving our business model to meet those needs in a more streamlined and efficient manner," the bank's Chief Executive Officer Tim Sloan said in a press release.

The decline will be a mix of displacements and team member attrition, Sloan said.
Smoking marijuana legally in a coffee shop in Amsterdam is a breeze. Producing and acquiring weed legally in the city is another story.

For decades, coffee shops around the Netherlands have permitted customers to buy and consume marijuana legally thanks to a Dutch toleration policy. But it's illegal for coffee shops to purchase their supply of weed. Cannabis production is also forbidden.

"The most difficult thing about having a coffee shop in the Netherlands is that it's allowed to sell it, but it's not allowed to buy it," said Joachim Helms, co-owner of Green House Coffeeshops in Amsterdam and chairman of the Dutch Cannabis Retailers Association.

Now, as countries like Canada and states in the U.S. are embracing marijuana legalization, the Dutch weed market may be falling behind.

"The coffeeshop, that whole thing, is organized really well and it really has a lot of benefits, but the back door, that's where the weed is coming in, that's not organized," Helms said.
You might not think there's much the classroom can teach you about the boardroom.

But, according to Jack Ma, co-founder and executive chairman of Alibaba Group, starting out his career as a teacher is what made him into the world-renowned businessman he is today.

"The only thing that made me into a successful businessman is my teaching background," Ma said Thursday, speaking at the World Economic Forum in Tianjin, China.

Ma famously got rejected from 30 jobs before he decided to band together with a group of friends at the age of 29 to create his internet start-up.

At the time, he said, he "didn't know marketing," "had no idea of technology," and was "at a loss at my financial accounts."

But, he was able to bring one skill from his early career at an English teacher in China: The ability to identify and cultivate talent.

That, he said, has been central to his role in turning Alibaba into a multibillion-dollar e-commerce giant.

"Most of my time was spent on identifying talents to train them and cultivate them in AliGroup," he explained in comments that were translated into English by CNBC.

"My top pride was not our business model," he continued. "Instead, today, it's the hierarchy of our talent, the organizational structure, the cultural development."

Ma said that for almost two decades, the company has been working to develop that line of talent, and he now believes they're there. So much so, in fact, that he said he believes the company already has its "fifth generation of leaders" in the pipeline.

Last week, the 54-year-old announced that he would retire as chairman of Alibaba in 2019, making room for the company's current CEO Daniel Zhang to step in.

Zhang, who is Ma's 46-year-old protege, first joined Alibaba Group in 2007 as chief financial officer of its consumer-to-consumer marketplace Taobao.

Early on, Ma said he identified in Zhang two talents he himself lacks  "systematic thinking" and "sober mind"  which he said will be vital in driving the business forward.

He added that today, he and his 17 co-founders are portrayed as "very strong" business leaders, but he believes the company's future success lies with the next generation. Indeed, he said many of the founders, themselves job rejects, would not likely have met the company's requirements if they'd applied for jobs in Alibaba 20 years ago.

"Why we can make success today is not my own success, it's my team's success," said Ma.

"The newcomers are stronger than us in their knowledge, capabilities and skills. Once we give them time they will give us a new success," he said.

Like this story? Subscribe to CNBC Make It on YouTube!

Don't miss:

Jack Ma's succession plan offers an important lesson in leadership

Three lessons for entrepreneurs from inside Alibaba's Taobao University

Jack Ma was inspired to create Alibaba by Malaysia's Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad
MOSS POINT, Miss. -- Tuesday's budget meeting saw a proposed millage increase voted down 4-2 with aldermen Chuck Redmond and Wayne Lennep voting for the increase.

Because the millage rate will remain at 54.21, $460,000 must be cut from the city's proposed budget for FY19. Mayor Mario King has said that the board has already cut $4 million from the budget and more cuts are coming.

Lack of cash on hand, according to King is causing the board to look at where additional cuts can be made -- one including the elimination of fire chief to create a public safety director.

The public safety director will oversee both the fire and police departments.

"I made the decision with the board about possible cuts where we could eliminate and this is one of the positions we decided on," King said.

The fire department applied for and received a grant for a training officer, according to King and that person essentially performs the same job as the fire chief.

Because fire departments have built-in overtime, King said he and the board decided the department needed restructuring where the city didn't have to pay a surplus of overtime because firefighters work around the clock.

"We consulted the Mississippi State Rating Commission and often time, cities consult police and fire and have a public safety commissioner, however, that's not what we are trying to do," King said.

The fire chief does not fight fires or control the day-to-day operations, according to King, instead, the chief only handles administrative work.

"The training officer, whose position is grant funded, already handles documentation," King said. "We're eliminating this position because those duties have already been absorbed. We took a long, hard look and ultimately, consolidation provided a more effective and efficient way to save money."

Had the millage increase been approved, it is likely the position of fire chief would have remained as a separate public safety entity. Lennep said at Tuesday's budget meeting cuts could be looming if the hike wasn't approved.

The entire fire department showed at Tuesday's meeting hoping to address the board and present a petition signed by every member of the department in support of Chief Tommy Posey, however, the meeting was adjourned.

Lennep was asked if he knew why the entire department staff showed to the meeting, but said he was unaware as to why, but did want to hear what they had to say.

King adjourned the meeting and said he would rather attend the meeting where the staff could address the board in its entirety.

Battalion Chief David Eaker said the department showed to the meeting to express support for Posey, but said he thought the board ended to meeting early to keep from hearing from them.

"They asked the chief to retire awhile back and thank goodness he didn't, because he has so many good things going for us," Eaker said. "He's been here over 36 years and he's stuck it out with the city. We feel morale would drop if he was let go, in fact, I think we would have more chaos. I think guys would start quitting should chief be fired. There would be nothing to look forward to."

According to King, Brandon Ashley's job as police chief will not be affected and the public safety director will likely come from within the city.

"My goal is to look at where we can cut and without the tax increase, services and jobs will be cut," King said. "We will not overspend. Everyone has been made aware of elimination of positions."

"The city is only as good as the money we can operate with," he said.

The city will adopt the FY19 budget on Tuesday, Sept. 25 at 6 p.m.
Photo: New York Media

New York Media, publisher of influential brands  including New York Magazine, Vulture, and the Cut  has launched New York Stories, a full-service division that includes a custom content studio as well as strategic consulting, insights, data, and events. The content studio  with capabilities in video, digital, social, and print creative strategy and execution  builds on the companys 50-year editorial legacy of shaping trends and sparking conversations, with cutting-edge expertise in e-commerce and audience behavior.

Led by New York Media CRO and publisher Avi Zimak and head of sales marketing Jackie Cinguina, New York Stories has a nimble, collaborative staff of about 35, focused on driving quality engagement and finding smart solutions for the companys partners. While New York Media has been producing dynamic branded content for several years, New York Stories brings the content studio together with a range of consulting, data, and event production services.

Storytelling, with style and wit, is at the core of our companys mission both editorially and on behalf of our marketing partners, says Zimak. New York Stories continues this legacy of serious fun, and combines best-in-class creative and production talent with data and insights on an influential and engaged audience.

New York Stories has the ability to leverage the New York Media audiences deep connection with the companys trusted journalism and focus their attention on authentic content and events for advertisers. Prior custom content partners of New York Media have included Bravo, Delta Brand of Faucets, Visa, TUMI, and Forevermark, among many others.

The Cut was a key partnership for TUMIs womens campaign, given the incredible loyalty shown by their audience, says Heather Gorman, VP of marketing and global support at TUMI. Working with the New York Media team was fulfilling from the start and is proving solid in action as we begin to see direct conversions.

Our best partnerships happen when clients come to us with a business problem they need help solving, says Jackie Cinguina, head of sales marketing at New York Media. We love to work collaboratively with brands to create programs that generate measurable, positive results.

The goal of our Money Is Changing campaign is to start a conversation about money with millennial women in an authentic way, so it was critical for us to work with partners who are trusted resources for that target audience, said Mary Ann Reilly, senior vice-president, North America marketing, Visa. Teaming up with the Cut allowed us to tap into a network of millennial women who are willing to start open and honest conversations and question old ideas around money that do not serve the reality of today.
Hi! I'm an education beat reporter for Fall 2018, and I'm a senior studying print and digital news. Please provide me with any feedback, questions or tips you have  my email is kyle.lahucik@mail.missouri.edu and my phone number is 708.359.9917.

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Mehrdad Fotoohighiam, who owns Columbia-based engineering firm ETI, is on trial for first-degree arson. He is also charged with conspiracy to commit first-degree murder and attempted murder. He is accused of paying James Hall, his employee, $500 to burn down a trailer home.
Photo-Illustration: retailers

An apron is just as essential a cooking tool as any piece of equipment or appliance you use on the regular. Amazon is filled with plenty of $9 polyester options that will do the job (i.e., protect your clothes from food spills) just fine. But to get something thats better than just fine, we asked chefs and bartenders about their favorites. They know the brands that put a lot of thought into their designs  from the cross-back styles that dont bulge, to the added pockets you can use to keep pens and paper, to the soft fabrics and cool patterns they use to keep you comfortable and looking put-together in the kitchen. Ahead, their top picks.

The best cotton aprons

BlueCut Mason Indigo Apron $90 Nate Courtland, an alum of Union Square Cafe, al di la, Esca, and Montanas Trail House, who more recently launched Hot Fire Hot Sauce in Long Island City, likes his BlueCut apron. I wear that thing every day and it gets better with age, he says. The clasp in the back is crucial, so you dont have a floppy string on your waist, dragging ladles out of the pot, or getting caught on stuff. BlueCut, like many chef favorites, also offers custom work. $90 at Etsy Buy $85 at BlueCut Buy

Travail Bib Chef Apron $30 Courtlands affordable alternative to his favorite from BlueCut is from Bragard. Theyre not one of those TV appearance aprons, he says, but they look nice. He adds that theyre intended for everyday use and hes found them to be well-made. Anna Polonsky, founder of the food-focused strategy-and-design consultancy Polonsky & Friends, is also a fan. They never disappoint, she says, and I think theyre made of the best-quality cotton on the market by far. Most bistros in Paris still use them. A classic. In fact, she likes them so much, she partnered with Bragard during the pandemic to make a collaboration apron that sends 100 percent of proceeds to the National Restaurant Association Educational Foundation. $30 at Bragard Buy

Euro Bib Apron $30 Jeff Seizer, who worked at Gramercy Tavern and Union Square Cafe before moving to North Carolina to open French-American restaurants Royale Raleigh and Lucarne, loves his apron from Cayson Designs  which costs half what its competitors do. The feel is amazing, and such good quality for the price, he says. And in the large size, its quite long and wraps around you fully. I like a long apron. $30 at Cayson Designs Buy

Authentic Bib Apron $75 $75 Seizer says he has more Tilit aprons than any other. Tilit, run by a husband-and-wife team in New York, produces a full line of clothing for cooking, all designed with the idea that chefs need utilitarian garments, but desire and deserve handsome ones, too. Seizer calls their aprons top-notch, points out that the company can do custom work, and appreciates that their aprons have lots of pockets for pens and sharpies. (If youre interested in a top-to-bottom cooking outfit, Seizer also recommends Tilits light and casual chef jackets.) $75 at Tilit Buy

Hedley & Bennett  The Essential Apron $85 $85 Many of the experts we spoke to pointed to Hedley & Bennett as being an industry favorite across the board. I guarantee this will be the top pick, Seizer said correctly. Courtland, as well as Shanti Church, co-owner of Talulas Pizza in New Jersey, back him up. They come in so many styles, colors, and designs, youre bound to find one thats perfect for you. $85 at Hedley & Bennett Buy

The best linen aprons

Candelaria Lemon Stripes Black $80 $80 Polonsky has a rotating set of these stunning aprons designed by Mariana Velasquez that she wears at home. I wear the simple linen ones every day, she says, and the more unique one-offs with statement fabrics over a dress if I have guests over. The selection is updated regularly. $80 at The Emporium Buy

The Darcy Apron $85 Years ago, we noticed Sophie von Oswald, a chef and recipe developer based in Berlin, wearing super-cute aprons on Instagram. Those, she says, are from the British line Labour and Wait. Her other pick is the brother-and-sister company Enrich & Endure. Von Oswald likes their lovely materials, referring to their linen, which is produced in Northern Ireland. The Citizenry recently collaborated with Enrich & Endure on an elegant, linen, color-blocked number. $85 at Citizenry Buy

The best denim aprons

Chef Works Womens Berkeley Petite Bib Apron $43 Susan Choi, a chef and owner of Mr. Susan cocktail bar in Berlin, tends to stock up on kitchen goods while back home in the United States, including her preferred aprons from Chef Works. I love the Berkeley bib aprons with a cross-back with suspenders, she says. First, the tailoring just makes you look good, slick, and put-together; second, the suspenders are amazing, versus having something hanging off your neck. This denim-and-red one is her current favorite. $43 at Amazon Buy $43 at Amazon Buy

Rendall Co. Larkspur Bib Apron $95 $95 Katie Byrum, a bartender at Studio at the Freehand Hotel, recommends Rendall Co. (formerly Jones of Boerum Hill). The six-year-old Brooklyn apron-makers are great, she says, because their products are lightweight and some are reversible with pockets in different places, either at the waist or a breast pocket. She adds, Also, the fit is very flattering for women  a clean line as opposed to other aprons that bunch and bulge in awkward ways. $95 at Rendall Co. Buy

The best leather apron

Atelier TB Tablier en Cuir Samba $257 $257 If you really want something durable, Polonsky recommends this leather number to many of her clients, which comes in three classic shades. Theyre elegant, she says, and also save on washing-machine water waste. $257 at Atelier TB Buy

Additional reporting by Susannah Edelbaum.

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Do you remember the July patching debacle? We were treated to wave after wave of Win10 patches that didnt work. Arguably worst of all, the .Net patches were so bad that the Microsoft .Net Framework team publicly  on Github, no less  posted a warning, advising those who had been suckered into installing the patches to curl up real tight and kiss their keesters goodbye.

I have it on good authority that the A-string .Net development team, who apparently were mostly on vacation at the time, had screaming fits, replete with pulled hair and not-so-subtle threats.

The folks in the trenches who were responsible for installing the patches werent any happier.

Now were seeing some relief, and its coming from a totally unexpected direction. Microsoft now vows that, starting with the next version of Windows, cumulative updates will come in two discrete packages: One for .Net, and the other for everything else.

The official announcement has layers of happy talk  the new .Net patches are going to be the best ever, of course  but at its core, the new plan represents a significant departure from the current method of patching Win10. Instead of delivering one blob of security patches every month, were going to get two. That way, if the .Net cumulative update turns out to be a massive pile of beetle dung  the problem we saw unfold multiple times in July  you can still install the other cumulative update. And vice versa.

For those of you who have been around the block a few times, thats heading in the direction of the old Windows 7 patches, where you could hold off on installing individual malfunctioning patches, and catch up with a Service Release.

Of course, Win7 isnt that way anymore and hasnt been since the Win7/8.1 patchocalypse two years ago. Were still doomed to install patches as a group, even when one part of the group turns into Hannibal Lecter. But at least now  starting with Win10 1809  well have a chance to hold off on .Net patches.

Microsofts intent is to release the .Net cumulative update at the same time as the general Win10 cumulative update. Itll be interesting to see how long that lasts  and whether well hit a situation where the .Net cumulative update requires the main cumulative update. Cue sad trombone.

Were also told:

Preview updates for .Net Framework will be released one to two weeks after the Patch Tuesday release, for non-security fixes as a limited distribution release (will not be installed automatically).

Out-of-band releases are reserved for situations where customer systems must be updated quickly and outside of the regular schedule, to fix security vulnerabilities or to resolve critical quality issues.

In other words, we can and should expect patches of .Net patches at any point in the month. Same old same old. Microsofts also doubling-down on the concept of releasing Preview versions as regular cumulative updates  just not pushing them out the Automatic Update chute. Wonder how long thatll last.

Folks running earlier versions of Windows  Win10 1803 or earlier, Win7 or 8.1  wont see any change. Earlier Win10 versions will get .Net updates bundled with the regular cumulative updates; Win7 and 8.1 will get individual updates.

Microsofts official announcement ends with a discussion of Validating the quality of updates, in which were reassured that .Net patches are the bestest and greatest ever.

Reminds me of something I heard in Texas, while scraping a bit of stuff off my boots: big hat, no cattle.

Were serving fava beans on the AskWoody Lounge.
Stalemate in Salzburg. May makes her case. The EU wants concessions.

you want but its important to be clear: there will be no second referendum in the UK. Mrs Mays stance was contradicted in London, however, as a Treasury minister suggested that a second referendum could be possible if the Chequers deal was voted down by MPs.  The Times

Raab demands Labour clarify position on second referendum  The Sun

Czech and Maltese leaders urge May to call another vote  The Times

German MEPs aide exits Downing Street with notes on a general election  The Sun

Theresa May told EU leaders last night that she would never countenance calling a second Brexit referendum as she warned them that they had a choice between her proposals and a mutually damaging hard Brexit. In a short address over dinner at the Salzburg summit the prime minister called on the EU 27 to respond in kind to the serious and workable proposal she had put forward in the Chequers white paper. She warned that if agreement could not be reached she would not ask for an extension to the Article 50 process or go back to the public in a second vote. Delaying or extending these negotiations is not an option, she said. I know that for many of you Brexit is not something

More Salzburg:

EU leaders unimpressed by Salzburg speech  Daily Mail

Chequers needs to be reworked, says Tusk  FT

Britain is willing to walk away without a deal, Prime Minister warns  Daily Telegraph

Mays plan opens rift between EU leaders  The Times

Salzburgs cautious welcome for May  FT

Kurz urges EU leaders to shift in order to secure a deal  Daily Express

>Today: Video: WATCH: Like a round-table of Bond villains. To staccato drum beats, May arrives with other leaders at the EU summit dinner.

>Yesterday:

as loyalist joins ERG in revolt against Chequers

One of Theresa Mays most loyal allies has said her Chequers plan is dead as a dodo as he accused the Prime Minister of trying to blackmail her own MPs into supporting it. Former minister Sir Mike Penning, who helped to orchestrate her 2016 leadership campaign, said Mrs May was deluded if she thought she could persuade Tory Eurosceptics to vote in favour of any Brexit deal based on Chequers. It came as a secret memo circulated among Tory MPs suggesting backbenchers will force Mrs May from office in April, as soon as Britain has formally left the EU. In an interview with The Telegraph, Sir Mike said Mrs May is playing Russian Roulette with the country and treating her own MPs like children who belong on the naughty step over Brexit.  Daily Telegraph

Davis suggests May is bigger menace to British voters than the EU  The Sun

Brexiteers face fresh scrutiny over referendum spending  FT

More:

Leaked memo reveals secret plan to replace May in April  Daily Telegraph

Momentum wont block Labour conference vote on second referendum  The Guardian

European airports warn of major disruption if no deal reached  Daily Mail

Comment:

Chequers is an attempt at a hybrid which Britain could accept  Anand Menon, Times Red Box

We need a royal commission to abandon Mays red lines  Catherine Barnard, The Guardian

Our democracy is not fit for dealing with Brexit  Alexandra Runswick, Times Red Box

>Yesterday:

May criticises Facebook for hosting ads encouraging migration to Europe

Davidson says Twitter risks becoming somewhere women fear to tread  Daily Telegraph

Social media drawn into regulatory and political net  FT

Nick Timothy: We need to stop trying to manage migration and simply cut it

Facebook is hosting adverts encouraging migrants to make the journey across the Mediterranean to Europe, Theresa May told EU leaders last night.The adverts show different prices and routes  while one even offers a discount for children. They make no mention of the perils of the journey which claims hundreds of lives each year. Instead they suggest that the crossing will be made on well fitted-out ships, or even luxury yachts. The Prime Minister briefed leaders in Salzburg on British operations which have identified more than 500 adverts posted by people smugglers on the social media platform in the last year. British sources said human traffickers were using Facebook to advertise travel agent-style services. In reality, thousands have died in recent years while trying to make the crossing on overcrowded, badly maintained boats, which often lack the most basic safety equipment.  Daily Mail

If in aggregate, a policy brings about even the tiniest benefit, policymakers believe it should be pursued, regardless of its effects on particular groups of people, such as low-paid workers, or certain communities, such as those that have to contend with great change. No matter that mass immigration can push down wages for the lowest paid or force some people out of work altogether, no matter that its social and cultural costs and benefits are unquantifiable  if the impact assessments show an increase in the size of the economy, then the policy must be followed. And who contributes towards these assessments? Well-meaning officials with liberal beliefs and partisan campaigners masquerading as neutral experts, like Mr Portes. But as he once said, the referendum presented a clear choice and delivered an unquestionable mandate. After Brexit, there can be no excuses: immigration must be cut.  Daily Telegraph

At last, a rational approach to immigration Labour can get behind  Diane Abbott, The Guardian

Editorial:

An independent report offers welcome recommendations  FT

Tax rises will be needed to fund NHS boost, Prime Minister claims

Companies also face possible business rates increase  Daily Mail

Tax rises will be needed to pay for the 20billion-a-year spending boost for the NHS, Theresa May said yesterday. But she vowed the extra revenue would be raised in a fair and balanced way. Her comments come despite a pledge before the general election that she intended to reduce the taxes on working families. To mark the 70th anniversary of the NHS earlier this year, Mrs May said it would get an extra 20billion-a-year by 2023. Weve said were putting a significant sum of money into the NHS  we believe thats right, she told a national newspaper Chancellor Philip Hammond will set out how the extra spending will be paid for in the Budget later this year. He has already faced a backlash from Tory MPs after he suggested that fuel duty freeze could be axed after eight years.  Daily Mail

Comment:

Were already over-taxed, why does a Tory leader want to soak us again?  Stephen Glover, Daily Mail

Tax reform could extend the life of North Sea oil  Ross Thomson MP, Times Red Box

Trump turned down Mays request for help over Salisbury

Donald Trump turned down Theresa Mays request for help over the poisoning of Sergei Skripal because she was at first only 95 per cent sure that Moscow was behind it. He told the Prime Minister she had to be 98 per cent certain, a book claims. The Presidents attitude meant it took days for the US to expel 60 Russian diplomats. The Apprentice: Trump, Russia And The Subversion Of American Democracy by Washington Post journalist Greg Miller, also claims that Vladimir Putin has Mr Trump under such control that he whispers conspiratorially to him on the phone. President Putin plays to Mr Trumps fears that he is being undermined by a secret deep state, the book says.  Daily Mail

President afraid of angering Russia  The Times

>Yesterday: Lord Ashcroft in International: What my poll of six thousand voters tells us Americans think about Trump

Landowners face higher planning bills

Reform will help families escape the leasehold trap  The Times

Theresa May hinted at forcing owners to hand over more of their profits when their land is given planning permission. Agricultural land increases in value from 21,000 per hectare to 1.95 million on average when councils allow it be used for new homes, according to government figures. Campaigners say that the windfalls should be shared more equally between owners and the state. Reforms to so-called land-value capture are understood to be part of a wider review into housebuilding by Sir Oliver Letwin. Mrs May told the National Housing Federation that the demand for more of the value generated by public investment and the planning system to be captured and invested in affordable homes, public services and local infrastructure was an important issue.  The Times

Comment:

Britain needs more homes, and failure is not an option  James Brokenshire, Daily Telegraph

May must make housing a priority or lose to Corbyn  Robert Colvile, The Sun

>Yesterday:

as Brokenshire announces retreat from plan to sell valuable council properties

Ministers have reversed plans to sell off the most valuable council houses to pay for cheaper social housing after admitting the policy was a bad idea. James Brokenshire, the Housing Secretary, said the Government would no longer take forward the plan announced under David Cameron in 2015, as officials admitted it was acting as a brake on development. It comes after Theresa May signalled a major shift in housing policy by saying people should feel proud to live in a state-owned home in a departure from the Tories traditional emphasis on right to buy. Mr Brokenshire said the Government had decided on a shift in housing policy which meant scrapping a plan contained in the 2016 Housing and Planning Act to raise money by selling off the most valuable council housing assets.  Daily Telegraph

Housing Associations welcome ten-year funding deals  FT

May praised for total step-change in approach  The Guardian

Boring Housing Secretary banned from Good Morning Britain  The Sun

Editorial:

Home ownership is a Conservative value May should not abandon  Daily Telegraph

This Tory housing revolution is pitiful  The Sun

>Today: Alex Mortons column: A Commons with no majority  so no radical Conservative measures? Youve forgotten about EVEL.

Damning new report on railways puts pressure on Grayling

Former BA chief called to lead rail review  FT

Passengers are routinely being failed by a chaotic rail industry, a damning official report concludes today. Bosses, ministers and regulators are all blamed for the thousands of cancellations and delays that followed the release of a new timetable in May. The rail watchdogs report said the debacle highlighted systemic weaknesses, poor leadership and a lack of accountability. It was unclear who was responsible for what, it said. Nobody took charge. The present industry arrangements do not support clarity of decision making. The interim report into the timetable fiasco will heap pressure on Chris Grayling, who today launches yet another review into the railways, admitting they are no longer fit for todays challenges. The Transport Secretary has been criticised repeatedly for refusing to accept any blame for the chaos.  Daily Mail

Analysis:

Dont bet on significant change  Graeme Paton, The Times

Editorial:

Review needs to make convincing case for reform  The Times

Hinds promises zero tolerance for county lines gangs

Gangs using child foot soldiers to flood the streets with heroin and crack cocaine will be met with zero tolerance, the Education Secretary said yesterday. Damian Hinds attacked the vile criminals preying on youngsters as he promised the vulnerable would be given protection. He spoke out as the Department for Education unveiled a 2million county lines unit to support councils in protecting those most at risk. The hub will provide funding and resources to local authorities to help children trapped in drug gangs, as well as those at risk of sexual exploitation. Due to open next year, the unit will run until 2022. It will provide advice and deliver additional staff with experience and knowledge of county lines operations. There will be an online forum for professionals.  Daily Mail

Johnson faces reprimand over burqa jibe

friends, who are likely to blame Brandon Lewis, the Tory chairman.  The Times

Watson calls for new restrictions on gambling adverts

Boris Johnson is likely to reprimanded by Conservative headquarters on the eve of the Tory conference over his comparison of women wearing burkas to letter boxes. The former foreign secretary wrote in the summer that he was against bans on face-covering veils in public places but that it was ridiculous people chose to wear them, prompting a backlash. The Muslim Council of Britain accused him of pandering to the far right. Mr Johnsons comments are being investigated by a panel at CCHQ to see if he broke the Tory code of conduct. A result is expected next week. Sources claimed that Mr Johnson was thought unlikely to receive a formal sanction but could receive a ticking off.This could provoke an aggressive reaction from his

Television and online gambling adverts should be banned during live sporting events, a new Labour policy suggests. Under a major overhaul of gambling laws, adverts would be outlawed from up to five minutes before kick off and five minutes after the final whistle. The report, by Labour deputy leader Tom Watson, follows a year-long review of problem gambling. It states the explosion in online gambling was unforeseen by the 2005 Gambling Act, passed by the last Labour government, which liberated gambling laws. As well as a ban on sport adverts, the report calls for a ban on credit card betting and a new tax on gambling firms of 1 per cent of revenues, used to fund treatment of addicts. There would also be new rules to allow addicts to tell their banks to block debit card transactions, and a ban on free-to-play gambling games for under-18s.  Daily Mail

>Yesterday: ToryDiary: The Government should rein in its miserable obsession with banning things

McDonnell told to pull out of conference event with antisemitic union boss

NEC backs plan to speed handling of antisemitism allegations  The Guardian

MPs shun conference over sickening crisis  The Sun

Police re-open investigation into assault claims against Labour MP

John McDonnell was told to pull-out of a Labour conference event next week with a union boss accused of anti-Semitism. Jewish campaigners warned that failure to withdraw would risk reigniting Labours bitter anti-Semitism crisis. The Shadow Chancellor  Mr Corbyns closest friend in politics  is scheduled to speak alongside controversial PCS union leader Mark Serwotka at an event organised by the Corbynista campaign group Momentum in Liverpool next week. It comes just days after Mr Serwotka sparked fury by claiming anti-Semitism does not exist in the Labour party and suggested it was a story created by Israel. The Labour Against Anti-Semitism group demanded Mr McDonnell pulled out of the event  branding Mr Serwotkas slur an undeniable promotion of an Anti-Semitic trope.  The Sun

Police have reopened an investigation into assault claims against the deputy leader of Welsh Labour. Carolyn Harris, shadow minister for women and equalities, was accused of pulling the hair of her assistant, Jenny Lee Clarke, so hard that clumps of it were torn out. South Wales police dropped the inquiry in 2016 but officers are re-examining the allegations after Ms Clarke, 42, complained about the handling of the initial investigation. She believed that the allegation was not taken further because of Mrs Harriss position. Ms Clarke claimed that she had not been offered support from Labour and that Jennie Formby, the partys general secretary, had not replied to her emails. If it wasnt for [Mrs Harriss] position I would have had justice by now, she said. Ive been treated differently because Im a layman and shes an MP. I just wanted the same treatment as everyone else when they have reported a crime.  The Times

Labour must take abusers as seriously as harassers  Labour Too, Daily Telegraph

Corbyn adviser claims MI5 is conspiring against Labour

Deputy leader suggests Murray is peddling fake news  Daily Telegraph

Split amongst leaders allies  The Times

An advisor to Jeremy Corbyn has suggested MI5 is conspiring to stop the Labour leader winning power. Andrew Murray, a former communist, said he had detected the workings of the deep state. As evidence, he pointed out he had been denied House of Commons security clearance for over a year. He said his suspicions were raised when the Mail on Sunday revealed at the weekend that he had been barred from Ukraine for allegedly being part of Vladimir Putins global propaganda network. Mr Murray was in the Communist Party of Britain before joining Labour in 2016. He works for Unite general secretary Len McCluskey and for Mr Corbyn part time. In the New Statesman magazine he wrote: The denial to me of Commons security clearance and a raft of hostile stories suggests the intelligence services may be working to block the election of a Labour government.  Daily Mail

Long Read:

Has Corbyn missed his moment?  FT

Comment:

Labours plans for democracy must begin at home  Owen Jones, The Guardian

Swinney orders schools to proceed with controversial tests despite Holyrood defeat

John Swinney has ordered schools to carry on with controversial primary one tests in defiance of a Holyrood vote for them to be halted. The embattled Education Minister refused to confirm he would respect the will of parliament, saying instead he would consider the motion that was passed. He said he will make a parliamentary statement on the next steps following the vote, but in the meantime schools should continue with the standardised assessments. In a sign he does not intend to capitulate, he insisted that the tests still have an absolutely fundamental role to play. But all four of Holyroods oppositon parties demanded he comply with the symbolic vote by issuing new instructions to headteachers to cease the tests.  Daily Telegraph

Paisley survives recall vote

Ian Paisley, the Democratic unionist, will hold on to his seat after Westminsters first recall petition fell narrowly short of the 10 per cent needed to force a by-election. A total of 7,009 constituents in North Antrim  9.3 per cent  signed the petition over the past six weeks. The 10 per cent threshold was 7,543. The first stage of the recall process, created in the wake of the Westminster expenses scandal, was triggered after Mr Paisleys suspension from parliament for failing to declare tens of thousands of pounds worth of hospitality from the Sri Lankan government. Three centres were opened in North Antrim in August to give voters the opportunity to sign the petition. Constituents were also able to register their support via

post.

News in Brief:

Politicians must stand up to a culture of rent-seeking  Thomas Aubrey, CapX

Forget hard and soft Brexit  were heading for a blind Brexit  James Forsyth, The Spectator

Brexit is about much more than trade  its about self-government  Mark Fox, Reaction

Thatchers prophetic Bruges speech sparked the debate that led to Brexit  Conor Burns MP, Brexit Central

How political correctness ate itself  Bruno Macaes, UnHerd

The result was announced in the early hours of this morning. The petition has not been successful, said Virginia McVea, Northern Irelands chief electoral officer.  The Times
It is unlikely that anyone has ever declined the leadership of the Liberal Democrats in so regal a manner as Gina Miller when she addressed them this week at their conference in Brighton. It is, however, possible that had she indicated her willingness to serve, they would have decided to bring forward Jo Swinson, or bring back Nick Clegg.

No such doubts appeared to trouble Miller as she told them:

Today I speak to you as a friend, someone who feels a bond with you on so many issues. But may I say straightaway, particularly for the journalists in the audience, who might be speculating, I am not addressing you as your leader in waiting. Truth be told, I am not a member of any party

There is a majestic, above-the-battle ring to this. Miller emphasised that I am not political, and indicated that she had not studied in any great depth the party she was addressing, for as Patrick Kidd noted in The Times, she referred to that great Liberal leader Lord Joyge', and to Dame Shirley Williams, whom she may have confused with Dame Shirley Bassey.

Yet Miller is intensely political. She leapt to fame as the anti-Brexit campaigner who won the case in the Supreme Court which obliged the Government to pass an Act of Parliament in order to start the process of leaving the EU.

Then too she declared, having won in the High Court and while calling on the Government not to appeal to the Supreme Court, that the case was about process, not politics.

Her decision to bring the case was, of course, intensely political. She wanted to stop Brexit, and she failed to do so, for on February 1st 2017 the Commons voted by the overwhelming margin of 498 to 114 to give effect to the referendum decision. In the short term, the conclusiveness of that vote actually strengthened Brexit.

Miller has not given up the fight to stop Britain leaving the EU, but some on her own side wish she had. For as one Remain campaigner put it:

Shes an absolute nightmare. Shes impossible to work with and has burned every bridge shes ever stepped on. Shes held in esteem and affection because of the court case, but shes one of the most self-obsessed people Ive ever met. She doesnt ever think whats the most collegiate and helpful thing to do in a situation. She has a personal staff of 18, or so she has told various people. Everybody is incredulous. You can launch a coup with 18 people.

In August this year, when Krishnan Guru-Murthy interviewed her for Channel 4 News, he put it to her, So you dont really fit British parliamentary democracy, and Miller agreed: No I dont.

Guru-Murthy went on, You would have been a presidential candidate had we had a presidential system, which led Miller to wonder: Is there something in between representative and direct democracy, something thats fit for the 21st, 22nd and 23rd centuries?

She is however, in her way, a populist, who knows her strength lies in reaching out directly to the people, and cannot bear the idea of being constrained by a party, or, as she put it later in her conversation with Guru-Murthy, a club:

You give up some of your integrity when you belong to a club because you have to play by the rules of the club and you have to speak in their voice and I think that can be quite limiting.

One sees her arrogant conviction that she is more honest than party politicians, and that she does not need to play by their rules.

But those qualities helped her to bring her court case. In theory anyone had the right to do this, but Miller had the boldness and the money to do it, and the toughness needed to stand up to an extraordinary degree of odium.

To her opponents, she exuded a sense of entitlement, and became a hated symbol of the self-righteous metropolitan elite which was plotting to use its power and money to thwart the wishes of Brexit voters living in unfashionable places far from London. Democracy was being subverted by an arrogant plutocracy.

Much of the abuse hurled at Miller was unconscionable. She received numerous death threats against herself and her three children.

Rhodri Colwyn Philipps, the 4th Viscount St Davids, wrote on Facebook, four days after she had won her case: 5,000 for the first person to accidentally run over this bloody troublesome first generation immigrant.

He also described her as a boat jumper, and went on: If this is what we should expect from immigrants, send them back to their stinking jungles. In July 2017 he was found guilty of two charges of making menacing communications, and sentenced to 12 weeks in prison.

It seems to me that many of the attacks on Miller rest on a misunderstanding of what it means to be British, aggravated by the ignoble passions surrounding the EU referendum, during which both sides quite often resorted to character assassination.

On the Leave side, Boris Johnson is the most frequent target for ad hominem attack: I have lost count of the articles by distinguished journalists in which his character is trashed, without a word being devoted to the arguments for and against belonging to the European Union.

Miller has herself revealed a rougher side of her character, almost spitting these words out when talking about Johnson: how can you have someone who is a repeated liar be it as a journalist or when he was a politician leading our country? Surely were better than that.

Because Miller is not white, and came to this country when she was a child, it is quite often assumed that she is some presumptuous foreigner, who has the gall to come to London and tell us how to run our affairs.

This is to misunderstand her. Miller was born in 1965 in what was still British Guiana. Her beloved father, Doodnath Singh, who died at the age of 80 in 2013 and to whom she bears a touching resemblance, was a barrister who had been called to the bar at the Middle Temple in London in 1958, fought cases in many parts of the West Indies and ended his career as Attorney-General from 2001-09 of Guyana, as British Guiana became. When one knows this, it seem less strange that Miller should set her faith on legal remedies.

At the age of 11, she was sent to boarding school in England. In her interview with Guru-Murthy she recalled: I was so excited, as with most Commonwealth countries we were coming to the motherland, I grew up with the Queen on the wall.

Her mothers most prized possession was a set of Wedgwood china: We were more British than the British.

She has described, in a recent article for Vogue, what happened next:

I left Guyana to attend school in Eastbourne with my elder brother, leaving our parents behind but when the country came under lock-down, they were unable to send cash to the UK. Luckily, my mother had had the foresight to buy a property near our schools and that is where we lived  I was 13 years old and my brother 15. On the weekends and twice in the week after school I worked in local hotels, either as a chambermaid or clearing up in the restaurant. My brother did two paper rounds and washed up in kitchens. We were aware that it would be illegal to live unsupervised until my brother turned 16, so I did everything to look older. I would leave for school in the morning wearing grown-up clothes and high heels, and then change into my school uniform in a petrol station on the way, then do the same in the evenings. Whilst we missed our parents dreadfully, and it was difficult juggling our home lives with homework and school, it made us who we are today.

What a traditional turn of phrase: It made us who we are today. Here is a British story of initiation through hardship. Moira House, the school in question, now part of the Rhodean group, issued a statement after the Brexit case: Gina was a student at Moira House from 19761983 and is clearly upholding the school motto of Let no-one be a stranger and Other people matter.

Miller likes to emphasise how often she has failed: Ive failed at marriages. Ive failed with my daughter who has special needs. Ive failed at businesses. Ive failed at wanting to become a criminal barrister which was my greatest dream. She has recently published a book about some of the harrowing experiences which she has survived.

She is now on her third marriage, to Alan Miller, a prosperous hedge fund man, has with him set up Miller Philanthropy, and has continued her career as a City marketeer, launching with her husband a campaign against excessive charges for City products.

She has, indeed, a gift for preposterous publicity, and for proposing herself as a role model: Ive worked for everything Ive got I do know what its like to have nothing. The other day, she was photographed on the white cliffs of Dover, occupying ground which defenders of national sovereignty might suppose to be their own.

Miller stood alone, yet again setting up her own campaign to enlighten the British people, yet again posing as a more moral figure (nobody else is providing that straight talking) than the very people who might be her companions in arms.
Matthew Scott is the Police and Crime Commissioner for Kent.

Police performance has been in the spotlight consistently in recent months. Death on the streets of London, an increase in the number of incidents reported to police, and fewer justice outcomes have all contributed to increased concerns.

Yet theres currently an officer inexplicably being disciplined for using the phrase whiter than white. And with one police force seeking sympathy for travellers during an illegal incursion, others nail painting and wearing high heels and ridiculous adverts asking people to report non-crime hate, one could be forgiven for thinking that political correctness is the order of the day.

The police are already dealing with too much non-crime demand. Around 20 per cent of police time is spent dealing with crime, the rest is everything else  mental health, missing persons, safeguarding and other issues.

So with all this focus, it was perhaps inevitable that unattributable comments, critical of Police and Crime Commissioners (PCCs), found their way to the media. They were actually in a report that was about Chief Constable recruitment, where there is a developing crisis of fewer applicants and shorter stints. Only the part about PCCs, written in 2015, is getting any attention. Its an out of date judgement of the first term of PCCs, which included the infamous documentary featuring my predecessor.

It includes inaccuracies such as there being no checks and balances on PCCs, completely forgetting the role played by Police and Crime Panels to scrutinise the decisions we make, as well as the requirement to be reselected by our Party, prior to there being an election, every four years.

It complains about interference. We actually set strategic priorities. It is up to the Chief Constable to determine, based on their years of operational experience, how they meet the end goal. And we are responsible for hiring and firing Chief Constables. In practice, the former is easier than the latter. They also work to fixed-term contracts, but we decide whether their performance is worthy of an extension, much like the electorate do to us.

For all the criticisms levied, even one naysayer had to admit there many good PCCs. The PCC role, done well, can be powerful, transformative and create greater transparency, and having worked across Westminster and in local Government, I believe being a PCC is one of the best roles in elected politics. I would recommend it to anyone. It gives you an ability to make real change on a daily basis that impacts on the lives of residents. In my first two and a half years, I have set about making those changes.

I meet Kents Chief Constable on a weekly basis to discuss operations and performance, which has mostly recently focussed on the performance of 101. Waiting times are down massively during the last three months thanks to my extra investment. In addition, I hold meetings with him every quarter in public, with papers that the public can access, to challenge the delivery of my priorities and question him on performance.

Priorities have changed, too. Ensuring that crime is given the attention it deserves in rural villages as well as urban towns is key in my Police and Crime Plan. My priorities ensure that victims needs, not criminals, are put first and foremost, and that both crime and antisocial behaviour are pursued with vigour. Road policing gets more attention.

Finance is one another of the big responsibilities that I have; direct control of a budget this year worth over 330 million, and the ability to set the council tax precept. In Kent, I am putting this power to better effect. By March 2019, I will have made over 20 million of savings, cracking down on waste and making better use of taxpayers money. And thanks to council taxpayers, there will be 270 more police officers in Kent than when I was elected. Ive also protected all 300 hundred PCSOs.

The role of the PCC has been expanded to include commissioning victims services, making us the voice for victims within the criminal justice system. So Im ensuring that victims of burglary, robbery and other crimes still get access to support, as well as people subject to exploitation and both domestic and sexual violence. Im also enabling more victims to hold offenders to account through restorative justice, by doubling the funding available, and speeding up justice by challenging poor performance in Kents criminal justice agencies.

The publication of these outdated comments on first-term PCCs is therefore a distraction from the real issues PCCs and Chief Constables are trying to solve. The police are doing the work of other agencies and trying to keep up with an increase in demand, all with fewer officers and tighter budgets. Those working on the frontline are stretched and stressed, and having to explain why they can no longer do as much as they used to. Theyre also not getting the proper pay rises they deserve  their pay, not PCCs, should be increasing at this stage.

PCCs are cheaper, and more accountable, transparent and accessible than what we replaced. Together, we can solve the actual issues of Chief Constable recruitment. But we should give no more time to those hiding behind the cloak of anonymity, opposed to any form of accountability and speaking up for vested interests that were abolished years ago.
Paisley narrowly sees off bid to force by-election

The Government whips will be breathing a sigh of relief this morning when it emerged that Ian Paisley Jr had survived a recall petition.

According to The Times, the bid to unseat the Democratic Unionist MP garnered 7,009 votes  not far shore of the 7,543 that would have been needed to hit the 10 per cent threshold.

However, he does remain suspended by the DUP as it carries out an investigation into his failure  which he insists was unintentional  to declare two family holidays paid for by the Sri Lankan government estimated to have been worth 50,000.

North Antrim is a rock-solid unionist seat which voted Leave in the referendum, so if the recall petition had been successful the seat would likely only have been at risk if the DUP declined to nominate Paisley as their candidate and put someone up against him.

But he would apparently have faced a challenge from a new pro-EU unionist group called the Both Unions Party, the Irish Times reports, with John Stevens, the former Conservative MEP and founder of the Pro-Euro Conservative Party, as the candidate. Readers with long memories may remember that Stevens originally floated his idea for a pro-EU unionist party, then dubbed the New Unionist Party, on this very site in 2014.

In other news, Michael Gove has apologised for attending a fundraising dinner for Paisley. According to the BBC both he and a special advisor believed the event to be a business one, as the Conservative Party does not allow Cabinet ministers to raise funds for other parties.

Salmond faces mounting pressure over harassment and bullying allegations

It has been another bad week for Alex Salmond as the press and police continue to dig into a range of allegations of misconduct dating back to his time in office.

First, the Daily Telegraph reports that the police have stepped up their inquiry into claims of sexual misconduct into a full-blown investigation following their initial assessment of the evidence presented by the Scottish Government.

Then the Daily Record discovered concerns that Salmond was bullying his staff were raised by trades unions almost ten years ago. It claims that his explosive temper disturbed civil servants, as did the behaviour of other ministers, and that up-to-date processes for handling inappropriate workplace behaviour were instituted because of these concerns.

Salmonds travails have already divided the Nationalist movement, and the former First Minister has been fiercely criticised for raising money to cover his legal costs from independence supporters. Now Nicola Sturgeon has been drawn into what the Herald calls a secrecy row after several meetings with her predecessor to discuss the crisis were left off her official engagement disclosures.

Welsh Labour choose one member, one vote for leadership election

A long-running battle drew to a close this week when Labour formally adopted One Member, One Vote (OMOV) for the election of their leader in Wales. At a special conference 64 per cent backed the changed, which had the backing of the leader of the Welsh division of Unite.

This dispute came into sharp focus after the previous electoral college handed the deputy leadership to Carolyn Harris despite her challenger comfortably winning the membership vote. The decision to change will weaken the hold of elected representatives and trade unions over the position and could clear the way for a Corbyn-style membership insurgency.

In other news, Carwyn Jones has confirmed that he personally vetoed elements of the official inquiry into his treatment of Carl Sargeant, the former Welsh minister who is believed to have taken his own life last November. As reported here last week, the inquiry is currently suspended whilst Sargeants widow seeks a judicial review into how it will be conducted.

Harris, Jones deputy leader, also faces an inquiry into allegations of assault by one of her aides. She is accused of pulling Jenny Lee Clarkes hair so hard that it came out in clumps. The investigation was initially closed in 2016, but has apparently been re-opened after Clarke complained about how the investigation was handled.

Davidson hailed for mental health honesty

The leader of the Scottish Conservatives made national headlines this week after opening up about her mental health challenges in a high-profile interview with the Sunday Times.

She said that this, combined with the need to maintain her relationship, were reasons that she would not consider running for the national leadership of the Conservative Party, according to the Herald. Her candidness won praise from commentators, politicians, and third sector organisations alike.

Davidson also spoke out against the way that women are treated on sites such as Twitter, the Daily Telegraph reports, and claimed that she is done with social media.

In the meantime, however, she also kept up the pressure on the Scottish Government over school performance, accusing the Nationalists of keeping parents in the dark over school performance.

This comes in the week that John Swinney, the SNPs education minister, was forced to order schools to keep conducting controversial P1 tests despite a high-profile defeat on the subject in the Scottish Parliament. He was also warned that his plan to mount a tax raid on private schools threatens teaching jobs, according to the Scotsman.

DUP maintain tough stance on border

Diane Dodds, the DUPs MEP, has reiterated her partys opposition to any Brexit deal which dislocates Northern Ireland from the mainland economy, the News Letter reports. The lack of any softening in the DUP stance may explain why Theresa May is proving immovable on the issue in Salzburg, rejecting EU proposals for de-dramatised and minimised arrangements on the Irish Sea.

However, a different push for alignment may put pressure on the partys relationship with the Tories when a ten-minute rule bill aimed at granting Northern Irish women access to abortion reaches the floor of the House of Commons. According to the Times this bill, although tabled by a Labour MP, commands the support of several senior female Conservative.

In other news Lord Empey, the former leader of the Ulster Unionist Party, has become the latest figure to publicly criticise those claiming that Brexit will undermine the Provinces peace process, claiming that such talk will only provide an excuse for those who seek a return to violence.

And in the Republic, a new report has claimed that annexing Northern Ireland would reduce permanently southern living standards by 15 per cent, due to the need to make up the funding Ulster currently receives from London in grants.

Plaid leadership hopefuls set out plans to reverse stagnation

As ballot papers are sent out to Nationalist members across Wales, the candidates vying for the top job have taken a last opportunity to outline their plans for Plaid Cymru.

One candidate, Adam Price, explicitly argued that the party has stagnated when compared to the stellar performance of the SNP, and outlined a series of proposals to overhaul the partys campaigning machinery and strategy, according to Wales Online. He also threw some red meat to his audience with proposals to force all senior office-holders in Wales to learn the Welsh language.

Meanwhile a Plaid-supporting economist has attacked plans by Alun Cairns, the Welsh Secretary, to integrate the economies of southern Wales and the West of England. Critics of the current devolved arrangements claim that the north-south focus cuts the two halves of Wales off from their natural hinterlands in England, but Eurfyl ap Gwilym claims the Governments plan is designed to undermine the integrity of Wales.
Back in June, I wrote about how the way that rail privatisation has proceeded put Chris Grayling, the Transport Secretary, in what appeared to be a deeply unfortunate position.

On the one hand, he was politically accountable to Parliament for the performance of the railways, a legacy of the nationalising logic of the 1945 Labour Government. On the other, as Secretary of State very few of the actual decisions regarding how the railways are operated have anything to do with him, instead being made by operating companies, or Network Rail, or other such independent, arms-length bodies.

Its therefore no surprise that todays report from the Office of Rail and Road concludes that: The present industry arrangements do not support clarity of decision making.

The Department for Transport has thus commissioned the former head of British Airways to conduct what the Financial Times has called a sweeping review of the network. At a bare minimum, this ought to clarify the role of the Department and the Secretary of State in overseeing the sector and clarify who Parliament  and the public  can hold to account when things go wrong.

In fact, it seems to have been given a rather more ambitious remit to consider wholesale reform. If the FT has it right, the review will apparently be tasked to examine integration between train and track.

This could, if done right, help to end the disconnect created when John Major decided to pursue horizontal privatisation in the 1990s, selling the right to operate passenger franchises whilst keeping the track and infrastructure in state hands. This was a very different model to the vertically-integrated, pre-nationalisation railways, where companies owned the track and stations as well as operating the trains.

Advocates of the second model (or long-term franchising arrangements which more closely resemble it) argue that this created both the means and the incentives for private operators to take plan and invest for the long-term, rather than trying to maximise returns on short-term franchises (for which they too-often have under-bid) by squeezing passengers. It could be a very worthwhile reform.

However, as the Times transport correspondent points out, over the past five years there have been at least seven other reviews. Todays announcement is no guarantee that this Government, embattled as it is on so many other fronts, is seriously considering any attempt at serious railway reform.

Moreover, even if it chose to do so the effects would not be felt for years. Yet if the Government is to draw some of the appeal out of Jeremy Corbyns calls for nationalisation  not to mention assuage public anger over disruptions and fare increases and offset the political damage done by the Governments decisions to abandon rail electrification projects in Wales and the North  it needs an answer much sooner than that.
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CORNWALL, Ontario  It is an annual tradition in Cornwall and across Canada to remember Terry Fox in early September and to raise money to fight cancer.

Cornwall held its 37th annual Terry Fox Run on Sunday, Sept. 16, 2018.

Terry Fox was a young man in his early 20s who was diagnosed with cancer. Fox lost a leg to cancer, but instead of letting the disease hold him back, he decided to do a run across Canada to raise money and awareness.

Terry Fox began the Marathon of Hope in St. Johns Newfoundland in April 1980. Sadly, after completing more than 5,373 km Fox was struck down with cancer just outside Thunder Bay and his run ended.

Chris Nicholls father believed in Terrys cause, and 37 years after his dad began the run in Cornwall, Chris and his partner Liz Levere have taken over the organizing of the event.

This year they expected around 188 participants to take part in the Run and hoped to raise as much as $10,000 for cancer awareness and research.
Save the date for Saga's first-ever new ship christening. The British brand announced the Spirit of Discovery will be christened at the Port of Dover on July 5, 2019.

It will be the first ship to be named at Dover following the 250m redevelopment of Dover Western Docks.

As the place that Sagas first cruise ship set sail from more than 20 years ago, Dover was the natural choice," revealed Chief Operating Officer Nigel Blanks.

With Sagas Group headquarters based in Kent, we felt it only right that we name our first brand new, purpose-built cruise ship in Kent and what better way to do that than with the iconic White Cliffs of Dover as a backdrop. Spirit of Discovery will be the first cruise ship to be named in the port for more than a decade and the first following the regeneration of the Western Docks. We are already planning a few surprises, and will no doubt add a few more before next year, so save the date, as we christen the first of our new-build fleet," Blanks noted.

The Spirit of Discoverys maiden voyage, A British First, will sail from Dover on July 10, 2019. The 999-guest luxury boutique ship will circumnavigate the British Isles, the company said.

We are really excited about her first cruise as its a great way to show-off our first new boutique cruise-ship to the British market as we call in to iconic ports such as Newcastle, Edinburgh, Belfast and Liverpool, added Blanks.

The inaugural cruise has already sold out and most other 2019 itineraries are well ahead of expectations with the 109 single cabins proving extremely popular, Saga said.

The Spirit of Discoverys destinations throughout summer 2019 include Spain, Scandinavia and the Baltic, as well as a four-night mini-cruise to Holland, Germany and Belgium.

In addition, Saga recently announced the companys strategic decision to move to all-inclusive cruising as standard from 2020.

Blanks said: "The decision to go all-inclusive in 2020 had been made to distance ourselves further from the competition and mass cruise market. He said: I firmly believe this will not only sit very well alongside our Boutique Cruising proposition but will reaffirm our position as Britains niche luxury cruise operator."
Bahamas Paradise Cruise Line (BPCL) is introducing four and six-night Cruise & Stay packages, according to a press release.

The company offers the opportunity for people to take a cruise one way from the Port of Palm Beach to Grand Bahama Island, stay two or four nights at one of their partner resorts on the island and then cruise back to the Port of Palm beach.

With several premier properties to choose from, guests can stay in an all-inclusive resort property that includes food and beverages like the Viva Wyndham Fortuna Beach or Lighthouse Pointe at Grand Lucayan, or they can opt for a hotel only plan at the Pelican Bay Hotel or the Marlin at Taino Bay.

Guests can pair two nights in an ocean view stateroom onboard Bahamas Paradise Cruise Line with two nights at an all-inclusive resort stay at the Viva Wyndham Fortuna Beach Resort for a four-night package starting from just $469 per person, based on double occupancy. Package prices also include convenient transfers from the ship to the resort and back.

We are the only cruise line in the industry that can offer this unique Cruise & Stay vacation experience and believe it gives consumers as well as our travel partners another reason to choose Bahamas Paradise Cruise Line, said Oneil Khosa, CEO of Bahamas Paradise Cruise Line. With our daily departures from the Port of Palm Beach, our Cruise & Stay packages are easily tailored to fit into travelers busy schedules and ultimately provide a perfect getaway option.
But, on September 18, the Newport Beach doctor became famous for all the wrong reasons when he and Cerissa were both charged with drugging and raping two women and filming the assault of at least one, according to the Orange County District Attorney's Office.

The woman contacted Newport Beach police the next day and tested positive for multiple controlled substances. Robicheaux and Riley deny the allegations. Prosecutors also are charging the pair with multiple additional felonies including rape by use of drugs, oral copulation by anesthesia and four counts of possession of a controlled substance for sale.

Robicheaux is also facing charges relating to possession of an assault weapon and a sentencing enhancement related to that weapon possession, while Riley faces a sentencing enhancement for being knowingly vicariously armed with a firearm.

Neither defendant could be immediately reached for comment by telephone.

If convicted, Mr Robicheaux and Ms Riley could spend 40 years and 30 years in prison respectively, according to the prosecutor.

Rackauckas said investigators are now reviewing the videos found on Robicheaux's cellphone and trying to identify the women in them, who may be additional victims.

"All allegations of non-consensual sex are unequivocally denied by Grant Robicheaux and his girlfriend Cerissa Riley".

Robicheaux and Riley are two "clean-cut, good-looking people", and they used their looks to "prey" on their victims, Orange County District Attorney Tony Rackauckas said.

"We don't know how many victims there might be out there", Rackauckas said.

Feds reportedly probing Musk and Tesla over public statements

Tesla and the U.S. attorney's office in the Northern District of California did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Last month Musk tweetedhe was contemplating taking Tesla private and had " funding secured " for the deal.

The defendants allegedly met one of their victims, a 32-year-old woman, at a restaurant in Newport Beach in April 2016. They invited her to a boat party, and once she was intoxicated, they took her to Robicheaux's apartment, authorities say.

Robicheaux, 38, and Riley, 31, are accused of drugging their victims and bringing them back to his Newport Beach bachelor's pad, where they would sexually assault and rape them.

On Oct. 2, 2016, the couple met a second woman at a bar who got so intoxicated she was no longer conscious. The other accuser told police she was taken to Robicheaux's apartment six months later after a night of heavy drinking.

When she allegedly awoke in the apartment, he added, she screamed for help until a neighbor called police.

The show, which was still available on the YouTube website at the time of writing, also had a digital angle, exploring how men approached online dating and meeting women from dating sites.

Defense attorneys Scott Borthwick and Philip Cohen said the accusations are untrue. One video shows a clip from Riley's YouTube channel, in which she talks about pursuing a teaching credential in physical education. Authorities noted the couple traveled to festivals such as Burning Man in Black Rock Desert in Nevada, the Dirtybird Campout in central California and the Splash House in Palm Springs, California.

On Tuesday, the Orange County district attorney said there could be several unidentified victims based on some of those videos.

During the press conference, Rackauckas urged victims not to blame themselves. "And they're barely responsive to the defendant's sexual advances".

Anyone who believes they may have been victimized by the suspects or has information on the investigation is asked to call the DA's office at 714-347-8794. "To do so is a crime".
In "Stage Blood," his 2013 memoir about his years at London's National Theatre, Tony-winning director Michael Blakemore, director of "Noises Off," among other stage successes, described the absolutely essential goal in the rehearsal room when a great play is being freshly tackled.

"Every word that is uttered, every action the play requires, has to be particularized through the personality of the individual performing it," he wrote. "It has to be translated into a second language, the language of acting."

I happened to be in the midst of reading Blakemore's book as I encountered just that variety of achievement the other night, in a small black-box theater on Manhattan's Upper East Side. There, on the stage of Hunter College's Frederick Loewe Theater, playwright-director Richard Nelson is mounting his adaptation of Chekhov's "Uncle Vanya," in a heart-piercing production as sublime as I've ever seen Chekhov performed.

That "language of acting" thing? Nelson has it figured out here, on the type of evening when you can confidently say that you know truth when you see it flashing before you. In a fleet and satisfyingly compact hour and 45 minutes, a cast led by Jay O. Sanders - supplying as the title character the most accomplished performance of an estimable stage career - manages to expose the raw essence of a tragicomedy that can easily slip through the fingers of less skillful hands. On this occasion, a playgoer leaves the theater with a new depth of understanding of the desperate sorrows of Vanya and Sonya (Yvonne Woods) and Elena (Celeste Arias), a grasp so complete that you might even catch yourself thinking, "Oh, now I get it!"

One of theater's most pleasing seductions is persuading you that the version before your eyes is the production you have been waiting for, the one that finally illuminates the elusive psychological corners of a great play-terrain you may not even have been aware was discoverable. Every time you sit down to the revival of such a play you should feel this is a possibility. And of course, that there will be many occasions on which the proceedings will fall short of that goal.

A lot of thoughtful minds met in preparation for the latest classic at Washington's Folger Theatre, and unfortunately, the results illustrate the latter point. In the sort of adventurous move for which the company has become ever better known, Folger, with the help of some theater and music scholars and a British funding source, resurrected a version of "Macbeth" that became popular after the restoration of public theater performances in England in the 1660s. The goal of reviving William Davenant's inferior 17th Century version of "Macbeth," one that rewrote Shakespeare's poetry, deleted the priceless Porter scene and turned the Weird Sisters into a Restoration-era version of the Andrews Sisters, has academic merit, and to Shakespeare lovers, a certain curiosity value.

But in this case, the director, Robert Richmond, appears not to have trusted that most vital language - the language of acting - quite enough. Onto the play he added a shopworn device: the bedraggled inmates of an insane asylum are pressed into service as a company, to perform this raggedy "Macbeth." As the asylum guards compel the "actors" into the performance, an audience, seeking a rationale for this framing mechanism, are cast adrift. Instead of giving this bastardized account an unfiltered hearing, we have to try to make as much sense of the director's manipulations as the of Restoration-era adapter's.

What goes wrong with Richmond's "Macbeth" is clarified by what goes right with "Vanya," a production that began life at the San Diego-based The Old Globe. Nelson has in recent years honed a distinctive directorial style, mostly through his own work, especially, the quartet of "Apple Family Plays" and the trilogy called "The Gabriels." Each is a comedy-drama set in a household in upstate New York, organized without much visual embroidery around a meal and a matrix of family matters that reflect social and political issues affecting us all. The actors in these productions speak in intentionally normal tones of voice, and if you have trouble catching every word, Nelson has said he doesn't much care.

"I'm trying to create a world that is true and truthful," he told me, in an interview last year, at the time a tour of "The Gabriels" stopped at the Kennedy Center. "I wanted it to be conversational. Not naturalism, not realism, but a kind of verisimilitude: not real, but truth."

It is that aspiration that colors every moment of Nelson's "Uncle Vanya," which begins much as the "Apple" and "Gabriel" plays do, with a family setting a table. The dish in which the production specializes is fully revealing the anguish of Sanders' Vanya. He's a man who's been grievously overlooked. Managing his family's rural Russian estate - in the control of his absentee brother-in-law Alexander (Jon Devries), a fatuous, retired professor - Vanya wants what Alexander has, namely, the devotion of Elena, who is married to the much older pedant.

Some productions of "Vanya," even good ones, lose the poignant thread of the narrative by shifting the emphasis onto another bit of unfinished passionate business, the attraction between Elena and the pensive doctor, Astrov, played by Jesse Pennington, in yet another of the production's remarkable turns. (The play is nothing if not a catalogue of dashed expectations.) Nelson and Sanders and company, though, by distilling the text to a seemingly fresh variety of conversational truthfulness, make Vanya's silent suffering feel brutally real. And when in this instance Vanya's patience finally runs out, Sanders' explosion is nothing less than cataclysmic.

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"Uncle Vanya," by Anton Chekhov, translated by Richard Nelson, Richard Pevear and Larissa Volkhonsky. Directed by Nelson. Set, Jason Ardizzone-West; lighting, Jennifer Tipton; costumes, Susan Hilferty and Mark Koss; sound, Will Pickens. With Alice Cannon, Kate Kearney-Patch, Jesse Pennington. About 1 hour 45 minutes. $15-$37. Through Oct. 14 at Frederick Loewe Theater, East 68th Street and Lexington Avenue, New York. hunter.cuny.edu/kayeplayhouse/tickets.

"Macbeth," by William Shakespeare, adapted by William Davenant. Directed by Robert Richmond. About 2 hours 50 minutes. $27-$79. Through Sunday at Folger Theatre, 201 E. Capitol St. SE. folger.edu/theatre or 202-544-7077.
In what might be Gov. Dannel P. Malloys last meeting presiding over the State Bond Commission, the Democrat-dominated panel approved about $795 million in capital projects, from brownfield cleanups to school safety and open space acquisition, along with millions for local projects around Connecticut.

Included was $60 million to design and build a new 1,000-space parking garage near the Stamford train station, taking the place of a since-abandoned plan for a larger-scale, public/private development.

We have a crisis in terms of timing for the removal of the old garage, said James Redeker, commissioner of the state Department of Transportation, adding that the project is about one-tenth finished. We have a lot of work to get it to final design. This is literally between the railroad and (Interstate) 95, in a very very tight spot. Its a very very challenging place to construct.

Well continue to own the property that this current garage is on, which is just steps from the station, Malloy told the commission. The project includes a pedestrian connection to the garage; and the demolition of the existing garage, and a new 500,000-square-foot building, under construction to become the new home of Charter Communications.

The panel also approved $200 million in school construction funding and $10 million for the states competitive-grant program to reimburse towns and cities for hardening security systems around and in public schools, including security cameras and the installation of metal detectors.

Since taking office I have always maintained that if we want to compete for jobs and economic opportunities we need to invest in building communities where people want to live and businesses want to grow, Malloy said after the commission meeting. Its a holistic approach to job creation and economic development. Its about housing. Its about transportation, its about education, and many other strengths that makes Connecticut a great place.

Malloy said the panels meeting will be its last until at least the Nov. 6 election and possibly his last before leaving office in January. Investing in our communities is a core component of forward-thinking economic-development efforts, he said.

The commission also approved:

$12 million for Metro-North stations to install new fiber-optic systems for better public address systems; and LED display signs, and security cameras.

$10 million for the reconstruction of the New Haven Public Works facility.

$10 million for brownfield remediation projects in the state.

$10 million for the creation of affordable housing units.

$8.8 million extend four more years of support for Aer Lingus to continue cross-Atlantic flights from Bradley International Airport.

$5.5 million for the purchase of a parcel in the Yale West section of Orange.

$5.5 million for the Crescent Crossing project in Bridgeport, replacing the former Marina Village.

$5 million, on top of $15 million previously allocated for Synchrony Bank in Stamford.

$5 million to the Stamford-based Gartner, Inc. market-research firm, to expand its headquarters in the South End, retaining 1,385 jobs and creating 400 new jobs.

$5 million for open space acquisition; plus $5 million for the statewide asbestos-removal program.

$5 million to upgrade the electric, heating and safety systems in the Lockwood Mathews Mansion Museum in Norwalk.

$4.3 million for Bridgeport projects, including $1.2 million to cap the Seaside Park landfill; $1.5 million for exterior renovations to historic McLevy Hall; and $1.6 million to demolish the long-broken Pleasure Beach Bridge.

$4 million for preliminary improvements to Interstate-95 between Exit 19 in Fairfield and Exit 27A in Bridgeport.

$3 million for the Greater Danbury Community Health Center.

$2.3 million for the repair and replacement of sidewalks in New Haven.

$1.5 million to dredge a channel adjacent to Cove Island Park in Stamford.

$1 million to rehabilitate the historic Curtiss Hanger off of Main Street in Stratford, at the Sikorsky Memorial Airport.

$1 million to replace the roof of the historic Warner Theater in Torrington, through the Northwestern Connecticut Association for the Arts.

$650,000 for the Stratfield Village Business District in Fairfield.

$650,000 to Operation Hope, Inc. for the acquisition and renovation of four affordable housing units on Durrell Drive in Fairfield.

$500,000 for the Common Ground Charter High School, so the New Haven-based school can repay debts.

$370,000 to repair to repair the historic reproduction of the Amistad slave ship.
While the Connecticut Department of Labor reported strong job growth Thursday, some economic observers worry that jobs could leave the state. Where those jobs would go is a point of disagreement.

Congressional Democrats issued a report Thursday that warned nearly 200,000 Connecticut jobs could be at risk of being moved overseas.

With state labor leaders, U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro, a Democrat representing the 3rd District, decried the GOP tax plan passed in December 2017 at a news conference.

It is unspeakable that President Trump and Republicans would advance a tax bill that promotes outsourcing, she said. That is why earlier this year, I introduced the Close Tax Loopholes That Outsource American Jobs Act. My bill would undo this incentive to outsource, striking the provisions of the tax law that allow for a lowered tax rate abroad.

But Pete Gioia, an economic adviser to the Connecticut Business Industry Association, said with lower corporate tax rates here in the U.S., the GOP plan incentivized companies to bring their money back  not move more business overseas.

Is there a threat of Connecticut outsourcing jobs elsewhere? Yes. But its not overseas ... its to other states because we are having trouble filling jobs, said Gioia. Companies that have operations in other states may say, Oh geez we cant fill the jobs in Connecticut, maybe well fill them in Tennesee and North Carolina and Florida and Texas. That could happen. Thats a threat.

He said Connecticut needs better job training programs to fill existing vacant positions.

The Democrats report identified two provisions of the tax plan that they believe encourage companies to move tangible assets like factories abroad.

Workers in the insurance carrier, aerospace manufacturing, computer systems design, company management, accounting, technical consulting, depository credit intermediation, architecture, engineering and scientific research services industries would be most vulnerable, the report said.

I talked to steel workers yesterday, and BIC is laying off 134 workers because they are offshoring some of components of lighters, said Lori Pelletier, president of the AFL-CIO, a union representing those workers. They are in the midst of it now, and they are getting Trade Administration assistance Its a side-effect of our policies.

Gioia said mostly, Connecticut jobs in those sectors have not been lost, though.

The Connecticut Department of Labor reported Thursday that the state added 24,000 jobs year over year.

Thats the best performance weve seen since the 80s, said Gioia.
Whether you call yourself an entrepreneur, a freelancer, an independent professional or a gig worker, your behavior or experience as a child may have foreshadowed your career direction.

Thats according to new research by FreshBooks, a leading provider of small business invoicing software, that highlights what entrepreneurs had in common as children. The survey of 1,000 entrepreneurs found that 8 percent of entrepreneurs started their first business by the time they were 10 years old, and 26 percent said their parents helped them with their first business plan.

Related: How This 13-Year-Old Entrepreneur Built a Multi-Million Dollar Candy Company

Case in point, FreshBooks co-founder Mike McDerment recently shared, in second grade he drew a video game design on the chalkboard for parent-teacher night and tried to sell copies to his classmates parents. Similarly, Vidyard founder Michael Litt confessed, Before working anywhere formal, I sold firecrackers to friends at school. I got the firecrackers from my grandfather. I guess Ive always been an entrepreneur. This experience taught me how to sell.

These early encounters with launching a business idea demonstrate the importance of support from parents. Mark Cubans new book, Kid Start-Up, encourages parents to help their children with action plans and goal setting, whether they think the business idea is good or not. Setting simple business goals, like hours worked or units sold, can help teach kids valuable business judgment at an early age.

Switching homes and taking risks.

The survey highlighted that 34 percent of entrepreneurs are eldest children, the most likely to start their own business. Seventy-eight percent moved around at least once or twice as children and 38 percent moved three or more times. Switching homes can be a highly disruptive experience for children, yet can provide benefits as an adult. Adults who moved around as children often cite a much stronger sense of self, putting less stock in material things and having a much clearer idea of what they want out of life early on.

Despite the obvious risks of starting a business, 67 percent of entrepreneurs describe themselves as careful versus risk-taking. One reason for this could be the perception of risk. Sixty-three percent of entrepreneurs knew someone growing up who owned their own business. Whether it was a relative (36 percent), a sibling (11 percent) or a close family friend (14 percent), most entrepreneurs had someone in their lives to model themselves after. A role model or mentor can provide a blueprint for de-risking the act of entrepreneurship.

Related: 5 Lessons Future Entrepreneurs Can Learn at Summer Camp

Daniel Saks, AppDirect Founder, saw entrepreneurship first-hand through his familys furniture store. At my family store, we sent hand-written notes to each customer for feedback on their experience with us, said Saks. This insight allowed us to make changes that ultimately lead to loyal customers and repeat business.

Using real customer feedback to take calculated risks is aligned with the majority of entrepreneurs who describe themselves as careful. The morale of the story is not to leave your decision to chance. Rather, successful entrepreneurs mitigate risks in creative ways.

Education in the classroom and in the real world.

Whats more is that 58 percent of entrepreneurs say they were above average students. Only 6 percent rated themselves below average. There are high-profile stories about entrepreneurs dropping out of school to pursue their new-found businesses, but that doesnt mean they werent high performers while in school.

There is no magic formula to entrepreneurship, says Laura Behrens Wu, co-founder of Shippo and graduate school dropout. Its a lot about hard work. Its about being persistent. Its about standing up again after you fail. Its important to keep in mind that your company worth is not equal to your self-worth.

Related: 4 Entrepreneurial Skills We Should Be Teaching in Schools

All told, starting and managing a business is no simple feat. Based on the latest research, certain individuals are a better fit for making the commitment to entrepreneurship and fighting through adversity to achieve success. Luckily, the definition of success is in the eye of the beholder. Entrepreneurs gravitate to career independence for income potential, lifestyle preference and other outcomes they want out of life.

Related:

5 Small Businesses That Get Customer Experience Right

Why This Fitness Influencer Describes Work-Life Balance as a Mix Not a Separation

What I Learned From Watching My Teenage Son Start and Grow His Side Hustle



Copyright 2018 Entrepreneur.com Inc., All rights reserved
WASHINGTON - An attorney for Christine Blasey Ford, the woman who has accused Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of sexually assaulting her when they were teenagers, said Thursday that her appearing at a hearing on Monday to detail her claims is "not possible" but she could testify later in the week.

Debra Katz, Ford's lawyer, relayed the response to top staffers on the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday, requesting to set up a call with them to "discuss the conditions under which [Ford] would be prepared to testify next week."

"As you are aware, she's been receiving death threats which have been reported to the FBI and she and her family have been forced out of their home," Katz wrote to the committee. "She wishes to testify, provided that we can agree on terms that are fair and which ensure her safety. A hearing on Monday is not possible and the committee's insistence that it occur then is arbitrary in any event."

The chairman of the Judiciary Committee, Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, said through a spokesman late Thursday that he would be consulting with colleagues on how to proceed. Kavanaugh wrote to Grassley in a letter released by the White House that he looks forward to testifying.

"I continue to want a hearing as soon as possible, so that I can clear my name," Kavanaugh said in the letter. "Since the moment I first heard this allegation, I have categorically and unequivocally denied it. I remain committed to defending my integrity."

Amid the maneuvering, the nomination was roiled further late Thursday by incendiary tweets from a prominent Kavanaugh friend and supporter who publicly identified another high school classmate of Kavanugh's as Ford's possible attacker.

Ed Whelan, a former clerk to the late Justice Antonin Scalia and president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, pointed to floor plans, online photographs and other information to suggest a location for the house party in suburban Maryland that Ford described. He also named and posted photographs of the classmate he suggested could be responsible.

Ford dismissed Whelan's theory in a statement late Thursday: "I knew them both, and socialized with" the other classmate, Ford said, adding that she had once visited him in the hospital. "There is zero chance that I would confuse them."

Republicans on Capitol Hill and White House officials immediately sought to distance themselves from Whelan's claims and said they were not aware of his plans to identify the former classmate, now a middle school teacher, who could not be reached for comment and did not answer the door at his house Thursday night.

Whelan did not respond to requests for comment. He had told people around him that he had spent several days putting together the theory and thought it was more convincing than her story, according to two friends who had talked to him.

Whelan has been involved in helping to advise Kavanaugh's confirmation effort and is close friends with both Kavanaugh and Leonard Leo, the head of the Federalist Society who has been helping to spearhead the nomination. Kavanaugh and Whelan also worked together in the Bush administration.

Kavanaugh and his allies have been privately discussing a defense that would not question whether an incident happened to Ford, but instead would raise doubts that the attacker was Kavanaugh, according to a person familiar with the discussions.

Democratic senators, pointing to the highly-charged Anita Hill hearings in October 1991, have defended Ford's request to have the FBI do its own probe before she testifies. Back then, the FBI report into Hill's allegations of sexual harassment against now-Justice Clarence Thomas was finished on Sept. 26, 1991 - three days after its inquiry began, according to a Washington Post report at the time.

"Someone who is lying does not ask the FBI to investigate their claims," Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., said Thursday at an event on Capitol Hill. "Who is not asking the FBI to investigate these claims? The White House. Judge Kavanaugh has not asked to have the FBI investigate these claims. Is that the reaction of an innocent person? It is not."

Gillibrand said Senate Republicans' ultimatum of a Monday hearing was "bullying."

Republicans have rejected the comparisons to the Hill proceedings. Grassley wrote in a Wednesday letter to Democrats on the Judiciary Committee that the FBI investigated Hill's accusations against Thomas when they were still not public. Because Ford's accusation is already public, Grassley argued that it was appropriate for the Senate to step in with their own investigation as lawmakers did when the Hill allegation first became public.

A senior Senate Democratic aide noted that reopening FBI background checks was fairly routine; 10 such probes into judicial nominees had been reopened in the last three months alone, the aide said. A Republican aide didn't dispute the figure, but said those updates can be relatively minor, such as adding a nominee's tax records or educational information that had been inadvertently excluded.

Meanwhile, the Judiciary Committee has interviewed lawyers to be potential outside counsel who would lead the questioning in the highly-charged hearing, according to two people familiar with the process. If the outside counsel was a woman, it could help with an optics issue facing the 11 Republican senators on the committee, who are all men.

The objective of bringing in an outside lawyer, one Senate GOP official said, would be having an "experienced attorney who hasn't been so deeply involved in the nomination and could bring some fresh eyes to evaluate everything fairly and firmly."

A variation of this plan had been discussed since at least Tuesday, when Republicans had discussed a proposal to hire a female attorney and have her do all the questioning, while the GOP senators on the committee would ask no questions, according to another Senate GOP official.

"There is a deliberate and conscious effort to not seem like we are attacking the woman in any way," this person said.

Earlier this week, Kavanaugh told Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, one of his most fervent supporters, that Ford has the wrong perpetrator in mind and that he has not attended a party like the one Ford described in the Post account.

A handful of pivotal senators have yet to disclose how they will ultimately vote on Kavanaugh's confirmation, including Republican Sens. Susan Collins, Maine, and Lisa Murkowski, Alaska. On Thursday, Alaska Gov. Bill Walker and Lt. Gov. Byron Mallott - both independents - issued a statement opposing Kavanaugh's nomination.

"Mr. Kavanaugh's record does not demonstrate a commitment to legal precedent that protects working families," Walker and Mallott said in the joint statement, remarks that could put political pressure on Murkowski. "Key aspects of our nation's health-care and labor laws may be at risk if Mr. Kavanaugh receives a lifetime appointment."

Earlier Thursday, Senate Republicans had reiterated their resolve to press forward with a vote on Kavanaugh in the coming days if Ford chose not to testify before the 21-member Judiciary Committee.

"If she doesn't want to participate and tell her story, there's no reason for us to delay," Sen. John Cornyn, Texas, the No. 2 Republican in the chamber, told CNN. "I think it all depends on what she decides to do. We've all made clear this is her chance."

Ford has alleged that while she and Kavanaugh were at a house party in the early 1980s, when the two were in high school, Kavanaugh drunkenly pinned her to a bed, groped her and put his hand over her mouth to stifle her screams as he tried to take off her clothes. Kavanaugh has repeatedly denied the allegations.

Late Thursday afternoon, Republican and Democratic staffers on the Judiciary Committee spoke on the phone with Katz to begin negotiations for a potential hearing next week. The first concern Katz raised on the call, according to a senior Senate aide directly familiar with the conversation, was the issue of Ford's security - asking the staffers what the protocol is for ensuring that she is safe and whether reporters could be kept at a distance from her, as was done for Kavanaugh during his confirmation hearings.

The roughly 30-minute conversation also touched on the scope of the questions, and Katz raised concerns about the potential of an outside counsel coming in to question Ford, arguing that the scenario would be too much like a trial, according to the aide. Ford also does not want Kavanaugh in the hearing room when she testifies, Katz told the staffers, and requested that the nominee speak first.

Katz also raised the possibility of a subpoena for Mark Judge, the person who is alleged to have been in the room at the party, and other potential witnesses, and suggested that Thursday would be a good hearing date.

Republicans are sure to push back on Katz's requests. One Senate GOP official familiar with the call said Ford's request to have Kavanaugh testify first is a "non-starter," adding that "it only makes sense for the accused to respond to the charge."

The committee also does not plan to issue subpoenas, the GOP official said, who added that other potential witnesses have already made it clear they have no intention of testifying on this matter.

Republicans have so far stuck to the Monday timeline, as well as Grassley's decision to limit the hearing to two witnesses: Kavanaugh and Ford.

"What is happening with the Judiciary Committee, really, I would call it a railroad job," Sen. Mazie Hirono, D-Hawaii, said alongside Gillibrand on Thursday. "They are totally intent on getting Judge Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court come hell or high water . . . You have to ask yourself why."

Hirono spoke at an event on Capitol Hill to highlight a letter of support that was said to have been signed by more than 1,000 alumni of Ford's high school in Maryland. A flood of anti-Kavanaugh protesters also descended on Capitol Hill Thursday while more Senate offices reported receiving threats related to the nomination.

"We're getting a lot of calls, many of which are angry and some of which are threatening," said Tom Mentzer, a spokesman for Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee who has played a central role in the Ford developments.

Cornyn said Thursday that he sees no reason to call additional witnesses since the committee had already held a full hearing on Trump's nominee.

"We already had a hearing," Cornyn said. "That's what I call hijacking the regular committee process to accommodate political interests."

On Thursday, a group of eight Democrats wrote to Trump, asking him to direct the FBI to reopen its background check on Kavanaugh, a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

The Democrats, all of whom served as prosecutors or state attorneys general, noted that President George H.W. Bush asked the FBI to investigate after Hill raised allegations against Thomas.

"Senate Republicans are attempting to make Dr. Blasey Ford testify on just a few days' notice - without having the FBI follow up on her allegations and provide a report first," said the letter, which was spearheaded by Sens. Kamala Harris, Calif., and Amy Klobuchar, Minn. "This strikes us as simply a check-the-box exercise in a rush to confirm Judge Kavanaugh."

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The Washington Post's John Wagner, Gabriel Pogrund, Alice Crites and Sharon Dunten contributed to this report.

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Video: Republicans are already judging the credibility of Christine Blasey Ford before she even speaks to the Senate Judiciary Committee.(JM Rieger/The Washington Post)

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All of a sudden, President Vladimir Putin is a soft touch on Syria. First, he let President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey persuade him not to begin a huge attack on the Syrian opposition in Idlib. Then he defused a conflict with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel over a downed Russian military plane.

Putin's risk-taking has shaped the outcome of the Syrian war. But in this final stage of the conflict, he is facing powerful constraints on further muscular action. One of his biggest achievements in Syria has been to show that Russia can successfully ignore the U.S. in the Middle East, and set itself up as a fast-moving, resolute, go-to player. It turns out, however, that he can no longer assume U.S. passivity, and that means being careful with U.S. allies, too.

On Sept. 17, Putin and Erdogan agreed to set up a demilitarized zone in the Syrian province of Idlib, to be jointly patrolled by Russian and Turkish troops. It was a turnabout from Russia's earlier intention to support Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's push to retake Idlib. It's difficult to imagine Putin was swayed by Erdogan's warnings that an offensive could lead to a bloodbath: In similar situations before, notably when Assad recaptured Aleppo in 2016 with Russian help, Putin ignored such warnings.

Hours after the Idlib agreement was announced, a Russian military plane carrying 14 service members was shot down over Syria. CNN, citing a U.S. government source, reported that Assad's air defense had downed the aircraft. Kremlin propaganda outlets and internet trolls reacted with disbelief, likely anticipating official attempts to blame the incident on Israel, whose aircraft were attacking a regime target at the time. The Russian Defense Ministry then admitted that the Syrians had launched the missile, but it still blamed Israeli pilots, who, according to ministry spokesman General Igor Konashenkov, "set up" the Russian plane for the attack, using it as cover against the Syrian air defenses.

Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu made an angry call to his Israeli counterpart, and the ministry put out a statement saying it reserved the right to an "adequate response." There will be no consequences, however: On Tuesday, Putin downplayed the incident during a press conference. Although he said he'd approved the Defense Ministry statement, the Russian president refrained from blaming Israel. He denied that the incident was in any way like the downing of a Russian fighter plane by Turkey in 2015, which lead to a temporary breakdown in Russian-Turkish relations and to Russian economic sanctions against Turkey. In a phone conversation, Putin merely called on Netanyahu to stick to deconfliction agreements.

Is Putin suddenly going soft in the Syrian endgame? In 2016, he would have been expected to defy Erdogan in Idlib and shake his fist at Netanyahu, perhaps setting off a domestic propaganda offensive against Israel and making it harder for the Israelis to attack targets in Syria. Not in late 2018, though.

The change should probably be credited to President Donald Trump. Unlike President Barack Obama, Trump has not hesitated to use force against the Assad regime. He has stepped up the U.S. military presence in Syria, and he reportedly agreed recently to keep troops there indefinitely. Erdogan's warnings against attacking Idlib were backed up by some strong rhetoric from the U.S.

The last thing Putin wants is for the U.S., flanked by Turkey and Israel, to attack the Assad regime. He'd be pitted against three major military powers with only Iran and the feckless Assad forces as his allies. He cannot hope that recent tension between Turkey and the U.S. will translate into a breakdown of their military union: In Idlib, U.S. and Turkish interests are aligned. The balance of forces has changed since Russia entered the war three years ago, and Trump's willingness to wade in has played a major role in bringing about the change.

Now, to hold on to the gains Putin made jointly with Assad, he needs to exercise caution. On the one hand, he's winning points by showing a willingness to compromise; on the other hand, though, he can't be seen as showing weakness. This is perhaps the most difficult position for the Russian leader in Syria since 2015. Whether Putin can wiggle out of it without losing face will have important consequences for Russia's role in the Middle East.
What makes a smart city "smart"? It's a question that many entrepreneurs, enterprise executives and civic leaders are asking themselves today, but the answer can take many forms.

Related: Should Your Business Set up Shop in Bill Gates's Smart City?

As an entrepreneur, I often think about "smart cities" in the context of disruption by entrepreneurs re-shaping the way cities function. With grassroots IoT incubators popping up here in the U.S. to first generation smart hubs like Singapore across the globe, smart cities offer entrepreneurs opportunities to meet needs that didn't exist pre-2014.

How are entrepreneurs actually fueling the creation of smart cities today? Let's take a look at three important components of smart cities and the people powering them.

Building an infrastructure that uniquely fits the environment

No two cities are the same. Every city worldwide experiences challenges unique to the population, climate, traffic patterns and more. Thus, when it comes to supporting basic infrastructure for a smart city, the devil is in the details. For example, Boston may evaluate how winter conditions and snow accumulation affect traffic December through March and prioritize heated, smart roads that de-ice themselves. Los Angeles, on the other hand, may focus its efforts on how solar or ocean wave energy could power the city.

Barcelona, a stellar example of a European smart hub, is utilizing a mix of high and low technology to benefit its own city-dwellers. According to IoT World Today, the city monitors air pollution by using a system dubbed XVPCA. This system deploys air quality sensors through the city that allows civic leaders to benchmark progress around regulation and air quality initiatives.

The list of what city leaders value, and how they differ from city to city, is likely endless. The challenges are often so unique that solutions to address them don't exist -- and requires someone who knows the city intimately to build it. But, this means that entrepreneurs worldwide who are invested in and proud of their home cities, have an advantage over "non-locals."

A city looking to achieve "smart" status should seek out its local tech and entrepreneurship community (most cities have at least one) first, before pouring hours into researching tech that only checks a handful of boxes. Entrepreneurs should make themselves available to city leaders to engage in discussions about city needs. In the new era of smart tech on a city scale, cities need entrepreneurs and entrepreneurs need cities. Unique cities require a unique solution.

Related: Looking for a Smarter Home? Get Ready to Learn About Connectivity.

Managing the onslaught of IoT data

The Dallas Innovation Alliance is one of many groups fostering innovation specifically for smart cities. Current projects include smart lighting, waste management, digital citizen-centric kiosks, smart irrigation, smart parking and city-wide access to public Wi-Fi. Each one of these components could be transformative to a city in the short term. But, with smart cities, a long-term perspective is essential, especially when it comes to data.

Data is foundational to the smart city model, and the ability to collect and report on trends is vital to a smart city's ongoing success. Thus, data analysis is just as important as the tech collecting it. Yet, the amount of data facing cities is intimidating.

In fact, IDC predicts that the amount of data could reach 163 zettabytes by 2025. To put this number in perspective, one zettabyte is the equivalent of about 930 billion gigabytes. The human mind, or even a team, can't possibly sift through the amount of data a smart city generates. To manage this onslaught of data, artificial intelligence and machine learning will become the new normal.

I was recently introduced to Moogsoft, a company in the AIOps industry, and was able to discuss smart city initiatives involving AI and IoT.

"The amount of data that will be generated when applying IoT technology to use cases like real-time city management will be massive," Phil Tee, CEO of Moogsoft, wrote in a blog post. "If the performance of these devices is not managed correctly through the smart application of AI and ML, the amount of incoming data will overwhelm human operators and will ultimately pose a barrier to leading cities toward a smarter tomorrow."

Tee's vision of an IT-powered smart city is an approach that combines both machine and manpower, tied together by the IoT devices driving smart efforts.

Related: Big Data Combined With Machine Learning Helps Businesses Make Much Smarter Decisions

Humans and machines working together

Have you ever fought with a customer service bot on the phone? Many have experienced the frustration of needing to speak to a real human being about an issue too complex for the bot to understand. In the same way, as artificial intelligence technology takes leaps forward, there will always be a need for the human touch. This provides an additional opportunity for entrepreneurs to not only build smart city tech, but service it, too.

Tee has a similar sentiment on this topic and shared how man and machine can work together in a scenario around urban energy projects.

"As our energy creation becomes more decentralized, sensors that monitor changes in factors like current, voltage and temperature will help us manage our power grids," Tee wrote. "From there, AI will be able to adjust and optimize the energy resources accordingly. The ability for IT teams to observe performance 'at the edge' -- where a specific panel is deployed, for instance -- will be necessary to detect anomalies and restore services when localized outages occur."

This scenario also illustrates how emergent technology doesn't need to eliminate jobs, but can improve services that truly matter.

Practical steps to a better tomorrow

The technology industry is one that must ask itself, "Is what I'm building going to benefit society?" No one wants AI or IoT to complicate things. We're looking for solutions that improve life for us all. Purpose-driven innovation at the city level is a good start.

While we still have the freedom to creatively dream about what is possible in 20 or 30 years, through the lens of IoT, AI and ML, we can see tangible ways to improve each day.

Related:

Why Smart Cities Are a Golden Opportunity for Entrepreneurs

The Future Of Cities: Tapping The Transformative Power Of Exponential Technologies

India's Richest Man to Expedite Modi's Smart Cities Plan



Copyright 2018 Entrepreneur.com Inc., All rights reserved
In a Tuesday phone call to Putin, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel was ready to provide Moscow with all relevant information regarding the incident, according to a statement issued by Netanyahu's office.

Proving just how unsafe the situation remains in Syria-where the U.S., Russia, Iran, Turkey, Lebanon, Israel, France and other nations are all maintaining military operations amid a civil war that has dragged on for almost seven years-the Kremlin on Tuesday is blaming Israel after the Syrian military reportedly downed a Russian military aircraft by mistake, killing all 15 airmen on board.

Israel has vowed to stop its arch-foe Iran, which backs the Assad regime, from entrenching itself militarily in neighbouring Syria.

Meanwhile, a number of Syrian Arab Army soldiers who were involved in the downing of the Russian aircraft were arrested and interrogated by Russian military police together with Syrian authorities, according to Syrian media and local sources.

"We will remain there even after the Idlib accord", Nasrallah said, referring to a Russia-Turkey deal to prevent a Syrian regime offensive on the country's last rebel-held stronghold.

The fighters from the air force base in Latakia were reportedly arrested by members of the Russian military police.

The incident was the worst case of friendly fire between the two allies since Russia's game-changing military intervention in September 2015.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu offered Russian Federation "all necessary information" to investigate.

OnePlus is coming for cordcutters next with a 4K dapper TV

OnePlus TV - When's It Coming? To kick off the development of its smart TV, OnePlus has TV product manager Stephen L. There will be only one grand-prize victor chosen by the OnePlus team and that will be announced before December 17.

The downing of a Russian military aircraft over Syria this week - which Moscow and Damascus have both blamed on Israel - appears to have strained relations between Israel and Russia.

The Il-20 aircraft, with 15 Russians on board, was shot down by Syrian government on Monday after Israeli F-16 jets carrying out air strikes used the Russian plane as "cover".

"These weapons were meant to attack Israel, and posed an intolerable threat against it", the army said. Some 15 Russian servicemen were killed in the crash, causing a tiff between Russia and Israel, which had been coordinating Syria policy.

In the early hours of Tuesday, Israeli F-16s entered Syrian airspace with a view to striking Syrian military targets in the northwestern Latakia province.

"Israel holds the Assad regime, whose military shot down the Russian plane, fully responsible for this incident".

Arguing that the military manuevers leading up to their plane being shot down were intentional, Konashenkov said the Israelis "deliberately staged this provocation" and accused Israel of creating a risky situation for both aircraft and sea vessels operating in that area.

"This unfortunate incident was the result of Israeli arrogance and depravity", the Syrian leader said.
The United States on Monday accused Russian Federation of "cheating" on UN sanctions against North Korea with plans for a railway project, oil transfers and ongoing business dealings with Pyongyang.

Earlier this week, Washington called an urgent meeting of the UN Security Council in response to what it claims are efforts by some countries "to undermine and obstruct" sanctions imposed on North Korea.

"Why, after voting for sanctions 11 different times is Russian Federation backing away from them?" she said. We know the answer. "And now they've been caught", she said.

China called for United Nations sanctions to be enforced but recalled that resolutions allow for a lifting of the punitive measures if there is progress toward denuclearisation.

The UN Under-Secretary-General for Political Affairs, Ms Rosemary DiCarlo, made this known at the Security Council meeting on Non-proliferation and North Korea. He also pointed out that the report had determined that a specific ship-to-ship transfer of fuel by a Russian ship, cited by Haley, was not a violation.

Seoul's Ambassador to the UN Cho Tae-yul said the South Korean Government expected "significant progress" to come from the upcoming meeting between South Korean President Moon Jae-in and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un later this week.

After the experts" report was released in August, Russian Ambassador Vassily Nebenzia said he put a hold on its official release to all U.N. member nations "because we disagree with certain elements' that he refused to disclose.

The administration led efforts past year to dramatically increase wide-ranging sanctions against North Korea to dry up its revenue for missile and nuclear programs.

Why Prince Harry gets nervous around the Queen

The journey out and the sea nannies that we had to stop us from launching ourselves over the side were very good memories... He also asked the recruits whether they'd bumped into the Queen, before offering them some advice. "It'll keep us busy".

Interested in North Korea?

The Treasury said he interacted directly with representatives of the North Korean regime in Russian Federation.

The sanctions "are not an a la carte menu where each piocherait according to its appetites", said the French ambassador, Francois Delattre.

And it said North Korea is violating sanctions by transferring coal at sea and flouting an arms embargo and financial sanctions. "This is not helpful!"

There are signs that the North is "still maintaining and developing its nuclear weapons and ballistic missile program", said Rosemary di Carlo, the United Nations undersecretary general for political affairs, at the Security Council meeting.

During the summit, Trump said Pyongyang should start the process "very quickly", and that "a lot of people" would be sent to North Korea to verify it.

"The U.S. farce of prosecution is none other than a vicious slander and another smear campaign full of falsehood and fabrication created to undermine the DPRK", KCNA said, referring to the country's official name, Democratic People's Republic of Korea.

China's ambassador Ma Zhaoxu likewise declared sanctions a "dead end" and warned, "Resorting to force will bring nothing but disastrous consequences".
Somerset Lake to be refilled at last

The work on Somerset Lake is basically completed and the Pennsylvania Fish and Boat Commission plans to stock fish in the spring.
In line with its plan for a mega showdown in the upcoming festival season, Flipkart has launched an instant credit line of up to Rs 60,000 to its customers. Its rival Amazon India announced the credit line of Rs 60,000 on Wednesday only. The instant credit facility is a part of Flipkart's strategy to drive its gross merchandise volume by "15-20 per cent" by launching affordability instruments in the next 24 months. According to Flipkart, this will make the shopping experience more inclusive.

It had previously launched affordability instruments like no-cost EMI, debit card EMIs, buy back options, and exchange offers to its customers. The latest 'Cardless Credit' service gives customers an option to get credit up to Rs 60,000, and payback full amount later or through EMI. The credit line is decided using transaction data, your shopping history, and data from other places. For now, you will be able to use a credit line on Flipkart only.

"Close to 45 million customers on our platform do not have formal access to credit and a good portion of this is emerging from tier II, III towns," said Ravi Garikipati, senior vice president and head of Fintech Flipkart told the Economic Times, adding that will help customers with a small credit line.

The festive season around Diwali brings bumper sales to customers, and it also brings a huge opportunity for online companies as well as offline stores to boost sales. Flipkart is aiming at achieving 50 per cent of all smartphone sales during the upcoming festive month. It has pumped in Rs 3,463 crore into its online marketplace, Flipkart Internet. This is the biggest capital infusion by the Walmart-backed e-commerce giant ever since the US-based retail behemoth acquired a majority stake in the company.

As per market research firm Redseer, Diwali is a big driver of sales and accounts for over 10 per cent of all e-commerce revenue in India. With an online population of 500 million in 2017, India has one of the fastest growing Internet population in the world. "The number of online shoppers which is currently pegged at 50 million is expected to grow at a CAGR of 28% to reach the 120 million marker by 2020," its report said.

Meanwhile, Flipkart employees are going to gain big from their stock options as the Walmart-backed company has allowed its staff to liquidate their employee stock ownership plans (ESOPs) at $126-128 per unit. The company signed a $16 billion merger deal with US retail company Walmart in May at a valuation of $20 billion. Now Walmart will buy ESOPs worth over $800 million, and many current and former employees are looking forward to a windfall.

Edited by Manoj Sharma
Theresa May has said there will be 'fair and balanced' tax increases to fund a NHS spending boost

When, a couple of weeks ago, the Archbishop of Canterbury preached in favour of higher taxes, there was a widespread view that he didnt know what he was talking about and could be safely disregarded.

But now that Theresa May has snatched the same hymn sheet, its impossible to be so sanguine. In a little-noticed newspaper interview yesterday, she said there would have to be fair and balanced tax increases to fund a massive boost in NHS spending.

Profligate clerics are one thing: Justin Welby even ludicrously suggested that paying more in tax could make us happier.

But when a supposedly prudent Conservative Prime Minister places a foot squarely on the tax bandwagon, it really is time to head for the hills.

It would be less shocking if ours were a low-tax economy in which the Government zealously guarded every penny. In that case, most people would probably say, yes, we do need an improved NHS, so lets all dig into our pockets on this occasion.

But Britain isnt a low-tax economy. Far from it. According to the Office for Budget Responsibility  thats the official Treasury watchdog  tax revenues are expected to account for 34.4 per cent of national income by 2019-20 the most since 1969-70, when Labours Harold Wilson was running the show.

Harold was a great tax-and-spend merchant. For those of you who werent around in those days (and I cant claim to have been a taxpayer then), let me assure you it wasnt a great time for those who didnt relish handing a large chunk of their earnings to the State.

Mind you, things got even worse in Harold Wilsons third term in the mid-Seventies, when the top rate of income tax was 83 per cent. On unearned income, it reached an unbelievable 98 per cent.

Since 2010, when the Tories were returned to power with the Lib Dems clinging to their coat-tails, the tax burden has risen inexorably. Those in gainful work  only just over half of adults now pay income tax  have felt the greatest pain.

Its true the Government has reduced corporation tax, paid by companies on their profits. Lo and behold, receipts from this tax have soared from 44 billion in 2014-15 to 58 billion in 2017-18.

Much less sensibly, in 2014 the then Chancellor, George Osborne, hiked stamp duty payable on many house purchases. Result: much of the housing market has atrophied, costing the Treasury hundreds of millions of pounds in lost revenue. Clever George.

According to the Office for Budget Responsibility tax revenues are expected to account for 34.4 per cent of national income by 2019-20 the most since 1969-70, when Labours Harold Wilson (pictured) was in power

Still, Britain under a Tory government can now boast that it has the highest property taxes (which include stamp duty, council tax and business rates) in the world. They are more than twice the average of developed economies.

The dear old Archbishop of Canterbury probably doesnt realise that the overall tax burden is close to a post-war high. But Im pretty sure Mrs May and Philip Hammond, the Chancellor, are perfectly well aware of this shameful fact.

Yet in recent weeks, Mr Hammond has been encouraging speculation about how he will squeeze out some extra income from an already highly taxed country. He might let rip on fuel taxes  already among the highest in Europe. Or he might mount another raid on pension tax relief.

It is surely beyond dispute that the Tories are no longer the party of low taxation. The best that can be said of them is that they are not  at least, not yet  contemplating the stratospheric tax increases that would be necessary to fund Jeremy Corbyns ill-conceived extravaganza.

Lets agree the NHS needs more money, though an extra 20 billion a year has the ring of a back-of-the-envelope figure. Moreover, there is absolutely no guarantee that this vast amount, if forthcoming, would be efficiently spent.

Before the Government asks for any more cash to fund its plans, it should satisfy tax-payers that it has, so to speak, looked under the mattress and beneath the sofa cushions to see what hidden resources it may have neglected.

For example, we learned yesterday of claims that the coffee chain Starbucks effectively paid as little as 2.8 per cent tax rate in the year to October 2017. Despite earning profits of some 162 million, it contrived to shell out just 4.5 million in tax.

All entirely legal, of course, as are the tax-avoiding measures of other huge American multi-nationals such as Amazon and Apple, which manage to run rings around a comatose HMRC. (Thats the same HMRC which hammers us if we are late in paying a few thousand pounds of tax.)

Do Mrs May and the sepulchral Mr Hammond realise how much ill-will and resentment they will cause if they pump taxpayers for more money while continuing to indulge voracious U.S. behemoths?

And then there is the question of foreign aid, which continues to rise year-by-year. Since it is set by law at 0.7 per cent of national income, it mounts relentlessly as the economy expands.

At the latest reckoning, 14 billion a year is being spent on foreign aid. Most taxpayers know that much of this is siphoned off by corrupt Third World governments or squandered on useless projects.

The latest, barely credible, example of feckless expenditure is nearly 16.5 million of foreign aid being spent to encourage Chinese investments in Africa. Why does China  the second biggest economy in the world  need our helping hand?

A further memo to Mrs May and Mr Hammond: there are many people who will reasonably complain about more taxation if they see resources being wasted on daft, lavish and unaccountable foreign projects.

Last but not least, the Prime Minister and Chancellor shouldnt ignore Britains rapidly improving public finances. In July, the Government received 2 billion more in taxes than it spent. The annual deficit could turn out 13 billion lower than expected in this financial year.

A couple of weeks ago Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby (pictured) 'ludicrously suggested' that paying more in tax could make people happier

Granted, there is still a deficit, though a diminishing one. So the extra 13 billion is hardly a windfall. But it doesnt make sense to load all the extra costs of the NHS on the taxpayer.

The self-same taxpayer, one might add, who has endured eight years of austerity  which has entailed worsening public services across the board  and wont be happy being stung for more taxes.

Why has the Tory hierarchy forgotten that their party is supposed to be in favour of lower taxes  not least because they are one of the pre-requisites of a healthy economy?

Do they ever look at Trumps tax-cutting United States, where a feisty growth rate of 4.1 per cent in the second quarter puts the EU, including the UK, to shame?

Perhaps they think they can get away with another comparatively modest tax increase because what Corbyn promises is so much more draconian. But that would be a dangerous thought. What is the point of the Tories if they uphold an ever bigger state?

I dont know whether the NHS needs an extra 20 billion a year. I do know that the correct amount, whatever it is, should not be raised by adding to a tax burden already at near-record levels.

And while I understand Theresa May has her mind on other things, its very hard indeed listening to a Conservative Prime Minister talking so serenely about raising further taxes.
Yesterday the warmth between the two women was palpable; their affection for one another entirely natural and the effect utterly dazzling.

Never before have a mother and daughter commanded the royal stage so spectacularly as Doria Ragland and the Duchess of Sussex did at Kensington Palace yesterday.

In the space of a few short minutes we witnessed not just the start of a new double act  sorry Harry but you have (at least temporarily) been downgraded to a supporting role  but also a statement of intent from the newest member of the Royal Family.

Meghan Markle, centre, pictured with her mother, Doria Ragland, took part in the launch of a Grenfell Tower cookbook at Kensington Palace yesterday

With all the polished skills honed from her life as an actress and an unerring ability to engage with people, Meghan staked out a future for herself that could make her the most potent  and glamorous  royal ambassador yet.

And the message was clear too: her mother is also part of this journey.

In all her years as a dutiful and capable hands-on granny to George, Charlotte and baby Louis, it is doubtful that the Duchess of Cambridge's mother Carole Middleton has ever come close to making such a significant appearance in her daughter's life.

Indeed, since that short clip eight years ago, when she was filmed speaking of her excitement at Kate's engagement to Prince William, we have barely heard a word from her.

When she turns up in the royal box at Wimbledon, however stylishly well-dressed, she hardly gets our pulses racing.

But Doria, with her 'Hi, I'm Meg's mom' yesterday, was an ice-breaker of extraordinary significance.

So often royal events are stagey, awkward and, let's admit it, unimaginative affairs. Doria's presence at Meghan's side at her charity cookbook launch  and her remarks  seemed both instinctive and authentic.

Meghan Markle as a baby with her mother. Doria was engulfed by the babbling and warm embrace of the women who, out of the misery of the Grenfell disaster, have found in her daughter an unlikely champion

As a child in Los Angeles, Meghan learned to cook at her mother's elbow instilling in her a love for food and experimenting with recipes.

Food sealed her romance to Prince Harry, remember  there was a chicken cooking in the oven as he proposed  and it was the essential ingredient of the duchess's first solo project, assisting the women of Grenfell Tower with their community kitchen.

So when Doria stepped unexpectedly from a royal Range Rover with Meghan and Harry  whose appearance, too, was unplanned  to meet some of those Grenfell cooks, it was completely appropriate.

The event couldn't have been choreographed better, with mother, daughter and, oh yes, son-in-law hosting a lunch for the women.

Pride radiated from Doria as she circulated. 'You must be proud as punch,' someone asked her. 'Head over heels,' came the assured reply.

When Doria stepped unexpectedly from a royal Range Rover with Meghan and Harry  whose appearance, too, was unplanned  to meet some of those Grenfell cooks, it was completely appropriate

What Miss Ragland's presence indicated above all is just how important she is to Meghan.

She is proof that her daughter did not cast her old life aside, as some predicted she would, when she became Her Royal Highness on marrying the Queen's grandson in May.

Meghan does not just dote on her mother, she depends on her. When they are together they are animated and share a kindly glow.

They speak regularly, using FaceTime and email too.

In July, Doria flew from America to spend a few days with Harry and Meghan at their country retreat in Oxfordshire. But that was private and she came and went unseen.

Twice now, Doria has been paraded into the limelight  once at the wedding and again yesterday  and twice she has handled it with remarkable aplomb.

Back on May 19, the impression etched on so many memories was the quiet dignity of the woman, the only member of the bride's family at the wedding in St George's Chapel, Windsor.

Meghan Markle as a baby pictured with her mother. Doria, with her 'Hi, I'm Meg's mom' yesterday, was an ice-breaker of extraordinary significance

Her poise and calm were a model of control in utterly strange and difficult circumstances.

In her seat, Doria had faced the massed ranks of the Royal Family across the quire but she remained impervious.

Then, of course, there was that moment her face dissolved into a smile as Prince Charles reached out to take her arm and she was alone no more.

Yesterday there was no princely arm to lean on. Instead she was engulfed by the babbling and warm embrace of the women who, out of the misery of the Grenfell disaster, have found in her daughter an unlikely champion.

But however electrifying that appearance, I fear that Doria's presence will shine an ever sharper spotlight on the one figure who has not shared in Meghan's happiness  her father Thomas Markle.

Never have the destinies of two royal in-laws been quite so extreme.

Markle's foolish behaviour with paparazzi in the weeks before the wedding, and his eccentric conduct since, have contributed to a bitter rift with his daughter.

Over the past weeks, relations between Meghan and her father have worsened to the point where he fears he may be excluded from her life for ever.

Sitting in his modest home in a run-down Mexican border town, Markle must be wondering why one parent is treated with courtesy and respect while he has become a virtual pariah.

How hurtful it must be as he views the son-in-law he has never met fussing around his ex-wife.

He has not met the Prince of Wales and the Queen in their private houses, while the chances are that Doria will do so for a second time in the next few days.

Meghan pictured with Mum Doria, right, receiving a Master of Social Work in California, in 2015. In July, Doria flew from America to spend a few days with Harry and Meghan at their country retreat in Oxfordshire, but that was private and she went unseen

The danger for the Palace, whose handling of the Markle affair has been little short of disastrous, is that every time Doria is given such special treatment, Thomas Markle is driven further to the margins.

His estrangement deepened after a series of interviews in which Markle criticised the Royal Family. In one outburst he liked the Queen's family to 'Scientologists' describing them as 'secretive' and 'cult-like.'

The former Hollywood lighting director claims he has been cut off by his daughter since their wedding.

He has also admitted that he lied to the couple over his collaboration with paparazzi in the run-up to their marriage.

Markle subsequently suffered a heart attack and days before the wedding decided not to walk his daughter up the aisle.

Royal sources say the duchess views the situation as 'deeply personal'.

'Meghan doesn't think it's a fair game between her father and the media, so she's not going to engage in it or instruct anyone on her behalf to set the record straight,' said a source. She and Harry fear that any attempts at contact will be leaked to the media.

How tragic if the success of Doria's visit should widen the yawning gap between Meghan and her father  and mar that heartfelt confidence she exuded to the world yesterday.
Stranded away from home and running out of money, a Sydney family is in the battle of their lives to save their little baby who was born two months premature and weighing just over a kilogram.

Tiny Sage, who measured just 41cms at birth, is slowly recovering at an ICU unit in The Royal Hobart Hospital with her parents constantly by her side.

Her unexpected birth occurred while her Sydney-based parents Aaron Dam and Alicia Dwyer were visiting Aaron's two-year-old son Bronik who lives in Launceston.

The family holiday, ahead of the birth of their new daughter, should have been a joyful moment, but sadly within days of the couple's arrival, Mr Dam received news his grandfather had died.

The following day, amid plans to attend the funeral, the family faced another emergency when Ms Dwyer's waters broke at 29 weeks and she went into labour and she needed to be airlifted to the closest hospital.

Baby Sage (pictured) was born more than two months premature and is currently fighting for her life in ICU

Ms Dwyer's waters broke at 29 weeks and she went into labour and she needed to be airlifted to the closest hospital

In a desperate bid to save their unborn child's life, the pair raced to Launceston Hospital only to discover the facility wasn't equipped to deal with such a premature birth.

In a race against the clock, Ms Dwyer was rushed onto an emergency flight and airlifted to The Royal Hobart Hospital.

Despite making every effort to stop Ms Dwyer's contractions, little could be done and a decision was made to deliver baby Sage via emergency C-Section.

The tiny girl, born at just 29 weeks, needed immediate medical care and her parents were told she would have to undergo ongoing treatment and constant monitoring over the next two months.

Currently, the tiny baby is ensconced in an ICU unit at The Royal Hobart Hospital with her parents constantly by her side

The tiny baby was born following an emergency flight to The Royal Hobart Hospital

Despite the fact the family hail from Sydney, there's no likelihood of a return until their baby is stronger.

It's a stressful situation for the family who've had to put their lives, and jobs, on hold in order to manage the emergency.

To help a Go Fund Me page has been set up by Sage's aunt Ally. It aims to raise money to help support the family while they are keeping vigil by their child's side.

The goal is to raise $12,000 to cover accommodation, food and the growing medical expenses.

Despite the fact the family hail from Sydney, there's no likelihood of a return until baby Sage is stronger

'Aaron and Alicia are proud people and would never ask for help,' a statement reads on a Go Fund Me page helped set up to raise much needed funds

'The funds they have personally saved up are running out fast; health care and Medicare can only cover so much,' a statement on the fundraising page reads.

'Aaron and Alicia are proud people and would never ask for help; so I am. I'm asking on their behalf for help. Any form of donation would be greatly received no matter how small or large.'

Although Sage has only been in ICU for a few weeks, she is growing stronger each day, according to information on Go Fund Me.

To make a donation to help Sage and her family, please visit Go Fund Me
Amazon India's flagship campaign Apni Dukaan that they rolled out to connect with customers in the remotest part of the country has run in to copyright issues. The campaign name 'Apni Dukaan' is same as Pune-businessman Ravi Jain's domain apnidukaan.com that he registered in 2007. Jain wants the retail giant to stop using the name for their campaign.

Apnidukaan.com is in the business of selling kitchen appliances, electronics and furniture. The owners are now in the process of asking Amazon to remove all references to Apni Dukaan from its advertisement and marketing campaigns as they own the intellectual property rights of the brand.

Jain said that their firm and Amazon have no connection. "As we own the trademark of Apni Dukaan, we are going to request Amazon to remove references to Apni Dukaan in all the ad and marketing campaigns," Jain said, as mentioned in a report in Business Standard.

According to Jain, this is a good time to approach Amazon as he is planning on expanding his business and wants to approach investors for funds. Jain also runs the e-commerce site of apnidukaan.com. Jain said that he does not want investors to be confused and think his platform to be related to Amazon in anyway. He plans to expand his business and bring in investors to sell a minority stake in the firm.

When Jain bought the domain name a decade ago, he spent Rs 500 on it. Analysts believe that if Amazon were to buy the brand name, he would earn a fortune.

Amazon launched its Apni Dukaan campaign in 2016 via YouTube advertisements and videos. In fact, CEO Jeff Bezos even referred to the campaign while thanking customers for their support in the last five years in a letter.

(Edited by Anwesha Madhukalya)
Earlier this week Zara Tindall was unveiled as a new ambassador for iCandy prams' 1,500 'all-terrain' buggy, with her daughter Lena making her advertising debut in a promotional video at three months old.

The new deal is just the latest in a long line of sponsorships and brand collaborations for the Queen's granddaughter, 37, who is able to use her unique position of being a part of the royal family but not having a title to maximum advantage.

Mother-of-two Zara is also a brand ambassador for Rolex, Land Rover and Musto, and has her own jewellery range with Australian brand Cajella, and experts estimate they could be worth a combined 1.1M or more a year.

Mischa Joslin, Managing Director of Influencer, PR and Branding agency, Edencancan told Femail: 'Whilst many brands would likely want to work with say Meghan or Kate, they are not allowed to do paid for partnerships.

'Zara Tindall provides a unique way for brands to tap into the Royal reputation without the restraints and restrictions that would apply to working with a member who is closer to the throne.'

Earlier this week Zara Tindall was unveiled as a new ambassador for iCandy prams' 1,500 'all-terrain' buggy, the latest in a long line of lucrative sponsorship deals

ICANDY PUSHCHAIR: 100K PLUS

The equestrian was this week named brand ambassador for the pushchair brand as it launches its 1,500 'all-terrain' buggy in partnership with Land Rover.

She and baby Lena, along with the family Labrador, star in a new video capturing the juxtaposition of Zara's world as a mother alongside her world as an athlete.

Speaking in the video Zara, 37, says: 'I always use the best equipment in competing and it definitely applies for the children and having the best for the baby.

Richard Thompson, CEO of M&C Saatchi Merlin, told Femail: 'They should pay a lot for live content.

'This feels a little left field and judging by the cost of the pram could be big six figures. She should have been paid a lot for this.'

Zara and baby Lena star in a new video capturing the juxtaposition of Zara's world as a mother alongside her world as an athlete

LAND ROVER: UP TO 200K

Zara became an official ambassador for the brand in 2006, strengthening the brand's already impeccable royal connections.

The Queen is thought to have had no fewer than 30 Land Rovers, while they're also driven by all of the Queen's children and most of her grandchildren - as well as the Duchess of Cambridge's family.

She became the first person to be given the keys to a Range Rover Evoque in 2011 and has presented a womens scholarship, for training in engineering, sponsored by the firm. And every year they sponsor her equestrian competitions.

Why is Zara Tindall such an appealing partner for brands? Mischa Joslin, Managing Director of Influencer, PR and Branding agency, Edencancan says Zara is a powerful combination of being royal but also accessible and down-to-earth. Plus she has no restrictions on forging commercial partnerships. 'Whilst Zara is of Royal blood, she isnt technically a part of the immediate firm and can therefore profit from her aristocratic connections,' she explained. 'This means brands can pay to give their product line a "royal seal of approval" without having the Palace involved. 'It's especially appealing for luxury labels as she adds prestige just by having her name and achievements attached to the brand.' Our royals are known the world over, which is another attractive selling point. 'The royals are a global brand which means, Zaras appeal isnt limited to the UK. 'She has kudos that travels well, especially in the US and Asia who often respond well to Britishness as a selling point. This increases her value dramatically,' Mischa explained. People also respond well to her image as a hard-working sportswoman and busy mother-of-two. 'One thing that really makes Zara special is that she hasnt rested on her laurels as a royal,' Mischa commented. 'She has seen huge success within the equestrian field, representing Team GB. Her clear athleticism, love for the outdoors and passion for sport has meant she is a hot commodity for brands that want to tap into the affluent country and horse set. 'Brands like Land Rover and Musto who appeal to this premium demographic are a natural brand fit, and the majority of her sponsored work is with companies that align themselves with her Olympic profile. 'I think a large part of Zaras appeal is that she seems very down to earth and comparatively normal for someone who was born into a rather unusual family. 'Her openness, her relationship with Mike Tindall and her life as a mum is something that consumers can connect to, and its this sense of relatability that means shes often a great choice for brands. 'A Royal who we could imagine sharing a cup of tea or glass of wine with? Thats a powerful combination.' Advertisement

Last month she used a video interview as a Land Rover ambassador to discuss how she felt getting back on a horse again for the first time since giving birth to her daughter Lena, and announced she hasn't ruled out taking part in another Olympics.

Richard Thompson estimates that Zara's deal with the brand could be worth up to 200K, including free products.

Zara Phillips during the world premiere of the all-new Land Rover Discovery in Birmingham in 2016. Her partnership with the brand is rumoured to be worth up to 200K a year

MAGIC MILLIONS: 125K

Zara was announced as the first Magic Millions Racing Women Ambassador in 2012.

She now travels to Surfers Paradise in Queensland every year for the Gold Coast Yearling Sale, seven days of auctions which culminate in a major race meeting where all contenders are horses bought at previous Magic Millions auctions.

'This is an ongoing partnership that sees Zara attend events every year to present gifts to the winners,' Mischa Jolin said.

'She is an integral part of the brand which empowers women within the equestrian field. I would anticipate this partnership is worth circa 125k per year.'

Zara Tindall and her husband Mike at the Magic Millions Raceday in Gold Coast, Australia in January 2017. The Queen's granddaughter receives an estimated 125K a year as brand ambassador

MUSTO: 500K

Zara has been a brand ambassador for Musto for almost a decade and has her own capsule collection with the brand.

'This is often cited as one of the most lucrative deals Zara bagged with it rumoured to be worth around 800k per year,' Mischa said.

'Its relative to the work as Zara designed her own collection for the company which features her name  a huge selling point.

'She is featured on their website, in marketing materials, advertising, PR and often attends the events they sponsor. I would likely put this as around the 500k mark, but rumours have seen that number escalate higher.'

Zara has been a brand ambassador for Musto for almost a decade and has her own capsule collection with the brand, and her deal is rumoured to be worth 500 to 800K a year

CALLEJA JEWELLERY: 80K

The Zara Phillips Collection by Calleija is a range of equestrian inspired pieces of fine jewellery with an exclusive price tag.

For example, a 'saddle ring' she's designed for the Australian brand costs around 7,000 and Zara will receive royalties from sales.

'This partnership appears to be a bit of a passion project, as Zara was very much involved in the design of the luxe jewellery,' Mischa said.

'She is also featured as the model of the campaign. I would anticipate this having netted her closer to 80k.

The mother-of-two has her own range The Zara Phillips Collection by Calleija with the Australian jewellery brand, rumoured to be worth 80K, plus royalties. Pictured: Zara at the launch of her collection in London in 2015

ROLEX: 100K

Zara has been a Rolex Testimonee, as the luxury watch brand calls its ambassadors, since 2006 and is regularly seen with its expensive timepieces on her wrist.

'The luxury watch brand sponsors equestrian events and Zara is their first choice to front this sector,' Mischa said.

'I would imagine she gets circa 100k a year to do this, not to mention some amazing watches which are worth over 5k each.'

Zara has been a Rolex Testimonee, as the luxury watch brand calls its ambassadors, since 2006 and is regularly seen with its expensive timepieces on her wrist. Pictured: Wearing a Rolex watch at a polo match in Berkshire in July 2018




After an afternoon nap in a beautifully comfortable bed, I remove my eye mask, peel back the duvet and ring a little bell on the bedside table. Relaxing music plays as a member of staff brings a cup of peppermint tea and politely enquires how Ive slept.

No, Im not super-rich and staying in a five-star hotel. Im testing a new breed of mattress showroom.

We spend a third of our lives asleep. Yet when buying a mattress, we usually have to make a decision in a matter of minutes, lying down self-consciously in a brightly lit room as a shiny-suited salesperson looms overhead.

The genius of The Bed Room, the latest innovation dreamed up by retailer Button & Sprung, is that you can take your time trying out the mattresses.

Customers can book a weekday slot in the showroom in Fulham, West London, between 10am and 7pm, stating preferences for type of music to be played and what hot drink theyd like (fancy Italian coffee or more than 30 specialist teas).

Jenny Wood visited The Bed Room, a showroom in Fulham, West London and the latest innovation dreamed up by retailer Button & Sprung, where you can take your time trying out the mattresses

When you arrive, youre talked through the nine mattresses in the range (from 595 for a Borderdale king-size to 4,000 for a luxury Wensleydale). Then youre shown up to the low-lit bedroom, where you can put them through their paces  alone.

Duvets and pillows, ear plugs, bed socks and alarm clocks are provided. Theres even a kids area downstairs, with Netflix and child-size headphones.

You cant tell if a mattress is any good in a busy department store  its impossible, says Adam Black, of Button & Sprung. If youre a tummy sleeper, or you like to lie like a starfish, now you can find out how the mattress feels without anyone watching or judging you.

Most customers stay fully clothed, although if you wear pyjamas (as I did), the staff wont bat an eyelid.

This try before you buy idea is just the latest ploy in whats suddenly become an incredibly competitive market. The past four years have seen a mind-boggling array of fancy new mattresses from a huge number of brands.

Most customers stay fully clothed, although if you wear pyjamas (as I did), the staff wont bat an eyelid

There are futuristic foam versions by companies such as Tempur, Eve, Leesa and Ergoflex; gel-enhanced mattresses from Sealy and Silentnight; and handmade spring-and-fibre ones from Vispring, Herdysleep and Savoir.

Rivalry is fierce, particularly between trendy memory foam companies and natural spring-and-fibre brands (Foam is a four-letter word, says Adam from Button & Sprung).

Faced with such stiff competition, almost all now offer customers a 100-night, no-strings-attached chance to change their minds.

So when it comes to deciding which mattress is the right one, you can now  quite literally  sleep on it.

Heres our selection of the best long-term test offers for you to try

You can book a slot between 10am and 7pm, stating preferences for type of music to be played and what hot drink theyd like (fancy Italian coffee or more than 30 specialist teas)

PRESSURE OFF

Ergoflex 5G, 669 king-size (ergoflex.co.uk). Online only, with a 30day home trial.

From one of the first foam mattress brands, this Which? best buy is designed for those with back problems and for athletes.

Three foam layers include a central cooling core that lets air flow through it, as well as an extra-deep 9cm top layer of high-density memory foam for pressure relief and support.

ALL-NATURAL

Button & Sprung Perendale, 1,500, king-size (buttonandsprung.com). Available to test in The Bed Room, and theres a 100-night home trial.

Containing 8,800 pocket springs to provide comfort and support, as well as five layers of natural fillings including Egyptian cotton to wick away moisture. This also contains soft, breathable mohair and horsehair in a chemical-free cover.

KEEP YOUR COOL

OTTY mattress, 549.99, king-size (otty.com). Available to try in the Leeds OTTY showroom, and some Next Home stores, with a 100-night home trial.

Created by a martial arts enthusiast to provide the very best in comfort at a reasonable price. The five squishy layers include foam, pocket springs and a patented temperature-regulating cool blue gel to soothe the body and aid sleep  great if youre prone to night sweats.

Most customers stay fully clothed, although if you wear pyjamas, as Jenny did, the staff wont bat an eyelid. You cant tell if a mattress is any good in a busy department store  its impossible, says Adam Black, of Button & Sprung

MOULDS TO FIT

Leesa mattress, 699, king-size (leesa.co.uk). Available to try in West Elm stores (westelm. co.uk), 100-night home trial.

Instead of a soft, medium or firm option, this claims to have a universal adaptive feel that works for any body shape and sleeping style.

For every ten sold, one is donated to organisations helping the homeless, or people and children at risk.

CASHMERE CLOUD

Handmade wool mattress, 999, king-size (herdysleep.com). Available to try at Barker & Stonehouse stores nationwide (barkerand stonehouse.co.uk), with a 100-night home trial.

For every ten sold, one is donated to organisations helping the homeless, or people and children at risk

Made in collaboration with luxury British mattress-makers Harrison Spinks, this contains 6,000 pocket springs, topped with a soft blend of cotton, cashmere and a full fleece of wool from a Lake District Herdwick sheep. The natural materials wick moisture away from the body, while being naturally hypoallergenic.

UTTER LUXURY

Savoir No2, around 10,050, king-size (savoirbeds.co.uk). Available to try at Savoirs three London showrooms, with a 25-year guarantee.

Made by the company which originally created mattresses for the Savoy hotel in 1905, it boasts that this can be tailored to fit you and your life as perfectly as a made-to-measure suit.

The past four years have seen a mind-boggling array of fancy new mattresses from a huge number of brands, making the bed market even more competitive and prompting the creation of the innovative Bed Room

Combining extra-deep pocket springs with horse-tail hair, cotton and lambswool, its encased in hand-stitched ticking.

The softness/firmness can be adjusted for free within the first six months, or (for a small charge) over the life of the mattress.

HIGH-TECH FOAM

Eve Original, 699, king-size (evemattress.co.uk). Available to try in Debenhams, Next Home, Dreams, Bentalls and Fenwick stores, with a 100-night home trial.

the bed-in-a-box, so-called because it arrives rolled up and boxed, aims to be the worlds most comfortable mattress.

It combines three layers of foam including an evecomfort layer 30 times more breathable than conventional memory foam and a supportive base layer with seven zones (tiny cutouts) to provide pressure relief in your shoulders and hips.

SLEEP WELL ON GEL

Sealy Activ Geltex Pocket Eurotop 2800, 979, king-size (sealy.co.uk). Available to try at independent showrooms (see website for details). Up to ten years warranty.

A combination of 2,800 pocket springs with Geltex, an elastic gel and foam mix. It also features Purotex microcapsules, which release friendly bacteria into the fabric of the mattress to clean up allergens, reduce humidity and create the perfect sleeping environment.

TITANIC COMFORT

Vispring Magnificence, from 11,569, king-size, andsotobed.co.uk. Available to try at And So To Bed showrooms nationwide. Has a 30-year guarantee.

Made by a company whose mattresses graced the first-class cabins of the Titanic, this claims to be as good as it gets in terms of comfort. It boasts 2,812 vanadium steel springs in individual sewn calico pockets as well as a hand-teased filling of real Shetland isle wool, European horsetail, cashmere and mohair. There are five rows of side-stitching that will have taken six hours to do by hand.
Rationing skincare products so they last longer is not unheard of, but it can also increase the likelihood of the beauty item going bad or growing mold.

Most beauty products contain preservatives to prevent bacteria and mold from growing inside any of the items. But lately with the rise of clean beauty, companies have focused on decreasing their ingredients list to appease customers.

While a condensed list of ingredients can be better for the skin, it is important to recognize what natural preservatives can do for a product and where it is best stored to prevent bacteria or mold.

Important: Mold and bacteria can grow in skincare products past their expiration date or kept in hot climates, experts warn (stock photo)

Gross: Experts recommend checking the look, feel and smell of a product to detect if mold or bacteria is growing. But mold will typically not look like what is found on bread (pictured)

When first purchasing skincare products, pay attention to if it contains natural preservatives. Without natural preservatives, water-based products are likely to grow mold quicker.

'Its really important that we push people away from the idea of preservative-free,' Nneka Leiba, deputy director of research for the Environmental Working Group, told Well + Good.

Besides paying attention to the ingredient list, it is also important to place the products in a specific area within the home.

'Mold grows where there is an ideal environment for them,' Roberta Del Campo, a board-certified dermatologist based in Miami Beach, Florida, told Allure.

'Moisture, warmth, and food are all necessary for mold to grow.'

Professional advice: DailyMailTV makeup artist Nikki Fontaine (pictured on set with host Jesse Palmer) warned that you also need to keep any tools used to apply beauty products clean and sanitized

DailyMailTV makeup artist Nikki Fontaine, who has worked with the likes of Heidi Klum and John Travolta, warned that any beauty products with bacteria in them, be it skincare or makeup, can cause all manner of skin issues, including 'clogged pours, breakouts, and irritation'.

She also noted that it isn't just the products themselves that need to be looked after - but also any implements that are used to apply them.

'Im all about cleaning and sanitizing the implements used to apply skincare and makeup products,' she explained.

Incorporating a special drawer or dark area in a bedroom or bathroom to store all the beauty products can also help increase its longevity and prevent mold growth.

Some makeup artists, such as Priscilla Ono a global MUA for Rihanna's Fenty Beauty, even go as far as to buy a mini fridge for the sole purpose to store all their skincare products.

Priscilla revealed her own mini fridge to her followers on Instagram last month and said she was 'extra af' because she had invested in such a specific item in order to protect her favorite products.

However, it's no surprise that the beauty pro went to such length in order to look after the different items, particularly as the majority come with a very high price tag.

Clever: Makeup artist Priscilla Ono, who works for Rihanna's Fenty Beauty, revealed last month how she keeps her skincare products in a mini fridge

Brilliant: The small fridge provides just enough room for her top products so they stay cool and out of harms way for growing mold or bacteria

While there were a couple of budget products in the cooler, including a $7 Mario Badescu Facial Spray, a number of them were incredibly high-end, including the Dior Hydra Life Cooling Hydration Sorbet Eye Gel ($55), the La Mer Moisturizing Lotion ($270), the La Mer Eye Concentrate ($215), and Tatcha's Luminous Deep Hydration Revitalizing Eye Mask, which are $12 each.

She also had a rose quartz face roller in there, which many people use to de-puff the skin.

Many of her followers thought incorporating a chilled place for beauty products was brilliant and wanted one of their own in their homes. But a drawer, cabinet, or even the kitchen fridge would work fine as a budget-friendly option.

How long do skincare products typically last? Peels and masks: three months Acne products: four to six months Toners: six months to one year Cleansers: one year Moisturizers: one year BHA or AHA exfoliants: one year Lip balm: one year Sunscreens: one to two years Facial scrubs: two years Advertisement

New York-based beauty pro Nikki added that keeping tabs on and following the expiration dates for each product will also help to ensure you aren't using any formulas that might be contaminated.

'Switching out products once they expire can ensure you arent adding unwanted bacteria to your beauty routine,' she advised.

Sunscreen, for example, should last between one to two years depending on the product while a mask or peel normally expires within three months.

But some beauty items might grow bacteria quicker than the label suggests.

To test if a product is contaminated, experts recommend using your look, touch and smell senses to detect mold or bacteria.

Be warned, all assumptions about mold resembling the green or white fuzz on fruit or bread tends to be false when it comes to cream products.

Look, instead, for products forming a clumpiness in its texture or even exuding an odor unlike how the product normally smells.

Roberta admitted to Allure, though, that some products in opaque bottles can make it difficult to tell if it has gone bad or not. But a change in smell will be the largest indicator.

If product with mold or bacteria inside is used on the skin, it could cause a rash or irritation.

'Further, it can cause itchy or swollen eyes when used on the face,' Roberta said.

Making sure lids on bottles are always tight, buying products with natural preservatives and finding a contained space to store products are the top ways to prevent mold and bacteria growth.
Azealia Banks has asked men to send pictures 'of their buttholes' to her Instagram account as she launches a new line of soap for male and female genitalia.

The 27-year-old rapper shocked her followers last week when she candidly asked for men to take pictures of their 'buttholes' while using her soap, entitled 'Bussy Pop' for males and 'Pussy Pop' for females, to show how it works.

'I need some boys who are willing to show their buttholes to get a three-month supply of bussyboy,' she wrote in the Instagram post. 'I would like to document five boys' buttholes in photos with flash to show how well bussyboy works!'

Interesting: Rapper Azealia Banks, 27, recently took to Instagram to ask men to send her pictures of their 'buttholes' to show how her new soap line works

Invasive: In the Instagram post, she said the men who participated would receive a three-month supply of Bussy Boy, her male soap for the butt area

Straight forward: On a Twitter page for Azealia's beauty line, the company released product packaging which described the soap as a 'lighten & tighten' bar

Revealed: The soap bars contain witch hazel, coconut oil, lactic acid, vitamin C and tea tree oil

She then in the caption encouraged any men interested in the project to send her a direct message through the social media app.

The two soaps, entitled 'Pussy Pop' and 'Bussy Pop' ($17), are part of the rapper's beauty line on her official website, CheapyXO.

Ingredients for the soaps include witch hazel, coconut oil, lactic acid, vitamin C, and tea tree oil, which all can work towards lightening and smoothing the area of skin where it is applied.

It remains unclear if Azealia received enough DMs to help with her beauty project, but people online couldn't get enough of the post.

One person commented: 'Crest Whitestrips is SHOOK.'

But other people couldn't help but say their own 'butthole' would look great for the campaign.

'Hell yeah I'll show my bootyhole,' one enthusiastic commenter wrote while another said 'mine is pretty.'

New: The soap products stuck to stereotypical gender norms with the females' bar a pink color and the mens' bar a blue color

Funny: Some commenters online didn't know what to make of Azealia's candid request

Hilarious: One commenter joked it was the least men could do after all the rapper has done for them

Intrigued: There were a number of men who were willing to share a picture for the product

Making waves: Azealia, pictured with one of the soap bars in Los Angeles, has also been working on more music besides launching these beauty products

Jokingly, some people said it was the least men could do since Azealia has already given them so much with her rapping career.

'She never asks you guys for anything,' one commenter wrote. 'It's the least you can do.'

In a Twitter account believed to be linked to Azealia's new beauty line, the company posted product images for the two different soaps.

Advertised across the soap is a slogan: 'Keep it tight, aight?'

It also states the bar of soap is meant to 'lighten and tighten' the area it is used on while also turning it from a 'hot mess' to 'hotness'. The soap bars for both men and women come in a 'candied grape' flavor.

Other product on her website include body peels, oils, and a retinoic acid face scrub that also aids in lightening the skin.

Besides launching this new beauty line, Azealia also recently released new music and has been touring around California to promote her songs.
A friend you havent seen in a while is sporting a stunning new winter coat. How do you know?

Perhaps youve seen a picture of her proudly parading the new purchase on Facebook or Instagram. Or perhaps she sent you a quick snap from the changing room.

Now you want one, too. So what was it that really caught your eye? Was it the flattering cut, the fluffy texture that looked so warm and inviting  or the stand-out neon pink panel on the back?

Even if you are not one of the increasing number of women using social media to window-shop, it is these eye-catching details that reflect a new reality: High Street brands and popular boutique labels are now actively designing clothes and accessories with these all- important photo opportunities (known as photo ops) in mind.

Many women scroll through Instagram looking for style inspiration and wouldnt dream of wearing a new dress without posting a selfie of their ootd (outfit of the day).

These days, many women scroll through Instagram looking for style inspiration and wouldnt dream of wearing a new dress without posting a selfie of their ootd (outfit of the day). But do the outfits look as good offline as they do online?

So the new consumer battlefield for clothes brands is to come up with designs that will photograph well and stand out from the crowd.

Ghost, the Nineties label best known for its silky slip dresses, has enjoyed a revival thanks, in part, by realising that statement prints photograph better than the more muted colour palette traditionally associated with the brand.

Statement prints will always photograph the best, explains creative director Sameera Azeem, so the classic capsule collection now includes prints, both modern and graphic or feminine and floral.

The growing army of fashion bloggers, meanwhile, scours the High Street for pieces that will become a talking point, and many women now like to share pictures of their purchases in online fashion forums.

Bloggers, meanwhile, are keen to set trends, and are on the look-out for photogenic pieces that will grab peoples attention.

Kelly Eastwood, of blog The London Chatter, admits: Bright colours, pom-poms, vivid prints  these get great engagement. They are the fashion equivalents of posting a photo of an avocado or a cupcake.

While we want to feel that we have our own individual style, labels are increasingly looking at online traction when designing seasonal collections.

So will these key autumn trends look as good on you in the flesh as they will in photographs?

Say it with a sassy slogan

Nothing makes more of a statement than . . . a statement, emblazoned across your chest. T-shirts and sweaters with messages ranging from the cute  Cherie at French Connection, to the powerful We Should All Be Feminists at Dior  make for a popular Instagram post.

Its a great way to make your point, says a spokesman at French Connection, and an easy way for us to achieve brand affiliation.

Monogramming your accessories is another trend that photographs well. And, of course, carrying a bag with your name on it is another way to advertise yourself.

Shirts and jumpers with slogans are a great way to make a point - look at this outfit for example. Pink jumper, 49, johnlewis.com; T-shirt, 35, and check skirt, 55, both hush-uk.com

Let your style roar!

Leopard is as powerful in person as it is in photographs, explains blogger Kelly Eastwood of the print that is everywhere this season

Leopard is as powerful in person as it is in photographs, explains blogger Kelly Eastwood (@TheLondonChatter) of the print that is everywhere this season.

All High Street brands have tapped in to the trend and are now vying for our custom by adding extra eye-catching details in the hope their leopard print offering will be the one we want.

The M&S design team cleverly added a bright pink side stripe to one of its leopard print tea dresses and the eye-catching frock worth 39.50 has sold out.

Then theres a kaftan with a smattering of polka dots on top, upping the photographic anti once again.

Other brands such as Hush offer customers a more subtle way to flaunt the trend with a leopard print cashmere scarf.

Theres a level of leopard to suit us all, with you deciding how loud to roar, says Kelly.

All High Street brands have tapped in to the leopard print trend and are now vying for our custom by adding extra eye-catching details. Leopard dot kaftan dress, was 79 now 42, stories.com; scarf, 159, hush-uk.com

Standout handbags to be the envy of others

Accessories are much more visible thanks to Instagram, says celebrity stylist and fashion critic, Alex Longmore. Large circle bag, 35, accessorize.com

Accessories are much more visible thanks to Instagram, says celebrity stylist and fashion critic, Alex Longmore.

We can zoom in and look at detail now so designers are producing bags with this in mind. The shape is also key.This summers trend for circular straw bags, seen everywhere from Zara to Marks & Spencer, added a new dimension to both an outfit  and a photo.

The circle shape proved to be so popular there are now eye-catching autumn versions which fashion bloggers are sure to snap up  and soon maybe you will too.

Cross-body bags are another social media-fuelled trend which are worn to add a splash of colour or print to an outfit.

Stores such as Accessorize encourage customers to post pictures of their purchases online with the hashtag Accessorizer to show others how theyve decided to style their new look.

Cult brand Gaias sculptural bags have stunning details that photograph like mini works of art, making them hugely popular with the style-conscious It-crowd on Instagram.

The circle shape handbag proved to be so popular there are now eye-catching autumn versions which fashion bloggers are sure to snap up. STAUD grace crushed velvet tote, 210, net-a-porter.com

Midi skirts have maximum impact

Midi-length skirts and dresses have proved to be photo favourites  and are fast becoming a staple in many womens wardrobes.

They are incredibly versatile  a midi skirt can be worn with a sweater and tights in winter and a T-shirt in summer.

It can be dressed up with heels or down with trainers. Its a look that signals both femininity and attitude, which is a popular stance among bloggers.

Midi skirts and long dresses, such as the Montana from L.K.Bennett (295), are favoured by older women who post fashion selfies because theyre more flattering. Younger women like the fact theyre less revealing.

Midi-length skirts and dresses have proved to be photo favourites  and are fast becoming a staple in many womens wardrobes. Steph skirt, 215, rixo.co.uk

Back is the new front

There is something very seductive about exposing your back. Its sexy but more discreet than showing off your cleavage, says photographer Sara McKinnon, who works with up-and-coming brands on their visual strategy.

Relative newcomer Ganni has tapped into this with the Julliard sweater, (198, net-a-porter.com), with its open back and ribbon details which sells so well that the brand remakes it every season in a different colour for new impact.

This winter a Boden classic coat has a stand-out colour-block panel at the back.

There is something very seductive about exposing your back. Its sexy but more discreet than showing off your cleavage, says photographer Sara McKinnon, who works with up-and-coming brands on their visual strategy

Ganni has tapped into this with the Julliard sweater, (198, net-a-porter.com), with its open back and ribbon details which sells so well that the brand remakes it every season in a different colour for new impact

Head-turning winter heels

Structural heels, which admittedly dont look very comfortable to wear, are having their moment in the spotlight. Shoes look better shot as a still life, and a close up really lends itself to intricate details like a statement heel, explains celebrity stylist and fashion critic, Alex Longmore.

A full length of a model doesnt look great in a traditional Instagram square picture because the proportions are off and you cant really see the shoes.

High-end accessories designer Charlotte Olympia is known for her outfit-elevating statement shoes but now even High Street brands Topshop and Zara are producing footwear with picture perfect architectural details such as round wooden heels.

Structural heels, which admittedly dont look very comfortable to wear, are having their moment in the spotlight. Ankle boots, 375, lkbennett.com

Attention-seeking tassels, pom-poms and faux fur

Faux fur, fringing, ruffles, pom-poms, mohair, tassels, knits or any kind of texture will bring depth to a photo for instant Insta-appeal.

Playing around with different fabrics will keep things interesting by giving your image a multi-dimensional effect, says photographer Sara McKinnon.

British brand Shrimps (shrimps.co.uk) knows how to work this Insta-trend well. The fluffy rainbow-hued faux fur coats were a runaway success when they launched a few years ago thanks to endless photos of celebrities and influencers wearing them.

This summers Insta It-bag doing the rounds on social media was the Antonia beaded box bag made from a cluster of faux pearls.

Meanwhile, the pom-pom trend encompasses everything from earrings to edging on bags, details on clothing and even interiors. Homeware is increasingly designed to be photogenic, too.

Faux fur, fringing, ruffles, pom-poms, mohair, tassels, knits or any kind of texture will bring depth to a photo for instant Insta-appeal. Faux fur collar, 41, helenmoore.com

Be bold and bright in black colours

Who wants to look at pictures of something black or grey?

Block colours, clashing colours, multi colours  anything bright is obviously more appealing visually, so we are now seeing more cheerful brights all year round.

The more colourful a design, the more impact, says designer Rae Feather, whose label has been built up by the success of a strong Instagram presence, thanks to such appealing little quirks as brightly coloured detail on bags and shoes.

Meanwhile, the simple lines of a block-colour skirt make for a more structural photograph, highlighting an elegant shape rather than hiding it with pattern and frills.

To stand out from the woman next to you, shoppers are also looking for basics like trousers, jumpers, shirts and T-shirts in bold colours that will make a statement and prompt the question: Where did you get that from?
Over-the-top runway trends rarely work in the real world, but Christopher Kane's 800 ($1,050) heels with sponges have defied the odds and are now sold out.

The bizarre stilettos first debuted at the designer's London Fashion Week show in 2017 and are adorned with strips of sponge on the toe and heel.

Although many were baffled by the unconventional design, it looks like the trend has only grown in popularity over the past year.

Say what? Christopher Kane's 800 ($1,050) heels with sponges have sold out

New trend? The bizarre stilettos first debuted on the runway at the designer's London Fashion Week show in 2017

Sparkle! A version of the shoes that was being sold online featured crystal embellishments

Tammy Kane, Christopher Kane's sister and the deputy creative director of the brand, was seen wearing a pair of the sponge-covered slingbacks while attending a welcome reception for London Fashion Week on Tuesday.

Disappointment! The shoes are currently sold out on the Christopher Kane website

In addition to the yellow sponge detailing, the black slingbacks also featured crystal embellishments on the toe.

Tammy wore her brother's designs from head to toe, paring her peculiar footwear with a 175 ($225) black T-shirt with 'More Joy' splashed across the front and a 1,295 ($1,695) diamond zipper skirt.

She was joined by her designer brother and her friend Samantha Cameron, the wife of former British Prime Minister David Cameron.

The designer's sister Tammy Kane (far right) wore the unconventional heels on Tuesday. She is pictured with her brother Christopher and friend Samantha Cameron

Style: The brand's deputy creative director wore the label from head to toe and paired the shoe with a 175 ($225) T-shirt a and a 1,295 ($1,695) diamond zipper skirt

Jazzy! Tammy was wearing the version of the shoe that was listed on the website (pictured), rather than the style showcased on the catwalk

While its understandable that Tammy would wear the shoes in support of both her brother and the company she works for, she isn't the only one who is rocking them.

A year after the shoes debuted on the runway, they are sold out despite their heft price tag.

A similar pair of embellished Christopher Kane slingbacks retailed for 490 ($645), but the sponge detailing actually caused the price to jump to 800 ($1,051) heels.

However, not everyone is a fan of the bizarre heel.

Writer Guy Walters took to Twitter to share a photo of Tammy wearing modeling the eye-catching footwear on Tuesday.

Added touch: The designer also designed a strappy black stiletto made with light blue sponges

Who would have guessed: A year after the shoes debuted on the runway, they are sold out despite their heft price tag

Just saying: Writer Guy Waters joked that they looked like they were 'made from scouring sponges'

DIY: Someone else suggested saving money by buying your own kitchen sponges

Maybe: Writer Janice Turner deduced that the sponges were on the heel to prevent blisters

Confused: One person noted it looked like the sponges should have been left in the shoe box

'Extraordinary shoes worn by Sam Cam's friend. They appear to be made from scouring sponges,' he wrote.

'Is that to stop them rubbing? Id get blisters just looking at those straps,' Janice Turner commented. 'I have some very *rubby sandals so I might insert sponges. #fashion.'

'Lmao dont need to spend 800 on them just buy a pack of sponges at a 1 and put them in your shoes and hey presto youve saved 799!' someone else added.

Of course, this isn't the first time the designer has raised eyebrows with his bizarre footwear.

Last September, he sent models down the runway wearing his limited-edition Crocs topped with natural gemstones during his Spring 2017 fashion show.

Despite costing 10 times the price of regular Crocs, the 285 ($375) shoe also ended up selling out.
A man who claims he is happily married can't stop watching pornography.

The New Zealand man, married for 19 years, has reached out online to seek help for his addiction.

Although his wife is aware of his obsession, and it's upsets her, he can't seem to stop.

Writing to Dear Mrs Salisbury, the man said he had always been faithful to his wife but had been watching pornographic videos for 14 years.

'I think that if I watch porn and masturbate and release the pressure I am not hurting anyone,' he said.

'My wife has known for years that I have watched porn on and off and it has hurt her at times because she thinks she is not attractive enough.'

A man has reached out online to seek help for his addiction, which is a 14-year dependency on porn that is hurting his wife

Despite his porn addiction, the man said his wife pleases him sexually in 'most ways possible' and they have a lots of sex.

His wife 'amazes' him with how sexual she can be and after almost a decade of marriage they're still having sex up to four times a week.

He is aware that she's going to a sex therapist and that he also needs help for his addiction.

Mrs Salisbury responded to his letter by telling him that he is fortunate to have maintained a healthy relationship, even though he has chosen to continue to do something that is hurting his wife.

He is aware that she's going to a sex therapist and he realises now he has gotten to the point where he needs help for his addiction

Mrs Salisbury explained the man is fortunate to have maintained a healthy relationship, even though he has chosen to continue to do something that is hurting his wife

Signs of porn addiction - Being unable to stop using porn or stop engaging in the behaviours associated with porn, despite repeated attempts to do so. - Experiencing cravings to view porn. Much like substance users report feeling strong urges to use drugs, porn addicts can experience strong urges to view porn. - Becoming angry, hostile, or irritable when asked to stop using porn. - Keeping all or part of ones porn use secret from loved ones. - Feeling as though one is living a double or secret life because of porn use. Source: Project Know Advertisement

To understand whether he has an addiction Ms Salisbury said there are multiple things he needs to consider.

'Do you feel compelled to watch porn? If there is a day when you do not have partnered sex nor masturbate to porn are you antsy, irritable, hanging out for an opportunity? Do you lie or take risks like watching porn at work?' She asked.

Ms Salisbury recommended that he take practical steps to block his usual forms of access to porn and organise it so that his wife can track his viewing history, although she said it isn't the wife's job to do so.

Ms Salisbury said reducing the amount of time he watches porn and how often he masturbates will help him understand his compulsive habit and give it the flick.

She also told him examine whether watching porn is to reassure things like his masculinity and desirability.

Her final recommendation was to seek professional help from a sex therapist and clarify with his wife's therapist.
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The kitchen is said to be the heart of the home - a statement which rings even more true when its owner is an internationally lauded cupcake entrepreneur.

Elise Strachan, who built a her baking empire thanks to the sweet treat, has recently sold her Gold Coast mansion, with real estate pictures showing a kitchen thoroughly fit for a cupcake queen.

Hallmarked by a glossy white finish and over-sized island bench, the room is sun-drenched, with light streaming in from several sets of sliding glass doors.

Since her YouTube channel's initial launch in 2011, Elise Strachan's baking success has continued to grow, garnering over three-million subscribers

The kitchen is said to be the heart of the home - a statement which rings even more true when its owner is an internationally lauded cupcake entrepreneur

Elise Strachan, who built a her baking empire thanks to the sweet treat, has recently sold her Gold Coast mansion, with pictures showing a kitchen thoroughly fit for a cupcake queen

Also spotted is a near-industrial size stainless steel fridge - presumably brimming with ingredients.

Finished off with a seamless glide between bench top and drawer space, the home's new owner may have also been enticed by its gleaming stove top and exhaust hood.

Eagle-eyed followers of Mrs Strachan's YouTube channel My Cupcake Addiction may also recognise the space as the shooting location for many of her popular videos.

For those eager to put their skills to the test, an adjacent butler's pantry is large and equipped enough to fulfill every budding baker's dream

The mother-of-two has also extended her empire to cookbooks, while splitting her time between Australia, New York and Los Angeles

And for those eager to put their skills to the test, an adjacent butler's pantry is large and equipped enough to fulfill every budding baker's dream.

Rivaling an average kitchen in both space and functionality, the pantry appears to have enough storage and bench space to run Mrs Strachan's now-international baking operation.

Marketed as an 'ultimate dream home', the house is primly positioned in the upmarket Tallebudgera Park estate, south of the Gold Coast, and is surrounded by million-dollar properties.

Hallmarked by a glossy white finish and over-sized island bench, the room is sun-drenched, with light streaming in from several sets of sliding glass doors

Marketed as an 'ultimate dream home', the house is primly positioned in the upmarket Tallebudgera Park estate, south of the Gold Coast, and is surrounded by million-dollar properties

The house's gilded new owner is also set to enjoy 'lazy Sundays, summer barbeques and a game of pool in a stunning outdoor pavilion' upon move in

Lauded by real estate agents as a home which promotes 'the simple pleasures in life', the property also boasts the privacy likely craved by the bonafide Internet celebrity.

The house's gilded new owner is also set to enjoy 'lazy Sundays, summer barbeques and a game of pool in a stunning outdoor pavilion' upon move in.

Since her YouTube channel's initial launch in 2011, Mrs Strachan's baking success has continued to grow, garnering over three-million subscribers.

The mother-of-two has also extended her empire to cookbooks, while splitting her time between Australia, New York and Los Angeles.
Australia's biggest family is about to get even bigger.

Supermum Jeni Bonell, 49, and her husband Ray, 50, are already the proud parents of 16 children, aged between four and 28.

The pair have Jesse, 28, Brooke, 27, Claire, 24, Natalie, 23, Karl, 21, Sam, 20, Cameron, 18, Sabrina, 17, Tim, 15, Brandon, 13, Eve, 12, Nate, 11, Rachel, 9, Eric, 8, Damian, 7, and Katie, 4.

Appearing on the Today show, the couple, from Queensland's Toowoomba, announced the family are welcoming yet another baby into their huge brood.

Australia's supermum Jeni Bonell has 16 children under her wing, aged between four and 28

Appearing on the Today show, the couple, from Queensland's Toowoomba, announced the family are welcoming yet another baby into their huge brood

'Our family is growing,' Mrs Bonell told the Today show as she laughed.

'But I'm not expecting. We are getting our very first two grandbabies. Our eldest daughter Brooke is expecting her first baby and our second eldest son and his wife is also expecting their first baby.

'So we get to be grandparents.'

Speaking about their thoughts on changing nappies all over again, Mr Bonell said: 'Yeah I can keep changing nappies, that's alright.

'I've been doing it for a few years now so I'm pretty confident.'

Today co-host Karl Stefanovic pressed Brooke Mathews - who's currently pregnant with her first baby - on whether she planned on having a large family like her mother.

'I don't think so,' she said, laughing.

'I think I'll just get through one. Let's get through one and see how I go after that and I think I'm a little behind of where I should be if I was going to have that many.'

The couple's eldest daughter Brooke (far right) is expecting her first baby

Speaking fondly about her mother falling pregnant over the years, Brooke said: 'I don't think you understand what you go through with pregnancy until you do it yourself.

'I've watched mum go through it and yes, it's amazing some of the things I've experienced myself and I just turn to mum and go "is this a thing?" and she goes "yep, that happens".

'It's good to have her here for all the advice. I just think she's an amazing role model and a fantastic mum and I'm really glad she's my mum.'

The latest baby announcements just months after Mrs Bonell revealed she was diagnosed with thyroid cancer after doctors found seven lumps in her throat.

Her husband said he was devastated following the shock cancer diagnosis - as he feared about the heartbreaking possibility of having to raise the children on his own.

Jeni Bonell and her husband Ray are proud parents of 16 children, aged between four and 28

'You sort of always feel like you're bulletproof but obviously getting that news from the doctor did rock our world quite a bit,' he told A Current Affair in July.

'It's very scary knowing you may lose your life partner to a terrible disease like this, and then on top of our situation to have to raise 16 kids on your own is very, very scary. I definitely need her around to do that.'

The 49-year-old mother revealed how a routine check-up that was meant to go for 10 minutes led to a terrifying four-hour ordeal.

'It was a bit of a shock to go to a specialist and have them say the word "cancer" to me,' she said.

'You just never think it's going to be you so I was just really unprepared for that.'

When the parents broke the heartbreaking news to their children, they were met with mixed emotions.

'When we spoke to the kids, we had some that went really quiet, some burst into tears and some that weren't angry with me but I think they just wanted to push it away, they didn't want to know.' Ms Bonell said.

The parents spoke about their whirlwind journey after the mother was diagnosed with cancer

Against all odds, the mother was given a good prognosis after undergoing surgery to remove her thyroid.

She now has to get tested every six months for the next 15 years to ensure the cancer doesn't return.

Despite the cancer scare, the brave mother has since 'soldiered on' with her life to spend quality time with her loving brood.

'I've learnt that I'm loved, I think as mums we spend all our time serving other people and some days, not always, we feel unloved and taken for granted,' she said.

And with 16 children under her wing, Ms Bonell hasn't ruled out baby number 17.

'A lot of those doctors have gone "okay, I'm happy with your results, now go have more children", or maybe I have to wait for grandbabies,' she said, laughing.

Earlier this week, Ms Bonell hinted about having another baby.

'We're always open to being blessed again but Ray has just turned 50, though we always say it ain't over till it's over,' she told Woman's Day magazine.

The family recently celebrated two of their children getting married.

Last October, daughter Brooke tied the knot to her long term partner Jamie and in March this year, their son Karl got married to Claire in an intimate church wedding.

And more wedding bells are on the way after their third-born child Claire recently announced her engagement to Daniel - and their son Jesse proposed to his 'soulmate' April.

'No grandbabies yet but we're expecting a whole bunch in one go... then I will be back in baby heaven again,' Mrs Bonell said.

The couple have Jesse, 28, Brooke, 27, Claire, 24, Natalie, 23, Karl, 21, Sam, 20, Cameron, 18, Sabrina, 17, Tim, 15, Brandon, 13, Eve, 12, Nate, 11, Rachel, 9, Eric, 8, Damian, 7, and Katie, 4

In May last year, the family were left reeling after Mrs Bonell needed to undergo a life-threatening throat surgery to remove her thyroid.

She saw a doctor after she began experiencing a nagging cough, only to be told a number of cancerous nodules was found in her throat.

Astonishingly, she made a remarkable recovery after she fought against cancer.

'I've had to find a new way to live life fearlessly, knowing it's a type of cancer that could come back,' she told the magazine.

In September 2016, the mother told Daily Mail Australia she spends up to $600 a week on groceries to feed her family of 18.

The grocery bill would include 17 three-liter bottles of milk and 14 boxes of cereal, loaves of bread - and 45 tubs of yoghurt.

At home, she would do between six to seven loads of washing a day.
When luxury fashion house Balenciaga's spring 2018 runway collection featured a parade of models in baggy denim jeans, over-sized trouser suits and purposely ugly running shoes perhaps the most unlikely style trend of the decade was born.

Enter: 'Dad chic', or as Vogue prefer to call it, 'dadcore', an avant garde twist on sartorial sophistication that has swiftly made unsightly clothing the go-to look of the moment.

Never far behind the curve, Adidas has quickly capitalised on the clunky shoe trend with the recent release of their new Falcon design.

The sought-after style comes in all-white, black and white and multi-coloured patterns and retails at the likes of Hype and The Iconic for $150.

Adidas has quickly capitalised on the clunky shoe trend with the recent release of their new Falcon design (pictured on brand ambassador Kylie Jenner)

The sought-after style comes in all-white, black and white and multi-coloured patterns

A throwback to the brands 1997 Falcon Dorf model, the latest sneakers have been endorsed by billionaire business mogul Kylie Jenner as the official face of their current campaign.

Kylie has shared Instagram pictures wearing black, white and pink as well as pure white variations of the shoe.

The newly-launched style sold out from Australian online stores in less than 24 hours after hitting sites earlier this month.

A popular all-white version of the shoe flew off the shelves after being seen on celebrities such as Kourtney Kardashian.

Model Hailey Baldwin is a fellow face of the Falcon, while catwalk queens Winnie Harlow and Leomie Anderson have also been spotted sporting various colour-ways of the functional footwear

The Falcon range is sure to be welcomed by high fashion lovers thanks to its similarity to the coveted Balenciaga Triple S sneakers

Model Hailey Baldwin is a fellow face of the Falcon, while catwalk queens Winnie Harlow and Leomie Anderson have also been spotted sporting various colour-ways of the functional footwear on the runway in London this week.

The Falcon range is sure to be welcomed by high fashion lovers thanks to its similarity to the coveted Balenciaga Triple S sneakers, albeit at almost one eight of the price.

Adidas' Vice President of Global Brand Communications Alegra O'Hare told Forbes the Falcon represents the 'confident mindset of a new generation of female creative consumers'.



'Falcon is for those who do what they want, regardless of what anyone thinks  it's not for the faint-hearted, but for those who know that living unapologetically is the only way to live.'
Forget competitors, the biggest challenge IKEA has faced so far in India are pests. The Swedish home furnishing giant is facing bad press once again after a customer found an insect inside a chocolate cake while his daughter was eating it. This happens to be second such incident at IKEA's Hyderabad store in the span of a month.

While reports suggest that the store was reportedly fined Rs 5,000 for the lacunae in hygiene, IKEA has denied reports of it being penalised. The Swedish company, however, did express 'regret' over the incident.

"In the IKEA Hyderabad restaurant when a customer was eating a chocolate cake which he bought, a fly was seen on the cake which eventually flew away. We regret this and apologize to our customer for the unfortunate experience. We are taking steps to avoid such occurrences. However, no samples were collected or inspection carried out by GHMC on the said incident. Further, IKEA has not been issued any notice or fined by the corporation," an IKEA spokesperson told India Today.

After the incident on September 12, the customer was quick to tweet the images of the cake with the insect perched on it. He even made a point to tag State Cabinet Minister KT Rama Rao, Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation (GHMC) and Hyderabad Police in the tweet. He followed it with a video which showed the insect crawling all over the cake, in response to IKEA's claim that the insect 'flew away'.

look at the right side of the cake its moving and its not a flying insect as was suggested by IKEA manager! pic.twitter.com/fLR1u1VgM1 - Kishore2018 (@Kishore20181) September 17, 2018

Earlier, IKEA India had voluntarily stopping sales of its popular vegetarian biryani and samosas, after a caterpillar was found in its vegetable biryani earlier this month. The municipal corporation had imposed a fine Rs 11,500 fine on IKEA. The episode had not only proved to be a major embarrassment for the Swedish furniture giant but also brought it under the scanner of the municipal authorities, who inspected the restaurant and collected food samples for bacteriological analysis.
An English National Ballet dancer revealed she has faced criticism for her decision not to wear traditional pink tights on stage.

American-born ballerina Precious Adams performs in brown tights that more closely match her skin colour, arguing she wants to 'look her best' in front of an audience.

Speaking to the Evening Standard, the 23-year-old star said she had the support of ENB director Tamara Rojo but admitted some traditionalists think her costumes are 'incorrect'.

Taking a stand: American-born ballerina Precious Adams, pictured on stage in 2014, performs in brown tights that more closely match her skin colour, arguing traditional pink tights change the aesthetic as they create a disconnect between her upper and lower body

Supportive: Precious Adams is backed in her decision by ENB director Tamara Rojo, 44, pictured in June last year with boyfriend and ENB principal dancer Isaac Hernandez, 28

'When I was a student I never really thought about the uniform  it was just pink tights and pink shoes,' Miss Adams said.

But once she turned professional she realised the tights no longer 'made sense'.

'It changes the aesthetic  you want there to be continuation between your upper and lower body and theres a big disconnect if I put pink tights on,' she continued.

For traditionalists, pink tights and the tutu are an integral part of the art of ballet.

'Theyre like: "But pink tights, thats what ballet is",' Miss Adams said. 'They think me wearing brown tights in a tutu is somehow "incorrect".'

Step forward: Ballerina Precious Adams, originally from Canton, Detroit, explained dance companies would have to embrace new ideas as they become more diverse. Pictured, the dancer on stage with Cesar Corrales at Sadler's Wells Theatre, London, in March 2017

But the ballerina, originally from Canton, Detroit, explained dance companies would have to embrace new ideas as they become more diverse.

She added: 'But I want to look my best on stage. Im not colour blind and I think it ruins the line of my body.'

Miss Adams has criss-crossed the world with dance, training in Toronto, Monte Carlo and at the Bolshoi in Moscow before joining the ENB in 2014.

The dance company has made headlines in recent months, primarily due to the relationship between Miss Rojo, 44, and male principal Isaac Hernandez, who is 16 years her junior.

Forward thinking: Miss Adams said ENB director Miss Rojo, pictured on stage with boyfriend Hernandez in March 2017, should be praised for embracing dancers' 'individuality'

There were rumours of discord backstage at the ENB, where it was claimed her appointment was followed by the departure of as many as a third of its some 60 dancers.

There has been speculation that the uncompromising approach of Ms Rojo - herself an acclaimed ballerina - and even suggestions her younger boyfriend was being given preferential treatment - were to blame.

But Hernandez spoke out to insist conditions have improved for dancers under his partner's helm.

He also rubbished claims their relationship - the couple have been together for almost two years - has benefited him professionally, pointing out that he joined the English National Ballet as a professional dancer.
A woman with a rare and incurable blood disorder is relying on an experimental horse hormone treatment to stay alive - after she was given just three months to live.

YouTuber Stephanie Matto, from Connecticut, US, began noticing back in 2016 that she would develop large black and purple bruises on her skin from people simply brushing up against her - or even carrying her shopping bags.

The 27-year-old was also suffering extreme fatigue and uncontrollable bouts of sickness, and so went for blood tests.

Her doctors diagnosed the cause of her declining health as a severe case of rare bone marrow disorder, known as aplastic anaemia.

With no known cure for her condition, doctors told Stephanie about a new treatment in which horse proteins are injected into a patient to help induce an auto-immune reaction in the body - and stop the immune system from attacking blood cells.

She had a second round of the treatment at the start of this month, because she is yet to have been matched with a donor on the US bone marrow transplant registry.

YouTube blogger Stephanie Matto, from Connecticut, US, was diagnosed with a rare and incurable bone marrow disorder known as aplastic anaemia where her immune system would attack her blood cells

The 27-year-old had to have almost daily blood transfusions to treat her incurable disorder but she admitted she didn't feel like she could keep this routine going for much longer, after she was only expected to live for another three months

Stephanie said she first began noticing symptoms after large black and purple bruises would appear on her skin from contact with other people brushing up against her and carrying her shopping bags

The blogger first noticed there was something wrong after her hands became severely bruised from carrying her shopping bags.

'In July 2016 I began to suffer from strange symptoms, but I decided to put it to the back of my mind and enjoy my summer,' said Stephanie.

'I went to Czech Republic to visit my family, regardless of the increasing number of bruises on my body and my inability to walk up a flight of stairs without losing my breath.

'Every single time my body would brush against anything or even carrying my bag would result in a bruise. Someone could put their hand on my arm and within an hour I'd have a bruise in the shape of fingerprints.

'The most intense bruise I got was when I was carrying shopping bags home one day and a few hours later I looked at my hands and they were a sea of blue-green. It looked as if all the veins in my hands had burst out blood.'

After months of blood tests and blood transfusions in hospital, Stephanie was told of her devastating diagnosis and began having blood transfusions every other day.

But as there was no cure, she didn't feel like she could keep this routine going for much longer, after she was only expected to live for another three months.

Doctors told Stephanie about an experimental treatment that had shown high rates of recovery after discovering there were no matches for her on the transplant registry.

The experimental treatment involves being injected with horse proteins to induce an auto-immune reaction in the body, to shut down the immune system and in turn stop it from attacking your blood cells.

The effect of the treatment is to simulate normal platelet production from the bone marrow, which Stephanie couldn't produce naturally.

Doctors told Stephanie about an experimental horse hormone treatment that had shown high rates of recovery after discovering there were no bone marrow matches for her on the transplant registry

After months of blood tests and blood transfusions in hospital, Stephanie was told of her devastating diagnosis and began having blood transfusions every other day

Stephanie was initially expected to live for another three months after her diagnosis in 2016 but now after the horse hormone treatment she has been able to remain healthy enough

'A week after returning from my travels I had blood work done and although I expected some bad news, I didn't expect the likes of what ended up happening.

'I woke up the following morning with a frantic voicemail from the phlebotomist telling me to get to the closest hospital straight away.

'I asked some of the doctors if I was okay or if I was dying. What worried me the most is that their only answer was 'we don't know'. Each day I would be pumped full of blood products and then the next day my numbers would crash down again.

'Eventually my doctor came in to tell me I had a very rare bone marrow failure called aplastic anaemia. I had to go and see a cancer specialist in another hospital and continue to receive lifesaving transfusions every other day to stay alive.

'If I didn't do all of this, I was only expected to live for another three months.'

Stephanie had to ride back and forth from hospital and she said it was like 'a very bad dream that I was constantly hoping to wake up from'.

'In the end, I found the easiest way of coping was to just emotionally put myself on pause, so I shut myself down and faced each day as if nothing really mattered.

'It felt so weird to rely on blood products from strangers to stay alive, but I realised that I not only need the blood to live but they also helped me feel better, so I began to look forward to them.

'By the time my red blood was low, I couldn't wait to get to the hospital and feel human again. It really made me realise just how important blood donations are.

'One day my doctors told me about a new experimental treatment being tested in Maryland which had remarkable rates of recovery in patients.

'Unfortunately, it wasn't a cure, but I decided that this was my best option, so me and my mom packed up our stuff and made the six-hour drive to Maryland.'

Stephanie had to ride back and forth from hospital and she said it was like 'a very bad dream that I was constantly hoping to wake up from'

Once she had completed the month-long treatment using the horse proteing, Stephanie was discharged. It was hoped that the immunosuppressive treatment would regenerate her bone marrow in up to six months' time

The experimental treatment involves being injected with horse proteins to induce an auto-immune reaction in the body, to shut down the immune system and in turn stop it from attacking your blood cells

Once she had completed the month-long treatment, Stephanie was discharged. It was hoped that the immunosuppressive treatment would regenerate her bone marrow in up to six months' time.

While still having blood transfusions, Stephanie nervously awaited any sign of reaction from the treatment with regular blood tests.

'Around the four-month mark, my bone marrow managed to spit out some blood cells. It wasn't much, and it was nowhere near a normal, healthy level, but it was enough to escape having another transfusion,' said Stephanie.

'By six-months, I was deemed to have had a partial response to treatment and was declared in remission. I finally felt like I was on my way back to having a normal life.

'Unfortunately, a few months down the line my blood levels went downhill again. I felt like I was back to square one when I needed to get a blood transfusion again after being transfusion free for four months.

'It was devastating, and I felt like a prisoner to this disease. Remission was like being on parole, but now I was back behind bars.'

At the start of September this year, Stephanie returned to Maryland to visit the doctors at the specialist treatment facility.

Stephanie and her mother decided the experimental drug was her best option and they packed up their stuff and made the six-hour drive to Maryland

At the start of September 2018, Stephanie returned to Maryland to visit the doctors at the specialist treatment facility. The doctors agreed that Stephanie's outcome from the treatment wasn't ideal and they offered another round of the immunosuppressive treatment

Unfortunately, a bone marrow transplant is no longer an option for Stephanie as no matches were returned in the transplant registry and she is just trying to live every day as it comes

The doctors agreed that Stephanie's outcome from the treatment wasn't ideal and they offered another round of the immunosuppressive treatment.

Unfortunately, a bone marrow transplant is no longer an option for Stephanie as no matches were returned in the transplant registry.

'The blood levels I was living with were enough to get me by as a young individual, but I want to get more out of life,' Stephanie said.

'A bone marrow transplant was off the table because I had no matches. I couldn't believe that there wasn't a single match in the registry for me. I would never have a cure, I would only have these temporary bandages.

'I have no desire to go through another round of treatment because that would be a big commitment. I try not to focus too much on the numbers or the needles.

'If I could take anything away from this journey it's simply to have patience and gratitude. It's a shame it took me getting a rare blood disease to learn these virtues.

'I won the bad health lottery because I'm literally one-in-a-million, but I have learned more I this year than I had in my entire life.

'I am more compassionate towards others who are struggling. Sometimes it's when we're faced with death that we really learn what living means.'

To find out more about Stephanie's rare condition, you can visit @stepankaaa


She is in the throes of wedding planning ahead of her nuptials last month, but Princess Eugenie is still making time for important charity work.

The bride-to-be revealed she visited Serbia last week to learn more about the work being done to stamp out the trade of vulnerable people, particularly women.

The royal, 28, shared photos from the trip showing her meeting charity officials, volunteers and survivors connected to two charities based in Belgrade.

Charity work: Eugenie visited Serbia last week to learn more about the work being done to stamp out the trade of vulnerable people. Pictured, Eugenie on a visit to Astra to hear about its SOS hotline which provides support and services to survivors of trafficking

Meaningful change: Stops included a visit to a local bagel shop where charity Atina works to empower women through training them in business skills while running a successful store

The Instagram post won praise from followers who thanked the royal for going 'above and beyond' to help others at such a busy time.

Princess Eugenie was joined on the visit by representatives from the United Nations Trust Fund to End Violence Against Women.

The royal, daughter of Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson, is a supporter of the UN Trust Fund and co-founder of UK based The Anti-Slavery Collective.

The delegation visited two charities, Astra and Atina, which both receive money from the UN fund.

Creative change: Eugenie takes part in an art workshop during a visit to one of the charities

Recognition: Eugenie shared these photos showing her meeting charity officials, volunteers and survivors connected to two charities based in Belgrade

Revealing the trip on Instagram, Eugenie wrote: 'I visited Astra to hear about its SOS hotline which provides support and services to survivors of trafficking and Atina which works to prevent human trafficking of refugee women in the context of the current humanitarian crisis in Serbia as a host and transit country.

'What an incredibly eye opening visit meeting outstanding women doing brilliant work to survive and to support.'

Stops included a visit to a local bagel shop where Atina works to empower women through training them in business skills while running a successful store.

Support: The Instagram post won praise from followers who thanked the royal for going 'above and beyond' to help others at such a busy time

During the visit, Princess Eugenie said: 'I believe in being an advocate for the amazing work that organizations like ASTRA and ATINA are doing with the support of the UN Trust Fund and learning from them.

'Collectively we can end human trafficking and violence against women. Coming together for a common goal can affect change and motivate people to be a part of that change.'

The work was praised by royal supporters on Instagram. One posted: 'Thank you for highlighting this work. It's because women like you that we know about such work, and in turn, we can support them.'

Another wrote: 'Thank you for working as hard as you do!! And while planning a wedding. Congratulations.'

Princess Eugenie will tie the knot with Jack Brooksbank at St George's Chapel, Windsor Castle, on 12 October.
A Kim Jong Un lookalike had This Morning viewers fooled when he appeared on the show on Thursday.

Holly Willoughby and Phillip Schofield unexpectedly announced a world exclusive with 'Kim Jong Um'.

Suddenly a man bearing a striking resemblance to the North Korean dictator arrived on a specially-made red carpet followed by his infamous jogging bodyguards, before he made Holly and Phil kiss his hand to greet him.

It turned out that the man was actually a Chinese-Australian man called Howard X, who has been working as a professional lookalike since 2012.

Viewers were shocked by the reveal as many had been tricked into believing he was the real deal, with one tweeting: 'Genuinely thought that was Kim Jong Un!'

A Kim Jong Un lookalike appeared on This Morning on Thursday, arriving on a specially made red carpet and followed by the dictator's infamous jogging bodyguards (pictured)

The appearance of Kim Jong Un hadn't been announced in the line-up at the beginning of the show, so it came as a surprise when the presenters revealed he would be coming on.

Holly said: 'Hes taken some time out of his political diary to have a world exclusive chat with us.'

'Kim' then walked out to the sound of the North Korean national anthem as he waved to everyone in the studio.

Holly and Phil went to shake his hand before he offered it to them to kiss, which they did respectfully.

Viewers were shocked when it was revealed that it was actually a lookalike as they'd been tricked into believing it was the real deal (pictured), with one tweeting: 'Genuinely thought that was Kim Jong Un!'

He took a seat on the sofa and the pair called over a translator, who translated his quotes to English.

When asked about talks with South Korea, 'Kim' said: 'There will be no World War Three.. for now.'

The ruse didn't last for long as the group - including the stony faced dictator - burst out laughing, as 'Kim' revealed his true identity.

The big reveal left viewers in shock as many had believed that it was genuinely Kim Jong Un.

Holly Willoughby and Phillip Schofield said they had a 'world exclusive' with the North Korean leader. Pictured: Howard X as Kim Jong Un on This Morning

The lookalike appeared with his own translator (right with the lookalike on the left), but the show couldn't keep up the ruse and the group all burst into laughter

One tweeted: 'Hang on. I seem to have just turned on this morning and found Kim jong un on it?! #thismorning #whatthehell.'

'Genuinely thought that was Kim Jong-Un on #ThisMorning,' another posted with a laughing emoji.

A third wrote: 'For once not a bad lookalike tbf.'

Howard X said he realised he had a striking resemblance to the dictator when he was first introduced into the public eye.

The fake Kim even made Holly and Phil kiss his hand (pictured) as they referred to him as 'supreme leader' when he made his dramatic entrance

Phil was forced to apologise when Howard said he attempted to 'get a s**g' from the cheerleaders at the Korean Olympics because of his appearance. Pictured: Holly and Phil after Howard swore on This Morning

Howard said: 'I thought ''Wow this really looks like me, I can make a living as a genocidal maniac, or at least looking like one.'''

He caused a stir on This Morning when he said he attempted to seduce the cheerleaders at the Korean Olympics earlier this year.

'Being on Valentine's Day, being the god of North Korea, I thought I could actually get a s**g,' he said.

The moment shocked Holly and Phil, with Phil jumping in: 'Sorry about that! It may be acceptable in Australia but not here. How romantic you are.'
A fashion brand has been accused of 'poverty appropriation' for selling worn-out trainers that appear to be held together with tape.

Luxury label Golden Goose is selling pairs of the pre-distressed trainers with tape across the front and back of the shoe.

The sneakers, which were originally launched in 2016, are being sold in a new colour on the label's website for an astonishing Euro 420 or 372.

The brand has labelled the shoes 'vintage-inspired' with a 'tape trim at toe and heel.'

Venetian brand Golden Goose has come under fire for selling 'distressed' trainers featuring mock tape for 372

They are part of a collection by the Venice based label with pre-worn soles and a 'dirty' exterior, with prices still start at 290.

The trend has sparked outrage online over the past 24 hours with people accusing the company of 'glorifying poverty' taking o Twitter to share their disgust.

Joon Lee tweeted 'We've already got a problem if any clothing description says 'crumply, hold-it-all tape details a sneaker.'

Another Twitter user commented 'This is the world we live in. The rich imitating the poor.'

The luxury label has been accused of 'glorifying poverty' with many pointing out that for some this is a reality not a fashion statement

The trainers, which were retailing for 420 euros now appear to have been removed from the Golden Goose website following the backlash

Holly Wilson posted 'That is not COOL - my mother and her siblings ALL HAD TO WEAR TAPE on their shoes to school. My grandfather was fighting in WW1 & WW2 and there was no money for shoes.'

Zoe Watson tweeted 'Talk about rich man poor man. The fashion industry at its absolute worst. What's next? Makeup to make you look like an addict?'

Following the backlash the Venetian brand appears to have removed the taped trainers from its website, as they are no longer in stock.

Outraged Twitter users have shared their disgust on social media describing the brand as 'extremely distasteful'

MailOnline has contacted Golden Goose for a comment.

Bizarrely this is not the first time the brand has come under fire for this particular shoe which was first launched in 2016 in a shade of pink.

Scottish comedian Limmy was the first to criticise the brand at the time which he called 'poverty appropriation'.

The brand has previously launched the style in 2016, in a shade of pink (pictured), causing equally as much outrage back then

Scottish comedian Limmy was the first to criticise the brand at the time which he called 'poverty appropriation'

The 'distressed' shoes were widly mocked on Twitter with many comparing them to a range of clothes featured in the US comedy film, Zoolander.

Zoolander follows a narcissistic model played by Ben Stiller. One of the clothing lines he wears is called 'Derelicte'.

However, despite the widespread backlash the brand has continued to renew its distressed line of shoes from season to season.
Nicola Sturgeon was virtually unrecognisable today as she joined fellow Scottish party leaders to support a breast cancer charity today.

First Minister Sturgeon put her political views aside as she accompanied Scottish Conservatives leader Ruth Davidson, Scottish Labour Jackie Baillie, co-convenor Scottish Green Party and Scottish Lib Dems leader Willie Rennie and Patrick Harvie at Holyrood on Thursday to promote the foundation Breast Cancer Now.

The typically formal SNP leader cut a colourful appearance in a pastel pink wig, fuchsia scarf, and matching sunglasses all the while carrying a giant inflatable hammer.

First Minister Nicola Sturgeon (centre) was virtually unrecognisable as she and other Scottish ministers dressed in pink to encourage Scotland to donate to Breast Cancer Now. Pictured, left to right: Patrick Harvie, Willie Rennie, Sturgeon, Ruth Davidson and Jackie Baillie

Her fellow ministers looked equally vibrant in an array of hot pink accessories including Green party member Patrick Harvie who opted for a pair of fluorescent bunny ears.

The political leaders assembled to encourage Scots to support Breast Cancer Nows Wear It Pink fundraiser on Friday 19 October.

Back for its 17th year, the fundraiser calls on the public to wear the shade and make a donation to Breast Cancer Now.

Since the first wear it pink event in 2002, over 31 million has been raised to help fund Breast Cancer Nows world-class research into breast cancer.

The typically formal SNP leader cut a colourful appearance in a pastel pink wig, fuchsia scarf, and matching sunglasses all the while carrying a giant inflatable hammer

Sturgeon normally opts for a more muted palette when it comes to her wardrobe as she did so earlier today at Scottish Parliaments Questions today

Speaking at the event today Sturgeon said: Breast cancer remains the most common cancer for women in Scotland - every year around 4,700 women are diagnosed.

'Thats why fundraising events such as wear it pink remain as important as ever. Breast Cancer Nows wear it pink campaign is a fantastic way for fundraisers across Scotland to get involved and really make a difference.

'Money raised will support researchers to find new ways to detect, prevent and treat breast cancer  and ultimately stop the disease in its tracks.

'The Scottish Government is committed to supporting Breast Cancer Nows aim that by 2050 everyone who develops breast cancer will live  and live well. To achieve this ambition we must work together and take action now.'

Sturgeon couldn't help but laugh while taking a look at her appearance in the mirror after donning her pink accessories

Speaking at the event today Sturgeon said: 'The Scottish Government is committed to supporting Breast Cancer Nows aim that by 2050 everyone who develops breast cancer will live'

Baroness Delyth Morgan, Chief Executive at Breast Cancer Now, said: 'We are very grateful for the support of party leaders and we would like to thank them for coming together once again to wear it pink in support of Breast Cancer Now.

'Breast cancer is at a tipping point. Thanks to research survival rates are improving but more and more people are hearing the devastating words, its breast cancer. Very sadly, nearly 1,000 people every year die of the disease.

'If we are to meet our ambition that by 2050, everyone who develops breast cancer will live  and live well, then we need to make sure we fund the most promising and impactful research.

'It is only by tackling this disease together, with strength and determination, that we will realise this goal and ultimately stop breast cancer taking the lives of those we love.'

To register for Wear It Pink on October 19 visit the Breast Cancer Now website here.
A terminally-ill teen fulfilled her dream to marry her childhood sweetheart in a deeply emotional hospital bed ceremony, just three days before she died.

Cancer-stricken Nina Marino, 19, tied the knot with Joey Williams, 21, on September 3 in the ICU of St. Joseph's Children's Hospital, Florida.

The teen, of Clearwater, Florida, was diagnosed with undifferentiated sarcoma in May 2017, but only began to write her bucket list when doctors discovered the disease had also spread to her only lung, which could not be cured.

Couple: Cancer-stricken Nina Marino, 19, tied the knot with Joey Williams, 21, on September 3 in the ICU of St. Joseph's Children's Hospital, Florida

Condition: The teen, of Clearwater, Florida, was diagnosed with undifferentiated sarcoma in May 2017. Doctors later discovered the disease had also spread to her only lung

Soulmates: Nina, of Clearwater, Florida, proposed to Joey, her best friend of 13 years and boyfriend, on August 2 in the ICU

Nina proposed to Joey, her best friend of 13 years and boyfriend, on August 2 in the ICU.

The pair had been planning an outdoor wedding, but on the morning of September 3 doctors said Nina's condition was too severe for her to sustain the wait.

The pair wed that same day in an emotional ceremony, with the bride writing her vows in her hospital bed.

''She had told me that one of the things that she wanted to do before she passed away was to get married,' Joey said.

'I'm so happy that we were able to do it. We were married for two days, 15 hours and 27 minutes.'

Nina was born with only one lung and VACTERL Syndrome, a disorder that affects many bodily systems. Joey has suffered from three congenital heart defects and a chronic pain condition since birth.

Timing: The couple had been planning an outdoor wedding, but on the morning of September 3 doctors broke the news that Nina's condition was too severe for her to sustain the wait

Tying the knot: The pair wed that same day in an emotional ceremony, with the bride writing her vows in her hospital bed

The couple met at Camp Boggy Creek, an event for sick children, when they were just eight and six years old, and found out they only lived 10 minutes away from each other.

Throughout their teens their friendship never evolved into anything romantic, but after a trip to Disney World in June 2017, something shifted between them.

'We spent the whole day together and then that night as we were driving home we talked and we both agreed that things felt a lot different,' Joey said.

'We decided that we would give dating a try. After that, we never really talked about it but we were both just so happy together. It just worked out.

'We spent 14 years getting to know each other, so by the time we started dating we already knew everything about each other.

'She could understand everything about me  and me about her  because we both had chronic illnesses.

'It was just really nice not to have to pretend that I wasn't in pain around her.

'During her first round of chemo I first came to realize just how much I loved her.'

The couple had casually discussed getting married, but one day, after Nina was rushed into ICU, Joey came into the ward to check on her and was met with a surprise proposal from Nina.

'I walked into her room when she was sitting in bed wearing a pair of Mickey mouse ears, except they were made of wood,' he said.

Childhood friends: The loved-up couple met at Camp Boggy Creek, an event for sick children, when they were just eight and six years old

Schedule: The couple had casually discussed getting married, but one day, after Nina was rushed into ICU, Joey came into the ward to check on her and was met with a surprise proposal

'They were like laser-engraved in her handwriting with the words, "Will you marry me?"'

Nina's mother Lesley, 54, who was a full-time caretaker to her only daughter, said: 'I was ecstatic for both Joey and Nina because I know that's what they really wanted.

'They wanted each other. They are each other's companions for life.'

The two had wooden wedding rings specially crafted in Australia, so they could wear them while undergoing MRI or CT scans, during which metal jewelry is not permitted.

Nina, who underwent 163 surgeries in her lifetime, breathed through an oxygen mask as she tied the knot with Joey.

The Children's Cancer Center in Tampa, Florida, organized the last-minute ceremony in the oncology ward of St. Joseph's Hospital.

'We called them at 1.30 pm and told them we were going to have to get married that day, and we got married at 5.30 pm,' Joey said.

'They printed out a bunch of pictures and decorated the entire room, and they built an arch over her bed for us to get married under.

'I think there were like 30 people in one room. It was insane.

'Nina was so happy. I was so happy.'

Planning: The Children's Cancer Center in Tampa, Florida, organized the last-minute ceremony in the oncology ward of St. Joseph's Hospital and decorated Nina's room with pictures

Wedding day: Joey said he was 'so happy' when he got to tie the knot with Nina, as was she

Lesley added: 'I think she took every ounce of any amount of energy she had left in her body to go through with it and do it.

'She was incredibly happy because that was one of the big things that she wanted to do  to marry her best friend.'

Three days later, on the morning of September 6, newlywed Nina passed away with family and her beloved husband by her side.

Joey, who originally shared Nina's story through Love What Matters, said: 'I was able to look at all of the wedding photos with Nina while she was still awake. She loved them.

'Before she passed away she wanted to go to Broadway to see Hamilton and Dear Evan Hansen, and she wanted to go to Australia.

'It's become my mission to do all of the things she didn't get to complete on her bucket list.'

Lesley said: 'She was buried into her wedding gown.

'She would want everyone to remember her as an outgoing, fun, loving, and adventurous person.

'She never let her medical issues hold her back from life.'

Joey added: 'Her smile was always so beautiful.'

Plans: The pair had wooden wedding rings specially crafted in Australia, so they could wear them while undergoing MRI or CT scans, during which metal jewelry is banned

Support: As Joey remembers it, there were about 30 people gathered in a hospital room to watch the young couple tie the knot

Photographer Nil Patel recounted in a post for Love What Matters how he rushed to the hospital after being told on Labor Day that his services were needed.

'At 2:45 p m on Labor Day, I got a message from a close friend about a 19-year-old bride who has cancer and was told she wouldn't make it through the night, so they had to move her wedding day to that very day at 5:00 pm,' he recounted.

'Unfortunately, the original photographer was unavailable for that day, due to the last-minute change. My friend who got the original inquiry couldn't do it and it broke his heart. While I know he would have been honored to have captured it himself, he blessed me with this opportunity.'

Nil promptly took a shower, grabbed his gear, and went to St. Joseph's Hospital.

'Everyone was full of life, smiling, laughing, making jokes,' he said. 'It was as if there wasn't even an illness present in this equation and everyone was there to celebrate another magical love story.'

After Nina's passing, Joey wrote a moving tribute to his wife. He shared on the Facebook page The Chronic Travelers, on which the pair documented their life together.

Together: Joey has suffered from three congenital heart defects and a chronic pain condition since birth. He and Nina supported each other through their respective illnesses

Adventures: Joey and Nina created a Facebook page called The Chronic Travelers to document all their happy times together

Love: Joey and Nina started dating after a trip to Disney World, and Joey wrote a tribute to Nina that they went to Disney 'an absolutely insane amount of times'

'We've gone on so many amazing adventures together, and Ive done things that I never in a million years could've seen myself doing but I had the time of my life because I was with you,' Joey wrote.

You will always be my beautiful wife, and you will always be with me

'From always trying new food at mildly sketchy places, falling in love with sushi, jumping into a hot tub during a thunderstorm, burning a year's worth of homework, losing your sunglasses in the ocean and finding them again, car picnics, having a picnic at the end of a runway, going to New Jersey to meet your family, having an epic paint fight and then spending hours trying to scrub the paint off of each other, cooking meals together at my apartment, going to drag shows, going to camps, going back to Boggy to fulfill our dreams of becoming counselors, going to private suites at lightning games, eating potatoes the size of your face, working with [the Children's Cancer Center] at Wine Women & Shoes, you being on television for CCC, celebrating my 21st birthday with you in your hospital room, going all out on the matching Mickey Mouse Christmas onesies, building an indestructible gingerbread house, seeing ice at Gaylord Palms, celebrating Christmas with both of our families together, you being there for my surgery and then holding me while I recovered, painting pottery together, celebrating your birthday by just being together, ringing in the new year with our families, you tickling me to the point that I would almost pass out, getting to meet your amazing friends, jumping into hundreds of gallons of Jell-O, going to a five-star spa and resort in Arizona, going to Disney an absolutely insane amount of times, starting a Disney pin collection together, and so many other absolutely incredible memories. All of these memories that I will never forget and that make me so happy.'

Big day: Hospital staffers set up an arch above Nina's bed for them to get married under

Tribute: Joey shared a moving message in Nina's honor following her passing, celebrating all the happy memories they made together

Sweethearts: Nina and Joey met at camp when they were children and were friends for years before they started dating

Project: Joey has pledged to accomplish all the items left on Nina's bucket list

Precious moments: After Nina passed away, Joey said he will always treasure the memories of their adventures

Flying: Over the course of their many adventures, Nina and Joey were able to travel together

He added: 'But perhaps the most amazing memory of all is when we finally got to fulfill our dream of getting married. It may not have been what we had seen in our heads when we thought about our wedding, but it was perfect.

'You looked so beautiful in your dress, and the way your eyes lit up when I put the ring on you finger will stay with me forever.'

Joey pledged to keep Nina in his heart forever, and to accomplish all the items left to cross out on her bucket list.

'I just want you to know that I love you and I always will, that the past 450 days of dating you have been some of the best days of my life, and the two days, 15 hours and 23 minutes I had with you here as your husband were magical,' he wrote.

'I will always love you, you will always be my beautiful wife, and you will always be with me.'
Meghan has hailed London's diversity as she launches her charity cookbook supporting families affected by the devastating Grenfell Tower fire.

The Duchess of Sussex, 37, said she was 'so proud' to live in the British capital as she delivered a three-minute speech without any notes at the launch event at Kensington Palace today.

She described how the charity cookbook was a 'labour of love' and a 'passion project' that she had been working on with the women of the Hubb Community Kitchen for the past nine months.

The Together: Our Community Cookbook, which is available in stores from today, is Meghan's first solo project as a member of the royal family.

Meghan, who was joined by mother Doria and husband Prince Harry at the event, looked stylish in a pleated skirt by designer friend Misha Nonoo, which she paired with a black high-neck top.

She finished off her polished ensemble with a 956 blue coat from Canadian brand Smythe over the top as she arrived at the event, along with a pair of black heels.

Meghan has declared she's 'so proud to live in a city with so much diversity' as she launches her charity cookbook supporting families affected by the devastating Grenfell Tower fire

The Duchess of Sussex was seen embracing two of the women involved in the Hubb Community Kitchen at the event at Kensington Palace today

Meghan wore a blue coat from Canadian brand Smythe and a pleated skirt by designer friend Misha Nonoo at the event celebrating the launch of the cookbook. She was joined by mother Doria and husband Prince Harry at the event

Addressing the women of the Hubb Community Kitchen at the event today, Meghan said: 'I'm so privileged to know you. Working on this project for the past nine months has been a tremendous labour of love.

'I have just recently moved to London and I felt so immediately embraced by the women in the kitchen, by your kindness and to be in this city and be in this room and see how multi-cultural it was.

'On a personal level I feel so proud to live in a city with so much diversity. This whole country is represented by the people in the kitchen. It's pretty outstanding.'

During the speech, the Duchess also thanked the women for letting her work with them on the project - describing how it 'took a village' to realise her vision.

The Duchess of Sussex, 37, delivered the three-minute speech without any notes at the launch event at Kensington Palace today

Meghan branded the charity cookbook a 'labour of love' and a 'passion project' that she has been working on for the past nine months

'There's so many people to thank - I'm extremely grateful because this is my first project and I appreciate your support,' she said.

'It truly took a village to see this through. Everyone has embraced this so fully because it has been a passion project for us all.'

The Duchess also emphasised the fact that the project was 'more than a cookbook', adding that the 'power of food' is the 'story behind it'.

'When you get to know the story behind the recipe, you get to know the person behind it and help us celebrate what connects us rather than divides us. That is the ethos of Together,' she continued.

The Duchess (pictured cooking with guests at the launch event) emphasised that the project was 'more than a cookbook', and told the women that it was already having a huge impact

Meghan said it was a 'privilege' to work with the women of the Hubb Community Kitchen, who came together following the devastating Grenfell Tower fire

The Duchess of Sussex said she felt 'immediately embraced by the women' at the Hubb Community Kitchen shortly after moving to London

Meghan opted for a polished ensemble as she arrived at the charity event at Kensington Palace, along with mother Doria and husband Prince Harry

Meghan finished by telling the women that the cookbook was already having an huge impact across the world, despite only being released today.

'Thank you so much for letting me be part of this and letting me be on this adventure with you and I'm so excited to see the projects we will continue to do in your community and also how you will inspire people globally by sharing your stories and your recipes,' she said.

'It's so impactful. You can see that in just a few days alone what's happened and the book's not out yet.

'What you have been able to do is a testament to what that means to people. I'm so proud of you.

'So on that note I know that some of you have started eating, as you should. I'd be the last one to want to let the food get cold so please enjoy your beautiful lunch and give another round of applause for the Hubb Community Kitchen.'
The Countess of Wessex looked chic in a blush pink dress as she paid a visit to the Isle of Wight today.

Sophie, 53, teamed the elegant shift dress with a cream coat and nude heels as she conducted a day of engagements.

The mother-of-two finished off the look with a woven clutch bag, along with a pair of oval amber earrings.

She was greeted by a group of schoolchildren waving Union Jacks as she arrived at her first stop of the day, the Aspire Community Centre in Ryde.

The Countess of Wessex looked chic in a blush pink shift dress as she arrived for a day of engagements on the Isle of Wight today

Sophie, 53, was greeted by a group of schoolchildren waving Union Jack flags as she arrived on the island today

The Countess was seen watching children taking part in a world-building puzzle as she visited the Aspire Community Centre in Ryde

Sophie was later seen giving a helping hand in the kitchen as she visited the community centre on the Isle of Wight

Sophie was seen chatting with youngsters at the centre, before giving a helping hand in the kitchen.

Later in the day, the Countess also officially launched the new Victoria of Wight car ferry, unveiling a plaque on board the boat.

Sophie looked delighted as she was presented with a bottle of gin after officially naming the ferry.

During her trip to the Isle of Wight, Sophie also visited the headquarters of beauty brand Liz Earle.

Later in the day, Sophie was presented with a bouquet of flowers as she arrived to launch the new Victoria of Wight car ferry

The Countess of Wessex was seen chatting to the captain as she was given a tour of the new ferry today

Sophie unveiled a plaque officially naming the new Victoria of Wight car ferry during a busy day of engagements

Sophie has had a busy month so far, conducting a number of royal duties after enjoying a break over the summer.

On Monday, she visited a lingerie exhibition at Windsor department store Daniels on Monday to mark its 100th birthday.

The previous week, the royal took part in 14th BGC Annual Charity Day in London, where she helped man the phones with Sarah Ferguson.

Sophie will open the Rare Diseases Centre at St Thomas's Hospital next week, before attending a reception at the British Museum.

Sophie looked in high spirits as she launched the new ferry. She teamed her blush pink dress with a cream coat over the top

The Countess of Wessex finished off her elegant look with a woven clutch bag and a pair of amber oval earring

Sophie had been greeted by a group of schoolchildren waving flags as she arrived on the island for a day of engagements

The Countess of Wessex looked delighted as she was presented with a bottle of gin after naming the new Victoria of Wight ferry

Sophie looked stylish in a feminine ensemble, which she finished off with a pair of nude heels

The Countess was seen meeting officials as she was given a tour of the new Victoria of Wight ferry today
All eyes were on special guest Doria Ragland at the celebration to mark the launch of Meghan's first royal solo project - a recipe book in support of victims of the Grenfell tragedy - on Thursday.

But in addition to Meghan's mother, there was another figure ever-present at the Duchess' side as she mingled with her guests in a marquee erected in the grounds of Kensington Palace, her visibly proud husband, Prince Harry.

So much so that, when a sudden gust of wind blew strands of Meghan's air to outside the tent, Harry was on hand to swiftly smooth it back into place for her.

When a gust of wind whipped up Meghan's hair as she posed for a photo with guests at a reception to celebrate the launch of a charity cookbook, her husband Prince Harry stepped in to help

The royal was seen smoothing down his wife's hair when it was caught during a gust of wind at the Kensington Palace launch of Together: Our Community Kitchen

The delighted Duchess smiled as her husband Harry helped her out of a tricky situation

The Prince seemed delighted to let his wife of four months take centre stage today at the relaxed alfresco lunch to mark the release of Together: Our Community Cookbook.

Meghan, dressed in a pleated skirt by her designer friend Misha Nonoo, a black high-neck top and heels, delivered a three-minute speech to guests before lunch, in which she described the charity cookbook as a 'passion project' and a 'labour of love' that she had been working on with the women of the Hubb Community Kitchen for the past nine months.

The Duchess of Sussex, 37, said she was 'so proud' to live in a city with London's diversity as she delivered a three-minute speech without any notes at the launch event at Kensington Palace today.

Meghan greeted guests from the Hubb Community Kitchen and their families at the launch of Together: Our Community Cookbook at Kensington Palace on Thursday, but the wind played havoc with her hair at one point

Proud Prince Harry was an ever present figure at his wife Meghan's wife today, as he and his mother in law Doria supported the Duchess at the lunch to mark the launch of her first solo project as a working royal, which she described as a nine-month 'passion project' in a speech to guests today

The Prince, pictured with Meghan and her mother Doria, who was snapped at LAX earlier in the week before boarding a flight to London, appeared delighted to let his wife take centre stage

Addressing the women of the Hubb Community Kitchen at the event today, Meghan said: 'I'm so privileged to know you. Working on this project for the past nine months has been a tremendous labour of love.

'I have just recently moved to London and I felt so immediately embraced by the women in the kitchen, by your kindness and to be in this city and be in this room and see how multi-cultural it was.

'On a personal level I feel so proud to live in a city with so much diversity. This whole country is represented by the people in the kitchen. It's pretty outstanding.'

Meghan has declared she's 'so proud to live in a city with so much diversity' as she launches her charity cookbook supporting families affected by the devastating Grenfell Tower fire

The Duchess of Sussex was seen embracing two of the women involved in the Hubb Community Kitchen at the event at Kensington Palace today

Meghan wore a blue coat from Canadian brand Smythe and a pleated skirt by designer friend Misha Nonoo at the event celebrating the launch of the cookbook. She was joined by mother Doria and husband Prince Harry at the event

During the speech, the Duchess also thanked the women for letting her work with them on the project - describing how it 'took a village' to realise her vision.

'There's so many people to thank - I'm extremely grateful because this is my first project and I appreciate your support,' she said.

'It truly took a village to see this through. Everyone has embraced this so fully because it has been a passion project for us all.'

The Duchess also emphasised the fact that the project was 'more than a cookbook', adding that the 'power of food' is the 'story behind it'.

The Duchess of Sussex, 37, delivered the three-minute speech without any notes at the launch event at Kensington Palace today

Meghan branded the charity cookbook a 'labour of love' and a 'passion project' that she has been working on for the past nine months

'When you get to know the story behind the recipe, you get to know the person behind it and help us celebrate what connects us rather than divides us. That is the ethos of Together,' she continued.

Meghan finished by telling the women that the cookbook was already having an huge impact across the world, despite only being released today.

'Thank you so much for letting me be part of this and letting me be on this adventure with you and I'm so excited to see the projects we will continue to do in your community and also how you will inspire people globally by sharing your stories and your recipes,' she said.

The Duchess (pictured cooking with guests at the launch event) emphasised that the project was 'more than a cookbook', and told the women that it was already having a huge impact

Meghan said it was a 'privilege' to work with the women of the Hubb Community Kitchen, who came together following the devastating Grenfell Tower fire

The Duchess of Sussex said she felt 'immediately embraced by the women' at the Hubb Community Kitchen shortly after moving to London

Meghan opted for a polished ensemble as she arrived at the charity event at Kensington Palace, along with mother Doria and husband Prince Harry

'It's so impactful. You can see that in just a few days alone what's happened and the book's not out yet.

'What you have been able to do is a testament to what that means to people. I'm so proud of you.

'So on that note I know that some of you have started eating, as you should. I'd be the last one to want to let the food get cold so please enjoy your beautiful lunch and give another round of applause for the Hubb Community Kitchen.'
OCEAN SPRINGS, Mississippi -- The 9th annual Mississippi Songwriters Festival kicked off Thursday night in Ocean Springs with a meet and greet for local mayors and other officials at the Mary C. O'Keefe Cultural Arts Center.

Officials and other VIP invitees were treated to a "Songs and Stories" concert by Nashville songwriter Chuck Cannon, with a VIP after-party at Boots & Spurs in downtown Ocean Springs.

Among Cannon's work: "Me, Too", "American Soldier", "How Do You Like Me Now?", "Getcha Some", and "I Love the Way You Love Me."

The festival continues Friday and Saturday, with songwriters performing their work at 13 venues in Ocean Springs. Gautier and Moss Point are also hosting the festival at venues this year.

Each venue will have a host and up to 12 performing songwriters throughout the night at each location. Over 100 songwriters have been booked for the festival.

The festival concludes Sunday at 5 p.m. at Mosiac Tapas Bar in downtown Ocean Springs, featuring an an all-star lineup and awards, presentations and, according to organizers, a special guest.

The list of venues and schedule of performances can be found at the festival website.
Isha Ambani, the daughter of India's richest man, will get engaged to Anand Piramal, the scion of business tycoon Ajay Piramal, in Lake Como resort in Italy. The engagement ceremony will be held today and celebrations will go on till Sunday.

Anand Piramal had earlier proposed to Isha Ambani at Mahabaleshwar temple in Maharashtra. The two families held a private party to celebrate the proposal in May this year.

Mukesh Ambani and Nita Ambani will be hosting lavish three-day festivities in Lake Como, a place often frequented by Hollywood stars. According to India Today, there are various events slotted for the weekend, from welcome lunches to dinners and dances. The function will end with a farewell lunch on September 23.

Isha's twin brother Akash Ambani got engaged to Shloka Mehta in June this year. The star-studded engagement bash had a guest list which included political figures, faces from the business world and some close aides of the Ambani family from Bollwood.

India Today has exclusive details on the schedule, dress code and venues for the engagement party.

The Ambanis will host a welcome lunch - 'Benvenuti A Como' (Welcome to Como) - for their guests at the respective hotels today. A dinner titled 'Amore E Bellezza' is planned in the evening at Villa Balbiano. The dress code for the dinner will be formals with 'black-tie'.

On Day 2, the festivities will begin with an Italian Fiesta at Villa Gastel. In the evening, guests are invited to Villa Olmo for dinner and dance. For the dinner and dance in the evening, guests are to be dressed in cocktail attire.

On Day 3, a farewell lunch for the guests is planned at Duomo di Como & Teatro Sociale Como.

Isha and Anand are expected to tie the knot in a lavish ceremony in Mumbai this December.
Michelle Obama's fans were treated to a rare look at her private life on Wednesday afternoon, when a very candid image of the first lady wearing a white robe and pouting enthusiastically for the camera was shared on social media.

In the image, which was taken in California and posted by the 54-year-old's makeup artist Carl Ray, Michelle is pictured with one arm around the beauty pro, while the other hand is on her hip.

It appears as though the mother-of-two, who is preparing for her upcoming book tour, had just finished up with a glam session, judging by the incredibly glamorous hair and makeup she is modeling in the snap.

Duo: Michelle Obama's make-up artist Carl Ray shared a photo of himself and his famous client in a white robe on Wednesday, while playing tribute to his 'friend and boss'

Friendship: Carl, who works in Washington, D.C. but geotagged the photo in San Diego, California, said he's had an 'amazing 10 years' working with Michelle

Unsurprisingly, Michelle's fans were in ecstasies over the image, which Washington D.C. resident Carl posted to celebrate the duo's decade-long working relationship, and were quick to praise the first lady's glamorous looks and sassy attitude.

Candid: Michelle didn't hesitate to pout for the camera while posing with Carl

Carl, who is wearing a zipped black sweater and thick-rimmed glasses in the snap, smiles at the camera while tipping his head towards Michelle's.

The former first lady's make-up looks impeccable in the image.

Her eyes are emphasized with black eyeliner and mascara, while her nude-colored lips have a nice shine.

Her engagement ring, a one-carat diamond solitaire, is clearly visible in the picture.

'Hello from me and @michelleobama,' Carl wrote in his Instagram caption. 'What an amazing 10 years it's been. #decadeofbeauty'

Carl said he's happy to call Michelle 'a friend and boss', and explained the two are currently getting ready for her 10-city, nationwide book tour, during which she will promote her memoir Becoming.

While Carl's photo is geolocated in San Diego, California, the make-up artist usually works out of D.C., where he offers his services to other clients at a salon located in the downtown area, half a mile away from the White House.

Michelle's fans loved the photo and promptly praised her beauty and 'timeless class' in the comments section

'What a beauty'! Plenty of people left smitten comments raving about Michelle's looks

The picture has garnered 3,705 likes since Carl posted it and plenty of people have left smitten comments raving about the former first lady's appearance.

'Carl, this is an incredibly sweet photo of a couple exceptional people. Former First Lady Michelle Obama's natural outer and inner beauty is simply. Stunning,' one person wrote. 'What a beautiful friendship indeed!'

Someone gushed about Michelle's 'timeless class', while another person wrote: 'Michelle looks gorgeous!'

'Classy!! What a beauty!!' another Instagram user commented.

Carl, a self-taught make-up artist, previously told Glamour he and the then-first lady 'clicked immediately' after he worked with her for the first time, getting her ready for the White House's 2009 Easter Egg Roll.

He has been known to favor high-end brands such as MAC, Tom Ford, NARS, and Bobbi Brown  all of which he singled out in a previous interview with the Huffington Post.

Instagram users rave about Michelle Obama's 'gorgeous' looks below make-up artist's photo Advertisement

Team: Carl (pictured doing Michelle's make-up in an archive shot) said he and Michelle 'clicked immediately' after he got her ready for the White House's 2009 Easter Egg Roll

His clients include other politicians, dignitaries, models, authors, actors, musicians, and celebrities, according to Carl's biography on the website of the salon he works for.

In addition to getting the former first lady ready for events, the make-up artist has worked for magazines such as Vogue, Glamour, Elle, and Allure.

Carl called Michelle a 'great collaborator', telling Glamour: 'She's always conscious of setting an example. For Mrs. Obama it's about being polished in an authentic way.

'She always looks like herself. To exude the confidence she shows the world, she has to feel great in her own skin.'

To that end, he said his favorite product to use on Michelle is 'a beautiful nude lip gloss', adding: 'Peach, pink, nude-nude  she's tried them all.'

During her book tour, Michelle will speak in arenas and other performing centers to accommodate crowds far too big for any bookstore.

Plans: Michelle (pictured left in June) will embark on a 10-city book tour in November to promote her memoir, Becoming (right)

The former first lady will begin at the United Center in her native Chicago on November 13, the book's release date. She will finish at the American Airlines Center in Dallas on December 17.

In between, appearances will include the Barclays Center in New York City, the Pepsi Center Arena in Denver and The Forum in Los Angeles.

Michelle and former President Barack Obama each have been working on memoirs, for which they negotiated a multimillion dollar deal with the Crown Publishing Group. No date has been set for his book, although it's expected in 2019.

'I've spent the last year and a half reflecting on my story as deeply and honestly as I could, and now I'm thrilled to travel the country and do the same with readers this fall,' Michelle previously said in a statement.

In a message and video on her Facebook page, she described the book as 'the story of my humdrum plainness, my tiny victories, my lasting bruises, my ordinary hopes and worries'.

Michelle and event promoter Live Nation will donate 10 per cent of every show's tickets to local charities, schools, and community groups in each city the tour visits.
Unless you were an expert in Greek mythology, you may have struggled to pronounce Hermione Granger's name correctly back when the first Harry Potter books hit shelves.

Quite a lot of fans of the series were saying her name as 'Hermy-own' or 'Hermy-one' as they tore through the early novels  until author J.K. Rowling helpfully wrote a passage in Goblet of Fire, having Hermione teach Viktor Krum the right way to say her name.

This week, a fan ventured on Twitter that Rowling likely included that bit on purpose to help readers out  and the writer tweeted back to confirm that it was true.

Correct! J.K. Rowling confirmed a Twitter fan's theory about the fourth book in the Harry Potter series this week

True: The fan wrote that she thought Rowling had Hermione teach Viktor Krum how to pronounce her name so readers would know the right way to say it

You've got it! Rowling fired off a quick reply to tell her she was right

In Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Hermione dates Viktor Krum, a visiting student from the Eastern European magic school of Durmstrang.

'Hermione was now teaching Krum to say her name properly; he kept calling her "Hermy-own,"' the passage reads.

'"Her  my  oh  nee," she said, slowly and clearly.

'"Herm  own  ninny."

'"Close enough," she said, catching Harrys eye and grinning.'

While it makes sense that Krum, who spoke limited English, would struggle with the name, plenty of English-speaking readers were also butchering it at home  something Rowling came to learn to well from interactions with her fans.

Huh? Before Goblet of Fire was released, there were three Harry Potter books  and no films to help guide people to say 'Hermione' the right way

In the fourth book, Hermione gives Viktor Krum a lesson in pronunciation

Winner: Rowling had heard a lot of people say it wrong, but one of her favorites was 'Hermy-won'

On a Monday, a woman from India who goes by Atulla wrote on Twitter: 'Theory: @jk_rowling included that passage on how to pronounce Hermione's name in Goblet of Fire just to school all of us who were saying HER-MY-OWN like Viktor Krum.'

Rowling happened to come across the tweet, replying: 'Theory correct.'

Her reply has been liked 16,000 times, with many fans chiming in to share how they used to mispronounce her name.

'My favourite mispronunciation of 'Hermione' was "Hermy - won." It suited her!' Rowling wrote in 2017.

In fact, this isn't the first time that Rowling has said she included the passage to guide readers.

In 2000 while promoting the release of Goblet of Fire, the author went on the Today show, where she was interviewed by Katie Couric.

Flashback: She's actually revealed that the passage was included for that purpose before (pictured in 2000)

Quote: She told Katie Couric in 2000, 'Erm, people will notice I put in how to pronounce Hermione in book four'

When Couric read a fan question about how to pronounce all the made-up names and words in her books, Rowling laughed.

'Erm, people will notice I put in how to pronounce Hermione in book four,' she said, confirming to Couric that a lot of people were asking about it.

'I introduced Hermione to a Bulgarian who couldn't say her name and so then she explains it, so that was my get-out-of-jail card on that one,' she added.

Though Rowling certainly came up with a few words of her own, most of the names are based in mythology  including Hermione.

In Greek mythology, Hermione was the daughter King Menelaus of Sparta and Helen of Troy.

Hermione is also the name of the queen in Shakespeare's A Winter's Tale
Prince Harry looked to have been caught sneaking some samosas home today as he supported Meghan at a charity cookbook event.

The Duke of Sussex, 34, appeared to be hiding the delicious treats behind his back as he emerged from the marquee to join his wife.

The royal then seemed to realise that he had been caught red-handed, flashing a cheeky grin to the cameras.

It appeared he liked the samosas so much he wanted to take a few home with him to Nottingham Cottage, just a stone throw's away from where the event was taking place today.

The vegetable samosas feature in Meghan's first solo project, Together: Our Community Cookbook, which was released today to support women affected by the Grenfell Tower fire.

Prince Harry appeared to have been caught sneaking some samosas from a charity cookbook event hosted by wife Meghan at Kensington Palace today

The Duke of Sussex, 34, seemed to realise that he had been spotted hiding the samosas behind his back, flashing a cheeky grin at cameras

Harry looked extremely proud as he and Meghan's mother Doria listened to her addressing the women from the Hubb Community Kitchen at the launch event.

And later on, he showed just how attentive he is to his wife, as he was seen helping her to flatten her hair as it was whipped up by the wind.

During her speech today, the Duchess of Sussex described the charity cookbook as a 'labour of love' that she has been working on for the past nine months.

She said: 'I'm so privileged to know you. Working on this project for the past nine months has been a tremendous labour of love.

Harry was seen emerging from the marquee with the vegetable samosas behind his back during the event at Kensington Palace today

The attentive royal was also seen helping Meghan smooth down her hair after a gust of wind whipped it up during the event

'I have just recently moved to London and I felt so immediately embraced by the women in the kitchen, by your kindness and to be in this city and be in this room and see how multi-cultural it was.

'On a personal level I feel so proud to live in a city with so much diversity. This whole country is represented by the people in the kitchen. It's pretty outstanding.'

She added: There's so many people to thank - I'm extremely grateful because this is my first project and I appreciate your support.

'It truly took a village to see this through. Everyone has embraced this so fully because it has been a passion project for us all.'

Prince Harry and Meghan's mother Doria were on hand to support the Duchess of Sussex at the launch of her first solo project as a royal

The Duchess of Sussex, pictured with Doria and Harry at the event, described the charity cookbook as a 'labour of love' that she has been working on for the past nine months
Lili Reinhart loudly clapped back after someone suggested she didn't deserve to date her Riverdale co-star Cole Sprouse.

The actress, 22, spoke out on Wednesday after an 18-year-old Twitter user named Emily publicly shared a screenshot of a conversation between herself and one of her friends, in which the friend took a jab at Lili.

'How come this cringey b***h gets to date Cole but I don't?' Emily's friend asked.

Scroll down for video

Speaking out: Lili Reinhart, 22, clapped back after someone suggested she didn't deserve to date her Riverdale co-star Cole Sprouse, 26 (pictured with her at the Met Gala in May)

Exchange: An 18-year-old Twitter user named Emily publicly shared a screenshot of a conversation between herself and one of her friends, in which the friend took a jab at Lili

Emily responded: 'She is so 2013 Tumblr' and speculated that Lili 'probably tells him to touch her butt and buy her pizza'.

The Twitter user then shared a screenshot of the entire exchange publicly along with the words: 'the scoop on @lilireinhart'.

She made sure to tag the actress in her post, meaning Lili saw it  and promptly shared her own retort.

'No no...' Lili told Emily. 'I tell him to touch me ~everywhere~ and then we eat Chinese food. Get your facts straight, Emily.'

Lili's response has since gone viral, generating more than 20,000 retweets and garnering more than 162,000 likes.

Conversation: Emily then shared a screenshot of the entire exchange publicly along with the words: 'the scoop on @lilireinhart'. She tagged the actress in her tweet

Response: 'No no...' Lili told Emily. 'I tell him to touch me ~everywhere~ and then we eat Chinese food. Get your facts straight, Emily'

She and Cole, 26, are believed to have been dating since early 2017, although they long remained private about their relationship.

Still, they have shared photos of each other on social media, have been spotted kissing in public, and last month, Lili posted a loving message on her Instagram account to mark Cole's birthday, calling him 'my love'.

Lili's fans loved her response to Emily and chimed in to praise her 'brilliant' retort.

'YOU FINISHED IT BABY!' one person wrote, while someone else cheered: 'F**K YES LILI TELL HER.'

'WHAT A WOMAN' someone else tweeted.

'Ohhhhhhh snap you tell her girlie,' another person wrote.

This isn't the first time this month Lili has shared a sassy comment pertaining to her relationship with Cole on social media.

The actress had a sardonic response after her Riverdale co-star Camila Mendes, 24, posted a group shot on her Instagram account earlier this month, saying it was taken during a 'Labor Day getaway'.

Camila tagged Cole as well as Riverdale's Charles Melton, 27, in the photo, but not Lili, who doesn't appear in it.

In jest: Earlier this month, Lili joked that she and Cole Sprouse 'must've broken up' after Camila Mendes posted this group snap that features Cole but not his co-star and girlfriend

How it began: After Camila posted the group shot, her co-star KJ apa, 21, joked in a comment: 'Omg... Coles not sitting next to lili.... [sic]', implying that something must have been wrong

Nice try: Lili told KJ she and Cole must have split, prompting Madchen Amick, who plays her mother on Riverdale, to ask her and KJ to 'stop trying to break the internet'

That detail wasn't lost on their co-star KJ Apa, 21, who plays Archie Andrews in the CW drama.

He joked in a comment: 'Omg... Coles not sitting next to lili.... [sic]', implying that something must have been wrong between the two lovebirds.

Lili played along and replied: 'They must've broken up' next to a string of emoji featuring a distressed face, a magnifying glass, and a pair of curious eyes.

Her comment, which has been liked more than 70,000 times, didn't quite convince actress Madchen Amick, 47, who plays Betty's mother Alice Cooper on Riverdale.

'Oh stop trying to break the internet,' she told Lili and KJ.

Fans of the couple, however, seemed rather distressed as they couldn't quite tell for sure whether Lili was joking or not.

'WTH? ARE YOU SERIOUS????' one person wrote, not long after another Instagram user poste: 'Wait what yu're kidding right.'

'NO THIS CANT HAPPENNNN' another person wrote in response to Lili.

'DON'T EVEN JOKE LIKE THAT,' someone else begged, while another fan declared: I'm just gonna pray that you are lying.'
Hope of a cure for Alzheimer's has been raised after scientists have discovered why decades worth of studies have failed to find a solution.

Attempts to stop the memory-robbing disorder in its tracks have targeted the toxic build-up of amyloid beta in the brains of patients.

This accumulation in the brain gradually destroy neurons and causes memory loss and confusion.

However, researchers at King's College London now claim that once these clumps have formed it is 'too late for drugs' to work.

Instead, they have found targeting a little-known protein that causes the clumps to develop 'dramatically' improves signs of Alzheimer's in mice.

Drug treatments that act on blocking this protein are already available in China and Japan for stroke.

Scientists have raised hopes of an Alzheimer's cure after discovering why decades worth of studies have failed to find ease the condition. They claim unsuccessful medications often target protein clumps in the brain when it is 'too late' to stop the disease (stock)

Alzheimer's - the most common form of dementia - affects around 5.5 million people in the US and 500,000 in the UK, figures show.

The researchers, led by Dr Christina Elliott, discovered that the disease's progression works like a circuit.

When the protein amyloid-beta starts to clump together in a patient's brain, it begins to break down nerve cells.

This causes these cells to produce more amyloid-beta, driving their own destruction.

Senior author Dr Richard Killick said: 'We show that a vicious positive feedback loop exists in which beta-amyloid drives its own production.

'We think once this feedback loop gets out of control it is too late for drugs which target beta-amyloid to be effective.'

IS DELAYED SPEECH A SIGN OF ALZHEIMER'S? Pauses in speech and taking longer to talk may be early signs of mental decline, research suggested in July 2017. People with a family history of Alzheimer's disease who are at-risk of developing the condition are less able to express their ideas and have reduced 'fluency' when speaking, a study found. They also use words such as 'it' or 'they' rather than specific names for things and speak in shorter sentences, the research adds. Julie Liss, a speech expert at Arizona State University, who was not involved in the study, said: 'Those are all indicators of struggling with that computational load that the brain has to conduct'. The researchers, from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, conducted a picture-description test on 400 healthy people. Such tests involve participants viewing a picture and answering a multiple-choice question about it. The researchers carried out the same test on 264 people in their 50s and 60s, most of which had a parent with Alzheimer's disease and were considered at-risk of the condition. Two years later, the same participants repeated the test. Advertisement

He added: 'This could explain why so many Alzheimer's drug trials have failed.'

Rather than focusing on amyloid-beta itself, the researchers believe drug developers should target the protein Dkk1, which stimulates amyloid-beta's production.

The scientists studied mice with large amounts of beta-amyloid in their brains to test their theory.

When the rodents were treated with the Dkk1-blocking drug fasudil for two weeks, their beta-amyloid levels reduced dramatically.

The results were published in the journal Translational Psychiatry.

Dr Killick said: 'We have convincingly shown fasudil can protect synapses and memory in animal models of Alzheimer's, and at the same time reduces the amount of beta-amyloid in the brain.'

The scientists plan to investigate if fasudil could boost brain health and prevent cognitive decline in people with early-stage Alzheimer's.

Study co-author Professor Dag Aarsland added: 'As well as being a safe drug, fasudil appears to enter the brain in sufficient quantity to potentially be an effective treatment against beta-amyloid.

'We now need to move this forward to a clinical trial in people with early stage Alzheimer's disease as soon as possible.'

Although experts agree the results of the study are promising, some question how blocking Dkk1 could ease Alzheimer's symptoms.

Professor Tara Spires-Jones, from the University of Edinburgh, welcomed the findings. She said: 'This paper is scientifically interesting.

'But there is a long way to go to know whether these results will lead to therapies that will help people with dementia.'

In addition, fasudil's effects were only tested in the lab and in mice. It is therefore unclear whether the drug will benefit Alzheimer's patients.

Dr Carol Routledge, from Alzheimers Research UK, said: 'Fasudil is an approved drug for other health conditions.

'But [it] is currently used in a critical care setting and would need to go through robust safety tests in trials of people with Alzheimers disease.'
A daily stroll could halve older peoples risk of a severe stroke, according to a study.

It found stroke victims who had taken regular 35-minute walks before being struck down were twice as likely to suffer milder attacks than those who hadnt.

Study author Professor Katharina Sunnerhagen, of Gothenburg University in Sweden, said: There is a growing body of evidence that physical activity may have a protective effect on the brain and our research adds to that evidence.

A daily walk could reduce the risk of older people having a severe stroke, a study has found (stock picture)

The latest findings, published in the journal Neurology, were based on 925 people with an average age of 73 who had a stroke.

The rate of severe cases doubled among those with sedentary lifestyles compared with those who engaged in light to moderate activity.

Light exercise was defined as walking at least four hours a week, while moderate was more intense  such as swimming, brisk walking or running two to three hours.

Professor Sunnerhagen said: While exercise benefits health in many ways, our research suggests even simply getting in a small amount of physical activity each week may have a big impact later by possibly reducing the severity of a stroke.

A Swedish study, published in the journal Neurology, found stroke victims who had taken regular 35-minute walks before being struck down were twice as likely to suffer milder attacks than those who hadnt (stock picture)

A UK study of more than 350,000 people this year found those who walked or cycled to work cut their risk of dying from stroke or heart disease by 30 per cent.

Around half of the participants in the latest study said they were physically inactive before their stroke.

Of these 481 people, 127 had a moderate or severe stroke rather than a mild one.

But among the 384 who engaged in light physical activity this dropped to 54. And of the 59 who took part in moderate exercise only six cases were serious.
The NHS will next month become the first health service around the world to use routine genetic testing to diagnose its patients.

The Genomic Medicine Service analyses a patient's DNA for mutations.

People suffering from 22 rare diseases and some paediatric and blood cancers will be among the first to routinely be tested.

This is expected to boost early diagnoses and improve preventative care, which Professor Dame Sue Hill calls the 'holy grail of the future health system'.

Dame Sue, NHS England's chief scientific officer, believes shifting treatments from being 'one size fits all' to a more personalised approach will 'transform patients' lives'.

But similar plans to genetically test everyone living in Dubai sparked fears earlier this year when security experts claimed cyber-hacking could cause people's DNA to end up in the wrong hands.

From next month, the NHS will become the first health service around the world to use routine genetic testing to diagnose patients who are at risk of developing 22 rare diseases (stock)

Speaking during an NHS briefing in London, Dame Sue said: 'Genomic medicine has the potential to transform patients' lives, enable quicker diagnoses, match people to the most effective treatments and increase the number of patients surviving cancer.

'In establishing the Genomic Medicine Service, we are putting the NHS in pole position to harness this technology as it develops.

'This is an important milestone as we develop the long-term plan for the NHS, creating a world-class resource and building on the long history of delivering cutting-edge technology for our patients.

'The holy grail of the health system for the future is that we take a more prognostic and preventative healthcare approach, and this will enable us to do that, by understanding some of the genetic make-up of individuals that might predispose them to developing certain conditions.'

Earlier this month, Matt Hancock said using a patient's DNA to design personalised drugs will vastly improve the NHS' quality of care.

During his first major speech as health secretary, Mr Hancock said: 'The power of genomics plus AI to use the NHS data to save lives is literally greater than anywhere else on the planet.'

WHAT IS WHOLE GENOME SEQUENCING? Whole genome sequencing allows researchers to read all the little bits of code that make us who we are. The human genome is composed of more than three billion pairs of building-block molecules and grouped into some 25,000 genes. It contains the codes and instructions that tell the body how to grow and develop, but flaws in the instructions can lead to disease. Many argue giving patients the blood tests will allow doctors to spot rare diseases caused by genetic mutations. Former Prime Minister David Cameron set-up a project to sequence 100,000 genomes for NHS patients with a known rare disease or cancer. Chief medical officer Dame Sally Davies wants to set up a central genetic database within the next five years to aid research. She said genetic testing should become as routine as an MRI scan, although patients would have the opportunity to opt out. The first decoding of a human genome - completed in 2003 as part of the Human Genome Project - took 15 years and cost 2.15 billion ($3bn). Advertisement

Artificial intelligence aims to identify patients with a similar DNA profile to those with a genetic disease.

The new genetic test will be based on the 100,000 Genomes Project.

Started in 2012, this sequenced the DNA of 80,000 people with 22 forms of cancer and rare diseases.

Patients offered the new service will be able to opt to share their data with a central database to boost the understanding of their illness.

The NHS already offers genetic tests in some areas, but it is hoped the Genomic Medicine Service will lead to the service being more evenly distributed.

Under the new service, which was announced in July, selected patients will have their tumour DNA screened to check for mutations, helping doctors identify a more 'personalised' treatment.

The Wellcome Sanger Institute, which sequenced the entire human DNA code, is behind the move, with its associate director Dr Julie Wilson calling it 'the start of a decades-long journey'.

She added: 'We will be treating on genetic faults rather than anatomy, we will be able to predict who may respond to treatment.

'We're really starting to witness the positive effect genomics can have on our health.'

But privacy campaigners have previously warned such schemes could be violated.

Speaking of Dubai's plan to genetically test its three million residents, the director of Big Brother Watch told MailOnline: 'Even in the hands of employers or insurers, genetic information can be used to discriminate against people.'

It is unclear what measures the NHS will put in place to prevent hacking, however, even tech giant Microsoft has been targeted before.

James Knight, from the US tech firm Digital Warfare Corp, previously told MailOnline: 'One's genome is highly intimate and the consequences of it being stolen haven't been fully imagined.'

If the NHS shares patients' genetic information between its trusts online, Mr Knight warned such a database could be easily and quickly hacked.
A model claims she had to pay 2,500 to be diagnosed with endometriosis after NHS doctors repeatedly told her nothing was wrong.

Kate Leyenda, 27, alleges doctors in her home city of Hull dismissed the pain and were 'horrible' to her - despite debilitating pain in her pelvis and legs.

Claiming to have visited doctors and phoned NHS helpline 111 between 40 and 50 times in the summer of 2017, the former Miss England finalist gave in and sought private help.

She paid 2,500 for a laparoscopy  a procedure to examine the inside of the abdomen  and was told it was endometriosis which had left her unable to work.

The common condition causes the womb lining to grow outside of the womb, such as in the ovaries or fallopian tubes, and can cause pain, constipation or diarrhoea.

Miss Leyenda's condition was so advanced she had to have six months of hormone therapy before having an operation to remove the womb tissue.

The model, who has worked for haircare brands Wella and Schwartzkopf, will now need regular medical treatment for the rest of her life.

Kate Leyenda, a hair model who has worked for Wella and Schwartzkopf, paid 2,500 for a procedure to diagnose her with endometriosis because she could not get NHS help

Miss Leyenda suffered crippling pain around her pelvis between June and September last year, but struggled to find a doctor to help.

She claims, despite dozens of attempts to get help from the NHS, she was repeatedly told there was 'not an issue'.

It took paying to go privately to be diagnosed, with specialists at The Spire in Anlaby, a village near Hull, discovering she had endometriosis in October 17, 2017.

The diagnosis brought to an end to a summer of anguish in which the self-employed model could not work because of the pain.

She has now accused A&E doctors at Hull Royal Infirmary of being 'horrible' to her, telling her they could find nothing wrong and to stop returning.

'I found the treatment at Hull Royal Infirmary horrible, and the GP wasn't great either,' said Miss Leyenda.

'The doctors at A&E kept saying, "there is not an issue, why do you keeping coming back?" I didn't know what to do.'

Endometriosis is thought to affect as many as one in 10 women in the UK.

It can cause chronic pain, a lack of energy, make it harder to conceive or painful to have sex, and even cause disability in the worst cases.

Miss Leyenda says she has been diagnosed with stage four endometriosis  the most severe form of the condition  and will need treatment for the rest of her life.

Endometriosis cannot be cured and long-term management of the condition usually involves hormone treatment or surgery, as well as painkillers.

Hormone treatment can reduce levels of oestrogen in the body, because endometriosis is worsened by the hormone, and surgery is used to remove excess womb tissue which grows in places like the fallopian tubes or ovaries.

The pain meant the short hair model had to turn down work for four months last summer, having previously starred in Wella and Schwarzkopf adverts.

She had to rely on parents for financial support while she was out of work.

The Spire referred her back to the NHS for follow-up treatment from endometriosis specialists at Castle Hill Hospital in East Riding of Yorkshire, one of 44 specialist units in the country.

Miss Leyenda's condition was so severe that she had to take six months of hormone injections to bring on the symptoms of menopause early before she could be operated on in April this year.

Despite the operation taking place less than six months ago, Miss Leyenda said she is already experiencing reoccurring pain.

'I had to have four months off work because I was literally going to A&E every day, she said. 'I pretty much had 111 on speed dial at one stage.'

Miss Leyenda said her treatment at Hull Royal Infirmary was 'horrible' and the NHS did not help her with her condition for months, leading even her parents to doubt her

'The doctors were doubtful and saying I was lying, basically. I had to pay to get the operation to get diagnosed.

'The NHS said they didn't think I had [endometriosis] so they wouldn't pay. They were saying it could be stress or anxiety.

'If I hadn't paid for it and gone privately I might never have been diagnosed.

'The pain is already back so I will probably have to go for more treatment. It can feel like you are fighting a lost cause.'

WHAT IS ENDOMETRIOSIS? Endometriosis occurs when cells in the lining of the womb are found elsewhere in the body. Each month, these cells react in the same way as those in the womb; building up, breaking down and bleeding. Yet, the blood has no way to escape the body. Symptoms include pain, heavy periods and fatigue, as well as a higher risk of infertility, and bowel and bladder problems. Its cause is unknown but may be genetic, related to problems with the immune system or exposure to chemicals. Treatment focuses on pain relief and improving quality of life, which may include surgery or hormone treatment. Source: Endometriosis UK Advertisement

The Miss England 2009 finalist is now looking to raise awareness of the condition, both in Hull and across the UK with the help of her MP, Emma Hardy.

Hull has a specialist nurse based at Castle Hill Hospital but Miss Leyenda, while praising the 'fantastic' care given to her after diagnosis, said getting in contact could be difficult because the demand is high for the services of one nurse.

Miss Leyenda said: 'I can't believe it took so long [to get diagnosed].

'For me it didn't take as long as for some people, so I'm lucky, but how can doctors say nothing is wrong with you when there is?

'I had support from my mum and dad while I was off work but even they were questioning it because the doctors were saying nothing was wrong with me.

'I want to make sure this doesn't happen again.'

Labour's MP for Kingston upon Hull West and Hessle, Ms Hardy, said Miss Leyenda's story 'chimed' with her after campaigning against the use of vaginal mesh, an implant that left some women in constant pain and even disabled.

'It feels like women have to battle when it comes to their health,' said Ms Hardy.

'Like with mesh, there hasn't been enough research into endometriosis.

'There are only 44 specialist centres in the UK and there is only one specialist nurse in the Humber.

'If you think that one in 10 women have some form of endometriosis, then this is a huge problem affecting so many women.

'This is a chronic condition to live with. There should be help available to support people who live with it.'

Miss Leyenda is now teaming up with her MP for Kingston upon Hull West and Hessle, Emma Hardy, to raise awareness of the common but debilitating condition

The city MP said she would be seeking a meeting with education secretary Damian Hinds to urge him to include menstrual health as part of the curriculum in primary schools, so prepubescent girls can be taught about 'what a normal period is'

Miss Leyenda and her MP have arranged a 'Pink Pants' event at Bean and Nothingness cafe in Whitefriargate on Monday, October 1, from 10am to 11.30am.

The pair want to use it as a chance for women to learn more about endometriosis, its symptoms and 'ending the shame' of talking about women's health issues.

The Hull and East Yorkshire Hospitals NHS Trust, which runs Hull Royal Infirmary and Castle Hill hospitals, said it was 'unable to comment on individual cases because of strict rules governing patient confidentiality'.

But consultant gynaecologist Kevin Phillips, an endometriosis specialist at the hospital trust, accepted women often faced delays of between five to seven years before diagnosis.

Mr Phillips said: 'Endometriosis can be a complex, debilitating condition which is not easy to treat. This is recognised nationally and internationally.

'Specialists are trying hard, with the help of charities, to get all medical professionals to recognise the possibility of this diagnosis at the earliest possible stage.

'Once a woman is referred to a gynaecologist, the diagnostic time is actually quite short but getting referred to a specialist in the first place can be difficult because of the complexity of the condition.'

As a specialist endometriosis centre, Castle Hill Hospital treats women from all over Yorkshire and Lincolnshire.

To maintain its status as a specialist centre, the trust employs a dedicated endometriosis specialist nurse and has dedicated surgeons to carry out the 'complex' procedures.

Mr Phillips said: 'Once women are diagnosed with endometriosis, we can offer them the best treatment possible because we know this is a condition which impacts very severely on a woman's life.'
His case is thought to only be the third of its kind caused by Fournier's gangrene

Flesh-eating infection spread along the man's swollen penis and turned it black

A man's entire penis fell off after it rotted away because of gangrene triggered during surgery to treat cancer in his neck.

The unnamed 65-year-old had cancer surgery just two weeks earlier and, for 10 days, lived with 'blackish discolouration' of the shaft of his penis, a case report revealed.

Medics realised the unfortunate man had developed an infection in his penis after attempts to put in a catheter  a tube in the penis to drain urine  during the operation had been botched.

During the process, the inside of his penis had been damaged and he developed Fournier's gangrene, an infection which eats away at human flesh.

Then, two weeks after surgeons tried to cut away the infection, the man's penis 'autoamputated'  meaning the whole member fell off on its own.

The unnamed man, 65, lost his entire penis because of an infection he caught after medics failed to properly insert a tube for him to urinate through during his cancer surgery (pictured, a scan of the remains of the man's urethra connected to his bladder)

The case is thought to be only the third of its kind  the man now urinates out of a tube and is said to be 'doing well' after recovering from his ordeal.

Admitted to King George's Medical University Hospital in Lucknow in India's northern Uttar Pradesh, the man was diagnosed with a condition called Fournier's gangrene.

Fournier's gangrene describes necrotising fasciitis, a rare bacterial infection which destroys tissue beyond repair, when it is specifically on the genitals.

The unnamed man had an operation to treat cancer in his thyroid  in the neck  two weeks before being diagnosed with the penis infection, according to BMJ Case Reports.

WHAT IS GANGRENE? Gangrene refers to the decay and death of tissue resulting from an interruption of blood flow to a certain area of your body. It most commonly affects your extremities - like fingers, toes, arms and legs. However it can also occur in your muscles and internal organs. Some types of gangrene also involve a bacterial infection. The risk of gangrene is higher if the patient has an underlying condition that can damage blood vessels and impede blood flow, such as diabetes or fatty buildup in the arteries. Treatments for gangrene include surgery to remove dead tissue, antibiotics and other approaches. The prognosis for recovery is good if gangrene is identified early and treated quickly. Source: Mayo Clinic Advertisement

During that operation, medics had tried to put a catheter into his penis to drain urine from his bladder, but failed and damaged the tissue inside his urethra.

After his procedure the man's penis swelled up and began to turn black, filling with fluid.

Symptoms worsened for 10 days and the man returned to hospital where medics realised he had Fournier's gangrene.

The gangrene had spread along the penis shaft and, although surgeons tried to cut away the infected flesh to save the man's penis, it eventually became so destroyed it dropped off.

The man had surgery to remove what was left of his penis, and has now been left with no appendange, just a tube to urinate from above his scrotum.

Doctor Siddharth Pandey wrote in his report: 'The patient had a [cancer] which might have contributed to him developing this condition.'

He suggested the man's weakened immune system because of his recent surgery and cancer could have also worsened the gangrene, as well as his age.

The shocking case is thought to only be the third ever case of someone's entire penis rotting away because of Fournier's gangrene.

Despite having lost his penis, the patient was 'doing well' three months later, Dr Pandey said.
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Millions of people in the UK and US are dying before they turn 70, a major report has revealed today.

Scientists analysed the number of deaths from cancer, heart disease, lung disease and diabetes across 180 countries.

They calculated the probability of a 30-year-old man and woman dying before they turn 70 in each of the nations.

In a league table of the countries, the UK only ranked 17th best for men and 27th for women. And the US fared even worse, placing 53rd for men and 44th for women. Australia fared better, ranked 7th best for men and 8th for women.

The report, published in the Lancet, is one of the most detailed global studies of non-communicable diseases (NCDs) in history.

In a league table of the countries, the UK only ranked 17th best for men and 27th for women. And the US fared even worse, placing 53rd for men and 44th for women

Imperial College London scientists say men and women in most countries around the world now have a higher chance of dying young from NCDs than HIV.

They found a 30-year-old woman in the UK has a nine per cent chance of dying by the time they turn 70 from one of the four major NCDs.

Eighteen European countries, including Spain, Portugal, Switzerland and Italy, were shown to have a lower risk.

South Korea topped the table, with women having a 4.7 per cent chance of dying from an NCD before their landmark birthday.

At the other end of the scale for women, the probability of an early death for those in Sierra Leone is 32.6 per cent.

The global report also revealed a 30-year-old man in the UK has a 13 per cent chance of dying before the age of 70 from an NCD.

Revealed: The 10 nations which have the highest probability of men and women dying from a major NCD before they turn 70 WORST (men) COUNTRY PROBABILITY (%) WORST (women) COUNTRY PROBABILITY (%) 1 Mongolia 38.8 1 Sierra Leone 32.6 2 Fiji 36.8 2 Cote d'Ivoire 30.1 3 Kazakhstan 36.8 3 Guyana 28.8 4 Turkmenistan 36.7 4 Yemen 28.2 5 Russian Federation 36.5 5 Afghanistan 27.7 6 Belarus 35.2 6 Papua New Guinea 26.6 7 Ukraine 35.1 7 Mali 26.2 8 Georgia 34.9 8 Lesotho 25.2 9 Kiribati 34.4 9 Haiti 25 10 North Korea 34.4 10 Lao PDR 24.9

Iceland topped the table, with men in the country having a 9.9 per cent chance of dying prematurely.

By comparison, Mongolia was by far the worst offender (38.8 per cent) for men, researchers revealed.

Professor Majid Ezzati, who led the study, said: 'NCDs are the main cause of premature death for most countries.

'Poverty, uncontrolled marketing of alcohol and tobacco by multinational industries, and weak health care systems are making chronic diseases a larger danger to human health than traditional foes such as bacteria and viruses.'

Concerned experts have now warned most nations are falling short of UN targets to cut the number of premature deaths from NCDs.

Nearly 41 million people each year die from the diseases, which is the equivalent of one in seven deaths across the world.

Around 17 million, or 41 per cent, of these deaths are considered premature  happening before the age of 70.

The UN three years ago asked nations to cut the number of premature deaths from the four key NCDs by 2030.

But only 35 countries are on track to meet the target for women and only 30 countries for men, according to the new study.

Some of those countries on track to meet the UN target for both men and women include Denmark, New Zealand, Norway and South Korea.

Revealed: The 10 nations which have the loweest probability of men and women dying from a major NCD before they turn 70 BEST (men) COUNTRY PROBABILITY (%) BEST (women) COUNTRY PROBABILITY (%) 1 Iceland 9.9 1 South Korea 4.7 2 Switzerland 10.6 2 Japan 5.7 3 Sweden 10.7 3 Spain 6.4 4 Norway 10.7 4 Switzerland 6.6 5 Bahrain 10.9 5 Singapore 6.9 6 South Korea 10.9 6 Portugal 7 7 Australia 11 7 Italy 7.2 8 Japan 11.2 8 Australia 7.2 9 Canada 11.5 9 Finland 7.2 10 New Zealand 11.6 10 France 7.2

By comparison, the UK, Australia, France, Germany, India and China will fail to hit the target for both sexes, if current trends continue.

According to the analysis, the situation is deteriorating or stagnating in 15 countries for women, including the US, and 24 for men.

The report also involved scientists from the World Health Organization and NCD Alliance.

Katie Dain, from the NCD Alliance, said: 'We are sleepwalking into a sick future because of severely inadequate progress on non-communicable diseases.'

Professor Ezzati warned 'much of the world is falling short of the UN target to alleviate the burden of chronic diseases'.

But he added: 'Dozens of countries could meet this goal with modest acceleration of already-favourable trends.

'This requires national governments and international donors to invest in the right set of policies.'

Professor Ezzati argued treatment of hypertension and slashing rates of smoking and alcohol use could prevent millions of deaths.

But he warned there is also a need for affordable high-quality care to diagnose and treat chronic diseases as early as possible.
An IndiGo aircraft carrying 185 passengers made an emergency landing here Wednesday after suffering a tyre burst, according to an airport official.

The flight 6E-361, operated with an A320 aircraft, was coming from Mumbai. The plane landed safely at 1921 hours and all passengers are safe, Ahmedabad Airport Director Manoj Gangal said in a statement.

However, an IndiGo spokesperson said there was no tyre burst and the aircraft did not make an emergency landing.

"After arrival at Ahmedabad, a tyre de-capping with full tyre pressure intact was observed. The aircraft has been towed to the parking bay. The wheel is being replaced and aircraft will be cleared for further flight," the spokesperson said in a statement.

The spokesperson also said that there were 177 passengers on board.

Generally, de-capping of a tyre refers to peeling off of a tyre's outer layer.

In his statement, the airport director said the IndiGo plane reported "tyre burst while taking off from Mumbai airport today evening".

According to him, the pilot had requested emergency landing at Ahmedabad which was immediately approved by the ATC.

"Emergency procedures were initiated at Ahmedabad Airport. The aircraft was accorded full priority... Total 185 passengers were on board. All of them are safe. The aircraft is now parked at Ahmedabad airport for a detailed inspection," he said.
Scientists have grown an esophagus in the lab for the first time, a new report reveals.

Organs grown from patients' own stem cells offer hope that scientists can one day study defects and diseases without invasively exploring the patients themselves.

They may also eventually change the fates of thousands of patients who wait years for transplants that they often don't survive.

At Cincinnati Children's Hospital in Ohio, the esophagus is the latest triumph in researchers' ambitious goal of growing the entire digestive system in the lab.

This image shows the tissue layers of a two-month-old esophagus 'organoid' that scientists grew in the lab at Cincinnati Children's Hospital

The esophagus is the crucial passageway between the throat and the stomach.

The muscular tube actively directs food down into the digestive tract, meaning that any problem within it could entirely disrupt our nutrition.

In order to fully understand diseases of the digestive tract, scientists really need to be able to look at the entire system, as each component is connected to and affects the next.

Collaborators with Cincinnati Children's have already 'grown' the intestine, stomach, colon and liver.

Now that the researchers have made an esophagus, that leaves only the mouth, anus pancreas and gallbladder.

Even standing alone, the stem cell esophagus could be a huge opportunity for scientists to study the common diseases and cancers of the esophagus without asking patients to endure painful invasive tests or waiting until they are already ill.

For example, just 20 years ago - a blip in medical research timelines - doctors discovered a disease called eosinophilic esophagitis.

The condition is named for particular kind of white blood cell that lines that esophagus.

At normal levels, these immune cells help to protect us against infection, but when we have an excess of them, they can build up in the passageway.

The resulting inflammation can make swallowing difficult or even impossible.

Eosinophilic esophagitis is the number one cause of choking on food.

Doctors think the condition most likely arises from food or other reactions and acid reflux, but it's still relatively new and not very well understood.

But the newly-grown esophagus might change that.

The researchers also hope that it may shed light on other common esophageal problems, including Barrett's metaplasia, a risk factor for esophageal cancer.

A lot of time can pass between the discovery of Barrett's cells in the esophagus and the development of cancer, however, and doctors don't have a good consistent way of working out what will happen for each individual patient.

'Disorders of the esophagus and trachea are prevalent enough in people that organoid models of human esophagus could be greatly beneficial,' said Dr Jim Wells, lead study author.

As they continue to build up an entire stem cell-grown gastrointestinal tract, Dr Wells and his team are coming closer and to being bale to non-invasively help the 74 percent of the population that suffers from some kind of GI issue.
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This is the most comprehensive account ever made of America's opioid epidemic, laying bare the insurmountable complexity of an epidemic that has driven tens of thousands to early deaths.

The report was spearheaded by Dr Donald Burke, one of the world leaders in preventing infectious diseases who has primarily focused on outbreaks of viruses like the flu or smallpox.

But he warns that the drug epidemic has all the hallmarks of a contagious outbreak, and needs to be treated that way by the US authorities.

Until now, efforts to control the epidemic have been sporadic and confused - effective in some ways but not in others.

Dr Burke's new data mapping with his team at Pitt Public Health, at the University of Pittsburgh, provide the most detailed explanation as to why: while the arc of general 'addiction' has rocketed uniformly in 40 years, it is not driven by one drug.

In fact, breaking it down to look at each drug or community specifically, no one graph looks the same. And until we had this data to understand each 'subepidemic', Dr Burke says, we've been shooting in the dark.

This report barely scratches the surface of what's possible to map out, he insists, and says that he plans to continue digging into the nuances of this epidemic for as long as he can, because he believes it's the only way to 'bend the curve' of overall drug overdoses.

Mortality rates for (A) individual drugs and (B) all drugs. Detailed data for individual drugs are only available from 1999 to 2016, although additional data for all drugs are available since 1979 (this area is grayed out). The exponential equation and fit are shown for all drugs

It's a curve that even Dr Burke was struck by.

'We were struck by the fact that this curve was so perfectly exponential,' he told DailyMail.com. 'It just jumped out at us as we were looking at the data. This stood out as unusually predictable.'

The report features 600,000 overdoses between 1979 and 2016.

Many of them have come in recent years. Last year, overdoses killed 72,000 Americans, up 6.6 percent from the year before.

Unlike with a season of flu, there is no clear 'story' here. Opioids are merely one facet.

Sat alongside that precipitous graph of overdoses in general is an erratic colorful one, with each drug on its own trajectory.

If you want to point a finger at a drug, you first have to single out which community or racial group or gender is doing the pointing.

Even then, that won't get you far. They found that most drug deaths implicate more than one drug, and there are very few consistent combinations, except for the fact the synthetic opioids like fentanyl are increasingly implicated in all drug deaths.

But why? That's a whole other monster.

Dr Burke's report highlights a number of factors - social, political and economic - which, in retrospect, have clearly added fuel to the fire.

Some of those things have been fleeting - such as an isolated spike in the graph of fentanyl deaths in 2006, which now appears to be tied to one specific batch funneled to the US from a lab in Mexico.

But other things have left a legacy.

Every community is a hot spot: Geospatial hotspot analysis by drug and period

The arc-shaped graph of cocaine deaths, as expected, almost perfectly mirrors the trajectory of Colombia's boom and bust of drug cartels.

In terms of opioids and heroin, Dr Burke's team points to the US DEA rescheduling hydrocodone (a potent and commonly-prescribed opioid) in 2014, after which was a clear impact. Soon after, there was a drop in deaths. However, that also drove many to illicit drugs to get their high, pushing them into an even more unregulated territory.

Once the epidemic became unignorable in the last eight years, pain clinics started popping up, which helped to control the rate of new addicts and overdoses.

But at the heart of everything lies the economic divide.

For those who were put on this road by prescriptions, getting off highly addictive painkillers is insurmountably hard, for both physiological and psychological reasons.

As revered photographer Nan Goldin put in a withering Art Forum op-ed earlier this year: 'Getting off drugs and staying off drugs are two different things, each painful in their own way. But going back is not an option.'

An increasingly common scenario is that a person is prescribed opioids, they are cut off, but mounting the path to getting the clean may be, or at least feel, logistically complicated.

Amid this increase in people desperate for an affordable fix, law enforcement across the country have seen a boom in the amount of manufactured fentanyl on the streets.

'The longer term underlying epidemic has these drivers, like higher prices and higher purity. It's making it cheaper for an individual to get a high.

'At the same time we have the underlying social factors and disparities, and the increased sense of a loss of purpose nationwide.'

Dr Burke has taken to calling his approach 'synoptic epidemiology', borrowed from the term synoptic meteorology, which takes a global view of weather systems across the world, how they impact each other, and what we can all expect to experience as a result.

'We need to look at the bigger patterns to understand the likelihood of something happening.

'I don't think the US has had an effective coordinated approach so far,' he explains.

'Part of that is that the data systems have been fragmentary. We need to be trying to craft a picture not just of what yesterday's epidemic looks like but also what it looks like for tomorrow's epidemic.

'There appears to be a much more serious effort this year but it still feels a lot more short term.

'I think it's fair to say that it's the most comprehensive analysis of the opioid epidemic extending back 40 years. This modeling is really important, and we have not done that as a country yet.'

As for where we're headed, Dr Burke insists that he's 'not that pessimistic' about turning the tide. It does seem ominously possible, though, that even if the many current strands are tied into a bow, another psychoactive substance could lie ahead of us. And despite the agony drugs are causing Americans at the moment, the nation loves a good quick fix.

'I do think we can bend the curve by the effective application of prescription controls, of making treatment available and Narcan. The concern is whether or not the curve will snap back onto the 40-year trajectory or not.

'That's something we can't know.'
More people are dying from five of the leading causes of death and life expectancy itself is down in the US, a grim new report reveals.

According to the latest figures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), in the last decade, the numbers of people dying in accidents, from Alzheimer's, liver disease and septicemia as well as by suicide have all gone up.

And that's not to mention drug overdoses, which continue to climb, rising 72 percent between 2006 and 2016.

Collectively, these dismal death rates have driven life expectancy in the US down for the second year in a row, marking the first downward trend since 1992.

All cause mortality is steady, but deaths from five of the leading killers were higher in 2016 than they had been a decade earlier, according to the CDC's latest data

Despite the remarkable advancements of modern medicine, deaths of despair and still-mysterious diseases like Alzheimer's mean Americans are expiring earlier and more often.

Past research has largely attributed the falling life expectancy to the burden of the opioid epidemic and the jaw-dropping number of fatal overdoses occurring every day in the US.

We have mostly been able to take heart that science is steadily catching up to the most common killers.

But the latest figures suggest we may be losing traction.

Rates of heart disease, cancer and lung disease deaths have not worsened.

But 16 percent more people died of unintentional injuries or in accidents in 2016 than did decade earlier.

And as the population's average age climbs, so do the numbers of people developing and dying from Alzheimer's disease.

By 2016, the number of fatal cases had increased by a 25 percent over rates in 2006.

Suicide became the tenth leading cause of death for all adults in the US, a ranking it only reached this year - but it is closer to being a to killer of younger people.

Rates are rising for all age, though, according to the CDC's latest figures.

Suicides were up by nearly a quarter (23 percent) in 2016 over 2017.

A growing number of people may be killing themselves slowly, too, by drinking their livers into failure, the new data suggests.

This is especially true for women. Each year, the number of female Americans dying from liver disease has risen by more than 11 percent every year for the last decade.

Men have fared only a little better. There has been an average increase of 7.9 percent every year over the same period.

This perhaps tracks the notable increase in the number of weekly drinks and total binge drinking sessions that Americans have indulged in in recent years.

Septicemia - a blood infection that can lead to systemic inflammation, or sepsis - doesn't make the top 10 leading causes of death, but the CDC has included it in its new report, rounding the list out to 12 causes.

That's because rates of the infection are on the rise in the US, an alarming trend that suggests more people's primary infections may be going untreated for far too long.

Altogether, these data mean that the future looks less bright - or at least less long for babies born today than it did for those that came into the world a decade ago.

Life expectancy dropped by 0.2 years from 2014 to 2015, and then fell another 0.1 years between 2015 and 2016, the report reveals.
Two thirds of GPs now only work part-time, according to an analysis of official figures.

NHS Digital statistics show just 31 per cent of family doctors work 37.5 hours each week  the standard full-time hours.

The British Medical Association today admitted it was unsurprising that GPs are pursuing a better work/life balance.

The UK is already in the midst of a GP crisis, with thousands of doctors retiring in their 50s, moving abroad or going to the private sector.

GPs are struggling to cope with the unprecedented pressure from an ageing population, a recruitment crisis and immigration levels.

NHS Digital statistics show just 31 per cent of family doctors work 37.5 hours each week  the standard full-time hours

Pulse, a magazine aimed at doctors, analysed the NHS figures from March to reveal thousands are giving up on full-time posts.

The statistics, which showed around 69 per cent of GPs worked part-time when data was collected earlier this year, are the most recent available.

This is a jump on the 65 per cent of GPs recorded as working less than 37.5 hours a week three years ago, in September 2015.

Dr Richard Vautrey, the BMAs GP Committee chair, warned of the extreme amounts of pressure currently facing GPs.

He added: It is unsurprising many are choosing to adopt a more flexible approach to working where they can have a more reasonable work/life balance.

Indeed, in many cases, those scheduled on part-time hours are still doing a full weeks work.

A Department of Health and Social Care spokesperson said: GPs are a vital part of the NHS.

Its important to recognise the need for flexible working options so we can better retain GPs with patients benefiting from their wealth of knowledge and expertise.

Numbers of GPs are known to be dwindling in recent years, placing even more pressure on an over-stretched health service.

One in seven posts across the NHS are now empty, it was reported earlier this summer, with vacancy rates trebling in six years.

Some GPs said they were choosing to become locums or even move abroad because the job has become so difficult.

Others are opting to only work part-time or practise as locums, rather than holding down permanent posts.

Record shortages are leaving patients with ever-longer waiting times, and make it far more difficult to see the same GP each time.

The shortage of doctors comes despite the NHS adopting a plan in April to recruit 5,000 extra GPs by 2021.

Former Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt's pledge of 2.4 billion was said to be the answer to the staffing shortage, helping plug the growing number of vacancies.

This money was devised to lure GPs to move to the worst-hit areas of England, and to stop them from seeking another career.

It comes after a survey of 759 doctors last month found the majority plan on retiring before they reach the age of 60.
US health officials plan to lead an urgent international initiative to fight antibiotic resistance as a global superbug crisis looms closer, the CDC announced Wednesday.

Antibiotic resistance is becoming an increasingly pressing global public health concern as cases have nearly doubled since 2002, according to some estimates.

As common bacteria and fungi 'learn' how they need to change to survive, our widespread, life-saving antibiotic drugs are being rendered ineffective.

The US Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), Alex Azar, is planning to call on international leaders to fight harder and faster against antibiotic resistance during the UN General Assembly on Tuesday September 25.

Department of Health and Human Services Alex Azar(pictured) will call for a global fight against antibiotic resistance during the UN General Assembly on Tuesday, the CDC says (file)

Less than 100 years ago, bacterial and fungal infections were often a death sentence.

Since the invention of antibiotics in 1928, the same illnesses are more commonly an inconvenience than a mortal threat.

But that's changing, and quickly.

Just like us, germs 'learn' from their mistakes. As antibiotics have become widespread, bugs have mutated and evolved to be immune to our drugs.

The more germs are exposed to antibiotics, the faster the process of natural selection happens, so that the strains that are vulnerable to drugs die off and the stronger ones multiply, gradually becoming a larger and larger proportion of the germ population.

Already, 23,000 Americans die of antibiotic-resistant bacterial infections each year.

Those deaths only account for a little more than 15 percent of the two million total people who get infected with one of these resilient bugs, but can still be cured with other antibiotics.

Epidemiologists and infectious disease expert have been warning that antibiotic resistance truly could be a threat to human existence for years.

But antibiotics are so commodified, their use is so ubiquitous, and the development of new such drugs takes so long that nothing short of a concerted global effort will slow the spread of resistant bacteria.

And that is exactly what Secretary Azar intends to call for before the UN on Tuesday.

Many experts have blamed physicians for over-prescribing antibiotics.

WHAT IS ANTIBIOTIC RESISTANCE? Antibiotics have been doled out unnecessarily by GPs and hospital staff for decades, fueling once harmless bacteria to become superbugs. The World Health Organization (WHO) has previously warned if nothing is done the world is heading for a 'post-antibiotic' era. It claimed common infections, such as chlamydia, will become killers without immediate solutions to the growing crisis. Bacteria can become drug resistant when people take incorrect doses of antibiotics or if they are given out unnecessarily. Former chief medical officer Dame Sally Davies claimed in 2016 that the threat of antibiotic resistance is as severe as terrorism. Figures estimate that superbugs will kill 10 million people each year by 2050, with patients succumbing to once harmless bugs. Around 700,000 people already die yearly due to drug-resistant infections including tuberculosis (TB), HIV and malaria across the world. Concerns have repeatedly been raised that medicine will be taken back to the 'dark ages' if antibiotics are rendered ineffective in the coming years. In addition to existing drugs becoming less effective, there have only been one or two new antibiotics developed in the last 30 years. In September, the WHO warned antibiotics are 'running out' as a report found a 'serious lack' of new drugs in the development pipeline. Without antibiotics, C-sections, cancer treatments and hip replacements will become incredibly 'risky', it was said at the time. Advertisement

And this is certainly a major driver of resistance, and perhaps even the primary one, as some studies have suggested.

But doctors aren't the only ones feeding us antibiotics.

About 70 percent of all antibiotics in the US are fed to livestock (as of 2017) that then feed Americans - and people anywhere that we export meat.

And on the same day that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced the US's plan to call for global action against antibiotic resistance, the agency also published a report on domesticated animals and resistance in people.

Specifically, a three-year investigation found that at least 100 people contracted antibiotic-resistant campylobacter jejuni infections from puppies.

It was probably humans' faults in the first place, as pet store owners often give young animals prophylactic antibiotics before selling them - despite warnings against the practice from the World Health Organization.

It is in the immediate and obvious interest of livestock and pet retailers and even doctors to try to prevent infection instead of fighting it after onset.

But a more widespread, urgent and global awareness of the long-term and dire risks of this practice is essential to stopping it - and antibiotic resistance, experts say.

'A pledge to this initiative means escalating government, civil society, and private industry efforts to save lives from antibiotic resistance - one of the worlds greatest public health threats,' the CDC said in a statement.

This must be accomplished through a global pus for 'developing new vaccines and drugs, and improving use of and access to current antibiotics; by improving infection prevention and control; by reducing antibiotic resistance in the environment, like water and soil; and by sharing data to stay ahead of antibiotic-resistant germs.'

Alongside Secretary Azar, CDC Director Redfield, Director-General of the WHO, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the Secretary of the Indian Department of Health and Research and Anand Anandkumar of Bugworks will unveil the finer points of their plan in a talk moderated by journalist Madlen Davies on Tuesday at the General Assembly in New York City.
One morning in May 1879, in the coal cellar of a large London house, a teenage errand boy made a terrible discovery: a decomposing corpse with a rope around its neck.

With that as his macabre beginning, Sinclair McKay tells a compelling story, connecting class, snobbery, sex, immigration, early forensic science and, fascinatingly, if a bit tenuously, Sir David Attenborough.

The house was No 4, Euston Square, which was bulldozed in the Sixties as part of the new Euston station development.

McKay, in this meticulously researched book, has now excavated its lurid secrets.

In May 1879, in the cellar of a London house, a teenage errand boy made a terrible discovery: a decomposing corpse with a rope around its neck. With that as his macabre beginning, Sinclair McKay tells a compelling story, connecting class, snobbery, sex and immigration

In 1879 it was owned by one Severin Bastendorff, an immigrant from Luxembourg who had built a successful business making bamboo furniture.

Severin married an Englishwoman, Mary Pearce. By 1879 they had four children and ran their home as a boarding house.

The rapid proliferation of boarding houses in London in the mid-19th century had changed the culture of the city. This startling new convention of living cheek by jowl with strangers fascinated authors such as Dickens. The Victorian public were captivated by stories of murdered landladies, predatory widows and illicit sexual liaisons, but little intrigued them as much as the corpse in the Bastendorff cellar.

Eventually, thanks to ingenious detective work by a rising star at Scotland Yard, the body was found to be that of Matilda Hacker, a woman in her 60s, who, although wealthy, chose to move between London boarding houses. In 1877 she arrived to lodge at 4 Euston Square, where she was well liked but seen as conspicuously odd, so no one questioned her sudden departure. In fact she had been murdered, her body hidden in the cellar.

The Victorian public were captivated by stories of murdered landladies, predatory widows and illicit sexual liaisons

The prime suspect was the Bastendorffs maid, Hannah Dobbs. On trial at the Old Bailey, it emerged that she had been having a sexual relationship with Severins younger brother, and possibly Severin himself. Had Miss Hacker found out? Or had she simply discovered Hannah stealing from her? The public were agog.

It didnt help Hannah that another sensational case was being reported at the time: that of a servant, Kate Webster, who had murdered her employer in Richmond-upon-Thames. Hannah and Kate met while awaiting their verdicts, and Hannah drew comfort from Kates cheerfulness.

But Kate was found guilty and hanged, her wax effigy soon on display at Madame Tussauds. She had dismembered and boiled the corpse; the skull was found more than a century later, unearthed by builders working for Sir David Attenborough.

Hannah was acquitted and published a bestselling account of her experiences, shedding light on more seedy goings-on at 4 Euston Square. She alleged that an urchin had also been murdered there and, causing yet more indignation among Victorian readers, that a dog had been tortured. She claimed the villain of the piece, to whom shed lost her virginity in a rampant affair, was Severin.

Having denied this during Hannahs trial, Severin was then tried for perjury, found guilty, and sentenced to 12 months hard labour.

Unsurprisingly, his marriage disintegrated. It was also no surprise that, with his attempt to assimilate into the English middle class having come so spectacularly unstuck, he became increasingly unstable.

He was eventually locked up in a lunatic asylum, where nobody listened when he told them who really killed Matilda Hacker . . .
Shortly after Philip Larkin died, in December 1985 at the age of 63, the biggest crime in literary history was committed.

His 30-volume diary was destroyed by Betty Mackereth, his secretary (and lover) at the University of Hull.

Betty fed the manuscript, page by page, into a shredder, and then burnt the residue. It took her hours. She claimed she was only acting on Larkins explicit deathbed instructions  but he would have been off his head on morphine at the time.

As a man who had carefully kept everything, including his parents jam recipes and the telegram announcing his Oxford degree, who had filed every letter he received in annotated shoeboxes, and who had actually made speeches on the importance of retaining famous authors drafts and fragments, Larkin, in his right mind, would never have countenanced destroying this archival treasure.

Although Philip Larkin's journals were lost, his secretary says he was unhappy. Sir Andrew Motion, in this superb biography, amplifies her view, saying Larkins journals functioned as sexual log books and a gigantic repository for bile, envy and misanthropy

Apparently, from the sections Betty glimpsed as she did what she had believed was her duty, the material was fully reflective of a man who was very unhappy. Desperate, really. Sir Andrew Motion, in this superb biography, amplifies her view, saying Larkins journals functioned as sexual log books and a gigantic repository for bile, envy and misanthropy.

How can he know this for sure, if the diary was incinerated? On the other hand, how could Larkins private musings have been anything other than an epic of howling? He was a man who had concluded, early on, that everything in life is either irritating, embarrassing or frightening.

Larkin had been particularly terrified of death, the black-sailed ship: So final. And so near.

Sir Andrew Motion, who went on to become Poet Laureate, had first-hand experience of Larkins furnace fear of terminal illness, particularly cancer, when, back in the Seventies, he was a lecturer at the University of Hull, where Larkin, since 1955, had been the librarian.

Larkin was famously unapproachable and grumpy. Indeed, he disliked virtually everyone who worked for the university. But Motion, as he tells us in the fascinating new preface included in this 25th anniversary reissue of his masterful biography, struck up an unlikely friendship with the old curmudgeon.

Sir Andrew Motion, who went on to become Poet Laureate, had first-hand experience of Larkins furnace fear of terminal illness, particularly cancer, when, back in the Seventies, he was a lecturer at the University of Hull, where Larkin, since 1955, had been the librarian

They would meet in the staff bar to judge local poetry competitions. Back at Larkins house, theyd listen to jazz records or recite favourite poets (Hardy and Wilfred Owen). Motion found that Larkin was drinking a great deal, beginning to go profoundly deaf and seemed very lonely.

After Motion moved back to Oxford and then London, where he became an important literary figure in his own right, he would return to Hull frequently, visiting Larkin in the Nuffield Hospital when he fell ill with the oesophageal cancer that would swiftly kill him.

It was as if, in some peculiar way, Larkin believed that even when he was eventually actually dead he would remain conscious of not being alive  an infinity of claustrophobia

Larkin made Motion his executor, and the hospital surroundings clearly had him not just worried. Petrified. It was as if, in some peculiar way, Larkin believed that even when he was eventually actually dead he would remain conscious of not being alive  an infinity of claustrophobia.

Larkin was the greatest poet of the 20th century  the greatest English poet since Tennyson.

What will survive of us is love, Life is first boredom, then fear, They muck you up your mum and dad (Ive misspelt that one), Nothing, like something, happens anywhere  in his works, notable for their lack of pretentiousness and obscurity, and their adherence to traditional formal skills, Larkin wrote about everyday emotions such as grief and loss, everyday scenes like doctors waiting rooms and cemeteries.

Reading the ample biography, Larkins breathtakingly cruel treatment of his many girlfriends was shocking. As Monica Jones, his chief paramour, told Motion: I loved him, but I couldnt make him love me enough.

He drew out an exquisite poignancy, painting portraits of an abiding yet vanishing Englishness.

When he died, the initial tributes and obituaries were troubled by the revelation of Larkins fondness for pornography, his swearing and reactionary political views  as if great writers should all be right-on Guardian readers. None of that means a fig today.

What I found shocking, however, revisiting this ample biography, is Larkins breathtakingly cruel treatment of his many girlfriends. As Monica Jones, his chief paramour, told Motion: I loved him, but I couldnt make him love me enough.

Larkin never fully gave of himself. He had a phobia about commitment in any of its manifestations. To think of myself owning furniture gives me a sort of sinking feeling, he confessed. He was a total miser, accepting hospitality but never returning it  the favoured few might get a lettuce sandwich (a speciality).

Larkin never fully gave of himself. He had a phobia about commitment in any of its manifestations. To think of myself owning furniture gives me a sort of sinking feeling, he confessed

His preference was for frightful rented rooms with bare lightbulbs and linoleum floors. Deprivation is for me what daffodils were to Wordsworth, he said wittily.

Motion goes into huge detail about Larkins behaviour with his numerous and overlapping lady friends. The pattern of seduction, mendacity and betrayal was always the same: courtship, discussion of a future together and then coldness as he backed out, moaning to Kingsley Amis in letters about the cost of having to pay for the drinks and meals. (Another bottle of Fleurie three-sodding -90-f***ing-five.)

Perhaps it was sex itself he didnt care for? Intercourse, he said, was like asking someone else to blow your nose for you. Larkin kept women dangling for years, even decades. It makes for exhausting and painful reading, the way he played off Monica in Leicester against Maeve in Hull. Unknown to both, Larkin was cheating on them with Betty.

It ought to be funny, the entanglements  like a French farce. But everybody ended up wasting their lives. It was as if Larkin engineered this, devising and intensifying the feelings and emotional distress as inspiration for his poems. Monica put it very well when she said: He cared a tenth as much about what happened around him as he did about what was happening inside him.

Perhaps it was sex itself he didnt care for? Intercourse, he said, was like asking someone else to blow your nose for you. Larkin kept women dangling for years, even decades. Pictured with his mistress Monica Jones

Motion is correct to trace it all back to Larkins childhood. He was born in Coventry in 1922, where his father, the City Treasurer, was a stickler for precision and correctness who much admired the office methods of the Nazis. Only when war was declared did he reluctantly remove the swastikas from the wall in his office.

Larkins mother, Eva, who lived until 91, in contrast to her husband who had died of liver cancer in 1948, was a nervous wreck, scared almost into hysteria by thunderstorms.

If she cooked lunch, with the aid of a maid, she had to lie down all afternoon. Larkin claimed to hate her passive aggression, yet he wrote to her daily, visited her weekly, and took her on holiday annually to exciting venues such as Minehead or Weymouth.

Eva was Larkins perverse muse. Her nagging and wheedling, her helpless pettiness, provoked his bad moods, stoked his misogyny and gave Larkin his subject matter.

Once Eva died, Larkin never wrote another poem. Im a chicken with no egg to lay, he told Motion.

Larkin was born in Coventry in 1922, where his father, the City Treasurer, was a stickler for precision and correctness who much admired the office methods of the Nazis

Evas early ambition was to have been a librarian, and though her son had said, I dont give a zebras turd for any kind of job, a librarian is what, after Oxford, he became. It suited his nature to have everything neat, ordered, catalogued.

At libraries in Leicester and Belfast, where Larkin worked in the late Forties and early Fifties, and where he was known as a sexually disappointed Eeyore, he continued to sabotage happiness, because emptiness always swallowed fulfilment, in his analysis.

Even when he was a famous published poet, and received innumerable honorary degrees, a CBE, the Order of the Companions of Honour and considerable riches, he still managed to complain about how the grave yawns. Offered the laureateship, he turned it down, which is how we ended up with Ted Hughes.

By the time Motion met him in Hull (Its a bit chilly here and smells of fish . . . I like it because its so far away from everywhere else), the gangly Larkin had become bald and bulky, sweaty and waxy-looking, from heavy drinking. He had to buy his clothes in High & Mighty and his new suit resembled a walruss maternity garment.

If you think registering regret, guilt, anger and disappointment are signs of a superior spiritual nature, Larkin is your man.

This biography judiciously explores its subjects depths and complexities, the mix of yearning and retreat. I simply wish we had the diaries to back everything up.

During his research, however, Motion met Larkins hearing-aid specialist, who was psychic. Apparently, Larkin now keeps busy tramping and is finding the afterlife, despite expectations, very satisfactory.
Most people today know of the Tudor politician Thomas Cromwell through Hilary Mantels inspired, prize-winning novels, Wolf Hall and Bring Up The Bodies.

Or through the performance of Mark Rylance, glowering intensely across dimly lit rooms, in the TV adaptation of the books.

What kind of man was the real, historical Cromwell? Six years in the making, Diarmaid MacCullochs huge biography attempts to answer that question in painstaking, sometimes even excruciating detail.

It comes as no great surprise that some of the most memorable scenes in Wolf Hall have no basis in fact. Novelists do that. They make things up.

Six years in the making, Diarmaid MacCullochs huge biography attempts to answer the question of who Thomas Cromwell was in painstaking, sometimes even excruciating detail

The books opening sequence has a young Cromwell taking a terrible beating from his father. Not true, according to MacCulloch. There is no real evidence that the father was a brutal bully. There is little record of Cromwells early life at all. He was an obscure brewers son from Putney.

What is striking is how often and how closely Mantel did follow the historical record.

Cromwells most notable trait was his ruthlessness in pursuit of power. Both novelist and biographer make that clear. He achieved it because he found a solution to what was known as the Kings Great Matter.

Henry VIII had decided that he had breached a biblical prohibition in marrying Katherine of Aragon, who had been his deceased brothers wife. The lack of a male heir was proof of Gods wrath.

Most people know Cromwell from the series written by Hilary Mantel. Cromwells most notable trait was his ruthlessness in pursuit of power. Both novelist and biographer make that clear

Henrys eagerness to annul his marriage was increased by his passion for Anne Boleyn. Unexpectedly, Anne insisted that she would not share Henrys bed unless she was his wife. (Her sister Mary, an earlier lover of the king, had had no such scruples.)

It was Cromwell who found a way to fulfil the Kings wishes. He smoothed the path to Annes royal marriage.

Yet, when she also failed to produce a male heir, he turned on her. Anne already resented her husbands chief minister. She was heard to say that she would see his head off his shoulders.

But it was Cromwell who saw her to the scaffold. Henry already had his eye on a young noblewoman named Jane Seymour.

Henry VIII was eager to annul his marriage because of his passion for Anne Boleyn. It was Cromwell who found a way to fulfil the Kings wishes - and it was also Cromwell who had Anne killed later when the King grew tired of her

He complained that he had been seduced and forced into marriage with Anne through spells and charms. The speed with which Anne was toppled is remarkable. Cromwell was behind charges, almost certainly untrue, of adultery. She was even accused of incest with her brother.

She was executed in the Tower in front of a thousand spectators. Prominent amongst them was her nemesis, Thomas Cromwell. Eleven days after her death, Henry married Jane Seymour.

At times, MacCulloch suggests an element of sadism in Cromwells character that is not present in Mantels portrait. He recommended the torture of a prisoner with the words, pinch him with pains.

MacCulloch suggests an element of sadism in Cromwells character that is not present in Mantels portrait. He recommended the torture of a prisoner with the words, pinch him with pains

When he heard that some monks from the London Charterhouse had died in Newgate prison, he was furious. He swore that hed had something far more unpleasant in mind for them.

Cromwells own tragedy was that he served a master even more ruthless than he was.

Mantel will tell of her heros downfall in the third, as yet unpublished, volume of her trilogy.

MacCullochs final chapters show Henrys willingness to cast off his chief minister as soon as his usefulness came to an end.

Anne of Cleves was the unwitting catalyst of his downfall. After the death of Jane Seymour in childbirth, Cromwell was determined that the King should next marry a German Protestant. Anne fitted the bill.

Anne of Cleves was the unwitting catalyst of Cromwell's downfall. After the death of Jane Seymour in childbirth, Cromwell was determined that the King should next marry a German Protestant. Anne fitted the bill but Henry was appalled by her

Unfortunately, when she arrived in England, Henry was appalled by her.

To his embarrassment, he couldnt make love to her either on his wedding night or on any succeeding night. Cromwell had to face the fact that his own protracted diplomacy had resulted in the Kings sexual humiliation.

Even worse, Henry came to believe that his chief minister was gossiping about his problems between the sheets. Cromwell was doomed.

He was arrested on June 10, 1540. From prison, he wrote to the King, ending his letter with the words, I cry for mercy! mercy! mercy!

The only mercy he was given was the privilege of being beheaded rather than facing burning at the stake (for heresy) or hanging, drawing and quartering (for treason).

Even then, one account suggests that the executioner botched the job and took several swipes of the axe to kill him.

On the very same day that Cromwell died on the scaffold, Henry married his fifth wife, Katherine Howard.

There is a paradox at the heart of this epic work of scholarship. Despite the relentless accumulation of detail, Thomas Cromwell himself remains a mystery. He is as unknowable at the end of the book as he is at the beginning.

Perhaps it needs a novelist of Mantels exceptional gifts to bring such an enigmatic character fully to life.
Thomas Markle Sr. has celebrated his 74th birthday alone by eating a McDonald's Happy Meal and shopping in Los Angeles just days after revealing he has lost all contact with his daughter Meghan.

The Duchess of Sussex's estranged father was spotted out on Wednesday visiting the fast food restaurant and running errands at a Bank of America and UPS store.

Later, Markle Sr. was pictured heading to a Best Buy store to pick up a number of small electronics, which he then took with him when he went to visit friends in a nearby apartment complex.

Thomas Markle Sr. marked his 74th birthday with a visit to McDonald's in Los Angeles on Wednesday

The Duchess of Sussex's estranged father was spotted out on Wednesday visiting the fast food restaurant and running errands after driving up from his home in Rosarito, Mexico

The 74-year-old was spotted leaving the fast food restaurant after purchasing a Happy Meal

Markle Sr. had left his home in Rosarito, Mexico on Tuesday night, the eve of his birthday, and drove the six hours in heavy traffic to check into a $130-a-night motel in Los Angeles.

His birthday celebrations came the day after Meghan and Prince Harry carried out their royal duties by visiting The Nelson Mandela Centenary Exhibition in London.

Meghan's father has repeatedly spoken out to the media ever since it emerged just days before the royal wedding that he had secretly collaborated with a British paparazzi photographer to set up 'candid' photos of himself preparing for the big day.

Days later, the former Hollywood lighting director, who was set to walk Meghan down the aisle, infamously pulled out of wedding, claiming he had suffered a heart attack and needed emergency surgery.

A source close to the Duchess of Sussex told DailyMail.com on Tuesday that Markle Sr. was never ill and faked the operation as an excuse to not attend the royal wedding and garner sympathy.

Later, Markle Sr. was pictured heading to a Best Buy store where he picked up a number of small electronics

He was spotted inspecting cameras inside the store before eventually purchasing a few items

Meghan's father juggled multiple items in his arms as he made his way back to his car on Wednesday

Markle Sr. left the store carrying accessories for a computer with a scanner and HP items among his purchases

He also stopped in at a Bank of America branch and a UPS store on his birthday day out

'The whole story about Meghan's father undergoing heart surgery was made up,' the source said.

'He had to come up with a good enough reason not to attend her wedding and avoid any further embarrassment after those staged photos went public.'

During his recent bombshell interview on ITV's Good Morning Britain, the former lighting director said he was admitted to the Sharp Chula Vista Medical Center, just a few miles north of the Mexican border in Tijuana, where a stent was fitted.

But when DailyMail.com reached out to the hospital for confirmation of his May 16 visit, the clinic replied that 'no such name' had ever checked into the hospital.

'The poor health story was his way of generating some compassion from the public, and taking the attention off those staged photos which were a complete embarrassment to Meghan and the royal family,' the source said.

'Of course Meghan is upset with him. Her father missed her wedding. He missed walking her down the isle all because of that ill-conceived publicity stunt.

The 74-year-old eventually stopped by to see friends at an apartment complex in the Los Angeles neighborhood

He carried the items he had purchased from Best Buy into the friend's apartment and left them there when he left

Markle Sr. had left his home in Rosarito, Mexico on Tuesday night, the eve of his birthday, and drove the six hours in heavy traffic to check into a $130-a-night motel (above) in Los Angeles

He checked into the $130-a-night motel (above) in Los Angeles on Tuesday night after driving in heavy traffic for six hours

'It was really just such poor judgement on his part. Now everyone's feeling sorry for him. They shouldn't. He brought this upon himself and if he were truly sick Meghan would have made an effort to visit him. Don't feel sorry for him. If anything, feel sorry for Meghan.'

Since the wedding, Markle Sr. has given a number of paid media interviews speaking about his daughter and the royal family.

The father-of-three recently revealed he isn't fazed by reports that the Duke and Duchess of Sussex are fed up with him running to the media and he vowed to continue speaking about Meghan until he can be part of her life again.

He said this week that he hadn't spoken to his daughter in two months and that he could no longer reach her on the phone number he had for her.

Markle Sr. told The Sun this week that the former Suits actor was 'terrified' of her new life as a royal.

'I see it in her eyes,' he said.

'I see it in her face and I see it in her smile. I've seen her smile for years. I know her smile. I don't like the one I'm seeing now. This one isn't even a stage smile - this is a pained smile.

'It really worries me. I think she's under too much pressure. There's a high price to pay to be married to that family'.

Since the wedding, Markle Sr. has given a number of paid media interviews speaking about his daughter and the royal family

His birthday celebrations came the day after Meghan and Prince Harry carried out their royal duties by visiting The Nelson Mandela Centenary Exhibition in London
A black legislative candidate says she feels humiliated after police in Wisconsin stopped her and questioned her while she was campaigning door-to-door.

Dane County Supervisor Sheila Stubbs, 46, revealed on Wednesday that she was campaigning last month with her 71-year-old mother and 8-year-old daughter when a neighbor called 911.

The male neighbor suspected that the silver sedan being driven by Stubbs' mother was waiting in the area to pick up narcotics from 'the local drug house', according to police records reviewed by the Capitol Times.

After winning the Democratic primary a week after the incident, Stubbs faces no opponent in the general election and is set to become the first black person to represent Dane County in the Wisconsin assembly.

Sheila Stubbs is seen on the campaign trail earlier this year. Last month, a man called 911 while she was campaigning door-to-door, suspicious that she was there to pick up drugs

Stubbs (left and right) is set to become the first black person to represent Dane County in the Wisconsin assembly, after winning the primary and facing no opponent in the general

'It was just so degrading,' Stubbs told the Times of the police encounter. 'It was humiliating. It was insulting.'

Stubbs said she had been in what she says is a predominantly white neighborhood for less than 20 minutes and had knocked on five or six doors.

The police report does not identify the 911 caller except as a male, and it is unclear what race he may have been.

She told the newspaper that she saw a squad car pull up next to her family's vehicle.

Stubbs said that she told the officer what she was doing and the officer asked to see the voter list she was using to determine which houses to visit.

She then tried to explain to her daughter what had happened.

My daughter said, 'Mommy, why don't they believe us?'' Stubbs told the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel.

'I said, 'Sometimes we have to do more as African-Americans because of who I am, who we are. It's not fair. That's why Mommy is working so hard to change things for you because I don't want you to go through the same thing Mommy goes through.''

Stubbs said she struggled to explain the incident to her eight-year-old daughter, seen above with her and her husband

Stubbs (right) is seen campaigning. She is the second black woman in recent months to be questioned by police while campaigning

The report indicates the encounter ended amiably, with Stubbs and her mother handing the officer, Katherine Bland, their cell numbers and offering to help Bland improve race relations.

Still, Stubbs said she had to work hard to prove she was who she said she was. She showed the officer her name tag, her campaign literature and a list of addresses she wanted to approach.

'I belong where I choose to go. You don't have to like me. You don't even have to respect me. But I have a right to be places,' Stubbs said.

Stubbs is the second black woman in recent months to be questioned by police while campaigning.

In July, a deputy confronted an Oregon state senator, Janelle Bynum, who was campaigning for re-election.
The government on Wednesday appointed heads for ten state-run banks, five alone from State Bank of India (SBI). The appointments of these 10 managing directors (MD) and chief executive officers (CEO) were given the nod by the Appointments Committee of the Cabinet headed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

Mrutyunjay Mahapatra and Padmaja Chundru, both Deputy MDs in SBI have been appointed as MD and CEO of Syndicate Bank and Indian Bank respectively, as mentioned in an official order issued on Wednesday. Both Mahapatra and Chundru will continue their tenure till the date of their superannuation i.e. May 31, 2020 and August 31, 2021 respectively.

Joining them are three other Deputy MDs of SBI Pallav Mohapatra, J Packirisamy and Karnam Shekhar, who have been appointed as MD and CEO of Central Bank of India, Andhra Bank and Dena Bank respectively. They all, too, will have tenure till the date of their superannuation. Mohapatra and Packirisamy's tenure will last till February 28, 2021. Shekhar will be the MD and CEO of Dena Bank till June 30, 2020.

The move to appoint five deputy managing directors from the country's largest lender is seen as the government's effort to lend a helping hand to other banks grappling with high non-performing assets.

Besides these appointments, SS Mallikarjuna Rao, Executive Director of Syndicate Bank has been appointed as the MD and CEO of Allahabad Bank initially for a period of three years. Rao's tenure will be extendable up to the date of his superannuation, i.e. January 31, 2022, the order said.

AS Rajeev, Executive Director of Indian Bank has been named MD and CEO of Bank of Maharashtra for an initial period of three years, extendable up to two years following a review of his performance, the order mentioned.

Atul Kumar Goel and S Harisnakar have been appointed MD and CEO in UCO Bank and Punjab & Sind Bank respectively. Goel is the Executive Director of Union Bank of India and Harisankar is the Executive Director of Allahabad Bank.

Ashok Kumar Pradhan who is the Executive Director of United Bank of India will be MD and CEO of the same.

Their appointments come more than two months after they were recommended by the Banks Board Bureau, an advisory body formed by the government for top level appointments in the banks.

The BBB had recommended 14 bankers, including six deputy managing directors of SBI for appointment. Of the six, all except CV Nageswar have been appointed as MD and CEO of different state-owned banks, according to a statement issued by it on June 30.

(With PTI inputs; edited by Anwesha Madhukalya)
A young Navy sailor has died after he was struck by a plane propeller aboard the deck of a US aircraft carrier.

Airman Apprentice Joseph Min Naglak, 21, had just secured an E-2C Hawkeye radar plane to the flight deck of the USS George H.W. Bush in the Atlantic on Monday, when he was hit by the aircraft's propeller.

'The loss of a shipmate is a heartbreaking experience for a crew of a naval vessel,' said Cmdr. Dave Hecht, spokesman for Naval Air Force Atlantic told the Navy Times.

'Those aboard USS George H.W. Bush will mourn Naglak's passing and remember him always for his devoted service and sacrifice to our nation.'

Naglak's death comes just two weeks after he proposed to his girlfriend Niki Weber on September 3. The couple were still celebrating their new engagement when the tragedy occurred.

U.S. Navy Airman Apprentice Joseph Min Naglak died after he was struck by a spinning plane propeller aboard the deck of a US aircraft carrier

The incident is currently being investigated by the authorities.

The New Jersey native had been in the Navy for roughly a year and a half at the time of his death.

After enlisting in April 2017, he attended recruit training at Great Lakes, Illinois, and follow-on training in in Pensacola, Florida, he reported onboard the Bush in August of 2017.

The ship remains at sea, and flight operations have resumed.

Naglak, 21, had just secured an E-2C Hawkeye radar plane (file picture) when he was hit by the aircraft's propeller

The Navy confirmed he died on the USS George H.W. Bush (file picture) in the Atlantic on Monday

Naglak is survived by his parents Ken and Gina, and sister Stephanie, as well as his fiance Niki Weber.

Weber has not publicly commented on his loss but has posted several photos of herself with Naglak on her social media.

Family and friends have paid tribute to the young sailor.

Martha Mikel-Hong wrote she was 'shocked and saddened' by the sudden death and shared her condolences with his parents.

Naglak's death comes just two weeks after he proposed to his girlfriend Niki Weber on September 3.

The couple were still celebrating their new engagement when the tragedy occurred

Naglak is survived by his parents Ken (pictured with him) and Gina, and sister Stephanie, as well as his fiance Niki Weber

'Sending love to all of you and wishing you strength during this painful time. I know there's nothing we can do to take away this pain but please call if there is some way we can assist you during this time.

'May his memory be a blessing,' she wrote to Ken Naglak.

'My children and both Burak and I have the best memories of Stephanie and Joseph babysitting.May he rest in peace,' Marianna Alpaslan wrote.
The federal judge in Ashley Judd's lawsuit against Harvey Weinstein has dismissed her allegations of sexual harassment

The federal judge in Ashley Judd's lawsuit against Harvey Weinstein has dismissed her allegations of sexual harassment, but said she can still sue him for defamation.

District Judge Philip S. Gutierrez ruled that the California law Judd was suing under does not apply to the professional relationship she and the movie mogul had at the time.

Gutierrez gave Judd a month to amend and attempt to revive that section of the lawsuit, which her lawyer Theodore J. Boutrous Jr. said they intend to do.

Judd alleged that Weinstein derailed her career when she turned him down sexually, after she was nixed for a role in Lord Of The Rings.

She claims that the opportunity was torpedoed after Weinstein or someone at Miramax told the director that she was a 'nightmare' to work with, reports the Hollywood Reporter.

Under California law her claim that Weinstein purposely tried to damage her career by making this false allegation still stands.

District Judge Philip S. Gutierrez ruled that the California law Judd was suing under does not apply to the professional relationship she and the movie mogul had at the time (pictured in January 2017)

The actress has stated that she was 'approached by Weinstein in her hotel room 20 years ago', where he allegedly made advances on her.

She claims that she only escaped the situation by regretfully agreeing to a deal where he could only touch her if she won an Oscar.

Gutierrez gave Judd a month to amend and attempt to revive that section of the lawsuit, which her lawyer Theodore J. Boutrous Jr. said they intend to do (pictured in May 2018)

Judd said she only found out that she had been passed up for the role during an interview in 2017 where director Peter Jackson recounted what had happened.

Weinstein reasoned that she had a duty to carry out an investigation into the claims, but she insisted it was unlikely that a producer would reveal something in confidence and disrupt the relationship.

After Weinstein's motion to dismiss on Wednesday, Gutierrez inspected whether Judd had brought a timely lawsuit or whether her claims were barred by statute of limitations.

Following this the judge said that Judd only needed to raise a plausible reason that she would have been unable to learn of Weinstein's statements about her to Jackson.

He stated in his order: 'At this point, no evidence has been presented about whether it is common in the industry for actors to inquire into why they were not cast, and further, no evidence has been presented as to whether Jackson and Walsh would have informed Plaintiff about Defendant's statements had she asked them why she was not given a role in the Lord of the Rings films.

'Taking Plaintiff's allegations as true  as the Court must at this stage  the Court concludes that she has raised a plausible inference that she would not have been able to learn about Defendant's statements during the limitations period, even if she had conducted a diligent investigation.'

She claims that the opportunity was torpedoed after Weinstein or someone at Miramax told the director that she was a 'nightmare' to work with, reports the Hollywood Reporter (pictured in July 2018)

After the judge ruled that Judd had argued a defamation claim adequately, Weinstein contended that when he stated that he had 'bad experiences' with Judd, this amounted to a non-actionable opinion.

Judd 'argues that she can prove these statements false because Defendant had no previous professional interaction with her and her short two-day experience working on the Miramax film Smoke (where she alleges that she did not interact with Defendant) was uniformly positive,' writes the judge. 'The Court agrees with Plaintiff.'

Judd's attorney, Theodore Boutrous Jr. said that they are pleased that Judd can proceed with her lawsuit against Weinstein and 'continue her effort to vindicate the wrongs he committed against her and so many other women.'
Hundreds of mourners attended the funeral of the lone victim of last week's dramatic series of natural gas explosions and fires north of Boston on Wednesday.

Some 300 people came out to St. Mary the Assumption Church in Lawrence to remember 18-year-old Leonel Rondon, the Eagle-Tribune reported.

Family members and friends cried and hugged each other tightly as they wore white shirts bearing the words 'RIP Leonel' and 'It's Leo's world, we're just living in it,' the Boston Globe reported.

Rev. John Dello Russo remembered Rondon, who was a local musician who went by the name DJ Blaze, as a teen with a bright future.

Miguel and Rosaly Rondon, parents of Leonel Rondon, 18, who died in the gas explosions in South Lawrence last week, watch as pall bearers carry their son's casket out of St. Mary the Assumption Parish in Lawrence, Massachusetts on September 19, 2018

Miguel and Rosaly Rondon watch as pall bearers carry their son's casket out of St. Mary the Assumption Parish in Lawrence on Wednesday

Friends and family of Leonel Rondon leave after his funeral at St. Mary the Assumption Parish in Lawrence on Wednesday

Leonel Rondon was killed when a chimney fell on his car when a house exploded. He was pronounced dead at Mass General Hospital

Rondon had just received his driver's license hours before the tragedy

Through the devastation and tragedy that rocked Lawrence, Andover and North Andover, he said, the best of humanity emerged.

'Last Thursday afternoon, all hell broke loose in our city,' Dello Russo said.

'But in the midst of it, people helped one another out. In ourselves we found power, compassion, love.'

In her eulogy, Leomary Colon recalled how her cousin had tried to cheer her up at a homecoming dance. He told her, 'You got to live it until it's gone.'

She said she'd miss his advice and support. 'He took care of everyone,' Colon said. 'You knew you were in good hands with him.'

The high school junior died Sept. 13 after the chimney of an exploding house crashed into his car and crushed him. Rondon had just received his driver's license hours earlier.

About 25 other people were injured in the three Merrimack Valley communities. Dozens of homes were damaged or destroyed and thousands of residents were forced to evacuate.

Nearly 9,000 homes and businesses may be without gas for weeks as investigators continue to probe what set off the explosions.

In this September 13, 2018, file image take from video provided by WCVB in Boston, flames consume the roof of a home in Lawrence, Massachussets a suburb of Boston

The house owned by Lawrence Police Officer Ivan Soto sits nearly burned to the ground on Jefferson Street, in Lawrence on September 14, 2018

Firefighters work to extinguish a fire caused by over pressurized gas lines on September 13, 2018 in Lawrence

The National Transportation Safety Board, which is heading the inquiry, has said investigators are partly focused on pressure sensors that were connected to a Columbia Gas pipeline being taken out of service shortly before the blasts.

The gas company, meanwhile, said Wednesday it would withdraw a $33 million rate increase that had been scheduled to take effect in November for its more than 320,000 Massachusetts gas customers.

The rate hike had been approved prior to the explosions, but Columbia Gas of Massachusetts president Steve Bryant said in a statement that the company is instead focused on recovery efforts and 're-establishing trust.'

A woman inside gets help with her claim, right, as other residents line up for information and to file claims, Wednesday, Sept. 19, 2018, in North Andover, Massachussetts

U.S. Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Edward Markey sent a letter to Columbia Gas on Wednesday saying the company needs to 'immediately commit whatever financial resources are necessary to ensure that every effected resident in this area has the resources they need to rebuild their lives now and is made economically whole.'

The Massachusetts Democrats said after the San Bruno gas explosion in 2010, the Pacific Gas and Electric Company made up to $100 million available for recovery and community rebuilding. That explosion killed eight people and destroyed 38 homes

Columbia Gas said Tuesday that it's donating $10 million to an emergency relief fund.

Also Wednesday, Democratic Massachusetts House Speaker Robert DeLeo called on National Grid, another utility in the state, to end its lockout of workers because of stalled contract negotiations and resume negotiations, pointing to the gas explosions and the coming of cold weather.

Residents wait for information and to file claims on Wednesday in Andover in the wake of last week's gas explosions and fires

About 8,600 customers were affected by the explosions, with many having to evacuate their homes for days, and some possibly having to go without gas service for weeks
Remarkable photographs of Florence and the aftermath of the storm as it passed over the Carolinas show the same areas as they looked before and after flood waters receded.

Florence dropped nearly 3 feet of rain on North Carolina as the storm moved slowly across the state, flooding towns, closing roads and killing dozens of people.

Thirty-seven people were killed and tens of thousands were ordered to evacuate communities along North Carolina's steadily rising rivers.

In New Bern, 4,300 homes were inundated, a third of the total number of homes in the city.

More than 1,000 search-and-rescue personnel with 36 helicopters and more than 200 boats were working in North Carolina, and the Defense Department assigned 13,500 military personnel to help relief efforts.

 Slide me  This combination of photos shows a member of the North Carolina Task Force urban search and rescue team on Sept. 16, 2018, left, and on Sept. 19, 2018, after the water receded in the aftermath of Hurricane Florence in Fayetteville, North Carolina

 Slide me  In this combination of photos, water inundates a street on Sept. 15, 2018, left, and on Sept. 19, 2018, after the water receded in the aftermath of Hurricane Florence in Wilmington, North Carolina

 Slide me  In this combination of photos, a man tries to cross a flooded street on Sept. 14, 2018, left, and on Sept. 19, 2018, after the water receded in the aftermath of Hurricane Florence in Wilmington

 Slide me  The image on the right shows Cape Fear River coming up to the doorstep of a bait and tackle shop in Fayetteville on Wednesday. The image on the left shows the same shop days before the river crested

 Slide me  This combination of satellite images shows a farm on Jan. 13, 2017, left, and after Hurricane Florence moved through the area on Sept. 17, 2018, near Trenton

North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper said 2,600 people and 300 animals had been rescued. The storm also closed 1,200 North Carolina roads, including 357 primary roads.

The Cape Fear River crested at 61.5 feet early Wednesday morning, according to the National Weather Service.

Members of the National Guard work on a long sand bag flood barrier being built by the South Carolina Department of Transportation on U.S. 501 in Conway to lesson damage to roads anticipated from floods caused by Hurricane Florence on Wednesday

As the cleanup continues, more than 53,600 U.S. homes and businesses, mostly in North Carolina and South Carolina, were still without power on Wednesday, power companies said

Members of the National Guard take a break while working on a long sand bag flood barrier in Conway

Seema Depani, left, helps her family clean up after flooding from Hurricane Florence destroyed the Starlite Motel which her family owns in Spring Lake, North Carolina

Part of the Starlite Motel is washed away in the aftermath of flooding from Hurricane Florence

U.S. Army Sgt. Rose Stromberg holds the American flag she was able to retrieve from her storage unit which was flooded in the aftermath of Hurricane Florence in Spring Lake

Dinesh Depani sorts through the damage of the Starlite Motel which his family owns

More than 5 million gallons of partially treated sewage spilled into the river after power went out at a treatment plant, officials said.

At Fayetteville, about 100 miles inland, near the Army's sprawling Fort Bragg, flooding from Cape Fear River got so bad that authorities closed a vehicle bridge after the water began touching girders supporting the span's top deck.

Fayetteville Mayor Mitch Colvin said it was unclear if the bridge was threatened.

More than 53,000 homes still without power

As the cleanup continues, more than 53,600 U.S. homes and businesses, mostly in North Carolina and South Carolina, were still without power on Wednesday, power companies said.

That was down from a peak of 1.9 million customers that lost power during the storm.

Duke Energy Corp, the biggest utility in the area, on Wednesday said power had been restored to 1.6 million customers out of nearly 1.7 million customers who experienced an outage during the storm.

The company said it expects to restore power to most customers by Sept. 26.

Florence portends more massive hurricanes in age of global warming

Global warming has increased the likelihood of more massive, sluggish storms like Florence, capable of dropping record amounts of rain and causing the type of catastrophic flooding that crippled North and South Carolina this week, experts said.

Most meteorologists agree that climate change can increase the volume of water vapor stored within weather systems.

Rosemary Acevedo-Gonzalez (right) walks with her daughter Jordalis, 2, who asked to carry her own clothing after retrieving it upon returning to their home for the first time since it was flooded in the aftermath of Hurricane Florence in Spring Lake, North Carolina on Wednesday

Glen Randles sits in front of his home that was flooded from the Northeast Cape Fear River in Burgaw, North Carolina on Wednesday

The North Carolina State Forest Services Office is flooded from the Northeast Cape Fear River in Burgaw

Lt. Keith Ramsey with the Pender County Sheriff's Office walks out to a boat while taking part in rescue operations in Burgaw

Pender County Sheriff's Office Lt. Keith Ramsey, left, and Capt. Jamie Ezell look around during rescue operations on areas flooded from the Northeast Cape Fear River in Burgaw

A large area east of Burgaw is experiencing severe flooding from the Northeast Cape Fear River due to the torrential rains from Hurricane Florence

Area residents ride down N.C. Highway 53 that is flooded from the Northeast Cape Fear River in Burgaw

Frustration and sheer exhaustion are building as thousands of people wait to go home seven days after the storm began battering the coast

Local residents walk along the edge of a collapsed road that ran atop Patricia Lake's dam after it collapsed in the aftermath of Hurricane Florence, in Boiling Spring Lakes, North Carolina on Wednesday

More water vapor means more rain, especially when the storm is a crawler like Florence, which slowed to about 2 miles per hour after slamming into the North Carolina coast.

When storms such as Harvey, which struck Texas last year, and Florence come to a virtual stall, a deluge of rain can fall in the matter of days, equal to what an area typically sees in a year, they said.

'It is compelling and sobering to see these storms come in back-to-back seasons,' said Jim Kossin, an atmospheric research scientist with the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

His research suggests that global warming has affected the speed of storms as well as the amount of moisture they contain.

Florence, which has killed at least 36 people, dumped up to 36 inches of rain in parts of North Carolina since Thursday.

At least 16 rivers remained at a major flood stage, with three others set to crest in the coming days in North Carolina, the state said.

It has been a little more than a year since Hurricane Harvey dumped trillions of gallons of water on Texas and the U.S. Gulf Coast, killing 68 people and causing an estimated $125 billion in property damage.

Based on data from about seven decades of storms, Kossin found tropical-cyclone speed had decreased globally by 10 percent from 1949 to 2016, according to a paper published in June in the scientific journal Nature.

The reason is that climate change is warming the Arctic much more than it is heating up the Tropics, easing the pressure difference between the two, he said in an interview on Wednesday.

TRUMP TELLS CAROLINA FLOOD VICTIM: 'AT LEAST YOU GOT A NICE BOAT OUT OF THE DEAL' President Donald Trump surveys damage of a home where a yacht was thrown onto its property in New Bern, North Carolina on Wednesday Some three dozen people have died, thousands of homes were destroyed, and tens of thousands remain without power, but President Donald Trump can see the positive in the destruction caused by Florence. During a tour of flood-ravaged New Bern on the North Carolina coast, Trump got a first-hand look at a home that suffered severe damage. The home was nearly destroyed completely by a yacht that was tossed from the water and right onto the houses deck. When the president took a glimpse at the yacht, he asked the home owner: Is this your boat? When the owner replied that it wasnt, Trump said: At least you got a nice boat out of the deal. Trump then told reporters that the owner of the home told him that the insurance company refused to pay for the damage to his house. We're going to find out, he said. We're going to find out the name of the insurance company. Trump then suggested that the owner, who probably has other things on his mind, may get to keep the boat. Trump hands out food while visiting a distribution center outside the Temple Baptist Church while on a tour of Hurricane Florence recovery efforts in New Bern I think it's incredible what we're seeing, the president said. This boat just came here. They don't know whose boat that is. What's the law? Maybe it becomes theirs. Eager to show heart in a moment of crisis, Trump handed out hot dogs, hugs and comforting words in the Carolinas as he surveyed the wreckage left by Florence. With residents still recovering from torrential rains that left widespread destruction and injury, Trump sought to strike a balance between comforter and cheerleader, mindful that he has been criticized in the past for not showing sufficient empathy in the face of tragedy. During a packed day, a wind-breaker-clad Trump visited both North and South Carolina, distributed meals at a church, walked amid piles of sodden furniture in damaged neighborhoods, offered hugs and handshakes to residents and discussed the response efforts with local and state officials. 'America grieves with you and our hearts break for you. God bless you,' he said during a briefing at a marine base in Havelock, North Carolina. 'We will never forget your loss. We will never leave your side. Were with you all the way.' The emotional words and comprehensive itinerary stood in contrast with Trumps trip to Puerto Rico last year after Hurricane Maria, when he drew criticism for tossing rolls of paper towels into the crowd. Or his initial visit to Houston after Hurricane Harvey, when he did not meet with any storm victims. Trump embraces a boy while helping hand out meals with North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper There were still flashes of Trumps outsized persona and unconventional style - he asked about the status of Lake Norman, where he owns a golf club, telling officials, 'I cant tell you why, but I love that area.' And he was caught on camera telling a person to whom he had just handed food to 'have a good time.' Trumps made his whirlwind tour through the Carolinas five days after the storm, which was blamed for at least 37 deaths in North Carolina, South Carolina and Virginia. North and South Carolina both backed Trump in the 2016 election, and the president largely saw people who were happy to greet him. One man told the president hed named his dog after Trump. After a briefing on the recovery effort in North Carolina, Trump helped hand out hot dogs and chips at a Baptist church in New Bern, a riverfront city that experienced severe flooding. The president leaned over and checked in with people as they drove through to pick up food. 'Hows the house?' he asked one person. 'You take care of yourself,' he said. Trump also praised the volunteers, at one point hugging a young helper and telling his parents, 'You did a good job.' Trump walked through a storm-damaged neighborhood where waterlogged sofa cushions, mattresses and downed trees were piled up along streets. 'Hows it doing?' the president asked after one woman pointed at a house. He chatted and shook peoples hands as he walked along a street strewn with trash, branches and wet furniture. Some people applauded as he went by. Trump later traveled to Conway, South Carolina, where more flooding is expected still. He toured a neighborhood where a street was already submerged under water. Trump, mindful of past criticism of his flippant behavior during times of crisis, tried to show more empathy this time around. He is seen above distributing food in New Bern on Wednesday 'Is everybody OK?' he asked those gathered, assuring them it was 'going to be OK.' 'Lot of money coming from Washington,' he promised. At Horry Countys emergency operations center, South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster said the storm had likely been the worst disaster in the states history, but warned it wasnt over yet. 'The rain and the water you see out there now is just the beginning,' he said. 'The worst is yet to come.' Trump, too, warned that more water was on the way, but assured those gathered that both he and Washington are 'with you.' 'Now it looks nice, but its really the calm before the storm,' he said. It was the same message at Trumps first stop in North Carolina, where Gov. Roy Cooper and federal and state officials briefed the president at a Marine Corps air station in Havelock, which sits among areas Florence hit hardest. The governor asked for help 'cutting red tape' to get his state the federal assistance it will need to recover. Cooper said Florence was an 'epic' storm and noted that farmers suffered significant losses and scores of people lost their homes. Some 10,000 people remain in shelters. 'We will be there 100 percent,' pledged Trump. 'All of the folks from the federal government that are around the table are confirming it.' Cooper, a Democrat, said hed told the president 'over and over again' that the state was 'going to need significant resources to recover.' 'He promised 100 percent support and were going to hold them to it,' he said of Trump. Trump spent the run-up to the storm focused on criticism of the federal response to a hurricane that battered Puerto Rico last year, rejecting the official death toll of nearly 3,000 and claiming Democrats manufactured the number to make him 'look bad.' When Trump visited San Juan last October after Hurricane Maria, he pumped his fists in the air when he landed. The enduring image of the trip was of Trump at a church lobbing paper towels into the crowd as if shooting baskets. At the time, it seemed to reflect Trumps brand of playfulness. Many people in the crowd smiled and raised their phones to record the moment. When Trump visited San Juan last October after Hurricane Maria, he pumped his fists in the air when he landed. The enduring image of the trip was of Trump at a church lobbing paper towels into the crowd as if shooting baskets But critics quickly dubbed it inappropriate for the grim crisis at hand. Before that, Trumps trip to Texas after Hurricane Harvey generated blowback for his failure to meet with victims of the storm. Four days later, he returned - and urged people at a Houston shelter to 'have a good time.' He also cheered on volunteers and emergency workers and handed out hot dogs and potato chips to residents. Some critics said the presidents trip took on the tone of a victory lap for successful disaster management. Source: San Francisco Chronicle, Associated Press Advertisement

Pressure differences drive the winds, which in turn can steer and slow down storms, he said.

In the case of Florence, warmer sea temperatures and the amount of available moisture in the air may have increased rainfall by as much as 50 percent in the hardest-hit areas, according to a study by researchers at Stony Brook University, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the National Center for Atmospheric Research.

To make matters worse, Florence was about 50 miles larger in diameter due to global warming, putting more people in harms way, the study showed.

'We can attribute that additional rainfall to human-induced climate change,' said Kevin Reed, a professor at Stony Brook Universitys School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences, who contributed to the study.

The paper, still unpublished, may fuel an ongoing debate in the scientific community about whether climate change, induced by human activity, has a direct impact on the strength and size of a storm.

Global warming has greatly increased the chances of another storm of Harveys magnitude hitting Texas again, according to a published study by Massachusetts Institute of Technology Professor Kerry Emanuel.

The likelihood of more massive rainfalls also should raise red flags for both coastal and inland communities and get them to rethink plans for storm-related inundation, experts said.

This includes planning for massive evacuations and making improvements to infrastructure related to water-flow resources to help ease the blow.

Most of the damage caused by Harvey and Florence has come from the flooding, which has devastated cities and rural areas, turning highways into rivers and pastures into lakes.

'There is going to be both more inland flooding and more storm-surge, ocean-related flooding because the ocean is getting higher,' said Brion Callori, senior vice president of engineering and research at commercial property insurance firm FM Global.

'The biggest risk is burying your head in the sand and not understanding your exposure,' he said.
Foreign government hackers continue to target the personal email accounts of U.S. senators and their aides - and the Senate's security office has refused to defend them, a lawmaker says.

Sen. Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, said in a Wednesday letter to Senate leaders that his office discovered that 'at least one major technology company' has warned an unspecified number of senators and aides that their personal email accounts were 'targeted by foreign government hackers.'

Similar methods were employed by Russian military agents who leaked the contents of private email inboxes to influence the 2016 elections.

Wyden did not specify the timing of the notifications, but a Senate staffer said they occurred 'in the last few weeks or months.' The aide spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the issue publicly.

Oregon Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden says tech experts believe foreign hackers are penetrating personal email accounts of members of Congress and their aides

Wyden is proposing new legislation that would allow the Senate's Sergeant at Arms to spend taxpayer money protecting senators' private email accounts and personal devices

But the senator said the Office of the Sergeant at Arms, which oversees Senate security, informed legislators and staffers that it has no authority to help secure personal, rather than official, accounts.

'This must change,' Wyden wrote in the letter. 'The November election grows ever closer, Russia continues its attacks on our democracy, and the Senate simply does not have the luxury of further delays.' A spokeswoman for the security office said it would have no comment.

Wyden has proposed legislation that would allow the security office to offer digital protection for personal accounts and devices, the same way it does with official ones. His letter did not provide additional details of the attempts to pry into the lawmakers' digital lives, including whether lawmakers of both parties are still being targeted.

Google and Microsoft, which offer popular private email accounts, declined to comment.

The Wyden letter cites previous Associated Press reporting on the Russian hacking group known as Fancy Bear and how it targeted the personal accounts of congressional aides between 2015 and 2016. The group's prolific cyberspying targeted the Gmail accounts of current and former Senate staffers, including Robert Zarate, now national security adviser to Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, and Jason Thielman, chief of staff to Montana Sen. Steve Daines, the AP found.

The same group also spent the second half of 2017 laying digital traps intended to look like portals where Senate officials enter their work email credentials, the Tokyo-based cybersecurity firm TrendMicro has reported.

Microsoft seized some of those traps, and in September 2017 apparently thwarted an attempt to steal login credentials of a policy aide to Missouri Sen. Claire McCaskill , the Daily Beast discovered in July. Last month, Microsoft made news again when it seized several internet domains linked to Fancy Bear, including two apparently aimed at conservative think tanks in Washington.

Such incidents 'only scratch the surface' of advanced cyberthreats faced by U.S. officials in the administration and Congress, according to Thomas Rid, a cybersecurity expert at Johns Hopkins University. Rid made the statement in a letter to Wyden last week .

'The personal accounts of senators and their staff are high-value, low-hanging targets,' Rid wrote. 'No rules, no regulations, no funding streams, no mandatory training, no systematic security support is available to secure these resources.'

'Russia continues its attacks on our democracy, and the Senate simply does not have the luxury of further delays,' Wyden wrote

Attempts to breach such accounts were a major feature of the yearlong AP investigation into Fancy Bear that identified hundreds of senior officials and politicians  including former secretaries of state, top generals and intelligence chiefs  whose Gmail accounts were targeted.

The Kremlin is by no means the only source of worry, said Matt Tait, a University of Texas cybersecurity fellow and former British intelligence official.

'There are lots of countries that are interested in what legislators are thinking, what they're doing, how to influence them, and it's not just for purposes of dumping their information online,' Tait said.

In an April 12 letter released by Wyden's office, Adm. Michael Rogers  then director of the National Security Agency  acknowledged that personal accounts of senior government officials 'remain prime targets for exploitation' and said that officials at the NSA and Department for Homeland Security were discussing ways to better protect them. The NSA and DHS declined to offer further details.

Guarding personal accounts is a complex, many-layered challenge.

Rid believes tech companies have a sudden responsibility to nudge high-profile political targets into better digital hygiene. He said he did not believe much as been done, although Facebook announced a pilot program Monday to help political campaigns protect their accounts, including monitoring for potential hacking threats for those that sign up.

Boosting protection in the Senate could begin with the distribution of small chip-based security devices such as the YubiKey, which are already used in many secure corporate and government environments, Tait said. Such keys supplement passwords to authenticate legitimate users, potentially frustrating distant hackers.

Cybersecurity experts also recommend them for high-value cyber-espionage targets including human rights workers and journalists.

'In an ideal world, the Sergeant at Arms could just have a pile of YubiKeys,' said Tait. 'When legislators or staff come in they can (get) a quick cybersecurity briefing and pick up a couple of these for their personal accounts and their official accounts.'
A zoo blamed over the deaths of dozens of exotic animals will remain open after its owners yesterday agreed to pay off their debts.

Borth Wild Animal Kingdom lost its licence for big cats last year when two lynx died.

Other animals died in unexplained circumstances, including an emu and a squirrel monkey.

Dean Tweedy feeding a Rea at The Animalarium in Borth, Wales, which he owns along with his wife Tracy. The couple left their house in Kent to start a new life in Wales

The zoo, which is near Aberystwyth, mid Wales, temporarily closed, leading it to run up debts of almost 350,000.

An escaped lynx, about twice the size of a domestic tabby, was shot dead last October by a marksman employed by the council after police helicopters and baited traps failed to recapture her.

Shortly after, a second lynx died when it was accidentally strangled to death on a catchpole while a zoo worker was rushing to move her ahead of an inspection.

The Mumbrays ran the zoo, then called the Borth Animalarium for 17 years before retiring.

A lynx in the enclosure at The Animalarium in Borth, Wales. The young animal was shot dead by a council-appointed marksman after police helicopters and baited traps failed to recapture her

It was faced with being shut down if it could not find the cash, but the High Court in London yesterday was told it had agreed a Company Voluntary Arrangement with creditors.

Dean and Tracy Tweedy took over the zoo in May 2017 after buying it from Jean and Alan Mumbray for 625,000.

Tracy Tweedy said they had agreed to pay around 40,000 of the 350,000 debt owed.

The psychotherapist and street artist gave up their careers and moved to Wales from Kent last year with their three children after purchasing the zoo for 625,000.

They have been criticised for lacking specialist knowledge.

Mrs Tweedy, 47, said: All you can do is move on and learn from things that have happened. Business is picking up now.
The distraught widow of an Australian soldier who died on a British SAS training exercise has hit out at defence chiefs after the case into his death was thrown out.

Corporal James Dunsby, 31, and two other soldiers died of heat exhaustion during a 26km hike over a Welsh mountainside on the hottest day of the year in July 2013.

His widow, Bryher Dunsby, was left shattered and angry after hearing that Judge Advocate General Jeff Blackett ruled the defendants had no case to answer.

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Corporal James Dunsby's widow, Bryher Dunsby, was left shattered and angry after hearing that Judge Advocate General Jeff Blackett ruled the defence force had no case to answer in her husband's death

'This is beyond unacceptable, and shows blatant ignorance to a vital need, where apparently three deaths are not enough to incite change,' she told The Daily Telegraph.

'This court martial has revealed the shocking reality that there is still no official guidance for those conducting endurance training marches in the British Army on heat illness, even five years on.'

JAG Blackett said the poor planning of the hike was only one factor that contributed to the tragic outcome, London's Daily Telegraph reported.

'The allegations of negligent performance of duty were only a small part in the overall failings - the deaths occurred because of the systemic failures within Joint Forces Command,' he said.

'These two defendants did the best they could in the circumstances of fewer resources than requested, a lack of even the most basic of training in relation to heat illness and risk assessment and within the culture that existed at the time.'

Corporal James Dunsby, 31, (pictured) and two other soldiers died of heat exhaustion during a 26km hike over a Welsh mountainside on the hottest day of the year in July 2013

Another widow has pressed for the Ministry of Defence to be stripped of its immunity from prosecution after being blamed for the deaths of three reservists.

A court martial case against the two SAS instructors fell apart after the MoD itself was blamed for the deaths of three soldiers on a special forces selection march.



Lance Corporal Craig Roberts, Lance Corporal Edward Maher and Corporal James Dunsby died after marching through the Welsh hills in high temperatures in July 2013.

Two SAS officers were brought before a court martial this week, charged with 'negligently performing a duty' for failing to take care of those on the march.

Speaking outside court, Mrs Dunsby said she still missed her husband, Corporal Dunsby, every day.

Lance Corporal Craig Roberts (left), Lance Corporal Edward Maher (centre) and Corporal James Dunsby (right) died on the exercise

Today's case was attended by Bryher Dunsby, widow of Corporal James Dunsby. She slammed the Army for not having revised safety guidance in the wake of the tragedy

She said: 'The MoD are still protected from prosecution for corporate manslaughter by Crown immunity, there is an obvious need for this in live combat, but I believe not in training in Wales'.

'Without ultimate accountability or punishment from the law, there is no incentive to do the right thing.'

Clare Stevens, who has represented members of two of the reservists' families, described 1A and 1B as 'scapegoats for those at the top'.

'The MoD is immune from prosecution under health and safety legislation, so it received a Crown censure - just a recording to confirm had they not been exempt from prosecution, they would have been prosecuted,' she said.

'That is simply not good enough. Until they are held properly accountable, there is no impetus to change.'

Mrs Dunsby had said she would call upon the head of the British Army to implement new guidelines for endurance marches.

She said: 'This would ensure that those running training have clear and direct orders to follow from the top of the chain of command. And I am asking him to tell me when this is done.'

'We all grow up with the national narrative that our SAS, quite rightly, are our elite and some of the best in the world, something we are very proud of here in the UK.

'If we are to continue this level of excellence in a global arena, where defence provision is increasingly fundamental to our national security, more defence funding, progressive thinking and competent quality leadership must be prioritised.

She called upon the head of the British Army to prioritise implementing the new guidelines

'Ensuring the training of our forces is run efficiently and safely is non negotiable, particularly when we are asking our service personal to push themselves to the ends of their endurance.'

Cpl Dunsby's father David told ITV News he would 'like to see others in the dock'.

Instructors 1A and 1B, whose identities are protected by an anonymity order, went on trial at the Court Martial Centre in Bulford, Wiltshire, last Monday.

But the two servicemen, who were the safety officers for the march, were acquitted by a five-person board on the direction of Jeff Blackett, Judge Advocate General.

The armed forces regularly use the Welsh hills for training exercises (pictured in file photo)

Judge Blackett found that their lack of training on heat illness and risk assessments meant that other servicemen in their position would not have acted differently.

'I have determined that there is no evidence of negligent performance of duty when the conduct of these defendants is measured against the reasonable serviceman of similar experience, knowledge and training,' he said.

'A board properly directed could not properly convict and I intend to stop the case now.'

Soldiers carry huge packs during the 'yomps'

Judge Blackett told the families of the three reservists that their deaths were due to 'systemic failures' in the Army rather than the fault of individual instructors.

The judge said to the soldiers' families: 'You may have thought that this trial might have helped you obtain some degree of closure.

'But this trial was never about attaching sole blame for the deaths of these three young men on these defendants.

'The allegations of negligent performance of duty were only a small part in the overall failings - the deaths occurred because of the systemic failures within Joint Forces Command.'

The judge added: 'These two defendants did the best they could in the circumstances of fewer resources than requested, a lack of even the most basic training in relation to heat illness and risk assessment, and within the culture that existed at the time.'

Prosecuting, Louis Mably QC said he would not seek leave to appeal the judge's decision that the defendants had no case to answer.

Clare Stevens, partner at JMW Solicitors which has representative relatives of one of the soldiers, explained that the MoD is immune from prosecution under health and safety legislation, so it received a crown censure, a recording to confirm had they not been exempt from prosecution, they would have been prosecuted.

She added: 'The failings were significant and went right to the top - the two put on trial are scapegoats for those at the top. Those that should have been on trial weren't.'

Temperatures in the Brecon Beacons (pictured) reached 79.3F from midday on the day of the march and had risen to 82.9F by 4pm, the court martial was told today

Thirty-seven reservists and 41 regular troops took part in the exercise, which was part of the aptitude phase for selection for a special military unit.

The march was 16 miles (26km) as the crow flies - though those taking part were expected to cover almost 18.5 miles (30km) - and had to be completed in eight hours 45 minutes.

Candidates carried a bergen, a backpack, weighing between 22 and 27kg as well as a dummy rifle.

Those who voluntarily withdrew from the march, or were withdrawn on medical grounds, failed.

Previous court hearings had been told that 'Wet Bulb Temperatures', which take into account factors including humidity and wind, reached 31.2C (over 80F) on the day of the exercise.

Lance Corporal Craig Roberts and L/Cpl Edward Maher were pronounced dead on the Welsh mountain range after suffering heatstroke.

Corporal James Dunsby died at Birmingham's Queen Elizabeth Hospital from multiple organ failure more than two weeks later.
More than a thousand bank customers have downloaded fake ANZ and Commonwealth Bank apps.

Before the glitch was eventually discovered, some unsuspecting users were potentially revealing their personal login credentials and credit card details to fraudsters.

All the downloaded fake apps were through Google Play store, and customers of all financial institutions have been urged to check their bank statements.

More than a thousand customers from ANZ and CBA have downloaded fake apps (stock image)

ANZ confirmed a customer made them aware about a fraudulent app which was circulating two months ago.

After informing Google Play, the fake app was removed.

In a statement, CBA said 'once a suspicious app is identified, we work with the app store to ensure the app is quickly removed or disabled.'

Nick Fitzgerald, a senior researcher at IT security company ESET, believes the code similarities in the two fake apps can be linked to a singular online hacker.

Before the glitch was eventually discovered, some unsuspecting users were potentially revealing their login credentials and credit card details to fraudsters (stock image)

'This is a big concern for anyone who may have handed over personal information,'' he said.

'The loss of personally identifiable information can result in financial fraud that may affect you for the rest of your life.'

Both falsified apps asked for credit card details or log-in credentials once launched.

If users filled out the form, the data was sent directly to the attacker's service.

Affected ANZ customers can contact their bank on 1800 033 844, with CBA customers advised to call 13 2221 to report any suspicious activity.
Australia's geopolitical tensions with China are set to escalate as it plans to build a new military base in Papua New Guinea that can also host American warships.

Six weeks before he was overthrown in a Liberal Party leadership coup, former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull discussed with his then PNG counterpart Peter O'Neill the idea of re-developing the Lombrum Naval Base on Manus Island.

The political leaders met in Brisbane on July 11, with The Australian learning Mr O'Neill was 'very interested' in the idea and had even put his support in writing.

Australia's geopolitical tensions with China are set to escalate as it plans to build a new military base in Papua New Guinea that can also host American warships

Six weeks before he was overthrown as PM, Malcolm Turnbull discussed with this PNG counterpart Peter O'Neill the idea of re-developing the Lombrum Naval Base on Manus Island

The base, run by Australia for 25 years until PNG gained independence in 1975, would be capable of hosting Australian and American warships on Manus Island, where asylum seekers are sent for processing.

The Australian Defence Force is understood to be conducting a scoping study of the area, with News Corp Australia reporting the former Turnbull government had wanted a deal signed with PNG before November's Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation summit, which is being held in Port Moresby.

Chinese President Xi Jinping is hosting a special APEC conference for regional leaders in the PNG capital.

The idea of stationing Australian and American naval warships in the area is set to infuriate China, with Beijing in 2011 expressing diplomatic concern about U.S. marines being stationed in Darwin.

The idea of stationing Australian and U.S. warships in the area is set to infuriate China, with Beijing in 2011 expressing diplomatic concern about U.S. marines being stationed in Darwin

The base, run by Australia for 25 years until PNG gained independence in 1975, would be capable of hosting Australian and American warships on Manus Island

While China is Australia's biggest two-way trading partner, Australia is suspicious about Chinese espionage activity, banning telecommunications firm Huawei from bidding for the National Broadband Network.

In July, Mr Turnbull signed a deal for Australia to fund a $136 million internet cable between Australia, PNG and the Solomon Islands in a bid to stop Huawei from doing so.

He attended the State of Origin with Mr O'Neill and Solomon Islands PM Rick Houenipwela as part of the diplomatic charm offensive, as the Queensland Maroons defeated the New South Wales Blues 18-12.

Mr Turnbull's successor Prime Minister Scott Morrison was tight-lipped about the possible new naval base on Thursday.

'The Pacific is a very high-priority area of strategic national security interest for Australia. We work very closely with all our Pacific partners,' he told the Seven Network.

'But I'm not going to comment on speculation on national security issues, that would not be appropriate.'
Kristopher Paul Beckstrom, 42, who teaches music at Landon Middle School, in Jacksonville, was arrested Wednesday

A middle school teacher is accused of posing as a 17-year-old boy to exchange obscene photos with underage girls.

Kristopher Paul Beckstrom, 42, who teaches music at Landon Middle School, in Jacksonville, was arrested Wednesday for producing or promoting the sexual performance by a minor and transmission of material harmful to minors.

Duval County Superintendent of Schools Dr. Diana Greene confirmed that Beckstrom, who once won Teacher of the Year, had been banned from the school after the allegations came to light, News4Jax reports.

The investigation began when a teenage girl came forward on September 13, telling police she'd been chatting online with user 'erikb20172018' who had been sending 'random' requests for nude photos on Instagram and Snapchat.

The user 'erikb20172018' claimed to be a 17-year-old boy and his profile showed pictures of a young teen.

The married music teacher at Landon Middle School, in Jacksonville, where he was once Teacher of the Year, posed as a 17-year-old boy under the username 'erikb20172018' which also featured a photo a random teenager - not associated with the case

'erikb20172018' posted several teenage angst style messages on his Instagram

Beckstrom teaches music at Landon Middle School, in Jacksonville, (pictured)

The girl said she had ignored the messages until September 10, when she said another Instagram user had messaged her, with a screenshot of the 'erikb20172018' profile, warning: 'He is not who you think he is.'

The stranger told the teen that she had been messaging with 'erikb20172018', but became suspicious when he kept coming up with excuses not to do a live video, and noted that his photos didn't seem to match his profile picture.

They said that when they confronted 'erikb20172018', he came clean and admitted he was in fact 42-year-old Kristopher Paul, a teacher at Jacksonvilles Landon Middle School who was married with children, according to the police report.

The teen who contacted the police, said that the description immediately set off alarm bells and that the stranger's detailed description, describing the teacher as an older, heavy-set white man with a distinctive mustache, brought to mind her former teacher Beckstrom.

The investigation began when a teenage girl came forward on September 13, telling police she'd been chatting online with user 'erikb20172018' who had been sending 'random' requests for nude photos on Instagram and Snapchat (pictured is the police report)

Police brought Beckstrom in for questioning on Wednesday, and he was arrested after he acknowledged sending obscene photos to minors, according to the Sheriffs Office.

Parents of children at the middle school were horrified by the news.

'He was a great guy and a great teacher, so this is such shocking news,' said Brea Nelson.
In an incident that is perhaps one-of-its-kind, international airline Cathay Pacific painted its own name incorrectly on a new plane. In a gaffe, Cathay Pacific's newly-painted plane was sporting a new version of its name - Cathay Paciic!

According to reports, the Boeing 777-367 even completed a journey. The plane flew overnight from Xiamen in China to Hong Kong, where it arrived in the early hours of Wednesday. A couple of passengers spotted the mistake and contacted Cathay Pacific.

The airline said that the plane will now be sent back for repainting. "Oops this special livery won't last long! She's going back to the shop!" the airline tweeted.

Oops this special livery won't last long! She's going back to the shop! (Source: HKADB) pic.twitter.com/20SRQpKXET - Cathay Pacific (@cathaypacific) September 19, 2018

While Cathay Pacific publicly accepted its mistake and brushed it off, it is not clear how this mistake came to be. An engineer for Haeco, a Cathay Pacific subsidiary pointed out to South China Morning Post: "The spacing is too on-point for a mishap. We have stencils. Should be a blank gap in between letters if it was a real mistake I think."

A company spokesperson told CNN that they did not want to make a fuss about it and just shared the hilarious incident with everyone. "We did not intend to make it a big fuss in the first place, but photos went viral within the aviation enthusiastic groups, so we just shared the hilarious moment with everyone," said the spokesperson.

Netizens saw the opportunity and took it. One user tweeted, "No one gives a F anymore, not even the painters!", while many urged the airline to change their Twitter handle name to Cathay Paciic.

Cathay Pacific is one of the top airlines in the world. It was ranked No. 6 in Skytrax's annual World Airline Awards in 2018.

(Edited by Anwesha Madhukalya)
Mike and Boo do everything together, from going on walks to sharing food and even a bed.

Not so unusual, you might think. Until you learn that Mike is a magpie and Boo is a whippet.

The unlikely bond between bird and dog blossomed four months ago after a distressed Mike was found floundering on his own at about two weeks old.

Boos owner Steve Rostron was out on an evening walk in Sabden, Lancashire, when the inquisitive dog sniffed out Mike behind a telephone junction box.

Boo the whippet and Mike the magpie playing with one another while out on a walk in the Lancashire countryside

Despite being an odd pairing the two animals have become inseparable since they first met

Mr Rostron, 44, an artist, believed Mike may have fallen out of his nest from a tree above. Worried that he might not survive, he and five-year-old Boo took the bird home and, along with Mr Rostrons partner Janine MacLean, nursed Mike back to health.

However, when it came to letting Mike back into the wild, he refused to go  preferring to stay with Boo instead.

Mike the magpie has become totally house-trained

Mike and Boos friendship has gone from strength to strength, with the pair enjoying nestling up on the sofa to watch television together.

During daily walks for Boo, Mike often joins in, flying ahead and waiting for Boo to catch up. The friendly bird even refuses to sleep in his cage and prefers to sleep in Boos basket.

Miss MacLean, 49, said: Its a bizarre but wonderful friendship.

When Steve brought Mike home I didnt think hed make it through the night, he was so tiny. He was really struggling. He must have fallen out of a tree as he couldnt have been older than two weeks, he had virtually no feathers.

We fed him with a syringe for weeks and weeks until he started to regain strength and bond with us and Boo, once he realised that Boo was a big friendly giant. It wasnt long before the pair became firm friends and now Mike is a permanent member of the family.

Miss MacLean, a teacher, said: It was heart-breaking but also amazing when he had regained enough strength to go back into the wild.

Boo and Mike going on a walk together with the magpie having taken to riding the dog's back

Janine Maclean said they fed Mike with a syringe for weeks and weeks until he started to regain strength

Me, Steve and especially Boo had formed such a weird but wonderful bond with him but we knew he had the right to be free as he was a wild bird. However, he refused to leave and now even when he does go for a fly wherever he wants, he always returns to the house.

The wild magpie has proved himself to be quite the showman, capturing the hearts of locals when he goes out for his solo travels by stealing sips out of their pints and flying into shops.

Miss MacLean said: He is such a social little man, he is drawn to anywhere with a crowd. He goes to the park on Boos back to see the kids. Everyone in the village knows and adores him.

We have bought him a cage but he tends to prefer to sleep with Boo and through the day he is always free to go out and do what he wants.

He is a little superstar and his relationship with Boo is just magical. I couldnt imagine our lives without him.

Steve Rostron and Janine MacLean have grown accustomed to having Mike around the home
Australia's self-inflicted cane toad invasion may soon be over after a team of scientists cracked the deadly amphibian's DNA code.

International scientists working with UNSW Sydney, the University of Sydney and Deakin University unlocked more than 90 per cent of the invasive toad's genome.

In the study, which was published in the journal GigaScience, the researchers identified the genome contains viruses, which could potentially eradicate the pest.

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Australia's self-inflicted cane toad (pictured) invasion may soon be over after a team of scientists cracked the deadly amphibian's DNA code

Lead author of the study, virologist Professor Peter White told ABC News the discovery came out of a conversation about how to stop the toad in its tracks.

He said despite the pesky cane toad's iconic status there were very few genomes of amphibians in the scientific community so it provided the impetus to do the study.

'But we've now got the blueprint as well as the plans to the factory,' he told AAP.

The poisonous toads have wreaked havoc on Queensland's ecosystem since they were first introduced in Queensland in 1935 from Hawaii to control cane beetles.

Over the years, they have become a menace for wildlife, including northern quolls, freshwater crocodiles and several species of native lizards and snakes.

Today, millions of toads now occupy more than 1.2million square kilometres of Australia following a seemingly unstoppable march across the top end.

Cane toads (pictured) have wreaked havoc on Queensland's ecosystem since they were first introduced in Queensland in 1935 from Hawaii to control cane beetles

Already Prof White's team has used the toad's genetics to find three new viruses that with further work may become biocontrols to stem the toad's march across the country.

'We're now going to see how prevalent they are in the population, going all the way back to South America, and then we'll see how pathogenic they are,' he said.

'Hopefully, they're very pathogenic, and then we can begin testing them.'

Prof White said the team needed to be sure any biocontrol created won't affect native amphibians.

Over the years, they have become a menace for wildlife, including northern quolls, freshwater crocodiles and several species of native lizards and snakes (stock)

'We don't want to introduce anything that's going to kill frogs or newts, it has to be cane toad specific,' he said.

Co-author Rick Shine, an environmental scientist from Sydney University, told ABC News the troublesome toads are nothing like their sedate Queensland cousins.

'The toads in Queensland sit on their bums and don't really go anywhere from one day to the next,' he said.

'The toads on the invasion front are these long-distance athletes that go further than any amphibian has ever been recorded to in the world.'

Scientists are hopeful the research will help them to cut down numbers of the out-of-control amphibian, similar to the viruses that successfully controlled European rabbits.

Myxomatosis was first introduced in the 1950s to eradicate rabbits that were in plague proportions, but a new strain of the Calicivirus is currently being released in Victoria to assist in the management of pest rabbits.

While there is more work to be done, Professor White said the next stage of the research process is to see how the viruses affect the ecosystem.

'Future studies would have to grow that virus and check that it can't infect related native animals,' he said.
A third person has caught legionnaires' disease after spending time in the industrial area of western Sydney.

All three cases have been traced to an infected water cooling system on a Lidcombe building, the Western Sydney Local Health District's public health director Shopna Bag said.

The water cooling system has since been decontaminated.

Legionella pneumophila is one of the bacteria species that causes legionnaires' disease (stock image)

Lidcombe residents and visitors are urged to see their doctor if they experience legionnaires' disease symptoms, which can include headaches, muscle pain, fever, shaking chills, nausea, vomiting, diarrhoea, dry coughing, and breathing difficulties.

Legionnaires' disease is a form of pneumonia caused by the Legionella genus of bacteria.

The bacteria thrives in water and in moist soils.

There are about 40 Legionella species, but most legionnaires' disease cases are caused by either Legionella pneumophila or Legionella longbeachae.

The disease is contracted by breathing in the bacteria, usually through infected water vapour or soil particles.

It can also be contracted by 'aspirating', which is choking during drinking, swallowing, or ingesting, thereby bringing infected fluid or particles into the lungs.
Illegal immigration into Britain is rising by 70,000 a year, a damning report has claimed.

The figure includes foreigners who have over-stayed visas, failed asylum seekers and migrants who have sneaked into the UK in the back of lorries.

But it does not cover criminals who have escaped deportation. It is believed the total number of illegal immigrants in the country stands at more than a million.

The Home Office's latest estimate for people living illegally in the UK is around 430,000

The MigrationWatch think-tank, which produced the new study, said the statistics were a 'scandal'.

Publicly the Home Office insists it is impossible to give an accurate figure for people living here unlawfully. The last estimate by the department  from 2001  was 430,000.

However, former Home Office chief David Wood last year admitted Britain was home to more than a million illegal migrants.

MigrationWatch has now used official statistics to calculate the number living under the radar. They may be working in the black economy, not paying taxes and illegally claiming benefits.

Researchers estimated there were 83,600 potential over-stayers a year.

Another 12,850 migrants were thought to be sneaking into Britain hidden in trucks, cars and trains, while 8,500 failed asylum seekers had not left the country.

This meant a total of 104,950 migrants staying in the UK without permission each year.

But only 35,000 on average annually were removed or deported, said MigrationWatch.

Migrants trying to board a truck at Ouistreham ferry port in the hope of reaching the UK earlier this month

The net rise in illegal immigration totals 70,000 a year  a staggering 700,000 over the course of a decade. MigrationWatch acknowledged that the figures were a 'rough estimate'.

But Lord Green, the group's chairman, said: 'The scale of illegal immigration to Britain is a scandal that has gone on for too long.

'It undermines public acceptance of genuine refugees and is damaging to community relations generally.'

The report recommended a 100million boost to immigration enforcement, a major increase in the size of detention centres and the introduction of identity cards.

A Home Office spokesman said: 'We do not recognise the estimate provided by MigrationWatch UK. We are committed to reducing the size of the illegal population.

'When someone has no leave to remain in the UK, we expect them to leave the country voluntarily. Where they do not, we will seek to enforce their departure.'
The Prime Minister could be forced to stand down after Brexit according to a memo circulating among Tory MPs, it was claimed last night.

The document also assesses who Theresa Mays likely successor will be and rates their chances. It will be seen as a sign of how widely the leadership issue is being discussed among Conservative MPs.

The document is based on the assumption that the 1922 Committee of senior backbench Tories will invite the PM to stand-down soon(ish) after March 2019.

Theresa May could be forced to stand down after Brexit according to a memo circulating among Tory MPs, it was claimed last night

Chequers deal is as 'dead as a dodo' An ally of Theresa May says her Chequers plan is as dead as a dodo and claims the Prime Minister tried to blackmail her MPs to support it. Sir Mike Penning told the Daily Telegraph that Mrs May was deluded if she thought she could persuade Tory Eurosceptics to back a Brexit deal based on Chequers. The former minister said she was playing Russian Roulette with the country and had treated her own MPs like children on the naughty step. Advertisement

It advises MPs to manoeuvre immediately and sets out details of 27 potential candidates, according to the Daily Telegraph. It describes Environment Secretary Michael Gove as being on manoeuvres, says Chancellor Philip Hammond is thinking he has a chance but has not a hope, while Trade Secretary Liam Foxs prospects are fading.

Boris Johnson is described as the front runner but is considered an unlikely successor because the front runner never wins. Jacob Rees-Mogg, chairman of the European Research Group of Eurosceptic Tories, was not on the leaked list. However, he is seen as the partys favourite but unlikely to succeed to the last two. Former Brexit Secretary David Davis, the memo says, pretends not to be interested, but is although it concludes he wont succeed because it is too late.

Boris Johnson (left), Matt Hancock (centre) and Michael Gove (right) could be potential leadership replacements for May

Amber Rudd (left), David Davis (centre) and Philip Hammond (right) are also on the memo's shortlist

Leaked memos verdict on Tory contenders to replace Theresa May David Davis: Claims not to be interested, but is. Wont succeed. Too late. Liam Fox: Will repeat 2016 strategy to try to prolong frontline career. Fading. Michael Gove: Has consistently made noises suggesting he remains on manoeuvres  future Chancellor? Philip Hammond: Thinks he has a chance. Not a hope, but will want to remain at the Treasury. Matt Hancock: Super ambitious, hawkish on Syria with an eye on the Party in the country. Damian Hinds: A Remainer, but reported as a threat by Williamson allies. No profile. Jeremy Hunt: Dark horse, near the front of the pack coming up on the rail (note John Major 1990). Sajid Javid: Wants it, trying to recover from Referendum positioning error. Boris Johnson: Bookies favourite after Jacob Rees-Mogg, but the front-runner never wins. Andrea Leadsom: Intends to correct her errors in 2016 leadership race but totally unsuitable. David Lidington: A Remainer, but not incredible. Would be deselected early. Penny Mordaunt: Insufficient authority and profile in the near-term. Amber Rudd: Credible, notwithstanding Windrush but a Remainer; very small majority (346). Liz Truss: On manoeuvres, probably replicating Foxs strategy. Gavin Williamson: In full campaign mode, but very reliant on PM controlling her own departure point. Advertisement

Leader of the Commons Andrea Leadsom, who stood against Mrs May until her campaign imploded in 2016, is branded totally unsuitable in the dossier drawn up in April. Home Secretary Sajid Javid is described as wanting it but trying to recover from Referendum positioning error. Mr Javid, who was seen as an arch-Eurosceptic before the referendum campaign, backed Remain but has made more pro-Brexit noises since.

Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt is described as a dark horse, near the front of the pack coming up the rail.

This is compared with John Majors unlikely accession to the leadership ahead of Michael Heseltine and Douglas Hurd after Margaret Thatcher resigned.

Brexit Secretary Dominic Raab is seen as having discreet support among ERG members. Health Secretary Matt Hancock is ambitious, hawkish on Syria with an eye on the party in the country. Defence Secretary Gavin Williamson is described as being in full campaign mode, but very reliant on PM controlling her own departure point.

While Liz Truss, Chief Secretary to the Treasury, is also on manoeuvres and is probably replicating Dr Foxs strategy.
In April, Jodie May, a resident of Grandville, Michigan, confiscated her 15-year-old daughters cell phone to punish her for getting in trouble at school

A mother was hauled into court for taking away her teenage daughters iPhone.

In April, Jodie May, a resident of Grandville, Michigan, confiscated her 15-year-old daughters cell phone to punish her for getting in trouble at school.

But her ex-husband called the police and told officers that he was the owner of the phone and that May had committed a crime.

The ex-husband then filed a criminal complaint with the Ottawa County Sheriffs Office, accusing his ex-wife of stealing the phone, according to WOOD-TV.

Authorities then arrested May, who was subsequently released on $200 bond.

She was charged with misdemeanor larceny under $200, a crime which carries a maximum sentence of 93 days in jail.

Mays trial was set to begin on Tuesday, but before proceedings started, prosecutors added another charge - larceny by conversion, a misdemeanor also punishable by up to 93 days.

After the new charges were announced, it was time to call witnesses. But prosecutors first wanted to confer with the judge.

I've had an opportunity to discuss this case with the victim in this case, or at least the person we believed owned the property, Ottawa County Assistant Prosecutor Sarah Matwiejczyk told Judge Judy Mulder.

But her ex-husband called the police and told officers that he was the owner of the phone and that May had committed a crime

It was learned that the phone did not belong to the ex-husband. Instead, it was the daughters device.

Since the daughter is a minor, the mother was well within her rights to confiscate the phone.

In light of the new information, the assistant prosecutor asked the judge to dismiss charges.

I think it's ridiculous, the mom said.

I can't believe I had to be put through it, my daughter had to be put through it, my family.

Authorities then arrested May, who was subsequently released on $200 bond. She was charged with misdemeanor larceny under $200, a crime which carries a maximum sentence of 93 days in jail

I'm very surprised, but I'm very happy with the outcome.

Mays court-appointed lawyer, Jennifer Kuiper-Weise, was once an assistant prosecutor in Ottawa County.

We knew this was parental discipline, she said.

We knew that it would come across that way.

Kuiper-Weise said this case should never have come to a trial.

The case was authorized on a probable-cause basis, and unfortunately at times there are misdemeanor cases that are not thoroughly vetted, and unfortunately Miss May was a victim of that, the attorney said.

May was satisfied with the outcome.

Mom prevailed, she said.
The parents of a boy who was rushed to hospital after allegedly being assaulted in a schoolyard game have hit out at the school and education department.

Nadal Chemaisse, ten, walked in on a group of older boys in the toilets at Wattawa Heights Public School, in Sydney's south-west, and was punched in the side of the head, his parents claim.

Nadal's distraught mother and father claim the punch rocked the young boy, causing him to hit his head on the wall before falling and smashing his head on the floor.

Rana Chemaisse (pictured) and her husband Walid have hit out at the NSW Department of Education and their son Nadal's (pictured in hospital) school after he was allegedly assaulted on school grounds

However the education department claims the incident was simple a school yard 'game gone wrong'.

His mother, Rana Chemaisse, said she received the call about her son while overseas for her and her husband Walid's anniversary, Ten News reported.

'I couldn't breathe when my daughter called me, it was every parents worse nightmare to hear your child is in intensive care,' she said.

She said she couldn't understand how her friendly and gentle son would be targeted in such a violent way.

'How can you hurt my son that bad? It's a thug act, no mercy, we want to know how? Why? He was dead! How did this happen at school with teachers around,' she said.

Nadal's heart stopped momentarily before paramedics were able to revive him.

The parents allege the punch rocked the young boy, causing him to hit his head on the wall before falling and smashing his head on the floor

NSW Education Deputy Secretary Murat Dizdar said in a statement that Nadal's injuries were a result of a game gone wrong.

'The school will unpack the incident further, and take appropriate action where necessary in line with the schools discipline policy, a number of students involved in playing a game that has gone tragically wrong,' he said.

Mrs Chemaisse said she would not accept the 'boys will be boys' argument.

She said the family of the boy who is alleged to have attacked Nadal had not even contacted her which was one of the 'most disappointing things' in the wake of the alleged attack.

Mrs Chemaisse said her son had never had any trouble at school prior to the alleged attack.

Nadal Chemaisse was hospitalised and is in critical condition after allegedly being assaulted

'We've never had any issues with fights or bullying ... I want to emphasise that he is a happy and popular child at the school and we've never had any problems there,' Mrs Chemaisse told Nine News.

The young boy was left fighting for life after allegedly 'being assaulted' and 'turning blue' in the schoolyard, where he was playing a game with friends when the incident occurred.

'We are grateful for the quick response from the school, paramedics and the NSW Police for all their efforts for saving my son's life,' she said.

Nadal's mother is an employee at the school but was in Dubai when the incident occurred.

Police initially declared the school's playground a crime scene after reports the boy had been bashed.

Paramedics performed CPR on Chemaisse after he collapsed in Wattawa Heights Public School

A young schoolboy is in critical condition after he was allegedly bashed at a school in Sydney's west

But relatives of the boy - whose condition has stabilised - told Daily Mail Australia he was playing a game with friends and they did not believe he had been attacked.

'These are all rumours; there was no bashing - nothing like that. It was just an incident with friends playing around,' the family member said.

Police confirmed on Wednesday morning that the boy suffered from a pre-existing medical condition.

In a statement, police said they had spoken to the other students involved in the alleged incident, and were not expecting to take further action.

'Police have been told the boy was involved in a game with a group of other students when he was allegedly assaulted and fell backwards,' the statement read.

A Police spokesman also told The Daily Telegraph they had spoken to the boys involved and no further action would be taken.
Donald Trump turned down Theresa May's request for help over the poisoning of Sergei Skripal because she was at first only '95 per cent sure' that Moscow was behind it.

He told the Prime Minister she had to be '98 per cent' certain, a book claims. The President's attitude meant it took days for the US to expel 60 Russian diplomats.

The Apprentice: Trump, Russia And The Subversion Of American Democracy' by Washington Post journalist Greg Miller, also claims that Vladimir Putin has Mr Trump under such control that he 'whispers conspiratorially' to him on the phone.

The President's attitude meant it took days for the US to expel 60 Russian diplomats

President Putin plays to Mr Trump's fears that he is being undermined by a secret 'deep state', the book says. 'Again and again [Trump] would belittle America's closest allies  Australia, Britain, Canada, France and Germany  all the while praising Russia's strongman,' Miller writes.

Mrs May requested Mr Trump's help in March after Mr Skripal and his daughter Yulia were poisoned with novichok, a Russian nerve agent, in Salisbury.

Two weeks ago Scotland Yard named two men working for Russian intelligence it believes carried out the attack.
What is happening in Salzburg?

Austria is hosting a one-off summit to discuss Brexit and the migrant crisis tearing apart the EU.

Last night Theresa May outlined her Chequers proposals to fellow leaders for the first time. Today they are expected to deliver their initial verdict on her plans.

What did Mrs May tell them?

The Prime Minister warned that she will not delay Brexit or hold a second referendum  leaving just two months to strike an agreement ahead of the UK's departure on March 29.

Effectively, she asked them to accept the Chequers proposals or risk the economic turbulence of a no-deal departure.

The gathered EU leaders in Salzburg (pictured) were told that Britain would be prepared to walk away from the negotiating table if a deal was not struck quickly

What are the sticking points?

Northern Ireland and trade. Mrs May has said she will never accept the EU's fall-back plan, which would introduce a customs border between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK.

The EU is resisting her plan to effectively keep the UK in the single market for goods via a common rule book.

Hasn't the EU compromised on Northern Ireland?

Not really. EU chief negotiator Michel Barnier said this week he was ready to make an 'improved offer' on the border issue.

But his new concession appears to be to allow British, rather than EU, officials to police customs and regulatory checks between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK.

Government sources say the idea of an internal border remains unacceptable, however it is policed.

What will happen today?

EU leaders are anxious not to destabilise Mrs May ahead of next month's Tory conference for fear of sparking her replacement by a hardline Brexiteer, such as Boris Johnson.

Leaders are expected to issue warm words of encouragement today, while making it clear they want further concessions from the UK.

May and Britain's Permanent Representative to the EU Tim Barrow arrive for the informal meeting on Wednesday

What are the EU's tactics?

Some in Brussels are determined to make sure the UK loses out as a result of Brexit in order to dissuade other countries from leaving. Others believe Mrs May is not serious about leaving without a deal and will eventually agree further concessions.

What happens next?

The original deadline for reaching a deal at next month's EU summit has been all but abandoned. Leaders are expected to propose a special Brexit summit in mid-November, but sources in Brussels are suggesting a final deal could slip even later  raising questions about whether there will be time for it to be ratified by Parliament before exit day.

Where does this leave the Chequers deal?

Hardline Brexiteers and diehard Remainers are both using the EU's scepticism about Chequers to step up their own campaigns to kill it off. Brexiteers such as Boris Johnson, Jacob Rees-Mogg and David Davis will pile pressure on Mrs May in the coming weeks to drop the complex proposals and pursue a simple free trade deal.

Remainers such as Justine Greening and Anna Soubry will argue that the disagreement makes the case for a second referendum.
The President of Burkina Faso, Roch Marc Christian Kabore is in Ghana for a two day working visit.



Mr Kabore's visit would seek to bolster ties between Ghana and Burkina Faso, as well as explore opportunities that both nations can collaboration for the good of their people, as well as solidify some decisions that were taken between both governments last year.



President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo received Mr Kabore at the Jubilee House on Tuesday after the Burkinabe President had inspected a full guard of Honour mounted by the Ghana Armed Forces.



The President Akufo-Addo thanked the Burkinabe President for visiting Ghana and for the reception accorded him when he paid a visit to his country last year.



President Akufo-Addo expressed his sympathies as well as that of Ghanaians for the casualties of the recent terror attacks in the Burkinabe capital, Ouagadougou, and condemned the act.



He pledged Ghana's support for Burkina Faso's efforts to reign in extremism and terrorism to make West Africa safe.



Both leaders are engaged in bilateral talks aimed at boosting the socio-economic development of the two states. The talks are expected to culminate in the signing of cooperation agreements.





Source: GNA









Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority.

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Bruce Rogal (pictured) is on the run after allegedly shooting at his ex-wife and shooting his parents dead soon after

A 59-year-old man shot at his ex-wife and killed his parents after he was served his final divorce papers on Wednesday, and he is still at large.

Police say Bruce Rogal of Glenmore was served his final divorce order, which dictated he had lost his house to his former wife, and took off to seek revenge, NBC reported.

Rogal allegedly shot at the woman six times after arriving at her home and finding her changing her car's oil in the driveway.

She was not injured.

After his failed attempt at killing his wife, police say he then headed to the Bellingham Retirement Community in West Chester, where his parents, William and Nancy Rogal, lived.

Rogal shot and killed both his parents, who were aged in their late 80s.

The man is considered armed and dangerous, and police believe he is driving a 2002 Honda Odyssey with a Pennsylvania license plate ENN 3549.

Roads up to a mile away from the crime scene have been cordoned off while a perimeter has been set up around the facility, WCAU-TV is reporting.

Authorities are searching for a white male standing at a height of 5 feet 11 inches tall with curly dark hair.

Officials said police received a report of a shooting at around 6:30pm on Wednesday, according to WPVI-TV.

Swarms of police vehicles and ambulances descended on the scene.

They are being assisted by federal agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives.

Rogal allegedly and killed two people at the Bellingham Retirement Community in West Chester, which is 35 miles west of Philadelphia, on Wednesday

Swarms of police vehicles and ambulances descended on the scene Wednesday night

Officials said police received a report of a shooting at around 6:30pm on Wednesday. The Bellingham Retirement Community is seen in the above stock photo

When police arrived, they were told the gunman fled.

Police have set up a staging area at East Goshen Elementary School.

West Chester made headlines last November when a local nursing home, Barclay Friends, was destroyed by a massive fire.

Four people died of smoke inhalation and more than two dozen others were injured in the blaze.

This is the second shooting in Pennsylvania on Wednesday.

A man chased his estranged wife into a crowded court building where they were due to appear for a domestic violence hearing on Wednesday, then shot and wounded her before he was fatally shot by police, according to law enforcement and local media.

Three others, including a police officer, were wounded in the incident that began with an argument between the man and woman outside the court building in Masontown, a small borough south of Pittsburgh, local TV station WPXI reported.

In Wisconsin, a software company employee had a semiautomatic pistol and plenty of ammunition when he opened fire at his office, seriously injuring several people before he was fatally shot by police.

Police say they dont know the motivation behind the Wednesday morning attack at WTS Paradigm in Middleton.

Investigators havent released the suspects name but said he lived in nearby Madison.
Pakistan's former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, his daughter and son-in-law were released from prison yesterday, after a court suspended their sentences and granted them bail pending their appeal hearings.

The Islamabad High Court made the decision after the family petitioned to appeal their sentences, which were handed to them earlier this year following a corruption case.

The three were released from a prison in the garrison city of Rawalpindi. Sharif had been serving ten years, his daughter Maryam seven, while his son-in-law Mohammad Safdar was meant to be serving just one year.

Nawaz Sharif (pictured) has had his prison sentence suspended

The two-judge panel headed by Justice Athar Minallah ordered that Sharif, Maryam Nawaz and Mohammad, be released once they each posted a bond of half a million rupees, or about 3,000.

In the evening, the three were released from the prison, where many party leaders and a large crowd of supporters gathered to receive them.

Television footage showed a security vehicle driving them through a massive crowd of supporters, some showering rose petals on the vehicle while others waved party flags and chanted slogans.

Some supporters showered Sharif's vehicle with rose petals as they drove to the family's estate

They later arrived at the family's estate in the Lahore suburbs.

This latest development is a twist in a series of scandals involving the former Prime Minister, which first began when he was ousted from office last year, following several corruption cases.

In July last year the Pakistani Supreme Court disqualified Sharif from office over corruption allegations. He faced several court cases at home and was later convicted of concealing assets abroad.

The charges stemmed from leaked papers from a Panama law firm. Sharif faced two more cases before the anti-graft tribunal and has been banned for life from public office.

When the anti-graft tribunal first convicted and sentenced Sharif on July 6, he was in London with his daughter, visiting his critically ill wife. The father and daughter returned home a week later and were taken to prison to serve their sentences.

Sharif was temporarily released earlier this month to attend his wife's funeral.

Sharif was temporarily released from prison earlier this month to attend his wife's funeral (pictured)

Later in July, Sharif's party, the Pakistan Muslim League, lost in parliamentary elections and has now taken on the mantle of opposition party to new Prime Minister Imran Khan's government.

The National Accountability Bureau, said they would appeal Wednesday's ruling and take the case against Sharif to the country's Supreme Court.

Following the judges' decision on Sharif and his family, supporters rushed to the court in jubilation, chanting pro-Sharif slogans and waving banners and posters of the ex-premier.

Supporters of former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif pray as they celebrate after a court ordered his release

Outside the court, former foreign minister Khawaja Asif said Sharif's release was a 'triumph of justice'.

Another supporter in the crowd, Naveed Abbasi, said he is convinced Sharif was a victim of conspiracy but that, 'God willing, the people will make Nawaz Sharif the Prime Minister again ... for a record fourth time.'

Reacting to the decision, Sen. Javed Faisal, a close aide to Prime Minister Khan, pointed out that the court only suspended Sharif's sentence and those of his family members, and did not acquit them.

Supporters of former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif celebrate after a court ordered his release, in Karachi, Pakistan

'Their supporters should not celebrate so much as they will likely have to go again to Adiala prison,' Faisal said.

However, analysts saw the decision as a definite boost for Sharif's party and supporters.

Ahsan Iqbal, Sharif party lawmaker and former interior minister, said the anti-graft tribunal had convicted Sharif, his daughter and son in-law without any legal grounds, but 'based on a vendetta.'

Sharif never completed any of his three terms as prime minister. His first government was dismissed by the then-President Ghulam Ishaq Khan in 1993 on corruption charges and his second government was toppled by Gen. Pervez Musharraf in a bloodless coup in October 1999.
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The woman who helped her husband kidnap 14-year-old Elizabeth Smart and hold her for nine months in 2002 has been released from prison, but defiant Smart has vowed she will not go into hiding.

Wanda Barzee, who was convicted for aiding street preacher Brian David Mitchell in the kidnapping of Elizabeth Smart, was released from a Utah state prison on Wednesday after 15 years in jail.

She was seen carrying a banana and a takeaway box of salad as she followed authorities into a hotel, where she will stay until appropriate accommodation has been found for her.

Smart was taken from her bedroom in Salt Lake City, Utah at knife point by Mitchell - who knew her because he had been hired by her family to do handiwork at their home.

For nine months, the religion-obsessed couple kept Smart tied up in the woods where Mitchell subjected her to daily rapes and death threats. Smart said Barzee would watch as her husband raped her.

Speaking on Wednesday night to Lock Haven University, Smart detailed the night she was taken and while she did not directly refer to Barzee's release during her talk, she was asked by an audience member how she felt about it.

'I'm not going to let these people, this woman, stop me from living the life that I want to live and that's how I still I feel,' Smart answered.

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Wanda Barzee (pictured) has been released from prison after spending 15 years behind bars for aiding her husband in the kidnapping of Elizabeth Smart in 2002

The 72-year-old was pictured racing into a hotel carrying a banana and a salad hours after her release. Barzee pleaded guilty in 2010 to aiding her husband Brian David Mitchell in the kidnapping of 14-year-old Elizabeth Smart

The elderly woman is not permitted to contact Smart in any way for the next five years, at which point Smart, soon to be a mother of three, will need to file for a protective order

Speaking on Wednesday night to Lock Haven University, Smart (seen above) detailed the night she was taken

She told the crowd about the first moment she heard Mitchell's voice, telling her: 'I have a knife at your neck. Don't make a sound, get up and come with me'.

'I opened my eyes and there was a man standing above me, with a knife against my neck,' she said of the moment that changed her life.

'There wasn't anything in my entire life that had prepared me for this moment.'

Ahead of the talk, she addressed the media, where she described her past few weeks as 'a rollercoaster of emotion', Good4Utah reported.

She was sentenced to 15 years jail, while her husband received a life sentence. Barzee has been released early as the parole board credited her for time served prior to her sentence

Smart said Barzee would watch as her husband raped her. Barzee is seen above arriving at a halfway house on Wednesday

'At the same time, I experienced an outpouring of love, support and prayers,' she said.

Smart said her decision to keep her commitment to speak at the university was a 'perfect example' of how she would not live in fear and continue to move forward with her life.

'I feel like being here tonight is a statement in my moving forward and continuing to do what I feel like is important,' she said.

In a press conference held last week, Smart said Barzee had been manipulated at some points by Mitchell, but: 'she in her own right abused me as much as he did'.

'She is a woman who had six children and yet could co-conspire to kidnap a 14-year-old girl, and not only sit next to her while [she was] being raped, but encouraged her husband to continue to rape me,' Smart said.

Authorities reportedly said she was not ready to be released back into the community, but Utah law states an inmate cannot be held past their sentence.

Smart has claimed she was told Barzee did not comply with treatment program requirements during her time in prison.

The state parole board said Barzee 'refused to meet with the psychologist and the evaluations had not been completed'.

Despite her non compliance, because she had completed the length of her sentence, Barzee could not be stopped from leaving the Timpanogos Correctional Facility in Drape.

Barzee only pleaded guilty in 2010, but was unexpectedly credited for time served by the Utah Board of Pardons and parole last Tuesday, meaning she was eligible to be released in 2018, as opposed to 2024, CNN reported.

Earlier, a request from her attorney to have her previously served time counted towards her sentence had been denied.

Brian David Mitchell, Barzee's husband who raped Smart daily while holding her in captivity, is pictured in his 2004 mugshot

Mitchell was sentenced to life behind bars in Arizona.

The 72-year-old will be prohibited from contacting Smart for the five years of her supervised release, after which time Smart, now a child safety activist, can file for a protection order.

Regardless, Smart has spent most of the year advocating against Barzee's release in 2024 after discovering she still carried around a manuscript containing revelations Mitchell said he received from God that told him to kidnap her.

'In this manuscript were the 'revelations' Mitchell 'received' from God to kidnap myself and six other young girls to be his wife,' Smart said.

She said the manuscript also contains other 'disturbing and dangerous ideas', but Smart didn't say how she knew Barzee had the book.

'This is proof to me that she hasn't changed, and if the prior 15-plus years hasn't changed her,' Smart said at the time. 'I don't see how the future years will.

'I do not think I'm a vindictive or vengeful person. If change were truly possible in her case then perhaps parole/release could be justified.'

Smart posted a pointed message on her Instagram account after her kidnapper walked out of prison gates a free woman.

'May we all remain vigilant in watching over our families, friends, and community from anyone who would seek to hurt or take advantage,' she wrote, without invoking Barzee's name.

'I truly believe life is meant to be happy and beautiful, and no matter what happens that will remain my goal for me and for my family.'

Smart, who is now a child safety activist, encouraged everyone to be 'vigilant' in watching over their families in a pointed Instagram post shared just hours after Barzee's release

Elizabeth was just 14 when she was taken. She is pictured at the time of her disappearance

Media crews were seen camping out at the Timpanogos Correctional Facility on Wednesday morning

Smart was eventually rescued when a stranger saw the three of them in the street and recognized the pair from an episode of America's Most Wanted.

Barzee's niece Tina Mace previously told DailyMail TV her family would not take Barzee in upon her release.

'Well I think they [family] are just wondering where she's gonna go, if she's gonna get the help she needs,' Mace said.

'I know that the probation that she's under will require her to get mental help and be on mental drugs to help her. I don't know how long... I think her probation is for five years.'
Woolworths has stopped selling sewing needles in a bid to prevent saboteurs using them to spike strawberries and other fruit.

The supermarket giant literally pulled the pin following the crises across Australia which saw several fruits tampered with.

'We've taken the precautionary step of temporarily removing sewing needles from sale in our stores. The safety of our customers is our top priority,' a Woolworths spokesperson told Daily Mail Australia.

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Woolworths has stopped selling sewing needles in a bid to prevent saboteurs using them to spike strawberries and other fruit

The supermarket giant literally pulled the pin following the crises across Australia which saw several fruits tampered with

More than 100 reports of tampered fruit are being investigated by police across the country, many of which are thought to be fake or copycat cases.

A Coles spokesperson told Daily Mail Australia they are not yet considering removing the sale of needles from their stores.

'Not at this stage,' they said.

It comes as a young boy was arrested on Wednesday after admitting he put needles in strawberries as a 'prank'.

NSW detectives announced the arrest of the boy on Wednesday afternoon, after earlier revealing the contamination crisis across the country being entirely the work of copycats and pranksters.

People have also claimed of finding needles in bananas and apples.

Acting Assistant Commissioner Stuart Smith said the arrest had been made in the past few days.

'Obviously in the last few days we found a young person has admitted to a prank, including putting needles in strawberries,' Mr Smith said.

Current state legislation says any NSW offenders will spend a maximum of 10 years in prison.

However, Mr Smith says the young boy will now be dealt with under the 'youth cautioning system'.

He also announced a $100,000 reward for information leading to the conviction of anyone who's contaminated fruit in NSW.

At least 13 people have gone public about finding needles in their strawberries since a man was rushed to hospital on September 9

At least 13 people have gone public about finding needles in their strawberries since a man was rushed to hospital on September 9.

Tougher penalties for contaminating fruit were announced earlier on Wednesday.

'Some idiot, for his own reasons, or her own reasons, has engaged in an act of sabotage,' prime minister Scott Morrison told reporters in Canberra.

'Now any idiot who thinks they can go out into a shopping centre and start sticking pins in fruit and thinks this is some sort of lark or something... that sort of behaviour is reckless and under the provision we will be seeking to introduce swiftly, that type of behaviour would carry a penalty of up to 10 years in prison.'

Under Mr Morrison's new laws, anyone found guilty of contaminating food would face a maximum of 15 years in jail.

'It's not a joke, it's not funny. You are putting the livelihoods of hard-working Australians at risk, and you are scaring children... and you're a coward and a grub,' he said.

'This is a shocking and cowardly thing for this individual and others who have jumped onto the bandwagon here to have engaged in.'

'Some idiot, for his own reasons, or her own reasons, has engaged in an act of sabotage,' prime minister Scott Morrison said

NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian has promised to stand shoulder to shoulder with farmers.

'It is beyond belief that anybody would deliberately sabotage fruit to try and harm people in the process, harm our hardworking fruit farmers and the industry,' she told parliament.

'This is a disgusting act designed to instil fear in consumers and to undermine our agricultural industry.'

It has also been reported Australian Federal Police were following up on as many as 100 leads, majority of which are anticipated to be copycats or hoaxes.
A 46-year-old tourist has miraculously survived a horrific shark bite after she was bitten while on holidays, but is still fighting for life.

Justine Barwick, from Tasmania, was swimming near a yacht in Queensland's exotic Whitsundays Islands on Wednesday night, when she was attacked by the shark.

A passing yacht found the woman with life-threatening bites to her right thigh, and helped her out of the water.

Justine Barwick, from Tasmania, was swimming near a yacht in Queensland's exotic Whitsundays Islands on Wednesday night, when she was attacked by the shark

Dr John Hadok's (pictured) actions saved Ms Barwick's life, as he was coincidentally on a nearby boat

Speaking to Daily Mail Australia, CEO for Family Based Care North West Doug Doherty confirmed it was his colleague who was the victim.

He said she had been holidaying with her husband, Craig, and friends for less than two weeks when the incident happened.

'Justine is a fighter, a fit, resilient woman who is an outstanding leader in the aged and disability care sectors,' he said.

The bite left Ms Barwick with a significant gash in her right upper thigh, local paramedics told The Mercury.

By the time she was pulled from the water, she was rapidly losing blood.

However, by pure coincidence, one of her rescuers was an emergency department doctor, whose actions saved her life.

Local paramedics say Dr John Hadok, who is an emergency department doctor at the Mackay Base Hospital.

He managed to stem the blood flow long enough to allow a rescue helicopter to arrive with Ms Barwick still breathing.

Queensland Ambulance Service Mackay manager of operations Tracey Eastwick told ABC she was very fortunate to have a doctor on the scene.

'He was able to assist with immediate treatment of the patient and to stabilise the serious haemorrhage that she had.'

Ms Barwick (second from left) was airlifted to hospital with a 'life-threatening' injury to her thigh after being attacked by a shark in the Whitsunday Islands

A nearby doctor managed to stem her blood loss with what little resources he had long enough for the rescue helicopter to arrive

A RACQ Rescue Helicopter spokeswoman said that if it wasn't for the people who found her and packed her wounds, the woman would be dead.

'By all accounts it was very serious and without the rescue helicopter she probably would have died, but those people did save her life by stopping the haemorrhaging,' she said.

The rescue helicopter, which Mr Doherty says was already in the air when the attack happened, took her to Mackay Base Hospital.

Mr Doherty said a late-night emergency surgery saved her life, and has left her in a critical condition as of Thursday morning.

The attack took place in Queensland's exotic Whitsunday Islands, a popular tourist destination

The Whitsunday Islands is popular swimming destinations in Queensland, (pictured here Sawmill Bay) particularly with tourists

The type of shark that attacked Ms Barwick is unknown.

The Whitsunday Islands are popular swimming destinations in Queensland, particularly with tourists who flock in droves during the warmer months.

While parts of the area has shark nets in place, they don't necessarily provide an impenetrable barrier between swimmers and sharks.

They do, however, reduce the overall number of sharks in the area, making it a safer place to swim.

There hasn't been a fatal shark attack in Queensland since 2014 when 18-year-old Daniel Smith was attacked by a tiger shark near Rudder Reef near Port Douglas.

He suffered a bite to the upper thigh and died within minutes of being pulled from the water.

In January 2006, 21-year-old Sarah Whiley was mauled by a trio of bull sharks, who attacked her in waist-deep water at Amity Point, north Stadbroke Island.

Ms Whiley lost both her arms in the attack and later died from massive blood loss.

In 2017, a father-of-two from Cairns lost his right leg and almost died when he was mauled by a shark while spearfishing off Hinchinbrook Island.
Disgusting footage has emerged of a motorist laughing as he mows down a mob of emus with his car.

The disturbing video shows the man yelling 'F****** emus', he sped along a rural road in the Australian outback.

'One, two three,' he counted as each bird was hit by his vehicle.

The man who filmed himself mowing down at least ten emus turned the camera on himself to show his excitement

He can be heard laughing hysterically before saying: 'This is f****** great.'

At least 10 emus are run over in the video, which has more than 17,000 views on Facebook.

Where or when the video was filmed is unknown.

The man, who appeared to be driving over 120km/h, turned the camera on himself toward the end of the video.

A mob of emus have been filmed being run down by a man with a thick, black moustache, wearing sunglasses and a cap

The driver had a thick, black moustache, and was wearing sunglasses and a cap.

An RSPCA Australia spokeswoman told Daily Mail Australia they are shocked and horrified by the footage.

She said staff were examining the footage to try and determine when and where it was filmed.

They are appealing to the public for information, and urge anyone with any knowledge of the source of this video to contact the RSPCA or the police immediately.

'Such sickening cruelty clearly has no place in our society,' she said.

'The RSPCA unequivocally condemns this type of violence, as it clearly shows a disregard for the lives of these vulnerable native animals, and raises grave concerns over this individual's capacity for such behaviour.'

The man who shared the footage on social media, Fabio Galleti, told Daily Mail Australia he shared it because he hates animal cruelty.

'I hope they can find this person and do serious justice to him,' he said.

Social media users expressed disgust at the footage.

'Scum of the earth,' one person said.

'What a maggot,' another said.
Prosecco sales in Britain have fallen for the first time in a decade as drinkers increasingly opt for other fizzy wines

Prosecco sales in Britain have fallen for the first time in a decade as drinkers increasingly opt for other fizzy wines.

Exports of the sparkling Italian wine fell by seven per cent in the first half of 2018, according to the biggest farming association in the country.

But sales of bottles of English fizz have gone up by seven per cent compared with 2016.

Italian producers are blaming Brexit uncertainty and 'fake news stories' about prosecco's sugar content for the slump in sales, reports The Daily Telegraph.

Last year it was reported that high levels of sugar in Italian bubbly could lead to rotten teeth and hum disease.

Coldiretti, Italy's largest farming group, said in a new report: 'The tensions caused by the Brexit negotiations and an increase in duties, but also nationalistic fake news aimed at discrediting Italian sparkling wine, have had an effect on exports.'

Earlier this year it was announced pub chain Wetherspoons, whose boss Tim Martin is a fervent Brexiteer, will stop serving prosecco and champagne, opting instead of UK or non-EU fizzy wines.

Experts claim the decline could also be the result of an inevitable plateau after so many years of growth.

A spokesman from a consortium of prosecco producers in northern Italy's Veneto region told the newspaper: 'The market has grown at a great rate and as of last year, the British drank more prosecco than even the Italians.'

Meanwhile British fans of bubbly are choosing the classic French champagne and Spanish cava instead of their old Italian favourite that has been flying off UK shelves for years.

The UK's record-breaking summer has also meant English fizz has flourished, with winemakers experiencing a bumper grape harvest.

Yesterday it was announced Aldi is launching its own Prosecco, which it says comes without the threat of a pounding headache the following day.

Its organic, extra-dry wine has hit the shelves after fellow budget chain Lidl launched a supposedly hangover-free bottle for 7.99.

Opting for Aldi's new Prosecco will hit customers' wallets slightly harder as their current Castellore sells for just 5.99.
The former boyfriend of a mining executive who police say has confessed to her killing allegedly sent messages to the dead woman's family pretending to be her.

Mario Marcelo Santoro was arrested in Rio de Janeiro in early July and accused of murdering his ex-girlfriend Cecilia Haddad, 38, whose lifeless body was found floating in a Sydney river.

He has now faced court in the Brazilian city, where prosecutors allege he used the deceased woman's finger to unlock her phone and send text messages to her mother and friends, The Daily Telegraph reported.

'My sweet Milu, my Whatsapp isn't good. I went to the shopping mall to have a massage,' one WhatsApp message sent to Ms Haddad's mother, Milu, read.

Scroll down for video

Mario Marcelo Santoro (right) confessed to strangling Ms Haddad (left) after the pair had an argument in their apartment, according to a court testimony from the head of the Rio homicide squad, Dr Fabio Cardoso, which a court heard

Santoro is alleged to have sent a What's App message from Ms Haddad's phone to her mother after her death

The message continued saying she 'hadn't come across Poca', which was a nickname Santoro was known as. It also said she was 'going to the mountains'.

The head of the Rio homicide squad, Dr Fabio Cardoso, told the court Ms Haddad's mother grew suspicious because the way the message was constructed did not sound like it came from her daughter.

It has been alleged Santoro, 40, killed Ms Haddad as he 'could not accept the end of their relationship'.

The court heard Santoro confessed to strangling her to death in an informal police interview.

The interview took place in Rio de Janeiro shortly after Santoro's arrest as he spent four days with officers.

Dr Cardoso, who was giving testimony before the court, said Santoro 'never denied being the author of the crime' throughout his interviews.

He also told the court Santoro 'was very incensed by Cecilia's growing separation from him' and Santoro 'said he had even turned to spiritualism to try to understand why she didn't want him anymore'.

Ms Haddad's fully-clothed body was discovered floating in the Lane Cove River on April 29, with Santoro flying back to his native Brazil on the same weekend her lifeless body was found.

It has been alleged Santoro killed Ms Haddad (pictured) as he 'could not accept the end of their relationship'

Mario Marcelo Santoro (left) confessed to killing his former girlfriend Cecilia Haddad (right) in an informal police interview with Rio de Janeiro police, a court has heard

Dr Cardoso also gave testimony Santoro confessed to strangling Ms Haddad in an informal conversation after the pair had an argument in their apartment.

The court heard Santoro went and purchased juice from a shopping centre after leaving the apartment and returned two hours later to try and hide Ms Haddad's body.

Santoro then drove her car with her body inside to the river close by, the court heard.

The court heard he threw away the car keys out the window on the Gladesville Bridge while taking an Uber to Sydney Airport to fly back to Brazil.

Dr Cardoso said police divers had found the keys after being alerted by the Uber driver.

Throughout the testimony, Santoro remained motionless and did not react. The detective said the defendant had told his colleague the confession was not formal testimony.

Santoro faced court in Rio de Janeiro this week following his arrest (pictured) in the Brazilian city in early July

Meanwhile, the father of Ms Haddad has choked up in court as he described how scared she was of finding her ex-boyfriend in her Sydney apartment.

Her father Jose Ibrahim Haddad Junior said Cecilia felt frightened because he did not accept the end of their courtship.

Ms Haddad allowed Santoro to continue living in her apartment because he had no job and needed to pay school fees for his daughters from his first marriage, the court was told.

Mr Haddad said that not long before the murder, Cecilia returned home after a few days away and did not know if Santoro would be in her apartment.

Arriving at the apartment, she stayed on the phone to her father for reassurance.

'She said, "Dad, he's not here. You can sleep,"' her father recalled, holding back tears.

It has been alleged by Rio de Janeiro police that Santoro flew back to Brazil because he was of the belief that country's constitution would not allow citizens to be extradited, meaning he could not be caught by authorities in New South Wales.

Ms Haddad's body was found floating in Sydney's Lane Cover River in late April (the river is pictured)

But Brazilian authorities, with the help of their NSW counterparts, are reportedly planning to try him for the crime.

Santoro was arrested a day after police searched his home in Rio de Janeiro as well as the homes of his parents and relatives, after a warrant for his arrest was issued.

Wednesday's court hearing was a pre-trial hearing at which four of the seven prosecution witnesses gave evidence.

Judge Daniel Werneck Cotta will decide if Santoro will face a full trial on qualified homicide charges.

Santoro is being held in the Bangu 8 prison as he awaits trial.
A former Google manager yesterday accused the tech company of 'manipulating human nature'.

Tristan Harris, who spent four years at the Silicon Valley giant, said its number one goal was to keep people plugged into its services, which was causing a 'race to capture attention'.

He claimed governments around the world had given the tech industry 'a free pass on regulation'.

Tristan Harris said Google's number one goal was to keep people plugged into its services, which was causing a 'race to capture attention'

His warning comes a day after Sharon White, the boss of the communications watchdog Ofcom, said that continuing to give tech giants free rein on the web  with no regulation in place  could have 'profound consequences' for children.

Mr Harris spent several years as a 'design ethicist' for Google, developing plans for how technology could ethically steer the thoughts and actions of web users.

Speaking on Radio 4's Today programme, he said firms like Google were fixated on clicks, rather than the effects their sites could have on others.

The organisations are locked in a 'race to capture attention', he said. 'It really is manipulating human nature and has consequences across the social spectrum.'

Mr Harris added: 'They [tech companies] are caught in this race to the bottom of the brain stem, and the problem is, it leads to huge consequences across the social fabric  from alienation and isolation to loneliness for teenagers.'

Asked to comment, Google said it had announced earlier this year that it was rolling out tools to help people 'better understand' how much time they spend online.
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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.



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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!


Pauline Hanson is so concerned about the supposed rise of anti-white racism she will move a motion in the Senate condemning it.

The One Nation leader has flagged her intention to make a speech about this form of skin-colour discrimination before Parliament goes on a break for three weeks.

The Queensland senator's motion, listed on the parliamentary notice paper for Thursday, has two parts.

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Pauline Hanson is so concerned about the supposed rise of anti-white racism she will move a motion in the Senate condemning it

Senator Hanson's motion is being moved two months after Canadian nationalist and social media personality Lauren Southern toured Australia and used the term, 'It's okay to be white'

The Queensland senator's motion, listed on the parliamentary notice paper for Thursday, has two parts

'The Senate acknowledges: (a) the deplorable rise of anti-white racism and attacks on Western civilisation; and (b) that it is okay to be white,' it said.

The motion is being moved two months after 23-year-old Canadian nationalist YouTube star Lauren Southern toured Australia and wore shirts with the slogan, 'It's okay to be white.'

The phrase 'anti-white racism' has also been used by former federal Labor leader Mark Latham to highlight his claims that some left-wing activists denigrate people of European descent with terms like 'white privilege'.

Senator Hanson does not support a return to the old white Australia policy, and made this clear last month after One Nation defector Fraser Anning told Parliament that Australia was a better place when it had a European-centred immigration policy.

The senator's motion also coincides with academic staff at the University of Sydney protesting against a proposal from the Ramsay Centre for it to fund a course on Enlightenment values and the evolution of European political philosophies.
The number of children seeking sex-changes has hit a record high.

It is expected by the end of 2018, 300 children will have been referred for transgender treatment this calendar year in Melbourne alone.

It comes after 253 youngsters were seen by the Gender Service at the Royal Children's Hospital in Melbourne in 2017, ABC News reported.

It is expected 300 children will be referred for transgender treatment by the end of this year at the Gender Service at the Royal Children's Hospital in Melbourne (stock image)

Over the past decade, there has been a huge increase in the number of children being referred to the service.

Only two patients were seen by the service in 2008, and just three more in the five years before that.

Children and teenagers no longer need permission from a court to start hormone therapy following a landmark ruling made by the Family Court last year.

Gender Service director Michelle Telfer told the ABC the figures were 'interesting' because the increase has not just occurred at the hospital, it is 'very similar and mirrored really by other services internationally'.

The Gender Service at the Royal Children's Hospital in Melbourne (pictured) has seen a huge increase in the number of children being referred to its service in the past decade

NUMBER OF GENDER SERVICE REFERRALS 2003 - 1 2004 - 0 2005 - 1 2006 - 0 2007 - 1 2008 - 2 2009 - 6 2010 - 7 2011 - 8 2012 - 18 2013 - 40 2014 - 104 2015 - 170 2016 - 226 2017 - 253 Source: Royal Children's Hospital, Melbourne Advertisement

A total of more than 1,000 children will have been referred to the service by year's end.

The sharp increase in the number of patients saw wait times blow out to 14 months but they are now just four months after nurse consultants and junior doctors started carrying out initial assessments.

But paediatric and psychological approval is still needed before puberty blockers and hormone therapy can start.

The $5,000-a-year treatment cost for each patient is paid for by Victorian taxpayers.

The Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme covers hormones but not puberty blockers.

Gender-reassignment surgery is not available at the hospital.
French police have seized 20 tonnes of miniature Eiffel Towers as part of a crackdown on the souvenirs which are offered illegally to tourists at visitor hotspots around Paris.

The small metal trinkets are sold for as little as five for one euro at places such as the Louvre museum or outside the real Eiffel Tower, usually by African migrants who play a game of cat-and-mouse with police.

A joint investigation involving French immigration authorities led to raids on three Chinese wholesalers who are suspected of importing the towers and supplying a network of vendors in Paris.

Trinkets, such as the one pictured above are sold for as little as one euro across Paris

More than 1,000 boxes, containing in total 20 tonnes of miniature Eiffel Towers, were seized from two depots and three shops in the Paris region on Monday and Tuesday, a security source told AFP, confirming a report in Le Parisien newspaper.

Nine people have been arrested.
An avocado farm which produces close to 1.5 million avocados every year is set to be sold for at least $250 million.

The farm in Goodwood, in the Bundaberg region of Queensland, is the biggest in Australia, and has only been on the market for a week.

Covering 1500 hectares, the land could be sold for anywhere between $250million and $300million.

Ron and Fay Simpson's avocado farm, in business for almost five decades, earns a revenue of roughly $75 million

Ron and Fay Simpson's avocado farm, in business for almost five decades, also grows mangoes and earns a revenue of roughly $75 million.

Simpson's avocados are sold all year around to supermarket giants Woolworths, Coles and Aldi.

The Simpson farm was put on the market last Thursday by Christopher Williams from Pricewaterhouse Coopers, who refused to disclose the exact price.

'It's on the market to any qualified buyer,' Pricewaterhouse Coopers' Christopher Williams told NewsMail.

The farm which produces close to 13,000 avocado trees per year is available to be was named Australia's largest producer of avocados

Simpson's avocados are sold all year around to supermarket giants Woolworths, Coles and Aldi

Deputy Mayor Bill Trevor said the avocado farm auction means the Bundaberg region will be a lead contender in the future of agriculture and was compared to as the 'next gas or oil industry'.

'The investment to our region out of this farm has a flow-on to not only commercial, but residential as it will raise the values,' he said.

The farm also includes a nursery which produces 13,000 avocado trees per year.

The package deal includes the avocado orchard, a 4,500 square metre packing facility and a newly developed manufacturing plant.
A Liberal backbencher who used parliamentary privilege to accuse a state MP from her own party of bullying will be getting $20,000 spending money to go on a United Nations junket.

Ann Sudmalis and Labor's former deputy leader Jenny Macklin, who are both retiring at the next election, will spent three months in New York and get a generous allowance from taxpayers despite already receiving a base salary of $207,000.

They will get a $20,000 cash advance for daily expenses and accommodation in a five-star hotel on Manhattan's Upper East Side, the Herald Sun said, citing traditional Department of Finance practice.

A previous four-month junket to the United States by a former senator cost taxpayers more than $70,000, which included a visit to the U.N.

Liberal backbencher Ann Sudmalis who used parliamentary privilege to accuse a state MP of bullying will be getting $20,000 spending money to go on a United Nations junket

The Department of Finance referred Daily Mail Australia to the recently-created Independent Parliamentary Expenses Authority, which publishes spending by MPs.

Ms Sudmalis earlier this week used a speech in the House of Representatives to accuse her state Liberal counterpart Gareth Ward of bullying and intimidation, after it appeared she had lost party support to contest her now-marginal seat on the New South Wales south coast.

'Bullying, betrayal and backstabbing have been the hallmarks of one of my state Liberal colleagues Gareth Ward over the past six and a half years,' she said on Monday night.

Another retiring female Liberal MP in a marginal seat, Julia Banks, who had accused her male party colleagues of bullying, reportedly declined an offer from Prime Minister Scott Morrison to go on a secondment to the U.N..

Labor's former deputy leader Jenny Macklin is also retiring at the next election and will be joining Ms Sudmalis on the secondment to the United Nations

Former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull established the IPEA in February last year following a public outcry about politicians rorting their expenses.

Secondments to the U.N. are often an expensive exercise.

In September 2013, former Liberal senator Chris Back went to United States and stayed there for four months.

He visited the U.N. in New York during a parliamentary study tour of the beef industry.

The trip cost taxpayers $70,187.97, old Department of Finance records show, with Mr Back missing three Senate sitting weeks during that time.
Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton says it is 'beyond frustrating' that inmates in immigration detention centres are granted access to mobile phones.

His comment comes in the wake of allegations Fisayo Oluwafemi ran a $3 million email scam from inside Sydney's Villawood Detention Centre.

Police seized 16 mobile phones, numerous SIM cards, identification information, and various electronic storage devices found in the facility.

Police have reason to believe the 43-year-old is the ring leader of a crime syndicate that targeted not only businesses, but women looking for love.

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Police have arrested the Nigerian man accused of masterminding a $3 million email fraud scam from inside a detention centre

Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton says it is 'beyond frustrating' that inmates in immigration detention centres are granted access to mobile phones

'Mate, it drives me mad,' Mr Dutton told 2GB radio on Thursday.

'They're organising escapes, they're organising assaults, organising all sorts of things that just aren't consistent with being in immigration detention,' Mr Dutton said of people doing the wrong thing in the facility.

Under the alleged scam, emails were sent out from falsified email addresses encouraging recipients to reveal personal details including credit card numbers, account names and passwords.

The emails also allegedly urged people to send money in exchange for love or goods.

Fisayo Oluwafemi (pictured) was charged with knowingly directing activities of a criminal group, two counts of knowingly dealing with proceeds of crime

Mr Oluwafemi was taken to Bankstown Police Station and charged with knowingly directing activities of a criminal group, two counts of knowingly dealing with proceeds of crime, and possessing illegally obtained identity information.

The group scam allegedly included two women and one man, all of African descent, and the majority of funds were sent back to Nigeria.

Mr Dutton said it defied common sense for immigration detainees to have access to mobile phones, given they can use landlines to contact their lawyers if needed.

'I've tried to get the bill through parliament and for whatever reason the Labor Party won't support it,' he said.

'These people shouldn't have mobile phones in the centres.'

Harriette Bangura (left), 36, who is accused of working with Mr Oluwafemi, was arrested by the strike force on September 4

Harriette Bangura, 36, who is accused of working with Mr Oluwafemi, was also arrested by the strike force on September 4.

She has been charged with 11 counts of knowingly dealing with the proceeds of crime.

Search warrants were executed for the Kingswood mother's property in Sydney's west and a Hoxton Park storage unit where police seized computers, electronic storage devices, mobile phones, sim cards, and documentation.

Harriette Bangura (centre) was granted strict conditional bail to reappear at Downing Centre Local Court on November 1

The woman's Land Rover was also seized from a car park at St Mary's, which police believe was purchased with criminal proceeds.

Ms Bangura was granted strict conditional bail to reappear at Downing Centre Local Court on November 1.

Police will allege in court she was involved in the laundering of more than $480,000 under Oluwafemi's alleged scam racket.

Police will allege in court she was involved in the laundering of more than $480,000 under Mr Oluwafemi's alleged scam racket

The strike force also raided homes in Chester Hill and Granville, in Sydney's west (pictured is the raid)

The strike force also raided homes in Chester Hill and Granville, in Sydney's west.

Police seized computers, mobile phones, SIM cards, methamphetamine and identity and financial documents - all believed to have been stolen.

The raids led to the arrest of a man and woman on September 5, both 20, at the Chester Hill property.

The pair are accused of working with Mr Oluwafemi.

The 20-year-old man was charged with seven counts of recklessly dealing with the proceeds of crime, possess identity information with intent to commit an indictable offence and possess drug implement.

Police attest he was involved in the syndicate and laundered $90,000.

The 20-year-old woman allegedly laundered $17,000 fraudulently under Oluwafemi's alleged scam racket.

The woman, 20, (pictured) was charged with knowingly dealing with the proceeds of crime

She was charged with knowingly dealing with the proceeds of crime.

The 20-year-olds were granted strict conditional bail and are due to appear at Parramatta Local Court on October 2.

A third woman, 36, was also arrested at the Granville property for drug related offences. She is due to appear at Parramatta Local Court on October 2.

The investigation is ongoing.

Reports of online fraud can be made to the Police Assistance Line.
An Australian woman who was caught sneaking her illegal immigrant Mexican boyfriend into the US has been spared jail.

Sarah Louise Branch from Sydney, was facing up to five years in prison in the US after she was arrested on the American border with Canada.

The 37-year-old was arrested by the American authorities on July 10 after agents discovered the passport of her Mexican lover, Benigno Godinez-Cortez, 46.

Sarah Louise Branch, 37, could face up to five years in prison in the US after she was arrested on the American border with Canada

Officers also found clothes, photos and a rental contract in the man's name for a shared unit, The Australian reported.

Branch appeared in the US District Court, north-east of Maine, on Wednesday where she was handed a time-served sentence of 70 days.

US assistant attorney Jim Moore, who prosecuted the case, said Branch had learnt from her mistake and did not need to serve any more time.

'It is clear that Ms Branch is a good person who made a bad decision - a mistake she has accepted responsibility for,' Mr Moore told AAP.

She avoided the maximum penalty of five-year prison sentence and a $US250,000 fine, if she were to be found guilty.

Her boyfriend, Godinez-Cortez had been subjected to deportation from the United States in 1994.

He was sentenced to time-served on Wednesday and is expected to be transported back to Mexico.

It's believed that Branch admitted to authorities to leaving her boyfriend on the Canadian side of the border and had planned to pick him up again after she had cleared customs.

The US Justice Department made an official statement stating that Branch had been arrested and pleaded guilty 'to encouraging and inducing the entry of an illegal alien' into the United States.

Branch was arrested by the American authorities on July 10 after agents discovered the passport of her Mexican lover, Benigno Godinez-Cortez

Branch's father, Don Branch, told The Australian the family is still in the dark about what is going on.

'My son has been in contact with Sarah, we're not sure yet what's happening, if she's pleaded guilty, and we don't know what comes after this,' he said.

It's alleged that a man was spotted crossing the border illegally and via a railway bridge which alerted border officials to the potential situation.

The prosecution filed documents in the US District Court in Maine stating Branch had allegedly already pleaded guilty.

Godinez-Cortex also pleaded guilty to crossing illegally into the United States.
Police are currently searching a car park at Monash University in Melbourne after a high-speed pursuit ended with a black Mercedes-Benz being ditched at the campus.

Officers scoured an underground park at the university campus at Caulfield on Thursday morning.

A stolen Mercedes was dumped in the car park at the university after a dramatic pursuit involving up to six police vehicles and a helicopter.

Pictures show police officers scouring an underground park at the university campus at Caulfield on Thursday morning

It is understood the people who ditched the car are hiding at the university.

Students said police have blocked off all entry and exit points.

In a statement, Victoria Police said they were searching for a man and a woman 'in the area surrounding' the university.

A Monash University student told The Age police had said a girl had stolen a car and then dumped it at the campus.

Police were seen inspecting a black Mercedes, with damage visible on the rear of the vehicle. Officers also seized a baseball bat.

The car is understood to have been involved in a high-speed chase in Malvern East and Moorabbin.

A witness told 3AW they saw a speeding car swerving across four lanes, as it 'almost collected myself and a few others'.

In a statement, Victoria Police said they were searching for a man and a woman 'in the area surrounding' Monash University

The man said the Mercedes' tyres were punctured and it was being pursued by an unmarked police car.

Another witness said the chase was 'crazy', and a helicopter was circling above as the pursuit was taking place.

A Monash University student said police were 'everywhere'.

'Making my Thursday morning journalism class (a) whole lot more exciting,' the student posted to Twitter.

A student told the Herald Sun police were asking if anyone had seen a 'short, chubby lady with purple streaks in her hair.'

More to come
Hundreds of Australians have queued for as long as two hours to show their support for farmers in the midst of the fruit contamination crisis.

A photo shared to Facebook on Wednesday morning shows a long line of cars waiting to buy strawberries from a local Queensland farm.

Customers at a Wamuran strawberry farm, north of Brisbane, queued for hours as the farmers picked the berries and put them straight into boxes.

Scroll down for video

Hundreds of Australians have been photographed queuing for a local farmer's strawberries

Faith Jennings, the photographer, said farmers at Queensland's Wamuran Farm were picking the berries and putting them straight in boxes

'At one point, 30-40 people were lined up waiting, and that's without those who were coming in to pick their own,' Faith Jennings, who took the photo, told the Brisbane Times.

Ms Jennings was one of the customers happy to wait in line for two hours.

She said she and her sister arrived at the farm at around 11.30am, with droves of members of the community already ahead of her.

When she left more than two hours later, she said there was still another 30 people behind her.

'They were happy to pick their own or stand and wait, knowing the strawberries hadn't been tampered with and were fresh off the farm.'

Ms Jennings queued with her sister for more than two hours but said others were happy to wait

The photos come as the fruit tampering crisis sweeps the nation, with police investigating as many as 100 leads on fruit embedded with metal sewing needles (pictured)

Police say they are still investigating as many as 100 leads on the food tampering crisis, with majority predicted to be copycats or hoaxes.

The crisis began on September 9, when a Queensland man ate a strawberry with a sewing needle embedded in it.

Since then, reports of contaminated fruits have spread across the country, with shocking reports of farmers dumping more than $10,000 worth of strawberries on a daily basis emerging.

An IGA supermarket had to post this sign to let their customers know their fruit was safe

To maintain their customer base, farmers selling their produce at markets have been using metal detectors to prove their fruit is safe.

They aren't cheap either, as Liz Jarman from Berry Sweet farm in Queensland said the small conveyor belt costs the same as a small car.

'They are installed at the end of pack benches, they are like miniature versions of the metal detectors at the airport,' she said.

As customers buy their fruits, the packaging passes through the metal detectors, giving the customers the all clear.

But the expensive precautionary measure is working, as Ms Jarman was one of many farmers who sold all of their strawberries hours before the market closed.
The United States Department of Agriculture has been condemned once again by bipartisan lawmakers, months after it was revealed the department uses taxpayer money to fund thousands of deadly kitten experiments.

Since 1982, the USDA has been operating a program that 'involves breeding hundreds of kittens, feeding them Toxoplasma-infected raw meat for two to three weeks and collecting their feces,' Republican Congressman of Michigan, Mike Bishop, wrote in a letter to United States Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue.

Then, the department harvests parasites and kills the kittens by discarding them through 'incineration,' Bishop said.

Representative Mike Bishop, Republican of Michigan, holds a kitten on Capitol Hill in June 2018 in Washington, DC at an event in support of the Kitten Act which aims to stop testing by the United States Department of Agriculture

Reps. Jimmy Panetta, D-Calif., left, Bishop, and Hannah Shaw, an animal advocate know as 'Kitten Lady,' pose during a event in Rayburn Building on bipartisan legislation to end the Department of Agriculture's scientific testing on kittens in June 2018

The testing, which takes place at the Beltsville Agricultural Research Center in Maryland, was exposed by taxpayer watchdog group, White Coat Waste Project in the spring.

As many as 100 kittens have been used for the deadly experiments each year and at least 3,000 have died as a result.

Bishop condemned the animal testing this week to Fox News and said Congress is working to put a stop to it.

'This is inhumane what they are doing... it is blatantly inhumane,' he said.

'The Senate is now starting to help and we'll continue to pressure the USDA as well as choke off their funding if this testing continues.'

The Beltsville Agricultural Research Center in Beltsville, Maryland is shown, where the lab experiments take place

He added the issue is deeper than just wasteful government spending.

'I first started out looking into wasteful government spending... but when I found out about this, it became even bigger and more important.'

The Kittens in Traumatic Testing Ends Now Act, or Kitten Act, was introduced in May by Democratic Congressman of California, Jimmy Panetta.

Bishop is listed online as one of the sponsors.

Republican Congressman of North Carolina, Walter Jones, who is also a sponsor, previously expressed his disapproval for the deadly kitten experiments.

Walter Jones, R-N.C., speaks with a reporters in Statuary Hall before votes on repealing and replacing Obamacare in May 2017. Jones is also a sponsor of the Kitten Act

'As a long-time cat owner, I was alarmed that the federal government has been secretively spending Americans tax dollars for archaic experiments on kittens, and then needlessly killing the healthy animals at the end of the project,' he said in a public statement.

'Abusing pets in government labs with taxpayers money has to stop and I'll continue to fight until it does.'

The USDA told Fox News: 'The cats are essential to the success of this critical research.

'The USDA does not seek adoptions of these cats because of the risk the cats could pose to their adoptive families.

'Our goal is to reduce the spread of toxoplasmosis. Adopting laboratory cats could, unfortunately, undermine that goal.'

DailyMail.com reached out to the department for further comment on the matter.
Police investigating the horrific acid attack of a Sydney nurse have executed a search warrant on a pawn shop in the city's west.

The body of Monika Chetty, a 39-year-old mother of three, was found in a bush reserve in West Hoxton, a suburb in south-west Sydney on January 3, 2014.

The qualified nurse, who was attacked with acid around a week earlier, suffered chemical burns to 80 per cent of her body.

She died 28 days later in the burns unit at Concord Hospital.

Mother-of-three Monika Chetty, 39, was found crying in pain in bushland at West Hoxton, 40km west of Sydney, on January 3, 2014

Detectives investigating the murder of Monika Chetty seized two hard drives from a pawn shop

A police officer outside a Sydney pawn shop where two computer hard drives were seized

Police on Wednesday confiscated a number of items from a pawn shop during the investigation

Officers from the Liverpool City Police Area Command formed Strike Force Lanlo after the incident and began a detailed investigation.

They believe Ms Chetty refused to seek medical attention for her wounds or alert authorities due to the fear of reprisals from her assailant or assailants.

Before her death, the homeless woman would beg for money, but would refuse offers of food or a place to sleep.

Acting on information generated by a recent public appeal, detectives executed a search warrant at a pawn shop in Sydney's west about 3pm on Wednesday.

Officers suspect Ms Chetty had links to the business.

According to a police statement, detectives confiscated two computer hard drives and business records relating to the pawn shop and inquiries are continuing.

Ms Chetty (pictured with her parents) was believed to be living rough in the years leading up to her brutal death

When formally questioned in hospital following the brutal attack in 2014, Ms Chetty told detectives she was attacked by an unknown person at Bigge Park in Liverpool when she did not give him a cigarette - but officers cast doubt on her version of events.

Police instead believe she was so fearful of her attacker she purposely withheld his identity.

'Imagine the pain of a highly corrosive acid, possibly hydrochloric, being thrown on most of your face and body,' Detective Chief Inspector Dean Johnstone said at the time.

'Monika held on in agony for more than a month before her body gave out. We have to find whoever did this.

Ms Chetty told detectives she was attacked by an unknown person at Bigge Park in Liverpool when she did not give him a cigarette, but officers do not believe her story (officers search for evidence in Liverpool)

'This is a personal crime of extreme violence which adds to our belief that she knew who did this to her.'

Investigators understand Ms Chetty was involved in a marriage scam and believe it might be connected to the attack.

Detectives said Ms Chetty's children, who attempted to reconnect with her before she died, are still desperate for answers.

Police have urged anyone with information to phone Crime Stoppers on 1800 333 000.
Malaysian citizen Khaw Kim Sun, 53, was convicted and sentenced to life in Hong Kong

An anesthesiologist convicted of killing his wife and daughter by placing a yoga ball that leaked carbon monoxide in their car has been sentenced to life in prison in Hong Kong.

Malaysian citizen Khaw Kim Sun, 53, had become estranged from his wife, Wong Siew Fing, 47, and their four children.

However they continued to live together while he had an affair with a student.

A jury of five men and four women found him guilty at Hong Kong's High Court after seven hours of deliberation Wednesday.

Prosecutors said that Khaw had decided to kill his wife because she would not grant him a divorce.

'It is shocking that a highly educated and successful man would conjure up such a calculated method to get rid of his wife,' judge Judianna Barnes Wai-ling told Khaw.

Wong Siew-fung (R) and her 16-year-old daughter (L) were found unconscious in the car parked at a bus stop about an hour after leaving home

Various items, including a deflated yoga fitball, were found in the boot of the car where the victims were found dead at Sai Sha Road in Hong Kong's Sai Kung district

Malaysian citizen Khaw Kim Sun, 53, covers his face as he is escorted in a prison bus leaving the court after being sentenced to life in prison in Hong Kong

Khaw was accused of putting the gas-filled yoga ball in the trunk of a Mini Cooper driven by his wife, Wong Siew-fung, on May 22, 2015.

Wong and their 16-year-old daughter were found unconscious in the car parked at a bus stop about an hour after leaving home.

They were later declared dead from severe carbon monoxide poisoning, although their vehicle showed no defects such as a leaky emissions system.

The case initially flummoxed Hong Kong police until the presence of the deflated yoga ball drew suspicion.

The yellow mini cooper where the suspect's wife and daughter were found unconscious

A police officer searches and collects evidence from the car where Khaw planted a yoga ball filled with carbon monoxide to kill his wife and daughter

Khaw was arrested in September after colleagues from the teaching hospital where he worked spoke with police.

Witnesses said they saw the associate professor at Hong Kong's Chinese University filling two balls with carbon monoxide.

Khaw reportedly obtained the carbon monoxide from the hospital. He told colleagues he wanted to 'test its purity' and its effects on rabbits, but later contradicted himself he told police he took the gas home to exterminate rats.

Khaw Kim-sun (C), who was convicted of murdering his wife and daughter, being escorted by police at Ma On Shan Police Station in Hong Kong

This was debunked by a domestic helper employed by the family, who testified that they had no rodent problem.

While Khaw stood to inherit considerable amounts of property co-owned with Wong following her death, there was no apparent motive for killing his daughter, leading to speculation that her death was unintentional.

He had allegedly told his younger daughter to finish her homework at home.

Khaw's other children reportedly cried when the verdict was announced, while he only shook his head.
Friends and family gathered for the funeral of a Brazilian student who became the first fatal shark attack vicitm in Massachusetts for more than 80 years.

Arthur Medici, born in Vitoria, Brazil, was bitten by a shark Saturday while boogie boarding off Wellfleet. He later died from his injuries in hospital.

A funeral service was held for the 26-year-old at the First United Methodist Church-Brazilian Ministry in Saugus on Wednesday where hundreds of mourners turned up to pay their final respects.

Friends were seen crying and clinging to each other for comfort outside the church before the service which was held in Portuguese but translated into English.

His fiance Emily Rocha, 23, the daughter of Pastor Cleverson Rocha who led the service, described him as 'a man of courage and love, selfless, and with a heart of gold', the Boston Herald reported.

'He loved sports, singing, and playing the guitar. He also loved his family and to make 'everyone around him laugh,' she said.

'His laugh could be heard across the room,' her father added. 'Now, we miss him.'

The engineering student's body is now due to be returned to his native Brazil for burial. 'We all want him here,' Arthur's father, Itamar Medici, who is still in the southern American country, told WBZ-TV.

Friends and family gathered for the funeral of a Brazilian student who became the first fatal shark attack vicitm in Massachusetts for more than 80 years

Friends were seen crying and clinging to each other for comfort outside the church before the service at the First United Methodist Church-Brazilian Ministry in Saugus on Wednesday

Dozens of family and friends attended the service Wednesday. Medici's body will later be returned to his native Brazil

Medici studied engineering at Universidade Vila Velha in Brazil before moving to the United States two years ago to study at Bunker Hill Community College in Boston.

He was happily engaged to a medical student, and worked at Boston-area restaurants to supplement his education. He was also an active member of the Maranatha Christian Church in Revere and loved the outdoors.

Grieving family and friends described the late Medici was 'happily engaged to a smart, kind-hearted medical student with a bright future.'

'He loved life, he was an active member of a Christian church, devoting his life to the Lord. He participated in the praise group of the church in Revere and was very involved in all of the church activities.

'He will be remembered for his great sense of humor, selfless ways and huge heart,' his obituary read.

Sandra Muniz and Francisco Pinto, both from Woburn, worked with Medici at The Capital Grille in Burlington.

They said he was always singing, dancing and laughing with them.

'Always dancing. Music was his thing,' Pinto added. 'He was a happy guy.'

Arthur Medici, 26, from Revere, Massachusetts, died after a shark attack on a Cape Cod beach on Saturday

Medici pictured with fiance Emily Rocha. Her brother was with Medici when he was attacked

'He loved hiking, biking, surfing and various other sports. There was never a bad time for him. He was always joyful and willing to help others, even going as far as feeding the homeless.

Others described him as a devout Christian who was humble, kind and always willing to help others.

'Our lives are are never going to be the same without him. His laughter filled our home and he will be greatly missed by us all.'

Medici was attacked Saturday afternoon when he was boogie boarding with his fiance's brother at Newcomb Hollow Beach in Wellfleet, police say.

The Cape Cod National Park Service reported that at 12.30pm the Revere man was knocked off his board then attacked by the shark. Police identified him Saturday evening.

Following the attack, Medici was brought to the shore by his friend where CPR was performed on him and beach goers tried to make a tourniquet to stop the blood flow, according to CBS.

He was taken to a Cape Cod Hospital in Hyannis where he died, State Police spokesman David Procopio said in a statement. The details of his injuries have not been revealed.

The Cape Cod National Park Service reported that at 12.30pm the Revere man was knocked off his board then attacked by the shark

An aerial shot at the beach shows the police rescue after the Revere man was fatally attacked

Newcomb Hollow Beach in Wellfleet was closed following the attack. Medici was rushed to the hospital where he died

The beach was closed after the attack and police released his identity Saturday evening.

Local fisherman and surfer Joe Booth said he was on the shore and witnessed the shark's strike. He said the victim aggressively kicked something behind him then he saw a flicker of a tail in the water.

'I was that guy on the beach screaming 'Shark, shark!' It was like right out of that movie Jaws. This has turned into Amity Island real quick out here,' Booth said WBUR.

A California surfer on the beach, who chose to remain anonymous, told the Boston Globe that he saw Medici unconscious and heavily bleeding from his right leg.

'I saw that he was bleeding and reached around the back of his leg, and there was nothing there. And there were bone-deep lacerations down by his calf,' he said.

Surfer Andrew Jacobs shared video of dozens of Good Samaritans carrying the victim's body away from the water.

Medici was born in Brazil and came to the United States two years ago to attend college. He was described by friends as being sweet and humble

'Pretty sad day at the beach today. Amazing effort by everyone who jumped into action to help this young man out. Prayers to him and his family,' Jacobs captioned his video.

Former lifeguard and witness Hayley Williamson said she was shocked to hear of the attack.

'We've been surfing all morning right here and they were just further down. Right spot, wrong time, I guess,' she said to WHDH.

'Today is just keeping everyone out of water. There'll be a determination later about what the town wants to do with the beaches going forward,' Wellfleet Police Lieutenant Michael Hurley said.

The Saturday incident is the state's first shark attack fatality since 1936. This is the second shark attack to take place in Cape Cod this summer.

On August, 15 a 61-year-old New York man was severely injured after fighting off a shark off Truro, Massachusetts, four miles north of where Saturday's attack took place. He's recovering from his wounds in a Boston hospital.

Police reported the suspected shark bite on Saturday afternoon

Police responded on the scene immediately after the attack. CPR was performed on Medici and he was taken to the hospital where he was pronounced dead

Newcomb Hollow Beach, where Medici was swimming, has a sign saying 'Be Shark Smart' warning swimmers to avoid going near seals and to swim near the shore

Newcomb Hollow Beach, where Medici was boogie boarding, has a sign saying 'Be Shark Smart' warning swimmers to avoid going near seals and to swim near the shore.

'The inshore waters off Wellfleet are a feeding ground for Great White Sharks. They come to this area to feed on seals. Great White Sharks are predators and should be considered dangerous. Encounters with sharks are rare, but please remain alert,' the sign said.

Wellfleet beach is popular with surfers and was busy on Saturday, even though lifeguards were no longer on watch as the summer season is over.

The Wellfleet Police Department reported the incident on Facebook shortly afterwards saying it is believed to be a shark bite attack.

Police did not name the victim until Saturday evening.

The attack is being investigated by State Police and the Cape and Islands District Attorney's office.
Mosman Council's latest plan to use digital parking sensors to issue parking tickets has been labelled a 'blatant money-grabbing exercise'.

The council first introduced the sensors into the shopping precinct in 2015 as a way to monitor parking habits, but now plans to use them as a way to issue parking fines.

Mosman councillor Simon Menzies told the Mosman Daily the sensors are nothing more than a money-making exercise, which will ruin the happy 'village atmosphere'.

Mosman councillor Simon Menzies (pictured) told the Mosman Daily the sensors are nothing more than a money-making exercise, which will ruin the happy 'village atmosphere'

'This is just a blatant money-grabbing exercise by the council that will actually deter people from shopping in Mosman,' Cr. Menzies said.

The councillor has started an online petition to reject the proposal, which he will present to his fellow councillors at next month's council meeting.

On the petition website, change.org, Cr. Menzies stated the sensors were never supposed to be used for 'enforcement purposes' and will be bad for business.

According to the website, the sensors will work by sending a text message to the parking ranger when someone's parking time limit is about to expire.

'The Ranger can then be in place to issue you a fine the moment your parking time limit expires,' the petition stated.

He added, the sensors will create anxiety in shoppers, knowing that if they're one minute late a parking ranger could be there ready to pounce with a ticket.

The sensors will work by sending a text message to the parking ranger when someone's parking time limit is about to expire (stock)

'This is bad for retail as shoppers will choose other centres that offer 3 hour parking and dont overpolice parking fines for revenue raising purposes,' the petition said.

While it's unclear how many councils use digital sensors, an NRMA spokesperson told Daily Mail Australia North Sydney Council and Great Lakes Councils use them.

Cr. Menzies said the digital sensors will mean the machines will be going off all day long, resulting in a 'fourfold increase in revenue'.

Cr. Menzies said the sensors are a 'blatant money-grabbing' exercise by the council that will actually deter people from shopping in Mosman (NSW Government)

According to Revenue NSW, Mosman had the fourth lowest income from parking fines among Sydneys councils in 2017/18 at $2.8million, but if Cr. Menzie's theory is right, it's estimated to blow out to $11.2 million.

The City of Sydney raked up the most revenue from fines for the last 12 months ($40.88million) with the total parking revenue for the state being $191.98 million.

A Mosman Council spokesperson told the Mosman Daily the predicted revenue increase from the digital sensors was 'unrealistic' and 'uninformed'.

'The vast majority of Mosman motorists who do the right thing in not overstaying will not be impacted,' the spokeswoman said.

Daily Mail Australia has reached out to Mosman Council for comment.
A girl has been attacked by a shark in the Whitsunday Islands less than a day after a woman was mauled in the same area at the idyllic Queensland holiday hotspot.

The child - reportedly a 12-year-old girl - was attacked by the shark near Whitehaven Beach about lunchtime on Thursday.

The attack came just hours after a 46-year-old Tasmanian tourist miraculously survived a savage shark bite after she was bitten in the same area.

A Queensland Ambulance Services spokesman told Daily Mail Australia they received reports of a child being attacked by a shark at the Whitsunday Islands at 1.45pm.

The child suffered a horrific leg injury and has since been airlifted from the scene at Cid Harbour by helicopter to Mackay Hospital in a serious condition.

A spokesperson from Mackay Hospital confirmed to Daily Mail Australia that the young girl is now in a critical condition.

Justine Barwick, from Tasmania, was swimming near a yacht in Queensland's exotic Whitsundays Islands on Wednesday night, when she was attacked by the shark

The Whitsunday Islands is popular swimming destinations in Queensland, (pictured here Sawmill Bay) particularly with tourists

The young girl and Ms Barwick were attacked in Queensland's exotic Whitsunday Islands, a popular tourist destination

The child has reportedly suffered a serious leg injury, and paramedics are at the scene after travelling on a police boat

A trauma team were waiting when the helicopter touched down.

Paramedics had arrived at the scene after travelling on a police boat.

Justine Barwick, from Tasmania, was swimming near a yacht in Queensland's scenic Whitsunday Islands on Wednesday night, when she was attacked by the shark.

A passing yacht found the woman with life-threatening bites to her right thigh, and helped her out of the water.

Speaking to Daily Mail Australia, CEO for Family Based Care North West Doug Doherty confirmed it was his colleague who was the victim of the first attack.

He said she had been holidaying with her husband, Craig, and friends for less than two weeks when the incident happened.

'Justine is a fighter, a fit, resilient woman who is an outstanding leader in the aged and disability care sectors,' he said.

The bite left Ms Barwick with a significant gash in her right upper thigh, local paramedics told The Mercury.

By the time she was pulled from the water, she was rapidly losing blood.

However, by pure coincidence, one of her rescuers was an emergency department doctor, whose actions saved her life.

A nearby doctor managed to stem her blood loss with what little resources he had long enough for the rescue helicopter to arrive

Local paramedics say Dr John Hadok, who is an emergency department doctor at the Mackay Base Hospital.

He managed to stem the blood flow long enough to allow a rescue helicopter to arrive with Ms Barwick still breathing.

Queensland Ambulance Service Mackay manager of operations Tracey Eastwick told ABC she was very fortunate to have a doctor on the scene.

'He was able to assist with immediate treatment of the patient and to stabilise the serious haemorrhage that she had.'

A RACQ Rescue Helicopter spokeswoman said that if it wasn't for the people who found her and packed her wounds, the woman would be dead.

'By all accounts it was very serious and without the rescue helicopter she probably would have died, but those people did save her life by stopping the haemorrhaging,' she said.

The rescue helicopter, which Mr Doherty says was already in the air when the attack happened, took her to Mackay Base Hospital.

Mr Doherty said a late-night emergency surgery saved her life, and has left her in a critical condition as of Thursday morning.

The type of shark that attacked Ms Barwick is unknown.

The Whitsunday Islands are popular swimming destinations in Queensland, particularly with tourists who flock in droves during the warmer months.

While parts of the area has shark nets in place, they don't necessarily provide an impenetrable barrier between swimmers and sharks.

Dr John Hadok's (pictured) actions saved Ms Barwick's life, as he was coincidentally on a nearby boat

They do, however, reduce the overall number of sharks in the area, making it a safer place to swim.

There hasn't been a fatal shark attack in Queensland since 2014 when 18-year-old Daniel Smith was attacked by a tiger shark near Rudder Reef near Port Douglas.

He suffered a bite to the upper thigh and died within minutes of being pulled from the water.

In January 2006, 21-year-old Sarah Whiley was mauled by a trio of bull sharks, who attacked her in waist-deep water at Amity Point, north Stadbroke Island.

Ms Whiley lost both her arms in the attack and later died from massive blood loss.

In 2017, a father-of-two from Cairns lost his right leg and almost died when he was mauled by a shark while spearfishing off Hinchinbrook Island.
A young Bangladeshi student who confessed to staging an ISIS-inspired attack was told to remove her niqab and show her face in court - but refused to stand for a judge.

Momena Shoma, 25, appeared at the Victorian Supreme Court on Thursday and pleaded guilty to stabbing her Melbourne homestay host in February.

The young woman was only in Melbourne for a week before she stabbed Roger Singarevelu in the neck with a 25cm knife as he slept near his young daughter.

Momena Shoma (pictured) appeared at the Victorian Supreme Court on Thursday and pleaded guilty to stabbing her Melbourne homestay host in February

The young woman was only in Melbourne for a week before she stabbed Roger Singarevelu (pictured, right) in the neck with a 25cm knife as he slept near his young daughter

The Herald Sun reported that once Shoma arrived in court, she was forced to remove her niqab and show her face.

She was told to leave the garment off as she entered court and confirmed her identity.

When asked to stand as Justice Elizabeth Hollingworth entered the court, the 25-year-old student refused and stayed seated.

This wasn't the first time the student refused to stand, as The Australian reported that she had previously refused to stand for Magistrate Sarah Dawes in July.

Shoma pleaded guilty to intentionally engaging in a terrorist act 'with the intention of advancing a political, religious or ideological cause, namely violent jihad'.

It was also done to coerce, or influence by intimidating, the government or the public, or both.

'The action caused serious harm that is physical harm to Roger Singaravelu and endangered his life,' the formal indictment says.

Shoma (pictured, right) was told to leave the garment off as she entered court and confirmed her identity

'The action was not advocacy, protest, dissent or industrial action.

'Alternatively, if the action was advocacy, protest, dissent or industrial action, it was intended to cause a person's death.'

Following the attack, the 25-year-old told police that she traveled to Melbourne with the intention of carrying out a terrorist attack on behalf of Islamic State.

'I had to do it  it could have been anyone  he just seemed like a very easy target,' Shoma told police of the attack.

'I had to push myself. I wouldn't even hurt a rat  I just felt like if I don't do it, I will be sinful, I will be punished by Allah.'

The young woman said that although she couldn't read or write Arabic, she was under the impression that Islamic State wanted women to fight for them.

Shoma (right) said that she had orders from Islamic State leader to carry out the attack and said that Mr Singaravelu (left) was an easy target

Shoma said that she had orders from Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.

Mr Singaravelu described the attack as 'terrifying', and said that he woke to a sharp pain on his neck and the Bangladeshi student on her knees next to him.

'(She) had such an intense look. Her eyes were so intense. She was saying 'Allahu Akbar', she kept on saying this over and over,' he told police.

He pushed her away, pulled the knife from his neck and fled with his daughter.

Justice Hollingworth ordered Shoma return to court in January for a sentencing submissions, and is facing a maximum penalty of life in prison.
Sydney nursing assistant Dana Maree Gray (pictured), who assaulted an elderly dementia patient, has been spared jail time

A nursing assistant who repeatedly slapped an 85-year-old dementia patient and hit her in the face with her own bathroom rubbish has been spared jail.

Dana Maree Gray, 59, was in August sentenced to 17 months' imprisonment with a six-month non-parole period for assaulting the 'entirely dependent' woman.

Gray assaulted the elderly dementia patient while working at The Poplars nursing home in North Epping, north-west Sydney, in August 2017.

However, at Burwood Local Court on Thursday, magistrate Robyn Denes ordered Gray serve the sentence by way of home detention in Blacktown, in the city's west.

The horrific assault had been captured on a GoPro camera which had been hidden by a colleague.

Gray had walked in to the woman's bedroom and attacked the patient, who was using a walking frame.

She yelled 'move' and aggressively pulled off the woman's glasses and cardigan before slapping her repeatedly and grabbing her hair to drag her head from left to right.

Gray (pictured here leaving court in November last year) was sentenced to 17 months' imprisonment but on Thursday a magistrate ordered her to serve the sentence by way of home detention

Gray was captured on a hidden camera assaulting the elderly dementia patient at a Sydney nursing home in August 2017

The patient's bra was tugged off, leaving her topless and hanging her head until a nightgown is shoved over her.

Gray then emptied the bathroom bin, tied the rubbish bag into a knot and swung the contents at the woman's face, hitting her on both cheeks.

Gray has been ordered to wear an electronic monitoring device. She can only leave her home once a week or for medical emergencies.
Shocking footage of a Washington DC jogger who was stabbed to death on Tuesday night shows her running into a Chinese takeaway store for help.

The video, obtained by Fox News, shows Wendy Karina Martinez, 35, dash into the restaurant as blood gushed from a laceration to her neck. While some ran away from the horrific scene, other patrons rushed to her side.

She was taken to hospital, where she was pronounced dead.

Martinez was out for an evening run near Logan Circle just before 8pm when she was attacked by a knife-wielding male stranger at the intersection of 11th and P streets, Metropolitan Police Chief Peter Newsham said.

Martinez's assailant is still on the run. Police believe he acted alone and randomly.

Video shows Wendy Karina Martinez, 35, dash into the restaurant as blood gushed from a laceration to her neck

Martinez, 35 (left), was stabbed to death in Washington DC Tuesday evening. Police are looking for this man seen in a surveillance video screenshot

Young professional: Martinez worked as a chief of staff at a DC-based technology and management company

35 year old Wendy Martinez seconds before she was fatally stabbed. Recently engaged killed apparently in a random attack. Tonight Logan Circle Residents on edge police in hunt for killer. @ABC7News pic.twitter.com/eP51JAu0wO  Stephen Tschida (@ABC7Stephen) September 19, 2018

D.C. Police Chief Peter Newsham described the event as: 'very disturbing'.

'You have a young woman out here exercising... in a very safe neighborhood,' he said.

'You have a lot of people out here, who are enjoying dinner across the street. It's unsettling.'

The Georgetown graduate had just become engaged just last week, according to her heartbroken family, with a storybook proposal and a emerald ring.

A photo from the happy occasion shows fiance Daniel Hincapie in a blue suit, down on one knee, with a ring box open as she stood beaming.

Family say she was excited to be planning her wedding to the DC bank executive.

She beamed as she showed off her new emerald and diamond sparkler just days before her brutal murder

The young executive got engaged just last week to her fiance Daniel Hincapie. Family say she was already excited to be planning their wedding

Martinez lived not far from the crime scene and was an avid jogger known to run for miles. Her Facebook account features photos from past races.

Police believe the attacker, described as a black man, did not know Martinez and that it was most likely a random act of violence and a 'singular incident.'

The chief said the suspect was last seen wearing a long-sleeve mustard-colored shirt, dark-colored sweatpants, white socks and light-colored sandals.

Police have released surveillance video showing the person of interest casually walking in the area around the time of the deadly attack, swinging an arm.

Fox 5 DC reported that the knife used in the stabbing has been recovered at the scene.

The jogger was attacked as she waited to cross the street at the intersection of 11th and O streets

The Metropolitan Police Department is offering a reward of up to $25,000 to anyone with information that leads to the arrest and conviction of the suspect.

Her family released a statement after the shocking murder, describing the 'light of our lives' daughter who was killed. They said in party:

'Wendy Karina Martinez was the light of our lives. Not only was she an avid runner, but she was a devout Christian, a wonderful friend, and a driven professional. Everything you hope that a daughter and a friend could be. She was also excited to be planning her upcoming wedding to her fiance, Daniel Hincapie. They were engaged just last week.'

Martinez, seen here in photos with her now-fiance Daniel, was an avid jogger who was known for running for miles around DC

Martinez, whose family described her as the 'light of our lives', had a Master's degree in Latin-American studies form Georgetown

According to her LinkedIn profile, Martinez had a Master's degree in Latin American studies and conflict resolution from Georgetown University. For the last two years, she had worked as chief of staff at the technology and management company FiscalNote.

Martinez's employer addressed news of her violent death in a tweet sent out on Wednesday.

'The entire FiscalNote family is shocked and deeply saddened to learn that Wendy Martinez, our Chief of Staff, was killed last night,' the message read. 'Wendy was an invaluable member of our team and a vibrant member of the community. Our thoughts and prayers are with Wendy's family and friends.'
A pot company backed by billionaire Peter Thiel was briefly worth more than Twitter, following news that regulators will allow it export cannabis extracts to the US for medical trials.

Shares in Tilray Inc soared as much as 94 per cent on Wednesday from the prior day's close, briefly hitting $300 for a market capitalization of $28 billion in a tumultuous day of trading.

The stock crashed in the afternoon before rallying to close at $214.06, a 39 per cent gain from Tuesday's closing price.

The shares are now trading at more than 13 times their July IPO price of $17 per share.

Peter Thiel (above) is a major backer of private equity fund Privateer Holdings, which owns 76 per cent of Tilrays stock. The shares soared in value on Wednesday

Wednesday's gains follow a 23 percent rise in the shares on Tuesday, after the company received US approval to import cannabis from Canada for use in a clinical trial.

The share price may have also been bolstered by a short squeeze, in which short-sellers buy up stock in a desperate attempt to cover their positions, driving up the price.

'This is nearly the most insane thing I have ever seen in my entire life,' said Henry Schwartz, president at options analytics firm Trade Alert in New York.

By 2pm, Tilray options volume was at 157,000 contracts, compared with an average daily trading volume of about 40,000 contracts as of last week, according to Trade Alert data.

'It's a situation where there's a frenzy in the sector, but there is only a handful of things you can trade to try to be involved,' said Henry Schwartz, president at options analytics firm Trade Alert in New York.

Peter Thiel is a major backer of private equity fund Privateer Holdings, which owns 76 per cent of Tilrays stock. The fund's stake in Tilray was worth about $15 billion at the close of trading on Wednesday.

A Tilray employee is seen in the company's grow room. The company makes extracts for medical use but is interested into expanding into consumer products

Tilray's high times came a day after its Chief Executive Brendan Kennedy told Bloomberg the company is interested in the market for consumer products that use ingredients from marijuana.

The company's current focus is medical cannabis research and distribution, and it stood to gain big from Tuesday's announcement that the DEA had approved a plan for Tilray to export pot extracts to the University of California San Diego's Center for Medicinal Cannabis Research.

The center will study the extracts' effectiveness in treating tremors that afflict millions of people, especially those over 65.

Marijuana remains illegal under federal law, making it impossible for researchers to simply obtain forms of the drug from one of the many medical marijuana programs approved by individual states - even a state with a pot culture as prevalent as California's.

Tilray scientists examine a kind bud in the company's laboratory. The company on Tuesday received DEA approval to export to the US for clinical trials

Instead, federal law dictates that researchers typically must obtain any weed for clinical trials through the National Institute on Drug Abuse, which uses cannabis grown at the University of Mississippi. Scientists have long complained about the difficulty of obtaining that marijuana, as well as its limited quality, variety and usefulness for clinical research.

The University of California San Diego researchers said they needed marijuana extracts in capsule form because it's easier to monitor the doses that patients receive, compared to having patients smoke or vaporize it.

They also believed many older patients would be reluctant to participate in the study if they had to inhale the drug, according to Dr. Fatta Nahab, a UCSD neurologist and the tremor study's principal investigator.

NIDA doesn't offer capsules, so the researchers spent about two years going through regulatory hoops to obtain permission to import the drug from Canada, where medical marijuana is federally legal and where recreational sales begin nationwide next month.
Dozens of passengers suffered ear pain and nose bleeds after crew on a Boeing 737 flight from Mumbai, India, reportedly forgot to maintain cabin pressure.

The Jet Airways flight with 166 passengers and five crew members was climbing towards at an altitude of 11,000ft when pressure began to drop.

The flight heading to Jaipur, Rajastan state, was forced to returned to a Mumbai airport, with 30 passengers needing medical assistance.

Video footage shot by one of the passengers shows the moment when the oxygen masks were deployed to compensate the cabin pressure drop.

According to witnesses onboard, passengers started complaining of a severe headaches and difficulty in breathing as the airplane climbed, and shortly afterwards, some also started bleeding from their nose and ears.

An official from the Directorate General of Civil Aviation said, 'During the climb, the crew forgot to select a bleed switch due to which cabin pressurization could not be maintained.'

Passenger Darshak Hath said there has also been issues with the plane's air conditioning after it took off from Mumbai.

Incident: The Boeing 737, which was carrying 166 passengers and five crew members, was climbing towards at an altitude of 11,000ft when cabin pressure began to drop

Passengers complained about head aches and difficulty breathing, and some began bleeding from their ears and noses

The flight heading to Jaipur, Rajastan state, was forced to returned to a Mumbai airport, with 30 passengers needing medical assistance

The Press Trust of India news agency quoted an official as saying the malfunctioning occurred during the plane's climb.

The airline said the flight's cockpit crew was taken off scheduled duties pending an investigation.

None of the passengers have been reported as seriously injured, but a drop in a cabin pressure could lead to reduction in the flow of oxygen in the lungs and bloodstream, leading to hypoxia.
The youngest daughter of a cold case murder victim has broken down after her mother's remains were found in the family's backyard.

Skeletal remains believed to be those of Colleen Adams have been dug up by police on Thursday afternoon, 45 years after the mother-of-two first went missing from their South Australian home in 1973.

Her husband, Geoffrey Adams, 70, was arrested in his Wallaroo home on Wednesday.

He faced court on Thursday, charged with her murder.

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Skeletal remains have been uncovered in the backyard of cold case murder victim Colleen Adams' family home

'After 45 years of hoping, we have found her,' Kaye Adams' statement read (pictured)

The property was cordoned off as a crime scene and covered with a tent overnight, before police began their dig on Thursday morning.

Heavy machinery was brought in at about 10.30am to assist in the effort.

Head of Major Crime, Des Bray, told Adelaide Now police located the remains at about 1pm.

'She was in the area indicated to us and discovered about one hour ago and we've made the necessary notifications since then,' Detective Superintendent Bray said.

'It's going to be some time before we can make a formal identification but we are proceeding on the basis that the remains are those of Colleen.'

A short time after the remains were discovered, Colleen's youngest daughter spoke (pictured middle with police)

Remains believed to be those of Colleen Adams were uncovered from the family's home

A short time later, Kaye Adams, the youngest daughter of Colleen, issued a statement, read by a support victim officer.

'Today I have finally found my mother,' it read.

'After 45 years of hoping, we have found her.

'It's hard to say in a few words what I am feeling, but I am so grateful to the South Australian police and everyone who has worked to help find her.'

Kaye was only 18-months-old when her mother vanished. Her older sister, Marie, was three-years-old.

Ms Adams' youngest daughter, Kaye Adams, said she was thankful her mother had been found. Colleen Adams had been missing for 45 years. Pictured: A victim support officer

Pictured: Colleen and Geoffrey Adams with their eldest daughter, Marie, in the same backyard skeletal remains were uncovered on Thursday afternoon

Their father and Colleen's husband, Geoffrey Adams, appeared via video-link in Kadina Magistrates Court on Thursday morning.

The court heard that Adams had earlier confessed, Adelaide Now reports.

'(Adams) did admit to the crime that he has been charged with,' Police prosecutor acting Sergeant Frank Jakacic said.

'He further identified the site where police are currently in the process of excavating.'

He did not apply for bail and was remanded to reappear before the court in October.

The excavation began after the investigation was launched on Wednesday evening.

Astonishing footage showed Mr Adams pointing to a spot in the driveway of the home he once shared with his wife.

Adams, accompanied by detectives, walked into his former yard and pointed out a concrete slab before appearing emotionally distraught, Nine News reported.

Geoffrey Adams (pictured), 70, has been charged over the cold case murder of his wife 45 years after she went missing.

A detective then spray painted a large rectangular shape above where officers now believe the remains of Ms Adams are buried.

Adams took a final look back at the backyard before being taken to Kadina Police Station and charged with his wife's murder.

He has previously claimed his wife packed two suitcases and told him he never wanted to see him or their two children again, before getting in a car with a middle-aged woman.

Chilling footage captured the moment Adams, accompanied by detectives, walked into his former yard and pointed out a concrete slab, underneath is believed to be his wife's remains

Authorities now face the delicate task of uncovering Ms Adams' (pictured) remains from the site, which had only recently become subject to forensic searches

Less than 24 hours before his arrest on Wednesday, he maintained his story in a television interview.

'I just hope that she's well and enjoying life yeah,' he said.

Ms Adams was reported missing by her mother about a month later, with the case not being declared a major crime until 1979.

The couple's daughters were aged 18 months and three at the time. Relatives told police Ms Adams was a doting and loving mother who would never abandon her children, according to The Advertiser.

Mr Adams has never strayed from his initial statement that his wife wanted a divorce, and never lodged a missing person report.
She said she would rather have lost a finger but now will shave the rest of it

Hogg allegedly laughed while shaving the blonde hair from her scalp

She claims she was stripped, tied to a pole, gagged, beaten and humiliated

The woman who claimed her bikie ex boyfriend abducted her, shaved part of her head and violently assaulted her for two days, has revealed she will now shave the rest of her hair off.

Cheyane Lubec, 22, claimed she was kidnapped by Gypsy Joker associate Chad Hogg on Sunday and taken to the gang's clubhouse in Horsley Park, 40km west of Sydney.

She was allegedly stripped naked, tied to a pole, gagged, beaten and had her hair shaven off.

Ms Lubec has said she will now shave off the rest of her hair, which will be yet another reminder of her ordeal, Nine News reported.

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After revealing the shocking abuse she allegedly suffered at the hands of her bikie gang member boyfriend, Cheyane Lubec (pictured) said she will now shave the rest of her hair off

She said having her head shaved was the most humiliating part of the entire alleged ordeal

'I would have preferred he cut off my finger than shave my hair off, I don't know who I am anymore,' she told 9 News.

She said Mr Hogg had allegedly laughed as he shaved her hair off, knowing what it meant to her.

Thoughts of seeing her mother and sisters helped her get through the whole ordeal Mr Lubec told 9 News.

Police arrested Hogg on Tuesday following a tense stand-off at the clubhouse after Ms Lubec courageously fled for her life in a desperate dash for freedom earlier that day.

Ms Lubec (pictured before ordeal) claimed she was abducted by Chad Hogg and taken to the Gypsy Joker clubhouse where she was stripped naked, tied to a pole, gagged, beaten and had her hair shaven off

Ms Lubec claimed Hogg (pictured) laughed while shaving the hair from her scalp in what was the final disgusting act of two days of humiliation at the hands of her former boyfriend

Hogg was already on bail and had a domestic violence order taken out against him after he allegedly strangled Ms Lubec with an electrical cord in July.

She claimed Hogg laughed while shaving the blonde hair from her scalp after two alleged days of humiliation at the hands of her former boyfriend.

'He shaved off my hair and he took pictures and he was laughing while he was doing it,' Ms Lubec said.

She was not able to scream for help as her mouth was allegedly closed shut with duct tape.

'I would have preferred him to take a finger than to shave off my hair,' she said.

She claims she was duct taped at the wrists and ankles and forced into a position where she was hugging a wooden pole inside the clubhouse.

She claimed Hogg laughed while shaving the blonde hair from her scalp after two alleged days of humiliation at the hands of her former boyfriend

Ms Lubec said she sustained bruising and fractures to her face, and claimed she now had blurred vision in one of her eyes and was unable to breathe properly out of her nose.

Ms Lubec claimed her terror came to a dramatic end when Hogg drove her to a a fast food restaurant in south Penrith for her first meal in two days.

She said she was able to retrieve her phone from inside a plastic bag in the glove box, as well as her handbag, and hide in a bush across the road after Hogg left the car to place an order. She then called the police.

'I am very grateful to be alive,' Ms Lubec said.

The 29-year-old man with alleged ties to the Gypsy Jokers allegedly forced Ms Lubec into his Ford Mustang in Cambridge Park on Sunday.

Cheyane Lubec (pictured) was allegedly kidnapped, held hostage and violently assaulted by her bikie ex-parter for two days

Ms Lubec claimed her terror came to a dramatic end when Hogg drove her to a a fast food restaurant in south Penrith for her first meal in two days

Hogg was the subject of a domestic violence order due to a different alleged attack earlier in the year.

He was not allowed to contact Ms Lubec under the DVO conditions, the result of an alleged incident in July - but she claims he has been contacting her constantly since then.

'He held me at a Bungalow across the road from Nepean River for three days,' Ms Lubec said of the alleged July attack.

Ms Lubec said she sustained bruising and fractures to her face, and claimed she now had blurred vision in one of her eyes and was unable to breath properly out of her nose

'The blood vessels in my throat are damaged after he strangled me with an electrical cord.'

Mr Hogg was arrested and charged but was given bail by police and twice more by a magistrate when he fronted court over the alleged incident.

Police from Nepean Police Area Command commenced an investigation after speaking with the Ms Lubec, who was taken to hospital in a stable condition.

Hogg was not allowed to contact Ms Lubec under the DVO conditions, the result of an alleged incident in July - but she claims he has been contacting her constantly since then

At 2.10pm on Tuesday, officers attended the Horsley Drive clubhouse, where Hogg was arrested after a tense two-hour stand-off.

He allegedly tried to flee but was intercepted by officers from Fairfield Police Area Command with the assistance of Traffic and Highway Patrol Command, the Public Order and Riot Squad and further specialist police.

He was taken to Fairfield Police Station where he was charged with assault occasioning actual bodily harm, taking or detaining a person with intent to obtain advantage cause actual bodily harm, breaching an AVO, and stalking.

He was refused bail and will appear at Fairfield Local Court on Wednesday.

Police from Nepean Police Area Command commenced an investigation after speaking with the Ms Lubec (right), who was taken to hospital in a stable condition

She said she was able to retrieve her phone from inside a plastic bag in the glove box, as well as her handbag, and hide in a bush across the road after Hogg left the car to place an order
A chef has been overwhelmed with requests for her homemade strawberry jam after her bid to save farmers from the sabotaged fruit crisis went viral.

Brooke Nugent, business owner of catering company Feed Your Tribe, was inundated with over 200 orders of jam.

The mother-of-two from Diamond Creek, Melbourne, saw the need to support devastated farmers suffering financially from strawberries sabotaged with needles.

Brooke Nugent is business owner of catering company Feed Your Tribe from Diamond Creek in Melbourne

Brooke Nugent, business owner of catering company Feed Your Tribe, was inundated with over 200 orders of jam

Ms Nugent posted pictures of her shopping trolley yesterday where she had 100 punnets of strawberries with her two children which said 'I'll buy the strawberries that others wont and turn them into jam.'

The post went viral and was shared hundreds of times within hours.

'The whole situation is just devastating, farmers losing their whole lively hoods because of a few people's selfish stupidity,' the post read.

'I bought 100 punnets of strawberries yesterday and I'll need more as I've got over 200, and they're still coming,' Ms Nugent told 9News. '

Due to a high demand in orders, Nugent has had to close orders but will continue making more

Ms Nugent will donate all profits she earns from her home-made jams to Australian farmers.

Farmers are now being forced to spend thousands of dollars everyday picking strawberries they have to immediately throw out as supermarkets rip produce off shelves in case they are contaminated with needles.

Due to a high demand in orders, Ms Nugent has had to close orders but will continue making more.
A seven-year-old girl has been left in critical condition after reportedly being brutally raped with a metal water pipe in eastern New Delhi, India.

The young girl was reportedly lured to a nearby landfill site by her 21-year-old neighbour, who had promised her chocolate and ten rupees.

The alleged victim reportedly returned home bleeding from her genitals, and was rushed to hospital where she needed urgent surgery.

Horrific: The girl was reportedly lured to a landfill site near her home in eastern New Delhi, India, (pictured) by her 21-year-old neighbour, who raped her with a metal pipe

The 21-year-old was named by the victim, and have since been arrested by local police.

Swati Maliwal, chairwoman of the Delhi Commission for Women, took to Twitter to describe how the young girl had been left in indescribable pain.

'Just met with 7 year old rape survivor who was brutally raped in Seemapuri yesterday by a 22 year old man.

'He took her to a park, inserted water pipe inside her private part & then raped her. Girl is v critical, has bled incessantly & was operated upon. Mom single parent, v poor!

Outrage: Swati Maliwal, chairwoman of the Delhi Commission for Women, took to Twitter to voice her upset over the incident, and vowed to support the young victim

'Cannot describe the pain the little girl was experiencing. Already malnourished, she has a long struggle ahead.

'We are going to support her in her legal fight to ensure death penalty to her culprits. Will file compensation application & shall make all efforts to rehabilitate her.'

Local media reports that the 21-year-old alleged attacker has confessed to carrying out the crime, and he has been denounced by his own family.

His pregnant wife told India Express: 'We used to argue over his alcoholism, but I can't believe he would do this. Police should bring justice to the girl.'
A driver has been lucky to walk away with his life after his car was ripped in half in a horror crash.

The driver, 23, was heading north on the Augusta Highway in Port Wakefield, South Australia when he collided with a power line at about 5.40am on Thursday.

The Yorke Peninsula man, who was the car's only occupant, was taken in an ambulance to northern Adelaide's Lyell McEwin Hospital with an arm injury.

A car was torn in half when it crashed into a Stobie Pole in Port Wakefield this morning

Police are asking for anyone who witnessed or has information about the crash to call Crime Stoppers on 1800 333 000 or online at www.crimestopperssa.com.au

Reporting to Crime Stoppers can be done anonymously.
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A beaming Kim Jong-un and Moon Jae-in wrapped up a peace summit by raising their hands while standing at the peak of North Korea's sacred volcano.

The leaders of the rival Koreas took to the road for the final day of their summit on Thursday after a day of wide-ranging agreements they trumpeted as a major step toward peace.

Kim and the South Korean president flew separately to an airport near Mount Paektu on Thursday morning where they then met up and drove to the mountain.

Standing on the peak of a beautiful volcano that is considered sacred in the North and a centerpiece of propaganda used to legitimise the Kim family's rule, they posed with their hands clasped and raised in a pose of triumph.

Their trip to the mountain on the North Korean-Chinese border, and the striking photo-op will resonate in both Koreas.

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Summit to smile about! North Korean leader Kim Jong-un (second from left) and South Korean president Moon Jae-in (second from right) wrapped up a peace summit by raising their hands while standing at the peak of North Korea's sacred volcano

Closer than ever: The leaders of the rival Koreas and their wives appear to chat animatedly as they sit inside a cable car travelling to the top of Mount Paektu in North Korea on Thursday

However, their premier accord on the issue that most worries the world - the North's pursuit of nuclear-tipped missiles that can accurately strike the U.S. mainland - contained a big condition: Kim Jong Un stated that he would permanently dismantle North Korea's main nuclear facility only if the United States takes unspecified corresponding measures.

Photos showed the leaders smiling broadly as they posed at the summit, their wives grinning at their sides, a pure blue sky and the deep crater lake that tops the volcano in the background; they also toured the shores of the lake.

Members of the Kim family are referred to as sharing the 'Paektu Bloodline,' and the volcano is emblazoned on the national emblem and lends its name to everything from rockets to power stations.

Many South Koreans also feel drawn to the volcano, which, according to Korean mythology, was the birthplace of Dangun, the founder of the first ancient Korean kingdom, and has long been considered one of the most beautiful places on the peninsula.

Clap for peace: Moon Jae-in (second from right), his wife Kim Jung-sook (right), Kim Jong-un (second from left) and his wife Ri Sol Ju clap hands while on the Mount Paektu in North Korea

Another photo-op: On Thursday, the two Korean leaders on the final day of their summit headed to Paektu after a day of wide-ranging agreements they trumpeted as a major step toward peace

North Korean leader Kim Jong-un (left) enjoys the view during the visit to Mount Paektu on the North Korean-Chinese border

Moon plans to return to South Korea later on Thursday, as the leaders bask in the glow of the joint statement they settled Wednesday.

Compared to the vague language of their two earlier summits, Kim and Moon seem to have agreed on an ambitious program meant to tackle soaring tensions last year that had many fearing war as the North tested a string of increasingly powerful weapons.

Kim promised to accept international inspectors to monitor the closing of a key missile test site and launch pad and to visit Seoul soon, and both leaders vowed to work together to try to host the Summer Olympics in 2032.

But while containing several tantalising offers, their joint statement appeared to fall short of the major steps many in Washington have been looking for - such as a commitment by Kim to provide a list of North Korea's nuclear facilities, a solid step-by-step timeline for closing them down, or an agreement to allow international inspectors to assess progress or discover violations.

Taking home a souvenir! South Korean President Moon Jae-in puts water from the crater lake into a bottle as his wife Kim Jung-sook watches on Mount Paektu in North Korea on Thursday

South Korean President Moon Jae-in (centre right) and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un (center left) visit Mount Paektu

The leaders of the rival Koreas pose with other officials during the visit to Mount Paektu in North Korea on Thursday

South Korean president Moon Jae-in (right) and First Lady Kim Jung-sook leave for Seoul at Samjiyon airport in North Korea

South Korean President Moon Jae-in and his wife Kim Jung-sook bow before boarding their plane for Seoul on Thursday

It also was unclear what 'corresponding steps' North Korea wants from the U.S. to dismantle its nuclear site.

The question is whether it will be enough for President Donald Trump to pick up where Moon has left off.

Trump told reporters Wednesday that the outcome of the summit was 'very good news' and that 'we're making tremendous progress' with North Korea. He didn't indicate in his brief remarks whether the U.S. would be willing to take further steps to encourage North Korean action on denuclearisation.

Declaring they had made a major step toward peace, Moon and Kim stood side by side Wednesday as they announced their agreement.

'We have agreed to make the Korean Peninsula a land of peace that is free from nuclear weapons and nuclear threat,' Kim said.

'The road to our future will not always be smooth and we may face challenges and trials we can't anticipate.

South Korean President Moon Jae-in (right) and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un inspect the honour guard as they head to Mount Paektu from Samjiyon airport

Kim Jong-un (left) and South Korean President Moon Jae-in (right) review honour guards as they arrive at Samjiyon airport

President Moon Jae-in (left) and Kim Jong-un hold the documents after signing an agreement at the Paekhwawon State Guesthouse in Pyongyang on Wedesday

North Korean leader Kim Jong-un (left) waves to South Korean President Moon Jae-in and his wife Kim Jung-sook after watching 'The Glorious Country' at May Day Stadium in Pyongyang on Wednesday

'But we aren't afraid of headwinds because our strength will grow as we overcome each trial based on the strength of our nation.'

Moon urged unity for all Koreans in a speech he gave Wednesday night to the crowd gathered for North Korea's signature mass games.

'We have lived together for 5,000 years and lived in separation for 70 years. I now propose that we completely eliminate the hostility of the past 70 years and take a big step forward in peace so that we can become one again.'

Historians say the 5,000-year timeline of Korean history is a groundless claim that became part of South Korea's official narrative after being inserted in school textbooks during the rule of former dictator Chun Doo-hwan.

Moon Jae-in and Kim Jong-un raise their hands after watching the mass games performance of 'The Glorious Country' at May Day Stadium in Pyongyang on Wednesday

South Korean President Moon Jae-in and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un hold their hands together after watching the mass games performance of 'The Glorious Country'

North Koreans perform during the mass games performance of 'The Glorious Country' at May Day Stadium in Pyongyang

An image of a map of Korean peninsular is formed by performers during the mass games

A huge unification flag is seen during the mass games performance of 'The Glorious Country' on Wednesday

North Koreans perform 'The Glorious Country' at May Day Stadium in Pyongyang on Wednesday. The letters read: 'Welcoming President Moon Jae-in's visit in Pyongyang'

This week's summit comes as Moon is under increasing pressure from Washington to find a path forward in efforts to get Kim to completely - and unilaterally - abandon his nuclear arsenal.

Trump has maintained that he and Kim have a solid relationship, and both leaders have expressed interest in a follow-up summit to their meeting in June in Singapore.

North Korea has been demanding a declaration formally ending the Korean War, which was stopped in 1953 by a cease-fire, but neither leader mentioned it Wednesday as they read the joint statement.

Moon Jae-in (second from left) his wife Kim Jung-sook (left), Kim Jong-un (second from right) and his wife Ri Sol Ju greet the audience upon their arrival

Moon Jae-in, his wife Kim Jung-sook, Kim Jong-un and his wife Ri Sol Ju receive flowers from children before the performance

In the meantime, however, Moon and Kim made concrete moves of their own to reduce tensions on their border.

According to a statement signed by the countries' defense chiefs, the two Koreas agreed to establish buffer zones along their land and sea borders to reduce military tensions and prevent accidental clashes.

They also agreed to withdraw 11 guard posts from the Demilitarized Zone by December and to establish a no-fly zone above the military demarcation line that bisects the two Koreas that will apply to planes, helicopters and drones.

Other agreements aimed at removing some longstanding irritants from their relations, such as allowing more contact between families divided by the Korean War.

Moon also appeared to be making good on his proposals to help build up the North's infrastructure and open cross-border rail links.

Spectators wave to South Korean President Moon Jae-in, foreground right, and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un inside May Day Stadium in Pyongyang
Many fighters involved in recent terror campaigns in Iraq and Syria still missing

Dozens of Australian jihadis have vanished in Europe after fleeing the conflict zone in the Middle East.

Ross Guenther, the Victorian counter-terrorism chief, confirmed high numbers of fighters who were due to return home following terror campaigns in Iraq and Syria remain unaccounted for.

Assistant Commissioner Guenther said it was challenging to determine where many of the fighters had landed, before adding it was testing in some places to penetrate borders.

Melbourne born Neil Prakash is a member of ISIS and is currently detained in Turkey

Ross Guenther (pictured) confirmed limited intelligence is available to locate Australian jihadis

Speaking at the unveiling of Victoria's counter-terrorism blueprint, Mr Guenther said there was currently limited intelligence when it comes to the whereabouts of fighters and the exact number involved overseas.

'We believe there's a number of Australians still in the Middle East or in Europe,' he said.

'We expected quite a few of these would have made their way back, but that hasn't been the case at this point in time.

'It could partly be because it's very difficult to cross the border there or because they have passed across other borders into western Europe.'

Victorian counter-terrorism chief Ross Guenther conceded pinpointing Australian fighters in the Middle East has been difficult

The chief focus of the Victorian counter-terrorism strategy is education.

'Prevention is far better than cure and we are committed to stopping people from seeking to engage in terrorist behaviour,' Mr Guenther said.

'In the past year, we've seen the establishment of the fixated threat assessment centre, which gives us the opportunity to have police and mental health professionals work together to manage potential threats from fixated persons.'

Neil Prakash is regarded as Australia's most infamous Islamic State terrorist.

Born in Melbourne, the ISIS member was believed to be dead, only to be captured in November of 2016 attempting to cross the Syrian border into Turkey using false documents and a fake name.

Prakash is currently on trial on terrorism charges.

He will not be returned to Australia until his current legal proceedings, as well as any imposed jail term, are completed.
A teenager died after suffering an allergic reaction after a 10-month anniversary meal with her boyfriend at Wagamama, an inquest heard today.

Alice Brooks collapsed after she ordered ginger chicken noodles with tofu at the high street restaurant in Uxbridge in 2014, and died 4 days later.

The 19-year-old, who suffered from several allergies to foods including nuts, fish and latex, had eaten the meal with her boyfriend Michael Jeffries when she became ill.

Around an hour after leaving the restaurant, Alice began having trouble breathing and collapsed, with doctors later discovering that she had suffered a 'catastrophic brain injury'.

Alice's family decided to turn off her life support in the early hours of November 29, 2014.

Alice Brooks (with boyfriend Michael Jeffries) collapsed and later died four days after she ordered ginger chicken noodles with tofu at the high street restaurant in Uxbridge in 2014

At an inquest into her death, her mother, Suzanne Wilby described how her daughter previously suffered a reaction after sipping a bottle of Coca Cola belonging to someone who had eaten a snickers bar several hours earlier.

As a child she also suffered heavy breathing when someone sat close to her ate a bag of nuts and one day she was sent home from working in a bakery when she had a severe reaction to a colleague baking a walnut cake.

Boyfriend Michael Jeffries told West London Coroners Court how he and Alice visited the popular shopping centre to celebrate their anniversary on November 25, 2014.

He said: 'Whenever we went for food she would ask about nuts and look at the allergy charts.

'The waitress came over and asked what we wanted and Alice asked if there were nuts in the dish she wanted.

'The manager then came over with the allergy chart and confirmed nothing on it was in the food. Alice made sure it didn't contain nuts but she asked to double check.'

Mr Jeffries continued: 'We finished the food, and went out and we carried on to do more Christmas shopping.

'We were walking into The Pavilions when she started to feel unwell so we decided to walk back to the car.

'She used her inhaler which leveled her breathing out, but only for a bit and then it was getting worse and worse every time. I'd never seen her breathing so bad.

'She said her throat was frozen up and her breathing was really bad at that point, her lips started turning blue and that was when she had an anaphylactic shock - in the driver's seat.

'She got her epipen out but she passed out before she could use it. She told me to get it from her bag, I took it and put it in her right thigh.'

Within minutes of calling 999, a solo vehicle arrived at the scene and medical technician Stephen Hale gave Alice life support after she suffered a cardiac arrest.

Michael Jeffries told West London Coroners Court how he and Alice visited the popular shopping centre to celebrate their anniversary on November 25, 2014

Mr Hale told the inquest: 'I remember finding Alice lying between parked cars surrounded by inhalers, I can't remember how many but certainly more than one.

'Her boyfriend said he used an epipen and she had a reaction after they ate at Wagamama.

'Within one minute of me arriving she went into cardiac arrest and I gave basic life support with decompressions and mask and air.'

The inquest also heard how two paramedics rushed up the car park stairs with equipment because the ambulance struggled to drive into the building, due to height restrictions, and there was around a 10 minute delay in transporting Alice into the ambulance due to this.

Following the incident, Detective Sergeant John Hine visited Wagamama in Uxbridge high street to obtain CCTV footage and question members of staff.

Giving evidence, he said: 'I attended the restaurant. The purpose was to secure CCTV and speak to the waitress, manager and chef.

Alice's family decided to turn off her life support on November 29, 2014

'They confirmed that the couple came in and ordered, requesting no-nut dishes. They explained to me that Miss Brooks had mentioned the nut allergy and the order was supervised by the manager.

'Wagamama has a protocol when serving people with allergies and they presented to me as very competent and they certainly considered people coming in with allergies.'

Statements provided by the restaurant's manager, waitress and senior sous chef supported the view that a rigorous protocol was carried out on the day Alice and her boyfriend ordered their meals.

'It's policy that the manager must take the order if there is allergies,' the waitress stated.

Meanwhile the manager confirmed she went through the allergy chart with Alice before she ordered the meal and highlighted the allergy to the chef, who stated he cleaned the hob and kitchen utensils before cooking the nut-free dish.

The specific medical state which led to Alice's collapse in the shopping centre car park that autumn afternoon remains disputed between an asthma attack, anaphylaxis or bronchospasm.

While first responders were called to a suspected anaphylactic shock, Doctor Sergei Vaganov of Hillingdon Hospital told the court he believed that Alice suffered a bronchospasm.

This opinion was supported by Doctor Andrew Jones from St Thomas' Hospital which was where Alice was transferred to and spent her remaining days.

In a written statement read in court, he described that Alice suffered a 'catastrophic brain injury' and had a 'complete absence of brain function'.

He added his opinion was that the teenager suffered a 'severe bronchospasm in the context of an allergic reaction'.

Alice's family decided to relieve her from life support in the early hours of November 29.

Miss Brooks is pictured here in photos provided to the media by her family on Thursday

This afternoon the inquest heard that Wagamamas changed the way it stored nuts after a Alice's death.

Peanut protein was also found in tofu from the restaurant after the council's food and safety team had it tested, it emerged.

An investigation into the incident was launched by the council 'immediately' after the incident.

Food and safety team manager Oliver Darius told the court one of his officers ordered food as a customer without identifying himself to staff to have it tested.

He told the court: 'We conducted an investigation into this tragic incident after being alerted by police. I was team manager and regularly reviewed evidence in this case.

'On the day that Alice collapsed George Nafornita visited Wagamama's restaurant on the basis of advice given by the police report of her collapse.

'Mr Nafornita went into the restaurant and requested a meal, not the same meal but a meal from the restaurant.

'He did this as a customer and did not identify himself. He subsequently identified himself and took the meal for testing.

'The restaurant was visited to investigate its practices and procedures, particularly around allergins.

'All the evidence around practices and procedures were considered around how meals were prepared in the restaurant.

'We took a sample of the ingredients in the meal and sent them for public analysis. We received word that there was no peanut in the meal.'

But when the team heard Alice had tofu in her meal, they sent tofu from the restaurant to be tested.

Mr Darius said: 'A trace amount of peanut protein was found in the tofu.'

Cross examining Ms Gillmartin said: 'But you said in your report that the allergy specialist from the food safety authority said these levels were very low, and even lower when it comes to an allergin.'

Mr Darius agreed and added: 'I spoke to the analyst again and he said that there could be false positives.'

After leaving the restaurant (pictured), Alice went into anaphylactic shock and collapsed, with doctors later discovering that she had suffered a 'catastrophic brain injury'

Ms Gillmartin brought up the change in Wagamama's policy on nut storage.

Ms Gillmartin said: 'Since the incident Wagamama changed its policies on how it stores nuts, hasn't it?

'They used to be blended and decanted on site.Now the company has decided to bring them in already decanted.'

Mr Darius agreed that was the case.

The court also heard from a histopathologist who agreed with the cause of death being an acute asthma attack.

Professor Sebastian Lucas said it was difficult to judge whether someone had died from a food allergy if they do not die soon after going into anaphylaxis because the injuries have a chance to 'resolve' in the body.

But he told the court via video link that there was a lot of evidence pointing to an asthma attack as the cause of death.

Earlier the pathologist who conducted Alice's post mortem examination said there was an absence of a laryngeal edema, swelling in the throat caused by anaphylactic shock.

Charlotte Gillmartin, representing the family, asked Prof Lucas whether the steroids given to her by the paramedic after she collapsed could have caused this to disappear.

Prof Lucas said: 'Any of the injuries associated with anaphylactic shock would have resolved.

'The chances are you would never see anything three days later. A lot of people who suffer from anaphylactic shock don't have a laryngeal edema anyway.

'I don't see the significance of it in relation to this. But we do have a lot of positive evidence pointing to the cause of death being an acute asthma attack.

'There was damage to the lungs. Anaphylactic shock does not damage the lungs, it stops circulation. It's not a pulmonary issue.'

The inquest continues.
An off-duty police officer who rescued two young girls from being burned alive by their drug-affected father has been honoured for her bravery.

Senior Constable Stephanie Bochorsky was lounging in her pyjamas at home when she heard a woman scream for help, so she rushed to her neighbour's Perth home in August 2015.

Edward John Herbert, who was naked and in a drug-induced psychosis, had set his three-year-old daughter on fire and also doused her autistic seven-year-old sister with petrol.

Stephanie Bochorsky admits the smell of burning flesh and the broken look from a small girl doused in petrol, immersed in flames, still haunts her

Edward John Herbert (pictured) who was naked and in a drug-induced psychosis, had set his three-year-old daughter on fire and also doused her autistic seven-year-old sister with petrol

During Herbert's trial, Snr Const Bochorsky fought back tears as she described seeing the younger girl in her cot with 'her whole head on fire'.

The officer covered the girl in a blanket to put out the flames and also dragged the older girl out of bed then bolted.

Constable Bochorsky said it was a night she would never forget.

''I will never forget the look in her eyes, ever. The smell of burning flesh and petrol is something that I can't explain,' she said, according to The West.

Police officer Stephanie Bochorsky (pictured) who saved two young girls from being burned alive has been honoured for her bravery

'My immediate reaction was to run towards them. I didn't think,' she told 6PR radio on Thursday.

'He (Herbert) looked possessed.'

Months later, Snr Const Bochorsky still suffers nightmares and flashbacks.

'It was hard to comprehend what I saw.'

Her heroic actions on the horrific night were recognised at a ceremony in Canberra on Wednesday night when she was received the National Police Bravery Award.

"Her heroism was truly exceptional. Without a thought for herself, she confronted a dangerous man in a dangerous situation and rescued those little girls from almost certain death,"

'Stephanie's actions epitomise the very best of policing - bravery, compassion, professionalism and a commitment to duty.'

As Snr Const Bochorsky observed parliament on Thursday, Opposition Leader Bill Shorten said Snr Const Bochorsky found herself 'in the midst of violence and cruelty'.

'You said that the rescue was the easy part, it was what came after that, which was difficult - your memories of the night, the scene set into your mind, the ongoing communication with these poor kids, those wakeful moments of reflection,' he said.

Stephanie Bochorsky (pictured) was off-duty, watching television in her home in Doubleview, Perth when she heard screams

'Two precious little girls owe you their lives (and) Australia owes you its thanks.'

Prime Minister Scott Morrison said it was difficult to comprehend the terror and evil of that night.

Herbert, who had shouted that aliens were going to get him and claimed 'the werewolf is coming' before he attacked his daughters, was found guilty of several offences and sentenced to 17 years in jail.

Last month, fellow neighbour Daniel McMillan received a bravery medal for running into the burning home to help.

Mr McMillan hit Herbert with a fire extinguisher after he lunged with a filleting knife.
Sir Mike Penning (pictured), an ex-defence minister, accused the PM of treating Eurosceptic MPs 'like children who belong on the naughty step'

Theresa May faces a mounting Tory mutiny today as a former ally branded her 'deluded' and said her Chequers blueprint is 'as dead as a dodo'.

Sir Mike Penning, an ex-defence minister, accused the PM of treating Eurosceptic MPs 'like children who belong on the naughty step'.

The brutal attack came as Mrs May struggles to push through her plan for future ties with the EU despite fierce opposition from her own ranks and Brussels.

The premier had a ten minute pitch at the end of an EU summit dinner in Salzburg last night to get their backing for her Chequers blueprint - but there was no breakthrough.

In a blunt ultimatum, Mrs May ruled out any delay to Britain's departure from the EU in March  and said there were no circumstances in which she would consider a second referendum.

She also rejected the EU's latest proposals for resolving the Northern Ireland border issue, warning leaders that they would break up the UK.

But leaders appear unimpressed and said talks are now going nowhere with six months until the UK leaves the EU - and at home Tory plotters are already calling for her removal by next April.

After the meal of Wiener schnitzel and Sachertorte at Felsenreitschule, the theatre where The Sound of Music was filmed, EU Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker said the two sides remained 'far away' from a deal.

Slovak PM Peter Pellegrini said: 'There has been no progress' and Lithuanian president Dalia Grybauskaite said simply: 'It's a standstill'.

The leaders of Czech Republic and Malta have today said that Britain's voters must have another chance to vote again on whether to leave the EU.

But opposition in the EU is not the only hurdle Mrs May has to overcome - as Tories mobilise to condemn her plan.

Up to 80 MPs have vowed to vote against the proposals if they ever come to parliament.

Theresa May held talks with Irish PM Leo Varadkar (pictured) before the summit entered its second day in Salburg this morning

Mrs May told EU leaders last night that Britain would be prepared to walk away from the negotiating table if a deal was not struck quickly

Former Brexit Secretary David Davis predicted yesterday that Theresa May will have to 'reset' her stance in the face of a Commons revolt.

He said there were signs Brussels was softening its stance on Northern Ireland, but warned Brussels would 'pile on extra requests' in other areas.

Sir Mike, a Brexiteer who backed Mrs May for the Conservative leadership after the referendum, told the Telegraph he was joining the hardline European Research Group (ERG) of MPs.

'I've come to the conclusion that this 'put up, shut up' attitude of the Prime Minister's - it's Chequers or nothing - you do as you're told or else, is a massive insult, not only to my colleagues but also to the voters,' he said.

'She is playing a game of Russian Roulette with the country which is frankly an insult to the referendum result and all those people who voted, no matter how they voted.'
A plumber sent his ex-girlfriend a heartbreaking text message saying 'I am sorry for what is about to happen' just hours before taking his own life, an inquest has heard.

Jordan Appleton, 23, was found dead by his grandfather in woodland near his home in April.

He had split from his girlfriend Jessica Greenway just a day before following a 'turbulent and acrimonious' romance which lasted around 12 months.

The Wigan resident had messaged her at 2.10am saying: 'I am sorry for what is about to happen. Remember the good times - I love you.'

Five hours later he was found dead.

Jordan Appleton, 23 and from Wigan, had been dating Jessica Greenway for 12 months but split with her in April. Just the day after the break-up he was found dead in woodland near his home

Mr Appleton (pictured here with his mother Pamela) had gone fishing with his family on the day of the break-up. His father Neil Appleton said his son had told him 'he was happy' at the time

Miss Greenway who is in her 20s was asleep at the time the message was sent to her phone and she didn't see it until it was too late.

An inquest heard yesterday that the tragedy occurred on April 9 after the couple had ended their relationship.

In a statement read out at the inquest Miss Greenway said: 'I was Jordan's girlfriend up until the day before his death. He spent a lot of time at my home and we spent time in each other's company for a considerable amount of time.

'Our relationship had its ups and downs although we loved each other so we did what he had to do to make it work.

'We would argue and break up, sometimes for only a few hours, then we would get back together.'

It was April 8 when Jordan ended his relationship with Ms Greenway, and he went fishing soon after to clear his head.

Ms Greenway said: 'He came back later and collected his belongings. He then left to go back to his parents.

'I didn't speak to him until he sent me a text message, but there wasn't anything on it that was a cause for concern.

'Then I received a text message from him at 2.10am on April 9, saying 'I am sorry for what I am about to do; remember the good times - I love you'.

'I didn't see the message until later as I was asleep. I found out that day that he had died.

'Jordan never said anything to me that would insinuate that he wanted to take his own life.'

Jordan Appleton (pictured) worked as a plumber in Wigan but had a 'turbulent and acrimonious' relationship with his ex-girlfriend Jessica Greenway. Ms Greenway, who is in her twenties, told the inquest: 'Our relationship had its ups and downs although we loved each other'

Jordan's father Neil Appleton, also a plumber from Winstanley, Wigan, Greater Manchester described the couple's relationship at the Bolton hearing.

He said: 'They had been together for about 12 months prior to his death but this relationship was very challenging.

'It was turbulent and acrimonious and Jordan had become extremely fond of her but things didn't run smoothly at all between them.

'While there was times he would be happy, there was a real conflict in the relationship.

'It was a potentially toxic and he wanted to protect us by not telling us about it. He didn't want us to worry.

'It was Jordan who ended the relationship. It happened on the Sunday April 8, the day before he died.

A fund-raiser launched by one of Mr Appleton's (pictured) close friends received more than 3,000 in just six days following news of his death

'We went out with the dogs and had a great day and then went fishing. He went about it the best he could - he said he was happy.

'Something must've happened to make him do this, maybe something on social media, but we were a close family and never kept secrets from each other.

'He had never self harmed before or talked about taking his own life. I thought he was fine.

'When he left school, he took a view that hands-on practical work was for him and he became a plumber and followed in my footsteps.

'He was a healthy person who went to the gym and was a keen fisherman. When he was younger, we would do a lot of sea fishing and as he got older he started to do carp fishing.

'He was very happy with his employer and there was nothing whatsoever to give me a clue as to the tragedy that was about to happen.'

Jordan's mum, Pamela Appleton added: 'He was upset initially and I said to him 'obviously you know how I feel about her but if she is the one then you have to follow your heart' but he said no.'

Coroner's Officer Marcheta Hogan told the inquest: 'Jordan Appleton was discovered by his grandfather while he was walking his dog.

'His father was also at the scene cradling him in a state of visible distress.

'His mobile phone was investigated and there was a message sent to Jessica Greenway.

'That message was not read by her until 6.41am.'

Mr Appleton was a keen fisherman. His father, Neil Appleton, told the inquest that when his son was younger, they would do a lot of sea fishing and as he got older he started to do carp fishing

The hearing was told Jordan had no history of depression and his GP said he never saw him other than for an injury to his left hand.

Recording a verdict of suicide coroner, Timothy Brennand, said: 'Behind the scenes Jordan had been texting a number of friends, and Jessica had been posting messages on social media saying that she had got over it and wasn't very concerned that they broke up.

'But what was happening here was that both the people involved in this relationship said they didn't care when the reality was self-evident that actually they did care.

'The circumstances of Jordan's death are a tragedy - a tragedy in particular for a very close family who I have met today.

'I don't think any parent or any member of society could fully understand the pain of losing a child until it has happened to them.'

At the time of Jordan's death, his parents said: 'Jordan had bought tools, been fishing, asked me to sew his work pants and was making plans with us and with friends - but most importantly he was looking to the future.

'We'd had a conversation for hours which although initially he'd been upset, he was then fine.

'Before going to bed he was laughing and joking with me and his dad. There was absolutely no indication of what he would do and he set his alarm for work the next day.

'Our beautiful funny boy was taken from us far too soon.

'Always the prankster, he lit up our lives and brought us great joy. He was the best big brother to Maison and Cassidie and was fiercely loyal and protective.

'We are filled with pride for everything he achieved in his short life but the heartache and loss without him here is indescribable.'

A fund-raiser launched by one of Jordan's close friends received more than 3,000 in just six days.

For confidential support in the UK, call the Samaritans on 116123 or visit a local Samaritans branch. See samaritans.org for details.
Wayne Rooney is faced with forking out about 6million after a tax avoidance scheme he invested in has folded.

The former Everton player sheltered about 12.5million with Invicta 43, which bought rights to two Hollywood films.

Some of the millions he sunk in were borrowed from the Bank of Scotland, with the rest being his own cash.

Wayne Rooney - pictured with wife Coleen and their children - faces forking out millions after the tax avoidance scheme folded

The DC United player pumped millions into the scheme, borrowing some of it from the Bank of Scotland

Now that Invicta 43 has gone bust, Rooney will have to pay the outstanding tax he owes, Mirror Online reports.

A spokesman for Rooney said: 'Wayne has always paid all UK taxes in full and in accordance with the law of the time.

'He has also complied, as have thousands of other taxpayers, when retrospective rulings have been applied by HMRC.'

The 32-year-old was one of 225 investors to collectively buy the rights to the movies Fred Claus and 10,000 BC.

Rooney and his wife Coleen shared this snap on Instagram of them at the Washington Monument. The DC United star faces paying up on tax owed

Companies House documents confirm that action to strike off the scheme has begun.

The Manchester United legend - who in 2016 topped the young sportsman's rich list with an 82million fortune - is not yet believed to have received the formal tax demand.

This year he became the highest-paid player in DC United's history when he signed to them for 10million.

A spokesman for HMRC said it could not comment but added that 'tax avoidance doesnt pay' because 'most schemes simply dont work'.
This is the incredible moment a sand buggy manages to climb a near-vertical sandy slope.

A crowd watches on as the brave driver manages to pull off the impressive feat during an off-road vehicle competition in Norway.

It initially looks as if the powerful buggy is struggling as it slides sideways along the loose sand.

The wheels look to be submerged in the sand and the accelerations from the driver throw huge plumes of sand behind the vehicle, not uncommon in the off-road spectacle.

The amazing driving feat was captured in Skien, a city in the south of Norway

It looks as if the ascent may be over as the buggy hits a sand bank and becomes airborne, only to land perfectly and power on up the hill.

Some commenters online suggested the host of the competition was shouting in Icelandic as that is where the sport, Formula Offroad, originated.

A YouTube user commented on the video saying: 'The builder is as impressive as the driver. What a machine.'

Driver and his buggy are taking part in a sport called Formula Offroading, popular in Iceland

Despite its origins in Iceland, the popularity of the sport has spread across all Nordic countries, with this video being shot in Skien, a city in the south of Norway.

Autocar described the sport in 2016: 'In this sport, mad machines driven by even madder men battle it out over land and water  yes, over water  to compete for the Icelandic Formula Offroad title.'

The sport started in Iceland and has gained popularity before spreading across America in 2016.

The crowd are enthused by the driving as the powerful buggy quickly climbs the sandy hill

Formula Off Road is a form of motorsport where drivers compete in precision driving through steep hills and extreme terrain with 4WD vehicles, like expertly shown in this video.

The drivers are protected by a roll cage, a full-face helmet with neck support, five-point harnesses, a bucket seat, flame resistant overalls, shoes and gloves, special arm restrainers and other safety measures that are required by the rules of the dangerous sport.

Spectators can sometimes be pelted with sand, earth or small stones kicked up by the huge shovels attached to the rear tyres.
The owner of a Texas company that makes untraceable 3D-printed guns has fled the country after he was accused of paying an underage girl for sex, police say

Cody R. Wilson, 30, flew to Taiwan after he was charged with sexually assaulting a 16-year-old girl he met through website SugarDaddyMeet.com, Texas cops say.

Wilson then missed a scheduled flight home and his current whereabouts are unknown, Austin Police Commander Troy Officer said.

Cody R. Wilson, 30, who owns 3D gun company Defense Distributed, has been charged with sexual assault of an underage girl that he allegedly met through the website SugarDaddyMeet.com

An unnamed girl told authorities that she met a man later identified as Wilson through this dating site, that they had sex in a Texas hotel and that he paid her $500 afterwards

Officer told Fox that a friend of the victim is thought to have told Wilson that he was under investigation before he left.

It is not clear why he went to Thailand specifically, Officer said.

Wilson owns the company Defense Distributed, which makes blueprints for untraceable 3D printed guns.

The company made headlines in July after the Department of Justice ruled it was legal to distribute the blueprints online, despite several states trying to ban them.

Police were alerted to the alleged assault after a counselor called on August 22 to say a patient had claimed she had sex with a 30-year-old man.

He announced in August that he is selling 3D-printed gun blueprints through his website after the federal court blocked him from posting them online for free.

The alleged victim, who has not been named, said that she had been paid $500 to have sex with the man in a hotel and that she had met the man, who used the name 'Sanjuro,' through the website SugarDaddyMeet.com, CBS Austin reported.

The girl told authorities that Wilson used the screen name 'Sanjuro' and that he later said his name was Cody Wilson and that he was 'a big deal'

Authorities said determined Wilson's identity by matching his ID picture to images on the dating site and reviewing surveillance footage and digital valet receipts at this hotel, where the girl said Wilson paid to have sex with her

According to the affidavit, the teen said that she and 'Sanjuro' texted each other inappropriate pictures.

She said that he later identified himself as 'Cody Wilson' and claimed to have been 'a big deal.'

Eventually the girl and 'Sanjuro' arranged to meet at Bennu coffee shop in Austin on August 15, before departing in a black Ford Edge sport vehicle to travel to the Archer Hotel.

Once there, according to the affidavit, the pair left the car with the hotel's valet service and walked together to a room, where they had sex.

Afterwards, the girl said that 'Sanjuro' gave her five $100 bills.

Police said in the affidavit they corroborated the girl's story by comparing Wilson's ID picture to images of 'Sanjuro' on SugarDaddyMeet.com. They also reviewed surveillance videos and digital valet receipts.

The license plate on the car that 'Sanjuro' drove matched one that was registered to Defense Distributed as well, according to KVUE.
The chilling moment a man heaves a heavy suitcase containing the corpse of his wife into a waiting taxi was caught on CCTV in Russia.

Anna Ovchinnikova, 37, was strangled with a rope by her husband Alexander in their apartment in Cheboksary, a city in western Russia on the Volga River.

Alexander, 44, had apparently become enraged when mother-of-two Anna asked him for a divorce. He punched the tattoo-artist in the face, then strangled her to death.

Scroll down for video

Alexander carries the suitcase to the waiting taxi having struggled to lift its weight down the steps and into the back

The killer made a full video confession while in police custody, according to the Investigative Committee, which probes serious crime in Russia

Despite being aware he had a previous conviction for murder, police seven times declined to take action against Alexander, despite his wife's written testimony complaining about how he had beaten her.

The macabre video shows him emerging from their apartment block and struggling to lift the heavy suitcase down the steps and into the waiting taxi.

The husband - who made a video confession to murdering his wife after being detained - then took the bag to a reservoir area of the city and used a shovel to bury it in the ground.

The victim Anna Ovchinnikova and her son, less than a year old, whose father Alexander has confessed to the murder

The couple with their daughter, now 6. It is not known whether the children were in the apartment when their father strangled their mother

Alexander said in his confession: 'On September 8, at about 10 pm, we had a row and during the argument I grabbed a rope and began to strangle her. Then I realised she was dead. I got the suitcase, and put her inside it, then called a taxi'

Police were alerted by the victim's father after her sudden disappearance.

Detectives arrested Alexander after they found CCTV footage showing a man resembling her husband with the suitcase.

He immediately admitted the killing, said the Investigative Committee (IC) which probes serious crime in Russia.

In his confession he said: 'On September 8, at about 10 pm, we had a row and during the argument I grabbed a rope and began to strangle her.

'Then I realised she was dead.

'I got the suitcase, and put her inside it, then called a taxi.

The couple met after Alexander's release from prison in 2011 and had two young children

Victim Anna Ovchinnikova, 37, made a living as a tattoo-artist and had made numerous complaints to police about her violent husband

Police were alerted by the victim's father after her sudden disappearance and Alexander was arrested after they found the CCTV footage showing him leaving their apartment with the suitcase

'I brought her to the Cheboksary Bay areaand I dug (the sand) with a shovel (to bury her).'

He told detectives where to find her body.

'Police found the suitcase and the body of the victim with a rope around her neck,' said a statement from the IC.

The man admitted he was 'drunk' and that the couple were arguing over Anna's desire for a divorce.

Alexander, 44, had apparently become enraged when mother-of-two Anna asked him for a divorce. He punched the tattoo-artist in the face, then strangled her to death

Photographs show a happy family, but Anna had complained many times about Alexander's violent behaviour

Officers reportedly told her that despite her written testimony they had no hard evidence on which to open a case against Alexander

Police said the man had previously served 14 years in jail for premeditated murder.

He was released in 2011 and the couple began a relationship soon afterwards.

They had a daughter, six, and a son, less than one year old.

Although pictures show a happy family, in recent months Anna had made a succession of complaints to police about Alexander having beaten her, reported Mash news outlet.

Officers told her they had no hard evidence on which to open a case.

Alexander told detectives where to find Anna's body - in a suitcase in a ditch he had dug himself with a shovel
A 46-year-old woman is lucky to be alive after being the victim of a shark bite

Justine Barwick, from Tasmania, was swimming near a yacht in Queensland's exotic Whitsundays Islands on Wednesday night, when she was attacked by the shark

A mother who watched a shark attack victim be dragged from the water and airlifted to hospital in a critical condition has shared chilling photographs of the rescue.

Sandi White, 45, was swimming with her family in Cid Harbour on Queensland's idyllic Whitsunday Coast just hours before the shark attack on Wednesday evening.

The Brisbane mother-of-three recalled the haunting moment her family were called out of the water moments after the shark attack on Wednesday evening.

Tasmanian holidaymaker Justine Barwick, 45, is in a critical condition after the terrifying attack.

'It was so frightening. We were all swimming around Cid Harbour yesterday morning, just hours before the shark attack happened,' Mrs White said.

That attack came a day before a 12-year-old girl, believed to be from New Zealand, was attacked by a shark in the same stretch of water on Thursday afternoon.

The girl underwent emergency surgery on Thursday evening for massive blood loss in the horrific event.

An eyewitness to Wednesday evening's shark attack in The Whitsundays has shared exclusive photographs of the dramatic rescue

That attack came a day before a second person was attacked in the same stretch of water

The Whitsunday Islands is popular swimming destinations in Queensland, (pictured here Sawmill Bay) particularly with tourists

Medical crew have described the young girl's injuries as 'absolutely horrific' after treating her on the beach for 20 minutes before rushing her to hospital.

'Unbelievably it's actually a really similar injury to what the lady yesterday suffered as well, exact same spot but opposite leg,' a spokeswoman told The Courier Mail.

'We landed on the beach of Whitsunday Island and the water police picked up our doctor and our paramedic, took them out to the vessel where she was and they got her into the boat and brought her back to the shore,' the spokeswoman said.

Mrs White described the Wednesday evening attack on 45-year-old Ms Barwick as 'dramatic', and left the harbour in a 'sombre mood'.

'To think I was swimming in the same water just hours before with my three boys. The whole thing was really frightening.'

'Around 5pm we heard on the (marine) radio that there had been a shark attack and for everyone to get out of the water,' Mrs White said of the incident.

Mrs White and her family immediately went out on their dinghy to investigate what was occurring just metres away from them.

The family then noticed a helicopter hovering around the area, and heard distressing screams from the boat.

'She was standing on the top deck of their yacht and talking to the paramedics in the helicopter,' she said.

Ms White described the woman as 'frantic' and was telling paramedics not to move the victim, but a doctor was on board to help the 45-year-old and control the bleeding.

'The helicopter did a few laps and he dropped one rescuer down to help with the recovery. Eventually they got her up into the helicopter and airlifted her away. Everyone who watched it on the harbour was really shaken up,' Ms White said.

Photographer Sandi White (pictured) was just metres away from the rescue that took place at Cid Harbour on Queensland's Whitsunday Coast

Mum-of-three Sandi, from Brisbane, said she could hear a woman who was on the boat (pictured) with the victim crying as the rescued unfolded

The young girl and Ms Barwick were attacked in Queensland's exotic Whitsunday Islands, a popular tourist destination

'They had a boat on standby ready to evacuate the woman to Hamilton Island if necessary, but luckily a doctor was on board,'Ms White said

Ms. Barwick is currently in a critical condition in Mackay hospital, according to a hospital spokesperson.

Earlier in the day details emerged of the attack with Rescue crewman Ben McCauley praising those who gave first aid, in an interview with the ABC.

'The shark had taken a huge chunk out of her inside leg and she was bleeding out,' RACQ CQ Rescue crewman Ben McCauley told the publication.

'The original first aid was actually really well done.

'We actually didn't have to do anything with the leg, it was pretty much tourniqueted up, bandaged up and bleeding had stopped. They'd done a really good job.'

A 12-year-old girl was attacked by a shark in the Whitsunday Islands less than a day after a woman was mauled in the same area.

The child was attacked by the shark near Whitehaven Beach about lunchtime on Thursday.

The attack came just hours after the 46-year-old Tasmanian tourist miraculously survived a savage shark bite after she was bitten in the same area.

The child has reportedly suffered a serious leg injury, and paramedics are at the scene after travelling on a police boat

Eyewitness to Wednesday evening's shark attack shared exclusive photos she took while the rescue unfolded

A Queensland Ambulance Services spokesman told Daily Mail Australia they received reports of a child being attacked by a shark at the Whitsunday Islands at 1.45pm.

The child suffered a horrific leg injury and has since been airlifted from the scene at Cid Harbour by helicopter to Mackay Hospital in a serious condition.

A spokesperson from Mackay Hospital confirmed to Daily Mail Australia that the young girl is now in a critical condition.

A trauma team were waiting when the helicopter touched down.

Paramedics had arrived at the scene after travelling on a police boat.

Justine Barwick, from Tasmania, was swimming near a yacht in Queensland's scenic Whitsunday Islands on Wednesday night, when she was attacked by the shark.

A passing yacht found the woman with life-threatening bites to her right thigh, and helped her out of the water.

Speaking to Daily Mail Australia, CEO for Family Based Care North West Doug Doherty confirmed it was his colleague who was the victim of the first attack.

He said she had been holidaying with her husband, Craig, and friends for less than two weeks when the incident happened.

'Justine is a fighter, a fit, resilient woman who is an outstanding leader in the aged and disability care sectors,' he said.

The bite left Ms Barwick with a significant gash in her right upper thigh, local paramedics told The Mercury.

By the time she was pulled from the water, she was rapidly losing blood.

However, by pure coincidence, one of her rescuers was an emergency department doctor, whose actions saved her life.

A nearby doctor managed to stem her blood loss with what little resources he had long enough for the rescue helicopter to arrive

Local paramedics say Dr John Hadok, who is an emergency department doctor at the Mackay Base Hospital.

He managed to stem the blood flow long enough to allow a rescue helicopter to arrive with Ms Barwick still breathing.

Queensland Ambulance Service Mackay manager of operations Tracey Eastwick told ABC she was very fortunate to have a doctor on the scene.

'He was able to assist with immediate treatment of the patient and to stabilise the serious haemorrhage that she had.'

A RACQ Rescue Helicopter spokeswoman said that if it wasn't for the people who found her and packed her wounds, the woman would be dead.

'By all accounts it was very serious and without the rescue helicopter she probably would have died, but those people did save her life by stopping the haemorrhaging,' she said.

The rescue helicopter, which Mr Doherty says was already in the air when the attack happened, took her to Mackay Base Hospital.

Mr Doherty said a late-night emergency surgery saved her life, and has left her in a critical condition as of Thursday morning.

The type of shark that attacked Ms Barwick is unknown.

The Whitsunday Islands are popular swimming destinations in Queensland, particularly with tourists who flock in droves during the warmer months.

While parts of the area has shark nets in place, they don't necessarily provide an impenetrable barrier between swimmers and sharks.

Dr John Hadok's (pictured) actions saved Ms Barwick's life, as he was coincidentally on a nearby boat

They do, however, reduce the overall number of sharks in the area, making it a safer place to swim.

There hasn't been a fatal shark attack in Queensland since 2014 when 18-year-old Daniel Smith was attacked by a tiger shark near Rudder Reef near Port Douglas.

He suffered a bite to the upper thigh and died within minutes of being pulled from the water.

In January 2006, 21-year-old Sarah Whiley was mauled by a trio of bull sharks, who attacked her in waist-deep water at Amity Point, north Stadbroke Island.

Ms Whiley lost both her arms in the attack and later died from massive blood loss.

In 2017, a father-of-two from Cairns lost his right leg and almost died when he was mauled by a shark while spearfishing off Hinchinbrook Island.
Jeremy Corbyn's 'peace minister' has been accused of flouting Labour policy by publicly demanding Trident be scrapped.

Fabian Hamilton sparked a fresh bout of infighting after MailOnline uncovered footage of him openly condemning the nuclear deterrent.

The Leeds MP is also due to give a talk at party conference on 'how to protect workers in the event of scrapping Trident'.

Critics said the leadership was using 'devious' tactics to try and reopen the issue, after Mr Corbyn failed to impose his own views.

Labour has been wracked by divisions over the nuclear deterrent since Mr Corbyn became leader three years ago.

The veteran left-winger is a life-long supporter of unilateral disarmament, and is still vice president of CND.

Fabian Hamilton sparked a fresh bout of infighting after MailOnline uncovered footage of him openly condemning the nuclear deterrent

Labour has been wracked by divisions over the nuclear deterrent since Jeremy Corbyn (pictured on a visit to Leicester this month) became leader three years ago

Mr Hamilton highlighted his appearance at the CND fringe meeting, which is taking place on Monday, on Twitter

Critics point out that the principle of the Trident deterrent (test launch pictured) is completely undermined if hostile states like Russia believe it would not be deployed

But despite Mr Corbyn vowing that he would never use Trident as PM, Labour's official policy is to support renewal of the weapons system.

A majority of the party's MPs voted in favour of renewal in 2016, and it would take a formal decision by conference to change the stance.

Mr Corbyn himself now avoids openly stating his views on the deterrent, merely insisting that the party is committed to renewal.

However, in an interview with the Trident Ploughshares anti-nuclear weapons group, dated June this year, Mr Hamilton said Trident should be scrapped.

He referred to the fact that party policy supported Trident renewal - but openly condemned the deterrent.

'It (Labour) should be a party of nuclear disarmament. It isn't at the moment. That is a source of sadness to me,' he said in the footage.

'I need to win this argument as shadow minister for peace and disarmament. But you need to carry on putting that pressure on elected members, on party members...

'You need to keep up that effort and that profile you've had making the case for Britain to sign the treaty, to get rid of its nuclear weapons.

'They are not a deterrent in my view, and they are certainly far too expensive, and they are certainly not independent.

'Let's use that money for life-enhancing expenditure on our health service, on our public transport system even on our conventional defence... but not on these terrible weapons of mass destruction that can only result in the end of life on Earth.'

Labour's former security minister Lord West, who served in the Royal Navy as First Sea Lord, said there seemed to be 'pretty devious business' going on over the nuclear deterrent.

'This is totally against party policy. Our policy is to keep it,' he said.

'He is making up new policy.

'What it makes you think is that although the Labour Party decided we would keep it, Jeremy Corbyn and some of his acolytes do not agree with that.

'They know there would be a huge backlash on the jobs side. But that should not be the basis on which we do our defence policy.

'What frightened him (last time) at the Labour Conference from going any further was that he did not want it to be the big issue.

Mr Hamilton (pictured left) was appointed in 2016 with a brief to 'reduce violence, war and conflict'. Shadow chancellor John McDonnell (pictured right) risked fuelling Labour splits earlier this month by insisting he would not use Trident under any circumstances

Labour's former security minister Lord West said there seemed to be 'pretty devious business' going on over the nuclear deterrent

'But now he has got so much else going on he doesn't care.'

Lord West added: It seems party discipline is a thing of the past, but it is not the way that I have been brought up to think people should behave.'

Mr Hamilton highlighted his appearance at the CND fringe meeting, which is taking place on Monday, on Twitter yesterday.

He said he was looking forward to speaking 'on defence diversification and how to protect workers in the event of scrapping Trident'.

Labour sources said the party's policy was clear, and Mr Hamilton was tasked with pursuing multilateral disarmament.

Supporters of the deterrent point out that the principle is completely undermined if hostile states like Russia believe it would not be deployed.

Shadow chancellor John McDonnell risked fuelling Labour splits earlier this month by insisting he would not use Trident under any circumstances.

He also told the New Statesman Britain should not have had nuclear weapons during the Cold War.

Both Labour and the Tories are committed to multilateral disarmament.

Mr Corbyn floated the idea of creating a 'peace minister' during his leadership campaign, and Mr Hamilton was appointed the following year with a brief to 'reduce violence, war and conflict'.
The New South Wales government is heading to the High Court as it fights to have a man face a single trial over the alleged murders of three Aboriginal children in Bowraville almost 30 years ago.

But any fresh trial could be years away, amid the groundbreaking bid to test the state's double jeopardy laws.

Attorney-General Mark Speakman said the state would apply to the High Court for special leave to appeal over his unsuccessful case in the NSW Court of Criminal Appeal.

The 52-year-old, who can't be named for legal reasons, was previously acquitted at separate trials of murdering two of the children - Evelyn Greenup (left), 4, and Clinton Speedy-Duroux (right), 16

The NSW government is heading to the High Court as it fights to have a man face a single trial over the alleged murders of three Aboriginal children in Bowraville almost 30 years ago

But any fresh trial could be years away, amid the groundbreaking bid to test the state's double jeopardy laws

Protesters rallied through Sydney on Sydney. One woman's shirt read: 'You are walking on stolen land'

The state's highest court last week rejected his bid after deciding fresh and compelling evidence hadn't been produced to warrant forcing a 52-year-old man to face a new trial over the three murders.

Evelyn Greenup, four years old, Clinton Speedy-Duroux, 16, and Colleen Walker, 16, disappeared from the northern NSW town over a five-month period from September 1990.

The man, who can't be named for legal reasons, was acquitted of Clinton's murder in 1994 and of Evelyn's murder in 2006.

Colleen Walker (pictured), 16, disappeared about the same time as Evelyn Greenup and Clinton Speedy-Duroux

He was also a suspect in the disappearance of Colleen whose body has never been found, but no charges have ever been laid.

If special leave is granted early in 2019, the attorney-general expects the High Court appeal itself to be heard in mid-2019.

Should that be approved, the High Court will most likely send the case back to NSW's highest court to consider whether the evidence presented during a hearing last year is compelling and whether a joint retrial is in the interests of justice.

Mr Speakman said he had consulted the cabinet, the state's crown advocate, the government's barrister in the case and the most immediate past president of the NSW Bar Association.

Evelyn Greenup, four years old, Clinton Speedy-Duroux, 16, and Colleen Walker, 16, disappeared from the northern NSW town over a five-month period from September 1990

The man, who can't be named for legal reasons, was acquitted of Clinton's murder in 1994 and of Evelyn's murder in 2006

A young boy latches onto an Aboriginal flag while he marches through the Sydney CBD

'I wouldn't be making this application unless I believed there were prospects for success,' Mr Speakman told reporters on Thursday.

The government believes evidence related to the disappearance of Colleen points to similarities in the three cases and links them to each other and to one killer.

But the Court of Criminal Appeal ruled all of the evidence related to Colleen was available to be tendered at the 2006 trial related to Evelyn.

Young children attended the protest wearing t-shirts with the Aboriginal flag

Official posters for the protest label the location as Parliament of New South Wales

Another possible path to a retrial is for the parliament to pass new laws.

Greens MP David Shoebridge has proposed allowing an acquitted person to be retried in 'exceptional circumstances'.

Mr Speakman said the government wanted to exhaust all current legal avenues before considering legislative changes to double jeopardy laws.

Relatives of the victims said they were pleased to have another option for justice.

Speakers stood infront of a sign that reads 'justice' with red and yellow writing

People held the Aboriginal flag at the process as a sign of solidarity

Melinda Walker, a first cousin of Colleen and aunty to Evelyn, said relatives had been traumatised at 'every single knockback' including last week's appeal rejection.

'It's just great to be finally heard,' she told reporters on Thursday.

The relatives and Bowraville residents earlier rallied outside parliament demanding justice and chanting 'black lives matter'.

A protester performs a smoking ceremony at the Thursday protest

Large amounts of people rallied together for the Thursday protest through Sydney CBD

One Bowraville local, Rowena Chapman, was carrying her two-year-old girl Djanaambi on her hip as she said she couldn't imagine how the victims' families had survived since the disappearances.

'It would just be heartbreaking, devastating, not knowing, not getting justice and letting someone get away with murder,' she told AAP.

'I wouldn't know what to do if it happened to my kids.'

A protest poster is stuck on the glass walls of the Law Courts
Celebrations of the holy Muslim day of Ashura is continuing around the globe, with sacred self-flagellation rituals leaving worshippers covered in blood.

The holiday is celebrated by Shiite Muslims, and mourns the death of Imam Hussein, the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad, on the battlefield in the 7th Century.

The gory ceremonies, which sees males of all ages cut themselves across the scalp, or whip themselves with blades attached to chains, are meant to commemorate Imam Hussein's violent end.

Young participant: A man holds a baby during an Ashura cutting ceremony, which sees male Shiite Muslims self-flagellate to commemorate the death of Imam Hussein, the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad, on the battlefield

Making the cut: A man gashes the head of a fellow pilgrim with a knife as they commemorate Ashura in Najaf, Iraq

Wrapping it up: A woman bandages the head of a child following a self-punishment ceremony in Najad this week

Photographs show babies spattered with blood after having been held by their fathers during a cutting ceremony in Najaf, Iraq.

Another image sees a woman bandage a young boy's head after he has had a small cut to his scalp.

Many of the worshippers wear white clothes, which are then coloured bright red by the blood streaming from head wounds and flagellation ceremonies.

Ashura is celebrated on the tenth day of Muharram  the first month in the Islamic lunar calendar. This year, Ashura begins in the evening of September 20 and ends at sundown on Friday September 21.

Red streets: Iraqi Shi'ite Muslims bleed after hitting their foreheads with swords and beating themselves during the religious festival of Ashura in Baghdad's Sadr City, Iraq

Gory: Celebrations in Najaf, Iraq today saw men cut their scalps and foreheads as part of the annual ceremony

Self-inflicted: Men in white clothes cutting parts of their scalps off are monitored by medical staff dressed in black

Measuring it out: Shiite Muslims flagellate themselves during the ten-day mourning period leading up to Ashura

For Shia Muslims, the annual Ashura commemorations mark the killing of Imam Hussein by the forces of the Caliph Yazid in 680 AD.

The beheading of Imam Hussein and the killing of his family was part of a dispute over who should succeed the Prophet Mohammed.

This dispute eventually developed into a bitter schism between the Sunni, who make up around 90 per cent of Muslims, and Shia branches of Islam.

Many Shiite worshippers travel from neighbouring Iran and other countries each year to visit Imam Hussein's shrine in Karbala, which lies about 50 miles southwest of Baghdad, Iraq.

A Shi'ite man flagellates himself alongside fellow pilgrims gashing their foreheads with swords while commemorating Ashura in Najaf, Iraq

Bloody devoted: A Kashmiri Shiite Muslim man flagellates himself during a religious procession held on the seventh day of Ashura in Srinagar, India

Historical moment: Ashura commemorates the slaying of the Prophet Muhammed's grandson in southern Iraq in the seventh century

Hot dash: A young child runs across burning coal during a commemoration ceremony in Lahore, Pakistan

Shocking: A man cuts himself in the back using a long sword on a street in Kashmir, India

Millions of others across the Shiite world, from Lebanon to south Asia, hold processions in their home towns, performing a variety of mourning rituals.

Some of these involve Shiites beating their chests and slapping their faces, which is referred to as Latyma.

Others see them whipping themselves with bladed chains until they bleed, to commemorate the violent deaths of Hussein and his family.

The faithful also drive in convoys through the streets carrying colourful flags and playing songs dedicated to Hussein.

Sunni Muslims also mark Ashura, as the day Moses was saved from the Egyptians by God.

Its observed as a day of atonement for Sunnis, allowing those participating to be forgiven for the sins they committed in the previous year. Many Sunni Muslims observe Ashura as a fast day.
Democratic Unionist MP Ian Paisley (file image) has clung on to his seat after Westminster's first ever recall petition fell just 444 votes short of the total required to force a by-election

Democratic Unionist MP Ian Paisley clung on to his Commons seat overnight after the first ever recall petition fell just 444 votes short of the total required to kick him out of Parliament.

Mr Paisley would have lost his seat if 10 per cent of voters in North Antrim - 7,543 people - signed the petition. In the event 7,099 people signed it (9.4 per cent).

The petition device, created following the Westminster expenses scandal, was initiated after Mr Paisley was banned from the House of Commons for 30 sitting days for failing to declare two 2013 luxury family holidays paid for by the Sri Lankan government.

A parliamentary watchdog found in August that a year after the luxury holidays, Mr Paisley lobbied then prime minister David Cameron not to support a UN probe into alleged Sri Lankan human rights abuses.

Three centres were opened in North Antrim for the last six weeks to give voters the opportunity to sign the petition. Constituents were also able to put their name to the petition via post.

Northern Ireland's Chief Electoral Officer Virginia McVea announced the outcome in Belfast around 1.25am after a count that commenced at midnight.

'The petition has not been successful,' she said.

Ms McVea communicated the outcome to Speaker John Bercow's office before making the announcement.

Mr Paisley, who did not attend the announcement, was informed by text message.

Northern Ireland's Chief Electoral Officer Virginia McVea announced the outcome (pictured) in Belfast around 1.25am after a count that commenced at midnight

Three centres were opened in North Antrim for the last six weeks to give voters the opportunity to sign the petition. The petition boxes were collected last night (pictured at Seven Towers leisure centre in Ballymena)

Afterwards Ms McVea rejected criticism that has been levelled at her for only opening three centres where people could sign the petition, when the maximum permitted was 10.

She said there had been 'unprecedented access', with the longest ever electoral period in Northern Ireland and voters able to access postal votes on demand.

Mr Paisley, son of late DUP founder Rev Ian Paisley, is currently suspended from his party pending its own internal investigation into his conduct.

His Commons ban has left current Prime Minister Theresa May shorn of one of her 10 DUP MP confidence and supply allies during a period that could witness several crucial Brexit votes. He is not due to return to the Commons until November.

It has also given the DUP another headache at a time when the party is under intense scrutiny at public inquiry hearings in Northern Ireland examining its handling of the botched green energy scheme that brought down Stormont powersharing.

An investigation by the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards found the cost of the hospitality afforded Mr Paisley and his family may have been 'significantly more' than his 50,000 estimate.

The petition process saw campaigners urge voters to sign the petition to 'end DUP corruption' (pictured are Sinn Fein politicians fighting to oust Mr Paisley in August)

It found the Sri Lankan holidays included business-class air travel, accommodation at first-class hotels, helicopter trips and visits to tourist attractions for the North Antrim MP and his wider family.

The trips also included meeting with Sri Lankan governmental figures.

Mr Paisley's threshold for registering such hospitality in 2013 was around 660.

In March 2014, Mr Paisley wrote to Mr Cameron to lobby against a proposed United Nations resolution setting up an international investigation into alleged human rights abuses in Sri Lanka.

In the wake of the watchdog report, Mr Paisley apologised for what he described as an 'unintentional failure' to declare the holidays.

In the 2017 general election, Mr Paisley retained his North Antrim seat with a landslide 20,000-plus majority, securing nearly 59 per cent of the vote.
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 teacher was asked to leave a branch of Costa Coffee for breastfeeding her baby when she had not bought anything.

Kaley Louise Riley, 29, claims she was told to leave a branch of Costa Coffee while on holiday in Penzance, Cornwall, for not buying anything before sitting down.

'Proud mummy' Kaley claims she had 'every intention' of buying a drink after breastfeeding her daughter Scarlett, but chose to feed her first because her 'shrill tones would have sent customers flying'.

Kaley Louise Riley, 29, claims she was told to leave a Costa Coffee while on holiday in Penzance, Cornwall, for not buying anything before sitting down

But when a member of staff reportedly asked her to leave if she was not planning on buying anything, Kaley left and complained to the company online.

When Costa Coffee defended the employee's decision and advised her to speak to a manager before sitting down next time, Kaley claimed the response was 'inappropriate' and 'insensitive'.

After ranting about the incident on social media, numerous users backed the coffee shop's decision and said that Kaley should have bought something before breastfeeding.

Sharing a screenshot of the company's private reply on social media, Kaley said: 'I sent Costacoffee a Facebook message complaining about the treatment I experienced in their Penzance store recently [sic].

When a member of staff reportedly asked her to leave if she was not planning on buying anything, Kaley left and complained to the company online

'As a reputable breastfeeding friendly company, I was expecting them to be equally as appalled as I was. Unfortunately that wasn't the case.

'To cut the story short: Scarlett's pram had broken, it was pouring with rain outside, and she had just woken up and was very hungry [and] thirsty.

'I immediately spotted Costa and went in. It was packed full of people and so I just took a seat and breastfed her in a corner out of the way.

'The queue was huge and I wanted to settle her and didn't see a problem in doing so.

When Costa Coffee defended the employee's decision and advised her to speak to a manager before sitting down next time, Kaley claimed the response was 'inappropriate' and 'insensitive'

'I had every intention, once she had calmed down, to buy my favourite chai latte and chill out of the rain.

'That was, until a member of staff approached me and told me I must leave immediately if I wasn't planning on buying anything. As you can imagine, I was quite cross.

'I'm now even more cross at the response from Costa (as if standing around waiting/looking for a store manager to explain the circumstances is even a suggestion.

'Scarlett's shrill tones would have sent customers flying after a few minutes any way and I will no longer be frequenting their stores or buying their products.

The coffee giant's response caused uproar with some of Kaley's friends, who slammed the company's reply

'Please share to ensure that no other mum needing a safe space to calm her baby, is subjected to the same treatment, and to highlight how terrible Costa's social media team are at responding appropriately and sensitively to such a matter. #Costacoffee #breastfeedingmums #mumsunite.'

Kaley's post was shared, liked and commented on more than 125 times. In their reply to Kaley's complaint, Costa Coffee had said: 'Thank you for getting in touch. Unfortunately we do expect anyone entering our stores to purchase a food or beverage product.

'On this type of occasion, we recommend speaking to the Store Manager on arrival to let them know your situation and it would be left down to their discretion whether or not staying in the store without making a purchase is possible.'

Kaley, from Newark, Nottinghamshire, said: 'I just wanted an apology really, and I didn't get that. I had to reread the message about five times. I didn't understand what had just happened.

'It's not even a lack of common sense, but a lack of common decency with whoever was handling it.

Kaley's (pictured with her daughter) post was shared, liked and commented on more than 125 times

'Babies need to come first because unfortunately they don't understand that there's a long queue and they have to wait. The queue was to the door, it was really long.

'I was really angry. I am 16 months into my breastfeeding journey but had that been me if she was two months old I would have been really upset because it's a really daunting aspect to breastfeed in public anyway.

'There's quite a lot of stigma around it. Had it have happened to a newer mum, a newly breastfeeding mum, it would have made it harder to be discreet.

'A couple next to me [in Costa] said how disgusting, I can't believe they have treated you like that. It's all based on circumstance.

'I am quite lucky that I have been breastfeeding for a while now and I am quite bolshie and will say no, I'm well within my rights to breastfeed.

'But if it had been two weeks in, or two months in, I probably would have left Costa in tears. That' what I want to avoid. I don't want anyone else to be made to feel like that. 'Breastfeeding should be celebrated, not isolated.'

The coffee giant's response caused uproar with some of Kaley's friends, who slammed the company's reply.

A Costa spokesman said: 'We have always been very happy for mothers to breastfeed in our stores and were concerned to hear about this customer's experience.

'We have since spoken to the customer directly and apologised.

'Costa is renowned for its family friendly environment and is the perfect place for mums to relax with their children. Our store teams will happily deliver drinks to parents' tables and go out of their way to accommodate families.'
This is the terrifying moment a giant great white shark swoops on a fisherman's catch in the same waters where an engineering student was killed by a shark the day before.

The video was shot by fisherman in Nantucket an island off Cape Cod, Massachusetts - on Sunday.

Arthur Medici, 26, became the first person to die in a shark attack in the state since 1936 the day before the video was shot.

Paul Derba was fishing with his nephews when the beast stole their striped bass

Shark activity in the area has been worryingly high, with the engineering student being bitten by a great white off Cape Cod, Massachusetts, in the same waters as Nantucket.

The man who shot this video of the beast swooping on a fisherman's catch said: 'We were fishing, aboard the Head Hunter out of Chatham, Massachusetts.

'At the time of this video, we were roughly five miles off Nantucket. I was filming my brother reeling in a striped bass when 10-feet from the boat, a great white shark came out of nowhere and ate the fish.'

Paul Derba said his nephew (pictured) was about to reach into the water to grab his catch

The great white shark was only a couple of feet from the boat when it snatched the catch

Paul Derba, whose nephew was about to reel in his catch, told local publication Cape Cod Times: 'The thing was, it was just so fast.

'The shark came from below, it didnt come across the water. We didnt see it until hes right under the striper (fish).'

Derba, from Boston, added that his nephew was just about to reach into the water to grab his catch before the shark arrived at ate the striped bass in one.

Forty miles to the west of Nantucket is Martha's Vineyard, the island where famous shark flick Jaws was filmed in the early 1970's.

Arthur Medici was attacked Saturday afternoon when he was boogie boarding with his fiance's brother at Newcomb Hollow Beach in Wellfleet, police say.

Arthur Medici, 26, died after being attacked by a shark while boogie boarding in Cape Cod

The Cape Cod National Park Service reported that at 12.30pm the Revere man was knocked off his board then attacked by the shark. Police identified him Saturday evening.

Medici was born in Brazil and came to the United States two years ago to attend college to be an engineer, according to WCVB.

A GoFundMe page set up by grieving family and friends stated that the late Medici was 'happily engaged to a smart, kind-hearted medical student with a bright future.'

Loved ones described him as a devout Christian who was humble, kind and always willing to help others.
Another school student has found a needle in a piece of fruit, this time in Victoria.

St Thomas Primary School in Geelong, southwest of Melbourne, contacted police on Thursday after a year 5-6 student came across the horrifying discovery in an apple they were eating.

It's the second reported incident involving an apple in two days after a woman found a needle in a Pink Lady in Sydney's north-west on Tuesday.

More than 100 reports of tampered fruit are being investigated, including more reports of more bananas and a mango being sabotaged in recent days.

In a note sent home, parents were advised that the majority of St Thomas Primary School students were unaware of what happened, The Geelong Advertiser reported.

The latest apple contamination in Victoria comes two days after a mum in Sydney's north-west came across this horrifying discovery (pictured) in a Pink Lady apple

'The student felt the blunt end of the needle with their thumb,' the note stated.

'All teachers were instructed to speak with all classes in relation to the children being able to consume their fruit safely by either inspecting it, cutting it up or both,' the note, understood to have been distributed via the school app.'

A Victoria Police spokeswoman wouldn't comment on the specific incident but confirmed to Daily Mail Australia it's aware of further reports of contaminated fruit.

'We can confirm we are investigating numerous incidents of what appears to be 'copy-cat' offending with reports of various other types of fruit contaminated across the state,' she said.

The latest incident happened at St Thomas Primary School (pictured) in Geelong on Thursday

'We urge the public to report any similar cases of fruit contamination to their local police. All contamination reports referred to police will be investigated thoroughly, with the safety and wellbeing of the public at the forefront of our minds.'

The latest incident comes a day after a child found a needle inside a banana at a Newcastle primary school north of Sydney on Wednesday.

The student from St Paul's Gateshead made the horrifying discovery before biting into the fruit that was in their lunchbox.

The child alerted teachers and police were called.

Lake Macquarie detectives are investigating the incident and seized the banana for further testing.

Woolworths has pulled sewing needles from its shelves across Australia in the wake of the fruit tampering crisis

'The student fortunately discovered the fruit was contaminated before biting into it,' the school posted on its Facebook page on Wednesday night.

'The local police were informed, have visited the school, and are investigating. If you send fruit to school over the next few days, please cut it up first and send it in a plastic container.'

Woolworths has taken the drastic step of withdrawing needles from its shelves nationally in the wake of the fruit tampering crisis.

'Weve taken the precautionary step of temporarily removing sewing needles from sale in our stores. The safety of our customers is our top priority,' a spokesman told Daily Mail Australia.

The customer bought the mango at a Coles supermarket in west Gosford on the NSW Central Coast on Monday (stock image)

Coles said it had no plans to pull sewing needles from its shelves and that its focus was on focused thoroughly inspecting strawberries.

Meanwhile, a customer claims to have found a needle embedded inside a mango after purchasing it at a supermarket.

The customer bought the mango at a Coles supermarket in west Gosford on the NSW Central Coast on Monday. The alleged discovery was reported to local police.

The discovery comes as police found a report of strawberry tampering was a hoax.

Chief Inspector Nigel Webber said the customer had the mango for two days before cutting it up and finding a small needle.

'Police have seized the needle for forensic examination. No persons were injured,' he told the Central Coast Gosford Express Advocate.

A Coles spokeswoman said they 'take food safety seriously and this matter is being investigated'.

'Health authorities have advised people should cut their fruit before they consume it.'

Many of the 100 reports of tampered fruit being investigated by police across the country are thought to be fake or copycat cases.

A young boy was arrested in NSW on Wednesday after admitting he put needles in strawberries as a 'prank'.

A boy in Western Australia who claimed to have found a needle in a strawberry will not be charged by police due to his age.

'At the same time, while that one has been false, we clearly have ongoing concerns and so our message is not going to change, and that is that this is a serious matter,' WA Police Commissioner Chris Dawson told radio station 6PR.

In a separate case, a 12-year-old girl is to be cautioned after she admited putting a small needle inside a piece of fruit.

The discovery comes as more than 100 reports of tampered fruit are being investigated by police across the country

Meanwhile, hundreds of Australians have queued for as long as two hours to show their support for farmers in the midst of the fruit contamination crisis.

A photo shared to Facebook on Wednesday morning shows a long line of cars waiting to buy strawberries from a local Queensland farm.

Customers at a Wamuran strawberry farm, north of Brisbane, queued for hours as the farmers picked the berries and put them straight into boxes.

'At one point, 30-40 people were lined up waiting, and that's without those who were coming in to pick their own,' Faith Jennings, who took the photo, told the Brisbane Times.

This map show the cases of strawberry tampering which have emerged across the country in a 'food terrorism' saga

Woolworths has stopped selling sewing needles in a bid to prevent saboteurs using them to spike strawberries and other fruit

Ms Jennings was one of the customers happy to wait in line for two hours

She said she and her sister arrived at the farm at around 11.30am, with droves of members of the community already ahead of her.

When she left more than two hours later, she said there was still another 30 people behind her.

'They were happy to pick their own or stand and wait, knowing the strawberries hadn't been tampered with and were fresh off the farm.'

To maintain their customer base, farmers selling their produce at markets have been using metal detectors to prove their fruit is safe.

At least 13 people have gone public about finding needles in their strawberries since a man was rushed to hospital on September 9

They aren't cheap either, as Liz Jarman from Berry Sweet farm in Queensland said the small conveyor belt costs the same as a small car.

'They are installed at the end of pack benches, they are like miniature versions of the metal detectors at the airport,' she said.

As customers buy their fruits, the packaging passes through the metal detectors, giving the customers the all clear.

But the expensive precautionary measure is working, as Ms Jarman was one of many farmers who sold all of their strawberries hours before the market closed.
A Florida man has been arrested after he set a woman on fire, leaving her in critical condition, cops say.

Terry L. Palmer, 39 appeared outside the Fort Myers home of Thelma Shelby, where the two got into an argument on Tuesday.

Following the dispute, Palmer left and returned to the home on the 2900 block of Evans Avenue, threatening to burn her house down and holding a container of flammable liquid.

Terry Palmer, 39, (left) has been arrested and charged with arson and arson causing great bodily harm after he set Thelma Shelby (right) on fire on Tuesday in front of her home

He accidentally set his shirt on fire and as he turned around to get rid of the flames and threw away the jug of flammable liquid, the flames caught on Shelby's clothes, setting her on fire, according to Fort Myers News Press.

Police were called and she was taken to Tampa Hospital Burn Unit in critical condition.

When cops arrived on the scene Palmer had already fled, but they tracked him down and arrested him a short time later.

He was familiar with the victim and her family.

The two were arguing outside of Shelby's home located on the 2900 block of Evans Avenue in Fort Myers, pictured above

He was treated at Lee Memorial Hospital for his burns before he was brought to Lee County Jail.

He has been charged with arson in the first degree and arson causing great bodily harm.

His bail has been set at $400,000 and jail records did not list an attorney.

Shelby is currently sedated and on breathing machines, according to Wink News.

'She had a therapist here thats trying to see what she can do when I guess when she comes alert but it will be a while they say,' Shelby's sister Lavoen Rodriguez said.
A man who was wrongly accused of deliberately mowing down emus has spoken out to clear his name after being sent death threats by vile trolls.

Sickening footage showing a man shouting 'f***ing emus' while speeding down a rural road in the Australian Outback went viral on Wednesday.

The man can be heard laughing hysterically before saying 'this is f***ing great' in the confronting footage as he deliberately runs over the flightless birds.

Melbourne man Harrison Hatzis, 19, was wrongly identified as the man seen in the vision, partly due to a photo on his Facebook next to an emu and his facial hair.

Speaking to Daily Mail Australia, Mr Hatzis said he was desperate to clear his name after social media users threatened to rape and kill his family.

Melbourne man Harrison Hatzis, 19, was wrongly identified as a man seen mowing down emus in a viral video posted to Facebook

'You can guarantee it's not me,' Mr Hatzis said after receiving a torrent of abuse online when a stranger tagged him in the post.

The video was originally posted by a man named Fabio Galletti and has sparked an online hunt to find the motorist.

'Motherf***ers. Hope karma will hit you hard,' Mr Galletti wrote in his post, encouraging users to share the video in a bid to find the emu killer.

'Scum of the earth! Lets share so maybe they can find it,' one social media user wrote.

'Does any one know when this was done and how to identify this disgusting human,' another person added.

'Hope you see this post and you come and get me you oxygen thieving scum,' wrote a third person.

Other social media users directly messaged Mr Hatzis on Facebook, threatening to rape and kill his family.

Mr Hatzis commented on Mr Galletti's post, saying: 'All these c***s messaging me thinking this was me yous are dumb c***s how do I even look like this c*** in the video.'

The video was originally posted by a man named Fabio Galletti and has sparked an online hunt to find the motorist

Social media users expressed their disgust at the disturbing video

The stomach-churning footage has been viewed almost half a million times since being uploaded on Wednesday afternoon.

At least 10 emus are run over in the video. Where or when the video was filmed is unknown.

The man, who appeared to be driving over 120km/h, turned the camera on himself toward the end of the video.

The driver had a thick, black moustache, and was wearing sunglasses and a cap.

An RSPCA Australia spokeswoman told Daily Mail Australia they are shocked and horrified by the footage.

She said staff were examining the footage to try and determine when and where it was filmed.

The man who filmed himself mowing down at least ten emus turned the camera on himself to show his excitement

A mob of emus were filmed being run down by a man with a thick, black moustache, wearing sunglasses and a cap

They are appealing to the public for information, and urge anyone with any knowledge of the source of this video to contact the RSPCA or the police immediately.

'Such sickening cruelty clearly has no place in our society,' she said.

'The RSPCA unequivocally condemns this type of violence, as it clearly shows a disregard for the lives of these vulnerable native animals, and raises grave concerns over this individual's capacity for such behaviour.'

Mr Galleti told Daily Mail Australia he shared it because he hates animal cruelty.

'I hope they can find this person and do serious justice to him,' he said.

Daily Mail Australia has since revealed the identity of the man behind the wheel of the four-wheel-drive.

Jacob Macdonald, 20, from Pinnaroo, a tiny country town in South Australia near the border of Victoria, deleted his social media accounts after the video began circulating online.

The 20-year-old is a keen hunter who is employed on a friend's farm to do tractor and welding work, but went 'off the rails' after his latest relationship breakdown, according to his ex-girlfriend.
Flight Lieutenant Maurice Mounsdon is one of the last surviving heroes of the glorious Few

Flight Lieutenant Maurice Mounsdon is one of the last surviving heroes of the glorious Few, whose daring and bravery saved Britain from Nazi tyranny.

It's been years since the Battle of Britain war hero has been back in a plane and even longer since he joined the RAF in 1940 as a 20-year-old just before the Second World War.

Now aged 100 - frail and unable to walk unaided - he celebrated the milestone with a nod to his military past as the Red Arrows - elite pilots from the modern age - paid tribute to the former pilot with a spectacular skyline display.

Sitting in a friend's apartment on the coast of Menorca, where he has lived since his retirement, the war hero watched as nine Hawk Jets' smoke trails carved '100' in red, blue and white over the Mediterranean.

Sitting in a friend's apartment on the coast of Menorca, where he has lived since his retirement, the war hero watched as nine Hawk Jets' smoke trails carved '100' in red, blue and white over the Mediterranean

The 30-minute performance saw jets flying at speeds of up to 360mph - a reminder of the time Mr Mounsdon served as a Hurricane pilot with 56 squadron based at RAF North Weald at the Battle of Britain had reached its height.

'It was a real honour for me for the Red Arrows to come to Menorca and put on this display,' he told The Times.

Mr Mounsdon was shot down by a Messerschmitt Bf 109 over Colchester, but not before he had made two confirmed kills of German bombers and fighters, two probable kills and damaged two other fighters.

'I was badly burnt but I rolled the aircraft over and came down by parachute from 14,000ft,' he explained.

As he recovered in hospital under pioneering surgeon Archibald McIndoe, he met his future wife Mary.

The 30-minute performance saw jets (pictured) flying at speeds of up to 360mph - a reminder of the time Mr Mounsdon served as a Hurricane pilot with 56 squadron based at RAF North Weald at the Battle of Britain had reached its height

Nearly 3,000 aircrew served with the RAF Fighter Command (pictured) between July 10 and October 31 1940

'The dogfights were pretty frightening. Everyone was firing at the same time. It was a matter of luck if you survived or not ... but at the end of it all it was the happiest time of my life, though I lost a lot of good friends,' he recalled.

Of the dwindling band of men, who were part of the near 3,000-strong aircrew who served with the RAF Fighter Command between July 10 and October 31 1940, just seven surviving members of The Few and five members of the Battle of Britain Fighter Association remain.

The last survivors of The Few Wing Commander John 'Tim' Francis Durham Elkington, aged 97. Wing Commander Paul Caswell Farnes, aged 100. Flight Lieutenant William Terence Clark, aged 99. Flight Lieutenant William Robert Kent Hughes, aged 97. Flight Lieutenant Maurice Mounsdon, aged 100. Advertisement

Many of the men were still teenagers or in their early 20s when they repelled Hitler's Luftwaffe in what may be the most important battle this country has ever fought.

The average life expectancy for British pilots at the time of the battle was just four weeks.

Five members of the Battle of Britain Fighter Association are believed to remain, most of which are just shy of age 100.

They include Wing Commander John 'Tim' Francis Durham Elkington, 97, who served in the RAF for 36 years. During the Battle of Britain he destroyed a Messerschmitt Bf 109, a Junkers Ju 88, and aided in bringing down a Dornier Do 215 bomber.

Wing Commander Paul Caswell Farnes, 100, who often talked of his love of flying, saying he joined the air force specifically to fly. 'To be able to fly several times a day, every day, in one of the finest airplanes going, we thought was good,' he said in an interview in 2015.

Surviving Flight Lieutenant William Terence Clark, now aged 99, (pictured) joined the Auxilliary Air Force in 1938 and was later posted to RAF Catterick as an air gunner on the Blenheim aircraft, before moving to the Beaufighter as a radio operator

Of the dwindling band of men, who were part of the near 3,000-strong aircrew who served with the RAF Fighter Command, just seven members of The Few and five members of the Battle of Britain Fighter Association remain

Flight Lieutenant William Terence Clark, 99, joined the Auxilliary Air Force in 1938 and was later posted to RAF Catterick as an air gunner on the Blenheim aircraft, before moving to the Beaufighter as a radio operator.

Flight Lieutenant William Robert Kent Hughes, 97, served in 23 Squadron during the Battle of Britain and went on to serve in Egypt where he completed two tours.

Three of the pilots, Flight Flight Lieutenant Ron Smyth, 96, Squadron Leader Stuart Nigel Rose, 99, and Flight Lieutenant Philip Anthony Loweth, 96, have died in the last year.

Hurricane pilot Mr Loweth, of Exeter, died on September 7, 2017.

Mr Rose passed away on September 10 also the same year and was laid to rest in his home town of Hay-on-Wye, Herefordshire.

To mark his burial a Spitfire from the Battle of Britain Memorial Flight performed three flypasts over St Eignon Church.

Mr Smyth, who was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross, died at his home in Shrewsbury on October 26.
The wife of Westminster terrorist Khalid Masood broke down in tears as she confessed she still cannot believe she was 'married to someone that evil' at his victims' inquest.

Rohey Hydara married Masood, 52, in 2007 and they had two children together.

Today she apologised to the families of his five victims for not being 'vigilant' in the run-up to his deadly attack in March last year.

Her evidence to the Old Bailey hearing on Thursday came after his mother's, which saw her tell of how he once 'turned into the Incredible Hulk' during a row over a chicken dinner.

Janet Ajao, who gave evidence after her application for anonymity was refused, said that as soon as she saw her son's dead body on the 10 o'clock news: 'I just knew and it made sense to me.'

He was shot dead by police after driving into five people on Westminster Bridge in March last year and fatally stabbing PC Keith Palmer.

Khalid Masood, pictured (left) in a police photo and (right) checking into a hotel shortly before he carried out the Westminster terror attack

Masood's wife, who is originally from Gambia, told the inquest that in the days leading up to his savage attack he was 'more emotional.'

Ms Hydara had been living in London with the children while Masood remained in Birmingham.

He told her he was looking into a business opportunity and moving the family to Morocco imminently.

He remembers Masood FaceTiming her and the children often in those last few days.

After he had seen his mother and step-father: 'He said he was emotional, that he broke down when he saw his mother and cried and he also had a heart to heart with his Mum.'

She continued, 'He was very emotional and his face was red. I thought he was upset about his stepfather being ill.'

On the morning of his attack he texted, 'I hope you guys are all OK, I have been thinking about you lots, love Dad.' This was followed by a kissing emoji.

Ms Hydara said, 'It was more loving than normal.' Moments before Masood launched his attack he sent a PDF titled 'Jihad.'

'I asked him a question like, what's this that you sent me.'

She began recieving news notifications of the attack on her phone and became concerned.

'He wasn't returning my calls, at the same time he had sent me this strange Jihad, something he had never done before.

'So all the things he had never done before, as well as asking me to forgive him. At the same time news was unfolding that something was happening at Westminster. I started to panic.'

Later that afternoon she saw more on Sky news and called Masood's eldest daughter in Birmingham to go and check his flat and soon after called the police.

'I told them I think my husband is involved in what is happening at Westminster.'

She spoke of her disbelief, adding: 'I think it's evil. I think it's evil.'

She told the inquest he could be 'very loving' with his children but she was anxious about his steroid taking which launched vile monologues.

Masood raged against his wife for taking more interest in Brexit and 'laughing at Nigel Farage' than Aleppo or Isis in steroid fuelled rants.

Ms Hydara recorded some while they were living in Birmingham, 'I never hear you saying there is any good in Isis, stop following along in this propoganda.'

He yelled that she was 'sheep' who needed to think for herself.

'If they can see you now,' Masood mocked. 'I want to look at Brexit... Idlib, what's happening there. I am not interested.

'I want to laugh at Nigel Farage, ha, ha, ha, Idlib, Aleppo. I'm not interested.'

His voice was raised and furniture could be heard clattering as he railed, 'You make me mad, I'm so furious.'

When asked if he was usually like that on steroids, his wife replied, 'That was actually one of the times when he was calmer.'

She concluded by saying: 'I would like to speak to the families. I am sorry that I wasn't vigilant enough

'He made me to trust him so I had no reason to doubt him. I know it's hard, it is for me everyday so I can't begin to imagine what you're going through.

'I can't believe that I was married to someone that evil.

Masood went to the same mosque as attended by Jawad Akbar (left), who, along with Waheed Mahmood (centre) and Omar Khyam (right), planned bomb attacks

'I hope that you will find closure at the end of all of this. I hope that you will not let him win.'

Earlier today the hearing was told how days before the attack, on March 16, he visited his mother and step-father in Wales.

His mother Mrs Ajao told the inquest: 'As he left the kitchen he just looked at me and said, 'They'll say I'm a terrorist but I'm not.'

'Well I walked away and I didn't say anything because I had basically no idea what he was referring to - all of this was a shock to me.

'I didn't understand and I didn't think it related to him, it sounds ridiculous now but at that time it just seemed - what is he talking about.'

She said in a witness statement that Masood was an 'angry person who would get a look in his eyes'.

The jury was told: 'I think he's always been a fiery, angry personality.

'He was never angry with me and the (only) time that he was, he was using my address, where I currently live, as a bail address, and he had gone down into town.

'He was drinking and he came home merry.

Masood visited a fish and chip shop in Brighton for a 'last supper' before the attack

Mrs Ajao said she was making dinner and asked her son how many pieces of chicken he was looking forward to.

'But he was still merry and I asked a second time and tossed a chicken over the kitchen table and that's when he went,' she said.

'I think I referred to him as the Incredible Hulk because it was like he exploded.

'My husband went, 'it's all right, it's all right', and I just grabbed hold of his arm because I didn't want it to become a violent thing.'

The court heard that after he became a father of two and lived with his partner Jane Harvey, he was arrested a number of times.

His mother said: 'This was down to drinking. I'm ashamed to say I think he quite enjoyed drinking and fighting.'

Earlier the inquest heard Masood had sent his wife a picture of himself in Mecca and verses from the Koran before he unleashed his murderous attack.

A jury was told he parked up in St Thomas's Hospital car park, near Westminster Bridge, and sent the documents to a random group of contacts, including his wife Rohey Hydara.

He selected a number of Islamic texts to justify his attack, but there was no specific reference to what he was about to do.

His wife replied: 'I need to speak to you urgently. I called you earlier today', she then added: 'What is this that you sent me? x'

Masood had already told his children he was 'going to die fighting for God' weeks before carrying out the attack

He also hinted at his plans for jihad during a farewell visit to his mother, saying: 'They will say I'm a terrorist. I'm not.'

Today, the inquest heard that Masood had attended the same mosque as terrorists convicted of plotting a series of fertiliser bomb attacks after converting to Islam in jail, an inquest was told.

Masood converted to Islam after he was jailed for a flick knife attack in 2000, and could have been radicalised as early as 2004.

He moved to Crawley, in West Sussex, after he was released from Lewes prison in December 2003, having become a 'zealous convert' after crediting his religion for a 'miracle' acquittal from an attempted murder charge.

He attended the Langley Green Mosque in the town, where terrorist Jawad Akbar had set up a 'Sunday school', the Old Bailey heard.

Akbar, along with Crawley residents Waheed Mahmood and Omar Khyam were part of a gang arrested after fertiliser was found stored in a warehouse in Hanwell, west London, in early 2004.

They were jailed in 2007 for a plot to bomb public places such as the Ministry of Sound nightclub in London and the Bluewater shopping centre in Kent.

Masood had come on to the radar of the security services at around the time of the plot, while one of his associates was arrested after his mobile phone shop was raided in a terror probe, the inquest heard.

But asked whether he was picked up on the periphery of the police investigation, counter-terror officer Detective Chief Inspector Dan Brown said: 'In the police investigation, no.'

CCTV footage of Masood at Tesco on 9 March 2017, where he went on to purchase the weapons he would use in the attack

The inquest heard a book by Abdullah Yusuf Azzam, the founder of global terror group al Qaida, was among a large amount of material collected by Masood, which was uncovered following the Westminster attack.

It was passed to one of Masood's associates in 2004 before he left on one of several trips to Saudi Arabia, where he taught English.

The inquest into the victims' deaths yesterday heard that he may have been attempting to attack Theresa May as she travelled between Downing Street and the House of Commons for Prime Minister's Questions.

Masood, who regularly injected himself with steroids, began planning the rampage two weeks earlier after his application to work as a teacher in Saudi Arabia was rejected because of his lengthy criminal record.

Angry and heavily in debt, the 52-year-old bought two kitchen knives from Tesco and researched 'crash tests' for a Hyundai Tucson which he rented for the rampage.

Detective Chief Inspector Dan Brown told the inquest at the Old Bailey it was possible he had also planned to use gas as a weapon, before abandoning the idea.

Kent-born Masood then drove to London before the attack, where he carried out a reconnaissance of the area in his 4x4. CCTV footage shows the Hyundai driving slowly over the bridge.

He then checked into the Days Inn Hotel at Cobham Services on the M25 where he watched Islamic State terror attacks on the internet.

CCTV from the hotel shows him grinning and laughing with the receptionist as he checked out. Masood then drove to Brighton and stayed at Preston Park Hotel where the staff log describes him as a 'nice man'.

On the eve of the attack, he ate fish and chips and called his wife and children  who were under the assumption he was travelling to Morocco to work as a teacher.

The following morning he researched Prime Minister's Questions and homemade bombs on the internet before leaving for London.

He carried out another reconnaissance mission around Westminster and spoke to the hire car company by phone and asked if he could extend the rental date.

The inquest continues.
A dog has been shot in the chest following a dramatic police investigation into a neighborhood shooting which involved a man being hit with a pellet gun.

Police responded to reports someone had been injured in an altercation in Whalan, 44 kilometres west of Sydney, shortly after 11am Thursday.

On arrival at the Kikori Crescent property, officers found a 31-year-old man with minor injuries to his hand and leg, then begun an immediate search for the shooter.

A dog has been shot in the chest following a dramatic police investigation into a neighborhood shooting which involved a man being hit with a pellet gun

Police responded to reports someone had been injured in an altercation in Whalan, 44 kilometres west of Sydney, shortly after 11am Thursday

As heavily armed personnel and bearcats surrounded a second property in the nearby suburb of Shalvey, neighbours were warned to leave their homes.

The suspected gunman, who police believed had been a long-time friend of the victim, was not at the Pacha Place address when police swarmed.

A senior constable ended up shooting a dog, Missy, after she allegedly lunged towards them.

Missy had given birth to a litter of puppies less than 10 days earlier and received vet treatment at the scene.

As heavily armed personnel and bearcats surrounded a second property in the nearby suburb of Shalvey, neighbours were warned to leave their homes

Missy (pictured) had given birth to a litter of puppies less than 10 days earlier and received vet treatment at the scene

The man with pellet gun wounds was taken in a stable condition to Nepean Hospital for treatment.

About 1.30pm Thursday, the 33-year-old suspect was arrested after handing himself into St Marys Police Station.

He was then was taken to Riverstone Police Station where he was charged with shoot at with intent to murder, and cause wounding/grievous bodily harm to person with intent to murder.

He was refused bail and is due to appear before Mt Druitt Local Court Friday.
A hotel spokesman has described the terrible moment a four-year-old Wigan boy was pulled out of a swimming pool while on holiday.

Presley Stockton, from Hindley, was staying with his extended family at the four-star Hotel Paradise Park Fun Lifestyle in Los Cristianos, Tenerife.

A spokesman for the hotel said the boy was in the busy family pool when he was spotted by a hotel lifeguard who pulled him out at around 3.30pm on Wednesday.

Tragic: Presley Stockton, four, drowned in a swimming pool at a hotel in Tenerife, on Wednesday, despite a rapid emergency response which involved an air ambulance

The spokesman said: 'He was in the family pool. It was packed, we are packed, the pool was packed with children and families.

'It is not a deep pool. There were two lifeguards on the spot. One pulled him out, the other one came over and they were both doing procedures.

'Two to three minutes later an ambulance came, there were lots of ambulances, five or six doctors were trying to resuscitate.

'When they found out everybody was then saying: 'My goodness how can this happen?' One gentleman said, 'I was half a yard away from him.'

Heartbreaking: Family members and friends have paid tribute to little Presley in the wake of his tragic death on Wednesday

'We at this point are aiming to put all our efforts on supporting the family. The family is a large family from the UK and we are aiming to give them all the support we can.

'This has been an absolute tragedy, in our 30-year history we have never had that experience, this has never happened.

'We are doing everything we can to first of all help the family in everything they need.

'It is just one of those terrible things. We want to get to the bottom of it. We are all very devastated really.

'The staff, the family, the other guests, it's just been a terrible, dark day in the history of our hotel but nothing compared to what the family are going through.'

A rapid emergency response which involved an air ambulance had battled to save Presley.

Family and friends have also paid tribute to 'one-in-a-million whirlwind' Presley, reportedly from Hindley, Wigan, on social media.

The boy's grandfather posted a number of pictures of Presley on Facebook, writing: 'Today our little P, our little whirlwind Presley, has been taken from us.

'Our family is broken-hearted. Fly high my little angel, you were one in a million.'

A relative wrote said: 'My heart hurts so much. Sad day today. RIP Presley Stockton. Absolutely devastated. Sending lots of love to all my family. Stay strong. Miss you all so much. Thinking of you all tonight.'

The incident is said to have taken place at the Hotel Paradise Park Fun Lifestyle on Wednesday afternoon

Jade Disley wrote: 'What a cruel world we live in. Four is no age to die. Can't imagine to think what Kirsty and her family are going through. Such heartbreaking news.'

Laura Francis added, in a message to the youngster's parents: 'Heartbreaking news RIP Presley. Thinking of Peter and Kirsty and the family at this awful time.'

Louise Caddick added: 'RIP Little Presley. What a horrible world we live in. Just four years old though. FOUR. Thoughts go out to Kirsty and Pey on the devastating news. Every parents' worst nightmare.'

An air ambulance was sent to the scene to deal with the tragedy today

Hannah Olivia wrote in a message of support to a relative of Presley's: 'Such a cruel world. Words cannot describe how distraught I am for you and your family. A lovely little boy taken way too soon. RIP Presley. Shine bright gorgeous.'

The youngster is only thought to have flown to Tenerife from Manchester Airport with close and extended family the day before the tragedy.

Efforts to revive the child proved unsuccessful and little Presley was pronounced dead at the scene.

Despite emergency service's best efforts, the young boy passed away

The circumstances surrounding the tragedy are now being investigated by police under the coordination of a local court.

Police said in a statement: 'An alert was received at 3.40pm informing us that a child who appeared to have been involved in a drowning incident and was suffering possible cardiac arrest, had been pulled out of a swimming pool at a hotel in the resort.

'Efforts to revive the youngster using CPR proved unsuccessful and he was confirmed dead at the scene.

'Local police cooperated with the emergency services and habilitated an area for an air ambulance to land near the hotel complex.

'National Police took charge of the body until court workers arrived.'
Omarosa Manigault Newman appeared in high spirits as she chatted to Michael Moore at the premier of his new political documentary Fahrenheit 11/9.

The former White House aide, 44, seemed to be sharing a joke with the director, as they posed for photographs on the red carpet at the Samuel Goldwyn Theater in Beverly Hills.

The pair will have had lots of catch up on following the recent comments they have made regarding Donald Trumps presidency in recent months.

It is unsurprising that Newman, who previously claimed that Trump is trying to start a race war, was one of the celebrities to turn out to the screening of the film which depicts how to 'get out' of the era of the Trump administration.

Omarosa Manigault Newman appeared in high spirits as she chatted to Michael Moore at the premier of his new political documentary documentary Fahrenheit 11/9

Newman beamed as she made her way into the star-studded event, wearing a dazzling red sequined gown and black court shoes.

Moore, who's latest film is a play on his previous hit Fahrenheit 9/11 which takes a critical look at the presidency of George W. Bush, opted for a more casual red carpet look in a navy blazer and blue jeans.

The director recently claimed that Trump is an 'evil genius' who deliberately arranged last month's New York Times op-ed which described a resistance movement within the White House.

The former White House aide, 44, seemed to be sharing a joke with the director as they posed for photographs on the red carpet at the Samuel Goldwyn Theater in Beverly Hills

He has made no secret of the fact that he thinks the president will win a second term, telling CNN in an interview that he operates as if he is a two-term Trump.

Talking about how Trump beat Hillary Clinton despite winning 2.8million fewer votes, he added: 'I think the man is an evil genius and he was able to outsmart the smartest person ever to run for president. He figured out how to win by losing the election.'

Last month's New York Times op-ed by an anonymous person within the administration called Trump 'immoral' and said that senior members were trying everything they can to guide him in the right direction.

Newman beamed as she made her way into the star-studded event, wearing a dazzling red sequined gown and black court shoes

The pair will have had lots of catch up on following the comments they have made regarding Donald Trumps presidency in recent months

There was widespread speculation about who wrote it, with suggestions ranging from Jared Kushner to Mike Pence. Trump was said to be 'obsessed' with finding the culprit.

But Moore thinks he deliberately arranged for it to be written as a distraction tactic.

Meanwhile, Manigault Newman revealed two new recordings of President Donald Trump on Monday, including one of him talking about how he wouldn't want to be a terrorist in the wake of an attack in Niger that left four U.S. soldiers - as White House staffers laugh in the background.

It is unsurprising that Newman, who previously claimed that Trump is trying to start a race war, was one of the celebrities to turn out to the screening of the film which depicts how to 'get out' of the era of the Trump administration

Moore, who's latest film is a play on his previous hit Fahrenheit 9/11 which takes a critical look at the presidency of George W. Bush, opted for a more casual red carpet look in a navy blazer and blue jeans

Newman said the recordings were from an October 2017 meeting of aides in the White House communications department that Trump allegedly crashed.

Among those present were Hope Hicks, then his communications director, and Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who is still his press secretary.

The new recordings add more questions about Trump's control and competency as the White House deals with the fallout from Bob Woodward's new book 'Fear' and an anonymous New York Times op-ed of a 'resistance' movement in the administration.

Newman worked the red carpet at the premiere of the politically-charged documentary which depicts Trump's rise to presidency

The director recently claimed that Trump is an 'evil genius' who deliberately arranged last month's New York Times op-ed which described a resistance movement within the White House

Also making a political statement at the screening of Moore's film was actress Alyssa Milano, who garnered plenty of attention in a T-shirt with the slogan: 'Your vote, your future.'

The 45-year old proudly displayed her 'get out the vote' t-shirt as she posed for the swarm of photographers.

Being the style-conscious woman that she is, the Insatiable star tied the shirt in the front and paired it with an eye-glaring white and silver striped skirt that came down to her calves.

She matched the skirt perfectly with a pair of open-toed heels, and pulled her long brown tresses into a ponytail.

Alyssa Milano hit the red carpet for the Los Angeles premiere of thepolitical documentary

Milano garnered plenty of attention with the slogan: 'Your vote, your future' written on a t-shirt

Milano has been a Hollywood fixture since her hit sitcom Who's the Boss? in 1984

Most recently Alyssa has starred in the Netflix dark-comedy series Insatiable

Some of the the other stars who came out for the premiere included: musicians Jackson Browne and Tom Morello, actors Jeff Garlin, Frank Grillo and Ron Pearlman, comedian Richard Schiff and his wife Sheila Kelley, former Trump protege Omarosa Manigault, actresses Jenifer Lewis and Perrey Reeves, and the filmmaker himself, Michael Moore.

This latest Moore production chronicles the 2016 United States presidential election, what led to a Trump presidency.

The film also explores the long-standing water crisis and health disaster in Moore's hometown of Flint, Michigan.

Moore acknowledged the fans at the LA premiere; this latest Moore production chronicles the 2016 U.S. presidential election and what led to a Trump presidency

Jackson Browne (l) and Rage Against the Machine/Audioslave guitarist Tom Morello (r) have made careers out of mixing music with politics

Curb Your Enthusiasm star Jeff Garlin also on hand for the premiere
Police will today quiz the husband of the Russian underwear model who claimed she was the victim of a new Salisbury poison plot as his chequered past including a 100,000 royal hoax and a child porn conviction was revealed.

Alex King, 42, was taken ill along with Anna Shapiro, 30, while eating at Prezzo on Sunday night causing a security alert in the city where Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia were GRU agents tried to kill them with Novichok.

Wiltshire Police later dismissed Ms Shapiro's claims Vladimir Putin was trying to kill her and detectives will grill them to see if it was a hoax.

Mr King will be interviewed in the city today - but it is not known if he will be arrested when he arrives at the police station later.

Their case took a twist last night as it emerged he once conned Prince Charles at a red carpet bash 12 years ago in an extraordinary security breach 12 years ago.

He shook hands with the heir to the throne at the 2006 premiere of the hit British movie The History Boys after claiming to be in the cast as part of a 100,000 bet with convicted fraudster and boss Edward Davenport.

Two years earlier he pleaded guilty to three counts of distributing indecent photographs or pseudo-photographs of children at London's Horseferry Road Magistrates' Court, according to the BBC.

Prince Charles shakes hands with Alex West after he gatecrashed the 2006 premiere of The History Boys in an apparent bet with his boss and convicted fraudster Edward Davenport

Anna Shapiro moved to London in 2008 and tied the knot with her partner Alex King last month

Anna Shapiro has already spoken to police but her new husband has not and he will be interviewed by detectives today

MailOnline revealed last night his wife has worked as a 4,000-a-night escort and he has helped stage sex involving prostitutes.

Shapiro claimed in a newspaper interview that she was the target of an assassination plot as she was critical of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

She suggested rat poison could have been used to try and kill her at the Italian restaurant Prezzo on Sunday night.

King (pictured), who was discharged from hospital on Tuesday afternoon having been declared medically fit, is to meet with detectives along with his wife

King, who was discharged from hospital on Tuesday afternoon having been declared medically fit, is to meet with detectives along with his wife.

A police source said a hoax carried out by the pair is one line of inquiry which led to the city being placed on lockdown and emergency crews wearing hazmat suits searching the restaurant amid fears of another nerve agent attack.

'We will be talking to the couple involved and one line of inquiry is that this was all a hoax,' said a police source.

'Now Mr King has left hospital we will interview him. We have already taken a statement from the female involved and will talk to her again.'

A claim by Shapiro that she was under 24-hour police guard in fear of her life was also dismissed as 'nonsense' by the source.

Mail Online can reveal King is an ex-business partner of convicted conman Eddie Davenport, known as 'Fast Eddie', and together they staged orgies involving Russian prostitutes at his London home.

In 2006 King was able to evade tight security and gate-crash a Royal event and shake hands with Prince Charles for a 100,000 bet.

Eton educated King sneaked into a line up of celebrities at a premiere for the film 'The History Boys' in London. He was unwittingly introduced to Charles and his wife Camilla.

He said at the time: 'A friend of mine bet me that I couldn't get to meet Prince Charles and I thought it would be a cool thing to do.

Ms Shapiro said she denounces Putin's policies, which has angered her family

'I could see the line of people waiting to be introduced to him, so I just walked up as if I knew what I was doing and stood on the end of it. No-one thought to challenge me for a second.'

Anna Shapiro, 30, and her husband Alex King, 42, fell ill while dining in the city's Prezzo last Sunday

'It was only when the Prince left that the police jumped on me.'

'But after giving me an official caution they let me go and I went in to watch the film.

'Obviously I did it for a dare but I have to admit that it raises a whole number of questions about royal security. I am astonished that no-one rumbled me earlier.'

King had previously been exposed by a newspaper as an 'ambassador of perversion' and supplied 500 a day prostitutes for orgies taking place at Davenport's London home.

He ran a model agency called 007 and met Shapiro, who models under the name Anna Webb, when she moved to London in 2008.

The couple are said to have only married last month and Shapiro's address is listed in public records as 32 Portland Place  the home owned by Davenport and venue for his seedy sex parties.

Davenport had previously lived across the street at 33 Portland Place which was used for scenes in the Oscar winning film 'The King's Speech'.

He was forced to sell the 24-room mansion in 2015 for 14million after his release from an eight year prison sentence for fraud in 2011.

Anna Shapiro, 30, and her husband Alex King, 42, fell ill while dining in the city's Prezzo last Sunday

Davenport, who made his name organising the Gatecrasher Balls for public school teens, served three years after falling ill following a kidney transplant.

Shapiro claimed she was the victim of a Putin-led attack and that her father was a general in the Russian army.

She said in an interview yesterday, she said: 'I'm sure the Russians think I'm a British spy. People make assumptions about me but I publicly renounce Putin and the country of my family.'

Anna claims she worked for Mossad after moving to Israel from Russia in her teens before fleeing and claiming asylum in the UK to study law.

She told friends: 'I spied on my own friends and even used my looks to seduce men. I was too young to know that what I was doing was wrong

'After I travelled to England I studied law and started a new life - now I work as a model and an escort.'

King and Shapiro were unavailable for comment.

The model had claimed that she found her husband foaming at the mouth shortly after arriving at Prezzo restaurant in Salisbury city centre.

As the Italian themed restaurant was less than 300 yards from where the Skripals had eaten when they fell ill last March and King's symptoms were similar to that caused by the deadly nerve agent Novichok a full-scale emergency was launched and part of the city put into lockdown.

Witnesses had described the scenes at the restaurant as like 'armegeddon' as police and emergency services, some wearing protective Hazmat suits, rushed to the scene on Sunday evening as a major incident was declared.

Shapiro, 30, was discharged from hospital after an overnight stay and said she believed President Putin wanted her dead.

She said because she had turned her back on her country by taking Israeli citizenship Putin wanted her dead. The model also said she had fled London after receiving death threats.

Kremlin officials in Moscow dismissed the claims as absurd.

President Putin's spokesman Dmitry Peskov said: 'I don't think there is any sense in commenting on such reports.'

'The absurdity of the most part of information coming from Salisbury is evident.'

Shapiro had claimed the owner of a rented 55 a night farmhouse in the village of Landford where she was staying had recommended she and her 42 year old husband visit Prezzo for a meal.

Owners of bed and breakfast lodgings in the village, about 11 miles from Salisbury, said they were not aware of any farmhouse in the area that can be rented for 55.

They also said with numerous country pubs in the vicinity no local hotelier would have recommended a chain restaurant in Salisbury.

'It is just laughable that anyone living in Landford would suggest an Italian chain restaurant as the best place to eat,' said one B&B owner.

'It just does not make sense. Why would anyone recommend an 11 mile drive when there are far closer places with much better food and atmosphere.'

Another B&B owner said Shapiro's claim of renting a 55 a night farmhouse was unrealistic.

'There is nowhere around here or the New Forest where it is so cheap, said the B&B owner who asked not to be named.

The part-time model believes she was the target of a Kremlin hit

Prezzo restaurant  which is less than quarter of a mile from where the Skripals dined at the Zizzi restaurant before falling ill  remained closed on Wednesday with two police officers at the entrance.

A forensic team could be seen inside the restaurant but Wiltshire Police have said the incident was 'not suspicious' and the couple were not exposed to any kind of nerve agent.

The spokesman added: 'Enquiries into what caused the pair to become unwell are still ongoing.'

In the interview it was claimed that the model and her husband could have been affected by rat poison.

Prezzo said the restaurant would be reopening today - said the chemical strychnine  used in rat poison  was not used at the restaurant.

'We are pleased to advise that the Wiltshire police have confirmed we can re-open. Our team have been readying the restaurant this evening and we will be open for business as usual from midday,' a statement said.

'Once again, we would like to thank Salisbury's emergency services, our neighbours, our customers and our team for their support and understanding.

Most of all, we look forward to welcoming back our customers from the Salisbury community which we value so greatly.'

They added: 'We wish to confirm that the chemical 'strychnine' is not used in Prezzo in Salisbury. This has been verified through independent technical support.

'We have been informed that Wiltshire police are not linking the event on Sunday evening to the recent nerve agent poisonings in Salisbury and Amesbury and have made no suggestion that the illness was a result of anything present in our restaurant.

'Based on the information we have received, this is an isolated incident. We can also confirm that none of our team suffered any related illness, and all are well and keen to return to duty when the restaurant re-opens. They dealt with the circumstances of Sunday evening in an admirable manner and our thanks go to each of them. At Prezzo our sole aim is to care for our customers and the events of Sunday evening have shocked us all.

'Our Salisbury branch remains closed, as a precautionary measure only, while the police complete tests into the cause of the illness. We await information from the police and as soon as we have that, we will issue a further statement.'

Emergency services outside the Prezzo restaurant in Salisbury on Sunday, where police have closed streets as a 'precautionary measure'

King was discharged from Salisbury District Hospital after being declared medically fit.

Lorna Wilkinson, Director of Nursing at Salisbury District Hospital said:

'On Sunday night, we admitted two people to Salisbury District Hospital following an incident in the city centre. These two people have now been discharged.

'Given recent events, we tested both individuals for the presence of nerve agents such as Novichok. Tests on both patients came back negative.

'Both patients are now medically fit and there is no need for them to be in hospital.

'While this incident did not involve nerve agents, it was still clearly very stressful for our staff who, once again, demonstrated the very best of the NHS. I want to thank them for rising to the occasion yet again.'

'For reasons of patient confidentiality we will not be commenting any further.'
A mother forced her son to wear a T-shirt saying 'I am a bully' to school after teachers told her he called classmates 'stupid idiots'.

The Texas woman, named only by her first name Star, said she was 'old school' and wanted to teach her 11-year-old son a lesson.

She posted pictures of the boy wearing the T-shirt on Facebook - but soon removed them after a furious backlash from people who criticised her 'cruel' parenting.

A mother forced her son to wear a T-shirt saying 'I am a bully' to school after teachers told her he called classmates 'stupid idiots'

'I don't coddle my children. I don't sugar-coat the world to them,' the mother told KTRK.

She said her plan worked because her son is already treating his siblings and cousins better.

'I wanted to know what he learned from it and he said, "I learned that I didn't like the way that that felt and I don't want anybody else to feel that way because of me," she said.

'That's exactly what I wanted him to take from it.'

The mother said she made the Facebook post so the children he had been bullying would see it.

Psychologists said the plan to embarrass a child was potentially damaging to the boy long term.

The Texas woman (pictured), named only by her first name Star, said she was 'old school' and wanted to teach her 11-year-old son a lesson

The Splendora Independent School District said in a statement: 'Parents have the rights to make important decisions and take certain actions on behalf of their child.

'This parent met with our counselor at Greenleaf Elementary School to discuss the student wearing the 'I am a Bully' T-shirt.

'The counselor, parent, and student met with all three of the student's teachers prior to entering the classroom.'

'The parent explained her rationale for the student wearing the shirt to the teachers and counselor.

'Ensuring a safe, physical, emotional, and social environment is one of Splendora ISD's Core Principles.

'With that in mind, our counselor checked on the child throughout the day on Friday and plans to follow up with the student and the parent early this week.'
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An urban explorer has uncovered portraits he believes date back to the Second World War sketched over the walls of a secret wartime bunker.

Chris Halliwell, 31, from Rochdale, Greater Manchester, had heard rumours about the existence of the drawings and decided he needed to see them for himself, dedicating three days of research to finding the entrance to the bomb shelter.

The father-of-four was stunned when he wandered through a mile of haunting tunnels to find the walls were plastered with coal portraits of characters from an era long past.

Factory worker Chris believes the sketches of soldiers and women with glamorous 1940s pin curls were created by workers at a nearby coal plant, as they took shelter during bomb attacks.

An urban explorer has uncovered portraits he believes date back to the Second World War sketched over the walls of a secret wartime bunker. Chris Halliwell, 31, had heard rumours about the existence of the drawings and decided he needed to see them for himself, dedicating three days of research to finding the entrance to the bomb shelter

The father-of-four was stunned when he wandered through a mile of haunting tunnels to find the walls were plastered with coal portraits of characters from an era long past

Factory worker Chris believes the sketches of soldiers and women with glamorous 1940s pin curls were created by workers at a nearby coal plant, as they took shelter during bomb attacks

While this is a 'dream discovery' for history lover Chris, he is adamant not to share the location of the bunker as he fears a wider knowledge of the tunnels would see the portraits vandalised and a piece of history ruined.

Chris said: 'I had heard about the portraits and done loads of research online but I never expected there to be so many.

'There were a lot of portraits of women and a few men - one that had a pipe in his mouth and another with a rifle on his back. It was amazing. They're portraits from people who were down there during the bombings. From the quality of them it looks like they could be drawn from life.

'Most of them were drawn in black coal and back in the day there was a coal plant nearby so the portraits are possibly by the workers who took shelter in the bunker.

While this is a 'dream discovery' for history lover Chris, he is adamant not to share the location of the bunker as he fears a wider knowledge of the tunnels would see the portraits vandalised and a piece of history ruined

Chris, who runs an urban explorer group, also documented his investigation of the air raid shelter with a set of photos

Most of the portraits were drawn in black coal - there was a coal plant nearby so the portraits could feature workers

Chris said: 'Urban exploring isn't something I've been doing for a long long time but it is a real passion of mine. After watching a few videos from other people I thought 'this is awesome' and had to give it a try. It's all gone from there really. I do abandoned building as well but I really love bunkers'

'It might have been a way for the people to keep themselves occupied during the tedious wait for the 'all clear'. This is the dream really to make a discovery like this, this is probably the best find I've made.

'I thought I knew what to expect and I'd seen a few photos but once I got down there it was a whole different story. I'm determined to keep the location secret. If more people find out about it, the portraits will end up getting rubbed off the walls or vandalised.

'I want to protect it, it's a piece of history.'

Chris, who runs an urban explorer group called CJ URBEX, also documented his investigation of the air raid shelter with a fascinating set of photos.

One of the coal sketches shows a man smoking a pipe. It is believed he may have been one of the coal plant workers

Chris said: ''There were so many findings down there, it was brilliant. I had about a mile of tunnels to walk through and there was so much to see. But the great treasure really was the portraits'

As well as the portraits, Chris also discovered old gas lamps, barrels used as chemical toilets and kettles 'rotting away' in the forgotten bunker.

After watching videos posted by other urban explorers two years ago, Chris was inspired to try out the hobby - and it quickly became a passion.

The father, who also has a love for photography and videography, enjoys the thrill of making new discoveries and 'wowing' people with his pictures and footage.

Chris said: 'Urban exploring isn't something I've been doing for a long long time but it is a real passion of mine. After watching a few videos from other people I thought 'this is awesome' and had to give it a try. It's all gone from there really. I do abandoned building as well but I really love bunkers.

The bunker may have begun as a Munich crisis trench during a few tense weeks in September 1938

Chris said: 'It might have been a way for the people to keep themselves occupied during the tedious wait for the 'all clear'. This is the dream really to make a discovery like this, this is probably the best find I've made'

'When you get down there you do have to stop and have a bit of a breather and give yourself a moment to take in your surroundings because you're in complete darkness.

'When I got down into the last bunker, it was really dark, dank and moist so you do need to take a minute.

'But being a photographer helps because once I start taking pictures and shooting some video it takes my mind off of all that.

'I really enjoy sharing the photos and videos with people who don't get to see things like that. I love wowing them and all the nice feedback I get.

'There were so many findings down there, it was brilliant. I had about a mile of tunnels to walk through and there was so much to see. But the great treasure really was the portraits.

'We found some cigarette lighter writing on the ceiling which indicates the dates 1942 and 1943.

'The bunker may have begun as a Munich crisis trench during a few tense weeks in September 1938.'
Millionaire MP Zac Goldsmith was pictured peering through the bird-droppings stained windscreen of his battered 19-year-old Toyota Hybrid today.

The politician, well known for his green credentials, was seen pootling about in the environmentally friendly - and rather dirty - electric car in London.

Mr Goldsmith, MP for Richmond Park, admirably drove the black Prius with mud covered side doors and a paint-scraped bumper despite being the second richest MP in parliament with an estimated personal wealth of 280million.

The 43-year-old regained his seat in Richmond last year after losing it in a by-election when he stood down as a Conservative and then stood as an Independent in 2016.

The son of billionaire businessman and financier Sir James Goldsmith, Zac ran an unsuccessful campaign to become mayor of London against Sadiq Khan.

Mr Goldsmith, a long-standing Eurosceptic and well know supporter of Brexit, announced his support for leaving the European Union after David Cameron called a referendum.

He is currently championing a campaign against the illicit wildlife trade alongside Environment secretary Michael Gove.

The politician, well known for his green credentials, was seen pootling about in the environmentally friendly - and extremely dirty - electric car in London today

Mr Goldsmith, MP for Richmond Park, admirably drove the black Prius with mud covered side doors and a paint-scraped bumper despite being the second wealthiest MP in parliament

The 43-year-old regained his seat in Richmond last year after losing it in a by-election when he stood down as a Conservative and then stood as an Independent in 2016

The son of billionaire businessman and financier Sir James Goldsmith, Zac ran an unsuccessful campaign to become mayor of London against Sadiq Khan

Mr Goldsmith, a long-standing Eurosceptic and well know supporter of Brexit, announced his support for leaving the European Union after David Cameron called a referendum
A man who decided to dye his beard was left looking like a 'family guy character' when a terrible allergic reaction caused his face to balloon.

Simon Oguz, 20, a restaurant owner, from Vaxjo, Sweden tried to dye his beard blonde on August 22 at his friend's home.

After a few days his chin started to feel itchy and his face began to swell until he was forced to seek medical attention.

Simon before the allergic reaction which made his face so swollen that he had to seek medical advice

Simon said he looked like a mix of a hamster and Quagmire - a character from the cartoon Family Guy

Simon said: 'At first I didn't notice anything, no rashes no nothing- then the day after, still nothing, until the evening when my beard started itching so I looked closer and I saw some small red rashes but I still thought to myself that it was nothing.

'Then when I woke up the next day, I went to the bathroom and looked at myself in the mirror and I thought I looked a bit swollen, but not so much.

'Throughout the entire day my face started to get bigger and bigger, so I went to look it up.

After a few days the swelling faded and Simon face and chest went back to normal again

'The doctors said it was nothing serious, just that I got an allergic reaction to the dye, so they gave me some medicine and that was it.

'It didn't hurt or anything, it was only itching and I looked like a hamster- my face had gotten even bigger, with more of a rash.

'When I shook my head my whole face was shaking and I could feel it, still it didn't hurt, it was just itching as hell.

'Then, I started to feel itching on my chest, so I went to look in the mirror and I had gotten a small lump in the middle of my chest - I was really scared, my first thoughts was that I had gotten a tumour.

20-year-old restaurant owner Simon said he always wanted to dye his beard but after this incident will never do it again

'But the doctor told me it was just a reaction to the dye and it was nothing to worry about, she gave me some stronger medicine.'

After a few days the swelling faded and Simon face and chest went back to normal again but compared himself to the a character from the hit comedy show, Family Guy.

He said: 'I looked like a mix of a hamster and Quagmire from Family Guy.

'I always wanted to try it but after this incident I'm sure I'll never do this again.'

His friend, Julia Leandersson, 20, works in a restaurant and helped Simon dyed his beard, and said: 'It was his own idea to dye his beard, but I may have pushed him a little as he started to chicken out about it.

Simon's friend Julie, who helped him dye the hair and picked out the colour, says she initially found it funny but now feels slightly guilty

'He wanted to pick a darker colour while I insisted to take a more blonde one.

'When I first saw him all swollen, I actually started to laugh, he looked so funny and I had no idea what so ever that it might be dangerous and after a while I became a little bit worried.

'Although I'll admit that I felt a little bit guilty- I remember him saying that he was allergic to henna tattoos, and asked if this had any kind of similarities.

'I said 'no I think it's cool' even though it clearly said on the packaging that you always should try a little bit on your hand or arm before applying to the hair.'
Police shot and killed a gunman who opened fire outside a crowded courtroom in Pennsylvania on Wednesday, injuring four people.

Officers said the man entered the lobby of District Judge Daniel Shimshock's office carrying a handgun in the afternoon and began shooting.

Police Sgt. R. Scott Miller was the first to encounter the gunman and was injured during an exchange of gunfire before taking cover, the local district attorney said.

Police shot and killed a gunman who opened fire in the lobby of a courthouse in Pennsylvania on Wednesday afternoon (pictured)

The man, who has not been named, shot and wounded a police officer along with two men and a woman before a second police officer shot him dead

The gunman, who has not been named, then shot and wounded two men, aged 47 and 35, and a 39-year-old woman.

A second police officer, who has also not been named, then exchanged fire with the gunman and shot him dead.

The shooting happened in the lobby of Judge Daniel Shimshock's offices, though cops say he was not the intended target

The man had been due in court that day on domestic violence charges of strangulation, aggravated assault, terroristic threats and simple assault.

A protective order had been issued against the gunman, police said, though it is not clear if any of his victims were related to the previous incident.

'In this case, as is so often the case, the German Township police officer ran toward the danger, not away. He protected over 30 to 40 people from injury or death,' Fayette County District Attorney Richard Bower said.

'These police officers and these emergency management people risk their lives every day ... and today they all were a shining light to our community.'

A Fayette County 911 center supervisor confirmed the three civilian victims were taken to the Ruby Memorial Hospital in Morgantown, West Virginia, for treatment and are in fair condition.

Masontown Mayor Toni Petrus was at the hospital Wednesday afternoon checking on Sgt. Miller. She said he was in good condition and was being treated for non-life-threatening injuries.

The man had been due in court that day over domestic violence offences, though cops say it is not clear if any of his victims were involved in the case (pictured, police outside the court)

State Police troop commander Lt. Steven C. Dowlin said that even though the shooting happened near the office of District Judge Daniel Shimshock, neither he nor his staff appeared to be the intended target of the shooter.

Dowlin said the judge, assistant district attorneys, lawyers, police officers and others were in the courtroom near the lobby when shots were fired.

Joyce Royster was in the courtroom at the building Wednesday. She told WTAE there were dozens of people inside the courtroom when the shooting started just outside.

Royster said people fled the courtroom as the shooter started to move inside and took shelter in offices and other courtrooms.

Dowlin said this is the second mass shooting that state police have responded to in Fayette County this year.

He said troopers stopped a young individual at a Uniontown High School from carrying out a shooting.

'It's becoming way too common,' he said.
The Kentucky Supreme Court has been asked to decide whether registered sex offender Ryan Scott Stone, 33, can spend time alone with his own children, ages three and six

The Kentucky Supreme Court has been asked to decide for the first time whether a registered sex offender can spend time alone with his own children.

Ryan Scott Stone, 33, pleaded guilty in 2007 to third-degree sodomy of a juvenile male relative, occurring in 2006 and 2003.

The state learned in 2015 that Stone had since gotten married and had two children, who are now aged three and six.

The state won an order from a family court judge barring Stone from being alone with his kids, but a Court of Appeals unanimously reversed that, saying that ruling infringed on his constitutional right to raise a family.

Stone has not been accused of abusing his children, but the state argues he should not be alone with his children because it violates sex offender rules.

Now, the case is being appealed to the highest court in the state, which will become the seventh state to rule on the matter of sex offender's spending unsupervised time with their own children.

Courts that have decides similar cases has split on the issue, across the country.

Stone pleaded guilty to third-degree sodomy of a male relative in 2007; The incidents occurred in 2003 and 2006, when the victim was a minor

Stone pleaded guilty to the sodomy charge in Montgomery Circuit Court in 2007. He sentenced to one year in jail, which was suspended, and required to register as a sex offender for life.

Stone was also placed on probation, ordered to have no contact with minors unless supervised by an adult, and required to complete a sex offender treatment program.

Stone was kicked out of that program, however, for allowing a family with two young boys to stay with him for more than a week, which constituted a parole violation and landed him in jail for 27 days.

He met a woman identified in court papers as AS in 2011, told her of his past, and they married in 2012, the same year they had their first child. Their second child was born in 2015.

Upon the birth of their second child, the state learned Stone was often alone with his then two-year-old child, and filed a petition accusing the couple of neglect. AS was included in the case for marrying and having children with a registered sex offender.

In 2016, Clark County family court Judge Rob Johnson granted the state Cabinet for Health and Family Services an order barring Stone from being alone with his children, finding he had violated his probation and failed to follow the requirements of the sex offender law.

'The children in this case are in danger of abuse,' Judge Johnson said, 'and the court cannot ignore that the sex crimes committed by the father were against his blood relative.'

Courts in North Carolina and Mississippi have similarly upheld restrictions on parents guilty of sex offenses being along with their own children.

On appeal, however, the order was unanimously reversed, holding that the state had intruded on Stones constitutional right to raise a family and failed to show proof that the children were at risk, noting that the fact that Stone preyed on another family member in 2003 and 2006 was not sufficient evidence of impending harm.

'While we appreciate the governments desire to be proactive rather than reacting after something happens, under the facts of this case feeling or fearing something may happen is simply too attenuated to allow an intrusion into the family-child relationship,' the Court of Appeals in Kentucky said.

The Supreme Court of Kentucky is expected to hear the case within the next few months

This decision falls in line with similar cases decided in Connecticut, Colorado, Michigan and New York, where it's been held that sex offenders may spend time alone with their children when there is no evidence of abuse or proof they are in immediate danger.

'The balance between childrens safety and parental rights is delicate and complicated,' Terry Brooks, Bexecutive director of Kentucky Youth Advocates, said.

'Certainly, I think the non-negotiable absolute is to protect kids. But the balance is different in every situation, in every case and in every setting.'

But Clark County prosecutor Brian Thomas, who is representing the cabinet in its appeal, feels the answer is definitive.

Children have a 'fundamental right to be free from sexual exploitation and adults have a duty to protect them from being at risk of harm,' Thomas told the Courier Journal.

He wrote in his brief to the high court:

'It appears that the Court of Appeals would rather this pedophile be restricted from coming into contact with other children  but finds it entirely appropriate to allow [Stone to be in] a position to enact criminal sexual behavior on his own children, in the quiet and privacy of their own home.'

He pointed out that Stone pleaded guilty 'not once, but twice for crimes against a minor child,' adding that, 'His behavior is such that for as long as there is breath in his body, he will be required to register his address so he can be monitored.'

From left to right, the justices on Kentucky's Supreme Court are: (Back row) Justice Bill Cunningham; Justice Laurance B. VanMeter; Justice Daniel J. Venters; Justice Samuel T. Wright III; (Front row) Deputy Chief Justice Lisabeth T. Hughes; Chief Justice John D. Minton, Jr.; and Justice Michelle M. Keller

Despite those fact, in an opinion written by Judge Christopher Shea Nikell and joined by Donna Dixon and Joy Kramer, Kentucky's Court of Appeals unanimously ruled that the state had failed to show that harm or risk of harm to the children was 'more likely to occur than not.'

The Kentucky Academy of Criminal Defense Lawyers has filed a friend-of-the-court brief in the case, arguing that no defendants would plead guilty if it meant giving up their parental rights, which would effectively halt many court proceedings in sexual offense case.

The group also argues in the brief that barring a parent from being alone with his or her child violates the state constitutions ban on cruel and unusual punishment.

The Supreme Court of Kentucky is expected to hear the case within the next few months.

The justices currently on the bench of Kentucky's highest court include Chief Justice John D. Minton, Jr.; Deputy Chief Justice Lisabeth T. Hughes; Justice Bill Cunningham; Justice Michelle M. Keller; Justice Laurance B. VanMeter; Justice Daniel J. Venters; and Justice Samuel T. Wright III.
This is the moment airline passengers restrain another traveller who was reportedly threatening to blow up the plane.

The unnamed passenger, 32, boarded a flight in the Russian capital Moscow which was bound for the city of Vladivostok in south-eastern Russia's Primorsky Krai region.

Local media report that he is the head of an advertising company and had threatened to set off an explosive device on the plane, hitting a flight attendant in the face when he was asked to calm down.

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Footage shows several male passengers on a domestic Russian flight from Moscow to Vladivostok restraining the 32-year-old suspect and bundling him to the ground

Local media report that the passenger is the head of an advertising company and had threatened to set off an explosive device on the plane

The footage shows several men restraining a passenger in the aisle of the plane.

The man is wrestled to the ground and eventually put into a lock without his shirt.

The 32-year-old was arrested when the plane touched down in Vladivostok and he continued shouting and being disruptive at the police station.

The man was eventually put into a lock with his top off in the struggle before being arrested when the plane landed in Vladivostok

The Russian investigative committee have initiated a criminal case for 'threat of a terrorist attack on board an aircraft.'

It is unclear if the suspect has been charged and no motive has been given for the incident although some reports suggest the suspect may have been drunk.

Netizen 'Pavel Gondilov' said: 'Those people that were flying with him did a good job managing to pin him down while still in the air, and that they did not wait to give him to cops upon arrival.'
The boss of prisons in England and Wales was sacked by the Ministry of Justice today amid continued chaos inside jails.

Michael Spurr will step down as chief executive of the Prison and Probation Service in March after nine years in charge and a 35-year career.

Government sources told MailOnline officials at the Ministry of Justice were seeking a 'change of direction' in prisons policy amid chaos in scores of jails.

The sacking was carried out by Ministry of Justice permanent secretary Richard Heaton with the agreement of Justice Secretary David Gauke.

Michael Spurr will step down as chief executive of the Prison and Probation Service in March after the Ministry of Justice demanded a 'change of direction'

Justice Secretary David Gauke thanked Mr Spurr for his 35-year career helping to run prisons after he was told by the Ministry of Justice's top official to step aside by the end of March

Today's announcement comes weeks after Birmingham's prison was taken out of private hands following a collapse in discipline.

After a damning report by inspectors, Prisons minister Rory Stewart admitted as many as 20 jails are gripped by drugs and violence.

Thousands of prison officers walked out for six hours last week in a protest at 'unprecedented violence' in British jails.

Mr Spurr became the chief executive of the National Offender Management Service Agency in June 2010 and continued as chief executive when HM Prison and Probation Service (HMPPS) was created in April 2017.

In a statement announcing his departure, Justice Secretary David Gauke said: 'I am extremely grateful to Michael Spurr for his leadership of HMPPS.

'His focus has been unwavering on doing the best for his staff and for victims of crime, on discipline in the prison estate and on caring for and rehabilitating offenders.

'He is an example of the very best of public service and civil service leadership. I look forward to continuing to work closely with Michael into the new year.'

It is understood that the decision by MOJ permanent secretary Richard Heaton to ask Mr Spurr to step aside was not sparked by one specific incident, but reflects a desire for fresh leadership to address ongoing problems.

The process of appointing a successor will begin in October.

Mr Spurr has faced increased criticism over the mounting crisis with the parliament's justice committee criticising his 'lack of leadership'.

Today's announcement comes weeks after Birmingham's prison was taken out of private hands following a collapse in discipline. Pictured are riot police at HMP Birmingmam in 2016

Peter Dawson, director of the Prison Reform Trust, said: 'Michael Spurr will be an extraordinarily hard act to follow.

'He is an exceptionally principled and knowledgeable leader who has selflessly served an endless succession of short term ministers.

'Whoever takes over will face the same fundamental problems of overcrowded and under-resourced prisons.

'Those are problems which only ministers can address and none of those whom Michael has served so faithfully have delivered.

'Anyone who thinks the problems in our prisons can be solved by a change of leader is deluding themselves.'

Chief Inspector of Prisons Peter Clarke has demanded Government action at four troubled jails in less than a year, including three state-run establishments.

Last week he triggered an 'urgent notification' for HMP Bedford after an inspection found inmates had effectively taken over the violent, overcrowded and vermin-infested prison.

In his annual report for 2017/18, the chief inspector warned that prisoners and staff have become 'inured' to unacceptable conditions.

He highlighted how thousands of inmates are living in 'squalid' and overcrowded cells, locked up for nearly 24 hours a day.

Authorities are also faced with a major task to stem the flow of contraband including drugs and mobile phones.

Mr Spurr, who was paid between 145,000 and 150,00 in 2017/18, started his career as a prison officer at HMP Leeds in 1983.

Mr Heaton said: 'Michael is an exceptional public servant. His commitment to the organisation he leads, and to a humane and effective offender management system, has been unflinching, through a period when the system has faced extraordinary pressures, challenges and constraints.

'Michael's leadership has been exemplary. But we now need to look ahead, building on Michael's work and developing a strategy for the next decade.

'I have therefore decided that April 2019 is the right time to ask a new chief executive to take on this important role.'
Brady Bunch star Maureen McCormick has revealed her parents nearly handed her over to police because of her cocaine addiction.

The 62-year-old, who played Marcia Brady in the popular 1970s show, became addicted to drugs as a young woman to the extent that she would stay awake for days on end because 'nothing else mattered'.

She said she only stopped when her parents threatened to call the cops and her husband of 33 years, Michael Cummings, threatened to leave her.

Brady Bunch star Maureen McCormick (pictured this year) has revealed her parents nearly handed her over to police because of her cocaine addiction

The 62-year-old, who played Marcia Brady (pictured) in the popular 1970s show, became addicted to drugs as a young woman to the extent that she would stay awake for days on end because 'nothing else mattered'

She said she only stopped when her parents threatened to call the cops and her husband of 33 years, Michael Cummings (pictured together in 2017), threatened to leave her

'My mom and dad, they almost turned me in to the cops,' the actress told US Weekly.

'They were at their last because they had been trying for years and knew something was going on and I was pretty sneaky and I could hide very, very well.

'But then I started messing up on jobs and so many things, so I'm sure everyone in the industry at the time knew that I was flaking out.'

1969: Robert Reed, Barry Williams, Eve Plumb, Chris Knight, Susan Olsen, Maureen McCormick, Mike Lookinland, Florence Henderson, Ann B Davis on the show

McCormick said it was her husband who eventually helped her turn her life around by telling her he would leave if she ever did hard drugs again.

'It woke me up,' she said. 'It was like the coldest shower you could ever take, there's just no way Im gonna lose somebody that I love.'

McCormick played iconic Marcia Brady on the Brady Bunch from 1969-1974, and later starred in The Brady Brides in 1981 alongside her TV sister Jan, Eve Plumb, now 60, in 1981.

But her life has been far from a sitcom. The actress wrote an eye-opening tell all in 2008 titled Here's The Story: Surviving Marcia Brady and Finding My True Voice.

The best seller chronicled, among other things, her descent into addiction, trading sex for drugs, crippling depression, and a battle with bulimia.

She now lives a quiet life outside Los Angeles with her husband and their 29-year-old daughter, Natalie.

In 2007 McCormick joined the VH1 reality show Celebrity Fit Club, and went on to win the competition by dropping 38lb from her 5ft, 3in, frame.

Two years later, she had packed back on all the weight and and then some before working with a trainer to get back to her goal weight of 125lb in 2011.

In 2015, she competed in the Australian version of I'm A Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here, where she camped out with fellow celebrities, ate bugs, and revealed that she used to date Michael Jackson.
As American scientists prepare to announce the location of the remains of Endeavour, a battle is expected over whether Britain, the United States or Australia gets the wreck of James Cook's famed ship.

A team of marine archaeologists from Australia and the US said they believe they may have found the resting place of the ship  used by the British explorer on a voyage of discovery to Australia in 1768 - 25 years after beginning their search.

They are expected to announce on Friday 'one or two' sites in Newport Harbour in Rhode Island, where the Endeavour was scuttled during the American War of Independence in 1778.

Kathy Abbass, the director of the Rhode Island Marine Archaeology Project, told The Telegraph that project leaders believe they know which of the wreckages they have been examining pinpoints the Endeavour.

But the revelation that centuries-long mystery may soon be solved sparked a new battle: who owns the vessel and where should it be displayed?

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A battle is expected over whether Britain, the United States or Australia gets the wreck of James Cook's famed ship (above, a replica of the ship)

Scientists are expected to announce on Friday 'one or two' sites in Newport Harbour in Rhode Island, where the wreckage of the Endeavour may be

Jenny Phillips, of the Middlesbrough Museums Service  where the Captain Cook Birthplace Museum is located  says the UK has a claim to the wreck since it was built in Whitby and registered in the country.

'If it came from here, it should come back here,' she told the Telegraph, adding that it is 'part of our heritage.'

But Charles Forgan, of Whitby's Captain Cook Memorial Museum, believes the ship is a 'spoil of war'  and therefore, belongs to the US.

In 1999, the Rhode Island state government took legal action to get ownership of the ship.

The Endeavour has entered popular lore thanks to James Cook's (pictured) voyages, which brought the British into contact with New Zealand and eastern Australia

James Cook is pictured arriving at Queen Charlotte's Sound in New Zealand in 1777 in an oil painting attributed to J Clevely

Meanwhile in Australia, reports are suggesting the vessel could be excavated in time to go on display during the 250th anniversary celebrations of Cook's landing in Botany Bay in 2020.

The centuries-long search for the Endeavour has been narrowed down to just a couple of sites after a 25-year search.

It is believed that the vessel can't be definitely identified until it is excavated.

'Early indications are that the team has narrowed the possible site for the wreck of HMB Endeavour to one site, which is very promising,' said Kevin Sumption, head of the Australian National Maritime Museum.

But he cautioned: 'A lot more detailed work, analysis and research has to happen before we can definitively say we have found the remains of James Cook's HMB Endeavour.'

The HMS Endeavour was first launched in 1764 by the Earl of Pembroke. Pictured, the Earl of Pembroke leaving Whitby Harbour in 1768

The Endeavour has entered popular lore thanks to Cook's voyages, which brought the British into contact with New Zealand and eastern Australia and foreshadowed the colonisation of the continent.

Today, a replica of the cramped and surprisingly small vessel sits in Sydney's Darling Harbour, as a reminder of a pivotal point in the history of modern Australia.

After being used by Cook, the Endeavour was decommissioned and sold to a commercial owner.

Then known as Lord Sandwich II, it was scuttled with 12 other vessels in Newport Harbour during the American War of Independence in 1778, but the remains have never been found.

Almost since it was sunk, a series of expeditions have sought to find the ship or relics

A replica of Captain Cook's ship 'Endeavour' is seen at the Australian National Maritime Museum in Sydney's Darling Harbour
One of the bodies belonged to Army Master Sgt. Charles H. McDaniel, of Vernon, Indiana, who died fighting at the age of 32, the president said

President Donald Trump said Thursday that two soldiers have been identified from the remains that North Korea returned to the United States of fallen soldiers.

Trump said in a tweet that the remains belonged to Army Master Sgt. Charles H. McDaniel, of Vernon, Indiana, who died in the Korean War at the age of 32, and Army Pfc. William H. Jones of Nash County, North Carolina, who perished at the age of 19.

The president said that the remains were returned 'as a result of my Summit with Chairman Kim' as he again cast his meeting with the North Korean dictator in June as a success.

'These HEROES are home, they may Rest In Peace, and hopefully their families can have closure,' he said, hours after the North Koreans floated a second summit.

President Donald Trump said Thursday that two soldiers have been identified from the remains that North Korea returned to the United States of fallen soldiers

Larry McDaniel, of Jacksonville, Fla., left, and his brother, Charles McDaniel, of Indianapolis, sons of Master Sgt. Charles Hobert McDaniel who died in the Korean War in 1950, are presented their father's dog tag by an official of the Army's Past Conflicts Casualty Office on August 8. The dog tag was among remains recently repatriated from North Korea

Kim Jong-un wants to meet with President Trump to speed up the process of denuclearizing his hermit country as soon as possible, South Korean President Moon Jae-in said Thursday as he ended summit with the dictator

Kim Jong-un wants to meet with President Trump to speed up the process of denuclearizing his hermit country as soon as possible, South Korean President Moon Jae-in said Thursday as he ended summit with the dictator.

The White House said last week that Kim had asked for second summit with Trump in a letter, as well, and that it was in the process of setting a second one up.

Trump reacted favorably to the level of progress that's been in remarks to reporters on Wednesday but he did not commit to meeting with Kim again soon or offering the kinds of concessions that North Korea is asking for to scale down its nuclear development.

'Well, well see what hes looking at. Well see. But in the meantime, were talking. Its very calm. Hes calm; Im calm. So well see what happens,' the president said.

Kim and South Korean President Moon Jae-in (left) met this week, and Moon said later that Kim wants another Trump summit to discuss a pathway to denuclearizing his country

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Wednesday evening that he had invited his counterpart, Foreign Minister Ri Yong Ho, to meet with him next week when they are both in New York for the United Nations General Assembly.

'I think the fact that Kim is showing signs of wanting to talk further is good,' United States Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley said at a Thursday afternoon news conference.

She said that a meeting with North Korea had not been confirmed since Pompeo made the offer on Wednesday and that it may not happen next week as a result.

Still, she said, progress had been made, pointing to the months-long pause in nuclear testing.

'These are all somewhat baby steps as they go forward, but as long as they are going in the right direction that's something we want to do but at the end of the day we have to know that the final line is total denuclearization with verification and accountability in that process,' she said. 'So its us working to get there.'

'I think the fact that Kim is showing signs of wanting to talk further is good,' United States Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley said at a Thursday afternoon news conference

Moon on Thursday said that Kim told him during a rare one-on-one meeting earlier in the week that he'd like to speak directly with Trump again about striking a deal.

A White House official echoed that hope on Thursday in Washington, saying that the wheels are already in motion. The official spoke to DailyMail.com on condition of anonymity to acknowledge sensitive discussions behind the scenes, and said locations for a potential follow-up summit have been discussed inside the National Security Council.

'That's what we're talking about right now,' the official said, adding that 'talking to foreign leaders is better than not talking with foreign leaders, and the president has been firm with everybody on this.'

President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un (left) could be meeting soon for a second time, if Kim gets his way

Kim first proposed a second meeting with Trump after their unprecedented June summit in Singapore. Moon said that Kim had hoped declaring a formal end to the 1950-53 Korean War would clear a path for rapid steps by the North to abandon its nuclear and missile programs.'

'Chairman Kim expressed his wish that he wanted to complete denuclearisation quickly and focus on economic development,' Moon said during a press conference in Seoul, describing his three-day summit with Kim in the North's capital of Pyongyang.

'He said he hoped Mike Pompeo would visit North Korea soon, and also a second summit with Trump would take place in the near future, in order to move the denuclearisation process along quickly,' Moon said.

Trump and Kim met in June in Singapore, in a first-of-its-kind summit that past presidents have avoided

White House officials are already discussing the merits of having a second Kim summit, and talking about where it would be acceptable to have it

Kim pledged to work toward the 'complete denuclearization of the Korean peninsula' during two meetings with Moon this year and at his summit with Trump, but talks on how to implement the vague commitments have since faltered.

Washington has demanded concrete action, such as a full disclosure of North Korea's nuclear and missile facilities, before agreeing to Pyongyang's key goals, including an easing of international sanctions and an official end to the Korean War.

An end-of-war declaration would not affect the presence of U.S. troops and the United Nations Command in South Korea, Moon said, adding that Kim shared his view.

'It would be a political declaration that would mark a starting point for peace negotiations,' Moon said.

'A peace treaty would be sealed, as well as normalisation of North Korea-U.S. relations, after the North achieves complete denuclearization.'

Trump has been tweeting complimentary messages about Kim, claiming that he's keeping his promise to gradually denuclearize

Trump tweeted late Tuesday: 'Kim Jong Un has agreed to allow Nuclear inspections, subject to final negotiations, and to permanently dismantle a test site and launch pad in the presence of international experts. In the meantime there will be no Rocket or Nuclear testing.'

He also tweeted that North Korea has agreed to conduct searches for the remains of soldiers who went missing during the Korean War.

And the two Koreas, he said, 'will file a joint bid to host the 2032 Olympics. Very exciting!'

He told reporters on Wednesday morning that he had received a 'tremendous letter' from Kim and that their countries are 'making tremendous progress with respect to North Korea.'

'Weve gotten our prisoners back. Were getting our remains back. They continue to come in. A lot of tremendous things,' he said. 'But very importantly, no missile testing, no nuclear testing. Now they want to go and put a bid in for the Olympics. No, we have a lot of very good things going.'

Trump said that his relationship with Kim, who he used to deride as 'Little Rocket Man' 'at least on a personal basis,' is 'very good' and has 'very much calmed down.'

Pompeo subsequently said in an interview that aired in primetime on Fox News, 'We have made steady, albeit slow progress. But its always -- weve always known this was going to take some time.

'The South Koreans had a successful engagement. President Moon with Chairman Kim just over the last 48 hours. Where we made another step, where we will get verification of an element of North Koreas program on the ground. Thats a good thing.'
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Russia has unveiled its 'stealth sea ghost' submarine  but the diesel-electric vessel can only operate for weeks without surfacing while Britain's HMS Artful can stay submerged for months.

The Russian Navy's Project 677 submarine Kronstadt was launched in a special ceremony at the Admiralty Shipyard in St Petersburg on Thursday.

Navy personnel watched as the impressive 68-metre vessel was wheeled into the shipyard for the occasion.

The Russian Navy Project 677 diesel-electric submarine Kronstadt was launched at the Admiralty Shipyard in St Petersburg

The 68-metre diesel-electric submarine is seen being transported during a launching ceremony at the Admiralty Shipyard

Navy personnel watched as the impressive 68-metre vessel was wheeled into the shipyard for the ceremony on Thursday

Admiralty Shipyard CEO Alexander Buzakov said the importance of the event was 'hard to overestimate,' TASS reports.

The Kronstadt began to be built in 2005, but there were breaks in construction due to financing, he said. The project resumed construction in 2013.

'The launch day has come at last,' he said. 'The delay in construction work allowed for using the experience gained in building and operating the submarine The St. Petersburg.

'By all parameters this submarine surpasses its predecessor - Project 636.

The Kronstadt submarine is seen being christened during the launch ceremony in St Petersburg, Russia, on Thursday

Workers atop the submarine, which will carry six torpedo launchers for a mix of 18 torpedoes or tube-launched missiles

The diesel-electric submarine Kronstadt is seen after the christening ceremony in the Admiralty Shipyard in St Petersburg

THE KRONSTADT Length: 68m Propulsion: 2 diesel generators, an electric propulsion motor, 2 diesel AIP systems based on oxygen-hydrogen fuel cells and a single shaft driving on a skewed seven-bladed propeller Submerged displacement: 2,650 tonnes Endurance: 45 days Speed: 21 knots when submerged Weapons: Six 533-mm torpedo launchers for a mix of 18 torpedoes or tube-launched missiles, including Kalibr or Oniks cruise missiles Advertisement

HMS ARTFUL Length: 97m Propulsion: Rolls-Royce PWR 2 reactor, 600 kilowatt diesel generators Submerged displacement: 7,400 tonnes Endurance: 90 days Speed: 30 knots when submerged Weapons: Armed with Tomahawk cruise missiles, Artful will be able to strike at targets up to 1,200m from the coast with pinpoint accuracy Advertisement

'We are certain that the future of non-nuclear submarine force of the Russian Navy should be pinned on project 677. There will be a large series.'

Russia's ministry of defence announced in June last year that Project 677's newest submarine  equipped with 'high-precision' weapons - would be launched this year.

Project 677 submarines, of the Lada class, are part of the fourth generation of Russia's non-nuclear submarines.

They carry six 533-mm torpedo launchers for a mix of 18 torpedoes or tube-launched missiles, including Kalibr cruise missiles.

They carry a crew of 35, have a displacement of about 1,750 tonnes when in the surface position and 2,650 when submerged and travel under water at a maximum speed of 21 knots.

HMS Artful - the 97 metre long nuclear-powered attack submarine is seen during a ceremony marking the end of its build process in Barrow-in-Furness in 2013

The HMS Artful, which can go three months without surfacing, is commissioned into the Royal Navy in Faslane, Scotland on March 18, 2016

Servicemen at a launching ceremony for the Russian Navy's diesel-electric submarine Kronstadt at the Admiralty Shipyard

The Kronstadt will be the Russia's first air-independent propulsion (AIP) boat, which will allow it to operate without access to atmospheric oxygen

Dubbed the 'stealth sea ghost,' it will only be able to operate submerged for a few weeks before needing to surface

The Kronstadt will be the Russia's first air-independent propulsion (AIP) boat, according to the Strategic Culture Foundation, which will allow it to operate without access to atmospheric oxygen.

Dubbed the 'stealth sea ghost,' it will only be able to operate submerged for a few weeks before needing to surface.

In comparison, the British Navy's HMS Artful is able to circumnavigate the planet without resurfacing as it can purify air and water.

But the vessel does need to surface at least every 90 days or so as it can only carry three months' supply of food for its 98 officers and ratings.

The Kronstadt has a submerged displacement of 2,650 tonnes of water, can travel at a maximum speed of 21 knots when under water and can go 45 days without surfacing

Russian Navy officers watch as the impressive Kronstadt - part of the fourth generation of Russia's non-nuclear submarines - is launched at a special ceremony
Andrew Shelton, (above) a 51-year-old assistant head teacher, was caught luring young girls into 'filthy' chat room conversations about sex

A pervert assistant head teacher who was caught with indecent images of children after luring young girls into 'filthy' chat room conversations about sex has been jailed.

Andrew Shelton, 51, attempted to seduce girls aged between 10 and 15 and encouraged them to send him explicit pictures via Skype.

A court heard the online sex chats gave the married dad a 'buzz' and he even made contact with the youngsters while working at Harborne Primary School, in Birmingham.

Shelton targeted the girls for his sexual gratification telling one 12-year-old she was 'hot and sexy as hell' and he wanted to 'hold, stroke and teach her to enjoy her body'.

A court heard Shelton even made contact with the youngsters while working at Harborne Primary School, in Birmingham (pictured)

Police were alerted to his contact with one teenager over Skype during March and April last year and raided his home in Halesowen, West Midlands.

Officers found 93 indecent pictures of young girls on his laptop, which were believed to have been sent as a result of 'disgusting' internet conversations dating back to 2014.

Shelton admitted to eight charges, including attempted sexual communication with a child, trying to incite a girl under 13 to engage in sexual activity and possessing indecent images of children.

He was jailed for two years and eight months at Wolverhampton Crown Court on Tuesday.

During sentencing, Judge Jinder Singh Boora said: 'These were systematic offences committed over a period of years.

'Some of the language used was disgusting and filthy when you thought you were conversing with children.

Detective Sergeant Rob Grace, said: ' Shelton was trying to coerce children over the internet and encourage them to send inappropriate images. He was a role model for young people as a teacher but away from the classroom he preyed on them for his own gratification'

'You are a man who should have known better.'

The court heard Shelton made contact with the girls - none of whom were pupils at the school where he taught - through several chat rooms.

Prosecutor, Hugh O'Brien Quinn said: 'He deliberately targeted young girls for his own gratification inciting them to sexual activity.'

On September 28 in 2015 he asked a girl who gave her age as 13 if she wanted a weekend in Birmingham.

Mr O'Brien Quinn added: 'He spoke to her about sex with older men.

'He knew it was wrong and illegal and saw himself as a paedophile.'

Shelton was rumbled when he contacted a girl called Chelsea who said she was 13 and told her she was a 'real stunner' on March 17 last year.

But Chelsea was really an undercover police officer and Shelton was arrested on July 17 last year following the search of his home.

Sophie Murray, defending, said the disgraced teacher, who suffers from spina bifida, had since voluntarily sought help to break his addiction to young girls.

She added: 'He has lost everything; his job, his wife, his relationship with his children. He is at rock bottom.'

After the case, Detective Sergeant Rob Grace, from West Midlands Police's Public Protection Unit, said: ' Shelton was trying to coerce children over the internet and encourage them to send inappropriate images.

'He was a role model for young people as a teacher but away from the classroom he preyed on them for his own gratification.

'Safeguarding of children will always be a top priority for the force.

'Anyone who encourages child abuse by viewing or sharing paedophilic images or engages in explicit conversations involving children needs to prepare themselves for being caught and hauled before the courts.'
An Italian nanny has launched an hilarious attack on Jamie Oliver, claiming: 'You know nothing about us and every Italian grandma would say the same.'

Just weeks after being accused of 'cultural appropriation' over his 'punchy jerk rice', Oliver has been taken to task for his use of the word 'Italian'.

London-based Diane Baldocchi took to the TV chef's official Jamie's Italian UK Facebook page to rant at the chef.

Diane Baldocchi (pictured) launched an online attack on Jamie Oliver claiming to be offended by the use of the word 'Italian' in his restaurants

Ms Baldocchi was responding to a post on the Jamie's Italian UK Facebook page. Jamie's Italian was founded by Jamie Oliver and his Italian mentor, chef Gennaro Contaldo, in Oxford, 2008 and has held over 60 restaurants worldwide

The scathing comment Ms Baldocchi left on the Facebook post. It received a number of emoji reactions

After Oliver posted a video captioned 'Pasta made fresh every day - just like the Italian Nonnas do', she wrote: 'As Italian I feel offended that you use the word 'Italian' in your restaurants.

'You don't know nothing about us and every Italian grandma could have said the same.

Jamie Oliver came under fire in August for calling one of his new products 'punchy jerk rice'. The decision to label the microwavable rice 'jerk' was criticised because it doesn't contain many of the ingredients traditionally used in a Jamaican jerk marinade

'Please keep on with something else but stop saying you cook Italia because what you sell in your restaurant its bad quality and over price food.'

She added: 'Sorry but you can taste the difference from quality and over price and uncooked pasta. But the point, that's not Italian.

'I eat Italian all my life. I ate Italian in UK and ireland and it's not something I would give to my dog.'

Baldocchi's compatriot, Giulia Crociani, added to Oliver's woes by condemning his Italian grammar.

Crociani wrote: 'That is not Italian cuisine, trust me. And it's not nonnas, it's nonne.

'You want to play Italian? Learn at least how to make plural.'

Another social media user, Karen Balkwill agreed with Baldocchi's post, writing: 'Well said. He is just cashing in on pretending to cook Italian food.'

Ruben Uruthiran wrote underneath: 'Horrible food and service at the Westfield branch in Stratford.

'The pasta was overcooked and sticky. It's such a disservice to the Italian cuisine.'

However, others jumped to Oliver's defence, including Sayda Ra who wrote: 'Overpriced yes but Italian food is just Italian food everywhere, nothing special about it.'

Ms Baldocchi didn't stop with her first comment, launching another soon after (above). She claimed the United Kingdom's Italian food is not something she would 'give to [her] dog'. Others commented on Ms Baldocchi's post (below)

Baldocchi's rant comes just weeks after the healthy eating advocate was accused of cultural appropriation for calling one of his new products 'punchy jerk rice'.

The decision to label the microwavable rice 'jerk' was criticised because it doesn't contain many of the ingredients traditionally used in a Jamaican jerk marinade.

Two years ago, Oliver also hit headlines for offending Spaniards for posting a recipe for paella - which was described as an 'abomination' and insult to Spanish culture.

Baldocchi's recent post slamming the 43-year-old restaurateur comes whilst Channel 4 is currently airing his new Jamie Cooks Italy series.

Oliver later branded the criticism of his 'jerk' product 'daft' before issuing a statement saying: 'I've worked with flavours and spices from all over the world my whole career, learning and drawing inspiration from different countries and cultures to give a fresh twist to the food we eat every day.

'When I named the rice my intention was only to show where my inspiration came from.'

Jamie's Italian was founded by Jamie Oliver and his Italian mentor, chef Gennaro Contaldo, in Oxford, 2008 and has held over 60 restaurants worldwide.

Earlier this year it was revealed he would close 12 UK branches following a restructuring review of the business.
An American adrenaline junkie crushed both of his legs after his parachute got caught in a sudden wind and skewed his landing.

John Michael, from Texas, crushed both of his legs in a botched base jump attempt after the unexpected winds.

The jump took place in Bryne, Norway, off one of the highest buildings in the city.

The Texan's parachute immediately got caught in a sudden gust after leaping from the roof

Stavenger Aftenblad reported that John Michael was conscious when he was rushed to hospital.

Michael leaped from the Forum Jaeren building after receiving approval from the building manager.

Forum Jaeren is a 222 foot high skyscraper in the southwestern city.

The Texan's parachute immediately got caught in a sudden gust after leaping from the roof of the 20-floor building on the 26th of June.

The Texan's crash landing crushed both of his legs. He is now recovering in hospital

Emergency services attended the scene where the adrenaline junkie was still conscious

As a result of his uneasy landing, John crushed both of his legs and was rushed to the hospital 30 km away in Stavenger and is currently recovering at home.

Local media in Stavenger are reporting now that there will be no more base-jumping allowed on the building after the incident.

It was also reported that another jumper was supposed to attempt the base jump before he was blocked following his fellow American's accident.

John Michael couldn't regain control of his parachute before spiralling out of control
Police have recovered a body from 1,000ft deep in Lake Tahoe after a consultant drowned when a family boating trip went horribly wrong.

Chaitanya Datla, 33, dived into the water without a life jacket last week and couldn't swim back to his family's rented boat.

His panicked uncles and cousins called police after he disappeared under the surface.

Mr Datla, from Cameron Park, California, was reported missing before his body was found and identified on Monday.

Chaitanya Datla (pictured), 33, dived into the water without a life jacket last week and couldn't swim back to his family's rented boat

Police (pictured in the lake) were able to find the body using an underwater remote operated vehicle, which had been donated from a private individual

Police were able to find the body using an underwater remote operated vehicle, which had been donated from a private individual.

Mr Datla worked as a Project Manager at TechTu Business Solutions having graduated from SIUE School of Business in 2016.

His heartbroken brother, Aditya, told MailOnline: 'Chaitanya was a highly ambitious and fun-loving guy. He was adventurous and always wanted to do his best.

'He was an inspiration and a role model. We're still in shock.'

Aditya said he was not on the boat the time of the tragedy but his cousins and uncles were. He said Mr Datla was a very good swimmer.

A police statement read: 'On September 17, 2018, Douglas County Sheriffs Office Marine Unit recovered a body from a depth of 1,062 feet in Lake Tahoe.

'The recovery was made while searching for a missing person, who reportedly drowned the week prior.

'The decedent has been positively identified as 33 year old Chaitanya Datla of Cameron Park, Ca, the missing person from last week. Next of kin notifications have been made.

'This search and recovery effort was unprecedented in Lake Tahoe due to the extreme depths and the technology needed to facilitate this type of recovery.

This image shows some of the equipment used in the search and recovery effort at Lake Tahoe

'The technology, an underwater remote operated vehicle, was recently donated to the Douglas County Sheriffs Office by a local resident and they graciously offered their assistance to El Dorado County.

'The Douglas County deputies recently completed ROV and SONAR training with Bruces Legacy, a non-profit search and recovery group out of Wisconsin that was instrumental in other recoveries around the region and nation.

'South Lake Tahoe Fire and Rescue Marine 17 responded to assist Douglas County Sheriff Marine 7 with recovery. The South Lake Tahoe Fire and Rescue Marine Unit were also donated by the same local resident that donated the ROV.'
Botswana has denied that almost 90 elephants were slaughtered for ivory by poachers in a wildlife sanctuary.

Elephants Without Borders (EWB) claimed two weeks ago that it had discovered at least 87 elephant carcasses during a routine aerial survey of conservation areas, suggesting a sudden spike in killings in recent months.

The claims led to global media attention and questions were raised about Botswana's anti-poaching efforts.

But officials demanded to see EWB's proof and subsequent visits to the Chobe National Park located just 19 corpses - only six of which were found to be poaching victims.

They rejected claims of a surge of elephant poaching made by the conservation charity and put on display the carcasses of animals allegedly slaughtered for ivory - some with tusks still intact.

Colonel George Bogatsu of Botswana Defence Force pauses near the marked remains of an elephant in Chobe on Thursday

Botswanan authorities showed journalists the carcasses of dead elephants in the Chobe National Park but denied an alleged rise in poaching

'Last year, the whole year, we lost about 81 elephants,' Churchill Collyer, the deputy director of the Department of Wildlife and National Parks, said.

'So I can say it's just normal, like any other year, we haven't recorded any mass killing.'

Officials added that since the start of the year, a total of 63 elephants had died across the country and that there had been no noticeable increase in elephant poaching.

Around 40,000 African elephants are killed every year for their tusks, according to conservation groups.

The elephants are illegally traded as part of a multi-billion dollar industry that extends from Africa to Asia and beyond.

Botswana, which has Africa's largest elephant population, is on the frontline of the battle against the illicit ivory trade.

The remains of an elephant allegedly killed by the poachers in Chobe National Park

This week, the country's authorities took journalists to the vast Chobe National Park in the northeast which has more than 100,000 elephants - the country's largest concentration of the animals.

Several hours spent flying over the reserve which borders Namibia, Zambia and Zimbabwe, showed six elephant carcasses, four of which appeared to have been poached.

'This is almost more than six months since it was killed,' said Collyer of one animal with dried, perforated skin and missing tusks.

Around 12 miles away, another decomposed carcass was found but when EWB led rangers to it, the tusks were still intact, suggesting it was not killed for ivory.

'The cause of the natural death could either be from old age, from diseases, from starvation during the drought season,' said anti-poaching deputy brigade commander George Bogatsu, a six-year veteran of the fight against poaching.

Members of the media gather around the carcass of a dead elephant in Chobe on Wednesday

He stood next to the carcass with an assault rifle slung over his arm and a handgun tucked into the side pocket of his camouflage trousers.

The animal was one of those counted by Elephants Without Borders as poached. EWB said in a statement that 'an unusually high number of elephant carcasses were seen by the survey team'.

'Our current survey adheres to the highest international standards,' it added.

'There is no cemetery in the wild -- animals like elephants will take years and years to completely disappear' from the spots where they die, said Simon Barwabatsile, the country's anti-poaching coordinator.

EWB had been contracted by Botswana to conduct aerial elephant population surveys.

Elephants Without Borders (EWB) claimed two weeks ago that it had discovered at least 87 elephant carcasses suggesting a sudden spike in killings in recent months

Botswana's authorities say there had not been any 'exponential' rise in poaching as there are generally around 80 to 90 elephants deaths per year

Before concluding the work, the group's director Mike Chase said the survey pointed to elephant poaching on a scale 'by far the largest' in Africa.

He said it coincided with the disarming of Botswana's rangers earlier this year.

But the military insisted it remained ready to repel poaching gangs armed with high-powered rifles.

Barwabatsile said there had been 'legal issues' about rangers being armed with certain guns.

'There's been a withdrawal of some arms from the anti-poaching unit within the department of wildlife and national parks,' he said.

He could not confirm how many weapons - understood to be fully automatic rifles - had been taken out of circulation.

An aerial shot shows the vast Chobe National Park, which has more than 100,000 elephants

A group of other wildlife conservation groups said last week that civilian rangers are still armed with 'high-calibre weapons, but no longer carry automatic assault rifles'.

Some in the conservation community have suggested that Elephants Without Borders made such alarming claims because of 'vested interests.'

Survival International's Stephen Corry said he expected more reports 'stirring up panic over the increasing threat of poaching' as groups raise cash ahead of a conference in London on the illegal wildlife trade next month.

But EWB insisted that 'given the high number of elephant carcasses seen during the survey, EWB felt it a moral and patriotic duty to immediately report this.'

'EWB's sole concern is for the wildlife and the natural heritage of our wonderful country.'
President Donald Trump linked American military support for Middle Eastern countries to oil prices on Thursday as he reminded OPEC nations that he has a long memory.

The Republican president has lashed out at the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries over the past several months, demanding price cuts and output increases in targeted tweets.

'We protect the countries of the Middle East, they would not be safe for very long without us, and yet they continue to push for higher and higher oil prices! We will remember. The OPEC monopoly must get prices down now!' Trump wrote in his latest volley on Twitter.

President Donald Trump linked American military support for Middle Eastern countries to oil prices on Thursday as he reminded OPEC nations that he has a long memory

Rising U.S. gasoline prices could create a political headache for Trump before November congressional elections by offsetting Republican tax cuts. It's Trump's sanctions on Iran, however, that could cause prices to again jump

Rising U.S. gasoline prices could create a political headache for Trump before November congressional elections by offsetting Republican claims that his tax cuts and rollbacks of federal regulations have helped boost the U.S. economy.

Trump has specifically called on Saudi Arabia, OPEC's largest producer, to raise output, saying that it should help the United States lower fuel prices since Washington is aiding Riyadh in its struggle against Iran.

OPEC and its allies are unlikely to agree to an official increase in crude output when they meet in Algeria this weekend, although pressure is mounting on top producers to prevent a spike in oil prices above $80 a barrel ahead of new U.S. sanctions on Iran, OPEC sources told Reuters on Thursday.

The new sanctions take effect in November, as a result of with Trump's decision to pull out of a 2015 agreement on Iran's nuclear program.

Saudi Arabia is worried that any sanctions-related spike in oil prices will trigger fresh criticism from Trump, but it also faces doubts over its ability to compensate for a drop in Iranian supply, the sources said.

'It's complicated. Saudi Arabia has to balance oil supply and demand, and it has to balance oil prices so they don't rise too much before the U.S. elections,' one OPEC source told Reuters.

'It's also political because the Saudis don't want to pump too much oil then the Iranians complain to OPEC that it (Saudi Arabia) is taking (Iran's) market share. They also don't want oil prices to fall too much.'

In a visit to Moscow this month, U.S. Energy Secretary Rick Perry asserted Saudi Arabia, the United States and Russia can between them raise global output in the next 18 months to compensate for falling oil supplies from Iran.

Under pressure from the U.S. president, the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, Russia and other allies agreed in June to boost production by 1 million barrels per day, having participated in a supply-cutting deal since 2017

Under pressure from the U.S. president, the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, Russia and other allies agreed in June to boost production by 1 million barrels per day, having participated in a supply-cutting deal since 2017.

The so-called 'OPEC+' coalition meets on Sunday in Algeria to discuss how to allocate that 1 million bpd increase within its quota framework.

OPEC sources say there is no immediate plan for any official action as such a move would require OPEC to hold what it calls an extraordinary meeting, which is not on the table.

The weekend gathering will discuss how to share the previously agreed output increase and examine whether the market needs more oil to offset the loss of Iranian supply as well as a decline in Venezuelan output, the sources said.

Fears over supply shortages have boosted crude prices in recent weeks, and international benchmark Brent was trading above $79 a barrel on Thursday.

Saudi officials believe there is insufficient oil demand so far to justify raising Saudi output much beyond the roughly 400,000 bpd that it has pumped above its 10 million bpd target, OPEC and industry sources told Reuters.

But that has raised some doubt over whether Riyadh can quickly boost output to what the kingdom says is its maximum sustainable capacity of 12 million bpd, the sources said.

Though Saudi Arabia has never tested such high levels, it has said it pumped 10.7-10.8 million bpd in the past.

Industry sources familiar with Saudi oil plans say state energy giant Aramco can raise output quickly to 11 million bpd, but reaching 12 million bpd could take up to six months.
Danielle Delgado Garcia, pictured with her three-year-old son Jayce, was using her phone when her car rear-ended a semi-truck on May 26 in Larned, Kansas

A Kansas mother whose 22-year-old daughter died after she crashed her car while using her phone has issued a heartfelt plea to others to avoid texting while driving.

In a blog post for the Kansas Department of Transportation, Jacque Tierce recalls the horrifying moment she learned her daughter Danielle Delgado Garcia had rear-ended a semi-truck while on her way to work in Larned on May 26.

Tierce made it to the hospital just as Garcia arriving in an ambulance, awake and able to speak.

''Mom,' she said in the most agonizing voice I've ever heard, 'It hurts so bad Mom. My stomach hurt so bad,'' Tierce wrote.

'I got to tell her I loved her and squeeze her hand before she went out again and was loaded into the helicopter.'

Hours later at a hospital in Witchita, Tierce learned that her daughter had died from her injuries.

The 22-year-old's mother Jacque Tierce, left, wrote about the crash in a blog post for the Kansas Department of Transportation published Wednesday

In the heartbreaking post published on KDOT's blog Wednesday, Tierce wrote that she'd heard sirens just before 8am the morning of the crash and 'began praying for whoever was involved' in the emergency.

Moments later, she received a text from Garcia's coworker expressing concern that the 22-year-old was late for work and wasn't answering her phone.

'My heart sank immediately,' Tierce wrote. 'Danielle was never late for work.'

After calling her daughter's phone twice with no answer, Tierce began to panic.

She reached out to Garcia's daycare provider, who was supposed to be watching her son Jayce that morning, and learned Garcia had messaged minutes earlier and said the three-year-old's other grandmother had made arrangements to pick him up before Danielle left for work.

'Now I knew, the sirens were for Danielle,' Tierce wrote.

'I got a phone call a few minutes later from Danielle's phone. I answered, knowing it would not be Danielle's voice on the other line.'

A Kansas Highway Patrol officer informed Tierce of the accident, which is believed to have occurred while Garcia was texting via Snapchat.

Garcia's destroyed Chevy is pictured after the fatal crash on Interstate 56 in central Kansas

Less than two weeks after the crash, Tierce launched a campaign called #DoItForDanielle to stop texting while driving. One of the campaign images is pictured above

Garcia was quickly transported to a local hospital, where doctors determined she would need to be airlifted to a medical center 120 miles away in Witchita.

Within a matter of hours they received news that Garcia had died on the operating table as a result of a severed artery.

'I couldn't even cry. I was in shock,' Tierce wrote.

Less than two weeks later the heartbroken mother had launched a campaign called #DoItForDanielle to stop texting while driving.

'I don't want anyone to go through this,' Tierce told KAKE. 'Not any mother, not any brother, not any sister, not any son, child. Not any friend.'

One campaign photo reads: 'No text message, Facebook post, or Snapchat is worth a life. Please put your phone up while you are driving.'
They say there is an unbreakable bond between a mother and her daughter.

For this family from China's Shaoxing city, the tie between Li Yueye and her child Ling Ling is even more special.

This week, seven-year-old Ling Ling braved a four-hour operation to donate her bone marrow in order to save her critically ill mother.

Scroll down for video

Ling Ling (pictured) went through a four-hour operation in China to donate her bone marrow

The girl's mother, Li Yueye (pictured), has a rare disorder needs her stem cells to survive

A brief video released by Pear apparently shows Ling Ling during the operation on Monday

According to local media, 30-year-old Li was diagnosed with acute aplastic anaemia in May. Aplastic anaemia is a rare disorder in which the bone marrow fails to make enough blood cells.

Doctors said Li's condition could worsen any time and she needed to undergo a stem cell transplant as soon as possible in order to survive, reported Qianjiang Evening News.

To Li's family, finding a bone marrow match proved to be difficult because Li was adpoted.

Qiangjiang Evening News said Li was abandoned by her birth parents when she was little. After she fell ill, her husband managed to find her biological parents, trying to ask them to go for a test and see if they would be bone marrow matches to Li. But Li's birth parents firmly refused.

That means Ling Ling, who is the only blood relative to Li in her family, became the family's last hope.

Her father said the girl agreed immediately when being asked to give her bone marrow

A nurse treats Ling Ling in the girl's hospital ward after she donated her bone marrow

The girl greets her mother though the glass, accompanied by her father, after the operation

A test showed that Ling Ling was a half match to Li.

Li's husband pondered over the matters and decided to ask Ling Ling if she would agree to donate her bone marrow.

The little girl said 'yes' without a second thought, telling her father 'give my cells to mum, I hope she could recover soon', Li's husband Dong Haiyong said.

Doctors at the Traditional Chinese Medicine Hospital of Zhejiang Province collected Ling Ling's bone marrow on Monday.

Medical staff told Qianjiang Evening News that they harvested 200ml bone marrow from Ling Ling in about four hours. They said the child was strong and cooperative throughout the process.

WHAT IS APLASTIC ANAEMIA? Aplastic anaemia is a rare disorder in which the bone marrow fails to make enough blood cells. The condition can be acquired, meaning that the condition has developed during the patient's life, or inherited. Aplastic anaemia is not a form of cancer but may be associated with certain cancers, especially those affecting the bone marrow, such as leukaemia. A small number of patients with aplastic anaemia may develop leukaemia. Because of the lack of cells within the blood, these are replaced by fat cells. Any remaining cells look more or less normal in contrast to other blood cancers There are approximately 125 cases diagnosed every year and, of this number, 30 cases are children. Patients may have symptoms of anaemia such as paleness, fatigue, shortness of breath and excessive bleeding and a tendency to bruise easily. Advertisement

Ling Ling's grandmother weeps as she says 'this breaks my heart, my granddaughter is so little'

Ling Ling's grandmother said she felt so sorry that her granddaughter had to go through the procedure.

'This breaks my heart. My granddaughter is so little. But this is for her mother to get better,' she told a reporter from Zhejiang Satellite TV from Ling Ling's hospital ward.

Ling Ling's hematopoietic stem cells were transplanted into Li's body the next day, and doctors are observing Li this week and next to see if the transplant was successful.

The medics are optimistic though. They told Zhejiang Satellite TV that Li has an 80 per cent chance of a full recovery.
President Trump joked that a Hurricane Florence victim had 'got a boat out of the deal' after a yacht washed up in the man's back yard during the storm.

Trump made the jibe as he was visiting victims of the deadly storm on Wednesday, where he handed out hot food and hugs to the survivors.

The President also pledged to help 'everybody' impacted by the 'epic' storm, saying: 'Whatever we have to do at the federal level, we will be there.'

President Trump spent Wednesday visiting disaster-hit areas of North Carolina, including one home-owner who had a yacht wash up against a dock in his back yard

After seeing the damage, in the town of New Bern, the President joked with the owner that 'at least you got a nice boat out of the deal'

Trump also pledged to help the man claim the damage on his insurance after hearing how the company was refusing to pay out

It was during a visit to the town of New Bern that Trump walked over to an older man standing outside a brick home that had been badly damaged by flooding.

Behind the house a large yacht had washed up against a dock and was sitting in the man's back yard.

'Is this your boat?', Trump asked, to which the man answered 'no'.

With a smile, Trump replied: 'At least you got a nice boat out of the deal.;

The man later told the President that his insurance company was refusing to pay for the damage, and Trump vowed to help.

'We're going to find out the name of the insurance company,' he said. 'I think it's just incredible what we're seeing. This boat just came here.

'They don't know whose boat that is. What's the law? Maybe it becomes theirs.'

Trump also visited Temple Baptist Church where he handed out hot meals to hurricane survivors at a make-shift drive thru

Trump hands containers filled with hot dogs, chips and fruit to Hurricane Florence survivors

A young boy gets a hug off the President as he visits areas that were badly affected by Hurricane Florence on Wednesday

Trump hugged survivors of Hurricane Florence on Thursday and passed out hot meals at a church as he toured areas affected by the storm.

He shook hands with volunteers and passed out Styrofoam containers at a make-shift, drive-thru pick up, located in the parking lot of a local church, where the meal of the day was hot dogs, chips and fruit.

At Temple Baptist Church in New Bern, survivors asked the president for hugs and told him that they were praying for him as he leaned into their car.

'Whatever we have to do at the federal level, we will be there - and you know that - 100 percent,' the president said.

He promised that the government would take care of 'everybody' affected as he participated in a briefing at Cherry Point

Trump pledged that 'everybody' who was impacted by the hurricane will be taken care of

The President also discussed the bill for damages with officials from South Carolina, with the figure currently resting north of $2billion

Trump greets people during a tour of Hurricane Florence damage in Conway, South Carolina

'Weve done a real job, and weve got to continue to do that real job because another phase is coming in right now, and were going to meet that phase just like we've met phase one,' Trump said.

In Conway, South Carolina, the president directing senators from the two states to put their heads together and come back to him with a proposal for federal funding.

A snippet of their conversation revealed the number was north of $2 billion.

North Carolina was hit the hardest by the storm, but the president warned residents of South Carolina as he spoke at Horry County Emergency Operations Center that the floods would be coming their way soon.

'You haven't really been hit yet by comparison to what's coming,' he said. 'Because youre going to have a lot of water.'

He described the period that South Carolina is in as 'the calm before the storm' and noted that residents of the area about to have a 'rough few days' followed by a period of recovery that could last a long time.

But he told them, 'Washington is with you. Trump is with you. We are all with you 100 percent.'
A Texas couple accused of enslaving a girl they brought from the Republic of Guinea for 16 years has been indicted on federal charges.

Mohamed Toure and Denise Florence Cros-Toure, both 57, were arrested on suspicion of forced labor on April 26, and were indicted by a grand jury in Fort Worth on Wednesday.

They were charged with forced labor, harboring an alien for financial gain, and two counts of conspiracy. Toure faces an additional charge for making false statements to federal agents, claiming he attempted to adopt the girl, according to Dallas News.

They are the son and daughter-in-law of former Guinean President Ahmed Sekou Toure, and Cros-Toure's father was the nation's secretary of state.

Southlake, Texas couple Mohamed Toure (left) and Denise Florence Cros-Toure (right) were indicted on Wednesday, accused of enslaving a Guinean woman for 16 years

The wealthy Southlake couple arranged for the unnamed victim to travel to the US when she was aged at least five but possibly as old as 13, from her rural Guinean village in 2000.

She's now in her late 20s or early 30s.

Toure and Cros-Toure were both Guinean natives and were granted asylum in the United States in 2000.

They allegedly forced the Guinean girl to work for 16 years in their home, ordering her to cook, clean, and care for their five kids in their Southlake home.

She was close in age to the five biological children of the Toure couple but unlike them she was denied schooling, medical care, and the other opportunities afforded to the children.

Denise Cros-Toure also slapped or hit the child as punishment, according to the complaint and an investigator noted scars on the girl's arms and ear.

They also denied her pay, isolated her from her family, and threatened serious harm if she refused to do the work they gave her.

They confiscated her official documents, forcing her to remain unlawfully in the US after her tourist visa expired in March 2000. They threatened to send her back to Guinea if they were unsatisfied with her work, according to a U.S. Department of Justice press release.

Southlake police found the girl in a city park in 2002 noting her disheveled appearance as 'wearing dirty unkempt clothing' and 'very visibly scared and nervous', according to a police report.

Her alleged life of servitude ended when she escaped in August 2016 with the aide of kind-hearted neighbors and alerted authorities.

The couple lived in this Texas home where the allegedly girl cooked, cleaned and cared for the couple's five children for 16 years before she escaped with the help of her neighbors

Denise Cros-Toure's attorney Scott Palmer said the government's case is 'weak' and suggested that the girl, referred to as Jane Doe, manipulated events to stay in the country as the couple planned to return her to her village, according to the Star-Telegram.

He called the criminal complaint against the couple 'riddled with salacious allegations, fabrications and lies'.

The government has also been presented with pictures and video of the girl on public outings and vacation with the family. The Toures' children also dispute the picture of enslavement that the government is presenting, Palmer said.

'The family was taking active steps to send her back to Guinea. A visa was obtained through a consulate in New York and she was headed back to Africa. She was living a normal life in Southlake that most people would be happy to live,' Palmer said.

The girl's parents have been interviewed by officials in the US department as well.

'I think the parents are awaiting a big payday. I think they believe that this will all end up bringing them a bunch of money,' Palmer said.

'We look forward to amassing a mountain of evidence to refute the Government's portrayal of our clients and look forward to revealing the motivation of this woman to lie, betray, and attempt to destroy the family that took her in at the request of her father for a better life in the United States,' Palmer said Wednesday in a statement.

If convicted, Toure and Cros-Toure each face a sentence of up to 20 years in prison.
Byron John claims his son Bradley (pictured) would still be alive if the school had acted to stop the bullies

The grieving father of a bullied pupil who hanged himself in school toilets is calling for the headteacher's resignation.

Heartbroken Byron John claims his son Bradley, 14, would still be alive if the school had acted to stop the bullies.

Bradley's 12-year-old sister Danielle found him dead in the toilet block at St John Lloyd Roman Catholic School in Llanelli, South Wales.

Mr John said his son had been missing for an hour and 10 minutes before the alarm was raised.

He claims teachers refused to break down the door of the cubicle where the troubled teenager was found.

Mr John, 53, will hand in a formal letter of complaint to the school tomorrow demanding that head Ashley Howells resigns.

Farmer Mr John said: 'I'm very unhappy at the way the school has handled things both before Bradley died, on the day it happened and since.

'There was a systematic failure of any workable anti-bullying policy.

'There was a failure to follow up our concerns and those of the healthcare professionals helping my son.

'I am asking for the head's resignation along with other teachers who let Bradley down.'

Bradley was being treated for Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder in the months leading up to his apparent suicide last week.

Mr John (pictured with his son) will hand in a formal letter of complaint to the school tomorrow demanding that head Ashley Howells resigns

Mr John said: 'I am asking for his school file containing details of the meetings we had with the school and what action they took against the bullying that was going on.

'The school has also put out misleading statements saying support is in place for Danielle.

'That is an untruth, they have not even picked up the phone to ask how she is.'

Mr John, of Ammanford, Carmarthenshire, is also angry over the way the school broke the tragic news.

He said: 'The head rang me to say Bradley had attempted to take his own life and paramedics were working on him.

Bradley was being treated for Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder in the months leading up to his apparent suicide last week

'I should never have been told in that way - it resulted in me driving to the school in a frantic and irresponsible way.'

Other parents will hold a peaceful protest outside the school gates at noon today(fri) while Mr John hands in four separate letters of complaint.

He added: 'We are not anarchists, we are concerned parents who want to do things properly.'

Mr John, Master of the Carmarthenshire Hunt until fox hunting was banned in the UK, described Bradley as 'the centre of our world'.

He is trying support his daughter Danielle who is 'going through hell' after finding Bradley dead.

Mr John said: 'It was her 13th birthday on Wednesday, exactly a week after Bradley died.

'I tried to maintain some degree of normality for her birthday but I failed miserably.

'It will always be her birthday a week after the anniversary of losing her big brother in such a terrible way.'

Carmarthenshire Council said it was aware of the protest and the family's concerns that Bradley was being bullied.

Cllr Glynog Davies, Executive Board Member for Education and Children's Services, said: 'There is a formal investigation underway, and therefore it is inappropriate to speculate on the circumstances leading to this tragic incident.

'We, as part of a multi-agency approach, continue to work closely with the school and the police to offer our support in every way possible.

'We wish to extend our most sincere sympathies to family, friends and all at St John Lloyd School at this deeply upsetting and difficult time.'
The young Drake fan who won over the nation earlier this summer after convincing the rapper to visit her in hospital has spoken out for the first time since receiving a heart transplant.

Sofia Sanchez, 11, underwent a nine-hour surgery on August 27, just a week after receiving a visit from the star at Lurie Children's Hospital in Chicago.

She was discharged on September 12 and has since been recovering at the Ronald McDonald House. She hopes to be able to go home by October 31 and has a Halloween costume planned for the occasion.

On Thursday, she took part in her first interview since receiving her transplant and revealed how it had changed her life.

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Sofia Sanchez, 11, is pictured on Thursday, speaking for the first time since she underwent heart surgery on August 27, a week after Drake visited her in the hospital. She was discharged from hospital on September 12 and has been recovering in Ronald McDonald House ever since

'I feel more alive. It's so much better than my other heart,' the smiley 11-year-old told ABC.

Since Drake visited her, the pair have remained in touch via text message. He gave her his personal cell number and made her promise not to share it with anyone which she hasn't.

'He said that when I'm out of the hospital and can be around more people, he said he's going to bring me up on stage and sing God's Plan with me,' Sofia told Today excitedly in a separate sit-down.

She also revealed that the rapper had sent her an iPad pro with the words 'Love always from Drake,' engraved on the back.

'It's permanently on there. You can't scratch it off!' she said excitedly of the gift and his special message.

On the day of the visit, Sofia said she had been having a 'tough morning'.

'When he came to surprise me, it made my whole entire day better.'

She had pleaded with him to come and visit her in a video after filming herself doing his In My Feelings challenge in the corridors of the hospital, hooked up to an IV.

Sofia was admitted to hospital in June after her mother Natalie noticed her health rapidly deteriorating.

Sofia's mother Natalie said she was grateful the surgery was a success and she was back to her old self

Sofia is now back on her feet, dancing through the halls of the Ronald McDonald House

Drake gave the little girl an iPad and they have been exchanging text messages ever since

The 11-year-old was stunned when Drake appeared in her hospital room on August 20

'She was really grey coloring, she was losing weight, not being able to eat. I was taking her from doctor to doctor.

'hey said asthma. One doctor said she had psychological issues,' Natalie recalled on Thursday.

Drake left this comment on a video Sofia posted where she learned she was getting a new heart

She kept visiting different doctors, sticking to her feeling that something was severely wrong.

Eventually, they ended up in the ER where a doctor recognized her condition as cardiomyopathy.

'I could tell the way the ER doctor came back in. She told me,"You were right, you saved her life,"' Natalie said.

Sofia, who is now looking forward to going back to school and seeing her friends, said she was grateful the surgery was a success.

'I'm happy it went well because some surgeries could go wrong but I am happy this one didn't because I get a second chance at life.'

Sofia begged viewers to become donors and said she was grateful for a second chance at life

Since their story went viral, more than $50,000 has been raised for the family on a GoFundMe page set up to pay for medical bills.

Natalie said on Thursday that she was grateful for the support and aware how lucky her family is.

'Some people have it worse. There is always somebody that has it worse. We have to be grateful for what we have.'

Sofia also made a plea to viewers to become heart donors.

'There's a to of kids who are waiting for a transplant and it's important for everyone to be a donor,' she said.

When she learned she would be getting a new heart a week after Drake's visit, the rapper shared his joy on Instagram, commenting on an emotional video where she learned about the transplant: 'YESSS!! My love so happy for you.'
French judges have ordered far-fight politician Marine Le Pen to undergo psychiatric tests as part of a criminal case that could see her imprisoned for up to three years.

Le Pen is facing charges relating to a series of tweets in which she posted ISIS propaganda pictures of victims of torture and executions.

According to a court document, published by Le Pen herself, the judge wants a psychiatrist to assess if she suffers from any mental illness and, if so, if that could have affected her understanding of what she was doing when she posted the tweets.

The expert is also tasked with determining whether her mental health could be a risk to the public.

Marine Le Pen, 50, is facing charges in a court in Paris, relating to a series of tweets in which she posted ISIS propaganda pictures, including the remains of U.S. journalist James Foley

The Paris court today declined to confirm it had ordered the evaluation but said the assessments were a normal part of such probes.

The 50-year-old politician has been charged with 'violent messages that incite terrorism or pornography or seriously harm human dignity, and that can be viewed by minors.'

If found guilty she could be sentenced to up to three years in prison, and receive a fine equivalent to more than 65,000.

Victim: James Foley was kidnapped and murdered by ISIS in 2014

She had used her Twitter account to post Islamic State torture pictures, including ones of the decapitated body of American journalist James Foley.

Journalist Foley was abducted by ISIS in northwestern Syria in November 2012, and beheaded by the terrorist group in August 2014.

Le Pen's tweets infuriated the Foley family, but Le Pen later claimed: 'I am being charged with condemning the horrors of Daesh [ISIS]. In other countries this would have earned a medal'.

The court in the Paris suburb of Nanterre reportedly now wants a psychiatrist to establish whether Le Pen, who came second to Emmanuel Macron in last year's presidential elections, 'is capable of understanding remarks and answering questions.'

This infuriated the leader of the National Rally, formerly known as National Front, who claims the instructions are a plot by the establishment 'to discredit her'.

Le Pen took to Twitter on Thursday, to say: 'I thought I had been through it all: well, no!

'For denouncing the horrors of Daesh using tweets the "justice system" has referred me for a psychiatric assessment.. How far will they go?!"

Publishing the legal order, Le Pen said: 'It's really incredible. This regime is really starting to worry me.'

She then said it was all part government plot to discredit her, even though there is a strict separation of powers between the executive and judiciary in France.

Ms Le Pen added: 'Of course I will not go to this psychiatric assessment and I will wait to see how the judge intends to force me.'
Dramatic footage of the second life-saving shark attack rescue mission in as many days in the Whitsundays has been captured by a helicopter paramedics' body-cam.

In the vision, the helicopter descends over the crystal blue waters of northeast Queensland before landing on the secluded beach solely occupied by the 'horrifically injured' 12-year-old victim.

The young girl, believed to be from New Zealand, was airlifted to hospital where she underwent emergency surgery on Thursday night and continues to fight for life.

Spectacular footage of the second life-saving shark attack rescue mission in as many days in the Whitsundays has been captured by a helicopter paramedics' body-cam

She was treated for 20 minutes on the beach, having sustained 'fairly large wounds with artery and bones, vessels, (and a) large haemorrhage' according to Queensland Ambulance Service's Tracey Eastwick.

'Her status at the moment could be called critical until further information is released,' Ms Eastwick told Courier Mail.

A Mackay Hospital spokesperson told Daily Mail Australia the 12-year-old's condition had not improved and she was still critical Thursday evening.

She was swimming with her father and sister near Whithaven Beach about midday Thursday when she was attacked, less than a day after a 45-year-old woman suffered critical injuries from a shark attack in the same area.

The rescue helicopter descends over the crystal blue water of northeast Queensland before landing on the secluded beach solely occupied by the 'horrifically injured' 12-year-old victim

The young girl, believed to be from New Zealand, was airlifted to hospital where she underwent emergency surgery and continues to fight for life

She was swimming near Whithaven Beach about mid day Thursday when she was attacked, less than a day after a 45-year-old woman suffered critical injuries from a shark attack in the same area (pictured being rescued Wednesday)

In a bizarre coincidence, the victims sustained strangely similar injuries - they were both mauled on the leg, just on opposing limbs.

'Unbelievably it's actually a really similar injury to what the lady yesterday suffered as well, exact same spot but opposite leg,' a rescue officer said on Thursday.

The older of the women, keen snorkeler Justine Barwick from Tasmania, was swimming near a yacht Wednesday night when she was set on by the shark.

A passing yacht, oddly carrying emergency department doctor Dr John Hadok, found the woman with life-threatening injuries and stemmed her blood loss until a rescue helicopter arrived.

The older of the women, keen snorkeler Justine Barwick (pictured being winched) from Tasmania, was swimming near a yacht Wednesday night when she was set on by the shark

Mrs Barwick, who was holidaying with her husband Craig, underwent late-night emergency surgery and remains in a critical condition at Royal Brisbane and Women's Hospital

Mrs Barwick, who was holidaying with her husband Craig, underwent late-night emergency surgery at Royal Brisbane and Women's Hospital and was in a stable condition Thursday, a spokesperson told Daily Mail Australia.

Baited drumlines are due to be deployed in the area as of Friday, while Queensland Boating and Fisheries officers were on site Thursday to stop people entering the water.

'Fisheries is working with other agencies including the police and marine parks,' the department said in a statement.

'It is important to be aware that sharks inhabit the Queensland coastline, as well as estuaries, rivers, creeks, canals and streams - both saltwater and freshwater.'

Dr John Hadok's (pictured) actions saved Mrs Barwick's life, as he was coincidentally on a nearby boat
Suzel Mackintosh, 23, sustained horrific injuries when she was attacked by a Staffordshire-pit bull crossbreed

A model who was mauled by a dog says she has to work two jobs to make ends meet following the horrific attack that ruined her career.

Perth woman Suzel Mackintosh had been working as a model in London before returning to Western Australia to visit friends.

The 23-year-old sustained horrific injuries when she was attacked by a Staffordshire-pit bull crossbreed while camping in the remote Pemberton area to celebrate New Year's Eve 2017.

In an interview with the 7.30 Report on Thursday, Ms Mackintosh revealed she struggled to find confidence and even employment, following the terrifying attack.

'I loved being a model because I could flaunt myself and feel good in my own skin,' she said.

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Ms Mackintosh revealed she struggled to find confidence and even employment, following the terrifying attack (pictured before the attack)

'I used to be quite confident and now I'm really insecure about how I look,' Ms Mackintosh (pictured) told the 7.30 Report

Ms Mackintosh (pictured) said it's been difficult to find jobs as a model and she is now forced to work two jobs

'I used to be quite confident and now I'm really insecure about how I look.

'I don't see myself in the mirror anymore.'

Ms Mackintosh, who has returned to the UK, said it's been difficult to find jobs as a model and she is now forced to work two jobs.

'I'm working two jobs trying to make ends meet, to cover all my costs and save up for future surgery,' she said.

Ms Mackintosh believes their should be licenses introduced to monitor more dangerous dogs that are likely to cause damage.

'If you have a tiny dog and it bites someone it's not going to do much damage. A dog with teeth like that, it can kill someone,' she told the 7.30 Report.

'I'm working two jobs trying to make ends meet, to cover all my costs and save up for future surgery,' she said

'I used to be quite confident and now I'm really insecure about how I look,' the model said

The model spent a week in hospital and had surgery on her face after the attack.

However, despite doctors' best efforts, the 23-year-old still finds it difficult to lift her upper lip due to muscle damage.

'I patted the dog and it just went for me. I fell back and I could feel my nose hanging off,' Ms Mackintosh told the Daily Star Sunday.

Ms Mackintosh said she and friends had played with the animal during the day and then placed it in a vehicle when night fell.

She said: 'I went to get something from the car and it jumped on my face. I did nothing to provoke it.'

Ms Mackintosh has never received an apology from the dog owner, which she says 'hurts more than the injuries'.

She sustained horrific injuries when she was attacked by a Staffordshire-pit bull crossbreed while camping in the remote Pemberton area

The Perth woman had been working as a model in London before returning to Western Australia to visit friends.
British author Daisy Johnson has become the youngest author to be shortlisted for the prestigious Man Booker Prize.

The 27-year-old, one of the six on the shortlist for the literary fiction prize, has been recognised for her book Everything Under.

The other five authors on the list are British author Anna Burns for Milkman, Canadian author Esi Edugyan for Washington Black and Scottish poet Robin Robertson for The Long Take.

British author Daisy Johnson (pictured left) has become the youngest author to be shortlisted for the prestigious Man Booker Prize for her novel, Everything Under (right)

The list features four female authors and three British authors in total, as well as two American authors: Rachel Kushner for The Mars Room and Richard Powers for The Overstory.

Announcing the shortlist at a press conference in London, the chair of this year's judging panel, Kwame Anthony Appiah, said: 'All of our six finalists are miracles of stylistic invention. In each of them the language takes centre stage. And yet in every other respect they are remarkably diverse, exploring a multitude of subjects ranging across space and time.

'These books speak very much to our moment, but we believe that they will endure'.

The list of 13 authors from the longlist announced in July this year was whittled down to the final six by the five-strong judging panel comprised of Appiah, as well as Scottish crime writer Val McDermid, cultural critic Leo Robson, writer and critic Jacqueline Rose and graphic novelist Leanne Shapton.

The list features four female authors and three British authors in total, as well as two American authors: Rachel Kushner for The Mars Room and Richard Powers for The Overstory

Works chosen this year encompass slavery, imprisonment, sectarian violence, and the acute dependence of humans on the natural and its coming catastrophe.

Johnson's Everything Under tells the tale of a girl living on a canal boat, mixing memory and 'personal mythologies' as she looks back to her youth and examines language.

McDermid said that the novel is summarised by the word 'fluidity', in myth, story and in gender, in a retelling of the tragic Oedipus myth.

Kushner's The Mars Room was labelled a 'heartbreaking exploration of lives at the margins of society', by Appiah. It is set against the grim backdrop of a women's prison.

Burns' Milkman uses her experiences of the Troubles in Northern Ireland to explore politics and society through sexual harassment and the stifling nature of some communities. It grapples, in the words of Appiah, with 'daily violence'.

The panel judges (left to right) Jacqueline Rose, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Val McDermid, Leo Robson and Leanne Shapton during the Man Booker Prize 2018 shortlist announcement

A tale of slavery and history told through a fable-like lens, Edugyan's Washington Black has been described as a 'ravishing' and sweeping novel which takes in everything from the plantations to Moroccan deserts. The Canadian author was praised by panel judge Robson for having told the tale with 'majestic grandeur'.

With a genre-defying entry, Robertson's verse novel The Long Take - which also includes photographs - follows the psychological trials of a D-Day veteran.

Powers has been selected for The Overstory, which sees nine strangers 'summoned by trees'. Graphic novelist and judge Shapton said it was the 'eco-epic of the year and perhaps the decade'.

The judges responded to the inclusion of non-UK authors with chair Appiah saying they 'do not check writers' passports' but simply read the books.

In 2013, aged 28, New Zealander Eleanor Catton was previously the youngest winner of the 50,000 prize for her novel The Luminaries.

The Man Booker Prize for fiction was first awarded in 1969 and the winner will be announced on October 16.
Investigators have identified three more potential victims after a California surgeon and his girlfriend were charged with drugging and raping two intoxicated women - as one of his former Tinder dates described him as aggressive.

Grant Robicheaux, 38, and his girlfriend Cerissa Riley, 32, were charged on September 12 with rape and other offenses in connection with alleged attacks on two women.

Robicheaux, who is an orthopedic surgeon from Newport Beach in Orange County, briefly appeared on Bravo reality show Online Dating Rituals of the American Male.

The Orange County district attorney's office said prosecutors have received numerous calls from potential victims since Tuesday when the initial charges were announced.

Grant William Robicheaux, 38, and his girlfriend Cerissa Laura Riley, 32, were charged on September 11 with rape in connection with alleged attacks on two women

Lauren Hayden, a woman who met Robicheaux on Tinder, said she narrowly escaped being one of his victims after describing him as aggressive

A woman who met Robicheaux on Tinder told Inside Edition that she narrowly escaped being one of his victims.

Lauren Hayden said they spent time at his Newport Beach house but she left after he allegedly became too aggressive.

'He just kept trying to rip my clothes off and I kept saying I'm not ready for that,' she said. 'I just remember I kept trying to retie my top and trying to keep it on and him trying to grab it off.'

Hayden recalls saying to him: 'What are you doing, what part of no do you not understand?'

'He's disgusting, he's deplorable, he's a monster.'

Defense attorneys say Robicheaux and Riley deny the claims.

'All allegations of non-consensual sex are unequivocally denied by Grant Robicheaux and his girlfriend Cerissa Riley,' attorneys Philip Cohen and Scott Borthwick said in a statement.

Lauren Hayden said they spent time at his Newport Beach house (above) after meeting on Tinder but she left after he allegedly became too aggressive

Robicheaux, 38, appeared on Bravo reality show Online Dating Rituals of the American Male

The attorneys said none of the allegations involve Robicheaux's medical practice or patients.

Authorities on Tuesday called for any other possible victims to come forward after police found hundreds of videos of intoxicated women believed to have been assaulted by the duo.

Investigators believe the duo trawled bars and restaurants in Newport Beach for victims and also hunted their prey at festivals over the past few years including Burning Man, the Dirtybird Campout festival and the Splash House festival in Palm Springs.

In calling for potential other victims to come forward, Orange County District Attorney Tony Rackauckas said that women 'might have felt a false sense of security' around Robicheaux and his girlfriend because they are 'clean-cut and good looking'.

'We have all heard of a wolf dressed up in sheep's clothing,' Rackauckas said.

'Well, a wolf can wear scrubs or doctors' clothing. Or the wolf can be a beautiful woman.

The duo are avid festival-goers and attended Burning Man and Splash House Festival. it is believed they hunted for victims at the festivals

A press release states Riley was also knowingly vicariously in possession of a firearm

Law enforcement is asking anyone with information to come forward and are concern they may have preyed on people at events and possibly the surgeon's patients

They have each been charged with more than a half-dozen felonies, including rape by use of drugs, assault with intent to commit a sexual offense, and possession of a controlled substance for sale.

During investigations police found videos on the couple's phones that suggest they could have taken advantage of up to 1,000 women.

'There are several videos where there women in the videos appear to be highly intoxicated beyond the ability to consent or resist and they're barely responsive to the defendants' sexual advances,' Rackauckas said.

Rackauckas said that in January police searched Robicheaux's apartment and found ecstasy, date-rape drugs and cocaine.

In the first case, a 32-year-old woman told how she met the couple at a restaurant in Newport Beach in April 2016. She said the duo invited her to party on a boat.

Prosecutors claim that once she was intoxicated they 'escorted' her to Robicheaux's apartment, gave her 'multiple drugs' and then raped her.

The alleged victim called police the day after the incident to report the rape and tests proved she had multiple controlled substances in her system.

The second victim alleges she was attacked on October 2, 2016, after meeting the couple in a Newport Beach bar. She says she drank with them until she was 'unconscious' and then woke up to them 'sexually assaulting her'.

Robicheaux had two assault rifles unlawfully and his charges are enhanced for possessing a firearm during a health and safety code violation

Riley and Robicheaux are thought to have taken advantage of 1,000 women

She screamed for help and neighbors called police.

Robicheaux is also accused of possessing two illegal, unregistered assault rifles, four other firearms and several large-capacity magazines.

The doctor is known for appearing on one episode of the Bravo dating show, titled 'Three's a Crowd'. It only lasted for one season in 2014.

Robicheaux was an undergraduate at Louisiana State University and then graduated from its medical school in 2007.

He then did postgraduate work at New York University Hospital for Joint Diseases in New York City and did an orthopedic surgery residency at University of California Irvine Medical Center in Orange, California.

He was licensed to practice medicine in California on May 30, 2009.

Riley previously worked as a substitute teacher in the Fullerton School District. Her last assignment there was in October 2015 and there had been no complaints regarding her conduct. it is unclear if she is currently still teaching.

Robicheaux and Riley were released on $100,000 bail each and are scheduled for arraignment Octovber 24.

Robicheaux faces up to 40 years in state prison if convicted of all charges and Riley faces up to 30 years and eight months.
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The works of hundreds of tattoo artists are being showcased in a new book about body art from all over the world.

The book, a collaboration between journalist Nicholas Schonberger and body art publication TTTism magazine, explores modern tattoo culture and its place in contemporary history.

TTT: Tattoo also delves deep into the ancient tradition of body modification and tattooing, and looks at how different styles have developed over the years.

Its features the work over 300 of the worlds best tattoo studios and individuals, including the legendary Ed Hardy, The Leu family and Kenji Alucky.

The book contains images of trendy geometric black-and-white styles, traditional Japanese body art and modern fusion tattoos.

Draw me like one of your French girls: French artist Lewisink, 27, is a former graphic designer who first started doing small tattoes on friends six years ago, and is now known for his asymmetric designs

In colour: Both of these tattoos are colourful Asian-style pieces, with the left full back tattoo by British artist Stewart Robson in more traditional Japanese style, and the right given as an example of Contemporary Asian Tattooing, carrying on the strong body art tradition on the continent

From Brighton, with love: Tattoo artist Jason Mosseri founded the 1770 tattoo shop in Brighton in 2005, and while he spends most of his time nowadays making bespoke handmade chairs, he still creates fantastic body art on the side

French tattoo artist Silly Jane describes her self as a 'lover of the Japanese ero-guro (erotic and grotesque) art movement'

Two worlds: Tattoos by Frederico Rabelo, left, often resemble Renaissance paintings, while Alvaro Flores, from Melbourne, Australia is inspired by architectural patterns

Iconic: Before he became known to younger generations for the clothing and accessories brand carrying his name, Don Ed Hardy became known for his iconic works of Japanese-style art work which incorporated more American elements, such as cartoon animals, eagles and MC culture motives

German tribes: Artist 'Gerhard' works at Blut & Eisen - meaning Blood and Iron - in Berlin, and has created this blackout lower-body artwork incorporating mandalas and geometric patterns

The finer details: American artist Talley Matthew is known for black and white pieces with fine lines and bold placement of the tattoos on the body, and he often includes organic elements, such as roses or other flowers

Abby Drielsma is a young tattoo artist from Melbourne, Australia, who, like Maud Dardeau - whose work can be seen on the right - works in black and grey
Police in Washington DC have made an arrest in the fatal stabbing of a newly engaged technology company executive who was attacked while jogging Tuesday evening.

During a press conference Thursday morning, DC Mayor Muriel Bowser and Metro Police Chief Peter Newsham announced the arrest of 23-year-old Anthony Crawford, of northwest DC, in the brutal killing of 35-year-old Wendy Martinez.

Chief Newsham said a combination of information received from patrol officers and tips from members of the public generated by a surveillance video helped homicide detectives track down Crawford in Girard Street Park on Wednesday night.

The 23-year-old was taken in for questioning and charged this morning with first-degree murder while armed.

'We do not have any information to suggest that Wendy knew or had any association with the suspect in this case,' the chief of police told reporters. 'We also do not have any information to suggest it was a robbery, so the motive in this case right now is unknown.'

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Caught: DC police on Wednesday night arrested Anthony Crawford, 23, seen in a surveillance video left, in the stabbing death of jogger Wendy Martinez, 35 (right)

Video shows Wendy Karina Martinez, 35, dash into the restaurant as blood gushed from a laceration to her neck

Newsham said the suspect was initially taken to a hospital with an injury to his hand, and he described him as being uncooperative.

Crawford has a prior criminal history in DC, but the chief declined to go into specifics, only saying his past record did not include violent offenses.

On Wednesday, shocking footage emerged showing a mortally wounded Martinez running into a Chinese takeout store for help.

The video, obtained by Fox News, the victim dash into the restaurant as blood gushed from a laceration to her neck. While some ran away from the horrific scene, other patrons rushed to her side.

She was taken to hospital, where she was pronounced dead.

Martinez was out for an evening run near Logan Circle just before 8pm when she was attacked by a knife-wielding male stranger at the intersection of 11th and P streets.

Young professional: Martinez worked as a chief of staff at a DC-based technology and management company

Chief Newsham described the event as: 'very disturbing'.

'You have a young woman out here exercising... in a very safe neighborhood,' he said.

'You have a lot of people out here, who are enjoying dinner across the street. It's unsettling.'

The Georgetown graduate had just become engaged just last week, according to her heartbroken family, with a storybook proposal and a emerald ring.

A photo from the happy occasion shows fiance Daniel Hincapie in a blue suit, down on one knee, with a ring box open as she stood beaming.

Family say she was excited to be planning her wedding to the DC bank executive.

She beamed as she showed off her new emerald and diamond sparkler just days before her brutal murder

The young executive got engaged just last week to her fiance Daniel Hincapie. Family say she was already excited to be planning their wedding

Martinez lived not far from the crime scene and was an avid jogger known to run for miles. Her Facebook account features photos from past races.

Police believe the attacker, described as a black man, did not know Martinez and that it was most likely a random act of violence and a 'singular incident.'

The chief said the suspect was last seen wearing a long-sleeve mustard-colored shirt, dark-colored sweatpants, white socks and light-colored sandals.

Police have released surveillance video showing the person of interest casually walking in the area around the time of the deadly attack, swinging an arm.

Fox 5 DC reported that the knife used in the stabbing has been recovered at the scene.

The jogger was attacked as she waited to cross the street at the intersection of 11th and O streets

The victim's family released a statement after the shocking murder, describing the 'light of our lives' daughter who was killed. They said in party:

'Wendy Karina Martinez was the light of our lives. Not only was she an avid runner, but she was a devout Christian, a wonderful friend, and a driven professional. Everything you hope that a daughter and a friend could be. She was also excited to be planning her upcoming wedding to her fiance, Daniel Hincapie. They were engaged just last week.'

Martinez, seen here in photos with her now-fiance Daniel, was an avid jogger who was known for running for miles around DC

Martinez, whose family described her as the 'light of our lives', had a Master's degree in Latin-American studies form Georgetown

According to her LinkedIn profile, Martinez had a Master's degree in Latin American studies and conflict resolution from Georgetown University. For the last two years, she had worked as chief of staff at the technology and management company FiscalNote.

Martinez's employer addressed news of her violent death in a tweet sent out on Wednesday.

'The entire FiscalNote family is shocked and deeply saddened to learn that Wendy Martinez, our Chief of Staff, was killed last night,' the message read. 'Wendy was an invaluable member of our team and a vibrant member of the community. Our thoughts and prayers are with Wendy's family and friends.'
A former schoolmate of the woman who accused Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of sexually assaulting her roughly 36 years ago says she has 'no idea' whether or not the scandalous moment ever happened, days after insisting that it did.

Cristina King Miranda wrote this week in a since-deleted Facebook post that what Christine Blasey Ford remembers 'did happen.'

But she told NPR on Thursday: 'That it happened or not, I have no idea. I cant say that it did or didnt.'

Miranda's seeming corroboration added momentum on Thursday to Democrats' case against confirming Judge Kavanaugh to a lifetime appointment on America's highest court.

Ford, now 51, claims a 17-year-old Kavanaugh pinned her down on a bed at a party when she was 15, covered her mouth, groped her and tried to remove her clothing.

She also says Kavanaugh's friend Mark Judge cranked up music in the locked room so her cries of protest couldn't be heard.

Both men have denied being in any such situation.

NPR reported that Miranda said she believes Ford. But her quoted about-face could tilt the scales of public opinion back in Kavanaugh's favor.

Cristina King Miranda, a 1980s schoolmate of Judge Brett Kavanaugh accuser Christine Ford, on Thursday walked back her confident earlier corroboration of Ford's allegation that Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her when they were teenagers

Kavanaugh, pictured leaving his Maryland home on Thursday morning, is President Donald Trump's nominee for a Supreme Court seat vacated by the now-retired Justice Anthony Kennedy

Ford (left) has accused Brett Kavanaugh of pinning her down to a bed during a party more than 35 years ago, covering her mouth, and groping her over a one-piece bathing suit while he tried to disrobe her. Kavanaugh flatly denies that it ever happened

Writing of her mini-essay on Facebook, she said Thursday: 'In my post I was, you know, empowered. And I was sure it probably did [happen].'

She said that days ago, 'I had no idea that I would have to now, you know, go to the specifics and defend it before 50 cable channels, and have my face spread all over MSNBC news and Twitter.'

Miranda had written on Facebook that she didn't know Ford personally when they were teens at the same private high school, 'but I remember her. This incident did happen.'

'Many of us heard a buzz about it indirectly with few specific details. However Christines vivid recollection should be more than enough for us to truly, deeply know that the accusation is true.'

'The incident was spoken about for days afterwards in school,' she wrote. 'Kavanaugh should stop lying, own up to it and apologize.'

Some details about Ford's claims remain inexact, including what time of year it happened. Her lawyer Lisa Banks told NPR this week that it was 'in the early summer' before her junior year in high school.

Banks said that 'as with many victims of sexual assault, some parts of a story, particularly the timing, might become fuzzy or vague. But her recollection of these events is crystal clear  the actual attack.'

Miranda made her original claim, that what Ford describes 'did happen,' on her Facebook page, which also contains photos like this one from a 2009 trip to the Burning Man festival

Christine Blasey (now Ford) and Brett Kavanaugh are pictured in their high school yearbooks

Cristina King (left) is pictured at Holton-Arms school in Bethesda, Maryland, with an nuidentified classmate

Miranda also wrote this week on Facebook, in a since-deleted post, that she would never have supported Kavanaugh's nomination, and that she felt 'horrible' when Kavanaugh friend Mark Judge  who Ford claims was in the room when Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her  stood her up on the night of her junior prom.

A New York Times feature published Wednesday adds a new dimension to the saga, with other former Ford schoolmates hinting that slivered elements of their memories jive with hers.

A male friend recalled that at the time she isolated herself and 'fell off the face of the earth socially

'All I remember is after my junior year thinking, "Wheres Chrissy Blasey?" ... I was like, "Where did she go?"' he told the Times.

And Cheryl Amitay, who graduated from Holton-Arms a year behind Ford told the newspaper that she, too, was sexually assaulted at a beer-soaked high school party during her sophomore year.

Two drunk teen boys, Amitay said, pushed her up against a car and groped her. One of them put his hand up her skirt and tore off her underwear.

'I will never forget that,' she added. 'When my mom picked me up she knew something was wrong, but I didnt say anything. You never say a thing. You feel like a jerk.'

Ford's lawyers have not said whether she will accept Senate Judiciary Committee Republicans' invitation for her to testify Monday about her recollections. Chairman Chuck Grassley of Iowa has given her a deadline of noon on Friday to decide.

Protesters placed a sign supporting Ford in front of the White House on Wednesday and spelled out the word 'AMORAL' near the Pennsylvania Avenue curb

Miranda made her first claim on Twitter that she had knowledge of Kavanaugh allegedly attacking Ford in high school, saying it was 'spoken about' at school after it happened

Miranda deleted her post hours later, saying she had been beseiged with unwanted media interview requests

Two hours later she clarified that she had no 'first hand knowledge' of what Ford claims

Miranda, posting on Facebook under her maiden name, said this week that she would never have supported Kavanaugh's nomination, and that she felt 'horrible' when Kavanaugh friend Mark Judge  who Ford claims was in the room when Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her  stood her up on the night of her junior prom

President Donald Trump said Wednesday that her performance in such a hearing could determine whether he stands by his embattled nominee.

'Look, if she shows up and makes a credible showing that'll be very interesting,' Trump told reporters at the White House, 'and we'll have to make a decision.'

'But I can only say this: he is such an outstanding man. Very hard for me to imagine that anything happened.'

An attorney speaking for Ford said Wednesday that she wouldn't cooperate with Judiciary Committee hearings until after the FBI had conducted an investigation of her claims. Senate Democrats have joined her in that demand.

Grassley wrote to them late Wednesday, saying that while the FBI conducts background checks of judicial nominees for national security purposes, it 'does not make a credibility assessment of any information it receives.'

And while the FBI's process is meant to be confidential, he added, Ford 'has already made her allegations public. ... Because Dr. Fords allegations are in the public arena, there is no longer a need for a confidential FBI investigation.'
Josephine Iyamu (pictured), 51, was sentenced to 14 years in jail at Birmingham Crown Court on July 4. Solicitor General Robert Buckland went to the Court of Appeal on Thursday to challenge the initial jail term

An NHS nurse who used 'voodoo' magic to traffic vulnerable women from Nigeria into Europe to work as prostitutes has had her jail sentence increased to 18 years.

Josephine Iyamu, formerly of south London, was jailed after she used a witch doctor to convince her victims they were under her control and exploited them to fund a lavish lifestyle including trips to Europe and 700 designer shoes.

Solicitor General Robert Buckland went to the Court of Appeal on Thursday to challenge the initial jail term of 14 years handed out in July this year.

As she tearfully watched the proceedings via videolink from prison, Mr Buckland urged three judges to find that the sentence imposed at Birmingham Crown Court in July was 'far too low' and should be increased.

After a hearing in London, Lord Justice Davis, Mrs Justice Simler and Mr Justice Dove ruled that the total sentence imposed on Iyamu, now 52, was 'unduly lenient' and upped it to 18 years.

Announcing the court's decision, Lord Justice Davis warned that others found guilty of such 'grave' offences could expect severe sentences.

The 51-year-old was a ringleader of an international human trafficking crime network and lived in a huge Nigerian mansion complete with a servants' quarters.

Liberia-born Iyamu, who was made a British citizen in 2009 having been allowed to stay in the UK due to her nursing qualifications, organised the travel of five women from Nigeria to Germany.

She was the first person to be prosecuted in the UK for arranging or facilitating travel for sexual exploitation of victims with no connection to Britain - and was sentenced to 14 years behind bars on July 4.

Iyamu (pictured left during her arrest) was been convicted of using 'juju' magic to frighten Nigerian prostitutes who were trafficked to Europe. During questioning (right) she refused to answer any questions

The victims were convinced they were under control due to the magic and trafficked to Europe

Iyamu was found guilty at the end of a 10-week trial of five offences under the Modern Slavery Act, and also of perverting the course of justice while on remand by arranging for relatives of the complainants in Nigeria to be arrested.

Passing sentence, Judge Richard Bond told the married nurse that her 'vile' offences had left the women in fear of their lives.

Iyamu charged each of her victims 30,000 and 38,000 to arrange for their travel to Europe - profiting from more than 15,000 from one victim alone via wire transfers and cash payments.

One of the brothels to which the victims were brought in Germany

The victims would then be forced to endure an arduous journey to the Libyan coast - which saw them shot at, ambushed and gang raped.

They would then catch an inflatable boat crammed with hundreds of people to Italy before being moved into Germany to work as prostitutes.

Iyamu forced one of her victims to have an abortion in Italy after being raped and impregnated on the journey.

The judge said she would have been fully aware of the dangers involved in a four-week land journey across the Sahara to Tripoli in Libya, followed by a sea voyage on inflatable boats.

The court heard during the trial that Iyamu made her victims swear oaths to hand over money during 'juju' ceremonies which saw them ordered to eat chicken hearts, drink blood containing worms, and endure powder being rubbed into cuts.

The prosecution said it was clear that Iyamu, known as 'Madam Sandra', had travelled extensively across Europe and into Africa on a regular basis to meet victims.

German police identified Iyamu as the ringleader of a Nigerian human trafficking operation after a brothel owner reported suspicions over one of his workers' paperwork last January.

Iyamu and her husband Efe Ali-Imaghodor, 60, were arrested at Heathrow Airport on August 24 last year after travelling back from Nigeria.

Police found her in possession of seven mobile phones and more than 30 SIM cards linked them to the German investigation.

Officers also discovered a piece of paper detailing a list of items needed as part of the 'Juju' ceremonies and another with telephone numbers of criminal associates.

Iyamu and her husband funded a lavish lifestyle by trafficking the women - pictured is just the servants quarters of their mansion in Nigeria

Footage obtained by Nigerian authorities showed one of the 'juju' ceremonies taking place

Iyamu had worked 37 days in 2016/17 as an agency nurse in south east London hospitals for NHS Capitol Staffing Services.

She lived with husband Ali-Imaghodor, a cloakroom attendant, in an ex-council home in Bermondsey, south east London.

The National Crime Agency (NCA) investigation found the victims - aged 24 to 30 - were made to undergo Juju rituals which exercised a control 'tighter than chains.'

They were so terrified by the threat of voodoo magic that they had to undergo another black magic 'revokation' ceremony to undo the oath they took to pay Iyamu.

Kay Mellor, NCA senior investigating officer, said Iyamu, originally from Liberia, became a British citizen in 2009 due to her nursing qualifications - which allowed her to be prosecuted in the groundbreaking case.

She is the first British national to be convicted of human trafficking crimes not involving British victims and which were not committed in the country.

Ms Mellor said: 'She was a registered nurse, she was an agency nurse and that totally goes against for me what a nurse is - somebody who looks after people, who makes them better and certainly what she was doing was totally opposed to what in my mind a nurse should be.'

Police found an array of phones and sim cars on Iyamu when she was arrested in London

The trafficking investigation - Operation Redroot - began after one victim was arrested and told German police of Iyamu's crimes. The victim's phone was then wire-tapped to gather evidence.

The prostitute last January told German police she was born into a 'relatively poor family' in Nigeria and was told she could earn huge amounts of money working as a prostitute in Europe.

Juju is a form of voodoo with 'highly respected' priests in West Africa.

The Nigerian victims visited the priest multiple times and for up to a week as part of the oath-swearing ceremony.

Ms Mellor said: 'They exert an insidious control which an expert witness has said is more powerful than chains.'

Describing the ceremony, the officer added: 'They were given blood containing worms to drink.

'A chicken was used to hit her naked body on the back and on the chest. She had to eat the heart of the chicken which had just been killed. And the priest would cut their skin and mouth with a razor blade.'

Iyamu then took snippets of her victims' head and pubic hair and kept them in individualised packages and she told the girls: 'You have now eaten from the devil and if you do not pay, the devil will kill you.'

Defence counsel John Benson QC told the court that Iyamu - the daughter of a politician - had 'lost everything' as a result of her conviction, including her hope of pursuing a political career in Nigeria.
President Trump is putting new pressure on GOP lawmakers to 'get tough' and fund his border wall in a spending bill that will the federal government humming along until the end of the year.

They're declining to force a government shutdown over the issue just before the midterm elections that are six weeks away. Trump has expressed his displeasure with the tactic but consented in order to help his party maintain control of Congress.

He signaled on Thursday that he was reconsidering his position, though, as he derided a Senate-passed bill as 'ridiculous' because it doesn't include money for his border structure.

'I want to know, where is the money for Border Security and the WALL in this ridiculous Spending Bill, and where will it come from after the Midterms? Dems are obstructing Law Enforcement and Border Security. REPUBLICANS MUST FINALLY GET TOUGH!' he tweeted.

President Trump is putting new pressure on GOP lawmakers to 'get tough' and fund his border wall in a spending bill that will the federal government humming along until the end of the year

Existing barrier: Trump wants to see a taller, longer, barrier than this across the U.S-Mexican border; the Senate has not allocated any money for it and wants to wait until after the election to take the issue on

He signaled on Thursday that he was reconsidering his position as he derided a Senate-passed bill as 'ridiculous' because it doesn't include funding for his border wall

Congress faces a Sept. 30 deadline to pass some sort of spending legislation in order to prevent a federal shutdown.

The Senate on Tuesday approved a $854 billion bill that encompasses the president's other legislative priorities like defense spending a pay raise for the troops.

That bill sailed through the Senate and was headed to the House for passage.

While the president could veto the bill in search of a better deal, Congress needs just a two-thirds majority of lawmakers to vote to override him. The Senate passed its version of the bill 97-3 the first time around.

Their compromise measure bundles several spending bills into one and authorizes $675 billion in defense spending. That includes a 2.6 percent pay raise for the armed services - the biggest boost in nearly a decade for the rank and file.

Lawmakers from both parties complained about what was or wasn't in the bill, but overall, the committee that oversees government spending hailed the legislation as a success.

'We did our job and focused on what we should be doing - making responsible, thoughtful decisions about how to fund these federal agencies and leaving controversial policy issues out of it,' said Vermont Sen. Patrick Leahy, the ranking Democrat on Appropriations.

Trump indicated in the Thursday morning tweet that had the potential to blow the deal up before it ever makes it to the floor of the House that he's having second-thoughts now about punting on his most-cherished campaign promise.

He ordered Republicans to 'get tough' and also demanded they prove to him that he will get the money for his wall after they're reelected.

The president similarly ranted in a Saturday tweet, before the Senate wrapped up its work on the spending bill, that GOP leaders are 'being played' by congressional Democrats, and they should stand firm on the wall.

'When will Republican leadership learn that they are being played like a fiddle by the Democrats on Border Security and Building the Wall? Without Borders, we dont have a country,' he charged. 'With Open Borders, which the Democrats want, we have nothing but crime! Finish the Wall!'

Two weeks ago, Trump eased off his position, telling Fox News in an interview that he understood why lawmakers wanted to punt on the wall until later this year.

Trump acknowledged, 'I have a lot of great Republicans, we need Republicans elected in the midterms, we have to get Republicans. And we are getting the wall done, but Ive had so many people, good people, great people - they'd rather not do it before, they'd rather do it right after the election.

'They dont want to do anything that would upset the apple cart. And my inclination, if it was up to me, Id shut down government over border security in a second. And I guess when you get right down to it, it is up to me,' he said. 'But I dont want to do anything thats going to hurt us or potentially hurt us because I have a feeling that the Republicans are going to do very well.'

The president said he'd received commitments from Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Speaker Paul Ryan to seek funding for the wall 'immediately after the election' and that was enough to keep him from single-handedly forcing a shutdown.

'So most likely I will not do that, but were going to do it immediately after the election,' he said. 'We do it right after the election, where hopefully, frankly itll be easy because well have more Republicans, not less.'

The president said earlier this month that he'd received commitments from Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (pictured) and House Speaker Paul Ryan to seek funding for the wall 'immediately after the election' and that was enough. Now he's thinking the strategy

He was confident then that his party would pick up seats in the midterms and he would, in fact, get his funding, just as he was promised.

'Were doing very well in this area and I think were doing really very well in the House, but well see how it comes out,' he said. 'So were going to get the wall, we've already started the wall and we'll continue onward.'

The strategy to hold off on a spending fight had the reluctant support of conservative hardliners like House Freedom Caucus chairman Mark Meadows.

'Not fighting for the wall becomes a tactical question more than folding,' Meadows told The Huffington Post around the same time. 'You know, whens the best time to take that fight?' he said.

Trump has himself waffled on whether he'd allow the government to go into free fall in order to get the money for the project. He said he didn't see it happening one day this month, only to proclaim later the very same day that 'if its about border security, Im willing to do anything.'

The problem of where the money for the wall will come from has plagued Trump's presidency, after the Republican promised before he was elected that Mexico would fund the border barrier that is intended to keep out immigrants and drugs.

Trump has since said he would exact the money through a renegotiated trade deal with Mexico.

The Mexican foreign minister said just after the deal was reached that there was no direct or indirect payment included, however, to the U.S. to pay for the construction of Trump's border barier.

'We just reached a trade understanding with the US, and the outlook for the relationship between our two countries is very positive. We will NEVER pay for a wall, however. That has been absolutely clear from the very beginning,' Mexican Foreign Minister Luis Videgaray Caso tweeted.
Donald Trump's former strategist Steve Bannon has warned consumers that the White House's tariffs on foreign goods may put up the price of 'the junk you buy at Walmart'.

The startling admission, in an interview with Anne McElvoy on Economist radio, came days after the White House announced the most punitive round of trade sanctions yet on Chinese goods.

Walmart, the nation's and the world's largest retailer, had written to Trump's trade representative Robert Lighthizer earlier this month, urging him not to impose tariffs on items including Christmas lights, bicycles, shampoo, dog food and air conditioners.

But Bannon told the Economist Asks podcast: 'Our system of economic nationalism is about maximizing the value of citizenship and sometimes that may have trade deals, tariffs, protection...

'And guess what - you may end up paying 5% more or 10% more for the junk you buy at Walmart.'

The derogatory description of the products of Walmart, the biggest grocery chain in the U.S. with more than 11,000 branches - comes at in inconvenient time for the White House.

Back in the groove: Steve Bannon told the Economist Asks podcast that his former boss Donald Trump was right to impose tariffs for the sake of 'economic nationalism' - even at the risk of a 10 per cent rise in the cost of 'the junk you buy at Walmart'

Retail warning: Walmart has already warned Trump's trade representative that tariffs risk price increases for consumers. The nation's largest retailer listed items it wanted exempted from levies, including Christmas lights and air conditioners

Enemies: Bannon renewed his criticism of Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner being in Trump's White House, saying: 'I don't agree that it serves his best interests that they are staffers - they had very different ideas about populism and some of the economic nationalism.'

It is fending off criticism from Walmart and other major businesses that the imposition of $200 billion of tariffs on Chinese goods from Monday, on top of $50 billion worth of products President Trump has previously taxed in a mounting trade war.

Pressed on whether the measures could 'cost the Walmart shopper more,' Bannon replied: 'This is the ultimate fetish, yes, the consumer sometimes may actually end up paying more, but the trade-off will be high value-added manufacturing jobs that you can build a family around.'

The new trade row comes as the White House sought to calm tensions with Walmart.

Ivanka Trump heads to Dallas to visit the store's staff training program Thursday, a move which appeared to be an olive branch by the White House.

It is not however the first time that Bannon, architect of Trump's campaign success and his 'America First' slogan has locked horns with the First Daughter and her husband Jared Kushner.

Revealing fresh details of fierce rows during his time in the White House with Ivanka Trump, Bannon compared their rows to a 'knife fight.

'On a number of occasions, Ivanka and I would get into it.

When we I had fights I would say to her, "You are first daughter and I understand you you love your father, but here you are just another staffer and you have a chain of command."

'In a bureaucratic knife fight I can give as good as I get.'

He described Ivanka Trump as 'very smart and tough and loves her father'.

But he added of Ivanka and Kushner: 'I don't agree that it serves his best interests that they are staffers - they had very different ideas about populism and some of the economic nationalism.'

Bannon also criticized the Trump campaign's preparations for the crucial November mid-term elections saying: 'If we had the mid-terms today we'd lose 35 seats minimum.

'Now on the evening of November 6th there are going to be half a dozen to a dozen congressional districts that are going to come down to a couple of hundred votes that will decide the majority.'

'There've been people - senior people associated with the campaign  who've said to Trump "It's not so bad if you lose to the Democrats You can run against them and win in 2020." These people are detached from reality.'

The elections are deemed vital to Trump's presidency as Democrats seek to re-assert their electoral force in a blue wave, hoping to retake the House of Representatives, make gains in the Senate and in governors' races.

He blamed 'a dangerous and insidious deep state' in the White House, for undermining the Trump agenda - and said he has been sending messages to Trump, advising his old boss to take a firmer stand on an anonymous article in the New York Times while laid bare internal opposition among senior West Wing staff.

Protested: Steve Bannon's appearance at The Economist's Open Future Festival in New York was controversial and came after The New Yorker withdrew his invitation to a similar forum. The event at 7 World Trade Center drew protests as a result of Bannon's presence

'I think the president has to do  not a witch hunt but the president needs to get in the Justice Department and the FBI... and hunt the sources of the article.'

One senior figure who put her head above the parapet in the aftermath of the op-ed was Nikki Haley, the ambassador to the United Nations, who wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post saying that she expressed her disagreements with the president face-to-face, not anonymously.

Bannon also expressed backing for a potential power bid by Haley and said: 'She's not shy about telling the President where she disagrees. I think she has tremendous future . and I hope she becomes a fiery populist.'

And quizzed on the impact on the administration of a grand plea bargain by former campaign chairman Paul Manafort, Bannon replied: 'If there is a plea bargain, especially with a prosecutors focused as Mueller, I wouldn't have a dinner that night celebrate.'

Since leaving the White House last year Bannon has sought to build a populist movement uniting populist forces in Europe.

He also intervened in the interview in domestic British politics, where the country's referendum decision to leave the European Union has led to ferocious rows over the arrangements on how the UK trades with the EU's remaining 26 members.

On Brexit, Bannon prophesied there 'would 'be 100% 'a trade deal after Brexit'.

But he voiced doubts that it Britain would ultimately leave the EU.

'I think there wil be a a 'do-ver' on Brexit. The opponents are dragging it on and hoping people forget about it ' He favors Boris Johnson as a successor to Theresa May.

'I have talked to Boris Johnson and I am very impressed by him.'

And he defended Johnson's controversial use of the suicide vest 'It was the type of phrase that cuts through', but thinks the former Foreign Secretary should have struck out nmore firmly against Theresa May when he quit the Cabinet over the Chequers deal this summer

'I was vocal (to Boris) about the fact that he had a Churchillian moment  maybe his Commons speech could have rallied the troops. My advice would have been to seize moments like that. You have to make decisions in the heat of the moment  and that was a moment.'

Anne McElvoy is Senior Editor and head of Economist Radio. The podcast is available from acst.com or on itunes
A Texas animal shelter claiming to operate as a 'no-kill' facility is under investigation after a 'multitude of animals' were euthanized.

The Montgomery County Animal Shelter (MCAS) in Conroe, allegedly put down several animals that were brought in from a hoarder.

Two employees have been suspended after the Montgomery County Sheriffs office got involved.

The Montgomery County Animal Shelter (MCAS) in Conroe (pictured), claiming to operate as a 'no-kill' facility, is under investigation after a 'multitude of animals' were euthanized

Shelter allegedly put down several animals (file image) that were brought in from a hoarder

One employee was identified as the shelter's director, Aaron Johnson, who has worked for the facility since May 2017, according to the Community Impact Newspaper.

County Precinct 3 Commissioner James Noack told the newspaper: 'Due to the serious nature of credible information, two employees have been suspended, with pay, pending the outcome of an internal (criminal) investigation.'

Two employees have been suspended over the alleged incident. One employee was identified as the shelter's director, Aaron Johnson (pictured)

On July 11, the shelter shared a Facebook post announcing that they had more than 900 animals at the facility and were 'BEYOND FULL'.

According to the post, 80 pets were dropped off at the shelter on July 10.

It's unclear if those animals were the ones that came from the hoarder.

'The shelter now has over 900 dogs, cats, puppies and kittens at the shelter. Adopters and fosters are desperately needed. To help, MCAS has waived adoption fees indefinitely,' the shelter wrote at the time.

In the post, the facility said they are 'committed to saving lives and making sure each pet has the best chance at finding a loving home - but we cant do it without the community's help'.

'We are asking everyone to pull together to save the lives of Montgomery County's pets.'

The sheriff's office became involved after receiving a tip about several animals being euthanized.

President of the Lone Star Animal Welfare League, Laura McConnell, told the Community Impact that 'it would be disturbing (if true) that the multitude of animals brought in from a hoarding case were not seen by the vet before euthanization or if a plea was not put out to rescues'.

'No-kill' shelters are supposed to only euthanize 'non-rehabilitatable pets who are irremediably suffering or dangerous to people or other pets', according to Paws Chicago.

In this case, it's still unclear whether or not the hoarded animals were treatable.

A DailyMail.com request for comment to the shelter was not immediately returned.

On July 11, the shelter shared a Facebook post announcing that they had more than 900 animals at the facility and were 'BEYOND FULL'
Scarlett Marshall (pictured) died at just 12 days old in what an inquest heard was 'an accident waiting to happen'

A baby girl who died at just 12 days old would still be alive today if not for the catastrophic state of affairs at a hospital maternity ward, a coroner has said.

Scarlett Marshall died St Marys Hospital in Manchester in September 2016.

Her brain had been starved of oxygen after her mother Tina Saunders faced significant and unacceptable delays to be transferred for delivery, an inquest into her death heard.

A senior coroner has now said that if Scarlett had been delivered earlier, she would still be alive today.

Following the three-day inquest at Manchester Town Hall, Fiona Borrill said that an ultimately catastrophic state of affairs led to Scarletts tragic death.

She criticised management at Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust for failing to take action, after issues were highlighted in a report more than a year before the infants death.

Scarletts death was an accident waiting to happen, according to Ms Borrill.

Miss Saunders and partner Christopher Marshall previously told of the heartbreaking moment they decided to withdraw their daughters life-support.

Scarlett failed to regain brain activity after she was born on September 18, five days after her mothers admission to hospital.

Miss Saunders was 37 weeks pregnant when she was taken into St Marys Hospital to be induced on September 12, 2016, the inquest heard.

New parents Tina Saunders and Chris Marshall posed with their daughter, Scarlett, whose life was cut short due to delays at the hospital

She believed the following day her waters would be broken artificially, but was told the delivery unit was too busy, the court was told.

The inquest heard at least 11 other women were waiting for the same procedure that day, but a lack of beds and midwifery staff meant that transfer to the delivery room, in Miss Saunders case, was repeatedly delayed.

On September 17, her waters broke naturally and she was informed that she was in a queue for delivery.

But, by September 18, Miss Saunders was still in the queue and said she felt unwell, fearing she may be developing an infection, the inquest heard.

Repeated attempts were made my midwife Mel Brignall to arrange transfer to the delivery room, the court was told.

The inquest heard she believed Miss Saunders was becoming septic and that urgent delivery was required.

Dr Peart, a fourth-year junior doctor, previously told of the stress of being faced with two obstetric emergencies at the same time.

She too attempted to arrange a transfer for Miss Saunders to the delivery unit, but was told this would not be possible, the inquest heard.

Scarlett Marshall (pictured) died aged just 12 years old following delays in her delivery that the coroner described as 'catastrophic'

The hospital trust subsequently admitted Miss Saunders should have been transferred by September 15.

Coroner Ms Borrill said the situation on the delivery unit that day was potentially unsafe and that the failure to transfer Miss Saunders earlier was an unacceptable delay.

She said: 'This was a series of events which left ongoing pressure on the delivery unit, which I heard had been ongoing for some time.

'I dont underestimate how distressing and stressful it must have been for midwives and clinical staff working in these conditions.

'Improvements have since been made by the trust but it is extremely distressing that these changes had not been introduced at the time of Tinas admission.'

By the time Miss Saunders was taken to theatre at 15.22 on September 18, she had become septic and baby Scarletts brain had been starved of oxygen, the inquest heard.

Scarlett had to be resuscitated immediately after birth and was transferred to the hospitals neonatal unit.

Further tests revealed that the newborn had showed no sign of brain activity since birth and her parents were informed the prognosis was poor. Scarlett passed away on September 30.

Recording a narrative conclusion, Fiona Borrill said: 'The deceased would not have died if transfer had happened before 3.22pm on September 18 and if delivery had occurred before 4.13pm that day.'

In a statement following the inquest, Scarletts parents said: 'We miss Scarlett all the time. We talk about her every day and what she would be like now.

'Everyday we go over it in our heads and think about what we could have done differently.

'Why didnt we kick up more of a fuss? Why did we accept the doctors word? Our greatest regret is that we didnt trust our instincts.

'We are not medical professionals though and we were always reassured that everything that was happening was normal.

'At the end we spent the night with Scarlett and washed her and changed her and read her a story and cherished the last bit of time we had with her.

'Those were the hardest days of our lives knowing we couldnt do anything to help her stay with us.

'The pain we feel knowing that she should be here but isnt due to mistakes made by professionals youre supposed to trust is heartbreaking.'

Victoria Beel, a clinical negligence specialist at law firm Slater and Gordon, representing the family, said: 'To lose a child is every parents worst nightmare and to know that Scarlett could have been saved has made it even more difficult for Tina and Chris to accept.

'It is also concerning to hear that issues that led to her death were highlighted in a CQC report more than a year before, but no action was taken which led to delays that the coroner said were unacceptable and sometimes unsafe.'

A spokesperson for Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust, which runs Saint Marys Hospital, said: 'We accept the findings and conclusions of the coroner and acknowledge that the care provided fell below our expected standards on this occasion.

'Following thorough internal investigation, we have made a number of changes, recruiting new midwifery staff, reviewing our pathways for women admitted for induction and introducing the option to transfer to one of our neighbouring units, should there be a significant delay due to clinical pressures.

'We would like to reassure women and their families that delivering safe and efficient patient care is our utmost priority.

'We are committed to implementing and sustaining the changes identified to prevent events such as these from happening in the future.'
The cold case rape and murder of a Florida woman that had gone unsolved for two decades was finally cracked by the Sarasota Sheriff's Office.

Luke Fleming, 39, was taken into custody on Sunday night for the 1999 murder of 47-year-old Deborah Dalzell, and is now facing charges of Murder and Sexual Battery with Great Bodily Harm.

Dalzell was discovered dead inside her home by law enforcement officials on March 29, 1999, after her co-workers called the authorities to express concern about her unexplained absence from work.

An investigation soon determined that she had been brutally beaten, strangled and raped by her murderer, whose identity was unknown for 19 years.

In those 19 years the man police believe killed the innocent woman has been in a series of failed relationships, gotten arrested for domestic assault and welcomed a son of his own into the world.

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Tragic end: Deborah Dalzell (above circa 1999) was brutally beaten and raped in 1999, but law enforcement officials were never able to arrest a suspect in the murder

Cold no more: New DNA testing led them to a suspect, and on Sunday Luke Fleming, 39, was arrested on charges of Murder and Sexual Battery with Great Bodily Harm (Fleming above on Sunday)

Baby joy: Fleming has been in a series of failed relationships, gotten arrested for domestic assault and welcomed a son of his own into the world since Dalzell's death (Fleming with his former fiancee Britney and their son)

The big break for detectives came, as it does with many cold cases these days, when advancements in DNA testing allowed for a new way to test bodily fluid.

Semen was discovered on the scene, and in 2015 a new program that is able to determine the ancestry and physical traits of an individual from a DNA sample came up with a suspect that looks remarkably like Fleming.

He was not arrested however until police were able to obtain a DNA sample from him, which also matched the evidence left at the scene.

Fleming also lived just a short walk from the victim's home at the time of the murder.

Since then he has been married and divorced, had a broken engagement and welcomed a son, who is now almost three.

Fleming had been working at a wholesale seafood distributor, Bama Sea Products, and living in St Petersburg with a new girlfriend at the time of his arrest.

He is now behind bars at the Sarasota County Jail on a $1.2 million bond.

'This is a very significant day for Deborahs family, for our community and our detectives,' said'We have dreamed of the day that we would get the news that they caught their killer. We now have a face and name for this monster,' said the victim's sister at a press conference on Wednesday.

Mugged: Fleming is now behind bars at the Sarasota County Jail on a $1.2 million bond

'I cant imagine what it feels like to spend nearly twenty years with unanswered questions related to such a heinous crime. My thoughts are with Deborahs family as I hope this resolution will eventually bring them the closure they need and deserve.'

Also speaking at the press conference was Peggy Thistle, the victim's sister.

'Its an emotional day today' said Thistle, who could not hold back her tears.

'We miss Deborah every day. We never gave up hope.'

She went on to speak about how shocked the family had been when Dalzell first told them she planned to move to Florida after spending most of her life in Massachusetts.

'But she fell in love with the beach, found the house of her dreams and called it paradise,' said Thistle.

'On March 29, 1999, this evil person turned her paradise into a nightmare.'

She then added: 'As a family, we have dreamed of the day that we would get the news that they caught their killer. We now have a face and name for this monster.'

Thistle also noted that Friday is her sister's birthday, and wished her a 'happy birthday' in her remarks.

'For 20 years, he has been able to see the sun, breathe the air, and see the flowers. May today be the last day,' said Thistle, who acknowledged that her mother was still alive and urged others in their situation not to give up hope.

Lock him up: 'We have dreamed of the day that we would get the news that they caught their killer. We now have a face and name for this monster,' said the victim's sister (Dalzell's sister Peggy Thistle above with Sheriff Tom Knight on Wednesday)

Sink or swim: The incident report revealed that someone cut a screen and entered the home through the pool area before murdering Dalzell in a savage killing, using only his or her hands (Fleming above in his family's pool just half-a-mile from the victim's home)

Dalzell had been speaking with her sister just before she was murdered, with the two talking on the phone at around 10:30pm on March 28.

They had been planning to have dinner toigether but Dalzell had complained of being tired from work and wanting toi get home to the new house she had just built - a little over half-a-milke from where Fleming lived at the time.

The incident report revealed that someone cut a screen and entered the home through the pool area before murdering Dalzell in a savage killing, using only his or her hands.

In addition to the sexual trauma, Dalzell also had a dislocated jaw and her entire body was covered with bruises.

Her body was found in the bathroom, and nothing had been stolen from the home.

Police were led to Fleming when their DNA test determined that the man's father, Joseph Fleming, was related to the individual whose semen was found at the scene.

Jesse Fleming, the older brother of the suspect, was already in the system due to previous arrests and was ruled out after comparing his DNA with the evidence, leaving just one possible suspect.

Fleming had a previous arrest in 2002 for domestic assault.

A friend of his ex-wife acknowledged the arrest when she wrote on Amiee Fleming's Facebook page Wednesday, stating: Glad youre alive.'

The investigation into the murder is still ongoing, though Thistle noted there was no connection between Fleming and her sister that she was aware of at the time.
International Day of Peace will be celebrated on September 21, as it is every year.

This years theme will focus on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which was drafted and adopted by the United Nations 70 years ago. The document, presented in Paris in December 1948, contained the first fundamental human rights protections.

In observance of International Peace Day, a two-minute silence will be held at 12pm in every time zone. There will also be peace education events, intercultural and interfaith dialogues, workshops on the UN Peace Day theme and more.

In observance of International Peace Day, a two-minute silence will be held at 12pm

What is International Day of Peace?

International Day of Peace, or Peace Day, is a globally-observed awareness day established by the United Nations in 1981.

According to the official website dedicated to the day, it provides a globally shared date for all humanity to commit to Peace above all differences.

International Day of Peace activities

Everyone observing International Day of Peace can observe a shared minute of silence at 12pm in all time zones.

Peace Day events will take place all around the world. Here are a few you can participate in:

Global Mala (yoga) project

The Global Mala project combines yoga, service and collective action to form a mala around the Earth. Its based upon the sacred cycle of 108.

Compassion Games International

Compassion Games International provides fun ways to get young people excited about International Peace Day. Check out the many kid-friendly peace day activities offered.

11 Days of Global Unity

The 11 Days of Global Unity have a goal of strengthening the ideals of unity and equality, diversity, oneness, harmony and compassion.

Roots and Shoots

Roots and Shoots groups from all over the world gather to celebrate Peace Day each year. As part of their celebrations, Dr Jane delivers a message of peace to the UN, as she has since 2002.

Global Feast for Peace

To participate in the Global Feast for Peace, simply gather a group of people together around your dining room table to share food and engage in peace-focused, intercultural or interfaith dialogue.

Be the Peace

Be the Peace is a synchronized online meditation taking place from September 19 to September 21.

Peace Crane Project

The Peace Crane Project sees those participating share paper peace cranes with people around the world.

One Day One Goal

This particular campaign aims to use the unifying power of sport to connect people on Peace Day.

International Day of Peace for kids

There are a number of ways to get kids involved on International Peace Day. Teachers can find coloring pages, talking points, video suggestions and more here.

The International Peace Day website also contains a peace breathing activity, a peace pledge template and more.
An Ohio woman with eight prior drunken-driving convictions in her criminal record has been charged with causing a crash that killed her passenger in July.

Heather Lynn Tapia, 47, on Tuesday was indicted by the Franklin County grand jury on counts of aggravated vehicular homicide and operating a vehicle under the influence of alcohol with repeat OVI offender specifications.

According to Franklin County Prosecutor Ron O'Brien, Tapia had a blood alcohol content of 0.138 per cent, which is almost twice the legal limit in Ohio, when she got behind the wheel on the morning of July 14.

Victim: Audrey Gartin, 39 (left and right), was killed in July while riding as a passenger in the car of Heather Tapia, 47, who police say was drunk when she swerved into oncoming traffic in Ohio.

A crash report obtained by DailyMail.com indicates that at 3.30am that day, Tapia was driving her blue 2001 Saturn SL west on Morse Road when she turned left in front of an oncoming eastbound van at the Cleveland Avenue intersection.

The other vehicle, a 1998 Dodge van, T-boned Tapia's car on the passenger's side, fatally injuring 39-year-old Audrey Gartin.

Gartin, of Tempe, Arizona, was taken to Ohio State Universitys Wexner Medical Center, where she was pronounced dead less than an hour later.

According to the report, Tapia told a responding officer at the scene that she could not remember where she was traveling from, or what street she was on.

She recalled leaving Zooey's Bar and heading to TeeJay's on High Street and Morse Road.

Tapia was taken to Riverside Hospital to be treated for arm and wrist injuries.

The two occupants of the Dodge were also hospitalized with minor injuries.

Records indicate that Tapia has racked up eight OVI convictions since 1991, most recently in 2016, reported the Columbus Dispatch.

This woman had only been out of prison for several months from her last OVI conviction, and was currently under a five-year suspension of her drivers license, without even limited driving privileges, yet she made the decision once again to drive while intoxicated, said OBrien.
Middle school teacher Anthony Helinski, 34, turned himself in to police Wednesday and reportedly admitted to having used a toddler to steal prizes from inside a toy vending machine at a mall in Salem, New Hampshire

A Massachusetts teacher who was caught on video putting his toddler into a game machine at a New Hampshire shopping mall so she could steal prizes has been arrested and charged.

Anthony Helinski, 34, reportedly turned himself in to Salem police on Wednesday, five days after several witnesses recorded a man instructing the young girl to grab prizes from inside the KeyMaster game.

The Lawrence, Massachusetts-native has been placed on leave from his job as a middle school teacher at Andover Public Schools, according to WCVB.

Helinski has now been charged with theft, trespassing and child endangerment. He does not have an attorney listed.

Several witnesses filmed a man now identified as Helinski instructing the young girl who had climbed inside the KeyMaster machine at the Mall at Rockingham Park last Friday night

The Salem Police Department posted a video of the incident and asked for the public's help in identifying the man earlier this week. The footage was pixelated to protect the child's identity

Earlier this week, Salem police released a video of a man crouching in front of the KeyMaster machine at the Mall at Rockingham Park on Friday night, accompanied by two children.

The suspect - now identified as Helinski - appears to be giving instructions to the young girl who had climbed into the prize-dispensing slot of the KeyMaster machine, telling her to reach up and grab items.

In the video, the other child, a young boy, is seen celebrating as the toddler passes out the prizes, excitedly saying: 'Yes, it worked!'

At the end of the video the little girl crawls out of the machine and all three of them leave the area with the stolen items.

It remains unclear what those items were, but Key Master machines are known to be stocked with valuable electronics as well as gift cards.

Police said they received numerous tips identifying Helinski as the man in the video.

He turned himself in shortly after an arrest warrant was issued Wednesday.
Democratic Congresswoman Anna Eschoo was the first to hear of Christine Ford's allegation of sexual assault against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh and is saying she came away from their 90 minute sit down convinced of her story.

Eschoo, who represents the Palo Alto area of California where Ford lives, describes the psychology professor as non-political, intelligent and 'terrified' for her family.

'It was more than obvious to me that she bore the scars of what she had been subjected to,' Eshoo told The Washington Post. 'She doesn't have a political bone in her body. And she obviously was really terrified about what could become of her and her family.'

Democratic Congresswoman Anna Eschoo was the first to hear of Christine Ford's allegation of sexual assault against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh

'At the end of the meeting, I told her that I believed her,' Rep. Anna Eshoo said of her meeting with Christine Ford (pictured)

'At the end of the meeting, I told her that I believed her,' she added. 'In telling her story, you know, there were details to it, and I believed her.'

Ford is a registered Democrat and participated in a local Women's March protesting Trump last year where she wore one of the pink-yarned hats.

Her claim that Kavanaugh, President Donald Trump's nominee to the Supreme Court, sexually assaulted her during a high school party in the 1980s, has rocked the confirmation process. He has denied the allegation.

Her hour-and-half sit down with Eshoo took place in mid-July in a conference room in the congresswoman's district, over coffee, tea and cookies.

Ford spoke softly and choked up at times, but she didn't seem nervous, Eshoo told The San Jose Mercury News.

'She was obviously intelligent,' said Eshoo, who asked Ford multiple questions during their time together. 'She seems like the person next door  well, the professor next door.'

Their meeting was the result of a call Ford placed to Eshoo's office requesting time with the congresswoman.

A staffer spoke with Ford in advance but Eshoo said she didn't realize the magnitude of Ford's allegations until the two women met in person on July 20.

Ford didn't remember all the details but Eshoo described her as a convincing and said Ford would be a strong witness.

It was Eshoo who suggested Ford write a letter to Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Eshoo's staff hand-delivered it to Feinstein's Washington, D.C., office on July 30, giving it to an aide there.

'You don't drop it off at the receptionist's desk,' Eshoo told The Post.

Eshoo and Feinstein were both elected to Congress in 1992, the 'Year of the Woman' election that swept a then-record number of women into office following Anita Hill's accusation of sexual harassment against Justice Clarence Thomas.

Eshoo said she hasn't met with Ford since their July sit down, although her staff has been in contact with her since she came forward.

'She's a courageous woman, and she has come forward for all the right reasons,' Eshoo told The Mercury News. 'What I'd like to see more than anything else is that she be treated with the respect that she should have  and that there not be a rush to judgment but a transparent process that really seeks the truth.'

She joined her fellow Democrats in calling for an investigation into the allegation.

'This should not be treated as a he-said, she-said,' Eshoo told The Post. 'I've dealt with the FBI when I served on the House Intelligence Committee for almost a decade. They are perfectly capable of conducting an investigation which then becomes foundational for the hearing.'

'That's what they do; they conduct investigations,' she added. 'And what I'm struck by is that there seems to be such a rush to judgment rather than taking the time for justice. There is no question in my mind that the Judge Kavanaugh, from the outside looking in, has excellent credentials. He has served on the bench. He's served in an administration. But character matters.'

Trump has said the FBI doesn't need to investigate.

'It would seem that the FBI really doesn't do that,' he said of the Democrats' demand.

Republicans have questioned the timing of Ford's public statements, which came after Kavanaugh had sat through more than 20 hours of judiciary committee hearings.

He strongly denies the allegation.

Republicans have also been sharply critical of Feinstein, who delivered the letter to the FBI a week ago.

Eshoo said her actions were dictated by Ford's desire for confidentiality as she weighed whether or not to go public. She said only she and one of her senior aides knew about Ford's allegation as part of their effort to keep it private.

'I think it's difficult for people to understand if you haven't dealt with people that have been subjected to something like this,' the congresswoman told The Post. 'They keep it to themselves. They feel guilty. They bury it. They tell themselves to move on. And so there wasn't any kind of political process in her mind whatsoever.'

Brett Kavanaugh, leaving his house in Chevy Chase, Md., on Thursday, strongly denies the allegation against him

Christine Blasey (now Ford) and Brett Kavanaugh in their respective high school year books

Rep. Eshoo (center) said Ford would be a strong witness if she testifies

The question now remains whether or not Ford will testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Monday. Republican Chairman Chuck Grassley has given her a deadline of 10 am on Friday to decide.

Democrats have pushed for an FBI investigation and expanded witness list. Only Kavanaugh and Ford are scheduled to speak on Monday.

Ford's lawyers said Republicans are not acting in 'good faith.'

'The Committee's stated plan to move forward with a hearing that has only two witnesses is not a fair or good faith investigation; there are multiple witnesses whose names have appeared publicly and should be included in any proceeding,' Ford's lawyer Lisa Banks said in a statement on Wednesday. 'The rush to a hearing is unnecessary, and contrary to the Committee discovering the truth.'

But Republicans, who want to see Kavanaugh on the court by its October 1 opening, are holding fast to Monday's date.

'It would be a disservice,' Grassley wrote in a letter to Democrats on Monday 'to delay this hearing any further.'

There are fears among Republicans that Democrats are trying to delay a vote on Kavanaugh's until after the midterm election, when there is a possibility Democrats will take control of the Senate and control the confirmation process.

Republicans are balancing their desire to place a conservative justice - who can tilt the Supreme Court's bench to the right - on the high court before its new term begins on Oct. 1 with fears of alienating women voters ahead of the November election.

The GOP is also mindful that with its 51-seat majority in the Senate, they can only lose one vote - if all Democrats vote no on Kavanaugh - in order to get him confirmed.

And the two Republicans to watch are both women - moderate GOP Senators Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, neither of whom has committed to voting for Kavanaugh.

Democrats on Tuesday charged Republicans with not doing enough to ensure Ford avoids an Anita Hill-type situation, where Clarence Thomas' accuser was assailed by Senate Judiciary Committee members in his 1991 confirmation hearing, and the GOP is countering they are giving her the option of public or private testimony.

'She is under no obligation to participate in the Republican efforts to sweep this whole thing under the rug, to continue this nomination on the fast track and to participate in a smear campaign and basically a railroad job,' said Democratic Sen. Mazie Hirono, a member of the judiciary committee, to reporters Tuesday on Capitol Hill. 'This is what they did to Anita Hill!'

She added: 'I just want to say to the men in this country, just shut up and step up. Do the right thing, for a change.'

Ford described to The Washington Post in detail how, when she was at a teenage party in the 1980s, Kavanaugh and his high school classmate followed her upstairs when she went to the bathroom and pushed her into a bedroom.

She detailed how Kavanaugh held her down, tried to rip off her swimsuit, and put his hand over her mouth when she tried to scream.

She said she escaped when his friend, Mark Judge, jumped on top of them.

'I thought he might inadvertently kill me,' Ford told the newspaper.

An aide to Rep. Eshoo hand delivered Ford's letter to an aide for Sen. Dianne Feinstein (pictured)

Republican Chairman Chuck Grassley of the Senate Judiciary Committee has given Ford until 10 am on Friday to decide if she'll testify in Monday's hearing

She said the incident affected her for years.

'I think it derailed me substantially for four or five years,' she said. She struggled academically and socially, she said, and was unable to have healthy relationships with men. 'I was very ill-equipped to forge those kinds of relationships.'

Kavanaugh has repeatedly and strongly denied the allegation.

'This is a completely false allegation. I have never done anything like what the accuser describesto her or to anyone,' Kavanaugh said in a statement provided by the White House.

Kavanaugh said he 'had no idea' who made the allegation until Ford identified herself Sunday in a bombshell Washington Post interview.

'Because this never happened, I had no idea who was making this accusation until she identified herself yesterday,' he noted.
Three men are facing a series of charges over a $364 million investment scheme that was to fund luxury cars, jewelry and $25 million worth of casino gambling.

A federal indictment states that Kevin Merrill of Towson, 53, along with Jay Ledford, 54, and Cameron Jezierski, 28, willingly devised a scheme to defraud investors of more than $364 million from January 2013 to the present day.

The indictment alleges that Merrill and Ledford, of Texas and Las Vegas, invited people to buy consumer debt portfolios and falsely represented that they'd profit from debt payments and flipping portfolios.

US Attorney Robert Hur announced at a news conference in downtown Baltimore that the men were arrested and charged with conspiracy, wire fraud, identity theft and money laundering.

Jay Ledford (left) and Cameron Jezierski (right) face charges over the alleged fraudulent scam

The properties (pictured) were purchased through the proceeds of the alleged Ponzi scheme

The alleged scheme is thought to have entrapped more than 400 victims nationwide.

'Most of these investors are just learning that they have been victimized', said Hur, alongside officials from the FBI and the US Securities and Exchange Commission.

These particular defendants took steps like setting up shell companies and setting up bank accounts for those companies, fabricating debt reports and sales agreements', Hur said at the conference broadcast by CBS Baltimore.

'Lies (were) being told to prospective investors about almost every conceivable aspect of this scheme.'

Merrill and Ledford spent tens of millions of dollars on luxury cars, jewelry, houses, boats, private jets and gambling at casinos, according to the indictment.

The 14-count indictment alleges that the defendants enticed victims by showing them they could make money through the purchase and sale of consumer debt owed on car and student loans and credit cards.

Prosecutors assert the 'proceeds' paid out came from other investors, not collections or sales, as represented.

The men created impostor companies and incorporated them in Texas, authorities said.

Authorities said the three suspects concealed their diversion of $73 million, which they used to fund a 'lavish lifestyle'.

US Attorney Robert Hur announced details of the charges against the men on Wednesday

Officials are beginning to notify investors nationwide who lost an estimated $364 million since 2015 in what prosecutors called one of the largest fraud cases ever filed in Maryland.

The victim investors included small business owners, restaurateurs, construction contractors, retirees, doctors and lawyers, accountants.

They also included bankers, talent agents, professional athletes and financial advisers in Maryland; Washington, DC; Northern Virginia; Las Vegas; Texas and elsewhere.

Merrill owned five houses, 25 cars  including two Rolls Royces  a boat and more, according to court records.

Prosecutors said the indictment seeks to forfeit nine properties, 26 luxury cars, one boat, interest in an aircraft, a life insurance policy, seven- and nine-carat diamond rings.

They also want to seize a 23-carat diamond bracelet, which was allegedly purchased with proceeds of the scheme to defraud.

Six of the houses could be forfeited by Merrill if he is convicted, including a property on Circle Road in Towson and another on Greenspring Valley Road in Stevenson.

Merrill is scheduled to appear Thursday in federal court in Baltimore for a detention hearing.

One of the properties in Stevenson, Maryland (pictured) which has been seized by the FBI

Authorities gave details of the elaborate scheme (pictured) to defraud 400 investors

Some of the luxury cars that were allegedly fraudulently purchased and seized by the FBI

Some $25 million was spent on casino gambling, prosecutors allege.

It was not immediately known if the suspects had defense attorneys who could comment on the charges. Lawyers for the three men were not listed in online court records.

Merrill, Ledford and Jezierski face a maximum of 20 years in prison each for wire fraud related charges while Merrill and Ledford face an additional 20 years each for money laundering related charges, the US Attorney's Office said.

Merrill and Ledford were ordered to be detained. Jezierski was released under the supervision of US Pretrial Services.

Both Ledford and Merill had worked together since at least 2013, at times selling genuine consumer-debt portfolios, according to court filings.

A Ponzi scheme is a fraudulent investing scam promising high with little risk to investors.

The scheme generates returns for older investors by acquiring new investors.

It is similar to a pyramid scheme in that both are based on using new investors' funds to pay the earlier backers.
Two Texas fraternity members are facing hazing charges after they allegedly forced pledges to sort sprinkles, eat expired guacamole and drink dangerous quantities of vodka straight from the bottle.

An arrest warrant for Texas Christian University students Christopher Barksdale and Andrew Walker, both 19, details the alleged hazing incident at the Kappa Sigma chapter house on the Fort Worth Campus earlier this month.

Barksdale, a former student, lived at the house and Walker, a current student, lived at the neighboring Sigma Phi Epsilon house.

According to the warrant obtained by the Star Telegram, a phone owned by Barksdale sent a text to two pledges ordering them to bring a handle of Tito's vodka to the house around 4pm on September 3.

Texas Christian University students Christopher Barksdale (left) and Andrew Walker (right), both 19, are facing charges stemming from an alleged hazing incident in which two Kappa Sigma fraternity pledges were forced to sort sprinkles, eat expired guacamole and drink dangerous quantities of vodka straight from the bottle on September 3

When the freshmen arrived they were introduced to Walker and a sorority member before being directed to Barksdale's room on the second floor.

Barksdale called one of the pledges into a bathroom where he handed him a beer and instructed him to drink it as fast as possible.

The accused ringleader then emptied a bottle of decorative baking sprinkles and ordered the pledges to sort them - forcing them to take 10 to 15 long swigs from their vodka bottles when they failed to work fast enough.

The two pledges were also forced to eat expired guacamole, the warrant says.

One pledge was walked back to his dorm room while the other was later found unconscious in Barksdale's room by another Kappa Sigma member.

Thinking the pledge was dead, members called an ambulance.

The student had a potentially-deadly blood alcohol level when he arrived at the hospital and didn't remember any of the events that led up to his being hospitalized, according to the warrant.

The Kappa Sigma chapter house where the alleged hazing occurred is pictured above

Both Barksdale and Walker were booked at Tarrant County Jail and are facing hazing charges.

Texas and 43 other states have instituted laws against hazing, which refers to physical and mental abuse a student must endure to gain admittance to an organization.

University officials have said they are conducting an investigation into the incident, and Kappa Sigma is the only fraternity implicated.

'National headquarters and Texas Christian University have suspended all activity by Kappa Sigma until the investigation is complete,' TCU spokeswoman Holly Ellman said Wednesday.

TCU is no stranger to hazing allegations, this having been the third incident reported on the North Texas campus in the last two years.

In 2016, the Phi Kappa Sigma fraternity was shut down after reports of drug dealing and possession of guns surfaced.

Then in December 2017, the Delta Tau Delta fraternity chapter was suspended for hazing, according to the fraternity's national office.
Chilling footage shows a huge tiger shark feasting on the carcass of a whale, in the same calm waters where two people were left fighting for their lives after separate shark attacks in 24 hours.

Seaworld's Trevor Long said Queensland's idyllic Whitsunday Islands, the scene of the two attacks, was not known for its dangerous and aggressive sharks.

'This is unusual highly occurrence, you know, the Whitsundays is a relatively safe area. There's a lot of people that use the Whitsundays,' Mr Long told 9News.

'This is a tropical area, there's probably four species that could be involved in it. Probably the worst of those species would be a tiger shark.'

The shark was spotted in waters where two people were left fighting for their lives after two shark attacks in 24 hours

The footage of the huge tiger shark, obtained by 7 News, was released on Thursday afternoon as two people remained in hospital clinging to life.

On Wednesday evening, a 45-year-old woman suffered critical injuries from a shark attack near Whithaven Beach. She remains in critical condition in hospital.

Just after midday on Thursday, a 12-year-old girl was attacked by a shark while swimming with her father and sister in the same spot.

She was airlifted to hospital with a huge gash in her leg and 'horrific' injuries.

A Mackay Hospital spokesperson told Daily Mail Australia the 12-year-old's condition had not improved and she was still critical Thursday evening.

Baited drumlines are due to be deployed in the area on Friday, while Queensland Boating and Fisheries officers were on site Thursday to stop people entering the water.

'Fisheries is working with other agencies including the police and marine parks,' the department said in a statement.

'It is important to be aware that sharks inhabit the Queensland coastline, as well as estuaries, rivers, creeks, canals and streams - both saltwater and freshwater.'

Chilling footage shows a huge tiger shark feasting on the carcass of a whale
A sex worker who was able to escape from an ICE agent who murdered four of her friends has told how she got away from him after getting a 'bad vibe' from him when she mentioned one of his victims.

Erika Pena is the woman who led to Juan Daid Ortiz's arrest earlier this month for the murders of four of her friends. On September 14, Ortiz, 35, picked Pena up for sex in Laredo, Texas.

The pair knew each other and she knew he worked in law enforcement so, her family said, she was not worried about their meeting.

At the time, one of her friends, Melissa Ramirez, had been dead for 10 days. Her body was found shot to death on Jefferies Road.

Pena brought her up to Ortiz innocently and immediately his mood changed. They were at his home at the time and he became angry at the mention of her.

Her aunt Marcela Rodriguez revealed to The Houston Chronicle on Thursday that his sudden change of mood was an immediate red flag.

Erika Pena is the woman who led to Juan Daid Ortiz's arrest earlier this month for the murders of four of her friends. She was with him when she brought up one of the victim's names and his mood suddenly changed. She is also a prostitute and Ortiz, an ICE agent, had enlisted her services on September 14

She told her that she got a 'bad vibe' and had to go out of his house to vomit. Scared to be left alone with him in the property, she convinced him to go for a ride in his white Dodge.

When they stopped at a gas station at 9pm, she mentioned Ramirez again and Ortiz lost his temper, ripping at her blouse.

She fled the car half-clothed and waved down a Texas State Trooper at the station.

Ortiz fled and, over the course of the next two hours, killed Humberto Ortiz, 28, and Guiselda Alicia Cantu, 35, before being arrested after running on foot to a hotel.

Melissa Ramirez was Pena's friend. Ortiz murdered her by shooting her in the head in September 3

He has admitted to the four murders since he was taken into custody.

On Thursday, Pena's aunt said she was still traumatized by coming so close to dying herself.

She is petrified that he will come after her, she said, and screams if she sees a white Dodge truck in the street.

'This is the first time something like this happens to her.

'I don't know what went through her mind at that moment that made her strong enough to get through this and escape.

'It has been really difficult seeing her. Erika is really traumatized. It's really difficult seeing her trauma. She doesn't want to eat.

'She always wants someone to be with her. She doesn't want to be alone because she's afraid.

'She's afraid because Juan David Ortiz knows where she lives,' Marcela said.

Pena has not gone out of her home since Ortiz was arrested.

'She doesn't want to go out. She won't eat. She hasn't slept. She screams every night. She thinks (Ortiz) is going to come to the house.

'(On Monday), (my niece) got out of the house.

'We were out on my porch and when she saw a white truck pass by, she began to scream, "He's coming for me!"'

Claudine Anne Luera-Main (left) and Humberto Janelle Ortiz (right) were also murdered

'I don't want the community to see her as just a hero. She is also a victim that thankfully was able to escape from the situation,' her aunt said.

Ortiz preyed on sex workers who he picked up on San Bernardo Avenue then drove out of city limits then shot them in the head.

Officers say he used his knowledge of law enforcement to target the victims and strategically dump their bodies.

According to authorities, Ortiz picked up Ramirez on September 3 and then drove outside the city limits.

Ortiz then pulled the car over and got out to urinate, according to the criminal complaint.

'Juan David Ortiz then used a firearm (handgun) to shoot Melissa Ramirez multiple times [in] the head,' the document read.

Ramirez's mother, Maria Cristina Benavides, said that her daughter, a mother of two young children ages 7 and 3, became addicted to drugs.

Ortiz killed his final two victims in the two hours after Pena escaped from him on September 14. He was arrested in the early hours of the morning on September 15

The second was Claudine Luera, 42, who was found alive but in critical condition on Thursday on Texas Highway 255.

On September 13, Ortiz picked up Luera and drove her outside the city limits on U.S. 83.

After he pulled over, she got out of the truck. Ortiz then shot her 'multiple times in the head', according to the criminal complaint.

She was found not far from where the previous body was discovered and she later died at a hospital from fatal head trauma.

Luera's sister, Colette Mireles, said she had also fallen victim to drug addiction and had been living on the street for the past five years

Luera is survived by her five children - all of whom were in the family's custody.

Mireles remembered her sister as someone with a contagious laugh.

'She was a happy-go-lucky person growing up,' Mireles said.

'Sadly, she was an addict. Her life took another turn.'

He then killed Humberto Ortiz, a transgender prostitute, after going back to the San Bernardo Avenue and driving them to the desert. He killed Guiselda in the same way.
The daughter of mental health patient who drowned while shackled in the back of a sheriff's van has slammed two deputies who drove around barriers to take a dangerous route through floodwater.

Nicolette Green, 43, and Windy Newton, 45, drowned when the van transfering them to another facility during storm Florence became engulfed near Darlington, South Carolina.

Two deputies were rescued but the detainees died.

Nicolette Green (pictured), 43, and Windy Newton, 45, drowned when the van transfering them to another facility during storm Florence became engulfed

Today, Green's daughter Rose Hershberger, 19, said officials had betrayed her schizophrenic mother.

'I was confused as to why someone would, or the police officers would drive down a road that was in an area that was known for flooding,' she said.

'I feel very upset and kind of betrayed, because my mom was a very, very trusting person.

'She put her trust in the deputies that were supposed to take care of her and made sure she got there safely, and the fact that they were able to get out but my mom and the other woman wasn't makes me feel really hurt and betrayed by them,' Hershberger said.

Horry County Sheriff Phillip Thompson said in a statement on Wednesday: 'We have three different people doing investigations.

'Obviously it appears that [the deputies drove around barriers]. My question is, I want to know why. What were the circumstances and what happened at the particular time.'

'We are sorry,' Thompson said. ' We take a lot of pride in what we do. We work hard to protect and to serve our citizens. We are just very sorry that this event has taken place.'

The tragedy happened near the Little Pee Dee River, one of the bodies of water that state officials are watching following the heavy rains of storm Florence.

Two female mental health patients drowned in rising floodwaters while chained up in the back of a sheriff's van. Pictured: Floodwaters from storm Florence

Two female mental health patients drowned in rising floodwaters while chained up in the back of a sheriff's van. Pictured: Floodwaters from storm Florence

The deputies tried to get the victims out but couldn't. Rescue teams plucked the deputies from the top of the van.

On the day of the tragedy, Horry County Sheriff Phillip Thompson said his office would cooperate with the probe.

'Tonight's incident is a tragedy,' he said. 'Just like you, we have questions we want answered.'

It comes after some prisons bosses in South Carolina refused to evacuate inmates over safety concerns.

Officials said that the van was near the Little Pee Dee River, one of the bodies of water that state officials are watching following the heavy rains of Florence. Pictured: Floodwaters in North Carolina

On Monday, the South Carolina Department of Corrections posted pictures of prisoners preparing sandbags to defend their facilities from flooding

Prisoners in South Carolina were pictured filling sandbags after officials refused to evacuate them to safety from storm Florence.

The South Carolina Department of Corrections tweeted pictures on Monday of prisoners preparing to defend their facilities from flooding.

Bryan Stirling, director of the department, chose not to move inmates despite prison evacuations in Virginia and North Carolina.

He said that evacuating thousands of convicts with buses on congested routes would have created a public safety concern.

A spokesman for the department added: 'In the past, it's been safer to leave them there.'

Among the prisons that are not being evacuated are Ridgeland, MacDougall, and Lieber Correctional Institutions.
An adventurous kitten had a lucky escape after getting caught in the grille of a car for one hour while the unwitting driver carried on unaware.

Jake DePrato drove to Baton Rouge, Louisiana to meet his girlfriend Kendall and heard an unusual sound coming from her car.

The unlucky kitten got stuck in the grille of the car and was clinging to the radiator as Kendall drove for around one hour to meet Jake.

The kitten can be seen inside (left) the grille of the car before eventually being set free (right) by Jake DePrato and his parents who removed the grille

Jake's girlfriend couldn't contain herself (pictured) when they discovered the kitten in the car

In the video, the cute kitty can be seen glaring up from behind the screen as DePrato finds a way to get it out safely.

With a little help from Jakes parents, they were able to take apart Kendalls car and safely remove the cat.

They placed it in a carrier bag and gave it food and water after the arduous journey. A little frightened but unharmed, the cat was then returned to its family.

During winter months cats will often seek out any warm space they can find.

One particularly irresistible lure seems to be the cozy confines of a warm car engine.

Unfortunately, cats that seek shelter under the hoods of cars can then be injured or killed when that car is started. But thankfully this brave kitten was unharmed.
A nine-year-old girl sitting on a school bus was shot dead after government soldiers opened fire to clear the way for their vehicle that was stuck in a traffic jam in Somalia.

Deqa Dahir was on her way home around midday on Tuesday when her bus got stuck in traffic near the busy Banadir junction in Mogadishu.

Government soldiers opened fire in an apparent attempt to clear the road for their vehicle and one of the bullets hit Deqa in the head, killing her instantly, according to Amnesty International.

Another child was also injured during the incident.

Deqa Dahir, nine, was shot dead was on her way home from school in Mogadishu

As public outrage over the shooting grew, Somalia's president Mohamed Abdullahi Mohamed met the youngster's family.

Her distraught father Dahir Moalim Ali Farah told Amnesty: 'It was shocking to see the dead body of my daughter.

'I am helpless and need justice for my daughter. I need the killers of my daughter arrested and brought to justice.'

He added: 'My 11-year old son, who was also in the bus with Deqa, came home crying and shouting and told us that she had been shot dead.

'I ran to the scene of the incident, where I was told the body of my daughter was taken to Masaarida hospital.'

Deqa was buried on Thursday, two days after she was killed.

Somali government soldiers opened fire in an apparent attempt to clear the road for their vehicle, according to Amnesty. Pictured: File photo of Somali police force officers

Four soldiers have now been arrested in connection with the incident, the BBC reports.

Amnesty International's Regional Director for East Africa, the Horn and the Great Lakes, Joan Nyanyuki said: 'The authorities must immediately launch an independent investigation and hold to account the officers behind this act of recklessness that took the life of a child and caused this terrible anguish to her family.

'The Somali government must also take concrete steps to make sure that security forces do not use force unnecessarily and randomly against people going about their daily business.'
Amanda La Bell, 41, announced she's ending her campaign for the State House District 54 seat on Wednesday

An Oregon State Representative candidate is dropping out of the political race after she lied about her university degree.

Amanda La Bell, 41, was the Working Families Party candidate in Bend for House District 54, but she announced she's ending her campaign on Wednesday after lying about her education in her Voters' Pamphlet statement.

Her candidacy was called into question after it was reported that she falsely claimed to have earned a bachelor's degree from Valdosta State University in Georgia, when she withdrew from the university after just one semester of enrollment.

Making false statements in the voter guide is a class C felony, according to The Bulletin.

'Regarding my college education, I attended Gulf Coast Community College for two years then transferred to Valdosta State University in the pursuit of my Bachelors of Arts in Music,' La Bell told The Bulletin in an email.

La Bell announced she's pulling out of race on Wednesday after she was outed for lying on voter pamphlet statements about her education. She claimed she earned a bachelor's degree from Valdosta State University in Georgia, when she attended school for just one semester

The Oregon Working Families Party announced the end of her campaign on Wednesday saying: 'As a Party, we believe when a candidate no longer has the trust of their community, they should withdraw their candidacy'

The Party announced that it supported her withdrawal from the race after she neglected to share accurate information on her voter pamphlet statement

'However, after one semester at Valdosta State University, I had to withdraw and enter the workforce. Through the years I tried to re-enter college but, like many working families, I faced significant barriers to completing my degree,' she added.

On her LinkedIn she formerly listed having a bachelors of art, but she has removed it following her clarification.

She claims that including her education in her official Voters Pamphlet statement was not deliberate.

'Due to an oversight during the rapid launch of my campaign, this error was mistakenly repeated in the voters guide. Unfortunately, I did not catch this until it was too late to correct. I have shared this error with my supporters and take complete responsibility for the mistake,' she said.

She also penned a letter to the Bend community on Tuesday clarifying her actions.

'Throughout my studies, I struggled to balance work, school, financial pressures, and caring for my family. Ultimately I couldn't strike that balance, and for years, I felt a deep sense of guilt and shame at not being able to achieve the milestone of a college degree,' she said.

'Neither my campaign nor I knowingly made false claims in the Voter's Pamphlet Statement. I realize that claiming to have earned a Bachelor's degree is unacceptable and wrong, and I express my profound apologies to all affected by this,' she added.

The Oregon Working Families announced her withdrawal on Wednesday.

'Amanda La Bell has notified the Oregon Working Families Party of her decision to end her campaign for State Representative in House District 54. The Oregon Working Families Party fully supports this decision,' the organization wrote.

'As a Party, we believe that when a candidate no longer has the trust of their community, they should withdraw their candidacy.

La Bell was the hope for Democrats to win a supermajority in the House

House Republicans filed a complaint against La Bell on Tuesday, requesting the Oregon Elections Division launch an investigation into her false claims

'Before nominating Amanda, we subjected her to the full vetting process that all candidates receive before they are nominated. Unfortunately, she was not fully forthcoming in this process and neglected to share the information that was released to the public this week,' the statement added.

Her withdrawal is a blow for Democrats hopeful to take over the House, as they're just one vote short of a supermajority.

La Bell was an alternative to Democratic nominee Nathan Boddie, who has lost support from his party due to allegations of sexual harassment and has refused to step down.

Because Boddie refused to step down, La Bell ran with the Working Families Party and could've been the key to having a supermajority in the House, which would allow Democrats to pass financial and tax bills without GOP help, according to Oregon Live.

With La Bell's withdrawal and Boddie running on the Democratic ticket, Republican candidate Cheri Helt seems likely to win the seat, which has run by Republicans for the past four terms.

La Bell entered the race in August, winning endorsements from Governor Kate Brown and former Governor Barbara Roberts as well as other Democratic-leaning groups.

It is now too late for the Working Families Party to replace La Bell or remove her name from the November 6 ballot.

House Republicans filed a complaint against La Bell on Tuesday with executive director of Oregon Leadership PAC Preston Mann sending Steve Trout of the Oregon Elections Division a letter requesting La Bell's false claim be investigated, according to Bend Source.
David Heinze (pictured), 19, was arrested for intimidation for allegedly threatening to kill his ex-girlfriend and her family

A 19-year-old man has been arrested for allegedly threatening to kill his ex-girlfriend and her family and shoot up her high school after she broke up with him.

Collier County Sheriff's deputies took David Heinze into custody on Saturday.

Police said he started sending the threatening texts to his ex-girlfriend after she broke up with him when he moved from Florida to Texas in June.

Heinze has reportedly sent about 50 threatening texts since, according to Naples Daily News.

In the texts, Heinze allegedly threatened to kill his ex-girlfriend and her family and to go to her school and become a 'mass murderer'.

According to deputies, he even drove from Texas to Naples on Friday and was arrested a day later.

Heinze later admitted to sending the texts but claimed he had no intention to kill anyone.

According to the Naples Daily News, Heinze had access to his father's firearms and sent a photo of the guns to his ex.

Witnesses said they saw Heinze driving near his ex-girlfriend's home on Saturday.

Heinze faces a felony charge of intimidation with a written threat to bodily injury, and felony aggressive stalking or cyberstalking with credible threat.
Incensed Venezuelans protested outside Salt Bae's restaurant in Miami on Wednesday, almost a week after the famous chef shared an Instagram video preparing a lavish steak meal for President Nicolas at his Istanbul steakhouse.

Dozens who took part in the rally in the Brickell neighborhood's Nusr-Et location insisted the Turkish celebrity, whose real name is Nusret Gokce, needs to publicly apologize for his actions after the video was removed.

Viral images of Salt Bae's flamboyant style of slicing pieces of steak to Maduro's delight instantly drew a backlash from Venezuelans.

It generated anger in Venezuela where millions struggle to get enough to eat and red meat the rarest of luxuries.

Maduro (right with the chef) was lavished with the gourmet lunch in Istanbul during a two-hour stop-off as he returned from a visit to China

Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro (right) has sparked fury in his impoverished homeland after dining on expensive steak at Salt Bae's (left) restaurant in Turkey

Since then, his Instagram feed has become a target of Venezuelans who've fled the struggling, impoverished country and political opponents and exiles of the leader's regime.

'I would like to see at least an [apology] for the people of the Venezuelan community,' Joe Antonio Colina, president of VEPPEX, told ABC affiliate WLPG in Miami.

However, Salt Bae still continues to draw the ire of Venezuelans and opponents of the South American leader, including those who now call the South Florida area their new home.

Images also revealed Salt Bae presenting a box of cigars to Maduro, who was accompanied by his wife Cilia during last Friday's brief stop in Turkey before the Venezuelan leader returned home.

President Maduro was also gifted a t-shirt featuring Salt Bae's likeness.

Demonstrators were also present at Salt Bae's midtown restaurant in New York City.

Niurka Melendez, a transplanted Venezuelan who participated in the civil protest, had no idea who the famous chef was until the video surfaced.

Dozens of protesters showed up outside Salt Bae's Nurs-Et Steakhouse in Miami to demand an apology from the famous Turkish chef

Jose Antonio Colina, president of VEPPEX, a group of exiled Venezuelans, organized Wednesday's protest in Miami

Protesters near the Miami Nurs-Et steakhouse hold a sign that reads: 'Serving tyrants amounts to mocking the oppressed people'

'What I see is that you have to be a little more informed and I would like it because without a doubt we as Venezuelans, our duty as citizens is to inform, and we came here to inform the people who attend this place that a humanitarian crisis is happening in Venezuela,' Melendez said on an Instagram post.

'People are dying of hunger in Venezuela, people are dying of lack of medicine in Venezuela. His ignorance is no excuse for having treated a tyrant like a king who denies ... the humanitarian crisis facing my country.'

Niurka Melendez, who was born in Venezuela, attended the rally outside Salt Bae's New York City based restaurant. She said the chef's ignorance can't be excused

The Turkish cook became an instant social media hit because of his dramatic ways of spreading salt on steaks.

The 35-year-old culinary expert is also popular among movie stars, musicians and athletes who constantly flock to his chain of 14 restaurants located in places like Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Doha.

Maduro said he visited the restaurant for lunch during a two-hour stop in Istanbul.

'Nusret attended to us personally. We were chatting, having a good time with him. ... He loves Venezuela, he told me several times,' Maduro said.

Maduro had traveled to Beijing in hope of securing fresh funds for his cash-starved socialist government, though he returned only having signed several deals involving Venezuela's energy sector.
A former Tory MP's aide cleared of raping a woman in the Houses of Parliament has called for all men accused of sex crimes to be granted anonymity.

Speaking for the first time since he was found not guilty, Sam Armstrong says his life will never be the same again after he was wrongly accused of rape in October 2016.

Then aged 24, he was suspended as chief of staff to South Thanet MP Craig Mackinlay and endured 14 months of 'cruel public shaming' until he cleared his name.

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Sam Armstrong says his life will never be the same again after he was wrongly accused of rape in 2016

Armstrong worked for South Thanet MP Craig Mackinlay (pictured) at the time the accusations were brought against him in October 2016

Yet despite being found not guilty by a jury of all charges last December, he argued his identity should have been protected from the start of the legal process and only have been revealed if he had been convicted.

Current laws grant victims of rape and sexual offences lifetime anonymity while those accused are named when charged by police.

Supporters of the current law said naming those charged of sex crimes encouraged other victims who may be reluctant to come forward.

But Sam criticised current legislation which he argued could leave the lives of innocent people in tatters.

He said: 'I was a young person with an exciting career and I had worked hard to get somewhere.

'I was fortunate enough to work for a fantastic boss in the shape of Craig Mackinlay and I loved the work for Thanet.

'Overnight all that changed in that a young lady made an allegation against me.

'It was untrue, it was unfounded and it was malicious and ultimately it was shown to be so.

'But in the intervening period, because of the extreme press interest in my case, I was slapped straight across the front of a tabloid newspaper within days.

'An event that I thought was entirely innocent became the most consequential thing in my life.

'It was very difficult for me to work, it was very difficult for me to sleep - I lost an awful lot in the process.'

Speaking outside court, he said his life had been turned 'upside down' by the allegations

Mr Armstrong, pictured with former prime minister David Cameron, denied raping the woman

Now 25, he no longer works for Mr Mackinklay after being accused of forcing himself onto a woman in the MP's Westminster office.

The pair had been drinking earlier that evening in the Houses of Parliament before having sex.

He was later arrested on suspicion of rape by police at work and said: 'It felt like someone had punched me in the stomach.

'In truth, it felt like the walls were crumbling in around me.

'I was taken into a room, I was forced to remove my clothing and I was subject to very invasive forensic tests.

'Then I was thrown into a cell and instantly I had a sense that my life was going to be very different from this point moving forwards and there as absolutely nothing I could do about it.'

Mr Armstrong's parents Andrew and Amanda have supported him through his ordeal

During his trial at Southwark Crown Court 14 months after the incident the jury heard his accuser had contacted a newspaper.

Text messages revealed she wanted to conceal her medical records which showed she was suffering from depression and anxiety.

He said sex was consensual and was acquitted.

But he added: 'It was a year in which it was difficult to eat, it was difficult to sleep, it felt like all of my friends, everyone I knew, thought the worst of me.

'There were people I thought I could rely on who, when the moment came, didn't want to hear from me, didn't want to know.

'And in the intervening period I had to go to court, I had to go to police stations, and when I arrived there were banks of cameras.

'It was a profound sense of shame.

'People where I lived looked at me funny.

'I was subject to a cruel public shaming and the consequences both psychologically and my physical health were overwhelming.

Mr Armstrong's boss, the Conservative MP for South Thanet Craig Mackinlay, said the verdicts should prompt debate over rape cases

'It all could have been avoided if it was for anonymity for suspects in cases like this, the same anonymity we extend to accusers. It's a simple matter of equality.'

Sam said: 'All of that happened because we have a system at the moment that seems to treat the investigation process as part of the punishment.

'When an allegation is made people's lives are essentially put on pause and there can't be a resolution until the end.

'Even then, it's not perfect because many people say there's no such thing as smoke without fire.'

He added: 'And anonymity would be such a simple change to make sure that injustice is not waged on anyone that does not deserve it.'

Samuel Armstrong, an MP's aide, said he could have been wrongly convicted of rape if his defence team hadn't unearthed key evidence days before his trial

'It seems to me entirely fair that that is extended to suspects, that we protect people until we are able to show beyond all reasonable doubt that they were guilty.'

But senior law lecturer Dr Sinead Ring, from the University of Kent who has written extensively on historical child sex abuse, said naming rape suspects can encourage more victims to come forward.

Dr Ring said: 'The question of whether to extend anonymity to defendants is a complex one.

'The defendant is entitled to the full protections of the legal process, including the presumption of innocence.

'An important advantage of keeping the status quo is that publicising a defendant's name may alert other victims to the fact that a prosecution is ongoing and this may encourage them to come forward and report themselves.

'This is really important where a victim may have been coerced into thinking that nobody would believe them or that it was their fault.

'Granting anonymity to defendants would add further to the stigma and silence around sexual crime that exists in our society.'

Sam agreed and added: 'Are there going to be cases in which it is appropriate to name suspects? Absolutely.

'But the presumption should be for anonymity.

'If the police or the prosecutors want to go to court and say we want to name this suspect because we believe there could be more victims, then that is a perfectly reasonable thing.

'But they should have to go to court in the same way they have to get a search warrant, to say we wish to name this person, can we do so?

'It would be an easily managed system and there seems to me to be no good reason at all to resist it.'

According to the Ministry of Justice, one in five rape cases are successfully prosecuted across England and Wales overall.
A man who pleaded guilty and was convicted in the Gone Girl kidnapping of a California couple has broken his silence to claim that he is not guilty.

Matthew Muller, 40, was sentenced to 40 years in prison last year after pleading guilty to breaking into the Vallejo home of Denise Huskins, 32, and Aaron Quinn, 33, when they were sleeping in 2015.

Prosecutors say the disbarred Harvard University-trained lawyer tied the couple up, drugged them and then kidnapped and raped Huskins over a two-day ordeal.

Police initially believed the kidnapping was so elaborate and bizarre that they dismissed it as a real life 'Gone Girl' hoax plotted by the two victims.

Matthew Muller spoke out for the first time in a prison interview with NBC on Wednesday to claim he is not guilty in the 2015 Gone Girl kidnapping case he pleaded guilty to last year

In a jailhouse interview with NBC on Wednesday, Muller said he was not guilty and plans to fight the charges.

'It's pretty simple. I'm not guilty,' he said.

'I'd really love to take the stand and be asked questions... It's a very intricate story, but it also a true one.

'Truth is stranger than fiction sometimes, but it will come out, and there's evidence for exactly what happened.'

Muller was given the 40 year sentence as part of a deal for pleading guilty to the kidnapping charge in federal court.

Police initially believed the kidnapping was so elaborate and bizarre that they dismissed it as a real life 'Gone Girl' hoax plotted by victims Denise Huskins and Aaron Quinn

He said he will fight state charges accusing him of raping Huskins and assaulting her boyfriend.

Muller said he plans to use a mental illness defense when he represents himself.

Matthew Muller, 40, was sentenced to 40 years in prison last year after pleading guilty to breaking into the Vallejo home of Denise Huskins, 32, and Aaron Quinn, 33, when they were sleeping in 2015

When explaining why he initially pleaded guilty, Muller said he had fallen into severe depression while being held at a Sacramento jail and he didn't care what happened to him.

He added that he wanted to help the couple in some way by taking the deal.

Muller is due to appear at a preliminary hearing next week and said he is likely to direct questions to Huskins and Quinn.

The couple are due to get married soon, but Muller denied he had planned the timing of the court case to cause them more pain.

'I did not control the timing on this. To suggest somehow Ive plotted to make this happen right before they got married is ridiculous,' he said.

Huskins and Quinn were awarded $2.5million in damages earlier this year after suing the Vallejo Police Department for defamation after they were accused of faking the kidnapping, which subsequently drew comparisons to the 'Gone Girl' film.

Prosecutors said Muller had used a remote-controlled drone to spy on his victims before breaking into their home, blindfolding and tying them up in March 2015.

Man convicted in bizarre "Gone Girl" kidnapping and assault involving Vallejo couple in 2015 speaks out during exclusive jailhouse interview: https://t.co/knoDfm3fbE pic.twitter.com/bpeBlRI39U  NBC Bay Area (@nbcbayarea) September 20, 2018

Muller, a disbarred Harvard University-trained attorney and ex-Marine, pleaded guilty last year to kidnapping Denise and holding her for ransom

Huskins and Quinn were awarded $2.5million in damages earlier this year after suing the Vallejo Police Department for defamation after they were accused of faking the kidnapping

He made them drink a sleep-inducing liquid before playing a pre-recorded message that made it seem as if there was more than one kidnapper.

Authorities said Muller then put Huskins in the trunk of car and drove to South Lake Tahoe where he held her hostage for two days and allegedly raped her twice while demanding a $15,000 ransom from her boyfriend.

Quinn called police after the break-in but was immediately questioned as a suspect in her possible murder.

After Huskins reappeared two days later, police said the pair had made the entire thing up.

Investigators dropped that hoax theory after Muller was later arrested in an attempted robbery at another San Francisco Bay Area home.

Police then apologized to the couple prior to them being award the damages in their lawsuit.
An 88-year-old woman who was brutally assaulted by a carjacker has said she wants to 'kill that son of a b****' if they ever crossed paths again.

Gloria Kevelighan's harsh words came the day after a man identified as Jason Harold Malinas, 38, approached her from behind and grabbed her purse in a Walmart parking lot in Livonia, Michigan, on Tuesday.

When Kevelighan tried to fight the man off using her cane, he punched her in the head and slammed her into the pavement.

He and his accomplice, 41-year-old Jessica Marie St Clair, then got into her car and drove off, nearly running Kevelighan over.

Gloria Kevelighan, an 88-year-old woman who was brutally assaulted by a carjacker in Livonia, Michigan, on Tuesday, says she wants to 'kill that son of a b****' if they ever cross paths again

88-year-old carjacking victim says she'd like to 'kill that s.o.b.' "I'd kill the son of a b****" Somebody thought 88-year-old Gloria Kevelighan was an easy target when he knocked her down and stole her car and purse. But if she sees him again...... http://bit.ly/2Npwqp3 Posted by FOX 2 Detroit on Thursday, September 20, 2018 =68.ARB07gNQS1R8B4LNQJsbwgR0y2JGGxquJqo5S0pg87lfU656b3hNDiw9JV11VnO_VSgZ_YGkMnjEkNNHVFdzngSFDe5Y74dNrZD-zzf37v5BB29uWcfDw64cH7nSVw-UewObSdxzw-m70b0kd1-txeMoFJFfblN7NkeYMJEpZIMdvZOpsqR6&__tn__=-R]

Bond for 38-year-old suspect Jason Harold Malinas (left) and his accomplice Jessica Marie St Clair (right), 41, was set at $2million on Thursday

Kevelighan was sporting severe bruises when she recounted the 'traumatic' attack on Wednesday, telling FOX2: 'I tried to hit him with my cane but I couldn't, he seemed to want to stay behind me so I couldn't see his face.

'I tried to turn around and sock him with my cane. If anyone bothers me, I use my cane.

'He pushed me and I fell flat on my face. I hit my head, I was bleeding and everything.

'The way he pushed me, he didn't care. He was very strong.'

When asked what she would do if she ever came face-to-face with the man who attacker her again, Kevelighan said emphatically: 'I'd kill that son of a b****.'

Kevelighan recounted the 'traumatic' attack in a Walmart parking to FOX2 on Wednesday. She said: 'The way he pushed me, he didn't care. He was very strong'

Kevelighan showed off the severe bruises she sustained when the man threw her to the ground

After the attack, a witness followed the stolen vehicle for a short ways but eventually lost track of it.

Police later spotted the two suspects in the area and arrested them.

Malinas, of Sterling Heights, and St Clair, of Lincoln Park, are facing charges of carjacking, robbery unarmed and five counts of 'stealing-financial transaction device'.

Their bond was set at $2million during an arraignment Thursday.
Donald Trump's former chief strategist Steve Bannon has backed Boris Johnson to be the next Tory party leader - as he voiced doubts Britain would ever leave the EU.

Bannon says he was 'very impressed' by Johnson when he met the former Foreign Secretary before he quit over Theresa May's Chequers agreement over Brexit.

And Trump's ex-aide insisted there would be a trade deal later on even in the event of a 'no deal Brexit'.

His prediction, in an interview with Anne McElvoy on Economist radio, came as May was warned she has just eight weeks to thrash out a deal with the EU.

Bannon said: 'I think there will be a 'do-over' on Brexit. Opponents are dragging it on and hoping people forget about it.'

Endorsing front-runner Johnson, who is getting divorced from Marina Wheeler after 25 years of marriage over his close relationship with young aide Carrie Symonds, Bannon said: 'I have talked to Boris Johnson and I am very impressed by him.'

He defended Johnson's controversial suicide vest remark, saying: 'I thought it was smart - he way the messaged that was quite powerful. It was the type of phrase that cuts through'.

Donald Trump's controversial former strategist Steve Bannon (pictured) backed Boris Johnson to be next Tory party leader when he spoke to Anne McElvoy of The Economist

Bannon says he was 'very impressed' by Johnson (pictured) when he met the former Foreign Secretary before he quit over Theresa May's Chequers agreement over Brexit

But Bannon thinks the former Foreign Secretary should have struck out 'more firmly' against May when he quit the Cabinet over the Chequers deal this summer

'I was vocal to Boris about the fact that he had a 'Churchillian moment'  maybe his Commons speech could have rallied the troops. My advice would have been to seize moments like that, You have to make decisions in the heat of the moment  and that was a moment.

He added: 'One thing I learned in the Trump campaign is that there are inflection points you only understand later on.'

Bannon said he was 'not a fan' of Mrs May as an explosive internal memo suggesting she will be forced to 'stand down soon after March 2019' and detailing the pros and cons of her potential successors was leaked.

The excruciating dossier is being widely circulated among Tory MPs and analyses the leadership prospects of her cabinet colleagues and other contenders, including leading Brexiteers Johnson and Jacob Rees-Mogg.

It emerged as Mrs May was desperately trying to sell her widely criticised Chequers plan to EU leaders in Salzburg on Wednesday evening.

Protested: Steve Bannon's speech at The Economist's Open Future Festival at the World Trade Center in New York was controversial and drew protests from some of the audience

Speaking to McElvoy, Bannon, architect of Trump's campaign success, switched from British to US politics as he opened up about explosive rows he had inside the White House with Trump's daughter Ivanka and her husband Jared Kushner - comparing their clashes to a 'knife fight.

'On a number of occasions, Ivanka and I would get into it. When we had fights, I would say to her, 'You are first daughter and I understand you, you love your father, but here you are just another staffer and you have a chain of command.'

'In a bureaucratic knife fight I can give as good as I get.'

He described Ivanka Trump as 'very smart and tough and loves her father'.

But he added of Ivanka and Kushner: 'I don't agree that it serves his (Trump's) best interests that they are staffers - they had very different ideas about populism and some of the economic nationalism.'

Anne McElvoy is Senior Editor and head of Economist Radio
The British Navy was forced to fire a warning flare at a Spanish ship today after it got too close to a nuclear submarine which had just been loaded with missiles in Gibraltar.

Dramatic pictures showed the HMS Talent, a Trafalgar-class nuclear sub, attempting to leave port on Wednesday along with a police escort.

But just after the submarine left the safety of the harbour, a patrol boat from the Spanish Guarda Civil could be seen approaching.

The accompanying British patrol boat (left) fired a flare towards the Spanish Guarda Civil ship (right) as it approached the submarine

The two British patrol boats including one police craft and a tug in the water next to HMS Talent

Pictures showed the police vessel firing a flare in the direction of the Spanish ship as it got closer and closer to the 'hunter killer' sub.

Eventually the Spanish ship retreated, leaving the Talent to continue on its course and exit the crowded bay of Gibraltar unscathed.

The HMS Talent sailed into Gibraltar on September 8, and was pictured reloading its missile supplies on Thursday morning.

The submarine has the capacity to carry up to 30 Tomahawk cruise missiles, capable of obliterating ground targets.

No information has been released by Royal Navy on the HMS Talent's current objectives in the Mediterranean.

'The dangerous incident today involving the departure of HMS Talent is regrettable,' Chief Minister Of Gibraltar Fabian Picardo said of the incident.

The HMS Talent leaves port in Gibraltar with the Spanish coastal city of Algeciras visible in the distance across the bay

The HMS Talent arrived into Gibraltar on September 8 although the Royal Navy has not said what it was doing there

'It serves to remind everyone of the importance of following the rules of navigation and recognising the respective jurisdictions that operate side by side to each other in the Bay of Gibraltar.

'The matter must be taken up at the highest levels. We are showing our ability to cooperate on something as complex as the Brexit negotiations.

'We can surely get our act together in the more prosaic matter of our respective agencies navigating the crowded waters of the Bay.'

This is not the first time the Royal Navy has been called upon to protect British sovereign territory in the region.

Earlier this year a Royal Navy ship was filmed by beachgoers intercepting a Spanish warship and dramatically chasing it back out into international waters.

HMS Sabre, part of the Gibraltar Squadron, escorted the OPV Servile P71 craft away from Gibraltar in June.

Pictured showed the Trafalgar-class submarine being loaded up with deadly Tomahawk missiles

Earlier this year HMS Sabre was forced to clear an unidentified Spanish warship out of British waters
Christine Blasey Ford is prepared to testify on her sexual assault allegation against Brett Kavanaugh as long as she is not in the same room as him.

Ford's attorney, Debra Katz, said her client 'would be prepared to testify next week,' in an email sent to Senate Judiciary Committee staff obtained by The New York Times. And she asked that senators offer 'terms that are fair and which ensure her safety'.

But Ford is not willing to testify on Monday - the date Republicans set for the hearing.

Ford said that testifying Monday 'is not possible and the Committee's insistence that it occur then is arbitrary in any event,' according to the email from Katz.

Sources told CNN that next Thursday could be an option but that at no point during any hearing could she be in the same room as Kavanaugh.

Katz reiterated that it is For's 'strong preference' that 'a full investigation' occur before her testimony, but her altered language suggests she is willing to testify without an FBI investigation.

Email from Christine Ford's lawyer to Senate Judiciary staff The text of the email from Christine Ford's attorney Debra Katz to the Senate Judiciary Committee staff: I would like to set up a call with you later today to discuss the conditions under which Dr. Christine Blasey Ford would be prepared to testify next week. As you are aware, she has been receiving death threats, which have been reported to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and she and her family have been forced out of their home. She wishes to testify, provided that we can agree on terms that are fair and which ensure her safety. A hearing on Monday is not possible and the Committee's insistence that it occur then is arbitrary in any event. Dr. Ford has asked me to let you know that she appreciates the various options you have suggested. Her strong preference continues to be for the Senate Judiciary Committee to allow for a full investigation prior to her testimony. Advertisement

Protesters are arrested during a demonstration in opposition to Brett Kavanaugh on Capitol Hill on Thursday

Supporters rally outside of Ford's house in Palo Alto to show their support for her

Many held signs saying thank you

Katz offered to hold a call with committee staff on Thursday to discuss conditions under which Ford would appear and expressed her client's appreciation for the various options that have been suggested.

'As you are aware, she has been receiving death threats, which have been reported to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and she and her family have been forced out of their home,' the email said. 'She wishes to testify, provided that we can agree on terms that are fair and which ensure her safety.'

Her message came ahead of the 10 am Friday deadline Republicans had set for her decision on whether to testify.

Additionally Ford has hired Democratic operative Ricki Seidman, who was Joe Biden's communication director in the 2008 presidential campaign, as an adviser, Politico reported.

Seidman, a senior principal at TSD Communications, also worked as an investigator for Sen. Ted Kennedy, and was involved with Anita Hill's decision to testify against Supreme Court Nominee Clarence Thomas in his 1991 confirmation hearings.

'I believe her and I think she's very courageous for coming this far,' Seidman told Politico.

Republican say the move is a sign Democrats are trying to leverage Ford's accusation to derail the Kavanaugh's confirmation.

'If you're concerned about an appearance of partisanship, hiring a Democratic operative with a history of smearing conservative judges doesn't exactly mitigate that,' Cassie Smedile, press secretary for the Republican National Committee, told the news website.

And Ford's attorneys Debra Katz and Lisa Banks cancelled a fundraiser for Wisconsin Democratic Sen. Tammy Baldwin planned for next month.

They were listed as headliners in a 'cocktails and conversation' event for Baldwin on October 1 at their law firm Katz, Marshall & Banks.

But after CNN contacted the Baldwin campaign and the attorneys, Katz called CNN to say that the event was being canceled.

A Baldwin spokesman said it was an 'old invite' and the event was scheduled before Ford's accusation became public.

'The short answer is this: We did a fundraiser for Sen. Baldwin six years ago when we ran for the Senate, we supported her then,' Katz told CNN. 'We are not going to be doing a fundraiser now. We're going to be focused on the issues involving the Kavanaugh confirmation process.'

Meanwhile, Republicans were growing more confident that Kavanaugh will come through the sexual assault allegations against him and be confirmed to the Supreme Court.

Three key Republican senators are lining up with their colleagues, giving statements that encourage Ford to testify while hinting they would support going ahead with the vote on Kavanaugh if she does not.

It's a strong indication the GOP has enough votes for confirmation, giving Republicans a shot of confidence they can have Kavanaugh on the court before its new term begins on October 1.

Brett Kavanaugh leaves his home on Thursday; he is spending his fourth day in a row at the White House as he works to defend his Supreme Court nomination

Sen. Susan Collins is touting the GOP line, which is being seen as an indication she will vote with her party when the time comes

President Donald Trump and White House aides also feel good about the way the pendulum is swinging toward his second nominee to the high court.

'We're very confident,' one Republican in touch with the White House told Politico.

'This is not in the bag,' a White House official noted to the news website. 'But I think we know what we are going to do.'

Republicans are treading carefully though, not wanting to rile up women ahead of November's midterm election. Women voters are particularly influential in the suburban House districts GOP lawmakers are trying to hold on to.

'One thing that is keeping everyone in line is that we're worried about the #MeToo movement, but we're also worried about discouraging the base,' the Republican said. 'There is a real concern, if Kavanaugh does not get confirmed and we don't rally to the cause, it could hurt us.'

Ford, in a bombshell interview in Sunday's Washington Post, accused Kavanaugh of sexually assaulting her at a high school party in the 1980s. She claims he held her down on the bed, tried to take off her clothes and covered her mouth when she screamed.

Kavanaugh strongly denies allegations.

Trump's nominee was spotted arriving at the White House on Thursday for the fourth day in a row as he fights to save his nomination.

He has been meeting with White House staff, including White House counsel Don McGahn, who's been guiding his nomination through the Senate; calling key Republican senators; and preparing to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee again on Monday.

Senators are waiting to hear if Ford, a professor of psychology at Palo Alto University, will appear on Monday also.

Ford's lawyers requested the FBI investigate Ford's allegation before she testifies, a move Republicans and Trump have said is not necessary.

And after Ford's lawyer made her demand, a few GOP senators who had called for a halt in Kavanaugh's confirmation process after Ford went public with her claims, said she needs to testify.

The actions of the three senators are notable. With Republicans 51-seat majority in the upper chamber, they can only lose one vote if all Democrats say no on Kavanaugh.

Sen. Susan Collins, who has always been seen as key to Kavanaugh's success, has indicated she would be fine with moving forward if Ford doesn't appear Monday.

'I think it's not fair for Judge Kavanaugh for her not to come forward and testify,' Collins told Maine radio station WVOM.

She also indicated she didn't support Ford's request for an FBI investigation.

'It seems to me, that this reverses the normal order of things,' Collins said.

'Usually the FBI does not pursue allegations against a nominee that occurred when the nominee was a minor,' she noted. 'It seems to me what we should be doing is bringing these two individuals before the committee.'

She added: 'If we need additional help from the FBI, then the committee can ask for it.'

While Collins isn't outright calling for a vote, she is towing the main GOP line. And her sticking to Republican talking points is seen as a sign she will vote with her party when the time comes.

Sen. Jeff Flake said he would support the Republican push to move forward with Kavanaugh's nomination if Ford does not appear at hearing Monday's hearing

Sen. Bob Corker said the GOP should vote if Ford doesn't appear on Monday

Republican Sen. Jeff Flake was the first lawmaker to put Kavanaugh's confirmation in doubt when he said Sunday he was 'not comfortable voting yes' on Kavanaugh until the Senate Judiciary Committee heard from Ford.

He told CNN Tuesday evening he would support the Republican push to move forward with Kavanaugh's nomination if Ford does not appear at hearing Monday's hearing.

'I think we'll have to move to the markup,' he said. 'I hope she does (appear). I think she needs to be heard.'

He is also pleading with Ford to speak to lawmakers - either in public or private.

'When Dr. Ford came forward, I said that her voice should be heard and asked the Judiciary Committee to delay its vote on Judge Kavanaugh. It did so. I now implore Dr. Ford to accept the invitation for Monday, in a public or private setting. The committee should hear her voice,' he tweeted Tuesday night.

Republican Sen. Bob Corker, who called for a delay on the Kavanaugh confirmation vote after Ford went public on Sunday, is now saying she should testify in Monday's scheduled hearing or the vote should proceed.

'After learning of the allegation, Chairman @ChuckGrassley took immediate action to ensure both Dr. Ford and Judge Kavanaugh have the opportunity to be heard, in public or private. Republicans extended a hand in good faith. If we don't hear from both sides on Monday, let's vote,' he tweeted late Tuesday night.

The final key GOP senator is Sen. Lisa Murkowski, who has been much quieter than her colleagues.

But if the rest of the party falls in line, Republicans can afford to lose her vote, letting Vice President Mike Pence cast the tie breaker that would put Kavanaugh on the court.

Christine Ford has been given a deadline of 10 am on Friday to decide whether to testify

Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski is another key vote who has been quieter than her colleagues

There are also a few Democrats to watch.

Democratic Senators Joe Manchin of West Virginia, Joe Donnelly of Indiana and Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota all voted for Trump's first Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch and face voters this fall in their home states, which the president carried in the 2016 election.

All have said they are undecided.

And Democratic Senators Jon Tester of Montana and Claire McCaskill of Missouri are both in tough re-election contests in states Trump carried in 2016. They voted against Gorsuch.

McCaskill announced Wednesday she will vote no on Kavanaugh, citing his judicial record.

Tester remains undecided.

Other Democrats have echoed Ford's demand for an FBI investigation and for additional witnesses to be allowed to help collaborate her allegation.

They charge Republicans with not doing enough to ensure Ford avoids an Anita Hill-type situation, where Clarence Thomas' accuser was assailed by Senate Judiciary Committee members in his 1991 confirmation hearing, and the GOP is countering they are giving her the option of public or private testimony.

Trump has said the FBI doesn't need to investigate.

'It would seem that the FBI really doesn't do that,' he said.

And some Republican senators argue the job to vet a nominee's qualifications falls to them.

'We have no power to commandeer an Executive Branch agency into conducting our due diligence. The job of assessing and investigating a nominee's qualifications in order to decide whether to consent to the nomination is ours, and ours alone,' Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley said in a letter Wednesday to Ford's lawyers.

Grassley has given Ford a deadline of 10 am on Friday to decide whether or not she is coming Monday.

Ford's lawyers said Republicans are not acting in 'good faith.'

'The Committee's stated plan to move forward with a hearing that has only two witnesses is not a fair or good faith investigation; there are multiple witnesses whose names have appeared publicly and should be included in any proceeding,' Ford's lawyer Lisa Banks said in a statement on Wednesday. 'The rush to a hearing is unnecessary, and contrary to the Committee discovering the truth.'

Ford described to The Washington Post in detail how, when she was at a teenage party in the 1980s, Kavanaugh and his high school classmate followed her upstairs when she went to the bathroom and pushed her into a bedroom.

She detailed how Kavanaugh held her down, tried to rip off her swimsuit, and put his hand over her mouth when she tried to scream.

She said she escaped when his friend, Mark Judge, jumped on top of them.

'I thought he might inadvertently kill me,' Ford told the newspaper.

Kavanaugh has repeatedly and strongly denied the allegation.

'This is a completely false allegation. I have never done anything like what the accuser describesto her or to anyone,' Kavanaugh said in a statement provided by the White House.

Kavanaugh said he 'had no idea' who made the allegation until Ford identified herself Sunday in a bombshell Washington Post interview.

'Because this never happened, I had no idea who was making this accusation until she identified herself yesterday,' he noted.
The Tennessee teenager who went on the run with her married teacher for more than a month last year sparking a nationwide manhunt is now seeking to set the record straight about what had happened.

'[People] think they know what happened,' Elizabeth Thomas told ABC's '20/20' in an exclusive interview that will air Friday night. 'They think that I'm a whore. They think that I like old men and that's not the case.'

Thomas was just 15 when she and Tad Cummins, her 51-year-old married health teacher, vanished from Columbia, Tennessee.

They had embarked on a romantic relationship that was initiated by Cummins and they spent 40 days hiding from police until eventually being tracked down in a cabin in California.

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Elizabeth Thomas is shown left this week speaking for the first time since she was taken by her married teacher Tad Cumins, right, from Tennessee. They were missing for 40 days before police found them in a cabin in California

Cummins is in custody awaiting sentencing. He pleaded guilty to traveling across state lines to have sex with a minor and obstruction of justice and now faces 30 years behind bars.

Thomas says that Cummins and his wife of 30 years, Jill, took her under their wing after her mother, Kimberly, was charged with child abuse and neglect involving the teen and her sister, Sarah.

Jill Cummins has previously said she came to think of Elizabeth as her third daughter, and she believed her relationship with her husband was akin to that of a parent and child.

But things took a strange turn one day in the school cafeteria when Elizabeth says Cummins, who was a teacher at her high school, made an unsettling comment to her.

I was standing there with a few friendsand then they said, "Are you hungry?" And I went, "I don't have a soul or if I did, I'd be hungry," or something like that,' Thomas said. 'And then he came to me and he pointed at me and said, "My soul sees your soul."'

Nevertheless, Thomas says Cummins made her feel like no one else cared for her the way he did. He also prevented her from seeking mental health assistance.

'I was feeling real low, and I was wanting to get on anti-depressants and try to go to a therapist. And he told me no and not to do it cause itd change who I was,' she recalled.

Thomas reveals that she and her married mentor began exchanging sexually explicit messages on Instagram, and then one day in class he told her, 'you'd look pretty nice naked,' according to Thomas.

There were no other students present at the time.

She also describes the first time Cummins kissed her which, she said, was when she 'realized it was getting too far.'

'He grabbed my face. I was right next to the double doors I had. I was 15. Being home schooled I haven't really had a boyfriend.

'When that happened, it was kind of like, "wow,"' she said.

Thomas and Cummins are shown above in a Walmart days after they vanished. He bought hair dye, cheese cubes, personal lubricant, women's razors and chocolate

The pair were found hiding out in this remote cabin in California last year. The person who called police about them is also interviewed in the show on Friday

Despite knowing their relationship was taboo, the teenager said she never told anyone because she doesn't like attention.

'I was scared, I don't want to tell my parent that a grown man kissed me and I don't want to tell friends that a grown man kissed me.

'I don't like the spotlight being on me,' she said.

Thomas also said she was afraid to make Cummins angry.

'He doesnt take "no" well,' the girl says in the interview.

Eventually, another student caught the pair kissing in class and reported it to school officials.

Cummins denied any wrongdoing, but was suspended from teaching.

Thomas says when other teachers and students found out about it, she became the target of relentless name-calling and bullying.

During his suspension, Cummins would force the teen to call and text him at regular intervals, according to her.

'And any time that I wouldn't post for a few hours, he would go crazy and say that I was cheating on him and saying if he found out that I was with another boy, he'd kill them,' Thomas said.

Elizabeth was 15 when they fled. She said she never told family members or adults about their relationship because she did not like the 'spotlight'

Eventually, Thomas says Cummins told her she had to run away with him, or else he would kill himself or someone else, including her family.

The girl says the teacher had two guns and he would threaten her with them.

Feeling trapped, Thomas reluctantly agreed to go with Cummins on the run for fear that he would do something drastic.

As soon as we went to go leave, he set a gun in the middle console, and I knew that I wasnt getting out of the car, Thomas said. He made me throw my phone off a bridge and his phone as well, that way the police couldnt track us.

Thomas likened the ordeal to a kidnapping and described in detail Cummins controlling behavior, which included keeping her by his side at all times, even when she went to use the bathroom or shower, and telling her what to eat.

He told me he likes skinny girls, she said, adding that she often went hungry.

In the days after he fled with the teenager, they were seen on surveillance cameras going into a Walmart where they bought hair dye to change Elizabeth's appearance.

They also bought cheese cubes, K-Y jelly, women's razors and chocolate.

He later bought a two-seater kayak and an iPad to try to monitor the media coverage of their case, prosecutors said.

When they would stay in motels, Thomas says Cummins made her sleep naked next to him and would keep her clothes separately so she could not leave.

He was really mean and said hurtful things a lot of the time, she said of Cummins. He called me his wife sometimes and said that we were going to get married and I was going to live with him until I died.

Cummins initial plan was to drive to the southern border and then make their way to Panama in the kayak, but having failed that, they ended up in a remote part of northern California.

After a brief stay at a commune, which ended with the teacher and the teen being thrown up for not following the rules, their journey led them to Griffin Barrys cabin, where the two were finally discovered by police acting on a tip.

Describing the moment she emerged from the house and saw the police, Thomas says: 'this was the best day of my life.'

Before he was taken away in handcuffs, Thomas said Cummins whispered to her, instructing her to tell the authorities that she had gone on the run willingly and that he was protecting her.

I know hes a bad man, and Ive blamed myself a lot. But now I know that hes at fault, Thomas says.

The teen is currently living with her older brother in her hometown in Tennessee. She works at a coffee shop, has a boyfriend and is planning to get her GED and eventually go to college.

Her dream is to become a medical examiner and one day have a family of her own.

I am a stronger person than I was and Im not afraid, she concluded.

Initially, Cummins pleaded not guilty but he changed his plea in May.

In a tearful court appearance then, he said: 'I cannot be the man I need to be and not tell the truth.'

The full interview will air on ABC's 20/20 on Friday night at 10pm EST.
A would be first time buyer is stuck without his dream home after Barclays' online banking and telephone systems collapsed.

Jake Parsons, 24, from Debden, Essex, was scheduled to move into a 130,000 one bedroom flat in Chapel Fields, in Coventry.

Mr Parsons, who works for a commercial vehicle company, had saved for a deposit and planned to pay the money via Barclays, his mortgage provider, on Thursday afternoon.

Mr Jake Parsons, above, is originally from Essex but is staying in Coventry. He said the house he has been staying in is to be returned tomorrow, and nearly faces losing his dream 130,000 flat because of the Barclays system crash

A technical glitch on Thursday morning sent both online and telephone systems for the bank crashing down for the day, leaving 24million UK customers, along with Mr Parsons, unable to pay money out-of-branch.

As a result, Barclays did not pay the solicitor fees to go ahead with the purchase.

Mr Parsons said: 'The plan was to pay today and move in tomorrow.

'Im speechless about it all, I sat in silence for an hour, Im gutted, absolutely gutted.

'Now, if its not done by 3.30pm tomorrow afternoon Im going to be stuck without a house because the solicitors wont have enough time to process the sale on my behalf.

'The house Ive been staying at is to be returned tomorrow and Id already extended the lend so I cant do it again.

'Im up in Coventry but Im originally from Essex meaning I wont have anywhere to stay over the weekend.'

The house he had planned to move into was a new build in Chapel Fields, near the city centre.

He saved for a deposit using a help to buy scheme, putting money away since the age of 16.

Mr Parsons bought the 130,000 one bedroom flat, pictured in the block above. He could be straight out of Coventry if he is still left waiting for funds by tomorrow afternoon

He said: Its already been a nightmare move so far with so many delays but today, out of the blue, technical issues with Barclays.

'Its a nightmare  all my stuff is in the property because the sellers allowed me to move some in, but I dont have access to the keys until the sale has gone through.

'Just as I thought it had all gone through and I had my first home, after moving my stuff into the new build, I got an email from my solicitors telling me about Barclays problem and that we cant go ahead.'

His family had planned to visit him on the weekend and help him move in.

He said: 'Im just stunned at how these things can happen at such a large organisation.

'Ive heard about these stories before but I dont understand how they happen.

'Theyre supposed to be my mortgage provider but it fills me with doubt to be honest.

'If the bank can release funds to my solicitor by 3.30 in the afternoon they can just about get it completed and transfer the money to the seller.

'We have 24 hours to be honest otherwise the sale cant go through.'

Barclays said it cannot comment on individual cases.
Edgar Garcia thought he had just lost his entire family for good - including his son.

Garcia just wanted to seek a new life for his family in the United States, like thousands of other immigrants who have risked their livelihoods crossing the Mexico-US border.

And just like countless of other migrants, the Guatemalan undocumented immigrant became part of the dream-crushing stat: illegal immigrants detained and deported from the US border.

The only asterisk next to his name was the one detailing he had just been separated from his son by immigration officials.

After four months of being detached from each other, Edgar was finally able to be reunited with his six-year-old son, Dylan, on Wednesday in their native Guatemala, months after New York Democratic Congressman Adriano Espaillat interceded on behalf of the family.

Edgar Garcia was reunited with his Guatemalan son on Wednesday after they were separated for four months by U.S. immigration officials

Dylan Garcia was split from his father under Trump's 'Zero Tolerance' immigration policy after Border Patrol agents detained him and his father in May

The Guatemalan father-of-two left behind his wife and daughter when he, along with his son, set off for Mexico before crossing the dangerous waters of the Rio Grande River, which at times away has completely swept away the dreams immigrants seeking the American dream.

Garcia and little Dylan made it to dry land May 14, walked four hours before they were intercepted by agents from the U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency.

In an interview with Univision, Garcia recalled obeying the Border Patrol agents orders and boarding the officer's truck with his son.

Upon reaching the Border Patrol station, Garcia was split up from his son under the Trump administration's 'Zero Tolerance' immigration policy that was active from May 5 to June 20.

Garcia spent two weeks detained by the U.S Immigration Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency and complained about the federal department's alleged inhumane treatment.

'I spent my time there at jail crying,' Garcia told Univision.

'I spent 15 days without being able to taste water, no food. I would tell them to give me a blanket. They would tell us, 'well you're animals. Sit down.'

Because his Garcia was being processed for deportation, Dylan was put placed under the supervision of the Department of Health and Human Services' Office of Refugee Resettlement.

In mid-June, the six-year-old Guatemalan boy was transferred to the Cayuga Centers, a non-profit agency in New York that allocates minor children with foster parents and which has housed many children who were separated from their parents during the 'Zero Tolerance' period.

'When I was there [in the detention center], I thought I had lost all my family because I thought all of them where going to be upset with what had occured,' Garcia said.

With the assistance of Congressman Espaillat, who's worked out the reunification of three different families and who's currently working on reuniting another two, Dylan appeared before an immigration judge on August 23 and received a special travel pass that allowed him to return to Guatemala on Wednesday.

The family's plan is to now reintegrate their traumatized son after a long, unexpected separation.
Sankat faces charges of criminal attempt to steal an aircraft, as well as a visa violation and trespassing. He is being held at the Brevard County Jail and will appear at a court hearing on Friday

A student pilot suspected of boarding a vacant passenger plane at a Florida airport has been charged with criminal attempt to steal an aircraft.

Nishal Sankat, a 22-year-old technology student from Trinidad, caused chaos after he accessed an American Airlines plane and was tackled by workers before being arrested.

The incident took place at Orlando Melbourne International airport on Thursday, which subsequently closed for five hours.

Airport spokesman Lori Booker said the Joint Terrorism Task Force is investigating and trying to determine a motive in the case.

Booker said Sankat entered the US from Canada and has a Florida driving license.

Nishal Sankat's facebook pictures and posts show he had a keen interest in aviation and weaponry

Nishal Sankat's facebook page heavily aircraft-themed but his motive for accessing the plane is not yet known

Early Thursday morning he parked his car curbside, jumped a fence and boarded the vacant passenger plane.

The Airbus 321 aircraft was based at maintenance facility and wasn't scheduled to fly when the incident happened.

An avionics technician was in the plane's galley when he saw a shadow, Booker said.

'He turned around and said, 'Who are you? Show me your badge,' she told news outlets.

The employee grabbed Sankat and with help from another technician, got him off the plane.

The student boarded the Airlines Airbus A321 plane (pictured) and caused an airport lockdown

Booker said that while one technician held the man down, the other called Orlando Melbourne airport police.

Sankat broke free and ran along the airfield before police took him into custody about two minutes later.

The student pilot now also faces a visa violation and criminal trespassing charges.

Booker described as 'heroic' the four staff who had seen the student board the plane and those who approached him on-board.

The car left abandoned by the man was searched by robots before being towed away.

Sankat was a part-time student at the Florida Institute of Technology in Melbourne, where he studied aviation management and had completed some flight training, school spokesman Adam Lowenstein said.

The university is cooperating with authorities, he said.

Sankrat's Facebook shows he was fascinated by aviation and weaponry and was an avid video gamer with a particular interest in war games.

He had posted updates online pondering the 2014 disappearance of Malaysian Airlines flight MH370 and voiced concerns about Russia's invasion of Crimea.

Airport spokesman Lori Booker (pictured) told news outlets the student pilot also faces a visa violation and criminal trespassing charges

Sankrat also penned a tribute to Mikhail Kalashnikov, who created the AK47, upon his death in 2013.

He wrote: 'I am deeply saddened by this event, R.I.P Mikhail Kalashnikov, A great leader and innovator, if it wasn't for you we wouldn't have these modern, yet efficient assault rifles that are available to both civilian and military use.

One of my lifelong heroes is no longer with us. I will remember you! R.I.P'

A sticker on the student's car, and a number of social media posts, indicated he lived in the area at least recently.

The airport, which handles about 500,000 passengers a year, was evacuated and authorities conducted a security sweep of the entire airport, which reopened about five hours later, according to Booker.

Police quickly arrived at the scene and took the man to Brevard County Jail

Two flights were delayed because of the incident.

Melbourne resident Manan Karia told Florida Today that he approached the airport about 5am on NASA Boulevard to try to catch a 6am Delta flight to Austin, Texas.

'I drove by Keiser and Sears and saw a bunch of cars in both parking lots, which I thought was weird.

'I get to the airport and there is a line about five cars deep, and a police officer has the entrance blocked with his car and lights are flashing. You can see more police cars with lights flashing around the airport,' Karia said.

'I finally get up to the officer, and he proceeds to tell me the airport is shut down and asks if I'm an employee or a passenger. I let him know I'm a passenger, and he tells me to go park at the Keiser parking lot.

'That's all the info they provided,' Karia said. 'I was just scouring Twitter and the internet trying to get more after that.'

Melbourne is 70 miles (112 kilometers) southeast of Orlando. Orlando-Melbourne is a popular airport for overhaul and maintenance, Booker said, and it's not unusual to have as many as eight jets parked on the tarmac outside the repair center.

Sankat is being held at the Brevard County Jail and will appear at a court hearing on Friday.
The Oklahoma Department of Corrections is being sued for not doing enough to prevent, Amber Hilberling (pictured), 25, who was convicted of murdering her husband, from hanging herself in her cell in 2016

The Oklahoma Department of Corrections is being sued for not doing enough to prevent a murder convict from hanging herself in her cell in 2016.

Amber Hilberling's estate filed the lawsuit in Oklahoma County District Court in July.

It says the department didn't take 'any reasonable steps to prevent or address the conditions' that led to Hilberling's suicide at the Mabel Bassett Correctional Center in McLoud.

Hilberling said she was acting in self-defense when she shoved her US Air Force veteran husband, Josh, through a window in their Tulsa apartment in 2011.

She was sentenced to 25 years.

The lawsuit alleges inadequate supervision, medical care and segregation procedures. The estate is seeking more than $75,000.

A corrections spokesman said the agency doesn't comment on pending litigation.

Last January, Hilberling, 26, was featured in an episode of the documentary Women Who Kill, which reveals the shocking stories of female prisoners who were driven to murder.

Hilberling had always maintained that she was acting in self defense when she pushed her husband out of their apartment window following a violent altercation.

Hilberling said she was acting in self-defense when she shoved her US Air Force veteran husband, Josh (both pictured, left), through a window in their Tulsa apartment in 2011

Josh fell from the 25th floor of their apartment tower (pictured) and landed on a parking garage below

This screenshot is from a video shot in 2011 and shows the busted window in the Hilberlings' apartment after Josh's fatal fall

Hilberling described the moments leading up to Josh's death, and how the pair argued and he attacked her, before she retaliated by pushing him.

The documentary included chilling original CCTV footage of her admitting to her grandmother that she had pushed her husband out of the window.

In what would turn out to be her last televised words, Hilberling said that while her marriage was fiery, she believes that they could have had a happy ending.

'I've never tried to make it sound like he is the big bad wolf and I'm little Red Riding Hood that is running for her life, it wasn't like that,' she said.

'We were both young and we were both selfish in our emotions because we were young, and I think if it had happened later on in life when we were both a little bit more grown up, I think it would have been happily ever after.'

Amber's mother Rhonda was also featured in the documentary and says the media painted her daughter 'as an aggressor', while Josh's military record - and the fact he was kicked out for manufacturing drugs - was ignored.

Amber, who married Josh when she was 18, was seven months pregnant when she was sentenced and her mother Rhonda now cares for her son Levi, six.

Levi also appeared in the documentary and would regularly visit Hilberling along with her mother, before she killed herself in her cell at the Mabel Bassett Correctional Center, in Oklahoma in October 2016.

Last January, Hilberling, 25, was featured in an episode of the documentary Women Who Kill, which reveals the shocking stories of female prisoners who were driven to murder

The image above is a still photo of the broken window through which the 23-year-old US Air Force veteran had fallen
Police have identified the names of two South Carolina women who drowned inside a sheriff's transport van, revealing that the victims were not inmates and had been seeking help for mental illness.

Horry County Sheriff Phillip Thompson said Wednesday that the two women killed are Wendy Newton, 45, and Nicolette Green, 43.

They died on Tuesday after the Horry County Sheriff van they were in drove into floodwaters near the Little Pee Dee River in Marion County. The two deputies traveling in the van survived after escaping and waiting on the roof of the vehicle for help.

It was previously reported that the women were inmates and were being transported from Conway to Darlington on Tuesday night, days after Tropical Storm Florence battered the Carolinas with torrential rain and heavy winds.

Nicolette Green (left) and Wendy Newton (right) drowned in a sheriff's transport van on Tuesday night

The women were being taken from the hospital to a mental health facility when the van drove into floodwaters. Pictured is the highway where the van was traveling

Responders congregate Wednesday near where two women drowned near the Little Pee Dee River

Officials in South Carolina were keeping a watch on several rivers known to flood, including the Little Pee Dee River.

Thompson said Newton and Green were mental health patients and were being taken from the hospital to a facility in the city of Florence when the van became engulfed by water.

According to the sheriff's department, Newton and Green were seated in the back of the van. Thompson said he does not believe they were shackled or in police restraints.

He said the two deputies, identified as Joshua Bishop and Stephen Flood, tried to help free Newton and Green from the van 'for a long period of time' but eventually had to seek refuge on the vehicle's roof as the floodwaters continued to rise.

'I'm not sure if it was the way the van was positioned, against a guardrail, or if it was pressure from the water, but unfortunately they were not able to get the van doors open and get the ladies out,' Thompson said Wednesday.

The sheriff said the part of the highway where the van became submerged was blocked off. He said it appears the deputies drove around the barrier, but the investigation is ongoing.

'It hasn't been confirmed to me that they did, but here's my questions: There's barriers there. It could be assumed that he did,' Thompson said.

According to the South Carolina Department of Transportation, the portion of Highway 76 where the van was was closed on Tuesday night. Officials told WMBF that it had been closed for some time.

The sheriff said he does not believe Newton (pictured) and Green were shackled or restrained in the van

Green had three children, her family said and had been diagnosed with schizophrenia three years ago

It took a rescue crew 45 minutes to find the submerged van. The deputies were plucked from the roof and taken to safety via a boat. According to CBS, by the time crews reached the women the van was underwater.

Joshua Bishop (pictured) escaped the van with another deputy and waited on the roof for help

Because of the dangerous conditions, rescuers were not able to retrieve the bodies immediately and they were pulled from the water on Wednesday evening, nearly 24 hours later.

'We're sorry. We take a lot of pride in what we do. We work hard to protect and to serve our citizens, and we're just so very sorry that this event has taken place,' Thompson said.

Green's family told CBS that she had three children, but one died in 2015 from cancer.

'We want those who are responsible to be held accountable,' the family said in a statement. 'These woman were not inmates or criminals. They were women who voluntarily sought help. They trusted the hospitals and sheriff deputies with their lives and that trust was abused. We want answers.'

Her 19-year-old daughter Nicolette Hershberger said Green had been diagnosed with schizophrenia three years ago and had went to a new therapist on Tuesday. The therapist had commanded Green be committed to a mental institution.

The part of the highway where the van was at had been closed because of the rising water of the Little Pee Dee River (pictured in a September 17 photo)

'I was confused as to why someone would, or the police officers would drive down a road that was in an area that was known for flooding,' she told NBC.

'The fact that they (the deputies) were able to get out but my mom and the other woman wasn't makes me feel really like hurt and betrayed by them.'

The drowning is being investigated by the State Law Enforcement Division and Highway Patrol. Thompson said there is also an internal investigation and the deputies involved were placed on administrative leave.
An Ivy League-trained neurologist accused of repeatedly raping female patients appeared in court on Thursday alongside his still-supportive wife.

Six women have accused Dr Ricardo Cruciani, 63, of sexually abusing them during appointments at his Beth Israel Medical Center practice in Manhattan over a period of several years.

The renowned doctor was arrested at his home in February, just two months after he admitted to groping seven women in Pennsylvania and was only sentenced to probation.

The New York accusers' case against Cruciani is ongoing, with prosecutors having said in June that they will be pushing for a sentence of at least 10 years.

Cruciani wore a downtrodden expression as he left the Manhattan Supreme Court on Thursday with his pediatrician wife Nora clutching his arm.

Neurologist Ricardo Cruciani, who is facing accusations of sexual misconduct from dozens of women, is pictured leaving Manhattan Supreme Court on Thursday with his wife Nora

The 63-year-old was arrested in February, just two months after he was sentenced to probation for admitting to groping seven women while treating them in Pennsylvania

Cruciani, who is out on $1million bail, appeared in court this week as both parties confirmed all discovery had been submitted.

The doctor's deposition is set to be completed by the end of October.

DailyMail.com has reached out to Cruciani's lawyer for additional details.

Earlier this week the plaintiffs, each listed under the name Jane Doe, hired attorney John M Pumphrey, who was involved in the Pennsylvania case against the accused serial-abuser.

At least 17 women across several states have come forward in the last year to accuse Cruciani of sexual misconduct, describing his creepy bedside manner that included unwanted touching and kissing.

Some of the women said they were coerced into oral sex, while another said he masturbated in front of her.

One woman was pregnant when she said he began abusing her by touching her breasts.

The women, who range in age from 31 to 55, have said they felt they had no choice but to continue to see the specialized neurologist because he is one of very few qualified to treat rare, complicated syndromes that produce debilitating pain.

They admitted they knew Cruciani, the former chairman of the neurology department at Philadelphias Drexel University, was taking advantage of their desperation.

Accuser Hillary Tullin, a former network news producer for ABC and CBS, said of the doctor: 'These hospitals created this perfect storm of opportunity for him to victimize so many patients. The system failed.'

Cruciani worked at Mount Sinai Beth Israel hospital in Union Square in Manhattan until 2014

Cruciani is pictured leaving court in Philadelphia with wife Nora following his November conviction

Last November, Cruciani was sentenced to serve seven years probation in connection with the allegations in Philadelphia.

While he avoided jail time, he was forced to give up his license and to register as a sex offender. He was also fired from Drexel University following his conviction.

During his sentencing, Cruciani apologized for the pain he had caused victims.

Months later in February, Cruciani was arrested for the set of disturbingly similar allegations out of New York.

In a statement at the time, a Mount Sinai spokesman told DailyMail.com: 'We are deeply disturbed to learn about these charges and have been working closely with the investigation being led by the District Attorney's office.

'The Mount Sinai Health System is committed to a safe environment for all patients, faculty, staff, students, trainees and visitors.'
The United States hit a Chinese military organization with punishing financial sanctions for buying Russian fighter jets and missiles as it stepped up pressure on Moscow over its 'malign activities.'

It was the first time the Trump administration targeted a third country with its CAATSA sanctions, designed to punish Russia for its seizure of Crimea and other activities.

The State Department said it was applying the 2017 legislation against the Equipment Development Department of the Chinese Ministry of Defense for its purchase of Russian Sukhoi Su-35 fighter jets and S-400 surface-to-air missiles.

At the same time, the State Department also announced it was placing 33 Russian intelligence and military-linked actors on its sanctions blacklist under the CAATSA rules.

'The ultimate target of these sanctions is Russia,' a senior administration official told journalists, insisting on anonymity.

President Donald Trump's administration is sanctioning a branch of China's defense agency because it bought fighter jets and missiles from a Russian military exporter

China purchased Russian-made Sukhoi Su-35 fighters, like this one pictured landing at a Russian base in Syria

China's purchases also included S-400 surface-to-air missiles like these

Trump has boasted that he's been unusually tough on Russia but was deferential to him during a joint press conference in Helsinki on July 16

'CAATSA sanctions in this context are not intended to undermine the defense capabilities of any particular country. They are aimed at imposing costs on Russia in response to its malign activities.'

CAATSA, or the Countering America's Adversaries Through Sanctions Act, was passed in 2017 as a tool that gives the Trump administration more ways to target Russia, Iran and North Korea with economic and political sanctions.

With regard to Russia, CAATSA arises from the country's 'aggression in Ukraine, annexation of Crimea, cyber intrusions and attacks, interference in the 2016 elections, and other malign activities,' the State Department said.

'We will continue to vigorously implement CAATSA and urge all countries to curtail relationships with Russia's defense and intelligence sectors, both of which are linked to malign activities worldwide,' it said.

The senior official said EDD and its director, Li Shangfu, were hit with sanctions because of the purchases made from Rosoboronexport, Russia's main arms export entity already on the CAATSA blacklist for its support of the Assad regime in Syria.

The sanctions freeze any of EDD's and Li's assets in U.S. jurisdictions.

The sanctions willbe applied by the U.S. State Department, led by Secretary Mike Pompeo

Russian Sukhoi Su-34 fighter-bombers participated in the Vostok-2018 (East-2018) military drills at Tsugol training ground not far from the Chinese and Mongolian border in Siberia, on September 13

They restrict EDD's access to global financial markets by blocking foreign exchange transactions under U.S. jurisdiction or any transactions in the U.S. financial system.

The Russians named for CAATSA blacklisting have all been named previously under other U.S. sanctions regimes.

They include private paramilitary contractor PMC Wagner, and Russian Defense Ministry procurement group Oboronlogistika, and KNAAP, Russia's largest aircraft manufacturer.

They also include 25 Russians and three Russian companies who were indicted over the past year by Russia collusion investigator Robert Mueller for their involvement in political meddling and hacking during the 2016 election.

In addition, the chief of the Russian military intelligence body GRU, Igor Korobov, and deputy chief Sergey Gizunov, were also hit with the CAATSA sanctions.
A registered sex offender has been arrested after he was allegedly caught having sex with a dog in New York.

Vincent Persico, 64, is accused of abusing the dog in the Long Island neighborhood of Melville on September 13.

Persico knew the owners of the dog he allegedly abused and that he had permission to be in their home at the time.

Suffolk SPCA Chief Wally Gross told DailyMail.com that the dog's owners came home to find Persico engaged in the sex act.

Registered sex offender Vincent Persico, 64, is accused of abusing the dog in the Long Island neighborhood of Melville on September 13

Persico was not expecting the family to return home, Gross said.

The family reported the incident to police and investigators tracked Persico down at a home in nearby Copiague.

He was charged on Tuesday with one count of animal cruelty and one count of sexual misconduct with a dog.

Persico is listed on the states sex offender registry as a level two sex offender. He was convicted in 1998 of second degree sexual abuse.

Chief Gross described the dog incident as 'unfortunate' and 'very disturbing'.

'The dog owners, when they see something like this, it's got to be a traumatic experience,' Gross said.

'There is a strong link between child abuse, domestic violence and animal cruelty... be vigilant.'

Persico was released on bail and is scheduled for arraignment in First District Court in Central Islip on November 27.

He faces up to two years in prison if convicted of both charges.
Bryan Deneumostier (pictured), 32, who posed as a housewife to lure men into his home, has pleaded guilty to making sex tapes with 150 unsuspecting men

A Florida man who posed as a housewife to lure men into his home has pleaded guilty to making sex tapes with 150 unsuspecting men and uploading them to porn sites.

Bryan Deneumostier, 32, pleaded guilty to two counts of illegal interception of oral communications on Thursday.

Deneumostier was arrested in July for making unlawful recording of sex acts for a porn site, according to the Miami Herald.

Out of the 150 men, at least 80 of them were unaware that Deneumostier was recording them.

Deneumostier went by the user name 'susanleon33326' on a site he created called StraightBoyz.net.

Prosecutors listed three victims on an indictment related to the website, which promised videos of gay men conning straight men into have sex.

The men in the videos were blindfolded or wearing blacked-out goggles.

Photos from Deneumostier's Twitter page showed him wearing wigs, makeup, pantyhose, heels and dresses as he prepared for his late-night romps with different men.

In one photo he is seen wearing a leopard print bra and panties set with red heels and black tights.

Photos from Deneumostier's Twitter page showed him wearing wigs, makeup, pantyhose, heels and dresses as he prepared for his late-night romps with different men

Prosecutors listed three victims on an indictment related to the website, StraightBoyz.net, which promised videos of gay men conning straight men into have sex. The men (pictured) in the videos were blindfolded or wearing blacked-out goggles

Other photos show him wearing red lipstick and fake eyelashes.

According to the US Department of Justice, Deneumostier assisted in the operation of the subscription-based pornography website.

'The site offered for streaming approximately 619 "hook up" videos that depicted sexual activity between Deneumostier and other men,' the department said in a statement.

According to the agency, Deneumostier 'had surreptitiously made audio and video recordings of the sexual encounters, without the victims' knowledge or consent'.

The department said the videos were later sold by Deneumostier to a third party located overseas and subsequently posted online.

Authorities believe Deneumostier posted ads on Craigslist seeking flings at his home while he was posing as a woman.

Authorities believe Deneumostier posted ads on Craigslist seeking flings at his home while he was posing as a woman

Deneumostier faces up to 10 years in prison for the incidents. Three related charges will be dropped as part of his plea deal

When the men questioned Deneumostier, who lives near the Homstead Reserve Air Base, he would assure them that he was married to someone in the Army and would never video their flings.

Deneumostier faces up to 10 years in prison for the incidents.

Three related charges will be dropped as part of his plea deal.

Deneumostier's website is no longer in operation, but several videos can still be viewed on other porn sites.
Janet P Winslow, 71, of Virginia has been arrested and charged with the 2012 murder of her husband, Ernest Winslow, age 65

A 71-year-old Virginia woman has been arrested and charged with the 2012 murder of her husband.

Janet P Winslow of Farmville was taken into custody in connection with the death of Ernest Winslow, 65, by the Buckingham County Sheriff's Office on September 13.

The sheriff's office received new information that prompted additional investigation into the six-year-old murder case, and led to Ms. Winslow's arrest.

Ms Winslow has been charged with first-degree murder in connection with the case, Buckingham Sheriff William G. Kidd Jr announced on Thursday.

The crime carries a minimum sentence of five and a maximum sentence of 40 years in prison.

Mr. Winslow died in his Curdsville-area home in 2012, authorities said.

The investigator did not elaborate on the cause of Mr Winslow's death.

The sheriff's office received new information that prompted additional investigation into the six-year-old murder case, and led to Ms Winslow's arrest; She is seen here in photos she shared of herself on social media in summer of 2013

Court records list the date of the incident for which Ms Winslow is charged as June 25, 2012.

'New information came to light, which initiated a review of the investigation and resulted in [Ms. Winslow's] arrest,' Kidd said.

At present there are no plans to exhume Mr Winslow's remains for the investigation, Fredericksburg.com reported.

Ms Winslow remains in custody, the sheriff's office said in a statement.

She's being held without bond at Piedmont Regional Jail.

Ms Winslow's next scheduled court appearance is set for October 16 in Buckingham County General District Court.
Breanne Bechtol, 21, was arrested on Wednesday after she intentionally crashed her car with her baby inside

A 21-year-old mother deliberately crashed her car into a pole with her baby in the back seat, in a desperate plea to get her ex-boyfriend's attention.

Breanne Bechtol, of Weeki Wachee, rammed her car into a pole and threatened to commit suicide on Wednesday evening with her two-month-old baby girl in the car, cops say.

Pasco County deputies arrived on the scene around 9pm and found Bechtol in fine condition and the car with minor damage.

Bechtol and the baby were taken to Florida Hospital Dade City as a precaution.

Bechtol told cops she wanted her ex-boyfriend to notice her and had no real intention of hurting herself, according to WTSP.

She was booked into Pasco County Jail on a charge of aggravated child abuse for the incident. She is being held on $50,000 bail.

Her baby girl was left in the care of the biological father.

She was also arrested in July 2018 for domestic battery.

The Florida mom-of-one deliberately crashed her car in a desperate attempt to get her ex-boyfriend's attention
By Ruth Styles in Palo Alto, California, for DailyMail.com

Demonstrators protesting against the way Christine Blasey Ford has been treated descended on her quiet California street on Thursday morning.

Chanting 'We Believe Christine' and 'Thank You Dr. Ford', the mostly female activists said they wanted to show their support for the 51-year-old - who has gone into hiding after publicly claiming Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her in the 80s.

Her attorney said that she could not live in her home because of her fears for her own safety.

Organizer Kristen Podulka, 43, of Palo Alto, California, told DailyMail.com: 'We're here to show our love and support, and in response to the death threats and hate mail she has received.

'We're a community here and we believe her. She is one of us and we wanted to show her that we love her and we care for her.'

Blasey Ford has not been home since Sunday when an article detailing her claims of sexual assault and attempted rape by Kavanaugh was published by the Washington Post.

Solidarity: How Christine Ford was given support in the home she says she does not feel safe in

Backing: protesters said they were angry with Congress and said the Friday deadline was eroding their trust in the system.

Democratic: The protesters were clear about their view of the partisan divide

The mother-of-two has suffered harassment and death threats since going public and has now gone into hiding with her sons and mechanical engineer husband Russell Biddle Ford, 56.

Ford has been invited to testify before the Judiciary Committee this Monday. Although given a deadline of 10a.m. Friday to agree, her attorney said Thursday afternoon that she was willing to testify but not on Monday, and only if the process was 'fair' and her 'safety' was guaranteed.

Outside her home, a four-bedroom property that is estimated to be worth $3.3m, protesters said they were angry with Congress and said the Friday deadline was eroding their trust in the system.

Bulbul Gupta, 40, said continuing the confirmation process for Kavanaugh would 'break trust in Congress'.

'I don't know if anger would be my first emotion but if they did confirm him [Kavanaugh], it would break my trust in Congress.

'They're just not doing their job and it erodes trust in government.'

Gupta, who carried a sign declaring herself to be a survivor and said she too had been a victim of sexual assault, added: 'It is horrible how standing up for yourself leads to attacks on your family.

'I think Congress now need to make sure they get the facts and not hold these false hearings. And when she does have the bravery to come in person, it cannot be a slander fest.'

Linda Henigin, 48, also of Palo Alto, added: 'I believe we live in a bullying culture right now  President Trump's behavior is bullying.

He said, she said: Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh has denied allegations made by Christine Ford that he sexually assaulted her when they were both teenagers

Voice: Bulbul Gupta, 40, said: 'It is horrible how standing up for yourself leads to attacks on your family.

'He bullies people and defeats them one by one. If we leave her [Ford] alone, he would defeat her too.'

She added: 'We live in a culture that doesn't value women. People will say that what she's saying isn't true but it is.

'It's much easier to dismiss her if you can bully and belittle her.'

Podulka, who described herself as a 'full time activist' added: 'How they're treating her is ridiculous. She's already come forward and it's now Congress' responsibility to order the FBI to investigate.

'She has been victimized twice now  first by what happened in high school and now by this.'

Although Kavanaugh has disputed her account of what happened and denied ever being at the party where the alleged attack took place, Ford is being supported by numerous politicians - including her local Congresswoman Anna Eschoo who said this morning that the 51-year-old 'still bears the scars' from the attack.

Speaking to the Washington Post, Eschoo said: 'It was more than obvious to me that she bore the scars of what she had been subjected to.

'She doesn't have a political bone in her body. And she obviously was really terrified about what could become of her and her family.'

Neighbors previously told DailyMail.com that they too believe her and insisted that she would have no reason to invent the story.

'Do I trust her? Yes. Do I believe her? Yes,' John Feradin, 84, told DailyMail.com. 'It's a horrible thing she's carried for the last 30 years and what she's doing is very brave.

'This horrible thing that happened to her some time ago and now the guy who did it to her is in a position to move into a very important position.

'It needs good character, to be a decent human being. I'm not saying he isn't a decent person but I believe her  she's got no reason to make this up.'

Ford is now understood to be negotiating with the Judiciary Committee over further conditions she wants put in place before she agrees to testify.

Her whereabouts is currently unknown with both the Palo Alto property and her $1m vacation home in Santa Cruz deserted when DailyMail.com visited this week.

Activists at the protest this morning now say they hope she will be given the space to decide what she wants to do but vowed to continue fighting for her rights and those of other women.

'I think at some point, the country is going to catch up  women are angry about what's been happening and not just to Dr. Ford,' Podulka said.

'We aren't going to stop fighting for what is right.'
Dog the Bounty Hunter is joining the manhunt for the Pennsylvania fugitive accused of threatening President Donald Trump and other elected officials.

On Wednesday, Duane 'Dog' Chapman said that a friend of Shawn Christy's family has retained his services, asking him to track down the 27-year-old self-proclaimed survivalist who has been on the run from the authorities for nearly four months.

A federal warrant was issued on June 19 for Christy in connection to Facebook threats against Northampton County's district attorney, alleging that he posted: 'I promise I'll put a bullet in your head as soon as I put one in the head of President Donald J Trump.'

Christy has made additional threats against former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin an d Medal of Honor recipient Dakota Meyer.

Scroll down for video

On his tail: Bounty hunter Duane 'Dog' Chapman (left) is set to join the manhunt for wanted fugitive Shawn Christy, 27, in Ohio, who is accused of threatening Donald Trump and others

Christy was last seen at around 4.45pm on Sunday after the crash on I-71. Authorities say he stole the truck from a Pennsylvania business nearly 400 miles away over the weekend

The suspect is also wanted in Pennsylvania on arrest warrants for burglary, probation violation, and failure to appear in court for an aggravated assault case.

Chapman, who has worked as a bounty hunter for 45 years, told the Mansfield News Journal he has passed on messages to the fugitive and that his goal is to find Christy and have him peacefully surrender.

'I have a very hot lead,' the 65-year-old former star of the reality show Dog the Bounty Hunter boasted to the paper.

Chapman, who resides in Hawaii with his wife, Beth, plans to travel next Thursday to Mansfield, Ohio, where Christy was last seen on September 16, when he crashed a truck he had allegedly stolen from a business in Pennsylvania the previous weekend.

Ohio State Highway Patrol recovered the white 2002 GMC utility truck with Pennsylvania registration after the crash.

Christy had fled the scene on foot and is believed to still be hiding in the area.

Chapmans said he suspects Christy wrecked the vehicle because he had dozed off behind the wheel. He does not think the wanted man in armed.

The veteran bounty hunter was heading to Mansfield anyway to host a town hall event dedicated to addiction and recovery on September 28.

The veteran bail bondsman (pictured above with wife Beth in 2017) boasted that he has a 'very hot lead' on Christy and that he has passed on messages to him

Christy, a self-described survivalist, is suspected of threatening Donald Trump (pictured Tuesday) and other elected officials

Police have warned all residents in the Mansfield area to use caution and keep their homes and cars locked.

US Marshals issued a statement about Christy on Sunday, saying he had stolen the truck along with food, money and a shotgun the night before from the Skitco Iron Works in Hazle Township, Pennsylvania.

The McAdoo man is believed to have burglarized the same business on September 5.

A federal warrant was issued for Christy's arrest in June after he allegedly threatened a Northhampton County district attorney by writing in a Facebook post: 'I promise I'll put a bullet in your head as soon as I put one in the head of President Donald J Trump'

Christy's parents said last week that he had sent a Facebook message to them saying he 'was slowed down a bit' after he may have broken his knee during a Maryland 'getaway'.

The message ends: 'Stay safe, I have a mission to complete.'

Federal authorities have asked for help for the public, offering a reward of up to $20,000, but warn that Christy should be considered armed and dangerous.

He is described as a white male with a white complexion, short dark-blonde hair and a beard, standing at 5'10" and weighing approximately 160lbs.

Christy has a tattoo of a cross on his right upper arm and speaks with a notable lisp.
Sajid Javid has pledged a fightback against evil drugs gangs enslaving tens of thousands of vulnerable children.

In a hard-hitting message, the Home Secretary announced he is taking action against the cowardly criminals who ruin lives and damage society.

He said it was chilling that children as young as 12 were being lured into becoming drug mules  and unwittingly ensnared in a web of brutality and intimidation.

His crackdown focuses on the county lines networks, where gangs based in Britains big cities use boys and girls as couriers to flood small market towns and seaside resorts with heroin and crack cocaine.

Javid announced he would be cracking down on city gangs' use of boys and girls as couriers to flood small market towns

Mr Javid launched the drive after the Mail brought into sharp focus the terrifying scale of the problem blighting the country. In one county, Norfolk, 126 children were arrested as part of a major crackdown.

More than 1,000 county line gangs are believed to operate in Britain  a 40 per cent rise in just one year  making an estimated 1.8billion annual profit between them. Their operations are named after the highly lucrative telephone lines used to organise the illegal trade.

In an article for the Mail, Mr Javid announced the opening of a new 3.6million National County Lines Co-ordination Centre, which will allow police forces to share intelligence and target gangs operating over a wide area.

He also said that 200 investigations are under way and several large-scale police raids will take place over the next few weeks to relentlessly pursue the gangs.

Meanwhile, police forces said that criminals were using rape, punishment beatings and even amputations to seize and dominate new markets.

The 38-strong Co-ordination Centre team will be made up of experts from the National Crime Agency (NCA)  dubbed Britains FBI  police forces and Regional Organised Crime Units.

As well as targeting serious offenders, it will work with health, education and welfare chiefs to prevent youngsters from being drawn into the underworld.

Children as young as 12 are currently being employed by 'county lines' gangs who use them as mules to sell drugs in Britain's smaller towns

Vince OBrien, head of drugs operations for the NCA, said: We have not always been as agile as we might have been in terms of joining up between the various different agencies and forces. He said the new centre would try to identify the scale of the problem and pinpoint hotspots for large drug networks around the UK.

Deputy Assistant Commissioner Duncan Ball, gangs spokesman for the National Police Chiefs Council, said: The very nature of county lines offending means that we can only truly tackle it by bringing together all UK police forces, law enforcement agencies and other partners to create a unified national response.

We will now have the opportunity to better identify and target those criminal networks who run county lines and, with partners, safeguard vulnerable children and adults who are exploited.

Earlier this week, Childrens Commissioner Anne Longfield said the true number of children being enslaved as drug runners could be as high as 50,000.

Criminals recruit them from childrens homes or outside city schools  or using social media. They are lured into becoming mules by being promised money, drugs, designer clothes or protection.

Police say gangs are using machetes, boiling water, knives, bats and hammers to terrorise anyone who steps out of line.

Humberside Police reported a young man involved with a county lines network whose hand was chopped off and both legs broken. A Home Office document said: It is suggested to be a punishment attack by the persons the victim was running drugs for, for having used drugs or spent the proceeds.

Teenage drugs mules are being made to take drugs such as heroin and crack cocaine to rural and seaside towns

These cowards are using kids as human pawns

by Home Secretary Sajid Javid for the Daily Mail

County lines drug gangs are devastating communities across the length and breadth of the UK. They are also devastating the lives of vulnerable children, enslaving them into a vicious circle of crime that is almost impossible to escape.

This newspaper has brought the growing problem into sharp focus this week  but it is one I have been aware of since becoming Home Secretary and one I am determined to tackle.

As part of this callous criminal model, ruthless gang leaders are preying on the young and using them as dispensable pawns to traffic their drugs from major cities to Britains rural towns before peddling them on their streets.

They are threatened with intimidation and violence, treated like modern day slaves and often end up being arrested  despite the majority being victims.

Mr Javid wrote in the Daily Mail that more than 1,000 county lines are currently operating in Britain

The lives of vulnerable adults are also being ruined after they lose control of their homes in a hideous practice known as cuckooing.

It is thought that more than 1,000 county lines are operating in Britain  a six-fold increase in just three years.

According to the National Crime Agency, the number of police forces reporting an issue with county lines has jumped from seven in 2015 to all 43 forces today.

Two hundred police investigations are already under way into this despicable crime which makes an estimated 1.8billion profit each year.

The impact of county lines not only ruins lives and damages society. It is one of the key drivers behind the recent rise in violent crime.

It chills me that young people are being used in this cowardly way and that vulnerable adults are also being caught up in this terrible criminality.

That is why the Government is taking action to disrupt these networks, bring the evil bosses who oversee them to justice and  above all else  keep our children safe.

We have already given police forces stronger powers to stop county lines criminals in their tracks and rescue the young people ensnared in their networks.

But I know we can and must do more. That is why we have invested 3.6million in a new National County Lines Coordination Centre which will be fully operational from today.

The centre will have the sole purpose of identifying and disrupting county lines hotspots and the criminal networks behind them, as well as identifying potential victims.

It will be staffed with around 40 experienced officers from the police and National Crime Agency and provide the capability for law enforcement agencies to share intelligence and plan operations to catch the perpetrators who cause so much harm.

The coordination centre  which is being funded through the Governments 40million Serious Violence Strategy  will significantly strengthen law enforcements response to the county lines problem.

A number of large scale raids will be taking place in the coming weeks and we will be relentless in pursuing these criminals.

Under the Home Secretary's new plan, early intervention initiatives funding will be doubled to 22million

We have already been working with mobile operators to identify and shut down the phone lines used by gangs to advertise their drugs and courts are using modern slavery legislation to ensure prison sentences reflect the seriousness of their crimes.

With these capabilities and the polices ability to use appropriate stop and search powers, we are already able to take swift action.

But country lines and violent crime more generally cannot be tackled with strong law enforcement alone.

That is why early intervention and prevention is at the heart of our Serious Violence Strategy. I have recently doubled the funding for early intervention initiatives to 22million.

This funding will give Police and Crime Commissioners and communities the resources to identify the young people at risk of criminal exploitation and make life changing and potentially lifesaving interventions.

In addition, our 13million Trusted Relationships Fund also helps steer young people at risk of exploitation away from this destructive life by providing a strong and dependable role model.

It is also important that teachers, youth workers, police officers and other professionals who come into contact with children know how to spot when they are at risk of being drawn into county lines.

That is why we have recently updated guidance for front line staff. Parents too can play a vital role and Id encourage anyone concerned their child is at risk to read it.

County Lines crime is a blight on our communities. We are already taking action but the introduction of the National Coordination Centre marks a significant step in our fightback.
A Maine lobsterman who is accused of causing his two crew members deaths for recklessly taking his vessel out with them while high on oxycontin is set to plead guilty to seaman's manslaughter.

As part of Christopher Hutchinson's plea agreement, which was filed on Friday, according to the Washington Post, he agreed to a set of facts laid out by prosecutors from the U.S. attorney's office in Maine.

In the documents, laid out as part of his plea, Hutchinson says he took 15-year-old Tyler Sawyer and 27-year-old Tomas Hammond out on the 45-foot lobster boat, which he had named 'No Limits,' around 1am after attending a Halloween party.

Hutchinson was told the weather would be bad. He saw it as an opportunity to snag the lobsters that would be missed by less daring fisherman in the dangerous conditions.

Earlier that day, he had smoked pot with Sawyer's father and told him he wouldn't put his son in harms way.

Sawyer's father didn't know Hutchinson had purchased 20 tablets of immediate action oxycodone that day.

Tom Hammond was 26, and Tyler Sawyer was 15, when they went out on the 'No Limits' boat captained by Christopher Hutchinson- facing terrible weather and their captain on drugs

Hutchinson entered as plea agreement, and is expected to plead guilty to two counts of seaman's manslaughter later this month

As the two men and the teen went out on the vessel around 1am on November 1, 2014 rain had started to fall.

The crew reached the area of Matinicus Island and started laying traps, within three hours the weather had taken a much worse turn.

Waves started reaching 14-feet with gusts of wind hitting around 45-miles-per-hour, well over the limit for a small craft advisory.

A wave overturned 'No Limits' with only Hutchinson managing to pull himself from beneath the vessel and saving his own life by pulling himself atop the keel, according to the documents reported by the Washington Post.

'I kept screaming for Tom and Tyler, but I didn't hear or see them again,' he later told the Bangor Daily News.

The boat's radio system sent out a distress signal that only one fisherman on the water heard who decided not to go out and try to rescue the lobsterman.

The Coast Guard and Maine Marine Patrol headed out into the storm to look for the missing crew members.

At around 4.08pm, a crew from Cape Cod spotted a life raft. Hutchinson sent up a flare.

Hutchinson would later test positive for opiates and THC.

Hutchinson was charged with two counts of seaman's manslaughter on Dec. 14, 2016, with a potential 10-years in prison and a $250,000 fine.

But because law enforcement failed to get a warrant for a blood sample the appeals court ruled it could only be used if he testified he had not used drugs.

He was released on $10,000 bail a few days later.

Hammond was a fisherman aboard the 'No Limits' when the men and teen went out onto the seas that fateful morning

Hutchinson (pictured) had several successful hauls before taking things too far in 2014 by heading out into the waters, knowing he and his crew would likely face severe weather

Three months into his bail release, his girlfriend called 911 in Friendship, Maine because he wasn't breathing.

Medics had to revive him with Narcan and he later admitted he had overdosed on heroin.

He was arrested by the Maine Marine Patrol on March 23, 2017, for violating the terms of his bail.

Hutchinson, now, 30, is awaiting a September 26 court appearance in which he is scheduled to plead guilty with prosecutors recommending a four-year prison sentence with an additional three years of supervised release, with credit for the time that he has already served while awaiting trial.
A Florida sheriff's deputy has posed for a selfie with a raccoon after authorities were called in to help remove the furry creature when it broke into a woman's home.

The 'masked bandit' raccoon broke into the home in Palm Harbor near Tampa on Wednesday.

It quickly scurried into the bathroom and perched itself on top of the cabinet when the homeowner's dog started racing around barking.

A Florida sheriff's deputy has posed for a selfie with a raccoon after authorities were called in to help remove the furry creature when it broke into a woman's home

The resident tried coaxing the raccoon down with food before eventually calling authorities for back up.

Pinellas County Sheriff's deputies responded and posed for a selfie with the startled creature.

Photos show the raccoon perched on the cabinet with its tail hanging down. One of its paws was midway in the cabinet while the other gripped the mirror in support.

The sheriff's department posted the selfie on Facebook, saying: 'A masked bandit!! A Pinellas County citizen was quite surprised to find this furry intruder in her home when she woke up!'

Authorities were eventually able to safely shoo the raccoon out a nearby bedroom window.
Dr Julia Morch-Siddall slammed into another vehicle, seriously injuring the driver, after downing cans of Stella Artois

A suicidal doctor who used alcohol to 'self-medicate' for crippling PMS caused a crash that left a man in a wheelchair.

Dr Julia Morch-Siddall, 50, downed beers behind the wheel before inflicting 'catastrophic' injuries on father-of-three Wesley Hall when she smashed her Land Rover Freelander into his vehicle after swerving onto the wrong side of the road.

The consultant anaesthetist was spared jail yesterday after a court heard she 'took drink as self-medication' for premenstrual dysphoric disorder (PMDD)  a severe form of premenstrual syndrome (PMS).

Morch-Siddall's barrister said she was suffering from 'severe mental illness' that was heightened during the time of the month she suffers PMDD.

He she had intended 'to drive into some stationary object with the view of ending her life' on the day of the crash in January.

Newcastle Crown Court heard how Morch-Siddall downed four-and-a-half cans of Stella Artois lager in her car before 'meandering' across lanes on the A1 in Gateshead, hitting the central reservation several times.

A concerned witness called the police and followed her car, getting out of his own vehicle as she stalled at some traffic lights on the A692 in an attempt to talk to her and grab her keys.

She 'meandering' across lanes on the A1 in Gateshead before hitting a car driven by Wesley Hall (left), who suffered life changing injuries

But the car was keyless, and the respected doctor sped off through a red light before swerving onto the wrong side of the road and smashing into another vehicle.

IT worker Mr Hall suffered life-changing injuries and spent months in a wheelchair after fracturing both feet in the crash. He now uses a crutch and has mobility problems.

He told the court: 'This could so easily have been fatal, and it would have devastated my children.

'This has had a catastrophic impact on both my personal life and employment. I face a long road to recovery. The future appears bleak. I just want it to go back to the life I once had.'

He said that he had been due to fly to Florida in April to propose to his partner, but was unable to do so after the accident. Prosecutor Emma Dowling said Morch-Siddall appeared to be remorseful in a police interview but admitted she 'could not remember anything' about the incident.

Dr Morch-Siddall, 50, downed beers behind the wheel before inflicting 'catastrophic' injuries on a father-of-three

The NHS consultant, from Heddon-on-the-Wall, Northumberland, was given an 18-month jail sentence suspended for 18 months after pleading guilty to causing serious injury by dangerous driving and failing to provide a specimen.

Christopher Knox, defending, said the doctor suffers from post traumatic stress disorder and PMDD  a disabling menstrual disorder which affects around 3-8 per cent of menstruating women.

Mr Knox said: 'She had clearly got suicidal thoughts. She had an intention to drive into some stationary object with the view of ending her life. She had a very severe mental illness at the time we are talking about. She took drink as self-medication, unsuccessfully but compulsively on this unfortunate day.'

Mr Knox added that Morch-Siddall is 'now a fit and proper person practising her profession' and that her patients have all been 'properly cared for'.

He said she has 'led a completely blameless life' and previously worked for the World Heath Organisation in places such as the West Bank and West Africa.

Judge Robert Adams, who described the defendant as a 'very intelligent woman', said: 'There is enormous personal mitigation  there must be a significant reduction. You are considered to be a very low risk of re-offending.'

Morch-Siddall was also given a three-year driving ban and must complete 80 hours unpaid work.
The pair were swimming when Darren got into difficulty, so Kimberly jumped in to help her husband

An American couple has died in an accident at a Costa Rican waterfall known as Belen de Nosarita.

They are identified as 48-year-old Darren Mizokami and his 41-year-old wife Kimberly Tean Mizokami, who had been married about two and a half years.

Costa Rica's Judicial Investigation Organization said Thursday that Darren Mizokami was swimming when he began to have trouble staying afloat.

Kimberly reportedly dived into the 23-foot pool to help him.

A third U.S. tourist, their friend who had been travelling with the pair went to get help, but when she returned both were dead in the water.

The couple 48-year-old Darren Mizokami and his 41-year-old wife Kimberly Tean Mizokami of Casper, Wyoming, drowned during a horrific accident in a Costa Rican waterfall (this is a waterfall photo from a separate trip)

The couple arrived in Costa Rica a week ago with their friend Sue Anderson, pictured left on the plane

The couple appeared to be married about two-and-a-half years when the horrific accident happened

A different witness who tried to help said the water was very cloudy and it was hard to see how deep it was.

The couple's bodies were recovered Wednesday.

The last post on a Facebook page under Darren Mizokami's name said the couple had checked in to Samara, a town on Costa Rica's Pacific coast near the falls.

The couple, who hailed from Casper, Wyoming, had been seeing the sites in Costa Rica since arriving one week ago

Darren's colleagues remembered him as always smiling and having a positive attitude and said he will be sorely missed by Casper, where he'd been a city employee for 25 years

Darren shared this photo with his wife on a Costa Rican beach on Tuesday

The couple arrived to the country along with a their friend Sue Anderson, a family friend, on September 13.

They had been visiting several tourist sites in the country, among them La Fortuna, San Carlos and Rincon de la Vieja and Tamarindo in Guanacaste, according to the Costa Rica Star.

The couple lived in Casper, Wyoming. Darren Mizokami was a Casper city employee and worked as utilities supervisor at the Meter Services Department and as acting supervisor of the Municipal Court.

City manager Carter Napier called him 'bright spot in our organization' and said the city was 'deeply saddened'.

A statement from the city also said that while he had worked for Casper for 25 years, working his way up, it was his 'positive attitude' and 'always having a smile and cheery greeting' that made him stand out and excel in his work.
A visibly furious Theresa May rounded on EU leaders for hanging her our to dry yesterday as she battled to keep her Chequers Brexit plan alive in the face of fierce Tory criticism.

At an extraordinary press conference in Salzburg, Mrs May said she still believed a deal was possible, and offered a fresh concession on Northern Ireland  but acknowledged there was 'a lot of hard work to be done'.

It came after Brussels issued a calculated snub to her Chequers plan, saying it was a non-starter.

EU chief Donald Tusk said the other 27 leaders 'all agreed' that the complex plans at the heart of the Chequers deal 'will not work'.

It forced Mrs May to declare she was closer than ever to walking away without a deal and her close ally Chris Grayling said last night that she would unless Euroocrats soften their position on the Irish border

Jean-Claude Juncker (pictured next to Theresa May at the Salzburg summit) said the two sides were 'far away' from a Brexit deal

Mrs May put on a brave face as she started crucial talks with EU leaders in Salzburg after several said talks over Brexit are 'at a standstill'. She is pictured with Jean-Claude Juncker (centre) and Luxembourg's Prime Minister Xavier Bettel (right)

The Prime Minister acknowledged she had had a 'frank' meeting with Mr Tusk shortly before she faced the press  diplomatic code for a blazing row.

In a warning to EU leaders that she cannot be pushed much further, she added: 'Let nobody be in any doubt we are preparing for 'no deal' so that if we get to a position where it is not possible to do a deal then the British people can have confidence that we will have done what is necessary to ensure we make a success of leaving the European Union regardless of the terms on which we do so.'

The Prime Minister also angrily rejected calls for a second referendum, after the prime ministers of Malta and the Czech Republic publicly backed the idea. She said: 'There will be no second referendum.'

Former Tory leader Iain Duncan Smith accused the EU of 'bullying' Britain.

'This demonstrates that the EU are behaving like bullies, throwing their weight around and using the Irish border as an excuse,' he said. 'This will demonstrate to so many people why we need to leave. Mrs May should go for free trade, and call their bluff.

Chris Grayling said last night that Britain was heading for a no-deal Brexit if the EU refused to soften its position on the Irish border.

The transport secretary told Newsnight the government would not drop its Chequers Plan despite Donald Tusk's rejection of it.

Mr Grayling said: 'We are in the midst of a negotiation where people are setting out robust, firm positions  and this is often the way with the European Union. They build up, there's tough language and actually a deal is done at the last. And I'm still confident that we will reach agreement.'

He added: 'We have put forward the only proposal that we believe meets the UK's red lines and also provides the right solution for the Irish border. At the moment what the European Union is asking in and around Northern Ireland is actually impossible for the UK to accept. If they stick with that position, there will be no deal.

'No UK government, certainly not this one  and the Labour party have said the same  could possibly accept any border in the Irish sea, between northern Ireland and the rest of the UK.'

Theresa May (pictured in Salzburg) was left isolated at the summit after leaders turned on her Chequers plan for Brexit

Mrs May had travelled to the EU summit in Austria hoping for warm words from fellow leaders to give her political cover for the Chequers plan, which is set to be savaged by critics like Boris Johnson at next month's Tory conference.

But despite a personal plea from her over dinner, the EU leaders issued a humiliating rebuff designed to hand fresh ammunition to her critics.

Mrs May suggested that rejection of Chequers was a negotiating 'tactic' designed to wring further concessions from her. Privately, aides said they had expected a similar 'stunt' at some point in the negotiations, but had not anticipated EU leaders deserting her in her hour of need.

Mr Tusk, who came under pressure from Emmanuel Macron and Angela Merkel to adopt a tough stance, said the two sides now faced a 'moment of truth' next month, which would decide whether a Brexit deal was possible or not.

He also cast doubt on whether a special Brexit summit pencilled in for November would take place at all unless Britain changes course.

At a press conference in Salzburg (pictured), EU council chief Donald Tusk insisted Theresa May's Chequers plan would undermine the single market

The diplomatic ambush led to recriminations last night against Mrs May's advisers, who had briefed that she was poised for a breakthrough.

Mr Duncan Smith said: 'I don't know what the civil service were up to when they told her the EU would accept the Chequers deal. It's clearly not going to fly and Ollie Robbins [Mrs May's chief Brexit adviser] should take the blame for that.'

Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orban said EU leaders were split between those who want a pragmatic Brexit deal and those who want one that 'punishes' the UK.

He said some leaders believed 'Britain must suffer', adding: 'I don't like that approach at all. What we need is a fair Brexit and good cooperation between the UK and EU in future.' Asked if more people were coming round to his camp, he said he was 'getting a majority'.

But hours later, President Macron, Chancellor Merkel and the EU's chief negotiator Michel Barnier persuaded the bloc to toughen its stance.

Mr Macron made it clear he wanted to punish Britain to dissuade other member states from heading for the EU's exit door. The French President branded pro-Brexit politicians as 'liars' adding: 'Brexit shows that it is not easy to leave the EU. It is not without costs. It is not without consequences.'

Mrs May insisted Chequers was 'the only proposal' that would deliver frictionless trade with the EU and keep the UK's pledge to avoid a hard border in Northern Ireland.

The EU leaders did not hold back in their criticism of the Chequers plan despite Mrs May's perilous political position. Pictured are (left to right) Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz, Mr Tusk and Jean-Claude Juncker

EU leaders were continuing their discussions at the informal summit in Salzburg

Why did PM's aide tell her Chequers was a 'game changer'? Theresa May's EU adviser last night faced questions about his role in the Salzburg summit after he assured the Prime Minister that her Chequers plan would be a success. Amid shock and anger over the rejection of her deal by the EU yesterday, Olly Robbins's name was repeatedly mentioned. The senior civil servant, who Mrs May appointed as her personal Brexit adviser last year, helped draw up the Chequers strategy, which is threatening to split her party. Earlier this month he assured the PM that EU leaders thought her Brexit plan was a 'game changer'. He indicated that his attempts to sell the proposals to the remaining EU 27 member states had been a success. The wholesale rejection of the Chequers blueprint yesterday  just over a week before the Tory party conference  will make the PM's job even more difficult. As a furious Mrs May returned to London, pressure was mounting on the man she trusted to be her 'eyes and ears' in Brussels. Mr Robbins, 43, joined her team a year ago as part of a move by Number 10 to exert more control over the Brexit negotiations. He repeatedly clashed with then Brexit secretary David Davis, and was said to have suggested that he should be the opposite number to Michel Barnier, the EU's chief negotiator. Earlier this month, Mr Robbins refused to say whether he believed leaving the EU would be a 'good thing'. A Europhile since his days at Oxford University, he became private secretary to Tony Blair aged just 31. He was steadily promoted before becoming an adviser to Mrs May and taking the helm of the Brexit negotiations. This summer, it emerged that Mrs May's right-hand man was paid a bonus of up to 20,000 despite the chaos surrounding the Brexit strategy. The PM personally signed off on the money, which comes on top of Mr Robbins's bumper pay packet of up to 165,000 a year. But his performance in selling the Chequers deal to the EU will raise questions about his future. Advertisement

She said EU leaders were wrong to believe that her controversial plan for a 'common rule book' on goods would undermine the single market  a point made specifically by Mr Tusk yesterday. 'Yes concerns have been raised,' she said. 'I want to know what those concerns are. There is a lot of hard work to be done. But I believe that there is a willingness to do a deal.'

The hardline approach from Brussels prompted an angry reaction in the UK. Former Tory chairman Grant Shapps said the PM was right to stick to her pledge to leave without a deal if Brussels continued to act unreasonably.

Mr Shapps said: 'I'm no Brexiteer  in fact I voted Remain  but we may fast be approaching a situation where our handling over 39billion [in 'divorce' payments] won't work for us either.' Fellow Remainer Tory MP Anna Soubry said it was clear the Chequers deal was 'bereft of life' and urged the PM to pursue membership of the EU single market after Brexit.

Meanwhile, Eurosceptic MPs stepped up their vows to kill off the Chequers deal at the Conservative conference. Jacob Rees-Mogg, chairman of the European Research Group of Eurosceptic Tory MPs, said: 'Everyone expected there would be some softening of Mr Barnier's line. That hasn't happened, it has been made firmer. I think Chequers now has no supporters at all. I doubt even the Downing Street cat is any longer backing the Chequers plan. I think the time has come for Mrs May to say, 'This is not going to work'.'

Former Brexit Secretary David Davis last night claimed more than 40 Tory Brexiteer MPs are ready to vote against Chequers. He said rebels have a 'solid core' of around three times the number needed to defeat the plan in Parliament.

Macron: Pro-Brexit campaigners 'lied' Emmanuel Macron branded the leaders of the pro-Brexit campaign 'liars' for telling voters it would be easy to leave the EU. The French president said the decision was 'not without costs' and 'not without consequences'. 'Brexit is the choice of the British people and it is a choice pushed by certain people who predicted easy solutions,' he said in Salzburg. 'Brexit has shown us one thing  and I fully respect British sovereignty in saying this  it has demonstrated that those who said you can easily do without Europe, that it will all go very well, that it is easy and there will be lots of money, are liars. 'This is all the more true because they left the next day, so they didn't have to manage it.' Mr Macron said it was true that Brexit negotiations had been complex and lengthy. But he added: 'That fact must not be exploited by those very people who are the cause of this problem, who got us into the Brexit situation and who now tell us that Europe is going from crisis to crisis.' His claim the leaders of the Brexit campaign 'left the next day' after the vote appeared to confuse them with David Cameron, who quit as PM after calling on voters to back Remain. By contrast, Brexit supporters David Davis, Boris Johnson and Liam Fox were brought into the Cabinet. Advertisement

So what on earth happens next? Theresa May is facing a bruising and potentially nightmarish end to 2018. After the EU yesterday all but killed off her post-Brexit Chequers plan, she flew home last night to lick her wounds and work out how to navigate the choppy months ahead. The Tory conference The first of the Prime Minister's challenges is the Tory party conference which starts on Sunday September 30 in Birmingham. Former foreign secretary and arch Brexiteer Boris Johnson is planning a pro-Brexit rally for hundreds of the party's grassroots activists. The event, hosted by the ConservativeHome website, will see further scorn poured on Mrs May's Chequers plan. Its aim will be to put more pressure on her to 'chuck Chequers'. The event is the night before her keynote party conference speech. Former UKIP leader Nigel Farage is planning a nationwide tour of 'Leave Means Leave' rallies to hammer home the anti-Chequers message. It starts in Bolton this Sunday and he will lead a Save Brexit rally on September 30 at the National Exhibition Centre in Birmingham where he will be joined by Tory MPs Peter Bone and Andrea Jenkyns. Mrs May will have painful memories of her disastrous speech to the conference last year  wrecked by a coughing fit and a collapsing stage set. Return of Parliament and leadership plotting Parliament returns from recess on October 9, having stopped sitting for the conference season. This will be the first time when MPs outraged at Mrs May's insistence on sticking with her Chequers plan will have a chance to voice their opinions. Many Eurosceptics will delight in telling Mrs May 'I told you so' when she reports back on the Salzburg summit. It would also provide the first opportunity for a potential leadership challenge. A handful of members of the pro-Brexit European Research Group of Tory MPs, led by Jacob Rees-Mogg, have been threatening to overthrow the Prime Minister for weeks. Last night former Brexit secretary David Davis claimed he had 40 MPs signed up to vote against Chequers. More awkward dates with EU leaders EU president Donald Tusk has warned that the next EU summit on October 18 is the moment Brexit talks could collapse if Britain does not make more concessions on Chequers and the Irish border. This would lead to him abandoning a further special summit that is due to be held on November 15. Mrs May yesterday said she was willing to walk away without a deal. But it is unclear what her position would then be after she has spent months failing to sell her Chequers plan to MPs and the EU. If she manages to get past the October summit with the basis of an agreement with the EU, she then faces the emergency summit, at which both sides have said they will aim to finalise matters. Any 11th-hour complications could turn this summit into a nightmare. But will any deal get MPs' backing? Mrs May's biggest challenge could be getting any Brexit 'divorce' deal past MPs. Labour has said it will vote against any deal she reaches. This, combined with Brexiteers angry about her not seeking their preferred Canada-style free trade deal, could mean she does not have the numbers to get it passed. Both the UK and EU have agreed that a deal should be done by no later than November so there is enough time to get it signed off by their respective parliaments in time for March 29, 2019, when Britain will leave the EU. Advertisement

'Chequers is DEAD': Brexiteers and Remainers unite to declare May Brexit blueprint is finished after EU leaders snub her desperate plea for a compromise - but furious PM insists her proposal is the only credible option

Brexiteers and Remainers declared Theresa May's Chequers plan dead after it was brutally savaged by the EU at a crucial summit.

The Prime Minister made a plea to European leaders to compromise as she desperately tries to get a deal agreed with less than two months to go in negotiations.

But leaders across the EU lined up to savage her plans in a series of scathing press conferences at the Salzburg summit.

EU council chief Donald Tusk insisted her Chequers proposal 'will not work' while German Chancellor Angela Merkel said 'substantial progress' is still needed.

Theresa May (pictured at the close of the Salzburg summit) bluntly dismissed the EU commission's latest proposals for resolving the Northern Ireland border issue, saying they would break up the UK

May's allies within the Conservatives have even moved to distance themselves from the Chequers plan.

Former minister Sir Mike Penning, who helped to orchestrate her 2016 leadership campaign, said her proposals were 'as dead as a dodo' and that she was 'deluded' if she thought she could persuade Tory Eurosceptics to vote in favour of any Brexit deal based on Chequers.

Tory Remainer Anna Soubry (pictured, left) and Conservative Brexiteer Jacob Rees-Mogg (pictured right) both said that damning verdict from the EU shows that Theresa May's Chequers plan is dead

Mrs May lined up alongside her EU counterparts including Angela Merkel (centre of front row) for the 'family photo' at the summit

A visibly shaken Mrs May appeared tetchy as she faced the world's cameras at a press conference to defend her embattled plans.

She bluntly dismissed the EU commission's latest proposals for resolving the Northern Ireland border issue, saying they would break up the UK.

'The backstop cannot divide the UK into two customs territories,' she told a press conference at the close of the summit.

And she insisted that Chequers remains the only viable and serious proposal on the table.

But after the unexpected onslaught of criticism from EU leaders she conceded that there is 'a lot of work to be done' over the next few weeks.

And she said that Britain is pumping resources into preparing for a no deal Brexit if Britain crashes out of the bloc.

What did EU leaders say about May's Chequers plan at the Salzburg summit? Leaders from across the EU savaged Theresa May's Chequers Brexit plan at the Salzburg summit. Here is what they said: Donald Tusk, EU Council President: 'Everybody shared the view that while there are positive elements in the Chequers proposal, the suggested framework for economic cooperation will not work, not least as it risks undermining the single market.' Emmanuel Macron, French President: 'It was a good and brave step by the prime minister,' he said of her trade plan. 'But we all agreed on this today, the proposals in their current state are not acceptable. 'The Chequers plan cannot be 'take it or leave it'.' Angela Merkel, German Chancellor: 'We need substantial progress on Brexit by October.' Jean-Claude Juncker, EU Commission President: 'No deal is not my working assumption, but would it happen, then we are prepared because the Commission has prepared in detail all the elements of consequences of a no-deal.' 'So don't worry. Be happy, don't worry.' Mark Rutte, Dutch PM: 'I do not feel more confident, but also at the same time not less optimistic.' Leo Varadkar, Irish PM: 'Time is running short. There's proposals for another summit in October and then in November. 'Ireland is a country that obviously wants to avoid a no deal scenario, we want to avoid a no deal Brexit, (but) we are preparing for that, we are hiring extra staff and officials, putting in IT systems, we're ready for that eventuality should it occur.' Charles Michel, Belgian PM 'Today I can see that it is necessary to make all the steps because the proposals are not enough in order to have an agreement.' Advertisement

As the pressure on Mrs May increases, Nicola Sturgeon has called for all British political parties to back an extension to the Article 50 process - meaning Brexit could be delayed.

She told the BBC: 'Taking the UK off the Brexit cliff edge without knowing where it lands would be the most irresponsible thing any prime minister has done in a very, very long time.

'That's why I think if that's the situation we end up in (then) extending Article 50 is a far better way of proceeding.'

The bruising clashes came as the bloc's leaders warned a Brexit deal is still 'far away' - and urged the UK to hold another referendum.

Ramping up the pressure, Dutch PM Mark Rutte jibed that his country had made more preparations for a no-deal outcome than Britain.

French President Emmanuel Macron, whose stance on Brexit has been among the toughest, took a swipe at 'liars' who said the UK could 'live easily without Europe'.

Angela Merkel said 'substantial progress' must be made by October for there to be any chance of getting an agreement.

The unexpected ferocity of the language from the EU appeared to take Mrs May aback, as she looked tetchy and slightly shaken answering questions from journalists.

Downing Street had been hoping fellow leaders would give her a soft ride to avoid fueling a mounting mutiny by Tory Eurosceptics ahead of the looming party conference in Birmingham in a week's time.

Over dinner with her 27 counterparts last night, Mrs May ruled out any delay to Britain's departure from the EU in March  insisting there were no circumstances in which she would consider another national vote on the issue.

But her fellow leaders - who received the speech in stony silence as they have vowed not to discuss Brexit directly with the UK - were unimpressed.

At a press conference closing the gathering this afternoon, Mr Tusk said: 'Everybody shared the view that while there are positive elements in the Chequers proposal, the suggested framework for economic cooperation will not work, not least as it risks undermining the single market.'

Mr Macron took a clear swipe at Mrs May's proposals to align with EU rules on goods but not services, saying he would not accept so-called 'cherry-picking' that eroded the EU single market.

'Those who explain that we can easily live without Europe, that everything is going to be alright, and that it's going to bring a lot of money home are liars,' he said.

Other leaders said the talks were at a 'standstill', and called for the UK to hold another public vote to reverse Brexit altogether.

Tory MP Marcus Fysh urged the PM to accept that her Chequers plan is unworkable and to move on to a new proposal

Arch Remainer and Conservative MP Anna Soubry also declared the Brexit proposal dead

Tory MPs rounded on Theresa May's Chequers Brexit plan after the EU's damning verdict - with Remain-voting Grant Shapps calling for the divorce bill to be withheld

Mr Rutte suggested little had changed over the two days in Salzburg.

'I do not feel more confident, but also at the same time not less optimistic.'

He added: 'I think we have made more preparations for a no deal than the UK has.'

Mrs May greeted Mr Juncker warmly at the summit but the negotiations are deadlocked

EU council president Donald Tusk took to Instagram to joke about the standoff, posting a picture of himself choosing cakes with Mrs May and the message: 'Sorry, no cherries.'

Tory MPs rounded on Theresa May's Chequers Brexit plan after the EU's damning verdict - with Remain-voting Grant Shapps calling for the divorce bill to be withheld

Arch Remainer and Conservative MP Anna Soubry also declared the Brexit proposal dead

In a clear swipe at Mrs May's proposals to align with EU rules on goods but not services, French President Emmanuel Macron (pictured) warned he would not accept anything that undermined the EU single market

Tory MP Marcus Fysh urged the PM to accept that her Chequers plan is unworkable and to move on to a new proposal

Mrs Merkel told her own press conference in Salzburg that 'substantial progress' was needed on the UK's withdrawal agreement by the next European Council meeting in October, in order to pave the way for it to be finalised at a special summit in November.

She warned there was 'still a large piece of work' on the separate issue of future trade relations with the UK.

The EU27 were 'united that, in the matter of the single market, there can be no compromises', she said.

'No-one can belong to the single market if they are not part of the single market.'

Lithuanian president Dalia Grybauskaite said of the Brexit negotiations: 'It's a standstill'

Mr Tusk mocked Mrs May on social media, posting a picture of them choosing cake at the summit with the message: 'Sorry, no cherries.'

It was a swipe at EU claims that Britain is trying to 'cherry pick' from the Brussels project.

Asked at her press conference how she can cling on to her Chequers plan in the face of so much opposition, Mrs May said: 'Yes concerns have been raised, I want to know what those concerns are. There is a lot of hard work to be done.

'But I believe that there is a willingness to do a deal.

'But let nobody be in any doubt, as I've always said, we are preparing for no deal so that if we get to a position where it is not possible to do a deal then the British people can be confident that we will have done what is necessary to ensure we make a success of leaving the European Union regardless of the terms on which we do so.'

Mrs May said that the UK would 'shortly' be coming forward with new proposals on the 'backstop' arrangements for the Northern Irish border.

This is the major stumbling block to agreeing a deal with the bloc.

She again categorically ruled out holding a second referendum.

'There will be no second referendum. There has been a vote of the people, it took place in June 2016 and people voted to leave the European Union,' she said.

Meanwhile, Mrs May is facing a growing revolt at home with Tory plotters branding her 'deluded' and calling Chequers 'as dead as a dodo'.

Mrs May held talks with Irish PM Leo Varadkar this morning, and was seen deep in conversation with Mrs Merkel as they arrived at the summit venue this morning.

But after a discussion on security, she will again be shut out of proceedings as the 27 remaining member states hold a private discussion on Brexit.

Arriving this morning, EU Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker said the two sides remained 'far away' from a deal.

Emmanuel Macron (pictured at a press conference this afternoon) has taken one of the hardest lines against the Chequers proposals

Slovak PM Peter Pellegrini said: 'There has been no progress' and Lithuanian president Dalia Grybauskaite said simply: 'It's a standstill'.

Malta's PM Joseph Muscat said there was 'almost unanimous' support among EU leaders for Britain to hold a second referendum on membership of the union.

Mr Muscat said that any deal would be 'sub-optimal' to continued membership, saying 'it won't be as easy as yesterday to trade between the two sides'.

Speaking to BBC Radio 4's Today programme he said: 'There is a unanimous, or almost unanimous I would say right now, point of view around the table that we would like the almost impossible to happen, that the UK has another referendum.

'I wouldn't know what the result would be, whether it would be any different from the first result.

'I think most of us would welcome a situation where there is the possibility of the British people putting things into perspective, seeing what has been negotiated, seeing the options and then deciding once and for all.'

But Mrs May did get backing from controversial Hungarian PM Viktor Orban, who complained that some of his fellow leaders wanted the British to 'suffer' because they voted to leave.

EU council president Donald Tusk took to Instagram to joke about the standoff , posting a picture of himself choosing cakes with Mrs May and the message: 'Sorry, no cherries.'

'I don't like that approach at all. So what we need is a fair Brexit and a good cooperation between the UK and the European Union in the future,' he said.

Tory conspirators believe the Prime Minister could be forced to stand down after Brexit according to a memo circulating among MPs last night.

The document also assesses who Mrs May's likely successor will be and rates their chances.

Angela Merkel said there must be substantial progress by a summit in October in order for a deal to be ratified by the Brexit date in March

The document is based on the assumption that the 1922 Committee of senior backbench Tories will 'invite the PM to stand-down soon(ish) after March 2019'.

It advises MPs to 'manoeuvre immediately' and sets out details of 27 potential candidates, according to the Daily Telegraph. It describes Environment Secretary Michael Gove as being 'on manoeuvres', says Chancellor Philip Hammond is 'thinking he has a chance' but has 'not a hope', while Trade Secretary Liam Fox's prospects are 'fading'.

Boris Johnson is described as 'the front runner' but is considered an unlikely successor because 'the front runner never wins'. Jacob Rees-Mogg, chairman of the European Research Group of Eurosceptic Tories, was not on the leaked list.

There is a deep rift in the party over her Chequers deal - with Brexiteers and Remainers both unhappy with it.

An ally of Mrs May said her Chequers plan was as 'dead as a dodo' and claimed the Prime Minister tried to 'blackmail' her MPs to support it.

Sir Mike Penning told the Daily Telegraph that Mrs May was 'deluded' if she thought she could persuade Tory Eurosceptics to back a Brexit deal based on Chequers.

Theresa May held talks with Irish PM Leo Varadkar (pictured) before the summit entered its second day in Salburg this morning

The former minister said she was playing 'Russian Roulette' with the country and had treated her own MPs 'like children on the naughty step'.

In recent weeks, senior figures in Brussels have floated the idea of extending the Article 50 process for up to a year to allow the talks to drift on as the Irish border issue caused deadlock.

With Labour and several Tory MPs wobbling on the issue, some harbour hopes that ministers could even agree to hold a second referendum.

Treasury minister Mel Stride went off message yesterday when he warned Eurosceptics that they could 'end up in the situation where we could have a second referendum' if they vote down the Chequers deal in Parliament.

But speaking directly to EU leaders at a special summit in Salzburg last night, Mrs May said delaying Brexit was 'not an option'.

Over a dinner of wiener schnitzel and Austrian wines at Felsenreitschule, the theatre where The Sound of Music was filmed, she said: 'We all recognise that time is short, but delaying or extending these negotiations is not an option.

'I know for many of you, Brexit is not something you want, but it is important to be clear  there will be no second referendum in the UK.

'The public has delivered its verdict and I as Prime Minister will deliver on that. The UK will leave on March 29 next year. I have put forward serious and workable proposals.

'We will not, of course, agree on every detail, but the onus is now on all of us to get this deal done.'

Theresa May held talks with Irish PM Leo Varadkar (pictured) before the summit entered its second day in Salburg this morning

Over dinner last night (pictured), gathered EU leaders were told that Britain would be prepared to walk away from the negotiating table if a deal was not struck quickly

Over dinner last night (pictured), gathered EU leaders were told that Britain would be prepared to walk away from the negotiating table if a deal was not struck quickly

The male premiers appeared to be enjoying themselves as they prepared for the group photo. Pictured front row left to right, Mr Macron, Austria's Sebatian Kurz, Mr Tusk; back row left to right, Mr Rutte, Luzembourg PM Xavier Bettel, Latvian PM Maris Kucinskis

Large-scale protests were undertaken near the venue in opposition to the Austrian government's controversial migration policies

Arriving at the summit yesterday, Mrs May said she remained 'confident' of a good deal  but warned that the EU would have to 'evolve' its position and move closer to her Chequers proposals, which have been greeted with scepticism in Brussels.

Mr Tusk described elements of the Chequers proposals as a 'positive evolution in the UK approach', particularly on security co-operation.

But he said key differences remained, adding: 'On other issues such as the Irish question or the framework of economic co-operation the UK proposals will need to be reworked and further negotiated. Today there is perhaps more hope but there is surely less and less time.'

The commission is hostile to the proposal for a 'common rule book' with the UK on goods and the idea of the UK collecting tariffs for the EU, but some EU leaders made it clear they were desperate to avoid a no-deal Brexit.

Austrian chancellor Sebastian Kurz, who holds the EU's revolving presidency, said: 'We are convinced that we need a deal. We must do everything to avoid a hard Brexit.

'It would not just harm British, but would also cause damage for us in Europe. We are striving to make a compromise possible.'

Large-scale protests were undertaken near the venue in opposition to the Austrian government's controversial migration policies

Luxembourg prime minister Xavier Bettel said: 'We need to find a deal, a no-deal is a really bad solution. It's a terrible solution for the UK and a bad solution for Europe. So we need to find a deal.'

The Chequers proposals led to the Cabinet resignations of Mr Johnson and David Davis.

Meanwhile, Michel Barnier reiterated his demand for Northern Ireland to stay within the EU's customs jurisdiction after Brexit - something the UK has repeatedly ruled out.

The DUP, which is propping the Tories up in power, dismissed the Eurocrat's promise to 'improve' his Irish border solution by using technology to reduce the need for checks.

Mr Barnier renewed his efforts to 'de-dramatise' the Irish border issue yesterday by saying he was working on a new draft of his blueprint.

Eurocrats have been sounding a more optimistic tone about the way checks can be enforced over recent weeks, including admitting that technology and 'trusted trader' schemes can largely do away with the need for physical infrastructure.

The EU official suggested officials could inspect goods entering the UK via Ireland on ferries and in business premises away from the border.

He said: 'We are ready to improve this proposal. Work on the EU side is ongoing. We are clarifying which goods arriving in Northern Ireland from the rest of the UK would need to be checked and where, when and by whom these checks could be performed'.
The imposing building in which Theresa May delivered her Brexit speech to EU leaders was used to film the Sound of Music's famous 'So long, farewell, auf wiedersehen, goodbye,' song.

The Felsenreltschule theatre in Salzburg featured the scene depicting Maria von Trapp and her children singing the song before fleeing to Switzerland to escape Nazi persecution.

Images released of an EU summit working dinner at the theatre were also likened to a gathering of villains from a James Bond movie.

The dinner at the Felsenreitschule theatre was the setting for the famous musical scene in the Sound of Music

But EU diplomats said the idea the venue could have been chosen deliberately was a 'conspiracy theory too far' adding; 'It did look like a Bond lair, however;

'You were expecting [Austrian Chancellor] Sebastian Kurz to have a red button which he could press and leaders disappear if they misbehaved. The truth is no-one knew what the programme of this dinner was going to be when the venue was chosen.'

The 17th century Baroque building is part-carved out of the mountain it sits next to. It provided a dramatic backdrop to Mrs May's speech in which she tried to sell her Chequers plan to the EU 27 remaining leaders.

Sources said she was effectively handed the 'graveyard slot' and spoke for just ten minutes after the leaders spoke for four hours about migration first.

The summit has been organised by Austria which holds the EU's rotating presidency.

Claims the venue was chosen to reference the 'So long, farewell, auf wiedersehen, goodbye' scene (pictured) were called 'conspiracy theories' by EU leaders

So what happens next?

Theresa May is facing a bruising and potentially nightmarish end to 2018.

After the EU yesterday all but killed off her post-Brexit Chequers plan, she flew home last night to lick her wounds and work out how to navigate the choppy months ahead.

The Tory conference

The first of the Prime Minister's challenges is the Tory party conference which starts on Sunday September 30 in Birmingham.

Former foreign secretary and arch Brexiteer Boris Johnson is planning a pro-Brexit rally for hundreds of the party's grassroots activists. The event, hosted by the ConservativeHome website, will see further scorn poured on Mrs May's Chequers plan.

Its aim will be to put more pressure on her to 'chuck Chequers'. The event is the night before her keynote party conference speech.

Former UKIP leader Nigel Farage is planning a nationwide tour of 'Leave Means Leave' rallies to hammer home the anti-Chequers message.

It starts in Bolton this Sunday and he will lead a Save Brexit rally on September 30 at the National Exhibition Centre in Birmingham where he will be joined by Tory MPs Peter Bone and Andrea Jenkyns.

Mrs May will have painful memories of her disastrous speech to the conference last year  wrecked by a coughing fit and a collapsing stage set.

Return of Parliament and leadership plotting

Parliament returns from recess on October 9, having stopped sitting for the conference season. This will be the first time when MPs outraged at Mrs May's insistence on sticking with her Chequers plan will have a chance to voice their opinions.

Many Eurosceptics will delight in telling Mrs May 'I told you so' when she reports back on the Salzburg summit. It would also provide the first opportunity for a potential leadership challenge.

A handful of members of the pro-Brexit European Research Group of Tory MPs, led by Jacob Rees-Mogg, have been threatening to overthrow the Prime Minister for weeks. Last night former Brexit secretary David Davis claimed he had 40 MPs signed up to vote against Chequers.

More awkward dates with EU leaders

EU president Donald Tusk has warned that the next EU summit on October 18 is the moment Brexit talks could collapse if Britain does not make more concessions on Chequers and the Irish border.

This would lead to him abandoning a further special summit that is due to be held on November 15.

Mrs May yesterday said she was willing to walk away without a deal. But it is unclear what her position would then be after she has spent months failing to sell her Chequers plan to MPs and the EU.

If she manages to get past the October summit with the basis of an agreement with the EU, she then faces the emergency summit, at which both sides have said they will aim to finalise matters. Any 11th-hour complications could turn this summit into a nightmare.

But will any deal get MPs' backing?

Mrs May's biggest challenge could be getting any Brexit 'divorce' deal past MPs. Labour has said it will vote against any deal she reaches.

This, combined with Brexiteers angry about her not seeking their preferred Canada-style free trade deal, could mean she does not have the numbers to get it passed.

Both the UK and EU have agreed that a deal should be done by no later than November so there is enough time to get it signed off by their respective parliaments in time for March 29, 2019, when Britain will leave the EU.

Surprise! EU chiefs tell Britain to have a new vote on Brexit

EU leaders sparked a backlash last night after calling for a second referendum to allow voters to 'change their view' on Brexit.

In separate interventions, the leaders of the Czech Republic and Malta urged Theresa May to drop her opposition to a second referendum.

Their comments prompted an angry response in the UK, with Mrs May responding: 'There will be no second referendum.'

Maltese PM Joseph Muscat, who has been dogged by questions about a corruption scandal, claimed EU leaders were 'almost unanimous' in wanting Britain to change its mind.

Malta's Prime Minister Joseph Muscat said he would like to see another referendum on Brexit

Mr Muscat, a friend of Tony Blair, who is campaigning for a second Brexit referendum, said the UK public should have the chance to 'put things in perspective' before leaving in March next year.

'There is a unanimous  or almost unanimous, I would say  point of view around the table that we would like the almost impossible to happen, that the UK has another referendum,' he told the BBC.

'That being said, I don't know what the result would be, whether it would be any different from the first result.

'I think most of us would welcome a situation where there is the possibility of the British people putting things into perspective, seeing what has been negotiated, seeing the options and then deciding once and for all.'

Czech PM Andrej Babis also said he would like to see a second referendum.

Mr Babis, seen as an ally of Mrs May, said: 'We hope that finally we will reach a deal but basically I am very unhappy that the UK is leaving, so it would be better maybe to make another referendum and maybe the people in the meantime could change their view.'

Czech PM Andrej Babis, who is generally seen as an ally of Mrs May, said he would also like to see another referendum held

The EU has a long history of ignoring inconvenient referendum results or forcing countries to vote again. The most famous example is Ireland's rejection of the Lisbon Treaty in 2008, which was overturned in a second referendum after intense pressure from Brussels.

But Mrs May has repeatedly said she will not countenance a second referendum  a message she repeated to EU leaders 'very firmly' at a dinner in Salzburg on Wednesday night.

Downing Street yesterday pointed out that the interventions from Mr Muscat and Mr Babis were recorded before the dinner with Mrs May.

Asked about their comments, Mrs May said: 'There have been voices talking about a second referendum, but actually what is happening is that people are starting to recognise that this (Brexit) is going to happen and that we are going to leave on 29 March next year.'

Campaigners for a second referendum seized on the EU leaders' comments. Eloise Todd, head of the group Best for Britain, which is campaigning for a so-called 'people's vote', said: 'What's clear is there is still time for the UK to check with the people if Brexit is what they still want  even EU leaders are now saying they would accommodate that if we wanted.' But MPs on both sides of the Brexit debate said foreign leaders had no business interfering in the UK's democratic processes.

Theresa May was left isolated at the Salzburg conference as she tried to convince the EU 27 of the value of her Chequers plan

Jacob Rees-Mogg, chairman of the European Research Group of Tory MPs, said: 'It is surprising that it has taken so long for member states to suggest a second referendum. The EU's version of democracy is to demand voters keep on voting until they give the right answer.' Fellow Eurosceptic Henry Smith said: 'So the Czech and Maltese prime ministers publicly call for a second Brexit referendum.

'Not surprising, it's the EU establishment's default.

'Time and again European electorates voted against EU plans but have been ignored. Well that's not the British tradition of democracy. Bye.' Henry Newman, director of the think-tank Open Europe, said elements of the British establishment had been using diplomatic channels for months to spread the idea that Britain would eventually give way to pressure for a second referendum.

He said serving MPs and former Cabinet ministers and Whitehall mandarins were among those encouraging EU leaders to offer a bad deal in order to increase the pressure for a second vote. Mr Newman said: 'It is not surprising that some EU leaders are under the impression the UK could hold a second referendum. Virtually every time I attend a diplomatic dinner there is a senior British figure there saying: 'Don't worry, we can stop all this. Offer the worst deal possible and there will be a second referendum.'

The votes they managed to overturn 2001  The Irish rejected the EU's Nice treaty by 54-46. The following year Ireland voted to accept it by 63-37 after receiving 'reassurances' from Brussels, particularly on defence 2005  France and the Netherlands rejected the EU Constitution treaty. The proposals were repackaged as the Lisbon Treaty, which was passed without a poll in either country 2008  Ireland rejects the Lisbon Treaty by 53-47. The following year Dublin caves in to pressure from Brussels to hold a second poll, which backs treaty 67-33 2015  Greeks reject terms of an EU austerity package by 61-39. Greek leaders and EU ignore result and push cuts through Advertisement
Police have raided a trucking company after one of their vehicles exploded into flames on one of Sydney's busiest roads, shutting down traffic for 12 hours.

Officers swooped on the headquarters of Owens Transport in Banksmeadow, in the city's south-east, early on Friday morning.

Police and Roads and Maritime Services inspectors are expected to remain at the site for several hours as part of their heavy vehicle compliance operation.

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Police have raided a Sydney trucking company after one of their vehicles burst into flames (pictured) on the city's M5 motorway on Wednesday

Officers swooped on the trucking company's headquarters early on Friday morning, accompanied by Roads and Maritime Service inspectors (pictured)

Police and RMS inspectors are expected to remain at the site for several hours

The truck became engulfed in flames after a collision on the M5 motorway near Sydney Airport just before midday on Wednesday.

The truck reportedly hit a barrier at Kingsgrove, bursting into flames and spilling oil onto the busy road as commuters made their way into the city.

Firefighters wearing breathing apparatus worked to manage the blaze, which was roughly 200 metres out of the M5 East tunnel.

Witnesses reported seeing trees alongside the motorway catching fire and 'big black smoke spewing' from the vehicle, with its 'tyres popping'.

All westbound lanes were closed for 12 hours as emergency services worked to clear the charred vehicle.

The driver was uninjured.

The truck reportedly hit a barrier just before midday on Wednesday, bursting into flames and spilling oil onto the busy road as commuters made their way into the city
Former rap mogul Marion 'Suge' Knight will serve 28 years in jail after pleading no contest to voluntary manslaughter after injuring one man and killing another when he hit them with his truck four years ago.

The charge is a downgrade from the murder, attempted murder and hit-and-run charges that Knight was facing and which could have landed him in jail for life.

Knight injured Cle 'Bone' Sloan and killed Terry Carter with his Ford pickup outside a burger drive-thru in south Los Angeles in January 2015 after an argument on the set of a commercial for the film Straight Outta Compton turned violent.

Suge Knight has pleaded no contest to voluntary manslaughter and after he ran over two men, killing one, nearly four years ago (pictured in court on Thursday)

According to reports at the time, Knight turned up to the set despite not being welcome due to a long-running feud with Dr Dre, who was there that day.

Knight was told to leave by Sloan, who was a consultant for the film, and the pair got into an argument before Knight left.

Terry Carter, a businessman and record producer, became involved and agreed to help smooth things over, before suggesting the men meet at a nearby burger joint for truce talks.

Carter and Knight were seen exchanging friendly words in the drive-thru parking lot before Sloan arrived and a fist fight broke out with Knight.

While trying to escape, Knight clipped Sloan with his car, knocking him to the ground, before running over Carter, killing him.

Knight, who co-founded Death Row Records with Dr Dre, has always denied intentionally hitting either man.

His plea came before jury selection was due to begin for his expected murder trial.

Last year, a judge allowed the jailed rap mogul an opportunity to see his ailing mother (left, with his father). At the time, Suge (right, in 2011), who was charged with murder, had been blocked from seeing family and receiving mail or phone calls while awaiting trial. He was declined day release to attend her funeral in June

During Thursday's hearing, Knight loudly and quickly announced his plea of 'no contest when questioned by Judge Ronald Coen. He will be formally sentenced on October 4.

The plea deal calls for Knight to serve 22 years in prison on the voluntary manslaughter count, and another six years because it is a third strike violation.

Carter's daughter, Crystal, sat in the front row of the courtroom and displayed no visible reaction to the proceedings.

'I'm surprised he pleaded out,' she said outside court. 'Normally he likes the cameras to be on him 24-7.'

Delays, detours and drama marked the run-up to Knight's trial, which was expected to begin Oct. 1 under tight security and secrecy.

Court officials had said no witness list would be released ahead of the trial, and some witnesses might not be identified by name during the case.

Knight collapsed during one court hearing, two of his former attorneys were indicted on witness-tampering charges, and his fiancee pleaded no contest to selling video of Knight hitting the two men with his truck.

His attorney Albert DeBlanc Jr., appointed by the court five months ago, was his 16th, and Knight tried to fire him and get yet another lawyer just a day before the deal was reached. DeBlanc declined comment Thursday.

While awaiting trial, Knight was also accused of threatening 'Straight Outta Compton' director F. Gary Gray.

Knight had tried to fire his attorney, Albert DeBlanc Jr, just one day before the plea deal was reached

Knight would frequently, against the advice of Coen and his attorneys, speak extensively during hearings, complaining about jail conditions, his attorneys and his health issues.

While Coen read legal language about the plea and told Knight he was subject to deportation if he was not a citizen, Knight said: 'ICE is coming to get me?' to a smattering of laughs - including from the judge.

The 53-year-old was a key player in the gangster rap scene that flourished in the 1990s, and his label once listed Dr. Dre, Tupac Shakur and Snoop Dogg among its artists.

Knight lost control of the company after it was forced into bankruptcy. He has prior felony convictions for armed robbery and assault with a gun.

He pleaded no contest in 1995 and was sentenced to five years' probation for assaulting two rap entertainers at a Hollywood recording studio in 1992.

He was sentenced in February 1997 to prison for violating terms of that probation by taking part in a fight at a Las Vegas hotel hours before Shakur was fatally wounded in a drive-by attack as he rode in Knight's car just east of the Las Vegas Strip. Shakur's slaying remains unsolved.

Knight had faced life in prison if convicted of murder for killing Carter.
Michael Cohen, President Donald Trump's former personal attorney, has spent multiple days in the last month with special counsel Robert Mueller's team and the questions have focused on Russia.

Mueller is investigating Russia's meddling in the 2016 presidential election and whether Trump and his team colluded, a charge the president has repeatedly denied.

Cohen, who Trump slammed for 'flipping' on him when he cut a deal with prosecutors, has heavy ties to the president have worked for the Trump Organization in addition to being his attorney.

Michael Cohen has spent hours talking to the special counsel's team about Trump and Russia

President Trump has criticized his former personal attorney for 'flipping'

The questioning of Cohen has focused primarily on all aspects of Trump's dealings with Russia, ABC News reported, including financial and business dealings in addition to the election.

Cohen's attorney, Lanny Davis, wrote on Twitter Thursday that Cohen had provided 'critical information' to Mueller's team.

'Good for @michaelcohen212 in providing critical information to the #muellerinvestigation without a cooperation agreement,' Davis wrote.

'No one should question his honesty, veracity or loyalty to his #family and #country over @potus @realdonaldtrump.'

Cohen's attorney, Lanny Davis, wrote on Twitter Thursday that Cohen had provided 'critical information' to Mueller's team

Investigators also wanted to know whether Trump or any of his associates discussed the possibility of a pardon with Cohen, sources told the network.

When Cohen was at the Trump Organization he was involved in discussions to build a Trump Tower in Moscow - a plan that never came to fruition.

And the man known as Trump's fixer also paid porn star Stormy Daniels $130,000 to keep quiet about an alleged affair with Trump, which the president has denied.

The interviews with Cohen happened in Washington, D.C., and New York City. Some of them were attended by prosecutors from the U.S. Attorney's Office in the Southern District of New York, which is the office that Cohen struck a plea deal with last month.

Cohen's participation has been voluntary and without any guarantee of leniency from prosecutors, ABC reported.

Additionally, Cohen is cooperating with a separate probe by New York state authorities into the inner workings of the Trump family charity and the Trump Organization.

The news of Cohen's cooperation follows last week's report that former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort came to a plea deal with Mueller's team to avoid a second federal trial. He has reportedly agreed to cooperate.

Some consider the state investigation more of a threat to Trump as he has no pardon power there.

'Both of these guys want to be loved and they both want loyalty,' says a person close to both men told ABC. 'Cohen's disavowal of Trump has triggered a series of events that turned once very good friends into permanent enemies. The consequences for both will be ugly.'

Trump and his team have been turning on Cohen, questioning his honesty.

Special Counsel Robert Mueller is investigating if Trump and his campaign colluded with Russia, which the president has repeatedly denied

Cohen pleaded guilty the same day former campaign manager Paul Manafort was convicted on eight counts

Rudy Giuliani, who's on the president's legal team, says Cohen is making up stories in order to protect himself

Rudy Giuliani, who's on the president's legal team, says Cohen is making up stories in order to protect himself.

'There's nobody that I know that knows him that hasn't warned me that if his back is up against the wall, he'll lie like crazy, because he's lied all his life,' Giuliani told CNN in July.

In August Cohen pleaded guilty to eight felonies in cases Mueller's team had referred to federal prosecutors in New York. Part of those pleas included his payment to Daniels and how he arranged for American Media Inc. to pay former Playboy Playmate Karen McDougal $150,000 for her story of an alleged affair with Trump.

The president has denied the allegation and the National Enquirer never printed the story in a practice known as catch and kill. American Media Inc. CEO David Pecker is said to be cooperating with investigators.

At his August plea hearing, Cohen told a federal judge he had arranged for the payments to the women 'in coordination with, and at the direction of a candidate for federal office,' referring to then-candidate Trump, and noted he participated in the transactions to influence the election.

On the day of Cohen's court appearance, Trump wrote on Twitter: 'If anyone is looking for a good lawyer, I would strongly suggest that you don't retain the services of Michael Cohen!'

Cohen has also been in contact with the New York Attorney General's office, according to multiple people close to the matter.

In June, the acting New York Attorney General, Barbara Underwood, filed a civil lawsuit accusing Trump's charitable foundation and its directors of having violated New York's charity laws.

The lawsuit names Trump, his sons Don Jr. and Eric, and his daughter, Ivanka, as defendants.

A representative of the Trump Foundation said the lawsuit was 'politics at its very worst.'

Cohen is scheduled to be sentenced in New York federal court on December 12.
A former aide so close to New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo that he considered him like a brother was sentenced to six years in prison Thursday for fraud and accepting bribes.

The judge said she hopes the punishment 'will be heard in Albany.'

U.S. District Judge Valerie E. Caproni tried to put the sentencing of Joseph Percoco in perspective, noting other recent high-profile convictions of state leaders.

She said those seeking the modest salaries of government jobs should not seek to supplement their incomes by accepting bribes.

'If you do so, this court will show you no mercy,' she said.

In this March 13, 2018, file photo, Joseph Percoco, right, former top aide to New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, reacts while talking to reporters outside U.S. District court in New York

Percoco, 49, was convicted in March of accepting more than $300,000 from companies that wanted to gain influence with the Cuomo administration.

The conviction was an election-year embarrassment for Cuomo.

His opponents say it proves the two-term Democrat hasn't done enough to address chronic corruption in state government, even within his own administration.

Prosecutors had asked Caproni to sentence Percoco to well over five years in prison. His lawyers said he should get no more than two years.

Cuomo wasn't accused of wrongdoing, but testimony presented an unflattering picture of the inner workings of his office.

In a statement after the sentence was announced, Cuomo said: 'Joe Percoco is paying the price for violating the public trust.

'And it should serve as a warning to anyone who failed to uphold his or her oath as a public servant.

'On a personal level, the human tragedy for Joe's young children and family is a very sad consequence.'

In a court filing, Percoco's lawyers wrote that his punishment has already begun.

'The trial - which played out on the pages of virtually every newspaper and media outlet in New York - has all but destroyed Joe's life. Joe faces impending bankruptcy and a substantial term of incarceration,' they wrote.

In court, Percoco told Caproni he wanted to 'express how sorry I am for my actions.'

Outside court, Percoco declined to comment, walking away as he was asked if he had remorse.

His lawyer, Barry Bohrer, said outside court that it was a "difficult day in court." He vowed to appeal.

Percoco, a former aide so close to New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (above) that he considered him like a brother, was sentenced to six years in prison Thursday for fraud and accepting bribes

'We had hoped for better,' he said.

'Obviously it is not the sentence we requested but it wasn't the sentence the government requested either.

'Mr. Percoco is a man of strength and a man of faith.

'He has faith in the system and we are hopeful that our appeal will be successful.'

Prosecutors in pretrial submissions had called on Caproni to send a message to state officials.

'As the Court is aware, and all too sadly, Percoco's trial exposed wrongdoing at high levels of state government that is hardly aberrant. Recent prosecutions and trials in this district have laid bare the ugly truth that, too often, political power and responsibility in New York leads to political corruption,' they wrote.

After the sentence was announced, U.S. Attorney Geoffrey S. Berman said in a statement that the punishment 'sends a strong message that public officials who violate their duties to faithfully serve the citizens of New York will be held accountable for their corrupt actions.'

During the state's Democratic primary contest, Cuomo's opponent, Cynthia Nixon, dismissed the governor's explanation that he didn't know about Percoco's misdeeds.

'We have either incompetence or corruption,' she said. 'Which is it?'

The scandal didn't substantially hurt Cuomo with Democrats. He won in a landslide.

But his Republican opponent in the general election, Dutchess County Executive Marc Molinaro, has picked up the cudgel, asking police to investigate Percoco's use of a state office and telephone while he was leading Cuomo's 2014 re-election bid.

Percoco plays a big role in Molinaro's 'Cuomo Corruption Tour,' a series of campaign events that he launched last week.
Donald Trump Jr and Kimberly Guilfoyle are hitching their wagons and heading west next week, where the couple will get to work campaigning for Republican candidates in a handful of hotly contested races.

The dynamic duo hit a bit of a bump in the road though ahead of their trip when the owners of one Montana bar politely informed them that they had no interest in hosting their grand old party.

That move left the pair scrambling to find a second venue, and a number of their fans threatening to boycott the establishment, but all seems to have worked out in the end.

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Shut it down: The Midrown Tavern in Bozeman, Montana has backed out of a fundraiser for GOP hopeful Matt Rosendale hosted by Donald Trump Jr and Kimberly Guilfoyle (pair above on Monday)

Get going: Owners stated that they did not have enough space and wanted to avoid the tension that would come with hosting the event

Don Jr and Guilfoyle are lending their star power to the campaign of US Senate candidate Matt Rosendale, a Republican who is challenger Democratic incumbent.

That was news however to the venue, who claimed to be left in the dark about the rally.

The owners of Midtown Tavern in Bozeman said that they had no idea the event was a political fundraiser at the time they made the booking and wanted to avoid any sort of gathering that might cause tension.

Owner Josh Palmer said: 'Midtown Tavern welcomes all patrons to our neighborhood establishment regardless of demographics or affiliations, including political ones. We welcome everyone.

'We strive to be a good community partner that embraces inclusivity and respect, in addition to providing a safe and friendly environment. We host a wide variety of private events.

'In the most recent instance, the Rosendale fundraiser increased in size and became significantly larger than what we can host and they elected to choose another venue.'

The Rosendale campaign announced the change of venue on Facebook.

'Due to unprecedented demand, with HUNDREDS of RSVPs in under 24 hours, the location for next week's RALLY in Bozeman with Donald Trump Jr. and Kimberly Guilfoyle has changed,l' read a Facebook post.

'Come join us at the Gallatin County Fairgrounds as we work together to MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!!!'

Making moves: This led some Trump supporters to call for a boycott,m but a second venue was quickly secured

This could all be practice for a Don Jr run for office, something both he and Guilfoyle have suggested might be a possibility in the past.

Don Jr. is 'an incredible outdoorsman,' the best I ever shot with' and in no way 'entitled' said Guilfoyle over in a Breitbart Radio interview in June.

'He knows everything about weapons, which I admire, because Im a big Second Amendment supporter,' added Guilfoyle, whose ex is trying to put restrictions on the sale of firearms.

'I don't like his position on guns at all, that really wasn't an issue when we were together but he's really taken a hard stance on that,' said Guilfoyle of Newsom.

'Obviously, he's been very aggressive as it relates to the wall and President Trump and that type of thing.'

Guilfoyle also called her boyfriend 'the number one up-and-coming political figure on the right,' and said that he 'is the base.'

This all seemed to suggest that Donald Jr could very well follow in his father's footsteps.

'He has a compelling political voice, he is incredibly bright. I have seen him at these different rallies,' explained Guilfoyle.

'He is a person that people can understand, he's very approachable. He is very relatable with his background and his interests.'

Most importantly, Guilfoyle said, is the fact that Donald Jr is a man of the people.

'He actually puts the time in and the effort to understand the base, because he is the base,' said Guilfoyle.

'He gets out there and actually talks to the real people, the men and women who have been left behind in this country.'
An ex-Virginia Tech student, 21, has been found guilty of being an accessory before the fact of first degree murder for helping her friend plot the murder of his secret 13-year-old girlfriend.

Prosecutors say that Natalie Keepers was closely involved in helping David Eisenhauer, 21, plan the death of Nicole Lovell; going with him to buy a shovel and helping him pick out the location for the murder.

Text messages also showed that the pair discussed the methods to kill Lovell - Eisenhauer's secret 13-year-old online girlfriend.

Prosecutors say that Natalie Keepers was closely involved in helping David Eisenhauer, 21, plan the death of Nicole Lovell. Keepers is pictured crying as she was found guilty of being an accessory before the fact of first degree murder

Keepers was lead away in handcuffs after being found guilty by a jury of being an accessory before the fact for the 2016 murder of Nicole Lovell in Christiansburg, Va., Thursday

Tim and Sara Keepers, parents of Natalie Keepers, react to their daughter being found guilty

Lawyers for Keepers, who pleaded not guilty to being an accessory before the fact, argued that she never really believed he planned to kill Lovell, and that she was 'just playing along with his fantasy.'

Attorney Kris Olin said that Keepers had never even met the victim but 'loved being part of the plan, not because it was a plan to murder but because it was a plan to be close to David.'

Olin told the jury that 'playing along' is not the same as 'shared intent.'

But on Thursday, a jury found Keepers, who spent most of the hearing with her head down, wiping tears from her eyes, guilty.

Keepers, of Laurel, Maryland, and Eisenhauer, of Columbia, Maryland, were both freshmen engineering students at Virginia Tech at the time of the killing. Lovell was a Blacksburg middle school student.

David Eisenhauer is serving a 50-year sentence after pleading no contest to charges of first-degree murder in the death of 13-year-old Nicole Lovell (pictured)

Defense attorney John Robertson, left, with his client Natalie Keepers, argued that Keepers never believed Eisenhauer would go through with the murder

Eisenhauer is now serving a 50-year sentence after pleading no contest to first-degree murder.

The first witnesses to testify included a Blacksburg police detective and an FBI agent who interviewed Keepers.

David Eisenhauer (pictured) admitted to stabbing the teenager 14 times including a lethal wound to her neck

Jurors were shown several video clips from the interviews. In one, Keepers gave a detailed account of how Eisenhauer stabbed Lovell to death in the woods.

'He wanted me there to help,' Keepers said. 'He wanted me to help kill her.'

Keepers said Eisenhauer drove her to Virginia Tech before the killing and she went to her dorm room. She has denied being present for the stabbing.

Keepers, now 21, also told police in the video clips that she and Eisenhauer talked about different ways to kill Lovell.

'He was bouncing so many ideas off my head, I couldn't keep track of them all,' she said. 'He was the one who officially developed the plan.'

Prosecutors say Eisenhauer met Lovell online and communicated with her for months before meeting her at least once in person.

They met again in January 2016, when the college freshman lured Lovell out of her family's apartment with the promise of a 'secret date'.

Tammy Weeks, mother of murder victim Nicole Lovell testifies during Natalie Keepers' trial, Tuesday

That's when he took her to wooded area and subsequently killed her because he feared she would expose their relationship.

Prosecutors have said that Keepers told police Eisenhauer told her he feared Lovell could be pregnant.

Keepers said Eisenhauer told her he might have had sex with Lovell at a party, but couldn't remember because he blacked out and later woke up in a ditch.

Natalie Keepers (pictured) will be sentenced at a later date

Lovell's body was found just over the state line in North Carolina.

A medical examiner had testified that she had 14 stab wounds, including a lethal wound to her neck.

Keepers previously admitted helping to hide the body of Lovell, a Blacksburg middle school student, after the murder on January 27 2016.

During his June sentencing hearing, Eisenhauer expressed regret over the young girl's slaying.

'I am sorry for the pain my actions have caused for Nicole Lovell and her family,' he said.

Before Eisenhauer's sentence was imposed, Lovell's parents described how their daughter's killing has affected them.

Her father, David Lovell, said he's been diagnosed with severe depression and post-traumatic stress disorder since his daughter's death.

'There is nothing that will happen in this courtroom that will fix it,' he said.

Her sentencing hearing has not yet been set.
Of course, alarm bells sounded when Alex King and his Russian-born wife, Anna Shapiro, became violently ill at an Italian restaurant in Salisbury last Sunday.

After all, this was the city in which, just six months earlier, former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia had been found slumped unconscious on a bench after dining in another Italian restaurant just a few hundred yards away.

Then, in July, local woman Dawn Sturgess died after being exposed to the nerve agent Novichok  the same substance used by Russian agents to try to assassinate the Skripals  after it was found discarded in a perfume bottle in a local park.

Alex King, 42, became ill along with his 30-year-old lingerie model wife Anna Shapiro in Salisbury

Faced with the possibility that Salisbury was once again under attack, Wiltshire police braced themselves for the worst.

Areas were promptly cordoned off, the city was placed in lockdown and emergency crews wearing protective clothing searched the restaurant.

The couple were rushed to Salisbury District Hospital, while panicked residents prepared themselves for yet another onslaught of global scrutiny and bad publicity for the city.

Yesterday, however, alarm bells were ringing for a different reason after grave doubts emerged about the couple's story, which had caused such distress and chaos.

Prince Charles shakes hands with Alex West after he gatecrashed the 2006 premiere of The History Boys in an apparent bet with his boss and convicted fraudster Edward Davenport

She, for a start, is reportedly a high-class escort and former professional 'honeytrap', while King, her husband of just one month who was released from hospital on Tuesday afternoon, is a troubled hoaxer who once duped Prince Charles.

He counted a fraudster as his best friend and is awaiting trial for intent to supply drugs.

Yet after leaving hospital on Monday, Shapiro, 30, further fanned the flames of an international conspiracy when she described how she had found King, 42, foaming at the mouth in the restaurant toilet after eating his sea bass. She placed the blame squarely on the Russian Government.

The daughter of a Russian military official who became an Israeli citizen against her father's wishes in 2006, Shapiro claimed she and her husband  who, she said, had been put in an induced coma in hospital  had been fleeing their London home after receiving a string of death threats.

'I was targeted by Putin's henchmen,' the part-time model and company director declared unequivocally in a redtop newspaper, alongside a scantily clad picture of herself, and suggestions the couple had been poisoned by strychnine.

'They want me dead as I oppose Putin and have turned my back on my country. Russia is capable of anything.'

King (left) is pictured with his convicted fraudster, and ex-friend, Eddie Davenport

That much, we know, is true. Yet Shapiro's audacious claims fast began to appear as puffed up as the dough in the Fiorentina pizza she enjoyed before falling ill.

The Sun newspaper, which published her interview, swiftly took down their original story on their website 'for legal reasons'; the police have now declared the incident 'non-suspicious' and the couple, it is emerging, have a background every bit as colourful as the history of the cathedral city where Shapiro claimed they were targeted.

So what really happened to this tawdry couple? And what possible motive could they have for claiming they have been poisoned?

There was no sign of either of them outside the ground-floor flat they share in a large mansion block in Central London yesterday, but one person who knows the couple spoke to the Mail and claimed that both their recent marriage and the accusations of poisoning were Shapiro's idea.

Talking on condition of anonymity, he claimed her British visa is about to expire and suggested she believes embroiling herself in a police investigation against the Russians would let her stay in this country.

'Anna created this story because she needed a visa to stay in Britain,' he claims.

Anna Shapiro said she was the target of an assassination attempt on behalf of Vladimir Putin

'She married Alex to get a visa. They got married at a register office. Alex is a nice guy. He's a silly man and a fool and she's a control freak. It's a bad relationship, him and her. She controls Alex.'

It's an extraordinary claim  but then nothing about this story is particularly normal.

Shapiro claimed she had to strip naked and shower in hospital before undergoing tests, and that after discharging herself the day after the incident she was taken to a local hotel and placed under 24-hour police protection.

'I'm sure the Russians think I'm a British spy. I know lots of rich businessmen in Central London and, because I have the accent, people make assumptions about me,' she claimed, adding that her father, who she says was a general in the Russian army, is so 'appalled' by her denunciation of her native country that: 'Someone purporting to be my father is behind a series of death threats I have had on various social media accounts and email addresses. They have frightened me.'

Ms Shapiro is a part-time model from Russia who has criticised Putin in the past. It's claimed she is trying to embroil herself in a police investigation against the Russians to extend her visa

So much so that she and King were staying at a 55-a-night farmhouse bed and breakfast in Landford, 11 miles outside Salisbury, last weekend, apparently en route to starting a new life on the South Coast.

The farmhouse owner, she claimed, recommended they dine in Prezzo that evening. 'I laughed and said: 'I hope we don't get poisoned,' she said in her interview. 'The owner smiled and said: 'Everywhere is safe now.' '

It could, of course, have been a coincidence that Shapiro ended up just yards from the scene of this year's most intriguing international crime.

Yet the blonde, who arrived in London in 2008 before studying for three years at Westminster Law School, does have a habit of gravitating towards the centre of attention.

On social media Shapiro  whose real name is Chana but whose Twitter and Instagram accounts are under yet another name  has posted myriad swimsuit pictures of herself, taut bronzed limbs draped over yachts, long hair flowing on yet another beach.

She reportedly used to be a 'honeytrap', seducing men for Israeli spy agency Mossad as a teen

She reportedly used to be a 'honeytrap', seducing men for Israeli spy agency Mossad as a teenager, claiming: 'I spied on my own friends and even used my looks to seduce men. I was too young to know that what I was doing was wrong.' Now, she is reported to have said: 'I work as a model and an escort.'

Said to charge 4,000 a night for her services, she allegedly entertains wealthy clientele at her marital home.

'She goes with people who are rich and famous,' said the friend, who described King as 'weak' and afraid of his 'selfish' wife: 'He sees all the people coming in and out (of the flat). It's very sad.'

King (pictured) has a child porn conviction

Of course, an aptitude for attention doesn't negate her version of events, even if it has proved handy in propelling her onto the front pages. Yet her husband, whom she met shortly after she arrived in Britain in 2008 but only married last month, does have a history of hoaxing.

Born Alex Ainley to an Irish businessman father, Shaun, Alex King, 42, discovered as a teenager that he was not Shaun's biological son, but the offspring of German aristocrat Baron Freddie von Nida, with whom his mother had a fling.

The discovery seemingly left him gripped by self-doubt.

He adopted the surname King, so as not to side with either his stepfather or genetic father, and used his newfound connections to assert an aristocratic identity, establishing a friendship with Edward Davenport, 52, an infamous playboy conman known as 'Fast Eddie' on account of his louche lifestyle. Davenport was given an eight-year jail sentence in 2011 for a 4.5m fraud.

Having made his name in the Eighties organising 'Gatecrasher Balls'  raucous parties for wealthy teenagers  Davenport bought a lavish 14m, 24-bedroom home in Portland Place, London, which he invited King to share (and which was, incidentally, used as a location for the film The King's Speech).

King looked up to his older contact, who told the Mail yesterday they enjoyed a 'great' friendship when Alex was 'fresh-faced'.

Perhaps that is why, in 2006, King accepted a 100,000 dare to infiltrate the cast line-up at the royal film premiere of Alan Bennett's The History Boys and shake hands with Prince Charles.

'Eddie was a guest and bet me 100,000 I couldn't gatecrash my way in,' he recalled shortly afterwards.

'I said not only would I get in  but I would also shake hands with both Charles and Camilla.' And he did. 'I just said whatever came into my head. I was talking gibber-jabber,' says King.

Whether desperate for money, attention or Davenport's approval is unclear, but his innocuous prank belied a darker personality.

Former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia were poisoned with novichok in March

King's mother Christine described her son as being 'bitter and angry' about being abandoned by his biological father, who later despaired of his acknowledged offspring.

'I am not proud to have a son who behaves like this,' said Baron von Nida shortly after the hoax. 'He races around after this Eddie Davenport fellow, trying to emulate him. He wants an easy life and easy money and he hankers after the champagne lifestyle.'

The same year, King was exposed by a newspaper as 'an ambassador of perversion' after telling undercover reporters, who had come to Portland Place on the pretence of renting the property for a porn film, that Eastern European girls who stripped naked for them were available for sex at 500 a day.

He told reporters the girls had answered adverts in Russian-language newspapers. It is not known how he met Shapiro, although, given both of their professions, one might hazard a guess.

Davenport, meanwhile, moved into a penthouse opposite London's Ritz Hotel and went into the sex party industry. 'I want to do what I love  organise great parties, meet beautiful women, celebrities and fun people. Everyone doing what they enjoy  having sex,' he boasted in 2016.

Yesterday, Davenport told the Mail his friendship with King deteriorated in 2010 after King and Shapiro became an item.

By the sounds of it, he was put out when King's allegiances switched from one dominant personality to another.

'He used to pretend to me that he hadn't really fallen for her but obviously he had. I think he totally fell for her,' he says.

'I think Alex has gone a bit mad. I think they're both mad. We never fell out but stopped seeing each other. I've absolutely no idea where they are now.'

Yet he, too, suspects Shapiro elaborated the poisoning story in the hope that becoming part of a police investigation would stop her having to leave Britain:

'People want visas to stay in the country, which is why people go and get married and claim people are trying to assassinate them.'

King, meanwhile, is charged with 12 counts of possession with intent to supply class A, B and C drugs, including cocaine and ecstasy, and is on bail until his trial next year.

Given his impending trial, one might have expected him to keep a low profile. And whether King was aware of the interview his wife gave is, as yet, unknown.

A spokesman for the Sun newspaper  which would not comment on why their story was taken offline or whether Shapiro was paid for her story  said: 'Given recent tragic events in Salisbury, the reporting of an event requiring the evacuation of bars and restaurants by police officers in bio-hazard suits, and that requires tests for the presence of Novichok, is of obvious public interest.

'Like any newspaper, we were keen to talk to those at the centre of the fast-moving incident and in this case chose to give Ms Shapiro the opportunity to share with the public her version of events.

We notified Wiltshire Police of Ms Shapiro's claims well in advance of publication and their statement at the time, which confirmed that this episode was being treated as a serious incident, was included.'

Kremlin officials dismissed Shapiro's claims as absurd, while a spokesperson for Wiltshire police told the Mail both had been interviewed and their inquiries were 'ongoing'.

No arrests have been made, although one line of inquiry, inevitably, will be that the whole incident was a hoax.
EU leaders sparked a backlash last night after calling for a second referendum to allow voters to 'change their view' on Brexit.

In separate interventions, the leaders of the Czech Republic and Malta urged Theresa May to drop her opposition to a second referendum.

Their comments prompted an angry response in the UK, with Mrs May responding: 'There will be no second referendum.'

Maltese PM Joseph Muscat, who has been dogged by questions about a corruption scandal, claimed EU leaders were 'almost unanimous' in wanting Britain to change its mind.

Mrs May lined up alongside her EU counterparts including Angela Merkel (centre of front row) for the 'family photo' at the summit today

Mr Muscat, a friend of Tony Blair, who is campaigning for a second Brexit referendum, said the UK public should have the chance to 'put things in perspective' before leaving in March next year.

'There is a unanimous  or almost unanimous, I would say  point of view around the table that we would like the almost impossible to happen, that the UK has another referendum,' he told the BBC.

'That being said, I don't know what the result would be, whether it would be any different from the first result.

'I think most of us would welcome a situation where there is the possibility of the British people putting things into perspective, seeing what has been negotiated, seeing the options and then deciding once and for all.'

Czech PM Andrej Babis also said he would like to see a second referendum.

Mr Babis, seen as an ally of Mrs May, said: 'We hope that finally we will reach a deal but basically I am very unhappy that the UK is leaving, so it would be better maybe to make another referendum and maybe the people in the meantime could change their view.'

Malta's Prime Minister Joseph Muscat said he would like to see another referendum on Brexit

The EU has a long history of ignoring inconvenient referendum results or forcing countries to vote again.

The most famous example is Ireland's rejection of the Lisbon Treaty in 2008, which was overturned in a second referendum after intense pressure from Brussels.

But Mrs May has repeatedly said she will not countenance a second referendum  a message she repeated to EU leaders 'very firmly' at a dinner in Salzburg on Wednesday night.

Downing Street yesterday pointed out that the interventions from Mr Muscat and Mr Babis were recorded before the dinner with Mrs May.

Asked about their comments, Mrs May said: 'There have been voices talking about a second referendum, but actually what is happening is that people are starting to recognise that this (Brexit) is going to happen and that we are going to leave on 29 March next year.'

Campaigners for a second referendum seized on the EU leaders' comments. Eloise Todd, head of the group Best for Britain, which is campaigning for a so-called 'people's vote', said: 'What's clear is there is still time for the UK to check with the people if Brexit is what they still want  even EU leaders are now saying they would accommodate that if we wanted.'

But MPs on both sides of the Brexit debate said foreign leaders had no business interfering in the UK's democratic processes.

Czech PM Andrej Babis, who is generally seen as an ally of Mrs May, said he would also like to see another referendum held

Macron: Pro-Brexit campaigners 'lied' Emmanuel Macron branded the leaders of the pro-Brexit campaign 'liars' for telling voters it would be easy to leave the EU. The French president said the decision was 'not without costs' and 'not without consequences'. 'Brexit is the choice of the British people and it is a choice pushed by certain people who predicted easy solutions,' he said in Salzburg. 'Brexit has shown us one thing  and I fully respect British sovereignty in saying this  it has demonstrated that those who said you can easily do without Europe, that it will all go very well, that it is easy and there will be lots of money, are liars. 'This is all the more true because they left the next day, so they didn't have to manage it.' Mr Macron said it was true that Brexit negotiations had been complex and lengthy. But he added: 'That fact must not be exploited by those very people who are the cause of this problem, who got us into the Brexit situation and who now tell us that Europe is going from crisis to crisis.' His claim the leaders of the Brexit campaign 'left the next day' after the vote appeared to confuse them with David Cameron, who quit as PM after calling on voters to back Remain. By contrast, Brexit supporters David Davis, Boris Johnson and Liam Fox were brought into the Cabinet. Advertisement

Jacob Rees-Mogg, chairman of the European Research Group of Tory MPs, said: 'It is surprising that it has taken so long for member states to suggest a second referendum.

The EU's version of democracy is to demand voters keep on voting until they give the right answer.' Fellow Eurosceptic Henry Smith said: 'So the Czech and Maltese prime ministers publicly call for a second Brexit referendum.

'Not surprising, it's the EU establishment's default.

'Time and again European electorates voted against EU plans but have been ignored. Well that's not the British tradition of democracy. Bye.'

Henry Newman, director of the think-tank Open Europe, said elements of the British establishment had been using diplomatic channels for months to spread the idea that Britain would eventually give way to pressure for a second referendum.

He said serving MPs and former Cabinet ministers and Whitehall mandarins were among those encouraging EU leaders to offer a bad deal in order to increase the pressure for a second vote.

Mr Newman said: 'It is not surprising that some EU leaders are under the impression the UK could hold a second referendum.

Virtually every time I attend a diplomatic dinner there is a senior British figure there saying: 'Don't worry, we can stop all this. Offer the worst deal possible and there will be a second referendum.'

In a clear swipe at Mrs May's proposals to align with EU rules on goods but not services, French President Emmanuel Macron (pictured) today warned he would not accept anything that undermined the EU single market
Thousands of shops are closing across Britain as record numbers of customers buy on the internet.

A total of 1,772 stores disappeared from the UKs busiest town centres last year, a report reveals  meaning almost five closed every day.

Retailer Evans Cycles last night reportedly became the latest firm to seek a rescue.

A string of retailers have recently gone bust or are facing an uncertain future. More than 50,000 retail jobs have already been lost this year (File photo)

Sky News reported that the business is looking for a buyer who can take charge and inject cash to stave off its collapse.

The figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) highlight the plight faced by retailers as foreign internet rivals such as Amazon take their business.

An unprecedented 18.2p of every pound forked out by shoppers is now spent online.

The figures sparked fresh calls from campaigners for the Government to help.

Professor Joshua Bamfield, of the Centre for Retail Research, said: Average profits are half what they were five years ago  ordinary shops are facing crippling bills and high taxes, but so far its not clear that the Government is taking this seriously.

A string of retailers have recently gone bust or are facing an uncertain future. More than 50,000 retail jobs have already been lost this year.

This is likely because in 2008, just 4.9 per cent of shopping was done online, but last August the figure was a record 18.2 per cent.

Department stores have this year been the most high-profile casualties of the High Street crunch, with 18.4 per cent of consumer spending in their category now done on the internet.

Empty shops for sale on Scunthorpe High Street, Lincolnshire (File photo)

Marks & Spencer recently announced it was shutting 100 stores, while House of Fraser had to be rescued by tycoon Mike Ashley after going bust.

Last week middle-class staple John lewis revealed its profits had slumped by 99 per cent in the half-year to July.

In its report the ONS referred to a study by accountant PwC showing 1,772 stores vanished from Britains 500 biggest town centres last year.

The Mail has been calling for an overhaul of business rates, as well as a fair tax on internet firms.

Mike Cherry, of the Federation of Small Businesses, said: With spiralling business rates, ever-increasing rents, reduced access to cash and expensive town centre parking clobbering small firms, something needs to be done.

The unfair and regressive business rates system needs a complete overhaul.

James Daunt, chief executive of bookseller Waterstones, said: Rates are clearly contributing to the hollowing out of the High Street and shopping centres, and the march of online retailers are also part of that.

The urgency of the need for something to be done is increasing, and the damage to shopping districts is increasing.

A Treasury spokesman said: Weve introduced more than 10billion of business rate support, so many businesses pay no rates at all.

He said an expert panel would advise on a plan to revive the High Street.
One of Jeremy Corbyn's closest advisers claims there is a 'deep state' conspiracy to prevent the Labour leader becoming Prime Minister.

What's more, Andrew Murray believes he himself is being targeted as part of a wider plot to discredit Corbyn.

Murray blames the intelligence services for his failure to obtain a Commons security pass despite working for Corbyn for more than a year, and accuses them of planting a fake news story alleging he had been banned from Ukraine because of links to the Kremlin.

In a rambling article for the New Statesman, worthy of Private Eye's resident revolutionary Dave Spart, Murray writes: 'The Establishment at home and abroad deplore Labour's approach to foreign policy more than anything else.

They fear the popularity of Corbyn's opposition to war, backing for global human rights and support for the Palestinian cause and their loss of control over the international narrative.

Andrew Murray (left) suggested in an article this week that Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn (right) may have been the victim of an Mi5 conspiracy

'The powers-that-be can perhaps live with a re-nationalised water industry but not, it seems, with any challenge to their aggressive capacities, repeatedly deployed in disastrous wars, and their decaying Cold War worldview.

'We are often told that the days of secret state political chicanery are long past and we must hope so. But sometimes you have to wonder...'

Which branch of the Funny People he suspects of being behind all this  MI5 or MI6  isn't specified. But just because you're paranoid, it doesn't mean they're not out to get you.

Andrew Drummond-Murray, to give him his full name, is precisely the kind of individual the intelligence services should be keeping tabs on.

Often described as a 'former Communist', he didn't join Labour until 2016. He's another one of those curious, privileged, privately educated, posh Lefties who surround Corbyn. Dad was a stockbroker and banker, and mum was the daughter of a Tory MP.

Murray himself has been involved in hardline Left-wing politics his entire adult life and is widely considered to be an apologist for Stalin. He's viscerally anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian and a supporter of North Korea.

Currently, as well as advising Corbyn, he also serves as chief-of-staff to Labour's paymaster 'Red Len' McCluskey at the Unite trade union.

He has worked for the Communist Morning Star newspaper  the Corbynistas' news outlet of choice  and during the Eighties was employed by the Soviet Novosti news agency.

As to whether he's a former Communist, all I can say is that in my days as a labour and industrial correspondent, I knew quite a few former Communists.

They were mostly old sweats who had left the party when they grew up, especially after the Russian invasions of Hungary in the Fifties and Czechoslovakia in 1968.

Murray was still a member of the Communist Party until a couple of years ago, more than a quarter of a century after the Berlin Wall came down.

Even if he's no longer a cardcarrying member, he has more in common with his old comrades than with most mainstream Labour MPs and supporters.

He says he has no links to Moscow, but backed Putin over the shooting down of that Malaysian airliner and the annexation of Crimea, and has appeared on the Russian-bankrolled RT television channel.

Could that be why the Ukrainian authorities branded him part of Putin's 'global propaganda network'?

Murray is joined at the hip to Corbyn's communications chief Seumas Milne, the privately educated son of a former BBC director-general, and another notable Soviet sympathiser. Like so many other committed socialists, Milne sent his children to selective grammar schools.

Murray is joined at the hip to Corbyn's communications chief Seumas Milne, the privately educated son of a former BBC director-general

Murray and Milne started out in agitprop politics in the Seventies and although Milne never joined the Communist Party  he joined The Guardian instead, which is almost the same thing  they share a warped, Wolfie Smith worldview which hasn't changed much in four decades.

That both have found a comfortable berth in Corbyn's inner circle is yet more confirmation of just how far Labour's centre of gravity has shifted to the extreme Left.

There has been much excitement recently over the reheated revelations about the late Labour leader Michael Foot being a paid agent of the KGB.

True or not, these days Moscow doesn't have to pay those at the top of the Labour Party for support. Labour's ruling politiburo is already simpatico.

Corbyn even refused to accept the Russians were responsible for the Salisbury poisonings without 'incontrovertible' proof, and called for samples of the nerve agent Novichok to be sent to Moscow for analysis.

It is impossible not to believe that Milne and Murray were 100 per cent behind their leader's stance and involved in formulating it.

The idea of Corbyn becoming PM is terrifying. So is the prospect of hardliners like Murray and Milne occupying sensitive positions in 10 Downing Street.

Murray might claim the intelligence services are plotting to prevent that happening, but given the way the Tories are tearing themselves apart over Mother Theresa's botched handling of Brexit, who would bet against Corbyn coming to power?

It would be the most Left-wing government in British history, with the potential to cause untold damage at home and abroad.

If the Funny People are getting jittery, be honest  can you blame them?

It's Pinky and very Perky!

It's official. Bert and Ernie are not gay, they're just good friends. Speculation about their sexuality has been raging for almost 50 years.

But Sesame Street's producers insist that although they have human traits and identify as men, they are not homosexual. They are, in fact, puppets.

That may come as some consolation to the Belfast bakers who were prosecuted in 2015 for refusing to make a Bert and Ernie cake promoting gay marriage.

Now the Bert and Ernie question has been cleared up, LGBT campaigners may turn their attention to other potential role models in the puppet world.

Will Pinky and Perky be forced to come out of the closet? What about Zig and Zag? Perhaps one of them can be persuaded to transition. And, to be honest, I've long had my doubts about Bill and Ben, the Flowerpot Men.

Flobadob!

Earlier this week it was suggested that Bert and Ernie from the Muppets (pictured) were homosexual

Well, that was a complete waste of time, wasn't it? What else did Mother Theresa expect?

The other EU states were never going to swallow her Chequers sell-out. They still cling to the hope that Britain can be humiliated into reversing the referendum result.

She was only given ten minutes to present her vision of Brexit, which they contemptuously rejected out of hand, as their negotiators said they would. Chequers is dead in the water.

Instead of crawling back to Brussels in the vain hope that some kind of shoddy compromise can be cobbled together, she should simply tell them we're leaving in March on WTO terms and they won't be getting a penny of the 39 billion divorce payment she foolishly offered upfront.

Just walk away, Mrs May.
Meghan and her beloved mother Doria Ragland were together in public for the first time since the royal wedding today.

The 62-year-old yoga instructor and social worker from California was the sole member Meghan's family at her wedding to Harry at Windsor Castle in May this year.

Meghan arrives with her mother Doria Ragland for her wedding to Prince Harry at Windsor Castle in Berkshire on May 19

She had tears in her eyes as her daughter was married to the sixth in line to the throne by the Archbishop of Canterbury.

In a sign of how she has been accepted by the Royal Family, Doria left St George's Chapel on the arm of Prince Charles, who gave Meghan away.

Doria's ex-husband Thomas, the Duchess of Sussex's father, had failed to walk her down the aisle after a heart attack and a paparazzi scandal that cast a shadow over the biggest day of his daughter's life.

Mr Markle, 73, married Ms Ragland in 1979 but they were divorced nine years later when Meghan was just six.

They had no other children, but Hollywood lighting director Thomas Markle has two more from his previous marriage.

Meghan is understood to cut off contact with her father, who lives in Mexico, who has given a number of incendiary interviews about his youngest daughter and Harry.

In contrast Ms Ragland has not spoken about Meghan's relationship and is understood to be a regular visitor to Kensington Palace.
A primary school pupil was rushed to hospital after being hit by a tree branch during Storm Ali.

The primary two pupil was enjoying his lunch break in the playground when he was injured by the branch.

The incident happened at Trinity Primary School in Edinburgh, at 1pm yesterday. A cordon was erected in the playground while investigations were carried out.

A Scottish Ambulance Service spokesman said: 'We received a callat 1.18pm on Wednesday, September 19 to attend an incident on Newhaven Road in Edinburgh.

'We dispatched one ambulance to the scene and we transported one child patient to the Royal Hospital for Sick Children in Edinburgh.'

A spokesman for the City of Edinburgh Council said the child's injuries were not thought to be life-threatening.
Doria Ragland has made several secret visits to Britain to comfort Meghan in the wake of her father's damaging outbursts, it was reported last month.

Ms Ragland, who lives in Los Angeles, made the trips after repeated criticism from Thomas Markle that he had been 'cut off' by his daughter.

On one occasion  in July  the social worker stayed with Harry and Meghan at their Oxfordshire cottage, the Mail On Sunday reported.

A source said: 'The visit was totally under the radar Doria supported Meghan throughout a lot of the ordeal with Thomas.'

Harry and Meghan have spent much of the summer at their 'safe haven' house on the Great Tew Estate.

The 74-year-old father to the Duchess of Sussex sensationally revealed how he had hung up on Prince Harry during a heated call ahead of the couple's wedding on May 19, leading the Duchess to want 'time off' from their relationship.
Leaders from across the EU savaged Theresa May's Chequers Brexit plan at the Salzburg summit.

Here is what they said:

Donald Tusk, EU Council President:

'Everybody shared the view that while there are positive elements in the Chequers proposal, the suggested framework for economic cooperation will not work, not least as it risks undermining the single market.'

Emmanuel Macron, French President:

'It was a good and brave step by the prime minister,' he said of her trade plan. 'But we all agreed on this today, the proposals in their current state are not acceptable.

'The Chequers plan cannot be 'take it or leave it'.'

Angela Merkel, German Chancellor:

'We need substantial progress on Brexit by October.'

Jean-Claude Juncker, EU Commission President:

'No deal is not my working assumption, but would it happen, then we are prepared because the Commission has prepared in detail all the elements of consequences of a no-deal.'

'So don't worry. Be happy, don't worry.'

Mark Rutte, Dutch PM:

'I do not feel more confident, but also at the same time not less optimistic.'

Leo Varadkar, Irish PM:

'Time is running short. There's proposals for another summit in October and then in November.

'Ireland is a country that obviously wants to avoid a no deal scenario, we want to avoid a no deal Brexit, (but) we are preparing for that, we are hiring extra staff and officials, putting in IT systems, we're ready for that eventuality should it occur.'

Charles Michel, Belgian PM

'Today I can see that it is necessary to make all the steps because the proposals are not enough in order to have an agreement.'
The text of the email from Christine Ford's attorney Debra Katz to the Senate Judiciary Committee staff:

I would like to set up a call with you later today to discuss the conditions under which Dr. Christine Blasey Ford would be prepared to testify next week. As you are aware, she has been receiving death threats, which have been reported to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and she and her family have been forced out of their home. She wishes to testify, provided that we can agree on terms that are fair and which ensure her safety. A hearing on Monday is not possible and the Committee's insistence that it occur then is arbitrary in any event. Dr. Ford has asked me to let you know that she appreciates the various options you have suggested. Her strong preference continues to be for the Senate Judiciary Committee to allow for a full investigation prior to her testimony.
Facebook officials are ramping up their efforts to stop the spread of 'fake news'.

The firm has revealed it will have a fully-functioning 'war room' up and running at its Menlo Park Campus in time for the US and Brazil elections.

It is hoped the room will allow the site to quash any attempt from third parties to meddle in the upcoming elections.

Facebook is yet to reveal the full details but it is thought it will allow the firm to co-ordinate efforts from several teams in real-time.

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Teams at Facebook have been honing responses to potential scenarios such as floods of bogus news or campaigns to trick people into falsely thinking they can cast ballots by text message, according to executives

'We are setting up a war room in Menlo Park for the Brazil and US elections,' Facebook Elections and Civic Engagement Director Samidh Chakrabarti revealed during a recent conference call.

'It is going to serve as a command center so we can make real-time decisions as needed.'

Mr Chakrabarti declined to say when the 'war room' would become fully operational.

Facebook executives claim the company has several teams currently working to improve its response to any attempts designed to manipulate Facebook's content to favour any specific candidate or party.

The Brazilian general elections are scheduled to be held on October 7 to elect the President and Vice President, the National Congress, state and Federal District Governors and Vice Governors, state Legislative Assemblies and Federal District Legislative Chamber.

The United States midterm elections are due to be held on November 6 2018. It will see all 435 seats in the House of Representatives and 35 of the 100 seats in the United States Senate contested.

'Preventing election interference on Facebook has been one of the biggest cross-team efforts the company has seen,' Mr Chakrabarti said.

The conference call was the latest briefing by Facebook regarding efforts to prevent voter manipulation and deception that took place ahead of the 2016 US election.

Facebook was used to sway public opinion prior to, and during, the election that brought Donald Trump to office.

Mark Zuckerberg, CEO and co-founder of Facebook claims the social network is now better prepared to defend against such efforts in the future.

In a post on the social network last week he revealed it has recently thwarted foreign influence campaigns targeting several countries.

'We've identified and removed fake accounts ahead of elections in France, Germany, Alabama, Mexico and Brazil,' Zuckerberg said.

'We've found and taken down foreign influence campaigns from Russia and Iran attempting to interfere in the US, UK, Middle East, and elsewhere  as well as groups in Mexico and Brazil that have been active in their own country.'

The firm has revealed it will have a fully-functioning 'war room' at its Menlo Park Campus during the US and Brazil elections. It is hoped the room will allow the site to quash any attempt from third parties to meddle in the upcoming elections

HOW MANY AMERICANS SAW RUSSIA'S DIVISIVE ADS DURING THE 2016 US PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION? Facebook says ads that ran on the company's social media platform and have been linked to a Russian internet agency were seen by an estimated 10 million people before and after the 2016 US presidential election. The company turned 3,000 ads over to three congressional committees in October 2017 as part of their investigations into Russian influence in the 2016 election. In a company blog post, Facebook's Elliot Schrage said the ads appeared to focus on divisive social and political messages, including LGBT issues, immigration and gun rights. In many cases, the ads encouraged people to follow pages on those issues. Facebook said last month that the ads appear to have come from accounts associated with a Russian entity called the Internet Research Agency. Fewer than half of the ads - which ran between 2015 and 2017 - were seen before the election, with 56 percent of them seen after the election. Advertisement

He repeated that Facebook was ill-prepared for the events of 2016 but added that 'today, Facebook is better prepared for these kinds of attacks.'

Facebook has started showing who is behind election-related online ads, and have shut down accounts involved in coordinated stealth influence campaigns.

With the help of artificial intelligence software, Facebook blocked nearly 1.3 billion fake accounts between March and October of last year, according to Mr Chakrabarti.

'We are working hard to amplify the good and mitigate the bad,' news feed director Greg Marra said on the call.

As elections near, Facebook will also encourage civic involvement and voter registration, according to global politics and government outreach director Katie Harbath.

Facebook said it has also started working with political campaigns to improve staff online security practices, such as requiring more than just a password to access an account.
A staple of summer - swarms of bugs - seems to be a thing of the past. And that's got scientists worried.

Pesky mosquitoes, disease-carrying ticks, crop-munching aphids and cockroaches are doing just fine.

But the more beneficial flying insects of summer - native bees, moths, butterflies, ladybugs, lovebugs, mayflies and fireflies - appear to be less abundant.

Scientists think something is amiss, but they can't be certain: In the past, they didn't systematically count the population of flying insects, so they can't make a proper comparison to today.

Nevertheless, they're pretty sure across the globe there are fewer insects that are crucial to as much as 80 percent of what we eat.

A staple of summer - swarms of bugs - seems to be a thing of the past. And that's got scientists worried. A study estimates a 14 percent decline in ladybugs in the United States and Canada from 1987 to 2006

Yes, some insects are pests. But they also pollinate plants, are a key link in the food chain and help decompose life.

'You have total ecosystem collapse if you lose your insects. How much worse can it get than that?' said University of Delaware entomologist Doug Tallamy. If they disappeared, 'the world would start to rot.'

He noted Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson once called bugs: 'The little things that run the world.'

The 89-year-old Wilson recalled that he once frolicked in a 'Washington alive with insects, especially butterflies.' Now, 'the flying insects are virtually gone.'

It hit home last year when he drove from suburban Boston to Vermont and decided to count how many bugs hit his windshield. The result: A single moth.

The un-scientific experiment is called the windshield test. Wilson recommends everyday people do it themselves to see. Baby Boomers will probably notice the difference, Tallamy said.

Several scientists have conducted their own tests with windshields, car grilles and headlights, and most notice few squashed bugs.

Researchers are quick to point out that such exercises aren't good scientific experiments, since they don't include control groups or make comparisons with past results.

(Today's cars also are more aerodynamic, so bugs are more likely to slip past them and live to buzz about it.)

Still, there are signs of decline. Research has shown dwindling individual species in specific places, including lightning bugs, moths and bumblebees.

One study estimated a 14 percent decline in ladybugs in the United States and Canada from 1987 to 2006.

University of Florida urban entomologist Philip Koehler said he's seen a recent decrease in lovebugs - insects that fly connected and coated Florida's windshields in the 1970s and 1980s. This year, he said, 'was kind of disappointing, I thought.'

University of Nevada, Reno, researcher Lee Dyer and his colleagues have been looking at insects at the La Selva Biological Station in Costa Rica since 1991.

There's a big insect trap sheet under black light that decades ago would be covered with bugs. Now, 'there's no insects on that sheet,' he said.

But there's not much research looking at all flying insects in big areas.

Last year, a study that found an 82 percent mid-summer decline in the number and weight of bugs captured in traps in 63 nature preserves in Germany compared with 27 years earlier. It was one of the few, if only, broad studies.

Scientists say similar comparisons can't be done elsewhere because similar bug counts weren't done decades ago.

'We don't know how much we're losing if we don't know how much we have,' said University of Hawaii entomologist Helen Spafford.

The lack of older data makes it 'unclear to what degree we're experiencing an arthropocalypse,' said University of Illinois entomologist May Berenbaum.

Individual studies aren't convincing in themselves, 'but the sheer accumulated weight of evidence seems to be shifting' to show a problem, she said.

After the German study, countries started asking if they have similar problems, said ecologist Toke Thomas Hoye of Aarhus University in Denmark. He studied flies in a few spots in remote Greenland and noticed an 80 percent drop in numbers since 1996.

Experts say light pollution is a big problem for some species of insects. Certain bugs are attracted to brightness, where they become easy prey and expend energy they should be using to get food, said University of Delaware entomologist Doug Tallamy

DECLINING BEE POPULATIONS Declines in recent months to honey bee numbers and health caused global concern due to the insects' critical role as a major pollinator. Bee health has been closely watched in recent years as nutritional sources available to honey bees have declined and contamination from pesticides has increased. In animal model studies, the researchers found that combined exposure to pesticide and poor nutrition decreased bee health. Bees use sugar to fuel flights and work inside the nest, but pesticides decrease their hemolymph ('bee blood') sugar levels and therefore cut their energy stores. When pesticides are combined with limited food supplies, bees lack the energy to function, causing survival rates to plummet. Advertisement

'It's clearly not a German thing,' said University of Connecticut entomologist David Wagner, who has chronicled declines in moth populations in the northeastern United States.

'We just need to find out how widespread the phenomenon is.'

THE SUSPECTS

Most scientists say lots of factors, not just one, caused the apparent decline in flying insects.

Suspects include habitat loss, insecticide use, the killing of native weeds, single-crop agriculture, invasive species, light pollution, highway traffic and climate change.

'It's death by a thousand cuts, and that's really bad news,' Wagner said.

To Tallamy, two causes stand out: Humans' war on weeds and vast farmland planted with the same few crops.

Weeds and native plants are what bugs eat and where they live, Tallamy said. Milkweeds, crucial to the beautiful monarch butterfly, are dwindling fast.

Manicured lawns in the United States are so prevalent that, added together, they are as big as New England, he said.

Those landscapes are 'essentially dead zones,' he said.

Light pollution is another big problem for species such as moths and fireflies, bug experts said. Insects are attracted to brightness, where they become easy prey and expend energy they should be using to get food, Tallamy said.

Jesse Barber of Boise State is in the middle of a study of fireflies and other insects at Grand Teton National Park. He said he notices a distinct connection between light pollution and dwindling populations.

'We're hitting insects during the day, we're hitting them at night,' Tallamy said. 'We're hitting them just about everywhere.'

INVASIVE SPECIES ARE THOSE INTRODUCED IN A REGION TO WHICH THEY ARE NOT NATIVE An invasive species is one  be it animal, plant, microbe, etc  that has been introduced to a region it is not native to. Typically, human activity is to blame for their transport, be it accidental or intentional. Hammerhead flatworms have become invasive in many parts of the world. They feast on native earthworms, as shown Sometimes species hitch a ride around the world with cargo shipments and other means of travel. And, others escape or are released into the wild after being held as pets. A prime example of this is the Burmese python in the Florida Everglades. Plants such as Japanese knotweed have seen a similar fate; first propagated for the beauty in Europe and the US, their rapid spread has quickly turned them into a threat to native plant species. Climate change is also helping to drive non-local species into new areas, as plants begin to thrive in regions they previously may not have, and insects such as the mountain pine beetle take advantage of drought-weakened plants, according to the National Wildlife Federation. Advertisement

Lawns, light pollution and bug-massacring highway traffic are associated where people congregate. But Danish scientist Hoye found a noticeable drop in muscid flies in Greenland 300 miles (500 kilometers) from civilization.

His studies linked declines to warmer temperatures.

Other scientists say human-caused climate change may play a role, albeit small.

RESTORING HABITAT

Governments are trying to improve the situation. Maryland is in a three-year experiment to see if planting bee-friendly native wildflowers helps.

University of Maryland entomology researcher Lisa Kuder says the usual close-crop 'turf is basically like a desert' that doesn't attract flying insects.

She found an improvement - 70 different species and records for bees - in the areas where flowers are allowed to grow wild and natural alongside roads.

The trouble is that it is so close to roadways that Tallamy fears that the plants become 'ecological traps where you're drawing insects in and they're all squashed by cars.'

Still, Tallamy remains hopeful.

In 2000, he moved into this rural area between Philadelphia and Baltimore and made his 10-acre patch all native plants, creating a playground for bugs. Now he has 861 species of moths and 54 species of breeding birds that feed on insects.

Wagner, of the University of Connecticut, spends his summers teaching middle schoolers in a camp to look for insects, like he did decades ago. They have a hard time finding the cocoons he used to see regularly.

'The kids I'm teaching right now are going to think that scarce insects are the rule,' Wagner said. 'They're not realizing that there could be an ecological disaster on the horizon.'
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Spiders have taken over the Greek town of Aitoliko with a hellish 1,000 foot (300 metre) web along its shoreline.

The web has snared trees, plants and rocks thanks to the unusually large number of Tetragnatha spiders contributing to the organic structure.

Warm weather and a large number of mosquitos are thought to be to blame for the booming population of the arachnids, which have swarmed the island to mate.

Although the phenomenon is highly unusual, experts say it is nothing to be worried since the spiders will soon perish and the web will vanish naturally.

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Spiders have taken over the Greek town of Aitoliko with a hellish 1,000 foot long web along its shore line. The web has snared trees, plants and rocks in a greenish hue thanks to an unusually large amount of Tetragnatha spiders

Warm weather and a large amount of mosquitos are thought to be behind the booming population of the spiders

The 1,000 foot area of greenery has been overrun by the sprawling web as spiders build a temporary home in order to mate.

Maria Chatzaki, professor of molecular biology and genetics at Democritus University of Thrace in Greece said a combination of factors resulted in the perfect conditions for spiders to flourish.

'High temperatures, sufficient humidity and food created the ideal conditions for the species to reproduce in large numbers,' Professor Chatzaki told Newsit.gr.

'It's as if the spiders are taking advantage of these conditions and are having a kind of a party.

'They mate, they reproduce and provide a whole new generation.

'These spiders are not dangerous for humans and will not cause any damage to the area's flora.

'The spiders will have their party and will soon die.'

Experts say it is a rare phenomenon but nothing to be worried about as the spiders will soon perish and the web will vanish naturally

The cast area of green has been completely taken over by the sprawling monstrosity as the spiders build a temporary home to mate

Residents of the besieged town reveal that in the days leading up to the completion of the spider web the region has seen swarms of mosquitos hit the town.

It is speculated that this provided a bountiful food source for the spiders as they worked on their masterpiece.

Tetragnatha is a genus of spiders that contains many thousands of species colloquially known as 'stretch spiders' because of their long and elongated bodies.

These spiders are common across the world and often build their webs near bodies of water.

Residents of the besieged town reveal that in the days leading up to the completion of the spider web the region has seen swarms of mosquitos arrive. It is speculated that this provided a bountiful food source for the spiders as they worked on their masterpiece
Josefa Llanes Escoda, founder of the Girl Scouts of the Philippines, has been honoured in the Google Doodle for September 20, 2018.

Known for her determination and yearning to be educated from a young age, after graduating as valedictorian, Josefa Llanes Escoda joined the Red Cross and her social work led to her being featured on the 1,000 peso note.

As a strong advocate for female suffrage, she worked to ensure all citizens could vote and founded organisations for underprivileged youth. But who is Josefa Llanes Escoda?

Josefa Llanes Escoda, founder of the Girl Scouts of the Philippines, has been honoured

Josefa Llanes Escoda biography

Born on September 20, 1898 in the Dingras town in Ilocos Norte, Josefa Llanes Escoda is renowned as one of Philippine historys most important pioneers for womens issues.

After graduating as valedictorian from Dingras Elementary School and salutatorian from Laong Provincial High School, Josefa earned a teaching degree from Philippine Normal College, graduating with honours in 1919.

Josefa earned her teaching certificate from the University of the Philippines in 1922 and then went to the US, where she studied social work, finishing with a Masters in Sociology from Colombia University.

During her time in the US, she met Antonio Escoda, who was a reporter from the Philippine Press Bureau and following their return to Manila, they got married and had two children, named Maria Teresa and Antonio Jr.

Her most notable work includes having founded Boys Town in Manila for young people who are underprivileged in 1937 and later, the Girl Scouts in 1940, according to the Google Doodle.

This encouraged President Manuel L. Quezon to sign the charter of the Girl Scouts of the Philippines and gave the Movement recognition of its role in the leadership training of girls and women.

She served as the first National Executive of GSP until she was captured by the Japanese Occupation army because she was considered a hero during the Japanese Occupation after she provided aid to prisoners of war.

As reported by ABS CBN News, Josefa was also fondly referred to as Pepang by her peers, but she and her husband Antonio were both arrested in 1944 and executed the following year.

Today, Josefas face appears on the Philippine one thousand peso note and a street in Manila has also been named after the famous social worker.

What is a Google Doodle?

As reported in Rappler, the Google Doodle for September 20, 2018 has been designed in order to illustrate the essence of Escoda's life work. The Doodle presents Josefa with girl scouts and is seen guiding them to the right path.

Google said this is 'a close portrayal of how Escoda led young Filipinas towards preparing for their responsibilities to the nation and to the world community.' She is also shown wearing a shawl similar to the iconic Girl Scout scarf.

Google Doodles are small illustrations or animations that appear in the Google logo on the search engine's homepage. The first time a Google Doodle was used was in 1998, when Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin visited the 1998 Burning Man Festival.

To commemorate their trip, the founders drew a stick-man standing behind the second o in the Google logo.

Recent doodles include Caio Fernando Abreu, Joanna Baillie and Professor Dorothy Hill.
Louisianas governor said his No. 1 priority for 2019 is to secure teachers a $1,000 pay raise. But frustrated with years of low pay, teachers groups are saying that amount wont satisfy everyone.

Gov. John Bel Edwards, a Democrat, said on Wednesday that its been a long time since the state passed a pay raise for teachers, who earn about a $50,000 salary on average, according to the National Education Association . Thats less than teachers earn in the neighboring state of Texas. Edwards also called for a $500 pay raise for school support staff, like bus drivers, custodians, and teachers aides.

That salary boost would come from an increase in the states revenue projections, rather than a tax increase, the Times-Picayune reported . And raising teacher pay seems to have received widespread support in the state legislature, although opinions vary on how much of an increase teachers should receive and who should be included in the pay bump. Some legislators dont support a salary increase for support staff, for example.

Still, the states two major teachers unions arent entirely on board with the governors plan. A spokesman for the Louisiana Federation of Teachers told the news station KPEL 965 that teachers in the state hadnt received a significant pay raise in over a decade, and $1,000 wasnt enough to raise teachers salaries to the regional average. That union has floated the idea of a $2,200 pay raise.

Nobody is going to turn down a $1,000 pay raise but that would not be enough to stem the outflow of teachers, said the LFT spokesman, Les Landon.

Meanwhile, the other statewide union, the Louisiana Association of Educators, is seeking a $1,200-a-year pay raise for teachers, according to news outlets.

Teachers dissatisfaction with their salaries has caused some to wonder if the Bayou State will be the next to see labor unrest . Last spring, teachers in six statesincluding nearby Oklahomawalked out of their classrooms to protest low pay and cuts to school funding.

In May, the Louisiana Federation of Teachers polled about 4,000 educators and found that just over 60 percent were in favor of a statewide walkout . And just this week, the president of the Louisiana Association of Educators said that while the union wasnt currently planning any type of job action, she didnt want to rule anything out.

Edwards, who is running for re-election in 2019, has said that he wants to continue to raise teacher pay for the next two or three years. Some lawmakers have also said they want to raise teacher pay by even more than $1,000 this yearfor example, Rep. Nancy Landry, the chairwoman of the state House education committee and a Republican, said she would support giving teachers a $1,800 raise if it could be done without raising taxes, according to the Advocate .

Image via Getty
Apple fans have flooded social media to complain the battery life of their iPhone handsets has plummeted seemingly overnight.

Twitter is awash with claims the power shortages have been caused by the firm preparing for the UK and US release of its iPhone XS and iPhone XS Max tomorrow.

One user claimed their iPhone 6S Plus battery drops by almost 50 per cent in less than 15 minutes since the announcement.

Another asked: 'Did anyone else's iPhone battery life just get cut in half?'

Although there is some truth to the claims, it is not evidence of an Apple conspiracy to force users to upgrade to the latest handset.

Instead, the recent release of iOS 12 has demanded additional resources from their gadgets while it downloads, installs and re-indexes data stored on the iPhone.

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Apple fans have taken to Twitter to complain about the battery life of their iPhones. One user asked: 'Did anyone else's iPhone battery life just get cut in half?'

WHY DOES IOS 12 KILL YOUR IPHONE'S BATTERY LIFE? Apple released its latest operating system iOS 12 days after the launch of its new iPhone range. The upgrade is available on any iPhone, iPad or iPod touch running Apple's last version of the software, iOS 11. Big updates often weigh heavily on the battery life of older phones. This is because the gadgets have to re-organise many of the apps, files and other data stored in their memory. This puts a heavy demand on the phone's processor, choking the battery while the device adjusts. Fortunately, the process normally only lasts for up to 48 hours. Advertisement

The process usually only takes up to 48 hours, but that hasn't stopped people taking to Twitter to complain.

User Nicole Grogan tweeted: 'I swear to God a week ago my battery life on my iPhone 8 was impeccable and as of like, today, its game over'.

Chase wrote: 'Whenever a new iPhone gets announced my battery life gets cut in half.'

Davo Howarth said: 'My iPhone X battery life has suddenly decided it cba anymore.

'Fair play, only costs me a million pounds a month. Bobbins'.

Apple declined to comment.

The firm rolled out its iOS 12 software update on Monday.

It is this upgrade that is believed to be throttling gadgets across the world.

During a major upgrade, a big chunk of the codes and systems that make up your phone are completely rearranged to boost the gadget's speed and efficiency.

New features, like the smart photo albums in Apple's Photos app which automatically collates and categorises similar pictures together, require the operating system to trawl through all the available photographs stored on the device.

Voice assistant Siri will also completely re-index all of the apps, documents and data stored on the device, so that it is able to surface the correct search results.

This puts a heavy demand on your iPhone's processor, which drains your battery.

apple: here's a new iphone



my phone's battery life 5 mins after it was fully recharged: pic.twitter.com/86u11uE3UF  karl #teamariana (@INMYPOSITI0NS) September 20, 2018

Twitter is awash with claims the power shortages have been caused by the firm preparing for the UK and US release of its iPhone XS and iPhone XS Max tomorrow

One user claimed their iPhone 6S Plus battery drops by almost 50 per cent in less than 15 minutes since the new announcement

The process only lasts for between 24 and 48 hours, meaning your battery life should be back to normal two days after the update.

However, this is not the only reason your battery life may be struggling.

Following big iOS updates, many app developers release new updates for their software to support the new software's features.

If you have your Automatic App Updates switched on, these updates happen in the background throughout the day.

This adds to the strain your processor is under, further draining your battery life until the apps are updated.

Users are also more likely to use their devices following a big update, adding more load to your already overloaded gadget.

Apple fans have taken to social media to complain that the battery life of their iPhones has plummeted virtually overnight

User Nicole Grogan tweeted: 'I swear to God a week ago my battery life on my iPhone 8 was impeccable and as of like, today, its game over'

Davo Howarth said: 'My iPhone X battery life has suddenly decided it cba anymore. Fair play, only costs me a million pounds a month. Bobbins'

Apple fans have taken to social media to complain that the battery life of their iPhones has plummeted virtually overnight. They claim that the power shortages have been caused by the firm preparing for the release of its iPhone XS (left) and iPhone XS Max (right)

Apple rolled out its iOS 12 software update on Monday, and it is this upgrade that is throttling gadgets

Apple launched pre-sales for its hotly-anticipated new flagship smartphones last Friday.

The 999 ($999) iPhone XS and 1,099 ($1,099) XS Max battled it out to be crowned Apple's fastest selling smartphone of all time.

The most expensive iPhone of all time - the 1,449 512GB XS Max - sold out in its space grey and gold finishes in under half an hour.

Customers looking to buy the phone were told to wait up to three weeks for Apple's next batch to arrive.

The iPhone XR, Apple's new 'budget' handset priced at $749 (749), will not be available for pre-order until October.

Last year's iPhone X pre-orders were snapped up in under an hour by Apple fans, with those who missed the window forced to wait until December for a re-stock.
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Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has confirmed that his Blue Origin space-tourism venture will launch a crewed mission sometime in 2019.

The revelation was made today at the Air Force Association's Air, Space and Cyber Conference in Washington, DC.

The comments from the 54-year-old multi-billionaire further fuel the commercial space race as several private companies jostle to become the first to send paying customers into space.

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is worth an estimated $159 billion  making him the wealthiest man on the planet  and is using part of this vast fortune to bankroll Blue Origin.

SpaceX founder and commercial space-flight trailblazer Elon Musk announced earlier this week that Japanese billionaire and fashion designer Yusaku Maezawa is the first customer to sign-up for a trip around the moon.

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Blue Origin, the space tourism firm owned by Amazon's Jeff Bezos, has successfully flown its reusable space tourism passenger capsule for the first time. This image shows the capsule after it landed near the launch site in western Texas, with a test dummy pictured in the right window

Bezos refused to say whether the first suborbital trip on Blue Origin's New Shepard capsule would exclusively host crew members, rather than paying customers.

His comments reinforce a timeline the space tourism firm has been publicly teasing for some time.

Blue Origin's CEO, Bob Smith, said last year the company was hoping to launch paying passengers in 2018.

However, this ambitious goal has been revised to 2020 following a number of test flights.

The first tickets are expected to go on sale at some point next year.

The space tourism company, headquartered in Kent, Washington, is looking to sell tickets aboard its rocket for around 150,000 to 230,000 ($200,000 to $300,000), according to sources with knowledge of the plans.

By comparison, Virgin Galactic started selling tickets more than a decade ago, even while SpaceShipTwo was still in the early stages of development.

The company has approximately 700 customers who have paid at least a deposit.

Blue Origin is looking to double its current workforce to around 3,000 employees over the next two to three years, according to sources speaking to Reuters.

The urgency centers on a rocket dubbed New Glenn.

The heavy-launch vehicle, which Bezos promises will be able to haul satellites and, eventually, people into orbit, is central to the companys hopes of winning lucrative military and commercial contracts.

New Glenns first-stage booster will be reusable  a key piece of Bezos strategy to lower costs and increase the frequency of launches. Blue Origin executives have stated publicly that test flights will begin within two years.

But whether Blue Origin can hit that mark remains to be seen. With the clock ticking on 2020, company engineers are still finalizing details on New Glenns design and just beginning to build model components that must be put through extreme testing, people familiar with the project said.

Blue Origin has been a quieter party in the space race, with Bezos often outshone by billionaire rivals Elon Musk and Richard Branson who head up SpaceX and Virgin Galactic, respectively.

The battle of the billionaires between Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Richard Branson continues to rage on, with all three firms achieving milestones in recent months.

Blue Origin completed its ninth successful test flight in July, SpaceX built on the success of the Falcon 9 launch by declaring the first passenger to go around the moon and Virgin Galactic sent the Unity spacecraft to an altitude of 46,500ft before it went supersonic - the first successful test flight since a catastrophic test in 2014 that killed one pilot and seriously injured another.

Blue Origin's test site in West Texas saw the most recent launch in July, when 'Version 2.0' of its crew capsule, outfitted with the large windows that are a distinctive feature of the spacecraft, took off.

The capsule carried 12 experiments as well as a test dummy, dubbed 'Mannequin Skywalker,' to measure the environment a human would experience on those flights.

The test flight was the first performed under a launch license awarded by the Federal Aviation Administration in August 2017.

The billionaire space race: Jeff Bezos (left) space firm Blue Origin, is now 'a year out' from human flights, while Richard Branson (center) says he hopes to fly aboard Virgin galactic 'within six months'. Elon Musk's SpaceX (right)hopes to send its first astronauts to the International Space Station under a lucrative NASA contract next year.

'You have to be licensed in order to collect revenue,' Jeff Ashby, a former Nasa astronaut who is director of safety and mission assurance for Blue Origin, told the Next-Generation Suborbital Researchers Conference.

'It was our first revenue flight for payloads: a huge, historic moment for us.'

'We're probably a year and a half, two years out from when we're actually able to fly tended payloads,' Ashby said, which will see astronauts working with experiments on missions.

'We're about roughly a year out from human flights, depending on how the test program goes.

'We have a bunch more tests to do, and we're going to fly some human test flights before we put paying people in the rocket.'

Blue Origin has yet to start selling seats on New Shepard flights.

'We have not yet opened our website for tickets yet, and we won't do that until we're flying the versions of the rocket and capsule that people will ride on, to be delivered some time next year,' he said. 'But we think there's a lot of interest.'

Blue Origin has released footage from inside its reusable space capsule, flown successfully for the first time this week to reveal the plush interior.

GOING TO SPACE WITH BLUE ORIGIN: HOW IT WORKS The system consists of a pressurised crew capsule atop a reusable 'New Shepard' booster rocket. The two vehicles launch together, accelerating for approximately two and a half minutes, before the engine cuts off. The capsule then separates from the booster to coast quietly into space. After a few minutes of free fall, the booster performs an autonomous rocket-powered vertical landing. The passenger capsule lands softly under parachutes, both ready to be used again. Like previous Blue origin launches, the New Shepard rocket fired into orbit (one) before disconnecting from the passenger capsule (two), and then landing vertically (four and five) back on the launch pad. Shortly after this, the 'Crew Capsule 2.0' pod floated back to the ground (six) Advertisement

The 'Crew Capsule 2.0' reached orbit and returned to Earth with a test dummy strapped into it called Mannequin Skywalker, who can be seen taking a dizzying ride into space before returning back to Earth.

While the flight itself provided stunning views of the Earth below, the landing is not for the faint hearted, with the capsule containing the test dummy seen spinning before kicking up a cloud of dust upon impact.

Mannequin Skywalker was launched aboard New Shepard, a prototype rocket being developed by Blue Origin, during the test flight on Tuesday.

Bezos took to Twitter at the time to share a video that captured every moment of the 11 minute long flight.

Viewers can watch out of the window as the vessel blasts off the launch pad before rapidly ascending, with the ground below quickly giving way to the blue hues of the upper atmosphere.

The craft then begins to descend, with mountains and plains below rising into view, before the craft makes a firm landing.

During the flight, Blue Origin reached a maximum altitude of 322,032 feet (62miles / 99km).

Bezos has assured future customers that they will have a better experience than Mannequin Skywalker.

Writing on Twitter, he said: 'Unlike him, you'll be able to get out of your seat during the zero gee part of the flight.

'And ignore the pinging sound  it's just from one of the experiments on this flight.'

The capsule's roomy interior includes seats for six travellers, who will be treated to views from the 'largest windows in space' when the firm begins commercial flights.

Launching from Blue Origin's West Texas Launch Site, Tuesday's test featured the latest version of the firm's reusable New Shepard rocket, its first flight in 14 months.

The 'Crew Capsule 2.0' reached orbit and returned to Earth with a test dummy strapped into it called 'Mannequin Skywalker' (pictured), who 'had a great ride', according to Bezos

WHO IS JEFF BEZOS? Jeff Bezos is best known as the founder and CEO of online giant Amazon. Born in New Mexico and raised in Houston, Texas, he went on to attend the prestigious Princeton University and graduated in 1986. After a decade or so of work on Wall Street, Mr Bezos founded his own company in 1994. Jeff Bezos was born in 1964 and is founder and CEO of Amazon. He is also the richest person in the world He initially called his company Cadabra, and then reportedly changed the name to Amazon when a colleague misheard it as 'cadaver'. Initially, it was launched as an online book store working out of Bezo's garage in Seattle but rapidly grew to include a variety of goods and services. Now, Amazon is one of the biggest companies in the world and the most successful website in the world. In 2018, the company is worth around $900 (691 billion). Mr Bezos himself has an estimated net worth of $150 billion (115 billion). He has bought and accumulated a variety of different companies and outlets including: Whole Foods, The Washington Post, Twitch and IMDB. He has a controlling share of 17 per cent in his first company, Amazon. In 2017, Jeff Bezos surpassed Bill Gates to become the richest person in the world, and the richest person of the modern world. He has been married since 1994 and has four children. Advertisement

In October, Bezos said Blue Origin will take tourists into orbit 'within the next 18 months'.

The company isn't yet taking reservations or publishing its ticket prices, with would-be riders forced to wait until the firm completes its tests.

In a separate video of the launch, the New Shepard rocket is captured firing into orbit, disconnecting from the capsule, and then landing vertically back on the launch pad.

Shortly after this, the 'Crew Capsule 2.0' pod is seen floating back to the ground under two enormous parachutes before landing in the Texas desert at around 1 mile per hour (1.6 kph), according to Blue Origin.

At the end of the video, the firm teased in big letters: 'Ready to fly?'

In addition to the dummy, yesterday's 10-minute test flight carried 12 commercial, research and educational payloads within the crew capsule, Blue Origin said.

The capsule offers 530 cubic feet (15 cubic metres) of space - large enough for passengers to float freely and turn weightless somersaults.

The include reclining black seats with blue piping, and seats emblazoned with the Blue Origin feather logo.

'Today's flight of New Shepard was a tremendous success,' Blue Origin CEO Bob Smith said at the time.

'It marks the inaugural flight of our next-generation crew capsule as we continue step-by-step progress in our test flight program.'

THE BILLIONAIRE SPACE RACE: HOW BRANSON, MUSK AND BEZOS ARE VYING FOR GALACTIC SUPREMACY Jeff Bezos in front of Blue Origin's space capsule Dubbed the 'NewSpace' set, Jeff Bezos, Sir Richard Branson and Elon Musk all say they were inspired by the first moon landing in 1969, when the US beat the Soviet Union in the space race, and there is no doubt how much it would mean to each of them to win the 'new space race'. Amazon founder Bezos had looked set to be the first of the three to fly to space, having announced plans to launch aboard his space company Blue Origin's New Shepard spacecraft on July 20, but Branson beat him to the punch. The British billionaire became Virgin Galactic Astronaut 001 when he made it to space on a suborbital flight nine days before Bezos - on July 11 in a test flight. Bezos travelled to space on July 20 with his younger brother Mark, Oliver Daemen, an 18-year-old physics student whose dad purchased his ticket, and pioneering female astronaut Wally Funk, 82. Although SpaceX and Tesla founder Musk has said he wants to go into space, and even 'die on Mars', he has not said when he might blast into orbit - but has purchased a ticket with Virgin Galactic for a suborbital flight. SpaceX became the first of the 'space tourism' operators to send a fully civilian crew into orbit, with the Inspiration4 mission funded by billionaire Jared Isaacman. His flight was on a Dragon capsule and SpaceX rocket built by space-obsessed billionaire, Elon Musk and took off for the three day orbital trip on September 16 - going higher than the International Space Station. SpaceX appears to be leading the way in the broader billionaire space race with numerous launches carrying NASA equipment to the ISS and partnerships to send tourists to space by 2021. On February 6 2018, SpaceX sent rocket towards the orbit of Mars, 140 million miles away, with Musk's own red Tesla roadster attached. Elon Musk with his Dragon Crew capsule SpaceX has also taken two groups of astronauts to the |International Space Station, with crew from NASA, ESA and JAXA, the Japanese space agency. SpaceX has been sending batches of 60 satellites into space to help form its Starlink network, which is already in beta and providing fast internet to rural areas. Branson and Virgin Galactic are taking a different approach to conquering space. It has repeatedly, and successfully, conducted test flights of the Virgin Galactic's Unity space plane. The first took place in December 2018 and the latest on May 22, with the flight accelerating to more than 2,000 miles per hour (Mach 2.7). More than 600 affluent customers to date, including celebrities Brad Pitt and Katy Perry, have reserved a $250,000 (200,000) seat on one of Virgin's space trips. The final tickets are expected to cost $350,000. Branson has previously said he expects Elon Musk to win the race to Mars with his private rocket firm SpaceX. Richard Branson with the Virgin Galactic craft SpaceShipTwo can carry six passengers and two pilots. Each passenger gets the same seating position with two large windows - one to the side and one overhead. The space ship is 60ft long with a 90inch diameter cabin allowing maximum room for the astronauts to float in zero gravity. It climbs to 50,000ft before the rocket engine ignites. SpaceShipTwo separates from its carrier craft, White Knight II, once it has passed the 50-mile mark. Passengers become 'astronauts' when they reach the Karman line, the boundary of Earth's atmosphere. The spaceship will then make a suborbital journey with approximately six minutes of weightlessness, with the entire flight lasting approximately 1.5 hours. Bezos revealed in April 2017 that he finances Blue Origin with around $1 billion (720 million) of Amazon stock each year. The system consists of a pressurised crew capsule atop a reusable 'New Shepard' booster rocket. At its peak, the capsule reached 65 miles (104 kilometres), just above the official threshold for space and landed vertically seven minutes after liftoff. Blue Origin are working on New Glenn, the next generation heavy lift rocket, that will compete with the SpaceX Falcon 9. Advertisement

On Twitter, Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos wrote: '#NewShepard had a successful first flight of Crew Capsule 2.0 today. Complete with windows and our instrumented test dummy. He had a great ride.'

Blue Origin's suborbital New Shepard launch system consists of a rocket and capsule designed to fly payloads and passengers to about 100 kilometres (62 miles) above the planet.

Test flights with crew members aboard are expected to begin next year.

Every seat on the flight will have access to a large window, which the company says is made of multiple layers of fracture-tough materials.

Minimising distortion and reflection, the windows transmit 92 per cent of visible light giving them visibility 'as good as glass', according to Blue Origin.

The system consists of a pressurised capsule on top of a reusable booster rocket.

The two vehicles launch together, accelerating for approximately two and a half minutes, before the engine cuts off.

The capsule then separates from the booster to coast quietly into space.

After a few minutes of free fall, the booster performs an autonomous rocket-powered vertical landing, while the capsule lands softly under parachutes, both ready to be used again.
Benevolent sexism is not the stereotypical, hostile sexism often seen in society.

Instead of discriminating against women because of their sex, benevolent sexism sees women undermined by the 'gentlemanly' or 'chivalrous' actions of men.

Psychologists, who originally coined the term, claim this behaviour continues to reinforce beliefs that one gender is intrinsically superior to the other.

However, research shows that women  including those who define themselves as feminists  are inherently attracted to this old-fashioned, 'sexist' behaviour.

In an article for The Conversation, post-doctoral research fellow at Iowa State University Pelin Gul and Tom Kupfer, a Marie Curie research fellow at Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, explain the intricacies of male perception in the modern world.

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Behaviours like opening car doors for women cast them as less competent and always in need of help. Scientists find this behaviour is actually attractive to women (stock)

If a man offers to help a woman with her heavy suitcase or to parallel park her car, what should she make of the offer?

Is it an innocuous act of courtesy?

Or is it a sexist insult to her strength and competence?

Social psychologists who describe this behaviour as 'benevolent sexism' firmly favour the latter view.

But researchers have also revealed a paradox: Women prefer men who behave in ways that could be described as benevolently sexist over those who don't.

How could this be?

Some say that women simply fail to see the ways benevolent sexism undermines them because they're misled by the flattering tone of this brand of kindness.

Psychologists have even suggested that benevolent sexism is more harmful than overtly hostile sexism because it is insidious, acting like 'a wolf in sheep's clothing.'

As social psychologists, we had reservations about these conclusions. Aren't women sophisticated enough to be able to tell when a man is being patronising?

Surprisingly no previous research had tested whether women do, in fact, fail to recognise that benevolent sexism can be patronising and undermining.

And given our backgrounds in evolutionary theory, we also wondered if these behaviours were nonetheless attractive because they signalled a potential mate's willingness to invest resources in a woman and her offspring.

So we conducted a series of studies to further explore women's attraction to benevolently sexist men.

What does benevolent sexism really signal?

The concept of benevolent sexism was first developed in 1996. The idea's creators argued that sexism is not always openly hostile.

To them, attitudes like 'women should be cherished and protected by men' or behaviours like opening car doors for women cast them as less competent and always in need of help. In this way, they argued, benevolent sexism subtly undermines gender equality.

Since then, social psychologists have been busy documenting the pernicious effects that benevolent sexism has on women.

According to studies, women who acquiesce to this behaviour tend to become increasingly dependent on men for help.

They're more willing to allow men to tell them what they can and can't do, are more ambivalent about thinking for themselves, are less ambitious and don't perform as well at work and on cognitive tests.

Given these documented downsides, why are women still attracted to this behaviour?

WHAT IS BENEVOLENT SEXISM? Benevolent sexism is not the stereotypical, hostile sexism that is often seen in society. Instead of attacking women and insulting women because of their sex, benevolent sexism is a separate branch which undermines women. It involves men behaving in what they consider to be a 'gentlemanly' or 'chivalrous' manner but undermining a woman in her own right. Common examples include  'Women Have Motherly Nurturing Instincts'

'Women Are More Compassionate'

'Women Are Just More Beautiful'

'Women Are More Intuitive'

'Women Are Neater' Advertisement

The answer could lie in what evolutionary biologists call 'parental investment theory.'

Whereas men can successfully reproduce by providing a few sex cells, a woman's reproductive success must be tied to her ability to complete months of gestation and lactation.

During much of human history, a woman's ability to choose a mate who was able and willing to assist in this process  by providing food or protection from aggressors  would have increased her reproductive success.

Evolution, therefore, shaped female psychology to attend to  and prefer  mates whose characteristics and behaviours reveal the willingness to invest. A prospective mate's muscular physique (and, today, his big wallet) certainly indicate that he possesses this ability.

But opening a car door or offering his coat are signs that he may have the desired disposition.

Women do perceive benevolently sexist men to be more patronising and more likely to undermine their partners but women perceive these men as more attractive, despite the potential pitfalls (stock)

Women weigh in

In our recently published research, we asked over 700 women, ages ranging from 18 to 73, in five experiments, to read profiles of men who either expressed attitudes or engaged in behaviors that could be described as benevolently sexist, like giving a coat or offering to help with carrying heavy boxes.

We then had the participants rate the man's attractiveness, willingness to protect, provide and commit, and their likelihood of being patronising.

Our findings confirmed that women do perceive benevolently sexist men to be more patronising and more likely to undermine their partners.

But we also found that the women in our studies perceived these men as more attractive, despite the potential pitfalls.

So what made them more attractive to our participants? In their responses, the women in our study rated them as more likely to protect, provide and commit.

We then wondered whether these findings could only really be applied to women who are simply OK with old-fashioned gender roles.

To exclude this possibility, we studied participants' degree of feminism with a widely used survey that measures feminist attitudes.

We had them indicate their level of agreement with statements such as 'a woman should not let bearing and rearing children stand in the way of a career if she wants it.'

We found that strong feminists rated men as more patronising and undermining than traditional women did.

But like the other women, they still found these men more attractive; the drawbacks were outweighed by the men's willingness to invest.

It seems that even staunch feminists may prefer a chivalrous mate who picks up the check on a first date or walks closer to the curb on a sidewalk.

In this time of fraught gender relations, our findings may provide reassurance for women who are confused about how to feel towards a man who acts chivalrous, and well-meaning men who wonder whether they should change their behaviour towards women.

But several interesting questions remain. Does benevolent sexism always undermine women? It might depend on context.

A male being overly helpful to a female co-worker in a patronising way might hurt her ability to project professional competence.

On the other hand, it's tough to see the harm in helping a woman move heavy furniture in the home.

Understanding these nuances may allow us to reduce the negative effects of benevolent sexism without requiring women to reject the actual good things that can arise from this behaviour.

Pelin Gul is a Post-doctoral Research Fellow at Iowa State University and Tom Kupfer is a Marie Curie Research Fellow at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam.

The original article was published in The Conversation.
The first step in conducting online propaganda efforts and misinformation campaigns is almost always a fake social media profile.

Phony profiles for nonexistent people worm their way into the social networks of real people, where they can spread their falsehoods.

But neither social media companies nor technological innovations offer reliable ways to identify and remove social media profiles that dont represent actual authentic people.

It might sound positive that over six months in late 2017 and early 2018, Facebook detected and suspended some 1.3 billion fake accounts.

But an estimated 3 to 4 percent of accounts that remain, or approximately 66 million to 88 million profiles, are also fake but havent yet been detected. Likewise, estimates are that 9 to 15 percent of Twitters 336 million accounts are fake.

The first step in conducting online propaganda efforts and misinformation campaigns is almost always a fake social media profile. Phony profiles for nonexistent people worm their way into social networks of real people, where they can spread their falsehoods. Stock image

Fake profiles arent just on Facebook and Twitter, and theyre not only targeting people in the U.S.

In December 2017, German intelligence officials warned that Chinese agents using fake LinkedIn profiles were targeting more than 10,000 German government employees.

And in mid-August, the Israeli military reported that Hamas was using fake profiles on Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp to entrap Israeli soldiers into downloading malicious software.

Although social media companies have begun hiring more people and using artificial intelligence to detect fake profiles, that wont be enough to review every profile in time to stop their misuse.

As my research explores, the problem isnt actually that people  and algorithms  create fake profiles online. Whats really wrong is that other people fall for them.

My research into why so many users have trouble spotting fake profiles has identified some ways people could get better at identifying phony accounts  and highlights some places technology companies could help.

People fall for fake profiles

To understand social media users thought processes, I created fake profiles on Facebook and sent out friend requests to 141 students in a large university.

Each of the fake profiles varied in some way  such as having many or few fake friends, or whether there was a profile photo.

The idea was to figure out whether one or another type of profile was most successful in getting accepted as a connection by real users  and then surveying the hoodwinked people to find out how it happened.

As my research explores, the problem isnt actually that people  and algorithms  create fake profiles online, Vaishwanath writes. Whats really wrong is that other people fall for them. The graph above shows what happens when fake profiles try to connect with real people

I found that only 30 percent of the targeted people rejected the request from a fake person.

When surveyed two weeks later, 52 percent of users were still considering approving the request. Nearly one in five  18 percent  had accepted the request right away.

Of those who accepted it, 15 percent had responded to inquiries from the fake profile with personal information such as their home address, their student identification number, and their availability for a part-time internship. Another 40 percent of them were considering revealing private data.

But why?

When I interviewed the real people my fake profiles had targeted, the most important thing I found was that users fundamentally believe there is a person behind each profile.

People told me they had thought the profile belonged to someone they knew, or possibly someone a friend knew. Not one person ever suspected the profile was a complete fabrication, expressly created to deceive them.

Mistakenly thinking each friend request has come from a real person may cause people to accept friend requests simply to be polite and not hurt someone elses feelings  even if theyre not sure they know the person.

In addition, almost all social media users decide whether to accept a connection based on a few key elements in the requesters profile  chiefly how many friends the person has and how many mutual connections there are.

I found that people who already have many connections are even less discerning, approving almost every request that comes in.

So even a brand-new profile nets some victims. And with every new connection, the fake profile appears more realistic, and has more mutual friends with others.

This cascade of victims is how fake profiles acquire legitimacy and become widespread.

Almost all social media users decide whether to accept a connection based on a few key elements in the requesters profile  chiefly how many friends the person has and how many mutual connections there are. Stock image

The spread can be fast because most social media sites are designed to keep users coming back, habitually checking notifications and responding immediately to connection requests.

That tendency is even more pronounced on smartphones  which may explain why users accessing social media on smartphones are significantly more likely to accept fake profile requests than desktop or laptop computer users.

Illusions of safety

And users may think theyre safer than they actually are, wrongly assuming that a platforms privacy settings will protect them from fake profiles.

For instance, many users told me they believe that Facebooks controls for granting differing access to friends versus others also protect them from fakers.

Likewise, many LinkedIn users also told me they believe that because they post only professional information, the potential consequences for accepting rogue connections on it are limited.

But thats a flawed assumption: Hackers can use any information gleaned from any platform.

For instance, simply knowing on LinkedIn that someone is working at some business helps them craft emails to the person or others at the company.

Furthermore, users who carelessly accept requests assuming their privacy controls protect them imperil other connections who havent set their controls as high.

Seeking solutions

Using social media safely means learning how to spot fake profiles and use privacy settings properly. There are numerous online sources for advice  including platforms own help pages.

But too often its left to users to inform themselves, usually after theyve already become victims of a social media scam  which always begins with accepting a fake request.

Adults should learn  and teach children  how to examine connection requests carefully in order to protect their devices, profiles and posts from prying eyes, and themselves from being maliciously manipulated.

That includes reviewing connection requests during distraction-free periods of the day and using a computer rather than a smartphone to check out potential connections.

Neither social media companies nor technological innovations offer reliable ways to identify and remove social media profiles that dont represent actual authentic people. Stock image

It also involves identifying which of their actual friends tend to accept almost every friend request from anyone, making them weak links in the social network.

These are places social media platform companies can help. Theyre already creating mechanisms to track app usage and to pause notifications, helping people avoid being inundated or needing to constantly react. Thats a good start  but they could do more.

HOW CAN PARENTS PROTECT THEIR CHILDREN ONLINE? A recent study found when sharing parenting advice on social media, common topics included: Getting kids to sleep (28 per cent)

Nutrition and eating tips (26 per cent)

Discipline (19 per cent)

Daycare/preschool (17 per cent)

Behaviour problems (13 per cent) These common topics of conversation often reveal key information about a child, including: name, age/date of birth, school name and even their appearance. Whilst it may be very difficult to protect the privacy of children in the digital age, there are some things that can be done to shelter children from online dangers. Know your privacy settings It is amazing how many parents leave on their Instagram location settings. Set your location settings to off if you do not want people to be able to figure out where you and your children live. Only share with people who care Ask yourself if all the people you're sharing your photos with really want to see them and will they protect them in a way you would. Explore private social networks Private social networks offer a secure way to share the pictures of your children with your family and friends. Don't take any digital photos Ultimately the only way to be 100 per cent sure that you don't have a digital footprint is not to have any digital photos taken but this isn't a road the vast majority of people want to go down. Advertisement

For instance, social media sites could show users indicators of how many of their connections are inactive for long periods, helping people purge their friend networks from time to time.

They could also show which connections have suddenly acquired large numbers of friends, and which ones accept unusually high percentages of friend requests.

Social media companies need to do more to help users identify and report potentially fake profiles, augmenting their own staff and automated efforts.

Social media sites also need to communicate with each other. Many fake profiles are reused across different social networks.

But if Facebook blocks a faker, Twitter may not. When one site blocks a profile, it should send key information  such as the profiles name and email address  to other platforms so they can investigate and potentially block the fraud there too.
Equifax, one of the three main credit reporting companies, announced a major data breach in September 2017.

The hack exposed Social Security numbers and other important information of 146 million customers globally, including 15 million UK citizens.

The data lost or compromised during the incident ranged from names and dates of birth to addresses, passwords, driving licence and financial details.

Experts said these crucial pieces of personal data are the 'holy grail' for criminals looking to commit identity theft.

Hackers had access to the data between May and July, Equifax said.

The company discovered the hack on July 29 and publicly announced it more than a month later.
Tourists visiting Venice may be banned from sitting on the ground, in a bid to rid the city of 'boorish' visitors.

Authorities in the Italian holiday hot spot are proposing fining people between 50 and 500 euros (44 and 443) if they are caught sitting or lying on the floor.

But some residents groups have hit back at the proposal saying there are so many rules in Venice now that they're impossible to police.

The Italian city of Venice, where tourists may soon be banned from sitting or lying on the ground

Sitting down on the steps of monuments and other buildings is already banned in the area around St Mark's Square.

The new proposal, put forward by mayor Luigi Brugnaro, would extend the law and would come into force next month if it's voted in at a council meeting.

But Marco Gasparinetti, who leads the residents group Gruppo Aprile 25, told the Guardian: 'There is such a long list of things that are forbidden in Venice there is nothing left that you can do.

'They would need to hire an extra 5,000 officers to properly enforce everything.'

Each summer a group of wardens, named the 'angels of decorum', roam Venice, tackling tourist behaviour they find uncouth.

This includes eating in the street, being drunk and dipping toes or swimming in the city's famous canals.

The proposed ban comes after visitor-only routes to popular landmarks were introduced earlier this year ahead of a holiday weekend to keep tourists away from the locals.

They had long complained about excessive crowds  and the measure was also designed to help protect the city's quaint alleyways and thoroughfares.

The visitor-only routes were put in place for tourists heading to St Mark's Square and the Rialto Bridge.

And last year Venice banned the opening of new hotels and fast food restaurants in a bid to cap the number of tourists swarming through its streets.

Florence, too, has been policing its image fairly heavily - it has introduced fines of up to 450 for eating in the street.

Some Venice residents groups have hit back at the proposal saying that there are so many rules that policing them is impossible

New laws, which went into force earlier this month, ban snacking in four streets in the Italian city's historic centre.

Local businesses in the affected sites have been asked to put up signs in prominent places warning visitors about the ban. They read: 'Respect residents, traders and workers of this street.'

In the capital Rome there has also been a crackdown on unruly tourists and authorities have even considered fencing off the celebrated Spanish Steps to protect them from 'barbarian' hordes of sightseers.

Last year, the city considered barring tourists from stopping next to the Trevi Fountain to crack down on illegal swimming there.

And in Milan earlier this year, visitors were banned from taking pictures with selfie sticks.
She has a number of major projects being released in the forthcoming weeks.

So it comes to no surprise that Emma Stone's downtime is nearly non-existent.

The 29-year-old was on-the-go again Wednesday in NYC, where she made quite the impression while arriving at The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.

Busy woman: Emma made a fashion statement as she sported a a long-sleeve dress from the Marc Jacobs Fall 2018 collection while making her entrance

Emma made an interesting fashion statement in her leggy silk abstract diamond long-sleeve dress from the Marc Jacobs Fall 2018 collection.

She complemented her look with a pair of black heels while keeping her eyes covered with a pair of black Oliver Peoples sunglasses.

Given that she is expected to play the role of Cruella de Vil in the forthcoming Cruella film, it appeared as if Emma was channeling her character months before she is even expected to start shooting the motion picture.

For her latest project, the La La Land actress will star alongside Jonah Hill in Netflixs TV series Maniac, which premieres on September 21.

Extra details: She complemented her look with a pair of black heels while keeping her eyes covered with a pair of black Oliver Peoples sunglasses

The 10-part series is already being named one of the most anticipated releases by the media giant since the Will Smith-led film Bright in 2017.

In a recent interview to promote the Netflix series, Emma admits to having signed her contract before even taking a look at the script.

The Easy A star tells Digital Spy that she didn't hesitate to sign on the dotted line, stressing that she had been wanting to work with Hollywood director Cary Joji Fukunaga for as long as she could remember.

'I loved the idea of working with Cary. I was a fan of his work, and the concept I thought sounded really fascinating.'

Giving a smile: The La La Land actress will star alongside Jonah Hill in Netflixs TV series Maniac, which premieres on September 21

Stone then went on to admit that, despite having signed her contract, she was then left with mixed emotions since she wasn't quite sure how the story was going to be developed given by the synopsis line she received.

'But again, it was a log line. It was a sentence. So once Patrick came on board and really developed it in the way that he did, it was a bunch of moving parts that came together.'

Fortunately for the red-haired Oscar winner, she couldn't be happier with the outcome of her forthcoming TV series.

Aside from the Netflix project, Emma will also be returning to the big screen in November as she takes on the role of Abigail in the R-rated film The Favourite.

Premiere: In a recent interview to promote the Netflix series, Emma admits to having signed her contract before even taking a look at the script
Montana Brown has revealed she 'feels sorry' for her Celebrity Island With Bear Grylls co-star Roxanne Pallett and fears she might try to commit suicide.

The Love Island star, 22, who spent three days with the Emmerdale actress, 35, on the tropical island, said she'd seemed like a 'genuine' and 'positive' person on the Channel 4 show.

She added that while Roxanne was 'completely in the wrong' for falsely accusing CBB's Ryan Thomas of aggressively punching her, she said it was time for trolls to stop targeting her.

Sympathy: Montana Brown has revealed she 'feels sorry' for her Celebrity Island With Bear Grylls co-star Roxanne Pallett and fears she might try to commit suicide

Roxanne found herself at the centre of a national scandal when she called Ryan a 'woman-beater' after a play-fight - before leaving CBB and admitting she'd been in the wrong.

'To be honest after this whole thing has blown up about Big Brother  I get that she is completely in the wrong and it's really bad what she did  but I also don't think it is OK for people to troll her the way that they are, because that is the kind of stuff that makes people want to take their own life. It's not nice,' Montana told The Sun.

'I was really shocked by Big Brother. To be honest I did feel really bad for her, I felt really bad for Ryan as well because I know Lucy quite well, but I think she obviously needs help so I think people need to support her in getting that help and hopefully she can get better.'

Roxanne quit Celebrity Island after five days after the bonfires caused her to have flashbacks of being caught in a house fire.

Support: The Love Island star, 22, who spent three days with the Emmerdale actress, 35, on the tropical island, said she'd seemed like a 'genuine' and 'positive' person on the Channel 4 show

Concern: She added that while Roxanne was 'completely in the wrong' for her false accusations that CBB's Ryan Thomas aggressively punched her, she warned that trolls needed to stop targeting her

The actress walked off the show earlier this year after the smell of the fire triggered traumatic memories of being involved in the blaze when she was aged 16.

Discussing what she was like on the island, Montana said: 'I don't know if you can tell from three days, but from what I saw from her she seemed like a genuine person.'

The reality star added that Roxanne was good at keeping energy levels high in camp, and said that while she was a 'bit of a drama queen', she was also 'really quite funny'.

Worried: 'I don't think it is OK for people to troll her the way that they are, because that is the kind of stuff that makes people want to take their own life. It's not nice,' she told The Sun

Exit: Roxanne walked off the show earlier this year after the smell of the fire triggered traumatic memories of being involved in the blaze when she was aged 16

Last month, Roxanne caused ructions on CBB after she accused ex Coronation Street star Ryan, of 'repeatedly and deliberately punching' her.

She later quit the house and admitted she was wrong after seeing Ryan's devastation.

She branded herself 'Britain's Most Hated Woman' last week when she sensationally quit the house after falsely accusing 'broken man' Ryan - in what came to be known as 'Punchgate'.

Remorse: Last month, Roxanne caused ructions on CBB after she accused ex Coronation Street star Ryan, of 'repeatedly and deliberately punching' her

She has now reportedly penned an apology letter to Ryan, deciding to use a more 'personal approach' after her two televised apologies with Emma Willis and Jeremy Vine were criticised by viewers for being a 'PR stunt'.

A source told The Sun that the soap star decided to write a letter of apology after sensationally quitting the show just hours after her allegation, which she handed to a member of staff to pass onto him.

They added that Ryan is yet to receive the note after the commotion of winning the Channel 5 series, they added: 'He's aware of it's existence though and it's expected that he'll receive it next week to be able to read it.
She's known for her striking looks and never-ending pins.

And Jasmine Sanders stayed true to form showing off her long legs at the the CIROC x Moschino collaboration during Milan Fashion Week.

The self-named 'Golden Barbie' put her gym-honed physique on display in a multi-coloured matching leather romper suit.

Leggy: Jasmine Sanders stayed true to form showing off her long legs at the the CIROC x Moschino collaboration during Milan Fashion Week

The 27-year-old stunner showcased her flawless figure in a revealing colourful outfit and chunky black heels.

Daring to impress, the Instagram sensation showcased her unique style as the sartorial choice featured a chunky black belt and matching collar.

The German-born model turned more than a few heads as she flashed her toned legs in leather shorts and a matching top that left little to the imagination.

Her golden tresses were pulled back into a sleek ponytail. A nude lip complemented her chunky gold earrings and thick black eyeliner.

Unique style: The self-named 'Golden Barbie' put her gym-honed physique on display in a multi-coloured matching leather romper suit

Strike a pose: The 27-year-old stunner showcased her flawless figure in a revealing colourful outfit and chunky black heels

Jasmine was on hand to help launch CIROC Vodka's new collaboration with Italian fashion house Moschino at Milan Fashion Week.

The campaign see's Moschinos creative director, Jeremy Scott, design a limited-edition bottle with the luxury alcohol brand.

Talking about the collaboration, Jeremy shared: 'I love the cheeky, playful nature of CIROC. It connects perfectly with my approach to both life and fashion, so the partnership felt natural; theres such synergy.

'I design a lot around personal, customised twists so its great to bring this into the partnership too. Its been fun to bring together our bold take on luxury and I cant wait to see what the year holds.'

Pin-credible: The German-born model turned more than a few heads as she flashed her toned legs in leather shorts and a matching top that left little to the imagination

Walking: Jasmine holds a giant cardboard Moschino shoe as she crosses the street in Milan

Jasmine launched the campaign alongside the designer, fellow model River Viiperi and superstar singer Wizkid in the Italian fashion capital.

Jasmine began modelling when she was just 13-years old. Over the years, she has been featured on the fashion magazine pages of Vogue, Galore, Seventeen, and many more.

She has also modelled for popular brands like Forever 21, Aldos, Ralph Lauren and Smashbox.

The model eventually transitioned to acting and got her big break in the film School Dance in 2014, which then led to roles in Smooth Talking Sexy hair and Glosses.

Work it: Her golden tresses were pulled back into a sleek ponytail. A nude lip complemented her chunky gold earrings and thick black eyeliner

Walk this way: Jasmine launched the campaign alongside fellow model River Viiperi (L), designer Jeremy Scott (centre right) and superstar singer Wizkid (R) in the Italian fashion capital

And being friends with the likes of Kim Kardashian and Kylie Jenner hasn't hurt her ability to get noticed.

Social media has also helped garner her world-wide attention, with more than three-million Instagram followers and counting.

'I honestly started using Instagram for their filters,' said Sanders in an interview with Vogue. 'I would upload just to steal the filter and later delete, until I noticed that people actually started liking my posts and my style.'

Sanders credits social media with giving models a real voice. 'Social media allows us to show everyone that theres more beyond the supposed glitz and glam of the industry. We have the power to share what we truly love and what makes us happy.'
She arrived in Australia with her three-month-old son Enrique Santiago last week.

And on Wednesday, Hollywood star Eva Longoria took a well-earned break from her parenting duties to enjoy a night-time beach run on Queensland's Gold Coast.

The 43-year-old Desperate Housewives actress took to her Instagram Story to document her exercise session with her 5.7 million followers.

'Getting it done!' Eva Longoria went for a night-time beach run in Australia on Wednesday, after flying into the country to film the new Dora The Explorer movie

Looking stylish in activewear and an Adidas cap, Eva jogged along the sand against the backdrop in several towering buildings.

At one stage, she pointed the camera towards the ocean view in front of her.

She included the hashtag, 'Getting it done', alongside an image of the Australian flag.

Enjoying the view! Eva, who welcomed her first child in June, went for a jog down the beach on Queensland's Gold Coast

Eva is in Australia to film the live-action Dora The Explorer movie on the Gold Coast.

She brought another traveller along for the ride - her three-month old son Santiago, who she shares with husband Jose Baston.

She previously described the child, who was born in Los Angeles in June, as a 'beautiful blessing'.

New role: Eva is in Australia to film the live-action Dora The Explorer movie on the Gold Coast

During a recent appearance on British talk show Lorraine, Eva spoke candidly about getting back into shape after her pregnancy.

'[Santiago] was fully cooked, so I just kept getting bigger and bigger,' she said.

'It's definitely going to take some effort to get back to the way I was.'
He won the hearts of the nation when he coupled up with surfer babe Laura Crane on Love Island.

Despite their split earlier this week, Jack Fowler looked happy as he stepped out in Manchester with Series 2 Islander Scott Thomas.

The east London born star donned double denim and clean white trainers as he left the city's Rosso Restaurant.

Smiles all round: Newly-single Jack flashed his pearly whites as he headed out in Manchester

He teamed washed out jeans with a white stripe with fresh trainers, a purple hoody and denim jacket.

The 22-year-old wore his black cap backwards and laughed with Scott as they walked through town.

Scott opted for a red, white and navy zip-up Fila jacket and jeans along with snazzy white trainers.

The brother of CBB-winner Ryan, made his Coronation Street star brother cry when he sent a letter into the Big Brother house amid Roxanne Pallett's false claims he had violently hit her.

No tears here: Jack was joined by Series 2 Islander Scott Thomas as the pair dined in Russo Restaurant in Manchester

Boys are back in town: The pair wore matching white trainers as they headed into Manchester

Stylish: The 22-year-old wore his black cap backwards and laughed with Scott as they walked through town

Friends:Scott opted for a red, white and navy zip-up Fila jacket and jeans along with snazzy white trainers

Laura Crane and Jack Fowler became the third couple from this year's Love Island to split when they announced the break-up earlier this week.

Just two months after finding love in the villa, the reality TV couple called time on their romance, with Jack celebrating his single status with a night out in Brighton on Saturday.

The split comes just days after Laura Anderson parted ways from Paul Knops.

Newly single: Laura Crane and Jack Fowler became the third couple from this year's Love Island to split when they announced the break-up earlier this week

Bothered: Jack headed out with Scott days after he partied with a bevvy of women in Brighton

Laura told Metro.co.uk: 'Sadly Jack and I have both decided to go our separate ways due to such busy schedules right now and not having the time to spend together.

'Feel truly blessed to have got to share my Love Island experience with him and to have made a friend for life, we will carry on supporting each other on this journey and I can't wait to see where it takes us.'

Jack added: 'We met in extraordinary circumstances and had an amazing time getting to know each other, both whilst in the villa and outside of it but our lives are currently taking us in different directions, we will remain friends and I will support her in whatever she does.'

Break-up: Laura Crane and Jack Fowler have become the third couple from this year's Love Island to split

Ladies' man: Jack celebrated his single status with a night out in Brighton on Saturday

Celebrating: The Love Island hunk seemed to be lapping up the female attention as he posed and took shots with a buxom blonde before wrapping his arms around another woman

Cosy display: At one point Jack chatted away to a scantily-clad bartender

Despite the break-up, Jack appeared in high spirits as he cosied up to a bevvy of beauties at Shoosh nightclub in Brighton.

The Love Island hunk seemed to be lapping up the female attention as he posed and took shots with a buxom blonde before wrapping his arms around another woman.

Pro-surfer Laura and Jack departed the villa as a couple after he ended his romance with Laura Anderson.

Laura previously admitted they had been 'taking it slower' since they re-entered the real world. She said: 'We're not officially boyfriend and girlfriend. Since we came out we are taking it slower.

'We're just not rushing. We've seen other things go wrong, but we do have genuine feelings. I trust him and I will trust him until I have reason not to.'

It's over: Laura said: 'Sadly Jack and I have both decided to go our separate ways due to such busy schedules right now and not having the time to spend together'

Discussing how their relationship has had its ups and downs since leaving the Love Island villa, she confessed: 'When we first came out we felt the pressure'.

She also spoke about the staggering amount of female attention Jack gets at nightclub PAs, where she reasoned: 'I 100 percent trust him and I said to him that 'I will trust you until I have reason not to'. I have no reason not to believe him.

For me, as long as we have each other's word and we trust each other like that then 'you can't rise to every story that comes out or every girl that has made claims.

I'm super chilled. I've grown up always around boys and in the surfing world. For me, I know how it works from watching girls go to guys. So it's never something I'm sat at home stressing about when he's at a PA. I trust him.'
They both command major presence in the fashion and modelling spheres.

So of course Olivia Palermo and Johannes Huebl were out in full force during Milan Fashion Week, in Italy attending The Next Chapter Presentation on Wednesday.

The American businesswoman, 32, exhibited her slender waistline in her elasticated waistband trousers as she joined her model husband, 40.

Picture of happiness: Olivia Palermo displayed her waist in elasticated trousers as she cuddled her husband Johannes Huebl during Milan Fashion Week on Wednesday

The couple, who were married in a romantic ceremony held four years ago in June 2014, looked closer than ever as they posed for the snaps together.

Olivia brought trends of the catwalk to her look with her leopard print clutch bag, which also acted as a statement piece complementing her all-black ensemble.

Johannes, however, cut a trendy figure in his navy puffer jacket matching his trousers in the very same deep shade of blue.

Milan Fashion Week has attracted modelling stars including Kendall Jenner, Gigi and Bella Hadid as well as Kaia Gerber.

Trendy figure: Olivia brought trends of the catwalk to her look with her leopard print clutch bag, which also acted as a statement piece complementing her all-black ensemble

Olivia found fame on MTV's The Hills spin-off The City, which documented Whitney Port's move to New York to work for Diane von Furstenberg in 2008.

The socialite appeared in both seasons of the reality show as Whitney's workplace friend and later rival.

Since featuring on the series, Olivia has become one of the most established front-row regulars on the fashion circuit, attending the world's most prestigious events.

Sense of belonging: Milan Fashion Week has attracted modelling stars including Kendall Jenner, Gigi and Bella Hadid as well as Kaia Gerber

Still going strong and four years ago now, she was happy to marry the love of her life and model Johannes in Bedford, New York.

Discussing the secret to the couple's happy marriage, Olivia previously told Harper's Bazaar Australia they are rarely apart.

She told the publication: 'We try not to ever be separated more than seven days. Its just something we have always done.'
Nicki Minaj donned a black Diesel jacket emblazoned with 'The Bad Guy' while serving as brand ambassador duties for the fashion label during MFW on Wednesday.

Fans were left hitting out at the Italian label's founder Renzo Rosso for the choice of the 35-year-old hip-hop star to represent his FW/18 'Hate Couture' collection, which benefits cyber-bullying organisations - given her recent fracas with Cardi B.

The 10-time Grammy nominee has previously been locked in public feuds with chart rivals such as Cardi B, Miley Cyrus, Mariah Carey, Lil' Kim, and Remy Ma - leading to the backlash from fans about the choice to feature her as an ambassador.

Shock? Rap diva Nicki Minaj donned a black Diesel jacket emblazoned with 'The Bad Guy' while serving brand ambassador duties for the Italian fashion label during MFW on Wednesday

When a Twitter user blasted the idea of Nicki as an 'anti-bullying beacon' on Wednesday, bosses at Diesel replied: 'We're here to support anyone who's getting hated on, and Nicki is one of them.'

The clothing company reportedly shut down an entire block near their San Babila flagship store in honor of the Trinidad-born, New York-raised star, who gushed: 'Milan, I love you!'

Diesel also enlisted rapper Gucci Mane and actors Tommy Dorfman, Yoo Ah-in, and Bella Thorne to front the 'Hate Couture' campaign.

The Queen hitmaker dressed her surgically-enhanced 5ft2in figure in a colorful catsuit and red patent leather Fendi booties selected by stylist Brett Alan Nelson.

'Renzo, my love': Eyebrows raised when Diesel founder Renzo Rosso (L) handpicked the 35-year-old hip-hop star to rep his FW/18 'Hate Couture' collection, which (partially) benefits cyberbullying organizations

Catty: The 10-time Grammy nominee has previously been locked in public feuds with chart rivals such as Cardi B, Miley Cyrus , Mariah Carey , Lil' Kim, and Remy Ma - leading to the backlash from fans about the choice to feature her as an ambassador

When a Twitter user blasted the idea of Minaj as an 'anti-bullying beacon' on Wednesday, Diesel replied: 'We're here to support anyone who's getting hated on, and Nicki is one of them'

Defensive: The clothing company reportedly shut down an entire block near their San Babila flagship store in honor of the star, who gushed: 'Milan, I love you!'

Swarmed: Diesel also enlisted rapper Gucci Mane and actors Tommy Dorfman, Yoo Ah-in, and Bella Thorne (not pictured) to front the 'Hate Couture' campaign

Hairstylist Dionte Gray coiffed the former American Idol judge's pink-and-purple wig while Mali Magic applied her fully-contoured complexion and false lashes.

Throughout her promotional appearance, Nicki, born Onika Maraj, captured all of the fan-screaming action for her captive, combined 152.7M social media following.

At one point, Minaj could be seen making heart hand signals for her impassioned Italian fanbase outside of the bustling boutique.

The Chun-Li rapper's sighting came nine days after she lamented being known as 'the bad guy' following her brawl with Cardi at the September 7th Harper's Bazaar Icons bash.

Feeling herself: The Queen hitmaker dressed her surgically-enhanced 5ft2in figure in a colorful catsuit and red patent leather Fendi booties selected by stylist Brett Alan Nelson

Wet look: Hairstylist Dionte Gray coiffed the former American Idol judge's pink-and-purple wig while Mali Magic applied her fully-contoured complexion and false lashes

Selfie: Throughout her promotional appearance, Nicki (born Onika Maraj) captured all of the fan-screaming action for her captive, combined 152.7M social media following

Feeling the love: At one point, Minaj could be seen making heart hand signals for her impassioned Italian fan base outside of the bustling boutique

'It's crazy for me that people always need to make Onika the bad guy,' the former Red Lobster waitress complained on Beats 1's Queen Radio.

'I was wearing [an Alexandre] Vauthier gown off the mother f***ing runway and I could not believe how humiliating it all felt - how we made ourselves look.'

As for whether the fight was over disparaging remarks about the 25-year-old Latina's baby daughter, Nicki called it a lie and scoffed: 'I would never ridicule anyone's child.'

'People always need to make Onika the bad guy': The Chun-Li rapper's sighting came nine days after she discussed her brawl with Cardi at the September 7th Harper's Bazaar Icons bash

Shock: The former Red Lobster waitress complained on Beats 1's Queen Radio: 'I was wearing [an Alexandre] Vauthier gown off the mother f***ing runway and I could not believe how humiliating it all felt - how we made ourselves look'

Bump on the noggin: During their NYFW melee, Cardi (born Belcalis Almanzar) flung her Gucci heels at a cowering Minaj and she sported a swollen knot after Nicki's bodyguards reportedly elbowed her forehead

During their NYFW melee, Cardi (born Belcalis Almanzar) flung her Gucci heels at a cowering Minaj and she sported a swollen knot after Nicki's bodyguards reportedly elbowed her forehead.

According to TMZ, the two-time Grammy nominee 'feels zero remorse' for defending the honor of her two-month-old daughter Kulture Kiari Cephus with husband Offset.

On Wednesday morning, the former stripper - who boasts 41.3M followers - Insta-storied a glimpse of little Kulture's arm as she lost sleep mothering and recording music in the studio.

She's do it again: According to TMZ, the two-time Grammy nominee 'feels zero remorse' for defending the honor of her two-month-old daughter Kulture Kiari Cephus with husband Offset (pictured Tuesday)
Kim Zolciak said she recently underwent a breast reduction with Dr. Leonard Hochstein, the husband of one-time Real Housewives of Miami star Lisa Hochstein.

The Bravo star, 40, on Wednesday told Us Weekly she 'went smaller' with the helop of Dr. Hochstein, someone she had previously trusted him for medical procedures.

'He did my boobs four years ago and I loved them,' the reality TV beauty said. 'I just wanted a cup size smaller. I'm in Miami recovering now.'

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On the mend: Kim Zolciak said she recently underwent a breast reduction with Dr. Leonard Hochstein, the husband of one-time Real Housewives of Miami star Lisa Hochstein

The Don't Be Tardy star said she was 'feeling fab at 40,' and took to Instagram Stories to share a selfie as she recovered while laying in bed.

'Part of the itty bitty t**** committee,' the blonde beauty wrote in the social media post, thanking Dr. Hochstein for the successful procedure.

The Real Housewives of Atlanta alum, who's married to former Atlanta Falcon Kroy Biermann, told the outlet she 'will tell her complete experience' on her House of Kim podcast.

On her podcast in July, Kim revealed her plans to undergo the procedure, noting that she 'was thinking of going from like a DD to like a C' in an effort to improve her quality of life.

Fan favorite: The outspoken Southern belle has been a staple on Bravo over the past decade

She noted, 'I already called Dr. Hochstein, who did my boobs and tummy a few years ago - he did my hernia repair and my tummy tuck after that.

'I said, "You know, I feel like I should get my boobs reduced. They're heavy, my posture is terrible, I'm getting older."'

Kim noted that she breastfed all six of her children, which left her breasts 'stretched out' with a 'loss of volume.'
The Block's Sara Vale has been dubbed the 'villain' of this year's show.

And the title has some serious consequences.

The 31-year-old flight attendant has revealed she's been subjected to some serious bullying by online trolls.

'You'd think The Bachelor girls would be getting worse criticism': The Block's villain Sara and husband Hayden say they've been bullied by cruel online trolls who have even attacked their parenting

'You would think The Bachelor girls would be getting worse criticism, but it feels like I'm on par with them,' Sara said in a candid interview with WHO magazine.

She said that while she can handle the backlash from fans about her renovations, she draws the lines when they attack her parenting.

'I haven't been receiving death threats, but I've been coming under fire for my parenting,' she explained.

And Sara admits that she does 'bites back' when trolls target their daughter Harlow, one.

Protective: Sara admits she 'bites back' when trolls target their daughter Harlow, one

Drama! Pictured are some of the Bachelor Australia contestants

'It's like, "don't you dare talk to me about my parenting style - you don't know who I am."

Sara and her husband Hayden have had a rather hard time on The Block, with the fiery brunette struggling to style their apartment and often spiraling into meltdowns.

She's also threatened to walk off the show and quit.

Stressed: Sara and her husband Hayden have had a rather hard time on The Block, with the fiery brunette struggling to style their apartment and often spiraling into meltdowns

Sara jokingly told New Idea that Hayden threatened to divorce her during filming for the show.

'Hayden threatened to divorce me several times throughout the series,' she said.

'But I won't give him the satisfaction. He's not rich enough for me to take him for everything.'
He shot to fame as the quirky groom on Married At First Sight, instantly gaining a legion of fans thanks to his unique personality.

And in a refreshingly honest chat, Nasser Sultan, 51, has admitted he's surprised at his popularity following his stint on the Channel Nine show, as he really doesn't have any 'talent'.

'I've become famous overnight,' Nasser told The Guardian News. 'It's crazy because I don't really have any talent, I'm not the best looking and I'm definitely past my prime but everywhere I go people keep coming up to say hello.'

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'I'm not the best looking and I'm past my prime': Nasser Sultan, 51, admits 'he doesn't have any talent' as he speaks about becoming an 'overnight sensation' following Married At First Sight

Nasser said that while he's got plenty of new work opportunities, he's still yet to find lasting love off-screen after his failed 'marriage' to Gabrielle Bartlett on the series.

Reflecting on two relationships he's had since leaving the show, the aspiring beauty blogger said distance was the reason behind one break-up while another was only with him for money.

'She soon got a shock when she found out just because you're on TV, you're not filthy rich,' he said.

Nasser is set to hit screens again after he was named as one of the new stars of I'm A Celebrity... Get Me Out Of Here! by Woman's Day magazine.

'I've become famous overnight,' Nasser told The Guardian News . 'It's crazy because I don't really have any talent, I'm not the best looking and I'm definitely past my prime but everywhere I go people keep coming up to say hello'

Still single! Nasser also said that while he's got plenty of new work opportunities, he's still yet to find lasting love off-screen after his failed 'marriage' to Gabrielle Bartlett on the seriestt

Stage entertainer Rhonda Burchmore is also tipped to enter the South African jungle, after being approached by producers.

Speaking to Daily Mail Australia on Monday, Nasser stopped short of confirming a new role on the Channel Ten reality show.

'I'm not sure how I'd deal with the bugs but I'm open to offers if the producers are reading haha,' he said.

The fifth season of the Network Ten show is believed to start filming in January 2019, with hosts Dr Chris Brown and Julia Morris both said to be returning.
Sarah Michelle Gellar shared a sweet birthday tribute to her daughter on Wednesday.

The Buffy The Vampire Slayer star, 41, posted a throwback snap as she said her nine-year-old girl Charlotte makes her 'want to be a better person everyday'.

And the beauty's husband, Freddie Prinze Jr., was spotted setting up balloons for Charlotte's big soiree outside their home in Los Angeles.

Birthday wishes: Sarah Michelle Gellar, 41, shared a sweet 9th birthday tribute to her daughter Charlotte on Wednesday

The adorable black and white photo featured Sarah holding Charlotte as a toddler with the caption: 'Nine years ago today, Charlotte Grace Prinze entered this world, and my life was forever changed.

'You make me want to be a better person every day. I am continuously inspired by your kindness and your love.

'If I had to choose between loving you and breathing, I would use my last breath to tell you how much I love you. Happy Birthday Charlotte.'

The couple - who also share a six-year-old son named Rocky James - are about to celebrate their 16th wedding anniversary.

Party prep: The beauty's husband, Freddie Prinze Jr., was spotted setting up balloons for Charlotte's big soiree outside their home in Los Angeles

After initially meeting filming the 1997 teen thriller I Know What You Did Last Summer, the duo started seeing each other three years later, tying the knot two years after that.

Prinze earlier this year said that the fact that they didn't rush into things helped them over the long haul.

'That's one of the reasons I think our relationship has always been so good,' the actor told E! News in April. 'We were just friends for a good two years before we ever went on a date.'

History: The couple - who also share a six-year-old son named Rocky James - are about to celebrate their 16th wedding anniversary

The five years of getting to know one another prior to exchanging vows helped pave the path to their healthy Hollywood marriage.

'She knew what kind of guy I was,' he said. 'She knew what my morals were, what my priorities were and visa versa. We already kind of knew all the faults in the other person ... we ended up being the perfect balance.

'But it didn't happen until years after and there was a solid foundation built, and that's probably the main reason why we've always been cool and groovy.'
Nick Cummins' charming personality, unusual ocker-isms and heart of gold captured viewers attention on The Bachelor Australia.

But after a rather awkward date with Dasha Gaivoronski on Wednesday's episode, fans suggested the former Wallaby may have issues 'carrying a conversation'.

Several viewers observed that Nick, 30, has been on several dates so far this season in which the women have been left with little to say.

'There's one common denominator and it's not the women!' Bachelor fans claim Nick Cummins is to blame for a string of awkward dates with Dasha (left), Jamie-Lee and Vanessa Sunshine

One fan remarked on Twitter: 'Remember when we all thought Vanessa Sunshine couldn't have a conversation? And then Jamie Lee and now Dasha... There's one common denominator here and it's not the women.'

Another wrote: 'That's three dead conversations.... Perhaps it's Nick who is boring?'

A similar tweet read: 'This is a season of awkward Bachelor dates. Nick has issues carrying a conversation.'

No more chemistry? Several viewers observed that Nick has been on several dates so far this season in which the women have been left with little to say. Pictured: Nick and Dasha

Fan theory: One fan remarked on Twitter: 'Remember when we all thought Vanessa Sunshine couldn't have a conversation? And then Jamie Lee and now Dasha... There's one common denominator here and it's not the women'

'He's so bland!' one viewer complained, prompting another to point out that Dasha - whose first language is Russian - was actually 'leading the conversation'.

Earlier in Wednesday's episode, Nick also stumbled to find the right words when talking to Cassandra Wood about his feelings for her.

The rugby star was trying to explain that it was hard for him to open up emotionally to one woman because he has the feelings of six other women to consider.

'He's so bland!' Another fan tweeted, 'This is a season of awkward Bachelor dates. Nick has issues carrying a conversation'

Awkward! Last week, intruder Jamie-Lee (left) found it difficult to connect with Nick after they went on a rather unromantic Japanese sword fighting date

Friend-zoned: Meanwhile, Vanessa Sunshine (left) was unable to strike up a romantic spark with the Honey Badger after their distinctly awkward one-on-one date

But instead of getting to the point, he stammered and hesitated. In a particularly odd moment, he laughed nervously when Cassandra asked him about his feelings.

Last week, intruder Jamie-Lee Dayz found it difficult to connect with Nick after they went on a rather unromantic Japanese sword fighting date.

Meanwhile, Vanessa 'Sunshine' Bennet was unable to strike up a romantic spark with the Honey Badger after their distinctly awkward post-group date conversation.
The stars came out for the Los Angeles premiere of Michael's Moore's new call-to-arms political documentary Fahrenheit 11/9.

Among the celebs shining the brightest on the red carpet on this Wednesday night: Alyssa Milano.

And the actress alum garnered plenty of attention when she dressed up a political statement with the slogan: 'Your vote, your future' written on a T-shirt across her ample assets.

Making a statement: Alyssa Milano hit the red carpet for the Los Angeles premiere of the Michael Moore political documentary Fahrenheit 11/9

The 45-year old proudly displayed her 'get out the vote' t-shirt as she posed for the swarm of photographers.

Being the style-conscious woman that she is, the Insatiable star tied the shirt in the front and paired it with an eye-glaring white and silver striped skirt that came down to her calves.

She matched the skirt perfectly with a pair of open-toed heels, and pulled her long brown tresses into a ponytail.

Get out the vote: Alyssa garnered plenty of attention with the slogan: 'Your vote, your future' written on a t-shirt across her ample assets

Head turner: The 45-year old also wore an eye-glaring silver and white skirt and matching open-toed heels

She has a voice: The Who's the Boss? alum has been involved in activism since the late 1980s

Seasoned: Alyssa has been a Hollywood fixture since her hit sitcom Who's the Boss? in 1984

Still relevant: Most recently Alyssa has starred in the Netflix dark-comedy series Insatiable

Some of the the other stars who came out for the premiere included: musicians Jackson Browne and Tom Morello, actors Jeff Garlin, Frank Grillo and Ron Pearlman, comedian Richard Schiff and his wife Sheila Kelley, former Trump protege Omarosa Manigault, actresses Jenifer Lewis and Perrey Reeves, and the filmmaker himself, Michael Moore.

This latest Moore production chronicles the 2016 United States presidential election, what led to a Trump presidency, and how the country can 'get out' of the era of a Trump administration.

The film also explores the long-standing water crisis and health disaster in Moore's hometown of Flint, Michigan.

All his glory: Michael Moore acknowledged the fans at the LA premiere; this latest Moore production chronicles the 2016 U.S. presidential election and what led to a Trump presidency

Always in the political mix: Jackson Browne (l) and Rage Against the Machine/Audioslave guitarist Tom Morello (r) have made careers out of mixing music with politics

Star power: Curb Your Enthusiasm star Jeff Garlin also on hand for the premiere

Hollywood nights: Richard Schiff and wife Sheila Kelley walked the red carpet together

On his website, Moore described his new film as a 'siren call' to 'a despairing, dispirited public who must  MUST  do its job and end the madness at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.'

He added: 'I have spent the better part of this year constructing a film that will not only explain how the @#&% we ended up with Trump, but also help show us the way out. I must warn you  I do not pull ANY punches in the film. No one is spared  not even me.'

Fahrenheit 11/9 hits theaters across the U.S. Friday, September 21.

Funky style: Actress/comedian Jenifer Lewis has appeared in a number of hit movies including Beaches, Sister's Act, and Poetic Justice

Casual elegance: Actress Elizabeth Tulloch is best known for her role as Juliette in the series Grimm

Adoring fans: Actress Perrey Reeves and husband Aaron Endress-Fox enjoyed their time in the spotlight

Beaming: Former Trump protege Omarosa Manigault strutted her stuff along the red carpet in a glittery burgundy gown
He recently revealed that he's heading to the UK and Ireland, to capitalise on his Love Island Australia fame.

And Grant Crapp, 23, has hinted he will appear on the UK version of I'm A Celebrity... Get Me Outta Here! UK.

In an Instagram post on Wednesday, the Canberra electrician shared a shirtless selfie and made reference to 'the jungle' - but did not specifically mention the show.

'I hope the jungle has this food': Love Island Australia's Grant Crapp hints he will appear on UK version of I'm A Celebrity

'Do you think you could out eat me #ihopethejunglehasthisfood,' he captioned the shot, which showed him eyeing a table of food.

In the comments section, suspicious fans instantly began to speculate.

'I'm a celebrity get me out of here??? is this your next adventure perhaps,' one follower wrote.

International tour: Last month, Grant announced that he's heading to the UK and Ireland after it was revealed that Love Island Australia was a hit with UK audiences

Another fan asked: 'Am I behind the 8 ball, or are you going on I'm a celebrity get me out of here ?!?!'

Daily Mail Australia has reached out to Grant and ITV for comment.

The eighteenth season of I'm A Celebrity UK is expected to begin in November and is usually filmed in Murwillumbah, New South Wales.

Last month, Grant announced that he's heading to the UK and Ireland after it was revealed that Love Island Australia was a hit with UK audiences.

Coming soon: The eighteenth season of I'm A Celebrity UK is expected to begin in November and is usually filmed in Murwillumbah, New South Wales

'With Love Island AU taking off on ITV in the UK - and Ireland - it's time to head over to see you all for the first time,' he wrote on Instagram.

'With shows already booked and ready to go, where would you like to see [former contestant John James] and myself in the UK/Europe? We are now taking tour dates... Can't wait to meet you all.'

Grant was crowned winner of Love Island Australia in July, along with model Tayla Damir and they shared the $50,000 prize money.

The pair split just days after returning to Australia after it was revealed that Grant had a secret girlfriend.
Russell Crowe was spotted at a shooting range in Coffs Harbour on Tuesday.

The Hollywood actor, 54, shot from a large rifle at the Coffs Harbour Clay Target Club.

The Gladiator star had a huge smile across his face as he fired away at clay targets for more than two hours while two men kept score.

Scroll down for video

Bang bang! A grinning Russell Crowe was spotted at a shooting range in Coffs Harbour on Tuesday

The star has been Down Under watching his Rugby team, the South Sydney Rabbitohs, make it to the finals.

He's also been busy working on his next film, True History of the Kelly Gang.

The A-lister plays Australian bushranger Harry Power in the Ned Kelly biopic, which also stars Sons of Anarchy's Charlie Hunnam and Captain Fantastic's George MacKay.

Nice shot! The Hollywood actor, 54, shot from a large rifle at the Coffs Harbour Clay Target Club

Perfect aim: Russell had a huge smile across his face as he fired away at clay targets for more than two hours while two men kept score

There's already been some controversy during filming, with a source from the film telling Daily Mail Australia this month that Russell lost it when he discovered that catering had run out of rice and he 'stormed off.'

According to the source, the meltdown occurred several weeks ago during filming in Victoria, Australia.

The insider added that others working on the movie were alerted to Russell's mood following the incident.

Ready for action: The Gladiator star loaded more bullets into the firearm

Careful where you point that thing! The 54-year-old knew exactly what he was doing with the weapon

Drama: There's already been some controversy during filming of Russell's latest movie, with a source telling Daily Mail Australia this month that the star lost it when he discovered that catering had run out of rice and he 'stormed off'

'Lots of the crew got text messages warning them about what happened,' the source told Daily Mail Australia.

'They were told Russell was really angry because there was no more rice.'

While no release date has been set for The True History of the Kelly Gang, it is likely to hit the big screen in 2019.
Natasha Oakley and Devin Brugman have transformed their blogging success into a business empire that includes a swimwear range and popular activewear brand.

And it was business as usual for the busty BFFs on Wednesday as they stepped out for a casual work lunch in sunny West Hollywood, California.

Blonde Natasha, 28, went braless in a stylish beige top as she slung a Louis Vuitton backpack over one shoulder.

Just another day at the office! Bikini designers Devin Brugman and Natasha Oakley (pictured) went braless while stepping out for a business lunch in West Hollywood on Wednesday

She teamed her look with a pair of high-waisted ripped jeans and white sneakers, and clutched an iPhone in her right hand.

Meanwhile, Devin flaunted her famously ample assets in a plunging black bodysuit that she tucked into skintight jeans.

The brunette accessorised with a pair of round-rimmed sunglasses, hoop earrings and a delicate gold necklace.

Keeping it casual: Natasha, 28, went braless in a stylish beige top as she slung a Louis Vuitton backpack over one shoulder

Cleavage-baring ensemble: Meanwhile, Devin flaunted her famously ample assets in a plunging black bodysuit that she tucked into skintight jeans

The two women, who were joined by another female friend, got straight down to business after meeting at Mauro's Restaurant on Melrose Avenue.

The outing follows speculation that Natasha and her fashion model ex-boyfriend Gilles Souteyrand had reconciled after splitting earlier this year.

The Frenchman recently shared a photo to Instagram of himself holding Natasha in his arms as she straddled him affectionately.

Curves ahead: The brunette accessorised with a pair of round-rimmed sunglasses, hoop earrings and a delicate gold necklace

Ladies who lunch! The two women, who were joined by another female friend, got straight down to business after meeting at Mauro's Restaurant on Melrose Avenue

On the search! At one point, Natasha rummaged through her luxury bag looking for something

Curiously, Gilles did not reference his relationship status in the caption, and instead used the accompanying text to promote his fitness brand.

However, fans of the genetically-blessed duo were quick to congratulate them for 'getting back together'.

It remains to be seen if they have actually reunited, but Natasha claimed in July that she was 'single' following the break-up.
She debuted her relationship with DJ Robbie Lowe in April, just months after being rejected by on-screen husband Sean Thomsen.

And it appears Married At First Sight star Blair Rachael's newfound romance is still going strong.

The 32-year-old looked loved-up as ever on Thursday as she shared a selfie with her beau to Instagram.

Still going strong! Married At First Sight's Blair Rachael looks loved-up as ever with partner Robbie Lowe after returning from a romantic Fiji escape

Blair, who has been nicknamed 'Blair Rabbit' by friends for her self-confessed love of sex, cuddled up to her partner in the candid throwback.

The former Miss Bondi competitor captioned the photo: 'Cannot wait to be in your arms again tomorrow night #lover.'

Blair had returned to Sydney's Manly a day earlier than Robbie from their romantic escape to Fiji.

Holiday mode: Blair had returned to Sydney's Manly a day earlier than Robbie from their romantic escape to Fiji

New love: The Married At First Sight star debuted her relationship with DJ Robbie Lowe in April

While on holiday, they soaked up the sunshine island hopping and snorkeling the pristine waters, as well as indulging in some surfing.

DJ Robbie was the main act at floating party pontoon venue Cloud 9 from September 18 to 20.

Robbie previously shared a selfie with Blair, claiming: 'Im definitely punching!'

Vacation time: While on holiday, they soaked up the sunshine island hopping and snorkeling the pristine waters, as well as indulging in some surfing

Blair's loved-up posts come after she was left in tears when TV 'husband' Sean rejected her during Nine's social experiment show in late February.

The bubbly blonde departed MAFS after he decided to leave the experiment.

Blair and Sean's lack of chemistry apparently saw them ultimately get the boot from the reality experiment.
Game Of Thrones won the Emmy for Outstanding Drama Series for the third time on Monday.

And on Wednesday, actress Emilia Clarke celebrated with a very special inking.

The 31-year-old, who stars as Daenerys Targaryen, the Mother of Dragons in the HBO show, posted a photo to Instagram showing off her new tattoo of tiny flying dragons on her right wrist.

Body ink: She plays Daenerys Targaryen, the Mother of Dragons on Game Of Thrones and on Wednesday, Emilia Clarke showed off her new dragons tattoo on Instagram

Famous role: The three winged dragons inked on her right wrist will, she said, always remind her of 'her babies'

The photo is taken sideways on and shows Emilia laughing as she raises her right arm to display her new body art.

She's wearing a green jacket and bright red lipstick and wears her blonde hair tucked behind her ear that displays a large gold hoop earring.

On her wrist are three tiny dragons with wings spread.

In the caption, she wrote: 'MOD 4 LYFE!!!! @_dr_woo_ made sure this mamma aint NEVER forgetting her babies....'

Dr. Woo is a tattoo artist in LA often used by celebrities.

Winning: The 31-year-old British actress has had a great week after Game Of Thrones won Outstanding Drama Series for the third time at the Emmy Awards in LA on Monday night

On Monday night, Emilia looked stunning as she arrived for the Emmys in a revealing lace black gown with a dramatic floral embroidered skirt.

The tight-fitting patterned bodice was virtually see-through and the dramatic full skirt tumbled to the floor.

Her slightly darkened blonde hair was styled in a sleek low bun and she accessorized with jade drop earrings.

Pure elegance: Emilia looked stunning on the red carpet in a revealing lace black gown with an almost see-through patterned bodice and a dramatic floral embroidered skirt

Made her famous: Emilia has herself been nominated three times for a supporting actress Emmy for her role in the HBO series. She's been starring as Daenerys since 2011

Emilia, who herself as been nominated three times for a supporting actress Emmy for her performance as Daenerys, joined her co-stars on stage to accept the Outstanding Drama Series Emmy Monday night.

The eighth and final season of Game Of Thrones will air on HBO next year and the final six episodes have already been filmed.

Actor Peter Dinklage won his third supporting actor Emmy Monday for his role as Tyrion Lannister.

The series also won four other Emmys this year, for costumes, music composition, prosthetic makeup and stunt coordination.

Celebrating: Emilia joined her co-stars for photos after the awards show. The fantasy series comes to an end next year with an eighth and final six-episode season
D'Andra Simmons screamed at LeeAnne Locken on Wednesday's episode of The Real Housewives of Dallas, saying she felt 'betrayed' after confiding in her.

The friendship of 10 years hit the skids after LeeAnne had insinuated that D'Andra only had $200 to her name.

The wealthy Texans went for a 'group therapy' session, which involved breaking things inside an 'anger room.'

Anger management: D'Andra Simmons vented her anger with LeeAnne Locken on Wednesday's episode of The Real Housewives Of Dallas

'I've never been this angry at LeeAnne in my entire life,' said D'Andra, who comes from money but was having some difficulties because she needed to separate from the joint business with her mother.

LeeAnne, a 51-year-old hothead, said the group was 'pretty good at being fake', which sparked off D'Andra about the $200 comment.

'That is not helpful to me, I know things about you that I would never say to anyone,' she bellowed.

'Who in the world would even believe this rumor, is this her Starbucks account?' scoffed Kameron Westcott, 35.

Fake friends: LeeAnne gathered the woman at the Anger Room to put an end to their fakeness

Called out: D'Andra called out LeeAnne for spreading a rumor that she only had $200 to her name

'You do not get to do that to me because I have your back and you do not have my back,' said D'Andra tearfully.

LeeAnne blamed nurse Cary Deuber for throwing her 'under the bus' because she was the one who told D'Andra.

'It's humiliating, I feel like you just betrayed me,' sobbed D'Andra.

Getting emotional: D'Andra sobbed after telling LeeAnne that she felt betrayed

Worst rumor: Kameron Westcott noted that nobody would believe that D'Andra was broke and wondered if the $200 referred to the balance of her Starbucks account

Former Dallas Cowboys cheerleader Brandi Redmond said that a lack of money shouldn't be a source of humiliation.

'Hello! I grew up in a trailer,' smiled the 40-year-old redhead.

Brandi then confronted LeeAnne about her 'hesitations' over her friendship with D'Andra.

Confrontation time: Brandi while they were in the Anger Room also confronted LeeAnne about her 'hesitations' over her friendship with D'Andra

'Why the hell are you telling her not to be friends with me?' she asked.

Kameron chimed in to accuse Brandi of being a 'bad influence' on D'Andra.

'She is a grown woman, she can make her own decisions,' sighed Brandi.

Bad influence: Kameron chimed in and said that Brandi was a 'bad influence' on D'Andra

Grown woman: Brandi defended herself by saying that D'Andra was a 'grown woman' and could make her own decisions

'If these b****es don't want to be around me and that think that I'm a bad influence then sayonara,' she added defiantly.

'Maybe we just shouldn't be friends,' Brandi told Kameron.

The show titled 'Smashing Friendships' opened with Brandi prepping her kids for a visit from the social workers related to her recent adoption.

New addition: The former Dallas Cowboys cheerleader opened the show prepping her daughters for a visit from social workers related to her recent adoption of son Bruin

'When they come you all have to tell them how amazing your mom is,' Brandi told her girls as she cradled her adopted son Bruin.

'The social workers will continue to check in on us once a month, to make sure I'm not too bats*** crazy,' she explained.

'I know that I'm a f***ing amazing mother, but our life is under a microscope,' she fretted, as her daughters Brooklyn, nine, and six-year-old Brinkley vexed her with repeated cheeky comments.

Social workers: A pair of social workers visited Brandi as part of a monthly check-in

They joked about telling the social workers that their mother ignored them and was on her phone all the time.

'I think my kids are being little s***s,' Brandi joked.

Dog-lover Kameron was off to Orlando, Florida to run a Sparkledog booth at the Global Pet Expo for her premium dog food brand.

Cheeky comment: Brooklyn and Brinkley teased their mom and said they would tell the social workers that she ignores them and is on her phone all the time

She had no idea how to travel alone, asking her husband if she needed to collect her bags before the rental car.

LeeAnne and D'Andra also went for coffee.

D'Andra, who admitted being born 'with a silver spoon' in her mouth, was trying to break away from her 'controlling' mother in her business.

Coffee break: LeeAnne listened as D'Andra talked about her business challenge over coffee

'You are lazy, you like your princess lifestyle and it's your own damn fault,' said LeeAnne, a former Miss USA Pageant finalist.

'LeeAnne is being really condescending right now and it's pissing me off because she doesn't pay for her household expenses, I pay for mine, Rich [her fiance] pays for hers,' complained D'Andra, whose husband is retired, making her the breadwinner.

LeeAnne then met with her wedding planner and best friend Steve.

Wedding planner: Steve met up with LeeAnne and her fiance Rich to go over wedding plans

Rich, her husband-to-be, said he 'hadn't even thought' about the wedding.

LeeAnne wanted 500 to 1,000 guests, but he vetoed that idea.

'I don't like that many people,' he scoffed.

Smaller wedding: Rich wanted a smaller wedding than the 500 to 1,000 guests LeeAnne wanted to invite

D'Andra cried to Cary about her fear about cutting off her mother, and possibly losing her money.

'I just feel like I'm kind of falling apart,' she sobbed.

The heiress grew angry when she heard that LeeAnne told Cary that she 'only had $200 in her bank account'.

Falling apart: Cary Deuber listened as D'Andra cried about her fear of cutting off her mother

'I have five bank accounts,' she huffed, while calling the experience 'humiliating.'

Stephanie Hollman's husband Travis was going back to business school, meaning she'd be home alone with their two young sons Chance and Cruz.

'I just get really anxious whenever I'm by myselfI feel like I constantly let myself down and when I let myself down it triggers depression,' said Stephanie, who admitted to always striving for perfection.

The Real Housewives Of Dallas continues next week on Bravo.

Business school: Stephanie Hollman's husband Travis was going back to school for a business degree
On Wednesday, Jessica Alba and Gabrielle Union filmed action-packed scenes on the Los Angeles set of Spectrum's Bad Boys spin-off, L.A.'s Finest.

The 37-year-old Golden Globe nominee wielded a handgun in front of lockers at a school while clad in brown blazer and black leggings as LAPD detective Nancy McKenna.

The Mexican-American beauty produces and stars as a 'married mother of two preteen stepkids, who joined the Army out of high school and spent most of the 2000s working as military police in Iraq and Afghanistan' - according to Deadline.

TV twosome: On Wednesday, Jessica Alba (L) and Gabrielle Union (R) filmed action-packed scenes on the Los Angeles set of Spectrum's Bad Boys spin-off, L.A.'s Finest

Meanwhile, the Nebraska-born 45-year-old's LAPD detective Sydney 'Syd' Burnett bravely prevented a gun-toting criminal from firing his weapon while holding a woman hostage.

The Breaking In actress - who's executive producing - was also undercover wearing a black jacket over a muscle tee and baggy jeans selected by costume designer Janelle Nicole Carothers.

When the cameras weren't rolling, Gabrielle flashed her effervescent smile while hauling script pages and a large container of alkaline water.

Both Alba and Union Insta-storied behind-the-scenes snaps from their trailer and their director's chair, respectively.

Locked and loaded: The 37-year-old Golden Globe nominee wielded a handgun in front of lockers at a school while clad in brown blazer and leggings as LAPD detective Nancy McKenna

In pursuit: The Mexican-American beauty produces and stars as a 'married mother of two preteen stepkids, who joined the Army out of high school and spent most of the 2000s working as military police in Iraq and Afghanistan'

Taking control: The Nebraska-born 45-year-old's LAPD detective Sydney 'Syd' Burnett bravely prevented a gun-toting criminal from firing his weapon while holding a woman hostage

Freeze sucka! The Breaking In actress - who's executive producing - was also undercover wearing a black jacket over a muscle tee and baggy jeans selected by costume designer Janelle Nicole Carothers

Bring It On alum: When the cameras weren't rolling, Gabrielle flashed her effervescent smile while hauling script pages and a large container of alkaline water

'Workkkkkk!' Both Alba and Union Insta-storied behind-the-scenes snaps from their trailer and their director's chair, respectively

Rather than original stars Martin Lawrence and Will Smith, Jerry Bruckheimer's 13-episode buddy cop drama features Ernie Hudson, Zach Gilford, and Duane Martin.

In it, the We're Going to Need More Wine author reprises her exact role as the Miami-born single lady Syd from the 2003 sequel Bad Boys II.

L.A.'s Finest marks Jessica's first small-screen role since playing genetically-enhanced supersoldier Max Guevara/X5-452 in Dark Angel, which ran for two seasons (2000-2002) on Fox.

Premiering next year! Rather than original stars Martin Lawrence and Will Smith, Jerry Bruckheimer's 13-episode buddy cop drama features Ernie Hudson, Zach Gilford, and Duane Martin

15 years ago! In it, the We're Going to Need More Wine author reprises her exact role as the Miami-born single lady Syd from the 2003 sequel Bad Boys II

Return to TV: L.A.'s Finest marks Jessica's first small-screen role since playing genetically-enhanced supersoldier Max Guevara/X5-452 in Dark Angel, which ran for two seasons (2000-2002) on Fox

On Tuesday, the Honest Company boss shared a snap of two of her three children - seven-year-old daughter Haven and eight-month-old son Hayes - with husband Cash Warren.

The Pair of Thieves sock designer proudly announced on Instagram last Saturday that his only son's first official word was 'Dada.'

Meanwhile, the UCLA grad is stepmother to three sons (Zaire, Zion, and Xavier) and one nephew (Dahveon) from her second husband, Miami Heat shooting guard Dwayne Wade, Jr.

'These two!' On Tuesday, the Honest Company boss shared a snap of two of her three children - seven-year-old daughter Haven and eight-month-old son Hayes - with husband Cash Warren
She's dubbed herself the original supermodel.

And Janice Dickinson looked just as great as ever while heading out from the nail salon in LA on Tuesday.

The New York native, 63, charmed in pink peasant blouse with tattered jeans as she left the manicurist with fresh claws.

Post-pampering: Janice Dickinson was spotted leaving the nail salon on Tuesday

Rings, a necklace, leather bag and simple sandals completed her look.

Janice wore her light brown locks long and loose with a deep side part.

Wide sunglasses hid the majority of her face but her full pout was still visible.

Looking sharp! The New York native, 63, charmed in pink peasant blouse with tattered jeans as she left the manicurist with fresh claws

Janice rose to fame in the 70s.

She returned to the spotlight once again in the early 2000s as one of the judges on America's Next Top Model.

She is also the author of three bestselling books.

Janice Dickinson, 63, (left) was united with her long-lost half-sister Gloria 'Bunny' Dickinson (center) in an emotional meeting along with her full sister Alexis, 67, (right) in New York City, DailyMailTV can reveal

Dickinson, who has been married four times, recently had the pleasure of uniting with her long lost older sister Gloria 'Bunny' Dickinson  a woman she didn't know existed until a year ago.

'It was amazing to meet her, beautiful. I'm absolutely out of my body. I'm floating,' Janice told DailyMailTV in an exclusive interview.

'At 63 years of age, I have known the world but nothing equates to this feeling.

'This is the most insane thing that's ever happened to me and a lot has happened to me.'
Erin Barnett has vowed to drop a bombshell tell-all video about her relationship with Eden Dally this week.

And on Tuesday, the feisty blonde sent a not-so-subtle message to her ex while attending TJ Swim's exclusive Summer/Spring 19' collection launch in Sydney.

The outspoken Love Island Australia personality displayed her cleavage and no-nonsense attitude by flipping the bird alongside exhibitionist Imogen Anthony.

Birds of a feather! Love Island's Erin Barnett (right) flips the bird as she poses with Imogen Anthony (left)... after vowing to reveal what REALLY caused Eden Dally split

Imogen shared the eyebrow-raising photo on Wednesday and declared herself and Erin 'bad girls.'

'Side profiles and heavy eyeliner... Scroll thru for xxtra fun w/ @erin.alysha - #badgirls,' Imogen captioned.

Erin, who attended the Upper East Side Bondi event with her Love Island co-stars, came face-to-face with fellow guest Eden, 25, for the first time since their split.

He was seen cosying up to stunning blonde Belinda Taylor, 22, at the event.

Over: Eden and Erin found love on the Inaugural season of Love Island Australia in May. They announced their split earlier this month and Eden recently told Daily Mail Australia that cheating rumours tore them apart

Erin recently vowed to reveal the 'truth' about their breakup after the Sydney prison officer blamed cheating rumours.

'I will not be talking about Eden and I or Love Island, that will be my next video,' she said in a YouTube clip last week.

In an Instagram story video on Thursday, she reiterated that a bombshell tell-all will be released soon.

Drama: On the show, Eden appeared to have a short temper and was constantly embroiled in drama. Pictured: Eden (right) and Grant Crapp's (left) fight

'My YouTube video will be up this week, I'm just going through a few things to see what I'm allowed to say and what I'm not allowed to say on YouTube in regards to Eden the f***head!' she said.

Eden and Erin found love on the inaugural season of Love Island Australia in May.

They announced their split earlier this month and Eden recently told Daily Mail Australia that cheating rumours tore them apart.

Arguments: Eden and Erin would often clash on the show however they later denied having a 'toxic' relationship

'There were many issues. A few little jealously and trust issues. Arguments and disagreements because strangers would send Erin and me messages,' he said.

'It was just happening constantly. Girls would claim they were with me or saw me with other girls. I would do nightclub appearances and girls would say [to Erin], "Eden was getting rowdy with other girls in Adelaide last night" or "Eden was with my friend."

'Or if a girl asked for a photo, they would claim I was with them last night. Like, a complete stranger.'
She's no stranger to flaunting her incredible figure in barely-there ensembles.

And on Wednesday, beauty queen Elyse Knowles took to Instagram to share a picturesque photograph of herself enjoying a day at the beach.

Flaunting her washboard abs and trim pins, the 25-year-old was captured splashing in the crystal blue water and basking in the sunlight amid a stunning ocean backdrop.

Red hot! Elyse Knowles flaunted her enviable assets and tiny waist in a barely-there crimson bikini while basking in the sunlight at the beach

Elyse wore a racy red bikini that consisted of a triangle top and matching skimpy briefs, which were cheekily tied up with scant strings on each side of her hip.

Being the face of the brand, the blonde beauty's bikini was by popular swimwear label Seafolly and retails at approximately $140.

'One step at a time,' Elyse cheerfully captioned the post, adding the hashtags '#smile,' '#appreciate' and '#selflove'.

'One step at a time,' Elyse cheerfully captioned the post, adding the hashtags '#smile,' '#appreciate' and '#selflove'

And the blissful day out comes after Elyse hit the runway for Myer as the department store's latest ambassador.

Following in the footsteps of Jennifer Hawkins, Elyse is set to succeed the former Miss Universe, who held the coveted role for 12 years.

After Jennifer made her final runway appearance with Myer last month, Elyse made a glamorous appearance on the catwalk 24 hours later for the retail giant at a fashion show held in Melbourne.

The stunner also stepped it out alongside Rebecca Judd, who walked the runway in her own Jaggad activewear label.

Success: Following in the footsteps of Jennifer Hawkins, Elyse is set to succeed the former Miss Universe, who held the coveted role for 12 years

Earlier this year, Jennifer, 34, took to Instagram to announce her retirement as Myer's ambassador, with Elyse reportedly inking a deal for $300,00 to replace her.

At the time, Elyse paid tribute to the former Miss Universe following claims the retail giant 'replaced' her with The Block winner 'at a fraction of the price'.

'I have admired Jen for so long for her business sense and her ambition,' she told The Daily Telegraph in August.

Elyse paid tribute to the former Miss Universe following claims the retail giant 'replaced' her with The Block winner 'at a fraction of the price'.
On our TV screens she is currently competing on Australian Survivor and is down to the last seven contestants in camp.

But yesterday model Monika Radulovic swapped island life for a stylish champagne high tea at The Langham hotel in Sydney.

The 28-year-old model attended the plush Laurent-Perrier event with her husband Alesandro Ljubicic, who she wed in March.

Stylish pair! Monika Radulovic and her husband Alesandro Ljubicic wore colour-coordinated outfits to a Laurent-Perrier high team at The Langham, Sydney on Wednesday

And it seems that the couple are still in the honeymoon stage and are even dressing together, wearing coordinated outfits to the chic champagne event.

Monika, who wrapped filming for Survivor in June, looked stunning in a shimmering pleated midi skirt and a fitted white top.

Her husband Alesandro matched her look with a bright green pocket tie, adding a splash of colour to his crisp white shirt and beige blazer combination.

A far cry from Fiji: The 28-year-old is currently appearing on TV screens on the current series of Australian Survivor. The model wrapped filming for the show in June

Cheers! The stylish couple were seen with Illustrator Kerrie Hess, who has designed special limited edition gift boxes to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Laurent Perrier's Cuvee Rose

The pair attended the event to help celebrate Laurent-Perrier's 50th anniversary of their Cuvee Rose and to mark the launch of the Kerrie Hess Limited Edition Cuvee Rose Gift Box.

As well as putting on a stylish display the couple were seen chatting with celebrated Australian artist Kerrie, who looked stunning in a floral embroidered tulle dress.

The celebrated illustrator is the first artist to be invited to design for the champagne house gift box and her illustration is a tribute to Parisian life.

Birthday twins! Australia's Next Top Model star Demelza Reveley also celebrated her birthday at the event. Pictured with Simon Hancock

Historic! Kerrie is the first artist to collaborate with the fine champagne house and there are only 500 units of the Kerrie Hess Limited Edition Cuvee Rose Gift Boxes

But the event also acted as an early birthday celebration for the Miss Universe Australia model, who turned 28 on Thursday.

And after indulging in the champagne high tea, the pair went on to enjoy a couple's massage later that evening.

On Thursday morning the couple hit up a sample sale before Monika paid tribute to her husband and her friends and family in gushing birthday tributes on Instagram.

Earlier this month Monika spoke of her disappointment at her lack of air time on Australian Survivor.

During an Instagram Q&A the beauty revealed that she was 'disappointed' that viewers hadn't seen that she was 'actually involved in some much more strategy and alliances' than what had been aired.
They announced season five will be the BBC One show's final series.

And Eleanor Tomlinson took to Instagram on Tuesday to share a hilarious windswept snap after filming got under way in Cornwall for Poldark.

The actress, 26, transformed into her character Demelza and shared a photo of her fiery red locks looking dishellved after shooting scenes along the picturesque coastline with her on-screen husband Aidan Turner, who plays Ross.

She's back! Eleanor Tomlinson took to Instagram on Tuesday to share a slew of snaps as filming got under way in Cornwall for Poldark

Eleanor looked the part as she donned a forest green crushed velvet hat, Victoriana shirt and khaki coat, later sharing a photo of what she looked like after facing the weather and high winds.

She wrote: 'So nice to be back in Cornwall #poldark #series5', and poked fun at bedraggled hair which fell over her face after a full day of filming.

The actress revealed to fans her beloved dog, Bert, paid a visit to the set as she shared a loved-up photo cuddling the pooch, while in another selfie Eleanor grinned as she stood next to her 'friend for life' Beatie Edney, who plays Prudie in the period drama.

Bedraggled: The actress, 26, transformed into her character Demelza and shared a very windswept photo after shooting scenes along the picturesque coastline

Heartthrob: Her on-screen husband Aidan Turner also filmed scenes out at sea on Tuesday

Period character: Eleanor looked the part as she donned a forest green crushed velvet hat, Victoriana shirt and khaki coat while filming on horseback with horse Seamus

Sweet: The actress revealed to fans her beloved dog, Bert, paid a visit to the set as she shared a loved-up photo cuddling the pooch

Meanwhile, her on-screen husband Aidan was also seen on horseback with Eleanor on Tuesday as they galloped through Cornwall's breathtaking landscape.

Aidan has gone straight to filming Poldark following his acclaimed theatre role in The Lieutenant of Inishmore on London's West End.

Poldark bosses have confirmed that season five will be the BBC One show's final series and fans have been left devastated over the news.

Talking about the upcoming series writer Debbie Horsfield revealed that it will be based between 1800 and 1810, which takes place in between Winston Graham's seventh novel, The Angry Tide and The Stranger from the Sea.

Tight-knit cast: In another selfie Eleanor grinned as she stood next to her 'friend for life' Beatie Edney, who plays Prudie in the period drama

She said: 'In The Stranger from the Sea Winston Graham made many references to developments that happened in the 'gap' years. Much can also be inferred.

'There are, of course, also historical events and people of the time, both in Cornwall and in London.

'Series five will draw on all of these to follow the lives of the Poldarks, George Warleggan, the Enyses, and the Carnes in this intervening period.'

To which executive producer for Mammoth, Karen Thrussell, added: 'At Mammoth were all fans of the Poldark books and we hope our audience will continue with us on the next stage of the journey.

Picturesque: She wrote: 'So nice to be back in Cornwall #poldark #series5', as she shared a snap of the idyllic coastline

'We are confident that fans of the novels will appreciate the care with which Debbie Horsfield is continuing to adapt Winston Grahams saga. This will be the last series in the Poldark chronicle...for now.

'Who knows what the future may bring...'

And as well as the show's leads, several new stars are joining the cast as new characters, which haven't been revealed just yet.

This includes Lily Dodsworth Evans, Kerri McLean, Sofia Oxenham, Vincent Regan, Peter Sullivan, and Freddie Wise.

Ross Poldark was left shattered during the July finale of the fourth series of Poldark when his childhood sweetheart Elizabeth Warleggan (Heida Reed) died.

The fourth series of the hit BBC drama ended in tragedy when the popular character died shortly after the birth of her second child with husband George, leaving fans devastated.

Viewers saw a desperate Elizabeth take drugs to induce an early birth, in an attempt to persuade husband George (Jack Farthing) that her son Valentine, was his and not Ross's.

By trying to induce her second baby and have an early delivery, Elizabeth hoped her husband would be convinced her first child Valentine was also premature and end his suspicions for good.

The dangerous plan at first worked, and Elizabeth gave birth to a healthy baby daughter but soon after she was found collapsed and in pain and died holding George's hand.
Imogen Anthony has had her fair share of online fights.

And on Thursday, the 27-year-old was at it again when she jumped to the defence of Real Housewife of Sydney star Athena X Levendi,

The RHOS star had been 'bullied' by an online troll before Imogen attempted to come to the rescue via her own Instagram account.

'It's illegal and needs to be taken seriously!': Imogen Anthony (left) hit back at an online 'bully' this week after the troll sent mean messages to Real Housewives' Athena X (right)

Taking to social media, Imogen shared one of Athena's posts in which the RHOS star revealed the online perpetrator who had been consistently insulting her via private message.

Re-sharing the post which named and shamed the online 'bully', Imogen wrote over the top of it, 'This is illegal - did you know?'

The caption was directed towards a private message originally directed at Athena, which read: 'The world would be a better place if people like you weren't on it. You're a total idiot!'

Imogen to the rescue! The blonde social media sensation shared Athena's post naming and shaming the troll

'If we all started taking this to the police, more laws would be enforced within the next two tears,' she continued in the text written over her screenshot.

'You can be tracked down and charged for internet harassment.'

The next Instagram Story image was a screenshot of a comment left by Imogen on Athena's Instagram account.

'Step up and become responsible for what you put out into the world': Imogen called upon social media users to put more thought into what they were uploading

'Wow this is truly horrible, she needs to have her account shut down and never allowed to use one again. It's abuse,' she wrote underneath Athena's post.

She continued: 'It's illegal and needs to be taken seriously.'

Imogen reflected on how serious online bullying is and said people need to start taking responsibility for what they put out there on the internet as it could have dire consequences.

'R.I.P - Reckless Internet Posting - the name of a small organisation I found in the States. The woman who started it had a son who was consistently bullied by trolls online, until he killed himself.'

'R.I.P - Reckless Internet Posting - the name of a small organisation I found in the States. The woman who started it had a son who was consistently bullied by trolls online, until he killed himself' she wrote on her Instagram story on Thursday

She added: 'Step up and become responsible for what you put out into the world'

The girlfriend of 'shock jock' Kyle Sandilands reminded social media users to 'stop worrying about the boobs and butts, and focus on worrying about 'horrible people that are purposely making accounts to hurt or ruin someone's life.'

One fan appeared particularly grateful and commended the model for standing up for Athena.

'Omg I can't believe reading your comment. It was just on your page love you heaps. You are a living legend,' the fan wrote.

Continuing to praise Imogen for 'calling out' bullying, the fan added: 'So many people have been affected in a bad way from cyber bullies and yes even resulting to their suicide. Enough with internet trolls.'

Her biggest fan: One of Imogen's Instagram followers has since commended the model for standing up for Athena
Helena Bonham Carter reportedly hired a psychic to contact the late Princess Margaret before playing her in The Crown.

The 52-year-old actress enlisted the help of a clairvoyant to speak to Queen Elizabeth's sister, who died in 2002 aged 71, from beyond the grave to ensure she researched the role with 'as much depth as possible'.

Speaking to The Sun, a source said: 'She always likes to research her roles with as much depth as possible - and is always prepared to go that extra mile.

Hire: Helena Bonham Carter reportedly hired a psychic to contact the late Princess Margaret before playing her in The Crown

'So if that means using someone with supernatural powers to speak to a character who is now on the other side then Helena has no problems with doing that.'

The Harry Potter star, who will appear alongside Olivia Colman, who will replace Claire Foy as the queen, in the third series of the Netflix drama, is said to have received 'positive feedback' from the princess.

The TV insider added: 'She is naturally spiritual and open-minded and is delighted shes had such positive feedback from the late royal.'

MailOnline contacted a Helena Bonham Carter's representative for comment.

Speaking: The 52-year-old actress enlisted the help of a clairvoyant to speak to Queen Elizabeth's sister, who died in 2002 aged 71, from beyond the grave to ensure she researched the role with 'as much depth as possible'

Dynamic: Speaking to The Sun , a source said: 'She always likes to research her roles with as much depth as possible - and is always prepared to go that extra mile'

Siblings: Queen Elizabeth pictured Princess Margaret at the Horseguards Parade in 1993

Helena is set to take over the role from Vanessa Kirby, who played Elizabeth's sister in the first two seasons of the show, and admitted she and her co-stars Olivia and Tobias Menzies - who will replace Matt Smith as Prince Philip - are feeling the pressure to follow on from the 'successful' first two series.

She told Variety on the Ocean's 8 red carpet: 'I think we're all ... we're completely terrified.

'I think also because the first two seasons were such a success, we have the onus of inheriting the responsibility of doing justice to all these genuinely famous people, and then on top of it, inheriting them from this previous generation of actors who've done such good jobs.

Royal role: Princess Margaret was last played by Vanessa Kirby, with the second series seeing her tie the knot with Anthony Armstrong-Jones, or Lord Snowdon

Hope and glory: The third series will also see Olivia Colman take on the role of Queen Elizabeth II, a role previously played by Claire Foy (right)

'None of us look at all like our previous generation. We don't actually look like our real people either. I don't look like Margaret. I don't think Olivia looks particularly like the queen, but it's interesting. We just have to try and create some sort of essence.'

The first series of The Crown was one of the most critically acclaimed dramas of 2016 - winning two Golden Globes and two SAG awards, and being nominated for four BAFTAs.

Additionally, the first two seasons have collectively bagged a whopping 26 Emmy nominations over the last two years.

Transformed: Tobias Menzies is set to play the royal in the 1960s and 1970s (Prince Philip right in 1978) as the Netflix show for its much-anticipated third series

Handing it over: Tobias is taking over the role of Prince Philip from Doctor Who star Matt Smith, who played the part for the show's first two series

Suave: Ben Daniels has taken over the part of Lord Snowdon from Matthew Goode, with the third series set to document his and Princess Margaret's turbulent marriage

The show, which has been met with overwhelmingly positive reviews, is the most expensive television series ever made - with the first series costing $100million to produce.

The second series dealt with the scandal surrounding Princess Margaret and Lord Snowdon, as well as swirling affair and divorce rumours between Elizabeth and Phillip.

The third is thought to focus on the 1970s, and will introduce Camilla Parker Bowles to the cast, after her first meeting with Prince Charles in 1971.

The new series is expected to land on the online streaming site in 2019.
Rupert Friend is not happy with one fan page which support his wife Aimee Mullins, after it ran throwback photos of the actor and his ex girlfriend Keira Knightley.

The actor, who is a prolific tweeter with 45k followers, spotted a post from an Aimee Mullins fan page earlier this week, which included 2008 photos of Rupert and his then girlfriend Keira arriving at a BAFTA party.

Responding to the tweet, Rupert posted a thumbs down emoji, prompting some of his followers to question why he was keen to 'erase his past.'

Ex: Rupert Friend is not happy with one fan page which support his wife Aimee Mullins, after it ran throwback photos of the actor and his ex girlfriend Keira Knightley (pictured together in 2009)

Fans rushed to support the Aimee fan behind the account, with one commenting: 'Please do not let Rupert's remark get your down! In this digital world you cannot erase your past! What's up Rupert???'

The account responded, pointing out: 'I certainly don't, I just go on. I am a fan of Aimee and regret that it is not appreciated.'

'How about an occasional thumbs up for all of the beautiful pics she posts of you and Aimee?' agreed another, tweeting Rupert.

Thumbs down: The actor gave a thumbs down to a Twitter post from an Aimee Mullins fan page which included 2008 photos of Rupert and his then girlfriend Keira arriving at a BAFTA party

'Why the down arrows? Its just focused primarily on you'' questioned another which prompted the response from the fan account:

'I know why, this is an Aimee fanpage and i post old pictures in his Keira time, Sorry Rupert.'

The apology was seen by Rupert who issued a thumbs up in response, confirming his reasons behind his discontent.

Apology: After the fan account apologised and suggested the reason for Rupert's thumbs down was because they included Keira photos, Rupert replied with a thumbs up

Keira and Rupert split in 2011 after five years together, amid speculation that gruelling work commitments had driven the actors apart.

They met on the set of their 2005 film adaptation of Pride And Prejudice.

Rupert and Aimee confirmed their engagement in late 2014, when the English actor called American fashion model Aimee on stage during the L'Oreal Paris Women Of Worth Awards in New York. They married in secret in May 2016.

Aimee first made waves in the fashion world, having featured on the cover of Dazed & Confused in an iconic image in 2008.

She was born with medical condition fibular hemimelia (missing fibula bones), resulting in the amputation of both of her lower legs at the age of one and has since become a prominent speaker on the topic of prosthetic innovation.

Split: Keira and Rupert split in 2011 after five years together, amid speculation that gruelling work commitments had driven the actors apart

Married: Rupert and American model and activist Aimee confirmed their engagement in late 2014 and married two years later (pictured in June 2018)_

Aimee is in high demand globally, speaking out on topics including body and identity.

She has made many appearances at TED conferences and her talks are some of the most watched.

Keira married musician James Righton, of Klaxons in 2013 after two years of dating. They welcomed their daughter in 2015.
Kourtney Kardashian has sparked dating rumours with Grown-ish star Luka Sabbat, despite the 19-year age gap, after the pair were seen out on a series of dates, despite the KUWTK star splitting with Younes Bendjima months earlier.

Kourtney and Luka went public last week after they were seen at The Nice Guy and later Chateau Marmont, before they continued celebrations at the opening of TAO Chicago with Khloes friend Malika Haqq and Kims bestie Jonathan Cheban.

After the sighting, a source told People that Kourtney finds Luka very charming and she is definitely interested, while another insider revealed that Luka had his arm around Kourtney, and they were flirting.

Kourtney Kardashian has sparked dating rumours with Grown-ish star and model Luka Sabbat

How old is Luka Sabbat?

Luka Sabbat is 20-years-old, a shocking 19 years younger than Kourtney Kardashian but he will definitely fit in with the Kardashian-Jenner clan having been born into a fashion family. His grandmother was an interior designer, his mother was a fashion stylist and now a chef, according to his website.

Luka was born in November 26, 1997 in New York City and grew up moving from the US city to Paris from the age of three. He is also a mix of Irish, English, German and Haitian heritage and despite hating the camera when he was young, is now represented by Noel of RE:MM.

On his website, it says: I don't believe in titles I believe you do what you want and find the right people who share your vision. If i had to put a name to it, I am a Creative Entrepreneur exploring all the world has to offer. Stylist, Creative Director, Design Director, Actor, Model, etc.....

Luka has modelled for Kanye Wests Yeezy line season one and two in 2015, but in addition to his modelling, Grown-ish fans will recognise Luka as Luca, who is Yara Shahidis love interest on the ABC show and this role was his breakthrough on the screen, as reported by Seventeen.

Kourtney Kardashian is seen with actor and model Luka Sabbat leaving The Nice Guy in LA

Kourtney Kardashian and Luka Sabbat

According to The Mirror, Luka and Kourtney met in 2016 and were pictured with family friends Stephanie Shepherd and Jonathan Cheban. The model is also reportedly friends with Kendall and Kylie Jenner.

Kourtney and Luka have been linked for a month and the Kardashian is head over heels for him, with a source revealing to People that She finds Luka very charming and she is definitely interested. Another said: Luka had his arm around Kourtney, and they were flirting.

However, although the couple were spotted at a number of fancy eateries and were close to each other, there was no PDA between them. There was a sense of chemistry as the two were laughing and having fun together all night.'

'Kourtney is great, she seems very happy. She had fun in Chicago with friends and Luka. She is back in L.A. now with her kids. Things with Luka are pretty new. It's not like she calls him a boyfriend. They are having fun. She finds Luka very charming and she is definitely interested. Everyone seems to have a very positive attitude about him.

The source went on to say that Kourtneys friends like Luka, but did not feel the same towards her previous beau, Younes Bendjima, who was also much younger than Kourtney at 25-years-old. 'All of their friends know she's head over heels for Luka.

None of her friends liked Younes, and they all love Luka even though he's only 20! They think he's good for her, and he's a very down to earth and good guy.'

Younes and Kourtney split in August and prior to that, she spent just under 10 years with the father of her children, Scott Disick.

Younes Bendjima split

Kourtney and Younes's split was confirmed when he was seen frolicking around on a Mexican beach with model Jordan Ozuna, who was also previously linked to Tyga after he ended his relationship with Kylie Jenner last year.

The male model made his debut with Givenchy by Riccardo Tisci in 2011 before he walked multiple shows and landed a Balmain campaign. Represented by Next Model Management, he also dated Jourdan Dunn after meeting her at the Met Gala in 2015.

Kourtney met Younes in a bar in Paris during Fashion Week in 2016, around the same time that Kim Kardashian was robbed in a hotel in the French capital.

Kourtney Kardashian and Younes Bendjima are seen here in Rome, Italy before their split

They split last month, with a source reporting that it did not end well after pictures emerged of Younes with another woman, but he denied allegations that they were dating. The source also revealed that Younes had never liked Kourtneys revealing pictures.

He never liked that she posted sexy pictures of herself on social media. He doesnt want his girlfriend to do that. He gets that its her job, but wants her to post more covered-up pictures. He has always had a problem with this. This is the stuff they argue about and what made them split in the past.

Scott Disick

Although Kourtney's ex and father to her children Scott Disick is still with Sofia Richie, a source revealed that 'Sofia is annoyed with Scott's obsession over his ex Kourtney. She's tired of listening to Scott complain about Kourtney and Sofia really doesn't like to hear Scott whine about Younes [Bendjima] taking his place.'

Scott Disick and Kourtney Kardashian arrive at his birthday celebration in Las Vegas

The insider added: 'It's a real turn-off when Scott stalks Kourtney online and obsesses about her, there is only so much more Sofia can take.' Scott started dating Kourtney in 2006 after meeting at a house party thrown by Joe Francis, the creator of Girls Gone Wild.

While their relationship ended in 2015, the couple reportedly attempted to reconcile in late 2016; though pictures of Scott Disick and J Lynne in 2017 together cast doubt over that. In the nine years they were together, they had three children together: Mason, Penelope and Reign.
Katie Piper stepped out with her bodyguard as she headed to rehearsals in London on Thursday.

The philanthropist has reportedly been given 'round the clock security' by Strictly Come Dancing bosses ahead of her acid attacker being released from prison.

The television personality, 34, cut a sporty figure as she practised her Waltz with professional dancer Gorka Marquez ahead of Saturday's show.

Time to dance: Katie Piper stepped out with her bodyguard as she headed to rehearsals in London on Thursday

Katie, who welcomed her second daughter Belle back in December, dressed her incredible post-baby figure in a black leotard and mustard yellow joggers.

Tying her blonde locks into a high ponytail, she paired the look with black trainers and toted a canvas bag and black leather bag over her shoulders.

The inspirational model, who will waltz to When We Were Young by Adele this weekend, appeared worn out as she left rehearsals with her bodyguard.

Dancing shoes: The philanthropist and television personality, 34, cut a sporty figure as she practised her Waltz with professional dancer Gorka Marquez ahead of Saturday's show

The mother-of-two has reportedly been given round the clock security by bosses at Strictly Come Dancing ahead of her acid attacker being released from prison.

Stefan Sylvestre, 30, is set to be freed imminently after Parole Board officials ruled he was no longer a danger to society, despite the model pleading with them to keep him locked up.

Katie, is active in training and rehearsals for the BBC show and sources say bosses have taken action to ensure she feels safe at all times.

Hard: Katie, pictured with Strictly dance partner Gorka Marquez, pleaded with the Parole Board not to release Sylvestre but said the show was helping her come to terms with the decision

A source at Strictly told The Sun: Strictly have discussed security with Katie and she has voiced her worries.

They told her that they will do all they can to ensure she is safe at all times. She decided against attending the press day but is putting on a brave face for the show.

Off-camera she keeps a very low profile. Now she is on Strictly its going to be tougher, but part of the conditions of her being on the show was they understood this.

Distraction: In an Instagram post last week, Piper revealed she was devastated Sylvestre would be released but her time on Strictly was helping her through it

Sylvestre, pictured, was jailed for six years in 2009 for the vicious attack that left Piper's face and body scarred

Sylvestre was jailed for six years after the attack in north London in March 2008 which left Piper severely scarred on her face and body.

Her ex-boyfriend and obsessed fan Daniel Lynch ordered the attack and was subsequently jailed for 16 years.

The Parole Board decided to release Sylvestre after concluding he 'displayed empathy for the victim and expressed remorse and shame for his actions'.

In an Instagram post last week, Piper revealed she was devastated Sylvestre would be released but her time on Strictly was helping her through it.

She wrote: 'Hi everyone, I felt it was important to put a message out to my friends, supporters and followers.

'This is a really difficult time for me. I am trying to come to terms with the decision and this is something I need to deal with.

'Over the past two weeks Strictly has already given me such a welcome and positive distraction from my past.

'Whilst there is never a good time to hear this news I am glad I have this new journey to concentrate on.

'Thank you for your continued support, I really appreciate it. Love Katie x'

A spokeswoman for Strictly Come Dancing said the show always considers the security of its celebrities as a high priority.

A statement: We always have extensive security measures in place to protect our cast, crew and audience, and the arrangements are reviewed regularly.

Representatives for Piper declined to comment when approached by MailOnline.
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Kimberley Garner has given fans an inside look at her stunning London home thanks to a slew of social media posts.

The 28-year-old former Made In Chelsea star is regularly seen sharing snaps of her incredible London home as the backdrop to her jaw-dropping looks, with the property boasting an enormous dining area and wall-to-wall artwork.

Kimberley's home has enough space to fit the entire cast of the E4 reality show alongside her, with the top-of-the-range pad also boasting a state-of-the-art kitchen, and two living rooms.

Amazing: Kimberley Garner has given fans an inside look at her stunning London home thanks to a slew of social media posts, with the property boasting a luxury dining room, wall to wall artwork and a staggering two living rooms

In one snap Kimberley's incredible kitchen is on full display, with white wood finishing and marble worktops, with the star even stripping down to her underwear as she prepares a dinner spread.

The bikini designer's posh pad has plenty of high windows and ceilings to make the home look far larger than most, with extra luxury coming from crystal chandeliers.

When Kimberley is entertaining her Chelsea pals, she has an enormous dining table with enough space for ten people, with guests able to perch on comfortable cream fabric chairs.

Jaw-dropping: The 28-year-old former Made In Chelsea star is regularly seen sharing snaps of her incredible London home, which is lined with soft cream furnishings and sleek dark wood finishes

And as if one living room wasn't enough, Kimberley's home as two separate lounge areas, both perfectly furnished with taupe sofas and a black wood finishing.

The spacious home also contains an oriental feel thanks to the delicate trims and extra detailing, with an array of different art pieces lining the walls.

As she whips up some delicious meals, Kimberley's pad even has a built in stereo system, so she can enjoy some tunes while putting together a delicious dish.

Lovely: The bikini designer's posh pad has plenty of high windows and ceilings to make the home look far larger than most, with the kitchen covered in sleek marble and white worktops

Perfection: An ever-present companion in Kimberley's property is her adorable pet Spaniel who can regularly be seen in snaps either perched on a sofa or nestled in her arms

An ever-present companion in Kimberley's property is her adorable pet Spaniel who can regularly be seen in snaps either perched on a sofa or nestled in her arms.

In her seemingly-endless social media feed Kimberley's home makes the perfect backdrop for her snaps, with looks ranging from a stunning black gown to mere lingerie.

It comes after she was forced to deny claims she had gone under the knife, recently taking to Instagram to share a sizzling bikini snap.

She wrote: 'For all the gossip, no I have not had a boob job, and no I have not had a butt job! (Which still comes as a very weird concept to me)'

Relaxing: The living room is covered with wall-to-wall artwork to decorate the property, with wall-to-ceiling windows making sure every space is well lit

'Womens bodys change, sometimes Im a little chubbier and sometimes too skinny, its just natural and so important to love our bodys, whatever the phase.

'But thanks for all the gossip I have heard over the past year, it has really made me laugh.'

She continued: 'ps I have been learning some butt exercises, will make a video, incase you want a fake butt ;) (sic).'

Unbelievable: In her seemingly-endless social media feed Kimberley's home makes the perfect backdrop for her snaps, with looks ranging from a stunning black gown to mere lingerie




Their daughter Kaia Gerber is currently leading the model pack at Milan Fashion Week.

But Cindy Crawford and Rande Gerber proved they're enjoying a more relaxed way of life as they hit Nobu restaurant in Malibu, California for a bite to eat on Wednesday evening, joined by their son Presley, 19.

The long-time spouses looked in high spirits as they left the upscale eatery, where original supermodel Cindy, 52, sported a typically chic style.

Family night out: Cindy Crawford and Rande Gerber proved they're enjoying a more relaxed way of life as they hit Nobu restaurant in Malibu, California for a bite to eat on Wednesday evening, joined by their son Presley, 19

The model maverick exuded cool in a polka dot blouse that boasted a cross-over, plunging neckline.

She tucked the chic garment into light-wash jeans, which featured an on-trend distressed hem, and elongated her already lithe legs with barely-there black stilettos that possessed a cool, perspex strap across the front of the foot.

Cindy finished the look by draping a black leather bomber jacket across her shoulders and toted her evening essentials in a tassled leather sidebag by high-end fashion house Gucci.

Animated: The long-time spouses looked in high spirits as they left the upscale eatery, where original supermodel Cindy, 52, sported a typically chic style

The beauty's trademark brunette tresses were styled into big, bouncy waves, while her face sported a neutral make-up palette.

Rande and son Presley, who, like Kaia, is also a model, sported more casual styles for their plush night out.

Presley opted for the nonchalant combo of a white T-shirt layered beneath an unbuttoned shirt while Rande teamed a khaki shirt and jeans with a navy bomber jacket.

In demand: The teenage model has been one of Fashion Month's most prominent stars [pictured storming the Fendi runway on Thursday for Milan Fashion Week]

The family looked contented as they left their dinner, which came as Kaia wrapped up her first day at Milan Fashion Week.

The teenage model has been one of Fashion Month's most prominent stars, having stormed a number of coveted runways, including Calvin Klein, Marc Jacobs and most recently Fendi.

Cindy has voiced her support for Kaia's modelling career, though previously admitted she would have preferred her daughter delayed her runway debut until she was 18.

She told The Associated Press: 'In some ways, I wish I could have pushed it off a year or two. But she's 16. That's how old I was when I started, which is young, but in fashion that's kind of the normal age when people start.'
Falling Down, a posthumous collaboration between XXXTentacion and Lil Peep has been released, thought to have been completed after they both passed away.

Co-writer ILoveMakonnen, who teased the track on Instagram, revealed that he and Lil Peep had been working on a new album, now left unfinished because of the rappers overdose at age 21, according to The Independent.

After hearing Falling Down, XXXTentacion recorded his own addition to it, before he was shot and killed in June 2018, resulting in his family reaching out to Peeps management to collaborate.

Lil Peep started to become a recognisable Instagram star because of the tattoos on his face

Who was Lil Peep?

Born Gustav Elijah Ahr on November 1, 1996 in Pennsylvania and having grown up in Long Island, New York, Lil Peeps parents were both Harvard graduates who split while he was in his teens, as reported in NME.

Speaking to The Times in August 2017, Peep said: 'I always got good grades, I just didnt go to school much. I didnt like it. They let me do my diploma from home, but I always knew I was destined to do something creative, so I didnt care.

However, he got his first tattoo at age 14 and as well as becoming known for his music, Peep started to become a recognisable Instagram star because of the tattoos on his face, which included Get cake, die young and the title of one of his song, Crybaby.

Lil Peep was also invited to walk at show at Paris and Milan Fashion Weeks because of his unique look, also having been photographed by the likes of Mario Testino for V Magazine. The rapper explained this in The Times interview.

They all say the same. That Im edgy. Of course its as much about image as music, he continued, but you could say the same about rock stars of the past.

They were characters. David Bowie is my biggest inspiration. Pretty much the only thing that stayed the same with Bowie was his eyes. Everything else constantly changed, from his sexuality to his songs. Around the same time that the interview was published, Lil Peep came out as bisexual.

Lil Peep songs

Part of Schema Posse and GothBoiClique, Lil Peep released his first mixtape LIL PEEP PART ONE in 2015, followed up with an EP called Feelz and later came out with another mixtape, this one being named LIVE FOREVER, all in the same year.

In 2016, the rapper came out with his well-known EP Crybaby, but his breakthrough release was Hellboy which preceded his debut album Come Over When Youre Sober Pt. 1 in August 2017. His music videos also draw in millions of views, especially for hits such as White Wine, Awful Things and Benz Truck.

When speaking about writing music, Lil Peep said it takes me like five minutes to make a whole f***ing song, he revealed to The Fader, although his tracks were a plethora of trap, emo, grunge and southern rock.

Peep also sampled Radiohead and Brand New in his music, writing about drug use and mental illness in his songs. In one notable track, OMFG, the lyrics are as follows: I used to wanna kill myself, came up, still wanna kill myself, my life is goin nowhere, I want everyone to know that I dont care.

Questioned about these lyrics, Peep said: Yeah, it is serious. I suffer from depression and some days I wake up and Im like: F***, I wish I didnt wake up  I realized it was just myself  its a chemical imbalance in my brain.

Some days Ill be very down and out, but you wont be able to tell, really, because I dont express that side of myself on social media. Thats the side of myself that I express through music. Thats my channel for letting all that s**t out, he said according to Pitchfork.

Lil Peep death

Lil Peep died on November 15, 2017 with the medical examiner confirming that an overdose on fentanyl and Xanax had been the cause, as reported by NME. He was 21 at the time and his death was considered to be accidental.

Peep is also said to have tested positive for painkillers and tranquilizers including benzodiazepines and tramadol, as well as cocaine and marijuana, but tested negative for alcohol.

The rapper was memorialised with his face being projected on the House of Commons a week after his death and family and friends paid tribute at a service in Long Beach, California.

Falling Down

Falling Down, a posthumous collaboration between XXXTentacion and Lil Peep was released on September 20, months after both rappers passed away. The track was their first song together and is thought to have been completed after they had both passed away, according to The Independent.

ILoveMakonnen teased the release on Instagram and said: I posted a few weeks ago about how much it meant to me to know that this song I co-wrote with @lilpeep inspired @xxxtentacion to want to jump on and add some verses.

OUT NOW pic.twitter.com/2kLeCFrKSI  GOTH ANGEL SINNER (@Lilpeep) September 19, 2018

He and Lil Peep had reportedly been working on a new album before the latters death and XXX had heard the track, recording his own addition to it, before he was shot in June 2018. His family reached out to Peeps management to collaborate on the track.

[X] ended up passing away, and his mom and his family were reaching out to Peeps management and everybody saying the song was something that [X] was very passionate about before he passed and he would really like to be a part of this and [asked] if we could make this happen.

So I was like, Sure. Thats what me and Peep were making music for, to bring people together, ILoveMakonnen told XXL magazine during an interview. He went on to say that it was the wish of both rappers mothers to make the song a reality and bring some closure to everybody with some healing.

A Lil Peep album will also be released in the coming months, in addition to unreleased music from XXXTentacion.

XXXtentacion is pictured during a visit to I Heart radio station 103.5 The Beat in May 2017

How did XXXTentacion die?

Born Jahseh Onfroy, XXXTentacion was shot and killed outside RIVA Motorsports in Deerfield Beach in Florida and in a statement, authorities described a developing incident at the motorcycle shop. 'An adult male victim was transported to an area hospital,' it read.

Officials later tweeted: 'The adult male that was taken to the hospital has been pronounced dead, with the police department tweeting another statement about the incident, revealing that they believed it may have been 'a possible robbery'. A Louis Vuitton bag was reportedly stolen from XXXTentacion's car.
It was a FROW that was glittered with celebrities as some of the world's top models stormed the runway.

And Nicki Minaj sported an ensemble that ensured she stood out from the crowd as she attended the Fendi Spring/Summer 2019 showcase during Milan Fashion Week on Thursday afternoon.

The rapper, 35, made a sartorial statement in a look from Fendi's streetwear collaboration with Fila as she sat alongside the fashion elite and watched the likes of Kendall Jenner and Gigi Hadid sample the high-end brand's latest collection.

Nicki Minaj sported an ensemble that ensured she stood out from the crowd as she attended the Fendi Spring/Summer 2019 showcase during Milan Fashion Week on Thursday afternoon

Nicki drew attention to her famous curves in garish leggings and flashed her toned midriff in a white crop top that had an elasticated collar once again adorned with the Fendi name.

Despite the Italian city's scorching temperature, the Superbass hitmaker refused to let the weather dictate her style as she teamed her ensemble with a padded jacket that she wore coolly off the shoulders.

Nicki toted her front row essentials in a white leather bucket bag with fringed detailing and finished her look with a matching sun-visor.

Standing out from the crowd: The rapper, 35, made a sartorial statement in a look from Fendi's streetwear collaboration with Fila as she sat alongside the fashion elite

Having more fun? The chart-topper opted for bobbed blonde locks with a blunt fringe, which she was spotted regularly maintaining inside the event with a large hand mirror

Known for regularly updating her locks, the chart-topper opted for bobbed blonde locks with a blunt fringe, which she was spotted regularly maintaining inside the event with a large hand mirror.

Her sighting came just a day after she donned a black Diesel jacket emblazoned with 'The Bad Guy' while serving as brand ambassador duties for the fashion label.

Fans were left hitting out at the Italian label's founder Renzo Rosso for the choice of the hip-hop star to represent his FW/18 'Hate Couture' collection, which benefits cyber-bullying organisations - given her recent fracas with Cardi B.

Sizzling: Nicki drew attention to her famous curves in garish leggings and flashed her toned midriff in a white crop top that had an elasticated collar

Finishing touches: Nicki toted her front row essentials in a white leather bucket bag with fringed detailing and finished her look with a matching sun-visor

The 10-time Grammy nominee has previously been locked in public feuds with chart rivals such as Cardi B, Miley Cyrus, Mariah Carey, Lil' Kim, and Remy Ma - leading to the backlash from fans about the choice to feature her as an ambassador.

When a Twitter user blasted the idea of Nicki as an 'anti-bullying beacon' on Wednesday, bosses at Diesel replied: 'We're here to support anyone who's getting hated on, and Nicki is one of them.'

The clothing company reportedly shut down an entire block near their San Babila flagship store in honor of the Trinidad-born, New York-raised star, who gushed: 'Milan, I love you!'

In the name of fashion: Despite the Italian city's scorching temperature, the Superbass rapper refused to let the weather dictate her style as she teamed her ensemble with a padded jacket

Strike a pose! Nicki playfully puckered a pout as she posed for snaps with head designer Karl Lagerfeld
Cary Fukunaga has been announced as the director of the next James Bond film and will replace Danny Boyle after he left the production over creative differences, the first time that an American has been picked to direct a Bond film.

After much speculation about who would be the director of the 25th Bond film, which will star Daniel Craig, Cary Fukunaga has beat out the likes of David Mackenzie, Denis Villeneuve, Yann Demange, Sam Mendes, Christopher Nolan and Kathryn Bigelow, who were thought to be in the running.

Fukunaga was chosen as the next Bond film director over David Mackenzie, Denis Villeneuve, Yann Demange, Sam Mendes and more

The official James Bond Twitter announcement said: Michael G. Wilson, Barbara Broccoli and Daniel Craig announced today that #Bond25 will begin filming at Pinewood Studios on 4 March 2019 under the helm of director, Cary Joji Fukunaga with a worldwide release date of 14 February 2020.

'We are delighted to be working with Cary. His versatility and innovation make him an excellent choice for our next James Bond adventure," said Michael G. Wilson and Barbara Broccoli.

Who is Cary Fukunaga?

Born July 10, 1977 in Oakland, California, Cary Joji Fukunaga is known as a producer and director, having worked in films such as Beasts of no Nation, Sin Nombre and True Detective. Fukunaga has now been named as the person who will take on directorial duties on James Bond 25, according to IMDb.

BBC reported that Cary grew in popularity after he wrote and directed Sin Nombre in 2009, which told the story of a Honduran girl and a Mexican gangster who went on a journey across the American border.

For the film, Fukunaga won a British Independent Film award for Best Foreign Film, the New Directors Prize at Edinburgh International Film Festival and three prizes at Sundance, before directing Mia Wasikowska, Michael Fassbender and Jamie Bell in an adaptation of Jane Eyre in 2011.

In 2014, he directed and executive produced the Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson documentary thriller series True Detective, which went on to win the Emmy for Outstanding Directing for a Drama Series, as reported by Metro.

Fukunaga went on to direct Beasts of no Nation, which starred Idris Elba and was watched by more than three million US subscribers as Netflix's first cinema-quality project and he was also one of the screenwriters on It, but left the project despite having been picked to direct it.

Idris Elba seen here in a scene from the 2015 Cary Joji Fukunaga film Beasts Of No Nation

IT

Back in 2015, Stephen King confirmed that New Lines It remake of his novel had been pushed back indefinitely after it emerged that writer-director Cary Fukunaga had exited the project after having repeatedly clashed with the studio over budget cuts from the $30 million first film of the two-parter.

Speaking to Variety, Cary said: I was trying to make an unconventional horror film. It didnt fit into the algorithm of what they knew they could spend and make money back on based on not offending their standard genre audience.

Our budget was perfectly fine. We were always hovering at the $32 million mark, which was their budget. It was the creative that we were really battling. It was two movies. They didnt care about that. In the first movie, what I was trying to do was an elevated horror film with actual characters.

He continued to say that their idea to make Pennywise into more than just a clown kept being rejected, despite Cary and Chase Palmer already having written the script. We invested years and so much anecdotal storytelling in it.

Chase and I both put our childhood in that story. So our biggest fear was they were going to take our script and bastardize it. So Im actually thankful that they are going to rewrite the script. I wouldnt want them to stealing our childhood memories and using that.

Cary Joji Fukunaga, Emma Stone, Patrick Somerville and Justin Theroux at Maniac premiere

Maniac

Fukunagas next release, Maniac, will be starting on Netflix from September 21. All 10 episodes follow Emma Stone who plays the lead in her first-ever television role alongside Jonah Hill, the pair having worked together on Superbad.

Justin Theroux, Sally Field, Julia Garner and Sonya Mizuno will also be making an appearance, the latter being a star of the recent hit release, Crazy Rich Asians, as reported by Express.

James Bond

Cary Joji Fukunaga will be directing the next James Bond film, which is yet to be named and will replace Danny Boyle, who stepped down from the project last month over creative differences.

The statement read: 'Michael G. Wilson, Barbara Broccoli and Daniel Craig announced today that #Bond25 will begin filming at Pinewood Studios on 4 March 2019 under the helm of director, Cary Joji Fukunaga with a worldwide release date of 14 February 2020.

'We are delighted to be working with Cary. His versatility and innovation make him an excellent choice for our next James Bond adventure," said Michael G. Wilson and Barbara Broccoli. In fact, back in 2015, the director revealed to Metro that he would like to direct a Bond movie and would bring Idris Elba on board.

That would be pretty cool to have Idris and I do a Bond film together. I wouldnt say no to that, he said. The new release date is five months later than scheduled, which will star Daniel Craig, on 25 October 2019 in the UK.

Michael G. Wilson, Barbara Broccoli and Daniel Craig announced today that #Bond25 will begin filming at Pinewood Studios on 4 March 2019 under the helm of director, Cary Joji Fukunaga with a worldwide release date of 14 February 2020. (1/2) pic.twitter.com/Oyzt826sXd  James Bond (@007) September 20, 2018
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Tensions have been reaching fever pitch between her and Yazmin Oukhellou in recent weeks.

Despite her woes, Amber Turner, 25, put on a glamorous display as she arrived for filming at The Old Regent Ballroom in Standford-Le-Hope in Essex alongside pal Chloe Meadows, also 25, on Thursday.

The blonde bombshell was sure to turn heads as she accentuated her ample cleavage in a strapless high-low midi dress for the cast-filled shoot.

Glam: Amber Turner (L), 25, put on a glamorous display as she arrived for filming at The Old Regent Ballroom in Standford-Le-Hope in Essex alongside pal Chloe Meadows (R), also 25, on Thursday

The reality star's gold brocade-printed number highlighted her narrow waist before skimming her slender frame and flaring out into a ruffle, which hinted at her slender legs.

Teetering inside the venue, she slipped on a pair of cream strappy heels, which added inches to her petite frame, and kept her accessories to a minimum with a a simple silver necklace.

The ITVBe star worked her waist-length blonde locks into a tousled style and sported a nude lip with a smokey brown eye as she arrived to set with her beau Dan Edgar, 28.

Complementing her pal's glamorous appearance, Chloe Meadows slipped into a cobalt blue backless gown, which highlighted her statuesque frame.

Going for gold: The blonde bombshell was sure to turn heads as she accentuated her ample cleavage in a strapless high-low midi dress for the cast-filled shoot

Picture pefect: The ITVBe star worked her waist-length blonde locks into a tousled style and sported a nude lip with a smokey brown eye as she arrived to set with her beau Dan Edgar, 28

Posing up a storm: Amber kept her accessories to a minimum with a a simple silver necklace, while Chloe (R) dazzled in her skin-flashing look

Chic: Complementing her pal's glamorous appearance, Chloe Meadows slipped into a cobalt blue backless gown, which highlighted her statuesque frame

Stellar: Courtney Green slipped into a slinky blue gown which featured daring double slits

Chloe's halterneck look highlighted her gym-honed figure while she gracefully walked up the pavement in her metallic heels.

She added to her sophisticated ensemble by styling her blonde locks into a straight sleek style and applying a heavy dusting of bronzer across her visage.

Tensions reached boiling point between two of The Only Way Is Essex 's power couples in last week's episode.

Trouble had been brewing between Amber and Yazmin Oukhellou in recent weeks, with the latter upset about being missed from the girls' nights out, and things only escalated when their boyfriends get involved.

The drama transpired when Yazmin asked Amber why she hadn't been invited out with her female co-stars, which prompted the pair's boyfriends James Lock and Dan to step in to defend them.

Demure darlings: Gemma Collins joined Saffron Lempriere as they arrived to filming together for the day

Party pals: Gemma stunned in a leopard print midi dress alongside her bestie Saffron, who stunned in a striking white gown with a glittering bodice

Blonde ambition: The pals arrived to the venue hand-in-hand

Happy days: Kady McDermott was only set to make more stirs as she joined her new beau Myles Barnett to film her first ever scenes for The Only Way Is Essex as she put on a glamorous display at The Old Regent Ballroom In Standford-Le-Hope

Shocking: Kady found TV fame on the ITV2 dating show, where her romance with Scott Thomas kept fans captivated due to their tumultuous rows - including a famous outburst in which she called co-star Tina Stinnes 'a Made In Chelsea reject c**t'

Denial: Insiders told The Sun: 'No one can deny that Kady and Myles make a great couple and theyre both definitely each others types'

Legs eleven: It was not only her cleavage on show but also her staggering legs

Happy days: When rumours first surfaced earlier this month, the couple remained coy at first shortly before sources revealed the details of their love

Vows: Earlier this year, Kady told the publication she would not want to hook up with another TV star, saying: 'I would never date another reality star, ever'

But it looked like their partner's involvement only exacerbated matters as things got seriously heated between James and Dan.

The situation didn't bode well with their good friends Courtney Green and Chloe Meadows either, who admited they feel caught in the middle when Yazmin gave her side of the story.

The animated bust-up between the two couples comes after James and his TOWIE co-star Myles Barnett came under fire - once again - for their treatment of women following the return of the show earlier this month.

Six months after the duo caused a shocking storm, in which charity Women's Aid blasted the show for 'glamourising abuse', viewers have again taken aim at the pair for their attitude towards their female co-stars and partners.

Hold on! She was at risk of a wardrobe malfunction as she strutted into the venue

Dapper: Pete Wicks arrived to the venue in a three-piece suit

Stylish: James 'Diags' Bennewith (L) and Chris Clarke looked equally dapper in their threads

Walk this way: Diags and Dan Edgar arrived to filming together in their suits

Texture: Myles Barnett donned a velvet blazer with a pair of matte suit trousers

Chit chat: Pals Jordan Wright and Dean Ralph looked animated as they arrived to set

Head-turning: Jordan looked dapper in a white blazer, while Dean (R) donned a navy suit jacket

Yellow there: Tommy Mallett (L) donned a vibrant yellow leather jacket alongside Liam 'Gastby' Blackwell

Casual: Earlier in the day, Myles slipped into a navy tracksuit before swapping his sweats for a suit

Ex factor: Courtney was spotted earlier in the day in Brentwood, wearing a pair of paperbag-waist

The duo were subject to much social media reaction as stunned viewers branded them 'narcissistic, toxic and dodgy' for their behaviour in the first episodes of series 23.

As the first episode of the series kicked off, Myles' ongoing messy split from Courtney played out following his cheating scandal, while he was not only seen making jibes about his ex's best pal Chloe but also locking horns with Amber.

Myles, who has now been exposed for dating Love Island star Kady McDermott, was subject to much commentary on social media as viewers swarmed the site to hit out at his relationship woes and his behaviour.

Users penned: 'Myles only tried to get back with @courtneyMgreen so he could be the one to finally finish the relationship! He's soooo controlling and manipulative!...

'These men dont understand that Myles has disrespected Courtney in their whole relationship and after the break up. This aint about him talking to someone else, this is about him!! #TOWIE... #Towie Myles is a douche!!...'

Relaxed: Georgia Kousoulou (L) and her beau Tommy Mallett showcased their low-key threads
They tied the knot in a lavish do on Saturday in Essex.

And on Thursday Love Island stars Olivia Buckland and Alex Bowen were jetting off to the sunnier climes of Sri Lanka for their Honeymoon.

Prolific Instagrammers Olivia and Alex shared plenty of updates as the couple travelled in style from London and arrived at their luxurious villa.

Leaving on a jet plane: Olivia Buckland and Alex Bowen jetted off to Sri Lanka for their Honeymoon on Thursday after tying the knot in Essex on Saturday

Olivia revealed they were jetting off hours after choosing their wedding pictures to feature in OK! Magazine.

The newlweds couldn't contain their excitement as they headed to London Heathrow to board their ten hour flight.

Reality stars Olivia and Alex travelled in style, showing off their luxury seats as they sipped on champagne and watched movies.

This is the life: Prolific Instagrammers Olivia and Alex shared plenty of updates as the couple travelled in style from London and arrived at their luxurious villa

Priorities: Olivia shared her skincare tips during the long ten hour flight

And relax: The couple were treated to VIP service on their flight as they indulged in drinks and movies

The long journey wasn't over when they touched down in Sri Lanka though as the couple had a four hour drive to get to their resort, stopping to admire the scenery on the way.

When they finally arrived, Olivia couldn't wait to show off their home for the next few days, with the villa boasting water features and a private pool.

The couple soon got stuck into some drinks, as they lounged in the pool with glasses in hand.

What a view: The long journey wasn't over when they touched down in Sri Lanka though as the couple had a four hour drive to get to their resort, stopping to admire the scenery on the way

Are we there yet? The newlyweds looked in great spirits despite their epic journey

Pit stop: Olivia shared some candid insight into their first look break in the country

Olivia and Alex tied the knot on Saturday at Gosfield Hall, which boasts 10 acres of elegant grounds, in the blonde beauty's native Essex.

The reality stars are the first Love Island couple to say 'I do' after meeting on the beloved ITV2 series in 2016.

Decadent Gosfield Hall, which boasts 23 luxurious bedroom suites for up to 67 guests, can seat up to 116 guests under 'crystal chandeliers and double-height mirrors' in their main dining hall, the Marquis of Buckingham's Ballroom.

Following a night of celebration, the lovebirds are thought to have spent their first night as husband and wife in the Rococco Bridal Suite, which was decorated during the residency of King Louis XVIII.

Having met on the 2016 series of ITV2's Love Island, Olivia and Alex came in second place behind Cara and her fiance Nathan Massey.

Finally made it! Alex shared a stunning shot of his new wife arriving at their luxurious retreat

Following their stint on the popular series, the couple quickly moved in together in her native Essex in August 2016, before Alex popped the question during a romantic trip to New York that December after just five months of dating.

Hunky scaffolder and fitness model Alex ignored claims that the couple were only a 'showmance' and popped the question after whisking Olivia away to a romantic trip to the Big Apple.

Despite coming in second place to Nathan and Cara, the couple won over the hearts of the nation.

Since then Olivia revealed that she was feeling the pressure of organising her special day, admitting that she was on the path to becoming a bridezilla after saying yes to a 2,069 Sophia Tolli dress on the TLC reality show in May.

Stunning: The villa was surrounded by water and greenery and looked absolutely blissful

Speaking to MailOnline last year, she said: 'I think I might turn into Bridezilla at some point, just waiting for it to happen.'

The wedding hasn't been without drama as it was revealed Olivia reportedly had a row with her former best friend and Love Island co-star Cara De La Hoyde over bridesmaid duties.

The businesswoman has since declared that she realises who her 'real friends are' after her pal revealed she would no longer be attending her wedding.

Writing in her column for last week's new! magazine, Olivia admitted she and Cara 'haven't spoken for a bit', but insisted 'everything is fine' between the pair.
Khloe Kardashian has expressed that she's overwhelmed about protecting daughter True from negativity as she grows up.

Speaking in a candid interview with Glamour UK's new A/W18 issue, the reality star - who was forced to disable the comments on the latest snap of her precious bundle of joy - confessed her worry over 'filtering things out of her life.'

Khloe also gushed over her 'motivational' half-sister Kylie Jenner, and has hailed her ability to be the ultimate working mother to the publication, which stars the Lip Kit mogul on the cover.

Khloe Kardashian has expressed that she's overwhelmed about protecting daughter True from negativity as she grows up

Having branched out with her own hugely popular denim line Good American, Khloe is the epitome of a successful working mother.

However, Khloe has revealed that her main priority is the welfare of her daughter True - who she welcomed with beau Tristan Thompson in April.

Khloe was forced to turn off the comments in the latest adorable snap shared of sweet True, and she has frequently been slammed by fans for 'filtering' the tot's face.

And speaking of potentially what's to come, Khloe pondered: 'I feel a bit overwhelmed for my daughter already, gosh all the things I am going to have to control and filter out of her life.

Candid: The reality star - who was forced to disable the comments on the latest snap of her precious bundle of joy - confessed her worry over 'filtering things out of her life'

Doting mother: Khloe proved to be thinking ahead when it came to her daughter True and has revealed worry over her 'evolving ages'

Khloe's number one priority in life is her sweet daughter True

'All the negative BS that you and I didnt have to deal with at those fundamental evolving ages, and thats something I worry about,' the TV personality confessed.

It seems as though Khloe will be swapping tips and tricks with her youngest sister Kylie, who she praised for 'juggling having a baby and a family, whilst also being a young woman.'

Khloe shared an especially special time with Kylie, as they experienced their first pregnancy together.

'Honestly, its the best thing ever because she was three months ahead of me so every time she would feel something, she would tell me about it and if I felt a certain way, I could tell her about it because she had gone through it a couple of months before me,' the reality star enthused.

Praise: It seems as though Khloe will be swapping tips and tricks with her youngest sister Kylie, who she praised for 'juggling having a baby and a family, whilst also being a young woman'

'It was the best thing ever': Khloe shared an especially special time with Kylie, as they experienced their first pregnancy together

While Khloe's pregnancy is currently being documented on Keeping Up With The Kardashians, Kylie chose to remain out of the spotlight before announcing the arrival of baby Stormi in February.

And Khloe has nothing but praise for Kylie, who is on track to be the youngest self-made billionaire.

'Kylie had taken this idea from an insecurity she had with her lips - that she would say was a negative - to such a positive place,' Khloe noted as she touched upon her sister's Kylie Cosmetics business.

Cute: While Khloe's pregnancy is currently being documented on Keeping Up With The Kardashians, Kylie chose to remain out of the spotlight before announcing the arrival of baby Stormi in February

'Motivational': Khloe has nothing but praise for Kylie, who is on track to be the youngest self-made billionaire

'Juggling all while being a young woman': Khloe touched upon her sister's Kylie Cosmetics business as she spoke of her success

'Its motivational to see how hard she works at 21 whilst juggling having a baby and a family, whilst also being a young woman.'

Since being thrust into the limelight at the age of ten, Kylie has become a hugely influential style icon, a successful cosmetics entrepreneur and most importantly, a mother to seven-month-old Stormi.

The star's sensational eye for style has made her an influential force in the style realm, which was never more evident than when she confirmed to getting lip fillers in 2015 after months of speculation.

See Khloe's full feature in the Autumn/Winter 2018 issue of GLAMOUR, available on digital download and newsstands now.
She's known for her elegant red carpet style.

But on Wednesday, Kate Mara opted for a casual look as the 35-year-old actress and model went for a hike in Los Angeles.

The House Of Cards starlet donned a vintage David Bowie T-shirt for the stroll.

Off duty beauty: Kate Mara opted for a casual look on Wednesday as the 35-year-old actress and model went for a hike in Los Angeles

The Shooter actress paired the distressed garment with dark, loose-fitting sweatpants and black Nike sneakers.

She shielded her eyes against the Californian glare with a pair of round framed sunglasses.

Kate traveled light for the summer stroll, carrying only her keys and cell phone.

Her short brunette tresses were pulled back in a high ponytail.

The Thin White Duke: The House Of Cards starlet donned a vintage David Bowie T-shirt for the stroll

Sweat it out! The Shooter actress paired the distressed garment with dark, loose-fitting sweatpants and black Nike sneakers

Chic: Kate's known for her elegant red carpet style. Seen here last month

The animal lover took to social media on Wednesday to urge her followers to support chimpanzees.

The Fantastic Four actress shared a picture of herself playing with two primates, who seemed to enjoy hanging around with Kate.

The wife of actor Jamie Bell captioned the photo in part: 'The chimpanzee orphans @liberiachimprescueprotection sanctuary in West Africa are victims of the bushmeat and illegal pet trade.'

'Please join me in supporting LCRPs efforts to rescue chimpanzees in need to keep wild chimps wild [HEART EMOJI]'
She is reportedly 'head over heels ' with 20-year-old Luka Sabbat.

And on Wednesday night, Kourtney Kardashian was spotted meeting up with the model/actor at Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles.

The 39-year-old Keeping Up With The Kardashians star was seen leaving the celebrity hot spot separately before Luka left as well.

Blooming romance? Kourtney Kardashian was spotted meeting up with Luka Sabbat, 20, at Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles on Wednesday

Kourtney was spotted in her car with pal Sarah Howard; the mother of three sported pink lipstick with her brunette locks loose.

Luka meanwhile donned a brown colored blazer with matching trousers, adding a white button up.

The star, who is 19 years younger than Kourtney, rocked the seventies inspired look with a mustache.

Kourtney, who parted ways with Younes Bendjima over the summer, is reportedly 'very happy' right now and doing 'great,' according to People.

Interesting: The 39-year-old Keeping Up With The Kardashians star was seen leaving the celebrity hot spot separately before Luka left as well

Good times: Kourtney was spotted in her car with pal Sarah Howard; the mother of three sported pink lipstick with her brunette locks loose

Kourtney is 'head over heels' for the Grown-ish star and her friends all like him, according to People.

The magazine's insider said that 'None of her friends liked Younes, and they all love Luka even though he's 20!'

Adding: 'They think he's good for her, and he's a very down to earth and good guy.'

Spending time: Kourtney is 'head over heels' for the Grown-ish star and her friends all like him, according to People; pictured on Saturday leaving The Nice Guy together

Getting closer: The magazine's insider said that 'None of her friends liked Younes, and they all love Luke even though he's 20'; seen on Saturday

Kourtney spent time with him at TAO Chicago and the FOUND Hotel opening in the Windy City.

A guest at TAO told People that 'there was a sense of chemistry' between the two, who were 'close to each other,' 'laughing' and 'having fun together all night.'

Luka is close friends with Kourtney's younger sisters Kendall and Kylie Jenner.

Kourtney has three children with ex partner of nine years Scott Disick: Mason, eight, Penelope, six, and Reign, three.

She dated Younes from October 2016 until their split in early August.
Ant McPartlin, 42, made a rare comeback to Twitter on Thursday after David Walliams poked fun at the embattled star with a hilarious post on Instagram.

The Britain's Got Talent judge, 47, shared a 113-year-old throwback black and white snap of Queen Mary standing with her sons Prince Edward and Prince Albert.

Comedian David compared himself to the Monarch while likening the queen's sons Edward and Albert to Ant and Dec in the tongue and cheek caption.

Comeback: Ant McPartlin made a rare return to social media on Thursday after David Walliams hilariously mocked the embattled star on Instagram

The funnyman wrote: 'My first meeting with @antanddecofficial.' (sic)

Ant showed the joke had tickled his sense of humour by breaking his social media silence to say David's joke was 'brilliant'.

'Brilliant!!!' He simply penned on the official Ant and Dec Twitter account, signing off as A and accompanied with a tearful laughing emoji.

My first ever meeting with Ant and Dec! The Britain's Got Talent judge, 47, shared a 113-year-old throwback snap of Queen Mary standing with her sons Prince Edward and Prince Albert

Ant is currently taking an extended break from all of his television commitments as he recovers from alcohol and substance abuse problems.

Holly Willoughby will fill the troubled star's shoes alongside his sidekick Dec on the upcoming series of I'm A Celebrity... Get Me Out Of Here.

While the funnyman is taking time out from his TV duties, the hunk has grown incredibly close to his new ladylove Anne-Marie Corbett.

Cheeky! Ant showed the joke had tickled his sense of humour by breaking his social media silence to say David's joke was 'brilliant'

Recently, it was claimed the comedian's new girlfriend Anne-Marie will be named in the divorce papers.

Ant and Lisa Armstrong, who have known each other 23 years and tied the knot in 2006, announced they were parting ways earlier this year.

Ant's fortune is estimated at 62million and he and fellow presenter reportedly Dec made a whopping 29.48million before tax in 2016.
She parted ways with her Love Island beau Jack Fowler on Sunday after two months together, blaming their busy schedules for the split.

And just three days later, Laura Crane seemed to be in great spirits as she celebrated her first night out as a single woman with her co-star Samira Mighty.

The surfer, 23, kept her mind off her heartache as she giggled and cuddled up to the West End star after a night of partying at London nightclub Cirque Le Soir.

Single ladies! Newly-single Laura Crane joined her Love Island co-star Samira Mighty for a raucous night out in London... just three days after her split from Jack Fowler

Laura appeared to be having a great time as she burst out laughing, while Samira wrapped her arms around the blonde beauty's neck.

The athlete flaunted her enviably toned frame in a skintight bandeau crop top teamed with high-waisted trousers.

She slung a cropped leather nude jacket off her shoulders and boosted her height with a chic pair of black block-heel sandals.

Styling her golden tresses in tousled waves, the reality star framed her features with a sweep of mascara - and a sweep of red lipstick on her cheek from where Samira kissed her.

Loving life: The surfer, 23, kept her mind off her recent heartache as she giggled and cuddled up to the West End star after a night of partying at London nightclub Cirque Le Soir

Great spirits: Laura appeared to be having a great time as she burst out laughing, while Samira wrapped her arms around the blonde beauty's neck

Chic: The athlete flaunted her enviably toned frame in a skintight bandeau crop top teamed with high-waisted trousers

Laura's outing comes just three days after she announced her split from Jack Folwer, making them the third couple from this year's Love Island to part ways.

Just two months after finding love in the villa, the reality TV couple called time on their romance, with Jack celebrating his single status with a night out in Brighton on Saturday.

Laura told Metro.co.uk: 'Sadly Jack and I have both decided to go our separate ways due to such busy schedules right now and not having the time to spend together.

It's over: She parted ways with her Love Island beau Jack Fowler on Sunday after two months together, blaming their busy schedules for the split

Looking good: Laura slung a cropped leather nude jacket off her shoulders and boosted her height with a chic pair of black block-heel sandals

Pucker up: The reality star framed her features with a sweep of mascara - and a sweep of red lipstick on her cheek from where Samira kissed her

'Feel truly blessed to have got to share my Love Island experience with him and to have made a friend for life, we will carry on supporting each other on this journey and I can't wait to see where it takes us.'

Jack added: 'We met in extraordinary circumstances and had an amazing time getting to know each other, both whilst in the villa and outside of it but our lives are currently taking us in different directions, we will remain friends and I will support her in whatever she does.'

Despite the break-up, Jack appeared in high spirits as he cosied up to a bevvy of beauties at Shoosh nightclub in Brighton.

The mane attraction: She styled her golden tresses in tousled waves

Monochrome maven: Samira, meanwhile, donned a chic bandeau crop top with flared black jeans

Finishing touches: The brunette beauty finished off her look with feather-trim heeled sandals and a chain-trim bag

The Love Island hunk seemed to be lapping up the female attention as he posed and took shots with a buxom blonde before wrapping his arms around another woman.

Pro-surfer Laura and Jack departed the villa as a couple after he ended his romance with Laura Anderson.

Laura previously admitted they had been 'taking it slower' since they re-entered the real world. She said: 'We're not officially boyfriend and girlfriend. Since we came out we are taking it slower.

Having a whale of a time! The good-looking duo couldn't stop laughing as they bid each other farewell after a wild night out

Moving on: Laura's outing comes just three days after she announced her split from Jack Fowler, making them the third couple from this year's Love Island to part ways

No more: Just two months after finding love in the villa, the reality TV couple called time on their romance, with Jack celebrating his single status with a night out in Brighton on Saturday

'We're just not rushing. We've seen other things go wrong, but we do have genuine feelings. I trust him and I will trust him until I have reason not to.'

Discussing how their relationship has had its ups and downs since leaving the Love Island villa, she confessed: 'When we first came out we felt the pressure'.

She also spoke about the staggering amount of female attention Jack gets at nightclub PAs, where she reasoned: 'I 100 percent trust him and I said to him that 'I will trust you until I have reason not to'. I have no reason not to believe him.

Sad: Laura told Metro.co.uk : 'Sadly Jack and I have both decided to go our separate ways due to such busy schedules right now and not having the time to spend together'

Parted ways: She added: 'Feel truly blessed to have got to share my Love Island experience with him and to have made a friend for life, we will carry on supporting each other on this journey and I can't wait to see where it takes us'

No more: Jack added: 'We met in extraordinary circumstances and had an amazing time getting to know each other, both whilst in the villa and outside of it but our lives are currently taking us in different directions, we will remain friends and I will support her in whatever she does'

Started off well: Pro-surfer Laura and Jack departed the villa as a couple after he ended his romance with Laura Anderson

Stalled: Laura previously admitted they had been 'taking it slower' since they re-entered the real world. She said: 'We're not officially boyfriend and girlfriend. Since we came out we are taking it slower'

'For me, as long as we have each other's word and we trust each other like that then you can't rise to every story that comes out or every girl that has made claims.

'I'm super chilled. I've grown up always around boys and in the surfing world. For me, I know how it works from watching girls go to guys.

'So it's never something I'm sat at home stressing about when he's at a PA. I trust him.'

Struggles: Discussing how their relationship has had its ups and downs since leaving the Love Island villa, she confessed: 'When we first came out we felt the pressure'

No insecurity: She also spoke about the staggering amount of female attention Jack gets at nightclub PAs, where she reasoned: 'I 100 percent trust him and I said to him that 'I will trust you until I have reason not to'. I have no reason not to believe him'
Miranda Kerr was showing off her impressive post-baby body in New York City on Thursday.

This sighting comes four months after the 35-year-old star welcomed her second child - a son named Hart - with her Evan Spiegel.

All eyes went to the supermodel's very fit legs that she showed off with the help of a a white mini skirt with a black border.

A 10! Miranda Kerr was showing off her impressive post-baby body in New York City on Thursday

Stylish as ever: The Australian wonder added a black blouse that had buttons down the front

The Australian wonder added a black blouse that had buttons down the front.

Pointy heels with a strap around the ankle added even more sophistication as did a large black Hermes purse on her left arm.

Kerr held onto a pair of sunglasses while flashing her wedding rings from Evan. Her necklace spelled out his name too.

And she wore her brunette hair down and stick straight. The runway favorite accented her photogenic face with red lipstick and black eyeliner.

Bling it on: Kerr held onto a pair of sunglasses while flashing her wedding rings from Evan. Her necklace spelled out his name too

The star was in the SoHo neighborhood of Manhattan and looked to be running errands.

On social media she shared images from her shoot earlier that day.

In one she was with her glam team.

Another shot was a closeup of her face. She captioned that post: 'Toronto Im coming for you! @koraorganics is now available at all @sephoracanada stores woohoo! Ill be at Sephora Toronto Eaton Centre this Friday, September 21 to celebrate the launch. If youre in Toronto please come join me! Check out link in profile for details #noniglow'

Great accessory: This sighting comes four months after she welcomed her second child - a son named Hart - with her Evan Spiegel

Chic on the street: Pointy heels with a strap around the ankle added even more sophistication as did a large black Hermes purse on her left arm

Miranda and Evan in February

Finally she was seen with Michelle Lee. 'I know this cover is backwards but it says Allure Best of Beauty. Because @koraorganics Noni Glow Face Balm has just won an Allure Best of Beauty Award!!! Thank you @heymichellelee & @allure.'

In April she welcomed Hart.

In May she took to Instagram to share a shot of Hart's name spelled out in wooden letters as she reveal that she's reveling in 'baby bliss' thanks to her newest bundle of joy.

Model Miranda, who celebrated a year of marriage to Evan, 27, in May wrote: 'Thank you so much for all of your warm wishes. Evan, Flynn and I have been in baby bliss for the last 17 days with our new arrival, baby boy Hart. We feel so very blessed.'

The beauty and Snapchat co-founder and CEO Evan welcomed their first child together at Los Angeles' Cedars-Sinai Medical Centre on May 7.

Beauty team: On social media she shared images from her shoot earlier that day. In one she was with her glam team

According to TMZ, the new arrival was named after Evan's grandfather and entered the world at 11:53 p.m.

Miranda is already mother to seven-year-old son Flynn, whom she shares with her ex-husband, 41-year-old actor Orlando Bloom. The pair divorced in 2013 after three years of marriage.

Evan and the former Victoria's Secret star publicly confirmed their romance in June 2015 and married in a small but lavish ceremony at Evan's home in Brentwood, California, in May last year.

Perfection: Another shot was a closeup of her face. She captioned that post: 'Toronto Im coming for you! @koraorganics is now available at all @sephoracanada stores woohoo! Ill be at Sephora Toronto Eaton Centre this Friday, September 21 to celebrate the launch'

Miranda wore a stunning Dior Haute Couture wedding dress and also personally cooked Evan's favorite dish - slow-roasted chicken scented with turmeric and lemon - for their wedding breakfast.

The caterer replicated the dish for the approximately 40 guests, Vogue reported.

Evan wore a Dior morning suit and Miranda's son Flynn, who served as ring bearer, wore a three-piece navy suit by Dior. The youngster also joined his mom and step-dad for the first dance, according to Vogue.

The couple announced in November that they were expecting their first child together.

Miranda had previously spoken about how she waited six months before she introduced Evan to her son Flynn, something she and ex Orlando had agreed together as they embarked on new romances.

'Evan met Flynn, so yeah, things are going well. Orlando thinks he's great. We're just a modern family now!' she said.
Tyrion Lannisters known to stir up trouble in the Seven Kingdoms and it looks like Peter Dinklage has been taking notes.

The actor, who was recently awarded an Emmy for his performance on the show, opened up to Jimmy Kimmel about the on-set pranks he plays on his co-stars. Dinklage is partial to a particularly morbid prank, which has been known to work on a slew of people working on Game of Thrones.

I like to pretend Im dead, he shared. Its fun.

Peter Dinklage recently opened up about the prank he likes to play on the set of Game of Thrones

Peter recently won an Emmy for his performance as Tyrion Lannister on Game of Thrones

Asked who hes mangaed to trick with the prank, Peter, 49, said: For whoever, the wardrobe person, or the producers, just my legs sprawled out in the trailer.

Youve got to get really smushed into the floor, like, a very awkward position.

He added: Ill wait hours. We have a lot of time on set.

Who is Peter Dinklage?

Peter Dinklage, born on June 11, 1969 in Morristown, New Jersey, is an actor. He was born with Achondroplasia, a common type of dwarfism. He is the only dwarf in his family.

Peter got his big break as an actor in The Station Agent, which was released in 2003.

Since then, hes appeared in Elf, Underdog, Penelope, The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian, X-Men: Days of Future Past, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri and Avengers: Infinity War.

Peter stars on Game of Thrones as Tyrion Lannister. Hes won three Emmys and a Golden Globe for the role.

With the HBO series coming to an end, Peter is looking forward to the future. Hell appear in a film called My Dinner with Herve on HBO. Hes also said to be working on a film adaptation of Joe R Lansdales The Thicket.

Peter is a vegetarian and has been since he was a teenager. He narrated a PETA-sponsored film called Face your Food on behalf of the organization.

He also appeared in a PETA campaign asking Game of Thrones fans to turn to shelters to adopt dogs rather than purchase huskies  which resemble dire wolves  from pet stores.

Peter Dinklage wife and kids

Peter Dinklage is married to Erica Schmidt, who is a theater director. They have two children together.

Peter Dinklage's Emmy speech

Peter Dinklage won an Emmy for outstanding supporting actor in a drama series, beating out co-star Nikolaj Coster-Waldau for the honor.

While accepting the award, he sent a shout out to the 48-year-old actor in the audience, calling him My brother from another mother.

The seemingly innocuous comment appears to be a nod to a popular Game of Thrones fan theory that Tyrion is actually a Targaryen. If its true, Peters character will complete the Three Headed Dragon prophecy as one of three Targaryens riding dragons into battle.

Viewers will have to wait to find out whether thats what Peter was getting at or hes simply grown close with Nikolaj.
Even with a big interview coming up, Hugh Jackman's dogs take priority.

Just before appearing on the Today show in New York City this morning, the Logan star, 49, was spotted with his wife, actress/producer Deborra-lee Furness, 62, walking their dogs.

Jackman was seen walking his French bulldog Dali, holding his leash in one hand and a drink in the other, while Furness was walking their poodle-terrier breed Allegra.

Dog walk: Hugh Jackman, 49, and his wife Deborra-lee Furness, 62, take their dogs Dali and Allegra for a walk in New York City this morning

Jackman was seen sporting a sharp light blue suit, sans tie, with black loafers and dark Aviator sunglasses.

Furness left her sunglasses on top of her head, wearing a black hoodie (with the hood down), black yoga pants and orange running shoes for the walk.

This comes just a day after Jackman revealed the 'secret pact' he has with his wife, and how important communication is to their relationship.

Walk and talk: Jackman was seen sporting a sharp light blue suit, sans tie, with black loafers and dark Aviator sunglasses

Jackman was in New York for an appearance on the Today Show, where he was joined by humanitarian Hugh Evans to discuss the Global Citizen Festival.

The Global Citizen Festival is in its seventh year, continuing its mission to end extreme poverty around the globe, by the year 2030.

The festival, hosted by both Jackman and Furness, takes place Saturday, September 29 at the Great Lawn in NYC's Central Park.

New York Hugh: Jackman was in New York for an appearance on the Today Show, where he was joined by humanitarian Hugh Evans to discuss the Global Citizen Festival

The festival will feature performances by Janet Jackson, The Weeknd, Cardi B, Shawn Mendes, John Legend and Janelle Monae, which Jackman said has helped create a new bond with his daughter, Ava, 13.

'Honestly, the reason I'm a host is I am finally cool with my 13-year-old daughter,' Jackman joked. 'Of all the things I do, superhero, whatever, Can you get me into the Global Citizen Festival?'

If you're in New York and want to attend the Global Citizen Festival, there are no actual tickets sold to the event. If you want to earn your tickets, you can visit GlobalCitizen.org for more information.
She's been showcasing her model prowess during Milan Fashion Week.

And Thursday proved to be just another working day for Kaia Gerber as she ruled the runway at the star-studded Prada Spring Summer 2019 show.

The catwalk queen, 17, appeared to follow in the footsteps of her mother Cindy Crawford as she oozed preppy chic in a keyhole bodysuit, complemented with a pair of navy satin shorts.

Catwalk queen: Thursday proved to be just another working day for Kaia Gerber as she ruled the runway at the star-studded Prada Spring Summer 2019 show during Milan Fashion Week

Kaia took her sartorial savvy look to the next level as she donned a pair of sheer knee-high tights and heeled ballet shoes.

The brunette completed her striking ensemble with a black and red hat, embellished with the same pattern as her clingy top.

Looking worlds away from her appearance, the IMG model sported a full-fringed wig, and dyed her eyebrows blonde for her runway look.

Wow-factor: The model-of-the-moment, 17, oozed preppy chic in a keyhole bodysuit, complemented with a pair of navy satin shorts

Kaia's make-up choice also featured dramatic eyelashes, matte foundation and nude lipstick.

The show was watched by an array of stars, including Poppy Delevingne, Spike Lee and Katherine Langford.

The Kingsman: The Golden Circle star, 32, turned heads as she slipped her modelesque physique in a green biker jacket and matching trousers, which were decorated in splashes of gold, black and brown stripes throughout.

Turning heads: Kaia took her sartorial savvy look to the next level as she donned a pair of sheer knee-high tights and heeled ballet shoes

Transformation: Looking worlds away from her appearance, the IMG model sported a full-fringed wig, and dyed her eyebrows blonde for her runway look

All in the details: Kaia's make-up choice also featured dramatic eyelashes, matte foundation and nude lipstick

Show-stopping collection: The designer's range featured a series of semi-sheer ensembles, waterproof jackets and knee-high stockings

Maintaining her attention-grabbing appearance, the older sister of model Cara complemented her ensemble with a ribbed turtleneck sweater.

Poppy ensured all eyes were on her as she boosted her frame in a pair of gold strappy heels.

The blonde bombshell tied her locks into a glossy bun to reveal her striking beauty, which was enhanced with bronzer, lashings of mascara and rose lipgloss.

Working it: The show was watched by an array of stars, including Poppy Delevingne, who turned heads in a green biker jacket and matching trousers

Close view: Spike Lee appeared in high spirits as he watched the show in the FROW

Loved-up: The award-winning director, 61, enjoyed a date night with his wife of 25 years, Tonya Lewis Lee

It has already been a very big week for Kaia, having also debuted her latest Vogue Paris cover which she later shared on her social media platforms.

'new @vogueparis cover by @mikaeljansson. thank you for having me again @emmanuellealt so much love and gratitude,' she sweetly captioned.

The cover was Kaia's second cover for the fashion magazine, earning her first Vogue wings back in February.

Fashion maven: 13 Reasons Why star Katherine Langford oozed elegance in a floral embroidered dress, tied in with a satin blazer

Bright ensembles: Anna Dello Russo (L) stunned in a neon green tulle frock, while Caroline Daur (R) accentuated her slimline figure in an form-fitting orange midi dress
She recently quit her job as a vet technician to focus on modeling.

And Shauna Sexton demonstrated her dedication to her new career on Thursday, when the 22-year-old left the gym in workout wear that showcased her enviable physique.

The girlfriend of Ben Affleck flaunted her toned abs in a gray crop top as she left the sweat session in Los Angeles.

Embracing change: Shauna Sexton demonstrated her dedication to her modeling career on Thursday, when the 22-year-old left the gym in workout wear that showcased her enviable physique

The blonde beauty flaunted her sensational legs in a pair of clingy gray leggings, and wore black trainers on her feet.

The model went makeup free for her morning at the gym, and wore her wavy tresses pulled back from her face in a loose bun.

Shauna shielded her eyes from the Californian summer glare with a pair of dark shades.

Legs for days: The blonde beauty flaunted her sensational legs in a pair of clingy gray leggings, and wore black trainers on her feet

Last month, Sexton handed in her notice at her job as a full-time veterinary technician.

The striking blonde, who was first pictured on a date with Ben at Nobu Malibu on August 16, abruptly left her role at the Veterinary Specialty and Emergency Center in Thousand Oaks after being thrust into the limelight.

'Her career in modeling was always a backup plan but things are really taking off now she's been spotted with Ben, despite some blaming her for his recent relapse,' a source revealed to DailyMail.com.

Doing the work: Ben was spotted going back to rehab after his daily work out on Thursday.

Keeping in shape: Even though he's enrolled in rehab center, Ben is allowed to visit home for his gym sessions

Shauna and Affleck saw each other as recently as Sunday, when she visited him at rehab.

Despite not yet confirming the status of their relationship, the Gone Girl actor seems to fancy the Playboy model, who has frequently visited him while he's been treated for alcoholism.

Ben checked into The Canyon rehab center with the help of ex-wife Jennifer Garner on August 22.
With the first live show taking place tomorrow, you might expect this year's Strictly contestants to be raring to go.

But as she clutches her ribs in pain during rehearsals, Susannah Constantine looks like she should be on her way to the doctor rather than the dancefloor.

The 56-year-old was shown on film grabbing her side and wincing as she practised the samba with dance partner Anton du Beke. Miss Constantine said she had pulled a muscle in her ribs and was a 'mess'.

The 56-year-old was shown on film grabbing her side and wincing as she practised the samba

But despite the injury, the TV presenter and style adviser  who is the bookies' favourite to be voted off the BBC1 show this week  said she was having fun and was 'a happy, willing to learn and determined mess'.

Sharing the rehearsal video on Instagram yesterday, the mother of three told the camera: 'If I hadn't already pulled the muscles in my ribs, I would have done today through cracking up every two minutes. I haven't had this much fun with my clothes on for years.'

Last week Miss Constantine posted a video of a compression pack over her ribs, saying: 'It is causing a lot of pain but I can laugh my way through it because I am with the funniest man, Anton du Beke.'

She also revealed she has been using a medication designed for horses to 'oil' her joints during rehearsals, posting a picture of the product and saying: 'This is what vets give to old, knackered horses who need their joints and tendons oiled.'

The first Strictly Come Dancing live show airs tomorrow at 6.15pm on BBC1.
He is in his element this Milan Fashion Week as one of the biggest designers to make his mark on the fashion spheres across the globe.

Yet Karl Lagerfeld, 84, looked barely-recognisable as he mingled with Nicki Minaj and Silvia Venturini backstage at his star-studded Fendi show on Thursday.

Known for his trademark sleek style in crisp suit jackets and smart ties, the fashion designer jazzed up his signature look with metallic silver gloves.

Spotted: Karl Lagerfeld, 84, looked barely-recognisable as he put a spin on his signature style with quirky silver gloves at the Fendi show for Milan Fashion Week on Thursday

German fashion designer Karl looked sharp as he wore his trademark slick white ponytail and his usual tinted sunglasses.

The Paris-based star found himself centre of attention backstage as he joined forces with rising stars Cindy Crawford's daughter Kaia Gerber and Gigi Hadid.

As the head creative director of the Italian powerhouse Fendi, it's no surprise Karl was in demand when the models put on the designer parade for the label.

Double take! The German fashion designer looked barely-recognisable (L) when he was backstage at the Fendi show

His outing comes after he sent shockwaves earlier this year when he slammed the #MeToo movement while revealing that he is 'fed up' with models and actresses speaking up about the sexual harassment they have faced over the years.

In an interview with French magazine Numero, the designer suggested that models should know what they are getting into, while defending former Interview magazine creative director Karl Templer, who has been accused of 'aggressively' pulling down models' underwear without asking them.

'If you don't want someone pulling down your panties, don't become a model,' he said. 'Join a nunnery, there'll always be a place for you in the convent. They're recruiting even!' he said.

Karl is the head creative director of Chanel and Fendi, as well as his own eponymous fashion line, and he believes the accusations being made by models are making it nearly impossible for designers to do their jobs.

Making headlines: Karl found himself centre of attention backstage as he joined forces with rising stars Cindy Crawford's daughter Kaia Gerber and Gigi Hadid

'I read somewhere that now, you have to ask models whether they feel comfortable when they are posing,' he said. 'That's opening the door to anything. From then on, as a creator, you don't do anything anymore.'

The designer said he didn't believe a 'single word' of the accusations against Templer, noting that 'a girl is complaining that he pulled on her panties and he gets excommunicated from an industry that, until then, worshiped him.'

Fashion photographers Mario Testino and Bruce Weber have also been accused of sexual misconduct this year, while Kate Upton called out Guess founder Paul Marciano for 'sexually and emotionally harassing women.'

But Karl has taken issue with the fact that that many of the women are sharing their stories of sexual harassment decades after it happened.
She was the picture of glamour at the Fendi and Max Mara showcases just hours earlier.

And Gigi Hadid proved to be a busy bee as she ruled the runway at the Moschino SS19 collection during Milan Fashion Week on Thursday evening.

The model, 23, looked every inch the striking bride as she rocked a puffy wedding dress, which came complete with an elaborate tulle veil - no doubt, teasing beau Zayn Malik with a glimpse of their future together.

Here comes the bride: Gigi Hadid proved to be a busy bee as she ruled the runway at the Moschino SS19 collection during Milan Fashion Week on Thursday evening

Emulating the beauty of a newlywed, the catwalk queen strutted down the runway holding a bouquet of white flowers, and added to her frame in elegant pointed heels.

Gigi's appearance adhered to the fashion house's trademark quirky style as her lean legs were covered in scribbles, while she was followed by an array of colourful butterflies.

The superstar injected a harsh contrast to her look with dark plum lipstick, strokes of bronzer and lashings of mascara.

Va-va-voom! The model, 23, looked every inch the striking bride as she rocked a puffy wedding dress, which came complete with an elaborate tulle veil

Striking display: Emulating the beauty of a newlywed, the catwalk queen strutted down the runway holding a bouquet of white flowers, and added to her frame in elegant pointed heels

Wow-factor! Gigi's appearance adhered to the fashion house's trademark quirky style as her lean legs were covered in scribbles, while she was followed by an array of colourful butterflies

For another striking look, Gigi slipped her gym-honed frame into a red mini dress, completed with a monochrome blazer and a matching satchel bag.

The vixen oozed glamour in the accessory department as she tilted a red wide brim hat on the side of her head, and wore heart-shaped earrings.

The colourful presentation truly kicked off fashion celebrations before a host of stars attended the CIROC x Moschino after-party following the runway show.

The Hadid sisters have been at the helm of the international fashion weeks, landing in Milan to attend the Alberta Ferretti Spring/Summer 2019 show earlier this week.

All eyes on her: For another striking look, Gigi slipped her gym-honed frame into a red mini dress, completed with a monochrome blazer and a matching satchel bag

All about the accessories: The vixen oozed glamour as she tilted a red wide brim hat on the side of her head, and wore heart-shaped earrings

So in love: When the blonde is not killing it on the runway, the beauty has been spending her off time with beau Zayn Malik

Gigi has walked in a variety of shows across the globe this month, including Michael Kors and Rihanna's Savage x Fenty in New York.

And when the blonde is not killing it on the runway, the beauty has been spending her off time with beau Zayn Malik.

With the couple announcing a brief split in March, the pair were later spotted smooching in public just a few weeks later - confirming they were very much back on.
She's a multimillionaire makeup mogul who has it all, including a hit reality TV series and a brand new baby girl.

And now Kylie Jenner, 21, even has a cow named after her, with a Californian dairy farmer dubbing one of his newborn bovines 'Kylie' in her honor.

The move was in recognition of the Kylie Cosmetics founder's revelation she recently tried adding milk to her cereal for the first time.

'Meet Kylie': Kylie Jenner, 21, even has a cow named after her, with a Californian dairy farmer dubbing one of his newborn bovines 'Kylie' in her honor

Dairy farmer David Jones took to Instagram on Thursday to announce the naming of the black and white calf.

'Meet Kylie, born 9/19/18 - named this gorgeous calf in honor of @kyliejenners life-changing milk-and-cereal revelation,' he captioned the post.

'She joins a line of dairy divas on my farm and would love to meet the real Kylie. @dairygood #undeniablydairy'

Cow-daddy: Dairy farmer David Jones [R] took to Instagram on Thursday to announce the naming of the black and white calf

Good moo-ve: The gesture was in recognition of the Kylie Cosmetics founder's revelation she recently tried adding milk to her cereal for the first time

Kylie Jenner has only just tried cereal with milk for the very first time.

The Keeping Up With The Kardashians star baffled the internet on Tuesday night when she confessed that she's never felt the desire to pour milk on her cereal because she doesn't like a 'soggy' breakfast.

Taking to her Twitter account, the TV star wrote: 'Last night i had cereal with milk for the first time. life changing. i always liked cereal dry i never bothered to put milk.'

She did it: Kylie has told fans that she only tried cereal with milk for the first time this week after her best friend Jordyn Woods asked her to

Big biz: The LA natives - who have been close for a decade - are working on a new beauty line together

Her life changing moment: She said it was a whole new experience for her

The Lip Kit founder also said the cereal was Cinnamon Toast Crunch, which she added was 'amazing.'

Another fan asked her what type of milk she used, to which she replied: 'Regular. Should i try almond next time?'

The businesswoman then took to her Snapchat account to explain her reason for only trying cereal with milk now and what made her decide to bite the bullet.

Her choice: The Lip Kit founder also said the cereal was Cinnamon Toast Crunch, which she added was 'amazing'

Yes, this really happened: Jenner carried on for a while with her followers as she explained her likes and dislikes with cereal

She explained: 'So I think people were a little confused when I tweeted that last night was the first time that I ever tried milk with my cereal.

'That is a fact. Everyone has their personal preference, I never preferred soggy cereal. I just really enjoyed my dry, crunchy cereal, and I know there are other people out there that agreed with me.

'So I think just as a young child, always eating dry cereal and never wanting to sog up my cereal, I've just got used to it where I never wanted to do it until last night until Jordyn [Woods, her best friend] said I want some cereal and milk and I was like: "You know, tonight's the night and I'm going to try it."'

There is humor in this: Jods shared this post that read, 'I'm really proud of you'

On a silver platter: NS had fun with this post where she made it seem like Jenner got her milk on the side of her cereal

Going back in the archives: DISTURB!A found an old shot of Kris Jenner and added the caption, 'You;re doing amazing sweetie'

Cereal madness: Kanvaz added a photo while others weighed in as well

However, the brunette beauty still isn't completely sold on the idea.

She explained: 'I still prefer dry cereal but it was pretty fire and nothing was ever the same. I don't like to put too much though, I definitely like cereal with a side of milk. I'm really not being dramatic, it's not hitting the spot crazy.'

Fans had a lot to say about her experience.

Emrysina shared, 'My two year old does this! Ill offer to put in milk in his cereal, and he always tells me no. He really prefers dry cereal.'

William Costar Jr added, 'Last time I ate dry cereal without any milk I felt incomplete the rest of my day.'

Dashkidss added, 'Did you put cereal or milk first?'

Then Indiaaa said she didn't add milk to her cereal because she could not 'afford it.'

Lexi became sarcastic: 'thank you for sharing your story, youre so brave.'

The memes included men in prison shaking their head and a man with a wig looking exasperated.

Trolls never sleep: These two tweeters took a more negative approach to Jenner's news
Bill Shorten insists Labor MPs who want the party to abandon support for a massive trade deal are having a fair dinkum debate about tough issues - not being disunited.

Minutes of last week's caucus meeting leaked to the media on Tuesday night, revealing a dozen or so Labor MPs spoke against supporting the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

The Herald Sun reports Labor senator Doug Cameron argued the deal will send voters to One Nation in Queensland and western Sydney.

Other MPs argued the deal will hurt workers and was against Labor policy.

"What we should never do in Australia is confuse debate and disagreement with disunity," Mr Shorten told reporters on Wednesday.

"Right through my caucus there is concern that this agreement has plenty of problems with it."

But Mr Shorten said he "reluctantly" supports it and intends to improve it when he gets into government.

He argued the deal benefits farmers, universities, the Australian steel and manufacturing industries.

"What we saw was, I thought, a thorough and fair dinkum debate," he said.

Labor supported the TPP through the lower house but is under pressure from unions and the Greens to block it in the Senate.

A Senate inquiry looking at the TPP recommended the government remove investor-state dispute settlement provisions from it and all future trade deals.

Labor MPs say ISDS laws allow foreign companies to sue the Australian government.

The committee also wants labour market testing included in the deal.

Women's rights organisation ActionAid Australia said the TPP entrenched gender inequality in favour of large corporations.

"If it goes ahead, this gender-blind deal will exacerbate existing gender inequalities for women living in poverty around the world," executive director Michelle Higelin said.

The TPP-11 trade pact involves Australia, Japan, Malaysia, Vietnam, Singapore, Brunei, New Zealand, Canada, Mexico, Peru and Chile, with the US pulling out of the deal when Donald Trump became president.

Mexico, Singapore and Japan have ratified the deal, with New Zealand, Peru and Canada expected to join the list in coming months.
NSW Police is offering a reward for information which leads to the conviction of anyone who's been contaminating fruit in the state.

Detectives said anyone responsible for placing needles in strawberries, apples or bananas across NSW was "causing hysteria" and hurting growers.

Acting Assistant Commissioner Stuart Smith will announce the reward amount at a press conference on Wednesday afternoon.

"The community is reminded that deliberately contaminating food is a criminal offence and a threat to public safety," a police spokesperson said, adding that in NSW the maximum penalty is 10 years in jail.

NSW Police this week confirmed needles have been found in an apple and a banana purchased from separate Sydney stores.

Needles have also been found in more than 20 punnets of strawberries across NSW from Tweed Heads to Albury.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison on Wednesday announced urgent and harsh new commonwealth criminal penalties for contaminating food as the ongoing needle crisis brings many Australian farmers to their knees.
Contaminated waterways in Melbourne's west will take "some time" to recover after toxic runoff from a suspicious factory fire killed off wildlife including fish and birds.

The blaze at the West Footscray factory started in the early hours of August 30 with an acrid smoke plume shutting schools, businesses and run-off from the factory flowing into Stony Creek.

"At this stage we can't say how long it will take for the creek to return to normal, but we know it will take some time," Environment Protection Authority chief executive Cathy Wilkinson said on Wednesday.

Weeks after the blaze, residents are still being told by the authority to keep themselves and pets away from Stony Creek due to contamination.

People are also warned not to eat fish caught in the creek or in lower part of the Yarra River from the West Gate Bridge.

Water quality sampling is occurring weekly and while concentrations of a number of chemicals have reduced significantly, there's still a couple of readings above recreational water quality standard, Dr Wilkinson said.

Water quality sampling is expected to continue at the creek and parts of the bay until results improve, she said.

Maribyrnong Council is now the lead agency in charge of the clean-up but it has been unable to determine the damage to waterways.

"While monitoring of the water and sediment of the creek are still being undertaken, it is difficult to estimate the extent of damage to the creek," chief executive Stephen Wall said.

"We are working with EPA and Melbourne Water to develop a recovery plan and, as yet, a time frame has not been determined."

It is understood the EPA, Maribyrnong Council, Melbourne Water and community groups will meet on Thursday.

Friends of Stony Creek president Steve Wilson said it would take years to return the creek to normal.

"It could take years before it's back to where it was ... all the chemicals have killed off the fish, eels and even the vegetation above the creek," Mr Wilson said.

"It's a big job to restore, but if there's a proper clean up it could take between three to four years, but worst case scenario up to ten years."
A former heroin addict, whose brother died from a drug overdose, has called for a life-saving drug that reverses the effect of opioids to be freely available.

Naloxone has been put in the spotlight following a report into fatal opioid overdoses skyrocketing in Australia.

The Penington Institute has issued a plea for the drug, which can temporarily reverse an opioid overdose, to be made available for free at pharmacies and hospital emergency rooms.

Opioids are the illegal drug heroin, along with prescription drugs such as oxycodone, codeine and morphine.

Penington Institute chief executive John Ryan warned Australia was hurtling towards a "United States style drug overdose crisis" after 2177 people died in 2016.

Prescription opioid deaths jumped 87 per cent in Australia in the seven years from 2008.

"There are answers to this crisis and we absolutely need to put the focus on a naloxone and put it in the hands of the people who need it the most," Mr Ryan said.

Health Minister Greg Hunt launched a report from the Penington Institute in parliament on Wednesday, saying more needed to be done to prevent drug-related deaths.

During the launch, a Victorian woman shared her battle with drug addiction and the pain of her brother dying in preventable circumstances.

Bendigo's Narelle Hassett almost died herself after overdosing on heroin 20 years ago, before paramedics issued her with naloxone.

She has turned her life around and has become an active campaigner for awareness around naloxone.

Her brother Shane was not so lucky and died in 2010, leaving a six-month old daughter behind.

"My story is a contrast - I'm here today because naloxone saved my life," Ms Hassett told AAP.

"But there's so many others like my younger brother who aren't alive now.

"To think if my parents had naloxone that morning and knew how to administer it and knew how to do all the right things with it, he'd still be here today.

"His little girl is seven now and she always asks about her daddy. It's quite upsetting."
With the mining boom having peaked and car manufacturing heading

offshore, Australia should look to the stars - and one Gold Coast company is leading the way.

"We're in the middle of a worldwide space renaissance, and Australia -

Queensland in particular - is primed to take flight," says Adam Gilmour,

CEO of Gilmour Space Technologies.

Despite a background in finance, Gilmour had always heard the stars call to him.

"A 20-year banking career allowed me to look at what was happening in the space industry in a different way," he says.

"Supply and demand is no different there, so I started looking into what

was possible."

There are 40-60 companies attempting to launch up to 8,000 small

satellites into orbit in the next five years.

"By 2022, these satellites will provide super-fast internet speeds beyond

anything possible through fibre-optic cables or copper, anywhere on the

planet. You won't need cell towers," he says.

"They're a true game-changer, and we wanted to be a part of that change."

These small satellites need rockets to get them into space, and that's where Gilmour saw an opportunity.

"There were just not enough rockets available for all the satellites that

needed to be launched."

After years of research, Gilmour founded Gilmour Space Technologies with his brother James in 2012 with a focus on satellites and rockets. Twenty-five full-time employees design and fabricate a range of space propulsion systems at their Gold Coast headquarters.

"Our big difference was that we started with lots of money," Adam says.

"It meant we were able to operate for three years without the need for

investors."

The fruit of their labour was the hybrid rocket, so named because it uses a mix of solid and liquid fuels.

"It was the only real way to get a true, low-cost launch vehicle onto the

market," Adam says.

Gilmour Space Technologies launched their first rocket in 2016. After a

design change that resulted in a 20-fold thruster increase, they're ready to launch again later this year.

The launch of a satellite into orbit is expected to follow in 2020.

"For a long time, space activities were dominated by governments and

multinationals," James says.

"But now, entrepreneurs like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos have invested in

space, and that's bearing fruit. There's no reason why that can't happen in Australia."

Queensland is naturally well-positioned as a launch site. Its close proximity to the equator means it takes better advantage of the planet's rotational velocity, meaning a rocket will require less fuel to escape Earth's orbit.

The Australian start-up's success has led to global attention. In February,

the Gilmours signed a deal with NASA to work on a rover that will harvest

water from the surface of Mars.

They've also managed to attract the 18th Australian Space Research

Conference to the Gold Coast, where it will be held on September 24-26.

"Delegates who come for the conference will be able to see what's on offer here on the Gold Coast, and local universities can get involved as well," James says.

"Space will always be inspiring to the next generation."

Adam hopes Gilmour Space Technologies serves as an example of an

Australian company making a splash in space.

"We've had no government funding. We'd like to see the government

getting more involved in the space industry," he says.

"There's a boom in space to serve customers on Earth, and we can be a part of it."

This feature has been produced in collaboration with the City of Gold Coast.
A BRIEF LOG OF THE CAREER OF JAMES COOK'S SHIP THE ENDEAVOUR:

* HM Bark Endeavour was a Royal Navy vessel commanded by Lieutenant James Cook on his first voyage of discovery in the Pacific from 1768 to 1771.

* The vessel was originally built in 1764 as a merchant coal carrier but was converted by the navy for Cook's voyage.

* She was launched at the English port of Whitby as the Earl of Pembroke, a fully rigged bark nearly 30 metres long and nine metres across, with about 30km of rigging and 28 sails carrying over 900 square metres of canvas.

* For Cook's voyage Endeavour carried 94 people, was fitted out with cannon and had aboard pigs, poultry and a milking goat.

* Endeavour rounded Cape Horn and reached Tahiti in time for Cook to observe the transit of Venus across the sun before setting sail into the largely uncharted southern Pacific to map and explore New Zealand and Australia's east coast.

* On June 11, 1770 Endeavour struck part of the Great Barrier Reef and was nursed to the Endeavour River at what is now Cooktown where it was beached and repairs were carried out on the holed hull.

* Endeavour returned to the English port of Dover in July 1771, having been at sea for nearly three years.

* The Endeavour next undertook navy voyages to and from the Falkland Islands. before being sold into private hands in 1775. After being renamed Lord Sandwich the vessel was hired out to the British government as a troop ship during the American War of Independence.

* It's believed the vessel was strategically scuttled in a blockade of Narragansett Bay, Rhode Island, in 1778.

* A replica of Endeavour was launched in 1994 and is now berthed at the Australian National Maritime Museum in Sydney's Darling Harbour.

* The US space shuttle Endeavour was named after Cook's ship.

Sources: State Library NSW, Australian Geographic, ABC, Wikipedia
Good luck, but not too much.

That's the message from Victorian Treasurer Tim Pallas to his new opponent at the November election, upper house independent Rachel Carling-Jenkins.

She revealed this week her intention to run as an independent in the lower house seat of Werribee at the upcoming state poll.

Mr Pallas, who holds the seat with nearly 57 per cent of the vote on first preferences, told reporters on Wednesday he was not threatened by Dr Carling-Jenkins' competition.

"If you're a politician and you're threatened by the democratic process you're probably in the wrong game," he said.

"I've discussed this issue with Rachel, she'd done me the courtesy of letting me know it was her intention to run in the seat a couple of weeks back and I wished her all the best, but not too much success."

Dr Carling-Jenkins is making a bid for the lower house after sitting as an upper Western Metropolitan Region member with her electorate office based in Werribee.

"It's time there is competition in the west so I'm looking forward to the challenge," she told reporters at parliament.

"There's quite a lot of issues in the west, one of them is everyone takes it for granted because it's safe."

Dr Carling-Jenkins said she would be running on law and order concerns, the lack of schools and hospitals for a rapidly growing population and child protection,

She was elected to the upper house in 2014 as a Democratic Labour Party member before defecting to the Australian Conservatives, but she has since stood aside from that party too.

Last year she revealed she had dobbed in her husband to the police after she discovered he had been watching child exploitation material , leading to his imprisonment.
A Chinese man living on the Gold Coast has been banned from owning a pet for three years after he was videoed beating a fluffy white puppy.

Jian Leo Zhang was sentenced to 12 months' probation in Southport Magistrates Court on Wednesday after outraged neighbours filmed him repeatedly hitting Ka Ka the samoyed dog with a stick at his Broadbeach Waters home.

Magistrate John Costanzo said Zhang had continued to hit Ka Ka even though it was obvious he was afraid and in pain.

"The incident on the video recording was distressing to the dog and obviously concerning to the neighbours and it is both concerning and distressing to this court," he said.

"You're a mature-aged man who should know better than to treat animals in the way that you did."

RSPCA officers removed Ka Ka and another samoyed dog.

Ka Ka was found to have urine stains on his neck, chest and front legs consistent with the puppy having been rubbed in urine or being held down in urine during a beating, according to veterinary evidence in court documents.

Both puppies were unsure and hesitant with people, which is unusual behaviour for puppies of that age and breed, the documents said.

They have been placed into foster care with an experienced dog owner so they can begin behavioural and psychological rehabilitation.

The 28-year-old had pleaded guilty to one count of animal cruelty and was also ordered to pay court costs of $8500.

Magistrate Costanzo said the sentence was appropriate given Zhang's persistent denials and consistent lack of remorse.
NSW government MP Gareth Ward is facing fresh allegations of bullying and intimidation days after federal Liberal MP Ann Sudmalis accused him of such behaviour.

Labor MP Anna Watson on Wednesday asked premier Gladys Berejiklian in parliament if she had received a letter from a woman claiming Mr Ward yelled and intimidated her at a community meeting in June.

The letter accuses Mr Ward of having "anger management issues" and "no concept of appropriate behaviour".

"Mr Ward started to yell at me, leaned in over me in a manner that I found intimidating, yelling that I was rude," the letter alleges.

"I was left shaking and trying not to appear upset (which is very difficult when you want to cry!)."

Ms Berejiklian said she had not seen the letter.

Ms Watson then used parliamentary privilege to level her own allegations at Mr Ward, saying he had bullied her in the past.

"I have had my intelligence questioned ... I have been called a 'hopeless, infective and useless member of parliament' by the member for Kiama and these are classic hallmarks of a bully," Ms Watson said

"Since Ms Sudmalis made her statement to the federal parliament I have been inundated with emails and phone calls from constituents passing on their experiences with the member.

"They recount being shouted at over meetings, being talked down to, being threatened when they disagree with him."

Mr Ward has been contacted for a response to the allegations in the letter and those of Ms Watson in parliament.

Ms Sudmalis, the member for Gilmore, on Monday accused Mr Ward in federal parliament of "bullying, betrayal and backstabbing", which Mr Ward has denied.

"People shouldn't conflate losing a party ballot or disagreements as bullying - there is a very, very big difference," Mr Ward told AAP on Tuesday.

"If there is any evidence of bullying that should be brought forward but, to date, I haven't seen that."
The Senate has ordered the government to release a review of religious freedom led by former Liberal minister Philip Ruddock.

A motion calling on the government to table the long-awaited report by Thursday morning passed the upper house on Wednesday.

Greens senator Nick McKim said releasing the findings, which the government had sat on for four months, was in the public interest because Prime Minister Scott Morrison had flagged legislation in the area.

"Mr Morrison and his cohorts on the right lost the marriage equality debate and now they want revenge," Senator McKim told parliament.

"It's time to end the secrecy and allow the Australian people to see this report including Mr Ruddock's recommendations."

Liberal frontbencher Anne Ruston said the government was undertaking detailed consideration of the report before releasing its findings.

Former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull was handed Mr Ruddock's final report in May, months after the inquiry was established in response to the same-sex marriage debate.
EMAILS ABOUT PETER DUTTON'S AU PAIR VISA DECISIONS

CASE NO.1

* Dutton's office asked for a briefing on ministerial intervention for an au pair detained in Brisbane at 6.30pm on a Wednesday night in 2015

* It was an "urgent" request from a former Queensland police colleague of Mr Dutton and the minister wanted it resolved within an hour

* The woman, who was on a tourist visa, was meant to be deported that night

* Border officers found a conversation on her phone where she agreed to do some babysitting work for cash while in Australia

* The ministerial intervention briefing was done and the visa granted just before midnight

* Dutton said it was "in the public interest" for the woman to stay in Australia

CASE NO.2

* On November 1, 2015, a different au pair was detained in Adelaide after border officers found out she was planning to nanny and work at a polo event

* AFL boss Gillon McLachlan, who knew the family the woman planned to work for, got his office to contact Dutton's office

* "There has clearly been a misunderstanding that (the woman) was intending to work for us when (the woman) is here to spend time with our family," the Adelaide family said in an email

* McLachlan's office contacted Dutton's office, who requested a ministerial intervention briefing

* Australian Border Force said the woman had already worked as an au pair on a tourist visa once before and planned to do so again

* A brief was prepared recommending Dutton intervene to keep the woman in the country, but at least one ABF officer didn't agree: "The ABF does not agree with the content, or think it appropriate that the Minister intervene."

* There was also a risk the department would have to bear the cost of the flight already booked to send the woman home

* Dutton missed the deadline to intervene but his decision was backdated after the department was told the woman would be granted a visa on Sunday night.

(SOURCE: Home Affairs Department emails given to Senate inquiry.)
Fears are mounting of a brewing bikie war in Perth after a motorcyclist was shot in a drive-by attack following a recent string of tattoo parlour fire-bombings.

Gang Crime Squad detectives are investigating the shooting in Calista on Tuesday night, which left the male victim, who is aged in his 50s, in a serious but stable condition in hospital.

A police spokeswoman told AAP the motorcyclist pulled over for an approaching car that he thought might have been driven by police, but was shot by the occupants.

Five tattoo shops have been deliberately torched between March and August, and police believe the fires are linked.

Earlier this month, the perimeter wall of a Waikiki house believed to be the home of a bikie club president was peppered with bullets.

Police Commissioner Chris Dawson recently said that incident, combined with the fires, was a concern.

Mr Dawson said there was always tension between WA's 12 bikie gangs, but a dispute between the Rebels and Comancheros was particularly worrying.

"We're putting particular emphasis on those two gangs," Mr Dawson told 6PR.

Not all tattoo parlous were bikie-connected but most were, he added.

State Crime Acting Commander Kim Massam will hold a media conference about "ongoing issues" with outlaw motorcycle gangs later on Wednesday.
Australia could face disaster if major steps aren't taken to address changes to the future of work, an inquiry has found.

A Labor-chaired Senate committee has called for an overhaul of industrial relations laws and creation of a new government body addressing the future of work in Australia.

The central body would have to develop policies for ensuring a positive future of employment for at-risk workers.

The upper house committee was led by Labor senator Murray Watt, who urged the government to take action.

"The changes that are facing the Australian workplace and Australian workers are so great that sitting back and letting it all happen to us is a recipe for disaster," Senator Watt told parliament.

"Hope is not a strategy, we have to take action."

The report said workers in the so-called gig economy, like Uber drivers, should be officially recognised as workers under the law, ensuring they have full access to protections.

It recommended legislation to extend workers' and trade unions' rights to collectively bargain.

Sham contracting and employment arrangements which classify dependent workers as independent contractors should be stamped out and labour hire workers covered by a national licensing scheme.

The report also recommends legislation requiring employers to consult more with unions and workers about the introduction of new technology.

Liberal senators Ian Macdonald and Amanda Stoker wrote a dissenting report accusing Labor of missing an opportunity to address one of Australia's key challenges.

"Regrettably the majority of the committee negated this opportunity and simply turned the inquiry into a union-directed Labor election campaign exercise," the government senators said.

The Liberals said the final report had regurgitated the usual union wish list.

"Rather than focusing on this more positive and aspirational narrative, the chair's report is focused on industrial relations and labour hire practices," senator Macdonald and Stoker said.

"This would seem to miss the point, and seems to be a political exercise by the union movement."
GPs in the ACT can now prescribe drugs for medical abortion, bringing the nation's capital in line with other jurisdictions.

The ACT Legislative Assembly passed laws on Wednesday to no longer require an approved facility, such as the Canberra Hospital and Marie Stopes clinic, to terminate pregnancies.

Doctors will now be able to prescribe RU486, for women to chemically trigger a miscarriage at home.

In NSW, QLD, WA, Victoria and Tasmania, women can access medical abortion services to terminate a pregnancy without the need to do so in an approved facility.

Greens MLA Caroline Le Couteur, who introduced the bill, says where a person lives shouldn't affect their access to reproduction healthcare.

"We're pleased that Canberrans will now no longer need travel across the border to Queanbeyan to access these services," she said in a statement on Wednesday.

"This is especially important for those more vulnerable people in our community, including those experiencing domestic violence."
Scott Morrison may be proud of his history of stopping migrant boats from coming to Australia, but he believes an ancient boat ramp built by Indonesian traders on the coast of the Northern Territory is a symbol of the region's enterprising history.

The prime minister has told an event in Canberra, showcasing territory products and spruiking the region's potential, that he spotted the ramp while fishing with former NT Chief Minister Shane Stone.

"We had no idea how old this old boat ramp was and it said something about the trading nature of the north," Mr Morrison said on Wednesday night.

"Territorians have always got trade. They have always got and understood that they are part of a region that is much bigger than just their small part of it."

Chief Minister Michael Gunner used the event to call for greater investment in the Northern Territory, and outlines the region's hopes to attract a bigger population.

"Just imagine what we could do with more people," he said.

Energy will be an important industry for the territory going forward, Mr Gunner said, since it lifted its moratorium on fracking in the past year.

The prime minister noted the territory has fewer people living in it than the Sutherland Shire in which he lives in Sydney.

"When Michael comes to me... and he says, I've got a plan to build the population of the territory, well they're the sort of plans we're going to back," he said.

"I'm always going to back those who are having a go. Territorians are having a go, and I'm going to back them."

Growing the population is also supported by Opposition Leader Bill Shorten, who said the territory was far from the blokey, 1980s culture that some still thought it was.

The Labor leader said he's open to the idea of creating incentives and allowances for people to make the move.

"I think there's a lot of dormant Territorians in the broader population," he said.
A man accused of indecently assaulting a wheelchair-bound woman with dementia while he was visiting a Sydney nursing home has rubbished claims he scouted out an empty room before the alleged offence.

David Patrick Frost, 68, was seeing his father at the eastern suburbs aged-care facility in November 2017 when he allegedly pushed the elderly woman into a bedroom, lifted her onto a bed and removed her pants.

"The complainant was found in a state of partial undress with the trousers removed (and) the incontinence pad folded down," crown prosecutor Melanie O'Connell submitted on Wednesday.

"She is now deceased and you won't be hearing evidence accordingly."

Frost is facing a hearing before magistrate Daniel Covington in Downing Centre Local Court after pleading not guilty to the aggravated indecent assault of a cognitively impaired victim.

The court was played an hour-long police video of the retiree being interviewed by the officer in charge of the investigation, Detective Sergeant Michael Egan-Hirst, less than 48 hours after the alleged incident.

In it, Frost said: "Ask me anything. I don't think there's too much to ask, actually."

He recounted a woman in a wheelchair had asked for a soda but demanded she get it herself, claiming he then wheeled her to a room, "pushed her in, up to the bed" and tried "to find out if there really was any soda in there".

Det Sgt Egan-Hirst asked: "Do you remember what she was wearing at the time?"

Frost replied: "No, I don't."

"She was dressed. She wasn't in a nightie or anything like that ... she was fully dressed," he said.

Frost was allegedly alone with the woman, who had severe dementia, for 13 to 14 minutes.

Det Sgt Egan-Hirst told Frost that after he left the room, a carer at the facility heard the woman screaming and found her naked from the waist down, with an incontinence pad pushed to the side and her pants on a dresser.

"I certainly didn't see her in that state," Frost said in the interview.

Det Sgt Egan-Hirst asked: "So you didn't take her pants off?"

Frost replied: "No."

Det Sgt Egan-Hirst also suggested Frost's gait slowed when first walking past the bedroom where the alleged offending later took place, and that he didn't "seem to take any notice" of any other rooms.

Det Sgt Egan-Hirst said: "I believe that you have entered that aged-care facility, located a room that has been empty, that you knew that was empty prior. What do you tell me about that?"

Frost replied: "I think as a cop, you'd be better off as a novelist."

Under cross-examination by defence barrister William Barber, the detective said "60 to 120 seconds" elapsed between Frost leaving the room and the carer entering.

The hearing continues.
Today's Birthday September 20: Italian actress Sophia Loren (1934 - )

Screen legend Sophia Loren was a young girl living in the slums of Italy when she was discovered in a beauty competition and her life changed forever.

Italy's most celebrated actress came from humble beginnings but would go on to become one of Hollywood's most enduring sex symbols.

Born Sofia Villani Scicolone in Rome on September 20, 1934, Loren and her sister were raised in Naples by a single mother in poverty.

As a young girl Loren lived through World War II; a scar on her chin received while running to a shelter with her mother serves as an everyday reminder.

"I certainly remember the war when it came. There were no joyful moments, just a lot of bombing, illness, misery and hunger," she once told the New York Times.

At 14, Loren entered a beauty contest and caught the eye of film producer Carlo Ponti, who gave her a contract to star as an extra in films.

She would later go on to marry Ponti in Mexico in 1957 after he unsuccessfully sought a Vatican annulment of his first marriage.

Charged with bigamy in Italy, Ponti was forced to move to the US - where Loren, who had by then starred in a number of Italian films, launched herself in Hollywood.

Roles in The Pride and The Passion (1957) and The Key (1958) followed before Loren went on to hold her own against Hollywood's heavyweights.

The girl from Italy's slums dazzled opposite the like of Clark Gable, Cary Grant, Paul Newman and Frank Sinatra.

In 1961 Loren won an Academy Award for her powerful performance as a mother during WWII in Two Women.

But while all was well in her public life, privately Loren faced a heartbreaking struggle to have children, losing two babies to miscarriage.

Loren managed to have two sons in 1968 and 1973 and took a break from acting to raise them.

Loren lost her husband in 2007. She now splits her time between Europe and America and is a devoted grandmother.
Today in History, September 20

September 20: Highlights in history on this date, famous birthdays and a thought for the day.

Highlights in history on this date:

1746 - With the help of Flora McDonald, the young pretender Bonnie Prince Charlie (Charles Edward Stuart) flees to France from Scotland following his unsuccessful attempt to capture the British throne.

1912 - Approval given to form a military flying school - the Australian Flying Corps, the forerunner of the Royal Australian Air Force.

1949 - First government is announced for the Federal Republic of Germany.

1958 - US civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr is seriously wounded at a New York City department store when an apparently-deranged black woman stabs him in the chest.

1960 - Thirteen newly independent African nations and the former British colony of Cyprus are admitted to the United Nations.

1962 - Southern Rhodesia declares Zimbabwe African People's Union an unlawful body.

1963 - United States President John F Kennedy goes before United Nations General Assembly and proposes joint US-Soviet expedition to the moon.

1972 - Explosive devices concealed in envelopes and mailed to Israeli officials are discovered in at least six cities around world.

1974 - Estimated death toll is put at thousands as hurricane lashes Central American nation of Honduras.

1975 - Thirteen die in coalmine gas explosion at Kianga, Queensland.

1977 - Vietnam and Djibouti become the 149th and 150th members of the United Nations.

1981 - Belize achieves independence from Britain.

1984 - A suicide car bomber attacks the US Embassy annex in north Beirut, killing a dozen people.

1989 - Indian peacekeeping troops declare ceasefire in their two-year-old battle against Tamil guerrillas fighting for independent nation.

1992 - French voters barely approve of Maastricht Treaty on European Union, by 51 per cent.

1994 - A pneumonic plague epidemic breaks out in Surat, an industrial city in western India. It causes widespread panic but only about 60 people die and the disease is soon brought under control.

1994 - Ships rescue thousands of villagers as two volcanoes erupt in Papua New Guinea.

1996 - Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto's brother, Murtaza Bhutto, is killed with seven supporters in a gun battle with police outside his Karachi home.

1998 - Malaysia's sacked deputy prime minister Anwar Ibrahim is arrested after thousands of his supporters demand the removal of Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamed.

1999 - Kosovo Liberation Army leaders and the NATO-led peacekeeping force sign an agreement to demilitarise the former rebel army and transform it into a 5000-member civilian corps.

2000 - Britain's MI6 spy headquarters is hit by a small missile fired from a rocket launcher in a high-profile strike at the intelligence services.

2000 - Australians competing in the Sydney Olympics continue to outrank other nations, eventually scoring 16 gold medals during those summer games.

2004 - Former general Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono defeats Indonesian President Megawati Sukarnoputri in an historic direct election.

2006 - Pham Xuan An, a Vietnamese spy who worked for Time magazine and other Western news media in Saigon during the US war in Vietnam, dies aged 79.

2007 - Peruvian astronomers reveal that a meteorite crashed near Lake Titicaca, a rare occurrence that left an elliptical crater and magnetic rock fragments in an impact powerful enough to register on seismic charts.

2008 - Australia's largest ever overseas Paralympic team, with 167 athletes, flies into Sydney from Beijing, the kit bag full with 79 medals, including 23 gold.

2008 - A suicide truck bomb at the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad, Pakistan, kills 53 people including the Czech ambassador, and wounds 270 others.

2011 - US military officially ends its controversial `don't ask, don't tell' policy.

2013 - Al-Qaeda militants disguised in military uniforms launch car bomb attacks on three different security and military outposts in southern Yemen, killing 38 soldiers.

2015 - Hungary reopens its border with Serbia after its closure led thousands of asylum seekers to surge into Croatia.

2016 - Two members of 12-year-old Tiahleigh Palmer's foster family, Trent Thorburn and his father Rick Thorburn, are charged with the schoolgirl's murder after her body was found on the banks of a Queensland river.

2017: As the death toll from the winter's deadly influenza tops 300, questions are being raised about the flu vaccine.

Today's Birthdays:

James Dewar, Scottish physicist who invented the vacuum flask (1842-1923); Chulalongkorn, reformist king of Siam (1853-1910); Sophia Loren, Italian film actress (1934-); Taro Aso, former Japanese prime minister and current deputy prime minister (1940-); Tim Rogers, Australian rock musician (1969-); Mattias Cormann, Australian politician (1970-); Juan Pablo Montoya, Colombian Formula One driver (1975-); George RR Martin, Game of Thrones author (1948 - ).

Thought For Today:

Men hate those to whom they have to lie - Victor Hugo, French author (1802-1885).
Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton faces a no confidence vote in the House of Representatives on Thursday after a Labor-dominated Senate committee found he misled parliament.

The committee's report said he misled the lower house when he said he had no personal connections to the employer of an au pair he gave a visa to.

Greens MP Adam Bandt wants a no-confidence vote in Mr Dutton in parliament.

"If he won't resign, the parliament should take matters into its own hands," Mr Bandt said on Wednesday.

Committee chair Louise Pratt said there is no basis for Mr Dutton to say he had no personal connections to the au pair's employer.

"The very genesis for this request came through his office because of his personal connections," Senator Pratt told parliament.

But Liberal senators on the committee said it was a "shambolic" inquiry that failed to land a killer blow.

"The extensive hearings show that not only is there no smoking gun, there is in fact no gun," Senator Jim Molan said in parliament.

Hours before the report was released, Mr Dutton said the inquiry was politically motivated and Labor and the Greens would just find him to be a "bad person".

Internal emails show Mr Dutton's office demanded an au pair detained at Brisbane airport be given urgent consideration for a visa, preferably within an hour.

Mr Dutton told parliament he did not know the people she was planning to work for.

It was later revealed her intended employer was an old Queensland Police colleague of Mr Dutton's, Russell Keag, who emailed his office to say it had been a "long time between calls".

Mr Dutton said he had not spoken to Mr Keag in 20 years before he was approached for help with the visa.

The emails also show the department expressly disagreed with Mr Dutton's push to give a visa to another au pair detained in Adelaide in November 2015.

He intervened after AFL boss Gillon McLachlan got his office to contact Mr Dutton's office to ask for help.

Mr Dutton also faces a potential motion to refer him to the High Court over a possible conflict of interest because of his stake in two childcare centres that get Commonwealth funding.
The Queensland Labor government has strongly rejected assertions by the opposition that it is facilitating funding to terrorism.

The Liberal National Party has called on the government to explain why it allows public servants to donate to Union Aid Abroad, which has recently been dropped as a preferred charity by the federal government because of alleged links to a Palestinian organisation which has been linked to a terror group.

Health Minister Steven Miles on Thursday clarified the charity is one of many which employees can donate to by deducting from their salaries, and they have been able to since 2009, under both Labor and LNP governments.
A man accused of attempted murder after allegedly shooting another man in Sydney's west is expected to face court.

The 33-year-old allegedly shot a 31-year-old man in Whalan on Thursday morning, sparking a large police response.

As police were searching neighbouring properties, they shot a dog they say was aggresive towards officers. It is understood it was taken to a vetinary hospital.

The accused handed himself in to a police station on Thursday afternoon, where he was charged with attempted murder.

He was refused bail to appear before Mt Druitt Local Court on Friday, while the victim, 31, was taken to Nepean Hospital in a stable condition.
Taking on two siblings and a sister-in-law will be tough enough for Kiwi-born Brisbane star Rona Peters in Friday's NRL Women's Premiership crunch clash with New Zealand's Warriors.

But it won't be as hard as what comes afterwards - telling her passionate Kiwi parents that she will pledge her allegiance to Australia.

Former Kiwi Ferns veteran Peters admitted to mixed feelings before lining up against sisters Hilda and Kahurangi as well as sister-in-law Laura Mariu at AAMI Park.

Warriors playmaker Mariu married Hilda earlier this year.

Another victory will guarantee Brisbane, the only undefeated team, a spot in next week's inaugural NRLW grand final - and knock her siblings' Warriors out of the title race.

"It's the first time I have played my sisters on such a big stage," said Peters.

"But what happens on the field, stays on the field. That's how I have to look at it.

"Besides I think my parents are secret Broncos fans."

Peters admitted she may not be as popular with her parents after she tells them her Test plans.

After representing the Kiwi Ferns over 12 years, Peters relocated to Queensland in 2015 and when signatures were called for the inaugural NRLW she pledged her allegiance to Brisbane and the Maroons.

Now the Broncos lock hopes to run out for the Jillaroos in their October 13 Test against her ex-team New Zealand in Auckland.

"It's a hard question but I will probably stay with the Jillaroos as much as I love my family," Peters said.

Asked how that will go down when she tells her parents, Peters said: "Probably not how I want it but my family are proud footy people so they will be happy with whatever jersey I wear."
US President Donald Trump says he supports Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh despite a woman's allegations that Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her 36 years ago

President Donald Trump doubled down Tuesday on backing his Supreme Court pick Brett Kavanaugh, as his accuser demanded an FBI probe into her allegations of sexual assault before testifying.

"A full investigation by law enforcement officials will ensure that the crucial facts and witnesses in this matter are assessed in a non-partisan manner, and that the committee is fully informed before conducting any hearing or making any decisions," lawyers for Christine Blasey Ford said in a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee.

The Republican-dominated panel had invited both Kavanaugh, 53, and Ford, 51, to testify publicly about her claims he pinned her down while he was drunk when they were teenagers.

Although Ford's letter does not indicate whether she would attend the hearing without a probe by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, it said that she has faced "vicious harassment and even death threats" since going public with her allegations on Sunday.

"As a result of these kind of threats, her family was forced to relocate out of their home. Her email has been hacked, and she has been impersonated online," it added.

Democrats were quick to back her call for a delay.

"I agree with her 100 percent that the rushed process to hold a hearing on Monday has been unfair and is reminiscent of the treatment of Anita Hill," said Senator Dianne Feinstein.

She was referring to the woman who testified in 1991 against Justice Clarence Thomas when he was a nominee over workplace sexual harassment claims. Thomas ultimately won confirmation after Republicans ruthlessly smeared Hill's character.

"A proper investigation must be completed, witnesses interviewed, evidence reviewed and all sides spoken to. Only then should the chairman set a hearing date," said Feinstein.

Senator Chuck Schumer said Ford "deserves to be treated with respect and fairness by the Senate."

Trump, who has shrugged off allegations about his own sexual improprieties, told a White House press conference that Kavanaugh has an "impeccable history in every way" and "has gone beautifully up the ladder."

Although he repeated his full support for the planned hearings over the claims, the president also rejected calls for an FBI probe and blamed the uproar on Democratic shenanigans to cast doubt over his pick to replace retired justice Anthony Kennedy.

"I don't think the FBI should be involved because they don't want to be involved," Trump told reporters.

"I feel so badly for him. This is not a man who deserves this," the president said, calling Democratic opponents who raised the issue at the last minute "lousy politicians" but "very good at obstructing."

Trump's vote of confidence in Kavanaugh reinforces what is rapidly becoming the latest battlefront in the deeply polarized country ahead of November midterm congressional elections.

- Last minute bombshell -

Kavanaugh faces a new allegation that he assaulted a woman when they were teenagers

Kavanaugh, whose confirmation would tilt the Supreme Court to the right for years to come, had appeared set to sail through Senate confirmation for the vacancy on the nation's top court until Ford, a California professor, went public.

A man Ford placed at the site of the assault as a witness, Mark Judge, categorically refused to testify.

"I have no memory of this alleged incident... More to the point, I never saw Brett act in the manner Dr Ford describes," Judge said in a letter to the committee sent by his lawyers.

"I have no more information to offer the committee and I do not wish to speak publicly regarding the incidents described in Dr Ford's letter."

Pressure is also building from supporters of the year-old #MeToo movement, which has brought down a string of powerful male figures after women went public with accusations of sexual harassment and assault.

"Anybody who comes forward at this point to be prepared to testify in the US Senate against someone who's being nominated to one of the most powerful positions in the US government, that takes an extraordinary amount of courage," said Democrat Kamala Harris, a member of the panel weighing Kavanaugh's nomination.

"The American public deserves to know the character of someone who will serve for his entire life on the highest court in our country."

- Upcoming polls -

The charge against Kavanaugh has left Trump and his Republicans in the precarious position of having to reject Ford's accusation without alienating women voters ahead of the midterm polls in which the Republicans could lose control of Congress.

Republicans are treading carefully, eager to avoid a repeat of the Thomas-Hill debacle. Their strategy appears to be centered on keeping the hearing to a limited "he said-she said" standoff that might embarrass, but not sink the nominee.

Republican supporters have also mustered letters from dozens of women declaring support for Kavanaugh throughout his career.

An activist group focused on promoting a conservative judiciary has begun buying $1.5 million media ads to defend Kavanaugh.
Hurricane Maria wreaked devastation on Puerto Rico, pictured two days after the storm hit in September 2017, forcing thousands to flee the island

They arrived in New York from Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria ravaged the island in September 2017, leaving widespread devastation in its wake and a death toll that would spiral to almost 3,000.

A year on, Joannelly Cruz and her mother Gloria Martinez are in a homeless shelter, part of a generation of Puerto Ricans struggling to rebuild shattered lives on the US mainland.

But they have no plans to return to their Caribbean home.

"I think coming here was the best thing to do," says Joannelly, 16, reflecting on the catastrophe unleashed as the storm wiped out infrastructure and brought chaos rarely paralleled in US history.

But life is hardly a cake walk in New York, where mother and daughter share a bed in a small room with no access to a kitchen. Their belongings lie scattered on a table which doubles as Joannelly's homework desk.

"It was a tough adjustment," she said. "It is kind of difficult to sit and do my homework in such a cramped environment, but I managed."

She and her mother hope to be considered for subsidized housing soon.

"Since we're homeless by accident, they should put us in priority to get housing," Martinez says, anxious about a precarious future for her daughter with no safety net, and no certainties at all.

- Indifference -

Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico, leaving nearly 3,000 dead and causing $90 billion in damage

Hurricane Maria, which made landfall on September 20, killed 2,975 people in Puerto Rico, according to a government-commissioned study, knocking out power and drinking water supplies, and causing $90 billion in damages.

The US Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), the body in charge of post-disaster aid, initially covered evacuees' hotel costs but that program ended in May, triggering court rulings that kept it in place through the summer. Knowing it would end, many moved into shelters.

A spokeswoman for the City of New York told AFP officials expected to see some 700 Puerto Ricans in homeless shelters going into the anniversary of the disaster.

Government-sponsored, long-term shelter is not available to Puerto Ricans relocated to the mainland -- an option offered to previous hurricane survivors on the continental US.

Latino Justice, an organization leading a class action suit against FEMA, said that the policy violates the evacuees' constitutional rights.

"We argue that it is FEMA's responsibility to provide for those individuals," Natasha Bannan, an attorney with the lobby group, told AFP.

Many see FEMA's response as a proof of a passive, indifferent attitude toward Puerto Rico from the administration of US President Donald Trump.

"They don't understand the gravity of the situation we lived through," said Sofia Miranda, a 44-year-old former insurance broker and evacuee.

- 'Emotional crisis' -

Many Puerto Ricans in New York City blame the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) for what they see as a weak response to Hurricane Maria

FEMA had offered to fly residents back to the island free-of-charge until August 30. Of the thousands displaced, just 500 or so accepted the offer, the agency said.

Miranda, who shares a room with her mother and son, is determined to stay, but says life in the shelter is taking its toll.

"As of now I'm in limbo. I haven't been told if I'm eligible for housing, nor if I can stay in this shelter. I haven't been able to sleep," she told AFP.

Rafael Barreto, an evacuee in New York since last November who does community work, spoke of the lingering psychological trauma weighing on displaced Puerto Ricans dealing with fresh stresses in their new home.

"There is an emotional crisis here after leaving this disaster. When there is strong wind, a lot of us here have flashbacks," he told AFP.

Meanwhile Leonell Torres, a clinical psychologist who has counseled displaced individuals, explained that each relocation was in itself a traumatic event that could act as a trigger.

"There is a misconception that being here is a guarantee for being healthy," he said.

In a report released on its website this summer, FEMA admitted to not being adequately prepared to handle the aftermath of Hurricane Maria, to being understaffed and to taking longer than expected to deliver supplies.

"Everything has been very complicated, frustrating, and the majority was thinking that because we are American citizens we would not be treated differently," said Barreto.
News of the settlement came as several US states, worried by a report in August detailing decades of sexual abuse involving more than 300 Catholic priests in Pennsylvania, are looking into historic abuse cases in their own jurisdictions

The Catholic church in New York has reached a record $27.5 million settlement with four men who said they were sexually abused as children, attorneys said Tuesday.

The Diocese of Brooklyn, one of the city's boroughs, agreed to make the payments to the four, who were sexually abused between 2003 and 2009 by their religion teacher, their lawyers said.

The sum breaks down to $6.87 million for each of the victims, who were between the ages of eight and 12 at the time.

"This is the largest settlement ever involving individual victims," said attorney Ben Rubinowitz.

"We are glad to see the church finally being brought to justice. It continued for months and in certain cases for years."

Church officials did not immediately comment. But the settlement ends the civil complaint of the four victims, which was to lead to a trial in early 2019, said Rubinowitz.

The complaint was filed in 2012. It came after religion teacher Angelo Serrano -- now 67 years old -- was arrested in 2009 for molesting a child, for which he pleaded guilty in 2011 and was sentenced to fifteen years in prison.

According to Rubinowitz, the diocese agreed to pay after trying to distance itself from Serrano, who was employed by the little parish of St Lucy-St Patrick, but not a priest.

A church priest, also targeted by the complaint, admitted to having seen Serrano one day kiss a child on the mouth, but never addressed the abuse, said another of the lawyers Peter Saghir.

"They decided that, rather than risk a trial, that it was time for them to make a payment."

According to the website BishopAccountability.org, the previous record for an individual compensation was $3.4 million and was paid to the two victims of Matthew Maiello of New York.

News of the settlement came as several US states, worried by a report in August detailing decades of sexual abuse involving more than 300 Catholic priests in Pennsylvania, are looking into historic abuse cases in their own jurisdictions.

The Church was also rocked by the resignation in July of US Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, an influential ex-bishop of Washington.

He was accused of sexually abusing a teenager while working as a priest in New York in the early 1970s.
Strawberry sales in Australia have plunged after a number of sewing needles and pins were found amongst the fruit

The piercing of supermarket strawberries with sewing needles is comparable to terrorism, Australia's prime minister said Wednesday, as he demanded sentences of up to 15 years in response to a nationwide scare.

Urging Australians to make a strawberry pavlova this weekend to help struggling farmers, Scott Morrison demanded a change in the law to toughen sentences.

"We're not mucking about" said Morrison, after pieces of fruit were found to be contaminated with needles or pins. "This is not on, this is just not on in this country," he said.

Calling the perpetrator a "coward and a grub", Morrison called on parliament to quickly raise the maximum sentence for such deliberate food contamination from ten to 15 years behind bars.

That, he said, would put the crime on par with "things like possessing child pornography and financing terrorism. That's how seriously I take this."

The scare has prompted a series of supermarket recalls, and some stores in New Zealand have temporarily banned the sale of Australian strawberries.

Farmers have been forced to pulp fruit and lay off pickers because of slower sales and lower wholesale prices.

"Just go back to buying strawberries like you used to and take the precautions that you should," Morrison told Australians in a televised address.

"Make a pav this weekend and put strawberries on it," he suggested, later adding in a video message that his wife Jen would actually be doing the baking in their house.

Authorities have suggested strawberries be cut up before they are eaten.

Police on Tuesday said they still did not know the motive for the attacks and were still looking for suspects.

They have asked the public for help with their investigation and are expected later Wednesday to increase a reward for information that helps resolve the case.

The authorities have also complained that the vast majority of the 100 reported cases were hoaxes, and warned that pranksters posting images on Facebook claiming that they have discovered tainted fruit could also face prosecution and potential jail time.

Police in New South Wales said a "young person" has admitted putting needles in strawberries as a copycat prank and will be dealt with under the youth cautioning system.
Absolute monarch: King Mswati III of eSwatini, pictured at a southern African regional summit last year

Political parties cannot be involved, there are no campaign rallies and the king wields absolute power, choosing the prime minister and cabinet: a parliamentary election in eSwatini is a vote like no other.

Opposition activists in the tiny southern African country formerly known as Swaziland say Friday's election is a mockery of democracy and reveals how its 1.3 million citizens have long lived under a repressive regime.

Around 540,000 eligible voters must choose from candidates who have no party affiliation and who are almost all loyal to King Mswati III, one of the world's last absolute monarchs.

Winners from the 59 constituency ballots take seats in a parliament over which the king has complete control. He also appoints a further 10 directly.

"It is a total misnomer to even call them elections," Alvit Dlamini, head of the Ngwane National Liberatory Congress, the oldest political party in eSwatini, told AFP.

"Elections are a competitive process between political parties. This is a non-election -- an appointment system by the royalists. If you participate, you can't advance your own political ideas."

But King Mswati's government is a fierce defender of the unique approach.

It says that constituencies are at the heart of Swazi life and provide a direct link between voters and those elected.

It describes the system as a "home-grown" reflection of traditional society.

The constitution enshrines "individual merit" as the basis for election, meaning that political parties -- which were banned by the king's father in 1973 -- are deemed unnecessary.

- A 'monarchial democracy' -

Parties are now allowed to exist under the 2005 constitution, but have suffered repeated security crackdowns as well as court defeats in their battle for legal recognition and to be allowed to take part in elections.

Such restrictions anger many young Swazis, including supporters of Pudemo, a party that was designated a terrorist organisation in 2008 under draconian new laws widely seen as targeting government critics.

"The election is fixed, and parliament has no power. It is all with the king," Pudemo's new leader Mlungisi Makhanya, 40, told AFP.

"We don't have people running in the election. If a candidate wants to be quietly known as a Pudemo supporter, we say 'no thanks -- you can't do anything even if you are elected'."

Nearly 20 members of Pudemo remain on bail after being charged with terrorism offences between 2009 and 2014.

Among the charges the group face are allegations they chanted pro-reform slogans at a rally and wore party T-shirts.

King Mswati, who has 14 wives and more than 25 children, has shown few signs of reforming what he calls the country's "monarchial democracy".

On the throne since the age of 18, this year he celebrates both his 50th birthday and 50 years since his country's independence from Britain.

Often dressed in traditional robes, the king retains widespread support in rural eSwatini despite his reputation for lavish spending on planes and palaces while 63 percent of his subjects live below the poverty line.

The country, landlocked between South Africa and Mozambique, suffers the highest HIV adult prevalence rate in the world at 27.2 percent.

The king demonstrated his untrammelled authority earlier this year when making a surprise announcement that Swaziland would officially change its name to eSwatini ("land of the Swazis").

- 'People are scared' -

In addition to curbs on opposition parties, anti-government protests are also effectively banned.

Marches are planned this week by striking civil servants, teachers and nurses, but the government said it "expected" trade unions to halt the action.

In June, police used rubber bullets to break up a rare demonstration by 500 trade unionists protesting against alleged government theft from the national pension fund.

"People can't express their views freely, they are scared," Shireen Mukadam, a researcher at rights group Amnesty, told AFP.

"eSwatini is an extremely closed society. There is a pervasive culture of secrecy.

"People are used to submitting to the king. The constitution itself says that he has absolute power."

Donor nations have had little success in lobbying for greater freedoms.

The European Union, which gave 20 million euros ($23 million) in aid in 2015, says it is "critical of the democratisation process".

The Commonwealth sent observer missions for the last three elections, but has not sent a team this week, although the Southern African Development Community bloc and African Union will deploy monitors.

After the 2013 vote, the Commonwealth's experts reported they "cannot conclude that the entire process was credible."
Freed after more than a year in prison, Cambodian opposition leader Kem Sokha sits with his mother

Cambodian prime minister Hun Sen batted down speculation Wednesday that he caved to international pressure after an opposition leader was released from jail, claiming the decision was made for his ailing foe's health and safety.

Kem Sokha, the co-founder of the now-defunct Cambodia National Rescue Party, was arrested on treason charges in September two months before the Supreme Court dissolved his party.

The moves came during a sweeping crackdown led by the 66-year-old strongman and paved the way for an easy election victory in July that was lambasted as a sham.

But in the aftermath of the vote Hun Sen has returned to a pattern of easing up on dissent and scores of activists and former opposition members have been freed.

Kem Sokha was the most prominent of those let go and his September 10 release on bail fuelled theories that Hun Sen was worried about the country's large clothing industry losing duty-free access to European markets.

European parliamentarians have floated the possibility of revisiting the trade scheme.

But the bombastic head of the ruling Cambodian People's Party, who has been in power for more than 33 years, told garment workers in a speech that he did not bow to "international pressure".

"It was just the change of the location of detention in case he dies in prison and causes trouble to the government," Hun Sen said, not mentioning the duty-free deal.

Cambodian PM Hun Sen has eased up on dissent after winning every seat in an election that was lambasted as a sham

He added that the decision was prompted by "humanitarian and safety concerns for the suspect".

Sokha, 65, spent more than a year in a remote prison near the Vietnamese border before his release.

Over the course of his detention he was repeatedly denied bail even as his lawyers pointed to Sokha's high blood pressure and diabetes.

The conditions of his bail are severe. He is supposed to stay within a block radius of his residence and is forbidden to meet with foreigners or host political rallies.

Lawyer Meng Sopheary said the opposition leader was taking medication regularly but still needed a full examination.

"He will be happy if he has his full freedom," she told AFP.

The US has expanded travel sanctions against senior Cambodian officials in response to the election but so far the country has received little real blowback for the deeply flawed poll.

The ruling party says it won more than 80 percent of the vote and all seats in parliament, turning Cambodia into a one-party state.

But critics claim the election was marred by the absence of any credible contender and voter intimidation in the run-up to the poll.

Before its dissolution Sokha's party had posed the biggest threat to Hun Sen in recent memory, winning more than 43 percent of the vote in the 2013 vote.

Hun Sen has remained defiant in the face of criticism, telling a regional summit in Hanoi last week that western governments should stay out of Southeast Asian politics.
Facebook said it will defend itself once it has reviewed the complaint

A complaint has been filed with the US government accusing Facebook and 10 other companies of using the platform's job ad targeting system to discriminate on the basis of gender.

The complaint was announced Tuesday by the American Civil Liberties Union, a union called the Communications Workers of America and a labor law firm, on behalf of three female job seekers and a group of "thousands" of members represented by the union.

It charges that job ads on Facebook targeted male users only. It also alleges that most of the listings were for jobs in male-dominated fields, so women and non-binary users were excluded from seeing these ads.

Facebook lets advertisers target ads on the basis of gender and age, which is against the law in America, the complaint reads.

"I shouldn't be shut out of the chance to hear about a job opportunity just because I am a woman," said Bobbi Spees, one of the three women named in the complaint.

Facebook spokesman Joe Osborne said in a statement to CNNMoney that there is no place for discrimination on Facebook.

"It's strictly prohibited in our policies, and over the past year we've strengthened our systems to further protect against misuse," Osborne said.

Facebook will defend itself once it has reviewed the complaint, he added.

The ACLU noted that online platforms such as Facebook are generally not liable for content published by others.

"But in this case, Facebook is doing much more than merely publishing content created by others," the advocacy group argued.

"It has built the architecture for this discriminatory marketing framework, enabled and encouraged advertisers to use it, and delivered the gender-based ads according to employers sex-based preferences."

Last month the US Department of Housing and Urban Development accused Facebook of breaking the law by letting landlords and home sellers use its ad-targeting system to discriminate against potential buyers or tenants.

Facebook responded by cutting more than 5,000 ad-targeting options to prevent advertisers from discriminating on the basis of traits such as religion or race.
Donald Trump claims that Beijing is seeking to influence midterm elections in the US by targeting his political base with tariffs

China on Wednesday called on the United States to show "respect" in their trade dispute and rejected President Donald Trump's claims that it was meddling in the US midterm elections by taking aim at his political base.

The comments follow a combative series of tweets claiming Beijing's retaliatory tariffs on US goods were seeking to influence knife-edge midterm congressional elections in November.

Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Geng Shuang rejected the claims, saying: "Anyone who has some knowledge of China's diplomacy will know that we will not interfere in other countries' domestic affairs."

"We don't want others to interfere in our domestic politics, and we will not interfere in the domestic politics of others," Geng said at a regular press briefing.

Accusations of election meddling are especially sensitive in the US, given the political maelstrom over Russia's alleged intervention to support Trump in the 2016 presidential vote.

China separately also rejected claims -- made by Trump in the past -- that it has manipulated the value of the yuan downwards to compensate for the effect of US tariffs on its exports.

"China will never rely on the depreciation of the renminbi (yuan) to stimulate exports, because a one-way depreciation of the renminbi exchange rate will have more disadvantages than advantages," Premier Li Keqiang told an economic forum.

The US announced Monday that it would push ahead with tariffs on $200 billion in Chinese goods, on top of $50 billion already targeted.

Beijing had in July announced a 25 percent increase in tariffs on soybeans, dealing a blow to Trump's rural base in the soy-growing American heartland

This means the additional levies will hit more than half of US goods from China -- its largest source of imports.

After China retaliated on Tuesday with duties on $60 billion of American products, Trump accused China of trying to sway the elections.

- 'Great and fast' retaliation -

"China has openly stated that they are actively trying to impact and change our election by attacking our farmers, ranchers and industrial workers because of their loyalty to me," Trump wrote on Twitter.

"China has been taking advantage of the United States on Trade for many years. They also know that I am the one that knows how to stop it," he added, warning of a "great and fast economic retaliation" if China targets American farmers and industrial workers.

Some of the items included in the new tariffs announced Tuesday include daily necessities like diapers and furniture -- which would hit US consumers hard -- as well as solar panels and liquified natural gas.

Beijing had in July announced a 25 percent increase in tariffs on soybeans, dealing a blow to Trump's rural base in the soy-growing American heartland.

China, the world's biggest importer of soybeans -- used in cooking oil and animal feed -- bought about one third of its beans from the US last year.

The US also accuses China of seeking global industrial dominance through industrial espionage and through forced transfers of technology from foreign companies; state-sponsored corporate acquisitions; illicit market interventions; subsidies and dumping.

Despite the escalating trade tensions, Washington last week asked China for a new round of trade talks led by US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin.

- 'Mutual respect' -

"On the one hand the US is making contact for dialogue and extending invitations but on the other hand it is threatening with sanctions, with pressures," Geng said on Wednesday.

"These little actions by the US have become the routine, and we are prepared for them," he said, calling on Washington to show "mutual respect", "sincerity" and "good faith".

Meanwhile, Premier Li railed against "unilateralism" in a veiled allusion to the trade war while also calling for disagreements to be worked out through consultations.

"It is essential that we uphold the basic principles of multilateralism and free trade," Li said in his speech at the summer session of the World Economic Forum in the eastern Chinese city of Tianjin.

Li also rejected claims of currency manipulation. Still, he acknowledged China faced problems, like infrastructure investment levels falling to record lows and external trade friction.
Malaysia's former prime minister Najib Razak (centre) leaves Duta court complex in Kuala Lumpur on August 08, 2018

Malaysia's toppled leader Najib Razak was arrested Wednesday and will be charged over allegations that $628 million linked to state investment fund 1MDB ended up in his personal bank accounts, officials said.

The Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission said in a statement that it had detained Najib as part of its investigations into the fund and "the entry of 2.6 billion ringgit ($628 million) into his personal account".

Allegations that huge sums were looted from the investment vehicle by Najib and his cronies were a major factor in the shock defeat of his long-ruling coalition at elections in May to a reformist alliance headed by Mahathir Mohamad.

Since losing power, Najib has already been arrested and hit with seven charges related to claims he pocketed some $10 million from a former unit of 1MDB.

However his arrest Wednesday related directly to one of the most damaging allegations in the long-running scandal -- that huge sums from the fund flowed into his bank accounts ahead of a hotly contested election in 2013.

When the allegations surfaced in 2015, they dramatically ratcheted up the scandal surrounding Najib and his inner circle.

The attorney-general later cleared him of any wrongdoing, saying the money was a personal donation from the Saudi royal family.

Najib will appear in court Thursday afternoon to be charged over the allegations, the anti-corruption commission said.
South Sudan's President Salva Kiir, wearing the hat, and his former deputy Riek Machar signed a peace deal last week

The United Nations warned Wednesday that entrenched suspicion was clouding a newly-minted deal to restore peace to South Sudan, as Amnesty International accused government forces of war crimes.

"There's currently a key ingredient that is lacking. That's trust," said David Shearer, head of the UN mission in South Sudan, referring to the September 12 peace accord.

"Those who signed the agreement have in the past been former friends and foes," he said. "From my discussions with them, suspicion is still widespread."

The agreement was signed by President Salva Kiir and rebel leader and former vice president Riek Machar.

"We also need to see clear evidence that all the warring factions have the political will to stop the violence," Shearer said.

"We have not seen anything concrete at the moment. What needs to happen first (is) we need to see a disengagement of the forces."

Recent clashes in the southern region of Central Equatoria were the subject of an investigation, he said.

Government security forces had also shot a Nepalese peacekeeper in the southern town of Yei over the weekend, he added.

- Northern 'war crimes' -

South Sudan

South Sudan, the world's youngest nation, broke away from Sudan in 2011 after a long and bloody independence struggle.

But just two years later, war broke out, triggering a severe humanitarian crisis.

A struggle for power between Kiir, a member of the Dinka tribe, and Machar, a Nuer, meant the conflict quickly took on an ethnic character with civilians subjected to massacres and widespread rape by forces on both sides.

Tens of thousands of people have been killed and millions pushed to the brink of starvation or forced to flee their homes in one of the world's worst humanitarian crises.

In a report released on Wednesday, Amnesty International said it had uncovered evidence of "war crimes" in a brutal government offensive on Leer and Mayendit counties in the northern state of Unity.

It said the offensive began in April and continued until early July "a week after the latest ceasefire was brokered on 27 June".

The ceasefire paved the way for last week's peace agreement.

- 'Shot, burnt alive, hanged' -

"Civilians (were) deliberately shot dead, burnt alive, hanged in trees and run over with armoured vehicles," it said.

Amnesty said its report drew on testimony from around 100 civilians survivors.

The group also documented "systematic sexual violence", rape and gang-rape as well as abductions of women and girls, and the deliberate killing of young boys and male infants.

But Michael Makuei, South Sudan's minister of information, lashed out at the report as seeking to sully the country's image.

"These are the people who do not want peace for South Sudan," he said.

"These are people who keep on sending such reports so that the international community is made to believe that South Sudan is not at peace."

The details outlined in the report echoed the type of brutality that has been characteristic of South Sudan's five-year civil war.

UN rights experts have warned of "ethnic cleansing" and the threat of genocide, while Amnesty has blamed the ongoing violence on Juba's failure to prosecute perpetrators.

A so-called "hybrid court" to try war crimes and crimes against humanity, proposed by the African Union as part of a failed 2015 peace agreement, has yet to be set up.
The ruling BJP has long pushed for a uniform civil code for marriage, divorce and property. India's constitution allows followers of each faith to use their religious laws to govern such matters

The Indian government Wednesday issued an executive order making the Islamic practice of "instant divorce" a criminal offence punishable by up to three years in prison.

The controversial move brings an outright ban on "triple talaq" -- when a Muslim man ends his marriage by saying "talaq" ("you are divorced" in Arabic) three times in succession -- a step closer.

Muslim women say they have been divorced over messaging apps like WhatsApp or in letters, leaving them without any legal remedy.

India's lower house, controlled by Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janta Party (BJP), passed legislation outlawing the practice in December.

But it got stuck in the upper house, prompting the government to issue Wednesday's executive order. It now needs only approval from the president to become law.

"There was a constitutional urgency to bring this law. The curse of triple talaq has continued unabated," Ravi Shankar Prasad, law and justice minister, told reporters.

In August 2017, India's Supreme Court declared "triple talaq" unconstitutional and ordered the government to legislate against it.

Prasad said that 201 cases have been reported across the country even after the top court's order.

The BJP has long pushed for a uniform civil code for marriage, divorce and property. India's constitution allows followers of each faith to use their religious laws to govern such matters.

But India's 180-million-strong Muslim community has historically opposed such a move, saying it will erode their religious identity and violate the constitution.

Critics have long accused Modi, who is supported by hardline Hindu nationalists and who is running for re-election in 2019, of demonising Muslims for political ends.

"The BJP's stand on the Muslim plight is well known and they have little sympathy for the community," said Yogendra Yadav, an academic and politician who heads the socio-political organisation Swaraj India.

"This issue gives them a nice pretext to present the Muslim community in a poor light and themselves as defender of a retrograde practice," he said.

R S Surjewala, a spokesman for the opposition Congress party, said that the next step would be to ensure Muslim women get alimony.

"But the Modi government would not want that, they don't want upliftment of Muslim women," he told news channels.
A Pakistani court ordered the release of former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and his daughter, suspending their prison sentences pending an appeal hearing, his lawyer said

A Pakistani court on Wednesday ordered the release of former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and his daughter, suspending their prison sentences pending an appeal hearing, his lawyer said.

"Today, the Islamabad High Court has suspended the verdict against Nawaz Sharif, his daughter Maryam Nawaz and his son-in-law Captain Safdar and ordered to release them on bail until a final decision," Khawaja Haris, Sharif's lawyer, told AFP.

Dozens of jubilant supporters chanted "Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif!" outside the court after the decision was announced.

Sharif was arrested on his return to the country in July this year.

An anti-corruption court that month sentenced them to 10 and seven years respectively over properties they allegedly owned in Britain, following revelations in the Panama Papers.

"Today the court has suspended the decision that was based on revenge," former minister Ahsan Iqbal told reporters.

"This trial is important because even a blind person in Pakistan will see that there was neither law nor constitution in the decision and it was just pre-poll rigging to pave the way for Imran Khan to win elections," he said.
A former columnist for state media has been jailed for seven years for "abusive" Facebook posts about Myanmar leader Aung San Suu Kyi, a court official said, the latest case threatening free expression in the country

A former columnist for state media has been jailed for seven years for "abusive" Facebook posts about Myanmar leader Aung San Suu Kyi, a court official said Wednesday, the latest case threatening free expression in the country.

Ngar Min Swe was sentenced for sedition on Tuesday, Yangon's Western District Court spokesman Htay Aung told AFP.

"He was convicted... for writing abusive posts on Facebook against State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi, making people get the wrong impression of her," Htay Aung said.

Myanmar faces widespread condemnation for infringing on freedom of expression following the jailing earlier this month of two Reuters journalists who reported on the Rohingya crisis.

Ngar Min Swe worked as a columnist under the previous military-backed government. He has spent the years since Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy party rose to power in 2016 penning screeds against her and the party.

He was arrested on July 12, the same day he posted about Suu Kyi receiving a kiss on the cheek from US President Barack Obama during his state visit in 2013.

This innocuous gesture of greeting came in for criticism from a conservative Myanmar public, especially supporters of the army-aligned Union Solidarity and Development Party -- like Ngar Min Swe, who took to social media to make sexist inferences about the state counsellor.
Thousands of civilians who fled a threatened government offensive on Syria's last major rebel bastion Idlib have headed home

Thousands of residents of Syria's last major rebel bastion Idlib headed home within 48 hours of a deal being announced to avoid a government offensive to retake the province, a war monitor said on Wednesday.

As air strikes intensified earlier this month, the looming threat of a Russian-backed assault had prompted tens of thousands of civilians to flee areas near the front line.

But many headed home after a deal was reached between Russia and rebel supporter Turkey to create a demilitarised buffer zone along the front line, as the first step in a wider settlement, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

"Around 7,000 people have returned to their towns and villages since the announcement of the deal on Monday, especially in the southeast of Idlib and the north of (neighbouring) Hama," said Rami Abdel Rahman, head of the Britain-based Observatory.

At a camp for the displaced in the town of Atme on the Turkish border on Tuesday, dozens of Syrians held up banners welcoming the agreement.

"We will return, God permitting," said one.

"Thank you to our Turkish brothers," said another, signed by the people of a town in the north of Hama province that had been bombarded in recent weeks.

One of the demonstrators, Marhaf al-Jadou, said he was tired of running from the shelling and air strikes.

"Enough of being displaced and sitting in tents. We want to return to our homes and our children to their schools," he said.

The United Nations has given cautious backing to the Russian-Turkish agreement.

It "will allow for the delivery of humanitarian assistance and for the saving of civilian lives," UN humanitarian coordinator in Syria, Ali al-Zaatari, said on Tuesday.

"We are engaging with all parties involved for more information and how this can be used to allow us to further access people in need," he told AFP on Wednesday.

The civil war in Syria has killed more than 360,000 people and displaced millions more since it erupted with the brutal repression of anti-government protests in 2011.

Around half of the three million residents of the rebel zone in and around Idlib have fled from other parts of Syria recaptured by government forces in previous offensives.
McDonald's escapes the fate of Apple, Starbucks and Amazon

The European Union on Wednesday ended a long-running investigation into the tax arrangements between US fast food giant McDonald's and Luxembourg, finding the setup did not amount to illegal state aid.

With the decision, the maker of Big Mac and McNuggets escapes the fate of US giants Apple, Starbucks and Amazon, which were ordered by the EU to repay big amounts in back taxes, angering Washington.

"Luxembourg did not break EU state aid rules," EU Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager told a news briefing in Brussels, though she carefully added that the company had managed to escape tax, albeit legally.

The case stemmed from a complaint by trade unions and the charity War on Want accusing McDonald's of avoiding around one billion euros ($1.2 billion) in taxes between 2009 and 2013 by shifting profits from one corporate division to another.

"Of course, the fact remains that McDonald's did not pay any taxes in Luxembourg on these profits -- and this is not how it should be from a tax fairness point of view," Vestager said.

But the commissioner said she welcomed that Luxembourg was in the process of closing tax loopholes related to the EU's investigations.

These would "avoid such situations in the future," she said.

Specifically, the Commission investigated whether the arrangements meant McDonald's paid no tax in Luxembourg nor any dues to US authorities, under special treaties between Washington and the duchy.

The EU found that the deals complied with national law and could not be seen as an unfair advantage handed the fast food conglomerate by Luxembourg at the expense of others.

McDonald's said it welcomed the decision and insisted it paid fair taxes in Europe.

"We pay the taxes that are owed and, from 2013-2017, McDonald's companies paid more than $3 billion just in corporate income taxes in the European Union with an average tax rate approaching 29 percent," a McDonald's spokesperson said.

- 'Missed opportunity' -

Launched in 2015, the case against one of the world's most iconic companies followed the LuxLeaks affair, which revealed that top global companies had negotiated lower tax rates, in some cases as low as one percent, in secret pacts with Luxembourg.

Luxembourg itself has been hit by negative decisions from Brussels -- including a payback demand against Amazon for 250 million euros.

McDonald's fate is in stark contrast to the spectacular decision against iPhone-maker Apple, which was handed a record 14 billion-euro tax bill over its arrangements in Ireland.

"The commission has missed an opportunity to tackle McDonald's," said Owen Espley, senior campaigner at War on Want, the complainant in the case.

"Our report showed that it is dodging over 1 billion euros across the EU. And it's not just a question of paying fair taxes -- McDonald's is not paying fair wages either," he added.

In May, European and US labour unions accused McDonald's of choosing Britain as its new international tax hub in face of the crackdown in the EU.

This raised alarms that the company was seeking to benefit from Brexit.
China denied US President Donald Trump's claims that it was meddling in the US midterm elections by taking aim at his political base in their escalating trade war

China on Wednesday denied US President Donald Trump's claims that it was meddling in the US midterm elections by taking aim at his political base in their escalating trade war.

The comments came after Trump wrote a combative series of tweets on Tuesday claiming that Beijing's retaliatory import duties on US goods were seeking to influence knife-edge midterm congressional elections.

But Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Geng Shuang rejected the claims, saying: "Anyone who has some knowledge of China's diplomacy will know that we will not interfere in other countries' domestic affairs."

"We don't want others to interfere in our domestic politics, and we will not interfere in the domestic politics of others," Geng said at a regular press briefing.

The US announced on Monday that it would push ahead with tariffs on $200 billion in Chinese goods, on top of $50 billion already targeted.

After China on Tuesday retaliated with duties on $60 billion of American products, Trump accused China of trying to sway the elections.

"China has openly stated that they are actively trying to impact and change our election by attacking our farmers, ranchers and industrial workers because of their loyalty to me," Trump wrote on Twitter.

Accusations of election meddling are especially sensitive in the US, given the political maelstrom over Russia's alleged intervention to support Trump in the 2016 presidential vote.
As the primary entry points into the EU for many of the refugees fleeing across the Mediterranean, Italy, Spain and Greece are sceptical about the plans to beef up the Frontex border agency

The EU must convince Italy, Spain and Greece to back a plan to bolster the bloc's external borders, Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz said Wednesday as bloc leaders met in Salzburg to discuss the controversial issue of migration.

EU Commission chief Jean-Claude Juncker "has put forward a proposal to widen the mandate of the Frontex (border agency) and make repatriations (of refugees) more effective," Kurz said in an interview with the Austrian daily Der Standard.

"Some member states are still rather sceptical. It's our task to convince them," said Kurz, whose country currently holds the European Union's rotating presidency.

As EU leaders gathered for Wednesday's summit, EU Council chief Donald Tusk warned that leaders must "stop the migration blame game".

Noting that the number of people entering Europe illegally had dropped dramatically since the 2015 migration crisis, Tusk had the following message for heads of government: "Instead of taking political advantage of the situation, we should focus on what works and just get on with it".

"We can no longer be divided between those who want to solve the problem of illegal migrant flows and those who want to use it for political gain," Tusk added, alluding to the anti-immigration parties that made gains in several recent European elections.

Kurz said that Italy, Spain and Greece, as key entry points into the bloc for many refugees fleeing across the Mediterranean, are sceptical about the plans to beef up the Frontex border agency.

"It's about their sovereignty rights, as well as concerns about the improved registration of migrants," the Austrian leader said.

Under the EU Commission's proposals, the number of Frontex border guards will be increased to 10,000 by 2020 and they will be able to intervene to better regulate the influx.

Germany and France in particular advocate improving the system for registering migrants.

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has also vowed to oppose the EU plan.

The fiercely anti-immigration premier said the plan would "strip Hungary of its right to protect its own borders".

"We will not give up our right to defend a border. No one can take an iota of that away from us," he told parliament in Budapest on Monday.
A prison van transporting Khaw leaves court last month

A Malaysian professor was jailed for life in Hong Kong Wednesday for murdering his wife and teenage daughter using a yoga ball filled with carbon monoxide which he had placed in their car.

Khaw Kim-sun, 53, shook his head and looked at his three other children sitting in court on hearing the verdict, broadcaster RTHK reported. One of them burst into tears.

Prosecutors had told the High Court that Khaw left the inflatable ball in the boot of a car and the gas leaked out and killed them.

His wife Wong Siew-fing and 16-year-old daughter Lily were found by the 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.

Prosecutors accused Khaw, a specialist in anaesthesiology and an associate professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, of hatching a murder plot because he was having an affair with a student.

The court heard earlier in the trial that Khaw had told colleagues he planned to use the gas on rabbits. He later told police he had taken it to get rid of rats at home.

The professor also told police after his arrest that Lily knew about the dangerous gas in the yoga ball, and suggested she may have wanted to commit suicide.

Khaw's case was the second murder investigation involving an academic in recent months.

In August a University of Hong Kong professor was arrested on suspicion of killing his wife after police found a body stuffed in a suitcase in his office.
Italian Interior Minister Matteo Salvini says his comments referring to Africans as slaves were misinterpreted

The African Union has called on Italy's far-right interior minister to withdraw comments he made last week in which he referred to Africans as slaves.

But Matteo Salvini on Wednesday insisted that his comments had been misinterpreted and that there was no need to apologise.

An AU statement issued Tuesday evening expressed "dismay" at Salvini's comments.

It called on him to "retract his derogatory statement about African migrants" adding, "name-calling will not resolve the migration challenges facing Africa and Europe".

Salvini's remarks were made on Friday during a clash with Luxembourg's Foreign Minister Jean Asselborn at an EU meeting in Vienna. Asselborn had suggested that ageing Europe needed immigrants.

"In Italy we feel it's necessary to help our children make more children. And not to have new slaves to replace the children we're no longer having," Salvini retorted.

His comments were filmed in a meeting closed to the press. Salvini himself posted a video of them on his Facebook page to mark his clash with Asselborn.

In comments to reporters on Wednesday however, he said his comments had been distorted.

"In fact, in Vienna I said exactly the opposite, to defend asylum seekers and immigrants who some people in Europe use as slaves," he argued.

"There is nothing that requires apologies from me," he said, adding that poor work by a French-speaking translator might have been behind the misunderstanding.

In its statement, the African Union pointed out that Italy had itself benefited from mass emigration, with more than 26 million Italians leaving their home country in between 1861 to 1976.

It was a matter of record, the statement added, that "Italy has benefited greatly from its huge diaspora through remittances and trade".

Salvini is the leader of the anti-immigration League party, part of Italy's ruling coalition, where he also serves as deputy prime minister.

Within days of becoming interior minister, he delivered on a campaign promise to close Italian ports to immigrants and asylum-seekers.
Bangkok's Suvarnabhumi airport will tighten security after two movie fans breached it

Two Thai fans were charged with trespassing Wednesday after sneaking into Bangkok's main airport by impersonating customs officials to meet South Korean movie star Lee Jong-Suk, police said.

The women, whose names were not disclosed, entered the restricted zone of Suvarnabhumi airport on September 14 using security passes they obtained in a risky attempt to meet the celebrity.

All went according to plan until one of the women detailed the derring-do exploit on Instagram, raising concerns about airport security.

Thailand receives about 35 million tourists a year and the airport is its busiest hub.

Camera footage shows one customs official handing the pair security passes and leading them to the prohibited area where Lee was due to arrive.

"The two women are now charged over transpassing while two officials are wanted for helping them to commit the crime," airport police chief Viroj Tudso told AFP.

If convicted, they face fines and possible jail terms of up to five years.

One of the women facing charges had thanked her friend in a post for helping find the actor's flight details and another person for leading her to the inner departure gate.

She also described the ruse, in which they wore outfits that made them look like customs staff, and said she was thrilled when it worked.

"I was the first person to shake hands with (him)," the woman said. "I wont wash my hands."

An airport representative said stricter rules on staff security checks would be implemented in response to the embarassing breach.
Askale Adacha, 63, weeps as she speaks about fleeing the violence on the outskirts of the Ethiopian capital

At least 58 people were killed during ethnic violence at the weekend on the outskirts of Ethiopia's capital, an Amnesty International researcher told AFP on Wednesday.

And another source involved in the investigation, who saw and counted the corpses, told AFP a total of 65 people had been killed, mostly in the city's western suburbs.

The figures are more than twice that given by state media which on Monday said the death toll from violence in and around Burayu stood at 23.

Fighting broke out last week in Burayu, a western suburb of Addis Ababa, and continued through the weekend, forcing hundreds to flee and sparking protests that paralysed the city on Monday during which police killed five people.

Speaking to AFP on condition of anonymity, the investigation source said most of the deaths had occurred in the city's western suburbs although others were killed in the centre.

"The 65 cases are from Burayu, Ashewa Meda, Kolfe and Kirkos," the source said, referring to three areas in the west and Kirkos in the centre.

Some of the victims had been stabbed while others died after being beaten with sticks and rocks.

None had been shot and the toll does not include five alleged looters killed by police on Monday.

- Targeted by Oromo mobs -

The weekend violence brought people onto the streets of Addis Ababa on Monday in protest

Fisseha Tekle, a Nairobi-based researcher with Amnesty International, said he had compiled a similar tally of 58 dead.

Residents told Amnesty International they saw "eight dead bodies on Friday, 21 on Saturday," he said.

"On Sunday they saw about 11 people and on Monday the number of dead bodies they've seen was 18."

Government spokesmen could not immediately be reached for comment.

Burayu lies on the outskirts of Addis Ababa but within the Oromia region that surrounds the capital and which is home to the Oromo people, Ethiopia's largest ethnic group.

People who fled the clashes told AFP they were targeted by Oromo mobs because they are members of minority ethnic groups.

- Police failings -

The violence began ahead of Saturday's highly-anticipated return of rebels from the once-banned Oromo Liberation Front

Fisseha said the government must investigate the conduct of the Oromia and federal police, whom he accused of failing to quell the violence.

"They have to investigate why they have not responded on time, why they have failed to protect the vulnerable communities there," Fisseha said.

The violence began last week in the run-up to Saturday's return of the once-banned Oromo Liberation Front, a rebel group that returned to Ethiopia following a string of radical political reforms pushed through by Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed.

An Oromo himself, Abiy took power in April and has won popularity for his aggressive reform agenda which has seen him freeing jailed dissidents and overhauling the security services, who have long been accused of violating human rights.

He has also pushed through a landmark peace deal with Eritrea, which was signed in July, ending two decades of enmity sparked by a border conflict.

But bloody ethnic clashes have broken out repeatedly since his inauguration, with the worst clashes occurring in the south where fighting between the Oromo and Gedeo minority has displaced nearly one million people.
Ian Dickson/RedfernsThere's some legal movement afoot in the Led Zeppelin camp: The band's biggest fan site reports that a streaming service is in the works that would provide fans with access to its legendary trove of concert recordings.

LedZepNews reports that lawyers for the band this week filed a U.S. trademark application for the name "The Led Zeppelin Experience," for the purpose of "providing non-downloadable prerecorded music on-line via a global computer network."

The band reportedly already holds the trademark for the name in the United Kingdom and Europe, but was denied in the States when they first filed, late last year. Zeppelin then hired a new, U.S.-based legal team and resubmitted the application with more specific information. The trademark also allows for the sale of clothing.

Because of the trademark requests, Jason Bonham was asked to change the name of his band from "Jason Bonhams Led Zeppelin Experience" to "Jason Bonhams Led Zeppelin Evening."

Back in February, Zep guitarist Jimmy Page told Planet Rock magazine, "There's a lot of [live recordings] to come out, a number of releases. I'd like to say that they'll be coming out over the next 10 years. There's more to come for sure."

Led Zeppelin has a legendary following of fans who collect the band's bootlegged concerts, and there have been rumors for years that the band was seeking to establish an official outlet for its archived live shows.

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Wow! Talk about getting blown away by a show, the last time that this writer witnessed a performance that was on this level of adrenaline rushing intensity was at the Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band MODA center appearance in 2013. Tonight it was Greta Van Fleet, representing the incarnate personification of youthful exuberance. Before the show began I ran into a recent Oregon transplant named Pat who just moved to the West Coast from Detroit, Michigan. Greta Van Fleet sold out the 5,000 seat Fox theater in downtown Detroit three nights in a row, he enthusiastically explained.

Greta Van Fleet played in Portland, Oregon last October, almost a year earlier at the 500 seat Hawthorne theater to a sold out gathering of enthusiastic screaming fans that knew their songs with such familiarity that they sang along with them. Tonight they were playing at one of the best mid size venues in the city, at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall, with a capacity of over 2,800. I wondered if they were popular enough 2,400 miles away from their home in Frankenmuth, Michigan to fill this venue. By the time Greta Van Fleets set began, the only vacant seats were from the rabid fans that stormed the stage and nearly knocked this writer over as he was photographing from center stage.

After WWII, Detroit, Michigan was a boom town, with the Big Three American automobile companies selling cars as fast as the industry could produce them. There were more good paying jobs than workers who were available to fill in the supporting industries, producing steel and tires, along with foundries and hundreds of machine, pattern and tool & die shops across the Greater Detroit area. This drew both White and Black workers from the Deep South who brought with them their music. The mix of gospel, country, folk, blues and jazz gave birth to R&B and Rock & Roll, which reached maturity in the early 1960s when Motown was born and then the emergence of the Detroit rock and roll scene of the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Greta Van Fleet is a worthy addition to the Wolverine states rock & roll pantheon. Michigan has been the home of some of the most important artists of the twentieth-century, which includes Aretha Franklin, Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder along with seminal rockers like the MC5, Iggy & the Stooges, the Bob Seger System, Ted Nugent and the Amboy Dukes and Grand Funk Railroad to name some along with more recent additions like Kid Rock, Eminem and The White Stripes. The quartet is comprised of brothers; vocalist Josh and guitarist Jake Kiszka. The duo graduated from high school a few years before younger brother and bass player Sam along with their best friend and drummer, Danny Wagner, who are both nineteen. They could only tour in the summer and during the holidays, until June 2017 when the latter pair graduated. Since then they have been touring relentlessly and have released a pair of four song EPs, that were combined into a double EP, titled From the Fires. Their first full length album Anthem of the Peaceful Army, is due to be released in October.

The opening act was Dorothy, a raucous psychedelic rock band from Los Angeles fronted by vocalist Dorothy Martin, that played a forty-five minute set. The quintet rocked the house with cuts from both their 2016 release, Rockisdead, along with their 2018 release, 28 Days in the Valley. Songs included Down to the Bottom and Flawless, in the tradition of the San Francisco hippie era bands like Jefferson Airplane and Cold Blood.

At 9:30 PM Greta Van Fleet took the stage and began the show with Highway Tune, which was their debut single and immediately drew a positive response from the packed house that was on its feet for the entire show. Josh Kiszkas voice soared, as Jake laid down his guitar chops. Edge of Darkness and Flower Power gave the rhythm section a chance to shine, as bass player Sam Kinszka filled two roles as both bass player and keyboardist, while drummer, Danny Wagner ravaged his drum kit with the intensity of Ginger Baker or Terry Bozzio. Sam put down his bass and sat at the organ for Flower Power whose keyboard riff sounded eerily similar to Your Time Is Gonna Come from Led Zeppelins eponymous debut album. Coincidentally John Paul Jones played both bass and keyboards.

When comparing Greta Van Fleets performance at this show to last years the growth is impressive. Everything from their stage apparel to the intensity of their performance was augmented along with the audience size. Josh and Sam both wore gold pants and Josh had feathers dangling and wore a hippie headband. Even Jake and Danny were wearing garish outfits, rather than normal street clothes

Their entire set was only an hour long, including the encore, but the vibrant intensity was so phenomenal that it made it seem longer. Songs were played in the tradition of the 1960s jam bands, like the Grateful Dead, New Riders of the Purple Sage and Quicksilver Messenger Service, that extended three and four minute singles into epic ten minute sonic excursions. The only criticism that anyone could have of the show, was that it was too short. The remainder of the set included Howlin Wolfs Evil, and the show closer When the Curtain Falls, from their upcoming debut album, Anthem of the Peaceful Army.

Every concert has an encore and the popularity of the act can be indicated by how long and intense the crowd cheers before the band returns. When Greta Van Fleets seven song set ended, the rabid crowd screamed, clapped and went nuts at a volume that equaled the concert itself for over five minutes until the band finally returned to the stage. As they began Black Smoke Rising the crowd sang the chorus,

And the black smoke rises

From the fires weve been told

Safari Song was the barn burner that the show concluded with, as it gave the quartet an opportunity to indelibly inoculate the audience with one final adrenaline rush. Joshs stellar crystal clear high octave vocals, reminiscent of Robert Plant or Freddy Mercury, along with Jakes Pete Townsend power chords and Sam dancing with his bass gave way to Danny Wagners violently intense drum solo. Wagners solo was a flashback of the late Who drummer Keith Moon in its intensity, but without the destructive conclusion. Maybe next year Greta Van Fleet will fill the 18,000 seat MODA center and amp up their performance by destroying their equipment for the grand finale.

Review by Bob Gersztyn
Millions of abalone are poached from South African waters each year, says conservation watchdog TRAFFIC. Most of the illegal exports end up in Hong Kong

Demand for abalone by Chinese gangs has caused South Africa's stocks of the marine molluscs to be depleted at a record rate, costing the country $60 million (51.35 million euros) annually, a report has warned.

Wildlife trade monitoring network TRAFFIC said the country's coasts have been stripped of at least 96 million abalone in the last 18 years, with 9.6 million poached in 2016 alone.

"These are almost the highest -- if not the highest -- poaching levels we have seen in the last twenty or more years," said the report published late Tuesday.

Despite a mounting risk that abalone could become extinct, they were removed from the CITES list of at-risk species in 2010.

Chinese criminal syndicates use crystal meth as a reward for gangs in the Western Cape, a region that includes Cape Town, to dive for the coveted delicacy.

It is fished illegally and outside of quota systems, TRAFFIC said.

"Driven by sophisticated transnational networks and local gangs, the illegal abalone trade has been fuelled by deeply entrenched socio-economic disparities," the report said.

The authors warned that bitter fights over official local fishing quotas and gang violence were pushing people into the trade.

Ninety percent of both legal and illegal exports end up in Hong Kong.

The once abundant high-end delicacy, a chewy sea snail with a distinctive salty taste, is popular at feasts and wedding banquets in the Far East.

The report found that the lack of regulation meant that once the abalone were smuggled out of South Africa, they could be easily re-sold without fear of detection.

"Because of the involvement of organised crime, the apparent links to gangs in Cape Town, the links between the trade in abalone and the trade in drugs, there are also some clear negative socio-economic impacts," said Markus Burgener of TRAFFIC in a statement.

Recent crime statistics show that the Western Cape has the highest number of murders in South Africa, driven by gang violence.
Ottawa and Washington remain at odds over Canada's protected dairy sector and cultural subsidies

There is still a way to go to reach a new North American Free Trade Agreement, Canada's prime minister said Wednesday, brushing off US pressure for a quick deal as high-level talks resumed in Washington.

"Our team is in Washington this morning to continue to see if we can get a good deal for Canada, a good deal for everyone," said Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

"We remain confident that there is always a deal possible, but it will take more work," he added.

As he spoke in Ottawa, Canada's top diplomat Chrystia Freeland, who leads the Canadian negotiating team, was meeting with US Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer in Washington.

Negotiations to modernize the 1994 accord between Canada, the United States and Mexico started a year ago at the behest of US President Donald Trump, who called it "one of the worst trade deals in history" for sending many manufacturing jobs -- notably in the auto sector -- to Mexico.

Freeland told reporters on Wednesday that negotiators had worked through the night. She emerged from meetings with Lighthizer saying officials were "tired but in good spirits."

"Our negotiators have been really hard added including an all-night session last night of one team. So we are working very, very hard," she said.

The United States and Mexico sealed their own two-way deal at the end of August, and Trump has since ramped up pressure on Canada to accept his terms.

But Ottawa has seemed reluctant to heed Trump's push to sign a deal before US midterm elections in November and the transfer of power in December to Mexican President-elect Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador -- as Trudeau's Liberals also need a win to hold up to voters when they return to the polls in one year.

- Dairy farmers on edge -

Ottawa and Washington remain at odds over Canada's protected dairy sector and cultural subsidies, as well as Canada's demand for an international system for resolving disputes.

Earlier, Canadian dairy farmers publicly urged Trudeau not to cave to US demands for increased access to Canada's dairy market, noting that the US already sells five times more milk to Canada than Canada sells to the US.

"We call on the government to ensure that any final NAFTA deal has no further negative impact on our dairy sector," Pierre Lampron, the president of the Dairy Farmers of Canada, said at a news conference.

Flanked by dairy farmers from all of Canada's 10 provinces, he said Ottawa had given milk and cheese carve-outs to the EU and 10 member nations in the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade pact in order to secure free trade with those blocs.

This cost Canada Can$250 million (US$193 million) in lost milk production, Lampron said. The Canadian industry is valued at Can$19 billion.

"This doesn't only hurt dairy farmers. From equipment dealers, to feed manufacturers to veterinarians to truck drivers, to processors, all are negatively impacted by these (trade) deals," Lampron said. "Enough is enough."

The supply-managed sector sees milk, egg and poultry production and prices controlled by the government, resulting in higher prices for consumers but a stable income for farmers.

"We will continue to defend supply management," Trudeau said. "This is a system that works for Canadians. It works for our agricultural industry."
Hunt arrived in Yangon on Wednesday and said he wanted to see "first-hand" the humanitarian crisis faced by the Rohingya

British foreign minister Jeremy Hunt on Thursday called for justice on the Rohingya crisis after his visit to Myanmar's Rakhine state, telling embattled leader Aung San Suu Kyi the world "won't let it rest".

Hunt's rallying cry for accountability comes at the end of a busy two-day visit during which he visited Rakhine -- the epicentre of a brutal military campaign that drove out more than 700,000 Rohingya Muslims -- and met with Suu Kyi.

"Burma needs to know the international community won't let it rest," said Hunt using Myanmar's former name.

Myanmar has set up an "independent" commission to address the army's crackdown against the Rohingya, rejecting the UN probe and calls for the International Criminal Court to investigate.

"If we don't see that process happening, we will use all the tools at our disposal to make sure there is justice... the world is watching," Hunt said after the meeting, which he said was "lively" and "frank".

The British foreign minister's visit came the same week UN investigators released a damning and meticulous report detailing why six Myanmar generals should be prosecuted for genocide against the Rohingya Muslim minority.

The Rohingya fled to neighbouring Bangladesh, where they joined about 300,000 already in cramped refugee camps, carrying accounts of extrajudicial killings, extreme sexual violence and arson.

The evidence warrants the charges of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes, UN investigators said.

British foreign minister Jeremy Hunt meets local residents in Rakhine state. He was led on a three-hour, tightly-managed tour of Rakhine via helicopter

Hunt also brought up with Suu Kyi his "concerns" on the jailing of two Reuters journalists, Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo, who were sentenced earlier this month to seven years each under the state secrets act.

The pair had uncovered the extrajudicial killings of 10 Rohingya men in the Rakhine village of Inn Din -- something the army has since acknowledged.

Suu Kyi, who endured a total of 15 years of house arrest under the previous junta-led regime, said last week Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo's sentencing upheld the rule of law.

"She said she would look into it," Hunt said Thursday.

- Tightly-managed tour -

Before the meeting, the foreign minister was led on a three-hour, tightly-managed tour of Rakhine via helicopter, which included the Taung Pyo Letwe returnee reception centre, opened to receive the refugees even though virtually no Rohingya have come back.

Bangladesh and Myanmar signed an agreement last year to repatriate the Muslim minority but it has stalled as they fear returning to Rakhine without their safety and rights guaranteed.

In each of the three other locations Hunt was shepherded to, he found a pre-selected group of locals waiting to speak to him. At Pan Taw Pyin village, the final stop, he walked off to try to speak with nearby residents about their experiences despite the heavy security presence.

The military has consistently denied nearly all wrongdoing, insisting that its campaign was justified to root out militants, and Myanmar's ambassador to the UN on Tuesday slammed the UN probe as "one-sided" and "flawed".

Suu Kyi, a former pro-democracy icon, has seen a sharp fall from grace internationally due to her failure to address the Rohingya crisis.

Her supporters say her hands are tied by a still powerful military, which controls a quarter of parliament's seats and three ministries.

UN investigators say her government's "acts and omissions" contributed to the "atrocity crimes" in the crisis.

Hunt will head to New York next week for the UN General Assembly, where he will chair a foreign ministers' meeting Monday on Myanmar.

Suu Kyi will not be travelling to New York for the UN top meeting.
Supporters of Lebanon's Shiite movement Hezbollah gather near a poster of their leader Hassan Nasrallah during a ceremony to mark Ashura in Beirut on September 20, 2018

Lebanon's Hezbollah said Thursday it had acquired "precision missiles" despite extensive efforts by neighbour and foe Israel to prevent the Shiite movement developing this capability.

"It has been done. The resistance now owns precision missiles" as part of its weaponry, Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah said in a televised address during the key Shiite commemoration of Ashura.

Israel this month acknowledged carrying out more than 200 strikes over the past 18 months in war-torn Syria, where Hezbollah fights alongside Israel's arch-foe and Shiite powerhouse Iran in support of the Damascus regime.

Israel has said it is working to stop Iran from entrenching itself military there and to keep Hezbollah from acquiring sophisticated arms.

"Attempts in Syria to block the way towards this (missile) capability" have failed, Nasrallah said.

"If Israel imposes a war on Lebanon, it will face a fate that it never would have expected."

Israel has fought several conflicts against Hezbollah, the last in 2006.

The Israeli military believes Hezbollah has between 100,000 and 120,000 short-range missiles and rockets, as well as several hundred longer-range missiles.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Nasrallah should not think twice but "at least 20 times" before deciding whether to attack Israel.

"If he seeks conflict with us, he will receive a blow he cannot even imagine," Netanyahu said in a statement.

- Iran's 'dangerous deadline' -

Late Monday, an Israeli raid hit Syria's coastal province of Latakia to prevent what it said were deliveries of materials for advanced weaponry to Hezbollah.

The same evening Syrian air defences downed a Russian military plane by mistake, killing all 15 on board.

Russia backs Syria's government militarily and it was the worst case of friendly fire between the two allies since Moscow intervened in the conflict in 2015.

On Tuesday, Netanyahu said his country was "determined to stop Iranian military entrenchment in Syria, and the attempts by Iran, which calls for the destruction of Israel, to transfer to Hezbollah lethal weaponry (to be used) against Israel".

Nasrallah accused the Israelis of trying to kill him "day and night". He has lived in a secret location for decades and rarely appears in public.

The Hezbollah chief also reiterated his support for Iran, after the United States withdrew from a landmark nuclear deal in May.

Washington reimposed sanctions on the Islamic republic last month, and a new round of even harsher sanctions targeting Iran's vital oil sector is set to go into effect in early November.

"It is our duty today to stand by Iran, who in a few weeks' time will face a dangerous deadline -- the start of American sanctions," he said.

Nasrallah accused the United States of "going to all the world's capitals in a bid to besiege" Iran, as Washington seeks support for its measures against the country.
Kurz said the EU leaders meeting in Salzburg had backed the plan

EU leaders vowed Thursday to intensify talks with Egypt and other North African countries on how to curb flows of illegal migrants to Europe and to fight those who traffic them.

European Council President Donald Tusk said the leaders meeting in the Austrian city of Salzburg have also agreed to attend a summit with their Arab counterparts in February to tackle migration, among other issues.

Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz said all EU leaders backed the plan to engage more with North African Arab countries and noted that Egypt, at least, is "ready to intensify talks with the European Union".

"I believe that this will be an important further step in the fight against illegal migration, but above all also in the fight against the business of traffickers," Kurz told reporters earlier.

Taking the lead in the negotiations will be Tusk, who chairs European summits, and Kurz, whose country currently holds the EU's sixth-month rotating presidency.

Kurz said the talks would also focus on economic development, echoing an EU approach with sub-Saharan Africa to ease the poverty that often drives migration.

The EU has previously struck cooperation deals with both Turkey and Libya, whose coast guard officers are trained by the Europeans to stop migrant sea crossings.

The deals with the two gateway countries have helped to cut migration to Europe sharply since a 2015 peak, but the bloc wants to expand work with all north African countries.

The 28-nation bloc is increasingly focusing on less controversial plans to bolster its external borders, but sharp splits persist over redistributing asylum seekers who make it to Europe.

Egypt's foreign ministry confirmed Thursday it has proposed hosting an EU-Arab League summit on a range of issues, including migration, but did not mention a date.

The Cairo-based Arab League includes North African countries Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco as well as those in the Middle East and Gulf.

- 'Efficient' Egypt -

Kurz, who visited Egypt with Tusk on Sunday, said Cairo has been "efficient" in the last two years in preventing boats from leaving its shores or forcing them back when they did.

EU sources told reporters that Egypt has set a high bar in fighting traffickers and smugglers, which could be emulated by other North African countries.

Tusk said he will have more talks with Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi on Sunday. Both are due to attend the UN General Assembly in New York at the weekend.

Tusk called the informal Salzburg summit in a bid to defuse simmering tensions over migration.

Since the summer, Italy has repeatedly turned away rescue ships carrying hundreds of African migrants to force other EU member countries to share responsibility for them.

The migrants were finally relocated to member states and non-member Albania on an ad-hoc basis, but EU countries have for years found an overall relocation plan elusive.

EU diplomats said it will also take time to develop proposals agreed at a June summit to set up centres in Europe and North Africa to separate genuine refugees from economic migrants who can be deported.

The officials say Brussels is not asking Egypt to host a disembarkation platform, which it opposes.

EU diplomats said disembarkation platforms could be part of a broader package, including improved trade, for North African countries.

Kurz, whose government takes a harder line on migration, said more EU leaders realise that tougher external borders rather than "sharing refugees" were the solution.

- Hurdle of resistance -

The EU is still confronted with the refusal of Hungary and other former communist eastern countries to admit migrants, particularly from Muslim countries.

But Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte said frontline countries like Italy have not given up on a scheme to redistribute the asylum seekers who arrive on their shores among other bloc members.

Italy's defence minister Elisabetta Trenta said meanwhile her country's military mission to Niger had finally received the parliament's green light to start helping authorities in that African transit country to check migration.

Kurz added that a proposal to boost the European border and coast guard agency from 1,300 agents to 10,000 from 2020 still faced resistance from member states reluctant to yield sovereign powers over migration.

Officials in Brussels have proposed the guards have greater powers to intervene, albeit under the authority of member states.
Boy band BTS -- a K-Pop sensation that is on a North American tour -- will address the United Nations as part of the launch of a new UNICEF campaign

K-Pop sensation BTS will address the United Nations on Monday for the launch of a campaign by the UN children's agency UNICEF as world leaders prepare to open their annual General Assembly debate.

BTS will be speaking at the launch of "Generation Unlimited," a new partnership to promote education, training and employment for the world's youth, said a UNICEF spokesperson.

Among South Korea's best known and most lucrative musical exports, BTS made music history this year by becoming the first K-Pop group to top the Billboard 200 music charts.

The septet will bring its "Love Yourself" tour to New York for a series of concerts next week including its first-ever stadium performance.

World leaders on Tuesday will begin six days of high-level debate at the General Assembly during which the new thaw in relations on the Korean peninsula will be a top agenda item.
Indian Christian nuns and Muslim supporters protest as they demand the arrest of Bishop Franco Mulakkal, who is accused of raping a nun, in the southern Indian state of Kerala on September 13

Pope Francis has relieved from duty an Indian bishop accused by a nun of raping her, local church officials said Thursday, in a high-profile abuse case that sparked protests by clergy angry at police inaction.

Bishop Franco Mulakkal, who has rejected the accusations, had written to the pope requesting he be temporarily relieved of his duties while an investigation was underway.

"Having considered all circumstances the Holy Father has accepted the request of Bishop Mulakkal," the Catholic Bishops Conference of India said in a statement Thursday.

Another bishop has been appointed temporarily in his stead, the statement read.

The nun first accused Mulakkal in late June of raping her 13 times between 2014 and 2016.

But police in the southern state of Kerala, home to India's largest Christian population, did not formally question him until September.

The lack of action provoked outrage and five nuns -- in a rare show of dissent within the Indian Church -- and dozens of supporters staged days of protests.

The alleged victim has also approached the Vatican representative in India to press her case.

Her letter, leaked to Indian media, said Mulakkal was "using political and money power to bury the case".

Mulakkal has called the whole scandal a conspiracy by those against the Church, and has won backing from his congregation at the Missionaries of Jesus Church.

In July, two priests were arrested for allegedly raping and blackmailing a woman for over 20 years in Kerala.

Sexual abuse by clergymen and the failure of senior Church officials to take action has been one of the biggest scandals facing the Catholic Church in recent years.

Pope Francis issued a letter on sexual abuse to the Catholics around the world in August, expressing the Church's "shame and repentance".

Christians -- overwhelmingly Catholic -- are the third-largest religious group in India. Around 80 percent of the country's 1.25 billion population is Hindu, followed by a sizeable Muslim minority.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel is "constantly alert to the dangers that threaten us"

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Thursday Israel will defend itself against Iran, after a friendly fire incident in Syria this week linked to Israeli strikes on Iranian targets there.

Syria accidentally downed a Russian plane late Monday, killing all 15 people on board, the same evening Israel launched strikes in the war-torn country.

Israel says it was targeting a Syrian military facility where weapons manufacturing systems were "about to be transferred on behalf of Iran" to Lebanese Shiite group Hezbollah.

"We do not want war, but if it is imposed on us, we will act with all our force," Netanyahu said during a ceremony in Jerusalem marking the 45th anniversary of the Yom Kippur war.

He said Iran "openly calls for the destruction of Israel."

"We will continue to defend ourselves in the face of this danger," said Netanyahu.

The incident on Monday was the worst case of friendly fire between Moscow and Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's regime since Russian forces intervened in the conflict in 2015.

It also risked harming relations between Israel and Russia, which established a hotline three years ago to avoid accidental clashes in Syria, but the leaders of both countries have since sought to move past the incident.

Israel sent its air force commander to Moscow on Thursday to share the military's findings on what happened.

Israel has vowed to stop its arch-foe Iran, which backs the Assad regime, from entrenching itself militarily in neighbouring Syria.

Earlier this month, it acknowledged having carried out more than 200 strikes in Syria over the past 18 months, mainly against Iranian targets.

The 1973 Arab-Israeli war saw Egypt and Syria carry out a surprise attack on Israel on Yom Kippur, the most solemn day in the Jewish calendar.

Despite its victory, Israel lost more than 2,500 soldiers in the war that it was not considered prepared for.

"The lessons of this war are rooted in us and we are constantly alert to the dangers that threaten us," Netanyahu said.
The cardinal of New York announced that a former federal judge would review, evaluate and recommend improvements to his archdiocese's response to the sexual abuse crisis

The cardinal of New York tapped a former federal judge on Thursday to investigate what the Catholic diocese can do better in dealing with accusations of sexual abuse, the latest sign of US bishops acting under pressure following a summer of scandals.

Cardinal Timothy Dolan, archbishop in America's financial district and most populous city, announced that Barbara Jones would review, evaluate and recommend improvements to his archdiocese's response to the abuse crisis.

"I'm asking you to conduct an independent, scrupulous review to see if there are gaps, if there are things we should be doing and are not," said Dolan, addressing the former federal judge and prosecutor.

The appointment followed what he said many in the Catholic community considered a "summer of hell" following the resignation of one of America's most prominent cardinals and a devastating report unveiling decades of church cover-ups in Pennsylvania.

Jones, Dolan said, would conduct "an exhaustive study of our policies, procedures and protocols on how we deal with any accusation that comes to us about an alleged abuse of a young person by a priest, deacon, or a bishop.

"I have promised her complete access to our records, personnel, and to me personally," the 68-year-old said.

"From my people, my clergy, and from the wider community... I hear that they want accountability, transparency, and action," said Dolan. "If I lose the trust of my people and this community, I don't have a lot left."

On Wednesday, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops announced that they had approved the establishment of a "third-party reporting system" that will receive complaints in confidence, by telephone and online, of any sexual abuse, misconduct or harassment involving a bishop.

The organization said it had also initiated the process of developing a code of conduct for bishops about the sexual abuse of children, any sexual misconduct with an adult or "negligence" related to such cases.

"This is only a beginning," said the statement.

"Some bishops, by their actions or their failures to act, have caused great harm to both individuals and the Church as a whole," it acknowledged.

On Tuesday, attorneys said the Catholic Church in New York had reached a record $27.5 million settlement with four men who said they were sexually abused as children between 2003-09 by their religion teacher in Brooklyn.

In July, Theodore McCarrick, the former archbishop of Washington, resigned after a review board found there was "credible" evidence that he had assaulted a teen while working as a priest in New York in the 1970s.

In August, a sweeping report into child sex abuse in Pennsylvania revealed that more than 300 priests abused at least 1,000 children over seven decades.
Vietnam considers merging or dissolving universities - News in English 20/09/2018

Vietnam once gave the green light to set up a series of universities in an effort to increase the number of students. But now it has to dissolve many of the schools to ensure training quality.

VOH
A Rite Aid truck drives past a police checkpoint near the scene of a mass shooting in the US state of Maryland that left four people dead including the suspect

A woman opened fire with a handgun on Thursday at the warehouse where she worked in the eastern US state of Maryland, killing three people and wounding another three in the country's latest mass shooting, police said.

The suspect -- a 26-year-old identified as Snochia Moseley -- died after shooting herself in the head, Harford County Sheriff Jeff Gahler told reporters.

Gahler said Moseley was a temporary employee at the distribution center for the Rite Aid drugstore chain in Aberdeen, Maryland.

"We do not have a motive for this senseless crime," he said, but terrorism did not appear likely.

The sheriff said the three wounded victims were hospitalized and were expected to survive.

He did not release the names of any of the victims pending notification of their families.

Mass shootings are common in the United States but the vast majority involve men and the Aberdeen incident is a rare mass shooting carried out by a woman.

Gahler said Moseley lived in Baltimore County and the handgun she used in the attack, a 9mm Glock, was registered under her name.

He said she was armed with the single handgun and several magazines.

- Gun violence epidemic -

He described how the woman turned up for work around 9:00 am (1300 GMT) and the shooting began just minutes later. He said people were shot both inside and outside the Rite Aid warehouse.

Police block off roads after a woman opened fire at a warehouse complex in Aberdeen, Maryland, killing three people and wounding another three before commiting suicide

Police responded within five minutes to reports of gunfire but Gahler said no shots were fired by law enforcement.

"We got completely bombarded by -- I'm not exaggerating -- 20-30 cops, and then ambulances and everything started pouring in," a witness told WBAL-TV.

Andre Cedeno, 30, told The Baltimore Sun that his sister, Lea, was at the Rite Aid facility and he rushed there from his own workplace after he heard of the shooting.

"She had a panic," Cedeno said, and hid in a bathroom. "It's crazy that people don't respect life."

The incident is the latest in an epidemic of gun violence that has struck schools and workplaces across the United States, where the right to bear arms is protected by the US constitution.

Attacks by women, however, account for less than five percent of the total, according to law enforcement officials and academics.

Thursday's attack came five months after an Iran-born female animal rights activist gunned down three people before killing herself at YouTube's California headquarters.

Maryland made grim headlines around the world in June when five employees of the Capital-Gazette died after a gunman stormed their Annapolis newsroom.

The man police say is responsible had harassed Capital-Gazette employees for years over an article about criminal stalking charges against him.
Angolan President Joao Lourenco has fought against corruption while also removing figures associated with the regime of his predecessor

Angolan prosecutors dropped corruption charges against a former army chief of staff who was sacked in April by President Joao Lourenco as he moved to shake up his predecessor's administration.

The charges against Geraldo Sachipengo Nunda were dropped late on Wednesday because of a lack of evidence "proving criminal conduct", according to the Supreme Court.

Eight other accused, including a spokesman for the ruling party, four Thai nationals, a Canadian and an Eritrean were placed under house arrest in connection to a $50 billion (43 billion euros) fraud.

Their trials are expected to begin before the end of the month.

In April Lourenco removed Sachipengo Nunda who had been implicated in the scandal by prosecutors a month before.

Since coming to power in September 2017, Lourenco has fought against corruption while also removing figures associated with the regime of his predecessor Jose Eduardo dos Santos.

During his 38-year rule, dos Santos secured the unquestioning loyalty of his security chiefs including the head of the army.

Other prominent dos Santos-era scalps claimed by Lourenco include his predecessor's son, Jose Filomeno, who is accused of attempting to steal $1.5 billion during his time at the helm of Angola's sovereign wealth fund.

Lourenco also removed dos Santos' daughter from the helm of the state oil company Sonangol and she is now facing probes for alleged corruption.
LAREDO, Texas (AP) - Dozens of family members and friends of four slain women who investigators say were the victims of a U.S. Border Patrol supervisor gathered Tuesday evening in South Texas to remember them at a vigil.

In a park near San Agustin Cathedral in downtown Laredo, they held small candles and photos of their loved ones while praying, crying and exchanging hugs. Many described still being in disbelief and experiencing numbness, saying the women didn't deserve to die.

Members of Melissa Ramirez's family wore pink and carried signs that read, "We want justice for all victims."

Dozens of family members and friends of four women who authorities say were killed by a U.S. Border Patrol agent gather for a candlelight vigil at a park in downtown Laredo, Texas, on Tuesday, Sept. 18, 2018. Juan David Ortiz was arrested Saturday while hiding in a hotel parking garage. Investigators believe he fatally shot the four victims during separate attacks after taking each of them to desolate areas outside of Laredo. Investigators say a fifth victim escaped and contacted authorities. (AP Photo/Susan Montoya Bryan)

Claudine Anne Luera's relatives held roses and photos of her during the vigil. They described her as a loving mother of five.

"She was loved. Just like these other victims, they had families. They are much more than what's being told about them," her sister, Colette Mireles, said.

Juan David Ortiz was arrested Saturday while hiding in a hotel parking garage. Investigators believe he fatally shot four women during separate attacks after taking each of them to desolate areas outside of Laredo. Investigators say a fifth victim escaped and contacted authorities.

Ortiz is facing several charges, including four counts of murder.

Authorities have said the women were believed to have been sex workers who the suspect knew and targeted for their vulnerability.

Relatives acknowledged that the victims had fallen on hard times for one reason or another and ended up on Laredo's streets, but they said the women still were loved by their families. They pointed to the crowd at the vigil, saying the women will not be forgotten and that family members will continue to fight for justice.

Those killed include 29-year-old Ramirez and 42-year-old Luera. A third victim was a 28-year-old transgender woman who authorities said had the birth name Humberto Ortiz but was known as Janelle. The fourth victim's name hasn't been released.

Dozens of family members and friends of four women who authorities say were killed by a U.S. Border Patrol agent gather for a candlelight vigil at a park in downtown Laredo, Texas, on Tuesday, Sept. 18, 2018. Juan David Ortiz was arrested Saturday while hiding in a hotel parking garage. Investigators believe he fatally shot the four victims during separate attacks after taking each of them to desolate areas outside of Laredo. Investigators say a fifth victim escaped and contacted authorities. (AP Photo/Susan Montoya Bryan)

Law enforcement officers gather near the scene where the body of a woman was found near Interstate 35 north of Laredo, Texas on Saturday, Sept. 15, 2018. A U.S. Border Patrol agent suspected of killing four women was arrested early Saturday after a fifth woman who had been abducted managed to escape from him and notify authorities, law enforcement officials said, describing the agent as a "serial killer." (Danny Zaragoza/The Laredo Morning Times via AP)

This image provided by the Webb County Sheriff's Office shows Juan David Ortiz, a U.S. Border Patrol supervisor who was jailed Sunday, Sept. 16, 2018, on a $2.5 million bond in Texas, accused in the killing of at least four women. Ortiz was nabbed early Saturday after a string of violence against female sex workers in Laredo, Texas, where he is a supervisor with the Border Patrol. (Webb County Sheriff's Office via AP)

Family members and friends of four women who authorities say were killed by a U.S. Border Patrol agent attend a candlelight vigil at a park in downtown Laredo, Texas, on Tuesday, Sept. 18, 2018. Juan David Ortiz was arrested Saturday while hiding in a hotel parking garage. Investigators believe he fatally shot the four victims during separate attacks after taking each of them to desolate areas outside of Laredo. Investigators say a fifth victim escaped and contacted authorities. (AP Photo/Susan Montoya Bryan)

Dozens of family members and friends of four women who authorities say were killed by a U.S. Border Patrol agent gather for a candlelight vigil at a park in downtown Laredo, Texas, on Tuesday, Sept. 18, 2018. Juan David Ortiz was arrested Saturday while hiding in a hotel parking garage. Investigators believe he fatally shot the four victims during separate attacks after taking each of them to desolate areas outside of Laredo. Investigators say a fifth victim escaped and contacted authorities. (AP Photo/Susan Montoya Bryan)

Dozens of family members and friends of four women who authorities say were killed by a U.S. Border Patrol agent pray during a candlelight vigil at a park in downtown Laredo, Texas, on Tuesday, Sept. 18, 2018. Juan David Ortiz was arrested Saturday while hiding in a hotel parking garage. Investigators believe he fatally shot the four victims during separate attacks after taking each of them to desolate areas outside of Laredo. Investigators say a fifth victim escaped and contacted authorities. (AP Photo/Susan Montoya Bryan)
MILWAUKEE (AP) - In a story Sept. 18 about the diversion of Lake Michigan water to Pleasant Prairie, Wisconsin, The Associated Press erroneously referred to Peter Annin as director of the Healing Our Waters-Great Lakes Coalition. Annin is a journalist and director of the Mary Griggs Burke Center for Freshwater Innovation at Northland College. Todd Ambs directs the Healing Our Waters-Great Lakes Coalition.

A corrected version of the story is below:

Book: Wisconsin quietly OK'd Lake Michigan water diversion

A decision by Wisconsin officials eight years ago to approve a big, new allotment of water from Lake Michigan to Pleasant Prairie is raising questions of transparency

MILWAUKEE (AP) - A decision by Wisconsin officials eight years ago to approve a big, new allotment of water from Lake Michigan to Pleasant Prairie is raising questions of transparency.

The 2010 decision gave the Kenosha County community on the Illinois border the right to tap millions of gallons of more water a day for years to come. The move by the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources was made in the final year of Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle's administration.

Peter Annin, a journalist who directs the Mary Griggs Burke Center for Freshwater Innovation at Northland College in Ashland, highlights details of the decision in his updated book, "The Great Lakes Water Wars." The book will be re-released Oct. 3 to mark the 10th anniversary of the signing of the Great Lakes Compact, which bars water diversions outside the basin in most cases.

Under the decision, the water will go to areas of the village outside the Lake Michigan basin. Those areas have struggled with radium and shrinking groundwater supplies.

The DNR told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel the agency was following Wisconsin law. Officials increased the upper limit of water available for Pleasant Prairie from 3.2 million gallons a day to 10.69 million gallons a day. All the water taken has to be returned to Lake Michigan.

That additional 7.49 million gallons a day is nearly as much as the 8.2 million gallons a day that Great Lakes Compact council members granted to the city of Waukesha in 2016.

Pleasant Prairie is not using that water yet. Last year, its average daily diversion of Lake Michigan water was 2.49 million gallons a day, according to DNR figures.

But the village's location at the edge of the Chicago metro area, and 20 minutes from Foxconn Technology Group's industrial complex now under development in southeastern Wisconsin, gives Pleasant Prairie a strategic edge.

"To me, it's a pretty significant marketing advantage - an economic advantage for them," said David Strifling, director of Marquette University Law School's Water Law and Policy Initiative.

Todd Ambs, the DNR water division administrator for much of the time the agency was working on the Pleasant Prairie case, said he was never told by staff that the village would be in line for a major increase in water from Lake Michigan.

Ambs, now the director of Healing our Waters-Great Lakes Coalition, said he would have pressed for more openness.

"I don't think it was envisioned that states would unilaterally increase water diversions by millions of gallons a day and not announce it publicly," Annin said.

Molly Flanagan, vice president of policy for the Chicago-based Alliance for the Great Lakes, said attorneys for the organization are evaluating the Pleasant Prairie case for potential violations of the compact.
SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) - Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Republican from Kentucky, and Kevin de Leon, a Democrat in the California state Senate, rarely have much in common. But they're united in their condemnation this week of Sen. Dianne Feinstein.

The top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, Feinstein is playing a central role in the battle over Brett Kavanaugh's nomination to the Supreme Court. She received a confidential letter earlier this summer from a constituent who accused Kavanaugh of sexually assaulting her at a party more than three decades ago, allegations that didn't begin to surface publicly until last week. Feinstein has argued she sought to honor the confidentiality of the letter, whose author, Christine Blasey Ford, came forward last weekend in an interview with The Washington Post.

McConnell slammed Feinstein for keeping the letter "secret until the 11th hour." De Leon, who is challenging Feinstein in the Nov. 6 election, said her actions amounted to a "failure of leadership." Feinstein defended herself in a Tuesday interview, and Ford's lawyer has said she acted appropriately.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., is surrounded by reporters as she arrives for a vote, Tuesday, Sept. 18, 2018, on Capitol Hill in Washington. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)

The accusation, which Kavanaugh has denied, is consuming Washington, where the nomination's fate is suddenly in limbo. It's also giving de Leon an opening to criticize Feinstein in his uphill election fight.

"That was a valuable piece of info that you could have kept the confidentiality and kept her privacy and still dealt with the issue at hand," he said in a Monday interview.

He said he would have shared the letter with fellow Democrats on the Judiciary Committee while redacting identifying information and said Feinstein should have asked Kavanaugh about his character during hearings.

Feinstein, who has been backed by several fellow Senate Democrats, said Tuesday she was honoring Ford's request to keep the information confidential.

"I did not know whether this woman would come forward or not. I did not know if it was credible," she told reporters. "We were looking for a way to get it investigated by an outside investigator and what we found is we had to go through (the rules committee) and we were discussing the pros and cons of doing that, so it hasn't been easy."

Republicans also seized on a remark from Feinstein to Fox News that they saw as casting doubt on elements of Ford's story. "I can't say everything's truthful," Feinstein said when asked about Ford. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, tweeted the quote and said it's "now clear" why Feinstein kept the allegation secret.

Feinstein later clarified to reporters that she finds Ford credible, based on what she knowns so far. She added, "One of the things I know is what happens to women in this situation and how difficult it is, and I hope people will let her be."

Feinstein faces a fellow Democrat in November because of California's unusual primary system that sends the two highest vote-getters to the general election regardless of party. As one of California's best-known politicians and one with deep pockets, Feinstein has kept de Leon's challenge at bay even as he's sought to paint her as too deferential to President Donald Trump. On Tuesday, he released an online advertisement linking Feinstein's language in the 1990s about immigrants in the country illegally to Trump's rhetoric today.

But his criticism on the Kavanaugh issue, made in statements, interviews and even a fundraising appeal, doesn't come without risk.

He led the state Senate last fall when accusations of widespread misconduct rocked the Capitol. De Leon's former housemate was forced to resign after allegations he made advances on multiple women, including inviting a young woman in a fellowship program back to the house the two shared in Sacramento. De Leon denied knowledge of it and moved out after the news broke. He also hired outside investigators to look into complaints and introduced a resolution to expel Democratic Sen. Tony Mendoza, who eventually resigned.

A bill to give whistleblower protections to state legislative employees died repeatedly in the Senate, only passing this year, spurred by the #MeToo movement. That bill's sponsor, Republican Assemblywoman Melissa Melendez, took to Twitter to criticize de Leon, and women who led the Capitol's #MeToo movement chimed in.

"As one of the CA Capitol women who helped elevate the issue I can attest to Kevin's lack of action," tweeted Alicia Lewis, a Sacramento lobbyist. Lewis said she voted for de Leon in the California primary but will now back Feinstein in November.

De Leon said the whistleblower bill didn't explicitly reference sexual harassment victims until this year, when it passed the Senate, though Melendez said it was always the intent to protect employees who report harassment. He called comparisons between his and Feinstein's actions "apples to oranges," and noted the California Legislature's complete overhaul of its procedures for handling sexual misconduct this year following the #MeToo movement.

Elected to the Senate in 1992, Feinstein was one of the first women to sit on the Judiciary Committee. She joined the panel as its previously all-male membership was grappling with stinging criticism of its handling of Anita Hill's sexual harassment allegations against then-Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas.

Over the years, Feinstein has developed a reputation for her preference of decorum and discretion. But that approach clashes with the more aggressive style that a new generation of liberal lawmakers such as de Leon is promoting.

Upending decorum has never been Feinstein's style, said Sherry Bebitch Jeffe, a public policy professor at the University of Southern California.

"It seems to me this is in line with the way Dianne Feinstein has always behaved, very carefully, very circumspectly," Jeffe said.

___

Associated Press writer Juliet Linderman in Washington contributed to this report.

FILE - In this May 3, 2018, file photo, Kevin de Leon, D-Los Angeles, poses for photos in his campaign office in Los Angeles. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Kevin de Leon, a Democrat in the California Senate, rarely have much in common. But they're united in their condemnation this week of Sen. Dianne Feinstein. The top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, Feinstein is playing a central role in the battle over Brett Kavanaugh's nomination to the Supreme Court. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong, File)
NEW YORK (AP) - Four men who said they were sexually abused as boys by a teacher at a Catholic church have reached a $27.5 million settlement with the Diocese of Brooklyn.

The New York Times reports Tuesday that the agreement is one of the largest settlements ever awarded to sexual abuse victims within the Catholic Church. The men will each receive about $6.8 million.

The settlement comes just two weeks after the New York attorney general subpoenaed all eight Roman Catholic dioceses in the state as part of an investigation into the handling of sex abuse allegations. A grand jury report this summer found rampant sexual abuse of more than 1,000 children by about 300 priests in Pennsylvania.

"These were boys who were abused in second grade through sixth grade, for years for some of them," said Ben Rubinowitz, one of the lawyers for the victims. "The egregious nature of the conduct is the reason that the church paid what they did."

Lawyers for the victims say 67-year-old Angelo Serrano, a lay teacher of religion at St. Lucy's-St. Patrick's Church in Brooklyn, repeatedly abused the victims between 2003 and 2009. Serrano is serving a 15-year sentence after pleading guilty in 2011 to inappropriate course of sexual conduct with a child.

"We hope this is another step forward in the healing process for these claimants," the Diocese of Brooklyn said in a statement. "The Diocese remains committed to ensuring that its parishes, schools and youth programs remain safe and secure for the young people who are entrusted to our care."

The statement added that Serrano was a "volunteer worker" at a local parish and "was not clergy or an employee of the Diocese or parish."

Since June 2017, 414 victims have applied for settlements through the Independent Reconciliation Compensation Program in Brooklyn. Other dioceses in the state run similar programs.

The latest settlement comes just two weeks after New York Attorney General Barbara Underwood subpoenaed all eight Roman Catholic dioceses in the state as part of an investigation into the handling of sex abuse allegations.

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Information from: The New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com
WASHINGTON (AP) - The way music is licensed and songwriters are compensated for the digital age will be undergoing big changes under a bill making its way through Congress.

The Senate cleared a bill late Tuesday that creates a new independent entity that will license songs to companies that play music online. The nonprofit collective will then pay songwriters, including those who wrote pre-1970s classics before music copyrights protected their work.

Tennessee Republican Sen. Lamar Alexander championed the bill and sought to rename it the Orrin B. Hatch Music Modernization Act after the retiring Utah senator, who also backed it.

The measure enjoys unusually strong bipartisan support from the music industry. It now goes to the House with changes from an earlier version that already passed that chamber on a nearly unanimous vote.
SEOUL, South Korea (AP) - This week's summit between rivals North and South Korea represents, in part, unfinished business for South Korean President Moon Jae-in.

In pursuing engagement with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un to defuse a nuclear crisis, Moon is also looking to bolster the legacy of his late friend and political mentor, former President Roh Moo-hyun, whose ambitious efforts to build trust with North Korea crumbled as it began building its nuclear arsenal a decade ago.

A dovish liberal, Moon said he will use the meetings with Kim in Pyongyang, North Korea's capital, which began Tuesday and are to end Thursday, to help revive stalled talks between the U.S. and North Korea and push for "irreversible, permanent peace" between the rivals. Depending on the results, Moon will either be remembered as a skillful statesman who helped fix decades of failed diplomacy or a stubborn idealist who repeated the mistakes of past liberal leaders at a time of much higher military and political stakes.

FILE - In this Oct. 2, 2007, file photo, South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun, right, shakes hands with North Korean leader Kim Jong Il, left, in Pyongyang, North Korea. In pursuing engagement with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un to defuse a nuclear crisis, South Korean President Moon Jae-in is also looking to bolster the legacy of his late friend and political mentor, former President Roh Moo-hyun, whose ambitious efforts to build trust with North Korea crumbled as it began building its nuclear arsenal a decade ago. (Korea Pool/Yonhap via AP, File)

Moon was enthusiastically greeted by Kim on Tuesday as he became the first South Korean president to visit Pyongyang in 11 years, since Roh made his own trip north. The two leaders tightly embraced at the airport in front of a military honor guard and thousands of people cheering and waving flowers and flags.

It was a much warmer welcome than what Kim's late father, Kim Jong Il, arranged for Roh in October 2007. Kim Jong Il didn't come to the border to greet Roh, who crossed into North Korea by land, and later shook hands with Roh with what looked like less than complete enthusiasm before a summit that took place amid turbulent nuclear negotiations following the North's first nuclear test explosion in 2006.

But Moon faces much higher stakes in his latest summit with Kim, their third this year, as the South Korean tries to save global diplomatic efforts to resolve the nuclear standoff with the North. Roh's inter-Korean engagement came at a time when the North Korean nuclear threat was relatively weak. Moon is dealing with a North Korea that could already have dozens of bombs and a growing arsenal of ballistic missiles, including intercontinental-range weapons that may be able to reach the U.S. mainland.

Roh's meeting with Kim Jong Il came near the end of the South Korean's single presidential term, and so any results were destined to be short-lived. South Koreans, angry over North Korea's nuclear ambitions and the engagement policies pursued by a succession of liberal governments, voted in a conservative leader in 2007 who upended Roh's policies. Roh leaped to his death the following year after being investigated for corruption. A grim-faced Moon read out a press statement about his friend's death.

Moon, who had a leading role in building Roh's inter-Korean policies as his chief of staff, didn't go to the 2007 summit. His efforts for engagement have received much stronger support than Roh's. Moon's previous summits with Kim in April and May at the inter-Korean border, which also set up a June summit between Kim and U.S. President Donald Trump, brought a tentative detente following a string of North Korean nuclear and missile tests last year that fanned war fears among South Koreans.

But Moon now faces perhaps the biggest challenge of his diplomacy because talks between Washington and Pyongyang have sputtered since the June summit, raising doubts about Kim's supposed willingness to relinquish his nuclear arsenal and putting pressure on Moon to broker progress once again. This week's inter-Korean summit will likely be a crucial indicator of how the larger nuclear negotiations with the United States will proceed; Moon's chief of staff, Im Jong-seok, has downplayed the possibility of a significant breakthrough.

"When former President Roh Moo-hyun visited North Korea in 2007, the meeting was focused on inter-Korean issues because the nuclear issue was dealt with in the six-party talks," Im said on Monday, referring to now-stalled nuclear negotiations involving the Koreas, the United States, China, Russia and Japan. "But this time, the heavy issue of denuclearization presses down on the summit meeting. This makes us very cautious, and it's hard to make any optimistic prediction about the summit."

Moon, a son of North Korean war refugees, won a presidential by-election in May last year following the removal of his conservative predecessor over a corruption scandal. He has been a harsh critic of Seoul's previous hard-line policies, which he says did little to stop the North's nuclear advancement while significantly reducing the South's voice in international efforts to deal with the crisis.

Moon has preached engagement even during the height of tensions.

Two days after North Korea flight-tested its first intercontinental ballistic missile in July last year, Moon vowed to build on the legacies of Roh and his liberal predecessor Kim Dae-jung. Roh and Kim's "Sunshine Policy" and economic inducements resulted in two historic summit meetings and a temporary rapprochement between the Koreas in the 2000s. Critics say the policies gave North Korea a lifeline while it pursued its nuclear dreams.

If the inter-Korean summit fails to produce concrete results and U.S.-North Korea talks begin to derail, some experts believe Moon will face a serious political dilemma over whether to continue to engage with the North or join another U.S.-led high-pressure campaign against it.

Moon has so far maintained a coordinated approach with Trump on North Korea, staying mostly firm on sanctions and offering vocal support last year to Trump's pressure campaign during North Korea's weapons tests. While reaching out to North Korea in past months, Moon has credited Trump at every step, even endorsing him for the Nobel Peace Prize.

But for Moon, it would be extremely difficult to accept a return to the animosity of 2017. Moon's popularity has declined sharply in recent months and he can ill afford a setback in inter-Korean relations, his main issue of strength. Pyongyang has already expressed frustration to Seoul about the slow pace of cooperation projects in railways, roads and forestry, which are held back by U.S.-led sanctions against the North.

Some argue that Moon has ample reason to continue engagement and maintain peace and stability because North Korea's nuclear weapons are just one of the many security concerns facing South Korea. There's also fear of the sporadic military tension that has led to occasional bloodshed between the rivals. While showing unease about the North's development of ICBMs, the United States, unlike its ally, doesn't have to worry about a barrage of artillery raining down on its cities.

In recent speeches, Moon has said that relations between the Koreas "are not by-effects of progress in the relationship between North Korea and the United States," and that advancement in inter-Korean ties could bring progress on denuclearization.

Moon's huge entourage in Pyongyang includes CEOs of the country's biggest companies, a possible sign that Seoul is preparing for the resumption of inter-Korean economic cooperation projects if diplomacy eventually yields results.

But other experts say Moon fears a split with Washington because Seoul would be forced from the "driver's seat" in diplomatic efforts to deal with the North. Any leverage South Korea has over North Korea, they say, comes from its relationship with the United States, which holds the keys to what Pyongyang desires most: sanctions relief and security assurances.

"If he's forced to choose, Moon will likely slow the pace of inter-Korean engagement," said Choi Kang, vice president of Seoul's Asan Institute of Policy Studies. "He's not the same leader as Roh Moo-hyun was."

FILE - In this Sept. 18, 2018, file photo, South Korean President Moon Jae-in, left, and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un ride in a car parade through Pyongyang in North Korea. In pursuing engagement with Kim to defuse a nuclear crisis, Moon is also looking to bolster the legacy of his late friend and political mentor, former President Roh Moo-hyun, whose ambitious efforts to build trust with North Korea crumbled as it began building its nuclear arsenal a decade ago. (Pyongyang Press Corps Pool via AP, File)

FILE - In this Sept. 18, 2018, file photo. South Korean President Moon Jae-in and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, right, wave during a welcoming ceremony at Sunan International Airport in Pyongyang in North Korea. In pursuing engagement with Kim to defuse a nuclear crisis, Moon is also looking to bolster the legacy of his late friend and political mentor, former President Roh Moo-hyun, whose ambitious efforts to build trust with North Korea crumbled as it began building its nuclear arsenal a decade ago. (Pyongyang Press Corps Pool via AP, File)
NEWARK, Ohio (AP) - The U.S. border wall with Mexico is frequently in the news, but few people have a chance to visit it up close, or to see details of the various sections.

Kenneth Madsen, an Ohio State University geography professor and border wall expert, hopes his new photo exhibit will help bring the border closer to people at a time of heated discussion about the role of the wall, and of barriers in society overall.

"Up Close with U.S.-Mexico Border Barriers" opens Wednesday at the LeFevre Art Gallery on the Ohio State campus in Newark, 40 miles (64 kilometers) east of Columbus. The free exhibit of 33 poster-sized pictures features border wall photos and maps.

This June 15, 2017, photo provided by Kenneth Madsen, shows a post-on-rail style of fence along the flood plain of the Colorado River between Arizona and Baja California, which is typical of border wall fences placed in environmentally sensitive areas or in areas prone to flooding. A new photo exhibit by Madsen opening Wednesday, Sept. 19, 2018, at the Ohio State University-Newark campus, "Up Close with U.S.-Mexico Border Barriers," highlights different types of border wall fencing. (Kenneth Madsen via AP)

One of the exhibit's goals is creating awareness about the wall, which can include low-grade sections in rural areas meant to stop vehicles and much stronger barriers in cities meant to stop people, Madsen said.

"People don't generally have a chance to see something up close, at that level of detail, to know what's going on out there," he said.

President Donald Trump has held out the possibility of a government shutdown before the November elections over his effort to build a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border, even as Republican congressional leaders publicly urged him away from that path and predicted it wouldn't occur. "Build the wall!" was a frequent rallying cry during Trump's 2016 campaign.

Madsen has studied the border wall since his graduate school days 20 years ago. His photo exhibit consists of pictures taken with his iPhone mostly in 2017, when he was on sabbatical.

In one image, children play at a Mexican playground beside a barrier in Tijuana near the Pacific Ocean while a U.S. border agent watches from his SUV on the American side just a couple of hundred feet away.

In another, stadium lights atop tall poles oversee a pedestrian barrier stretching for miles along a section of the wall between Douglas, Arizona, and Agua Prieta in the Mexican state of Sonora.

In a third, a post-on-rail type wall snakes through a Colorado River flood plain between Arizona and Baja California in Mexico, a design meant to minimize soil disturbance in fragile landscapes, as well as to prevent it being washed away in a flood.

U.S. communities tend to grow away from the border wall, while Mexican communities tend to hug them up close, Madsen said. That helps account for large murals or brightly painted panels along several sections on the Mexican side.

Madsen is also an expert on waivers along the wall, whereby the government can exempt fence construction from a variety of federal requirements, including archaeological and environmental surveys.

Madsen plans to attend an international conference on border walls next week in Montreal.

Another border expert attending that conference says it's important to share the experience of the border with people through such exhibits because so many stereotypes about the wall are wrong.

"The social construction of the border is negative and it's perpetuated by people that have never even seen it, been here, touched it, felt it, crossed it," said Irasema Coronado, a political science professor at the University of Texas-El Paso and a past president of the Association for Borderland Studies.

Madsen's exhibit isn't overtly political, and provides useful information for people on both sides of the border debate. But he notes the irony that wall building has increased with the rise of globalization.

Though the free-flow of capital means more freedom for more people, "there also are these border walls and fences to restrict movement of people of lesser economic means with fewer opportunities available, who are maybe stuck in bad situations," he said.

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Andrew Welsh-Huggins can be reached on Twitter at https://twitter.com/awhcolumbus.

In this Friday, Sept. 14, 2018, photo, Kenneth Madsen, an Ohio State University-Newark geography professor and border wall expert, discusses his photo exhibit of border wall pictures and maps, "Up Close with U.S.-Mexico Border Barriers," in Newark, Ohio. Madsen says the goal of his exhibit, opening Wednesday, Sept. 19 is to raise awareness about an issue that most people have only seen on the news. (AP Photo/Andrew Welsh-Huggins)

In this Nov. 15, 2016, photo provided by Kenneth Madsen, stadium lights atop tall poles oversee a pedestrian barrier stretching for miles along a section of the border wall between Douglas, Arizona, and Agua Prieta, in the Mexican state of Sonora. A new photo exhibit by Madsen opening Wednesday, Sept. 19, 2018, at the Ohio State University-Newark campus, "Up Close with U.S.-Mexico Border Barriers," highlights different types of border wall fencing. (Kenneth Madsen via AP)
KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia (AP) - Malaysia's government has come under renewed pressure to outlaw child marriages after another case of a child bride surfaced in a poor rural state, the second in weeks.

A 15-year-old teenager became the second wife of a 44-year-old Muslim man in northeast Kelantan state, the New Straits Times newspaper reported. It said the union was approved by the Islamic Shariah court in July after her parents consented due to poverty. The latest case occurred in the same month when a Kelantan rubber trader married an 11-year-old girl as his third wife, but only became public this week.

Muslim girls under the minimum legal marriage age of 16 can wed with the consent of the Shariah court and their parents. Muslim men can marry up to four wives.

The case has sparked renewed outrage among rights groups. UNICEF in a statement received Wednesday slammed the latest child marriage as "unacceptable" and urged Malaysia to bring legislative change to ban the practice.

"A new legislation on child marriage should be accompanied by other measures, including compulsory access to secondary education, sexual reproductive health education and poverty reduction," said UNICEF representative to Malaysia, Marianne Clark-Hattingh.

The New Straits Times cited the girl's parents as saying that they wanted a better life for theirs daughter, a school dropout and the youngest of 13 children.

Similarly, the 11-year-old Thai girl, who lives in Kelantan with her parents, was also a school dropout from a poor family. A 41-year-old rubber scrap dealer, who has two wives and six children aged between ages of 5 and 18, secretly wed the girl in Thailand. The union became public after one of his wives lodged a complaint with police.

The man was later fined by the Shariah court for marrying without its permission but wasn't charged for underage marriage. He told local media he would formalize the marriage by applying for an official certificate in five years when his latest wife turns 16. The girl has reportedly been sent back to Thailand where she is placed under welfare care.

Malaysian Deputy Prime Minister Wan Azizah Wan Ismail has said the government is investigating the latest case but that its hands are tied as the marriage was approved by the Shariah court. She said the government is seeking to raise the minimum legal age of marriage for Muslim girls to 18, same as under civil laws.

Malaysia follows a dual-track justice system. Nearly two-thirds of Malaysia's 31 million people are Muslims, who are governed by Islamic courts in family, marriage and personal issues.

Rights group Lawyers for Liberty urged police to probe the man in the latest case for "sexual grooming" as he reportedly knew the girl for several months before marriage. It warned that "pedophiles are now clearly using marriage as a shield to prevent prosecution for rape or sexual grooming" following the government's failure to act.

"This puts the children of this country, particularly Muslim children, in constant danger from perverts and pedophiles," executive director Latheefa Koya said in a statement.

The Human Rights Commission of Malaysia said it was concerned that parents can now legally resort to "selling" their children under the guise of marriage.

"It now appears that poverty can also be a reason accepted by the Shariah court to approve an application for marriage of an underage child, which in turn seems to treat children as mere commodities," said Chairman Razali Ismail. He called for social protection for children in poverty and echoed calls for the government to outlaw child marriages.

Government officials have said some 15,000 child marriages have been recorded in the past 10 years, two-thirds of which involve Muslims.




Guwahati : Guwahati city police has suspended an Assistant Sub-Inspector (ASI), who allegedly sexually assaulting two women.





The accused police personnel identified as Mohan Doley posted at Satgaon police station in the city had sexually assaulted the women on different occasions when the victims came to the police station for different

purposes.





According to the reports, the victims hailing from Jorabat and Panjabari area had lodged complaint against the accused police official.





Following the complaint, Guwahati city police had registered a case (no  227/2018) under section 354 of IPC at Noonmati police station and started investigation.





Purabi Mazumdar, Assistant Commissioner of Police (ACP) said that, based on the FIR lodged by one of the victim police conducted investigation and

found sufficient evidences against the accused police official.





The incidents were happened few days ago, but one of the victim had lodged an FIR on Tuesday. As of now, Mohan Doley has been suspended from his duty and investigation is going on, Purabi Mazumdar said.




WELLINGTON, New Zealand (AP) - New Zealand plans to increase the number of refugees it takes each year from 1,000 to 1,500.

Liberal Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announced on Wednesday that the new quota will take effect from 2020.

The country has previously been criticized for not taking enough refugees after the annual quota remained at 750 for three decades before it was raised to 1,000 this year.

FILE - In this Sept. 5, 2018, file photo, New Zealand's Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, center, and Foreign Affairs Minister Winston Peters, right, speak to the media during the Pacific Islands Forum in Nauru. New Zealand plans to increase the number of refugees it takes each year from 1,000 to 1,500. Liberal Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announced on Wednesday, Sept. 19, that the new quota will take effect from 2020. (Jason Oxenham/Pool Photo via AP, File)

Ardern said moving the number to 1,500 represents a significant increase.

"It is the right thing to do," she said. "It puts New Zealand much more in line with the humanitarian policies of other developed countries."

Ardern said she doesn't anticipate the negative reaction to refugees that some people have had in countries like Germany because New Zealand gives refugees intensive support to ensure they have adequate housing and are well integrated into the community.

"We have one of the best records globally in the way we resettle," Ardern said. "So no, I don't anticipate having those issues."

New Zealand focuses most of its efforts on resettling refugees from the Asia-Pacific region, said Immigration Minister Iain Lees-Galloway. He said other regions could be considered in the future.

The quota increase comes at a time that overall immigration to New Zealand is forecast by the government to decline, from current near-record levels of about 70,000 to just over 50,000 by 2020.

The new policy is not likely to help the more than 600 refugees who are stuck on the tiny Pacific island of Nauru after they tried to reach Australia by boat. New Zealand has offered to take some of those refugees, but so far Australia has declined that offer, saying its worried the refugees will use New Zealand as a backdoor to gain access to Australia.
BENNETTSVILLE, S.C. (AP) - As the pounding rains from Hurricane Florence finally ended, Lutrice Garcia left the shelter where she had spent several nights on a cot and tried to head home. But floodwaters from overflowing Crooked Creek covered the road and an emergency responder told her water was seeping into the houses.

The 28-year-old nurse had left photo albums and other important keepsakes stashed on high shelves before she fled Friday. She worried about the wedding dress she plans to wear on her big day in November, still hanging in the closet.

With the creek still rising, Garcia mostly wondered if the home she recently finished repairing from Hurricane Matthew's flood damage in 2016 would once again wind up uninhabitable. Her mother lives nearby, but already has eight other relatives under her roof. If she can't go home, Garcia isn't sure where she'll go.

In this Tuesday, Sept. 18, 2018, photo, Lutrice Garcia stands outside a Red Cross shelter where she's staying, at a school in Bennettsville, S.C. Garcia said her nearby home was damaged by flooding caused by Hurricane Florence, and she doesn't know if she'll be able to return there to live once the water recedes. (AP Photo/Russ Bynum)

"It's up in the air. I'm just taking it day by day," Garcia said Tuesday as she returned to the middle school where more than 30 people remained in a disaster shelter in rural Marlboro County in northeast South Carolina.

Officials overseeing evacuations and emergency rescues following Florence's catastrophic crawl across the Carolinas will soon face a long, hard recovery. Among the first tasks: finding temporary housing for thousands whose homes were destroyed or severely damaged by the storm's coastal surge and inland floods.

It's too early to say how many will end up homeless because of Florence, as rivers swollen by days of rain still threaten to swamp communities barely touched by the storm's landfall. North Carolina had about 10,000 people in shelters Tuesday, and South Carolina had another 320. Many could need a place to stay for weeks, even months.

They might get vouchers to stay in hotels, or rent to move into apartments. Some could get trailers deployed after disasters by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. The federal government has approved major disaster declarations for the Carolinas, meaning immediate funds can go to help with damage repairs and recovery.

Tom Farigone of the Incident Management Assistance Team at FEMA said "everything was on the table" in terms of possible temporary housing.

"But our first priority is to get people out of areas that are immediately dangerous to their health and into a safe, sanitary and secure temporary shelter-like accommodation," Farigone said. "And then we will move them into something that better suits their needs."

FEMA officials have been in North Carolina for days looking at housing options, said Mike Sprayberry, director the state Division of Emergency Management. He said they expect to use FEMA's Transitional Sheltering Assistance program, which uses state and federal funds to house displaced residents in hotels.

The demand for hotel rooms for Florence's victims could be much greater than after Hurricane Matthew. While 4,000 evacuees found protection in North Carolina shelters during Matthew, that number during Florence peaked at over 20,000.

FEMA reduced its reliance on trailers after they became symbols of the troubled federal response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005, when more than 144,000 trailers were deployed to Louisiana and Mississippi.

The agency's downsized trailer stock led to shortages last year amid high demand after Hurricane Harvey slammed Texas and Hurricane Irma struck Florida. FEMA had just 1,700 trailers when Harvey hit in August 2017, and the agency rushed to put out bids for an additional 4,500.

FEMA hasn't said how many trailers it has available after Florence, but agency officials have said they're better prepared this hurricane season than in the past.

The long-term recovery will take years. Although more than $740 million in federal, state and local funds have been spent to address Matthew's damages, North Carolina officials are still working to distribute $236 million allocated by the federal government last year to help reimburse or pay for extensive home repairs.

Jackie and Quinton Washington lost their home in Lumberton, North Carolina, to flooding during Matthew. They finished rebuilding last October. Then on Friday the couple and their two children evacuated again as the Lumber River began overflowing.

Even before the river crested, photos from neighbors showed the Washingtons' house surrounded by water Monday, with the river still expected to rise several more feet.

"So it's pretty much we've lost the house again. There' no doubt about it," Jackie said from her mother's home in Rock Hill.

She said her family should be fine staying with relatives, as they did after Matthew. Their greatest worry is affording another round of rebuilding. FEMA gave the Washingtons $20,000 two years ago, not nearly enough to cover the cost, she said. They couldn't afford flood or homeowners insurance then, and they don't have it now. Every extra dollar the couple had went into rebuilding the first time around.

"Our whole life savings is in that house," Jackie said. "And now it's gone again."

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Robertson reported from Raleigh, North Carolina. Associated Press writers Meg Kinnard in Columbia, South Carolina, and Colleen Long in Washington contributed to this story.

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For the latest on Hurricane Florence, visit https://www.apnews.com/tag/Hurricanes
SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) - Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Republican from Kentucky, and Kevin de Leon, a Democrat in the California state Senate, rarely have much in common. But they're united in their condemnation this week of Sen. Dianne Feinstein.

The top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, Feinstein is playing a central role in the battle over Brett Kavanaugh's nomination to the Supreme Court. She received a confidential letter earlier this summer from a constituent who accused Kavanaugh of sexually assaulting her at a party more than three decades ago, allegations that didn't begin to surface publicly until last week. Feinstein has argued she sought to honor the confidentiality of the letter, whose author, Christine Blasey Ford, came forward last weekend in an interview with The Washington Post.

McConnell slammed Feinstein for keeping the letter "secret until the 11th hour." De Leon, who is challenging Feinstein in the Nov. 6 election, said her actions amounted to a "failure of leadership." Feinstein defended herself in a Tuesday interview, and Ford's lawyer has said she acted appropriately.

FILE - In this May 3, 2018, file photo, Kevin de Leon, D-Los Angeles, poses for photos in his campaign office in Los Angeles. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Kevin de Leon, a Democrat in the California Senate, rarely have much in common. But they're united in their condemnation this week of Sen. Dianne Feinstein. The top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, Feinstein is playing a central role in the battle over Brett Kavanaugh's nomination to the Supreme Court. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong, File)

The accusation, which Kavanaugh has denied, is consuming Washington, where the nomination's fate is suddenly in limbo. It's also giving de Leon an opening to criticize Feinstein in his uphill election fight.

"That was a valuable piece of info that you could have kept the confidentiality and kept her privacy and still dealt with the issue at hand," he said in a Monday interview.

He said he would have shared the letter with fellow Democrats on the Judiciary Committee while redacting identifying information and said Feinstein should have asked Kavanaugh about his character during hearings.

Feinstein, who has been backed by several fellow Senate Democrats, said Tuesday she was honoring Ford's request to keep the information confidential.

"I did not know whether this woman would come forward or not. I did not know if it was credible," she told reporters. "We were looking for a way to get it investigated by an outside investigator and what we found is we had to go through (the rules committee) and we were discussing the pros and cons of doing that, so it hasn't been easy."

Republicans also seized on a remark from Feinstein to Fox News that they saw as casting doubt on elements of Ford's story. "I can't say everything's truthful," Feinstein said when asked about Ford. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, tweeted the quote and said it's "now clear" why Feinstein kept the allegation secret.

Feinstein later clarified to reporters that she finds Ford credible, based on what she knowns so far. She added, "One of the things I know is what happens to women in this situation and how difficult it is, and I hope people will let her be."

Feinstein faces a fellow Democrat in November because of California's unusual primary system that sends the two highest vote-getters to the general election regardless of party. As one of California's best-known politicians and one with deep pockets, Feinstein has kept de Leon's challenge at bay even as he's sought to paint her as too deferential to President Donald Trump. On Tuesday, he released an online advertisement linking Feinstein's language in the 1990s about immigrants in the country illegally to Trump's rhetoric today.

But his criticism on the Kavanaugh issue, made in statements, interviews and even a fundraising appeal, doesn't come without risk.

He led the state Senate last fall when accusations of widespread misconduct rocked the Capitol. De Leon's former housemate was forced to resign after allegations he made advances on multiple women, including inviting a young woman in a fellowship program back to the house the two shared in Sacramento. De Leon denied knowledge of it and moved out after the news broke. He also hired outside investigators to look into complaints and introduced a resolution to expel Democratic Sen. Tony Mendoza, who eventually resigned.

A bill to give whistleblower protections to state legislative employees died repeatedly in the Senate, only passing this year, spurred by the #MeToo movement. That bill's sponsor, Republican Assemblywoman Melissa Melendez, took to Twitter to criticize de Leon, and women who led the Capitol's #MeToo movement chimed in.

"As one of the CA Capitol women who helped elevate the issue I can attest to Kevin's lack of action," tweeted Alicia Lewis, a Sacramento lobbyist. Lewis said she voted for de Leon in the California primary but will now back Feinstein in November.

De Leon said the whistleblower bill didn't explicitly reference sexual harassment victims until this year, when it passed the Senate, though Melendez said it was always the intent to protect employees who report harassment. He called comparisons between his and Feinstein's actions "apples to oranges," and noted the California Legislature's complete overhaul of its procedures for handling sexual misconduct this year following the #MeToo movement.

Elected to the Senate in 1992, Feinstein was one of the first women to sit on the Judiciary Committee. She joined the panel as its previously all-male membership was grappling with stinging criticism of its handling of Anita Hill's sexual harassment allegations against then-Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas.

Over the years, Feinstein has developed a reputation for her preference of decorum and discretion. But that approach clashes with the more aggressive style that a new generation of liberal lawmakers such as de Leon is promoting.

Upending decorum has never been Feinstein's style, said Sherry Bebitch Jeffe, a public policy professor at the University of Southern California.

"It seems to me this is in line with the way Dianne Feinstein has always behaved, very carefully, very circumspectly," Jeffe said.

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Associated Press writer Juliet Linderman in Washington contributed to this report.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., is surrounded by reporters as she arrives for a vote, Tuesday, Sept. 18, 2018, on Capitol Hill in Washington. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)
WASHINGTON (AP) - While Hurricane Florence barreled through the Carolinas, a different type of storm was brewing within the federal disaster relief agency tasked with responding to the fallout.

The fate of Brock Long, the head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, was cast in doubt with revelations that he was being investigated by Homeland Security's internal watchdog and a congressional committee for the possible misuse of government vehicles.

The watchdog, the inspector general's office, has turned the review over to federal prosecutors to determine whether any criminal charges are warranted, according to a person familiar with the probe. The person was not authorized to speak publicly about the investigation and requested anonymity.

FILE- In this May 30, 2018 file photo, FEMA Administrator Brock Long speaks during a news conference at the National Hurricane Center in Miami. According to a story published in the Wall Street Journal, Long is being investigated by Homeland Security's internal watchdog and a congressional committee for the possible misuse of government vehicles. (AP Photo/Wilfredo Lee, File)

Long, a well-respected emergency manager, says he is not focused on the probes.

"I am fully focused on those impacted by Hurricane Florence," he said in a statement Monday evening, after being asked for comment on the investigation.

But some emergency management experts say the investigations are a distraction for the beleaguered agency as it deals with the worst storm of the year.

Beverly Cigler, co-chair of a Hurricane Katrina task force set up by the American Society for Public Administration, said Long has been working hard but that "any organization has to have active engaged leadership at the very top."

"You don't want your FEMA administrator to be under investigation that's going to distract you somewhat no matter how focused you are," said Cigler, a Penn State distinguished professor emerita.

Rafael Lemaitre, who was a senior FEMA official in the Obama administration, said the timing was troubling.

"For these allegations to emerge in the hours before landfall of a major hurricane is a huge distraction to the work the FEMA administrator is doing," he said.

The agency is already under pressure after a grueling hurricane season last year that included Harvey, Irma and Maria. The federal response to Maria in Puerto Rico was widely criticized; President Donald Trump has lashed out over the criticism and suggested without evidence the revised death toll of nearly 3,000 was a conspiracy made up by Democrats.

Long has not been asked to resign. Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, who oversees FEMA, has said she has confidence in him. Other Trump administration officials have lost their jobs over ethics issues related to travel, but they involved more outsized allegations.

Long, 43, took over as FEMA administrator in June 2017. He has extensive emergency management experience - a federal requirement for the job since the Bush administration's bungled response to Katrina. He previously served in Alabama as the director of emergency management.

The investigations center on whether Long used government-owned vehicles for visits home to Hickory, North Carolina. It's not uncommon for an inspector general to refer cases so federal prosecutors can determine whether charges are warranted, and it doesn't mean he'll be charged with a crime.

Meanwhile, Long has until Oct. 1 to turn over documents to the House Oversight Committee related to travel and hotels possibly used by FEMA employees who were required to accompany him on the personal trips.

Long has largely kept a low public profile during Florence. He'd been front-and-center at press briefings as FEMA managed Hurricane Lane in Hawaii earlier this month. After the news broke of the investigation last week, Long appeared at a briefing in Washington to say he was fully focused on the storm preparations and would fully comply with the probe.

"Doing something unethical is not part of my DNA and it's not part of my track record in my whole entire career," Long said then.

But on Tuesday, he spoke at a North Carolina news conference with other emergency managers.

"It's really important for me to get out of D.C. and to be on the ground to be able to help North Carolina," Long said.

State emergency management head Mike Sprayberry thanked him for his work, as did Gov. Roy Cooper.

"Right now FEMA is giving us what we need," Cooper said.

Before the storm struck, FEMA had deployed more than 8 million bottles of water and meals, plus generators, blankets, tarps and cots to North Carolina, South Carolina and Virginia. It was acting on lessons learned following Maria, when it had underestimated the food and fresh water needed, and how hard it would be to get supplies to the island.

It's too early to gauge FEMA's response. While the storm has moved away, the rivers are still rising.

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Associated Press writer Michael Balsamo contributed to this report.
WASHINGTON (AP) - The politics of natural disasters can be tricky for a president.

Long before President Donald Trump tossed paper towels to storm-stricken Puerto Ricans and denied Hurricane Maria's official death toll, his predecessors struggled to steer the nation through life-and-death emergencies.

To project empathy without looking weak. To show both command and cooperation. To put the focus on victims - but provide leadership, too.

FILE - In this Oct. 3, 2017 file photo, President Donald Trump tosses paper towels into a crowd at Calvary Chapel in Guaynabo, Puerto Rico. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci, File)

As Trump heads to North Carolina on Wednesday to survey damage from Hurricane Florence, a look back at how presidents have grappled with the challenges and opportunities of disaster politics:

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TRUMP

Trump is not known for shows of empathy and relishes fights he thinks will resonate with his core supporters.

That includes a bitter and lasting brawl with Puerto Rico in the year since the U.S. territory was devastated by Hurricane Maria. He also has grappled with getting it right in ruby-red Texas and Louisiana after Hurricane Harvey, which dumped nearly 50 inches of rain near Houston.

Trump's first post-Harvey trip to Texas generated blowback for his failure to meet with victims of the storm. Four days later, he returned - and urged people at a Houston shelter to "have a good time." He also cheered on volunteers and emergency workers and handed out hot dogs and potato chips to residents. Some critics said the president's trip took on the tone of a victory lap for successful disaster management.

Trump has had trouble keeping facts right about the devastating storms under his watch.

In June, Trump said on a conference call that the Coast Guard had saved thousands of people while Houston was under water, including what he suggested were hurricane gawkers. "People went out in their boats to watch the hurricane. That didn't work out too well," the president said. There is no indication the Coast Guard rescued foolhardy storm watchers drifting off the Texas coast.

Then there's Puerto Rico, flattened by Maria as a Category 4 storm nearly a year ago. Trump pumped two fists in the air when he landed in San Juan last October. The enduring image was of Trump at a San Juan church lobbing paper towels into the crowd as if shooting baskets. At the time, it seemed to reflect Trump's brand of playfulness. Many people in the crowd smiled and raised their phones to record the moment. But critics quickly dubbed it inappropriate for the massive, grim crisis at hand.

A year later, the official death toll from the storm stands at 2,975. Even as Hurricane Florence approached the Carolinas this week, Trump rejected that count and griped that it's the product of Democrats trying to make him "look bad." He also tweeted that San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulin Cruz, a frequent Trump critic, is "incompetent."

"The victims of Puerto Rico and the people of Puerto Rico in general do not deserve to be questioned about their pain," said Gov. Ricardo Rossello.

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OBAMA

On Oct. 29, 2012, Hurricane Sandy made landfall in Atlantic City, New Jersey, and became the costliest storm in U.S. history behind Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

Republican Gov. Chris Christie invited Democratic President Barack Obama to view the storm damage, and when the president arrived, the two shared a friendly, widely photographed greeting. At one point, as the two shook hands, Obama put his left hand on Christie's right shoulder. The resulting image was derided by some conservatives as a "hug" - and a potential re-election boost for Obama when he was being challenged by Republican Mitt Romney.

The storm is blamed for 182 deaths and cost about $70 billion in New Jersey and New York.

It was one of several natural disasters that gave Obama the opportunity to play the traditional role of comforter in chief.

A year earlier, a tornado devastated Joplin, Missouri, with winds up to 250 mph and claimed at least 159 lives. Obama visited the moonscape of rubble and tree stumps, and delivered an emotional memorial service speech in which he told the stories of heroic efforts by individuals during the storm.

"It's in these moments, through our actions, that we often see the glimpse of what makes life worth living in the first place," Obama told the crowd.

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BUSH

President George W. Bush, praised for his leadership after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, stumbled during what proved to be the government's inadequate response to deadly Hurricane Katrina four years later.

Heading back to Washington after nearly a month on his ranch, Bush had Air Force One fly over part of the devastation, giving him a view of it from high above. The moment was preserved in photographs and generated criticism that he didn't come in person.

"Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job," he told FEMA Director Michael Brown, three days after Katrina flooded New Orleans. The storm left 1,800 people dead and caused $151 billion in damage. Much public blame went to the Bush administration for a too-slow response.

Together, the vacation, the high-altitude tour and Bush's "Brownie moment" left a lasting impression that the president had been detached from the tragedy on the ground.

In his 2010 book "Decision Points," the former president reflected on his mistakes during Katrina, writing that he should have urged the evacuation of New Orleans sooner, visited sooner and shown more empathy.

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CLINTON

Bill Clinton, who famously claimed during the 1992 campaign "I feel your pain," was a natural at connecting with disaster victims. As president, he visited Des Moines, Iowa, the next year to examine flood damage in the region. He shook hands with people who had lost their homes as well as National Guard troops.

During a visit to a water distribution center, a woman can be heard in footage preserved by C-SPAN telling him, "My house was flooded."

"I'm so sorry," Clinton replied.

A weeping woman in pink with a blue small cooler in her hand told Clinton: "My parents lost their home and I have not been home for like a week. I can't take it anymore."

He draped an arm around her and said, "Hang in there."

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Follow Kellman on Twitter at: http://www.twitter.com/APLaurieKellman

FILE - In this May 28, 2013 file photo, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie greets President Barack Obama upon his arrival at McGuire Air Force Base, N.J. Obama traveled to New Jersey joining Christie to inspect and tour the Jersey Shore's recovery efforts from Hurricane Sandy. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais, File)
INDIANAPOLIS (AP) - Mike Braun, the Republican candidate for a crucial Senate seat in Indiana, often refers to his rival, Sen. Joe Donnelly, as "Sleepin' Joe" and has vowed to wake the vulnerable Democrat from his "siesta" on Election Day.

But as Donnelly barnstorms the state in a used RV, it is Braun's own sleepy campaign that's leaving Republicans underwhelmed - and worried.

Groups that typically back GOP candidates, such as the Indiana Chamber of Commerce, are sitting on the sidelines. Braun's recent three-stop "solutions" tour - spread out across three days - was ridiculed by Democrats, who pointed to Donnelly's seven-day, 40-stop trek in August.

FILE - This May 8, 2018 file photo Republican Senate candidate Mike Braun thanks supporters after winning the republican primary in Whitestown, Ind. Braun often refers to his rival, Democratic Sen. Joe Donnelly, as "Sleepin' Joe," but it's actually Braun's own sleepy campaign that has Republicans worried. Groups that typically back GOP candidates are sitting on the sidelines. Braun's recent three-stop "solutions" tour across the state in a used RV was dwarfed by Donnelly's seven-day, 40-stop trek in August. (AP Photo/Michael Conroy, File)

And while Braun, a multimillionaire businessman, took out $6.4 million in loans to fund his primary campaign, he also publicly groused about the cost. Now, with less than two months until the election, he has yet to purchase air time for October, while Donnelly has outspent him by almost double on TV and radio since June, records show.

That's cause for concern, according to a half-dozen GOP officials, operatives and commentators familiar with the race, most of whom spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity to offer candid assessments of the contest. They say Braun appears to be coasting at a time when he ought to be investing more of his own money and rallying the base.

Conservative talk radio host Rob Kendall summed up the GOP's worries by pointing to Braun's recent appearance with President Donald Trump at a rally in Evansville.

"He's in front of (thousands of) people at the Ford Center and it sounds like you're at a funeral," said Kendall, who is a producer and has a show on Indianapolis-based WIBC radio. "I would have been like James Brown and the Blues Brothers shouting out 'Do You See the Light' to the congregation. And this guy, you have to check him for a pulse."

Republicans have viewed Donnelly's seat as a prime pickup opportunity in a state Trump won by nearly 20 points in 2016. The criticism of Braun's performance reflects a sudden sense among the GOP that Senate contests in several states Trump carried may be tougher than expected and that control of the Republican-led chamber could be at stake - a prospect that was unthinkable just a few weeks ago.

Braun's campaign dismissed the criticism and insisted he's winning despite recent polling that suggests a neck-and-neck battle.

"Mike gets things done, and Donnelly is the least effective Democrat in the Senate," Braun spokesman Josh Kelley said in a statement. He noted that Braun "has held 80 grassroots events since the primary - including two packed rallies with President Trump - reminding Hoosiers of Donnelly's liberal record of voting for Obamacare and against tax cuts."

The race was thrown into further chaos this week after an allegation of decades-old sexual misconduct surfaced against Trump's Supreme Court nominee, Brett Kavanaugh. The development could cut both ways in the race, potentially hurting Braun - who has said he supports Kavanaugh - with suburban women. But the turmoil surrounding the nomination could also sting Donnelly if Democrats are seen as politicizing the allegation. Kavanaugh has denied the allegation.

For years, Republicans have insisted Donnelly's 2012 victory was a fluke caused by GOP nominee Richard Mourdock's incendiary comments about abortion and rape. Many now concede they underestimated Donnelly, who portrays himself as a conservative Democrat and often touts his votes for Trump's priorities.

While commuting back-and-forth between Indiana and Washington, Donnelly has held more than 190 campaign events since May - more than double the number attended by Braun, who resigned from his seat in the Indiana Legislature to focus on campaigning.

Bob Grand, a GOP fundraiser and Indiana powerbroker, said Donnelly has done a "phenomenal job" campaigning, but doubted it will be enough to win in an overwhelmingly Republican state.

"He's even featuring Donald Trump in his ads. What does that tell you?" Grand said.

Still, groups that have enthusiastically supported GOP nominees in the past are uncharacteristically absent.

In addition to the Indiana Chamber of Commerce, which opted against issuing an endorsement, the U.S. Chamber was mum over whether it will get involved. In 2016, the group spent at least $3.7 million backing GOP Sen. Todd Young in his race against Democrat Evan Bayh, a popular former Indiana governor and senator who previously worked for them.

Americans for Prosperity, the political arm of billionaire industrialists Charles and David Koch, interviewed Braun but decided not to directly support him. Two years ago, they launched a door-knocking and phone-bank operation that helped Young win.

On paper, Braun has everything the GOP wants: He built a national auto parts distribution company from the ground up, speaks with a subtle southern Indiana twang and is a virtual outsider to politics, despite his brief stint in the Legislature.

He also has the ability to self-fund.

During the GOP primary, Braun used his wealth, worth somewhere between $37 million and $95 million, to bury U.S. Reps. Todd Rokita and Luke Messer with more than $6.2 million worth of radio and TV spots, Federal Election Commission records show.

But Braun - whose wife once described him to The Indianapolis Star as the "tightest guy I know" - said after his May 8 victory that he wasn't looking to do the same in the general election.

With November looming, his campaign only started to ramp up spending on TV ads this week. Meanwhile, Democratic groups and super PACs are set to spend $22 million, much of it ruthlessly attacking Braun's business record.

They've seized on stories by the AP that revealed his companies racked up safety violations and were sued by employees for unfair treatment, including a worker kicked off health insurance days after he suffered a heart attack .

Democrats also labeled Braun a hypocrite for attacking Donnelly's family business for outsourcing jobs to Mexico while using Chinese goods for his own brand of auto accessories.

Republican outside groups, including a super PAC linked to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, have picked up the slack. They're on pace to pour at least $19 million into advertising. They've attacked Donnelly for being weak on immigration, voting against the Republican tax cut and being indecisive about whether he will support Kavanaugh.

But that may not matter if Braun doesn't campaign to win.

"I think Braun has a good narrative and a great story," said Kendall, the radio producer. "But he needs to be out there telling it."
PYONGYANG, North Korea (AP) - South Korean President Moon Jae-in and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un announced a sweeping set of agreements after their second day of talks in Pyongyang on Wednesday that included a promise by Kim to permanently dismantle the North's main nuclear complex if the United States takes corresponding measures, the acceptance of international inspectors to monitor the closing of a key missile test site and launch pad and a vow to work together to host the Summer Olympics in 2032.

Declaring they had made a major step toward peace on the Korean Peninsula, the two leaders were side by side as they announced the joint statement to a group of North and South Korean reporters after a closed-door meeting Wednesday morning.

"We have agreed to make the Korean Peninsula a land of peace that is free from nuclear weapons and nuclear threat," Kim said as he stood by Moon's side at the guesthouse where Moon is staying. "The road to our future will not always be smooth and we may face challenges and trials we can't anticipate. But we aren't afraid of headwinds because our strength will grow as we overcome each trial based on the strength of our nation."

South Korean President Moon Jae-in, left, and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un exchange the documents after signing at the Paekhwawon State Guesthouse in Pyongyang, North Korea, Wednesday, Sept. 19, 2018. Moon and Kim announced a sweeping set of agreements after their second day of talks in Pyongyang on Wednesday that included a promise by Kim to permanently dismantle the North's main nuclear complex if the United States takes corresponding measures, the acceptance of international inspectors to monitor the closing of a key missile test site and launch pad and a vow to work together to host the Summer Olympics in 2032.(Pyongyang Press Corps Pool via AP)

Kim and Moon earlier smiled and chatted as they walked down a hallway and into a meeting room to finalize the joint statement, which also said that the leaders would push for a Korean Peninsula without nuclear weapons and to "eliminate all the danger of war." They agreed that Kim would visit the South in the near future.

The statement caps off the third summit between Kim and Moon, who is under increasing pressure from Washington to find a path forward in its efforts to get Kim to completely - and unilaterally - abandon his nuclear arsenal.

But while containing several tantalizing offers, it appears to fall short of the major steps many in Washington had been looking for - such as a commitment by Pyongyang to provide a list of the North's nuclear facilities, a solid step-by-step timeline or an agreement to allow international inspectors in to assess progress or discover violations.

The question is whether it will be enough for President Donald Trump to pick up where Moon has left off.

Trump has maintained that he and Kim have a solid relationship, and both leaders have expressed interest in a follow-up summit to their meeting in June in Singapore. North Korea has been demanding a declaration formally ending the Korean War, which was stopped in 1953 by a cease-fire, but neither leader mentioned it as they read the joint statement.

In the meantime, however, Moon and Kim made concrete moves of their own to reduce tensions on their border.

According a joint statement signed by the countries' defense chiefs, the two Koreas agreed to establish buffer zones along their land and sea borders to reduce military tensions and prevent accidental clashes. They also agreed to withdraw 11 guard posts from the Demilitarized Zone by December and to establish a no-fly zone above the military demarcation line that bisects the two Koreas that will apply to planes, helicopters and drones.

Though not directly linked to security, the leaders' announcement that they would seek a joint Summer Olympics was a significant move in terms of easing tensions and building trust. It also flows from the North's decision to participate in the Pyeongchang Winter Games in February, which was regarded as a success for both sides.

Other agreements aimed at removing some longstanding irritants from their relations - such as allowing more contact between families divided by the Korean War. Moon also appeared to be making good on his proposals to help build up the North's infrastructure and open cross-border rail links.

Unlike Trump's initial tweets praising the summit, the news brought a quick and negative response from Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, who tweeted he was concerned the visit would undermine efforts by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley to impose "maximum pressure" on Pyongyang.

"While North Korea has stopped testing missiles and nuclear devices, they have NOT moved toward denuclearization," he tweeted.

With the main business of the day complete, North Korea was expected to hold a huge mass games spectacle in the evening, with Moon as the special guest.

The North had put the iconic games, which feature tens of thousands of performers dancing and flipping placards in unison to create giant mosaics and slogans, on a back burner for the past several years, but revived them for this month's celebrations of its 70th founding anniversary. In a performance for the anniversary, a giant photo of Moon and Kim shaking hands at their first summit in April was projected onto one side of the stands in Pyongyang's 150,000-seat May Day Stadium.

Kim has gone all out to make Moon's visit a memorable one.

On Tuesday, the first day of the summit, he greeted Moon and his wife at Pyongyang's airport and then rode into town with Moon in an open limousine through streets lined with crowds of North Koreans, who cheered and waved the flag of their country and a blue-and-white flag that symbolizes Korean unity.

The summit talks began at the ruling Workers' Party headquarters where Kim and Moon were joined by two of their top deputies - spy chief Suh Hoon and presidential security director Chung Eui-yong for Moon, and for Kim, his sister, Kim Yo Jong, and senior Workers' Party official Kim Yong Chol, according to Moon's office.

At the start of their meeting Tuesday, Kim thanked Moon for brokering the June summit with Trump.

"It's not too much to say that it's Moon's efforts that arranged a historic North Korea-U.S. summit. Because of that, the regional political situation has been stabilized and more progress on North Korea-U.S. ties is expected," Kim said, according to South Korean media pool reports and Moon's office.

Moon responded by expressing his own thanks to Kim for making a "bold decision" in a New Year's speech to open a new era of detente and send a delegation to the South Korean Winter Olympics in February.

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Kim reported from Seoul. Associated Press writers Hyung-jin Kim and Foster Klug in Seoul, South Korea, contributed to this report. Talmadge is the AP's Pyongyang bureau chief. Follow him on Instagram and Twitter: @EricTalmadge

South Korean President Moon Jae-in, left, and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un shakes hands after signing the documents at the Paekhwawon State Guesthouse in Pyongyang, North Korea, Wednesday, Sept. 19, 2018. Moon and Kim announced a sweeping set of agreements after their second day of talks in Pyongyang on Wednesday that included a promise by Kim to permanently dismantle the North's main nuclear complex if the United States takes corresponding measures, the acceptance of international inspectors to monitor the closing of a key missile test site and launch pad and a vow to work together to host the Summer Olympics in 2032. (Pyongyang Press Corps Pool via AP)

South Korean President Moon Jae-in, left, and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un hold documents after signing at the Paekhwawon State Guesthouse in Pyongyang, North Korea, Wednesday, Sept. 19, 2018. Moon and Kim announced a sweeping set of agreements after their second day of talks in Pyongyang on Wednesday that included a promise by Kim to permanently dismantle the North's main nuclear complex if the United States takes corresponding measures, the acceptance of international inspectors to monitor the closing of a key missile test site and launch pad and a vow to work together to host the Summer Olympics in 2032. (Pyongyang Press Corps Pool via AP)

Members of media and volunteers watch a huge screen showing South Korean President Moon Jae-in, left, shake hands with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un after a joint press conference in Pyongyang, North Korea, at a press center for the inter-Korean summit in Seoul, South Korea, Wednesday, Sept. 19, 2018. (AP Photo/Lee Jin-man)
WELLINGTON, New Zealand (AP) - New Zealand became the first nation in the world to allow women to vote 125 years ago, and hundreds of people celebrated the anniversary on Wednesday by turning out to gatherings and speeches. Some wore period costumes or white camellia flowers, a symbol of the historic movement.

New Zealand's female lawmakers also marked the occasion by re-enacting an all-male photograph of lawmakers taken more than a century ago. This time, the photograph featured New Zealand's third female Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern in the center, holding her 3-month-old baby Neve.

Ardern was also the guest editor for the "suffrage edition" of the country's largest daily newspaper, The New Zealand Herald, although some questioned whether that move could taint the political neutrality the paper seeks in its journalism.

A group of New Zealand women lawmakers featuring Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern in the center holding baby Neve pose for a photograph at Parliament taken on Wednesday, Sept. 19, 2018, in Wellington, New Zealand. The lawmakers were re-enacting a 1905 photograph, which featured only male lawmakers, as part of the 125th anniversary celebrations of New Zealand becoming the first country to give women the right to vote.(AP Photo/Nick Perry)

Liberal lawmakers introduced a new bill Wednesday that they say is aimed at addressing historic lower pay for women by making it easier for workers to make claims for pay equity.

"It reminds us that that is what we are here for," said Acting Minister for Women Eugenie Sage, referring to the photo session, proposed law change and other advancements for women. "That is why we got the vote."

Earlier in the day, Ardern spoke to hundreds of people gathered in Auckland, telling them her own great-great-grandmother had signed the petition for women to get the vote back in 1893.

In her edition of the newspaper, Ardern wrote that she felt an "enormous sense of responsibility" to capture women's voices and highlight the extraordinary within the ordinary. She pointed out that she left the content and placement of political stories to the news editor.

The paper featured a photograph of Ardern, who is liberal, with New Zealand's two previous female prime ministers, Jenny Shipley and Helen Clark. The focus on a diverse group of women throughout the paper was applauded by many readers.

But conservative commentator David Farrar compared the treatment of Ardern by the newspaper, which also featured her in a large billboard, to North Korea's reverence for its leader Kim Jong Un.

"This is very efficient," Farrar wrote on his site Kiwiblog. "Having the PM edit the Herald directly cuts out the middle man!"

The news organization Stuff pointed out that while New Zealand had made global history by giving women the vote, one of its own newspapers had been on the wrong side of that history by saying in an editorial at the time that the "shrieking sisterhood" had forced the vote on women.

Other parts of The Press editorial have better withstood the march of history.

"They must take part in the elections," the 1893 editorial said of women. "They, too, must study public questions, and seek to make their influence felt."

In this Sept. 1, 2018 photo, New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, center, sits for a portrait with former prime minister's Jenny Shipley, left, and Helen Clark, right, in Auckland, New Zealand. New Zealand became the first nation in the world to allow women to vote 125 years ago, and hundreds of people celebrated the anniversary by turning out to gatherings and speeches with some wearing period costumes or the white camellia flowers - a symbol of the movement. (Babiche Martens/New Zealand Herald via AP)

A group of New Zealand women lawmakers featuring Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern in the center holding baby Neve pose for a photograph at Parliament taken on Wednesday, Sept. 19, 2018, in Wellington, New Zealand. The lawmakers were re-enacting a 1905 photograph, which featured only male lawmakers, as part of the 125th anniversary celebrations of New Zealand becoming the first country to give women the right to vote.(AP Photo/Nick Perry)

New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, center, and the Mayor of Auckland, Phil Goff attend the Suffrage 125 year sunrise celebration in Auckland, New Zealand, Wednesday, Sept. 19. 2018. New Zealand became the first nation in the world to allow women to vote 125 years ago, and hundreds of people celebrated the anniversary by turning out to gatherings and speeches with some wearing period costumes or the white camellia flowers - a symbol of the movement. (Michael Craig/New Zealand Herald via AP)
NEW DELHI (AP) - Indian police have arrested a nurse for trying to perform an abortion on a 28-year-old woman who died at her home in southern India, an official said Wednesday.

The woman, a mother of three daughters, approached a private hospital on Monday in Usilampatti, a town in southern Tamil Nadu state, but doctors refused to carry out the procedure as she was seven months' pregnant, district administrator S. Natrajan said.

However, a hospital nurse offered to perform an abortion at the woman's home, where she died soon after, said police officer Madasamy, who uses one name.

Police are investigating whether the victim opted to have an abortion upon learning through an illegal sex determination test that she was carrying a female fetus, The Hindu newspaper said.

Female infanticide is a lucrative business that thrives underground in India. Most Indian parents, especially the poor, prefer a son as a daughter's birth means immense debts they'll need to pay for marriage dowries.
PARIS (AP) - A former security aide of French President Emmanuel Macron who was videotaped beating a protester apologized Wednesday for insulting a Senate commission as "little people" and calling its chief a "little marquis."

Alexandre Benalla was the star witness of a Senate commission investigating issues triggered by the May Day march at which the former aide was videotaped beating a protester. Benalla's blows to a protester at the march, which had descended into violence, led to Macron's most difficult period in office since he became president in May 2017.

"I have a deep respect for the Senate," Benalla told the commission.

Former President Macron's security aide Alexandre Benalla appears before the French Senate Laws Commission prior to his hearing, in Paris, France, Wednesday, Sept. 19, 2018. Benalla who triggered a political crisis after being videotaped beating a protester is grudgingly appearing before a Senate inquiry commission whose members he insulted as "little people" for whom he has no respect. He was fired in late June when the affair became a political scandal. (AP Photo/Thibault Camus)

The ex-aide said he had overreacted in a radio interview last week when he insulted the panel, because he felt some were "using the institutions of our country for political and media ends."

"I've been raised in the respect of these institutions."

The commission, which has taken testimony from ministers, generals and other ranking officials, is trying to understand the nature of Benalla's job at the presidential Elysee Palace and why he benefited from numerous perks, including permission to carry a gun. It is also trying to uncover possible dysfunctions in Macron's security detail.

Preliminary charges, including being involved in group violence, have been filed against Benalla, 27, and as a result questions about his actions on May Day are off-limits.

Some members of Macron's centrist party have protested Benalla's appearance, with party chief Christophe Castaner suggesting at one point that it was part of a ploy to "bring down the president."

Benalla's apology led off nearly two-and-a-half hours of grilling during which he said he carried a gun for his personal protection - not the president's - and insisted he was never Macron's bodyguard.

Benalla was identified in late July as one of two men seen in an online video brutally roughing up a protester at the violent May Day march even though he was present as an observer.

"I am not a thug ... a little ruffian," Benalla said in reference to speculation that he was a hot-tempered man lacking the status of others at the presidential Elysee Palace.

He was fired only when the affair became a political scandal and Macron is reorganizing the Elysee to address alleged dysfunctions.

The belated firing of Benalla, and an initial light punishment, fed questions about whether the presidency under Macron had a hidden side that answered to no one with Benalla playing a critical role.

Benalla stressed that he was never Macron's bodyguard, saying his job was helping to orchestrate presidential outings, "a sort of conductor."

However, Benalla admitted he carried a gun, occasionally into the presidential palace when returning from target practice - but for his own protection.

"I wasn't walking around on the president's trips with my gun exposed. It was a guarantee for my own safety," he said, adding that he was armed on such occasions only about three times.

Benalla refused to explain potential threats to himself, indicating it was a question off-limits.

The former top aide of the police chief, Yann Drouet, contradicted Benalla's version in later testimony Wednesday, saying the gun permit was authorized "in the framework of his mission."

"It was not for his personal safety," he said.

Benalla initially refused to appear before the commission but ceded when told he risked prison for refusing.

Former President Macron's security aide Alexandre Benalla leaves the hearing room after he testified before the French Senate Laws Commission, in Paris, France, Wednesday, Sept. 19, 2018. Benalla who triggered a political crisis after being videotaped beating a protester is grudgingly appearing before a Senate inquiry commission whose members he insulted as "little people" for whom he has no respect. He was fired in late June when the affair became a political scandal. (AP Photo/Thibault Camus)

Former President Macron's security aide Alexandre Benalla, left, appears before the French Senate Laws Commission prior to his hearing, in Paris, France, Wednesday, Sept. 19, 2018. Benalla who triggered a political crisis after being videotaped beating a protester is grudgingly appearing before a Senate inquiry commission whose members he insulted as "little people" for whom he has no respect. He was fired in late June when the affair became a political scandal. (AP Photo/Thibault Camus)

Former President Macron's security aide Alexandre Benalla, center, arrives to face senators from the French Senate Laws Commission prior to his hearing, in Paris, France, Wednesday, Sept. 19, 2018. Benalla who triggered a political crisis after being videotaped beating a protester is grudgingly appearing before a Senate inquiry commission whose members he insulted as "little people" for whom he has no respect. He was fired in late June when the affair became a political scandal. (AP Photo/Thibault Camus)




Guwahati: Police has seized huge quantity of illegal drugs worth of Rs 10 lakh and arrested three persons in Assams Karimganj district.





According to the reports, based on intelligence input, Churaibari police in the Barak valley district on Tuesday had intercepted a Mahindra Bolero bearing registration number of AS-10D- 5821 vehicle at the check post at Churaibari along with Assam-Tripura border.





During search operation police had found about 2000 numbers Yaba tablet (illegal drugs) packed in a bag and arrested three persons, who carried the illegal drugs.





The vehicle was coming from Nilambazar area to Tripura.





The arrested persons were identified as Suhail Ahmed, Alaluddin and Milan Miyan and they had tried to carry the seized illegal drugs to Bangladesh via Tripura.





We had intercepted a Bolero vehicle coming from Nilambazar area to Tripura. During search operation, we had found a suspected packet of illegal drugs and arrested three persons, a police officer said.




MIAMI (AP) - Thousands of people are still in shelters in North Carolina anxiously waiting to find out if they have a home to go back to. Heavy rains and swelling rivers are still a major concern as rising flood waters may affect communities barely touched by Florence. The storm is being blamed for at least 37 deaths in three states.

BY THE NUMBERS

-Storm deaths: Florence is being blamed for at least 37 deaths in three states, and Typhoon Mangkhut has killed at least 81 people in the Philippines and China

The waters of the Little River flow up against a bridge as it begins to recede making the road passable in the aftermath of Hurricane Florence in Fayetteville, N.C., Tuesday, Sept. 18, 2018. (AP Photo/David Goldman)

-Heavy rains: Nearly 36 inches (91 centimeters) of rain has fallen over Elizabethtown, North Carolina, and other towns have seen roughly 30 inches (76 centimeters) of rainfall since Thursday

-High water: The Cape Fear River crested at 61.5 feet (18.7 meters) early Wednesday morning, according to the National Weather Service.

-In the dark: About 205,000 outages, mostly in North Carolina

-Damage estimates: $17 billion to $22 billion in lost economic output and property damage, according to economists at Moody's Analytics

-Evacuations: Tens of thousands ordered out of communities along North Carolina's steadily rising rivers, while over 2.4 million people in southern China's Guangdong province were warned to escape Mangkhut

-To the rescue: Over 1,000 search-and-rescue personnel with 36 helicopters and over 200 boats were working in North Carolina, and the Defense Department assigned 13,500 military personnel to help relief efforts

-Safe now: North Carolina's governor says 2,600 people and 300 animals had been rescued

-Blocked: 1,200 North Carolina roads closed, including 357 primary roads

-City underwater: 4,300 homes in New Bern, North Carolina, inundated by flooding, or one-third of the entire number of homes in the city

IMAGES FROM THE GROUND

Images captured by Associated Press journalists show flooding caused by Florence in the Carolinas and Typhoon Mangkhut in the Philippines .

DETAINEES' DEATHS

Authorities say two female inmates being transported to a mental health facility in South Carolina drowned in rising flood waters after the van they were in was swept away. High-water rescue teams plucked two deputies from the top of the van. The deaths are being investigated.

FLORENCE'S VICTIMS

Officials in the Carolinas are worried about what deaths are still to come amid the swelling rivers and flooding from Florence's crawl across both states. So far, several people have died after being swept up in the storm waters , and falling trees have killed two small children.

TYPHOON MANGKHUT

A Philippine police officer says residents of a mining camp in a mountain village refused to leave ahead of the powerful typhoon, believing their chapel and nearby bunkhouses were on stable ground. Now dozens of people are missing after a massive landslide buried the structures.

WILMINGTON GETS SUPPLIES

One of North Carolina's largest cities still is mostly cut off by floodwaters, so food, water and tarps are being brought into Wilmington by big military trucks and helicopters. More than 60 percent of homes and businesses were without power, and crews have completed about 700 rescues in the county where Wilmington is located.

SAVE HOMES OR A HIGHWAY?

A wall of concrete barriers and plastic sheets is being built along U.S. Highway 501 to save the main road into Myrtle Beach , South Carolina, from going underwater. Residents in the nearby town of Conway worry that's going to send water from the rising Waccamaw River to flood their homes instead.

PLACE TO CALL HOME

It's too early to tell how many people will end up homeless because of Florence. Rivers swollen by days of rain still threaten communities barely touched by the storm. Thousands are already in shelters in North Carolina. Mike Sprayberry, director the state Division of Emergency Management, says FEMA officials have been in the state for days looking at housing options for the displaced.

DAM HAZARDS

At least one North Carolina dam has breached so far under the strain of Florence's flooding, but officials say no homes were affected. False alarms about dam failures have caused panic in a state where there is a lot of concern about whether many dams already in poor condition will hold as rivers keep rising.

EXPLAINING THE DANGER

Experts say people likely got complacent about Florence because of a scale that only categorizes hurricanes by wind strength . Water is responsible for the vast majority of deaths in hurricanes and tropical storms, but that hazard isn't included in the system forecasters used when they described the storm as a "Category 1 hurricane" at landfall.

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For the latest on Hurricane Florence, visit https://www.apnews.com/tag/Hurricanes

Farm buildings are inundated with floodwater from Hurricane Florence near Trenton, N.C., Sunday, Sept. 16, 2018. (AP Photo/Steve Helber)

Crews with N.C. Baptist on Mission set up Monday Sept. 17, 2018 at the First Baptist Church of Independence Blvd. in Wilmington, N.C. The group plans on offering relief to those going thorough the aftermath of Hurricane Florence for as long as they are needed. (Ken Blevins /The Star-News via AP)

A message outside a razed home along the Neuse River in New Bern, N.C. on Monday, Sept. 17, 2018. Near the flooded-out town of New Bern , where about 455 people had to be rescued from the swirling floodwaters, water completely surrounded churches, businesses and homes. In the neighboring town of Trenton, downtown streets were turned to creeks full of brown water.(AP Photo/Gary D Robertson)

Chris Stein yells at an Onslow County Sheriff deputy begging for a power company to come cut the wires that are down in front of her neighborhood near Jacksonville N.C.,Monday, Sept. 17, 2018. She says "It's like being in Jurassic Park" and has been trapped for 4 days. (AP Photo/Tom Copeland)

The Cape Fear River rises under a closed Interstate 40 just north of Wilmington, NC in Castle Hayne N.C.,Monday, Sept. 17, 2018. (AP Photo/Tom Copeland)

William Larymore, left, of the South Carolina Department of Natural Resources, and Salvatore Cirencione, of the State Law Enforcement Division, partially visible behind, help resident Franklin Bessemer, who lives on the river, back to a pier on the Waccamaw River in Conway, S.C., Monday, Sept. 17, 2018. Bessemer's boat had quit while he was checking on his home as residents evacuate. The river is expected to flood in the coming days due heavy rains from Hurricane Florence. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)

William Larymore, right, of the South Carolina Department of Natural Resources, and Salvatore Cirencione, of the State Law Enforcement Division, help resident Franklin Bessemer, who lives on the river, onto the pier on the Waccamaw River in Conway, S.C., Monday, Sept. 17, 2018. Bessemer's boat had quit while he was checking on his home as residents evacuate. The river is expected to flood in the coming days due heavy rains from Hurricane Florence. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)

A funnel cloud hangs over the Richmond, Va., skyline, Monday, Sept. 17, 2018. (Bob Brown/Richmond Times-Dispatch via AP)

A resident stands on her pier looking out onto the rising Waccamaw River in Conway, S.C., Monday, Sept. 17, 2018. Residents are evacuating as the river is expected to flood in the coming days due heavy rains from Hurricane Florence. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)

Traffic moves past a downed tree on Ridge Road near Glendale Road in Henrico County, Va., Monday, Sept. 17, 2018, as the remnants of Florence pass through the area. (Bob Brown/Richmond Times-Dispatch via AP)
SEOUL, South Korea (AP) - The Korean leaders' surprisingly substantive summit announcement is a huge step toward a durable peace on the Korean Peninsula - and a Nobel Peace Prize for Kim Jong Un and Moon Jae-in. No, no, it's the death rattle of the once formidable U.S.-led pressure campaign against the North as it crumbles under the false optimism of inter-Korean engagement. Or maybe it's just the latest empty promise from a North Korean regime famous for backstepping?

How you see the third summit this year between Moon and Kim - and there could be another in the works, with Kim promising to come to Seoul soon - may depend on where you're sitting, both geographically and politically.

The view from Seoul will largely be relief, mixed with a sort of built-in wariness that many here wield as a default reaction to anything having to do with their northern neighbors. South Korea is a deeply divided place politically, with a chasm between conservatives who hate the North and liberals who want to reach out. But for Moon, whose aides have been hinting at his eagerness to secure protection from the North's conventional weapons, this looks like a domestic win, provided the two sides can follow through.

South Korean President Moon Jae-in, right, and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un walk together at the Paekhwawon State Guesthouse in Pyongyang, North Korea, Wednesday, Sept. 19, 2018. Moon and Kim have announced a sweeping set of agreements after their second day of talks in Pyongyang. It includes a promise by Kim to permanently dismantle the North's main nuclear complex if the United States takes corresponding measures, the acceptance of international inspectors to monitor the closing of a key missile test site and launch pad and a vow to work together to host the Summer Olympics in 2032.(Pyongyang Press Corps Pool via AP)

After all, much of what Moon and Kim agreed to on Wednesday - beginning to disarm their border, the world's most heavily armed, removing land mines, setting up buffer zones to prevent accidental skirmishes and dismantling, under outside inspectors' supervision, a North Korean missile launch pad - could tangibly improve South Koreans' safety.

"The South and North today have agreed to remove every threat in all areas of the Korean Peninsula that can cause war," Moon declared as he stood by Kim's side in a guesthouse in the North Korean capital of Pyongyang. "By creating the Korean Peninsula as a permanent space for peace, we will be able to return the normality of our lives."

While there are fears of nuclear war among some in the South, a much more common worry is that some sort of clash along the border, where millions of troops and pieces of artillery face each other, could spiral out of control and restart the Korean War, which still officially continues because it was ended in 1953 by a cease-fire, not a peace treaty.

The two Koreas have had multiple bloody naval clashes along their disputed sea border. In 2010, a torpedo attack blamed on the North killed 46 South Korean sailors, followed several months later by a North Korean artillery attack that killed four South Koreans, including two civilians, and prompted a South Korean return strike.

South Koreans are famous for their ability to keep calm and carry on in the face of North Korean belligerence, but it would be a mistake to think there isn't concern - and a clear recognition of the potential danger - when animosity rises.

About 25 million people live in the greater Seoul area, which is in easy artillery range of the nearby border. And while South Koreans mostly ignore North Korea's vows to turn Seoul into a "sea of fire," they also know that it could technically be done, more or less; the first time Pyongyang made that now-common threat, in 1994, it caused panic in Seoul.

Many here will wisely reserve judgment on whether the South Korean president's lofty claim to have removed "every threat" of war is correct - recent Korean history is littered with grand-sounding rhetoric that dissolved in the winds of the rivals' enmity - but if Moon and Kim can pull off what they've agreed to this week, there could be an outbreak of that rarest of feelings when it comes to inter-Korean ties: optimism.

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Foster Klug, the AP bureau chief in South Korea, has been covering the Koreas since 2005. Follow him at www.twitter.com/apklug
COPENHAGEN, Denmark (AP) - The man at the center of a sex-abuse and financial crimes scandal that is tarnishing the academy that awards the Nobel Prize in Literature went on trial in Sweden Wednesday.

Jean-Claude Arnault, a major cultural figure in the country, faces two counts of rape of a woman in 2011 before the Stockholm District Court.

The French citizen is married to poet and member of the Swedish Academy Katarina Frostenson. He has denied the rapes and other sex abuse allegations.

Jean-Claude Arnault arrives at the district court for the start of court proceedings in Stockholm, Wednesday, Sept. 19, 2018. The Stockholm District Court says Arnault, a major cultural figure in Sweden, faces two counts of rape of a woman in 2011. The French citizen is married to poet and member of the Swedish Academy Katarina Frostenson. He has denied the rapes and other sex abuse allegations. (Fredrik Sandberg/TT News Agency via AP)

The proceedings, which will include testimonies by the alleged victim and seven witnesses, are being held behind closed doors. Closing remarks are expected Sept. 24. It was not clear when a verdict would be announced.

Arnault, wearing a white scarf and a dark coat, made his way through dozens of reporters seeking comments at the court house. He declined to answer questions and simply asked them to "leave me alone."

Bjorn Hurtig, his lawyer, has said his client is the victim of "a witch hunt" that "may only have the purpose of harming" Arnault.

The woman's lawyer, Elisabeth Massi Fritz, told Swedish news agency TT that one of the difficulties with the trial was that the crimes had been committed seven years ago.

"She carries on traumatic experiences, but she will get through this in a very good way," Massi Fritz said.

The scandal led to seven academy members either being forced to leave or quitting. Frostenson quit in April at the same time as former permanent secretary Sara Danius.

In May, the academy announced that no prize will be awarded this year.

Arnault also has been suspected of violating century-old Nobel rules by leaking names of winners of the prestigious award - allegedly seven times, starting in 1996. It was not clear to whom the names were allegedly disclosed.

All the allegations have shredded the body's credibility, called into question its judgment and kicked off a debate over how to face up to its flaws. It has divided the group's 18 members - who are appointed for life - into hostile camps and prompted seven members of the prestigious institution to leave or disassociate themselves from it.

Many in the Scandinavian nation, known for promoting gender equality, have expressed dismay over the scandal, which has exposed bitter divisions within the academy and given rise to accusations of patriarchal leanings among some members.

It began in when 18 women came forward in a Swedish newspaper with accusations against Arnault.

In April, the Swedish Academy said an internal investigation into sexual misconduct allegations found that "unacceptable behavior in the form of unwanted intimacy" has taken place within the ranks of the prestigious institution.

The internal probe eventually led to a police investigation.

Jean-Claude Arnault arrives at the district court for the start of court proceedings in Stockholm, Wednesday, Sept. 19, 2018. The Stockholm District Court says Arnault, a major cultural figure in Sweden, faces two counts of rape of a woman in 2011. The French citizen is married to poet and member of the Swedish Academy Katarina Frostenson. He has denied the rapes and other sex abuse allegations. (Fredrik Sandberg/TT News Agency via AP)
LONDON (AP) - British police are investigating a possible hate crime after a car hit pedestrians near a Muslim community center, injuring three people.

Police were called early Wednesday morning after a confrontation developed between four people in a car and a large group of people visiting a Muslim community center and mosque in the Cricklewood area of northwest London.

Officials said some anti-Muslim comments were made and the car reportedly sustained minor damage from some of the people from the center. It then sped off, mounting the pavement twice, and hitting three people without stopping.

Women and children with heightened security outside The Hussaini Association in the Cricklewood area of London, where two people were injured after a car hit pedestrians leaving the annual Al Hussaini Majlis shortly after midnight Wednesday Sept. 19, 2018. Heightened security arrangements were made in response to an incident when a car hit pedestrians in the early hours of Wednesday. (John Stillwell/PA via AP)

Police said the injuries are not life threatening although two people needed hospital treatment. The case is not being treated as related to terrorism.

"It is being dealt with as an Islamophobic hate crime and it is being dealt with as a racist hate crime," Simon Rose, the metropolitan police chief superintendent, said.

The Hussaini Association, which had organized a lecture at the mosque, called the collision "a suspected premeditated Islamophobic attack."

In a statement, the group said the car "swerved into innocent bystanders" and the occupants were heard shouting anti-Islamic taunts just before the attack.

Police are searching for the car and its occupants, reported as three men and a woman.

"This incident is not being treated as terror-related but the hate crime aspect of the collision is being looked at by detectives as an aggravating factor," police said in a statement.
BEIJING (AP) - China has reached out to the U.S. over reports that the Department of Justice has ordered two top Chinese state-run news outlets to register as foreign agents, a spokesman said Wednesday, adding that Beijing opposed "politicizing" the role of the media.

Foreign Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang said that Beijing had "contacted and communicated" with the U.S. side over the issue, but gave no details.

"Media serve as an important bridge and link to help the people from different countries to better understand and communicate with each other," Geng told reporters at a daily briefing. "We should provide convenience for media's normal works instead of posing obstacles, still less politicizing their role."

FILE - In this Feb. 19, 2016, file photo released by China's Xinhua News Agency, Chinese President Xi Jinping, right, shakes hands with staff members at the control room of China Central Television (CCTV) in Beijing. China said Wednesday, Sept. 19, 2018, that it has reached out to the U.S. over reports that the Department of Justice has ordered Chinese state-run media outlets, Xinhua News Agency and CGTN, the international arm of state broadcaster CCTV, to register with the government as foreign agents. (Ma Zhancheng/Xinhua via AP, File)

The Wall Street Journal said Tuesday that the Xinhua News Agency and CGTN, the international arm of state broadcaster CCTV, had been told in recent weeks to register as foreign agents amid growing scrutiny of efforts by overseas media organizations to influence U.S. public opinion. The demand was also reported by Bloomberg News.

Registering with the Foreign Agents Registration Act, or FARA, would put Xinhua and CGTN in the same legal category as lobbyists working for overseas entities and could cause them to lose their congressional press credentials, as happened to the U.S. affiliate of Russia's state-run RT television network, the Journal reported.

The U.S. broadcaster for Russia's government-controlled Sputnik Radio also registered under FARA. Both Russian outlets had been accused by U.S. intelligence of being part of a Moscow-led effort to interfere in the 2016 presidential election.

Following that, in January a letter from a bipartisan group of senators including Marco Rubio and Patrick Leahy called on the Justice Department to provide information on state-run Chinese media operating in the U.S., including Xinhua, which is directly under the control of the State Council, China's Cabinet, and exists to produce news reports, distribute propaganda and collect intelligence.

The letter cited a report from the National Endowment for Democracy, saying both China and Russia exploit a "glaring asymmetry" by raising "barriers to external political and cultural influence at home while simultaneously taking advantage of the openness of democratic systems abroad."

"A sensible step for the United States government to take is appropriately enforcing existing laws, such as FARA, designed to protect against just such concerns," the letter said.

Chinese media is almost entirely state-run and heavily censored, while the country maintains strict limits on the presence and ability of foreign outlets to report and travel in the country.

Another state outlet, China Daily, has registered under FARA through its U.S. distribution company. The newspaper has been aggressively seeking to boost its presence in the U.S. through newsstand sales and inserts in the Washington Post and other American newspapers. CGTN and other Chinese news organizations have also been rapidly expanding their foreign presences.

Spokesmen for Xinhua and CGTN could not immediately be contacted for comment.
DAYTON, Ohio (AP) - A debut novel about a displaced Palestinian family and a book of essays exploring race and identity during Barack Obama's presidency have been named the winners of the annual Dayton Literary Peace Prize.

The judges named Hala Alyan's "Salt Houses" and Ta-Nehisi (tah neh-HAH'-see) Coates' "We Were Eight Years in Power" as its 2018 winners. The Dayton Daily News reports the award offers $10,000 in cash to one fiction and one nonfiction author whose works advance "peace as a solution to conflict."

Books qualifying for the awards had to be published or translated into English in 2017 and must address peace.

FILE - In this May 22, 2018 file photo, author Ta-Nehisi Coates attends the The Gordon Parks Foundation Annual Awards Gala in New York. Coates' "We Were Eight Years in Power" and Hala Alyan's "Salt Houses" been named the winners of the annual Dayton Literary Peace Prize. (Photo by Andy Kropa/Invision/AP, File)

The novel "Pachinko," by Min Jin Lee, and the memoir "Reading With Patrick," by Michelle Kuo, were runners-up in the fiction and nonfiction categories, respectively.
CAIRO (AP) - The U.N. food agency said Wednesday time was running out for aid groups working in Yemen to prevent a "devastating" famine in the war-torn country.

World Food Program said new entry points were urgently needed to bring in humanitarian food aid and commercial imports in and to address what it called a "growing hunger crisis" across the impoverished Arab nation.

Yemen's civil war has wrecked the country's already fragile ability to feed its population of 29 million people.

FILE - In this Aug. 25, 2018 file image made from video, a severely malnourished girl is weighed at the Aslam Health Center in Hajjah, Yemen. The U.N. food agency said Wednesday, Sept. 19, 2018, that time is running out for aid groups operating in Yemen to prevent a devastating famine in the war-torn country. The World Food Program said what's urgently needed to prevent famine is new entry points for humanitarian and commercial food imports to address what it calls a "growing hunger strike" across the impoverished Arab nation. (AP Photo/Hammadi Issa, File)

U.N. figures show the number of Yemenis who face starvation without aid has risen to 8.4 million. That number is likely to soon jump by another 3.5 million because of the national currency's falling value.

The war pits Shiite rebels known as Houthis, who hold the north of the country, against a Saudi-led coalition fighting on the side of Yemen's internationally recognized government. The coalition's main tactic has been to bomb the Iran-backed rebels into submission with an air campaign in support of the government forces.

In addition, relief workers in Yemen are concerned over an ongoing assault by the Saudi-led coalition forces trying to take the rebel-held Red Sea port city of Hodeida. Nearly 80 percent of Yemen's imports come through this port, including much of the humanitarian aid.

Save The Children said this week the lifeline from Hodeida could be damaged or temporarily closed by renewed fighting, reducing the supply of available food and fuel and further driving up prices.

The international charity also raised by 1 million the number of Yemeni children at risk of famine, bringing the number to 5.2 million. "

Already, more than two-thirds of Yemen's population doesn't know where their next meal is coming from, it added.
BRUSSELS (AP) - The European Union has ruled that Luxembourg did not give the U.S. fast food giant McDonald's a special sweet tax deal and that the non-taxation of some of its profits did not amount to illegal state aid.

The EU Commission ended a probe that started in 2015 by saying on Wednesday that advantages granted to McDonald's were the result of differences between Luxembourg and U.S. tax laws, and EU Commissioner Margrethe Vestager said "Luxembourg did not break EU state aid rules."

The outcome stands in stark contrast to similar cases between the EU and other U.S. giants since the EU ruled two years ago that Apple was getting preferential treatment from the Irish government and forced it to pay 13 billion euros ($15 billion) in back taxes.

The EU handed similar tax rulings to several other companies, though the amount of back tax was smaller. Last year, the EU said Amazon had to repay $295 million in back tax after it allegedly had struck a special tax deal with Luxembourg.

The EU wanted to see whether the McDonald's case was a similar example where too few taxes were paid overall and where other companies unfairly did not get the same treatment as big multinationals.

The EU said that from 2009 to 2015, McDonald's Europe Franchising paid no corporate tax in Luxembourg despite large profits. It said the profits were more than 250 million euros ($265 million) in 2013 alone.

Vestager said that even though Luxembourg did not break state aid rules, a broader view needed to be taken.

"Of course, the fact remains that McDonald's did not pay any taxes on these profits - and this is not how it should be from a tax fairness point of view," Vestager said.

The Luxembourg government said that even though it was cleared of wrongdoing in this case, it was updating its tax laws because it realized they no longer represented the spirit of the times when there should be more accountability of multinationals.
MOSCOW (AP) - Election officials have moved closer to canceling the results of Sunday's gubernatorial elections in Russia's Far East, bending to the pressure of accusations of blatant vote rigging.

The Central Election Commission voted on Wednesday to recommend to the local election authorities in the Primorye region that they should nullify the results due to numerous violations.

Communist candidate Andrei Ishchenko had a comfortable with 95 percent of the ballots counted before the final results showed an extraordinary surge in votes for the pro-Kremlin candidate. Ishchenko called his supporters onto the streets and said his team had evidence that the results had been tampered with.

Andrei Ishchenko, communist candidate of the governor election in Primorye region, centre, attends a protest rally with his supporters in Vladivostok, Russia's Far East, Monday, Sept. 17, 2018. Ishchenko said on Monday he is starting a hunger strike over alleged irregularities in a gubernatorial race. (AP Photo/Alexander Khitrov)

The move is the first time in many years that officials have paid heed to widespread reports of vote rigging.

People gather for a protest rally at the Primorye region administration's building after the governor election in the Primorye region in Vladivostok, Russia's Far East, Monday, Sept. 17, 2018. Communist candidate Andrei Ishchenko, in Russia's Far East said on Monday he is starting a hunger strike over alleged irregularities in a gubernatorial race. (AP Photo/Alexander Khitrov)

Andrei Ishchenko, communist candidate of governor election in Primorye region, center, speaks with his supporters in Vladivostok, Russia's Far East, Monday, Sept. 17, 2018. Andrei Ishchenko said on Monday he is starting a hunger strike over alleged irregularities in a gubernatorial race. (AP Photo/Alexander Khitrov)

People gather for a protest rally at the Primorye region administration's building after the governor election in the Primorye region in Vladivostok, Russia's Far East, Monday, Sept. 17, 2018. Communist candidate Andrei Ishchenko, in Russia's Far East said on Monday he is starting a hunger strike over alleged irregularities in a gubernatorial race. (AP Photo/Alexander Khitrov)
PINHAO, Portugal (AP) - The scorching late summer sun of northern Portugal is ripening the black, super-sweet grapes that will go to make what European Union rules say is the only wine in the world that can be called port.

Winemaking has for centuries been a way of life for many families here in the picturesque valley of the River Douro. It's a tradition the EU regulations are designed to protect.

"If it wasn't for wine, the Douro region would be on its knees," says 59-year-old Jose Pereira, a foreman for the Rozes port wine producer, as behind him two dozen local people pick the first grapes of the annual harvest. "Wine is our wealth."

In this photo taken Sept. 12, 2018, workers pick grapes on the slopes above the Tavora river, in the background, where it meets the Douro river near Tabuaco, northern Portugal. The scorching late summer sun of northern Portugal is ripening the black, super-sweet grapes that will go to make what European Union rules say is the only wine in the world that can be called port. But port wine's second-largest export market is the United Kingdom, and the impending British exit from the EU is throwing port's almost 50 million euros' ($58 million) worth of annual business there into doubt. (AP Photo/Armando Franca)

For these workers and the local port wine producers, just like the makers of French Champagne, Greek feta cheese or Italy's Parma ham, the EU's name-protection laws help ensure their livelihood by shielding them from industrial-scale, lower-cost copycats.

But port wine's second-largest export market is the United Kingdom, and the impending British exit from the EU is throwing port's almost 50 million euros' ($58 million) worth of annual business there into doubt.

That's because London conspicuously isn't saying whether after leaving the EU next year it will keep the bloc's name protection rules. It could, for example, choose to let in rival port producers from the British Commonwealth, such as South Africa and Australia, as it casts around for post-Brexit trade deals.

Authorities in the United States have long fought against the EU's Geographical Identification laws, saying they amount to trade barriers - an argument that is not lost on the British government as it eyes closer business ties with Washington.

Product name protection is not a minor issue.

Last week, the EU's Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier singled it out as one of the three main outstanding questions, alongside a possible future border in Ireland and working out the post-Brexit EU-U.K. relationship. And it is likely to come up at an EU summit in Austria this week where leaders will assess the state of the Brexit talks.

Enrico Bonadio, senior lecturer in intellectual property law at City, University of London, says Geographical Identification laws are "a very sensitive issue which could jeopardize the whole Brexit negotiations."

He believes the British government, aware that the U.K. is a major market for the more than 3,000 EU-protected items, is using the issue as "a bargaining chip" to win advantages in other areas of the negotiations.

EU protected names are prized by businesses. The labelling comes with strict regulations on production and is regarded as a quality guarantee that helps branding and sales.

The EU says the scheme seeks to protect local economies and cultures against misuse of names or imitations.

The policy has been a flashpoint before, being a factor in holding up a trade deal between the EU and the United States, where Geographical Identification rules fall under trademark law and where feta and parmesan, for example, are considered generic names.

The Office of the United States Trade Representative, in a report this year, described the EU rules as "harmful" for free trade and as "barriers on market access for American-made goods and services."

The U.S. Dairy Export Council, which is pressing Britain to drop the EU rules, says it is not wholly against protecting geographical indications.

"What we take issue with," says Shawna Morris, its vice president for trade policy, "is the EU's aggressive approach to GIs, in which it uses GIs as a way to monopolize certain markets of commonly produced food categories, confiscating generic terms like parmesan and feta, even though such terms entered into generic usage generations ago."

The nub of this argument is that while it is acceptable for Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese to come only from the region around the Italian city of Parma, not all parmesan cheese should be required to come from Italy.

Portugal's port wine industry offers a look into how a protected name earns its special status and what's at stake for families and businesses in the Brexit talks.

The Douro Valley has an abundance of arresting landscapes along an almost 200-kilometer (120-mile) stretch, reaching from the Atlantic almost into Spain. The spectacular scenery places it on a par with other outstanding European wine regions, such as the Rhine Valley in Germany or France's Loire.

The valley's steep and stony slopes are scored with contours of green vines that ripple back from the river in corrugated lines. Terraces of ancient walls, hand-built in local brown slate, hold the soil in place. The quiet landscape is punctuated with ridgetop clusters of whitewashed houses and port wine estates called 'quintas.'

Several factors, producers say, make this a singular place: it has weather extremes, with summer heat well above 30 degrees Celsius (86 Fahrenheit) and winter bringing snow and ice; grape varieties such as Touriga nacional, Tinta roriz and Barroca are unique to Portugal; the poor, bone-dry soil means fewer grapes but a high concentration of sugar; and the slopes, up to 600 meters (2,000 feet) high, offer varying angles of exposure to the sun.

Trucks and tractors have replaced mules and oxen, but plenty has remained unchanged, including grape-treading in a knee-high granite tank called a 'lagar.'

Port is the queen of Portuguese wines. A bottle of 19th-century vintage port, which is the top of the range, can sell for over 3,000 euros ($3,500) at auction.

It is a fortified wine, made by adding grape spirit to halt the fermentation and keep the grapes' natural sweetness. It allows winemakers to produce deep, textured wines admired around the world.

It is an ironic twist of Brexit that Britishness runs through the history of Portugal's port wine.

The port business was largely created by, and flourished because of, the British. The port companies, or 'houses,' carry names like Taylor's, Croft's, Churchill's, Warre's, Sandeman, and Symington.

Taylor's, for example, was established in the Douro Valley in 1744 by Bartholomew Bearsley. He was succeeded by a string of British men, leading to today's managing director, Adrian Bridge.

Bridge's office is on the coast by the city of Porto, where the port companies have traditionally brought their wines for aging and shipping.

Standing amid hundreds of centuries-old barrels piled in a musky cellar with granite walls, Bridge notes that Brexit is already hurting business as the British pound's drop in value against the euro has pushed up port's price on U.K. shelves.

Taylor's sells port to 105 countries and there are plans to expand in other markets, "but Britain is far and away the most important."

He adds, with typical British understatement, that he expects Brexit to "require some degree of readjustment."

In this photo taken Sept. 12, 2018, a truck carrying crates with grapes recently picked, at the Quinta da Gricha vineyard in the Douro river valley near Ervedosa do Douro, northern Portugal. The scorching late summer sun of northern Portugal is ripening the black, super-sweet grapes that will go to make what European Union rules say is the only wine in the world that can be called port. But port wine's second-largest export market is the United Kingdom, and the impending British exit from the EU is throwing port's almost 50 million euros' ($58 million) worth of annual business there into doubt. (AP Photo/Armando Franca)

In this photo taken Sept. 12, 2018, a worker sorts grapes picked at the Quinta da Gricha vineyard in the Douro river valley near Ervedosa do Douro, northern Portugal. The scorching late summer sun of northern Portugal is ripening the black, super-sweet grapes that will go to make what European Union rules say is the only wine in the world that can be called port. But port wine's second-largest export market is the United Kingdom, and the impending British exit from the EU is throwing port's almost 50 million euros' ($58 million) worth of annual business there into doubt. (AP Photo/Armando Franca)

In this photo taken Sept. 12, 2018, a worker lifts a bucket full of grapes picked on the slopes above the Tavora river where it meets the Douro river near Tabuaco, northern Portugal. The scorching late summer sun of northern Portugal is ripening the black, super-sweet grapes that will go to make what European Union rules say is the only wine in the world that can be called port. But port wine's second-largest export market is the United Kingdom, and the impending British exit from the EU is throwing port's almost 50 million euros' ($58 million) worth of annual business there into doubt. (AP Photo/Armando Franca)

In this photo taken Sept. 12, 2018, a worker spreads grapes in a granite stone tank for treading at the Quinta da Gricha vineyard in the Douro river valley near Ervedosa do Douro, northern Portugal. The scorching late summer sun of northern Portugal is ripening the black, super-sweet grapes that will go to make what European Union rules say is the only wine in the world that can be called port. But port wine's second-largest export market is the United Kingdom, and the impending British exit from the EU is throwing port's almost 50 million euros' ($58 million) worth of annual business there into doubt. (AP Photo/Armando Franca)

In this photo taken Sept. 11, 2018, Adrian Bridge, Managing Director of Taylor's port wine company, opens a roof window while posing for pictures amid hundreds of centuries-old barrels piled in rows in a cellar in Vila Nova de Gaia, northern Portugal. The scorching late summer sun of northern Portugal is ripening the black, super-sweet grapes that will go to make what European Union rules say is the only wine in the world that can be called port. But port wine's second-largest export market is the United Kingdom, and the impending British exit from the EU is throwing port's almost 50 million euros' ($58 million) worth of annual business there into doubt. (AP Photo/Armando Franca)

In this photo taken Sept. 11, 2018, Britain's Queen Elizabeth II's Royal Warrant crest is displayed by the entrance to the cellars of Taylor's port wine company in Vila Nova de Gaia, northern Portugal. The scorching late summer sun of northern Portugal is ripening the black, super-sweet grapes that will go to make what European Union rules say is the only wine in the world that can be called port. But port wine's second-largest export market is the United Kingdom, and the impending British exit from the EU is throwing port's almost 50 million euros' ($58 million) worth of annual business there into doubt. (AP Photo/Armando Franca)

In this photo taken Sept. 12, 2018, workers sort grapes picked at the Quinta da Gricha vineyard in the Douro river valley near Ervedosa do Douro, northern Portugal. The scorching late summer sun of northern Portugal is ripening the black, super-sweet grapes that will go to make what European Union rules say is the only wine in the world that can be called port. But port wine's second-largest export market is the United Kingdom, and the impending British exit from the EU is throwing port's almost 50 million euros' ($58 million) worth of annual business there into doubt. (AP Photo/Armando Franca)
Your daily look at late-breaking news, upcoming events and the stories that will be talked about today:

1. WHAT KAVANAUGH ACCUSER IS INSISTING

Christine Blasey Ford wants the FBI to investigate her decades-old allegation that she was sexually assaulted by the Supreme Court nominee before testifying on Capitol Hill.

South Korean President Moon Jae-in, left, talks with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un at Okryu-Gwan restaurant in Pyongyang, North Korea, Wednesday, Sept. 19, 2018. Moon and Kim announced a sweeping set of agreements after their second day of talks in Pyongyang on Wednesday that included a promise by Kim to permanently dismantle the North's main nuclear complex if the United States takes corresponding measures, the acceptance of international inspectors to monitor the closing of a key missile test site and launch pad and a vow to work together to host the Summer Olympics in 2032.(Pyongyang Press Corps Pool via AP)

2. KOREAS SUMMIT PRODUCES SWEEPING AGREEMENTS

Kim Jong Un promises to permanently dismantle North Korea's main nuclear complex if the U.S. takes corresponding measures.

3. 'A NIGHTMARE THAT JUST WON'T END'

Those are the words of North Carolina's governor, who is pleading with thousands of hurricane evacuees to be patient and not return home just yet.

4. FEELING YOUR PAIN

When Trump visits hurricane-flooded North Carolina, he'll be just the latest U.S. president to tread the tricky politics of national disasters.

5. ELIZABETH SMART REASSURED BY AUTHORITIES

Wanda Barzee, who helped kidnap Smart when she was 14 and stood by as she was sexually assaulted, will be closely watched when she's released from prison.

6. TAX LAW LIMIT ON DEDUCTIONS A CAMPAIGN ISSUE

Democrats are focusing on the potential for the new GOP tax law to hurt certain voters in high-tax states such as California, New Jersey and New York.

7. TRUMP: DECLASSIFIED RUSSIA PROBE PAPERS EXPOSE 'BAD THINGS'

Experts say the president's decision may expose sensitive sources and methods and brush up against privacy law protections.

8. CHINA'S PREMIER APPEALS FOR FREE TRADE

Li Keqiang is advocating more open markets and promising to improve conditions for foreign companies amid the escalating U.S.-Chinese tariff battle.

9. NOT-SO-NICE CANADIANS INVADING US WATERS

Experts say aggressive green crabs migrating from Nova Scotia are a threat to the coastal ecosystem.

10. CALIFORNIA CITY LATEST TO REDO 'SEXIST' SCHOOL DRESS CODE

A school district near San Francisco becomes the latest to adopt a dress code allowing midriff-baring shirts and short shorts that it says is less sexist.

Augustin Dieudomme looks out at the flooded entrance to his apartment complex near the Cape Fear River as it continues to rise in the aftermath of Hurricane Florence in Fayetteville, N.C., Tuesday, Sept. 18, 2018. (AP Photo/David Goldman)

FILE - This April 8, 2016, file photo, provided by Utah State Prison shows Wanda Barzee. Appearing in an interview Tuesday, Sept. 18, 2018, on "CBS This Morning," Elizabeth Smart said she believes Barzee remains a danger. Barzee is expected to be freed Wednesday after 15 years in custody because Utah authorities had miscalculated the amount of time the woman should serve. (Utah State Prison via AP, File)
BERLIN (AP) - A swimming instructor in southwestern Germany has gone on trial accused of sexually abusing 37 young girls.

The Baden-Baden regional court began hearing the case Wednesday and is expected to deliver a verdict at the end of October.

Prosecutors say the 34-year-old German filmed some of the estimated 200 crimes he committed from October 2015 until his arrest in September last year. Underwater footage was part of the evidence seized.

The man, who wasn't named for privacy reasons, is also accused of trying to silence his victims with death threats.

The youngest alleged victim was four years old.

Authorities were unable to identify three suspected victims.

The defendant denies the charges.

Prosecutors have applied for him to be remanded in detention even after he has served a possible prison sentence.
BERLIN (AP) - Police in Austria are on the lookout for a tall man who robbed a bank disguised with a latex mask, glasses, bright red lipstick and an Islamic-style headscarf.

Vienna police said Wednesday the suspect robbed a bank in Linz at the end of July, threatening staff with a pistol and making off on an electric kick scooter.

Police say the suspect had also tried to rob a bank in Vienna two weeks earlier wearing the same hijab-and-mask outfit, but fled without any money.

This picture provided by the Police in Vienna, Austria, Wednesday, Sept. 19, 2018 shows an unidentified man, dressed as a women, as he tries to rob a bank in Vienna. (Police Vienna via AP)

Vienna police say 2,000 euros ($2,340) are being offered for information that leads to the arrest of the man they describe as being slim, up to 180-190 centimeters (over 6 feet) tall and between 20 to 35 years old.
BANGKOK (AP) - Extreme efforts by two Thai female fans to meet their South Korean idol have raised concerns about security procedures at Thailand's main airport.

The two women's misadventures were exposed when one posted photos on Instagram detailing how they got into the secure arrival zone at Bangkok's Suvarnabhumi Airport last Friday to greet South Korean soap opera star Lee Jong-suk face-to-face.

The posts explained how they changed into clothing to make them look like customs officers and thanked two officials who apparently helped them.

The Customs Department said it is seeking trespassing charges against the two fans, and the airport's police chief, Col. Viroj Tudso, said Wednesday that summonses had been issued for two customs officers accused of helping them enter a restricted area. A third is also under investigation, as Customs authorities examine whether their personnel lent security passes and uniforms to the women to allow them to enter the baggage claim area.

The trespassing charge carries a maximum punishment of five years in prison and a 100,000 baht ($3,100) fine.

The Instagram posts showed the enthusiasm of the two fans for their idol.

"Thank you, my dear friend, Piano, for finding out Suk's flight. Sai, for getting an official to let me into the departure gate," the fan wrote. "I was also the first person to touch Suk's hand!" she said.

Lee, 29, came to Bangkok to attend a fan meeting session on Saturday, where tickets to guarantee a brief high-five with the celebrity, an act known as "Hi-Touch," cost as much as 5,500 baht ($170). South Korean pop culture has a large following in Thailand.

The matter drew wider public attention when a Twitter user, who is also a follower of the South Korean star, reposted the fan's accounts and alerted the Twitter account of Airports of Thailand, the parent company of Suvarnabhumi Airport.

"Thank you very much," Airports of Thailand said in a Twitter post replying to the reposted images. "We will coordinate (with authorities) to continue the process."

The newspaper Khao Sod's English-language website reported Wednesday that airport Vice President Kittipong Kittikachorn had acknowledged that "the security team did not strictly follow procedures that day, allowing outsiders to slip in." It cited him as saying that airport authorities approved spending up to 20 million baht ($617,000) to improve security.

"I'd like to ask all staff and related personnel to cooperate with the authentication process to keep up the security standards," he was quoted saying. "For the safety of everyone, please comply willingly. We don't want something like this to happen again."
SRINAGAR, India (AP) - Police in Indian-controlled Kashmir fired tear gas and used batons on Wednesday to break up religious processions marking the Muslim month of Muharram.

Authorities imposed a curfew in Lalchowk, the commercial hub of disputed Kashmir's main city of Srinagar, fearing that the religious processions could morph into anti-India protests.

Clashes erupted when police attempted to stop groups of Muslims who were trying to break the curfew and hold processions at several places in the city.

Kashmiri Shiite Muslims shout slogans amid tear smoke as they clash with Indian policemen during a Muharram procession in Srinagar, Indian controlled Kashmir, Wednesday, Sept. 19, 2018. Police and paramilitary soldiers on Wednesday used batons and fired tear gas to disperse hundreds of Muslims participating in religious processions in the Indian portion of Kashmir. Authorities had imposed restrictions in parts of Srinagar, the region's main city, to prevent gatherings marking Muharram from developing into anti-India protests. (AP Photo/Mukhtar Khan)

Muharram, one of the most important holy days for Shiite Muslims, marks the death of Prophet Muhammad's grandson, Imam Hussein, in the battle of Karbala on Ashura.

Police detained over a hundred mourners, who were expected to be released later in the day.

Indian authorities "provide state facilities and protection to facilitate the annual Hindu pilgrimage in Kashmir but ban our traditional religious processions," said Hakim Adil, a participant in Wednesday's processions.

Officials say the processions are only banned in Srinagar's main commercial hub to avoid a "law and order situation," a euphemism for anti-India protests.

Residents of Indian-controlled Kashmir have often defied bans on large public gatherings since the outbreak of an armed insurgency in 1989 demanding the Himalayan region's independence from India, or its merger with neighboring Pakistan.

Nuclear-armed India and Pakistan each administer part of Kashmir, but both claim it in its entirety. Most Kashmiris support the rebel cause.

Nearly 70,000 people have been killed in the uprising and the ensuing Indian military crackdown.

Indian policemen charge at Kashmiri Shiite Muslims participating in a religious procession in central Srinagar, Indian controlled Kashmir, Wednesday, Sept. 19, 2018. Police in Indian portion of Kashmir detained hundreds of mourners as they defied restrictions imposed by authorities, fearing religious processions marking the Muslim month of Muharram would turn into anti-India protests. (AP Photo/Dar Yasin)

Kashmiri Shiite Muslim women, rush to rescue a Shiite youth being detained by a policeman during a Muharram procession in Srinagar, Indian controlled Kashmir, Wednesday, Sept. 19, 2018. Police and paramilitary soldiers on Wednesday used batons and fired tear gas to disperse hundreds of Muslims participating in religious processions in the Indian portion of Kashmir. Authorities had imposed restrictions in parts of Srinagar, the region's main city, to prevent gatherings marking Muharram from developing into anti-India protests. (AP Photo/Mukhtar Khan)

Kashmiri Shiite Muslims clash with Indian policemen during a Muharram procession in Srinagar, Indian controlled Kashmir, Wednesday, Sept. 19, 2018. Police and paramilitary soldiers on Wednesday used batons and fired tear gas to disperse hundreds of Muslims participating in religious processions in the Indian portion of Kashmir. Authorities had imposed restrictions in parts of Srinagar, the region's main city, to prevent gatherings marking Muharram from developing into anti-India protests. (AP Photo/Mukhtar Khan)

A Kashmiri Shiite Muslim kicks an exploded tear gas shell at Indian policemen as they clash during a Muharram procession in Srinagar, Indian controlled Kashmir, Wednesday, Sept. 19, 2018. Police and paramilitary soldiers on Wednesday used batons and fired tear gas to disperse hundreds of Muslims participating in religious processions in the Indian portion of Kashmir. Authorities had imposed restrictions in parts of Srinagar, the region's main city, to prevent gatherings marking Muharram from developing into anti-India protests. (AP Photo/Mukhtar Khan)

Indian policemen chase Kashmiri Shiite Muslims during a Muharram procession in Srinagar, Indian controlled Kashmir, Wednesday, Sept. 19, 2018. Police and paramilitary soldiers on Wednesday used batons and fired tear gas to disperse hundreds of Muslims participating in religious processions in the Indian portion of Kashmir. Authorities had imposed restrictions in parts of Srinagar, the region's main city, to prevent gatherings marking Muharram from developing into anti-India protests. (AP Photo/Mukhtar Khan)
LONDON (AP) - The Latest on Britain's looming exit from the European Union (all times local):

3:30 p.m.

A top European Union official says key parts of Britain's offer to conclude Brexit talks fall short of expectations and need to be improved, just six months before the country leaves the bloc.

EU chief Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier, background, is kissed by European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker before a meeting at the European Commission headquarters in Brussels, Wednesday, Sept. 19, 2018. British Prime Minister Theresa May urged EU leaders to compromise and back her Brexit blueprint Wednesday, ahead of a key meeting of the bloc's leaders in Salzburg, Austria. (AP Photo/Francisco Seco)

European Council President Donald Tusk said "the U.K.'s proposals will need to be reworked and further negotiated." He noted issues surrounding the Irish border and future economic cooperation.

The key stumbling block to a Brexit deal is an agreement that would keep goods, services and people flowing between EU member Ireland and Northern Ireland in the U.K.

Speaking before chairing a summit of EU leaders in the Austrian city of Salzburg, Tusk warned that time is running out to conclude a deal.

Britain leaves in late March but both sides are keen to seal an agreement in coming weeks to leave relevant parliaments enough time to ratify it.

___

10:30 a.m.

British Prime Minister Theresa May urged EU leaders to compromise and back her Brexit blueprint Wednesday, ahead of a key meeting of the bloc's leaders in Salzburg, Austria.

Writing in German newspaper Die Welt, May said Britain "has evolved its position" and argued that "the EU will need to do the same."

With six months to go until Britain leaves the EU in March, major differences remain between the two sides. But May said a divorce deal is within grasp if both sides show "good will and determination."

May argues that the U.K. and the EU face a choice between her proposal - which would keep Britain aligned to the EU rulebook in return for seamless trade in goods - and an economically disruptive Brexit in which Britain crashes out of the bloc without a deal.

Britain's Prime Minister Theresa May waits to greet her Maltese counterpart Joseph Muscat to 10 Downing Street in London ahead of talks, Monday Sept. 17, 2018. (Dominic Lipinski/PA via AP)
GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip (AP) - Palestinians protested Wednesday at a new location along the perimeter fence between Israel and Gaza as Hamas intensified demonstrations at the border after Egyptian-led cease-fire talks stalled.

The militant Hamas group was hoping its indirect talks with Israel would result in the lifting of a crippling blockade that Israel and Egypt placed on Gaza when it took over the territory in 2007 from the Palestinian Authority, but it accused the West Bank-based PA of thwarting the negotiations.

For months, the marches were limited to Fridays but Wednesday's protest is the third this week, with new grounds including Gaza's northwestern tip at the Mediterranean where land and sea boundaries converge. On Tuesday, Palestinian protested outside Erez, the only crossing point for people into Israel or the West Bank.

Mourners chant Islamic slogans while carrying the body of Ahamd Omar, 20, during his funeral in the Shati refugee camp, Wednesday, Sept. 19, 2018. Omar was killed Tuesday during a protest at the entrance of Erez border crossing between Gaza and Israel. (AP Photo/Adel Hana)

"This thunderous march will not stop until the ordeal is over. This is our resolution," Hamas chief Ismail Haniyeh said during the funeral of a Palestinian killed a day earlier at a protest.

For Hamas, giving new momentum to the protests aims at building more pressure on Israel.

"Creating new ways and tactics and diversifying the marches is meant to achieve the coveted goal of ... the lifting of the siege," Hamas spokesman Hazem Qassem said.

The protests have persisted since late March, driven in large part by the desperation of living under the blockade.

Hamas was close to reaching a deal and the mediation efforts reached their peak in August, but intervention by President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority resulted in "confusing and slowing" the discussions, Qassem said.

With limited options, Hamas resorted to escalating the protests in response to "its feeling that it was let down," said independent Gaza analyst Akram Attallah.

Hamas expects the persistence of the protests will become "annoying to Israel and invite a renewal of mediation diplomacy," he said.

Israeli gunfire has killed 133 people who were either present or participating in the demonstrations, including three paramedics and two journalists. In July, an Israeli soldier was killed by a Palestinian sniper from Gaza.

At the protests, Palestinians burn tires, hurl rocks and sometimes firebombs at Israeli forces and snipers perched atop earthen mounds behind the boundary fence. For some time, protest activists sent incendiary kites and balloons across the fence to set fire to Israeli farmland.

Relatives wait for the body of Ahamd Omar, 20, at the family's house during his funeral in the Shati refugee camp, Wednesday, Sept. 19, 2018. Omar was killed Tuesday during a protest at the entrance of the Erez border crossing between Gaza and Israel. (AP Photo/Adel Hana)

Relatives wait for the body of Ahamd Omar, 20, at the family's house during his funeral in the Shati refugee camp, Wednesday, Sept. 19, 2018. Omar was killed Tuesday during a protest at the entrance of the Erez border crossing between Gaza and Israel. (AP Photo/Adel Hana)

Mourners carry the body of Ahamd Omar, 20, into the family's house during his funeral in the Shati refugee camp, Wednesday, Sept. 19, 2018. Omar was killed Tuesday during a protest at the entrance of the Erez border crossing between Gaza and Israel. (AP Photo/Adel Hana)

Protesters burn tires during a protest at the entrance of Erez border crossing between Gaza and Israel, in the northern Gaza Strip, Tuesday, Sept. 18, 2018. Gaza's Health Ministry says two Palestinians were killed by Israeli fire at a protest near a crossing point between the enclave and Israel. (AP Photo/Adel Hana)
WASHINGTON (AP) - Global poverty has fallen to a record low.

The World Bank said Wednesday that 10 percent of the world's population lived on less than $1.90 a day in 2015 - the last year for which numbers were available - down from 11.2 percent in 2013. That means 735.9 million people lived below the poverty threshold in 2015, down by 68.3 million from 804.2 million two years earlier.

Still, the bank warned that the pace of poverty reduction has slowed, jeopardizing its goal of reducing the poverty rate to 3 percent by 2030.

FILE- This Sept. 10, 2017, file photo shows a night view of the Mangueira slum, seen from a squatter building that used to house the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics IGBE) in the Mangueira slum of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Global poverty has fallen to a record low. The World Bank says 10 percent of the world's population lived on less than $1.90 a day in 2015, down from 11.2 percent in 2013. That means 735.9 million people lived below the poverty threshold in 2015, down from 804.2 million. (AP Photo/Felipe Dana, File)

Poverty dropped everywhere but the Middle East and North Africa, where conflicts in Syria and Yemen ratcheted the poverty rate to 5 percent in 2015 from 2.6 percent in 2013, raising the number of impoverished to 18.6 million from 9.5 million.

The poverty rate fell to 41.1 percent from 42.5 percent in Sub-Saharan Africa, to 12.4 percent from 16.2 percent in South Asia, to 4.1 percent from 4.6 percent in Latin America and the Caribbean, to 2.3 percent from 3.6 percent in East Asia and the Pacific and to 1.5 percent from 1.6 percent in Europe and Central Asia.

FILE- In this Nov. 21, 2017, file photo a girl returns from a designated area where neighbors use the bathroom outside, in the Cite Soleil slum of Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Global poverty has fallen to a record low. The World Bank says 10 percent of the world's population lived on less than $1.90 a day in 2015, down from 11.2 percent in 2013. That means 735.9 million people lived below the poverty threshold in 2015, down from 804.2 million. (AP Photo/Dieu Nalio Chery, File)
COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) - Reporters can view preliminary autopsy reports and photos in the still-unsolved slayings of eight Ohio family members in one of the state's most notorious crimes, the Ohio Supreme Court said Wednesday.

The court ruled unanimously in favor of the Cincinnati Enquirer, saying Ohio law allows reporters to view preliminary autopsy and investigative notes and findings, and photographs.

The law governing the viewing of the information is clear, the court said in overturning a lower-court decision.

FILE - In this May 3, 2016, file photo, mourners gather around caskets for six of the eight members of the Rhoden family found shot April 22, 2016, at four properties near Piketon, Ohio, during funeral services at Scioto Burial Park in McDermott, Ohio. The Ohio Supreme Court has sided with a newspaper seeking to view autopsy reports and photos in the still-unsolved slayings of the eight Rhoden family members. The court ruled unanimously Wednesday, Sept. 19, 2018, in favor of the Cincinnati Enquirer, saying Ohio law allows reporters to view preliminary autopsy and investigative notes and findings, and photographs. (AP Photo/John Minchillo, File)

If "a journalist submits a proper request to review preliminary autopsy and investigative notes and findings, suicide notes, or photographs of the decedent made by the coroner, the coroner 'shall' grant the request," the court said.

The still-unsolved case involves seven adults and a teenage boy from the Rhoden family who were found shot to death at four homes in Piketon in southern Ohio in April 2016.

The Attorney General's Office, which is investigating the killings, said it would make the reports and photos available for inspection Wednesday morning. Under Ohio law, reporters can only view the information and are prohibited even from taking notes.

Heavily redacted versions of the reports released in 2016 showed all but one of the victims were shot multiple times in the head. Toxicology results, which could include the use of drugs or alcohol, were blacked out for all the victims. Evidence of injuries beyond the mention of gunshot wounds was also blacked out for all the victims.

The Enquirer's lawyer said the court made the right decision.

"This is a case that is now over two years old, unsolved, and I think the investigators deserve to be scrutinized," said attorney Jack Greiner, an expert in public records law.

The high court previously ruled against releasing the autopsies as public records. Wednesday's decision was decided under a different law that specifically regulates inspecting the records.

The victims were Christopher Rhoden Sr., 40; his ex-wife, 37-year-old Dana Rhoden; their three children, 20-year-old Clarence "Frankie" Rhoden, 16-year-old Christopher Rhoden Jr. and 19-year-old Hanna Rhoden; Frankie Rhoden's fiancee, 20-year-old Hannah Gilley; and a cousin, 38-year-old Gary Rhoden. Three children were found unharmed.

The last victim to be discovered, 44-year-old Kenneth Rhoden, who was the brother of Christopher Rhoden Sr., died of a single gunshot.

Authorities suspect there were multiple attackers who were familiar with the victims' homes and the surrounding area, about 70 miles (113 kilometers) south of Columbus.

The office of Attorney General Mike DeWine has said Christopher Rhoden Sr. had "a large-scale marijuana growing operation," leading some to speculate the killings were drug-related.
LAKE MARY, Fla. (AP) - Three police officers who fatally shot a man who pointed a gun at them in a parking lot have been cleared of any wrongdoing.

A report by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement says officers Martin Neal, Robert Ritter and William Rodwick were acting in accordance with the law when they shot 34-year-old David Mickey Romansky III in Lake Mary on May 15.

The Orlando Sentinel reports a 911 caller told dispatchers that Romansky had brandished a gun at another motorist during a road rage incident that night. Officers tracked his car to a shopping center and he refused orders to get out.

The report says he pointed a gun at officers and fired. They fired more than 25 shots, hitting him 10 times.

Romansky was white, as are all three officers.
PARIS (AP) - A French court of appeals has upheld a ruling Wednesday that two directors of French celebrity magazine Closer should be fined a maximum 45,000 euros ($52,500) for breaching the privacy of Kate Middleton, when publishing topless photos of the Duchess of Cambridge sunbathing back in 2012.

The Versailles appeals court upheld the Sept. 2017 decision in Nanterre to hand the maximum possible fine under French law to Laurence Pieau, an editor of Closer's French edition, and Ernesto Mauri, chief executive of Mondadori, the media group that publishes the weekly.

The court also upheld fines for the two photographers who snapped the duchess of 10,000 euros each.

FILE - In this Friday, Sept. 14, 2012 file photo a stack of Closer magazines are displayed at the magazine's headquarter, in Montrouge, outside Paris. A French court of appeals has upheld a ruling that two directors of French celebrity magazine Closer should be fined a maximum 45,000 euros ($52,500) for breaching the privacy of Kate Middleton, when publishing topless photos of the Duchess of Cambridge back in 2012. (AP Photo/Thibault Camus, File)

Last September, the office of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge said they were pleased at the ruling as they "wished to make the point strongly that this kind of unjustified intrusion should not happen."

The timing of last year's ruling had particular resonance in Britain, as it was shortly after the 20th anniversary of the death of Prince William's mother, Princess Diana, who was being pursued by paparazzi when her car crashed in a tunnel in Paris.

The damages were short of the 1.5 million euros ($1.75 million) hoped for by the couple.
ISLAMABAD (AP) - The Latest on the release from prison of former Pakistan prime minister Nawaz Sharif, his daughter and son-in-law on bail after their sentences were suspended. (all times local):

7:20 p.m.

A party aide says Pakistan's former prime minister Nawaz Sharif, his daughter and son in-law have been released from a prison in the garrison city of Rawalpindi after a court suspended their prison sentences while they appeal.

Sen. Mushahidullah Khan said Sharif, Maryam Nawaz and Mohammad Safdar were released from Adiala prison Wednesday evening and were being taken to the airport amid tight security.

Khan said many party leaders and a large crowd of supporters gathered outside the prison to receive them. He said a special plane would fly them to the eastern city of Lahore.

In July 2017, the Pakistani Supreme Court disqualified Sharif from office for life over corruption allegations and later an anti-graft tribunal convicted him and two relatives of concealing assets abroad. Sharif faced two other cases before an anti-graft tribunal.

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3:10 p.m.

A Pakistani court has suspended the prison sentences of former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, his daughter and son-in-law, and set them free on bail pending their appeal hearings.

The Islamabad High Court made the decision on Wednesday on a corruption case handed down to the Sharifs by an anti-graft tribunal earlier this year.

The court also ordered Sharif, his daughter Maryam Nawaz and son-in-law Mohammad Safdar, be released once they each post a bond of half a million rupees, or about $4,000.

The three are serving 10-, seven- and one-year prison sentences, respectively.

Sharif was disqualified from office by the country's Supreme Court last year over corruption allegations. He faces several court cases at home.

The former prime minister was briefly released earlier this month for his wife's funeral.
WASHINGTON (AP) - President Donald Trump said Wednesday that he's not concerned about what his former campaign chairman is telling investigators in the Russia probe.

Trump told reporters at the White House that if Paul Manafort tells the truth to special counsel Robert Mueller's team then he doesn't see a problem. Trump also batted away a question about whether he was considering a pardon for Manafort.

"I don't want to talk about it now," the president said.

President Donald Trump talks to media before boarding Marine One on the South Lawn of the White House in Washington, Wednesday, Sept. 19, 2018, for the short trip to Andrews Air Force Base en route to Havelock, N.C. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)

Trump's comments come just days after Manafort ended his nearly yearlong fight against Mueller. Manafort pleaded guilty to two felony charges related to his unregistered Ukrainian lobbying and millions of dollars he laundered through offshore accounts. The plea headed off a second trial for Manafort less than a month after he was convicted on eight other counts of filing false tax returns, failing to report foreign bank accounts and bank fraud.

The plea deal provided Mueller with a key cooperator in Manafort, who led the Trump campaign for several crucial months and has extensive knowledge of powerful Russian and Ukrainian businessmen heavily involved in their country's politics.

Manafort will also be debriefed by investigators about his time on the campaign as Mueller continues to investigate Russian election interference and any possible coordination with Trump associates.

Those questions will almost certainly include Manafort's account of a June 2016 meeting at Trump Tower with a Russian lawyer that was attended by Donald Trump Jr. and Trump son-in-law, Jared Kushner. The meeting has drawn scrutiny because it was described to Trump Jr. in emails as part of a Russian government effort to help the campaign. Trump Jr. was told the lawyer had damaging information on Democrat Hillary Clinton.

Trump Jr. and the president have downplayed the meeting, saying it was a waste of time and didn't amount to anything. But other attendees of the meeting have been before a grand jury used by Mueller, and the special counsel has been scrutinizing a public statement the president was involved in drafting when The New York Times publicly revealed the meeting in July 2017.

That statement said the meeting primarily concerned a Russian adoption program and omitted any mention of Trump Jr. being promised information on Clinton.

On Wednesday, Trump said he's not worried about Manafort's cooperation.

"Paul Manafort was with me for a short period of time. He did a good job. I was, you know, very happy with the job he did," Trump said. "And I will tell you this: I believe that he will tell the truth and if he tells the truth, no problem."

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Follow Chad Day on Twitter: https://twitter.com/ChadSDay

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Associated Press writer Darlene Superville contributed.
PARIS (AP) - French President Emmanuel Macron has pledged to create a memorial museum to honor the victims of terrorism.

Macron, speaking Wednesday at a ceremony organized by victims' associations, said a committee will immediately start working on the project.

Macron also announced more financial aid to survivors and relatives of terror attacks, especially to allow them to pay for travel and legal expenses when attending a trial abroad.

French President Emmanuel Macron delivers a speech during a national ceremony to pay tribute to the victims of terrorism, at the Invalides in Paris, France, Wednesday, Sept. 19, 2018. French President Emmanuel Macron has pledged to create a Memorial Museum to honor the victims of terrorism. (Ludovic Marin/Pool Photo via AP)

Macron said a national day of commemoration will be formally designated to pay tribute to terrorism victims. The date has not been decided yet but a report requested by the government suggested March 11, which is the European Remembrance Day for Victims of Terrorism.

France has been the target of multiple deadly terrorist attacks in recent years.

French President Emmanuel Macron delivers a speech during a national ceremony to pay tribute to the victims of terrorism, at the Invalides in Paris, France, Wednesday, Sept. 19, 2018. French President Emmanuel Macron has pledged to create a Memorial Museum to honor the victims of terrorism. (Ludovic Marin/Pool Photo via AP)
NEW YORK (AP) - Jonas is back, if only briefly. Anna is here, in full diva mode. The seemingly unstoppable Placido marks his 50th anniversary. And the "Ring" contraption returns - maybe for the last time - with a promise of greater reliability and fewer "clunks and clicks."

These attractions and more are on tap as the Metropolitan Opera opens its 134th season on September 24 with a new production of Saint-Saens' "Samson et Dalila" starring Elina Garanca and Roberto Alagna. It winds up 212 performances later on May 11, with the final installment of Wagner's four-part "Der Ring des Nibelungen," starring Christine Goerke as Bruennhilde.

This will be the last season before the company launches Sunday matinee performances, a move aimed at boosting sagging box-office revenues.

This image released by the Metropolitan Opera shows tenor Roberto Alagna and mezzo-soprano Elina Garanca rehearsing a scene from Saint-Saens' "Samson et Dalila," which will open the Metropolitan Opera's new season on Sept. 24. (Ken Howard/Metropolitan Opera via AP)

Besides "Samson," there are new productions of Verdi's "La Traviata," Cilea's "Adriana Lecouvreur" and a recent work, Nico Muhly's "Marnie," adapted from the book that inspired the Alfred Hitchcock film. But many opera lovers are just as enthused about the wealth of intriguing revivals.

"It's one of the strongest seasons in years, featuring important, starry revivals of some of the operas I love best," said James Jorden, editor and publisher of the online opera magazine "parterre box." He cited in particular a revival of Debussy's "Pelleas et Melisande," conducted by the Met's new music director, Yannick Nezet-Seguin.

Other major revivals include Poulenc's "Dialogues des Carmelites," again conducted by Nezet-Seguin; Puccini's three one-acts, "Il Trittico," commemorating the 100th anniversary of its Met world premiere; and Verdi's "Otello," led by L.A. Philharmonic maestro Gustavo Dudamel in his Met debut.

A few of the highlights:

-The elusive Jonas Kaufmann, the most acclaimed tenor in the world today, jets in midway through the run of Puccini's "La Fanciulla del West" to sing four performances - including an HD broadcast - as Dick Johnson, the bandit with a heart of gold. Kaufmann has been absent from the Met since 2014.

-Anna Netrebko, the Russian soprano who has been a mainstay at the Met since her 2002 debut, has moved from light lyric roles into heavier repertory, scoring huge successes as Verdi's Lady Macbeth and Puccini's Tosca. Now she's taking on the touchstone of spinto soprano roles, Verdi's "Aida." The Met's general manager, Peter Gelb, heard her debut in the role in Salzburg, Austria, and said he was "not surprisingly blown away. ... In my opinion she's the best Aida since Leontyne Price." Netrebko will also headline the new "Lecouvreur," a verismo chestnut that's a favorite of prima donnas with a flair for melodrama.

-Placido Domingo, the 77-year-old tenor-turned-baritone, is, as Gelb noted, "somewhat obsessed with his various milestone achievements, as he deserves to be." Having just sung the 150th role of his career, in Salzburg, he celebrates his Met anniversary with a flurry of appearances: seven in Puccini's "Gianni Schicchi" and five in "La Traviata." He'll also conduct "Aida" three times and reign as guest of honor at a black-tie dinner dance on the Met stage (tickets start at $2,500).

-Finally, and most controversially, the $16 million, 45-ton "Ring" set conceived by Canadian director Robert Lepage, consisting of 24 giant aluminum planks arrayed on a central spine like a gigantic seesaw and supported by 26-foot-tall towers on either side of the stage. Through use of projections, the set created some spectacular visual effects, but it also was plagued by safety, reliability and noise issues from its first appearance in 2010.

The apparatus has now undergone a complete overhaul, much of it carried out over four months in an old train depot in Middletown, New York, under the guidance of Jeffrey Mace, the Met's director of production operations. Lepage himself is not returning for the revival.

Mace said the computer running the original set was "a stand-alone system that just controlled the machine" and a lot of the breakdowns stemmed from lack of integration with the Met's own computers. He said the systems are now linked, allowing operators to "diagnose and react much more quickly to bugs and problems."

As for noise, Mace identified two separate problems: first were the "clunks ... deep low-frequency sounds emitting from the towers" when "large steel elements were crashing into other large steel elements." Mace said his crews adjusted the connections between towers and planks to "eliminate as much freedom of motion as possible but not too much."

Then there were the "clicks," which Mace said came from a loosening of the nuts-and-bolts connections between sections of the seesaw itself. To keep these joints sufficiently tight, his engineers developed a "custom-made nut-tightening hydraulic wrench."

How successful has the effort been? "The clunks are gone," Mace said in an interview last month. "We're still working on the clicks."

Gelb estimated the cost of all this work at "several million dollars," though some of that was capital expenditure for technical improvements to be used in other productions.

Many question whether the effort was worth it. "I'm not sure there's a single person who is looking forward to seeing the Lepage production again," said musicologist Micaela Baranello. "It's the Met's white elephant."

Nevertheless, this season's revival has been selling well. And whatever the audience response, it may be the last opportunity to see the set in action.

"We'll see how it goes this time," Gelb said. "I think the jury is out as to whether this will ever play here again." He said Nezet-Seguin will surely want to put his imprint on his own production at some point: "Every music director wants to make his mark with his own 'Ring.'"
ARIVACA, Ariz. (AP) - Jim Chilton stood before the four strands of barbed wire that separate his ranchland from Mexico and pointed at a nearby ridge. "Very often, I see scouts on that mountain, right there," he told Rep. Martha McSally.

McSally, a Republican who represents a stretch of the Arizona border in the House of Representatives and is running for U.S. Senate, quickly said she wrote a bill to stiffen penalties for the spotters who help usher people illegally into the United States.

The legislation has since been incorporated into one that would implement dramatic cuts in legal immigration and represents a rightward shift on the issue for McSally.

FILE--In this Aug. 22, 2018, file photo, U.S. Senatorial candidate U.S. Rep. Martha McSally, R-Ariz., stands at the international border with Mexico, with ranchers Jim Chilton, left, and Tom Kay, right, south of Arivaca, Ariz. For a decade, the fight against illegal immigration has helped Republicans win every statewide election in Arizona. Now, in what's shaping up to be a difficult November for the GOP, they're counting on it helping extend their winning streak in Arizona and maintain their hold on the U.S. Senate. (AP Photo/Matt York, file)

But here on one of the wildest stretches of the border with Mexico - where Chilton brought a rifle for safety as he showed McSally around - the only issue that came up was security.

For a decade, the fight against illegal immigration has helped Republicans win every statewide election in Arizona. Now, in what's shaping up to be a difficult November for the Republicans, they are counting on it helping extend their winning streak in Arizona and maintain their hold on the U.S. Senate.

McSally faces Democratic Rep. Kyrsten Sinema in a race that could determine which party controls the Senate, where Republicans currently have a narrow two-vote majority. The two are competing for a seat vacated by Republican Jeff Flake, who retired after his criticisms of President Donald Trump's hawkish immigration stance and ethics made his re-election impossible.

Mike Noble, a Phoenix-based GOP pollster, quipped that people in other states think the role of immigration in Arizona politics is crazy.

"We're very unique," Noble said. "We're just exposed to it a lot more with the border."

Immigration routinely polls as a top issue for Arizona Republicans, Noble said. But there's been a recent shift in a state where a growing Latino population has given Democrats hope. Independents, who comprise about one-third of the electorate, are more interested in education and health care, key Democratic issues.

That may explain why the issue has remained an undercurrent since McSally won the Aug. 28 GOP primary against two immigration hardliners. Instead, McSally, a former air force colonel who was the first female combat pilot, attacked Sinema for the Democrat's anti-war protests against the Afghan and Iraq wars. Sinema, meanwhile, has focused on health care and veterans issues.

Still, it's important for McSally to remind Republican voters of the issue - part of the reason that she has lobbied Trump, who has delivered several heated speeches on immigration in Arizona, to return to the state.

In an interview at the Chilton ranch, McSally, viewed as a moderate in her Tucson-area swing district, sharply denied she had shifted on immigration.

"It's fake news," she said. "I've been a leader on border security since I've been in Congress."

McSally this year dropped her sponsorship of a bill that would have provided legal status to people brought to the country illegally as children after introducing the hardline bill she co-authored. That, she argues, is not a shift - she says she began work on the hardline bill before running for the Senate and never intended to vote for the more lenient measure she had co-sponsored.

Sinema, meanwhile, has also moved rightward on immigration. As a state legislator, she opposed a raft of hardline GOP immigration measures. But she has moved toward the center and was one of the few House Democrats to support increasing legal penalties for people deported multiple times.

While some Republicans fret McSally could alienate Hispanic voters with her tougher immigration stance, Petra Falcon, head of the Latino rights group Promise Arizona, condemned both congresswomen's maneuvers.

"I think the electorate his been disappointed at both candidates," Falcon said.

In an interview, Sinema noted she still supports legalizing many of people in the country illegally, as outlined in the last immigration bill to pass the Senate, in 2013, on a bipartisan basis. McSally opposed the bill, and House Republicans never voted on it. Sinema also opposes Trump's border wall.

"The wall is an 18th century solution to a 21st century problem," Sinema said.

It's one Chilton desperately wants. Last month, Chilton and his wife led a convoy of trucks to the stretch of their ranch on the border through canyons so rugged it took 90 minutes to travel the 19 miles (30 kilometers) of dirt road from their house to the edge of the country.

Chilton and McSally rode in the lead truck, and his wife, Sue, drove the second one.

"This is no-man's land," said Sue Chilton, 76, after she passed a spot where a border patrol agent was shot two months earlier. "It's not controlled by the United States of America."

The Chiltons want a wall because constructing it would require the government to pave a road along the border that could help the Border Patrol arrive faster. Currently, the ranchers say, it takes agents hours to intercept smugglers who cross there.

When the convoy finally reached the border, Sue Chilton laid out a picnic lunch of sandwiches and potato salad under the mesquite trees. The Chiltons and several other ranchers who accompanied them talked of how initially thousands of job-hungry migrants began crossing the land in the 1990s. Now they said there are fewer, but they're more likely to be heavily-armed drug cartels.

"We need to stop the drugs from coming into the United States," Jim Chilton said, "and this is the best place to do it."

Democrats were ready to strike a deal with Trump this year to fund the start of his border wall in exchange for protections for the immigrants brought to the country illegally as children. But the deal melted down after Trump insisted on additional cuts in legal immigration.

With the Chiltons and other ranchers, McSally spoke fluently of the different techniques to secure the border - from drones to barricades to funding for port of entry border crossings - and bemoaned how political the issue has become.

"Border security used to be a unifying issue," McSally said.
FARGO, N.D. (AP) - The Latest on the trial of a man charged in the killing of a pregnant North Dakota woman (all times local):

11:30 a.m.

A prosecutor says a man accused in the death of a North Dakota woman who bled to death when her baby was cut from her womb helped finish the crime.

William Hoehn, right, participates in jury selection for his trial with defense attorney Daniel Borgen, Tuesday, Sept. 18, 2018, in district court, in Fargo, N.D., for the murder of Savanna Greywind, a 22-year-old whose baby was cut from her womb. (Michael Vosburg/The Forum via AP, Pool)

William Hoehn charged with helping to kill Savanna Greywind, who was eight months pregnant when she was killed in August 2017.

Hoehn's girlfriend, Brooke Crews, pleaded guilty in the case and is serving life in prison without parole. Hoehn says he knew nothing of Crews' plan to kill Greywind.

Prosecutor Ryan Younggren said in his opening statement Wednesday that Crews couldn't have subdued Greywind without help.

Younggren says Hoehn burst into his apartment bathroom to discover Crews with Greywind. He says Crews told Hoehn she didn't know if Greywind was dead, so Hoehn put a rope around Greywind's neck and finished her off.

Defense attorney Daniel Borgen says Greywind was already dead when Hoehn entered the bathroom.

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6:45 a.m.

Opening statements are scheduled Wednesday for a North Dakota man charged with conspiracy to commit murder in the killing of a 22-year-old woman who bled to death when her baby was cut from her womb.

William Hoehn (hayn) has admitted to covering up the death of Savanna Greywind, who was eight months pregnant when she was killed in August 2017.

Hoehn's girlfriend, Brooke Crews, pleaded guilty to killing Greywind and is serving life in prison without parole .

Hoehn says he knew nothing of Crews' murderous plan. Crews hasn't spoken publicly of Hoehn's role, but she is on the government's list of potential witnesses for Hoehn's trial in Fargo.

Greywind's death led to the creation of Savanna's Act, which aims to standardize protocols for responding to cases of missing and murdered Native American women .
FAYETTEVILLE, N.C. (AP) - When Florence knocked the power out Friday evening in a leafy, Fayetteville, North Carolina, subdivision, Mary Kennedy checked in with her elderly neighbors by phone to make sure they were OK.

Carl and Patricia Flanagan told Kennedy they were fine and had gotten out lanterns and candles to help see in the dark. Power outages were nothing new in the neighborhood and the Flanagans, both 86, were lively and energetic. Carl was a retired Army officer who volunteered at a museum; Patricia was always taking walks around the neighborhood.

But within 45 minutes of the power going out, Kennedy said, the couple was dead. The house caught fire and Florence's strong winds fanned the flames despite heavy rains.

"It spread so fast," Kennedy said.

The Flanagans' deaths in a neighborhood far from any flood zone are evidence of Florence's broad and deadly reach . The storm has killed at least 37 people in three states.

Children have been killed in their homes by falling trees, an elderly man was electrocuted in the rain while trying to connect extension cords for a generator and a Virginia man died when a tornado destroyed a flooring store just outside Richmond, an area that forecasters had not previously predicted was in Florence's path of destruction.

Florence first blew ashore as a hurricane before slowly dumping more than 3 feet (0.91 meters) of rain and inundating city after city in North Carolina and South Carolina. The violent winds that tore down trees last week have given way to quietly rising rivers - all the while continuing to claim lives.

Two mental health patients drowned Tuesday when a van they were riding in was swept away in South Carolina flood waters, while Fayetteville officials say a man drowned late Tuesday after refusing to evacuate from his mobile home.

The Flanagans' home in Fayetteville sits empty with a giant charred hole in the roof and police tape around the yard. City officials have not yet said what caused the fire.

Kennedy said the deaths have shaken the neighborhood. The Flanagans had lived in their home for decades and served as the area's "unofficial grandparents."

"It's so hard not having them there," Mary Kennedy said. "It's a big hole. It's a big hole."

Carl volunteered at the Fayetteville's Airborne and Special Operations Museum and was active in the Kiwanis club. Patricia always took care to ask about people's families.

Bob Kennedy said the couple would always invite him over for dinner when his wife was out of town to make sure he was eating well.

The couple, he said, was "just a very good example of how to live your life."

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For the latest on Hurricane Florence, visit https://www.apnews.com/tag/Hurricanes
CATONSVILLE, Md. (AP) - A class-action lawsuit says prosecutors and detectives worked to cover up sexual assault complaints at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

Two former students said they reported rapes to the university and county police, who then failed to act and intimidated the plaintiffs, news outlets reported.

According to the lawsuit filed Sept. 10, authorities have a pattern of coding sexual assault reports to deflate crime statistics.

One plaintiff's rape kit was destroyed early, and university police discouraged her from reporting the assault to local police, the lawsuit said, and when she did go to local authorities, the case was improperly closed.

The other plaintiff said she was gang-raped by UMBC students while a student at Towson University. She submitted a rape kit and reported the case to police, but the lawsuit said the case was "inexplicably closed." Detectives interviewed the three men, who acknowledged having sex with her while drunk but said "they did not understand what the issue was," according to court documents.

A prosecutor declined to charge the men. The case was "cleared due to exceptional circumstances," according to the filing.

The plaintiff asked the court to intervene, resulting in first-degree rape and related charges that were later dismissed. That request triggered a pattern of intimidating behavior from Baltimore County State's Attorney Scott Shellenberger, according to the lawsuit, sent county police officers to her home to threaten her with criminal charges if she continued to pursue the case. Two months later, her sister was fired from an internship in the Baltimore County state's attorney's domestic violence section.

While prosecutors enjoy special immunity, legal experts told The Baltimore Sun that immunity doesn't extend to actions outside the scope of their duties - like intimidating a witness.

Plaintiff's attorney Rignal W. Baldwin said multiple women have come forward with similar experiences, and he anticipates amending the lawsuit to include them as plaintiffs. Baldwin described a massive systemic concealments and dismissal of sexual assault cases, saying the $10 million sought in damages is secondary to accountability.

University police, county police and prosecutors declined to comment. UMBC President Freeman A. Hrabowski III told student protesters Monday that the school would launch an external review.

"You have my word," he told students. "We will take this very seriously."

The lawsuit was filed nearly two years after a report on the unusually high number of sexual assault cases deemed unfounded led to an independent review of Baltimore County police policies and procedures. The county instituted changes to sexual assault investigatory policies in February 2017.
EAST GOSHEN TOWNSHIP, Pa. (AP) - A Pennsylvania man who was apparently upset that his ex-wife had been awarded their home in their divorce was found dead early Thursday, several hours after he shot at her and later killed his own parents.

Bruce Rogal, 59, died after a manhunt and a police chase that ended when he crashed his car at the West Bradford Township home he had shared with his wife, Chester County District Attorney Tom Hogan said.

State police said at least one trooper shot at Rogal following the crash, but it's not clear if he returned fire. A gun was found in his car, authorities said, but a cause of death hasn't been determined.

Police talk with family members at the staging area after a shooting at Bellingham Retirement Community on East Boot Road in East Goshen Township, Pa., Wednesday, Sept. 19, 2018. Authorities are searching for a man who they say shot at his ex-wife and then killed his parents at the retirement center. Chester County District Attorney Tom Hogan says authorities are looking for 59-year-old Bruce Rogal of Glenmoore. (Pete Bannan/Daily Local News via AP)

No troopers were injured, authorities said.

Rogal had received word of an order finalizing the divorce that authorities said was mailed on Wednesday and "that appears to be what set him off," Hogan said.

Rogal first went to the house where his ex-wife was in the driveway changing her car's oil, shot at her and missed. He then drove to a retirement center in East Goshen where he shot and killed his parents, William and Nancy Rogal, who were both in their late 80s.

Rogal then drove off, and police soon sent out an alert about the car he was driving. State police spotted the vehicle driving past the agency's Embreeville Barracks shortly before 1 a.m. Thursday, and a chase ensued that also involved SWAT team members.

Aided by a police helicopter, the troopers were able to follow Rogal a few miles into the West Bradford neighborhood where his ex-wife lives and where the initial shooting incident happened.

The chase ended when Rogal's crashed his car into the side of the house.

Court documents obtained by the Daily Local News in West Chester, Pennsylvania, showed Rogal's ex-wife had filed an order of protection from abuse against him in 2015, shortly before filing for divorce.

Rogal's attorneys had argued the order was a way to gain an upper hand in the divorce and said some of the incidents she had listed in the petition alleging Rogal had threatened or assaulted her. The court ordered him to leave their home.

Authorities confirmed they contacted both the special master who oversaw the divorce and the judge who signed the decree, eventually evacuating the special master from her home Wednesday night as a safety precaution.

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This story has been corrected to show Rogal drove his car into his ex-wife's home in East Bradford Township, not into his home in Glenmoore.

Police arrive after a deadly shooting at Bellingham Retirement Community on East Boot Road in East Goshen Township, Pa., Wednesday, Sept. 19, 2018. Authorities are searching for a man who they say shot at his ex-wife and then killed his parents, William and Nancy Rogal, both in their late 80s, at the retirement center. Chester County District Attorney Tom Hogan says authorities are looking for 59-year-old Bruce Rogal of Glenmoore. (Pete Bannan/Daily Local News via AP)

Police arrive after a deadly shooting at Bellingham Retirement Community on East Boot Road in East Goshen Township. Pa., Wednesday, Sept. 19, 2018. Authorities are searching for a man who they say shot at his ex-wife and then killed his parents at the retirement center. Chester County District Attorney Tom Hogan says authorities are looking for 59-year-old Bruce Rogal of Glenmoore. (Pete Bannan/Daily Local News via AP)
NAGA, Philippines (AP) - A massive landslide buried dozens of homes near a central Philippine mountain Thursday, killing at least 21 people and sending rescuers scrambling to find survivors after some sent text messages pleading for help.

The slide surged down on about 30 houses in two rural villages after daybreak in Naga city in Cebu province, city police chief Roderick Gonzales said by telephone as he helped supervise the search and rescue. Seven injured villagers were rescued from the huge mound of earth and debris.

Some victims managed to send messages after the landslide hit, Gonzales said, adding that elderly women and a child were among the dead.

Rescuers reveal a father and his daughter in an embrace following a landslide that buried dozens of homes in Naga city, Cebu province central Philippines on Thursday Sept. 20, 2018. A landslide set off by heavy rains buried homes under part of a mountainside in the central Philippines on Thursday, and several people are feared buried, including two who sent text messages seeking help. (AP Photo/Bullit Marquez)

Nimrod Parba, a 26-year-old resident, said a relative trapped in a house beneath the rubble managed to call Thursday morning and begged to be rescued. The calls stopped, however, and the relative could not be reached hours later, Parba said.

Naga city Mayor Kristine Vanessa Chiong said at least 64 people remained missing.

"We're really hoping we can still recover them alive," she said.

The landslide hit while several northern Philippine provinces are still dealing with deaths and widespread damage wrought by Typhoon Mangkhut, which pummeled the agricultural region Saturday and left at least 88 people dead and more than 60 missing. A massive search is still underway for dozens of people feared dead after landslides in the gold-mining town of Itogon in the north.

Cebu province was not directly hit by Mangkhut but the massive typhoon intensified monsoon rains across a large part of the archipelago, including the central region where Naga city lies about 570 kilometers (355 miles) southeast of Manila.

Rescuers were treading carefully in small groups on the unstable ground to avoid further casualties.

"We're running out of time. The ground in the area is still vibrating. We're striking a balance between intensifying our rescue efforts and ensuring the safety of our rescuers," Naga city Councilor Carmelino Cruz said by phone.

Cristita Villarba, a 53-year-old resident, said her husband and son were preparing to leave for work when the ground shook and they were overwhelmed by a roar.

"It was like an earthquake and there was this thundering, loud banging sound. All of us ran out," Villarba said, adding that she, her husband and three children were shocked but unhurt.

Outside, she saw the house of her older brother, Lauro, and his family buried in the landslide.

"Many of our neighbors were crying and screaming for help. Some wanted to help those who got hit but there was too much earth covering the houses, including my brother's," she said.

Nearly 20 people lived in her brother's home, mostly his family and grandchildren, she said.

Villarba said she had felt sorry a few days earlier for the landslide victims in the country's north.

"I had no idea we would be the next," she said.

Elsewhere in the landslide-hit community, a father and his young daughter were found dead in each other's embrace in a house, volunteer rescuer Vic Santillan said.

It's not clear what set off the landslide, but some residents blamed limestone quarries, which they suspect may have caused cracks in the mountainside facing their villages. Villarba said a light rain stopped when the landslide hit and there was no rain on Wednesday.

The nearest quarry was abandoned about a year ago, but another government-authorized quarry is still being operated not far away, and villagers also profit from the limestone business, said Angeline Templo, an assistant to the mayor.

The Philippines is one of the world's most disaster-prone countries. It is lashed by about 20 storms each year and is located in the Pacific "Ring of Fire" that is vulnerable to earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. Poverty has forced many to live on or near volcanoes, steep mountains and storm-vulnerable coasts, often leading to disasters.

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Associated Press writer Jim Gomez in Manila contributed to this report.

Rescuers dig through the rubble to search for possible survivors, with some sending cellphone text messages pleading for help, following a landslide that buried dozens of homes in Naga city, Cebu province central Philippines on Thursday Sept. 20, 2018. A landslide set off by heavy rains buried homes under part of a mountainside in the central Philippines on Thursday, and several people are feared buried, including two who sent text messages seeking help. (AP Photo/Bullit Marquez)

Rescuers dig through the rubble to search for possible survivors following a landslide that buried dozens of homes in Naga city, Cebu province central Philippines on Thursday Sept. 20, 2018. A landslide set off by heavy rains buried homes under part of a mountainside in the central Philippines on Thursday, and several people are feared buried, including two who sent text messages seeking help. (AP Photo/Bullit Marquez)

Rescuers carry a body of a child after being dug out of the rubble following a landslide that buried dozens of homes in Naga city, Cebu province central Philippines on Thursday Sept. 20, 2018. A landslide set off by heavy rains buried homes under part of a mountainside in the central Philippines on Thursday, and several people are feared buried, including two who sent text messages seeking help. (AP Photo/Bullit Marquez)

Evacuees seek temporary shelter at an evacuation center after fleeing their homes following a landslide that buried dozens of homes in Naga city, Cebu province central Philippines on Thursday Sept. 20, 2018. A landslide set off by heavy rains buried homes under part of a mountainside in the central Philippines on Thursday, and several people are feared buried, including two who sent text messages seeking help. (AP Photo/Bullit Marquez)

Rescuers carry a body of a victim after being dug out of the rubble following a landslide that buried dozens of homes in Naga city, Cebu province central Philippines on Thursday Sept. 20, 2018. A landslide set off by heavy rains buried homes under part of a mountainside in the central Philippines on Thursday, and several people are feared buried, including two who sent text messages seeking help. (AP Photo/Bullit Marquez)

Rescuers conduct search houses for survivors after a landslide struck a village in Naga city, Cebu province central Philippines on Thursday Sept. 20, 2018. A landslide set off by heavy rains buried homes under part of a mountainside in the central Philippines on Thursday, and several people are feared buried, including two who sent text messages seeking help. (AP Photo)

In this handout photo provided by Philippine Red Cross-Cebu Chapter, Red Cross volunteers treat a victim after she was pulled out of her house that was struck by a landslide in Naga city, Cebu province central Philippines on Thursday, Sept. 20, 2018. A Philippine official says several people were killed and more are feared buried in a landslide that hit two villages amid heavy rains in the central Philippines. (Philippine Red Cross - Cebu Chapter via AP)

Rescuers pull out a victim from a landslide after it struck their village in Naga city, Cebu province central Philippines on Thursday Sept. 20, 2018. A landslide set off by heavy rains buried homes under part of a mountainside in the central Philippines on Thursday, and several people are feared buried, including two who sent text messages seeking help. (AP Photo)
ATLANTIC CITY, N.J. (AP) - Democrat Phil Murphy campaigned for governor of New Jersey in part on a promise to end the state takeover of Atlantic City, the cash-strapped seaside gambling resort whose assets and major decision-making power were seized by his Republican predecessor, Chris Christie.

But after nearly nine months in office, Murphy is leaving the takeover in place, possibly for as long as the next three years - the entire term Christie intended.

Murphy's administration released a plan for helping Atlantic City get back on its feet that involved numerous study groups, task forces and committees, as well as a redirection of some state government funds to youth programs, and a training program for municipal department heads.

New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy, left, announces his administration will leave a state takeover in place in Atlantic City N.J. during a speech in the city on Sept. 20, 2018, as Mayor Frank Gilliam, right, looks on. (AP Photo/Wayne Parry)

But what the plan does not do is end the takeover, which Christie and the state Legislature put in place in Nov. 2016, determining the city either could not or would not make the painful choices necessary to get its fiscal house in order. The report recommends keeping the takeover in place for the full five years called for under the 2016 law, unless drastic financial improvement happens before then, including the significant reduction or total elimination of the city's reliance on state aid.

"We had a pretty clear-eyed sense of what the challenge was," Murphy said at a press conference in a school library during which he repeatedly referred to the takeover as a "partnership." He said he resented the "big-footing" of Atlantic City that was done under Christie's administration.

"That doesn't mean Atlantic City doesn't need the state, that the state won't continue to stay the course and be a partner. We're not going away; we're going to go out and executive this plan."

The takeover law gave the state broad powers, including the right to overturn decisions of the city council, override or even abolish city agencies and seize and sell assets, including the city's much-coveted water utility. The state overseers could also hire or fire workers, break union contracts, and restructure the city's debt, most of which was done to varying degrees, although no major assets were sold off.

Mayor Frank Gilliam, a fellow Democrat, said it has been difficult serving under the takeover, but he said Murphy's administration has been willing to listen to concerns and work with city officials, even while retaining ultimate power.

The plan was put together by Jim Johnson, a fellow Democrat who unsuccessfully challenged Murphy for the gubernatorial nomination. It calls for the Casino Reinvestment Development Authority to redirect some of its redevelopment money to programs for Atlantic City's 10,000 children, more than a third of whom live in poverty.

The city's finances cratered in recent years as five of the city's 12 casinos shut down, shedding 11,000 jobs and millions of dollars in tax revenue. Two of those five casinos reopened this summer.

Follow Wayne Parry at http://twitter.com/WayneParryAC

New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy applauds at a press conference in Atlantic City N.J. on Thursday Sept. 20, 2018, at which he announced his administration is leaving a state takeover of Atlantic City in place. (AP Photo/Wayne Parry)

New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy speaks at a press conference Thursday Sept. 20, 2018, in Atlantic City N.J. at which he announced a state takeover of the city will continue for perhaps the next three years. (AP Photo/Wayne Parry)
Kavanaugh accuser may testify after all -- under right terms

WASHINGTON (AP) - Christine Blasey Ford may personally testify against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh after all, her attorney said Thursday, breathing new life into the prospect of a dramatic Senate showdown next week over Ford's accusation that he assaulted her when both were in high school.

Ford will tell her story to the Judiciary Committee, whose senators will vote on Kavanaugh's confirmation - but only if agreement can be reached on "terms that are fair and which ensure her safety," the attorney said.

The positive tone of the lawyer's email revived the possibility that the panel would hold an electrifying campaign-season hearing at which both Ford and President Donald Trump's Supreme Court nominee could give their versions of what did or didn't happen at a party in the 1980s. Kavanaugh, now a judge on the powerful District of Columbia Circuit Court of Appeals, has repeatedly denied her allegation.

The accusation has jarred the 53-year-old conservative jurist's prospects for winning confirmation, which until Ford's emergence last week had seemed all but certain. It has also bloomed into a broader clash over whether women alleging abuse are taken seriously by men and how both political parties address such claims with the advent of the #MeToo movement - a theme that could echo in this November's elections for control of Congress.

In one obstacle that must be overcome, Katz's email said a hearing Monday is "not possible" and that scheduling it that day "is arbitrary in any event." Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, has scheduled the hearing for that morning, and he and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., have indicated it would be Ford's only chance to make her case. Republicans are anxious to move ahead to a vote by the committee, where they hold an 11-10 majority, and then by the full Senate, which they control, 51-49.

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Will what happened at Georgetown Prep stay there?

NORTH BETHESDA, Md. (AP) - To the uninitiated, Georgetown Preparatory School feels less like a high school than a well-heeled liberal arts college. The 93-acre campus in a Maryland suburb of the nation's capital boasts a state-of-the-art athletic center, a nine-hole golf course, and its own gift shop. Gardeners crisscross the grounds on carts.

This is where U.S. Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh spent most of his teen years. And exactly what happened one summer night during that time has become a question that threatens to unravel his chances of joining the nation's highest court.

Multiple accounts from 1980s-era classmates depict an alcohol-soaked party culture among the close-knit network of single-sex, mostly Roman Catholic private schools in the country's wealthiest state. At raucous house parties and drunken beach vacations, boys from Georgetown Prep and other all-male academies would meet up with students from nearby all-girl private schools like Stone Ridge, Holy Cross, Georgetown Visitation and the non-sectarian Holton-Arms School. Binge drinking was a routine part of the social scene, with minimal adult supervision.

California college professor Christine Blasey Ford, a 1984 graduate of Holton-Arms, has accused Kavanaugh, who graduated Georgetown Prep in 1983, of pinning her down in a locked bedroom and groping her during a drunken house party when she was about 15 and he was about 17.

As details of the allegation emerged, a video clip from a 2015 speech Kavanaugh made at Catholic University's law school circulated online, prompting some to view the comments in a more disturbing context. In the speech, Kavanaugh referenced some old friends and jokingly referred to an unofficial motto at his alma mater.

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China distances children from families to subdue Muslim west

ISTANBUL (AP) - As tens of thousands of Uighur families have been swept up in Chinese President Xi Jinping's campaign to subdue the sometimes restive Xinjiang, there is evidence that the children of detainees and exiles are being placed into dozens of childcare facilities across the far west region.

The measures, which experts say echo colonialist treatment of indigenous children in North America and Australia, come as around one million Uighurs and other Muslim minorities are held in internment camps that have alarmed a United Nations panel and the U.S. government.

The Associated Press interviewed 14 Uighur families living in Turkey and one Kazakh man in Almaty with a total of 56 children who remain in China. The families believe that among these kids, 14 are in state-run orphanages or boarding schools.

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Stocks at records; Dow beats all-time high from January

Wall Street delivered another set of milestones Thursday as a wave of buying sent U.S. stocks solidly higher, driving the Dow Jones Industrial Average above the all-time high it closed at in January.

The S&P 500, the benchmark for many index funds, also hit a new high, eclipsing the peak it reached last month.

Technology stocks, banks and health care companies accounted for much of the broad rally. Energy companies declined along with crude oil prices.

A weaker dollar, which helps U.S. exporters, and a mix of mostly encouraging economic reports helped put investors in a buying mood, a turnaround from earlier in the week when the U.S. and China each announced a new round of tariffs on each other's goods, triggering a sell-off.

"Some of the economic data that came out today continued to show strength," said Lindsey Bell, an investment strategist with CFRA. "Given the strength in the economy, backed by the stimulus from tax reform as well as just fiscal stimulus in general, that should be able to offset some of the impact that we're going to get from tariffs as we go into the end of the year."

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4 dead, including suspect, after Maryland warehouse shooting

ABERDEEN, Md. (AP) - A woman working a temporary job at a drugstore warehouse in Maryland got into an argument at work Thursday morning and began shooting colleagues, killing three before fatally turning the gun on herself, authorities and witnesses said.

Workers at the Rite Aide distribution center in northeastern Maryland described terrifying moments of "crazy" gunfire and people screaming and running in all directions after the shooting. Others said they helped the wounded, one person tying blood-soaked jeans around a man's injured leg in a bid to stop the bleeding.

Harford County Sheriff Jeffrey Gahler said at a news conference that the woman was later identified as a temporary employee of the distribution center, Snochia Moseley of Baltimore County.

"She had reported for her workday as usual, and around 9 a.m. the shooting began, striking victims both outside the business and inside the facility," Gahler said. "We do not at this time have a motive for this senseless crime."

Krystal Watson, 33, said her husband, Eric, works at the facility and told her told her that the suspect had been arguing with somebody else near a time clock after a "town hall meeting."

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Florence-weary South Carolina could get more record flooding

WILMINGTON, N.C. (AP) - As rivers swollen to record levels started to recede Thursday in North Carolina, officials tried to head off potential environmental disasters and prepared for more record flooding downstream in South Carolina.

Roads were still clogged with people trying to make it back to where the floods had creeped back, leaving silty mud on walls and floors. Crews closed some bridges and reopened others as trillions of gallons of water continued its long, meandering journey to the Atlantic Ocean.

Potential environmental problems remained. Duke Energy issued a high-level emergency alert after floodwaters from the Cape Fear River overtopped an earthen dike and inundated a large lake at a closed power plant near Wilmington, North Carolina. The utility said it did not think any coal ash was at risk.

State-owned utility Santee Cooper in South Carolina is placing an inflatable dam around a coal ash pond near Conway, saying the extra 2.5 feet (76 centimeters) should be enough to keep floodwaters out. Officials warned human, hog and other animal waste were mixing in with floodwaters in the Carolinas.

South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster estimated damage from the flood in his state at $1.2 billion in a letter that says the flooding will be the worst disaster in the state's modern history. McMaster asked Congressional leaders to hurry federal aid.

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AP Analysis: Trump heads to UN as US retreats from world

WASHINGTON (AP) - America first? Try America first, second and third.

As President Donald Trump prepares for his second U.N. General Assembly, the Olympics of international diplomacy, his administration has turned unabashedly and profoundly inward, pursuing ever more unilateral policies in what critics argue is a great retreat from global engagement that had been a bipartisan hallmark of previous U.S. leaders.

Trump aides who used to qualify his well-worn campaign slogan by insisting that "America first does not mean America alone" are gone. In their place are advocates of inviolable state sovereignty who share a belief that many of the institutions established after World War II to secure and maintain international order are either obsolete or in need of serious revision.

Ahead of the General Assembly, some expect the meeting to have a different tone from last year when wary world leaders weren't prepared for Trump's brand or style of diplomacy or for his determination to push an "America first" agenda. This time around they know what to expect.

"A lot of leaders have gamed out how to deal with the president," said Jon Alterman, senior vice president of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "They will be nice to him in person, but will work to create broad coalitions to block or undermine a lot of the president's initiatives because they think they are misguided. They'll try to use this meeting to advance strategies that promote their vision and not the president's, but not rub the president's face in it."

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Cornell review finds academic misconduct by food researcher

NEW YORK (AP) - A prominent Cornell University food researcher resigned after an investigation found he committed academic misconduct, including misreporting data, the school announced Thursday.

Brian Wansink has been removed from all teaching and research positions and will retire at the end of the school year next June, Cornell said in a statement.

Wansink had previously helped update the U.S. dietary guidelines and is known for his research on consumer behavior, which has been widely cited including in articles by The Associated Press.

Cornell says Wansink's academic misconduct also included "problematic statistical techniques, failure to properly document and preserve research results, and inappropriate authorship."

Thursday's announcement comes a day after six more of Wansink's papers were retracted. The most recent retractions included a 2005 paper that said people eat more when served in large bowls and a 2013 article that said grocery shoppers buy food with more calories when they're hungry.

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Suge Knight pleads to manslaughter over fatal confrontation

LOS ANGELES (AP) - Averting a murder trial that had been nearly four years in coming, former rap mogul Marion "Suge" Knight pleaded no contest Thursday to voluntary manslaughter for running over and killing a Compton businessman and agreed to serve nearly 30 years in prison.

The Death Row Records co-founder entered the plea in Los Angeles Superior Court after striking a deal with prosecutors, and has agreed to serve 28 years. Jury selection for his trial, which could have led to a life sentence, had been scheduled to begin Monday.

Knight was charged with murder, attempted murder and hit-and-run after fleeing the scene of a dispute in January 2015 outside a Compton burger stand. Knight and Cle "Bone" Sloan, a consultant on the N.W.A. biopic "Straight Outta Compton," traded punches before Knight clipping him with his pickup truck and ran over businessman Terry Carter, who died from his injuries.

Knight's attorneys have said he was acting in self-defense and was fleeing armed attackers when he ran over Carter and Sloan. Sloan has denied he was carrying a gun during the confrontation.

During Thursday's hearing, Knight, wearing orange jail attire with his arms and legs in chains, answered Judge Ronald Coen's questions, loudly and quickly saying "no contest" when the judge asked for his plea. He will be formally sentenced on Oct. 4.

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It's high times for soaring marijuana stocks on Wall Street

NEW YORK (AP) - Reefer Madness has gripped Wall Street.

Investors are craving marijuana stocks as Canada prepares to legalize pot next month, leading to giant gains for Canada-based companies listed on U.S. exchanges. Some experts are concerned that the ending will be a buzzkill.

Billions of dollars have poured into the stocks in the last few months, and investors smell green (money, not leaves) in the air as they consider the opportunities these companies might have as the marijuana market in Canada grows, along with the possibility that the U.S. and other countries could follow suit.

The value of one company, British Columbia-based Tilray, has jumped tenfold since its initial public offering just two months ago. The company had $20 million in sales in 2017, but it's now worth considerably more than Macy's or Hasbro. With those huge gains have come extreme swings.

Wednesday was a trip for Tilray stock: after closing at $154 the previous day, it opened at $233 a share, soared to $300, and then plunged to $151 before rallying to close at $214. Trading was halted several times because of that volatility.
WASHINGTON (AP) - Christine Blasey Ford may testify against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh after all, her attorney said Thursday, breathing new life into the prospect of a dramatic Senate showdown next week over Ford's accusation that he assaulted her when both were in high school.

The preference would be for Ford to testify next Thursday, and she doesn't want Kavanaugh in the same room, her attorney told Judiciary Committee staff in a 30-minute call that also touched on security concerns and others issues, according to a Senate aide who wasn't authorized to discuss the matter and spoke on condition of anonymity.

Ford is willing to tell her story to the Judiciary Committee, whose senators will vote on Kavanaugh's confirmation - but only if agreement can be reached on "terms that are fair and which ensure her safety," the attorney said in an email earlier Thursday. In the call, she said Ford needs time to secure her family, prepare her testimony and travel to Washington. No decisions were reached, the aide said.

Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., with Sen. Mazie Hirono, D-Hawaii, left, joined by former students from Holton Arms School, speaks to reporters in support of professor Christine Blasey Ford, who is accusing Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of a decades-old sexual attack, during a news conference on Capitol Hill in Washington, Thursday, Sept. 20, 2018. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

The discussion revived the possibility that the panel would hold an electrifying campaign-season hearing at which both Ford and President Donald Trump's Supreme Court nominee could give their versions of what did or didn't happen at a party in the 1980s. Kavanaugh, now a judge on the powerful U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, has repeatedly denied her allegation.

The accusation has jarred the 53-year-old conservative jurist's prospects for winning confirmation, which until Ford's emergence last week had seemed all but certain. It has also bloomed into a broader clash over whether women alleging abuse are taken seriously by men and how both political parties address such claims with the advent of the #MeToo movement - a theme that could echo in this November's elections for control of Congress.

Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, has scheduled a hearing for Monday morning, and he and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., have indicated it would be Ford's only chance to make her case. Republicans are anxious to move ahead to a vote by the committee, where they hold an 11-10 majority, and then by the full Senate, which they control, 51-49.

Taylor Foy, spokesman for Republicans on the panel, said after the call that Grassley "will consult with his colleagues on the committee. He remains committed to providing a fair forum for both Dr. Ford and Judge Kavanaugh."

Attorney Debra Katz said anew that Ford, 51, a psychology professor in California, has received death threats and for safety reasons has relocated her family.

"She wishes to testify, provided that we can agree on terms that are fair and which ensure her safety," Katz wrote in the email, which was obtained by The Associated Press after first being reported by The New York Times.

In the call later Thursday, Katz asked the committee to subpoena Mark Judge, whom Ford has named as the other teen in the room at the time. Judge has told the committee he does not recall the incident and does not want to speak publicly.

Should Ford testify, especially in public, it would pit the words of two distinguished professionals against each other as television close-ups capture every emotion. Assessing them would be not just the committee's 21 senators -only four of whom are women, all Democrats - but also millions of viewing voters.

Underscoring the sensitivity of all-male GOP senators grilling a woman who's alleged abuse, Republicans are considering reaching out to female attorneys who might question Ford, according to a person familiar with the situation but who wasn't authorized to discuss it publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.

If Ford opts not to participate, Republicans could well dispense with the hearing to avoid giving Democrats a forum for peppering Kavanaugh with embarrassing questions. They would argue that they'd offered Ford several options for describing her accusation, but that she'd snubbed them.

Kavanaugh, who's been eager to testify, said he was ready to appear Monday.

"I will be there," he wrote Grassley in a letter. "I continue to want a hearing as soon as possible, so that I can clear my name." Kavanaugh was spotted at the White House on Thursday.

Trump, who has been careful in recent days not to criticize Ford as he defends his nominee, told Fox News host Sean Hannity Thursday that he feels the nomination has been delayed long enough.

"I think it's a very sad situation," he said, asking, 'Why didn't somebody call the FBI 36 years ago?... What's going on?"

He said Kavanaugh's accuser should "have her say and let's see how it all works out, but I don't think you can delay it any longer. They've delayed it a week already."

At a Las Vegas rally not long after, Trump praised Kavanaugh as "one of the finest human beings you will ever have the privilege of knowing or meeting" and called his reputation "impeccable."

Ford has contended that at a house party in Washington's Maryland suburbs, a drunken Kavanaugh tried undressing her and stifling her cries on a bed before she fled.

Grassley has said that in the interest of making Ford comfortable, he'd be willing to let Ford testify in public or private. He even offered to send committee aides to her California home to take testimony.

As the week has proceeded, Republicans have seemed to regain momentum toward approving Kavanaugh though his prospects have remained uncertain.

Even moderate Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, said it would be "unfair" to Kavanaugh if Ford decides to not appear, and others were urging leaders to proceed quickly to a vote. Still, the bare 51-49 Republican majority means they can lose just one vote and still approve him if all Democrats vote no. Vice President Mike Pence would break a tie.

Democrats have tried using the issue to demonstrate that Republicans treat women unfairly, their eyes on upcoming elections in which suburban, anti-Trump female voters could be pivotal in many races. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., a possible 2020 presidential candidate, said Republicans were "bullying" Ford by giving her a Monday deadline to testify.

Ford went public with her accusation over the weekend in a Washington Post interview and said Monday through her lawyer that she was ready to testify. But Tuesday, she began insisting on an FBI investigation of her allegations and said other witnesses should also participate in a hearing. Those conditions had cast strong doubts on her willingness to appear, and it became unclear whether Republicans would even hold the hearing.

The email said Ford's "strong preference" remains that the committee allow a thorough investigation of her claim before she appears. But that wording fell short of a nonnegotiable demand.

Republicans have resisted all Democratic efforts to slow and perhaps block Kavanaugh's confirmation. A substantial delay could push confirmation past the November elections, when Democrats have a shot at winning Senate control, plus allow more time for unforeseen problems to crop up.

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Associated Press writers Padmananda Rama, Catherine Lucey and Mary Clare Jalonick contributed to this report.

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, walks through a tunnel towards the Dirksen Senate Building on Capitol Hill in Washington, Wednesday, Sept. 19, 2018. (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta)

Sen. Mazie Hirono, D-Hawaii, a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, is welcomed by protesters opposed to President Donald Trump's Supreme Court nominee, Brett Kavanaugh, as they demonstrate in the Hart Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill in Washington, Thursday, Sept. 20, 2018. Kavanaugh has denied stories of a sexual assault as alleged by California college professor Christine Blasey Ford. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

Protesters opposed to President Donald Trump's Supreme Court nominee, Brett Kavanaugh, demonstrate in the Hart Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill in Washington, Thursday, Sept. 20, 2018. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

Protesters opposed to President Donald Trump's Supreme Court nominee, Brett Kavanaugh, occupy the office of Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, in the Hart Building on Capitol Hill in Washington, Thursday, Sept. 20, 2018. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

FILE - In this Sept. 6, 2018, file photo, after more than an hour of delay over procedural questions, President Donald Trump's Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh waits to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee for the third day of his confirmation hearing, on Capitol Hill in Washington. Christine Blasey Ford, the woman accusing Kavanaugh of sexual misconduct when they were teenagers has come forward to The Washington Post. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite, File)
WILMINGTON, N.C. (AP) - As rivers swollen to record levels started to recede Thursday in North Carolina, officials tried to head off potential environmental disasters and prepared for more record flooding downstream in South Carolina.

Roads were still clogged with people trying to make it back to where the floods had creeped back, leaving silty mud on walls and floors. Crews closed some bridges and reopened others as trillions of gallons of water continued its long, meandering journey to the Atlantic Ocean.

Potential environmental problems remained. Duke Energy issued a high-level emergency alert after floodwaters from the Cape Fear River overtopped an earthen dike and inundated a large lake at a closed power plant near Wilmington, North Carolina. The utility said it did not think any coal ash was at risk.

Area residents ride down N.C. Highway 53 that is flooded from the Northeast Cape Fear River in Burgaw, N.C., Wednesday, Sept. 19, 2018. The river had severe flooding due to the rains from Hurricane Florence. (Matt Born/The Star-News via AP)

State-owned utility Santee Cooper in South Carolina is placing an inflatable dam around a coal ash pond near Conway, saying the extra 2.5 feet (76 centimeters) should be enough to keep floodwaters out. Officials warned human, hog and other animal waste were mixing in with floodwaters in the Carolinas.

South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster estimated damage from the flood in his state at $1.2 billion in a letter that says the flooding will be the worst disaster in the state's modern history. McMaster asked Congressional leaders to hurry federal aid.

North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper said he knows the damage in his state will add up to billions of dollars, but said with the effects on the storm ongoing, there was no way to make a more accurate estimate.

Florence is blamed for at least 41 deaths in North Carolina, South Carolina and Virginia. Well over half of those killed were in vehicles.

In North Carolina, a familiar story was unfolding as many places that flooded in Hurricane Matthew in 2016 were once again inundated.

Pastor Floyd Benfield walked inside his Presbyterian Church of the Covenant in Spring Lake now that the Little River has retreated.

Two years ago, flooding ruined the baseboards and carpet. This year, the water broke the windows, leaving the pews a jumbled mess and soaked Bibles and hymn books on the floor.

"This sanctuary was built in 1909, and it never flooded until Hurricane Matthew," Benfield said.

In Wilmington, things kept creeping back closer to normal in the state's largest coastal city. Officials announced the end of a curfew and the resumption of regular trash pickup.

But they said access to the city of 120,000 was still limited and asked people who evacuated to wait a few more days. They also warned people to not get caught off guard as rivers that briefly receded were periodically rising back.

The storm continues to severely hamper travel. Parts of the main north-south route on the East coast, Interstate 95, and the main road to Wilmington, Interstate 40, remain flooded and will likely be closed at least until nearly the end of September, North Carolina Department of Transportation Secretary Jim Trogdon said.

More than a thousand other roads from major highways to neighborhood lanes are closed in the Carolinas, officials said. Some of them have been washed out entirely.

In South Carolina, the flood was far from over. The water appeared to stop rising in Nichols, but the town of 360 was almost entirely submerged for the second time in three years.

Jodi Pajaro owned one of the few houses in Nichols that wasn't flooded in 2016 by the Little Pee Dee and the Lumber Rivers which flow past either side of the town.

She evacuated like the rest of the residents and tenses up each time her cellphone dings. It is frequently pictures from friends who are rescuers riding boats in town. In the last one she saw, the water was maybe an inch or two (2.5 to 5 centimeters) from her front door.

"It doesn't look good. I am heartbroken," she wrote in a text.

The flood has been giving so much warning to Horry County, South Carolina, that officials published a detailed map of places that flooded in 2016 and warned those same places were going underwater again.

One man had time to build a 6-foot (1.8-meter) high dirt berm around his house. Rental trucks and flatbeds whisked furniture and valuables out of homes that were still dry in Conway.

The Waccamaw River has started its slow rise in the city of 23,000, and forecasters expect it to swell more than 3 feet (0.90 meters) above the previous record crest by Tuesday while still rising. Some areas could stay underwater for weeks, forecasters warned.

All that water from Nichols and Conway is heading toward Georgetown County, where five different rivers dump into the Atlantic Ocean. Officials warned more than 10 percent of the county's 61,000 residents might have to evacuate sometime next week, but called that a worst-case scenario and they couldn't give any specific forecast.

Authorities planned to start handing out 15,000 sandbags Friday.

"We're at the end of the line of all waters to come down," said Georgetown County Administrator Sel Hemingway, as he warned the area may see a flood like it has never seen before.

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Derosier reported from Spring Lake. Associated Press writers Jonathan Drew, Martha Waggoner and Gary D. Robertson in Raleigh; Jeffrey Collins and Meg Kinnard in Columbia, South Carolina; Michael Biesecker in Washington and Jay Reeves in Atlanta contributed to this report.

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For the latest on Hurricane Florence, visit https://www.apnews.com/tag/Hurricanes

Part of the Starlite Motel is washed away in the aftermath of flooding from Hurricane Florence in Spring Lake, N.C., Wednesday, Sept. 19, 2018. (AP Photo/David Goldman)

Part of the Starlite Motel is washed away in the aftermath of flooding from Hurricane Florence in Spring Lake, N.C., Wednesday, Sept. 19, 2018. (AP Photo/David Goldman)

Kishor Depani sorts through the damage of the motel he co-owns and lived in which was destroyed in the flooding from Hurricane Florence in Spring Lake, N.C., Wednesday, Sept. 19, 2018. Depani had put all his savings in the motel which he bought with family members about six months ago. (AP Photo/David Goldman)

Smita Depani, left, dumps out tea as her husband, Kishor, looks on while the family sorts through the damage of the motel they co-own and lived in which was destroyed in the flooding from Hurricane Florence in Spring Lake, N.C., Wednesday, Sept. 19, 2018. (AP Photo/David Goldman)

Smita Depani, center, stands in the apartment she lived in while surveying the damage with her brother-in-law Jayanti Depani, left, and sister-in-law Puspa Manvar in the motel they own which was destroyed in the flooding from Hurricane Florence in Spring Lake, N.C., Wednesday, Sept. 19, 2018. (AP Photo/David Goldman)

Dinesh Depani sorts through the damage of the motel his family owns which was destroyed in the flooding from Hurricane Florence in Spring Lake, N.C., Wednesday, Sept. 19, 2018. (AP Photo/David Goldman)

Jose Perez-Santiago, right, holds his daughter Jordalis, 2, as they return to their home for the first time since it was flooded in the aftermath of Hurricane Florence in Spring Lake, N.C., Wednesday, Sept. 19, 2018. "I didn't realize we would lose everything," said Perez-Santiago. "We'll just have to start from the bottom again." (AP Photo/David Goldman)

Rosemary Acevedo-Gonzalez, left, holds her daughter, Jordalis, 2, as they return to their home for the first time since it was flooded in the aftermath of Hurricane Florence in Spring Lake, N.C., Wednesday, Sept. 19, 2018. (AP Photo/David Goldman)

Rosemary Acevedo-Gonzalez retrieves clothing from her daughter's bathroom as she returns to their home for the first time since it was flooded in the aftermath of Hurricane Florence in Spring Lake, N.C., Wednesday, Sept. 19, 2018. "This is the only thing I can get," said Acevedo-Gonzalez of what was salvageable. "That's it. I'm done." (AP Photo/David Goldman)

Rosemary Acevedo-Gonzalez retrieves her daughter's clothing as she returns to their home for the first time since it was flooded in the aftermath of Hurricane Florence in Spring Lake, N.C., Wednesday, Sept. 19, 2018. "This is the only thing I can get," said Acevedo-Gonzalez of what was salvageable. "That's it. I'm done." (AP Photo/David Goldman)

Jose Perez-Santiago, left, and Rosemary Acevedo-Gonzalez, walk with their daughter Jordalis, 2, after retrieving her clothing upon returning to their home for the first time since it was flooded in the aftermath of Hurricane Florence in Spring Lake, N.C., Wednesday, Sept. 19, 2018. "I didn't realize we would lose everything," said Perez-Santiago. "We'll just have to start from the bottom again." (AP Photo/David Goldman)

U.S. Army Sgt. Rose Stromberg holds the American flag she was able to retrieve from her storage unit which was flooded in the aftermath of Hurricane Florence in Spring Lake, N.C., Wednesday, Sept. 19, 2018. The flag, which is adorned with all the names of those killed in the 9/11 terrorist attacks, flew with her during her deployment in Afghanistan. (AP Photo/David Goldman)

Dirt covers the back of U.S. Army Sgt. Rose Stromberg after she crawled into her storage unit, which was flooded in the aftermath of Hurricane Florence, to retrieve an American flag adorned with the names of those killed in the 9/11 terrorist attacks, in Spring Lake, N.C., Wednesday, Sept. 19, 2018. (AP Photo/David Goldman)

Seema Depani, left, helps her family clean up after flooding from Hurricane Florence destroyed the Starlite Motel which her family owns in Spring Lake, N.C., Wednesday, Sept. 19, 2018. (AP Photo/David Goldman)

Part of the Starlite Motel is washed away in the aftermath of flooding from Hurricane Florence in Spring Lake, N.C., Wednesday, Sept. 19, 2018. (AP Photo/David Goldman)

Part of the Starlite Motel is washed away in the aftermath of flooding from Hurricane Florence in Spring Lake, N.C., Wednesday, Sept. 19, 2018. (AP Photo/David Goldman)

Smita Depani, left, dumps out tea as her husband, Kishor, looks on while the family sorts through the damage of the motel they co-own and lived in which was destroyed in the flooding from Hurricane Florence in Spring Lake, N.C., Wednesday, Sept. 19, 2018. (AP Photo/David Goldman)

Kishor Depani sorts through the damage of the motel he co-owns and lived in which was destroyed in the flooding from Hurricane Florence in Spring Lake, N.C., Wednesday, Sept. 19, 2018. Depani had put all his savings in the motel which he bought with family members about six months ago. (AP Photo/David Goldman)

The wall of a motel room shows how high the flooding reached from the Little River in the aftermath of Hurricane Florence in Spring Lake, N.C., Wednesday, Sept. 19, 2018. (AP Photo/David Goldman)

Smita Depani, center, stands in the apartment she lived in while surveying the damage with her brother-in-law Jayanti Depani, left, and sister-in-law Puspa Manvar in the motel they own which was destroyed in the flooding from Hurricane Florence in Spring Lake, N.C., Wednesday, Sept. 19, 2018. (AP Photo/David Goldman)

Dinesh Depani sorts through the damage of the motel his family owns which was destroyed in the flooding from Hurricane Florence in Spring Lake, N.C., Wednesday, Sept. 19, 2018. (AP Photo/David Goldman)

President Donald Trump shakes hands with FEMA Administrator Brock Long as Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen watches after visiting areas in North Carolina and South Carolina impacted by Hurricane Florence, Wednesday, Sept. 19, 2018, at Myrtle Beach International Airport in Myrtle Beach, S.C. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

President Donald Trump visits a neighborhood impacted by Hurricane Florence, Wednesday, Sept. 19, 2018, in Conway, S.C. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

President Donald Trump visits a neighborhood impacted by Hurricane Florence, Wednesday, Sept. 19, 2018, in Conway, S.C., accompanied by South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster and Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., right. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

In this Sept. 19, 2018, photo released by Cape Fear River Watch, heavy rains from Hurricane Florence erode and breach a coal ash landfill at the L.V. Sutton Power Station in Wilmington, N.C. The landfill under construction at the site ruptured over the weekend, spilling enough material to fill 180 dump trucks. Coal ash contains arsenic, mercury and other toxic metals.(Kemp Burdette/Cape Fear River Watch via AP)

In this Sept. 19, 2018, photo released by Cape Fear River Watch, an earth mover is used to repair one of several breaches in a ruptured coal ash landfill at the L.V. Sutton Power Station in Wilmington, N.C. The landfill under construction at the site meant to hold coal ash in lined terraces ruptured over the weekend from heavy rains from Hurricane Florence, spilling enough material to fill 180 dump trucks. Coal ash contains arsenic, mercury and other toxic metals. (Kemp Burdette/Cape Fear River Watch via AP)

Severe flooding from the Northeast Cape Fear River due to the torrential rains from Hurricane Florence is seen in Burgaw, N.C., Wednesday, Sept. 19, 2018. Frustration and sheer exhaustion are building as thousands of people wait to go home seven days after the storm began battering the coast. (Matt Born/The Star-News via AP)
LAREDO, Texas (AP) - Janelle Ortiz dreamed of becoming famous. Melissa Ramirez imagined a day when the street wasn't home and drugs not her preoccupation. Claudine Luera just ached to see her children do better than she had.

All of these women, bound by difficulties in life, met an eerily similar death: They were shot in the head and left on rural Texas roadsides, allegedly by a Border Patrol agent who has been described as a serial killer. Relatives of the dead are now grieving for loved ones who, they say, were more than the troubles they endured.

"They had families. They were loved. They were someone. They were human," said Colette Mireles, a sister of Luera.

A framed photo of Melissa Ramirez sits at the end of a makeshift altar in her mother's home in Rio Bravo, Texas, on Tuesday, Sept. 18, 2018. (AP Photo/Susan Montoya Bryan)

The suspect's motive remains unknown. Authorities said the three women and a fourth woman, Guiselda Alicia Cantu, whose name was released Wednesday, were sex workers, and that Border Patrol supervisor Juan David Ortiz knew some of them.

Each lived a life littered with hardship. Gracie Perez remembered her sister-in-law, 29-year-old Ramirez, telling her she was raped when she was 13. She dropped out of high school, experienced depression and eventually began living on the streets. Her five children were left in the care of others. She struggled with a drug habit.

Despite all of that, her relatives remembered someone always trying to make others laugh. Ramirez liked pulling up funny videos on YouTube, devouring whatever food was before her and enjoying TV at full blast as she fell asleep on the couch.

Perez said her sister-in-law frequently returned home to her mother's house, where two of her children live, typically staying a few days, vowing to get off drugs and improve her life before returning to the streets.

"She wanted to be a better mom, a better person," Perez said. "She didn't want to be running the streets anymore."

Janelle Ortiz, 28, envisioned a future where her personality and gift for talking with nearly anyone transformed her into someone famous. Rosenda Ortiz, her younger sister, remembered the difficult childhood they shared, with them constantly being thrust into new homes. She said her sister was strong and had a big heart, always asking what others needed.

Rosenda Ortiz hoped that one day she'd be able to get a home of her own and invite her sister to come live with her.

"He was not known as a prostitute or a sex worker," she said, using pronouns she knows her transgender sister would have chided her for. "He was just a human being like the other victims. He was just living his life."

Mireles last talked to her 42-year-old sister two days before her body was found. She was "over the moon" upon hearing that one of her sons was doing well in school and was already ironing out plans for prom with his girlfriend.

As children, the sisters were at each other's throats. But Mireles marveled at her sister's ability to smile through her pain, even as her life spiraled downward the past few years. She always knew she might get a call with news of Luera's death, but she figured it would be an overdose. To hear she was found shot, clinging to life on the side of the road, was harrowing.

The suspect told police that Luera questioned him about being the last person to have seen Ramirez before her death, authorities said. Mireles takes some comfort thinking of her sister's bravery in confronting him.

"My sister was feisty, so I'm sure she put up a hell of a fight," she said.

Joey Tellez, the attorney for the 35-year-old suspect, released a statement saying he would not be commenting on the case. Ortiz is a Navy veteran who had been in the Border Patrol about 10 years.

Back at the modest home Ramirez frequented, an American flag is tied to a front window of a faded green trailer, and toys are strewn across the yard. Her mother, Maria Cristina Benevidez, steps haltingly as she places a photo of her daughter beside the wooden box that holds her ashes, hanging rosary beads and a gold cross necklace from the frame.

Roosters are crowing, a Chihuahua named Mia is barking and Benevidez stands solemnly, her head bowed. Two weeks before Ramirez was found, she sat at the kitchen table in this home and shared a frightening premonition.

"I'm going to get killed. I'm going to be dead in less than a month," her brother Cesar Ramirez remembered his sister saying.

"Stop saying nonsense," he said his mother responded. "Stop saying those stupid things."

She persisted, insisting she would be shot in the head.

"They're going to kill me. They're going to kill me," she said.

Ramirez was drunk, her sister-in-law said, and she didn't offer any more details of her vision.

Later, Perez said, her sister-in-law pressed her to join her for a night of partying. Ramirez called her over and over, but she didn't answer. Now, she thinks she should have done something more, and she's haunted by Ramirez's parting words.

"This is the last time you're going to see me," she warned.

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Sedensky reported from New York.

Maria Cristina Benevidez holds a photograph of her daughter, Melissa Ramirez, at her home in Rio Bravo, Texas. Ramirez is one of four women authorities say were killed by a Border Patrol supervisor. (AP Photo/Susan Montoya Bryan)

A framed photo of Melissa Ramirez sits at the end of a makeshift altar in her mother's home in Rio Bravo, Texas, on Tuesday, Sept. 18, 2018. (AP Photo/Susan Montoya Bryan)

Gracie Perez, right, and husband Cesar Ramirez pose for a portrait Tuesday, Sept. 18, 2018, in Rio Bravo, Texas. Ramirez's sister, Melissa, was among the four victims authorities say were killed by a Border Patrol supervisor. (AP Photo/Susan Montoya Bryan)

Dozens of family members and friends of four women who authorities say were killed by a U.S. Border Patrol agent gather for a candlelight vigil at a park in downtown Laredo, Texas, on Tuesday, Sept. 18, 2018. Juan David Ortiz was arrested Saturday while hiding in a hotel parking garage. Investigators believe he fatally shot the four victims during separate attacks after taking each of them to desolate areas outside of Laredo. Investigators say a fifth victim escaped and contacted authorities. (AP Photo/Susan Montoya Bryan)

Dozens of family members and friends of four women who authorities say were killed by a U.S. Border Patrol agent gather for a candlelight vigil at a park in downtown Laredo, Texas, on Tuesday, Sept. 18, 2018. Juan David Ortiz was arrested Saturday while hiding in a hotel parking garage. Investigators believe he fatally shot the four victims during separate attacks after taking each of them to desolate areas outside of Laredo. Investigators say a fifth victim escaped and contacted authorities. (AP Photo/Susan Montoya Bryan)

Family members and friends of four women who authorities say were killed by a U.S. Border Patrol agent attend a candlelight vigil at a park in downtown Laredo, Texas, on Tuesday, Sept. 18, 2018. Juan David Ortiz was arrested Saturday while hiding in a hotel parking garage. Investigators believe he fatally shot the four victims during separate attacks after taking each of them to desolate areas outside of Laredo. Investigators say a fifth victim escaped and contacted authorities. (AP Photo/Susan Montoya Bryan)

Dozens of family members and friends of four women who authorities say were killed by a U.S. Border Patrol agent pray during a candlelight vigil at a park in downtown Laredo, Texas, on Tuesday, Sept. 18, 2018. Juan David Ortiz was arrested Saturday while hiding in a hotel parking garage. Investigators believe he fatally shot the four victims during separate attacks after taking each of them to desolate areas outside of Laredo. Investigators say a fifth victim escaped and contacted authorities. (AP Photo/Susan Montoya Bryan)

Dozens of family members and friends of four women who authorities say were killed by a U.S. Border Patrol agent gather for a candlelight vigil at a park in downtown Laredo, Texas, on Tuesday, Sept. 18, 2018. Juan David Ortiz was arrested Saturday while hiding in a hotel parking garage. Investigators believe he fatally shot the four victims during separate attacks after taking each of them to desolate areas outside of Laredo. Investigators say a fifth victim escaped and contacted authorities. (AP Photo/Susan Montoya Bryan)
LIMA, Peru (AP) - Facing closure, Peru's Congress has backed a proposal for a referendum on anti-corruption measures.

The vote late Wednesday by the opposition-dominated Congress represents something of a truce with President Martin Vizcarra, who had threatened to use his constitutional powers to dissolve the house unless it went along with his plan.

Vizcarra has been rallying the public's support with a promise to clean up politics following the leak of several videos showing judges negotiating bribes with politicians.

A television screen in the Napoleon restaurant shows Peru's Prime Minister Cesar Villanueva speaking, right, in the Legislative Palace chamber where lawmakers are debating President Martin Vizcarra's call for a referendum on anti-corruption measures, in Lima, Peru, Wednesday, Sept. 19, 2018. If Congress refuses to back his plan, Vizcarra will be empowered to dissolve the legislature, something that hasn't happened since the authoritarian government of Alberto Fujimori in 1992. (AP Photo/Rodrigo Abd)

Under the deal approved Wednesday, lawmakers gave themselves two weeks to come up with the proposed reforms that will be submitted to voter approval in December.

Vizcarra took over as president in March after Pedro Pablo Kuczynski resigned amid a vote-buying scandal.

Government supporters hold signs with messages that reads in Spanish: "No more Congress", left, and "Say what they say, Do what they do, The People are with Vizcarra," in front of the Legislative Palace, in Lima, Peru, Wednesday, Sept. 19, 2018. Peruvian lawmakers are debating President Martin Vizcarra's call for a referendum on anti-corruption measures. If Congress refuses to back his plan, then Vizcarra will be empowered to dissolve the legislature, something that hasn't happened since the authoritarian government of Alberto Fujimori in 1992. (AP Photo/Rodrigo Abd)

A man holding a cat is flanked by riot police patrolling near the Legislative Palace, in Lima, Peru, Wednesday, Sept. 19, 2018. Peruvian lawmakers are debating President Martin Vizcarra's call for a referendum on anti-corruption measures. If Congress refuses to back his plan, then Vizcarra will be empowered to dissolve the legislature, something that hasn't happened since the authoritarian government of Alberto Fujimori in 1992. (AP Photo/Rodrigo Abd)
SEOUL, South Korea (AP) - A sacred volcano at the heart of North Korea's founding mythology. The ruling party's headquarters, said to be a potential target of South Korean and U.S. military attacks. An art studio that produces giant propaganda statues. And a 150,000-seat stadium in Pyongyang where the country's unique mass games are performed.

The places South Korean President Moon Jae-in visited during his three-day trip to North Korea are glimpses into the country and how it sees itself.

A look at what Moon saw:

In this Sept. 18, 2018, file photo, South Korean President Moon Jae-in, left, and North Koran leader Kim Jong Un stand at the headquarters of the Central Committee of the Workers' Party in Pyongyang, North Korea. (Pyongyang Press Corps Pool via AP, File)

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MOUNT PAEKTU

Moon and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un visited the picturesque active volcano on the North Korean-Chinese border on Thursday and took a cable car to the crater lake called "Chonji" where they strolled together.

North Korean documents say national founder Kim Il Sung, the current leader's grandfather, had an anti-Japan guerrilla base on the slopes of Paektu during Tokyo's colonial rule. The official biography of Kim Jong Il says the second-generation leader was born on Paektu when a double rainbow filled the skies. The North's state media have described Kim Jong Un visiting the mountain days before significant events such as the execution of his powerful uncle in 2013 and his New Year's Day speech this year in which he suggested the Koreas cooperate during the Winter Olympics that were held in South Korea in February.

Moon's Paektu trip was arranged at Kim's suggestion. During their April summit, Moon told Kim that a Paektu trek was one of his unrealized wishes.

Paektu is the highest peak on the Korean Peninsula, and climbing the mountain from its Chinese side is popular among South Korean tourists.

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THE WORKERS' PARTY HEADQUARTERS

Moon and Kim held the first of their summit talks Tuesday at the Pyongyang headquarters of the ruling Workers' Party. It's where Kim's office is located, and South Korean media dub it "the heart of North Korea." Kim rules North Korea in his capacity as the party's chairman, one of his many official titles such as supreme commander of the North's 1.2 million-strong People's Army.

South Korean and U.S. militaries have designated the headquarters among their targets to attack in the event of war on the Korean Peninsula, according to South Korean media.

Moon is the first South Korean leader to hold a summit at the building. The leaders who went to Pyongyang for summits in 2000 and 2007 met with Kim's father at the Paekhwawon guesthouse where they stayed.

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MANSUDAE ART STUDIO

Thousands of government artists work in the huge studio complex to produce everything from propaganda-themed paintings, huge bronze statues and mosaics to watercolor tigers. The studio is on the U.N. sanctions blacklist and subject to an asset freeze and travel ban because of its dispatch of artists and other workers abroad to do projects to generate revenue for the Kim government. African countries are Mansudae's main overseas market for its socialist-style monuments and statues.

During his visit Wednesday to the studio, Moon looked at paintings of Paektu, an ancient Pyongyang pavilion and the scenic Diamond Mountain where the Koreas once ran a joint tourism project.

He also looked at paintings of Pungsan dogs, the same breed as Moon's pet, Maru, who lives at the presidential palace in Seoul.

In a guestbook, Moon wrote, "I wish that art would become a bridge connecting South and North Korea as one."

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MAY DAY STADIUM

On Wednesday evening, the two leaders went to the 150,000-seat May Day Stadium to watch a "Glorious Country" mass performance.

The performers moved in unison to display handshakes between Kim and Moon and an undivided Korean Peninsula.

Moon delivered an emotionally charged speech to the crowd, saying that "We lived together for 5,000 years and lived in separation for 70 years. I now propose that we completely eliminate the hostility of the past 70 years and take a big step forward in peace so that we can become one again."

It was the first public speech by a South Korean president in North Korea since the end of the 1950-53 Korean War.

The mass games embody socialist ideals, and North Korea revived them for its 70th birthday last month after a five-year hiatus.

In 2000, Kim's father took visiting U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright to a mass performance. The show included a giant mosaic displaying a flying rocket, and Albright later said she was spellbound by the precision of the performance but felt uncomfortable with its glorification of the North Korean government. Kim reportedly told Albright at the time, "This will be our last missile."

FILE - In this Sept. 19, 2018, file photo, South Korean President Moon Jae-in and his wife Kim Jung-sook tour at the Mansudae Art Studio in Pyongyang, North Korea. Thousands of government artists work in the huge studio complex to produce everything from propaganda-themed paintings, huge, bronze statues and mosaics to watercolor tigers. The studio is on the U.N. sanctions blacklist and subject to an asset freeze and travel ban because it sends artists and other workers to do projects abroad to generate revenue for the Kim government. (Pyongyang Press Corps Pool via AP, File)

South Korean President Moon Jae-in, center right, and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, center left, visit the Mount Paektu in North Korea, Thursday, Sept. 20, 2018. Moon and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un visited the picturesque and active volcano on the North Korean-Chinese border on Thursday and took a cable car to the crater lake called "Chonji" where they strolled together. (Pyongyang Press Corps Pool via AP)

In this Sept. 18, 2018 photo, a general view of the headquarters of the Central Committee of the Workers' Party in Pyongyang, North Korea. South Korea's President Moon Jae-in and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un held the first of their summit talks Tuesday, Sept. 18, at the Pyongyang headquarters of the ruling party. It's where Kim's office is located and South Korean media dub it "the heart of North Korea." (Pyongyang Press Corps Pool via AP)

FILE - In this Feb. 14, 2012 file photo, a new bronze statue depicting the late North Korean leader Kim Jong Il, right, and his father Kim Il Sung are seen at stands inside the grounds of the Mansudae Art Studio after it was unveiled in Pyongyang, North Korea. Thousands of government artists work in the huge studio complex to produce everything from propaganda-themed paintings, huge, bronze statues and mosaics to watercolor tigers. The studio is on the U.N. sanctions blacklist and subject to an asset freeze and travel ban because it sends artists and other workers to do projects abroad to generate revenue for the Kim government.(AP Photo/David Guttenfelder, File)

In this Sept. 19, 2018, file photo, North Koreans perform during the mass games performance of "The Glorious Country" at May Day Stadium in Pyongyang, North Korea. (Pyongyang Press Corps Pool via AP, File)

FILE - In this Sept. 19, 2018, file photo, North Koreans welcome South Korean President Moon Jae-in and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un during the mass games performance of "The Glorious Country" at May Day Stadium in Pyongyang, North Korea. On Wednesday evening, Sept. 19, South Korea's President Moon Jae-in and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un went to the 150,000-seat May Day Stadium to watch a "Glorious Country" mass performance. The performers moved in unison to display handshakes between Kim and Moon and an undivided Korean Peninsula. (Pyongyang Press Corps Pool via AP)

FILE - In this Sept. 19, 2018, file photo, South Korean President Moon Jae-in, left, and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un hold documents after signing at the Paekhwawon State Guesthouse in Pyongyang, North Korea. Moon and Kim held the first of their summit talks Tuesday, Sept. 18, at the Pyongyang headquarters of the ruling Workers' Party. It's where Kim's office is located and South Korean media dub it "the heart of North Korea." (Pyongyang Press Corps Pool via AP, File)

South Korean President Moon Jae-in, right, and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, left, visit the Mount Paektu in North Korea, Thursday, Sept. 20, 2018. Moon and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un visited the picturesque and active volcano on the North Korean-Chinese border on Thursday and took a cable car to the crater lake called "Chonji" where they strolled together. (Pyongyang Press Corps Pool via AP)
TAIPEI, Taiwan (AP) - Taiwan said Thursday it is looking for the owner of a Texas company that sells blueprints to make untraceable 3-D printed guns who is wanted on an arrest warrant tied to an accusation that he had sex with an underage girl and paid her $500 afterward.

The National Immigration Agency and Criminal Investigation Bureau confirmed that Cody Wilson was in Taiwan after arriving on the island earlier this month.

Division Director Kan Yen-min was quoted by the official Central News Agency as saying the bureau has yet to receive intelligence from the U.S. regarding Wilson, but will continue seeking more information about the case.

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. Police allege in an affidavit filed Wednesday, Sept. 19, that Wilson had sex with an underage girl and paid her $500 afterward. Austin police Detective Shaun Donovan wrote in a request for a warrant to arrest Wilson on a sexual assault charge. The court filing doesn't say how old the girl is, but Texas' age of consent is 17. (AP Photo/Eric Gay, File)

Taiwan and the U.S. do not have an extradition treaty but cooperate extensively on legal and security matters.

Austin, Texas, police Cmdr. Troy Officer said Wednesday that his department is working with national and international law enforcement agencies to find Wilson, whose last known location was Taiwan's capital, Taipei.

Officer said it's unclear why Wilson went to Taiwan, but he is known to travel extensively. He said before Wilson flew there, a friend of the 16-year-old girl informed Wilson that police were investigating the accusation that he had sex with the youth.

Wilson is identified in the affidavit as the owner of Austin-based Defense Distributed. After a federal court barred Wilson from posting the printable gun blueprints online for free last month, he announced he had begun selling them for any amount of money to U.S. customers through his website.

Nineteen states and the District of Columbia sued to stop an agreement that the government reached with Defense Distributed, arguing that the blueprints for how to print plastic guns could be obtained by felons or terrorists.

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This story has been corrected to show that company sells blueprints to make 3-D printed guns, not the guns themselves.
PYONGYANG, North Korea (AP) - South Korean President Moon Jae-in has wrapped up a three-day visit to North Korea's capital, the first by a South Korean leader in 11 years. His meetings with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un appear to have put wobbly U.S.-North Korea talks on the North's nuclear weapons back on track. A look at what happened and what it means:

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THE SUBSTANCE

South Korean President Moon Jae-in, center left, his wife Kim Jung-sook, second from left, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, center right, and his wife Ri Sol Ju, second from right, clap hands upon their arrival at Okryu-Gwan restaurant in Pyongyang, North Korea, Wednesday, Sept. 19, 2018. (Pyongyang Press Corps Pool via AP)

After two earlier summits with soaring but empty rhetoric, the Korean leaders finally produced some substance on their third try. North Korea promised to dismantle some of its nuclear facilities, though in one case only if the U.S. takes unspecified reciprocal measures. The two Koreas agreed to several steps to reduce tensions and the risk of accidental clashes along the heavily fortified border that divides them, and to make a joint bid to host the 2032 Summer Olympics. The better-than-expected outcome kick-started stalled negotiations between Washington and Pyongyang, boosting President Donald Trump's high-stakes push to get the North to give up its nuclear weapons.

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THE POMP

Throughout the trip, Moon could be seen smiling broadly as he and Kim enjoyed the ecstatic reception of a Pyongyang that seemed to have been painted, polished and framed until it was the best possible version of itself. To some observers, the grand theater was a propaganda coup for North Korea and its leader. On the final day, Kim even escorted Moon to Mount Paektu , a still-active volcano considered to be the spiritual center of the North Korean revolution. The places Moon visited , including the mammoth stadium where he watched a performance of North Korea's unique mass games, provided glimpses into the country and how it sees itself.

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THE MEANING

How you see the third summit this year between Moon and Kim - and there could be a fourth in the works, with Kim promising to visit Seoul soon - may depend on where you're sitting, both geographically and politically. AP bureau chiefs reported on the views from Pyongyang and Seoul . For Moon, the summit also represented unfinished business . He is looking to bolster the legacy of his late friend and political mentor, former President Roh Moo-hyun, whose ambitious efforts to build trust with the North crumbled as it began building its nuclear arsenal. The still unanswered question : Whether Moon's outreach will succeed in bringing about the denuclearization of North Korea.

In this Wednesday, Sept. 19, 2018 photo, South Korean President Moon Jae-in, center left, talks with North Korean official Choe Ryong Hae, center right, after planting a memorial tree at Paekhwawon State Guesthouse in Pyongyang, North Korea. (Pyongyang Press Corps Pool via AP)

In this Wednesday, Sept. 19, 2018 photo, South Korean President Moon Jae-in, left, and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un watch the mass games performance of "The Glorious Country" at May Day Stadium in Pyongyang, North Korea. President Moon Jae-in has delivered a speech to a massive North Korean crowd gathered for mass games, calling for the rival Koreas to end seven decades of hostility and build a future of peace and prosperity. (Pyongyang Press Corps Pool via AP)
BEIRUT (AP) - The leader of Lebanon's militant Hezbollah boasted Thursday the group now possesses "highly accurate" missiles despite Israeli attempts to prevent it from acquiring such weapons.

Hassan Nasrallah didn't offer specifics on the precision weapons, but his comments prompted a reply from Israel's Prime Minister.

Benjamin Netanyahu warned the Hezbollah leader that "if he confronts us, he will receive a lethal blow that he can't even imagine."

A Lebanese Shiite supporter of the Iranian-backed Hezbollah group, holds a portrait of Hezbollah leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, during activities to mark the ninth of Ashura, a 10-day ritual commemorating the death of Imam Hussein, in a southern suburb of Beirut, Lebanon, Wednesday, Sept. 19, 2018. Hassan Nasrallah says his group may reduce the number of its fighters in Syria because of an easing of the conflict, particularly after a recent Russian-Turkey agreement that prevented an offensive on the last rebel stronghold. (AP Photo/Hussein Malla)

Israel worries that Hezbollah has been improving its capabilities and Israeli officials have said they will not allow "game-changing" weapons, such as guided missiles, to reach the group.

In recent months, Israel has acknowledged carrying out scores of strikes in Syria, most of them believed aimed at halting suspected arms shipments for Hezbollah from Iran, its main backer and Israel's archenemy.

On Thursday, Nasrallah claimed Israeli strikes in Syria to prevent Hezbollah from acquiring precise missiles were ineffective.

"I tell (Israel) no matter what it did to cut the route, it is over. It has already been achieved," he said, adding that Hezbollah "now possesses precision missiles and non-precision and weapons capabilities."

Nasrallah was speaking during a traditional televised speech at the end of Ashoura, a top religious holy day for Shiite Muslims that lasts for ten days.

He told supporters to be confident and Israelis to be concerned of Hezbollah's capabilities.

Nasrallah said the balance of power in the region has changed.

Hezbollah has thousands of fighters in Syria supporting President Bashar Assad's forces in the civil war.

"If Israel imposes a war on Lebanon, Israel will face a destiny and reality it didn't expect any day," Nasrallah said.

Nasrallah's speech was broadcast on a large screen to supporters in Beirut's majority-Shiite suburb of Dahiya.

On Wednesday, Nasrallah said Israeli claims to have targeted a shipment to Hezbollah in Syria's Latakia province earlier this week were "lies."

Hezbollah fighters will continue to be deployed in Syria, he said, but perhaps in lesser numbers due to reduced fighting there after Syrian government forces regained control of most rebel-held areas.

Nasrallah also urged supporters to rally behind Iran, saying it's facing hard times as more U.S. sanctions take effect in November.
LONDON (AP) - A novel in verse and a story about trees and the people who love them are among six finalists announced Thursday for the prestigious Man Booker Prize for fiction.

U.K. poet Robin Robertson's verse novel about violence and social division in contemporary America, "The Long Take," and U.S. novelist Richard Powers' eco-saga "The Overstory" - whose characters are both human and arboreal - are on a list that includes three U.K. authors, two Americans and a Canadian.

"The Long Take" is one of two debut novels on the list, alongside "Everything Under," a story of words and memory by British writer Daisy Johnson. At 27, Johnson is the youngest-ever Booker finalist.

The panel of judges, from left, Jacqueline Rose, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Val McDermid, Leo Robson and Leanne Shapton pose for a photo, during the Man Booker Prize 2018 shortlist announcement, at Riverbank House, in London, Thursday, Sept. 20, 2018. Three U.K. authors, two Americans and a Canadian are finalists for the Man Booker Prize for fiction. The shortlist announced Thursday includes two first novels: U.K. poet Robin Robertson's verse novel "The Long Take" and "Everything Under" by British writer Daisy Johnson. The American finalists are Rachel Kushner's prison story "The Mars Room" and Richard Powers' tree-inspired tale "The Overstory." (Yui Mok/PA via AP)

U.S. writer Rachel Kushner's gritty women's prison story "The Mars Room" is also a finalist. "Washington Black," the saga of an escaped slave by Canada's Esi Edugyan, and "Milkman," a story by Northern Ireland writer Anna Burns set during the violent conflict known as the Troubles, round out the list.

The prize, subject to intense speculation and a flurry of betting, usually brings the victor a huge boost in sales and profile.

This year's judges have favored new talent over more established names. Of the six finalists, only Edugyan has been nominated before, and favorites including Canada's Michael Ondaatje didn't make the cut from the 13-novel longlist.

Writer Kwame Anthony Appiah, chairman of the judging panel, said "these books speak very much to our moment but we believe they will endure."

Founded in 1969, the prize was originally open to British, Irish and Commonwealth writers. Americans have been eligible since 2014, and there have been two American winners - Paul Beatty's "The Sellout" in 2016 and George Saunders' "Lincoln in the Bardo" in 2017.

The winner of the 50,000-pound ($66,000) prize will be announced on Oct. 16 during a black-tie dinner at London's Guildhall.
KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) - An Afghan official says the Taliban have carried out a series of coordinated attacks in central Ghazni province, killing five members of the security forces.

Arif Noori, a spokesman for the provincial governor, said three security outposts in Ab Band district were attacked by insurgents in coordinated raids on Thursday morning.

Two policemen were wounded in the attacks that lasted several hours as security personnel and insurgents exchanged gunfire. Noori said six Taliban fighters were killed and four were wounded before the attacks were repelled.

Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said in a statement that the Taliban captured a district in Ghazni. Insurgents often exaggerate their battlefield gains.

Also on Thursday, police officer Amin Jan said a roadside bomb wounded five people in eastern Nangarhar province.
Your daily look at late-breaking news, upcoming events and the stories that will be talked about today:

1. MOON SAYS KIM WANTS SUMMIT WITH TRUMP

South Korea's president says that the North Korean leader wants the U.S. secretary of state to come to Pyongyang for nuclear talks, and that Kim wants to have a second summit with Trump as soon as possible.

South Korean President Moon Jae-in and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un raise their hands after watching the mass games performance of "The Glorious Country" at May Day Stadium in Pyongyang, North Korea, Wednesday, Sept. 19, 2018. (Pyongyang Press Corps Pool via AP)

2. WHAT GOP IS WARNING

That time is running out for Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh's accuser to tell Congress about her claim that he sexually assaulted her when both were in high school.

3. 'TREATED WOMEN WITH DECENCY AND RESPECT'

It started as a chain of phone calls among old high-school friends and in a matter of hours, 65 women signed onto a letter rallying behind Kavanaugh, AP learns.

4. FOR FLORENCE VICTIMS, THE LONGEST WEEK

Thousands of frustrated and exhausted residents of the Carolinas have endured an agonizing week of violent winds, torrential rain, widespread flooding, power outages and death.

5. US LAWMAKER CLAIMS STATE-BACKED HACKING

Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden says his office discovered that an unspecified number of senators and aides have received warnings that their personal accounts have been targeted by foreign government hackers.

6. IMMIGRANT ROUNDUPS NETTING NON-CRIMINALS

Arrests by ICE of non-criminals soared 66 percent in the first nine months of this fiscal year over the same period a year earlier, while apprehensions of criminals have gone up only 2 percent.

7. WHAT ABE'S THIRD TERM MIGHT MEAN

The Japanese prime minister might pursue his long-sought revision to Japan's U.S.-drafted pacifist constitution, although hurdles remain and doing so would carry political risks.

8. SCIENTISTS FEAR NON-PEST INSECTS ARE DECLINING

Experts say environmental change may be the reason why flying insects that aren't really pests, like moths, lady bugs, fireflies and butterflies, are on the decline.

9. MARIJUANA MUSEUM OPENS IN VEGAS

Sin City's newest tourist attraction features a glass bong taller than a giraffe and huggable faux marijuana plants.

10. WHEN ART IMITATES LIFE

Hollywood stuntman Eddie Braun, who successfully jumped the Snake River Canyon in a steam-powered rocket in honor Evel Knievel, is the subject of the documentary "Stuntman."

Jose Perez-Santiago, left, and Rosemary Acevedo-Gonzalez, walk with their daughter Jordalis, 2, after retrieving her clothing upon returning to their home for the first time since it was flooded in the aftermath of Hurricane Florence in Spring Lake, N.C., Wednesday, Sept. 19, 2018. "I didn't realize we would lose everything," said Perez-Santiago. "We'll just have to start from the bottom again." (AP Photo/David Goldman)
SALZBURG, Austria (AP) - Britain and its European Union partners failed on Thursday to secure a breakthrough in Brexit talks, largely because of seemingly intractable divisions over the best way to avoid a hard border on the island of Ireland and how to deal with future trade.

With Britain's departure from the EU on March 29, 2019, looming, there are growing concerns that a deal on the post-Brexit relationship may not be cobbled together in time to ensure a smooth and orderly British exit.

All leaders, including British Prime Minister Theresa May, are desperate to solve the biggest Brexit riddle - how to keep goods moving freely between Northern Ireland in the U.K. and EU member state Ireland.

British Prime Minister Theresa May looks to passing by heads of government after the family photo at the informal EU summit in Salzburg, Austria, Thursday, Sept. 20, 2018. (AP Photo/Kerstin Joensson)

Despite reports of a friendly spirit at a summit in Salzburg, Austria, the fundamental differences remained. EU Council President Donald Tusk said parts of May's Brexit plan - dubbed Chequers after a key Brexit meeting at the premier's country residence of the same name - simply "will not work."

But just minutes after he spoke, May insisted that her Brexit plan was the "only serious and credible" proposal on the table.

Like many leaders, including May, Tusk said "we need to compromise on both sides." He wants to see a major breakthrough by the time the leaders meet again in Brussels on Oct. 18-19. Tusk said a special Brexit summit could be held in mid-November if things progress as hoped - but only as a "punch line" if most of the deal had already been agreed.

If Britain is to leave with a deal in six months, May and the Europeans must find solutions in coming weeks so parliaments have enough time to ratify the agreement.

They've spent two days in Salzburg trying to do just that, but with things at a standstill, each side tried to ramp up pressure on the other. Each is urging the other to compromise, while EU leaders issue constant warnings to Britain about the Brexit clock ticking.

"Time is running short," Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar told reporters. "We want to avoid a 'No Deal Brexit,' but we are preparing for that. We are hiring extra staff and officials, bringing in IT systems. We are ready for that eventuality, should it occur."

Tusk said that key parts of the British proposals to leave would undermine the union of the 27 remaining members.

May wants to keep the U.K. inside the bloc's single market for goods, but not services. The EU has insisted that the single market cannot be cherry-picked like that.

"Europe isn't an a la carte menu," French President Emmanuel Macron said.

The French said May's proposals "are not acceptable as they stand, particularly in the economic realm" because they "don't respect the integrity of the single market."

Tusk agreed May's Chequers proposals "will not work, not least because it risks undermining the single market" of seamless movement of goods, services, capital and persons.

The biggest single obstacle to a deal is the need to maintain an open border between the U.K.'s Northern Ireland and EU member Ireland. For Ireland, it's important not to undermine the hard-won peace after decades of sectarian tensions in neighboring Northern Ireland.

May said Britain and the EU agreed on the need for a legally binding backstop to guarantee there would be no hard Irish border. But Britain rejects the EU's proposal, which would keep Northern Ireland inside the bloc's customs union while the rest of the U.K. leaves.

May said the backstop "cannot divide the United Kingdom into two customs territories." She said Britain "will be bringing forward our own proposals shortly" about how to break the impasse.

Dealing with the EU is only part of May's problem. Her Chequers plan also faces opposition from pro-Brexit members of her own Conservative Party, who say it would keep Britain tethered to the bloc, unable to strike new trade deals around the world.

Former Brexit Secretary David Davis, who quit the government in July, said Thursday that the Chequers plan was "devoid of democracy" and "worse than no deal."

Macron, meanwhile, expressed contempt for pro-Brexit British politicians who told the public there would be "simple solutions" to leaving.

He said Brexit "demonstrated that those who explain that one can get by easily without Europe - that it will all go well, that it is easy and brings in a lot of money - are liars."

Any Brexit deal will include a withdrawal agreement and transition period to smooth Britain's exit from the bloc.

Currently that's expected to last until the end of 2020 - but without a deal Britain would crash out of the EU on Brexit day, a development that in theory could see flights parked and trade between the two sides grind to a halt.

It all suggests a fractious summit in Brussels next month.

"We are today at the moment of truth," Macron warned.

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Lawless reported from London. Raf Casert in Brussels, Thomas Adamson in Paris, and Geir Moulson in Berlin contributed.

French President Emmanuel Macron, left, talks with British Prime Minister Theresa May when arriving for a family photo at the informal EU summit in Salzburg, Austria, Thursday, Sept. 20, 2018. (AP Photo/Kerstin Joensson)

Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte, left, and Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz chat when arriving at the informal EU summit in Salzburg, Austria, Thursday, Sept. 20, 2018. (AP Photo/Kerstin Joensson)

British Prime Minister Theresa May arrives at the informal EU summit in Salzburg, Austria, Thursday, Sept. 20, 2018. (AP Photo/Kerstin Joensson)

Swedish Prime Minister Stefan Lofven, Slovenian Prime Minister Marjan Sarec, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Finnish Prime Minister Juha Sipila, Lithuanian President Dalia Grybauskaite and French President Emmanuel Macron, front row from left, and, back row from left, Bulgarian Prime Minister Boyko Borissov, Estonian Prime Minister Juri Ratas, British Prime Minister Theresa May, Maltese Prime Minister Joseph Muscat, Slovenian Prime Minister Marjan Sarec and Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte poses for a family photo at the informal EU summit in Salzburg, Austria, Thursday, Sept. 20, 2018. (AP Photo/Matthias Schrader)

German Chancellor Angela Merkel, left, and British Prime Minister Theresa May talk prior to the beginning of the plenary session of the informal EU summit in Salzburg, Austria, Thursday, Sept. 20, 2018. (AP Photo/Matthias Schrader)

German Chancellor Angela Merkel, left, and British Prime Minister Theresa May wait for the beginning of the plenary session of the informal EU summit in Salzburg, Austria, Thursday, Sept. 20, 2018. (AP Photo/Matthias Schrader)

Jean-Claude Juncker, President of the European Commission, arrives at the informal EU summit in Salzburg, Austria, Thursday, Sept. 20, 2018. (AP Photo/Kerstin Joensson)
MINSK, Belarus (AP) - Ukraine's president says the country needs to amend its constitution to make NATO membership its long-term goal.

President Petro Poroshenko said Thursday that Ukrainians are finally convinced of the benefits of the alliance with NATO and said the Ukrainian army will meet the criteria for NATO membership by 2020.

Ukraine abruptly changed its pro-Russian stance following the overthrow of the pro-Kremlin government in 2014 and Russia's annexation of Crimea a month later. One of the arguments that Russia used to justify the annexation was fears that Ukraine would invite NATO troops to Crimea's strategic Black Sea port of Sevastopol.

Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko speaks during his annual state-of-the-nation address in Verkhovna Rada, the Ukrainian parliament, in Kiev, Ukraine, Thursday, Sept. 20, 2018. (Mykola Lazarenko/Presidential Press Service Pool Photo pool via AP)

Following Poroshenko's speech, the Ukrainian parliament voted to appeal to the Constitutional Court to review the amendments.
BUDAPEST, Hungary (AP) - A Hungarian appeals court on Thursday lowered to five years from seven the prison sentence of a Syrian man convicted of entering Hungary illegally and of complicity in throwing rocks at police during a 2015 border riot.

The case stems from rioting at the Hungary-Serbia border on Sept. 16, 2015, when dozens of police officers, migrants and some journalists were injured in clashes a day after Hungary closed the frontier, stranding hundreds of migrants.

Amnesty International said the conviction exemplified "the erosion of the rule of law and human rights protections in Hungary."

FILE - In this Sept. 16, 2015 file photo Hungarian police use water canons against refugees at the "Horgos 2" border crossing into Hungary, near Horgos, Serbia. A Hungarian appeals court on Thursday lowered to five years from seven the prison sentence of a Syrian man convicted of entering Hungary illegally and of complicity in throwing rocks at police during a 2015 border riot. The case stems from rioting at the Hungary-Serbia border on Sept. 16, 2015, when dozens of police officers, migrants and some journalists were injured in clashes a day after Hungary closed the frontier, stranding hundreds of migrants. (Tamas Soki/MTI via AP, file)

"Ahmed's absurd conviction has nothing to do with justice but instead plays into the hands of the Hungarian authorities' demonization of refugees, migrants and those seeking to protect them," said Eda Seyhan, Amnesty International's counter terrorism campaigner.

Since the 2015 migration crisis in Europe, Prime Minister Viktor Orban's government has applied increasingly strict anti-immigration policies. Recent legislation has included constitutional amendments, the imposition of a special tax on the funding of activities the government considers to be promoting migration and the criminalization of any assistance given to refugees and asylum-seekers, whose rights have also been curtailed.

The appeals court in the southern city of Szeged said Ahmed Hamed, a resident of Cyprus, has to serve at least two-thirds of his sentence before he can be released, so he may be freed in a few months.

Hamed, who was also expelled from Hungary for 10 years, had been sentenced to 10 years in prison in November 2016 but an appeals court annulled his conviction and ordered a retrial in June 2017. That resulted in the seven-year sentence which has now been reduced.
MASONTOWN, Pa. (AP) - The wife of a gunman killed after he opened fire at a Pennsylvania municipal building Wednesday said in a social media post that she was OK but did not say whether she had been injured in the shooting.

Crystal Dowdell, 39, posted on her Facebook account that she was fine late Wednesday and that police had taken her phone as evidence. Pennsylvania state police confirmed Thursday that Patrick Dowdell, 61, was the deceased gunman.

Dowdell entered the Masontown Borough building about 60 miles south of Pittsburgh after 2 p.m. Wednesday with a handgun drawn and began firing into the crowded complex's lobby. He wounded a police officer, who was treated and released for injuries to his hand, before wounding three civilians.

Law enforcement and emergency personnel gather outside the office of District Judge Daniel Shimshock's office in Masontown, Pa., Wednesday Sept. 19, 2018. At least four people were shot at the office. Details were not immediately available on the conditions of the victims. (AP Photo/Mike Jones/Washington Observer Reporter via AP)

Authorities would not say whether any of the victims were Dowdell's intended target or related to the domestic violence charges he was scheduled to appear in court to face Wednesday.

The three were taken to Ruby Memorial Hospital in Morgantown, West Virginia. A spokeswoman said Thursday the two men, ages 35 and 47, and a 39-year-old woman were all released Wednesday night.

Dowdell was shot and killed by a German Township police officer, who has not been identified.

Dowdell had been arrested Aug. 25 and charged with aggravated assault, terroristic threats, strangulation, simple assault and harassment.

The Observer-Reporter obtained court records related to a protective order granted against Dowdell and obtained by his wife Crystal.

Crystal Dowdell said in her August 27 request for a protective order that her husband had grabbed her and threatened her with a gun three days earlier after she asked for a divorce. She reported to police that he also choked her with a belt two days earlier, after accusing her of blocking his phone number and ignoring his calls.

"He said if this is the way I want it this is the way it will be. He said there would be no divorce and he would take out whoever he needed to take out," she wrote in the petition.

The final protection order granted on September 10, ordered authorities to get his belongings, and car from the shared home and to confiscate any of Patrick Dowdell's firearms or weapons.

It was unclear Thursday if the order had been executed.

An officer investigates a shooting that occurred in the Masontown borough municipal center on Wednesday, September 19, 2018, in Masontown, Pa. A gunman opened fire outside a crowded courtroom Wednesday afternoon, shooting at police and others before an officer fired multiple shots at him, killing him. (Andrew Stein/Post-Gazette via AP)
SALZBURG, Austria (AP) - The Latest on Europe's response to the influx of migrants (all times local):

5:40 p.m.

Cyprus police say 65 people - including 24 children and 18 women - believed to be Syrian migrants are receiving medical check-ups after arriving aboard a boat spotted southeast of the east Mediterranean island nation.

Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz arrives at the informal EU summit in Salzburg, Austria, Thursday, Sept. 20, 2018. (AP Photo/Kerstin Joensson)

Police said their vessel is believed to have set sail from Lebanon and was escorted by patrol boats into a harbor along Cyprus' eastern coast Thursday.

The boat's arrival coincided with an appeal for help with coping with migrants that Cypriot President Nicos Anastasiades issued to other European Union leaders during a summit in Austria on Thursday. Anastasiades said EU leaders showed understanding and that he expects "tangible" assistance.

Anastasiades earlier told leaders that Cyprus with a population of just over a million has reached its limits in absorbing more migrants amid a surge in asylum applications.

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1:50 p.m.

The European Union and Serbia have agreed that the bloc's border agency teams will work with Serbian police to help secure the Balkan country's borders against migrants.

Serbia lies at the heart of the so-called Balkan route for migrants trying to reach wealthy EU nations while fleeing war and poverty in their home countries.

The EU Commissioner for migration Dimitris Avramopoulos and Serbia's Interior Minister Nebojsa Stefanovic signed an agreement on Thursday for officials from the EU's Frontex border agency to work with Serbian police. The deal still needs ratification in Serbia's parliament before formally taking effect.

Hundreds of thousands of people passed through the Balkans toward the EU in 2015.

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9:30 a.m.

Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz is urging the European Union to enter talks with Egypt to help stem the flow of migrants entering Europe from Africa.

Kurz said Thursday that "Egypt has proven that it can be efficient" in stopping people leaving its coast for Europe in search of better and safer lives.

Austria currently holds the EU's rotating presidency, and Kurz and EU Council President Donald Tusk recently visited Cairo for talks with President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi.

Tusk said Tuesday that no migrants are leaving Egypt at the moment.

Kurz said that "Egypt is now prepared possibly to deepen cooperation with us in talks. We should use that."

Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz arrives for the plenary session of the informal EU summit in Salzburg, Austria, Thursday, Sept. 20, 2018. (AP Photo/Matthias Schrader)

Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz gives an interview when arriving at the informal EU summit in Salzburg, Austria, Thursday, Sept. 20, 2018. (AP Photo/Kerstin Joensson)
PARIS (AP) - French far-right leader Marine Le Pen is refusing to undergo a court-ordered psychiatric exam for tweeting brutal images of Islamic State violence, comparing the demand to methods used in totalitarian regimes.

A preliminary charge of distribution of violent images was filed in March against Le Pen, a lawmaker, after her immunity was lifted.

On Thursday, she tweeted a decision ordering a psychiatric exam that was dated Sept. 12 and gives her 10 days to modify questions to be asked. She said on BFM TV that totalitarian regimes use such methods against opponents to "make them look like they're crazy."

FILE - In this June 1, 2018 file photo, French far right leader Marine Le Pen gestures as she delivers a speech to announce a name-change for her National Front party, in Bron, central France. Le Pen is refusing to undergo a court-ordered psychiatric exam for tweeting brutal images of Islamic State violence, comparing the demand to methods used in totalitarian regimes. (AP Photo/Laurent Cipriani, File)

Le Pen's December 2015 tweets showed executions by IS extremists, including the killing of American reporter James Foley. She posted them after the November 2015 Paris attacks by IS that killed 130 people.
MOSCOW (AP) - A high-level Israeli military delegation visited Moscow on Thursday to present detailed information related to the downing of a Russian warplane by Syrian forces that responded to an Israeli air raid.

All 15 crew members on board the Russian Il-20 reconnaissance plane were killed when it was downed Monday by Syrian air defense forces that mistook it for Israeli jets. The incident threatened to derail the close security ties between Russia and Israel.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu quickly called Russian President Vladimir to express sorrow over the death of the plane's crew, blamed Syria and offered to share detailed data.

FILE In this file photo taken on Saturday, March 4, 2017, The Russian Il-20 electronic intelligence plane of the Russian air force with the registration number RF 93610, which was accidentally downed by Syrian forces responding to an Israeli air strike flays near Kubinka airport, outside Moscow, Russia. The Kremlin said that Russian President Vladimir Putin has accepted Israel's offer to share detailed information about the Israeli air raid that triggered the Syrian fire and led to the plane's loss. (AP Photo/Marina Lystseva)

Netanyahu said Thursday that while voicing regret over the deaths, he told Putin that "the root of the problem is Iran's attempt to use Syrian territory for attacks against Israel and to arm our enemies, such as Hezbollah."

"I told him that we have the right of self defense," Netanyahu said, adding that "there is also very great importance to maintaining the security coordination between Israel and Russia."

He said he dispatched the Israeli air force chief, Maj. Gen. Amikam Norkin, to Moscow with a double objective: "One, to continue defending our citizens, and two, to preserve the cooperation between our two countries."

On Thursday, a delegation of Israeli military officers led by Norkin, held several meetings in Moscow with their Russian counterparts.

The Israeli military said in a statement that they presented the situation report regarding the plane's downing, as well as the pre-mission information and the findings of an Israeli military inquiry.

"The meetings were held in good spirits and the representatives shared a professional, open and transparent discussion on various issues," the Israeli military said. "Both sides emphasized the importance of the states' interests and the continued implementation of the deconfliction system."

The Israeli military has said its fighter jets were targeting a Syrian military facility involved in providing weapons for Iran's proxy Hezbollah militia and insisted it warned Russia of the coming raid in accordance with deconfliction agreements. It said the Syrian army fired the missiles that hit the Russian plane when the Israeli jets had already returned to Israeli airspace.

But the Russian Defense Ministry charged that the Israeli warning came less than a minute before the strike, leaving the Russian aircraft in the line of fire. It accused the Israeli military of deliberately using the Russian plane as a cover to dodge Syrian defenses and threatened to retaliate.

The Russian military made no comment after Thursday's meetings with the Israeli delegation.

While the Russian Defense Ministry blamed the plane's loss on Israel, Putin quickly sought to defuse tensions Tuesday, pointing at "a chain of tragic accidental circumstances."

The Israeli military also noted that its delegation "presented the ongoing Iranian attempts to establish its military presence in Syria and to transfer strategic weapons to the Hezbollah terror organization."

Moscow has played a delicate diplomatic game of maintaining friendly ties with both Israel and Iran. In July, Moscow struck a deal with Tehran to keep its fighters 85 kilometers (53 miles) from the Golan Heights to accommodate Israeli security concerns.

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Associated Press writers Nataliya Vasilyeva in Moscow and Josef Federman in Jerusalem contributed to this report.
WILMINGTON, N.C. (AP) - The Latest on Florence (all times local):

9 p.m.

The new owner of the NFL's Carolina Panthers has announced an initial package to aid Hurricane Florence disaster relief efforts in North and South Carolina.

Women walk past a beached vessel on East Front Street in New Bern, N.C., on Thursday, Sept. 20, 2018. The craft was washed ashore in the city's historic district a week earlier by Hurricane Florence. (AP Photo/Allen G. Breed)

Owner David Tepper and Panthers Charities announced the donations in a news release Thursday.

The package includes a $1 million donation to the American Red Cross, $450,000 to regional food banks through 25,000 emergency food packs, as well as aid to high school athletic programs affected by storm damage.

The Panthers staff and players will engage in direct service projects for impacted areas.

The team is also spearheading and coordinating an effort with college football programs in North and South Carolina to unveil a special "One Carolina" helmet sticker to be worn during games on Saturday. Panthers players will wear the sticker during Sunday's home game against Cincinnati.

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7:40 p.m.

Gov. Roy Cooper says he'll call a special session of the North Carolina legislature in a few weeks to get initial state funding approved to aid the Hurricane Florence recovery.

Cooper on Thursday evening announced his plans to proclaim a special session of the General Assembly to begin Oct. 9.

The governor hasn't said how much damage the storm has caused but earlier Thursday said it would be in the billions of dollars. Cooper's news release says he'll be assembling funding requests for lawmakers in Raleigh and in Washington.

Special sessions have been called after Hurricane Floyd in 1999 and Hurricane Matthew in 2016, either two or three months after each event. This one will occur more quickly. Cooper says it's clear the destruction caused by Florence is "historic" and that elected officials need to come together to begin rebuilding.

North Carolina has a rainy-day reserve fund of $2 billion, and there are hundreds of millions of dollars in other pots available to Cooper.

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6:30 p.m.

Authorities cracking down on looting and break-ins in one North Carolina county impacted by Florence say they've arrested more than a dozen people. Three of those arrests came after an online undercover sting operation.

News outlets cite Jacksonville police as saying officers saw a broken-out front window at an athletic shoe store but the investigation had to be delayed during the storm's passage - and until they could contact the owners.

Police say the suspects were using an online app to sell stolen goods to undercover officers. The three were charged with felony breaking and entering, looting, curfew violation and other charges. They say they recovered dozens of pairs of stolen shoes, as well as clothing, many of the items with security devices and tags still attached.

The three men were all given $70,000 secured bonds. It's not known if they have attorneys.

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6:30 p.m.

Two interstates closed to traffic in eastern North Carolina because of river flooding from Florence likely will remain closed for at least another week.

Transportation Secretary Jim Trogdon said Thursday that 16 sections of Interstate 40 and Interstate 95 are still flooded, preventing major traffic from getting into and out of the city of Wilmington. While some motorists are using alternate routes to reach the southeastern North Carolina coast, Gov. Roy Cooper urged displaced residents to stay away from areas that still lack power and other necessities.

Trogdon says he anticipates the interstate routes won't re-open until the flooding recedes on the Cape Fear and Lumber rivers. He says that means I-40 won't be cleared to traffic until next weekend at the earliest, and I-95's reopening could be longer.

Cooper says more than 700 roads remains closed. Authorities are warning against road travel in all or parts of 17 eastern counties.

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5:20 p.m.

Officials in the place where much of the floodwaters from Hurricane Florence will reach the Atlantic Ocean are preparing for a flood like they have never seen before.

Georgetown County Administrator Sel Hemingway said Thursday it is too early to know exactly how high the water will get or how much land will be flooded starting next week.

Water from five different rivers flow through the county to the ocean.

Hemingway says in the worst-case scenario, more than 10 percent of the county's 61,000 residents might have to evacuate. Flooding could cut off U.S. Highway 17, the main road north out of Georgetown.

Hemmingway says officials should know more by this weekend.

Authorities planned to start handing out 15,000 sandbags Friday.

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5:20 p.m.

Officials from several state agencies are urging motorists not to travel in areas of southeastern North Carolina because many roads remain impassable due to flooding and road conditions which continue to change.

The N.C. Highway Patrol and others say travel is not recommended in Bladen, Brunswick, Columbus, western Craven, Cumberland, Duplin, Harnett, Hoke, southern Johnston, Jones, Lenoir, New Hanover, Pender, Robeson, Sampson, Scotland and southern Wayne counties.

Patrol commander Col. Glenn McNeill Jr. says that while some routes are starting to open, motorists should avoid travel in flooded areas unless necessary and should never drive on flooded roads.

Officials say that GPS systems are less reliable in the aftermath of a hurricane when conditions are frequently changing. As such, motorists should avoid completely relying on their GPS systems for roadway information as these systems may re-route them to a road that is closed.

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4:05 p.m.

At least 41 deaths have now been attributed to Hurricane Florence.

North Carolina Department of Public Safety spokesman Keith Acree says four additional deaths were reported Thursday to the state and occurred in Duplin County. He says a 74-year-old man and his 22-year-old granddaughter died Monday of carbon monoxide poisoning caused by a generator that was inside the home.

An 87-year-old woman and her 81-year-old husband also died. Acree said they had been living without power for several days.

The death toll in North Carolina now stands at 31. The other deaths occurred in South Carolina and Virginia.

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4:05 p.m.

Utility workers continue to work to restore power to North Carolina residents who lost electricity due to Hurricane Florence.

North Carolina's electric cooperatives reported Thursday statewide outages have dropped to about 38,000, down from a historic high of 326,000 on Saturday.

Duke Energy reported more than 70,000 customers without power in southeastern North Carolina. Of those, more than a third, or about 24,500, are in New Hanover County, which includes the city of Wilmington.

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1:45 p.m.

Hundreds of roads in North Carolina remain closed due to the effects of former Hurricane Florence.

The N.C. Department of Transportation said on its Twitter page Thursday that nearly 750 roads are still closed. At one point as many as 2,200 were closed.

The closures include sections of Interstate 40 and Interstate 95. Also, U.S. Highway 258 in Kinston was closed Thursday due to flooding, and the department said drivers should plan for U.S. Highway 70 to be closed as the Neuse River continues to rise.

U.S. 70 is one of the major routes from Raleigh to the coast.

The department also said U.S. 421 at the New Hanover County line is now closed.

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1:45 p.m.

Major flooding on North Carolina's Little River earlier this week swallowed buildings and forced evacuations. Now that waters have receded, property owners along its banks are returning to survey the damage.

The destruction brought by the flood was evident Thursday in Spring Lake, North Carolina, a town of 13,000 near Ft. Bragg. The banks were littered with bricks and debris from a motel that collapsed after flooding swept the earth out from under it.

Next door, a convenience store owner inspected damage to his shop where turbulent floodwater had knocked down shelves and left silty mud on the walls and floor.

Heavy rain from Hurricane Florence earlier this week caused the Little River to swell well beyond its banks.

Before National Weather service gauges measuring water levels stopped working, it had reached 36 feet (10 meters), a record-breaking major flood.

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1:45 p.m.

Many groups are helping to feed victims of Hurricane Florence in North Carolina, but one stands out for the sheer volume of meals it has distributed: World Central Kitchen.

The chairman of the New Hanover County commissioners says the nonprofit organization came to Wilmington four days before the storm. He says it has provided 90,000 meals so far for shelters, first responders, the National Guard and the people working in the county's emergency operations.

Chairman Woody White said the group has started bringing meals into communities via food trucks. White says World Central Kitchen's work has been "remarkable to witness."

Celebrity chef Jose Andres founded the nonprofit, which is best known for serving more than 1 million meals last year in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria.

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1 p.m.

South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster says the state's financial losses from Florence are estimated at more than $1.2 billion.

McMaster provided the damages estimates Thursday in a letter to the state's congressional delegation.

Among the breakdowns included in McMaster's letter is an estimated $125 million hit to South Carolina's agriculture industry. The governor noted that some of the estimates were based on damage resulting from Hurricane Matthew in 2016.

McMaster has requested federal disaster-recovery funds be made available for 23 of South Carolina's 46 counties.

He wrote the damage from Florence in the northeastern area of the state "will be catastrophic, surpassing anything recorded in modern history."

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10 a.m.

Duke Energy has activated a high-level emergency alert at a retired coal-fired power plant near Wilmington, North Carolina, as floodwaters from the nearby Cape Fear River overtopped an earthen dike and inundated a large lake.

Duke spokeswoman Paige Sheehan said Thursday that the dam containing Sutton Lake appears stable and they are monitoring the situation with helicopters and drones to react to what was called "an evolving situation."

The lake is a former cooling pond at the L.V. Sutton Power Station and is adjacent to three large coal ash dumps. A landfill at the site ruptured over the weekend, spilling enough material to fill 180 dump trucks. Coal ash contains arsenic, mercury and other toxic heavy metals.

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8:30 a.m.

A section of Interstate 95 in South Carolina has been closed because of flooding.

The Department of Public Safety said Wednesday evening that the highway was closed in both directions at the 175 mile marker because of high water levels at the bridges crossing the Great Pee Dee River. There are detours available for local traffic.

The decision to close the road comes less than 12 hours after the department had reopened a 9-mile (14-kilometer) stretch of the highway near the North Carolina state line, which had meant the entire highway was open in the state.

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1 a.m.

Hurricane Florence is still wearing out the Carolinas, where residents have endured an agonizing week of violent winds, torrential rain, widespread flooding, power outages and death.

Frustration and sheer exhaustion are building as thousands of people wait to go home seven days after the storm began battering the coast.

Florence is blamed for at least 37 deaths. That includes those of two women who drowned when a sheriff's van taking them to a mental health facility was swept off a road.

President Donald Trump visited North and South Carolina on Wednesday, saying the government will be there to help.

But evacuee and college student Evan Jones says he's just ready for it all to be over. In his words: "I'm trying to get it all out of my head."

In this drone photo released by Duke Energy, flooding from the swollen Cape Fear River overtops an earthen dike at Sutton Lake, a 1,100-acre (445-hectare) lake at the L.V. Sutton Power Station near Wilmington, N.C. , Thursday, Sept. 20, 2018. Duke Energy activated a high-level emergency alert at the retired coal-fired power plant due to the flooding, raising concerns of a potential breach. (Duke Energy via AP)

FILE - In this Sept. 19, 2018, file photo, people sit in a long line of bumper to bumper traffic on US 421 in Harrells, N.C., as they try to make their way toward Wilmington, N.C. Many in Wilmington woke up Wednesday suddenly very tired. The days-long scavenger hunt for gas and ice was over as stores opened and relief agencies were able to roll into the city. Many in Wilmington woke up Wednesday morning suddenly very tired. The days-long scavenger hunt for gas and ice was over as stores opened and relief agencies were able to roll into the city. They could no longer just focus on getting through the day; they had to contemplate what had happened to them and what might happen next. (AP Photo/Chuck Burton, File)

People gather in Wilmington, N. C., on Thursday, Sept. 20, 2018, to work for SERVPRO, a company that specializes in repairing water damage to homes and buildings. (AP Photo/Alan Suderman)

In this Wednesday, Sept. 20, 2018, photo local firefighter Chasity Hewett, left, and her fiancee, Fire Chief Westly Dorsch, center, help a Coast Guard crew navigate flooded streets of their tight-knit community in Crusoe Island, N.C., to rescue pets that remained after emergency evacuations of those who underestimated Hurricane Florence in Columbus County, N.C. (Casey Toth/The News & Observer via AP)

FILE - In this Sept. 18, 2018, file photo, members of the Civil Air Patrol load cars with MREs, (Meals Ready To Eat) water and tarps at distribution area in Wilmington, N.C. Many in Wilmington woke up Wednesday suddenly very tired. The days-long scavenger hunt for gas and ice was over as stores opened and relief agencies were able to roll into the city. (AP Photo/Chuck Burton, File)

FILE - In this Sept. 19, 2018, file photo, Stan Atamanchuk, right, buys large bags of ice from Rose Ice & Coal days after Hurricane Florence in Wilmington, N.C. Many in Wilmington woke up Wednesday suddenly very tired. The days-long scavenger hunt for gas and ice was over as stores opened and relief agencies were able to roll into the city. (AP Photo/Chuck Burton, File)

FILE - In this Sept. 18, 2018, file photo, employees of Rose Ice and Coal Co. distribute bags of ice to customers in Wilmington, N.C. Many in Wilmington woke up Wednesday suddenly very tired. The days-long scavenger hunt for gas and ice was over as stores opened and relief agencies were able to roll into the city. (AP Photo/Chuck Burton, File)

U.S. Army Sgt. Rose Stromberg holds the American flag she was able to retrieve from her storage unit which was flooded in the aftermath of Hurricane Florence in Spring Lake, N.C., Wednesday, Sept. 19, 2018. The flag, which is adorned with all the names of those killed in the 9/11 terrorist attacks, flew with her during her deployment in Afghanistan. (AP Photo/David Goldman)

Part of the Starlite Motel is washed away in the aftermath of flooding from Hurricane Florence in Spring Lake, N.C., Wednesday, Sept. 19, 2018. (AP Photo/David Goldman)

FILE - In this Sept. 19, 2018, file photo, people begin to form a line in the morning sun as they wait outside Rose Ice & Coal for it to open days after Hurricane Florence in Wilmington, N.C. Many in Wilmington woke up Wednesday suddenly very tired. The days-long scavenger hunt for gas and ice was over as stores opened and relief agencies were able to roll into the city. (AP Photo/Chuck Burton, File)
SANT JOAN DE VILATORRADA, Spain (AP) - A farm tractor with a crane lifts up half a dozen people holding Catalan independence flags in northeast Spain, trying to get high enough so they can peek into a prison courtyard and see their separatist heroes.

The distance makes it hard to recognize the faces of the Catalan activists and politicians jailed in the Lledoners penitentiary while they await trial for their involvement in a banned independence referendum last year in Catalonia. But inmates and supporters make a quick connection.

Shouts of "Freedom!" and "We want you home!" from outside are met with "We want to be out!" coming from the prison. And joy erupts when the unofficial Catalan flag embraced by secessionists, the "estelada," appears through the bars of a cell window.

In this Tuesday, Sept. 18, 2018 photo, pro independence people carry chairs and a picnic basket, as they arrive to a field overlooking the Lledoners prison in Sant Joan de Vilatorrada, about 50 kilometres away from Barcelona, Spain. Every Tuesday as the sun sets on the quiet hills surrounding the Lledoners prison in rural Catalonia, dozens of people sit in a field overlooking the penitentiary where seven out of the nine prominent jailed separatists are awaiting trial for their involvement in an unauthorized referendum on independence held last year. (AP Photo/Emilio Morenatti)

"I'm convinced that the energy we send them from here helps them," said Quima Albalate a 58-year-old nurse who joins her son for twice-a-week picnics of solidarity in these quiet hills of rural Catalonia.

Jailed Catalan separatists, together with those who fled abroad to avoid prosecution by Spain, have become an emotional symbol of what many perceive as Spain's heavy-handed attempt to crush the independence movement in Catalonia. They are also a key stumbling block in negotiations trying to find a way out of the political deadlock, Spain's worst constitutional crisis in decades.

Their absence casts a shadow over Thursday's commemorations of the year since Spanish police began searching government buildings in Barcelona and arresting Catalan officials.

Several thousand people, including Catalan regional president Quim Torra, turned out for a protest Thursday night in Barcelona to mark those events, which helped to fire up the latest secessionist push in a region where many have long sought to break away from Spain. Protesters shouted for the jailed activists to be released from prison.

Nine of the separatists remain in preventive jail on preliminary charges of rebellion and abuse of power. Seven are in Lledoners, including prominent activists Jordi Sanchez and Jordi Cuixart, who drew tens of thousands to the streets one year ago to protest police searches ahead of Catalonia's banned Oct. 1, 2017 referendum on independence. Former regional ministers Oriol Junqueras and Jordi Turull are also here.

The latter's wife, Blanca Bragulat, stood this week outside the prison's walled perimeter and put her husband on speakerphone for supporters.

"We're OK, we are strong," Turull said, replying to questions by friends and relatives who applauded when they heard his voice.

Holding Catalan independence flags and wearing yellow t-shirts and ribbons - ubiquitous symbols of support for those they consider to be political prisoners - these families have been setting up the picnic tables twice a week ever since the inmates were transferred from prisons near Madrid to this facility 70 kilometers (43 miles) north of Barcelona.

The transfers were ordered by Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez soon after he came to power in June to ease the political conflict. But regional separatist authorities in Catalonia want more and are urging state prosecutors to change their position and allow the release of the prisoners.

The central government, which appoints the top prosecutor, is sticking to the line that the separatists are receiving due process according to Spanish law. But some officials have acknowledged that dialogue would be easier with the Catalans out of jail.

Foreign Minister Josep Borrell, a politician from Catalonia who presided over the European Parliament, recently said "at a personal level" he would have preferred for the separatists to be free while awaiting trial. That comment was mirrored by Territorial Affairs Minister Meritxell Batet, another Catalan in Sanchez's cabinet, who said "it would be better and much easier for the dialogue" if the Catalans were free.

For separatist parties in the prosperous region, however, the prisoners keep pro-independence supporters united, says political analyst Pablo Simon.

"For a highly fragmented Catalan movement that scrambles to find the next step in the fight for independence, the prisoners' plight is their only source of cohesion currently. But the politicians are in the hands of activists who think that with jailed separatists there can't be any compromise with central authorities," said the Carlos III University professor. "There's very little room to maneuver."

Meanwhile, divisions over the issue of independence are still running high in the streets of Catalonia. Some people have objected to using public spaces to hang symbols in support of the prisoners.

For separatists - but also for some of those who don't support a separate Catalonia - the jailing of the officials without even setting a date for a trial feels like a deep injustice.

"We need the higher courts to look at us here and see that these people defended political ideas," said Albalate, the nurse. "But that's not a reason for them to be in jail."

Bragulat said she hoped "the European Community at some point will say something."

But even Europe seems unmoved by the Catalan separatists' plight.

Council of Europe Secretary General Thorbjorn Jagland told reporters this month that he "had no doubt Spanish courts were treating the matter in accordance with Spanish law and the European Human Rights convention." He said the separatists could appeal their case in the European human rights court but only after they had gone through courts in Spain.

That's a bleak prospect for supporters and relatives like Bragulat, who told The Associated Press she has "gotten used to living day by day" in order to cope with her husband's absence.

"We don't know how long all of this will last," she said. "But it will end well, right?"

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Parra reported from Madrid.

In this Tuesday, Sept. 18, 2018 photo, pro independence supporters set their chairs and tables to make a picnic on a field overlooking the Lledoners prison in Sant Joan de Vilatorrada, about 50 kilometres away from Barcelona, Spain. Every Tuesday as the sun sets on the quiet hills surrounding the Lledoners prison in rural Catalonia, dozens of people sit in a field overlooking the penitentiary where seven out of the nine prominent jailed separatists are awaiting trial for their involvement in an unauthorized referendum on independence held last year. (AP Photo/Emilio Morenatti)

In this Tuesday, Sept. 18, 2018 photo, pro independence people arrive on a hill overlooking the Lledoners prison, in Sant Joan de Vilatorrada, about 50 kilometres away from Barcelona, Spain. Every Tuesday as the sun sets on the quiet hills surrounding the Lledoners prison in rural Catalonia, some dozens of people sit in a field overlooking the penitentiary where seven out of the nine prominent jailed separatists are awaiting trial for their involvement in an unauthorized referendum on independence held last year. (AP Photo/Emilio Morenatti)

In this Tuesday, Sept. 18, 2018 photo, pro independence people, some of them wearing "esteladas" or independence flags, enjoy a picnic on a field overlooking the Lledoners prison, in Sant Joan de Vilatorrada, about 50 kilometres away from Barcelona, Spain. Every Tuesday as the sun sets on the quiet hills surrounding the Lledoners prison in rural Catalonia, dozens of people sit in a field overlooking the penitentiary where seven out of the nine prominent jailed separatists are awaiting trial for their involvement in an unauthorized referendum on independence held last year.(AP Photo/Emilio Morenatti)

In this Tuesday, Sept. 18, 2018 photo, pro independence people enjoy a picnic on a field overlooking the Lledoners prison, in Sant Joan de Vilatorrada, about 50 kilometres away from Barcelona, Spain. Every Tuesday as the sun sets on the quiet hills surrounding the Lledoners prison in rural Catalonia, dozens of people sit in a field overlooking the penitentiary where seven out of the nine prominent jailed separatists are awaiting trial for their involvement in an unauthorized referendum on independence held last year. (AP Photo/Emilio Morenatti)

In this Tuesday, Sept. 18, 2018 photo, pro independence people enjoy a picnic on a field overlooking the Lledoners prison, in Sant Joan de Vilatorrada, about 50 kilometres away from Barcelona, Spain. Every Tuesday as the sun sets on the quiet hills surrounding the Lledoners prison in rural Catalonia, some dozens of people gather in a field overlooking the penitentiary where seven out of the nine prominent jailed separatists are awaiting trial for their involvement in an unauthorized referendum on independence held last year.(AP Photo/Emilio Morenatti)

In this Tuesday, Sept. 18, 2018 photo, pro independence people, wave "esteladas" or independence flags on top of a hill overlooking the Lledoners prison, at the background, in Sant Joan de Vilatorrada, about 50 kilometres away from Barcelona, Spain. Every Tuesday as the sun sets on the quiet hills surrounding the Lledoners prison in rural Catalonia, dozens of people sit in a field overlooking the penitentiary where seven out of the nine prominent jailed separatists are awaiting trial for their involvement in an unauthorized referendum on independence held last year. (AP Photo/Emilio Morenatti)

In this Tuesday, Sept. 18, 2018 photo, an "estelada" or independence flag, is waved from the window of a cell in Lledoners prison, in Sant Joan de Vilatorrada, about 50 kilometres away from Barcelona, Spain. Every Tuesday as the sun sets on the quiet hills surrounding the Lledoners prison in rural Catalonia, dozens of people sit in a field overlooking the penitentiary where seven out of the nine prominent jailed separatists are awaiting trial for their involvement in an unauthorized referendum on independence held last year. (AP Photo/Emilio Morenatti)

In this Tuesday, Sept. 18, 2018 photo, a tractor lift up pro independence supporters holding a banner for former minister Jordi Turull and chanting "freedom", on a field overlooking the Lledoners prison, in Sant Joan de Vilatorrada, about 50 kilometres away from Barcelona, Spain. Every Tuesday as the sun sets on the quiet hills surrounding the Lledoners prison in rural Catalonia, dozens of people sit in a field overlooking the penitentiary where seven out of the nine prominent jailed separatists are awaiting trial for their involvement in an unauthorized referendum on independence held last year. (AP Photo/Emilio Morenatti)

In this Tuesday, Sept. 18, 2018 photo, an "estelada" or independence flag, and a banner reading in Catalan "Freedom", are waved from windows of cells in Lledoners prison, in Sant Joan de Vilatorrada, about 50 kilometres away from Barcelona, Spain. Every Tuesday as the sun sets on the quiet hills surrounding the Lledoners prison in rural Catalonia, dozens of people sit in a field overlooking the penitentiary where seven out of the nine prominent jailed separatists are awaiting trial for their involvement in an unauthorized referendum on independence held last year. (AP Photo/Emilio Morenatti)
HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) - The candidate had just chided the media minutes earlier for not being tougher on his opponent when the moderator asked him what might be his least favorite campaign question: Why won't you release your tax returns?

It wasn't a scene from the 2016 presidential race. Rather, it was from this year's campaign for governor in Pennsylvania, where the Republican challenger who has made millions from his trash-hauling business has refused to release his tax returns.

"How much I make or don't make is nobody's business, frankly," the candidate, Scott Wagner, responded during a question-and-answer forum.

This combination of October 2017 photos shows Pennsylvania gubernatorial candidates Democrat Gov. Tom Wolf, left, and Republican Scott Wagner. In several states, candidates are refusing to release their tax returns. That's true even in states with a long tradition of candidates releasing their tax information. In Pennsylvania, Wagner, the Republican challenger who has made millions from his trash-hauling business is refusing to release his returns. The incumbent, Democratic Wolf, has released his in what he said was a nod to transparency. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke)

The incumbent, Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf, released his tax return in what he said was a nod to transparency. The discrepancy between the two candidates and the ongoing dispute highlights a fact that was overlooked in the controversy over then-candidate Donald Trump's refusal to release his returns during the 2016 presidential race: The nation's other executive branch leaders - state governors - also are not required to release their tax returns and often don't.

It's an issue that is playing out this year in several hotly contested races, including in Illinois, Iowa and New Mexico, to name a few.

With races for governor on the November general election ballot in 36 states this year, candidates in fewer than half of those states have released part or all of a tax return, according to a review by Associated Press statehouse reporters.

Only one state, Vermont, has a law that says candidates for governor and other statewide offices must release at least part of their tax returns. It's in use for the first time this year after being passed in 2017, but there are no penalties for ignoring it - as did one candidate who appeared on the state's primary ballot in August.

Somewhat ironically, lawmakers in more than two dozen states introduced legislation last year that would have required presidential candidates to release their tax returns as a condition of getting on the ballot. None of those became law, in part because of constitutional concerns, and two were vetoed.

Even without a requirement, it has become customary in some states for the candidates for governor to release their tax returns, or at least partial returns, as it has been in U.S. presidential contests. Trump's refusal to release his broke four decades of precedent and has led to questions about his wealth, debts and, amid the ongoing investigation into Russian election interference, whether he has Russian financial ties.

Failure to release tax returns has stirred similar suspicions in some governor's races, with Trump's name often invoked.

In New Mexico, the Democratic nominee, U.S. Rep. Michelle Lujan Grisham, has publicly shared five years of tax returns. The Republican, Congressman Steve Pearce, has not released any returns, instead referring inquiries about personal finances to his annual congressional financial disclosures.

Democrats say Pearce's tax returns could provide more information about his 2003 sale of an oilfield services company and show whether he has any conflicts of interest in a state that depends on the oil and natural gas industry to support about one-third of its annual state budget.

Democrats and their allies have attacked him on social media for refusing to release his returns and tied that criticism to Trump: "What is Pearce hiding?" reads one labor union's Twitter post.

Transparency advocates worry that Trump's election victory will embolden other candidates for top office to keep their tax returns private.

It has emerged in some races as a campaign issue.

In Illinois, where candidates traditionally release a return, Democrat J.B. Pritzker, a billionaire, did not release a full tax return. That inspired a rival in the primary to compare him to Trump. After surviving that campaign, Pritzker is facing off in the general election against a candidate with almost as much money - the incumbent governor, Republican Bruce Rauner - who also has not released a full tax return.

Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds, a Republican, released 10 years of tax returns and challenged Democratic nominee Fred Hubbell to do the same. Hubbell released only portions of his returns, prompting Reynolds to question what Hubbell had to hide.

Hubbell's campaign shot back that Reynolds is being hypocritical, after having never questioned Trump's failure to release his. Reynolds' campaign responded that she believes Trump, too, should release his returns.

Tax returns are far more detailed than the financial disclosure forms often required of candidates for statewide office, which generally show sources of income and little more.

A tax return will show specific amounts of income, the sources of that income, taxes paid and strategies used to limit or avoid tax liability, what they deduct and how much they give to charity.

All those details can be fodder for campaign attack ads, explaining why many candidates are reluctant to release it.

California's Democratic nominee, Gavin Newsom, released six years of tax returns after two straight cycles in which neither major party nominee released theirs. That gave Republican nominee John Cox a target to attack.

Cox - who released his two-page 1040 forms, but none of the attachments or schedules released by Newsom - suggested the Democrat is taking advantage of lower income taxes in Nevada and getting rich from an "intricate web of Getty-funded properties and businesses."

A spokesman, Nathan Click, said Newsom had no regrets about releasing his tax returns, and remained "proud to have set the bar of transparency in this race."

The release-or-not-to-release calculation has been on full display in Wagner's uphill bid to unseat Wolf in Pennsylvania.

Wagner has said he will not divest his ownership of the $75 million waste hauling business should he win. That has raised alarms with transparency advocates about the potential for conflict because state government heavily regulates municipal waste.

He has given varied reasons for his refusal to open his tax returns for review - saying at one point it was because they were "very complicated." At another, he said unions would use them to promote his wealth in an attempt to organize his company's workers.

Wagner maintains that he has complied with state requirements to disclose sources of income, that he owes no back taxes and provides charitable contributions through his company. Democrats say his word is not enough.

In a statement, the state Democratic Party said Wagner's "refusal to release his tax returns raises questions about what he could be hiding."

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Associated Press writers Sara Burnett in Chicago, Morgan Lee in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and David Pitt in Des Moines, Iowa, contributed to this report.

This combination of photos shows Steve Pearce, left, on July 30, 2018 and Michelle Lujan Grisham on July 2, 2018, in Albuquerque, N.M. In several states, candidates are refusing to release their tax returns. In New Mexico, the Democratic nominee, Grisham, has publicly shared five years of tax returns. The Republican, Pearce, has not released any returns, instead referring inquiries about personal finances to his annual congressional financial disclosures. (AP Photos)
SALZBURG, Austria (AP) - The Latest on Brexit talks at the European Union summit (all times local):

4 p.m.

British Prime Minister Theresa May has said her Brexit plan is the "only serious and credible" proposal on the table, minutes after EU chief Donald Tusk said May's plan will not work.

British Prime Minister Theresa May smiles when arriving at the informal EU summit in Salzburg, Austria, Thursday, Sept. 20, 2018. (AP Photo/Kerstin Joensson)

May says her so-called Chequers plan will guarantee the frictionless movement of goods across borders, and ensure there is no return to a hard frontier between Ireland and Northern Ireland.

The plan calls for Britain to remain in the EU's single market for goods, but not services. The EU says that amounts to cherry-picking benefits of membership, and is unacceptable.

May said Britain would make new proposals soon to solve the Irish border problem.

She told reporters "there are key issues we need to resolve" but "I believe that there is a willingness to do a deal."

Britain is due to leave the EU in six months.

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3:30 p.m.

EU Council President Donald Tusk says that key parts of the British proposals to leave the European Union "will not work."

Tusk said Thursday after a two-day summit partly centering on the British divorce talks with the EU that some of the suggestions from Prime Minister Theresa May would undermine the union of the 27 remaining members.

May has been looking to keep trade in goods in the single market of the EU after Britain leaves but not for services. The EU has said that the single market cannot be cherry-picked like that.

He said of the so-called Chequers proposals that "the suggested framework for cooperation will not work, not least because it risks undermining the single market."

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12:30 p.m.

The European Union and Britain are walking a diplomatic tightrope as they attempt to thrash out a divorce deal in time for Britain's departure from the bloc next March.

Arriving Thursday at a summit of EU leaders in the Austrian city of Salzburg, Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte labeled the Brexit negotiations "a balancing act."

Even though both sides remain far apart on shape of their future economic relationship and on the border between Ireland and the U.K.'s Northern Ireland, no one sought confrontation.

British Prime Minister Theresa May urged flexibility when addressing EU leaders at a dinner Thursday.

EU Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker said May was "interesting" and "polite."

Both sides have said they want a deal this autumn to allow parliaments to give their approvals in time.

Donald Tusk, President of the European Council, arrives at the informal EU summit in Salzburg, Austria, Thursday, Sept. 20, 2018. (AP Photo/Kerstin Joensson)

Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz, left, speaks beside Donald Tusk, President of the European Council, during a press conference after the informal EU summit in Salzburg, Austria, Thursday, Sept. 20, 2018. (AP Photo/Kerstin Joensson)

Jean-Claude Juncker, President of the European Commission, arrives at the informal EU summit in Salzburg, Austria, Thursday, Sept. 20, 2018. (AP Photo/Kerstin Joensson)

Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte, left, and Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz chat when arriving at the informal EU summit in Salzburg, Austria, Thursday, Sept. 20, 2018. (AP Photo/Kerstin Joensson)

British Prime Minister Theresa May arrives at the informal EU summit in Salzburg, Austria, Thursday, Sept. 20, 2018. (AP Photo/Kerstin Joensson)
LONDON (AP) - Meghan Markle was joined by her mother Thursday to launch a cookbook aimed at raising money for the victims of London's Grenfell Tower fire.

The former actress from the United States, who married Prince Harry and is now the Duchess of Sussex, hosted the reception at Kensington Palace beside her mother, Doria Ragland, to support the cookbook titled "Together."

The book celebrates the power of cooking to strengthen communities and bring people together.

Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex, centre, accompanied by Britain's Prince Harry, the Duke of Sussex and her mother Doria Ragland walk to attend a reception at Kensington Palace, in London, Thursday Sept. 20, 2018. Markle was joined by her mother for the launch of a cookbook aimed at raising money for victims of the Grenfell fire. Markle, now the Duchess of Sussex, hosted the reception beside her mother, Doria Ragland, to support the cookbook called "Together." (Ben Stansall/Pool Photo via AP)

Harry also attended the event. The book was inspired by Markle's visit to the Hubb Community Kitchen in North Kensington, which could only open a few days a week for lack of funds.

The cookbook features recipes from women in the community who prepare food to help and heal. The dishes include coconut chicken curry, aubergine masala, caramelized plum upside-down cake and spiced mint tea.

The 2017 Grenfell Tower fire killed 72 people and prompted nationwide calls for tightening building codes and increasing firefighting capabilities for large apartment blocks.

Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex, centre, accompanied by Britain's Prince Harry, the Duke of Sussex and her mother Doria Ragland walk to attend a reception at Kensington Palace, in London, Thursday Sept. 20, 2018. Markle was joined by her mother for the launch of a cookbook aimed at raising money for victims of the Grenfell fire. Markle, now the Duchess of Sussex, hosted the reception beside her mother, Doria Ragland, to support the cookbook called "Together." (Ben Stansall/Pool Photo via AP)

Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex, centre, accompanied by Britain's Prince Harry, the Duke of Sussex and her mother Doria Ragland walk to attend a reception at Kensington Palace, in London, Thursday Sept. 20, 2018. Markle was joined by her mother for the launch of a cookbook aimed at raising money for victims of the Grenfell fire. Markle, now the Duchess of Sussex, hosted the reception beside her mother, Doria Ragland, to support the cookbook called "Together." (Ben Stansall/Pool Photo via AP)

Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex, left, reacts with one of the women behind the cookbook "Together" during a reception at Kensington Palace, in London, Thursday Sept. 20, 2018. Markle was joined by her mother Doria Ragland and husband Prince Harry for the launch of a cookbook aimed at raising money for victims of the Grenfell fire. (Ben Stansall/Pool Photo via AP)

Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex, left, cooks with women involved in the cookbook "Together" during a reception at Kensington Palace, in London, Thursday Sept. 20, 2018. Markle was joined by her mother Doria Ragland and husband Prince Harry for the launch of a cookbook aimed at raising money for victims of the Grenfell fire. (Ben Stansall/Pool Photo via AP)

Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex, left, cooks with women involved in the cookbook "Together" during a reception at Kensington Palace, in London, Thursday Sept. 20, 2018. Markle was joined by her mother Doria Ragland and husband Prince Harry for the launch of a cookbook aimed at raising money for victims of the Grenfell fire. (Ben Stansall/Pool Photo via AP)

Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex, centre talks to her mother Doria Ragland, with Prince Harry at right, as they attend a reception for the cookbook "Together", at Kensington Palace, in London, Thursday Sept. 20, 2018. The cookbook is being launched with an aim of raising money for victims of the Grenfell fire. (Ben Stansall/Pool Photo via AP)

Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex, centre, reacts with one of the women behind the cookbook "Together" during a reception at Kensington Palace, in London, Thursday Sept. 20, 2018. The Duchess was joined by her mother Doria Ragland and husband Prince Harry for the launch of a cookbook aimed at raising money for victims of the Grenfell fire. (Ben Stansall/Pool Photo via AP)

Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex, left, reacts with unidentified women behind the cookbook "Together" during a reception at Kensington Palace, in London, Thursday Sept. 20, 2018. The Duchess was joined by her mother Doria Ragland and husband Prince Harry for the launch of a cookbook aimed at raising money for victims of the Grenfell fire. (Ben Stansall/Pool Photo via AP)

Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex, left, cooks with unidentified women behind the cookbook "Together" during a reception at Kensington Palace, in London, Thursday Sept. 20, 2018. The Duchess was joined by her mother Doria Ragland and husband Prince Harry for the launch of a cookbook aimed at raising money for victims of the Grenfell fire. (Ben Stansall/Pool Photo via AP)

Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex, centre reacts with unidentified women involved with the cookbook "Together" during a reception at Kensington Palace, in London, Thursday Sept. 20, 2018. The Duchess was joined by her mother Doria Ragland and husband Prince Harry for the launch of a cookbook aimed at raising money for victims of the Grenfell fire. (Ben Stansall/Pool Photo via AP)

Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex, centre looks on during a reception for the women involved with the cookbook "Together" at Kensington Palace, in London, Thursday Sept. 20, 2018. The Duchess was joined by her mother Doria Ragland and husband Prince Harry for the launch of a cookbook aimed at raising money for victims of the Grenfell fire. (Ben Stansall/Pool Photo via AP)

Britain's Prince Harry and Doria Ragland, gesture as Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex, left, hugs a woman involved with the cookbook "Together" during a reception at Kensington Palace, in London, Thursday Sept. 20, 2018. The Duchess was joined by her mother Doria Ragland and husband Prince Harry for the launch of a cookbook aimed at raising money for victims of the Grenfell fire. (Ben Stansall/Pool Photo via AP)

Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex, gestures to her mother Doria Ragland, foreground, as she welcomes women involved with the cookbook "Together" during a reception at Kensington Palace, in London, Thursday Sept. 20, 2018. The Duchess was joined by her mother and husband Prince Harry for the launch of a cookbook aimed at raising money for victims of the Grenfell fire. (Ben Stansall/Pool Photo via AP)
NEW YORK (AP) - Isabel Allende, winner of an honorary National Book Award, sees no reason to discuss her legacy.

"I think legacy is a very masculine word," the author known for "The House of the Spirits" and other novels told The Associated Press during a recent telephone interview. "I don't think women think in terms of legacy very much. We're more practical and we know trends don't last for too long. People and things are forgotten. I am just very happy to have so many readers right now."

The National Book Foundation announced Thursday that Allende will be given a medal for "distinguished contribution to American letters." The Peruvian native is the first Spanish-language author and first since Saul Bellow (in 1990) born outside the U.S. to receive the prize, which in previous years has gone to authors likely to be long remembered, including Bellow, Toni Morrison, Arthur Miller and Joan Didion.

FILE - In this June 5, 2017 file photo, Chilean author Isabel Allende poses for a photograph after the presentation of her latest book "Mas alla del invierno" ("In the midst of the winter") in Madrid. Allende is getting a medal for "distinguished contribution to American letters" from the National Book Foundation. She is the first Spanish-language author to receive the prize. (AP Photo/Francisco Seco, File)

"Through expertly crafted and propulsive narratives, Allende elevates the stories and lives of women, never condescending to her readers or cheapening the experiences of her characters," Lisa Lucas, the book foundation's executive director, said in a statement. "Allende's work is proof that artistic excellence and commercial viability are not exclusive concepts, and that the stories about women written with women in mind are not only good business, but also represent crucial contributions to the literary landscape."

Luis Alberto Urrea, best known for the acclaimed "The Devil's Highway," will present Allende with her medal at the National Book Award benefit dinner and ceremony in Manhattan. The Nov. 14 event also will feature Doron Weber of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation receiving the Literarian Award for the foundation's long history of providing grants to writers.

Allende, 76, is among the world's most popular Spanish-language writers, with sales exceeding 60 million copies. Known for her multigenerational narratives and style of "magical realism," she sees her life as defined by "love and violence." She weaves personal and political themes into her stories, set everywhere from Chile to the Bay Area, where Allende has lived since the 1980s. She has been translated into more than 30 languages and has had many works adapted to operas, plays and other media, including a film version of "House of the Spirits" starring Meryl Streep, Glenn Close and Jeremy Irons. Her previous honors include a Presidential Medal of Freedom, awarded in 2014, and, two years later, a lifetime achievement award from PEN Center USA.

She has completed more than 20 books, even though her first didn't come out until the year she turned 40. Born in Peru, she lived in Bolivia and Beirut as a child before settling in Chile, where her stepfather worked in the diplomatic corps. Allende also was a first cousin-once removed from Salvador Allende, Chile's president in the early '70s, and fled to Venezuela after he was overthrown in a military coup in 1973. Isabel Allende then worked as a columnist for the Venezuelan newspaper El Nacional for several years before a family crisis changed her life: Her grandfather was dying, and Allende began working on a "spiritual" letter to him that became "The House of the Spirits," published in 1982 after numerous publishers rejected it.

Her other books include "Eva Luna," ''The Stories of Eva Luna," ''Of Love and Shadows" and "Island Beneath the Sea." Allende has long seen her fiction as a way of preserving history, and she is currently working on a novel inspired by an act of heroism by the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda during the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s. Thousands had fled Spain and Neruda arranged for a boat to take some to South America. One of the survivors, now past 100, is a friend of Allende's.

"I feel like I'm able to have the color, the sense, the feeling of that time," she said, comparing the story to the narrative of "Island Beneath the Sea," set in part during the late 18th century. "'Island Beneath the Sea' took years to research. I couldn't talk to anybody who lived through the experience. I had to rely on books and personal letters. ... To me this (the current novel) is recent history, because I know someone who is still alive. I can get a sense of it, touch it, in ways I cannot with the remote past."
JOHANNESBURG (AP) - South Africa is one of the continent's biggest defense spenders but its military is increasingly stretched as the country faces recession and a weakening currency.

This week's biennial Africa Aerospace and Defence exhibition is a showcase for the country's military, which is one of the top 20 contributors to United Nations peacekeeping missions and helps with anti-piracy operations off Mozambique's coast.

Concerns also are growing about possible corruption linked to state-owned defense conglomerate Denel, part of a wider inquiry into the alleged plundering of state resources under former President Jacob Zuma.

Russian sniper rifles are displayed at the the biennial Africa Aerospace and Defence Exhibition at the Waterkloof Airforce Base in Pretoria, South Africa Wednesday Sept. 19, 2018. (AP Photo/Christopher Torchia)

South Africa's military "has got a lot on its plate," said Guy Martin, editor of defenceWeb, an industry news site.

The country has a defense budget of more than $3 billion. However, the weakening South African currency and the economic recession are making it harder for the military to acquire new equipment and training.

President Cyril Ramaphosa opened the fair this week with a speech acknowledging the "economic reality" and pledging support for the defense industry, a key earner of foreign currency.

Despite the problems, soldiers at the five-day trade fair were enthusiastic.

Capt. T.G. Netshineulu encouraged a group of schoolchildren to consider joining the military after they finish their studies.

"I can die for this country," he said. "And I'm willing to do so."

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Follow Africa news at https://twitter.com/AP_Africa
MIDDLETON, Wis. (AP) - The Latest on a Wisconsin workplace shooting that injured four people and left the gunman dead (all times local):

2:20 p.m.

Authorities have identified the gunman who died after shooting four co-workers at a Wisconsin software company.

Emergency personnel arrive on the scene of a shooting at a software company in Middleton, Wis., Wednesday, Sept. 19, 2018. Four people were shot and wounded during the shooting in the suburb of Madison, according to a city administrator. (Steve Apps/Wisconsin State Journal via AP)

The Dane County Medical Examiner's Office says 43-year-old Anthony Y. Tong died from "firearm related trauma" in Wednesday's shooting at WTS Paradigm in Middleton.

The medical examiner says an autopsy was conducted Thursday and that additional testing is underway.

Authorities say Tong seriously wounded three co-workers during the attack, and that a fourth person suffered a graze wound. Police say the gunman was fatally shot by responding officers.

The investigation involves Middleton police, the state Division of Criminal Investigation and the Dane County Medical Examiner's Office.

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1:50 p.m.

Police are escorting employees back to a Wisconsin software company where an employee opened fire on co-workers a day earlier.

Officers are helping the workers collect cellphones, keys, pursues and other personal items they left behind as they fled the shooting Wednesday morning shooting at WTS Paradigm in Middleton.

Police Chief Chuck Foulke said Thursday that officers still have control of the building as they investigate the shooting that left three employees seriously wounded. The gunman was fatally shot by police.

Police still don't know why the man attacked his office. His name hasn't been released.

You Tube videos about the software company show a workplace where employees can play ping-pong and shuffleboard, and gather at a coffee bar or sit on an outdoor patio.

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11:15 a.m.

Police say the gunman who was killed by officers after shooting four people at his Wisconsin workplace is a 43-year-old man who had been employed at the software company since April 2017.

Middleton Police Chief Chuck Foulke declined to identify the gunman during a news conference Thursday, but he says the man had no criminal history and no prior contact with area law enforcement officers.

Foulke says officers searched the man's home in nearby Madison late Wednesday, several hours after the man opened fire inside WTS Paradigm.

Foulke says two men and one woman were seriously wounded in the attack and remain hospitalized. UW Health says all three are in serious condition.

The chief says the gunman arrived for work and sometime later opened fire on his colleagues. An autopsy by the Dane County Medical Examiner's Office is scheduled Thursday.

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9:30 a.m.

A hospital says the condition of the person most seriously wounded during a shooting at a Wisconsin software company has improved.

Spokeswoman Lisa Brunette said Thursday that the person critically injured in Wednesday's shooting at WTS Paradigm has been upgraded to serious condition at University Hospital in Madison.

Two others injured in the shooting are also hospitalized in serious condition. Police say a fourth person was grazed by a bullet when an employee opened fire inside the company's office in nearby Middleton.

Police say responding officers fatally shot the heavily armed worker. Authorities have not identified him or a possible motive for the Wednesday morning attack.

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8:50 a.m.

Law enforcement officers have searched a house in Madison in the investigation into a shooting at a Wisconsin software company.

Dane County Sheriff's Office spokeswoman Elise Schaffer says officers searched the residence late Wednesday on the city's southwest side following the shooting earlier that day at WTS Paradigm in nearby Middleton.

The shooter, a company employee, shot and wounded four people before he was fatally shot by officers.

Schaffer declined to say if the house belonged to the gunman, whose name has not been released. Three people suffered serious injuries, while a fourth sustained a graze wound.

Middleton police say the gunman fired at officers before he was shot.

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11:30 p.m.

Authorities say they still don't know why a Wisconsin software company employee went to his office with a pistol and extra ammunition and opened fire on his colleagues, seriously injuring several before he was fatally shot by police.

The attack happened Wednesday morning at WTS Paradigm in Middleton. Investigators haven't released the suspect's name but say he lived in nearby Madison.

Middleton Police Chief Chuck Foulke says three victims suffered serious injuries, while a fourth suffered a graze wound.

Foulke says officers were on the scene and shot the man within eight minutes of getting an emergency call. Foulke says the man was using a semi-automatic pistol and had extra magazines, and that he believes officers prevented more bloodshed.

He says the man fired at officers before he was shot.

A woman is escorted from the scene of a shooting at a software company in Middleton, Wis., Wednesday, Sept. 19, 2018. Four people were shot and wounded during the shooting in the suburb of Madison, according to a city administrator. (Steve Apps/Wisconsin State Journal via AP)

Emergency personnel arrive at the scene where a shooting was reported at a software company in Middleton, Wis., a suburb of Madison, Wednesday, Sept. 19, 2018. Multiple people were reported to have been shot. (AP Photo/Todd Richmond)

Police tape off an area near the scene where a shooting was reported at a software company in Middleton, Wis., Wednesday, Sept. 19, 2018. Multiple were reported to have been shot. (AP Photo/Todd Richmond)
WASHINGTON (AP) - The Latest on Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh and a woman who accuses him of sexually assaulting her decades ago (all times local):

10:30 p.m.

President Donald Trump says the delay over his Supreme Court nominee following a sexual assault allegation has lasted long enough.

President Donald Trump arrives at McCarran International Airport for a campaign rally, Thursday, Sept. 20, 2018, in Las Vegas. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

Trump tells Fox News host Sean Hannity before a campaign rally in Las Vegas, "I don't think you can delay it any longer."

Trump says, "They've delayed it a week already" and "have to get on with it."

Negotiations continue over whether Christine Blasey Ford will testify next week about her allegation against Brett Kavanaugh, which he has denied.

Trump tells Hannity, "I think it's a very sad situation" and is praising Kavanaugh as an "outstanding person."

But Trump also says he wants to hear Ford's side of the story, adding: "Let her say what she has to say. And let's see how it all comes out."

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8:30 p.m.

A Senate aide says Christine Blasey Ford's lawyer told the Judiciary Committee she prefers to testify next Thursday and doesn't want Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh in the room.

Attorney Debra Katz outlined five points during a call late Thursday with committee staff ahead of Ford's possible appearance. The aide was unauthorized to discuss the matter and spoke on condition of anonymity.

Ford and Kavanaugh were invited to appear Monday about her allegation that he sexually assaulted her when they were teens. Kavanaugh has denied the allegation.

The attorney raised questions about security that staff said would be provided by Capitol Police and press access they said would be similar to during Kavanaugh's confirmation hearing.

She also wants the committee to subpoena Mark Judge, who Ford has said was present for the alleged assaulted.

- By AP Congressional Correspondent Lisa Mascaro

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5:45 p.m.

Women who attended Christine Blasey Ford's high school have delivered a letter in support of her to senators as she faces scrutiny over her accusation that Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh sexually assaulted when they were teens.

Organizers say more than 1,000 women from the school signed the letter. The women say they believe Ford, calling her accusation "all too consistent with stories we heard and lived" while going to the Holton-Arms School in Bethesda, Maryland.

Some of the women who signed the letter delivered it personally Thursday to Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, a West Virginia Republican who also graduated from the Holton-Arms School.

Alumna Alexis Goldstein says word of the letter spread through social media and personal networks. She describes Ford as courageous.

Kavanaugh has denied Ford's accusation.

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5:05 p.m.

The U.S. Marshals Service is investigating threats against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh and his family amid an accusation that he sexually assaulted Christine Blasey Ford when they were teens.

The threats were confirmed Thursday by a senior administration official at the White House who was not authorized to speak publicly and disclosed the news on condition of anonymity.

The official says the threats were made in emails to Kavanaugh's wife, Ashley, and came from one person. The one being investigated uses vulgar language and suggests violence.

Ford, now a professor in California, has also faced death threats since going public with her story. Her attorney says she's had to relocate her family.

Ford claims Kavanaugh assaulted her at a party when they were in high school. Kavanaugh denies the accusation.

- By AP Congressional Correspondent Lisa Mascaro

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4:45 p.m.

More than 50 protesters opposing the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court have been arrested on Capitol Hill.

The protesters on Thursday swarmed a range of Senate offices, including those of Sen. Charles Grassley, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and Sen. Susan Collins, a key Republican swing vote.

Kavanaugh is accused of sexually assaulting Christine Blasey Ford decades ago when the two were in high school. Kavanaugh denies the allegation.

The protesters chanted, in part: "We believe Christine Ford!"

Twenty-three people were arrested Thursday morning for unlawful demonstrations. They were charged with violating the Washington, D.C., law that makes it illegal to obstruct the entrances and passageways of public buildings.

U.S. Capitol Police spokeswoman Eva Malecki says an additional 33 people were arrested Thursday afternoon on the same charge.

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3:20 p.m.

A lawyer for a woman accusing Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of sex assault decades ago says she'd be willing to testify to the Senate Judiciary Committee next week if they can agree to terms "that are fair and which ensure her safety."

The email from an attorney for Christine Blasey Ford to committee aides also says that holding the session on Monday isn't possible. Panel chairman Chuck Grassley and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell have said Monday would be her chance to testify.

Ford's lawyers have said she's received death threats.

Ford has said she wants the FBI to investigate her claim that Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her at a high school party in the 1980s. He denies it.

Lawyer Debra Katz writes that Ford's "strong preference" remains a full investigation before she testifies.

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2:45 p.m.

Groups fighting Brett Kavanaugh's nomination to the Supreme Court say a Judiciary Committee lawyer's tweet shows Republicans are biased against Christine Blasey Ford's allegation of sexual assault.

Mike Davis, the chief counsel for Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, tweeted late Wednesday that he had personally interviewed Kavanaugh as part of the committee's review but was "still waiting" for Ford's lawyers to get back to him.

He wrote: "Unfazed and determined. We will confirm Judge Kavanaugh." The tweets have since been deleted.

The tone was a more forceful admission of the GOP's push to confirm Kavanaugh with or without Ford's testimony. Ford has been invited to testify Monday, but it's uncertain if she'll appear.

Davis says he deleted the tweets "to avoid any further misinterpretation by left wing media."

Kavanaugh has denied Ford's allegation.

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2:20 p.m.

Democratic Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York says Republicans are "bullying" a woman who has accused Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of sexual assault.

Gillibrand and Democratic Sen. Mazie Hirono of Hawaii held a news conference Thursday with alumnae from the Holton-Arms School. That's the Maryland all-girls school that Christine Blasey Ford attended in the early 1980s, when she says she was assaulted by Kavanaugh. He denies the allegation.

The Senate Judiciary Committee has scheduled a Monday hearing with Ford and Kavanaugh. Ford wants an FBI investigation done before testifying, but President Donald Trump and Republicans have rebuffed her.

Gillibrand says it's "bullying" for Republicans to say Ford must show up Monday or not at all. She says they want a "he said, she said" scenario because men are usually believed.

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10:10 a.m.

Demonstrators have congregated in a Senate office building to protest Republicans' handling of the sexual-assault accusation against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh.

A group of roughly 100 people marched to the office of Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley on Thursday for a sit-in, some with fists raised.

The Iowa Republican senator plans a hearing on Monday for testimony from Kavanaugh and accuser Christine Blasey Ford, if she appears. Ford and Democrats want the FBI to investigate her allegations Kavanaugh assaulted her three decades ago, but Republicans are refusing.

The demonstrators chanted, "We believe Anita Hill! We believe Christine Ford!" Some told Grassley aides they themselves have been victims of harassment.

Hill is the law professor who during the Senate's 1991 consideration of Clarence Thomas' Supreme Court nomination accused him of sexual harassment.

Thomas and Kavanaugh have denied the accusations against them.

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12:15 a.m.

Republicans are warning that time is running out for Brett Kavanaugh's accuser to tell Congress about her claim that he sexually assaulted her when both were teenagers.

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley says his panel still plans a Monday morning hearing that Kavanaugh and Christine Blasey Ford are invited to attend.

Grassley has told Ford's attorneys that the panel is giving the California psychology professor until 10 a.m. Friday to submit a biography and prepared statement "if she intends to testify" Monday.

It remains unclear whether Ford will attend or if the hearing will occur without her.

A statement by a Ford attorney, Lisa Banks, says Grassley's plan to call just two witnesses, Kavanaugh and Ford, "is not a fair or good faith investigation."

In this Sept. 6, 2018 photo, Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh reacts as he testifies after questioning before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Capitol Hill in Washington. Official Washington is scrambling Monday to assess and manage Kavanaugh's prospects after his accuser, Christine Blasey Ford, revealed her identity to The Washington Post and described an encounter she believes was attempted rape. Kavanaugh reported to the White House amid the upheaval, but there was no immediate word on why or whether he had been summoned. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
WASHINGTON (AP) - The U.S. hopes to begin face-to-face negotiations with North Korea next month on terms for resuming on-the-ground searches in North Korea for remains of American servicemen, a senior Pentagon official said Thursday.

Kelly McKeague, director of the Defense POW-MIA Accounting Agency, said the aim is to begin searches at former battlefields next spring if agreement can be reached on areas of current dispute such as the types and amounts of compensation to North Korea for its assistance.

Remains of two American servicemen killed during the Korean War and returned by North Korea two months ago were identified by President Donald Trump on Thursday, as Army Master Sgt. Charles H. McDaniel, 32, of Vernon, Indiana, and Army Pfc. William H. Jones, 19, of Nash County, North Carolina.

Vice President Mike Pence, right, presents a American flag that was used during the return of remains from the Korean War at a ceremony in Hawaii in August 2018, to retired Army Col. Richard Dean, Vice Chairman of the Korean War Veterans Memorial Foundation, Thursday, Sept. 20, 2018, during a ceremony at the Korean War Veterans Memorial in Washington. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)

McDaniel's name had already been made public last month because his military identification tag was among the 55 boxes of remains that North Korea turned over on July 27. The tag was turned over to his sons. These are the first two service members identified from those remains.

"These HEROES are home, they may Rest In Peace, and hopefully their families can have closure," Trump tweeted.

Also Thursday, Vice President Mike Pence spoke about the remains recovery during remarks to the Korean War Veterans Memorial Foundation, but he did not reveal the names of the two who have been identified. He presented the foundation with an American flag that was among those draped over the 55 boxes from North Korea.

He said he hoped the remains from the 55 boxes are "a vanguard of what's to come" from future recoveries of war dead in North Korea. The U.S. conducted excavations in North Korea from 1996 to 2005 but suspended them amid rising political and military tensions on the Korean peninsula.

McKeague said it was unclear how many individuals are contained in the 55 boxes, but he said it could be dozens more than 55. He described the bones as a "mish-mash" that will require DNA analysis and other extensive study. The first two identifications came relatively quickly, he said, because the remains included partial skulls with teeth that could be matched to dental records, as well as clavicles matched to military X-ray records.

The remains contained in the 55 boxes had been stored by the North Korean army, probably for decades. Thousands of additional remains are believed to lie on North Korean battlefields and at former POW camps. McKeague said the Pentagon would like to send search and excavation teams into the country as early as next spring if acceptable arrangements can be negotiated in advance.

North Korea recently submitted proposed terms for follow-on search operations, but McKeague said the offer was rejected. He described the offer as "out of sorts," which he said meant that some elements were unreasonable. He cited as an example a demand that the U.S. provide eight ambulances in addition to other vehicles, fuel, food and other items.

The U.S. is preparing a counterproposal, McKeague said, and has offered to meet with a North Korean negotiating team in a third country in late October.

A Marine holds a American flag while Vice President Mike Pence, right, holds his hand over his heart as retired Army Col. Richard Dean, Vice Chairman of the Korean War Veterans Memorial Foundation, salutes, during a ceremony presenting the flag that was used during the return of remains from the Korean War during a ceremony in Hawaii in August 2018, to the Korean War Veterans Memorial Foundation, Thursday, Sept. 20, 2018, at the memorial in Washington. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)

Reflected in the wall of the Korean War Veterans Memorial, Vice President Mike Pence, center, walks through the memorial, accompanied by retired Army Col. Richard Dean, Vice Chairman of the Korean War Veterans Memorial Foundation, left, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, and Karen Pence, at the start of a ceremony to present a American flag to the Korean War Veterans Memorial Foundation that was used during the return of remains from the Korean War during the ceremony in Hawaii in Auguest 2018, Thursday, Sept. 20, 2018, in Washington. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)
MURFREESBORO, Tenn. (AP) - Four Tennessee teens are accused of burglarizing a predominantly black church and scrawling racist graffiti there.

News outlets report a Rutherford County sheriff's deputy responding to Walnut Grove Missionary Baptist Church found "KKK" written in a destroyed Bible and "We are white and we are watching you, white power" on the doors.

The church's associate minister, 69-year-old Goldy Wade, told the Daily News Journal that overflowing toilets caused water damage and a fire extinguisher was sprayed on the lobby floors.

A white robe was also found.

A sheriff's release says a stolen laptop and video camera were recovered Tuesday, and a 14-year-old and 16-year-old were charged with burglary, theft and vandalism. A 15-year-old and another 16-year-old were charged with burglary and vandalism Wednesday.

Authorities are planning to pursue additional charges.
ABERDEEN, Md. (AP) - A woman working a temporary job at a drugstore warehouse in Maryland got into an argument at work Thursday morning and began shooting colleagues, killing three before fatally turning the gun on herself, authorities and witnesses said.

Workers at the Rite Aid distribution center in northeastern Maryland described terrifying moments of "crazy" gunfire and people screaming and running in all directions after the shooting. Others said they helped the wounded, one person tying blood-soaked jeans around a man's injured leg in a bid to stop the bleeding.

Harford County Sheriff Jeffrey Gahler said at a news conference that the woman was later identified as a temporary employee of the distribution center, Snochia Moseley of Baltimore County.

FBI agents walks at the industrial business park, where several people had been shot, according with police reports in Harford County, Md., in Thursday, Sept. 20, 2018. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)

"She had reported for her workday as usual, and around 9 a.m. the shooting began, striking victims both outside the business and inside the facility," Gahler said. "We do not at this time have a motive for this senseless crime."

Krystal Watson, 33, said her husband, Eric, works at the facility and told her told her that the suspect had been arguing with somebody else near a time clock after a "town hall meeting."

"And she went off," she said.

"She didn't have a particular target. She was just shooting," Watson said as she drove away from a fire station where relatives tried to reunite with loved ones.

The sheriff said the call about shots fired came in at about 9:06 a.m. and deputies and other officers were on the scene in just over five minutes. The shooting began outside the business and continued inside, he said.

It appears only one weapon was used - a 9 mm Glock handgun that was registered in Moseley's name - and no shots were fired by responding law enforcement officers, Gahler said.

Walter Zambrano, 64, who described himself as a worker at the distribution center, said he was in the bathroom when shooting broke out and saw nothing as he hid, frightened for his life.

The person was "shooting like crazy," Zambrano said, speaking in Spanish.

He said the gunfire seemed to go on several minutes, and when it was over he sprinted outdoors. On the way out, he said he saw a female co-worker down on the floor. The scene, he said, was one of chaos.

"Everyone was screaming, running this way and that. I didn't know which way to run," he said.

The sheriff said three victims were fatally shot and three more were wounded but were expected to survive. They were not immediately identified. Moseley died at a hospital from a self-inflicted gunshot wound, Gahler said.

Area hospitals reported receiving five patients from the incident.

Susan Henderson, spokeswoman for the drugstore chain Rite Aid, described the building where the shooting took place as a support facility adjacent to a larger building. The company said in a statement that the facility had been closed temporarily and grief counselors will be made available to workers.

The company didn't immediately respond to an inquiry about Moseley's employment history.

Mike Carre, an employee of a furniture logistics operation next to the distribution center, said he helped tend to a wounded man who came hobbling in, bleeding from his leg. He called 911 from a bathroom before helping colleagues wrap the man's blood-soaked jeans above his injury to cut off blood flow.

Carre said the man told him the shooter "just came in in a bad mood this morning. He said she's usually nice. But today, I guess it wasn't her day. She just came in to pick a fight with someone."

"She pulled out a gun and she just started shooting at her co-workers."

Harford County Executive Barry Glassman said that, unfortunately, incidents like this are "becoming a too-often occurrence not only in Harford County but in the country."

The attack came nearly three months after a man armed with a shotgun attacked a newspaper office in Annapolis, Maryland, killing five staff members. Authorities accused Jarrod W. Ramos of attacking The Capital Gazette because of a longstanding grudge against the paper.

It came less than a year after a fatal workplace shooting less than 10 miles (16 kilometers) from the warehouse, in which five were shot, three fatally. And it followed another shooting Wednesday in Wisconsin in which authorities say a gunman shot four co-workers before being killed by responding officers.

On Thursday, 33-year-old Dominique Norton of Aberdeen, endured an excruciating wait of nearly two hours to be reunited with her mother, 62-year-old warehouse worker Irene Norton. Dominique Norton said she didn't know that her mother was unharmed until she got off a bus at the fire station and they tearfully embraced.

"I busted out crying. I was relieved and shaken," she said. "I am praying for all of the victims."

___

Kunzelman reported from Havre de Grace, Maryland. Associated Press writers Eric Tucker in Washington; Bill Cormier in Atlanta; Sarah Rankin in Richmond, Virginia; and Sarah Brumfield in Washington contributed to this report.

___

This story has been updated to correct the spelling of Dominique Norton's first name.

Shirley Pollack, of Perryville, Md. reacts to what authorities have called a shooting with multiple victims in Perryman, Md. on Thursday, Sept. 20, 2018. Authorities say multiple people have been shot in northeast Maryland in what the FBI is describing as an "active shooter situation." Pollack,was concerned about her son who worked near the scene of the shooting. (AP Photo/Steve Ruark)

Authorities respond to a shooting in Harford County, Md., Thursday, Sept. 20, 2018. Authorities say multiple people have been shot in northeast Maryland in what the FBI is describing as an "active shooter situation." (Jerry Jackson /The Baltimore Sun via AP)

Authorities respond to a shooting in Harford County, Md., Thursday, Sept. 20, 2018. Authorities say multiple people have been shot in northeast Maryland in what the FBI is describing as an "active shooter situation." (Jerry Jackson /The Baltimore Sun via AP)

ATF police officers patrol the industrial business park, where several people had been shot, according with police reports in Aberdeen, Md, in Thursday, Sept. 20, 2018. Authorities say multiple people have been shot in northeast Maryland in what the FBI is describing as an "active shooter situation." (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)

Maryland police officers patrol the industrial business park, where several people had been shot, according with police reports in Aberdeen, Md, in Thursday, Sept. 20, 2018. Authorities say multiple people have been shot in northeast Maryland in what the FBI is describing as an "active shooter situation." (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)

Law enforcement officials walk near the scene where a shooting took place in Aberdeen, Md., on Thursday, Sept. 20, 2018. (AP Photo/Steve Ruark)

Law enforcement officials gather near the scene where a shooting took place in Aberdeen, Md., on Thursday, Sept. 20, 2018. (AP Photo/Steve Ruark)

Tim Buffaloe, a chaplain from DayStar Advanced Response Ministerial Operations, talks to a bus driver who said he arrived to transport crime witnesses near the perimeter of a scene where a shooting took place in Aberdeen, Md. on Thursday, Sept. 20, 2018. (AP Photo/Steve Ruark)

Ambulance leave the industrial park where several people had been shot, according with police reports in Aberdeen, Md, in Thursday, Sept. 20, 2018. Authorities say multiple people have been shot in northeast Maryland in what the FBI is describing as an "active shooter situation." (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)

Maryland State Police stand near the perimeter of a scene where a shooting took place in Aberdeen, Md. on Thursday, Sept. 20, 2018. (AP Photo/Steve Ruark)

A Harford County Sheriff's vehicle blocks an entrance at the industrial business park, where several people had been shot, according with police reports in Aberdeen, Md, in Thursday, Sept. 20, 2018. Authorities say multiple people have been shot in northeast Maryland in what the FBI is describing as an "active shooter situation." (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)

JoWanda Strickland- Lucas, of Aberdeen, Md., speaks to Maryland State Police near the perimeter of a scene where a shooting took place in Aberdeen, Md. on Thursday, Sept. 20, 2018. (AP Photo/Steve Ruark)

Aberdeen police officers blocks the entrance of industrial complex where several people had been shot, in Harford County, Md, Thursday, Sept. 20, 2018. Authorities say multiple people have been shot in northeast Maryland in what the FBI is describing as an "active shooter situation." (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)

Maryland state police block the road that connects the industrial business park, where several people had been shot, in Harford County, Md, Thursday, Sept. 20, 2018. Authorities say multiple people have been shot in northeast Maryland in what the FBI is describing as an "active shooter situation." (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)

ATF police officer with a sniffing dog walks out the industrial complex in Harford County, Md., Thursday, Sept. 20, 2018. Authorities say multiple people have been shot in northeast Maryland in what the FBI is describing as an "active shooter situation." (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)

A Maryland State Police officer speaks with a motorist near the scene of a shooting in Perryman, Md. on Thursday, Sept. 20, 2018. Authorities say multiple people have been shot in northeast Maryland in what the FBI is describing as an "active shooter situation." (AP Photo/Steve Ruark)
ABERDEEN, Md. (AP) - The Latest on the shooting in Maryland (all times local):

12:05 p.m.

Law enforcement officials say the lone suspect in a shooting at a Rite Aid distribution center in northeast Maryland is in custody in critical condition.

Authorities respond to a shooting in Harford County, Md., on Thursday, Sept. 20, 2018. Authorities say multiple people have been shot in northeast Maryland in what the FBI is describing as an "active shooter situation." (Jerry Jackson /The Baltimore Sun via AP)

Harford County Sheriff Jeffrey R. Gahler says there is no longer any threat at the site of the Thursday morning shooting. He says there are multiple injuries and multiple fatalities. He didn't go into further details about the casualties at a Thursday afternoon news conference. He says authorities are taking care in the preliminary investigation to avoid giving incorrect information.

A law enforcement official told The Associated Press that three people were killed in the shooting. The law enforcement official has knowledge of the shooting but wasn't authorized to discuss details by name and spoke on condition of anonymity to The Associated Press. The official stressed that the number is based on preliminary information.

Gahler says the call about shots fired came in from the Rite Aid distribution center at 9:06 a.m., and deputies and other officers were on the scene in just over five minutes.

-Eric Tucker contributed from Washington.

__

11:35 a.m.

A spokeswoman for Rite Aid says a shooting has taken place on the campus of a company distribution center in Aberdeen, Maryland.

Spokeswoman Susan Henderson told The Associated Press on Thursday morning that the shooting happened at a support facility adjacent to a larger building.

A law enforcement official told The Associated Press that three people have been killed in the shooting. The law enforcement official has knowledge of the shooting but wasn't authorized to discuss details by name and spoke on condition of anonymity to The Associated Press. The official stressed that the number is based on preliminary information.

Henderson says authorities are at the scene and the company is cooperating with the investigation.

She says the company has no further information to share.

___

11:25 a.m.

An official says three people have been killed in a shooting in Harford County, Maryland, that authorities describe as an "active shooter" situation.

The law enforcement official has knowledge of the shooting but wasn't authorized to discuss details by name and spoke on condition of anonymity to The Associated Press. The official stressed that the number is based on preliminary information.

The Harford County Sheriff's Office tweeted that there was a shooting Thursday morning in the Perryman area that involves "multiple victims." They warn that the situation is still fluid and asked people to avoid the area.

The FBI's Baltimore field office tweets that it's responding and assisting the sheriff's office with an active shooter situation. The Baltimore field division of the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives tweets that its special agents are responding too.

-Erick Tucker, The Associated Press

___

11:10 a.m.

An official says multiple people have been killed in a shooting in Harford County, Maryland.

The law enforcement official has knowledge of the shooting but wasn't authorized to discuss details by name and spoke on condition of anonymity to The Associated Press.

The Harford County Sheriff's Office tweeted that there was a shooting Thursday morning in the Perryman area that involves "multiple victims." They warn that the situation is still fluid and asked people to avoid the area.

The FBI's Baltimore field office tweets that it's responding and assisting the sheriff's office with an active shooter situation. The Baltimore field division of the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives tweets that its special agents are responding too.

-Eric Tucker, The Associated Press

___

10:35 a.m.

Authorities say multiple people have been shot in northeast Maryland in what the FBI is describing as an "active shooter situation."

The Harford County Sheriff's Office tweeted that there was a shooting Thursday morning in the Perryman area that involves "multiple victims." They warn that the situation is still fluid and ask people to avoid the area.

The FBI's Baltimore field office tweets that it is responding and assisting the sheriff's office with an active shooter situation. The Baltimore field division of the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives tweets that its special agents are responding too.

Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan says his office is monitoring the situation in Aberdeen and that the state stands ready to offer any support.

Authorities respond to a shooting in Harford County, Md., Thursday, Sept. 20, 2018. Authorities say multiple people have been shot in northeast Maryland in what the FBI is describing as an "active shooter situation." (Jerry Jackson /The Baltimore Sun via AP)
BEIRUT (AP) - The Latest on Syria related developments (all times local):

8:35 p.m.

The Russian military says that over 3,000 Syrians have returned to their homes over the past week.

Russian Col. Gen. Mikhail Mizintsev speaks during meeting between Russia and Syria, in Moscow, Russia, Thursday, Sept. 20, 2018. The meeting discussed joint efforts with Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan to speed up the return of Syrian refugees to government-controlled areas in Syria. (AP Photo/Alexander Zemlianichenko)

Col. Gen. Mikhail Mizintsev said Thursday that 2,180 internally displaced people and 937 refugees have come home during the past week. Mizintsev spoke at an official meeting focusing on coordination of efforts to encourage the return of refugees.

The Russian general said a massive work is under way across Syria to repair vital infrastructure, including 126 schools, 92 hospitals and 105 electric power units.

Mizintsev said a United Nations convoy of 600 vehicles is expected to soon move into Syria from Jordan, carrying food and medicine.

At the same time, he accused unspecified foreign nations of trying to hamper the return of Syrians who fled to other countries by claiming that Syria remains unsafe.

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6:05 p.m.

A top U.N. humanitarian aid official for Syria says he sees "great potential for a lot of fighting" in rebel-held Idlib province despite an accord between Russia and Turkey that has delayed a military offensive.

Jan Egeland says "it's not over" and that air raids and ground offensives are likely to continue against U.N.-listed terror groups whose fighters live near civilians.

Egeland said some militants were prepared to fight to the end, and it was "totally legal and recommended to speak to armed men, even listed terrorist organizations, to end the conflict without bloodshed for civilians."

He added: "No one's asking for any impunity for terrorists here."

Egeland also said the situation in southeastern Rukban, where some 50,000 civilians are in camps near the Jordanian border, has "rapidly deteriorated in recent days."

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3:20 p.m.

Israel's air force chief is flying to Moscow to brief Russian President Vladimir Putin on the incident over Syria that led to the downing of a Russian reconnaissance plane.

Syrian missile forces on Monday mistook the Russian Il-20 for an Israeli aircraft, shooting it down and killing all 15 people aboard. Russia's Defense Ministry initially blamed the plane's loss on Israel, but Putin sought to defuse tensions, pointing at "a chain of tragic accidental circumstances."

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has offered to share data with Russia on what was happening in the sky over Syria that day and dispatched the Israeli air force chief to Moscow. The official is due to arrive in Moscow on Thursday.
BERLIN (AP) - A German newspaper has quoted a letter allegedly written by Emeritus Pope Benedict XVI in which he hit back at criticism of his 2013 resignation.

The Bild daily reported Thursday that it had obtained correspondence from November between the German-born pontiff and an unidentified German cardinal. The paper published a photo of a small excerpt with Benedict's signature.

In the letter, Benedict allegedly said he understood "deep-seated pain" caused by the end of his papacy, but for some "the pain has turned into an anger that no longer merely concerns my resignation, but increasingly also my person and my papacy as a whole."

Bild reported he said the anger "devalued" the papacy.

The Vatican declined to confirm or deny the authenticity of the letter, or comment on it Thursday.
WASHINGTON (AP) - Raising the specter of a government shutdown in just 10 days, President Donald Trump complained Thursday that a spending plan pushed by congressional Republicans is "ridiculous" because it does not include funding for a border wall with Mexico.

Trump tweeted that he wants to know "where is the money for Border Security and the WALL in this ridiculous Spending Bill." He added that "REPUBLICANS MUST FINALLY GET TOUGH" against Democrats he said are obstructing law enforcement and border security.

Trump's outburst could complicate efforts by GOP leaders to avert a partial government shutdown at the end of September and put off a potentially messy fight over border funding until after the midterm elections in November.

In this Nov. 15, 2016, photo provided by Kenneth Madsen, stadium lights atop tall poles oversee a pedestrian barrier stretching for miles along a section of the border wall between Douglas, Arizona, and Agua Prieta, in the Mexican state of Sonora. A new photo exhibit by Madsen opening Wednesday, Sept. 19, 2018, at the Ohio State University-Newark campus, "Up Close with U.S.-Mexico Border Barriers," highlights different types of border wall fencing. (Kenneth Madsen via AP)

The Senate on Tuesday approved a bill that funds the military and some civilian agencies for the next year and provides a short-term fix to keep the government open through Dec. 7.

The stopgap bill would not address Trump's long-promised wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, although separate spending bills being considered in the House and Senate provide funding for the wall. GOP leaders have said they prefer to resolve the issue after the Nov. 6 elections.

Trump cited an opinion column by Sen. David Perdue, R-Ga., blaming Democrats for the failure to fund the wall.

While Congress has made progress on spending bills, GOP leaders decided to roll their unfinished work into a package tied to defense funding and "call it a day until December," Perdue said.

"This a total sleight of hand. It is caving to Senate Democrats who are doing everything they can to derail President Trump's agenda, including funding for border security and the wall," Perdue wrote in the Washington Examiner.

Perdue was one of seven senators who opposed the stopgap bill approved by the Senate. The House is expected to approve the bill next week, days ahead of a Sept. 30 deadline for a government shutdown.

A Republican congressional aide, who was not authorized to speak publicly and asked not to be identified, dismissed Trump's tweet as "just saber-rattling" and said it would not derail efforts to avert a government shutdown at the start of the new budget year Oct. 1.

"We believe we are still on track with respect to the president signing both appropriations conference reports" that fund a range of agencies and keep the government open through Dec. 7, the aide said.

While Trump vented on Twitter, he privately assured aides Thursday that he would sign the spending bill, said an administration official who was not authorized to speak publicly and sought anonymity.

Indeed, despite Trump's frustration, his tweet hints he will eventually sign the stopgap bill by asking where money for the wall will come from "after the Midterms?"

A bill being considered in the Senate allocates $1.6 billion for Trump's wall next year, far short of the $5 billion that Trump is seeking. A bill approved by a House committee includes $5 billion for physical barriers and associated technology along the U.S. southern border.

___

Associated Press writer Catherine Lucey contributed to this story.
MELBOURNE, Fla. (AP) - The Latest on the arrest of a student pilot who board a vacant plane at a Florida airport (all times local):

11:45 p.m.

Authorities say a 22-year-old student pilot has been charged with criminal attempt to steal an airplane at a central Florida airport.

Orlando-Melbourne International Airport spokeswoman Lori Booker tells news outlets that the man also has been charged with a visa violation and criminal trespassing. His name hasn't been released.

The case unfolded Thursday morning in Melbourne, on Florida's Atlantic coast.

Booker says the man boarded a vacant American Airlines Airbus A321, which can seat up to 200 passengers. Florida Today reports the plane was blocked in to prevent movement. Two technicians doing work inside the plane confronted him and tackled him. One called police while the other subdued him. He was arrested within minutes.

Booker says the case is being investigated by the Joint Terrorism Task Force. They're trying to determine a motive.

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8:25 a.m.

Authorities in Florida say a 22-year-old student pilot boarded a vacant Airbus 321 American Airlines aircraft in a maintenance facility, causing a short lockdown at Orlando-Melbourne International Airport.

Airport spokeswoman Lori Booker tells news outlets the student drove to the curb outside the airport early Thursday, left his car running, hopped a fence and boarded the plane. A maintenance worker spotted him and police took him into custody.

Booker said officials conducted a sweep of the airfield before re-opening the airport. She says no passengers were in the area at the time.

Booker said the man was born in Trinidad and entered the United States through Canada. She says he has a Florida driver's license, but didn't know what school he attended.

Melbourne is 70 miles (112 kilometers) southeast of Orlando.

___

This item has corrected the suspect's age to 22.
SUTHERLAND SPRINGS, Texas (AP) - All federal lawsuits against the U.S. Air Force over a Texas church shooting last year that left more than two dozen worshippers dead will be consolidated into one case, a judge says.

Senior U.S. District Judge David Ezra announced Wednesday that the lawsuits will be combined and handled by U.S. District Judge Xavier Rodriguez, the San Antonio Express-News reported. Four lawsuits have been filed so far by victims or their relatives. More are expected.

The lawsuits allege that the Air Force was negligent for failing to report the convictions of gunman Devin Kelley, who opened fire Nov. 5 at the First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs. Kelley later killed himself.

FILE - In this Nov. 12, 2017, file photo, a man walks out of the memorial for the victims of a shooting at Sutherland Springs First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, Texas. A judge will consolidate all federal lawsuits against the U.S. Air Force over the 2017 South Texas church shooting that killed more than two dozen worshippers. The gunman formerly was in the military. (AP Photo/Eric Gay, File)

The Air Force admitted shortly after the massacre that the agency failed to report Kelley's past crimes to a federal database, which allowed him to pass a background check and obtain the guns he used in the slaying.

Kelley, an Air Force veteran, had a history of violence. He was discharged in 2014 for bad conduct after he was convicted of beating his first wife and injuring his stepson.

"This court has great sympathy for the victims and their families," Ezra said. "It makes no sense to have these cases spread out."

The lawsuits likely face multiple hurdles, including the doctrine of sovereign immunity that makes it nearly impossible to sue the federal government. But the Federal Tort Claims Act allows individuals to seek damages in limited cases if they can prove direct negligence by the government.

Attorney Jamal Alsaffar is handling three separate lawsuits filed by survivors or their relatives.

"It's been almost a year since this horrible thing happened, and the government has done very little to move this case. In fact, they've done nothing," Alsaffar said. "The quicker we can get the cases together and move forward so that these families' cases can be addressed openly and transparently ... the better."

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Information from: San Antonio Express-News, http://www.mysanantonio.com
State-backed hackers are still trying to break into the personal email accounts of U.S. senators and their aides - and a lawmaker focused on cybersecurity says the Senate's security office should stop refusing to help defend them.

Sen. Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, said in a Wednesday letter to Senate leaders that his office discovered that "at least one major technology company" has warned an unspecified number of senators and aides that their personal email accounts were "targeted by foreign government hackers."

On Thursday, Google spokesman Aaron Stein confirmed that his company had notified the Senate targets.

FILE - In this Feb. 4, 2015, file photo, Sen. Mike Enzi, R-Wyo., checks his phone as he arrives for a bipartisan lunch in the Kennedy Caucus Room on Capitol Hill in Washington. Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden is proposing new legislation that would allow the Senate's Sergeant at Arms to spend taxpayer money protecting senators' private email accounts and personal devices amid persistent anxieties over the digital security of the American midterm vote. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh, File)

Neither Stein nor Wyden provided any indication as to who might be behind the attempted break-ins, whether they targeted lawmakers from both political parties or their timing, though a Senate staffer said they occurred "in the last few weeks or months." The aide spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the issue publicly.

Email theft is favored by hackers the world over, including the Russian military agents accused of leaking the content of Democrats' inboxes ahead of the 2016 elections, and personal accounts have proven to be the easiest targets.

Wyden noted that the Office of the Sergeant at Arms , which oversees Senate security, had informed legislators and staffers that it has no authority to help secure personal, rather than official, accounts.

"This must change," Wyden wrote in the letter. "The November election grows ever closer, Russia continues its attacks on our democracy, and the Senate simply does not have the luxury of further delays."

A spokeswoman for the security office said it would have no comment.

Wyden has proposed legislation that would allow the security office to offer digital protection for personal accounts and devices, the same way it does with official ones.

The Wyden letter cites previous Associated Press reporting on the Russian hacking group known as Fancy Bear and how it targeted the personal accounts of congressional aides between 2015 and 2016. The group's prolific cyberspying targeted the Gmail accounts of current and former Senate staffers, including Robert Zarate, now national security adviser to Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, and Jason Thielman, chief of staff to Montana Sen. Steve Daines, the AP found.

The same group also spent the second half of 2017 laying digital traps intended to look like portals where Senate officials enter their work email credentials, the Tokyo-based cybersecurity firm TrendMicro has reported.

Microsoft seized some of those traps, and in September 2017 apparently thwarted an attempt to steal login credentials of a policy aide to Missouri Sen. Claire McCaskill , the Daily Beast discovered in July. Last month, Microsoft made news again when it seized several internet domains linked to Fancy Bear, including two apparently aimed at conservative think tanks in Washington.

Such incidents "only scratch the surface" of advanced cyberthreats faced by U.S. officials in the administration and Congress, according to Thomas Rid, a cybersecurity expert at Johns Hopkins University. Rid made the statement in a letter to Wyden last week .

"The personal accounts of senators and their staff are high-value, low-hanging targets," Rid wrote. "No rules, no regulations, no funding streams, no mandatory training, no systematic security support is available to secure these resources."

Attempts to breach such accounts were a major feature of the yearlong AP investigation into Fancy Bear that identified hundreds of senior officials and politicians - including former secretaries of state, top generals and intelligence chiefs - whose Gmail accounts were targeted.

The Kremlin is by no means the only source of worry, said Matt Tait, a University of Texas cybersecurity fellow and former British intelligence official.

"There are lots of countries that are interested in what legislators are thinking, what they're doing, how to influence them, and it's not just for purposes of dumping their information online," Tait said.

In an April 12 letter released by Wyden's office, Adm. Michael Rogers - then director of the National Security Agency - acknowledged that personal accounts of senior government officials "remain prime targets for exploitation" and said that officials at the NSA and Department for Homeland Security were discussing ways to better protect them. The NSA and DHS declined to offer further details.

Wyden said Thursday that state-backed hackers "are like burglars who are knocking on windows and doors. They are out knocking on a lot of them right now just looking for an opportunity to get through."

Guarding personal accounts is a complex, many-layered challenge.

Boosting protection in the Senate could begin with the distribution of small chip-based security devices such as the YubiKey, which are already used in many secure corporate and government environments, Tait said. Such keys supplement passwords to authenticate legitimate users, potentially frustrating distant hackers.

Cybersecurity experts also recommend them for high-value cyber-espionage targets including human rights workers and journalists.

"In an ideal world, the Sergeant at Arms could just have a pile of YubiKeys," said Tait. "When legislators or staff come in they can (get) a quick cybersecurity briefing and pick up a couple of these for their personal accounts and their official accounts."

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Bajak reported from Boston. Satter reported from London. AP video journalist Gillian Flaccus contributed from Portland, Oregon.

FILE - In this June 28, 2018, file photo, Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee, speaks during a hearing on the nomination of Charles Rettig for Internal Revenue Service Commissioner on Capitol Hill in Washington. Wyden is proposing new legislation that would allow the Senate's Sergeant at Arms to spend taxpayer money protecting senators' private email accounts and personal devices amid persistent anxieties over the digital security of the American midterm vote. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin, File)

FILE - In this April 30, 2015, file photo, a Capitol Hill staffer looks down at papers while on a cellphone while walking inside the Russell Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill in Washington. Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden is proposing new legislation that would allow the Senate's Sergeant at Arms to spend taxpayer money protecting senators' private email accounts and personal devices amid persistent anxieties over the digital security of the American midterm vote. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin, File)
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September 19, 2018

An impressive overview of the SCOTUS criminal docket on the eve of a new Term

Rory Little has this terrific lengthy post over at SCOTUSblog under the heading "Criminal cases in the October 2018 term: A law professors dream." The post provides a detailed review of a handful of the criminal cases on tap for the start for the coming Supreme Court Term as well as a brief review of all the other. Here is how the post begins:

Applying a broad definition, 13 of the 38 cases in which the Supreme Court has granted review for the upcoming October 2018 term raise criminal law and related issues. (A few more will be granted in the long conference order list to be released September 27.) This is about average: Between a quarter to a third of cases decided by the court every year are criminal-law-related. But this term the docket feels a bit special: As I explained to the American Bar Association in my Annual Review of the Supreme Courts Term, Criminal Cases last month, October Term 2018 might be described as a criminal law professors dream.

September 19, 2018 at 10:48 PM | Permalink

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The double jeopardy case makes me aroused; I have been arguing against dual sovereignty for decades.

Posted by: Daniel | Sep 20, 2018 3:45:47 PM

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NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) - The U.S. Court of Appeals says the city of Nashville violated the First Amendment rights of anti-gay preachers at a 2015 LGBT pride festival.

The Tennessean reports the decision filed Wednesday reverses the district court's ruling. John McGlone and Jeremy Peters filed the lawsuit against the city in April 2016, asserting their freedom of speech was violated when they were made to leave the sidewalk in front of the park where the festival was being held. They had been protesting using amplification equipment.

Nashville had argued the protesters' message interfered with that of the festival. But the decision says that explanation makes it clear that they wouldn't have been excluded if they weren't spreading an anti-homosexuality message.

One judge dissented, saying the use of bullhorns was sufficiently disruptive.

___

Information from: The Tennessean, http://www.tennessean.com
ABERDEEN, Md. (AP) - The Latest on the shooting in Maryland (all times local):

4:30 p.m.

Authorities have released the identity of a woman who they say killed herself after fatally shooting three people and wounding several others at a Maryland warehouse.

A Maryland State Police officer speaks with a motorist near the scene of a shooting in Perryman, Md. on Thursday, Sept. 20, 2018. Authorities say multiple people have been shot in northeast Maryland in what the FBI is describing as an "active shooter situation." (AP Photo/Steve Ruark)

Harford County Sheriff Jeffrey R. Gahler said Thursday she was 26-year-old Snochia Moseley of Baltimore County, a temporary employee at the Rite Aid distribution center where the shootings took place.

Officials say the suspect opened fire around 9 a.m. with a 9 mm Glock that was registered in her name. Gahler said authorities don't know her motive.

___

3:20 p.m.

A Maryland sheriff says the 26-year-old female suspect in a shooting at a Rite Aid distribution center shot herself in the head and is dead.

Harford County Sheriff Jeffrey R. Gahler said Thursday the woman was a temporary employee there and was from Baltimore, but he did not immediately release her name.

He said seven people were wounded altogether. Four of the seven died, including the suspect.

A Baltimore hospital received four patients with gunshot wounds after the shooting.

Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center said in a statement Thursday afternoon that it was waiting to confirm that family members have been notified before sharing any additional information.

The hospital has declined to say whether one of the patients is the suspected shooter.

A law enforcement official told The Associated Press that three people were killed in the shooting Thursday morning. Officials said the suspect was critically wounded.

___

3:05 p.m.

A Baltimore hospital that received four patients with gunshot wounds after a shooting at a Rite Aid distribution center in Maryland says two are in stable condition and two are seriously injured.

Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center said in a statement Thursday afternoon that it was waiting to confirm that family members have been notified before sharing any additional information.

The hospital has declined to say whether one of the patients is the suspected shooter.

A law enforcement official told The Associated Press that three people were killed in the shooting Thursday morning. Officials said the suspect was critically wounded.

___

2:30 p.m.

A law enforcement official says authorities have been methodically working their way through a Rite Aid distribution center in Maryland to clear the facility after a morning shooting there.

Christie Hopkins is communications director for the Harford County sheriff's office. She says officers need to "ensure there are no other victims inside, ensure that there is no one that was hiding from violence, and ensure that there were no other suspects."

She also says officials are confident that the suspect who is now in custody acted alone, and there is no further threat to the community.

A law enforcement official told The Associated Press that three people were killed in the shooting Thursday morning. The suspect was critically wounded.

___

1:15 p.m.

A Baltimore hospital has received four patients with gunshot wounds after a shooting at a Rite Aid distribution center in Maryland.

Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center spokeswoman Monica Stone said in an email Thursday that she was unable to provide details about the patients' conditions.

She says the patients were brought there because it was the closest trauma center to the distribution center in Harford County.

Authorities say a call about shots fired came in from center at 9:06 a.m. Thursday, and deputies and other officers were on the scene in just over five minutes.

A law enforcement official told The Associated Press that three people were killed in the shooting Thursday morning and the suspect was critically wounded.

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12:05 p.m.

Law enforcement officials say the lone suspect in a shooting at a Rite Aid distribution center in northeast Maryland is in custody in critical condition.

Harford County Sheriff Jeffrey R. Gahler says there is no longer any threat at the site of the Thursday morning shooting. He says there are multiple injuries and multiple fatalities. He didn't go into further details about the casualties at a Thursday afternoon news conference. He says authorities are taking care in the preliminary investigation to avoid giving incorrect information.

A law enforcement official told The Associated Press that three people were killed in the shooting. The law enforcement official has knowledge of the shooting but wasn't authorized to discuss details by name and spoke on condition of anonymity to The Associated Press. The official stressed that the number is based on preliminary information.

Gahler says the call about shots fired came in from the Rite Aid distribution center at 9:06 a.m., and deputies and other officers were on the scene in just over five minutes.

-Eric Tucker contributed from Washington.

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11:35 a.m.

A spokeswoman for Rite Aid says a shooting has taken place on the campus of a company distribution center in Aberdeen, Maryland.

Spokeswoman Susan Henderson told The Associated Press on Thursday morning that the shooting happened at a support facility adjacent to a larger building.

A law enforcement official told The Associated Press that three people have been killed in the shooting. The law enforcement official has knowledge of the shooting but wasn't authorized to discuss details by name and spoke on condition of anonymity to The Associated Press. The official stressed that the number is based on preliminary information.

Henderson says authorities are at the scene and the company is cooperating with the investigation.

She says the company has no further information to share.

___

11:25 a.m.

An official says three people have been killed in a shooting in Harford County, Maryland, that authorities describe as an "active shooter" situation.

The law enforcement official has knowledge of the shooting but wasn't authorized to discuss details by name and spoke on condition of anonymity to The Associated Press. The official stressed that the number is based on preliminary information.

The Harford County Sheriff's Office tweeted that there was a shooting Thursday morning in the Perryman area that involves "multiple victims." They warn that the situation is still fluid and asked people to avoid the area.

The FBI's Baltimore field office tweets that it's responding and assisting the sheriff's office with an active shooter situation. The Baltimore field division of the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives tweets that its special agents are responding too.

-Erick Tucker, The Associated Press

___

11:10 a.m.

An official says multiple people have been killed in a shooting in Harford County, Maryland.

The law enforcement official has knowledge of the shooting but wasn't authorized to discuss details by name and spoke on condition of anonymity to The Associated Press.

The Harford County Sheriff's Office tweeted that there was a shooting Thursday morning in the Perryman area that involves "multiple victims." They warn that the situation is still fluid and asked people to avoid the area.

The FBI's Baltimore field office tweets that it's responding and assisting the sheriff's office with an active shooter situation. The Baltimore field division of the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives tweets that its special agents are responding too.

-Eric Tucker, The Associated Press

___

10:35 a.m.

Authorities say multiple people have been shot in northeast Maryland in what the FBI is describing as an "active shooter situation."

The Harford County Sheriff's Office tweeted that there was a shooting Thursday morning in the Perryman area that involves "multiple victims." They warn that the situation is still fluid and ask people to avoid the area.

The FBI's Baltimore field office tweets that it is responding and assisting the sheriff's office with an active shooter situation. The Baltimore field division of the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives tweets that its special agents are responding too.

Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan says his office is monitoring the situation in Aberdeen and that the state stands ready to offer any support.

Shirley Pollack, of Perryville, Md. reacts to what authorities have called a shooting with multiple victims in Perryman, Md. on Thursday, Sept. 20, 2018. Authorities say multiple people have been shot in northeast Maryland in what the FBI is describing as an "active shooter situation." Pollack,was concerned about her son who worked near the scene of the shooting. (AP Photo/Steve Ruark)

Authorities respond to a shooting in Harford County, Md., Thursday, Sept. 20, 2018. Authorities say multiple people have been shot in northeast Maryland in what the FBI is describing as an "active shooter situation." (Jerry Jackson /The Baltimore Sun via AP)

Authorities respond to a shooting in Harford County, Md., on Thursday, Sept. 20, 2018. Authorities say multiple people have been shot in northeast Maryland in what the FBI is describing as an "active shooter situation." (Jerry Jackson /The Baltimore Sun via AP)
WASHINGTON (AP) - U.S. and Canadian negotiators are working around the clock on a deal to keep Canada in a North American trade bloc ahead of a Sept. 30 U.S. deadline.

"Our officials are in pretty much constant contact," Canadian Minister of Foreign Affairs Chrystia Freeland told reporters after meetings Thursday with her counterpart, U.S. Trade Rep. Robert Lighthizer. "It would not be an exaggeration to say they are working 24/7."

Freeland is returning to Canada for a summit of women foreign ministers Friday but said she and Lighthizer remain in close contact by phone and email.

Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland arrives at the Office Of The United States Trade Representative in Washington, Thursday, Sept. 20, 2018. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)

Canada was left out when the United States and Mexico reached an agreement last month to revamp the North American Free Trade Agreement. Freeland is trying to get the No. 2 U.S. trade partner reinstated.

The countries are under pressure to reach a deal by the end of the month, when Lighthizer must make public a copy of the full text of the agreement with Mexico. Until then, he has time to bring Canada back into the regional trading bloc.

Freeland shrugged off the Sept. 30 deadline, saying she cared only about "getting a deal that is good for Canada and good for Canadians."

Trump has said he wants to go ahead with a revamped NAFTA - with or without Canada. It is unclear, however, whether Trump has authority from Congress to pursue a revamped NAFTA with only Mexico, and some lawmakers say they won't go along with a deal that leaves Canada out.

Among other things, the negotiators are battling over Canada's high dairy tariffs and policies meant to keep the country's culture from being overwhelmed by U.S. movies and television. Canada also wants to keep a NAFTA dispute-resolution process that the U.S. wants to jettison.

Jerry Dias, president of the Canadian private-sector union Unifor, expressed "guarded optimism" about the talks.

The U.S., he said, "is now recognizing that there is not going to be a deal" if it does not make some concessions to Canada.

Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland speaks to the media as she arrives at the Office Of The United States Trade Representative in Washington, Thursday, Sept. 20, 2018. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)

Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland arrives at the Office Of The United States Trade Representative in Washington, Thursday, Sept. 20, 2018. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)
Theresa May is to issue a fresh call to EU leaders for compromise in the Brexit talks as Brussels chief negotiator said he was ready to come forward with a new offer on the Irish border.

As EU leaders prepared to gather in Salzburg, Michel Barnier said he was working on an improved plan to avoid the return of a hard border while respecting the territorial integrity of the UK in an attempt to break the talks deadlock.

After briefing EU foreign ministers in Brussels on Tuesday, Mr Barnier warned time for an agreement was running out and that the moment of truth would come at the next full EU summit on October 18.

It is then we shall see whether agreement we are hoping for is in our grasp, he told a news conference.

Michel Barnier has said he is ready to make an improved offer on the Irish border (Niall Carson/PA)

The informal gathering of EU leaders in Salzburg will be the first time they have met together since Mrs May published her Chequers blueprint for Brexit in July.

The Prime Minister is expected to brief the other 27 leaders on proposals over dinner on Wednesday and they will then have a separate discussion on Thursday after she has left.

In an interview with the Daily Express she said it was the right plan for the UK while representing a good deal for the EU.

Im not going to be pushed away from doing what is necessary to get the right deal for Britain, she said.

(PA Graphics)

A senior No 10 source said she would tell them the UKs position had evolved and that the EU would need to do the same if they were to get an agreement.

And she will make clear that the existing EU backstop proposal to avoid the return of a hard border between Northern Ireland and the Republic in the event of a no-deal Brexit remains unacceptable.

The Government argues Brussels plan, which would see Northern Ireland remain in the customs union until a new arrangement could be agreed, would effectively create a border between the North and rest of the UK.

Writing in German newspaper Die Welt, Mrs May said the UK and EU were close to agreement on withdrawal, but added: Neither side can demand something completely unacceptable from the other.

Good to catch up today with @simoncoveney ahead of #Salzburgsummit18. Progress on backstop absolutely essential in the run up to October #EUCO #Brexit  pic.twitter.com/TrhnjosAaq  Michel Barnier (@MichelBarnier) September 18, 2018

Mr Barnier said that his latest proposal to break the deadlock would de-dramatise the controls that would be necessary in the event of the backstop coming into play.

We are ready to improve this proposal. Work on the EU side is ongoing.

We are clarifying which goods arriving in Northern Ireland from the rest of the UK would need to be checked and where, when and by whom these checks could be performed, he said.

We can also clarify that most checks can take place away from the border at the company premises or in the markets.

We need to de-dramatise the checks that are needed.

There was no immediate response to his comments from either Downing Street or the Department for Exiting the EU, and it was unclear whether they would be sufficient to unlock the negotiations.

A No 10 source said Mrs May will tell the other leaders in Salzburg that a disorderly Brexit can still be avoided with good will and determination on both sides.

While she will say the UK will honour its commitment to ensure there is a legally operative protocol on the Irish border, it must preserve the constitutional and economic integrity of the UK, which the existing proposal does not.

Limiting damage caused by #Brexit is a shared interest. Unfortunately, a no deal scenario is still quite possible. But if we all act responsibly, we can avoid a catastrophe. #SalzburgSummit18 https://t.co/Xs2qaZwtYf  Charles Michel (@eucopresident) September 18, 2018

In his comments, Mr Barnier reminded the British that the whole issue of the border had arisen as a result of their decision to leave not only the EU but also the single market and the customs union.

What we need in withdrawal agreement is a legally operational backstop which fulls respects the territorial integrity of the UK. It is a backstop that will only apply unless a better solution is found, he said.

Mr Barnier also made clear that time to reach a deal was running out with his comment that the October summit would be the moment of truth.

Attention had been increasingly focused on the prospect of a special summit in November to finalise an agreement, however Mr Barnier said it should be clear before then whether a deal was actually possible.

European Council president Donald Tusk said EU leaders should discuss arrangements for the final phase of the Brexit talks including the possibility of calling another European Council in November.

In a letter to leaders ahead of the Salzburg meeting he called on them to work on limiting the damage caused by Brexit.

Unfortunately, a no-deal scenario is still quite possible. But if we all act responsibly, we can avoid a catastrophe, he said.

Housing Secretary James Brokenshire said he remains positive and confident based on feedback from EU member states about how the Brexit process can be taken forward.

He told BBC Radio 4s Today programme: We have clearly evolved our position and it is now for the EU to evolve its position.

I think the Chequers deal sets out a deliverable, workable plan.

Pushed on whether the UK position could change, Mr Brokenshire replied: We obviously want the EU to evolve its stance and we wait to see how they respond to this.
An estimated four million UK mobile phone users have been charged 490 million for handsets they already own, a charity has warned.

Citizens Advice said EE, Three and Vodafone routinely continued to charge customers for handsets after they had paid them off in full.

It warned that customers were often unaware they were being charged for handsets after their contracts had ended, even though they owned the phone and only needed to continue paying for calls, texts and data.

File photo dated 11/10/14 of a woman using a mobile phone.

The most common mobile contracts are bundled deals, which typically last for two years and do not include information about the cost of the handset.

A study by the advisory service of more than 700 bundled contracts found that consumers would pay more than buying the phone outright in 73% of cases, despite 55% of consumers assuming it was the cheaper option.

On average customers are overcharged 22 a month, but this was as high as 38 for high-end phones such as an iPhone or Samsung Galaxy, the charity found.

The study found vulnerable people were at higher risk of being overcharged, with older people twice as likely to be charged for a phone they already owned for longer than 12 months at an potential average cost of 264.

The advisory service is calling on the three companies to separate the cost of the phone from the mobile service  a practice already in place with other providers.

Ofcom is consulting on addressing the problem, but Citizens Advice said the regulators proposal of sending a single notification to customers before their contract ends does not go far enough.

Citizens Advice chief executive Gillian Guy said: It is unacceptable that mobile providers are knowingly overcharging customers for phones they already own.

Weve heard a lot of talk from Government and the regulator but now we need action. Other companies have already stopped doing this so were looking for these three major providers to follow suit.

In the meantime, consumers should check their phone bills to see if they can save money with a SIM-only contract or upgrade to a new phone.

Digital minister Margot James said: It is absolutely unacceptable for consumers to be charged for a product they have already bought. Mobile providers must make it clearer when a customer has paid off their handset and is in a position to switch to a cheaper deal.

We will continue to work with Ofcom and Citizens Advice to push for a fairer and more transparent system that helps people save money.

An EE spokesman said: We fully agree that customers shouldnt overpay, but we believe that this is best achieved through clear communications with consumers about their options, and that the current proposals for separating phones and tariff is overly simplistic and doesnt give the customers either the transparency or best deal that they deserve.

Three said: We continue to look closely at the issue of handset financing and are working closely on this with the Government and regulators.

Vodafone said: We already contact all of our customers when they are approaching the end of their minimum term to let them know their options. These include upgrading their handset or moving to a SIM-only contract so they are not paying anything for a handset.

An Ofcom spokesman said: We share concerns about customers paying more than they need to. People are not being given the information they need about their contracts, so weve set out plans to force companies to tell customers when their minimum contract ends.

Well continue to work with Citizens Advice, Government and mobile providers and consider any necessary further action.
The way social media impacts young peoples mental health needs to be better understood, according to new research by the Centre for Mental Health.

The charity has published a briefing paper which says there is evidence to show both positive and negative effects on mental health by using social media, but more research is needed if young people are to be helped navigate the challenges of 21st-century life.

The report comes in the wake of research by Ofcom and the Information Commissioners Office which found that 45% of UK adults had experienced some form of online harm.

The Centre for Mental Health paper said: Evidence about the roles social media play in relation to our mental health is still emerging.

(Yui Mok/PA)

And while more has been said and written about the potential risks and dangers, evidence has come to light on both positive and negative impacts that may be associated with social media use.

The paper highlighted concerns around social media use such as addiction and cyberbullying, which have been linked to social network use in previous research.

Some platforms, including Facebook and Instagram, have moved to mitigate fears of addiction by introducing wellbeing tools that enable users to monitor and restrict their time on such platforms.

Public campaigns such as Scroll Free September have also been launched to encourage the public to use social media less.

But the charity also highlighted the role of social media in creating and sustaining connections between people and reducing loneliness as one positive impact on mental health, along with the boost in self-esteem that can come from presenting a positive version of ourselves to the world.

(PA)

The report calls on government departments, social media companies and charities to work together to help mitigate the risks around social media.

This may include changing the way social media platforms work, but also supporting schools and families to help children and young people to navigate social media safely and making greater use of the opportunities to promote good mental health and speedy help-seeking, the charity said.

Chief executive Sarah Hughes added: Social media use is fundamental to many of our lives today, and particularly those of young people.

Public and political debate about social media and mental health has so far been polarised and often lacking in evidence.

Blaming social media for mental health difficulties with many complex causes simply alienates the young people whose lives are being debated and social media companies who could do more to help young people to thrive.

We need a new start that starts with the experiences of young people, that understands the context in which social media exist in young peoples lives and that seeks solutions which will make a difference.
A petition giving voters the opportunity to unseat Democratic Unionist MP Ian Paisley will close later.

The exercise in the constituency of North Antrim represents the first use of a democratic device created following the Westminster expenses scandal.

It was triggered after Mr Paisley was banned from the House of Commons for 30 sitting days for failing to declare two 2013 family holidays paid for by the Sri Lanka government.

In August, a parliamentary watchdog found that a year after the luxury holidays Mr Paisley lobbied then Prime Minister David Cameron not to support a UN probe into alleged Sri Lankan human rights abuses.

If 10% of the electorate sign the recall petition, 7,543 voters, Mr Paisley will automatically lose his seat and a by-election will be called.

He would be able to contest the subsequent poll.

Sinn Feins Mairtin O Muilleoir and Raymond McCartney leaving the Joey Dunlop Leisure Centre in Ballymoney where a recall petition opened for a Westminster by-election in North Antrim (Niall Carson/PA)

Three venues have been open in North Antrim for the last six weeks to enable people to sign the petition.

Voters have also been able to put their name to the petition via post.

Counting will begin in Belfast at midnight, with the result due in the early hours of Thursday.

Mr Paisley, son of late DUP founder Rev Ian Paisley, is currently suspended from his party pending its own internal investigation into his conduct.

His Commons ban has left current Prime Minister Theresa May shorn of one of her 10 DUP MP confidence and supply allies during a period that could witness several crucial Brexit votes.

It has also given the DUP another headache at a time when the party is under intense scrutiny at public inquiry hearings in Northern Ireland examining its handling of the botched green energy scheme that brought down Stormont powersharing.

An investigation by the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards found the cost of the hospitality afforded Mr Paisley and his family may have been significantly more than his 50,000 estimate.

A sample of the recall petition (Niall Carson/PA)

It found the Sri Lankan holidays included business-class air travel, accommodation at first-class hotels, helicopter trips and visits to tourist attractions for the North Antrim MP and his wider family.

The trips also included meeting with Sri Lankan governmental figures.

Mr Paisleys threshold for registering such hospitality in 2013 was around 660.

In March 2014, Mr Paisley wrote to Mr Cameron to lobby against a proposed United Nations resolution setting up an international investigation into alleged human rights abuses in Sri Lanka.

In the wake of the watchdog report, Mr Paisley apologised for what he described as an unintentional failure to declare the holidays.

In the 2017 general election, Mr Paisley retained his North Antrim seat with a landslide 20,000-plus majority, securing nearly 59% of the vote.
TV presenter and comedy writer Denis Norden has died aged 96, his family said.

The Itll Be Alright On The Night host died on Wednesday morning after spending many weeks at the Royal Free Hospital in north London, a statement from his children, Nick and Maggie Norden, issued to the Press Association said.

It added: Wed like to say a huge thank you to all the dedicated staff and doctors who have looked after him  with much devotion.

A wonderful dad, a loving grandfather and great great-grandfather  he gave his laughter-mongering to so many.

He will be in our hearts forever.

Denis Norden presented Itll Be Alright On The Night for 29 years (PA)

Norden presented the ITV bloopers show for 29 years until his retirement in 2006.

After stepping down he gave a lot of attention to raising awareness of macular disease, a degenerative eye condition from which he suffered, and became a patron of the Macular Society.

Born in Hackney, east London, in February 1922, he trained as a manager for the Hyams brothers, owners of impressive London picture palaces.

He served in the RAF in the Second World War with such other future famous names as Eric Sykes and Bill Fraser, and wrote shows to entertain the troops  and get off guard duty.

Norden met future writing partner Frank Muir in 1947 and they created Take It From Here, the radio hit broadcast by the BBC between 1948 and 1960 starring Jimmy Edwards, Joy Nichols, June Whitfield and Dick Bentley.

His small screen career kicked off in 1951 with Heres Television, the BBC sketch show starring Sidney James and Ian Carmichael.

Norden and Muir amicably parted ways in 1964 after a series of successes and he wrote material for The Frost Report, hosted by the late Sir David Frost.

He became established as a television presenter in the 1970s, hosting Looks Familiar, the nostalgic chat show, before Itll be Alright On The Night hit the airwaves in 1977.

Its popularity saw ITV commission spin-off Denis Nordens Laughter File, with both running until his retirement.

After stepping down from presenting Itll Be Alright On The Night he spent time raising awareness of macular disease, a degenerative eye condition he suffered.

He joined the Macular Society as a member in 2004 and became patron in 2009.

Cathy Yelf, chief executive of the charity, told the Press Association: The society was privileged to have Denis as a patron.

Denis first joined the society as a member in 2004 after he was diagnosed with age-related macular degeneration (AMD), the biggest cause of blindness in the UK. Were pleased we were able to offer him the support he so needed at the time.

He was an inspiration to many of us as he coped with his deteriorating sight for many years, before it became public knowledge, devising ways to learn his lines and carry on working.

We will always be grateful for everything he did for the society and everyone here would like to pass their condolences to his family and friends, he will be much missed.
A 2 billion investment in social housing, air pollutions link to dementia and Brexit make headlines on Wednesday.

There has been wide criticism from the business community of a Government-commissioned report on migration after Brexit, The Guardian reports.

The Guardian front page, Wednesday 19 September 2018: Business anger at elitist plan to axe visas for lower-paid pic.twitter.com/AWBRrdkQrs  The Guardian (@guardian) September 18, 2018

The Independent also focuses the report, which recommended controls on immigration of low-skilled workers.

What the papers say - September 19

The Independent: Backlash against bid to stop low-skilled migrants #tomorrowspapertoday pic.twitter.com/aF3DenAGp0  Helena Wilkinson (@BBCHelena) September 18, 2018

Theresa May has discussed her Brexit plans in an interview with the Daily Express.

Daily Express: Brexit plan delivers freedoms people voted for #tomorrowspaperstoday pic.twitter.com/V7E6OvbCME  Helena Wilkinson (@BBCHelena) September 18, 2018

On its front page, the Daily Telegraph carries a pledge by the PM to invest an extra 2 billion in social housing over the next 10 years.

The Times and the Daily Mail lead with a study into the increased risk of dementia from living in polluted areas.

Tomorrow's front page: Dementia threat soars in areas hit by pollution #tomorrowspaperstoday pic.twitter.com/cDiM2M2wGO  The Times (@thetimes) September 18, 2018

In other news, the Financial Times reports on Beijing reaction to a US move to place 200 billion dollars worth of Chinese goods.

Just published: front page of the Financial Times UK edition Wednesday September 19 https://t.co/gyb3Vmixpe pic.twitter.com/Ehd5Nyt32u  Financial Times (@FinancialTimes) September 18, 2018

A Russian woman has told The Sun she fears she was the victim of a rat poison attack after falling ill at a restaurant in Salisbury on Sunday.

The Daily Mirror carries a warning over bed blocking in the NHS as winter approaches.

The over-75s may have to pay for their TV licences in a bid to ease cost pressures on the BBC, the i reports.

i: BBC threat to free TV licences for over-75s #tomorrowspaperstoday pic.twitter.com/rTdUbRdPNE  Helena Wilkinson (@BBCHelena) September 18, 2018

The Metro leads with criticism of policing practices at the Houses of Parliament heard at the inquest of victims of the Westminster Bridge terror attack.

Metro: Hero cop failed by bungled security #tomorrowspaperstoday pic.twitter.com/hjBBCnniuY  Helena Wilkinson (@BBCHelena) September 18, 2018

And the Daily Star reports on the arrival of Storm Ali.
Tesco is to launch its new discount store format called Jacks, taking on German discounters Aldi and Lidl.

The UKs biggest retailer invited reporters to join chief executive Dave Lewis at its site in Chatteris, Cambridgeshire, on Wednesday.

Tesco unveils the new Jacks concept at their site in Chatteris, Cambridgeshire (Joe Giddens/PA)

It simply said it will be sharing some exciting news and did not give further detail, but earlier advertised for staff for a new store format in Chatteris.

It was reported in July that Tesco was close to launching a chain of discount stores in Britain called Jacks, after Jack Cohen, who founded a business in 1919 that became Tesco.

Goods at Tescos new Jacks concept store (Sam Russell/PA)

The Chatteris store will be the first to open under the new brand.

Tesco is Britains grocery market leader with a share of 27.4%, while Aldi and Lidl have increased their combined share to 13.1%, according to the Kantar Worldpanel data.
 An impressive overview of the SCOTUS criminal docket on the eve of a new Term | Main | Brennan Center reports on encouraging 2018 crime data based on preliminary data from largest 30 US cities 

The title of this post is the title of this new report from the Cornell Center on the Death Penalty Worldwide. Here are excerpts from its executive summary:

We estimate that at least 500 women are currently on death rows around the world. While exact figures are impossible to obtain, we further estimate that over 100 women have been executed in the last ten years  and potentially hundreds more. The number of women facing execution is not dramatically different from the number of juveniles currently on death row, but the latter have received a great deal more attention from international human rights bodies, national courts, scholars, and advocates.

This report aims to shed light on this much-neglected population. Few researchers have sought to obtain information about the crimes for which women have been sentenced to death, the circumstances of their lives before their convictions, and the conditions under which they are detained on death row. As a result, there is little empirical data about women on death row, which impedes advocates from understanding patterns in capital sentencing and the operation of gender bias in the criminal legal system. To the extent that scholars have focused on women on death row, they have concluded that they are beneficiaries of gender bias that operates in their favor. While it is undeniable that women are protected from execution under certain circumstances (particularly mothers of infants and young children) and that women sometimes benefit from more lenient sentencing, those that are sentenced to death are subjected to multiple forms of gender bias.

Most women have been sentenced to death for the crime of murder, often in relation to the killing of family members in a context of gender-based violence. Others have been sentenced to death for drug offenses, terrorism, adultery, witchcraft, and blasphemy, among other offenses. Although they represent a tiny minority of all prisoners sentenced to death, their cases are emblematic of systemic failings in the application of capital punishment....

Our research also indicates that women who are seen as violating entrenched norms of gender behavior are more likely to receive the death penalty. In several cases documented in this report, women facing the death penalty have been cast as the femme fatale, the child murderer, or the witch. The case of Brenda Andrew in the United States is illustrative. In her capital trial, the prosecution aired details of her sexual history under the guise of establishing her motive to kill her husband. The jury was allowed to hear about Brendas alleged extramarital affairs from years before the murder, as well as details about outfits she wore. The trial court also permitted the prosecutor to show the underwear found in the suitcase in her possession after she fled to Mexico, because it showed that she was not behaving as a grieving widow, but as a free fugitive living large on a Mexico beach. As one Justice of the Court of Criminal Appeals of Oklahoma noted, Brenda was put on trial not only for the murder of her husband but for being a bad wife, a bad mother, and a bad woman....

Our country profiles aim to provide a snapshot of women facing the death penalty in several major regions of the world. The stories of women on death row provide anecdotal evidence of the particular forms of oppression and inhumane treatment documented in this report. It is our hope that this initial publication, the first of its kind, will inspire the international community to pay greater attention to the troubling plight of women on death row worldwide.
Two detainees have died after a van was swept away by rising floodwater in South Carolina, authorities said.

A sheriffs office van was carrying two detainees and two officers from Conway to Darlington when it was engulfed by water, according to Horry County Sheriffs Department spokeswoman Brooke Holden.

The van was travelling near the Little Pee Dee River, one of the bodies of water officials in South Carolina are watching closely as water pours into the state from upriver in North Carolina following the heavy rains of Storm Florence.

South Carolina (AP Photo/Sean Rayford)

Marion County Coroner Jerry Richardson confirmed that two women died in the incident. Their names have not been released.

US&R FL-TF1 assists stranded residents in Horry County, SC. Rescue teams like these are deployed to areas heavily impacted by #Florence as flooding continues to be a major concern. pic.twitter.com/kqC2mk7iYJ  FEMA Region 4 (@femaregion4) September 18, 2018

Ms Holden said the two deputies tried to free the detainees out but could not open the doors. High-water rescue teams plucked the officers from the top of the van.

The incident is being investigated by the State Law Enforcement Division.

Forecasters predict some rivers in the north-east of the state might not reach their highest levels until later this week or next week.

In North Carolina, governor Roy Cooper pleaded with thousands of Florence evacuees to be patient and not return home yet.

Governor Cooper in Wilmington today: "Together we can beat this thing and get through it." pic.twitter.com/YeFDGPSvlT  Governor Roy Cooper (@NC_Governor) September 19, 2018

The city of Wilmington is still mostly an island surrounded by floodwater, and people are waiting for hours for handouts of necessities like food.

Mr Cooper told a news conference it was hard for residents to leave home, and it is even harder for them to wait to go back, but many roads are dangerous and new hazards are possible as water recedes.

Officials said about 10,000 people are in shelters.

Aides said President Donald Trump will visit North Carolina on Wednesday to see the damage. He has already tweeted that any criticism of the government response is a total lie.
Detectives are investigating whether an incident in which a car hit pedestrians outside a mosque was an anti-Muslim attack.

Three people were struck by the vehicle outside the Al-Majlis Al-Hussaini Islamic centre in Cricklewood, north-west London, as it sped away following a row, Scotland Yard said.

(PA Graphics)

Two men in their 20s suffered minor injuries, and a man in his 50s is in hospital with a serious leg injury, Scotland Yard said.

The force said it is investigating reports the occupants of the car shouted anti-Islamic taunts after being asked to leave by security for drinking, using drugs and behaving anti-socially.

The Hussaini Association in Oxgate Lane, Cricklewood (John Stillwell/PA)

Officers were called to Oxgate Lane, by Edgware Road, at around 12.35am on Wednesday.

Occupants of the car, inside a private car park at the Islamic centre, were told to leave by security at around 12.20am for anti-social behaviour, drinking and apparently using drugs, the force said.

The occupants, three men and a woman in their mid-20s, were then involved in a row with a group outside the centre where anti-Muslim language was apparently used.

Some of the crowd reportedly inflicted minor damage on the car before it made off at speed, hitting three people as it left, the force said.

The Islamic centre said the car was hurtling down the road and mounted the pavement before swerving into bystanders who were indiscriminately mown down.

Detectives are analysing CCTV in a bid to trace the driver and are keeping an open mind as to the cause of the collision, the Metropolitan Police said.

It is not being treated as terror-related, he added.

No arrests have been made.

Detective Chief Superintendent Simon Rose (left) talks to Hassan Haddi, head of security, outside The Hussaini Association in Oxgate Lane, Cricklewood (John Stillwell/PA)

A spokesman for the Hussaini Association, which organises Islamic lectures at the centre, said: We are in deep shock at such an attack taking place on our community but remain proud to live in a diverse and tolerant society.

Kelly Schonhage from Brent CID said: We are treating this incident very seriously and a number of inquiries are under way to trace the car and those involved.

Inquiries into the full circumstances of the collision are ongoing. If you were there at the time and have information I would urge you to contact police with information.

Extra neighbourhood police patrols have been stepped up in the area and officers will be on hand to speak with those in the local community.
B&Q owner Kingfisher has seen half-year profits tumble after being hit by woes in its French arm and amid consumer belt-tightening in the UK.

Shares in the retailer fell as much as 8% after it posted a 30% fall in statutory pre-tax profit to 281 million for the six months to July 31, with profits down 14.8% on an underlying basis at 375 million.

Kingfisher said the profits slump came after earnings dropped by nearly a third in its French arm, while its bottom line was also knocked by costs of its ongoing revamp, range overhauls and higher labour costs.

B&Q owner Kingfisher has seen half-year profits tumble after being hit by woes in its French arm and amid consumer belt tightening in the UK.

Sales fell 2.5% on a like-for-like basis across its DIY chain B&Q in the UK and Ireland after a mixed performance, impacted by poor weather at the start of the year and boosted by the heatwave in the final quarter.

Comparable sales of weather-related ranges jumped by 4.9%, while sales of other products  including more big-ticket items in its showroom  dropped 5.4%.

Screwfix like-for-like sales rose 4.5% in the first half.

For the overall UK and Ireland business, retail profits edged 1.2% higher to 281 million.

But it was a 31% tumble in constant currency profits to 122 million at its French arm that weighed on wider group profits in the first half.

Sales at Castorama slumped 5.8% and were 1.7% lower at Brico Depot.

Kingfisher chief executive Veronique Laury insisted the group was making good progress having reached the halfway point in its five-year strategy overhaul.

She said: Transformation on this scale is tough, and there are challenges that were working through.

There is still much to do to improve our performance in France and to remove inefficiencies within the business as we continue to transform at pace.

She added the difficult retail trading conditions are making our task more difficult than expected.

In the UK, the group said there was evidence of consumer belt-tightening, while Brexit uncertainty was also holding back the property market, which has a knock-on effect on demand for DIY products.

Neil Wilson, chief market analyst at Markets.com, said investors remained unconvinced by Kingfishers revamp.

He said: Its still the same old story at Kingfisher with little sign that the turnaround is really working.

With talk of activist investors circling, the French operation is one that could certainly be earmarked for hiving off, as previously argued on several occasions in the past.

B&Qs turnaround saw it shut 65 shops and slash around 3,000 jobs in the UK and Ireland over the last two-and-a-half years.

It has also been shaking up its ranges and improving its online offering, while the group recently announced it was investing 100 million as part of plans to lower everyday prices.

Kingfisher has nearly 24,700 staff in the UK and Ireland and more than 63,900 overall, with operations also across markets including Poland, Russia, Romania and Iberia.

It has 296 B&Q stores and 598 Screwfix outlets in the UK and Ireland.
A caravan has blown off a cliff with a woman inside as high winds from Storm Ali batter the west of Ireland.

Police and emergency services are at the scene. The woman is believed to be aged in her fifties.

Rescuers attended at Claddaghduff, Co Galway, on Wednesday morning.

Irish police are at the scene after a caravan was blown off a cliff in Co Galway with a woman inside. (Niall Carson/PA)

A total of 55,000 homes and businesses, mainly in the south-west of Ireland, have been left without power due to the bad weather, the Electricity Supply Board (ESB) said.

Forecasters have issued a Status Orange wind warning for more than half the country due to the storm.

 55,000 across Ireland without power as storm Ali passes over the country.@ESBNetworks will start work in the South of country shortly as high winds have passed & will begin to bring supply back to customers.



Work will continue in other areas as it becomes safe to do so.  Eoghan Murphy (@MurphyEoghan) September 19, 2018

A statement from Irish police said: Gardai in Clifden Co Galway are dealing with an incident which occurred at Claddaghduff, Co Galway this morning.

A caravan has blown off a cliff. It is believed that a female in her 50s was in the caravan.

Gardai and emergency services are currently at the scene.

ESB Networks, which oversees the power supply, said approximately 55,000 homes, farms and businesses were without power this morning, primarily in the south-west of the country.

#StormAli Advisory Number 6

Max Sustained Winds: 95mph

Strength: C2

MSLP: 977mb

Ali now a Category 2 storm on the European Windstorm Scale with 95mph of the North West Coast of the Ireland, expected to bring heavy squally showers and locally strong gusty winds this morning... pic.twitter.com/KMwFTHZqbk  Joint Cyclone Center (@JointCyclone) September 19, 2018

The damage is mainly attributable to fallen trees on overhead lines as a result of the high winds.

Storm Ali is currently active across the south-west and west coast of the country with gale force winds and gusts of up to 120 km/h per hour.

The counties most impacted include Cork, Kerry and Limerick, as the storm continues to track north.

Crews have been mobilised and are working towards restoring power to all affected families.

In Northern Ireland, the M1 motorway was closed in both directions just west of Belfast due to fallen cables, the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) said.

Saintfield Road in Co Down was also closed at the junction of the old Ballynahinch Road due to a fallen tree.

A PSNI statement said: Motorists are advised to exercise extreme caution in adverse weather conditions. Police are advising motorists to stay in their vehicles.
Wales international Ethan Ampadu has signed a new five-year contract with Chelsea, the Premier League club have announced.

Ampadu signed from Exeter in July 2017 with the fee of up to 2.5million agreed by tribunal in April.

The defender or midfielder, who turned 18 last week, has impressed since moving to Stamford Bridge.

Wales midfielder or defender Ethan Ampadu has committed his long-term future to Chelsea (Niall Carson/PA)

Im really proud and happy, Im looking forward to the next five years, he said.

Ampadu has made seven Chelsea appearances to date and is certain to get further opportunities this season under Maurizio Sarri.

The Welshman could be involved in Thursdays Europa League clash at PAOK in Greece.

All I have got to do now is continue to work hard, and hopefully good things will happen, Ampadu added.

Chelsea director Marina Granovskaia said: Ethan has shown great potential and unbelievable maturity since arriving at Chelsea a year ago.

In this short time he convinced a lot of people with his exceptional quality and mentality and we look forward to watching him develop into a key player for the club over the coming years.

Ampadu made his debut aged 17 years and six days in the Carabao Cup win over Nottingham Forest and became the first player born this millennium to start for Chelsea in the next round against Everton.

Ampadu recently earned the praise of Wales boss Ryan Giggs, the Manchester United great, who predicted the teenager would become a magnificent player.
Theresa May is expected to warn too many politicians look down on social housing residents as she pushes for reform of the sector.

The Prime Minister will detail the Governments plans for a 2 billion programme from 2022 which aims to give housing associations the chance to secure money for projects running from then until 2028/29.

Downing Street believes the approach would offer long-term certainty to the associations when it comes to planning and developing tens of thousands of affordable and social homes.

(PA Graphics)

It adds that the funding is separate to the 9 billion of public funding put toward the existing affordable homes programme until 2022.

Mrs May, addressing the National Housing Federation Summit in London on Wednesday, also plans to focus on the stigma attached to social housing and insist tenants are not second-rate citizens.

The PM will say: Some residents feel marginalised and overlooked, and are ashamed to share the fact that their home belongs to a housing association or local authority.

Here we go. @BBCMarkEaston introduces #NHF18 with a call to arms for housing. "We need change. We need ideas. We need this Summit." pic.twitter.com/CHyqCm1pM0  National Housing Federation (@natfednews) September 19, 2018

On the outside, many people in society  including too many politicians  continue to look down on social housing and, by extension, the people who call it their home.

Mrs May will add: We should never see social housing as something that need simply be good enough, nor think that the people who live in it should be grateful for their safety net and expect no better.

Whether it is owned and managed by local authorities, TMOs (tenant management organisations) or housing associations, I want to see social housing that is so good people are proud to call it their home  our friends and neighbours who live in social housing are not second-rate citizens.

Housing associations will be encouraged by Mrs May to change how tenants and society view social housing, and also to lead major developments themselves.

However, Labour warned Mrs Mays promises fall far short of what is needed for the sector.

PMs promise is housing on the never never: if funding comes it wont be until after 2021. Theresa May could be long gone before then. If the PM and Tories want a proper plan to build a million genuinely affordable homes then she should look here https://t.co/dTrNSikoQk  John Healey MP (@JohnHealey_MP) September 19, 2018

Shadow housing secretary John Healey said: The reality is spending on new affordable homes has been slashed so the number of new social rented homes built last year fell to the lowest level since records began.

If Conservative ministers are serious about fixing the housing crisis they should back Labours plans to build a million genuinely affordable homes, including the biggest council house-building programme for more than 30 years.

The English housing survey 2016/17 reported that 3.9 million households, approximately nine million people, lived in the social rented sector  which was 17% of households in the country.

The survey added 10% rented from housing associations and 7% from local authorities.

By contrast, 20% of households were private rented and 63% owner-occupied.

Housing Secretary James Brokenshire, asked who Mrs May saw as the politicians who look down on social housing, told BBC Radio 4s Today programme: I think its more a sort of a greater public perception, sadly.

Pressed further if there are Conservative politicians who take this view, Mr Brokenshire again referred to a general stigma which he said was a feeling among tenants who were consulted for a Government policy paper.

Mr Brokenshire said: I think home ownership absolutely is a really core credo of what I believe and what the party believes, and I dont think theres this, almost, like, a false dichotomy of it being one thing or the other  social housing or actually seeing home ownership as well. I think we can do both.

That is what our white paper around housing is intent on delivering, that were building more affordable homes but through Right to Buy, through other initiatives to get people on to the housing ladder to meet that ambition.
Scottish economic growth has overtaken the UK with 0.5% growth, new official figures show.

Scottish GDP grew by 0.5% in real terms between April and June 2018, a marginal increase on the 0.4% the previous quarter.

The UK economy grew 0.4% in the second quarter of 2018.

Economic growth in Scotland has moved ahead of the UK (Dominic Lipinski/PA)

Across Scotland in this period output in the construction sector grew by 1.8%, production by 0.6% and the services sector by 0.4% while agriculture fell by 1.2%.

Latest  GDP figures published this morning. Growth in Scotland in second quarter of 2018 was 0.5% (UK 0.4%). Over the year, Scottish economy grew by 1.7% (UK 1.3%). Services, production and construction all showing positive growth.  Nicola Sturgeon (@NicolaSturgeon) September 19, 2018

Scottish economic growth for the first half of 2018 at 0.8% is higher than the 0.7% growth forecast the Scottish Fiscal Commission projected for the whole of 2018.

In the year since the the second quarter of 2017, the Scottish economy has grown 1.7%, while the equivalent growth UK-wide was 1.3%.

Scottish Finance Secretary Derek Mackay, said: These are welcome figures which show that Scottish growth is both pulling ahead of the UK, and outperforming the official growth forecast.

The Scottish Government is focused on building on the countrys strong economic foundations, supporting businesses to stimulate growth jobs and investment.

Our Programme for Government includes an ambitious package of measures to ensure we are delivering for the economy of today and ready to seize the opportunities of the future.

He also warned of the risk Brexit poses to the economy.

Scottish Secretary David Mundell said: It is welcome news that Scotlands economy continues to grow. However, we cannot be complacent.

Scotlands economic performance is still struggling to close the gap with the UK economy which has opened up over recent years.

I urge the Scottish Government to focus on growing Scotlands economy.

Analysis by economist John McLaren highlighted Scotlands 1.1% annual GDP growth rate post 2010, almost half of the UK growth of 2% a year in the same period.

He said: Scotland continues to perform relatively well in 2018. It is particularly welcome to see that much of this growth has returned to the active side of the economy, including manufacturing and most private sector services.

However, Scotlands longer term GDP growth performance continues to disappoint, despite recent data revisions.

While the recent uptick in output over the last six months is welcome it does little to redress past failings and its source remains largely a mystery, as too does the causes of past underperformance.

Even at the higher growth rates seen in the past two quarters Scotland is still only looking at a growth rate of around 1.5% for 2018 as a whole.
A woman has died after the caravan she was in was blown off a cliff onto a beach in the west of Ireland during Storm Ali, Irish police said.

She was believed to be aged in her fifties.

Rescuers attended at Claddaghduff, near Clifden in Co Galway, on Wednesday morning.

The woman was said to be in her fifties (Niall Carson/PA)

The west of Ireland has been battered by high winds caused by the Atlantic storm.

1/2 There will be severe or possibly damaging gusts for a time this morning especially in the west and northwest. Extreme caution is advised in the coastal districts of Clare, Connacht and Donegal this morning with strong gale and storm force winds here.#StormAli pic.twitter.com/2amyRPtl7N  Met Eireann (@MetEireann) September 19, 2018

A statement from Irish police said: At approximately 7.45am a report was received that a caravan had blown off the cliff at the above location.

A search was carried out at the scene on the beach and after a short time the body of a female in her 50s was recovered.

Her body is expected to be removed to University College Galway for a post-mortem examination. The local coroner has been notified.

The RTE broadcaster said the victim was sleeping at the time when strong winds lifted the caravan from the ground.

2/2 Squally showery rain will affect many areas at first, with heavy bursts in the east. The rain will clear quickly eastwards later this morning however, with sunshine and blustery showers following behind. 14 to 17C. Winds will ease somewhat through the afternoon.#StormAli pic.twitter.com/7fa9MaXgs0  Met Eireann (@MetEireann) September 19, 2018

It said the dwelling was blown onto a stretch of coastline and is not submerged in water.

Irish President Michael D Higgins urged everybody to be cautious when travelling or out in the open.

I was deeply saddened to learn that storm Ali has already claimed one victim today in Claddagduff, Co Galway.

As President of Ireland, may I express my deepest condolences to her family.

I would also take this opportunity to pay tribute to all those, in statutory and voluntary organisations around the country, who are helping and stand ready to assist their fellow citizens, and who are working to maintain essential services around the country.

A total of 55,000 homes and businesses, mainly in the south-west of Ireland, have been left without power due to the bad weather, the Electricity Supply Board (ESB) said.

Forecasters have issued a Status Orange wind warning for more than half the country due to the storm.

 55,000 across Ireland without power as storm Ali passes over the country.@ESBNetworks will start work in the South of country shortly as high winds have passed & will begin to bring supply back to customers.



Work will continue in other areas as it becomes safe to do so.  Eoghan Murphy (@MurphyEoghan) September 19, 2018

ESB Networks, which oversees the power supply, said approximately 55,000 homes, farms and businesses were without power this morning, primarily in the south-west of the country.

The damage is mainly attributable to fallen trees on overhead lines as a result of the high winds.

Storm Ali is currently active across the south-west and west coast of the country with gale force winds and gusts of up to 120 km/h per hour.

#StormAli Advisory Number 6

Max Sustained Winds: 95mph

Strength: C2

MSLP: 977mb

Ali now a Category 2 storm on the European Windstorm Scale with 95mph of the North West Coast of the Ireland, expected to bring heavy squally showers and locally strong gusty winds this morning... pic.twitter.com/KMwFTHZqbk  Joint Cyclone Center (@JointCyclone) September 19, 2018

The counties most impacted include Cork, Kerry and Limerick, as the storm continues to track north.

Crews have been mobilised and are working towards restoring power to all affected families.

In Northern Ireland, the M1 motorway was closed in both directions just west of Belfast due to fallen cables, the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) said.

Saintfield Road in Co Down was also closed at the junction of the old Ballynahinch Road due to a fallen tree.

A PSNI statement said: Motorists are advised to exercise extreme caution in adverse weather conditions. Police are advising motorists to stay in their vehicles.
Royal Mail chairman Peter Long is stepping down just months after shareholders revolted over the new chief executives bumper pay packet.

The group said Mr Long was leaving the company after realising it was no longer possible to continue as non-executive chairman of Royal Mail, while also serving as executive chairman of estate agency chain Countrywide.

He will step down immediately and be replaced by Royal Mail board member and former Axa Sun Life boss Les Owen.

Peter has reviewed his board appointments and concluded it is no longer possible for him to remain executive chairman of Countrywide and non-executive chairman of Royal Mail, the company said in a market announcement.

Mr Owen joined the Royal Mail board in 2010, becoming a member of its audit and risk committee and remuneration committee, and chairing its pensions committee during a major review of its pensions scheme.

He previously served as chief executive of AXA Sun Life and AXA Asia Pacific Holdings.

Royal Mails outgoing chairman Peter Long joined the company in 2015 (PA)

Mr Long, who has been chairman at Royal Mail since September 2015, said: It is with a heavy heart that I step down from the Royal Mail board.

Over my three years as chairman, I have taken great pride in what has been achieved by the group.

It is a company with an incredible heritage. Operating in a challenging environment, it is positioning itself well for diversified growth under the leadership of Rico Back and his executive team.

The changeover comes just months after the board was left with a bloody nose following a row over a salary rise for its new Zurich-based chief executive Mr Back.

The directors remuneration report was rejected in a vote at its annual general meeting in July, with 70% of proxy shareholders voting against the package.

While the vote was non-binding, the board said it would consult further as continued to review its remuneration policy.

Investor advisory firms ISS and Glass Lewis had suggested shareholders vote against the remuneration report, in part because Mr Back was set to receive a higher salary than outgoing boss Moya Greene.

Mr Back is being paid a 640,000 annual salary, 100,000 more than his predecessor.

But Royal Mail insisted that differences in pension arrangements meant his fixed pay will be exactly the same as Ms Greenes.

Mr Back has decided to stay in Zurich, Switzerland, with plans to commute regularly to work at Royal Mails London headquarters.

Royal Mail also made headlines for paying a near-6 million golden hello to Mr Back, when he joined from General Logistics Systems (GLS)  Royal Mails European parcels business  earlier this year.
The Government is launching a 2 billion social housing programme to run until 2028/29.

Here are the key events in the history of council housing in the UK.

 The first major programme of council house building took place between the First and Second World Wars. Some 17,000 homes were built across Britain in 1920/21, jumping quickly to 110,000 in 1921/22. Housing was a big concern for Liberal prime minister David Lloyd George, who had campaigned on the slogan of building homes fit for heroes.

 The scale of building fluctuated over the next two decades, peaking in 1938/39, when 122,000 new council houses were completed, but the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939 brought building almost to a halt.

 It was not until 1946 that major construction began again, hitting 168,780 in 1949. Between then and 1978, the total number of new council homes completed each year in the UK never fell below 100,000.

(PA Graphics)

 Construction was particularly high during the 1950s. In 1953 almost a quarter of a million new council homes (245,160) were completed  the highest number for any one year since records began. This was a period when successive Conservative prime ministers Winston Churchill, Anthony Eden and Harold Macmillan made housebuilding a priority of their governments.

 Council house building fell dramatically from 1979 onwards. This was a consequence of changes introduced by Conservative governments led by Margaret Thatcher and John Major. Councils were redesignated as enablers working with housing associations to deliver accommodation, rather than providers. Council tenants were given the chance to purchase their own homes under the Right to Buy scheme, which reduced the stock of council housing. Councils were allowed to keep only a portion of the income from these sales.

 The number of newly built council houses fell from 88,530 in 1980 to 17,710 in 1990. The decline accelerated in the next two decades, hitting a low of just 130 in 2004. By comparison, in 2004 20,660 new homes were completed by housing associations, while 182,700 were completed by private firms.

 In recent years housebuilding by local authorities has picked up again. In 2017 a provisional total of 3,280 were built by councils across the UK. But this was still only 1.7% of the total new homes completed in the UK in 2017, with 16.6% built by housing associations and 81.7% privately.
 "A Way Out: Abolishing Death By Incarceration in Pennsylvania" | Main | An impressive overview of the SCOTUS criminal docket on the eve of a new Term 

Sharon Dolovich, Professor of Law and Director of the Prison Law & Policy Program at the UCLA School of Law asked me to post the following. It is my pleasure to do so:

Below are two announcements for law students and recent law grads interested in prisoners rights:

About 18 months ago, the UCLA Prison Law and Policy Program launched Prison Law JD, a listserv for current law students and young lawyers interested in prisoners rights. The list is currently used to share job and fellowship announcements and other information of interest, and we are in the midst of creating mechanisms to allow members to connect to one another directly over issues of mutual interest. The ultimate aim is to forge a community among the next generation of prisoners rights advocates. If you know any law students or young lawyers who might want to join Prison Law JD, please invite them to contact me at dolovich@law.ucla.edu. The National Prisoners Advocates Conference will take place at University of Denver College of Law Oct 5-6, 2018. The day before, Thursday Oct 4, Prison Law JD will be hosting a pre-conference program. If you know anyone you think might like to participate in either part of this program, whether in person or remotely, please share this information with them.

From 3:30-5:15pm, there will be a panel discussion geared toward law students and recently graduated lawyers interested in doing this work. The panel will feature Sarah Grady of Loevy and Loevy on the nuts and bolts of prisoner litigation, Deb Golden of the Human Rights Defense Center on the Prison Litigation Reform Act (PLRA), and Bret Grote of the Abolitionist Law Center on non-obvious routes to doing prisoners' rights work.

For those unable to attend in person, this panel will be broadcast at the link below:

Starting out as a Prisoners Rights Lawyer: What You Need to Know, 10/4/2018 (Thu)

https://du-denverlaw.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=4a5ba04a-1669-4c85-929b-a95f0112fd67

Live stream from classroom starts at 3:20pm and ends at 5:30pm.

At 5:45pm, there will be a working group strategy session to think about how to build out the Prison Law JD community and best support the next generation of prisoners rights lawyers. Those who cant be there in person are welcome to participate remotely. Heres the call-in info:

Zoom Conference Call in Number and Meeting ID Number (Meeting Starts at 5:45 pm and Ends at 8:00 pm MDT)

Telephone: Dial(for higher quality, dial a number based on your current location): US: +1 646 558 8656 or +1 669 900 6833

Meeting ID: 568 249 890 International numbers available: https://zoom.us/u/aewKZAGStV
The leader of North Korea has agreed to dismantle his main nuclear complex but only if the United States does the same.

Kim Jong Un agreed on the second day of meetings with his South Korean counterpart President Moon Jae-in on an ambitious programme meant to tackle soaring tensions between the two countries last year.

Mr Kim promised to accept international inspectors to monitor the closing of a key missile test site and launch pad and to visit Seoul soon, and both leaders vowed to work together to try to host the Summer Olympics in 2032.

But their joint statement appeared to fall short of the major steps many in Washington have been looking for.

Such steps include a commitment by Mr Kim to provide a list of North Koreas nuclear facilities, a timeline for closing them down, or an agreement to allow international inspectors to assess progress or discover violations.

US President Donald Trump, described the Korean leaders agreements as Very exciting! in a tweet.

Mr Moon and Mr Kim stood side by side as they announced the joint statement to a group of North and South Korean reporters after a closed-door meeting.

We have agreed to make the Korean Peninsula a land of peace that is free from nuclear weapons and nuclear threat, Mr Kim said at the guesthouse where Mr Moon is staying.

The road to our future will not always be smooth and we may face challenges and trials we cant anticipate. But we arent afraid of headwinds because our strength will grow as we overcome each trial based on the strength of our nation.

Mr Kim and Mr Moon earlier smiled and chatted as they walked down a hallway and into a meeting room to finalise the joint statement, which also said that the leaders would push for a Korean Peninsula without nuclear weapons and to eliminate all the danger of war.

Mr Moon and Mr Kim planned to visit a volcano sacred to the North on Thursday, the last day of Mr Moons visit.

This weeks summit comes as Mr Moon is under increasing pressure from Washington to find a path forward in efforts to get Mr Kim to completely  and unilaterally  abandon his nuclear arsenal.

Mr Trump has maintained that he and Mr Kim have a solid relationship, and both leaders have expressed interest in a follow-up summit to their meeting in June in Singapore.

Moon Jae-in and Kim Jong Un pose after signing documents in Pyongyang (Korea Broadcasting System via AP)

North Korea has been demanding a declaration formally ending the Korean War, which was stopped in 1953 by a ceasefire, but neither leader mentioned it as they read the joint statement.

In the meantime, however, Mr Moon and Mr Kim made concrete moves of their own to reduce tensions on their border.

According to a statement signed by the countries defence chiefs, the two Koreas agreed to establish buffer zones along their land and sea borders to reduce military tensions and prevent accidental clashes.

They also agreed to withdraw 11 guard posts from the Demilitarised Zone by December and to establish a no-fly zone above the military demarcation line that bisects the two Koreas that will apply to planes, helicopters and drones.

Moon Jae-in shakes hands with Kim Jong Un after a joint press conference in Pyongyang, (Lee Jin-man/AP)

Though not directly linked to security, the leaders announcement that they would seek a joint Summer Olympics was a significant move in terms of easing tensions and building trust. It also flows from the Norths decision to participate in the Pyeongchang Winter Games in February, which was regarded as a success for both sides.

Other agreements included allowing more contact between families divided by the Korean War. Mr Moon also appeared to be making good on his proposals to help build up the Norths infrastructure and open cross-border rail links.

Unlike Mr Trumps initial tweets praising the summit, the news brought a quick and negative response from Republican senator Lindsey Graham, who tweeted that he was concerned the visit would undermine efforts by US secretary of state Mike Pompeo and UN ambassador Nikki Haley to impose maximum pressure on the North.

While North Korea has stopped testing missiles and nuclear devices, they have NOT moved towards denuclearisation, he tweeted.
Theresa May has called for an end to the stigma of social housing, as she promised 2 billion to build tens of thousands of homes.

Speaking to the National Housing Summit in London, Mrs May said the programme would offer housing associations the chance to secure money for projects running from 2022 until 2028/29.

Downing Street believes the approach will offer long-term certainty to associations to plan new developments.

(PA Graphics)

The funding, for social and affordable housing, is separate to the 9 billion of public funding for an existing programme running until 2022.

Speaking to an audience of housing association representatives, Mrs May said that social housing had been pushed to the edge of political debate under successive governments.

The Grenfell Tower fire last year exposed the extent to which tenants feel ignored, patronised and overlooked by those responsible for their homes and safety.

Im pleased the Government is investing 2 billion in new long-term funding to build more affordable and social homes. Everyone deserves a decent and safe place to live. And I want to see social housing that is so good that people are proud to call it their home. #NHF18 pic.twitter.com/b4MtIxztBG  Theresa May (@theresa_may) September 19, 2018

Social homes should be designed, built, maintained and managed in a way which makes clear they are not a second-rate alternative to home ownership, she said.

For many people a certain stigma still clings to social housing, said Mrs May.

Some residents feel marginalised and overlooked, and are ashamed to share the fact that their home belongs to a housing association or local authority.

On the outside, many people in society  including too many politicians  continue to look down on social housing and, by extension, the people who call it their home It shouldnt be this way.

The unique status, rich history and social mission of housing associations mean you also have a much broader role to play - changing the way tenants and society as a whole think about social housing. @theresa_may at #NHF18 pic.twitter.com/P1fwSbRtoY  National Housing Federation (@natfednews) September 19, 2018

In future developments, social properties should not be tucked away out of sight behind private homes, but built so that it is not easy to tell between the two, said the PM.

And she added: We should never see social housing as something that need simply be good enough, nor think that the people who live in it should be grateful for their safety net and expect no better.

Whether it is owned and managed by local authorities, TMOs (tenant management organisations) or housing associations, I want to see social housing that is so good people are proud to call it their home.

Our friends and neighbours who live in social housing are not second-rate citizens. They should not have to put up with second-rate homes.

Housing associations will be encouraged by Mrs May to change how tenants and society view social housing, and also to lead major developments themselves.

However, Labour warned Mrs Mays promises fall far short of what is needed for the sector.

PMs promise is housing on the never never: if funding comes it wont be until after 2021. Theresa May could be long gone before then. If the PM and Tories want a proper plan to build a million genuinely affordable homes then she should look here https://t.co/dTrNSikoQk  John Healey MP (@JohnHealey_MP) September 19, 2018

Shadow housing secretary John Healey said: The reality is spending on new affordable homes has been slashed so the number of new social rented homes built last year fell to the lowest level since records began.

If Conservative ministers are serious about fixing the housing crisis they should back Labours plans to build a million genuinely affordable homes, including the biggest council house-building programme for more than 30 years.

(PA Graphics)

The chief executive of housing charity Shelter, Polly Neate, said: There are over a million households on social housing waiting lists, and yet last year we built the lowest number of social homes at any point since the Second World War.

This is why its good to see the Prime Minister today indicating the Government is starting to get serious about correcting this historic failure.

This must be the start and not the end. What we need now is more social homes actually being built as well as a big shift in attitude to start viewing social housing as a right for hard-pressed families across the country.

The English housing survey 2016/17 reported that 3.9 million households, approximately nine million people, lived in the social rented sector  which was 17% of households in the country.

The survey added 10% rented from housing associations and 7% from local authorities.

By contrast, 20% of households were private rented and 63% owner-occupied.

Today at @natfednews summit PM @theresa_may pledged to work in partnership with housing associations to build more homes and get more people on the housing ladder #NHF18 

Here's what she said: https://t.co/s3lKhxYlHF pic.twitter.com/1DkbTcIMqo  UK Prime Minister (@10DowningStreet) September 19, 2018

Housing Secretary James Brokenshire rejected suggestions that Mrs Mays comments represented a break from Margaret Thatchers vision of home-ownership as a central pillar of Conservative policy.

I think home ownership absolutely is a really core credo of what I believe and what the party believes, Mr Brokenshire told BBC Radio 4s Today programme.

Theres a false dichotomy of it being one thing or the other  social housing or actually seeing home ownership as well. I think we can do both.
The mother of murdered 14-year-old Breck Bednar, whose killer groomed him through an online gaming community, will appear in a film to be shown in secondary schools to highlight the dangers of online grooming.

Breck was stabbed to death by computer engineer Lewis Daynes in Grays, Essex, in February 2014 in what a judge described as a sexual and sadistic killing.

Daynes had lured Breck, from Caterham, Surrey to meet him.

Daynes, aged 18 at the time of the offence, admitted the murder at Chelmsford Crown Court and was jailed for life with a minimum term of 25 years in 2015.

Lewis Daynes was jailed for life with a minimum term of 25 years for the murder of Breck Bednar (Essex Police/ PA)

Brecks mother Lorin LaFave will appear in a film called Brecks Last Game, which is a collaboration between four police forces  Essex, Leicestershire, Northamptonshire and Surrey.

The film, which features the 999 call made to police by Daynes, captures the events leading to Brecks death and police said it would carry a 15 certificate if shown in a cinema.

It will be shown at schools in the counties of the four police forces as part of planned lessons over the coming months.

The case will feature in a film to be shown in secondary schools, warning children of the dangers of online grooming. (Essex Police/ PA)

Police said the full film will not be released publicly until spring 2019 to allow it to be used in lessons.

Ms LaFave said: Brecks story shows how easily grooming can happen.

He met the predator through an online friendship group and would have been flattered to have an intelligent, older mentor helping him expand his gaming skills.

At the time, I believed the offender was older than he was because he was so controlling and manipulative, even with me, so its important for young people to realise not only can predators lie about their age, where they live or who they are online, they can also be a similar age to the victim.

They are not always the stereotypical creepy old guy.

Its so important for us to raise awareness of the fact that boys can be groomed too.

Brecks murder came after international media coverage surrounding the Rochdale and Rotherham cases, where the victims were all girls.

His version wasnt the typical type of grooming people had heard about in the news.

His story shows even regular school boys can make mistakes if they arent educated to recognise the signs of grooming and exploitation.
A Pakistani court has suspended the prison sentences of former prime minister Nawaz Sharif, his daughter and son-in-law, and set them free on bail pending their appeal hearings.

The Islamabad High Court made the decision on a corruption case handed down to the Sharifs by a tribunal earlier this year.

The court also ordered Sharif, his daughter Maryam Nawaz and son-in-law Mohammad Safdar, be released once they each post a bond of half a million rupees, or about 3,000.

Nawaz Sharifs prison sentence has been suspended (AP Photo/Anjum Naveed, File)

The three are serving 10, seven and one-year prison sentences, respectively.

Sharif was disqualified from office by the countrys Supreme Court last year over corruption allegations. He faces several court cases at home.

The former prime minister was briefly released earlier this month for his wifes funeral.
The Queen has sent a message of support to the president of the Philippines Rodrigo Duterte following the death and destruction caused by Typhoon Mangkhut.

The Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh sent sincere condolences to all those affected by the disaster which struck the country at the weekend.

Read The Queen's message to the President of the Philippines in full: https://t.co/L2p8lcB8lz  The Royal Family (@RoyalFamily) September 19, 2018

The Queen said: I was deeply saddened to learn of the loss of life and the devastation caused by Typhoon Mangkhut.

The Queen has sent a message of support to the President of the Philippines following the devastating Typhoon Mangkhut. (Joe Giddens/PA)

Prince Philip and I send our sincere condolences to all the victims, to those who have lost loved ones, and to those who have seen their homes and property destroyed.

My thoughts and prayers are with all those affected by these tragedies.

Mangkhut, the most powerful storm to hit the Philippines this year, left at least 74 people dead and dozens missing, mostly following an avalanche in the goldmining town of Itogon in Benguet province.

The storm later blew on to Hong Kong and southern China, where it caused more deaths and damage.
A fire officer begged his superiors to abandon stay-put advice being given to Grenfell Tower residents within minutes of arriving at the burning block, an inquiry has heard.

Norman Harrison, a watch manager from Wembley with 25 years experience, was called to the scene at 1.15am on June 14 last year, quickly realising something was badly wrong.

London Fire Brigade was first alerted to the blaze at 12.54am and, in line with the fire policy for high-rise buildings, told residents to remain in their flats.

Grenfell Tower

However, the speed and ferocity of the fires spread meant many occupants became trapped on upper floors and were left beyond the reach of rescue teams.

The stay-put advice was finally ditched at 2.47am, a delay that has been heavily criticised.

On Wednesday, it emerged at the inquiry into the disaster that Mr Harrison tried to get the stay-put strategy stopped much earlier.

He told a hearing at Holborn Bars he concluded the strategy was redundant by around 1.50am, adding: I was truly shocked at such a severe fire over so many floors.

Immediately I knew that stay-put policy should no longer apply in this building, because the stay-put policy is predicated upon the assumption that someone can stay in their flat, safe, from the one compartment that is alight somewhere in the building and theyre not going to be affected by the fire, either flames, heat or smoke.

I could see that just didnt apply here any more.

His written statement described how the intensity of the fire on the external face of Grenfell Tower reminded him of the surface of the sun.

It was bright yellow and he had never seen a fire like it, it continued.

He was reminded of a recent cladding fire on a tower in Dubai and initially held out hope that the flames would remain on the facade of the building only.

Getting closer to the building it became clear the blaze had broken back into flats from the fourth floor all the way to the top.

I was extremely concerned for the members of the public who were trapped inside the building, his statement said.

I was also concerned for my colleagues who were going to be committed into the building.

Mr Harrison said he knew from previous experience that each flat would be designed to withstand flames for 60 minutes  but he estimated it would take six hours to reach the top floor.

I knew that our telephone operators at Merton HQ would be telling people to stay put in their flat and that the fire brigade would come and rescue them.

In reality I didnt think that there would be an opportunity to rescue people on the upper floors and I strongly felt that the advice needed to be changed from the stay-put policy to almost a simultaneous decision to evacuate.

He then rushed over to the incident command vehicle from where the operation was being directed, according to the statement.

He encountered a cluster of senior managers, including a group manager  believed to be Richard Welch  with two station managers and two watch managers.

I announced to all of them that I believed the advice our operators were giving out to the people trapped in the building needed to be changed, he wrote.

I suggested that someone tell our control operators to change that advice as soon as possible. I recall that some discussion took place.

It was mentioned that there was only one escape route  there would have been lots of firefighting hose within the very narrow stairwell.

I then asked if it was possible to use our emergency air supply equipment. We call it a second set bag to be given to members of the public to assist them in breathing whilst being evacuated.

I never got answered.

On Wednesday he added he had received no response from them at all when he raised his concerns.

Asked in what tone he had addressed the group, he replied: It was quite loud. Very direct and unequivocal.

Mr Harrison was sent back to his command unit vehicle, where he spent the night passing information from 999 calls with trapped residents to rescue teams in the tower.

His statement said there was only a brief timeframe when an evacuation was safe, when the fire was still only on the external face.

I think we had a small window of opportunity to bring people down to safety, or basically as safe as it was going to be for the duration of the incident, he said.

His statement concluded: It was an impossible task from the off. I think it was a lose-lose situation no matter what decisions were made. People were going to die that morning. It was just a matter of how many.

It added: I wouldnt say that I am any happier at work as there are still a lot of organisational failures. To tell the truth they have always been there from day one all throughout my career. I find it now harder to accept the shortcomings of the fire brigade.
An allegation that a Labour MP assaulted her senior aide is being investigated by police.

Carolyn Harris, shadow minister for women and equalities, was accused of pulling her assistants hair so hard clumps of it were torn from her head.

The allegation is now being re-examined by officers after former aide Jenny Lee Clarke submitted a complaint about how the initial investigation was handled two years ago.

South Wales Police decided back in 2016 not to take the allegation of assault any further following their inquiries.

Jenny Lee Clarke claimed she was abused by the MP after confiding in her that she was gay

Ms Clarke, 42, said she believes her allegation was dropped by police because of Mrs Harris position as an MP and deputy Welsh Labour leader.

She added: If it wasnt for her position, I would have had justice by now.

Ive been treated differently because Im a layman and shes an MP.

I just wanted the same treatment as everyone else when they have reported a crime.

Ms Clarke said she had not been offered any support from the Labour Party, and emails she had sent to General Secretary Jennie Formby had not been replied to.

Details of the alleged office attack were revealed during a Crown Court trial in July, where Ms Clarke was cleared of forging the MPs signature to give herself a pay rise.

Mrs Harris after winning the Swansea East seat last year (Ben Birchall/PA)

Giving evidence, Ms Clarke told the court she had been abused by Mrs Harris, after the Swansea East MP outed her as a lesbian to colleagues at their constituency office.

Cardiff Crown Court heard Mrs Harris on one occasion violently shook her aide so hard she tore clumps of hair out.

Ms Clarke also alleged that the MP referred to her shoes as dyke boots.

The allegations date back to a year before Mrs Harris was elected, when both she and Ms Clarke worked for former MP Sian James.

Mrs Harris denied the assault allegation and said she had no memory of making the homophobic remark, but added if she had it would have been office banter.

A spokeswoman for South Wales Police said: South Wales Police has received a complaint regarding an allegation of assault, which was made in 2016.

That complaint is currently being investigated. It would be inappropriate to comment further at this stage.

Carolyn Harris has been approached for comment.
The DUP has poured cold water on a European Union offer of compromise on its proposals for the Irish border after Brexit.

Ahead of a summit in Austria at which Theresa May will appeal for flexibility from Brussels, the EUs chief negotiator Michel Barnier said he was ready to come forward with a new offer on the Irish border.

In order to de-dramatise the main obstacle to a withdrawal deal, Mr Barnier suggested arrangements could be made to conduct the majority of checks on imports and exports away from the border itself.

He warned that time was running out, with the moment of truth coming at the next full EU summit in Brussels on October 18, when it would become clear whether an agreement was in our grasp.

But the Democratic Unionist Party, which props up Mrs Mays minority administration in Parliament, dismissed Mr Barniers proposals as unpalatable, because they would involve a customs border between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK.

It still means a border down the Irish Sea although with different kinds of checks, said the partys deputy leader Nigel Dodds.

The fact is that both Theresa May and the Labour Party have said no British prime minister could accept such a concept. It is not just unionists who object.

Michel Barnier has said he is ready to make an improved offer on the Irish border (Niall Carson/PA)

Former shadow Northern Ireland secretary Owen Smith, a backer of the Best for Britain campaign for a second EU referendum, said Mr Dodds response had sunk Barniers improved offer on Northern Ireland before he has even floated it.

Wednesdays gathering in Salzburg will be the first time EU leaders have met since Mrs May published her Chequers blueprint for Brexit in July.

It comes as supporters of a second referendum publish a blueprint setting out how MPs could force the Prime Minister to accept what they call a Peoples Vote on her deal, with the option of remaining in the EU.

Despite Mrs May insisting the choice was between her deal or no deal, Treasury minister Mel Stride appeared to suggest that a second poll was still a possibility.

Mr Stride told Sky News: When we have a firm deal on the table, I suspect that those to the right of the party  the pro-Brexit wing  will be very concerned that if that deal does not prevail, they will end up in the situation where we could have a second referendum or we could end up not leaving the EU altogether, so there is a danger of that happening if Chequers does not prevail.

Over dinner at the Felsenreitschule  the theatre where the Von Trapp family performed before fleeing the Nazis in The Sound Of Music movie  Mrs May will set out her plan and explain why Brussels should show more flexibility to give her the support she needs.

(PA Graphics)

As part of the drive to set out the UKs position to the EUs leaders, she used an article in German newspaper Die Welt to explain her stance.

The Chequers blueprint  a common rulebook for trade in goods and business-friendly facilitated customs arrangement  is the only way to resolve the thorny issue of the border between Northern Ireland and Ireland, she said.

It is profoundly in both sides economic interest, it respects the integrity of the single market and, crucially, no-one else has come up with a proposal that could command cross-community support in Northern Ireland that is the only true foundation for stability there.

Mrs May said: To come to a successful conclusion, just as the UK has evolved its position, the EU will need to do the same.

Neither side can demand the unacceptable of the other, such as an external customs border between different parts of the United Kingdom  which no other country would accept if they were in the same situation  or the UK seeking the rights of EU membership without the obligations.

Mrs May is expected to use the Salzburg summit to hold formal face-to-face talks with Belgian premier Charles Michel on Wednesday and Irelands Leo Varadkar and European Council president Donald Tusk on Thursday.

She may talk to other leaders in the margins of the summit in an effort to win backing for a plan which has met fierce resistance from within the ranks of her own Conservative Party.

Good to catch up today with @simoncoveney ahead of #Salzburgsummit18. Progress on backstop absolutely essential in the run up to October #EUCO #Brexit  pic.twitter.com/TrhnjosAaq  Michel Barnier (@MichelBarnier) September 18, 2018

Attention had been increasingly focused on the prospect of a special summit in November to finalise an agreement, but Mr Barnier said it should be clear before then whether a deal was possible.

European Council president Donald Tusk said EU leaders should discuss arrangements for the final phase of the Brexit talks including the possibility of calling another European Council in November.

In a letter to leaders ahead of the Salzburg meeting he called on them to work on limiting the damage caused by Brexit.

Unfortunately, a no-deal scenario is still quite possible. But if we all act responsibly, we can avoid a catastrophe, he said.
A much-loved caretaker who was surprised with money for flights to Jamaica paid for by students at the university where he works has now made the trip.

Some 230 University of Bristol students chipped in to raise 1,500 to send Herman Gordon and his wife Denise on a trip back to his home country.

Video of him being surprised with the cash for flights went viral earlier this summer.

It included a letter to Herman, who works in a university library, thanking him for all the positive energy you have given to us throughout the years.

You have brightened many of our days and we want you to know that we love and appreciate you, the letter said.

Mr Gordon moved to the UK aged 12 as part of the Windrush generation and hasnt been back to the island for almost a decade.

(Sandals)

Students who opted to help Herman described him as the epitome of happiness.

Now in Jamaica, Mr Gordon paid tribute to the kind-hearted students saying: God bless you all. Everybody will see this and think that Im a trillionaire.

The students generosity has been matched by Sandals Resorts where the couple kicked off their holiday with a two-night stay at Sandals Royal Caribbean Resort & Private Island in Montego Bay.

(Sandals)

It comes just a few weeks after the couple celebrated their 23rd wedding anniversary.

Mrs Gordon added: I just wanted to say thank you to all the University of Bristol students for this gift that they have given to me and Herman.

As well as their stay at Sandals, where they sipped champagne, dined on the beach, received messages, and enjoyed a boat tour, the couple are due to visit family in Kingston.

Details of the Gordons trip have been shared on the Bristruths Facebook page where the idea to help Mr Gordon first materialised back in May.

Were delighted to say that Herman loved his holiday at a five-star resort in Jamaica along with his wife Denise, it said in a post.

Bristruths would like to thank all the Bristol students who made this possible.
The world needs to show the same ambition as it has on climate change to protect global wildlife, Environment Secretary Michael Gove has said.

Speaking ahead of an international conference on tackling the illegal wildlife trade in London in October, Mr Gove said the loss of species was a massive global problem for both nature and humans.

He said illegal fishing, competition for resources, intensive farming and climate change were all eroding habitats.

And he warned: Illegal wildlife trade is one of the biggest threats not just to biodiversity on this planet but to the stability and chance of progress in the developing world.

Every day hundreds of special, precious, iconic species are slaughtered in pursuit of greed, and we need to take collective action.

Countries in the developing world have said to Britain that we have a key role as a leader, a convener in bringing nations both where animals are facing devastating pressures and also bringing together countries where there is still a demand for this trade.

Its only by acting together we can safeguard natural life on this planet.

The conference will look at species such as rhinos, elephants, pangolins and threatened trees exploited for timber, and will build momentum towards meetings in the next two years on protecting the worlds nature.

Mr Gove acknowledged there was much more to do to safeguard the UKs wildlife, with more than half of species seeing declines in recent decades.

But he insisted the Government was taking steps in the new Agriculture Bill, which paves the way for paying farmers for public goods such as protecting wildlife, and in its 25-year environment plan to reverse the problem.

He also said ministers were also taking action to help on the international stage, such as legislation to curb the ivory trade.

Zac Goldsmith, who is acting as champion of next months Illegal Wildlife Trade Conference in London, joined Michael Gove to pose with the Tusk Trust rhino statues (Stefan Rousseau/PA)

Just as weve got together to take on the challenge of climate change, we need to get together to take on the challenge of making sure we have our wildlife, flora and fauna protected and habitats enhanced, he said.

The world, collectively, has taken action in order to set ambitious goals to deal with climate change, and I think we need to show a similar level of ambition when it comes to making sure we safeguard wildlife and biodiversity.

He promised new funding from the UK Government would be announced at the illegal wildlife trade conference, which is the fourth such event since 2014 and the largest so far.

Mr Gove was joined by MP Zac Goldsmith, who is playing a role as champion of the conference, to pose with rhino sculptures which have been painted by artists including the Chapman Brothers, Zhang Huan and Ronnie Wood.

The rhinos are part of a London-wide installation by wildlife charity Tusk, which highlights the severe threat they face from poaching, and will be auctioned to support the charitys work on rhinos in Africa.

. @michaelgove & @ZacGoldsmith pose with @tusk_org rhino statues ahead of international conference next month in London to tackle the illegal wildlife trade. #EndWildlifeCrime pic.twitter.com/htCQb3dID6  Emily Beament (@EmilyBeament) September 19, 2018

Mr Goldsmith said it was important for the conference to bring together not just governments but also the private sector, and pointed to progress already being made by online trading sites, and in the transport and tourism sectors.

The private sector has to come together and work with governments, otherwise were going to lose, he warned.

Quizzed on whether arming rangers with better weapons to protect wildlife was part of the solution, Mr Goldsmith said the UK could help countries with training and skills, rather than weaponry.

And he said: Our job and our value is helping with intelligence gathering, the judicial process, helping them to build capacity so they can bring about an end to what is a very vicious and organised criminal activity.

Tony Juniper, executive director of WWF, said: The Secretary of State is right  the destruction of nature and disappearance of our wildlife is one of the greatest threats facing the human race.

And its not just about the extinction of rhinos or tigers on the other side of the world. Its about the disappearing birds, butterflies and other animals on our own doorsteps.

We hope Mr Gove will translate this concern into ambitious action, by delivering a strong Environment Act that protects our wildlife and nature here at home, and leading other nations to agree a new global commitment for nature.
 Brennan Center reports on encouraging 2018 crime data based on preliminary data from largest 30 US cities | Main | Spotlighting ever-increasing overdose casualties amidst the last four decades of the war on drugs 

The title of this post is the headline of this lengthy New York Times review of the high-profile sentencing set to take place at the start of next week. The article includes some original analysis of Pennsylvania sentencing outcomes, and here are some excepts that should be of interest to sentencing fans:

When Bill Cosby arrives at the Montgomery County Courthouse next week to be sentenced for sexual assault, he will find out whether prison is the final stop on his descent from beloved entertainer to disgraced felon. But the judge making that decision, Steven T. ONeill, will confront his own personal pressures, weighty expectations and knotty legal challenges. Chief among them: What to do with an 81-year-old sex offender who could become one of the most famous Americans ever to enter a cell?

At a time when the country is finally reckoning with a culture of predatory sexual abuse by powerful men, Judge ONeill is likely to survey a courtroom in Norristown, Pa., that is filled with many of the dozens of women who say Mr. Cosby drugged and assaulted not just Andrea Constand, but them, too. A large number of these women expect a long prison sentence, one that will put an exclamation mark on the first major conviction of the #MeToo era.

My wound was greatly healed by the guilty verdict in the spring, said Lili Bernard, an actress who says that Mr. Cosby drugged and raped her in the early 1990s. But to see him in handcuffs, that would be like, Wow. We, the victims, deserve that.

Prosecutors have said they will push for the maximum 30-year prison term: 10 years on each of three counts of aggravated indecent assault. But Mr. Cosbys lawyers are sure to fight that, depicting him as a frail old man with failing vision, incapable of assaulting another woman or surviving a long sentence.

And Judge ONeill will have to consider state guidelines that recommend, but do not mandate, appropriate sentence ranges. A New York Times analysis of Pennsylvania court data for the past five years found that offenders convicted of crimes similar to Mr. Cosbys often did not receive the maximum penalty, but were more typically given sentences of two to five years....

Mr. Cosbys spokesman, Andrew Wyatt, confirmed that Mr. Cosby would appeal his conviction, but declined to specify on what grounds.... Mr. Wyatt said Mr. Cosby would ask to remain free on bail, post-sentencing, while he pursues his appeal, a process that could take years. If Judge ONeill were to allow that, he would surely face criticism from the many female accusers looking to find closure in the case.

We will all feel very let down by that, said Victoria Valentino, a former model for Playboy who says Mr. Cosby drugged and raped her in Los Angeles in 1969....

Testimony concerning prior alleged crimes is only allowed in Pennsylvania, as in other states, if, among other conditions, it demonstrates a signature pattern of abuse. But its inclusion is extremely rare, and Judge ONeill never explained why he allowed the five additional women to testify in the trial this year after allowing only one additional accuser to speak at Mr. Cosbys first trial in 2017. That ended in a mistrial after the jury failed to reach a verdict. The No. 1 issue is definitely that big change, of letting in those additional complainants in the case, said Shan Wu, a former sex-crimes prosecutor in Washington. I am sure that Cosbys team are licking their chops.

Experts say judges are often more lenient about bail in cases where the appeal issues are viewed as strong. When someone has a legitimate issue, said Brian Jacobs, a former federal prosecutor in New York who has studied the topic, and theres an argument that certain evidence should not have been allowed that could reduce the chance of a conviction at retrial, then there is an interest in allowing that person to stay out on bail.

Mr. Cosby, who has denied sexually abusing any of the women, is currently free on $1 million bail, though he is confined to his suburban Philadelphia home and has to wear a GPS monitoring device. After Mr. Cosbys conviction, prosecutors had immediately asked for his bail to be revoked, but Judge ONeill said he did not view Mr. Cosby as a flight risk, one of the criteria weighed in such a decision. Legal experts said it was generally uncommon in Pennsylvania for offenders to be allowed to remain free on bail, pending appeal, after a judge had sentenced them to incarceration.

Mr. Cosby was convicted on these three counts: penetration with lack of consent, penetration of the victim while she was unconscious, and penetration after administering an intoxicant. The New York Times reviewed state sentencing data for 121 cases over the past five years in which the most serious conviction was for at least one of those three counts. Mr. Cosby is far older than all of the others convicted. Their median age was 36, though in a few cases, the offender was in his late 60s.

A vast majority of the offenders also received fewer than 10 years, with a median sentence of two to five. But there were several cases in which judges gave maximum sentences of 20 years or more to offenders who had been convicted on multiple counts of aggravated indecent assault, or a single count in tandem with other, lesser crimes.

In some of those cases, the judge eschewed a common practice of making multiple sentences concurrent and instead ruled that they be served consecutively. In another case, the person qualified for a more severe sentence because he was viewed as a repeat offender under Pennsylvanias sex offender laws.

Mr. Cosby had never before been convicted of a crime, and his team is expected to argue that his three counts should be merged into a single count, a decision that would mean that he would face a prison term of no more than 10 years.

Prosecutors have asked that an unspecified number of women who have accused Mr. Cosby of sexually assaulting them be allowed to testify at the sentencing hearing, a move that one of Mr. Cosbys lawyers, Joseph P. Greene Jr., is trying to block. But Ms. Constand will certainly be allowed to speak at the hearing, as will Mr. Cosby, if he so chooses. The person being sentenced usually has the last word.

Mr. Jacobs, the former federal prosecutor, said that even if none of the other women were allowed to speak, he had to believe that the number of accusers who say Mr. Cosby preyed on them for decades would be an important factor in Judge ONeills thinking. One purpose of sentencing in such a high-profile case can be to send a message that might deter others, he said. The judge would have to be conscious of the fact that this is one of the earliest sentences in the Me Too era, Mr. Jacobs said.

Judge ONeill declined to comment for this article. But Dennis McAndrews, a Pennsylvania lawyer who has known the judge since they attended Villanova University School of Law together, said he did not expect Judge ONeill to have any problem navigating the maze of factors in this sentencing. He has been a judge for 14 years, Mr. McAndrews said, and in terms of experience and temperament, he has got all the tools necessary to assimilate and synthesize every piece of information that will come before him.
UK airports could be losing out on more than 60 direct routes because of air passenger duty (APD), a report has found.

Research commissioned by trade body Airlines UK identified 66 potential new connections that could be more viable if the tax was abolished.

The routes are:

New routes could be introduced to UK airports if APD is abolished, according to a new report (Owen Humphreys/PA)

 20 domestic, such as Liverpool to Southampton, Bristol to Leeds Bradford, and Edinburgh to Guernsey

 31 short-haul (non UK), such as Belfast to Madrid, Newcastle to Lisbon, and Aberdeen to Munich

 15 long-haul from outside London, such as Bristol to Dubai, Edinburgh to Delhi, and Birmingham to Tel Aviv

66 new air links could be added by airlines in the UK if APD were removed  new report https://t.co/W122u1kKZk  Airlines UK (@airlines_UK) September 19, 2018

The study, carried out by consultancy Frontier Economics, also found that several routes dropped by airlines for financial reasons in recent years could have been viable if APD had been abolished.

APD constitutes as much as half the price of an off-peak short-haul ticket (from the UK to Poland) and 44% of the price of an off-peak long-haul ticket (from the UK to Israel), according to the study.

The rate of APD for long-haul passengers is 78 in economy and 156 in premium seats, with short-haul trips charged at 13 in economy and 26 in premium.

Airlines UK chief executive Tim Alderslade urged the Government to get rid of this damaging tax.

He claimed levying the worlds highest rate of tax on air travel is incompatible with creating the right conditions for post-Brexit economic success.

He went on: APD is putting the brake on the UKs economic growth with dozens of potential services  including long-haul connections outside of London  unviable under current conditions.

The removal of APD will leave airlines in a position to respond with more routes, greater frequency and better connectivity for the whole of the UK.

EasyJet chief executive Johan Lundgren agreed that removing APD would allow airlines to provide more routes and lower fares, while Virgin Atlantic boss Craig Kreeger called on the Government to show it is serious about helping us to connect to international markets.

No duty is paid on direct long-haul flights from Northern Ireland or any departures from the Scottish Highlands and Islands region.
It is extremely fortunate no-one died after a car hit a group of worshippers outside a mosque in an apparent anti-Muslim attack, a senior officer has said.

Three people were struck by the vehicle outside the Al-Majlis Al-Hussaini Islamic centre in Cricklewood, north-west London, following a late-night lecture.

Two men in their 20s suffered minor injuries and a man in his 50s is in hospital with a serious leg injury, Scotland Yard said.

The occupants of the car hurled anti-Muslim insults and abuse before driving at a group leaving the Islamic centre on Oxgate Lane, by Edgware Road, at around 12.30am on Wednesday, Scotland Yard said.

The occupants, three men and a woman in their mid-20s, confronted worshippers after being told to leave a private car park by security some minutes earlier.

They are said to have been drinking, taking drugs, and behaving antisocially.

(PA Graphics)

Metropolitan Police Chief Superintendent Simon Rose said: The people who had been challenged then drove at members of the community in a car.

The car mounted the pavement twice. The vehicle then drove off and was involved in a fail-to-stop accident.

We were extremely fortunate there was no loss of life.

It is being dealt with as an Islamophobic hate crime and it is being dealt with as a racist hate crime.

Detectives are analysing CCTV in a bid to trace the driver and the incident is not currently being treated as terror matter, the Metropolitan Police said.

The Hussaini Association in Oxgate Lane, Cricklewood (John Stillwell/PA)

The mosque said a red Nissan Juke was hurtling down the road and mounted the pavement before swerving into bystanders who were indiscriminately mown down.

Al Balaghi, of the Al Hussaini Association, which organised the lecture, wished the victims a speedy recovery.

He said: We request all members of the public to stay calm and not to fuel any retaliation.

We can only extend our prayers to the families and the victims.

No arrests have been made.
Hospital bosses have been orderd to apologise to the family of a patient who died after a watchdog found there were significant failings in his care.

Scottish Public Services Ombudsman Rosemary Agnew said there were a number of failings in the treatment the elderly man received after in the enhanced recovery area of Glasgow Royal Infirmary in October 2016.

She added she was making a public report on his daughters complaint because of her concerns about the significant failings in his care and treatment and because I consider it is in the wider public interest.

The Scottish Public Services Ombudsman found `significant failings in a patients care (Peter Byrne/PA)

The man, identified only as Mr A in the report, was admitted to the hospital on September 30, 2016 after losing weight and complaining of stomach pains.

On October 5 he had surgery to remove sections from his intestine, and afterwards was cared for in the high dependency unit, where his family said the care was excellent.

But when he was transferred to the enhanced recovery area on October 12, the Ombudsman said staff failed to act in response to the familys concerns, with the report noting the mans daughter  identified as Ms C  was begging for medical help.

His condition deteriorated and he was transferred back to high dependency, with doctors carrying out another operation. Despite this he died on October 21.

The Ombudsman said: Had Mr A been assessed and examined proactively by an experienced doctor earlier, it was likely that they would have recognised his deterioration and escalated his care sooner.

Had this happened, there would have been a greater chance of survival.

It was also ruled a CT scan should also have been carried out sooner, saying this would have alerted medics to the patients gross abdominal infection  with the mans daughter complaining staff failed to notice her father had a bellyful of pus.

The Ombudsman said: By the time the CT scan was done, his condition had deteriorated to an extent where further surgery and aggressive treatment were unlikely to be successful.

And while he should have been monitored at least every four hours, the report said there were occasions when there were more than six hours between observations, and there was once a gap of over seven hours which was unreasonable.

The Ombudsman added: In relation to Ms Cs complaint that the Board did not provide reasonable medical treatment to Mr A in the enhanced recovery area, we found that there were a number of failings.

A spokeswoman for NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde said: We will be writing to the family to reiterate our sincere condolences and to apologise for the clear failings in this patients care.

The recommendations from the Ombudsman have been discussed by a multi-disciplinary team and a number of changes have already been implemented.

We are working to implement the remaining recommendations and ensure that lessons learned in this case are shared with the appropriate staff.
Westminster terrorist Khalid Masoods mother feared he would kill someone while he was still a teenager, an inquest has heard.

His failed relationships, violent criminal past and conversion to Islam during the first of two spells in prison were laid bare at the inquest into his victims deaths on Wednesday.

Masood, 52, was shot dead by police after fatally stabbing Pc Keith Palmer, 48, and ploughing into Kurt Cochran, 54, Leslie Rhodes, 75, Aysha Frade, 44, and Andreea Cristea, 31, on Westminster Bridge in a rented 44, causing fatal injuries.

Khalid Masood was shot dead by police (Met Police/PA)

The Old Bailey heard Masood believed his Muslim faith was reinforced by a number of miracles in his life.

Masood first got into trouble with the police for shoplifting when he was just 14 years old while at school in Tunbridge Wells, Kent, where he lived with his mother, stepfather and two stepbrothers.

Counter-terror officer Detective Chief Inspector Dan Brown said: His mother suggested he exhibited normal boisterous behaviour, but his two brothers suggested he was a violent, disruptive person, who would not back down from a disagreement.

The Old Bailey heard Masoods mother Janet Ajao told police he would go out to pubs and clubs looking for a fight as an older teenager.

She also described him as an angry person, said DCI Brown.

She was worried he would kill someone through fighting.

John Hough QC, counsel for the inquest, described a number of incidents of significant violence escalating in seriousness and apparently becoming more regular.

In May 2003, Masood plunged a carving knife through the nose of Daniel Smith, who had suggested Masood was an undercover policeman.

In what was described as a horrific incident, the blade went through the palate of his mouth, through the tongue and into his jaw with such force the last inch of the blade broke off.

Masood claimed self-defence and was acquitted of attempted murder, wounding with intent and having a bladed weapon.

He was released from West Sussexs Lewes prison, where he had been held on remand, in December 2003 based on time served having been convicted of another weapons offence.

The inquest heard he credited his acquittal as well as the survival of his eldest daughter, who was later involved in a serious car accident, as the miracles that reinforced his Muslim faith after he had converted to Islam during his first spell in prison.
The European Union has ruled that Luxembourg did not give McDonalds a special tax deal and that the non-taxation of some of its profits did not amount to illegal state aid.

The EU Commission ended a probe that started in 2015 by saying that advantages granted to McDonalds were the result of differences between Luxembourg and US tax laws, and EU Commissioner Margrethe Vestager said Luxembourg did not break EU state aid rules.

Under the complicated tax structure in Luxembourg and the United States, McDonalds avoided to pay taxes on some profits on both sides of the Atlantic.

Under the complicated tax structure in Luxembourg and the US, McDonalds avoided paying some taxes (Nick Ansell/PA)

Our in-depth investigation did not find that Luxembourg gave selective tax treatment to McDonald's.

The reason for double non-taxation is a mismatch between Luxembourg and US tax laws.

Now the Luxembourg government is changing legislation to stop this  https://t.co/PFqQ6xkrxq pic.twitter.com/mjf6qTkNeG  European Commission  (@EU_Commission) September 19, 2018

Ms Vestager said the investigation has shown that the reason for double non-taxation in this case is a mismatch between Luxembourg and US tax laws, and not a special treatment by Luxembourg.

The outcome stands in stark contrast to similar cases between the EU and other US giants since the EU ruled two years ago that Apple was getting preferential treatment from the Irish government and forced it to pay 13 billion euro (11.5 billion) in back taxes.

The EU handed similar tax rulings to several other companies, though the amount of back tax was smaller. Last year, the EU said Amazon had to repay 224 million after it allegedly had struck a special tax deal with Luxembourg.

The EU wanted to see whether the McDonalds case was a similar example where too few taxes were paid overall and where other companies unfairly did not get the same treatment as big multinationals.

The EU said that from 2009 to 2015, the food giants Luxembourg-based company McDonalds Europe Franchising paid no corporate tax in Luxembourg despite large profits. It said the profits were more than 250 million euro (222 million) in 2013 alone.

McDonalds set up a structure where its Europe Franchising company is a subsidiary of the US based McDonalds Corporation  yet also has a branch in the United States.

Ms Vestager said that even though Luxembourg did not break state aid rules, a broader view needed to be taken.

Of course, the fact remains that McDonalds did not pay any taxes on these profits  and this is not how it should be from a tax fairness point of view, Ms Vestager said.

The Luxembourg government said that even though it was cleared of wrongdoing in this case, it was updating its tax laws because it realised they no longer represented the spirit of the times when there should be more accountability of multinationals.
Standardised tests in Scotland are not being used in a way which causes concern, an educational adviser has said.

Allison Skerrett, of the International Council of Education Advisers (ICEA), said members had feared the early tests would be used to label pupils, teachers and schools as high or low performing at an early age.

If the standardised assessment is used to shame or blame, label or rank schools schools, that serves no benefit, she said.

Holyrood is expected to vote against testing for P1 children (Andrew Milligan/PA)

The data arent being used in the ways the could cause the negative consequences that we were concerned about.

The Scottish Government is facing defeat in a vote on the use of national assessments for P1 pupils, which are opposed by all opposition parties.

Questioned on the vote, Ms Skerrett, a professor at the University of Texas, said: My view is its early to decide that something is not working.

She urged people to see the P1 tests as a part of larger improvement.

She said there remained differences in levels of support for the tests among members of the ICEA, set up by the Scottish Government to advise on education.

Regardless of the some diversity of opinions in the council I can say we generally support the ways in which the assessments have been delivered and the purposes for which they are going to be used, she said.

If they are used and delivered wisely and well through teacher judgement with the support of their school leaders in determining when they are administered that it could help additional insight to teachers into areas in which their students are strong, areas in which they are struggling, that could help guide their instruction and ultimately improve student learning.

MSPs at the Scottish Parliament are expected to back a Tory motion calling on ministers to halt the use of tests for the youngest students.

The vote is not binding on the government and Education Secretary John Swinney he would consider the outcome but insisted the P1 tests have an important role to perform.

But opposition leaders say if the Scottish Government is defeated, Mr Swinney should respect the wishes of the Parliament and call a halt to the tests.

Conservatives submitted the motion, which questions if the assessments are in line with the play-based learning philosophy of early years education, after some teachers reported P1 pupils had been reduced to tears.
Theresa May has been told her Brexit plans need to be reworked as time runs out to reach a deal with the European Union.

European Council president Donald Tusk said the Prime Ministers Chequers blueprint was a welcome evolution in the UKs approach, but major issues remained to be resolved including avoiding a hard border in Ireland and the future trading relationship between Britain and the EU.

Warning that there was less and less time to reach a deal before the UKs March 29 2019 exit date, Mr Tusk confirmed he would propose an emergency EU Brexit summit in November.

Today there is perhaps more hope but there is surely less and less time. On the Irish question and the framework for economic cooperation the UKs proposal needs to be reworked. #Brexit  Charles Michel (@eucopresident) September 19, 2018

His comments came as the Prime Minister prepared to address her EU counterparts at a meeting in Salzburg, the first such gathering since the Chequers plan was published.

Mrs May will use the meeting to say that now the UK has showed it is willing to evolve its position, the EU must also be prepared to show flexibility.

But, in a blow to her efforts to persuade fellow leaders of the viability of her plan, it emerged that her former Brexit secretary David Davis has described Chequers as a non-starter.

In extracts of a speech he plans to deliver in Munich on Thursday, Mr Davis said the PMs plan crossed all of her own negotiating red lines.

And he said: Chequers is devoid of democracy altogether. This is why many of us will shortly be presenting an alternative plan which will outline a more ambitious vision.

Mr Tusk told reporters in Salzburg: The Brexit negotiations are entering the decisive phase.

Various scenarios are still possible today but I would like to stress that some of Prime Minister Mays proposals from Chequers indicate a positive evolution in the UKs approach, as well as the will to minimise the negative effects of Brexit.

Those positive areas included foreign and security policy co-operation, he said.

But in a blow to Mrs Mays approach, he said: On other issues such as the Irish question or the framework for economic co-operation the UKs proposals will need to be reworked and further negotiated.

Today there is perhaps more hope, but there is surely less and less time, he added, as he confirmed he would propose a mid-November summit.

Efforts to find an acceptable way to avoid a hard border between Ireland and Northern Ireland suffered a further setback as Mrs Mays DUP allies poured cold water on the latest EU offer.

Ahead of the summit in Austria, the EUs chief negotiator Michel Barnier said he was ready to come forward with a new offer on the Irish border.

In order to de-dramatise the main obstacle to a withdrawal deal, Mr Barnier suggested arrangements could be made to conduct the majority of checks on imports and exports away from the border itself.

But the Democratic Unionist Party, which props up Mrs Mays minority administration in Parliament, dismissed Mr Barniers proposals as unpalatable, because they would involve a customs border between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK.

It still means a border down the Irish Sea although with different kinds of checks, said the partys deputy leader Nigel Dodds.

The fact is that both Theresa May and the Labour Party have said no British prime minister could accept such a concept. It is not just unionists who object.

The Department for Exiting the EU welcomed the commitment by Brussels to resolving the issue, but stressed Britain could not accept Northern Ireland being separated off from the UK customs territory.

Michel Barnier has said he is ready to make an improved offer on the Irish border (Niall Carson/PA)

The Salzburg meeting came as campaigners in the UK published a blueprint setting out how MPs could force the Prime Minister to accept what they call a Peoples Vote on her deal, with the option of remaining in the EU.

Despite Mrs May insisting the choice was between her deal or no deal, Treasury minister Mel Stride appeared to suggest that a second poll was still a possibility.

Mr Stride told Sky News: When we have a firm deal on the table, I suspect that those to the right of the party  the pro-Brexit wing  will be very concerned that if that deal does not prevail, they will end up in the situation where we could have a second referendum or we could end up not leaving the EU altogether, so there is a danger of that happening if Chequers does not prevail.

Mr Tusks intervention in Salzburg came just hours before a working dinner at the Felsenreitschule  the theatre where the Von Trapp family performed before fleeing the Nazis in The Sound Of Music movie  where Mrs May will set out her plan and explain why Brussels should show more flexibility to give her the support she needs.

(PA Graphics)

As part of the drive to set out the UKs position to the EUs leaders, she used an article in German newspaper Die Welt to explain her stance.

The Chequers blueprint  a common rulebook for trade in goods and business-friendly facilitated customs arrangement  is the only way to resolve the thorny issue of the border between Northern Ireland and Ireland, she said.

It is profoundly in both sides economic interest, it respects the integrity of the single market and, crucially, no-one else has come up with a proposal that could command cross-community support in Northern Ireland that is the only true foundation for stability there, she said.

Mrs May added: Neither side can demand the unacceptable of the other, such as an external customs border between different parts of the United Kingdom  which no other country would accept if they were in the same situation  or the UK seeking the rights of EU membership without the obligations.

Mrs May is expected to use the Salzburg summit to hold formal face-to-face talks with Belgian premier Charles Michel on Wednesday and Irelands Leo Varadkar and Mr Tusk on Thursday.

She may talk to other leaders in the margins of the summit in an effort to win backing for a plan which has met fierce resistance from within the ranks of her own Conservative Party.
A former security aide of French President Emmanuel Macron who was videotaped beating a protester has apologised for insulting a senate commission.

Alexandre Benalla was the star witness of a senate commission investigating issues triggered by the May Day march at which the former aide was videotaped beating a protester.

Benallas blows to a protester at the march, which had descended into violence, led to Mr Macrons most difficult period in office since he became president in May 2017.

I have a deep respect for the senate, Benalla told the commission.

The ex-aide said he had overreacted in a radio interview last week when he insulted the panel, because he felt some were using the institutions of our country for political and media ends.

Ive been raised in the respect of these institutions.

The commission, which has taken evidence from ministers, generals and other ranking officials, is trying to understand the nature of Benallas job at the presidential Elysee Palace and why he benefited from numerous perks, including permission to carry a gun.

It is also trying to uncover possible dysfunctions in Mr Macrons security detail.

Preliminary charges, including being involved in group violence, have been filed against Benalla, 27, and as a result questions about his actions on May Day are off-limits.

Benalla was quizzed for nearly two-and-a-half hours (AP Photo/Thibault Camus)

Some members of Mr Macrons centrist party have protested Benallas appearance, with party chief Christophe Castaner suggesting at one point that it was part of a ploy to bring down the president.

Benallas apology came in a nearly two-and-a-half hours-long grilling during which he said he carried a gun for his personal protection  not the presidents  and insisted he was never Mr Macrons bodyguard.

Benalla was identified in late July as one of two men seen in an online video brutally roughing up a protester at the violent May Day march even though he was present as an observer.

I am not a thug  a little ruffian, Benalla said in reference to speculation that he was a hot-tempered man lacking the status of others at the presidential Elysee Palace.

He was fired only when the affair became a political scandal and Mr Macron is reorganising the Elysee to address alleged dysfunctions.

The belated firing of Benalla, and an initial light punishment, fed questions about whether the presidency under Mr Macron had a hidden side that answered to no one with Benalla playing a critical role.

Benalla stressed that he was never Mr Macrons bodyguard, saying his job was helping to orchestrate presidential outings.
Lady Gabriella Windsor, a relative of the Queen, is to marry boyfriend Tom Kingston, Buckingham Palace has announced.

Lady Gabriella, 37, whose parents are Prince and Princess Michael of Kent, is likely to wed her 40-year-old fiance next spring, the palace indicated.

The couple have been dating for a number of years and Mr Kingston proposed while they were on the island of Sark this summer.

As the daughter of Prince Michael, a minor royal who is the Queens cousin, Lady Gabriella is not a household name but her immediate family members are better known.

Prince and Princess Michael of Kent arrive with Lady Gabriella for the Queens Christmas lunch in 2016 (Nick Ansell/PA)

Her brother Lord Freddie Windsor is married to actress Sophie Winkleman, while her mother has made headlines over the years for her outspoken comments, being dubbed Princess Pushy by the press.

Buckingham Palace said in a short statement: Prince and Princess Michael of Kent are delighted to announce the engagement of their daughter Lady Gabriella Windsor to Mr Thomas Kingston.

The engagement took place in August; Mr Kingston proposed on the Isle of Sark.

Known as Ella to her family and friends, Lady Gabriella dated journalist Aatish Taseer in her 20s.

He wrote a tell-all Vanity Fair article earlier this year which claimed they swam naked in the Buckingham Palace pool.

Aatish Taseer with Lady Gabriella at a Vanity Fair party (Ian West/PA)

Mr Taseer also highlighted what he claimed were Princess Michaels strong views on commoners marrying royals, writing she had told him: The moment the girl down the road thinks she can be Princess, or Queen, its all over. The mystery is gone.

Lady Gabriella studied at the private Brown University in America and works as an arts and travel director for brand company Branding Latin America, based in Knightsbridge, London.

She is also a board director for the Playing for Change Foundation, an arts education body, and has written for various publications.

Her fiance is a director of Devonport Capital, which specialises in providing finance for companies in frontier economies, and is a close friend of Pippa Middleton.
Four men who admitted being involved in supplying more than 1.72 million worth of drugs have been jailed.

Robert Wright, 55; Terrence Connelly, 31; Brian McCulley, 39; and Peter Ewing, 53, were caught with significant quantities of cocaine, cannabis and cannabis resin following a police surveillance operation.

Police arrested McCulley and Ewing after they were seen leaving a yard in the Dennistoun area of Glasgow on December 13, 2017.

The four men were sentenced at Glasgow High Court (David Cheskin/PA)

Prosecutors said officers found 18kg of cannabis with an estimated street value of 170,000 and 20kg of cannabis resin worth 56,000 in the vehicle.

Wright was later spotted near the yard and arrested.

Later the same day officers followed Connelly when they saw him entering the same yard and found him in a shipping container with white powder on the floor. He was arrested.

Police searched the yard which held three shipping containers as well as a trailer, five vans and a car.

They found 10kg of cocaine worth 407,880 in one of the containers, along with 261kg of cannabis resin worth 732,000 and 47kg of cannabis worth 363,000 in one of the vans.

Drug-making equipment and cutting agents were also found in the yard.

The four men, all from Glasgow, were sentenced at the High Court in Glasgow on Wednesday, having pleaded guilty to drugs offences at a hearing in August.

Nicola Patrick, procurator fiscal for homicide and major crime, said: This was a coordinated effort to bring significant quantities of illegal and harmful drugs through Scotland.

These men are now serving prison sentences thanks to an extensive police operation, working with COPFS, to investigate a network of drug supply in the Glasgow area.

With each case of this kind we can help reduce the harm that these drugs do to Scotlands communities.

The Crown Office said Wright was sentenced to eight years while Connelly was jailed for six years.

McCulley was jailed for three years and Ewing was sentenced to 32 months.
The 27th International Food Exhibition (WorldFood Moscow 2018) is now underway until September 20, with the participation of more than 1,500 firms from 62 countries and territories worldwide.



With the support of the Trade Promotion Centre under the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development and the Vietnamese Trade Office in Russia, Vietnamese firms including Dakao Agricultural Produce Export and Production Company (Dakao Vietnam), Nam Viet Foods & Beverage, Tan Phat Foods Corporation, Hanoi Trade Corporation (Hapro), Trung Nguyen Group and TH Group, have been attending the event.

A wide range of Vietnamese agricultural and aquatic products are introduced at the exhibition such as cashew nuts, tea, coffee, fruits and canned fish.

Within the framework of WorldFood Moscow 2018, a trade promotion conference designed to connect Vietnamese and Russian firms was held on September 18. At the event, Vietnamese businesses introduced their products and discussed measures of cooperation with their Russian partners.

Nguyen Quoc Toan, Acting Director of the Agro-Product Processing and Market Development under MARD, said WorldFood Moscow 2018 is a large-scale international fair attended by many major brands.

The Russian market holds huge potential for Vietnamese businesses, he noted, adding that Vietnam needs to take advantage of the free trade agreement with the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU) in the time ahead.

Nguyen Van Trien, Director of the Tan Phat Foods Corporation, said the company wants to seek partners to export canned tuna to Russia, hoping that the country will become its major market.

Sharing the view, Do Tat Thang, CEO of the Dakao Agricultural Produce Export and Production Company, said Dakao is paying heed to expanding its markets and it expected that Russia would become one of the companys major markets in the future.

Vietnamnews
Energy company Cuadrilla has received the final go-ahead from the Government to frack a second exploration well at a site in Lancashire.

The shale firm has already been given the green light by ministers for fracking, or hydraulic fracturing, at the first well it has drilled at the Preston New Road site, and has planning and environmental permits in place for both wells.

Francis Egan, chief executive of Cuadrilla, said: We are delighted to receive this consent.

Cuadrilla said it was `delighted to receive consent to frack a second exploration well at the Preston New Road site (Cuadrilla/PA)

We are currently completing works on site in readiness to start hydraulically fracturing both wells in the next few weeks.

Cuadrilla claims there is a need for the UK to have a new and reliable source of natural gas, which it calls the cleanest fossil fuel.

But the move by energy minister Claire Perry to grant the go-ahead for the second fracking well during parliamentary recess has prompted criticism from opponents of the controversial process for extracting shale gas.

Green Party MP Caroline Lucas said the move meant MPs, including those from the Conservative Party, could not hold the Government to account.

The fiasco of allowing fracking at Preston New Road has been an exercise in trampling over democracy and the wishes of local people, she said.

The Government is paving the way for a whole new fossil fuel industry just when we should be dramatically reducing our reliance on dirty energy.

If they continue down this road, theyll face a growing backlash in Parliament and across the country.
President Donald Trump has said well have to make a decision if Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaughs sexual-assault accuser makes a credible showing before the US Senate Judiciary Committee.

Mr Trump calls Mr Kavanaugh an outstanding man and says it is very hard for him to imagine anything happened, adding the committee hearing would be very interesting.

Brett Kavanaugh denies the allegations against him (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

The Judiciary Committee has scheduled a public hearing for Monday and has invited Mr Kavanaugh and California college professor Christine Blasey Ford to give evidence regarding her allegation against him.

Ms Ford says a drunken Mr Kavanaugh assaulted her decades ago when they were teenagers.

Mr Kavanaugh has denied Ms Fords allegation and has said he is willing to appear before the committee.

Ms Fords lawyers said she wants the FBI to investigate her allegation before she gives evidence.
Westminster Bridge attacker Khalid Masood told his children he was going to die fighting for God in the weeks leading up to the atrocity.

The inquest into his victims deaths heard that during video calls to his younger children, who were living in east London while he stayed in Birmingham, he told them about dreams he had been having.

Detective Chief Inspector Dan Brown told the Old Bailey: He told them that he was going to die fighting for God.

In the days before he ploughed into pedestrians on Westminster Bridge and stabbed Pc Keith Palmer on March 22 last year, he also searched for Birmingham Calor Gas Centre.

Mr Brown accepted it was at least possible that he had planned to use gas as a weapon.

The inquest heard Masood drove from Birmingham to Wales to visit his mother, Janet Ajao, and stepfather on March 16 after picking up the vehicle he used to carry out the attack.

Hundreds of floral tributes were left at the scene in the days and weeks following the attack (Yui Mok/PA)

Mr Brown said investigators believe this to be what we now realise was a goodbye visit.

The detective added: As he was leaving the house on March 17 he turned over his shoulder and said, they will say Im a terrorist. Im not.

Earlier, the court heard how his mother feared he would kill someone while he was still a teenager.

His failed relationships, violent criminal past, and conversion to Islam during the first of two spells in prison were laid bare in court.

Masood, 52, was shot dead by police after stabbing Pc Palmer, 48, and ploughing his rented 44 into Kurt Cochran, 54, Leslie Rhodes, 75, Aysha Frade, 44, and Andreea Cristea, 31, on Westminster Bridge, causing fatal injuries.

The Old Bailey heard he believed his Muslim faith was reinforced by a number of miracles in his life.

Masood first got into trouble with the police for shoplifting when he was aged just 14 while at school in Tunbridge Wells, Kent, where he lived with his mother, stepfather and two stepbrothers.

Counter-terror officer Mr Brown said: His mother suggested he exhibited normal boisterous behaviour, but his two brothers suggested he was a violent, disruptive person, who would not back down from a disagreement.

The Old Bailey heard his mother said he would go out to pubs and clubs looking for a fight as an older teenager.

She also described him as an angry person, Mr Brown said.

She was worried he would kill someone through fighting.

Jonathan Hough QC, counsel for the inquest, described a number of incidents of significant violence escalating in seriousness and apparently becoming more regular.

In May 2003, Masood plunged a carving knife through the nose of Daniel Smith, who had suggested Masood was an undercover policeman.

In what was described as a horrific incident, the blade went through the palate of his mouth, through the tongue and into his jaw with such force the last inch of the blade broke off.

Masood claimed self-defence and was acquitted of attempted murder, wounding with intent and having a bladed weapon.

He was released from West Sussexs Lewes prison, where he had been held on remand, in December 2003 based on time served having been convicted of another weapons offence.

The inquest heard he credited his acquittal as well as the survival of his eldest daughter, who was later involved in a serious car accident, as the miracles that reinforced his Muslim faith after he had converted to Islam during his first spell in prison.
Former Brexit Secretary David Davis is set to brand Theresa Mays Chequers plan for EU withdrawal as a non-starter.

In a speech in Germany on Thursday, Mr Davis will say that Chequers is devoid of democracy and breaches all of the red lines laid down by the Prime Minister.

Mr Davis walked out of Mrs Mays Cabinet in July in protest at the plan agreed at her country residence, which envisages the UK remaining in a free trade area for goods under a common rulebook with the EU.

David Daviss latest attack on the Chequers proposals come as the PM seeks to persuade fellow EU leaders to throw their weight behind the plan (Victoria Jones/PA)

His latest attack on the proposals comes as the PM seeks to persuade fellow EU leaders at a summit in Austria to throw their weight behind the Chequers deal.

According to extracts released ahead of Mr Daviss speech in Munich, he will say: We have been told that the Chequers proposal fulfils what the British people voted for. Well, I am afraid I simply do not buy that.

Fifty-two per cent of British voters oppose the proposals. Only 18% approve. It is quite remarkable for a government policy to be that unpopular.

And, for me, the Chequers plan was always a non-starter.

At Lancaster (House) and Mansion House, the Prime Minister promised to return control over our law, our money and our borders. These promises were in our manifesto too. But the Chequers plan crosses all of those red lines.

The EU is often correctly described as having a democratic deficit. But Chequers is devoid of democracy altogether.

This is why many of us will shortly be presenting an alternative plan which will outline a more ambitious vision.

Mr Davis will say that German companies should not fear a more competitive UK outside the EU, but should instead embrace the opportunity that it will create for German workers, families and businesses large and small.

In the long run, the friendly economic competition between neighbours is massively beneficial, he will say.

Beneficial for the German companies whose supply chains will be provided with improved components from British factories; beneficial for the consumers of tomorrow, who will enjoy the fruits of a more competitive global economy; and beneficial for the students and entrepreneurs of all Europe.
Orla Kiely, a fashion brand worn by the Duchess of Cambridge, has closed its stores after falling into administration.

The retail and wholesale side of the brand, famed for its colourful patterns, ceased trading on Monday, resulting in the closures of three outlets.

Staff were informed of the closure earlier this week and made redundant with immediate effect.

Operations have now ceased both in the stores and on the brands website.

Two of the stores which have now closed are in London, on Kings Road and Seven Dials, while a third is located in a shopping outlet in Kildare, Ireland.

However, the licensing arm of the business will continue trading, meaning Orla Kiely branded product collections for the likes of John Lewis and Partners and Very.co.uk will not be affected.

In a statement posted on the brands website, founder Orla Kiely and her husband Dermott Rowan wrote: Thank you for embracing our brand and designs throughout the years and for your ongoing support.

Restructuring firm David Ruben and Partners have been appointed as administrators to Kiely Rowan, the parent company of the retail and wholesale business.

Kiely, an Irish designer, set up her own label in the 1990s and has gained widespread recognition for her distinctive prints.

The designs have appeared on a range of branded products including bicycles for Halfords and a range of Citroen cars.

The Duchess of Cambridge has also been spotted wearing clothes by the brand.
Malaysias former prime minister Najib Razak has been arrested and will face further charges of abuse of power over the looting of a state investment fund.

The agency said in a statement that Najib was detained at its office over the transfer of 2.6 billion ringgit (476 million) into his bank account.

It said Najib will be taken to court on Thursday to face several charges under Section 23 of the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission Act.

Former Malaysian prime minister Najib Razak (AP Photo/Vincent Thian)

Najib was earlier charged with multiple counts of criminal breach of trust, corruption and money laundering over the scandal at the 1MDB state fund, just months after his shocking electoral defeat.

He has pleaded not guilty and his trial is due to start next year.

Najib set up 1MDB when he took power in 2009 to promote economic development, but the fund amassed billions in debts and is being investigated in the US and several other countries for alleged cross-border embezzlement and money laundering.

Public anger over the 1MDB scandal led to the ouster of Najibs long-ruling coalition in national polls on May 9 and ushered in the first change of power since independence from Britain in 1957.

The new government reopened investigations stifled under Najibs rule and barred him and his wife from leaving the country.

Police also seized jewellery and hundreds of handbags and other valuables estimated at more than 1.1 billion ringgit (207 million) from properties linked to Najib.

Police have said that investigations have shown that 739 million had been transferred to Najibs bank account from three companies linked to 1MDB.

Najib, 65, has accused Malaysias new government under Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad of seeking political vengeance and vowed to clear his name at his trial.

He has claimed the money was a political donation from Saudi Arabias royal family.
Doctors have voiced concern over whether the Irish Health Service will be ready to start carrying out abortions by January 2019.

The Oireachtas Health Committee heard warnings from doctors that more investment is needed in the health service to adapt to the new reality ahead.

The Irish electorate voted to repeal the Eighth Amendment in Mays referendum, with just under 67% voting in favour of repeal.

Doctors are concerned about the timescale ahead of abortions starting (Thinkstock/PA)

Irish President Michael D Higgins signed a bill on Tuesday officially repealing the Eighth Amendment, amending Irelands abortion laws.

With guidelines still being drawn up, abortion services are set to start being offered in Ireland for the first time from January 1, 2019.

Draft measures would allow relatively free access to abortions, subject to consultation with a medical professional and after a short waiting period, up to 12 weeks after gestation and up to 24 weeks with restrictions.

But doctors warned the Oireachtas Health Committee on Tuesday that more investment is needed to be able to offer these services.

Representatives from the Medical Council, the Irish College of General Practitioners, the Institute of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists gave evidence to the committee.

Dr John OBrien, president of the Irish College of General Practitioners, spoke of his concern at the timeline.

He pointed out there is already a strain on GP services, with 60% of practices currently closed to new patients.

There may be other matters taking place within the HSE or the Department of Health which I am not aware of, which might allay some of those concerns, he told the committee.

Dr Mary Favier, vice president of the college, said very few doctors in Ireland are trained to carry out abortions.

The result of this referendum has created a new reality, she told the committee.

Termination of pregnancy will be legalised for the first time in Ireland, this means that there are actually very few clinicians who are trained to deliver this care pathway unless they have received training outside of the jurisdiction.

Dr Favier said the college has been consulting with its members and have heard a number of concerns.

There are concerns about capacity and resourcing issues such as staffing, facilities, training.

They are concerned about the potential lack of appropriate specialist support, the possibility of medical complications for their patients, what will be the public reaction to those who dont provide and those who do.

They have a fear of litigation, they wish to see an acknowledgement of conscientious objection and how to accommodate this in the clinical pathway but also an acknowledgement of conscientious commitment and how to support this.

Dr Peter Boylan, chairman of the Institute of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, described the proposed timescale as challenging.

He also warned of infrastructural deficits in access to ultrasound in pregnancy.

Introduction of a termination service without adequate scanning facilities is fraught with risk, he told the committee.

The institute recommends that appropriate and immediate investment in ultrasound is an integral element of termination services.

He has called for round table meetings with all interested parties, including the Department of Health, to decide on a pathway for the implementation of services.

Dr Boylan warned they must set the service up right, adding the consequences of getting it wrong are very serious.

The committee also heard from representatives from the Health Products Regulatory Authority (HPRA) over the licensing of abortion medication.

Clinical Assessment manager Dr Elaine Breslin outlined how medical termination of pregnancy is achieved by taking two medicines 48 hours apart to induce a miscarriage.

She said since the referendum results, the HPRA has received applications from drug companies to supply the medication in Ireland which are currently being assessed.

If the applications are considered acceptable, marketing authorisations can be issued in late 2018, she told the committee.
US President Donald Trump has escalated his attacks on Jeff Sessions, saying I dont have an attorney general.

Mr Trump told reporters he is so sad over Jeff Sessions, who he has repeatedly denounced for recusing himself from the investigation into the Trump presidential campaigns links with Russia.

He was the first senator that endorsed me. And he wanted to be attorney general, and I didnt see it, Mr Trump said in the Oval office interview.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions has withstood huge criticism from the president (AP Photo/Charlie Riedel)

And then he went through the nominating process and he did very poorly. I mean, he was mixed up and confused, and people that worked with him for, you know, a long time in the Senate were not nice to him, but he was giving very confusing answers. Answers that should have been easily answered.

The president softened his stance slightly when talking to reporters on the White House lawn hours after the interviews publication, saying: Im disappointed in the attorney general for numerous reasons, but we have an attorney general.

Mr Trump has repeatedly asserted that Mr Sessions, a former US senator from Alabama, did not need to step away from the Russia probe, a move the president believes in part led to the appointment of special counsel Robert Mueller, who is investigating contacts between Trump campaign officials and Russians.

Mr Trump suggested that Mr Sessions rocky Senate confirmation hearings may have impacted his performance as attorney general.

He gets in and probably because of the experience that he had going through the nominating when somebody asked him the first question about Hillary Clinton or something he said, I recuse myself, I recuse myself,' Mr Trump said.

Department of Justice guidelines recommended the attorney general step away because of his own contacts with foreign government officials during his time with the 2016 Trump campaign. Mr Sessions told congress that his decision was not due to any wrongdoing.

Mr Trump also broadened his attacks beyond the recusal, saying he is unhappy with Mr Sessions performance on several issues.

Im not happy at the border. Im not happy with numerous things, not just this, Mr Trump said in the interview.

Mr Trump has repeatedly complained publicly and privately about Mr Sessions, pushing him to curtail the Mueller probe, urging him to investigate Mrs Clinton and suggesting he should drop investigations into Republican congressmen until after the November midterm elections.

He also said that he does not feel as though Mr Sessions supports him like former attorneys general Eric Holder and Bobby Kennedy backed presidents Barack Obama and John F Kennedy, respectively.

Mr Trump has repeatedly considered firing Mr Sessions, the nations top law enforcement officer, only to be opposed by aides who think a dismissal would upend the Russia investigation, conservatives who applaud Mr Sessions hardline stances at the Department of Justice and Republican senators who have said they would not confirm a replacement.

But there have been cracks in that resistance of late. South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham, who once fought for Mr Sessions, recently said that the president was entitled to having an attorney general he has faith in while other Trump allies have suggested that a move could be made after the midterms.

Mr Sessions recently punched back against Mr Trump, saying he and his department will not be improperly influenced by political considerations.

And Mr Sessions has made clear to associates that he has no intention of leaving his job voluntarily despite Mr Trumps constant criticism.

Mr Trump said in the interview that well see what happens with Mr Sessions future.

Well see how it goes with Jeff, Mr Trump continued. Im very disappointed in Jeff. Very disappointed.
An HIV charity has been saved from closure following a Scottish Government funding u-turn.

HIV Scotland feared it would have to shut after losing out on Scottish Government cash earlier in the year, forcing staff lay offs.

Now, Public Health Minister Joe FitzPatrick has confirmed the Scottish Government has offered the charity 231,000 over three years.

The grant, covering core costs, will enable them to seek extra funding to secure a sustainable future, the charity said.

It had previously received around 270,000 a year from the Scottish Government before losing out in its bid in the latest funding round.

Nicola Sturgeon being given a HIV test by George Valiotis, chief executive of HIV Scotland, to mark World Aids Day last year (Jane Barlow/PA)

In response to a parliamentary question, Mr FitzPatrick said: The Scottish Government has agreed to offer HIV Scotland 231,000 over the next three years.

This funding will support the organisation to move to a sustainable financial position.

He said the Scottish Government has given 2.13 million to organisations dealing with sexual health and blood-borne viruses between 2018 and 2021.

HIV Scotland board chairwoman Nicoletta Policek: Were pleased to have reached an agreement with the Scottish Government to contribute to our core operating costs.

This new, arms-length relationship with the government will allow us to develop new relationships with other funders to secure a sustainable future, whilst continuing our award winning work which protects the human rights of people living with and at risk of HIV.

Today Scottish Government announced a rescue package to secure the future of @HIVScotland. This is the product of a summer of detailed meetings and negotiation. Grateful to Ministers & officials for time and access they gave me & the charity and to all those who offered support. pic.twitter.com/Az8OV5YiQ3  Alex Cole-Hamilton MSP (@agcolehamilton) September 19, 2018

Liberal Democrat MSP Alex Cole-Hamilton, who campaigned to save the charity, said: The Scottish Government understands that the charity is globally recognised and respected and that it still has an important contribution to make, particularly given that HIV is growing in Scotland and that 13% of Scots who carry the virus dont know they do.

This rescue package will allow the charity to continue its vital work and move to a more sustainable financial position going forward.
Britons with dual Iranian nationality have been told to avoid all but essential travel to Iran because of an increased risk they will be arbitrarily detained by its hardline Islamic regime.

The Foreign Office said Jeremy Hunt had taken the decision to heighten the warning against unnecessary visits to the Middle Eastern country because of the risks we have seen all too sadly in a number of cases.

Tehran continues to hold a British-Iranian charity worker, Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, in prison after convicting her of spying, which she denies.

Handout file photo of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe with her daughter Gabriella during her temporary release from prison in Iran.

Mr Hunt has previously vowed to leave no stone unturned in his efforts to secure her release.

An FCO spokeswoman said: The Foreign Secretary has taken the decision to advise against all but essential travel by UK-Iranian dual nationals to Iran.

British citizens who also hold Iranian nationality face risks if they travel to Iran, as we have seen all too sadly in a number of cases.

The Iranian government does not recognise dual nationality so if a dual national is detained our ability to provide support is extremely limited.

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.

The new travel advice warns: British nationals, in particular dual British/Iranian nationals, face greater risks than nationals of many other countries.

The security forces may be suspicious of people with British connections.

The risks are likely to be higher for independent travellers or students than for people travelling as part of an organised tour or business people invited by the Iranian authorities or companies.

If you have links to any organisation perceived as being anti-Iranian, either within Iran or elsewhere, you may be at even greater risk.

It goes on to warn that if people are detained the UK Government has serious concerns that the subsequent judicial process falls below international standards.

Iran has been rocked by economic unrest in recent months and US sanctions linked to its nuclear programme due to be reinstated in November are likely to make matters worse.

The travel advice continues: Any behaviour that doesnt have an obvious explanation can put you at risk, no matter how innocent you believe it to be.

This may include travel off the beaten track, being present near crowds or sensitive sites, having contact with Iranians who are of interest to the authorities, taking photographs (except in major tourist sites), or behaviour that could be perceived as contrary to official Iranian interpretations of Islam.

The threat to travellers is likely to be higher if theres any national unrest, terrorist incident or an increase in tensions between Iran and the international community.
An agreement to this effect was signed between the citys Education and Training Department and the Thang Long-Hanoi Heritage Conservation Centre on September 19.



Director of the Hanoi Education and Training Department Chu Xuan Dung said the move aims at nurturing childrens interest in history in general and local history in particular, and encouraging them to discover the heritage of the city where they live.

Under the agreement, Hanoi schools will coordinate with the preservation board to organize tours of the Thang Long imperial citadel during the school year as an extra curriculum activity.

The Thang Long-Hanoi heritage conservation centre has designed various learning programmes to suit different age groups and school level. Besides thematic tours and exchanges with historians, the programmes arrange for students to try their hands at making traditional handicraft such as making paper fans, decorating pottery, printing folk paintings.

Tours of the Co Loa citadel relics also include folk games such as crossbow shooting, a game associated with the legend about the citadel, or tug of war.

Director of the centre Tran Viet Anh said the sides will make assessment of the teaching every year based on feedback from teachers and students.

With the goal of promoting the heritage among the community, the Thang Long-Hanoi conservation centre has worked with the Hanoi UNESCO Office, the Vietnamese Association of Historical Sciences and experts to develop educational activities target students.

Last year, more than 3,900 students in Hanoi participated in educational activities at the Thang Long imperial citadel, and more than 18,000 children attended side activities such as Lunar New Year and Mid-Autumn Festivals held at the site.

The Thang Long Imperial Citadel was recognised as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2010. At the citadel, many artefacts and items dating back to between the 6th and 20th centuries were excavated in 2004, including foundations of old palaces, ancient roads, ponds and wells. On top of these discoveries, archaeologists also found bronze coins, ceramics and pottery from many places in Asia, all of which demonstrate a close trading relationship in the area.

Co Loa Citadel was built during the end of the Hong Bang Dynasty (about 257 BC), about 20km to the north of todays Hanoi.

It is a place of worship for King An Duong Vuong and Princess My Chau, who are mentioned in the legends that have been passed down many generations.

According to folklore, An Duong Vuong founded the ancient Vietnamese state of Au Lac and chose Co Loa as the capital city.

Vietnamnews
A judge has decided not to punish a 66-year-old homeless handyman who admitted wrongly revealing information about a mentally-ill pensioner at the centre of proceedings in a specialist court where issues relating to people who lack the mental capacity to make decisions are considered.

Mr Justice Williams concluded on Wednesday that Imre Stalter, who lives in a van in the Richmond area of London, was in contempt of court because he had published information in breach of an order made by another judge who was overseeing the womans case in the Court of Protection.

He told Mr Stalter not to breach the judges order again, but said there was no need to impose any prison term, suspended prison term or fine.

A judge has decided not to punish Imre Stalter, a 66-year-old homeless handyman who admitted wrongly revealing information about a mentally-ill pensioner at the centre of Court of Protection proceedings. PA/Nick Ansell

Officials at the Office of the Public Guardian, a Government body set up to protect and help vulnerable people who lack the mental capacity to make decisions, had launched contempt proceedings against Mr Stalter.

They said he had wrongly published information, which identified the pensioner as being a person at the centre of proceedings in the Court of Protection, on more than 20 occasions.

Mr Stalter, a friend of the pensioner, admitted publishing information in breach of an order. He apologised and said the would not publish such information again.

Mr Justice Williams, who is based in the Family Division of the High Court and said the pensioner could not be named, had analysed evidence against Mr Stalter at a hearing in London.

He said that Mr Stalter had become unhappy about what was happening to the pensioner.

I understand on a human level, Mr Justice Williams told Mr Stalter.

But part of the foundation of our society requires people to comply with court orders, even if they feel very strongly that they are unfair.

He added: However strongly you feel once you are away from this court, please, I dont want to see you again in a case like this.

Barrister Emma Sutton, who represented the Office of the Public Guardian, had told Mr Justice Williams that the case was the first of its kind.

Court of Protection hearings have traditionally been staged in private to protect people at the centre of litigation.

In 2016, judges began hearing cases in public in the wake of secret justice complaints.

Judges overseeing public hearings make orders  called transparency orders  limiting what can be published by any reporter or member of the public.

Miss Sutton said it was the first time anyone had faced contempt proceedings as a result of being accused of breaching a Court of Protection transparency order  and the first application of its kind by the Office of the Public Guardian.
Westminster terrorist Khalid Masood obsessed over racist and rude Donald Trump, and called Theresa May sick and a liar as he plotted his murderous attack, an inquest has heard.

Masood, 52, was shot dead by police following a stabbing attack on Pc Palmer, 48  and after ploughing into Kurt Cochran, 54, Leslie Rhodes, 75, Aysha Frade, 44, and Andreea Cristea, 31, on Westminster Bridge in a rented 44, causing fatal injuries.

An inquest into their deaths heard he told his children he was going to die fighting for God in the weeks leading up to the atrocity.

Six days before the attack, Masood collected the rented Hyundai Tucson he would use in his rampage before driving from Birmingham to Wales to visit his mother, Janet Ajao.

Westminster attacker Khalid Masood (Met Police/PA)

His final words to her were: They will say Im a terrorist. Im not.

The Old Bailey heard Masood converted to Islam during the first of two prison spells and believed his faith was reinforced by miracles in his life, including an acquittal for attempted murder and his daughter surviving a car crash.

But a former girlfriend, speaking to investigators after last years March 22 attack, said he was vile.

She said: He was controlling, violent, obsessive, intelligent and narcissistic. Im amazed hes religious. I honestly believe this is a front, an excuse to hurt people.

He would love the attention and the fear he has created.

Earlier the court heard how his mother feared he would kill someone while he was still a teenager as he visited pubs and clubs looking for fights in the affluent Kent town of Tunbridge Wells.

Born Adrian Elms, Masood descended into a life of crime  first getting into trouble with police aged 14, and was known to be involved in drug dealing and frequently carried a knife.

He was jailed in July 2000 for a flick-knife attack, and in 2003 spent six months behind bars after plunging a carving knife through the nose of Daniel Smith  who had suggested Masood was an undercover policeman.

Mr Smith was left with horrific injuries after the blade went through the palate of his mouth, through the tongue and into his jaw with such force the last inch of the blade broke off.

Masood claimed self-defence and was acquitted of attempted murder, wounding with intent and having a bladed weapon.

The branch of car-hire firm Enterprise in Spring Hill, Birmingham where Khalid Masood got the Hyundai 44 (Joe Giddens/PA)

In the run up to the attack, CCTV footage captured Masood buying knives and hiring the car in Birmingham before visiting his mother and heading to London to conduct reconnaissance.

The inquest heard Masood made searches for the Prime Minister on his laptop, protected by the password Islam1, and made comments to his children about her and Donald Trump.

He complained about racism and rudeness from the president and described Theresa May as a liar and said she was sick, said Gareth Patterson QC, representing families of Masoods victims.

On the morning of the attack, following a last supper from a Brighton fish and chip restaurant, Masood made further searches for Prime Ministers Questions, which was taking place that afternoon.

Masood was shot three times by a plain-clothes police officer as he headed towards Parliaments Members Entrance.

Mr Patterson suggested that if he had been targeting the Prime Minister, he would not have been the only terrorist to do so, coming before similar foiled plots last year.
MSPs have narrowly voted in favour of halting national assessments for P1 pupils  with Education Secretary John Swinney now facing calls to respect the will of Parliament and ditch the controversial tests.

After a heated debate, Holyrood voted by 63 to 61 for a Conservative motion, demanding the Scottish Government halt the use of standardised national assessments for four and five-year-olds.

Tory education spokeswoman Liz Smith said afterwards: The Scottish Parliament has voted decisively on this matter, and now the SNP government must act on that.

Mr Swinney said he would `consider the result of the vote and `make a Parliamentary statement in due course (Andrew Cowan/Scottish Parliament/PA)

In light of @ScotParl debate on P1 assessment, I will consider outcome and make a Parliamentary statement in due course. @scotgov still believes assessment is an important part of improvement agenda and I advise schools to continue with their existing plans on SNSAs.  John Swinney (@JohnSwinney) September 19, 2018

Mr Swinney said he would consider the result of the vote and make a Parliamentary statement in due course.

He added the Scottish Government still believes assessment is an important part of improvement agenda and advised schools to continue with their existing plans for the assessments.

The vote came after Allison Skerrett, a professor at the University of Texas who is one of the Scottish Governments International Council of Education Advisers, said of the tests: Its early to decide that something is not working.

She insisted the council generally support the ways in which the assessments have been delivered and the purposes for which they are going to be used.

During the debate Mr Swinney defended the use of the tests for four and five-year-olds, saying: Assessment is an essential part of a good education system, it is an integral part of effective teaching and learning.

He explained the standardised assessments  which are also used to measure the performance of youngsters in P4, P7 and S3  were introduced after the OECD reviewed the Scottish education system in 2015.

We sought external independent opinion which said that we did not have enough information about learning outcomes and progress, the Education Secretary said.

So, we have put in place the standardised assessments.

And he added: It is absolutely vital to get as much information as possible on childrens achievement as early as possible.

The Scottish Parliament has voted decisively and now the SNP must act.



The nationalists have ignored the evidence on Primary 1 testing for some time, but they cant afford to any longer. pic.twitter.com/Nt0BNYohBY  Scottish Conservatives (@ScotTories) September 19, 2018

However Ms Smith claimed the evidence for testing children in P1 needed to be rexamined.

Calling for a halt to the assessments for this group, she stated: The SNP is always talking about how important the Scottish Parliament is and how its will must be respected.

This is the perfect chance for the SNP to do just that.

That call was echoed by Labour, the Greens and the Liberal Democrats, who had united with the Conservatives to vote against P1 testing.

Scottish Labour leader Richard Leonard said: Teachers told this government that these tests were useless, ministers ignored them.

Parents told this government that they do not trust these tests, ministers ignored them.

The Scottish Parliament has now voted to scrap these tests and SNP ministers must not now ignore the will of Parliament.

The Government must therefore bring forward immediate plans for how it will respond to this evenings vote as a matter of urgency.

The Scottish Parliament has voted to scrap Primary 1 tests.



The SNP can't ignore parents and teachers any longer. It's time for them to now outline when these tests will end. pic.twitter.com/a4rERIWecJ  Scottish Labour (@ScottishLabour) September 19, 2018

Green education spokesman Ross Gree said while a majority of MSPs had joined teachers and others in calling for the tests to be scrapped, in a fit of arrogance the government seems set to ignore our decision.

And Liberal Democrat Tavish Scott said: This is now the will of the Parliament. The SNP Government must now issue instructions to all schools to cease these tests.

The SNP however accused opposition politicians of appaling hypocrisy, pointing out the Tories had supported testing for P1 pupils in their 2016 Holyrood manifesto.

Gordon MacDonald, a member of the Parliaments Education Committee, said: The Scottish Government introduced P1 assessments because they are a tool we need to track kids progress and help drive up standards in our schools.

The Tories put standardised P1 assessments in their manifesto, the vast majority of Tory-run councils across Scotland already assessed kids from P1, so did Labour councils and likewise the Lib Dems.

Labour and the Lib Dems have sided with the Tories in their political gamesmanship, and sought to prey on the anxieties of parents, just to grab a headline.

Its depressing that they all stood willing to do so at the expense of kids education.
Ian Paisley has thanked the voters of North Antrim for their unwavering support after Westminsters first ever recall petition fell short of the threshold required to unseat him.

The MP also hailed his family and true friends for sticking by him after he narrowly avoided a by-election.

Mr Paisley would have been ousted as an MP if 10% of the electorate in his North Antrim constituency  7,543 voters  signed the petition. In the event 7,099 people signed it (9.4%).

Ian Paisley thanked the voters of North Antrim (PA)

The petition device, created following the Westminster expenses scandal, was initiated after Mr Paisley was banned from the House of Commons for 30 sitting days for failing to declare two 2013 family holidays paid for by the Sri Lankan government.

A parliamentary watchdog found in July that a year after the luxury holidays, Mr Paisley lobbied then prime minister David Cameron not to support a UN probe into alleged Sri Lankan human rights abuses.

In a statement to the Press Association, Mr Paisley said the electorate had spoken.

In July I apologised for a mistake made almost six years ago.

The electorate was asked to pass judgment. 90.6% have accepted my apology.

The electorate has clearly spoken.

I would like to thank my true friends, family, the electorate who have stood by me with unwavering support. Hallelujah.

NI Chief Electoral Officer Virginia McVea announces the outcome of Westminsters first ever recall petition. pic.twitter.com/UZ9HIoiga4  David Young (@DavidYoungPA) September 20, 2018

The long-standing Democratic Unionist, whose late father the Reverend Ian Paisley founded the party, is currently suspended from the DUP pending its own internal investigation into his conduct.

Three centres were opened in North Antrim for the last six weeks to give voters the opportunity to sign the petition. Constituents were also able to put their name to the petition via post.

Northern Irelands Chief Electoral Officer Virginia McVea announced the outcome in Belfast around 1.25am on Thursday morning after a count that commenced at midnight.

The petition has not been successful, she said.

BREAKING - @ianpaisleymp has thanked the voters of North Antrim for their "unwavering support" after Westminster's first ever recall petition fell short of the threshold required to unseat him. In a statement to @PA , Mr Paisley said: pic.twitter.com/rkdY5hQrMr  David Young (@DavidYoungPA) September 20, 2018

Ms McVea communicated the outcome to Speaker John Bercows office in London before making the announcement. Mr Paisley, who was not there in person, was informed by text message.

Afterwards Ms McVea rejected criticism that has been levelled at her by Sinn Fein for only opening three centres where people could sign the petition, when the maximum permitted was 10.

She said there had been unprecedented access afforded, with the longest ever electoral period in the region and voters able to access postal ballots on demand.

There has never been access to an electoral event like that before, said told the Press Association.

And the three designated places were the three hubs within the North Antrim constituency. Legislation allows for one up to a maximum in any constituency of ten across the UK and we decided on three.

Ulster Unionist leader Robin Swann said it was clear there was no public appetite for a by-election.

I respect that outcome, he said.

BREAKING. @ianpaisleymp holds onto his seat...just. Petition falls 444 votes short of the 7543 required to force a by-election in North Antrim.  David Young (@DavidYoungPA) September 20, 2018

However I would caution Ian Paisley not to see this as some sort of victory or endorsement of his actions in acting as a paid advocate for a foreign government and bringing North Antrim and the House of Commons into disrepute.

Rather I would urge him to use the time that he has been suspended from Parliament and the DUP, to reflect on the severity of what he has done and the embarrassment he has brought on Northern Ireland. He should demonstrate some humility.

Mr Paisleys Commons ban has left current Prime Minister Theresa May shorn of one of her 10 DUP MP confidence and supply allies during a period that could witness several crucial Brexit votes.

It has also given the DUP another headache at a time when the party is under intense scrutiny at public inquiry hearings in Northern Ireland examining its handling of the botched green energy scheme that brought down Stormont powersharing.

An investigation by the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards found the cost of the hospitality afforded Mr Paisley and his family may have been significantly more than his 50,000 estimate.

It found the Sri Lankan holidays included business-class air travel, accommodation at first-class hotels, helicopter trips and visits to tourist attractions for the North Antrim MP and his wider family.

The trips also included meeting with Sri Lankan governmental figures.

Mr Paisleys threshold for registering such hospitality in 2013 was around 660.

In March 2014, Mr Paisley wrote to Mr Cameron to lobby against a proposed United Nations resolution setting up an international investigation into alleged human rights abuses in Sri Lanka.

In the wake of the watchdog report, Mr Paisley apologised for what he described as an unintentional failure to declare the holidays.

In the 2017 general election, Mr Paisley retained his North Antrim seat with a landslide 20,000-plus majority, securing nearly 59% of the vote.

Sinn Feins North Antrim Assembly member Philip McGuigan said: Ian Paisleys party leadership have yet to condemn these actions or to confirm whether or not he still has their support as MP for North Antrim.

That is a failure of leadership.

They need to come out of their hiding place and address the very serious issues at the heart of this scandal.
An anaesthetist convicted of killing his wife and daughter by placing a yoga ball which leaked carbon monoxide in their car has been sentenced to life in prison in Hong Kong.

Malaysian citizen Khaw Kim Sun, 53, had become estranged from his wife, Wong Siew Fing, 47, and their four children, although they continued to live together while he had an affair with a student.

A jury of five men and four women found him guilty at Hong Kongs High Court after seven hours of deliberation.

Khaw Kim Sun, 53, was sentenced to life in prison (AP)

Judge Judianna Barnes Wai-ling told Khaw: It is shocking that a highly educated and successful man would conjure up such a calculated method to get rid of his wife.

Khaw was accused of putting the gas-filled yoga ball in the boot of a Mini Cooper driven by his wife, Wong Siew-fung, on May 22 2015.

Ms Wong and their 16-year-old daughter were found unconscious in the car parked at a bus stop about an hour after leaving home. They were later declared dead from severe carbon monoxide poisoning, although the vehicle showed no defects such as a leaky emissions system.

The case initially flummoxed Hong Kong police until the presence of the deflated yoga ball drew suspicion.

Khaw was arrested in September after colleagues from the teaching hospital where he worked spoke with police.

He reportedly obtained the carbon monoxide from the hospital, telling colleagues he wanted to test its purity and its effects on rabbits, according to accounts.

Khaw reportedly told police he took the gas home to use it to exterminate rats at home, although a domestic helper employed by the family testified that they had no rodent problem.

While Khaw stood to inherit considerable amounts of property co-owned with Ms Wong following her death, there was no apparent motive for killing his daughter, leading to speculation that her death was unintentional.
Austria has urged its European Union partners to enter talks with Egypt to help stem the flow of migrants entering Europe from Africa, amid deep divisions over how to manage the challenge.

Mr Kurz, whose country currently holds the EUs rotating presidency, and EU Council President Donald Tusk visited Cairo over the weekend for talks with President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi, a top army general who took office in 2014.

Both men have praised him for stopping people from leaving its coast bound for Europe.

Egypt has proven that it can be efficient, Mr Kurz told reporters at an EU summit in Salzburg, Austria.

Austrian chancellor Sebastian Kurz at the informal EU summit in Salzburg, Austria (Kerstin Joensson/AP)

Since 2016, it has prevented ships sailing from Egypt to Europe or, when they have sailed, it has taken them back.

Mr Kurz said Egypt is now prepared possibly to deepen cooperation with us in talks. We should use that.

He also said EU leaders support the idea of entering into talks with other North African countries as well.

In dealing with the migrants crisis of the past few years, the EU has been creative, willing to part with billions to secure deals around the Mediterranean with leaders with autocratic leanings.

The bloc lauds the deal it struck with Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan for slowing migrant arrivals to a trickle over the last two years, in exchange for up to six billion euros in aid for Syrian refugees there and other incentives.

Read the remarks by @FedericaMog upon arrivals at the informal meeting of Heads of State or Government https://t.co/80Ibm0LDrQ  European External Action Service - EEAS  (@eu_eeas) September 19, 2018

Italy alone paid billions to former Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi to stop African people from leaving his countrys shores.

Thousands were transported from Libyas coast to its southern border.

Beyond keeping tight control over Egypts coastline, Mr Sissi could have important influence with the military and militias in lawless, neighbouring Libya; a main departure point for migrants trying to enter Europe through Italy.

Already, Mr Tusk is lobbying to hold an EU-Arab League summit in Cairo in February.

The call comes after a summer in which Italys anti-migrant government closed its ports to NGO ships, and even its own coast guard, carrying people rescued at sea.

Hundreds of migrants spent unnecessary days at sea or aboard boats while EU countries bickered over who should take them.

Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah El-Sissi is seen by EU leaders as a key player (Evan Vucci/AP)

Looking for help from Mr Sissi is a new sign of the EUs determination to outsource the migrant challenge, even though arrival numbers are barely a trickle compared to 2015, when well over a million people entered Europe, mostly fleeing conflict in Syria and Iraq.

EU countries are studying plans to create disembarkation platforms in northern African countries, where people rescued at sea could be dropped off for screening.

No African country has expressed interest in hosting one so far.

Migrants and refugees in a rubber dinghy arrive on a Greek beach (Jonathan Brady/PA)

The EUs inability to balance responsibility for the migrants and share the burden of hosting them has been a vote-winner for far-right parties across the 28-nation bloc.

EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini warned that Africa is not keen at the moment.

If we take the approach of: we dont take them, you take them, that doesnt fly, she said.

But this doesnt mean that North African countries would not be ready to cooperate with us, and with the UN, to have a reasonable, sustainable solution.
Joe Root intends to continue batting at four for England this winter as he feels he can have a greater influence on their Test fortunes in that position.

Root had been at first drop for the summer but moved down a place midway through the penultimate Test against India at the Ageas Bowl before capping Englands 4-1 Specsavers series victory with a sparkling century at The Oval.

A knock of 125 was his first three-figure score in 28 Test innings and reinforced his view he is better served coming in at four in the order.

Furthermore, Root believes being comfortable in his own role can strengthen England, whose top order is far from certain ahead of three November Tests in Sri Lanka.

Root told Press Association Sport: I think four is where I get the best out of myself. I think thats probably where Im most settled, having batted at three for a good period of time now.

If I didnt do that and find out I wasnt going to be as comfortable there, then we wouldnt have the knowledge that we do now to know thats the way to go for this team and whats going to be best for this team moving forward.

I dont think you can ever pin things down too specifically but, for now, I genuinely think that me batting at four is going to give us a better opportunity of making big scores and give us better chances of winning.

I thought for a while that would be at three but thats changed and I think its really important the teams best interests come first.

Joe Roots England defeated India 4-1 in the Specsavers Test series (Adam Davy/PA)

While Roots Test-best score of 254 came at three, he averages a fraction above 40 there compared with a career mark of 51.04  and 52.9 a spot further down.

It has been a patchy past few months for Root, whose 824 runs at 36.33 represent his lowest return in an English summer.

Yet the Yorkshireman, speaking to launch a nationwide community project called The Village Green at the Village Hotel Club in Leeds South earlier this week, bristled at suggestions he was out of form.

He followed up back-to-back one-day international centuries against India with a fluent 80 in the opening Test before being dismissed in the first of two run-outs in the series.

He added: Two run-outs when I was set and going, if I converted those into hundreds, which I felt in a really good position to do that on both occasions, it looks a very different summer.

Youve got to be quite realistic about things. It was nice to go on and get a big hundred at The Oval at the end and I feel like Im in a good place going into what is going to be a very different challenge in Sri Lanka.

England are expected to announce their Test squad to face Sri Lanka on Friday.

 Joe Root met school children at the Village Hotel Club in Leeds South to launch their nationwide community project called The Village Green. The initiative will see the hotel chain commit more than 30,000 hours per year across its 30 hotels to volunteering in the community.
A major international organisation has downgraded its forecasts for UK economic growth over the next two years, amid warnings of the uncertainty created by the possibility of a no-deal Brexit.

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) cut its prediction for UK GDP growth in 2018 from 1.4% in May to 1.3% now, and for 2019 from 1.3% to 1.2%.

And the bodys chief economist said it was vital for a Brexit deal to be struck which maintains the closest possible links between the UK and the European Union.

The City of London (Jonathan Brady/PA)

The forecasts in the OECDs Interim Economic Outlook see Britain lagging significantly behind the eurozone, with single currency area GDP slated to grow by 2% this year and 1.9% in 2019.

But the report warns of a global slowdown amid uncertainties over political instability and protectionist trade policies.

Already, tit-for-tat tariffs imposed by Donald Trumps USA and China have contributed to global trade slowing markedly in recent months, with US imports of steel from China and Chinese imports of American cars sharply down.

OECD chief economist Laurence Boone said the prices of washing machines for US consumers jumped by 20% following the imposition of trade barriers, warning: Down the line, higher tariffs mean higher prices for consumers, less investment and less jobs for workers, and ultimately losses in productivity and standards of living.

Forecasts for global GDP growth were downgraded from 3.9% to 3.7%, as the report warned that confidence has weakened, trade and investment growth have proven slower than anticipated and wage growth has remained modest across most countries.

On Brexit, Mr Boone said: In Europe, political risks could harm growth and social cohesion.

Brexit is an obvious source of uncertainty. It is vital that a deal is struck that maintains the closest possible relationship between the United Kingdom and the European Union.
Ryanair chief executive Michael OLeary has warned of a rising risk of a no-deal Brexit and claimed the Irish border backstop was undeliverable.

Mr OLeary predicted potential political chaos in Britain and said if the UK crashed out, flights would need to be cancelled a month in advance of next Marchs withdrawal.

He said: We are selling tickets between the UK and Europe  on flights that may not take place.

Ireland believes last Decembers agreement in principle between the UK and EU will keep Northern Ireland within the EUs regulatory arrangements if negotiations fail.

Ryanair chief executive Michael OLeary has warned of the rising risk of a Brexit no deal (Niall Carson/PA)

Mr OLeary focused his comments on Britains role in the negotiations, rather than Irelands.

The outspoken Ryanair chief has been strongly critical of Brexit.

He thought a deal would be done eventually but reiterated that there was a real danger of no-deal by omission.

Risk factors included if Theresa May was replaced as Prime Minister, or a general election was called.

There is a rising risk, if the deal is not done by about November then, frankly, it will not get done at all.

Doing a deal is going to be very difficult.

Mr OLeary expressed concern about the Irish border.

The backstop agreement is undeliverable, there is no way you can deliver a frictionless border if you are leaving a common market  it is not deliverable.

Mr OLeary said the backstop solution to the Irish border was undeliverable (Niall Carson/PA)

He added: There are going to be real and serious consequences, both in the UK economy and in the European economy.

From my narrow perspective all I want to see is a continuation of open skies and free flights, cheap flights.

The British cannot deliver what they have proposed unless they have a border down the Irish Sea, he said.

It is not Leo (Varadkar), it is not the Irish Governments challenge to come up with a resolution, it is the British Governments.

Mr OLeary addressed other challenges ahead for the airline  including costs.

He said: Oil is still going to be the most significant cost for every airline, but I would like to see oil prices go higher this winter because I think it would speed up the inevitable bankruptcy of a number of other European airlines.

It would create more opportunity for us to grow.
Japans prime minister Shinzo Abe was re-elected as head of his ruling Liberal Democratic Party in a landslide, paving the way for up to three more years as the nations leader and a push toward a constitutional revision.

The decisive victory may embolden Mr Abe to pursue his long-sought amendment to Japans US-drafted pacifist constitution, although the hurdles remain high and doing so would carry political risks.

Its time to tackle a constitutional revision, Mr Abe said in Thursdays victory speech.

Mr Abe said he was determined to use his last term to pursue his policy goals to sum up Japans post-war diplomacy to ensure peace in the country.

Japans Prime Minister Shinzo Abe shouts "Banzai" (Koji Sasahara/AP)

Lets work together to make a new Japan, he said.

Mr Abe, who has been prime minister since December 2012, has cemented control of his party and is poised to become Japans longest-serving leader in August 2021.

He has several policy challenges, including dealing with Japans ageing and declining population, a royal succession in the spring, and a consumption tax hike to 10% he has already delayed twice.

Amid international effort to denuclearise North Korea, Mr Abe seeks to meet with Kim Jong Un to resolve their disputes, including the decades-old problem of Japanese citizens abducted to the North.

He faces Chinas increasingly assertive activity in the region, and intensifying trade friction with the US that could shake his friendly relations with President Donald Trump.

Mr Abe said he will meet with Trump next week in New York, where they attend the annual UN assembly, to discuss bilateral trade and the roles Japan and America should play in establishing global trade rules.

The Japanese surrender at Tokyo Bay with Admiral Bruce Fraser signing on behalf of the UK. Japans current constitution was imposed after the Second World War. (Cross W G/PA)

Mr Abe renewed his commitment to push for a revision to the US-drafted 1947 constitution, a decades-old pledge of the Liberal Democratic Party since its foundation in 1955 and a goal that none of Mr Abes predecessors has been able to achieve.

Many conservatives see the constitution as a humiliation imposed on Japan following its Second World War defeat.

Among them was Mr Abes grandfather, Nobusuke Kishi, who served as prime minister between 1957-1960.

Mr Kishi was imprisoned as a suspected war criminal during the US occupation.

Constitutional revision is divisive and it is unclear whether Mr Abe could get enough votes for passage.

For the public, the constitution is a lesser concern than issues such as pay, education and the high cost of child care, surveys show.

If a revision is rejected in a national referendum, Mr Abe would likely have to step down.

Its a goal that would be difficult to achieve, Mr Abe told a news conference later Thursday.

Well have to walk on a thorny path.

Mr Abe and his party want to rush a revision while their ruling coalition still holds two-thirds super majority in both houses, a requirement to propose a revision.

Liberal Democratic Party President Shinzo Abe, right, waves with former defence minister Shigeru Ishiba after the vote result was called (Koji Sasahara/AP)

The next parliamentary election is due next summer.

Mr Abe seeks to submit a draft constitution revision to a parliamentary session later this year.

He is proposing to add a clause to Article Nine, which bans the use of force in settling international disputes, to explicitly permit the existence of Japans military, now called the Self-Defence Force.

In Thursdays leadership vote, Mr Abe defeated his sole challenger, Shigeru Ishiba, a former defence minister.

Mr Abe won 553, or about 70%, of 807 votes.
The current reports show that in the past few years, HCMC has led the nation in economic transfer thanks to its high-tech products. ICT has become one of the four key industries as well as the nine priorities of the city, with an impressive development rate of 16.5 percent in the last 5 years. It accounts for over 17 percent of the national output.





Yet, many delegates voiced their concern in the meeting, saying that there still exists monopoly and inequality between giant enterprises and their smaller counterparts.

According to Mr. Tran Anh Tuan, Vice President of the HCMC Computer Association, it is necessary that in the development of the startup ecosystems, major ICT businesses become the sound footing for these new companies via their investment, partnership, and customer relationship.

However, many current policies on ordering high-tech products for the construction of smart cities seem to encourage monopoly since they prioritize large ICT enterprises like VNPT, Viettel, FPT Group.

Even though smaller companies are able to develop better products, they are not given any chance to participate because there is no clear public information on how to receive orders or what kind of products to meet the needs of local authorities in each area.

Mr. Ngo Vi Dong, President of the Vietnam Information Security Association  Southern Branch, shared that all ICT businesses, especially startup or small ones, wish to contribute to the 7 breakthrough programs and the project of transforming HCMC into a smart city.

Mr. Nguyen Xuan Hien, CEO of Ingreetech Co., Ltd. said that monopoly happens only in major projects but also in minor ones like public shopping in district level, which are not publicly bid. Since these applications are not new and nearly become outdated, investing into them is a clear waste of time and money.

Responding to those feedbacks, Vice Chairman of the HCMC Peoples Committee Tran Vinh Tuyen confirmed that the city determines to successfully finish the project of building a smart urban area in order to tackle current problems and increase interaction with businesses as well as citizens. Therefore, the municipal authorities are hopefully waiting for innovative products from ICT enterprises.

HCMC also assures that there is no monopoly in its mechanism and welcomes all products from all businesses. It will also work with giant groups of major utilities industries like electricity and water to introduce these works.
North Antrim MP Ian Paisley has made three complaints to police over allegations electoral law was broken in the failed recall petition to oust him.

He has claimed electoral law was broken in Westminsters first ever recall petition which was triggered after Mr Paisley was suspended from the House of Commons for failing to declare two family holidays paid for by the Sri Lankan government.

Northern Irelands chief electoral officer Virginia McVea warned a Sinn Fein MLA over a video he posted to social media which appeared to comment on the state of the poll in a recall petition attempting to oust Mr Paisley from parliament.

Mr Paisley thanked constituents for their support (Brian Lawless/PA)

There are strict rules over what can be said or published during the six weeks the petition is open, which if proven to be broken can carry potential fines and prison terms.

Mr Paisley told the Press Association on Thursday that he has made at least three complaints to the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) over allegations electoral law was broken.

A number of people have breached section 124 of the election law and I have raised at least three specific complaints about individuals with police, he said.

BREAKING - @ianpaisleymp has thanked the voters of North Antrim for their "unwavering support" after Westminster's first ever recall petition fell short of the threshold required to unseat him. In a statement to @PA , Mr Paisley said: pic.twitter.com/rkdY5hQrMr  David Young (@DavidYoungPA) September 20, 2018

Its up to police now to take that forward. I know if I had breached the law in that way, the same people would be asking questions.

Speaking to the Press Association in Ballymena on Thursday morning, Mr Paisley said he was delighted the recall petition failed.

I was asked to make an apology, I gave that apology, and I believe that 90.6% of the electorate who had the opportunity to say we dont accept that apology, I believe they said we do accept that apology, and we are prepared to move on, he said.

I must say I am delighted with that, delighted with the unwavering support I have received from my constituents. Hopefully now we can move on and get on with the real job I am elected to do.

The recall petition failed to attract enough signatures (Brian Lawless/PA)

Mr Paisley said he felt humbled and privileged and also hailed his family and true friends for sticking by him after he narrowly avoided a by-election.

He would have been ousted as an MP if 10% of the electorate in his North Antrim constituency  7,543 voters  signed the petition. In the event, 7,099 people signed it (9.4%).

Speaking on Wednesday, Sinn Fein MLA Philip McGuigan said he found the warning from Ms McVea incredible.

He said: I do not believe there was anything in the post that predicted the outcome of the petition.

The petition device, created following the Westminster expenses scandal, was initiated after Mr Paisley was banned from the House of Commons for 30 sitting days for failing to declare two 2013 family holidays paid for by the Sri Lankan government.

Pro BREXIT MP will be back in Commons after electors reject petition for a by election. Trust EU Council and Commission get this message from Northern Ireland.  Lord John Kilclooney (@KilclooneyJohn) September 20, 2018

A parliamentary watchdog found in July that a year after the luxury holidays, Mr Paisley lobbied then prime minister David Cameron not to support a UN probe into alleged Sri Lankan human rights abuses.

The long-standing Democratic Unionist, whose late father the Reverend Ian Paisley founded the party, is suspended from the DUP pending its own internal investigation into his conduct.

Three centres were opened in North Antrim for the last six weeks to give voters the opportunity to sign the petition. Constituents were also able to put their name to the petition via post.

Sinn Fein campaigned vociferously to unseat Mr Paisley and afterwards Mr McGuigan said more centres should have been available.

Ms McVea announced the outcome in Belfast around 1.25am on Thursday morning after a count that commenced at midnight.
Bill Cosby could be sent to prison next week for drugging and molesting a woman at his suburban Philadelphia home in 2004 in what became the first celebrity trial of the #MeToo era.

Cosby is due in court on Monday for a two-day sentencing hearing that follows his conviction in the spring on three felony counts of aggravated indecent assault.

The judges options are broad, because the state guideline range of about one to four years spans the gamut from a prison term to a jail stint to house arrest or probation.

The maximum term is 10 years per count.

Prison is one option for Bill Cosby (Andrew Milligan/PA)

Lawyers for the 81-year-old, legally blind Cosby will no doubt stress his age, health problems, legacy and philanthropy as they plead to keep him at home, while prosecutors hope to call other accusers to paint Cosby as a sexual predator deserving of prison.

Judge Steven T. ONeill may aim straight for the heart of the guidelines to blunt public criticism from both sides and avoid being overturned on appeal, legal experts said.

Cosby should learn his fate by Tuesday.

Sentence

Jurors convicted Cosby of sexually assaulting Andrea Constand without consent, while she was impaired and after incapacitating her.

Though each count carries a 10-year maximum sentence, Mr ONeill will likely merge them since all three stem from the same encounter, in effect weighing only one charge, legal experts say.

State guidelines call for a base 22-to-36-month sentence.

The judge can add up to a year for aggravating factors, such as the 60-some other accusers, Cosbys denials and lack of remorse, and even his defence teams repeated attacks on the judge and prosecutor.

Then Mr ONeill could deduct up to a year for mitigating factors, Cosbys age, health and perhaps even the 3.4 million dollars he paid to settle Ms Constands related lawsuit.

Ms Constand has waived anonymity.

Prison, or house arrest?

If Cosby gets even a day more than two years, he will enter the state prison system, with a first stop at SCI Phoenix, a new 400 million dollar, 3,830-bed prison in suburban Philadelphia where staff would assess his physical, medical and security needs.

Cosby could end up in a long-term medical care unit there or elsewhere.

If he is deemed at risk because of his age or celebrity, or a risk to others, he would be held in solitary confinement, spending most of the day alone in his cell.

Otherwise, he would likely share a two-person cell, leaving for meals, exercise, counselling and other activities.

He would be free to bring a personal tablet for music or games but would not have internet access, corrections spokeswoman Amy Worden said.

Bill Cosby (Matt Rourke/AP)

If Cosby gets two years or less, hed likely go to the Montgomery County Correctional Facility in nearby Eagleville, a 2,080-bed site that also has a medical unit.

Or Mr ONeill could give him less than a year and let him serve some or all of the time on home confinement, typically with an ankle monitor or probation.

The key question, if Cosby gets time, is whether Mr ONeill lets him stay home while he appeals against his conviction.

The violent nature of the crime works against him, but Cosbys age might work in his favour.

Accusers

More than 60 other women accuse Cosby of sexual misconduct during his 50-year show business career.

Mr ONeill allowed five of them to give evidence at trial, while others came to watch the court proceedings.

District Attorney Kevin Steele wants some of them to speak at the sentencing.

However Mr ONeill rules, he already knows their stories well after presiding at both trials and several intense pretrial hearings over their prior bad act evidence.

Judge

Mr ONeill, who is married and has three adult sons, took the bench in 2002.

He has watched the Cosby teams attacks on the court system intensify, and grow more personal, as the stakes grew.

Bill Cosby, left, with his wife, Camille (Matt Slocum/AP)

When the first trial ended in a deadlock in June 2017, the defence attacked the judge and prosecutor from the courthouse steps.

In court in April, moments after his conviction, Cosby called Mr Steele an expletive and said he was sick of him.

Then, just this week, Camille Cosby filed a state ethics complaint against Mr ONeill, invoking a long-ago romance to allege he had a bias in the case.

She has called him arrogant, unethical and corrupt.
Workers on South Western Railway are to stage a fresh strike in the long running dispute over the role of guards on trains.

Members of the Rail, Maritime and Transport union (RMT) will walk out on October 5 and 6, causing more disruption to passengers on routes including to and from London Waterloo.

The union accused the company of refusing to engage in serious talks to resolve the bitter row.

RMT members at South Western Railway are to stage two strikes next month (Victoria Jones/PA)

RMT members at SWR recently renewed their support for industrial action in a ballot.

Union general secretary Mick Cash said: The company has continued to fail to provide any offer that comes close to resolving this dispute and their latest attempts at delaying talks has not gone unnoticed.

Before the result of the re-ballot, I sent a letter to the company asking them to make the necessary arrangements for a meeting to take place.

I never received a response from the company and they have made no attempt at trying to resolve this dispute since. It would appear that once again the company were riding their luck in the desperate hope that we would not be successful in another re-ballot.

However, our members have stood rock solid and its down to the company to get out the bunker and get serious talks under way.

Theres a simple solution to this dispute and it means SWR stop playing with words and negotiate the guard guarantee that reflects the best safety practice elsewhere in the industry.

That is the package we have successfully negotiated in both Wales and Scotland and on a number of English franchises. It defies belief that we are being denied the same positive outcome on the South Western Railway routes.
Workers at two rail companies are to stage fresh strikes in the long-running dispute over the role of guards on trains.

Members of the Rail, Maritime and Transport union (RMT) at South Western Railway (SWR) will walk out on October 5 and 6, causing more disruption to passengers on routes including to and from London Waterloo.

The union has also called strikes on Arriva Rail North (Northern) on October 6, 13 and 20.

RMT members at South Western Railway are to stage two strikes next month (Victoria Jones/PA)

South Western Railway said it was disappointed by the decision.

The union accused SWR of refusing to engage in serious talks.

Northern was accused of failing to give assurances on the guarantee of guards on its services.

Talks between the RMT and Northern ended without agreement on Wednesday.

RMT members at SWR recently renewed their support for industrial action in a ballot.

Union general secretary Mick Cash said: The company has continued to fail to provide any offer that comes close to resolving this dispute and their latest attempts at delaying talks has not gone unnoticed.

Before the result of the re-ballot, I sent a letter to the company asking them to make the necessary arrangements for a meeting to take place.

I never received a response from the company and they have made no attempt at trying to resolve this dispute since.

It would appear that once again the company were riding their luck in the desperate hope that we would not be successful in another re-ballot.

However, our members have stood rock solid and its down to the company to get out the bunker and get serious talks under way.

Theres a simple solution to this dispute and it means SWR stop playing with words and negotiate the guard guarantee that reflects the best safety practice elsewhere in the industry.

That is the package we have successfully negotiated in both Wales and Scotland and on a number of English franchises.

It defies belief that we are being denied the same positive outcome on the South Western Railway routes.

Mr Cash said the Northern dispute would have been entirely preventable if the company had listened to the unions deep-seated safety concerns.

In spite of the collapse of this weeks talks, RMT will not be deterred in its efforts and will continue to campaign both industrially and politically to ensure passengers using Arriva Rail North Train Services are afforded the respect they deserve and are provided with a continued and guaranteed safe, secure and accessible railway.

A South Western Railway spokesman said: We are our extremely disappointed that yet again the RMT has decided to disrupt the lives of customers and employees rather than participate in constructive talks to help resolve this matter for their members.

Contrary to the RMTs claims of rock-solid support for a mandate to strike, the fact is that when factoring in non-RMT members and those RMT members who did not vote, only around half of our total number of guards voted for strike action.

We have offered a framework for talks which would guarantee the rostering of a second person with safety critical competencies on all our trains, and our plans mean more guards, not fewer.

We urge the RMT to call off these unnecessary strikes which are hindering, not helping, progress on this issue.
Britain is set to unveil new proposals on the future status of the Northern Irish border, in a bid to break deadlock in Brexit negotiations.

Speaking at the end of a two-day EU summit in Austria, at which Brexit was high on the agenda, Theresa May said the UK would shortly be coming forward with new proposals on the so-called backstop arrangements for implementation at the border if no long-term solution is found.

Her announcement came as European Council president Donald Tusk told the Prime Minister she will have to rethink her Chequers blueprint for Brexit, saying the plan will not work in its present form.

Following a working lunch of the remaining 27 EU states at the informal summit in Salzburg, Mr Tusk said that while there were positive elements in the Chequers plan, they could not accept any proposal which threatened the single market.

European Council president Donald Tusk warned that Theresa Mays Chequers plan will not work (European Commission Audiovisual Services)

Everybody shared the view that while there are positive elements in the Chequers proposal, the suggested framework for economic co-operation will not work, not least because it is undermining the single market, he said.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel said that the EU27 were agreed that, in the matter of the single market, there can be no compromises.

After what she described as a frank meeting with Mr Tusk, Mrs May  who was not present at the lunch  insisted that the plan drawn up at her country residence in July remains the only serious and credible proposition on the table for resolving the issue of the Irish border.

She has flatly rejected a European Commission backstop proposal for Northern Ireland to remain within the EU customs area after Brexit, arguing that this would draw a border down the Irish Sea.

Speaking after her meeting with Mr Tusk, the PM said: We both agree there can be no withdrawal agreement without a legally-operative backstop. But that backstop cannot divide the United Kingdom into two customs territories, and we will be bringing forward our own proposals shortly.

On the economic partnership, there is no solution that will resolve the Northern Ireland border which is not based on the frictionless movement of goods.

Our White Paper remains the only serious and credible proposition on the table for achieving that objective.

Mrs May acknowledged there was a lot of hard work to be done to secure agreement on the withdrawal agreement and a political declaration on future trading relations.

But she said: If the political will is there on the other side, Im confident we will reach a deal and to do so is in the EUs interests as well as the UKs.

Mr Tusk said the moment of truth in the negotiations would now come at the next full European Council meeting in October, when it will be decided whether to hold a special summit in November to finalise the withdrawal agreement.

In October we expect maximum progress and results in the Brexit talks and then we will decide whether conditions are there to call an extra summit in November to finalise and formalise the deal, he said.

He added: Today I am a little more optimistic when it comes to a positive outcome of our negotiations.

Unfortunately we cannot at this stage exclude a no-deal  it depends on both sides of negotiations.
Multiple people have been killed in a shooting in the US state of Maryland, an official has said.

The Harford County Sheriffs Office tweeted that there was a shooting on Thursday morning in the Perryman area that involves multiple victims.

The official said there had been deaths.

Authorities respond to a shooting in Maryland (Jerry Jackson/Baltimore Post/AP)

FBI Baltimore is responding & assisting @Harford_Sheriff with an Active Shooter situation. For updates please follow @Harford_Sheriff.  FBI Baltimore (@FBIBaltimore) September 20, 2018

They warned that the situation is still fluid and asked people to avoid the area.

We can confirm there was a shooting in the area of Spesutia Road and Perryman Road. Multiple victims. The situation is still fluid. Please avoid the area. Media staging area still TBD.  Harford Sheriff (@Harford_Sheriff) September 20, 2018

The FBIs Baltimore field office tweeted that it was responding and assisting the sheriffs office with an active shooter situation.

The Baltimore field division of the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives tweeted that its special agents were responding too.

An official said that three people had been killed, based on preliminary information.
Theresa May remains wedded to her Brexit plan despite being told it will not work at a summit of European Union leaders, setting up a tense month of negotiations as time runs out to reach a deal.

The Prime Minister said the Chequers blueprint is the only proposal on the table as the deadline approaches, with the next leaders meeting in October set to be a moment of truth.

But Mrs May indicated the UK will unveil new measures on the future status of the Northern Irish border in a bid to break the deadlock.

Theresa May in Salzburg (Kerstin Joennson/AP)

Speaking at the end of a two-day EU summit in Austria  during which she had a meeting with Irish counterpart Leo Varadkar  Mrs May said the UK will shortly come forward with new proposals on the so-called backstop arrangements for implementation at the border if no long-term solution is found.

Mrs May, who also held frank face-to-face talks with European Council president Donald Tusk at the informal Salzburg summit, insisted Chequers is the only serious and credible proposition for an overall deal.

But Mr Tusk said the 27 other EU leaders had agreed the plans need to be redrawn.

Moment of truth for #brexit talks will be October #EUCO. We expect maximum progress and results by then. https://t.co/MTtoEYpVTB pic.twitter.com/GwXBg2HARA  Charles Michel (@eucopresident) September 20, 2018

Everybody shared the view that while there are positive elements in the Chequers proposal, the suggested framework for economic co-operation will not work, not least because it is undermining the single market, he said at the conclusion of the two-day meeting.

Individual leaders of EU nations were equally blunt:

 German Chancellor Angela Merkel said substantial progress is needed over the next four weeks.

 French President Emmanuel Macron said leaders of the Brexit campaign who told British voters it would be easy were liars and leaving the EU was not without costs.

 Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte said his country is better prepared for a no-deal Brexit than Britain and an agreement is not easy because of Mrs Mays red lines.

The next major milestone in the Brexit process is fast approaching, with the October 18 summit labelled a moment of truth by Mr Tusk.

An additional Brexit summit could be held in November, but only if a deal is within reach.

Mr Tusk said: In October we expect maximum progress and results in the Brexit talks and then we will decide whether conditions are there to call an extra summit in November to finalise and formalise the deal.

At a news conference at the conclusion of the summit, Mrs May struck a defiant tone, saying she had always expected negotiating tactics to be used during the course of the Brexit process.

She has flatly rejected a European Commission backstop proposal for Northern Ireland to remain within the EU customs area after Brexit, arguing this would draw a border down the Irish Sea.

Speaking after her meeting with Mr Tusk, the PM said: We both agree there can be no withdrawal agreement without a legally-operative backstop. But that backstop cannot divide the United Kingdom into two customs territories, and we will be bringing forward our own proposals shortly.

On the economic partnership, there is no solution that will resolve the Northern Ireland border which is not based on the frictionless movement of goods.

Briefed by @MichelBarnier on state of Brexit negotiations at informal European Council meeting in Salzburg. Progress made, but still a lot to do. Also discussed internal security: more coordination and better cooperation needed. Read more: https://t.co/uIF18WWsSW pic.twitter.com/JVDLf55s3J  Mark Rutte (@MinPres) September 20, 2018

Our White Paper remains the only serious and credible proposition on the table for achieving that objective.

With the Chequers plan facing resistance from the EU and a bitterly divided Conservative Party, a no-deal Brexit remains a potential outcome.

Mrs May said: Let nobody be in any doubt: as I have always said, we are preparing for no deal, so that if we get to the position where its not possible to reach a deal then the British people can be confident that we will have done what is necessary to ensure we make a success of leaving the EU, regardless of the terms on which we do so.

Mr Tusk insisted that despite the EUs reservations about the Chequers plan, he is a little more optimistic about the prospect of a positive outcome.

But unfortunately we cannot at this stage exclude a no-deal  it depends on both sides of negotiations.

Earlier, the leaders of the Czech Republic and Malta had suggested a second referendum should be held to give the British people the chance to rethink Brexit.

Maltese Prime Minister Joseph Muscat said there is almost unanimous support among EU leaders for Britain to hold a second vote.

EU leaders are "almost unanimous" that the UK should hold a 2nd Brexit referendum, according to Prime Minister of Malta, @JosephMuscat_JM #r4today pic.twitter.com/wqvv27Zvil  BBC Radio 4 Today (@BBCr4today) September 20, 2018

But Mrs May restated her position: We are going to leave the European Union, we will leave on March 29, 2019 and there will be no second referendum.

She received support from controversial Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who claimed that while some EU leaders want to punish the UK for its choice, he wants a fair Brexit deal.

Jacob Rees-Mogg, leader of the influential European Research Group of pro-Brexit Tories and a prominent critic of the Prime Ministers plan, summed up events in Salzburg by tweeting Chequers goes pop with the hashtag #ChuckChequers.

Shadow Brexit secretary Sir Keir Starmer said: It has been clear for weeks that Theresa Mays Chequers proposals cannot deliver the comprehensive plan we need to protect jobs, the economy and avoid a hard border in Northern Ireland.

With just weeks to go until a deal must be struck, the Prime Minister cannot keep ignoring this reality.

Nigel Dodds, deputy leader of Mrs Mays DUP minority government allies, said: Salzburg represents more evidence of the unreasonable and inflexible approach of the EU to negotiations.

The UK Government must demonstrate a resolute determination not to be bullied.

Mr Dodds reiterated the DUP wants to preserve the political, constitutional and economic integrity of the UK, describing this as an absolute priority.
It comes as a welcome relief that a Bombay High Court bench, led by Justice Shantanu Kemkar, on September 14 refused to lift the blanket ban on DJs and high-volume sound systems during Ganesh Chaturthi and Navratri celebrations.

Denying interim relief to the petitioner, Professional Audio and Lighting Association, the bench said that the association cannot use DJs and high-volume sound systems in violation of noise control norms.

Cut it out: We cannot play with people's health in the name of populism. (Source: India Today)

In India, public religiosity does not recognise the rights of individuals. Those who practice public religiosity, no matter what their religion or caste, are always greater in number and have larger constituencies than the dissenting individual.

He/she is the real minority.

No matter what nuances about democracy they taught you about in school and college, this is the reality that is brought home to you every festival season. In the recent past, the Maharashtra government has, under pressure from populist netas who rely on mob support, extended the deadline to play loudspeakers.

Despite laws that exist on paper, hard-won every inch of the way by noise pollution activists who undergo mockery, abuse and threat of physical harm from the very people on whose behalf they struggle, a visit to the average police station in India by any complainant will reveal the apathy and reluctance of the law to fall foul of popular sentiment. So, what message does this send out?

Firstly, this proves that if you have enough numbers (comprising potential rioters and arsonists of whatever persuasion), you can toss all those nice pretty things written in the Constitution out of the window. The government will always give in.

Secondly, the 10 pm deadline was just a sop handed out because a bunch of English-speaking "pseudo-secular" activists with nothing better to do had to be appeased, because apparently, they still mattered. As far as the organisers are concerned, all that's thankfully changing now with small town "real" India calling the shots. The fact that noise pollution is more than just a mere inconvenience that one has to 'kindly adjust' to, has been ignored.

These are some of the things that happen to all of us  yes, not just us poofy types, but also the sturdy sons of the soil  when noise goes beyond certain limits: Exposure to noise tells upon the health. Very loud noise of 150 decibels can cause a rash under the collar, in-between the fingers and the thighs. Eardrums may rupture. It can cause giddiness and nausea. The international limit set for noise is 60 decibels, while in India, people burn crackers producing over 125 decibels  which is tantamount to a jet flying at 300 feet.

Exposure to over 100 decibels for a few hours lessens efficiency and makes one more prone to accidents. It makes one aggressive and quarrelsome.

Even for those who are sleeping, exposure to loud noise causes a disturbance in their brain waves as recorded by the electroencephalogram.

While we enjoy, we should ensure nobody is inconvenienced. (Source: Agencies)

Prolonged exposure to loud noise can lead to irregular or faster pulse, enlarged hearts and increase in blood cholesterol. It causes mental fatigue, irritability, and precipitates or aggravates mental tension and neurosis.

Loud noise increases the heart rate of the foetus in a pregnant mother. This may cause irreparable damage to the unborn baby. Noise-induced hearing loss can indeed impair the quality of life, through a reduction in the ability to hear important sounds and to communicate with family and friends. Some of the other effects of noise, such as sleep disruption, the masking of speech and television, and the inability to enjoy one's property or leisure time, also impair the quality of life. In addition, noise can interfere with the teaching and learning process, disrupt the performance of certain tasks, and increase the incidence of anti-social behaviour.

Sound level in decibels is a logarithmic rather than a linear measure of the change in pressure with respect to a reference pressure level. A small increase in decibels can represent a large increase in sound energy. Technically, an increase of 3 dB represents a doubling of sound energy, and an increase of 10 dB represents a tenfold increase. The ear, however, perceives a 10-dB increase as doubling of loudness.

Noise can also produce disruptive after-effects, commonly manifested as a reduced tolerance for frustration, and it appears that the presence and timing of control over the noise are critical to the prediction of after-effects. Even moderate noise levels can increase anxiety, decrease the incidence of helping behaviour, and increase the risk of hostile behaviour.

These effects may, to some extent, help explain the "dehumanisation" of today's urban environment.

Take Mumbai for instance, our financial capital  the city police recorded 41 cases of noise pollution during dahi handi this year, higher compared to 28 in 2017 and 22 in 2016. This year, the cases were mostly related to loudspeakers for crossing the permissible limits in residential areas and silence zones. According to the police, noise readings were taken in every zone, but they can't be made public as the investigation in each case is pending and a Bombay High Court (HC) order from 2016 had directed them to file reports in individual cases, and submit action-taken reports. The Supreme Court and the HC have passed several orders directing noise pollution rules be strictly followed and have emphasised that religion should not be a reason to break the rules.

Our festive celebrations should not become a problem for others. (Source: Reuters)

According to the World Health Organisation, the average noise level in Mumbai is steadily increasing by 1.5 decibels a year. The decibel level in Mumbai during the daytime is way above the 55 db recommended by the WHO, touching 85 to 90 db in traffic-nodal areas like Saki Naka, Byculla, Kalabadevi and Ghatkopar, and airport-noise-affected suburbs like Vile Parle and Santa Cruz.

"Acting on HC guidelines, we make a proposal, highlighting the cases and decibel (dB) levels. We then give the report to the Maharashtra Pollution Control Board, and they further file charge sheets in the court," says Manjunath Shinge, deputy commissioner of police and Mumbai police spokesperson. Much of what the higher ups say does not get implemented on the street level by the lower officers.

According to Sumeira Abdulali of Awaaz Foundation, who has been practically singlehandedly campaigning against noise pollution for more than two decades, "Filing cases is one thing, but taking preventive action by confiscating speakers, arrests or convictions to ensure cases are not repeated has to be seen We have examples from 2010 where cases were filed against political parties during the Dussehra Rally, but no action has been taken."

The Central Pollution Control Board of India had published a rule book in the Gazette of India, dated February 2, 2000, titled The Noise Pollution (Regulation and Control) Rules, 2000.

In this rule book they have divided all areas in 4 different zones and decided limits for noise level in respective zones.

a) Industrial area: 75dBA (day time) and 70dBA (night time)

b) Commercial area: 65dBA (day time) and 55dBA (night time)

c) Residential area: 55dBA (day time) and 45dBA (night time)

d) Silence Zone: 50dBA (day time) and 40dBA (night time)

Noise pollution can also lead to other health issues aside from hurting our ears. (Source: Reuters)

Note:

1) Day time shall mean from 6 am to 10 pm

2) Night time shall mean from 10 pm to 6 am

3) Silence zone is an area comprising not less than 100 metres around hospitals, educational institutions, courts, religious places or any other area which is declared as such by the competent authority

4) dBA (A - weighted decibel) is unit of noise

There are different noise limits for vehicles as well depending upon the capacity of their engines.

The 'threshold of pain' is pegged at 140 db (the sound of an aeroplane). Much of the festival noise in Mumbai comes perilously close to this. For those who wish to do more than just bellyache about the horrible singing of the aunty next door over the loudspeaker during Navratri, or the maddening banjo wailing away in the small hours, it is incumbent upon us to be proactive for our sheer survival, pick up the phone and dial 100.

Also read: Thugs of Hindostan releases this Diwali: Are movie launches during festivals good for families or not?
What would have happened if after the 1970 election, Sheikh Mujeebur Rehmans Awami League had formed a majority Government at the Centre?

Alternative History (AH) is a popular fiction genre of speculative history where the story plots are based on what if scenarios during certain important points of history. Famous AH novels include Philip K Dicks Man in the High Castle set in a world in which Hitler wins the Second World War; Philip Roths The Plot Against America in which a populist pro-Nazi candidate wins the US presidential election in the midst of the WWII; Kim Robinsons Years of Rice and Salt in which the 14th-century plague in Europe wipes out 90 per cent of Europes population, leaving Muslim and Chinese cultures to control the world.

These are just a few examples but sometimes in the what if scenarios, the consequences are not always radically different. It is as if no matter from what angle one tweaks or changes an historical event, the result almost remains the same. This is exactly what happened when, last year, as an analytical exercise for a possible novel, I investigated a what if scenario rooted in Pakistans history.

I asked, what if after the 1970 election, Sheikh Mujeebur Rehmans Bengali nationalist outfit, the Awami League had been allowed to form a majority Government in the centre? Indeed, there would not have been a civil war in former east Pakistan, no 1971 Indo-Pak war, and, thus, no Bangladesh. But would Pakistan have become a stable, secular and multicultural democracy? Not quite.

One of the consequences of the 1973 Arab-Israel War was a rapid rise in international oil prices; the coffers of oil-rich Arab monarchies and dictatorships filled up like never before. This gave countries, such as Saudi Arabia, immense leverage and influence in world affairs, and a lot of say in the fortunes of the less fortunate Muslim countries.

Thats why from 1973 onwards, many erstwhile leftist/progressive regimes in the Muslim world began to move towards the Saudi orbit of influence and for this they were willing to change the nature of their ideological disposition. Examples in this respect include Egypts Anwar Sadat, Pakistans ZA Bhutto, Sudans Gaafar Nimeiry, and others.

How would Mujeeb have acted in such a scenario? Not very different from ZA Bhutto. Heres why: Like Bhuttos PPP, Mujeebs Awami League too had a populist and socialist manifesto. Indeed, as Prime Minister, Mujeeb would have done much in trying to shift the balance of the countrys economic and political power from Islamabad to Dhaka. His policies too would have been largely populist. Like the Bhutto regime, Mujeeb would also have nationalised industries and businesses.

Though as Prime Minister of Bangladesh he nurtured friendly ties with India, such would not have been the case had he become the Prime Minister of Pakistan. Firstly, despite the fact that that there would not have been a war against India in 1971, there is scant reason to believe that India would not have tested a nuclear device in 1974. It would have still done that. Secondly, in the absence of the 1971 war, the Pakistani military would not have been weakened and its influence in civilian politics would have been far stronger than it was during the early years of the Bhutto regime.

Mujeebs pro-Bengali bent would have drawn the same kind of reactions that Bhuttos allegedly pro-Sindhi policies attracted from Sindhs Mohajirs in 1972. In fact, Mujeeb would have faced added displeasure from Punjab as well. And even though relations between the Awami League and the Baloch, Sindhi and Pakhtun nationalists were cordial before the election, there would still have been commotion in Balochistan because, to neutralise a push-back from Punjab, Mujeeb would have had to go along with the security narrative of a powerful and influential military  a narrative that would not have changed from the time of the Ayub Khan regime (1958-69).

Pakistans economy began to go downhill during the 1968 protest movement against the Ayub regime. The Mujeeb regime would not have been able to reconstruct it through his populist economic manoeuvres. Eventually, just as Bhutto, Mujeeb too would have had to unconditionally move into the wealthy Saudi orbit and start to dispatch thousands of Pakistanis to rich Arab countries.

Without a war in 1971, and thus a powerful military in place, relations with the US would be cordial, but there would now be far more US aid coming in than there was during the Bhutto regime, keeping Pakistan firmly on the US side of its Cold War against the Soviet Union. Opposition to the Mujeeb rule would have come from religious parties, strategically allied to powerful business groups offended by Mujeebs populist economic policies. Thus, the 1974 Ahmadi riots would still have taken place, as east Pakistan too would have been influenced by the global rise of political Islam, witnessed during the emergence of Saudi political and economic power. This is what happened in Bangladesh as well from late 1970s onwards. Even in this alternative history, the military would still have been impacted by political Islam, the way it was after 1971, during the Bhutto Government, and, later, the Zia regime. This time, the 1974 Indian nuclear test would make sure that it did. But in our alternative history, the desire to construct Pakistans own nuclear device would be a military initiative than that of the Prime Ministers.

As Bangladeshs Head of State and Government, Mujeeb had exhibited a stark dictatorial streak, so most likely as a Pakistani Prime Minister he would have tried to instal his own people in key positions in state institutions and then try to rig the next election. The consequences of this would have been the same as those faced by Bhutto. There would have been a violent reaction from the countrys conservative bourgeois, petty-bourgeoisie and business classes, impacted by Mujeebs economic policies, and from the religious parties emboldened by the global rise of political Islam.

In fact, protests would be more violent as the same classes in East Pakistan, too, would have joined the protests. Because remember, these segments welcomed the violent coup against the Mujeeb regime in Bangladesh in 1975. Like Bhutto, Mujeeb, for survivals sake, would have tried to shift drastically from left to right, but he would have been unable to save himself from a reactionary military coup that would ultimately have shifted the balance of power back in West Pakistans favour.

(Courtesy: The Dawn)
At a time when India has the dubious distinction of being a laggard in nurturing the environment, we should emulate the tiny State of Sikkim

This is one feat we could do without. A report, The World Population Prospects: The 2017 Revision, released by the Department of Economic and Social Affairs, United Nations, estimated that by 2024, India could surpass China as the most populous country. While Indias current population is estimated at 1.34 billion people, China is at the top with 1.41 billion people. On the contrary, our record on the environment front is not so good. According to a biennial report, Environmental Performance Index 2018 by Yale and Columbia universities along with the World Economic Forum, India ranks 177 among 180 countries in Environmental Performance Index. Indias poor performance in the environmental health category is a cause for worry.

It is distressing that Delhi has earned the unenviable distinction of being one of the most polluted cities on earth, with perpetually worsening air quality. The scary smog that envelops the National Capital Region and chokes peoples lungs is still fresh in memory. As hapless citizens look to the State to address such grave dangers, there have been instances where people have organised themselves to demonstrate their angst and anxiety. Delhiites displayed a rare surge in sentiments when recently, they organised themselves to protest against the ruthless felling of trees for road construction. But Delhi is not alone in this notoriety. All across the country, environmental degradation has shown a rare uniformity. But Sikkim offers a rare reprieve from this scary consistency and is worth emulation.

The tiny State, nestled in the Himalayan foothills in the North-East, has been driving a green revolution of its own kind. Despite being small and isolated, and with its people leading their lives in extremely tough mountainous terrain, Sikkim has emerged as one of Indias environmental leaders. Its probably the only State that has witnessed afforestation. Due to sustainable environmental policies and novel initiatives, forest cover has increased by about four per cent in the last 25 years.

Sikkim is a State with many firsts when it comes to green policies. It is the first Indian State which is fully organic. It is also Indias first State to ban open defecation and plastic use. It has come out with novel initiatives like Mitini and Ten Minutes to Earth, which were implemented and are being followed for over a decade now. Sikkim is the only State which is open defecation free today. Urinating in public can attract a fine of up to Rs 500. The Government made it mandatory to have a toilet at home. The State even banned firecrackers in 2014 to contain noise and air pollution.

Sikkim has not only introduced policies to remain Indias cleanest and greenest State but has initiated novel initiatives, like Mitini to forge amity between people and trees. Sikkimese can adopt trees and get into a relationship of brotherhood or sisterhood with trees. This kind of initiatives has brought a sense of preserving the environment at the grass-root level.

The Environment Policy of Sikkim states that the State shall endeavour to protect and improve the environment, to safeguard the forests and wildlife and to protect and improve the natural environment, including forests, lakes, rivers and wildlife and to have compassion for the living creatures. More than 80 per cent of the land resources of the State is under the management of the Department of Forests, Environment and Wildlife. Sikkims forest cover has increased from 44 per cent to 47 per cent at a time when most States are struggling to protect their existing forest covers.

Our movement to make Sikkim a complete green State will be pursued till we reach our goal. We aim to give Sikkim a unique identity as a natural university of the world, pledged the current Government.

In January 2016, Sikkim gained global attention when Prime Minister Narendra Modi declared it as Indias first fully organic State. Nearly 15 years ago, the State Government had decided to shun chemical pesticides and fertilisers and return to natural methods of farming. Today, Sikkim has the distinction of becoming the first State in India to go 100 per cent organic, but achieving this feat was an uphill task.

Sikkims Chief Minister, Pawan Chamling, who is also often referred to as the greenest Chief Minister, announced a slew of measures to further support the cause of organic farming. In order to encourage organic farmers and to ensure the success of the organic mission, the State recently announced transport subsidy, goods compensation, crop insurance and price support among other incentives to organic farmers of the state over the next five years. The longest serving Chief Minister in the country, Chamling was also honoured for his pioneering work in the field of organic farming during a ceremony at Germanys Lagau on the occasion of the One World Festival last year. At the time when there have been rising concerns about life-threatening hazards, Sikkim has to lead the way towards preserving the environment. Chamling once said, Development is impossible without the protection of the environment and a democratic atmosphere. Its time other States take a leaf out of this and emulate Sikkim.

(The writer is a strategic communications professional)
Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Geng Shuang's Regular Press Conference on September 20

2018/09/20

At the invitation of President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita of the Republic of Mali, Vice Chairman of the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference Zheng Jianbang, as President Xi Jinping's Special Envoy, will travel to Bamako, the capital of Mali, to attend the inauguration ceremony of President Keita on September 22.

China and Mali enjoy profound traditional friendship. During the past 58 years since the establishment of diplomatic relations, our bilateral ties have been growing smoothly with notable outcomes in cooperation across the board. China remains a sincere friend and reliable partner of Mali. The destiny of the Chinese people is closely connected with that of the people in Mali. China attaches high importance to the development of its ties with Mali. We are willing to work with Mali to take the implementation of the outcomes of the 2018 Beijing Summit of the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation as an opportunity to elevate our traditional friendly cooperative relations and deliver greater benefits to our two countries and two peoples.

Q: On September 19, the European Commission issued a policy document titled "the EU strategy on connecting Europe and Asia", which represents the most comprehensive and systematic policies and proposals put forth by the EU on the Eurasian connectivity so far. The paper said that China would be a priority for bilateral cooperation and highlighted the China-EU cooperation on the connectivity platform as well as the cooperation between the EU and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank. What is your comment?

A: We have noted that the EU issued the policy document on the Eurasian connectivity yesterday. The document speaks highly of the significance of the Eurasian connectivity and its role in driving the Eurasian economic growth, advocates the "comprehensive, sustainable and rules-based connectivity" and expresses the EU's willingness to strengthen cooperation with China and other Asian countries. We hope that the EU can play a constructive role in advancing the Eurasian connectivity and send out the positive signal of promoting the economic cooperation between the Eurasian countries and building an open world economy.

Strengthening the connectivity of the Eurasian continent will help open up new room for the economic growth of the region as well as the world and inject new impetus into the cooperation between the Eurasian countries. It serves the common interests of all relevant parties. The Chinese side always actively supports the Eurasian connectivity, which is also an important goal of the Belt and Road Initiative. The leaders of China and the EU have reached consensus on seeking synergy between the Belt and Road Initiative and the EU's connectivity plan. Our two sides have also established the China-EU connectivity platform. We believe that with the concerted efforts of China and the EU, the China-EU connectivity will continuously make new progress and deliver benefits to the people of all countries in the region.

Q: Several Chinese Uygurs living abroad say they haven't been able to contact their relatives for over a year. They fear that their family members in China may have been "segregated". Can you tell us what happened?

A: You may have missed our press conferences in recent weeks, and I already took similar questions.

I'm not aware of the case you mentioned. But we noted that there has been much interest in Xinjiang recently, and I could say a few words about that.

The series of measures implemented in Xinjiang are meant to improve stability, development, solidarity and people's livelihood, crack down on ethnic separatist activities and violent and terrorist crimes, safeguard national security, and protect people's life and property. Xinjiang enjoys social stability, sound economic growth and harmonious coexistence of ethnic groups. People there enjoy full freedom of religious belief.

I would like to share with you some statistics here. In 2017, the number of visitors travelling to Xinjiang from at home and abroad topped 100 million, increasing by 32.4% compared to the previous year. From January to July this year, the number hit 78.33 million, rising by 38.7%. If Xinjiang were unsafe, unstable and inharmonious, there wouldn't have been so many Chinese and foreign visitors going there. I believe this in part proves the sound situation in Xinjiang.

Q: Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was reelected President of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP). What is China's expectation?

A: We have noted Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's reelection as the president of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP). We hope Prime Minister Shinzo Abe will continue to attach importance to China-Japan relations and move forward the continuous improvement and development of our bilateral relations.

Q: Yesterday the DPRK and ROK leaders held a meeting and inked the Pyongyang Joint Declaration of September. The US sent its congratulations on that. President Trump said he will be meeting Chairman Kim Jong Un soon. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said in a statement that the United States is prepared to engage immediately in negotiations to transform US-DPRK relations. What's your comment?

A: Just as State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi said, we express warm congratulations on and lend staunch support to the meeting of the DPRK and ROK leaders once again and the signing of the Pyongyang Joint Declaration of September. We noted that the US speaks positively of this inter-Korean summit and makes positive remarks on talks between the DPRK and the US. The Chinese side supports and looks forward to the efforts by the DPRK and the US to step up contact and negotiations, accommodate each other's legitimate concern, enhance mutual trust, implement the consensus reached at the DPRK-US summit and make new progress in the denuclearization of the Peninsula and the political settlement process.

Q: According to the Pyongyang Joint Declaration of September, the DPRK decided that it would first permanently close the missile launch pad and the engine testing site in Tongchang-ri in the presence of experts from relevant countries. If the US took reciprocal steps according to the spirit of the joint statement it signed with the DPRK on June 12, the DPRK was ready to take such additional measures as permanently disassembling its nuclear facilities in Yongbyon. What is your comment?

A: The DPRK reaffirmed its will for denuclearization and made statements on taking further steps in this regard during the DPRK-ROK summit in Pyongyang, which deserves full recognition.

We hope that the DPRK and the US can meet each other halfway and make earnest efforts to achieve the denuclearization and lasting peace of the Korean Peninsula. All relevant parties should also make joint efforts towards this goal.

Q: Prime Minister Shinzo Abe announced today that he would continue to work on the revision of the Constitution. What's your comment?

A: We already stated our position clearly on the issue of Japan's revision of the Constitution many times.

Due to what happened in history, the issue of Japan's revision of the pacifist Constitution has been followed by the international community. We hope that the Japanese side will draw lessons from history, honor the commitment it has made, adhere to the path of peaceful development and take concrete actions to win the trust of its Asian neighbors and the international community.
Going on a driving holiday abroad is becoming ever more common for Indians and I recently did the same. But there can be some potholes in the process. Here are some tips to avoid those

Get an International Driving Permit

In most countries your Indian Driving Licence (DL), at least newer ones with clearly legible text and a printed picture, are perfectly valid because licences in Roman script are valid. But, that said, in some countries, such as the United Arab Emirates for example, you will still need an International Driving Permit (IDP). And even if your Drivers Licence is accepted by a car rental company, keeping a IDP is always a good idea for insurance purposes or if you are pulled over by the police. Sometimes, at the rental agency, there is the possibility that you will be asked for an IDP, so keep it handy. Nowadays, in Delhi and some other states, the IDP is a printed sheet of paper, which you can apply for very easily. In Delhi, the application process is automated and you have to just visit your local Transport Office for the issuance and it costs just Rs 1,000. But in countries like China, you need to apply separately for a permit.

Book your car in advance

There are several car rental agencies at most major airports across the world. However during peak vacation season there is huge demand for cars. This could mean not only long wait times, expect to wait an hour, occasionally more at popular holiday destinations. High demand also means that your chances of getting a car at the last minute might be slim, so book in advance.

Choose your car and rental agency carefully

This is important, you often want to rent a car that you might not get to drive in India, such as a convertible or a luxury car. But before you set out, choose the car that suits your needs the best. Are you travelling with kids and a lot of luggage? Well, if you are, you should choose something that suits your requirements, in Europe that would mean something like the Ford C-Max. It can get very warm in Europe and America during summer and while a convertible is a cool car, it can get very hot inside. Due to the roof mechanism, they have more limited luggage room. Also, in some countries in Europe, the historic town centres are very narrow, a larger car may not be easy to maneuver in these narrow streets, especially given that driving on the left-hand seat is unnatural to most of us. While there are many rental agencies to choose from, I would suggest you stick to the global majors and their subsidiary firms. I chose a car from Budget Car rental, a subsidiary of French rental major, Avis. There is also Hertz, EuropCar, Sixt, Enterprise and more to choose from but do your research in advance.

Get ready to be disappointed that you do not get your car of choice

Since I was in Italy recently, I wanted to rent a Fiat or Alfa Romeo badged car. After all, do what the Romans do, right? I had chosen the extremely popular Fiat Panda, a tall-boy small car that Fiat should really sell in India. But when I got to the counter, I was told that they ran out of pandas and I got "upgraded" to an European-spec Ford EcoSport instead. The EcoSport was a more than capable replacement, it was a bit bigger with more luggage room and came with Fords superb SYNC3 infotainment system which allowed me to use Google Maps navigation and Google Play Music with my phone, something I really appreciated. But I was a bit disappointed that I did not get the car I wanted.

Take full depreciation insurance

Now this is a slightly controversial tip, adding full depreciation insurance that reduces your excess in case of damage or theft to zero. It can pretty much double the rental cost of your car but it ensured complete peace of mind for me. I was driving in some very narrow streets and almost all the cars that I saw had a few scratches here or there. Given that often driving on the other side in many countries is alien to Indians, you can very easily have issues dealing with space and taking some corners, so a scratch here or there could easily happen.

Some car rental firms are notorious for charging customers for even small scratches, so yes, if you do not want to worry, ensure you do this. In case you do not take this package, because it is expensive, ensure you check the car thoroughly and in good lighting for any pre-existing damage. You do not want to be charged for prior damage. Even so, it may not be a bad idea to at least take partial coverage for damage or theft.

Full to Full

Most car rentals across the world work on a full to full basis, that is you get a full tank (sort of) when you leave and you return the car with a full tank when you return. Car rental firms can be very difficult and charge major penalties if you do not do so, so ask the rental firm about fuel pumps close to the airport, or wherever you have rented the car from in advance, you do not want to be left holding the can, literally.

Second driver or not?

Personally, I do not believe this is a bad thing, because if more than one of you can drive, you should be able to drive in case the primary driver gets injured or maybe has had a few too many drinks. Check the costs of an additional driver before leaving. Dont think you can save a few dollars or Euros by doing this on the sly. In case an unauthorised driver has an accident, you will be liable for the full damage to the car.

Follow the rules

This is stating the bleeding obvious but do remember that you are not in India and you cant really make a phone call for help or offer a bribe to get out of trouble. Driving in most other parts of the world is very organised and you should know your road signs very well. When to give way, when to not overtake and also be aware of speed limits. In the UK and the US, you should remember that limits are posted in miles per hour instead of kilometres. Some countries are a bit more lenient when it comes to speed limits than others, but unless you are on an unrestricted German Autobahn you cant really lose it, and you should know the sign for the unrestricted bit (A circular white board with three thin black diagonal lines). However, while driving though towns, limits are strictly enforced in Germany and elsewhere, so be doubly careful and always keep an eye on the speedometer at all times. Fines can be huge for speeding and matters can be worse still for drunken driving, which might involve arrest and a time behind bars and you cant get out with a tweet to Sushma Swaraj over here. Remember, you are not in your own country while driving and you have to follow the rules where you are. Rules that preclude you from stopping willy-nilly and if you must get out of the car, you have to wear a high-visibility vest.

Also, most countries are very strict about child safety, so children must be put inside child seats or on booster seats. If they are not, keep in mind that the authorities can charge you for child endangerment and in extreme cases even take your children away from you. You can rent these seats at car rental agencies, but do book them in advance.

Plan your parking and routes in advance

Of course, have a navigation system handy. Thankfully, Google Maps is fairly accurate in most countries but many cars do not have a plug and play Android Auto or Apple CarPlay (Apple Maps is far superior in western countries). It may not be a bad idea to pick up a local SIM card with a data plan, so that you can have maps planned on your phone. I used Google Maps constantly on this trip and on prior international drives I have depended completely on car navigation systems. Also, many towns and hotels have paid parking only, keep that in mind before you set out.

Parking can cost as much as 10 Euros per day or 1 Euro per hour in some towns and the systems are automatic. Please ensure you pay for your parking in advance lest you be charged a massive fine. Talk to the hotels where you are staying in advance to figure out parking.

Most of all, have fun

A driving holiday is a holiday after all, and a holiday is about fun. Dont be tense while driving and just remember to have fun while following all the rules.
The relations between India and Nepal are age old and there is huge potential to further enhance it as New Delhi is committed to improve its relationship with the neighbouring countries, according to a top Indian official Thursday.

Delivering a lecture on "Nepal, India and Neighbourhood: The Economic Reforms, Innovation and Connectivity" here, Vice Chairman of NITI Aayog Rajiv Kumar said that India has established around 2,000 'Atal Tinkering Labs' to inculcate the innovative spirit among students, and also offered to establish similar facilities in Nepal's schools.

The lecture was jointly organised by the Institute for Integrated Development Studies of Kathmandu University and the Barbara Foundation.

"Prime Minister Narendra Modi is inordinately committed to improve relationship with the countries in India's neighbourhood," said Kumar, adding that India-Nepal relations are age old and there is huge potential to further enhance it.

He also said that significant efforts were being made to increase connectivity with Nepal.

Kumar said that India is on a path of major economic transformation and was entering into a period where double digit growth is achievable.

"Prime Minister Modi has insisted on converting development into a mass movement and first time leadership and people of the country have realized the importance of participative development," he said.

He said NITI Aayog has started "Atal Innovation Mission" to inculcate innovative spirit among students and two thousand "Atal Tinkering Labs" have been established in schools.

Kumar also offered help to establish similar labs to be set up in Nepali schools.

He said significant efforts are being made to increase connectivity with Nepal.
At least 30 passengers of a Jet Airways flight took ill, several of whom suffered from nosebleed and pain in the ears, on Thursday morning, after a substantial drop in the cabin pressure that forced Jaipur-bound aircraft to return to the Mumbai airport after being in the air for over 15 minutes.

The bizarre incident took place after the pilots of Mumbai-Jaipur flight 9W-697  carrying 166 persons and a five-member crew took off from the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj International Airport (CSMIA) at 6 am  in a major breach of the Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) forgot to press the bleed switch that controls the air pressure in the cabin during the take-off process, resulting in the drop of cabin pressure.

The smartphone video footage of the goings-on shot by a few passengers inside the affected flight showed oxygen masks hanging from overhead compartments and panicked passengers breathing through them. After the aircraft made an emergency landing at the CSMIA, the affected passengers were rushed to the terminal building where they were administered first aid.

In a statement issued shortly after the return of the Jet Airways flight to the Mumbai airport, the Ministry of Civil Aviation (MoCA) said, MoCA has taken cognisance of the incident in flight 9W-697 earlier on Thursday and has requested the DGCA to file its report immediately on the issue. The crew is being de-rostered. Of the 166 people on board, 30 were affected and have been given treatment.

Civil Aviation Minister Suresh Prabhu ordered safety audit of all scheduled airlines and airports.

The officials concerned should prepare a comprehensive safety audit plan which involves assessment of safety parameters of all scheduled airlines, aerodromes, flying training schools and MROs immediately, Prabhu said, seeking a safety audit report within 30 days. He also directed the officials concerned to corrective action immediately if deficiencies were noticed in the safety audit.

Independent of a preliminary enquiry into the incident by the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) which has been asked to file a report on the incident immediately, the Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau (AAIB) is looking into the incident.

Confirming the incident, a DGCA official said, During climb, the crew forgot to select bleed switch because of which cabin pressure dropped. As a result, the passengers made use of oxygen masks.

Darshak Hathi and Satish Nair were among the first passengers on board the affected flight to tweet about the incident. Panic situation due to technical fault in @jetairways 9W 0697 going from Mumbai to Jaipur. Flt return back to Mumbai after 45 mts. All passengers are safe including me. - at Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport (BOM), Hathi tweeted. He also posted video footage of the incident shot from his smartphone on his tweeter handle.

I was on board.....horrifying and worst incident in my life...Passengers on Jet flight bleed after crew forgets to maintain cabin pressure, Nair tweeted.

The aircraft made an emergency landing in Mumbai. Airplane lost pressure immediately after taking off. Scores of passengers including me bled from nose....no staff to help...no announcement on board to wear the oxygen mask. Passengers safety was completely ignored, another passenger, Nair elaborated on the incident later.

Regretting the inconvenience caused to passengers on board the affected flight, a Jet Airways spokesperson said of the 166 passengers on board the original flight, 144 left for Jaipur in an alternative flight, while 17 of them wished to travel at another point in time

Five guests who were referred to a hospital for additional medical check-up accompanied by the Jet Airways Care team have since been released, post medical examination. The airline will continue to offer necessary medical care and attention to the concerned guests as required. Jet Airways is also extending full cooperation to the DGCA for the ongoing investigation of the event, the airline spokesperson said.

Dwelling upon the condition of the passengers admitted to his hospital, Dr Rajendra Patankar, Chief Operating Officer of the Nanavati Hospital said, The five patients, all males, have mild conductive deafness, a temporary condition that is likely to take a week or 10 days to heal. They are advised not to fly till that time. They are under observation and are stable.

Dr Patankar said the five passengers said they had suffered barotrauma of ear, which was caused due to a change in air pressure.

The five hospitalised passengers were identified as Anveshan Ray (39), Mukesh Sharma (31), Vikas Agarwal (31), Damodar Das (37) and Ankur Kala (38).

Thursdays was the first of its kind witnessed in the country. In one of the similar but much severe incident witnessed elsewhere in the world, Helios Airways Flight 522, a scheduled passenger flight from Larnaca, Cyprus, to Athens, Greece, had crashed on August 14, 2005, killing all 121 passengers and crew on board, following the loss of cabin pressurisation that incapacitated the crew, leaving the aircraft flying on autopilot until it ran out of fuel and crashed.

In another similar mishap, Aloha Airlines Flight 243, a scheduled Aloha Airlines flight between Hilo and Honolulu in Hawaii, had suffered extensive damage after an explosive decompression in flight on April 28, 1988, but managed to land safely at Kahului Airport on Maui. A flight attendant Clarabelle Lansing was killed in the incident after having been ejected from the aircraft.
Court orders probe against ex-Minister and her husband in Muzaffarpur case

There cannot be a blanket ban on media reporting on cases of rape and sexual abuse but such incidents should not be sensationalised, the Supreme Court said on Thursday.

It made the observations after vacating a Patna High Court order restraining the media from reporting on the probe into the Muzaffarpur shelter home case where several women were raped and sexually abused over a period of time. The SC termed as very disturbing the facts emerging from CBIs probe into the Muzaffarpur shelter home sexual abuse case and asked the Bihar Police to probe the alleged recovery of large quantity of ammunition from former Bihar Minister Manju Verma and her husband.

On media coverage of sexual assaults and their investigation, the SC asked both the print and the electronic media not to sensationalise incidents of sexual assaults and abuse and report such cases responsibly so as not to reveal the identity of the victim. A Bench of Justices Madan B Lokur and Deepak Gupta issued notices to Press Council of India, Editors Guild of India, News Broadcasting Standards Authority and News Broadcasters Association seeking their help in the matter.

The SC said it would need the help of these bodies on the issue of media reporting in such cases as it related to the criminal justice system and press freedom.

In the meanwhile, the blanket order passed by the Patna High Court on August 23 with regard to media reporting (in Muzaffarpur shelter home case) is vacated, it said.

The SC also restrained the electronic media from telecasting or showing the victims of sexual abuse and violence, even in a morphed or blurred form, saying this would be in the interest of such victims.

We request the media not to interview the victims. The news of the event may of course be disseminated, the bench said, adding, we also request the electronic and print media not to sensationalise such events.

Senior advocate Shekhar Naphade, appearing for a scribe who has challenged the Patna High Court order, argued that there were guidelines, including on journalistic ethics, and statutory provisions, but these were being violated as the media was conducting parallel investigations and trial.

It appears that there is no mechanism of enforcement and implementation of statutory provisions and guidelines, the SC observed, adding that in the absence of any mechanism, it is possible that there could be some person, who is not involved in a case, be mistakenly made an accused by the media.

Naphade said media trial of cases cannot be allowed and they should be asked to do factual reporting.

The SC observed that there cannot be a blanket ban on media reporting. One of the aspects is how do you prevent disclosure of identity (of victims of sexual assaults). The second aspect is conclusions are drawn by the media,

They (media) announce a fellow guilty, it said, adding there cannot be media trials.

The SC then asked Naphade where to draw the line and how to check it?

The senior counsel said the media cannot pronounce a person guilty and conduct parallel investigation. It is the duty of media to report facts. Somewhere, a line has to be drawn. We have to look into it.

Referring to section 228-A of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) which deals with disclosure of identity of such victims, Naphade said the media was taking a circuitous route, like interviewing the father of the victim, to do this.

He said that under section 228-A, revealing the identity is a cognisable offence and the police is bound to take action in such cases. If they (media) do not obey this, it amounts to contempt and also abetment of offence. Police has to be alerted, he said.

However, the SC observed, Tell us about this. We will prepare some guidelines. We may need the assistance of Press Council of India also.

Naphade referred to the Protection of Children from Sexual Offenses (POCSO) Act and said disclosure of a victims identity is a non-cognisable offence and the apex court could direct the police chiefs of all the States to nominate an officer who could file complaints in this regard before a magistrate.

At the fag end of hearing, lawyer Aparna Bhat, assisting the court as an amicus curiae in the matter, referred to an earlier report of the Law Commission and said the same issue was dealt with in it.

Naphade also referred to the Broadcasting Services Regulation Bill, 2006 and said that it has lapsed.

He said the apex court can pass direction under Article 142 of the Constitution, which deals with enforcement of decrees and orders of the Supreme Court, as was done at the time of Visakha guidelines which dealt with the issue of sexual harassment of women at workplace.

We cannot become Parliament, the SC told Naphade, who said he would circulate the bill among the parties in the case.

On September 18, the apex court had referred to the recent Rewari gang rape case and asked why no action was taken against media houses for flouting the law as everything has been said about the 19-year-old victim.

In the Muzaffarpur case, over 30 girls were allegedly raped at the shelter home run by one Brajesh Thakur, the chief of a state-funded NGO.

The alleged sexual exploitation of the girls was first highlighted in an audit report submitted by Tata Institute of Social Sciences to the states social welfare department. An FIR was lodged against 11 people, including Thakur, on May 31. The probe was later taken over by the CBI.
Dogs without leashes are not allowed in many gated societies in the country, but national Capitals Sangam Park area near Rana Pratap Bagh is different, as eight stray dogs man the locality at night keeping thieves and miscreants away.

And this is something that has been bothering robbers, said residents, adding that an unidentified person suspected to be a thief stabbed a street dog guarding the locality post Thursday midnight. It was the dogs whine that alerted some residents who rushed outside and were left heartbroken after seeing the canine in pain.

I saw a horrid scene, tonnes of blood, said one resident, who with others rushed the wounded dog to a veterinary hospital, where its condition is stated to be stable.

We heard the dog barking following which we came out and saw a man with a chopper attacking the dog. Other dogs were seen standing at a distance barking at him. Seeing us, the accused fled, said Payal, a resident. Another resident informed the PCR.

We are looking for CCTV footage to identify the accused. We have registered a case under the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act. Further investigation is going on, said a senior police official.

These stray dogs are part of our family and the local residents look after them. They act as security guards during night and bark whenever they see a suspicious person, thus alerting the residents. Such attack on animals is unacceptable, said another resident.

This is not the first incident. In August seven puppies were killed at Kargil Apartments in Sector 18A in Dwarka. The post-mortem report revealed the dogs were killed with a sharp object.
India OKs Foreign Ministers meet but says wont resume dialogue

Against the backdrop of Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khans letter to Prime Minister Narendra Modi for the resumption of dialogue between the two countries, the Government on Thursday confirmed that External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj and her Pakistani counterpart Shah Mahmood Qureshi will meet on the sidelines of the upcoming United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) in New York next week. It will be the first such high-level meeting between the two sides since the Pathankot terror attack in January, 2016.

The Government, however, sought to clarify that it will be just a meeting and not resumption of dialogue.

Lets distinguish between meeting and dialogue. This doesnt change our stand on terrorism, said MEA spokesperson Raveesh Kumar.

We have just agreed to the meeting. The agenda is not finalised, Kumar said.

Making this assertion here, Kumar said the meeting between the two Foreign Ministers will take place on Pakistans request. Khan, who took charge as Pakistan Prime Minister last month, in his letter to Modi had specifically sought the meeting between the two Ministers.

Indicating that the forthcoming meeting between Sushma and Qureshi does not indicate any change in Indias policy towards Pakistan, the MEA spokesperson said the date for the meeting was being finalised by the permanent missions of the two countries in New York. He said the agenda for the meeting has also not been finalised.

He said Sushma will also participate in the South Asian Association for Regional Co-operation (SAARC) Foreign Ministers meeting on the sidelines of the UNGA. The first day of the high-level UNGA debate will begin on September 25 and will last for nine working days.

India, however, rejected Khans proposal for a SAARC summit in Pakistan, saying the atmosphere is not conducive there. Khan is learned to have written in his letter to Modi that Pakistan remains ready to discuss terrorism. Khan said the two Foreign Ministers could explore the way forward. He said India and Pakistan should resolve all outstanding issues, including terrorism and Kashmir through dialogue. Khan also said the SAARC Summit in Islamabad will offer an opportunity for you to visit Pakistan and for us to re-start the stalled dialogue process.

Rejecting the SAARC suggestion, Kumar said, We have agreed to their request for a meeting but do not read too much into it. Sources said the resumption of dialogue was not possible as talks and terror cant go together.

India is expected to strongly raise the issue of terrorism emanating from the Pakistani soil during Sushma-Qureshi meeting. Kumar said Sushma will also raise the issue of Kartarpur Sahib during the meeting. The Kartarpur Sahib shrine in Pakistan is revered by Indian Sikhs, who have been seeking permission for easier access to the pilgrimage. The issue gained limelight after Congress leader Navjot Singh Sidhus assertion following his return from Khans swearing-in that Pakistan had agreed to give access to the shrine for the devotees from India. The MEA, however, maintained that there was no official communication in this regard from Pakistan.

Sushma had visited Islamabad in December 2015 for a Heart of Asia conference and it was the last time a substantive dialogue between the two countries took place. The joint statement issued then said Foreign Secretaries should explore modalities under the comprehensive dialogue. Terrorist attack on Pathankot airbase in January 2016 derailed the dialogue process.

Incidentally, Khans offer for dialogue was reported a day after a Border Security Force (BSF) personnel was shot dead by Pakistani forces on the International Border in Jammu region on September 18. His body was also mutilated. India lodged strong protest with Pakistan over the incident.
As many as 12,381 posts in high schools across the State are lying vacant and 2,045 retired teaches were engaged against vacant posts during 2017-18.

School and Mass Education Minister Badri Narayan Patra informed this in the State Assembly in response to a question of Congress MLA Chandra Sekhar Majhi on Thursday.

The vacant posts include 8,665 in Government high schools, 1,433 aided high schools and 2,282 in Block Grant high schools. The State Government has directed to fill up 2,740 teacher posts during the current year, the Minister informed.

He further informed that there is a provision for filling up vacant posts with guest teachers as and when required.

He said no retired teacher has been engaged in teaching in primary schools and recruitment process for appointment of 14,085 teachers against vacant pots has started this year. By now, 9,348 Siksha Sahayaks have joined in different districts and the rest would be recruited soon, he said.
Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) national president Amit Shah will be on days visit to Chhattisgarh on Friday.

Shah will arrive at Swami Vivekananda Airport in Raipur at 11.00 am from New Delhi, party sources here informed.

State BJP office bearers and workers would accord him warm welcome at the Airport.

Shah will reach directly to Shadhani Darbar where he would participate in a programme organised by Sindhi community.

He would then participate in the Shakti Kendra Workers Convention scheduled at the venue near the Wholesale Market, Dumartarai. The meeting is to be attended by BJP Shakti Kendra coordinators and in-charges, Division president, district presidents and other public representatives.

Shah will later also inaugurate the newly-constructed auditorium based in Kushabhau Thakre premises  the partys State headquarters situated on Dhamtari

Road at 3.30 pm.

The BJP president would also address the Core Committee members besides State office-bearers, MPs, MLAs, Chairmen of Board/Corporation besides others. He would later proceed for New Delhi in the evening.

State unit of Bharatiya Janata Party is excited over the visit of partys National President Amit Shah to Raipur for a day, said State BJP president Dharamalal Kaushik.

Kaushik said party workers are eagerly waiting to welcome the partys national president and would be accorded a grand welcome.

All the preparations for scheduled programmes of the visit have been completed. During the meeting with party workers, Shah would guide them on the 65 plus Mission. The party workers from different parts of the State have started to arrive in Raipur, he said.
Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal on Thursday accused the BJP of controlling the media by filing police cases against journalists. Kejriwal levelled the allegation following a BJP worker's complaint against several journalists for reporting that he washed a party MP's feet and drank the dirty water.

On Monday, a video clip had gone viral, showing Jharkhand BJP worker Pawan Kumar Sah washing MP Nishikant Dubey's feet at a function in Godda district and drinking the collected water. Sah alleged that he was being "hounded" by reporters since then.

"Every day, people from TV channels call me and threaten me with derogatory words. They are continuously trying to damage my image in social circles and this has affected my health," Sah complained to Godda police.

Kejriwal's reaction came on Twitter after Leader of Opposition in Bihar, Tejashwi Yadav, shared a copy of Sah's complaint.

"So far, the BJP was controlling the media by controlling advertisers and through money. But now, it seems it has decided to file police cases against the media if it dares to question the shameful acts of its MPs," Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) supremo Kejriwal said.
In a role reversal, members of the Treasury benches put the Ministers on the hot seat by darting pointed and well-thought-out questions while the Opposition lawmakers chose to amuse themselves by the visible discomfiture of the Government.

The ruling party lawmakers made the Ministers baffled as they flung questions on a wide range of issues from seat reservation for Scheduled Castes (SC), Scheduled Tribes (ST) and Other Backward Castes (OBC) in the urban local bodies (UPB) to sound pollution, pending cases of compensation in the human- wild life conflict and felling of Pine trees. Compounding the woes of the nonplussed Ministers, the ruling party members refrained from rushing to the rescue of the troubled Government when the Opposition members cornered the Government on the emotive and electorally important issue of demolition drive.

BJP member Deshraj Karanwal asked the Government to clarify on the matter of the reservation status to SC, ST and OBC in the urban local bodies. The Urban Development Minister Madan Kaushik said that the reservation is provided according to the relevant act and things are decided by taking into account the criteria of population of these sections. The member, however, looked far from satisfied by the evasive reply. With two other BJP lawmakers Chandan Ram Das and Suresh Rathore supporting him, he demanded the Government to increase the quantum of reservations to the SC, ST and OBC in ULBs. Chandan Ram Das looked agitated on the matter at some point of time, prompting the Opposition members to ask him to stand up and march to the well of the House by way of registering his protest.

The Congress members rushed to the well of the House to make the agitated BJP MLA to follow suit. However, Chandan Ram Das stood his ground and refused to toe the Congress line. But what happened was enough to leave the ministers on edge.

Similar embarrassing situation for the Government came up when BJP legislator from Salt, Surendra Singh Jeena triggered sensation by claiming that officers are providing wrong information to the Ministers, something which left the Forest Minister Harak Singh Rawat puzzled.

Senior BJP member Munna Singh Chauhan tore into the Forest Minister Harak Singh Rawat on the report of Forest Research Institute (FRI) on Pine forests.

Inspired by the treasury bench throwing a dare to its own Government to rise up to the occasion, a BJP MLA was heard saying to the Congress legislators jestingly that they are acting as the real Opposition, a role which the Congress lawmakers are incapable of.
Crisis. Emergency. Epidemic.

These are just some of the words public health advocates and officials are using to describe the rising rates of syphilis, gonorrhea and chlamydia in the U.S.

A recent report from the Centers of for Disease control showed in 2017, about 2.3 million cases of STDs were diagnosed. It marks the highest number ever reported, by more than 200,000 (the record previously set in 2016).

In regards to syphilis public health officials went from plans to eliminate (the STD) to a public health crisis, said Adam Sukhija-Cohen, the Director of Advocacy and Policy Research for the AIDS Healthcare Foundation. This is an insane resurgence.

Sukhija-Cohen noted that at the turn of the century public health officials were preparing for the elimination of Syphilis in the U.S. but then the CDC budget has decreased by a third since early 2000s.

While there are many factors involved in why STD rates are increasing all three of the public health advocates SFGN spoke with cited the decrease in federal funding as a main cause.

This is a public health emergency, said Jeffrey D. Klausner, Professor of Medicine and Public Health at UCLA. But most concerning is a lack of a federal response. Weve not seen any response from the secretary of health and human services office.

Matthew Prior, Director of Communications for the National Coalition of STD Directors concurred that a federal response is needed to address the growing epidemic.

Were seeing STDs increase across the nation, every age group, every demographicthese national trends are very worrisome, he said.

A more detailed report from the CDC is expected by the end of September that will include state level data.

While STD rates continue to increase, new HIV infections continue to decrease.

We know that investing in prevention works because of the progress weve made in HIV prevention, Prior said.



The Consequences

Sukhija-Cohen and Prior both were particularly concerned about mothers passing syphilis to their children which is called congenital syphilis. Its life threatening and entirely preventable. Those rates have doubled over the past decade.

Forty percent of babies born with syphilis are stillborn. Its tragic, Prior said. All it takes is to make sure to test pregnant women for the infection, which is fairly easy to do since most women receive regular checkups during their pregnancy.

Ultimately we dont have a healthcare infrastructure for our pregnant women, Sukhija-Cohen said. Prior added Its so easy to test for, in most places its just checking a box.

Drug resistant gonorrhea is another major concern. Right now cases have been reported overseas. Its only a matter of time before a strain appears in the U.S. If normal treatment of gonorrhea fails it may require an expensive hospital stay to rid a patient of the infection.

Our public health system is ill prepared for this, Prior said.

Obamacare

Some people might assume the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, would have addressed this public health issue. It hasnt. While its been a tremendous success in getting people covered by insurance and access to primary health care, it has not really impacted the STD rates.

STDs are public health issue. They are not controlled with better primary care, Klausner said. Thats partly why Obamacare is not a solution. It takes special knowledge, special training, and special management.

Prior had similar thoughts.

We fully support the ACA but unfortunately that network is ill-equipped. Many doctors have a severe lack in knowledge about STDs, he said.

Prior noted that many areas of the U.S. do not have STD clinics like South Florida. In fact Klausner pointed the Broward Wellness Center, a joint venture between the Florida Department of Health and AHF, as a very effective model.

Broward has the newest and most advanced testing and treatment program in the United States, Klausner said. Thats a breakthrough in terms of sexual health services. There is no reason, other than funding, that this couldnt be replicated in urban areas around the United States.

What can be done?

We are calling for a 70 million dollar increase in STD prevention... this will kick start our response to rising STDs, Prior said. We need federal funding to support the public health infrastructure. STD programs should be supplemented by state and local level, but we really need a national response to address this. I will say in most states the federal STD funding line is the only funding stream for STD prevention.

All three public health advocates are calling for an increase federal funding. Increased condom usage would also reduce the rates of STDs. Beyond those two items there are other things that can be done.

Sukhija-Cohen explained that currently the CDC recommends opt out testing for HIV, meaning all healthcare patients should be screened for HIV unless they specifically ask not to. There is no such recommendation for other STDs like chlamydia, gonorrhea and syphilis.

Sukhija-Cohen also said that there needs to be anatomically site specific testing. For instance gonorrhea and chlamydia can occur in the genitals, and the mouth. Many healthcare providers only use a urine test, which will not pick up gonorrhea of the throat or rectum.

Lastly Sukhija-Cohen recommends more access to rapid result testing. Rapid testing for HIV has been around since the 1990s but only recently have rapid tests for STDs come onto the market. This year in Florida AHF rolled out rapid testing for gonorrhea and chlamydia, which takes about 90 minutes. AHF is currently conducting a pilot test for rapid syphilis testing in some locations across the country. Those results take 10 minutes.

In regards to Syphilis Klausner noted there may be some hope on the horizon in terms of prevention. Just like PrEP, the once a day pill to prevent HIV, has ushered in a new era of HIV prevention Klausner said one drug has shown promise in reducing the rates of syphilis, and chlamydia. According to the The Lancet, a medical journal, using doxycycline, a common antibiotic, after a sexual encounter significantly reduced the rates of syphilis, and chlamydia. It had no affect on gonorrhea. That study was focused on men who have sex with men, a high risk group for STDs.

Its been talked about in STD meetings. There have been whole debates on it. Journals have written about it, Klausner said. So its emerging from under the radar. But there is not a whole lot of awareness yet. Its definitely something people should know about.

This is a first part of a series of reports SFGN will publish on the rising STDs rates in the U.S.
Chairman and Managing Director (CMD), Steel Authority of India Ltd (SAIL) Saraswati Prasad said on Thursday that Bhilai Steel Plants (BSP) new BF#8 Mahamaya and SMS-III were commissioned during FY18 and the Plant has also supplied long rail panels (260 metres) to Indian Railways from new

Universal Rail Mill (URM), registering a growth of around 112 per cent in FY18.

He was addressing shareholders of SAIL during the companys 46th Annual General Meeting held in New Delhi, a SAIL press release informed.

The persistent strategic approach to improve operational profitability assisted SAIL to improve the EBIDTA in FY18 to Rs 5,184 crore, a substantial increase over FY17, Prasad said.

He added that the improved operational performance is backed by increase in Saleable Steel production, higher share of Concast production, improved product mix, improvement in BF Productivity, reduction in Coke Rate & Specific Energy consumption, reduction in specific wage bill etc.In FY18, after slimming losses by around 83%, companys Profit After Tax (PAT) on standalone basis improved to Rs(-) 482 crore from Rs(-) 2833 crore in FY17.

The consolidated profit after tax of the Company stood at Rs(-) 281 crore for FY18 as against Rs(-) 2,756 crore in FY17, he said.

Prasad said that SAIL has almost finished its balance Modernisation & Expansion Programme.

He reiterated that FY18 witnessed several landmark achievements through ramping up of new facilities and surpassing previous records in physical performance. SAIL achieved its highest ever production of Hot Metal of 15.983 MT, Crude Steel of 15.021 MT and Saleable Steel of 14.071 MT.

The company also clocked an all-time best performance of Continuous-Cast (CC) Steel production of 12.80 MT with a growth of 9% over previous best of 11.77 MT, achieved in FY17, Prasad said.

He added that, on the back of various new initiatives to improve productivity and efficiency across all Plants, every Unit has registered improvement. At Durgapur Steel Plant, Narrow Gauge Wheels from Wheel & Axle Plant and High Strength Structural E350 grade from Medium Structural Mill were developed In-house.

Sighting positive outlook for global and domestic steel industry, Prasad said that growth in domestic steel consumption is strongly backed by robust development of Indias infrastructure sector.

It is further supported by 7.8% growth in domestic finished steel consumption during the FY18, as a result of growing activities of steel intensive sectors, he said.
Ahead of the crucial Investors Summit scheduled next month, the Uttarakhand Government has offered many sops to the industries. With an apparent focus on the small and medium investors, the State Government has decided to provide incentives to the entrepreneurs planning investment in the range of Rs 10 crore to Rs 50 crore. For purchasing plots of land in SIIDCUL areas, the industrialists would now be allowed to deposit 50% of the amount in the first year while the remaining amount can be paid in two instalments spread over the next two years.

The Government would offer a rebate of 5 % in stamp fee if onetime payment is made.

Similarly, the Government has decided to provide an exemption of 5 % or Rs 3 lakhs whichever is higher in the interest amount on the loan of the projects for a period of five years. The investors would also be offered a waiver of 50 % in stamp fees on lease deeds. Continuing the largesse, the investors would get an exemption of 30% or Rs 30 lakhs whichever is higher in setting up of Effluent Treatment Plants (EFT).

All these decisions were learnt to have been taken in the meeting of the state cabinet held in Vidhan Sabha on Thursday. The Government spokesperson Madan Kaushik said that a total of 12 issues were taken up by the cabinet on the day. He, however, refused to elaborate further as monsoon session of State Assembly is now on. Sources informed that apart from decisions on promoting investments, the State cabinet was informed that a sum of Rs 3.64 crore has been sanctioned for departments like Public Works Department (PWD), Irrigation, MDDA and GMVN for beautification and other works related with the upcoming investors meet. The cabinet also approved a proposal of Rs 50 lakh for a promotional movie for the summit.

In other decisions, the Cabinet approved the proposal to implement recommendations of P H Parekh committee for payment of medical reimbursements for retired High Court (HC) judges. The cabinet also vetted the regulations for grant of land plots on lease by the Government. Similarly, Uttarakhand Scheduled Tribe Welfare Technical employee cadre service regulation was also cleared by the Cabinet.

The State Cabinet also decided to merge schools belonging to the dying cadre of city schools. Four schools of Kotdwar were merged into two, three schools of Pauri and Bahadarbad into one while four schools of Manglaur were merged into two schools. For the employees still getting salaries of V and VI pay commission, the Cabinet approved a hike of 10 and 6% in DA respectively. The employees drawing salary of V pay commission would now get 284 percent DA while a DA of 148 percent would be paid for the employees receiving VI pay commission salary.

In a move which would benefit 3614 students of 81 Sanskrit schools, the cabinet decided to implement the scheme of Direct Benefit Transfer (DBT).
Belligerent Babus

Cornered by the zero tolerance stratagem of TSR Government which has resulted in suspension of two high-profile IAS officers with indications of more heads to roll, the enraged bureaucracy of the Himalayan State has entered a defiant mode. The Babus have virtually stalled the movement of files. They have now made it a habit to take permission of the higher-ups and seek legal opinion before they go ahead in the most trivial of things. The Babudom is deeply hurt by the State Governments policy of putting them at the mercy of police officers in the corruption- related cases. Most of them are openly airing the view that a wrong precedent is being set in the State. Interestingly, the young Babus have become more aggressive in defying orders. They are showing extra caution in taking initiatives. One such officer working as District Magistrate of a prominent district of Kumaon has expressed his inability to attend a programme in Nepal. He is least bothered by fact that the Chief Minister himself has asked him to attend.

Cat Fight

High decibel verbal spat between two senior lady officers of IAS cadre recently has become a talking point in the corridors of power in Uttarakhand. A meeting between two officers turned acrimonious when one of them accused the other of trying to put her now-retired IAS officer husband into trouble. The grapevine going around is that after taking action against two IAS officers, the TSR Government is contemplating to initiate an inquiry in some cases involving a former high-profile bureaucrat. Eyebrows were raised when this mighty officer took premature retirement last year. It was, generally, believed that wary of the likelihood of punitive action to be taken against him by the new Government, the officer put his career prospects at stake and thought it prudent to opt out through voluntary retirement and to thus save both the money stashed during his career and his skin in the process. It seems that the IAS officer wife has now taken up the cudgels on behalf of her edgy husband. She is out to pre-empt any move of inquiry against him.

Haraks Heir?

The visitors gallery during the Monsoon Session of Uttarakhand Vidhan Sabha had a guest who caught everyones attention. This visitor was Anukriti Gusain, a former beauty queen and film actress. However, in Uttarakhand she has an additional recognition as the daughter in-law of the Cabinet Minister Harak Singh Rawat. Gusain came accompanied by her husband and took keen interest in the proceedings of the House. Interestingly, her father in-law, known for high-decibel verbosity inside the Assembly, chose to keep the pitch of his voice low this time. He even enlightened other members on the harmful effects of high-decibel bickering.

The chastening of the loquacious Harak Singh Rawat has triggered speculation that young Anukriti Gusain is being groomed to carry forward his political legacy. Given Haraks track record, it would not be surprising if he decides to launch his already famous daughter-in-law into the realm of politics.
State BJP today came down heavily on Congress and stated that the party was cheating people of the State in the name of fraudulent campaigns. State BJP Spokesperson Pratul Shahdeo said that when the Congress will begin its phase wise protest on land issue on September 26, it should begin with a gherao of CM candidate Hemant Sorens residence. He said that the maximum illegal occupation of land in the State is done by Hemant and family.

Shahdeo said that before talking about womens security Congress should not forget Nirbhaya and Naina Tandoor case. He said that NCRB records make it clear that during the joint regime of Hemant Soren and Congress murder and rape cases were more. He also said that the State government has prepared the school merger plan scientifically and bicycles will be given to students from the funds saved by the plan.

Shahdeo said that Congress alleges State BJP president of being involved in corrupt practices but they should answer about partys stand on ED chargesheet against Karnataka leader DK Shivkumar. He said how the leader had told the income tax sleuths in his confessional statement about the hawala transactions of his party. Shadeo said that the Congress has kept silence on the issue and it states clearly how Congress and corruption are going hand in hand since long.

Meanwhile, speaking in a press conference State BJP Spokesperson Misfika Hasan said that the Ordinance passed by the government on Triple Talaq was a Constitutional strength for Muslim women. She said that the issue was connected with the self-esteem and honour of Muslim women.

Hasan said that Congress and other Opposition parties have always used Muslims as vote bank and stripped them off their basic rights. She gave the xample of Shah Bano case and denounced the Congress. She said that triple talaq was banned in 22 countries and eight Muslim countries and in India now it is a punishable offence.
Taking a cue from the demand raised by the Jharkhand Petroleum Dealers Association with the Government, the State Congress also pitched for slashing the rate for the ease of common users.

Pradesh Congress Committee spokesperson Rajiv Ranjan Prasad on Thursday said in a press conference that the decision of the State Government to levy 22 per cent VAT on the fuels along with Re 1 as cess is hurting the consumers the most.

This is bizarre that the same BJP came to power giving slogan bahut hue mahangai ki maar, abki baar BJP sarkar and now is indulged in tax terrorism through petroleum products. Due to 22 per cent VAT and cess the products have gone costlier in Jharkhand than neighbouring States. This is costing dearly to the dealers as well as people of the State, said the Congress leader.

Members of the Dealers association had raised the issue meeting Food and Consumer Affairs Minister Saryu Roy on Wednesday to which the Minister on his part wrote to Chief Minister Raghubar Das requesting for some kind of reconsideration.

Though no step has come so far from the Government and petrol in the State continues over Rs 80 per liter the party is threatening to launch protest. Congress is also looking to highlight issues of law and order and women safety and has outlined series of protests.

Different cells of the Congress as per the directions of the PCC president Ajoy Kumar have decided to protest right up to district level. Women Congress on September 23 would search for women safety whereas on September 26, our Tribal wing would look for lost tribal lands, said party leader Ravindra Singh.

On fuel prices the party on September 29 would protest at all the district headquarters and handover memorandum to the DCs. Similar protests would take place in the name of cow vigilantism, dalit atrocities, joblessness, absconding financial fraudsters Vijay, Malya, Mehul Chaukasi and Nirav Modi and several others.

The party also rapped the State Government for school merger, land acquisition steps, displacement of tribal and moolvasi and growing crime and murder incidents taken place in the State, especially in the capital Ranchi. Rajiv Ranjan presented crime statistics of several recent years to drive home his point.

During last 10 days or so seven murders and rapes took place in Ranchi itself. Murders are happening in front of the Chief Ministers residence. It seems that police administration has lost its prowess and there is no fear in the mind of the criminals, said the spokesperson.
Indian Institute of Natural Resins and Gums (IINRG) and a non-government organisation (NGO) on Thursday signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) on increasing utilisation of the lac-host trees in Jharkhand.

The MoU was signed in a function organised to celebrate the 95th Foundation Day of the institute at Namkum in Ranchi. Senior officials of IINRG and the NGO named Udyogini were present on the occasion.

Informing about the MoU chief executive officer of the partner NGO Arvind Malik said, At present the utilisation of the lac-host trees is only 15-20 per cent. We aim to increase it by at least 50 per cent in collaboration with the IINRG.

He added that Udyogini was also carrying out training programme for the lac farmers in the IINRG.

It may noted be here that Udyogini is engaged in promoting lac cultivation in three districts of state namely Ranchi, Khunti and Gumla.

It would start similar projects in Simdega district by beginning of 2019.

The NGO is funded by World Bank for entrepreneurial development at the grass root level.

Speaking as a Chief Guest in the function, vice-chancellor of the Sido Kanhu University professor MP Sinha observed that scientist of IINRG must have passion for work adding such attitude would take the organisation to greater heights.

Even after 95 years the organsiation, still have scope to grow. Measures should be initiated to make this institute a special one in the country, Sinha said.

VV Ramamurthy of the Division of Entomology Indian Council of Agriculture Research, New Delhi delivered a lecture on the topic Bisystematics and Biodiversity in the function.

While welcoming the participants Director of IINRG Dr KK Sharma earlier said the organisation climatic change has adversely impacted lac production as well.

He added that IINRG has preserved 60 host species of different states.

He also mentioned about a fruit coating formulation developed by the institute which could be used preservation of fruits and vegetables.

Swami Bhaveshanand of Ram Krishna Mission Ashram said that lac quality of Ranchi was very good. The best scientists, technicians and supporting staffs were awarded by the dignitaries on the occasion, he said.

It may be noted here that the IINRG was thrown open for the public on Thursday during which school students visited its museum and research centre.

The institute is also educating the students on the swachhta drive at present.
Mayor: join hands in Swachhata hi Sewa

Chandigarh: The Mayor of Chandigarh Davesh Moudgil appealed to the citizens of Chandigarh on Thursday to join hands in Swachhata hi Sewa campaign. He said that Swachhata hi Sewa programme is being conducted throughout the country from September 15 to October 2. He said that the MCC, Govt. institutions, Punjab University, Colleges, Schools, social organizations, NGOs are conducting awareness and sanitation drives during this campaign throughout the city.

irrigation programme from Sept 22

Chandigarh: Punjab Irrigation Department has announced the rotational programme of canals for irrigation in the Kharif Season from September 22 to September 29. The channels of Sirhind Canal System would run on the priority basis from Sidhwan Branch, Bathinda Branch, Bist Doab Canal, Patiala Feeder and Abohar Branch respectively. A spokesman said that distributaries and Branches of Bhakra Main Line (BML) i. e. Direct distributaries of BML in Group 'A' being in the Channels of first preference will run to their indent. Balance water available will be utilised in Ghaggar Branch and Patiala Minor in group 'B' respectively.

5th Session of 15th Punjab VS Prorogued

Chandigarh: A spokesperson of the Punjab Vidhan Sabha informed that the 5th Session of the 15th Punjab Vidhan Sabha, which was adjourned sine-die at the conclusion of its sitting held on August 28 has been prorogued by an order of the Governor of Punjab on September 19, 2018.

BSNL launches cheaper high speed plans

Chandigarh: In a series of offering customers friendly schemes for the benefits of customers and to attract new customers to experience wire line broadband services, BSNL has launched cost effective and affordable promotional unlimited plans like BBG Combo ULD 150GB plan ,BBG Combo ULD 300GB plan & BBG Combo ULD 600GB at a very nominal charges of Rs 199,Rs 299 and Rs 491 for their esteemed customers. Under these plans, customers can download unlimited Broadband data without bothering of any data limit in GB along with 24 Hrs. unlimited free calling (Local + STD) on any network within India at a very cheaper cost.

HP Pollution Control Board conferred awards

Chandigarh: Himachal Pradesh Pollution Control Board was conferred the two prestigious SKOCH Environment Award and SKOCH Order-of-Merit Award for the PAPA (Pollution Abating Plants Abhiyan) Project during 53rd SKOCH Summit held at Constitution Club of India, Rafi Marg, New Delhi. Dr RK Pruthi (IAS), Member Secretary HP Pollution Control Board received the award on behalf of Himachal Pradesh Pollution Control Board. The award is the national recognition by the SKOCH Group for the noble initiative made by the Pollution Control Board to address the issues of high air pollution concentration of the eight towns/cities namely Baddi, Nalagarh, Parwanoo, Paonta, Kala amb, Sundernagar, Una and Damtal of the State Board through a flagship programme namely PAPA (Pollution Abating Plants Abhiyan).
In a setback for the Congress and Opposition unity bid to stop the BJP juggernaut, BSP supremo Mayawati on Thursday said her party will go it alone in upcoming Madhya Pradesh Assembly elections and in Chhattisgarh tie up with former Chief Minister Ajit Jogis outfit Janta Congress Chhattisgarh(J).

The Congress was desperate to ally with the BSP in Chhattisgarh, which has roughly 12 per cent Scheduled Caste population. Congress State president Bhupesh Baghel bared his pain for failing to stitch alliance with the BSP and said, Finally, Jogi and Mayawati have come out in open to rescue the BJP.

Though the BJP has slammed the new opportunistic alliance, partys strategists have cheered the news in closed door conversations as the Mayawati-Jogi combine has greater potential to upset Congress poll arithmetic than the BJPs. A top BJP leader in Chhattisgarh remarked, Its cheering news for us. The Congress has to revisit its strategy as the new alliance will heavily erode the Congress traditional vote bank in at least 12-15 Assembly segments, mainly in areas dominated by powerful Satnami community.

Chhattisgarh has always witnessed bipolar contest between the BJP and the Congress but with the latest political development the State is all set to experience a three-corner fight in the Assembly elections scheduled for November this year.

Mayawati, who announced the tie-up in the presence of the wheelchair-bound Jogi in Lucknow, said the JCJ would contest 55 seats, while the BSP will field candidates in remaining 35 seats.

If the alliance comes to power, Jogi will be the Chief Minister, remarked Mayawati. Though the BSP won just one seat in the last Assembly election in 2013, the party was polled 4.4 per cent of the total votes polled.

Analysts say that the alliance between the BSP and the JCJ will have larger implications in the State which has track record of a close contest between the BJP and the Congress. In 2013 polls, the BJP managed to retain power for the third straight term by just 92,000 votes and (0.72) per cent difference from the Congress in entire 90 seats.
On the third day of the Vidhan Sabha monsoon session, the treasury bench once again appeared to fumble for replies to questions raised by MLAs from both the Congress and Bharatiya Janata Party especially regarding Education and Panchayati Raj departments. Later in the evening, the session was adjourned till 11 AM on September 24.

Independent MLA Pritam Singh Panwar questioned whether the Government is making necessary arrangements to ensure proper education for children in the mountainous regions. Replying to this, Education Minister Arvind Pandey informed that at the initial level in more than 97 per cent settlements, primary education is available within one kilometre radius while in more than 98 per cent settlements upper primary education is available within three kilometres radius as per the standards.

Raising a supplimentary question, Kedarnath MLA Manoj Rawat asked about the shortage of faculty in model schools. As the Minister replied stating the number of faculty positions in model schools in various districts, Rawat said that following implementation of the Transfer Act, the appointment procedure had been negatively affected. MLA Bharat Singh Chowdhary asked about the number of sanitation workers posts and appointments made to the same in schools. The Minister stated that as per an earlier Government order, the posts of cleaners were being discontinued after retirement of the staff and the task was being outsourced. Sanitation in schools could also be maintained through voluntary work by the pupils, the Minister said. MLA Mamta Rakesh questioned the system of primary school students being made to clean the schools. The minister replied that the principal through the SMC could get cleaners appointed throught UPNL and PRD. BJP MLA from Sahaspur, Sahdev Singh Pundir, citing the example of Central Hope Town, asked who was responsible for sanitation in Gram Panchayats which were upgraded in status after which the issue was pending in court.

Other members also added supplementary questions asking who was responsible for sanitation and other works in areas which are now neither Gram Panchayats nor urban local bodies. In the absence of satisfactory reply, the Speaker directed the Panchayati Raj and Urban Development departments to sit together and work in coordination to resolve the issue.

BJP MLA from Yamkeshwar raised the question of problems being faced by students due to lack of adequate number of NCERT text books. She appreciated the decision to implement NCERT books but said that delay in printing of the books was causing major problems for the students.
In a crackdown on drug peddlers, Haryana Police have seized more than 456 kg ganja while it was being smuggled to Jind district in a truck. Police have also arrested two persons in this connection.

Giving this information, a spokesman of Police Department said that following a tip-off, the truck was intercepted by a team of Crime Investigation Agency near Ramrai village in Jind and recovered 456 kg 870 gram ganja. This is the second biggest haul in Jind this year after 386 kg ganja in August 25, he said.

The arrested accused were identified as Rajesh, a resident of village Data in Hisar and truck driver Kapil, a native of village Lohari Raghu, Hisar.

During preliminary investigation, it was revealed that Rajesh and two others are partners in this illegal trade. They used to bring ganja from Orissa and Chhattisgarh border in a truck belonging to Anil, a native of village Dhana in Hansi, and supply it in Jind area. Monu, a resident of Jagdalpur was middlemen in this trade, the spokesman said.

He further said that Police are interrogating the accused to know where and to whom they were supposed to deliver such huge quantity of narcotics. The police have registered a case under Narcotics Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Act.

In another seizure of tramadol, Haryana Police have recovered 1.17 lakh tablets under operation prabal prahar in distict Sirsa. Police have also arrested four persons who were in possession of the prohibited tablets.

The spokesman said that a police team had seized these tablets from four persons in an Innova car during patrolling near Ding police station area in the district. The arrested accused have been identified as Vikas and Sunil of village Khariyan and Gurvinder and Kuldeep, both residents of village Raghuana.

He said that Police is also enquiring about the name of suppliers from the accused and efforts were being made to nab them. A case has been registered against them at Ding police station and further investigation is on, he added.
President Trump was widely condemned recently when he dismissed Hurricane Marias official death toll in Puerto Rico without any credible evidence to support his claims.

3,000 people did not die in the two hurricanes that hit Puerto Rico, said Trump in one of two tweets, referring to Maria, which made landfall in Puerto Ricos southeast coast on Sept. 20, 2017, and Hurricane Irma, which brushed the U.S. commonwealth less than two weeks earlier. When I left the island, after the storm had hit, they had anywhere from six to 18 deaths. As time went by it did not go up by much. Then a long time later, they started to report really large numbers, like 3,000.

Trump in a second tweet accused Democrats of inflating the death toll in order to make me look as bad as possible when I was successfully raising billions of dollars to help rebuild Puerto Rico.

If a person died for any reason, like old age, just add them onto the list, he said. Bad politics. I love Puerto Rico.

Trump made his comments less than three weeks after Puerto Rico Gov. Ricardo Rossello accepted the findings of a George Washington University study that attributed 2,975 deaths to Maria. Trump also took to Twitter as Hurricane Florence was beginning to batter the North Carolina coast.

The presidents statements questioning the number of people who died as a result of Hurricanes Irma and Maria are deplorable, said Omar Gonzalez-Pagan, a staff attorney for Lambda Legal who is from Puerto Rico, told the Washington Blade on Thursday from the Puerto Rican capital of San Juan. They demonstrate that the president is not only divorced from reality, but also his utter disregard for peoples suffering and, frankly, his cruelty.

Nearly 3,000 Puerto Ricans died as a result of Hurricanes Maria and Irma, he added. Their lives matter.

Wilfred Labiosa, co-founder of Waves Ahead, a group that is helping LGBTI Puerto Ricans and other vulnerable groups recover from Maria, echoed Gonzalez-Pagan when he spoke to the Blade on Thursday from Puerto Rico. Labiosa added Trumps tweets reflect the lack of acceptance of Puerto Ricans as U.S. citizens.

It reflects that Puerto Rico is not a commonwealth but a colony of U.S., that we can be dispensable to the U.S., Labiosa told the Blade.

San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulin Cruz is among those who remain vocal critics of Trumps response to Maria, which included throwing paper towels into a crowd of people at a suburban San Juan church less than two weeks after the hurricane made landfall. Cruz on Thursday in a lengthy statement said Trumps comments show a lack of respect for our reality and our pain.

He simply is unable to grasp the human suffering that his neglect and lack of sensibility have caused us, said Cruz. 3,000 people died on his watch and (it is) his inability to grasp that makes him dangerous.

Rossello, who has been reluctant to criticize Trump, also pushed back against the tweets.

Neither the people of Puerto Rico nor the victims deserve their pain to be questioned, Rossello told CBS News.

San Juan mayor: Our lives matter

Maria had winds of 155 mph when it made landfall.

Hundreds of thousands of Puerto Ricans did not have electricity or access to safe drinking water for months.

Labiosa and other activists in Puerto Rico with whom the Blade has spoken have said people with HIV/AIDS did not have access to antiretroviral drugs in the days and weeks after Marias landfall. They also said LGBTI Puerto Ricans faced discrimination at emergency shelters across the island.

Houses with blue tarps as temporary roofs were still commonplace throughout the San Juan metropolitan area and southeastern Puerto Rico in May when this reporter was on the island.

CBS News reporter David Begnaud recently reported FEMA said it moved millions of bottles of water to an old runway in Ceiba, a town on Puerto Ricos northeast coast, that were photographed this week with weathered tarps over them.

BuzzFeed reported FEMA approved only 75 of the 2,431 requests for funeral assistance it received from Puerto Ricans after Maria. Trump on the same day again defended his administrations response to Maria as he spoke with reporters at the White House about Florence.

While he is busy trying to save face, he will continue to turn his back on all those who suffer, said Cruz on Thursday in her statement. Simply put: He is fully unhinged from reality. One thing is for sure, our lives matter and we do not need a tweet from Trump to remind of us that.

Labiosa agreed, noting his organization and others continue to help Puerto Ricans recover from Maria and Irma. Labiosa also told the Blade that Waves Ahead, SAGE Puerto Rico and other groups that continue to provide assistance to LGBTI Puerto Ricans are also working to respond to the islands growing mental health crisis.

The community, diaspora, and local non-government entities are making the difference by working hard to provide the necessary services to those devastated by the hurricanes, he told the Blade.
A day after a former woman staff of the Air Odisha levelled rape allegations against the airlines CEO Santosh Pani, the GSEC Monarch Decan Aviation Private Limited, the major shareholder in the Air Odisha, on Thursday suspended the accused from his post.

An official statement issued by the company said, Based on the rape allegations, Panis employment has been revoked with immediate effect. He is no longer in service of Air Odisha Aviation Private Limited.

Notably, a former woman employee of Air Odisha lodged a rape a complaint at the Khandagiri police station here on Wednesday alleging that Pani raped her twice in August.

The complainant, who currently works with Air Deccan, is a resident of Kolkata. She had joined te Air Odisha as security supervisor in July 2018.
Educationist and social activist Dr Achyuta Samanta was honoured with the MGR Ratna Award for Lifetime Contribution to Education for Tribal Children by the Government of Sri Lanka on Wednesday.

Sri Lanka Parliament Speaker Karu Jaisurya presented the award in the presence of Sri Lanka Minister of Education Akila Viraj Kariyawasam.

As Dr Samanta is unwell, he was not physically present to receive the award.

A well-wisher from KIIT and KISS, Dr K Abdul Ghani, received the award on his behalf.

Earlier too, Prof Samanta has been decorated with three civilian awards and over 200 international awards for his relentless contribution to eliminate poverty and hunger through education in particular and social service in general.
The Central Governments Ordinance on triple talaq would provide justice to Muslim women and also end the atrocities inflicted upon them, said patron of Muslim Rashtriya Manch (MRM) Indresh Kumar here on Thursday.

Those opposing the Government decision are playing the devils role and they should stop it, he said while addressing a discussion on the topic Communal Harmony, National Unity and Nationalism at Vidhan Sabha. The progamme was organized by State unit of MRM.

He asserted that MRM aims to promote communal harmony and progress in the country. We are working for the past 16 years for a riot free and fearless society on India, he said.

On India Pakistan relation Kumar said that his organization hopes that new PM Imran Khan would be able to establish peace on the Indo-Pak borders. If he succeeds in stopping cross border firing and also the instigation of Kashmiri youths then I would consider the new PM as successful, he mentioned.

Former Chief Minister Arjun Munda praised the work of MRM adding that every citizen wants peace in the society.

He asked the organisation to continue the efforts for achieving its aims.

Former chairman of state minority commission and national convenor of MRM Dr Sahid Akhtar said that Muslim were safest in India adding that one should be ready to make sacrifices for the country.

He detailed that MRM was working in the field of education, solemnizing marriages of poor Muslim girls and helping the divorced women.

He added the organization was providing basic necessities to 100 divorced women across the country. He said that four mediation centers have been opened to resolve family disputes.

He said it was due to efforts of MRM that leaders of other organization including the Hindu Jagran Manch and Rashtriya Swamsewak Sangh have come to one platform to discuss communal harmony and national unity.

The chairman of the State Haj Committee Rizwan Khan also addressed the gathering.
India may revert to paying Iran in rupees for the oil it buys from its third largest supplier as US sanctions will from November 4 block use of US dollars to settle such trades, a top official said Thursday.

Oil refiners such as state-owned Indian Oil Corp (IOC) and Mangalore Refinery and Petrochemicals Ltd (MRPL) could use UCO Bank or IDBI Bank to route oil payments to Iran, the official added.

US sanctions against Iran come into effect from November 4 and will block banking channels.

The official said refiners have booked oil cargoes from Iran for the current month as well as for October. Payment for oil bought in September would be due in November as Iran provides a 60 days credit period.

India had planned to import about 25 million tonnes of crude oil from Iran in the current fiscal, up from 22.6 million tonnes imported in 2017-18. But the actual volumes imported may be far less as companies like Reliance Industries have totally stopped buying oil from Iran and others too are scaling it down in hope of winning a sanction waiver from the US.

US President Donald Trump had in May withdrawn from the 2015 nuclear accord with Iran, re-imposing economic sanctions against the Persian Gulf nation. Some sanctions took effect from August 6 while those affecting the oil and banking sectors will start from November 4.

The official said Iran is open to accepting rupee payment for oil and may use the money to pay for equipments and food items it buys from India.

UCO Bank and IDBI Bank have been identified to route the payment as the two have no exposure to the US financial system.

UCO Bank had in the previous round of sanctions handled rupee payments.

Currently, India pays its third largest oil supplier in euros using European banking channels. These channels would get blocked from November.

During the first round of sanctions when EU joined the US in imposing financial restrictions, India initially used a Turkish bank to pay Iran for the oil it bought but beginning February 2013 paid nearly half of the oil import bill in rupees while keeping the remainder pending opening of payment routes. It began clearing the dues in 2015 when the restrictions were eased.

Besides, New Delhi sought to get around the restrictions by supplying goods including wheat, soybean meal and consumer products to Iran in exchange for oil.

The official said this time around the entire 100 per cent of Iranian oil import bill can be paid in rupees.

Iran is India's third-largest oil supplier behind Iraq and Saudi Arabia. It was India's second biggest supplier of crude oil after Saudi Arabia till 2010-11 but Western sanctions over its suspected nuclear programme relegated it to the seventh spot in the subsequent years. In 2013-14 and 2014-15, India bought 11 MT and 10.95 MT, respectively from it.

Sourcing from Iran increased to 12.7 MT in 2015-16, giving it the sixth spot. In the following year, the Iranian supplies jumped to 27.2 MT to catapult it to the third spot.

Iranian oil is a lucrative buy for refiners as the Persian Gulf nation provides 60 days of credit for purchases, terms not available from suppliers of substitute crudes -- Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iraq, Nigeria, and the US.

Besides blocking of banking channels from November, the absence of payment mechanism may pose a challenge to the transportation of the oil as Iranian crude is bought on a CIF basis and shipped on Iranian tankers.

Under Cost, Insurance and Freight (CIF) mode of shipping, the seller assumes the responsibility of transportation and insurance. The liability and costs associated with successful transit are paid by the seller until the goods are received by the buyer.
US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo Thursday said America was prepared to engage immediately in negotiations with North Korea to transform relations and to achieve the denuclearization of Pyongyang by 2021.

His comments came after North Korean leader Kim Jong Un agreed to make a historic visit to South Korea soon and close a missile testing site in the presence of international inspectors in a meeting with President Moon Jae-in in Pyongyang on Wednesday.

Pompeo, in a statement, welcomed Moon and Kim's reaffirmation of the Singapore joint statement of complete denuclearisation of the Korean Peninsula, including the permanent dismantlement of all facilities at Yongbyon in the presence of the US and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)inspectors.

"This will mark the beginning of negotiations to transform the US-DPRK relations through the process of rapid denuclearisation of North Korea, to be completed by January 2021, as committed by Chairman Kim, and to construct a lasting and stable peace regime on the Korean Peninsula," he said.

"We also welcome Chairman Kim's decision to complete the previously announced dismantlement of Tongchang-ri site in the presence of US and international inspectors as a step toward the final fully verified denuclearisation of North Korea, as agreed by Chairman Kim at the Singapore summit with President Trump," Pompeo added.

On the basis of these important commitments, he said, the US was prepared to engage immediately in negotiations to transform its relations with North Korea.

Pompeo said he has invited South Korean Foreign Minister Ri Yong Ho to a meeting in New York City next week, where they both are already scheduled to be in attendance at the United Nations General Assembly.

"Likewise, we have invited North Korean representatives to meet our Special Representative for North Korea, Stephen Biegun, in Vienna, Austria, at the earliest opportunity," he added.
Hornbeck Offshore Services, Inc., together with its subsidiaries, provides marine transportation, subsea installation, and accommodation support services to exploration and production, oilfield service, offshore construction, and the United States military customers. It operates offshore supply vessels (OSVs), multi-purpose support vessels (MPSVs), and a shore-based facility to provide logistics support and specialty services to the offshore oil and gas exploration and production industry, primarily Gulf of Mexico in the U.S., Latin America, and internationally. Its fleet of U.S.-flagged OSVs and MPSVs support deep-well, deepwater, and ultra-deepwater activities of the offshore oil and gas industry, such as oil and gas exploration, field development, production, construction, installation, well-stimulation, and other enhanced oil recovery, as well as inspection, repair, and maintenance services. The company also provides vessel management services, including crewing, daily operational management, and maintenance activities for other vessels owners. As of December 31, 2018, it owned and operated 66 OSVs and 8 MPSVs. Hornbeck Offshore Services, Inc. was founded in 1997 and is headquartered in Covington, Louisiana.

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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. 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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. 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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, SinnerSchrader AG, SinnerSchrader Commerce GmbH, SinnerSchrader Content GmbH, SinnerSchrader Deutschland GmbH, SinnerSchrader Praha s.r.o., SinnerSchrader Swipe GmbH, 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, 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.
Allergan plc, a pharmaceutical company, develops, manufactures, and commercializes branded pharmaceutical, device, biologic, surgical, and regenerative medicine products worldwide. The company operates in three segments: US Specialized Therapeutics, US General Medicine, and International. It offers a portfolio of products in various therapeutic areas, including medical aesthetics and dermatology, eye care, neuroscience, urology, gastrointestinal, women's health, and anti-infective therapeutic products. The company also offers breast implants and tissue expanders; and RM-131 (relamorelin), a peptide ghrelin agonist for the treatment of diabetic gastroparesis. In addition, it develops medical and cosmetic treatments; therapies for non-alcoholic steatohepatitis and other liver diseases; inhibitor for the treatment of psoriasis and other autoimmune disorders; atopic dermatitis drug candidate; peri-ocular rings for extended drug delivery and reducing elevated intraocular pressure in glaucoma patients; and treatments for neurodegenerative disorders, including Alzheimer's disease. Further, the company develops RST-001, a novel gene therapy for the treatment of retinitis pigmentosa; small molecule therapeutics for inflammatory and fibrotic diseases; topical medicines for fat reduction; and delivery system and botulinum toxin-based prescription products. It has collaboration, option, and license agreement with Lyndra, Inc.; and strategic alliance and option agreement with Editas Medicine, Inc. Allergan plc also has licensing agreements with Assembly Biosciences, Inc.; MedImmune; and Heptares Therapeutics, Ltd. The company was formerly known as Actavis plc and changed its name to Allergan plc in June 2015. Allergan plc was founded in 1983 and is headquartered in Dublin, Ireland.

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18 minutes ago

Biden to showcase Baltimore as fertile ground for his agenda

BALTIMORE (AP)  When he was in the White House, Donald Trump referred to Baltimore as a disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess. But for President Joe Biden, the city is the first stop Wednesday in what probably will be a national tour to showcase his agenda. At the Port of Baltimore, Biden plans to lay out the benefits of the $1 trillion infrastructure package that Congress passed last week.

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Centrica plc operates as an integrated energy company in the United Kingdom, Ireland, Norway, North America, and internationally. The company operates through British Gas, Energy Marketing & Trading, Centrica Business Solutions, Bord GAis Energy, and Upstream segments. It supplies gas and electricity to residential customers, as well as offers energy-related services; and generates power from combined cycle gas turbines and nuclear assets. The company also provides installation, repair, and maintenance services for domestic central heating, plumbing and drains, home electrical, and gas and kitchen appliances; and heating, ventilation, and air conditioning equipment, as well as offers breakdown services. In addition, it is involved in the procurement, trading, and optimization of energy; procurement and sale of LNG; and supplies energy efficiency solutions and technologies to residential customers. Further, the company produces and processes gas and oil; develops new fields to maintain reserves; constructs, owns, and exploits infrastructure; and engages in the social enterprise investment fund activities. Additionally, it provides vehicle leasing, commercial, and insurance services, as well as energy management products and services; and operates a gas storage and franchise network. The company was formerly known as Yieldtop plc and changed its name to Centrica plc in December 1996. Centrica plc was incorporated in 1995 and is based in Windsor, the United Kingdom.

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Whitbread has been the subject of 7 research reports in the past 90 days, demonstrating strong analyst interest in this stock.

According to analysts' consensus price target of GBX 3,715.56, Whitbread has a forecasted upside of 11.6% from its current price of GBX 3,330.50.

Whitbread has received a consensus rating of Buy. The company's average rating score is 2.90, and is based on 9 buy ratings, 1 hold rating, and no sell ratings.

4.7 Community Rank

Outperform Votes Whitbread has received 821 outperform votes. (Add your outperform vote.)

Underperform Votes Whitbread has received 346 underperform votes. (Add your underperform vote.)

Community Sentiment Whitbread has received 70.35% outperform votes from our community.

MarketBeat's community ratings are surveys of what our community members think about Whitbread and other stocks. Vote Outperform if you believe WTB will outperform the S&P 500 over the long term. Vote Underperform if you believe WTB will underperform the S&P 500 over the long term. You may vote once every thirty days.

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Mandalay Resources Corporation, a natural resource company, engages in the acquisition, exploration, extraction, processing, and reclamation of various mineral properties. It explores for gold, silver, and antimony deposits. The company holds a 100% interest in the Costerfield gold-antimony mine covering an area of 7,540.78 hectares (ha) located in Central Victoria, Australia; and the Bjorkdal gold mine that comprises 9 mining concessions and 19 exploration permits located in Vasterbotten County in northern Sweden. It also holds a 100% interest in the Cerro Bayo silver-gold mine covering 29,495 ha of exploitation concessions and 45 hectares of exploration concessions located in the Cerro Bayo district, southern Chile. In addition, the company holds a 100% interest in the Challacollo silver-gold project, which includes 98 mining exploitation concessions covering an area of 20,378 ha located to the southeast of the port city of Iquique, Chile. Mandalay Resources Corporation was incorporated in 1997 and is headquartered in Toronto, Canada.

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Invesco Variable Rate Preferred ETF's stock was trading at $23.01 on March 11th, 2020 when Coronavirus reached pandemic status according to the World Health Organization (WHO). Since then, VRP shares have increased by 13.7% and is now trading at $26.16.

View which stocks have been most impacted by COVID-19.
Invesco S&P 500 Equal Weight ETF's stock was trading at $93.15 on March 11th, 2020 when Coronavirus reached pandemic status according to the World Health Organization. Since then, RSP stock has increased by 73.5% and is now trading at $161.57.

View which stocks have been most impacted by COVID-19.
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.
Oasis Petroleum Inc., an independent exploration and production company, focuses on the acquisition and development of onshore unconventional oil and natural gas resources in the United States. It operates through Exploration and Production(E&P), and Midstream segments. The E&P segment engages in the acquisition and development of oil and gas properties. The Midstream segment offers midstream services, such as natural gas gathering, compression, processing and, gas lift supply; crude oil gathering, terminaling, and transportation; produced and flowback water gathering, and disposal; and water distribution. As of December 31, 2020, the company had 401,766 net leasehold acres in the Williston Basin; and 24,396 net leasehold acres in the Permian Basin, as well as approximately 152.2 million barrels of oil equivalent of estimated net proved reserves. The company sells its crude oil and natural gas to refiners, marketers, and other purchasers that have access to pipeline and rail facilities. Oasis Petroleum Inc. was founded in 2007 and is headquartered in Houston, Texas.

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The following companies are subsidiares of AON: 6824625 Canada Ltd., 7193599 Canada Inc., A.B. Insurances Limited, ADIS A/S, AIB Services Limited, AIS Affinity Insurance Agency Inc., AIS Insurance Agency Inc., AMXH LLC, ARM International Corp., ARM International Insurance Agency Corp., ARMRISK CORP., AS Holdings Inc., ASPN Insurance Agency LLC, Access Plans USA Inc., Acumen Credit Insurance Brokers Limited, Adm Administradora de Beneficios Ltda., Administradora Aon C.A., Admiseg SA, Admix, Admix - Administracao Consultoria Participacoes e Corretora de Seguros de Vida Ltda., Aeropeople Limited, Affinity Group Insurance Services Limited, Affinity Insurance Services Inc., Affinity Risk Partners (Brokers) Pty Ltd, Agenion N.V./SA, Agility Credit Insurance Brokers Limited, Alexander & Alexander Holding B.V., Alexander Clay, Alexander Insurance Managers (Netherlands Antilles) N.V., Alexander Reinsurance Intermediaries Inc., Allen Insurance Associates Inc., Alliance HealthCard Inc., Alliance HealthCard of Florida Inc., American Insurance Services Corp., American Special Risk Insurance Company, Aon (Bermuda) Ltd., Aon (CR) Insurance Agencies Company Limited, Aon (DIFC) Gulf Limited, Aon (Fiji) Ltd., Aon (Isle of Man) Limited, Aon (Thailand) Limited, Aon 180412 Limited (in liquidation), Aon ANZ Holdings Limited, Aon APAC Holdings B.V., Aon Acore Sarl, Aon Adjudication Services Limited, Aon Affinity Administradora de Beneficios Ltda., Aon Affinity Argentina S.A., Aon Affinity Chile Ltda., Aon Affinity Colombia Ltda. Agencia de Seguros, Aon Affinity Mexico Agente de Seguros y de Fianzas S.A. de C.V., Aon Affinity Mexico S.A. de C.V., Aon Affinity Servicos e Participacoes Ltda., Aon Affinity do Brasil Servicos e Corretora de Seguros Ltda., Aon Agencies Hong Kong Limited, Aon Americas Holdings BV, Aon Angola Corretores de Seguros Limitada, Aon Antillen N.V., Aon Aruba N.V., Aon Assurance Agencies Hong Kong Limited, Aon Australia Group Pty Ltd, Aon Australian Holdco 1 Pty Ltd, Aon Australian Holdco 2 Pty Ltd, Aon Australian Holdco 3 Pty Ltd, Aon Austria GmbH, Aon Bahrain W.L.L., Aon Belgium B.V.B.A., Aon Benefit Solutions Inc., Aon Benfield (Chile) Corredores de Reaseguros Ltda., Aon Benfield Argentina S.A., Aon Benfield Australia Limited, Aon Benfield Brasil Corretora de Resseguros Ltda., Aon Benfield Canada ULC, Aon Benfield China Limited, Aon Benfield Colombia Limitada Corredores de Reaseguros, Aon Benfield Fac Inc., Aon Benfield Global Inc., Aon Benfield Group Limited, Aon Benfield Inc., Aon Benfield Israel Limited, Aon Benfield Italia S.p.A., Aon Benfield Japan Ltd, Aon Benfield Latin America SA, Aon Benfield Limited, Aon Benfield Malaysia Limited, Aon Benfield Mexico Intermediario de Reaseguro SA de CV, Aon Benfield Middle East Limited, Aon Benfield New Zealand Limited, Aon Benfield Panama S.A., Aon Benfield Peru Corredores de Reaseguros SA, Aon Benfield Puerto Rico Inc., Aon Bermuda Holding Company Limited, Aon Bermuda QI Holdings Ltd., Aon Beteiligungsmanagement Deutschland GmbH & Co. KG, Aon Bolivia S.A. Corredores de Seguros, Aon Botswana (Pty) Ltd., Aon Brazil Holdings LLC, Aon Broking Services SA, Aon Broking Technology Limited, Aon CANZ Holdings B.V., Aon CANZ Holdings N.S. ULC, Aon Canada Holdings N.S. ULC, Aon Canada Inc., Aon Canada Intermediaries GP, Aon Captive Services Antilles N.V., Aon Captive Services Aruba N.V., Aon Cash Management B.V., Aon Central and Eastern Europe a.s., Aon Centre for Innovation and Analytics Ltd, Aon Charitable Foundation Pty Ltd, Aon Chile Holdings LLC, Aon Commercial Insurance Agencies Hong Kong Limited, Aon Commercial Services Ireland Limited, Aon Commercial Services and Operations Ireland Limited, Aon Consolidation Group Pty Ltd, Aon Consulting & Insurance Services, Aon Consulting (Chile) Limitada, Aon Consulting (Thailand) Limited, Aon Consulting Bolivia S.R.L., Aon Consulting Ecuador S.A., Aon Consulting Financial Services Limited, Aon Consulting Inc., Aon Consulting Kazakhstan LLP, Aon Consulting Limited, Aon Consulting Private Limited, Aon Consulting Romania SRL, Aon Corporate Services (Isle of Man) Limited, Aon Corporate Services Limited, Aon Corporation, Aon Corporation Australia Limited, Aon Corporation EMEA B.V., Aon Credit International Insurance Broker GmbH, Aon Cyprus Insurance Broker Company Limited, Aon DC Trustee Limited, Aon Danismanlik Hizmetleri AS, Aon Delta Bermuda Ltd., Aon Delta UK Limited, Aon Denmark A/S, Aon Deutschland Beteiligungs GmbH, Aon Direct Group Inc., Aon Edge Insurance Agency Inc., Aon Energy Caribbean Limited, Aon Enterprise Insurance Agencies Hong Kong Limited, Aon Finance Bermuda 1 Ltd., Aon Finance Bermuda 2 Ltd., Aon Finance Canada 1 Corp., Aon Finance Canada 2 Corp., Aon Finance International N.S. ULC, Aon Finance Luxembourg S.a.r.l., Aon Finance N.S. 1 ULC, Aon Finance N.S. 5 ULC, Aon Finance N.S. 8 ULC, Aon Finance US 1 LLC, Aon Finance US 2 LLC, Aon Financial & Insurance Solutions Inc., Aon Finland Oy, Aon France, Aon Global Holdings 1 Limited, Aon Global Holdings 2 Limited, Aon Global Holdings 3 Limited [In strike-off], Aon Global Holdings Limited, Aon Global Operations plc, Aon Global Risk Consulting B.V., Aon Global Risk Consulting Luxembourg S.a.r.l., Aon Global Risk Research Limited, Aon Grana Peru Corredores de Seguros SA, Aon Greece S.A., Aon Groep Nederland B.V., Aon Group (Bermuda) Ltd., Aon Group (Thailand) Limited, Aon Group Holdings International 1 B.V., Aon Group Holdings International 2 B.V., Aon Group Inc., Aon Group International N.V., Aon Group Pty Ltd, Aon Group Venezuela Corretaje de Reaseguros C.A., Aon Hewitt (Bermuda) Ltd., Aon Hewitt (Ireland) Limited, Aon Hewitt (PNG) Ltd., Aon Hewitt (Thailand) Ltd., Aon Hewitt Consulting (Shanghai) Co. Ltd., Aon Hewitt Consulting Korea Inc., Aon Hewitt Financial Advice Limited, Aon Hewitt GmbH, Aon Hewitt Health Market Insurance Solutions Inc., Aon Hewitt Hong Kong Limited, Aon Hewitt Inc., Aon Hewitt Investment Consulting Inc., Aon Hewitt Investment Management Inc., Aon Hewitt Japan Ltd., Aon Hewitt Limited, Aon Hewitt Ltd., Aon Hewitt Malaysia Sdn Bhd, Aon Hewitt Management Company Limited, Aon Hewitt Middle East Limited, Aon Hewitt Risk & Consulting S.r.l., Aon Hewitt Risk & Financial Management B.V., Aon Hewitt Trust Solutions GmbH, Aon Hewitt US Holdings Limited, Aon Holding Deutschland GmbH, Aon Holdings (Isle of Man) Limited, Aon Holdings Antillen N.V., Aon Holdings Australia Pty Limited, Aon Holdings Austria GmbH, Aon Holdings B.V., Aon Holdings Botswana (Pty) Ltd, Aon Holdings Corretores de Seguros Ltda., Aon Holdings France SNC, Aon Holdings Hong Kong Limited, Aon Holdings International B.V., Aon Holdings Israel Ltd., Aon Holdings Japan Ltd, Aon Holdings Limited, Aon Holdings Luxembourg S.a.r.l., Aon Holdings Mid Europe B.V., Aon Holdings New Zealand, Aon Hong Kong Limited, Aon Hungary Insurance Brokers Risk and Human Consulting LLC, Aon Insurance Agencies (HK) Limited, Aon Insurance Agencies (Macau) Limited, Aon Insurance Brokers (Malaysia) Sdn Bhd, Aon Insurance Brokers (Pvt) Ltd., Aon Insurance Management Agencies (HK) Limited, Aon Insurance Managers (Antilles) N.V., Aon Insurance Managers (Barbados) Ltd., Aon Insurance Managers (Bermuda) Ltd, Aon Insurance Managers (Cayman) Ltd., Aon Insurance Managers (Dublin) Ltd., Aon Insurance Managers (Guernsey) Ltd., Aon Insurance Managers (Holdings) Ltd., Aon Insurance Managers (Isle of Man) Ltd., Aon Insurance Managers (Liechtenstein) AG, Aon Insurance Managers (Luxembourg) S.A., Aon Insurance Managers (Malta) PCC Limited, Aon Insurance Managers (Puerto Rico) Inc., Aon Insurance Managers (Shannon) Limited, Aon Insurance Managers (USA) Inc., Aon Insurance Managers (USVI) Inc., Aon Insurance Managers Gibraltar Ltd., Aon Insurance Micronesia (Guam) Inc, Aon Insurance Underwriting Agencies Hong Kong Limited, Aon Insurance and Reinsurance Brokers Philippines Inc., Aon International Cooperatief U.A., Aon International Energy Inc., Aon International Holdings Inc., Aon Investment Holdings Ireland Limited, Aon Israel Insurance Brokerage Ltd., Aon Italia S.r.l., Aon Japan Ltd, Aon Jauch & Hubener Gesellschaft m.b.H., Aon Korea Inc., Aon Latam Holdings N.V., Aon Lead QI B.V., Aon Life Agency of Texas Inc., Aon Life Agente de Seguros S.A. de C.V., Aon Life Insurance Company, Aon MacDonagh Boland Group Ltd, Aon Majan LLC, Aon Management Consulting Taiwan Ltd., Aon Mauritius Holdings, Aon Meeus Assurantien B.V., Aon Mexico Business Support SA de CV, Aon Mexico Holdings LLC, Aon Mexico Holdings S. de R.L. de C.V., Aon Middle East Co LLC, Aon Nederland C.V., Aon Netherlands Operations B.V., Aon Neudorf Finance S.a.r.l., Aon New Zealand, Aon New Zealand Group ULC, Aon Norway AS, Aon Overseas Holdings Limited, Aon PHI Acquisition Corporation of California, Aon PMI International Limited, Aon Parizeau Inc., Aon Pension Trustees Limited, Aon Pensions Insurance Brokers GmbH, Aon Polska Services Sp. z o.o., Aon Polska Sp. z o.o., Aon Portugal - Consultores Unipessoal Lda., Aon Portugal - Corretores de Seguros S.A., Aon Premium Finance LLC, Aon Private Risk Management Insurance Agency Inc., Aon Private Risk Management of California Insurance Agency Inc., Aon Product Design & Development Australia Pty Limited, Aon Product Design and Development New Zealand Limited, Aon Product Risk Services Hong Kong Limited, Aon Property Risk Consulting Inc., Aon Qatar LLC, Aon Re (Thailand) Limited, Aon Re Bertoldi - Corretagem de Resseguros S.A., Aon Re Bolivia S.A. Corredores de Reaseguros, Aon Re Canada Holdings SARL, Aon Real Estate B.V., Aon Realty Services Inc., Aon Reed Stenhouse Inc., Aon Retirement Plan Advisors LLC, Aon Retirement Solutions Limited, Aon Risiko & Unternehmensberatungs GmbH, Aon Risk & Asset Management Pty Ltd, Aon Risk Consultants Inc., Aon Risk Insurance Services West Inc., Aon Risk Management (Pty) Ltd, Aon Risk Services (Chile) Corredores de Seguros Limitada, Aon Risk Services (Holdings) of Latin America Inc., Aon Risk Services (Holdings) of the Americas Inc., Aon Risk Services (NI) Limited, Aon Risk Services (PNG) Ltd., Aon Risk Services (Thailand) Limited, Aon Risk Services Argentina S.A., Aon Risk Services Australia Limited, Aon Risk Services Canada Inc., Aon Risk Services Central Inc., Aon Risk Services Colombia SA Corredores de Seguros, Aon Risk Services Companies Inc., Aon Risk Services EMEA B.V., Aon Risk Services Ecuador S.A. Agencia Asesora Productora de Seguros, Aon Risk Services Holdings (Chile ) Ltda., Aon Risk Services Inc. of Florida, Aon Risk Services Inc. of Hawaii, Aon Risk Services Inc. of Maryland, Aon Risk Services Inc. of Washington D.C., Aon Risk Services Northeast Inc., Aon Risk Services South Inc., Aon Risk Services Southwest Inc., Aon Risk Services Venezuela Corretaje de Seguros C.A., Aon Risk Solutions (Cayman) Ltd., Aon Risk Solutions Agente de Seguros y de Fianzas SA de CV, Aon Risk Solutions of Puerto Rico Inc., Aon Riskminder A/S, Aon Romania Broker de Asigurare - Reasigurare SRL, Aon Rus Insurance Brokers LLC, Aon Rus LLC, Aon S.p.A. Insurance & Reinsurance Brokers, Aon Saver Limited, Aon Securities (Hong Kong) Limited, Aon Securities Investment Management Inc., Aon Securities LLC, Aon Securities Limited, Aon Service Corporation, Aon Services (Guernsey) Ltd, Aon Services (Malta) Ltd, Aon Services Group Inc., Aon Services Hong Kong Limited, Aon Services Pty Ltd., Aon Sigorta ve Reasurans Brokerligi ve A.S., Aon Soluciones S.A., Aon Soluciones S.A.C., Aon Southern Europe UK Limited, Aon Sp. z o.o., Aon Special Risk Resources Inc., Aon Superannuation (PNG) Limited, Aon Superannuation Pty Limited, Aon TC Holdings Inc., Aon Taiwan Ltd., Aon Treasury Ireland Limited, Aon Trust Company LLC, Aon Trust Corporation Limited, Aon Trust Services B.V., Aon UK Group Limited, Aon UK Holdings Intermediaries Limited, Aon UK Limited, Aon UK Trustees Limited, Aon US & International Holdings Limited, Aon US Holdings 2 Inc., Aon US Holdings Inc., Aon Ukraine LLC, Aon Underwriting Agencies (HK) Limited, Aon Underwriting Managers (Bermuda) Ltd., Aon Underwriting Managers Inc., Aon Versicherungsberatungs GmbH, Aon Versicherungsmakler Deutschland GmbH, Aon Vietnam Limited, Aon Ward Financial Corporation, Aon-COFCO Insurance Brokers Co. Ltd., Aon/Albert G. Ruben Insurance Services Inc., Asevasa Argentina S.A., Asevasa Caricam S.A., Asevasa Chile Peritaciones e Ingenieria de Riesgos S.A., Asevasa Mexico S.A. de C.V., Asevasa Panama S.A., Asian Reinsurance Underwriters Limited, Asscom Insurance Brokers S.r.l., Association of Rural and Small Town Americans, Associacao Instituto Aon, Assurance Licensing Services Inc., B E P International Corp., B.V. Assurantiekantoor Langeveldt-Schroder, BMS Insurance Agency L.L.C., Bacon & Woodrow Partnerships (Ireland) Limited, Bacon & Woodrow Partnerships Limited, Bain Hogg Group Limited (in liquidation), Baltolink UADBB, Bankassure Insurance Services Limited, Bayfair Insurance Centre Limited, Beaubien Finance Ireland Limited, Beaubien Finance Limited, Beaubien UK Finance Limited, Becketts (Trustees) Limited, Becketts Limited, Beech Hill Pension Trustees Ltd, Bekouw Mendes C.V., Benefit Marketing Solutions L.L.C., Benfield Advisory Inc., Benfield Corredores de Reaseguro Ltda., Benfield Finance (London) LLC, Benfield Group, Benfield Investment Holdings Limited, Benfield Juniperus Holdings Limited, Benfield do Brasil Participacoes Ltda. (dormant), Benton Finance Ireland Limited, Benton Finance Limited, Blanch Americas Inc., Bowes & Company Inc. of New York, CEREP III Secondary Manager LLC, CFSSG Real Estate Partners I LLC, CFSSG Real Estate Partners II LLC, CIF-H GP LLC, Cammack Health LLC, Cananwill Corporation, Cananwill Inc., Cardea Health Solutions Limited, Casablanca Intermediation Company Sarl, Celinvest Amsterdam B.V., Chapka Assurances SAS, Citadel Insurance Managers Inc., CoCubes, CoSec 2000 Limited, Coalition for Benefits Equality and Choice, Cocubes Technologies Private Limited, Coles Hewitt Partnership, Contingency Insurance Brokers Limited, Contractsure Limited, CoverWallet, Coverall S.r.l. Insurance and Reinsurance Underwriting Agency, Credit Insurance Brokers (Reynolds) Limited, Crion N.V., Custom Benefit Programs Inc., Cut-e, Cut-e (UK) Limited, Cut-e Assessment (Hong Kong) Limited, Cut-e Assessment Solutions Europe Limited, Cut-e Australia Pty Limited, Cut-e Consult DMCC, Cut-e Danmark A/S, Cut-e Finland Oy, Cut-e GmbH, Cut-e Ireland Limited, Cut-e Nordic AS, Cut-e Norge AS, Cytelligence, Delany Bacon & Woodrow Partnership, Dempsey Partners, Denney O'Hara (Life & Pensions) Limited, Doveland Services Limited, E. W. Blanch Holdings Limited, E. W. Blanch Investments Limited, E.W. Blanch Capital Risk Solutions Inc., E.W. Blanch International Inc., EW Blanch Limited, Elysium Digital IP Products LLC, Elysium Digital L.L.C., Ennis Knupp Secondary Market Services LLC, Essar Insurance Services Limited, Exploitatiemaatschappij Beukenlaan 68-72 B.V., Farmaseg - Solucoes Assistencia e Servicos Empresariais Ltda., Farmsure Limited [In strike-off], Finaccord Limited, Financial & Professional Risk Solutions Inc., Futurity Group Inc., GTCR/AAM Blocker Corp., Ge.f.it. S.r.l., Gefass S.r.l., Glenrand M I B (Mocambique) Corretores de Seguros Limitada, Global Safe Insurance Brokers S.r.l., Globe Events Management, Gotham Digital Science LLC, Gotham Digital Science Ltd., Grant Liddell Financial Advisor Services Pty Ltd, Grant Park Capital LLC, Groupe-Conseil Aon Inc., Grupo Innovac Sociedad de Correduria de Seguros SA, HIA Insurance Services Pty Ltd., Hall Rhodes Holdings Limited, Hall Rhodes Limited, Hamburger Gesellschaft zur Forderung des Versicherungswesens mbH, Harbourview West Lake Co-Invest (GP) LP, Health Index Advisors LLC, Healthy Paws Pet Insurance, Henderson Corporate Insurance Brokers Limited, Henderson Insurance Brokers Limited, Henderson Insurance Partnership Limited [In strike-off], Henderson Risk Management Limited, Hewitt Amalco 3 ULC, Hewitt Amalco 4 ULC, Hewitt Amalco 5 ULC, Hewitt Associates (a partnership), Hewitt Associates Administradora e Corretora de Seguros Ltda., Hewitt Associates Corp., Hewitt Associates Outsourcing Limited, Hewitt Associates Pty Ltd, Hewitt Associates S.C., Hewitt Associates SAS, Hewitt Associates Servicos de Recursos Humanos Ltda., Hewitt Beneficios Agente de Seguros y de Fianzas S.A. de C.V., Hewitt Holdings Canada Company, Hewitt Insurance Brokerage LLC, Hewitt Insurance Inc., Hewitt International Holdings LLC, Hewitt Management Ltd., Hewitt Risk Management Services Limited, Hewitt Western Management Amalco Inc., Hogg Group Limited, Hogg Robinson North America Inc., Huntington T. Block Insurance Agency Inc., I. Beck Insurance Agency (1994) Ltd., IAO Actuarial Consulting Services Canada Inc., INPOINT INC., IRM/GRC Holding Inc., Impact Forecasting L.L.C., Inspiring Benefits, Inspiring Benefits Portugal Unipessoal Lda, Insuractive Limited [In strike-off], Insurance Broker Aon Kazakhstan LLP, International Risk Management (Americas) Inc., International Risk Management Group Ltd, International Space Brokers Europe Limited, International Space Brokers France, International Space Brokers Inc., International Space Brokers Limited, Inversiones Benfield Chile Ltda., J H Minet Puerto Rico Inc., J. Allan Brown Consultants Inc., JDPT Manager LLC, Jenner Fenton Slade Limited, John Reynolds & Company (Credit Insurance) Limited, John Reynolds & Company (Insurances) Limited, John Reynolds & Company (Life & Pensions) Limited, Johnson Rooney Welch Inc., K & K Insurance Brokers Inc. Canada, K & K Insurance Group Inc., K & K Insurance Group of Florida Inc., K2 Technologies Inc., KVT GP LLC, Kloud S.a.r.l., Krumlin Hall Limited, Lake Erie Real Estate General Partner Limited, Lake Tahoe GP LLC, Lake Tahoe II GP LLC, Lake Tahoe III GP LLC, Lake Tahoe IV GP LLC, Lenzi Paolo Broker di Assicurazioni S.r.l., Lincolnshire Insurance Company PCC Limited, Linx Underwriting Solutions Inc., Lombard Trustee Company Limited, M.A. Shakeel Management Ltd. Amalco, MacDonagh Boland Crotty MacRedmond Ltd, Marinaro Dundas S.A., Marinaro Dundas SA, Mark Kelly Insurance and Financial Services PTY LTD, McLagan (Aon) Limited, McLagan Partners Asia Inc., McLagan Partners Inc., Membership Leasing Trust, Minet Consultancy Services Ltd, Minet Group, Minet Holdings Inc., Minet Inc., Minet Re North America Inc., Modern Survey Inc., Muirfield Underwriters Ltd., NBS Nominees Limited, National Insurance Office Ltd., Nauman Insurance Brokers Limited, Nexus Insurance Brokers Limited, One Underwriting Agency GmbH, One Underwriting B.V., One Underwriting Health B.V., One Underwriting Pty Ltd, Optica Agency A/S, Optimum Risk Solutions Limited, Ovatio Courtage SAS, P.G. Bradley & Co Limited, PGOF Manager 1 LLC, PRORUCK Ruckversicherungs Aktiengesellschaft, PT Aon Benfield Indonesia, PT Aon Hewitt Indonesia, PT Aon Indonesia, PWZ AG, Paragon Strategic Solutions Inc., PathWise Solutions LLC, Penn Square Manager 1 LLC, Penn Square Manager II LLC, Portus Consulting, Portus Consulting (Leamington) Limited, Portus Consulting Limited, Portus Online LLP, Praesidium S.p.A. - Soluzioni Assicurative per il Management, Premier Auto Finance Inc., Private Client Trustees Ltd., Private Equity Partnership Structures I LLC, Probabilitas N.V./SA, Protective Marketing Enterprises Inc., Randolph Finance Unlimited Company, Rasini Vigano Limited, Redwoods Dental Underwriters Inc., Richard Kiddle (Insurance Brokers) Limited, Risk Laboratories LLC, Riskikonsultatsioonide OU, Ronnie Elementary Insurance Agency Ltd, SA Special Situations General Partner LLC, SG IFFOXX Assekuranzmaklergesellschaft mbH, SLE Worldwide Limited, SN Re S.A., Salud Riesgos y Recursos Humanos Consultores Ltda. (former Aon Corporte Advisors Ltda.), SchneiderGolling IFFOXX Assekuranzmakler AG, SchneiderGolling Industrie Assekuranzmaklergesellschaft mbH, Scritch Inc., Shanghai Kayi Information Technology Co. Ltd, Sheppard Netherlands B.V., Specialty Benefits Inc., Sports Insure Limited [In strike-off], Strategic Manager-III LLC, Stroz Friedberg (Asia) Limited, Stroz Friedberg Inc., Stroz Friedberg LLC, Stroz Friedberg Limited, Stroz Friedberg Risk Management Limited, Superannuation Management Nominees Limited, Suresport Limited [In strike-off], Swire Blanch MSTC II SA, Swire Blanch MSTC SA, TTG BRPTP GP LLC, TTG Cayuga Bavaria Intermediate 2 S.a.r.l, TTG Core Plus Investments LLC, TTG German Investments I LLC, TTG Investments II LLC, TTG Irish Investments I LLC, TTG Manager LLC, Tecsefin S.A. en liquidacion, The Aon Ireland Mastertrustee Limited, The Aon MasterTrustee Limited, The John Reynolds Company Limited, The Key West Saxon Group LLC, The Townsend Group Inc, The Townsend Group LLC, Townsend Alpha Manager I LLC, Townsend Alpha Manager II LLC, Townsend Alpha Manager III LLC, Townsend Group Asia Limited, Townsend Group Europe Ltd., Townsend HWL GP Ltd., Townsend Holdings LLC, Townsend Lake Constance GP Limited, Townsend REF GP LLC, Townsend Re Global GP Limited, Townsend SO Manager I LLC, UAB One Underwriting, UADBB Aon Baltic, UK Credit Insurance Specialists Limited, UNIT Versicherungsmakler GmbH, US Underwriting Solutions S.r.l., USLP Underwriting Solutions LP, Underwriters Marine Services Inc., Unidelta AG, Unirobe Meeus Groep, UnitedPensions Deutschland AG, Univers Workplace Solutions, VERO Management AG, Ventiv Technology, WT Government Services LLC, WT Technologies LLC, Wannet Speciale Verzekeringen B.V., Wannet Sports Insurance GmbH, Ward Financial Group Inc., West Lake General Partner LLC, West Lake II GP LLC, Wexford Underwriting Managers Inc., White Rock Insurance (Americas) Ltd., White Rock Insurance (Europe) PCC Limited, White Rock Insurance (Gibraltar) PCC Ltd., White Rock Insurance (Guernsey) ICC Limited, White Rock Insurance (Netherlands) PCC Limited, White Rock Insurance (SAC) Ltd., White Rock Insurance Company PCC Ltd., White Rock Insurance PCC (Isle of Man) Limited, White Rock Services (Bermuda) Ltd., White Rock USA Ltd., Willis Towers Watson, Worldwide Integrated Services Company, Wrapid Specialty Inc., Zalba-Caldu Correduria de Seguros SA, and cut-e USA Inc..
Novan, Inc., a clinical development-stage biotechnology company, provides nitric oxide-based therapies to treat dermatological and oncovirus-mediated diseases. Its clinical stage dermatology drug candidates include SB204, a topical monotherapy for the treatment of acne vulgaris; SB206, a topical anti-viral gel for the treatment of viral skin infections; SB208, a topical broad-spectrum anti-fungal gel for the treatment of fungal infections of the skin and nails, including athlete's foot and fungal nail infections; and SB414, a topical cream-based gel product candidate for the treatment of inflammatory skin diseases. The company also develops SB207, an anti-viral product candidate for the treatment of external genital warts; WH602, a nitric oxide-containing intravaginal gel to treat high-risk human papilloma virus (HPV); WH504, a non-gel formulation product candidate to treat high-risk HPV; and SB019 for the treatment of SARS-CoV-2. Novan, Inc. has a license agreement with Sato Pharmaceutical Co., Ltd.; and a strategic alliance with Orion Corporation. The company was incorporated in 2006 and is headquartered in Morrisville, North Carolina.

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Luxoft Holding, Inc., together with its subsidiaries, provides software development services and IT solutions to multinational corporations. The company offers application software development, software architecture design, performance engineering, optimization and testing, process consulting, and software quality assurance services; functional specification and mock-up, product design, engineering, automated testing, maintenance, support, and performance engineering services; and IT strategy, software engineering process, and data security consulting services. Its products and platforms include Populus, a tool chain for human machine interface (HMI) design and development, and the deployment of automotive user interfaces for distributed embedded systems; Qt Automotive Suite, which enables developers to create stunning user experience and ease the integration toward the system backend; AllView, an user-experience demonstrator; software tools and consulting services focused on scheduling analysis, architecture optimization, and timing verification; Pelux, a base development platform; and ARP, an automotive hardware reference platform. It serves financial services, automotive and transport, healthcare and life sciences, travel and aviation, technology, telecom, energy, and other industries. The company operates in North America, Europe, Russia, the Asia-Pacific, and internationally. Luxoft Holding, Inc. was founded in 2000 and is headquartered in Zug, Switzerland. Luxoft Holding, Inc. operates as a subsidiary of IBS Group Holding Limited.

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BT Group plc provides communications services worldwide. Its Consumer segment sells telephones, baby monitors, and Wi-Fi extenders through high street retailers, online BT Shop, and Website BT.com; and offers home phone, copper and fiber broadband, TV, and mobile services in various packages. The company's EE segment offers 2G, 3G, and 4G mobile network services; broadband, fixed-voice, and TV services; and postpaid and prepaid plans, and emergency services network. This segment also sells 4G mobile phones, tablets, connected devices, and mobile broadband devices from various manufacturers. Its Business and Public Sector segment provides fixed voice, mobility, fiber and connectivity, and networked IT services to retailers, utilities, public sector, healthcare, sports, construction, finance, and educational sectors. The company's Global Services segment offers business communications and ICT services comprising BT Connect, BT Security, BT One, BT Contact, BT Compute, BT Advise, and BT for financial markets. This segment serves approximately 5,500 customers in 180 countries. Its Wholesale and Ventures segment enables communications providers and other organizations to provide fixed or mobile phone services. Its ventures provide mass-market services, such as directory enquiries and payphones; and enterprise services comprising BT Fleet and BT Redcare. This segment also provides broadband and Ethernet, voice, hosted communication, mobile virtual network operator, managed solutions, machine-to-machine, roaming, and media services. The company's Openreach segment engages in the provision of services over the local access network; and installation and maintenance of fiber and copper communications networks that connect homes and businesses. The company was formerly known as Newgate Telecommunications Limited and changed its name to BT Group plc in September 2001. BT Group plc was incorporated in 2001 and is headquartered in London, the United Kingdom.

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Six years after the Slots At Racetracks Program was discontinued, the possibility of alternative gaming returning to an Ontario border track may make its sale more lucrative for buyer and seller alike.

According to Buffalo, N.Y.-based National Public Radio affiliate WBFO 88.7, slot machines could potentially return to Fort Erie Race Track  which at its peak contributed $5 million annually to municipal coffers, which in turn were directed to infrastructural improvements and other city projects.

With new Ontario Premier Doug Ford having indicated a potential return of slots, which were also pulled from Windsor Raceway and Hiawatha Horse Park on the Ontario-Michigan border, to the Thoroughbred racecourse, the implications for revitalisation  and the viability for the city to buy the racetrack  are amplified.

"There's this great discussion going on as to whether the Town of Fort Erie is going to go off and sell bonds in order to allow FELRC  which is called the Fort Erie Live Racing Consortium  to allow FELRC to own the track property and deal with the idea of updates," Carl Paladino, managing partner for current Fort Erie owners CMP, told WBFO.

The property is currently under lease to FELRC to operate racing through 2022.

(With files from WBFO 88.7)
1 Wall Street equities research analysts have issued "buy," "hold," and "sell" ratings for iShares North American Tech ETF in the last year. There are currently 1 hold rating for the stock. The consensus among Wall Street equities research analysts is that investors should "hold" iShares North American Tech ETF stock. A hold rating indicates that analysts believe investors should maintain any existing positions they have in IGM, but not buy additional shares or sell existing shares.

View analyst ratings for iShares North American Tech ETF or view top-rated stocks.
Conifex Timber Inc. primarily manufactures and sells lumber products in the United States, China, Canada, Japan, and internationally. It is involved in the timber harvesting, reforestation, and forest management activities; manufacture of finished softwood lumber from spruce, pine, and fir logs; manufacture, sale, and distribution of dimension lumber; processing logs into lumber and wood chips, as well as by-products or residues, such as trim blocks, sawdust, shavings, and barks; and providing value added lumber finishing services. The company also develops bioenergy and bio products; and operates a 36 megawatt biomass power generation plant, which produces renewable energy for commercial sale. The company was formerly known as West Fourth Capital Inc. and changed its name to Conifex Timber Inc. in June 2010. Conifex Timber Inc. was incorporated in 2007 and is headquartered in Vancouver, Canada.

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The following companies are subsidiares of Vodafone Group: 360 Connect S.A., [email protected] Telecom, A-ccelerator B.V., A-ccelerator Holding B.V, AAA (Euro) Limited, AAA (MCR) Limited, AAA (UK) Limited, Acorn Communications Limited, Africonnect (Zambia) Limited, Ag Mercantile Company Private Limited, Al-Amin Investments Limited, Amsterdamse Beheer- en Consultingmaatschappij B.V., Apollo Submarine Cable System Limited, Array Holdings Limited, Asian Telecommunication Investments (Mauritius) Limited, Aspective Limited, Astec Communications Limited, Autoconnex Limited, Aztec Limited, BelCompany BV, Bluefish Apac Communications Pte. Ltd, Bluefish Communications, Bluefish Communications Limited, Business Serve Limited, C&W Worldwide Nigeria Limited, C.S.P. Solutions Limited, CCII (Mauritius) Inc., CGP India Investments Ltd., CGP Investments (Holdings) Limited, COOP Mobil s.r.o, CT Networks Limited, CWGNL S.A., CWW Operations Limited, Cable & Wireless Access Limited, Cable & Wireless Americas Systems Inc., Cable & Wireless Aspac Holdings Limited, Cable & Wireless CIS Services Limited, Cable & Wireless CIS Svyaz LLC, Cable & Wireless Capital Limited , Cable & Wireless Communications Data Network Services Limited, Cable & Wireless Communications Starclass Limited, Cable & Wireless Communications Technical Service (Shanghai) Co. Ltd (Beijing Branch), Cable & Wireless Europe Holdings Limited, Cable & Wireless GN Limited, Cable & Wireless Global (India) Private Limited, Cable & Wireless Global Business Services Limited, Cable & Wireless Global Holding Limited, Cable & Wireless Global Telecommunication Services Limited, Cable & Wireless Holdco Limited, Cable & Wireless Networks India Private Limited, Cable & Wireless Trade Mark Management Limited, Cable & Wireless UK Holdings Limited, Cable & Wireless UK Services Limited, Cable & Wireless Waterside Holdings Limited, Cable & Wireless Worldwide, Cable & Wireless Worldwide Limited, Cable & Wireless Worldwide Pension Trustee Limited, Cable & Wireless Worldwide Services Limited, Cable & Wireless Worldwide Voice Messaging Limited, Cable & Wireless a-Services Inc, Cable & Wireless a-Services Limited, Cable and Wireless (India) Limited, Cable and Wireless (India) Limited Indian Branch Office, Cable and Wireless Nominee Limited, Cable and Wireless Worldwide South Africa (Pty) Ltd, Cavalry Holdings Ltd, Celfocus  Solucoes Informaticas Para Telecomunicacoes S.A, Cellops Limited, Cellular Operations Limited, Central Communications Group Limited, Central Telecom (Northern) Limited, Centurion GSM Limited, Chelys Limited, City Cable (Holdings) Limited, Cobra do Brasil Servicos de Telematica ltda., Commnet Cellular Inc., Complete Network Technology, Connect (India) Mobile Technologies Private Limited, Cornerstone Telecommunications Infrastructure Limited, Dataroam Limited , Device Insight, Digital Island (UK) Ltd, Digital Mobile Spectrum Limited, East Africa Investment (Mauritius) Limited, Emtel Europe Limited, Energis (Ireland) Limited, Energis Communications Limited, Energis Holdings Limited, Energis Local Access Limited, Energis Management Limited, Energis Squared Limited, Erudite Systems Limited, Esprit Telecom B.V., Eudokia Limited, Euro Pacific Securities Ltd., Eurocall Holdings Limited, Europolitan Holdings AB (now Europolitan Vodafone AB), FB Holdings Limited, FM Associates (UK) Limited, FinCo Partner 1 B.V., FireFly Networks Limited, Flexphone Limited, GS Telecom (Pty) Limited, Gateway Communications Africa (UK) Limited, Gateway Communications Tanzania Limited, General Mobile Corporation, Generation Telecom Limited, Ghana Telecommunications, Ghana Telecommunications Company Limited, Global Cellular Rental Limited, Globe Limited, GrandCentrix GmbH, Grupo Corporativo ONO S.A.U., H3ga Properties (No 3) Pty Limited, HBO Nederland Cooperatief U.A., HBO Netherlands Channels sro, HBO Netherlands Distribution B.V., Hellas Online, How2 Telecom Limited, Hutchison Essar Ltd, Indus Towers Limited, Intercell Communications Limited, Internet Network Services Limited, Invitation Digital Limited, Ipergy Communications NV, Isis Telecommunications Management Limited, Jaguar Communications Limited, Jaykay Finholding (India) Private Limited, Jupicol (Proprietary) Limited, KABELCOM Braunschweig Gesellschaft Fur BreitbandkabelKommunikation Mit Beschrankter Haftung, KABELCOM Wolfsburg Gesellschaft Fur BreitbandkabelKommunikation Mit Beschrankter Haftung, Kabel Deutschland, Kabel Deutschland Holding, Kabel Deutschland Holding Erste Beteiligungs GmbH, Kabel Deutschland Holding Zweite Beteilgungs GmbH, Kabel Deutschland Neunte Beteiligungs GmbH, Kabel Deutschland Siebte Beteiligungs GmbH, Kabelfernsehen Munchen Servicenter GmbH & Co. KG, LG Financing Partnership, LGE HoldCo V B.V., LGE HoldCo VI B.V., LGE HoldCo VIII B.V., LGE Holdco VII B.V., LLC Vodafone Enterprise Ukraine, Le Bunt Holdings Limited, Legend Communications Limited, Liberty Global, Liberty Global Content Netherlands B.V., London Hydraulic Power Company, M-PESA Foundation, M-PESA Holding Co. Limited, ML Integration Group Limited, ML Integration Limited, ML Integration Services Limited, MV Healthcare Services Private Limited, Mannesmann AG, MetroHoldings Limited, Mezzanine Ware Proprietary Limited (RF), Mirambo Limited, Misrfone Trading Company LLC, MobiFon S.A., Mobile Commerce Solutions Limited, Mobile Phone Centre Limited, Mobile Wallet VM1, Mobile Wallet VM2, Mobile by Sainsburys Limited, Mobiles 4 Business.com Limited, Mobileworld Communications Pty Limited, Mobileworld Operating Pty Ltd, Mobilvest, Motifpros 1 (Proprietary) Limited, Multi Risk Indemnity Company Limited, Multi Risk Limited, ND Callus Info Services Private Limited, Nadal Trading Company Private Limited, Nat Comm Air Limited, National Communications Backbone Company Limited, Navtrak Ltd, Netforce Group Limited, Netgrid Telecom SRL, Number Portability Company (Proprietary) Limited, ONO, Omega Telecom Holdings Private Limited, Oni Way  Infocomunicacoes S.A, Oskar Mobil S.R.O., Oxygen Solutions Limited, P.C.P. (North West) Limited, PPL Pty Limited, PT Network Services Limited, PTI Telecom Limited, Peoples Phone Limited, Pinnacle Cellular Group Limited, Pinnacle Cellular Limited, Plex Limited, Plustech Mercantile Company Private Limited, Prime Metals Ltd., Project Telecom Holdings Limited, Quickcomm Software Solutions, Radio Opt GmbH, Rian Mobile Limited, SBC SMART CITY 1517 B.V., SMMS Investments Pvt Limited, Safaricom Limited, Safenet N.P A., Sarmady Communications, Scarlet Ibis Investments 23 (Pty) Limited, Scorpios Beverages Pvt. Ltd, Silver Stream Investments Limited, Singlepoint (4U) Limited, Singlepoint (4U) Ltd., Singlepoint Payment Services Limited, Siro Limited, Spar Aerospace (Nigeria) Limited, Sport TV Portugal S.A, Starnet, Stentor Communications Limited, Stentor Limited, Storage Technology Services (Pty) Limited, T.W. Telecom Limited, T3 Telecommunications Limited, TKS Telepost Kabel-Service Kaiserslautern Beteiligungs GmbH, TKS Telepost Kabel-Service Kaiserslautern GmbH & Co. KG, TNAS Limited, TSM NZ Limited, Talkland Airtime Services Limited, Talkland Australia Pty Limited, Talkland Communications Limited, Talkland International Limited, Talkland Midlands Limited, Talkmobile Limited, Tele2 Italia SPA, Tele2 Spain, Telecom Investments India Private Limited, Telecommunications Europe Limited, Ternhill Communications Limited, The Cobra Group, The Eastern Leasing Company Limited, The Old Telecom Sales Co. Limited, Thus Group Holdings Limited, Thus Group Limited, Thus Limited, Thus Profit Sharing Trustees Limited, TnT Expense Management LLC, Tomorrow Street GP S.a r.l., Tomorrow Street SCA, Torenspits II B.V., Townley Communications Limited, Trans Crystal Ltd., UMT Investments Limited, UPC Nederland Holding I B.V., UPC Nederland Holding II B.V., UPC Nederland Holding III B.V., Unified Communications, Uniqueair Limited, Urbana Teleunion Rostock GmbH & Co.KG, Usha Martin Telematics Limited, VAPL No. 2 Pty Limited, VBA (Mauritius) Limited, VBA Holdings Limited, VBA International (SL) Limited, VBA International Limited, VEI S.r.l., VM SA, VND S.p.A, VSSB Vodafone Shared Services Budapest Private Limited Company, Verwaltung Urbana Teleunion Rostock GmbH, Victus Networks S.A., Vizzavi Finance Limited, Vizzavi Limited, Voda Limited, Vodacall Limited, Vodacash s.p.r.l., Vodacom (Pty) Limited, Vodacom Business (Angola) Limitada, Vodacom Business (Ghana) Limited, Vodacom Business (Kenya) Limited, Vodacom Business Africa (Nigeria) Limited, Vodacom Business Africa Group (Pty) Limited, Vodacom Business Africa Group Services Limited, Vodacom Business Cameroon SA, Vodacom Business Cote Divoire S.A.R.L., Vodacom Congo (RDC) SA, Vodacom Financial Services (Proprietary) Limited, Vodacom Group Limited, Vodacom Insurance Administration Company (Proprietary) Limited, Vodacom Insurance Company (RF) Limited, Vodacom International Holdings (Pty) Limited, Vodacom International Limited, Vodacom Lesotho (Pty) Limited, Vodacom Life Assurance Company (RF) Limited, Vodacom Payment Services (Proprietary) Limited, Vodacom Properties No 1 (Proprietary) Limited, Vodacom Properties No.2 (Pty) Limited, Vodacom Tanzania Limited Zanzibar, Vodacom Tanzania Public Limited Company, Vodacom UK Limited, Vodafone (NI) Limited, Vodafone (New Zealand) Hedging Limited, Vodafone (Scotland) Limited, Vodafone 2, Vodafone 4 UK, Vodafone 5 Limited, Vodafone 5 UK, Vodafone 6 UK, Vodafone Albania Sh.A, Vodafone Alternatif Telekom Hizmetleri A.S., Vodafone Americas 4, Vodafone Americas Virginia Inc., Vodafone And Qatar Foundation L.L.C, Vodafone Asset Management Services S.a r.l., Vodafone Australia Pty Limited, Vodafone Automotive Deutschland GmbH, Vodafone Automotive Electronic Systems S.r.L, Vodafone Automotive France S.A.S, Vodafone Automotive Iberia S.L, Vodafone Automotive Italia S.p.A, Vodafone Automotive Japan K.K, Vodafone Automotive Korea Limited, Vodafone Automotive SpA, Vodafone Automotive Technologies (Beijing) Co Ltd, Vodafone Automotive Telematics Development S.A.S, Vodafone Automotive Telematics S.A, Vodafone Automotive UK Limited, Vodafone Belgium SA/NV, Vodafone Benelux Limited, Vodafone Bilgi Ve Iletisim Hizmetleri AS, Vodafone Business Services Limited, Vodafone Business Solutions Limited, Vodafone Canada Inc, Vodafone Cellular Limited, Vodafone Central Services Limited, Vodafone China Limited (China), Vodafone China Limited (Hong Kong), Vodafone Connect 2 Limited, Vodafone Connect Limited, Vodafone Consolidated Holdings Limited, Vodafone Corporate Limited, Vodafone Corporate Secretaries Limited, Vodafone Czech Republic A.S., Vodafone DC Pension Trustee Company Limited, Vodafone Dagitim Hizmetleri A.S., Vodafone Data, Vodafone Distribution Holdings Limited, Vodafone Egypt Telecommunications S.A.E., Vodafone Elektronik Para Ve Odeme Hizmetleri A.S., Vodafone Empresa Brasil Telecomunicacoes Ltda, Vodafone Empresa Mexico S.de R.L. de C.V., Vodafone Enabler Espana S.L., Vodafone Enterprise Australia Pty Limited, Vodafone Enterprise Austria GmbH, Vodafone Enterprise Bahrain W.L.L., Vodafone Enterprise Bulgaria EOOD, Vodafone Enterprise Chile SA, Vodafone Enterprise Communications Technical Services (Shanghai) Co. Ltd, Vodafone Enterprise Corporate Secretaries Limited, Vodafone Enterprise Denmark A/S, Vodafone Enterprise Equipment Limited, Vodafone Enterprise Europe (UK) Limited, Vodafone Enterprise Europe (UK) Limited  Czech Branch, Vodafone Enterprise Europe (UK) Limited  DubaiI Branch, Vodafone Enterprise Finland OY, Vodafone Enterprise France SAS, Vodafone Enterprise Germany GmbH, Vodafone Enterprise Global Businesses S.a r.l., Vodafone Enterprise Global Limited, Vodafone Enterprise Global Network HK Ltd, Vodafone Enterprise Global Network Pte. Ltd., Vodafone Enterprise Hong Kong Ltd, Vodafone Enterprise Italy S.r.L, Vodafone Enterprise Korea Limited, Vodafone Enterprise Luxembourg S.A., Vodafone Enterprise Netherlands BV, Vodafone Enterprise Norway AS, Vodafone Enterprise Regional Business Singapore Pte.Ltd., Vodafone Enterprise Singapore Pte.Ltd, Vodafone Enterprise Spain S.L.U.  Portugal Branch, Vodafone Enterprise Spain SLU, Vodafone Enterprise Sweden AB, Vodafone Enterprise Switzerland AG, Vodafone Erste Beteiligungsgesellschaft mbH, Vodafone Espana S.A.U., Vodafone Euro Hedging Limited, Vodafone Euro Hedging Two, Vodafone Europe B.V., Vodafone Europe UK, Vodafone European Investments, Vodafone European Portal Limited, Vodafone Finance Limited, Vodafone Finance Luxembourg Limited, Vodafone Finance Sweden, Vodafone Finance UK Limited, Vodafone Financial Operations, Vodafone Financial Services B.V., Vodafone Fixed Ltd, Vodafone Foundation, Vodafone Foundation Australia Pty Limited, Vodafone Gestioni S.p.A, Vodafone Ghana Mobile Financial Services Limited, Vodafone Global Content Services Limited, Vodafone Global Enterprise (Hong Kong) Limited, Vodafone Global Enterprise (Italy) S.R.L., Vodafone Global Enterprise (Japan) K.K., Vodafone Global Enterprise (Malaysia) Sdn Bhd, Vodafone Global Enterprise Limited, Vodafone Global Enterprise Russia LLC, Vodafone Global Enterprise Taiwan Limited, Vodafone Global Enterprise Telecommunications (Hellas) A.E., Vodafone Global Network Limited, Vodafone Global Network Limited  Slovakia Branch, Vodafone Global Services Private Limited, Vodafone GmbH, Vodafone Group (Directors) Trustee Limited, Vodafone Group Pension Trustee Limited, Vodafone Group Services GmbH, Vodafone Group Services Ireland Limited, Vodafone Group Services Limited, Vodafone Group Services No.2 Limited, Vodafone Group Share Trustee Limited, Vodafone Hire Limited, Vodafone Holding A.S., Vodafone Holdings (Jersey) Limited, Vodafone Holdings (SA) Proprietary Limited, Vodafone Holdings Europe S.L.U., Vodafone Holdings Luxembourg Limited, Vodafone Hutchison Australia Pty Limited, Vodafone Hutchison Finance Pty Limited, Vodafone Hutchison Receivables Pty Limited, Vodafone IP Licensing Limited, Vodafone India Digital Limited, Vodafone India Limited, Vodafone India Services Private Limited, Vodafone India Ventures Limited, Vodafone Institut fur Gesellschaft und Kommunikation GmbH, Vodafone Intermediate Enterprises Limited, Vodafone International 1 S.a.r.l. Luxembourg Zweigniederlassung Bern, Vodafone International 1 S.a r.l., Vodafone International 2 Limited, Vodafone International Holdings B.V., Vodafone International Holdings Limited, Vodafone International M S.a r.l., Vodafone International Operations Limited, Vodafone International Services LLC, Vodafone Investment UK, Vodafone Investments (SA) Proprietary Limited, Vodafone Investments Australia Limited, Vodafone Investments Limited, Vodafone Investments Luxembourg S.a r.l., Vodafone Investments Luxembourg S.a r.l. Luxembourg Zweigniederlassung Bern, Vodafone Ireland Distribution Limited, Vodafone Ireland Ltd., Vodafone Ireland Marketing Limited, Vodafone Ireland Property Holdings Limited, Vodafone Ireland Retail Limited, Vodafone Italia S.p.A., Vodafone Jersey Dollar Holdings Limited, Vodafone Jersey Finance, Vodafone Jersey Yen Holdings Unlimited, Vodafone Kabel Deutschland Field Services GmbH, Vodafone Kabel Deutschland GmbH, Vodafone Kabel Deutschland Kundenbetreuung GmbH, Vodafone Kenya Limited, Vodafone Leasing Limited, Vodafone Libertel B.V., Vodafone Limited, Vodafone Luxembourg 5 S.a r.l., Vodafone Luxembourg 5 S.a r.l. Luxembourg Zweigniederlassung Bern, Vodafone Luxembourg S.a r.l., Vodafone Luxembourg S.a r.l. Luxembourg Zweigniederlassung Bern, Vodafone M-PESA SH.P.K., Vodafone M-Pesa S.A, Vodafone M.C. Mobile Services Limited , Vodafone Magyarorszag Mobile Tavkozlesi Zartkoruen Mukodo Reszvenytarsasag, Vodafone Malta Limited, Vodafone Marketing UK , Vodafone Maroc SARL, Vodafone Mauritius Ltd., Vodafone Mobile Commerce Limited, Vodafone Mobile Communications Limited, Vodafone Mobile Enterprises Limited, Vodafone Mobile NZ Limited, Vodafone Mobile Network Limited, Vodafone Mobile Operations Limited, Vodafone Mobile Services Limited, Vodafone Multimedia Limited, Vodafone Nederland Holding I B.V., Vodafone Nederland Holding II B.V., Vodafone Nederland Holding III B.V., Vodafone Net Iletisim Hizmetleri A.S., Vodafone Network Pty Limited, Vodafone New Zealand Foundation Limited, Vodafone New Zealand Limited, Vodafone Next Generation Services Limited, Vodafone Nominees Limited1, Vodafone ONO S.A.U., Vodafone Oceania Limited, Vodafone Old Show Ground Site Management Limited, Vodafone Overseas Finance Limited, Vodafone Overseas Holdings Limited, Vodafone Panafon International Holdings B.V., Vodafone Panafon UK, Vodafone Partner Services Limited, Vodafone Payment Solutions S.a r.l., Vodafone Portugal  Comunicacoes Pessoais S.A., Vodafone Procurement Company S.a r.l., Vodafone Property Investments Limited, Vodafone Pty Limited, Vodafone Qatar Q.S.C., Vodafone Retail (Holdings) Limited , Vodafone Retail Limited, Vodafone Roaming Services S.a r.l., Vodafone Romania S.A, Vodafone Romania M - Payments SRL, Vodafone Romania Technologies SRL, Vodafone Sales & Services Limited, Vodafone Satellite Services Limited, Vodafone Servicios SL.U, Vodafone Servizi E Tecnologie S.R.L, Vodafone Servicos Empresariais Brasil Ltda., Vodafone Shared Services Romania SRL, Vodafone Specialist Communications Limited, Vodafone Stiftung Deutschland Gemeinnutzige GmbH, Vodafone Technology Solutions Limited, Vodafone Teknoloji Hizmetleri A.S., Vodafone Tele-Services (India) Holdings Limited, Vodafone Telecel-Comunicates Pessoais S.A., Vodafone Telecommunications (India) Limited, Vodafone Telekomunikasyon A.S, Vodafone Towers Limited, Vodafone UK Content Services Limited, Vodafone UK Investments Limited , Vodafone UK Limited1 , Vodafone US Inc, Vodafone Ventures Limited1 , Vodafone Vierte Verwaltungs AG, Vodafone Worldwide Holdings Limited, Vodafone Yen Finance Limited , Vodafone m-pesa Limited, Vodafone-Central Limited Vodaphone Limited, Vodafone-Panafon Hellenic Telecommunications Company S.A., VodafoneZiggo Group Holding B.V, Vodata Limited , Vouchercloud SA (Pty) Ltd, Wataneya Telecommunications S.A.E, Waterberg Lodge (Proprietary) Limited, Wayfinder, Wheatfields Investments 276 (Proprietary) Limited, Wireless Interactions & NFC Accelerator 2013 B.V., Woodend Cellular Limited, Woodend Communications Limited, Woodend Group Limited, Woodend Holdings Limited, XB Facilities B.V, XLink Communications (Proprietary) Limited, Your Communications Group Limited, ZUM B.V., ZYB, Zelitron S.A., Zesko B.V., Ziggo B.V., Ziggo Bond Company B.V., Ziggo Deelnemingen B.V., Ziggo Finance 2 B.V., Ziggo Financing Partnership, Ziggo Holding B.V., Ziggo Netwerk B.V., Ziggo Netwerk II B.V., Ziggo Services B.V., Ziggo Services Employment B.V., Ziggo Services Netwerk 2 B.V., Ziggo Zakelijk Services B.V., and Zoranet Connectivity Services B.V..
HSBC Holdings plc provides banking and financial products and services worldwide. The company operates through Wealth and Personal Banking, Commercial Banking, and Global Banking and Markets segments. The Wealth and Personal Banking segment offers retail banking products and services, such as current and savings accounts, mortgages and personal loans, credit and debit cards, and local and international payment services for ultra high net worth individuals; and wealth management services, including insurance and investment products, global asset management services, investment management, and private wealth solutions. The Commercial Banking segment provides credit and lending, treasury management, payment, cash management, commercial insurance, and investment services, as well as commercial cards, and international trade and receivables finance services; and foreign exchange products, and capital raising and advisory services to small and medium sized enterprises, mid-market enterprises, and corporates. The Global Banking and Markets segment is involved in the provision of financing, advisory, and transaction services, including credit, rates, foreign exchange, equities, money markets, and securities services, as well as principal investment activities to government, corporate and institutional clients, and private investors. The Global Private Banking segment provides a range of services to high net worth individuals and families with complex and international needs. HSBC Holdings plc was founded in 1865 and is headquartered in London, the United Kingdom.

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The following companies are subsidiares of Ecolab: AO Ecolab, Abednego Environmental Services, Abednego Environmental Services LLC, Abednego Mexico Holdings LLC, Abednego de Mexico S. de R.L. de C.V., Alcide Corp., Anios America S.A., Anios Diffusion SAS, Anios Manufacturing SAS, Bioquell, Bioquell Asia Pacific Pte. Ltd., Bioquell Global Logistics (Ireland) Ltd., Bioquell Holding SAS, Bioquell Inc., Bioquell Limited, Bioquell SAS, Bioquell Technology (Shenzhen) Ltd., Bioquell Technology Canada Ltd., Bioquell UK Limited, Bioxyquell Limited, CALGON EUROPE LIMITED, CALGON LLC, CID LINES HOLDING NV, CID LINES INVEST NV, CID LINES NV, CID Lines, CID Lines Beijing Animal Hygiene Co Ltd., CID Lines France Sarl, CID Lines Iberica SL, CID Lines LLC, CID Lines Mexico S.A. DE C.V., CID Lines R&D NV, CID Lines Sp. z o. o., CORPAK MedSystems, Cascade Water Services, Champion Technologies, Chamtech L.L.C., Chemlawn, Chemstaff Inc., Chemstar Corporation, Cirlam BVBA, Copal Holding NV, Copal Invest NV, DERYPOL SA, DMD, E&M Bio-Chemicals LLC, ECOLAB NL 10 B.V., ECOLAB PEST FRANCE SAS, Ecolab (Antigua) Ltd., Ecolab (Aruba) N.V., Ecolab (Barbados) Limited, Ecolab (China) Investment Co. Ltd, Ecolab (Fiji) Pty Limited, Ecolab (GZ) Chemicals Limited, Ecolab (Guam) LLC, Ecolab (Proprietary) Limited, Ecolab (Schweiz) GmbH, Ecolab (St. Lucia) Limited, Ecolab (Taicang) Technology Co. Ltd., Ecolab (Trinidad and Tobago) Unlimited, Ecolab (U.K.) Holdings Limited, Ecolab A.E.B.E., Ecolab AB, Ecolab AP Holdings LLC, Ecolab AT 2 GmbH, Ecolab AU2 Pty Ltd, Ecolab Acquisition LLC, Ecolab ApS, Ecolab Argentina S.R.L., Ecolab Asia Pacific Pte. Ltd., Ecolab B.V., Ecolab B.V.B.A./S.P.R.L., Ecolab Bahrain S.P.C., Ecolab CDN 2 Co., Ecolab CDN 4 ULC, Ecolab CH 1 GmbH, Ecolab CH 2 GmbH, Ecolab CH 3 GmbH, Ecolab CH 5 GmbH, Ecolab CH 6 GmbH, Ecolab Chemicals Limited, Ecolab Co., Ecolab Colombia S. A., Ecolab DE 1 GmbH, Ecolab Deutschland GmbH, Ecolab EOOD, Ecolab East Africa (Kenya) Limited, Ecolab East Africa (Tanzania) Limited, Ecolab East Africa (Uganda) Limited, Ecolab Ecuador Cia. Ltda., Ecolab Engineering GmbH, Ecolab Europe GmbH, Ecolab Export GmbH, Ecolab FR 1 SAS, Ecolab FR 4 SAS, Ecolab Finance Company Designated Activity Company, Ecolab Food Safety & Hygiene Solutions Private Limited, Ecolab G.K., Ecolab Global Business Services LLC, Ecolab GmbH, Ecolab Gulf FZE, Ecolab HK 1 Limited, Ecolab HK 2 Limited, Ecolab Hispano-Portuguesa S.L., Ecolab Holding Italy S.r.l., Ecolab Holdings (Europe) LLC, Ecolab Holdings Inc., Ecolab Holdings Mexico S. de R. L. de C. V., Ecolab Hygiene Kft., Ecolab Hygiene d.o.o., Ecolab Israel Holdings LLC, Ecolab JVZ Limited, Ecolab Korea Ltd., Ecolab LLC, Ecolab LUX & Co Holdings S.C.A., Ecolab LUX 1 Sarl, Ecolab LUX 2 Sarl, Ecolab LUX 4 Sarl, Ecolab LUX 7 Sarl, Ecolab LUX Sarl, Ecolab Limited, Ecolab Ltd., Ecolab Lux 10 Sarl, Ecolab Lux 12 Sarl, Ecolab Lux 13 Sarl, Ecolab Lux 14 Sarl, Ecolab Lux 15 Sarl, Ecolab Lux 9 S.a.r.l., Ecolab Lux Partner LLC, Ecolab MT Holdings LLC, Ecolab MT Limited, Ecolab Malta 1 Limited, Ecolab Malta 2 Limited, Ecolab Malta GPS, Ecolab Manufacturing IE Limited, Ecolab Manufacturing Inc., Ecolab Manufacturing UK Limited, Ecolab Maroc Societe a Responsabilite Limitee, Ecolab NL 11 B.V., Ecolab NL 15 BV, Ecolab NL 16 B.V., Ecolab NL 23 B.V., Ecolab NL 3 BV, Ecolab NL 4 BV, Ecolab Name Holding Limited, Ecolab New Zealand, Ecolab Peru Holdings S.R.L., Ecolab Pest Deutschland GmbH, Ecolab Philippines Inc., Ecolab Production Belgium B.V.B.A., Ecolab Production France SAS, Ecolab Production Italy Srl, Ecolab Production LLC, Ecolab Production Netherlands B.V., Ecolab Production Poland sp. z o.o., Ecolab Pte. Ltd., Ecolab Pty Ltd., Ecolab Quimica Ltda., Ecolab S. de R.L. de C.V., Ecolab S.A., Ecolab S.A. de C.V., Ecolab SAS, Ecolab SIA, Ecolab SNC, Ecolab SRL, Ecolab Sdn Bhd, Ecolab Services Argentina S.R.L., Ecolab Services Poland Sp. z o o, Ecolab Sociedad Anonima, Ecolab Sp. z o o, Ecolab Spain Services S.L.U., Ecolab Temizleme Sistemleri Limited Sirketi, Ecolab U.S. 2 Inc., Ecolab U.S. 6 LLC, Ecolab U.S. 7 LLC, Ecolab US 1 GP, Ecolab USA Inc., Ecolab Viet Nam Company Limited, Ecolab Water Holding LImited, Ecolab a.s., Ecolab d.o.o., Ecolab s.r.l., Ecolab s.r.o., Ecolab y Compania Colectiva de Responsabilidad Limitada, Ecolab-Importacao E. Exportacao Limitada, Ecolabone B.V., Ecolabtwo B.V., Endoclear Equipamentos Medicos Hospitalares Ltda., Enviroflo Engineering Limited, Food Protection Services, GCS Service, Gallay Medical & Scientific Pty Ltd, Gallay Medical & Scientific Pty Ltd., GallayTrac Pty. Ltd., Georgia-Pacific - Paper Chemicals Business, Gibson Chemical Industries, Green Harbour Mainland Holdings Ltd, Guangzhou Green Harbour Environmental Operation Ltd., HYDROSAN LIMITED, Henkel-Ecolab, Hicopla SL, Holchem Laboratories, Huntington Laboratories, Hydenet SAS, INDUSTRIAL) UNIPESSOAL LDA, INTERNATIONAL WATER CONSULTANT B.V., Immobiliare R.E.O.P.A. SRL, Instrunet Hospital SLU, Jianghai Environmental Protection Co., Jianghai Environmental Protection Co. Ltd., KATAYAMA NALCO INC., Kay BVBA, Kay Chemical Company, LHS (UK) Limited, Laboratoires Anios, Laboratoires Anios-Distribution SAS, Les Produits Chimiques ERPAC Inc., Lobster Ink, Lobster Ink Africa (Pty.) Ltd., Lobster International S.A., London & General Packaging Ltd, MALAYSIA SDN. BHD, MANUFACTURING S.R.L., MOBOTEC AB LLC, Master Chemicals OOO, Meratech Rus Group LLC, Microtek Dominicana S.A., Microtek Italy S.R.L., Microtek Medical B.V., Microtek Medical Europe Limited, Microtek Medical Holdings, Microtek Medical Holdings Inc., Microtek Medical Inc., Microtek Medical Malta Holding Limited, Microtek Medical Malta Limited, Midland Research Laboratories, Midland Research Laboratories UK Limited, NALCO (SHANGHAI) TRADING CO. LTD., NALCO AB, NALCO ACQUISITION ONE, NALCO ACQUISITION TWO LIMITED, NALCO AFRICA (PTY.) LTD., NALCO ASIA HOLDING COMPANY PTE. LTD., NALCO BELGIUM BVBA, NALCO CHINA HOLDINGS LLC, NALCO COMPANY OOO, NALCO DANMARK APS, NALCO DE MEXICO S. de R. L. de C.V., NALCO DELAWARE COMPANY, NALCO DEUTSCHLAND GMBH, NALCO DEUTSCHLAND MANUFACTURING GMBH UND CO. KG, NALCO DUTCH HOLDINGS B.V., NALCO EGYPT LTD., NALCO EGYPT TRADING, NALCO ESPANOLA MANUFACTURING S.L.U., NALCO ESPANOLA S.L., NALCO EUROPE B.V., NALCO FINLAND MANUFACTURING OY, NALCO FINLAND OY, NALCO FRANCE, NALCO FRANCE SNC, NALCO GLOBAL HOLDINGS B.V., NALCO GLOBAL HOLDINGS LLC, NALCO HOLDING B.V., NALCO HOLDING COMPANY, NALCO HOLDINGS G.m.b.H., NALCO HOLDINGS UK LIMITED, NALCO HONG KONG LIMITED, NALCO INDUSTRIAL OUTSOURCING COMPANY, NALCO INDUSTRIAL SERVICES, NALCO INDUSTRIAL SERVICES (NANJING) CO. LTD., NALCO INDUSTRIAL SERVICES (SUZHOU) CO. LTD., NALCO INDUSTRIAL SERVICES (THAILAND) CO. LTD., NALCO INDUSTRIAL SERVICES CHILE LIMITADA, NALCO INTERNATIONAL HOLDINGS B.V., NALCO INTERNATIONAL HOLDINGS LLC, NALCO INVESTMENTS U.K. LIMITED, NALCO ISRAEL INDUSTRIAL SERVICES LTD, NALCO ITALIANA, NALCO ITALIANA HOLDINGS S.R.L., NALCO ITALIANA SrL, NALCO KOREA LIMITED, NALCO LIMITED, NALCO LUXEMBOURG HOLDINGS SARL, NALCO MANUFACTURING BETEILIGUNGS GMBH, NALCO MANUFACTURING LTD., NALCO NETHERLANDS B.V., NALCO NORTH AFRICA LIMITED, NALCO OSTERREICH Ges m.b.H., NALCO OVERSEAS HOLDING B.V., NALCO PAKISTAN (PRIVATE) LIMITED, NALCO PHILIPPINES INC., NALCO PORTUGUESA (QUIMICA, NALCO PWS INC., NALCO SAUDI CO. LTD., NALCO TAIWAN CO. LTD., NALCO TWO INC., NALCO U.S. HOLDINGS LLC, NALCO UNIVERSAL HOLDINGS BV, NALCO WORLDWIDE HOLDINGS LLC, NALCO ZAO, NALFLOC LIMITED, NALTECH INC., NANOSPECIALTIES LLC, NLC PROCESS AND WATER SERVICES SARL, Nalco (BN) SDN BHD, Nalco (China) Environmental Solution Co. Ltd., Nalco Anadolu Kimya Sanayi ve Ticaret Limited Sirketi, Nalco Canada ULC, Nalco Company LLC, Nalco Contract Operations LLC, Nalco Grundbesitz GmbH & Co. KG, Nalco Gulf Response Corp., Nalco Japan G.K., Nalco Libya, Nalco Middle East FZE, Nalco Polska Sp. z o. o., Nalco Production LLC, Nalco Real Estate GmbH, Nalco Schweiz GmbH, Nalco US 1 LLC, Nalco Wastewater Contract Operations Inc., Nalco Water India Limited, Nalco Water Pretreatment Solutions LLC, Nalco Worldwide Holdings S.a.r.l./B.V., Nigiko, Nuova Farmec S.r.l., Oksa Kimya Sanayi A.S., Oy Ecolab AB, PT Ecolab International Indonesia, PT Ecolab Technologies and Services, Purate business - AkzoNobel, Quantum Technical Services LLC, Quimicas Ecolab S.A. de C.V., Quimiproductos S.A. de C.V, RP Adam Ltd, Research Fumigation Co., Royal Pest Solutions, Shield Holdings Limited, Shield Medicare Limited, Shield Salvage Associates Limited, Soluscope International Trading (Shanghai) Co. Ltd., Soluscope SAS, Swisher Hygiene, Technical Textile Services Limited, Techtex Holdings Limited, Terminix, Ultrafab, Wabasha Leasing LLC, and vanBaerle Hygiene AG.
The following companies are subsidiares of Eli Lilly and: 1096401 B.C. Unlimited Liability Company, ARMO BioSciences Inc, ARMO Bioscience, Advanced Cardiovascular Systems, Alnara Pharmaceuticals, Alnara Pharmaceuticals Inc., Andean Technical Operations Center, Applied Molecular Evolution Inc., AurKa Pharma, Avid Radiopharmaceuticals, Avid Radiopharmaceuticals Inc., ChemGen, CoLucid Pharmaceuticals, CoLucid Pharmaceuticals Inc., Dermira, Devices for Vascular Intervention(DVI), Disarm Therapeutics, Dista Ilac Ticaret Ltd. Sti., Dista S.A., Dista-Produtos Quimicos & Farmaceuticos LDA, ELCO Dominicana SRL, ELCO Insurance Company Limited, ELCO Management Inc., ELCO for Trade and Marketing S.A.E., ELGO Insurance Company Limited, Elanco Animal Health Ireland Limited, Elanco Switzerland Holding Sarl, Eli Lilly (Malaysia) Sdn. Bhd., Eli Lilly (Philippines) Incorporated, Eli Lilly (S.A.) (Proprietary) Limited, Eli Lilly (Singapore) Pte. Ltd., Eli Lilly (Suisse) S.A., Eli Lilly Asia Inc., Eli Lilly Asia Pacific SSC Sdn Bhd, Eli Lilly Australia Pty. Limited, Eli Lilly B-H d.o.o., Eli Lilly Benelux S.A., Eli Lilly Bienes y Servicios S de RL de CV, Eli Lilly CR s.r.o., Eli Lilly Canada Inc., Eli Lilly Cork Limited, Eli Lilly Danmark A/S, Eli Lilly Egypt for Trading, Eli Lilly European Clinical Trial Services SA, Eli Lilly Export S.A., Eli Lilly Finance S.A., Eli Lilly Ges.m.b.H., Eli Lilly Group Limited, Eli Lilly Holdings Ltd., Eli Lilly Hrvatska d.o.o., Eli Lilly Interamerica Inc., Eli Lilly Interamerica Inc. y Compania Limitada, Eli Lilly International Corporation, Eli Lilly Ireland Holdings Limited, Eli Lilly Israel Ltd., Eli Lilly Italia S.p.A., Eli Lilly Japan K.K., Eli Lilly Kinsale Limited, Eli Lilly Nederland B.V., Eli Lilly Nigeria Ltd., Eli Lilly Norge A.S., Eli Lilly Pakistan (Pvt.) Ltd., Eli Lilly Polska Sp.z.o.o. (Ltd.), Eli Lilly Regional Operations GmbH, Eli Lilly Romania SRL, Eli Lilly S.A., Eli Lilly Saudi Arabia Limited, Eli Lilly Services Inc, Eli Lilly Services India Private Limited, Eli Lilly Slovakia s.r.o., Eli Lilly Sweden AB, Eli Lilly Vostok S.A. Geneva, Eli Lilly and Company, Eli Lilly and Company (India) Pvt. Ltd., Eli Lilly and Company (Ireland) Limited, Eli Lilly and Company (N.Z.) Limited, Eli Lilly and Company (Taiwan) Inc., Eli Lilly and Company Limited, Eli Lilly de Centro America S.A., Eli Lilly do Brasil Limitada, Eli Lilly farmacevtska druzba d.o.o., Eli Lilly y Compania de Mexico S.A. de C.V., Eli Lilly y Compania de Venezuela S.A., Glycostasis Inc, Greenfield-Produtos Farmaceuticos Lda., Heart Rhythm Technologies Inc, Hybritech, Hypnion, ICOS Corporation, ImClone GmbH, ImClone LLC, ImClone Systems Holdings Inc., ImClone Systems LLC, Imclone Systems, Irisfarma S.A., Ivy Animal Health, Kinsale Financial Services Unlimited Company, Lilly (Shanghai) Management Co. Ltd, Lilly Asia Ventures Fund I L.P., Lilly Asia Ventures Fund II L.P., Lilly Asian Ventures Fund III L.P., Lilly Cayman Holdings, Lilly China Research and Development Co. Ltd., Lilly Deutschland GmbH, Lilly France S.A.S., Lilly Global Nederland Holdings B.V., Lilly Global Services Inc., Lilly Holding GmbH, Lilly Holdings B.V., Lilly Hungaria KFT, Lilly Japan Financing G.K., Lilly Korea Ltd., Lilly Nederland Finance B.V., Lilly Nederland Finance B.V. - GCC, Lilly Nederland Holding B.V., Lilly Pharma Ltd., Lilly Portugal - Produtos Farmaceuticos Lda., Lilly S.A., Lilly Suzhou Pharmaceutical Co. Ltd., Lilly Trading Co. LTD, Lilly USA LLC, Lilly Ventures Fund I LLC, Lilly del Caribe Inc., Lilly ilac ticaret limited sirketi, Lohmann Animal Health, Loxo Oncology, Lylly Centre for Clinical Pharmacology PTE. LTD., Novartis Animal Health, OY Eli Lilly Finland AB, Origin Medsystems, PT. Eli Lilly Indonesia, Pacific Biotech, Pharmaserve-Lilly S.A.C.I., Physio-Control, SGX Pharmaceuticals, SGX Pharmaceuticals Inc, Spaly Bioquimica S.A., UAB Eli Lilly Lietuva, Valquifarma S.A., and Vital Pharma Productos Farmaceuticos.
There is not enough analysis data for Firestone Diamonds.

5.0 Community Rank

Outperform Votes Firestone Diamonds has received 291 outperform votes. (Add your outperform vote.)

Underperform Votes Firestone Diamonds has received 74 underperform votes. (Add your underperform vote.)

Community Sentiment Firestone Diamonds has received 79.73% outperform votes from our community.

MarketBeat's community ratings are surveys of what our community members think about Firestone Diamonds and other stocks. Vote Outperform if you believe FDI will outperform the S&P 500 over the long term. Vote Underperform if you believe FDI will underperform the S&P 500 over the long term. You may vote once every thirty days.

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There is not enough analysis data for Hertz Global.

4.3 Community Rank

Outperform Votes Hertz Global has received 516 outperform votes. (Add your outperform vote.)

Underperform Votes Hertz Global has received 279 underperform votes. (Add your underperform vote.)

Community Sentiment Hertz Global has received 64.91% outperform votes from our community.

MarketBeat's community ratings are surveys of what our community members think about Hertz Global and other stocks. Vote Outperform if you believe HTZ will outperform the S&P 500 over the long term. Vote Underperform if you believe HTZ will underperform the S&P 500 over the long term. You may vote once every thirty days.

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Baker Hughes, a GE company provides integrated oilfield products, services, and digital solutions worldwide. Its Oilfield Services segment offers drilling, wireline, evaluation, completion, production, and intervention services; and drilling and completions fluids, completions tools and systems, wellbore intervention tools and services, artificial lift systems, pressure pumping systems, and oilfield and industrial chemicals for integrated oil and natural gas, and oilfield service companies. The company's Oilfield Equipment segment designs and manufactures products and services, including pressure control equipment and services, subsea production systems and services, drilling equipment, and flexible pipeline systems; and onshore and offshore drilling and production systems, and equipment for floating production platforms, as well as provides a range of services related to onshore and offshore drilling activities. Its Turbomachinery & Process Solutions segment provides equipment and related services for mechanical-drive, compression, and power-generation applications across the oil and gas industry, as well as products and services to serve the downstream segments of industry. Its product portfolio includes drivers, compressors, and turnkey solutions; and pumps, valves, and compressed natural gas and small-scale liquefied natural gas solutions. This segment serves upstream, midstream, onshore and offshore, industrial, engineering, procurement, and construction companies. The company's Digital Solutions segment provides sensor-based measurement, non-destructive testing and inspection, turbine, generator and plant controls, and condition monitoring, as well as pipeline integrity solutions for a range of industries, including oil and gas, power generation, aerospace, metals, and transportation. It serves through direct and indirect channels. The company is based in Houston, Texas. Baker Hughes, a GE company is a subsidiary of General Electric Company.

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The following companies are subsidiares of Illinois Tool Works: A V Co 1 Limited, A V Co 2 Limited, A V Co 3 Limited, ACCU-LUBE Manufacturing GmbH - Schmiermittel und -gerate -, AIP/BI Holdings Inc., Accessories Marketing Holding Corp., Advanced Molding Company Inc., Allen Coding GmbH, Allen France SAS, Alpine Automation Limited, Alpine Engineered Products, Alpine Holdings Inc., Alpine Systems Corporation, Anaerobicos S.r.l., AppliChem GmbH, Arylux Hungary Elektromechanikus Alkatreszgyarto Kft, Avery Berkel France, Avery India Limited, Avery Malaysia Sdn Bhd, Avery Weigh Tronix, Avery Weigh-Tronix (Suzhou) Weighing Technology Co. Ltd., Avery Weigh-Tronix Finance Limited, Avery Weigh-Tronix Holdings Limited, Avery Weigh-Tronix International Limited, Avery Weigh-Tronix LLC, Avery Weigh-Tronix Limited, Avery Weigh-Tronix Properties Limited, Azon Limited, B.C. Immo, Beijing Miller Electric Manufacturing Co. Ltd., Berkel (Ireland) Limited, Berrington UK, Brapenta Eletronica Ltda., Brooks Instrument (Shanghai) Co. Ltd, Brooks Instrument B.V., Brooks Instrument GmbH, Brooks Instrument KFT, Brooks Instrument Korea Ltd., Brooks Instrument LLC, Buell Industries Inc., CAPMAX Logistica S.A. de C.V., CCI Realty Company, CFC Europe GmbH, CS (Australia) Pty Limited, CS (Finance) Europe S.a.r.l., CS Mexico Holding Company S DE RL DE CV, CSMTS LLC, Calvia Spolka z Ograniczona Odpowiedzialnosci, Capital Ventures (Australasia) S.a r.l, Capmax Logistica S.A. de C.V., Celeste Industries Corporation, Coeur, Coeur (Shanghai) Medical Appliance Trading Co. Ltd, Coeur Asia Limited, Coeur Holding Company, Coeur Inc., Compagnie Hobart, Compagnie de Materiel et d'Equipements Techniques-Comet, Constructions Isothermiques Bontami C.I.B., Crane Carrier Company, Despatch Industries, Diagraph Corporation Sdn. Bhd, Diagraph ITW Mexico S. de R.L. De C.V., Diagraph Mexico S.A. DE C.V., Dongguan Ark-Les Electric Components Co. Ltd., Dongguan CK Branding Co. Ltd., Dorbyl U.K. (Holdings) Limited, Duo Fast de Espana S.A.U., Duo-Fast Korea Co. Ltd., Duo-Fast LLC, E.C.S. d.o.o., ECS Cable Protection Sp. Zoo, ELRO (Holding) AG, ELRO Grosskuchen GmbH, ELRO-WERKE AG, Elga Skandinavian AS, Elro Group, Eltex-Elektrostatik-Gesellschaft mit beschrankter Haftung, Envases Multipac S.A. de C.V., Eurotec Srl, FEG Investments L.L.C., Fasver, Filtertek, Filtertek De Mexico Holding Inc., Filtertek De Mexico S.A. de C.V., GC Financement SA, Gamko B.V., Gun Hwa Platech (Taicang) Co. Ltd., HOBART Gesellschaft mit beschrankter Haftung, Hartness International, Hobart (Japan) K.K., Hobart Andina S.A.S., Hobart Brothers International Chile Limitada, Hobart Brothers LLC, Hobart Dayton Mexicana S. de R.L. de C.V., Hobart Food Equipment Co. Ltd., Hobart Foster Belgium, Hobart International (Singapore) Pte. Ltd., Hobart Korea LLC, Hobart LLC, Hobart Nederland B.V., Hobart Sales & Service Inc., Hobart Scandinavia ApS, Hobart Techniek B.V., Horis, ILC Investments Holdings Inc., ITW (China) Investment Company Limited, ITW (Deutschland) GmbH, ITW (EU) Holdings Ltd., ITW (European) Finance Co. Ltd., ITW (European) Finance II Co. Ltd., ITW (European) Finance III Co. Ltd., ITW (Ningbo) Components & Fastenings Systems Co. Ltd., ITW AEP LLC, ITW AOC LLC, ITW Aircraft Investments Inc., ITW Alpha Sarl, ITW Ampang Industries Philippines Inc., ITW Appliance Components EOOD, ITW Appliance Components S.A. de C.V., ITW Appliance Components S.r.l.a, ITW Appliance Components d.o.o., ITW Australia Holdings Pty Ltd, ITW Australia Property Holdings Pty Ltd., ITW Australia Pty Ltd, ITW Automotive Components (Chongqing) Co. Ltd., ITW Automotive Components (Langfang) Co. Ltd., ITW Automotive Japan K.K., ITW Automotive Korea LLC, ITW Automotive Parts (Shanghai) Co. Ltd, ITW Automotive Products GmbH, ITW Automotive Products Mexico S. de R.L. de C.V., ITW Bailly Comte, ITW Befestigungssysteme GmbH, ITW Belgium, ITW Brazilian Nominee L.L.C., ITW Building Components Group Inc., ITW CER, ITW CP Distribution Center Holland BV, ITW CS (UK) Ltd., ITW Canada Inc., ITW Celeste Inc., ITW Chemical Products Ltda, ITW Chemical Products Scandinavia ApS, ITW Colombia S.A.S., ITW Construction Products (Shanghai) Co. Ltd., ITW Construction Products (Singapore) Pte. Ltd., ITW Construction Products AB, ITW Construction Products AS, ITW Construction Products ApS, ITW Construction Products CZ s.r.o., ITW Construction Products Italy Srl, ITW Construction Products OU, ITW Construction Products OY, ITW Contamination Control (Wujiang) Co. Ltd., ITW Contamination Control B.V., ITW Covid Security Group Inc., ITW DS Investments Inc., ITW DelFast do Brasil Ltda., ITW Delta Sarl, ITW Denmark ApS, ITW Dynatec, ITW Dynatec Adhesive Equipment (Suzhou) Co. Ltd., ITW Dynatec GmbH, ITW Dynatec Kabushiki Kaisha, ITW EAE B.V., ITW EAE Mexico S de RL de CV, ITW EF&C France SAS, ITW EF&C Selb GmbH, ITW Electronic Business Asia Co. Limited, ITW Electronic Components/Products (Shanghai) Co. Ltd., ITW Electronics (Suzhou) Co. Ltd., ITW Epsilon Sarl, ITW Espana S.A., ITW FEG Hong Kong Limited, ITW FEG do Brasil Industria e Comercio Ltda., ITW Fastener Products GmbH, ITW Finance Designated Activity Company, ITW Finance Europe S.A., ITW Fluids and Hygiene Solutions Ltda., ITW Food Equipment Group LLC, ITW France Finance Alpha S.A.S., ITW GH LLC, ITW GSE ApS, ITW GSE Inc., ITW Gamma Sarl, ITW German Management LLC, ITW Global Investments Holdings LLC, ITW Global Investments Holdings Y Compania Sociedad en Comandita por Acciones, ITW Global Investments II Inc., ITW Global Investments Inc., ITW Global Tire Repair Europe GmbH, ITW Global Tire Repair Inc., ITW Global Tire Repair Japan K.K., ITW Graphics (Thailand) Ltd., ITW Graphics Asia Limited, ITW Graphics Italy S.R.L. in liquidazione, ITW Great Britain Investment & Licensing Holding Company, ITW Group France (Luxembourg) S.ar.l., ITW HLP Thailand Co. Ltd., ITW Holding Quimica B.C. S.L. Sole Shareholder Company, ITW Holdings Australia L.P., ITW Holdings I Limited, ITW Holdings II Limited, ITW Holdings III Limited, ITW Holdings IV Limited, ITW Holdings IX Limited, ITW Holdings Inc., ITW Holdings UK, ITW Holdings V Limited, ITW Holdings VI Limited, ITW Holdings VII Limited, ITW Holdings VIII Limited, ITW Holdings X Limited, ITW Holdings XI Limited, ITW Hungary Finance Beta Kft, ITW ILC Holdings I Inc., ITW IPG Investments LLC, ITW Imaden Industria e Comercio Ltda., ITW India Private Limited, ITW International Holdings LLC, ITW Invest Holding GmbH, ITW Ireland Holdings Unlimited Company, ITW Ireland Unlimited Company, ITW Italy Finance Srl, ITW Italy Holding Srl, ITW Japan Ltd., ITW Korea LLC, ITW LLC & Co. KG, ITW Limited, ITW Lombard Holdings Inc., ITW Lys Fusion S.r.l., ITW M FILMS II LLC, ITW MH LLC, ITW Meritex Sdn. Bhd., ITW Metal Fasteners S.L., ITW Mexico Holding Company S. De R.L. de C.V., ITW Mexico Holdings LLC, ITW Morlock GmbH, ITW Mortgage Investments II Inc., ITW Mortgage Investments III Inc., ITW Mortgage Investments IV Inc., ITW Netherlands Administration BV, ITW Netherlands Beta B.V., ITW Netherlands Finance Alpha BV, ITW New Universal LLC, ITW New Zealand, ITW Novadan Sp. Z.o.o., ITW PPF Brasil Adesivos Ltda., ITW Packaging Technology (China) Co. Ltd., ITW Participations S.a r.l., ITW Pension Funds Trustee Company, ITW Performance Plastic (Shanghai) Co. Ltd., ITW Performance Polymers & Fluids Japan Co. Ltd., ITW Performance Polymers & Fluids Korea Limited, ITW Performance Polymers & Fluids OOO, ITW Performance Polymers (Wujiang) Co. Ltd., ITW Performance Polymers ApS, ITW Performance Polymers and Fluids Group FZE, ITW Peru S.A.C., ITW Philippines Holdings LLC, ITW Poly Mex S. de R.L. de C.V., ITW Polymers Sealants North America Inc., ITW Pronovia s.r.o., ITW Pte. Ltd., ITW Qufu Automotive Cooling Systems Co. Ltd., ITW Real Estate Germany GmbH, ITW Residuals III L.L.C., ITW Residuals IV L.L.C., ITW Rivex, ITW SMPI, ITW SPG Mexico S. de R.L. de C.V., ITW Simco-Ion (Shenzhen) Co. Ltd., ITW Slovakia s.r.o., ITW Spain Holdings S.L., ITW Specialty Film LLC, ITW Specialty Films France, ITW Specialty Materials (Suzhou) Co. Ltd., ITW Spraytec, ITW Sverige AB, ITW Sweden Holding AB, ITW Test & Measurement Equipment (Shanghai) Co. Ltd, ITW Test & Measurement GmbH, ITW Test and Measurement Italia Srl, ITW Test and Measurement Services Industry and Trade Ltd., ITW Texwipe Philippines Inc., ITW Thermal Films (Shanghai) Co. Ltd., ITW UK, ITW UK Finance Beta Limited, ITW UK Finance Delta Limited, ITW UK Finance Gamma Limited, ITW UK Finance Limited, ITW UK Finance Zeta Ltd., ITW UK II Limited, ITW Universal II LLC, ITW Welding, ITW Welding AB, ITW Welding GmbH, ITW Welding Products B.V., ITW Welding Products Group FZE, ITW Welding Products Group S. DE R.L. De C.V., ITW Welding Products Italy Srl, ITW Welding Products Limited Liability Company, ITW Welding Produtos Para Solgdagem Ltda., ITW Welding Servicios Mexico S. de R.L. de C.V., ITW Welding Singapore Pte. Ltd., ITW de France, ITW do Brasil Industrial e Comercial Ltda., Ideal Molding Technologies LLC, Illinois Tool Works (Chile) Limitada, Illinois Tool Works (ITW) Nederland B.V., Illinois Tool Works Norway AS, Impar Comercio E Representacoes Ltda., Industrie Plastic Elsasser GmbH, Inmobiliaria Cit. S.A. de C.F., Innova Temperlite Servicios S.A. de C.V., Innovacion y Transformacion Automotriz S.A. de C.V., Instron (Shanghai) Ltd., Instron (Thailand) Limited, Instron Brasil Equipamentos Cientificos Ltda., Instron Foreign Sales Corp. Limited, Instron France S.A.S., Instron GmbH, Instron Holdings Limited, Instron International Limited, Instron Japan Company Ltd., Instron Korea LLC, International Leasing Company LLC, International Truss Systems Proprietary Limited, Isolenge - ITW Sistemas de Isolamento Termico Ltda., KCPL Mauritius Holdings, Kester, Kester Components (M) Sdn. Bhd., Kleinmann GmbH, Krafft S.L., Loma Systems, Loma Systems (Canada) Inc., Loma Systems BV, Loma Systems sro, Lombard Pressings Limited, Lumex Inc., Lys Fusion Poland Sp. z.o.o., M&C Specialties (Shenzhen) Co. Ltd., M&C Specialties Co., MAGNAFLUX GmbH, MEHB Holdings Limited, MGHG Property LLC, MOA Enterprises Inc, Manufacturing Avancee S.A., Meritex Technology (Suzhou) Co. Ltd., Meurer Verpackungssysteme GmbH, Miller Electric Mfg. LLC, Miller Insurance Ltd., NDT Holding LLC, NOVADAN APS, Norden Olje AB, North Star Imaging Europe, North Star Imaging Inc., Nova Chimica S.r.l., Orbitalum Tools GmbH, PENTA-91 OOO, PR. A. I. Srl, PT ITW Construction Products Indonesia, Pacific Concept Industries Limited (Enping), Panreac Quimica S.L., Paslode Fasteners (Shanghai) Co. Ltd., Peerless Machinery Corp., Penta Dnepr LLC, Penta Sever OOO, Penta Volga OOO, Polyrey, Premark FEG L.L.C., Premark HII Holdings LLC, Premark International, Premark International LLC, Prolex Sociedad Anonima, QSA Global Inc., Quimica Industrial Mediterranea S.L., Ramset Fasteners (Hong Kong) Ltd., Rapid Cook LLC, Refrigeration France, S.E.E. Sistemas Industria E Comercio Ltda., ST Mexico Holdings LLC, Sealant Systems International Inc., Sentinel Asia Yuhan Hoesa, Shanghai ITW Plastic & Metal Co. Ltd, Simco (Nederland) B.V., Simco Japan Inc., Societe de Prospection et dInventions Techniques  SPIT, Speedline Holdings I Inc., Speedline Holdings I LLC, Speedline Technologies GmbH, Speedline Technologies Mexico S. de R.L. de C.V., Speedline Technologies Mexico Services S. de R.L. de C.V., Stokvis Celix Portugal Unipessoal LDA, Stokvis Danmark ApS, Stokvis Holdings S.A.R.L., Stokvis Promi s.r.o, Stokvis Prostick Tapes Private Limited, Stokvis Tapes (Hong Kong) Co. Limited, Stokvis Tapes (Shanghai) Co. Ltd., Stokvis Tapes (Shenzhen) Co. Ltd., Stokvis Tapes (Taiwan) Co. Ltd., Stokvis Tapes (Tianjin) Co. Ltd., Stokvis Tapes BVBA, Stokvis Tapes Benelux B.V., Stokvis Tapes Deutschland GmbH, Stokvis Tapes France, Stokvis Tapes Italia s.r.l., Stokvis Tapes Limited, Stokvis Tapes Limited Liability Company, Stokvis Tapes Norge AS, Stokvis Tapes Oy, Stokvis Tapes Polska Sp Z.O.O., Stokvis Tapes Sverige AB, Stolvis Holdings II S.A.R.L., Technopack Industria Comercio Consultoria e Representacoes Ltda., Teknek (China) Limited, Teknek (Japan) Limited, Teksaleco Ltd., The Miller Group Ltd, Thirode Grandes Cuisines Poligny, Tien Tai Electrode (Kunshan) Co. Ltd., Tien Tai Electrode Co. Ltd., Unichemicals Industria e Comercio Ltda., VR-Leasing Sarita GmbH & Co. Immobilien KG, VS European Holdco BV, Valeron Strength Films B.V.B.A., Veneta Decalcogomme S.r.l., Versachem Chile S.A., Vesta, Vesta (Guangzhou) Catering Equipment Co. Ltd, Vesta Global Limited, Viltronics Soltec, Vitronics Soltec B.V., Wachs Canada Ltd., Wachs Subsea LLC, Weigh-Tronix Canada ULC, Weigh-Tronix UK Limited, Wilsonart International Holdings LLC, Wynn Oil (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd., Wynn's Automotive France, Wynn's Belgium BVBA, Wynn's Italia Srl, Wynn's Mekuba India Pvt Ltd, ZF TRW (Engineered Fasteners and Components), and Zip-Pak International B.V..
Ellie Mae, Inc. provides cloud-based platform for the mortgage finance industry in the United States. It provides Encompass, an enterprise solution that engages in running the business of originating mortgages, including marketing and lead management; loan origination and processing; underwriting; preparation of mortgage applications, disclosure agreements, and closing documents; loan funding and closing; compliance with regulatory and investor requirements; and enterprise management. The company's Encompass Digital Lending Platform helps lenders and investors across their workflow from the prospective customers to the point of loan delivery. In addition, the company provides education and training services; professional and technical support services; and loan product, policy, and guideline data and analytics services. Ellie Mae, Inc. was founded in 1997 and is headquartered in Pleasanton, California.

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iShares MSCI France ETF's stock was trading at $25.23 on March 11th, 2020 when COVID-19 reached pandemic status according to the World Health Organization. Since then, EWQ stock has increased by 60.3% and is now trading at $40.45.

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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.

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Lilis Energy, Inc., an independent oil and natural gas company, engages in the acquisition, exploration, development, and production of conventional and unconventional oil and natural gas properties. Its total net acreage in the Delaware Basin is approximately 20,400 acres. The company's oil and natural gas properties are located in the Delaware Basin in Winkler, Loving, and Reeves counties, Texas; and Lea County, New Mexico. As of December 31, 2018, it had proved reserves of 42,707 million barrels of oil equivalent. The company was formerly known as Recovery Energy, Inc. and changed its name to Lilis Energy, Inc. in December 2013. Lilis Energy, Inc. was incorporated in 2007 and is headquartered in Fort Worth, Texas.

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The following companies are subsidiares of Mohawk Industries: A&S Energie NV, A&U Energie NV, Aladdin Manufacturing Corporation, Aladdin Manufacturing Of New York LLC, Aladdin Manufacturing of Alabama LLC, Alsace Logistique S.A., Avelgem Green Power CVBA, Avon Pacific Holdings Ltd, B&M NV, BGE Mexico S. de R. L. de C.V., Berghoef GmbH, Berghoef-Hout B.V., Bienes Raices y Materiales del Centro S. de R.L. de C.V., C.F. Marazzi S.A., Canterbury Spinners Ltd, Carpet Foundation Ltd, Cevotrans BV, Ceramus Bahia S/A  Produtos Ceramicos, DT Mex Holdings LLC, DTM/CM Holdings LLC, Dal Italia LLC, Dal-Elit LLC, Dal-Tile Chile Comercial Limitada, Dal-Tile Colombia S.A.S., Dal-Tile Distribution Inc., Dal-Tile Group Inc., Dal-Tile I LLC, Dal-Tile Industrias S. de R.L. de C.V., Dal-Tile International Inc., Dal-Tile Mexico Comercial S. de R.L. de C.V., Dal-Tile Mexico S. de R.L. de C.V., Dal-Tile Operaciones Mexico S. De R.L. De C.V., Dal-Tile Peru SRL, Dal-Tile Puerto Rico Inc., Dal-Tile Services Inc., Dal-Tile Shared Services Inc., Dal-Tile Tennessee LLC, Dal-Tile of Canada ULC, Daltile, Daltile, Dekaply NV, Durkan, Dynea NV, Eliane Argentina Sociedad Anonima, Eliane S/A - Revestimentos Ceramicos, Emilceramica India Pvt Ltd., Emilceramica S.r.l, Emilgermany GmbH, Emilgroup Asia Ltd, Explorer S.r.l., F.I.L.S. Investments Unlimited Company, Feltex Carpets Ltd, Feltex Carpets Pty Ltd, Feltex New Zealand Ltd, Fibremakers Australia Pty Ltd, Flooring Foundation Ltd, Flooring Industries Limited S.a r.l., Flooring XL B.V., Floorscape Limited, Godfrey Hirst & Co Pty Ltd, Godfrey Hirst (Singapore) Pte Ltd, Godfrey Hirst Australia Pty Ltd, Godfrey Hirst Group, Godfrey Hirst NZ Ltd, Hytherm (Ireland) Limited, IVC BVBA, IVC Far-East Trading (Shanghai) Co. Ltd., IVC France S.a r.l., IVC GROUP LIMITED, IVC Green Power NV, IVC Group, IVC Group GmbH, IVC Luxembourg S.a r.l., IVC Rus OOO, IVC US Inc., International Flooring Systems S.a r.l., International Vinyl Company - Vostok OOO, KAI Group, KAI Keramica Ltd, KAI Mining EOOD, KERAMA CENTER OOO, Kerama Baltics OOO, Kerama Export OOO, Kerama Marazzi OOO, Kerampromservis (LLC), Khan Asparuh - Transport EOOD, Khan Asparuh AD, Khan Omurtag AD, Koninklijke Peitsman B.V., Kraj Kerama OOO, MG China Trading Ltd., MI Finance SRL, MUD (Holding) Brazil Ltda., Management Co EAD, Marazzi Acquisition S.r.l., Marazzi Deutschland G.m.b.H., Marazzi France Trading S.A.S., Marazzi Group, Marazzi Group F.Z.E., Marazzi Group S.r.l., Marazzi Group Trading (Shanghai) Co. Ltd., Marazzi Iberia S.L.U., Marazzi Japan Co. Ltd., Marazzi Middle East FZ LLC, Marazzi Schweiz S.A.G.L., Marazzi UK Ltd., Mohawk Assurance Services Inc., Mohawk Australia Pty Ltd, Mohawk Canada Corporation, Mohawk Capital Finance S.A., Mohawk Capital Luxembourg SA, Mohawk Carpet Distribution Inc., Mohawk Carpet Foundation Inc., Mohawk Carpet LLC, Mohawk Carpet Transportation Of Georgia LLC, Mohawk Commercial Inc., Mohawk ESV Inc., Mohawk Europe BVBA, Mohawk Factoring II Inc., Mohawk Factoring LLC, Mohawk Finance S.a r.l., Mohawk Foreign Acquisitions S.a r.l., Mohawk Foreign Funding S.a.r.l, Mohawk Foreign Holdings S.a r.l., Mohawk Foreign Investments Inc., Mohawk Global Investments S.a r.l., Mohawk Holdings International B.V., Mohawk Industries Inc., Mohawk International (Europe) S.a r.l., Mohawk International (Hong Kong) Limited, Mohawk International Capital N.V., Mohawk International Financing S.a.r.l, Mohawk International Holdings (DE) LLC, Mohawk International Holdings S.a r.l., Mohawk International Luxembourg S.a r.l., Mohawk International Netherlands B.V., Mohawk International Services BVBA, Mohawk KAI Luxembourg Holding S.a r.l., Mohawk KAI Luxembourg S.a r.l., Mohawk Luxembourg Capital S.A., Mohawk Luxembourg Financing S.a r.l., Mohawk Luxembourg Holdings S.a r.l., Mohawk Luxembourg Investments S.a r.l., Mohawk Luxembourg Pacific S.a r.l., Mohawk Marazzi International BV, Mohawk Marazzi Russia BV, Mohawk New Zealand Limited, Mohawk Operaciones Mexicali S. de R.L. de C.V., Mohawk Operations Luxembourg S.a r.l., Mohawk Pacific Investments S.a r.l., Mohawk Resources LLC, Mohawk Servicing LLC, Mohawk Singapore Private Limited, Mohawk Trading (Shanghai) Co. Ltd, Mohawk Unilin Luxembourg S.a r.l., Mohawk United Finance B.V., Mohawk United International B.V., Mohawk Vinyl Financing S.a r.l., Molber Beheer B.V., Monarch Ceramic Tile Inc., P.F. Onroerend Goed B.V., PF Beheer B.V., Pergo, Pergo (Europe) AB, Pergo Holding BV, Pergo India Pvt Ltd, Polcolorit S.A., Premium Floors Australia Pty Limited, RR Apex LLC, Rata International Pty Ltd, Recubrimientos Interceramica S. de R.L. de C.V., Riverside Textiles Pty Ltd, S.C. KAI Ceramics SRL, Sibir Kerama OOO, SimpleSolutions USA LLC, Soft Step (Australia) Pty Ltd, Spano Group, Spano Invest BVBA, Spano NV, Stroyagromekhzapchast ChaO, Stroytrans OAO Orelstroy, Summit Wool Spinners Ltd, The Flooring Federation Ltd, Tiles Co OOD, Unilin (Malaysia) Sdn. Bhd., Unilin ApS, Unilin Arauco Pisos Ltda., Unilin BVBA, Unilin Beheer BV, Unilin Distribution Ltd., Unilin Distribution Ukraine LLC, Unilin Finland OY, Unilin Flooring India Private Limited, Unilin Flooring SAS, Unilin GmbH, Unilin Holding BVBA, Unilin Insulation BV, Unilin Insulation SAS, Unilin Insulation Sury SAS, Unilin Italia S.R.L., Unilin North America LLC, Unilin Norway AS, Unilin OOO, Unilin Panels SAS, Unilin Poland Sp.Z.o.o., Unilin SAS, Unilin Spain SL, Unilin Swiss GmbH, Unilin s.r.o., World International Inc., Xtratherm, Xtratherm Limited, Xtratherm S.A., and Xtratherm UK Limited.
National Bank of Canada provides various financial products and services to retail, commercial, corporate, and institutional clients in Canada and internationally. It operates through four segments: Personal and Commercial, Wealth Management, Financial Markets, and U.S. Specialty Finance and International. The Personal and Commercial segment offers personal banking services, including transaction solutions, mortgage loans and home equity lines of credit, consumer loans, payment solutions, savings and investment solutions; various insurance products; and commercial banking services, such as credit, and deposit and investment solutions, as well as international trade, foreign exchange transactions, payroll, cash management, insurance, electronic transactions, and complimentary services. The Wealth Management segment provides investment solutions, trust and estate services, banking services, lending services, guaranteed investment certificates, mutual funds, notes, structured products, and other wealth management solutions through internal and third-party distribution networks. The Financial Markets segment offers risk management products and services; and debt and equity underwriting; advisory services in the areas of mergers and acquisitions, and financing. The U.S. Specialty Finance and International segment provides specialty finance expertise; financial products and services to individuals and businesses in Cambodia; and the activities of targeted investments in certain emerging markets. The company also offers credit cards. It provides its services through a network of 483 branches and 1,573 banking machines. The company was founded in 1859 and is headquartered in Montreal, Canada.

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iShares Core MSCI Emerging Markets ETF's stock was trading at $44.90 on March 11th, 2020 when COVID-19 (Coronavirus) reached pandemic status according to the World Health Organization (WHO). Since then, IEMG shares have increased by 40.0% and is now trading at $62.88.

View which stocks have been most impacted by COVID-19.
The following companies are subsidiares of Quaker Chemical: AC Products Inc., Applied Surface Concepts Holdings Ltd. , Binol AB, Binol Biosafe OY, Commonwealth Oil Corporation, DA Stuart India Private Limited, DA Stuart Shanghai Co, ECLI Products LLC, EFHCO LLC, Engineered Custom Lubricants, Engineered Custom Lubricants GmbH, Epmar Corporation, G.W. Smith and Sons, GH Holdings Inc., GHG Lubricants Holdings Limited, GHGL London Ltd., GHI Asia Pacific Pte. Ltd., Global Houghton Ltd., Houghton (Shanghai) Specialty Industrial Fluids Co. Ltd, Houghton Argentina S.A., Houghton Asia Pacific Co. Limited, Houghton Australia Pty. Ltd., Houghton Benelux BV, Houghton CZ s.r.o, Houghton Canada Inc., Houghton Denmark AS, Houghton Deutschland GmbH, Houghton Europe BV, Houghton Holdings Limited, Houghton Iberica S.A. , Houghton International, Houghton International Inc., Houghton Italia S.p.A., Houghton Japan Co. Ltd., Houghton Kimya Sanayi AS, Houghton Magyarorszag Kft, Houghton Mexico S.A. de C.V., Houghton Oil (Malaysia) Sdn Bhd., Houghton Polska Sp. Zo.o., Houghton Romania S.R.L., Houghton S.A.S., Houghton Sverige AB, Houghton Taiwan Co. Limited, Houghton Technical Corp., Houghton Ukraine ToV, Houghton do Brazil Ltda., Houghton plc, Internationale Metall Impragnier GmbH, Lubricor Inc, Lubricor Inc., Lubricor Mexicana S.A. de C.V., Lubricor USA Inc., MIH Acquisition Company LLC, MX Systems International Ltd, Maldaner GmbH, NP Coil Dexter Industries, New Houghton Brazil Inc., Norman Hay Engineering Ltd., QH Chemical Limited, QH Europe BV, QH Holdings Limited, QH International Limited, Quaker (Thailand) Ltd., Quaker Australia Holdings Pty. Limited, Quaker Chemical (Australasia) Pty. Limited, Quaker Chemical (China) Co. Ltd., Quaker Chemical B.V., Quaker Chemical CV, Quaker Chemical Canada Holdings Inc., Quaker Chemical Canada Limited, Quaker Chemical Europe B.V., Quaker Chemical Holdings South Africa (Pty) Limited, Quaker Chemical India Private Limited, Quaker Chemical Industria e Comercio Ltda., Quaker Chemical Investment Management (Shanghai) Co. Ltd., Quaker Chemical Limited, Quaker Chemical MEA FZE, Quaker Chemical Operacoes Ltda., Quaker Chemical Participacoes Ltda., Quaker Chemical S.A., Quaker Chemical S.r.l., Quaker Chemical Services EURL, Quaker Chemical South Africa (Pty.) Limited, Quaker China Holdings B.V., Quaker Denmark ApS, Quaker Houghton (Finco) Ltd., Quaker Houghton Holdings Limited, Quaker Houghton Holdings Ltd., Quaker Houghton International LP, Quaker Houghton Ltd., Quaker International Holdings LLC, Quaker Italia S.r.l., Quaker Russia B.V., Quaker Sales Europe BV, Quaker Shanghai Trading Company Limited, Quaker Spain Holding SLU, Quaker Specialty Chemicals (UK) Limited, SB Decking Inc., SIFCO Applied Surface Concepts (UK) Ltd, SIFCO Applied Surface Concepts LLC, SIFCO Concepts Sarl, SIFCO Concepts Sweden, Sterr & Eder Industrieservice GmbH, Summit Lubricants Inc, Summit Lubricants Inc., Surface Technology (Coventry) Ltd, Surface Technology (Dalian) Co Ltd, Surface Technology (East Kilbride) Ltd., Surface Technology (Leeds) Ltd, Surface Technology Aberdeen Ltd, Surface Technology Australia, Surface Technology Holdings Ltd., TecniQuimia Mexicana, Tecniquimia Mexicana S.A. de C.V., Thai Houghton 1993 Co. Ltd., Ultraseal Asia Limited, Ultraseal Chongqing Limited, Ultraseal Germany GmbH, Ultraseal International Group Ltd, Ultraseal Machinery Dongguan Ltd, Ultraseal Shanghai Limited, Ultraseal USA Inc., Unitek Servicios De Asesoria Especializad S.A de C.V., Verkol S.A.U., Verkol SAU, Wallover Enterprises Inc., Wallover Oil Company Incorporated, Wallover Oil Hamilton Inc., and Wuhan Quaker Technology Co. Ltd.
The following companies are subsidiares of Teledyne Technologies: Alia Corporation Inc, Bolt Technology Corp, Bowtech Products, CARIS, CDL do Brasil Equipamentos e Servicos Submarinos Sociedade Empresaria Ltda., CETAC Technologies, DALSA, Demo Systems, Detcon Holdco Inc., Ensambles de Precision S.A. de C.V., Falcon Analytical, Frontline Test Equipment, GMI Group Holdings Limited, Hafmynd ehf, Hanson Research Corp, IST Oldham Instruments India Private Limited, Industrial Control Machines, Intelek, Intelek Limited, Intelek Pension Trustees Limited, Intelek Properties Limited, LeCroy (Beijing) Trading Co. Ltd., LeCroy Corporation, Lidar Aviation Services Inc., Maple Imaging LLC, Micralyne Inc, Ocean Design Ltda., Oldham Instrument (Shanghai) Co. Ltd., Oldham Simtronics SAS, Oldham-Winter GmbH, PDM Neptec, Reynolds Industries Limited, Rhombi Canada LP, Rhombi Holdings Limited, Rhombi Netherlands B.V., Rockwell Scientific Company, Simtronics AS, TDY Jersey Limited, Teledyne Advanced Pollution Instrumentation, Teledyne Australia Pty Ltd, Teledyne BlueView, Teledyne Bogatin Enterprises LLC, Teledyne Bowtech Limited, Teledyne Brown Engineering Inc., Teledyne C.M.L. Group Limited, Teledyne CARIS B.V., Teledyne CARIS Inc., Teledyne CARIS UK Ltd., Teledyne CARIS USA Inc., Teledyne CDL Inc., Teledyne CDL Limited, Teledyne Catalyst Enterprises Inc., Teledyne Computer Access Technology Corporation, Teledyne Controls LLC, Teledyne Cougar, Teledyne Czech s.r.o., Teledyne DALSA (Shanghai) Trading Co. Ltd., Teledyne DALSA Asia-Pacific Ltd., Teledyne DALSA B.V., Teledyne DALSA GmbH, Teledyne DALSA Inc., Teledyne DALSA Industrial Products Inc., Teledyne DALSA K.K., Teledyne DALSA Semiconductor Inc., Teledyne Dalsa, Teledyne Defense Electronics LLC, Teledyne Denmark A/S, Teledyne Detcon Inc., Teledyne Digital Imaging Inc., Teledyne Digital Imaging US Inc., Teledyne Energy Systems Inc., Teledyne Europe Holdings C.V., Teledyne France, Teledyne France SAS, Teledyne Gas Measurement Instruments Limited, Teledyne Gavia ehf., Teledyne Germany GmbH, Teledyne Hanson Research Inc., Teledyne ICM SA, Teledyne ICM SPRL, Teledyne Innovaciones Microelectronics S.L.U., Teledyne Instruments Inc., Teledyne Instruments Malaysia Sdn. Bhd., Teledyne Japan Corporation, Teledyne Korea Ltd., Teledyne Labtech Limited, Teledyne LeCroy AB, Teledyne LeCroy Delaware LLC, Teledyne LeCroy GmbH, Teledyne LeCroy Inc., Teledyne LeCroy India Trading Private Ltd., Teledyne LeCroy Japan Corporation, Teledyne LeCroy Korea Ltd., Teledyne LeCroy OakGate Inc., Teledyne LeCroy S.A.R.L., Teledyne LeCroy S.R.L., Teledyne LeCroy SA, Teledyne LeCroy Singapore Pte. Ltd., Teledyne Limited, Teledyne Micralyne Inc., Teledyne Monitor Labs, Teledyne Monitor Labs P.R. Inc., Teledyne Netherlands B.V., Teledyne ODI, Teledyne Optech Inc., Teledyne Paradise Datacom Limited, Teledyne RD Instruments, Teledyne RD Technologies (Shanghai) Co. Ltd., Teledyne RESON, Teledyne RESON A/S, Teledyne RESON B.V., Teledyne RESON GmbH, Teledyne RESON Holding B.V., Teledyne RESON Inc., Teledyne RESON Pte. Ltd., Teledyne RESON UK Limited, Teledyne RISI Inc., Teledyne Rad-icon Imaging Corp., Teledyne Redlake MASD LLC, Teledyne Reynolds Inc., Teledyne SG Brown Limited, Teledyne Scientific & Imaging LLC, Teledyne Scientific Imaging GmbH, Teledyne Scientific Imaging Limited, Teledyne Signal Processing Devices Sweden AB, Teledyne Singapore Private Limited, Teledyne TSS Limited, Teledyne Taiwan Company, Teledyne Technologies (Bermuda) Limited, Teledyne Technologies (Shanghai) Co. Ltd., Teledyne Technologies International Corp., Teledyne Technologies Israel Ltd., Teledyne Tekmar Company, Teledyne UK Limited, Teledyne VariSystems, Teledyne VariSystems Inc., Teledyne Wireless LLC, Teledyne e2v, Teledyne e2v (Beijing) Co. Ltd., Teledyne e2v (Overseas) Holdings Limited, Teledyne e2v Asia Pacific Limited, Teledyne e2v Limited, Teledyne e2v Semiconductors SAS, and The Oceanscience Group Ltd..
The following companies are subsidiares of Hewlett Packard Enterprise: 3Com International Inc., 3PAR Inc., Apogee, Aruba Networks Inc., Aruba Networks International Cayman, Aruba Networks International Limited, BlueData Software, Cloud Cruiser, Cloud Technology Partners, Cloud Technology Partners Inc., Compaq Computer (Mauritius), Compaq Trademark B.V., Cray, Cray Inc., EDS World Corporation (Far East) LLC, EYP Mission Critical Facilities Inc., H3C Holdings Limited, HP Enterprise Services Australia Pty Ltd, HP Financial Services (Australia) Pty Limited, HP Financial Services (Chile) Limitada, HP Financial Services (Japan) K.K., HP Financial Services Arrendamento Mercantil S.A., HP Financial Services Company (Korea), HP Financial Services International Holdings Company, HPE Government LLC, HPFS Global Holdings I LLC, HPFS Global Holdings II LLC, HPFS Rental S.R.L., Hangzhou H3C Technologies Co. Ltd, Hewlett Packard Caribe BV LLC, Hewlett Packard Colombia Ltda., Hewlett Packard Enterprise (China) Co. Ltd., Hewlett Packard Enterprise B.V., Hewlett Packard Enterprise B.V. Amstelveen Meyrin Branch, Hewlett Packard Enterprise Canada Co., Hewlett Packard Enterprise Canada Co. Hewlett Packard Enterprise Canada Cie, Hewlett Packard Enterprise Costa Rica Limitada, Hewlett Packard Enterprise GlobalSoft Private Limited, Hewlett Packard Enterprise India Private Limited, Hewlett Packard Enterprise Ireland Limited, Hewlett Packard Enterprise Luxembourg SCA, Hewlett Packard Enterprise Polska sp. z o.o., Hewlett Packard Pathfinder LLC, Hewlett Packard Taiwan Ltd., Hewlett-Packard (Israel) Ltd., Hewlett-Packard (M) Sdn. Bhd., Hewlett-Packard (Nigeria) Limited, Hewlett-Packard (Schweiz) GmbH, Hewlett-Packard (Tanzania) Limited, Hewlett-Packard (Thailand) Limited, Hewlett-Packard ApS, Hewlett-Packard Argentina S.R.L., Hewlett-Packard Asia Pacific Pte. Ltd., Hewlett-Packard Australia Pty Ltd, Hewlett-Packard Belgium SPRL/BVBA, Hewlett-Packard Bermuda Enterprises LLC, Hewlett-Packard Brasil Ltda., Hewlett-Packard Bulgaria EOOD, Hewlett-Packard Caribe B.V., Hewlett-Packard Caribe Y Andina B.V. LLC, Hewlett-Packard Chile Comercial Limitada, Hewlett-Packard Cyprus Ltd, Hewlett-Packard Ecuador Cia. Ltda., Hewlett-Packard Egypt Ltd., Hewlett-Packard Financial Services (India) Private Limited, Hewlett-Packard Financial Services Canada Company, Hewlett-Packard Financial Services Company, Hewlett-Packard France SAS, Hewlett-Packard G1 SPV (Cayman) Company, Hewlett-Packard Gesellschaft mbH, Hewlett-Packard Ghana Limited, Hewlett-Packard GmbH, Hewlett-Packard Guatemala Limitada, Hewlett-Packard HK SAR Ltd., Hewlett-Packard Hellas EPE, Hewlett-Packard Holdings Ltd., Hewlett-Packard International Bank Designated Activity Company, Hewlett-Packard International Bank Public Limited Company, Hewlett-Packard International Sarl, Hewlett-Packard Italiana S.r.l., Hewlett-Packard Japan Ltd., Hewlett-Packard Korea Ltd., Hewlett-Packard Leasing Limited, Hewlett-Packard Limited, Hewlett-Packard Luxembourg Enterprises LLC, Hewlett-Packard Macau Limited, Hewlett-Packard Manufacturing Ltd, Hewlett-Packard Marigalante Ltd., Hewlett-Packard Mexico S. de R.L. de C.V., Hewlett-Packard Middle East FZ-LLC, Hewlett-Packard Mocambique Limitada - Sociedada em Liquidacao, Hewlett-Packard Nederland B.V., Hewlett-Packard New Zealand, Hewlett-Packard Norge AS, Hewlett-Packard OY, Hewlett-Packard Operations Mexico S. de R.L. de C.V., Hewlett-Packard Peru S.R.L., Hewlett-Packard Philippines Corporation, Hewlett-Packard Portugal Lda., Hewlett-Packard SARL, Hewlett-Packard SIA, Hewlett-Packard Servicios Espana S.L., Hewlett-Packard Singapore (Sales) Pte. Ltd., Hewlett-Packard South Africa (Proprietary) Limited, Hewlett-Packard Sverige AB, Hewlett-Packard Technology Center Inc., Hewlett-Packard Teknoloji Cozumleri Limited Sirketi, Hewlett-Packard The Hague B.V., Hewlett-Packard Venezuela S.R.L., Hewlett-Packard Vision Limited, Hewlett-Packard d.o.o., Hewlett-Packard s.r.o., Limited Liability Company Hewlett Packard Enterprise, MapR Technologies, New H3C Technologies Co. Ltd., Niara Inc., Nimble Storage, Nimble Storage Inc., Nimble Storage Israel Ltd, Nimble Storage Japan GK, Nimble Storage UK Limited, Plexxi, RedPixie, SGI (Silicon Graphics), Sapphire Holding Co, Scytale, Shanghai Hewlett-Packard Co. Ltd., Silver Peak, SimpliVity, Sinope Holding B.V., Trilead, UAB ES Hague Lietuva, and Unis Huashan Technologies Co. Limited.
The following companies are subsidiares of Boston Scientific: 34 Biomedical Merger Corp., 9357-1867 Quebec Inc., Acurate Industria e Comercio Ltda., Advanced Bionics, Advanced Stent Technologies, American Medical Systems, American Medical Systems Europe B.V., Apama Medical, Apama Medical Inc., Asthmatx, Atritech, Augmenix, Augmenix Inc., Augmenix K.K., BSC International Medical Trading (Shanghai) Co. Ltd., BSC Medical Device Technology (Shanghai) Co. Ltd., BTG, BTG Australasia Pty Ltd, BTG Europe B.V., BTG IM Holdings Ltd., BTG International (Holdings) Limited, BTG International Asia Limited, BTG International Canada Inc., BTG International Germany GmbH, BTG International Healthcare Inc., BTG International Healthcare LLC, BTG International Healthcare Limited, BTG International Inc., BTG International Limited, BTG Limited, BTG Management Services Limited, BTG Medikal Limited Sirketi, Bard Electrophysiology, Barosense, Biocompatibles Inc., Biocompatibles International Limited, Biocompatibles UK Limited, Boston Scientific (Malaysia) Sdn. Bhd., Boston Scientific (South Africa) Proprietary Limited, Boston Scientific (Thailand) Ltd., Boston Scientific (UK) Limited, Boston Scientific AG, Boston Scientific Argentina S.A., Boston Scientific Asia Pacific Pte. Ltd., Boston Scientific Benelux NV, Boston Scientific Canada Limited, Boston Scientific Ceska republika s.r.o., Boston Scientific Chile SpA, Boston Scientific Colombia Limitada, Boston Scientific Comercial de Costa Rica BSCR S.R.L., Boston Scientific Far East B.V., Boston Scientific Gesellschaft m.b.H., Boston Scientific Group plc, Boston Scientific Hellas S.A., Boston Scientific Hong Kong Limited, Boston Scientific Iberica S.A., Boston Scientific India Private Limited, Boston Scientific International B.V., Boston Scientific International Finance Limited, Boston Scientific International S.A., Boston Scientific Israel Ltd., Boston Scientific Japan K.K., Boston Scientific Korea Co. Ltd., Boston Scientific Lebanon SAL, Boston Scientific Limited, Boston Scientific Ltd., Boston Scientific Medical Device, Boston Scientific Medical Device Limited, Boston Scientific Medizintechnik GmbH, Boston Scientific Middle East FZ-LLC, Boston Scientific Middle East SAL, Boston Scientific Nederland B.V., Boston Scientific Neuromodulation Corporation, Boston Scientific New Zealand Limited, Boston Scientific Nordic AB, Boston Scientific Peru S.A.C., Boston Scientific Philippines Inc., Boston Scientific Polska Sp. z o.o., Boston Scientific Portugal - Dispositivos Medicos Lda, Boston Scientific Pty Ltd, Boston Scientific Romania S.R.L., Boston Scientific S.A.S., Boston Scientific S.p.A., Boston Scientific Scimed, Boston Scientific Scimed Inc., Boston Scientific Services Private Limited, Boston Scientific TIP Gerecleri Limited Sirketi, Boston Scientific Technology & Engineering Services Private Limited, Boston Scientific Uruguay S.A., Boston Scientific Vietnam Company Limited, Boston Scientific de Costa Rica S.R.L., Boston Scientific de Mexico S.A. de C.V., Boston Scientific del Caribe Inc., Boston Scientific do Brasil Ltda., Bravo Bidco Limited, BridgePoint Medical, Cameron Health, Cardiac Pacemakers Inc., Cardiac Pathways Corp, Catheter Innovations, Claret Medical, Claret Medical Inc., Cosman Medical, Cosman Medical LLC, CryoCor, Cryterion Medical, Cryterion Medical Inc., Cryterion Medical Ireland Limited, EKOS LLC, EMcision, EMcision International Inc., EP Technologies, EP Technologies Inc., Electron Acquisition Corporation, EndoChoice, EndoChoice Holdings Inc., EndoChoice Inc., EndoChoice Innovation Center Ltd., EndoChoice Israel Ltd., Endotex, Enteric Medical Technologies, Galil Medical Inc., Galil Medical Ltd., Galil Medical UK Limited, Guidant, Guidant Delaware Holding Corporation, Guidant Europe NV, Guidant Puerto Rico B.V., Hong Kong Medtech Trading Limited, Intelect Medical, Millipede, Millipede Inc., NXT Merger Corp., Notebook Merger Sub Ltd., Novate Medical Limited, NxThera, NxThera Inc., PT Boston Scientific Indonesia, PneumRx GmbH, PneumRx LLC, PneumRx Liimited, Protherics Medicines Development B.V., Protherics Medicines Development Limited, Protherics UK Limited, Provensis Limited, RMI Acquisition Corp., Remon Medical Technologies, Rhythmia Medical, Robert S. Smith M.D. Inc., Roxwood Medical Inc., SNS Merger Corp, Sadra Medical, Sadra Medical Inc., Securus Medical Group, Securus Medical Group Inc., Special K Merger Corp., StarMedTec, Stream Enterprises LLC, Symetis, Symetis SA, Target Therapeutics, Target Therapeutics Inc., The LumenR Tissue Retractor System, Veniti, Veniti Inc., VertiFlex, Vertiflex Inc., Vessix Vascular, Xlumena, Zuma Investment Pty Ltd, iogyn, nVision Medical, and nVision Medical Corporation.
Invesco S&P 500 Equal Weight Consumer Staples ETF's stock was trading at $130.54 on March 11th, 2020 when COVID-19 reached pandemic status according to the World Health Organization (WHO). Since then, RHS shares have increased by 22.5% and is now trading at $159.9616.

View which stocks have been most impacted by COVID-19.
During his 7-week adventure, the White Russian Blue found his owner a new home and a new job, thanks to the help of strangers
Zalando SE operates as an online fashion and lifestyle retailer. It offers a range of products, including shoes, apparel, accessories, and beauty products for women, men, and children, as well as free delivery and returns services. The company also sells its products through its Zalando Lounge; and brick-and-mortar stores in Berlin, Frankfurt, Cologne, Leipzig, Hamburg, Hanover, MAnster, Stuttgart, Mannheim, and Ulm. It serves in Austria, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Luxemburg, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom. The company has a strategic partnership with Sephora SAS to create the online prestige beauty destination. Zalando SE was founded in 2008 and is headquartered in Berlin, Germany.

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Panasonic today, showcased its prowess in the Intelligent Home Appliances range comprising of refrigerator, washing machine and microwave oven, through an interactive masterclass. Panasonic, exclusively for the event, brought Indias very own food media specialist and food stylist, Chef Michael Swamy to exhibit his renowned culinary skills at the #PanasonicMasterclass. Discovering the secret of creating a happy combination of food which delights the taste buds, and is healthy to eat, Chef Michael prepared scrumptious dishes with zero oil and rejuvenating mocktails using Panasonics latest range of intelligent microwaves and refrigerators. The masterclass also showcased how Panasonic washing machines with stain master plus technology is adept at removing all common food stains from curry, gravy, ketchup and other sauces.

Mr Gaurav Minocha, Home Appliances Head, Panasonic India said, With the ever-changing lifestyle of people, the consumers are looking for solutions to make their life easier and more convenient. Panasonic has always been a frontrunner when it comes to innovation and technology. Our extensive research on consumer needs and behaviours help us identify gaps in consumer experience and focus on coming up with relevant solutions to address the gaps, by introducing intelligent appliances and home solutions such as refrigerator and washing machine.

Mr. Syed Alvi, Microwave and Small Appliances Head, Panasonic India said, People are tired of losing the battle between their waist line and ever demanding taste buds. They try different solutions and appliances to fill the gaps but end up spending more time, money, energy, and definitely consume more calories. With Panasonic microwave and small appliances range, we provide end-to-end kitchen solutions, which will not only help them to make their life easier, but also cook healthy with our technology and features such as Zero Oil.

Sharing his excitement at the Master Class, Chef Michael Swamy said, Everyone prefers wholesome eating without compromising on taste, but the key to healthy eating is low calorie and low cholesterol foods. Additionally, to combat some of todays most hazardous lifestyle diseases, it becomes even more imperative to adopt healthy cooking solutions which allow us to cook, bake and grill with zero oil, and retain the freshness & nutrients. It is important for consumers to select home appliances addressing these needs. The fact that today people can use Panasonic intelligent home appliances to cook healthy and quick meals, and packed with features that preserve freshness and nutrition for a long time.

It has been an absolute pleasure to conduct the Panasonic Masterclass, I was impressed by the emphasis laid on technology and innovation. I compliment the Panasonic team for their commitment to introduce, research based smart home appliances. he added.

The master class showcased the ability and zeal to develop technology thatll help users choose from an even wider range of Intelligent Home Appliances and features including Microwave, Refrigerator and Washing Machine.

Health & delight! All under one lid with Panasonic microwave and Zero Oil cooking

The thought of cooking without oil can be a little mind-bending, but with Panasonic Microwaves Zero Oil technology, delectable dishes with zero oil are now a guilt free reality. Breaking the common hearsay  zero oil cooking means boiled and bland food, the microwave range has a pre-programmed Zero Oil recipe menu including popular Indian & International recipes that are easy to make and delight the palate. Michael Swamy prepared lip-smacking warm chocolate mousse & grilled peach salad, hasselback potatoes and baked stuff chicken with salad during the masterclass, without using a single drop of ghee, oil or butter.

The microwave range promises to offer everyday convenience, with added advantages like 360 degree Heat Wrap for uniform cooking; Magic Grill for faster grill retaining moisture juices & nutrients; and Vapor Clean for hassle-free and easy cleaning. Available in various colours & design, and Stainless Steel, there is a Panasonic microwave to fit every Indian kitchen.

Redefine freshness and ensure efficiency with Panasonic Refrigerators

Ensuring ideal temperature and humidity control, Panasonics refrigerator vows to keep your food healthy, nutrient-rich and fresh. The range is equipped with an Intelligent invertor & ECONAVI technology that adjusts its operations as per the user household requirement, to ensure optimal cooling & energy savings. Equipped with AG Clean technology, it also helps retain freshness by removing 99.9% of bacteria. The range has been customized for Indian households, to offer the biggest vegetable case. The Surround Airflow cooling system allows airflow to softly wrap each of the food items and cool them evenly. Chef Michael prepared smoothies and a salad using the fresh ingredients stored in the refrigerator.

Fight stubborn stains and keep your clothes safe from bacteria with Panasonic Stain Master Plus Washing Machine

From working mothers, to stay-at-home moms and even singletons, everyone battles with dirty laundry and if they are additional food stains, it adds to the agony.

To help tackle a Womans worst enemy, dirt and concentrated curry & sauce stains, Panasonic introduced their Panasonic Stain Master Plus series. Powered by Active Foam Technology, the series uses Foam to remove stubborn stains such as Mud, Sweat, Sauce, Curries and difficult to clean areas like Cuffs & Collars, at a press of a button. Additionally, the bacteria elimination feature in Stain Master plus Models, soaks and washes clothes in hot detergent solution to eliminate common Bacteria like E-Coli & Staphylococcus for an extra hygienic wash. Panasonics team demonstrated the removal of 99.9% of bacteria from the clothes with help of a glow t-shirt experiment.

Make your kitchen smarter with Aicool Smart Trash Can.

Technuter.com News Service
The Province of Nova Scotia has signed on to play a leading role in the $38.5-million expansion and revitalization of the Dalhousie Arts Centre  a project partners say will pay cultural dividends well into the future.



Premier Stephen McNeil took the floor in the Centres Sir James Dunn Theatre Wednesday morning (Sept. 19) to announce his governments $10-million contribution to Dals Performing Arts Campaign.



"When you go beyond this province and you talk to people about Nova Scotia, they talk about our culture, they talk about performing arts, they talk about the musicians, said Premier McNeil.



Premier McNeil (right) with Minister of Labour and Advanced Education Labi Kousoulis (middle) and Performing Arts Campaign Chair Rob Steele.

"It is important that we as a government partner with Dalhousie and the private sector to ensure that we have world-class facilities, not only for our own sons and daughters but for the many, many children from around the world who choose Dalhousie, Nova Scotia and Atlantic Canada as the place for them to educate and discover who they are."



The Dalhousie Arts Centre is home to the Fountain School of Performing Arts and has played a pivotal role in supporting the sector in Atlantic Canada for nearly 50 years, both as a training ground for students and as a top performance hub for well-known touring artists from around the world. More than 150,000 people watch performances on its stages each year.



Expanding performing arts excellence



Dals campaign aims to build on that value with several marquee physical enhancements and additions to the nearly 50-year-old building.
When was the last time you looked at your bank account balance? According to a survey, over 60% of Americans check their balance at least once a week. This habit, if practiced the right way, can put you on the path to achieving your financial...
21st Annual Food & Wine Show

We like to think that our Food & Wine Show is the perfect kickoff to a celebratory season to come, and this year is certainly no exception. For one night, DLM Springboro transforms into the stage of a spectacular gustatory experience and its hard to believe that it started 21 years ago. We hope that each year, just like a fine wine, it keeps getting better and better.

At our Food & Wine Show, Thursday, Nov. 7, youll have the opportunity to taste wines from around the world and from some of the best producers, and talk to knowledgeable sommeliers all while sampling chef-driven food prepared by DLMs best. Its truly an evening that we take great pride in hosting and infusing with our passion.

A ticket to the Food & Wine Show includes an opportunity to taste from a selection of nearly 200 fine wines and beer with a bevy of hors doeuvres coming from our kitchen along with ample food stations. We promise you wont go hungry!
The massive 210mm of ground clearance provides a rugged stance and enables the Captur to manage harsh terrain without breaking a sweat.

Planning to buy the Renault Captur? Well now is the best time as the French automaker is offering benefits up to Rs 2 lakh on limited stock*. Interested? Check out the schemes here.

The Renault Captur stands out from its peers thanks to its curvaceous design, which gives it quite a European flair when compared to other boxy designs. The massive 210mm of ground clearance provides a rugged stance and enables the Captur to manage harsh terrain without breaking a sweat.

Complementing the Renault Capturs flamboyant styling is the plethora of personalisation options on offer, including various dual-tone finishes and roof wraps, and several class-leading features. Here are some of the prime features of the Renault Captur:

ErgoDesign seats: These seats are contoured to offer utmost comfort thanks to the quilted Ivory leather upholstery with contrast Gold Deco stitching. The high seating position and 210mm of ground clearance offer a commanding view of the road ahead! The drivers seat is also 6-way adjustable.

Innovative Lighting System (ILS): The Captur comes with full-frontal LED lighting  headlamps, fog lamps, cornering lamps, C-shaped Sapphire LED DRLs and unique Floating Indicators  Ripple effect LED tail lamps along with LED interior and ambient lighting.

Infinity Instrument cluster: It is easily one of the most distinctive elements of the Renault Captur. The cockpit inspired cluster offers easy-to-read analogue dials for the tachometer and the fuel gauge along with a digital speedometer at the centre.

R17 Crystal Cut Alloy Wheels: The Capturs dual-tone machined finish 17-inch wheels definitely make a style statement wherever it goes! And these wheels are shod with fatter 215/60 cross-section tyres that offer a brilliant ride quality.

Powering this compact SUV is Renaults proven 1.5-litre dCi diesel, which is rated at 110PS and 245Nm, mated to a slick-shifting 6-speed manual. The petrol version gets a refined 1.5-litre H4K engine that puts out 106PS and 142Nm, coupled to a 5-speed manual.

The Renault Capturs European styling, plethora of features and the massive discount make it the de facto choice for SUV buyers.

Don't miss:

*Benefits may vary across variants, year of manufacturing and location

Disclaimer: This article has not been edited by Deccan Chronicle and is taken from a syndicated feed. Photos: CarDekho.
In December last year, Flipkart had bought back ESOPs worth over USD 100 million from over 3,000 current and former employees of the company.

New Delhi: Walmart-backed Flipkart will offer its employees an opportunity to cash in on part of their stockholding in the company at USD 126-128 per share, according to an e-mail to staff.

The e-mail, which follows the USD 16-billion deal of Walmart to buy majority holding in the Indian e-commerce major, said eligible staff members will be allowed to liquidate part of their employee stock ownership plans (ESOPs) at USD 126-128 per unit. This would translate into a total sum of about USD 800 million (around Rs 5,755 crore).

In a recent filing to the US SEC, Walmart had said it has "reserved 11,947,026 company ordinary shares for issuance under the company option plans, of which options to purchase 6,242,271 company ordinary shares are outstanding as of the agreement date".

When contacted, a Flipkart spokesperson said the ESOP repurchase programme is part of its "continuing efforts to thank and reward our employees for their service".

"Flipkart has a strong culture of fairness and does acknowledge that employees are an invaluable asset. We take immense pride in being the employer of choice and believe in rewarding employees by making them partners in the organisation's success," the spokesperson said.

In December last year, Flipkart had bought back ESOPs worth over USD 100 million from over 3,000 current and former employees of the company as well as its other units like Myntra, Jabong and PhonePe.

The mega deal, which saw Walmart buying 77 per cent stake in Flipkart, was announced on May 10 this year.

With festive season around the corner in India, the e-commerce major is also gearing up to tap into newer users with the introduction of 'Cardless Credit' as a new payment option. This facility will enable millions of customers to get an instant credit line of up to Rs 60,000 to make purchases.

"This is aimed at millions of credit worthy yet underserved customers who the traditional banks are not able to serve / underwrite credit for," it said.

Stating that only an estimated 20 million people have a credit card, Flipkart said cardless credit is a step in the direction to make e-commerce more inclusive and help customers with small ticket credit line.
Hotel Leelaventure said the total interest outstanding as on date is Rs 13.80 crore.

New Delhi: Cash-strapped hospitality chain Hotel Leelaventure has defaulted in payment of quarterly interest of Rs 2.12 crore to Life Insurance Corporation of India (LIC).

Hotel Leelaventure, which currently has a debt of over Rs 3,600 crore, had issued secured redeemable non-convertible debentures (NCDs) on private placement basis aggregating to Rs 90 crore to LIC in December 2008.

"The company has defaulted in payment of quarterly interest of Rs 2.12 crore, which was due on September 19, 2018," Hotel Leelaventure said in a regulatory filing.

Hotel Leelaventure said its operating cash flows are not sufficient to service its term loans and NCDs and the funds of the company are escrowed with its lenders and are also monitored by the lenders.

"The company is evaluating various options for a viable restructuring, including sale/monetisation of non-core assets, sale of hotels, equity infusion and debt refinancing by investors, etc," it added.

Hotel Leelaventure said the total interest outstanding as on date is Rs 13.80 crore and principal redemption amount outstanding as on date is Rs 45 crore.

Earlier this month, Hotel Leelaventure got its shareholders approval to sell the company's land in Pune to Leela Lace Holdings Pvt Ltd for a consideration of Rs 130 crore.
New Delhi: RBI Governor Urjit Patel said on Thursday that preventive vigilance can be used as an effective tool of governance in public sector institutions, arguing that punitive vigilance may not yield the desired result.

Patel was speaking at a conference at the Central Vigilance Commission (CVC) here on 'Preventive Vigilance  The Key Tool of Good Governance at Public Sector Institutions'. Patel said 'preventive vigilance is aimed at reducing the occurrence of a lapse (violation of a law, a norm, or, broadly speaking, a governance requirement), while punitive vigilance seeks to deterring the occurrence of a lapse.

He said that punitive vigilance is difficult in a public sector institution for several reasons, adding the rewards are low to start with, thereby limiting the possibility of downward revisions. Given this constraint, Patel said disciplinary actions that limit the chances of career progression are often the preferred punishment.

"However, this has the misfortune of demotivating employees beyond the point of their career when punitive vigilance action is undertaken. This could, in principle, be dealt with a 'golden handshake'; however, the insurance that public sector jobs offer is often a key attractive feature of these jobs given the lack of significant upside financial rewards," he said.

Also, detective vigilance too is rendered somewhat ineffective, he said. Put simply, detection does not lead to punitive outcomes so that investment in detective vigilance does not guarantee the desired reduction in incidence of lapses, even though it might help in some cases arrest the slide and contain with remedial measures, Patel argued.

As a result preventive vigilance takes centre-stage and becomes a key effective tool of governance in a public sector institution, the RBI chief said, while elaborating on various aspects of vigilance.

"In other words, while not taking away from the need to engage in some detective and punitive vigilance, preventive vigilance is conceptually likely to be the most effective governance mechanism at public sector institutions," Patel stressed.

Referring to vigilance mechanism at the Reserve Bank, he said the overall responsibility for vigilance work at the central bank vests with the Central Vigilance Cell, which exercises its jurisdiction over all employees of the Bank and coordinates the activities of the 49-branch vigilance units.

The Cell maintains liaison with the Central Vigilance Commission (CVC) and the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI).

"The focus of the Cell is to have a comprehensive preventive vigilance setup supported by an audit framework so that vigilance issues are minimised and to sensitise our employees to various aspects of vigilance administration," Patel said.

Giving a fact sheet about the RBI, he said over the last four years, the percentage of vigilance cases against RBI employees' vis-a-vis the total staff strength of the Bank stood on average at 0.004 per cent. Further, in terms of complaint cases received against RBI/RBI employees over this same period, the percentage that required punitive vigilance action stood on average at 0.081 per cent.
The officials met TS minister of IT, K.T. Rama Rao and discussions have been going on with the ministry.

Hyderabad: Hyundai Mobis will be setting up a campus in Kollur, Osmannagar IT Cluster across 20 acres. The proposed campus spread across a million square feet, will house 2,000 employees in an integrated work environment. The proposed activities at the campus with include product engineering, research and development and associated IT and ITES activities.

The officials met TS minister of IT, K.T. Rama Rao and discussions have been going on with the ministry. The minister has issued an allotment letter to the company for 20 acres in the Kollur/ Osmannagar cluster in the presence of the principal secretary IT and Industries, Jayesh Ranjan IAS and the Chief Relations Officer, Amarnath Reddy Atmakuri.

The minister has also directed the MD TSIIC, E.V. Narasimha Reddy to immediately clear all procedures and complete the allotment at the earliest in lieu of the year 2020 target date set by the company.

K.T. Rama Rao said, With Hyundai Mobis setting up its campus in Kollur/Osmannagar, it will lead to the creation of a sizeable mobility cluster in the city. The firm will bring great impetus to the expanding automotive and smart mobility ecosystem in the city. We are already working with a few other major automotive companies in this regard. We are glad that the firm has set up this huge investment in the city and we look forward to working with the firm.
When Twinkle Khanna decided to pick up her pen at the age of 38, she had finally found her calling. But having come from a time when films like Mela were being made and words like sexism and gender equality were confined to social study classes, she seems to have gracefully adapted to the time of #metoo and raging public debates around feminism. Talking about the past, she says, I dont look back.

While Mrs. Funnybones has emerged out of the actor much later in life, there was no doubt about her being a misfit, as she calls herself. For someone who had also harboured a dream to be a charted accountant, and had been pushed into Bollywood, she says, I was always a misfit. I would be knitting on the sets of my films or reading. My grandmother taught me how to knit and ours was a nice hippie household. Someone was always reading, or knitting or playing the guitar. But it didnt seem like a fitting thing for an actor to do back then.  I was never interested in fitting in, she tells the audience at the event organised by YFLO Delhi.

It is this very attitude that has transformed the actor into a much adored author and columnist today. In the capital to promote her recent book,Pyjamas are Forgiving, the actor says, The pajama is a metaphor. It is very nice to be accommodating like pajamas are, but sometimes as women we let our drawstrings too loose and before we know it we are standing in out underwear. The book taps on the importance of consent and is in a way a Metoo book.

Twinkle says, Consent has been ambiguous. Even five years ago, a man wouldnt stop. He would try regardless. That has changed and it has not only affected women. I think men are also looking at their ingrained behaviour and it filtered into this book.

On being questioned as to why she doesnt choose to write about Bollywood or set the book closer home, which she knows so well, Twinkle replies, Bollywood is boring to me. I dont write about it in my columns or shot stories, I dont find it interesting. I have seen it and why would I write about it. It is too familiar.

She goes on to says, I have worn hideous costumes, I have said terrible lines. I have danced and done all the pelvic thrusts. But I learnt how to laugh at myself and I think that is one of the reasons why I am here. Now I hope people will forget Mela and remember me for my books.

Having been called a tomboy, she recalls, I had a mustache, I didnt use lipstick till I acted in movies. A lot of people told me that I talk like a man, I think like a man and I really thought that there is some man trapped inside my body. But it wasnt like that. I realised soon that my perception didnt have a gender. As Virginia Woolf says, An androgynous mind is a incandescent mind.

On her views on feminism, Twinkle says, I think we keep telling women to speak up and be more independent. But you have to tow the line of the hand that writes the cheque. That I think, is the biggest problem. So economic independence is the primary thing for women to be fearless.

With her strong opinions, Twinkle also has to handle her share of trolls. But I have a think skin because I have the biggest troll at home - my mother, she laughs.

She says she wont ever write a book about herself, I wont do that because it would be all lies. All that you can find about me is in these books, in fiction, she signs off.
It has often been a trend for an actor who appears in a supporting role is typecast and is approached with the same kind of roles, and villains are no exceptions. Do similar roles offer a challenge to an actor? It depends on the approach the actor has towards a role, says Ravi Singh who has gained acceptance in Mollywood for his negative roles in Prithviraj starrer Tiyaan and Biju Menon starrer Padayottam. If you get to be the bad man on screen, then show the different shades of grey in every movie. Make it difficult for the people to judge which character of yours was fiercer.

It was a slow and steady transition for Mumbai based Ravi who started his career with theatre. I started my career in 1994 as a production manager and then shifted to theatre, says Ravi. It was after doing four years of theatre that I started getting chances in TV serials. I also got a chance to work in a couple of Bollywood films like Department directed by Ram Gopal Verma. However, the actor soon started rejecting similar roles. I was bored of playing same kind of villain in every film, he says. It was not helping the actor in me to grow. Playing an antagonist was a well- thought out decision as I understood that I had that look which persuaded the directors to approach me with such roles. I am happy for that but I cannot do same thing over and over again. Hence the decision. The number of roles I have rejected is more than the ones I have accepted.

The actor was referred for Tiyaan by a crew member who happened to see his profile. Ravi was called for the movie and the actor sounded overjoyed. It was one of the best moments in his career and a turning point, too, he recalls. I was very happy that the Malayalee audiences are very welcoming and give importance to the character irrespective of the fact that it is positive or negative. I was applauded by the Malayalee audience for my character in Tiyaan and I am obliged for the encouragement I have received. May be it is the reason why I could do justice to my character in Padayottam as well.

The actor giggles when he says that most of his followers in social media are Malayalees and that he received many friend requests from them after Tiyaan. God knows, if everything goes well in terms of my career in Mollywood I might soon became a part of this industry and Kerala, he observes. Ravi has also done a pivotal role in Dr. Bijus Painting Life. The actor is in talks for movies in Kollywood and Bollywood in addition to Malayalam movies.
Bengaluru: A 36-year-old habitual offender jumped to his death during interrogation from the second floor of Amruthahlli police station near Hebbal on Thursday morning. The offender, Satish alias Sketch Manja, had over 20 cases of house thefts registered against him at various police stations in the city. Satish hailed from Madhugiri and was staying alone in the city. He used to frequently shift houses in Bagalakote, Ramanagara and Magadi. The incident took place while senior police officers were investigating a house theft case. They have, however, ruled out any harassment.

DCP (North-east) Kala Krishnaswamy said while the staff of Amruthahalli police station were questioning Satish on, he pushed one of the policeman and jumped from the second floor balcony. Police said that Satish was brought to the station after he was apprehended based on a tip off. Around 9.30am, four police station officials began interrogating him in connection with burglary at a government employees house, two months ago.

Around 12.15pm he pushed one of the staff and ran towards balcony and jumped. The policemen immediately rushed him to a private hospital in Hebbal where he was declared brought dead.

The body has been shifted for post-mortem and once we are able to contact his relatives, further medical procedures will be done, the police said. Satish was earlier arrested by Tilaknagar, Kodigehalli and Basaveshwarnagar police for house thefts.

He was unmarried and during interrogation he had misled police by providing false information regarding his whereabouts and also did not reveal the identity of his parents. A case of unnatural death has been registered and further investigations are on.
Attacking Congress president Rahul Gandhi, Finance minister Arun Jaitley said, 'By repeating a lie on several occasions, you cant change that reality. Not a single rupee of any debtor has been waived.' (Photo: File)

New Delhi: Finance Minister Arun Jaitley today called Rahul Gandhi Clown Prince and accused him of spreading falsehood in connection with the Rafale deal and waiving loans given to 15 industrialists.

Jaitley said that the Congress president is leading a campaign of falsehood on the Rafale deal. His strategy is simple  concoct a lie and repeat it as many times, he wrote in his Facebook blog titled Falsehood of a Clown Prince.

The finance minister also said, By repeating a lie on several occasions, you cant change that reality. Not a single rupee of any debtor has been waived.

Jaitley further alleged that the Congress leaders lied over the amount of Non Performing Assets (NPAs).

Today the UPA leaders stated that when they went out of Government, the Non-Performing Assets (NPAs) were only Rs 2.5 lakh crores. The truth is that actually NPAs were hidden under the carpet. In 2015, an asset quality review was conducted by the Reserve Bank of India and as a result of AQR and subsequent transparent recognition by banks it was found that the NPAs were actually Rs 8.96 lakh crores and the real amount was being hidden, the finance minister said.

Intensifying his attack on the Congress president, the finance minister said: In mature democracies those who rely on falsehood are considered unfit for public life. Many have been banished from political activity because they were caught lying. But this rule obviously cant apply to a dynastic organisation like Congress Party.

Jaitley concluded his blog with a taunt at the Congress president saying, Public discourse is a serious activity. It is not a laughter challenge. It cannot be reduced to a hug, a wink or repetition of falsehood.

Read Arun Jaitleys full blog here.
Gandhi was referring to the Prime Minister's 'silence' on the Rafale fighter aircraft deal with France and the Modi government's 'failure' to bring fugitive businessman Vijay Mallya to book. (Photo: ANI | Twitter)

Dungarpur: In a no-holds-barred attack on Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Congress president Rahul Gandhi Thursday said people are now heard saying the country's "watchman is a thief.

Gandhi's remark at a public meeting provoked a strong reaction from the BJP with Union minister Smriti Irani calling him the clown prince who had no respect for the prime minister's post.

Rahul Gandhi was referring to the prime minister's silence on the Rafale fighter aircraft deal with France and the Modi government's failure to bring fugitive businessman Vijay Mallya to book.

He said he had asked questions on this in Parliament but got no reply, and took a jibe at Modi's past assertions on tackling corruption. Modi had said he did not want to become the country's prime minister, but its chowkidar' (watchman), Gandhi recalled. He added now it is heard on the streets that the country's chowkidar' is a thief.

Galli galli mein shor hai, Hindustan ka chowkidar chor hai, he said in Hindi at a rally in tribal-dominated Sagwara. He said this is what the people in Rajasthan and elsewhere in the country felt.

Assembly elections will be held in the state later this year, shortly ahead of the Lok Sabha elections in 2019.

Gandhi said people are disappointed with the Bharatiya Janata Party governments at the Centre and in Rajasthan and the Congress is now set to win.

Neither the prime minister and the chief minister, nor their money can stop the change of government in Rajasthan, he said.

Referring to a recent row, Gandhi claimed Finance Minister Arun Jaitley had admitted that Vijay Mallya met him before leaving the country. The finance minister allowed Vijay Mallya who defrauded banks to tune of Rs 9,000 crore to leave the country but the prime minister did not break his silence, he said.

Mentioning Modi's monthly radio talk, he said the prime minister speaks his mann ki baat' in all his speeches but the Congress wants to hear what the people say. The Congress chief said the promise to provide employment to two crore youths every year and the Make In India campaign had failed as phones, shoes and clothes carried the Made In China tag. Gandhi claimed only 450 youths get employment in the country each day while China created jobs for 50,000 people every 24 hours.

He alleged an amount of Rs 2,30,000 crore has been written off as bad loan to 15 or 20 big industrialists, but the government has not helped debt-ridden farmers.

We will make the people of the state secure and focus on providing employment. We want mobile phones with Made in Rajasthan tag, he said.

Gandhi tried to allay speculation over rifts in the state unit of the party by referring to a motorcycle ride that Rajasthan Congress chief Sachin Pilot and former chief minister Ashok Gehlot took together.

The Congress is yet to announce its CM candidate in Rajasthan, unlike the BJP which has said Chief Minister Vasundhara Raje will be nominated again.

The Congress president assured that party workers will decide on the candidates in the coming election.

I can guarantee you that this time not a single parachute candidate will be able to get the ticket. If any such candidate comes, I will cut the rope, he said. He also asked senior Congress leader Avinash Pandey to find women faces to represent the party. Gandhi suggested that the BJP was using money from the state exchequer on its campaign meetings.

You should know that the posters that you see of the prime minister and the chief minister were made with your money, he said.

Gandhi said the demonetisation of high-currency bank notes and the Goods and Services Tax (GST), which he called the Gabbar Singh Tax', broke the back of common people and the small businessman.

We had proposed a one country, one tax system but the prime minister levied a multiple-layer tax system. The Congress government will change it to a single-layer tax system, if voted to power, he said.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi has disclosed cash in hand of Rs 48,944 significantly less than the previous year when it was Rs 1,49,700. (Photo: File | AP)

Mumbai: Prime Minister Narendra Modi owns movable and immovable assets worth Rs 2.28 crore, according to the latest declaration of assets released by the Prime Minister's Office as of March 31, 2018.

PM Modi has disclosed cash in hand of Rs 48,944 significantly less than the previous year when it was Rs 1,49,700.

He has a bank balance of Rs 11.29 lakh in the State Bank of Indias Gandhinagar branch.

The Prime Minister also has fixed deposit of Rs 1.07 crore with the SBI.

Click here for Prime Minister Narendra Modi's detail of assets.

He has also invested Rs 20,000 in an infrastructure bond in 2012.

Apart from this, PM has made investment of Rs 5.18 lakh in National Savings Certificate and Rs 1.59 lakh in life insurance policies.

However, he has not taken any loans from banks.

In addition, PM Modi owns 4 gold rings worth Rs 1.38 lakh.

The Prime Minister also owns a house in Gujarats Gandhinagar built on over a 3,500 square feet land that he purchased in 2002 for Rs 1.30 lakh. The approximate current market value of the house is Rs 1 crore.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi does not own any car or motor vehicle, as per the latest declaration.
Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan writes to his Indian counterpart Narendra Modi seeking to 're-start the stalled dialogue process' between the two neighbours. (Photo: File | PTI)

New Delhi: Newly-elected Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan has reached out to his Indian counterpart Narendra Modi seeking to re-start the stalled dialogue process between the two neighbours.

In a letter written to PM Modi, Imran Khan emphasised that Pakistan is ready to discuss terrorism.

Khan also proposed an informal meeting between the foreign ministers of the two countries at the sidelines of upcoming UN General Assembly in New York in the letter.

I endorse your sentiment that the only way forward for our two countries lies in constructive engagement, the letter read.

The Pakistan prime minister also said, Pakistan and India have undeniably challenging relationship. We, however, owe it to our people, especially the future generations, to peacefully resolve all outstanding issues, including the Jammu and Kashmir dispute to bridge differences and achieve a mutually beneficial outcome.

He further stated that Siachen and Sir Creek also need close attention to move towards resolution.

Imran Khan further emphasised on the need to discuss trade, people to people contacts, religious tourism, humanitarian issues.

Pakistan prime minister concluded his letter saying that he is looking forward to working with PM Modi for the benefit of the people of both the countries.

Mohammad Faisal, spokesperson of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Pakistan, said that they will wait for a formal response from India.

(Photo: Twitter | ANI)
MEA said the date for the meeting of both the foreign ministers (Sushma Swaraj and Shah Mahmood Qureshi) is being finalised by permanent missions of the two countries in New York. (Photo: File | PTI)

New Delhi: India and Pakistan foreign ministers will meet next week on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in New York, the government said on Thursday.

"I can confirm that on the request of the Pakistani side, a meeting between External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj and Pakistani foreign minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi will take place on the sidelines of UNGA at a mutually convenient date and time," Ministry of External Affairs spokesperson Raveesh Kumar told the media in New Delhi.

The MEA spokesperson further said that it will "just be a meeting, not talks or resumption of dialogue."

"We have not finalised the agenda for the meeting," Raveesh Kumar said.

"This does not indicate any change in our policy towards Pakistan," Raveesh Kumar said.

The government said that the date for the meeting of both the foreign ministers (Sushma Swaraj and Shah Mahmood Qureshi) is being finalised by permanent missions of the two countries in New York.

Pakistan prime minister Imran Khan had written to PM Modi asking that India and Pakistan resume dialogue that has been suspended since 2015. The newly-elect Pakistan PM also suggested a meeting between the foreign ministers and said Pakistan "remains ready" to discuss terrorism.

Also Read: Ready to talk terrorism: Imran Khan writes to Modi, seeks fresh dialogue

The foreign ministers could explore the way forward, he said, adding that the SAARC Summit in Islamabad "will offer and opportunity for you to visit Pakistan and for us to re-start the stalled dialogue process."
Congress has stepped up attack on BJP government over Rafale deal and is seeking to make it a major poll issue ahead of assembly elections in some key states and 2019 general polls. (Photo: File | PTI)

New Delhi: Congress president Rahul Gandhi on Thursday accused Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman of "lying" on HAL's capability to build Rafale aircraft and demanded her resignation.

The Congress chief took to Twitter to attack Sitharaman, alleging that her position as the defence minister has become untenable as a former chief of the state-run Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL) has "nailed her lie".

"The RM (Rafale Minister) tasked with defending corruption has been caught lying again. The former HAL Chief, T S Raju, has nailed her lie, that HAL didn't have the capability to build the RAFALE. Her position is untenable & she must resign," he tweeted and tagged of a media report on the former HAL chief's assertion.

The RM (Rafale Minister) tasked with defending corruption has been caught lying again. The former HAL Chief, T S Raju, has nailed her lie, that HAL didnt have the capability to build the RAFALE. Her position is untenable & she must resign. https://t.co/7mKXV5wo8x  Rahul Gandhi (@RahulGandhi) September 20, 2018

The Congress has alleged that the government caused loss of over Rs 41,000 crore to the exchequer and endangered national security by bypassing the state-run HAL in favour of some businessman "friends" for offset contract in the Rafale deal.

Under India's offset policy, foreign defence entities are mandated to spend at least 30 per cent of the total contract value in India through procurement of components or setting up of research and development facilities.

Sitharaman had earlier told news agency PTI that it was former defence minister A K Antony's unprecedented intervention that led to the deal being cancelled after the price negotiation committee had almost finalised the deal. The charge has been denied by Antony as false.

Sitharaman had also accused Antony of not supporting HAL in getting the Rafale deal.

The Congress has stepped up the attack on the government over the Rafale deal and is seeking to make it a major poll issue ahead of assembly elections in some key states later this year and the parliamentary election in 2019.
Over the course of 2017, India and US pledged to strengthen cooperation against terrorist threats from groups, including Al-Qaida, ISIS, Jaish-e-Mohammad, Lashkar-e-Taiba and D-Company, report said. (Photo: File | AP)

Washington/New Delhi: The Trump administration on Wednesday praised India for its significant counterterrorism actions and said Pakistan-based militant groups continued their terror attacks in the country.

In its annual 'Country Report on Terrorism', as mandated by the Congress, the State Department said the Indian leadership expressed resolve to prevent terrorist attacks domestically and to bring to justice the perpetrators of terrorism, in cooperation with the US and other like-minded countries.

The parts of India seriously impacted by terrorism in 2017 included Jammu and Kashmir, the northeast Indian states, and parts of central India in which Maoists remain active, it said.

"India continued to experience attacks, including by Pakistan-based terrorist organisations as well as tribal and Maoist insurgents. Indian authorities blamed Pakistan for cross-border attacks in the state of Jammu and Kashmir," the report said.

India, the report said, continued to apply sustained pressure to detect, disrupt and degrade terror operations within its borders. Over the course of 2017, India sought to deepen counter-terrorism cooperation and information sharing with the US, including through the first-ever Designations Dialogue held in Delhi in December, it said.

In the same year, India and the US pledged to strengthen cooperation against terrorist threats from groups, including Al-Qaida, ISIS, Jaish-e-Mohammad, Lashkar-e-Taiba and D-Company, it said.

During a June 2017 summit, President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Narendra Modi directed officials to establish a new mechanism for cooperation on terrorist designations. The report further said the Indian government closely monitored the domestic threat from transnational terrorist groups like ISIS and Al-Qaida.

The State Department praised India for its significant counterterrorism actions.

Citing an example of a significant counter-terrorism law enforcement action by India, it said the police arrested Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB) leader Mohammad Idris from a hideout in Kolkata on March 8. Idris was allegedly involved in the July 2016 Holey Artisan Bakery attack in Bangladesh capital, Dhaka.
The Palike faced some serious questions when it failed to produce a measurement book related to pothole repair works in the 198 wards in the city. (Representional Image)

Bengaluru: The BBMP on Wednesday faced the ire of the judiciary over the poor condition of roads across Bengaluru. The Karnataka High Court, while coming down heavily against the city administrators, asked them to ensure pothole-free roads by Thursday.

The court made these observations while hearing a PIL, which stated that the all the stretches are filled with potholes that have cost peoples lives.

The division bench, headed by Chief Justice Dinesh Maheshwari, further orally observed that it will take a decision if palike fails to fix the problem. There should be zero potholes by tomorrow (Thursday). How you do it, is left to you. You have one whole night, the court observed.

Referring to the number of potholes, which are around 1,600, the court pulled up BBMP officers.

Earlier in the day, the Palike faced some serious questions when it failed to produce a measurement book related to pothole repair works in the 198 wards in the city. The furious court warned of serious action and went on to say that it will ask the chief secretary to take over the administration of the Palike.

Keeping roads in good condition is not just an amenity, but a necessity, the court observed, adjourning the matter to Thursday. The high court also directed the BBMP to submit the measurement books and work orders of pothole repair works to the Registrar (Judicial) by 4.30 pm on Thursday.
The ordinance has to be cleared in Parliament within six months. (Photo: File | AFP)

New Delhi: Triple talaq or instant divorce is now a punishable offence after President Ram Nath Kovind signed the executive order on Wednesday night, hours after it was cleared by the Union cabinet.

The decision that comes ahead of the series of assembly and national elections follows Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Independence Day declaration that he would "leave no stone unturned to ensure that Muslim women do not suffer due to triple talaq".

With the President's assent on the ordinance, 'triple talaq', the Islamic practice of Muslim men divorcing by uttering the word talaq thrice in any form  spoken, in writing, or over electronic communication - has become punishable with a jail term of up to three years and a fine. The woman will be entitled to maintenance.

The Lok Sabha cleared the Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on Marriage) Bill, in December but it has been stuck in the Rajya Sabha where the BJP-led NDA is in minority.

The ordinance has to be cleared in Parliament within six months.

On Wednesday, the government has said the measure was necessary as the practice of talaq-e-biddat was continuing unabated despite the Supreme Court last year striking it down.

Seeking to allay fears that the proposed law could be misused, the government has included certain safeguards in it such as adding a provision of bail for the accused before trial.

These amendments were cleared by the Cabinet on August 29.
Hyderabad: Around 1,000 students from 20 student organisations came together on one platform and took out a rally demanding that A6 accused T. Sravan, who was the brother of the main accused T. Maruthi Rao, be named as A2 in the Pranays murder case.

They also demanded an inquiry into the case by a sitting judge of the High Court and a fast track court.

Speaking to this newspaper, Sharahth Naliganti, student leader from Dalit Bahujan Student Association (DBSA), Osmania University, said, It is not an honour killing but it is a caste hatred killing. All the accused should be recognised as terrorists. In recent times, oppression of Dalits have increased starting from the killing of Manthani Madhukar.

Since the formation of Telangana state in 2014, there have been been 14 incidents of caste-based killings. If the government had reacted and punished the culprits behind the murder of Manthani Madhukar, we would not have seen the murder of Pranay in Miryalaguda, he added.

Naresh, student leader from the Dalit Minority Student Association, OU, said, We will fight till Amrutha Varshini gets justice.
New Delhi: Finance minister Arun Jaitley on Thursday called Congress president Rahul Gandhi a Clown Prince and the Opposition party hit back to dub the senior BJP leader as a court jester in bitter personal attacks over Rafale deal, NPAs and waiving loans of industrialists. Earlier, in a no-hold-barred attack on Mr Modi, Mr Gandhi said people are now heard saying that the country's watchman is a thief.

Mr Modi had said he did not want to become the countrys Prime Minister, but its chowkidar' (watchman), Mr Gandhi recalled. He added now it is heard on the streets that the countrys chowkidar is a thief. Galli galli me shor hai, Hindustan ka chowkidar chor hai, he said in Hindi at a rally in Rajasthan.

Accusing Mr Gandhi of leading the falsehood campaign, the Union minister advised the Congress president that public discourse is a serious activity and not a laughter challenge. Hitting back, the Congress called Mr Jaitley as a court jester to the Modi Sultanate and the abuse, diversion and deception are the desperate tools of a Lying -Jait-LIE.

The campaign of falsehood is entirely led by the Congress president. His strategy is simple, concoct a lie and repeat it as many times. This, at least, provides him some concocted material for his statements, speec-hes for otherwise an issu-eless Congress, he said.
Minister for labour and excise T.P. Ramakrishnan in front of the model house along with Kalathingal Pathumma and family at 4th Mile, Pozhuthana, Wayanad on Thursday.

Kalpetta: The first nature friendly model house constructed by Thanal, an NGO based at Thiruvananthapuram, for the flood victims was handed over by Minister for labour and excise T.P .Ramakrishnan at a function held here on Thursday. Mr Ramakrishnan received the key of the house from the sponsors of the housing project TK Jafer and Ahammed Haji of ID Fresh Foods.

The house was constructed for Kalathingal Pathumma, 70 of 4th Mile, who had lost her house in the flood waters. Cash strapped, the family of seven members were struggling to make two ends meet when the calamity struck. The marriage of her daughter has been fixed for October 7. Pathumma and family would shift to the new house soon, after some final finishing works.

Addressing the gathering, minister Ramakrishnan said that such models would be considered to construct homes in flood prone zones. Such initiatives give a creative message to the world, he added.

Our target is to ensure housing for all. The calamity struck when the LDF government was on with its mission, he said, adding that the state incurred a loss of about Rs 40,000 crores which also hit more than 1000 villages and 55 lakh persons. The house was constructed with the support of Pozhuthana village panchayat with the technical support of Urvi foundation. The house was completed with a budget of Rs 6.25 lakhs and in fifteen days.

The house on 3.5 cents land has 560 square feet area. The NGO Thanal has evinced its interest to construct such homes for another 70 houses to families in Mananthavadi municipality and Panamaram and Pozhuthana panchayats.

Panamaram panchayat has already identified 60 cents of land for the project at Palukunnu while Pozhuthana village panchayats has identified 40 cents land for the project. The uniqueness of each area also would be considered before selecting the construction model, office bearers of Thanal said.
New Delhi: Foreign ministers of India and Pakistan will meet on sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in New York, the government announced on Thursday. India agreed to Swaraj-Qureshi meeting following a letter to Prime Minister Narendra Modi by his Pakistani counterpart Imran Khan seeking a ministerial interaction on the sidelines of the UNGA.

Announcing the meeting between external affairs minister Sushma Swaraj with her Pakistani counterpart Shah Mahmood Qureshi, MEA Spokesperson Raveesh Kumar, however, made it clear it is not a resumption of the Indo-Pak dialogue and India agreed to the meeting following a request from Pakistan. He also insisted the decision doesnt change the countrys position on cross-border terrorism. During the meeting, which is likely to take place next week, India is expected to strongly raise the issue of terrorism emanating from the Pakistani soil.

The Swaraj-Qureshi meeting will be the first engagement at this level since January 2016 when New Delhi halted the dialogue with Islamabad in the aftermath of Pathankot terror attack, for which India holds Pakistan-based groups responsible. Indo-Pak ties have nose-dived since then in view of a number of terror strikes by Pakistan-based groups, which India retaliated by carrying out surgical strikes in September 2016 across the LoC. India has been maintaining that terror and talks cannot go together.

Foreign ministers of India and Pakistan will meet on sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in New York, the government announced on Thursday, the first such high-level engagement since suspension of dialogue between the two nations after the Pathankot air base terror attack in 2016.

I must distinguish between a meeting and dialogue. This does not indicate any change in policy as far as our stand on terrorism and cross-border terrorism is concerned, the MEA spokesperson said at a media briefing. The last meeting between the two foreign ministers was held during Swarajs visit to Islamabad in December 2015 to attend the Heart of Asia Summit.
Thiruvananthapuram: The post-flood financial assistance announced by the government, Rs 10,000, is not for everyone affected by floods. Ask Manikantan K., a carpenter who lives at Kulappuram near Government High School, Jagathy, whose home was just a metre away from flood water.

Water had seeped into its foundation, damaging it and causing visible cracks on the walls of his home. He and his family were at the schools relief camp.

I had listed my name for the assistance, twice. But I dont know why we did not receive the amount, even as the others did, he says.

Most here have received the money, according to Lekha A., a flood-affected resident. But there was at least one more Kulappuram resident who did not receive the money. DC has taken photographs which show that his house was inundated during the two days. But he did not want to raise it as a complaint as he was hopeful he would get the money in a weeks time.

I saw water rising in my backyard at night, and had an inkling that the home will be flooded. So I immediately rang up a relative and went to stay with them in Vattiyoorkavu. When the village officer visited the camp and made a list, I was not there. Later, the village officer had prepared a second list, and I am probably included in it, he said.

The village officer was supposed to include even those who were not at relief camps, according to Trivandrum Tehsildar. I will look into why this name was not included. As long as their house was flooded over the two days, they are eligible for the money, he said.

As for Mr Manikantans case, he said they are not eligible for the financial assistance if there was no water inside their home, but he can apply for maintenance assistance.But he had to attend the cracks at the earliest. He said he could not have waited for the North East monsoon to start. So he borrowed money. Since he could not afford to employ workers, he and his brother-in-law Rajesh were repairing the house on Thursday.

The aid of Rs 10,000 would not have been enough. C. Jagadamma, a 70-year-old widow, who lives right next to Killi river, said, A mason asks for Rs 2000 per day. Theres so much work left at my home. She too has cracked walls and floor in the home which was freshly plastered using the aid.
Kochi: A six-member delegation, headed by Commodore Khamis Salim Sulaiman Jabri, the Director General (Operations) of the Royal Navy of Oman (RNO) visited Kochi Thursday as part of a five-day visit to India.

During their visit to Kochi, the RNO delegation called on the Chief of Staff Rear Admiral RJ Nadkarni and discussed scope for improving the cooperation between the two Navies. The dignitaries also visited the Navigation and Direction School, Signal School and the Water Survival Training Facility at the Naval Base.

They also interacted with the four RNO trainees presently undergoing training at various units of the Southern Naval Command (SNC). The delegation will depart Kochi on Friday for INS Shivaji, the marine engineering training establishment at Lonavala, where they will spend one day visiting various training facilities.

Prior to visiting Kochi, the delegation had participated in the second Indian Navy-Royal Navy of Oman staff talks at Delhi from 18-19 September.
Kochi: Bishop Franco Mulakkal, who was interrogated for eight hours on Thursday, may be arrested on Friday after further questioning, it is learnt. The Vatican, meanwhile, announced that the bishop has been relieved from the pastoral responsibilities of Jalandhar diocese temporarily.

Possibly realising that his options were narrowing down, the bishop formally requested the Vatican to relieve him of the responsibilities. Having considered all circumstances, the Holy Father has accepted this request from bishop Mulakkal and has appointed Rev Agenlo Rufino Gracias, auxiliary bishop of Mumbai, as apostolic administrator of Jalandhar diocese, a statement said on Thursday.

The police, who questioned the bishop for eight hours on the second consecutive day at the Tripunithura Crime Branch office, allowed him to leave the station with the questioning set to continue on Friday. The bishop has undergone the quizzing for a total of 15 hours in two days.

The bishop, who stayed at a five-star hotel in Kochi on Wednesday night, reached the Tripunithura CB office at 11 a.m. Shortly after his arrival, the police team led by Kottayam superintendent of police Hari Sankar and Vaikom deputy superintendent of police K.Subhash started the interrogation at the hi-tech facility. The bishop left the place around 7 p.m.

Mr Hari Sankar told reporters that the bishop was served a notice to appear before the probe team at 10.30 a.m. on Friday. A decision on the further course of action would be taken based on the verification of his statements. A detailed verification is needed for the statements given by the bishop. For this, three teams will examine them in detail and complete the verifications overnight, he said.

The officer refused to answer when asked whether the bishop would be arrested on Friday. He said the interrogation was not over yet and that a decision on the arrest cannot be made half way through the process. The arrest depends on the investigation, interrogation and the evidence collected. However, we hope that the interrogation will be completed by tomorrow, he said.

However, it is learnt that he may be arrested after the interrogation on Friday. The officer said that an immediate decision could be taken once the questioning is completed. The team is not rushing through the probe but making progress slowly by clarifying even minute details, Mr. Sanker said.
New Delhi: The Supreme Court on Thursday granted three months time to the CBI and Enforcement Directorate for completing the probe in the 2G cases relating to Aircel Maxis on the alleged involvement of former Finance Minister P. Chidambaram and other issues.

A Bench of Justices A.K. Sikri and Ashok Bhushan accepted the submissions of Additional Solicitor General Tushar Mehta who sought further time for completing the probe.

The pending probes include that by CBI into the role of Malaysian accused T. Anant Krishnan and Ralph Marshall in the Aircel-Maxis deal, and that by CBI regarding Foreign Investment Promotion Board approval for Aircel-Maxis deal.

The ED is also looking into the money laundering aspects of the Aircel-Maxis deal. This includes the probe into the role of former Finance Minister P. Chidambaran in granting FIPB approval and his son Karti Chidambaram's role in connection with the Aircel-Maxis case.

According to the ED, the Malaysian businessman Anant Krishnan is not cooperating in the Aircel Maxis Case and is not joining the probe.

It was submitted that the Malaysian government had also refused to cooperate in the investigation stating that no criminality against T. Anant Krishna of the Maxis group was established. Despite Letter Rogatories, the Malaysian government refused to furnish even a single document and they even sent letters stating that CBI was making unnecessary statements.

BJP leader Subramanian Swamy had alleged that there had been illegal clearances of the deal by the Foreign Investment Promotion Bureau (FIPB) of which Mr. P. Chidambaram was ex-officio Chairman; and this was done to enable Mr. Chidambaram and his son Mr. Karti Chidambaram to profit from the deal by granting an undue and illegal FIPB clearance which Mr. Chidambaram was not authorized to grant. Mr. Bhushan had filed a similar application for probe into the role of Mr. Chidambaram.
The government of AP had constituted the AP State Biodiversity Board (Board) in June 2006 to advise and assist state government in implementing the Biological Diversity Act, 2002 (Act) in the state.

Vijayawada: The CAG in its report of Andhra Pradesh found that the state does not have any biodiversity conservation strategy and action plan. Biodiversity management committees (BMCs) have a vital role to play in the implementation of the Act.

The government of AP had constituted the AP State Biodiversity Board (Board) in June 2006 to advise and assist state government in implementing the Biological Diversity Act, 2002 (Act) in the state. Even after a decade since its formation, the Board has not attained the level of preparedness necessary for undertaking conservation of biological diversity in the state.

The CAG report stated that the government of India had established the National Bio-diversity Act in October 2003.

At the state level, the government of AP constituted the AP State Biodiversity Board in May 2006. After the bifurcation of AP state, the Board was bifurcated in March 2015.

As per the Act, the main functions of the State Board are to advise state government on matters relating to the conservation of biodiversity, sustainable use of its components, equitable sharing of benefits arising out of the utilisation of biological resources, regulation by granting of approvals for requests for commercial utilisation or bio survey and bio utilisation of any biological resource by Indians.

The CAG report stated that every local body shall constitute a biodiversity management committee (BMC) within its area for promoting conservation, sustainable use and documentation of biological resources.

The audit observed that only 2,908 (21 per cent) out of a total of 13,725 local bodies in the state had formed BMCs as on June 2017. While formulating the AP State Biological Diversity Rules, government had not stipulated any time frame for the constitution of BMCs by local bodies in the state. In the last 12 years since the formation of the Board, the AP government did not nominate any representatives from the Panchayat Raj and the Municipal Administration departments as ex-officio members of the Board.

The CAG report stated that red sanders are scarce and high-value biological resources grown in the five districts of Chittoor, YSR Kadapa, Kurnool, Prakasam and SPS Nellore in the state.

As per information furnished by the Board, red sanders are grown in areas under 348 villages in 47 mandals of four districts (except Prakasam district). However, out of these 348 villages/47 mandals, only 162 gram panchayats and three mandals had formed BMCs.

Biodiversity management committees (BMCs) were not formed in 79 per cent of the local bodies in the state.

The Board had not even built a database of biological resources available in the state. The Board did not have regular staff as government did not sanction any posts.

Government was not providing adequate funds to the Board which was adversely affecting the Boards functioning.

CAG endorsed YSRC view on Polavaram: Buggana

Reaffirming that the partys stand on the irregularities in the Polavaram project had been vindicated, YSR Congress said that the CAG report had endorsed their views on the issue from land acquisition to kickbacks.

Party leader and chairman of PAC in the AP Assembly, Buggana Rajendernath said, The project was taken over only to benefit contracts and get kickbacks and this view was endorsed by the CAG. The report basically focused more on the irrigation sector and the irregularities therein. It has questioned the methodology involved in monitoring the expenses, which is a slap in the face for the state government.

The state has failed to reach the target and meet the timeline of the project and it has only rehabilitated 4 per cent of the families that needed to be shifted, the CAG has pointed out, he said. He added that many other works had not yet begun and the Centre had also not released the funds as the state had failed to show proper accounts. The serious irregularities come in the form of escalated disbursement of money to contractors over and above the earmarked `18,300 crore under various heads.
Our politics is such that a significant social reform like abolition of instant triple talaq, or talaq-e-biddat, has to be brought in through an ordinance rather than comprehensive legislation. The Supreme Court ruled last year that triple talaq is unconstitutional, but despite that it is suspected the the practice still prevails with Muslim men divorcing their wives. By making it an offence with a jail term upto three years, a tough message is being sent out that this is a crime and violators would brought to book. Its not certain if marital discords are best settled by jailing one of the parties. Nor is an ordinance the best way out of the legislative impasse in the Rajya Sabha due to which the government was unable to try to pass the Muslim Women (Protection of Rights in Marriage) Bill even though the Lok Sabha had approved it.

There is, however, no doubt that triple talaq is not in conformity with foundational principles of gender justice, and has no justification in a society that has evolved into modern times, but with some needless historical baggage like triple talaq and social evils like casteism. It appears that in the absence of an informed debate and broader consultation, the measure has flaws, and it remains to be seen how it works if men do break the law. The clause under which only the wife or a close relative can lodge a complaint builds some safety against misuse, that can be expected in all matters regarding marital discord. The ordinance would serve its purpose, however temporary, if some good does flow in terms of initiating social and gender justice for women.
In a first for the Hindu-supremacist outfit RSS, its chief Mohan Bhagwat held forth publicly, on three successive days, seeking to explain his secretive outfit to the country in a well-orchestrated outreach in the nations capital, rather than speak on the advertised subject of Indias future.

In this proselytisation bid, no deviance was discernible from the core principles and practices of the mother-body of all Hindutva-oriented outfits, although the impression was given that the RSS is a liberal outfit, one which regards all Indians as one.

RSS adherents themselves wouldnt have been fooled into thinking their organisation, which they regard with a certain sacredness, is anything other than what it has always been  a proponent of Hindu Rashtra. The RSS has no constitution or charter laying down its beliefs and principles. Therefore, for public consumption, it can say anything that is convenient at any point. Without compromising its core beliefs, it has generally sought to camouflage its Hindu-majoritarian outlook, and it has done that now.

The RSS runs the BJP, not day-to-day but like a board of directors does. The BJP is its political front, like the ABVP is its students front, the BMS its trade union, and the VHP its chosen body for religious interventions. Mr Bhagwat said quite accurately it only advises the BJP and has no interest in running the BJP government. Technically, this is correct. But it is also disingenuous.

As the most influential positions in the BJP are held by RSS men, the intervention is inbuilt. Top RSS leaders are also loaned to the BJP for specified organisational, pedagogical and propaganda tasks. Ram Madhav, a former RSS spokesman, is an example. Narendra Modi wouldnt have been named the BJPs PM candidate without the RSS sanction. Once that came, no other aspirant stood a chance.

Mr Bhagwat appeared to impress many liberals when he said there can be no Hindutva without Muslims in India. This is nothing new. The RSS only seeks that Indian or Bharatiya Muslims and Christians live by the cultural rules and standards of Hindus, and has never officially sought to expel them. At the practical level, however, the minorities are seen as internal enemies.

This is rooted in the writings of RSS second chief M.S. Golwarkar, whose Bunch of Thoughts and We, Our Nationhood Defined are sheer poison. These underline ideas that are antithetical to our Constitution. Golwarkars works are yet to be officially repudiated by the RSS, though Mr Bhagwat did tell the media that sections of Golwalkars thoughts are no longer part of the RSS canon, but he didnt say which. Thats cleverness.

Other than the Communists, the RSS has never professed to be against any other political formation. Mr Bhagwat was consistent when he said that, unlike the BJP, the RSS doesnt seek a Congress-free India or Congress-mukt Bharat. The apparent RSS-BJP dichotomy here is only a matter of political convenience.
NC and PDP should start to work together

Engineer Rasheed

Times do change. Who would have imagined that someday the National Conference (NC) and the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) would boycott the urban and panchayat polls and New Delhi would still go ahead with holding them, not paying any heed to the cries of its proxies. The move by the two main regional parties to boycott these polls and the Centres response thereof is a defeat of both, as the ultimate goal and vision of both lies in strengthening the relationship between Srinagar and New Delhi.

It is meanwhile anyones guess that holding these elections without the participation of the NC, PDP and some other parties will be a futile exercise and sequentially a setback to the political process that the Centre may have thought about for the restive state.

No matter in what numbers do people participate in these elections, the bigger issue here is the harsh reality that nothing except uncertainty and distrust has changed in Kashmir even after three decades of militancy and resistance against New Delhi. If the NC and PDP have sincerely realised that New Delhi, by linking the Article 35A hearing in the Supreme Court to local body polls has ditched Kashmiris, it should be welcomed by all, but both the mainstream parties need to realise that if New Delhi can show the courage to bypass them, it should not be difficult to realise that its arrogance is touching new heights. While one may praise the NC and PDP for showing some resistance by not taking part in the local body elections, both the parties need to confess that their apologetic, compromising and unrealistic attitude till the recent past has been the only strength of New Delhi while dealing with the Kashmir issue. No doubt, Mehbooba Mufti and Omar Abdullah may be cursing themselves without expressing it for the humiliation they have been gifted by New Delhi over the local body polls, the latter too has achieved nothing except ensuring an early funeral of mainstream politics in J&K. Lets not forget that the NC and PDP have been always representing New Delhi in Kashmir rather than representing Kashmir in New Delhi, and are seen as New Delhis main faces and proxies in the state. Now if its own people are losing faith in New Delhi, things may turn uglier in the coming days subject to the consistency NC and PDP may show in their stances. Whatsoever is being witnessed vis-a-vis these polls has yet again proven that calling mainstream parties just puppets and downplaying their significance is unrealistic. The boycott by the NC and PDP of these polls has shaken those who matter and if Kashmiris, including both separatists and mainstream politicians, understand the sentiments of their people, they need to have a common minimum programme to find a roadmap for a resolution to Kashmir dispute. This, at least, is the lesson and the message the local body elections have for all of them. Let the NC and PDP move a step further and join hands with each other.

The writer is the leader of the Awami Itehad Party and a member of the J&K Legislative Assembly

It will make separatists irrelevant

Khalid Jehangir

Out of power, the Kashmir-based mainstream parties -- the National Conference and the Peoples Democratic Party -- have raised a banner of revolt against New Delhi as both are finding it hard to digest that they have been sidelined by the Government of India. The decision of the NC and PDP to boycott the forthcoming panchayat and municipal polls is just a stunt to intimidate New Delhi to give importance to them.

The forthcoming polls are aimed at empowering the people at the grassroots level. The panchayat and municipal polls in Jammu and Kashmir are being held after a gap of 10 and 13 years respectively. The delay has proved to be a big loss for the common man. Many Centrally-sponsored schemes which are directly linked to panchayats and municipal committees have come to a grinding halt due to the local bodies not being in place. Its unfortunate that the mainstream parties seem least bothered about allowing the benefits of various schemes to reach the common man.

It has been observed that leaders of the mainstream parties in Kashmir have always tried to sabotage these polls as the MLAs on many occasions have expressed reservations about empowering the panchs, sarpanchs and counsellors. Its regrettable that Kashmiri leaders dont want to share power with anyone.

Now the poll schedule has been announced and the Centre has decided to go ahead with the democratic process despite the boycott calls. One of the PDP ministers during his heyday had predicted that polls cannot be held in Kashmir for many years. But the time has come to prove him wrong.

In absence of the PDP and NC, many new faces will come to the fore during these elections as the youth are keen to make their presence felt on the ground. There is every possibility of new people challenging the hegemony of the NC and PDP, which have in all these years been promoting dynastic rule.

The forthcoming panchayat and municipal polls are a big challenge for the security forces. Everyone, including the separatists and the mainstream parties in Kashmir, will try their best to disrupt the exercise. It looks like that no one wants to give the democratic process a chance as all players in the Kashmir Valley have got together to prove to New Delhi that Kashmir is burning, and that the flames cannot be doused.

The PDP and NC have always thrived on boycotts. They want this trend to continue to ensure that they dont become irrelevant. But New Delhi remaining firm on its stand to go ahead with the polls has unnerved both the parties, which during all these years have been just indulging in lip-service and nothing else.

The coming local bodies polls are just a beginning. The exercise will throw up big surprises and would prove to be a stepping stone for many newcomers. The successful conduct of these polls would turn the politicians with separatist leanings completely irrelevant.

The writer is a former journalist and J&K affairs spokesperson of the BJP
The greater the energy consumption, the more likely a society was booming with population and political and economic activity. (Photo: ANI)

A recent study has found that ancient civilizations engaged in globalisation more than previously believed, suggesting that an integrated global economy is nothing new and may have benefited societies for ages.

The archaeological research used radiocarbon dating to examine human societies on a long-term scale. The researchers found that societies often experienced booms and busts simultaneously, a process known as synchrony.

They used radiocarbon dating and historical records to measure energy consumption through a period of history ranging from about 10,000 to 400 years ago, a time frame that encompasses a large portion of the current Holocene era.

The greater the energy consumption, the more likely a society was booming with population and political and economic activity.

Some of the areas examined included the western United States, the British Isles, Australia, and northern Chile.

The radiocarbon dates came from preserved organic items such as seeds, animal bones and burned wood from ancient trash deposits at these sites. Radiocarbon dating measures the radioactive decay of the atom carbon-14 from organic matter to find the organic matter's age.

The researchers' findings suggest that early globalisation was possibly a strategy for societies to grow through migration, trade, and conflict with other distant societies when a society's carrying capacity began to get overloaded.

Jacopo A. Baggio, one of the lead researchers, said that it is especially important to study societies' resilience or the ability to recover from a disaster, over the long term, and radiocarbon dating is a useful tool for this assessment.

"Resilience is intrinsically dynamic. So, it becomes very hard to understand resilience within a short time span. Here we have the opportunity to look at these longer trends and really see how society has reacted and adapted and what were the booms and busts of these societies. Hopefully, this can teach some lessons to be learned for modern day society," Baggio said.

The researcher said the rise and fall of societies seem to be an inherent part of civilization.

"Our data stop at 400 years ago, and there has been a huge change from organic economies to fossil fuel economies," Baggio said. "However, similar synchronisation trends continue today even more given the interdependencies of our societies."

Jacob Freeman, another researcher, said that the new study suggests the process of societies creating connections and becoming interdependent, known as globalisation, also played out among human society millennia ago.

"If every culture was unique, you would expect to see no synchrony, or harmony, across human records of energy consumption," Freeman said.

Another researcher, Erick Robinson, said that it is important to look at not only cultures at specific times, but also over the long term. "We must move back and forth between different spatial and temporal scales in order to understand the whole picture," Robinson said.

The full findings are present in the journal- Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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Chinese police eventually discovered that servers for the application were located in Cambodia. (Photo: Pixabay)

Chinese police have repatriated from Cambodia 18 suspected members of a gang that operated a $36.5 million pornographic live-streaming platform with more than 3.5 million registered users, the official Xinhua news agency reported on Wednesday.

Police in the eastern province of Zhejiang told Xinhua the gang hired more than 16,000 people to recruit members to a mobile application called Max, which aggregated over 110 live streaming porn platforms and stored hundreds of thousands of videos. Pornography is illegal in China.

More than 200 people linked to the platforms operations were arrested in April but the application continued to operate and its promotion over social media strengthened following the arrests, Xinhua said.

Chinese police eventually discovered that servers for the application were located in Cambodia and seized the pornography platform gang in August in cooperation with Cambodian authorities, the report said.

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Diesel trains can be fitted with Rolls-Royce Hybrid PowerPacks to turn them into hybrid trains that can also run on battery power

Rolls-Royce has signed a deal to conduct a trial conversion of diesel trains to hybrid-electric engines in Britain, in a deal which could be rolled out to hundreds of trains across the country from the 2020s.

The British company, which is best known for making aircraft engines, said on Wednesday that its German Power Systems business had signed an agreement with Porterbrook, the UKs largest owner of passenger rolling stock.

Rolls-Royces Power Systems unit, which sells engines used on ships, yachts, trains, trucks, mining and nuclear power stations, is one of the fastest growing parts of the company, and its boss said hybrid technology is behind that.

We expect hybrid technology to grow at above the current growth rates of diesel, the CEO of Rolls-Royce Power Systems, Andreas Schell, told Reuters.

The Power Systems business is expected to post low double-digit revenue growth this year and is a bright spot in a company grappling with the negative headlines and cost of fixing a problem with its Trent 1000 aero-engines.

Diesel trains can be fitted with Rolls-Royce Hybrid PowerPacks to turn them into hybrid trains that can also run on battery power, reducing carbon emissions and making them cheaper to run for operators while also making them much quieter when, for example, they approach stations.

The hybrid initiative comes as Britain seeks to phase out diesel-only trains by 2040. Adding the powerpacks to trains allows railway networks to be partially electrified without the need for expensive overhead infrastructure.

The Institution of Mechanical Engineers says that 42 percent of Britains rail network is currently electrified, which means that the country lags behind electrification rates in other European nations.

Last year the British government scrapped electrification projects in some parts of the country, saying it would look to hybrid technology trains instead.

Rolls-Royce also said it has signed a test deal with Irelands Iarnrod Eireann, which could see up to 234 of its powerpacks fitted across the Irish rail network.

Were going into serious production now. No more R&D projects, no more demonstrators. Serious production, Schell said.

Rolls-Royce and Porterbrook said in a statement that after initial trials on two trains in 2020, Porterbrook aims to offer the hybrid conversion to a range of its rail company customers who operate Turbostar trains, of which it has 182 on lease across the country.

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.
Speaking before Pompeos comments, Trump welcomed Kims pledges, calling them part of 'tremendous progress' with Pyongyang on a number of fronts, and hailing 'very good news' from the summit between the Koreas. (Photo: File | AFP)

Washington: The United States said it was ready to resume talks with North Korea after Pyongyang pledged on Wednesday to dismantle its key missile facilities and suggested it would close its main Yongbyon nuclear complex if Washington took unspecified actions.

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said he had invited North Koreas foreign minister to meet in New York next week, with the aim of completing its denuclearisation by January 2021, after a Pyongyang summit between the leaders of the two Koreas.

The United States appeared eager to seize on commitments by North Korean leader Kim Jong Un at his talks with South Korean President Moon Jae-in even as critics said the steps did little to put Pyongyang on a course for irreversible denuclearisation.

North Korea will allow experts from concerned countries to watch the closure of its missile engine testing site and launch pad at Tongchang-ri, Moon said at a joint news conference with Kim after their meeting in the North Korean capital.

North Korea will also take additional steps such as closing its main Yongbyon nuclear complex if the United States undertook unspecified reciprocal measures, Moon added.

The sudden revival of diplomacy followed weeks of doubts in US President Donald Trumps administrations about whether North Korea was willing to negotiate in good faith after a June summit between Trump and Kim yielded few tangible results.

The January 2021 completion date was the most specific deadline set in what is expected to be a long process of trying to get the North to end its nuclear program, which may threaten US allies South Korea and Japan as well as the US homeland.

In addition to inviting North Korean Foreign Minister Ri Yong Ho to meet when both are in New York next week for the annual UN General Assembly gathering of world leaders, Pompeo said Washington invited Pyongyangs representatives to meet the US special representative for North Korea, Stephen Biegun, in Vienna at the earliest opportunity.

China, North Koreas most important economic backer and diplomatic ally, said it warmly welcomed the agreement reached in Pyongyang and strongly supported it.

We absolutely cannot let this hard to come by opportunity for peace slip away once again, the Chinese governments top diplomat, State Councillor Wang Yi, said in a statement.

Skepticism

Some US officials were deeply skeptical. Speaking before Pompeos announcement, two senior US officials involved in US-North Korea policy voiced fears Kim was trying to drive a wedge between Washington and Seoul.

At the summit, the two Koreas agreed on plans to resume economic cooperation, including working to reconnect rail and road links. They agreed as well to restart a joint factory park in a border city of Kaesong and tours to the Norths Mount Kumgang resort, when conditions are met.

US officials suggested Kim was trying to ease the economic pressure on him to curb his nuclear programs and to undercut the rationale for US troops being based in South Korea by improving relations with Seoul.

The United States has some 28,500 US troops in South Korea to deter North Korean attack. Pyongyang has long sought their withdrawal and Trump has questioned their rationale and cost.

There is nothing the North has offered so far that would constitute irreversible movement toward denuclearisation, however you define that, by January 2021 or any other time, or even a reduction of the military threat it poses to the South and the region, said an US intelligence official.

Everything thats out there now is conditional on US actions that would reduce the pressure on the North to cooperate or (is) filled with loopholes and exit ramps, added the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

US officials said the ambiguity about what Washington was supposed to do for the North to close its nuclear complex at Yongbyon gave Kim room to argue that Washington had not done enough for North Korea to follow through on its pledges.

Trump: Hes calm, Im calm

Even if North Korea were to shut down Yongbyon, officials and experts believe it has other secret nuclear facilities.

South Koreas national security adviser, Chung Eui-yong, said the reciprocal US steps could include an end-of-war declaration. South Korea and the United States remain technically at war with North Korea because the 1950-53 Korean War ended in an armistice and not a peace treaty.

Though Wednesdays inter-Korean agreement failed to stipulate the Norths commitment to declare nuclear and missile facilities for inspection and eventual decommissioning, Seoul has been in talks with both Pyongyang and Washington over the issue, a senior South Korean official said.

What North Korea really wants and their priorities may be different from ours, the official told reporters on Thursday on condition of anonymity.

Were talking about a package that would carry many elements, including the declaration of the facilities, Yongbyon and Tongchang-ri, which are of US interest, and from the North side, the issues of normalising relations, ending the war and easing sanctions.

Despite the doubts of US officials and outside analysts, North Koreas pledge at the summit with the South Korean president drew an enthusiastic response from Trump.

Speaking before Pompeos comments, Trump welcomed Kims pledges, calling them part of tremendous progress with Pyongyang on a number of fronts, and hailing very good news from the summit between the Koreas.

Hes calm, Im calm - so well see what happens, Trump, who last year threatened to destroy North Korea, told reporters.

Theatrical promises

Kim pledged to work toward the complete denuclearisation of the Korean peninsula during two meetings with Moon earlier this year and at his summit with Trump.

But discussions over how to implement the vague commitments have since faltered and North Korea has consistently refused to give up its nuclear arsenal unilaterally.

Washington has demanded concrete action, such as a full disclosure of North Koreas nuclear and missile facilities, before agreeing to Pyongyangs key goals, including an easing of international sanctions and an official end to the Korean War.

While North Korea has stopped nuclear and missile tests in the past year, it did not allow international inspections of its dismantling of its Punggye-ri nuclear test site in May, drawing criticism that its action was for show and could be reversed.

The day after the June 12 Trump-Kim summit, Pompeo said he hoped to achieve major disarmament by North Korea by the end of Trumps first term in January 2021.

His latest statement that the process should be completed by January 2021 may be a signal Washington will not wait forever.

The statement clearly implies that inter-Korean summits and theatrical promises to dismantle the odd facility simply cant substitute for a negotiating process on the nuclear issue, said the Asia Society Policy Institutes Daniel Russel.

Invoking the end of Trumps term in January 2021 is another way of saying to the North that American patience is not unlimited and that Kim Jong Un wont be able to sidestep denuclearisation indefinitely, Russel added.
Tokyo: Prime Minister Shinzo Abe won comfortable re-election as leader of his ruling party Thursday, setting him on course to become Japan's longest-serving premier and realise his dream of reforming the constitution.

The 63-year-old conservative secured 553 votes against 254 won by former defence minister Shigeru Ishiba, a hawkish self-confessed "military geek", in a two-horse race for leader of the Liberal Democratic Party. The win effectively hands Abe three more years as PM, giving him the chance of breaking the record for the nation's longest serving premiership held by Taro Katsura, a revered politician who served three times between 1901 and 1913.

Public support for Abe, a political thoroughbred whose grandfather and father both held power, has recovered after he managed to survive a series of cronyism and cover-up scandals.

Now reconfirmed in power, Abe will head to New York this weekend to attend the UN General Assembly and hold a summit with US President Donald Trump. Abe and Trump, who enjoy each other's company on the golf course and are close diplomatic allies, are expected to analyse the latest inter-Korean summit. But they will also have to confront a growing trade dispute as Trump sees Tokyo among "unfair" trade partners.

While Japanese voters put the economy and social security as their top priorities, Abe aims to use the election to push his dream of reforming the country's post-World War II pacifist constitution. Nationalist Abe has frequently voiced his wish to rewrite the charter, imposed by the victorious US occupiers, which forces the country to "forever renounce war" and dictates that armed forces will "never be maintained".

Abe insists any changes would merely remove the country's well-equipped Self-Defense Forces from the constitutional paradox whereby they should not technically exist.

"It's time to stipulate both the Self-Defense Forces and the protection of Japan's peace and independence in the constitution," Abe said in his last stump speech in Tokyo.

But any changes to the text would be hugely sensitive in pacifist Japan and almost certainly greeted with fury in China and the Koreas, 20th-century victims of Japanese military aggression. Even if Abe manages to force a revision through parliament, he would face a referendum, raising the prospect of a Brexit-style political meltdown if the people vote against him, said Yu Uchiyama, political scientist from the University of Tokyo. In addition, surveys show that tinkering with the legal text is far from top of most Japanese voters' to-do list, as the country faces an ageing and declining population and a still-sluggish economy.

Acknowledging concerns over the economic outlook, Abe said he plans to introduce "bold" stimulus measures to ease the expected impact of a tax hike scheduled for October next year. Japan's economy has been expanding for the past few years at a slow pace thanks to the Bank of Japan's ultra-loose monetary policy and huge government spending, which have led to a weak yen -- a key positive element for Japanese exporters.

But analysts warned US-led trade wars could be a major risk factor for an economy still struggling to win a long battle against deflation. Local media said Abe plans to reshuffle his cabinet on October 1. However, he is expected to retain Vice Prime Minister and Finance Minister Taro Aso, a political ally who has backed his "Abenomics" strategy to stimulate the world's third-largest economy.
'Those who oppose the BRI or the CPEC shall never succeed as this is an initiative of peace and development not only for China but for region and beyond,' it quoted Xi as saying. (Photo: File)

Beijing: Chinese President Xi Jinping has told Pakistan Army chief General Qamar Javed Bajwa that those who oppose his pet projects - the BRI and the CPEC - will "never succeed" as these are initiatives aimed at fostering peace and development.

The USD 50 billion China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) is the flagship project of the multi-billion dollar Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), a pet project of President Xi aimed at enhancing China's influence around the world through China-funded infrastructure projects.

India has opposed the CPEC project and protested to China as it is being laid through Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK).

General Bajwa, who is in China, called on Xi after his meetings with the top Chinese military officials.

"While we work for peace, we need to stay strong to thwart designs of all inimical forces challenging our resolve. We greatly value Chinese support...," Bajwa said.

He met Xi on a special invitation and they discussed regional security environment, challenges and way forward, Pakistan military's media wing Inter Services Public Relations (ISPR) said in a statement.

"Those who oppose the BRI or the CPEC shall never succeed as this is an initiative of peace and development not only for China but for region and beyond," it quoted Xi as saying.

Terming Pakistan as "our time-tested iron friend", he said the country had a pivotal role towards this lasting relationship.

He acknowledged the role of the Pakistan armed forces towards regional peace and stability.

President Xi said that China shall continue to support Pakistan as a strategic partner.

Bajwa said that Pakistan understands the importance of peace and has given lot of sacrifices for achieving it.

He said the BRI, with the CPEC as its flagship project, is destined to succeed despite all odds and the Pakistan Army shall ensure security of the CPEC at all costs, the statement said.

Earlier, Bajwa in his meeting with top military official General Zhang Youxia assured him that the new government, like the Pakistani military, follows a consistent policy of pragmatic cooperation with China.

General Zhang is the highest military official as he is the vice chairman of China's Central Military Commission (CMC) which is the high command of the two-million-strong People's Liberation Army (PLA) headed by President Xi.

"The Pakistani military and its new government are consistent in their policy towards China," Bajwa told Zhang during their meeting here on Tuesday, a Chinese Defence Ministry press release quoted him as saying.

His assurance about the new government besides the Pakistan military following a "consistent policy" towards China comes in the backdrop of reports of differences over the USD 50 billion CPEC.

Projects of the CPEC, regarded as the flagship initiative in Xi's multi-billion-dollar BRI, figured high during Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi's talks with new Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan in Islamabad last month.

Pakistan is willing to continue to strengthen pragmatic cooperation with China in the areas of counter-terrorism, equipment technology, and personnel training to ensure the safe and smooth development of CPEC, Bajwa said.
'If we are going to achieve a successful conclusion then, just as the UK has evolved its position, the EU will need to evolve its position too,' British Prime Minister Theresa May said. (Photo: File)

Salzburg: British Prime Minister Theresa May clashed with EU leaders on Wednesday over who should make the next move to break the Brexit logjam, as time runs out to get a deal.

EU Council President Donald Tusk opened a crucial summit in the Austrian city of Salzburg with a stark warning that Britain's position on key issues must be "reworked".

He said negotiations on Britain's withdrawal from the European Union, due to take place in March, were reaching a "decisive phase" but said the outcome still remained open.

While welcoming the "positive evolution" of Britain's position on security ties, Tusk said that on the Irish border and post-Brexit trading relations, "the UK's proposals will need to be reworked and further negotiated".

Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz, who hosted the Salzburg summit, added that the EU was "ready to compromise but we also expect that from the UK", calling for May to offer a "step forward".

But May said that after she presented her so-called Chequers plan on post-Brexit trade ties this summer, Brussels must also give ground.

"If we are going to achieve a successful conclusion then, just as the UK has evolved its position, the EU will need to evolve its position too," she said.

She told fellow leaders over a summit dinner Wednesday that "we will of course not agree on every detail", but "the onus is now on all of us to get this deal done".

She warned however against waiting for a change in heart in London, again rejecting calls in Britain for a re-run of the 2016 vote on EU membership.

"The UK will leave on March 29 next year," she said, according to officials.

'Hard border'

EU leaders will meet without May for lunch on Thursday in Salzburg to discuss Brexit.

Officials on both sides of the Channel hope this summit will give new impetus to divorce negotiations ahead of a crunch summit in Brussels on October 18.

That was originally viewed as the deadline for a deal, but Tusk is planning a last-gasp gathering in mid-November.

A key sticking point in the talks is how to avoid a "hard border" between British-ruled Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic when London leaves the EU single market and customs union.

There are fears that frontier checks would disrupt trade and could undermine the 1998 peace deal on the island.

But Europe is insisting on a fall-back plan, a "backstop", that would keep Northern Ireland in the customs union under EU rules while a future trade relationship is negotiated.

London has rejected this, saying it would create a border in the Irish Sea that threatens its territorial integrity.

Europe's chief Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier this week indicated a shift in his position, saying any checks between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK could be away from the border.

May welcomed his recognition of "the need to find a new solution", and conceded that some checks were already carried out in the Irish Sea, for example on agricultural products.

"However the (European) Commission's proposal for this protocol that I should assent to a legal separation of the United Kingdom into two customs territories is not credible," she told the dinner.

May's parliamentary majority depends on support from Northern Ireland loyalists bitterly opposed to any weakening of links with the UK.

Future ties

Despite continued hopes of a deal, both sides are also preparing for the possibility that Britain stumbles into a chaotic and damaging break-up.

Kurz said that failing to reach a deal "would be difficult for Europe but it would be terrible for the UK".

Officials say that 80 percent of the divorce settlement is agreed, but that progress must be made quickly on Ireland and on the parallel political statement that will lay out a blueprint for future relations.

London wants a detailed outline of future trade ties in exchange for paying billions of euros the EU says it is owed in dues.

Brussels appears ready to fudge a plan to at least get the UK departure from the bloc out of the way, although this may not be acceptable to May's restive MPs at home.

One EU diplomat told AFP that leaders in Salzburg wanted to give May something to take back home, ahead of a meeting of her fractious Conservative party next month.

They realise May is the only one who can seal a deal on Brexit and they do not want her to "go belly up", the diplomat said.
The chief executive of Denmark's largest lender, Danske Bank, resigned on Wednesday as the institution said it was unable to determine how much money was laundered through its Estonian branch.

The bank said it had probed transactions amounting to 200 billion that had transited Danske Bank's Estonian branch through the accounts of 15,000 non-resident clients between 2007 and 2015.

But the bank was unable to provide an accurate estimate of how much of that was laundered money, nor exactly where the money came from.

It said 23% of the incoming funds were from Russia.

"A large part of the flow (transactions) is suspicious," explained Ole Spiermann, a partner in the external law firm that carried out a probe for Danske Bank.

The 200-billion-euro figure can be compared to Estonia's gross domestic product of 23 billion in 2017.

In early August, the Danish state prosecutor's office for serious economic and international crime said the bank was being investigated and prosecutors would decide whether to press charges.

The bank tasked an independent legal firm to conduct an investigation of its own.

It exonerated chief executive Thomas Borgen of any direct responsibility in the case, which has thrown the Danish bank into a whirlwind of legal and media attention in recent weeks.

Borgen nonetheless said it was best for him to go.

"It is clear that Danske Bank has failed to live up to its responsibility in the case of possible money laundering in Estonia," he said in a statement.

The bank said it "knew that the Estonian branch had high-risk customers."

"Even though the investigation conducted by the external law firm concludes that I have lived up to my legal obligations, I believe that it is best for all parties that I resign," he added.

Of the 15,000 accounts -- which Danske Bank closed in 2015 -- 6,200 are considered suspicious and most of them have been brought to the attention of authorities.

"We can't exclude that a lot of the suspicious transactions are criminal, but that's up to the authorities to decide," he told reporters.

As a way to clean up its tarnished image, Danske Bank said it would "donate the gross income from the customers in the period from 2007 to 2015, which is estimated at 1.5 billion kroner (201 million), to an independent foundation which will be set up to support initiatives aimed at combating international financial crime, including money laundering, also in Denmark and Estonia."

With that sum set to be booked in the third quarter, the bank had to revise downwards its earnings outlook for the whole of 2018, forecasting a net profit of 16-17 billion kroner instead of the previously anticipated 18 to 20 billion.

The financial pain from the case was already being felt on the trading floor: Shares in Danske Bank plunged more than 7.8% in the Copenhagen Stock Exchange before noon local time.

Lars Krull, an economics professor at Aalborg University, told AFP he believed the bank would do whatever it takes to rehabilitate its reputation.

"I think they (Danske Bank) will do everything in their power to be robust in handling this case," he said.

But Mikkel Emil Jensen, an analyst at Sydbank, told Ritzau news agency that it may be a long time yet before life at Danske goes back to normal.

"We do not know the extent of the money laundering problem which means the uncertainty can last. The fear of receiving heavy fines is still there," he said.

The money laundering allegations are linked to a fraud case exposed by the Russian lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, who was jailed in Russia after he revealed the involvement of several high-ranking Russian officials in stealing massive tax payments from several companies.

Magnitsky died in 2009 aged 37 after being held in a Russian jail for a year, where he was denied medical care.

Other major European banks that have been ensnared in massive laundering scandals in recent years including France's BNP Paribas and Germany's Deutsche Bank.

In early September, Dutch banking giant ING paid 775 million euros to settle a criminal investigation over money laundering after it failed to ensure its accounts were not misused.
The Maldives' opposition party on Wednesday raised concerns over conduct of the presidential elections on Sunday in a free and fair manner by the country's poll body, which it alleged has deployed activists of the ruling dispensation for the poll duty.

President Abdulla Yameen, of the ruling Progressive Party of Maldives (PPM), is seeking a second five-year term in the Indian Ocean archipelago, a popular high-end tourist destination.

Yemeen had imposed a state of emergency in February after the Supreme Court quashed the conviction of nine opposition leaders, including the country's first democratically elected president Mohamed Nasheed.

Nasheed, the main opposition Maldivian Democratic Party (MDP) leader, is currently in exile in Sri Lanka. He has been barred from contesting the Sunday's polls.

The Maldives' Elections Commission has appointed 107 PPM activists and members and tasked them with the official work on the election day, the MDP said here Wednesday.

"In yet another egregious example of bias, the Elections Commission has given the PPM activists official roles in administrating the voting, vote counting, and complaint procedures on election day. These PPM activists, as officials, will have sole discretion on how to adjudicate a complaint at the polling booth," a MDP release said.

The opposition party claimed that the Commission had rejected its written complaint, demanding political activists be relieved of their poll responsibilities.

The MDP also alleged that the Commission was headed by a staunch Yameen loyalist, who was the General Secretary of Yameen's former political party.

The commission had refused to allow political parties to use a copy of the final signed voter register. It is planning to use tablet computers to tally the vote, and ordering officials at the ballot boxes not to announce the vote until it is verified by the central Elections Commission.

These were a clear breach of election law and precedence, the opposition claimed.

It further alleged that the use of tablet computers to collate election results from polling stations on election day will create an opportunity for rigging and fraud.

President Yameen is pitted against the joint opposition candidate Ibrahim Mohamed Solih.

Ahead of polls, the government has sent to jail his main rivals after speedy trials for charges ranging from terrorism to corruption. It has also and introduced new vote-counting rules that observers say will prevent them from seeing individual ballot papers, leading to doubts about the legitimacy of the vote.
Narendra Modi government has decided to observe September 29 as surgical strike day, according to the University Grants Commission (UGC).

Referring to the central government's decision in a latest circular, the higher education regulator on Thursday asked all the universities to organise various activities on their campuses on September 29.

Indian troops crossed the LoC and targetted terrorist camps on September 29, 2016 in retaliation to a deadly terror attack at Uri in Jammu and Kashmir

The Government of India has decided to observe 'Surgical Strike Day' on September 29, 2018, UGC said in a circular posted on its website on Thursday evening.

It asked the higher education institutions to organise a special parade of NCC cadets on the said date.

After which NCC commander shall address them on the modalities of protection of the borders, UGC secretary Rajnish Jain said in the circular.

He also suggested the higher education institutions to organising call ex-servicemen to their campus on the day to sensitise the students about the sacrifices made by the armed forces in protecting the borders.

To mark the occasion, a multimedia exhibition will be organised around the India Gate here in Delhi on September 29.

Similar exhibitions may be organised at all the state capitals/union territories and important towns/cantonments all over India, Jain suggested.

The UGC asked the institutions to make students take a pledge in support of the armed forces by writing letters and cards.

This may be produced in both physical and digital format, Jain said.

These letters and cards will be shared with the Public Relation Officer of the Defence Ministry and the Press Information Bureau for publicity across various media, he added.

While the exhibition will be a public event, the institutions should encourage their faculty members and students to visit these exhibitions, Jain suggested.

All higher education institutions are requested to take steps for these activities, he added.
Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister N Chandrababu Naidu has decided not to attend a hearing in the Dharmabad court in Maharashtra on September 21 in connection with the 2010 Babhali barrage agitation case.

He has decided to send his lawyer to file a petition to recall the Non-Bailable Warrant (NBW) issued against him by the court.

Meanwhile, Naidu will leave for the US on September 22 to deliver a keynote address at a convention on Financing Sustainable Agriculture  Global challenges and opportunities on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly on September 24.

The TDP had expressed apprehension about the timing of the NBW to the TDP chief. Few even said that the ruling BJP at the Centre was unhappy over Naidu addressing the UN conference.

Naidu took the decision not to attend the court, after a series of meetings with TDP seniors and advocates. It is said that many have advised Naidu not to attend the court in the politically volatile time. The Dharmabad court had issued the warrant against Naidu and 15 others including AP ministers D Umamaheswara Rao and Nakka Anandababu.

Naidu was Leader of Opposition in the Assembly of undivided Andhra Pradesh in 2010 when the incident took place.

"BJP president Amit Shah claimed that 25 summons were issued and I had willfully skipped. I verified with my office and not a single summon was received," he said in the Assembly suspecting a plot by the BJP and the TRS to corner him with the Telangana Assembly elections round the corner.

According to sources in Amaravati, the Nanded district superintendent of police informed Andhra Police on Tuesday, that a letter and copy of the NBW has been sent to Naidu. AP officials informed Maharashtra officials that Naidu has received only the letter but not the copy of the NBW and the case details.
With the elections just two months away, the Vasundhara Raje government in Rajasthan is facing scores of protests from disgruntled employees at various departments  education, roadways, electricity and Panchayati Raj.

The state electricity department staff staged half-naked protest over the suspension of fellow colleagues, pay-related discrepancies, cashless mediclaim policy and other employee welfare schemes. Employees also threatened to go on hunger strike if their demands were not met.

More than 4,000 buses remained off the roads as the strike led by employees of Rajasthan roadways entered the third day. Lakhs of passengers were affected as nearly 10 lakh people use the Rajasthan State Road Transport Corporation (RSRTC) buses every day. The bus strike has also caused big revenue loss for the RSRTC.

Education sector too witnessed protests as about 50,000 teachers protested at the Ramlila Maidan here against the norms of the central governments new pension scheme, which says the government will invest a portion of the salary of the employees in share market through various agencies.

Rural development work in the state has also come to a standstill as about 200 block development officers (BDOs) of the Rajasthan Rural Development Officers (RRDOs) continued to stay on mass leave along with other officers for the past one week. Their demands include proper promotion channel for RRDOs and dedicated cadre and better service conditions.

Even after a warning from Minister for Panchayati Raj and Rural Development Rajendra Rathore on Tuesday, the officers continued with their strike.

Reacting to the series of strikes in the state, the Opposition Congress called it as an inefficiency of the BJP-led government in Rajasthan. She (Raje) has been neglecting issues of employees in various departments and instead of resolving the matter she is busy in using government funds for the use of her party, former chief minister and Congress general secretary Ashok Gehlot said.
The Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) on Friday announced to ally with Ajit Jogis party for Chhattisgarh Assembly election, but kept an option for alliance with the Congress open for Madhya Pradesh.

If the BSP is offered respectable number of seats, the party will ally with other parties in other states too, she said while announcing an electoral pact with Jogis Chhattisgarh Janata Congress in a press conference in New Delhi.

The BSP has been demanding at least 50 seats for poll pact with the Congress in Madhya Pradesh.

By unilaterally releasing a list of 22 candidates prior to formal talks for a possible alliance, the BSP supremo has tried to exert pressure on the Congress leadership to yield to her demand, according to Congress sources.

However, BSPs alliance with Ajit Jogis party in neighbouring Chhattisgarh state has immensely dimmed prospects of a BSP-Congress alliance in Madhya Pradesh. Former Chhattisgarh chief minister Jogi formed his political party three years ago after breaking away from the Congress. The alliance is set to take on both the Congress and the BJP in Chhattisgarh.

In the event, the Congress is left with two options; either accommodate Jogi -- Mayawati pact in a grand alliance in Chhattisgarh or go in alone in Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan as well. Either way, it is difficult and politically risky choice for the Congress.

The BJP has about 7% vote bank in Madhya Pradesh. It won on four seats in the 2013 election but caused defeat to the Congress in 29 seats.

Madhya Pradesh has 15% scheduled castes votes and 35 seats reserved for them. The ongoing upper caste protests against the amendments in the SC/ST (prevention of atrocities) Act, 1989 have significantly upset political arithmetic in Madhya Pradesh ahead of the election. Both the Congress and the BJP are engaged in an unenviable exercise of wooing the upper caste while, at the same time, not antagonising the Dalits.
A Malayali youth, suspected to be an Islamic State (IS) terrorist, was arrested by the National Investigation Agency (NIA) when he landed in the national capital after he was deported from Kabul, officials said on Wednesday.

Nashidul Hamzafar (26), native of Kalpetta in Wayanad district, was taken into custody on Tuesday.

He was detained by Afghan security agencies last year on charges of illegally entering the country to join his associates in the IS.

His case is part of a criminal conspiracy hatched by other accused from Kasaragod of Kerala and their associates since 2015 with the intention of joining and furthering the objectives of the IS.

Fourteen others from Kasaragod district had left India or their work places in West Asia between mid-May and early-July 2016 before travelling to Afghanistan where they joined the IS.

"Nashidul Hamzafar participated in the conspiracy through encrypted social media platforms, with the other absconding accused persons in this case like Abdul Rashid and Ashfak Majeed who were known to him through his college-mates Shihas, Firoz Khan and Bestin Vincent," an NIA statement said.

He had left India on 3 October, 2017 and travelled to Muscat before travelling to Iran and further reaching Kabul where he was detained.

Nashidul, who is the 16th accused in the case, was produced before special NIA court in Delhi on Wednesday. He will now be taken to Kochi on transit remand for producing him before the Special NIA Court in Ernakulam, which had issued a NBW against him.

The NIA had on 27 January, 2017 filed a charge sheet against Rashid, a Malayali, and Yasmeen Mohd Zahid, a woman who hails from Bihar's Sitamarhi, in the case.

Others were not named in the charge sheet, while Nashidul did not figure in the list as he had left India only after the charge sheet was filed.

It claimed that the accused, who have left India are continuing their "anti-national activities by propagating the ideology of and inviting support for the Islamic State" through various means including, but not limited to, internet-based social media platforms".

Quoting witnesses, the charge sheet also claimed that Rashid had also sought support for the IS by inviting his friends and colleagues to travel out of India and join the organisation in Afghanistan.
Two unidentified militants were killed in an ongoing encounter with security forces in the forests of north Kashmirs Bandipora district on Thursday.

Reports said the gunfight broke out after Army's 14 Rashtriya Rifles and J&K police launched a cordon-and-search operation (CASO) at Shukbabun area of Sumlar forest area of Bandipora.

As the forces intensified the searches, the hiding militants opened fire triggering off a gunfight, in which two militants were killed so far, sources said. The slain militants are most probably of the foreign origin. Operation is still on and might prolong for the night as there is a possibility of more militants trapped, they said and reinforcements have been sent to the area to ensure that militants dont escape the cordon.

However, the police confirmed the killing of only one militant in the encounter so far. A militant has been killed so far. Identity is yet to be ascertained. Search continues. Information is preliminary in nature, Kashmir police zone tweeted.

The latest gunfight comes just four days after five local militants, belonging to Lashkar-e-Taiba and Hizb-ul-Mujahideen outfits, were killed in an encounter with security forces in Chowgam area of south Kashmirs Kulgam district.
We hit Earth Overshoot Day on August 1 this year. Its not something to celebrate, but something to mourn as it demonstrates our copious consumption patterns. Its the day of the year when we run out of our annual allocated natural resources and borrow from the resources of future generations. We reached this earlier than ever before in 2018, and for the rest of the year, we live in ecological debt. This debt is calculated by the Global Footprint Network in collaboration with the World Wide Fund for Nature from United Nations data. Basically, the planets populations annual consumption would require 1.7 times the earths natural resources.

Actually speaking, the developing worlds consumption patterns and ecological footprint can help reduce this ecological debt, because if world consumption was like that of, say, Indias, wed need only 0.7 times the earths allocated annual resources, and will not overshoot. The problem with the lifestyle of the Global South is the inequity in the distribution of resources, that is, huge proportions of the population live below the poverty line and consume a pathetic fraction of what they need to survive, as well as the over-dependence on cheap but polluting energy sources, that is, the fossil fuel menace.

To preserve our planets resources for posterity and to protect the environment, consumption patterns need to change in developed nations and urban populations, as well as among the worlds rich wherever they might be. In addition, to avoid the tipping point of irreversible climate change, we need to consciously decarbonise the economy across the planet.

India and other developing nations have the opportunity to leapfrog to cleaner energy and cleaner and more efficient technologies as they work to bring resources to the below poverty line, rural, tribal and indigenous populations. Indias vast power grid is fuelled by a toxic brew and its in our national interest to clean up and move towards clean energy sources. Karnataka, an early adopter and a global leader in renewable energy capacity, can show the rest of the country the path to clean energy adoption.

Karnataka has a 12.3GW renewable energy capacity, including massive solar energy plants, hundreds of turbines generating wind energy, solar-wind hybrid farms and hydro-electric and biomass energy generation, according to the World Economic Forum. Karnataka leads nationally in renewable energy generation and exceeds the installed capacity of European renewable energy specialists and early adopters such as Denmark and the Netherlands (7.8GW and 7.7GW respectively).

A countrys energy mix is a group of different primary energy sources from which secondary energy for direct use -- usually electricity -- is produced. In India and across most countries, fossil fuels are the main stay. Its a toxic energy mix and positive climate action means taking fossil fuels out of the energy mix and opting for clean yet affordable energy sources. A move to decarbonise the economy and a nations power sector means significant achievement of Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) 7 and 13 -- Clean and Affordable Energy Access and Climate Action, respectively.

High-efficiency low-emission tech

India is tackling a major air pollution crisis. Removing coal and thermal power plants as the mainstay of our electricity grid and adopting high-efficiency low-emission (HELE) technologies such as supercritical and ultra-supercritical combustion technologies in the phasing out coal period would drastically help reach Indias climate commitments.

The Oil and Natural Gas Corporation (ONGC) exploration projects, petroleum and coal mining and refining come with massive societal and environmental costs. Civil unrest as well as pollution of land, water and air are toxic by-products of the economys thirst for fossil fuels.

As the recent ONGC exploration clearance in the Eastern Ghats and off Ramanathapuram as well as older reports of coal reserves in Odisha and Jharkhand show, accessing it would mean massive deforestation of prime virgin forests as well as interruption of ecologically sensitive zones, biospheres and watershed forests.

Bird sanctuaries and the ecological hotspot of the Gulf of Mannar will be disrupted for the sake of ONGC exploration which, in the end, means adding to stranded assets for the state-owned enterprise while devastating the environment, creating ill-will among local populations and investing billions in a project that wouldnt yield a return if international climate commitments are to be honoured.

As the London School of Economics Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment puts it, to limit global warming to below two degrees as promised in the Paris agreement, existing fossil fuel reserves should be kept in the ground and definitely, if extracted, cannot be burnt  which means stranded assets, or the devaluation of resources that took billions to extract and refine. In addition, we cannot afford to lose any more carbon traps such as virgin forest lands. We need to avoid any kind of deforestation to avoid climate calamity, as the flood-drought cycle and the vicious forest fires across the country and the planet give a foretaste of!

Already, fuel prices in India are pinching middle-class pockets, the time is right to innovate for clean fuels and clean power. Electric and hybrid vehicles, jugaad and innovations making petrol and diesel engines of existing vehicles into hybrids or completely electric affordably should be incentivised to address air pollution and climate change.

Decarbonisation should be the development mantra. By making clean energy sources such as small hydel, wind, solar, biomass, waste-to-energy, tidal power and offshore and onshore hybrid renewables, the mainstay of the grid, while promoting off-grid and grid-connected individual solutions such as rooftop solar power as well as rooftop wind energy, we can tackle multiple issues while generating jobs and promoting Indian energy start-ups. This is the much-needed Sustainable Development.

(The writer is a Chennai-based writer and sustainable development consultant)
Members of the Rashtriya Heddari Horata Samiti staged a protest near the Hejamady toll gate on Thursday, demanding a speedy completion of the pending works on the NH 66.

The protest which began at 8 am continued till noon. The activists shouted slogans against the Navayug company with a series of demands.

The protesters asked for not just speedy completion of pending works on the Kundapur  Talapady stretch, but also construction of serviced roads on both sides of the national highway, identification of accident zones, underpasses or flyovers near education institutions, religious places, pedestrian paths at toll plazas, bus shelters, street lights and drainage facilities, a skywalk near Shivanagara a two-way bridges across rivers.

They claimed that the toll gate at Surathkal was illegal as its construction had violated the rule of a minimum of 60-km distance between two rolls. The distance between Hejamady and Surathkal toll gates is just 8 km.

Mangaluru MP Nalin Kumar Kateel said that Union Road Transport and Highway Minister Nitin Gadkari has promised waiver of toll for vehicles with registration numbers KA 19 and KA 20 on NH 66.

The MP quoted Union Minister while interacting with committee President Dr Deviprasad Shetty, over the phone. He also said a meeting will be held with the National Highway Authority, the Navayug company, the elected representatives and the activists in Bengaluru on September 24.

Forest minister R Shankar, who is on a visit to Udupi, met the protesters and promised to discuss the issue with the chief minister.

A memorandum was submitted to Kaup Tahsildar Gurusiddaiah Hiremath.

Elected representatives from different political parties, bus, car, tempo union members and activists from different forums took part in the protest.

Dr Deviprasad Shetty, Rashtriya Heddari Horata Samiti president; Gulam Muhammed, vice president, and Shekhar Hejamady, convener, were also present.
Congress workers staged a protest in front of BJP state president B S Yeddyurappas residence in the city on Thursday against the saffron partys attempts to destabilise the coalition government.

Shouting slogans against Yeddyurappa for trying to do yet another Operation Kamala, they tried to storm into his Dollars Colony residence. They were, however, stopped by a few BJP MLAs and workers. Police arrived at the scene before the Congress and BJP workers clashed with each other.

Minutes before the protest, Chief Minister H D Kumaraswamy and Yeddyurappa had traded charges against each other.

The BJP charged that Kumaraswamy had instigated the protest and demanded that Governor Vajubhai Vala intervene.

Congress and JD(S) goons tried to enter Yeddyurappas house today. If the BJP MLAs and workers were not there, Yeddyurappa may have been harmed. Police turned a blind eye to the entire episode, said BJP MLA Govind Karjol.
The invitation of the state Tourism department to Yaduveer Krishnadatta Chamaraja Wadiyar, scion of the erstwhile royal family, to be Tourism ambassador for Mysuru region, is expected to evoke a good response from tourists.

Mysuru carries a host of epithets like Cultural, Royal and Heritage city, but its image is on the wane, over the past several years, due to various reasons. If Wadiyar agrees to be the ambassador and if the government succeeds in convincing him to be part of its activities, to promote tourism in the region, especially in Mysuru, it would make a lot of positive difference, said N K Ananth Ballal, retired senior vice president of India Tourism Development Corporation (ITDC).

Even though all are equal in a democracy, people still have a fascination for royalty.

The Yadu dynasty, of the Wadiyar kings, has a rich legacy of 620 years with 27 heads. Some of them, like Mummadi Krishnaraja Wadiyar, Tenth Chamaraja Wadiyar, Nalvadi Krishnaraja Wadiyar and Jayachamaraja Wadiyar, are still adored by the people of the region for their pro-people policies and works.

Yaduveer has inherited their legacy and is already popular among the people, said Suma Rajkumar, a ventriloquist.

Ballal said, the move by the Tourism department has tremendous marketing value.

The perception of the city and its value will surely go up. It will be a big feather in the cap for the Tourism department. It has to be noted that in Rajasthan, the erstwhile royals are actively involved in tourism activities in places like Udaipur and Jaipur, he said.

He said, to make the Jamboo Savari more attractive, Wadiyar can follow the elephants, carrying the golden howdah, in his silver chariot.

Besides, if the Tourism department can convince him, his private durbar during Dasara, can be marketed to tourists. It is a rare thing for tourists. Real princes are rare in the world, with most of the dynasties disintegrating, he said.

S Rajeshwari, an entrepreneur in JP Nagar, said, besides Mysuru, tourism in Bengaluru, Hassan, Shivamogga, Chikkamagaluru, Chitradurga and Kolar can also be marketed well, if Wadiyar is made ambassador for Karnataka tourism.

It may be recalled that 15 districts, out of the present 30 districts in the state, were under the administration of the Wadiyar. It may also be mentioned that his predecessors were all pro-people rulers, she said.
HAVERFORD- Haverford High School (HHS) announced their National Merit Commended Scholars of 2018-2019 are Jameson Barry, Andrew Borbi, Nina Brown, Zheng-Cheng Chen, Robert Gorman, Drew Havlick, Abigail Kesselman, Alindra Lambert, Raphael Lopez, Lauren May, Madelyn McAlexander, Edward Nestor, Britt Riegler and Spencer Hurst. The HHS National Semi-Finalist Commended Scholars for 2018-2019 are Gregory Damico, William Gardner and Brian Timoney.

The National Merit(R) Scholarship Program is an academic competition for recognition and scholarships that began in 1955. High school students enter the National Merit Program by taking the Preliminary SAT/National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test (PSAT/NMSQT(R)).

Krueger-Braneky announces grants for local improvement projects

State Rep. Leanne Krueger-Braneky announced that state grants were awarded to help four local municipalities with infrastructure and environmental protection projects. The Commonwealth Financing Authority approved the following grants this week:

Nether Providence Township was awarded $150,000 in Watershed Restoration and Protection funds to help stabilize and restore stretches of eroded streambank in three locations along Dicks Run.

Brookhaven Borough was awarded $390,175 in Pennsylvania Small Water and Sewer funds to replace 618 feet of sanitary sewer main along W. Brookhaven Rd. and other work.

Swarthmore Borough was awarded $300,000 in Pennsylvania Small Water and Sewer funds to rehabilitate portions of the sanitary sewer system in the borough.

Rutledge Borough was awarded $424,972 in Pennsylvania Small Water and Sewer funds to rehabilitate portions of the sanitary sewer system in the borough, including area between President and Swarthmore Aves. and along Morton Ave.

The CFA is an independent agency of the Department of Community and Economic Development, established in 2004 to administer Pennsylvanias economic stimulus packages.

2018 Delaware County Studio Tour features 37 artists in 12 studios

Art collectors, enthusiasts and novices will have two full days in October to meet some of the best artists in their Delaware County studios, observe the creative process and to purchase their distinctive creations. This year, 37 artists in 12 studios will exhibit different mediums such as painting, sculpture, jewelry, photography, clay, glass, and paper. All the artists will be on hand to talk about their work and meet buyers and browsers alike. The third annual Delaware County Studio Tour is free and open to the public on Saturday Oct. 20, from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. and Sunday, Oct. 21, from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Visit www.delawarecountystudiotour.com for a map, artists and studio listings and catalogue. Handicapped accessible studios are marked on the studio pages in the catalogue and on the website. Email info@countystudiotour.com or call 610-942-9629 for further information. Members of the public can design their own self-guided tour and start with a nearby studio, or anywhere they like, by using the convenient map. In addition, Hanks Place has designed an itinerary that will allows visitors to pick their own studios to attend and create their most efficient route.

The Delaware County Studio Tour was created by Jeff Schaller, painter and tour organizer.

2018 Delco Public Transit Map and Guide available

Many Delaware County residents utilize a variety of transportation options offered by SEPTA. To assist residents in understanding the different SEPTA modes of transportation available, the Delaware County Planning Department has issued the 4th edition of the Delaware County Public Transit Map and Guide, as a reference to SEPTAs public transit offerings in Delaware County.

The map depicts all bus, regional rail, trolley, and high-speed rail services in Delaware County and certain routes in neighboring Chester and Montgomery Counties and the City of Philadelphia. It also shows the locations of major employers, social service agencies, colleges and universities, shopping centers, hospitals, state and county government office buildings, business centers and office parks, hotels and motels, senior care facilities, and parks and trails. Detailed inset maps show Media and areas surrounding the Darby, Chester, and 69th Street Transportation Centers.

Also provided is a guide to SEPTA fares and detailed information on Delaware County bus, trolley, high speed line, and regional rail routes, service, and stations. Information includes the frequency of service, the number of car and bicycle parking spaces at rail stations, fare prices, and on-board bicycle policies.

Maps are available at County and municipal government offices, libraries, major businesses, colleges and universities, school districts, hospitals, malls, hotels, SEPTA, nursing homes, and senior care facilities within Delaware County. A PDF version of the map and transit guide are available on the countys website, www.co.delaware.pa.us/.

Lansdowne Library to hold book sale

The Friends of the Lansdowne Public Library will hold a big Back-To-School Book Sale in the Bany Community Room, 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. Friday, Sept. 28; 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday, Sept. 29; and 1-4 p.m. Sunday, Sept. 30. Childrens books, previous best sellers, biographies, non-fiction, audiobooks, DVDs and more will be for sale at unbeatable prices. The library is at 55 S. Lansdowne Ave., Lansdowne. Donations of gently-used books in good condition are now being accepted during library hours for consideration for sale. Donation guidelines can be found on the library website at http://www.lansdownelibrary.org/. For more information, call 610-623-0239.

Veterans Appreciation Day at VFW Post #928

The Herbert W. Best VFW Post #928,1805 MacDade Blvd., Folsom, will hold its Fourth Annual Veterans Appreciation Day 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. Saturday, Sept. 22. Everyone is invited to the free community event that will demonstrate support for all the brave veterans. The day will include food and drink, family fun, a roast pig, a horseshoe tournament, DJ and live music, raffles and prizes and more.Veterans will have an opportunity to connect with their peers and brothers and sisters who put on the uniform in defense of freedom and the citizens of the local community who support and appreciate what theyve done for this country. For information, contact John Sheaffer, commander of Post #928, at 610-427-3130 or vfw928@gmail.com/.

Readers can send community news and photos to Peg DeGrassa at pdegrassa@21st-centurymedia.com/.
From the time we enter school, we are taught that to understand something we must assess, label, group, compare and define it. While this may be effective for learning shapes, numbers and various academic or scientific subjects, it actually inhibits our ability to feel compassion, have empathy and act with charity toward other people.

Sages and saints, philosophers and prophets have tried to teach people for centuries that striving for understanding only through mortal methods not only impedes our capacity to feel true sympathy but also constricts our capacity to minister in the purest and most powerful way.

For example, when we see a homeless man on the street, it is easy to begin to assess him, label his problems, group him with a class of addicts, compare him to partying junkies and define him by his current circumstances.

Similarly, when we notice a single mother at a shelter or a government agency requesting services, we can inappropriately start the same process to assess, label, group, compare and define her by what we see on the surface.

Less conspicuous is what happens when we meet a family who seems to have it all together with a great job, good kids, nice house, financial means and success. We assess that they are living the dream, label them as wealthy, group them with the elite, compare them to the famous and define them as the perfect family.

In each case, what the last thing these individuals need is an assessment, label, grouping, comparison or definition of their lives so we can make their world make sense to us. What they need  the only thing they need  is our compassion, empathy and charity.

The homeless man may be college-educated and of a brilliant mind; the single mother may have had an abusive spouse or simply a string of bad breaks, and the seemingly perfect family may be deeply disconnected, filled with loneliness and even despair. None needs a lecture. All could use an open mind, a helping hand and a listening ear.

People today need less critical analysis and more compassionate understanding.

Often we are uncomfortable pursuing the path to deeper understanding and the core needs of the people we encounter each day. So we use our process of the understanding model to simply address the surface-level problems while missing out on more meaningful opportunities to minister and help.

My daughter Sarah learned this while serving those living in a leper colony in India. She said, I can go and put bandages on people or help paint a wall or build a school, but actually loving the unlovables is the only thing that will ever make a difference in the true progress of people and communities.

People today need less critical analysis and more compassionate understanding.

Suspending judgment and acting on the impulses of our better angels always takes us to more significant impact opportunities.

In a historic address to nearly 50,000 people at Safeco Field in Seattle, President Russell M. Nelson of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints implored his listeners to a higher and holier way of ministering and serving others in both their congregations and communities.

He said, A fundamental characteristic of followers of Jesus Christ is the desire and willingness to care for others. This is also why the church actively engages in humanitarian service around the globe. Whether we are digging wells in Africa, providing wheelchairs to those in need in Peru, or among the first to respond after natural disasters anywhere in the world, our efforts are designed to help all mankind. No shipments are labeled: 'For Latter-day Saints only.'"

In other words, there is no need to label, group, compare or define those who are suffering in any way. Before the Safeco Field event, President Nelson met with local civic, religious and business leaders who have joined together to deal with homelessness in the Northwest. President Nelson described the nonjudgmental, compassion-filled approach to community-driven ministry, saying, We find great satisfaction in partnering with such agencies as the Red Cross, Catholic Charities, and Islamic Relief for much of our humanitarian work. We care deeply for our friends and neighbors the world over and are eager to build bridges of cooperation rather than walls of segregation.

As a world religious leader, President Nelson is urging all to transcend traditional ways of understanding the struggling, whether in the aftermath of hurricanes in the Philippines or the Carolinas, fires in the West or opioid-ravaged communities in the East. His message to the religious and nonreligious alike is that when it comes to uniting to serve the suffering, oneness need not be sameness.

Avoiding labels, suspending judgment and looking at one another not as groups or categories to be defined but as fellow travelers through life is the first step. Then, with compassion, empathy and charity, we can act on the impulses of our better angels and maximize our opportunities to positively impact the people we encounter every day.
URBANA, Ill.  Bryce Tune wants to win elections someday. But he has a problem: his core beliefs are a complex mix of conservative and liberal values.

He's Christian and he supports the LGBTQ community. He's pro-gun and in favor of Medicare for all.

Tune, a freshman at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, worries he'll have to choose a side to succeed in politics. But it's politics that really needs to change, said Robin Fretwell Wilson, director of the school's family law and policy program, during a Sept. 17 event on campus titled "Religious Liberty and the Culture War Over LGBT Rights: Can University Students Make a Difference?"

"People think, 'I have to side with this value. I can't side with that one,'" she said. "Culture war conflicts (create) an either/or. Well how about 'and'?"

Wilson and other speakers at the event advocated for a more tolerant form of politics, which would feature searching for common ground instead of drawing strict battle lines. We should celebrate people who empathize with both sides in clashes over LGBTQ and religious rights, not make them feel out of place, said Shannon Minter, legal director of the National Center for Lesbian Rights.

"I think one of the most important, maybe the most important, challenges facing LGBT people right now is finding a way to bridge the gap with conservative people of faith," he said.

People like Tune remind us that our country could be less polarized if we give tolerance a chance, Wilson said.

"I think the challenge for us is to find a new chapter of American pluralism," she said.

Seeking better solutions

Wilson has shared this message in state legislatures and on college campuses across the country, promoting policies that protect the LGBTQ community and people of faith at the same time. Her vision of "fairness for all" caught on in Utah, which passed compromise legislation in March 2015. Elsewhere, a winner-take-all mentality still dominates.

"In 28 states, the public square is essentially controlled by or dictated by the interests of people of faith with little thought for the interests of LGBT persons.  That's legal but it's wrong," Wilson said during her remarks at the University of Illinois. "In the remaining states, we can think of the public square as being dominated by concerns for LGBT persons and religious people can be told effectively to get out. That should be unacceptable to us, too."

But that's apparently not unacceptable for many policymakers, who continue to propose laws that protect LGBTQ people or religious people, not both. State legislatures considered nearly 150 bills related to religious freedom and LGBTQ rights in 2018 and the vast majority were one-sided, according to a recent Deseret News analysis.

Similarly, this year's high-profile Supreme Court case involving a Christian baker in Colorado who for religious reasons did not want to bake a wedding cake for a same-sex couple made it seem as if a compromise between LGBTQ and religious rights was out of reach.

There are also legal and legislative conflicts playing out in child welfare policies. State and local governments have been sued for allowing faith-based adoption and foster care agencies to receive government funds while opting out of serving same-sex couples for religious reasons.

"The culture war never seems to end," Wilson said. That's why she's started looking outside state legislatures for solutions.

Last year, she helped launch Tolerance Means Dialogues, a series of discussions on college campuses about the relationship between LGBTQ rights and religious freedom. This week's program at the University of Illinois, sponsored by a mix of conservative and liberal groups, was the latest event.

The strength of this approach is that it brings high-level policy debates down to a human level, wrote Thomas Berg, a law and public policy professor at St. Thomas University, in an email.

"Activist groups on both sides  often push uncompromising positions that hamper reaching solutions for living together long-term. Making personal connections is a sort of 'bottom-up' way to forge those solutions," he said.

Each dialogue includes presentations from leading religious freedom and LGBTQ rights advocates, as well as two or three university students, who are selected through an essay contest. The goal is to pair wonky policy talk with the lived experience of people choosing tolerance over hate, Wilson said.

"When these essays come in and I'm reading them, I just feel proud of the world sometimes," she said. "You read one of these essays and you think, let's turn the entire kingdom over to these kids. It would go better."

Elizabeth Kazmierczak, one of the student speakers during this week's event, focused her essay on the difficulties and benefits of being a bisexual Catholic. She struggles to accept that some people in her church would reject her if she acted on her interest in women, but she also takes comfort in God's love.

"Im not going to get my church to fly the rainbow flag anytime soon but talking to the people in my faith about being part of the LGBT community can foster some kind of dialogue," wrote Kazmierczak, a senior who majors in natural resources and environmental science.

What dialogue does

Dialogue and tolerance can seem like the wrong choice when the other options are lawsuits and legislation, Minter said. Inviting people into a conversation rarely allows you to name a clear winner and loser.

However, dialogue does address fear and misunderstanding much better than legal cases or one-sided bills, he added, noting that he has embraced opportunities for conversation in his personal and professional life.

"When you have a chance to sit down face-to-face and have conversations, people can share their fears and talk about them. Then, a lot of them go away," said Minter, who was part of the legal team that successfully argued in favor of same-sex marriage before the Supreme Court in 2015.

Minter, a transgender man who grew up in a conservative community in east Texas, adopted this approach with his own family in recent years.

"It was not hard once we started talking to get to a much better place," he said.

Dialogue cuts through the tensions threatening the campus environment and broader political life in this country, said Robert J. Jones, chancellor of the University of Illinois, during his opening remarks at this week's event.

"We have problems and challenges that must be solved. But we cannot start to resolve them if we cannot talk about them in a respectful and thoughtful way with those who we assume will disagree with us," he said.

In a conversation, people move beyond old stereotypes about who is Republican or religious or gay, said Blake Gibney, a University of Illinois law student who also spoke at this week's event.

"I think we need to come into a situation with an open mind and not have preconceived ideas," he said.

Wilson chose to bring her work to college campuses because she believes today's college students are generally more open-minded than other Americans. From a young age, they've had to navigate racial, religious and sexual diversity.

"They're working things out. Whatever's in the air (around them), we want to figure it out, distill it, bottle it and sell it across America," Wilson said.

Kazmierczak said it took coming to college for her to recognize that there's room for the LGBTQ community in the church and vice versa. A gay friend from church helped her rethink whether religious and LGBTQ people have to be in conflict.

"He was gay and he would go to church every Sunday. At first, I was super confused by that," she said. "He was a big influence on how I changed my perspective."

By giving students like Kazmierczak a platform to share their experiences, Wilson hopes she can help other Americans have similar realizations.

"In some sense, all of us have been hijacked by the culture war. This is an opportunity for people to take a step back and say, 'This is not how we should live,'" she said.
SALT LAKE CITY  The bitter divide between Salt Lake City Mayor Jackie Biskupski and the Salt Lake City Council deepened after the mayor stepped out of the City Council's meeting Tuesday night to address a crowd of residents concerned about the creation of the controversial inland port.

In the spontaneous speech, which Biskupski confirmed in an interview with the Deseret News on Wednesday, the mayor called the state legislation that created the Utah Inland Port Authority "unconstitutional" and told the crowd, "Our day in court will happen."

However, that legal fight may not come from her administration  but perhaps concerned environmental groups, the mayor said.

"At the end of the day, there are multiple constitutional challenges in the legislation. And yes, we will have our day in court," Biskupski said Wednesday, though she noted that day won't come until the port authority board takes a contestable action.

"So until we have our day in court, there's a lot of work to do to fight for the things we believe in," she said.

Throughout the tumultuous creation of the powerful Inland Port Authority, Biskupski and her administration have consistently said litigation against the state has remained on the table. But Tuesday marked the first time Biskupski indicated a legal challenge was indeed on the horizon.

Wednesday, the mayor said that although a lawsuit currently isn't in the works, she believes that unless the port legislation is changed to address the "constitutional challenges," a lawsuit is inevitable.

"I can't see how a constitutional challenge won't arise in our legal system," she said.

For that potential challenge, Biskupski and others have pointed to the so-called "ripper clause," a rarely invoked and somewhat vague section of the Utah Constitution written to keep the state out of city affairs.

Council frustration

While Bisupski addressed the crowd in the hall, applause and cheers could be heard from inside the council chambers, where council members continued their work.

City Councilman James Rogers  who has often clashed with Biskupski and has been at times the most outspoken critic of her on the council  laughed into his microphone.

Amid talks of a lawsuit months ago, the City Council blocked Biskupski from filing a lawsuit regarding the inland port without the council's approval. The action came after Biskupski's talks with Gov. Gary Herbert to negotiate changes to the bill creating the port authority broke down.

Biskupski would later publicly say she declined to continue talks with state leaders after it became clear to her they had no intention of letting the city keep its final land use and tax authority.

But City Council members, arguing some change to the law was better than no change, continued their own negotiations with the governor, which ultimately led to a special session that resulted in some concessions to the city. Biskupski still opposed the compromise, arguing the port authority still has the power to decide final land use decisions and control tax increment.

Tuesday, Rogers and other council members took verbal jabs at Biskupski for leaving the City Council meeting early, before a scheduled agenda item for the council to ask questions of the administration.

"It looks like the time that the mayor is here, she's out grandstanding and raising a ruckus outside," Councilman Charlie Luke said, adding that the mayor "campaigning or doing whatever she's doing" during the council meeting was "really, really irritating."

Rogers, who is a member of the port authority board, then announced he'd just heard the mayor had said "they'll have their day in court."

"You know anything about the mayor bringing a suit against the inland port?" Rogers questioned Biskupski's chief of staff, Patrick Leary, who sat in her place at the council meeting.

What resulted was a tense exchange.

"I don't think we're at the point to talk about that," Leary said.

"Well, she just announced it out there," Rogers said.

"Well, I didn't hear it," Leary replied.

Rogers then expressed frustrations to the mayor's staff about an email regarding the inland port that he sent requesting that Biskupski call him about the issue.

"I've been waiting," Rogers said.

"James, you know where to find me," Leary rebuked.

"Hey, you guys are out there talking all sorts of (expletive)," Rogers shot back. "You can come talk to me. And I know it's not you, Patrick, and you're just the messenger, and I'd hate to have your job. That's the truth."

The email, obtained by the Deseret News Wednesday, was in response to a letter Biskupski sent to Council Chairwoman Erin Mendenhall requesting "clarification" on who Rogers represented as a member on the board and whether he represents "the interests and wishes of the Salt Lake City Council."

Recently, Rogers as a port board member was among the majority who voted against opening the port authority's closed-door subcommittees, which resulted in backlash from concerned residents.

Biskupski also urged the council to publicly request the port authority board open its subcommittees.

"If the mayor is interested in knowing my strategy, please have her call me," Rogers said in an emailed reply to the letter. "I can bring her up to speed on how I've been working behind the scenes to be successful and not an obstructionist."

In an interview Wednesday, Rogers said Biskupski's comments in the hall was a "typical Mayor Biskupski move" of "trying to save face for (past) screw-ups."

"I've tried to bite my tongue on this and tried to be calm and collected, but last night was a tipping point," Rogers said.

Rogers declined to elaborate to the Deseret News about his "strategy" behind the scenes because he didn't "want to shoot myself in the foot" before the next inland port board meeting.

Litigation conversation

During Tuesday's public hearing, 19 people addressed the City Council expressing environmental concerns about a global trade hub being built in the city's undeveloped northwest quadrant, as well as how a possible rail yard would impact the Salt Lake Valley's air quality.

At the conclusion of the hearing, Mendenhall thanked residents, noting the council plans to take their input to the port authority board for its consideration and to "remain at the crux of the conversation between the community and the state and the port board as this advances."

Addressing comments that called for no inland port at all, Mendenhall also noted that Biskupski's administration has played a part in advancing the port.

"I think the recent contention that has happened isn't necessarily reflective of the fact that the city has been working toward an inland port for a very long time, and that includes the mayor and her administration."

Wednesday, Biskupski said had Mendenhall "not made that statement about me, I wouldn't have even left my seat" to address residents in the hall, "but I needed to make sure people understood why those processes happened, and that was under the impression that the city would control the mission and the vision of the port."

"And then that all got pulled out from under us," Biskupski said.

Mendenhall said Wednesday Biskupski's talk of a lawsuit continues to concern her "when there isn't a basis for a case at this point, and it's illustrative of her lack of collaboration with entities that have a great deal of decision-making authority."

"For the good of the city, the council will always favor conversation over litigation," Mendenhall said.

Deeda Seed, a former Salt Lake City councilwoman and a campaigner with the environmental group Center for Biological Diversity, said Wednesday no one has begun working on a specific lawsuit, but she and other people from groups including the Sierra Club, Utah Physicians for a Healthy Environment, Breathe Utah and HEAL Utah have been discussing the possibility with lawyers.

"We're talking about it, but there's nothing to litigate over yet because the harm hasn't been inflicted yet," she said.

In response to Biskupski's indications of an impending lawsuit, Derek Miller, chairman of the inland port board and Salt Lake Chamber president, said in a text message Wednesday, "The legal issues around the inland port board will continue to be decided by lawyers."

"The political battles around the inland port have been and will continue to be fought by politicians," he continued. "The job of the port board is to move forward responsibly and expeditiously to build an inland port that will benefit the community and the state. It is a job the board takes seriously and which we will do to the best of our ability."

The port board's next meeting is scheduled for Wednesday at 4 p.m., at the state Capitol.
MURRAY  Scientists, doctors and hospital administrators are expected to come from all over to learn and share the latest medical techniques and best practices at the new Intermountain Healthcare Kem C. Gardner Transformation Center.

It aims to transform the ways health care is provided across the United States and globally.

"This building is not only beautiful, it's inspiring," Dr. Charles Sorenson, former president and CEO of Intermountain Healthcare and founding director of the Intermountain Healthcare Leadership Institute, said Wednesday. He said changes need to happen on the front lines of health care, where clinicians interact with the patient, focusing on "preventing serious illness and injury in the first place."

Sorenson, the mastermind behind the center of transformation, said training offered there will be more about character and moral force than strategic insights.

"The good news is that values-based leadership can be taught," he said.

The first group of "visionaries," as Intermountain Healthcare CEO Marc Harrison calls them, is set to arrive Oct. 15.

"I want to say the opportunity is great, but in some ways the obligation is even greater," he said, reflecting on Intermountain's roots, as The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints gifted its hospitals in 1975 with one charge  "to create a model health care system."

"I feel like I'm standing in a place where the future is going to be created," Harrison said. "I'm confident we're going to make a big difference here."

The Transformation Center, where leaders in health care will collaborate and be trained to develop and deliver the highest clinical quality at the lowest sustainable cost, was made possible with a $20 million donation from local philanthropist and chairman of the Intermountain Foundation Board, Kem C. Gardner. It was designed by innovative global architecture firm, NBBJ, whose work includes numerous medical facilities and other structures around the world.

"I particularly like making contributions to Intermountain with the hope they'll keep me alive to fulfill them," Gardner joked. He said he was grateful to be a part of the "momentous undertaking," to "accelerate what's possible."

Gardner, who recited poetry and biblical verse as sources of his own inspiration, said he and his wife, Carolyn, saw the need and believed "patients shouldn't have to pay for the facility," a catalyst to transform health care.

Mitt Romney, a U.S. Senate candidate and longtime friend of Gardner who spoke at the center's grand opening on Wednesday, said it is important for clinicians to share what they know to improve the life and health of communities. He witnessed the impact of best practices in health care during his career in consulting.

Intermountain Healthcare, which offers high-quality care at low cost, Romney said, is continually ranked in the top 5 percent of hospitals nationwide.

He said Gardner's generous penchant for spreading knowledge led to the Intermountain center "for learning and advancement and technology  and the learning will continue," Romney said. "It will go on for generations."

In addition to the Healthcare Leadership Institute, the four-story, 120,000 square-foot Healthcare Transformation Center houses the first physical location  just north of the Intermountain Medical Center campus  of the College of Healthcare Information Management Executives' innovation center, a Leadership Simulation Center, space for clinical programs, and the already up-and-running collaborative Healthcare Delivery Institute, which has brought thousands of doctors, nurses and others to attend courses revolving around the transition to value-based health care.

Harrison said more than 40 percent of the care provided at Intermountain facilities is now prepaid.

"We are finally incentivized to keep people well," he added. "Because, in the end, health care is a people business. It is an opportunity, an obligation, an honor and a privilege to touch people in some of their times of greatest need."

The new Transformation Center, Harrison said, is perfectly poised to fulfill Intermountain's mission  "helping people live the healthiest lives possible."

"This is a great day. For now and into the future," he said.
SALT LAKE CITY  A complaint against Rep. Mia Love, R-Utah, has been filed with the Federal Election Commission by a progressive Utah nonprofit claiming the congresswoman accepted more than $1.1 million in illegal campaign contributions.

Love's campaign denied any wrongdoing Wednesday and called the complaint an effort to "smear" the congresswoman.

The Alliance for a Better Utah, which calls itself a good government group, said in a detailed letter to the FEC and the Department of Justice's criminal division that Love's "actions are a betrayal of the public trust of Utah voters."

At issue is money raised by Love for the June primary election, since she had no opposition and was nominated as the Republican Party's general election candidate by delegates to the party's state convention in April.

The alliance's letter said the issue should be "investigated immediately to determine the extent of the violation," then the campaign should be compelled to return money that shouldn't have been accepted.

The letter also calls for the campaign to be fined the maximum amount permissible and asks that "any knowing and willful violations" be referred to the Department of Justice for possible criminal prosecution.

"Any way you look at it, Rep. Love broke the rules and got a $1.1 million advantage," said the alliance's executive director, Chase Thomas, who signed the letter.

"Whether because of flagrant disregard for the rules, or massive ineptitude, the fact remains that Love has improperly received and retained a staggering amount of money, which her campaign is brushing off as though the rules don't apply to her," Thomas said.

The 4th District congresswoman's campaign has said about $370,000 raised after the convention is expected to be redesignated for another election, and less than $10,000 in contributions exceeding the maximum limit may be refunded.

The FEC had contacted the campaign about the money raised for the primary, news first reported by CNN. Love is facing a tough fight in her bid for a third term from Democratic Salt Lake County Mayor Ben McAdams.

In response to the FEC complaint, her campaign issued a two-page "fact check" Wednesday that labeled it "a desperate attempt to smear" Love and stressed no funds were raised illegally.

The document said "national Democrats, the liberal media and Ben McAdams are using technical uncertainties about how FEC fundraising rules map on to Utah's" unique candidate nomination system that allows up to three fundraising cycles.

"It's not a concern of ours because we're very confident that we're in the right on this," said Love's campaign manager, Dave Hansen. He said he expected that a complaint would be filed.

"The FEC is going to deal with it," Hansen said. "The results are going to be the same whether some group files a complaint or not." He said the alliance is a "liberal, left-leaning organization" tied to the McAdams campaign.

McAdams' campaign manager, Andrew Roberts, noted the issue is receiving national attention. On Wednesday, the New York Times reported the complaint is "escalating the liberal fight against the vulnerable incumbent" weeks before the election.

"News outlets in Utah and across the country have reported that Rep. Mia Love's campaign admitted to raising a million dollars in violation of federal campaign finance law," Roberts said in a statement.

He said the lieutenant governor's office, which oversees elections, has said Love would have known she wouldn't have a primary election as of March 15, the deadline for filing as a 2018 candidate.

"Even still, Love ignored the rules," Roberts said. "The right thing to do is return the money. Utahns deserve better than a member of Congress who continually breaks the rules and believes she can get away with it."
To many, the name Elizabeth Smart is no longer associated with a 14-year-old girl kidnapped from her Salt Lake City home in the middle of the night. It has instead become a name of courage, perseverance and bravery. It has become a name of positivity and hope, a name that encourages anyone facing adversity to keep moving forward and find a life of fulfillment.

The day after Smart was rescued in 2003, her mom told her to not let her captors steal anymore of her life away. In the ensuing years, she has used that guidance to thrive, giving service for her church, starting a family and becoming a vocal advocate for the abused who face hopeless injustice.

I really have spent the last 15 years of my life trying to move forward, Smart told CBSs Gayle King in an interview Tuesday. I would say this whole situation  has really given me a greater appreciation and understanding for how all of those thousands of victims (must feel) whose cases never even make it to court, whose perpetrators  are walking free from the day that they violated them or raped them or kidnapped them or hurt them in any way and nothing was ever done.

Since coming home, Smart has testified in front of Congress, shaped legislation, given speeches across the country and received high honors. But the real effect of her advocacy is not any title or award an organization has bestowed on her. Its that everyone can find some untapped courage to face insurmountable tasks and leverage harrowing experiences to improve the lives of others.

Smart remarked in her interview, It changed me as a person.  I wouldn't have the voice that I have today. I wouldn't have the compassion or the empathy that I have today. I wouldn't understand what it's like to, you know, walk the proverbial mile in their shoes. But I have. I have been there. I do know what it's like.

Similar words could be said of her family, which endured nine months of searching and waiting and tirelessly prodding officials to keep the search alive.

When asked if Smart was worried about her safety upon returning home, she simply stated, I was still concerned, but I wasn't consumed. And that may be the very lesson the country needs most right now. Division can rage, but it need not consume those willing to lower their shoulders and do the hard work of fixing broken policies while striving toward higher principles of kindness and compassion. Opioid abuse, homelessness and immigration, among a host of other issues, need less blaming, shaming and shouting, and more of an Elizabeth Smart approach  an unwavering understanding and courage that present circumstances dont need to determine the future.
SALT LAKE CITY  Support is slipping slightly for the nonbinding question on the November ballot about raising state gas taxes by 10 cents a gallon to help fund schools, according to a UtahPolicy.com poll.

Results released Wednesday show 50 percent of Utahns say they back raising the gas tax for education, down from 52 percent in May. Opponents of the increase are up to 47 percent, from 43 percent.

The poll of 809 likely Utah voters was conducted Aug. 22-31 for the online political news source by Dan Jones & Associates and has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.4 percent points.

"It's going to be close," said Austin Cox, campaign manager for Our Schools Now, the group that reached an agreement with lawmakers to drop an initiative that would have raised both sales and income taxes to collect some $700 million.

The non-binding ballot question is part of that agreement, which also included record education spending and a five-year freeze in the state property tax levy that allows additional revenue to be captured as property values rise.

Cox announced Wednesday that Our Schools Now and state leaders have now also agreed on how the additional revenue would be spent. He said a working group has been meeting privately to draft legislation.

The bill, which does not yet have a sponsor, follows much of the formula in the original initiative except for setting aside 5 percent of the new public school funding for teacher retention programs, Cox said.

Eighty percent of the new education funds would go to K-12 schools and the remaining 20 percent of the overall increase in funding would be available to higher education.

A 10-cent hike in the state's 29.4 cents a gallon gas tax is expected to bring in $180 million in the first full budget year that begins July 1, 2019, according to the Legislative Fiscal Analyst's office.

About $60 million of the increased gas tax revenue would go to local transportation needs, while the rest would be used to offset the general fund revenues now being used for transportation, freeing up more money for education.

It's going to be close.  Austin Cox, campaign manager for Our Schools Now

That somewhat complicated explanation for how the money gets to the classroom may be adding to the decline in support reflected in the poll, said LaVarr Webb, UtahPolicy.com publisher.

"The bottom line is, if you support this, it's more likely education will get more money. But behind that simple statement is some complexity," Webb said. He said voters are also starting to pay more attention as the election gets closer.

"It seems like everyone supports public education and when you ask, 'Does education need more money?' There's a lot of support for that," he said. "When it gets real, like it's actually on the ballot, it becomes more difficult."

Additionally, Webb said, the gas tax is a hard sell and voters are being asked to tell the Legislature they want a tax increase. Plus, there are other issues on the ballot competing for attention, including an initiative to legalize medical marijuana.

But he said there's still time to win over Utahns.

"I think proponents may be able to overcome all this, but they have some work to do," Webb said. "I think it's much needed, but there is a lot on the ballot, so voters are going to have to be educated about a lot of things."

Our Schools Now has been running TV commercials encouraging Utahns to vote for the gas tax increase and Gov. Gary Herbert is expected to appear in a new spot scheduled to begin airing next week.

Heather Williamson, state director for Americans for Prosperity of Utah, said the organization opposes the ballot question. Gas prices are already high in the state, she said, and the question would endorse a 33 percent increase in the tax at the pump.

"This is a significant increase," Williamson said.

Read more about views on the possible gas tax hike from the Deseret News opinion section:

Jay Evensen: Why you'll be asked to raise gas taxes by 10 cents, not 33 percent

A. Scott Anderson: This effort is Utah's chance to improve public education

Greg Bell: Will Utah voters increase their taxes this November?

Op-ed: Tax Day is a good time to reflect on tax reform to come
SALT LAKE CITY  Ricky Rubio and several members of the Utah Jazz already unveiled via social media on Wednesday the brand-new purple throwback jerseys that the team will wear this season.

But what they didnt tell you were the details of the uniforms.

Utah will actually be celebrating the 40th season of the franchise being in Salt Lake City with the Nike Classic Edition purple uniforms.

The Jazz will wear them a total of nine times this season  five at home and four away  starting Nov. 7 against the Dallas Mavericks at Vivint Arena.

The jerseys feature the original Jazz logo in gold and white on the front chest, plus the original J-Note logo and the 5 For the Fight logo patch.

These classic jerseys are an instant visual connection to our rich and storied past in the state of Utah, said Bart Sharp, senior vice president of marketing for the Utah Jazz. Our 40th-season celebration is a natural time to reflect on the past and all we have shared together with the fans of Utah, but its also an opportunity to look ahead to what is undoubtedly an exciting time for this franchise and the entire state.

On the night the Jazz breaks out the throwback uniforms, the organization also throughout the contest will highlight notable franchise moments as well as bring back special guests. The Jazz moved to Utah in 1979-80 after playing the first five seasons in New Orleans, with former franchise star Pistol Pete Maravich lighting up the league.

Utahs throwback merchandise is set to hit the Utah Jazz Team Store in mid-November.

Here is a full list of games during which the Jazz will wear the jerseys:

Nov. 7, 2018 vs. Dallas

Dec. 6, 2018 vs. Houston

Dec. 10, 2018 at Oklahoma City

Dec. 21, 2018 at Portland

Jan. 9, 2019 vs. Orlando

March 4, 2019 vs. New Orleans

March 13, 2019 at Phoenix

April 1, 2019 vs. Charlotte

April 7, 2019 at L.A. Lakers
SALEM  Amber Haskell has four brothers-in-law in her neighborhood, so she always assumed her family could stay with them if ever something happened to her house.

Then lightning sparked a pair of wildfires near their community of Elk Ridge, torching more than 175 square miles as of Thursday and forcing an estimated 6,000 people from their homes. Haskell, her husband and three children have moved into the Salem house of a family she previously had only said 'hi' to from time to time.

"We really didn't know them that well," Haskell said. "They've been so wonderful."

The Haskells aren't alone. Many who are displaced in Utah County are receiving support  whether it's housing, meals, or other assistance  from those just outside the evacuation zone.

The effort, in large part coordinated by congregations of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, has been so overwhelming that an underutilized Red Cross evacuation center closed earlier this week.

"Most disasters, you go other places. Everybody goes to Red Cross shelters. But here, you go to family or a friend," said Jan Newman, Elk Ridge Stake president for the church. "In this situation, everybody was very quickly able to relocate with someone they knew, or someone that was offering their home."

A small group of evacuees also were staying in hotel rooms covered by their insurance policies, he noted, and the Red Cross has provided meals and vouchers for Taco Bell and Chick-fil-A, plus other resources for those ordered to evacuate a week ago.

"We just remain available for the support they need," said Utah-Nevada Red Cross spokesman Rich Woodruff. His organization still is able to help evacuees who may need shelter in coming days, he said.

When the Haskells asked if they could park their RV on a dead-end Salem street near their acquaintances, the family instead offered up a basement with bedrooms, a bathroom and a kitchenette.

"We said, 'Move in. Dont stay in the trailer. Thats no fun," said Brenda Betteridge. "We just wanted them to be comfortable."

Even though their daughters were friends, their parents hardly knew each other a week ago. At 13 years old, Alexa Betteridge had first thought to ask in a text message how she could help the Haskells.

The families this week got to know each other over a dinner of beef fajitas cooked by Haskell  a gesture Betteridge appreciated because she doesn't cook much. The host also is recovering from ankle surgery and is grateful for the company.

Theyre taking care of me as much as Im providing a house for them," Betteridge said. Her miniature schnauzer Maggie has also enjoyed the new guests, sneaking downstairs to spend time with them.

"Ive heard firefighters say theyve never seen any community come together like this and provide for evacuees," Betteridge added. "All I can say is Im really glad I live where I do."

Several others have also offered to house the Haskells, Amber Haskell added.

"What is surprising is how much people think of you: the texts, the offers, people checking in,'" she said. "To let other people serve us has been challenging, but also heartwarming and touching."

Aside from shelter, other homegrown help is available for evacuees.

A chapel in Salem has become a community center, where toys and children's movies are available to kids while their parents catch up and commiserate. Newman and others also are coordinating homecooked meals for clients evacuated from an assisted living facility in Elk Ridge.

He emphasized that even though his and nearby stakes have organized volunteer efforts, the assistance is open to people of other faiths and to those who aren't religious.

"They're all our friends. And they're part of our community," he said.

Ranchers on Thursday also expressed gratitude for help from their own community in rounding up cattle that have spent the summer grazing in Diamond Fork, where the Pole Creek Fire now is burning and threatening their herds.

"It's a great bunch of people who live around here," said cattleman Larry Carson.

Early Thursday, authorities reopened U.S. 6 through Spanish Fork Canyon, saying they expect a cold front to shift winds and help them fight the lightning-sparked wildfires that together have consumed more 175 square miles.

The Bald Mountain Fire threatening the Haskell's home had grown to 17,000 acres as of Thursday morning, and containment held steady at 12 percent, according to a news release from agencies fighting the blaze. The flames overlap in some places with the Pole Creek Fire, which has charred 95,700 acres and was 32 percent contained. The cost of fighting the flames had topped $6 million as of Wednesday, fire managers said.

Authorities also reopened U.S. 89 Thursday, lifting evacuations for roughly 50 houses in the area, said Utah County Sheriff's spokesman Spencer Cannon. A cold front has shifted winds to the northwest and will likely blow the northwest corner of the fire back on itself, away from Elk Ridge and the city of Woodland Hills, which remained under evacuation.

Contributing: Caitlin Burchill
SALT LAKE CITY  The Food and Drug Administration is waging a war on teenage vaping.

On Tuesday, the FDA announced the launch of The Real Costs Of Vaping, a new ad campaign that will seek to educate teens on the dangerous effects of using electronic cigarettes such as Juul, which has been a common charge for the FDA in recent weeks.

A video ad for the Real Costs of Vaping campaign can be viewed below.

Fortune reported that as part of the campaign, advertisements, such as the one below, will be placed in high school bathrooms:

FDA launches new, comprehensive campaign to warn kids about the dangers of e-cigarette use as part of agencys Youth Tobacco Prevention Plan, amid evidence of sharply rising use among kids https://t.co/f2k2ei7VoV pic.twitter.com/7MragAyafw  U.S. FDA (@US_FDA) September 18, 2018

Additionally, the FDA has updated The Real Costs website in order to spread awareness of the risks teens take when they vape.

The announcement follows a previous statement made last week by the agency, in which FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb declared that youth vape-use had become an epidemic."

According to the FDA's website, e-cigs contain harmful chemicals such as acrolein (which can cause lung damage) and formaldehyde (a cancer-causing chemical). Users also risk inhaling metals such as nickel, tin and aluminum.

Similarly, diacetyl, the chemical commonly used in e-cigs to add flavor, has been known to cause popcorn lung.

In a story published last week, the Associated Press discussed the FDAs potential flavor ban and noted that Juul, an e-cigarette company, claims its flavored vapor helps adult smokers to quit."

While Gottlieb and the FDA arent against exploring the use of e-cigarettes as an alternative to adult smoking, the agency has its priorities.

The FDA wont tolerate a whole generation of young people becoming addicted to nicotine as a tradeoff for enabling adults to have unfettered access to these same products, he said in the FDA released statement.
PITTSBURGH  A Sandy man who jumped into the fast-moving and cold Provo River in an attempt to save a woman and her daughter in 2017 is one of 16 people being honored with Carnegie medals for heroism.

The Carnegie Hero Fund Commission, based in Pittsburgh, announced the winners on Thursday.

Sean Thayne died on May 29, 2017, trying to save a 4-year-old girl and her mother from drowning after they were swept downstream in the Provo River.

Brenda Nalleli DeDios, 34, of West Jordan, had been sitting with her two daughters on the rocks at the end of a footbridge along the bank of the Provo River near Bridal Veil Falls. London DeDios either slipped or stumbled into the river while on the rocks, officials reported.

The mother immediately jumped in after her daughter. Five bystanders, all males who saw what had happened, also jumped into the river, including Thayne.

Four of the adults got out of the water about 150 yards downriver, where Thayne and DeDios were last seen. They were pulled out of the water by police about 3 miles downstream near the Murdock Diversion Dam. Both were unconscious or not breathing at that point and pronounced dead a short time later. The girl's body was recovered a day later.

Another winner includes a receptionist who used a child's booster seat to fight off a pit bull that was attacking a 12-year-old boy was also named a hero.

Ana Ramirez was driving home with her 15-year-old daughter on April 18, 2017 2017, when she rounded a corner and saw Jose Ramos being attacked by two 65-pound dogs. The boy had been taking his husky for a walk on a leash when a male and female pit bull pounced.

Ramirez honked her horn, which caused the female dog to flee but the male continued its attack on Jose and his dog. She grabbed a child's booster seat out of her car and ran toward the pit bull and struck it. The animal latched onto her wrist and she hit it again with the booster seat, causing it to finally flee. She escorted Jose home.

She told The Modesto Bee newspaper she wasn't afraid.

"No, I was just mad; I guess my anger took over," Ramirez told the newspaper at the time. "My reaction was to defend."

She and Jose were both treated for bite wounds and recovered.

The Carnegie Hero Fund Commission was founded and endowed by the late steel magnate and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie, who was inspired by stories of heroism during a coal mine disaster that killed 181 people, including a miner and an engineer, who died trying to rescue others.

The commission investigates stories of heroism and awards medals and cash several times a year. It has given away $40.4 million to 10,044 awardees or their families since 1904.

Four of those honored Thursday died in rescue attempts, including 39-year-old Jason Sigelow, of Rochester, New York, who led a rescue of a 9-year-old boy struggling in deep water in Lake Ontario, but drowned. Another man in that rescue, Philip Orzech, is also being honored with a Carnegie medal. He managed to grab the boy.

Other winners announced Thursday include:

 Liam Bernard of Chapel Island, Nova Scotia, saved Ralph Chrisman from a truck crash on a rural highway on Sept. 16, 2016. He pulled Chrisman from the burning truck, removing the dashboard despite the flames.

 Blake Huff and Benjamin Hawkins, both of Kalkaska, Michigan, saved a paraplegic woman after a fire broke out in her home on Feb. 22, 2017.

 Delbert Blare, of Melbourne, Florida, died attempting to save Robert Shepard from drowning after he was carried away by a rip current while swimming in the Atlantic Ocean on Oct. 14, 2017. Shepard eventually reached shallow water and was saved.

 Michael Chestnut, of Foster, Kentucky, saved three 16-year-olds after their car overturned and caught fire on Aug. 24, 2017.

 John Hazelrigg, of Lunenburg, Massachusetts, and Russell Phippen, of North Billerica, Massachusetts, saved Revath Than from drowning as he clung to a rock in the icy Merrimack River on Jan. 3, 2018.

 Jay Agli, of Meriden, Connecticut, died trying to save a 19-year-old woman and young girl from drowning in the Connecticut River on June 11, 2017.

 John Meffert, of Rancho Santa Margarita, California, saved 62-year-old Frank Pisano after his twin-engine plane crashed and burst into flames on a multi-lane expressway on June 30, 2017.

 Ronald Manning, of Bogalusa, Louisiana, saved two women after their car overturned and caught fire on a rural road on July 14, 2017.

 Jennifer Emo, St. Louis, Missouri, rescued 2-year-old girl from her grandparents' sedan after it caught ablaze on a highway on Aug. 26, 2017.

 Andrew Miller, of Frisco, Texas, saved a 62-year-old man who was being assaulted by a group of teens on a Washington, D.C. subway platform on May 12, 2017.
RIVERTON  As the Jordan School District gears up to open five new schools for the 2019-20 school year, the school board will unveil boundary options during a meeting on Tuesday.

The meeting will begin at 4 p.m. at the Jordan Academy for Technology and Careers, 12723 Park Ave.

In a letter to parents, officials said significant boundary changes are needed throughout the district and every school has the possibility of being affected by boundary changes as a new high school in Herriman, a middle school in South Jordan, a replacement building for West Jordan Middle, and elementary schools in both Bluffdale and Herriman open their doors. In the 2020-21 school year, an additional new middle school will open in Bluffdale.

The letter said after Tuesday's meeting, boundary options and a boundary survey will be emailed to every home in the district and posted online at boundary.jordandistrict.org. The district also said no decisions will be made until the public has an opportunity to comment on the options through an online survey.

In addition to Tuesday's meeting, the district will hold five public meetings where the public will be able to provide feedback to the board. The meetings will be held on the following dates and at the following locations from 6:30 p.m. to 8 p.m.:

 Tuesday, Oct. 2, Riverton High School, 12476 S. Silverwolf Way.

 Wednesday, Oct. 3, Copper Hills High School, 5445 New Bingham Highway.

 Monday, Oct. 8, Bingham High School, 2160 W. 10400 South.

 Wednesday, Oct. 10, West Jordan High School, 8136 S. 2700 West.

 Monday, Oct. 15, Herriman High School, 11917 S. Mustang Trail Way.

The board is scheduled a final decision on the boundary changes at its Nov. 13 meeting.
The president of Kenya, Uhuru Kenyatta, has detailed the countrys proposals for increasing taxes on telecom and mobile money services.

The government is keen to raise revenues to fund initiatives in areas such as housing and healthcare without squeezing lower income citizens, but the proposals would likely result in operators increasing their prices.

The proposals recommend increasing excise duty for airtime and data services from 10% to 15%, and pushing up the tax on mobile money transfers from 10% to 12%. Additionally, Kenyatta has called for a 20% excise duty on the fees that financial institutions and services charge on every completed transaction.

The proposals will be voted on today by Kenyas parliament. They have been met with opposition from operators, with market leader Safaricom railing against any tax increases on mobile money transfers back in June.

Safaricoms CFO Sateesh Kamath argued that any tax hike would be a particular blow to the countrys unbanked (and therefore very low income) population, as well as being an impediment to Kenyas goal of reducing societal dependence on cash.

Mobile money has seen stellar success in Kenya, with the country regarded as a paradigm for African markets keen to expand financial inclusion. Safaricoms m-Pesa is the countrys most widely use mobile money offering.
The Central Bank of Nigeria has eased its pressure on MTN Group, causing the operators shares to rise more than they have in the past six months.

A statement from Central Bank of Nigeria representative Isaac Okorafor confirmed that further information provided by MTN relating to allegations that the operator had illegally repatriated $8.1 billion could lead to an equitable resolution of the dispute. The bank was previously demanding a full refund of the amount; its accusations caused MTNs share prices to plummet by almost a third.

Okorafor noted that four banks -- Standard Chartered, Citigroup, Stanbic IBTC and Diamond Bank  were providing information about MTNs transactions that would be reviewed by the Central Bank. Between them, the four have been fined around $16 million for enabling the alleged illicit activity.

The $8.1B refund is not the only payout facing MTN in Nigeria  the group has been hit with a bill for $2 billion in unpaid taxes on imported equipment and supplier payments relating to its operations over the past ten years. This bill, issued by the attorney general, was not mentioned in the Central Banks statement.

MTN claims that the allegations by the Central Bank and the attorney generals office are both baseless and malicious. This is not the first time the company has run into difficult in Nigeria, having incurred a $5.2 billion fine two years ago over its failure to disconnect unregistered SIM cards. On this occasion, it was able to resolve the dispute to all parties satisfaction, negotiating the fine down to $1.7 billion.

While this is a step in the right direction, continued dialogue to reach an amicable resolution is a minimum standard expected by the investment community, said Olusola Teniola, president of the Association of Telecommunications Companies of Nigeria. We look forward to the central bank disclosing the exact reasons for their actions.
Google is bringing its cloud storage subscription service, Google One to India soon. The company announced the imminent launch of Google One through a blogpost saying that the service would become active in India over the next few weeks.

With Google One, users can get extra cloud storage across Drive, Gmail, and Photos at cheaper prices. We've improved the price of some of our plans and added new plan options, ranging from 100GB to 30TB, you can choose the plan thats right for you, Google said in its post. Beyond the 15GB free cloud storage that Google already offers its users, if one wants to purchase additional cloud storage, Google One will offer more cost effective plans compared to the current prices. Google has not revealed India prices for Google One plans, but in the US, the company offers 100GB storage at $1.99 a month, 200GB at $2.99 per month and 2TB storage at $9.99 per month, and so on. Google One members can also share their cloud storage plan with up to five additional family members, who will also have access to all the benefits of the programme.

Additionally, Google One members will get access to a team of Google experts 24/7 to answer any questions related to file recovery, accidental deletion, and other general queries regarding Googles products. Members are also eligible for other benefits such as deals on hotels listed in Google Search, Google Play Store credits and more.

Those who have already purchased Drive storage plans will be updated to Google One automatically over the next few weeks. Look out for an email confirming your upgrade to Google One, where you can manage your storage plan and benefits. The way you use Drive to store and share files doesnt change, Google wrote in its post. Alternatively, users can also sign up for an update to know when Google One becomes available in India.
This article was first published on January 25, 2012. Today we bring you the updated article and the video to go along with it.



UPDATE 2018: Everything in this article still applies. House Hunters has done three shows in Ecuador since writing this article, that we know about.





Last week House Hunters International asked Frank and me if we would like to be featured on one of their shows doing an episode about house hunting for rentals here in Cuenca.



This version of HHI is a spinoff of the house hunters show. It was pretty exciting to be asked to do one of their shows and we gave it some careful thought. But we are not the type of people who just jump into something without doing the due diligent research first. What would the consequences of such a move be?

We did our research and investigation about this show and it is a very contrived reality show. Viewers do not realize that when they watch this show the people in it our actually acting! But that is not the scary part, the scary part is how they can and will slant anything they want from the four day shoot into their favor and say and do whatever they want. It's pretty much like watching the news or reading the newspaper. Is that what you want? we don't think it is. As our readers already know, we have our own show already.



Update 2018: In fact during the considerations we called them several times with our questions and they said we had to stick to their script and that's when things began to fall down hill from there and is why we decided not to do their show.



We have a reputation to uphold for our readers and YT viewers and for ourselves and we feel it will do more harm than good. We have a pretty large readership now and our readers truly have an expectation from us, and we believe we owe our readers the low cost Cuenca, not the hyped up Cuenca with inflated rents.



HHI is a very popular and well-known cable television show and for us to go on this show and pretend we like the hyped up rents and real-estate prices would be contradictory to what we teach people about how to live in developing countries.

We believe that if we were to go on this show it would inflate rental prices even more and that is something we are not willing to do. We cannot stop others from hyping up Cuenca with high priced rentals and real estate prices, but for us it is not an option. We love being the Frugal blog about Cuenca and we love being able to tell our readers about how not to be a gringo target and how to find good rental deals.

We live in a pretty nice rental now for only $250 a month and we know there are other rentals out there in the local rental market as well. If we were to go on the show we would be asked to look at high priced rentals that are actually out of our price range and that is not who we are.

This is how the show works and why we wont do it: They open the show up with how we moved from the U.S all the way to Cuenca to make a new life for ourselves. Then they show us three rentals in Cuenca, one being the home we are in now. They take everything out of our house and pretend like it is just one we are looking at to possibly rent. We would be expected to act the whole time. (If it were our show our slant would be how to find three nice but economical houses or apartments between the price ranges of $250 to $400. We would want to talk about the three factors to look for when searching for these rentals. And the three things not to look for when finding these rentals)

The shows slant would be to show us expensive, gringo inflated rentals that in reality we would never consider in a million years looking at or telling our readers about. They would get a very popular real-estate agency involved like Caldwell Banker or Remax, both of whom are actually here in Cuenca and they would show us $500 on up rentals. Frank and I would have to act like these overpriced gringo rentals are something we would consider renting. Of course, in the end wed have to say they are not really in our budget and we choose the $250 rental, the home were really in.

The bottom line is the show is really contrived and artificial, which is nothing like our videos we already have on YouTube. The videos we make for our viewers are never rehearsedwhat you see is what you getTo see us on television would be like watching two people you already know and have become accustomed to seeing on YouTube and then be expected to not really know them once you saw the show. We know that are readers would be disappointed and wed probably lose much of our devoted fans if we did the show.

You see, we already know that if you do your due diligence you can find a decent rental at the local prices of between $300 and $400, unfurnished. At least at this time in Cuenca. Things are changing, however in that area but we do not want to have any part of that new change. Prices are going up, yet we still rent for $250 per month.

Anyway, in the end of the show we would obviously pick out the house we are in now as the one we choose. They pretend like its 3 months later and they put all the furniture back and they show how we have adjusted to our new home, ladda, ladda, ladda.
Jet Airways flight turns back as passengers fall sick after air pressure mix up

A Jet Airways flight from Mumbai to Jaipur turned nightmare for passengers today as a goof-up, apparently by the pilot, failed to turn on a switch that controlled cabin air pressure, officials said.

Several passengers on the Jet Airways flight 9W 697 suffered nose and ear bleeding and the pilot had to turn back to Mumbai airport to rectify the mistake.

Around 30 passengers experienced nose and ear bleeding, with at least one person partially losing hearing.

During climb, the crew forgot to select the bleed switch due to which cabin pressurisation could not be maintained. As a result, oxygen masks got deployed, the official at aviation regulator, the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA), said.

The Boeing 737 aircraft returned to Mumbai due to loss of cabin pressure and the pilots had been taken off duty pending investigation, a Jet Airways spokesperson said.

Citing initial information, the official said a few passengers had nose-bleeding.

Out of 166 passengers on board, 30 passengers are affected...some have nose-bleeding, a few have ear-bleeding and some are complaining of headache, he added.

There were 166 passengers and five crew members on board flight 9W 697.

The Jet Airways spokesperson expressed regret for the inconvenience caused to passengers and said alternative arrangements were being made for the passengers.

Video footage on news channels showed oxygen masks hanging from overhead compartments and passengers breathing through them.

The airline official said all affected passengers were being attended to by doctors at the airport.

According to the airline, the aircraft landed normally in Mumbai.

All guests were deplaned safely and taken to the terminal. First-aid was administered to a few guests who complained of ear pain, bleeding nose, etc, it said.

The civil aviation ministry said it had requested the DGCA to immediately file the report on the issue.

The crew is being derostered. Of the 166 people on board, 30 were affected and have been given treatment, the ministry said in a tweet.
IAF deputy chief flies Rafale jet in France amidst political slugfest in India

Indian Air Force deputy chief Air Marshal Raghunath Nambiar took to Rafale fighter aircraft on a test flight in France as political slugfest contined in India.

Finance minister Arun Jaitley on Thursday hit out at Congress president Rahul Gandhi for repeatedly 'lying' by making allegations over the Rafale deal.

As per a report by defence website LiveFistDefence, the IAF deputy chief completed a front-seat sortie in a Rafale at the Istres air base in France. He flew a Dassault-owned Rafale testbed sporting the India-specific software and system enhancements, separate from the first Rafale for India.

Air Marshal Nambiar (Nambi) is among the first test pilots to fly the LCA Tejas program and fly precision strikes on Tiger Hill during the 1999 Kargil conflict.

Earlier this month, three Rafale jets had landed at the Maharajpur air base in Gwalior. The French pilots had made a layover while returning from Exercise Pitch Black 2018, the multilateral air training exercise that concluded recently in Australia. During the exercise in Australia, the IAF pilots had got a first-hand experience of the Rafale jet when an Indian pilot was onboard the fighter aircraft.

Amid allegations from Congress and other opposition parties, the IAF has recently been defending the Rafale jet.

Nambiar had recently said that Rafale is being discussed for the wrong reasons and once it is inducted into the IAF, it would 'revolutionise airpower in the sub-continent'. "The Rafale gives us full spectrum capabilities to a large extent and would revolutionise airpower in our sub-continent having capabilities which do not exist," he had said earlier this month.

Justifying the procurement of the jets, Air Chief Marshal Birender Singh Dhanoa, Chief of the Air Staff, had also said that IAF needs to strengthen its fleet to match the neighbours who have been modernising their military at a rapid pace.

Air Force Vice Chief Air Marshal SB Deo had also said that the IAF is waiting for the aircraft while adding that the allegations are being made about the deal by people who do not know the facts. "We're waiting for the aircraft. Rafale is a beautiful and capable aircraft. I shouldn't comment but I can tell you all this discussion and all these things going on in Rafale, because we know a lot about how everything went, we find that, people dont have the information," the Vice Chief of Air Force had said.

Finance minister Arun Jaitley today hit out at Congress president Rahul Gandhi for repeatedly 'lying' by making allegations over the Rafale deal.

"The campaign of falsehood is entirely led by the Congress President. His strategy is simple - concoct a lie and repeat it as many times. This, at least, provides him some concocted material for his statements/speeches for otherwise an issueless Congress," Jaitley said.

He added: "If the Rafale concoctions were the first big lie, the second one stated repeatedly is that Mr. Modi waived off rupees two lakh fifty thousand crores of fifteen industrialists. Every word of that sentence repeatedly uttered by Rahul Gandhi is false."

Attacking Rahul, Jaitley said that public discourse is a serious activity and not a laughter challenge. "You lied on the Rafale deal, you lied on the NPAs. Your temperament to concoct facts raises a legitimate question  do people whose natural preference is falsehood deserve to be a part of the public discourse. Public discourse is a serious activity. It is not a laughter challenge. It cannot be reduced to a hug, a wink or repetition of falsehood. The worlds largest democracy must seriously introspect whether public discourse should be allowed to be polluted by the falsehood of a 'Clown Prince'," he said.
New Delhi, Beijing to jointly train Afghan diplomats in rare collaboration

India and China will jointly train Afghan diplomats from mid-October this year, in a rare third-country collaboration, official sources said on Wednesday. The decision follows a bilateral meeting between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and visiting Afghan President Ashraf Ghani.

The genesis for this joint collaboration was agreed upon during the meeting between Modi and Chinese President Xi Jinping during the Wuhan summit in April this year.

The joint undertaking by New Delhi and Beijing in Afghanistan assumes significance as it is the first between two feuding neighbours. It also points to Beijing acknowledging Indias view points on the Afghan scenario.

The cooperation with China on Afghanistan is going to be in the sector of training of diplomats. Part of the training will take place at the Foreign Service Training Institute in New Delhi, while the other part will take place in Beijing, the source said.

Ghani briefed Modi on initiatives by his government towards peace and reconciliation and also in confronting the challenges of terrorism and extremism imposed on Afghanistan and its people, a statement by the ministry of external affairs said.

Sources said Ghani shared his assessment of the security situation in Ghazni province and expressed confidence that his government and the Afghan security forces will be able to handle the situation there.

Ghani gave the Indian government an account of the recent Taliban attack on Ghazni, in which over 100 foreign nationals were killed by Afghan forces. These, he said, had come from Pakistan. Media reports showed a number of bodies returned to Pakistani towns for last rites.

Ghani also informed the Indian side that Islamic State was increasing its presence in Afghanistan, something that has been echoed by the US, Russia and Iran separately. However, the Afghan assessement of the composition of IS continues to be that they are mainly disaffected TTP members from Orakzai agency of Pakistan, confirming once again that Pakistans interference in Afghanistan was unchanged.

Modi is reported to have raised the issue of seven abducted Indians in Afghanistan, who have gone missing since May this year. Ghani said he was personally monitoring the progress in securing the release of the Indian engineers who were abducted.

The prime minister reiterated Indias support to an Afghan-led, Afghan-owned and Afghan-controlled peace and reconciliation process that would enable Afghanistan to continue as a united, peaceful, inclusive and democratic nation and emerge as an economically vibrant country. The prime minister emphasised Indias unwavering commitment to support the efforts of the government of Afghanistan to this end, as also for the security and sovereignty of Afghanistan. He unequivocally condemned terrorist attacks and violence in Afghanistan which have caused immense loss of precious human lives and expressed solidarity with the people and national defence forces of Afghanistan in their fight against terrorism, the official statement by MEA said.

The two leaders reviewed the progress of the multi-faceted India-Afghanistan strategic partnership.

Addressing a civic reception in his honour by the India Foundation, Ghani said the war in Afghnaistan was an unrestricted war, targeting civilians and places of worship. Defending his ceasefire offer to Taliban, he said it was widely welcomed in the country. Peace in Afghanistan must be an inclusive peace. Why is peace with Taliban important? Because if we arrive at peace with Taliban, we can concentrate on counter-terrorism. No matter how much the process goes on for and how much blood is spilt, Taliban are part of our society.
RBI asks Yes Bank's Rana Kapoor to step down in 4 months

Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has asked chief executive and managing director of private sector lender Yes Bank Ltd, Rana Kapoor, to step down after a term extension ends on 31 January 2019, as per a letter received from the Reserve Bank of India.

RBI cited governance and regulatory issues and directed Yes Bank to search for a successor in the interim. The central bank had, on 30 August, allowed Kapoor to continue as MD and CEO until further notice.

"Reserve Bank of India has vide letter dated September 17, 2018 received today, intimated that Shri Rana Kapoor may continue as the MD & CEO till 31 January 2019, and the Board of Directors of the Bank are scheduled to meet on September 25, 2018 to decide on the future course of action," Yes Bank said in a regulatory filing with the stock exchanges.

Kapoors current term ended in September. In June, the bank had approved another three year term but required RBIs approval for the same. The regulator has asked Kapoor to continue till further notice.

While Yes Bank reported rapid growth over the last decade under Kapoor, the regulator pointed out discrepancies in the way the bank reported its bad loans. The bank had higher bad loan ratios for two consecutive years.

Kapoors is the second instance of RBI stalling a reappointment in a private lender after Shikha Sharma, managing director and chief executive officer of Axis Bank Ltd, was not allowed a term extension.

RBI asked the bank board to reconsider its approval prompting Sharmas exit. She will step down on 31 December, following which, Amitabh Chaudhry of HDFC Standard Life Insurance Company Ltd. is set to take over.

Rana Kapoor, founded Yes Bank in 2003 with his brother-in-law Ashok Kapur and colleague Harkirat Singh, becoming the first to get a banking licence under RBIs policy of allowing more private sector banks.

Rana Kapoor, Ashok Kapur and Harkirat Singh had together set up Rabo India Finance, the India arm of Netherlands-based lender Rabobank. Later all three partners sold their cumulative 25 per cent stake in the India arm to set up Yes Bank with a Rs200 crore capital.

While Harkirat Singh left the outfit due to differences among the major shareholders on who would lead the bank, Ashok Kapur tragically passed away during the Mumbai terror attack in November 2008. Since then, Kapoor has been the sole founder director to lead the bank.

Rana Kapoor also successfully fought off a challenge by his sister and Ashok Kapurs wife Madhu Kapur who dragged him and the Yes Bank board to court in 2013, seeking more powers in nominating new board members. Since Kapoos promoter shareholding had been passed on to his family after his death, his wife initially sought to appoint their daughter Shagun Gogia on the banks board.

Kapoor and the banks board opposed this appointment citing lack of experience. The bank also contested that the Kapur familys shareholding had moved to non-promoter status after the co-founders death.

The Kapur family later demanded that they have say in appointing new directors on the banks board. In 2015, the Bombay High Court ruled in favour of Kapur and Gogia, giving them powers to jointly nominate new members.
Japanese billionaire buys all tickets for SpaceX's moon trip

Elon Musks SpaceX mission round the moon carrying paid customers is all sold out. On Monday, Yusaku Maezawa, a Japanese billionaire, announced that he has bought all the tickets to moon, which would make him the first private paying customer to ride around the Moon aboard the company's next-generation rocket.

Maezawa, the founder of Japan's largest online clothing retailer site Zozotown, would invite six to eight artists to board the trip since he "bought all the seats." Maezawa, 42, with a real-time net worth of $2.9 billion, suggested the flight would take place as early as 2023.

SpaceX founder Elon Musk tweeted that Yusaku would be "bringing eight (brave) artists and cultural figures with him on the journey around the moon."

The company considered the would-be trip an "important step toward enabling access for everyday people who dream of traveling to space."

Musk said SpaceX will be using the BFR (or the Big Falcon Rocket), which was still under development, for the moon trip. Under the current design, the BFR will be 118 meters long, with a payload capacity of 1,100 cubic meters and 100 metric tonnes.

SpaceX's BFR is set to be a bit more powerful than the Apollo missions' Saturn V rocket. The company released a promotional video in early 2018 showing a simulated BFR crew vehicle landing on the moon, but did not provide any technical information.

The BFR will have seven Raptor engines, each capable of 200 tonnnes of thrust, according to Musk.

Yusaku Maezawa, a relatively unknown person outside the archipelago where he lives, hopes to become more famous with his plan to fly to Earth's biggest satellite.

Elon Musk called Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa "brave" and "an adventurer."

Yusaku Maezawa has always sought to stand out. He skipped college, moved to California to play in a rock band and started his own e-commerce company, Start Today Co. After making money, the 42-year-old started buying millions of dollars worth of artwork. Now he is ready to blast off to the moon on a SpaceX rocket scheduled in 2023.

Maezawa intends to take a combination of painters, musicians, dancers, photographers, film directors, fashion designers and architects on a weeklong lunar loop, where he'll get to watch as they get inspired and create art along the way.

"I thought long and hard about how valuable it would be to be the first passenger to the moon," Maezawa said at an announcement at Space Exploration Technologies Corp's headquarters in Hawthorne, California, sitting next to the rocket company's CEO, Elon Musk. "I choose to go to the moon with artists."

Maezawa and Musk declined to say how much the lunar trip would cost. "This is not us choosing him," Musk said. "He chose us. He is a very brave person to do this."

With a net worth of $2.3 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, Maezawa made a splash in the art world in 2017 when he spent $110.5 million on a single Jean-Michel Basquiat painting at a Sotheby's auction, setting a record for an American artist's work at the time.

Maezawa built his art binge on the money he got by selling shares in the company he founded. He has so far sold about 23 billion yen ($205 million) worth of the company's shares.
A Donegal man has won a national award for his outstanding contribution to research in civil engineering.

Declan Gavigan from Ardara is the recipient of this years Civil Engineering Research Association of Irelands Young Researchers Award.

Declan received this national award for his outstanding contribution to research and practice at an early stage in his career.

He has been highly successful as the Group R&D Engineering Manager with the innovative company, OpenHydro, leading a multi-disciplinary team of engineers conducting research into tidal energy.

With several awards already in his portfolio, including prestigious IRCSET and IABSE awards, he has worked with third level institutions in winning H2020 funding amounting to some 18 million in the last three years and had a patent filed last year.

Declan graduated with a Gold medal in Civil Engineering from NUI Galway, and with a doctoral research interest in the environmental impact of buildings.



Speaking at the award ceremony, Prof Roger West, chairman of the selection committee, commented: This year the judges were faced with a very strong field of candidates for this award, reflecting the exceptionally high quality of international research being undertaken in Ireland. 



This years Civil Engineering Research in Ireland (CERI2018) conference was held recently at University College Dublin.
The Special Silver Commemorative Coin in honour of legendary guitarist Rory Gallagher released this week by the Central Bank of Ireland was launched at a Special Ceremony by President Michael D. Higgins at Aras an Uachtarain.

The sterling silver coin depicts Gallagher playing the guitar against a backdrop of a vinyl record over an image of a map of the world.

The first coin was presented to President Higgins at Aras an Uachtarain by the governor of the Central Bank Philip Lane in the presence of Rory Gallaghers brother Donal Gallagher who was flanked by his wife Cecilia, sons Eoin and Hugh and daughter Kate.

https://www.donegaldemocrat.ie/news/home/336326/president-unveils-rory-gallagher-commemorative-coin.html

Invited guests

Among the invited guests attending the launch were Peter Aiken (Aiken Promotions), Dave Fanning (RTE Broadcaster), Julian Vignoles (Author and Broadcaster), Niall Stokes (Hot Press Magazine) and representing the Rory Gallagher Festival in Ballyshannon was Barry ONeill.

In his address, President Higgins said Rory Gallagher was born in Ballyshannon in County Donegal, although I know that Cork people often try to claim him because his family moved down.

Indeed, you can find a statue of Rory in Ballyshannon.

In our time, I would ask what better symbol could we find for our creative, artistic, freedom-loving country than an image of one of our most iconic musicians, Rory Gallagher?

I am so pleased that the Central Bank, assisted by the Numismatic Advisory Committee and spurred on by members of the public, decided to honour and commemorate Rory in this way.

Special mention

The Governor of the Central Bank Philip Lane also gave a special mention to Ballyshannon, Mr. Lane said the success of Ballyshannons International Rory Gallagher festival showed how cultural value can translate into economic value.

He also spoke of Gallaghers enduring appeal, It is European and global  the ongoing impact of Rory Gallagher. Around the world it has such a big impact, which is wonderful.

The coin is one of three representing Irish musicians which will be issued. The Modern Irish Musicians series will include silver coins commemorating Phil Lynott in 2019 and Luke Kelly in 2020.

Very special occasion for fans

Rory Gallagher Festival Chairperson Barry ONeill speaking after the event said it was a very special occasion for Rory Gallagher, his family and his fans.

It is particularly pleasing from the viewpoint that the coin is being released now to coincide with Rorys 70th birth year and that goes all the way back to 2nd March, 1948 at the Rock Hospital in Ballyshannon, he said.

https://www.donegaldemocrat.ie/news/news/316704/ballyshannon-rocks-on-with-a-bumper-rory-gallagher-festival.html

I was very proud to represent the Festival and Ballyshannon today and the comments relating to the town, the Rory Gallagher International Festival and its impact was very pleasing, very proud and a significant day when the President of Ireland and the Governor of the Central Bank are recognising the legacy of hard work achieved in honouring Rory in Ballyshannon.
The move by Donegal County Council (DCC) to acquire three homes in the Gaeltacht village of Fintown has been commended by councillors of the Glenties Municipal District.

The Cathaoirleach of the Glenties Municipal District, Cllr John Sheamais O Fearraigh said that the move by DCC to take-over three homes which formerly belonged to Udaras na Gaeltachta was one that should be welcomed.

Sustained development

Sinn Fein Cllr, Marie Therese Gallagher said that the authority ought to be pro-active in acquiring homes in small villages in a bid to sustain population and development.

What we need is schools to remain open, families living in the area and so forth, she said.

She said that Fintown has suffered over the years.

She urged the council to look aggressively at a plan to support the population of communities from Creeslough to Ardara.

The Dungloe-based public representative said that families will live where homes are made available to them.

She added that she understood that resources were a huge issue for all concerned: I know that resources are a huge issue.

Where we build homes we sustain families and preserve the language which is very important, she said.

Declining population

Her sentiments were echoed by Cllr Terence Slowey who said that there are homes closing on a regular basis in certain areas of the county.

He also said that the Irish language ought to be considered in relation to decreasing populations in Gaeltacht areas.

Cllr John Sheamais O Fearraigh welcomed the fact that DCC is looking at implementing a village renewal programme in the area: I welcome the move, he said.
Thirty-six French language students from St Vincents school here in Dundalk and their accompanying teachers got the new term off to a wonderful start as they embarked on a tour of the French Riviera and attended a French-language immersion course at the Centre International in Antibes.

Set in the glorious South of France which is renowned for its beautiful coastline and glamorous cities, the resort town of Antibes is set between Cannes and Nice. Known for its old town which is enclosed by 16th Century ramparts with the star-shaped Fort Carre, it overlooks luxury yachts moored at the Port Vauban marina. The group followed a busy schedule of intensive French classes modelled on the European Framework for Modern Languages and graduated with a diploma after their week-long course, where they also met with students from various European countries.

In the afternoon, they enjoyed excursions around the Riviera. Among the highlights were visits to Eze, Monaco, Cannes, Nice and Grasse. Participants also enjoyed the Mediterranean climate and were able to swim and sunbathe in the beautiful little cove outside the walls of Old Antibes.

They were accommodated by local French families which allowed them to experience authentic day to day life in France, with many of the girls commenting on how much their use of the language improved over the week as they were totally immersed in French home life.
An Irish meteorologist has warned of 'very disturbed' weather for the weekend as two storm systems move towards Ireland in the wake of Storm Ali.

Cathal Nolan from the Midland Weather Channel predicts that Ireland will avoid the brunt of Storm Bronagh on Thursday and Friday, but predicted the potential Storm Callum to cause more widespread upheaval on Saturday and Sunday.

Speaking about Storm Bronagh, Nolan said, "On Monday morning we issued a warning that two named storms would affect the country before Friday. Storm Ali, the first named storm of the year brought devastation across the country on Wednesday, with the highest wind speed recorded occurring at Mace Head, Galway, at some 146 Km/h."

"Included in our initial warning was the potential that Storm Bronagh would affect the country during Thursday, and as of this morning Storm Bronagh has been officially named by the Met Office, with very strong winds expected across much of England and Wales this evening."

Looking towards the weekend and the potential Storm Callum, the meteorologist said, "our weather looks very disturbed, with the potential risk of some stormy conditions across the southeast of the country late Saturday night and Sunday morning."

He said current models "indicate that the worst of the storm will miss the country, with some charts indicating that the storm won't truly develop until it affects central Europe on Monday/Tuesday, where it will bring the first snowfall of the year to Alpine countries."

"However, other models such as the ECMWF continue to show the potential for some stormy conditions in many areas of the east and south as we head into Sunday morning," Cathal concluded.
Irish Water and Louth County Council have stated this afternoon that they are working with the ESB to restore power to the Workhouse Hill Pumping station that supplies water to Dunbin reservoir as soon as possible.

The power outage which occurred as a result of Storm Ali has stopped water from being pumped to the reservoir and it is impacting water supply to 3,000 customers in Dunbin, Courtbane, Shelagh, Rathmor, Kilkerley, Stonetrough, Knockbridge Rd, Little Ash and surrounding areas in County Louth.

The supply to Dunbin and surrounding areas is currently solely dependent on storage in the reservoirs.

"We can confirm that ESB is prioritizing restoring power to the water supply infrastructure", said Irish Water in a statement this afternoon.

Bottled Water Supply is available at the following locations from noon onwards:

- Kilkerley Community Centre

- Philipstown Pump House located close to Callans Bar & Restaurant

"Irish Water is encouraging customers to conserve water so as not to deplete our reservoirs while power is being restored. We are urging customers to conserve water by not running taps, taking showers instead of baths and to refrain from using dishwashers and washing machines."

It is expected that water supply will return to normal by 5pm this evening. The latest updates are posted to our supply and service section on our website www.water.ie and on Twitter @IWCare.

The Irish Water customer care helpline is open 24/7 and customers can call us on 1850 278 278.


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It should be pretty clear by now that the level of effort devoted to manipulating our opinions is unprecedented at the moment. Granted, a lot of this has to do with the fact that most of the "free" online services we use aren't free at all. They are trading our ability to make measured opinions for advertisers' money, and some of these "advertisers" are foreign governments.

With all of these attempts to manipulate us into doing things we otherwise don't want to do -- many of which are surprisingly successful -- there is one question we should be asking of any inflammatory story: Why?

We focus on the what, where, and when almost exclusively, but it's become increasingly important for us to know the motive behind the news. Last week's op-ed in The New York Times is a good example, because the "why" is likely far more interesting than what is said in the piece.

I'll close with my product of the week: Cinego, an impressive head-mounted streaming video system.

Understanding Manipulation

Sales, marketing and politics -- in governments, companies and a lot of family dynamics -- are all about manipulation. Understanding the need to manipulate and being able to identify it are critical skills to becoming successful in most any field. Both confirmation bias and argumentative theory have at their cores an inbred programmed foundation of needing to manipulate others, which often overcomes good sense and even self-preservation.

The ability to manipulate is a form of power and status, and it currently revolves around an ever-changing but still growing group of people we call "influencers," which is just a nice way to say "manipulators at scale." You can profit handsomely from this, particularly if you are good at it, but if you allow yourself to be manipulated by someone who doesn't have your best interests at heart, the results can be personally damaging.

One of the painful trends now is the ramped-up activity of folks who attempt to manipulate you -- a less kind term is defraud you -- into sending them money. Facebook seems to be up to its armpits in folks like this at the moment. It has a reporting structure in place. Email and, particularly, the age-old scam phone calls are variants of this game.

The defense is to simply ask "why" they are calling you. In most cases, they want your money or your information. For instance, you get a note on Facebook from someone you've never met who wants a relationship. The person doesn't know you, probably hasn't even read your profile, and really doesn't care what you look like. Chances are the "why" is they want you to send them money. Knowing this you don't engage.

The Trump Resistance Op-Ed

The op-ed The New York Times published last week spotlights a presidency in crisis -- so much so that apparently there is an internal "resistance" trying to make sure the president doesn't screw up. I've worked in a lot of companies and the idea of having a group of executives and assistants working to keep the CEO from doing something stupid isn't as unusual as you might think. This is likely something Elon Musk should have in place before he gets himself fired.

The new Bob Woodward book does suggest the White House is a bit of a mess. That shouldn't be a huge surprise, even if you only look at the unprecedented turnover rate of cabinet members.

The book is pretty damning, and it appears to be well written and well researched -- but it doesn't really cover that much new ground. The New York Times op-ed doesn't really add much to the book, or to other recent books, except for the idea of an organized "resistance."

The result of an op-ed like this typically would not be a change in behavior. Rather, it would trigger an all-out effort to find and fire the writer, not to mention pretty much render the "resistance" moot.

Can you imagine an op-ed in a French newspaper during the Second World War talking about how the French Resistance was secretly blocking German efforts to govern France? The person who wrote it likely would be shot by the French Resistance.

If your effectiveness as a group is predicated on your secrecy, why would you break secrecy, unless you wanted to torpedo the group or someone in it? We are a few months from a critical election. If you could get one party to go on a witch hunt inside itself, you likely could distract it enough so that it would be far more likely to lose.

This would be an important question for The New York Times, because these things tend to come out, and the Times trying to manipulate an election would be problematic for that publication, regardless of whether it knew this or not.

Another answer to the "why" question might involve a disgruntled employee who was passed over for a promised raise. (Money is a lousy motivator when you add it, according to Maslow, but if you take it away it works incredibly well at motivating employees against you.) The president effectively just took raises off the table for all federal workers (which should result in a huge number of them wanting him gone).

The op-ed could be a play to tarnish someone else with Mike Pence the seemingly obvious target, given some unusual wording. (But why target Pence?)

A scarier thought is that the Times op-ed was designed specifically to do what it is doing. However, instead of influencing the upcoming mid-term elections, its purpose might be to eliminate the effort to keep the president from doing something massively stupid.

In other words, the op-ed's goal might be to render ineffective any effort to prevent a catastrophic presidential decision. Now whether that is the intention or not, that is the likely outcome. That doesn't bode well for the United States, if the president's judgment is massively compromised, as Woodward's book and the op-ed suggest.

The actual "why" behind this op-ed may be far more important than what it says.

Wrapping Up

We are under an almost constant barrage of companies and people who are trying to get us to do things we otherwise wouldn't do. From scamming us for money or information to scamming us to vote against our own best interests, the level of effort going into manipulating us is unprecedented.

What concerns me about The New York Times op-ed is that, regardless of whether it is true or not, it will disable efforts to prevent a presidential mistake. In the future, anyone who should attempt to play that role likely would be fired.

The "why" is always important. In this case, the answer to "why" may be that someone wants to do the country harm. I doubt this will end well at all. In any case, to protect ourselves from the increasing waves of manipulation, we need to channel our inner 3-year-olds and ask "why" far more often.

I get really bored when I have my teeth cleaned. I have to sit in the chair for up to an hour (my tartar likely could be used in building construction, it is so hard), and I get really bored watching the ceiling fan and waiting for surprise pains.

My last appointment wasn't so bad, however, as I brought my Goovis G2 Cinego headset with me. Rather than watch the fan, I watched the sci-fi movie Serenity, and I was disappointed the appointment didn't last longer.

Goovis Cinego VR Headset

What makes the difference with Cinego is the combination of high resolution displays for each eye. You can adjust for the distance between your pupils and for focus individually. This result is a crystal-clear high-resolution image that is impressive in use.

I ordered my Goovis G2 Cinego through Indiegogo when the product was first launched and got a decent deal -- under US$500. Currently they are on Amazon for close to $800, but for those of us who like to enjoy high-quality personal video in tight places, this is still a decent product for the money.

Cinego isn't without issues. For instance, I can't seem to raise support to save my life. The software update function currently is not working, and I can't log into Google or Amazon from the device at the moment. (Issues such as these often arise with the initial run of a product.)

When Cinego does work, mostly with Netflix, it is brilliant. Navigation is pretty easy, as is streaming content. Viewing downloaded content is a bit more difficult. Both the picture and sound are wonderful. Battery life is about two movies, suggesting that you'll want a charging cable (micros USB) or a portable battery backup product for long trips.

Except for poor support and the inability to use Amazon or sign into Google, I really am impressed with the performance of this product. As a result, the Goovis G2 Cinego headset is my product of the week.

I'll add this cautionary advice, though: Before you buy one, I suggest you send a note to Goovis to see if you get a response. The lack of support is troubling.

The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of ECT News Network.

Rob Enderle has been an ECT News Network columnist since 2003. His areas of interest include AI, autonomous driving, drones, personal technology, emerging technology, regulation, litigation, M&E, and technology in politics. He has an MBA in human resources, marketing and computer science. He is also a certified management accountant. Enderle currently is president and principal analyst of the Enderle Group, a consultancy that serves the technology industry. He formerly served as a senior research fellow at Giga Information Group and Forrester. Email Rob.




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The line between journalism and public relations can be fuzzy, and news organizations have wrestled with that problem for some time. However, that line recently has become more blurred than ever, with some publications enlisting armies of nonprofessional scribes to satisfy an insatiable appetite for content.

It's easy to understand why the problem has mushroomed. Demand for copy has gone up. The number of people to produce it and the revenue it generates have gone down. The result has been the rise of business models that embrace dubious editorial practices in the pursuit of fatter bottom lines.

One such practice is the use of contributor networks to fill Web pages. Networks of writers, usually with some measure of expertise in a subject, have become attractive to some publishers because they often can pay nothing or next-to-nothing for the content. They're attractive to subject experts, too, providing them with opportunities to get their bylines in prominent publications.

Since those networks largely depend on voluntary disclosure policies to vet contributors, the practice is ripe for abuse, as Stephen Gandel discovered several years ago, when examining contributors to financial websites.

"In the past year or so, several finance websites -- including Forbes.com, Seeking Alpha, Wall St. Cheat Sheet, and others -- have published articles by authors who were allegedly paid to promote the stocks they were writing about," he wrote in a 2014 Fortune article.

"These articles were not labeled as advertisements and carried no disclosures that the authors had been compensated by their subjects," Gandel continued.

Journalistic Netherworld

It doesn't appear that things have changed much since Gandel's piece appeared.

The practice of paying journalists and others for publishing promotional content while making no mention of the money changing hands is very much alive, according to Jon Christian, who conducted an investigation of "payola" in online publications and reported his findings in a 3,000-word article for The Outline last year.

Christian interviewed more than two dozen marketers, journalists and others about individuals and marketing firms that paid journalists to promote their clients in articles and keep the arrangements on the QT.

All the publications in which the journalists placed articles and took payoffs had strict policies prohibiting such behavior, but apparently that did not deter some writers from supplementing whatever the publication was paying them with some under-the-table money.

"In that journalistic netherworld, where business leaders can pay to write about their own industries and publicists are trusted to write about topics related to their own clients," Gandel wrote, "it can feel as though a dark new media zeitgeist has swept away old norms of integrity and independence and replaced them with a racket that, depending on your perspective, is either very funny or very sad."

Due Diligence

Payola is not limited to writers. "Earned" or "organic" public relations is among the services offered by firms such as JoTo PR of Tampa, Florida, for example. Earned PR is the result of a journalist following up on a PR person's story pitch and developing it into an article for publication.

For example, a company that has sponsored a survey may release results that reveal some insights about its industry or consumers, which can be spun into a trends story.

For the last several months, though, there has been a disturbing turn with respect to earned PR pitches, according to Karla Jo Helms, JoTo's chief evangelist and anti-PR strategist.

"I've noticed that more publications are coming back and saying, 'We're not doing earned media any more. You can pay us $350, and we'll do a mention -- more and we'll do an article,'" she told the E-Commerce Times.

That happens at only a small percentage of the publications JoTo deals with, Helms said. "It started to get on my radar when I started talking to my delivery team and found medical and health care publications doing it."

"How can they be doing their due diligence on these health care products and services?" she asked. "It would seem that they would be beholden to the person that paid them."

Power of Advertorial

As media outlets mine new ways to make money, the distinction between ads and editorial content can be a casualty. The rise of the "advertorial," or "native advertising," is an example of that. It is the practice of packaging advertising in a format that looks like editorial content, creating the illusion of earned public relations.

Advertorials succeed in misleading people, in part, by tamping down their skepticism and expectations for truth in advertising, according to a Dartmouth College-Stanford University study of health advertorial published in 2016.

An advertorial is supposed to be clearly identified. If it isn't, an advertiser is courting trouble, according to a media kit for pitch outfits prepared by The Seattle Times.

"Studies have shown that an advertorial can often generate better response [than] a direct promotion, but to avoid any confusion and potential customer backlash, advertisers must take extra care to clearly define the space as commercial, not editorial," the paper notes.

"In today's skeptical society, anything less than total transparency can be fatal to a company's reputation," it continues.

"Any time you do something and you don't disclose it, you know it's probably not OK," JoTo's Helms added.

Murky Distinctions

Making paid advertising look like earned public relations can be an effective tool if used correctly, noted Elizabeth Lampert, president of Elizabeth Lampert PR in Los Angeles.

"One could argue it's sort of like product placement where people pay for their product to be highlighted in movies and other venues," she told the E-Commerce Times.

"If you are providing content and you are using native advertising or advertorials, the line is blurred if and when you are being deceptive or providing false information," Lampert said.

"There is definitely a market for this, and in our content-driven world it has to be considered in any type of PR campaign. Today, there's no solid line where paid media ends and earned media takes over. You'll find people using a blend of the two," she observed.

"The tricky part about this for a PR company is it runs a fine line if there is any suggestion of deception," Lampert added. "You don't want to get a reputation for creating content that has every intention of tricking the audience into thinking an ad is actually editorial content."

There is no wiggle room when it comes to paying for product placement in news and feature stories, maintained Dan Kennedy, an associate professor in the School of Journalism at Northeastern University in Boston.

"Pay to play is completely unacceptable, but it's also understandable, since writers have to pay the rent just like anyone else," said Kennedy, author of The Return of the Moguls: How Jeff Bezos and John Henry Are Remaking Newspapers for the Twenty-First Century.

"Media organizations that pay their contributors little or nothing are reaping what they've sown," he told the E-Commerce Times, "and they have little credibility when they express outrage about the practice."

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.




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No one at Oracle will ever be nominated for sainthood, and that's probably OK with them. Over the years the company has developed a bad boy image that in some cases is richly deserved, while in others it has been embellished by events.

Much derives from the brash doings of founder and longtime CEO (now CTO) Larry Ellison who, from all appearances, may be a charter member of the "never explain, never complain" club.

Ellison does what he does, and the outside world might not fully appreciate it but that's fine. You'll never see him getting all mushy and doing an Elon, as Tesla's CEO did in a recent interview with The New York Times. Business is hard? So what? Push on. It can be refreshingly old school.

The Dastardly Software Audit

Oracle's marketplace actions on more than one occasion have served to give the business a black eye that, in retrospect, might not be fully deserved. For example, Oracle's software audit process recently has come under the microscope.

Oracle exercises its contractual right to audit the use of its software at customer locations. When an audit turns up a violation or potential violation of the license agreement, the sides work out a solution that often involves additional license purchases. No one likes this.

The process makes Oracle look bad in the eyes of the public, who think of licensing as supporting one or a few software deployments. However, although the audits are randomized, they often involve customers with hundreds, or even thousands, of licenses spread across far flung empires.

Rimini Street Ruling

The recent ruling in the seemingly never-ending Rimini Street litigation provides a window into how Oracle's public image gets formed. To recap, Rimini Street in 2015 was found guilty of 93 Oracle patent infringements involving its methods of providing competing services to Oracle customers, often at half the cost of the competing Oracle service.

Rimini Street lost on appeal and had to pay Oracle US$46.2 million in prejudgment interest and attorney's fees. Another $27.7 million fine was added shortly after. Earlier this year the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals reduced the fines by $50 million.

However, the court last week issued a permanent injunction against Rimini Street and awarded nearly $30 million in attorney's fees to Oracle. Yet that's not the interesting part of this story regarding Oracle's reputation.

There are many people in the industry who already have a fixed idea about Oracle and often it's not a good one. Take a look at the judgment issued by judge Larry Hicks of the Nevada District Court.

Among other things, Hicks wrote that Rimini was able to sell low-cost service contracts because, unlike Oracle, it didn't have the overhead of developing service documentation and diagnostic software and other things relevant to supporting its products.

Rimini didn't have to "expend significant resources in time and money in developing its own competing software," the judge noted. The cost disparity damaged Oracle's reputation, because it "created the impression that Oracle was overcharging for support and eroded the bonds and trust that Oracle has with its customers."

Rimini has been growing and making money, the exact picture of a startup success story. However, Hicks' ruling reminds everyone that "Rimini Street would not have achieved its current market share and exceptional revenue growth without its infringing conduct." That conduct was "conscious disregard" for Oracle's copyrights.

Last Words

There's a lot of litigation in Silicon Valley that doesn't hit your screen. Often parties settle because there's much more money to be made in the tech market than in court. There are many reasons for the litigation, but at least some of it stems from overly broad patents that typically are granted in the early stages of disruptive innovation.

At some point the industry might benefit from refactoring its patents, which has happened in other fields already. Imagine the Wright Brothers or their descendants owning the rights to "flight," so that every time you boarded a plane the airline had to pay something to the heirs.

Flying machines are more than 100 years old at this point, and any patent has long expired. That's how our system of capitalism works. It enables inventors to stand on the shoulders of previous giants to make the world new again. However, this isn't that. Software support focuses on a particular product down to its version, operating system and other factors. It's a product that takes resources and skill to produce, and taking it constitutes a theft.

There's no way a company like Oracle can defend itself from such theft without appearing in the eyes of some as bullying a much smaller competitor. Still, Oracle has a duty to its stakeholders to defend its property rights. This isn't to say that the company doesn't deserve to be sued now and then, and there are certainly other cases now working their way through the courts that I am not offering an opinion on. Quite possibly, though, the company's reputation could benefit from softening its apparent position about complaining and explaining.

Oracle has a big PR organization that seems focused on getting product information out, which is fine. However, the world has changed. It's not enough just to have good or even great products. Today a vendor needs to be seen as doing the right things for the right reasons, too.

The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of ECT News Network.

Denis Pombriant is a well-known CRM industry analyst, strategist, writer and speaker. His new book, You Can't Buy Customer Loyalty, But You Can Earn It, is now available on Amazon. His 2015 book, Solve for the Customer, is also available there. Email Denis.




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Leaders from Human Rights Watch and Harvard Law School's International Human Rights Clinic last week issued a dire warning that nations around the world haven't been doing enough to ban the development of autonomous weapons -- so-called "killer robots."

The groups issued a joint report that calls for a complete ban on these systems before such weapons begin to make their way to military arsenals and it becomes too late to act.

Other groups, including Amnesty International, joined in those urgent calls for a treaty to ban such weapons systems, in advance of this week's meeting of the United Nations' CCW Group of Governmental Experts on Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems in Geneva.

This week's gathering is the second such event. Last year's meeting marked the first time delegates from around the world discussed the global ramifications of killer robot technologies.

"Killer robots are no longer the stuff of science fiction," said Rasha Abdul Rahim, Amnesty International's advisor on artificial intelligence and human rights. "From artificially intelligent drones to automated guns that can choose their own targets, technological advances in weaponry are far outpacing international law."

Last year's first meeting did result in many nations agreeing to ban the development of weapons that could identify and fire on targets without meaningful human intervention. To date, 26 nations have called for an outright killer robot ban, including Austria, Brazil and Egypt. China has called for a new CCW protocol that would prohibit the use of fully autonomous weapons systems.

However, the United States, France, Great Britain, Israel, South Korea and Russia have registered opposition to creating any legally binding prohibitions of such weapons, or the technologies behind them.

Public opinion is mixed, based on a Brookings Institution survey that was conducted last week.

Thirty percent of adult Americans supported the development of artificial intelligence technologies for use in warfare, it found, with 39 percent opposed and 32 percent unsure.

However, support for the use of AI capabilities in weapons increased significantly if American adversaries were known to be developing the technology, the poll also found.

In that case, 45 percent of respondents in the survey said they would support U.S. efforts to develop AI weapons, versus 25 who were opposed and 30 percent who were unsure.

The Latest Weapons of Mass Destruction

The science of killing has been taken to a new technological level -- and many are concerned about loss of human control.

"Autonomous weapons are another example of military technology outpacing the ability to regulate it," said Mike Blades, research director at Frost & Sullivan.

In the mid-19th century Richard Gatling developed the first successful rapid fire weapon in his eponymous Gatling gun, a design that led to modern machine guns. When it was used on the battlefields of the First World War 100 years ago, military leaders were utterly unable to comprehend its killing potential. The result was horrific trench warfare. Tens of millions were killed over the course of the four-year conflict.

One irony is that Gatling said that he created his weapon as a way to reduce the size of armies, and in turn reduce the number of deaths from combat. However, he also thought such a weapon could show the futility of warfare.

Autonomous weapons have a similar potential to reduce the number of soldiers in harm's way -- but as with the Gatling gun or the World War I era machine gun, new devices could increase the killing potential of a handful of soldiers.

Modern military arsenals already can take out vast numbers of people.

"One thing to understand is that autonomy isn't actually increasing ability to destroy the enemy. We can already do that with plenty of weapons," Blades told TechNewsWorld.

"This is actually a way to destroy the enemy without putting our people in harm's way -- but with that ability there are moral obligations," he added. "This is a place where we haven't really been, and have to tread carefully."

Less Massive Destruction

There have been other technological weapons advances, from the poison gas that was used in the trenches of World War I a century ago to the atomic bomb that was developed during the Second World War. Each in turn became an issue for debate.

The potential horrors that autonomous weapons could unleash now are receiving the same level of concern and attention.

"Autonomous weapons are the biggest threat since nuclear weapons, and perhaps even bigger," warned Stuart Russell, professor of computer science and Smith-Zadeh professor of engineering at the University of California, Berkeley.

"Because they do not require individual human supervision, autonomous weapons are potentially scalable weapons of mass destruction. Essentially unlimited numbers can be launched by a small number of people," he told TechNewsWorld.

"This is an inescapable logical consequence of autonomy," Russell added, "and as a result, we expect that autonomous weapons will reduce human security at the individual, local, national and international levels."

A notable concern with small autonomous weapons is that their use could result in far less physical destruction than nuclear weapons or other WMDs might cause, which could make them almost "practical" in comparison.

Autonomous weapons "leave property intact and can be applied selectively to eliminate only those who might threaten an occupying force," Russell pointed out.

Force Multiplier

As with poison gas or technologically advanced weapons, autonomous weapons can be a force multiplier. The Gatling gun could outperform literally dozens of soldiers. In the case of autonomous weapons, one million potentially lethal units could be carried in a single container truck or cargo aircraft. Yet these weapons systems might require only two or three human operators rather than two or three million.

"Such weapons would be able to hunt for and eliminate humans in towns and cities, even inside buildings," said Russell. "They would be cheap, effective, unattributable, and easily proliferated once the major powers initiate mass production and the weapons become available on the international arms market."

This could give a small nation, rogue state or even a lone actor the ability to do considerable harm. Development of these weapons could even usher in a new arms race among powers of all sizes.

For this reason the cries to ban them before they are even developed have been increasing in volume, especially as development of the core technologies -- AI and machine learning -- for civilian purposes advances. They easily could be militarized to create weapons.

"Fully autonomous weapons should be discussed now, because due to the rapid development of autonomous technology, they could soon become a reality," said Bonnie Docherty, senior researcher in the arms division at Human Rights Watch, and one of the authors of the recent paper that called for a ban on killer robots.

"Once they enter military arsenals, they will likely proliferate and be used," she told TechNewsWorld.

"If countries wait, the weapons will no longer be a matter for the future," Docherty added.

Many scientists and other experts already have been heeding the call to ban autonomous weapons, and thousands of AI experts this summer signed a pledge not to assist with the development of the systems for military purposes.

The pledge is similar to the Manhattan Project scientists' calls not to use the first atomic bomb. Instead, many of the scientists who worked to develop the bomb suggested that the military merely provide a demonstration of its capability rather than use it on a civilian target.

The strong opposition to autonomous weapons today "shows that fully autonomous weapons offend the public conscience, and that it is time to take action against them," observed Docherty.

Practical Uses of Autonomy

However, the calls by the various groups arguably could be a moot point.

Although the United States has not agreed to limit the development of autonomous weapons, research efforts actually have been focused more on systems that utilize autonomy for purposes other than as combat weapons.

"DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) is currently investigating the role of autonomy in military systems such as UAVs, cyber systems, language processing units, flight control, and unmanned land vehicles, but not in combat or weapon systems," said spokesperson Jared B. Adams.

"The Department of Defense issued directive 3000.09 in 2012, which was re-certified last year, and it notes that humans must retain judgment over the use of force even in autonomous and semi-autonomous systems," he told TechNewsWorld.

"DARPA's autonomous research portfolio is defensive in nature, looking at ways to protect soldiers from adversarial unmanned systems, operate at machine speed, and/or limit exposure of our service men and women from potential harm," Adams explained.

"The danger of autonomous weapons is overstated," suggested USN Captain (Ret.) Brad Martin, senior policy researcher for autonomous technology in maritime vehicles at the Rand Corporation.

"The capability of weapons to engage targets without human intervention has existed for years," he told TechNewsWorld.

Semi-autonomous systems, those that wouldn't give full capability to a machine, also could have positive benefits. For example, autonomous systems could react far more quickly than human operators.

"Humans making decisions actually slows things down," noted Martin, "so in many weapons this is less a human rights issue and more a weapons technology issue."

The Role of Semi-Autonomous

Where the issue of killer robots becomes more complicated is in semi-autonomous systems -- those that do have that human element. Such systems could enhance existing weapons platforms and also could help operators determine if it is right to "take the shot."

"Many R&D programs are developing automated systems that can make those decisions quickly," said Frost & Sullivan's Blades.

"AI could be used to identify something where a human analyst might not be able to work with the information given as quickly, and this is where we see the technology pointing right," he told TechNewsWorld.

"At present there aren't really efforts to get a fully automated decision making system," Blades added.

These semi-autonomous systems also could allow weapons to be deployed at a distance closer than a human operator could go. They could reduce the number of "friendly fire" incidents as well as collateral damage. Rather than being a system that might increase causalities, the weapons could become more surgical in nature.

"These could provide broader sensor coverage that can reduce the battlefield ambiguity, and improved situational awareness at a chaotic moment," Rand's Martin said.

"Our campaign does not seek to ban either semi-autonomous weapons or fully autonomous non-weaponized robots," said Human Right Watch's Docherty.

"We are concerned about fully autonomous weapons, not semi-autonomous ones; fully autonomous weapons are the step beyond existing, remote-controlled armed drones," she added.

Too Little, Too Late

It's uncertain whether the development of autonomous weapons -- even with UN support -- could be stopped. It's questionable whether it should be stopped entirely. As in the case of the atomic bomb, or the machine gun, or poison gas before it, if even one nation possesses the technology, then other nations will want to be sure they have the ability to respond in kind.

The autonomous arms race therefore could be inevitable. A comparison can be made to chemical and biological weapons. The Biological Weapons Convention -- the first multilateral disarmament treaty banning the development, production and notably stockpiling of this entire category of WMDs -- first was introduced in 1972. Yet many nations still maintain vast supplies of chemical weapons. They actually were used in the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s and more recently by ISIS fighters, and by the Syrian government in its ongoing civil war.

Thus the development of autonomous weapons may not be stopped entirely, but their actual use could be mitigated.

"The U.S. may want to be in the lead with at least the rules of engagement where armed robots might be used," suggested Blades.

"We may not be signing on to this agreement, but we are already behind the limits of the spread of other advanced weapons," he noted.

It is "naive to yield the use of something that is going to be developed whether we like it or not, especially as this will end up in the hands of those bad actors that may not have our ethical concerns," said Martin.

During the Cold War, nuclear weapons meant mutually assured destruction, but as history has shown, other weapons -- including poison gas and other chemical weapons -- most certainly were used, even recently in Iraq and Syria.

"If Hitler had the atomic bomb he would have found a way to deliver it on London," Martin remarked. "That is as good an analogy to autonomous weapons as we can get."

Peter Suciu has been an ECT News Network reporter since 2012. His areas of focus include cybersecurity, mobile phones, displays, streaming media, pay TV and autonomous vehicles. He has written and edited for numerous publications and websites, including Newsweek, Wired and FoxNews.com. Email Peter.


Shale-gas company Cuadrilla announced Wednesday it would begin fracking in northwest England within weeks following government approval of a second well at its New Presto Road site, Reuters reported.

British energy and clean growth minister Claire Perry approved the first well in July, the day before parliament headed to summer recess, The Independent reported.

The second approval came six days into another parliamentary recess, for party conference season, and fracking opponents have criticized the timing of the approvals.

"They know it's totally unpopular; they know some of their own MPs are against it, so they sneak this through in an underhand manner," Frack Free Lancashire media team member Pam Foster told The Independent.

Green Party MP Caroline Lucas took to Twitter Wednesday to oppose the decision.

"Claire Perry has just granted permission for another fracking well at Preston New Road just two months after it trampled over local democracy and approved the first. And they've done it during recess so MPs can't hold them to account," she tweeted, according to The Independent.

No fracking has taken place in the UK in seven years after fracking by Cuadrilla near Blackpool caused earthquakes in 2011, Reuters reported.

The government, however, eager to increase energy independence, has upped regulations and hopes to try again.

It has introduced a system that will stop work on fracking wells if activity of 0.5 or greater on the Richter scale is detected and has stepped up groundwater checks.

"Shale gas has the potential to be a new domestic energy source, further enhancing our energy security and helping us with our continued transition to a lower-carbon economy," Perry said in an emailed statement reported by Reuters.

Northern England contains enough shale for 1,300 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, the British Geological Survey found, according to Reuters. Just 10 percent of that could satisfy England's energy needs for 40 years.

But fracking opponents worry about the practice's impact on groundwater and contribution to climate change.

"The evidence of the damaging environmental, climate and health implications of fracking continues to mount, yet this government is determined to push it through, and the people of Lancashire are going to bear the brunt of it," Foster told The Independent.

Cuadrilla, on the other hand, pitched fracking as a climate win.

"The UK's need for a new and reliable source of natural gas, the cleanest fossil fuel, is underlined by a new report suggesting the UK is going to have to rely on more coal to generate electricity," it said in a statement posted on its website, The Independent reported.

The decision comes as the country prepares to celebrate Green Great Britain Week next month, which Perry will promote, Foster pointed out. "It's totally hypocritical," she said.

Fracking is still banned or on hold in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.
Update, Sept 4: The bottom of this article has been updated with the Missouri Department of Agriculture's new guidelines and a statement from Beyond Meat.

Missouri is the first state in the country to enact a law that criminalizes certain uses of the word "meat."

The mandate, which came into effect on Tuesday, prohibits companies from "misrepresenting" products as meat if they are not from "harvested livestock or poultry." The measure was approved by the legislature in May and signed by former-Gov. Eric Greitens on June 1. Violators could be fined $1,000 and face imprisonment for a year, according to USA TODAY.

The initiative was backed by the state's pork producers, the Missouri Farm Bureau and the Missouri Cattlemen's Association.

"The big issue was marketing with integrity and ... consumers knowing what they're getting," Missouri Cattlemen's Association spokesman Mike Deering told USA TODAY. "There's so much unknown about this."

The terminology change could force a costly overhaul of certain brands' marketing and packaging in the state, Munchies reported. For instance, companies such as Gardein sell products such as Meatless Meat; Whole Foods' 365 brand touts Meatless Meatballs, Meatless Burgers and Meatless Breakfast Patties. It could also hamper Memphis Meats, a San Francisco-based startup developing "lab-grown" tissues cultured from animal stem cells.

Additionally, the St. Louis Dispatch reported that plant-based burger company Beyond Meat just expanded its manufacturing facility in Columbia. It employs more than 200 workers in mid-Missouri and is poised to add another 250 employees.



On Monday, a coalition of organizations including the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Missouri, the Animal Legal Defense Fund (ALDF), the Good Food Institute (GFI) and vegetarian foodmaker Tofurky filed a complaint in a Missouri federal court challenging the law.

The groups say the law is designed to protect the meat industry against the growing $5 billion plant-based "fake meat" sector, which has boomed from the public's increasing appetite for healthier, more humane and environmentally sustainable food products.

"As more and more consumers are making the conscious choice to remove animals from their plates, Missouri is putting its thumb on the scale to unfairly benefit the meat industry and silence alternative producers," said ALDF executive director Stephen Wells in a statement.

The groups maintain that the state's consumer protection agency has no evidence that consumers are confused by the labels of plant-based products.

The lawsuit alleges that the new law violates constitutional principals such as free speech, discriminates against out-of-state companies, denies fair and honest competition in the marketplace, and infringes on the Due Process Clause because the vague language in the law makes it difficult for companies to know what is and is not legal.

"Americans don't like censorship, and they don't like the government picking winners and losers in the marketplace," said GFI executive director Bruce Friedrich. "We're confident that the Court will overturn this anti-competitive and unconstitutional law."

Not all meat producers are against faux-meats. Earlier this year, Tyson Foods, one of the largest meat companies in the U.S., announced it is ramping up its investment in lab-grown animal protein in response to growing demand for meat worldwide. The company's venture capital arm purchased a minority stake in Memphis Meats.

The meat industry is lobbying the federal government to make similar changes. In April, the National Cattlemen's Beef Association submitted official comments to the United States Department of Agriculture outlining key principles for the regulation of fake meat products.

"It is critical that the federal government step up to the plate and enforce fair and accurate labeling for fake meat," Kevin Kester, president of National Cattlemen's Beef Association, said in a press release.

On Aug. 30, the Missouri Department of Agriculture issued a clarification of how the new "Missouri Meat Advertising Law" will be implemented, as follows:

Products must include a prominent statement on the front of the package, immediately before or immediately after the product name, that the product is "plant-based," "veggie," "lab-grown," "lab-created" or a comparable qualifier; and

Products must include a prominent statement on the package that the product is "made from plants," "grown in a lab" or a comparable disclosure.

No enforcement referrals will be made until Jan. 1, 2019.

The new guidelines will be phased in over the next four months to give companies time to update product labels and bring packages into compliance.

Beyond Meat issued a statement to EcoWatch on Aug. 31 saying the company was pleased the legislation does not disallow the descriptor "plant-based meat" and plans to continue operating under the newly released guidelines.

"We are satisfied we were able to reach an understanding with the state of Missouri that affirms our use of a 'plant-based' qualifier on our packaging is fair and accurate. We believe that we are building meat directly from plants, and that consumers are not only accepting of this innovation but enthusiastically embracing it," said Ethan Brown, CEO and founder of Beyond Meat, in the statement. "Free speech, commerce that is unstifled by unnecessary government interference, and consumer choice are foundations of our country. To this end, we are pleased that the legislation did not go so far as to disallow our use of the descriptor plant-based meat, and we plan to continue operating under the newly released guidelines, selling our delicious plant-based burgers, sausages and beyond."
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.
Wilhelm Oelers, CTO of Triptec, gives the tutorial NB-IoT at the Wireless Congress 2018.

Five questions to Wilhelm Oelers, from Triptec, about his tutorial Make your hands dirty on NB-IoT application at the 15th Wireless Congress 2018 on November 14th in Munich.

With the extension of the LTE standard by LTE Cat-NB1, the mobile network operators and the 3GPP (3rd Generation Partnership Project) have reacted to the growing of LPWANs in the license-free SRD frequency range below 1 GHz. LTE Cat-NB1 promises a number of advantages. The LTE networks are still fragmented, but manufacturers are already offering the first wireless modules. The tutorial Make your hands dirty on NB-IoT application on November 14th in Munich will show how an IoT system for LTE-Cat-NB1 can be realized in practice.

? Mr. Oelers, what challenges does LTE-Cat-NB1 present to developers compared to GSM?

! Wilhelm Oelers: With GSM we have a sensitivity of -110 dBm in the receiver of the GSM module. For LTE-Cat-NB1  called NB-IoT before standardization by 3GPP  the sensitivity is much higher at 129 dBm. Interference signals on the board amounting to 116 dBm are not visible to the GSM module.

However, the NB-IoT module is blocked by 116 dBm and could no more receive. PCBs for all LPWAN techniques need to be designed and routed much more carefully.

? Your tutorial is based on the radio module akorIoT for LTE-Cat-NB1. Why do you use this hardware?

! Oelers: In the akorIoT SensPRO, besides the NB-IoT module, the GNSS module, ten sensors, charging controllers and PCB antennas are all connected. The IoT developer can use the Arduino SDK and the libraries to take his first quick steps and then switch to the GCC GNU compiler.

There is also an expansion bus to connect your own PCBs with your own sensors.

The word akor is the ancient Celtic word for open. With the wireless module akorIoT much is open and can be taken over thus easily into own circuits.

akorIoT with Arduino Nano

Alle Bilder anzeigen (3)

? Who supports akorIoT?

! Oelers: The akorIoT boards are available as evaluation kits or reference designs - at a cost of 109 to 149 Euro. All akorIoT PCBs always contain a cellular wireless module and a GNSS module plus a few sensors.

The akorIoT concept is supported by the wireless module manufacturer Quectel. We get direct support from Quectel and very early access to new wireless modules. The akorIoT Micro was the world's first radio adapter with NB-IoT multi-mode module (NB-IoT, LTE-M, GPRS, GNSS) with Arduino R3 connectors for Arduino Uno and all STM32 Nucleo 64 from STMicroelectronics.

14-15 November 2018Munichwww.wireless-congress.com

The akorIoT PCBs were developed by the author Harald Naumann according to the wishes of the readers of the IoT / M2M Cookbook. With the akorIoT SensPRO we now have the third generation. Since the used microcontroller and the Quectel wireless module BG96 on the akorIoT SensPRO are also used by Deutsche Telekom, their libraries for Ardunio will immediately work on the akorIoT SensPRO.

The first Hello World message to the public NB-IoT network in Berlin was sent with an akorIoT microphone in May 2017. The first Hello World message to Telkomsel's NB-IoT network in Indonesia was also sent with an akorIoT Micro. The akorIoT users can be found all over the world.

? How can a developer use akorIoT?

! Oelers: Very simple: buy akorIoT SensPRO. Load the demo code with Arduino-SDK on it - done. How easy it is we show in the tutorial.

? What do you show in your tutorial at the Wireless Congress 2018 and to whom do you address yourself?

! Oelers: We show you how to put an NB-IoT module with microcontroller and sensors into operation in a few minutes.

Our target group are developers without hardware knowledge, but also developers with experience in PCB development.

In the tutorial, we point out the special features of the development of NB-IoT systems, share our experience with the participants and are available for customer-specific questions after the tutorial.

The NB-IoT antenna as a trace for about 0 Euro will be explained by the author Harald Naumann in the tutorial for antennas on the second day of the congress.

Wireless Congress: Systems & Applications Tutorial 2: NB-IoT 14. November 2018, 17:00  18:00 Munich www.wireless-congress.com

Wilhelm Oelers, CTO of Triptec HL UG (haftungsbeschrankt)

Wilhelm Oelers

is an IoT /M2M developer with many years of experience in the development of radio applications. He has more than 30 years of professional expertise.

Oelers started his professional career as a telecommunications engineer at Deutsche Post. He was head of development and/or member of various project teams for radio applications in Ambiente Assited Living, remote reading of meters and remote control equipment, or GSM/GPS-based locating devices.

Today his knowledge flows into many products of customers in the area of M2M or IoT.

Oelers is CTO of Triptec in Lubeck and the developer of the akorIoT PCBs.

w.oelers@triptec.de
DOI apologises for Traffic chaos



Douglas Sea Terminal

The Department of Infrastructure and Steam Packet Company have issued an apology after motorists got stuck in huge queues during this morning's rush hour.

The DOI says the problems around the Sea Terminal were caused by a number of factors.

It has blamed the late arrival of the Ben-My-Cree and the port was busier than usual following cancellations of sailings yesterday due to adverse weather.

The Steam Packet said delays in loading meant car check in lanes could not be opened until 7:45am.

The Department will be working with the Isle of Man Steam Packet Company to review the interim and permanent arrangements for vehicle check-in at times of very busy sailings.
The chemical element sulfur is an important constituent in many pharmaceuticals and, consequently, it is desirable to be able to introduce sulfur-containing fragments efficiently in a broad range of chemical compounds. The Skrydstrup team provides an effective and safe way for introducing a small sulfur building block, which is generally difficult to work with, being a gas and with an extremely repulsive odor. Especially interesting in this work is that a gold-based catalyst is exploited for these specific reactions involving carbon-carbon double bonds.

The research group focused on the use of the smallest carbon-containing thiol, namely methanethiol (MeSH). However, not only is MeSH the main compound responsible for bad breath and the smell of flatus, it is also highly flammable and therefore unsafe to work with in the laboratory. In the present study, researchers from iNANO and the Department of Chemistry, Aarhus University, report on how they successfully exploit their own invention, the two-chamber system, in order to avoid handling pressure cylinders with MeSH, and having to add the gas directly to the chemical reactions. The authors also demonstrate that a crystalline organic compound can be used to liberate an exact amount of MeSH upon activation in the two-chamber system.

In this work, the direct use of MeSH has been circumvented and a protocol for the delivery and use of a stoichiometric amount of gaseous MeSH has been developed without the need of pressure cylinders. The Skrydstrup group has demonstrated by the ex-situ generation of MeSH from a simple crystalline precursor in the two-chamber reactor that a gold(I)-mediated hydrothiolation of terminal alkenes is possible to provide the corresponding methyl sulfide in high yields. The reaction promoted by a gold(I) complex is also interesting as these complexes appear to operate as radical initiators from the mechanistic investigation undertaken.

###

The research has been carried out by scientists from Interdisciplinary Nanoscience Centre (iNANO) and Department of Chemistry at Aarhus University (AU) in collaboration with Haldor Topse A/S. Professor Troels Skrydstrup has been in charge of the research team behind the study.

The work was generously supported by BIOVALUE SPIR (Strategic Platform for Innovation and Research), the Danish National Research Foundation, Innovation Fund Denmark, Haldor Topse and Aarhus University.

The scientific article has been published in the international journal Angewandte Chemie Int. Ed.:

"Ex Situ Formation of Methanethiol: Application in the Gold(I)?Promoted anti?Markovnikov Hydrothiolation of Olefins"

Steffan K. Kristensen, Simon L. R. Laursen, Esben Taarning and Troels Skrydstrup

https://doi.org/10.1002/anie.201809051

For further information, contact

Professor Troels Skrydstrup

Interdisciplinary Nanoscience Center

Department of Chemistry

Aarhus University

Denmark

Email: ts@chem.au.dk

Phone: 45-87-15-59-68
Researchers from Aarhus University show that grieving patients who receive what is known as talk therapy at the general practitioner shortly after a relative's death, have a lower risk of suicide and psychiatric illness than others

Talking with the doctor makes it easier to deal with grief and bereavement

In a comprehensive study, researchers from Aarhus University show that grieving patients who receive what is known as talk therapy at the general practitioner shortly after a relative's death, have a lower risk of suicide and psychiatric illness than others. Data from 207.000 million Danes is included in the register-based study, which can contribute to new practices in the preventative area.

Losing a close family member is psychologically painful. In fact, it is so painful that the risk of committing suicide or developing other serious psychiatric conditions increases for grieving people who have experienced a serious bereavement. A study now suggests that talk therapy with a general practitioner early in the grief process can reduce this risk.

This is shown by a new, nationwide study of health data on Danes over the age of 18 who have lost a child, a spouse, siblings or parents during the period 1996-2013. The results have just published in Clinical Epidemiology.

"The study shows that patients whose general practitioners often use talk therapy have a lower risk of suicide and other psychological disorders than others," says senior statistician and PhD student, Morten Fenger-Grn from Aarhus University, who is behind the study.

The purpose of the study was to investigate the effects of early treatment with talk therapy or antidepressant medicine on grieving patients. The researchers looked at three specific consequences in connection with the grief resulting from the death of a close relative: suicide, self-harm and admission to a psychiatric hospital.

Scalpels and prescriptions are not enough

A simple comparison showed that the grieving patients who were treated with talk therapy or antidepressant medicine had an increased risk of developing psychological disorders or committing suicide.

In the period from six months to two years after the bereavement, 4,584 patients (2.2 per cent) were affected by one of these events; suicide, self-harm and admission to a psychiatric ward, of which suicide was the rarest. Among patients who had received antidepressant treatment in the first six months, the figure was 9.1 per cent, and among patients who received talk therapy, it was 3.2 per cent.

"It was an expected finding which could in principle be due to the fact that the treatment is harmful, or the more desirable situation that the general practitioners are able to target the treatment towards the most seriously ill patients. The question was whether these patients would have had an even greater risk, if they had not received treatment," says Morten Fenger-Grn.

To answer this question, the researchers used a new analytical approach, where they utilised the fact that there are differences between general practitioners' propensity to use different treatments.

"We're talking about a so-called marginal patient, a patient that some doctors will choose to treat and others will not," says Morten Fenger-Grn.

The study showed that the risk of a serious psychiatric condition during the grief process would be 1.7 per cent lower if the patient received talk therapy.

"It seems to document the importance of doctors having other means than scalpels and prescriptions. Our results suggest that early intervention in response to grieving patients can prevent serious psychiatric events. Unfortunately, the study cannot tell us the most effective form of therapy, or whether general practitioners are well enough prepared for the task, but it appears that taking time to talk with the patient works," he says.

The research results have been adjusted for both the patient's characteristics and the general practitioners' propensity to prescribe antidepressant medicine. The study could not, however, provide any precise measurements for the significance of antidepressant medicine in this context.

The research results - more information

The study is a so-called population-based instrument variable study - a systematic register-based study with health data from more than five million Danes who had a general practitioner between 1996-2013, with special focus on the 207,000 people who experienced a serious bereavement during the period.

###

The researchers made use of a new analytical approach which has been developed in collaboration between the Research Unit for General Practice and the Section for Biostatistics at Aarhus University.

Funding: The research group behind the project is supported by the Lundbeck Foundation, the Novo Nordisk Foundation, the Danish Cancer Society, TrygFonden and the Research Fund for General Practice.

See the study "Early treatment with talk therapy or antidepressants in severely bereaved people and risk of suicidal behavior and psychiatric illness: an instrumental variable analysis" in Clinical Epidemiology.

Contact:

Senior Statistician and PhD student Morten Fenger-Grn

Aarhus University, Department of Public Health and the Research Unit for General Medical Practice

Mobile: +45-2745-6059

mfgr@ph.au.dk
Voluntary agreements more likely to improve the reputation of global corporations than improve the health of the nation, warn experts

Public Health England (PHE) has failed to learn the lessons over its partnership with the drinks industry, warn public health experts in The BMJ today.

Last week, Ian Gilmore, a senior government adviser on alcohol policy, stepped down from his role at PHE after the agency partnered with Drinkaware, an alcohol education charity that receives funding from industry, for a new campaign encouraging middle aged people to have more alcohol-free days per week.

In an editorial for The BMJ, Gilmore and colleagues John Britton and Linda Bauld point out that voluntary agreements with the tobacco industry in the second half of the 20th century served to "undermine, dilute or constrain measures designed to curtail their activities."

By entering into a voluntary agreement with Drinkaware, "PHE appear to have fallen victim to the delusion that a new partnership with the alcohol industry will somehow avoid the same fate," they write. "In so doing they tread a path that, at least to those who have worked in tobacco policy, is depressingly familiar," they add.

They question the campaign's two alcohol-free days per week target as "a somewhat modest interpretation of current UK Chief Medical Officers advice, which refers to 'several' alcohol-free days each week."

And they note that the campaign is badged as part of the broader One You campaign, which includes advice on smoking, physical activity and other 'lifestyle' determinants of health, "thus linking an alcohol industry-funded body with wider health messaging."

Finally, they point out that senior PHE managers do not appear to have asked themselves why the alcohol industry is happy to fund a campaign that ostensibly aims to reduce alcohol consumption. Had they done so, they say the answer would be because it thinks the campaign will be ineffective, or will divert attention from other more effective policies to reduce alcohol consumption that the industry fears more, such as minimum unit pricing.

More importantly, however, through Drinkaware, "the alcohol industry gains valuable engagement with PHE, establishes working relations with PHE staff, and may even secure a seat at the table when other alcohol harm initiatives are planned and executed," they explain.

It is right that the alcohol and other harmful commodity industries pay to prevent and treat harm caused by their products, they say, but payment "must be made through statutory levies, not voluntary agreements."

This new campaign backed by high profile individuals telling drinkers to drink less "is all well and good," says Tony Rao, Visiting Researcher at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience, King's College London, in a linked article. "But skirting around and dumbing down the specifics of existing guidelines does not bode well for providing a consistent health message to the public."

He warns that, if we cannot maintain our government to observe the principle of being at 'arm's length' from the drinks industry, "we wander into a storm that has the potential to capsize public health and all that it represents."

###

Externally peer-reviewed? No

Type of evidence: Opinion

Subjects: People
A novel mathematical approach has uncovered that some animal cells have robust 12-hour cycles of genetic activity, in addition to circadian or 24-hour cycles. The method, published in the journal PLOS ONE, assessed the periodicity of gene expression data and compared the results with those obtained with other computational methods. As opposed to the other methods, this novel approach showed not only the existence of unsuspected biological cycles, but also that the 12-hour cycles work independently from the 24-hour cycles, which has been confirmed by laboratory experiments. These findings open a new area of study of how gene functions over time influence health and disease.

"Circadian rhythms are physical, mental and behavioral changes that follow a 24-hour cycle driven by environmental light and darkness. One of the best known circadian cycles is sleeping at night and being awake during the day," said corresponding author Dr. Clifford C. Dacso, professor of molecular and cellular biology and member of the Dan L Duncan Comprehensive Cancer Center at Baylor College of Medicine. "These biological rhythms reflect complex interactions at the molecular level that occur among the paths mediating the expression of genes into active proteins carrying functions in the cell."

There is evidence, however, that other biological cycles exist in addition to 24-hour rhythms. Blood pressure, body temperature, cognitive performance, some circulating hormones, reaction to stress and responses to drug therapy, for instance, appear to follow a 12-hour rhythm, but little is known about the biological basis of it. Dacso and his colleagues set out to find out answers.

"We decided that we needed to apply an unbiased mathematical approach different from those other groups were using," Dacso said. He contacted colleagues at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Rice University and they referred him to Dr. Athanasios Antoulas, a professor in that department who also is a fellow at the Max-Planck Society in Germany.

Antoulas is a mathematician and an engineer with expertise in processing digital signals such as electronic waves. He had developed a new mathematical tool called the matrix pencil method that allowed him to uncover frequencies from very noisy digital data.

"Other mathematical methods approached this type of problem by asking, does a specific wave form exist in the data? They were already biased to find a particular type of wave," said Antoulas, who is the first author of the paper as well as adjunct professor of molecular and cellular biology at Baylor. "On the other hand, the method that we proposed asked an unbiased question; what type of wave is present in the data, if any?" When math meets biology

The researchers applied the mathematical method Antoulas used to analyze electronic digital signals to analyze a biological phenomenon, specifically gene expression data that had been collected every hour for 36 hours. The researchers analyzed more than 18,000 mouse liver genes involved in a variety of cellular processes, including metabolism, cell stress, cell cycle and cellular respiration.

"Our method revealed the fundamental cycles present in each data set collected for each gene," Antoulas said. "We confirmed the 24-hour circadian cycles and uncovered genes whose expression over time followed a 12-hour cycle that was not evident when using other computational methods."

"We took a closer look at the 12- and 24-hour cycles," Dacso said. "The matrix pencil method revealed that these cycles were independent, and this has been confirmed by laboratory experiments showing that knocking down genes that follow a 24-hour cycle does not affect the expression pattern of the 12-hour genes."

"By looking at the function of genes over time, as opposed to looking at a single moment, we have uncovered that fundamental cell functions, such as inflammation, stress response, protein quality control and energy supply, follow certain cycles," Dacso said. "This finding has enormous implications for redefining aspects of human health as controlled by genes."

"We and others have shown that disturbing the 24-hour clocks may lead to diseases of metabolism," said co-author Dr. Bert O'Malley, chancellor and professor of molecular and cellular biology and Thomas C. Thompson Chair in Cell Biology at Baylor College of Medicine. "For instance, experimental evidence shows that night-shift workers who periodically change their night and day shifts or people who travel overseas often alter their sleep cycles, and this seems to make them prone to gain weight and develop diabetes and other alterations of metabolism that may lead to disease. It's not a good idea to disturb the circadian rhythm on a regular basis. We anticipate that disturbing the other cycles may also affect health and disease."

###

Other contributors to this work include Bokai Zhu, Qiang Zhang and Brian York. The authors are affiliated with one or more of the following institutions: Baylor College of Medicine, Rice University and the Max-Planck Institute for the Dynamics of Complex Technical Systems, Germany.

Financial support for this project was provided by the National Institutes of Health (NIDDK), the National Science Foundation, the American Diabetes Association, Kay and Rene Joyce Foundation and the German Science Foundation. Additional support was provided by the Max-Planck Institut fu?r Dynamik Komplexer Technischer Systeme, Center for the Advancement of Science in Space, Brockman Medical Research Foundation, Phillip J. Carroll, Jr Professorship, Joyce Family Foundation, Sonya and William Carpenter and Peter J. Fluor Family Fund.
PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] -- With a new grant from the U.S. Department of Energy, a Brown University-led research team will use machine learning to speed up atom-level simulations of chemical reactions and the properties of materials.

"Simulations provide insights into materials and chemical processes that we can't readily get from experiments," said Andrew Peterson, an associate professor in Brown's School of Engineering who will lead the work.

"Computational power is growing rapidly, which lets us perform larger and more realistic simulations. But as the size of the simulations grows, the time involved in running them can grow exponentially. This paradox means that even with the growth in computational power, our field still cannot perform truly large-scale simulations. Our goal is to speed those simulations up dramatically -- ideally by orders of magnitude -- using machine learning."

The grant provides $3.5 million dollars for the work over four years. Peterson will work with two Brown colleagues -- Franklin Goldsmith, assistant professor of engineering, and Brenda Rubenstein, assistant professor of chemistry -- as well as researchers from Carnegie Mellon, Georgia Tech and MIT.

The idea behind the work is that different simulations often have the same sets of calculations underlying them. Peterson and his colleagues aim to use machine learning to find those underlying similarities and fast-forward through them.

"What we're doing is taking the results of calculations from prior simulations and using them to predict the outcome of calculations that haven't been done yet," Peterson said. "If we can eliminate the need to do similar calculations over and over again, we can speed things up dramatically, potentially by orders of magnitude."

The team will focus their work initially on simulations of electrocatalysis -- the kinds of chemical reactions that are important in devices like fuel cells and batteries. These are complex, often multi-step reactions that are fertile ground for simulation-driven research, Peterson says.

Atomic-scale simulations have demonstrated usefulness in Peterson's own work in the design of new catalysts. In a recent example, Peterson worked with Brown chemist Shouheng Sun on a gold nanoparticle catalyst that can perform a reaction necessary for converting carbon dioxide into useful forms of carbon. Peterson's simulations showed it was the sharp edges of the oddly shaped catalyst that were particularly active for the desired reaction.

"That led us to change the geometry of the catalyst to a nanowire -- something that's basically all edges -- to maximize its reactivity," Peterson said. "We might have eventually tried a nanowire by trial and error, but because of the computational insights we were able get there much more quickly."

The researchers will use a software package that Peterson's research group developed previously as a starting point. The software, called AMP (Atomistic Machine-learning Package) is open-source and already widely used in the simulation community, Peterson says.

The Department of Energy grant will bring atomic-scale simulations -- and the insights they produce -- to bear on ever larger and more complex simulations. And while the work under the grant will focus on electrocatalysis, the tools the team develops should be widely applicable to other types of material and chemical simulations.

Peterson is hopeful that the investment that the federal government is making in machine learning will be repaid by making better use of valuable computing resources.

"Modern supercomputers cost millions of dollars to build, and simulation time on them is precious," Peterson said. "If we're able to free up time on those machines for additional simulations to be run, that translates into vastly increased return-on-investment for those machines. It's real money."

###
Management researchers say people with high emotional stability and autonomy are best suited for remote-work opportunities

WACO, Texas (Sept. 19, 2018) - Many U.S. employees believe working from home - or at least away from the office - can bring freedom and stress-free job satisfaction. A new Baylor University study says, "Not so fast."

The study, published recently in the European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology, examines the impact of remote work on employee well-being and offers several strategies to help managers provide remote-work opportunities that are valuable to the employee and the company.

"Any organization, regardless of the extent to which people work remotely, needs to consider well-being of their employees as they implement more flexible working practices," the researchers wrote.

A total of 403 working adults were surveyed for the two studies that made up the research, said lead author Sara Perry, Ph.D., assistant professor of management in Baylor University's Hankamer School of Business. The research team measured each employee's autonomy (the level of a worker's independence), strain (defined in this study as exhaustion, disengagement and dissatisfaction) and emotional stability.

Emotional stability, Perry explained, "captures how even keeled someone is or, on the opposite end, how malleable their emotions are. An example would be if something stressful happens at work, a person who is high on emotional stability would take it in stride, remain positive and figure out how to address it. A person low on emotional stability might get frustrated and discouraged, expending energy with those emotions instead of on the issue at hand."

The research found that:

Autonomy is critical to protecting remote employees' well-being and helping them avoid strain.

Employees reporting high levels of autonomy and emotional stability appear to be the most able to thrive in remote-work positions.

Employees reporting high levels of job autonomy with lower levels of emotional stability appear to be more susceptible to strain.

Perry said the study contradicts past research that says autonomy is a universal need that everyone possesses. Per this research, those who are lower in emotional stability may not need or want as much autonomy in their work.

"This lower need for autonomy may explain why less emotionally stable employees don't do as well when working remotely, even when they have autonomy," researchers wrote.

In addition to their findings, the researchers offered several recommendations for managers who design or oversee remote-work arrangements.

The research team advised managers to consider their employees' behavior when deciding who will work remotely.

"I would suggest managers look at employee behaviors, rather than for personality traits, per se," Perry said. "For example, if someone does not handle stress well in the office, they are not likely to handle it well at home either. If someone gets overwhelmed easily, or reacts in big ways to requests or issues in the office, they are likely less well positioned to work remotely and handle that responsibility and stress."

Based on this study, individuals with high emotional stability and high levels of autonomy are better suited for remote work, but such candidates might not always be available.

"If less emotionally stable individuals must work remotely, managers should take care to provide more resources, other than autonomy, including support to help foster strong relationships with coworkers and avoid strain," they wrote.

Managers might also consider providing proper training and equipment for remote work, including proper separation of work and family spaces, clear procedural and performance expectations and regular contact (virtual or face-to-face) with coworkers and managers.

ABOUT THE STUDY

"Stress in Remote Work: Two Studies Testing The Demand-Control-Person Model," published in the European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology, is authored by Sara Perry, Ph.D., assistant professor of management, Hankamer School of Business, Baylor University, Emily Hunter, Ph.D., associate professor of management, Hankamer School of Business, Baylor Univeersity, and Cristina Rubino, professor of management, David Nazarian College of Business and Economics, California State University Northridge.

ABOUT BAYLOR UNIVERSITY

Baylor University is a private Christian University and a nationally ranked research institution. The University provides a vibrant campus community for more than 17,000 students by blending interdisciplinary research with an international reputation for educational excellence and a faculty commitment to teaching and scholarship. Chartered in 1845 by the Republic of Texas through the efforts of Baptist pioneers, Baylor is the oldest continually operating University in Texas. Located in Waco, Baylor welcomes students from all 50 states and more than 80 countries to study a broad range of degrees among its 12 nationally recognized academic divisions.

ABOUT HANKAMER SCHOOL OF BUSINESS

Baylor University's Hankamer School of Business provides a rigorous academic experience, consisting of classroom and hands-on learning, guided by Christian commitment and a global perspective. Recognized nationally for several programs, including Entrepreneurship and Accounting, the school offers 24 undergraduate and 13 graduate areas of study. Visit http://www.baylor.edu/business and follow on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/Baylor_Business.

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UK and European research collaborations in cancer research have received a vote of confidence by three major cancer charities, with an announcement today of approximately 30 million into six international projects.

Cancer Research UK is partnering with two of Europe's leading cancer research charities, AIRC (Associazione Italiana per la Ricerca sul Cancro) and FC AECC (Asociacion Espanola Contra el Cancer), to invest in six international collaborations, which are aimed at accelerating progress in translational research.

Scientists in the 5-year funded Accelerator Awards* projects will investigate the potential of immunotherapies in treating liver cancer; develop manufacturing methods for CAR-T cell production; track cancer cell evolution; investigate drug resistance in blood cancers; devise a blood test for advanced prostate cancer and find new routes for personalising blood cancer treatment.

As the UK and EU work to form a new relationship after Brexit, the awards are an example of how funding organisations are seeking to continue to collaborate post-Brexit to drive research forward.

Dr Iain Foulkes, executive director of research and innovation at Cancer Research UK, said: "No single organisation or country is going to beat cancer on its own. Research must be prioritised as the UK builds a new relationship with the EU, as much-needed breakthroughs in treatment are dependent on collective action from the international research community.

"Our Accelerator Award funding will lay the groundwork for a Europe and UK research pipeline, boosting our life sciences industry, and ensuring basic biological research translates into new innovative treatments in future."

Each collaboration is aiming to deepen our understanding of cancer and bring us closer to new treatments, making use of the expertise and diverse technologies of the different partner organisations. UK scientists are leading two of the funded programmes, Italian scientists are leading three, and one by a Spanish researcher.

The scope of these awards brings together world-class researchers who would not have previously been able to work together without this funding available. A number of the grants are also focused on training the next generation of early career scientists and clinicians so that the expertise is developed to carry this research forward.

Federico Caligaris Cappio, AIRC scientific director, said: "Cancer research must innovate relentlessly to understand and deal with the complexity of cancer. This requires more investment, coordinated interdisciplinary research and international collaborations, because cancer doesn't know borders, and research has to overcome them. The partnership with Cancer Research UK and FC AECC has allowed us to fund collaborative projects that promote the development of international networks and the creation of new research tools that could not be done independently at the national level."

Isabel Orbe, general director of the FC AECC, said: "A global collaboration is needed to accelerate results in cancer research. This charity partnership will provide tools to support researchers in an international framework, helping them to create multidisciplinary networks and support the research of new unexplored areas. Moreover, this call looks to improve cancer research in a global manner and with a clear focus on the patients, with the final aim of defeating cancer."

Accelerator Award projects include:

HUNTER: Hepatocellular Carcinoma Expediter Network - Newcastle University will be leading a project of around 5 million to establish a European and UK network of clinicians and scientists specialising in hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) - the most common primary liver cancer in adults. The aim will be to understand the immune environment in liver cancer and whether immunotherapies might be effective at treating this disease.

Innovative CAR Therapy Platform (INCAR) - The University of Milan-Bicocca will be leading a project of around 4.5 million to support research into CAR T-cell therapy, which is where immune cells are 'edited' so that they are more able to target and destroy tumour cells. The team aim to make these therapies more accessible and affordable through developing manufacturing methods and providing recommendations for CAR T-cell immunotherapy development, which could be applied to a broad range of cancer types.

Single cell cancer evolution in the clinic - Researchers at Fondazione Centro San Raffaele, Functional Genomics of Cancer Unit, will lead on project with around 4.8 million funding to track cancer cell evolution in organoids, clusters of cells that behave similarly to cells in human organs. Their findings will be used to learn more about drug resistance, and to predict optimal treatment options for relapsed cancer patients.

Early detection and intervention: Understanding the mechanisms of transformation and hidden resistance of incurable haematological malignancies - The Clinica Universidad de Navarra is leading on a project of around 4.8 million to investigate blood cancers. The team will seek to uncover the mechanisms of initial tumour resistance to drugs and identify new treatment opportunities for the disease.

Multi-modal clinical testing of prostate cancer patients plasma - The University of Trento, Centre for Integrative Biology (CIBIO), are leading on a project worth around 5 million to develop a blood test for advanced prostate cancer treatment selection. The team's work will look to develop a test ready for clinical studies that will stratify patients into personalised treatment arms.

ACRCelerate: Colorectal Cancer Stratified Medicine Network - The Cancer Research UK Beatson Institute in Glasgow will lead on a project with up to 5 million funding to find new routes for personalised bowel cancer treatment. The team will be looking to identify new targets so that patients can be stratified into different treatment groups, which may lower the risks for patients in clinical trials. These methods will also help to reduce the level of animal research required.

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For media enquiries contact Carl Alexander in the Cancer Research UK press office on 020 3469 8882 or, out of hours, on 07050 264 059.

Notes to editor:

Accelerator Awards webpage: https://www.cancerresearchuk.org/funding-for-researchers/our-funding-schemes/accelerator-award

About Cancer Research UK

Cancer Research UK is the world's leading cancer charity dedicated to saving lives through research.

Cancer Research UK's pioneering work into the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of cancer has helped save millions of lives.

Cancer Research UK receives no funding from the UK government for its life-saving research. Every step it makes towards beating cancer relies on vital donations from the public.

Cancer Research UK has been at the heart of the progress that has already seen survival in the UK double in the last 40 years.

Today, 2 in 4 people survive their cancer for at least 10 years. Cancer Research UK's ambition is to accelerate progress so that by 2034, 3 in 4 people will survive their cancer for at least 10 years.

Cancer Research UK supports research into all aspects of cancer through the work of over 4,000 scientists, doctors and nurses.

Together with its partners and supporters, Cancer Research UK's vision is to bring forward the day when all cancers are cured.

For further information about Cancer Research UK's work or to find out how to support the charity, please call 0300 123 1022 or visit http://www.cancerresearchuk.org. Follow us on Twitter and Facebook.

About AIRC

The Italian Association for Cancer Research was founded in 1965, the first Italian non-profit association to support scientific research, entirely supported by donations from individuals.

AIRC is today the main private cancer research charity in Italy, thanks to its 4.5 million supporters. In little more than 50 years, together with its Foundation, AIRC has distributed over 1.3 billion euro to cancer research (data updated to 1 January 2018). In 2018 alone, AIRC has made available to the Italian scientific community more than 118 million euro to support 584 research projects, 66 scholarships and other special programs. About 5,000 researchers - a real army of scientists, 63% women, 54% of under 40 - are working to make cancer ever more curable, in laboratories at universities, hospitals and research institutions all over Italy, mainly in public facilities, with a tangible benefit for the country's research and health systems. In addition to supporting innovative scientific projects, AIRC disseminates scientific information and promotes the culture of prevention among the lay community.

About FC AECC

The Spanish Association Against Cancer, AECC, is a private non-profit organization which has been working since 1953 to fight cancer. The AECC is integrated by patients, families, volunteers and professionals who work together to prevent, raise awareness, accompany cancer patients and their families and fund cancer research projects that will enable better diagnosis and treatment of cancer.
Ithaca, NY - Its name is an acronym used to convey its size, but researchers at Cornell Engineering and Weill Cornell Medicine are hoping their hand-held cancer detection device's impact in the developing world is anything but small.

About half the size of a lunch box, the Tiny Isothermal Nucleic acid quantification sYstem (or TINY) has shown promise as a point-of-care detector of Kaposi sarcoma-associated herpesvirus (KSHV) in resource-limited settings such as sub-Saharan Africa. Early testing has resulted in about 94 percent agreement with traditional methods, with results being generated in a matter of hours instead of weeks.

Developed by a team led by David Erickson, the Sibley College Professor of Mechanical Engineering, and Ethel Cesarman, M.D., professor of pathology and laboratory medicine at Weill Cornell Medicine, TINY met its goals in the first round of funding from the National Institutes of Health. The team is planning expanded testing over the next several years.

Results of the team's field testing of the device in 2017 in Uganda are detailed in the paper, "A Portable Device for Nucleic Acid Quantification Powered by Sunlight, a Flame or Electricity," published Sept. 11 in Nature Biomedical Engineering. Ryan Snodgrass, doctoral student in the Erickson lab, and Andrea Gardner, researcher technician at Weill Cornell Medicine, are first and second authors.

Kaposi sarcoma (KS) is a cancer that develops in lymph or blood vessels, and usually appears as lesions on the skin, inside of the mouth or internally. There are four types of the disease; epidemic, or AIDS-associated, KS is the most common in sub-Saharan Africa and is AIDS-defining. That means when someone with the HIV virus is diagnosed with KS, they officially have AIDS.

Early detection leads to better outcomes, but that's not always possible in the developing world, where pathological testing can take one to two weeks. "There's a problem with being able to diagnose it there," Erickson said. "A number of things look like KS ... and the time it takes for a traditional diagnosis, one to two weeks, makes it tough."

TINY has shown the ability to generate results in approximately 2 hours.

Now in its third generation, TINY performs loop-mediated isothermal amplification (LAMP) for nucleic acid quantification. That requires heating the sample to 154 degrees, which necessitates a power source.

One of the main benefits of TINY: It can collect and store heat generated from electricity, the sun or even a Bunsen burner, and will function even during temporary power disruption, of which three occurred during testing in Uganda. TINY's power flexibility is important because in many sub-Saharan African countries healthcare facilities lack access to reliable electricity.

For the study, Erickson's team collected biopsy samples from 71 patients in Uganda suspected of having KS and tested the samples with TINY as well as via quantitative polymerase chain reaction (qPCR), the current standard for nucleic acid quantification. Agreement between TINY and qPCR was 94 percent (67 of 71), and the team showed that all disagreement stemmed from assay limitations and not TINY capability.

Not only can TINY be carried to remote locations for point-of-care use, it could also be valuable in clinics and hospitals where electric power can be unreliable. "Both applications can enable nucleic acid diagnostics to reach more of the population in [low- and middle-income countries]," the group concluded in its report.

"As a pathologist who knows how difficult it can sometimes be to diagnose KS," Cesarman said, "it is very exciting to collaborate with engineers that invented a brilliant new device that makes it so easy to support or discard a diagnosis of KS in less than three hours from the time a biopsy is taken."

Future work on TINY will include expanding testing to more locations in Africa, South America and the U.S., and developing a commercialization plan. The group has applied for patent protection through Cornell's Center for Technology Licensing.

Erickson and Cesarman began work on this device approximately five years ago. "Where we are now," Erickson said, "is beyond the best-case scenario I could have envisioned when I wrote the proposal."

And Snodgrass, who's been to Uganda twice testing TINY, said it's "very rewarding to build a device, take it there and see it used on real patients."

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A portion of this work was done at the Cornell NanoScale Science and Technology Facility, which is supported by the National Science Foundation. Support also came from the NIH, the National Cancer Institute and the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship program.
Cambridge, MA (September 20, 2018) -- Just about any elementary school student can rattle off the characteristics that make mammals special - they're warm-blooded, have fur or hair and nearly all are born alive.

A new study suggests mammals are unique in one more way - the makeup of their spine.

Led by Associate Professor of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology and Curator of Vertebrate Paleontology Stephanie Pierce and postdoctoral researcher Katrina Jones, the study challenges the notion that specialization in mammal backbones date back to the earliest land animals. The research is described in a September 21 paper in Science.

"The spine is basically like a series of beads on a string, with each bead representing a single bone - a vertebra." said Pierce. "In most four-legged animals, like lizards, the vertebrae all look and function the same. But mammal backbones are different. The different sections or regions of the spine - like the neck, thorax, and lower back - take on very different shapes. They function separately and so can adapt to different ways of life, like running, flying, digging, and climbing."

To understand how those specialized regions came to be, Pierce and Jones decided to look back at the fossil record.

"There are no animals alive today that can record the transition from a 'reptile-like' ancestor to a mammal" said Jones, the lead author of the study. "To do that we must dive into the fossil record and look at the extinct forerunners of mammals, the non-mammalian synapsids."

But studying fossils isn't easy.

"Fossils are scarce and finding extinct animals with all 25 plus vertebrae in place is incredibly, incredibly rare," Jones explained. To tackle this problem, the researchers combed museum collections from around the world to study the most perfectly preserved fossils, which lived some 320 million years ago.

Pierce and Jones, along with co-author Ken Angielczyk from the Chicago's Field Museum, examined dozens of fossil spines, as well as over 1,000 vertebrae from living animals, including mice, alligators, lizards, and amphibians.

The goal was to test if mammal regions were as ancient as previously thought, or if mammals were doing something unique.

"If vertebral regions had remained unchanging through evolution, as hypothesized, we would expect to see the same regions in the non-mammalian synapsids that we see in mammals today," said Pierce.

The evidence suggests that isn't the case. When the researchers compared the positioning and shape of the vertebrae, they found something surprising - the spine gained regions during mammal evolution.

"The earliest non-mammalian synapsids had fewer regions than living mammals." Jones explained.

Around 250 million years ago, a new region evolved in close proximity to the shoulders and front legs, as dramatic changes began to appear in the forelimbs of animals known as non-mammalian therapsids. Those simultaneous changes, Pierce and Jones believe, likely occurred in conjunction with changes in how creatures walked and ran.

"There appears to be some sort of cross-talk during development between the tissues that form the vertebrae and the shoulder blade," Pierce said. "We hypothesize that this interaction resulted in the addition of a region near the shoulder as the forelimbs of our ancestors evolved to take on new shapes and functions."

Later, a region emerged in the ancestor of modern mammals near the pelvis.

"It is this last region, the ribless lumbar region, that appears to adapt most to different environments," adds Pierce. That final step in building the mammal backbone may be linked to changes in Hox genes, the genetic blueprint for laying out spine regions early in development.

"What I think is exciting here is that we've been able make connections between changes to the skeletons of extinct animals and ideas from modern development and genetics." Jones said. "This combined approach is helping us to understand what makes a mammal a mammal."

"Mammals can be found on continents and in oceans around the world," says Dena Smith, a program director in the National Science Foundation's Division of Earth Sciences, which funded the research. "Looking into the ancient past, an early change in mammals' spinal columns was an important first step in their evolution. Changes in the spine over time allowed mammals to develop into the myriad species we know today."

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This research was supported with funding from the National Science Foundation and a AAA Postdoctoral Fellowship.
In a case study published online last week in Academic Medicine, an international team of researchers led by the University of Cambridge and Johns Hopkins Medicine looked at what prevented employees from raising concerns. The study identifies measures to help health care organizations encourage their employees to speak up and recommends a systematic approach to promoting employee voice that appears to have already made a positive impact at Johns Hopkins.

"It's not enough just to say you're committed to employee voice. Health care staff must genuinely feel comfortable speaking up if organizations are going to provide safe, high-quality care," says Mary Dixon-Woods, D.Phil., M.Sc., a professor at the University of Cambridge, director of THIS Institute (The Healthcare Improvement Studies Institute) and the study's lead author. "Even when reporting mechanisms are in place, employees may not report disruptive behaviors if they don't feel safe in doing so and don't think their concerns will be addressed."

Health care workers often are reluctant to raise concerns about co-workers and unsafe behaviors, so leadership at Johns Hopkins Medicine sought to encourage employee voice in the organization by first identifying barriers. The research team interviewed 67 administrators and front-line staff members about raising patient safety issues at The Johns Hopkins Hospital. The researchers found that some staff members said they didn't know how to report their concerns, and others said that reporting processes were difficult to navigate. More generally, employees reported a culture of fear--they worried about hostile or angry responses, retaliation, or being labeled a bad team player. Even when employees did speak up, they reported, nothing seemed to happen in response. A particular concern for many employees was a small number of senior staff members who engaged in poor conduct with apparent impunity. Quietly referred to by many as the "untouchables," their behavior was regarded as unacceptable, but they were so powerful that many felt that raising concerns would go nowhere.

To address the issues raised in these interviews, Johns Hopkins leaders developed, implemented, and in some cases expanded a series of interventions from fall 2014 through summer 2016. These interventions included clear definitions of acceptable and unacceptable behavior, well-coordinated reporting mechanisms, leadership training on having difficult conversations, and consistent consequences for disruptive behaviors. Safe at Hopkins, a program dedicated to addressing and investigating concerns, was designed, researchers say, to make everyone feel comfortable and safe. It means that instead of relying on individual accounts that could be disputed, Johns Hopkins Medicine leadership now investigates an entire clinical unit. During the period studied, 382 individual reports of disruptive behavior were made that led to 55 investigations in which a whole clinical unit was interviewed.

"Once Safe at Hopkins came into units where there was disruptive behavior, people started to speak up and make reports," says Janice Clements, Ph.D., professor of molecular and comparative pathobiology, the vice dean of faculty at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and an author of the study. "Although there is a lot more work to be done to formally evaluate and refine this program and all the other interventions we have put into place, I think it's safe to say that giving people a 'safe' way to speak up can be done."

With further testing in different contexts, Dixon-Woods says the interventions used at Johns Hopkins could be applicable to other health care organizations looking to promote employee voice and improve how they respond to transgressive behavior. "Though the importance of giving voice to employees--and the difficulties in doing so--are widely known, the two-stage approach of diagnosis and intervention that we undertook for this study demonstrated some intriguing promise in remaking norms in health care organizations."

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Authors on this study include:

Mary Dixon-Woods of University of Cambridge, Cambridge Biomedical Campus, United Kingdom; Anne Campbell of School of Pharmacy, Queen's University Belfast, United Kingdom; Graham Martin, Janet Willars and Carolyn Tarrant of University of Leicester; Emma-Louise Aveling of Harvard T.H.Chan School of Public Health; Kathleen Sutcliffe of the Johns Hopkins Carey Business School; Janice Clements and Peter Pronovost of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine; and Michelle Carlstrom of Build a Better Culture.

Funding for this work was provided by Dixon-Woods' Wellcome Trust Investigator award (WT097899), Johns Hopkins Medicine, and the U.K.'s National Institute for Health Research Collaborations for Leadership in Applied Health Research and Care, East Midlands.

This news release was written by Johns Hopkins science writing intern Paige Bartlett.
In past years, the demand for cobalt has been on the increase due to its many applications. For one thing, the metal is a crucial component of rechargeable lithium-ion batteries for smartphones and electric cars. Around 60% of the world's cobalt supply comes from the mineral-rich Katanga Copper belt, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Researchers at KU Leuven (Belgium) and the University of Lubumbashi have now shown that cobalt mining takes a high toll on both the creuseurs - the 'diggers' who work in the mines, often by hand - and on the environment.

Previous research by KU Leuven and the University of Lubumbashi (2009) had already found high concentrations of trace metals in the urine of people living close to mines. The new case study, published in Nature Sustainability, confirms the health risks of cobalt mining.

Mine dust in Kasulo

The researchers conducted a case study in Kasulo, an urban neighbourhood in Kolwezi, in the heart of the Congolese mining area. When cobalt ore was discovered under one of the houses there, the entire area quickly became an artisanal mine. The houses are now interspersed with dozens of mine pits where hundreds of creuseurs hunt for cobalt. Most residents remained in the area.

The major problem is the dust - containing cobalt and many other metals, including uranium - that is released during the mining process and settles on the ground.

Too much cobalt in children's urine

The researchers collected blood and urine samples from 72 Kasulo residents, including 32 children. A control group with a similar composition was selected in a neighbouring district.

According to Professor Nemery, a doctor-toxicologist at the KU Leuven Department of Public Health and Primary Care, the results of their study are worrisome: "Children living in the mining district had ten times as much cobalt in their urine as children living elsewhere. Their values were much higher than what we'd accept for European factory workers. This study may be limited in scope, but the results are crystal-clear. The differences cannot be attributed to coincidence."

Detrimental effects on public health and society

The long-term consequences of this increased exposure to cobalt are not clear (yet), but Professor Nemery is not optimistic. "Cobalt is less toxic than other metals such as lead, cadmium, or arsenic. But we found increased concentrations of several other metals as well. Furthermore, we found more DNA damage in children living in the mining area than in those from the control group. And the preliminary results of an ongoing study suggest that miners' new-born babies have an increased risk of birth defects."

According to Professor Nemery, artisanal cobalt mining causes other problems as well. "Young men looking for quick cash often start working in the mines, because they earn much more as creuseurs than, for instance, as farmers, which may lead to food shortages. And after their arduous work, many miners spend some of their money on alcohol and prostitutes, further adding to social problems."

"Solving these issues is no easy matter. Simply banning artisanal mining in the DRC is not a good option because the industrial mines usually leave a lot to be desired as well. So, unfortunately, sustainable cobalt mining in the DRC is still a utopia."

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About KU Leuven

KU Leuven is Europe's most innovative university in the latest Reuters ranking. Located in Belgium, it is dedicated to research, education, and service to society. KU Leuven is a founding member of the League of European Research Universities (LERU) and has a strong European and international orientation. Its scientists conduct basic and applied research in a comprehensive range of disciplines. The university welcomes more than 50,000 students from over 140 countries. The KU Leuven Doctoral Schools train approximately 4,500 PhD students. http://www.kuleuven.be/english
Hookworms exploit a live fast/die young strategy in their South American fur seal pup hosts, report Morris Animal Foundation-funded researchers at the University of Georgia. As a result, they often kill their host, rather than finding a happy equilibrium. Scientists are concerned that this type of hookworm infection could eventually pose a risk to critically endangered populations of fur seals.

The research, recently published in the International Journal for Parasitology: Parasites and Wildlife, showed that by adapting to the seals' breeding cycles, this Uncinaria species has evolved to live only 30 to 65 days in the pups' intestines. This forces the worms to feed at a constant rate before they produce eggs and die. The result is high levels of anemia in pups, with more than 20 percent dying of parasitic infections every year.

"Usually we find that most parasites will try and find an equilibrium with a host, so they will extract just enough resources for their own transmission and their own reproductive success," said Dr. Mauricio Seguel, a research fellow at the University of Georgia. "What we found is a very unusual relationship, but one that is well synchronized to a short window of time."

The team studied a reproductive colony of about 3,000 South American fur seals on Guafo Island, in southwestern Chile. During the 2014 and 2015 birthing seasons, the team measured, weighed and took blood and fecal samples from the same randomly selected newborn pups every five to 10 days for 10 weeks. The sampling allowed researchers to follow infections beginning at initial transmission, as well as monitor the pups' health status.

The study showed hookworms feed from their hosts at a constant rate, regardless of how many other hookworms are in the intestine. Further, despite reaching high within-host densities, female hookworms do not decrease egg output. Pups with a higher burden of parasites experience anemia and mortality and release more hookworms into the soil through their feces.

Fur seal pups acquire hookworms during their first days of life, through their mothers' colostrum. Before this, larvae live in the soil, then penetrate a female's skin and live in her subcutaneous tissue until she is pregnant, when they migrate to her mammary glands.

Researchers believe the hookworms' short lifespans have evolved to synchronize with the fur seals' reproductive cycles. Due to the harsh environment on Guafo Island, hookworm larvae survival time in the soil is very limited as storms will wash many to sea. During birthing season, though, fur seals congregate in large groups on the beach. If hookworms can produce as many eggs as possible, as soon as possible, during this time, they provide greater the chances for their larvae to find a female's skin to penetrate.

"This study really allows us to know our enemy. Now that we better understand how these parasites live, we can begin to learn how to control the problem to avoid the worst consequences," said Dr. Kelly Diehl, Morris Animal Foundation Interim Vice President of Scientific Programs. "This particular population is stable, but other populations of fur seals are critically endangered. If they were infected with this disease, we now know when we could potentially intervene to protect fur seal pups and increase survival."

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About Morris Animal Foundation

Morris Animal Foundation's mission is to bridge science and resources to advance the health of animals. Founded by a veterinarian in 1948, we fund and conduct critical health studies for the benefit of all animals. Learn more at morrisanimalfoundation.org.
Scientists from Russia and Germany shed light on the crystalline structure of calaverite, foretelling the existence of a new gold compound previously unknown to chemists. The results of their study were published in the reputable scientific journal PNAS.

A gold tellurite with the chemical formula AuTe2, calaverite may not only be a source of gold, but displays highly incommensurate modulation in the positions of gold and tellurium atoms in its crystals. This means that calaverite's crystal lattice cannot be explained by Hauy's law which describes the crystals of most minerals. Calaverite and other incommensurate crystals have long been a mystery for crystallographers. In the 1970s, scientists found a way of describing their structures using 4D space instead of the customary 3D space in their calculations. However, researchers have been clueless as to the reasons of such weird behavior of calaverite crystals.

Research teams from the RAS Institute of Metal Physics (led by Professor Sergey Streltsov), the University of Cologne (led by Professor Daniil Khomsky), Skoltech and the Moscow Institute of Physics Technology (MIPT) (led by professor Artem Oganov) cracked the mystery of incommensurate calaverite crystals, gaining insights into their electronic spectra obtained in the experiments and their superconducting capability created by pressure or additives.

"The simple reasoning suggests that gold should be divalent in this compound in much the same way as iron is in FeS2, known as "fool's gold". Any chemist understands that divalent gold is extremely unstable and tends to become monovalent and trivalent, but there lies the rub: first, 3+ is too high a valence and, second, there is no way you can place monovalent or trivalent gold (assuming it exists in the first place) on calaverite's triangular lattice with the pattern repeating in each direction. Therefore, it's the nature that dictates the compromise by smoothly changing the valence of gold in the crystal. Tellurium's environment responds to the change and this results in bizarre crystal lattices," explains Sergey Streltsov

The scientists also relied on the USPEX ? an advanced evolutionary algorithm created by Artem Oganov and intensively used by crystallographers worldwide ? to predict all the known stable tellurides of gold and a new telluride, AuTe, unknown until now.

"There's quite a story behind calaverite. Apart from its marked impact on the Gold Rush, the mineral has been a headache and a great paradox for crystallographers for decades. The deeper you dug into it, the more new questions came up. Our team has succeeded in interlacing all the oddities of calaverite within a simple model, so experimenters can now hunt for the new compound we predicted, AuTe, which I'm sure is full of new riddles," says Professor of Skoltech and MIPT Artem Oganov.

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A new federally-funded research project at the Ohio University Edison Biotechnology Institute and Heritage College of Osteopathic Medicine could lead to treatments that extend human lifespan and allow people to enjoy better health in their old age.

ATHENS, Ohio (Sept. 20, 2018) - A new federally-funded research project at the Ohio University Edison Biotechnology Institute and Heritage College of Osteopathic Medicine could lead to treatments that extend human lifespan and allow people to enjoy better health in their old age. The study, led by John Kopchick, Ph.D., has been awarded a five-year grant for more than $2.23 million from the National Institutes of Health.

"We're very excited about it," said Kopchick, Goll-Ohio Eminent Scholar and Distinguished Professor of Molecular Biology in the Department of Biomedical Sciences at the Heritage College, and principal investigator at the Edison Biotechnology Institute at Ohio University. He noted that one of the main objectives of NIH's National Institute on Aging is funding research to increase human "healthspan," which translates as "a better old age; a healthier old age."

Among those collaborating with Kopchick on the new research will be co-investigators Darlene Berryman, Ph.D., R.D., L.D., associate dean for research and innovation at the Heritage College, and Edward List, Ph.D., associate investigator with the Edison Biotechnology Institute.

"Dr. Kopchick's research on growth hormone has been tremendously important for our college, the University and the whole field of endocrinology," said Ken Johnson, D.O., executive dean of the Heritage College and OHIO's chief medical affairs officer. "This new avenue of that research, in collaboration with Dr. Berryman and Dr. List, has the potential to make real improvements in the health and wellness of our aging population. It's very exciting that it's happening here."

Kopchick, who is principal investigator on the new project, said it builds on his past research in growth hormone, which led to the discovery of the GH receptor antagonist drug, pegvisomant (trade name Somavert). This drug, the first specific drug of its kind, is used to treat the disease acromegaly, and its commercialization has yielded $97 million in royalty income to Ohio University as of 2018.

"Dr. Kopchick is a world-renowned researcher whose work has been life-changing for those who suffer from acromegaly," Ohio University President Dr. M. Duane Nellis said. "With this grant, Dr. Kopchick and his team will remain on the cutting edge of growth hormone research and its impact on aging. We're proud that such revolutionary work is happening here at OHIO." Unlocking the secrets of the world's oldest mouse

In the early 1990s, Kopchick and a graduate assistant genetically engineered a strain of mouse in which the receptor gene for GH was disrupted, preventing it from working. The dwarf mouse that resulted was found to live longer than normal mice (it holds the world record for oldest lab mouse) and to be healthier in significant ways. These mice are resistant to cancer, diabetes and cognitive decline and show less accumulation of senescent cells (cells that have stopped dividing and that play a role in aging). Kopchick's team has supplied these long-lived mice to gerontology researchers all over the world.

The long-term goal of the new project, according to a description given to NIH, is "to determine the molecular mechanisms that are responsible for these remarkable health and longevity benefits."

The researchers will investigate whether the health and lifespan improvements seen in the mice that were genetically modified in utero can be replicated if the disruption of the GH receptor gene is initiated in adult mice at six months of age - corresponding to about 25 years old for a human. They also want to see if lifespan can be further extended by treating the animals with rapamycin, a drug known to lengthen the lives of mice.

"There are two aims in the grant," Kopchick explained. "One is disrupting the gene in the early adult life of a mouse. The second is to take the long-lived mouse, the longest-lived mouse in the world, and see if we can make it live longer and healthier by adding rapamycin, which in normal mice will promote longevity a bit. So we want to tweak what we already did to see if we can make it better." A promising approach to life extension

Kopchick noted that at a workshop of scientific experts on aging, held in Italy in 2013, participants discussed the various types of interventions now available for extending human lifespan. An article on the workshop in the journal Aging Cell, titled "Interventions to slow aging in humans: Are we ready?" recounted that the participants voted on six known life-extending strategies, ranking Kopchick's drug, the GH receptor antagonist, as the most promising.

"That's really what led to us doing all this work," Kopchick said. "The idea is, could a drug - our drug or similar compound - be used, not to delete the growth hormone receptor in humans, but to tie it up, to antagonize it, to prevent it from working." If the two aims of the research are successful, he believes this would suggest the approach should be tried with humans. He added that his team has already disrupted the GH receptor gene in mice of about six weeks old and found that in mice so treated, females do live longer.

"So we have the longest-lived mouse, and we know that in young life we can see the [increased longevity] effect in females," he said. "Now we want to see if we can see it in later adult life, and if we can, then can we use our drug or some similar yet-to-be-discovered compound to slow aging?"

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A naturally occurring antibiotic called kanglemycin A is effective against Mycobacterium tuberculosis, the bacteria that cause tuberculosis, even in drug-resistant strains, according to an international team of researchers who used chemistry, molecular biology, microbiology, and X-ray crystallography to show how the compound maintains its activity. A paper describing the research appears September 20, 2018 in the journal Molecular Cell.

The compound, kanglemycin A, is related to the antibiotic rifampicin, according to Katsuhiko Murakami, professor of biochemistry and molecular biology at Penn State and one of leaders of the project. "Rifampicin is already part of the cocktail of antibiotics used to treat tuberculosis, but many strains of the tuberculosis-causing bacteria have developed resistance to it," Murakami said.

"Tuberculosis is the leading cause of death by infectious disease worldwide," said Murakami. "Development of rifampicin resistance in M. tuberculosis has made treatment of this disease very difficult since it extends treatment time of tuberculosis from 6 months to 2 years. Identifying new compounds that are effective against the rifampicin-resistant bacteria is incredibly important for public health."

The researchers screened a library of naturally occurring compounds from U.K. biotech company Demuris Ltd. for their ability to inhibit bacterial cell growth or prevent the production of RNA--an essential process in all living organisms--in bacteria. They discovered that a compound named kanglemycin A was effective at inhibiting RNA production even in rifampicin-resistant bacteria.

"Kanglemycin A is related to rifampicin, an antibiotic that functions by binding to bacterial RNA polymerase, the enzyme responsible for RNA production, and preventing it from making more RNA," said Murakami. "Understanding how kanglemycin A manages to maintain its affinity to rifampicin-resistant RNA polymerase and stay active against the drug-resistant bacteria will help to accelerate its approval for use in patients with tuberculosis."

To determine the mechanism of kanglemycin A action against rifampicin-resistant RNA polymerase, the Murakami group used X-ray crystallography to determine the three-dimensional structure of the complex of kanglemycin A bound to bacterial RNA polymerase. It was known that rifampicin binds to a groove in the RNA polymerase molecule and that mutations that change the amino-acid sequence of the RNA polymerase can prevent this binding, while maintaining the ability to produce RNA. Kanglemycin A binds to the same groove, but its structure revealed extensions that also bind just outside the groove allowing it to inhibit activity of rifampicin-resistant RNA polymerase.

"The X-ray structure actually revealed that kanglemycin A has two modifications that improve its function compared to rifampicin," said Murakami. "First, one of modifications allows it to bind just outside of the rifampicin binding pocket increasing the strength of its affinity to the RNA polymerase in rifampicin-resistant bacteria. Second, another modification actually allows kanglemycin A to stop the synthesis of RNA even earlier than rifampicin."

"It is a really exciting finding," said Nikolay Zenkin, professor of molecular biology at Newcastle University in the U.K. and one of leaders of the project. "The previously unknown interactions of the unique chemical groups of kanglemycin A with RNA polymerase will direct the development of antibiotics against rifampicin-resistant M. tuberculosis. Approximately one third of the world's population is already infected with M. tuberculosis, and 600,000 people every year are diagnosed with rifampicin-resistant tuberculosis. Our work is the first step in developing a new drug for the treatment of these patients."

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The research was led by Zenkin and Murakami, working closely with Newcastle University spin out company, Demuris Ltd, which will be taking on the commercialization of the new compounds. In addition, the research team included Vadim Molodtsov and Yeonoh Shin at Penn State; Hamed Mosaei, Bernhard Kepplinger, John Harbottle, Lucia Ceccaroni, Stephanie Morton-Laing, Corinne Wills, William Clegg, Yulia Yuzenkova, and Michael John Hall at Newcastle University in the United Kingdom; Christopher William Moon, Rose Elizabeth Jeeves, and Joanna Bacon in the TB Research Group of the U.K. National Infection Service; Emma Claire Louise Marrs and John David Perry at Freeman Hospital in Newcastle upon Tyne, U.K.; and Nicholas Allenby and Jeff Errington at Demuris Limited, Newcastle upon Tyne, U.K.

The research was supported by the Wellcome Trust, the Leverhulme Trust, Innovate U.K., a Royal Society University Research Fellowship, the U.S. National Institutes of Health, The U.K. Department of Health, and the PHE Pipeline Fund.
LA JOLLA--(September 19, 2018) The words "fly like an eagle" are famously part of a song, but they may also be words that make some scientists scratch their heads. Especially when it comes to soaring birds like eagles, falcons and hawks, who seem to ascend to great heights over hills, canyons and mountain tops with ease. Scientists realize that upward currents of warm air assist the birds in their flight, but they don't know how the birds find and navigate these thermal plumes.

To figure it out, researchers from the Salk Institute and the University of California San Diego used reinforcement learning to train gliders to autonomously navigate atmospheric thermals, soaring to heights of 700 meters--nearly 2,300 feet. The novel research results, published in the September 19 issue of Nature, highlight the role of vertical wind accelerations and roll-wise torques as viable biological cues for soaring birds. The findings also provide a navigational strategy that directly applies to the development of autonomous soaring vehicles, or unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs).

"This paper is an important step toward artificial intelligence--how to autonomously soar in constantly shifting thermals like a bird. I was surprised that relatively little learning was needed to achieve expert performance," says Professor Terrence Sejnowski, head of Salk's Computational Neurobiology Laboratory and one of the paper's authors.

Reinforcement learning is an area of machine learning, inspired by behavioral psychology, whereby an agent learns how to behave in an environment based on performed actions and the results. According to UC San Diego Department of Physics Professor Massimo Vergassola and PhD candidate Gautam Reddy, it offers an appropriate framework to identify an effective navigational strategy as a sequence of decisions taken in response to environmental cues.

"We establish the validity of our learned flight policy through field experiments, numerical simulations and estimates of the noise in measurements that is unavoidably present due to atmospheric turbulence," explained Vergassola. "This is a novel instance of learning a navigational task in the field, where learning is severely challenged by a multitude of physical effects and the unpredictability of the natural environment."

In the study, conducted collaboratively by the Salk Institute, the UC San Diego Division of Biological Sciences and the Abdus Salam International Center for Theoretical Physics in Trieste, Italy, the team equipped two-meter wingspan gliders with a flight controller. The device enabled on-board implementation of autonomous flight policies via precise control over bank angle and pitch. A navigational strategy was determined solely from the gliders' pooled experiences collected over several days in the field using exploratory behavioral strategies. The strategies relied on new on-board methods, developed in the course of the research, to accurately estimate the gliders' local vertical wind accelerations and the roll-wise torques, which served as navigational cues.

The scientists' methodology involved estimating the vertical wind acceleration, the vertical wind velocity gradients across the gliders' wings, designing the learning module, learning the thermalling strategy in the field, testing the performance of the learned policy in the field, testing the performance for different wingspans in simulations and estimating the noise in gradient sensing due to atmospheric turbulence.

Adds Sejnowski, "These results are significant because we were able to successfully apply our previous simulation work to a real-world glider."

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The work was funded by Simons Foundation Grant 340106.

This release is based on materials provided by the University of California San Diego.

About the Salk Institute for Biological Studies: Every cure has a starting point. The Salk Institute embodies Jonas Salk's mission to dare to make dreams into reality. Its internationally renowned and award-winning scientists explore the very foundations of life, seeking new understandings in neuroscience, genetics, immunology, plant biology and more. The Institute is an independent nonprofit organization and architectural landmark: small by choice, intimate by nature and fearless in the face of any challenge. Be it cancer or Alzheimer's, aging or diabetes, Salk is where cures begin. Learn more at: salk.edu.
A decade-long effort led by Stanford University School of Medicine scientists has been rewarded with the identification of the human skeletal stem cell.

The cell, which can be isolated from human bone or generated from specialized cells in fat, gives rise to progenitor cells that can make new bone, the spongy stroma of the bone's interior and the cartilage that helps our knees and other joints function smoothly and painlessly.

The discovery allowed the researchers to create a kind of family tree of stem cells important to the development and maintenance of the human skeleton. It could also pave the way to treatments for regenerating bone and cartilage in people.

"Every day children and adults need normal bone, cartilage and stromal tissue," said Michael Longaker, MD, professor of plastic and reconstructive surgery. "There are 75 million Americans with arthritis, for example. Imagine if we could turn readily available fat cells from liposuction into stem cells that could be injected into their joints to make new cartilage, or if we could stimulate the formation of new bone to repair fractures in older people."

A paper describing the finding, which follows the discovery by the same group of the mouse skeletal stem cell in 2015, will be published online Sept. 20 in Cell.

Longaker, the Deane P. and Louise Mitchell Professor in the School of Medicine and the co-director of the Stanford Institute for Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine, is the senior author. The lead authors are Charles K.F. Chan, PhD, assistant professor of surgery; medical student Gunsagar Gulati, MD; Rahul Sinha, PhD, instructor of stem cell biology and regenerative medicine; and research assistant Justin Vincent Tompkins.

'True, multipotential, self-renewing'

The skeletal stem cells are distinct from another cell type called the mesenchymal stem cell, which can generate skeletal tissues, fat and muscle. Mesenchymal stem cells, which can be isolated from blood, bone marrow or fat, are considered by some clinicians to function as all-purpose stem cells. They have been tested, with limited success, in clinical trials and as unproven experimental treatments for their ability to regenerate a variety of tissues. Recently, three elderly patients in Florida were blinded or lost most of their sight after mesenchymal stem cells from fat were injected into their eyes as an experimental treatment for macular degeneration.

"Mesenchymal stem cells are loosely characterized and likely to include many populations of cells, each of which may respond differently and unpredictably to differentiation signals," Chan said. "In contrast, the skeletal stem cell we've identified possesses all of the hallmark qualities of true, multipotential, self-renewing, tissue-specific stem cells. They are restricted in terms of their fate potential to just skeletal tissues, which is likely to make them much more clinically useful."

Skeletal regeneration is an important capability for any bony animal evolving in a rough-and-tumble world where only the most fit, or the fastest-healing, are likely to survive very long into adulthood. Some vertebrates, such as newts, are able to regenerate entire limbs if necessary, but the healing ability of other animals, such as mice and humans, is more modest. Although humans can usually heal a bone fracture fairly well, they begin to lose some of that ability with age. And they are completely unable to regenerate the cartilage that wears away with age or repetitive use. Researchers have wondered whether the skeletal stem cell could be used clinically to help replace damaged or missing bone or cartilage, but it's been very difficult to identify.

Adult stem cells lineage-restricted

Unlike embryonic stem cells, which are present only in the earliest stages of development, adult stem cells are thought to be found in all major tissue types, where they bide their time until needed to repair damage or trauma. Each adult stem cell is lineage-restricted -- that is, it makes progenitor cells that give rise only to the types of cells that naturally occur in that tissue. For our skeleton, that means cells that make bone, cartilage and stroma.

Chan, Longaker and their colleagues had hoped to use what they learned from identifying the mouse skeletal stem cell to quickly isolate its human counterpart. But the quest turned out to be more difficult than they had anticipated. Most cell isolation efforts focus on using a technology called fluorescence activated cell sorting to separate cells based on the expression of proteins on their surface. Often, similar cell types from different species share some key cell surface markers.

But the human skeletal stem cell turned out to share few markers with its mouse counterpart. Instead, the researchers had to compare the gene expression profiles of the mouse skeletal stem cell with those of several human cell types found at the growing ends of developing human bone. Doing so, they were able to identify a cell population that made many of the same proteins as the mouse skeletal stem cell. They then worked backward to identify markers on the surface of the human cells that could be used to isolate and study them as a pure population.

"This was quite a bioinformatics challenge, and it required a big team of interdisciplinary researchers, but eventually Chuck and his colleagues were able to identify a series of markers that we felt had great potential," Longaker said. "Then they had to prove two things: Can these cells self-renew, or make more of themselves indefinitely, and can they make the three main lineages that comprise the human skeleton?"

The researchers showed that the human skeletal stem cell they identified is both self-renewing and capable of making bone, cartilage and stroma progenitors. It is found at the end of developing bone, as well as in increased numbers near the site of healing fractures. Not only can it be isolated from fracture sites, it can also be generated by reprogramming human fat cells or induced pluripotent stem cells to assume a skeletal fate.

'The perfect niche'

Intriguingly, the skeletal stem cell also provided a nurturing environment for the growth of human hematopoietic stem cells -- or the cells in our bone marrow that give rise to our blood and immune system -- without the need for additional growth factors found in serum.

"Blood-forming stem cells love the interior of spongy bone," Chan said. "It's the perfect niche for them. We found that the stromal population that arises from the skeletal stem cell can keep hematopoietic stem cells alive for two weeks without serum."

By studying the differentiation potential of the human skeletal stem cell, the researchers were able to construct a family tree of stem cells to serve as a foundation for further studies into potential clinical applications. Understanding the similarities and differences between the mouse and human skeletal stem cell may also unravel mysteries about skeletal formation and intrinsic properties that differentiate mouse and human skeletons.

"Now we can begin to understand why human bone is denser than that of mice, or why human bones grow to be so much larger," Longaker said.

In particular, the researchers found that the human skeletal stem cell expresses genes active in the Wnt signaling pathway known to modulate bone formation, whereas the mouse skeletal stem cell does not.

The ultimate goal of the researchers, however, is to find a way to use the human skeletal stem cell in the clinic. Longaker envisions a future in which arthroscopy -- a minimally invasive procedure in which a tiny camera or surgical instruments, or both, are inserted into a joint to visualize and treat damaged cartilage -- could include the injection of a skeletal stem cell specifically restricted to generate new cartilage, for example.

"I would hope that, within the next decade or so, this cell source will be a game-changer in the field of arthroscopic and regenerative medicine," Longaker said. "The United States has a rapidly aging population that undergoes almost 2 million joint replacements each year. If we can use this stem cell for relatively noninvasive therapies, it could be a dream come true."

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Longaker is a member of the Stanford Child Health Research Institute, the Stanford Cardiovascular Institute, the Stanford Cancer Institute and Stanford Bio-X.

Additional Stanford authors are CIRM Scholars Michael Lopez, Rachel Brewer, and Lauren Koepke, former graduate students Ava Carter, PhD, Ryan Ransom, graduate students Anoop Manjunath, and Stephanie Conley; former postdoctoral scholar Andreas Reinisch, MD, PhD; research assistant Taylor Wearda; clinical assistant professor of plastic and reconstructive surgery Matthew Murphy, MD; medical student Owen Marecic; former life sciences researcher Eun Young Seo; former research assistant Tripp Leavitt, MD; research assistants Allison Nguyen, Ankit Salhotra, Taylor Siebel, and Karen M Chan; instructor of stem cell biology and regenerative medicine Wan-Jin Lu, PhD; postdoctoral scholars Thomas Ambrosi, PhD, and Mimi Borrelli, MD; orthopaedic surgery resident Henry Goodnough, MD, PhD; assistant professor of orthopaedic surgery Julius Bishop, MD; professor of orthopaedic surgery Michael Gardner, MD; professor of medicine Ravindra Majeti, MD, PhD; associate professor of surgery Derrick Wan, MD; professor of surgery Stuart Goodman, MD, PhD; professor of pathology and of developmental biology Irving Weissman, MD; and professor of dermatology and of genetics Howard Chang, MD, PhD.

Researchers from the Medical University of Graz in Austria, RIKEN in Japan and the University of California-San Diego also participated in the study.

The study was supported by the National Institutes of Health (grants R01DE027323, R56DE025597, R01DE026730, R01DE021683, R21DE024230, U01HL099776, U24DE026914, R21DE019274, U01HL099999, R01CA86065, R01HL058770, NIAK99AG049958, P50HG007735, R01 R055650, R01AR06371 and S10 RR02933801), the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Oak Foundation, the Hagey Laboratory, the Pitch Johnson Fund, the Gunn/Oliver Research Fund, a Siebel Fellowship, a PCFYI Award, Stinehart/Reed, the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft and the Ellenburg Chair.

The researchers have a pending patent for the isolation, derivation and use of human skeletal stem cells and their downstream progenitors.

Researchers from the Medical University of Graz in Austria, RIKEN in Japan and the University of California-San Diego also contributed to the study. Stanford's Department of Medicine also supported the work.

The Stanford University School of Medicine consistently ranks among the nation's top medical schools, integrating research, medical education, patient care and community service. For more news about the school, please visit http://med.stanford.edu/school.html. The medical school is part of Stanford Medicine, which includes Stanford Health Care and Stanford Children's Health. For information about all three, please visit http://med.stanford.edu.

Print media contact: Krista Conger at 650-725-5371, kristac@stanford.edu

Broadcast media contact: Margarita Gallardo at 650-723-7897, mjgallardo@stanford.edu
Therapy assisted by a dog could be more effective than standard speech and language therapy for children with communication impairments, suggests a new study published in the journal Anthrozoos.

The study found children with the condition developmental dysphasia, which affects the ability to communicate and form words, were more likely to be able to mimic communicative signals in a therapy session where a dog was present.

Researchers observed that the children in the group with the therapy dog also seemed more motivated and open to communicating. Additionally, the children displayed authentic, natural expressions during their interactions with the dog.

Lead author Kristyna Machova from Czech University of Life Sciences in Prague commented, "The presence of the dog improves the relationship with the therapist, as it distracts from the fear of therapy in children and provides them with a form of support during the practice."

In this study, researchers at Czech University conducted the first long-term randomized study of its kind, with a control and an experimental group, involving 69 nursery-school children (52 male and 17 female) participants diagnosed with developmental dysphasia. The aim was to understand if undergoing speech therapy accompanied by a dog improved results.

For both groups, the initial examination of each child involved evaluating their skills at baseline, with a follow-up scheduled for 10 months later. The control group received traditional speech therapy, while the experimental group had animal assistance therapy sessions with a female middle-aged Peruvian hairless dog named Agata.

Despite the promising findings from this study, as this is the first of its kind and there were improvements found in both groups, the authors have stated that further research would be needed to consolidate the findings - especially those involving a larger group of participants.

However, they do agree that there is great potential in the approach to complement and aid the current conventional approach, as canine-assisted therapy has been found to be more effective than more standard forms of delivery in many other disciplines.

Developmental dysphasia, or specific speech impairment, is a common disorder whereby sufferers struggle to formulate words verbally and rank significantly below their non-verbal intellectual level. It is widely thought that the ability to improve communication skills in sufferers would also help to improve quality of life which strongly supports funding more research into this area.

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NOTES

For an interview, please contact:

Contact: Kristyna Machova

Email: machovakristyna@af.czu.cz

For a copy of the journal article, and other queries:

Krystina Sihdu, Press & Media Relations Executive

Email: newsroom@taylorandfrancis.com

Phone: +44 (0) 20 7017 6571

"Canine-assisted Speech Therapy for Children with Communication Impairments: A Randomized Controlled Trial: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08927936.2018.1505339

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A team of researchers at the University of Cologne's Faculty of Medicine and the German Center for Infection Research (DZIF) has achieved a scientific breakthrough in the accelerated diagnosis of multi-resistant hospital pathogens. Using a novel immunochromatographic method, the researchers detected bacteria that are resistant to the antibiotic group carbapenemes within 20 to 45 minutes from blood cultures with 100 percent certainty. Current test procedures still take up to 72 hours. The results have been published in PLOS ONE.

Patients with bloodstream infections caused by gram-negative pathogens such as Escherichia coli (E. coli) have a high mortality rate. However, the infection has so far usually been treatable with antibiotics. But due to the increased antibiotic resistance of bacteria, also against the group of carbapenems, therapy has become increasingly difficult. Infections with multi-resistant pathogens that are also resistant to such 'reserve antibiotics' often lead to ineffective antibiotic therapy and thus to higher mortality.

In order to detect pathogens such as E. coli in the bloodstream, methods are currently being used that take 16 to 72 hours to detect antibiotic resistance. Accelerated diagnostics is therefore an essential step in treating patients with infections caused by carbapenem-resistant bacteria faster and more specifically, and in curbing the spread of the pathogens. The resistance of gram-negative bacteria is usually caused by enzymes that can destroy antibiotics, including carbapenem antibiotics. They are known as carbapenemases. The most common carbapenemases worldwide are Klebsiella pneumoniae carbapenemase (KPC), New Delhi metallo-betalactamase (NDM) and OXA-48.

The present study examined blood samples mixed with carbapenemase-producing bacteria. Three of the four most common carbapenemases - OXA-48, KPC and NDM - were discovered directly from positive blood cultures using a single test procedure without the need for time-consuming further cultivation on agar plates. The new method is fast, easy to use, inexpensive (approximately 10 euros per test) and can be performed in any clinical microbiology laboratory.

'With this procedure, we have come a giant step closer to our goal of being able to help patients infected with multi-resistant pathogens as quickly as possible', said the lead author of the study ,Professor Dr. med. Axel Hamprecht from the German Center for Infection Research and the Institute for Medical Microbiology, Immunology and Hygiene at Cologne University Hospital. 'In the case of the aggressive pathogens we are confronted with, every minute counts in order to start a targeted therapy. We now have to conduct follow-up studies in order to transfer our findings into clinical practice as quickly as possible.'

The proof-of-principle study, which is funded by the University of Cologne's Faculty of Medicine, proves the safety and efficacy of the new method. However, before the new method can replace conventional diagnostics and be introduced into clinical practice, further studies will be necessary.

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At the German Center for Infection Research, approximately 500 scientists and physicians from 35 institutions work together to develop new approaches for the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of infectious diseases. The goal is translation: the rapid and effective transfer of research results into clinical practice. That way, the German Center for Infection Research paves the way for the development of new vaccines, diagnostics and drugs against infections.

The Faculty of Medicine at the University of Cologne trains more than 3,500 students in a practice-oriented environment, closely interlinking teaching, patient care and research. The Faculty's main research areas are 'Tumor biology, infection and immunity', 'Homeostatic principles in metabolism and tissue regeneration' and 'Neuromodulation'.

Publication:

Hamprecht A, Vehreschild JJ, Seifert H, Saleh A (2018) Rapid detection of NDM, KPC and OXA-48 carbapenemases directly from positive blood cultures using a new multiplex immunochromatographic assay. PLOS ONE 13(9): e0204157. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0204157
Workshy bosses can promote a contemptuous attitude amongst their staff - leading to anger, frustration and abuse in the work place, new research has shown.

An international team of researchers, led by Drs Alison Legood and Allan Lee from the University of Exeter, has looked at how bad habits displayed by those in charge can affect the mentality and productivity of the workforce.

They found that managers who procrastinate when making decisions and carrying out tasks not only leave employees feeling less committed to the business, but also more likely to display abnormal and unpleasant behaviour.

Most alarmingly, this can escalate beyond taking unnecessary sick days to becoming abusive to colleagues, and stealing office supplies.

The research is published in the Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology .

Dr Lee, a Senior Lecturer in Organisation Studies and management at the University of Exeter's Business School said: ": "We have found procrastination from managers can be really detrimental to their staff and companies need to take action to ensure there are better relationships between bosses and employees.

"When bosses fail to do their work, knowing this will cause problems for others, it causes their staff to become frustrated and leaves them less committed to their employer."

For the research, the team collected data from 290 employees on the impact of their leaders procrastinating, and measured how much managers procrastinated using a scale, based on questions such as: "my manager delays making decisions until it's too late".

The researchers also collected further information from 250 workers, and their 23 supervisors, in a Chinese textile manufacturing company located in Zhejiang Province.

Staff were asked to rate their relationships with their bosses, and managers were asked to rate whether staff were deviant, and how committed they seemed to the company.

The results show when leaders procrastinate this leads to "deviant behaviour" from their staff.

The researchers, also from SOAS, University of London and Deakin University, Australia, suggest that staff should try to discover why their managers are prone to procrastination, and also take part in any decision making, to help combat the issue.

Companies could also deliver training to try to encourage better relationships between staff and managers, the research suggests.

Dr Lee said: "We found employees are less likely to be frustrated by their leaders procrastination if they had a good relationship with that leader.

"Encouraging feedback sessions, such as 360-degree feedback, may help leaders to become more aware of their own behaviour, and sharing leadership could reduce the effect of a procrastinating leader."

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The research, entitled From self-defeating to other defeating: Examining the effects of leader procrastination on follower work outcomes, is published in the Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology.
WHEN the 120m-long research vessel Polarstern is solidly frozen - quite intentionally - in the ice fields of the Arctic, a University of Huddersfield scientist will be on board.

Conditions will be austere, but Dr Byongjun (Phil) Hwang is a seasoned Arctic researcher who has already made 15 voyages to the region, observing, recording and analysing seasonal changes in the ice. The data he gathers makes an important contribution to the scientific debate over climate change.

Dr Hwang is a senior lecturer in physical geography whose Arctic expertise contributes to the curriculum of new geography degree courses at the University of Huddersfield.

He has learned that the UK Government-backed Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) has agreed to provide almost 300,000 in funding so that he can participate in the multi-national project known as MOSAiC - standing for 'Multidisciplinary drifting Observatory for the Study of Arctic Climate. The projects total cost will be over 100 million euros.

Arctic sea ice decline

The Arctic is the region where climate change is at its fastest, with sea ice in rapid decline. There is an urgent need for new, improved methods of modelling and predicting these changes, which have an impact on weather patterns around the world.

The new overall project, which Dr Hwang will join, will be co-ordinated by Alfred-Wegener Institute. The plan is to allow the vessel Polarstern to be frozen into the Arctic in the winter of 2019 and then allow the ship to spend the next year drifting south with the ice for more than 700 miles, with teams of scientists on board.

The University of Huddersfield's Dr Hwang stresses that the Polarstern will not move under its own power. It will be carried by the ice for an average distance of about six miles a day, with the speed of the flow being more rapid in the summer.

The project takes its inspiration from an expedition of the 1890s, when the Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen attempted to reach the North Pole by allowing his vessel to be frozen into the ice.

Arctic survey

MOSAiC is the largest Arctic research expedition yet planned, and includes scientists from 16 nations, including Germany, Russia, USA, China, UK, Norway and Canada, and more than 60 institutions.

Now that his proposal to take part in MOSAiC has received NERC backing, Dr Hwang is beginning to make preparations. Setting out from a departure point in northern Europe or Russia, we will probably join Polarstern in July 2020 and remain on board for two months, having been "ferried" to the research vessel by an icebreaker, although helicopter travel might also be necessary.

He will take with him some specially-designed and constructed buoys equipped with GPS devices that are capable of tracking the movement of ice with extreme precision.

The goal of Dr Hwang and his co-investigator Dr Jinchang Ren, of the University of Strathclyde - an image processing specialist who will remain in the UK - is to investigate what is known as the marginal ice zone and the patterns which increasingly sees winter ice deforming and then breaking up in the spring and melting in the summer. It is believed that greater understanding of these seasonal ice floes can lead to better models for climate prediction.

It is important that he spends time on board the Polarstern, says Dr Hwang.

"We have satellite observation that can see what is happening alongside the ship. But if we want to measure how the individual ice is breaking up and melting, satellite cannot resolve that. In simple terms, we have to be there to go and measure it."

As a geophysicist and remote sensing expert, Korean-born Dr Hwang has developed a specialism in the dynamics and thermodynamics of snow and sea ice in polar regions. He has undertaken a large number of expeditions to the Arctic, including some tough mid-winter assignments.

Early in his career, he was based at Canadian Centre for Remote Sensing and this was followed by a decade with the Scottish Association for Marine Science, until his appointment at the University of Huddersfield. He will appoint one PhD researcher to help him work with his findings as part of the MOSAiC project.

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Traditional artisanal fishing has been harmed by EU fishing policies that favor big businesses and ignores other more sustainable approaches to conserving fish stocks, according to new research from the University of Kent

EU Fisheries Policy failures jeopardise sustainability of small scale fishing communities

Traditional artisanal fishing has been harmed by EU fishing policies that favour big businesses and ignores other more sustainable approaches to conserving fish stocks, according to new research from the University of Kent.

This is the main finding of research by Dr Alicia Said, Professor Douglas MacMillan, and Dr Joseph Tzanopoulos of the School of Anthropology and Conservation (SAC) published in the world-leading open-access journal Frontiers in Marine Sciences.

To uncover the impact these actions have on local fishing fleets the researchers conducted in-depth interviews with fishing communities, fishers, and policy people, combined with detailed economic and policy analysis. The report found that traditional fishermen were being driven from the sea by specific policies that favour larger boats and richer owners.

Furthermore, inadequate safeguards around informal recreational fishing meant that the pressures on vulnerable fish stocks such as scorpionfish, red seabream, mullets, and other prestigious fisheries has actually intensified.

The study examined the highly controversial and complex subject of 'blue-grabbing' - the legitimate use of appropriating marine resources from traditional users, through policies and governance systems that favour large-scale fisheries, and other activities such as marine conservation for ecotourism.

Professor MacMillan says that EU policy focuses too much on fish stock conservation and has no meaningful policy regulations to ensure that quotas for over-fished stock such as tuna are equitably shared amongst fishermen. He said: 'This allows individual nations to implement their own policies, which more often than not are captured by local elites to enhance their wealth and power through, for example, capturing all the quota. Furthermore, additional conservation measures such as no fishing zones are crude and tend to curtail all fishing activity over large segments of coastal waters, regardless of whether the fishing undertaken there is sustainable or not.'

Dr Said, who is from a traditional Maltese fishing community, said: 'In Malta, the small traditional fishermen have essentially been pushed out of the water and their livelihood by government and EU policies that were actually intended to conserve fish stocks. At the end of the day the small guy ends up with nothing but a meagre retirement package, fishing communities fall into a spiral of decay, and profits for the large boat owners soar as they can capture all the quota and use cheap, often illegal labour to catch the fish.'

Working closely with the local fishing community, the research, has been discussed among key government officers, reaching as high as the Prime Minister of Malta and a major reallocation of quotas for tuna and other commercially important species to the traditional fishing fleet has been promised.

In the forthcoming days, the research will be presented to the Ministers of the Mediterranean who will meet in Malta for a High-level Ministerial Conference on 25th and 26th September to discuss the issues of small-scale fisheries sustainability, and one hopes that this article will bring positive change in the governance of fisheries in the Mediterranean region.

The contested commons: The failure of EU fisheries policy and governance in the Mediterranean and the crisis enveloping the small-scale fisheries of Malta by Alicia Said, Douglas MacMillan, Joseph Tzanopoulos, is published in Frontiers in Marine Science, section Marine Fisheries, Aquaculture and Living Resources.

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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 Notes for editors

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.
The building blocks of matter in our universe were formed in the first 10 microseconds of its existence, according to the currently accepted scientific picture. After the Big Bang about 13.7 billion years ago, matter consisted mainly of quarks and gluons, two types of elementary particles whose interactions are governed by quantum chromodynamics (QCD), the theory of strong interaction. In the early universe, these particles moved (nearly) freely in a quark-gluon plasma. Then, in a phase transition, they combined and formed hadrons, among them the building blocks of atomic nuclei, protons and neutrons. In the current issue of the science journal Nature, an international team of scientists presents an analysis of a series of experiments at major particle accelerators which sheds light on the nature of this transition. The scientists determined with precision the transition temperature and obtained new insights into the mechanism of cooling and freeze-out of the quark-gluon plasma into the current constituents of matter such as protons, neutrons, and atomic nuclei. The team of researchers consists of scientists from the GSI Helmholtzzentrum fur Schwerionenforschung in Darmstadt, and from the universities of Heidelberg and Munster (Germany), and Wroclaw (Poland).

Analysis of experimental results confirm the predicted value of the transition temperature / Onehundred and twenty thousend times hotter than the interior of the sun

A central result: The experiments at world-wide highest energy with the ALICE detector at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the research center CERN produce matter where particles and anti-particles coexist, with very high accuracy, in equal amounts, similar to the conditions in the early universe. The team confirms, with analysis of the experimental data, theoretical predictions that the phase transition between quark-gluon plasma and hadronic matter takes place at the temperature of 156 MeV. This temperature is 120,000 times higher than that in the interior of the sun.

"Snowballs in hell"

The physicists analyzed more precisely the yields of a number of particles and anti-particles. "Our investigations revealed a number of surprizing discoveries. One of them is that light nuclei and their anti-particles are produced at the same temperature as protons and anti-protons, although their binding energies are about 100 times smaller than the energy corresponding to the transition temperature", explains Prof. Dr. Anton Andronic who recently joined the University of Munster from the GSI Helmholtzzentrum fur Schwerionenforschung. The scientists presume that such "loosely bound objects" are formed at high temperature first as compact multi-quark objects which only later develop into the observed light nuclei and anti-nuclei. The existence of such multi-quark states was proposed a long time ago but no convincing evidence was found.

"Confinement": Charm quarks travel freely in the fireball

Another remarkable observation concerns a phenomenon long known but poorly understood: Normally, quarks are confined into the interior of protons and neutrons; isolated quarks have never been observed, a property which scientists describe as "confinement". In the interior of the fireball formed in nuclear collisions at high energy this confinement is lifted (deconfinement). The new study shows that charmonium states such as J/psi mesons, consisting of a pair of charm and anti-charm quarks, are produced far more often at LHC energies compared to observations at lower energies, such as at the "Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider" in the USA. Because of the higher energy density at LHC the opposite, namely a reduction of J/psi mesons through dissociation was expected. In contradistinction, enhancement was predicted 18 years ago by two of the team members (Prof. Dr. Peter Braun-Munzinger, GSI, and Prof. Dr. Johanna Stachel, Universitat Heidelberg) because of deconfinement of the charm quarks. The consequences of the prediction were worked out in detail in a series of publications by the whole team. The now observed enhanced production of J/psi particles confirms the prediction: J/psi mesons can only be produced in the observed large quantities if their constituents, the charm- and anticharm quarks, can travel freely in the fireball over distances of a trillionth of a centimeter - corresponding to about ten times the size of a proton. "These observations are a first step towards understanding the phenomenon of confinement in more detail", underlines Prof. Dr. Krzysztof Redlich of the University of Wroclaw (Poland).

Experiments at CERN and at Brookhaven National Laboratory

The data were obtained during several years of investigations in the framework of the experiment "ALICE" at the Large Hadron Collider accelerator at the research center CERN near Geneva. In "ALICE", scientists from 41 countries investigated in collisions between two lead nuclei the state of the universe within microseconds after the Big Bang. The highest ever man-made energy densities are produced in such collisions. These result in the formation of matter (quarks and gluons) as it existed at that time in the early universe. In each head-on collision more than 30,000 particles (hadrons) are produced which are then detected in the ALICE experiment. The actual study also used data from experiments at lower energy accelerators, the "Super Proton Synchrotron" at CERN and the "Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider" at the US-Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island, New York.

This is a conjoint press release by the GSI Helmholtzzentrum fur Schwerionenforschung in Darmstadt, and by the universities of Heidelberg and Munster (Germany).

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Scientists have challenged the theory of "love at first sight" after discovering that they can boost the reproductive success of zebrafish by pairing them by personality, rather than appearance.

Experts at the University of Stirling, collaborating with the Autonomous University of Barcelona, conducted the first study into the impact of animal personality and external coloration patterns on the reproductive success of a fish.

The team - led by Dr Sonia Rey Planellas, from the welfare and behaviour research group of Stirling's Institute of Aquaculture - then assessed how these factors influence the fitness of the species as a whole.

"There is a lot of research on the impact of coloration patterns on sexual selection and reproductive success - and animals tend to choose mates that look better and have more defined coloration patterns, or those that look similar to them," Dr Rey Planellas explained. "Other studies link animal behaviour traits, or personality, with assortative mating and the fitness of the species."

"Our research explored both areas - coloration patterns and personality traits - to see if they were linked in some way and how they impacted the fitness of the species." Dr Rey Planellas worked with Professor Simon MacKenzie, Director of Research at the Institute of Aquaculture, and the study formed part of the thesis - on zebrafish personality and phenotypic variability - by PhD student Reynaldo Vargas, now working at the University of Panama.

The team selected fish - males and females - on both their personality and coloration patterns and crossed both parameters, creating four combinations: proactive, or bold, fish with clear defined coloration; proactive fish with undefined and unclear coloration; reactive, or shy, fish with clear defined coloration; and reactive fish with undefined and unclear coloration.

From the successful crossings, the scientists counted a number of reproductive parameters: the number of eggs, survival of the eggs, embryos, and growth and survival of the larvae up to juvenile stages among others.

Dr Rey Planellas said: "For all of the parameters of fertility and fitness of the species, proactive animals were the best, regardless of their external coloration pattern. However, both parameters were additive meaning that proactive fish with defined coloration patterns always achieved the best scores. This is also a very interesting result.

"Behaviour of the males during female guarding was also different, with proactive animals being more aggressive and protective of the females, compared to the reactive fish." She added: "Our research concluded that personality plays an important role that surpasses the effect of external appearance in the reproductive success under this conditions, and therefore, in the fitness of the species.

"This is important in understanding the evolutive drivers for the ecology and conservation of fish, and for the industry to select specific phenotypes that will perform better. It may also inform how we select fish for aquaculture, and the potential impact upon conservation."

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The study, 'Love at first sight': the effect of personality and colouration patterns in the reproductive success of zebrafish (Danio rerio), is published in PLOS One. It was funded by the Ministry of Science and Education in Spain under the Consolider-Ingenio Programme 2010's Aquagenomics project and the Government of Panama through a PhD grant to Dr Vargas.
Four UT graduate students have received Science Graduate Student Research (SCGSR) awards. This is the highest number of SCGSR awardees UT has had in one year.

SCGSR, a program of the US Department of Energy's Office of Science, grants supplemental awards to graduate students in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields who demonstrate potential for advancing scholarship and innovation in areas critical to the Office of Science's mission. The goal of the program is to better prepare students for scientific and technical careers.

Since its inception in 2014, the SCGSR program has provided support to more than 370 graduate awardees from more than 120 different universities to conduct thesis research at 18 DOE national laboratories and facilities across the nation. Seventeen of those awards have gone to UT students, making the university a national leader in terms of number of SCGSR awards received.

The award consists of travel expenses to and from the student's assigned national laboratory and a monthly stipend of up to $3,000 to assist in their graduate thesis research alongside one of the laboratory scientists.

The UT students offered awards are:

Joshua Barrow, of Chattanooga, Tennessee, a fourth-year physics doctoral candidate. He will go to Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois to study fundamental particle physics and nucleon instability as it applies to the imbalance of matter and antimatter in the universe. "I greatly appreciate the DOE's support of my own independent endeavors," he said. "It is reassuring to me that my current and future work is recognized as both interesting and worthwhile to our community's fundamental physics goals." Such work, he said, could answer some basic questions about the nature of the universe. Last year, Barrow won a fellowship to model nuclear reactors through the Computational Physics Student Summer Workshop at Los Alamos National Laboratory. He also participates in light dark matter searches at the High Flux Isotope Reactor at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) and studies short-range nucleon correlations in Experimental Hall C at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility.

Bernadette Cladek, of Flemington, New Jersey, a doctoral candidate in materials science and engineering and a 2018 Chancellor's Fellow. While at ORNL, Cladek will seek to help develop methods to analyze complex neutron diffraction. "The integration of advanced computational modeling and data analysis is fundamental to extracting the best quantitative information from neutron experiments," she said.

Philip Dee, of Cleveland, Ohio, a doctoral candidate in theoretical condensed matter physics. He will work with Thomas Maier, senior research staff in the computational materials science group at ORNL. Their work is aimed at gaining a better understanding of layered material systems, which he hopes will help advance the understanding of these systems while fostering new collaborative opportunities in his field. "Our approach will build on previous theoretical approaches by reintroducing previously neglected details which are important for studying interesting phases such as superconductivity," he said. Dee was awarded the 2016 James E. Parks Award and 2017 Outstanding Graduate Teaching Award by UT's Department of Physics and Astronomy.

Andrew Lopez, of Mount Sterling, Kentucky, a doctoral candidate in nuclear physics. While at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), he will run a variety of physics simulations as part of an ongoing project at ORNL to search for neutrinoless double-beta decay, a phenomenon that could change our understanding about how the universe evolved. "It is an honor to be selected for this award. I'm excited to work with the LANL group, a team that I greatly respect," he said. "I hope to further develop the analysis, programming, and teamwork skills I will need to complete my thesis work and to pursue my career after graduation." He was recognized with the Extraordinary Professional Promise award at the 2018 Chancellor's Honors Banquet.

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Graduate students interested in applying to the SCGRS program may do so at the Office of Science website. Applications are due by 5 p.m. November 18.

See the complete list of 2018 SCGSR awardees.
Less than one percent of the global population controls more than 50 percent of wealth. All over the world these wealthy investors have an increasing interest in investing their wealth sustainably, in accordance with socially responsible, environmentally friendly and ethical principles. This flow of capital could be a decisive factor in ensuring sustainable development. Many banks are aware of this growing segment of clients and have developed corresponding investment strategies. But how helpful are the sustainable products and services of the individual banks really? And how well are clients informed about these investment opportunities?

Analysis of mission statements, portfolios and services

Two researchers of the Center for Sustainable Finance and Private Wealth of the University of Zurich have now addressed these questions. In their report, Taeun Kwon and Falko Paetzold analyzed the sustainable offerings aimed at wealthy clients of 15 European banks - from French BNP Paribas and Dutch Triodos Bank to UBS, Credit Suisse, Zurcher Kantonalbank and Edmond de Rothschild private bank. Their analysis focused on the banks' mission statements, their range of offers as well as associated services.

"Good sustainable investing offerings exist in the market. However, the difference between banks is large and the number of sustainable products offered can be as low as five, or as high as 108," explains Taeun Kwon, first author of the study and head of the private banking program. "Some banks are in the process of integrating sustainability into all of their investment options, while others offer complementary sustainable products. However, those offers that are really interesting to investors and that are strategically thought through and have a significant positive effect are still few and far between." In the study, Globalance Bank from Switzerland and Triodos Bank from the Netherlands, both of which specialize in sustainability, achieved the best marks. Other banks in the study, including UBS and Credit Suisse, roughly correspond to the industry average, with individual strengths and weaknesses.

Limited influence

However, the banks' products fall short where there might be the largest interest and impact for investors. "Many banks buy shares and funds for their clients and hope for the price to go up and integrate sustainability aspects into the relevant products. But very few actively engage with their investees and achieve meaningful impact," says Falko Paetzold, founder and managing director of the Center for Sustainable Finance and Private Wealth. According to the study, only half of the banks offer voting services on shares, which under certain circumstances would enable investors to shape the business policy of the investees with regard to sustainability. While this is possible for private investors explicitly looking to actively engage with companies on issues of sustainability, this option is still largely unavailable for most products, according to the authors of the study.

Relationship managers often lack training

Private investors in particular are often interested in sustainability topics, but have to rely on relationship managers when it comes to investing their wealth. And here the study has identified a key issue: "We often hear that wealthy clients leave their bank because their relationship managers say the bank does not have a sustainable investing offering, although we know that the bank does have such products," says Taeun Kwon.

According to the report, only one in two banks include sustainable investing as part of their mandatory training for relationship managers. And even where sustainable investing is covered in the training, it is limited to two to four hours. "Relationship managers need more training to feel comfortable about leading a professional conversation on the topic," concludes Kwon. Relationship managers also need more organizational support from their bank. When it comes to services, Lombard Odier and Pictet in particular achieved good results, along with the two specialized banks. However, all of the banks participating in the study are aware of the fact that they need to better train their relationship managers about their sustainable product offerings.

Guidance for private investors and banks

The Sustainable Investing Capabilities of Private Banks report of the Center for Sustainable Finance and Private Wealth (CSP) of the University of Zurich offers guidance for both private investors and private banks interested in sustainable investing. It includes leading private banks such as UBS and Credit Suisse and provides a representative overview of the sustainable investing offering in private banking in Europe. The individual bank profiles are of particular interest to private investors who want to review their own banks or other potential banks. For private banks, the report offers an overview of their own capabilities and those of other players, and case studies of good practices.

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The report Sustainable Investing Capabilities of Private Banks - Report #2: Assessment of 15 European Private Banks is available at http://www.csp.uzh.ch.
Walter and Eliza Hall Institute researchers have made a surprise discovery about how subtle changes in the way cell survival is regulated during embryonic development can have drastic health implications.

The study, published today in the journal Cell Reports, suggests that it is important to strike a healthy balance between too little cell death, which can cause cancer, and too much cell death, which can lead to developmental abnormalities.

The research was led by Dr Stephanie Grabow, Dr Andrew Kueh, Dr Francine Ke, Professor Andreas Strasser and Associate Professor Anne Voss and performed in collaboration with researchers at Monash University and the United States-based biotechnology company Genentech.

At a glance

Researchers have found there is a fine balance between cell survival and cell death during development.

Subtle changes in the proteins that regulate cell death can cause severe defects in face and brain development.

The finding was a surprise outcome of cancer research and led to an exciting collaboration between cancer researchers and developmental biologists.

A perfect dose of cell death

Programmed cell death, also known as apoptosis, is a process that removes unwanted cells from the body. Apoptosis is crucial for normal development, for example removing the webbing between our fingers.

In this new study, researchers discovered that subtle changes in the regulation of apoptosis can have drastic consequences on development, particularly of the face and brain.

"There is a remarkably tight balance between the 'pro-survival' and 'pro-death' proteins that regulate cell death during development," Dr Kueh said. "We found that reducing certain regulators by only 50 per cent, which is relatively subtle for these types of experiments, can cause craniofacial abnormalities such as eye and palate defects."

Dr Kueh said altered levels of apoptotic regulators could be due to differences in the genes themselves, but could possibly also be affected by environmental factors such as nutritional deficiencies or infections.

Striking a healthy balance

Associate Professor Voss said the fine balance between apoptotic regulators may have evolved as a protection against cancer.

"The tight balance we see between apoptotic regulators - with only just enough of the pro-survival proteins to keep cells alive - makes it relatively easy to trigger cell death when cells are damaged or no longer needed.

"The 'clearing out' of damaged cells helps to safeguard tissues against cancer formation. This is important as cells that grow rapidly - such as those present during development - are intrinsically at risk of becoming cancerous.

"However, if the amount of pro-survival proteins dips too low during development, there may not be enough cells produced for structures such as the face and brain to form properly, resulting in devastating birth defects," Associate Professor Voss said.

Collaboration accelerates research

Professor Strasser said the findings exemplified the powerful collaborative nature of research at the Institute.

"Our discovery of the fine balance between apoptotic regulators during development was a complete surprise.

"We were actually studying the role of two pro-survival proteins, called MCL-1 and BCL-XL, in blood cancer, not embryonic development, so it was a total shock when we halved the amount of both proteins and saw dramatic developmental abnormalities," he said.

"I immediately contacted my colleague and developmental biology expert Associate Professor Voss to examine precisely what was going wrong.

"This research is a perfect example of how collaboration accelerates research discoveries," Professor Strasser said.

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The research was supported by Cancer Council of Victoria, Lady Tata Memorial Trust, Leukaemia Foundation Australia, Australian Research Council, National Health and Medical Research Council, Leukemia and Lymphoma Society of America, University of Melbourne, Cancer Therapeutics CRC, Australian Government and the Victorian State Government.
September 19, 2018 - Implementing an electronic medical records (EMR) system at an orthopaedic clinic may have unanticipated effects on clinic efficiency and productivity - including a temporary increase in labor costs and a lasting reduction in time spent interacting with patients, reports a study in September 19, 2018 issue of The Journal of Bone & Joint Surgery. The journal is published in the Lippincott portfolio in partnership with Wolters Kluwer.

Even after an initial learning period, introducing a new EMR system may affect several aspects of clinic workflow, according to the paper by Daniel J. Scott, MD, MBA, of Duke University, Durham, N.C., and colleagues. They write, "Healthcare systems and policymakers should be aware that the length of the implementation period is approximately six months and that implementation may alter the time that providers spend with patients."

Introducing EMRs Could Have 'Negative Trade-Off' for Patient Care

The researchers used time-driven activity-based costing methods to evaluate how a new EMR system affected costs and productivity at two outpatient orthopaedic arthroplasty (joint replacement) clinics. The analysis included detailed observations of 143 patient visits before implementation of the EMR system, and again at two months, six months, and two years after implementation.

At two months after EMR implementation, total labor costs had increased significantly, from $36.88 to $46.04 per patient visit. The cost increase was related to increases in the time that attending surgeons spent per patient, from 9.38 to 10.97 minutes, and in the time that certified medical assistants spent on patient assessment, from 3.4 to 9.1 minutes. For surgeons and medical assistants combined, the time spent documenting patient encounters more than doubled: from 3.3 to 7.6 minutes.

By six months after implementation of the EMR system, total labor costs were similar to costs in the pre-implementation period. From six months to two years, labor costs remained stable. Average weekly patient volume decreased for one of the surgeons studied, but remained stable for the other surgeon.

However, the increases in time spent on documentation persisted, even after the initial learning period. This was accompanied by a significant reduction in time spent interacting with patients, from 14.65 to 10.03 minutes.

Electronic medical records systems are rapidly being adopted throughout the US healthcare system, in part due to increased regulation. "EMR implementation can be costly and typically requires workflow redesign," Dr. Scott and coauthors write. The study is the first to assess the impact of EMR systems in orthopaedic practice.

"This could suggest that providers ultimately were able to spend less time with patients as documentation requirements increased," Dr. Scott and coauthors write. "If so, this could represent a negative trade-off for patient care and leave patients less satisfied, a trend worthy of further study."

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Click here to read "The Impact of Electronic Medical Record Implementation on Labor Cost and Productivity at an Outpatient Orthopaedic Clinic"

DOI: 10.2106/JBJS.17.01339

About The Journal of Bone & Joint Surgery The Journal of Bone & Joint Surgery (JBJS) has been the most valued source of information for orthopaedic surgeons and researchers for over 125 years and is the gold standard in peer-reviewed scientific information in the field. A core journal and essential reading for general as well as specialist orthopaedic surgeons worldwide, The Journal publishes evidence-based research to enhance the quality of care for orthopaedic patients. Standards of excellence and high quality are maintained in everything we do, from the science of the content published to the customer service we provide. JBJS is an independent, non-profit journal.

About Wolters Kluwer

Wolters Kluwer is a global leader in professional information, software solutions, and services for the health, tax & accounting, finance, risk & compliance, and legal sectors. We help our customers make critical decisions every day by providing expert solutions that combine deep domain knowledge with specialized technology and services.

Wolters Kluwer, headquartered in the Netherlands, reported 2017 annual revenues of 4.4 billion. The company serves customers in over 180 countries, maintains operations in over 40 countries, and employs approximately 19,000 people worldwide.

Wolters Kluwer Health is a leading global provider of trusted clinical technology and evidence-based solutions that engage clinicians, patients, researchers and students with advanced clinical decision support, learning and research and clinical intelligence. For more information about our solutions, visit http://healthclarity.wolterskluwer.com and follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter @WKHealth.
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

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[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.

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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.

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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.

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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.
Karan Bajaj has quit as Head of Discovery Communications India.

JB Perrette, President and CEO of Discovery Network International, sent an official mail to the India team saying, I want to let you know that Karan has decided to move on to pursue his own entrepreneurial ambitions. Karan has embodied many of our companys guiding principles...purposeful as he passionately lead a bold wing to create a new type of purpose driven GE channel in India with Jeet; a creative dreamer who believed we could invest in a great team, one who could take our small kids channel from the lowest rankings to being a top three kids network; consumer obsessed by launching new digital products that focus on making our brands and content more relevant to Indias exploding digital consumers.

"I want to thank Karan for his dedication and contributions to Discovery over the last two years and we wish him all the best as he embarks on his next chapter," further read the mail by Perrette.



Commenting on the replacement, Perrette wrote, "Karan has agreed to continue to stay in his current role and lead our India team and business until we select a replacement, so for the next few months it will be business as usual.

Bajaj joined Discovery India in 2016 as head of India and South Asia at Discovery Networks.

Read more news about (internet advertising India, internet advertising, advertising India, digital advertising India, media advertising India)
OYO Hotels has announced its foray into London, UK. This is its first market beyond Asia. The company plans to invest 40 million by looking to launch in 10 cities, including Manchester, Birmingham, Glasgow, and Edinburgh in the UK by 2020. Starting operations with four properties in London that offer more than 80 rooms, OYO plans to delight customers looking for quality living experiences at affordable prices, with a selection of over 5000+ rooms in the next 15 - 18 months. With this launch, OYO Hotels is all set to etch its international footprint, while reiterating its leadership in the South Asian countries. OYO was welcomed in the UK, at a special event, in the presence of chief guests, honorable Indian High Commissioner to the UK, YK Sinha and Craig Harrison, Director, Inward Investment at London & Partners.



The UK business will be led by British entrepreneur Jeremy Sanders, who co-founded the British restaurant chain, Coco di Mama. Over the next year, they will aim to build out the team by hiring an additional 100 OYOpreneurs (employees empowered to function like entrepreneurs) across the country.



Announcing the launch event in London, Sinha said, ''OYO has established itself as a strong and popular Indian brand in South Asia and I am happy to see the company making a commitment to invest in creating beautiful living spaces in the United Kingdom. I convey my best wishes to the OYO team for their future endeavours.''



Commenting on the development, Ritesh Agarwal, Founder & CEO  OYO, said: The UK has been the topmost international travel destination for several years and last year hosted over 19 million tourists from around the world. Driven by its booming domestic and international travel and budget hospitality needs, the UK presents a multi-billion dollar opportunity for OYO. We are thrilled to now be able to offer OYOs affordable, hassle-free and quality living experiences to guests across the UK. - and to be empowering the UK independent hoteliers with the technology and operational expertise that helps them focus on customer experience and thereby generate increased, sustainable incomes.



Jeremy Sanders, Head of OYO UK, said: I am very excited to be leading OYOs expansion into the UK, one of the most dynamic hospitality markets in the world. We want to become the trusted partner of independent hotels across the UK and, as weve experienced in Asia, we are confident that our bespoke technology and operational expertise brings real value to hotel owners and customers alike. There is so much potential here - I and the team cannot wait to get started.



At the time of entry, OYO will offer guests the OYO Townhouse experience - perfectly suited for the needs of millennial travelers, aspiring for high quality accommodations. These properties will be operated under models of manchise, lease with full - inventory control similar to other markets like India and China.

Read more news about (internet advertising India, internet advertising, advertising India, digital advertising India, media advertising India)
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Oil exports from the Texas Gulf Coast eclipsed imports for the first time earlier this year as growing U.S. oil production pours into foreign markets and the shale revolution continues to reshape the global energy industry.

The milestone, reached in April and expanded in May, is another reminder of how quickly the flood of oil from the Permian Basin in West Texas and other shale fields has shifted the balance of trade and the regions role in the world economy.

For decades, the Gulf Coast was a net importer of crude oil, pouring money into the accounts of foreign oil producers in the Middle East, Latin America and other regions.

Today, with U.S. exports recently hitting a record of 2 million barrels a day, nearly three of every four barrels  1.4 million a day  move through Texas Gulf Coast ports, the U.S. Energy Department reported Monday. In May, the most recent data available, the region exported nearly 500,000 more barrels of crude each day than it imported, bringing into the region billions of dollars that are driving new investment, creating jobs and helping power one of the nation's fastest-growing state economies.

Over the past year, both Texas and the Houston area have added jobs at twice the rate of the nation as a whole, according to the U.S. Labor Department.

Export Central Of the 2 million barrels a day of crude oil exported by the U.S. 1.4 million or 70 percent move through Texas Gulf ports. See More Collapse

The economy would not be as strong as it is if it werent for the fact that we were exporting crude now, said Patrick Jankowski, senior vice president of research at the Greater Houston Partnership, a business association. That gives us the opportunity to sell to a much bigger market, which means theres opportunity for us to drill more, to produce more. It also means were building more oil rigs, were building more equipment, were employing more people.

Related: New review shows oil and gas debt at lowest levels since late 2014

Crude exports grew slowly in the months after Congress lifted a 40-year ban  dating to the Arab oil embargo of the 1970s  at the end of 2015, when crude prices were plunging toward their bottom of $26 a barrel in early 2016. Over the past year, as both prices and production have increased, U.S. exports have accelerated, nearly doubling between May 2017 and May 2018, according to the Energy Department.

Exports have been crucial to the growth of U.S. production, which has surpassed Saudi Arabias and is closing in on that of the worlds leading producer, Russia, which pumps just over 11 million barrels a day. Analysts say that U.S. drilling would have expanded much more slowly without access to global markets because of limited domestic demand for the lighter grades of crude that come from shale formations.

Gulf Coast refineries, which account for more than 40 percent of the nations refining capacity, are primarily set up to process heavier grades of crude from the Middle East and Latin America. While some refiners are processing lighter grades from the Permian Basin and elsewhere, analysts said U.S. production exceeds their ability to consume domestic oil.

For producers to continue growing production, their only option is to push that crude out into the global market, said John Coleman, senior research analyst for North American crude markets at the energy consultancy Wood Mackenzie. If youre a U.S. shale producer, the story for you is an export story almost exclusively.

The Permian Basin accounts for nearly one-third of U.S. production and companies are investing billions of dollars in pipelines, storage and export terminals to move that oil from West Texas to overseas markets, such as Europe, where refiners are better set up to process U.S. crude, and Asia, where rapidly growing economies and middle classes are driving demand for gasoline. China, Italy and the United Kingdom are among the top markets for oil exported from the Texas Gulf Coast.

Related: West Texas' Permian losing luster as companies look elsewhere

The Energy Department credited the rising share of exports moving through the Texas Gulf Coast to those investments. For much of the past year, crude shipped through the Houston-Galveston port district  which stretches from Corpus Christi to Beaumont  accounted for slightly more than half of U.S. crude oil exports. In May, however, the share jumped to 70 percent.

Sean Strawbridge, chief executive of the Port of Corpus Christi, said oil exports through his port averaged about 500,000 barrels a day in 2017, and he expects that to quadruple to 2 million barrels a day by 2023. The port plans to invest hundreds of millions of dollars to dredge the ship channel. It also aims to build an export terminal on Harbor Island, just a few miles from the Gulf of Mexico, that could host some of the worlds largest oil tankers, called Very Large Crude Carriers, which can hold up to 2 million barrels of oil.

Two companies are proposing offshore export terminals to accommodate large tankers. In July, the Houston energy company Enterprise Products Partners said it would build a terminal in the Gulf of Mexico south of Galveston, a project that analysts estimated would cost $1 billion to $2 billion. In August, the global commodities trading firm Trafigura Group said it planned to build a similar project off the coast from Corpus Christi.

rdruzin@express-news.net | Twitter: @druz_journo
AUSTIN, Texas  Three years after a health scare that nearly spelled the end of the line for a beloved Texas brand, Blue Bell has rebounded  and is, in fact, growing and expanding.

The Austin American-Statesman reports the Brenham-based company, which got its start 111 years ago, shut down production for a time in 2015 and recalled 8 million gallons of ice cream after reports of listeria started coming in. In all, 10 people fell ill. Three died.

During the shutdown, the company deep-cleaned its three plants  in Brenham, Sylacauga, Alabama, and Broken Arrow, Oklahoma  replaced some equipment and reworked procedures to remedy investigators concerns. The state of Texas says it is pleased with the companys progress and, as of this year, has closed out an enforcement agreement it had with Blue Bell that had allowed operations to resume with expanded monitoring.

Were now regulating Blue Bell just as we would any other ice cream maker, said Chris Van Deusen, spokesman for the Texas Department of State Health Services. Blue Bell has certainly made strides to improve their manufacturing process and limit the chance that their products could make someone sick.

RELATIVE: Remove FDA precautions for Blue Bell

Health officials in Alabama and Oklahoma said last week that their states also were treating Blue Bell as they would any similar company.

Because Blue Bell abided by the terms of Texas enforcement agreement, it wound up only paying $175,000 of an $850,000 fine levied by the state. The remaining $675,000 was forgiven, according to a letter from Jonathan Huss, assistant commissioner in the Texas Department of State Health Services Consumer Protection Division, to Blue Bell President Ricky Dickson.

Van Deusen characterized issues found at Blue Bells Brenham plant in recent months as minor. An American-Statesman review of state inspection reports from the past three years found just a few concerns mentioned. Those included condensation dripping from the ceiling, cobwebs in a dry storage area, insects in a floor crack, ingredients being unboxed in close proximity to cleanup operations, ice buildup on doors and dusty air intakes.

Also, in one case from June, the state and Blue Bell received a report that a customer found two pieces of metal in a half-gallon of Southern Blackberry Cobbler ice cream. The metal, according to the report, appeared to be two halves of a decorative spoon collar  a type of spoon not used in Blue Bells facilities.

Blue Bell spokeswoman Jenny Van Dorf said the company has acted quickly whenever inspectors have pointed out possible problems.

RELATIVE: FDA findings show Blue Bell not at fault in cookie dough case

We are pleased with the steps that have been taken in our facilities and confident that we are producing safe products that our customers can enjoy, she said. Along with the enhancements we have made to our facilities and equipment, we have a robust cleaning and sanitation program and manufacturing processes that are designed to ensure that the products we produce are safe.

While the worst has passed, its possible that Blue Bell might not be done facing fallout from the listeria scare.

Some, including those who were sickened, sued the company. In Delaware, a judge ruled in July that a lawsuit claiming the companys board members didnt do enough to ensure its plants werent producing contaminated products could proceed, according to Bloomberg news service.

CBS News reported in 2015 that the U.S. Justice Department was looking into Blue Bell, however, the agency never publicly confirmed that. Three years later, Bill Marler, a Seattle-based lawyer who is an expert on foodborne illness and in 2016 helped settle a case related to the listeria outbreak, said Blue Bell could still face consequences.

Justice Department investigations can take years, Marler said, although the department has broad discretion on whether any criminal charges are filed.

RELATIVE: Houstonian settles federal lawsuit with Blue Bell over listeria outbreak

Marler said that while condensation, leaks and other small infractions happen at many refrigerated food plants, Blue Bells fractured brand cannot afford more of those issues.

If the inspectors are finding those kinds of violations and are noting them, the reason they are noting them is not to be clean freaks. Its because they know those are potential entry points for listeria, Marler said. If inspection after inspection is showing condensation time after time, then they didnt get the message.

Blue Bell continues to have a loyal following, but that could be threatened if the brand develops a reputation of not taking potential health risks seriously, Marler said.

But Blue Bell isnt dwelling on the past. Instead, its charging forward. The company, which dramatically shrank its footprint after the recall, is back in growth mode.

Van Dorf said 59 distribution centers are now up and running, serving customers in all or part of 22 states: Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, New Mexico, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia and Wyoming.

Blue Bell recently announced a new 14,000-square-foot distribution facility will open in Suffolk, Virginia, next year. A grant from the Suffolk Economic Development Authority helped seal the deal.

RELATIVE: Blue Bell gets a new leader

The plants in Brenham, Sylacauga and Broken Arrow are all running, Van Dorf said, with plans to expand each one in the coming months and years.

The Brenham facilities, in particular, are due for a boost. In May, the Brenham City Council agreed to submit a nomination on Blue Bells behalf to the governors office for possible Texas Enterprise Zone incentives.

Blue Bell said it intended to spend $40 million on its Brenham plant alone in the next five years, Bryan/College Station TV station KBTX reported.

There are significant expansion projects underway at all three production facilities, Van Dorf said. In Brenham, we are in the early stages of an expansion that will include new construction, facility improvements and equipment upgrades. These projects will allow us to add employees, bring new products to market and expand into more territories.

We believe our expansion projects show the commitment to the communities where our facilities are located, our employees and the quality of our operations.

In addition to expanding its facilities, Blue Bell has been steadily expanding its product lineup, which was trimmed back after the recall. Today, there are more than 50 flavors in grocery store freezers. The Fudge Bar, a longtime customer favorite, is one of the latest additions, making its return a couple months ago, Van Dorf said.

Blue Bell is big business in Brenham, and its recent and future growth are great news for the area, according to Page Michel, president and CEO of the Washington County Chamber of Commerce.

She said Blue Bells success affects every sector of the local economy. Currently, Van Dorf said, Blue Bell has about 720 employees in Brenham  approximately a quarter of its national workforce, which numbers 3,000.

When the ice cream maker temporarily shut down in 2015, it resulted in hundreds of layoffs that affected local industries such as manufacturing, retail and tourism. Blue Bells Brenham plant saw more than 200,000 tourists in the year prior to shutting down, Michel said. Then it went to zero.

Things have gotten better since then, Michel said.

Theres a sense of vibrancy and optimism again, she said. Because its a small town, and the company is more than a century old, it has a very personal impact.
With less than two weeks left to register to vote in the November elections, a group of San Antonio educators has been trying to boost turnout by engaging students and their families.

SA RISE, or San Antonio Rising in Solidarity for Equity, launched its Teach. Lead. Vote. campaign this month, holding get-out-the-vote efforts in schools in the San Antonio and Harlandale independent school districts and the IDEA Public Schools charter network, said Mary Hoekje, a co-leader of the campaign.

Volunteers were at Riverside Park Academy in SAISD on Tuesday, which was National Voter Registration Day. The deadline to register for the Nov. 6 election is Oct. 9.

Hoekje, an SAISD teacher, said the campaign, which launched in 2016, is about improving voter turnout and energizing students and their families to be more literate about our world.

Fewer than 20 percent of registered Texas voters cast ballots in the 2018 March gubernatorial primary elections, according to the Texas secretary of states office. Fifty-nine percent voted in the 2016 presidential election.

A record-low percentage of Bexar County registered voters, slightly less than 3.7 percent, cast ballots in the November 2017 election for a handful of local races.

Engaging students in politics, even before theyre able to vote, gives them the opportunity to exert power at a young age and mobilizes them as the next generation of leaders, Hoekje said. Its really important that they understand the power they have in voting.

The group has partnered with MOVE Texas, a progressive nonprofit, and YoungerWomens Task Force: San Antonio, to provide the training, which will also cover ways for people who arent eligible to vote to be involved.

Hoekje said SA RISE has worked in districts that the groups 100-plus members have connections to. She hopes to expand it to other parts of the city.

District 4 City Councilman Rey Saldana, a graduate of South San Antonio ISD, said he was full-throttle in support of the initiative. SA RISE held its campaign kickoff last week, at which Saldana and Mayor Ron Nirenberg both spoke, at South San Antonio High School.

I happen to have grown up in and represent a community that doesnt realize how much power they have, Saldana said.

The answer to that is pretty simple, he said: Throw out the playbook and focus on every potential voter instead of identifiable regular voters. When politicians hold events or knock on doors during campaigns, we actually systematically ignore communities and doors (of nonvoters) and then ask ourselves, I wonder why people dont come to vote?

Outgoing South San Superintendent Abelardo Saavedra also spoke, pointing to the Aug. 14 tax ratification election at his district as an example of low voter engagement.

Out of more than 22,000 registered voters in the school district, just 1,859, slightly more than 8 percent, cast ballots on the measure.

Texas law requires high schools to distribute voter registration applications to students and register those who respond, but schools vary in how they implement it. SA RISEs efforts are part of a long history of attempts to boost turnout and political awareness among students from groups based outside of schools.

The Bexar County GOP, for example, has worked with student groups at Alamo Heights, Reagan and Churchill high schools to register young voters. Its treasurer, Lillie Gough, said the party currently has no such arrangement with any high school organizations but hopes to engage in that again.

Involving students in the campaign has proved challenging so far, Hoekje said. The goal extends beyond registration, to actually ensuring that people show up at the polls, she said.

Saldana quoted a bumper sticker he saw recently explaining why increasing turnout matters: Bad politicians are elected by good people who dont vote.

LTeitz@express-news.net | @LizTeitz
Lola Sanchez, 16, didnt fully appreciate how much her years at the Young Womens Leadership Academy had helped her until she began tutoring a sixth-grader from another school.

Sanchez, an 11th-grader at the girls-only school near Woodlawn Lake for grades six through 12, put together a quiz to test her pupils basic multiplication and division skills. The younger girls smile vanished as she stared at the paper, then explained that math confused her but she never felt comfortable asking questions in class.

She was disappointed in herself, Sanchez said. No one, throughout her education, told her that she could do it.

She spoke at a news conference Wednesday at the library of Page Middle School, where next August the San Antonio Independent School District will open Bexar Countys first all-girls public elementary school.

RELATED: SAISD. city clash over abandoned century-old elementary school building

No young girl will ever feel left behind at the new school, Sanchez said. Instead they will have a family, a sisterhood, a community of older sisters to help guide the way and teachers to give them the necessary tools to succeed.

The district wants to build on the success of the YWLA, and create a pipeline to the well-regarded academy, a 2015 National Blue Ribbon School that received a score of 98 out of 100 under the states new rating system. It has a 100 percent graduation rate and students generally score above the national average on the SAT, SAISD Superintendent Pedro Martinez said. Most go on to attend top universities, he said.

Proponents of single-gender public schools, which are regaining popularity nationwide, say boys and girls learn differently. Keeping genders separated removes social pressures that interfere with learning, they say.

Critics dismiss the claims of learning differences as junk science and say such schools do not adequately prepare students for an integrated world  but enough local families are interested in them to spawn wait lists at both the decade-old YWLA and the newer Young Mens Leadership Academy on the East Side.

The state gave the boys school, which teaches grades four through high school, an 81 percent grade this year and a distinction for academic achievement in science.

RELATED: SAISD predicts improved state rating, but one elementary school will close in a year

The district, meanwhile, has been phasing out Page and other underperforming middle schools and grappling with wait lists for the lowest grades at its new, innovative schools of choice, including the Twain Dual Language and Steele Montessori academies.

Single-gender public schools waned in popularity after Title IX, enacted in 1972, banned gender discrimination in federally funded education. Under the law, public school districts that run single-gender campuses must offer comparable programs to both genders. Although no one keeps national statistics on it, experts say such schools have made a comeback in recent years, especially as a model for low-income students who need extra support.

YWLA Primary at Page, as the school will be called, will be the eighth campus, and the only elementary, in the statewide Young Womens Preparatory Network, said Berta Fogerson, the networks chief academic and accountability officer. At least one other all-girls public elementary school has opened in Texas, in Dallas ISD.

I think its a great opportunity for our students to experience a single-gender school in a foundational capacity, Fogerson said.

YWLA Primary will open next year to kindergarten and first grades. It will also focus on STEAM  or science, technology, engineering, arts and math  as well as social-emotional learning and college preparation. It will benefit from a districtwide fine arts expansion, offering chorus, strings and dance electives, said YWLA Principal Delia McLerran, who will oversee both schools, with an associate principal at each.

RELATED: New SAISD work schedule better for students

Classes will be rigorous and all girls will be expected to achieve at or above their grade levels, she said.

Our vision is for a strong next generation of female leaders  women of character, women of integrity and women of action, McLerran said. Our team commits to preparing our young girls starting as early as kinder, educating the whole child, the curious mind and the compassionate heart.

The Texas Education Agency has given SAISD a $1.5 million grant to fund planning and technology for the new school, Martinez said. A planning team will visit top schools with the same focus as YWLA Primary to learn what is working across the country, McLerran said. We know that every school is not going to fit every family.

The Young Womens Preparatory Network includes schools in Lubbock, Dallas, Fort Worth, Grand Prairie, Austin and Houston. SAISDs chief innovation officer, Mohammed Choudhury, said the planning team will also visit Solar Preparatory School for Girls, the Dallas ISD school for kindergarten through eighth grade.

At YWLAs upper school, teachers and administrators work long hours to prepare girls for college, opening the school on weekends and over the summer if necessary. The curriculum emphasizes science, technology, math  and, as the schools name suggests, leadership. There is also a health and wellness component, which manifests itself in the foyer between classes as girls snack from a bowl of fruit.

Connor Caldwell, 17, has been at YWLA since the sixth grade and will graduate in the spring. She said the school offers challenging courses and visits to colleges all over the country.

Learning positive habits at an earlier age, such as how to be a leader, how to be a sister and how to be a champion will undoubtedly create even greater successes for San Antonio, Caldwell said at the news conference. It is wonderful to see a group of strong women working together to effect such positive change.

RELATED: School leaders to city: stop helping charters expand

Many YWLA graduates pursue engineering and technological careers in which women are generally underrepresented, Martinez said. Administrators tried to choose between a math and science or a fine arts focus for the new girls elementary school and ended up picking both.

The success of YWLAs upper school shows whats possible for an all-girls elementary campus, Martinez said.

Its going to be a strong academic program based on best practices and research, he said.

Andrea Pitts, former assistant principal at SAISDs Martin Luther King Academy, will run YWLA Primary as associate principal, while Regina Arzamendi, who has been an assistant principal at YWLA for the past three years, will oversee the upper school.

The elementary school will have a minimum of two classes per grade next year, but that could expand based on interest, administrators said, noting the Page campus is larger than most elementary schools. YWLA Primary will add a new grade each year, topping out at fifth.

Students will be accepted by lottery, without academic prerequisites. SAISD hopes to offer priority admissions to East and South Side neighborhoods that have fed into Page, then to students within school district boundaries, while setting aside seats for Bexar County students from outside SAISD, Choudhury said.

We always want to promote socioeconomic diversity because those are optimal learning environments, but this community has first preference, Choudhury said.

Students at the YWLA elementary school will not be granted automatic admission to the secondary school, but they will be better prepared should they get in, Martinez said.

Applications for YWLA Primary will be accepted from Nov. 26 to Feb. 8. The district will hold several information sessions at Page beginning next month. For details visit www.saisd.net/ywlaprimary

Alia Malik covers several school districts and the Alamo Colleges District in the San Antonio and Bexar County area. Read her on our free site, mySA.com, and on our subscriber site, ExpressNews.com. | amalik@express-news.net | Twitter: @AliaAtSAEN
By Azernews





By Laman Ismayilova

A press conference dedicated to the first ever festival Fantazia has been held in Baku.

The festival will take place in Azerbaijan's capital on November 1-10 as part of the Year of Cultural Heritage in Europe.

The head of the EU Delegation to Azerbaijan, Ambassador Kestudis Jankauskas, the first adviser to the EU representation in Azerbaijan Denis Danilidis, the heads of the diplomatic missions in Azerbaijan Aurelia Buschez (France), Onno Kervers (Netherlands), Marek Janusz Tsalka (Poland), Victor Shederkenyi (Hungary) , Andrea Syuhl (Germany), Rodrigo Labardini (Mexico), the head of the Office of the State Historical and Architectural Reserve "Icherisheher" Riad Gasimov, the head of the Department of International Relations of the State Agency ARISING Tourism Jamil Talibzade, director of Azerbaijan Carpet Museum Shirin Melikova, artist Sabina Shikhlinskaya and others attended the press conference.

A video of the festival was presented at the event. The speakers noted that various concert programs, seminars, excursions, film screenings, exhibitions and a number of other events will be organized within the framework of the festival.

It was stressed that Azerbaijan is one of the important partners of the European Union and the state pays special attention to the preservation and propaganda of the national, historical and cultural heritage.

The festival received its name from the architectural landmark of Baku - the Fantazia bathhouse, which was built at the end of the 19th century, and it closely intertwined Eastern and European traditions.

2018 is declared the Year of Cultural Heritage in Europe. The slogan for the year is: "Our heritage: where the past meets the future".

During this year, projects are underway in Europe devoted to a diverse cultural heritage, both at the level of the European Union and at the national, regional and local levels. The aim of the European Year of Cultural Heritage is to encourage more people to discover and engage with Europe's cultural heritage, and to reinforce a sense of belonging to a common European space.

The cultural heritage forms our identity and determines the course of our daily life, according to the speakers.

We can see it in big cities, small towns of Europe, natural landscapes and archaeological sites. It also manifests itself in literary works, art, folk crafts, passed down from generation to generation. This legacy comes to life in our stories told to the children; in food, which we share with friends, and in films in which we learn ourselves.

It is important to preserve the cultural heritage and pass it on to future generations. We are used to treating the cultural heritage as something static, something related only to the past. In fact, the cultural heritage is developed through our interaction with it. It is also important to understand that our heritage plays a significant role in building the future of Europe.

The festival is held by the European Union Delegation in Azerbaijan in cooperation with the Embassies of Germany, France, Greece, Poland, Croatia, the Netherlands and Hungary, with the participation of the diplomatic missions of Mexico, Moldova and Morocco and the support of United Cultures.

The official partners of the festival are the State Tourism Agency, Administration of the State Historical-Architectural Reservation Icheri Sheher, Azerbaijan Carpet Museum, Maksud Ibrahimbeyov Creative Centre, Yarat Contemporary Art Center, Ca Foscari University of Venice, ADA University, Azerbaijan National University of Culture and Arts, The Landmark Hotel and Baku Business Center.

Media partners of the event are Azernews.az, Trend.az, Day.az, Milli.az.








Provided by St. Mary's University /

St. Marys University will celebrate San Antonio history with a lecture and a display of 19th-century paintings of the citys Spanish colonial missions.

Gerald E. Poyo, a history professor, will give the annual OConnor Lecture at 7 p.m. Tuesday in the University Center, Conference Room A, to discuss the citys origins, early history, Hispanic legacy and the development of mission, military and civilian communities along the San Antonio River, a university news release states.
Deputy constables arrested two more juveniles Wednesday they say are linked to a string of attacks in the Westbury neighborhood, Harris County authorities said.

The two were among seven juveniles officials with Harris County Precinct 5 say are are responsible for at least nine attacks in the southwest Houston neighborhood. Authorities also believe they could be connected to at least 26 reported aggravated robberies, carjackings and thefts since May in and near Westbury.
Getty Images

Only about one in three Texans line up at the polls during midterm elections, a new study on voter turnout in America finds.

In a Washington Post story examining how easy it is to vote in America, Texas came in dead last for voting in midterms.
Standing before a room full of officers at the San Antonio Police Training Academy, Charles Thibodeaux held up a small, white nasal spray dispenser.

Administering that form of Naloxone  the drug that rapidly reverses the effects of an opioid overdose  is not difficult, he explained. Place a thumb on the bottom of the spray piece. Position it in the nostril of the person in distress. Pump out the dose. Life saved.

Who needs to have this? Really, everybody, Thibodeaux said. Its the simplest to use.

Thibodeaux, with the Texas Overdose Naloxone Initiative, led the training session Tuesday for law enforcement officers, one of the strategies to grow out of the local opioid overdose prevention task force.

The toll from opioid overdoses in Bexar County, while not at the crisis levels reached in other parts of the country, caused 108 deaths in 2015, which computes to the third-highest rate in Texas. San Antonio has the highest rate in the state of babies born addicted to drugs.

To reduce those numbers, Mayor Ron Nirenberg and Bexar County Judge Nelson Wolff organized the task force in 2017, bringing together representatives from the city, county, health care providers, social service organizations and law enforcement agencies.

Since then, substantive steps have been taken to combat opioid abuse, according to a briefing for the City Council on Wednesday. The task force has secured a collective $11 million in grants, some for the Naloxone training. More than 32,000 doses of the nasal spray have been distributed to first responders, law enforcement agencies and the public, according to the UT Health San Antonio School of Nursing.

On ExpressNews.com: Federal grant would fund opioid task force efforts

Three additional drop boxes for the safe disposal of leftover prescription drugs have been installed at police substations. There is a centralized map of treatment providers. Health-care providers hosted a symposium on substance abuse. An educational campaign was launched to help parents and youth better understand the dangers of prescription drug abuse.

Steps have been taken toward establishing a needle exchange program, and within the next few months, Crosspoint plans to open a recovery house newly tailored for pregnant and postpartum women who have undergone treatment.

If you had asked me a year ago did I think we would have accomplished all of these things, I would have said no way, said Colleen Bridger, director of the San Antonio Metropolitan Health District and co-chair of the task force.

Read more: Caught in the opioid snare

Lisa Cleveland, an assistant professor at the UT Health San Antonio School of Nursing who has helped manage the Naloxone training, said having all SAPD officers comfortable administering the drug is a major step for the city.

They may actually be the first ones to arrive on the scene, and every minute counts when somebodys not breathing, she said. They can do something right there to save a life.

Now that the proscribed year for examining opioid deaths in San Antonio has passed, Bridger said the task forces recommendation was for the city and county to next tackle substance abuse and mental health resources more broadly. The county is still waiting to hear back on a federal grant that would fund an employee to work on the issue full time, said T.J. Mayes, Wolffs chief of staff.

Wolff said the most significant outgrowth of the task force has been uniting area health care providers to start addressing the problem in a concerted way.

It was a wake-up call. When you shine the light on something, people have a way of responding to that light, Wolff said.

Lauren Caruba covers health care and medicine in the San Antonio and Bexar County area. Read her on our free site, mySA.com, and on our subscriber site, ExpressNews.com. | lcaruba@express-news.net | Twitter: @LaurenCaruba
Cody Wilson, the self-described crypto-anarchist from Austin whose plan to post blueprints for printable firearms on the Internet put him at the center of a national controversy, was charged Wednesday with child sexual assault and was the subject of an international search.

Austin police said Wilson, 30, was believed to be in Taiwan and may have gone there to avoid arrest after learning that he was under police investigation.

An arrest warrant accused Wilson of having sex with a 16-year-old girl at an Austin hotel last month and paying her $500. The legal age of consent in Texas is 17.

Police said they were working with international law enforcement agencies to locate Wilson and extradite him to Travis County. If convicted of child sexual assault, a felony, he could be sentenced to up to 20 years in prison.

RELATED: Accused Border Patrol agent is a Navy veteran, served in Iraq

Austin Police Commander Troy Officer said it wasnt clear when Wilson left for Taiwan, although police said he frequently travels there for business. Flight records show he hadnt returned to the United States as of Wednesday night, police said.

Before he left, he was informed by a friend of the victim that she had spoken to police, and police were investigating him for having sex with a minor, Officer said.

The 16-year-old girl reported the incident on Aug. 27 to a counselor at the Center for Child Protection, a nonprofit child advocacy group in Austin. The organization notified police.

According to court records, the victim said she met Wilson through the website SugarDaddyMeet.com, which requires users to be at least 18 years old to become members.

The girl said Wilson went by the username Sanjuro, told her he was a big deal and identified himself as Cody Wilson, court records say. The girl later told investigators that Wilson sent her photos of his naked anatomy and she responded by sending him nude photos of herself.

The two exchanged phone numbers, and on Aug. 15 they met in the parking lot of a coffee shop, court records state.

RELATED: Sutherland Springs lawsuits to be consolidated

Wilson arrived in a black Ford Edge SUV with a license plate that matches one registered to Wilsons business, Defense Distributed, according to his arrest affidavit. The two went to the Archer Hotel Austin, the affidavit says.

Security cameras captured Wilson and the girl using the hotels valet service about 8:30 that night. They took an elevator to the seventh floor and entered a room, where the girl said they had sex, according to the affidavit. Wilson then paid her $500 in cash, authorities said.

Wilson caught the publics attention in 2013, when he created the first gun made from plastic using a 3D printer and put the blueprints for the weapon online, to be downloaded for free by anybody.

He was promptly shut down by the U.S. State Department, which cited a federal law prohibiting the sale of certain weapons and firearm designs to other countries. Wilson responded with a free speech lawsuit, claiming that he and his company, Defense Distributed, had a First Amendment right to distribute the plans. The federal government relented, but then 19 states and the District of Columbia filed lawsuits to stop Wilson, calling printable guns a safety threat because they lack serial numbers and could pass unnoticed through metal detectors.

A judge granted a restraining order against Wilson and extended it last month. Wilson then announced that he would load the blueprints onto flash drives and sell them by mail.

Experts have said making a 3D gun requires a fairly advanced printer. The gun Wilson successfully fired that started the controversy was made with an $8,000 3D printer bought on eBay. Its firing pin was made of metal.

Staff Writer Rene A. Guzman contributed to this report.

cdowns@mysa.com | Twitter: @calebjdowns
WASHINGTON  In an ad in San Antonio with black-and-white photos of unnamed Texans, Democrat Gina Ortiz Jones blames second-term U.S. Rep. Will Hurd, the Republican she hopes to unseat, for a precarious grip on health care felt by many Texans.

These are the faces of the more than 300,000 people in this part of Texas who could lose their health care coverage because they have a pre-existing condition or will no longer be able to afford the premiums, Jones says in the ad.

And in one of the new Democratic-sponsored health care ads airing in Houston for congressional candidate Lizzie Pannill Fletcher, a woman examining a pill bottle asks: Hey Audrey, why in the heck are these prescriptions so expensive?

But ads dont always tell the whole story: Hurd was one of 20 Republicans who defected from his party at a pivotal moment last year: the repeal of the Affordable Care Act by a narrow margin in the GOP-run House.

RELATIVE: Tax cut becomes a campaign for Jones, not Hurd

With or without details, Democrats across the country are unleashing a fusillade of commercials and campaign tactics tied to health care, the issue many see as the ticket to regaining control of the House in November.

The ads are a big investment: The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committees spots in the Houston area are the first of a $2 million, six-week broadcast and cable buy backing Fletchers drive to unseat nine-term GOP incumbent John Culberson.

Candidates are using that pulpit both to bludgeon Republicans for unfinished business on health insurance and to accentuate personal appeals.

Mary MJ Hegar of Round Rock, who is trying to unseat eight-term GOP Rep. John Carter, released a health care ad last week highlighting her injuries in Afghanistan and the tattoos that cover them.

RELATIVE: Hurd's race with Democrat Ortiz Jones may be costliest in Texas

When I took a round through my helicopter windshield, the bullet fragmented across my arms and leg. I immediately learned how important quality medical care is, and its why Ill fight politicians and insurance companies to lower the cost of health care, Hegar says in the ad, filmed partly in a tattoo parlor.

Issue resonates in Texas

Even before all the new ads, 44 percent of all 3,998 ads aired in Texas last month for congressional campaigns mentioned health care, according to a study by the Wesleyan Media project based on ad tracking. Nationally, 37 percent of the ads had a health care link.

Democrats reliance on health care issues is a stark reversal from recent elections, in which repeal Obamacare became the Republicans clarion call in campaigns for Congress.

The political offensive reflects polls that show voters deepening concerns about health insurance costs and what they pay for prescriptions. Those concerns hold special significance in Texas: Federal court proceedings in Fort Worth initiated by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and 19 other GOP attorneys general could lead to all or part of the nations health insurance law being declared unconstitutional.

The laws protections for health insurance consumers with pre-existing conditions, which the Trump administration has chosen not to defend in the courtroom in Fort Worth, are especially popular.

RELATIVE: S.A.'s first lady blasts Hurd's anti-bullying panel

A Kaiser Family Foundation poll released this month found that 75 percent of Americans consider it very important that those protections remain law, with 4 in 10 very worried that they or a family member will lose coverage if the protections are overturned in court.

That result mirrored findings in a Texas Medical Center national consumer survey released last week showing that more than 6 in 10 say they are likely to vote only for candidates in November who promise health care fixes.

Polls give Democrats an overwhelming advantage when voters are asked which party can best deal with health care issues. An NBC-Wall Street Journal survey last month put the Democratic advantage at 18 percent, the highest in more than a decade of asking the question.

Republicans fight back with the economy

Republicans unleashed their own array of ads last week, marking the national parties first heavy entry into the battle for House control. They were largely silent on health care matters, instead trumpeting the strength of the economy and immigration while skewering Democrats for alleged ethical transgressions and ties to House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif.

RELATIVE: West Side native Gina Ortiz Jones wants to create opportunity in CD 23

Jack Pandol, spokesman for the National Republican Congressional Committee, expressed no concern about the effect of the Democrats onslaught. He contends that Democratic divisions over moving to a single-payer insurance system that showed up in primary elections will gird his party this season.

Pandol raised the specter that a single-payer system  an unlikely outcome in Congress anytime soon  would lead to massive tax increases and rationed care.

What weve seen over and over again in polling across the country and in Texas is that when voters see Democratic support for this government-run health care plan, they run away as fast as they can, he said.

Brad Woodhouse, executive director of advocacy group Protect Our Care, said the Democratic debate on single-payer  also known as Medicare for All  was largely limited to primary races and shouldnt be an issue in the fall campaign.

RELATIVE: Hurd way off on rival getting more cash from Bay Staters than Texans

Republicans have lied and demagogued on health care for years. They were the ones who came up with the term death panels, which never existed, he said. We are not in charge. Its not our policies or programs or governance that voters are going to express their views on in November. This is a referendum on Republican officeholders.

Sen. John Cornyn, a Texas Republican, said of Democratic candidates tactics: Democratic pollsters told them that they need to stoke peoples fears about eliminating coverage for pre-existing conditions and the like.

Speaking to reporters, he added: The argument that the only way you can cover pre-existing conditions is to continue with the Affordable Care Act, otherwise known as Obamacare, is simply untrue. There are ways to cover pre-existing conditions and still give people choices when it comes to their health care coverage rather than mandate one size fits all, which is what Obamacare did.

Looking for middle ground with Trump

National Democrats earlier this month chose U.S. Rep. Lloyd Doggett of Austin, a senior member of the Ways and Means Committee, to deliver the Democratic rebuttal to President Donald Trumps weekly radio address.

Apparently, our Republican colleagues are afflicted with their very own special type of pre-existing condition, called amnesia. They have forgotten about all the suffering, for so many, before the Affordable Care Act became the law of the land, Doggett said in his national address.

In an interview, Doggett said that while traveling his district in recent weeks, people spoke of their fears of losing protection for their pre-existing conditions if Paxton and allies win their suit. People with diabetes are especially troubled, he said.

RELATIVE: Jones reports three-month haul of $1.2 million to bid unseat

Its the kind of pre-existing condition that will result in being denied entirely, excluded from protection they need most or leading to unaffordable premiums for their coverage, he said.

Doggett said that even if Democrats win control of the House in November, health care solutions would be uncertain.

Well move from a situation of worst to just bad, he said, noting the prospect of vetoes to Democratic-drawn bills.

The strategy in a Democratic-run House, he said, would be adding health care provisions to must-sign bills, such as those that fund the military, or crafting bipartisan legislation that might appeal to Trump.

He noted the presidents expressed support of allowing Medicare to negotiate the prices of drugs directly with manufacturers, prohibited now by law.

That may be an issue where we can have a victory, Trump can have a victory and, more importantly, all those people who are being gouged can have a victory, he said.
All federal lawsuits filed by victims or relatives of the Sutherland Springs church massacre against the U.S. Air Force are to be consolidated and handled by U.S. District Judge Xavier Rodriguez, Senior U.S. District Judge David Ezra said Wednesday.

Four lawsuits have been filed, but more are expected  some of them within the coming two weeks. The suits filed so far accuse the Air Force of negligence over its failure to report convictions of the shooter that would have prevented him from buying the guns he used to kill 26 parishioners and injure many more.

This is akin to a mass tort case, said Ezra, who had two lawsuits assigned to him. There will be a lot of plaintiffs. The facts are relatively identical. We had a crazed individual who, without reason or justification of any kind, came in and began to massacre people in the church.

This court has great sympathy for the victims and their families, Ezra added. It makes no sense to have these cases spread out.

RELATED: Memorial stone touches the hearts of Sutherland Springs residents

He said he consulted with Chief U.S. District Judge Orlando Garcia and Judge Rodriguez before deciding Rodriguez could provide the required time and attention the cases deserve. Ezra, who also handles cases on the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals aside from his work on the Western District of Texas, has one of the busiest dockets in the country and has spent more than five months in successive trials this year alone.

This isnt judge shopping, Ezra said, noting the grouping is necessary to ensure justice is served.

Shortly after Devin P. Kelley entered the First Baptist Church on Nov. 5 and mowed down his victims with an assault-style rifle, the Air Force admitted it failed to report his past crimes to a federal database, which allowed him to pass a background check and obtain guns, including the one he used in the slayings.

Despite the admission, the suits could encounter a number of hurdles, including claims by the feds that no matter how glaring its mistakes were, whoever was responsible is shielded by governmental immunity. Due to the doctrine of sovereign immunity, its nearly impossible to sue the federal government. But under the Federal Tort Claims Act, people can seek damages in limited cases if they can prove direct negligence on the part of the government.

Several have filed administrative claims with the Air Force seeking redress outside the court. Under the tort claims law, they are required to give the government six months to try to respond. Those who havent gotten anything more than cursory responses from the feds have proceeded to lawsuits, including attorney Jamal Alsaffar, who is handling three separate lawsuits.

RELATED: Wife of Sutherland Springs gunman Devin Kelley speaks for the first time

Alsaffar represents Margarette Vidal, who survived after being shot in the knee and in the back. He also represents the relatives of Tara McNulty, 33, a mother of two, and Sara, 68, and Dennis Johnson Sr., 77, who were among those killed.

Lawyers Rob Ammons and April Strahan represent Joe and Claryce Holcombe, who lost nine family members in the massacre and were the first to sue earlier this year.

Its been almost a year since this horrible thing happened, and the government has done very little to move this case. In fact, theyve done nothing, Alsaffar said after Wednesdays hearing. The quicker we can get the cases together and move forward so that these families cases can be addressed openly and transparently...the better.

Lawyer Justin Demerath told Ezra he represents several victims or their relatives and is likely to file suits on their behalf. Another attorney, Dennis Perry, told Ezra he is representing the family of slaying victim 16-year-old Charlene Uhl, and is also expected to sue.

Daniel Sciano, an attorney representing the family of Ricardo Rodriguez, who was among those killed, said he expects to file suit soon.

Kelley, an Air Force veteran, had a history of violence. In 2014, he received a bad-conduct discharge after he was convicted of beating his first wife and seriously injuring his stepson. Two years earlier, he had escaped from a mental facility where he was admitted after threatening to kill his superior officers. The crimes normally would have put Kelley on an FBI criminal database and barred him from legally owning guns.
AUSTIN  The spokesman for the state agency pushing greater awareness of sex trafficking trivialized allegations of high school-era sexual assault brought against U.S. Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh.

Marc Rylander, communications director for Attorney General Ken Paxton, retweeted, Judge Kavanaugh now being accused of kicking his mother several times  while in the womb. In another retweet, he shared, Breaking: Democrats have a witness who says Kavanaugh cheated at Pin the Tail On the Donkey in Kindergarten class. The tweets were originally shared by Mark Simone, a conservative New York radio host.

Ryland did not respond to requests for comment, although the tweet about Kavanaugh kicking his mother several times was deleted from his account Monday afternoon.

The comments come after the sexual assault allegations surfaced from Christine Blasey Ford. She said Kavanaugh and another male classmate, both two years older than her, locked her in a bedroom during a high school party in suburban Maryland. She said Kavanaugh tried to pull off her clothes and covered her mouth. She said she escaped the room when the second boy jumped on the bed, causing them to tumble to the floor.

Kavanaugh has said the alleged sexual assault never happened.

MORE: Official Washington scrambles over Kavanaugh allegations

Rylanders Twitter activity comes just weeks after Paxton released an ad that spoke to rape culture. The agency unveiled a commercial with actor Matthew McConaughey speaking to the gravity of the agencys concern over human and sex trafficking, an issue the agency says is a priority to prosecute.

Nearly 79,000 Texas minors and youth are victims of sex trafficking, an activity that forces women into the sex trade and subjects them to commercialized sexual assault and rape.

Paxton, a Republican, is up for re-election in November. He is running against Justin Nelson, a Democrat and Austin lawyer.

Sexual assault is a crime of violence and abuse of power  never a laughing matter. Another disgrace surrounding indicted Ken Paxton, Margaret Justus, a spokeswoman for Nelsons campaign, said in a written statement.

Paxton was indicted in 2015 and is awaiting trial on a pair of first-degree felony securities fraud charges and a third charge of failing to register as an investment adviser. He is unlikely to face trial until after the November election.

andrea.zelinski@chron.com
The largest study of silicone breast implants has found the devices are generally safe but associated with a slightly higher risk of a few rare diseases, a controversial finding that quickly reheated the seemingly settled issue.

The conclusion by MD Anderson Cancer Center researchers, based on the outcomes of nearly 100,000 patients who received one of the devices since they returned to the market in 2006, was disputed Friday by many experts, including federal health regulators, who have nevertheless scheduled a public meeting of medical advisers next year to consider implant safety.

These findings arent meant to suggest implants caused these problems, said Dr. Mark Clemens, an MD Anderson professor of plastic surgery and the senior investigator of the study. Theyre associations, which underscore the need for more research in this area, but do provide key safety information for women and their providers to consider when thinking about cosmetic or reconstructive surgery with breast implants.

Significant shortcomings

In a paper the Annals of Surgery will post online Monday, Clemens team is reporting that four health problems  the skin cancer melanoma and autoimmune disorders rheumatoid arthritis, scleroderma and Sjogrens syndrome  occurred more often in patients with silicone-gel implants than in the general population. The numbers were small but statistically significant, Clemens said.

RELATIVE: Health care angst fuels Texas Democrats in congressional races

The Food and Drug Administration issued a statement in response Friday, urging the public and health-care community to view the studys conclusions with caution. The statement noted concerns about significant shortcomings with the studys methodology and data presentation and said we respectfully disagree with the conclusions.

A number of other experts in the field echoed the FDAs concerns.

The strong reaction to the study was reminiscent of the ruckus breast implant safety concerns caused in the 1990s and first half of the 2000s. Allegations that ruptured or leaking devices caused a variety of systemic autoimmune disorders in women led to huge payouts from high-profile class-action lawsuits. Dow Corning, the leading supplier at the time, declared bankruptcy because of all the claims against it.

The issue was particularly big news in Houston, birthplace of the breast implant and site of some of the biggest plaintiff victories, many secured by the late John OQuinn, the famed Houston trial lawyer. Texas Monthly magazine once dubbed Houston as Silicone City.

The FDA declared a moratorium on silicone-based implants in 1992, then lifted it in 2005 after concluding there was not sufficient evidence to tie implants to systemic autoimmune disorders. In 2006, it approved devices from Allergan and Mentor Corp. but required the companies to conduct studies on patient outcomes.

RELATED: UT Health San Antonio researchers link 'zombie cells' to Alzheimers

It was data from those studies, made public last year, that the MD Anderson team analyzed.

Undue alarm?

Faced with criticism, Clemens said the team stands behind the data and feels this is the best data we have to date. He emphasized the findings were consistent with previous implant safety studies and added that the study found 90 percent of patients were satisfied or very satisfied with their decision to get the device.

Clemens said he was heartened that his team and the FDA see a similar path going forward  not just the planned 2019 public meeting, but also the establishment of a national breast implant registry and a call for more research.

The study is reassuring in many ways, but I fear the parts associating implants with rare diseases could unduly alarm women, said Dr. Andrea Pusic, chair of plastic surgery at Brigham and Womens Hospital in Boston and president-elect of the American Society of Plastic Surgeons. They needed to be interpreted carefully.

RELATIVE: UT Health, MD Anderson leaders tout cancer partnership

The study drew criticism for what experts said were fundamental flaws in the data used for the research. That included inconsistent sources of outcomes  one manufacturer required a doctors diagnosis of a complication; the other took the patients judgment at face value. As a result, disease risk rates could differ dramatically, even though the gels used by the companies are similar.

Also, more than half the women dropped out of the study by the second year, which Pusic said often happens when patients feel healthy. Their lack of updated outcomes likely skewed results, she said.

Data defies explanation

In the paper, the MD Anderson team acknowledged those limitations in the data.

Annals of Surgery is a monthly journal of surgical science that has existed since 1885. The journal has posted an FDA editorial about the study as well as a highly critical commentary co-written by plastic surgeons at Massachusetts General Hospital and Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York. One of the two surgeons is a consultant to Allergan.

David Bernstein, a George Mason University law professor and silicone historian, said he doesnt think the study would result in new litigation because some of the data defies explanation, such as an association noted between implants and a lesser risk for fibromyalgia. He said a lawyer defending a manufacturer being sued for a slight increase in rheumatoid arthritis associated with implants could easily undermine such arguments by pointing to the devices possible protective benefit for fibromyalgia in the study.

About 400,000 women get implants annually, most silicone. The vast majority  about 85 percent  are for cosmetic reasons, the rest for reconstruction after cancer surgery.
Erika Pena had known Border Patrol agent Juan David Ortiz for about four months.

Her aunt, Marcela Rodriguez, said there was nothing unusual about him, and Pena knew Ortiz was in law enforcement.

So when he picked Pena up Friday on San Bernardo Avenue and paid her to have sex with him, she didnt think twice about it, according to Rodriguez, who said shes talked to Pena about that night.

Investigators said Ortiz has confessed to assaulting Pena and killing four women between Sept. 3 and Sept. 15. They have been identified as Melissa Ramirez, 29, Claudine Ann Luera, 42, Humberto Ortiz, 28, and Guiselda Alicia Cantu, 35. The Department of Public Safety released Cantus name Wednesday. Her body was discovered about 1 a.m. Saturday near mile marker 21 on Interstate 35.

Rodriguez said shes taken on the role of being her nieces spokesperson. Pena lives with Rodriguez.

RELATED: Accused Border Patrol agent is a Navy veteran, served in Iraq

Erika said he was cheerful, Rodriguez said. I imagine he knew how to put up a front. Shed say that he was talkative, and he would talk to her. Then when everything happened, Erika had never seen him react the way he did.

When Juan David Ortiz took Pena to his home Friday, she brought up Melissa Ramirez, a friend of hers who was found slain Sept. 4. Ortiz appeared to become angry, Rodriguez said. Pena said she felt a bad vibe, got nauseous and went outside to vomit, according to her aunt.

She then convinced Ortiz to go for a ride. While stopped at a gas station about 9 p.m., Pena mentioned Ramirez again. Arrest affidavits state that Ortiz then pointed a gun at Pena in the vehicle, which was stationary. Pena managed to escape from the vehicle and sought help from a Texas trooper, who happened to be refueling at the gas station.

After investigators interviewed Pena, they issued a lookout for Ortiz and his white Dodge pickup. Two hours later, Ortiz was spotted at a gas station, according to reports. He fled on foot to a nearby hotel, where he was arrested without incident.

Ortiz now faces four counts of murder. He also has been charged with assaulting and unlawfully restraining Pena.

This is the first time something like this has happened to her, Rodriguez said. I dont know what went through her mind at that moment that made her strong enough to get through this and escape.

Rodriguez said this is a difficult time for her family.

It has been really difficult seeing her, Rodriguez said. Erika is really traumatized.  She doesnt want to eat. She always wants someone to be with her. She doesnt want to be alone because shes afraid.

Pena was friends with the four victims, Rodriguez said. She was closest to Humberto Ortiz, a transgender woman she knew as Janelle.

We dont know what his motive was for committing this type of horrific crime, Rodriguez said. No matter what these women worked in, no one deserves to end their lives this way. On behalf of Erika and all of our family, we send our condolences to all the families of the victims. Be strong. There are no words, but only God will heal them.

Rodriguez also asked that Pena be viewed as a victim.

I dont want the community to see her as just a hero, Rodriguez said. She is also a victim that thankfully was able to escape from the situation.

Rodriguez has created a GoFundMe page to help raise funds for Penas psychological and medical expenses.
By Trend





NATO reiterates support for the peaceful settlement of the Armenia-Azerbaijan Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, NATO Deputy Secretary General Rose Gottemoeller told reporters in Baku Sept. 20.

She said that the organization supports the work of the OSCE Minsk Group and the efforts of the parties to find a peaceful solution to the conflict.

Gottemoeller noted that NATO is very happy to have such a partner as Azerbaijan, adding that they are working together on projects that meet the interests of Azerbaijan.

She also emphasized joint work in the development of institutions in the defense sphere in Azerbaijan.

NATO believes that by these projects it can help Azerbaijan in the countrys further development as a key player in the region, she said.

She also highly appreciated the active support of Azerbaijan for the NATO mission in Afghanistan. In particular, Gottemoeller stressed the increase in the number of the military contingent of Azerbaijan as part of the NATO mission in Afghanistan.

NATO is also grateful to Azerbaijan for providing transit opportunities as part of this mission, she noted, adding that Azerbaijan participates very effectively in NATOs activity in the fight against terrorism.




A police officer employed by the Alamo Colleges District was arrested Tuesday for choking his wife, according to San Antonio police.

Marlon Go, 36, was charged with assaulting a family member by strangulation.

RELATED: Controversial Austin man behind 3-D printed guns charged with child sex assault

On Sunday, Go asked his wife, from whom he is separated, to go to his home to take the dogs out and bring him food, according to his arrest affidavit.

When she arrived, she discovered Go's girlfriend hiding in the laundry room, the affidavit says.

Go's wife became upset and she slapped him twice and broke his watch, police said.

Go retaliated by choking her, authorities said. She went to the hospital Monday and said she was unable to move her neck due to the assault, according to the affidavit.

Once the Alamo Colleges District learned of his arrest, Go was put on administrative leave pending a San Antonio police investigation and a separate inquiry conducted by the district's police department.

Go has been employed with the district since May 2013.
JERRY LARA /San Antonio Express-News

The town hall meeting tonight featuring fire union President Chris Steele and Mayor Ron Nirenberg was canceled after Steele backed out of the event less than two hours before doors were set to open.

The two were poised to debate the controversial charter amendments that Steele and his union have placed on the Nov. 6 ballot.
WASHINGTON - Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz has cast significant votes and staked out controversial positions on a range of major issues during his six-year term, helping him emerge as a top 2016 presidential contender and a leading conservative voice in American politics.

Over the same period, Democratic challenger Beto ORourke has served three terms in Congress, establishing a reliably liberal voting record on some of the most consequential issues of the day.

Forget the media hype, the attack ads, and the money chase.

We look at six major issues that contrast how ORourke would differ from Cruz if he were to unseat him in the Senate.

NOT MODERATE ENOUGH? Why Beto O'Rourke lost

Immigration/Border Wall

No issue better differentiates the two candidates than their contrasting positions on the wall and illegal immigration, major issues in Texas. While Cruz has been a staunch supporter of President Donald Trumps proposed border wall, ORourke has emerged as a leading critic, saying that the border with Mexico has never been safer and calling for an end to the militarization of our immigration enforcement system.

Another key point of divergence: While ORourke has championed a path to citizenship for Dreamers - immigrants brought over the border illegally as children - Cruz has frequently derided as "amnesty" any plan that confers legal status or citizenship on people living in the country illegally.

Last February, Cruz stood alone in voting against a GOP motion to start debate on a new immigration proposal that could resolve the standoff over Dreamers.

In April, 2017, Cruz garnered headlines with legislation proposing that a new border wall be financed with assets forfeited by alleged Mexican drug lord Joaquin El Chapo Guzman, who had recently been extradited to the United States. The bill went nowhere, and Republicans are still looking for a way to fund the wall, with estimates running as high as $25 billion.

Cruz also introduced Kates Law to increase penalties on people who repeatedly cross the border illegally. Adopted as a campaign issue by Trump, the bill was named for a San Francisco woman who a jury later found had been accidentally shot in 2015 by a Mexican man who had been deported five times. The bill failed to overcome a filibuster led by Democrats who saw it as an attempt to exploit the tragedy for political purposes and demonize immigrants.

STAR POWER: Ted Cruz edges out Beto O'Rourke in an epic Texas race that goes down to the wire

In recent months, Cruz has started running ads accusing ORourke of wanting to decriminalize unauthorized border crossings. What ORourke has actually said, however, is that the U.S. should not criminalize immigrants requesting asylum between ports of entry.

Cruz also has criticized ORourke for saying he would be open to a vote abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), as some Democrats have demanded. ORourke says he has not actually called for abolishing ICE.

Overall, Cruz has supported Trumps zero tolerance enforcement policies; ORourke has slammed them. In response to widespread criticism of family separations on the border - a practice ORourke called inhumane - Cruz backed legislation that could keep families together in detention facilities.

GOP Tax Cuts

Cruz was a leading supporter of the Republican tax cut plan that passed the Senate last December on a 51-48 party-line vote. He also has rolled out legislation to make permanent the laws cuts to individual income tax rates, which, unlike the corporate tax cuts, are set to expire in 2025.

Were seeing enormous benefits as a result of the historic tax cuts passed last year, Cruz said in April. Texans are investing capital, expanding businesses, hiring new workers, and raising wages, and that economic growth is benefiting middle class families across the Lone Star State.

ORourke, on the other hand, has criticized the $1.5 trillion tax package, saying it will deepen deficits, provides large cuts for corporations and the wealthiest of Americans, and gives only small breaks to middle- and low-income families.

NEW BENCHMARK: Harris County surpasses presidential year turnout

In a tweet on the eve of the final Senate vote, ORourke warned that it would become a 2018 campaign issue: If Republicans pass this tax bill, there will be consequences & an election where the voters of Texas hold them accountable, he wrote.

But ahead of the November midterm elections, Cruz and his Republican allies in Washington have celebrated the economys continued strength, which they attribute in large part to the tax cuts - the signature victory of Trumps first year in office.

Gun Laws

The Second Amendment is huge in heavily-armed Texas, rendered all the more emotional by a series of modern-day mass shootings in Fort Hood, Dallas, Sutherland Springs, and Santa Fe High School outside Houston.

Cruz, who receives strong backing from the NRA, has staked out as strong a pro-gun position as anyone in Congress, resisting efforts to ban assault rifles, raise the age for buying long guns, or expand background checks for firearms sales on the internet or at gun shows. NRA executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre has called him one of our nations leading defenders of the Second Amendment.

ORourke, on the other hand, first popped up on the national radar following a mass shooting in Orlando in 2016. He and other Democratic lawmakers livestreamed a 24-hour protest on the House floor pressing GOP leaders for votes on proposals to prevent suspected terrorists from purchasing guns and expand background checks.

ORourkes campaign has called for universal background checks and a ban or restrictions on the sale of AR-15s and other weapons of war. While a Cruz commercial accuses ORourke of wanting to take our guns, ORourke does not call for taking away weapons that citizens already own, saying he supports Texas proud and honorable tradition of responsible gun ownership for hunting, sport, self-defense, and collecting.

Unlike Cruz, ORourke opposes federal concealed carry reciprocity, which would require all U.S. states to recognize concealed carry permits granted by other states.

In contrast to ORourke, Cruz has consistently rejected gun restrictions as a solution to the plague of mass shootings in the U.S. Following last Mays shooting in Santa Fe, which took 10 lives, Cruz said he backed a federal budget deal that included $2.5 billion to beef up school security, including metal detectors and police officers. He also backed calls to arm teachers, saying "It makes perfect sense that if teachers want to exercise their right to keep and bear arms, that it will only make schools safer."

Obamacare Repeal

Cruzs first big splash in the Senate came in 2013 when he led a push to defund Obamacare, an effort that led to a two-week government shutdown, a result that was widely decried by Democrats as well as Republican leaders.

Following that, one of the central pledges of his 2016 White House bid was to repeal and replace every word of Obamacare.

While the new Republican tax cut bill gutted Obamacares individual mandate to buy insurance, the prospect of full repeal all but died on July 28, 2017. That was when a Republican-led bill to repeal the Obama-era Affordable Care Act (ACA) was defeated 51-49 in the Senate, with the deciding vote cast in a thumbs-down motion by the late Sen. John McCain, R-Arizona.

Since then, Republican leaders have sought to move on to other things. But Cruz says he has not given up, blaming the law for rising insurance premiums. Most controversially, even within GOP ranks, Cruz has defended a Texas-led lawsuit that would declare the ACA unconstitutional - largely on the theory that the mandate to cover pre-existing medical conditions is invalid without the individual mandate.

Democrats have seized on the Texas lawsuit as evidence that Republicans would be willing to jettison one of the most popular aspects of the ACA. Meanwhile ORourke has called health care a basic human right that transcends politics, running on a platform of bolstering the ACA and stabilizing the insurance markets by guaranteeing continued federal subsidies.

More broadly, ORourke has called for achieving universal healthcare coverage  whether it be through a single payer system, a dual system, or otherwise - to lower costs. But he says he is not committed to single payer, which is anathema to conservatives, as a goal.

One specific proposal ORourke has backed would offer Medicare as a public option on the Obamacare exchanges to younger people who cant get or afford private insurance.

Abortion and Defunding Planned Parenthood

This summer the Senate turned down a Cruz-backed amendment that would have cut $400 million in funding for Planned Parenthood next year. Supporters of the amendment, which failed on a 45-48 vote, said the cut would assure that no federal money goes to organizations that provide abortions. Opponents argued that federal policy already bars the use of federal tax dollars for abortion, and that Planned Parenthood provides many other health services for women, particularly poor women.

While opposition to abortion is one of the bedrock positions of Cruzs religious and social conservatism, ORourke is a long-time supporter of abortion rights. In May, he signed on to a letter signed by other Democratic lawmakers opposing administration plans to restrict, gag, or otherwise defund family planning programs for low-income patients.

Federal health policy should be evidence-based and produced with the best interests of patients in mind, the letter said. It should not be the result of the political whims of a partisan campaign pledge.

Supreme Court

The ongoing political fracas over the nomination of federal Judge Brett Kavanaugh underscores the potential stakes in any Senate election. Cruz was an enthusiastic supporter of Trumps first pick, Neil Gorsuch, who was approved by the Senate last year on a 54-45 vote. Only three Democrats voted for the conservative jurist.

THE BIG PICTURE: Texas is Ground Zero as Trump steers the federal judiciary to the right

The largely partisan battle lines have been drawn again as Kavanaugh faces accusations by a woman who says he tried to sexually assault her decades ago at a high school party. Before the allegations were made public, Cruz, a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, was effusive in his praise for Kavanaughs nomination, which many conservatives see as a watershed moment in their ascendancy in the federal courts under Trump. Since then, Cruz has trod more carefully, saying the womans allegations against Kavanaugh "are serious and deserve to be treated with respect."

With the direction of the Supreme Court at stake, ORourke has called Kavanaugh the wrong pick and predicted Cruz would pay a price for his support.

How to watch Friday's debate

Friday night's debate is not being televised in Houston or San Antonio, but NBC affiliates in both cities will be streaming the debate on their websites starting at 6 p.m.

In Houston viewers can view the livestream on the KPRC 2 website, click2houston.com

In San Antonio, viewers can tune in to News4sanantonio.com.
Hurricane Florence has drenched eastern North Carolina with more than 30 inches of rain, an all-time record for the state. Last year, Hurricane Harvey stalled over Houston and dumped more than 60 inches of rain, an all-time record for the whole country. Also last year, Hurricane Maria ravaged the island of Puerto Rico and caused, according to an independent study, nearly 3,000 deaths.

Welcome to the new normal.

Tropical cyclones are nothing new, of course. But climate scientists say that global warming should make such storms wetter, slower and more intense  which is exactly what seems to be happening. And if we fail to act, these kinds of devastating weather events will likely become even more frequent and more severe.

Climate change is a global phenomenon. Authorities in the Philippines are still trying to assess the damage and death toll from Super Typhoon Mangkhut, a rare Category 5-equivalent storm that struck the archipelago on Saturday with sustained winds of 165 miles per hour. Mangkhut went on to batter Hong Kong, and now, as it weakens, is plowing across southern China.

Every human being on the planet has a stake in what governments do to limit and adapt to climate change, including those who, like President Trump, prefer to believe global warming is some kind of hoax. I doubt the citizens of Wilmington, North Carolina  a lovely resort town that Monday was turned into an island by widespread flooding  feel there is anything illusory about the hardship theyre going through.

As I noted last month, scientists are now cautiously making the first serious attempts to gauge the impact of climate change on specific weather events such as storms, monsoons, droughts and heat waves.

The most ambitious attempt to quantify the link between climate and weather  a blue-chip international consortium called World Weather Attribution  has not yet made an attempt to estimate any possible effect global warming may have had on Florence or Mangkhut. But another group of researchers, the Climate Extremes Modeling Group at the Stony Brook University School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences, estimated Sept. 12 that Florence would produce 50 percent more rainfall than if human-induced global warming had not occurred.

You dont have to be a scientist to understand why that makes sense. We know from direct measurement that the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has increased by more than 40 percent since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, when humans started burning fossil fuels on a large scale. We know from direct observation that carbon dioxide traps heat. We know from direct measurement that both atmospheric and ocean temperatures have been rising sharply. We know from direct measurement that warmer water takes up more space than cooler water, which is the main reason why ocean levels are rising.

We know that warmer water is more easily evaporated, which means there is more moisture available to fuel a storm like Florence or Harvey  and to be released by such storms as rainfall.

If humankind suddenly stopped burning fossil fuels tomorrow, we would still have to adapt to the climatic changes we have already set in motion. The excess carbon dioxide we have pumped into the atmosphere will remain there for thousands of years. We will be coping with massive tropical storms, tragic coastal and riverine flooding, deadly heat waves and unprecedented wildfires for the rest of our lives.

At the very least, we should be trying to reduce carbon emissions and keep global warming to a manageable level. With the landmark Paris Agreement, the nations of the world agreed to try. But Trump foolishly pulled the United States  the worlds second-biggest emitter of carbon dioxide, behind only China  out of the deal.

The administration has already proposed weakening restrictions on carbon emissions from automobiles and coal-fired power plants. And last week, there were reports that the administration also wants to loosen rules governing the release of methane, which traps even more heat than carbon dioxide.

A cargo ship is presently making the journey from Vladivostok, on Russias Pacific coast, to the German port of Bremerhaven via the Arctic Ocean, rather than taking the usual southern route through the Suez Canal and the Strait of Gibraltar. Until now, the northern route has always been impassible because it was blocked by polar ice. But because of climate change, a lot of the ice has melted.

Climate change is no longer theoretical. It is real, it is all around us, and it is going to get much worse.

eugenerobinson@washpost.com
Re: Not all were Texans, Your Turn, Sunday:

True, while most Alamo defenders were not native Tejanos ( Tejano: a Mexican born in the Mexican state of Tejas), some Anglos were citizens of the country of Mexico. You must remember that Tejas was still a part of Mexico  a Mexican state. While I dont believe that the Anglos were misogynist or racist, I do believe that a lot of them were in it for themselves.

Many were in Tejas illegally. They had crossed the Sabine River without permission seeking to take land or whatever was not tied down. They were hoping to become empresarios (landholders/agents). And some were agents of the U.S. to find how it would be possible to take Tejas away from Mexico.

Some Anglos did become Mexican citizens and Catholic, and tried to learn Spanish as was required to accept free land. Others said yes and lied to get free land, and they lied about their slaves, claiming they were indentured servants.

All in all, some were heroes. The Tejanos had no choice but to stand and fight, they had no place to go. The Anglos could always escape across the Sabine River to safety; some stayed. In the end, a hero is what you want him or her to be  the one you choose. Be it your teacher, father, mother.

As for my heroes: They were my ancestors who withstood the onslaught of Anglos (good or bad) and their insults and prejudices, and dug in and stayed in Tejas (now Texas).

As for the Mexican soldiers, they were simply defending their country, fighting rebels who refused to obey the law of the land. Yes, the Anglos were asked to pay taxes and they refused. They were not in America; they were in Mexico.

Frederick M. Vasquez

Which socialists?

Re: Alamo battle against dictatorship, Another View by Allan Parker, Saturday:

Mr. Parker wrote an articulate and well-thought out article that states the history of the Alamo exactly as I learned it over 50 years ago. I was only left with one question.

Who are these socialists of whom he speaks?

Are they the socialists of the highways that take us where we want to go? Are they the socialists of the fire departments who save our forests and our houses? Are they the socialists of Social Security and Medicare that protect our elderly? Are they the socialists of the $12 billion handed to farmers harmed by trade wars? Are they the socialists of the military that protect our country? Or, more likely, are these socialists the bogeyman that the right wing uses in much the same way the left uses fascists as their bogeyman?

Mr. Parker destroys any credibility he had by seeking to divide us with one hostile statement.

Dont worry, Mr. Parker. We conservatives, we liberals, we Americans will hopefully overcome poorly disguised attempts to divide us and vilify the others.

Don Ahlgren

Boerne doesnt care

If Boerne city property neighbors your property and you have tree or drainage issues that are on city property, dont expect any help.

The city of Boerne has told me that the city does not own any trees.

Fifteen years ago, I traded a piece of my property to the city for water hookups. Thus, the city of Boerne owns a swath of property outside my property line and in between the street that goes in front of my house. Several trees that sat on the city property were dead and a danger to my house and those who drive on the street. The city of Boerne told me that I am responsible for everything outside of my property line all the way to the curb. The city of Boerne also told me that I actually own all the property to the middle of the street in front of my house.

How can a city take ownership of property and then tell someone else that they are responsible for the upkeep of that property? How can a homeowner own half a street? Would it be illegal for me to put a toll booth and charge to use the road?

What it comes down to is the city of Boerne is only interested in accumulating more property for taxes and the ability to put in more Legoland subdivisions and not have to take care of any of the property it owns. The city of Boerne does not care about the quality of life for those living in Boerne, nor do they look into the future when making decisions.

Boerne is all about giving off the image that Boerne is the promised land and better than everywhere else.

Tyler Smurr, Boerne

Help the children

Re: Who will defend detained children? Another View by Greg Bosk, Sept. 12:

I expect my voice is no more effective than Mr. Bosk, and I do not have the means to provide significant financial support for detained children. But will do what I can.

I wholeheartedly agree with the need for U.S. citizens to come to the aid of families separated at the border. I urge political leaders, churches of all faiths, community organizations and others to create an awareness of the responsibility we have to work toward reuniting detained children with their families.

Ronald C. Olson

Leave cities alone

Re: Abbott wants to remove cities red light cams, Page One, Sept. 12:

Gov. Greg Abbott just cant seem to keep his little paws off city affairs. Last session was packed with bills to limit or stop city and county powers and give them to the state.

Sure appears that the good governor cannot abide federal interference into state territory.

Do I glimpse a bit of hypocrisy? Or just another power grab?

Dianne Lavake, Zapata
The Croatian Minister for Tourism, Gari Capelli, has confirmed that the country is negotiating flights to China for next year. It comes as Dubrovnik plays host to the fourth high-level meeting on tourism cooperation between China and sixteen Central and Eastern European countries, which form part of the "16+1" cooperation mechanism. "This is primarily about simplifying and accelerating visa procedures, opening and introducing new nonstop flights from China, and adapting Croatian destinations to online payment services through Chinese mobile applications", Mr Capelli said. Croatia is seeking flights from Beijing and Shanghai to both Zagreb and Dubrovnik. During the two-day summit, which wraps up today, Hungary secured a new service between Shanghai and Budapest, which is to be launched by China Eastern Airlines next summer.





According to Mr Capelli, a total of 153.000 Chinese tourists visited Croatia between January and September of this year, compared with 160.000 for the whole of 2017. The Chinese Minister for Culture and Tourism, Luo Shugang, noted, "In the future, we have to put more emphasis on establishing direct flights in order to further stimulate the mutual exchange of visitors. Examples from the Czech Republic, Serbia, Poland and Bosnia and Herzegovina have proved that direct air links or visa-free policies contribute dramatically to the increase of mutual tourist flow". Zagreb Airport's General Manager, Jacques Feron, recently noted, "We anticipate to finalise talks over the arrival of a Chinese carrier because Croatia is becoming of growing interest to Chinese tourists".





Hainan Airlines, which launched flights between Beijing and Belgrade via Prague last year, is said to be "very interested" in commencing flights to Croatia. "We discussed the possibility of Hainan Airlines introducing nonstop flights from China to Croatia, most probably to Zagreb. The launch of this service would boost the number of Chinese tourists to Croatia", the Zagreb-based Chinese Southeast European Business Association, said. Beijing Capital Airlines, which shares the same owner as Hainan Airlines, was to introduce services between Beijing and the Croatian capital over the 2017 summer season, however, the planned operations were later cancelled. Initially, the carrier filed for a permit for a two weekly service with an Airbus A330-200 aircraft.





Further discussions on the development of air traffic between China and the former Yugoslav states will take place next month when officials meet with the Chinese Minister for Transport as part of the "16+1" mechanism in Belgrade on October 16 and 17.
FAIRFIELD Sen. Richard Blumenthal had a reminder for students at the Constitution Day Town Hall at Fairfield Ludlowe High School: The U.S. Constitution, he said, is a living document.

They (the founders) left open a lot of questions for us to answer, Blumenthal, a Democrat in his second term, said..

The town hall has become one of the ways the AP Government class at Fairfield Ludlowe marks Constitution Day. Joining them on Monday were students from Fairfield Warde and Weston high schools.

Students, some of them decked out in red, white and blue attire, wanted to know how do they not become cynical about politicians and the political process.

Youre the guys that are going to take over, Blumenthal said. The way to changes things in this country is through the ballot box.

All it takes, Blumenthal said is one really good leader to make a difference. He noted that the compromise in forming the government and writing the Constitution that led to both a Senate and a House of Representatives came from Connecticuts two delegates.

They were at each others throats, Blumenthal said, but the Connecticut Compromise saved the day.

Getting involved for an individual you believe in, causes you believe in, he said are ways to fight that cynicism. I wake up a little cynical every day, Blumenthal said. I have to go Washington today and deal with that morass. Its still a swamp.

In response to another question about the growing student debt, Blumenthal said that is one of the greatest scandals of our time and suggests that student loans be forgiven for those graduates who become firefighters, or police officers or teachers.

A reverse GI Bill, Blumenthal said. He also said the government should not be making a profit off of student loans. I have been pounding my head against this problem for the eight years Ive been in the Senate.

Blumenthal also told the students he does not support Judge Brett Kavanaughs nomination to the Supreme Court, noting that he would be the vote to outlaw abortion and end a womans right to choose, and against same-sex marriage.

I have fought, and believed, for the last 40 years that the government has no right to be in your doctors examining room, he said. The government ought to stay out of your personal, private decisions.

As for the recent allegations that have come out regarding Kavanaugh and an incident sexual misconduct in high school, Blumenthal said there is no question that the vote on his nomination should be delayed.

greilly@ctpost.com; 203-842-2585
Living Gospel Equality Now: Loving in the Heart of God: Association of Roman Catholic Women Priests
By Trend





First Vice-President of Azerbaijan Mehriban Aliyeva met with a delegation led by Deputy Secretary General of NATO Rose Gottemoeller on Sept. 20.

Mehriban Aliyeva noted that Azerbaijan attaches great importance to cooperation with NATO, adding that the country attends various meetings of the Alliance.

She underlined that Azerbaijani peacekeepers have been serving in Afghanistan shoulder to shoulder with NATO servicemen since 2002, saying that in January 2018, Azerbaijan increased the number of its servicemen in the Resolute Support mission by 30 percent, bringing it to 120 people.

Our country also provides financial support to the Afghan national army and assistance in addressing logistical and transport problems, and organizes training for the personnel of the Afghan army, the first vice-president said.

Hailing successful development of high-level dialogue between NATO and Azerbaijan, Mehriban Aliyeva noted that Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyevs participation in the NATO Summit in Brussels this July and his meeting with Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg contributed to the development of bilateral relations between Azerbaijan and the organization.

The first vice-president said Azerbaijan highly appreciates NATO member states unequivocal support for its sovereignty and territorial integrity.

Mehriban Aliyeva also emphasized that Azerbaijan lauds NATOs great attention to gender issues, and the issues relating to women, peace and security.

We are very happy that a conference on this issue has recently been held in Azerbaijan, said the first vice-president, adding that gender equality is one of the key priorities of state policy in Azerbaijan.

She said that one of the steps taken by the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic 100 years ago was granting women the right to vote.

"We are proud that at the beginning of the twentieth century the Azerbaijani women achieved this equality before a number of developed countries, she said.

Mehriban Aliyeva pointed out that the Azerbaijani women have been actively involved in the countrys public and political life after the restoration of independence.

She noted that 17 percent of the members of parliament in Azerbaijan are women, expressing hope that the figure will increase in the future.

The first vice-president noted that 1,600 women are serving in the Azerbaijani army along with men. She underlined that women in Azerbaijan have enjoyed great respect for centuries, adding that this tradition lives on.

Mehriban Aliyeva emphasized that Azerbaijan is a peaceful country, which built relations with its neighbors and other countries on the basis of mutual respect.

However, it is for 25 years that we have been suffering from Armenia's policy of aggression, Mehriban Aliyeva said. As a result of this policy the internationally recognized territory of Nagorno-Karabakh and its seven surrounding districts have been occupied, more than one million people have become refugees and IDPs, hundreds of Azerbaijani women have been killed and captured during the conflict, and over 600 people, including women and children were brutally murdered during the Khojaly tragedy.

The first vice-president mentioned that although the UN Security Council adopted four resolutions on immediate and unconditional withdrawal of the Armenian occupying forces from the Azerbaijani territories 25 years ago, this occupation still continues.

Noting that Azerbaijan wants the conflict to be solved in a fair manner in accordance with the norms and principles of international law, First Vice-President Mehriban Aliyeva said Azerbaijan's territorial integrity must be restored, the refugees must return to their homeland, and only then peace will be established in the region.

"Peace, security are the factors that ensure mutual understanding among peoples," said the first vice-president, adding that NATO's humanitarian activity is highly praised in Azerbaijan and that the country is ready to work closely with the organization in this field.

You can rest assured that we have taken notes of your statements, said Deputy Secretary General of NATO Rose Gottemoeller.

She expressed satisfaction with the visit to Azerbaijan.

Gottemoeller noted that "Women, Peace and Security" conference in Baku coincides with remarkable days for the country as it celebrates the 100th anniversary of the Azerbaijani parliament.

She also spoke of the beauty of Baku, and hailed the countrys achievements.












Genevieve Reilly / Hearst Connecticut Media

FAIRFIELD  The answer to the question Whats for dinner? should be easy on Sept. 30 when the Friends of the Fairfield Public Library host their second annual Food Truck Festival.

Last years event drew about 4,000 people  twice what was expected  forcing organizers to switch to hand stamps when they ran out of wristbands. The turnout was so high that when some attendees got up to the window of their chosen food truck, all the food was gone.
FAIRFIELD  The Catholic Church can recover from the ongoing priest sex abuse scandals, but it will take work, and allowing all voices to be heard, speakers at a Sacred Heart University event said Wednesday.

A mix of college students and older adults were on hand for the conversation, that was led by several Sacred Heart professors and billed as a conversation In the wake of recent revelations.

While the scandals in Boston, highlighted in the 2015 movie, Spotlight, and the recent Grand Jury report in Pennsylvania were raised by the panelists, the Diocese of Bridgeports own cases were not brought up until a question from an audience member. Should the three Roman Catholic dioceses be investigated by the attorney generals office?

Part of the problem is that there is this separation, Caitlin Merritt, a professor of Catholic Studies, said, with the church performing its own internal investigations, rather than allegations turned over for criminal investigations. I think we do need to have criminal investigations wherever these allegations lie.

Michael Higgins, professor of Catholic Thought, pointed out that the church in France is not experiencing the same issues because any abuse allegation is automatically turned over for government authorities to investigate.

There are models we can look at, he said.

Higgins said while the flood of reports on priest sex abuse can be distressing, he said the church has faced darker times and has reformed itself.

The abuse of people in the church is not unique to our times, Higgins said, adding that awareness of the scandals, and of cash settlements with victims, was led by the secular press. We owe that secular world our thanks.

Higgins said the power structure of the church did not allow for easy transparency, and the clerical culture, which puts priests on a different level, contributes to issues of transparency and accountability.

Merritt said the secrecy surrounding the abuse was done out of a false sense of self-preservation. But, she said, they arent preserving anything if they dont build the structures necessary for transparency and accountability.

Another Catholic Studies professor, Jennifer Reek, said the Pennsylvania Grand Jury report is really quite shocking and horrific.

She said the jury members wrote that they need you to hear this and it is what is making things feel different this time.

Bishops, she said, need to be held accountable, and that was one of the real crimes.

They were never held accountable and it seems like there has been a real shift now, Reek said. She said the church received a report in 1985 and was urged to address the situation. Instead, she said the priest who wrote the report was punished.

I think this is a real turning point now, Reek said. It seems to me theres something really different about this.

greilly@ctpost.com; 203-842-2585
The following companies are subsidiares of Archer-Daniels-Midland: ADM (Shanghai) Management Co. LTD, ADM (Thailand) Ltd, ADM Ag Holdings Ltd, ADM Agri-Industries Company, ADM Agriculture Limited, ADM Agro Iberica S. L. U., ADM Agro Indust Latur and Vizag Pvt Ltd, ADM Agro Industries India Private Limited, ADM Agro Industries KOTA and AKOLA Pvt. Ltd., ADM Agro SRL, ADM Agroinvestimentos LTDA, ADM Alliance Nutrition of Puerto Rico LLC, ADM Americas S de RL, ADM Andina Peru SRL, ADM Antwerp NV, ADM Arkady Ireland Limited, ADM Asia-Pacific Trading Pte. Ltd., ADM Australia Holdings I PTY Limited, ADM Bio Science And Technology (Tianjin) Co Ltd, ADM Bioproductos SA DE CV, ADM CZERNIN SA, ADM Caribbean Inc, ADM Chile Comercial LTDA, ADM Clinton Bioprocessing Inc, ADM DO Brasil LTDA, ADM Direct Polska SP. ZO.O, ADM Dominican Holdings Inc., ADM Dominicana SA, ADM Edible Bean Specialties Inc, ADM Europe HoldCo SL, ADM European Holdings LLC, ADM European Management Holding GMBH, ADM Export Co, ADM Food Technology (Beijing) Co. Ltd., ADM France, ADM Germany GmbH, ADM Grain River System Inc., ADM Hamburg Aktiengesesllschaft, ADM Holding (Thailand) LTD, ADM Holdings LLC, ADM Hungary Agro Trading LLC, ADM Industries Centers Ltd, ADM International Holdings Inc, ADM International SARL, ADM Interoceanic LTD, ADM Investments LTD, ADM Investor Services Inc, ADM Investor Services International LTD, ADM Ireland Receivables Company Limited, ADM Israel, ADM Japan Ltd, ADM MALBORK SA, ADM Mainz GMBH, ADM Medsofts Sarl, ADM Mexico Inc, ADM Mexico SA DE CV, ADM Milling Co, ADM Milling LTD, ADM New Zealand Limited, ADM Olomouc S.R.O., ADM Paraguay SRL, ADM Protexin Limited, ADM Pura Limited, ADM Receivables LLC, ADM Rice Inc, ADM Ringaskiddy Unlimited Company, ADM Romania Logistics SRL, ADM Romania Trading SRL, ADM Specialty Ingredients - Europe BV, ADM Spyck GMBH, ADM Szamotuly SP Z O.O, ADM Trading Australia Pty. Ltd., ADM Trading Co, ADM Transportation Company, ADM Trucking Inc, ADM Vietnam CO. LTD, ADM WILD Europe GmbH and Co. KG, ADM WILD Ingredients GmbH, ADM WILD Nauen GmbH, ADM WILD Valencia S.A., ADM Wild Netherlands BV, ADM Worldwide Holdings LP, ADMIS Holding Co Inc., ADMIS Hong Kong LTD, ADMIS Singapore Pte Limited, AOR, AT Holdings II Company, Agri Port Services Investments Ltd., Agri Port Services LLC, Agricolas Madagascar SARLU, Agrinational Insurance Co, Agriserve, Agrograin LTD, Alfrebro LLC, Alfred C Toepfer International Netherlands BV, Alimenta USA, American River Transportation Company LLC, Ameriseed, Amylum Bulgaria EAD, Amylum Nisasta Sanayi Ve Ticarek Anonim Sirketi, Archer Daniels Midland (UK) Limited, Archer Daniels Midland Asia Pacific Ltd., Archer Daniels Midland Erith LTD, Archer Daniels Midland Europe BV, Archer Daniels Midland Europoort BV, Archer Daniels Midland Nederland BV, Archer Daniels Midland Singapore PTE LTD, Arinos Unlimited, Aston Foods & Food Ingredients, Balanceados Nova SA Balnova, Barbados Mills Limited, Bela Vista Bio Etanol Participacoes LTDA, Bern Aqua, BioPolis SL, Biopolis, Campa Sued GmbH & Co KG, Cattleman's Choice Loomix LLC, Chamtor, Ci ADM Colombia Ltda., Controladora ADM Sa De Cv, Crosswind Petfoods Inc., Daavision BV, Eaststarch, Eatem Corporation, Eatem Foods, Elstar Oils, English River Pellets Inc., Epicore Bionetworks INC, Epicore Networks (USA) INC, Erich Ziegler GmbH, Evialis France, Fasco Mills Co., Filozoo SRL, Florida Chemical, Florida Chemical Company LLC, GP Blanching Inc., Global Cocoa Holdings LTD, Golden Peanut Company LLC, Golden Peanut and Tree Nut Seed SA (PTY) LTD, Golden Peanut and Tree Nuts SA, Group Lysac, Guyomarc'h - VCN Company Limited, Guyomarc'h Vietnam CO LTD, HFR Shipping Company Ltd, HRA Shipping Company Ltd, HTI Shipping Company Ltd, Harvest Innovations, Hilltop Grain and Feed, Holding P and A Asia Company Limited, Hubei Meiweiyuan Biotechnology, Ilitchevskiy Maslo Extractionniy Zavod (IMEZ), Invivo NSA Asia PTE LTD, Invivo NSA Philippines Inc, Jamaica Flour Mills Limited, Julius Meijer-Alpharma BV, LLC ADM Ukraine, Liquid Feed Commodities, Malta Industries SA de CV, Malta-Texo De Mexico SA de CV, Master Mix of Trinidad LTD, Medsofts Investment Co, Medsofts L.L.C., Medsofts Trading Co, Mepla Comercio e Navegacao Ltda, NRG Inc, Naviera Chaco SRL, Neovia, Neovia Latina SL, Neovia Nutricao E Saude Animal LTDA, North Star Shipping S.R.L., P and A Marketing SA, PJSC ADM Illichivsk, PT Wirifa Sakti, Pancosma (Shanghai) Feed Additives CO LTD, Pancosma France SAS, Pancosma SA, Premiere Agri Technologies of Mexico Inc, Pura Foods LTD, Rodelle Inc., Schokinag-Schokolade-Industrie Herrmann, Sermix, Setna Nutricion SA, Societe Industrielle Des Oleagineux, Southern Cellulose Products Inc, Soy Investors LLC, Specialty Commodities, Specialty Commodities LLC, Sul Mineira Alimentos LTDA, SzSzV Kft, Toepfer International, Toepfer International Trading (Shanghai) Co. LTD., Vantage Corn Processors LLC, WILD Amazon Flavors Ltda, WILD Flavors, Wild Flavors Inc., Wild Flavors International GmbH, Wild Flavors Singapore Pte. Ltd., Wild Intermare GmbH, Wild Russia LLC, and Wisium SA (PTY) LTD.
Dubais Roads and Transport Authority, RTA, is participating in the 12th edition of International Trade Fair for Transport Technology, InnoTrans 2018, being held in the German capital, Berlin, said a report.



The event, which runs from September 18-21, sees the participation of 3,000 entities from 61 countries with about 200 innovations exhibited in five key segments: Rail Technology, Rail Infrastructure, Public Transport, Interiors and Tunnel Construction, said a report in WAM.



RTA has exhibited key projects and initiatives including the Route 2020, Enterprise Command and Control Centre, Dubai International Project Management Forum, Hamdan bin Mohammed Award for Innovation in Project Management, Dubai World Challenge for Self-Driving Transport - which will be held in October 2019, 3D Printing and the Hyperloop.



Director general and chairman of the Board of Executive Directors of the RTA, Mattar Al Tayer, headed RTAs delegation at the opening ceremony of the exhibition and conference.



A discussion panel about mobility, innovation and sustainable transport focused on key solutions and innovations of multi mobility. Topics discussed included digitisation of rail infrastructure and innovation in increased rail capacity without increasing areas for infrastructure construction. The event witnessed announcements of top rail projects currently underway all over the globe, the report said.



Al Tayer said that RTAs participation in InnoTrans 2018 was part of its endeavours to keep pace with the fast changes of the rail industry and familiarise with the latest international best practices of public transport construction, operation and maintenance.



"We are always keen on tracking the latest trends of metro safety & security procedures and quality passenger services. The exhibition is a good opportunity to meet with manufacturers of rail and transport systems, and gain exposure to international experience in the field of rail and public transport," he said.
Mkango Resources Ltd., together with its subsidiaries, explores for and develops rare earth elements and associated minerals in the Republic of Malawi, Africa. It explores for uranium, niobium, tantalum, zircon, nickel, cobalt, rutile, and gold ores. The company's principal project is the Songwe Hill property within the Phalombe exploration license, which covers an area of 849.1 square kilometers located in southeast Malawi. It also holds 100% interests in the Thambani, Chimimbe Hill, and Mchinji licenses. Mkango Resources Ltd. is based in Vancouver, Canada.

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Genesee & Wyoming Inc. owns and leases freight railroads. It operates through three segments: North American Operations, Australian Operations, and U.K./European Operations. The company transports various commodities, including agricultural products, autos and auto parts, chemicals and plastics, coal and coke, food and kindred products, lumber and forest products, metallic ores, metals, minerals and stone, petroleum products, pulp and paper, waste, and other commodities. It owns or leases 122 freight railroads, including 105 short line railroads and 2 regional freight railroads located in the United States, 8 short line railroads located in Canada, 3 railroads located in Australia, 1 railroad located in the United Kingdom, 1 railroad in Poland and Germany, and 2 railroads in the Netherlands with a total of approximately 16,200 miles of track. The company also operates 6,200 additional miles of track that is owned or leased by others. In addition, it operates deep sea maritime containers and provides bulk haulage, including coal, aggregates, cement, and infrastructure services. Further, the company provides rail service at approximately 40 ports; rail-ferry service in North America, Australia, and Europe; and contract coal loading and railcar switching for industrial customers. Genesee & Wyoming Inc. was founded in 1899 and is headquartered in Darien, Connecticut.

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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.

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Ormat Technologies, Inc. operates as a holding company. The firm engages in the provision of geothermal and recovered energy power business. It operates through the following segments: Electricity, Product and Energy Storage. The Electricity segment focuses in the sale of electricity from the company's power plants pursuant to PPAs. The Product segment involves in the manufacture, including design and development, of turbines and power units for the supply of electrical energy and in the associated construction of power plants utilizing the power units manufactured by the company to supply energy from geothermal fields and other alternative energy sources. The Energy Storage segment consists of battery energy storage systems as a service and management of curtailable customer loads under contracts with U.S. retail energy providers and directly with large commercial and industrial customers. The company was founded in 1965 and is headquartered in Reno, NV.

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Two Harbors Investment pays an annual dividend of $0.68 per share and currently has a dividend yield of 10.57%. TWO has a dividend yield higher than 75% of all dividend-paying stocks, making it a leading dividend payer. Two Harbors Investment has been increasing its dividend for 2 consecutive year(s), indicating that it does not yet have a strong track record of dividend growth. The dividend payout ratio of Two Harbors Investment is 43.04%. This payout ratio is at a healthy, sustainable level, below 75%. Based on EPS estimates, Two Harbors Investment will have a dividend payout ratio of 83.95% in the coming year. This indicates that Two Harbors Investment may not be able to sustain their current dividend.

View Two Harbors Investment's dividend history.
iShares Latin America 40 ETF's stock was trading at $22.49 on March 11th, 2020 when COVID-19 reached pandemic status according to the World Health Organization (WHO). Since then, ILF shares have increased by 13.7% and is now trading at $25.58.

View which stocks have been most impacted by COVID-19.
The UAE has led the Middle Easts private K-12 growth, with Dubai and Abu Dhabi accounting for 60 per cent of the market, said a report by L.E.K. Consulting, a leading global management consulting firm.



According to the report titled The Private K-12 Opportunity in the Middle East, released ahead of the IPSEF Middle East conference taking place in Dubai this weekend, the private K-12 market in the region has grown three times faster on average than GDP in the last three years alone, and is even larger than the higher education market that is valued at $3.7 billion.



A favourable regulatory environment, consumer willingness to pay, and promising demographics in both the local and expatriate populations make the regions K-12 opportunity highly attractive, said Ashwin Assomull, partner, L.E.K. Consulting, who will present the full details of the report at IPSEF Dubai.



According to Assomull, the Middle East has benefited from the entry of large global chains such as Nord Anglia as well as prestigious independent school brands (e.g. NLCS, Brighton College), alongside the growth of homegrown private operators such as GEMS and Taaleem.



Private K-12 in the UAE has been at the forefront of growth in the region and continues to experience unparalleled market expansion, with close to 24,000 seats added in the most expensive schools in the market over the last three years, he added.



The UAE has historically led the wave of growth in the regions education sector and still represents an attractive market opportunity. Dubai and Abu Dhabi are among the largest and have been popular with investors.



These markets widely focus on expat students since they tend to offer international K-12 options across all price points (ranging from $1,000 to $25,000). They are different from markets such as Singapore and Hong Kong, which tend to cater to primarily wealthy expats. The availability of options in the UAE enables parents to move across price segments as household income changes. This broad coverage has given rise to strong, high-quality mid-priced and premium K-12 markets, contributing to the UAEs higher overall tuition revenue.



Meanwhile, early years education will also be in the spotlight at IPSEF Dubai, as experts see growth prospects within this segment.



Courteney Donaldson, managing director  Childcare & Education, Christie & Co said, The fragmented nature of for-profit provision in the UAE, along with other factors, including economic, infrastructure and accessibility, and as a regulated sector, has meant that the UAE has become increasingly attractive to a number of international day nursery groups that are keen acquire high calibre early years businesses across the UAE, and additionally seek partners to facilitate organic growth and development of new early years ventures.



Donaldsons presentation at IPSEF will look at the different reasons as to why for-profit trade buyers are going global - buying and investing overseas  as well as other issues such as the establishment of international partnerships and acquisitions that can lead to the development of early years education.  TradeArabia News Service
Call it a monster of a fishing contest and it would be a good way to describe the biggie of the year, the annual Fall Brawl, a huge fishing event made even grander each autumn as more and more anglers from more and more places hear about it and take part in it.

Indeed, the 2018 edition of the brawl may draw more than 4,000 registered contestants, that after an unspectacular birth a few years back when some four dozen casual Lake Erie walleye night- bite fans tossed in a couple bucks each to provide a prize for the catcher of the biggest walleye.

It was thought to be a fun contest between friends, nothing more. That was then, but this is now, and this year its all about winning a $100,000 worth of goodies for first prize.

Running late October through November, the brawl is all about Lake Eries now legendary night fishery for near-shore walleyes, fish of all sizes that seem to be staging for the upcoming winter months and following that, the early spring move to the western basin reefs.

Big

However, fish of all sizes dont play a part in this game. Just the big ones do, the real big ones.

Winning fish are all females, the biggest of the species, and if last years winner wasnt big enough to bring spectators out of their seats, no walleye ever will.

The 2017 top spot was awarded to Matt Branigan for his 15-pound walleye. Previous winners were more common trophy fish in the 12-pound class.

Night Brite

The Night Bite is just what it sounds like. Ten years ago it was something only the brave took part in.

Others might call it stupid, but come on, good fishing is good fishing and the only others out there were duck hunters.

Best months are November and December, maybe even January if the lake is still ice free.

The interest in night fishing grew steadily but with the creation of the Fall Brawl it has increased so rapidly that almost ever harbor from east to west is jammed with anglers heading out at sunset on any given evening.

Some call it a city of lights as hundreds of boats crowd in near the shore waters to catch their share, and one thing the brawl has made very clear; its all about luck, nothing more.

In a nutshell, the luckiest person and the unluckiest walleye will meet. It may happen on a Thursday or maybe a Sunday and it isnt about the most skilled or the best equipped or the highest paid.

The winner may just be that fellow with the beat-up boat, the cheap fishing rod and a borrowed lure. Thats the best part of the whole event.

Pre-registration, due by Oct. 17, is offered online ($32) or on paper ($30) along with all the rules at www.lakeeriefishingderby.com.
SALINEVILLE, Ohio  Rich Wright has been named director of the Utica Shale Academy.

Wright replaces Eric Sampson, who was director of the community school since its inception in 2014.

The school has locations at Southern Local and Columbiana high schools in Columbiana County. It offers welding in conjunction with the New Castle School of Trades and courses involved with the gas and oil industry, and Wright has been working with the USA board of directors and sponsor Jefferson County Educational Service Center to expand the program.

Wed like to expand by increasing our student options and one of those areas includes a stronger connection with NCST, he said.

Theyre also looking at a technology-based partnership with Youngstown State University.

Current student enrollment is 45 participants between the main location at Southern Local and the Columbiana branch.

About 50 students have graduated from USA since it began, with the largest class in 2018 at 22 people.

Grades 9-12

USA provides curricula required by the Ohio Department of Education and includes a customizable digital curriculum allowing for acceleration or remediation, along with flexible scheduling. It also offers certification courses in SafeLand, OSHA10, First Aid and CPR, hydrogen sulfide (H2S) awareness and confined space certifications.

Registration is open and the academy is offered to students in grades 9-12. Academy graduates receive a high school diploma, certificates and college credit options offered through Eastern Gateway Community College.

For more information about USAs programs, contact Wright at 330-420-5353 or visit the website at uticashaleschool.com.
OBERLIN, Ohio  Kyle Riggs, Lorain County JVS industrial equipment mechanics 2017 graduate from Firelands High School, will receive one of the National FFA Organizations highest honors, the American Degree, this October.

This degree is awarded to less than 1 percent of FFA members.

Riggs currently attends the University of Northwestern Ohio in Lima, majoring in agricultural equipment/diesel technician.

Being a part of the JVS and their FFA chapter helped me realize that this is exactly what I want to be doing for my career. The courses I took have prepared for the next steps in my life and also showed me that this isnt just a hobby, that this is what I like to do and want to do for the rest of my life, said Riggs, who hopes to become an on/off highway equipment road technician.

The American FFA Degree is awarded at the National FFA Convention and Expo, which will be held in Indianapolis, on Oct. 24-27.

Riggs is the fourth JVS student to receive this honor.



SULLIVAN, Ohio  The Black River FFA chapter of Sullivan, has been recognized in the 2018 National Chapter Award Program from the National FFA Organization.

Chapters are rewarded for providing educational experiences for the entire membership. Chapters that received star ratings during judging July 22-27 and will be recognized at the 2018 National FFA Convention and Expo, Oct. 24-27, in Indianapolis.

All-star FFA chapters receive honors made possible by corporate sponsor John Deere.
CHARLESTON, W.Va.  A five-year strategic plan to move West Virginias Agriculture industry forward is in the works. This gives the public another opportunity to offer their input into the process.

The steering committee of the West Virginia Agriculture Advisory Board, made up of the West Virginia Department of Agriculture, Farm Bureau, Conservation Agency, Extension Service and others, is holding 14 community meetings across the state during October.

This is a chance for West Virginians to have a say in the future of our agriculture economy, said Commissioner of Agriculture Kent Leonhardt. We are inviting agriculture business owners and stakeholders to participate in a hands-on process to identify specific strategies for how we can help move the industry forward and what direction we need to take.

More than 500 people completed a survey earlier this summer narrowing down the issues that most impact West Virginia agriculture. That is the stepping-off point for the community meetings. Producers and agriculture stakeholders are urged to attend one of the 14 events and offer their input. The community meetings are being held in Charleston, New Martinsville, Ghent, Sutton, Martinsburg, Moorefield, Parkersburg, Philippi, Core, Lewisburg, Tridelphia, Wayne, Point Pleasant and Mt. Clare.

The first is Oct. 1, at 6 p.m. at Camp Virgil Tate, in Charleston. The second meeting is Oct. 2, same time, at the Wetzel County 4-H Camp, in New Martinsville.

To view all 14 meetings and locations, and to register, visit https://bit.ly/2x8xKSq. Advance registration is required.
Bill and Donna Vair, from Hartville, Ohio, took us along in June when they visited the Isle of Man TT (Tourist Trophy) motorcycle races. We also took many other sights during the trip, including the Slieve League Cliffs in Ireland.

STAY INFORMED. SIGN UP! Up-to-date agriculture news in your inbox!
A new report has been launched to show the progress European companies are making towards meeting their 2025 cage-free egg commitments.

In recent years, a wave of cage-free egg commitments from leading food businesses around the world has promised to transform the future for laying hens.

Numerous retailers and major food businesses have pledged a transition by 2025, including the UK's leading egg producer Noble Foods, Asda, Lidl, Aldi, Tesco, Morrisons and Iceland.

The aim of the European EggTrack report, launched by Compassion in World Farming, is to track those companies that have made the commitment.

The report will encourage them to report year-on-year progress towards their cage-free goals.

And while the 2025 commitment target may still seem a long way away, it equates to only five laying hen flock cycles.

Companies have been urged by the animal welfare charity to start planning their production system changes now, and work closely with suppliers to ensure implementation by the agreed deadline.

EggTrack will not only track data from 83 group level companies, which have been selected for their size and therefore potential impact in the market, but also 132 subsidiary business divisions, with a total of 201 individual commitments being tracked.

Noble Foods is noteworthy for being the sole producer included in EggTrack this year.

The report highlights the progress companies are making across not only shell or whole egg, but also their product and ingredient egg supply chains too.
Top European Union politicians must ensure there is no Mercosur deal on beef while Brexit remains unresolved, the Ulster Farmers' Union has said.

The comment came as European Commission officials hold talks in Uruguay with prominent South American politicians representing Mercosur.

The Latin American trade bloc consists of Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay.

UK farmers have frequently blasted the trade talks between the EU and Mercosur, who say that the South American countries do not come close to matching the food safety, animal welfare or environmental standards which farmers comply with in the UK and across Europe.

Ulster Farmers Union (UFU) beef and lamb chairman, Sam Chesney said farmers work hard to maintain world-leading standards.

Local farmers have invested to make sure they deliver what consumers want and this cannot be ignored or set to one side by Brussels, Mr Chesney said.

He added that these standards do not apply in South America, warning that the big players there, led by Brazil, would use the weakness of their national currencies to mount an export drive into Europe.

No one is opposed to international trade deals. Farmers realise the global opportunities potentially available to our industry, said Mr Chesney.

But we cannot support trade negotiations taking place on an uneven playing field that sacrifice European agriculture for the supposed wider benefits for the eurozone of free trade with South America.
A farmer has used the power of social media to successfully track a dog owner after twelve of his sheep were killed following an attack.

Luke Smith, a farmer from Forest Green, near Dorking, Surrey, stumbled across the gruesome discovery on Saturday (September 15) morning.

He found that 17 of sheep sheep, 12 fatally, had been attacked by two dogs.

The 26-year-old has since made a public Facebook post, urging the public for help in finding those responsible for the "horrendous" attack.

"It happened in Forest Green, and please ask you share this post especially in that area to help us find the dogs responsible, to avoid this happening again to us or anyone else locally," the post says.

In an update, Mr Smith said the online appeal led to someone claiming to be the owner of the two dogs.

He said: "We have found the dogs. Thanks to you and the power of Facebook this has happened and I could not thank you all enough for this support and help."

Speaking to Surrey Live, the farmer said the dog owner was kind enough to ring.

"She was obviously very distressed and extremely apologetic and I didn't feel that was the right time to go through the ins and outs.

"But I actually thanked her. There's no point being angry, it's not going to bring the sheep back," he said.
Dubais Roads and Transport Authority (RTA) has exhibited key mass transit projects & initiatives at the ongoing 12th edition of International Trade Fair for Transport Technology (InnoTrans 2018) in Berlin, Germany.



The projects included the Route 2020, Enterprise Command & Control Center (EC3), Dubai International Project Management Forum (DIPMF), Hamdan bin Mohammed Award for Innovation in Project Management, Dubai World Challenge for Self-Driving Transport (Oct 2019), 3D Printing and the Hyperloop.



The event is held from 18-21 September, with the participation of 3000 entities from 61 countries with about 200 innovations exhibited in five key segments: Rail Technology, Rail Infrastructure, Public Transport, Interiors and Tunnel Construction.



Director General and Chairman of RTA Mattar Al Tayer headed RTAs delegation at the opening ceremony of the exhibition and conference held under the patronage of HE Andreas Scheuer, Federal Minister of the German Transport and Digital Infrastructure.



Al Tayer toured the exhibition that highlighted top solutions & innovations of multi mobility, digitization of rail infrastructure and capacity and customers services. RTAs delegation was acquainted with the latest developments of rail management & operation, and the use of 3D printing in rail and spare parts manufacturing.



Al Tayer inspected RTAs stand, which focuses on key public transport projects and initiatives. The array of exhibits include Route 2020 of the Dubai Metro Red Line extension by 15 km to the Expo 2020 site, and the Enterprise Command And Control Centre (EC3 ) one of the biggest and most sophisticated transport control centres in the world. The centre uses cutting-edge technologies in controlling and integrating multi-mode transit means, coordinates with other control centres in the Emirate and meets the needs of hosting Expo 2020.



RTAs stand also promotes the Dubai International Project Management Forum (8-11 Dec 2018) under the theme Building Nations, Hamdan bin Mohammed Award for Innovation in Project Management and Dubai World Challenge for Self-Driving Transport (Oct 2019) which carries prize money of US$5m. RTAs initiatives on display also include 3D Printing and the Hyperloop technologies.



Al Tayer and the delegation attended the Rail Leaders' Summit (The future of cities is rail) in the presence of leaders of top eight operators of rail systems worldwide. The summit discussed the trends of global cities in the smart integration of rail in public transport.



On the sidelines of the Conference, Al Tayer held a series of meetings with top leaders including the British Secretary of State for Transport HE Chris Grayling. The meeting discussed the cooperation between Serco (Dubai Metro operator) and RTA, and metro future expansion plans including the Green Line.



Al Tayer also met Michael Peter, CEO of Siemens Transport, and discussed Dubais integrated mobility platform, smart apps for serving customers, 3D printing, and RTAs future rail projects. Al Tayer and the delegation reviewed the latest driverless trains manufactured by Siemens.



Al Tayer also held a meeting with HE Millard Crawford, Deputy CEO of Land Transport Systems, Thales. The meeting reviewed the latest products and services launched by the company such as fibre-optic solutions, mainline traffic management system, new digital platform apps (Eclipse & Naia) and the new Gen of Seltrac G7.



We are always keen on tracking the latest trends of metro safety & security procedures and quality passenger services. The exhibition is a good opportunity to meet with manufacturers of rail and transport systems, and gain exposure to international experience in the field of rail and public transport, said Al Tayer.



The conference has become an iconic international rail event offering highlights of rail infrastructure and carriage interiors. As RTA serves a broad spectrum of the community, it is keen on delivering world-class services in line with the development upswing witnessed by Dubai across the board, concluded Al Tayer.  TradeArabia News Service
The Welsh Chair of Nature Friendly Farming Network has resigned citing differences of opinion on recognising potential impacts of policies on families and food production.

Gwynedd farmer Geraint Davies, who resigned as Welsh Chair last week, has cited the differences of opinion as key reasons he felt he could no longer lead the organisation in Wales.

Nature Friendly Farming Network (NFFN), which was launched in January this year at the Real Oxford Farming Conference, comprises farmers from across the UK.

It is funded and supported by a range of organisations, including the RSPB, Wildlife Trusts, National Trust, Friends of the Earth and the Organic Soil Association.

The organisation calls on the UK to create a post-Brexit framework that will help farmers restore British wildlife, reverse declines in soil quality and help manage the impacts of climate change, at the same time as growing food.

However, speaking about his decision to step down, Mr Davies said his "strong views" on family farming and food production are not shared with some organisations.

He said: This decision was not taken lightly, but following numerous discussions with the charities and stakeholders who support and fund NFFN it became clear to me that my strong views about protecting Welsh farming families, food production, rural communities and our natural environment were not necessarily shared by some of these organisations.

I also felt that some of the big worries about the impacts of what has been proposed in Wales and England, in terms of moving rapidly to an untried, untested and potentially illegal system of providing support through a public goods scheme, were not being taken seriously.

'Hand in hand'

Mr Davies, who was made Chair of NFFN in June, said he joined the organisation to try and bridge the perceived gap between agriculture and environmental bodies.

I am passionate about nature and wildlife and about farming and food production, and the two go hand in hand on our farm here above Bala, he said.

Im proud to say that we have this year created three new Golden Plover nesting sites on our mountain - not despite farming but because of the presence and management of grazing livestock, without which those species would not be there.

Mr Davies said he had major concerns that while what was being proposed in Wales and England might work for his farm, on many others the impact could be terrible for families, with serious knock on effects for communities, jobs and the wider economy.

I just dont think these concerns about people, families and communities are being taken seriously enough by some, even if they do pay lip-service to the issue, he said.

At the end of the day, if the changes proposed are not investigated thoroughly to make sure they are safe, or are introduced too rapidly, it will not only affect families and communities, but also the habitat and species which rely on farming.

I dont think some take those issues and concerns seriously enough. They seem to want to base policies on blind faith it will all turn out OK rather than careful consideration, added Mr Davies.
The NFU will be bringing its fringe events to all party conferences this year as a way to encourage discussion on future UK farming policy.

Fringe events are being jointly held with the Food and Drink Federation at all party conferences, which started this week at the Liberal Democrats conference in Brighton.

After the NFUs first exhibition stand at the Conservative party conference last year, it will be hosting an additional exhibition at the Labour party conference.

Visitors to the stand will be able to sample British produce and see how the role of farming plays in producing food for Britain.

The importance of food and farming to the country will be highlighted to those visiting the stand, as well as the role of farmers maintaining and enhancing the countryside.

Delegates will have the opportunity to pledge their support to British farming and will also be able to experience harvest in a virtual reality experience in a Massey Ferguson red tractor.

NFU President Minette Batters said: This is a vital time for British food and farming and it is clear there is significant parliamentary backing for our sector at this crucial time, particularly as the Agriculture Bill begins its passage through Parliament.

Just last week we saw over 140 MPs support Back British Farming day and it was great to see the entire Shadow Cabinet show their commitment to the sector.

This is a fantastic opportunity to showcase our vibrant industry to thousands and I am proud to take the best of British farming to the party conferences.

Labour party conference fringe event will be held on Tuesday 25 September, and the Conservative party conference fringe event will be held on Monday 1 October.
Use of antibiotics in UK livestock falls again, report shows

Last year saw another drop in use of antibiotics
2020 was a year marked by hardships and challenges, but the Fauquier community has proven resilient. The Fauquier Times is honored to serve as your community companion. To say thank you for your continued support, wed like to offer all our subscribers -- new or returning --

4 WEEKS FREE DIGITAL AND PRINT ACCESS.

We understand the importance of working to keep our community strong and connected. As we move forward together into 2021, it will take commitment, communication, creativity, and a strong connection with those who are most affected by the stories we cover.

We are dedicated to providing the reliable, local journalism you have come to expect. We are committed to serving you with renewed energy and growing resources. Let the Fauquier Times be your community companion throughout 2021, and for many years to come.
The Fauquier Times is honored to serve as your community companion. To say thank you, we are excited to offer 4 weeks FREE Digital & Print access to all subscribers new and returning alike.

We are dedicated to continuing providing reliable, high quality journalism. This is possible with the trust and support of our subscribers in the community we are proud to serve.
Summary

Company Announcement Date: September 20, 2018 FDA Publish Date: September 25, 2018 Product Type: Medical Devices

Cardiovascular Reason for Announcement: Recall Reason Description Potential interruption and/or inability to start therapy to the patient Company Name: Getinge Brand Name: Brand Name(s) Cardiosave Product Description: Product Description Maquet/Getinge Cardiosave Intra-Aortic Balloon Pumps (IABP)

Company Announcement

Getinge is voluntarily initiating a Worldwide recall involving a field correction of approximately 5,223 Maquet/Getinge Cardiosave Intra-Aortic Balloon Pumps (IABP) sold by Datascope Corp., for a potential interruption and/or inability to start therapy to the patient regarding the use of certain Intra-Aortic Balloons (IABs) prior to or during the use with Cardiosave IABP for users who are at altitudes above 3200 feet/975 meters. This condition could potentially lead to patient hemodynamic instability.

It is important to note, there have been no adverse events or deaths attributed to this issue.

AFFECTED PRODUCT PART NUMBER DISTRIBUTION DATE Cardiosave Hybrid IABP 0998-00-0800-XX March 06, 2012 to

August 31, 2018 Cardiosave Rescue IABP 0998-UC-0800-XX

IABs used with the CS100 or CS300 IABPs are not affected by this issue. Interim immediate actions for consumers who have Cardiosave IABPs:

The only action to be taken by the user for this issue is to follow the operating altitudes as specified below for the Cardiosave IABP.

Balloon Name and Size: Operating Altitude: Sensation 34cc / 40cc,

Sensation Plus 40cc / 50cc -1,250 feet to 3,200 feet (795 mmHg to 676 mmHg) (1,060 hPa to 901 hPa)

-381 to 975 meters (795 mmHg to 676 mmHg) (1,060 hPa to 901 hPa) Mega 50cc -1,250 feet to 5,000 feet (795 mmHg to 632 mmHg) (1,060 hPa to 843 hPa)

-381 to 1,524 meters (795 mmHg to 632 mmHg) (1,060 hPa to 843 hPa) Mega 30cc / 40cc

Linear 25cc / 34cc / 40cc -1,250 feet to 12,000 feet (795 mmHg to 483 mmHg) (1,060 hPa to 644 hPa)

-381 to 3,657 meters (795 mmHg to 483 mmHg) (1,060 hPa to 644 hPa)

For Japan users only

Balloon Name and Size: Operating Altitude: TransRay 34cc / 40cc,

TransRay Plus 35cc / 40cc -381 to 975 meters (795 mmHg to 676 mmHg) (1,060 hPa to 901 hPa) Yamato Plus N or R 30cc / 35cc / 40cc -381 to 3,657 meters (795 mmHg to 483 mmHg) (1,060 hPa to 644 hPa)

Alternatively, use a CS100 or CS300 IABP since they are not affected by this issue.

Maquet/Getinge is currently developing a software correction to address the altitude issue. Maquet/Getinge anticipates the installation of the updated software to begin February 2019. A Maquet/Getinge Service representative will contact affected customers to schedule the installation of the updated software.

Customers with questions may contact the company via telephone + 1 973 709 7967, Monday through Friday, between the hours of 8:00 a.m. and 6:00 p.m. EST. or via e-mail at Helena.swan@getinge.com.

Adverse reactions or quality problems experiences with the use of this product may be reported to the FDAs MedWatch Adverse Event Reporting program either online, by regular mail or by fax.

Complete and submit the report Online : www.fda.gov/medwatch/report.htm

: www.fda.gov/medwatch/report.htm Regular Mail or Fax: Download form www.fda.gov/MedWatch/getforms.htm

or call 1-800-332-1088 to request a reporting form, then complete and return to the address on the pre- addressed form, or submit by fax to 1-800-FDA-0178.
Category Select Category Apparel/Garments Textiles Fashion Technical Textiles Information Technology E-commerce Retail Corporate Association Press Release

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Red Hot & Sizzling

Disha Patani is one of the hottest Bollywood actress' around and she regularly posts bikini pictures by the beach. Her fans love her holiday images and we're all waiting for more pictures. We're sure it's gonna be much hotter than this one.

Hotness Alert

Just a few weeks ago, Disha Patani posted this stunningly hot picture on her social media handle and set tongues wagging. She's an absolute visual treat, folks!

Eye Candy Of The Day

Disha Patani cannot be considered as the eye candy of the month, in fact she should be considered as the eye candy of the day, everyday!

On The Work Front

The lovely and hot Disha Patani is currently shooting for her upcoming movie Bharat, which also stars Salman Khan and Katrina Kaif in the lead roles. The movie completed its leg in Mumbai and Malta and the crew will soon begin shooting in Abu Dhabi. Bharat is scheduled to hit the theatres during Eid 2019 and is directed by Ali Abbas Zafar.

A Trapeze Artist

Disha Patani plays the role of a trapeze artist in Bharat and Salman Khan portrays the character of a daredevil bike stuntman. Disha has been working really hard for the role and her Instagram handle is filled with gym workout videos. Playing the role of a trapeze artist requires intense workout and Disha is doing just that.
A day after Bollywood actor Salman Khan's upcoming film's title was changed from Loveratri to Loveyatri, a Hindu outfit told the Gujarat High Court Wednesday that the new title was unacceptable to it. The city-based Sanatan Foundation had last week moved a Public Interest Litigation (PIL) seeking change of the title and some content of the film, or its ban for "hurting sentiments of Hindus".

The outfit told the court Wednesday that the new film title was not acceptable as it still sounds similar to Hindu festival 'Navratri'.

The petitioner's lawyer B B Agrawal submitted in the court that the film's tagline - a journey of love - as shown in its posters and promotions could be converted into "Love Ki Yatra".

Salman Khan, the film's producer, had Tuesday announced on micro-blogging site Twitter that the movie's title had been changed to Loveyatri, from Loveratri.

During a hearing on the admission of the PIL Wednesday, the respondent producer's lawyer told the court that the litigation was "immature" as the movie was yet to get a certification from the censor board. A division bench of Chief Justice R Subhash Reddy and Justice V M Pancholi directed the lawyer representing the film's producer to seek instructions regarding the content of the movie, and asked how its promos were released without certification from the censor board.

Justice Reddy also said that if needed the bench will watch the film. The movie marks the debut of Salman Khan's brother-in- law Aayush Sharma and actor Warina Hussain and is set against the backdrop of Navratri. Directed by debutant Abhiraj Minawala, the film is slated for release on October 5.

The PIL had urged the court to ask the film's producers to change its title and remove the content that hurts Hindu sentiment as an alternative to a ban. The petitioner claimed that the film will offend Hindus upon its release. It claimed that the film's (original) title Loveratri as well as some dialogues shown in the trailers were offensive.

The PIL contended that while Navratri is a pious festival, the name of the film conveys that it is all about getting "intimate". "If this movie is allowed to be viewed in cinemas in Gujarat, it will leave a very bad impact on the youngsters and the public at large," it claimed. PTI

Also Read: Sui Dhaaga Challenge: Shahrukh Khan Is The Winner, But There's A Hilarious Twist!
Abu Dhabi Global Market (ADGM) has signed an agreement with Etisalat, and Emirates Integrated Telecommunications Company (EITC) - Du to boost digital innovation in the financial freezone.



The memorandum of understanding (MoU) includes deploying and showcasing innovative solutions and integrated services to transform the digital offerings of information and communications technology and related services across Al Maryah Island.



Both MoUs were signed during the 2018 FinTech Abu Dhabi Summit by ADGM held under the patronage of Sheikh Hazza bin Zayed Al Nahyan, deputy chairman of Abu Dhabi Executive Council.



The deal with Etisalat was signed between Sultan Al Dhaheri, general manager of Etisalat Abu Dhabi; and Khalid Al Suwaidi, chief operating officer of ADGM; and witnessed by Saif Mohamed Al Hajeri, chairman of the Department of Economic Development; and Ahmed Al Sayegh, chairman of ADGM.



The agreement with du was signed by Osman Sultan, CEO of EITC; and Khalid Al Suwaidi.



The MoU between ADGM and Etisalat formally establishes a framework where Etisalat will provide innovative and integrated telecommunications service offerings catering to ADGMs registered firms and entities.



This will also facilitate further exploration and development of Etisalats research facilities and programmes focusing on various areas, including FinTech, blockchain and cyber security. As part of the partnership, Etisalat will pilot appropriate products and services on ADGMs financial freezone on Al Maryah Island before opening up to the wider community in the UAE.



Al Dhaheri said, "Today Etisalats digital initiatives are manifested through our diverse product portfolio, digital experience, network modernisation keeping in line with our strategy and vision to Drive the Digital Future to Empower Societies. We are proud to be partnering with ADGM to foster the digital ecosystem, stimulate technological innovation, and provide innovative solutions and smart services catering to ADGMs registered firms and entities and community in Al Maryah Island."



Du and ADGM will jointly explore appropriate business opportunities and collaborations in areas of communications, technology infrastructure, innovation platforms, pilot projects, digital services that cater to the evolving needs of ADGMs registered firms and community set up in Al Maryah Island.



Sultan said, "One of our key objectives at du, is to strengthen our partnerships both on the public and the private sectors to enable the digital transformation of innovative technologies in the UAE. Our strategic alliance with Abu Dhabi Global Market is a reflection of the confidence and trust reposed in our brand du, in undertaking the digital and ICT transformation agenda across all sectors. The mandate, will provide du the opportunity to collaborate in the development of bespoke mission critical solutions and innovative experiential services that will propel ADMC with a defining competitive digital advantage.



Al Suwaidi added: "Technology and access to current information are fundamental enablers of businesses, decision-making and opportunities. We are pleased to further our business collaboration with both leading telecommunications providers to introduce more innovative products and smart services to transform the business delivery and accelerate operational efficiency for our community and stakeholders on Al Maryah Island, Abu Dhabi and wider UAE."  TradeArabia News Service
Mahesh Bhatt Returns Back To Direction

Announcing the film today on his 70th birthday, Mahesh Bhatt was quoted as saying by DNA, "As I step into the sunset years of my life, the last act, there's something that has happened to me. Never in my wildest dreams did I think that I will ever hear the words - a Mahesh Bhatt film - mentioned around me again. Alia used to say, Papa, make a film'. And I would tell her that I am like an extinct volcano. But then, suddenly one day, the volcano was rumbling. You know, they say that autumn is another spring, so as I go into my autumn years, it's the process of what is called decomposition or decay, that too is a way of life."

Mahesh Bhatt On Reuniting With Sanjay Dutt

"Don't forget that the two years he spent in jail haven't been tapped into by anyone. And I know that buried in there is that unspoken anguish, which I had tuned in to during the making of Naam (1986). I think life has brought us a full circle. If there ever was an actor who has trusted me and went on to become a star purely because of his ability to surrender, it's Sanju. He is like that lion, who perhaps can only be tamed by the language of love."

Sanjay Dutt On Starring In Sadak 2

"I'm lucky that before I die, I get to work with the man I love the most. For any actor, Bhatt saab is a dream to work with. My last film with him was Gumraah (1993), soon after he quit direction. Ever since, I have done many films, but I always remember him. I have always believed that one day he will get back on the field and make that one epic. I know what I'm signing up for because I've worked with him in many movies, but these kids don't know what they are getting into (laughs)."

Alia Bhatt Opens Up About Working Under Her Home Banner

"Every time I was asked the question, with a little bit of heaviness in my heart, I would say, "My dad is not going to direct and he has told me this time and again. But whenever I would work with my dad and his company, it would be special." Back then, I used to say it because it was the right thing to say, but little did I know that I was putting out a great feeling into the universe. I can't call this just another special experience because we'll have to create a new word to describe it. People often say that you can have one wish fulfilled, but I have had two dreams come true at the same time. One is to be an actor and second is to be directed by my father."

Aditya Roy Kapoor On Being A Part Of Sadak 2

"I had the pleasure of having Bhatt saab narrate a film that he was going to direct. It was a surreal experience. Every 20 minutes I wondered if he wanted to take a break, but he was ready to keep going. He was enjoying himself so much." Talking about signing the film, Aditya says it wasn't something that he needed to contemplate about. "There was no question in my mind about joining this journey. I would have given my left arm to be a part of it. This is my second movie with Vishesh Films. The first project with them changed my life, so I don't take this lightly and am honoured to be a part of it."
Rating: 4.0 /5 Star Cast: Fahadh Faasil, Aishwarya Lekshmi, Dileesh Pothan, Jinu Joseph Director: Amal Neerad

The combo of Fahadh Faasil & Amal Neerad, who gave the Malayalam film audiences a spectacle in the form of Iyobinte Pusthakam, which released in the year 2014, is back in action with Varathan. Along with them, there is Aishwarya Lekshmi, who plays the leading lady and Nazriya Nazim too is a part of the project as one among the producers. It is indeed a big team, which is capable of coming up with a solid project. Has Varathan turned out to be worth the wait? Read Varathan review here to know more about the same.

The plot of Varathan revolves around a couple, Abin and Priya. They are settled in the Middle East and one day, Abin loses his job. Priya and Abin decide to go for a short vacation to her ancestral place and the events that unfold take forward Varathan.

The best thing is in the fact that Varathan has got most of the things right in it. Amal Neerad has packaged the film in a taut and stylish manner, which gives Varathan an all-new look. Due credits must be given to the writers for coming up with a plot, which doesn't question the sensibilities of the audiences. The plot of the film isn't anything new or novel but the writers have set the story in a different milieu and have taken forward the script, with the major elements unveiling as the film progresses. Moreover, Varathan is not just about the thrills and chills, but family and an emotional angle as well, which set the tempo of the film. It also addresses some issues, which are quite relevant.

Amal Neerad scores high by trying two different things. He tries his hands on the realistic village tale in the first half and when he shifts gear in the second, especially towards the end, the film-maker in him becomes simply unstoppable with the audiences getting some pumped-up moments. Importantly, the first and second halves have two different paces and that works for the film well. In films of this genre, what matters the most are the final moments, and Varathan scores high in those areas and makes it up for those minor glitches in the initial portions.

Fahadh Faasil is terrific in the role of Abin and he takes forward the role the way only in which he could do. In fact, he comes up with those goosebumps moments, which are to be savoured from the theatres. Once again, the director in Amal Neerad has perfectly used the actor in him. Aishwarya Lekshmi as Priya does complete justice to the character. Sharafudheen is indeed a revelation as he proves that he is one among the most talented young blocks around. Rest of the cast comprising of Dileesh Pothen, Arjun Ashokan, etc., have done a neat job.

The technical aspects of the film score higher. The variety of frames set by Littil Swayamp does help the film in giving it a stunning experience. Due credits to the music department handled by Sushin Shyam. This young man continues to impress with his background scores, which lift the scenes to newer heights. Editing by Vivek Harshan is also sharp and precise.

Varathan would easily find a place in the list of the best theatrical experiences of the recent times. Amal Neerad, in his own style, delivers a taut and sharp movie, which will keep you on toes. For the lovers of the genre, this one is simply not to be missed.
In a shocking and disturbing development,TV actress Nilani has reportedly tried to commit suicide. According to a report carried by Indiaglitz, the lady tried to take the extreme step by consuming poison. As soon as her well-wishers came to know about this, they rushed her to a private hospital in Chennai. She's currently undergoing treatment and is under observation. Nilani has been in the news for the past few days for all the wrong reasons.

Her troubles began when a man, who claimed to be her lover, committed suicide. Following this, Nilani had opened up about her relationship with the man and made several scandalous claims about him.

"I got introduced to Gandhi Lalithkumar three years back, and we became good friends after few months of talking to each other. After a point of time, he presented me a marriage proposal, to which I did not agree. I was a single mother and I thought if this marriage would impact the lives of my children. However, I continued getting love proposals from various other people, and that is when I felt, if I married Gandhi, atleast a little amount of secured feeling could be there. I gave it a thought, but didn't tell him. Later, I found out that Gandhi was a womanizer, who is not anymore with his family members," she was quoted as saying by Behindwoods.

She had also said that the man was a 'psycho' and would often beat her up.

Nilani is the mother of two kids and we hope that she recovers soon.
Only Females Are Eligible To Compete For Captaincy!

# Later, Bigg Boss announces that since BB Press Conference task was incomplete and male contestants didn't perform well, only female contestants can be contenders of captaincy. But for this, the singles and jodis have to choose one contender each for captaincy!

Dipika & Kriti-Roshmi Are Contenders Of Captaincy

# While singles, without any argument or confusion, come up with the decision that Dipika will be contender of captaincy, the jodis get into an argument as both Kriti-Roshmi and Somi-Saba want to become captain. After lot of argument, the jodis come to mutual decision that Kriti-Roshmi will be contender of captaincy.

Captaincy Task: Anup Is Rangeela Rajkumar

# After the announcement of contenders, Romil reads out the rules of the captaincy task to the housemates. According to the task, Anup is the Rangeela' Rajkumar, while Jasleen is his Wazir, who will be advising the Rajkumar. Kriti-Roshmi and Dipika are the Ranis. The other housemates are Rajkumar's senapati.

Sreesanth & Shivashish Fight

# While performing the task, Sreesanth and Shivashish get into the war of words. Shivashish gets offended as Sreesanth apparently abused him. When Shivashish confronts Sreesanth, he defends himself and says that he was just said it as he was in his character!

Dipika & Kriti-Roshmi Impress Anup

# Meanwhile, Dipika and Kriti-Roshmi are seen impressing the Rajkumar by dancing. Roshmi even goes extra miles, slips into a swimsuit and takes a swim in the pool. Anup gets impressed and gives her a rose.

# Anup and Jasleen discuss and decide to make Dipika, a captain, as they feel if two people (jodi) become a captain there will be more confusion. Hence, Dipika gets more roses from Anup.

Kriti-Roshmi Become The First Captain Of The House; Dipika Cries

# But Dipika does a mistake by giving the flowers to Anup. The opposition team snatches the roses and kill the mood of the contestants. Bigg Boss announces about the task completion. Since Kriti-Roshmi get more flowers they become the captain. Dipika cries as she feels it was her mistake.

Saurabh Cries

# Sreesanth and Shivashish get back into an argument again. Somehow, Somi gets involved in the argument with Shivashish! Deepak and Khan sisters get into an argument as the latter accuses Deepak of interrupting and having an opinion when two people are talking.

# The day ends with the fights and Saurabh is seen crying, as he feels Shivashish is the culprit!

Karanvir Bohra & Nirmal-Romil Jailed!

# In Precap, Bigg Boss announces that three contestants are directly nominated for eviction this week! Karanvir Bohra, Nirmal and Romil are sent to the jail. Well, it has to be seen what they did that Bigg Boss got annoyed with them and sent to the jail!
As far as fans of Telugu cinema are concerned, the legendary ANR is a name that well and truly needs no introduction at all. The thespian was an inseparable part of the Telugu film industry during its 'golden years' and gave movie buffs countless memories. He enjoyed a strong fan following thanks to his charismatic personality and subtle style of acting. Now, here is some great news for all you ANR fans out there.

Today (September 20, 2018), on the occasion of ANR's 94th birth anniversary, the makers of the NTR biopic have revealed Sumanth's look from the film. The actor plays the 'Natasamrat' in the film and he seems to have transformed into ANR quite well.

Not surprisingly, Sumanth's ANR look brought back several fond memories and left the fans nostalgic. They remembered the legend and said that he would live on forever in their hearts.

Happy Birthday Legend ANR Garu 

Trend Setter for a reason #ANRLivesOn #ANRJayanthi



Thanks for giving us the stylish KING @iamnagarjuna 



Style is inbuilt in Akkineni's blood pic.twitter.com/7LXNvQ8hcU  King Sudarshan (@gsudarshang) September 20, 2018

My father's favourite Hero .The king of Romance #ANRLivesOn   KadiriNagamani (@kadirinag9) September 20, 2018

Natasamrat #ANR garu dual role lo Bapu-Mullapudi combinationlo Vachina Biggest Musical Hit. Swara Brahma KV Mahadevan Musical (20/09/1969) #ANRLivesOn



Evergreen Album :



..

 

 

 

 

 https://t.co/AwMqndtFok pic.twitter.com/TWynXRiJpq  BARaju (@baraju_SuperHit) September 20, 2018

In case you did not know, ANR began his acting career with the 1941 release Dharma Patni and soon became an integral part of the film world. Some of his most notable films include Devadasu, Aatma Bandhuvulu and Meghasandesam. After an enviable career that spanned over several decades, he passed away in 2014. His last film Manam was released shortly after his death and it became a hit. In it, he was seen alongside son Nagarjuna and grandson Naga Chaitanya.

On a related note, the NTR biopic is being directed by Krish and features Balakrishna in the lead. ANR was NTR's contemporary and shared a lovely rapport with him. As such, his character is going to be an important part of the film. The NTR biopic is slated to hit the screens sometime next year.
CHUNGJU, South Korea, Sept. 20, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- 13th World Firefighters Games (WFG) has wrapped up its eight-day schedule in Chungju, South Korea.

Some 6,600 firefighters from 63 countries competed in the biennial international event.

Hong Kong, which sent the largest delegation of 230 firefighters, secured the top post in the medal standings with 241 gold medals, trailed by South Korea with 239 and Russia with 32.

South Korea, however, won the Toughest Firefighter Alive (TFA) title, the event's centerpiece.

Some 150 firefighters contended with each other in the four-day TFA sport, which consists of hose pulling, an obstacle course, and a tower and stair climbing. South Korea's 32-year-old Hong Beom-seok grabbed the title with a time of 4 minutes and 48.29 seconds.

Subsidiary events included a firefighting industry expo and meetings on firefighting polices, a fire investigation, an emergency medical service and a variety of cultural programs.

"We're surprised at the scale and operation of the Chungju Games. We will also make sincere preparations to make the 2020 Aalborg Games a venue for the friendship and unity of all firefighters around the world," an Aalborg organizing committee official said.

Aalborg, a Danish city, was chosen as the next host.

The WFG was inaugurated in Auckland, New Zealand, in 1990 to promote world firefighters' friendship and competition in sports.

Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/746617/close_photo.jpg
- CHF 400 million investment in Lonza's biopark in Visp (CH) to expand Ibex Solutions with two innovative offerings

- The expansion includes drug substance development and drug substance and drug product manufacturing, which allows customers to manage the complete product lifecycle in one site

- Advanced technology, single-use bioreactors and improved platform processes shorten time to clinic and to market, while innovative business models will increase predictability

BASEL, Switzerland, Sept. 20, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Lonza announces the addition of two new Ibex Solutions offerings to Lonza's 100,000 m2 (1.1 million ft2) biopark in Visp (CH). In July 2017Ibex Dedicate, a modular, technology-agnostic biomanufacturing concept, was launched as the first Ibex Solutions offering. Ibex Dedicate offers an innovative facility concept with reduced CAPEX and accelerated timelines, enabling speed to market or allowing biopharma companies to delay investment decisions to decrease financial risk.

The two new Ibex Solutions, Ibex Design and Ibex Develop, announced today are designed to meet the evolving needs of biotech companies with antibody therapies, from the preclinical stage through to commercialization. Together with Ibex Dedicate, the new investment allows Lonza to offer complete product lifecycle management in one site.

Ibex Design covers the early stages of creating a new biologic, from gene through to clinical phase I. The offering comprises a pioneering fixed-price gene-to-vial package with terms under which Lonza will deliver drug product based on at least 1 kg drug substance within 12 months. The package also includes the reservation of a manufacturing slot for clinical resupply. Ibex Design allows aspiring companies to start clinical trials earlier while reducing uncertainty.

Ibex Develop helps companies seamlessly and rapidly transition from clinical phase II to commercialization. The offering enables biologics license applications (BLAs) to be submitted within 22 months from the start of process characterization. Eliminating the need for tech transfers, allowing process optimizations and creating operational efficiencies are expected to accelerate the path to market.

Ibex Design and Ibex Develop draw on Lonza's R&D and operational experience from more than 30 years in biomanufacturing. Proven platform technologies, such as the GS Gene Expression System and expertise in drug product development, are an integral part of the new offerings. The application of single-use technologies and a high degree of automation further increase the efficiency of Ibex Design and Ibex Develop. In addition, customers of all three Ibex Solutions can benefit from the ability to scale-up or scale-out to other sites in the established Lonza network in Europe, America or Asia.

"We looked at every step in the development and manufacturing process and asked how we could transform the path to commercialization for customers," said Marc Funk, COO Lonza Pharma & Biotech. "The result strengthens our capabilities from the early stages of drug development all the way through to commercialization. It will help biotech companies deliver life-saving medicines to patients faster."

Ibex Design and Ibex Develop will become operational from 2020 and provide a full range of manufacturing options from early development through to full commercialization.

Images for editorial use can be downloaded from www.ibex.lonza.com.

About Ibex Solutions

Ibex Solutions consist of three innovative offerings: Ibex Design, Ibex Develop and Ibex Dedicate. The complete offering spans the preclinical to commercial stages, from drug substance development and manufacture to drug product manufacture, all in one location.

Ibex Design has been created for companies with early-stage products, simplifying and speeding up their path to clinical trials. Ibex Develop has been created for companies with candidates in clinical development, where the goal is commercialization and BLA approval. Ibex Dedicate is a technology-agnostic concept, enabling customers with products in late clinical or commercial stages to build capacity in a short time to respond to increased demand.

Ibex Solutions offer the following key benefits:

Speed to clinic and market

Flexibility to manage uncertainty

Supply chain simplification

Risk management across the entire product lifecycle

Ibex Solutions are provided out of Lonza's biopark in Visp (CH), which leverages existing infrastructure, support networks and a stable and highly skilled workforce.

More information is available at www.ibex.lonza.com.

About Lonza

Lonza is one of the world's leading and most-trusted suppliers to the pharmaceutical, biotech and specialty ingredients markets. As an integrated solutions provider, Lonza is boosting its value creation along and beyond the healthcare continuum with a strong focus on patient healthcare, consumer preventive healthcare and consumer's healthy environment.

Lonza harnesses science and technology to create products that support safer and healthier living and that enhance the overall quality of life. With the recent Capsugel acquisition, Lonza now offers products and services from the custom development and manufacturing of active pharmaceutical ingredients to innovative dosage forms for the pharma and consumer health and nutrition industries.

Benefiting from its regulatory expertise, Lonza is able to transfer its know-how from pharma to hygiene and fast-moving consumer goods all the way to coatings and composites and the preservation and protection of agricultural goods and other natural resources.

Founded in 1897 in the Swiss Alps, Lonza today is a well-respected global company with more than 100 sites and offices and approximately 14,500 full-time employees worldwide. The company generated sales of CHF 5.1 billion in 2017 with a CORE EBITDA of CHF 1.3 billion. Further information can be found at www.lonza.com.

Contact Details

For Investor Relations Inquiries:

Dirk Oehlers, Head Investor Relations

Lonza Group Ltd

Tel +41 61 316 8540

dirk.oehlers@lonza.com

For Media Inquiries:

Lonza Corporate Communications

Constance Ward, Head External Communications

Lonza Group Ltd

Tel +41 61 316 8840

constance.ward@lonza.com

Lonza Pharma & Biotech

Sanna Fowler, Head Public Relations

Lonza Pharma & Biotech

Tel +41 61 316 8929

sanna.fowler@lonza.com

Additional Information and Disclaimer

Lonza Group Ltd has its headquarters in Basel, Switzerland, and is listed on the SIX Swiss Exchange. It has a secondary listing on the Singapore Exchange Securities Trading Limited ("SGX-ST"). Lonza Group Ltd is not subject to the SGX-ST's continuing listing requirements but remains subject to Rules 217 and 751 of the SGX-ST Listing Manual.

Certain matters discussed in this news release may constitute forward-looking statements. These statements are based on current expectations and estimates of Lonza Group Ltd, although Lonza Group Ltd can give no assurance that these expectations and estimates will be achieved. Investors are cautioned that all forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainty and are qualified in their entirety. The actual results may differ materially in the future from the forward-looking statements included in this news release due to various factors. Furthermore, except as otherwise required by law, Lonza Group Ltd disclaims any intention or obligation to update the statements contained in this news release.

Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/746890/Lonza_biopark_at_Visp.jpg
Skandinaviska Enskilda Banken AB's(publ) Annual General Meeting will be held on Tuesday, 26 March 2019.

The Nomination Committee members are:

Petra Hedengran, Investor AB, Chairman

Magnus Billing, Alecta

Lars Heikensten, Trygg-Stiftelsen

Javiera Ragnartz, AMF

Marcus Wallenberg, Chairman of the Board, SEB

The shareholders having appointed members of the Nomination Committee together represent approximately 37,2 per cent of the voting rights for all shares in the Bank as of 31 August 2018.

The SEB Board has appointed Tomas Nicolin additional member of the Committee.

The Nomination Committee will prepare a proposal for Directors etc. to be presented to the Annual General Meeting 2019 for decision. The matters to be dealt with by the Nomination Committee are described on www.sebgroup.com (http://www.sebgroup.com) under the heading 'Annual General Meeting'.

A shareholder who would like to submit a proposal to the Nomination Committee can do so by e-mail to nomination.committee@seb.se (mailto:nomination.committee@seb.se) or by ordinary mail under the address Skandinaviska Enskilda Banken AB(publ), Nomination Committee, Att: Ulf Thornander, KA1, 106 40 Stockholm, by Tuesday 8 January 2019 at the latest.

For further information, please contact

Christoffer Geijer, Head of Investor Relations

+46(0)8 763 8318

christoffer.geijer@seb.se (mailto:christoffer.geijer@seb.se)



Press contact

Frank Hojem, Group Press Officer

+46(0)8 763 9947

frank.hojem@seb.se (mailto:frank.hojem@seb.se)



SEB is a leading Nordic financial services group with a strong belief that entrepreneurial minds and innovative companies are key in creating a better world. SEB takes a long-term perspective and supports its customers in good times and bad. In Sweden and the Baltic countries, SEB offers financial advice and a wide range of financial services. In Denmark, Finland, Norway, Germany and UK the bank's operations have a strong focus on corporate and investment banking based on a full-service offering to corporate and institutional clients. The international nature of SEB's business is reflected in its presence in some 20 countries worldwide. At 30 June 2018, the Group's total assets amounted to SEK 2,818bn while its assets under management totalled SEK 1,838bn. The Group has around 15,000 employees. Read more about SEB at http://www.sebgroup.com (http://www.sebgroup.com).









Press release (PDF) (http://hugin.info/1208/R/2216921/866058.pdf)



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: SEB via Globenewswire


Although more than half of the Dutch working population in their mid-fifties work until their retirement age, there are many early trajectories out of the labour market. Low-educated workers in particular continue to run a risk of unemployment and inactivity.

According to a fresh dissertation, retirement is a long-term process rather than a single event. A comparison between the Netherlands and Finland by Senior Researcher Aart-Jan Riekhoff (Finnish Centre for Pensions) shows that retirement includes multiple transitions that take place over several years.

This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180919005410/en/

Lehtikuva/Petra Piitulainen (Photo: Business Wire)

"Many people get some other type of pension or benefit before they retire on an old-age pension. In the Netherlands and Finland unemployment or sickness often result in an early, permanent exit from the labour market. The risks tend to add up over the life course for people with a low education level, insecure jobs and low earnings," Riekhoff explains.

Education reduces the risk of early exit

Riekhoff has followed the employment lives of workers in the Netherlands and Finland from their mid-fifties until retirement. Welfare and pension systems are similar in many regards in both countries. It is possible to retire early or late. Many people also retire after longer spells of sickness, disability and unemployment.

"Looking at the factors that contribute to each of the trajectories, it is clear that a higher education reduces the risk of involuntary early exit in both the Netherlands and Finland, Riekhoff says.

More transitions between work and benefits

Following the benefit and pension reforms, elderly workers in the two countries tend to stay in employment longer. Whereas late careers have remained relatively stable in Finland, there has been a slight increase in transitions between work and benefits in the years before the retirement age of 65 in the Netherlands.

"This might be due to the stricter criteria that applied after the introduction of the new disability benefit legislation (WIA) in 2006 as well as to the abolishing of extended unemployment benefits in 2003 and the tightening of job search requirements for older workers in 2004. These reforms did not prevent older workers from becoming unemployed or disabled but pushed them back into the labour market after a shorter period on benefits."

More information

Riekhoff's dissertation published by the Finnish Centre for Pensions

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180919005410/en/

Contacts:

Finnish Centre for Pensions

Aart-Jan Riekhoff

arie.riekhoff@etk.fi
Money planning sessions worth up to 500 during Financial Planning Week 3 10 October

UK consumers nationwide are being offered free personal financial planning sessions by CISI CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNERTM professionals, with the aim of giving everyone a helping hand to achieving financial wellbeing, resilience and life goal planning.

The free, one-hour, one-to-one, confidential sessions worth up to 500, are being offered by CFPTM professionals throughout the UK, Scotland and Wales during CISI Financial Planning Week 3 10 October MakeDreamsHappen

The annual campaign, organised by the-not-for profit professional body the Chartered Institute for Securities Investment (CISI), is a national initiative to help improve the financial fitness of the UK public, while highlighting the fact that CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNERTMpractitioners represent the pinnacle of professionalism for their knowledge, skills and integrity.

Consumers are being encouraged to think about the value of financial planning and to take up the offer of a free session with a local CFPTM via cisi.org/fpweekor by calling 020 7645 0708

With 52 financial planning firms already on board throughout the UK*, the aim is to shine the spotlight on financial planning, which differs to "financial advice" ie "financial planning" helps people to organise their money to achieve specific life goals, whereas "financial advice" focuses more on financial services products.

The free, one-hour money management sessions will offer a chance for members of the UK public to have a one-to-one meeting with a qualified CFPTM professional, who begin by working through an individual's life goals and then helping plan how to achieve them. Financial planning firms will be offering:

Free consultation surgeries, either in person, via skype or over the phone

'Ask a Planner' online sessions

Talks to schools across the country about the merits of the financial planning profession as a career

Financial planners are supremely qualified to offer financial guidance not only to pre or post retirees, but to all members of society at differing life stages including women, couples, families, families with adult children, students, young adults and families with caring responsibilities for those with special needs.

Jacqueline Lockie CFPTM, Chartered FCSI and CISI Head of Financial Planning said: "Our CFPTM members throughout the UK are ready to help everyone, no matter what their age or financial circumstances, during our Financial Planning Week 3 10 October. Financial planners can help people achieve their life goals, build financial confidence, combat anxiety and stress about money and deal with life's challenges around day-to-day financial decisions.

"Whether you are part of the sandwich generation trying to manage work, children and parents simultaneously or a young or older person with debt worries our financial planners will aim to help all consumers navigate and improve their personal financial lives.

"Our aim is to encourage all UK consumers to stop and think about their own personal financial plan to take advantage of these free one-to-one confidential financial guidance sessions to plan for the life you want."

Julie Lord CFPTM, Chartered FCSI, CFP and CEO of Magenta Financial Planning said: "I have worked with many people across the UK, from all walks of life. One person in particular comes to mind who worked in the City and who bought a coffee and a muffin every morning from a well-known American coffee shop. His lifetime cashflow forecast showed that if he had breakfast at home instead and saved his "coffee money," he would be able to pay off his mortgage 5 years earlier, saving thousands of pounds! A good financial plan is key to making the most of your money."

This year the start of CISI Financial Planning Week is also marked by the first ever World Financial Planning Day 3 October, organised by the Financial Planning Standards Board Ltd (FPSB) as a complement to the International Organisation of Securities Commission's World Investor Week (WIW), a global campaign to raise awareness of the importance of investor education and protection and will encourage 175,500 CFP professionals worldwide to join together to help.

ends

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180920005053/en/

Contacts:

CISI

Lora Benson

lora.benson@cisi.org

Tel: +44-20-7645-0662
Air France's subsidiary airline, Joon, will be launching flights between Paris and Quito, Ecuador, from May 2019.



Customers will be able to travel between the two capitals by an Airbus A340 in the comfort of new long-haul travel cabins, with 30 seats in the Business Class, 21 seats in the Premium Economy Class and 227 seats in the Economy Class.



The thrice-weekly service will commence from May 14, 2019, at 299 ($347.5), including tax one way.



Flight AF210 will leave Paris-Charles de Gaulle at 13h10 and arrive in Quito at 18:05. Return flight AF211 will leave Quito at 19h50 and arrive in Paris at 13h50 the following day.



Flights operate on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays during the summer season.



The ancient city of Quito



Located more than 2,850 m above sea level, and built on the ruins of an Inca city, Ecuador's capital is home to many treasures. Its historic centre, the best preserved in Latin America, is the first to be included in Unesco's World Heritage List. From Independence Square to San Francisco Square, nothing beats getting lost in the narrow and colorful streets to discover Old Quito. Want a great view? The Panecillo peak, which stands in the middle of the city, offers a breathtaking view.



Want to go even higher? Quito, bordered by the Andes, is also the starting point for unforgettable escapades into the heart of the volcanoes, the gateway to the lush Amazonian forest and an opportunity to discover the Galapagos Islands and its protected species. - TradeArabia News Service


Toronto, Ontario--(Newsfile Corp. - September 20, 2018) - Drone Delivery Canada 'DDC or the Company' (TSXV: FLT) (OTCQB: TAKOF), is pleased to announce that the Company has successfully assembled its team and infrastructure in the communities of Moosonee and Moose Factory, Ontario to commence its Beyond Visual Line-of-Sight (BVLOS) Pilot Project 'BVLOS Pilot Project'.

"We intend to deploy our technology to support remote communities in Canada.", commented Tony Di Benedetto, CEO of Drone Delivery Canada. "DDC has created an innovative logistic solution for outlying communities which experience on-going and difficult infrastructure challenges. To address these challenges, we intend to deploy our technology, with the aim of establishing a 'railways in the sky' connecting communities to provide a just in time, cost effective means of delivery."

In Canada, there are approximately one thousand remote communities, and, almost all face similar infrastructure and logistics challenges that contribute to a high cost of living. DDC looks to provide a cost effective and highly efficient logistic solution to these communities to improve lives, create jobs in Canada's north all while reducing costs.

"Living in Canada's north comes with challenges. We are excited to see the benefits of DDC's drone delivery solution in our community as a means to help mitigate these challenges, improve logistics, lower costs and bring employment to the region", commented Stan Kapashesit, Director of Economic Development Moose Cree First Nation.

DDC's BVLOS Pilot Project will take place on a soon to be approved set of flight paths that will connect the communities of Moosonee and Moose Factory. DDC's Sparrow X1000 cargo drone and DDC's proprietary FLYTE management system will be utilized for these flights which are intended to include the transportation of; medical supplies, food, automotive parts and general parcels. Transport Canada is seeking to develop its regulations while NAV Canada is actively supporting this effort. This ongoing set of trials is anticipated to last into the month of October.

DDC looks to report on-going results from its pilot program to all shareholders on a timely basis.

For more information, please visit www.dronedeliverycanada.com

About Drone Delivery Canada

Drone Delivery Canada is a drone technology company focused on the design, development and implementation of its proprietary logistics software platform, using drones. The Company's platform will be used as Software as a Service (SaaS) for government and corporate organizations.

Drone Delivery Canada Corp. is a publicly listed company trading on the TSX V Exchange under the symbol FLT, on the U.S. OTC Q B market under the symbol TAKOF and on the Frankfurt exchange in Germany under the symbol A2AMGZ.

For further information, please contact:

Tony Di Benedetto, CEO

Telephone: (416) 791-9399

Email: tony@dronedeliverycanada.com

Richard Buzbuzian, President

Telephone: (647) 501-3290

Email: richard@dronedeliverycanada.com
Vancouver, British Columbia--(Newsfile Corp. - September 20, 2018) - Dan Blondal, CEO of Nano One Materials (TSXV: NNO) (OTC Pink: NNOMF) (FSE: LBMB), is pleased to announce that its Lithium Iron Phosphate (LFP) cathode material, and the cost of making it, are outperforming global benchmarks and could be a disruptive force in the lithium ion battery market space.

"Major cathode producers have begun evaluating our LFP and initial results are consistent with the excellent battery performance we've been measuring in our lab," said Mr. Blondal. "The preliminary economic modeling is also very compelling with LFP production costs conservatively estimated at 10 to 30% below industry standards."

The global LFP market size is projected to be 130,000 tonnes in 2025 and worth about $1.5B. To address this opportunity, Nano One has developed a proprietary process, using lithium carbonate, that enables lower cost sources of iron and phosphate than those used presently by LFP producers. Economic modeling of this innovative process, based on adding production line capacity in units of 10,000 tonnes per annum, delivers capital and operating projections well below current industry costs. This leads to a sizable revenue opportunity that Nano One is evaluating with commercial interests in the lithium ion battery and cathode material space.

LFP is the cobalt-free, high durability, low cost, and safest cathode material of choice for lithium ion batteries. It is used in e-buses, e-bikes, power tools and grid storage systems for renewable energy. As costs come down, LFP may also replace lead acid batteries, further increasing demand.

LFP is currently produced through either hydrothermal or solid-state methods. The hydrothermal method produces high quality LFP but is costly due to high pressure and high temperature aqueous reactions and a waste lithium salt stream that must be recovered. The solid-state method, by comparison, is lower cost with lower quality LFP, produced by grinding, milling and firing in controlled atmospheres. Both of these methods require powders of LFP to be carbon coated in a series of post-production steps. In contrast to these production methods, Nano One has developed a simpler process that produces high performance carbon coated LFP particles from an aqueous solution operating at atmospheric temperature, pressure and mild pH. It uses low cost raw materials, with fewer steps and does not produce a waste stream.

Nano One Chairman, Paul Matysek added "There is a compelling business case with our LFP technology, it is ripe for partnership on full scale production, and this adds to other opportunities Nano One is pursuing to jointly develop solid state batteries and low-cobalt chemistries."

Nano One Materials Corp.

Dan Blondal, CEO

For information with respect to Nano One or the contents of this news release, please contact John Lando (President) at (604) 420-2041 or visit the website at www.nanoone.ca.

About Nano One:

Nano One Materials Corp ("Nano One" or "the Company") is developing patented technology for the low-cost production of high performance battery materials used in electric vehicles, energy storage and consumer electronics. The processing technology addresses fundamental supply chain constraints by enabling wider raw materials specifications for use in lithium ion batteries. The process can be configured for a range of different nanostructured materials and has the flexibility to shift with emerging and future battery market trends and a diverse range of other growth opportunities. The novel three-stage process uses equipment common to industry and Nano One has built a pilot plant to demonstrate high volume production and to optimize its technology across a range of materials. The pilot plant is being funded with the assistance and support of the Government of Canada through Sustainable Development Technology Canada (SDTC) and the Automotive Supplier Innovation Program (ASIP) a program of Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada ISED). Nano One also receives financial support from the National Research Council of Canada Industrial Research Assistance Program (NRC-IRAP). Nano One's mission is to establish its patented technology as a leading platform for the global production of a new generation of nanostructured composite materials. For more information, please visit www.nanoone.ca

Certain information contained herein may constitute "forward-looking information" under Canadian securities legislation. Forward-looking information includes, but is not limited to, the execution of the Company's plans which are contingent on the receipt of grant monies and the commercialization of the Company's technology and patents. Generally, forward-looking information can be identified by the use of forward-looking terminology such as 'believe', 'expect', 'anticipate', 'plan', 'intend', 'continue', 'estimate', 'may', 'will', 'should', 'ongoing', or variations of such words and phrases or statements that certain actions, events or results "will" occur. Forward-looking statements are based on the opinions and estimates of management as of the date such statements are made and they are subject to known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause the actual results, level of activity, performance or achievements of the Company to be materially different from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements or forward-looking information, including: the ability of the Company to obtain additional financing; including the receipt of grant monies from SDTC, ASIP, NRC-IRAP and the receipt of all necessary regulatory approvals. Although management of the Company has attempted to identify important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those contained in forward-looking statements or forward-looking information, there may be other factors that cause results not to be as anticipated, estimated or intended. There can be no assurance that such statements will prove to be accurate, as actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such statements. Accordingly, readers should not place undue reliance on forward-looking statements and forward-looking information. The Company does not undertake to update any forward-looking statements or forward-looking information that is incorporated by reference herein, except as required by applicable securities laws.

NEITHER THE TSX VENTURE EXCHANGE NOR ITS REGULATION SERVICES PROVIDER (AS THAT TERM IS DEFINED IN THE POLICIES OF THE TSX VENTURE EXCHANGE) ACCEPTS RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE ADEQUACY OR ACCURACY OF THIS NEWS RELEASE
Multi-Generational Study Surveys Over 900 U.K. HNW Investors and Advisers

LONDON, Sept. 20, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- OppenheimerFunds, a leading global asset manager, today announced the launch of "The Generations Project U.K.," a new research study that surveys the different investing behaviours, goals and attitudes across generations within high-net-worth (HNW) families, including their relationships with their advisers.

Art Steinmetz, OppenheimerFunds Chairman & CEO, commented, "As one of the first global investment managers, we continue to underscore the importance of global thinking and diversification for our clients and look forward to sharing our research insights with a new segment of investors and advisers in the U.K. market."

"The report makes clear the risks of home market bias and lack of asset class diversification, as investors who overwhelmingly choose domestic equities could miss out on the benefits of an increasingly global economy and innovations driving growth throughout the developed and developing world," said John McDonough, OppenheimerFunds Head of Distribution and Marketing.

In anticipation of the largest wealth transfer in U.K. history - an estimated 66% increase to 115 billion by 2027, according to the Centre for Economics and Business Research - investors are poised to rewrite the rules of wealth advisory. "The Generations Project U.K." includes the opinions of 900 U.K. HNW investors and advisers across the younger and older Millennial, Generation X, Baby Boomer and Silent Generations.

"With rising generations of heirs continuing to become more active in the management of their family wealth, changing expectations and preferences are having a profound impact on the ability of advisers to maintain existing relationships and build new ones," stated Doug Stewart, Head of EMEA for OppenheimerFunds.

Key Findings

The study indicates a number of potential areas of opportunity for advisers to better engage with their clients' families across generations. For example, while a vast majority (88%) of HNW advisers typically teach investment concepts to their primary client, only 54% do the same with their primary clients' children.

Disconnects in the adviser/client relationship were also highlighted by a stark misalignment in expectations between what HNW investors seek from their advisers and what advisers think clients want.

While HNW Millennial investors rank good investment performance as the most critical aspect of their adviser relationship, advisers believe HNW Millennial clients primarily seek an adviser who has a clear understanding of their financial goals, with performance ranking eighth among advisers, along with fees and commissions.

The research also looked at the investing preferences of U.K. HNW investors, and found a lack of portfolio diversification across markets and asset classes, led by evidence of a strong home market bias with U.K. domestic stocks.

According to the study, 88% of HNW investors own U.K. stocks, while only 62% have international stocks in their portfolios. Ownership of European stocks (58%), emerging markets stocks (44%) and U.K. bonds (38%) follow a similar pattern.

In addition, the research found:

A lack of communication between investors and their families: Only 54% of investors surveyed currently have financial discussions with their spouse or partner, and 30% have never had these conversations at all. Nearly a fifth (17%) are not currently discussing their finances with anyone.

Only 54% of investors surveyed currently have financial discussions with their spouse or partner, and 30% have never had these conversations at all. Nearly a fifth (17%) are not currently discussing their finances with anyone. Sustainable investing: It sounds good, but younger Millennial investors aren't buying. While 39% of younger Millennial investors have expressed interest in ESG, only 14% who are interested in the category have actually invested in it. Older investors outpace youngers ones with respect to holding sustainable investments.

It sounds good, but younger Millennial investors aren't buying. While 39% of younger Millennial investors have expressed interest in ESG, only 14% who are interested in the category have actually invested in it. Older investors outpace youngers ones with respect to holding sustainable investments. Too few advisers engaged in next gen financial education: With just 26% of Millennials, 23% of Gen X and 21% of Baby Boomer advisers currently providing financial education training to their clients, there is a significant opportunity for advisers to step in and cultivate the next generation of HNW family members through education.

With just 26% of Millennials, 23% of Gen X and 21% of Baby Boomer advisers currently providing financial education training to their clients, there is a significant opportunity for advisers to step in and cultivate the next generation of HNW family members through education. Millennial advisers offer less services: Young advisers are not yet wise advisers in terms of client service, with Millennials trailing their older adviser peers in offering solutions tailored to different generations (just 61%), compared to 77% of Baby Boomer and 70% of Gen X advisers. Millennial advisers also rank last in providing inheritance advice to clients for both giving (73%) and receiving (68%), compared to Gen X (83%/85%) and Baby Boomers (85%/89%).

"This study should be a clarion call for advisers to better communicate and engage with different family members across generations and hopefully empower younger investors to expect more from their adviser relationship going forward," said Stewart. "By transitioning from one-to-one advising to a whole family model, advisers are better positioned to help spouses and younger family members prepare for the responsibilities of wealth while establishing a stronger practice for themselves going forward."

This is the third annual high-net-worth study conducted by OppenheimerFunds, which commissioned CoreData Research LLC to survey wealthy U.S. and U.K. investors and advisers who primarily serve high-net-worth clients to better understand investment behaviours and attitudes across all generations, the role of family dynamics and how advisers engage investors. Conducted online from December 2017 through January 2018, the study included nearly 2,000 investors and advisers. The minimum net investable assets for investors to qualify for the study was $500,000 (250,000) for Millennial aged investors and $1 million (500,000) for all other investors. Adviser qualifications included $100 million in assets under management in the U.S and 25 million for the U.K. study with the majority of their book of business comprised of high-net-worth clients.

About OppenheimerFunds

OppenheimerFunds, Inc., a leader in global asset management, is dedicated to providing solutions for its partners and end investors. OppenheimerFunds, including its subsidiaries, manages more than $248 billion in assets for over 13 million shareholder accounts, including sub-accounts, as of August 31, 2018.

Founded in 1959, OppenheimerFunds is an asset manager with a history of providing innovative strategies to its investors. The firm's 16 investment management teams specialize in equity, fixed income, alternative, multi-asset, and factor and revenue-weighted ETF strategies, including ESG, as a signatory of the UN PRI. OppenheimerFunds and its subsidiaries offer a broad array of products and services to clients, who range from pensions and endowments to financial advisors and individual investors. OppenheimerFunds and certain of its subsidiaries provide advisory services to the Oppenheimer family of funds, and OFI Global Asset Management offers solutions to institutions. The firm is also active through its Philanthropy & Community initiative: 10,000 Kids by 2020, reaching children with introductions to math literacy programs.

Web: oppenheimerfunds.com

Tweets: twitter.com/OppFunds

Podcasts: oppenheimerfunds.com/advisors/podcasts

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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.
BARCELONA, Spain, September 20, 2018 /PRNewswire/ --

IoT Solutions World Congress (http://www.iotsworldcongress.com), the event on innovations in the industrial Internet of Things (IoT) and the digital transformation of different economic sectors, will take place from October 16 to 18 in Barcelona (Spain). Organised by Fira de Barcelona and the IIC (Industrial Internet Consortium), it will comprise a congress, an exhibition area and will exhibit testbeds of new applications. The show will confirm the mass implementation of IoT across a range of industries and will also present the convergence of this technology with artificial intelligence and blockchain.

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300 exhibitors, including IT companies, software platform developers, hardware manufacturers, security firms, telecommunications operators, service operators and industrial automation companies will participate in the exhibition area. The list of exhibitors includes ABB, Deloitte, Google Cloud, Huawei, Intel, Microsoft, New Alchemy, SAS, Telit, Vodafone, Wipro, Crypto Quantique, Dassault Systemes, Fiware, Hitachi, Kaspersky, Libelium, Orange, PTC, relayr, Rigado, Software AG, Telefonica, Thingstream, Uptake, Verizon and Zyfr.

In addition, IoTSWC 2018 will open the testbeds area presenting a dozen IoT applications developed by leading companies. Visitors will be able to see, for example, a smart residential door capable of opening upon the owner's arrival and transforming a garage into a giant mailbox for online shopping deliveries, a fully sensorised fire engine, and a smart platform to control water quality and help saving Beluga whales in Alaska.

As for the Congress, it will gather together more than 250 experts to discuss the impact of IoT solutions on different environments. The sessions will revolve around nine thematic axes: connected transport, manufacture of goods, healthcare, energy and supplies, construction and infrastructure, facilitating technologies, blockchain and artificial intelligence, the latter two with their own forums.

The list of speakers includes Jeff Merrit, manager of IoT and connected devices at the World Economic Forum, Gloria Zaionz, emerging technology guru, Fabian Simmer, director de digitisation at SEAT, Seb Chakraborty, CTO Centrica Hive Limited/British Gas, Tomi Teikko, Director de Empathic Building Teito, Christopher Bailey, Director of Innovation & Architecture Matson, and Hajime Sugiyama, IIoT Evangelist, Factory Automation Systems Group Overseas Strategic Planning Mitsubishi Electric Corporation.

A new feature this year will be the organisation of several workshops to take a closer look at aspects of IoT technology approved by the IIC (https://www.iiconsortium.org )and the holding of a meeting of female managers who lead the international IoT ecosystem.
- Alliance focuses on addressing business planning challenges in the face of rising customer demands and evolving market landscape

- EY and Oliver Wight to co-innovate on next generation of Oliver Wight Integrated Business Planning model for clients

LONDON, Sept. 20, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Ernst & Young LLP (EY) today announces a strategic alliance with leading business transformation specialist Oliver Wight EAME (Europe, Africa and Middle East) to help organizations address their planning challenges.

Those planning challenges include leveraging new technologies that bring efficiencies while requiring increased collaboration, new behaviors and culture change to work with more transparent data across the entire company, combined with rising customer demands, an evolving market landscape and the pressure to improve profit margin.

The alliance will initially work with clients headquartered in the EAME (Europe, Africa and Middle East) region.

The alliance will leverage Oliver Wight's experience in its Sales and Operations Planning process and its Integrated Business Planning (IBP) model with the experience of EY in supply chain financial and commercial planning practices and digital capabilities. Together, EY and Oliver Wight will focus on helping management teams to use digital tools to assess their enterprise across the value chain, helping to improve their view of the supply chain and helping to enable them to develop plans that align markets, supply chain, operations and finance.

The organizations will work together to develop the next generation of IBP, which is the business planning model for aligning demand, supply and product portfolio plans, helping businesses to allocate critical resources to satisfy their customers in the most profitable way. EY and Oliver Wight will leverage collaboration and technology to deliver end-to-end transparency in profitable decision-making, linking strategy to execution across an organization.

Les Brookes, CEO, Oliver Wight and Alliance Leader, says:

"Both Oliver Wight EAME and EY have a long history in serving their clients well and doing so in a complementary way. Oliver Wight EAME has a strong capability in demonstrating to C-level executives the way in which integrated business planning can help provide transformational results and EY has the scale to accelerate implementations and therefore results. Oliver Wight and EY will collaborate to address the processes, operating models, organization, behaviors, culture and digital technologies companies need to compete."

EY and Oliver Wight EAME are already collaborating to help a number of clients. This includes helping the medical device industry address supply chain issues for improved customer delivery; working with the postal services industry to use data analytics to improve operations; and supporting office supplies organizations to transform their planning processes through using advanced data analytics.

Glenn Steinberg, EY Global and EY Americas Supply Chain Leader, Advisory, says:

"There is considerable disruption in the way enterprises work, plan, execute and make decisions in their businesses. For example, implementing new technologies - like blockchain, intelligent automation or artificial intelligence -- can provide efficiencies but typically require more collaboration, and adopting new behaviors and culture change. For enterprises to be competitive, it is essential for them to be able to break down silos and drive end-to-end transformation across their business, which is the focus of the EY alliance with Oliver Wight."

Tanguy Caillet, Global Supply Chain Planning Capability Leader at Ernst & Young LLP and Alliance Leader for the Oliver Wight EAME alliance, says:

"Through our alliance with Oliver Wight EAME, we will work together to help enterprises discover new ways to reach and serve their customers, engage with their employees, maximize their production and improve how they manage their finances across their organizations. We believe the strengths of EY in commercial, financial, supply chain and operations and advanced data analytics combined with Oliver Wight's experience in sales and integrated business planning will provide enterprises with the tools they need to transform themselves in a time of tremendous change and challenges."

For more information, visit www.ey.com/oliverwight.

Barbara Burgess Zoe Davis EY Global Media Relations Oliver Wight EAME Marketing +1 212 773 1652 +44 (0) 1452 397200 barbara.burgess@ey.com Zoe.davis@oliverwight.com

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VANCOUVER, BC / ACCESSWIRE / September 20, 2018 / First Mining Gold Corp. ("First Mining" or the "Company") (OTCQX: FFMGF, TSX: FF, FSE: FMG) is pleased to announce final fire assay results and partial metallic screen fire assay results for eight drill holes completed to date on the Miller prospect at the Company's wholly-owned Goldlund property ("Goldlund") in northwestern Ontario, Canada. Previously the Company had released fire assay results for the first six drill holes of the eight hole campaign at the Miller prospect (see the Company's news release dated August 20, 2018).

Drilling Highlights:

Hole MI-18-007 intersected 49.0 metres ("m") of 2.49 grams per tonne gold ("g/t Au")

including 21.5 m of 5.34 g/t Au



and including 1.0 m of 89.21 g/t Au



and 3.0 m of 4.24 g/t Au

Hole MI-18-008 intersected 14.0 m of 0.62 g/t Au

including 2.5 m of 1.80 g/t Au

Note: Assaying for the Miller drill program is being done by SGS Canada Inc. ("SGS") at their laboratories in Red Lake, Cochrane and Lakefield, Ontario. Reported widths are drilled core lengths; true widths are unknown at this time. Assay values are uncut.

Jeff Swinoga, President and Chief Executive Officer of First Mining, stated, "We are excited with the continued drilling success of our Goldlund regional exploration program, indicating the potential for significant gold mineralization 10 kilometres from the initial gold discovery. This new discovery is encouraging in light of the property's 50 kilometre strike length. These two new reported holes, located at the Miller prospect, have both encountered gold mineralization, with several visible gold occurrences similar to the first six drill holes. The early results from the Miller prospect indicate that the entire width of the sill/dyke appears receptive to gold mineralization and this mineralization remains open along strike in both directions and also at depth."

Due to the coarse, nuggety nature of the gold mineralization present within the Goldlund deposit and its surrounding regional targets, the initial fire assay results from the Miller prospect have been followed up with a program of metallic screen fire assays on select samples. Samples were chosen for metallic screen analysis either where visible gold mineralization ("VG") was observed in the core, or adjacent to VG occurrences, or where the initial fire assay results did not appear to be representative of the level of gold mineralization observed in the core. A larger sample size of 1,000 grams ("g") is being utilized for these metallic screen fire assays (as compared with the 50 g sample size that was used for the fire assays).

A comparison of the results of the initial fire assay program with the fire assay results incorporating the metallic screen fire assay re-runs is presented in Table 1 below.

Table 1. Drill Hole Assay Results (including Metallic Screen Fire Assay Results) from the Miller Prospect

Hole ID From (m) To (m) Length (m) Au g/t (Fire Assay only)* Au g/t (Fire Assay inc. Metallics) MI-18-001 MI-18-001 7.0 114.6 107.6 0.33 0.42 inc 15.0 88.6 73.6 0.41 0.55 inc 16.0 18.3 2.3 1.93 2.01 and inc 18.0 18.3 0.3 8.59 9.15** and inc 23.3 29.6 6.3 0.91 2.01** and inc 27.3 27.6 0.3 8.67 32.12** and inc 77.6 88.6 11.0 1.17 1.43 and inc 87.6 88.6 1.0 6.27 9.09 MI-18-002 MI-18-002 0.42 142.5 142.08 1.90 1.90** inc 1.5 109.5 108.0 2.44 2.43** and inc 57.5 88.5 31.0 4.44 further results pending and inc 75.5 82.5 7.0 14.67 further results pending and inc 81.5 82.5 1.0 88.80 metallics not requested and inc 102.5 109.5 7.0 9.60 further results pending and inc 108.5 109.5 1.0 54.47 metallics not requested MI-18-003 MI-18-003 69.0 72.0 3.0 1.12 1.19** and 90.0 138.0 48.0 1.07 1.17** inc 90.0 90.5 0.5 17.23 16.10** and inc 94.0 97.5 3.5 2.28 2.41** and inc 105.0 106.0 1.0 3.90 metallics not requested and inc 115.0 130.0 15.0 1.41 1.71 and inc 125.0 125.5 0.5 10.55 19.10** and inc 137.7 138.0 0.3 9.87 11.80** MI-18-004 MI-18-004 34.0 57.8 23.8 0.54 metallics not requested inc 34.0 35.0 1.0 2.56 metallics not requested and inc 52.0 57.8 5.8 1.40 metallics not requested and inc 55.0 56.0 1.0 6.12 metallics not requested

MI-18-005 MI-18-005 46.0 47.0 1.0 4.18 metallics not requested and 68.0 78.0 10.0 0.43 0.45** and inc 72.0 74.0 2.0 1.25 metallics not requested and 109.0 110.0 1.0 1.00 metallics not requested MI-18-006 MI-18-006 76.0 77.0 1.0 1.38 metallics not requested and 102.0 124.0 22.0 0.69 0.68 inc 103.0 109.4 6.4 2.09 2.08** and inc 103.62 104.0 0.38 21.66 20.80** and inc 109.0 109.4 0.4 4.69 5.37 and 145.0 147.0 2.0 1.48 metallics not requested and 169.0 170.0 1.0 3.01 metallics not requested MI-18-007 MI-18-007 66.0 69.0 3.0 4.24 metallics not requested inc 66.0 67.0 1.0 9.16 metallics not requested and 89.0 138.0 49.0 2.53 2.49** inc 94.5 116.0 21.5 5.43 5.34** and inc 107.5 109.0 1.5 8.83 9.29 and inc 114.0 115.0 1.0 91.41 89.21** MI-18-008 MI-18-008 135.0 149.0 14.0 0.58 0.62** inc 135.5 138.0 2.5 1.59 1.80** and inc 146.0 147.0 1.0 2.14 metallics not requested

*Fire assay results for holes MI-18-001 to MI-18-006 (inclusive) were reported in the Company's previous news release dated August 20, 2018.

**Additional metallic screen fire assay re-runs still underway

In addition to drilling the Miller prospect, the Company has completed seven diamond drill holes at the Eaglelund prospect, and one diamond drill hole at the Miles prospect (see Figure 1 below), for a total 2018 summer regional drill program of 688 metres. This completes this phase of the Company's regional drill program at Goldlund, and assaying is currently underway for these eight holes.

Figure 1. Plan Map

Table 2. Drill Hole Locations for the Miller Prospect

Hole ID Azimuth  Dip  Length (m) UTM East UTM North Section MI-18-001 140 -80 140.5 554522 5533533 NW-50 MI-18-002 140 -85 200.0 554540 5533551 NW-100 MI-18-003 140 -55 170.0 554521 5533611 NW-100 MI-18-004 140 -55 101.0 554465 5533537 NW-00 MI-18-005 320 -65 110.0 554488 5533458 NW-00 MI-18-006 320 -65 170.0 554536 5533480 NW-50 MI-18-007 320 -60 182.0 554614 5533530 NW-150 MI-18-008 320 -60 182.0 554634 5533557 NW-150

Collar coordinates reflect final surveyed locations.

Figure 2. Cross-Section through the Miller Prospect

QA/QC Procedures

The QA/QC program for the 2018 regional drilling programs at Miller, Eaglelund and Miles consists of the submission of duplicate samples and the insertion of certified reference materials and blanks at regular intervals. These are inserted at a rate of one standard for every 20 samples (5% of total) and one blank for every 30 samples (3% of total). The standards used in the 2018 regional drilling program consist of 5 different gold grades ranging from 1 to 9 g/t Au, and are sourced from CDN Resource Laboratories in Langley, BC. Blanks have been sourced locally from barren granitic material.

Field duplicates from quartered core, as well as 'coarse' or 'pulp' duplicates taken from coarse reject material or pulverized splits, are also submitted at regular intervals with an insertion rate of 4% for field duplicates and 4% for coarse or pulp duplicates. Additional selected duplicates are being submitted to an umpire lab for check assaying. SGS also undertake their own internal coarse and pulp duplicate analysis to ensure proper sample preparation and equipment calibration.

Dr. Chris Osterman, P.Geo., COO of First Mining, is the "qualified person" for the purposes of National Instrument 43-101 Standards of Disclosure for Mineral Projects ("NI 43-101") and he has reviewed and approved the scientific and technical disclosure contained in this news release.

ABOUT THE GOLDLUND PROJECT

The Goldlund deposit is situated within a land package of approximately 280 square kilometres (28,000 hectares) referred to as the Goldlund Gold Project. The Property has a strike-length of over 50 kilometres in the Wabigoon Subprovince. Goldlund is an Archean lode-gold project located in northwestern Ontario, approximately 60 kilometres from the township of Dryden. The claims that make up the land package cover the historic Goldlund and Windward mines.

On January 9, 2017, the Company announced an initial mineral resource estimate for Goldlund that was prepared by WSP Canada Inc. in accordance with NI 43-101. At a 0.4 g/t Au cut-off grade, the Goldlund deposit contains pit constrained Indicated Resources of 9.3 million tonnes at 1.87 g/t Au, or 560,000 ounces of gold. At a 0.4 g/t Au cut-off grade, the Goldlund deposit contains pit constrained Inferred Resources of 40.9 million tonnes at 1.33 g/t Au, or 1,750,000 ounces of gold. The technical report for this resource estimate, which is titled "Technical Report and Resource Estimation Update on the Goldlund Project" and is dated February 7, 2017, is available under the Company's SEDAR profile at www.sedar.com, and is also available on the Company's website at www.firstmininggold.com.

ABOUT FIRST MINING GOLD CORP.

First Mining Gold Corp. is an emerging development company with a diversified portfolio of gold projects in North America. Having assembled a large resource base of 7 million ounces of gold in the Measured and Indicated categories and 5 million ounces of gold in the Inferred category in mining friendly jurisdictions of eastern Canada, First Mining is now focused on advancing its assets towards production. The Company currently holds a portfolio of 24 mineral assets in Canada, Mexico and the United States.

For further information, please contact Jeff Swinoga, President and CEO at 416-816-0424, or Derek Iwanaka, Vice President of Investor Relations at 604-639-8824, or visit our website at www.firstmininggold.com.

ON BEHALF OF FIRST MINING GOLD CORP.

"Keith Neumeyer"

Keith Neumeyer

Chairman

Cautionary Note Regarding Forward-Looking Statements

This news release includes certain "forward-looking information" and "forward-looking statements" (collectively "forward-looking statements") within the meaning of applicable Canadian and United States securities legislation including the United States Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These forward-looking statements are made as of the date of this news release. Forward-looking statements are frequently, but not always, identified by words such as "expects", "anticipates", "believes", "plans", "projects", "intends", "estimates", "envisages", "potential", "possible", "strategy", "goals", "objectives", or variations thereof or stating that certain actions, events or results "may", "could", "would", "might" or "will" be taken, occur or be achieved, or the negative of any of these terms and similar expressions.

Forward-looking statements in this news release relate to future events or future performance and reflect current estimates, predictions, expectations or beliefs regarding future events and include, but are not limited to, statements with respect to: (i) the near-term potential to expand the existing Goldlund resource; (ii)the potential for the existence of significant gold mineralization 10 kilometres from the current resource area at the Goldlund project along the property's 50 kilometre strike length;(iii) the completion of metallic screen fire assays; (iv) assaying of the seven drill holes at the Eaglelund prospect and one drill hole at the Miles prospect, and the results of assays; (v) the estimated amount and grade of Mineral Resources at Goldlund; and (vi) the potential for exploration upside at Goldlund. All forward-looking statements are based on First Mining's or its consultants' current beliefs as well as various assumptions made by them and information currently available to them. The most significant assumptions are set forth above, but generally these assumptions include: (i) the presence of and continuity of metals at Goldlund at estimated grades; (ii) the capacities and durability of various machinery and equipment; and (iii) success in realizing proposed regional drilling programs. Although the Company's management considers these assumptions to be reasonable based on information currently available to it, they may prove to be incorrect.

By their very nature, forward-looking statements involve inherent risks and uncertainties, both general and specific, and risks exist that estimates, forecasts, projections and other forward-looking statements will not be achieved or that assumptions do not reflect future experience. We caution readers not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements as a number of important factors could cause the actual outcomes to differ materially from the beliefs, plans, objectives, expectations, anticipations, estimates assumptions and intentions expressed in such forward-looking statements. These risk factors may be generally stated as the risk that the assumptions and estimates expressed above do not occur as forecast, but specifically include, without limitation: (i) risks relating to variations in the mineral content within the material identified as Mineral Resources from that predicted; (ii) general risks related to exploration drilling programs; (iii) developments in world metals markets; (iv) risks relating to fluctuations in the Canadian dollar relative to the US dollar; (v) management's discretion to refocus the Company's exploration efforts and/or alter the Company's short and long term business plans; and (vi) the additional risks described in First Mining's Annual Information Form for the year ended December 31, 2016 filed with the Canadian securities regulatory authorities under the Company's SEDAR profile at www.sedar.com, and in First Mining's Annual Report on Form 40-F filed with the SEC on EDGAR.

First Mining cautions that the foregoing list of factors that may affect future results is not exhaustive. When relying on our forward-looking statements to make decisions with respect to First Mining, investors and others should carefully consider the foregoing factors and other uncertainties and potential events. First Mining does not undertake to update any forward-looking statement, whether written or oral, that may be made from time to time by the Company or on our behalf, except as required by law.

Cautionary Note to United States Investors

This news release has been prepared in accordance with the requirements of the securities laws in effect in Canada, which differ from the requirements of U.S. securities laws. Unless otherwise indicated, all resource and reserve estimates included in this news release have been prepared in accordance with National Instrument 43-101 Standards of Disclosure for Mineral Projects ("NI 43-101") and the Canadian Institute of Mining, Metallurgy, and Petroleum 2014 Definition Standards on Mineral Resources and Mineral Reserves. NI 43-101 is a rule developed by the Canadian Securities Administrators which establishes standards for all public disclosure an issuer makes of scientific and technical information concerning mineral projects. Canadian standards, including NI 43-101, differ significantly from the requirements of the United States Securities and Exchange Commission ("SEC"), and mineral resource and reserve information contained herein may not be comparable to similar information disclosed by U.S. companies. In particular, and without limiting the generality of the foregoing, the term "resource" does not equate to the term "reserves". Under U.S. standards, mineralization may not be classified as a "reserve" unless the determination has been made that the mineralization could be economically and legally produced or extracted at the time the reserve determination is made. The SEC's disclosure standards normally do not permit the inclusion of information concerning "measured mineral resources", "indicated mineral resources" or "inferred mineral resources" or other descriptions of the amount of mineralization in mineral deposits that do not constitute "reserves" by U.S. standards in documents filed with the SEC. Investors are cautioned not to assume that any part or all of mineral deposits in these categories will ever be converted into reserves. U.S. investors should also understand that "inferred mineral resources" have a great amount of uncertainty as to their existence and great uncertainty as to their economic and legal feasibility. It cannot be assumed that all or any part of an "inferred mineral resource" will ever be upgraded to a higher category. Under Canadian rules, estimated "inferred mineral resources" may not form the basis of feasibility or pre-feasibility studies except in rare cases. Investors are cautioned not to assume that all or any part of an "inferred mineral resource" exists or is economically or legally mineable. Disclosure of "contained ounces" in a resource is permitted disclosure under Canadian regulations; however, the SEC normally only permits issuers to report mineralization that does not constitute "reserves" by SEC standards as in-place tonnage and grade without reference to unit measures. The requirements of NI 43-101 for identification of "reserves" are also not the same as those of the SEC, and reserves reported by the Company in compliance with NI 43-101 may not qualify as "reserves" under SEC standards. Accordingly, information concerning mineral deposits set forth herein may not be comparable with information made public by companies that report in accordance with U.S. standards.

SOURCE: First Mining Gold Corp.

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SpendEdge, a global procurement market intelligence firm, has announced the release of their Global Agave Syrup Category Procurement Market Intelligence Report.

This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180920005254/en/

Global Agave Syrup Category Procurement Market Intelligence Report. (Photo: Business Wire)

A recent analysis of the market reveals that the consumers are shifting their preference towards agave syrup substitute owing to its low fructose content. In the US, the fructose content of the agave syrup has barred it from being classified as a GRAS product and has been declared unfit for consumption for fructose intolerant consumers. The combined effect of these factors is decelerating the spend growth momentum for the agave syrup market.

"Buyers should conduct sampling tests on inbound materials related to agave syrup as well as maintain a record of the same to monitor the consistency of the product quality delivered by the suppliers," says SpendEdge procurement expert Angad Singh.

The agave syrup market is influenced by dynamic and multiple factors that are changing the course of its growth on a regular basis. As a result, to sustain themselves in such a market, both the buyers and the suppliers must be abreast of all the key factors that are impacting procurement. Request a FREE sample reportto know more about these factors and other important scopes of this comprehensive report

The procurement experts at SpendEdge expect the following factors to play a key role in influencing theglobal category spend for the agave syrup market.

Consumers' preference shift towards agave syrup substitute

Extensive use of agave syrup in making baked confectionery products

Not what you are looking for? Our industry experts will work directly with you to understand your requirements and offer customized information! Get in touch

SpendEdge is now offering limited-time discounts on report purchases. Buy two reports and get the third one for free

SpendEdge's procurement market intelligence reports for the agro commodities and raw materials category offers key insights on sustainability and procurement best practices. The reports offer a clear overview of the supplier market ecosystem which aids the buyers in making critical procurement organization decision. Additionally, SpendEdge's reports provide insights on supplier evaluation metrics and category pricing strategies.

Report scope snapshot: Agave syrup market

Category pricing insights

Total cost of ownership analysis

Overview of pricing models

Comparison of pricing models

Interested to know more about the scope of our reports? Download a FREE sample

Category management strategy

Supplier and buyer KPIs

Outsourcing category management activities

Category management objectives

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Suppliers selection

Supplier selection criteria

Service level agreement

Incumbent supplier evaluation metrics

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Do you purchase multiple reports in a year? Our subscription platform, SpendEdge Insights provides ready-to-use procurement research reports for multiple categories, latest supplier news, innovation landscape, markets insights, supplier tracking, and much more at the click of a button. Start your 14-day FREE trial now.

Related Reports:

Global Nutmeg and Mace Category- Procurement Market Intelligence Report

Global Quinoa Category Procurement Market Intelligence Report

About SpendEdge:

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Contacts:

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Vancouver, British Columbia--(Newsfile Corp. - September 20, 2018) - Great Bear Resources (TSXV: GBR) (the "Company" or "Great Bear") today reported revised results from its recent high-grade gold discovery in the Hinge Zone, and provided details on its new drill program, now underway at its Dixie Project in the Red Lake District of Ontario.

Drill hole DHZ-004 was originally reported as returning 44.47 g/t gold over 7.00 metres on August 22, 2018.The interval has been increased to 68.76 g/t gold over 7.00 metres through re-assay of a previously under-reported core interval.

Table 1: Revised assay results for drill hole DHZ-004. All intervals are drill indicated, as there has been insufficient drilling in the Hinge Zone to define true thicknesses.

Drill Hole

From

(m) To

(m) Width

(m) Original Interval Gold (g/t) Revised Interval Gold (g/t) DHZ-004

124.50 131.50 7.00 44.47 68.76 including 124.50 128.30 3.80 81.09 125.84 including 124.50 126.50 2.00 143.25 228.27 including 125.50 126.50 1.00 224.03 302.48

*The interval contains a 2.75 m section of 0.02 g/t gold from 129.00 m to 131.75 m.

R. Bob Singh, P.Geo, Director and VP Exploration of Great Bear commented, "As part of our quality control procedures, all high grade intercepts are reviewed in detail and samples are flagged for check-assay and re-assay. After reviewing the intercepts in hole DHZ-004, it was determined that the analytical result from sample number 279693, originally reported as 1.7 g/t gold over 0.5 metres of core length, did not match the visual description of the drill core and was inconsistent with the grade of surrounding samples. After consultation with SGS Canada's quality control department, the sample was re-submitted for triplicate assays which returned an average of 341 g/t gold by gravimetric analysis. We are satisfied with the results of our quality control assessment and do not anticipate any further changes to our reported results."

SGS Canada Inc., Great Bear's assay laboratory, provided the following comment:

"Great Bear Resources submitted samples to SGS Canada Minerals Red Lake laboratory on July 17th, 2018. The samples were tested under report RL1801865 on August 3rd, 2018. Great Bear Resources requested a repeat analysis on sample # 279693 as the Great Bear geology team had previously identified visible gold in this sample. The original result was 1.7 g/t gold by AAS instrumentation and the subsequent triplicate check assay reported 303 g/t, 350 g/t and 370 g/t gold by gravimetric analysis.

The sample was originally tested through the typical exploration gold method with the upper limit of 10 g/t gold. The issue was likely due to incomplete dissolution of the dore bead prior to instrumental analysis and related to the high gold content. This under reporting issue appears to be limited to sample # 279693.

As with all quality concerns, SGS strives to continuously improve and provide customer satisfaction. SGS is working closely with Great Bear Resources and measures have been put in place to prevent this issue in future."

An image of the core segment originally assayed as containing 1.7 g/t gold is shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1: Image of DHZ-004 sample 279693, originally reported as 1.7 g/t gold, but returning an average grade of 341 g/t gold in triplicate gravimetric re-assay.





Cannot view Figure 1? Please visit:

https://orders.newsfilecorp.com/files/5331/38781_a1537393486620_11a.jpg

2018 - 2019 Dixie Project Drill Program

The Company also reports it has commenced a 30,000 metre drill program that will consist of approximately 150 drill holes and will continue through 2018 and 2019. The program's anticipated budget is $5,500,000.The Company currently has $11,500,000 on hand following the closing of a $10,070,000 private placement announced September 11, 2018.

The new drill program will continue to drill test the Dixie Limb Zone ("DLZ"), including its various sub-zones such as the Hinge Zone and South Limb Zones. Step-out drilling will also test additional targets along the 10 kilometre strike length of the DLZ.

In addition to the DLZ, a number of parallel structural trends and geological contacts have also been identified by Great Bear's technical team that represent new potential gold mineralization targets elsewhere on the Dixie property. Many of these are associated with D2 fold closures, potential intrusive bodies, and cross-cutting structures that have been defined using the Company's 2017 high-resolution airborne magnetic survey data. These factors are important gold mineralization controls across the district and have the potential to host additional zones of gold mineralization at Dixie.

Additions to the Exploration Team

The Company is pleased to announce that Director and VP Exploration R. Bob Singh, P.Geo, has increased his involvement with the Company to a full-time basis. The Company has also retained Andrea Diakow, P.Geo, as Exploration Manager. Bob and Andrea have previously worked together on other Red Lake drill programs for a variety of publicly-traded exploration companies.

The Company also reports that it has retained Rimini Exploration and Consulting Ltd., based in Red Lake, to assist with project operations. Rimini staff have assisted Great Bear since the Company's drill program was initiated in summer 2017.

Collectively, Great Bear's exploration staff have over 110 years of experience in the Red Lake district, including underground at the main Red Lake Gold Mine operated by Goldcorp Inc.

The Company also reports it has granted an aggregate of 1,220,000 stock options to officers, directors, advisors and consultants of the Company, exercisable at $1.85 per share for a period of five years. The options are subject to a four month hold period.

About Great Bear

Great Bear is earning a 100% royalty-free interest in the Dixie property for remaining payments totaling $110,000 over three years. The property consists of 9,140 hectares located approximately 15 minutes' drive along Highway 105 from downtown Red Lake, Ontario. The Red Lake mining district has produced over 30,000,000 ounces of gold and is one of the premier mining districts in Canada, benefitting from major active mining operations including the Red Lake Gold Mine of Goldcorp Inc., plus modern infrastructure and a skilled workforce. The Dixie property covers a drill and geophysically defined multi-kilometre gold mineralized structure similar to that hosting other producing gold mines in the district. The project has seen over 200 drill holes to-date and has yielded high grade near-surface gold results from several gold zones hosted at an extensive mineralized geological contact - the Dixie Limb Zone. In addition, Great Bear is also earning a 100% royalty-free interest in its West Madsen properties which total 3,860 hectares and are contiguous with Pure Gold Mining Inc.'s Madsen property. All of Great Bear's Red Lake projects are accessible year-round through existing roads.

Drill core is logged and sampled in a secure core storage facility located in Red Lake Ontario. Core samples from the program are cut in half, using a diamond cutting saw, and are sent to Activation Laboratories Ltd. in Ancaster Ontario, and SGS Canada Inc. in Red Lake, Ontario, both of which are accredited mineral analysis laboratories, for analysis. All samples are analysed for gold using standard Fire Assay-AA techniques. Samples returning over 3.0 g/t gold are analysed utilizing standard Fire Assay-Gravimetric methods. Certified gold reference standards, blanks and field duplicates are routinely inserted into the sample stream, as part of Great Bear's quality control/quality assurance program (QAQC). No QAQC issues were noted with the results reported herein.

Mr. R. Bob Singh, P.Geo, Director and VP Exploration for Great Bear, is the Qualified Person as defined by National Instrument 43-101 responsible for the accuracy of technical information contained in this news release.

For further information please contact Mr. Chris Taylor, P.Geo, President and CEO at 604-646-8354, or Mr. Knox Henderson, Investor Relations, at 604-551-2360.

ON BEHALF OF THE BOARD

"Chris Taylor"

Chris Taylor, President and CEO

Inquiries:

Tel: 604-646-8354

Fax: 604-646-4526

info@greatbearresources.ca

www.greatbearresources.ca

Neither TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.



This new release may contain forward-looking statements. These statements are based on current expectations and assumptions that are subject to risks and uncertainties. Actual results could differ materially because of factors discussed in the management discussion and analysis section of our interim and most recent annual financial statement or other reports and filings with the TSX Venture Exchange and applicable Canadian securities regulations. We do not assume any obligation to update any forward-looking statements.

We seek safe harbor
SAN FRANCISCO, September 20, 2018 /PRNewswire/ --

Next-generationlearning solution accessible anytime, anywhere and on any device

Infosys (NYSE: INFY), a global leader in consulting, technology and next-generation services, today announced the launch of Infosys Wingspan, its next-gen learning solution to help organizations accelerate their talent transformation journey. Based on open source technologies, the cloud-first and mobile-first solution is designed to provide a seamless interactive learning experience accessible anytime, anywhere and on any device.

(Logo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/633365/Infosys_Logo.jpg )



Infosys Wingspan provides best-in-class curated content from multiple sources that learners can access to enrich their knowledge. Users are provided a personal and engaging experience, by creating their own 'goals', measuring 'time spent' and 'learning history'. With machine learning capabilities, the solution provides tailored and relevant learning recommendations while the AI-powered voice-enabled 'learning assistant' also offers guidance at any stage of the learning process. The connected and collaborative solution also enables interaction with peers and provides opportunities for collaborative and competitive learning.

In addition, the solution allows learners to test their competencies through various assessments and gain relevant certifications. Wingspan also enables leaders to drive impactful learning initiatives with insights leveraging analytics, which helps companies understand the learning trends within the organization and plan requisite interventions.

Since its launch in April 2018, Infosys Wingspan (known as Lex internally) has been used by over 1,14,000 Infosys employees. The solution is now available for clients and can easily be integrated into any enterprise's IT infrastructure to transform its learning capabilities. Infosys Wingspan will be offered with round-the-clock guidance from experts and educators as well as technical and operational support.

Pravin Rao, Chief Operating Officer, Infosys, said, "The need to reskill and upskill the workforce has become business critical for global enterprises as they embrace the digital disruption. This was evident in a recent research we undertook, in which we found that the lack of digital skillsets was highlighted by many organizations as the greatest barrier to transformation. Infosys Wingspan is a robust holistic learning solution that will enable organizations to focus on reskilling their talent of today, to be ready for tomorrow in a hands-on and interactive way."

Phil Fersht, Founder and CEO, HfS Research, said, "We operate in an era where the demands on services talent to understand their clients' digital business models and apply emerging technologies to support them is unprecedented. The only way professional IT services firms can stay ahead of the market is to create university-like environments for their talent to thrive, and Wingspan is a powerful example of empowering the sharing of cutting-edge knowledge and insight across a massive global services organization."

Know more about Infosys Wingspan

About Infosys

Infosys is a global leader in next-generation digital services and consulting. We enable clients in 45 countries to navigate their digital transformation. With over three decades of experience in managing the systems and workings of global enterprises, we expertly steer our clients through their digital journey. We do it by enabling the enterprise with an AI-powered core that helps prioritize the execution of change. We also empower the business with agile digital at scale to deliver unprecedented levels of performance and customer delight. Our always-on learning agenda drives their continuous improvement through building and transferring digital skills, expertise, and ideas from our innovation ecosystem.

Visit www.infosys.com to see how Infosys (NYSE: INFY) can help your enterprise navigate your next.

Safe Harbor

Certain statements in this press release concerning our future growth prospects are forward-looking statements regarding our future business expectations intended to qualify for the 'safe harbor' under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, which involve a number of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those in such forward-looking statements. The risks and uncertainties relating to these statements include, but are not limited to, risks and uncertainties regarding fluctuations in earnings, fluctuations in foreign exchange rates, our ability to manage growth, intense competition in IT services including those factors which may affect our cost advantage, wage increases in India, our ability to attract and retain highly skilled professionals, client concentration, restrictions on immigration, industry segment concentration, our ability to manage our international operations, reduced demand for technology in our key focus areas, disruptions in telecommunication networks or system failures, our ability to successfully complete and integrate potential acquisitions, liability for damages on our service contracts, the success of the companies in which Infosys has made strategic investments, withdrawal or expiration of governmental fiscal incentives, political instability and regional conflicts, legal restrictions on raising capital or acquiring companies outside India, and unauthorized use of our intellectual property and general economic conditions affecting our industry. Additional risks that could affect our future operating results are more fully described in our United States Securities and Exchange Commission filings including our Annual Report on Form 20-F for the fiscal year ended March 31, 2018. These filings are available at www.sec.gov. Infosys may, from time to time, make additional written and oral forward-looking statements, including statements contained in the company's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission and our reports to shareholders. In addition, please note that any forward-looking statements contained herein are based on assumptions that we believe to be reasonable as of the date of this press release. The company does not undertake to update any forward-looking statements that may be made from time to time by or on behalf of the company unless it is required by law.
During the summer vacation period this year, various regions of Saudi Arabia received as many as 11.3 million tourists who spent more than SR13.5 billion ($3.5 billion), according to the Saudi Commission for Tourism and National Heritage (SCTH).



The commission said the spending was an increase of about 12 per cent over the previous summer.



The Tourism Information and Research Centre (MAS), affiliated to the Saudi Commission for Tourism and National Heritage, revealed that the number of inbound tourists reached up to 2.3 million, up 21.2 per cent compared to 2017.



The Eastern Region was the most visited destination for inbound tourists, receiving about 45 percent of the tourists, followed by Riyadh, which has a 27 per cent share. Makkah accounted for 16 per cent of the inbound tourist numbers.



SCTH said about 39 per cent of the tourists travelled to various parts of the kingdom to visit their friends and relatives. Those travelling for business represented about 31 per cent while those doing shopping were about 12 per cent.



The commission pointed out that the number of outbound tourists departing from the kingdom reached 9.4 million, up 7.4 per cent compared to 2017.



With regard to the expenditure of the departing tourists, the report showed that tourist expenditures amounted to more than SR30.5 billion ($8.1 billion), which is a drop of about 4.6 per cent over their spending the previous year.



According to the centre, the average expenditure of each tourist was SR1,196 ($318.7).



SCTH said most of the foreign tourists came from the GCC countries, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, East Asia and the Pacific, North America and Africa. - TradeArabia News Service
Aperture Investors aligns client and manager interests using an innovative performance-linked fee model

Assicurazioni Generali SpA, one of the world's leading insurance and asset management groups and Aperture Investors today announce the launch of an innovative new asset management company with a disruptive revenue model led by Peter Kraus, the former Chairman and CEO of AllianceBernstein (AB) and Global Co-Head of Goldman Sachs' Investment Management Division. Generali will contribute up to $4 billion of strategic investment capital for individual investment strategies, subject to the approval of Assicurazioni Generali's Board of Directors and Aperture Investors.

This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180920005190/en/

In Aperture Investors' unique revenue model, the firm charges ETF-like fees, which can only go higher when managers beat their benchmarks. Similarly, managers are paid modest base compensation and can only earn more when they generate outperformance*, a major departure from the traditional fixed-fee structure in which managers are compensated based on the volume of assets managed. In addition, a deferral mechanism provides for unearned compensation to be returned to Aperture Investors' clients ensuring that the profitability of the firm is dependent on whether or not its clients receive returns in excess of benchmarks over the long run*.

Tim Ryan, CEO of Generali Asset Management, commented: "Aperture Investors is another important milestone in Generali's multi-boutique strategy launched last year. We believe that innovation is not only a key lever for our long-term success but also an opportunity for Generali to guide the process of change as a leader in the insurance and financial industry. Aperture Investors offers us the ability to develop a new model that addresses manager incentives while also leveraging invaluable know-how in our sector."

Carlo Trabattoni, Head of Generali Investments Partners, said: "Peter Kraus has a twenty-year history of successfully leading global financial organizations and the ability to inspire and attract talent eager to transform the business of asset management. The total AUM in the world amounts to well over $84 trillion, many active managers are underperforming and passive indexing is growing. With Aperture, we want to combine the interest for passive with the need for active."

"Asset management is an industry long overdue for disruption. There are currently too many active managers managing too much money. Fixed fees and a lack of real capacity constraints have long incentivized managers to grow assets under management rather than pursue outperformance*," said Peter Kraus, Chairman and CEO, Aperture Investors. "This structure has led to years of poor performance that has eroded client trust in active management. We intend to change this by aligning manager and client incentives around outperformance*. We do this by charging fees that are similar to passive ETFs when performance is at or below a stated benchmark and we only charge more when we generate outperformance*. It's our belief that investors would rather pay for performance than pay regardless of whether or not they get any, and the only way to do that is to disrupt the long-held model of fixed fees based on AUM in asset management."

For more information on Aperture Investors please visit: http://apertureinvestors.com/

Follow the firm on Twitter: www.twitter.com/apertureinvstrs

Follow the firm on Instagram: www.instagram.com/apertureinvestors

Follow the firm on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/aperture-investors/

Follow the firm on Facebook: www.facebook.com/apertureinvestors/

About Generali

Generali is an independent, Italian insurance and asset management group, with a strong international presence. Established in 1831, it is among the world's leading insurers and is present in 50 countries with total premium income exceeding 68 billion in 2017. Generali's total AUM was around 500 billion at the end of June 2018. With nearly 71,000 employees in the world and 57 million customers, the Group is a major player in Western Europe and has an increasingly significant presence in Central and Eastern Europe as well as in Asia.

About Aperture Investors

Aperture Investors aims to reestablish trust in the asset management industry by aligning client interests with its own. Its objective is outperformance*. Aperture Investors strategies charge low, ETF-like fees when performance is at or below stated benchmarks. When and only when returns* are generated in excess of a strategy's benchmark, Aperture Investors charges a performance-linked fee. Aperture Investors investment teams are compensated primarily on outperformance rather than assets under management*. Led by industry veteran Peter Kraus in partnership with Generali, one of the world's largest insurers, Aperture Investors' mission is embedded in its fee and compensation structures, as well as in the ways it openly engages with the investing community online. To learn more about Aperture Investors, its managers, and its innovative structure, visit us at www.apertureinvestors.com.

*Investments involve risks. Past performance is not a reliable indicator of future performance and can be misleading. There can be no assurance that an investment objective will be achieved or that there will be a return on capital. You may not get back the amount initially invested.

Important Information

This Marketing publication has been issued by Assicurazioni Generali Societa per Azioni having its registered office at no. 2, Piazza Duca degli Abruzzi, Trieste, Italy, with a fully paid-up share capital of Euro 1.595.915.364,00 fiscal code no. 00079760328, entered in the Companies' Register (Registro delle Imprese) of Trieste under no. 00079760328, entered in the Register of Italian Insurance and Reinsurance Companies under no. 100003, Parent Company of Generali Group, registered with number 026 in the Register of Insurance Groups (Albo dei gruppi assicurativi), and Aperture Investors, LLC, an investment adviser registered with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission ("SEC") (hereinafter "the Issuers"). Aperture Investors, LLC wholly owns Aperture Investors UK Ltd., a newly formed UK limited company (FCA reference number 648953 of G10 Capital Limited).This publication is for information purposes only and does not provide any professional investment, legal, accounting nor tax advice. All information and opinions contained in this publication represent the judgment of the Issuers at the time of publication and are subject to change without notice. For more information about costs, risks and conditions in relation to an investment, please always read the relevant legal documents. This publication may not be reproduced (in whole or in part), transmitted, modified, or used for any public or commercial purpose without the prior written permission of the Issuers. This release is not intended for any potential investor outside the jurisdictions in which the mentioned investment manager investment adviser has been authorised.

2018 Aperture Investors, LLC. All rights reserved.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180920005190/en/

Contacts:

Aperture Investors

Kate Gundry, +1 617-797-5174

press@apertureinvestors.com

or

Generali Media Relations, +39 02 48248884

media@generali.com
PUNE, India, September 20, 2018 /PRNewswire/ --

ReportsnReports added SON (Self-Organizing Networks) in the 5G Era: 2019 - 2030 - Opportunities, Challenges, Strategies & Forecasts report.

SON (Self-Organizing Network) technology minimizes the lifecycle cost of running a mobile network by eliminating manual configuration of network elements at the time of deployment, right through to dynamic optimization and troubleshooting during operation. Besides improving network performance and customer experience, SON can significantly reduce the cost of mobile operator services, improving the OpEx-to-revenue ratio and deferring avoidable CapEx.

To support their LTE and HetNet deployments, early adopters of SON have already witnessed a spate of benefits - in the form of accelerated rollout times, simplified network upgrades, fewer dropped calls, improved call setup success rates, higher end-user throughput, alleviation of congestion during special events, increased subscriber satisfaction and loyalty, and operational efficiencies - such as energy and cost savings, and freeing up radio engineers from repetitive manual tasks.

Largely driven by the increasing complexity of today's multi-RAN mobile networks - including network densification and spectrum heterogeneity, as well as 5G NR (New Radio) infrastructure rollouts, global investments in SON technology are expected to grow at a CAGR of approximately 11% between 2019 and 2022. By the end of 2022, estimates that SON (Self-Organizing Network) will account for a market worth $5.5 Billion.

Access Complete Research of SON (Self-Organizing Networks) in the 5G Era: 2019 - 2030 - Opportunities, Challenges, Strategies & Forecasts report by purchasehttps://www.reportsnreports.com/purchase.aspx?name=1674801

Although SON was originally developed as an operational approach to streamline cellular RAN (Radio Access Network) deployment and optimization, mobile operators and vendors are increasingly focusing on integrating new capabilities such as self-protection against digital security threats, and self-learning through artificial intelligence techniques, as well as extending the scope of SON beyond the RAN to include both mobile core and transport network segments - which will be critical to address 5G requirements such as end-to-end network slicing. In addition, dedicated SON solutions for Wi-Fi and other access technologies have also emerged, to simplify wireless networking in home and enterprise environments.

The "SON (Self-Organizing Networks) in the 5G Era: 2019 - 2030 - Opportunities, Challenges, Strategies & Forecasts" report presents an in-depth assessment of the SON and associated mobile network optimization ecosystem, including market drivers, challenges, enabling technologies, functional areas, use cases, key trends, standardization, regulatory landscape, mobile operator case studies, opportunities, future roadmap, value chain, ecosystem player profiles and strategies. The report also presents revenue forecasts for both SON and conventional mobile network optimization, along with individual projections for 10 SON submarkets, and 6 regions from 2019 till 2030.

The report comes with an associated Excel datasheet suite covering quantitative data from all numeric forecasts presented in the report.

Topics Covered

The report covers the following topics:

SON (Self-Organizing Network) Market ecosystem

Market drivers and barriers

Conventional mobile network planning & optimization

Mobile network infrastructure spending, traffic projections and value chain

SON technology, architecture & functional areas

Review of over 30 SON use cases - ranging from automated neighbor relations and parameter optimization to self-protection and cognitive networks

Case studies of 15 commercial SON deployments by mobile operators

Complementary technologies including Big Data, advanced analytics, artificial intelligence and machine learning

Key trends in next-generation LTE and 5G SON implementations including network slicing, dynamic spectrum management, edge computing, virtualization and zero-touch automation

Regulatory landscape, collaborative initiatives and standardization

SON future roadmap: 2019 - 2030

Profiles and strategies of more than 160 leading ecosystem players including wireless network infrastructure OEMs, SON solution providers and mobile operators

Strategic recommendations for SON solution providers and mobile operators

Market analysis and forecasts from 2019 till 2030

Get Discount on this Research Report athttps://www.reportsnreports.com/contacts/discount.aspx?name=1674801

Forecast Segmentation

Market forecasts are provided for each of the following submarkets and their subcategories:

Mobile Network Optimization

SON

Conventional Mobile Network Planning & Optimization

SON Network Segment Submarkets

RAN (Radio Access Network)

Mobile Core

Transport (Backhaul & Fronthaul)

SON Architecture Submarkets

C-SON (Centralized SON)

D-SON (Distributed SON)

SON Access Network Technology Submarkets

2G & 3G

LTE

5G

Wi-Fi & Others

Regional Markets

Asia Pacific

Eastern Europe

Latin & Central America

Middle East & Africa

North America

Western Europe

Key Questions Answered

The report provides answers to the following key questions:

How big is the SON opportunity?

What trends, challenges and barriers are influencing its growth?

How is the ecosystem evolving by segment and region?

What will the market size be in 2022, and at what rate will it grow?

Which regions and countries will see the highest percentage of growth?

How do SON investments compare with spending on traditional mobile network optimization?

What are the practical, quantifiable benefits of SON - based on live, commercial deployments?

How can mobile operators capitalize on SON to ensure optimal network performance, improve customer experience, reduce costs, and drive revenue growth?

What is the status of C-SON and D-SON adoption worldwide?

What are the prospects of artificial intelligence in SON and mobile network automation?

What opportunities exist for SON in mobile core and transport networks?

How can SON ease the deployment of unlicensed and private LTE/5G-ready networks?

What SON capabilities will 5G networks entail?

How does SON impact mobile network optimization engineers?

What is the global and regional outlook for SON associated OpEx savings?

Who are the key ecosystem players, and what are their strategies?

What strategies should SON solution providers and mobile operators adopt to remain competitive?

Inquire Before Buying of this Research Report athttps://www.reportsnreports.com/contacts/inquirybeforebuy.aspx?name=1674801

Key Findings

The report has the following key findings:

Largely driven by the increasing complexity of today's multi-RAN mobile networks - including network densification and spectrum heterogeneity, as well as 5G NR (New Radio) infrastructure rollouts, global investments in SON technology are expected to grow at a CAGR of approximately 11% between 2019 and 2022. By the end of 2022, SNS Telecom & IT estimates that SON will account for a market worth $5.5 Billion .

. Based on feedback from mobile operators worldwide, the growing adoption of SON technology has brought about a host of practical benefits for early adopters - ranging from more than a 50% decline in dropped calls and reduction in network congestion during special events by a staggering 80% to OpEx savings of more than 30% and an increase in service revenue by 5-10%.

In addition, SON mechanisms are playing a pivotal role in accelerating the adoption of 5G networks - through the enablement of advanced capabilities such as network slicing, dynamic spectrum management, predictive resource allocation, and the automated of deployment of virtualized 5G network functions.

To better address network performance challenges amidst increasing complexity, C-SON platforms are leveraging an array of complementary technologies - from artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms to Big Data technologies and the use of alternative data such as information extracted from crowd-sourcing tools.

In addition to infrastructure vendor and third-party offerings, mobile operator developed SON solutions are also beginning to emerge. For example, Elisa has developed a SON platform based on closed-loop automation and customizable algorithms for dynamic network optimization. Through a dedicated business unit, the Finnish operator offers its in-house SON implementation as a commercial product to other mobile operators.

List of Companies Mentioned:

3GPP (Third Generation Partnership Project), 5G PPP (5G Infrastructure Public Private Partnership), Accedian Networks, Accelleran, Accuver, Actix, AIRCOM International, AirHop Communications, Airspan Networks, Allot Communications, Alpha Networks, Alphabet, Altiostar Networks, Altran, Alvarion Technologies, Amdocs, Anritsu Corporation and many more company profiles discussed in report.

Browse Another Related Research Report:

The Private LTE & 5G Network Ecosystem: 2018 - 2030 - Opportunities, Challenges, Strategies, Industry Verticals & Forecasts

The 2G, 3G, 4G & 5G Wireless Network Infrastructure Market: 2017 - 2030 - with an Evaluation of Wi-Fi and WiMAX

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Bagsvrd, Denmark, 20 September 2018 - Novo Nordisk today announced the headline results from PIONEER 10, a phase 3a trial with oral semaglutide vs once-weekly subcutaneous dulaglutide, both in combination with one oral antidiabetic drug in Japanese adults with type 2 diabetes. Oral semaglutide is an investigational GLP-1 analogue taken once daily as a tablet. The trial investigated the safety, tolerability and efficacy of 3, 7 and 14 mg oral semaglutide compared with 0.75 mg once-weekly dulaglutide in 458 Japanese people with type 2 diabetes. Prior to enrolment, participants were inadequately controlled on one oral antidiabetic drug.

The trial achieved its primary objective by demonstrating a comparable number of adverse events with oral semaglutide compared to 0.75 mg dulaglutide. The proportion of people treated with 3, 7 and 14 mg oral semaglutide who experienced gastro-intestinal adverse events were 31%, 39% and 54%, respectively, compared to 40% with dulaglutide; the most frequently reported events being constipation and nausea. The proportion of people who discontinued treatment due to adverse events was between 3% and 6% of people treated with oral semaglutide, compared to 3% of people treated with dulaglutide.

Two distinct statistical approaches to evaluating the efficacy of oral semaglutide vs dulaglutide were applied in the PIONEER 10 trial; a primary statistical approach[1] evaluating the effect regardless of discontinuation of treatment and use of rescue medication, and a secondary statistical approach[2] describing the effect while on treatment and without use of rescue medication.

When applying the primary statistical approach, statistically significantly greater reductions in HbA 1c and body weight were seen with oral semaglutide 14 mg than 0.75 mg dulaglutide at week 52.

When applying the secondary statistical approach, from a baseline of 8.3%, people treated with 14 mg oral semaglutide experienced a statistically significantly greater reduction in HbA 1c of 1.8% compared to 1.3% with 0.75 mg dulaglutide after 52 weeks. The reductions in HbA 1c were 0.7% and 1.4% for people treated with 3 and 7 mg oral semaglutide, respectively. Reductions in body weight from baseline were also statistically significantly greater with 14 mg oral semaglutide at week 52, with a reduction of 1.9 kg compared to a weight gain of 1.1 kg with dulaglutide. People treated with 3 and 7 mg oral semaglutide experienced a weight gain of 0.1 kg and weight reduction of 1.0 kg, respectively.

In addition, applying the secondary statistical approach, The Japanese Diabetes Society (JDS) treatment target of HbA 1c below 6.5% was achieved by 21%, 43% and 58% of people on treatment with 3, 7 and 14 mg oral semaglutide, respectively, compared to 41% of the people treated with 0.75 mg dulaglutide.

"Many people with type 2 diabetes in Japan remain uncontrolled on oral antidiabetic treatments," said Mads Krogsgaard Thomsen, executive vice president and chief science officer of Novo Nordisk. "When adding oral semaglutide to the treatment of this group of people, this study has demonstrated that oral semaglutide is both well tolerated and more efficacious compared to subcutaneous dulaglutide."

About PIONEER 10 and the PIONEER clinical trial programme

PIONEER 10 was a 57-week, randomised, open-label, active-controlled, parallel-group, multi-centre, single country trial with four treatment arms comparing the safety, tolerability and efficacy of 3, 7 and 14 mg oral semaglutide with 0.75 mg dulaglutide (the approved dose by the Pharmaceutical and Medical Devices Agency (PMDA) in Japan) in Japanese people with type 2 diabetes inadequately controlled with one oral antidiabetic drug (sulfonylurea, glinide, thiazolidinedione, alpha-glucosidase inhibitor or sodium glucose cotransporter-2 inhibitor). PIONEER 10 randomised 458 people in a 2:2:2:1 manner to receive either a dose of oral semaglutide 3, 7 or 14 mg once daily or 0.75 mg dulaglutide once weekly. The primary endpoint was the number of adverse events during exposure to the drug, assessed up to 57 weeks. Key secondary endpoints included the change from baseline to week 26 and 52 in HbA 1c and change from baseline to week 26 and 52 in body weight.

The PIONEER phase 3a clinical development programme for oral semaglutide is a global development programme with enrolment of 8,845 people with type 2 diabetes across 10 clinical trials, which are all expected to complete in 2018.

Further information

Media: Katrine Sperling +45 3079 6718 krsp@novonordisk.com (mailto:krsp@novonordisk.com) Investors: Peter Hugreffe Ankersen +45 3075 9085 phak@novonordisk.com (mailto:phak@novonordisk.com) Anders Mikkelsen +45 3079 4461 armk@novonordisk.com (mailto:armk@novonordisk.com) Valdemar Borum Svarrer +45 3079 0301 jvls@novonordisk.com (mailto:cnje@novonordisk.com)



Company announcement No 74 / 2018



[1] Treatment policy estimand approach: treatment effect regardless of discontinuation of treatment or initiation of rescue medication (analysed by pattern mixture model using multiple imputations to handle missing data with an analysis of covariance (ANCOVA)). [2] Hypothetical estimand approach: treatment effect while on treatment without use of rescue medication (analysed by Mixed Models for Repeated Measurements (MMRM)). Similar statistical methodology as applied in the SUSTAIN programme for subcutaneous semaglutide.





PR180920_PIONEER_10_UK (http://hugin.info/2013/R/2216978/866121.pdf)



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: Novo Nordisk A/S via Globenewswire


VANCOUVER, BC / ACCESSWIRE / September 20, 2018 / MGX Minerals Inc. ("MGX" or the "Company") ( CSE: XMG ; FKT: 1MG ; OTCQB: MGXMF ) is pleased to announce that its wholly owned subsidiary ZincNyx Energy Solutions, Inc. ("ZincNyx") has now commissioned particle sizing equipment as part of final preparations to begin manufacturing cathodes for use in its next generation fuel cell batteries. The immediate objective is to decrease cathode manufacturing costs by at least 50% and ultimately reduce costs by more than 90% to achieve a manufactured cost of less than $10 per cathode. In addition to its use in manufacturing of the existing cathode, ZincNyx also plans to use the equipment in the development of its next generation of proprietary fuel cell cathodes that will bring further cost and performance gains. The ability of the new equipment to analyze particles in suspension will also enable ZincNyx engineers to better characterize the morphology and behavior of the dendritic zinc particles that are at the core of the ZincNyx technology.

Initial test work performed during the commissioning phase of the equipment demonstrated sample concentrations around 6m in size (Figure 1). The particle size analyzer will serve as one of the main qualification tools for further development and optimization of the processes used in the manufacturing of the company's unique fuel cell cathodes. ZincNyx intends to conduct microscopic characterization and performance optimization studies to reduce catalyst loading as the cathode is an essential component of its patented fuel cell module, which has already been released for production.

Figure 1. Result of test scan performed during the commissioning



About ZincNyx Energy Solutions

ZincNyx has developed a patented regenerative zinc-air flow battery that efficiently stores energy in the form of zinc particles and contains none of the traditional high cost battery commodities such as lithium, vanadium, or cobalt. The technology allows for low cost mass storage of energy and can be deployed into a wide range of applications.

Unlike conventional batteries, which have a fixed energy/power ratio, ZincNyx's technology uses a fuel tank system that offers flexible energy/power ratios and scalability. The storage capacity is directly tied to the size of the fuel tank and the quantity of recharged zinc fuel, making scalability a major advantage of the flow battery system. In addition, a further major advantage of the zinc-air flow battery is the ability to charge and discharge simultaneously and at different maximum charge or discharge rates since each of the charge and discharge circuits is separate and independent. Other types of standard and flow batteries are limited to a maximum charge and discharge by the total number of cells as there is no separation of the charge, discharge and storage components.

Figure 2. Typical 5kW Modular System



The ZincNyx mission is to provide cost effective, long duration and reliable energy storage systems for markets involving renewables firming, peak shaving, diesel generator replacement, telecom facility back-up, electrification of ferries and tug boats and electric vehicle charging support. With a portfolio of 20 granted patents and an experienced management team, ZincNyx has begun mass production (see press release August 9, 2018). To learn more about ZincNyx technology visit www.zincnyx.com .

About MGX Minerals

MGX Minerals is a diversified Canadian resource company with interests in lithium, magnesium and silicon assets throughout North America. Learn more at www.mgxminerals.com .

Contact Information

Jared Lazerson

President and CEO

Telephone: 1.604.681.7735

Web: www.mgxminerals.com

Neither the Canadian Securities Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the Canadian Securities Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

Forward-Looking Statements

This press release contains forward-looking information or forward-looking statements (collectively "forward-looking information") within the meaning of applicable securities laws. Forward-looking information is typically identified by words such as: "believe," "expect," "anticipate," "intend," "estimate," "potentially" and similar expressions, or are those, which, by their nature, refer to future events. The Company cautions investors that any forward-looking information provided by the Company is not a guarantee of future results or performance, and that actual results may differ materially from those in forward-looking information as a result of various factors. The reader is referred to the Company's public filings for a more complete discussion of such risk factors and their potential effects which may be accessed through the Company's profile on SEDAR at www.sedar.com .

SOURCE: MGX Minerals, Inc.

View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/512264/MGX-Minerals-to-Manufacture-Proprietary-Cathodes-for-Next-Generation-Fuel-Cell-Batteries
Thunder Bay, Ontario--(Newsfile Corp. - September 20, 2018) - White Metal Resources Corp. (TSXV: WHM) ("White Metal" or the "Company") is pleased to announce it has filed documents with the TSX Venture Exchange to close the first tranche of a financing as part of the non-brokered private placement previously announced on September 5, 2018. Subject to regulatory approval, White Metal will issue 1,340,000 units at $0.15 per unit of Flow Through Units ("FTU") for gross proceeds of $ 201,000 to fund exploration on its Gunners Cove Gold Property (the "Property") in Newfoundland.

The previously announced private placement consists of up to a combined maximum of 3,333,333 units of both FTUs at $0.15 per FTU and Non Fow Through Units ("NFTUs") at $0.15 per NFTU for combined gross proceeds of $500,000 which are expected to be completed in multiple tranches.

Each FTU consists of one common share and one-half (1/2) of one share purchase warrant. Each full warrant entitles the holder to purchase an additional common share at $0.25 for two years from closing of the private placement. Each NFTU will consist of one common share and one (1) share purchase warrant. Each warrant will entitle the holder to purchase an additional common share at $0.25 for two years from the closing of the private placement. The flow through proceeds will be expended on the continued exploration of the Company's Gunners Cove Gold Project project located in Newfoundland. The non flow through proceeds will be used for working capital and general corporate purposes.

The first tranche close of the Financing was effected with 1 insider of the Company subscribing for 335,000 FTUs for aggregate subscription proceeds of $50,250.00, that portion of the Financing a :"related party transaction" as such term is defined under Multilateral Instrument 61-101 - Protection of Minority Security Holders in Special Transactions ("MI 61-101"). The Company is relying on exemptions from the formal valuation and minority approval requirements set out in MI 61-101. The Company is exempt from the formal valuation requirement of MI 61-101 under sections 5.5(a) and (b) of MI 61-101 in respect of the transaction as the fair market value of the transaction, insofar as it involves the interested party, is not more than 25% of the Company's market capitalization. Additionally, the Company is exempt from minority shareholder approval under sections 5.7(1)(a) and (b) of MI 61-101 as, in addition to the foregoing, (i) neither the fair market value of the Units nor the consideration received in respect thereof from interested party exceeds $2,500,000, (ii) the Company has one or more independent directors who are not employees of the Company, and (iii) all of the independent directors have approved the transaction. Material change reports were not filed 21 days prior to the closing of the financing because insider participation had not been established at the time the financing was announced.

The offering is open to accredited investors in Canada and will be subject to the completion of formal documentation, receipt of all necessary regulatory approvals, including the TSX Venture Exchange and other customary conditions. All of the securities issued pursuant to the offering will be subject to a four-month plus one day hold period from the date of closing.

Finder's fees may be payable on a portion of the private placements and consist of 7% cash and 7% Broker's Warrants, where applicable. In respect of NFTU's, the Broker Warrant will be exercisable for $0.15 for a unit consisting of one common share and one (1) share purchase warrant exercisable at $0.25 for a period of two years from closing. In respect of FTU's, the Broker Warrant will be exercisable for $0.15 for a unit consisting of one common share of the Company and one half (1/2) of one share purchase warrant, each such whole warrant being exercisable at $0.25 for a period of two years from closing. No Broker Warrants or their underlying common shares shall be eligible for flow through tax deductions.

Although the Company fully expects to spend the funds as stated, there may be circumstances, for sound business reasons, where a reallocation of funds may be necessary.

For more information with respect to to the Gunners Cove Gold Property please visit the Company's Web Page at www.whitemetalres.com.

About White Metal Resources Corp (TSXV: WHM):

White Metal Resources Corp. is a junior mineral exploration company exploring for gold in Canada.

On behalf of the Board of Directors of White Metal Resources Corp.

"Jean-Pierre Colin"

Jean-Pierre Colin, President, CEO and Director

NEITHER THE TSX VENTURE EXCHANGE NOR ITS REGULATION SERVICES PROVIDER (AS THAT TERM IS DEFINED IN THE POLICIES OF THE TSX VENTURE EXCHANGE) ACCEPTS RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE ADEQUACY OR ACCURACY OF THIS NEWS RELEASE.

The information contained herein contains "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of applicable securities legislation. Forward-looking statements relate to information that is based on assumptions of management, forecasts of future results, and estimates of amounts not yet determinable. Any statements that express predictions, expectations, beliefs, plans, projections, objectives, assumptions or future events or performance are not statements of historical fact and may be "forward-looking statements."

Forward-looking statements 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, including, without limitation: risks related to failure to obtain adequate financing on a timely basis and on acceptable terms; risks related to the outcome of legal proceedings; political and regulatory risks associated with mining and exploration; risks related to the maintenance of stock exchange listings; risks related to environmental regulation and liability; the potential for delays in exploration or development activities or the completion of feasibility studies; the uncertainty of profitability; risks and uncertainties relating to the interpretation of drill results, the geology, grade and continuity of mineral deposits; risks related to the inherent uncertainty of production and cost estimates and the potential for unexpected costs and expenses; results of prefeasibility and feasibility studies, and the possibility that future exploration, development or mining results will not be consistent with the Company's expectations; risks related to gold price and other commodity price fluctuations; and other risks and uncertainties related to the Company's prospects, properties and business detailed elsewhere in the Company's disclosure record. Should one or more of these risks and uncertainties materialize, or should underlying assumptions prove incorrect, actual results may vary materially from those described in forward-looking statements. Investors are cautioned against attributing undue certainty to forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements are made as of the date hereof and the Company does not assume any obligation to update or revise them to reflect new events or circumstances. Actual events or results could differ materially from the Company's expectations or projection.

For further information contact:

Jean-Pierre Colin

President, CEO & Director

jpcolin.whitemetal@gmail.com

Phone: (416) 573-4300

or

Michael Stares

684 Squier Street

Thunder Bay, Ontario, Canada, P7B 4A8

Phone: (807) 628-7836 Fax (807) 475 7200
Toronto, Ontario--(Newsfile Corp. - September 20, 2018) - Northern Sphere Mining Corp. (CSE: NSM) (OTCQB: NSMCF) ("Northern Sphere" or the "Company") announced today that it proposes to raise up to $400,000 through a non-brokered private placement (the "Private Placement") of up to 5,000,000 units ("Units") of the Company at a price of $0.08 per Unit. Finders fees may be payable in connection with the Private Placement and the Private Placement may be closed in tranches. Each Unit will be comprised of one common share ("Common Share") of the Company and one Common Share purchase warrant (a "Warrant"). Each Warrant will be exercisable to acquire one Common Share (a "Warrant Share") for a period of three years months following the date of closing at an exercise price of $0.12 per Warrant Share, subject to adjustments in certain events.

The Company anticipates that the net proceeds from the Private Placement will be used for the ongoing development of mining assets and for general corporate purposes.

The Company also announced today that it proposes to effect a debt conversion (the "Debt Conversion") of approximately $334,000 owing to certain creditors of the Company. The Debt Conversion will consist of the issuance of Common Shares at a conversion price of $0.08 per Common Share.

Common Shares issued pursuant to the Private Placement and the Debt Conversion, and Warrant Shares issuable upon the due exercise of the Warrants, will be subject to a four-month hold period from the date of closing.

About Northern Sphere Mining Corp.

Northern Sphere is dedicated to growth through the acquisition and development of mining assets with an emphasis on gold, silver and copper. In efforts to expedite and optimize mineral targeting on its assets, the Company is employing cutting-edge exploration technologies to generate robust mining projects. Headquartered in Toronto, Ontario, Northern Sphere has a strong project pipeline of properties with a focus on gold, silver and other metal production in pro-mining jurisdictions.

Cautionary Statements

This press release contains forward-looking statements which reflect Northern Sphere's current expectations regarding future events. The forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties. Actual results could differ materially from those projected herein. Northern Sphere disclaims any obligation to update these forward-looking statements other than as required by applicable securities laws.

For further information, please contact:

A. John Carter

Chief Executive Officer

Northern Sphere Mining Corp.

Tel: 905-302-3843

The Canadian Securities Exchange has not reviewed and does not accept responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.
Seoul Semiconductor (KOSDAQ:046890) (collectively with Seoul Viosys Co., Ltd., "Seoul"), a leading global innovator of LED products and technology, announced that the U.S. Federal District Court for Nevada issued a judgment in favor of Seoul against Philcor T.V. Electronic Leasing, Inc. dba energyavenue.com ("Philcor"), a company that sells LED lighting products.

This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180920005043/en/

Seoul Semiconductor's Key Patented Technologies (Graphic: Business Wire)

Previously, Seoul filed a patent infringement lawsuit in Nevada District Court against Philcor asserting infringement of 8 LED patents.

In the lawsuit, Philcor acknowledged that LED products used in the accused products were manufactured by several third party suppliers and, although previously unknown to Philcor, Philcor did not dispute that those products infringed Seoul Semiconductor's patents. Philcor also did not dispute the validity of Seoul Semiconductor's patents and agreed to pay past damages, as well as a license fee, in order to affirm its commitment to respecting the intellectual property of patents in technologies for high-voltage operation (Acrich Driver), Acrich MJT (multi-junction technology; over-6V high power chip), filament LED bulb structure, LED packaging, LED epitaxial growth, and LED chip fabrication.

Other Enforcement Actions against LED Lighting Retailers

Seoul continues a series of enforcement actions to prevent distribution of suspected infringing products in the LED lighting market.

On March 2, Seoul filed a patent litigation for infringement of 10 LED patents in the Texas Northern District federal court against Service Lighting Electrical Supplies, Inc. the operator of America's largest online retail channel for LED bulbs: 1000bulbs.com.

On May 8, Seoul initiated a patent infringement lawsuit for infringement of 8 LED patents in the California Central District federal court against Bed Bath Beyond Inc., an American chain of big-box retail stores having 1,550 stores. In the complaint, the accused products include various LED bulbs supplied by Feit Electric.

At the end of August, Seoul also filed a patent infringement lawsuit for infringement of 15 LED patents in the Texas Eastern District federal court against Fry's Electronics, a retail company of consumer electronics accusing UCD technology (KSF) that enables significant improvement of color gamut of LCD displays such as TVs and smartphones as well as optical lens technology of infringement.

In furtherance of its enforcement campaign, Seoul has also delivered notices to manufacturers of various LED lighting products, as well as their distributors, where it suspects infringement of its patents. Seoul has warned these companies that they need to stop using LEDs and any other components that may infringe upon Seoul's patented technology.

Nam Ki-bum, Executive Vice President of the Lighting Department at Seoul, said, "In order to create fair competition in the market and make sure that intellectual property rights are respected, manufacturers as well as distributors should take active precautionary measures not to manufacture or sell infringing products" He added, "We will do our best to encourage a fair-competition environment, in which young entrepreneurs and small entities can succeed in the business world, relying on fair competition in the market and respecting hard-earned patented technology. This is one of the most valuable things Seoul Semiconductor is pursuing."

About Seoul Semiconductor

Seoul Semiconductor develops and commercializes LEDs for automotive, general illumination, specialty lighting, and backlighting markets. As the fourth-largest LED manufacturer globally, Seoul Semiconductor holds more than 12,000 patents, offers a wide range of technologies, and products such as SunLike delivering the world's best light quality in a next-generation LED enabling human-centric lighting optimized for circadian rhythms; WICOP a simpler structured package-free LED which provides market leading color uniformity and cost savings at the fixture level, providing high lumen density and design flexibility; NanoDriver Series the world's smallest 24W DC LED drivers; Acrich, the world's first high-voltage AC-driven LED technology developed in 2005, including all AC LED-related technologies from chip to module and circuit fabrication, as well as multi-junction technology (MJT); and nPola, a new LED product based on GaN-substrate technology that achieves more than ten times the output of conventional LEDs. UCD constitutes a high color gamut display which delivers more than 90% NTSC.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180920005043/en/

Contacts:

Seoul Semiconductor Inc.

Jeonghee Kim, +82-70-4391-8311

jeonghee.kim@seoulsemicon.com
HAIFA, Israel, September 20, 2018 /PRNewswire/ --

Round includesleading international investors,further solidifying MeMed'sleadership in host-based diagnostics

MeMed today announced the completion of a new round of financing totaling over $70 million, with participation from new and existing investors including Ping An Global Voyager Fund, Foxconn, Caesarea Medical Holdings, Clal Insurance, Phoenix Insurance, OurCrowd, Social Capital, WTI, Horizons Ventures, and high-net-worth executives renowned for early investments in industry-changing companies.

(Logo: http://mma.prnewswire.com/media/451805/MeMed_Ltd_Logo.jpg )



MeMed will use the proceeds to advance in three areas: (i) Market adoption of MeMed BV, a breakthrough immune-system based test for distinguishing between bacterial and viral infections, while continuing to generate an unprecedented level of clinical evidence validating test performance; (ii) Complete development, upscale manufacturing and clearance of MeMed Key, a pioneering point-of-care (POC) protein measurement platform; and (iii) Expand its pipeline of innovative tests that integrate machine learning and immune-based measurements to tackle big clinical challenges.

Dr. Eran Eden, MeMed's co-founder and CEO said, "The overwhelming enthusiasm to participate in the latest round reflects the vast clinical challenge and huge market opportunity our technology addresses. For nearly a decade, with leading academic and commercial partners, we've developed MeMed BV, and then generated high quality double-blind clinical evidence to validate it. When measured on MeMed Key and on other platforms, MeMed BV has the potential to serve as a valuable tool in the fight against resistant bacteria - one of the biggest healthcare challenges of our time. The additional funds, and the significant support we are receiving from the U.S. government and EU commission, solidify MeMed as a global leader in the space of host-based diagnostics of infectious and inflammatory disorders."

"These resources will expedite the final development phases, clearance and manufacturing of the pioneering MeMed Key platform, which will run the MeMed BV test in minutes," said Dr. Kfir Oved, MeMed's co-founder and CTO. "Importantly, the MeMed Key platform opens the way to central lab precision at the point-of-care. It will allow measurement of multiple other proteins and signatures, both conventional and new, that currently are only measurable in the central lab. This unlocks enormous value in diagnosing and managing patients across a wide range of other diseases."

Dr. Marco Huesch, Chief Medical Officer, Ping An Voyager Fund, and former Assoc Prof. and Chief, Division of Radiology Innovation and Value Enhancement at Penn State Medical Center, said, "This exciting innovation will greatly enhance diagnostic and therapeutic confidence among physicians and their patients when faced with distinguishing bacterial from viral infections. Beyond profoundly benefiting individual patients, this groundbreaking technology will address antibiotic overuse within the broader population and contribute to reducing the growing burden of antibiotic resistance."

About MeMed

Our mission is to translate the complex signals of our immune system into simple diagnostic insights that transform the way we treat infectious and inflammatory diseases - at the right place and the right time. Over nearly a decade, with collaborators around the globe, MeMed has developed and validated a pioneering immune-based protein signature called MeMed BV for distinguishing between bacterial and viral infections - an indispensable tool in the fight against resistant strains of bacteria - one of the biggest healthcare challenges of our time. An ELISA format of MeMed BV, called ImmunoXpert, is cleared for use in the EU (CE-IVD), Switzerland and Israel and is currently in pilot distribution in these territories. MeMed is also developing MeMed Key, a groundbreaking platform that opens the way to measuring multiple proteins and signatures, conventional and innovative, with central lab precision at the point-of-care. MeMed Key will measure MeMed BV within minutes. Today, we are expanding our network of partnerships with internationally renowned academic, commercial and government stakeholders to advance, validate and facilitate global availability of our platform and tests. For additional information, please visit http://www.me-med.com.
Wipro Limited (NYSE: WIT, BSE: 507685, NSE: WIPRO), a leading global information technology, consulting, and business process services company, today announced that it has been positioned as a Leader in Everest Group's Digital Workplace Services Market Trends and PEAK Matrix assessment. The report was published in June 2018.

Everest Group evaluated and featured 20 leading IT service providers on the digital workplace services PEAK matrix on the basis of criteria such as digital workplace services vision strategy, scope of services offered, innovations investments and delivery capabilities. The PEAK matrix is a framework that provides an objective, data driven, and comparative assessment of digital workplace service providers based on their absolute market success and delivery capability.

Kiran Desai, Senior Vice President and Global Head, Cloud and Infrastructure Services, Wipro Limited said, "We are honoured to be positioned as a Leader in Everest group's Digital Workplace Services Market Trends and PEAK Matrix assessment. This recognition reaffirms our edge in workplace services and our commitment to delivering world-class infrastructure solutions to our customers. We will continue to invest in expanding our technology capabilities and solution portfolio in this space to offer services that are closely aligned to our customer's business requirements and which will help accelerate their digital transformation journey."

"Wipro's proven capabilities to manage complex workplace transformation and a balanced and matured set of offerings across the workplace services spectrum has enabled the company to position itself as a Leader in this assessment. Wipro's clients have specifically pointed out delivery flexibility and technology agnosticism as key strengths. The company continues to make the right investments aligned with business requirements to provide a user-centric collaborative workplace," said Ashwin Venkatesan, Practice Director (Cloud Infrastructure Services), Everest Group.

To view the full report, please visit: https://www.wipro.com/forms/wipro-has-emerged-as-a-leader-in-the-everest-groups-peak-matrix-for-digital-workplace-services/

Wipro's LiVE Workspace solution, powered by Wipro HOLMES and backed by a strong partner ecosystem helps enterprises advance to a digitally empowered user-centric workspace from a traditional desktop system-based approach. The solution is an end-to-end standardized and integrated workplace offering consisting of pre-defined tools, technologies, and processes, that enables users to access their business applications and data, anywhere, anytime, and on a device of their choice. The solution also offers predictive and prescriptive analytics with cognitive capabilities to proactively identify, resolve, and manage critical applications and infrastructure-related snags before end-users experience issues.

About Wipro Limited

Wipro Limited (NYSE: WIT, BSE: 507685, NSE: WIPRO) is a leading global information technology, consulting and business process services company. We harness the power of cognitive computing, hyper-automation, robotics, cloud, analytics and emerging technologies to help our clients adapt to the digital world and make them successful. A company recognized globally for its comprehensive portfolio of services, strong commitment to sustainability and good corporate citizenship, we have over 160,000 dedicated employees serving clients across six continents. Together, we discover ideas and connect the dots to build a better and a bold new future.

Forward-looking and Cautionary Statements

Certain statements in this release concerning our future growth prospects are forward-looking statements, which involve a number of risks, and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those in such forward-looking statements. The risks and uncertainties relating to these statements include, but are not limited to, risks and uncertainties regarding fluctuations in our earnings, revenue and profits, our ability to generate and manage growth, intense competition in IT services, our ability to maintain our cost advantage, wage increases in India, our ability to attract and retain highly skilled professionals, time and cost overruns on fixed-price, fixed-time frame contracts, client concentration, restrictions on immigration, our ability to manage our international operations, reduced demand for technology in our key focus areas, disruptions in telecommunication networks, our ability to successfully complete and integrate potential acquisitions, liability for damages on our service contracts, the success of the companies in which we make strategic investments, withdrawal of fiscal governmental incentives, political instability, war, legal restrictions on raising capital or acquiring companies outside India, unauthorized use of our intellectual property, and general economic conditions affecting our business and industry. Additional risks that could affect our future operating results are more fully described in our filings with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission. These filings are available at www.sec.gov. We may, from time to time, make additional written and oral forward-looking statements, including statements contained in the company's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission and our reports to shareholders. We do not undertake to update any forward-looking statement that may be made from time to time by us or on our behalf.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180920005456/en/

Contacts:

Wipro Limited

Shraboni Banerjee

Shraboni.banerjee@wipro.com


A little-known unit in the office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is conducting a covert surveillance, espionage and blackmail campaign against American citizens on a large scale. Not since the arrest of Jonathan Jay Pollard and the 1992 expose of the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai Brith's espionage against civil rights activists has the Israeli government been so actively involved in clandestine influence and espionage against American targets.

The unit is Israel's Ministry of Strategic Affairs, headed by director general Sima Vaknin-Gil. Vaknin-Gil reports personally to PM Netanyahu. Vaskin-Gil is a former Brigadier General in the IDF, who once was the Chief Israeli Military Censor. Her Ministry has spawned a "private" security firm, Israel Cyber Shield, headed by former Ministry official and Israeli National Police officer Eran Vasker. According to Haaretz, ICS is part of the spy network gathering dossiers on anti-Israel activists from the BDS movement in the United States.

The existence and mission of the Ministry first came to prominence in a four-part documentary produced by Al Jazeera, the Qatar-based international news organization. In 2016, Al Jazeera successfully infiltrated the American Zionist apparatus via James Anthony Kleinfeld, a British Jew who graduated from Oxford, spoke six languages and was well-versed in Middle East affairs. Kleinfeld infiltrated The Israel Project and other pro-Israel US organizations to such an extent that the leadership welcomed him with open arms and let down their guard about their collusion with the Israeli government, in targeting pro-Palestine organizations and other Israel critics.

Armed with a hidden video recorder, Kleinfeld obtained large amounts of material on the inner workings of TIP, AIPAC, the Israeli-American Council, the Maccabee Task Force and the Zionist Organization of America. He got "straight from the horse's mouth" that the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies is a spy agency working as an unregistered agent of the Israeli government. One TIP official confided to Kleinfeld that they had to be very careful, because they were "a different government working on foreign soil."

Earlier this year, Al Jazeera was scheduled to air four 50-minute documentary segments on Kleinfeld's findings. But, Al Jazeera was required to first inform the organizations that were to be featured in the documentary about the pending airing of the series. At that point, the full weight of the US Zionist apparatus along with the Israeli government came down on the Qatar government to press for censorship of the documentary. Suddenly, the US Zionist lobby, which had allied with Saudi Arabia and the UAE in denouncing Qatar as a terrorist state, backing Hamas and other jihadist organizations, reversed positions and gave their support to Qatar. The documentary has never aired.

But bootleg copies of the devastating documentary are clearly circulating around. Alain Gresh wrote a lengthy summary for The Nation on August 31, based on his having viewed the entire four-part series, courtesy of a friend in the Middle East. Sooner or later, the entire series will surface, despite the Qatar censorship decision. Excerpts have already been posted on some websites.

I like to think this is a story that is too big to bury for long.
Allows Law Enforcement To Accelerate Investigations to Completion Through Better Use and Management of Digital Evidence

SANTA CLARA, Calif., Sept. 20, 2018, a wholly owned subsidiary of Hitachi, Ltd. (TSE: 6501), today announced the availability of Hitachi Digital Evidence Management (HDEM), an integrated solution to address the challenges of digital evidence management in modern policing.



The exponential increase of digital evidence from an ever-greater number of sources has challenged law enforcement with the complex and time-consuming task of identifying and organizing digital evidence needed for investigation and prosecution. Law enforcement officials are challenged by compliance policies and procedures such as evidence disclosure rules. They are also hampered by antiquated manual processes that can introduce delays and mistakes from the initial collection of evidence within existing pools of information to its ongoing management throughout an investigation. These growing challenges can limit the ability of law enforcement to manage the collected evidence efficiently and ensure that it is available when required.

The HDEM solution provides an opportunity for law enforcement to meet these challenges and set new standards for using evidence in today's digital world.

Hitachi Digital Evidence Management is highly scalable, permitting the collection of data from any digital source so it can be placed in context for an investigation or prosecution. This includes body-worn and car video cameras, mobile phones, documents, closed-circuit television (CCTV) and other digital information sources. Using HDEM, law enforcement can identify and associate evidence with a particular case, and secure, analyze, clip, redact and handle it according to the guidelines of police information management in the local jurisdiction. Measures to enable GDPR compliance are built into the application together with security and user provisioning to assist law enforcement in building criminal cases and gaining further intelligence from the collected digital evidence.

By automating the discovery, processing, analysis, organization, storage and sharing of information that is retrieved from multiple evidential sources, HDEM is data-agnostic, meaning that it even works with dissimilar data formats from multiple sources. This capability allows law enforcement to paint a comprehensive and integrated evidential picture and supports prosecution efforts, helping law enforcement lead criminal cases to more efficient and effective closure.

HDEM also manages evidential continuity and integrity issues to prevent challenges to its validity. The solution allows seamless delivery of evidence packages to the prosecuting authorities for both pre-charging decisions and case progression. The core HDEM platform ingests data from the repositories of existing endpoint devices such as body-worn video and has web portals available for the public and partners to upload possible evidence directly into the solution. Additional modules are available, including live facial matching for greater insight from the collected digital evidence.

Hitachi Digital Evidence Management is available initially for police and law enforcement agencies within Abu Dhabi, Australia, Canada, Denmark, Dubai, India, Singapore, Sweden and the United Kingdom. HDEM will be expanded into other countries and localized for additional use cases in the future. HDEM is available on a price-per-officer subscription basis.

Supporting Quotes

"It can be challenging and time-consuming to collect and manage all of the diverse types of digital evidence we require for effective policing," said Andrew White, assistant chief officer at Lincolnshire Police. "Hitachi Digital Evidence Management are working with Lincolnshire Police to prove there is a solution to manage, secure, share and analyse all the digital evidence we acquire helping us to ensure that investigations are conducted efficiently, and evidence is disclosed in the right manner at the appropriate time. In turn, this will help us to provide effective policing by being able to focus our resources on solving crimes and have a positive impact on our communities."

"We are collecting more and more information from digital sources every day in separate silos and are faced with the challenges of scale, privacy and security," says Mike Barton, chief constable, Durham Constabulary. "Hitachi Digital Evidence Management delivers a scalable evidence platform that will help us protect our citizens' privacy while allowing us to prevent crime and apprehend and prosecute criminals more effectively. The people of County Durham and Darlington can be confident that we will deploy innovation in policing that makes our communities safer by using Hitachi Digital Evidence Management."

About Hitachi Vantara

Hitachi Vantara, a wholly owned subsidiary of Hitachi, Ltd., helps data-driven leaders find and use the value in their data to innovate intelligently and reach outcomes that matter for business and society. We combine technology, intellectual property and industry knowledge to deliver data-managing solutions that help enterprises improve their customers' experiences, develop new revenue streams, and lower the costs of business. Only Hitachi Vantara elevates your innovation advantage by combining deep information technology.

Connect with Hitachi Vantara

Twitter (https://twitter.com/HitachiVantara)

(https://twitter.com/HitachiVantara) LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/11257500)

(https://www.linkedin.com/company/11257500) Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/HitachiVantara)

About Hitachi, Ltd.

Hitachi, Ltd..

HITACHI is a trademark or registered trademark of Hitachi, Ltd. All other trademarks, service marks, and company names are properties of their respective owners.

MEDIA CONTACTS

Amanda Lennon

Hitachi Vantara

Amanda.Lennon@HitachiVantara.com

650.703.7610
Wolters Kluwer, Health, released today the newest version of its industry-leading clinical surveillance solution, Sentri7. The solution gives hospitals tools and resources to stay in front of new and emerging clinical challenges and battle the antibiotic-resistant bacteria that are taking a toll on patient safety and hospital costs. In an April 2018 report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there were 221 instances of unusual resistance of so-called nightmare bacteria that are virtually invulnerable to most known treatments.

"Battling these antibiotic-resistant superbugs calls for new and more advanced ways of detecting them and treating patients," said Karen Kobelski, General Manager of Safety and Surveillance at Wolters Kluwer, Health. "We have a decade of knowledge, learnings and outcomes that allow us to deliver a platform that is smarter and tuned to workflows of frontline clinicians and the speed at which they need to make decisions. The latest release of Sentri7 on the SoleSource platform will help hospitals and health systems adopt even more advanced surveillance practices."

Sentri7 is part of a suite of applications that have been integrated into the SoleSource platform, which brings together solutions that address a wide range of clinical surveillance challenges and compliance activities across a hospital or health system. It makes it easier for clinicians to proactively identify patients who may be experiencing a life-threatening condition or quickly find and respond to an infection before it spreads.

Newly released surveillance capabilities include:

The integration of clinical initiatives on the SoleSource platform for antimicrobial stewardship, medication management, infection prevention and opioid management. The platform also contains POC Advisor , a dedicated surveillance module for sepsis and other emergent conditions.

, a dedicated surveillance module for sepsis and other emergent conditions. Out-of-the-box, evidence-based content including alerts and recommended actions for real-time prioritization of urgent conditions and follow-up for patients at-risk.

Integrated documentation provides a one-click solution to push clinical notes into the EHR, keeping the full care team on the same page while eliminating double documentation.

Robust analytics create an environment for continuous improvement by enabling clinicians and administrators to understand how their interventions are driving measurable improvement in cost and outcomes performance.

Real-Time and Predictive

Understanding the impact on outcomes has been a gap in clinical surveillance solutions. The SoleSource platform offers new analytics that give hospitals control of intuitive views of their outcomes, supporting reporting within the department, at the facility level and across a health system.

"The hospitals across our system are preparing for Joint Commission accreditation, which really requires that we have easy access to the metrics to respond to data stewardship questions and validate the information we're using," explained Nathan Everson, Infectious Diseases Clinical Pharmacist at Carilion Clinic, a healthcare organization based in Roanoke, VA caring for nearly 1 million residents. "With the sheer volume of data across a multi-hospital system like ours, we've got to have confidence that it's accurate and trustworthy and we do with Sentri7's analytics. We also know we can pull the data quickly without a lot of trial and error."

Everson and the pharmacy team also provide guidance to the hospitals' quality staff on which key performance metrics should be tracked and reported year-over-year. Everson added, "We can now connect our clinical activities to the impact we're having on performance and that is going to be a game changer for us."

About Wolters Kluwer

Wolters Kluwer N.V. (AEX: WKL) is a global provider of professional information, software solutions, and services for physicians, nurses, accountants, lawyers, tax specialists, and finance, audit, compliance, and regulatory sectors.

The company provides expert solutions a combination of deep domain knowledge with specialized technology and services that help professionals navigate change, solve complex problems, and deliver impact in their respective fields.

Headquartered in Alphen aan den Rijn, the Netherlands, Wolters Kluwer holds market-leading positions in 40 countries globally, represents customers across 180 countries and employs 19,000 people worldwide. In 2017, it reported annual revenues of 4.4 billion.

Wolters Kluwer is a leading global provider of trusted clinical technology and evidence-based solutions that engage clinicians, patients, researchers and students with advanced clinical decision support, learning and research and clinical intelligence. For more information about our solutions, visit http://healthclarity.wolterskluwer.com and follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter @WKHealth.

For more information, visit www.wolterskluwer.com, follow us on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and YouTube.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180920005229/en/

Contacts:

Wolters Kluwer Health

Andre Rebelo, +1 781-392-2411

Public Relations Manager

andre.rebelo@wolterskluwer.com
BLACKROCK SMALLER COMPANIES TRUST PLC (LEI: 549300MS535KC2WH4082)



All information is at 31 August 2018 and unaudited.

Performance at month end is calculated on a capital only basis

One month

% Three months

% One

year

% Three

years

% Five

years

% Net asset value* -1.8 1.0 12.3 56.2 101.3 Share price* -2.0 0.7 19.8 60.5 101.2 Numis ex Inv Companies + AIM Index -0.5 -1.0 1.9 25.3 36.6

*performance calculations based on a capital only NAV with debt at par, without income reinvested. Share price performance calculations exclude income reinvestment.



Sources: BlackRock and Datastream

At month end Net asset value Capital only(debt at par value): 1,602.88p Net asset value Capital only(debt at fair value): 1,595.13p Net asset value incl. Income(debt at par value)**: 1,623.69p Net asset value incl. Income(debt at fair value)**: 1,615.93p Share price 1,485.00p Discount to Cum Income NAV (debt at par value): 8.5% Discount to Cum Income NAV (debt at fair value): 8.1% Net yield^^^: 1.8% Gross assets^: 852.1m Gearing range as a % of net assets: 0-15% Net gearing including income (debt at par): 7.2% 2018 Ongoing charges ratio^^ 0.7% 2018 Ongoing charges ratio (including performance fees): 1.0% Ordinary shares in issue#: 47,879,792

**includes net revenue of 20.81p

^includes current year revenue

^^As reported in the Annual Financial Report for the year ended 28 February 2018, the ongoing charges ratio is calculated as a percentage of net assets and using operating expenses, excluding performance fees, finance costs and taxation.

^^^Yield calculations are based on dividends announced in the last 12 months as at the date of release of this announcement, and comprise of the final dividend of 16.00 pence per share, (announced on 27 April 2018, ex-dividend on 17 May 2018) and the interim dividend of 10.00 pence per share (announced on 30 October 2017 and gone ex-dividend on 9 November 2017)

excludes 2,113,731 shares held in treasury.

Sector Weightings % of portfolio Industrials 31.8 Financials 21.0 Consumer Services 12.2 Health Care 8.2 Consumer Goods 7.9 Technology 7.5 Basic Materials 5.6 Oil & Gas 5.3 Utilities 0.5 ----- Total 100.0 =====

Ten Largest Equity Investments Company % of portfolio Robert Walters 2.0 4imprint Group 2.0 Dechra Pharmaceuticals 1.9 YouGov 1.8 Integrafin 1.8 Premier Asset Management Group 1.6 Polar Capital Holdings 1.5 Bodycote 1.5 Liontrust Asset Management 1.5 Big Yellow 1.4

Commenting on the markets, Mike Prentis and Roland Arnold, representing the Investment Manager noted:



During August the Company's NAV per share fell by 1.8% to 1,602.88p on a capital only basis, underperforming our benchmark index which fell by 0.5%; the FTSE 100 Index fell 4.1% on a capital only basis.

August proved to be a difficult month for the Company, with performance impacted by two stock specific disappointments which caused the portfolio to underperform its benchmark.

Shares in Hill & Smith fell after the company reported a reduction in first half profits caused by short-term project delays in the UK's road programme and adverse weather in the first quarter. Shares in veterinary group CVS fell after it too admitted to being affected by the severe weather earlier in the year, and also by the weaker than expected performance of some recent acquisitions.

On the positive side, the Company benefited from good share price rises in a number of other holdings notably GB Group, Next Fifteen, Warpaint and Tatton Asset Management.

There was profit taking in many industrial engineering companies, and given our significant overweight sector position in this area, this also contributed to underperformance.

We have maintained a higher weighting to good companies with significant international exposure, and have continued to reduce or sell holdings where our conviction has weakened.



20 September 2018



ENDS



Latest information is available by typing www.blackrock.co.uk/brsc on the internet, "BLRKINDEX" on Reuters, "BLRK" on Bloomberg or "8800" on Topic 3 (ICV terminal). Neither the contents of the Manager's website nor the contents of any website accessible from hyperlinks on the Manager's website (or any other website) is incorporated into, or forms part of, this announcement.
Vancouver, British Columbia--(Newsfile Corp. - September 20, 2018) - Northern Empire Resources Corp. (TSXV: NM) (OTC Pink: PSPGF) ("Northern Empire" or the "Company") is pleased to announce the voting results for its special meeting of the securityholders of Northern Empire (the "Northern Empire Securityholders") held on September 19, 2018 in Vancouver, British Columbia (the "Special Meeting").

The sole matter considered at the Special Meeting was the special resolution (the "Arrangement Resolution") approving the statutory plan of arrangement (the "Arrangement") with Coeur Mining, Inc. ("Coeur") whereby Coeur, through a corporation directly or indirectly wholly-owned by Coeur (the "Purchaser"), will acquire all of the issued and outstanding common shares of Northern Empire ("Northern Empire Shares") and, in exchange, shareholders of Northern Empire (the "Northern Empire Shareholders") will receive 0.1850 of a common share of Coeur ("Coeur Shares") for each Northern Empire Share held. In addition, each option and common share purchase warrant of Northern Empire outstanding immediately prior to the effective time of the Arrangement will automatically vest and will be transferred to the Purchaser in exchange for that number of Coeur Shares as is equal to the value of the "in-the-money" amount of the options and warrants, as applicable, minus any withholding taxes required to be withheld.

Securityholders, representing a total of 73.62% of the securities of Northern Empire eligible to be voted at the Special Meeting, voted on the Arrangement Resolution, which was approved as follows:

99.98% of the total votes cast by Northern Empire Securityholders, voting as a single class, at the Special Meeting voted FOR the Arrangement resolution; and 99.97% of the votes cast by Northern Empire Shareholders, after excluding the votes of Northern Empire Shares held or controlled by Coeur and its subsidiaries, Douglas J. Hurst and Michael G. Allen each of whom is an "interested party" under Multilateral Instrument 61-101 - Protection of Minority Security Holders in Special Transactions.

Closing of the Arrangement remains subject to court approval as well as other customary closing conditions. Assuming the timely completion of these conditions, Northern Empire expects the Arrangement to close on or about October 1, 2018.

If holders of warrants to purchase Northern Empire Shares ("Warrants") wish to exercise their Warrants prior to closing of the Arrangement, the notice of exercise of such Warrants must be submitted to the Company no later than 4:30 p.m. (Vancouver time) on September 26, 2018.

About Northern Empire

Northern Empire Resources Corp. (TSXV: NM) (OTC Pink: PSPGF) is expanding and discovering heap leach gold deposits in Nevada. Northern Empire presently has initial resource statements on four potentially heap-leachable deposits, three of which are past producing, at the 100%-owned Sterling Gold Project.

About Coeur

Coeur Mining, Inc. is a well-diversified, growing precious metals producer with five mines in North America. Coeur produces from its wholly-owned operations: the Palmarejo silver-gold complex in Mexico, the Silvertip silver-zinc-lead mine in British Columbia, the Rochester silver-gold mine in Nevada, the Wharf gold mine in South Dakota and the Kensington gold mine in Alaska. In addition, Coeur has interests in several precious metals exploration projects throughout North America.

ON BEHALF OF THE BOARD OF NORTHERN EMPIRE RESOURCES CORP.

"Michael G. Allen"

President, CEO and Director

NEITHER THE TSX VENTURE EXCHANGE NOR ITS REGULATION SERVICES PROVIDER (AS THAT TERM IS DEFINED IN THE POLICIES OF THE TSX VENTURE EXCHANGE) ACCEPTS RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE ADEQUACY OR ACCURACY OF THIS NEWS RELEASE.

Certain information set forth in this news release contains "forward-looking statement", and "forward-looking information" under applicable securities laws. Except for statements of historical fact, certain information contained herein constitutes forward-looking statements. Some of the forward-looking statements may be identified by words such as "will", "expects", "anticipates", "believes", "projects", "plans", and similar expressions.

Forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance and undue reliance should not be placed on them. Such forward-looking statements necessarily involve known and unknown risks and uncertainties, which, may cause the Company's actual performance and financial results in future periods to differ materially from any projects of future performance or results expressed or implied by such forward-looking statement. Such forward-looking statements are based on certain assumptions made by the Company, including but not limited to assumptions that: the Arrangement will complete under the terms, structure, and timeline currently contemplated; the requisite court approval in connection with the Arrangement will be obtained in a timely manner and on satisfactory terms; the parties will be able to satisfy the other conditions to the closing of the Arrangement and on the timeline currently contemplated; no significant events will occur outside of the Company's normal course of business; and the continuation of the business and operations of the Company, and the integration thereof with Coeur, following completion of the Arrangement will occur as currently contemplated.

Material risks and uncertainties applicable to the forward-looking statements set out herein include, but are not limited to: the Arrangement is not completed in a timely fashion or at all; the requisite court approval is not obtained in a timely fashion (or at all) or on satisfactory terms; and other unforeseen events, developments, or factors causing any of the aforesaid expectations, assumptions, and other factors ultimately being inaccurate or irrelevant.

There can be no assurance that forward-looking statement will prove to be accurate, and actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipate in such statements. The Company undertakes no obligation to update forward-looking statements if circumstances or management's estimates or opinions should change except as required by applicable securities laws. The reader is cautioned not to place undue reliance on forward-looking statements.

For further information contact:

Michael G. Allen, President, CEO and Director

Tel: +1 (604) 646-4522

Dylan Berg, Manager, Investor Relations

Tel: +1 (604) 646-4520


TwentyFour Income Fund Limited

(a closed-ended investment company incorporated in Guernsey with registration number 56128)

LEI Number: 549300CCEV00IH2SU369

(The "Company")

20 September 2018

RESULT OF ANNUAL GENERAL MEETING

At the Annual General Meeting of the Company held on 20 September 2018, all Ordinary Resolutions set out in the Annual General Meeting Notice sent to Shareholders dated 17 August 2018 were duly passed.

Details of the proxy voting results which should be read along side the Notice are noted below:

Ordinary Resolution For Discretion

(voted in favour) Against Abstain 1 201,287,637 0 0 0 2 188,694,655 0 12,592,981 0 3 201,176,122 0 21,515 90,000 4 166,075,797 0 41,469 35,170,369 5 201,265,392 0 22,244 0 6 201,287,637 0 0 0 7 201,287,637 0 0 0 8 201,287,637 0 0 0 9 201,283,347 0 4,290 0 10 188,694,655 0 12,592,981 0

Note -A vote withheld is not a vote in law and has not been counted in the votes for and against a resolution.

At the same AGM noted above, the following Extraordinary Resolutions were also passed:

Extraordinary Resolution 11

(201,197,438 in favour / 90,199 against / 0 withheld)

That, in substitution of all existing powers (but in addition to any power conferred on them by ordinary resolutions 8 and 9 above), the Directors be and are authorised generally and unconditionally in accordance with Article 6.7 of the Articles to exercise all powers of the Company to issue equity securities (as defined in Article 6.1.1(a)) for cash as if the members' pre-emption rights contained in Article 6.2 of the Articles did not apply to any such issue pursuant to the general authority conferred on them by the ordinary resolutions 8 and 9 above (as varied from time to time by the Company in general meeting):

a) pursuant to an offer of equity securities open for acceptance for a period fixed by the Directors where the equity securities respectively attributable to the interests of holders of Ordinary Shares are proportionate (as nearly as may be) to the respective numbers of Ordinary Shares held by them but subject to such exclusions or other arrangements in connection with the issue as the Directors may consider necessary, appropriate or expedient to deal with equity securities representing fractional entitlements or to deal with legal or practical problems arising in any overseas territory, the requirements of any regulatory body or stock exchange, or any other matter whatsoever; and

b) provided that (otherwise than pursuant to sub-paragraph (a) above) this power shall be limited to the allotment of equity securities up to an aggregate nominal value equal to 10 per cent. of the total number of shares in issue in the Company at the date of the passing of this extraordinary resolution, and provided further that (i) the number of equity securities to which this power applies shall be reduced from time to time by the number of treasury shares which are sold pursuant to any power conferred on the Directors by ordinary resolution 10 above and (ii) no issue of equity securities shall be made under this power which would result in Ordinary Shares being issued at a price which is less than the net asset value per Ordinary Share as at the latest practicable date before such allotment of equity securities as determined by the Directors in their reasonable discretion, and such power hereby conferred shall expire on whichever is the earlier of: (i) the conclusion of the annual general meeting of the Company to be held in 2019; or (ii) the date 15 months after the date on which this extraordinary resolution is passed (unless renewed, varied or revoked by the Company prior to that date) save that the Company may, before such expiry, make offers or agreements which would or might require equity securities to be issued after such expiry and the Directors may issue equity securities in pursuance to such offers or agreements as if the authority conferred hereby had not expired.

Extraordinary Resolution 12

(165,100,052 in favour / 36,187,584 against / 0 withheld)

That, conditional on extraordinary resolution 11 above having been passed, in substitution of all existing powers (but in addition to any power conferred on them by ordinary resolutions 8 and 9 and in addition to and without prejudice to the power granted by extraordinary resolution 11 above), the Directors be and are authorised generally and unconditionally in accordance with Article 6.7 of the Articles to exercise all powers of the Company to issue equity securities (as defined in Article 6.1.1(a)) for cash as if the members' pre-emption rights contained in Article 6.2 of the Articles did not apply to any such issue pursuant to the general authority conferred on them by the ordinary resolutions 8 and 9 above (as varied from time to time by the Company in general meeting):

a) pursuant to an offer of equity securities open for acceptance for a period fixed by the Directors where the equity securities respectively attributable to the interests of holders of Ordinary Shares are proportionate (as nearly as may be) to the respective numbers of Ordinary Shares held by them but subject to such exclusions or other arrangements in connection with the issue as the Directors may consider necessary, appropriate or expedient to deal with equity securities representing fractional entitlements or to deal with legal or practical problems arising in any overseas territory, the requirements of any regulatory body or stock exchange, or any other matter whatsoever; and

b) provided that (otherwise than pursuant to sub-paragraph (a) above) this power shall be limited to the allotment of equity securities up to an aggregate nominal value equal to 10 per cent. of the total number of shares in issue in the Company at the date of the passing of this extraordinary resolution, and provided further that no issue of equity securities shall be made under this power which would result in Ordinary Shares being issued at a price which is less than the net asset value per Ordinary Share as at the latest practicable date before such allotment of equity securities as determined by the Directors in their reasonable discretion, and such power hereby conferred shall expire on whichever is the earlier of: (i) the conclusion of the annual general meeting of the Company to be held in 2019; or (ii) the date 15 months after the date on which this extraordinary resolution is passed (unless renewed, varied or revoked by the Company prior to that date) save that the Company may, before such expiry, make offers or agreements which would or might require equity securities to be issued after such expiry and the Directors may issue equity securities in pursuance to such offers or agreements as if the authority conferred hereby had not expired.

Enquiries:

Northern Trust International Fund Administration Services (Guernsey) Limited

The Company Secretary

Trafalgar Court

Les Banques

St Peter Port

Guernsey

GY1 3QL

Tel: 01481 745001

END
New Solutions Offer Wireless ISPs higher throughput, higher spectral efficiency and affordable Wi-Fi access solutions to propel service provider business growth opportunities

ROLLING MEADOWS, Illinois, Sept. 20, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Cambium Networks, a leading global provider of wireless networking solutions, today announced new wireless broadband connectivity solutions to improve the opportunities for Wireless ISPs. Each of the solutions will be demonstrated at the annual Wireless Internet Service Provider Association (WISPA) conference and trade show October 8 - 12 in Las Vegas.

"Our wireless fabric of connectivity solutions makes network expansion easy, affordable and reliable for Wireless ISPs," said Atul Bhatnagar, President and CEO, Cambium Networks. "Our solutions enable WISPs to provide cost effective connectivity to business and residential customers. This year, we are launching the new cnRanger Fixed LTE; ePMP 3000 Multi-User MIMO (MU-MIMO) point-to-multipoint solution; and our support of the FCC's Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS) using shared access spectrum (SAS) technology, anchored by the introduction of the 3 GHz PMP 450m. The 3 GHz PMP 450m leverages Cambium Networks pioneering cnMedusa technology to provide Massive MU-MIMO capabilities, enabling denser network deployments with a 3x improvement in network capacity. These three solutions will provide WISPs more options to choose the solution that best meets their business case."

"These new Intelligent Edge connectivity solutions fortify the ease of deployment and overall network resiliency while providing additional network flexibility to service providers and network operators. Intelligence at the edge also enables a broader range of services to their customers at greater distance and faster speeds," said Scott Imhoff, Senior Vice President of Product Management and Marketing. "They enable high-speed cloud access to devices, sensors and controls in dense urban areas and remote locations."

Connectivity solutions to be demonstrated include:

New ePMP 3000 Wireless multipoint distribution networks with MU-MIMO technology supports peak throughput of 1.2 Gbps in the 4.910-5.970 GHz bands.

with MU-MIMO technology supports peak throughput of 1.2 Gbps in the 4.910-5.970 GHz bands. New cnRanger Fixed LTE operates in the 2.3 and 2.5 GHz spectrum, bands 38, 40 and 41; substantially increase range and coverage while reducing cost and complexity typically associated with LTE networks.

Fixed LTE operates in the 2.3 and 2.5 GHz spectrum, bands 38, 40 and 41; substantially increase range and coverage while reducing cost and complexity typically associated with LTE networks. New PMP 450m with cnMedusa Massive MU-MIMO technology available in the 3 GHz licensed band with triple the capacity of a PMP 450i system.

with cnMedusa Massive MU-MIMO technology available in the 3 GHz licensed band with triple the capacity of a PMP 450i system. New Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS) support with integrated Shared Access Spectrum (SAS) services via the PMP 450 platform.

support with integrated Shared Access Spectrum (SAS) services via the PMP 450 platform. Wireless backhaul and licensed microwave links including the PTP 550 offering 1.4 Gbps throughput through the use of non-adjacent asymmetric channel aggregation.

including the PTP 550 offering 1.4 Gbps throughput through the use of non-adjacent asymmetric channel aggregation. Indoor and outdoor 802.11ac Wi-Fi access networks with cnPIlot access points and the new e430 wall plate designed for multi-dwelling units and e700 for 802.11ac Wave 2 outdoor networks.

with cnPIlot access points and the new e430 wall plate designed for multi-dwelling units and e700 for 802.11ac Wave 2 outdoor networks. Cloud-based end-to-end management with the cnMaestro system.

Cambium Networks events at WISPAPALOOZA include:

Technical Certification training

Oct 06-08 - PTP 820 Licensed Microwave Installation and Administration

- PTP 820 Licensed Microwave Installation and Administration

Oct 07-08 - PMP 450 Certification Training

- PMP 450 Certification Training A free Open House event Monday, October 08

Exhibit booth #635 Oct 09-11

About Cambium Networks

Cambium Networks is a leading global provider of wireless connectivity solutions that strengthen connections between people, places and things. Specializing in providing an end-to-end wireless fabric of reliable, scalable, secure, cloud-managed platforms that perform under demanding conditions, Cambium Networks empowers service providers and enterprise, industrial and government network operators to build intelligent edge connectivity. Team members also contribute to social responsibility activities to serve the communities in which they live. Headquartered outside Chicago and with R&D centers in the U.S., U.K. and India, Cambium Networks sells through a range of trusted global distributors. www.cambiumnetworks.com

Media Contact:

Sara Black

Bospar

213.618.1501

sara@bospar.com

Logo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/117974/cambium_networks_logo.jpg
New Developer SDKs enable partners to integrate solutions with Anomali Threat Platform

NATIONAL HARBOR, Md., Sept. 20, 2018today announced at the Detect Conference 2018 the expansion of the partner ecosystem with the launch of a suite of partner developer resources. The new tools enable easier and faster integration with the Anomali Threat Platform and APP Store, allowing clients immediate access to partner content, integrations and analytics.



The partner program expansion includes the launch of a suite of software development kits (SDKs). The SDKs address three critical integration areas:

Threat Intelligence Feeds SDK: integrate proprietary threat intelligence feeds and make these accessible via the APP Store

Integration SDK: integrate threat intelligence from the Anomali Threat Platform into third party products and solutions

Enrichment SDK: integrate 3rd party threat analysis and data enrichments into the Anomali Threat Platform

"Organizations need a comprehensive threat platform that incorporates the most relevant threat intelligence, integrates with their internal security stack, and leverages the most valuable analytics available," said Hugh Njemanze, chief executive officer at Anomali. "We developed these SDKs to deliver better threat visibility and response. I'm grateful to our partners, Symantec, Intel471, and RiskIQ for their early adoption and feedback, and welcome all interested partners to work with Anomali."

"We share Anomali's commitment to enabling more seamless interoperability of our solutions to deliver the full promise of threat intelligence," said Peter Doggart, vice president business development, Symantec. "The Anomali Integration SDK furthers this vision and we look forward to working with Anomali to combine the power of Symantec's Integrated Cyber Defense Platform with their cyber threat intelligence."

"Combatting sophisticated cybercriminals requires timely, relevant and actionable intelligence that can be operationalized easily within an organization", said Michael Anderson, vice president of partnerships at Intel 471. "Anomali's SDK will enable customers to operationalize Intel 471 intelligence easily and at near real time within their Anomali deployment and security stack."

"Threat analysts require immediate access to RiskIQ's unique datasets to understand and respond to the adversary," said Lou Manousos, chief executive officer at RiskIQ. "Our integration with the Anomali Threat Platform ensures that analysts have the right information available just a click away at all times."

Partners can learn more about the SDKs and the APP Store program and register for access at www.anomali.com/app-store . The Detect '18 Conference begins this morning with keynote addresses from Hugh Njemanze and General Colin L. Powell, USA.

About Anomali

Anomali detects adversaries and tells you who they are. Organizations rely on the Anomali Threat Platform to detect threats, understand the adversary, and respond effectively. Anomali arms security teams with machine learning optimized threat intelligence and identifies hidden threats targeting their environments. Anomali enables organizations to collaborate and share threat information among trusted communities and is the most widely adopted platform for ISACs worldwide. To learn more, visit www.anomali.com and follow it on Twitter: @anomali .

Contact:

Haylee Hewlett Sr. Marketing Manager (408) 800-4050
Washington, D.C.--(Newsfile Corp. - September 20, 2018) - The Securities and Exchange Commission today announced that Pamela C. Dyson plans to leave the SEC to serve as executive vice president, head of the Technology Group, and Chief Information Officer (CIO) at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

Ms. Dyson joined the SEC in 2010, progressing through several positions of increasing responsibility in the Office of Information Technology (OIT). She became CIO in February 2015 after serving as Acting CIO for several months. During her time as CIO, she delivered the SEC's 2018-2020 IT Strategic Plan, established the SEC's core cloud capability in Amazon Web Services as well as its ongoing governance, created the IT Strategy and Innovation program to lead the SEC's digital transformation efforts, and worked to develop and support the ongoing agency-wide cyber uplift program.

"Pam's leadership and experience have been critical to maintaining the information technology capabilities we need to fulfill our mission while ensuring we address ever-evolving cyber threats," said SEC Chairman Jay Clayton. "I thank her immensely for her service to the Commission and to America's investors."

"All of us at the Commission are deeply indebted to Pam for the hard work and dedication she has brought to her work as CIO," said SEC Chief Operating Officer Kenneth Johnson. "We will continue to benefit from the important advances she brought to our technological systems and cybersecurity."

"It has been an absolute honor to contribute to the important mission of this wonderful agency in its service to the citizens of America," said Ms. Dyson. "I am equally grateful to have served alongside such a dedicated team of professionals across the Commission, and I am proud of the work we accomplished together."

Ms. Dyson began her SEC career as Assistant Director for Enterprise Operations. In that capacity, she managed day-to-day operations such as IT infrastructure and all enterprise operations for the SEC's headquarters and its 11 regional offices. Before joining the SEC staff, Ms. Dyson was the Deputy CIO for the U.S. International Trade Commission.

Ms. Dyson received her Bachelor of Science degree from the University of Maryland in College Park.

Upon Ms. Dyson's departure, Charles Riddle, the SEC's Chief Technology Officer, will become the Acting Chief Information Officer.

Mr. Riddle joined the SEC in 2016 from the U.S. Government Publishing Office, where he served as Chief Information Officer beginning in 2011. He worked at the U.S. Department of Agriculture from 2005 to 2011 in several positions relating to information technology including Chief Technology Officer at USDA's Food Safety Inspection Service. Prior to his government service, Mr. Riddle worked in the private sector at Booz Allen Hamilton and several organizations involved in telecommunications, including BetterWorld Telecom, Cable & Wireless, and NETtel Communications. He received his MBA from Johns Hopkins University and his BA from George Mason University.
GTIS Brazil Real Estate Fund Ranked Number 1 for Fourth Consecutive Year

GTIS Brazil Real Estate Funds II and III Take Second and Third Places, Respectively

GTIS Partners LP ("GTIS"), a real assets investment firm headquartered in New York City, with offices in Sao Paulo, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Atlanta, Paris and Munich, today announced that the GTIS Brazil Real Estate Fund ("GTIS Brazil Real Estate Fund I") has been recognized as 2018's most sustainable private equity real estate investment fund in South America by the Global Real Estate Sustainability Benchmark (GRESB). This is the fourth year running the fund has clinched the top ranking.

GTIS Brazil Real Estate Funds II and III took second- and third-place honors, respectively, matching the funds' 2017 survey rankings.

"Our across-the-board top-place rankings are a testament to the day-in, day-out efforts of the entire GTIS Brazil team, who've incorporated environmental, social and governance principles into their investment and management practices," said Josh Pristaw, Senior Managing Director, Head of Capital Markets and Co-head of Brazil at GTIS Partners. "What we're most proud of is that in 'doing well while doing good,' we're generating value for our clients and other stakeholders while creating tangible benefits for the environment and society as a whole."

Pristaw noted that GTIS is continually looking to build on its ESG efforts and has put into place detailed plans to focus specifically on the areas of building assessments, data management, and tenant engagement.

"We are very honored by this recognition," said Joao Teixeira, Senior Managing Director and Co-Head of the Brazil Office at GTIS Partners. "Commitment to the principles of ESG is part of who we are as an organization. It helps provide a roadmap for the betterment of our local communities, no matter where we operate."

In an ongoing effort to meet and exceed global ESG standards, GTIS created a sustainability committee, which ensures best practices are utilized at real estate projects owned by the funds. The committee meets quarterly and comprises senior GTIS professionals focused on Brazil acquisitions, asset management, legal, operations, and capital markets functions. The firm has also incorporated ESG into its annual employee evaluation process for all offices since 2016.

GTIS Partners has been actively investing in Brazil real estate since 2005, making it one of the first to recognize the potential of the country's real estate markets. As one of the largest foreign real estate investors in Brazil, it has invested more than R$5 billion of investor equity commitments for its Brazil platform.

Last month, GTIS Partners announced its expansion into infrastructure investment in Brazil, and the simultaneous hire of Eduardo Klepacz, formerly CEO of Cubico Brazil, one of the country's largest renewable energy generators, to head GTIS' new Sao Paulo-based infrastructure investment team.

"We view the expansion into renewable energy generation as another strong commitment on behalf of GTIS to ESG. We look forward to one day supplying our real estate projects and our real estate tenants with low cost, renewable energy," said Klepacz.

Added Dan Winters, GRESB's Head of the Americas: "GTIS Partners continues to outperform its peers and has once again received the top three rankings in South America in the GRESB 2018 results. With seven consecutive years of benchmarking their ESG performance, GTIS has proven to be an industry leader making outstanding progress with its sustainability programs, and continues to set the bar higher for the sector."

Turning to the U.S., GTIS Partners has for the first time submitted the GRESB survey for its U.S. Property Income Fund ("USPIP"), a vehicle that targets sustainable, long-term dividends with modest leverage. USPIP has been active in the multifamily space, with recent acquisitions of Class A multifamily projects in Dallas and Orlando.

About GRESB

GRESB is an industry-driven organization committed to assessing the sustainability performance of real estate portfolios (public, private and direct) around the world. Their dynamic benchmark is used by institutional investors to engage with their investments with the aim to improve the sustainability performance of their investment portfolio and the global property sector at large. GRESB covers about $18 trillion of institutional capital and 903 property companies and funds across the globe.

The GRESB survey is widely recognized as the most rigorous standard for measuring the sustainability performance of real estate companies and funds, and GRESB participation has become standard practice for most of the world's fund managers and listed property companies. For more information, please refer to www.GRESB.com.

About GTIS Partners

GTIS Partners is a global real assets investment firm headquartered in New York with offices in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Atlanta, Sao Paulo, Brazil, Paris, France and Munich, Germany. GTIS Partners was founded in 2005 and is managed by President Tom Shapiro and Senior Managing Directors Josh Pristaw, Rob Vahradian, Tom Feldstein, Joao Teixeira, and Amy Boyle. GTIS Partners has 95 employees and approximately $4.7 billion of gross assets under management. The firm pursues opportunistic real asset investments through direct equity investment and lending activities. To date, the firm has committed capital to residential, retail, industrial, office, hotel and mixed-use projects in the U.S. and Brazil, and is among the largest real estate private equity companies in Brazil. For more information, please visit www.gtispartners.com.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180920005542/en/

Contacts:

Water Wall Group

Scott Sunshine, 212-625-2364

scott@waterandwallgroup.com
By Badre Alam & Sanjay Kumar for TwoCircles.net

Editors: Prof. Christophe Jaffrelot and Dr Narender Kumar

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Pages: 263

Price (Hardbound): Rs 850

Professor Christophe Jaffrelot (Kings India Institute, London) and Prof. Narender Kumar (JNU, New Delhi) brought out a new volume on Dr Ambedkar and Democracy: An Anthology (2018). The book underlines the limitations of Hindu nationalist politics and its version of Hindu majoritarian democracy vis-a-vis minority rights and social justice. While reflecting on minority questions Ambedkar had argued that if the communal majority rather than secular majority captures the state power then it is imperative for the democratic state to develop a certain institutional mechanism to safeguard the rights of religious and social minorities. The very aim of democratic politics, as Ambedkar believes, is to overcome the gap between the majority and minority communities. However, under the current political dispensation of PM Modi, the gap has widened and created the irony of democracy and its electoral politics. For instance, in Uttar Pradesh Assembly election 2017, BJP secured an unprecedented majority without fielding a single Muslim candidate. Another noticeable yet unfortunate feature of Indian democracy is the declining representation of Muslims since independence. Currently, there are only 23 Muslim MPs out of 544 in the Indian parliament, which is far less than the Muslim percentage and hence defies Ambedkars idea of democratic inclusion of minorities in the political domain.

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It is sad to see many ministers in the current regime who secured their seats riding on their communal views on minorities and against Muslim in particular. No wonder, a BJP minister recently has openly expressed that the provisions of minority rights should be deleted from the Indian Constitution. Some politicians from the ruling party engaged in propaganda that Indian minority has more rights than the majority, which sounds clearly against the principle of equal opportunities and the very spirit of the constitution. However, the point must be underlined here that studies carried out in several states by a number of civil society groups, clearly noted that the socio-economic and educational conditions of Indian Muslims are close to the bottom. Sachar Committee report (2006), Rangnath Mishra Report (2007), and Kudu report (2014) have shown that Muslims marginalization in all walks of life continues unabated.

It is clear that the BJP is interested in only appropriating Ambedkar symbolically and on the ground, the party betrays his egalitarian approach. Moreover, BJP-RSS combine use Ambedkar as anti-Muslim and quotes his selected writings and comments out of context to prove their points. However, from his writings and speeches, one could argue, that Ambedkar had always stood for social justice, irrespective of caste and communities. In this respect, the present volume is a timely intervention that addresses the communal question.

In this regard, well-known scholar, Prof. Sukhdeo Throat and editors of this volume have pointed out that the project of nation- building could not be realised unless Ambedkars ideas on social justice, substantive democracy, minority rights, women rights etc. are addressed by the current regime. Prof. Thorat in his forward has mentioned the Ambedkars views on democracy, social and economic representations, Buddhism, etc. and highlighted their relevance in todays context. While introducing the idea of democracy, as Babasaheb had put forth about the formative stage of nation-building, Prof Thorat quotes, for Dr Ambedkar, democracy is primarily a mode of associational living with an attitude of respect and reverence towards fellow men. Prof. Thorat further says, Ambedkar proposed an alternative economic framework in the form of a particular type of socialism in which he suggested state ownership in agriculture and basic industries. While citing Dr Ambedkar observation on Buddhism, Throat mentions- the rise of Buddhism in India was as significant as the French Revolution. In the words of Dr Ambedkar, Buddhism paved way for the establishment of democracy and socialistic pattern of society in India (p-201) Moreover, Prof. Throat also discusses the idea of minority representation as conceptualized by Ambedkar. It is pertinent to note that Dr Ambedkar reminded us long back that if communal majority captures the state power then some forms of safeguards for minority groups is extremely crucial for the survival of liberal democracy. Dr Ambedkars understanding of minority rights is not based on numbers and demographics alone but social discrimination and position in the power structure of the larger public sphere must be also taken into account while defining minorities. For Ambedkar, the Untouchables are the minority in India. It is be noted that editors of this volume have underlined that in todays context of communal politics, Dr Ambedkars idea of giving more rights and weight to minority communities against the communal majority has now become more significant.

More importantly, while discussing the need for Constitutional socialism, Prof Throat observes, Dr Ambedkar brought the provision for social and economic justice through directive principles of state policy, which place responsibility on the state to follow the principles to pursue the objective of social and economic equality through laws and policies. While highlighting the intimate connection between social democracy and political democracy, he points, Ambedkar viewed Social democracy as a necessary condition for the success of political democracy. Dr Ambedkar argued that social democracy primarily involves the idea of social justice.

The editors in this anthology have explored that Ambedkars views on the representation of minorities are very elaborate and insightful on three aspects of minorities the definition of minority, principles justifying minority representation, the electoral method for minority representation, and general safeguards against the communal legislative majority. Ambedkar observed in the mid-1940s the implication of communal majority for the nation and nationalism. In this regard, State and minorities, Ambedkar said: Unfortunately, for the minorities in India, Indian nationalism has developed a new doctrine which may be called the divine right of the majority to rule the minorities to the wishes of the majority. Any claim for the sharing of power by the minority is called communalism while the monopolizing of the whole power by the majority is called nationalism. (p.-172)

It is pertinent to underlined here that Ambedkars idea of democracy is very relevant in the current socio-political scenario. Because, Indian democracy still not able to maintain equality in social and economic life and there is a lack of fraternity in our social relations, undermine the efforts towards strengthening democracy and the nation. For Ambedkar, Hindu caste society is against the notion of egalitarianism. This idea of hierarchical Hindu Social order has been sanctified by Hindu scripture. That is why; Dr.Ambedkar had advocated the Buddhism which promotes the idea of liberty, equality, and fraternity in all walks of life. While discussing the conditions precedent for the successful democracy, long back he reminded that democracy cannot be achieved if glaring inequalities prevailed in the society. In this context, he defined democracy in the following terms. As he writes, Democracy is a form and method of government whereby revolutionary changes in the economic and the social life of the people are brought without a bloodshed(P-219). He went on to say that, we made this constitution because we did not want a hereditary monarchy and we did not want a hereditary ruler or a dictator.(p-225). And finally, he stresses that for the successful working of democracy, Constitutional morality must be prevailed over the so-called public morality.

The danger of Hindutva politics to the idea of India is well addressed by this volume and hence a welcome addition to engaged with. The volume has successfully brought out fundamental questions like social justice, democracy, representations, minority rights, etc. It wouldnt be an exaggeration to say that after the rise of Hindu Nationalists in the Indian politics, the principles and ideas championed by Dr Ambedkar are critically under threat. The dreams and aspirations of nation-building could not be realized unless we safeguard the rights of the underprivileged.

Badre Alam is a Research Scholar at Delhi University, Department Of Political Science, and Sanjay Kumar is Post- Doctoral Fellow at JNU
Pullach (ots) - IFCO, leading global provider of reusable packaging solutions for fresh foods, announced that it is inaugurating a sustainability certification initiative for its retailer customers in Europe and North America. IFCO is amongst the most sustainable logistics companies worldwide. Therefore, retailers awarded with IFCO's sustainability certificate will benefit from credible proof of their commitment to environmental protection and sustainability.IFCO is constantly monitoring the environmental benefits generated by its logistics concept, the IFCO SmartCycleTM, which is based on the principle of "share and reuse". All IFCO RPCs are reused over 50 times during their lifetime, and at every cycle are put through a rigorous cleaning and inspection process before being delivered for the next cycle. Damaged RPCs that cannot be repaired are 100% recycled and used for the production of new IFCO RPCs.Several studies have proven that the use of RPCs has a meaningful contribution to the environment by leading to savings in terms of CO2 (up to 60%), energy (64%), water (80%), solid waste (up to 86%), and food product damage (up to 96%), when compared with single-use packaging.In Europe and North America, IFCO business enabled the following savings in 2017:- 460,000 tonnes of CO2, equivalent to 241,000 fewer cars per year - 8 million cubic meters of water, equivalent to over 188 million five-minute showers - 29,500 terajoules of electricity, enough to power 15 million light bulbs for a year - 237,000 tonnes of solid waste, equivalent to the trash produced by 171 million individuals per day - 42,200 tonnes of food product waste, equivalent to 70 million mealsFind the complete text here: ftp://presse.hbi.de/pub/IFCO/Sustainabil ity_Certificate/IFCO_Sustainability-Certificate.pdfFind images here: ftp://presse.hbi.de/pub/IFCO/Sustainability_Cert ificate/IFCO_Environmental_Benefits.jpgOriginaltext: IFCO Systems digital press kits: http://www.presseportal.de/nr/130931 press kits via RSS: http://www.presseportal.de/rss/pm_130931.rss2Contact: HBI GmbH Stefan Schmidt Tel.: +49 (0)89 99 38 87-30 ifco@hbi.de

Werbehinweise: Die Billigung des Basisprospekts durch die BaFin ist nicht als ihre Befurwortung der angebotenen Wertpapiere zu verstehen. Wir empfehlen Interessenten und potenziellen Anlegern den Basisprospekt und die Endgultigen Bedingungen zu lesen, bevor sie eine Anlageentscheidung treffen, um sich moglichst umfassend zu informieren, insbesondere uber die potenziellen Risiken und Chancen des Wertpapiers. Sie sind im Begriff, ein Produkt zu erwerben, das nicht einfach ist und schwer zu verstehen sein kann.
Keysight Technologies, Inc. (NYSE: KEYS), a leading technology company that helps enterprises, service providers, and governments accelerate innovation to connect and secure the world, announced today that the company will showcase its latest solutions at the European Conference on Optical Communication Exhibition 2018 (ECOC 2018) in Rome, Italy, September 24-26.

Keysight will demonstrate its latest high-speed, test solutions in a private room, building SC3, room J, and its solutions will be used to enable several demonstrations at customers' stands throughout the exhibition. In the room, Keysight will highlight coherent signal analysis solutions featuring the new Infiniium UXR-Series Real-Time Oscilloscopes and the new N4391B Optical Modulation Analyzer with up to 110 GHz Bandwidth, as well as the M8194A 120 GSa/s arbitrary waveform generator (AWG). The room will include demonstrations of new optical and electrical 400GE PAM4 compliance test solutions, as well as 1.2 Terabit and 400ZR test equipment for coherent optical applications. The private room will be open to the public on Sept. 24 26 starting at 3:30 pm.

Ixia, a Keysight business, will demonstrate its 400 Gigabit Ethernet (GE) test solutions at ECOC 2018 in cooperation with other organizations. With the Ethernet Alliance (Stand 618), Ixia will participate in the first multivendor demonstration of interoperability in the 400GE ecosystem with a 400GE switch over OSFP optical transceivers which leveraged all 8 ports in the AresONE OSFP 8x400GE test system to deliver 3.2 Tbps of live Ethernet traffic. The demo also uses passive copper Direct Attached Cable (DAC) assemblies from Amphenol and TE Connectivity Ltd.

Keysight and Ixia solutions will be used at several customers' stands to showcase their next-generation optical innovations. Some examples include:

Fujitsu Optical Components (FOC) (Stand 703), a leading global supplier of high performance optical components and transceivers, uses Keysight's N1092C DCA-M sampling scope with N1078A optical/electrical clock recovery unit and 86100D DCA-X mainframe with 86108B precision waveform analyzer for the development of their 400G OSFP/QSFPDD transceivers.

HUBER+SUHNER Cube Optics AG (Stand 410), will present a live demo at its booth of its latest ultra-compact integrated multi-lambda 200 Gbps PAM4 Receiver Optical Sub-Assembly (ROSA), compatible with the 200G and 400GBase-FR8 standard using Keysight's N1092E DCA-M sampling oscilloscope for analysis.

Ciena Corporation (private room), is a global networking systems, services, and software company. Ciena uses Keysight's M8290A optical modulation analyzer (OMA) to demonstrate its Wavelogic Ai coherent applications.

Finisar (Stand 400), a global leader in optical communications, will demonstrate their leading optical transceiver modules operating in the Ixia's 2nd generation 400GE, AresONE test system. The demonstration will consist of AresONE ports transmitting and receiving up to 3.2 Tbps of live Ethernet test traffic with Forward Error Correction (FEC).

Source Photonics (Stand 416), a leading global provider of innovative and reliable technology that enables communications and data connectivity, will demonstrate the maturity of the 400GE ecosystem, using their 400G QSFP-DD LR8 transceiver and traffic from Ixia's field-proven K400 QSFP-DD test system.

Mellanox Technologies (Stand 432), a leading supplier of end-to-end Ethernet and InfiniBand intelligent interconnect solutions, will use Ixia's AresONE 8x400GE QSFP-DD test system to demonstrate 200Gb/s live traffic using 200GBASE-SR4 multimode fiber transceivers and 400Gb/s QSFP-DD passive copper DAC assemblies.

Molex (Stand 606), a leading global manufacturer of electronic solutions, will demonstrate line rate 400G Ethernet traffic with Ixia's K400 over Molex's new 3m QSFP-DD DAC. Real-time analysis on K400 will showcase test results of pre-FEC (forward error correction) per lane BER (bit error rate) better than IEEE specifications.

Show Information: ECOC 2018, Rome, Italy, on September 23-27, 2018

Exhibition Hall: Sept. 24-26, 2018 Fiera Roma, The Exhibition Congress Centre of Rome

For more information about ECOC 2019, visit: https://www.ecoc2018.org/

About Keysight Technologies

Keysight Technologies, Inc. (NYSE: KEYS) is a leading technology company that helps enterprises, service providers, and governments accelerate innovation to connect and secure the world. Keysight's solutions optimize networks and bring electronic products to market faster and at a lower cost with offerings from design simulation, to prototype validation, to manufacturing test, to optimization in networks and cloud environments. Customers span the worldwide communications ecosystem, aerospace and defense, automotive, energy, semiconductor and general electronics end markets. Keysight generated revenues of $3.2B in fiscal year 2017. In April 2017, Keysight acquired Ixia, a leader in network test, visibility, and security. More information is available at www.keysight.com.

Additional information about Keysight Technologies is available in the newsroom at https://www.keysight.com/go/news and on Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Twitter and YouTube.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180920005573/en/

Contacts:

Keysight Technologies, Inc.

Beth Hespe, Americas

+1 609-994-7442

beth.hespe@keysight.com

or

Magda Antone, Europe

+34 (93) 3434612

press.emea@keysight.com

or

Fusako Dohi, Asia

+81 42 660-2162

fusako_dohi@keysight.com
PULLACH, Germany, Sept. 20, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- IFCO, the leading global provider of reusable packaging solutions for fresh foods, announced that it is inaugurating a sustainability certification initiative for its retailer customers in Europe and North America. IFCO is amongst the most sustainable logistics companies worldwide. Therefore, retailers awarded with IFCO's sustainability certificate will benefit from credible proof of their commitment to environmental protection and sustainability.

IFCO is constantly monitoring the environmental benefits generated by its logistics concept, the IFCO SmartCycleTM, which is based on the principle of "share and reuse". All IFCO RPCs are reused over 50 times during their lifetime, and at every cycle are put through a rigorous cleaning and inspection process before being delivered for the next cycle. Damaged RPCs that cannot be repaired are 100% recycled and used for the production of new IFCO RPCs.

Several studies have proven that the use of RPCs has a meaningful contribution to the environment by leading to savings in terms of CO 2 (up to 60%), energy (64%), water (80%), solid waste (up to 86%), and food product damage (up to 96%), when compared with single-use packaging.

In Europe and North America, IFCO business enabled the following savings in 2017:

460,000 tonnes of CO 2 , equivalent to 241,000 fewer cars per year

, equivalent to 241,000 fewer cars per year 8 million cubic meters of water, equivalent to over 188 million five-minute showers

29,500 terajoules of electricity, enough to power 15 million light bulbs for a year

237,000 tonnes of solid waste, equivalent to the trash produced by 171 million individuals per day

42,200 tonnes of food product waste, equivalent to 70 million meals

Find the complete text here: ftp://presse.hbi.de/pub/IFCO/Sustainability_Certificate/IFCO_Sustainability-Certificate.pdf

Find images here: ftp://presse.hbi.de/pub/IFCO/Sustainability_Certificate/IFCO_Environmental_Benefits.jpg

Contact:

HBI GmbH

Stefan Schmidt

Tel.: +49-(0)89-99-38-87-30

ifco@hbi.de
Projected takeover bid on Selectirente shares

Regulatory News:

Tikehau Capital (Paris:TKO), the alternative asset management and investment group, accelerates its development in real estate by entering into exclusive negotiations with a view to acquiring Sofidy, a major player in real estate asset management in France.

This proposed acquisition would allow Tikehau Capital not only to become one of the leading independent French players in real estate asset management, but also to increase its assets under management by over 30%2, enabling it to achieve its target of 20bn in assets under management by the end of 2018 initially announced for 2020.

A unique opportunity to strengthen its presence in the promising real estate asset management market3 and thus balance the Group's business mix

This acquisition project is fully aligned with Tikehau Capital's strategy to broaden its fund offering in order to balance its business mix. It enables the Group to reach out to new investor categories and extend its know-how in the field of real estate investment solutions thanks to the strong complementarities between the two companies.

Established in 1987 by Christian Flamarion4, Sofidy is a leading asset manager in the real estate management sector in France and Europe, involved in the creation and development of investment and savings products particularly focused on retail and office real estate. A leading independent player in the SCPI (real estate investment trust) market with 4.8bn under management, Sofidy manages a portfolio of over 4,100 real estate assets on behalf of over 45,000 individual investors and a large number of institutional investors.

Strong operational complementarity rooted in a common independent entrepreneurial culture

This planned tie-up flows from the operational complementarity between the two groups, supported by common values of independence and excellence, which will allow their different know-how and expertise to be given free rein.

This complementarity is demonstrated firstly in the client base profile: institutional investors on the one hand and private investors on the other. The complementarity is also clear in terms of product range: on the one hand Real Estate Collective Investment Schemes (OPCI) for professional investors; and Real Estate Investment Companies (SCPI), real estate UCITS and OPCI for private investors, on the other.

For Mathieu Chabran, co-founder of Tikehau Capital: "Tikehau Capital is pleased to be able to seize the unique opportunity of acquiring Sofidy. We have high ambitions to grow in the real estate sector, and we are delighted to not only broaden our expertise in this area, but above all to welcome Sofidy and its teams alongside us.

For Jean-Marc Peter, CEO of Sofidy: "We are moving closer to a Group with strong growth, and with which we have numerous shared values, foremost among them being independence and performance at the service of our investors. We are convinced that this proposed operation will strengthen Sofidy over the long term and will benefit all our clients and partners.

A significant increase in assets under management generating growth and profitability

By consolidating 4.8bn5 in additional real estate assets under management, the proposed acquisition of Sofidy will enable Tikehau Capital to almost triple its assets under management in this sector (which amounted to 2.6bn at the end of June 2018).

In addition to the strong operational complementarities, this acquisition will immediately generate growth and profitability for Tikehau Capital. With net revenue corresponding on average to around 100 basis points of assets under management, and an operating margin of around 40% of net revenues in 2017, the acquisition of Sofidy will have an immediate positive impact on the average fee rate and operating margin of Tikehau Capital's asset management activities.

Following this envisaged operation, Tikehau Capital should hold over 90% of Sofidy's capital. The valuation for 100% of the shares in Sofidy amounts to 220m, corresponding to an estimated enterprise value of c. 120m (or below 7x EBITDA), plus c. 100m in available cash and financial assets. The transaction will mostly consist in a sale in cash and for a marginal portion in a remunerated contribution in new Tikehau Capital shares. Tikehau Capital will finance the operation from its own resources and will communicate at a later date on the definitive terms of the operation.

Development process of the transaction

The operation is subject to an information-consultation with the unique staff representative body of Sofidy.

The signature of an exclusive agreement has been authorised by the Supervisory Board of the Company as regulated agreements. For the purpose of this operation, the Supervisory Board designated an ad hoc committee composed of independent members. Its assignment is to supervise the works of an independent expert (Finexsi) and to submit a fairness opinion on the terms of the acquisition. M. Antoine Flamarion will abstain from taking any measure related to this operation for the account of Tikehau Capital.

Tikehau Capital is advised by Rothschild Cie.

Once signed, the completion of the operation will be subject to approval from the French Financial Markets Authority (Autorite des marches financiers) as well as the competent competition authorities. Its completion is planned for Q4 2018.

Projected takeover bid on Selectirente shares

After the definitive completion of the Sofidy acquisition, Tikehau Capital intends to launch a takeover bid for the acquisition of the shares in Selectirente. The offer price is under discussion and will be subject to a fairness opinion from an independent expert. The terms and conditions of the offer will be communicated to the market once they have been set.

About Tikehau Capital

Tikehau Capital is an asset management and investment group, which manages 14.8 billion of assets (as at 30 June 2018), with shareholders' equity of 2.3 billion (as at 30 June 2018). The Group invests in various asset classes (private debt, real estate, private equity and liquid strategies), including through its asset management subsidiary Tikehau IM, on behalf of institutional and private investors. Controlled by its managers, alongside leading institutional partners, Tikehau Capital employs 230 staff (as at 30 June 2018) in its Paris, London, Brussels, Madrid, Milan, New York, Seoul and Singapore offices.

Tikehau Capital is listed on the regulated market of Euronext Paris, Compartment A (ISIN code: FR0013230612; Ticker: TKO.FP)

www.tikehaucapital.com

1 As at 30 June 2018

2 On the basis of total amount of assets under management of 14.8 bn as at end June 2018 for Tikehau Capital

3 As at end June 2018, the French SCPI market represented a total of 53 bn in outstandings, including 92% (49 bn) invested in retail real estate. In 2017, the net inflows in the SCPI retail real estate sector recorded growth of 15% to reach 6.1 bn.

4 M. Christian Flamarion is the father of M. Antoine Flamarion, co-founder of Tikehau Capital.

5 As at 30 June 2018

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180920005629/en/

Contacts:

Press

Tikehau Capital:

Julien Sanson, +33 1 40 06 18 40

or

Image 7:

Gregoire Lucas Florence Coupry, +33 1 53 70 74 70

press@tikehaucapital.com

or

Shareholders and Investors

Louis Igonet, +33 1 40 26 11 11

shareholders@tikehaucapital.com
Vancouver, British Columbia--(Newsfile Corp. - September 20, 2018) - Upco International Inc. (CSE: UPCO) (OTCQB: UCCPF) (FSE: U06) ("Upco") is pleased to announce it has launched its highly anticipated Upco mobile messenger communication app ("Upco App"). The Upco App is available for download on Apple App Store for iOS and Google play store for Android and will provide:

Serverless technology (end to end Encryption): this will enhance the privacy and the protection between the user's communication avoiding the misuse of third-party data.

Cashless technology (eWallet): We are working to enhance the security and unlock the barrier of money transfer improving the economy among others in developing countries.

The Upco user gets worldwide access to initiate long distance calls with very low calling rates: up to 40% less expesive than any incumbent mobile Operator. The Upco user receiving international calls will not have any roaming costs (Call Forward). The Upco users will be able to transfer funds to other Upco users without additional costs. Also they will be able to transfer cash funds to regulated banks and cash pick up outlets. The receiver can collect the funds in local currencies. Through algorithms which create a higher compression, the user can chat and use video features faster with a higher quality of voice and images. This all with less MB's use. Example: 1 MBbit usage for calling: Viber/up to 3 minutes - WhatsApp / up to 5 minutes and Upco / up to 7 minutes. The Upco user in fact will hear the difference and saves the usage of MB's. With the forthcoming integration of our advanced Blockchain E-Wallet, led by a highly experienced system architect and Blockchain specialist Dominic da Assuncao, we are working to provide our Upco users with an E-Wallet that is protected by encryption on your device. This will enable users to transfer funds instantly to family and friends worldwide, at a reasonable cost, without worrying about surcharges or any additional charges that might be levied by banks.

List of features include:The Upco App supports sending and receiving the complete package of media (text, photos, videos, documents), as well as location and voice calls. Our messages and calls are secured with end-to-end encryption. Additionally, our users' data is not interfered with in any way or collected for subsequent use of personal identification information, other than for regulatory purposes and account management.

CEO Andrea Pagani stated, "The Upco App with its forthcoming E-Wallet will align perfectly with how payments across the world are changing into digital formats. Our App will facilitate commerce in a number of important ways, and allow our European users to be able to transfer funds to friends and relatives seamlessly and instantly."

About Upco International Inc.

Upco International Inc. is a cloud-based mobile service company which provides high-quality voice termination to a market driven by the growing activity in online communications and commerce. Upco is a licensed Global Telecom Carrier within the international VoIP (voice over IP) wholesale business. Upco has designed a software application for Apple iOS and Android, similar to SKYPE and WhatsApp. With the forthcoming addition of the Upco E-Wallet using Blockchain Payment Services, users will be able to: send invoices, approve payments, transfer international funds, convert international currencies, and track transfers and payments.

www.upcointernational.com or www.upcomobile.com

ON BEHALF OF THE BOARD OF DIRECTORS

Andrea Pagani, CEO and Director

office@upcointernational.com

212-461-3676

Forward-Looking Statements

This press release contains forward-looking information or forward-looking statements (collectively "forward- looking information") within the meaning of applicable securities laws. Forward- looking information is typically identified by words such as: "will" "may" "believe", "expect", "anticipate", "intend", "estimate", "development", "forthcoming", "potentially" and similar expressions, or are those, which, by their nature, refer to future events. Upco cautions investors that any forward-looking information provided by Upco is not a guarantee of future results or performance.
Robust cash position of 17.3 million as of June 30, 2018

All clinical and research activities funded through 3Q2019

Regulatory News:

GeNeuro (Paris: GNRO) (Euronext Paris: CH0308403085 GNRO), a biopharmaceutical company developing new treatments for neurological and autoimmune diseases, today reported its half-year financial results for the period ending June 30, 2018 and provided a corporate update.

Key Financials

On September 20, 2018, the Board of Directors of GeNeuro reviewed and approved the financial statements for the six-month period ended June 30, 2018. The Statutory Auditors have conducted a review of the condensed consolidated interim financial statements. The half-year financial report in English is available in the Investors section on www.geneuro.com.

"The financial results for the first half of 2018 are fully in line with our expectations. Thanks to the completion of the CHANGE-MS clinical trial in multiple sclerosis, we have recognized as income the balance of the milestone payments received from our development partner and have thus recorded income of 7.3 million in the first six months, compared to 3.3 million in the same period last year. At the same time, the completion of this study has also led to a reduction of our R&D expenses, by 0.9 million, whilst our research tax credits have increased by 0.4 million. This has largely contributed to reducing our total operating loss to 2.4 million in the first half of 2018 compared to 8.0 million in the same period of last year," said Miguel Payro, Chief Financial Officer at GeNeuro. "Our general and administrative expenses have also remained under control, with a 0.2 million reduction."

Income amounted to 7.3 million during 1H2018 vs. 3.3 million for the same period of last year. This corresponds to a 7.2 million revenue recognized by GeNeuro with respect to milestone payments received from Servier as part of the recently completed CHANGE-MS clinical trial for GNbAC1, up 4.2 million vs the comparable period of the prior year. This increase reflects the completion of this Phase 2b clinical trial, which has led to the recognition as income of the balance of the milestone payments received from our development partner Servier (for more details, please refer to note 9 of the notes to the Company's condensed consolidated half-yearly accounts).

Research Development expenses decreased compared to the first half of 2017, both on a gross and a net basis. Before subsidies (research tax credits), R&D expenses decreased 0.9 million, reflecting the completion of the CHANGE-MS clinical trial, partly offset by higher costs for the type 1 diabetes trial that was in full swing during 1H2018, and the new Phase 1c trial testing the safety of higher doses of GNbAC1. Accordingly, costs of the CHANGE-MS phase 2b clinical trial, which was completed in March 2018, have declined to 3.5 million from 4.6 million during the first half of 2017. All other R&D costs were stable or down, including personnel expenses, which decreased slightly from 2.0 million to 1.8 million, reflecting the one-off nature of the 1H2017 closure costs of GeNeuro's secondary research site in Archamps, France.

General and administrative expenses also declined from 2.5 million in 1H2017 to 2.3 million in 1H2018, thanks to an across the board control on costs. Administrative personnel expenses was down from 1.1 million to 976 thousand and the only cost category that increased is professional fees, due to higher audit costs. Share-based payments were down from 237 thousand to 197 thousand.

The Company recorded a net loss of 2.3 million vs. 8.0 million in 1H2017, in line with management's expectations.

Cash and cash equivalents at June 30 2018 amounted to 17.3 million compared to 26.6 million at December 31 2017. The decrease is due to cash used in operations of 9.2 million.

Business and Financial Outlook

GeNeuro continues to execute on its business strategy. In March 2018, it presented successful data from the CHANGE-MS Phase IIb clinical trial at 12 months, demonstrating a consistent positive impact on key neuroprotection markers associated with disease progression in MS. These positive results in relapsing remitting patients enable the development of GNbAC1 for all forms of MS, potentially as a monotherapy for patients with progressive forms of the disease, as well as in combination with existing drugs for relapsing forms. These results will be presented at the ECTRIMS 2018 meeting held 10-12 October 2018 in Berlin, Germany.

On September 18, 2018, GeNeuro announced that GeNeuro has regained worldwide rights ex US and Japan to its lead compound GNbAC1 in multiple sclerosis from Servier. In 2014, Servier had acquired an option to license the development and commercialization of GNbAC1 for MS in all territories ex-US and Japan for 37.5 million, including the costs of Phase IIb. Servier made the decision to decline this option "based on R&D strategic reasons and international development priorities". GeNeuro, which had retained US rights, is currently engaged in partnering discussions regarding the development in the USA, and having regained global rights, will expand those discussions to new geographic territories and treatment combination options.

The Company continues the RAINBOW-T1D 12-month Phase 2a clinical trial in type 1 diabetes, and will present topline 6-month results before the end of September.

Other pre-clinical programs, notably in ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis), where GeNeuro is in partnership with the US NIH, are expected to lead to results being presented before year-end 2018.

GeNeuro projects cash utilization to be roughly 19 million for the full year 2018, of which approximately 10 million in the second half of 2018. This forecast includes:

Continuation of the type 1 diabetes study to its completion at 12 months, with final visit of the last patient expected by the end of 2018;

Conclusion of the Phase Ic trial testing the safety of higher doses of GNbAC1;

Termination of the Servier-funded ANGEL-MS extension study, by the end of 2018;

Continuation of the Company's research and preclinical activities.

About GeNeuro

GeNeuro's mission is to develop safe and effective treatments against neurological disorders and autoimmune diseases, such as multiple sclerosis or Type 1 diabetes, by neutralizing causal factors encoded by HERVs, which represent 8% of human DNA.

GeNeuro is based in Geneva, Switzerland and has R&D facilities in Lyon, France. It has 28 employees and rights to 16 patent families protecting its technology.

For more information, visit: www.geneuro.com

Disclaimer

This press release contains certain forward looking statements and estimates concerning GeNeuro's financial condition, operating results, strategy, projects and future performance and the markets in which it operates. Such forward-looking statements and estimates may be identified by words such as "anticipate," "believe," "can," "could," "estimate," "expect," "intend," "is designed to," "may," "might," "plan," "potential," "predict," "objective," "should," or the negative of these and similar expressions. They incorporate all topics that are not historical facts. Forward looking statements, forecasts and estimates are based on management's current assumptions and assessment of risks, uncertainties and other factors, known and unknown, which were deemed to be reasonable at the time they were made but which may turn out to be incorrect. Events and outcomes are difficult to predict and depend on factors beyond the company's control. Consequently, the actual results, financial condition, performances and/or achievements of GeNeuro or of the industry may turn out to differ materially from the future results, performances or achievements expressed or implied by these statements, forecasts and estimates. Owing to these uncertainties, no representation is made as to the correctness or fairness of these forward-looking statements, forecasts and estimates. Furthermore, forward-looking statements, forecasts and estimates speak only as of the date on which they are made, and GeNeuro undertakes no obligation to update or revise any of them, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except as required by law.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180920005761/en/

Contacts:

GeNeuro

Jesus Martin-Garcia, +41 22 552 4800

Chairman and CEO

investors@geneuro.com

or

NewCap (France)

Emmanuel Huynh/Mathilde Bohin (investors), +33 1 44 71 98 52

Nicolas Merigeau (media), +33 1 44 71 94 98

geneuro@newcap.eu

or

Halsin Partners

Mike Sinclair (media), +44 20 7318 2955

msinclair@halsin.com

or

LifeSci Advisors

Chris Maggos (investors)

+1-646-597-6970

+41 79 367 6254

chris@lifesciadvisors.com
Toronto, Ontario--(Newsfile Corp. - September 20, 2018) - Added Capital Inc. (TSXV: AAD) ("Added" or the "Company") announces that the cease trade order issued on August 3, 2018 by the Ontario Securities Commission has been revoked and the Company's shares will be reinstated to trading on the TSX Venture Exchange (the "Exchange") on Tuesday, September 25, 2018.

Further to the Exchange's review, the Company has been notified that it does not meet Continued Listing Requirements in accordance to Exchange Policy 2.5. The Exchange has given the Company 90 day notice to remedy the deficiencies or alternatively be transferred to NEX.

Accordingly, the Company is examining potential M&A transactions and potential financings to be carried out within the 90 day period.

The Company shows $2 million in debt as of March 31, 2018. However, as a practical matter none of the debt is owing with the exception of one or two small accounts payable, one of which is for $7,000.

The reason for this is that there are three main lenders, one of whom is owed $500,000, another who is owed $200,000 and Vic Alboini who is owed $343,000. All three lenders have agreed there is no maturity date on their respective loans. In addition, the three lenders have agreed that all historic interest and future interest is waived. Therefore these loans are payable at the discretion of the Company.

There are also $525,000 in statute-barred accounts payable. These accounts payable are not payable because no payments have been made for the past two years and, in most cases, the past five years. That leaves accounts payable of approximately $400,000. Again, none of these payables will be paid with the exception of one of the payables, the one for approximately $7,000. Therefore, of the $2 million in notional debt posted on the Company's balance sheet, no significant debt is due and payable as a practical matter.

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.

About Added Capital Inc.

Added Capital Inc. is a Toronto-based financial advisory firm and merchant bank focused on small cap and microcap public companies and private companies, with a specialization in mergers and acquisitions, merchant banking investments and financial restructurings.

For additional information on this press release, please contact:

Vic Alboini, Chairman & Chief Executive Officer

Added Capital Inc.

416-483-3760
Gallery Walk highlights new generation of changemakers showcasing how data and technology are empowering the developing world at event hosted by Dun & Bradstreet and Tableau Foundation

NEW YORK, Sept. 20, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Today, global leaders attended a first-of-its-kind "Gallery Walk" - an interactive demonstration designed to educate through experience and provide actionable insights into the pathway to achieving the U.N.'s Sustainable Development Goals by 2030.

Taking place during the 73rd U.N. General Assembly, the event welcomed senior officials from the U.N. and national governments, NGOs, the private sector, and civil society organizations to explore how data and technology are poised to revolutionize and empower our developing world.

"Organisations from U.N. entities to community-led NGOs are using tools and information to empower people to overcome some of the biggest challenges we face," said Assistant Secretary-General, Chief Information Technology Officer Atefeh Riazi.

The event turned observers into active participants as they self-guided through interactive exhibits exploring different uses of data and technology to help solve complex global problems. Attendees saw technology solutions poised to address such global challenges as hunger, children's advocacy, women's rights, and extreme poverty.

Each of the 16 presenting organizations use data and technology to positively and profoundly impact the global community. Presenters were selected on the strength of innovation and criticality of their solution, and also represented a variety of the size, scope, and leadership required to address our global challenges.

Presenters included the UNDP, UNICEF, the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, World Food Programme, Kessler Foundation, MasterCard, Rights Lab, Virtue Foundation, Equal Measures 2030, WEConnect International, and many more. Additional information is available at: https://www.gallerywalksdg.org/.

The event was hosted by Dun & Bradstreet and Tableau Foundation. Additional support was provided by ANDE, Mr. Habib Paracha, and User1st.

QUOTES FROM PARTICIPATING EXECUTIVES

David McNair, Executive Director for Global Policy at The ONE Campaign

"Policymaking without quality, accessible data is governing by guesswork. We are excited to participate in this event because we believe data has the power to mobilize decision-makers and influencers to address some of our world's most pressing challenges from narrowing gender gaps that fuel extreme poverty to eradicating preventable diseases."

Alison Holder, Director of Equal Measures 2030

"Whether I am talking to CEOs in Davos at the World Economic Forum or to women's advocacy groups in Jakarta, Indonesia, the message is the same: Data does not speak for itself--we need human energy and creative technology to ensure that data shows the needed insights to drive change."

Tom Manning, CEO Dun & Bradstreet

"Data and analytics are powerful tools to address needs and improve conditions for people around the world. We are proud to contribute to these innovative global solutions."

Neal Myrick, Global Head of Tableau Foundation

"Data and the technology to manage it are critical for the global community to manage progress toward and achieve the Sustainable Development Goals. We're pleased to bring together so many organizations showing the world what is possible."

Michele Bongiovanni, CEO and Founder HealRWorld LLC

"HealRWorld is honored to be selected by Dun & Bradstreet and the Tableau Foundation for the UN General Assembly Gallery Walk to showcase our work in support of sustainably-committed private businesses globally. We are at a critical inflection point with environmental concerns and social issues plaguing our planet. It's critical we stop saying how important MSMEs are and start supporting them if we are to achieve the SDGs by 2030. As such, we've developed a new economic model leveraging our unique data set coupled with cutting-edge blockchain and financial solutions from our partners at Unify.Earth to help fill the $2T annual SME funding gap."

Mr. Habib Paracha

"While peace and stability are the cornerstone for social development, the applications of innovative data and technology solutions coupled with global dialogue present the path for our sustainable future and prosperity."

Amihai Miron - Founder & CEO USER1st

"At User1st we have seen the complexities of innovation pass by those who need it the most. Thus we believe that while technology can be complex: 'Accessibility Should be Simple'. We are honored to be part of the Gallery Walk Showcase with other disruptive technology vendors looking to move the needle for those who need it the most"

George Heinrichs, ANDE CEO

"ANDE is honored to sponsor Revolutionizing and Empowering our Developing World, which precisely aligns with our mission," says George Heinrichs, ANDE CEO. "ANDE Rapid DNA brings DNA identifications out of the lab and into the world, where ever or whenever it is needed. Critical, real time identifications can solve global issues, like human trafficking, disaster victim identification, and family reunification. It is the most significant technological advancement in decades and will help agencies think differently about how, together, we can make the world a safer place."

Elizabeth Vazquez, WEConnect International CEO & Co-Founder

"Today, women-owned businesses earn less than 1% of the money spent on vendors by large corporations and governments. By harnessing the power of data and information technology, WEConnect International is working with our corporate member buyers, women-owned businesses and global partners to close this gender gap."

About Tableau Foundation

The Tableau Foundation is a philanthropic initiative led by the employees of Tableau Software that encourages the use of facts and analytical reasoning to solve the world's problems. Tableau Foundation grants combine Tableau's two most valuable resources - its people and its products - with financial support to nonprofits that are using data to reshape communities around the globe. To learn more, please visit www.tableaufoundation.org.

About Dun & Bradstreet

Dun & Bradstreet helps companies around the world improve their business performance. The global leader in commercial data and analytics, we glean insight from data that helps connect our customers with the prospects, suppliers, clients and partners that matter most. Since 1841, companies have relied on Dun & Bradstreet to help them manage risk and reveal opportunity.

Media Contacts:

Steve Schwartz, Tableau Foundation: sschwartz@tableau.com

Deborah McBride, Dun & Bradstreet: mcbrided@dnb.com

Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/747788/Dun_Bradstreet_Kessler_Foundation.jpg

Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/747789/Dun_Bradstreet_Tableau_Dashboard.jpg
Regulatory technology company Kyckrhas extended contracted services to Bank of Ireland for a period of three years.They provide services to them through the prime contracting party, NTT Services.The agreement covers the provision of data to facilitate Corporate Know Your Customer Due Diligence Services, including getting new customers onboard and on-going monitoring through Kyckrs Company Watch service.Bank of Ireland was their launch enterprise customer.Shares in Kyckrclosed 10 per cent higher at 11 cents yesterday.
The ED is probing a money-laundering case in the Aircel-Maxis matter arising out of 2G spectrum cases.

The Supreme Court on Thursday extended by three months the deadline given to the Enforcement Directorate (ED) to complete the probe in the Aircel-Maxis deal case.

A bench of Justices AK Sikri and Ashok Bhushan said the probe should be completed in three months.

Additional Solicitor General Tushar Mehta, appearing for the ED, said the agency needs some two-three months to complete the probe as it needs to confront some accused with several e-mails.

#SupremeCourt extends deadline by 3 months for completing probe in #AircelMaxis deal cases. pic.twitter.com/1oXIH8YbUN  All India Radio News (@airnewsalerts) September 20, 2018

The apex court had in March given the ED a six-month deadline to complete the probe in the case.

The ED is probing a money-laundering case in the Aircel-Maxis matter arising out of 2G spectrum cases.

On Tuesday, the Supreme Court allowed senior Congress leader P Chidambaram's son Karti, who is facing proceedings in Aircel-Maxis case, to travel to the UK from 20-30 September.

Despite ED's objection that Karti has been "blatantly misusing" the liberty granted to him by the court, a bench of Chief Justice Dipak Misra and justices AM Khanwilkar and D Y Chandrachud allowed his plea.

The ED on Monday told the apex court that Karti was using the liberty granted by the court to protract the investigation in the cases against him. Karti has been facing criminal cases being investigated by the ED and the CBI.

The ED had said the liberty granted to him by the apex court is "blatantly and brazenly hampering, subverting, jeopardising and protracting" the investigation pending against him in the Aircel Maxis Case, which the agency has to complete in six months.

The agency in its reply also said: "The petitioner (Karti) during this period of 6 months has remained unavailable for investigation for a total number of 51 days due to his foreign visits."

With inputs from PTI
Amazons latest acquisition adds more heat to the US e-commerce giants battle with Walmart Inc in the Indian market, after Walmart acquired Indian firm Flipkart for $16 billion earlier this year.

Mumbai: Amazon.com Inc and private equity firm Samara Alternative Investment Fund-owned Witzig Advisory Services will fully acquire Aditya Birla Retail Ltd (ABRL), which runs 'more' chain of stores, for an enterprise value of Rs 4,200 crore (($580.35 million), CNBC TV18 reported on Wednesday citing sources, Reuters said.

In a BSE filing, RKN Retail Pvt Ltd, a part of the Aditya Birla group, said it along with Kanishtha Finance and Investment Pvt Ltd and ABRL has entered into a share purchase agreement (SPA) with Witzig, to sell their combined stake of around 99.99 in ABRL.

Amazons latest acquisition adds more heat to the US e-commerce giants battle with Walmart Inc in the Indian market after Walmart acquired Indian firm Flipkart for $16 billion earlier this year.

Samara will buy 51 percent, while Amazon will have the rest, CNBC TV18 reported, Reuters said.

RKN Retail said its board of directors at a meeting held Wednesday approved the sale of its entire 62.19 percent stake in ABRL to Witzig.

Subsequently, the company jointly with Kanishtha Finance and Investment Pvt Ltd and ABRL, entered into an SPA with Witzig, to sell their combined stake aggregating to 99.99 percent in ABRL, it added.

Pranab Barua, who heads the retail and apparel vertical of the Aditya Birla Group, is likely to head the operations of the entity, Reuters said. Amazon did not immediately respond to a request for comment, while Gautam Gode, the managing director of Samara Capital, said the firm does not comment on its investments, Reuters said.

Aditya Birla Group confirmed the development to Reuters but did not elaborate further.

Meanwhile, RKN Retail said that the deal would be subject to regulatory approvals from various authorities.

"The aforesaid sale of shares of ABRL would be subject to the terms of the SPA and regulatory approvals," said RKN Retail.

ABRL, part of $44.3 billion Aditya Birla Group, operates two different store formats - Supermarket and Hypermarket under the brand 'more'.

When contacted, Aditya Birla group declined to comment over the value of the deal.

It operates 523 supermarkets across the country and some in-house labels as VOW, Kitchen's Promise and Feasters.

The other brands include Prarthana, More Choice, More Daily, More Life, Bluearth, Karinee, Kruff, Incheels, TRU, Chatter Kids and Yo.

ABRL had ventured into food and grocery retail sectors in 2007 with the acquisition of Trinethra Super Retail and subsequently expanded its presence across the country.

It is the fourth largest supermarket chain in the country after Future Group, Reliance Retail and D-Mart.

-- With PTI inputs
Many Indians are switching off air conditioners in cars and going to gas pumps across state borders in a bid to save money

New Delhi: Many Indians are switching off air conditioners in cars and going to gas pumps across state borders in a bid to save money, as petrol prices across the country hover at record-high levels.

Protests against high petrol and diesel prices paralysed many parts of India earlier this month, shutting businesses, government offices and schools. The government blamed the high pump prices on the rising cost of crude oil and a weakening rupee.

Kalyan Chakrabarty, a 39-year old cab driver in the eastern state of Odisha, said he switches off his cars air conditioner intermittently while travelling so that he can save one or two litres of fuel.

For 42-year old Brij Nandan from Delhi, abandoning his scooter for a bicycle was the only option.

My fuel bills kept rising steadily and once it crossed 2,000 rupees ($27.61) a month, I could no longer afford riding a scooter, said Nandan, who supports a family of five.

Fuel prices are not uniform across the country due to variable state taxes.

Anirudha Bora, a truck owner from the northeastern Indian city of Guwahati, says he crosses the state border to save money.

I drive across the road to Meghalaya state. I save about 400 rupees when I fill 100 litres of fuel, Bora told Reuters.

States like Andhra Pradesh, Rajasthan and West Bengal this week cut taxes on fuel to reduce the burden, but the central government has so far not done so

Taxes on petrol and diesel, which account for more than a third of retail fuel prices, are one of the biggest sources of income for state and central governments.
The proposed merger of Bank of Baroda, Vijaya Bank and Dena Bank is 'credit positive' because the merger would provide scale efficiencies and help improve the quality of corporate governance, rating agency Moody's said.

Hyderabad: The proposed merger of Bank of Baroda, Vijaya Bank and Dena Bank is "credit positive" because the merger would provide scale efficiencies and help improve the quality of corporate governance, rating agency Moody's said.

The merged bank would have a market share of about 7.2 percent in deposits and 6.8 percent in loans, based on March 2018 data, which would make it the second-largest bank by deposits and the third-largest by loans, Moody's said in its report on Wednesday.

Also, the combined institution would have the second largest branch network, with about 9,500 outlets nationwide, it added.

"The plan is credit positive because the merger will provide scale efficiencies and help improve the quality of corporate governance," it said.

Though the government did not provide any timeline for the merger, Moody's expects it to be completed by the end of the current fiscal year.

Public Sector Banks as a whole dominate the Indian banking sector, accounting for about 70 percent of total deposits in the system and 63 percent of loans as of March 2018.

However, PSBs are highly fragmented, and only State Bank of India has sufficient scale to have a competitive advantage, it said.

"The merger will enable the government to pay closer operational attention to the enlarged institution, as is the case with SBI, which will result in the formation of a stronger board and management team," Moody's noted.

Enhanced corporate governance can help strengthen underwriting and risk-management processes, which in turn can result in an improvement in asset quality.

The three banks, like other PSBs, have been struggling with weak profitability and capitalisation in recent years owing to a surge in nonperforming loans (NPLs), and poor underwriting has been a key reason behind the asset quality deterioration, the report said.

Among the three banks to be merged, Dena is particularly weak, with the highest NPL ratio and the lowest capital ratio.

The bank reported losses for three straight years through March 2018, as well as in the quarter that ended in June 2018.

"We expect Dena to remain unprofitable in the current fiscal year before returning to profit in the following 12 months," the rating agency said.

Given the weakness of Dena, the merged entity would equire capital support from the government to be able to meet regulatory capital requirements, even though at the end of June 2018, all three had Common Equity Tier 1 ratios that exceeded 8 percent, which satisfied the Basel III minimum and a 2.5 percent capital conservation buffer, according to Moody's.

The merger plan entails significant execution risks related to integrating business portfolios, IT systems and human resources, as well as reducing overlapping operations, it further said.
The merger of Bank of Baroda, Vijaya Bank and Dena Bank by the government poses short-term challenges like spurt in bad assets, but will be beneficial over a longer term, a India Ratings report said

Mumbai: The merger of Bank of Baroda, Vijaya Bank and Dena Bank by the government poses short-term challenges like spurt in bad assets, but will be beneficial over a longer term, a report said on Thursday.

Slippages may increase in the short-term as recognition of non-performing assets is harmonised and accelerated, India Ratings said in a note.

Stating that it may take appropriate rating actions after the merger proposed earlier this week gets a formal approval, it said the combined entity will require "significant bandwidth" in the management for business growth and NPA resolutions.

Dena Bank's lower capital buffers are offset by Vijaya Bank's higher capital buffers, it said, adding that the merged the bank may need additional tier 1 capital depending on internal accruals for FY19.

However, from a longer-term perspective, the merger will be positive with benefits like reducing combined operating costs, lower funding cost and strengthened risk management practices, it said.

The asset-liability mismatch issues at smaller banks (Vijaya and Dena) can be better addressed at the consolidated level, it said.

A successful merger can also impact the capital requirements for the government as internal accruals can go up with efficiencies, it said, pointing out that this may act as a roadmap for further consolidations in the public sector banking space.

The product offerings of the three banks are "largely homogeneous" and 50 percent of the combined entity advances are to the corporate segment, followed by 25 percent to retail.

The combined entity's 16 percent branches are in the top 12 banked districts of the country (which account for 42 percent of deposits and 55 percent of advances).

There is a "moderate" scope to decrease branches in Mumbai, Thane, Ahmedabad and Pune, while Gurugram and Chennai offer a "limited scope" for branch consolidation.

However, there is the significant scope of branch rationalisation in Gujarat, Karnataka, Maharashtra, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh, it said, adding that 65 percent of the combined entity's branches are concentrated in these states.

In the present form, the smaller size Vijaya Bank and Dena Bank may have had to compromise on margins in order to lend to better-rated corporates, it said pointing out that a merger strengthens the lending ability for the banks.

In a surprise move, the government announced a merger of the three entities earlier this week, which will create the country's third-biggest lender.
By Gabriela Baczynska and Elizabeth Piper SALZBURG, Austria (Reuters) - British Prime Minister Theresa May urged fellow European Union leaders at an informal summit on Wednesday to follow her lead and adapt their Brexit negotiating stance to secure a good deal. However, before a dinner in the Austrian city of Salzburg, some of those leaders said key elements of the 'Chequers' plan that May was aiming to sell to them needed reworking, and Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar said there had been no progress at all in six months on the delicate issue of the Irish border. With just over six months to go until Britain leaves the EU, both sides are keen to secure some kind of deal on future relations before the end of the year, to avert a disruptive 'cliff-edge' exit from EU agreements and institutions

By Gabriela Baczynska and Elizabeth Piper

SALZBURG, Austria (Reuters) - British Prime Minister Theresa May urged fellow European Union leaders at an informal summit on Wednesday to follow her lead and adapt their Brexit negotiating stance to secure a good deal.

However, before a dinner in the Austrian city of Salzburg, some of those leaders said key elements of the "Chequers" plan that May was aiming to sell to them needed reworking, and Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar said there had been no progress at all in six months on the delicate issue of the Irish border.

With just over six months to go until Britain leaves the EU, both sides are keen to secure some kind of deal on future relations before the end of the year, to avert a disruptive "cliff-edge" exit from EU agreements and institutions.

"If were going to achieve a successful conclusion then, just as the UK has evolved its position, the EU will need to evolve its position too," May told reporters on arrival in Salzburg. "Im confident that, with goodwill and determination, we can agree a deal that right for both parties."

EU summit chairman Donald Tusk said parts of the British plan indicated a "positive evolution" in the UK's approach.

"On other issues, such as the Irish question, or the framework for economic cooperation, the UK's proposals will need to be reworked and further negotiated," he said.

European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker said a deal with Britain was still "far away", an EU official said.

One of the biggest stumbling blocks is the need to prevent border posts being erected between the British province of Northern Ireland and EU member Ireland.

"THE ONLY CREDIBLE PLAN"

May said her Chequers proposal on a future customs and trade arrangement would maintain "frictionless trade" with the bloc, and that it was "the only credible and negotiable plan on the table that delivers no hard border in Northern Ireland and also delivers on the vote of the British people".

The plan calls for Britain to remain in a free trade zone with the EU for agricultural and manufactured goods, which would be covered after Brexit by a "common rulebook" of regulations.

May has said she will not accept an EU proposal that would keep Northern Ireland in a customs union with the bloc if there is no other agreed plan to avert a hard border.

A British government source said London could not accept any proposal that would effectively move the customs frontier into the Irish Sea.

But Dublin has Brussels' backing for its drive to ensure that the border does not once again become a cause of the north-south tension that bedevilled it in the last century.

"I don't think we're any closer to a withdrawal agreement than we were in March, so I can't report any progress unfortunately," Varadkar told reporters. "We have yet to see an alternative text from the UK government that anybody in the European Union finds to be acceptable."

At dinner at the Felsenreitschule theatre -- known to film fans for a scene in the musical "The Sound of Music" -- May was due to make another pitch for support for her Chequers plan.

She will then be out of the room on Thursday afternoon when the other 27 leaders discuss her proposals.

Tusk said he would call an additional summit in mid-November to seal any deal with Britain.

British Brexit Minister Dominic Raab told London's LBC radio that if the EU did not give ground, it would be "lose-lose" for both sides - and that a "no-deal" Brexit would cause short-term disruption, but not chaos. He said Britain would not seek to delay its exit and would leave the EU as planned, on March 29.

"NOTHING ON IRELAND"

But the summit host, Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz, said that, while a no-deal Brexit would be difficult for the EU, it would be terrible for Britain.

"If you want to make a deal, both sides will need to try to find a compromise," he said. "I am still optimistic."

According to an EU official, Barnier has suggested going to the "bare bones" on any checks between the rest of Britain and Northern Ireland, which could be further reduced if there is a trade facilitation agreement similar to that with Japan.

Northern Ireland's Democratic Unionist Party, which supports May's minority government in Westminster, said that would still mean an unacceptable border between the province and the rest of the United Kingdom.

EU officials are minded not to paint May into a corner, aware that she faces increasing opposition to her plans in her own Conservative Party and needs a victory of sorts to persuade a reluctant parliament to back a deal.

May has told lawmakers that they will vote either for a Chequers-based deal or to leave without an agreement. Mel Stride, a junior treasury minister, said that, if pro-Brexit and pro-EU lawmakers reject her plan, they could usher in a second referendum on EU membership.

"We could end up not leaving the EU altogether," he told Sky News. "There is a danger of that happening."

But Raab said the government would not call a second referendum, and that parliament was unlikely to ask for one.

(Additional reporting by Alastair Macdonald, Francois Murphy Andreas Rinke, Jan Strupczewski in Brussels, and William James in London; Editing by Kevin Liffey)

This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed.
Last month, Adani Enterprises had filed a plea in the Bombay High Court seeking quashing of all LRs against its firms that are under probe for alleged over-invoicing of Indonesian coal imports.

Mumbai: The Bombay High Court on Wednesday granted interim relief to the Adani group by restraining the Directorate of Revenue Intelligence (DRI) from giving effect to the letters rogatory (LRs) issued to several countries against three group companies in an alleged case of overvaluation of Indonesian coal imports in the past.

A bench of justices Ranjit More and Bharati Dangre restrained the DRI from acting upon or giving effect to the LRs and directed it to file a detailed reply on a plea filed by Adani Enterprises, the flagship of the Adani group, against the agency.

A letter rogatory is usually sent by a country to seek help of foreign judicial authorities in investigating an offshore entity.

Last month, Adani Enterprises had filed a plea in the Bombay High Court seeking quashing of all LRs against its firms that are under probe for alleged over-invoicing of Indonesian coal imports.

In April 2018, the Customs, Excise & Service Tax Appellate Tribunal had rejected a DRI plea seeking over Rs 50,000 crore from a clutch of 40 companies including Adani group, Essar group, Anil Ambani group, Sajjan Jindal's JSW Energy and JSW Steel, Hyderabad- based NSL Group, India Cements apart from PSUs like sector NTPC, MMTC, Tamil Nadu SEB and Karnataka Power Corporation among others.

The DRI investigation, started in 2009 and is still continuing, alleges over-invoicing of imported coal and power-plant equipment cumulatively amounted to around Rs 50,000 crore prior to 2008.

Of this coal imports accounted for around Rs 29,000 crore, while power-plant equipment imports and "compensatory tariffs" claimed by a few companies is around Rs 21,000 crore.

Since May 2014, the DRI has issued demand notice worth Rs 6,000 crore from three Adani group firms-- Adani Power Maharashtra, Adani Power Rajasthan, and Maharashtra Eastern Grid Power Transmission Company. The group is also accused of overvaluing power-plant equipment to the tune of to the tune of Rs 3,974 crore.

Earlier this year, the DRI had issued LRs to courts in Singapore, Dubai, Hong Kong, Switzerland, and Indonesia to investigative cases of over-invoicing by some corporate groups including Adani Enterprises.

As per the DRI, such overvaluing of coal might have been done to help power companies get inflated tariffs for their generating stations.

Earlier this year, following the LRs, a Singapore court had asked the Adani group to produce documents pertaining to Indonesian coal imports under the ongoing probe by the DRI.

Adani Enterprises appealed to the Singapore high court against the lower court order but was denied relief. It then approached the Bombay HC seeking quashing of the LRs.
The scheme, Atal Bimit Vyakti Kalyan Yojna, is a relief payable in cash directly to bank account of insured person in case of unemployment and while they search for new engagement, Labour Minister Santosh Gangwar said.

New Delhi: Employees State Insurance Corporation (ESIC) on Wednesday approved a new scheme which would pay cash relief to insured persons during the period of unemployment, the Labour Ministry said.

The scheme, Atal Bimit Vyakti Kalyan Yojna, is a relief payable in cash directly to bank account of insured person in case of unemployment and while they search for new engagement, Labour Minister Santosh Gangwar said.

The scheme would benefit insured persons (IP) covered under the Employees' State Insurance Act, 1948. It has been formed considering the change in employment pattern and the current scenario of employment in India which has transformed from a long-term employment to fixed short-term engagement in the form of contract and temporary, the ministry said.

The proposed scheme was approved Wednesday in the ESIC board meeting chaired by the labour minister.

Detailed instructions including eligibility conditions, application format, etc. will be issued separately.

The ESIC has also approved the proposal for reimbursement of Rs 10 per person to the employers to encourage the seeding of Aadhaar (UID) in ESIC database of their workers and their family members. It will curtail the multiple registrations of same Insured Persons and thus enable them to avail the benefits requiring longer contributory conditions.

The ESIC also approved the proposal for relaxing eligibility conditions for availing Super Specialty treatment from the earlier insurable employment of 2 years to 6 months with contribution requirement of only 78 days.

Besides, the eligibility for availing Super Specialty treatment for dependents of Insured Person has now been relaxed to the insurable employment of one year with 156 days of contributions. This relaxation will immensely help the Insured Persons and their beneficiaries to avail Super Specialty treatment free of cost as per revised eligibility, it added.

The ESIC has approved the proposal for increasing the funeral expenses from existing Rs 10,000 to Rs 15,000 being paid on the death of Insured Person.
By Foo Yun Chee BRUSSELS (Reuters) - McDonald's avoided having to repay millions of euros in back taxes after EU antitrust regulators said that its tax deal with Luxembourg was not illegal, citing quirks in the Grand Duchy's bilateral tax treaty with the United States. The decision by the European Commission came after a three-year long investigation, part of its crackdown on illegal sweetheart deals between EU governments and multinationals that has resulted in Apple, Starbucks and Fiat paying billions of euros in back taxes.

By Foo Yun Chee

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - McDonald's avoided having to repay millions of euros in back taxes after EU antitrust regulators said that its tax deal with Luxembourg was not illegal, citing quirks in the Grand Duchy's bilateral tax treaty with the United States.

The decision by the European Commission came after a three-year long investigation, part of its crackdown on illegal sweetheart deals between EU governments and multinationals that has resulted in Apple, Starbucks and Fiat paying billions of euros in back taxes.

The Commission said McDonald's tax deal was in line with national tax laws and the Luxembourg-U.S. double taxation treaty.

"Our in-depth investigation has shown that the reason for double non-taxation in this case is a mismatch between Luxembourg and U.S. tax laws, and not a special treatment by Luxembourg. Therefore, Luxembourg did not break EU state aid rules," European Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager said.

"Of course, the fact remains that McDonald's did not pay any taxes on these profits  and this is not how it should be from a tax fairness point of view," she said.

The investigation had focused on McDonald's Luxembourg-based subsidiary Europe Franchising which receives royalties from franchisees in Europe, Ukraine and Russia.

Luxembourg in a 2009 tax ruling said the company did not have to pay corporate taxes as its profits would be taxed in the United States. In a second tax ruling, the Grand Duchy said that the company was no longer required to prove that its royalty income was subject to U.S. taxation.

"HAPPY MEAL"

The Commission said 70 companies benefited from the bilateral tax treaty but were not being investigated. In June this year, Luxembourg presented draft legislation to avoid double non-taxation.

Luxembourg said in a statement that it welcomed the Commission's recognition of the steps it had taken to avoid similar cases in future. It had been ordered to claw back millions from Engie, Amazon and Fiat in the last three years.

"We pay the taxes that are owed and, from 2013-2017, McDonalds companies paid more than $3 billion just in corporate income taxes in the European Union with an average tax rate approaching 29 percent," McDonald's said. "We will continue to invest in Europe and expect to create 50,000 new jobs over the next four years."

Sven Giegold, a Greens lawmaker at the European Parliament who has been pushing for more action to tackle tax loopholes, criticised the EU decision.

"Luxembourg and other EU countries are serving McDonalds a happy meal with tax loopholes, and taxpayers must pay the bill," said Giegold.

The ruling is a recognition by enforcers that they cannot make unlimited use of their state aid powers on taxation issues, said Natura Garcia, a partner at law firm Linklaters.

"This is a welcome development given the wider context of other state aid investigations into tax rulings and will give some comfort to companies which have obtained similar tax rulings in Luxembourg or elsewhere in the EU," she said.

(Reporting by Foo Yun Chee; editing by Philip Blenkinsop and Emelia Sithole-Matarise)

This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed.
Indian refiners are currently using State Bank of India and Germany-based Europaeisch-Iranische Handelsbank AG to buy Iranian oil in euros

New Delhi: India may revert to paying Iran in rupees for the oil it buys from its third largest supplier as US sanctions will from 4 November block use of US dollars to settle such trades, a top official said Thursday.

Oil refiners such as state-owned Indian Oil Corp (IOC) and Mangalore Refinery and Petrochemicals Ltd (MRPL) could use UCO Bank or IDBI Bank to route oil payments to Iran, the official added.

US sanctions against Iran come into effect from November 4 and will block banking channels.

The official said refiners have booked oil cargoes from Iran for the current month as well as for October. Payment for oil bought in September would be due in November as Iran provides a 60 days credit period.

India had planned to import about 25 million tonnes of crude oil from Iran in the current fiscal, up from 22.6 million tonnes imported in 2017-18. But the actual volumes imported may be far less as companies like Reliance Industries have totally stopped buying oil from Iran and others too are scaling it down in hope of winning a sanction waiver from the US.

US President Donald Trump had in May withdrawn from the 2015 nuclear accord with Iran, re-imposing economic sanctions against the Persian Gulf nation. Some sanctions took effect from August 6 while those affecting the oil and banking sectors will start from November 4.

The official said Iran is open to accepting rupee payment for oil and may use the money to pay for equipments and food items it buys from India.

UCO Bank and IDBI Bank have been identified to route the payment as the two have no exposure to the US financial system.

UCO Bank had in the previous round of sanctions handled rupee payments.

Currently, India pays its third largest oil supplier in euros using European banking channels. These channels would get blocked from November.

During the first round of sanctions when EU joined the US in imposing financial restrictions, India initially used a Turkish bank to pay Iran for the oil it bought but beginning February 2013 paid nearly half of the oil import bill in rupees while keeping the remainder pending opening of payment routes. It began clearing the dues in 2015 when the restrictions were eased.

Besides, New Delhi sought to get around the restrictions by supplying goods including wheat, soybean meal and consumer products to Iran in exchange for oil.

The official said this time around the entire 100 per cent of Iranian oil import bill can be paid in rupees.

Iran is India's third-largest oil supplier behind Iraq and Saudi Arabia. It was India's second biggest supplier of crude oil after Saudi Arabia till 2010-11 but Western sanctions over its suspected nuclear programme relegated it to the seventh spot in the subsequent years. In 2013-14 and 2014-15, India bought 11 MT and 10.95 MT, respectively from it.

Sourcing from Iran increased to 12.7 MT in 2015-16, giving it the sixth spot. In the following year, the Iranian supplies jumped to 27.2 MT to catapult it to the third spot.

Iranian oil is a lucrative buy for refiners as the Persian Gulf nation provides 60 days of credit for purchases, terms not available from suppliers of substitute crudes -- Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iraq, Nigeria, and the US.

Besides blocking of banking channels from November, the absence of payment mechanism may pose a challenge to the transportation of the oil as Iranian crude is bought on a CIF basis and shipped on Iranian tankers.

Under Cost, Insurance and Freight (CIF) mode of shipping, the seller assumes the responsibility of transportation and insurance. The liability and costs associated with successful transit are paid by the seller until the goods are received by the buyer.
During a 2013 currency crisis, a separate window for oil companies in which the central bank sold dollars to importers on a forward swap basis without leading to a drain down on foreign exchange reserves helped push up the rupee.

New Delhi: India is considering asking the central bank to offer dollars directly to oil marketing companies or through a state-run bank, a government source said on Thursday, as part of steps to stem a fall in the rupee.

As an 'extreme' measure, the government could also look at raising dollars by tapping expatriates to invest in bonds for non-resident Indians, said the source who has direct knowledge of the deliberations over the currency's fall.

The rupee is Asia's worst performing currency this year. However, earlier on Wednesday it posted its strongest intraday gain since May 25 on hopes that oil companies, which are among the largest buyers of dollars in India, would now direct their demand to the central bank and not the open market.

"We could ask the Reserve Bank of India to earmark $8 billion to $10 billion a month separately for the public sector oil companies," the source said, declining to be named as the discussions continue. "As an extreme step, we would be ready to raise dollars through non-resident deposits."

Finance Ministry spokesman D S Malik declined to comment.

The source said proposed restrictions on the import of non-essential items may have only a limited impact on the falling rupee as the current account deficit continues to widen.

The rupee has depreciated more than 11 percent this year, closing at 72.39 on Wednesday after hitting a record low of 72.99 on Tuesday.

The source said it could fall further once the US sanctions on Iran's oil exports come into force in November, measures which may limit global crude supplies and push up prices.

During a 2013 currency crisis, a separate window for oil companies in which the central bank sold dollars to importers on a forward swap basis without leading to a drain down on foreign exchange reserves helped push up the rupee.

"This is one of the easiest solutions that should have been done long back," said a dealer at a foreign bank. "Why are the policymakers waiting for people to bear such huge losses on the currency and not announcing this simple measure?"
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.
CBI had registered a preliminary enquiry against Deepak Kochhar, and also officials of the Videocon Group and others to determine whether any wrongdoing was involved.

Months after it registered a preliminary enquiry to determine whether there was any wrongdoing in the sanctioning of a Rs 3,250 crore loan to the Videocon Group by ICICI Bank Ltd, the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) is still waiting for some more documents to firm up the case, according to a media report.

The investigative agency has reportedly collected documents pertaining to the Rs 40,000 crore loan granted to Videocon group in 2012 and documents pertaining to setting up of NuPower Renewables -- the company founded by Deepak Kochhar, ICICI Bank MD and CEO Chanda Kochhar), Mint reported, quoting a person familiar with the development.

From CBIs end, there is nothing that is being done against the Kochhar family as of now. Neither is Chanda Kochhar being called in nor is her husband Deepak Kochhar likely to be summoned now, an official familiar was quoted as saying by the newspaper.

In March, the CBI had registered a preliminary enquiry against Deepak Kochhar, and also officials of the Videocon Group and others to determine whether any wrongdoing was involved.

The CBI action came in the wake of news reports raising questions about Videocon chairman Venugopal Dhoot allegedly providing crores of rupees to a firm promoted by Deepak Kochhar and two relatives six months after his group got the Rs 3,250 crore loan from ICICI Bank.

The said amount was part of a loan of Rs 40,000 crore which Videocon received from a consortium of 20 banks led by State Bank of India (SBI).

In April, CBI had questioned Rajiv Kochhar, brother-in-law of Chanda Kochhar, along with NuPower Renewables Pvt Ltd director Mahesh Chandra Punglia.

In June, ICICI Bank's Board decided to institute a 'comprehensive enquiry' to look into allegations that Chanda Kochhar had not adhered to provisions relating to the 'code of conduct' of the bank.

Former Supreme Court judge BN Srikrishna had accepted the lender's request to preside over that investigation.

In August, Bank Chairman Girish Chandra Chaturvedi said the committee holding enquiry into charges of impropriety against Chanda Kochhar was expected to submit its reports in the next two to two-and-half months.

Responding to nepotism allegations against her, Chanda Kochhar had said that the private lender works under and abides by all regulatory norms and that it has been fully cooperating with regulatory and investigative agencies.

On 29 March, ICICI Bank Chairman MK Sharma had said that reports alleging nepotism by Kochhar were unfounded and malicious in nature.

With inputs from agencies
At present, mutual funds pay distributors upfront commission as high as 2 percent against the 1 percent recommended by industry body Association of Mutual Funds in India

New Delhi: Investing in mutual funds will become cheaper, while margins of asset management companies may get affected due to regulator Sebi's move to slash the charges levied on investors, experts said Wednesday.

In a major overhaul of the fee structure of mutual funds, Sebi on Tuesday cleared a proposal to cap the maximum total expense ratio (TER) -- the fee that MFs collect from investors every year to manage their capital -- for closed-ended equity schemes at 1.25 percent and for other schemes at 1 percent.

The maximum TER for open-ended equity schemes will be 2.25 percent and 2 percent for other open-ended schemes.

"TER has come down and even slabs of AUM have been changed. In my view, it will definitely benefit investors as the costs of investing in mutual funds will come down. All these steps will also lead to more transparency in the industry," Quantum Asset Management CEO Jimmy Patel said.

G Pradeep Kumar, CEO of Union AMC said the review of expense ratios by Sebi reflects the principle that as individual schemes get larger, the economies of scale should be shared with the investors.

"The margins of AMCs running some of the very large equity or balanced schemes may get affected but hopefully, volumes will make up for it," he said. For AMCs with relatively smaller schemes, the impact will be limited, he added.

Anurag Garg, CEO and Founder, Nivesh.com believes that the reduction in TER and creating a graded structure where schemes with smaller AUMs can charge higher TER will reduce inflows into the celebrated or flagship schemes and benefit mid-sized players. This will also lead to some reduction (15 to 20 basis points) in distributor commissions, he added.

"As costs go down, the net return of funds increase thereby making mutual funds an even more attractive option for the investor. Though care should be taken to ensure that costs are not lowered to an extent where the industry is unable to attract and pay for quality talent," Stefan Groening, Director Investment Solutions, Sharekhan, BNP Paribas said.

In a bid to pass on the economies of scale to investors, Sebi has reduced the expense ratio of funds across categories, Morningstar said in a report.

From Rs 79,501 crore in July 1999, the industry has grown at a compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) of 20 percent to reach Rs 25.20 lakh crore in August 2018.

The expense ratio slabs were introduced in 1996 which have not been changed since then, which means that the expenses have not reduced commensurate with the growth of the industry.

Apart from this, Sebi said the industry must adopt full trail model of commission in all schemes, "without payment of any upfront commission or upfronting of any trail commission".

A trail-fee model benefits distributors if their clients stay invested in schemes for a longer period.

At present, mutual funds pay distributors upfront commission as high as 2 percent against the 1 percent recommended by industry body Association of Mutual Funds in India (Amfi).

"Going for full trail commission will provide an annuitised payout for serious distributors. However, small independent financial advisors may have to adjust their cash flows accordingly," Patel noted.

"A large number of distributors are already operating on trail fee model and systematic investment plans (SIPs) constitute a large chunk of the flows for AMCs and the distributors," Kumar noted.
This move from Jet Airways comes two years after the airline introduced 'Fare Choices,' a flexible, tier-based, fare-choice system that helped flyers customise their travel needs by choosing their preferred fare.

Mumbai: Facing strong financial headwinds, full-service carrier Jet Airways Wednesday said it will be stopping free meals on its Economy class from bookings done from 25 September.

The unbundle plan covers the 'Economy Light' and 'Economy Deal' categories in the domestic sector, the airline said, adding, however, flyers will continue to get free

beverages, including tea and coffee.

The airline said following this, its tickets in these two buckets will become cheaper as the cost of meals in inclusive of the ticket fare now.

"From 25 September guests travelling in the Economy and booking 'Light'/'Deal' fares for travel from 28 September on its domestic flights, will not only be able to avail of competitive low fares but have the opportunity to buy meals from a specially curated on-board menu," Jet Airways said, adding complimentary beverages including tea and coffee will be served to all guests in the Economy 'Light'/'Deal' fares."

The move comes two years after the airline introduced 'Fare Choices,' a flexible, tier-based, fare-choice system that helped flyers customise their travel needs by choosing their preferred fare.

Raj Sivakumar, senior vice-president for sales and distribution said the decision comes from the fact that guests, especially the millennials, wish to be empowered and exercise their right of choice and globally service models in the aairlines' space change every day.

"We understand these changes and endeavor to align our service framework to embrace such needs of various segments of consumers. Our first such measure was the introduction of our Fare Choices concept in 2016. Our latest initiative is a step ahead in terms of flexibility and being receptive to our guests' preference to facilitate greater choice and convenience," he said.

Elaborating further, Belson Coutinho, SVP-marketing, e-commerce and innovations said "this unbundling will ensure we stay relevant to guests' needs and empower them to choose from fare options that suit them based on their travel needs".

The revised offering under Fare Choices will now allow guests to enjoy more value for money, by letting them choose a travel plan based on their preference, travel requirements and budget, the airline said.

Currently, the Fare Choices in the Economy offers a total of five fare options--'Light', 'Deal', 'Saver', 'Classic' and 'Flex'. On all domestic flights, all features and benefits, including complimentary meals will continue for the Economy fare options of 'Saver', 'Classic' and 'Flex and for all fare options in Premire. Similarly, all international flyers will continue to get the benefits under First class, Premire and Economy.

Jet connects 66 destinations, including in the domestic network and overseas, operating a fleet of 123 aircraft, comprising Boeing 777-300 ERs, Airbus A330-200/300s, Boeing 737 Max 8s, Next Generation Boeing 737s and ATR 72-500/600s.
Moody's said the growth in both the interest and non-interest income will help Yes Bank maintain 'solid profitability'.

Mumbai: Moody's Investors Service Thursday affirmed the ratings of Yes Bank, a day after RBI curtailed term of the midsize private lender's promoter chief executive Rana Kapoor.

The rating agency has also maintained the outlook on the ratings as stable.

"Yes Bank's profitability is strong, and Moody's expects that the bank can maintain low credit costs over the next 12-18 months," the global rating agency said in a note.

It added that the growth in both the interest and non-interest income will help the city-headquartered bank maintain "solid profitability".

The agency warned that while the bank's current asset quality metrics are strong and superior to that of peers, its "aggressive growth strategy poses asset risks".

The overall issuer rating, accordingly continues to stand at Baa3, it said, adding that all the other ratings on the bank have been affirmed.

The bank informed last evening that the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) had curtailed the term of Rana Kapoor, its promoter, chief executive and managing director, till January 31, 2019, and asked the board to find a replacement. The 61-year-old Kapoor owns over 10 per cent in the bank.

Private sector bank chiefs are allowed to continue holding their posts till the age of 70. In August, the bank board had given a three-year extension to Kapoor and sought the central bank's go-ahead for the same.

The bank had been found to have under reported non-performing assets (NPAs) by over Rs 10,000 crore for two consecutive years.

Moody's said Yes Bank will continue to outpace the industry in loan book growth, but added that while the capital buffers are adequate for now, it will have to raise capital from the market soon.

It said the bank's share in the system-wide assets has increased five times to 2.4 percent since 2009, which "underpins" its belief that the government will support it in case needed, and added that its "importance to the Indian banking system is increasing".

If the bank is able to maintain the present asset quality ratios and reduce credit risk concentrations, its share of low-cost Casa (current account savings account)

deposits improves without affecting the margins and profitability is sustained, the agency said the bank's rating can move up.

However, an increase in NPAs or decline in earnings can lead to a downgrade in ratings, it said.
As many as 27 states and Union Territories are ready to join the ambitious healthcare scheme Pradhan Mantri Jan Arogya Yojana after its launch on Sunday by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, a NITI Aayog member said.

New Delhi: As many as 27 states and Union Territories are ready to join the ambitious healthcare scheme Pradhan Mantri Jan Arogya Yojana after its launch on Sunday by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, a NITI Aayog member said.

Over 15,000 hospitals, both public and private, across the country have expressed their willingness to be empanelled for the scheme which aims to provide 10.74-crore poor families health insurance, NITI Aayog member V K Paul, who is the chief architect of the scheme, told PTI in an interview.

"The Prime Minister will launch the scheme on 23 September but effectively it will become operational from 25 September on the birth anniversary of Pandit Deendayal Upadhyay," he said, adding that in the current fiscal, the burden on the Centre is likely to be around Rs 3,500 crore.

"With the launch by the prime minister, 26-27 states and UTs are likely to immediately commence the PMJAY," Paul added.

The NITI Aayog member said that five or six states have not signed, so obviously the scheme will not be implemented in those states till they come on board.

"Remaining states that have signed (MoUs with the Centre) should hopefully be in the process of actual launch of (PMJAY) in the next 2-3 months," he noted.

The mega healthcare scheme aims to provide medical cover of up to Rs 5 lakh to over 10.74 crore poor and vulnerable families, constituting 40 percent of India's total population.

Billed as the world's largest government healthcare programme, it will be funded with 60 percent contribution coming from the central government and the remaining from the states.

Paul also said that the government expects thousands of new hospitals to come up in the next five years in tier 2 and tier 3 cities.

"We have received applications from 15,000 hospitals for being empanelled ... Out of this half, that means 7,500 applications for empanelment are private hospitals," he said, adding that in some states process for empanelment is yet to start.

Noting that the government is in the process of building optimum hospital infrastructure in small towns, Paul highlighted that there was about 30 percent spare capacity in the private sector, "which is now available".

Asked about the cost to the exchequer in the current fiscal, he said, "Around Rs 3,500 crore has been budgeted by the central government for the scheme this year".

He mentioned that Rs 2,000 crore had been provided in the budget for 2018-19 as token money for the scheme, then named as Ayushman Bharat.

"We are six months into this fiscal and we also know that only 27 states will go immediately into operations. Therefore full uptake is still be building up. Accordingly, Rs 1,500 crore more has been sought, so we now have Rs 3500 crore as central government budget."

"So I don't think there is any concern for money at all. As the scheme matures, we will have more precise estimates, and even if in current fiscal more money is required, it will be made available" he asserted.

Asked how confident is the government that the PMJAY will not face the teething troubles like Goods and Services Tax (GST), Paul said the government has taken steps to ensure that the information technology (IT) system did not face any hiccups.

Also, he added that the original software has been tested in Telangana and have been improved further.

On whether the beneficiary would be required to produce any special card for treatment in any empanelled hospital, Paul said, "One would only need to establish one's identity. It could be through Aadhaar card or election ID card or ration card."

All the poor people identified by the Socio-Economic and Caste Census 2011 will be eligible for the scheme, the Niti Aayog member added.
RBI taking strict action is good for the banking sector, but its silence on the reasons for trimming of Rana Kapoor's term could be damaging for common shareholders

The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has left the world guessing about the exact reasons why it did not approve another three-year term for Yes Banks Managing Director and CEO, Rana Kapoor. This came after the decision was left pending for about two weeks.

Reserve Bank of India has vide letter dated 17 September, 2018 received today, intimated that Shri Rana Kapoor may continue as the MD & CEO till 31 January 2019, and the Board of Directors of the Bank are scheduled to meet on 25 September, 2018 to decide on the future course of action, Yes Bank informed the stock exchanges late Wednesday night.

In other words, the RBI has said that Kapoor can continue only for four more months in the capacity of chief executive and needs to step down after that. The interesting aspect here is that no one knows why the regulator decided not to give an extension to Kapoor. Given that the RBI has left everyone guessing about the reasons for trimming Kapoors term, let us do the guess work:

Guess 1: The regulator wasnt happy with the under-reporting of bad loans by the private sector bank and what RBI found with its inspection about the bank.

The bank had been found to have under-reported non-performing assets (NPAs) by over Rs 10,000 crore for two consecutive years. Now thats one thing which can make RBI governor Urjit Patel and his colleagues at the central bank very angry. Hence, they didnt want to offer Kapoor another term.

Of course, this isnt the first time the RBI has done that. It wasnt long back that the RBI said No to another term for Axis Bank MD and CEO, Shikha Sharma in the backdrop of rising NPAs. The regulator then wrote a letter to the bank asking the board to re-consider Sharmas appointment.

Guess 2: For years, the regulator has been insisting that founder-promoters of commercial banks need to keep an arms length from their entities and eventually move away from controlling positions to leave the bank to a professionally-run board and management. Kapoor has held the CEOs post for a very long time now and the regulator felt that it is time to draw a line. Theres nothing wrong in it. Banks arent institutions that should be subjected to skewed ownership or functionally under the control of a select few individuals, including founders.

Kapoor may not be guilty on these accounts but the central banks actions are justified in the context cited above. After all, banks are guardians of public money. By drawing the line at the right time, the RBI deserves kudos although it is only doing what it is expected to do.

But the problem here is that neither the lender nor the central bank has given reasons as to why Kapoor was denied another term.

The RBI's decision can send the right signals to the industry, but it might also lead to confusion and panic among common shareholders.

Founder-promoters and boards of other private sector banks may get the message that they should, but not necessarily the shareholders, particularly small shareholders. Remember, in June this year, Yes Banks shareholders had approved Rana Kapoors extension for another term. How will the bank explain the RBIs decision to its shareholders?

It would have been better if the RBI explained the decision to the public in a manner that can be understood even without getting into the specifics that can be sensitive to the institution. After all, the occasions where the central bank denies a bank CEO another term post-shareholders approval are rare. The RBIs big No will likely leave the Yes bank shareholders in a state of confusion and can even be damaging if shareholders switch to panic mode.
Rana Kapoor was part of the founding team of Yes Bank, along with Ashok Kapur who died in 2008. As a promoter, Kapoor and his family own 10.66 percent stake in the bank.

New Delhi: The Reserve Bank has curtailed the term of Yes Bank's founding CEO Rana Kapoor and asked the private sector lender to look for his replacement by January 2019.

Kapoor, who has been managing director and CEO since the bank's inception in 2004, had sought a three-year extension till 31 August 2021. However, the sector regulator did not agree to the request and permitted him to continue only till January 2019.

"Reserve Bank of India has vide letter dated 17 September 2018 received today, intimated that Shri Rana Kapoor may continue as the MD & CEO till 31 January 2019, and the Board of Directors of the Bank are scheduled to meet on 25 September 2018 to decide on the future course of action," the bank said in a statement.

In June this year, Yes Bank's shareholders had approved the re-appointment of Kapoor for three years, subject to final approval from the Reserve Bank of India (RBI).

His present term ended on 31 August. However, the RBI had allowed him to continue till further notice.

RBI approved the reappointment of Rana Kapoor as MD and CEO of Yes Bank on 30 August 2018 but did not specify the period.

Earlier this year, RBI denied a three-year extension to Axis Bank CEO Shikha Sharma despite the board endorsing her reappointment.

Kapoor was part of the founding team of Yes Bank, along with Ashok Kapur who died in 2008. As a promoter, Kapoor and his family own 10.66 percent stake in the bank.

The banking sector has seen increased regulatory scrutiny over the last two years as the RBI has tried to push for appropriate recognition of bad loans.

The asset quality review initiated in December 2015 has led to banks recognising an additional Rs 6 lakh crore as bad loans.

Banks were asked to disclose 'divergences' in bad loan reporting. As a result, the RBI judged gross NPAs at Rs 8,373.8 crore for Yes Bank for 2016-17 against the declared gross NPAs at Rs 2,018 crore. Thus, there was a divergence of Rs 6,355 crore or three times the reported amount.

Shares of the bank closed at Rs 318.50, down 1.44 percent per unit on the BSE on Wednesday.
The Supreme Court has asked the banks to maintain status quo and not to initiate insolvency proceedings against defaulting power companies till 11 November, 2018, when it would hear the case again. During this period lenders would be able to resolve stressed assets.

New Delhi: State Bank of India hopes to resolve 7-8 stressed power assets with an exposure of around Rs 17,000 crore during the breather given by the Supreme Court till 11 November, SBI Chairman Rajnish Kumar said on Thursday.

The Supreme Court has asked the banks to maintain status quo and not to initiate insolvency proceedings against defaulting power companies till 11 November, 2018, when it would hear the case again. During this period lenders would be able to resolve stressed assets.

"On my radar there are 7 or 8 projects. We are working only on that. If there is 100 percent consensus among lenders only then it (resolution of stressed power assets) would happen," Kumar told reporters when asked whether SBI would be able to resolve any stressed assets during the breather till 11 November.

About any resistance from lenders to resolve these stressed assets, he said, "They are all at various stages of approval. So at this stage, it is not the right statement to say that there is resistance. We have to give time to boards and management committees of lenders to take a decision.

"SBI has taken a decision regarding 7 to 8 such projects. We have conveyed that. Some other banks have also conveyed and some other banks are yet to get approval. That is why we need some time."

About the SBI exposure in those assets, he said, "SBI has exposure of Rs 17,000 crore in these projects."

About the Supreme Court order, he said, "Whatever legal options or whatever is permitted by law and regulation would be done. Right now the Supreme Court has said that maintain status quo (on 12 February circular)) in respect of petitions pending in high courts. So everybody is maintaining the status quo."

The RBI framework provided for a strict timeline for resolution of these bad loans where debt is Rs 2,000 crore or more. It mandates starting insolvency proceedings in case no resolution plan is provided by the lenders within 180 days of default.

About the steps to check rupee depreciation, he said, "There are some more measures which are coming. But current account deficit needs to be contained. The step taken so far would definitely help the sentiment in favour of the rupee."

On steps taken on containing rupee depreciation by bankers like NRI bonds, he said, "Whatever you do ultimately add to the debt burden of the country. It is not what banks will decide. Ultimately these are the issues or decisions which are to be taken by RBI that how do we manage our external sector. Once those decisions are taken, the banks implement those decisions."

About unveiling of SASHAKT scheme guidelines, he said, "That is what in progress. earlier target was 30 September, you can add 10 to 15 days more to that. Banks can invest up to 10 percent in AIF (alternative investment fund). But it has to carry in mind that 10 percent carries 150 percent risk weight. But in AMC (asset management company) we would be participating to the extent of 10 percent."

Project Sashakt aims to strengthen the credit capacity, credit culture and credit portfolio of public sector banks. It is an Asset Management Company (AMC) resolution approach, under which an independent AMC would be set up to focus on asset turn around, job creation and protection.

Kumar spoke to reporters on the sideline of an event where Hindustan Urvarak & Rasayan Ltd (HURL) signed the Rupee Term Loan (Rs 5,314.33 crore) agreement for the Gorakhpur fertiliser plant with a consortium of banks led by the SBI as the lead banker and Punjab National Bank, Allahabad Bank, Union Bank of India, Indian Bank, Bank of India and Canara Bank.

The HURL is a joint venture company of three Maharatna PSUs -- NTPC, IOCL and CIL -- along with FCIL & HFCL and is currently engaged in implementing three urea projects at Gorakhpur, Sindri and Barauni in the eastern part of the country.

These plants which are being built at an estimated cost of Rs 21,000 crore shall bring a new lease of life in the economic growth of eastern India. The GAIL is implementing a natural gas pipeline for supplying gas to these three plants and the total investment by HURL and GAIL amounting to Rs 36,000 crore.
SEBI has already been conferred with a wide array of legislative, executive and quasi-judicial powers.

In the recently concluded board meeting of Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi), the regulator considered the recommendations of the report of the Committee on Fair Market Conduct (Committee) headed by T K Vishwanathan, which was released last month. Amongst other things, the Committees mandate included review of the surveillance mechanism undertaken by Sebi for protecting market integrity.

In this regard, the Committee put forth a contentious recommendation of empowering SEBI to directly intercept calls and electronic communication. Notably, in the board meeting which concluded on 18 September 2018, SEBI referred the matter to the government to take an appropriate view.

Traditionally, insider trading cases have been prosecuted primarily on the basis of circumstantial evidence. While such interception of calls/electronic evidence may provide direct evidence, the bigger question is whether such an enormous power should be conferred on a securities regulator in the absence of any significant global precedent.

Notably, in the United States (US), the government has relied extensively on wiretap evidence in high profile cases of securities fraud involving Raj Rajaratnam, founder of the New York-based hedge management firm Galleon Group and Rajat Gupta, former Director of Goldman Sachs. However, the US law does not empower the US securities regulator, i.e. Securities Exchange Commission (SEC) to directly intercept calls.

It is the Office of the Attorney General and the Federal Bureau of Investigation that executes wiretap warrants pursuant to a specified procedure set out under the Wiretap Act. Such wiretap evidence may be shared with other investigative agencies like SEC, subject to certain statutory conditions.

Further, unlike other jurisdictions like the US and the United Kingdom, India does not have a dedicated law to regulate interception of communication. Current regulations are scattered in the Telegraph Act, 1885, the Information Technology Act, 2000 and the rules issued thereunder.

The regulatory framework under these laws has been subject to much criticism for several reasons, including the absence of judicial authorisation, transparency, and effective grievance redressal. Against this background and in light of the Supreme Court judgment recognising the right to privacy as a fundamental right, this recommendation does not make a compelling case.

SEBI has already been conferred with a wide array of legislative, executive and quasi-judicial powers. For instance, for insider trading violations, it is empowered to impose a maximum penalty of Rs 25,00,00,000 or three times the amount of profits made, whichever is higher. It can also institute criminal proceedings against a person, and if convicted, such a person can be imprisoned for a period of 10 years.

Further, under the existing law, SEBI already has the power to call for phone records for an ongoing investigation. In fact, commentators have often argued that SEBI has more powers than its US counterpart, SEC. M Damodaran, the former Chairman of SEBI, has also recently stated that the problem with SEBI is not of inadequate powers. The concern is with the strict enforcement of these powers. This, in turn, depends on the institutional capacity of a regulator.

The Report of the Committee on Corporate Governance headed by Uday Kotak (Kotak Committee) noted that SEBI has one employee for six listed companies as opposed to SEC, which has almost one employee for each listed company. In this regard, the Kotak Committee recommended increasing the staff strength and utilising specialist hires to deal with cases.

These changes along with effective exercise of the powers already conferred on SEBI can go a long way in protecting the investors and promoting market integrity. The government should keep the aforesaid considerations in mind prior to taking any decision regarding empowering SEBI with the power to intercept calls.

(The writer is Senior Resident Fellow (Corporate Law and Financial Regulation), Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy. Views are personal)
We now have one big problem which the Narendra Modi government is trying to postpone further by merging different public sector banks. The trouble is bringing two rotten eggs together is only going to lead to another rotten egg

Editor's note: A political blame game is on after the recent revelations of former Reserve Bank of India (RBI) governor Raghuram Rajan to a Parliamentary panel about the origin of the bank NPA (non-performing assets) mess. About 90 percent of NPAs in India's banking sector is on the books of state-run banks. This is the third part in a series in Firstpost where experts analyse the issue.

In the aftermath of the financial crisis that broke out in 2008, the Western world discovered the work of the economist Hyman Minsky. Its time that India did as well. Minsky had put forward the financial instability hypothesis.

The basic premise of this hypothesis is that when times are good, there is a greater appetite for risk and banks are willing to extend riskier loans than usual. And once the banks are ready to make riskier loans, the quality of their lending automatically comes down. This ultimately creates a problem. Or to put it simply, stability breeds instability.

This is clearly how the Indian banks ended up with all the bad loans that they have over the last few years. Bad loans are loans which havent been repaid for a period of 90 days or more.

As Raghuram Rajan, former governor of the Reserve Bank of India put it in a recent note to the Chairman of the Parliament Estimates Committee, Murli Manohar Joshi: A larger number of bad loans were originated in the period 2006-2008 when economic growth was strong, and previous infrastructure projects such as power plants had been completed on time and within budget. It is at such times that banks make mistakes. They extrapolate past growth and performance to the future. So they are willing to accept higher leverage in projects and less promoter equity.

Basically, a lot of loans to industry were made by banks before 2008, when the going was good. And this is when the quality of lending fell dramatically.

Initially, banks only lent to businesses that were expected to generate enough cash to repay their loans. But as time progressed, the competition between lenders increased (i.e. the different banks) and caution was thrown to winds. An era of easy money was unleashed and money was doled out left, right, and centre.

Of course, what helped was the fact that the demand projections of projects for which money was being lent, were also pretty good. As Rajan put it: Indeed, sometimes banks signed up to lend based on project reports by the promoters investment bank, without doing their own due diligence. One promoter told me about how he was pursued then by banks waving checkbooks, asking him to name the amount he wanted.

Such was a rush among banks to lend money.

Normally anything like this doesnt end well. And India was no exception to this. In fact, as of 31 March 2018, the total bad loans of banks stood at Rs 10,35,528 crore or 11.6 percent of the total advances made by these banks. Public sector banks constitute a bulk of these bad loans. The total bad loans of these banks as of 31 March 2018, amounted to Rs 8,95,601 crore or around 86.5 percent of the total bad loans of banks. In fact, 15.6 percent of advances made by public sector banks have been defaulted on.

The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) publishes the data for the total lending carried out by banks to industry, every month. The trouble is that this data is available only from March 2008 onwards. Given this, we dont have any direct way of verifying how much lending was carried out by banks to industry, between 2006 and 2008, which is the period during which things started to go wrong.

Nevertheless, what we can take a look at is the non-food credit given out by banks. Banks lend money to the Food Corporation of India and other state procurement agencies to carry out their procurement operations, where they buy agricultural produce directly from the farmers. What is left after this lending is referred to as non-food lending.

Between April 2005 (the start of the financial year 2005-2006) and March 2008 (the end of the financial year 2007-2008), the total non-food lending of banks went up by 119 percent to Rs 23.17 lakh crore. This couldnt have happened without the loans to the industry going up at a good pace during that period.

Of course, all this money was lent to the industry at a time when the going was good. And given that the demand projections were very optimistic. The global financial crisis started in 2008 and this led to the economic growth falling to 3.9 percent in 2008-2009, this after three years of greater than 9 percent growth. In 2009-2010 and 2010-2011, government spending pumped up growth again.

But by 2011-2012 onwards slow growth returned. As Rajan puts it: Strong demand projections for various projects were shown to be increasingly unrealistic as domestic demand slowed down." Also, what did not help was the lack of decision making on the government front, which led to a slowdown in projects. As Rajan puts it: Once projects got delayed enough that the promoter had little equity left in the project, he lost interest.

This is where things went from bad to worse. Take a look at Figure 1, which basically plots the total loans given by banks to industry to over the years.

(Source: Reserve Bank of India)

The bank lending to industry between the end of March 2008 and end-March 2014, went up by 193 percent to Rs 25.16 lakh crore. So post-2008, lending to industry continued at a very fast pace. What was happening here? Basically, everyone, the bank, the borrowers and the government, were kicking the can down the road.

As Rajan puts it: It was in everyones interest to extend the loan by making additional loans to enable the promoter to pay interest and pretend it was performing. The promoter had no need to bring in equity, the banker did not have to restructure and recognize losses or declare the loan NPA and spoil his profitability, the government had no need to infuse capital.

This was the period when the banks should have actually been looking to genuinely restructure these loans to industry. They should have written-off loans they knew they were not in a position to collect. Further, they should have insisted on the borrowers bringing in more equity (i.e. their own money) into the project. This was clearly not possible without the bank being in a position to threaten promoters, even incompetent or unscrupulous ones, with loss of their project.

What happened instead was that everybody got busy running a Ponzi scheme. The banks gave fresh loans to promoters, the promoters used the fresh loans to repay the old loans and the governments (both UPA and NDA) looked the other way. The profits that the banks generated during this period was illusory because it was their own loans being returned to it.

The bank loans to industry peaked at Rs 27.31 lakh crore as of March 2016. The RBI started a crackdown on the bad loans sometime in early 2015.

There were cases of crony capitalism as well. In several cases (in particular real estate project), the promoter simply siphoned off the bank loans. Of course, the problem could not be perpetually kicked down the road, and we now have one big problem, which the Narendra Modi government is trying to postpone further by merging different public sector banks. The trouble is bringing two rotten eggs together is only going to lead to another rotten egg.

(The writer is the author of the Easy Money trilogy)

Read Part 1 here: UPA's sins were of commission while NDA's are of omission

Part 2: Bad loans can snowball into banking crisis, Arun Jaitley's solutions has political overtones
Ma has already warned that the trade war between the worlds two largest economies could last decades and that China should focus exports on the Silk Road trade route

Alibaba Chairman Jack Ma said the company can no longer meet its promise to create 1 million jobs in the United States due to US-China trade tensions, Chinese news agency Xinhua reported on Wednesday.

Ma has already warned that the trade war between the worlds two largest economies could last decades and that China should focus exports on the Silk Road trade route, citing Africa, Southeast Asia and Europe.

Ma met US President Donald Trump two years ago and laid out the Chinese e-commerce giants plan to bring one million small US businesses onto its platform to sell to Chinese consumers over the next five years.

This commitment is based on friendly China-US cooperation and the rational and objective premise of bilateral trade, Ma told Xinhua on Wednesday.

The current situation has already destroyed the original premise. There is no way to deliver the promise.

While Ma had not detailed how he would add those jobs, he has said that he wanted to encourage American small businesses to sell on Alibaba marketplace Tmall and Taobao, reasoning that every new business that joined the platform would have to hire a person to manage the extra sales.

Investors seemed unfazed by Mas comments, with Alibaba shares closing up 3.8 percent on Wednesday. They have declined 5.7 percent so far this year, including those gains.

Trump on Monday imposed 10 percent tariffs on about $200 billion worth of imports from China, and threatened duties on about $267 billion more if China retaliated.

China responded a day later with tariffs on about $60 billion worth of US goods as planned, but reduced the level of tariffs it will collect on the products.

Mas latest comments come on top of others he recently made about the escalating trade skirmish and show his support for Beijings stance on how additional tariffs will affect businesses and the countrys cornerstone One Belt One Road foreign policy initiative.

The US like competition, China likes harmony, theyre two different cultures, Ma said at an investor conference in Shanghai on Tuesday.

Ma, expected to step down as Alibaba chairman in a year, predicted on Tuesday that trade frictions would lead to a mess for all parties involved.

He added US tariffs on hundreds of billions of dollars of Chinese products could prompt the country to export elsewhere.

We should work more in Africa, SEA (South East Asia), Europe, he said.
Abhijit Iyer-Mitra's arrest could be in connection with his tweet from Sunday with a 'defamatory' video commentary from the Konark temple in Odisha.

Journalist and defence expert Abhijit Iyer-Mitra, who was briefly arrested in Delhi on Thursday, has been granted bail on a surety of Rs 1 lakh. A team of the Odisha Police had arrested him in the capital earlier in the day in connection with a case registered against him in Odisha. The police have asked him to join the investigation by 28 September.

Iyer-Mitra was held at Delhi's Nizamuddin Police Station. His lawyer had earlier said they had no idea what he was taken in for as they were not given a copy of the FIR. ANI quoted his legal counsel as saying: "He is being taken to Saket court for remand. We are going there to oppose it. We have not even been given a copy of the FIR, so we can't say what the offences are, who the complainant is or under what sections the case has been registered."

According to an Odisha TV report, the arrest was in connection with a 16 September tweet that Iyer-Mitra had posted. The tweet was a video commentary from the Konark temple. It said:

Odisha 9: my special message to you from the Konark temple expressing my utter disgust at this monumental conspiracy against the Hindu Civilisation pic.twitter.com/wJeqZPHRDk  Abhijit Iyer-Mitra (@Iyervval) September 16, 2018

The video garnered heavy backlash, with legislators of the ruling Biju Janata Dal (BJD) and Opposition Congress on Tuesday demanding action against the journalist for what they said were "derogatory" remarks. Stating that Iyer-Mitra had "ridiculed" the sun temple, BJD MLA Sanjay Dasburma had said: "It (the video) is an insult to the state and its existence. Action should be taken against the man." Odisha TV reported that the Leader of Opposition in the Odisha Assembly and Congress member Narasingha Mishra had said: "There are two video clips that show a non-Odia, RSS man standing in front of the Konark Temple making comments... Abhijit Iyer's remarks have disrespected and hurt the sentiments of the people of Odisha and the Odia language. He should be summoned to the state, and the House should decide on the quantum of punishment." On Thursday, Speaker Pradip Amat accepted the privilege motion in the Assembly and allowed a discussion on the controversy in the House. Twitterati responded immediately to the news of Iyer-Mitra's detainment and spoke out in his support, condemning the police action. A Twitter movement is afoot, with #IStandWithAbhijit beginning to trend on the social media platform:

So Odisha Police has arrested my friend @Iyervval for his satirical humor because it hurt religious sentiments. This is the other side of Indian democracy where religious sentiment supersedes and prevails over all other fundamental rights. We remain stuck in Middle Ages. Shame.  Aarti Tikoo Singh (@AartiTikoo) September 20, 2018

Apparently, Odisha Police has detained him without a warrant and no one knows his whereabouts.  Aarti Tikoo Singh (@AartiTikoo) September 20, 2018

It was an immature thing to do. He may have been trying satire, & perhaps meant the opposite of what some ppl concluded, but sarcasm doesn't fit well w/religious & cultural sentiments, which call for sensitivity. Of course, it goes without saying i take pride in our heritage  https://t.co/XSozxCU6lP  Baijayant Jay Panda (@PandaJay) September 18, 2018

#IStandWithAbhijit his video was of course a satire. He has made such Videos many times and we all have taken it as a joke. Don't know what is police thinking.  Vikas Pandey (@MODIfiedVikas) September 20, 2018

These fruitcakes don't know who they are dealing with. @Iyervval would probably egg them on to make sure he is jailed and stuffed inside a striped jumpsuit. Then he will tweet on the nuances of prison cuisine from inside. STOP this nonsense and get to work. #IStandWithAbhijit pic.twitter.com/09lW4669kK  Anand Ranganathan (@ARanganathan72) September 18, 2018

This is terrible news. @Iyervval has been detained ??? Really !!!! For what ? For satire? Are we a police state ? #IStandWithAbhijit  Samir Saran (@samirsaran) September 20, 2018
Panchayat officials in a Haryana village in Rohtak district issued a diktat asking the Muslim population in the area to keep Hindu names, not offer namaz in open spaces and remove visible identity markers indicating their religion, including long beards and skull cap, according to reports.

Officials of Haryana panchayat in a village in Rohtak district issued a diktat asking the Muslim population in the area to keep Hindu names, not offer namaz in open spaces and remove visible identity-markers indicating their religion, including long beards and skull cap, reports said.

The decision was adopted as an oral resolution at the panchayat after a mob attacked house of a Muslim family on 22 August and accused them of killing a calf in Titoli village. At least, half a dozen policemen were also present at the panchayat meeting, reported The Hindu.

A probe has been ordered into the matter as well. "It is unconstitutional. I will speak to the village sarpanch in this connection," the report quoted Rakesh Kumar, Rohtak sub-divisional magistrate as saying.

This is not the first time the issue of religious freedom has come into question in the state. In May this year, Haryana chief minister Manohar Lal Khattar said namaz should be offered in mosques and not public spaces, inviting ire from members of the community. We are of the view that namaz should be offered at mosques or eidgahs... In case of shortage of space, it should be offered at a personal place. These are issues which should not be put for public display... It should be avoided at public places for the convenience of all," News18 had quoted Khattar as saying.

The chief minister has also made statements in the past which indicate restricting the religious freedom of Muslims in Haryana. In 2015, Khattar had said, "Muslims can continue to live in this country, but they will have to give up eating beef. The cow is an article of faith here."

He had also said that in while there is freedom in a democracy, those freedoms have a limitation. "Freedom of one person is only to the extent that it is not hurting another person," he had said.
In a case of negligence and oversight, at least 166 passengers aboard a Jet Airways flight suffered nose bleed and headaches as the cabin crew had forgotten to select the switch that maintains cabin pressure during take-off.

In what appears to be a case of negligence and oversight, at least 30 passengers aboard a Jet Airways flight suffered nosebleeds and headaches when the cabin crew forgot to select the switch that maintains cabin pressure during takeoff.

The incident was reported on board a Mumbai-Jaipur Jet Airways flight on Thursday. According to reports, Jaipur-bound flight 9W 697 was turned back to Mumbai mid-air due to the incident. During the climb, the crew forgot to select the switch that maintains the cabin pressure following which 30 out of the 166 passengers experienced nose and ear bleeding. Many also complained of headache. Oxygen masks had to be deployed to help the passengers breathe normally. There were 166 passengers and 5 crew members on board flight 9W 697.

The civil aviation ministry has taken note of the incident and ordered the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) to conduct an enquiry and fix accountability. The aviation regulator looked at the primary information available and decided that it could be a case of negligence on the part of the pilots since controlling cabin pressure control is part of check before operating a flight. Subsequently, the probe was transferred to the Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau (AAIB), which is tasked to investigate serious incidents and accidents.

The Civil Aviation Minister Suresh Prabhu has also ordered the DGCA to come up with a comprehensive safety audit plan to assess the compliance to safety parameters by all airlines. The plan should be submitted to the ministry within 30 days, CNN-News18 reported.

Meanwhile, one of the flyers who suffered nose and ear bleeding had to be later rushed to the hospital. A middle-aged man was brought to Dr Balabhai Nanavati Hospital in suburban Vile Parle by Jet Airways officials. "He has been admitted for audiometry test and the hospital will issue a health statement after some time," a spokesperson of the hospital said.

Darshak Hathi, one of the persons onboard the aircraft, told Firstpost that the passangers started facing difficulty in breathing within the first 10 minutes after the takeoff. "The air-conditioning system stopped functioning within the first 10 minutes. In the next five minutes, the air pressure had dropped so much that the oxygen masks came down automatically," Hathi said. He claimed that there was no oxygen flow in the masks and many people faced difficulty in putting on the mask. The cabin crew was also unavailable for help as they too had taken their seats and had put on masks.

He said that their was no official announcement or communication from the pilot, other than an advice to wear the mask, which lead to a lot of commotion and confusion.

Panic situation due to technical fault in @jetairways 9W 0697 going from Mumbai to Jaipur. Flt return back to Mumbai after 45 mts. All passengers are safe including me. pic.twitter.com/lnOaFbcaps  Darshak Hathi (@DarshakHathi) September 20, 2018

The airlines later issued a statement expressing 'regret' over the inconvenience caused to the passengers. It also clarified that the Boeing 737 aircraft had indeed returned to Mumbai due to "loss of cabin pressure" and the pilots have been taken off duty pending investigation, a Jet Airways spokesperson said in an official response.

Please refer to our official statement: pic.twitter.com/MfKGi29OqE  Jet Airways (@jetairways) September 20, 2018

The flight was later scheduled to take off at 10.15 am for Jaipur. "During climb, the crew forgot to select bleed switch due to which cabin pressurisation could not be maintained. As a result, oxygen masks got deployed," an official at aviation regulator DGCA told PTI. All the 166 passengers were given first aid by doctors at the Mumbai airport, a journalist reported on Twitter citing sources from the DGCA. Several passangers also tweeted their ordeal.

According to the airline, the aircraft landed normally in Mumbai.

"All guests were deplaned safely and taken to the terminal. First aid was administered to few guests who complained of ear pain, bleeding nose etc," it said.

With inputs from PTI
Christian James Michel, a British middleman wanted in India in connection with the Rs 3,600-crore AgustaWestland VVIP chopper scam, has till 2 October to challenge his extradition decision issued by a Dubai court, according to a media report Wednesday.

Dubai: Christian James Michel, a British middleman wanted in India in connection with the Rs 3,600-crore AgustaWestland VVIP chopper scam, has till 2 October to challenge his extradition decision issued by a Dubai court, according to a media report Wednesday.

In a decision dated 2 September, the Dubai Court of Appeals had ruled that he can be extradited to the authorities concerned in India. However, the extradition decision has to be approved by the UAE Minister of Justice before its implementation procedures can start, the Khaleej Times reported.

Michel, who is accused of organising bribes in exchange for a contract for VVIP helicopters, has 30 days from the day the decision was issued to appeal it, the report quoted a source as saying.

The Briton is out on bail, while his passport remains seized with the authorities here, the report said. The ruling follows deliberation by a bench presided over by judge Eissa Mohamed Sherif, with member judges Rashid Mohamed Al Sumairi and Ashraf Mohamed Al Shawadfi. The 2 September decision, however, was pronounced by a different set of judges, it said.

Earlier on Wednesday, the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) said it was awaiting confirmation from the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) on reports about extradition of Michel from the UAE. The MEA had asked its embassy in the UAE to find out all the details relating to the issue. Government sources in India said the country has not received any official communication from authorities in the UAE relating to extradition of Michel.

The Enforcement Directorate (ED), in its charge sheet filed against Michel in June 2016, had alleged that he received 30 million euros (about Rs 225 crore) from AgustaWestland. Michel is one of the three middlemen being probed in the case, besides Guido Haschke and Carlo Gerosa, by the ED and the CBI. Both the agencies have notified an Interpol red corner notice against him after the court issued a non-bailable warrant. On 1 January 2014, India scrapped the contract with Finmeccanica's British subsidiary AgustaWestland for supplying 12 AW-101 VVIP choppers to the IAF over alleged breach of contractual obligations and charges of paying kickbacks to the tune of Rs 423 crore by it for securing the deal. The CBI has alleged that there was an estimated loss of 398.21 million euros (approximately Rs 2,666 crore) to the exchequer in the deal that was signed on 8 February 2010 for the supply of VVIP choppers worth 556.262 million euros.
The hospitals has told the Justice A Arumughaswamy Commission that the CCTV recordings of Jayalalithaa's 75-day-long stay in Chennai's Apollo hospital has been overwritten several times automatically

The judicial commission probing the death of late Tamil Nadu chief minister J Jayalalithaa may have hit a roadblock in its investigation as it has failed to retrieve the crucial CCTV footage of the AIADMK chief's final days.

The hospitals has told the Justice A Arumughaswamy Commission that the CCTV recordings of Jayalalithaa's 75-day-long stay in Chennai's Apollo hospital has been overwritten several times automatically.

The commission is probing the circumstances leading to the hospitalisation of Jayalalithaa on 22 September, 2016 and the treatment provided to her till her death on 5 December, 2016, after many people in political circles expressed doubts over the circumstances that led to her death.

"The CCTV recordings get overwritten automatically after 30 days. This information was shared with the commission on 11 September," Maimoona Badsha, counsel for Apollo Hospitals, told IANS on Wednesday.

The hospital has informed the commission that it is unable to submit the requested footage as it pertains to the period when Jayalalithaa was in the hospital  between 22 September, 2016 and 5 December, 2016  which is further back than the time frame for which the hospital keeps records.

However, the commission is now looking at the possibility of retrieving data even after the storage was wiped to accommodate new data, sources within the inquiry committee told The Economic Times.

This was the second response from the hospital about the footage, which is different from its previous statement.

Earlier, Apollo Hospitals' executive chairman Prathap C Reddy had said that the CCTV cameras of the ward where Jayalalithaa was admitted were switched off.

"I am sorry but unfortunately all the CCTV cameras were switched off after Jayalalithaa was admitted. Since she was a VVIP person, she was the only person occupying that ward and all other patients were diverted to another ICU. The cameras were switched off because they did not want everybody to be watching," Reddy had told reporters in March this year.

But when Badsha was asked to comment on Reddy's earlier statement, he simply said "that is a different issue."

The Arumughaswamy Commission had even then asked the hospital as to who ordered the CCTV cameras to be switched off. The hospital's response in this regard, if any, has not been made public.

The commission has now asked the hospital's chief operating officer Subbiah Viswanathan to appear before it on 25 September. It has also written to the governor's office to know whether the Raj Bhavan sought any information from AIIMS and Apollo Hospitals on the health of the then chief minister, The New Indian Express reported.

The commission had invited all those with "personal knowledge and direct acquaintance" in the matter to furnish information.

The Arumughaswamy Commission was tasked to inquire into the circumstances surrounding the death of the former Tamil Nadu chief minister, after suspicions were raised by several of her followers, including current deputy chief minister O Panneerselvam. Panneerselvam, who had at the time split from the AIADMK and later unified with the Edappadi Palaniswami-led faction. One of the conditions for the unification was to launch a probe into the death of Jayalalithaa.

The probe panel, set up in September 2017, was extended in December 2017, and subsequently in June this year after it said that all circumstances surrounding Jayalalithaa's death could not be probed within the given time frame.

Jayalalithaa was admitted to Apollo Hospitals for fever and dehydration on 22 September, 2016. After a prolonged hospitalisation, she had died on 5 December, 2016 following a cardiac arrest.

With inputs from IANS
After a Dubai court issued a non-bailable warrant against alleged AgustaWestland middleman Christian Michel, both the Enforcement Directorate and CBI issued an Interpol Red Corner Notice against him.

According to media reports in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Christian James Michel, a British national allegedly the middleman in the Rs 325.46 billion AgustaWestland chopper deal gone wrong, has been given till 2 October to appeal against the decision of the Dubai courts to proceed with his extradition.

In that decision announced on 2 September, the Dubai Court of Appeals had allowed for his dispatch, pending the final green signal from the UAE's Ministry of Justice. It is pretty much on the cards that Michel will appeal against the verdict, a normal practice at this juncture of such a case, with a 30-day window to file an appeal.

Michel is allegedly one of the three middlemen being investigated in the AgustaWestland chopper case, besides Guido Haschke and Carlo Gerosa, by the Enforcement Directorate and the Central Bureau of Investigation. Both agencies issued an Interpol Red Corner Notice against Michel after the Dubai court issued a non-bailable warrant against him.

The Briton is currently on bail, though his passport is in the custody of the authorities. Media reports quote the British Embassy as saying that it is assisting a British national in Dubai.

Meanwhile, the Indian Mission in the UAE is refusing to disclose anything on the subject because the matter is subjudice. Indian Ambassador to the UAE Navdeep Suri told Firstpost on Thursday afternoon that they will wait for the final judgment before venturing to say anything.

The UAE is signatory to the Riyadh Arab Agreement for Judicial Cooperation of 1983, which was ratified in 2000. It also signed a prisoner extradition treaty with India on 20 May, 2013.

According to law firm Hadef & Partners, the UAE has very clear laws on the subject. One indisputable aspect of its laws is that the executive does not override the judiciary or interfere in its decision-making powers. To that extent, India can believe that for now, unless new evidence is brought to the fore, the Dubai Court of Appeals' acceptance of New Delhi's request in September will be invoked.

The brief on how it works is simple  extradition to a foreign country may be requested for a person residing in the UAE for the purpose of interrogation, prosecution or execution of criminal verdicts against such individuals. To extradite people from the UAE, the conditions set out in Article 7 of Law No 39 have to be met:

* The crime that is the subject of extradition must be punishable under the law of the country requesting extradition (the "requesting country"), with a freedom-restricting or custodial penalty of at least one year or any other severer punishment.

* The act for which extradition is required, if committed within the UAE, must constitute a crime punishable with a freedom-restricting penalty for at least one year or any other severer penalty.

* If the subject of extradition pertains to the execution of a custodial penalty, the remaining unexecuted penalty shall be no less than six months.

* If the subject of extradition constitutes a punishable crime under the laws of the "requesting country" and the UAE, it is irrelevant if the crime is listed under a different name or description, or if the elements of the crime are different.

Clearly, the parameters were met for the Dubai court to decide in favour of India's extradition request for Michel.

It has to be mentioned that the case was reportedly closed administratively before the September announcement because India had not filed the necessary papers. It was after they submitted the requisite documents later that the case was reopened and proceeded accordingly to this final stage.

On 1 January, 2014, India scrapped the contract with AgustaWestland's parent company Finmeccanica for supplying 12 AW-101 VVIP choppers to the Indian Air Force. The case deals with charges of kickbacks of Rs 423 crore paid by the government to secure the deal. The enforcement Directorate alleged that money was laundered through multiple foreign companies, which were used as fronts to park alleged kickbacks.
As rapid industrialisation and a lot of construction activities are going on in and around the state's capital city Bhubaneswar, lakhs of people from neighbouring states and Bangladeshi refugees have come to Odisha in search of work.

Bhubaneswar: For 40-year-old Kamalesh Mandal, a resident of Hariabank village under Khranasi Gram Panchayat of Mahakalpada Block in Odisha's coastal Kendrapara district, life is a twice-told story. Kamalesh with his six-member family though earning his livelihood through cultivation and wage labour is living with constant fear of being an illegal immigrant under The Foreigners Act, 1946. He is said to be an infiltrator entered India illegally.

Similar is the case of Ramesh Mandal, 55, of the same village. Although he was born in neighbouring Jajpur district, his ancestors had come to India from Bangladesh.

Significantly, though they have enough reasons to prove that they are living here since decades  Babu Mandal, now 45 and Asiit Mirdha, 54  have already faced the wrath of the authorities.

All the above are under the constant vigil of both the district administration and local people as they have been slapped with 'Quit India' notice and are likely to face deportation. They have been debarred from owning a ration card and other such facilities under various government schemes. Kamalesh and Ramesh, are among the 1,551 refugees, settled in Odisha and are not covered by government schemes.

Their latest worry is the fear of deletion of their names from the electoral rolls which are being prepared now for the forthcoming General Elections in 2019. Even though they have voted during the February 2017 panchayat elections it had been said that their names will not figure in the ongoing summary revisions of voters' list as they have been issued the 'Quit India' notice by the Odisha government.

While speaking to this correspondent, state chief electoral officer cum ex-officio principal secretary, home department, Odisha, Surendra Kumar flatly rejected the reports published in various newspapers.

"Newspaper reports are false. It has not been done in the current summary revision of voters' list which is to be published on 4 January 2019. We have already inquired. There are no deletions whatsoever in the recent revisions. The collectors and district electoral officers have been asked to strictly adhere to the rules and find out irregularities if any. If they find anything wrong then they will correct it. It is in no way related to the particular community (Bangladeshi refugees) you are talking about," Kumar said.

Questions are also being raised about the validity of 'Quit India' notice.

"The notice that was served to us to leave India was handwritten and it was done hastily to show that we have been served notice when there was a hue and cry on this issue during 2004-05," said Bhupesh Mirdha of Khranasi village. "The latest fear of possible removal of our names from the voters' list has occurred as teachers and officials who had come to the village for voters' list verification or for the National Population Survey neither came to our homes for verification nor asked for any documents. That's the reason we have to live with fear, hatred, agony and uncertainty as neither locals nor authorities listen to us although we are the genuine citizens of India."

Close on the heels of the publication of the final draft of the National Register of Citizens in Assam and the uncertainty over the identity of four million left out people who have been allegedly living there, the future of nearly one lakh (conservative estimate says it is about seven lakh) illegal Bangladeshi immigrants in Odisha hangs in balance.

Not only in Kendrapara but lakhs of refugees who are settled in Khurdha, Puri, Gajapati, Malkangiri and Nabarangpur districts are also struggling to arrange valid documents for legacy proof as it is difficult to find birth certificates, caste certificates and residential proof because their ancestors who had come from Bangladesh were just settled by the government and were not given any documents then.

Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik has admitted in the floor of State Assembly while replying to a question by BJP legislator Dilip Ray in 2015 that there are 3,997(of them 1,551 were slapped with 'Quit India' notice years back in 2005) illegal infiltrators are living in Odisha mostly in coastal Kendrapara and Jagatsinghpur districts.

"But barring slapping notices to them nothing concrete has happened to repatriate them despite their suspected activities," said political commentator Sriram Dash.

"Does the government has any tracking mechanism on the large-scale influx of illegal Bangladeshi infiltrators who are still coming in citing the presence of relatives here? Leave aside what their activities are. It is rather unfortunate that local politicians create their own vote bank compromising national security and put pressure on the authorities to provide them with all facilities," said Dash.

As rapid industrialisation and a lot of construction activities are going on in and around the state's capital city Bhubaneswar, lakhs of people from neighbouring states and Bangladeshi refugees have come to Odisha in search of work. The locals have also started suspecting them for their alleged involvement in petty criminal activities and as child lifters.

The issue has cropped up again as the election is approaching and the ruling Biju Janata Dal fears that the Bharatiya Janata Party might usurp the issue for electoral benefits. In an attempt to outsmart the national party, the regional outfit has raked up the issue of illegal immigrants beforehand to garner maximum political mileage.

During the ongoing summary revision of voters' list at the direction of chief electoral officer, Odisha, the Kendrapara district administration is said to have deleted the names of 137 illegal settlers on the complaints of local people and after thorough verification of their identity, newspaper reports said. But it has been refuted by the additional district magistrate, Kendrapara, Basant Kumar Rout.

According to him, only 37 names have been deleted not because they are illegal Bangladeshi settlers but due to insufficient proof and on the basis of duplicases, irregularities and other such reasons. "And we are going to delete 36,000 more names for similar discrepancies," said Rout.

Kendrapara, district collector Dasarathi Mishra said, "All has been done following the electoral rules and with the criteria to have free and fair elections."

When asked about the deletion of names of Bangladeshi settlers from the voters' list, Mishra said, "As the matter is sub-judice, unless there is a court order, we can't go for addition or deletion of names."

Many of these so-called infiltrators claim that their ancestors had come to India immediately after the partition in 1948 from erstwhile East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) and were settled in different parts of India including in Odisha. This was followed by more exodus in 1971 during the Bangladesh War and the third wave started post-1990 after the process of liberalisation began in India creating a lot of jobs in the country's private sector because of rapidly rising foreign direct investment.

Interestingly, almost all these people have acquired local residential proof and have been voting in successive elections barring a few. Those (1,551) who were served 'Quit India' notice had challenged it in the Odisha High Court in 2016 for not being provided with ration card and other such benefits under different government schemes. The court had given a ruling directing the authorities to not to take coercive action against them.

Narayan Haldar, a former sarpanch of Khranasi Gram Panchayat and a prominent face of the refugee community, has a different story to tell.

"Look all those who have been branded as 'infiltrators' are Hindus. They are not Muslims. Fearing backlash during post-Independence and Bangladesh War they came and settled here with the approval of the then Union and state governments," said Haldar. "They were also provided with 25 to 33 decimal homestead land and one acre each of cultivable land for livelihoods and were settled under the rehabilitation scheme of the Government of India in different locations of different states."

He further stated that because many among them have married locally and as their children grew up their identities became a concern for all.

According to the former sarpanch, there are 70,000 Bengali speaking people living in Mahakalpada and Rajnagar blocks in Kendrapara district spread over 40 villages. Most of them eke out their living depending on fishing in the sea, rivulets and creeks and a major chunk of the population are dependent upon agriculture.

"Though I was the sarpanch because the government had slapped notice to them, I couldn't provide them with benefits under government welfare schemes even Re 1kg rice," Haldar said.

A government official on the condition of anonymity said, "I don't think all those who are staying here are Bangladeshi infiltrators. Though all of them speak Bengali many of them have come from neighbouring West Bengal and lateral entrants are from other refugee settlements elsewhere in the country eying more income here from fishing and wage labour etc."

For now, the future of the Bangladeshi refugees in Odisha borders on the realm of uncertainty, particularly the 1,551, who already received the 'Quit India' notice.
The Supreme Court Wednesday extended the house arrest of five activists in connection with the Koregaon-Bhima case by a day, saying it would look into the case with a hawk's eye as liberty cannot be 'sacrificed at the altar of conjectures'.

New Delhi: The Supreme Court Wednesday extended the house arrest of five activists in connection with the Koregaon-Bhima case by a day, saying it would look into the case with a hawk's eye as liberty cannot be "sacrificed at the altar of conjectures".

The top court told the Maharashtra government that there should be a clear-cut distinction between opposition and dissent on one hand and attempts to create disturbance, law and order problems or overthrow the government on the other."Our institutions must be robust enough to accommodate any dissent or opposition to the system or even to this court. We cannot sacrifice liberty at the altar of conjectures,"a bench of Chief Justice Dipak Misra and Justices AM Khanwilkar and DY Chandrachud said.

The apex court extended till Thursday the house arrest of the five rights activists  Varavara Rao, Arun Ferreira, Vernon Gonsalves, Sudha Bharadwaj and Gautam Navlakha  at their respective homes. During the hearing, it asked the Maharashtra government to place before it the "best documents available" as most of the material referred by it were "more like conjectures." Additional Solicitor General Tushar Mehta, appearing for Maharashtra government referred to the various stages of investigations in the case and the materials which led to the arrest of the five activists.

"As a nation, we should be concerned at this. It is too serious a matter. I request the court to form an opinion only after hearing the matter in full," Mehta said. To this, Justice Chandrachud said "Yes, we will do that, but our mind is human" and added "we will look at this case with a hawk's eye". "You have to make a clear-cut distinction between dissent and opposition and attempts to create disturbance, law and order problem, overthrow elected government," it said.

Senior advocate Harish Salve, appearing for complainant Tushar Damgude, said "the court should hear the matter in full as what can be simple today may be complex tomorrow and what is complex today may be simple tomorrow". The bench asked the state government regarding the presence of the independent witnesses, who are employees of the Pune Municipal Corporation, during the search operations conducted at the homes of the activists. "Why did you have to carry two clerks from Pune Municipal Corporation to Maharashtra Sadan to act as 'panch' (independent) witnesses? The allegation of petitioners is that they were stock witnesses who were present during searches," the bench asked Mehta. The ASG said he will explain everything and the police will file an affidavit to clarify the position.

The bench, while referring to the documents submitted by the state government, pointed out that it has been said that students of a reputed university were at the site. "Your documents name a reputed university and a prominent social science institute." It said there are institutes and universities which keep sending students and scholars for research work in affected areas, which does not mean they are involved with any unlawful organisation. Mehta said one of the letters written on 18 April, 2017, by an arrested accused Rona Wilson to one Comrade Prakash reveal that there was systematic plan to create chaos and law and order problem.

He said this letter was recovered from the computer of Wilson during the search and investigation has revealed that Prakash was the chief communicator of the central committee of CPM. Mehta alleged that the activists had planned to organise an international seminar for creating an opinion and systematically create chaos in the society. At this, the bench said "our system should be robust enough to deal such international seminars." Mehta also alleged that former Delhi University professor GN Saibaba, who was convicted and sentenced to life by a trial court in 2017, has changed his name from Prakash to Chetan.

Senior advocate AM Singhvi, appearing for petitioner Romila Thapar and others said this case is "cooked up" as the police has based its entire case on 13 letters, of which 6-7 were written to or received by Comrade Prakash. "If Comrade Prakash is GN Saibaba who is in jail since 7 March, 2017. Then how can he receive or write a letter even after his conviction", he said, adding that all intrinsic evidence is being cooked up in the name of a person who is in jail. He said that a supervisory court-monitored SIT should be formed to look into the entire spectrum of the case. Singhvi also questioned the presence of the 'panch' witnesses during the searches and arrests of the activists.

Senior advocate Anand Grover, Ashwini Kumar and advocate Prashant Bhushan also alleged that the entire case was cooked up and adequate safeguards should be provided to protect the liberty of five activists. The hearing remained inconclusive and would continue tomorrow. The apex court had on September 17 said it may order an SIT probe if it found that the evidence has been "cooked up". The plea by Thapar and economists Prabhat Patnaik and Devaki Jain, sociology professor Satish Deshpande and human rights lawyer Maja Daruwala has sought an independent probe into the arrests and the immediate release of the five activists.
Eminent citizens on Wednesday told the Supreme Court that a court-monitored Special Investigation Team (SIT) should be constituted to look into the entire spectrum of the Bhima Koregaon case.

New Delhi: Eminent citizens on Wednesday told the Supreme Court that a court-monitored Special Investigation Team (SIT) should be constituted to look into the entire spectrum of the Bhima Koregaon case.

Senior advocate Anand Grover, appearing for the five arrested persons in the case, alleged before a bench of Chief Justice Dipak Misra and justices AM Khanwilkar and DY Chandrachud that there was a deficiency in the investigation and sought the court's interference to protect the individuals from the State's "oppressive prosecution".

Grover, claimed that the investigation is "unfair, biased and deficient" as indicated by "illegalities" in search of the houses of the activists. "Mere assertions of criminality by the State in the background of the special circumstances of the case cannot become the basis for incarceration of those detained," he said.

He further claimed that the probe into the second FIR, lodged by Tushar Damugade, is not permissible as two FIRs cannot be lodged on the same facts and circumstances. He said that the raids carried out at the residences of activists were illegal as the proper procedure of law was not followed.

Senior advocate and former union law minister Ashwani Kumar, who also appeared for the eminent citizens claimed that criminal investigations prior to and following the arrests as also detention of the accused is "patently mala-fide and a gross violation" of their fundamental rights.

"Allegations of criminal conduct on the part of those arrested on 28 August 2018, criminal investigations prior to and following the arrests as also detention of the accused is patently mala-fide and a gross violation of their fundamental rights," the plea said.

He further said that this assertion is prima facie validated by the manner in which the focus was shifted from the original accused, that is, Milind Ekbode and Shambhaji Bhide named in the first FIR to those arrested on 28 August, who were admittedly neither present at the Elgar Parishad meeting nor are named in the FIR of 4 January, 2018.

Kumar claimed that the facts on record including the manner in which criminal investigation is being conducted merits interference by this court to protect the individuals conceived from "oppressive prosecution and to ensure fair investigation under its own supervision".

He also said that action against citizens under stringent penal statutes such as the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act must pass the test of "reasonableness, rationality and procedural fairness".

The apex court extended till Thursday the house arrest of five rights activists  Varavara Rao, Arun Ferreira, Vernon Gonsalves, Sudha Bharadwaj and Gautam Navlakha  at their respective homes. The court had on 17 September said, it may order SIT probe if it found that evidence has been "cooked up".

The Maharashtra police had arrested the rights activists on 28 August in connection with an FIR lodged following a conclave  'Elgaar Parishad'  held on 31 December last year that had later triggered violence at Bhima Koregaon village.

Prominent Telugu poet Rao was arrested on 28 August from Hyderabad, while activists Gonsalves and Ferreira were nabbed from Mumbai, trade union activist Sudha Bharadwaj from Faridabad in Haryana and civil liberties activist Navlakha from Delhi.
Disgruntled BJP MLA Ashish Deshmukh demanded Wednesday that the state government declare drought in some parts of Vidarbha and provide necessary assistance to farmers.

Nagpur: Disgruntled BJP MLA Ashish Deshmukh demanded Wednesday that the state government declare drought in some parts of Vidarbha and provide necessary assistance to farmers. Many parts of Vidarbha including Katol, Amravati, Yavatmal and Buldhana are facing shortage of water for irrigation as well as for drinking purposes, he said.

No guardian minister has reviewed the situation in these parts, he claimed. "Farmers would hardly be able to save their kharif crops," he said. Deshmukh, who has often criticised his own party over various issues, also informed that he has invited AAP's Rajya Sabha member Anil Singh, BJP MP Shatrughan Sinha, Congress leader Prithviraj Chavan, TMC's Dinesh Trivedi and NCP's Majid Memon for `Vidarbha Yuva Sansad' at Kalol on 22 September.

Asked if he is trying to send out a political message by inviting opposition leaders, he said, "We can not deny the fact that the youth are disappointed due to lack of job opportunities....We are going to discuss that."
Pakistani troops slit the throat of the Border Security Force solider earlier this week after fatally shooting him along the International Border near Jammu.

His picture is that of a thousand others who leave their villages to try for that coveted job in the uniformed forces. Once in khaki or olive green, his future is ensured, with a pretty bride and status in the village. But for Head Constable Narendra Kumar, that career ended brutally. It should not have.

Earlier this week, Pakistani troops slit the throat of the Border Security Force solider after fatally shooting him along the International Border near Jammu.

Death in the process of carrying out their mission is acceptable with some resignation, and the grieving family is able to rejoice in a heros death; death by mutilation is not so easily digested. There is no honour in being tortured.

The point is that brutality is now part and parcel of the wars Pakistan has unleashed in Jammu and Kashmir in Indian and in Afghanistan. Its propagation is based on exploiting the worst in men and women on each side. In the process, both wars have taken a turn for the worse, making the conflict even more difficult to manage.

Take a look at the components of this dirty war in Kashmir. The fighters in the jihadi cause are taught skills that are based on hate for oppressors  a term that fluctuates between Delhi, the armed forces and the local police, and at various times, other, including panchayat leaders who represent the state.

The target is always a shifting one, depending on the state of the Valley. When local elections are due, it is the panchayat leaders and/or aspirants. When the local police gather strength and begin the make their presence felt, it is the constables and their families. And if there is even the least sign of any reconciliation with separatists, then there is no compunction in killing a few of them.

Mirwaiz Umar Farooq is hardly likely to forget that his father was gunned down by a militant of the Hizbul Mujahideen. More recently, Mohammed Yusuf Rather was killed allegedly for following secular policies, and Shujaat Bukhari made the error of being an impartial journalist.

Worst of all is the deliberate killing of civilians simply by firing at security forces who use them as shields. Getting civilians killed in the crossfire is probably the biggest triumph for Pakistani planners. It does not just lead to cries of human rights violations, it has, over the years, helped to identify the militant with the local population. Militant graves are now all over the Valley and revered as symbols of heroism.

Remember that less than six years ago, this phenomenon was largely absent. Srinagar would still observe shutdowns, but unwillingly. Most people wanted the militants gone and quietly provided vital intelligence on their movements. But since then, the Kashmir conflict has been knowingly pushed towards a deliberate glorification of violence, with young recruits being lured into joining militant ranks in a bid for that glory. What they usually get is death at an early age, leading to a new cycle of protests and violence. The challenge is to break this cycle of cruelty and despair, particularly among the youth.

During a recent trip to the Valley, the dominant narrative was to blame Delhi for anything and everything. Alongside was disgust of established parties and their leaders. Neither former chief ministers, Mehbooba Mufti and Omar Abdullah, cut any ice. Support for religious parties, such as the Jamaat-eIslami, seems to be waning even within their own strongholds in South Kashmir. There is a huge vacuum in terms of political belief that could, under certain circumstances, allow for the emergence of a new leader and a new party that bases its manifesto on humanity and a set of lost values that once marked the state. Hearts and minds programmes launched from outside are no good. The change has to be set in motion by Kashmiris themselves.

India must and should retaliate against Pakistans abhorrent acts with the maximum possible use of violence. Any action no longer needs to be kept limited to the Line of Control. If the International Border is fair game to Islamabad, it is for New Delhi, as well.

There is near certainty that infiltration will rise in the next month, as Pakistan puts its all into preventing peaceful panchayat elections in Jammu and Kashmir. The challenge for the government is to cut the Gordian knot that is the dramatisation of violence. This requires a raft of measures, including responsible reporting by mainstream and local media. It might be useful take a leaf out of Pakistan itself. Balochistan is burning, but try finding any coverage of that in the news.

Curiously, it is apparent that Pakistani forces themselves are on the slippery slope of brutaliation, which is an integral end-effect of backing terrorists for over three decades in at least three different theatres. This process is far more dangerous for Pakistan, given that this is an army with a country attached to it. The killing of Head Constable Narendra Kumar confirms that the slide may have worsened.
Sources said that the BSF spoke to the Pakistan Rangers in the afternoon, when it 'denied any hand' in the killing of Head Constable Narender Singh on Wednesday.

New Delhi: The BSF has registered a strong protest with its Pakistani counterpart over the killing and slitting of throat of one of its jawans, Head Constable Narendra Kumar Singh, in Jammu and has told the Pakistan Rangers that the act was "unsoldierly", official sources said on Thursday. They said the atmosphere along the border areas was "tense", and a high alert is in place along this region of the India-Pakistan International Border.

The sources said that the Pakistani side, which spoke to the Border Security Force officials in the noon over the phone, "denied any hand" in the killing of Head Constable Narender Singh on 18 September. The Indian side termed the act as "unsoldierly". It was informed that Pakistani troops "shot and killed" the BSF trooper, they said.

They added that on getting this response, the BSF told the other side that any future misadventure on the India-Pakistan border will be the responsibility of the Pakistan Rangers.

"A brief phone call talk took place between the two sides this noon. When it was brought to the notice of Pakistan that they had killed the jawan by resorting to unprovoked fire, they flatly refused any hand of their troops in the incident," a senior official said.

This was the second round of protest that the BSF registered with their counterparts in the last over three days over the killing and throat slitting of their jawan who, along with seven others, had gone beyond the border fence in the Ramgarh sector as part of an elephant grass (sarkanda) cutting patrol.

The official said that the force has issued a "high alert" to all its forward locations on the 192-kilometre-long frontier in Jammu in the backdrop of this incident, which is suspected to be "handiwork of a probably a pair of troops from the other side".

The force, they said, has also observed the movement of helicopters and drones in the forward locations across the border in Jammu and hence, border posts and patrols have been asked to remain extra vigilant, they said.

It has also sought, they said, for a sector commander-level (the level of a Deputy Inspector General) talks between the two sides in Jammu to thrash out issues but has not received any positive response.

They added that various field formations of the force have been receiving "spoof calls" from across the border, with people masquerading as government intelligence operatives or journalists were seeking details of the incident. Over a dozen calls have been received over the last two days on the personal and official numbers of field officers, and it is suspected that the calls are being made from across the border, they said.
While the government's intention to ban Triple Talaq is laudable inasmuch as it can act as an effective deterrent for men from arbitrarily divorcing their wives, the question is whether criminalising the offence can amount to a case of 'legislative over-reach'; here, I refer to a scenario where the Legislature is overstepping into the domains of a religion's personal law to prescribe a remedy which the personal law never intended.

The Union Cabinet passed an Executive Order which makes triple talaq an offence in India. The law is formally called Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on Marriage) Bill, 2017. Not surprisingly, any move to criminalise triple talaq or talaq-e-biddat in India in the past has been quite controversial.

The law governing triple talaq in India and provisions of the Ordinance

The practice of instant triple talaq (also known as talaq-e-biddat) is an irrevocable form of divorce where a Muslim man divorces his wife by uttering talaq thrice in succession. The ordinance criminalises talaq-e-biddat which is distinguished from other forms of divorce like talaq-e-hasan (a revocable form of divorce) wherein the husband pronounces talaq thrice but at certain intervals, and which can be revoked at any time before the third pronouncement.

In August 2017, a five judge bench of the Supreme Court in Shayara Bano versus Union of India in a majority of 3:2 held that triple talaq (talaq-e-biddat) is unconstitutional on grounds that triple talaq did not form an essential part of religion under Article 25 (right to religion). The case was filed in 2016 by Shayara Bano, to declare the practice of instantaneous triple talaq unconstitutional, arguing that the practice violated her right to equality before law and protection against discrimination on the basis of her religion and gender.

In December 2017, the Lok Sabha passed the Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on Marriage) Bill, 2017 (Bill No. 247 of 2017). The Bill states that talaq-e-biddat, whether spoken or written or used in any other form is void and illegal. The punishment for pronouncing talaq-e-biddat is imprisonment up to three years and additional fine. The offence is non-bailable and cognisable (the police can arrest the accused without a warrant).

Under the Bill, a Muslim woman is also entitled to maintenance from her husband for herself and her children, and the custody of her minor children. The government subsequently amended the Bill under pressure from the Opposition to water down certain provisions. However, as the Bill could not be passed by the Rajya Sabha in this year's Monsoon Session, it was still pending in the Rajya Sabha when the central government passed the ordinance criminalising triple talaq.

The Statement of Objects and Reasons of the Bill states that the Bill was introduced in light of the many cases of talaq-e-biddat in India that were reported in spite of the Supreme Court ruling in Shayara Bano. While it is not clear when the Ordinance comes into force, the ordinance must be passed within six weeks after the Parliament reassembles.

Arguments against criminalising triple talaq

The Muslim Personal Law (Shariat) Application Act, 1937 states that all personal matters such as inheritance, marriage, divorce, maintenance and guardianship where the parties are Muslims would be governed by Muslim Personal Law (Shariat).

One of the strongest criticisms of any attempt by the government to criminalise Triple Talaq is that the government should not interfere in the personal laws of any religion and that Triple Talaq falls in the jurisdiction of the All India Muslim Personal Law Board (AIMPLB); the AIMPLB is a non-governmental organisation which was established in 1973 to ensure the protection and application of Sharia law in India.

What also emerges from the debate on criminalising Triple Talaq is that while the practice is not necessarily supported by the Muslim community, Muslims (including women) are averse to criminalising the practice of triple talaq. The arguments to support this are that penalising a Muslim man for pronouncing Triple Talaq would erode the institution of marriage. Activists, who are not in favour of the Triple Talaq law, argue that it is sufficient that the Shayara Bano ruling makes instant Triple Talaq void and that there is no need to criminalise what is essentially a civil wrong (marriage between Muslims is in the nature of a civil contract).

The concerns regarding misuse of Triple Talaq are real. In an incident reported recently, a Hyderabad-based woman sought the intervention of External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj after her husband an Onami national divorced her through Triple Talaq over Whatsapp. Similarly in April 2018, a Muslim woman in Maharashtra alleged that her husband had divorced her by pronouncing triple talaq in a Whatsapp video that he sent to her. There are also reports of Muslim men divorcing their wives through registered post and a newspaper advertisement. These incidents highlight the plight of Muslim women who are divorced unilaterally and abandoned by their husbands.

This is why the Shayara Bano ruling has brought reprieve to many Muslim women in India. The question which requires greater scrutiny is whether criminal sanctions such as imprisonment and fine are warranted in cases of Triple Talaq.

Triple talaq Bill- reminiscent of Shah Bano controversy?

Interestingly, the practice of talaq-e-biddat has already been abolished in as many as 20 countries (a fact which was referred to by the Supreme Court in its Triple Talaq ruling) and some states have also considered criminalising the practice. In February 2018, the Council of Islamic Ideology (a constitutional body instituted to offer legal advice on Islamic issues to the Pakistan government and the Parliament) recommended criminalising Triple Talaq in Pakistan. However, there is a view that India should not be guided by the laws in other jurisdictions as Indian Muslims differ in their religious beliefs from Muslims in other parts of the world.

While the government's intention to ban Triple Talaq is laudable inasmuch as it can act as an effective deterrent for men from arbitrarily divorcing their wives, the question is whether criminalising the offence can amount to a case of 'legislative overreach'; here, I refer to a scenario where the Legislature is overstepping into the domains of a religion's personal law to prescribe a remedy which the personal law never intended. Apart from the example of Pakistan, there is little evidence to suggest that Triple Talaq has in fact been criminalised in other jurisdictions.

It is one thing for the Indian judiciary to draw on the religious practices in other countries to justify that Triple Talaq is not an essential part of religion and therefore, not protected under Article 25, however, when the Legislature imposes sanctions for the same practice, it can be argued that this too is unconstitutional as this was not envisaged by the personal laws of a community.

I am also sceptical that while the ordinance is progressive where it safeguards a Muslim woman's right against triple talaq, the ordinance invites the criticism that followed the Supreme Court's ruling in the Shah Bano case in 1985. Shah Bano was a landmark case in India where the court confirmed a Muslim woman's right to receive maintenance beyond the iddat period. The judgment was mired in controversy because the court was seen as encroaching upon the personal laws of Muslims and imposing its own interpretation of Sharia law.

This concern has already been flagged by Islamic clerics in case of the Triple Talaq law. The government of the day should therefore be careful not to repeat this mistake.

The author holds a Master of Law (LL.M.) degree from University of Cambridge
Those sisters show us what belief looks like. It is a faith in who we should be, not who we are

Editor's note: This is a multi-part series that investigates sexual abuse in the church and the institutions that it runs. Articles in the series rely on opinion pieces, interviews with victims, abusers, those accused of abuse, church elders, parish members and state officials to examine the role of the three institutions that are critical to the issue: The Church, the community, and the State.

For days now, I have been watching the footage of the Roman Catholic nuns sitting stone-faced in a city square in Kerala as witnesses to their sister who has accused a bishop of repeated rape. I am almost without words. Does anyone need to write that rape is unacceptable? No person should fear violence of any kind, especially in an avowed, religious community. Should not those who set their lives aside to serve and teach be treated even more gently than the rest of us? Is it worth writing that women as vulnerable as these do not make accusations lightly? They stand to lose everything. Some already have.

Among my colleagues in response to reports of sexual abuse we say, I believe her. We say it and share it before the usual suspects chime in with accusations against the victim. How can rape occur repeatedly? It must have been her fault. Nothing at all happened. To that we say, I believe her.

These sisters are saying the same, and they are doing it in the style of the original Christian witness, like the women at the foot of the cross. They will not turn away, and because of their witness, we cannot turn away.

Those sisters show us what belief looks like. They have faith in the police and courts capacity to find the truth, which probably has no basis in their lived reality. It is a faith in who we should be, not who we are. They do not look to me like people easily influenced by foolishness. They make me want to sit up straight, check that my nails are clean, and hope my homework is correct. These women who are set apart and carry the honour of the church have expressed their faith in their church, in their society, and in their sister. We must pay attention.

The church is facing accusations like these in many parts of the world. Where the church has failed to govern itself with justice, civil society is doing it for us. It is a shame. A shame we have let it come to this, but it would be more of a shame if we made peace with evil in the name of pride.

This kind of violence is not limited to convents or to Kerala. I live in the United States, where #MeToo about sexual harassment and abuse in the workplace has been copied by the church with #ChurchToo. We have watched major religious figures rightly lose their empires because of allegations of abusing subordinates. #ChurchToo acknowledges that we have too often protected the more powerful person, as a way of protecting the institution of the church.

We have treated the vulnerable and the harmed as though they were the problem. The church I belong to in the United States enacted a liturgy in our church-wide meeting in which bishops read aloud the complaints of women who had been sexually harassed or abused in the church. It was powerful to see those hidden stories read by the people charged with protecting the church and its people. The responsibility of justice can, at times, be defending the institution of the church from attack from those on the outside who wish to do it harm, but there is also the attack from the inside, an attack on our core values from within that we must guard against.

All over the world, women and men are speaking about sexual harassment and sexual violence done to them. These are often stories that cause the victim to feel shame and trauma because of the way they might be judged by others. The vulnerability of these victims is confusing for some, and yet, if we think about it for just a moment, we know how difficult it is to resist a person with power over us.

These are difficult stories to hear. Many of us confuse the shamefulness of the violence done to a person, with shaming the person harmed. Maybe it is some kind of survival of the fittest response to laugh alongside the bully, to isolate the vulnerable, and to emotionally remove ourselves from any possibility that this same kind of harm could come to us or someone we love. We as a society have to decide we are better than that. We do not submit to our desire to manipulate or dominate other people. We inscribe in the law a fair and just society, and we check the power of those who abuse others.

I was at a church gathering in Kerala in which tens of thousands of people, overwhelmingly women, had taken over a church campus to celebrate Mother Mary. When I asked one of the men about it he said dismissively what translates to: Oh, this is just women. He was right, and wrong. It was tens of thousands of faithful women. Those women love the church. Those women bring faith, authority, and even some respectability. They bring their families. From the time of Jesus, women have been among the disciples, our texts say they often paid for the others.

If the church cannot be a safe place for women, perhaps it should not have any. What if all of those vulnerable in these institutions left? There would be no church. I dont think the sisters would approve. Those sisters have shown us the power of bearing witness to one anothers truth, whatever the cost. May God bless them, and may God bless the church with justice.

The author is an Episcopalian priest from Trinity, Wall Street, New York City
The incident at the former judge's residence in Delhi took place on Monday night and was reported to police by the daughter.

New Delhi: The wife of a former Chief Justice of the Delhi High court was held hostage at her residence allegedly by her servant and accomplices who decamped with cash and valuables worth lakhs of rupees, police said on Wednesday.

Chief Justice Dalip Kumar Kapur, at whose residence in southeast Delhi's New Friends Colony the incident took place, passed away in 2000 due to brain haemorrhage.

The incident took place on Monday night and was reported to police by the daughter of the former judge who was also at home at the time of the incident.

In her statement to police, Riba Kapur, the 78-year-old wife of the former judge alleged that she and her 45-year-old daughter who lives with her were held hostage by the servant and his accomplices, a police officer said.

Kapur alleged that her daughter was hit by an iron rod by accused, the officer said.

Police said the accused stole cash and jewellery worth lakhs of rupees and fled the spot in the car owned by the victims.

The injured daughter called up the police and informed about the incident.

The servant was hired just four days before the incident, police said, adding that a case has been registered and efforts are on to nab the accused.
The opposition Congress in Goa on Wednesday claimed that it had the support of over 21 legislators in the 40-member Assembly, giving it enough strength to form the government in the state.

Panaji: The opposition Congress in Goa on Wednesday claimed that it had the support of over 21 legislators in the 40-member Assembly, giving it enough strength to form the government in the state.

The Congress, which is the single-largest party with 16 MLAs, has already staked claim to form the government in the coastal state.

The opposition party's claim comes at a time when Chief Minister Manohar Parrikar, 62, is admitted to the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) in Delhi for a pancreatic ailment. The Leader of Opposition in the state Assembly Chandrakant Kavlekar told PTI that the Congress had enough support to form the government in Goa.

"We have the required numbers. I am not going to tell you whom we are in discussions with, but we need the support of 21 MLAs and we have more than that," he said. The Congress legislators, led by Kavlekar, had met Governor Mridula Sinha on Tuesday and demanded a floor test by the Bharatiya Janata Party-led government to prove its majority in the Assembly.

Kavlekar said his party was waiting for a response from the governor, who had assured them that she would get back on the issue in three-four days.

The state is being ruled by the BJP with the support of the Goa Forward Party (GFP), the Maharashtrawadi Gomantak Party (MGP), the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) and Independent MLAs.

The BJP has 14 seats in the Assembly, the GFP and the MGP have three each and the NCP has one. There are also three Independent legislators. Kavlekar claimed the political situation in the state was in favour of the Congress as there was a lot of "discontent" among the ruling coalition partners.

"You have seen how the BJP observers came to Goa and met their legislators, former MLAs and alliance partners. They are also talking about inviting a leader from one of the allies to head the government.

"This has created a bitter situation as allowing one alliance partner to head the coalition will upset another," he said. Kavlekar also claimed that a section within the BJP was upset over the possibility of a leader being "imported" from outside and was in touch with the Congress for joining the opposition party.

"We need not go to anyone with the proposal of supporting or joining us. In fact, they are coming to us with proposals," he added. The Congress leader had earlier said the BJP might force the dissolution of the Assembly and another election in just a year-and-a-half. The Assembly polls in Goa were held in February 2017.

Senior Congress leader and party spokesperson Ramakant Khalap said with three ministers including Parrikar in hospital, the ruling coalition is short of the halfway mark, which makes it imperative for the governor to call the single largest party to form the government.

Apart from Parrikar, two ministers  Francis D'Souza and Pandurang Madkaikar  are admitted to different hospitals. "The effective strength of the House today is 37, of which one is Speaker and he has no right to vote if there is motion for trust," he said.

If the house meets tomorrow morning, the ruling coalition will not be able to show the majority," he said.

The Congress legislators have urged the governor not to allow the Assembly to be dissolved. BJP national general secretary Ram Lal, who, along with two other senior leaders, was deputed by the party's central leadership to take stock of the political situation in Goa, had on Monday said the state government was stable and there was no demand for a change in the leadership.

He had said this after a meeting with the party's MLAs, former legislators and core committee members.

On May 18 too, the Congress had staked claim to form the government in Goa, citing the example of Karnataka, where the largest party, the BJP, was invited to form the government after the Assembly polls threw up a fractured verdict.

The Congress had said it was not invited to form the government in Goa after the Assembly polls last year, despite emerging as the single-largest party.
Pakistan prime minister Imran Khan on Thursday continued the peace talks between India and Pakistan with his letter to Prime Minister Narendra Modi in which he asked for the two neighbouring countries to resume dialogue and iron out differences.

Pakistan prime minister Imran Khan on Thursday continued the peace talks between India and Pakistan with his letter to Prime Minister Narendra Modi in which he asked for the two neighbouring countries to resume dialogue and iron out differences. The Times of India reported that he also suggested a meeting between External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj and Pakistan's foreign minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi. The Ministry of External Affairs confirmed Khan's letter to Modi on Thursday.

Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan's letter to Prime Minister Narendra Modi. pic.twitter.com/2FZRci3d50  ANI (@ANI) September 20, 2018

In Khan's first official communication about bilateral talks since he took office in August, he said that all major issues, including terrorism and Kashmir, should be resolved through dialogue. Khan's letter comes a month after Modi own letter on 20 August in which the prime minister said that India was committed to peaceful neighbourly ties with Pakistan.

Khan's letter is the first formal proposal of bilateral dialogue since he formed the government in Pakistan last month. It came in response to Modis own letter on August 20 which conveyed that New Delhi was looking for constructive and meaningful engagement with Islamabad. The letter sent by Modi stated that India was looking for constructive and meaningful engagement with Pakistan. He had also stressed the need to work for a terror-free South Asia.

The Pakistan prime minister's communication comes amid the Kartarpur corridor issue and speculations regarding whether Swaraj and Qureshi will meet on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in New York later this month.

Pakistan Foreign Office (FO) spokesperson Mohammed Faisal, confirming "engagement" with India to plan a bilateral meeting between Swaraj and Qureshi, said that no decision has been taken on the issue so far. "We are engaged in the matter," he said when asked about reports speculating if both sides have formally approached each other.

Qureshi, in his maiden address before taking the post of foreign minister in August, had stated that, My message is for the Government of India. I want to tell the Indian foreign minister that we are not just neighbours; we are also the atomic powers besides we have a lot of common resources between each other, he stated.

He claimed that the issues between the two countries are complicated and in order to resolve them, we must engage. We will have to admit that we are facing problems, we must admit that Kashmir is a reality. The Islamabad declaration is a part of our history, he said.

According to reports, this is the first concrete step for resolution of differences between India and Pakistan since 2015, when Swaraj had attended a 'Heart of Asia' conference in Islamabad. The efforts were stalled after the terror attacks on the Pathankot airbase and Army camp in Uri in 2016.

Ever since Khan took office in August, there have been several interactions between the Indian and Pakistani prime ministers. On 30 July, Modi called Khan to congratulate him on the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) emerging as the single largest party in Pakistan's recently conducted general election. Modi, in his conversation with the PTI chief had expressed hope that democracy would take deeper roots in Pakistan.

In response to Modi's letter after Khan was sworn in as prime minister on 18 August, Khan had tweeted that the neighbours need to "resolve their conflicts, including Kashmir." He said, "The best way to alleviate poverty and uplift the people of the subcontinent is to resolve our differences through dialogue and start trading."

International support for peace between India and Pakistan

On 12 September, the US responded to the positive messages that were exchanged between India and Pakistan and said that it would be "very supportive" if conditions can be created for productive talks between the two countries, however, underlining that Washington understands New Delhi's position that "demonstrable reduction" in cross-border terrorism would create the confidence for such a dialogue.

Alice Wells, the Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asia. said that the US had sent a two-pronged message to Pakistan: a desire to engage constructively and an emphasis on the need for Pakistan to implement its promises to fight all terrorist groups.

On 22 August, China too, said that it was willing to play a "constructive role" in easing relations between India and Pakistan. Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Lu Kang said the improvement and development of relations between India and Pakistan are quite important to regional peace, stability and prosperity.

"We have noted relevant reports and we welcome the positive remarks made by the Indian and Pakistani leaders on improving bilateral relations," Lu said while replying to a question on the statements made by the two leaders. "Both Pakistan and India are important countries in South Asia. As a common neighbour to Pakistan and India, China firmly supports the two sides to enhance dialogue increase mutual trust, properly handle and solve their differences," Lu said. "China hopes the two countries can jointly stay committed to regional peace and development," he added.

With inputs from agencies
India and China will jointly train diplomats from Afghanistan as part of their commitment to help the country move forward in path of development

India and China will jointly train Afghan diplomats, as per sources. The course, coordinated by India and China, will commence in October, during which Afghan diplomats will be trained in New Delhi and Beijing.

Earlier this year, India and China had agreed to work together on an economic project in Afghanistan, during Prime Minister Narendra Modi's visit to China for the informal summit with Chinese president Xi Jinping.

This is, however, not the first time India has offered to train officials from Afghanistan. In fact, India has been playing a key role in training Afghan forces in their fight against the Taliban, and is one of the key element of India-Afghanistan relations. In September 2017, the two countries even signed an MoU under which India agreed to train Afghan police forces in India.

In December same year, the Indian Army had trained a group of Afghan women military personnel at Officers Training Academy in Chennai. Seventeen women officers were selected from different provinces of Afghanistan representing all the major ethnicities of the country.

Afghanistan, however, is not the only country which receives training from India. In fact, New Delhi regularly conducts training programmes for foreign police, election and public administration officials from developing countries, and has signed several MoUs in connection with this.

It's also a known fact that the Union Public Services Commission, are open to not just Indian citizens but also to Nepalese and Bhutanese nationals. Although their appointment is subject to their clearance by the Government of India, India conducts several advance training programmes for officials from these countries on a regular basis.

The Institute of Secretariat Training and Management (ISTM) for civil employees which is managed directly by the Department of Personnel Training often conducts domain specific courses / workshops for participants from countries in collaboration with Ministry of External Affairs. It conducts short term programmes on training techniques and financial management under India Technical Cooperation Programmes (ITEC) / SCAAP programmes. ISTM has conducted such programmes with delegations from countries like Afghanistan, Vietnam, Thailand, China, Bhutan etc, to exchange training experiences and explore areas for collaboration with these countries.

The newly-constructed Central Detective Training Institute (CDTI) in Chandigarh offers special course on investigation of homicide cases for foreign nationals. The institute is open for police officers from SAARC countries with a special focus on Nepal, Bhutan and Bangladesh.

Bhutan is among the countries that receives the largest amount of support in terms of training. In Bhutan, the Indian Military Training Team (IMTRAT), headed by a major-general, plays a critical role in training Bhutanese security personnel. India also regularly conducts training session for Bhutanese election officials.

The Election Commission of India also regularly conducts training programmes for election officials from SAARC countries with sponsorship from the Ministry of External Affairs. One such programme was conducted in 2016, according to the Press Information Bureau.

In December 2017, a group of Bangladeshi Army received training in combating terrorism in Danapur, Bihar.

With inputs from ANI
MEA spokesperson Raveesh Kumar said the atmosphere in the region was not conducive to hold a SAARC Summit.

New Delhi: Asserting that terror and talks cannot go together, India on Thursday rejected new Pakistan prime minister Imran Khan's proposal for holding a SAARC Summit in Islamabad. India, however, accepted Islamabad's request for a meeting of the foreign ministers on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly session later this month.

Responding to a question during a media briefing here, Ministry of External Affairs spokesperson Raveesh Kumar said India's stand the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) "has been very clear and consistent".

"Time and again we have said that the atmosphere in the region is not conducive for this summit," Kumar said. "This is not only India which has felt in this manner."

"There are a number of other countries in the region that have accordingly felt that under the shadow of terrorism and cross-border terrorism, it is difficult to hold the Saarc Summit which is to be hosted by Pakistan."

Earlier, in his briefing, Kumar announced that Sushma Swaraj and Qureshi will meet at the UN, the first foreign minister-level meeting between the two South Asian nuclear neighbours in nearly three years. India will also participate in an informal meeting of SAARC foreign ministers on the sidelines of the UNGA session.

In a letter to Prime Minister Narendra Modi that was received on September 17, Imran Khan sought to hold the 20th Saarc Summit in Islamabad. "The summit will offer an opportunity for you to visit Pakistan and for us to re-start the stalled dialogue process," he wrote.

Following a cross-border terror attack from Pakistan at an army base in Jammu and Kashmir in September 2016 that killed 17 Indian soldiers, the SAARC Summit that was to be held in Islamabad later that year had to be cancelled as other member states of the bloc joined India in boycotting it.
The National Crime Records Bureau will be tasked to maintain the database and profile of sexual offenders.

In what is touted to be a move to curb the rising number of crimes against women, the Centre on Thursday rolled out a National Registry of Sexual Offenders (NRSO), a massive database of convicted sexual offenders from across the nation.

In doing so, India joined a club of eight other countries who maintain a dedicated database on sexual offenders, including the US  the only country to keep its database in public domain even as the demand to review the policy grows. Other countries to maintain a database of sexual offenders are Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, South Africa,Trinidad and Tobago and United Kingdom, where such data of convicted sex offenders is maintained, but is purely for the consumption of the law enforcement authorities. India too has said that the database will remain accessible to law enforcement agencies only.

What is the NRSO?

The database will have personal details, including residential address, fingerprints, photo-identification, Aadhaar numbers, DNA sample and PAN number of not only convicted criminals but also of those accused of the crime or against whom an FIR is registered. However, the details of arrested and chargesheeted offenders can be accessed only by officers with the requisite clearance, The Indian Express reported. The government is also mulling over introducing the list of juvenile offenders, the newspaper reported. But a final decision on the same will be taken at a later time.

The register was proposed to be formed at the same Cabinet meet in April, when the promulgation of the Criminal Law (Amendment) Ordinance, 2018 (which recently became a law) to award death sentence to child rapists was passed. The National Crime Records Bureau will be tasked to maintain the database and profile of sexual offenders. It will collect information on more than 4.5 lakh cases from the past fifteen years, details of which will be collected from jails across the country.

Following the US style, the database will classify offenders based on the 'severity of threat' they cause to the society. According to The Hindu, the data will be stored for 15 years in the case of those who pose a low danger, 25 years for those posing "moderate danger" and lifetime for "habitual offenders, violent criminals, convicts in gangrape and custodial rapes."

The move came ostensibly after massive public outrage over the recent incidents of rapes, including the rape and murder of an eight-year-old girl in Jammu and Kashmir's Kathua.

Idea not free of flaws

There was no clarity on the extent to which the state plans to use this data. PTI had reported in the past that it will be "regularly shared with states and Union Territories for tracking, monitoring and investigation, including verification of antecedents by police."

However, in countries that maintain such a database, sexual offenders are typically required to periodically check in with the local police, informing them about their place of residence, recent whereabouts, place of employment, and provide details of their physical description. Moreover, governments often place severe restrictions on where a previously convicted sex offender can reside and work. This could seriously impede the process of rehabilitation and recovery of criminals and also leave scope for lifetime of harassment by local authorities, even after an accused has served his or her sentence.

Inclusion of juvenile offenders in the list at a later stage is another problematic avenue.

Another issue lies in the definition of the term sexual offences. The draft guidelines reportedly include rape, voyeurism, stalking and aggravated sexual assault. However, as this article in The Hindu points out, the Protection of Children From Sexual Offences Act, 2012 criminalises consensual sexual intercourse with minors and between minors. This could mean that a person could possibly face the wrath of objecting parents and live with the consequences of being on the register for a lifetime for having a consensual sexual relationship.

Besides, the government may have plans to hand out contracts to private entities for technical support and maintenance of the database. The NCRB had floated a Request for Proposal (RFP) for selection of agency for "development and implementation of NRSO". This puts the privacy of convicted, or even accused individuals at a greater risk.

However, a home ministry official told The Hindu that the private entity will not be involved in actually handling the data. "The private operator will only design the platform, the input and management of data will be available with law enforcement agencies. The data pertaining to passports has been developed by a private party, it is being run efficiently," an MHA spokesperson told the newspaper.

Move gets support from WCD ministry, child and women rights' groups

Union Minister of Women and Child Development Maneka Gandhi has been a long-time advocate of such a register. When the 38-year-old Sunil Rastogi was arrested earlier this year for raping and sexually assaulting minors, he confessed to the cops that he had assaulted around 500 girls in the states of Delhi, Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand. Rastogi was arrested, jailed and then released only to repeat this crime. Union minister Maneka Gandhi lamented that if an SOR was in place, many of Rastogis crime could have been prevented.

Gandhi pointed out that the listing of names of sexual offenders and placing it in the public domain would definitely act as a deterrent.

Sunita Krishna, who runs the NGO Prajwala which claims it has rescued and rehabilitated more than 10,000 rape victims, told Firstpost that she suppports the move. She believes only "the public naming and shaming of offenders" will stop this sharp increase in rape.

Nobel laureate Kailash Satyarthi had also urged the government to push for a registry of sexual offenders, propagating the 'name and shame' approach in dealing with sexual predators. "Name and shame them. Sexual offenders should not be accepted as employees anywhere," he had said in the past.

Experts point out flaws in system, say move will discourage victims from reporting crime

However, many rights' organisations and activists have pointed out serious flaws in implementing such a system. Organisations such as the Human Right Watch and ACLU have spoken out against the sex offenders registry, claiming that it negates the concept of rehabilitation and perpetuates social stigma.

"Government statistics (in the US) indicate that most sexual abuse of children is committed by family members or trusted authority figures, and by someone who has not previously been convicted of a sex offence."

"In India, too, children are often sexually abused by people known to them and regarded as authority figures. The government must ensure implementation of existing measures...including enforcement of the POCSO Act," Jayshree Bajoria, author of Human Rights Watch report documenting barriers to justice for sexual assault survivors in India, told PTI.

"Once such a registry comes into being, I am concerned that it might lead to people not reporting rapes or sexual offences, because most of them are by people known to the victims. Also, once you are on the registry, it will mean no jobs, no chance to rehabilitate. Across the world such registries have failed to act as a deterrent," said Bharti Ali of HAQ Centre for Child Rights.

An HRW report, in fact, states that such offender lists "may do more harm than good".

Activists in India say that the talk of these lists is a knee-jerk reaction to cases such as the Kathua and Unnao rape cases, both of which involved minor victims, and is intended to satisfy the public rage against sexual abuse by strangers.

"If it is a family member, a person known to the family of the victim, which is true in most cases in India, will this work? I have my doubts. The registry operates most aggressively in the US. However, there is very little evidence in that country to show that it has helped to prevent sexual assaults against children," said Supreme Court advocate KV Dhananjay.

Speaking to Hindustan Times, Apar Gupta, a lawyer who works on privacy issues, even opined that there is no empirical evidence to support that the law actually helped bring down crime in countries where it has been existence for over a decade.

"Many international studies have shown that instead of preventing repeat offences, maintaining such a database has an adverse affect as person accused of sex crime does not have any incentive to reform. His identity as a rapist is established for life even after he has completed his sentence," he said.

With inputs from PTI
By Steve Scherer and Giuseppe Fonte ROME (Reuters) - Italy's populist ruling coalition called on Economy Minister Giovanni Tria on Wednesday to allow greater deficit spending in next year's budget in order to make good on campaign promises, causing jitters in financial markets worried about debt. Pressure on Tria has increased as a Sept. 27 deadline approaches to set the deficit and debt targets for next year's budget, which must be presented to parliament by Oct.

By Steve Scherer and Giuseppe Fonte

ROME (Reuters) - Italy's populist ruling coalition called on Economy Minister Giovanni Tria on Wednesday to allow greater deficit spending in next year's budget in order to make good on campaign promises, causing jitters in financial markets worried about debt.

Pressure on Tria has increased as a Sept. 27 deadline approaches to set the deficit and debt targets for next year's budget, which must be presented to parliament by Oct. 20.

Italy's public debt is the highest in the euro zone after Greece's, and markets are concerned about the prospect of it rising further. Tria is seen as the bastion of market discipline against the demands of the ruling anti-establishment 5-Star Movement and far-right League party, which took office in June.

"We can't wait two or three years to maintain our promises," Luigi Di Maio, deputy prime minister and 5-Star leader, said on Wednesday during a trip to China, after repeating he had "full confidence" in Tria.

"The objective is not to reassure markets. The objective of the budget is to improve the quality of life of Italians," Di Maio said.

The comments, although in line with Di Maio's previous rhetoric, pushed up the yield on Italy's 10-year bond because of concern that party leaders were leaning harder on Tria as the deadline looms to release the budget targets.

Giancarlo Giorgetti, a cabinet undersecretary and high-ranking League official, said in an interview with la Repubblica newspaper: "We only ask that Minister Tria not get hung up on decimal points, that he show a minimum of flexibility."

THE SPREAD

Tria wants to keep the 2019 budget deficit at 1.6 percent of gross domestic product, according to a government source, while sources from 5-Star and the League have told Reuters they want it as high as 2.5 percent and not below 2 percent.

The sources said both parties were asking for nine billion euros each to enable them to start implementing their very different economic programmes. They also want Tria to find 12.4 billion euros to avoid an automatic increase in sales taxes.

The 5-Star is determined to introduce a basic income for the poor -- the cornerstone of its electoral manifesto -- while the League wants to cut taxes and offer incentives to firms to plough their profits back into their businesses.

"A serious government will find the funds to fulfil its promises," Di Maio said in China.

This year's deficit goal is 1.6 percent and the target for 2019 set by the previous centre-left administration is 0.8 percent. However, Tria -- an academic who is not affiliated with either ruling party -- has already said this will be raised significantly, partly because the economy is slowing.

"I'm tired of having to stick to parameters set by others," League leader Matteo Salvini said on Tuesday during on a late-evening TV talk show, referring to public finance targets agreed between the previous government and the European Commission.

Speaking of the gap, or spread, between Italy's 10-year bond yield and that of the safer German counterpart, Salvini said: "I'll take care of the spread. I eat bread and spread, and I'll keep it low."

The spread was at 233 basis points on Wednesday, sharply down from peaks around 300 in May and June. However, it is still about 100 points higher than in early May before the ruling parties began negotiating their government "contract".

Salvini said he did not believe the spread depended on the deficit target, but on the credibility of the government's policies and their ability to boost growth.

(Additional reporting by Angelo Amante; Editing by Peter Graff and Crispian Balmer)

This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed.
Infiltration attempts all along the LoC in the Jammu and Kashmir divisions will continue and probably taper off after the panchayat polls, unless there is a delayed winter

A single action on the Line of Control (LoC) or International Border (IB) need not always be something of concern. However, anything small and tactical always has the scope of going strategic in a matter of moments. That is why an early assessment is always necessary when taking stock of other events in the same environment and within the same bracketed time proximity. The tactical mistakes, forced errors or deliberate acts always have lessons that need to be absorbed to avoid negative effects.

The first context here is the unfortunate death of BSF head constable Narendra Kumar, who along with seven other BSF men had gone to defoliate a piece of ground ahead of the anti-infiltration fence in the Ramgarh sector of the IB near Jammu (Pakistan calls it the working boundary or WB). Kumar was reportedly shot and went missing. Pakistani troops denied the BSF a safe return to the spot to search. Subsequently, when the body was discovered, the throat had been slit. Without vilifying the BSF, it needs to be pointed out that the clearing of the field of fire is a routine task in defence; the basic teaching is that it must be done with adequate firepower tactically deployed to respond if the adversary or terrorists attempt to sneak in and take potshots.

The second basic that cannot be forgotten is that all such tasks are performed while grouped as buddy pairs, so that in the event of a contingency, one man knows exactly where his buddy is. A soldier/constable being abducted then becomes extremely unlikely. In all probability, a Pakistani Border Action Team (BAT) observed the pattern of the BSF men, analysed the weaknesses and carried out the operation. The abducted head constable was shot and captured; his throat was slit but no decapitation of the head was done to avoid the kind of impact of the not-too-distant past.

Cut to the Reasi operation, where three Jaish-e-Mohammad terrorists were killed on 13 September. Investigations by the police revealed that they had infiltrated through the Jammu IB sector and were attempting to get to the Valley in a truck provided by an over ground worker (OGW). They were intercepted and after a series of contacts, finally neutralised. There has been criticism regarding the supposed ease with which infiltration took place through the Jammu IB sector. However, counter-infiltration can never guarantee  nor should it ever be expected to do so  that there will be zero infiltration in any sector. The contingencies for troops deployed on the ground are just far too many to cater to every possible attempt; leakages have taken place in the past and will continue despite state-of-the-art border management instruments that are in the offing and a sample of that was just inaugurated. What is heartening is that there was a good intelligence grid that managed to trace the infiltrated terrorists and did not allow them to melt away.

In the Kashmir Valley, more terrorists were killed in Sopore and at the LoC in the Keran sector. Equally important is that a video emerged from the Hizbul Mujahideen stable, threatening all Kashmiri personnel in the security forces and giving them four days to resign from their positions. They were asked to upload their resignations on the internet, purportedly to create greater panic and allow the few resignations that may occur to have a viral effect. With doubts about the local bodies' polls having been laid to rest last week and the two mainstream local political parties pulling out from the polls on grounds of the Article 35A controversy, the political and security scene for the next two months is set. Add to it the UN General Assembly (UNGA) session that began in New York on Tuesday and will be addressed by Minister of External Affairs Sushma Swaraj on 29 September.

When all events are viewed collectively many pictures emerge.

First, with the mutually-agreed ceasefire at the LoC and IB sector, is the Pakistani establishment viewing an advantage in a breakdown of the ceasefire yet again? If not, could the BAT action against the BSF men have been the handiwork of terror groups working alone; not likely given the dragnet Pakistan has at its border and the fact that the Pakistan Rangers took no action to enable the BSF to undertake a response. A fairer assessment would point towards a risk being taken as a contributory factor towards escalation to eventually contribute cumulatively to the situation in Jammu and Kashmir that Pakistan attempts to project to the world, timed with the UNGA session.

Second, for the Pakistan establishment and the separatists, any potential success of the local bodies' polls would be a setback. In 2011, the huge turnout in these polls contributed to the stabilisation of the situation. Sarpanches and panches were then targeted to offset the advantage gained by Indias democratic stamp. It is another thing that India shot itself in the foot by not empowering the local elected representatives and not sufficiently securing them (16 were killed and 30 injured since 2011). The creation of an environment projecting chaos, lack of control and general mayhem helps keep away voters. Already on the first day of registration for the polls, only four potential candidates registered themselves.

Third, the threat against security personnel is not new, although a fresh angle is introduced every time. Having experienced the fact that the Jammu and Kashmir Police remained a force multiplier through the turbulence of 2008-10, it was pointedly targeted in 2016 in multiple ways, including the burning of individual policemen's homes and the destruction of police stations. The new ploy of mass targeting is a generic attempt to obtain large size resignations. Some Special Police Officers (SPOs), who are temporary and poorly paid have already resigned and joined labour gangs.

It needs to be recalled that the separatists and the Pakistan establishment (deep state) has a habit of sometimes attempting to bite off more than it can chew.

In 2010, it was the disastrous attempt by Syed Ali Shah Geelani, to give a call for mass sit-ins around Army camps. The Armys strong warning sent the Separatists into face saving mode. Perhaps the call to all Kashmiri security men to resign en masse could be considered a step too far, given Kashmir's realities in terms of unemployment and the past history of the Jammu and Kashmir Police's loyalty. This is where social media must be harnessed by the state government to run a powerful counter-campaign to keep policemen motivated.

In the calendar of the next two months, pinprick low-risk activities at the border/LoC will probably continue with greater chances of success but insufficient to cause high alarm in India. With a reported upward jump in terrorist numbers, their seeking contact through targeting of security forces may be the norm with higher casualty rates imposed upon the forces. Infiltration attempts all along the LoC in the Jammu and Kashmir divisions will continue and probably taper off after the panchayat polls, unless there is a delayed winter. It's a tough two months ahead needing 'all hands on deck'.
The biggest fall in the migrants was seen in the United Arab Emirates, the most favourite destination of Keralites, with the number coming down from 8.98 lakh to 8.30 lakh.

The 2016 Kerala Migration Survey (KMS) had shown emigration from the state reaching the inflexion point in 2016. The latest survey has confirmed the trend of taking a concrete decreasing turn now.

According to the 2018 survey conducted by the Centre for Development Studies (CDS), Thiruvananthapuram, the emigration from the state has declined by 11.6 percent between 2013 and 2018.

The number has come down from 2.4 million to 2.1 million during the period. As many as 89.2 percent of the total migrants are in the West Asian countries. The remaining 10 percent of the emigrants are concentrated in the other countries like the US, the UK, and Australia.

Migration to both the regions has been showing a declining trend. While the migrants in West Asia came down from 20.70 lakh in 2013 to 18.93 lakh in 2018, it fell from 3.3 lakh to 1.28 lakh in the rest of the world during the five-year period.

The biggest fall in the migrants was seen in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), the most favourite destination of Keralites, with the number coming down from 8.98 lakh to 8.30 lakh. The country had seen a surge in migrants from Kerala between 2013 and 2016 with the figure touching 9.43 lakh in 2016.

The UAE is followed by Kuwait with a fall in migrants from 1.83 lakh in 2013 to 1.27 lakh in 2018. Saudi Arabia, which accounts for the second largest number of migrants from the state, has seen a fall of 35,000. The number of migrants in the kingdom came down from 5.22 lakh to 4.87 lakh between 2016 and 2018.

Migration experts are expecting a huge fall in the number of Keralites migrating to Saudi Arabia since it has started aggressively following a drive for naturalisation of labour and imposition of various taxes on the migrants.

S Irudaya Rajan, chair professor, Ministry of Overseas Indian Affairs (MOIA) Research Unit on International Migration at CDS, who led the survey said this was the first time the number of migrants from the state has shown such a huge decline since the CDS started conducting the survey in 2018.

The total number of emigrants living abroad in 1998 was 13.6 lakh. This went up to 18.4 lakh in 2003, 21.9 lakh in 2008, 22.8 lakh in 2011 and 24 lakh in 2013. Irudayarajan pointed out several trends  some directly related to emigration and others related to its determinants  playing a major role in the fall in migration.

The study found continuing demographic contraction of Keralas young working age population, the narrowing of wage differentials between Kerala and the Gulf as well as rising competition from other states in India as the major factor behind the decreasing migration from the state.

The demographic changes have decreased the population in the migration prone age group (15-29 years). Kerala attained replacement level of fertility in 1987. Since then, the working age population in Kerala has grown at a decreasing rate leaving lesser people for migration, Irudayarajan said.

Moreover, the migration to West Asia turned less attractive to the educated and skilled new generation with wages in Gulf economies showing steady decline against a steady increase in the domestic economy. City-based development and opportunities in the informal sector have risen as a result of which people tend to stay back.

Decades of investment in education has made Keralites skilled. High skilled people tend to migrate to other parts of the world, especially the developed economies in the West, owing to better opportunities, he said.

However, the study shows migration to the West is also declining. The migrants in the West declined from 3.30 lakhs to 2.02 lakh between 2013 and 2018. The US which accounted for the maximum number of migrants outside the Middle East has now only 46,535 migrants from the state compared to 69,559 in 2013.

Irudayarajan has attributed the decline to the anti-migrant policies of Trump presidency. He also anticipates setback to migration to Europe due to recent international events of cultural backlash such as Brexit.

He suggests a vibrant domestic economy as the only solution to deal with the change in migratory patterns. The first step is to create an inclusive society for return migrants. This will improve trust in the government which will urge the migrant community to invest more in social schemes and policies.

These investments, coupled with creative solutions such as low-cost housing, digital infrastructure in education and health care, and an overall engagement with the migrant community will help chart a new growth path for the state  one that relies more on the strengths of the domestic economy, Irudayrajan said.

Interestingly, the decline in the migration has not led to a corresponding fall in foreign remittances. On the contrary, it has gone up. This is seen as an indication of the new generation migrants climbing the social ladder and earning higher wages.

The increase in household remittances during the period was 26 percent. The estimated total annual remittances to Kerala are placed at Rs 85,092 crore. This means an average per capita remittance of Rs 24,000. The corresponding per capita remittance in 2013 was Rs 21,000, in 2011, Rs 14,883 and Rs 12,840 in 2008.

The CDS scholar feels the recent devastating floods, and the massive loss of physical capital and land value may push migration at least in the short run. The importance for emigration for Kerala could not be more important for Kerala now than ever.

However, he said that it is obvious that the long-term future of Kerala is going to be less dependent on emigration and remittances. With an unfavourable demographic dividend, it is impossible for Kerala to regain the dominance it had in migration to the Gulf.

Although there is still a possibility of improving skilled migration to developed nations in the West, recent international events may make migration harder for Keralites looking for greener pastures abroad.
In the case against Bishop Franco Mulakkal, the police will have to answer how a person accused of rape is being questioned without being arrested.

While the investigation against Bishop Franco Mulakkal  accused of raping a nun 13 times between 2014 and 2016  continues for a second day, the most important question which the police will have to answer is how a person accused of rape is being questioned without being arrested. The procedure that the law mandates, in a case involving non-bailable offences, is to arrest the accused and interrogate, once the accused is in custody.

It is up to the counsel of the accused to apply for bail and prove the grounds for issue of bail. In the case of non-bailable offence, bail is usually granted only if it proved that a prima facie case cannot be made out from the complaint registered.

The FIR registered on 28 June, at 6.12 pm in Kuravidangalu police station, Kottayam (a copy of which Firstpost has reviewed), pursuant to a complaint by the survivor nun, charges Mulakkal with Sections 342, 376(2)(k), 376(2)(n), 377, 506 for offences amounting to wrongful confinement, rape, unnatural sex and criminal intimidation. Mulakkal approached the high court for anticipatory bail, the hearing for which was adjourned to 25 September.

If the accused hasnt been able to procure anticipatory bail, the police cannot delay arrest any further. But the police force behaves like this often, only when influential people are involved," says criminal advocate Paneer Selvam, practising in Tamil Nadu, who says he can mention multiple cases of immediate arrests when rape is in question.

Rajat Kalsan, a Haryana criminal lawyer, who has represented the victim in the Dabra gangrape case, as well as other such sexual offences, told Firstpost: "According to the CrPC, the procedure is clear: first arrest, then interrogate. They (police) delay saying (section) 164 (of the CrPC, which deals with the recording of confessions and statements) hasn't been filed, or medical evidence is awaited, but the criminal procedure code is unambiguous."

The Allahabad High Court had severely reprimanded the Uttar Pradesh government and Uttar Pradesh Police for delaying the arrest of Unnao BJP MLA Kuldeep Singh Sengar, who is an accused in the Unnao rape. Similarly, different courts have routinely criticised police for delaying arrests of those in positions of power. But these delays continue, like it is evident from the case of Mulakkal.

The Kerala-based nun had accused the bishop of having sexually assaulted her repeatedly between 2014 and 2016 at a convent run by the Jalandhar diocese in Kottayam district.

Mulakkal has, however, dismissed the allegations as "baseless and concocted", insisting he was "innocent". He appeared before a Special Investigation Team (SIT) of the Kerala police for the second day on Thursday.

He arrived at the Crime Branch (CID) office in Thrippunithura and was quizzed by a five-member team headed by Vaikom Deputy Superintendent of Police, K Subhash, over the nun's allegations.

On Wednesday, the bishop, who traveled from Jalandhar to Kochi after being summoned by Kerala police, was questioned for seven hours. Mulakkal filed for anticipatory bail in Kerala High Court on Tuesday, which was deferred by the court to 25 September.

He also wrote to Pope Francis, the highest authority in the Roman Catholic Church hierarchy, expressing his desire to "temporarily step aside" from the responsibilities of the diocese, allowing him time to fight his case.

Several priests and nuns have been protesting against the bishop in Kerala. On Thursday, activists staged a protest outside the Kerala Secretariat in Thiruvananthapuram, demanding that the priest be arrested.

The nun wrote to Apostolic Nuncio, the representative of the Pope in India, demanding justice in the matter, following which the Vatican formed a one-member panel to probe the rape allegations against the priest.

With inputs from TK Devasia and PTI
Bishop Franco Mulakkal, accused of rape by a Kerala nun, is being interrogated for the second day by the Special Investigating Team, even as protests continue in Kochi demanding his arrest for the sexual abuse.

Even as the Kerala Police question rape-accused Bishop Franco Mulakkal for the second day, protests continued in Kochi on Thursday, with people burning his effigy, as well. The police are interrogating the clergyman in the case of a nun's rape. She has accused the clergyman of raping her 13 times between 2014 and 2016, but Mulakkal maintains his innocence.

Workers of the All India Youth Federation (AIYF)  the youth wing of the Communist Party of India (Marxist)  have been protesting outside the Crime Branch, burning Mulakkal's effigy and demanding his arrest. The activists have protesting since Wednesday, when they jumped in front of the Jalandhar bishop's car and shouted slogans after his questioning ended.

Mulakkal, who had recently relinquished his administrative responsibilities as the bishop of the Jalandhar diocese, joined the probe around 11 am at the Crime Branch office at Thrippunithura in Kochi around 11 am. He was asked to appear for questioning for the second time, after the Special Investigation Team grilled him for seven hours on Wednesday.

#BREAKING  CPI takes out protest march seeking rape accused Bishops arrest in Kochi. #ArrestBishopFranco | @Neethureghu with more details pic.twitter.com/NF3tHkF0lP  News18 (@CNNnews18) September 20, 2018

Before resuming the interrogation, Kottayam Superintendent of Police Hari Sankar said they had completed around 50 percent of the questioning and hoped to complete the interrogation by Thursday evening. He said investigators are trying to solve and make sense of the contradictions in the statements of the nun, witnesses and the accused in the case.

When asked about the contradictions on Wednesday, Sankar had said: "That's the purpose of the interrogation. The interrogation is not over. We will reflect on it after it is over."

The Kerala-based nun has accused the senior Catholic priest of sexually assaulting her repeatedly between 2014 and 2016 at a convent run by the Jalandhar diocese in Kottayam district. The clergyman has claimed that the allegations against him were a "cooked up story to wreak vengeance" for the actions he had taken on various complaints received against the nun. Claiming innocence, the bishop has said that the allegation of rape was "nothing but a fictional story".

As the bishop joined the investigation, a protest by various Catholic reform organisations and a group of nuns seeking his arrest entered its 13th day on Thursday.

A nun protesting at Kochi's Vanchi Square with the others said they all were waiting for news of the bishop's arrest because it would send a strong message to those who abuse women in the country.

The rape survivor's sister, a nun who has been on a hunger strike, was hospitalised on Wednesday as her health deteriorated. A march was organised to the office of the Inspector General of Police in Kochi seeking the bishop's arrest.

The secretary of the Mother Superior of the Jalandhar diocese, Sister Alphonso, on Thursday said that the rape allegations were false, reported India Today. She also alleged that if the nun was raped multiple times for two years, why was she happy with the bishop during that time.

With inputs from agencies
The senior priest arrived at the Crime Branch (CID) office in Thrippunithura and is being quizzed by a five-member team headed by Vaikom Deputy Superintendent of Police, K Subhash, over the nun's allegations. The senior priest has denied the rape allegations and assured full co-operation in the probe.

Kochi: Bishop Franco Mulakkal, who allegedly raped a Kerala nun, appeared before a Special Investigation Team (SIT) of the Kerala police for the second day on Thursday.

Mulakkal arrived at the Crime Branch (CID) office in Thrippunithura and is being quizzed by a five-member team headed by Vaikom Deputy Superintendent of Police, K Subhash, over the nun's allegations. He has denied the rape allegations and assured full co-operation in the probe.

On Wednesday, the Bishop, who travelled from Jalandhar to Kochi after being summoned by Kerala police, was questioned for seven hours. Bishop Mulakkal filed for anticipatory bail in Kerala High Court on Tuesday, which was deferred by the court to 25 September.

He also wrote to Pope Francis, the highest authority in the Roman Catholic Church hierarchy, expressing his desire to 'temporarily step aside' from the responsibilities of the diocese, allowing him time to fight his case and repeated travels to Kerala, where the case is lodged.

Several priests and nuns have been protesting against the Bishop in Kerala. On Thursday, activists staged a protest outside the Kerala Secretariat in Trivandrum, demanding that the prelate be arrested.

The nun wrote to Apostolic Nuncio, the representative of the Pope in India, demanding justice in the matter, following which the Vatican formed a one-member panel to probe the rape allegations against the priest.

The nun has accused the priest of raping her 13 times between 2014 and 2016. The Bishop, however, refuted the allegations, terming them "baseless and concocted".
According to the ordinance, giving instant Triple Talaq has been made illegal and void, and will attract a jail term of three years for the husband.

Stating that there was an "overpowering urgency" to bring the measure as instances of this mode of divorce continued unabated despite the Supreme Court striking it down, the Union Cabinet on Wednesday passed the Ordinance to amend provisions of the Triple Talaq Bill. President Ram Nath Kovind signed the Ordinance later the same day. The official name for the law is the Muslim Women (Protection of Rights of Marriage) Ordinance 2018

According to the ordinance, giving instant Triple Talaq has been made illegal and void, and will attract a jail term of three years for the husband. Seeking to allay fears that the law could be misused, the government has included certain safeguards in it such as adding a provision of bail for the accused before trial.These amendments were cleared by the Cabinet on 29 August.

The Ordinance states that even though the Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on Marriage) Bill, 2017 is pending in the Rajya Sabha and despite the Supreme Court has observed that the practice of Triple Talaq is unconstitutional, the practice still carries on.

Here are a few of the key features of the Ordinance:
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 TISS

New Delhi: The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) on Thursday arrested four persons including an Assistant Director of the Social Welfare Department in Bihar in connection with its ongoing investigation into the shelter home rape case in Muzaffarpur of the state.

The CBI said that the agency has arrested Rosy Rani, Assistant Director, and three others - Santosh, Guddu and Vijay - from Muzaffarpur and Sonepur of Bihar.

Rani, who was responsible for carrying out inspection at the shelter homes, is being investigated for abetment under the POCSO Act. "The girls shared their ordeal with Rani but she didn't take any action," the official said.

The other three are staffers of main accused Brajesh Thakur. "The agency has also frozen 20 bank accounts of Thakur," he added.

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 (TISS), Mumbai that mentioned incidents of rapes of minor girls.
The Supreme Court has also asked both electronic and print media not to sensationalise incidents of sexual abuse like the Muzaffarpur shelter homes case and be cautious and diligent in its reporting.

The Supreme Court on Thursday vacated the Patna High Court's 23 August order banning the media from reporting on the Muzaffarpur shelter home rapes case and decided to monitor the investigation.

The bench asserted that there cannot be a blanket ban on the media in covering the case, but the press needs to be cautious and diligent in its reporting, according to Bar and Bench. The court directed that the media cannot telecast or publish images of victims of sexual offences even in morphed or blurred forms. It also asked both electronic and print media not to sensationalise incidents of sexual abuse and sexual violence.

The Supreme Court perused the existing status reports of the Central Bureau of Investigation, which is looking into the Muzaffarpur case, and observed that the inquiry appears to be progressing in the right direction. Justices Madan B Lokur and Deepak Gupta have sought another status report from the CBI within four weeks, reported CNN-News18.

On Wednesday, while hearing the plea against the high court-imposed ban, the Suprme Court had observed that no action had been taken against the media for flouting laws and disclosing details about a 19-year-old girl who was gangraped in Rewari in Haryana, which could help identify the victim.

The plea challenging the Patna High Court order restraining the media was filed by a Patna-based journalist through advocate Fauzia Shakil. The petition, which sought a stay on the high court's direction, claimed that the order was "patently erroneous" as it amounted to imposing a "blanket ban" on the media reporting on the shelter home case.

With inputs from PTI
In a year, since it assumed power, the Modi government promulgated nine ordinances, PRS Legislative Research reported. The list of ordinances include: the ordinance to amend the land acquisition act and the ordinance to allow foreign direct investment in insurance companies to be increased to 49 percent of equity, from the current 26 percent.

In July 2014, Vice-President of India Venkaiah Naidu, who was the then parliamentary affairs minister, said that in ten years (between 2004-2014) when the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance was in power, it promulgated 61 ordinances. This statement has repeatedly been used as an explanation by the current BJP-led NDA regime every time they take the ordinance route.

The latest such instance was when President Ram Nath Kovind signed the ordinance banning the practice of triple talaq and making it a penal offence. Union Law Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad said that there was an "overpowering urgency" to bring the measure as instances of this mode of divorce continued unabated despite the Supreme Court striking it down.

According to the ordinance, giving instant triple talaq has been made illegal and void, and will attract a jail term of three years for the husband. Seeking to allay fears that the law could be misused, the government has included certain safeguards such as adding a provision of bail for the accused before trial.

These amendments were cleared by the Cabinet on 29 August. "There was an overpowering urgency and a compelling necessity to bring the ordinance as the practice continued unabated despite the Supreme Court order last year," Prasad told a press conference. While the law makes instant triple talaq a "non-bailable" offence, an accused can approach a magistrate even before trial to seek bail. In a non-bailable offence, bail cannot be granted by police at the police station itself.

Read the key features of the ordinance here

BJP's ordinance route

In the year after it assumed power, the Modi government promulgated nine ordinances, PRS Legislative Research reported. The list of ordinances include: The ordinance to amend the land acquisition Act and the ordinance to allow foreign direct investment in insurance companies to be increased to 49 percent of equity (up from 26 percent).

One of the major reasons for the government issuing ordinances is because the NDA does not enjoy the same majority in Rajya Sabha. Low numbers are a hurdle as disruption by MPs in Rajya Sabha did not allow the House to operate. The BJP has only 45 out of the 250 MPs that comprise the Rajya Sabha. Without Opposition support, it was a herculean task for the BJP to pass any legislation in the Upper House of Parliament. Which is where the ordinance route comes in play.

What is an ordinance?

Ordinances are temporary laws which can be issued by the president when Parliament is not in session. The Indian system allows the Executive to pass emergency ordinances without having to get a majority in Parliament. Ordinances are issued by the president based on the advice of the Union Cabinet. The president has been empowered to promulgate ordinances based on the advice of the central government under Article 123 of the Constitution. This legislative power is available to the president only when either of the two Houses of Parliament is not in session to enact laws.

The purpose of ordinances is to allow governments to take immediate legislative action if circumstances make it necessary to do so at a time when Parliament is not in session. The legislation stands for six weeks from the start of the next Parliament. If it isnt voted onto the permanent statute within that time, the ordinance lapses, but can be reissued through a so-called repromulgation. Repromulgation of ordinances raises questions about the legislative authority of the Parliament as the highest law making body.

Currently, the maximum duration of six months the ordinance will be in effect will also give the BJP ample time to campaign on this legislative 'achievement', despite the uncertainty of winning approval for the law when Parliament meets for the Winter Session. However, ordinances can also be used to get around the opposition the government might be facing in Parliament. "If the government decides to do that, it is in a way putting to test the basic tenets of democracy," PRS noted.

Ordinances passed by Modi government since 2014

In five years under the UPA-II headed by former prime minister Manmohan Singh, 25 ordinances were promulgated. The Manmohan Singh government of UPA-I (2004-2009) issued 36 ordinances. It averaged six ordinances a year in its 10-year term. In October 2016, after promulgation of the Ordinance to amend the Enemy Property Act (Eviction of Unauthorised Occupants Act) of 1971, the number of ordinances promulgated under the NDA government headed by Modi was 22.

According to a report in The Hindu, after taking charge in 2014, the Modi government recommended two ordinances at the very first Cabinet meeting. One was an ordinance to amend the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) Act to facilitate Nripendra Mishra take over as Principal Secretary to the Prime Minister, and the other to amend the Andhra Pradesh Reorganisation Act for transfer of a cluster of villages for the Polavaram project. Both were issued on 28 May, 2014. These aside, the government issued five ordinances in 2014, including the one to amend the Land Acquisition law of 2013. The ordinance envisaged procuring land for industrial corridors, rural infrastructure, defence and housing.

In 2015, 10 ordinances were promulgated, including the one to amend land law which was issued twice on 3 April and 30 May respectively. The other ordinances issued in 2015 included the one to amend the Citizenship Act to merge Persons of Indian Origin (PIO) and Overseas Citizenship of India (OCI) schemes, by which PIOs will also get life-long Indian visas.

Another ordinance was aimed at amending the Motor Vehicles Act to bring e-carts and e-rickshaws under the ambit of the law.

Ordinance to amend the Enemy Property Act was promulgated twice in 2016. It sought to amend a 48-year-old law to guard against claims of succession or transfer of properties left by people who migrated to Pakistan and China after the wars.

After promulgating the ordinance allowing the foreign direct investment in insurance companies to be increased to 49 percent of equity, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley said: "The ordinance demonstrates the firm commitment and determination of this government to reform. It also announces to the rest of the world, including investors, that this country can no longer wait even if one of the Houses of Parliament waits indefinitely to take up its agenda." Jaitley further added that "already there is too much delay, which is why there is urgency."

Records show that former prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru cleared 70 ordinances from 1952 to 1964. Indira Gandhi issued 77 ordinances from 1971 to 1977. Rajiv Gandhi issued 35 ordinances in five years. PV Narasimha Rao's Congress government issued 77 ordinances during its five-year term. The United Front government, during its 1996-1998 term under two prime ministers, HD Deve Gowda and IK Gujral, issued a record 77 ordinances. The NDA government headed by the BJP's Atal Bihari Vajpayee issued 58 ordinances between 1998 and 2004.
Hamzafar, a native of Kerala's Kalpetta, was detained by Afghan Security Agencies last year for illegally entering the country to join his associates in the Islamic State.

New Delhi: The National Investigation Agency (NIA) arrested Nashidul Hamzafar, an accused in the Islamic State Kasargod case after he was deported to Delhi from Kabul.

Hamzafar, a native of Kerala's Kalpetta, was detained by Afghan Security Agencies last year for illegally entering the country to join his associates in the Islamic State.

The case relates to the criminal conspiracy hatched by the accused persons from Kasaragod district of Kerala and their associates since Ramadan, 2015, with the intention of joining and furthering the objectives of the Islamic State.

Pursuant to the conspiracy, 14 accused persons from Kasaragod district had left India or their workplaces in the West Asia between mid-May and early-July 2016, before travelling to Afghanistan, where they joined the Islamic State.

Hamzafar had participated in the conspiracy through encrypted social media platforms with the other absconding accused persons in this case like Abdul Rashid Abdulla and Ashfak Majeed who were known to him through his college-mates Shihas, Firoz Khan and Bestin Vincent.

Pursuant to the criminal conspiracy hatched with fugitive Islamic State activist Abdulla, besides Majeed and others, Hamzafar had left India on 3 October, 2017, and travelled to Muscat before travelling to Iran and further reaching Kabul, Afghanistan, where he was detained.

The arrested accused was produced before the Special Court for NIA Cases, New Delhi, on Wednesday, and will now be taken to Kochi on transit remand for producing him before the Special NIA Court, Ernakulam, that had issued a non-bailable warrant against him.
Imran Khan and Sheikh Mohamed discussed ways to further enhance strong bilateral relations in all fields. The also discussed figured major regional issues, especially the Palestinian cause, the situation in Yemen, the Iranian interference in the region, the situation in Afghanistan and the means to deal with these challenges

Amid reports that Imran Khan Pakistan might seek economic assistance from Saudi Arabia on his visit, Imran told international media on Wednesday that Pakistan has a special bond with the country and that they will not allow anyone to attack the country. He also met with the Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi with whom he discussed bilateral relations.

Imran arrived in Saudi on Tuesday where he traveled to media and visited the prophet's mosque. He then flew to Jiddah, Saudi Arabia's port city on the Red Sea on Wednesday, where he met with King Salman at a luncheon at Peace Palace, after which he left for UAE.

Imran spoke to the Arabiya TV emphasising the fact that Pakistan will always stand with Saudi Arabia. Pakistan always stands by Saudi Arabia, Imran said, Saudi Arabia helped Pakistan when Pakistan needed help, he also said, according to tweets from the Saudi-based network.

In an exclusive interview to Saudi Gazette, Imran also stated that Pakistan would like to play the role of a mediator in West Asia to bring the Muslim world together.

"I would like to ensure peace in West Asia because it is very distressing for Muslims to see conflict among Muslim nations. If you look at the Muslim world... in Libya, in Somalia, Syria, Afghanistan, and Pakistan too. But Pakistan has controlled terrorism. In West Asia, we would like our role as reconciliator to bring the Muslim world together. This would be our main effort," he said.

On Wednesday night, Imran arrived in UAE where he met Mohamed Bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi and Deputy Supreme Commander of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) Armed Forces.

The two leaders discussed ways to further enhance strong bilateral relations in all fields. The discussion also figured major regional issues, especially the Palestinian cause, the situation in Yemen, the Iranian interference in the region, the situation in Afghanistan and the means to deal with these challenges, reported Saudi Gazette.

The Crown Prince of UAE also tweeted about the meetings.

Mohamed bin Zayed holds talks with the Pakistani Prime Minister on regional and international issues of mutual interest as well as enhancing of bilateral ties. pic.twitter.com/zvOzrVkgTH     (@MohamedBinZayed) September 19, 2018

Mohamed Bin Zayed spoke of UAE's determination to maintain ties between the countries. "The UAE under the leadership the President His Highness Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan is determined to maintain robust ties with all its friendly countries on the basis of mutual respect, trust and common understanding of each other's interests," the Crown Prince of UAE said to Khaleej Times.

He reaffirmed the country's keenness to promote the values of peace, tolerance, and peaceful co-existence on the regional and international levels.

On similar lines, Imran emphasised on Pakistan resolve to maintain resilient relations based on collaboration with the UAE across all domains and to continue to cultivate constructive partnerships between the two countries, said the report.

According to reports, the meetings were attended by Minister of Interior Prince Abdul Aziz Bin Saud Bin Naif, Minister of Islamic Affairs, Call and Guidance Sheikh Abdullatif Al Asheikh, Minister of Commerce and Investment Majed Al-Qasabi, Minister of Foreign Affairs Adel Al-Jubeir, Minister of Energy, Industry and Mineral Resources Khalid Al-Falih, Minister of Media Awwad Al-Awwad, and other senior civil and military officials. Pakistan finance minister Asad Umar and foreign minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi were also present.

Adel Al-Jubeir reaffirmed the depth of the Saudi-Pakistani relations, describing them as historical and strategic, reported Saudi Gazette. He also stated that ways of strengthening and intensifying strategic bilateral relations in all fields were discussed during the meeting.

With inputs from agencies
PDP, which was a coalition partner of the BJP in Jammu and Kashmir government till its fall on 19 June 2018, was reacting to a tweet by Pakistan Foreign Office spokesperson Mohammad Faisal

Srinagar: The Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) Thursday expressed hope that Prime Minister Narendra Modi will reciprocate the offer of talks made by his Pakistan counterpart Imran Khan, saying dialogue was the only way out of the stalemate.

Khan has proposed a meeting between Pakistan Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi and his Indian counterpart Sushma Swaraj on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in New York in September.

In a tweet on its official handle, the PDP said, "Thank you Prime Minister Imran Khan for your positive gesture. We hope Prime Minister Narendra Modi will reciprocate your sentiments. Dialogue is the only way out of this stalemate".

PDP, which was a coalition partner of the BJP in Jammu and Kashmir government till its fall on 19 June 2018, was reacting to a tweet by Pakistan Foreign Office spokesperson Mohammad Faisal.

"Imran Khan has responded to Narendra Modi, in a positive spirit, reciprocating his sentiments. Let's talk and resolve all issues. We await formal response from India," Faisal wrote on Twitter.

Ties between India and Pakistan nose-dived following a spate of terror attacks on Indian military bases by Pakistan-based terror groups since January 2016. Following the strikes, India announced it will not engage in talks with Pakistan, saying terror and talks cannot go hand-in-hand.

Amid heightened tension with Pakistan over Uri terror attack in which 18 soldiers were killed, India had pulled out of the SAARC Summit to be held in Islamabad in November, 2016.
Congress President Rahul Gandhi on Thursday visited poll-bound Rajasthan where he was scheduled to meet party workers and address a public gathering in the Dungarpur district.

Congress President Rahul Gandhi on Thursday visited poll-bound Rajasthan where he was scheduled to meet party workers and address a public gathering in the Dungarpur district. His visit to the poll-bound state comes a few days after he held a roadshow in Madhya Pradesh. This is also Rahul's second visit to Rajasthan since his roadshow in Jaipur on 11 August.

Pratibha Raghwanshi, the National General Secretary of the Indian Youth Congress, tweeted that Rahul was to address people in the Sagwara area in Dungarpur, which is a tribal district in south Rajasthan. According to Raguvanshi, the tribal population has traditionally voted for the Congress party. She also said that they would "welcome him among them".

Today Congress President Shri @RahulGandhi will be in Saagwara, Dungarpur, to address people in the tribal district in south Rajasthan, is part of the Vagad region.The tribals have been traditionally Congress supporters and will welcome him amongst them #AapnoRahulGandhi pic.twitter.com/NYlNGpPCBk  Pratibha Raghuwanshi   (@pratibhaiyc1) September 20, 2018

However, The Economic Times reported that the BJP pulled ahead of the Congress in the party's supposed stronghold of the tribal districts of Udaipur, Banswara, Dungarpur, and Pratapgarh in the 2013 elections.

Ahead of Rahul's arrival, AICC general secretary and former Rajasthan chief minister Ashok Gehlot "welcomed" Rahul to the state.

Rahul's visit came a few days after BJP president Amit Shah's visit to the state. Shah had spoken to farmers at a function in Nagaur district and said that the BJP and Prime Minister Narendra Modi do not give slogans merely for elections and they know how to make them a reality. Targeting Rahul, Shah said that he doubted if the Congress leader even knew Rabi crops and Kharif crops are grown.

The Modi government approved the declaration of 227 villages across the tribal districts as 'scheduled area' in April 2018. This would allow the people control over minor resources of minerals and forest produce.

However, the Rajasthan Congress remains optimistic about a win at the Assembly polls this year. The Economic Times quoted state Congress chief Sachin Pilot as saying, The writing is on the wall. Congress is coming with a big majority. Rajasthans result will pave the way and Congress will lead the government at the Centre also."

Meanwhile, Rajasthan Chief Minister Vasundhara Raje on Sunday said her government left "no stone unturned" in serving the people of the state and sought from them another term, during 'Rajasthan Gaurav Yatra' at her home turf in the Hadouti region.
Vice-President Venkaiah Naidu said he had a series of productive meetings with Romanian president Klaus Iohannis, Prime Minister Viorica Dancila and President of the Senate and Chamber of Deputies on Wednesday.

Bucharest: Vice-President Venkaiah Naidu on Thursday said that the growing outreach of Romania and India's political leadership has created a fertile ground for economic development.

Addressing the Prahova Chamber of Commerce and Industries in Romania, Naidu said, "The warm outreach of the two nations' political leadership has created a fertile ground to reap the fruits of economic development. I am confident that sustained efforts will take our bilateral relations to greater levels."

The Vice-President of India further said that he had a series of productive meetings with Romanian president Klaus Iohannis, Prime Minister Viorica Dancila and President of the Senate and Chamber of Deputies on Wednesday.

He also expressed his elation at the Prahova Chamber's existing agreements with Indian business entities such as the Confederation of Indian Industry, Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce & Industry, All India Association of Industries and Federation of Indian Export Organisation.

"These chambers are working together to generate business on both sides. Today, ASSOCHAM has also signed a Memorandum of Understanding of cooperation with the Prahova Chamber. This is a welcome development. I am told that many Indian companies are already doing business in Prahova county. Prahova county hosts the Oil and Gas University of Ploiesti, which signed a Memorandum of Understanding yesterday (Wednesday) with Pandit Deendayal Petroleum University in Gujarat," Naidu added.

He stressed that Indian investment in Romania is increasing and that the government is fully committed and working towards supporting these trends.

"India is experiencing transformation on an unprecedented scale. India is the fastest growing, major economy in the world, with a growth rate of 8.2 per cent in the last quarter. India is moving towards a knowledge-based society, which aims to build a five trillion dollar economy by 2025. This will make us the third largest consumer market in the world by 2025," the vice-president said.

Concluding his speech, he said, "I wish to warmly invite you all to partner us in India's exciting and transformative journey, which is going to usher in a new era in India-Romania ties. I wish the Prahova Chamber of Commerce all the very best in all its future endeavours."
Bhagwat even went a step further: Asserting that it is for the government to decide whether it wants the state to be divided into three parts: Jammu, Kashmir and Ladakh.

RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat caused a stir Wednesday after he endorsed the removal of articles 370 and 35A, both of which grant special status to Jammu and Kashmir. Bhagwat not only wants an abrogation of these articles (which ensure special privileges for state citizens) he even went a step further: Asserting that it is for the government to decide whether it wants the state to be divided into three parts: Jammu, Kashmir and Ladakh.

"The idea behind the division of any state is administrative convenience and the country's integrity and security should remain intact. If on these parameters the government feels at any time that the state should be divided, then so be it. If not, the state may remain intact," Bhagwat explained. Congress leader professor Saifuddin Soz called a press meet at his residence in Srinagar on Wednesday to expressed regret at these statements and said he saw them as just one more step in the RSS' avowed ambition of building a Hindu Rashtra.

Soz called upon mainstream political parties to note that even the "subtle distance between the RSS and the BJP on political and social issues has evaporated, with the Indian society and particularly Muslims and minorities having to face very difficult times". The issue troubling Kashmiris deals with the revocation of Article 35A which is being contested by the RSS, and it is with this objective that they have filed a petition before the Supreme Court, Soz pointed out.

This repeated 'harping on the Kashmir issue' must be understood, Soz believes, in the context of the recently published book The RSS- A View To The Inside by Walter Anderson and Shridhar Damle. While praising the phenomenal growth of the RSS since the 1980s, the book highlights how while the RSS has an almost pan-India presence, the only place in the subcontinent where they been unable to set up functional shakhas is the Valley, Soz pointed out.

Dr Sameer Kaul, spokesperson for the National Conference in Delhi, believes that the abrogation of Article 35A is akin to playing with fire and could well see a return to the 1989 situation when insurgency flared up in a major way. National Conference leader Farooq Abdullah has threatened to withdraw from the 2019 Lok Sabha polls and also the Assembly elections if the Centre does not clarify its stance on articles 35A and 370. Farooq Abdullah said in a subsequent tweet, We will not only boycott the panchayat elections but also the Lok Sabha and Assembly elections if the Centre doesnt clear its stand on Article 35A and Article 370.

Former chief minister Mehbooba Mufti, who is the leader of the Peoples Democratic Party, warns that removal of these articles will have disastrous implications. "Tinkering with or scrapping these articles that grant special status to the state of Jammu and Kashmir will only create alienation, push more youth to the wall and will have serious consequences not just for the state, but the whole country." Right through her tenure as chief minister, Mehbooba warned both Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Home Minister Rajnath Singh on the need to safeguard articles 370 and 35A, even going to the extent of saying that there would be no one in the state to fly the Tricolour if any sort of tinkering happened since these two articles of the Indian Constitution dealt with her state.

In fact, her party hired constitutional expert Fali Nariman and a slew of high-profile lawyers to buttress their stand in the Supreme Court. They also prepared all the requisite documents in May which were to be filed in the Supreme Court in July. Unfortunately, her government fell on 19 June. Insiders in her government believe that her unequivocal view on this matter was one of the main reasons why the BJP chose to withdraw support. On 22 June, two days after her government fell, Mehbooba went to meet then governor NN Vohra. Mehbooba yet again raised both articles and how imperative it was to safeguard them.

The PDP also announced its unwillingness to participate in the local panchayat elections given the Centres unwillingness to clarify their stand on this grave issue. The CPM also announced that they will not participate in the local panchayat elections. Two days ago, CPM state secretary Ghulam Nabi Malik announced that given the situation, their party would boycott the polls and that the governor should have convened an all-party meet to discuss the issue. The CPM is the first national party to announce their boycott. However, the Congress said Tuesday that they will fight all the urban local body and panchayat elections as they do not want to hand over grassroot democratic institutions to the BJP and RSS. The Valley is also home to other minority groups, including Kashmiri Pandits, Sikhs and Christians, many of whom are united in their support Article 35A.

The Valley has almost 80,000 Sikhs and the All Parties Sikh Coordination Committee has taken to the streets to protest this move. The 3,500 Kashmiri Pandits who chose to stay in the Valley during the years of militancy have also come out in support of Article 35A. Sanjay Tickoo, president of the Kashmir Pandit Sangarsh Samiti, throwing his support behind 35A will only further muddy the waters given the charged atmosphere. Tickoo cites the example of the Valley being home to seven lakh non-Kashmiri labourers and the fact that there has never been an opposition to their presence either.

Soz believes no effort has been made by the Centre to engage with the locals, a view he insists has the support of several senior army officials. He mentions that several generals, including Lt General DS Hooda, asked the political government to engage with the people, especially the youth.

During this press meet, Soz recalled his discussion with Spanish intellectual Johan Galtung, who possesses enormous knowledge on how to deal with conflict situations. "Galtung shared with me his experience of discussing the Afghan crisis with young members of the Taliban whom he met in Jalalabad. These young people told him he was the first person who tried to discuss the Afghan problem with them. Dialogue is also the only way forward in our state," added Soz.
Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) chief Mohan Bhagwat on Wednesday asserted that the outfit was not against inter-caste marriages, adding that such kind of marriages were most common among volunteers of the Sangh.

New Delhi: Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) chief Mohan Bhagwat on Wednesday asserted that the outfit was not against inter-caste marriages, adding that such kind of marriages were most common among volunteers of the Sangh.

Addressing the last day of the three-day lecture series at New Delhi's Vigyan Bhavan, the RSS chief said inter-caste marriage was an issue of compatibility between men and women.

"First inter-caste marriage in Maharashtra took place in 1942, congratulatory messages poured in for them, including ones from Baba Saheb Ambedkar and Sri Guruji. Guruji had said 'you aren't getting married only due to physical attraction. You want to convey that everyone is equal. If you do a survey of inter-caste marriages in India, maybe you will find the maximum percentage of those being swayamsevaks from Sangh," he added.

Reacting to Article 35A, which disallows people from residing in Jammu and Kashmir, buying or owning immovable property in the state, settling permanently, or getting state government jobs, the RSS chief said that the Sangh does not accept Article 370 and 35A of the Constitution.

"Our views on Article 35 A and 370 are well known. We do not believe that these provisions should exist," he said.

Responding to questions of mob lynching and cow vigilantism, Bhagwat said cow protectors shouldn't be equated with "anti-social vigilantes".

The RSS chief further said that although cows should be protected, nobody should go against the law in the name of cow vigilantism.

"Cow protectors shouldn't be equated with those anti-social vigilantes. The society needs to be made aware. Only then cows will be protected and the country would benefit. Taking the law into one's own hand, violence, destructing property are totally inappropriate. Due process of law should follow. The guilty should be punished," he added.

Bhagwat also called for the timely construction of a Ram Temple in Ayodhya.
Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) chief Mohan Bhagwat spoke at the organisation's three-day outreach event organised in Delhi from Monday to Wednesday, at which he presented the Sangh's views on a number of contentious subjects. He also answered wide-ranging written questions on the concluding day of the conclave, including on matters like the Ram temple dispute, inter-caste marriages, education, crimes against women and cow vigilantism.

The event saw the presence of several leaders of the ruling BJP as well as Bollywood actors, artistes, academicians and other politicians. However, nearly all major Opposition parties gave the conclave  'Bhavishya Ka Bharat: An RSS Perspective'  a miss, though the RSS had said it had invited them.

'Faceless' RSS is 'most open organisation'

The three-day lecture series was primarily an attempt by the RSS to change the public perception of the Sangh. With this in mind, Bhagwat focused on creating a new image for the RSS at the event.

"The Sangh wants the common man to lead the society in the right direction. People tell us that the Sangh is becoming faceless. We want to be faceless so that we don't become arrogant. If tomorrow pictures of Mohan Bhagwat start getting published in newspapers, it will be a matter of concern for Mohan Bhagwat," he remarked.

"Who will be in power and what policy the country will accept is something to be decided by the society and people. There are mechanisms in place for that... We are not concerned about that, what we are concerned about is the conduct of the society. The Sangh is the most democratic organisation. We function by consensus. Here, every worker can express his views. There are no restrictions... We have started our work to make a certain kind of people and society and we do not want anything else," the RSS chief said.

"People often believe that the RSS is a dictatorial organisation, and that one man decides everything... If you want to see the most open organisation, then you should come to the Sangh. There is no restriction. An RSS worker conducts himself in line with the values imbibed from the organisation. The RSS keeps away from politics but has views on issues of national interests. The Sangh believes that the centre of power should remain as envisaged in the Constitution. We consider it wrong if it is not so," Bhagwat said. "We never ask a swayamsevak (RSS volunteer) to work for a particular party; we ask them to back those working in national interest."

Bhagwat said that the RSS does not seek domination and is indifferent to who comes to power. The Sangh does not give advice but offers suggestions if it is sought, he said, without naming the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) or any of its leaders.

"We speak about interests of the nation and if we have strength, we push for what we consider to be right. There is nothing to hide here. We do it openly," he said. "Anyone (political party) can have such a policy in national interest. It is not that only one has it and another cannot have so," he said.

'Building Ram temple with defuse Hindu-Muslim tensions'

Bhagwat strongly pitched for the construction of a Ram temple in Ayodhya "at the earliest", asserting that it will end tensions between Hindus and Muslims. Describing Lord Ram as "Imam-e-Hind", Bhagwat said he may not be a god for some people of the country, but he is an idol of Indian values for people from all sections of society. "... As a Sangh worker, head of the Sangh and as part of the 'Ram Janambhoomi Andaloan', I want that a grand Ram temple be constructed at the earliest at the birth place of Lord Ram (Ayodhya)," he said.

"It should have happened by now. The construction of a grand Ram temple will help end a major reason for tensions between Hindus and Muslims, and if the temple is built harmoniously, then fingers will no longer be more pointing at Muslims," he said, on the final day of the RSS' lectures series, adding that this was a matter to "strengthen unity" and the culture of the country as well as an issue of faith for crores of citizens.

He also supported a dialogue on the dispute, but said the final decision lies with the Ram Mandir Samiti, which is spearheading the movement for the construction of a temple in Ayodhya. The Supreme Court is expected to pronounce its verdict in the case before the current Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra demits office on 2 October.

Bhagwat also said he did not know whether an ordinance on the Ram temple could be promulgated as he is not part of the government, but that it is the Centre's prerogative to make the decision. He said aspects such as whether an ordinance can be passed and legal challenges to it will have to be examined.

Hindutva and Hindu population

Speaking on Hindutva, the RSS chief claimed there is an increasing acceptance of the ideology in the world, but there was anger against it in India because of various wrong practices that have crept into society over the years. The Sangh is working to remove these practices, he added.

To a question about changing the demographic balance in parts of India and the "declining" Hindu population, Bhagwat said the matter of demographic balance is considered significant the world over, and it should be maintained in India, as well.

"Keeping this in mind, a policy on population should be prepared," he said, adding that one has to consider the country's projected population for the next 50 years and its resources to deal with the number. He said that such a policy should be applied first where the problem (of population) exists, "where there are more babies but means to bring them up are limited". "If their upbringing is not good, then they will not become good citizens."

Many BJP leaders and Hindu outfits have often claimed that the Hindu population was dwindling in India while Muslim numbers were on an upswing. Speaking against religious conversion, Bhagwat said it is almost always done with ulterior motives and also causes demographic imbalance. He said conversion through forceful means was wrong.

"KB Hedgewar (the founding chief of the RSS) always used to say, for how long will we blame the Muslim invaders and the British for our state? How did a handful of invaders from thousands of miles away conquer this nation of warriors? He used to say there is some problem that we need to correct," Bhagwat said.

"When we forgot our values, our decline started. If you study it, you will find that India's decline started with our decline. The solution is to go back to these values. This value-based behaviour and culture is our Hinduness. Therefore, Hindutva unites us... Hedgewar said we will organise a Hindu community. He did not make this proclamation because he wanted to oppose somebody, but he wanted to unite people."

LGBTQ rights, diversity and language

Replying to another question, he said it was the responsibility of the government and administration to protect its people against any discrimination. He also said that the LGBTQ community should not be isolated as it is also part of society. "Times are changing and society has to take a call on such issues," Bhagwat said.

"India is a country full of diversity and it must be respected and celebrated. In the form of the Congress, a big freedom movement had started in the country, which gave us many great personalities. For the sake of uniting the society, no one is a stranger to us, not even those who are opposed to us. We believe in an India, which includes everyone and does not exclude anybody. That is why we try to approach everyone. We do not want to dominate the society," Bhagwat said.

Bhagwat also asserted that the Sangh was not opposed to any language, including English, but it should be given its proper place, suggesting that it cannot replace an Indian language. "We have no enmity with English, we need proficient speakers in the language. You should not be opposed to any language, including English," Bhagwat said.

Kashmir and education

Speaking on education, he said there was a need for a new education policy that is a mix of modern methods of teaching and Indian traditions. He added that degrees were being given out by institutes today, but research work was decreasing.

Among other issues, Bhagwat also talked about the conflict in Jammu and Kashmir and said the RSS does not accept Article 370 and Article 35A of the Constitution that are related to the state. While Article 370 deals with the autonomy of the state, Article 35A allows the state Assembly to define the permanent residents of the state. Bhagwat pitched for greater development of Jammu and Kashmir, saying it was essential to bring its people into the mainstream.

Bhagwat also pitched for protection of cows but disapproved of miscreants going against the law in the name of cow vigilantism. The RSS chief said it is a crime to take law into one's own hands, and there should be stringent punishment in such cases. "But we have to reject the double-speak as there is no talk of violence by cow smugglers."

On the Sangh's view on inter-caste marriages, Bhagwat said it supports such weddings, and if there is a census on inter-caste marriages, the maximum such marriages would be of workers of the organisation.

Moreover, expressing anguish over crime against women, he said an environment needs to be created in India where women feel safe and secure. Men, he said, have to learn to respect women.

He also strongly backed the existing reservation system for various communities, but added that there should not be any politics on the matter.

With inputs from PTI
The Supreme Court on Thursday reserved it judgement in the Bhima Koregaon activists' arrest case.

The Supreme Court on Thursday reserved its judgment in the Bhima Koregaon activists' arrest case. Additional Solicitor-General Tushar Mehta opened the arguments in the court on behalf of the State of Maharashtra.

Mehta, while referring to the Eastern Regional Bureau (ERB) meeting, read out the contents of some letters without disclosing the names of the senders and the addressee. He tried to establish through the letters that how the five arrested activist are connected in the Bhima-Koregaon violence matter. But, Justice AM Khanwilkar asked Mehta how the material presented by him was connected to those arrested.

Mehta then read from his written submissions and said that "no interference should be allowed in criminal matters in the garb of a PIL". He maintained that it is an ongoing investigation and that the overall supervision was being done by an ADG rank officer. Mehta then said that since the writ petition isn't maintainable, the court should dismiss the petition and restore status quo ante.

He concluded his arguments with this and after him, Harish Salve took over the proceedings in the court. Salve put his submission for the complainant who had filed an FIR which led to the arrests under challenge. Salve asked as to "What constitutes sedition? Is it an investigation to foster political ideology or to detect the unlawful activities?"

Salve said that if court feels that the accused are on trail of unlawful activities, then the investigation must go on. "One can have any ideology but have to draw a line when it comes to unlawful activities. I am suggesting the contours where free speech ends and unlawful activity begins," Salve remarked in the apex court.

But, he argued that SITs are constituted when the political class is under question and they are in power, giving the example of the 2G scam case. "SIT comes in when the investigation is capable of being derailed. Unless court finds investigation is baseless, there is no reason to order an SIT," Salve said, concluding his argument."We can't trust the CBI, the NIA, police; then whom are we going to trust?" Salve asked.

Senior advocate Abhishek Manu Singvi then started his rejoinder saying that "his clients are nowhere in the FIR". "The entire object of the proceedings against these accused is to create a subtext of plot to assassinate the prime minister," Singhvi said.

However, Salve then raised the question of how the petitioners came across the letters. To which, Singhvi said that it is on the website of national news channels like NDTV and Republic TV. "This is a serious issue", Salve replied.

Singhvi then said that second FIR was "wholly unwarranted". "ADG Maharashtra distributed a total of 30 letters to the media. NDTV had a program where those letters were flashed and discussed. Letter dated 18 April 2017 is from comrade 'R' to 'Prakash' and the one dated 26 December, 2017 is also from 'R' to 'Prakash'," Singhvi said. "Republic TV was given special access to these letters. This was followed by a public statement by arrested activist Sudha Bharadwaj denying that she wrote any of those letters. She then sent a legal notice also to Republic TV, Singhvi submitted in court. However, he said, that in response to the notice, Republic TV replied that "it got the letters from a confidential sources".

After listening to Singhvi's argument, Chief Justice Dipak Misra quelled the debate and said that, "You have it, use it. We will look into it." After which, Singhvi continued his submissions.

"The Maoist plot isn't mentioned in any record produced in court. The entire experience by the Maharashtra Police is to rope the people ex post facto," Singhvi said. "The transit remand application is based entirely on Bhima Koregaon and has no mention of the three letters," he pointed out in court. Here, Salve interrupted again but Singhvi objected to him saying, "Interventions that too by an intervenor." Singhvi then asked that how can a man in jail write a letter, referring to Professor Sai Baba.

At this point, Misra asked Mehta to supply to the court the entire case diary in its original language. "You do one thing, you give us the entire case diary," the Chief Justice said. Salve then said that a lot of it (the case diary) will be in Marathi. "That is okay," replied Misra. "Your Lordships have sufficient Marathi bench strength," Singhvi pitched in, referring to Khanwilkar and Justive DY Chandrachud on the bench.

After going through the letters, senior advocate Anand Grover said that, "The letter allegedly written by Sudha Bharadwaj and Ronal Wilson contains Marathi words which they could not have written as they are Hindi speaking. "Letters by Rona Wilson and Sudha Bharadwaj written in Hindi include words that only Maharashtrians could have written. That is why I am saying this case is cooked up," Grover remarked.

Read the note submitted by Senior Advocate Anand Grover highlighting marathi words used in a letter allegedly written by Sudha Bharadwaj & Roma Wilson, who don't know Marathi. He submits that letters are wholly fabricated and written by somebody knowing marathi. pic.twitter.com/CMsZ35f23F  The Leaflet (@TheLeaflet_in) September 20, 2018

To this, Chandrachud said, "Yes" and the court then concluded the hearing, ordering the written notes to be filed by Saturday.

With inputs from Bar and Bench and The Leaflet
The Ministry of External Affairs confirmed that a meeting between Sushma Swaraj and her Pakistani counterpart Shah Mahmood Qureshi will take place.

The Ministry of External Affairs confirmed on Thursday that a meeting between External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj and her Pakistani counterpart Shah Mahmood Qureshi will take place on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA).

"Our prime minister congratulated the new Pakistan prime minister through a letter. The Pakistan foreign minister, in response, wrote a letter to the external affairs minister in response to that letter."

"They reiterated their proposal for a meeting of the external affairs minister and Pakistan's foreign minister at the sidelines of the UNGA," Raveesh Kumar, MEA spokesperson, said at a press conference in New Delhi.

"We have decided that the meeting at the sidelines of the UNGA will take place. The date will be decided through consultations," Kumar further said.

"I must distinguish between a meeting and a dialogue. This is just a meeting which we have agreed to after a request from Pakistani side. This does not change our stand on terrorism and cross-border terrorism," the MEA spokesperson added.

"On SAARC, our policy has been consistent. The atmosphere is not conducive for this summit. Other countries have also felt that it is diffuclt to attend the SAARC summit which is to be hosted by Pakistan," he said.

Reiterating that the meeting between Swaraj and Qureshi did not imply a resumption of talks between India and Pakistan, Kumar said, "This meeting is taking place on the request of the Pakistani side. We have not finalised the agenda of this meeting."

He also called the killing of a Border Security Force (BSF) jawan along the International Border in Jammu a "barbaric incident which defies logic and is against international norms."

Earlier, the Pakistan Foreign Office (FO) spokesperson Mohammad Faisal had said it is "engaged" with India to facilitate a bilateral meeting between Qureshi and Swaraj in New York. Both Swaraj and Qureshi will be in New York next week to attend the UNGA.

The India-Pakistan ties nose-dived in recent years following a spate of terror attacks in India by Pakistan-based terror groups. India has not been holding official talks with Pakistan following the attacks.

The last SAARC Summit in 2014 was held in Kathmandu, which was attended by Modi. The 2016 SAARC Summit was to be held in Islamabad.

But after the terrorist attack on an Indian Army camp in Uri in Jammu and Kashmir on 18 September that year, India expressed its inability to participate in the summit due to "prevailing circumstances" and stepped up diplomatic pressure on Pakistan.

The summit was called off after Bangladesh, Bhutan and Afghanistan also declined to participate in the Islamabad meet.

With inputs from PTI
One person was killed and 14 others were injured when a mob clashed with the police over entry of newly-appointed Urdu teachers in a school in West Bengal's North Dinajpur district Thursday, police said.

Raiganj: One person was killed and 14 others were injured when a mob clashed with the police over entry of newly-appointed Urdu teachers in a school in West Bengal's North Dinajpur district Thursday, police said.

The students of Dori Bhita High School at Islampur and the locals here stopped the entry of the Muslim teachers saying all vacant teaching posts must be filled, they said.

A police team accompanied the three newly-appointed Urdu teachers to the school on Thursday.

However, the locals did not relent and pelted stones at the policemen, injuring six of them.

To control the situation, the police first baton-charged and then burst tear gas shells to disperse the mob.

When the measures failed, the police were forced to open fire, an official said.

A person died of bullet injuries and several of the injured were admitted to Islampur hospital, the authorities at the medical facility said.

The deceased is a local resident, police said.
A decade after the catastrophic Kosi embankment breach, a look at the history of embankments in Nepal and northern India By Peter Gill and Bhola Paswan In Kusaha village, news of an impending disaster spread quickly on the morning of 18 August 2008. Kusaha is located in Sunsari District in Nepals southern plains, just five kilometres from the Indian border, on the east bank of Nepals largest river, the Kosi. In the 1950s, the Indian government built embankments (also known as dikes or levees) along roughly 150 km of the Kosi, in both Indian and Nepali territory, in order to prevent floods. At the time of its construction, the embankment separating Kusaha from the river was roughly five-metres tall and, at its base, was a 50-metre wide wall of compacted earth. But the monsoon-swollen river had eroded the embankment so that it was now just a few meters thick. The water could break through any moment. When Sahadev Yadav, a Kusaha farmer in his 40s, heard the news, he didnt believe a break was possible. Along with several neighbors, he climbed the embankment to see the damage for himself, and was horrified. Everyone was saying, God, God, God, recalls Samsul Mia, another Kusaha resident. Yadav ran home to warn his family, collect their meagre cash savings and official documents, and move to higher ground. Suleiman Mansuri, a construction contractor in his 30s, was nearby when the waters broke through, around 2 PM. There was suddenly a lot of mist, like fog had rolled in, he says, describing the influx of water. Several hectares of land were inundated immediately; soon Kusaha was under a metre-and-a-half of fast-moving water. The break in the embankment continued to spread over the coming 24 hours until it was over a kilometre wide, and the flow grew stronger. Although no one died in Kusaha itself, there was calamity downstream. Over 400 people died and millions were affected by the floods in Bihar, while several dozen people died and tens of thousands were displaced in Nepal. Like the villagers in Kusaha, the Nepali and Indian governments appeared to have been caught off-guard. Just two days before the breach, the Indian Chief Engineer for the Kosi Project, which is part of Bihars Water Resources Department and administers the embankments on both sides of the border, had denied there was any danger. In many cases, victims received no warning about the floods, and bureaucratic hierarchies hindered communication between the two governments. Even the Kosi Treaty of 1954, under which the embankments in Nepal were established and maintained, lacked provisions for what to do in the case of a breach. The people and governments of Nepal and India had simply assumed the structure would not fail. And yet, there was already a long and tragic history of river embankment breaches in both countries.

Flood-affected people are seen living near the banks of a flooded Kosi river, in the border area between Supaul and Saharsa, in the state of Bihar, in August 2008.  REUTERS

A history of embankments In pre-colonial north India, farmers and zamindars (landlords) sometimes constructed earthen embankments known as bundhs along short stretches of rivers to protect small tracts of land from flooding for certain periods of time. But historical accounts suggest such constructions were intentionally ephemeral, and never aimed to fully eliminate floods. Rather, many farmers depended on occasional river floods to deposit silt and organic matter from upper catchments in their fields, providing nourishment to crops before the age of modern chemical fertilisers. Floods sometimes entered villages and damaged homes, but because the current was usually slow and water was able spread over extensive plains, the damage was often limited. The British built the first large-scale embankments in South Asia aimed at permanently preventing floods. They often contracted with local zamindars or tax collectors, who in turn organised the labour to build extended earthen bundhs for long sections of flood-prone rivers. While official rhetoric emphasised the benefits for poor farmers, the colonial rulers also had certain self-interests in mind. In the Mahanadi delta of Orissa, for example, the historian Rohan DSouza has argued that the British attempted to control meandering waterways to delineate property more clearly and strengthen the role of tax-collecting authorities. This helped usher into the world of colonial capitalism what he called a flood-dependent agrarian regime The British also built embankments to protect infrastructure. In the 1850s, they undertook perhaps their most ambitious project  the embankment of a section of the Damodar river, west of the colonial capital Calcutta (now Kolkatta), to protect a new railway. But problems soon emerged. Farmers complained that the lack of silt hurt agricultural yields. And embankments prevented water outside of rivers from draining into the rivers, causing and prolonging floods. Whats more, when the embankments broke  which, absent constant maintenance and reinforcement, they inevitably did  they unleashed waters into surrounding territories at high velocities, causing much more damage than slow-rising floods historically had. Because they were so unsuccessful at preventing floods, most of the Damodar embankments had to be demolished within a decade of their construction. Sediment  from silt to sorrow These problems were exacerbated by a particularly irksome nuisance: sediment. Several major tributaries of the Ganga in northern Bihar, which descend from the eastern Himalaya in Nepal, were particularly notorious for sediment. The largest, the Kosi, has a catchment area of nearly sixty-thousand square kilometres in the Tibetan plateau and Nepali mountains before debouching into the plains. In its upper reaches, the water carries large quantities of earth  alluvium  eroded from the mountains and hills. Although the science of calculating river sediment loads is imprecise, modern studies suggest the river carries between 80 million and 120 million cubic meters of sediment per year, or a cubic kilometre every eight to 12 years. Once the river reaches the plains it slows down, and riverine hitch-hikers begin to drop out of the water column and settle: first the largest stones, followed by sand, then silt, and progressively smaller particles as the velocity decreases. This deposition leads the river bed to continually rise, and so the river seeks to change course, always looking for lower ground, creating one of the largest alluvial fans in the world. Between the mid-18th century and the mid-20th century, the Kosi migrated over 100 kilometres westward, abandoning old channels and forming new ones. Along with mercurial water flow  the Kosis typical monsoon-season discharge is five to ten times its dry-season discharge  sediment contributed to flooding. But sediment also complicated British flood-control efforts. When they attempted to build embankments along small sections of the river, the river bed began to rise faster than before because the deposited alluvium had less space to spread out. This resulted in the river becoming super-elevated relative to the surrounding floodplain, making breaches all the more dangerous.

Map showing the historical channels (paleochannels) of the Kosi River over the past 250 years, from Barahakshetra in Nepal to the confluence with the Ganga in Bihar. Image courtesy: Chakraborty et al. in Quaternary International, 2010

Dinesh Kumar Mishra, a Bihar-based engineer and civil society activist who has conducted extensive historical research on the Kosi, has written that British engineers and other officials began to rethink flood control efforts by the late 19th century. At a flood conference in Calcutta in 1897, an army officer compared embankments to throwing ones gloves in Natures face, an insult which she is not yet known to leave un-avenged. By the late colonial period, engineers in Bihar had all but given up on embankments. Captain GF Hall, the chief engineer of the state, told colleagues in 1937 that he wanted to emphasize one point and one point only as a preliminary to government devising a flood policy, i.e., that bundhs obstruct the free flow of water and accentuate instead of relieve the intensity of floods. However, official opposition to embankments did not last long. Post-Independence boost Mishra shows that flood-control policy experienced a quick about-face following Indian independence. Public and media attention initially turned to an idea that had been floated as early as 1937  to build a high dam that could hold back flood waters at Barahakshetra in Nepal, where the Kosi debouches from the hills. However, an Indian government committee declared the dam infeasible in 1951 (it would have cost INR 1.77 billion  an astronomical sum at the time when the Indian rupee was almost at par with the US dollar  and taken nearly two decades to build). In 1953, devastating floods hit the Kosi and, amid public pressure for the government to act, embankments gained favour once again. After Prime Minister Nehru toured affected areas, his government announced a plan for a Kosi Scheme to embank nearly 150 kilometres of the river from near the base of the Himalayas in Nepal to near its confluence with the Ganga in Bihar. The decision to build the embankments was based on what Mishra euphemistically calls extra-technical considerations. He notes that the government sent engineers on trips to the Yellow River in China and the Mississippi in the US to assess the feasibility of embanking large rivers. But in fact, the feasibility trips occurred only after the Kosi Scheme had essentially been approved. Foreign counterparts in both the US and China recommended the Indians consider the effects of siltation carefully. The Indian engineers seemed to ignore serious problems on the rivers they visited: both the Mississippi and Yellow had experienced embankment breaches and devastating floods in recent decades. (For example, in 1938, Chiang Kai Sheks Nationalist Army cut through embankments on the Yellow to induce a flood to halt oncoming Japanese imperial troops, killing nearly a million people. Though it was intentional, the flood was all the more destructive because of the Yellows super-elevation relative to the surrounding land.)

The scheme  redubbed the Kosi Project  moved ahead. Embankment construction commenced in 1955, and continued until 1959. The construction work utilized heavy earth-moving equipment and also mobilized over a million labourers who worked with picks, shovels and baskets to dig and move earth to build the earthen walls. To slow the flow of water near the edge and reduce the rivers ability to erode the embankments, they were studded with spurs  pier-like projections 100 to 300 metres long pointing in towards the river, placed roughly every half-kilometre, buttressed at their base and sides with boulders and metal fencing. Initially there was widespread excitement about the Kosi Project. Globally, large infrastructure projects  like the Hoover and Coulee dams in the American West  were seen as symbols of national pride and unity. In Bihar, the Bharat Sevak Samaaj organized tens of thousands of volunteers  including students, policemen, and sadhus  to contribute to the earth-moving campaign. A government-produced documentary film declared that with the completion of the project, a wild, capricious river will have been tamedThe present gives but an inkling of a brighter future. The harvest will increase. The land will grow more fertile. And the river will be a herald of plentyFor the people of this region, the harnessing of the Kosi river will mean the end of a long and tragic drama. The problems emerge Despite initial euphoria, problems soon emerged. Because the river could not be pinched too closely, a significant slice of land  roughly 100,000 hectares, including over 300 villages in Bihar  had to be left within the embankments, at the mercy of floods. As construction of the embankments moved ahead, villages lobbied with the government to change the alignment so their villages would be outside. Villages turned against one another; women and children staged satyagrahas, and gangs of men from inside the embankment fought those from outside with sticks. In the long-term, the problems the British engineers had warned about re-surfaced. Although drainage pipes were constructed through embankments so that water outside the embankments could drain in, these usually failed to function well and became completely useless once the river bed became super-elevated. The project had originally been designed to protect over 2,000 square kilometres, but by the 1990s over 3,000 square kilometres had become water-logged. Meanwhile, floods continued. Although river engineering textbooks called for fire-fighting-type maintenance to keep embankments safe, in reality they were often neglected by corrupt construction contractors, damaged by burrowing animals, or in some cases cut through by villagers living on the inside of embankments seeking to save their own homes. Although attempts were made to resettle people living within the embankments, over 200,000 continue to live there today. Major breaches of the embankments occurred seven times prior to the 2008 Kusaha breach, in 1963, 68, 71, 80, 84, 87, and 91. Government data showed that the flood-prone area in Bihar gradually increased from 2,500,000 hectares (25,000 square kilometres) in 1954 to 6,800,000 hectares (68,000 square kilometres) in 1994. This is the first in a three part series on the history of embankments in India and Nepal along the Kosi, a major tributary of the Ganga. Read part two here. Peter Gill is an American journalist based in Nepal who writes on the environment, politics, society, and travel. Follow him on Twitter at @pitaarji. Bhola Paswan is a Nepali journalist who writes on a variety of political and social issues for the national dailies Kantipur and Nagarik, among others. Follow him on Twitter at @paswanbhola. The Third Pole is a multilingual platform dedicated to promoting information and discussion about the Himalayan watershed and the rivers that originate there. This report was originally published on thethirdpole.net and has been reproduced here with permission.
By Ramesh Bhushal Undervalued and ignored, wetlands are disappearing and drying up in Nepal  leaving the communities and wildlife that depend on them exposed in a changing climate A few kilometres north of the Indian border in the Kapilvastu district  the birth place of the Buddha  lies Jagdishpur lake, the largest reservoir in Nepal, and one of the ten wetlands in the country listed under the Ramsar Convention. The lake is home to about 23,000 birds according to the latest survey  probably the largest single avian population in the country. Local farmer Purnabashi Chaudhary often visits the lake to collect medicinal plants. When we reached the lake one early afternoon in the first week of February, Chaudhary was resting in the shade of a tree after applying the juice of the Madaar plant to his teeth. It relieves pain, he said, pointing to a shrub nearby. But the overgrazing of goats has left very few plants around the lake now.

Image by Nabin Baral

The lake was declared a wetland of international importance under the Ramsar Convention in 2003, but since then there has been little action to protect the lake. There is very minimal funding available to protect or conserve this lake, its mostly our voluntary efforts that are keeping it alive, said Abdul Rashid Khan, a local conservationist who lives near the lake. In the early 70s, the reservoir was built to irrigate adjoining paddy fields and later expanded to 225 hectares. This became one of the best habitats for endemic and migratory birds. However, locals were not aware of its importance until recently. People used to think that these birds come every year, so whats wrong with killing them for meat? added Khan. This all changed when the local communities came together to control such activities a few years ago. But the poaching hasnt stopped completely. Some people still kill birds. If asked not to, then they threaten us and say [the birds] are public property, Chaudhary said. Weighty wetlands According to the Ramsar Convention, 2,293 lakes are listed as wetlands of international importance globally, covering 230 million hectares. Listed as the richest ecosystems on earth after tropical rainforests, these wetlands support wild animals and plants, some of which are on the brink of extinction. Jagdishpur hosts not only water fowl but the one horned rhinos and royal Bengal tigers also use these wetlands as a source of water.

Image by Nabin Baral

Wetlands are also a major source of livelihood for communities across Nepal. From fish to fodder, drinking water to medicinal plants, communities benefit from the natural wealth of wetlands. We can hardly think of life without this water source, as it irrigates our fields, provides water to drink, said Krishna Chaudhary, drinking untreated water from the source of Ghodaghodi lake in Kailali district. We are at the source so I can drink water without treatment, but as you move south, it gets polluted and you cant imagine drinking it, he said, smiling. Undervalued and ignored Government officials agree that enough has not been done to protect wetlands and it is a low priority issue on their agenda. With increasing population pressure, land degradation, haphazard road construction and unplanned urbanisation, there is tremendous pressure on wetlands and we should be more serious about protecting these water bodies which are often termed as the earths kidneys, said Maheshwar Dhakal, joint secretary at the Ministry of Environment and Forests of the Nepal government. With the federal system in place now, we hope that the wetlands will receive more attention in future, he added. Nepal promulgated a new constitution in 2015 and decided to establish a federal system, abolishing the monarchy. Under the new constitution, federal governments are now responsible for managing wetlands. Its not about who has been given authority, its about where this falls on their priority list. Wetlands have been thought of as wastelands in spite of their significant role in ecosystems, and they continue to be encroached or destroyed, said Hem Sagar Baral, Country Manager at the Zoological Society of Londons Nepal office and a noted ornithologist in the country.

Image by Nabin Baral

A heaven for birds  but for how long? My first visit to Nepal was in 1978. I will forever remember the remarkable diversity of bird life that greeted us in the Sal forests of the Terai  the feeding parties, seemingly in a hurry, packed full of woodpeckers, drongos, flycatchers, and warblers. Bird after bird was new for me and I was in heaven, wrote Richard Grimmett, who now heads the Bird Life Internationals global conservation program, in a book titled, Status of Nepals birds: The National Rest List series. But in last 40 years, things have changed considerably. About 20 percent of Nepals 878 birds are threatened with extinction, including 37 species which are threatened on a global scale, according to the latest research by Bird Life International and the Zoological Society of London. About 25 percent of those threatened are wetland birds.

Image by Nabin Baral

This years survey of birds, which is yet to be published, estimates 45,000 to 50,000 birds travelled from northern Asia to Nepal this winter  travelling from as far away as Siberia. Its hard to count exact numbers but our regular survey shows about 150 species of birds migrate to Nepal in winter every year and about one-third of them are wetland-dependent, said Baral, country manager of Nepal at the Zoological Society of London. But ornithologists have warned that the rapid degradation and deterioration of wetlands may lead to permanent extinction of several species. Comb Ducks used to be spotted frequently on Ghodaghodi, the largest lake in Kailali district, Nepals far western region. But the species hasnt been recorded in the area for the past 20 years, said Baral. Unlike other species, the Comb Duck wont easily bounce back even if conditions are made favourable, he added. The Comb Duck is listed under category II of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), meaning it will soon be threatened with extinction if it is not protected. There isnt much research being done on the impact of urbanisation, habitat destruction and other developmental works on the wetlands. Since the birds fly across countries it is hard to estimate the full impact without coordinated transboundary research, Baral said, But research in Nepal suggests overall population is declining with some species already rare and threatened, he added. Another ornithologist Benj Smelt, who has been doing research on birds in Ghodaghodi, said that once common species like peafowl (Mayur) have almost disappeared, and called for authorities to take action before it is too late. Human -wildlife conflict Jogilal Dagaura has a contract to raise fish in a small pond on the boundary of Ghodaghodi lake owned by Ghodaghodi Forest Users Group. While his sons sell fish in the market, his job is to guard the lake and protect the fish from birds. Every few minutes, he makes a loud sound to distract birds that come to feed in the pond. As we tried to talk to him, he ran to another corner of the lake as he saw some birds trying to catch fish. Its his daily routine. We bring fingerlings and grow them in this pond and sell them in the market, but its hard to save them from birds, said Dagaura. Birds have become a source of conflict in villages because they eat the crops. In Ghodaghodi, lake conservation is a story of happiness and sorrow. On the one hand, communities are happy to help protect the lake and birds, but on the other hand, birds have left them helpless. They eat our crops, which is the only source of food for many of us, as we cant afford to buy food. Its really hard to farm here with birds around, said Deepak Shah, Chairperson of Ghodaghodi Community Forest Users Group. People have been demanding compensation for years, but the government has turned a deaf ear. Who listens to us? A compensation policy would have been very helpful as it would encourage local communities to engage with conservation of lakes and birds, but authorities are not bothered about it, added Shah.

Image by Nabin Baral

The Nepal government has a policy to compensate people for the damage caused by wild animals but this doesnt include birds. Deepak Shah thinks that the government is not serious about protecting lakes or forests and the communitys efforts have been undervalued. A few years ago, he said, a boy fell into Ghodaghodi lake while playing and was killed by a crocodile. Villagers dragged his body out of the crocodiles mouth and demanded compensation from the government for his family, but not a single penny was provided.

Image by Nabin Baral

Instead, authorities took that wounded crocodile, arranged for a veterinary doctor from Kathmandu and put it back in a river nearby after treatment. They didnt even provide transportation to carry the boys dead body to the place of cremation, Shah added. The district administration office said that there is no policy to compensate for such casualties. Despite our commitment and efforts to save the lake, the authorities have not valued our contribution and that has irked the communities. Humans have less value than animals here, he added. Declining fish diversity, worried fishermen About 21 ethnic communities directly depend on the wetlands of Nepal, and fishing is one of their major occupations. Its hard to get fish nowadays, wetlands are shrinking or disappearing and there are too many people, said Bimala Bote, a fisherwoman near the Jagdishpur lake in Kapilvastu in west Nepal. Its not only in Jagdishpur that the fish are declining. Rupa Chaudhary in the Maghi village near Ghodaghodi lake in the far west had a similar experience. Research shows that fish diversity is declining rapidly in the wetlands of Nepal, especially in the southern plains. In Ghodaghodi lake alone there has been a 50 percent decline in fish diversity over the last 20 years. Twenty-seven fish species were recorded in 1998, but only 13 species were found in 2017. Fishing communities in the east are equally worried. On the Koshi riverbank we met Chandan Kumar Mukhiya, a fisherman who feeds his family of four. As fishing became more difficult, he opted to take a part time job as an electrician in Indias capital New Delhi. Fish are declining and some days I have to return home empty handed. A few years ago, this wasnt the case, Mukhiya said.

Image by Nabin Baral

A 2009 study found fish from the wetlands of Koshi Tappu are the most important source of food and income for local people. There are 15 ethnic communities who depend on fishing in the Koshi Tappu wetland alone. In the past there were few people who used to fish, but nowadays, everyone is fishing. Thats why its hard to find fish, added Mukhiya. Wetlands are also the major source of drinking water for wildlife, including rare or endangered species. Wildlife officials said an increasingly dry climate across the country has put wetlands under threat  and this will lead to a shortage of water for animals to drink. We have already started pumping groundwater and collecting it in the ponds for wildlife to drink in western Nepal, but increasing dryness may lead to similar conditions in central and eastern Nepal, said Bed Kumar Dhakal, chief warden at Chitwan National Park. We dont have long-term data to help us understand the pattern of change in our wetlands. I think is very important to invest in this so we can make better plans before its too late, he added. According to Nepals Water and Energy Commission Secretariat report, the annual average precipitation over Nepal is decreasing at the rate of 9.8 mm per decade.

Image by Nabin Baral

A need for better management and more respect Wetlands are one of the most threatened ecosystems on the planet but the richest in biodiversity. The first thing is to make everyone understand that these are not wastelands and they have a huge role in providing food, water, medicine and many other services as well as maintain ecosystems, said Hem Sagar Baral. As the most undervalued natural resources in the country they fall prey to any development work, but they need more respect. Our thinking in Nepal needs to change, said Maheshwar Dhakal, joint secretary at the ministry of environment and forests. For us water means rivers flowing from north to south and we hardly consider the small ponds, lakes or marshy lands that provide such an important resource to people. They deserve better respect and better management.

Image by Nabin Baral

Economy dominates environment Most of the communities we met have plans to attract more tourists and build infrastructure around or inside the lake to earn money. We would like to get boats for tourists and generate income, hopefully we will be doing this by the end of this year, said Chandan Kumar Bhagat, manager of Barju lake in eastern Nepals Sunsari district. Locals around Jadishpur had similar plans. Conservationists worry tourist activities will damage the habitat of a large number of birds and animals that depend on the wetlands. However, locals say that its hard to maintain the lake without funding, and promoting tourism will allow them to raise money to protect the wetlands. If there is no benefit for locals in terms of money through tourism, then who would be interested in saving these lakes? Bhagat said. Ornithologist Hem Sagar Baral believes the local area can attract more environmentally aware tourists. People go with loudspeakers, dance, and drink and there is no regulatory body to monitor. Such kinds of activities have negative impacts on birds or they degrade their habitat. There could be different ways to enjoy these wetlands, he said. We can promote bird watching groups, where people enjoy nature rather than boats. Quality tourism rather than quantity would save biodiversity as well as increase the income of the communities around, he added. This story was produced with support from Internews Earth Journalism Network. The Third Pole is a multilingual platform dedicated to promoting information and discussion about the Himalayan watershed and the rivers that originate there. This report was originally published on thethirdpole.net and has been reproduced here with permission.
Even states in the same country fight over common rivers. For instance, the states of Telangana and Andhra Pradesh in India have been fighting over sharing the waters of Krishna and other rivers. Andhra is the lower riparian like Bangladesh, and Telangana is the upper riparian like India. Andhra fears that Telangana will not give it water from the common rivers, especially because water storage is possible in Telangana. On the other hand, the demand is higher in the lower part  the valley, agricultural land, settlement and city. Another problem is, the sea is in the lower part. If the fresh water supply is reduced, then you will have increased salinity, and that will affect the ecology and the environment. So, the opportunities are in the upper riparian  you can store the water, you can produce hydropower, and you can maintain the navigation in the entire river.

Ainun Nishat: First of all, you have to understand what a transboundary river is, to understand the gravity of the Ganga Water Sharing Treaty. A river crossing more than one independent country is called "transboundary"; it is common that there would be conflicts over the sharing of waters of this river among the countries involved.

More than 20 years after the signing of the Treaty, Ainun Nishat  a noted Bangladeshi environmentalist and one of the architects of the Treaty  spoke to Kamran Reza Chowdhury about its impact: What had it achieved, what needed to be done in the future.

On 12 December 1996, Dhaka and Delhi signed a historic treaty on sharing the waters of the Ganga, that travels through Nepal and India, and then into Bangladesh. Until the signing of the Ganga Water Sharing Treaty, the withdrawal of water in India caused huge environmental, social and economic consequences for Bangladesh, especially after the commissioning of the Farakka Barrage in 1975.

More than 20 years after the signing of the historic India-Bangladesh Ganga Water Sharing Treaty, one of its architects speaks about its past, present and future

If a river crosses through two independent countries or two provinces of a same country, none of them are interested in accommodating each others requirements. Added to this is the increased demand for water due to the rapid population growth in the world. We need huge quantity of water for irrigation and agriculture. Another fact is sometimes there is too much water [leading to flooding] and sometimes too little water [leading to drought, and people not wanting to share water].

How did the Treaty come about?

Based on ideas from British times, in 1951 India published its plan to construct the Farakka Barrage along the Bangladesh-India border. The aim of the barrage was to maintain navigability of the Kolkata port in the state of West Bengal. Between 1960 and 1970, officials of India and Pakistan (when Bangladesh was part of Pakistan) discussed the issues that arose out of building the Barrage, but they failed to thrash out an acceptable solution.

In December 1971, Bangladesh emerged as an independent country. In April 1975, India formally sought Bangladeshs consent for a test run of the Farakka Barrage  to see if it was constructed properly. In August 1975, Bangabandhu (Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the founding leader of Bangladesh) was assassinated. In 1976, India went for total withdrawal of the Ganga waters, causing serious problems in areas of Bangladesh including the southwestern region, which hosts the Sundarbans, the worlds largest mangrove forest in the Bay of Bengal.

In 1977, Bangladesh and India signed a five-year agreement that stressed that the two governments need to cooperate with each other in finding a solution to the long term problem of augmenting the flow of the Ganga during the dry season. After the 1977 agreement expired, Bangladesh and India signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) on 7 October 1982 for one year. Another MoU for water sharing between 1986 and 1988 was inked. The second MoU being over, there was no agreement on sharing of the Ganga waters from 1989 to December 1996 when the 30-year Ganga Water Treaty was signed.

The previous deals were for short terms  from one year to five years. When we got 30 years, we thought it a big achievement.

You have to understand that in 1996 we convinced India to sign a treaty  not an MoU or agreement  on sharing the Ganga waters. A treaty is the strongest international legal deal between two countries. This is historic, though the treaty has some limitations.

Why was the Treaty considered historic?

Historic because India had not agreed to sign a treaty before; all the previous deals were for short terms. We do not face water scarcity during the rainy season  June to October, but during the dry season, particularly between January and May, the flow reduces drastically. So, the Ganga Water Treaty, signed by the prime ministers of Bangladesh and India, guaranteed a fair deal between Bangladesh and India.

So, would you call it a good deal on water sharing?

Yes, this is a fair deal. The Treaty has been working, more or less, very well. I quote, Subject to the condition that India and Bangladesh each shall receive guaranteed 35,000 cusec of water in alternate three 10-day periods during the period 11 March to 10 May. So, Bangladesh has been getting the benefits of the treaty. Of course there is room for improvement.

What are the limitations of the Ganga Water Treaty?

One of the main problems or limitations is the Treaty is for 30 years; this is not fair. For example: if you and your brother inherit a piece of land from your father, would you share it for 10 or 20 or 30 years? You will share it forever. What would happen after 30 years? The time-bound treaty will give India an upper hand in the negotiation in the long run. So, the treaty should have stated that the treaty would be in place unless replaced by another treaty.

Another problem is that we are sharing the residual flow at the Farakka point. The other upper riparian states such as Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and Bihar have been withdrawing waters in the upper portion. Bihar and West Bengal have been fighting with Bangladesh, but they are not talking about withdrawal of waters in their upper portion. In the future, I fear that the Indian central government may not be in a position to ensure the minimum 70,000 cusec of water at the Farakka point for sharing with Bangladesh. The Farakka Barrage is a central government project; so the Indian central government must intervene to ensure equitable share of waters of the Ganga.
Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) on Thursday announced 22 candidates for the Madhya Pradesh Assembly elections and said it will contest all 230 seats.

Bhopal: Dealing a blow to the Congress' plans to sew up an alliance, the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) on Thursday announced 22 candidates for the Madhya Pradesh Assembly elections and said it will contest all 230 seats.

The list includes three sitting MLAs.

State Congress president Kamal Nath had said earlier that his party wants to join hands with like-minded parties such as the BSP for taking on the ruling BJP.

Nath had also met BSP supremo Mayawati on 15 July.

However, the BSP said Thursday that it will contest all 230 Assembly seats on its own in the state where elections are due by year-end.

A Congress leader said on the condition of anonymity that his party still has hopes that an alliance with the BSP will materialise.

"They have announced only 22 candidates, including three sitting MLAs, for the seats where their position is strong. It is just a move to scare us and get a better seat sharing deal," he said.

"We had offered them 15-16 seats but they wanted more," he said.

However, BSP's Madhya Pradesh in-charge Ram Achal Rajbhar said his party will contest all 230 seats.

The list of candidates released by Rajbhar includes three out of the party's four sitting MLAs: Sheela Tyagi (Mangawa seat), Usha Choudhary (Raigaon) and Satyaprakash Sakwar (Ambah).

The name of a fourth BSP MLA, Balveer Singh Dandotia who represents Dimni in Morena district, does not figure in the list. BSP sources said he wants to contest from the Morena Assembly seat this time.

The list also names candidates for Assembly seats in Datia, Bhind, Shivpuri, Ashoknagar, Chhattarpur, Damoh, Singrauli, Sidhi, Shahdol, Umaria, Katni and Jabalpur districts.
Speaking at a rally in Rajasthan's Dungarpur, Congress leader Rahul Gandhi said Narendra Modi talks about only his 'mann ki baat' on his monthly radio show, not on people's 'mann ki baat''.

Dungarpur: Congress president Rahul Gandhi on Thursday took a dig at Prime Minister Narendra Modi, saying that his party will not make false promises like putting Rs 15 lakh in every citizen's bank account.

"You have listened to these false promises... I want to ask you  did you receive Rs 15 lakh in your bank accounts? Yes or no? We will not make these false promises like Modi did," Gandhi said at a Congress rally in Rajasthan's Dungarpur. "But whatever the strength of the Congress, it will be used for the uplift of the people of Rajasthan."

Rahul was referring to Modi's promise ahead of the 2014 general elections to bring back black money stashed abroad and deposit Rs 15 lakh each in the bank accounts of people out of that money.

The Congress leader also criticised the Centre for its flagship schemes like 'Make in India', claiming that "everything in India is made by China". "We want to hear that the products in India are also made in Dungarpur...," Rahul said.

Comparing the employment rates in China and India, Rahul blamed the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance government for the conditions in this country. "Only 450 jobs are given in India, whereas China creates 50,000 jobs a day."

Referring to Modi's Mann ki Baat monthly radio address, Rahul said: "The prime minister only talks of his 'mann ki baat'... He is not interested in our 'mann ki baat'."

He said the strength of India lies in listening to the views of each and every citizen, irrespective of their religion, caste or status in society.

The Rajasthan Assembly elections are due by the year-end.
The alleged dumper scam against Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan is one of the major issues like the Vyapam scam that the Opposition Congress has been using as a weapon to attack the BJP government in Madhya Pradesh alleging corruption.

In a major setback to the Congress party, the Supreme Court on Thursday dismissed the petition filed by Congress leader KK Mishra related to the infamous dumper scam against Madhya Pradesh chief minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan as withdrawn.

The apex court also observed orally that election should be fought outside the court and not in the courtroom.

The Supreme Court today dismissed the petition filed by KK Mishra as withdrawn. The Madhya Pradesh High Court on 29 January had dismissed the review petition on the ground that sanction from competent authority wasnt obtained by the petitioner, as it was against the CM (Shivraj Singh Chouhan), whos a public servant. The HC had also observed that a similar complaint was discussed earlier and after three years the petitioner (KK Mishra) again brought it. Therefore the SC today didnt want to intervene with the HC order, advocate Vanshaja Shukla, who appeared before the Supreme Court along with senior advocate Mukul Rohatgi told Firstpost.

Rohatgi and Shukla represented Chouhan on Thursday during the hearing before the Supreme Court bench comprising Justices AK Sikri and Ashok Bhushan.

Justice Sikri observed orally to senior Congress leader and senior advocate Kapil Sibal that election is round the corner and they (Congress party) should fight election outside the court and not in the courtroom. It was not recorded but was in response to senior advocate Mukul Rohtagis plea that the said case is politically motivated, said advocate Shukla.

The alleged dumper scam against Chouhan is one of the major issues like the Vyapam scam that the Opposition Congress has been using as a weapon to attack the BJP government in Madhya Pradesh alleging corruption.

The dumper scam

Bhopal-based Congress leader and a lawyer by profession, Mishra had alleged that Chouhan after becoming the chief minister of Madhya Pradesh in November 2005, doled out favours to an industrial group -- Jaypee Associates in Rewa. He had moved court alleging that the chief minister misused his official position and rented out dumper trucks to the said group as quid pro quo for allocation of out-of-the-turn mining leases.

The complainant had also alleged that four dumpers worth Rs 2 crore were registered in the name of Chouhans wife Sadhna Singh.

An FIR was registered against Chouhan, his wife, an IAS officer and others in November 2007 regarding the purchase of dumpers. The Lokayukta had investigated the case and found that no offence was committed. A closure report was filed by the Lokayukta police.

In January this year, the Madhya Pradesh High Court dismissed a review petition filed by Mishra, challenging Bhopal district courts judgment (28 October 2017) that had dismissed his previous petition seeking reinvestigation into the alleged dumper scam. The ground of dismissal of review petition was the absence of sanction in the case.

A sanction is required from a competent authority for the prosecution against a person holding public office (or a public servant). In the case of the chief minister, the competent authority is the governor.

The alleged dumper scam snowballed into a major controversy in the state and Assembly proceedings were disrupted for days when the issue became public.

Congress stand

The Opposition Congress in Madhya Pradesh that pursued the case for almost a decade, is up in arms against Shivraj Singh government and wants to use it as a major case of corruption during its upcoming Assembly election campaign.

Senior Congress leader and senior advocates Sibal, Vivek Tankha and others represented Mishra at the Supreme Court.

SC wasnt inclined to hear the petition, as the apex court sought a sanction from the competent authority in this case. As the petition is against Madhya Pradesh chief minister, a sanction is needed. This only means more delay, as they (Madhya Pradesh chief minister and others) have gained two months and by then the Assembly election will take place. But well continue with our fight against this scam, senior advocate and Rajya Sabha member from Congress Tankha told Firstpost.

Im told that our senior leader Kapil Sibalji, whos also a senior advocate and representing this case along with Vivek Tankhaji and others, withdrew the case on technical grounds. It has not been rejected. After discussion with our lawyers and leaders, we may file a fresh petition afresh, said Mishra.
Smriti Irani said this was 'the desperation of the clown prince', referring to Congress chief Rahul Gandhi.

Jaipur: Union Textile Minister Smriti Irani on Thursday slammed Congress president Rahul Gandhi for his comments on Prime Minister Narendra Modi, saying he is desperate to attract attention.

Earlier in the day, Rahul had said at a public meeting in Dungarpur district in Rajasthan that people now thought that the country's watchman is a thief. In response, Irani said Rahul has no regard for the prime minister's post, which he respected only when a member of his own family held it.

I think that the desperation of the clown prince, as Mr Jaitley calls him, is to attract attention to himself at the cost of the prime minister's name, she told reporters on the sidelines of a Carpet Export Promotion Council event in Jaipur. "One needs to ask Rahul Gandhi what is his vision for the country. National building is not something that Rahul Gandhi is keen on. People of the country know that Rahul Gandhi lacks vision.

At his rally in Dungarpur, Rahul had referred to the Rafale fighter deal with France and mocked Modi's assertions on tackling corruption. He said people were now heard saying that the country's watchman is a thief. Galli galli mein shor hai, Hindustan ka chowkidar chor hai, Rahul had said.

Irani's reaction came on the sidelines of an interaction with Jaipur-based exporters.
Former Punjab chief minister Parkash Singh Badal on Thursday described the conduct of Wednesday's zila parishad and panchayat samiti polls in the state as 'brutal and broad daylight murder of democracy.'

Chandigarh: Former Punjab chief minister Parkash Singh Badal on Thursday described the conduct of Wednesday's zila parishad and panchayat samiti polls in the state as "brutal and broad daylight murder of democracy."

He said "the wanton lawlessness and criminality" witnessed on Wednesday during the polls should finally open the eyes of those who thought that the SAD's fears of poll violence were just a "ruse."

Badal said 19 September, 2018 will be remembered as "one of the darkest days" for democracy in Punjab when the Congress made the state "look like Bihar" during the latter's worst period.

The former chief minister said it was "extremely painful and regrettable" that the state election commission completely abdicated its constitutional responsibility on Wednesday.

"Both the state machinery and the state election commission functioned as an extension of the Congress party during the entire poll process," he said in a statement in Chandigarh.

Badal said not only the mammoth and unprecedented response of Punjabis to the SAD-BJP rally at Faridkot and earlier at Abohar, but also its strong Punjabi and Panthic character had unnerved the Congress and its stooges.

"For these stooges hiding behind Panthic cloaks, yesterday was repayment time for the favours they continue to receive from the Congress government. They carried out poll violence at the behest of the Congress which is keeping them politically afloat for its ultimate anti-Sikh agenda."

"The Congress is providing political cover to the forces inimical to peace and communal harmony. As in the eighties, this nexus is pushing Punjab into the jaws of violence," he said.

Badal said the SAD is their prime target because "our party has always articulated the Sikh and Punjabi cause in a peaceful and democratic way."

"Peace and democracy is at stake in Punjab. The non-performance of the state government and its betrayal to the people of Punjab on the promises made to them by Amarinder Singh by holding Gutka Sahib (religious book) in hand has completely isolated the Congress from the people," he said.

The Congress now is using its old card of dividing Punjabis and conspiring to push the brave Sikh community into a fratricidal civil war, he said.

Badal said the SAD is determined not only to expose the nexus and its conspiracies but also to save Punjab and the Sikhs from these evil designs.

Meanwhile, SAD leaders in Chandigarh alleged the police helped Congress during the polls and sought the registration of a case against SSP Muktsar.

SAD president Sukhbir Singh Badal will not file for anticipatory bail in the "political vendetta case" that was registered against him Wednesday, the SAD leaders said.

Senior SAD leaders Bikram Singh Majithia, Maheshinder Singh Grewal and Dr Daljit Singh Cheema alleged that the officer "gave directions to the district police to help Congress workers capture booths as per the command of his political masters".

This was the reason that out of the over 50 booths where re-polling was ordered, 36 were in Muktsar district and 11 in Lambi constituency alone, the Akali leaders claimed.

"Despite such large scale booth capturing no case was registered against a single Congress worker or officer. This indicts the SSP and he should be punished for muzzling the voice of democracy," they alleged.

Grewal said former chief minister Parkash Singh Badal went to the spot at Killianwali in Muktsar upon getting information about booth capturing after ringing the state DGP eight times and the IG twice.

"Mr Parkash Singh Badal chose to go to the people after appeals made to the state police failed to produce any results. He was accompanied by SAD president Sukhbir Singh Badal," he said.

On the case registered against the SAD president Sukhbir Singh Badal, Grewal claimed the complainant was the brother of a Congress candidate.
To take on Vasundhara, Raje naming Ashok Gehlot as the chief ministerial candidate would be the best option for Rahul Gandhi.

Editor's note: This column presents the travel notes of a student of Indian politics and serves as a journal marking the run-up to General Election 2019. Sandip Ghose's day job as a marketing executive takes him deep into the country's interiors, which affords him the chance to listen to, and make sense of, India's concerns. These pieces will run in tandem to the frequency of his travels. Views expressed here do not reflect those of Ghose's employer.

Read the series here.

***

Three months ago, most die-hard BJP supporter would not put money on the partys return in Rajasthan. Not with Vasundhara Raje as the chief ministerial candidate for sure. But, if one asks now, many would say it is a 50:50 game that could go either way in the coming months. So, has anything changed?

I drove to Alwar from Delhi. The first stop was Bhiwadi, an industrial town across the Haryana border. Locals credit Bhairon Singh Shekhawats vision for this manufacturing hub. In coming years, it may well become an extension of Gurgaon-NCR.

Little did I expect to get caught in a traffic jam in Bhiwadi. But, there I was sitting in the midst of Jagran procession. This was outside one of the many temples in the city run by the Gujjar Samaj. The Gujjars came to Bhiwadi after reaping a fortune, when land prices soared in Haryana. Now they are the dominant set in the area. And, Sachin Pilot is a Gujjar, informed my driver.

Thus at Alwar, I expected to find a resounding endorsement for Pilot. Instead, the traders I met were rather circumspect. Pilot may draw the Gujjar votes, but he may not be able to reign in its rowdy elements. That might make the others wary. Here, lies the importance of Ashok Gehlot.

Pilot is the darling of the national media. But, Gehlot remains the favourite face of Congress in Rajasthan. In recent times, no other Congress leader in the state has commanded as much respect as Gehlot. In a world where corruption is a relative term, Gehlot enjoys a clean image. People rate his last term well. They admire his administrative acumen and people connect. Gehlot fans think, had it not been for the Modi Wave of 2014, he would have definitely come back for a second inning.

In recent months, Gehlots stock has risen further in Rajasthan. He gets the credit for Rahul Gandhis second coming as it were, starting with the Gujarat elections. People believe, he is the brain behind Rahuls temple run and Shiv-Bhakt makeover. They feel as a member of Rahul's inner coterie, he will play a much bigger role in the days to come.

Pilot has been working hard at a micro-level ever since he took charge of the state unit. Congress' good showing in some of the local elections and by-polls are the result of his efforts. But, he has still not acquired the stature to stake a claim the top job on his own steam.

Apart from Gehlot, CP Joshi is far from hanging his boots. Joshi shows no intention of fading into the sunset yet. He still wields enough clout to influence the ticket distribution.

Pilot will have to contend with all these forces. Only Rahuls endorsement cannot see him through. He will need Gehlots blessings to advance further. It is doubtful if Gehlot will relinquish his turf so early. Knowing the Congress, it is unlikely to spell out its chief ministerial choice before the elections.

Rahul is no Narendra Modi that he can sweep state election on his own equity without a strong local face. To take on Vasundhara, naming Gehlot as the chief ministerial candidate would be the best option for Rahul. But, will he be able to spare him before the Lok Sabha polls? That is the dilemma, which should be troubling Rahul.

The road to Jaipur via the Sariska Tiger Reserve is an orthopaedics delight. Because it is sure to cause a few spine dislocations daily. A stark contrast to the satin smooth Delhi-Jaipur Highway it merges into. Who can tell if these are symbolic of what lies ahead on the election trail?

In Jaipur, the mood, as they say, is mixed. Detractors of Vasundhara were predicting a change of guard in the state for long. Much of it was wishful thinking. People within the party did not like her imperious style and lack of access. The business community at large seemed to prefer the previous regime.

But, their hopes crashed at every turn. The last bet was Modi-Shah will project a second face as a chief minister probable in the run-up to the elections. But, Vasundhara put an end to all speculations. She checkmated Amit Shahs nominee and installed her own candidate as the new state president of the BJP. The message was sharp and clear that she remains in control. Shah had little option but to declare that BJP will go to the polls with Vasundhara on the driver's seat.

It would be naive to believe that Shah-Modi had to field Raje under duress. There is a lot going in her favour. First, the BJP has no other mass leader in Rajasthan. No other BJP leader, not even Om Mathur, has such universal acceptability across the state. Even a sharp-shooter like Rajyavardhan Singh Rathore would be an instant casualty of the internal crossfires of the party.

It is well known that Raje commands the loyalty of over 120 odd MLAs. Through them, she has her own network across the state. Only she has the assured backing of the RSS ground force with her direct line to Nagpur.

Like Gehlot, she has channels open with every caste constituency and regional satraps. Over the years, she has mastered the art of cutting deals and neutralising opponents. This was evident in the way she diffused several political crises during her two tenures.

But, she is not one to rely only upon political manoeuvres to secure her position. She has followed structured and well-targeted welfare programmes. Schemes like BHAMASHA have won her huge support among women voters and mass connect.

Vasundhara runs a tight party machinery. It would be even more formidable with RSS foot-soldiers. With various factions in the state Congress, Pilot may not enjoy the same unity of command.

Like every other state even Vasundhara will have to depend on the Modi Magic to deliver the final goods. The balance will tilt decisively in BJPs favour if the state and Lok Sabha polls are made to coincide, an option that cannot be ruled out as yet. But, as on date, no one can write Vasundhara off as some were prone to do a few months ago. The contest is still wide open.

A local wit at the Jaipur Club Bar summed it up with a smart quip. Those who decide to vote for Congress will do so in the hope that, after the Lok Sabha elections Gehlot will come back as the chief minister. People voting for BJP will do so confident of Modi returning as prime minister. They will hope that Vasundhara having proved a point might then hand over the baton to a new face and move to a role at the Centre.

No doubt the outcome in Rajasthan will also impact the Lok Sabha elections. But, the battle for the chief minister's chair in Jaipur will not be sealed till the new occupant of the throne in Delhi is decided.
Siddaramaiah again rejected reports of any dissent in the state Congress unit but alleged that BJP was trying to bribe the party's MLAs.

Former Karnataka chief minister Siddaramaiah on Thursday night again rejected reports of any dissent in the state Congress unit, but alleged that the BJP was trying to bribe his party's MLAs.

Our government is stable, none of the @INCKarnataka MLAs have gone to Mumbai. @BJP4Karnataka is trying to lure our MLAs by offering 100 times more money than what @narendramodi promised to deposit in everyone's account. Our MLAs have shared all the details with the party.  Siddaramaiah (@siddaramaiah) September 20, 2018

On Tuesday, Siddaramaiahwho heads the coordination committee of the Congress-JD(S) coalition governmentrubbished reports of dissent in the Congress and said media reports of it were 'baseless.'

"There is nothing, no discord. Whatever is coming in the media does not have even an iota of truth.... It is totally baseless," he told reporters after meeting the Jarkiholi brothers.

Congress has been hit by internal dissent, triggered by a faction of MLAs led by minister Ramesh Jarkiholi, who is locked in a turf war with another minister DK Shivakumar.

The Jarkiholi brothers' activities have led to speculation that BJP was fishing in troubled waters and was in touch with them to dislodge the government.

The siblings are upset over Shivakumar allegedly trying to challenge their supremacy in Belagavi district through MLA Laxmi Hebbalkar.

Siddaramaiah said there are six ministerial posts to be filled and many aspirants for the posts, leading to speculation in the media about dissidence in the party. The former chief minister claimed that the BJP was trying to destabilise the government and many MLAs have said that some people from the BJP approached them.

"It is true that the BJP is trying to destabilise this government. They have given up all the civility to come to power.There is no discord in our party," Siddaramaiah asserted.

With inputs from PTI
The fact that triple talaq has either been banned or has been regulated in 22 Islamic countries is only helping the ruling BJP to make its arguments more convincing.

The Union Cabinet chaired by Prime Minister Narendra Modi government on Wednesday gave nod to an ordinance to ban triple talaq. This means that in the next few days, after receiving presidential assent and issuance of the notification, it will become the law of the land but will have to be ratified by both Houses of Parliament in the Winter Session.

The Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on Marriage) Bill, 2017, popularly called as the Triple Talaq bill was passed by Lok Sabha but has been pending in Rajya Sabha since January this year due to opposition from Congress and its allies. The bill also couldnt be taken up in this years budget and Monsoon session.

The criminalisation of talaaq-e-biddat or triple talaq has a significant amount of political connotations apart from social ones as many BJP-ruled states like Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh are going for polls later this year besides Telangana and Mizoram which are not BJP-ruled. The Lok Sabha polls are also due in the first half of next year.

Although Union Law Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad made it amply clear that the proposed law was about gender justice and gender equity among Muslim women, the underlying political message was unmissable. While talking about the need for an ordinance, Prasad kept on repeating how the Congress has consistently plotted to stall the bill in Rajya Sabha. He even mentioned about his and Parliamentary Affairs Minister Ananth Kumars meetings with Leader of Opposition in Rajya Sabha Ghulam Nabi Azad and his deputy in Congress party in Rajya Sabha, Anand Sharma. In a clear reference to Sonia Gandhi, Prasad said that despite "a distinguished woman" being at the helm of the Congress until recently, the bill to prevent suppression of Muslim women couldnt get the party's support because of vote bank considerations. The minister's appeal to women leaders of the Opposition like Sonia Gandhi, Mayawati and Mamata Banerjee to come forward and support the bill in Rajya Sabha, where it will now be tabled in the Winter Session, also has a political implication apart from gender considerations.

The Congress, Bahujan Samaj Party and Trinamool Congress collectively have 67 MPs in the Upper House and heavily bank on the Muslim community to win elections.

It appears that womenfolk in the Muslim community are largely in favour of the triple talaq bill but most men in the community, as also the religious leaders of the community, are stridently opposed to the bill, particularly because of the penal provisions in the bill. The Congress objections to the bill, which have proved to be stalling or delaying tactic, are same as that of All India Muslim Personal Board (AIMPLB) and other community leaders.

Senior Congress leader Kapil Sibal had represented Muslim AIMPLB in Supreme Court, an organisation which supports the continuance of triple talaq. The BJP used Sibals contention in the Supreme Court as an electoral issue against Congress in the Gujarat elections which the saffron entity won.

The triple talaq bill has put the Congress, Samajwadi Party, BSP, TMC, Rashtriya Janata Dal and such other like-minded parties in a catch-22 situation. If they support the ordinance and its prospective passage in the Parliament they might end up antagonising the maulanas and the menfolk in the community and if they oppose it they might end up pushing the womenfolk in the community to support Narendra Modi and the BJP.

At a public rally in Azamgarh in July this year, Modi had said, "The real face of these parties was revealed by their approach on triple talaq On one side, the Centre is making efforts to ease and improve the lives of women and on the other hand, these parties are working to put the lives of women, especially Muslim women, in dangerCrores of Muslim women had always demanded that triple talaq should be banned, as it is also banned in Islamic countries. I read in the newspaper that the Congress president had said that the Congress is a party of MuslimsBut I want to ask the Congress whether it is a party of Muslim men alone."

The BJP has built a smart public narrative around this issue. The fact that triple talaq has either been banned or has been regulated in 22 Islamic countries is only helping the ruling BJP to make its arguments more convincing.

The Modi government claims that there was compelling necessity and a great deal of urgency to bring an ordinance because the practice of triple talaq continues even after Supreme Court in August 2017 declared triple talaq as illegal. Since January 2017 till the current month, 430 triple talaq cases have been reported, 229 before the Supreme Court verdict and 201 after that.

The government has made three crucial amendments in the original bill  first, the offence will be cognisable only when a complaint is filed by the wife, a relative by blood or by marriage; second, it was compoundable at the instance of wife on appropriate terms and conditions; third, magistrate will have powers to give bail after hearing the wife because this was a private dispute between husband and wife.

Although the Congress is not convinced by the amendments, as it stands today, in the politics of triple talaq, the BJP has placed itself in an advantageous position.
tech2 News Staff

Google recently announced a new subscription-based service called Google One for Indian users which will replace the paid Google Drive storage plans to Google One. Initially rolled out only for users in the US, the service has now started to roll out to Indian users as well. However, currently, the rollout is happening in a phased manner and will reach all Indian Google users in the forthcoming weeks.

Google One was announced back in May, and in August Google began the process of migrating the paid Google Drive users to the new Google One membership. As for new users looking for some extra cloud space, they will now be given an option to sign up for a Google One subscription.

With Google One, you can buy space starting 100 GB and go up to 30 TB on the cloud. Just to clear the confusion if any, if you are a member of the Google services, this shift from Google Drive to Google One, will not take away your first free 15 GB of storage. But with Google One, anything over and above the 15 GB that you wish to get will have to be bought.

We reached out to Google for the prices of the storage plans in India, however, we havent heard back from them yet. But this is how the recently announced plans in the US look like:

Google One plans start at 100 GB, which is priced at $1.99 per month. Then there is a 200 GB tier for $2.99, and finally a 2 TB option for $9.99. Google also wrote in its blog that plans larger than 2 TB will remain the same. Additionally, the existing 1 TB Drive plans will now be upgraded to 2 TB at no extra cost.

And in case you need even more storage space, you can also get 10 TB, 20 TB and 30 TB plans, priced between $99.99 and $299.99 per month as well.
tech2 News Staff

Apple forgot making new AirPods, so Huawei is, apparently.

Huawei is expected to launch the Mate 20 Pro in London this October and according to a few leaks that have surfaced online, wireless AirPod-like earphones will launch along with the device.

Famous tipster Roland Quandt tweeted that Huawei Freebuds 2 pro is a product that the company will launch. From the image he tweeted, the wireless earphones look very similar to Apples AirPods. Huawei had launched the Freebuds earlier this year in March during the P20/P20 Pro launch, but they did not resemble the AirPods as much as the Freebuds 2 Pro appear to resemble.

Huawei Freebuds 2 Pro - new AirPod look-a-like wireless headphones. The battery case can be charged wirelessly - using the Mate 20 Pro! https://t.co/XGKV1n1f6o  Roland Quandt (@rquandt) September 19, 2018

The big difference, however, is that the Freebuds 2 Pro are expected to come in a case which can be charged wirelessly, which is unlike the Apple AirPods.

Yep, this is the Mate 20 Pro in a marketing shot for the new Huawei Freebuds 2 Pro. It isn't as big as we all thought - under 150mm length. Oh, also, Huaweis new wireless charger is in this pic too. More here: https://t.co/XGKV1n1f6o pic.twitter.com/8mf9jW21C0  Roland Quandt (@rquandt) September 19, 2018

The wireless earphones are also expected to be launched in a black color and will be priced somewhere around 150 euros (about Rs 12,700).

As far as the Huawei Mate 20 and Mate 20 Pro are concerned, the device is expected to come with a Kirin 980 chipset, which was launched at IFA this year in Berlin. They will also feature a 4 GB RAM with 64 GB storage and 6 GB RAM with 128 GB internal storage, respectively.
Agence France-Presse

DNA tests on smuggled elephant tusks have identified three major ivory cartels in Africa and are helping investigators bolster the criminal cases against some of the most dangerous traffickers, researchers said Wednesday, 19 September.

Around 40,000 African elephants are killed every year for their tusks, which are illegally traded as part of a multi-billion dollar industry that extends from Africa to Asia and beyond.

Traffickers conceal their ivory in shipping containers  but inspectors peer inside just one percent of the one billion containers sent around the world each year.

Where physical inspections fall short, genetic testing has come to the rescue, said the report in the journal Science Advances.

Lead author Samuel Wasser, a professor of biology at the University of Washington, said an "important breakthrough" came when experts realized about half of the tusks were not in pairs. Often, one was missing.

So they ran DNA tests on 38 seizures from 2006 to 2015 to find out where the tusks came from.

They found 26 of the 38 matched a tusk seized at a different time.

They also discovered that two shipments with matching tusks would frequently pass through the same port, usually within 10 months of each other.

"This suggests the same major cartel was responsible for both shipments," Wasser told reporters on a conference call.

"We were able to identify what we believe are the three major cartels shipping tusks out of Africa."

They operate out of Mombasa, Kenya; Entebbe, Uganda; and Lome, Togo, according to Wasser.

Bolstering case

Since most ivory traffickers face prosecution for a single seizure, being able to connect individual traffickers to multiple large seizures can raise the stakes, allowing them to be charged with major transnational crimes and face tougher penalties.

Wasser said his team's research has been able to link far more ivory to certain criminals.

Chief among them is ivory "kingpin" Feisal Mohamed Ali, a Kenyan national who had his 20-year jail term overturned earlier this year by a judge who cited "gaps" in the evidence against him.

Ali was arrested in Tanzania in 2014 in connection with two tons of ivory  228 whole tusks and 74 pieces  found in a Mombasa warehouse. Authorities put the value of the ivory at $4.2 million.

His case has been referred to a lower court, said Wasser.

"There is a great deal of evidence we have uncovered  as have others  that link him to multiple seizures," Wasser said.

"Our hope is that the data presented in this paper will help strengthen the case against this cartel."

Wasser said DNA analysis from his lab was "instrumental" in the conviction of another ivory smuggler, Emile N'Bouke, nicknamed "The Boss" (Le Patron), allegedly the largest ivory trafficker in west Africa.

In 2014 he was handed the maximum sentence under the law in Togo for possessing 1,500 pounds (700 kilograms) of ivory  two years in jail.

Since then, more DNA analysis has linked N'Bouke to other criminal syndicates in Africa, Wasser said.

"We had not yet developed the links between all these different seizures," Wasser said.

"This is a case where we wish we had this data sooner," he said, adding that "eyes are still on him."

Hard evidence

John Brown, special agent in the US Department of Homeland Security and country representative for HSI Nairobi, said the DNA analysis has been "important" in the pursuit of multiple ongoing investigations, though he declined to go into further detail.

"Dr. Wasser's lab has provided hard evidence to identify, dismantle and disrupt criminal organizations behind illicit trade in wildlife," Brown said.

Smugglers and poachers are "very well organized" and "can be violent," Brown said.

Trade in ivory was banned in 1989 under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES).

Smugglers often try to evade detection by shipping ivory out of a different country than where it was poached.

Wasser said that even though most of the DNA data relates to tusks that were trafficked from 2011 to 2014, a period of rapid escalation, the science is still relevant today.

"It takes a long time to catch these guys," he said
Australia was aiming to finalise an agreement on the joint facility  to be built on Papua New Guinea's Manus island  ahead of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Port Moresby in November,

Australia is planning to build a new naval base in Papua New Guinea (PNG), reports said Wednesday, in an apparent move to curb China's influence in the Pacific.

Canberra was aiming to finalise an agreement on the joint facility  to be built on the Pacific nation's Manus island  ahead of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Port Moresby in November, The Australian reported.

The newspaper said Australian defence officials visited PNG's Lombrum Naval Base on Manus to review a potential redevelopment after PNG prime minister Peter O'Neill visited Brisbane in July.

"The Pacific is a very high-priority area of strategic national security interest for Australia," Prime Minister Scott Morrison said Wednesday, refusing to deny the report. "But I'm not going to comment on speculation on national security issues, that would not be appropriate."

Beijing has been showering billions of dollars in infrastructure loans to tiny island nations across the Pacific Ocean, a region considered strategically important as a maritime gateway to Asia.

Canberra, which has a history of military cooperation in the Pacific with close ally Washington, has warned of a need to counter China's influence in the region. Australia has been critical of Beijing's Pacific "soft diplomacy", and announced this year it would negotiate a security treaty with Vanuatu and also build an undersea communications cable to the Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea.

Canberra's PNG move follows reports China had approached Vanuatu about the possibility of opening a military base there.

World leaders, including Chinese President Xi Jinping, will attend the APEC summit in November, an event both Canberra and Beijing have openly supported, throwing millions of dollars at security and infrastructure improvements in PNG.
As US president Donald Trump prepares for his second U.N. General Assembly, the Olympics of international diplomacy, his administration has turned unabashedly and profoundly inward, pursuing ever more unilateral policies in what critics argue is a great retreat from global engagement that had been a bipartisan hallmark of previous U.S. leaders.

Washington: America first? Try America first, second and third.

As US president Donald Trump prepares for his second U.N. General Assembly, the Olympics of international diplomacy, his administration has turned unabashedly and profoundly inward, pursuing ever more unilateral policies in what critics argue is a great retreat from global engagement that had been a bipartisan hallmark of previous U.S. leaders.

Trump aides who used to qualify his well-worn campaign slogan by insisting that "America first does not mean America alone" are gone. In their place are advocates of inviolable state sovereignty who share a belief that many of the institutions established after World War II to secure and maintain international order are either obsolete or in need of serious revision.

Ahead of the General Assembly, some expect the meeting to have a different tone from last year when wary world leaders weren't prepared for Trump's brand or style of diplomacy or for his determination to push an "America first" agenda. This time around they know what to expect.

"A lot of leaders have gamed out how to deal with the president," said Jon Alterman, senior vice president of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "They will be nice to him in person, but will work to create broad coalitions to block or undermine a lot of the president's initiatives because they think they are misguided. They'll try to use this meeting to advance strategies that promote their vision and not the president's, but not rub the president's face in it."

Stewart Patrick, a former State Department official in President George W. Bush's administration who is now a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, said Trump is "abdicating global leadership and retreating into narrow-minded nationalism" and that his approach "provides few incentives for other countries to align themselves with American purposes."

"The administration's unilateralism is wearing thin, as (U.N.) member states tire of America's browbeating and unwillingness to compromise," he wrote on Wednesday. "Next week, the president will encounter a more skeptical global audience, woke to the reality that his administration's diplomacy is all take and no give."

Getting the Trump administration to change course, however, may be difficult, considering its foreign policy trajectory.

When former Secretary of State John Kerry left the State Department for the last time on January 19, 2017, he told diplomats that the United States was "more engaged in more places in this world with greater positive impact than at any time in American history."

His assertion was arguable at the time. But if it was true then, it is no longer.

The seeds of the retreat were planted even before Trump fired his first secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, in March, and the departures the next month of his chief economic adviser, Gary Cohn, and national security adviser, H.R. McMaster.

In his first several months, Trump withdrew from a trans-Pacific trade deal, the Paris climate accord and pulled the U.S. out of the U.N.'s science, educational and cultural organization. He repeatedly questioned the relevance of NATO, the utility of other multilateral groups and organizations, insulted the leaders of U.S. allies and pared back the Obama administration's rapprochement with Cuba. In December, against the advice of his national security team, he recognized Jerusalem as Israel's capital.

But since Tillerson, Cohn and McMaster left and were replaced with Mike Pompeo, Larry Kudlow and John Bolton, the pace of the retreat has intensified and heading into the General Assembly appears set to increase.

In the last six months alone, Trump has pulled the U.S. out of the U.N. Human Rights Council, yanked funding for the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees, halted virtually all assistance to the Palestinians themselves and re-ignited the Jerusalem dispute by moving the U.S. embassy there from Tel Aviv.

In the same time frame, the administration has also imposed sanctions on NATO ally Turkey, slashed its contributions to Syria stabilization efforts, withdrawn from the Iran nuclear deal, sharply reduced refugee admissions, threatened to prosecute International Criminal Court employees if the tribunal even opens an investigation into alleged war crimes by U.S. troops, started a trade war with China and suggested the U.S. might quit the World Trade Organization.

Two areas where the administration has tried outreach  with North Korea and Russia  have been criticized or viewed with extreme skepticism by many foreign policy veterans, Republicans and Democrats alike.

Trump has met the leaders of both nations at summits that produced questionable results.

And, while he has claimed progress on the North Korea front that may yet pan out, the engagement has yet to achieve any concrete sign of success on the desired result of denuclearization.
US president Donald Trump piled pressure on Wednesday on the woman accusing his Supreme Court pick of sexual assault by insisting that she testify next week if she wants to be heard.

Washington: US president Donald Trump piled pressure on Wednesday on the woman accusing his Supreme Court pick of sexual assault by insisting that she testify next week if she wants to be heard.

Trump echoed Republican leaders in suggesting that time is running out for Christine Blasey Ford, the California psychology professor whose allegation that she was assaulted as a teenager threatens to derail confirmation of conservative Judge Brett Kavanaugh to America's highest court.

Ford has backtracked from earlier statements that she is ready to face a grilling in the Senate Judiciary Committee. Instead, she is calling for an FBI probe into her allegation that Kavanaugh pinned her to a bed and muffled her cries as he tried to pull off her clothes when she was 15 and he was 17.

Kavanaugh, now 53, denies any such incident took place and no other direct witnesses have come forward.

Trump told journalists at the White House that he retained full faith in the judge, saying it was "very hard for me to imagine that anything happened."

He urged Ford to take her chance at the committee hearing set for Monday, where Kavanaugh is likewise invited to explain his side of the story.

Trump indicated that his patience is wearing thin, even telling political website The Hill that the scandal resembles what he called "the witch hunt" by a special prosecutor into allegations his campaign colluded with Russia to bring about his surprise 2016 election.

"We continue to give her a lot of time. We've held up the whole hearing," Trump told reporters.

The Republican chairman of the Senate committee, Chuck Grassley, wrote to Ford's lawyers, ruling out any FBI role and saying that the sole venue for airing the allegations would be the Senate hearing.

"You have stated repeatedly that Dr Ford wants to tell her story. I sincerely hope that Dr Ford will accept my invitation to do so, either privately or publicly, on Monday," Grassley said.

Late Wednesday, a lawyer for Ford, Lisa Banks, was quoted by The Washington Post saying that the "rush to a hearing is unnecessary and contrary to the Committee discovering the truth."

But Susan Collins, a Republican senator seen as potentially voting against party lines, also said that Ford needed to testify.

"I think it's not fair for Judge Kavanaugh for her not to come forward and testify," she said.

Ultimate goal

Until last week, Kavanaugh looked almost certain to win confirmation in the Senate in a victory for Trump that would tilt the Supreme Court to conservative rulings, potentially for decades to come.

The scandal, erupting just before the Senate Judiciary Committee had been due to vote on Kavanaugh, ignited an uproar fueled by the #MeToo movement against sexual harassment.

For Democrats hoping to hurt Trump before November congressional elections, when they hope to retake at least one house of the Republican-dominated Congress, the row is a godsend.

And Trump  who faces a raft of serious allegations of sexual impropriety and was once caught on tape boasting of being able to "grab" women's genitals whenever he wanted  has had to tread a fine line.

Instead of the real estate tycoon's usually no-holds-barred combative style, honed during decades of cutthroat business deals, he has been careful to speak about Ford with respect.

However, he has at the same time repeatedly insisted on Kavanaugh's "unblemished" record.

On Wednesday, Trump made clear that his main goal is shifting the Supreme Court to the right.

"When I first decided to run, everybody said the single most important thing you do is the Supreme Court justice," he said.

Call for FBI involvement

Lawyers for Ford, 51, say now that they want a broader FBI investigation first, rather than a one-day hearing which Democrats say will be used by Republicans as fig leaf before going ahead with Kavanaugh's confirmation vote.

In a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee, the lawyers said she has faced "vicious harassment and even death threats" since going public with her allegations on Sunday.

"As a result of these kind of threats, her family was forced to relocate out of their home," they added.

Some on the left believe that Ford could become a new icon of the #MeToo campaign against the sexual harassment of women by powerful men. However, with her yet to appear in public, it remains uncertain what level of grassroots anger is being stirred.

A GoFundMe campaign for aiding Ford's costs had raised $135,542 of its $175,000 goal in less than 24 hours Wednesday, although another campaign had raised only around $5,000 after two days.
By Elizabeth Piper and Gabriela Baczynska SALZBURG, Austria (Reuters) - Prime Minister Theresa May appealed directly to fellow European leaders on Wednesday to drop 'unacceptable' Brexit demands that she said could rip Britain apart, and urged the bloc to respond in kind to her 'serious and workable' plan. Over Wiener schnitzel in Salzburg, May was trying to win over the leaders of the European Union by effectively asking them what they would do if they were asked to agree a 'legal separation' of their countries -- something she says the EU is asking for by insisting Northern Ireland might stay under EU economic rules. It may be a high-risk strategy

By Elizabeth Piper and Gabriela Baczynska

SALZBURG, Austria (Reuters) - Prime Minister Theresa May appealed directly to fellow European leaders on Wednesday to drop "unacceptable" Brexit demands that she said could rip Britain apart, and urged the bloc to respond in kind to her "serious and workable" plan.

Over Wiener schnitzel in Salzburg, May was trying to win over the leaders of the European Union by effectively asking them what they would do if they were asked to agree a "legal separation" of their countries -- something she says the EU is asking for by insisting Northern Ireland might stay under EU economic rules.

It may be a high-risk strategy. EU officials again said Britain had to move its own position over what has become known as the Irish backstop - how to avoid erecting border posts between the British province and EU member Ireland - as well as on future economic cooperation after Brexit day in March.

A government source suggested Britain would come up with other proposals to try to reach agreement on Northern Ireland "in due course", but May has so far been reluctant to move from her Chequers plan, hashed out at her country home in July.

With just over six months to Brexit day, both sides agree on one point - that time is running out to secure a deal that will mark Britain's biggest policy shift in almost half a century.

"I believe that I have put forward serious and workable proposals. We will of course not agree on every detail, but I hope that you will respond in kind," she was set to tell the other leaders at the Felsenreitschule theatre -- known to film fans for a scene in the musical 'The Sound of Music'.

"The onus is now on all of us to get this deal done," she was due to say, according to the senior British government source.

BORDER PLAN "NOT CREDIBLE"

The talks, which have gone on for over a year, are bogged down in how to ensure that what will become Britain's only land border with the EU, between Northern Ireland and Ireland, will not become home again to the checks and tensions of the past.

May has rejected an EU proposal to keep the province in a customs union with the bloc if they fail to reach a deal to keep the entire EU-UK border open, instead offering a time-limited customs arrangement that would cover the whole of Britain.

Over dinner, she was again planning to say that the problem could be solved by securing the type of "frictionless trade" envisaged in her Chequers plan, and that Britain was still committed to agreeing a fall-back scheme with the EU.

"However, the Commission's proposal for this protocol - that I should assent to a legal separation of the United Kingdom into two customs territories - is not credible," she was set to say.

May has shown little sign of moving away from her Brexit plan, shrugging off criticism not only from Brussels but also at home over her proposals for future trade relations and Northern Ireland.

She may have little option. Facing the annual Conservative Party conference later this month, she is keen to show hardline Brexiters who have called on her to "chuck Chequers" that her plan is the only one that can be negotiated with the EU.

And, possibly for that audience, she planned to tell the EU leaders that although time was short, "delaying or extending these negotiations is not an option" and rule out the option of a second referendum on Britain's EU membership.

EU officials are minded not to paint May into a corner, aware of the increasing opposition to her plans in her Conservative Party, and that she needs a victory of sorts to persuade a reluctant parliament to back a deal.

But while they were keen to emphasise the positive movement seen in the Chequers plan, some said no deal could be reached until there was movement from Britain on Northern Ireland.

"NO PROGRESS"

Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar told reporters there had been no advance on the issue: "I don't think we're any closer to a withdrawal agreement than we were in March, so I can't report any progress, unfortunately."

European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker said a deal with Britain was still "far away".

According to an EU official, chief negotiator Michel Barnier has suggested going to the "bare bones" on any checks between the rest of Britain and Northern Ireland, which could be further reduced if there is a trade facilitation agreement similar to that with Japan.

The government source said Britain had yet to receive a formal proposal.

But he did say London would offer proposals for regulatory aspects of the backstop to try to move the talks forward. He did not say when. EU negotiators say the problem is not only about customs but also ensuring the goods coming into the EU are produced according to EU rules, which Britain wants to shed.

May expects little immediate feedback at the dinner.

She will attend a morning session on Thursday to discuss security, where she will raise the poisoning of a former Russian spy in Salisbury. She will also have a face-to-face meeting with Varadkar.

She will then be out of the room when the other 27 leaders discuss her Brexit proposals over lunch, and will find out about their reactions only when Tusk briefs her separately afterwards.

But the senior British source said Britain believed momentum was growing for a deal, noting Tusk's plan to convene a special summit in mid-November to ink a hoped-for treaty.

"I think this signals that very serious discussions are now taking place," the source said. "We are confident of getting a deal."

(Additional reporting by Alastair Macdonald, Francois Murphy Andreas Rinke, Jean-Baptiste Vey, Jan Strupczewski in Brussels, and William James in London; Editing by Kevin Liffey)

This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed.
The tension between the Sheikh Hasina government and Sinha, Bangladesh's first-ever Chief Justice from a minority group, was triggered by a verdict nullifying a constitutional amendment

Former Chief Justice of Bangladesh Surendra Kumar Sinha, who resigned last year amid intense pressure over a verdict nullifying a constitutional amendment, accuses the country's notorious military spy agency, the Directorate General of Forces Intelligence (DGFI), of orchestrating his forced resignation. In a new book, released on 16 September, he also lays out a detailed and explosive account of the events that led to his resignation.

A brief introduction to the book titled A Broken Dream: Rule of Law, Human Rights and Democracy, written in first person, states, "Finally, in the face of intimidation and threats to my family and friends by the country's military intelligence agency called the Directorate General of the Defence Forces Intelligence (DGDFI) (sic), I submitted resignation from abroad."

In total, there are 63 mentions of DGFI in the book.

The tension between the Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina-led government and Sinha, who was Bangladesh's first-ever Chief Justice to come from a religious or ethnic minority group, was triggered by a verdict nullifying a constitutional amendment that would have given the Parliament power to impeach judges. And as it turned out, Sinha became the first Chief Justice to resign. The book is full of explosive materials incriminating the military intelligence and even the prime minister herself. According to excerpts seen by this correspondent, it details how the DGFI interfered in judicial affairs by, for example, "exerting pressure on the judges for delivery of a judgment in favour of the government."

Even when he requested the prime minister to rein in her DGFI officers, he writes, she remained silent.

He alleges that after he fell out with the government, he was basically confined to his residence, with lawyers and peers denied entry to him and plainclothes DGFI men taking control of the entire Supreme Court premise. Meanwhile, a series of charges including graft and money-laundering against him appeared in the staunchly pro-government newspaper Janakantha. Sinha describes a meeting with the DGFI chief, who told him that there were some "allegations" against him.

"What! You're exceeding your limits. Who gave you the power to talk like this?" he shouted at the DGFI chief in response, according to the book. But the latter insisted that he wasn't saying this without any proof.

In October, the government announced that Sinha would go on leave due to health issues, while the law minister said that the Chief Justice had cancer. On his way to Australia, Sinha, however, contradicted the statement, telling reporters that he was not unwell at all, and that he would return soon. In a written statement given to reporters, he also challenged the legality of the government's decision to appoint another appellate court judge as "an interim Chief Justice" during his absence.

In a rejoinder circulated to the press after Sinha left the country, the Supreme Court's registrar-general trashed his statement, saying that the five other judges of the appellate division refused to sit alongside him because he failed to give a proper explanation when they confronted him about serious charges against him  the list of which had been handed over to them by President of Bangladesh Abdul Hamid. The unprecedented statement of the Supreme Court contradicted Sinha's statement, in which he tried to clarify that he himself sought the leave and the president approved it accordingly.

In his book, Sinha also alleges that his relative, businessman Aniruddha Roy Chowdhury was picked up by the DGFI to put pressure on him to resign, although it was reported back then in the local media that he had been abducted by his business partners. While the allegation remaining unproven, Chowdhury returned home six days after Sinha had resigned on 18 October.

Regardless of his claims, the circumstances surrounding his resignation were highly dramatic. Less than a year after the ruling Awami League came to power in a highly controversial election  that was boycotted by Opposition parties  in 2014, the 16th Amendment to the Constitution, which would have given the Parliament power to impeach Supreme Court justices, was passed in Parliament. The high court struck down the amendment. While the party appealed to the Supreme Court, an appellate division bench headed by Sinha unanimously rejected the appeal upholding the high court's decision.

As soon as the full text of the verdict was made public in August 2018, several ruling party leaders launched a blistering attack against Sinha and called for his resignation, taking issue with a particular sentence of the observation of the judgment: "No nation  no country is made of or by one person. If we want to truly live up to the dream of Sonar Bangla as advocated by our Father of the Nation, we must keep ourselves free from this suicidal ambition and addiction of 'I'ness." By 'one person', the ruling party leaders alleged, Sinha took a dig at Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the country's founding father  a charge he denied.

The tension intensified after Sinha, while hearing another longstanding contentious case regarding the separation of the executive branch and judiciary, referred to the removal of Pakistans then prime minister Nawaz Sharif by its Supreme Court  a remark that drew sharp criticism from Hasina.

Brigadier General Tanveer Mazhar Siddique, the chief of DGFI's Public Relations and Media Communications, denied these allegations in a short interview with Bangla Tribune. "We haven't yet read the book," he is quoted as saying, "We are trying to collect it. It's better we comment after we read the book. However, I can say on behalf of the agency that threatening or intimidating someone is not our job. We never do this. Nevertheless, after reading the book, more can be said as to what he said in what context and about whom."

Having lost his power, Justice SK Sinha wrote a book full of fiction. When someone is not in power, they feel grievances. They say stuff out of such grievances, Obaidul Quader, a top minister and secretary of Awami League, told reporters. We do not think that its necessary to respond to stuff written from abroad.

Meanwhile, senior minister and secretary of the Awami League Obaidul Quader told reporters, "Having lost his power, Sinha wrote a book full of fiction. When someone is not in power, they feel grievances. They say stuff out of such grievances.... We do not think that its necessary to respond to stuff written from abroad."

Sinha never returned to Bangladesh after he going to Australia. Efforts to contact him were unsuccessful.
Empty recruiting tables and are becoming more common for the Japanese military SDF as the country's demographic troubles and robust economy have created a silent crisis for military recruiting.

Tokyo: As a Japanese military recruiter sat patiently at a booth outside a supermarket in northern Tokyo one recent weekend, she welcomed a rare visitor, high school student Kazuaki Matsumura.

But Matsumura, who plans to go to university, wasnt there to sign up. He was just curious.

There are scenes in the media that spark interest in the Self-Defence Forces (SDF), the 16-year-old said, referring to Japans military. But there are also scenes showing how tough it is and I dont think many want to join. They want to do other things.

Empty recruiting tables and disinterested audiences are becoming more common for the SDF as Japans demographic troubles and robust economy have created what some defence insiders call a silent crisis for military recruiting.

Amid a rock-bottom birth rate, the number of Japanese age 18 to 26  the core of the recruitment pool  has shrunk to 11 million from 17 million in 1994. That group is forecast to shrink to 7.8 million over the next 30 years.

That has left the SDF unable to hit recruitment quotas since 2014. Overall, the military was only able to recruit about 77 percent of the 9,734 lowest-rank enlisted personnel it had sought in the year ending in March.

Twenty years from now, unless we can replace a considerable number of people with robots, itll be hard to maintain the current level of war capability, said Akihisa Nagashima, a former parliamentary vice defence minister and conservative independent lawmaker. Japans (security) situation wont be more peaceful, so I think this is really serious.

The personnel crunch could force Japans military into tough choices about future missions as it tries to contain Chinas maritime expansion and deal with volatility on the Korean peninsula.

The manpower shortage will affect operational efficiency, said Hideshi Tokuchi, a former vice defence minister who once headed the ministrys personnel bureau. It is a headache. There is more to do with fewer people and I dont think there is an easy solution.

A Tough Sell

As Japans economy has improved, unemployment has fallen to around a 25-year low. More high school grads are also heading to college.

That is good news for the country, but it makes military recruiting even tougher.

Even though we have the budget, we fall below the allotted number of troops, said Kenji Wakamiya, a former defence vice minister who heads a ruling party panel on defence policy.

Japan budgeted for 247,154 SDF personnel in the year to March 2018, but the military employed only 226,789. The biggest shortfall is in the lowest ranks of enlisted personnel, which were roughly 26 percent below their budgeted level.

With conscription deemed unconstitutional, the military is trying to recruit more women, and starting next month, the maximum age for new recruits will be raised to 32. Retirement ages may be increased as well.

There was a time when it was thought youth equals strength, but if you think about it ... experience and skill have become even more important for todays SDF, said Ritsuko Hiroshi, director of the defence ministrys personnel affairs division.

A Female Personnel Empowerment Initiative unveiled last year aims to double the percentage of women in the SDF from 6.1 percent in 2016, and to at least 9 percent by 2030.

That compares with about 15 percent in the United States and 10 percent in Britain.

Although Japanese women can hold a wider range of military jobs than they once could, they still are often assigned to non-combat roles, officials and experts said.

They tend to be positions that are traditionally coded female ... anything that doesnt require picking up a weapon, said Sabine Fruhstuck, a professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

A Softer Image

Recent pop culture campaigns such as manga-style posters help create a soft image of the SDF among the public, but the impact on recruitment is limited, experts said.

Hardly anyone joins because he or she saw a poster. They are encouraged to join by parents or relatives or teachers who were former SDF members, said Hitotsubashi University professor Fumika Sato, who researches recruitment.

It takes roughly 5,000 SDF officials, many in regional headquarters, to recruit about 14,000 new personnel each year.

Its a very time-consuming, labour-intensive business, Tokuchi said. Recruiters have to approach high schools and parents to explain what they have to do and can do in the military... and then take kids to events organised by the defence forces and induce them to take the exam, he said.

The defence ministry is seeking a 5.8 percent increase in the military recruitment budget for the year from April to 2.4 billion yen ($21 million).

The SDF last year embraced internet advertising, which resulted in a three-fold increase in visits to its recruiting homepage, said Major Yoshiaki Hayashida of the Ground Self-Defence Force staff offices personnel division.

About 90 percent of the public has a positive view of the SDF, surveys show, largely due to military disaster relief work, but that doesnt necessarily mean they want to serve, recruiters and experts said.

People want to join because its challenging, a stable job and because they want to be useful, said Colonel Shuzo Yoshida, head of recruiting at the SDFs Tokyo Provincial Cooperation Headquarters.

Hiroki Hashimoto, 24, who attended an army technical high school and the National Defence Academy, was more explicit.

Many people join the SDF or attend its technical high school because they are poor. That is a fact, said Hashimoto, who did not enlist.

A post-war attachment to pacifist ideals also complicates recruitment.

Compared to 10-20 years ago, the SDF is more firmly established in society, Nagashima said. But because Japan had the trauma of defeat in the war, and many were sacrificed, I think it will take 100 years (for sentiments to change).
CCTV images from the area reportedly show a group of four-five youths, dressed in hoodies, attempting the act of arson outside the Karlekars' home.

London: An Indian-origin family of four in the UK had a lucky escape when their house was targeted in an "unprovoked" arson attack which the police is treating as a hate crime.

Mayur Karlekar, known as Mac Karlekar, his wife Ritu and two young children were asleep in their home late on Saturday night when they were woken up by their neighbours, who had called in the fire brigade to tackle a huge blaze outside their home in south-east London's Borkwood Park area of Orpington.

"The Metropolitan Police is investigating this as a hate crime. It is being dealt with as a case of arson and criminal damage. No arrests have been made so far," a Metropolitan Police spokesperson said on Wednesday.

CCTV images from the area reportedly show a group of four-five youths, dressed in hoodies, attempting to start a fire on the hedges outside the Karlekars' home.

"We all were sleeping and were luckily woken up by neighbours on time. Though most of the damage was done to the hedges leaving the house now exposed, my son's bedroom was just saved  he was sleeping in it at the time of the incident," said Karlekar, a digital consultant who move to the UK from Mumbai in the late 1990s. "We are glad it was stopped on time but the damage to our neighbourhood, our society, to our home has been done, irrecoverably. We have not caused any trouble to anyone and have only helped others in all our lifetime. I was special police myself doing voluntary unpaid work. This act happening to us was a complete shock," said the 43-year-old, who has been appealing for information to bring the suspects to justice across various social media channels.

Karlekar, originally from Dombivali in Thane district of Maharashtra, said he wanted to ensure no other families in the neighbourhood become victims of a similar hate crime. "Hope this kind of arson attack does not happen to any family as it happened on ours unprovoked. If you know anyone or seen any video floating around on social media of dares, please help stop it. Be safe, be vigilant," he said in his appeal.

Images posted on social media reveal huge flames and extensive damage to the outside of the property in the residential suburb in the borough of Bromley in London. Karlekar has expressed his unhappiness with the nearly 32-hour delay in the Met Police starting their investigation into the case.

@metpoliceuk 12 hours since the Arson attack on our property, still not a single call from police. We tried 5 times and were told someone will call but since fire on control there is no urgency. Son's bedroom right next to where fire set, saved by neighbors but no police yet. pic.twitter.com/s4A23Kpcvg  Mac Karlekar (@mackarlekar) September 16, 2018

"This is the second incident in this area, the first one being a robbery, but we feel more may have happened or are going unreported. We want those people to come out and raise their voice too," he said.

British police describe hate crimes as those perceived as motivated by hostility or prejudice based on a personal characteristic and monitor it under five strands  race or ethnicity; religion or beliefs; sexual orientation; disability; or transgender identity.

According to official figures released earlier this year, incidents of hate crime had registered a spike in the immediate aftermath of the Brexit referendum in 2016. There were 80,393 offences in 2016-17, compared with 62,518 in 2015-16, the largest increase since the UK Home Office began recording these figures in 2011-12.
Three United Kingdom authors, two Americans and a Canadian are finalists for the Man Booker Prize for fiction for 2018.

Three United Kingdom authors, two Americans and a Canadian are finalists for the Man Booker Prize for fiction for 2018.

The shortlist announced on Thursday, 20 September, includes two first novels: UK poet Robin Robertsons verse novel The Long Take and Everything Under by British writer Daisy Johnson. At 27, Johnson is the youngest-ever Booker finalist. The American finalists are Rachel Kushners prison story The Mars Room and Richard Powers tree-inspired tale The Overstory.

Washington Black, the saga of an escaped slave by Canadas Esi Edugyan, and Troubles-set story Milkman by Northern Ireland writer Anna Burns round out the list.

Favourites, including Canadas Michael Ondaatje, didnt make the cut from the 13-novel longlist, nor did Nick Dranaso's graphic novel Sabrina.

Here is a brief look at the finalists, one of whom will be the winner of the 50,000 pounds ($66,000) prize, which will be announced on 16 October 2018 during a black-tie dinner at Londons Guildhall.

The Long Take, by Robin Robertson

The Long Take, a noir narrative, follows Walker  a D-Day veteran with post-traumatic stress disorder  through a sequence of poems as he moves through post-war American cities of New York, Los Angles and San Francisco. Unable to face a return to his family home in rural Nova Scotia, he goes in search of freedom, change, anonymity, and repair.

Everything Under, by Daisy Johnson

Everything Under, a reimagination of classical myths and tales, follows Gretel, a lexicographer, who grew up on a houseboat with her mother, inventing a language of their own. Not having seen her mother since the age of 16, her memories are fading. But everything changes when a phone call from the hospital interrupts her isolation and throws up questions from long ago.

The Mars Room, by Rachel Kushner

Romy Hall is at the start of two consecutive life sentences at a womens correctional facility, deep in Californias Central Valley. Inside, she faces a new reality  thousands of women hustling for the bare essentials needed to survive; the bluffing and pageantry and casual acts of violence by guards and prisoners alike; and the deadpan absurdities of institutional living.

The Overstory, by Richard Powers

An Air Force loadmaster in the Vietnam War is shot out of the sky, then saved by falling into a banyan. An artist inherits a hundred years of photographic portraits, all of the same doomed American chestnut. A hard-partying undergraduate in the late 1980s electrocutes herself, dies, and is sent back into life by creatures of air and light. These three, and six other; in his twelfth novel, Powers tells the stories of nine Americans whose unique life experiences with trees bring them together to address the destruction of forests.

Washington Black, by Esi Edugyan

Working in the sticky heat of the Barbados sugar plantation where he was born, 11-year-old field slave Washington Black is terrified when he's made manservant to his master's offbeat brother. But naturalist/explorer Wilde, or "Titch," eagerly introduces Wash to a brave new world and protects him when a bounty is placed on his head, as they flee north along America's Atlantic coast to the chilly Arctic.

Milkman, by Anna Burns

In this unnamed city, to be interesting is dangerous. Middle sister, the book's protagonist, is busy attempting to keep her mother from discovering her maybe-boyfriend and to keep everyone in the dark about her encounter with Milkman. But when first brother-in-law sniffs out her struggle, and rumours start to swell, middle sister becomes 'interesting'. The last thing she ever wanted to be.

With inputs from The Associated Press
The Convention Centre, which would be a spacious, modern and eco-friendly facility, is being established in the context of the African Union (AU) Summit that Niger is set to host next year

New Delhi: India and Niger on Wednesday signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) for the implementation of Mahatma Gandhi International Convention Centre (MGICC) in Niamey, Niger with the Indian government's grant assistance.

The agreement was signed by Secretary (Economic Relations), Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) TS Tirumurti and Ambassador of Republic of Niger in India Ali Illiassou, in the presence of External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj and Minister and Special Adviser to the President of Republic of Niger, Saidil Moctar Mohamed, a statement from the MEA read.

Bapus message would reverberate in Niger too! In presence of EAM @SushmaSwaraj, MoS @mjakbar and Minister of Niger, Saidil Moctar Mohamed, an MoU was exchanged for establishing GoI funded Mahatma Gandhi International Convention Centre in Niamey.#IndiaforAfrica pic.twitter.com/euWftsnoSG  Raveesh Kumar (@MEAIndia) September 19, 2018

Mohamed, who is currently in New Delhi, called on Swaraj and thanked India for providing grant assistance to build MGICC. The two ministers also discussed other issues of bilateral and regional interest, including combating terrorism, development partnership among others. Minister of State for External Affairs M.J. Akbar also hosted a lunch in honour of the visiting Niger minister.

The Convention Centre, which would be a spacious, modern and eco-friendly facility, is being established in the context of the African Union (AU) Summit that Niger is set to host next year, which would witness high-level and wide-ranging participation from AU member states, the statement added.

The centre honours the memory of Mahatma Gandhi, whose 150th birth anniversary is also being observed in 2019. The establishment of the centre is a landmark for Niger-India friendship and also a symbol of India's firm commitment towards Africa.

In response to growing request from countries in Africa, India has offered to establish Mahatma Gandhi convention centres in more than 20 countries in Africa, of which the project are being taken up in the immediate phase in nine countries.

"India and Niger enjoy close relations. The bilateral relations have expanded significantly since the opening of the Indian Resident Diplomatic Mission in Niamey in 2009. India has provided lines of credit worth USD 96.54 million for projects in transport, electrification, solar energy and potable drinking water. India's grant assistance for MGICC will further contribute towards enhancing of bilateral ties," the statement concluded.
Deposed Pakistan prime minister Nawaz Sharif, his daughter and son-in-law were brought to their home turf, Lahore, in a special plane after their release from prison in Islamabad.

Lahore: Deposed Pakistan prime minister Nawaz Sharif, his daughter and son-in-law were brought to their home turf, Lahore, in a special plane after their release from prison in Islamabad on Wednesday evening, hours after the Islamabad High Court suspended their sentences in a major corruption case that jeopardised their political career.

A large number of Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) party supporters, including women workers, gathered outside the Haj Terminal to welcome them. Subsequently, the Sharif family was escorted to their Jati Umra residence located in the outskirts of Lahore.

While they were being escorted, the party supporters showered Sharif's car with rose petals and chanted slogans. Some of the supporters also kissed his car saying, "You are innocent, we love you."

A large number of PML-N workers were also present at Jati Umra to greet the the former prime minister, his daughter Maryam Nawaz and son-in-law Mohammad Safdar. The road leading to Jati Umra was lit up as workers queued up there to receive their leaders.

"I have come here soon after I heard the release of my leader (Sharif) from the Adiala jail. I am very happy to have him among us," Hasan Ali, a PML-N worker, said. He said no corruption charge has been proved against his leader and he was put behind the bar to give Imran Khan an "open field" to form the government.

The PML-N workers distributed sweets and also offered thanks giving prayer at Jati Umra. "We will continue celebrating the release of our leader for coming days," PML-N leader Imran Nazir said. PML-N president Shahbaz Sharif said the court's decision has vindicated his elder brother. "Today truth prevailed and my brother has been vindicated," he added.
By Hyonhee Shin and Joyce Lee SEOUL (Reuters) - North Korea's Kim Jong Un wants a second summit with U.S.

By Hyonhee Shin and Joyce Lee

SEOUL (Reuters) - North Korea's Kim Jong Un wants a second summit with U.S. President Donald Trump soon to hasten denuclearization, but a key goal is declaring an end this year to the 1950-53 Korean War, the South's President Moon Jae-in said on Thursday.

Moon said he and Kim spent most of a three-day summit discussing how to break an impasse and restart nuclear talks between Pyongyang and Washington, which are at odds over which should come first, denuclearization or ending the war.

Kim, who recently proposed another summit with Trump after their unprecedented June talks in Singapore, said the North was willing to "permanently dismantle" key missile facilities in the presence of outside experts, and the Yongbyon main nuclear complex, if the United States took corresponding action.

The joint statement from the summit stipulates his commitment to a "verifiable, irreversible dismantlement" of the nuclear programmes, and ending the war would be a first U.S. reciprocal step, Moon said.

"Chairman Kim expressed his wish that he wanted to complete denuclearization quickly and focus on economic development," Moon told a news conference in Seoul, shortly after returning from the summit with Kim in Pyongyang.

"He hoped a second summit with Trump would take place in the near future, in order to move the denuclearization process along quickly."

INSPECTIONS

Moon said Kim was also open to inspection of a nuclear test site in the northwest town of Punggye-ri, which he called the North's sole existing facility for underground detonations.

While Pyongyang has stopped nuclear and missile tests this year, it failed to keep its pledge to allow international inspections of its dismantling of the Punggye-ri site in May, stirring criticism that the move could be reversed.

U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said on Wednesday he had invited North Korea's foreign minister to meet in New York next week and other Pyongyang officials to Vienna for talks with nuclear envoy Stephen Biegun.

Asked on Thursday if those meetings would take place, U.S. State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert said invitations had been sent and added: "We certainly stand ready to meet if they are able to."

Nauert said Washington looked forward to a formal readout of the North-South talks in meetings with the South Koreans next week, which will include one between Trump and Moon on Monday on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly.

Asked about Pompeo's statement on Wednesday welcoming plans for the dismantlement of all facilities at Yongbyon in the presence of U.S. and IAEA inspectors, Nauert said Moon and Kim had talked about inspectors.

"Having IAEA inspectors and United States inspectors be a part of anything is really just a shared understanding," she said.

"Any time you have a nuclear situation like this where there is a dismantlement, the expectation is that the IAEA would be part of that, so that would be just the normal course of doing business. We have that shared understanding with the countries."

Asked why this detail was not in the document signed by Moon and Kim, Nauert replied: "We have had conversations ... with the government of North Korea and that is our mutual understanding; that is also the understanding between (South) Korea and North Korea. That was one of the things discussed, according to my understanding of it, over the past few days."

Nauert did not respond when asked if the United States was willing to take "corresponding measures," except to say: "Nothing can happen in the absence of denuclearization; denuclearization has to come first."

The North Korean ambassador to the United Nations, Kim Song, did not reply when asked by reporters on Thursday if his foreign minister would meet Pompeo on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly next week.

ENDING WAR

Kim pledged to work toward the "complete denuclearization of the Korean peninsula" during two meetings with Moon and his encounter with Trump, but follow-up negotiations on how to implement the vague commitments have since faltered.

Washington calls for concrete action, such as a full disclosure of North Korea's nuclear and missile facilities, before satisfying Pyongyang's key demands, including an official end to the war and the easing of international sanctions.

The war ended in an armistice, rather than a peace treaty, meaning U.S.-led United Nations forces, including South Korea, are technically still at war with the North.

But there have been concerns in South Korea and the United States that ending the war would ultimately prompt China and Russia, if not North Korea, to demand that the United Nations Command (UNC), which overlaps with U.S. forces in South Korea, be disbanded and leave.

Seoul aims to jointly announce with the United States an end to the war within this year, a measure Moon said he would discuss with Trump when they meet next week at the United Nations General Assembly in New York.

An end-of-war declaration would not affect the presence of U.S. troops and the UNC in the South, Moon said, adding that Kim shared his view.

"It would be a political declaration that would mark a starting point for peace negotiations," Moon said.

"A peace treaty would be sealed, as well as normalisation of North Korea-U.S. relations, after the North achieves complete denuclearization."

(Reporting by Hyonhee Shin and Joyce Lee; additional repotring by David Brunnstrom in Washington and Michelle Nichols at the United Nations; editing by Soyoung Kim, Clarence Fernandez and Lisa Shumaker)

This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed.
Slain Hizbul Mujahideen commander Burhan Wani has been declared a 'freedom icon' by Pakistan as the country has expressed its solidarity with Kashmiris in their 'fight against Indian oppression'.

Slain Hizbul Mujahideen commander Burhan Wani has been declared a "freedom icon" by Pakistan as the country has expressed its solidarity with Kashmiris in their "fight against Indian oppression". Pakistan commemorated the "victims of atrocities by Indian troops in Kashmir" by issuing 20 special postage stamps which carry captions such as: 'Burhan Wani (1994-2016) freedom icon'.

According to The Times of India's report, a senior official of Pakistan Post said that the stamps were issued from the Post's headquarters in Karachi on 24 July to locally and internationally highlight the "plight of people living in Kashmir". The stamps carry photos of Wani and his two associates who were killed in a gunbattle with police in the Anantnag district of Jammu and Kashmir in July 2016.

Besides the picture of the militant commanders, the stamps have captions like  "use of chemical weapons", "use of pellet guns", "mass graves" and "braid chopping"  carried alongside. Whereas, the subjects of the stamps include phrases like "over 100,000 Kashmiris martyred", "freedom struggle", "fake encounters" and "bleeding Kashmir", the report stated.

According to the report, the stamps were issued on 'Kashmir Martyrs Day' by the Philately Bureau in Karachi and are available on online shopping portal, eBay, for $6.99 (Rs 500 approximately) while in Pakistan, the stamps are being sold at PKR 8 (~Rs 4.50) apiece.

However, Indian philatelists are not amused with this initiative of the Pakistani Post and have asked the Government of India to convey its objections to Pakistan and ask them withdraw the stamps. Philatelists have reportedly said they have brought the matter to the notice of Indian government officials.
In a statement issued on Tuesday, Executive Director of UN Women Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka said the investigative and disciplinary processes into allegations involving a UN Women staff member have 'concluded that sexual misconduct occurred'.

United Nations: In the strongest disciplinary measure available within staff rules in the United Nations, an Indian national employed in the UN agency for gender equality and women empowerment has been dismissed after an investigation determined he engaged in sexual misconduct.

UN Women had said last month that the Office of Audit and Investigation of UNDP had completed its investigation into the sexual misconduct allegations involving the UN Women staff member.

While the staff member has not been named throughout the process of investigation, sexual misconduct allegations were leveled against Indian national Ravi Karkara, who had served as Senior Advisor on Strategic Partnerships and Advocacy to the Assistant Secretary-General and Deputy Executive Director at UN Women.

In a statement issued on Tuesday, Executive Director of UN Women Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka said the investigative and disciplinary processes into allegations involving a UN Women staff member have "concluded that sexual misconduct occurred". "As a result, I have dismissed the staff member; this is the strongest disciplinary measure available within the Staff Regulations and Rules of the United Nations (UN). Consequently, the staff member is prohibited from employment within the UN system, she said.

Karkara is not named in the statement. However, he was under investigation for sexual misconduct after at least eight men had accused him of using his prestige and position to sexually harass them, five sources with knowledge of the investigation had told Newsweek.

Mlambo-Ngcuka further confirmed "emphatically" that the former staff member "cannot be protected by diplomatic immunity." She said although UN Women does not have the authority to prosecute, the UN is guided by its obligation to bring credible allegations of criminal conduct to the attention of relevant national authorities.

"UN Women stands ready to cooperate with any national authority that decides to investigate this matter," she said, adding that UN Women has made every effort to offer victim support throughout the investigation. "We hold ourselves accountable to ensure a victim-centred approach in fulfillment of our mandate to advance and protect gender equality as a fundamental human right, she said.

In line with UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres's commitment of zero-tolerance to violence against women, Mlambo-Ngcuka said UN Women continues to advocate for a world free of violence and abuse. "Our work with others across the entire UN system is rooted in improving policies and practices in this regard." The Executive Director had appointed earlier this year Purna Sen as Executive Coordinator on Sexual Harassment to engage with survivors so that they are supported in a range of areas.

Sen had told PTI earlier that zero tolerance to sexual exploitation and abuse must be strictly followed and practiced and that those who show the courage to speak out against abuses should not feel judged. She had also added that the UN agency wants to change the dynamics and culture in which men and women feel that their position of seniority and authority entitles them sexually to other more junior staff, interns and young people.

A UN spokesperson had previously confirmed to PTI that the individual under investigation was Karkara. Reports of the allegations against Karkara surfaced early last month. UN Women had said back in December 2017 that it received allegations of sexual misconduct involving one of its staff members, again not naming Karkara. According to Newsweek, Steve Lee, a 25-year-old policy activist, who has addressed the United Nations and was a member of the Major Group for Children and Youth, is among the men accusing Karkara of misconduct.

According to his profile, Karkara has worked with UN Women, UNICEF, Save the Children among others. He serves as Global Advisor on Youth with UN-HABITAT and had represented UN-HABITAT as the co-chair of the UN Interagency Network on Youth Development. He also co-chaired the Policy Strategy Group for World We Want 2015  largest UN and civil society post-2015 data-curation-visualization Big Data platform. It said he has written more than 80 publications and has given keynote and panel addresses.

According to the latest report in The Guardian, other individuals, including 26-year old Muhammad Junaid Mandoori, had alleged that they had been stalked online, sent indecent images and asked for sexual favours in return for opportunities within the UN. However, a legal adviser for campaign group Code Blue, Sharanya Kanikkannan, said in The Guardian report that questions remained unanswered regarding the Karkara case, including why UN Women had declined to name him.

"Many of the actions taken by UN Women surpass the actions taken in recent months by other UN entities. The same UN organisation which promises to refer this case to the authorities is responsible for sitting on dozens of cases of civilian peacekeepers, from as far back as 2015, among which not a single one has ever been referred to justice, the report quoted Kanikkannan as saying.
By Gina Cherelus (Reuters) - A woman armed with a handgun opened fire on Thursday at a Maryland distribution centre for the Rite Aid drugstore chain, killing three people and wounding three others before she took her own life, the Harford County sheriff said. The shooting unfolded shortly after the suspect, a temporary employee at the facility, reported for work at about 9 a.m. EDT (1300 GMT) at the warehouse in Perryman, Maryland, about 34 miles (55 km) northeast of Baltimore, Sheriff Jeffrey Gahler said at a news conference

By Gina Cherelus

(Reuters) - A woman armed with a handgun opened fire on Thursday at a Maryland distribution centre for the Rite Aid drugstore chain, killing three people and wounding three others before she took her own life, the Harford County sheriff said.

The shooting unfolded shortly after the suspect, a temporary employee at the facility, reported for work at about 9 a.m. EDT (1300 GMT) at the warehouse in Perryman, Maryland, about 34 miles (55 km) northeast of Baltimore, Sheriff Jeffrey Gahler said at a news conference.

The sheriff's office identified the assailant only as a 26-year-old woman whose last known address was in Baltimore County.

The sheriff said investigators have not yet determined a motive, but a law enforcement source told Reuters the shooting was believed to have been sparked by a work-related grievance.

The fact that the assailant was a woman marked an unusual circumstance in and of itself as the overwhelming majority of mass shootings in the United States are committed by men.

Gahler said the shooting began outside the warehouse and then moved inside. He said a total of seven people were hit by gunfire and that four, including the woman who opened fire, were killed. He said the suspect shot herself in the head.

(Reporting by Gina Cherelus in New York; additional reporting by Don Pessin in Washington and Mark Hosenball in London; writing and additional reporting by Steve Gorman in Los Angeles; editing by Jonathan Oatis)

This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed.
Sri Lanka's president on Monday justified his decision to sack six diplomats  including an ambassador  for not answering his phone calls, saying more would follow if the foreign service did not shape up.

Colombo: Sri Lanka's president on Monday justified his decision to sack six diplomats  including an ambassador  for not answering his phone calls, saying more would follow if the foreign service did not shape up.

Maithripala Sirisena was criticised for the shock dismissal last week of his top envoy to Austria and five other Vienna-based staff after his office tried unsuccessfully for hours to reach them by phone.

"I am being attacked ferociously over social media for recalling the entire embassy staff. Yes, I did that to send a powerful message to other embassies," Sirisena told a public meeting in Colombo.

He said he ordered the sacking of ambassador Priyanee Wijesekera and five other staff to set an example. Sirisena did not say why he needed to contact the embassy urgently, or why other avenues were not explored to reach the staffers.

The Sri Lankan embassy in Austria is accredited to UN bodies in Vienna, as well as Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Czech Republic, Serbia, Slovakia and Slovenia. It was the second time in days that Sirisena has raised eyebrows.

Last week, he flew into a rage over nuts served aboard SriLankan Airlines, the island's national carrier, saying they were unfit for animals. "Returning from Kathmandu, I was served some cashews on board a Sri Lankan flight, but it was so bad even a dog wouldn't eat it," he said.

An airline spokesman said it had cleared its stock of cashews  only served in business class  and would change its Dubai-based supplier.
President Bashar al-Assad on Thursday blamed Israel for the downing of a Russian plane, which was accidentally hit by Syrian anti-aircraft fire during an Israeli missile strike.

Damascus: President Bashar al-Assad on Thursday blamed Israel for the downing of a Russian plane, which was accidentally hit by Syrian anti-aircraft fire during an Israeli missile strike. "This unfortunate incident was the result of Israeli arrogance and depravity," the Syrian leader said, offering his condolences in a letter to his Russian counterpart for the death of 15 Russian crew members killed in the incident over Syria on Monday.

"We are determined that such tragic events will sway neither you nor us from continuing the fight against terrorism," he continued in the letter published by the official Sana agency. The Russian plane was downed by Syria's Russian-made S-200 air defence system and all aboard were killed. The Russian military has accused Israeli pilots of using the Russian plane as a cover, "exposing it to fire from Syrian air defences".

Israel said it had targeted a Syrian military facility where weapons manufacturing systems were "about to be transferred on behalf of Iran" to Lebanese Shiite group Hezbollah. It was the worst 'friendly fire' incident between Moscow and the Syrian regime since Russian forces intervened in the country in late 2015 to support Assad whose grip on power had been weakened by rebels and jihadist fighters.

Russian President Vladmir Putin described the incident as the result of "tragic accidental circumstances," warning Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu against carrying out such operations in the future and pledging to beef up security for Russian forces in Syria. Netanyahu on Tuesday expressed his "sorrow" to Putin in a phone call, offering to assist Moscow in the investigation.

However he insisted the Russian plane had been felled by "extensive and inaccurate Syrian anti-aircraft (fire)". In recent months Israel has increased its attacks in Syria against the regime or its ally Iran.
Chinese president Xi Jinping has told Pakistan Army chief General Qamar Javed Bajwa that those who oppose his pet projects  the BRI and the CPEC  will 'never succeed' as these are initiatives aimed at fostering peace and development.

Beijing: Chinese president Xi Jinping has told Pakistan Army chief General Qamar Javed Bajwa that those who oppose his pet projects  the BRI and the CPEC  will "never succeed" as these are initiatives aimed at fostering peace and development.

The $50 billion China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) is the flagship project of the multi-billion dollar Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), a pet project of President Xi aimed at enhancing China's influence around the world through China-funded infrastructure projects.

India has opposed the CPEC project and protested to China as it is being laid through Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK).

General Bajwa, who is in China, called on Xi after his meetings with the top Chinese military officials.

"While we work for peace, we need to stay strong to thwart designs of all inimical forces challenging our resolve. We greatly value Chinese support...," Bajwa said.

He met Xi on a special invitation and they discussed regional security environment, challenges and way forward, Pakistan military's media wing Inter Services Public Relations (ISPR) said in a statement.

"Those who oppose the BRI or the CPEC shall never succeed as this is an initiative of peace and development not only for China but for region and beyond," it quoted Xi as saying.

Terming Pakistan as "our time-tested iron friend", he said the country had a pivotal role towards this lasting relationship.

He acknowledged the role of the Pakistan armed forces towards regional peace and stability.

President Xi said that China shall continue to support Pakistan as a strategic partner.

Bajwa said that Pakistan understands the importance of peace and has given lot of sacrifices for achieving it.

He said the BRI, with the CPEC as its flagship project, is destined to succeed despite all odds and the Pakistan Army shall ensure security of the CPEC at all costs, the statement said.

Earlier, Bajwa in his meeting with top military official General Zhang Youxia assured him that the new government, like the Pakistani military, follows a consistent policy of pragmatic cooperation with China.

Gen Zhang is the highest military official as he is the vice chairman of China's Central Military Commission (CMC) which is the high command of the two-million-strong People's Liberation Army (PLA) headed by President Xi.

"The Pakistani military and its new government are consistent in their policy towards China," Bajwa told Zhang during their meeting in Beijing on Tuesday, a Chinese defence ministry press release quoted him as saying.

His assurance about the new government besides the Pakistan military following a "consistent policy" towards China comes in the backdrop of reports of differences over the $50 billion CPEC.

Projects of the CPEC, regarded as the flagship initiative in Xi's multi-billion-dollar BRI, figured high during Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi's talks with new Pakistan prime minister Imran Khan in Islamabad last month.

Pakistan is willing to continue to strengthen pragmatic cooperation with China in the areas of counter-terrorism, equipment technology, and personnel training to ensure the safe and smooth development of CPEC, Bajwa said.
Antonio Guterres welcomed the announcement by North Korea leader Kim Jong-un during a summit with his South Korea counterpart Moon Jae-in in Pyongyang

United Nations: UN secretary-general Antonio Guterres on Wednesday called for concrete action to follow up on North Korea's commitment to close a missile test site with international monitors present.

Guterres welcomed the announcement by North Korean leader Kim Jong-un during a summit with his South Korean counterpart Moon Jae-in in Pyongyang.

"The commitments reflected in the joint statement include important military confidence-building measures and a commitment by the DPRK to dismantle missile engine testing infrastructure in the presence of experts from related countries," Guterres said in a statement. "Now it is time for concrete action."

When North Korea dismantled a nuclear test site in May, Guterres complained that no international experts had been on hand to witness the closure.

North Korea also expressed readiness to close its Yongbyon nuclear plant, which is key to its weapons program, if Washington takes "corresponding measures." Guterres offered UN help to advance efforts to fully rid the Korean peninsula of nuclear weapons and called for unity among global powers.

The breakthrough at the Pyongyang summit came amid preparations for next week's annual gathering at the United Nations of world leaders, during which North Korea will loom large.

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has invited North Korean foreign minister Ri Yong-ho for talks in New York, on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly meeting.

Pompeo said the talks in New York and meetings in Vienna will be the beginning of negotiations on the denuclearisation of North Korea, to be completed by 2021.

Pompeo will chair a Security Council meeting next week on North Korea to discuss US diplomatic efforts that have undergone a major shift in tone from last year.

At last year's UN gathering, US president Donald Trump threatened to totally destroy North Korea and derided Kim as "little rocket man." The Trump administration is facing calls from Russia and

China to consider easing tough economic sanctions imposed on North Korea to create an incentive for Pyongyang to move forward.

The United States maintains that sanctions must remain in place until North Korea has fully dismantled its weapons programs.
In its annual 'Country Report on Terrorism', as mandated by the Congress, the State Department said the India has expressed resolve to prevent terrorist attacks domestically.

Washington: The US has praised India for its significant counter-terrorism actions and said Pakistan-based terror groups continued their terror attacks in the country.

In its annual 'Country Report on Terrorism', as mandated by the Congress, the State Department on Wednesday said the Indian leadership has expressed resolve to prevent terrorist attacks domestically and to bring to justice the perpetrators of terrorism, in cooperation with the US and other like-minded countries.

The parts of India seriously impacted by terrorism in 2017 included Jammu and Kashmir, the northeast Indian states, and parts of central India in which Maoists remain active, it said.

"India continued to experience attacks, including by Pakistan-based terrorist organisations as well as tribal and Maoist insurgents. Indian authorities blamed Pakistan for cross-border attacks in the state of Jammu and Kashmir," the report said.

India, the report said, continued to apply sustained pressure to detect, disrupt and degrade terror operations within its borders.

Over the course of 2017, India sought to deepen counter-terrorism cooperation and information sharing with the US, including through the first-ever Designations Dialogue held in Delhi in December, it said.

In the same year, India and the US pledged to strengthen cooperation against terrorist threats from groups, including Al-Qaida, Islamic State, Jaish-e-Mohammad, Lashkar-e-Taiba and D-Company, it said.

During a June 2017 summit, President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Narendra Modi directed officials to establish a new mechanism for cooperation on terrorist designations.

The report further said the Indian government closely monitored the domestic threat from transnational terrorist groups like Islamic State and Al-Qaida.

The State Department praised India for its significant counter terrorism actions.

Citing an example of a significant counter-terrorism law enforcement action by India, it said the police arrested Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB) leader Mohammad Idris from a hideout in Kolkata on 8 March. Idris was allegedly involved in the July 2016 Holey Artisan Bakery attack in Bangladesh capital, Dhaka.
Update: Samsung has announced that the smartphone will launch in India on September 25th, exclusively on Flipkart.

Earlier: Samsung has officially announced the Galaxy A7 (SM-A750F), the companys latest mid-range smartphone, after it surfaced in press shots earlier this week. It has triple rear cameras, the main 24-megapixel sensor with f/1.7 aperture, secondary 8-megapixel 120 Ultra Wide Lens for wide-angle photos and the third 5-megapixel camera to capture depth information for portrait shots.

It also has a 24-megapixel front camera with that automatically lets more light in by combining four pixels into one pixel in low light conditions. It also has an adjustable LED flash, Selfie Focus, Pro Lighting Mode and AR emoji. It has a metal frame and a glass back.

It has a 6-inch Full HD+ Super AMOLED screen, is powered by a 2.2GHz Octa-Core processor which could be Exynos 7885, has a side-mounted fingerprint scanner, supports Dolby Atmos and packs a 3300mAh battery.

Samsung Galaxy A7 (2018) specifications

6-inch (10802220 pixels) Full HD+ Super AMOLED Infinity display

2.2GHz Octa-Core processor

4 GB RAM with 64GB / 128 GB Storage, 6GB RAM with 128GB storage, expandable up to 512GB via micro SD card

Android 8.0 (Oreo)

Dual SIM

24MP rear camera with LED flash, f/1.7 aperture, 8MP 120 Ultra Wide camera, 5MP f/2.2 depth camera

24MP front camera with f/2.0 aperture

Side-mounted Fingerprint sensor

Dolby Atmos

Dimension:159.8 x 76.8 x 7.5 mm; Weight: 168g

4G VoLTE, Wi-Fi 802.11ac (2.4/5GHz), VHT80, Bluetooth v5, GPS + GLONASS, NFC (Optional)

3300mAh battery with adaptive fast charging

The Samsung Galaxy A7 (2018) comes in Blue, Black, Gold and Pink colors, starts at 349 (US$ 407 / Rs. 29,385 approx.) and will roll out in select European and Asian markets starting from October. It should also be available in India soon since the support page for the phone is live.

Samsung is also holding an event on October 11, 2018, in Malaysia to introduce a new Galaxy smartphone, which is said to pack four rear cameras. The event starts at 5:00 PM (MYT) (2:30 PM IST).
Qualcomm today announced that it is making its Device Identification, Registration, and Blocking System (DIRBS) platform as freely downloadable open-source software. The DIRBS server-based software platform can be used to help identify illegal, and stolen mobile devices in a country.

The DIRBS software platform will help regulatory agencies classify devices and generate IMEI-based lists for notification, amnesty, and blocking purposes. This move comes as its efforts to combat the improper use of counterfeit, illegal and stolen devices on cellular networks. Qualcomm says that counterfeiting resulted in around 184M global lost smartphone sales units in 2015.

The DIRBS server-based software platform will be hosted on the open-source software website Github, and may be freely downloaded from here and used by anyone.

Mohammad Raheel Kamal, Senior Director, IPR Enforcement, Qualcomm Incorporated said:

Counterfeit devices are a significant problem worldwide and result in an estimated45.3 billion EUR in lost sales to genuine manufacturers each year, according to a recent European Union Intellectual Property Office Study issued in February of 2017. Sharing the DIRBS solution as the freely downloadable open-source software will allow the mobile industry to rapidly implement this powerful technology to help address counterfeiting and related issues around the globe.

John Han, senior vice president, Qualcomm Incorporated and general manager, Qualcomm Technology Licensing said:

Qualcomm is committed to enriching the mobile ecosystem, including assisting regulatory agencies in addressing their needs for security with respect to cellular-enabled devices. We are excited to share the DIRBS software platform to help enable regulatory agencies to further fight the proliferation of counterfeit, illegal and stolen devices.

Source
Best Smartphones Under 15000

Updated on: September 20, 2018

Which is the best smartphone for Rs.15000? India being an economic smartphone market, these are the questions we are often asked about. In fact, this is the sweet spot to invest in a smartphone as you get almost all the features that you get on high-end devices, but with very few compromises. We have compiled a list of top 10 smartphones under Rs. 15000, that will help you in this process.

Xiaomi Redmi Note 5 Pro The Redmi Note 5 Pro is one of the best phone at a price of Rs.14,999 in Xiaomi's portfolio. In fact, the Redmi Note 5 Series has become the fastest selling phone series in India to cross the five million mark across all platform in a given time. Between the Snapdragon 636 chipset, the fresh design ID and the absolutely fantastic battery life, the phone delivers the goods. Xiaomi Redmi Note 5 Pro Specifications: Price : Rs.14,999.00 Ram : 4GB Cpu : Qualcomm Snapdragon 636 Storage : 64GB Battery : 4000mAh Primary camera : 12MP + 5MP Front camera : 20MP Operating Systems : Android 7.1

Nokia 6.1 HMD global launched Nokia 6.1 with some improvement over its predecessor bringing in a faster processor, 4k video capability, and fast charging technology. Right now you can get your hands on Nokia 6.1 (3GB + 32GB) on Amazon India at a price tag of Rs. 14,499. Nokia 6.1 Specifications: Price : Rs.14,999.00 Ram : 4GB Cpu : Qualcomm Snapdragon 630 Storage : 64GB Battery : 3000mAh Primary camera : 16MP Front camera : 8MP Operating Systems : Android 8.0

Samsung Galaxy On6 Samsung launched the online version of Galaxy J6 under the name tag On6. Leaving out the name tag, the remaining specification is the same as the Galaxy J6. This is one of the most affordable devices from Samsung's stable in a compact polycarbonate body. Samsung Galaxy On6 Specifications: Price : Rs.14,490.00 Ram : 4GB Cpu : Samsung Exynos 7870 Storage : 64GB Battery : 3000mAh Primary camera : 13MP Front camera : 8MP Operating Systems : Android 8.0

Motorola Moto G6 Motorola launched Moto G6 with a water-repellent coating that protects the phone from splashes or light rain. This is the perfect handset for those who want a good looking, feature rich smartphone in the Rs.15000 price range. Motorola Moto G6 Specifications: Price : Rs.13,999.00 Ram : 3GB Cpu : Qualcomm Snapdragon 450 Storage : 32GB Battery : 3000mAh Primary camera : 12MP + 5MP Front camera : 16MP Operating Systems : Android 8.0

Vivo Y83 Vivo launched the worlds first smartphone to be powered by MediaTeks latest Helio P22 Octa-Core 12nm SoC. Dubbed as Y83, this smartphone comes with a slew of features including Face Access 2.0, Game Mode 2.0, Smart split 3.0, and app clone. You can get your hands on the device at Rs. 13,990 on Amazon India. Vivo Y83 Specifications: Price : Rs.13,990.00 Ram : 4GB Cpu : MediaTek Helio P22 Storage : 32GB Battery : 3260mAh Primary camera : 13MP Front camera : 8MP Operating Systems : Android 8.1

Samsung Galaxy J6 The Samsung launched Galaxy J6 is the front runner when it comes to the build quality, display, and battery life. This is one of the most affordable devices from Samsung's stable in a compact polycarbonate body. Samsung Galaxy J6 Specifications: Price : Rs.13,990.00 Ram : 3GB Cpu : Samsung Exynos 7870 Storage : 32GB Battery : 3000mAh Primary camera : 13MP Front camera : 8MP Operating Systems : Android 8.0

Motorola Moto G5S Plus Priced at Rs. 11,999, Moto launched the G5S Plus as a special edition smartphone in India with a minor upgrade to the G5 Plus. With this device, the company has managed to pack dual rear cameras to capture images with depth effect. At this price point, the phone ticks almost all the boxes for a right reason with very few compromises. Motorola Moto G5S Plus Specifications: Price : Rs.11,999.00 Ram : 4GB Cpu : Qualcomm Snapdragon 625 Storage : 64GB Battery : 3000mAh Primary camera : 13MP + 13MP Front camera : 8MP Operating Systems : Android 7.1

Asus Zenfone Max Pro (M1) (ZB601KL) Asus launched their first-ever Made in India smartphone dubbed as Zenfone Max Pro M1 with humongous 5000mAh battery with up to 42 hours 3G talk time and up to 28 hours WiFi browsing time. It was priced below Rs.15000 which surprised everyone. This device received a tremendous response from both critics and masses alike due to its amazing performance at the cheaper price. Asus Zenfone Max Pro (M1) (ZB601KL) Specifications: Price : Rs.10,999.00 Ram : 3GB Cpu : Qualcomm Snapdragon 636 Storage : 32GB Battery : 5000mAh Primary camera : 13MP + 5MP Front camera : 8MP Operating Systems : Android 8.0

Huawei Honor 9 Lite Honor launched 9 Lite smartphone under the mid-range segment with a premium glass back build. This device is one of the few that comes equipped with a quad-camera setup. It has all the features one would expect in a mid-range smartphone along with good performance. Wish it had fast charging and dedicated SIM slots as well. It is now available at a price of Rs. 10,999. Huawei Honor 9 Lite Specifications: Price : Rs.10,999.00 Ram : 3GB Cpu : Huawei Kirin 659 Storage : 32GB Battery : 3000mAh Primary camera : 13MP + 2MP Front camera : 13MP Operating Systems : Android 8.0
The UKs trade agreement with Australia is the first it has negotiated from scratch, setting the template for a line of new deals currently underway. Analysts are... Read More
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We want to let our customers affected by the devastating bushfires know that were thinking of you and are here to help.

We understand your Foxtel service might not be a priority just now, but when youre ready our team is here to assist.

To support our customers affected by the recent bushfires we are able to offer the following:

Free Foxtel installation in temporary accommodation for customers evacuated from their regular residence

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Suspension of service for up to 12 months with no fees for customers who contact us

Waive any early termination fees for disconnection of service for customers who have experienced severe damage due to bushfires

Replacement at no charge for damaged equipment e.g. satellite dish and Foxtel set top boxes

Extended payment periods for customers suffering financial hardship as a result of the bushfires

If youre back in your home and your Foxtel service is not working, please give us a call on 1300 762 708. Our team will do everything they can to get your service back up and running as quickly as possible. In the meantime, if you have access to the internet, dont forget you can access Foxtel GO .
Handyman Connection Launches Newest Texas Location In San Marcos

Leading Home Repair Company Offers Renovation and Restoration Services to Community

September 20, 2018 // Franchising.com // San Marcos, TX - Handyman Connection, a home repair company with over 25 years experience, has opened its seventh Texas location in the San Marcos area. Known for superior service and results, Handyman Connection offers services ranging in difficulty from basic maintenance and installations, to kitchen and bathroom remodeling. The San Marcos location is owned and operated by local entrepreneur Jason Whaley.

My dad worked in construction for the majority of his career and I always admired the level of workmanship and customer satisfaction he prioritized above all else at work, and these attributes have stayed with me, said Whaley. With Handyman Connections proven business model and franchisee support, I have the proper tools and resources needed to deliver quality experiences for our customers. I look forward to serving the community of San Marcos for all of their home repair and renovation needs.

Handyman Connection operates more than 65 locations throughout 27 states and Canada. For more than 25 years, the brand has offered homeowners across North America a complete resource for professional craftsmanship and exemplary customer service. Handyman Connection offers a variety of services ranging from traditional home repairs to painting, remodeling and more.

To request a free, no-obligation project estimate, contact Handyman Connection at (512) 337-3336 or visit us at https://www.handymanconnection.com/san-marcos/.

About Handyman Connection

Since 1991, homeowners across North America have been calling on Handyman Connection for our professional craftsmanship and exemplary customer service. Each Handyman Connection franchise is locally owned and operated, backed by the company that helped launch the industry. Our values are steeped in a long-standing dedication to the people we serve, and truly differentiate Handyman Connection as a home repair company.

Media Contact:

Chelsea Bear

Fish Consulting

954-893-9150

cbear@fish-consulting.com

SOURCE Handyman Connection

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Sacramento Proclaims September 25 Sacramento Jimboys Day As A Nod To One Of The Countys Most Iconic Brands, Jimboys Tacos

California State Capital Celebrates Jimboys Tacos, Which Has Been A Fixture In The Area For Nearly 60 Years

September 20, 2018 // Franchising.com // SACRAMENTO, Calif. - Jimboys Tacos, the iconic Sacramento, Calif.-based brand famous for creating The Original American Taco, is receiving one of the highest honors from Sacramento County for being a beloved hometown brand that serves as an integral part of the community. On the cusp of the brands 65th year in business, the county has declared September 25 Sacramento Jimboys Day, which the brand is celebrating by offering its most iconic menu item, The Original Ground Beef Taco, for just $2 at participating Sacramento locations.

Jimboys Tacos first opened in 1954, nearly 65 years ago, as a simple food trailer on the shores of Lake Tahoe, CA. With sights set on serving the best tasting taco on the planet, founder Jim Jimboy Knudson created his signature Ground Beef Taco, which has not changed since it was first served in 1954, and remains the brands most popular menu item to this day. The iconic taco is made fresh at each Jimboys Tacos location with seasoned ground beef, freshly shredded cheese, and lettuce encased in a crispy, stone-ground corn shell dusted with parmesan cheese. Jimboys currently serves nearly 7 million of its signature ground beef tacos every year, which equates to 13 tacos every minute.

The first Jimboys Tacos in Sacramento opened in 1958, just four years after its conception. Since then, Jimboys has become a beloved part of the county, serving 15,000 guests chainwide each day.

Its truly an honor to be recognized by the great city of Sacramento for Jimboys long-standing commitment to this community and the people who have helped our restaurants thrive for nearly 65 years, said Bob Andersen, CEO of Jimboys North America. We owe much of our success to the residents here, and for us to be formally recognized as an integral part of the city of Sacramento is one of the greatest honors we, as a brand, could receive.

When my father opened the first Jimboys Tacos trailer on the shores of Lake Tahoe, he knew he had something special, and he knew that people would love it, but I cant imagine he could have foreseen the devotion and appreciation our wonderful customers have shown to us, said Karen Knudson-Freeman, President of Jimboys Tacos and daughter of company founder, Jim Jimboy Knudson. To know that his legacy, and the legacy he created for Jimboys Tacos, will be honored for years to come in Sacramento is one of the greatest privileges we can imagine for our family.

For more information about the Jimboys Tacos brand and to view their full menu, visit www.jimboystacos.com and follow @JimboysTacos on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

About Jimboys Tacos

Jimboys Tacos started out different in 1954 with the debut of The Original American Taco, its signature Original Ground Beef Taco made with seasoned ground beef, freshly shredded cheese, and lettuce encased in a crispy, stone-ground corn shell dusted with parmesan cheese. Jimboys has been committed to using fresh, premium ingredients, cooked in small batches to ensure freshness and great flavor since its inception. A family-owned business, Jimboys Tacos got its start as a food trailer in Kings Beach, Lake Tahoe, CA in 1954, when founder Jim Jimboy Knudson made it his goal to pioneer the best tasting taco on the planet. Today, the almost 65-year-old brand has 40 locations operating in California and Nevada. Jimboys Tacos is rapidly growing with its fresh take on a vintage brand and is on target to have 100 locations by 2020, and 500 locations by 2028. Through the enduring passion and commitment to its heritage and values, the brand brings a unique taco experience that makes people happy like nobody elses business. To share in the experience, visit Jimboys Tacos restaurants, go to www.jimboystacos.com, and follow @JimboysTacos on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

Media Contact:

Jenna Satariano

Ajenda Public Relations

Jenna@ajendapr.com

562-761-2095

SOURCE Jimboys Tacos

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After the tragic news of several deaths at festivals last weekend, two in particular passing away at Lost Lands festival in Ohio, many artists playing at the gigs have remained silent.

Excision however, has come out following the Lost Lands deaths, where he played, penning an emotinal resonse to the really horrific news.
The 4th Caspian Media Forum - a unique platform for exchanging experiences, discussing new vectors for the development of regional and international journalism, and creating a unified information space of the countries of the Caspian region - has opened in Astrakhan on September 19. The media forum in Astrakhan was attended by media representatives from Azerbaijan, Iran, Kazakhstan, Russia and Turkmenistan. Panel discussions, expert meetings and strategic sessions will take place at various venues during the two days of forum. The forum was co-organized by the Center for International Public Policy Studies 'Caspian-Eurasia.'

The media forum was opened by a plenary session with the participation of the Astrakhan region's governor Alexander Zhilkin, as well as representatives of delegations from the Republic of Azerbaijan, the Republic of Iran, the Republic of Kazakhstan, and Turkmenistan. The meeting was attended by Russian Foreign Ministry's Ambassador at-large Igor Bratchikov, deputy minister of Russia's Ministry of Digital Development, Communications and Mass Media Alexei Volin, Iran's Consul General in Astrakhan Ali Mohammadi, head of the Kazakh delegation Serik Egizbayev, as well as representative of the Turkmen delegation Perkhat Nuryev.

The session opened with welcoming remarks by the Astrakhan region's governor Alexander Zhilkin. "The forum is very representative this year. It gathered journalists and media experts from the 'Caspian Five' countries. During the forum's work, we held many events and signed agreements on information cooperation. Exchange of information was established between the media outlets of partner countries: they publish materials in print and electronic media, we have the Caspian editorial team. It works out ongoing media plans, prepares news releases about the Caspian region, a quick exchange of information in emergency situations set up, as well as important political events. Information and technological support is provided." According to Alexander Zhilkin, thanks to the work of the Caspian editorial team, the region knows more about the life of the Caspian countries. "We receive information necessary for joint industrial and agrarian projects, we exchange experience in solving environmental problems. We monitor information programs in interregional non-state relations." The head of the region also stressed the work of the Caspian Expert Group. More than 10 teleconferences have been held since the establishment of the Caspian Expert Club, including field meetings in Aktau and Baku. "All this helps to expand the borders and cooperation between our countries," Zhilkin said.

The deputy minister of Digital Development, Communications and Mass Media of the Russian Federation, Alexey Volin, also made welcoming remarks: "I am glad that I am opening the Caspian Media Forum for the fourth time. This event became an integral part of the media and political calendar of events taking place in the Caspian. Information cooperation is not limited to the days of the forum. We work daily to set up a unified information space. It is very important that we pay attention to industrial, environmental and transportation problems. It should be noted that not just Caspian countries express interest in the forum. Which is confirmed by the Uzbek delegation presented here today, and it shows that the forum is expanding." In addition, Alexey Volin proposed to create a single information bank or informal news agency, which would disseminate information in the Caspian region and beyond.

Following the panel session titled 'The Caspian - the territory of the future', a resolution was adopted at the meeting of the Caspian Expert Club at the media forum. "The signing of the Convention on the legal status of the Caspian Sea on August 12, 2018, was a historic landmark in the international relations of the Caspian region. Thanks to the joint efforts of the heads of all five Caspian states, a unique document was approved, which guarantees a climate of cooperation, good-neighborliness and mutual understanding, it also fixes the conditions of cooperation between the Caspian states in various spheres - industrial, military, environmental. The adoption of the Convention has become an example of a new level of diplomatic relations between our countries, and according to many experts - the most difficult issue decided in a multilateral format over the past quarter of a century," the document reads.

"The signing of the Convention and intergovernmental agreements on trade, economic and transport cooperation has created the preconditions for consolidating the efforts of the Caspian countries in enhancing the investment attractiveness and competitiveness of the Caspian region. The Caspian region's steady growth in the global system of macroeconomic coordinates, the progressive development of trade, infrastructure and logistics impose the need to form a single mechanism for trade and economic interaction between all regional players. The Organization for the Caspian Economic Cooperation (OCEC), headquartered in Astrakhan, could be such an universal mechanism. The creation of such an organization will contribute not only to consolidating the potential of the Caspian states, but also to achieving a new level of economic development on the basis of multilateral projects," the resolution stresses.

Members of the Caspian Expert Club said that the formation of the Organization for the Caspian Economic Cooperation should be carried out taking into account the geopolitical position of the region and in close cooperation with the already functioning regional international structures, such as the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), the Black Sea Economic Cooperation Organization (BSEC), the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) - as well as called on the heads of the Caspian countries to develop and approve the Caspian Development Strategy as a single economic, humanitarian, educational and information space under the conditions of the further development of Caspian diplomacy.

"Cooperation in the sphere of mass communications, which will allow to overcome the information disunity of the region, can become a foundation for the formation of a new model of the Caspian Partnership, as it will give an impetus to the creation of its own information guides, thus contributing to the expansion of the dialogue between the Caspian states and the strengthening of the region's information security. The already traditional Caspian Media Forum performs an exceptional geopolitical mission. Being an authoritative discussion area, which is annually attended by experts from Azerbaijan, Iran, Kazakhstan, Russia and Turkmenistan, the media forum serves as an important milestone on the path towards setting up a unified information space of the Caspian states, opening up great prospects for the region's successful development and approval of the Caspian on the global stage," the resolution concludes.
The 7th International Caspian Energy Forum Baku-2018 has opened in the Azerbaijani capital today.

The opening ceremony was started with a video message addressed to the forum by European Commission Vice-President for Energy Union Maros Sefcovic, who stressed that Azerbaijan is one of the main Europe's partner in the Caspian region.

According to him, the talks on a new strategic partnership with Azerbaijan is underway. Sefcovic noted that with joint efforts they will be able to transport Azerbaijan`s natural gas to Europe in 2020, as a result of which, Europe`s energy balance will be diversified and the geopolitical environment will change overall, the correspondent of Vestnik Kavkaza reported.

"The Southern Gas Corridor is a project that meets all the interests of the European Union and is among the EU`s strategic projects," he said.

The European Commission Vice-President for Energy Union hailed the implementation of the Southern Gas Corridor project, saying that the Southern Gas Corridor will contribute to the decarbonization and energy efficiency of the continent.

Azerbaijani Energy Minister Parviz Shahbazov said that the interest of the European Union and the United States towards the Southern Gas Corridor project is indicative of its importance for the region.

"Speaking about the strategic significance of the project, it should be taken into account that the project is aimed at Eastern Europe, a sensitive region from the point of view of energy security, he noted.

"The SGC project will be able to meet up to 30-35% of the gas needs in Bulgaria and Greece, and, initially, about 10% of the total needs of Italy," he said. The minister explained that at the second stage it will turn into a gas hub for this country. "With the help of interconnectors, the project will be able to meet about 40-50% of the needs of the Balkan countries," Shahbazov added.

The Azerbaijani minister assured that in the future, the volumes of gas supplies through the SGC may increase.

Over 1,500 delegates around the world are taking part in the Caspian Energy Forum Baku 2018, including heads of state structures, ministries, state committees, state agencies, public services, as well as heads of state and transnational companies, international financial institutions, leading think tanks, investment companies and rating agencies of the Caspian-Black Sea and Baltic countries, as well as representatives of diplomatic and international missions accredited in Azerbaijan.
OnePlus enters top 5 premium Android OEMs in Q2 : Report News oi-Sandeep Sarkar The premium segment which consists of the devices priced at $400 or above accounts for a total of one-fifth of the global smartphone market.

OnePlus, the Chinese smartphone manufacturer has reached the top five premium Android OEMs (Original Equipment Manufacturers) globally in the Q2 of 2018. The company gained this position with the increase in sales in the countries such as India, China, and the UK. Considering that the brand is now amongst the top five premium Android OEMs it can play a major role in the brand's success in the developed markets such as the USA and Western Europe.

As per a report from Counterpoint Research's "Market Monitor Q2 2018" report, OnePlus was amongst the fastest growing brands in the $400-$600 (Res 28,000- Rs 43,000 approx) price range of devices. This is considering the fact that the global premium segment of smartphones has seen a growth 7+ percent as compared to the overall smartphone segment which had seen an overall growth of -1 percent in the Q2 of 2018. The premium segment, on the other hand, which consist of the devices priced at $400 (Rs 28,000 approx) or above accounts for a total of one-fifth of the global smartphone market.

A statement made by the Counterpoint research firm says "In India, it (OnePlus) surpassed Apple and Samsung to become the number one premium smartphone OEM during the quarter with a strong 40 percent market share. It was also amongst the top five premium smartphone OEMs in France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Sweden, and the UK on account of strong initial sales of OnePlus 6."

Apple, on the other hand, leads the global premium smartphone segment. The Cupertino tech giant has a 43 percent share of the premium smartphone segment. Samsung holds the second position with 24 percent of the total share, whereas, Oppo grabs the third position with a 10 percent share of the global premium segment of the smartphone.

Apple dominates the $800+ price segment (Rs 57,000 approx) with a total of 88 percent share during the second quarter of 2018.

Counterpoint further mentioned that "In the $600-$800 segments, Apple and Samsung alone contributed to 85 percent of shipments, while Huawei trailed by a big margin".

The research firm also added that Samsung's share in the $600-$800 (Rs 43,000- Rs 57,000 roughly) price segment declined due to fewer than expected sales of the Galaxy S9 series."

Out of the 40 OEMs which compete in the premium smartphone segment worldwide, the top five brands account for almost 88 percent of sales.

Best Mobiles in India

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Director of Armenia's National Security Service Artur Vanetsyan held a meeting with Kazakh Ambassador Timur Urazaev.

The director presented the functions of Armenias national security system, and reflected on the mutually beneficial activities and solid practical ties between the two countries, the security service said.

Urazaev, in turn, expressed confidence that Armenian-Kazakh relations will contribute to productive and organized work, News.am reported.

In addition, the sides expressed readiness to deepen cooperation and find frameworks for joint activities between the law enforcement agencies of the two countries.
Widow of Poisoned Spy: UK Has Upped Response to Would-Be Assassins

By Yulia Savchenko September 19, 2018

The widow of an ex-KGB agent who was poisoned by a radioactive isotope in 2006 says Britain's swift medical and diplomatic response to the recent nerve agent attack on former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter shows some improvement by British officials.

Skripal's case has drawn numerous comparisons to the case of Alexander Litvinenko, the Russian KGB-officer-turned-British-intelligence-agent and highly public critic of President Vladimir Putin.

Litvinenko died an agonizing death days after drinking tea laced with radioactive polonium-210 in a London hotel over decade ago, leaving British doctors struggling to identify the substance that killed him.

Speaking with VOA's Russian service, Marina Litvinenko, Alexander's widow, was asked whether British security officials had done enough to prevent  or at least prepare for  another attack.

She said that learning another former Russian spy had mysteriously fallen gravely ill on British soil  Skripal and his daughter were found unconscious on a bench in the English town of Salisbury last March  came as a shock and "very serious disappointment."

"But in this case, everything was different. There was no need to explain what was going on," she said.

When her late husband was first hospitalized in November 2006, doctors initially attributed the poisoning to a severe stomach bug or ingested chemical. Her repeated attempts to explain the rationale of a possible covert assassination attempt, she said, fell on deaf ears.

"The doctors had no idea what we were talking about," she said. "When we tried to explain that we were not just political refugees, but that [Alexander] had a very serious conflict with a special intelligence agency in Russia, the people acted like we lived on another planet. And not because they didn't believe us  they just couldn't comprehend what we were talking about."

In Skripal's case, however, "there was no need to explain what was going on," in part because of his official status with British authorities. Unlike Litvinenko's late husband, who advised British intelligence in an informal capacity, Skripal, she said, had received full asylum in a spy swap, meaning that security officials and forensic analysts were much better prepared to read the crime scene and outline a probable scenario.

Rapid confirmation of Skripal's personal background, she said, also prepared medical professionals for the possibility that they would be dealing with a highly exotic  and exceptionally lethal  substance.

"There was really no need to prove who wanted to poison Skripal or why," she said, adding that although she isn't aware of any formal mechanisms for safeguarding fugitive spies against future poisoning attempts, "the U.K. has shown that for the most part, it did learn a lesson."

Diplomatic response

"Literally a week after Skripal was poisoned, a completely different reaction followed, different from what was happening with our case," Litvinenko said. "[Prime Minister] Theresa May made a public statement that was quite harsh, but it's wrong to say that she immediately accused Russia. It wasn't quite like that. She simply said that there are suspicions, and that it is important that Russia immediately provide evidence that they did not do it. And what did we all see? Angry responses from Russia saying that they had nothing to do with it and that the case does not apply to them in any way."

As Britain launched a formal probe of the Salisbury chemical attack, which experts traced to a Soviet-era nerve toxin known as Novichok, Russia, she said, refused to discuss the possibility of pooling information, which might have entailed allowing international experts to investigate Russian chemical weapons labs.

"And then there was the international reaction," said Litvinenko. "The way Britain was immediately supported by the EU and USA; the mass expulsion of diplomats was impressive. Nothing like that happened after my husband was poisoned. Also, the way the U.K. started treating money from Russian investors  that [large foreign investments] are now vetted and treated much more seriously. And this is important to understand ... that people who benefit from this [Russian] regime should not be accepted in civilized countries simply as people with money.

"And I'm by no means saying that all rich people are thieves  absolutely not," she added. "But if we say that this regime is a threat, and these people get big money only because they are close to the regime and not because they are very talented, not because they created their own businesses ... these people need to understand that they cannot spend their money  stolen money, if you ask me  in America or in Europe."

Real estate markets in London, New York and Miami are all under varying levels of scrutiny for the unusually large number of all-cash transactions that can be legally anonymized via offshore shell companies or are frequently traced to wealthy investors from Russia or former Soviet republics.

Russia has vigorously denied having any role in the attacks on British soil, a denial that even family members of both victims support.

In 2012, for example, Walter Litvinenko, father of the dead spy, appeared on Russia's RT news outlet alongside Andrei Lugovoi, the man Britain accused of poisoning his son, to retract his longstanding opinion that Russian intelligence murdered his son on direct orders from Putin.

"I think [Walter] was used," Marina Litvinenko told VOA on Friday. "He had just then lost his wife. He was in a difficult financial situation living in exile in Italy. And I think Russian intelligence emphasized [Alexander's] cooperation with British agents, giving him an excuse to save face, to return to Russia and beg the president's forgiveness."

During that same broadcast, which also aired on state-run Channel One, the senior Litvinenko, who served as a doctor in a Soviet-era gulag and now resides in a pensioner's flat in Moscow, called fugitive Russians in the U.K. "hostages" of Western spy agencies.

Lugovoi, who Russia has long refused to extradite, blamed the 2006 murder on Alexander Goldfarb, a personal friend of the late Litvinenko, whom he described as an undercover CIA officer out to frame Russian operatives.

About a year before the RT broadcast, Lugovoi joined the State Duma representing the Kremlin-friendly Liberal Democrat Party, thereby securing lifetime immunity from domestic prosecution.

Goldfarb recently filed a libel suit in U.S. federal court alleging that both RT and Channel One aired deliberately misleading reports about the circumstances of Litvinenko's death. The suit claims that RT's rolling coverage of Skripal's case, which routinely touches on Litvinenko's murder, is part of a politically motivated Kremlin TV campaign to deflect blame from the real perpetrators of both attacks.

Libel suit

RT representatives issued a public statement saying they are in the process of reviewing the complaint.

Earlier this year, Viktoria Skripal, niece of the spy poisoned in Salisbury, repeatedly took to the Russian airwaves to express skepticism about Britain's handling of her uncle's investigation, suggesting that Britain's MI5 intelligence agency had been manipulating her cousin Yulia, who had refused offers of assistance from the Russian embassy in London after being poisoned alongside her father.

On July 3, Skripal's niece appeared on Russian television to announce that her candidacy for Yaroslavl region Duma elections had been endorsed by the pro-Kremlin Just Russia party.

"This is what Russian intelligence agencies still do," Litvinenko told VOA, explaining that turning family members against each other has a long history in Russia's spy community.

"They find a person who is easily influenced, who understands the benefits of his or her position," she said. "Both Viktoria and Walter Alexandrovich were in very difficult financial situations, so this allows them to improve their financial situation. Both now have a salary, and Walter Alexandrovich even has an apartment in Moscow. And Victoria Skripal is going to run for the Yaroslavl Duma," she added in a sarcastically cheerful tone. "This is a great start for her career."

This story originated in VOA's Russian Service.

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Task Force Looks at Making Infantry Squads More Lethal

Sept. 19, 2018

By Jim Garamone

DoD News, Defense Media Activity

WASHINGTON -- The Close Combat Lethality Task Force is gathering information from the services, industry and allies before making recommendations to Defense Secretary James N. Mattis, the senior Army enlisted representative to the task force said here today.

Speaking to reporters at the Pentagon, Army Sgt. Maj. Jason Wilson explained the process for the task force, which Mattis set up in March.

The task force seeks to ensure Army, Marine Corps and special operations infantry squads overmatch any potential adversary, he said. Noting that infantry squads need to be more lethal, more resilient and more capable, he said the task force has the mission to look at lethality from every angle, from personnel to equipment to training to doctrine, and make recommendations to the secretary.

The task force members are examining what the services and U.S. Special Operations Command are currently proposing for infantry soldiers. They are looking at weaponry, protective gear and tactics and seeing if those already existing proposals and equipment can be adapted throughout the U.S. infantry world.

Pursuing Promising Leads

"Close combat is an environment characterized by extreme violence within line-of-sight of the enemy, where historically the vast majority of military combat casualties occur  approximately 90 percent," Wilson said. The [task force] is pursuing promising leads in manpower policy, focusing on recruiting, developing and retaining the individuals with the requisite cognitive capacity, skills and traits to excel within a close-combat environment."

As part of gathering information upon which they can base their recommendation, the sergeant major said, task force members visited Israel and "gained a different perspective on leader development, equipment and policies, which will potentially enhance our close-combat lethality."

They also visited the Marine Corps training area at Twentynine Palms, California, where the members observed the Squad X experiment. This effort looks at "distinct sensing capabilities designed to be organic to the close-combat formation," Wilson said.

Dominating the Operational Environment

"These capabilities are directly linked to the find, fix, finish, exploit and analyze, which are designed to allow our close-combat formations to dominate the operational environment," he added.

Finally, the task force went to Fort Benning, Georgia, where members spoke with the chief of infantry and visited the Maneuver Center of Excellence to understand the latest Army efforts. The task force also visited the 75th Ranger Regiment "to gain an appreciation for the models used in selecting their current soldiers," Wilson said.

Infantry personnel have to have the physical strength and mental acuity to do the job. Wilson, a 23-year infantry soldier, said he does not want the infantry to be a place "where we send soldiers who don't have the mental capacity to do other jobs."

"We want to get away from our close-combat forces  being the place where soldiers who don't meet the requisite criteria to be an intel analyst or whatever get sent to," he said.

Advances in technology can be brought into the toolbox of infantry personnel, Wilson said, including new ways of viewing the battlefield, processing information from the battlefield and executing missions upon the battlefield.

Infantry training on its own will change, the sergeant major said. He spoke about bringing simulation technology to the field to allow squads of platoons to practice a mission many times before having to do so for real.

Wilson said the group is shaping its recommendations to the secretary and will present them to him soon.

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U.S. Department of Defense

Press Operations

News Release

No. NR-267-18 September 19, 2018

Readout of Secretary of Defense James N. Mattis' Meeting with Delfin Lorenzana, Secretary of National Defense of the Philippines

Pentagon Chief Spokesperson Dana W. White provided the following readout:

Secretary of Defense James N. Mattis met with Philippine Secretary of National Defense, Delfin Lorenzana today at the Pentagon to reaffirm the longstanding defense relationship between the United States and the Philippines.

The leaders discussed a broad range of defense issues, to include their commitment to fighting terrorism and reaffirmed U.S. military advisory support to assist the Philippines in combatting ISIS and other violent extremist networks.

Secretary Mattis thanked Secretary Lorenzana for his country's contribution to maritime security through its trilateral air and maritime patrols with Indonesia and Malaysia in the Sulu and Celebes Seas.

http://www.defense.gov/News/News-Releases/News-Release-View/Article/1638228/

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Russia says Taliban ready for Afghan talks in Moscow

Iran Press TV

Wed Sep 19, 2018 03:51PM

The Russian Foreign Ministry says the Taliban militant group is prepared to attend multiparty talks on Afghanistan in Moscow.

On Wednesday, Russian media quoted Afghanistan's embassy as saying that the country's deputy foreign minister was expected to visit Moscow on Thursday to discuss the dates of a new round of Moscow peace talks on Afghanistan.

Russia had been preparing to host the peace talks on September 4 and had invited 12 countries, including the United States, and Taliban representatives to participate.

The talks, however, were postponed following a request by Afghan President Ashraf Ghani.

The Taliban were ousted from power in 2001 following a US-led invasion. That war, which continues to this day, has failed to bring stability to the country despite the presence of thousands of foreign forces.

The militants have recently stepped up their attacks in Afghanistan.

The United Nations said in a recent statement that blasts, attacks and clashes between militants and Afghan forces killed over 1,600 civilians in the first six months of the year, the highest number in the past decade.

While the Taliban militant group has rejected an offer of talks from the Afghan government, it has been holding negotiations with the United States.

Earlier this month, the Taliban said they planned to send a delegation for further talks with US officials.

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5.2 million Yemeni kids on brink of famine amid Saudi war: Charity

Iran Press TV

Wed Sep 19, 2018 08:04AM

A UK-based charity has expressed concerns about the humanitarian repercussions of renewed Saudi attacks on Yemen's port city of Hudaydah, saying a total of 5.2 million children are at risk of famine amid the ongoing war in the country.

In a report released on Tuesday, Save the Children warned that any disruption to supplies coming through Hudaydah, which is a lifeline for millions of Yemenis, could "cause starvation on an unprecedented scale."

It also estimated that an extra one million Yemeni children risk falling into famine as prices of food and fuel soar, bringing the total to 5.2 million.

Any closure at Hudaydah "would put the lives of hundreds of thousands of children in immediate danger while pushing millions more into famine," the charity added.

Over the past few months, Hudaydah, through which flows almost 80 percent of Yemen's imports, has witnessed deadly ground and aerial attacks by the Riyadh regime and its allies.

Backed by Saudi airstrikes, Emirati forces and elements loyal to former Yemeni President Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi launched the Hudaydah offensive on June 13 despite international warnings that it would compound the impoverished nation's humanitarian crisis.

Saudi Arabia claims that the Houthis are using Hudaydah for weapons delivery, an allegation rejected by the fighters.

"Even the smallest disruption to food, fuel and aid supplies through its vital port could mean death for hundreds of thousands of malnourished children unable to get the food they need to stay alive," said Tamer Kirolos, Save the Children's representative in Yemen.

"It could drive up the price of fuel -- and as a result transport -- to such an extent that families can't even afford to take their sick children to hospital," Kirolos added.

Earlier this month, violent clashes resumed between Houthi fighters and Saudi-backed pro-Hadi militants in Hudaydah after the latest round of peace talks between Yemen's warring sides collapsed in the Swiss city Geneva.

Helle Thorning-Schmidt, CEO of Save the Children International, warned that the war endangers the lives of an entire generation of Yemeni children.

"Millions of children don't know when or if their next meal will come," she said. "This war risks killing an entire generation of Yemen's children who face multiple threats, from bombs to hunger to preventable diseases like cholera," she added.

Last week, The Associated Press reported that many Yemeni families have nothing to eat but leaves.

Saudi Arabia and its allies launched a brutal war, code-named Operation Decisive Storm, against Yemen in March 2015 in an attempt to reinstall Hadi, a staunch ally of Riyadh, and crush the Houthis.

The Western-backed offensive initially consisted of a bombing campaign, but was later coupled with a naval blockade and the deployment of ground forces into Yemen.

The blockade on Yemen has smothered humanitarian deliveries of food and medicine to the import-dependent state.

An estimated 8.4 million Yemenis are on the verge of starvation while almost 18 million lack access to good, nutritious food.

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Afghanistan's Shi'a Brace For More Attacks On Ashura Holiday

RFE/RL's Radio Free Afghanistan September 19, 2018

KABUL -- Members of Afghanistan's Shi'ite minority are bracing for potential violence as they prepare to commemorate Ashura, the holiest celebration in their religious calendar.

A series of deadly attacks on the country's Shi'ite community in recent weeks has fueled fears of more violence during the September 20 festival marking the killing of Imam Hussein, a grandson of the Prophet Muhammad.

Shi'a are estimated to number around 3 million in overwhelmingly Sunni Afghanistan, and the majority belong to the Hazara ethnic group.

The authorities said they had security plans for the Ashura celebrations, which were targeted in the past, amid criticism they were failing to protect Shi'a.

Aref Rahmani, an ethnic Hazara representative in the lower house of parliament, the Wolesi Jirga, told RFE/RL that his community will act on their own to protect itself if the government does not provide security.

"The international community, our colleagues at NATO, have a responsibility to pressure the government of Afghanistan to bring reforms and maintain the security of its citizens so people won't have to take up arms," said Ahmad Behzad, another ethnic Hazara member of the Wolesi Jirga.

More than 60 people were killed in separate suicide bombings at an education center and a wrestling club in a predominantly Shi'ite neighborhood of Kabul this month.

In early August, two burqa-clad suicide bombers struck a Shi'ite mosque in the eastern city of Gardez, capital of Paktia Province, killing at least 35 people.

The Sunni extremist group Islamic State (IS), which considers Shi'a "apostates" who deserve death, claimed responsibility for those attacks.

Afghanistan's main intelligence agency announced on September 18 the arrest of 26 suspected IS militants in Kabul who were allegedly plotting attacks against Shi'a during the celebrations.

The Western-backed government in Kabul has struggled to combat the Taliban and IS since the United States and NATO formally ended their combat mission in the country in 2014.

Afghan President Ashraf Ghani on September 8 announced plans to divide the capital into four security zones.

He also said that increased security, such as setting up a "green zone" similar to the one where many embassies and international organizations are located in Kabul, was needed in the city's predominately Shi'ite west.

However, more consultations were required before the proposals could be implemented, Ghani added.

With reporting by AFP

Source: https://www.rferl.org/a/afghanistan-s- shi-a-brace-for-more-attacks-on-ashura -holiday/29498204.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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EU Could Accept Partition of Kosovo If Belgrade, Pristina Reach Agreement -Dacic

Sputnik News

17:50 19.09.2018

BELGRADE (Sputnik) - The European Union, in particular the United Kingdom and Germany, could eventually accept the partition of Kosovo as a last-resort solution to the conflict if Belgrade and Pristina agree to it, Serbian Foreign Minister Ivica Dacic said on Wednesday.

"The United Kingdom and Germany advocate for the inviolability of borders, but if an agreement is reached and if it becomes the only possible solution, I have no doubt that it [the deal] will be accepted. And the great EU, which mediates the [Pristina-Belgrade] dialogue, will accept it," Dacic said as quoted by the Tanjug news agency.

Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic said in early August that he favored having Kosovo partitioned along ethnic lines as a means of avoiding further conflicts. Vucic's plan has been supported by the heads of Kosovo's 10 Serb-majority municipalities but criticized by the Serbian opposition. Kosovo President Hashim Thaci has, in turn, rejected the idea.

The partition has also been opposed by the United Kingdom and Germany, with German Chancellor Angela Merkel rejecting any changes to borders in the Balkans.

In 2008, Kosovo's ethnic Albanian leadership unilaterally proclaimed independence from Serbia, which has never recognized the move. The self-proclaimed republic currently possesses recognition from more than 100 countries.

 Sputnik

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US Base in Poland to Change Geopolitics of Europe - Polish Defense Ministry

Sputnik News

15:36 19.09.2018

WARSAW (Sputnik) - Once the US military base is established in Poland, the country would no longer be considered a buffer state, and would not promote "the sense of security," Polish Deputy Defense Minister Tomasz Szatkowski said on Wednesday.

The establishment of a permanent US military base in Poland will change the geopolitical landscape of Europe, Polish Deputy Defense Minister Tomasz Szatkowski said on Wednesday.

"A new US base, including at least [some] elements of classic permanent [military] presence, could change the geopolitical landscape of Europe," Szatkowski said, as quoted by the Polish Press Agency.

The official added that a permanent US military base would have a strategic political influence that will continue to long-term containment, and also a "purely" military influence, since it would enhance existing troops and also open doors for receiving new personnel.

The deputy minister went on to say that after the establishment of the US military base, Poland would no longer be considered a "buffer state," something which would promote "the sense of security."

On Tuesday, US President Donald Trump and his Polish counterpart Andrzej Duda held a meeting in Washington, during which it was announced that the United States was considering the idea of setting up a permanent military presence in Poland at Duda's request. The presidents have also signed an agreement to strengthen defense, military and energy security cooperation between the United States and Poland.

 Sputnik

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Warsaw Prepared to Pay for Construction of 'Fort Trump' in Poland  Duda

Sputnik News

13:01 19.09.2018(updated 13:32 19.09.2018)

Earlier, the Polish president attempted to entice Trump with a proposal to build a new permanent American base in Poland with the US president's name on it. Trump confirmed that Washington was looking at the proposal "very seriously."

Polish President Andrzej Duda has confirmed his country's willingness to pay part of the hefty cost associated with the construction of a new US base on Poland's soil.

Speaking to TVP Polonia, Duda said that while "the cost of deploying such a base would be very large," Warsaw was ready to "undertake and finance preparatory activities, and the costs of preparing a place where the Americans could be stationed," with Washington expected to pick up the cost of the base's contents.

"We have long said that we are ready  to assume the financial obligations to prepare such place," Duda reiterated.

The Polish president's remarks come following Polish Defense Minister Mariusz Blaschak's announcement

that his country was ready to spend up to $2 billion on the deployment of a new US military base in the country.

"I hope that such a base will appear," Duda stressed, emphasizing that it would be in the interests of both Poland and the United States.

During talks with President Trump in Washington on Tuesday, Duda is believed to have discussed the expansion of US-Polish military cooperation, as conducted negotiations on the possibility of the supply of more US arms to the country.

Trump seemed to favor the base idea, saying that the US was willing to "certainly talk about [it]," given Warsaw's willingness to pay. "The [Polish] president offered us much more than $2 billion  so we're looking at it," he said, speaking to reporters during a joint press conference with Duda.

Secretary of Defense James Mattis said there were still "many" questions surrounding the possible new base and said that the Pentagon was studying the proposal.

Earlier, Polish officials said that a new permanent US base in the Eastern European country would send a "message" to Moscow about Washington's readiness to defend its Eastern European ally. Moscow has repeatedly denied that it has any aggressive intentions toward the NATO alliance and complained about the NATO buildup along Russia's western borders.

The US deployment in Poland already includes a tank brigade, a US Air Force detachment consisting of five F-22 Raptors, and a missile defense complex, currently under construction.

Last week, US Army Europe announced that it would be expanding its presence in Germany by 1,500 troops, adding to the 33,000 servicemen already stationed in the country.

 Sputnik

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Theresa May's proposed new economic partnership with the EU "will not work", the head of the European Council has said, BBC reports.

Donald Tusk said the plans risked undermining the EU's single market. He was speaking at the end of an EU summit in Salzburg where leaders of the 27 remaining member states discussed Brexit.

At a press conference, Mr Tusk said there were some "positive elements" in the UK's blueprint for future relations with the EU, which was agreed by ministers at Chequers in July.

But, he added: "The suggested framework for economic cooperation will not work."

Mr Tusk added that October would be the "moment of truth" for reaching a deal, and that "if the conditions are there" an additional summit would be held in November to "formalise" it.
South Sudanese soldier who shot UN peacekeeper on Saturday, will face court martial: UN mission chief

19 September 2018 - The South Sudanese soldier who shot and wounded a UN peacekeeper on Saturday is facing a court martial, said David Shearer, head of the UN Mission in South Sudan (UNMISS), during a press conference in the capital, Juba.

Speaking on Wednesday, Mr. Shearer said that the peacekeeper, a Nepalese national, had been travelling with a convoy to collect water when the shooting occurred. The peacekeeper, he added, is recovering at a hospital in Juba. The authorities have assured UNMISS that the shooting was an "isolated incident."

The targeting of UN peacekeepers in South Sudan, said Mr. Shearer, is a result of insecurity in the country, which is still ongoing, despite the signing of a revitalized peace agreement a week ago.

He welcomed the reduction in the level of fighting since last year, but said that there have been allegations of ceasefire violations, including flare-ups of fighting in southern Central Equatoria, which are being investigated by ceasefire monitors.

Mr. Shearer reiterated calls, first made following the shooting of the peacekeeper, for the local authorities and the Government of South Sudan to "establish command and control over the armed forces to ensure this kind of unruly behavior does not occur again."

He also echoed comments on the progress of the peace process  delivered to the UN Security Council on Tuesday  by Jean-Pierre Lacroix, the head of UN Peacekeeping Operations, and Nicholas Haysom, outgoing UN Special Envoy for Sudan and South Sudan.

From his vantage point on the ground, Mr. Shearer agreed that the peace accord is an important step on the long road to peace, but said there was still a lack of trust between the "warring factions"  the national army loyal to the government of President Salva Kiir, and forces loyal to main political opposition leader, former Vice-President, Riek Machar.

"Those who signed the agreement have, in the past, been former friends but have also been former foes. From my discussions with them, suspicion is still quite widespread. So, a lot of work needs to be done to encourage trust between the parties, as well as between the parties, and the people of South Sudan. And that's something that we all need to help with."

Mr. Shearer will travel to UN Headquarters in New York, to take an active part in discussions during the General Assembly high level week which begins on Monday, and expand on how UNMISS can best support the implementation of the peace agreement.

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Report Accuses South Sudan Troops of Rapes, Killings

By Ayen Bior September 19, 2018

Children and elderly burned alive. Women gang-raped. Civilians shot, run over with armored vehicles, or hanged from trees and rafters.

A new report by the rights group Amnesty International alleges that South Sudan's government committed such atrocities earlier this year in a military campaign targeting the northern area once known as Unity state. The area, which borders Sudan, is an opposition stronghold.

The report, released Wednesday, contends the government offensive began in mid-April and continued for more than two months. During that period, President Salva Kiir and former vice president and rebel leader Riek Machar were in negotiations for a peace agreement that they signed Sept. 12. It aims to end nearly five years of armed conflict.

The alleged attacks "seem to have been carried out with an absolute intent to displace civilians" and to leave their villages "uninhabitable," said Joanne Mariner, the report's co-author and Amnesty's senior crisis adviser. Amnesty's research indicates systematic targeting of women and children, as well as widespread looting and destruction of property.

Mariner said the moves could constitute war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Major General Lul Ruai Koang, spokesman for the South Sudanese army, dismissed the report as a collection of "broad statements" that "do not carry water at all."

Ruai noted that earlier this month, a military court in the capital city of Juba sentenced 10 soldiers to prison for raping foreign aid workers and murdering a local journalist in an attack two years ago.

He said it's a clear example that South Sudan's government and the Sudan People's Liberation Army do "not condone impunity, contrary to what is being alleged and contrary to what is being said on the global stage by Amnesty International and other international institutions."

In July, the United Nations' human rights office estimated the offensive left 232 civilians dead, more than 120 women and girls raped, and at least 31,000 people displaced. It urged the government to halt the attacks and bring its perpetrators to justice.

That month, Amnesty researchers interviewed some 100 civilians for the report titled "Anything That Was Breathing Was Killed." The civilians blamed the alleged brutality on government soldiers and allied militia. Some reportedly were in uniform, though some interviewees said they witnessed attacks carried out by men in plainclothes.

The report describes incidents such as an elderly man burned alive in his house. One man said he found his wife hanged from a rafter in their house. A woman said her two young children were killed. One said she witnessed the rape of a 15-year-old boy.

Others spoke of fleeing their homes to hide in swamps where, they claim, government soldiers hunted for them, killing the less fortunate. Food was used as a weapon of war, Mariner said. Researchers saw deliberate destruction of food stocks and an effort to push civilians out.

The government and U.N. agencies declared a famine in Unity's Leer and Mayendit counties in early 2017. In a joint press release, the World Food Program, UNICEF and the Food and Agriculture Organization described the famine as "man-made" and said years of violence  including an upsurge in 2016  had devastated food production.

Mariner said the recurrence of violence in Unity state indicates a lack of accountability.

She complained of "similar aggressive campaigns in 2014 and 2015, and none of the known leaders in charge of those campaigns have been prosecuted. So, the really predictable result of that kind of impunity is continuing violence."

Amnesty International published a 2016 report on South Sudan urging the international community to investigate four individuals it maintained had orchestrated war crimes and crimes against humanity. The rights group had written to South Sudan's army chief at the time, but got no response.

This report originated in VOA's English to Africa Service and its weekday radio program "South Sudan in Focus."

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Candidates Absent from Cameroon's English-Speaking Regions

By Moki Edwin Kindzeka September 19, 2018

Candidates for Cameroon's October 7th presidential election have largely avoided traveling to the restive English-speaking regions where armed separatists have vowed the vote will not take place. But all of them are proposing solutions to the problems that have crippled the English-speaking regions for two years now, leaving at least 300 dead.

The only presidential candidate in Cameroon who has visited an English-speaking town is Frankline Ndifor Afanwi, the flag-bearer of the Cameroon National Citizenship Movement. Afanwi said he mustered the courage to visit Mutengene when his supporters assured him there was calm after the military chased armed separatists from the southwestern town last week.

Afanwi said he is pleading with fighters to drop their guns.

"Let all those who are fighting stop the fighting. The insecurity is coming up because many people are acting out of grievances. Let them not be filled with grievances anymore. We are going to bring in what will satisfy the hearts of Cameroonians," he said.

Although the eight other candidates, including incumbent Paul Biya, have not been to the restive regions, they are proposing solutions to the crisis.

Main opposition candidate Joshua Osih, of the SDF, who is from the English-speaking southwest region, wants to adopt a federal republic granting each region greater autonomy.

"The problem is not the secession. The problem is the marginalization and injustices that led to that secession. Guess what, the secession will not necessarily solve that problem. When you have a president of the republic who understands these issue, the first thing that has to happen is to solve the problem of marginalization," said Osih.

Candidate Garga Haman Adji of the ADD party is from the French speaking far north region. He also thinks it is worth considering a more decentralized government and wants to see more English speakers appointed to ministerial positions.

"What is remaining is a joint commission to discuss the anglophone problem. They are my brothers and sisters. I want this problem to be solved," he said.

The candidates say their security is not assured in the English-speaking regions, where kidnappings, killings and burning of public property have occurred.

President Paul Biya is running to extend his 36 years in power. He said he is ready for dialogue, but opposes any discussion on changing the form of the state.

There are doubts the election will be held in Anglophone regions, where two years ago, residents began to press for more autonomy, complaining of the dominant use of the French language in the bilingual country.

Separatists took over the movement. Last year, they declared a new English-speaking state called Ambazonia had been born in Cameroon. The government responded by declaring war on them.

The separatists have vowed on social media that no election will take place and intensified attacks on towns and villages, provoking an exodus of people.

The country's elections management body ELECAM says it has adopted security measures so the vote can take place.

The United Nations says 200,000 Cameroonians have been internally displaced and 40,000 have sought refuge in Nigeria.

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Combat-search-and-rescue Airmen press pause to tackle Hurricane Florence aftermath

By Tech. Sgt. Kelly Goonan, 920th Rescue Wing Public Affairs / Published September 19, 2018

PATRICK AIR FORCE BASE, Fla. (AFNS) -- Reserve and active duty pararescuemen were undergoing dive and jump training Sept. 11, in Key West, Florida, when they were recalled back to their home units to immediately begin the process of pre-positioning for Hurricane Florence search-and-rescue operations.

Reserve Airmen within the 920th Rescue Wing at Patrick Air Force Base, Florida, put their lives on temporary hold to respond to a natural disaster.

"When we returned to Patrick (AFB) that evening, we unpacked our dive gear and repacked all of our hurricane gear," said Senior Master Sgt. Joe Traska, 308th Rescue Squadron pararescueman. "We went home to see our families briefly and returned the following morning to begin the trip to Moody Air Force Base, Georgia."

In all, 140 Reservists dropped what they were doing on a Wednesday afternoon to fix and fly search-and-rescue aircraft, and perform everything imaginable in-between, to get four HH-60G Pave Hawk helicopters and all the necessary personnel and equipment heading north to Moody AFB, Georgia, when the prepare-to-deploy order was given September 12.

The 920th RQW Airmen integrated forces with active duty personnel at Moody AFB's 23rd Wing and began posturing for an official disaster relief operation as one cohesive Air Expeditionary Group, waiting out Hurricane Florence as it crawled through the Carolinas.

Two days later, Maj. Gen. Leonard Isabelle, director of search-and-rescue operations coordination element for Air Force North Command, officially established the 334th Air Expeditionary Group tasked with positioning the fully integrated forces of Airmen and assets for relief efforts to assist those most severely impacted by Hurricane Florence.

Within 18-hours, 270 Airmen working together seamlessly picked up and moved their search-and-rescue operation from middle Georgia forward to Joint Base Charleston, S.C.

However, the coastal installation was still under evacuation orders leaving the 334th AEG faced with establishing a bare base operations center while contending with lingering unfavorable weather conditions.

"The base had to literally open their gates for our arrival," said Lt. Col. Adolph Rodriguez, 334th Mission Support Group commander. "They (JB Charleston officials) began recalling critical personnel to give us the necessary assistance for this operation to be a success."

With the aid of the host installation, the 334th AEG was at full operational capability, ready to conduct search-and-rescue missions when the first HH-60 Pave Hawk helicopter landed Sept. 15.

Switching gears from readiness training in South Florida to real-world operations in South Carolina is a prime example of, "being constantly fluid and flexible," said Capt. Jessica Colby, 334 AEG public affairs officer. "Search and rescue is often like that: You never know where you're going to go, you never know how big of a footprint you can bring, or what will be needed."

There is one constant in situations like these, training, explained Rodriguez. "Reserve Citizen Airmen must constantly train to not only stay current, but to propel their capabilities beyond just meeting the minimum requirement. Honing their proficiencies will ultimately provide the best possible performance in real-world operations. All of the readiness training efforts that the 920th RQW has conducted has better positioned the Wing to this current operational pace."

"The same capabilities which make the U.S. armed forces so powerful in combat also lends themselves extraordinarily well to disaster relief."

"It's amazing what these Citizen Airmen did inside and outside their Air Force specialty codes," Rodriguez said. "They're doing things they're trained for, and accomplishing tasks beyond their job scope with zero deficiencies and zero mishaps."

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Indiana National Guard departs for North Carolina to support Hurricane Florence relief

By Staff Sgt. Jeremiah Runser | Indiana National Guard September 19, 2018

INDIANAPOLIS -- The 38th Combat Aviation Brigade deployed to Raleigh, North Carolina, on Sept. 16 to support Hurricane Florence relief efforts.

After the request for aviation support was received from North Carolina, 14 pilots and crewmembers flew two UH-60 Black Hawks from Gary, Indiana on Sept. 13 and 14 to Knoxville, North Carolina.

"Gov. Eric Holcomb activated the Indiana National Guard to provide support to the victims of Hurricane Florence in North Carolina," said Indiana National Guard Adjutant General, Maj. Gen. Courtney P. Carr.

In addition to the aviation support personnel, Indiana's 181st Intelligence Wing activated an unclassified processing, assessment and dissemination, or UPAD, team to provide archival and live imagery, geospatial intelligence and assessment capabilities to incident commanders in affected areas.

"The skills that our analysts are using in UPAD domestic response to Hurricane Florence are the same skills and fill the same training tasks necessary in their Title 10 Intelligence Analyst roles for their assigned global reach back missions from the 181st Intelligence Wing on a continual 365 day, seven days a week, 24 hour basis," said 181st Intelligence Wing Commander, Col. Christopher Alderdice.

The Indiana National Guard was to be fully integrated into relief efforts by Sept. 17.

"We are doing exactly what the National Guard was designed to do - supporting states and territories in times of need," said Alderdice. "The capabilities we have are not only beneficial when fighting wars, but also when serving our citizens."

The Indiana National Guard responded to both Hurricane Harvey and Hurricane Irma with more than 180 personnel in 2017. Since 2004, the Indiana National Guard has responded to more than 30 events with nearly 5,000 Soldiers.

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Pennsylvania Guard Guard continues search and rescue from Myrtle Beach, S.C.

By Capt. Travis Mueller, Pennsylvania National Guard September 19, 2018

EASTOVER, S.C. -- Members of the Pennsylvania National Guard launched multiple search and rescue missions in South Carolina from McEntire Joint National Guard Base , Sept. 18, 2018.

Pennsylvania National Guard members conducted missions with their partners in the Pennsylvania Helicopter Aquatic Rescue Team. They departed McEntire Joint National Guard Base in UH-60 Black Hawk and CH-47 Chinook helicopters in the morning and flew throughout the day.

Members of the Pennsylvania National Guard and PA-HART searched areas around the cities of Nichols, Conway and Myrtle Beach for citizens stranded by floodwaters or otherwise in need of assistance.

Activity during the search and rescue missions included:

- Evaluation of water levels, bridges and associated infrastructure.

- Identifying primary areas of concern for future flooding.

- Ensuring flooded roadways were properly barricaded.

- Standing by to make sure people operating vehicles or boats navigated floodwaters safely.

One Pennsylvania National Guard crew in a UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter discovered a portion of a railway that was damaged by flood currents. They sent the location, severity and photos of the damaged portion to appropriate personnel.

Pennsylvania National Guard crews did not identify anyone in need of aerial rescue. National Guard crews were also on the ground, navigating the floodwaters in high clearance vehicles.

Local leaders in the area believe that flooding will develop further until later in the week.

A portion of the Pennsylvania National Guard task force in South Carolina was repositioned at Myrtle Beach International Airport in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina Tuesday. The remaining Pennsylvania National Guardsmen in South Carolina are expected to join them in Myrtle Beach Wednesday. They are being repositioned to launch missions closer to impacted areas.

Pennsylvania National Guard and PA-HART members plan to conduct more search and rescue missions in South Carolina Wednesday. They stand ready to assist the populace and complete further assignments as directed by local authorities.

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U.S. Again Names Iran As Leading Terrorism Sponsor

RFE/RL September 19, 2018

The United States has once again named Iran as the world's leading state sponsor of terrorism, accusing it of fueling conflicts and undermining governments throughout the Middle East.

An annual survey on global terrorism, released by the State Department on September 19, said Iran and its proxies are responsible for intensifying multiple conflicts and undermining U.S. interests in the region.

"Designated as a state sponsor of terrorism in 1984, Iran continued its terrorist-related activity in 2017, including support for Lebanese Hizballah, Palestinian terrorist groups in Gaza, and various groups in Syria, Iraq, and throughout the Middle East," the report said.

The survey said that Iran used the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps-Qods Force to provide support to terrorist organizations, provide cover for associated covert operations, and create instability in the region.

The Iranian government maintains a robust offensive cyberprogram and has sponsored cyberattacks against foreign government and private sector entities, the State Department report said.

The survey also reported a 24 percent decrease in terrorist attacks around the world between 2016 and 2017.

It was mostly due to a sharp decline in the number of attacks in Iraq, where the Islamic State (IS) extremist group was largely defeated by government and international coalition forces.

However, the report noted that members of the group have dispersed from the Middle East and are surfacing with their own operations and networks elsewhere, including in Southeast Asia.

Last year, IS operatives conducted attacks in Britain, Spain, Egypt, the United States, and the Philippines, the report said.

It also pointed out that IS is also threatening China and Chinese interests around the world, after some Chinese nationals joined the group.

Source: https://www.rferl.org/a/u-s-again-names-iran-as- leading-terrorism-sponsor/29498883.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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Coordinator for Counterterrorism Nathan A. Sales on the Release of the Country Reports on Terrorism 2017

Special Briefing

Nathan A. Sales

Ambassador-at-Large and Coordinator for Counterterrorism

Via Teleconference

September 19, 2018

MR PALLADINO: Thank you. Hello, everyone. This is Robert Palladino. Thank you so much for joining us for today's call. Today's call is on the record. And I also want to note that both the call and the report are embargoed until the end of the call

Today the State Department is releasing its annual Country Reports on Terrorism, which describes the global counterterrorism landscape in 2017 and fulfills a congressional mandate. The report allows us to highlight significant terrorist trends and takes stock of how effective United States and international efforts were in countering these threats. It also helps us make more informed judgments and plans about our policies, priorities, and where to place our resources.

At this point I'd like to turn it over to Ambassador Nathan A. Sales, who was sworn in as the coordinator of counterterrorism in August 2017. Nathan, thank you very much for being here today.

AMBASSADOR SALES: Thanks, Robert, very much for the introduction. And thanks to everyone on the line who called in for today's call. Country Reports on Terrorism is an important document laying out the United States Government's assessment of recent counterterrorism trends and highlighting some of the efforts that we and our partners have taken to combat groups like ISIS, al-Qaida, Iran-backed threats, and other terrorist groups of global reach.

Let me start with some numbers. The report includes a statistical annex that was prepared by the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism just down the street at the University of Maryland. The annex notes that the total number of terrorist attacks worldwide in 2017 decreased by 23 percent. Similarly, the total deaths due to terrorist attacks decreased by 27 percent. Both of those are compared to the numbers for 2016.

While numerous countries saw a decline in terrorist violence between 2016 and 2017, this overall trend was largely due to dramatically fewer attacks and deaths in Iraq. Although terrorist attacks took place in 100 countries in 2017, they were concentrated geographically. Fifty-nine percent of all attacks took place in five countries. Those are Afghanistan, India, Iraq, Pakistan, and the Philippines. Similarly, 70 percent of all deaths due to terrorist attacks took place in five countries, and those are Afghanistan, Iraq, Nigeria, Somalia, and Syria.

The report notes a number of major strides that the United States and our international partners made to defeat and degrade terrorist organizations in 2017. We worked with allies and partners around the world to expand information sharing, improve aviation security, enhance law enforcement and rule of law capacities, and to counter terrorist radicalization with a focus on preventing recruitment and recidivism.

In December 2017, the U.S. drafted UN Security Council Resolution 2396, was adopted unanimously with 66 co-sponsors. UNSCR 2396 requires member-states to collect and use biometrics and traveler data, including passenger name record data, to identify and disrupt terrorist travel and to develop watch lists or databases of known and suspected terrorists.

We continue to engage foreign partners to conclude bilateral arrangements for the exchange of identity information on known and suspected terrorists. This is pursuant to Homeland Security Presidential Directive 6, or HSPD-6.

Since 2007, the CT Bureau and the FBI's Terrorist Screening Center have signed 71 of these arrangements with foreign partners, and they're helping to identify, track, and deter the travel of known and suspected terrorists.

2017 saw the United States and a global coalition accomplish major efforts against ISIS. Ninety-nine percent of the territory ISIS once held in Iraq and Syria has now been liberated. Approximately 50 percent of those gains were achieved since January of 2017. Similarly, more than 7.7 million people have been liberated from ISIS' brutal role  approximately 4.5 million in Iraq and 3.2 million in Syria. Of those 7.7 million people, an estimated 5 million have been liberated since 2017.

We increased pressure on al-Qaida to prevent its resurgence. We're working closely with our allies to counter al-Qaida's ability to recruit, raise money, travel, and plot. In May of this year, the State Department expanded the terrorist designation of an al-Qaida affiliate in Syria. We also designated al-Qaida's Mali branch earlier this month, on September 5th, and we have led efforts at the UN Security Council to designate numerous organizations and individuals affiliated with al-Qaida.

Despite these many successes, the terrorist landscape grew more complex in 2017. ISIS, al-Qaida, and their affiliates have proven to be resilient, determined, and adaptable. They have adjusted to heightened counterterrorism pressure in Iraq, Syria, Somalia, and elsewhere. Foreign terrorist fighters are heading home from the war zone in Iraq and Syria or traveling to third countries to join ISIS branches there. We also are experiencing an increase in attacks by homegrown terrorists  that is, people who have been inspired by ISIS but have never set foot in Syria or Iraq. We've seen ISIS-directed or ISIS-inspired attacks outside the war zone on soft targets and in public spaces like hotels, tourist resorts, and cultural sites. We've seen this trend in places as far afield as Bamako, Barcelona, Berlin, London, Marawi, New York City, Ouagadougou, and many others.

Iran remains the world's leading state sponsor of terrorism and is responsible for intensifying multiple conflicts and undermining U.S. interests in Syria, in Yemen, in Iraq, in Bahrain, in Afghanistan, and in Lebanon, using a number of proxies and other instruments such as Lebanese Hizballah and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corp's Quds Force. The threats posed by Iran's support for terrorism are not confined to the Middle East; they are truly global.

Since 2012 alone, Hizballah has conducted a successful attack in Bulgaria that killed six, it has undertaken two separate plots in Cyprus, and it has developed large caches of military equipment and explosives in Kuwait, Nigeria, and Bolivia while sending terrorist operatives to Peru and Thailand.

On June 30th of this year, German authorities arrested an Iranian official for his role in a terrorist plot to bomb a political rally in Paris. Authorities in Belgium and France also made arrests in connection with this Iranian-supported terrorist plot.

So that about wraps up some of the key points that we made in the report. I thank you for taking the time to join this call, and I anxiously await your questions. Thank you.

MR PALLADINO: Thank you, Ambassador Sales. Let's open it up for questions. I'd like to ask that everyone please identify your outlet and name, and to limit your question to one question. Thank you.

OPERATOR: As a reminder, we've reached the Q&A phase of our conference call. Please to press *1 at this time.

Our first question will come from the line of Carol Morello of The Washington Post. Please, go ahead.

QUESTION: Hi, thanks for doing this. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit more about what you call in the report the "near-global reach of Iran and its proxies." And you mentioned a little at the end. It seems like whenever it's mentioned, it's a incident here and there, in some cases maybe inspired by as opposed to actually conducted by Iran. Do you think you may be overstating the, quote, "near-global reach of Iran and its proxies" in terrorism?

AMBASSADOR SALES: Not at all. Iran is the world's preeminent state sponsor of terrorism, and it brings to its terrorist activities the resources of a state. We have seen Iran's and its proxies' terrorist-related activities across the globe. There are active fundraising networks in places as far afield as Africa, in South America. We've seen weapons caches planted around the world. We've seen operational activity not just in Lebanon by Hizballah, but by Iran-backed terrorists in the heart of Europe. Iran uses terrorism as a tool of its statecraft. It has no reservations about using that tool on any continent.

MR PALLADINO: Next question, please.

OPERATOR: We have a question from the line of Susan George, Associated Press. Please, go ahead.

QUESTION: Hey there. Thanks for doing this call. I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about al-Qaida. You describe the group expanding its membership. Could you give us a bit more detail exactly what you mean by that?

AMBASSADOR SALES: Hey, Susan. Thanks for the question. Al-Qaida is a determined and patient adversary. They have largely remained out of the headlines in recent years as they've been content to let ISIS bear the brunt of the international response, but we shouldn't confuse that period of relative quiet with an  with al-Qaida's abandonment of its capabilities or intentions to strike us and our allies. That is why we are continuing to keep the pressure on al-Qaida, its affiliates, and its individuals. The report details a number of efforts that we've taken to designate  and I mentioned in my opening remarks  efforts that we have taken to designate al-Qaida affiliates in Syria, in Mali, as well as individuals who are associated with the group.

So although ISIS has gotten the headlines, we remain focused and determined to confront al-Qaida wherever we find it.

MR PALLADINO: Next question, please.

OPERATOR: Cristobal Vasquez, Caracol Radio. Please, go ahead.

QUESTION: Yes, hi. Thank you. I would like to ask about the FARC. A recent report from The New York Times said that around 40 percent of the FARC militants did not actually sign up into the peace agreement or  and they are still free and they're still doing illicit activities. Can you dig into  a little bit more into these  those militants that are not in the peace agreement of  that the FARC signed with the Colombian Government?

AMBASSADOR SALES: Well, thanks for the question, Cris. I can tell you it's a situation that we at the State Department and throughout the U.S. Government are watching very closely. We have consistently maintained our support for Colombia's efforts to secure a just and lasting peace. The Colombian people deserve no less than that. We're committed to cooperating with Colombia to undermine those terrorist groups and their remnants  groups like the ELN, dissidents from the FARC.

MR PALLADINO: Next question, please.

OPERATOR: J.J. Green, WTOP. Please, go ahead. Mr. Green, your line is open.

(Break.)

OPERATOR: We have a question from the line of Maria Molina of W Radio Colombia. Please, go ahead.

QUESTION: Hey, thank you for doing this. I want to go back to FARC because we already have FARC members in our congress in Colombia. They signed a peace agreement, as my colleague said, but you still include them in the list of foreign terrorist organizations. Is the State Department considering at any point, and why haven't they been taken out of this list if they are already not anymore a terrorist organization? Or they're not supposed to be, at least.

AMBASSADOR SALES: Thanks for the question. I'm not going to be in a position to comment on any internal deliberations that may or may not be taking place. What I can tell you is that the statutory standards for getting on the FTO list or getting off the FTO list are very clear, and it  we apply the standards that Congress has given us consistent with the evidence in front of us, and we do that regardless of the organization or country.

MR PALLADINO: Thank you. Next question, please.

OPERATOR: Kim Dozier of Daily Beast. Please, go ahead.

QUESTION: Hi there. Thanks for doing the call. I would like to understand where you see the terrorist groups in competition in terms of attacks directed at the continental United States. Between al-Qaida, ISIS, other groups, and geographically, where do you see the greatest threat to the continental U.S.? It used to be AQAP, but that seems to have shifted.

AMBASSADOR SALES: Well, I think all three of the major terrorist adversaries that I've highlighted have both the capability and intent to strike the United States and our allies. Al-Qaida's leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri, has repeatedly called for AQ members and followers to commit attacks here in the U.S. ISIS-inspired attacks have occurred here in the United States, including in New York City last October. And as far as Iran-backed terrorist organizations are concerned, we've arrested a number of operatives who allegedly were casing targets in support of Iran-backed terrorist organizations and they're now facing charges in federal court.

So I think all three of them have both the capability and intent, and so the key question then becomes: What are we doing about it? And I think there's a suite of tools that are useful against all three of those diverse threat streams. You've got to stop the flow of money to these organizations. That's why we designate individuals and facilitators and financiers. You've got to be able to stop terrorist travel. That's why we're doing things like collecting biometrics at the border, sharing information about known and suspected terrorists, analyzing airline reservation data to identify previously unknown threats. And another thing you've got to do is use law enforcement tools to prosecute and investigate and, when convicted, to incarcerate suspected terrorists.

MR PALLADINO: At this point, I would like to thank Ambassador Sales, the State Department's coordinator for counterterrorism, for his  for making  providing this opportunity today. This call is now ended. This call has been on the record. And the embargo is now lifted for both the call, its contents, and the reports themselves. Thank you all for joining us today. Bye-bye.



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Treasury Sanctions Key ISIS Financial Facilitators

September 19, 2018

Action includes targets connected to the Caribbean and the Middle East

Washington -- The U.S. Department of the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) took action today to designate two Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) financiers pursuant to Executive Order (E.O.) 13224, which targets terrorists and those providing support to terrorists or acts of terrorism.

"While coalition efforts have led to the collapse of ISIS's self-declared caliphate, Treasury continues to aggressively target financiers supporting ISIS's radical agenda. We are sanctioning individuals involved in financial facilitation to obstruct and deter ISIS financial operations in regions across the world," said Sigal Mandelker, Treasury Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence. "Our actions coincide with the 10th meeting of the Counter-ISIS Finance Group (CIFG), which includes 52 countries and international organizations committed to disrupting critical sources of ISIS revenue to permanently prevent ISIS from accessing the international financial system."

Today's designations are part of Treasury's and the broader U.S. government's ongoing and concerted efforts to disrupt ISIS-related financial activities around the globe. Throughout 2018, the Departments of the Treasury and State targeted ISIS branches, facilitators, and networks in Bangladesh, Iraq, Somalia, the Philippines, and across West and North Africa. The U.S. government will continue taking disruptive action to prevent ISIS from exploiting the financial system to fund its operations.

As a result of today's action, all property and interests in property of these persons subject to U.S. jurisdiction are blocked and U.S. persons are generally prohibited from engaging in transactions with them.

Emraan Ali

Emraan Ali (Ali) was designated for acting for or on behalf of ISIS.

Syria-based, dual U.S. and Trinidadian national, Ali has been involved in money transfers from Trinidad and Tobago to Syria in support of ISIS. As of January 2017, Ali would receive and provide funds to Trinidadian ISIS fighters. For several years, a number of citizens of Trinidad and Tobago in Syria received money transfers through Ali. In the summer of 2015, Ali lived at an ISIS guest house in Syria and had been assigned to Raqqah, Syria.

Eddie Aleong

Eddie Aleong (Aleong) was designated for assisting in, sponsoring, or providing financial, material, or technological support for, or financial or other services to or in support of ISIS.

As of March 2018, Trinidad-based Aleong facilitated money transfers to ISIS members in ISIS-controlled territory. As of January 2017, a Trinidadian ISIS supporter possibly planned to work with Eddie Aleong, to transfer funds to Emraan Ali, who would then provide the funds to Trinidadian ISIS fighters in Syria.

Identifying information on the individuals designated today.

####

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US Official: Islamic State, Al-Qaida Determined and Adaptable

By Cindy Saine September 19, 2018

U.S. counterterrorism officials say despite major strides in combating and regaining territory from terror groups like Islamic State and al-Qaida, the terror landscape has grown more complex.

"ISIS, al-Qaida, and their affiliates have proven to be determined, resilient and adaptable," U.S. Coordinator for Counterterrorism Nathan Sales said Wednesday, using an acronym for Islamic State. "They have adjusted to heightened counterterrorism pressure in Iraq, Syria, Somalia and elsewhere."

Sales made the comments in a briefing to reporters on the release of the State Department's 2017 Country Reports on Terrorism, which found that IS and al-Qaida have become more dispersed, turning to the internet to inspire attacks by distant followers, making them less susceptible to conventional military action.

The State Department report says as IS lost territory last year, it continued to shift away from a centralized command and encouraged its sympathizers around the world to use whatever weapons they have at hand against so-called "soft targets." The report says 2017 saw such attacks in Manchester, Barcelona, Sinai, Marawi, New York City and elsewhere.

While terror groups have become more resilient, Sales noted progress in the fight, with the United States and its allies working to expand information security, improve aviation security and enhance law enforcement capabilities.

The U.S. counterterrorism official said the coalition has succeeded in liberating nearly all the territory Islamic State fighters once held in Iraq and Syria, and increased pressure on al-Qaida.

Also in 2017, the total number of terrorist attacks worldwide decreased by 23 percent, and the total number of deaths caused by terrorism decreased by 27 percent. Sales said the main reason for that decrease is that the number of terrorist attacks and resulting deaths plummeted in Iraq.

Still, Sales says there is one country that leads others in supporting terrorism.

"Iran remains the world's leading state sponsor of terrorism and is responsible for intensifying multiple conflicts and undermining U.S. interests in Syria, Yemen, in Iraq, in Bahrain, in Afghanistan and in Lebanon, using a number of proxies and other instruments, such as Lebanese Hezbollah and the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps-Quds Force," Sales told reporters Wednesday.

Sales also noted that while al-Qaida has not been in the spotlight as much as in the past, the terror group has been expanding its numbers.

"Al-Qaida is a determined and patient adversary. They have largely remained out of the headlines in recent years as they've been content to let ISIS bear the brunt of the international response. But we shouldn't confuse that period of relative quiet with al-Qaida's abandonment of its capabilities or intention to strike us and our allies."

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Georgia's Prime Minister Mamuka Bakhtadze met with the Chairman of the Helsinki Commission, senator Roger Wicker in the US Senate yesterday.

Bakhtadze and Wicker have discussed the political and economic reforms being carried out in Georgia, as well as security challenges in the region, in which Georgia plays an important role.

The Georgian PM thanked the senator for his efforts in preparing bills that have been supportive of Georgia, Agenda.ge reported.

The U.S. senator has positively assessed steps made by Georgia for strengthening security and defence. Wicker also expressed his belief that the upcoming presidential elections will be held in a peaceful and fair environment.
Beijing Wants You! China Seeks Young Fighter Pilots For Growing Carrier Fleet

Sputnik News

22:06 19.09.2018

The Chinese military is looking to ramp up recruitment of fighter pilots as the People's Liberation Army-Navy shifts from "shore-based" to "carrier-based" operations, according to a Tuesday announcement.

The PLA-Navy faces a shortage of both carrier-based fighter pilots and fighter aircraft themselves, Sputnik reported September 13. A central reason that the shortage has become pressing, though, is that the Liaoning aircraft carrier is set to join multiple new aircraft carriers in the coming years.

Beijing's carrier-based J-15 jet is in relatively short supply, and apparently pilots are too. The PLA-N has initiated a large recruitment effort across 23 provinces, municipalities and autonomous regions in China, the service said Tuesday. With the country's new Type 001A carrier, which has yet to be named, expected to join the fleet in 2019, the need for carrier-based pilots is urgent.

"Through the shifting from 'shore-based' to 'carrier-based' standards, the PLA-Navy aims to build a pilot recruitment system with Chinese naval characteristics that can adapt to carrier-born operations," the announcement states.

The service will "test and select" pilot trainees aged 16 to 19 during the recruitment initiative, according to the Chinese military.

Chinese media reports show little admiration for the J-15, an aircraft tailored for taking off from the ski-jump featured at the bows of China's first two carriers. According to the Asia Times, Chinese media have characterized the J-15 as a "flopping fish" as a consequence of the aircraft's struggles taking off from the ramps. The J-15 has also had issues with its flight control system, leading to crashes in recent years, Sputnik noted.

Chinese engineers plan to integrate the next-generation J-31 with carrier operations, but this prospect will not come to fruition for some time. With a few upgrades, the J-15 will be the backbone of carrier operations in the intervening years, Russian military expert Vasily Kashin told Sputnik earlier this year. "I don't expect the first carrier-based J-31s to reach an initial stage of combat readiness before the mid-2020s. Until then, they will have to make do with the J-15," the expert said.

 Sputnik

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Full text of September 19th Pyongyang Declaration

KBS World Radio

19-09-2018

South Korea's President Moon Jae-in and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un held summits in Pyongyang from September 18th to the 20th.

The two leaders assessed that remarkable achievements had been made since the historic Panmunjeom Declaration was signed, including the two Koreas engaging in close government-level dialogue and communication as well as in nongovernmental exchanges and cooperation in various areas, and taking significant steps toward easing military tensions.

The two leaders reaffirmed the principles of self-reliance and self-determination of the Korean people and agreed to consistently and continuously advance inter-Korean ties for reconciliation, cooperation, peace and joint prosperity. They also agreed to exert joint efforts to realize, through policies, the people's aim and hope for improved inter-Korean ties to lead to unification.

The two leaders sincerely and extensively discussed issues on further boosting inter-Korean ties to a higher level through the thorough implementation of the Panmunjeom Declaration. They also shared the view that the Pyongyang summits will become a major turning point in history.

1. The two Koreas agreed to end hostility at fortified regions, including the Demilitarized Zone, and continue such momentum by seeking to remove all real risks of war on the Korean Peninsula and resolve hostile relations.

The two Koreas agreed to adopt a military accord on implementing the Panmunjeom Declaration as a side agreement of the Pyongyang Declaration, and to thoroughly observe and execute the accord. They also agreed to take substantial steps to make the Korean Peninsula a permanent peace zone. The two Koreas agreed to swiftly operate a joint military committee to inspect the status of the implementation of the military accord. They also agreed to engage in close communication and consultation at all times to prevent armed clashes of accidental nature.

2. The two Koreas agreed to further boost exchanges and cooperation based on mutual reciprocity and co-prosperity as well as devise substantial ways to advance national economy in a balanced manner.

The two Koreas agreed to hold within this year ground-breaking ceremonies for connecting the Gyeongui and Yellow Sea railways and roads. The two Koreas agreed to normalize operations of the Gaeseong Industrial Complex and tours to Mount Geumgang once necessary conditions are met as well as to discuss the issue of creating a joint special economic zone along the Yellow Sea and a special tourism zone along the East Sea. In a bid to conserve and restore the natural ecosystem, the two Koreas agreed to actively pursue cooperation on environmental issues, starting with producing results in cooperation on forestry currently under way. The two Koreas agreed to boost cooperation in health and medicine, including emergency steps on preventing infectious diseases from entering or spreading on the peninsula.

3. The two Koreas agreed to further strengthen humanitarian cooperation to fundamentally resolve the issue of separated families.

The two Koreas agreed to open a permanent reception venue for separated families in the Mount Geumgang region at the earliest date possible and to that end, agreed to swiftly repair the reception house at the mountain resort. The two Koreas agreed to first work out through Red Cross talks the issue of holding video reunions and of allowing families to exchange video messages.

4. The two Koreas agreed to actively pursue cooperation and exchanges in a wide array of areas to promote the mood of reconciliation and unity as well as to boast the unyielding spirit of the Korean people both inside and outside of their countries.

The two Koreas agreed to further boost exchanges in culture and arts, starting with a performance in Seoul in October by a Pyongyang art troupe. The two Koreas agreed to jointly take part in international competitions, including the 2020 Summer Olympics, and to seek to jointly host the 2032 Summer Olympics. The two Koreas agreed to hold ceremonies to mark the eleventh anniversary of the October 4th joint declaration and to jointly commemorate the 100th anniversary of the March 1st independence movement. To this end, they agreed to hold working-level consultations.

5. The two Koreas agreed that the Korean Peninsula must become a place of peace that is free of nuclear weapons and nuclear threats and for that aim, the two Koreas shared the view that they must swiftly make necessary headway.

North Korea agreed to permanently dismantle its missile engine test facility and missile launch tower in Dongchang-ri in the presence of experts from related countries. North Korea expressed intent to take further steps, including permanently dismantling the Yongbyon nuclear facility, if the United States takes corresponding steps in line with the spirit of the June 12th joint statement. The two Koreas agreed to engage in close cooperation in the process of pursuing the complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.

6. North Korean leader Kim Jong-un plans to visit Seoul at an early date at the invitation of President Moon Jae-in.

September 19, 2018

Pyongyang

Moon Jae-in

President

Republic of Korea

Kim Jong-Un

Chairman

State Affairs Commission Democratic People's Republic of Korea

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Leaders of two Koreas sign document after second face-to-face talks in Pyongyang

People's Daily Online

(Xinhua) 10:52, September 19, 2018

PYONGYANG/SEOUL, Sept. 19 -- Kim Jong Un, top leader of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK), and South Korean President Moon Jae-in on Wednesday signed a document after their second face-to-face dialogue in Pyongyang.

There is no immediate report about the content of the document, signed at the Baekhwawon State Guest House.

Witnessed by the two leaders, defense chiefs of the two countries also signed an agreement on reducing military tensions on the peninsula.

Kim and Moon are expected to hold a joint press conference before the luncheon.

Moon and Kim had a two-hour-long talks Tuesday afternoon at the headquarters of the Workers' Party of Korea (WPK).

During Tuesday's meeting, the two sides had an "in-depth exchange of opinions on various issues arising in further accelerating the development of the north-south relations by honestly implementing the Panmunjom declaration in an all-round manner," the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) said Wednesday.

The two leaders highly appreciated the present state of the north-south relations going forward on good terms after the previous two inter-Korea summits earlier this year, and had a frank and candid conversation over important matters of mutual concern, according to the KCNA.

Before leaving for Pyongyang, Moon said he planned to have a lot of frank talks with Kim in order to bring an "irreversible, permanent peace to the Korean Peninsula" and help restart the DPRK-U.S. dialogue on the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.

Moon's ongoing visit is the first by a South Korean head of state to Pyongyang in 11 years. He and Kim had met twice earlier this year.

Their first meeting in April resulted in the Panmunjom Declaration, in which the two leaders expressed commitment to the "denuclearization of the Korean peninsula" and agreed on a range of measures to reduce military tensions on the peninsula.

The South Korean president is slated to wrap up his three-day trip to Pyongyang and return home Thursday morning.

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Leaders of two Koreas agree to denuclearize peninsula at Pyongyang summit

People's Daily Online

(Xinhua) 13:07, September 19, 2018

PYONGYANG/SEOUL, Sept. 19 (Xinhua) -- Leaders of the two Koreas agreed Wednesday to end military tensions and try to achieve complete denuclearization of the Korean peninsula.

Kim Jong Un, top leader of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK), and South Korean President Moon Jae-in made the pledge at a joint press conference in Pyongyang.

At the press conference, Kim said that Panmunjom Declaration would serve as groundwork for a new era of peace on the Korean peninsula and he wished to make the peninsula nuclear-free.

The Panmunjom Declaration was signed during Kim's first meeting with Moon in April at the truce village of Panmunjom on the border of the two Koreas.

Kim promised to accelerate the inter-Korean peace talks, further develop inter-Korean relations and visit Seoul, capital of South Korea, in the near future.

Moon said he and Kim have agreed on ways to denuclearize the Korean Peninsula for the first time. In addition, they agreed to end military tensions and transform the inter-Korean border into a "peace zone."

Moon noted that they reached consensus to eliminate all threats of war on the entire Korean Peninsula.

Before meeting the press, the two leaders signed a summit agreement.

Defense chiefs from both sides also signed a separate agreement on military affairs in the presence of the two leaders.

Moon and Kim had a two-hour-long talks Tuesday afternoon at the headquarters of the Workers' Party of Korea (WPK) and an one-on-one meeting earlier on Wednesday.

During Tuesday's meeting, the two sides had an "in-depth exchange of opinions on various issues arising in further accelerating the development of the north-south relations by honestly implementing the Panmunjom declaration in an all-round manner," the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) said Wednesday.

Under the joint declaration signed by Moon and Kim in Pyongyang, the DPRK expressed its willingness to continue additional steps, such as the permanent destruction of its main Yongbyon nuclear facility, if the United States takes corresponding measures in accordance with the spirit of the DPRK-U.S. summit agreement reached on June 12 in Singapore.

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Russia rejects US claim of supplying fuel to North Korea

Iran Press TV

Wed Sep 19, 2018 05:29PM

Moscow has dismissed allegations by Washington that Russia helped North Korea acquire fuel through transfers at sea in violation of sanctions against Pyongyang.

Russia's Foreign Ministry said on Wednesday that the accusations were not supported up by evidence.

US Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley on Monday accused Russia of "cheating" on UN sanctions on Pyongyang, saying that Washington had "evidence of consistent and wide-ranging Russian violations."

The Wall Street Journal reported last week that the US is convening a multinational coalition to better track ships supplying fuel to North Korea in violation of UN sanctions.

Citing US military officials, the Journal reported on September 14 that the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Japan, South Korea and France would join the US to form the coalition, which would also contribute warships and military surveillance aircraft to better spot shipments to the North.

The coalition is formed despite international calls on Washington to ease pressure in response to Pyongyang's efforts toward denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.

Moscow and Beijing have called on the UN to consider easing sanctions on North Korea in response to its opening up dialogue with the United States and halting missile tests.

However, Washington insists on maintaining "maximum pressure" on North Korea, emphasizing "denuclearization first."

Pyongyang has urged Washington to take reciprocal measures for its goodwill gestures, including officially declaring an end to the Korean War and removing sanctions.

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'The Era of no war has started:' Koreas reach new agreements

Iran Press TV

Wed Sep 19, 2018 07:09AM

The two Koreas have agreed to take further steps toward peace following a one-on-one meeting between North Korean leader Kim Jong-un and South Korean President Moon Jae-in, who is on his first ever visit to Pyongyang.

The two leaders issued a joint statement at the end of the second day of their summit in the North Korean capital on Wednesday, agreeing to take a step closer to peace by turning the Korean Peninsula into a "land of peace without nuclear weapons and nuclear threats."

"The era of no war has started," Moon said at a joint press conference with Kim after issuing the statement. "Today, the North and South decided to remove all threats from the entire Korean Peninsula."

He said that Kim "agreed to permanently close the Tongchang-ri missile engine test site and missile launch facility in the presence of experts from relevant nations."

The South Korean president said the North's leader had also agreed to shut down its Yongbyon nuclear facility but only if the United States took "corresponding measures."

It was not clear what measures were expected of the US.

Moon said Pyongyang had already pledged to work toward the "complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula" during his first encounter with him in April, in the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) that separates the two Koreas.

The two Koreas "have continuously shown their trust toward one another and I hope there will be another summit between the two countries as soon as possible," Moon said.

Kim also agreed to work toward denuclearization during a summit with US President Donald Trump in Singapore back in June.

But North Korea has said denuclearization will have to be phased, with each stage coming in return for reciprocal steps by the US, potentially including the removal of US forces from the region.

Yet, no specific steps have been designated toward that goal, and Pyongyang says that, while it has taken several goodwill measures  including the suspension of missile and nuclear tests  the American side has taken no moves in return.

North Korea has also already dismantled a nuclear site and has returned the remains of some US soldiers killed in the 1950-53 Korean War to America.

In return, Pyongyang is also seeking relief from harsh international sanctions  mostly spearheaded by the US  imposed on the country over its nuclear and missile programs.

The US, however, has not offered any such relief.

Kim to visit Seoul

When President Moon hoped for another summit, he must have had little idea that his wish would be granted very soon. Kim said shortly after their meeting that he would make a visit to the South in "the near future," in what would be the first-ever visit to the capital, Seoul, by a North Korean leader.

Moon then said that the trip could happen this year unless there were "special circumstances." He said the trip would be "unprecedented" and would "provide a turning point for the two Koreas."

'This divided nation to unite on its own'

Kim described the latest agreements as a "leap forward" toward military peace on the peninsula.

"The world is going to see how this divided nation is going to bring about a new future on his own," the North Korean leader said, in a remark potentially meaning that diplomacy with the US, which has already stalled, may not be necessary.

The two Koreas also plan to link up their railways, allow reunions for families separated by the Korean War, and to co-host the 2032 Summer Olympics, according to the joint statement.

The Korean War ended with a truce and not a peace treaty. Ever since, the two countries were on a near-constant war footing. But Kim initiated a rapprochement with South Korea in January. And the US started diplomatically engaging North Korea only later.

The two Koreas have since been advancing their relations. But the US failure to reciprocate North Korean moves has plagued diplomatic engagement between Washington and Pyongyang.

Trump 'excited' by developments

Following the announcement, Trump took to Twitter to describe the developments as "very exciting."

He failed to mention the North Korean demand for reciprocal US measures.

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Moscow Regrets US Attempt to Control UNSC Regarding N Korea Sanctions Issue

Sputnik News

17:54 19.09.2018(updated 18:29 19.09.2018)

Earlier in the day, Russia's ambassador to North Korea, Alexander Matsegora, said that the US claims that Russia was "cheating" on the UN Security Council (UNSC) resolution on North Korea were totally groundless and that the state strictly complied with its obligations.

US accusations that Russia illegally assisted North Korea in obtaining fuel via transfers at sea lacked evidence, the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs stated on Wednesday.

On Monday, US Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley accused Russia of "consistent" violations of the UN Security Council resolution on sanctions against Pyongyang, which involve restrictions on supplies of fuel to North Korea and hiring North Korean workers.

The accusations drove Russia's ambassador to North Korea, Alexander Matsegora, to call them "unfair," who noted that they were not based on facts, but rather depended on groundless speculations and assumptions.

The official also noted that Russia "scrupulously, very responsibly and consistently fulfills the requirements of the resolutions of the UN Security Council."

The diplomat stressed that this was the reason why bilateral trade between Russia and North Korea fell by more than 70 percent since the beginning of the year.

 Sputnik

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North, South Korean Leaders in Fact Proclaimed End of State of War - Seoul

Sputnik News

05:17 19.09.2018(updated 10:50 19.09.2018)

North Korea and South Korea signed an agreement in defence sector as well as a joint statement following the results of the summit in Pyongyang.

South Korean President Moon Jae-in and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un have in fact proclaimed the end of the state of war, the South Korean presidential spokesperson said on Wednesday.

"Leaders of the South and the North have in fact announced the end of the war on the Korean Peninsula by their agreements," the spokesperson said.

Leaders of North Korea and South Korea have signed a joint agreement following the summit in Pyongyang. Also, the agreement in military sphere was signed by South Korean Defense Minister, Song Young-moo, and North Korean Defense Minister of People's Armed Forces, No Kwang Chol in the presence of the two states' leaders.

According to the joint statement by the leaders, North Korea decided to fully dismantle its rocket testing field in Tonchkhan-ni and will let international observers visit the field.

The statement also said that North Korea was going to dismantle its nuclear reactor in Yonbyon within the framework of agreements with the United States.

After the meeting, North Korean leader promised to visit Seoul in near future. He also said that both nations agreed to make efforts to denuclearize the peninsula. Meanwhile, South Korean president said that Seoul an Pyongyang agreed to remove threat of war on Korean Peninsula.

The joint statement also said that the works on connection of roads and railways between the two nations would start before the year's end.

Seoul and Pyongyang also agreed to send joint team to 2020 Olympic games as well as to submit joint bid to host 2032 games.

The meeting of the nations' leaders took place on Wednesday in the "one-on-one" format in the official residence for the honorable guests. The persons accompanying the leaders were waiting for the end of their conversation in the corridor.

The two nations agreed to cease large-scale artillery exercises and military flights near demarcation line. They also agreed to withdraw servicemen from the demilitarised zone and disarm personnel in Panmunjom truce village. Two Koreas agreed to create 80-kilometre zone free from military exercises in Yellow sea, sea of Japan.

Earlier, a spokesperson for Seoul administration confirmed that DPRK and South Korea would sign a military agreement and a joint statement after the summit.

South Korean President Moon Jae-in is on a three-day visit in Pyongyang, which the first visit by a president of South Korea to Pyongyang in nearly 11 years, as former president Roh Moo-hyun travelled to North Korea back in October 2007.

During South Korean President's visit it was planned that the leader would twice hold talks with Kim Jong-un and discuss further improvement of relations, denuclearization and development of dialogue between North Korea and the United States.

 Sputnik

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Pompeo: US Ready to Restart Talks With North Korea

By VOA News September 19, 2018

U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has welcomed the "important commitments" made by North Korean leader Kim Jong Un at a summit with his South Korean counterpart this week.

North Korea announced it would disassemble its nuclear missile test complex under a comprehensive agreement reached by the leaders of the two rival Koreas.

Pompeo said Wednesday that he had invited North Korean Foreign Minister Ri Yong Ho to meet with him in New York at next week's United Nations General Assembly. He also said Pyongyang's representatives have been invited to hold talks with the U.S. special envoy for North Korea in Austria "at the earliest opportunity."

"This will mark the beginning of negotiations to transform U.S.-DPRK relations through the process of rapid denuclearization of North Korea, to be completed by January 2021, as committed by Chairman Kim, and to construct a lasting and stable peace regime on the Korean Peninsula," Pompeo said in a statement.

President Donald Trump also welcomed the post-summit news from North Korea. "We had very good news from North Korea, South Korea. They met, and we had some great responses," Trump told reporters at the White House Wednesday.

Earlier in the day, he tweeted: "Kim Jong Un has agreed to allow Nuclear inspections, subject to final negotiations, and to permanently dismantle a test site and launch pad in the presence of international experts. In the meantime there will be no Rocket or Nuclear testing."

At the end of their three-day summit, Kim and South Korean President Moon Jae-in announced that Pyongyang had agreed to close the Yongbyong facility, coupled with a pledge to permanently shut down its missile engine testing facility and launchpad under the watchful eye of international experts.

"We have agreed to make the Korean Peninsula a land of peace free from nuclear weapons and nuclear threats," Kim told reporters during the joint announcement with President Moon.

Moon traveled to Pyongyang Tuesday with the goal of breaking an impasse between North Korea and the U.S. over the pace of Pyongyang's intentions in ending its nuclear and ballistic missile programs. The two sides agreed to break the impasse during Kim's historic meeting with Trump in Singapore in June. Trump canceled Pompeo's trip to Pyongyang last month over the impasse.

The two leaders also said Kim will visit Seoul sometime before the year is out, which would make him the first North Korean leader to visit the South Korean capital since the two sides split in the 1950-1953 Korean War.

Moon will wrap up his final full day in Pyongyang, watching North Korea's spectacular "Mass Games" outdoor propaganda show.

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N. Korea Kim Agrees to International Inspections, Visit to Seoul

By Steve Miller September 19, 2018

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un announced Wednesday he has agreed to allow international inspectors to observe the dismantlement of facilities key to Pyongyang's missile program. South Korean President Moon Jae-in said during the joint press conference that the era of a war-free Korean Peninsula has begun and invited Kim to Seoul, hopefully by the end of the year.

The second round of inter-Korean talks wrapped up Wednesday with the signing of the September Pyongyang Declaration and a comprehensive military agreement. The latter document, signed by South Korean Minister of National Defense Song Hyung-moo, and No Kwang Chul of People's Armed Forces of North Korea, outlined steps to ease military tensions.

The joint announcement made Wednesday concludes scheduled talks between the two leaders, although there will be additional cultural exchanges into the evening and Thursday.

Inter-Korean deal lauded as new era of peace

The September Pyongyang declaration covered a number of topics. These included the easing of military tensions, economic development, resolving family separation issues, furthering cultural exchanges, and denuclearizing the Korean Peninsula. Moon announced at the end of his remarks that Kim had accepted his invitation to visit Seoul, hopefully by the end of the year.

Kim Jong-un agreed during the talks to permanently dismantle the missile test facilities at Dongchang-ri under the observation of international inspectors. He also expressed an intent to dismantle the Yongbyon nuclear test site, although that would be contingent on the United States taking "corresponding actions."

Harry Kazianis, Director of Defense Studies at The Center for the National Interest, tweeted one possible action would be a peace declaration, formally ending the Korean War.

"The Trump Administration will now be faced with a dilemma of enforcing principles and risking strained relations with Seoul or getting on the euphoric peace train," wrote Heritage Foundation Senior Research Fellow Bruce Klinger in an email to VOA.

He added, "Washington was looking for Moon to deliver on real, tangible, and unambiguous North Korean commitment to abandoning its nuclear and missile arsenal. The Pyongyang Declaration was not it. The regime continues to put the onus on the United States to take appropriate, though unspecified, measures first."

Cessation of hostilities

South Korean officials say the comprehensive military agreement signed Wednesday will create a permanent peace zone on the peninsula. As part of the agreement, the two militaries agreed to halt military exercises in the demilitarized zone beginning this November and will implement a joint military committee to facilitate regular communication and prevent accidental armed clashes.

National Security Advisor Chung Eui-yong said South Korea interpreted the pact as a non-aggression agreement and the first stage for arms control on the peninsula. He expected the agreements signed Wednesday would facilitate dialogue between Washington and Pyongyang.

That echoed comments made by South Korean President Moon, who said he hoped a second Trump-Kim summit would take place as soon as possible.

Resolving separated families and facilitating cultural exchanges

It was announced both governments would cooperate to resolve lingering issues related to separated families from the Korean War. North Korea will open a meeting facility on Mt. Kumgang to help connect loved ones and working with the Red Cross, the two governments will promote video calls and letter exchanges.

The two Koreas said they would further work to enhance cultural and art exchanges. Part of those efforts includes Seoul hosting the Pyongyang Art Company next month and both nations participating in international sporting competitions in 2020. President Moon said South and North Korea would also launch a joint bid to host the 2032 Summer Olympics.

In order to prevent the influx and spread of disease, Seoul and Pyongyang will enhance the cooperation in the prevention of epidemics, hygiene, and medical care.

To facilitate economic growth, North and South Korea said they will hold a groundbreaking ceremony, which will lead to the coastal railways and roads eventually connecting, reopening the Kaesong Industrial Complex, and resume Mt. Kumgang Mountain tourism operations. Seoul and Pyongyang are also to develop a western Special Economic Zone and an eastern Special Tourism Zone.

However, "President Moon makes economic promises he can't deliver without UN and U.S. acquiesce to accepting blatant violations of UN resolution sanctions and U.S. laws," wrote Klinger.

A night out and a morning trip

Wednesday evening, President Moon and his delegation are to visit the Pyeongyang Daedonggang Seafood Restaurant. Presidential spokesman Yoon Young-chan told reporters it was a restaurant frequented by locals, who would join the South Korean delegation.

Following dinner, the entire South Korean delegation will head to May Day Stadium, the largest such facility in North Korea. It's expected the 150,000 person capacity stadium will be filled for a one-hour performance entitled "Brilliant Fatherland."

A presidential spokesman announced South Korean President Moon Jae-in and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un will visit the North's Mount Paektu Thursday morning. It's an active volcano on the North Korea - Chinese border and considered the spiritual home of Koreans.

President Moon and his delegation are expected to return to Seoul later Thursday morning.

Lee Ju-hyun contributed to this report.

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NATO Deputy Secretary General Rose Gottemoeller has arrived in Baku today. According to the correspondent of Vestnik Kavkaza, she said at the press conference that NATO supports the work of the OSCE Minsk Group and the efforts of the parties to find a peaceful solution to the Nagorno Karabakh conflict.

Gottemoeller noted that NATO is very happy to have such a partner as Azerbaijan, adding that they are working together on projects meeting Azerbaijan's interests.

She stressed joint work in the development of institutions in the defense sphere in Azerbaijan.

"NATO believes that by these projects it can help Azerbaijan in the countrys further development as a key player in the region," Gottemoeller stressed.

The NATO Deputy Secretary General also highly appreciated the active support of Azerbaijan for the NATO mission in Afghanistan. In particular, the increase in the number of the military contingent of Azerbaijan as part of the NATO mission in Afghanistan was stressed.

It was also said that NATO is grateful to Azerbaijan for providing transit opportunities as part of this mission, she noted, adding that Azerbaijan participates very effectively in NATOs activity in the fight against terrorism.
Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un and President Moon Jae In Make Joint Statements on "September Pyongyang Joint Declaration"

Korean Central News Agency of DPRK

Pyongyang, September 20 (KCNA) -- Kim Jong Un, chairman of the Workers' Party of Korea and chairman of the State Affairs Commission of the DPRK, together with President Moon Jae In, made joint statements on the "September Pyongyang Joint Declaration" on Wednesday.

Supreme Leader of the Party, state and army Kim Jong Un mentioned first.

Kim Jong Un said that he signed the historic declaration together with President Moon Jae In with a rich harvest in the implementation of the Panmunjom declaration.

Kim Jong Un noted that the issues of further accelerating the progress of the north-south relations so as to give steady continuity to a new era of national reconciliation and peace and prosperity were discussed in depth.

He said that they discussed the practical measures to comprehensively develop the inter-Korean ties based on the principle of national independence, signed an agreement in the field of military and agreed to strive to make the Korean peninsula a peaceful land without nuclear weapons and free from nuclear threats.

He said that they also discussed the detailed ways of invigorating visits, contacts, multi-sided dialogue, cooperation and diverse exchanges between people of all social standings so as to make the strong trend of national reconciliation and reunification prevail in the 3 000-ri land of the north and the south of Korea.

The declaration reflects the mind of the nation full of new hope, the strong will of the fellow countrymen for reunification and the dream of all of us which will come true before long, he added.

He said that he promised President Moon Jae In he would visit Seoul, expressing the will to always take the lead hand in hand in the sacred journey toward peace and prosperity.

President Moon Jae In made a statement next.

He said that the south and the north agreed on clearing the Korean peninsula of all dangers that may lead to a war and on operating the "south-north joint military committee" for the constant discussion of issues concerning the implementation of the agreed points.

He noted that the south and the north committed themselves to closely discussing and cooperating with the international community for the complete denuclearization of the Korean peninsula.

A huge historic change is taking place on the Korean peninsula and in its vicinity after the publication of the historic Panmunjom declaration, he said, recalling that the south and the north agreed to further expand exchanges and cooperation and take practical steps for the balanced development of the nation's economy.

Noting that Chairman Kim Jong Un gladly accepted his Seoul visit request, he expressed his conviction that Chairman Kim Jong Un's Seoul visit would mark an occasion of providing an epochal turning point in the south-north relations.

Chairman Kim Jong Un clearly indicated the way for the denuclearization of the Korean peninsula today and it complied with the desire of all the fellow countrymen and the world to be free from nuclear weapons, nuclear threat and war, he said, emphasizing that he expressed deep respects for Kim Jong Un's definite decision and practice.

He said with pleasure that the seeds of peace and prosperity were sown on the Korean peninsula in spring last and the fruits of peace and prosperity were in bearing in Pyongyang this fall, confirming that the south-north relations will continue to make a steady progress. -0-

(2018.09.20)

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US envoy says Washington seeks a treaty with Iran

Iran Press TV

Wed Sep 19, 2018 09:47PM

The United States says it seeks a treaty with Iran ahead of the next week's United Nations General Assembly meeting in New York.

US special envoy for Iran Brian Hook made the comments at an event at the Hudson Institute on Wednesday.

"The new deal that we hope to be able to sign with Iran, and it will not be a personal agreement between two governments like the last one, we seek a treaty," he told the audience.

He further said that the nuclear deal, officially called the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), lacked support among members of the Republican-held Congress, when it was cliched under former US President Barack Obama.

"They did not have the votes in the US Senate so they found the votes in the UN Security Council," Hook said. "That is insufficient in our system of government if you want to have something enduring and sustainable."

US President Donald Trump re-imposed anti-Iran sanctions, lifted as part of the 2015 nuclear deal, in August, after withdrawing the US of the agreement, also backed by the UK, Russia, Germany, Russia, and China.

Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei has previously stressed that the Islamic Republic will not enter into new negotiations with the United States due to cheating and bullying nature of its government.

"In any negotiations, if the opposite side refrains from giving real concessions, Americans will launch such a propaganda and media rancor in the world that the other side feels at loss and becomes passive," Ayatollah Khamenei added.

Under the JCPOA, Iran undertook to put limits on its nuclear program in exchange for the removal of nuclear-related sanctions imposed against Tehran.

Iran has repeatedly emphasized that its missile program is merely defensive and deterrent, thus non-negotiable.

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Tehran Has Sovereign Right to Develop Missile Program - Moscow

Sputnik News

20:57 19.09.2018(updated 21:01 19.09.2018)

MOSCOW (Sputnik) - Moscow believes that the development of the Iranian missile program is Tehran's sovereign right, and all the issues arising in this regard should be resolved without pressure, especially military, at the negotiating table, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov told Sputnik.

"We have always supported resolving any problems that arise in interstate relations and in the dialogue on acute issues through negotiations and through relevant agreements," Ryabkov said on Wednesday.

The deputy foreign minister further stressed that the developments in the situation around Iran nuclear deal and other issues that American counterparts put in the context of this deal, as well as Iran's behavior, attracted Russia's close attention.

Speaking to Sputnik reporter, Ryabkov also revealed that the meeting of the five mediators and Iran at the level of foreign ministers will take place on the sidelines of the high-level week of the UN General Assembly at the end of September.

"The meeting of the participants of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA)  those who stayed in the agreement  will be held at the ministerial level," the official stated.

He also noted that the definite time is being coordinated, and the European External Action Service is expected to make a relevant announcement in the near future. However, Ryabkov assured that it was certain that the meeting would take place.

The JCPOA stipulates the gradual removal of the West's sanctions against Iran in exchange for Tehran maintaining a peaceful nature of its nuclear program. However, US President Donald Trump announced in May the withdrawal of the United States from the JCPOA and the reinstating of the first round of sanctions in August.

 Sputnik

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Washington Reveals What Deal It Wants to Sign With Iran to Replace JCPOA - Envoy

Sputnik News

18:56 19.09.2018(updated 18:57 19.09.2018)

The United States US wants to conclude an agreement with Iran that will take into account both, nuclear and intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBM), Special Representative for Iran Brian Hook said in remarks at the Hudson Institute on Wednesday.

"It was a mistake not to include intercontinental ballistic missiles in the Iran nuclear deal," Hook said referring the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).

Hook explained in his remarks that nuclear and intercontinental ballistic missiles go hand in hand and it was insufficient to have a deal with Iran on its nuclear program that did not include ICBMs.

The official claimed that exception for intercontinental ballistic missiles in the 2015 JCPOA agreement provided Iran opportunities to develop its missile program.

Earlier in the day, the Iranian media reported citing Rouhani's Deputy Chief of Staff for Communications and Information Parviz Esmayeeli that Iran's President Hassan Rouhani will leave for the US city of New York on Sunday in order to take part in the UN General Assembly.

According to the Fars news agency, during the event, Rouhani will also deliver a speech at a peace summit, held on the session's sidelines in commemoration of late South African anti-apartheid political leader Nelson Mandela.

The JCPOA stipulates the gradual removal of the West's sanctions against Iran in exchange for Tehran maintaining a peaceful nature of its nuclear program.

However, US President Donald Trump announced in May the withdrawal of the United States from the JCPOA and the reinstating of the first round of sanctions in August.

The other parties to the JCPOA  Russia, China, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, the European Union and Iran  reaffirmed their commitment to the agreement.

 Sputnik

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Iraqi security forces kill 15 Daesh terrorists

IRNA - Islamic Republic News Agency

Baghdad, Sept 19, IRNA -- Iraqi security forces killed 15 Daesh terrorists on borders common with Syria.

Iraq Army media center in a statement announced that Iraqi forces killed ISIS members in a cave used as a shelter.

Iraqi forces targeted the cave in Akashat Town, west of Al Anbar Province, the statement reads.

During the operation some arms, explosive belt and weaponry were confiscated, it added.

Daesh terrorists have attempted to penetrate Karbala and cause sabotage in Muharram mourning rituals over the past weeks.

Iraqi forces have so far foiled all the moves.

Earlier Iraqi Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF) foiled terrorist attack on the mourning rituals sited in Diyala Province, eastern Iraq.

Muharram is the first month of the Islamic calendar. It is one of the four sacred months of the year. The tenth day of Muharram is known as the Day of Ashura, part of the Mourning of Muharram for Shia Muslims and a day of fasting for Sunni Muslims. Shia Muslims mourn the death of Imam Hussein (A.S) and his family, respecting the sacrifice of the martyrs by praying in abundance and refraining from all the joyous events.

9376**1420

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Iraq oil output to be squeezed until 2028

Iran Press TV

Wed Sep 19, 2018 01:32PM

New estimates show Iraq's oil production would be squeezed for the next decade as a result of what analysts see as a lack of adequate operational infrastructure.

A report by US consultancy IHS Markit as reported by media showed that Iraq would be able to marginally increase its production from the current 4.5 million barrels per day (m/bpd) to 5 m/bpd by 2028.

The country  which is the second largest producer of the Organization of the Oil Exporting Countries (OPEC) after Saudi Arabia and the fourth biggest in the world would not be able to push up its oil output to 6 m/bpd before 2036, the report added.

"There is a lot of investment in getting wells out of the ground. And there's a lot of investment in exporting that oil. But the connections between the oil fields and the storage farms in the south and the export points have been what has really led to the bottlenecks in Iraq," said IHS analyst Christopher Elsner in an interview with Arab News.

Other impediments were the absence of electricity to run some oil fields, as well as the lack of pipelines, pumping stations and storage space  all of which have constrained capacity.

"Coordinating the purchase of various components such that you can progress without delay  has been another major issue," said Elsner.

The state-run company responsible for oil projects in mid-stream had "a spotty execution track record," he added. There was legal uncertainty around contracts, security risks, and water and electricity services were unreliable.

The oil-rich Basra province was rocked by renewed violence earlier this month as political protests regain momentum, threatening oil facilities. Thousands of Iraqis have been taking to the streets daily over the past week, torching government buildings and political party offices.

The demonstrations have added to oil supply concerns, according to various media reports.

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Iraq's Oil Output Can't Exceed More Than 10% Growth in Next Decade  Report

Sputnik News

20:15 19.09.2018(updated 21:04 19.09.2018)

A new report on Iraq's oil production capability says a series of problems, including export bottlenecks caused by a lack of infrastructure, will continue to limit the country's oil output for years to come.

The report, penned by the London-based consulting firm IHS Markit, found that while Iraq could theoretically produce about 7 million barrels per day (bpd), in practice, the connections between the supergiant oil field production points and storage farms and export points in the country's south have led to bottlenecks that hamper growth.

Speaking to Arab News, IHS Markit analyst Christopher Elsner said that Iraq would be lucky to reach 5 million bpd, up from the current 4.5 million bpd, by 2028, and 6 million bpd by 2036.

According to the analyst, other limitations to Iraqi output include the lack of electricity infrastructure at some fields, the lack of pipeline infrastructure, pumping stations and storage capacity, as well as legal uncertainty surrounding contracts, security risks, and the general unreliability of existing water and electricity infrastructure.

"Coordinating the purchase of various components such that you can progress without delay  has been another issue," Elsner said. Finally, the "spotty execution track record" of the state company responsible for oil projects in mid-stream is another concern, the IHS Markit analyst said.

Violence has been rocking the oil-rich southern Iraqi province of Basrah this month, with demonstrators protesting government corruption, water and electricity shortages, and clashing with police. A curfew has been imposed in the city of Basra after nearly a dozen deaths. Last week, Iraqi law enforcement arrested more than 30 people for the torching of the Iranian consulate building, with the headquarters of political parties, and provincial and city administration buildings, also attacked. On September 8, an unknown group fired a salvo of Katyusha rockets at Basra's airport, targeting the US consulate. Protesters also temporarily blocked Umm Qasr Port, Iraq's only deep water port, prompting concerns over possible global oil supply shortages.

Iraq is the world's second-largest oil producer behind Russia, Saudi Arabia and the United States, and has the world's fifth-largest proven oil reserves, sitting on an estimated 142,503,000,000 barrels spread throughout the country's north, south and center. The country's oil production figures have fluctuated violently over the last 40 years amid the country's many wars, including the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq War, the Gulf War of 1990-1991, the violence following the US invasion in 2003, and Baghdad's campaign against the Daesh (ISIS/ISIL)* terrorist group from 2014-2018.

* Outlawed in Russia and many other countries.

 Sputnik

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Pakistan court orders release of former PM Nawaz Sharif, daughter

Iran Press TV

Wed Sep 19, 2018 12:57PM

A Pakistani court has suspended prison sentences previously handed down to ousted former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, his daughter, and son-in-law in a corruption case.

The Islamabad High Court on Wednesday ordered the release of Sharif, Maryam Nawaz, and Mohammad Safdar on bail pending their appeal hearings.

A two-member bench led by Justice Athar Minallah suspended the jail sentences while hearing the appeal against the convictions, which will stand even though their sentences have been suspended.

The court also ordered the trio be freed once they each post a bond of 500,000 rupees ($4,000).

Nawaz Sharif was sentenced to ten years in prison on July 6 in a corruption case linked to his family's purchase of upscale flats in London. His daughter, widely seen as his political heir, received a seven-year prison sentence. Safdar was given a one-year term.

Sharif remains barred from running for public office for life, after the Supreme Court in April ruled that he had lied on a parliamentary wealth declaration and that the disqualification from that crime would last for an indefinite period.

The Wednesday court ruling comes just a week after Sharif's wife, Kulsoom Nawaz, died from cancer in London. They were briefly allowed out of prison in the garrison city of Rawalpindi to attend her funeral in the eastern city of Lahore but were later returned.

Hundreds of Sharif's supporters had gathered at the court ahead of the verdict, and chanted slogans praising him following the announcement of the sentence suspension.

Reacting to the verdict, Hamza Shehbaz, Nawaz Sharif's nephew, said the family was thankful for the ruling.

"Today is a happy day that our leader will be released from jail. We are thankful to Allah. As I said earlier, this verdict from the anti-corruption court, it was clear that there was no corruption proved against Nawaz Sharif. Hopefully we will show that there is nothing to this case."

"Today's fundamental news is that the verdict by the anti-corruption court against Nawaz Sharif was very weak, and ... hopefully we will continue our legal battle against all the other cases."

The former prime minister had earlier censured the court proceedings as politically motivated and a judicial witch hunt.

The Sharif clan and their supporters have repeatedly denied allegations of corruption, suggesting the three-time premier is the victim of a conspiracy driven by Pakistan's powerful military establishment.

The latest court decision would serve a blow to Sharif's bitter political rival Imran Khan, who swept a July general election following Sharif's conviction and jailing. Khan, the current prime minister, was in Saudi Arabia on a state visit when the decision was announced.

The National Accountability Bureau (NAB), Pakistan's anti-corruption watchdog, is expected to appeal the Islamabad High Court's verdict at the Supreme Court. Hearings in two other corruption cases against Sharif and his family are continuing at an anti-corruption court.

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Former Pakistani PM Sharif Freed From Prison On Bail

September 19, 2018

Pakistan's former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, his daughter, and son-in-law have been released from prison after a court suspended their prison sentences in a corruption case.

Sharif, Maryam Nawaz, and Mohammad Safdar were released from Adiala prison in the garrison city of Rawalpindi in the evening on September 19, and were being taken to the airport, officials said.

Television footage showed a security vehicle driving the Sharifs through a massive crowd of supporters, some showering rose petals on the vehicle while others waved flags and chanted slogans.

Earlier, the Islamabad High Court announced the decision ordering their release on bail pending their appeal hearings.

The court ordered the trio be freed once they each post a bond of 500,000 rupees ($4,000).

Dozens of supporters waiting outside the courtroom chanted "Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif!" after the decision was announced.

"Today's decision is a victory for justice," said former Foreign Minister Khawaja Asif.

Another ex-minister, Ahsan Iqbal, told reporters that the court "suspended the decision that was based on revenge."

However, Senator Javed Faisal, an ally of Prime Minister Imran Khan, pointed out that the court only suspended Sharif's sentence and those of his family members, and did not acquit them.

"Their supporters should not celebrate so much as they will likely have to go again to Adiala Prison," Faisal said.

Prosecutors in the case, the National Accountability Bureau, said they would appeal the ruling and take the case against Sharif to the country's Supreme Court.

An accountability court in July sentenced the former leader and his daughter to 10-year and seven-year terms in prison, respectively, over the purchase of luxury apartments in London in the 1990s.

Safdar was given a one-year prison term.

They were also barred from seeking public office for up to 10 years after release.

The three have denied wrongdoing, with Sharif calling the charges political motivated.

He suggested collusion between the country's powerful military and courts to throw him out of power and destabilize his Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) party ahead of general elections.

Pakistan Tehrik-e Insaf (PTI) leader Imran Khan became prime minister after the party won the most parliamentary seats in the July 25 vote.

Sharif, who has served as prime minister for three nonconsecutive terms, was disqualified from office by the Supreme Court last year over corruption allegations.

He was briefly released from prison in Rawalpindi earlier this month for the funeral of his wife, who died from cancer in London.

With reporting by Reuters, AFP, dpa, AP, and Dawn

Source: https://www.rferl.org/a/pakistani-court- suspends-prison-sentences-for-sharif-daughter -son-in-law/29498119.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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Pakistani Court Orders Release of Jailed Ex-PM Nawaz Sharif, His Daughter

Sputnik News

21:26 19.09.2018

Former Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and his daughter Maryam Nawaz were convicted by the apex court after his family was found to be linked to offshore companies named in the Panama Papers released in 2015.

Nawaz Sharif and his daughter are set to be released after the Islamabad High Court suspended their prison term in a corruption case. The two were convicted in July this year, shortly before the general elections in Pakistan.

A two-judge bench of the Islamabad High Court suspended the 10-year jail sentence after hearing an appeal by Sharif denying any wrongdoing by him and his daughter in an illegal properties case that surfaced from the Panama Papers investigation. Sharif alleged that his arrest and conviction were politically motivated.

"The prosecution has failed to show the properties belong to Nawaz Sharif. It also failed to prove how Maryam Nawaz was sentenced under the same charge sheet which convicted Nawaz Sharif," Justice Athar Minallah said in court.

Their convictions remain under appeal, as the final hearing has yet to take place.

Last year, Nawaz Sharif had to resign as prime minister after the Supreme Court disqualified him from holding public office amidst the graft case against him.

 Sputnik

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Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev has signed an order, approving funds for the construction of a new school in the city of Bilasuvar, AzerNews reported.

Under the presidential order, the Ministry of Education is allocated 2 million manats for the construction of the 1,176-seat school in the city.
Pakistan Court Suspends Prison Sentence, Frees Ex-PM Sharif

By Ayaz Gul September 19, 2018

A high court in Pakistan has ordered the release of former prime minister Nawaz Sharif, his daughter Maryam, and son-in-law Mohammad Safdar, suspending the sentences handed to them for corruption.

In July, a special anti-corruption tribunal found the three guilty of owning foreign assets worth beyond their known sources of income.The so-called accountability court sentenced Nawaz Sharif, Maryam and Safdar to jail terms of 10 years, seven years and one year respectively.The convictions were appealed to the Islamabad High Court.

On Wednesday, a three-member panel of judges ruled the sentences "shall remain suspended until the final adjudication of the appeal."

Sharif was released, along with the other members of his family late Wednesday and were greeted by party leaders and workers outside the prison.

The Sharifs had been in prison in the garrison city of Rawalpindi, which borders the national capital of Islamabad.

The former prime minister and his Pakistan Muslim League Nawaz (PML-N) party reject the corruption charges against him as politically motivated and allegedly designed to keep the former prime minister out of the July 25 elections.Sharif and his party leaders accused the powerful military of orchestrating the judicial proceedings.

The Pakistani judiciary and the army each have rejected Sharif's allegations as unfounded.

Just hours after the high court announced its verdict Wednesday, the anti-corruption National Accountability Bureau (NAB) said it will file an appeal in the Supreme Court against the suspension of Sharifs's sentences.

Speaking outside the court building in Islamabad, senior party leader and former interior minister Ahsan Iqbal congratulated Sharif's supporters and repeated the allegations.

"These cases (against Sharif) have no constitutional and legal basis.They were based on vendetta and pre-poll rigging to keep Nawaz Sharif out of the elections," Iqbal asserted.

The PML-N party lost the parliamentary election to its main rival, Prime Minister Imran Khan's Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf (PTI) party.

Khan's government briefly released Sharif on parole earlier this month to allow him to attend the funeral of his wife, Kulsoom Nawaz, who died of cancer in a London hospital.

Sharif's party won the 2013 parliamentary elections, enabling him to become the prime minister of Pakistan for a historic third time.But the Supreme Court removed him from office in July, 2017, for concealing assets and ordered him to go to trial in an anti-corruption court.Prosecutors maintained Sharif failed to disclose a salary that he was receiving from a foreign-based company owned by one of his sons.

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South Korean President Speaks Before North Korean Citizens for the First Time

Sputnik News

20:23 19.09.2018

SEOUL (Sputnik) - Since the start of the year, the situation on the Korean Peninsula has substantially improved with Pyongyang promising to close its missile test range and completely disassemble its nuclear facilities in Yongbyon.

South Korean President Moon Jae-in on Wednesday for the first time spoke before the North Korean public at a large stadium in Pyongyang, where 150,000 people gathered to listen to his speech, a Sputnik correspondent reported from the Seoul press center, which receives all information about Moon's visit to Pyongyang.

"Let's take a big step toward peace and enter a new future together," Moon said, addressing Pyongyang residents.

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un stood on the stage near his South Korean counterpart.

Introducing the South Korean president, Kim said that "this event today will become a wonderful moment in history."

The situation on the Korean Peninsula has significantly improved since the start of the year, with Kim and Moon earlier holding two other bilateral meetings in April and May.

In June, Kim reached an agreement with US President Donald Trump stipulating that North Korea would make efforts to promote complete denuclearization in exchange for the United States and South Korea ceasing their joint military drills, as well as potential sanctions relief.

According to the joint statement, which outlined the results of the Kim-Moon meeting on Wednesday, Pyongyang has promised to close its missile test range in Tongchang-ri and completely disassemble its nuclear facilities in Yongbyon, while Seoul and Pyongyang have agreed to start working to connect their roads and railways before the end of the year.

In addition, the North and South Korean defense ministers signed a military agreement following the summit. Under this accord, the two Koreas pledged to create a joint military commission to enhance mutual trust, and establish in the border regions of the Yellow Sea and the Sea of Japan a zone where military drills would not be held.

 Sputnik

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'Shocked' Russian Elections Chief Urges Annulment Of Fraud-Marred Vote

RFE/RL September 19, 2018

Russia's top election official has recommended that regional authorities annul the result of a disputed gubernatorial runoff vote in the Primorye region, where the Communist Party cried foul after the Kremlin-backed incumbent surged ahead at the end of the ballot count.

Central Election Commission (TsIK) chief Ella Pamfilova made the proposal on September 19, saying electoral authorities have concluded that the closely contested vote was marred by "serious violations," including ballot-box stuffing and altering records of the count. She said culprits should be punished for fraud that "shocked" election officials.

"We propose...recommending that the election commission of the Primorye region declare the result of the...gubernatorial election invalid," Pamfilova said.

If the regional authorities do so, which is highly likely because provincial officials in Russia rarely defy the central government in Moscow, she said a new election would be held in three months.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov made clear that President Vladimir Putin favors annulling the results, saying the adminstration "certainly appreciates and supports the CEC's position."

The regional electoral commission said it would announce a decision on September 20, and media reports said it would be the first time a runoff has been annulled in Russia since 1996.

The TsIK recommendation came amid tension in the Far Eastern region, whose capital is Vladivostok, over a last-minute reversal in which the candidate from the Kremlin-controlled United Russia party, acting Governor Andrei Tarasenko, suddenly erased Communist rival Andrei Ishchenko's substantial lead and surged ahead.

Hundreds of people protested in Vladivostok on September 17 and the Communist Party was preparing lawsuits claiming that the vote count was falsified in several districts.

Pamfilova, who listed a host of violations that also included vote-buying and forcing people to vote, said that electoral officials are unable to determine whether the declared results of the vote count reflected "the will of the people" in 13 of the sprawling Pacific Coast region's polling districts.

The "abuses and violations in the final stage of the second round -- they shocked us, of course," Pamfilova said.

Communist Party chief Gennady Zyuganov called for a criminal investigation and said that Ishchenko should be acknowledged as the winner of the runoff. But both Ishchenko and Tarasenko said they would take part in a new election if the runoff results are annulled.

The September 16 runoff was thrown into dispute in the final stages of the vote count early the following day.

With 95 percent of the ballots counted, Tarasenko was nearly 6 percentage points behind Ischenko, but officials said that once the ballot count reached 99.1 percent, official tallies showed the acting governor ahead of his challenger by a total of 7,644 votes -- a turnaround the the Communists alleged was the result of fraud.

United Russia, in turn, accused the Communists of violations including vote buying.

Communist Party chief Gennady Zyuganov appealed to Putin to look into the situation and promised to hold a nationwide protest action on September 22 if there was no progress by then.

Kremlin critics consider the Communist Party a pliant part of Putin's ruling system, and it supports Putin's initiatives with some frequency, but the rivalry on the regional level is very real and any Communist victory is embarrassing for Putin and United Russia, which dominates politics nationwide.

Out of 21 Russian regions in which gubernatorial elections were held on September 9, the Primorye region was one of four where United Russia faced runoffs after failing to win 50 percent of the vote. The other three runoffs will be held on September 23.

The September 9 elections were a test of Putin's government as it seeks to raise the retirement age for men and women by five years, a highly unpopular move that has prompted protests across the country. Putin met with Tarasenko ahead of the runoff and told him that "everything is going to be fine," according to the transcript on the Kremlin website.

Both Ishchenko and Tarasenko said on September 19 that they would take part in a new election if the runoff results are annulled.

With reporting by TASS and Interfax

Source: https://www.rferl.org/a/russian-election- chief-recommends-annulling-vote-in-disputed- gubernatorial-runoff/29497921.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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UN chief welcomes agreement over buffer zone in Idlib

IRNA - Islamic Republic News Agency

New York, Sept 19, IRNA -- The agreement between Turkey and Russia to create a demilitarized buffer zone protecting civilians living in Idlib, Syria, has been welcomed by United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres.

In a statement, Mr. Guterres also urged all parties in Syria to ensure safe and unimpeded humanitarian access to all areas of the country, where a brutal civil conflict has raged for more than seven years.

"The Secretary-General stresses the need for swift action to address the root causes of the conflict and forge, at long last, a durable political solution in line with Security Council resolution 2254", noted the statement, released by his Spokesperson Stephane Dujarric.

The agreement, reached between Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Russian President Vladimir Putin on Monday, aims to avert a full-scale military operation that the UN chief warned last week, could turn the region into a "bloodbath". The last rebel-held Governorate in Syria, half of Idlib's population of nearly three million, are internally-displaced civilians, and a million are children.

According to media reports, a 15-20-kilometre-wide de-escalation zone  to be patrolled by Russian and Turkish troops  will be established by 15 October, to separate Government forces from rebel fighters based there.

The agreement is also a welcome development amid "worrying escalation" in other parts of the country, Staffan De Mistura, the UN Special Envoy for Syria, told the Security Council on Tuesday, citing reports of fresh airstrikes in Damascus and the downing of a Russian military aircraft on Monday night, which left 15 servicemen dead.

Russia has blamed Israel for the incident. Israel on the other hand, said that its fighter aircraft were targeting a weapons shipment to Lebanon, threatening its security. The Israeli Defense Forces issued a statement on Twitter "expressing sorrow" for the deaths and blamed the Syrian military for the Russian aircraft being shot down. Israel also said that it will share all the relevant information concerning the incident with the Russian Government.

At the Security Council, UN envoy De Mistura, urged all parties to refrain from military action, reiterating that it would "only exacerbate a complex situation" in war-ravaged Syria.

Turning to the agreement itself, Mr. De Mistura said that there is now "no reason not to move forward expeditiously" on the political process, guided by Security Council resolution 2254, that lays out a roadmap for a political settlement in the country.

"We need an inclusive political process, and the UN is here to facilitate that process, starting with a constitutional committee getting to work," he said, noting that the process must be credible, "because only then can the UN invest it with the legitimacy it needs."

"I ask all concerned to give the UN facilitation in the next weeks, their full support," he said.

action response However, much more needs to be done before the city is safe and conducive for returns," said Mr. Lowcock.

Meanwhile, Iran's Permanent Representative to the United Nations Gholamali Khoshroo told a UN Security Council session in New York that the Sochi Agreement was achieved as a result of the tripartite summit of the Iranian, Russian and Turkish presidents in Tehran and the diplomatic efforts of the three countries.

1396**1396

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U.S. Downplays Russian Plane Shoot-Down, Vows To Continue Fight Against IS

RFE/RL September 19, 2018

U.S. officials expressed sorrow over the shoot-down of a Russian military surveillance plane off the Syrian coast and said it would not affect the U.S. campaign against Islamic State (IS) fighters.

The comments on September 18 came as Russian officials said that Syrian antiaircraft forces brought down the Il-20 plane inadvertently, but also blamed Israel for conducting a fighter jet raid on Syrian forces at around the same time.

U.S. officials said U.S. forces were not involved in the incident.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo issued a statement expressing sorrow for the shoot-down, which killed 15 Russian servicemen. He also criticized Iran, which has reportedly shipped sophisticated weaponry to the Hizballah fighters in Lebanon.

Israel has struck targets in both Lebanon and Syria, seeking to thwart Hizballah's ambitions.

U.S. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, meanwhile, told reporters that the shoot-down complicates relations between Syria and Russia but would have "no effect whatever" on the U.S. campaign to defeat the extremist group IS in Syria.

Mattis also said the incident was a reminder of why the United States supports the United Nations' effort to end the seven-year civil war.

President Donald Trump also expressed concern about the downed Russian plane, calling it a "very sad thing" and "not a good situation."

Earlier, Russian President Vladimir Putin warned Israel against conducting air raids on Syria.

And Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called Putin to express sorrow over the plane's loss but insisted that Syria bore responsibility.

With reporting by AP and Reuters

Source: https://www.rferl.org/a/us-russia-plane-shotdown-syria/29497533.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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British companies get green light to press ahead with new Army vehicle plans, Defence Minister announces

A programme to supply the British Army with a new fleet of eight-wheeled armoured vehicles has taken a major step forward, Defence Minister Stuart Andrew has announced at one of the world's leading land equipment events.

19 September 2018

The Army intends to make an initial purchase of over 500 Boxer vehicles, and the Defence Minister has today announced that British suppliers have been given the green light to bring forward concrete plans for the project, which is set to support at least 1,000 UK jobs.

Artec, the consortium who lead on the production of the troop carriers, have been given the go-ahead to invite industry to bring forward actual contractible proposals for work on the vehicles. A big step towards making a purchase, the news means that Artec will now ramp up work to complete their supplier selection process before returning to the MOD with a formal proposal next year.

The Defence Minister made the announcement whilst speaking at DVD2018 at Millbrook Proving Ground in Bedfordshire, which showcases equipment and technology for the British Army and is one of the biggest land equipment events in the world.

Speaking at the event, Defence Minister Stuart Andrew said:

"A new 8x8 armoured vehicle is a key part of our British Army's future, and today marks a big step towards equipping our soldiers with this brand-new troop carrier. British companies are stepping up to the plate yet again for a project which could support up to 1,000 jobs across the country, and it is great to give industry the green light to now pull together a full plan of action. I am looking forward to pressing ahead with negotiations in our pursuit of a vehicle which works best for the Army, the taxpayer and British industry."

The MOD announced that the British Army had re-joined the Boxer programme back in March, as it looks to modernise its vehicle fleet and meet the Mechanised Infantry Vehicle (MIV) requirement, which is central to the Army's plans for fast-moving 'strike brigades'.

Artec will now complete supplier selection and confirm their proposal to manufacture and support Boxer in the UK, offering new opportunities to British suppliers for what is set to be their largest single order.

The UK played a major role in the original design, development and testing of the Boxer, and would reassume the rights it had as a project partner if a deal was to go through - allowing the option for the vehicle to be built and exported from the UK.

Artec has already made commitments to UK industry by signing partnership agreements with various British companies in anticipation of a deal being struck, whilst there are a number of British firms which already supply systems for the vehicle, which is already in service with the Netherlands, Lithuania and Germany.

The MOD conducted a comprehensive market analysis of Mechanised Infantry Vehicles in service, entering service and in development. The analysis was guided by the British Army's requirements and how best to deliver them. The Boxer delivered on protected mobility, capacity, flexibility, utility and agility. The first vehicles are set to be in-service by 2023.

Production of the 4.5 billion Ajax family of armoured vehicles is already ramping up, and they are set to enter service in 2020. The Defence Minister also revealed today that Lockheed Martin UK has successfully delivered the first eight production turrets to Ajax's prime contractor, General Dynamics Land Systems.

Lockheed Martin UK is under contract to manufacture, test and certify 245 turrets for the reconnaissance variant of the Ajax fleet at its multi-million pound Ampthill site, which is just a five minute drive from the testing centre which hosts DVD.

Welcoming the news, Defence Minister Stuart Andrew said:

"Ajax is the UK's biggest order of armoured vehicles in a generation, supporting thousands of jobs across the country and modernising our frontline fleet. Having been expertly produced just a few miles away in the same county, it is apt that this first batch of turrets have been delivered in time for Bedfordshire's Army showcase, marking another step towards bringing these vehicles onto the battlefield."

While at the show the Minister also revealed that the MOD has recently taken delivery of the 200th Cased Telescope cannon  the innovative weapon, developed between UK and French industry, which will provide the stopping power for the armed Ajax variant, as well as the upgraded Warrior vehicle being developed through an MOD Capability Sustainment Programme.

DVD is the premier defence land equipment event in the UK and one of the biggest of its type in the world. Attending UK companies ranged from SMEs to larger suppliers. Manufacturers marking recent export successes at the show included QinetiQ which has won two contracts to supply armoured vehicle drive and suspension systems for the US Office of Naval Research.

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VANCOUVER, September 20, 2018 - Sarama Resources Ltd. ("Sarama" or the "Company") (TSX-V:SWA) announces that a combined reverse circulation ("RC") and aircore ("AC") drilling program has extended the strike length of shallow zones of gold mineralisation at the Zanawa Prospect, 4km north-east of the Bondi Deposit (or "Bondi") on Sarama's Djarkadougou(4) Property ("Djarkadougou" or the "Property") in south-western Burkina Faso.

The drill results demonstrate the potential to add to the existing historical estimate of mineral resources at the Bondi Deposit(1) and strengthens Sarama's regional development options for the ThreeBee Project and the Company's adjoining South Hounde Project.

Highlights

- 200m of RC and 1,500m of AC drilling was completed at the Zanawa Prospect ("Zanawa"), building on results from earlier reconnaissance drilling and extending the strike length of mineralisation to 1km. - Zanawa remains open-ended to the north, south and to depth. - Drilling at Zanawa intercepted intervals of shallow mineralisation, several of which contain significant gold grades. Highlighted downhole intersections include (refer to Appendices A and B for full results): - 22m @ 3.85g/t Au from 5m in hole DJR0029; - 29m @ 1.44g/t Au from 1m and 10m @ 1.24g/t Au from 67m in hole DJR0030; - 5m @ 4.54g/t Au from 15m in hole DJA0141; and - 15m @ 0.74g/t Au from 7m and 11m @ 0.98g/t Au from 27m in hole DJA0159. - Drilling at Zanawa confirms that mineralisation is associated with a mafic volcanic - intermediate intrusion contact that extends for at least 3km across the north-eastern part of the Djarkadougou Property. - 1,300m of RC drilling on the southern limits of the Bondi Deposit extends the SE Splay Prospect ("SE Splay") to the south-east and identifies several high-grade zones which remain open at depth. Highlighted downhole intersections include (refer to Appendix A for full results): - 3m @ 4.71g/t Au from 51m and 3m @ 19.86g/t Au (EOH) from 69m in hole DJR0013; - 7m @ 2.43g/t Au from 62m in hole DJR0015; and - 6m @ 3.46g/t Au from 44m in hole DJR0016. - 700m of RC drilling in the southern extension of the main Bondi Deposit has extended this zone to depth. Highlighted downhole intersections include (refer to Appendix A for full results): - 13m @ 1.50g/t Au from 86m in hole DJR0004; and - 6m @ 1.93g/t Au from 134m in hole DJR0006.



Sarama's President and CEO, Andrew Dinning, commented:

"We are extremely pleased with the results of this drill program, which has demonstrated the potential to add additional free-milling and high-grade gold ounces to the historical resource base on the Djarkadougou Property. The intersection of broad zones of high-grade oxide mineralisation in areas separate to the Bondi Deposit provides substantial encouragement as does the drilling completed in the southern extents of the known resource area."

Reverse Circulation and Aircore Drilling

Sarama's recent focus has been on developing drill targets along strike and also away from the Bondi Deposit on Djarkadougou. Djarkadougou is one of four properties constituting the ThreeBee Project which is situated within the southern part of the prospective Hounde Belt in south-west Burkina Faso (refer to Figure 1).

The re-interpretation of the geology underlying the Property includes the recognition of multiple regional shear zones with secondary fault splays within a mixed volcanic and volcano-sedimentary package cut by late intermediate to felsic intrusions. These geologic features highlight a number of exploration targets with good potential to host gold mineralisation in addition to that previously outlined at the Bondi Deposit (refer to Figure 2).

The reported results are from a drilling program conducted in H1 2018 that targeted: 1) the Zanawa Prospect, a new discovery lying 4km to the north-east of the main Bondi Deposit; 2) the southern strike extent of the Bondi Deposit; and 3) a south-east zone representing a distinct splay from the main north-south trending Bondi Deposit. A total of 46 aircore holes, for a total of 1,500m, and 28 RC holes, for a total of 2,200m, were drilled. Full results are included in Appendices A and B.

Zanawa Prospect

Of principal interest was shallow, oxide mineralisation that was first intersected in an earlier, reconnaissance AC drill program approximately 4km to the north-east of the main, northerly-trending Bondi Deposit (refer to Figure 2 and Sarama news release dated September 12, 2017). The mineralisation is interpreted to be proximal to the contact zone of an intermediate intrusive unit that cuts a regionally extensive band of mafic volcanic rocks. Gold mineralisation is associated with quartz veins and veinlets within wider zones of silica-pyrite-sericite-albite alteration similar in many respects to mineralisation within the Bondi Deposit to the south-west.

Gold mineralisation at Zanawa strikes north and can be traced across several east-west oriented drill fences. It is parallel to an intrusive contact highlighted by gold-in-soil anomalism. Gold mineralisation of significance has been found on almost all drill fences that were spaced out over 1km and the zone is open along strike and to depth.

Highlighted drill results for Zanawa include:

- 22m @ 3.85g/t Au from 5m in hole DJR0029; - 29m @ 1.44g/t Au from 1m and 10m @ 1.24g/t Au from 67m in hole DJR0030; - 5m @ 4.54g/t Au from 15m in hole DJA0141; and - 15m @ 0.74g/t Au from 7m and 11m @ 0.98g/t Au from 27m in hole DJA0159.



Whilst drill density is limited and does not yet allow detailed interpretation of mineralised lode geometry, the presence of wide drill intervals of mineralisation in successive holes on several drill fences (refer to Figure 3) highlights the exploration potential at Zanawa and warrants further drilling.

Of further interest is a target zone to the north-north-east of current drilling that is defined by a gold-in-soil anomaly and a strong coincident resistivity-chargeability induced polarisation anomaly proximal to an interpreted regionally-extensive structure (refer to Figure 2). A 'data gap' exists between the Zanawa Prospect and the target area to the north-north-east that will require further investigation to see if the two prospects might be part of a larger, continuous mineralised system.

South-East Splay Zone

The SE Splay is a previously-identified southeast-striking mineralised structure that trends away from the main north-striking Bondi Deposit in the southern part of the deposit area (refer to Figure 2). This structure was targeted for drilling due to historic drill information and evidence of significant grade along the splay structure.

Sarama has extended this mineralised structure to moderate depth and further to the south-east and intersected high-grade gold mineralisation in several holes drilled beneath historic drill holes, including the following results:

- 3m @ 4.71g/t Au from 51m and 3m @ 19.86g/t Au (EOH) from 69m in hole DJR0013; - 7m @ 2.43g/t Au from 62m in hole DJR0015; and - 6m @ 3.46g/t Au from 44m in hole DJR0016.



The high-grade intercepts in hole DJR0013 are within, and proximal to, a granitoid dyke that cuts mafic volcanic host rocks. Further drilling will be carried out in order to follow-up on these encouraging results received to date.

Southern Extension of the Bondi Deposit

The southern extension of the north-south-striking Bondi Deposit (refer to Figure 2) was tested by RC drilling that confirms the continuation of mineralisation along strike and to depth. Significant intercepts include:

- 13m @ 1.50g/t Au from 86m in hole DJR0004; and - 6m @ 1.93g/t Au from 134m in hole DJR0006.

Mineralisation is spatially associated with a north-striking, mafic volcanic - volcano-sedimentary contact and proximal to a north-striking fault. This zone will be further investigated as it is open along strike and to depth.

Looking forward, Sarama will continue its two-pronged strategy of systematic regional exploration for discovery of new mineralisation and secondly, validation of the large amount of historical data concentrated in the Bondi Deposit area with a view to generating extensional targets.

For further information on the Company's activities, please contact:

Andrew Dinning or Paul Schmiede

e: info@saramaresources.com

t: +61 (0) 8 9363 7600



Click Image To View Full Size

Figure 1 - Regional Project Plan (ThreeBee Project in Red)



Click Image To View Full Size

Northeast Prospect

Figure 2 - Geology Plan of Djarkadougou Property (Recent Drill Hole Collars in Blue)



Click Image To View Full Size

Figure 3 - 1209900mN drill fence (view to north) showing location of AC (DJA prefix) and RC (DJR prefix) drill holes, geology and interpreted mineralised zones (red).

Orientation of gold mineralised zones with respect to the east-west oriented drill fence is not precisely known.

ABOUT SARAMA RESOURCES LTD

Sarama Resources Ltd. (TSX-V: SWA) is a West African focused gold explorer with substantial landholdings in Burkina Faso. Sarama is focused on consolidating under-explored landholdings in Burkina Faso and other established mining jurisdictions.

Sarama's flagship properties are situated within the Company's South Hounde Project area in south-west Burkina Faso. Located within the prolific Hounde Greenstone Belt, Sarama's exploration programs have built on significant early success to deliver an inferred mineral resource estimate of 2.1 Moz gold(2). Acacia Mining plc is earning up to a 70% interest in the South Hounde Project by satisfying certain conditions, including funding earn-in expenditures of up to US$14 million, over a 4-year earn-in period and may acquire an additional 5% interest, for an aggregate 75% interest in the Project, upon declaration of a minimum mineral reserve of 1.6 million ounces of gold. Acacia has satisfied certain milestones and currently holds a 50% interest in the South Hounde Project and is continuing to sole fund exploration activities.

Sarama holds a 27% participating interest in the Karankasso Project Joint Venture ("JV") which is situated adjacent to the Company's South Hounde Project in Burkina Faso and is a JV between Sarama and Savary Gold Corp. ("Savary"). Savary is the operator of the JV and in October 2015, declared a maiden inferred mineral resource estimate of 671,000 ounces of contained gold(3) at the Karankasso Project JV.

Sarama also has a 100% interest(4) in the Bondi Deposit which has a historical estimate of mineral resources of 0.3Moz Au (measured and indicated) and 0.1Moz Au (inferred)(1).

Together, the South Hounde Project, Bondi Deposit and the Karankasso Project form a cluster of advanced gold deposits, within trucking distance of one another, which potentially offers a development option for a multi-source fed central processing facility in the southern Hounde Belt region of Burkina Faso.

Incorporated in 2010, the Company's Board and management team have a proven track record in Africa and a strong history in the discovery and development of large-scale gold deposits. Sarama is well positioned to build on its current success with a sound exploration strategy across its property portfolio.

FOOTNOTES

1.Bondi Deposit - 4.1Mt @ 2.1g/t Au for 282,000 oz Au (measured and indicated) and 2.5Mt @ 1.8g/t Au for 149,700 oz Au (inferred), reported at a 0.5 g/t Au cut-off.

i.The historical estimate of the Bondi Deposit reflects a mineral resource estimate compiled by Orezone Gold Corporation ("Orezone") which has an effective date of February 20, 2009. The historical estimate is contained in a technical report titled "Technical Report on the Mineral Resource of the Bondigui Gold Project", dated date of February 20, 2009 (the "Bondi Technical Report") and is available under the profile of Orezone on SEDAR at www.sedar.com. ii.Sarama believes that the historical estimate is relevant to investors' understanding of the property, as it reflects the most recent technical work undertaken in respect of the Bondi Deposit. iii.The historical estimate was informed by 886 drillholes, assayed for gold by cyanidation methods, were used to interpret mineralised envelopes and geological zones over the area of the historical estimate. Gold grade interpolation was undertaken using ID2 methodology based on input parameters derived from geostatistical and geological analyses assessments. Field measurements and geological logging of drillholes were used to determine weathering boundaries and bulk densities for modelled blocks. iv.The historical estimate uses the mineral resource reporting categories required under National Instrument 43-101. v.No more recent estimates of the mineral resource or other data are available. vi.A qualified person engaged by Sarama has not undertaken sufficient work to verify the historical estimate as a current mineral resource and Sarama is therefore not treating the historical estimate as a current mineral resource. Sarama is currently undertaking the necessary verification work in the field and on the desktop that may support the future reclassification of the historical estimate to a mineral resource.

2.South Hounde Project - 43.0 Mt @ 1.5 g/t Au (reported above cut-off grades ranging 0.3-2.2 g/t Au, reflecting the mining methods and processing flowsheets assumed to assess the likelihood of the inferred mineral resources having reasonable prospects for eventual economic extraction). The effective date of the Company's inferred mineral resource estimate is February 4, 2016. For further information regarding the mineral resource estimate please refer to the technical report titled "NI 43-101 Independent Technical Report South Hounde Project Update, Bougouriba and Ioba Provinces, Burkina Faso", dated March 31, 2016. The technical report is available under Sarama Resources Ltd.'s profile on SEDAR at www.sedar.com. 3.Karankasso Project - 9.2Mt @ 2.3g/t Au (at a 0.5g/t Au cut-off). The effective date ("Effective Date") of the most recent Karankasso Project JV mineral resource estimate that is supported by a technical report is October 7, 2015. For further information regarding that mineral resource estimate please refer to the technical report titled "Technical Report and Resource Estimate on the Karankasso Project, Burkina Faso", dated October 7, 2015 and prepared by Eugene Puritch and Antoine Yassa. Eugene Puritch and Antoine Yassa are employees of P&E Mining Consultants Inc. and are considered to be independent of Savary and Sarama. The technical report is available under Savary's profile on SEDAR at www.sedar.com. Sarama has not independently verified Savary's mineral resource estimate and takes no responsibility for its accuracy. Savary is the operator of the Karankasso Project JV and Sarama is relying on their Qualified Persons' assurance of the validity of the mineral resource estimate. Additional technical work has been undertaken on the Karankasso Project since the Effective Date, including but not limited to, metallurgical testwork, exploration drilling and mineral resource estimation, but Sarama is not in a position to quantify the impact of this additional work on the mineral resource estimate referred to above. 4.The Djarkadougou Exploration Permit is going through a process with the government of Burkina Faso where it is required to be reissued as a new full-term exploration permit. The Company anticipates this to be completed in due course, though there can be no assurance that the process will be successfully completed on a timely basis, or at all.

CAUTION REGARDING FORWARD LOOKING STATEMENTS

Information in this news release that is not a statement of historical fact constitutes forward-looking information. Such forward-looking information includes statements regarding the Company's plans for further exploration at the Djarkadougou Property and its other prospects, the potential for mineralization of significance to be discovered at Djarkadougou, the significance and contribution of the Djarkadougou and ThreeBee Project in regional development plans, drilling and geochemical and geophysical surveys at the South Hounde Project, the timing and prospects for the re-issuance of the Djarkadougou Exploration Permit, the Earn-In Agreement with Acacia, including the amounts that may be spent on exploration and interests in the South Hounde Project that may be earned by Acacia upon making certain expenditures and estimating a minimum reserve and future exploration plans.

Actual results, performance or achievements of the Company may vary from the results suggested by such forward-looking statements due to known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors. Such factors include, among others, that the business of exploration for gold and other precious minerals involves a high degree of risk and is highly speculative in nature; Mineral Resources are not Mineral Reserves, they do not have demonstrated economic viability, and there is no certainty that they can be upgraded to Mineral Reserves through continued exploration; few properties that are explored are ultimately developed into producing mines; geological factors; the actual results of current and future exploration; changes in project parameters as plans continue to be evaluated, as well as those factors disclosed in the Company's publicly filed documents. There can be no assurance that any mineralisation that is discovered will be proven to be economic, or that future required regulatory licensing or approvals will be obtained. However, the Company believes that the assumptions and expectations reflected in the forward-looking information are reasonable. Assumptions have been made regarding, among other things, Acacia's continued funding of exploration activities, the Company's ability to carry on its exploration activities, the sufficiency of funding, the timely receipt of required approvals, the price of gold and other precious metals, that the Company will not be affected by adverse political events, the ability of the Company to operate in a safe, efficient and effective manner and the ability of the Company to obtain further financing as and when required and on reasonable terms. Readers should not place undue reliance on forward-looking information.

Sarama does not undertake to update any forward-looking information, except as required by applicable laws.

Neither TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

NOTES -DRILLING

Drilling results are quoted as downhole intersections. True widths and orientation of mineralisation intersected by the drilling are not yet well understood.

The reported composites for the drilling were determined using a cut-off grade of 0.30g/t Au to select significant and anomalous intersections, with a maximum of 2m internal dilution being incorporated into the composite where appropriate. No top-cuts were applied to assay grades. Isolated mineralised intersections less than 2m in length have not been reported.

Gold assays for the drilling were undertaken by the Bigs Global laboratories in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso. Assays are determined by fire assay methods using a 50 gram charge, lead collection and an AAS finish with lower detection limits of 0.005g/t Au (Bigs Global).

The drilling was generally designed using west-east azimuths, according to program aims and expected mineralization orientation, dipping at approximately -55-60 degrees and were of variable length. Holes were spaced at various intervals according to targeting intent. All aircore holes were sampled at regular 2m downhole intervals.

Intersection oxidation state classification is based on visual logging of the drillholes.

Sarama undertakes geological sampling and assays in accordance with its quality assurance/quality control program which includes the use of certified reference materials as well as field duplicates.

For further information regarding the Company's QAQC protocols please refer to the technical report titled "NI 43-101 Independent Technical Report, South Hounde Project Update, Bougouriba and Ioba Provinces, Burkina Faso", dated March 31, 2016. The technical report is available under the Company's profile on SEDAR at www.sedar.com.

QUALIFIED PERSONS' STATEMENT

Scientific or technical information in this news release that relates to the Company's exploration activities in Burkina Faso is based on information compiled or approved by Guy Scherrer. Guy Scherrer is an employee of Sarama Resources Ltd. and is a member in good standing of the Ordre des Geologues du Quebec and has sufficient experience which is relevant to the commodity, style of mineralisation under consideration and activity which he is undertaking to qualify as a Qualified Person under National Instrument 43-101. Guy Scherrer consents to the inclusion in this report of the information, in the form and context in which it appears.

Scientific or technical information in this news release that relates to the preparation of the South Hounde Project's mineral resource estimate is based on information compiled or approved by Adrian Shepherd. Adrian Shepherd is an employee of Cube Consulting Pty Ltd and is considered to be independent of Sarama Resources Ltd. Adrian Shepherd is a Chartered Professional Member in good standing of the Australasian Institute of Mining and Metallurgy and has sufficient experience which is relevant to the commodity, style of mineralisation under consideration and activity which he is undertaking to qualify as a Qualified Person under National Instrument 43-101. Adrian Shepherd consents to the inclusion in this news release of the information, in the form and context in which it appears.

Scientific or technical information in this news release, in respect of the Bondi Deposit relating to mineral resource and exploration information drawn from the Technical Report prepared for Orezone on that deposit has been approved by Guy Scherrer. Guy Scherrer is an employee of Sarama Resources Ltd. and is a member in good standing of the Ordre des Geologues du Quebec and has sufficient experience which is relevant to the commodity, style of mineralisation under consideration and activity which he is undertaking to qualify as a Qualified Person under National Instrument 43-101. Guy Scherrer consents to the inclusion in this report of the information, in the form and context in which it appears.

Scientific or technical information in this disclosure that relates to the quotation of the Karankasso Project's mineral resource estimate is based on information compiled by Paul Schmiede. Paul Schmiede is an employee of Sarama Resources Ltd. and is a Fellow in good standing of the Australasian Institute of Mining and Metallurgy. Paul Schmiede has sufficient experience which is relevant to the commodity, style of mineralisation under consideration and activity which he is undertaking to qualify as a Qualified Person under National Instrument 43-101. Paul Schmiede consents to the inclusion in this disclosure of the information, in the form and context in which it appears. Paul Schmiede and Sarama have not independently verified Savary's mineral resource estimate and take no responsibility for its accuracy.

APPENDIX A - REVERSE CIRCULATION DRILLING

Hole ID Hole Type Downhole Intersection Intersection Material Type Depth From (m) Depth To (m) Dip (degree) Azimuth (degree) Hole Length (m) DJR0001 RC No significant intersection - 0 70 -49 233 70 DJR0003 RC 1m @ 9.56g/t Au 100% Fresh 59 60 -54 242 66 DJR0004 RC 13 m @ 1.50 g/t Au 100% Fresh 86 99 -55 270 108 DJR0005 RC No significant intersection - 0 126 -55 271 126 DJR0006 RC 6m @ 1.93 g/t Au 100% Fresh 134 140 -55 272 144 DJR0007 RC 8m @ 0.36 g/t Au 100% Oxide 22 30 -55 270 75 DJR0008 RC 4m @ 0.31 g/t Au 100% Fresh 103 107 -50 270 146 5m @ 0.59 g/t Au 100% Fresh 110 115 3m @ 1.73 g/t Au 100% Fresh 119 122 DJR0009 RC 7m @ 0.85 g/t Au 100% Fresh 66 73 -55 270 90 DJR0011 RC 2m @ 1.17 g/t Au 100% Fresh 69 71 -55 239 90 3m @ 1.24 g/t Au 100% Fresh 74 77 -55 DJR0012 RC 3m @ 1.53 g/t Au 100% Fresh 61 64 -55 239 76 DJR0013 RC 3m @ 0.32 g/t Au 100% Fresh 29 32 -55 240 72 3m @ 4.71 g/t Au 100% Fresh 51 54 3m @ 19.86 g/t Au 100% Fresh 69 72 DJR0014 RC 10m @ 1.79 g/t Au 100% Fresh 35 45 -54 241 62 DJR0015 RC 7m @ 2.43 g/t Au 100% Fresh 62 69 -56 239 85 DJR0016 RC 6m @ 3.46 g/t Au 100% Fresh 44 50 -55 240 71 DJR0017 RC 4m @ 0.73 g/t Au 100% Fresh 52 56 -55 241 75 DJR0018 RC 2m @ 42 g/t Au 100% Trans 23 25 -55 241 60 DJR0019 RC No significant intersection - 0 60 -55 239 60 DJR0020 RC No significant intersection - 0 62 -55 241 62 DJR0021 RC 2m @ 0.70 g/t Au 50% Oxide / 50% Trans 17 19 -55 240 60 DJR0022 RC 6m @ 0.37 g/t Au 100% Fresh 40 46 -54 241 72 DJR0023 RC No significant intersection - 0 62 -55 240 62 DJR0024 RC No significant intersection - 0 60 -55 240 60 DJR0025 RC No significant intersection - 0 60 -55 241 60 DJR0026 RC No significant intersection - 0 60 -54 239 60 DJR0027 RC No significant intersection - 0 60 -53 240 60 DJR0028 RC No significant intersection - 0 60 -55 240 60 DJR0029 RC 22m @ 3.85 g/t Au 86% Oxide / 14% Trans 5 27 -55 90 100 including 6m @ 4.96 g/t Au from 6-12m and 5m @ 9.54 g/t Au from 17-22m 23m @ 0.37 g/t Au 100% Fresh 34 57 9m @ 0.48 g/t Au 100% Fresh 60 69 9m @ 0.53 g/t Au 100% Fresh 88 97 DJR0030 RC 29 m @ 1.44 g/t Au 79% Oxide / 10% Trans / 10% Fresh 1 30 -55 90 100 including 5m @ 2.32 g/t Au from 20-125m 10m @ 1.24 g/t Au 100% Fresh 67 77 -55 90 100 including 2m @ 4.52 g/t Au from 72-74m - - -55 90 28 2m @ 0.45 g/t Au 100% Fresh 81 83

APPENDIX B - AIRCORE DRILLING

Hole ID Hole Type Downhole Intersection Intersection Material Type Depth From (m) Depth To (m) Dip (degree) Azimuth (degree) Hole Length (m) DJA0114 AC No significant intersection - 0 52 -55 90 52 DJA0115 AC No significant intersection - 0 39 -55 90 39 DJA0116 AC No significant intersection - 0 42 -55 90 42 DJA0117 AC No significant intersection - 0 37 -55 90 37 DJA0118 AC No significant intersection - 0 47 -55 90 47 DJA0119 AC No significant intersection - 0 38 -55 90 38 DJA0120 AC No significant intersection - 0 40 -55 90 40 DJA0121 AC No significant intersection - 0 36 -55 90 36 DJA0122 AC No significant intersection - 0 40 -55 90 29 DJA0123 AC No significant intersection - 0 33 -55 90 33 DJA0124 AC 6m @ 1.19 g/t Au 100% Trans 20 26 -55 90 30 DJA0125 AC No significant intersection - 0 40 -55 90 40 DJA0126 AC No significant intersection - 0 22 -55 90 22 DJA0127 AC No significant intersection - 0 35 -55 90 35 DJA0128 AC No significant intersection - 0 24 -55 90 24 DJA0129 AC No significant intersection - 0 28 -55 90 28 DJA0130 AC No significant intersection - 0 30 -55 90 30 DJA0131 AC No significant intersection - 0 18 -55 90 18 DJA0132 AC No significant intersection - 0 14 -55 90 14 DJA0133 AC No significant intersection - 0 41 -55 90 41 DJA-134 AC No significant intersection - 0 23 -55 90 23 DJA0135 AC No significant intersection - 0 33 -55 90 33 DJA0136 AC No significant intersection - 0 23 -55 90 23 DJA0137 AC No significant intersection - 0 36 -55 90 36 DJA0138 AC No significant intersection - 0 36 -55 90 36 DJA0139 AC No significant intersection - 0 38 -55 90 38 DJA0140 AC 2m @ 0.40 g/t Au 50% Oxide / 50% Trans 27 29 -55 90 31 DJA0141 AC 5m @ 4.54 g/t Au 100% Oxide 15 20 -55 90 32 DJA0142 AC No significant intersection - 0 33 -55 90 33 DJA0143 AC No significant intersection - 0 39 -55 90 39 DJA0144 AC No significant intersection - 0 30 -55 90 30 DJA0145 AC No significant intersection - 0 36 -55 90 36 DJA0146 AC No significant intersection - 0 30 -55 90 30 DJA0147 AC No significant intersection - 0 24 -55 90 24 DJA0148 AC No significant intersection - 0 30 -55 90 30 DJA0149 AC No significant intersection - 0 32 -55 90 32 DJA0150 AC No significant intersection - 0 24 -55 90 24 DJA0151 AC No significant intersection - 0 22 -55 90 22 DJA0152 AC No significant intersection - 0 18 -55 90 18 DJA0153 AC No significant intersection - 0 38 -55 90 38 DJA0154 AC No significant intersection - 0 41 -55 90 41 DJA0155 AC No significant intersection - 0 39 -55 90 39 DJA0156 AC No significant intersection - 0 44 -55 90 44 DJA0157 AC 4m @ 0.70 g/t Au 100% Oxide 22 26 -55 90 36 6m @ 0.88g/t Au (EOH) 100 Trans 30 36 DJA0158 AC No significant intersection - 0 45 -55 90 45 DJA0159 AC 15m @ 0.74 g/t Au 100% Oxide 7 22 -55 90 38 11m @ 0.98 g/t Au (EOH) 73% Oxide / 27% Trans 27 38

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Iran will veto any OPEC decision that harms its interests and warned that some oil producers are trying to create an alternative suppliers forum that supports U.S. policies hostile to the government in Tehran, the Islamic Republic's oil minister Bijan Namdar Zanganeh said.

"I will block any OPEC decision that poses the slightest threat to Iran," Iran's oil minister said. He stressed that any decision on a new production agreement by OPECs Joint Ministerial Monitoring Committee that meets on Sunday would be "void" and "invalid".

"Decisions can only be made at OPEC meetings in the presence of all OPEC members and by consensus of members," Bloomberg cited Zanganeh as saying.

According to the minister, oil at $80 a barrel is a "suitable" price.
Pirelli have promised that they will learn their lesson following a poor Singapore Grand Prix, where there was excessive tyre saving.

The hypersoft tyres that were deployed in Singapore made for some very entertaining and rapid qualifying laps, but when it actually came to the race, drivers were very cautious that there tyres would be ruined and consequently slowed down.

The result was more than 10 seconds a lap slower than what they'd been busting out in the qualifying laps.

Pirelli motorsport manager Mario Isola confirmed that this had been noted by his team and they will do everything they can to avoid similar problems in the future.

"This is something we should discuss because with experience and all the data that has been collected this year, we now have a better picture of the approach of the teams," Isola said when asked about the situation by Autosport.

"It is good to understand which is the right direction for the future. These are all considerations that must help us to understand and to improve and to improve the situation for next year.

"I don't have a solution right now but it is important we learn from what happened, not just go ahead without looking behind."
Ukraine will officially notify Russia on September 21 that it will not extend its treaty of friendship, cooperation, and partnership with Moscow, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Pavlo Klimkin said.

He added that Kiev will notify all relevant organizations, including the United Nations, about the move.

The 10-year treaty was originally signed on May 31, 1997, with a clause that set its automatic extension if the parties did not take action to end it. The treaty took effect on April 1, 1999. Neither party notified the other of the wish to terminate before October 2008, thereby automatically prolonging it for another 10 years.

The treaty sets out the principle of strategic partnership, the inviolability of existing borders, respect for territorial integrity, and an obligation not to use one nation's territory to damage the others security, RFE/RL recalls.

"As friendly, equal, and sovereign states, the [parties] shall base their relations upon mutual respect and trust, strategic partnership, and cooperation," Article 1 of the treaty states.
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PCC Panels Trigger Unrest In Seniors!

The announcement of various affiliated committees of the Pradesh Congress Committee to face the ensuing assembly elections to Telangana triggered a lot of unrest among the seniors.

Veteran Congress leader and former Rajya Sabha member V Hanumantha Rao, considered to be the strong loyalist of Sonia Gandhi family, was expecting to be nominated as the chairman of PCC campaign committee.

But the AICC denied him the position and instead made him the chairman of PCC strategy committee.

This has angered VH, who walked out of the meeting with AICC general secretary Ghulam Nabi Azad fretting and fuming after registering his protest.

Instead of giving me an insignificant post, it is better to send me to Chanchalguda jail. I cannot work under the directions of my junior, he said.

What angered him most was the appointment of former MP Vijayashanti as the partys star campaigner and advisor to the campaign committee and former MLA A Revanth Reddy as the PCC working president.

It is an insult to seniors. Obviously, there are coverts in the party who want to ruin its chances in the elections, VH said.

Another senior leader and former MLA D Sudheer Reddy, who was also expecting some senior position in the PCC, was peeved at his nomination as just a member of the PCC election committee.

I have been working as a disciplined soldier in the Congress party. I will continue to work like a loyalist till the end. I dont need any posts and positions, Reddy said.

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Azerbaijan's Energy Minister Parviz Shahbazov will take part in the 10th meeting of the Joint OPEC+ Ministerial Monitoring Committee, which will be held on September 23 in Algeria, the Azerbaijani ministry said.

The information on the development trend of the oil market will be provided at the meeting, the presentation of the Joint Technical Committee on oil production in August will also be conducted.

In addition, the issue of redistribution of quotas in accordance with the decision taken on June 23 this year at the fourth meeting of the ministers of OPEC and OPEC+ countries regarding the total increase in oil production by one million barrels per day will be considered.
Pranay murder: Politicos shower benefits on widow

The brutal murder of Pranay Perumalla, a Dalit engineer in the hands of a contract killer hired by his father-in-law and realtor T Maruthi Rao last Friday, became an excellent issue for the political parties to gain some mileage in the run-up to the next elections.

While the TRS leadership is silent on Maruthi Raos affiliation to the ruling party, it has promised all help to Pranays widow Amrutha Varshini.

On Thursday, chief minister K Chandrasekhar Rao deputed minister for power G Jagadish Reddy to console Amrutha.

He said Pranays murder was shameful to the society and that such incidents need to be avoided, he said that the State government would take steps to ensure that the accused in Pranays murder case are given stringent punishment.

A government job would be provided to Amrutha Varshini, Pranays wife. Also, agricultural land and a double-bedroom house would be allocated to his family, he said.

He informed that the government has sanctioned Rs 8.25 lakh towards the immediate expenses of Pranays family members. He also extended a cheque for Rs 4.12 lakh to Amrutha Varshini.

On the other hand, Telangana TDP unit chief L Ramana also called on Amrutha and announced that if the Mahakutami came to power in the coming elections, it would provide Rs one crore financial assistance to her.

He also made the promise of providing the government job to Pranay's wife once his party voted to power in Telangana.

The TDP leader lambasted KCR for maintaining silence on such a big incident that shook the entire nation in the recent times.

He demanded the distribution of 50 percent of the property of Amrutha's father in the name of her.

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Russian President Vladimir Putin, addressing the Eurasian Womens Forum in St. Petersburg, noted that Russia has always paid special attention to women.

"Russia contributes in significant ways to discussions on strategies designed to enhance the role of women in tackling global challenges," he said, stressing that this is not without reason. "Since Russia has always paid special attention to protecting mothers and children, as well as supporting women," the head of state explained. "I would go as far as to argue that we treat women in a special way, with tenderness, cordiality and sincerity," TASS cited Putin as saying.

"History provides us with quite a few extraordinary examples when women assumed responsibility for decisions that were pivotal for entire countries and nations," thwe presidet of Russia stressed.

According to him, "in todays complex, rapidly changing world women are proactive and successful in many spheres, and play an increasingly important role in strengthening peace and security, which is their natural role, and contribute to addressing key socioeconomic and humanitarian problems."

The Second Eurasian Womens Forum is taking place between September 19 and 21 at major convention centres and cultural venues in the historical centre of St Petersburg. The Tavrichesky Palace and the Parliamentary Centre serve as the main venue for the forums business programme. The forum is organised by the Federation Council and the Inter-Parliamentary Assembly of the CIS, with support from a number of ministries, agencies and NGOs.
Independent candidate Ted Barney has officially announced his candidacy for Senate District 13.

Barney, currently a Green River City Councilman, is running against incumbent Democrat John Hastert and Republican Tom James. Since Barney is running as an independent candidate, he had to obtain 76 signatures of registered voters to be included on the November ballot.

Barney said he made sure to obtain way more than that in case some on his list werent registered when they thought they were. He said all of the voters information must be up to date in order for it to count.

Obtaining the signatures didnt come easily. Barney said he thought he was doing everything correctly because he followed the information provided on the Wyoming Secretary of States website. He didnt realize that he needed to fill out a special form and get approval prior to obtaining signatures. By the time he had discovered the mistake, he had already collecting signatures for two months.

All the signatures I collected for the first two months didnt count, Barney said. I was just frustrated and tossed them.

After he obtained approval, he started the signature process over again. With signatures in hand, Barney went to Cheyenne to the Wyoming Secretary of States office to delivery the signatures. He could have mailed them in, but thought better of it.

I didnt want them to get lost, he said.

After 10 days, Barney received an email from the Secretary of States office letting him know his name would be on the ballot.

Why hes running

Im sick and tired of party politics, he said.

Barney was a human intelligence collection specialist for the military prior to becoming an investigator with the public defenders office. He said his careers have been based on finding the facts and providing people with those facts, which is why is upsets him when decisions are based on what the party wants and not what the facts show.

Its about politics and power, he said.

There are four main areas Barney would like the state to pursue: improving education, legalizing marijuana for medicinal purposes, diversifying the economy and clarifying and updating criminal codes.

They are butchering our education system, Barney said.

Barney said he was raised to respect parents because they gave him life and teachers because they gave him knowledge.

As for the legalization of medical marijuana, Barney said a University of Wyoming poll on the issue showed 81 percent of the state was in favor of legalizing it for medicinal purposes.

When it comes to the economy, he said Wyoming has to find a way to expand it. The international market is what drives the oil and gas economy. He said the state needs more businesses like Church and Dwight to take local resources and manufacture it into something the country needs. He never understood why a glass company hasnt located near one of the trona mines.

Since Barney has worked in criminal justice for the past 18 years, he sees a need to update certain criminal codes. A couple of examples were the kidnapping and burglary charges.

Even though he has these as some of the things he would like to see changed, hes open to suggestions.

Its just the simple desire to actually listen to people and represent them, he said.
Commerce Bank has been selected by the county treasurer as the bank Sweetwater County will put its depositories in.

At the Sweetwater County Commissioners meeting Tuesday morning, county treasurer Robb Slaughter gave the commissioners an update on how the transfer of funds out of Bank of the West was going.

The county had $15.8 million of the general fund is with Bank of the West, while $1.4 million is in insurance with them and about $14 million is invested with the bank.

The reason the county decided to pull its funds out of Bank of the West was because of a statement corporate Bank of the West made on its website. Its website blog.bankofthewest.com/change, stated We will no longer do business with companies whose main activity is exploring, producing, distributing, marketing or trading oil and gas from shale and/or tar sands. We will no longer finance coal mines or coal-fired power plants that are not actively involved in the energy transition.

The Bank of the West also stated on the website, its withdrawing support from companies and business activities that are detrimental to our environment and our health.

With this in mind, Slaughter checked all local banks environmental statements on their websites and called each local bank to discuss the statements. He then asked for proposals from the banks on what the county needed.

He received four proposals and narrowed it to two.

He said the county already had an existing account with Commerce Bank and the bank told him they would have a team dedicated to helping the county through the transition.

Commerce Bank was good on their offer and five team members visited the county and helped get payroll, forms and computer programs ready.

Weve transferred virtually all of the money from Bank of the West, Slaughter said. Its been a much simpler transition then I anticipated.

He told the commissioners he would meet that Oct. 1 deadline.
School children who want to learn more about computer science will not want to miss out on hours of fun this Saturday.

WyoCSZone is hosting a computer science event at the Sweetwater Events Complex Saturday from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.

According to the website wyocszone.com, WyoCSZone is a Wyoming CS teacher community dedicating our efforts to fellow teachers and students within Wyoming. We act as a bridge for teachers, students, our communities and the professional world by helping them gain confidence and build CS skills necessary to become community and business leaders.

Carla Hester Croff, Western Wyoming Community College information technology associate professor, said this is the second year this event has been hosted and its a way to educate the community and make residents more aware of what computer science really is.

Croff is part of the Wyoming Computer Science Task Force. She said the task force has been working with the Wyoming Department of Education and the Wyoming Professional Teaching Standards Board and one area they are working on is getting the community and parents a better understanding of what computer science is by hosting various events throughout the state.

This is our biggest one, Croff said.

With the support of both Sweetwater County School Districts No. 2 and No. 1, the event will offer numerous stations for children from kindergarten through 12th grade to participate in. Some of the stations children can visit, include virtual reality, Makey Makeys, coding, drones, computer games, a gaming tournament, robotics and computer science unplugged. Computer science unplugged is a why for students to learn about computer science without using and electronic device.

Croff said a lot of people dont realize what goes on behind the scenes of modern technology. For example: those who created the Google Maps app never get a break because as streets are added and cities and towns expand, there is a person behind the scenes constantly updating the app so its up to date.

On Saturday, students will be encouraged to try every station to try everything, however, if they find a station they really want to spend more time at, they may do so.

This generation of kids dont know anything else but technology, Croff said. We dont have enough people to fill technology positions out there.

Croff said it was for this reason that the Wyoming Legislature passed a bill making sure computer science is offered in all Wyoming schools.

Last year, about 350 students along with their siblings and parents attended the event. This year, the sponsors have provided money to give away cash prizes, sets of Bloxels and Makey Makeys.

Come and have a good time, Croff said. It will be fun.
Brian McNutt of Cheyenne, from left, Roger Dean with Wired Communications and Tim Wilson of Cheyenne look at the light, while Dean tells them about it. This was just one of several vendor booths at the ARRL Wyoming Convention.

For quite possibly the first time, Southwest Wyoming hosted the ham radio conference on this side of the state.

Rick Breininger, president of the Sweetwater Amateur Radio Club, said as far as he knows this past weekend was the first time Southwest Wyoming has hosted the 2018 American Radio Relay League Wyoming Section Convention. The convention took place at the Sweetwater Events Complex this Saturday with about 60 in attendance from Wyoming, Colorado, Utah and Idaho.

"It moves around the state every year," Breininger said. "I think it says our location is interesting and growing."

He said the Sweetwater Club was asked if they would be willing to host it on this side of the state and the club was happy to. He said it is a convenient location because Rock Springs is located right along Interstate 80.

In the past, the convention was hosted over a two-day span, but this year it was one day. Breininger said since it was their first year hosting the event they wanted to start small knowing they could always get bigger in future years. To make the event a success, the Sweetwater Club lined up vendors and speakers to attend the event.

Spencer Shields was one of the quest speakers at the convention and he gave a talk on how he was hunting near Pinedale and how he used a ham radio to save his life. Using a ham radio while he was in a life-threatening situation, allowed him to contact a lady in Pinedale who calmed him down and helped him do the right things to stay alive, while she got help to him.

Another speaker was Bob Overton, who has been a licensed ham since 1970, worked in telecommunications 35 years for the BNSF railroad, and taught Electronics at Yakima Valley JR College and held a Commercial Radio Telephone license for 37 years. He spoke about protecting two-meter repeaters and base stations with a quarter wave shorted stub.

Mike Covey, was another speaker who, joined the ARRL Headquarters staff as the emergency preparedness manage. He has also served as an emergency management volunteer, disaster response volunteer, reserve police officer, law enforcement academy and public safety instructor, and on emergency operations center staff.

Breininger said the Sweetwater Club is trained and ready to act as Sweetwater County's backup communication should a disaster occur in Sweetwater County. He said the club works closely with Sweetwater County Emergency Management.

He said those who are involved in ham radio have often been sent to help out in disasters such as when the hurricane hit Puerto Rico. Ham radio operators were sent to Puerto Rico to help communications between the fire departments, police departments and other emergency responders.

In fact, a group out of Kansas called KCN Rescue, was supposed to be at the convention, couldn't come because they were asked to help out with the most recent hurricane Florence that hit North Carolina this week.

Ham radio operators are non-paid professionals licensed by the government. They have their own frequencies and all one has to pay for it the license and the equipment.

"We do it because it's fun," Breininger said. "It's a hobby."

Award received

Breininger was quite surprised when he found out he was named the Wyoming Ham of the Year for 2017. He said he never thought he would receive this distinguished award.

Nominations for the award are submitted to the award committee, while then sends its recommendation onto the Wyoming Section Manager Jack Mitchell who then approved the recommendation.

One of Breininger's favorite parts of being a ham radio is chatting with people around the world Australia, Europe and Japan.

"I do that from my house," he said."

He said those interested can even start out with just a hand-held device and chat with locals. All they have to do it buy the equipment and the license.
Russia is considering the possibility of withdrawing from the Council of Europe, Russian Federation Council (upper house of parliament) Speaker Valentina Matviyenko said at a meeting with President of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) Liliane Maury Pasquier on Thursday, TASS reports.

"I tell you frankly, we are close to a decision on pulling out of the Council of Europe," Matviyenko said, addressing Maury Pasquier. "If the Council of Europe is ready to accept it, if it does not value Russias membership, then so be it," she added.

In her opinion, "it is no use dragging this process out" because the situation is at a standstill despite several years of negotiations and Russias efforts to clarify things.

According the Russian senate speaker, Moscow is interested in strengthening the Council of Europe as "a universal European organization" with unique mechanisms, which would ensure "a united humanitarian and legal space."

"At the same time, we consider that the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe is going through a crisis," she went on to say. "We believe that PACE should ensure equal rights and opportunities for all the 47 member states of the Council of Europe," Matviyenko added.
Turkeys competition authority said on Thursday it had fined Google some 93 million Turkish lira ($15 million) for violating competition laws with its mobile software sales, Reuters reported.

In a statement, the competition authority said Google LLC, Google International and Google Reklamcilik were given six months to make the necessary changes in order to reinstill effective competition in the market and end the violation.
iStock/Thinkstock

(WASHINGTON) -- A suspect has been arrested in the fatal attack of a woman who was stabbed multiple times while jogging in a trendy neighborhood in the nation's capital just a few miles from the White House.



Police sources told ABC News Thursday morning that an arrest was made in the slaying of Wendy Karina Martinez and that the suspect is expected to appear in court later today. The suspect's name was not immediately released.



Washington D.C. Chief of Police Peter Newsham and Mayor Muriel Bowser are expected to provide details of the arrest at a press conference.



Martinez, 35, stumbled into a Chinese restaurant in Washington D.C.s Logan Circle on Tuesday night, suffering from multiple stab wounds to the neck, police said. Martinez tried to alert customers to her attacker, but the suspect had already fled the scene, witnesses said.



She was transported to a nearby hospital where she succumbed to her injuries, police said.



"They tried to provide medical assistance to her. Unfortunately, she was taken to a local hospital where she was pronounced dead," D.C. Police Chief Peter Newsham said Wednesday. "It is more likely a random act than anything else, but we're going to look at all possibilities."



"It's horrible to see something like this happen in the city," he added, describing the area as a "very safe neighborhood."



Martinez was an "avid runner" and worked for a local software company, according to her family. She and her fiance, Daniel Hincapie, were engaged last week.



"We are deeply saddened by this senseless tragedy. Wendy Karina Martinez was the light of our lives," her mother, Cora Martinez, wrote in a statement. "Not only was she an avid runner, but she was a devout Christian, a wonderful friend, and a driven professional. Everything you hope that a daughter and a friend could be."



FiscalNote, where Wendy Martinez served as chief of staff, tweeted its condolences to her family on Wednesday.



"The entire FiscalNote family is shocked and deeply saddened to learn that Wendy Martinez, our Chief of Staff, was killed last night," the company wrote. "Wendy was an invaluable member of our team and a vibrant member of the community. Our thoughts and prayers are with Wendy's family and friends."



The Metropolitan Police Department released surveillance footage of a suspect that showed a man wearing a long-sleeved mustard-colored shirt, flip flops and white socks.



The police department had put up a $25,000 reward for information leading to an arrest.



"We ask that you respect our privacy as we grieve the passing of her beautiful soul and inform her friends and family of this terrible news," the victim's mother said in her statement. "We also want to encourage the community to please contact the police with any information that may lead to finding justice for Wendy."



Copyright  2018, ABC Radio. All rights reserved.
The Trump administration persuaded Volkswagen AG to end almost all of its business in Iran, Bloomberg reported, citing U.S. Ambassador to Germany Richard Grenell, who led the discussions with the carmaker.

According to the U.S. official, the U.S. and Volkswagen hammered out the final details on September 18 after weeks of talks.

He stressed that the car manufacturer has said it would comply with U.S. sanctions on Iran. "We are pleased with this decision because Iran diverts its economic resources away from its people to spread violence and instability across the globe," the envoy said.

Grenell added that Volkswagen will be able to conduct some business in Iran on humanitarian grounds.
Residents of Armenia's Chambarak (Gegharkunik province), who are IDPs from Artsvashen, are holding a protest near the building of the Armenian government in Yerevan, demanding compensation, which were promised them many years ago.

"The former government promised to provide us with 1 million drams ($2,000 at the current exchange rate) for each house as compensation. They came to us, wrote it down, then left and did not give us a penny," Sputnik-Armenia cited one of the protesters.

He explained that the disgruntled residents of Chambarak arrived in Yerevan today to talk with Armenia's Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan personally.

Another participant of the action said that they all moved from Artsvashen to Chambarak, where Molokans used to live. Now their old wooden houses are rotting and falling apart. According to the estimates of the protesters, about $20 thousand is needed to restore each house.

The head of the correspondence department of the Prime Minister's control service, Harutyun Gevorgyan, listened to the protester's complaints and said that he has never hearing heard about this problem before. "We invited them to submit documents to understand problem and how to solve it within our competence," he said.

His reaction only increased the discontent of the protesters, which explained that they have no opportunity to make such far trips to the capital often, so they demand that Prime Minister Pashinyan personally talk to them.

The director of the Armenian branch of the CIS Institute, Alexander Markarov, speaking with the correspondent of Vestnik Kavkaza, noted that the new Armenian authorities must be aware of the situation that exists in the country. "The question is whether the system solutions can be presented for the problems existing in the social and economic life of Armenians. Specific examples, like the situation with the inhabitants of Chambarak, require a specific subject reference to the problem and allocation of resources to solve it," he pointed out.

According to Alexander Markarov, protests in the country will continue. "It is clear that taking to the streets is one of the last elements in the process of expressing protest. It is one of the forms of protest in Armenia that is used to pressure the government directly, which should solve problems not only point-by-point, but systemically," the director of the Armenian branch of the CIS Institute stressed.
U.S. President Donald Trump's administration is working to provide alternative sources of oil to American allies that will be affected because of U.S. sanctions on Iran, Financial Times writes, citing a senior administration official.

In the Bush administration and during the Obama administration until the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran, some US allies, including Japan, South Korea and India, were given waivers from sanctions related to Iranian oil imports. But the US told allies not to expect waivers as it boosts pressure on Iran. Instead, it is trying to find sources to replace the oil they would have obtained from Tehran, the newspaper reported.

The statement comes two months before a second tranche of US sanctions on Iran are reimposed.

India, which is the second-biggest buyer of Iranian oil, is also looking elsewhere for crude. According to data from Reuters, India is set to take 360,000-370,000 b/d of Iranian oil on average in September and October, compared with 658,000 b/d during April-August.

South Korea, in turn, has replaced Iranian crude with imports from Saudi Arabia and Iraq, according to the energy ministry, but it is also in talks with the US to get a waiver.

According to Financial Times, Irans exports have already fallen significantly, down at least 500,000 barrels a day since May to below 2m b/d, even before US sanctions officially kick in from November.
A native of Columbia who was the leader of a heroin trafficking organization was sentenced Wednesday to 61/2 years in prison, federal authorities said in a release.

Alex Ortiz-Gomez, 35, a citizen of Colombia who was last residing in Hartford, was sentenced by U.S. District Judge Vanessa L. Bryant in Hartford on one count of conspiracy to distribute and to possess with intent to distribute 100 grams or more of heroin, the release from the office of Connecticut U.S. Attorney John H. Durham said.

Ortiz-Gomez came to the U.S. from Colombia as a child and faces immigration proceedings when he completes his prison sentence, the release said.

The release noted that, according to court documents and statements made in court, the Drug Enforcement Administration Hartford Task Force identified Ortiz-Gomez as the head of a drug trafficking organization that was distributing large quantities of heroin in the Hartford area.

The investigation, which included court-authorized wiretaps, revealed that members of the organization used an apartment on Wayland Street in Hartford to store heroin, cocaine, drug packaging materials and cash, and to process and package narcotics for street sale.

When Ortiz-Gomez went to New York City in May 2015, law enforcement officers conducted a motor vehicle stop of the car and seized approximately $125,000 in cash, the release said.

Ortiz-Gomez and several co-conspirators were arrested in June 2015 and a search of the Wayland Street apartment revealed a bag of cocaine, approximately 400 bags of heroin, a heroin stamp, six boxes containing hundreds of stamped bags for packaging heroin, and other items used to process and package heroin for street sale.

A related search of co-conspirators residence in East Hartford revealed 500 grams of heroin, thousands of bags used to package heroin, a heroin brand stamp and other items, the release said.

Ortiz-Gomez, who has been detained since his arrest, pleaded guilty on Feb. 5 to one count of conspiracy to distribute and to possess with intent to distribute 100 grams or more of heroin, the release said.

Six other people were charged and convicted as a result of this investigation, which was conducted by the Drug Enforcement Administrations Hartford Task Force with the assistance of the Connecticut State Police. The DEA Task Force includes participants from the Bristol, East Hartford, Hartford, Manchester, New Britain, Rocky Hill, Wethersfield, Willimantic and Windsor Locks Police Departments, and the Food and Drug Administration, the release said. The case was prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorney Geoffrey M. Stone.
President Donald Trump had a suggestion for how Spain could deal with Europe's migration crisis during a recent meeting with Foreign minister Josep Borrell, according to reports in the Spanish media.

The idea was simple: "Build a wall across the Sahara."

El Pais and Europa Press reported this week that Borrell recalled Trump's suggestion during a luncheon in Madrid on Tuesday. The Spanish Embassy in Washington did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but the Spanish Foreign Ministry told Britain's Guardian newspaper that the accounts of Borrell's comments were accurate.

According to those accounts, Borrell told his audience that Trump had compared the situation in northern Africa and the Mediterranean to that along the U.S. border with Mexico. During his campaign, Trump had promised to build a wall along the southern border with Mexico and force the Mexican government to pay for it.

Borrell said that he did not support a wall along the border between the United States and Mexico and that Spanish diplomats had told Trump that the situation was considerably different in scale anyway. Trump disagreed, according to Borrell's recollection, adding that "the Sahara border can't be bigger than our border with Mexico."

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Though estimates vary, U.S. Customs and Border Protection says that the border between the United States and Mexico is roughly 1,900 miles long. Most estimates for the Sahara put it at about 3,000 miles long from east to west.

A wall across the Sahara would probably also involve building through several sovereign nations. The desert spreads over parts of 11 countries: Algeria, Chad, Egypt, Eritrea, Libya, Mali, Mauritania, Morocco, Niger, Sudan and Tunisia.

It was unclear from the Spanish media whether Trump was speaking in jest when he made the purported comments. Borrell had accompanied Spain's King Felipe VI and Queen Letizia to the White House in June.

Spain has seen rising numbers of migrants and refugees arrive on its shores in recent months, the result of a crackdown on a central Mediterranean route between Libya and Italy. According to the International Organization for Migration, more that 33,000 people have arrived in Spain via the western Mediterranean in 2018 - three times as many as in the same period last year.

The left-wing government of Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, in power since June, has attempted to welcome the new arrivals - accepting migrant rescue boats such as the MV Aquarius after Italy rejected them.

Borrell, who was president of the European Parliament between 2004 and 2007, has been critical of anti-immigration sentiment in Europe. "Everybody in Europe is being affected by this virus, fears of immigration," he told The Washington Post during the June visit to the United States. "This is not the case of Spain."

His comments at the luncheon this week appear to affirm, however, that migration and identity are the most important issues facing the continent.

"European societies are not structured to absorb more than a certain percentage of migrants, especially if they are Muslims," he said, according to El Pais.
I was walking on the sidewalk in Cos Cob last week when a woman said something in a sing-song voice as she passed by. At first I wasnt sure if she was speaking to me or to the guy she was walking with; I couldnt even tell if she was speaking English or a different language. After a second I realized she had chanted Konnichiwa, shay shay! at me. (1)

Huh? Why would she chant Asian words at me? To be clear, she was jeering at me; she did not smile or stop to chat pleasantly. So why did she blurt it out? Well ... I presume it was because Im of Asian descent. The jeerer was white. Im born and raised in the United States, so not only am I American, I  for lack of a better word  look totally American. That day I was dressed pretty Greenwich: polo shirt, L. L. Bean shorts, and vaguely preppy shoes. (2) But this woman saw first and foremost my Asian-ness.

I kept walking. Stuff like this is old hat. I have gotten racial remarks  and worse  since childhood. (3) The rule is that you dont give jerks the satisfaction of acknowledging you heard them. Also, she was walking with a man, so they were two people and I was by myself. Its unfortunate, but you have to consider the possibility that if you confront a stranger they could get physical. However, the main reason I ignored them is that is what I have been taught. It is what I have internalized over years of experience. Ignore taunts. Dont engage. Dont even show youre bothered. There is value in this line of thinking. People who attempt to bully you want to get a reaction out of you, so if you react, you are playing into their hands.

But.

We are at a point in our culture where we are questioning the just ignore it strategy. We have decided, for example, that schoolyard bullying is not simply kids being kids and that we should not ignore it anymore. People who have been sexually harassed should not be told to just ignore it because that dismisses the crime and allows harassers to continue. We no longer just ignore inconvenient facts about our countrys history. I am proud that our society is moving in this direction. No doubt part of the impetus for this cultural change is the behavior of some high-profile people in our country. There are influential people who serve up racially  and ethnically themed stereotypes and insults every day. They dish it out; their supporters applaud and ask for more. This role-modeling at the top is racist, blatant, and destructive to our civil society. That is why many of us refuse to ignore it any longer.

Before someone accuses me of complaining about a trivial incident, let me be clear: I have a wonderful life and I love living in Greenwich. I have great friends here. I have had privileges, blessings, and just plain good luck that most people would sell their soul for. The reason I write about this incident is not to complain about my First World problems, but to share with people a fact of life which, if they are white, they may have no concept of. I write this to inform people that yes, even in the liberal Northeast, in our truly wonderful town with truly wonderful people (I say this earnestly, not sarcastically), there are slings and arrows that non-white people face that white people do not, and that as a civilized, decent society, we ought to try to eliminate.

So what can we do? We can reject the policy of just ignore it. If you see racial insults happening, speak up if it is safe to do so. Because bullies are cowards, theyll usually act when they are in a group and their target is alone. If you speak up, the person is no longer alone. If its not safe to speak up at that moment, write about it. Post it on your social media and say why you think this is unacceptable. Talk to your friends about it and send an article to your newspaper. Support politicians who agree with you.

Footnotes (1) Konnichiwa: basically, "hello" in Japanese; "shay shay" is a bad English pronunciation of , which means "thank you" (2) Olukai brand. I highly recommend them. (3) If you are white, try asking an Asian-American friend if they have ever been teased for being Asian-American. I guarantee they have been on the receiving end of racial remarks - or worse - all their lives. (4) To this writer, "young' is anyone under 40. See More Collapse

One important point: I believe the woman who taunted me deserves our compassion. Why? I think that her behavior was not so much virulent racist as it was foolish young person.(4) After she blurted out her racist remark, I doubt she thought about it again, not for a second; certainly not for a few days, as I have. Maybe she has received putdowns for her looks or gender, and maybe she has learned thats what you do in life: you gratuitously taunt others. I would guess her life is not very happy, because people who are happy dont jeer at strangers. No, I dont like that she tried to hurt me; I dont like that she doesnt have the maturity or kindness to behave decently. But putting her down in person or in print would neither get her to change nor make society better. Im not proud of it, but there are times when Ive said unkind, insensitive things. If at those times someone had yelled at me, no matter how much I might have deserved it, I would have been defensive. If instead someone had said with compassion, Hey, what you did was unkind, I might have listened.

So I hope this woman is listening; but if she isnt, I hope others are. Because when you think about it, its really crazy: last week in Cos Cob a 20-something woman decided that I, a 55-year-old mother of four GHS graduates, should be jeered at because my ancestors did not come from Europe. How messed up is that? If I could wave a magic wand I would make her realize the damage she does to our society and to herself when she demeans others on the basis of race. I dont have a magic wand, so Im doing the next best thing: telling this story in the hope that other people can know it, recognize it, and maybe stop themselves or others from doing it in the future. Just ignore it? Not anymore.

Christine Kim is a Cos Cob resident.
GREENWICH  Four New York City men are facing charges of bank fraud after they allegedly took part in a scheme to profit off a bogus transaction.

Police were called to the Chase branch in Old Greenwich Tuesday afternoon.
Following Apple paying 13.1 billion euro ($15.3 billion) in back taxes, the EU antitrust regulator plans to withdraw legal action against Ireland.

In 2016 the European Commission ruled that Apple was unfairly given tax breaks in an illegal sweatheart tax deal with the Irish government.

Citing that it gave Apple an significant advantage over its competition, ruling that Apple had to pay taxes it owed from between 2003 and 2014 - plus interest.

European Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager took legal action against the Irish Government last year for failing to recover the amount from Apple.

In light of the full payment by Apple of the illegal State aid it had received from Ireland, Commissioner Vestager will be proposing to the College of Commissioners the withdrawal of this court action

European Commission spokesman Ricardo Cardoso said in an email.

Apple previously stated that its confident the decision would be overturned - so watch this space.

Source
By Vasia Orion | Published on 2018/09/19

The charming quartet of "The Third Charm" all have a different approach to love and romance, which is now being teased through newly released character posters. From the sentimental to the spontaneous, and from the romantic to the pragmatic, it looks like these pairings will be facing plenty of challenges.

Advertisement

We start off with On Joon-yeong (Seo Kang-joon). His poster reads 'Sentimentalism even in love!" Joon-yeong is more organized and refined than necessary, so this otherwise sensitive, down to earth man is very emotional in his dating life. Heroine Lee Yeong-jae (Esom) is defined by 'Straightforwardness even in love!" Like an active volcano, she is emotional and spontaneous, and dives right into love.

Our second leads have different circumstances as well. Yeong-jae's brother, Lee Soo-jae (Yang Dong-geun), feels that 'Love has always been about romanticism!' After losing his parents in middle school, and his grandma in high school, Soo-jae gave up on trying to pass the police exam. He serves coffee by day, and writes scenarios by night. Prepare for angsty writer woes.

Baek Joo-ran (Lee Yoon-ji) is a hair designer who lives and dies in style. Having exchanged her youth for money and fame, she is nearing forty while having lived aimlessly. While looking for her one true love, she realizes that 'Even love is a struggle!' A tired romanticist meets a pushy romanticist. We will be meeting this romantic cast when "The Third Charm" premieres on the 28th.

Written by: Orion from 'Orion's Ramblings'

Sources (1)
Burnie Inman stands in the field with Burnham School west of Havre in the background Wednesday. This year the Havre/Hill County Preservation Commission has designed its Christmas ornament after this historical building owned by Charlie and Burnie Inman.

Members of the Havre/Hill County Historic Preservation Commission traveled west of Havre Wednesday to present the first 2018 Preservation Ornament to the owners of the building featured on the ornament, Charlie and Burnie Inman at the Burnham Schoolhouse.

The building is the most-photographed schoolhouse in the entire state, appearing in many different pieces of artwork, book covers and other places, said Havre/Hill County Preservation Commission Historic Preservation Officer Becki Miller.

Charlie Inman said he his wife have owned the Burnham Schoolhouse, since the 1970s. He added that his father and his siblings had actually attended the original school when they were younger, although the original building burned down. After the school had burned down, the new building was built and later moved to where it presently stands, he said.

Inman said that after the school was closed, the building's ownership passed through a few people, with one wanting to turn the building into a grain elevator and another wanting to make it into a studio.

He said he purchased the schoolhouse from artist Don Greytak.

"It's part of our history," Inman said.

The ornament will be for sale at the Havre Chamber of Commerce for $20 starting today, Miller said.

Previous year's ornaments will also be for sale at a discount, she added, including the Hill County Courthouse ornament, St. Mark's Episcopal Church, Donaldson Hall at Montana State University-Northern, Fort Assinniboine/Northern Agricultural Research Center, Kiwanis Chapel at Beaver Creek Park and the Clack Elevator in Havre.

Last year's ornament was the Havre Historic Post Office, but the ornaments are sold out, she said.

The money collected from the ornament sales will be put toward preservation projects in the Havre and Hill County area, Miller added.

The ornaments are made by a Colorado artist, who also does ornaments for the historic preservation society in Great Falls, Miller said.

Miller and Montana Preservation Alliance Director Christine Brown started researching Burnham School during a statewide survey done by the alliance.

Miller contacted Brown about the schoolhouse during the survey.

Montana had about 2,700 rural schoolhouses at the height of the homesteading days. It is believed that fewer than 20 percent of those original historic schoolhouses are still standing, Brown told Miller in an email.

The Montana Association of Rural Schools reports that across Montana, about 90 to 100 small rural schools are still operating, Brown said, adding that the number fluctuates up and down every year, and it is estimated about 50 to 60 of those schools are historic.

The Inmans said they were very excited to receive the ornament, with Charlie Inman adding that it will look fantastic on the tree this year.

"I'm overwhelmed," he said, adding that he plans to display it in his home 12 months of the year.

He said he also has the original bell from the original school building that burned down. The North Central Montana Shrine Club has the bell from the building that stands today, he added.

The schoolhouse has been the most-photographed schoolhouse in the state, but Inman said his favorite picture of the schoolhouse is a painting that is on display Northern Montana Care Center. He added that the colors in the painting and the trees, that are no longer there because of beavers, are beautifully done and remind him of what the building looked like years ago.

Havre Daily News / Gen Yamaguchi This year Havre Hill County Preservation Commission has designed the Christmas ornament after the Burnham School of Hill County. The school was opened in 1913 and closed its doors June 30, 1947. Photo taken on Wednesday.

The schoolhouse also is on the cover of Italian author Andrea B. Nardi's novel "No Shade in South Dakota," a story of pioneers on the prairie available at Amazon.com, and the cover of Charlotte Caldwell's book "Visions and Voices: Montana's One-Room Schoolhouses."

Caldwell's book is now at half-price, $25, with 100 percent of the profits going to Montana Preservation Fund, a grant managed by the Montana Historical Foundation, for the stabilization of historic one- and two-room schoolhouses in Montana.

--

Online: Havre/Hill County Preservation Commission: http://www.havrehillpreservation.org/.

Montana Preservation Alliance: http://www.preservemontana.org/.

Montana Historical Foundation: https://www.mthistory.org/. To order a copy of Caldwell's book call 406-449-3770.

Nardi's book is available on Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/Shade-South-Dakota-Andrea-Nardi/dp/1720462240/ref=sr_1_cc_1?s=aps&ie=UTF8&qid=1529608033&sr=1-1-catcorr&keywords=Andrea%20B.%20Nardi/.
Havre firefighters will be on the streets during Festival Days with boots in hand asking people to help them help Muscular Dystrophy Association.

Local 601 of the International Association of Fire Fighters will be on First Street from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m Friday, on the intersections with Third and Fourth avenues, in the annual Fill the Boot Campaign.

The fire fighters will be asking people to stop and make a donation in the campaign, with the proceeds going to Muscular Dystrophy Association.

Members of the firefighter union have been holding the Fill the Boot Campaign for more than 60 years, supporting MDAs work including research  with three new promising drugs receiving FDA approval in the past year, the union webpage on the campaign says  supporting MDA care centers and sending children to the Muscular Dystrophy Association Summer Camp.

The firefighters have been raising money for MDA since the drive started in 1954.

IAFF is the single largest sponsor for the association and, since 1954, has raised more than $558 million for MDA, including $24 million in 2017 alone.

The Havre local was one of 1,567 participating in the drive last year, with more than 100,000 firefighters across the U.S. in the drive.

The Fill the Boot drive was one of the earliest fundraisers for the association, which was created in 1950, awarding its first research grant that year, the Muscular Dystrophy Association website says.

Perhaps the most familiar fundraiser was the Labor Day telethon, which ran from 1956 through 2014. It started with comedic duo Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin appealing to people to support muscular dystrophy research at the end of their NBC television show in 1951, and then co-hosting a telethon in 1956.

Lewis hosted MDA telethons again in 1957 and 1959, and then in 1966 held the first MDA Jerry Lewis Labor Day Telethon. That tradition continued until Lewis was unable to continue hosting, and announced his retirement in 2011.

MDA continued the telethon, although in increasingly streamlined formats, from 2011 through 2014, ending the tradition in 2015.

In 1952 National Association of Letter Carriers became the first national sponsor for MDA, holding Deliver the Cure fundraisers.

The Fill the Boot Campaign began in 1954 when a group of families affected by muscular dystrophy approached Local 718 fire station in Boston asking for help. The fire fighters took to the streets with their boots, starting a nationwide tradition and making IAFF the top fundraising association for MDA.



Online: Muscular Dystrophy Association : https://www.mda.org/.

IAFF Fill the Boot campaign: https://firefighters.mda.org/.
Speakers discussed an array of topics throughout the day, from practical HR tech implementation to blockchain, artificial intelligence, emerging technology and data analytics.

Speaker Gillian Davie, chief people officer, NetComm Wireless and David Burrows, global head of workforce analytics from insurance giant QBE reflected on the movement towards qualitative data over quantitative data in the field of HR analytics.

Davie spoke about the richness of insight that can be drawn from employee survey comments.

Self-service was identified as a must-have for forward-thinking HR teams, with David Burrows, global head of workforce analytics from QBE Insurance highlighting the importance of user and employee experience in HR technology. Burrows said that HR systems need to be user-friendly and efficient in order to be effective.

Nikki Symonds, head of corporate and enterprise IT from Origin Energy brought a unique perspective as an IT leader, speaking about the importance of HR partnering with the in-house IT team to ensure successful HR tech roll-outs.
Fine Gael TDs have raised serious concerns about the controversial BusConnects plan at a private meeting of the party.

A series of TDs and senators from the capital raised questions about the proposed overhaul of bus routes in Dublin amid fears it could become as politically dangerous as the water charges fiasco.

There has been a call for Transport Minister Shane Ross to come before an upcoming Fine Gael meeting to answer questions about the plan, which was the subject of a Fianna Fail motion in the Dail yesterday.

The motion called for protection of Dublin Bus services.

The debate at the Fine Gael meeting was sparked after Dublin North West TD Noel Rock tabled a motion to discuss "profound concerns" relating to the scheme.

One source said the party was "getting it in the neck" from hundreds of people at public meetings about the proposals and claimed the issue was being seized on by opposition parties.

Mr Rock is said to have claimed that Mr Ross appeared "uninterested" in the bus plan.

Sources said Dublin Fingal TD Alan Farrell argued that it was a "mistake" for Mr Ross not to stay in the Dail chamber for the entirety of a debate on the matter.

Warned

Dublin South West TD Colm Brophy compared the issue to water charges and warned it could cost Fine Gael seats at the local elections.

Contributions were also made by Kate O'Connell and Frances Fitzgerald.

Sources said Senator James Reilly asked if Mr Ross could be asked to attend a Fine Gael meeting to discuss the issue.

Parliamentary party chairman Martin Heydon is understood to have said he will consider inviting Mr Ross.

During the Dail debate, Mr Ross said Fianna Fail TDs needed to "get their act together" and choose "which side you are on".

Yesterday, Fianna Fail said it supports a large portion of the project but expressed concerns about the redesign of routes. The party has reservations about the project, saying it must not be used to cut services.

Mr Ross entered the Dail chamber yesterday with a photograph of Fianna Fail TD John Lahart and Senator Gerry Horkan at a BusConnects event.

"Today we have the language of chaos and culling from Fianna Fail, yet here in the photo I have Deputy Lahart standing shoulder-to-shoulder with what he calls the culls," Mr Ross said.

"They cannot be on both sides on this one."

Dublin TD John Lahart said he supported seven of the eight elements of the plan but had concerns about the redesign of routes because passengers on popular routes would face having to make connections to complete journeys.
Springville explosion leaves families displaced, gas line may be the cause

Just after noon on Tuesday, a large explosion and subsequent fire came from an apartment complex at 500 South and Main Street in Springville. Two units of a six-unit north complex were completely lost. Several people have been displaced from both the north and south apartment complexes, according to police reports. No one was in the apartment where the explosion occurred according to Lt. Warren Foster. A parent and child were in the unit next door, but both got out safely. No one else was harmed. Work had been done on the gas line and it had been shut off. When the gas was turned on ...
From cyber security to eyelashes: New HCC incubator helping businesses

"Our goal is to recruit entrepreneurs both from in Washington County, from the region and from around the nation, if we could," says HCC president.
The writ petition filed by more than 350 serving army personnel in the Supreme Court is certainly in the best interests of our national security. Perhaps this was the only option left after the curative petition, moved by the Union of India seeking recall of the July 2016 verdict, was rejected by the apex court in April 2017. The Attorney General in the curative plea had highlighted the negative impact of the verdict on the ongoing counter proxy war and counter-insurgency campaigns in Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) and the north-eastern states along with its long term ramifications on national security.

It is apparent that the verdict was given without a clear understanding of the contours of an asymmetric war-fighting arena, which was also highlighted in the curative petition. The term asymmetric warfare encompasses proxy war, insurgency, guerrilla warfare, terrorism and all kinds of irregular warfare. The instant petition provides one more opportunity for the army and the nation to apprise the court of the challenges faced by the soldiers in safeguarding national interests in disturbed areas. Hopefully, this time around, a favourable verdict will restore status quo ante.

Areas experiencing unrest are declared disturbed only when the situation becomes grave and the movement turns violent with the armed cadre using lethal force to undermine the Constitution and challenge the authority of the government. Lets not forget that the majority of the terrorist and insurgent outfits in J&K and the Northeast have pursued secessionist designs, which have been contested and blunted only by the security forces with their sweat and blood. Such environments are dreadfully chaotic and are characterised by volatility, unpredictability, ambiguity, uncertainty and complexity. This is owing to the lack of intelligence, fluidity of operations, blurring of the distinction between friend and foe, malicious media reporting, changes in tactics and technology employed by the terrorists, time-sensitivity in accomplishing missions and the inimical stance of the subverted sections of the population and, at times, even the administration.

No proxy war or insurgency can survive without local support. It is the population that facilitates terrorists to wage war against the state by catering to their daily needs and providing hideouts, guides, intelligence on the security forces, porters for the movement of warlike material and planting improvised explosive devices.

While the terrorists and their supporters expect the security forces to abide by the international conventions, laws and rules of engagement, they themselves believe in none. Their modus operandi hinges on guile, deception, treachery, irrationality and barbarity with which they manipulate and shape the environment to bleed the security forces and put them on the back foot. Moreover, to dampen their morale, one of the most profitable low-cost, high impact options they always exercise is to discredit the soldiers by implicating them in human rights cases. Such vilification campaigns receive illimitable funds from inimical external players, including the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). Its a flourishing business for anti-national elements in such environments. There are numerous instances in which terrorists have used the locals as human shields while fighting the security forces and even killed them in cold blood and blamed it on the soldiers.

The Indian Armys record in upholding the law of the land and respecting human rights has been commendable vis-a-vis the other armies engaged in such warfare. Unlike the United States, NATO and Pakistan armies, the Indian Army has scrupulously refrained from employing fighter aircraft, gunships and artillery to neutralise terrorists. It has continued to operate with minimum force despite the disadvantages. According to statistics available with the Indian Army, approximately 96% of the human right allegations against the army have turned out to be false. Those found guilty of criminal misconduct or wilful defiance of the rules, have been dealt with sternly as per the law, with prior sanction of the government, as was the practice prior to the verdict, in terms of the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act.

The soldiers fight this dirty war not because they enjoy doing so; they do so because for them welfare and safety of the nation is always paramount. At this juncture, our great nation should stand with its army on this vital issue, which portends imminent threat to our national security. Any tampering with the time-tested asymmetric warfighting architecture will be a retrograde step in our campaigns and, over time, is bound to impinge on our sovereignty, unity and integrity besides robbing our soldiers of their boldness and initiative.

The issue certainly merits some serious soul-searching and introspection at all levels.

General Bikram Singh is the former Chief of the Army Staff

The views expressed are personal
Almost two decades after he bid direction adieu, Mahesh Bhatt confirmed on his 70th birthday that he will be helming Sadak 2, a sequel of the 1991 superhit, which will star daughters Alia Bhatt and Pooja Bhatt. The film will have Sanjay Dutt and Aditya Roy Kapur as the male leads. The Sadak 2 teaser was revealed by Alia on Mahesh Bhatts 70th birthday.

Alia wrote on Instagram, On your 70th Birthday you have given me the greatest present I could ask and dream for. You are directing me! Sadak 2 is a dream come true.. What I thought will never be possible you have made possible. Thank you daddy from the bottom of my heart, soul and bones.This will be a journey of discovery.. Of life, movies, feeling and most of all.. Of a father and daughter. I love you my not-so-old man! Happy Birthday.

The clip teasing Sadak 2 begins with a few scenes from the 1991 superhit starring Pooja and Sanjay and then segues into the announcement of the new film.

Mahesh himself wrote about returning to direction after almost 19 years. Life has no full stops. Just when I thought it was autumn, another spring arrives out of nowhere. I feel like a volcano that is about to explode again . There is no end, there is no beginning, there is only this never ending passionate flow of life, he tweeted.

Life has no full stops. Just when I thought it was autumn, another spring arrives out of nowhere. I feel like a volcano that is about to explode again . There is no end, there is no beginning, there is only this never ending passionate flow of life. pic.twitter.com/rwC5KaOOCT  Mahesh Bhatt (@MaheshNBhatt) September 20, 2018

Talking to Hindustan Times, Mahesh spoke about casting Alia in Sadak 2, It was Sanju (Sanjay Dutt), Mukesh and Pooja, who suggested that it (Sadak 2) should be narrated to Alia but we hadnt considered her while writing the script. Alia is a difficult cookie to crack because she only responds with her heart; shes very clear about whether she wants to embrace it wholeheartedly or say no. Honestly, she doesnt have to say yes and prove anything vis-a-vis our relationship; I also wouldnt belittle our relationship by putting this burden on her. We gave a full narration to her and by the end of it; she was left shaking and crying. That was one hell of a triumph.

Pooja, who played a girl being forced into sex trade in Sadak, also tweeted, And hes back!To breathe new life into our souls & to breathe more soul into our lives.I thought bdays were about receiving presents Pops & there you go and turn that on its head by giving us a gift instead-the gift of Sadak2 & the privilege of being directed by you. Shukriya!

Sanjay Dutt also wished Mahesh on his birthday and wrote, Thank you for giving me #Sadak bhatt saab. Wish you a very Happy Birthday. I love you! Proud to take this journey with you again @MaheshNBhatt & @PoojaB1972. #Sadak2 on 25th March 2020. Looking forward to working with @aliaa08 & #AdityaRoyKapoor.

And hes back!To breathe new life into our souls & to breathe more soul into our lives.I thought bdays were about receiving presents Pops & there you go and turn that on its head by giving us a gift instead-the gift of Sadak2 & the privilege of being directed by you. Shukriya! pic.twitter.com/A3xZNTtvi8  Pooja Bhatt (@PoojaB1972) September 20, 2018

Thank you for giving me #Sadak bhatt saab. Wish you a very Happy Birthday. I love you!

Proud to take this journey with you again @MaheshNBhatt & @PoojaB1972. #Sadak2 on 25th March 2020. Looking forward to working with @aliaa08 & #AdityaRoyKapoor.#MukeshBhatt @VisheshFilms pic.twitter.com/BaI6a4yUTO  Sanjay Dutt (@duttsanjay) September 20, 2018

The announcement is truly important as it brings back Mahesh in the directors chair years after he announced his retirement. Also, daughter Alia is playing at the top of her prowess right now. It is also a collaboration with Pooja who chose direction over acting more than a decade back.

The film will release on March 25, 2020.
Looks like after our gorgeous girls, Priyanka Chopra and Deepika Padukone, it is the turn of our boys to make it big in Hollywood. Tiger Shroff, son of Jackie Shroff and Ayesha, may be making his Hollywood debut in a big budget film.

According to a report in Mumbai Mirror, Lawrence Kasanoff, who is the producer of the Mortal Kombat series, made a quiet visit to Mumbai to meet Tiger and discuss details of the project. It is expected to be an action film. Lawrence, along with a big studio head and Emmy Award-winning writer Sean Catherine Derek of the Batman series came to Mumbai. Sanjay Grover, son of veteran actor Gulshan Grover, who has been part of the project for the last one year, was also part of the meetings, the report added.

Tiger Shroff strikes an action pose during a programme in Mumbai on September 10, 2018. (IANS)

Quoting a source, the report said that it was Sanjay who recommended Tigers name to the Hollywood filmmaker.

The report adding a quote by the source said: Larry shared the script of his film with Sanjay who suggested they bring on board a fresh new face to play the lead and strongly recommended his childhood buddy Tiger with whom he had studied in school, to play the lead. Larry and his team were impressed with Tiger who they felt has an international look, is trained in martial arts, has a large fan following and has age on his side.

For the uninitiated, Sanjay has previously worked as director, Special Projects at Metro Goldwyn Mayer (MGM) for over a decade and has been associated with movies like The Hobbit, The Zookeeper, Fame, Creed and the James Bond franchise. If the project comes through Tiger could be seen fighting Jackie Chan, Chuck Norris and Shannon Lee, daughter of the legendary Bruce Lee.

Meanwhile, Tiger has his hands full here in Bollywood. He will soon be seen in Karan Johars next presentation, Student of the Year 2 (which will see two new faces Ananya Pandey and Tara Sutaria make their film debuts) and another one with Yash Raj, where he will star with his childhood idol, Hrithik Roshan. Reports add that he will be will seen in Sidharth Anands official Hindi remake of Sylvester Stallones Rambo.

Follow @htshowbiz for more
The girl gang raped in a leading school on the outskirts of Dehradun and her father recorded their statements before a local court on Wednesday, while her medical report confirmed sexual assault, police said.

A check by the state education department found that the school had violated several safety norms and it could soon lose its license, an official said.

The victim and her father recorded their statements before the court of Additional District Judge (Civil) Manju Singh, Investigating Officer Naresh Rathore said.

The medical report has also arrived confirming the victim was sexually assaulted, Rathore said.

Nine persons, including students accused of the crime, school officials and employees have been arrested in connection with the case.

While three minors boys have been sent to a correctional home in Haridwar by the Juvenile Justice Board, their adult accomplice and five school employees including its director and principal were sent to the district jail in Dehradun on judicial remand, he said.

The school employees were arrested as they kept the heinous crime committed within the premises under wraps for a month, the police officer said.

The crime took place on August 14 and came to light on September 16 despite the school authorities already knowing about it, Rathore said.

The victim shared her ordeal first with her elder sister who studied at the same school. She informed the school authorities who instead of approaching the police tried to hush it up by threatening to throw the sisters out of school if they disclosed it to anyone, an official said.

However, after sometime the elder sister of the survivor confided it to a relative who approached the police.

Meanwhile, the state education department announced it will cancel the licence and no objection certificate issued to the school.

Chief education officer SB Joshi who visited the school said it had violated several norms including installing no CCTVs on campus and not deploying security guards for the safety of students.

CBSE regional officer Ranvir Singh said he had recommended to the head office cancellation of the schools affiliation. The response to a show cause notice issued to the school to explain its actions was not found satisfactory, he said.
Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal and deputy chief minister Manish Sisodia were the kingpins of a criminal conspiracy that led to an assault on chief secretary Anshu Prakash at the CMs official residence on February 19, according to the charge sheet filed by Delhi police.

The charge sheet, which has been seen by HT, was filed in a Delhi court on August 13. It blames Kejriwal and Sisodia for calling Prakash to the meeting deceitfully, and with criminal intent, to pressurise him.

Taking cognisance of the charge sheet on Tuesday, additional chief metropolitan magistrate Samar Vishal directed Kejriwal, Sisodia and 11 other Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) legislators to be present in court on October 25. The court is likely to frame charges against them on that day. The AAP denies the allegations.

The 1,300-page document charges the 13 AAP leaders for offences, including criminal conspiracy, assaulting a public servant, threatening to cause death or grievous injury, and wrongful confinement, among other sections. The most stringent of the sections  section 506(2)  carries a maximum punishment of seven years in prison.

In the charge sheet, the police have accused AAP MLAs Amanatullah Khan and Prakash Jarwal of abusing and slapping Prakash.

The police have alleged that the top bureaucrat was made to sit on a sofa and was hit on his head and temple by the two MLAs. The police have said that following the assault, Prakashs spectacles fell on the ground, which left him shocked.

On Tuesday, AAPs chief spokesperson Saurabh Bhardwaj called the charge sheet bogus and fake, and denied all allegations against his party leaders. He alleged that police registered the case to malign the Delhi government. On the Delhi Police calling the two top AAP leaders the kingpins of the attack, Congress leader Haroon Yusuf said the party has been involved in criminality since its inception and the charge sheet is a testimony of the fact. Ravinder Gupta, general secretary of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in Delhi, said the charge sheet has exposed AAP completely. Whatever police have said in the charge sheet about them is already known, he said.

The Delhi Police had on February 20 filed an FIR based on Prakashs complaint, in which he alleged he was called by the Kejriwals advisor, VK Jain, for a midnight meeting to discuss release of the partys advertisements related to the government completing three years in Delhi.

The AAP said at the time that Kejriwal and MLAs had called Prakash to discuss why a large number of families were not getting rations due to the glitches in the implementation of Aadhaar.

Prakash said that he was manhandled and assaulted in the course of the meeting. Police filed the case after the chief secretary was examined by a team of doctors at the Ram Manohar Lohia hospital.

The alleged attack caused a rift between IAS officers and the political executive of the Delhi government.
The Delhi Commission for Women (DCW) has said that it will soon move a proposal with the Delhi government, asking them to formulate a policy for rehabilitation of rescued victims and improvement of shelter homes in the national capital.

A draft policy pertaining to the issue was framed in March this year. The policy was kept in public domain for stakeholders to give their comments. However, the draft policy had some issues and the government had asked the Commission to rework it. The DCW had, in 2017, set up a 16-member expert panel to work on the policy. The same panel was asked to rework it.

Around 60 per cent of those rescued in the 573 rescue operations carried out by the DCW in the last three years are victims of human trafficking  whose rehabilitation have been problematic, DCW officials said. The policy on the issue, DCW officials said, will aim to reduce the rate of rescued victims falling back into the trap of trafficking for lack of rehabilitation steps such as skill training to earn a living.

DCW chief Swati Maliwal said, So far, rehabilitation of victims has been a major problem due to the lack of a state-level policy on the issue. We are waiting for the recommendations of the expert committee, following which we will write to the government again and ask them to finalise the policy. If required, we may start a pilot project on the basis of the expert panels suggestions.

The policy, she said, will include improvements to the condition of shelter homes in the city. The city needs a more organised policy for improving conditions of shelter homes where victims are housed for rehabilitation, she said.

At present, there are 75 shelter homes for women in the city. Only last month, the commission had rescued 73 women reportedly victims of trafficking rescued from south Delhis Munirka and Maidangarhi and north Delhis Paharganj.
For the last one year, allottees of Delhi Development Authoritys (DDA) 2014 housing scheme have been waiting for the authority to do away with a clause that prohibits them from selling the flats before five years from the date of allotment.

In 2017, the authority had done away with the five year lock-in period clause while re-selling 13,000 flats that had been surrendered by the allottees of the 2014 housing scheme.

The flats are the same. We cant sell our flats while those who were allotted the flats in 2017 can. How can DDA have two different policies? said Vaibhav Puggal, former RWA president of a DDA housing complex in Rohinis Sector 35. He said he had also filed a complaint regarding the same with the DDA.

In 2017, we were assured that a circular to remove the lock-in period will be issued soon. But it has been a year and no action has been taken so far, said Puggal.

In reply to Puggals complaint, DDA has said that the proposal to do away with the lock-in period is under consideration.

Some allottees also alleged that the land-owning agency had not been able to provide even the basic civic infrastructure in the last three years. Water is supplied through tankers in the society. A majority of the houses have not got water meters installed, but we have been asked to pay water bills. Ever since the flats were handed over to us, we have been asking DDA to provide us with basic infrastructure. But little has been done so far, said Sanjay Saini, resident of DDA housing complex in Narela G2.

Aneesh Puri, president of DDA flats in Narela A-9, said that the DDA has not paid attention on the upkeep of his colony despite charging money from residents. We are finding it hard to maintain the society and provide essential facility to residents. Despite repeated complaints, DDA is doing little to maintain the area, said Puri.

A senior DDA official aware of the matter said, The matter related to five year lock-in period is under consideration. A proposal in this regard will soon be placed in the DDA meeting.

Following representations from allottees last year, DDA had assured them that a decision to do away with the clause will be taken soon. The possession of the flats was given to us three years ago. How long will it take DDA to remove the clause? Those who bought the flats in 2014 are at the receiving end of DDAs poor planning, said Puggal.

DDAs last two housing schemes, in 2014 and 2017, have got a poor response from the public. Of the 25,000 flats put on sale in 2014, close to 13,000 were surrendered by allottees. In 2017, DDA came out with a new housing scheme to re-sell these flats. Of the 12,072 flats put on sale, close to 8,000 were surrendered again.

In the recent meeting, the land-owning agency approved a proposal to sell these flats to government organisations and PSUs.
The wife and daughter of a retired high court judge were allegedly held hostage in a room by three people, including their domestic help, during a robbery in south Delhis New Friends Colony on Monday.

The suspects allegedly attacked the retired judges 75-year-old wife and her 40-year-old daughter with an iron rod when they resisted the robbery.

They then ransacked the house and decamped with cash and jewellery worth around Rs 20 lakh. Police said the domestic help had let his two friends enter his employers home to assist him in the robbery.

Police said the domestic help, Sandeep, was employed only ten days ago. The family had not got his police verification done yet. No documents related to his identification or residential address were found with the family, said a police officer.

The officer said the crime took place on Monday night when the elderly woman and her daughter were sleeping in a room when they heard some noise in their home. When the womans daughter came out , she was overpowered and pushed inside. As she tried to raise an alarm, the three men attacked her with an iron rod and threatened her.

The women were held hostage in their room and one of the men stood guard outside. The other men ransacked the house and fled with cash and jewellery. The womans daughter later called the police control room and informed them about the robbery , said the officer.

We have registered a robbery case and have launched a probe. The investigating team has got some clues about the suspects. They will be nabbed soon, added the officer.

Police said the elderly womans husband had retired as a Delhi high court judge in 1986.
For Satish Kumar, 22, son of a farmer in Rajasthans Jhunjhunu, a job in Indian Railways was like a dream come true, even if he had to pay Rs 8 lakh to get it. A government job as ticket collector(TC) in the railways with a Rs 40,000 per month starting salary, plus perks and a secure future, meant a lot.

Kumar was told to start as a trainee, first at Delhis Adarsh Nagar railway station, and then at Uttar Pradeshs Muzaffarnagar railway station. For two months, Kumar did his 10am to 5pm duty at the two stations, during which time he was asked to record the arrival and departure timing of all trains. He was issued an identity card and received Rs 6,500 and Rs 8,500 in his bank account as his trainees salary for the first two months.

Kumars problems began when he completed his probation and did not receive the promised salary of Rs 40,000. He tried to contact the people who had helped him get the job but their phones were switched off. He then visited the Railway Board office in New Delhi and was told that the appointment letter was fake.

Kumars case is not a solitary one.

On Tuesday, Delhi Police busted one such pan-India job racket in which aspirants were duped of Rs 22 lakh after promising them jobs in the Oil and Natural Gas Corporation (ONGC). Seven men  two of them employees of the rural development ministry, a software engineer and a web designer  were arrested. Police said the arrested men conducted interviews of job aspirants in the highly secured premises of Krishi Bhawan, which houses key Union ministries.

Deputy commissioner of police (crime), Bhisham Singh, said their probe revealed that the fraudsters sent interview confirmation emails to candidates through accounts that was similar to ones used by ONGC. They also used mobile apps to make the job applicants believe that they had indeed received a call from the landline number of the corporation. The interviews were conducted at the vacant offices of senior officials at Krishi Bhawan with the help of the two junior employees of the rural development ministry.

Their objective was to win the confidence of candidates by making everything look genuine, Singh said, adding the arrested men admitted to having conned over two dozen job aspirants over the last three or four years.

Whenever such fraudulent activities are brought to notice, ONGC takes necessary actions, an ONGC spokesperson said.

Police files show that hundreds of aspirants are victims of mushrooming job rackets.

From conducting physical eligibility tests, written exams and medical tests at government offices and hospitals, to paying salaries during the training period, Delhis job racketeers excel at manipulating the system and duping job aspirants, often in collusion with government officials.

In 2018, the Delhi Police busted at least eight fake employment rackets and arrested 30 people from different gangs who had duped hundreds of job aspirants from Delhi, Rajasthan, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, and Hyderabad. They were promised jobs in Indian Railways, Indian Army and Territorial Army, Food Corporation of India, ONGC and various nationalised banks.

What is unique about these gangs is their modus operandi that is too good to be true, said deputy commissioner of police (crime), Ram Gopal Naik, who busted one of the rackets in May that promised jobs in the Indian Territorial Army.

Five men, including one serving and two retired Army personnel, were arrested for allegedly cheating seven men from Haryana of over Rs 25 lakh. A case was registered against them in on the complaint of Sudhir Kumar from Haryanas Charkhi Dadri, who was allegedly duped of Rs 5 lakh, and two others.

Explaining the modus operandi, Naik said the fraudsters approached the victims through a common friend and promised them jobs in the Territorial Army by using their contacts.

The aspirants were introduced to army constable Amit Kumar at the Territorial Army office premises in the Delhi Cantonment and assured them that he would manage the entire recruitment process. The physical eligibility test of the three candidates were conducted at 150 Territorial Ground in the cantonment area -- a highly secure area where their entry was facilitated by Kumar.

Police later discovered that he had mislead the army personnel deputed at the entry gate, saying the three men were job aspirants from his village, and he had brought them to the ground for practice sessions so they could qualify the physical tests.

The candidates were made to run and participate in other physical tests, similar to the ones given in the armys physical eligibility tests, said an investigator who asked not to be named.

A few days later, the candidates were informed that they had qualified for the next round, and were called again to cantonment area for a written test. They were given question papers in a parking lot, and were helped with answers. The candidates were told that it was a special arrangement they had made to help them clear the exam. The racketeers wore in uniform, the question papers looked genuine, and a stipulated time was given to write the answers  which hardly left any doubts in the minds of the candidates, the investigator said.

In the final round, an ex-military man, Sandeep (who goes by one name), posed as an army doctor and took the candidates to Army Base hospital, where he took their blood samples. As Sandeeps last posting before retirement was at the hospital, most staffers knew him, and he took advantage of it, police said.

The fraudsters issued fake appointment letters and asked candidates to reach Bangalore for their first posting as trainees. The candidates realised they were duped when nobody came to receive them at the airport and the mobile numbers of their facilitators were switched off.

HT couldnt reach the Indian Army for a comment.

Police said gangs offering jobs in the Railways used a similar modus operandi to dupe aspirants. One of the gang that was busted this June was run by a woman, who is still absconding. She cheated 14 job seekers to the tune of over Rs 1 crore. The meetings between them and racketeers, who pretended to be senior Railway officials, was conducted at New Delhi railway station and in Northern Railways HQ.

A written exam was conducted at these places, and the candidates were taken to the Railway hospital as well as other government hospitals for medical tests. They were later issued fake appointment letters. The candidates were given job training at various railway stations in Delhi and UP and even paid salary of two-three months, said Joy Tirkey, DCP (crime).

Railways have been issuing advisory through its website and media that there is no interview in the recruitment process and entire exercise in online. We are creating awareness so that job seekers are not cheated, said a spokesperson for railway.
The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh chief Mohan Bhagwats lecture series in Delhi stemmed from the organisations desire to reach out to the capitals residents, particularly its opinion-making elite; allay misconceptions that exist about the Sangh worldview and functioning; and present its own vision. The Sangh wields tremendous influence in contemporary India  through both its political affiliate, the Bharatiya Janata Party, as well as other affiliates working with students, teachers, tribals, workers, farmers, the Hindu religious leadership and other groups. Bhagwats elaborate policy statements were critical in showing the ways in which the Sangh had evolved.

For one, on the minorities, while the Sangh remains a Hindu organisation, committed to Hindutva and a Hindu rashtra, it has acknowledged that Muslims are as Indian as Hindus; they have a place in Indian society; and their exclusion cannot lead to a stronger nation. The most important departure in this regard was Bhagwat distancing himself from Guru Golwalkars more extreme texts on Muslims  and emphasising that the organisation had evolved since then. Two, the Sangh goal of Hindu unity has often been seen as a code for upper caste domination. But with its unequivocal support for reservations and inter-caste marriages, and acknowledgment that it needed to get more diverse, it has sought to become more inclusive at least in terms of bringing backward communities, Dalits and tribals into its fold. Three, Bhagwat  by acknowledging the role of other political actors, including the Congress and communists, who have been bitter ideological adversaries  tried to position the Sangh as being above the partisan fray. And four, while it may be cautious and uncomfortable, there is a degree of social liberalism that seemed to have found its way within the Sangh, for instance its openness to accepting difference in the case of sexual minorities.

All these are welcome changes. But what is important now is that this gets internalised on the ground. There has been violence in the name of causes dear to the Sangh, by activists who draw inspiration from the Sangh, and often through affiliates of the Sangh. Distancing itself from it  through sporadic condemnations  is not enough for the RSS. What is needed is a mass campaign by the Sangh to crack down on any such activity. And while the Sanghs views have clearly evolved, the trace of Hindu supremacy or belief that Hindus are the true inheritors of Indian civilisation persists. This too must change and a more accommodative vision constructed. Bhagwats outreach was important. The same message of inclusion, non-violence, harmony and brotherhood must now trickle down to the shakhas.
Telangana state level police recruitment board has released the hall ticket for the examination to recruit Stipendiary Cadet Trainee (SCT) Police Constable (PC) civil and some other equivalent posts. The preliminary written test (PWT) to fill 16,925 tentative vacancies will be conducted on September 30 from 10am to 1pm.

The PWT will be of three hours duration and carry a maximum of 200 marks. The exam will be objective in nature and carry 200 questions of intermediate standard. The questions will be to test your knowledge of English, arithmetic, general science, history of India, Indian culture, Indian national movement, Indian geography, polity and economy, Current events of national and international importance, Test of reasoning / mental ability, contents pertaining to the state of Telangana.

Candidates who have applied for the exam can download their admit card by clicking here.

The minimum marks to be secured by the candidates in order to qualify in the Preliminary Written Test is 40% for OCs, 35% for BCs and 30% for SCs / STs / Ex-Servicemen. Questions in the Paper will be objective in nature and will be set in English, Telugu and Urdu languages. Candidates have to answer the questions on an OMR answer sheet using Blue / Black Ball Point Pen only. Candidates should bring their own ball point pens.

Telangana SCT PC 2018 admit card: Steps to download

1) Visit the official website of Telangana state level police recruitment board

2) Click on the link for Download hall ticket

3) Key in your registered mobile number and password

4) Click on sign in

5) Take a printout of admit card and save it on your computer

Note: Candidates must bring their admit card to the examination centre.
A boy who went missing from south Delhis Chhatarpur area when he was six years old, was traced to Gurugram and reunited with his family on Tuesday evening in an over nine-year-long saga of loss, despair, providence and perseverance.

Hassan Ali, now 16, had been living in a child care institute (CCI) in Gurugram since he was separated from his parents on March 2, 2009. He had given up on the prospect of reuniting with his family  until a chance trip to an amusement park earlier this year changed everything.

This July 22, Ali was travelling with about 100 others from the CCI to an amusement park in Sonepat. As they were crossing the Chhatarpur area, he told Ashique Ali, a CCI coordinator, that he has seen the place before, and that he remembered having been here several times with his family.

This clue triggered in 24-year-old Ashique the will to reunite Ali with his parents and to help him find his home.

That evening, while they were returning from the trip, Ashique and Ali got off the bus at Chhatarpur and asked the others to go ahead. We kept on roaming at several places but could not get any leads. We returned, but then we kept visiting the area regularly in search of clues, Ashique said.

Ali had gone missing from a playground in Chhatarpur. It was assumed that he had run away from the madrasa in which he studied. The two did not know that Alis family had since moved from Delhi to Dharuhera, 60km away.

Ashique and Ali kept making trips to Chhatarpur every few days. In the last week of July, the two met a few children playing in a small ground and asked them if there was any madrasa in the vicinity. They took us to the maulvi, Mohammad Shamshir Qari. He immediately recognised Hassan, hugged him, and took out his mobile phone to contact the boys grandfather, who often called him on the off chance that Ali had returned, said Ashique.

Qari later took the boy to his grandfather, but even he had not been in contact with the boys parents for a few years because of some family dispute. Ashique said, after searching for two months, they found a contact of a relative in West Bengal, but he also said he had not been in contact with the parents.

By now, word had spread in the extended Ali family, and a hunt for the parents had begun.

Eventually, on Monday evening, one of Alis relatives found them in Dharuhera after getting a tip that they may be there. He informed them that their son had been found a decade later. Delighted, the parents rushed to Gurugram and went straight to the CCI late at night.

Hassan Ali with his mother (R) outside child care institute (CCI) in Narsinghpur, Gurugram. (Yogendra Kumar/HT PHOTO)

I couldnt believe my eyes  my son was in front of me! He immediately recognised us. We were taken to the Child Welfare Committee (CWC) for documentation the next morning, said Salim Mohammad, 40, the boys father.

Mohammad said he had sent Ali to study at a madarsa in Chhatarpur because he was then a daily wage labourer who earned Rs 50 a day and could not afford to admit him in a private school. Hassan had refused to study at madrasa and cried a lot, but I thought he will start staying with other children, and will gradually start liking the place. Even his mother was unwilling to send him, but I wanted him to study and do well in life, he added.

Two months after that, Mohammad got a call from the madrasa saying the boy was missing. He was last seen playing with other children in a nearby playground. It was suspected that the boy might have boarded a bus and travelled somewhere.

Mohammad said he left work to search for Ali  the family spent days at the railway station and bus stop scoping for clues  registered a missing complaint at Mehrauli police station, but could not find him.

The parents gave up after four months, and shifted to Sector 92, Gurugram, where they got a job at a construction site. I lost my younger daughter, she fell ill and we could not take care of her. My husband had no money to look after her  we were already depressed, and one tragedy was followed by another, said Hamida Biwi, Alis mother.

The parents have now learnt that the boy was spotted by Gurugram Police on the day he went missing in 2009  he was crying on the street, all alone. He was unable to furnish details of his family despite being asked several times. He was then produced before the CWC and sent to Ujjwal Niketan, a child care in Gurugrams Sector 4, where he lived for eight years.

In March last year, after the CCI was declared illegal for allegedly accepting two minor girls and releasing them for adoption against rules of the Juvenile Justice Act 2015, Hassan was shifted to Udayan Care, a CCI in Gurugrams Narsinghpur.

Ali studies in class 8 in a private school, and will move to his parents home after his exams next year.

CWC chairperson Shakuntala Dhull said they have reunited several children who went missing, but this is a unique case where a child was reunited after a gap of nine years. Learning from this, we have directed CCIs to ask other children if they can share anything about the place, location or city they are from. They will be taken to those places and we will share the picture and details with the local police, she said.
Following a letter from Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan to PM Narendra Modi, India has confirmed a meeting between external affairs minister Sushma Swaraj and her counterpart Shah Mehmood Qureshi in New York later this month.

I can confirm that on the request of the Pakistani side, a meeting between EAM & Pakistani foreign minister will take place on the sidelines of UNGA at a mutually convenient date and time, said MEA spokesperson Raveesh Kumar.

Swaraj will leave for New York on September 24. She and Qureshi are heading the delegations of their respective countries to the United Nations General Assembly.

The two foreign ministers are to attend the SAARC foreign ministers lunch and get-together on September 27.

As the first step, Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan, in his letter, had suggested a meeting between the foreign ministers of the two countries on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly meeting.

Though Imran Khan called for resumption of comprehensive dialogue process, India would like to see progress on the neighbour addressing its concerns on terrorism, sources indicated.

They said any move such as Pakistan moving ahead with the process of bringing those behind 26/11 Mumbai terror attacks would be a proof of its sincerity in addressing New Delhis concerns.

The India-Pakistan ties have nose-dived in recent years with no bilateral talks taking place.

Relations between the two countries had strained after the terror attacks by Pakistan-based groups in 2016 and Indias surgical strikes inside Pakistan-occupied Kashmir. The sentencing of alleged Indian spy Kulbhushan Jadhav to death by a military court in April last year further deteriorated bilateral ties.

The two sides often accuse each other of ceasefire violations along the Line of Control, resulting in civilian casualties.

India had also announced decision to skip the 2016 SAARC Summit to be held in Islamabad due to prevailing circumstances after a major terror attack on an Indian Army camp in Uri in Jammu and Kashmir on September 18 that year.

The summit was called off after Bangladesh, Bhutan and Afghanistan also declined to participate.
The fuel for the Gaurav Yatra undertaken by Rajasthan chief minister Vasundhara Raje has been bought with the money of the states common people, Congress president Rahul Gandhi said on Thursday.

The petrol and diesel for the vehicles of the Gaurav Yatra comes from your pockets. When you see (prime minister Narendra) Modiji smiling or the advertisements of the Vasundhara Raje government, these are paid from money taken from your pockets, he said addressing a party rally at Sagwara in the states Dungarpur district.

The Congress will fight the elections in Rajasthan with unity to alleviate the suffering of the states people under the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), he said. Our party leaders have understood one thing that BJP governments have only brought pain and suffering to the people of Rajasthan.

He said that Congress had announced railway lines worth Rs 2000 crore to connect the districts of Rajasthan, but the BJP government cancelled this project.

We will implement this when we come to power, he added.

Hitting out at prime minister Narendra Modis pet bullet train project, Gandhi said it would the railway budget of India is Rs 1,50,000 crore but the prime minister announced the bullet train of Rs 1,00,000 crore that only benefits a handful of people.

The MNREGA empowered millions of people by providing them guaranteed employment. Even this was stolen away from Modi government. All policies started by the Modi government only benefit a handful of people, he said.

No one can save Rajasthan government from falling. Neither Narendra Modi, nor his money. Our work is to protect the common people by prioritising job creation. Make in India has flopped. The Congress government will open the doors of banks to our the youth and MSMEs (micro, small, and medium enterprises of Rajasthan who in turn will provide employment, he said.
A revised draft of the forest policy retains the controversial idea of commercial plantations in forest areas, although it now says local communities will get a share of the benefits.

The change, which activists are still not happy with, is part of several significant amendments in the draft forest policy based on more than 1200 comments received from stake-holders. The finalised draft will now be sent to the Cabinet.

A major change is facilitating tripartite agreements between industry, government and the local community to give the community a share of economic benefits from private plantation projects, said a senior forest-division official who asked not to be identified. The original clause on facilitating forest-industry interface had drawn flak from environmentalists and forest-rights groups because it encouraged forest corporations and industrial units to develop industrial plantations to meet the demand for timber. The clause was misunderstood, the forest division official added, as the areas that will be prioritised for industrial plantations will be fallow land, degraded land recorded as jhudpi jungle (a kind of revenue forest), degraded forests and orange areas (disputed land in Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh). Protected forests will not be considered for the projects, he said.

Industry has already expressed interest in making investments in these large-scale commercial plantations. Timber is a carbon neutral resource. Indias annual timber import is worth Rs 42,000 crore, this gap needs to be bridged. Plus, our aim is to have at least 33% forest cover nationally. We currently have 24%, these plantations will help cover the 9% left. Our priority for such industrial projects will be areas outside protected forests because the communities are dependent on forests for livelihoods. We plan to make the local community a partner in these projects, the officer said.

Activists campaigning for forest and land rights said the clause continues to be as damaging to forest communities and biodiversity. We are concerned about the final version of the forest policy. What are degraded forests? Its a very arbitrary description. Many such forest areas are being used for shifting cultivation (jhum) on ground. Plus these common lands are yet to be recognised for community forest resource rights, said Tushar Dash of Community Forest Rights-Learning and Advocacy (CFR-LA) group.

He added that jhudpi jungle, degraded revenue forests and orange areas are forests where communities have traditional rights and allowing commercial ventures violated the forest rights act 2006.

There is a specific clause in the forest rights act recognising community rights in those areas in orange areas, which are disputed between revenue and forest departments.

In some cases, these plantations will come up on so-called commons currently used by local communities.

Orange areas are about 30 lakh acres of land in Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh that were doubly recorded as forest and revenue lands after the zamindari abolition act. Both of these areas are used as common lands by the local communities, said Sanjay Upadhyay, a SC advocate who has worked on a number of forest cases.

Activists are also worried that the plantations being planned will just become another business.The focus on plantations underplays the existing biodiversity of forest lands and also runs a serious risk of turning them into monoculture areas with the singular purpose of revenue generation, said Kanchi Kohli, researcher, Centre for Policy Research. Another change made to the draft is the inclusion of forest-dwelling communities in conservation efforts.
Andhra Pradeshs (AP) power sector is going through a second phase of reforms. While the first phase (1999 - 2004) was widely seen as focused on privatisation on electricity distribution, this time the goal is to ensure affordable and reliable power supply for all. To do so, chief minister Chandrababu Naidu has pledged to keep retail tariffs unchanged in the coming years for all consumer categories, while improving the quality of supply and service.

At present, there is a strong Central government push to raise retail tariffs to reflect the rising costs of supply -- a target set for states under the UDAY scheme for discoms financial turnaround. This makes Andhra Pradeshs plan to improve electricity without any additional cost burden on the consumers particularly intriguing. Can Naidu pull off this trick while avoiding negative consequences for Andhra Pradeshs electricity sector? What are the consequences of failure?

The context for this latest gambit is the earlier reform effort of 1999-2004. Back then, despite backing from the chief minister (it was Naidu then too), supportive and skilled regulators and utilities, and Central government backing, the plan to improve discoms health through tariff and management reforms did not receive public support. Although discoms registered efficiency gains, the public focused on the accompanying tariff hikes which caused mass agitations. Some have suggested this was central to Naidus defeat in the 2004 state assembly election.

In his return to power in 2014 in a smaller Andhra Pradesh, Naidu has devised a second, revised reform strategy. First, consumers are at the centre of reforms, and are promised high quality service at affordable prices. Notably, however, this does not include promises of 247 supply of free power to farmers, as in Telangana. Second, the reform relies on disruptive technologies to bring down the power bills of discoms through a five-point strategy: improve supply through enhanced renewable energy (RE) generation, energy storage technologies, and full capacity utilisation of conventional power plants; implement energy efficiency measures; strengthen the transmission and distribution (T&D) network to bring down losses to below 6%; adopt IT for better consumer services; and lastly, improve financial management of power projects including loan swaps.

There are early signs of progress. The state has achieved 7 GW RE installed capacity, which is 10% of the national RE capacity and 30% of the states total generation capacity. To complement RE capacity, Andhra Pradesh has inaugurated the first thermal battery plant of India and allocated over 100 acres land for energy storage projects. The state has set a target of 1 million electric vehicles on road by 2023 backed by a dedicated electric mobility policy and planned investment of Rs 30,000 crores. Andhra Pradesh has emerged as a national frontrunner in the State Energy Efficiency Preparedness Index. To improve efficiency and reliability of the T&D network, the state has initiated a US$ 570 million project last year, with donor assistance.

What works in Andhra Pradeshs favour is that the state has some breathing room to manoeuvre. Following the bifurcation of the state, Andhra Pradesh gained from a slight reduction in subsidised load (domestic and agriculture) and AT&C losses.Since it is a relatively wealthy state, it has managed a persistent revenue gap by increased state subvention, from 12% of discoms revenue requirement in 2014-15 and 2015-16 to 19% in 2018-19 (see chart), preventing a decline in quality of service. In September 2018, the per unit revenue gap was Rs 0.06, one-fifth of the national average, and AT&C losses were 11%, half of the national average, as reported by the UDAY portal. These developments make Andhra Pradesh a leader in UDAY target achievements while providing the fiscal space to manage the political demands for explicit subsidies.

However, for long term gains, Andhra Pradesh will need to use this breathing room to bring down the costs of supply and create enough demand for the additional power capacity it is adding through RE and augmented capacity utilisation. Naidu hopes his plans for industrialisation will absorb the surplus power. Whether this works will depend on growth in industrialisation as well as proper resource planning for the additional generation capacity.

Notably, Andhra Pradesh has proactively sought to capture the gains of falling RE generation costs as technology improves. The counter, and more problematic story, is that industrial consumers would leave the grid to capture these gains through direct installation of RE, which would cut into the cross subsidy available for poorer customers. Andhra Pradesh is seeking to manage this transition by proactively adopting these disruptive technologies in an effort to reduce the power bills for all, but also retaining industry through improved quality and a stable tariff.

In this tale of two reforms, Andhra Pradesh has moved from a price and privatisation-focused effort to one that aims to put consumers upfront. If they fail, the results would be dismal and all too familiar  low tariffs combined with growing stranded capacity as new generation finds no takers, and cross subsidy declines as industrial customers flee. But the Andhra Pradesh reforms are designed specifically and deliberately to avoid these traps, which is what makes them interesting. If Andhra Pradesh succeeds, it will signal an alternative, consumer welfare-focused, model of power reforms. While it is too early to predict success, this is an effort worth watching..

(Ashwini K Swain is executive director at Centre for Energy, Environment & Resources, and visiting fellow at Centre for Policy Research. This research is based on work presented in full in the book Mapping Power, edited by Dubash, Kale and Bharvirkar.)
Mumbai-based professional Darshak Hathi flies three times a week but never had as harrowing experience as he had on his Thursday morning flight to Jaipur.

Hathi was one of 166 people on board a Jet Airways Mumbai-Jaipur flight, which returned about 50 minutes after takeoff because the cabin crew forgot to put on a key switch that maintains cabin pressure. Hathi and other passengers reported screams and cries of fear as the aircraft climbed, with the emergency oxygen masks eventually coming down.

I had severe headache due to the low cabin pressure. We were all surprised when the oxygen masks got deployed. Most of us felt that there was no oxygen being deployed from the mask due to which we continued to feel uneasy. Though the next flight did not have any such issue, the cascading effect continued to trouble us. I travel thrice in a week, but I had never experienced such an ear pain before.

The airline said it has taken its flights cockpit crew off scheduled duties until an investigation into the incident is completed.

I hope that such a situation never occur in the future. There was no response in the first flight that took off from Mumbai. Cabin crew just regretted the inconvenience and delay in the alternative flight, Hathi said at Jaipur airport later.

Satish Nair, a passenger who reported bleeding from his nose, was on business trip. He said the crew members did not handle the situation well.

There were 166 passengers and seven crew members, including five attendants, on board the flight.

A passenger said after the flight landed in Mumbai, they were separated into two groups, with those with nose and ear bleeds promised priority transport to the terminal.

However, they were made to wait . Mumbai International Airport Limited (MIAL), the company that runs Mumbai airport) had deployed just one ambulance on the tarmac for us.

Mumbai International Airport Limited did not respond.

Of the passengers, 144 traveled to Jaipur via an alternative flight of the airline, while 17 of them wished to travel at another point in time. Five of the passengers were taken to Dr Balabai Nanavati Hospital, Vile Parle.

The five patients, all males, have mild conductive deafness, a temporary condition which is likely to take a week or 10 days to heal. They are advised not to fly till then. They are undergoing all required tests, said Nanavati Hospitals chief operating officer Rajendra Patankar.

Another passenger Ankur Kala, who suffered nasal bleeding, said oxygen masks were deployed about 15 minutes after takeoff but there were no announcements or instructions from the crew. We were covering our ears and holding the oxygen mask with our hands but it was still intolerablewhen I removed my mask it was full of blood. I told my co-passengers that I am bleeding and waved to the air hostess, but she told me to remain seated and that all is normal, Kala said.

(with agency inputs)
The Congress on Thursday escalated its attacks on the Modi government over the Rafale deal with party chief Rahul Gandhi demanding defence minister Nirmala Sitharamans resignation for lying on the capability of Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL) to build the fighter aircraft.

The RM (Rafale Minister) tasked with defending corruption has been caught lying again. The former HAL Chief, TS Raju, has nailed her lie, that HAL didnt have the capability to build the RAFALE. Her position is untenable & she must resign, Gandhi tweeted.

He was referring to a September 20 Hindustan Times report on the former HAL chiefs assertion that the state-run plane maker could have built Rafale aircraft in India had the government managed to close the original negotiations with French aerospace firm Dassault Aviation for 126 fighters and that there was a work-share agreement between the two companies.

Defence ministry officials on Wednesday reiterated there were areas of disagreement between HAL and Dassault such as work-share, responsibility sharing and man-hours required for making aircraft components. They added that there were many areas of diasgreement between HAL and Dassault regarding responsibility sharing and man-hours required for manufacture.

The RM (Rafale Minister) tasked with defending corruption has been caught lying again. The former HAL Chief, T S Raju, has nailed her lie, that HAL didnt have the capability to build the RAFALE. Her position is untenable & she must resign. https://t.co/7mKXV5wo8x  Rahul Gandhi (@RahulGandhi) September 20, 2018

The officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said HAL had highlighted work-share and responsibility sharing issues in letters to the ministry in October 2012 and July 2014, but that there was no work-share agreement as claimed by Raju. They added that claiming lower life cycle cost was presumptive as work-share between the two firms was not agreed upon, adding the proposal for buying 126 jets did not progress due to these very reasons.

HTs September 20 report referred to some of these issues including the fact that HALs cost of assembling the aircraft was high and that it was taking more time than the French company thought it should.

The main opposition party has alleged that the Modi government caused a loss of over Rs 41,000 crore to the public exchequer and endangered national security by overlooking HAL.

Later, Congress spokesperson Manish Tewari too demanded Sitharamans resignation for allegedly misleading the people on the Rafale deal, claiming that the governments arguments have been demolished by the former HAL chiefs statement. Raju, who was heading HAL till three weeks ago, was also a member of the defence ministrys Contract Negotiation Committee for the 126 fighters.

The NDA governments decision to enter into a government-to-government deal with France to buy 36 Rafale warplanes was announced in April 2015 with the deal signed a little over a year later. This replaced the UPA regimes decision to buy 126 Rafale aircraft, 108 of which were to be made in India by HAL using parts imported from France.

The former union minister also reiterated his partys demand for a joint parliamentary committee (JPC) probe into the Rafale deal. The nailer is that he (ex-HAL chief) says that if the 126 MMRCA contract would have gone through, India would have been self reliant in so far as the fighter aircraft platform is concerned, Tewari said. What happened to Make in India. Make in India seems to have gone out the window, he added, referring to one of the Modi governments flagship programmes. Tewari demanded that the government should make public all the files related to the issue as demanded by the HAL chief.
A court in New Delhi on Thursday directed Delhi Police to hand over some documents to Congress leader Shashi Tharoor in connection with a case against him pertaining to his wife Sunanda Pushkars death around four years ago in a luxury hotel in the Capital.

Additional Chief Metropolitan Magistrate Samar Vishal issued the directions after senior advocate Vikash Pahwa, appearing for the politician, told the court that some of the documents the agency gave were not readable, while many pages were missing.

The documents were filed by police along with the charge sheet. The court also granted Tharoor exemption from personal appearance for the day after an application was moved by his counsel in this regard.

The court, thereafter, posted the matter for further hearing on October 4.

Pushkar was found dead in a suite of a luxury hotel in the city on the night of January 17, 2014. The couple was staying in the hotel as the official bungalow of Tharoor was being renovated at that time.

The court had directed the Delhi Police to hand over various documents filed along with the charge sheet, including statements of witnesses, to Tharoor on a plea moved by him.

The Thiruvananthapuram MP was granted regular bail by court on July 7 after he appeared before court in pursuance to the summons issued against him.

The court had on June 5 summoned Tharoor, observing there was sufficient ground to proceed against him.

Tharoor has been charged under sections 498A (husband or his relative subjecting a woman to cruelty) and 306 (abetment of suicide) of the Indian Penal Code (IPC), but has not been arrested in the case.
Five inmates of a correctional home in Bihars Purnea district, including the son of a ruling Janata Dal (United) leader, fled on Wednesday evening after shooting dead the warden and a fellow inmate in a clash over a banned cough syrup seized from them.

A few days ago, a few bottles of the banned medicine were recovered from the possession of these five inmates, and they had suspected another group of inmates of telling officials about them. On Tuesday, warden Bijendra Mandal had allegedly beaten all the five over the matter.

On Wednesday, the two groups clashed and an inmate, whom the five suspected of informing on them, was shot dead. The warden was also shot when he tried to intervene and break up the fight.

The incident also came on the day when judicial magistrate first class Divya Prakash, of juvenile justice board, had directed the fives transfer to the Sheikhpura correctional facility.

These five inmates were drug-addicted and whenever they were stopped they grew violent, police cited some inmates as telling them.

Staff of the correctional facility have doubts whether the five were juvenile at all. All the five are between 21 and 25 years of age and have been lodged in correctional facility. They have been creating nuisance ever since they were brought here, a cook at the facility said.

Sources said: Even the guard deputed on gate had no courage to stop them from going outside and they would often go and spend their nights with their families and friends.

While police have launched a manhunt to nab all the five, a judicial probe has been ordered into the incident. The probe has been undertaken from two angles - from where the inmates were supplied firearms and how the banned cough syrup continued to be made available to them, a probe team member said.

JD (U) leader Amarendra Kumar Kushwaha, whose son was among the five, was detained by the Purnea police on Thursday in connection with the shootout. Kushwaha, who is the general secretary of the partys district unit, said he has resigned from the post soon after his sons name figured in the incident.

I want speedy trial in the case, he told media at the police station.

I have often been visiting correctional facility and have discovered lawlessness inside it. I want impartial probe into the matter including who funded these boys to procure the pistol which was used in killings, he said. Till the probe is complete I cant hold any party post, he added.

Kushwaha said that his son had cleared Intermediate this year and was admitted in local Purnea College. He has cleared BHU (Banaras Hindu University) entrance this year but he could not get admitted as he was in correctional facility after he fired at one of the college students in Purnea town, he said.

I did not resign from my post at that time in the hope that he would shun bad company and also it was his first crime, he said.

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What should have been an uneventful 105-minute hop from Mumbai to Jaipur turned into a nightmare for 166 passengers Jet Airways flight 9W 697, after the crew forgot to turn on the so-called bleed switch resulting in a drop in cabin pressure that caused headaches, and bleeding noses and ears and forcing the flight to return to Mumbai. It was all over in 48 minutes but it left the passengers scared and mentally scarred and prpmoted the civil aviation minister to set up a probe.

The flights cockpit crew has been taken off scheduled duties pending investigation.

The pilot in command (PIC) of the flight had an experience of 14 years with five years as a commander.

The incident, possibly the first of its kind in India, saw emergency masks being automatically deployed and 30 passengers being rushed to a hospital for treatment.

Experts said fluctuations in air pressure inside aircraft cabins is not unusual but it is rare for cabin pressure to change drastically because of human error.

9W697, carrying 166 passengers and five crew members, was originally scheduled to depart at 5.55am, but took off at 6.16am.

According to the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA), the crew forgot to select the bleed switch during the climb due to which cabin pressure could not be maintained, causing discomfort to passengers. The flight returned to the airport at around 7.04 am. Minister of civil aviation Suresh Prabhu has instituted an investigation into the incident by the Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau.

The 9W 697 Mumbai-Jaipur flight was turned back to Mumbai after takeoff as, during the climb, crew forgot to select switch to maintain cabin pressure. This resulted in the oxygen masks dropping. Thirty out of 166 passengers experienced nose and ear bleeding, some also complained of headache, Lalit Gupta, deputy director general, DGCA said. Jet Airways, in a statement, said it would assist DGCA in the investigation. Following the air-turn back of Jet Airways flight of 20th September, 2018; 144 of the 166 guests of the original flight traveled to Jaipur via an alternative flight of the airline, while 17 of them wished to travel at another point in time. 5 guests who were referred to a hospital for additional medical check-up accompanied by the Jet Airways Care team have since been released, post medical examination. The airline didnt apologise for the incident. Loss of cabin pressure could result in hypoxia or the deprivation of oxygen. In on extreme case in 2005, a Helios Airline flight crashed into a mountain after the pilots lost consciousness from hypoxia. Oxygen deprivation is also the cause of headaches, nausea, and nosebleeds. A sudden drop in air pressure can be fatal for people with pre-existing conditions such as hypertension and cardiac anomalies, doctors said. There is a cavity in our oral and nasal passages and sudden change in air pressure of the surroundings negatively impairs the internal air pressure maintained in these cavities, thus causing bleeding through nose, ears or mouth. At the same time, the sudden drop in the pressure and lack of oxygen supply to the brain can also cause strokes, paralysis or convulsions in some people, said Dr Ashwinikumar Patil, assistant professor, neurology and stroke specialist at KEM Hospital.

Doctors said that the drop in air-pressure in the surrounding affects people differently. While it usually causes heaviness in the head, dizziness and drowsiness in some, it can also be fatal for people with high blood pressure and a history of heart attacks, Dr Patil added.

At the time of going to print, none of the passengers were planning to sue the airline for the incident. But one of the passengers, Ankur Kala, demanded compensation of Rs 30 lakh and 100 upgrade vouchers from the airline. Sources in the airline confirmed the passenger has asked for a compensation, threatening legal action against the airline if the demand was not met.

Sudhakar Reddy, president of Passengers Association of India, a body representing fliers, said: Unfortunately , we do not have a fixed rule about the amount of compensation that has to be paid to passengers after such incidents. It is up to the airline to decide the quantum of compensation.

Passengers reported that the pressure in the cabin dropped immediately after takeoff. One of the passengers, Amit Relan, an event management professional and a frequent flier, said, The crew members could have handled the situation in a better manner. Though the affected passengers were made to deboard the aircraft on priority... We were clueless what was happening. We were not even offered a bottle of water....

Airport officials said that, as a precautionary measure, senior citizens on the flight were advised to avoid travelling the same day. While most of the injured passengers were helped by doctors at the airport, five were taken to Dr Balabai Nanavati Hospital, Vile Parle, after they insisted that they be taken to a hospital for a thorough check up. The flight later took off for Jaipur at around 10.40am with a changed aircraft. All five were discharged later in the evening.

Aviation expert and former Air Force pilot Vipul Saxena said that such incidents were rare. He explained that the Bleed switch has to be kept on unless the aircraft has to take off from a short runway or a runway from a region with high atmospheric pressure. He added that by the time the aircraft reached 8000 ft, the switch has to be on, and that the pilot has to check this. I am surprised why the pilot switched the bleed off while taking off from Mumbai and when he switched it off, why he did not switch it on, said Saxena. This points to two violations by pilots and poor compliance to procedures. An independent inquiry should be launched into the accident and exemplary punitive action should be taken.
State-run plane maker Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL) could have built Rafale fighters in India had the government managed to close the original negotiations with Dassault and had actually signed a work-share contract with the French company, said T Suvarna Raju, who was heading HAL till three weeks ago. He questioned why the Union government was not putting out the files in public.

He admitted that HAL may not have been able to build the planes at the desired cost-per-piece, one of the reasons why that deal fell through, but insisted that the company has the ability to make advanced fighters.

A former air chief, however, said making the Rafale would have been a challenge for the public sector undertaking.

When HAL can build a 25-tonne Sukhoi-30, a fourth-generation fighter jet that forms the mainstay of the air force, from raw material stage, then what are we talking about? We could have definitely done it (licence produced the Rafale jets), said Raju, who retired on September 1.

This is the first time anyone from the state-owned aircraft maker has publicly commented on the questions around the deal.

His comments come even as the politics around the Rafale deal show no signs of dying down.

The government and the Congress have been trading charges over the controversial Rs 59,000-crore purchase almost every day. On Tuesday, defence minister Niramala Sitharaman said HAL was dropped from the deal when the UPA was in power, because it couldnt agree on terms of production with Dassault.

The NDA governments decision to enter into a government-to-government deal with France to buy 36 Rafale warplanes was announced in April 2015 with the deal signed a little over a year later. This replaced the UPA regimes decision to buy 126 Rafale aircraft, 108 of which were to be made in India by HAL using parts imported from France.

Raju said HAL had maintained the Mirage-2000 aircraft, manufactured by Rafale maker Dassault Aviation, for the last 20 years.

It was also involved in the complex Mirage upgrade programme.

We would have delivered on the Rafale too. I was the leader of the technical team for five years and everything had been sorted out, said Raju. On questions related to the cost of India-assembled Rafales being higher, one of the reasons why the UPA could not conclude the negotiations, Raju said making military platforms in India is always a strategic decision and its not always about the immediate cost.

You have to see the life-cycle costs and not the cost per piece of a fighter. Life-cycle costs would have definitely been cheaper. And ultimately its about self reliance. There is a learning curve. If the French are making 100 jets in says 100 hours, I will take 200 hours as I am doing it for the first time. I cant do it in 80 hours. Its a scientific process, he said.

He also added that HAL would have been happy to give a guarantee for the aircraft it produced. Dassault and HAL had signed the mutual work-share contract and given it to the government. Why dont you ask the government to put the files out in public? The files will tell you everything. If I build the planes, I will guarantee them, he said.

The earlier deal also fell through because Dassault could not guarantee that HAL would deliver the aircraft it was assembling on time. There was a huge disparity between the time Dassault thought it should take HAL to make the planes in India, and the time HAL said it would take.

Air Chief Marshal AY Tipnis, a former IAF chief, said building Rafales in India would have been a challenging task for the HAL though not impossible with transfer of manufacturing technology from France. The fact is HAL has not performed to the level it could have. It promises more than it can deliver and quality of work has been substandard in many cases. It has also backtracked on its promises.

Pricing and guarantee had become intractable problems as pointed out by defence minister Nirmala Sithraman on several occasions, said a defence ministry official, who asked not to be identified.

The NDA government and the Congress locked horns over the controversial Rs 59,000-crore Rafale deal on Tuesday, with Sitharaman asserting that HAL lost out on the chance to build the warplanes because of the UPA regime and former defence minister AK Antony accusing Sitharaman of suppressing facts.

The Rafale deal has become controversial with the opposition, led by the Congress, claiming that the price at which India is buying Rafale aircraft now is Rs 1,670 crore for each, three times the Rs 526 crore, the initial bid by the company when the UPA was trying to buy the aircraft. It has also claimed the previous deal included a technology transfer agreement with HAL. The NDA has not disclosed details of the price, but the UPA deal, struck in 2012, was not a viable one, former defence minister Manohar Parrikar has previously said, implying that it would have never been closed and that, therefore, any comparison is moot. The NDA has said that the current deal also includes customized weaponry.

The deal has also become controversial on account of the fact that one of the offset deals signed by Dassault is with the Reliance Group of Anil Ambani. The Congress claims the earlier deal was scrapped and a new one signed just to provide Ambani this opportunity for an offset deal. Both the government and Reliance have repeatedly denied this. Sniffing an electoral opportunity in the Rafale deal, the Congress has been keeping up the heat on the government through events across the country.
India said on Thursday it will take up the barbaric killing of a Border Security Force (BSF) jawan with Pakistan in an appropriate manner and added that the incident was against all international norms.

BSF jawan Narender Singhs body was found on Wednesday with bullet wounds and his throat slit in Jammu along the border with Pakistan, according to two officials who asked not be named. They suspected Pakistani troops to be behind the act.

We are ascertaining the facts on this matter... I can say (it is) a barbaric incident which not only defies logic, not only defies civilised behaviour, but also is against all international norms, external affairs ministry spokesperson Raveesh Kumar said.

It is a very serious issue and definitely we will take it up with the Pakistani side in an appropriate manner, Kumar added. The BSF also registered a protest with Pakistan Rangers over the unsoldierly act, an official of the agency said on the condition of anonymity.

Union home minister Rajnath Singh told reporters that he spoke to BSF chief KK Sharma on the day the mutilated body of the BSF jawan was found at the India-Pakistan border.

A home ministry official said the BSF, which guards the international border, has been given a free hand to deal with such incidents at the border. The BSF has been asked to give appropriate reply to the murder of BSF jawan by the Pakistani forces, the official added.

Hundreds of people gathered at Thana Kalan village in Haryanas Sonipat district on Thursday for the BSF jawans cremation. Singhs mortal remains were cremated with full state honours.

Following an attack by Pakistani forces on Tuesday, Singh was found with multiple bullet injuries and gashes that suggested his throat was slit and an attempt was made to gouge his eyes out.

Such killings are not unheard of on the Line of Control in Kashmir, where troops from both sides often accuse each other of engaging in hostilities, but are rare on the International Border.

In a statement, BSF confirmed Kumars death and said that he was part of a patrol party that came under fire while clearing tall grass close to the boundary.

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Swedish furniture major IKEAs first ever store in India in Hyderabad again landed in controversy after a customer who bought a chocolate cake from the stores food outlet complained of an insect in it.

The customer, Kishore, tweeted on September 12 that he had found an insect in the chocolate cake which he had bought for his daughter at the food counter in the IKEA outlet. Ikea on Thursday apologised to the customer and assured steps to prevent any recurrence of any such incidents.

This is the second such incident that happened at the Ikea Hyderabad store that was opened on August 9. On September 2, a customer reported a caterpillar in the vegetable biryani supplied to him. Ikea India subsequently took vegetable biryani and samosa off its menu and apologised to the customer.

Ikea had taken off Vegetable Biryani off the menu after a man complained of finding a caterpillar in the dish served to him at the Hyderabad store. (HT Photo)

Acting on the latest tweet, the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation (GHMC) slapped Rs 5,000 as fine on the IKEA India management. In the earlier instance, it imposed a fine of Rs 11,500 on the firm.

On Thursday, Ikea regretted the latest episode too. In our Hyderabad restaurant when a customer was eating a chocolate cake which he bought, a fly was seen on the cake which eventually flew away. We regret this and apologize to our customer for the unfortunate experience. We are taking steps to avoid such occurrences, a spokesperson said.

A GHMC health official said samples of the cakes were collected for lab test.

In the earlier instance of caterpillar in biryani, the GHMC served notice to both Ikea and its Nagpur-based food supplier, Haldirams.
The family of a 23-year-old Kashmiri woman on Thursday claimed that she died of heart attack in South Kashmirs Kulgam district Wednesday evening after the army allegedly picked her brother up. The army and the Jammu and Kashmir police denied having detained Rifat Jaans brother.

A police statement said Jaan died of heart attack. Some rumours are being circulated that she died due to a heart attack when the army picked up her brother. The news circulated is totally baseless as the Army has not picked up anybody from Ashmuji area, the statement said. ...it is just being done by anti-national elements to vitiate the peaceful atmosphere.

Jaans father, Hamidullah Rather, said his son, Hidayatullah Rather, was picked up while he was returning home . Something had happened and army men stopped my sons auto and snatched his keys. They bundled him into a vehicle and let the other person go. The other man came to our place and broke the news about the detention.

Rather said they were told Jaan had collapsed as they rushed to a nearby army camp to get his son released. He added Jaan was declared dead at a hospital. Rather said his son was let off immediately after the army inquired about his identity and work. Whom can we blame? This was in our destiny. 

Army spokesman, Colonel Rajesh Kalia, said their men neither detained anybody nor entered anybodys home. These are all allegations to malign the army. Police have clarified it.
The CCTV recordings of late Tamil Nadu chief minister J Jayalalithaas stay in the hospital has been overwritten several times automatically, Apollo Hospitals has told the Justice A Arumughaswamy Commission.

The Commission is probing the circumstances leading to hospitalisation of Jayalalithaa on September 22, 2016 and the treatment provided to her till her death December 5, 2016.

The CCTV recordings get overwritten automatically after 30 days. This information was shared with the Commission on September 11, Maimoona Badsha, counsel for Apollo Hospitals, told IANS on Wednesday.

The hospital has informed the Commission that it is unable to submit the requested footage as it pertains to the period when Jayalalithaa was in the hospital - between September 22, 2016 to December 5, 2016.

The Commission had earlier asked the Apollo Hospital to submit the CCTV footage of certain areas within the hospital.

Badsha said it has been the procedure at the hospital to store the CCTV footage for 30 days after which new images are recorded.

When asked about Apollo Hospitals executive chairman Prathap C Reddys earlier statement that the CCTV cameras were switched off, Badsha said that is a different issue.
More than 13 years ago, a Boeing aircraft crashed in a hilly terrain in Greece snuffing out 121 lives. A year later, investigators concluded that omissions in controlling cabin pressure was a key reason for the crash.

On Thursday morning, the 166 passengers on board a Jet Airways flight might not have been aware about the incident that happened in Greece over a decade ago. But, they faced a similar situation as the cockpit crew forgot to control cabin pressure.

At least 30 passengers on the airlines Mumbai-Jaipur flight suffered nasal and ear bleeding and headache as the Boeing 737-800 aircraft returned to Mumbai within minutes of take-off.

Both the pilots -- commander and copilot - have been de-rostered, an investigation has been ordered and the airline has expressed regret over the incident.

According to two senior pilots and regulatory officials, Thursdays incident could be due to human negligence as checking cabin pressure is part of standard checks carried out before operation of a flight.

Nasal and ear bleeding of air passengers due to de-pressurisation of cabin is a rare occurrence, the two senior pilots who are working with two different airlines told PTI.

One of them operates Boeing planes and the other Airbus aircraft.

One of the pilots said that generally, an aircraft is pressurised to 8,000 feet so that the pressure is adequate for the human body.

Normally, a plane flies at an altitude of around 35,000 feet.

A pilot said de-pressurisation could even result in hypoxia for the people on board. Hypoxia or lack of adequate oxygen supply for the human tissues, can cause various problems, including deterioration in a cognitive abilities.

According to a doctor at Dr Balabhai Nanavati Hospital in Mumbai, five Jet Airways passengers who were on board the flight were suffering from mild conductive deafness.

As per their preliminary examination by ENT doctors, the five passengers suffered barotrauma of ear, which is caused due to a change in air pressure, said Rajendra Patankar, chief operating officer at the hospital.

There were 171 people on board, including 5 crew members.

A passenger, who was in the flight, recalled a fellow passenger with bleeding nose.
Days after his allegedly derogatory tweets on the Sun and the Jagannath temples created a storm in Odisha Assembly and outside, the Odisha police arrested political commentator Abhijit Iyer-Mitra from Delhi on Thursday.

However, Manish Khurana, chief metropolitan magistrate of Delhis Saket court, granted Iyer-Mitra bail on a bond of Rs 1 lakh, directing him to join investigation in Konark police station by September 28.

A Odisha police team from Konark arrived at Delhis Nizamuddin police station this morning with an arrest warrant against Iyer-Mitra, a friend of former Biju Janata Dal MP Baijayant Panda, accusing him of deliberate and malicious acts intended to outrage religious feelings, using words, deliberately intended to wound the religious feelings of any person, promoting enmity between different groups on grounds of religion under the Indian Penal Code and under section 66 of Information Technology Act.

The case were lodged following his tweets on September 16 mocking the erotic sculptures of the 13th century Sun temple at Konark as well as another disparaging post on the 12th century Jagannath temple, which is one of the four major Hindu pilgrimage sites. Panda has been accused of the same offences, while another case under the same charges lodged against Iyer-Mitra at Bhubaneswars Sahid Nagar police station, sources said.

No senior Odisha police official was ready to be quoted on the matter.

Iyer-Mitra, who is also senior fellow of Delhi-based Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies, has been in the eye of controversy ever since he flew over Chilika lake with Panda and a journalist on September 15, and then posted a vlog (video blog) of his trip to Konark the next day.

In the video posted on Twitter, he said the temple was a humple (a slang for sex). Here people are seen having sex. You see all these statues where the women, men and the animals are having sex. Can this temple be an auspicious place? Never. These statues are against the tradition of the Hindu community. It is the conspiracy of the Muslims who want to denigrate us. All I want to say is Jai Shree Ram. At least such statues will not be found in our new Ram temple, he said.

In a subsequent tweet, he sought clarify that these remarks were meant jokingly. Jokes aside this temple is just mindblowing. The sculptures are exquisite & it has a great sense of symmetry & gravitas.

But the tweet added fuel to the furore over Pandas alleged low-flying over Chilika lake. The former MPs chopper was impounded at Bhubaneswar airport after Arakhakuda Marine police station lodged a case that the low-flying aircraft made the waters of Asias largest brackish water lake foul with its fumes. While Panda claimed the impounding was a brazen attempt to restrict his movements after his resignation from the party in May this year, the Odisha police have now called for the cockpit data recorder of the chopper for determining its course when it flew over Chilika lake.

While Biju Janata Dal MLAs staged protest inside the assembly on Wednesday calling for arrest of Panda for his low-flying and Iyer-Mitra for his disparaging comments on Sun temple, the outrage became intense this morning when the assembly moved privilege motion against the latters tweets.

MLAs cutting across party lines also took offence to one of Iyer-Mitras tweets in November 16 last year in which he claimed that the state was discovered by Bengali explorers. Odisha was discovered by Bengali explorers, who called it OriShala!!! And it was named Orissa. No such thing as Orissa, just the wild southern provinces of undivided Bengal, he had tweeted.

He had also said that the Jagannath temple was built by the Gangas, who were disgraced retainers of the Pallava dynasty.

Moving the motion in the assembly after suspension of Question Hour on Thursday, leader of opposition Narasingha Mishra, of the Congress, said Iyer-Mitra should be given exemplary punishments for making nasty comments on MLAs as well as Jagannath temple and Sun temple which may trigger communal tension.

Mishra took offence to Iyer-Mitras tweet which ridiculed the abysmal intellectual calibre of BJD MLAs and said terming the MLAs as fools mean condemning the people of Odisha. He is a non-Odia. A non-Odia who feels that Odisha has no existence. How could he give such derogatory remarks against MLAs and the Speaker should secure his attendance in Assembly, he said.

Congress MLA Tara Bahinipati also attacked him. I dont want to take his name. He may be Jay Pandas friend. But the Odia race would not tolerate one who has denigrated it, he said.

BJD member Arun Sahoo said Iyer-Mitras comments have hurt Odishas ancestors too. The souls of people who fought for Odia language would have been hurt. If we are silent today, then history would not forgive us.

His party colleague Atanu Sabyasachi and law minister Pratap Jena also demanded action against him for comparing Odisha to North Korea.

The MLAs also trained their guns at Panda for bringing Iyer-Mitra to Odisha. Panda, who has emerged a rival of chief minister Naveen Patnaik had however said he did not agree with Iyer-Mitras video. The video was made when they went on a road trip & I was not present with them, but I condemn it. We should be sensitive about our religious places, heritage, tradition and history. So making parody on such subjects is unwarranted. I am proud of our history & heritage, said Panda through a YouTube video last evening.

Political analysts say the cases against Panda is an attempt by Patnaik to not allow much freedom to ally with other anti-BJD forces in the state ahead of the Lok Sabha and Assembly polls next year. Patnaik is seeking a record 5th term as chief minister in next election.
Karnataka chief minister HD Kumaraswamy on Thursday alleged that the Bharatiya Janata Party state leaders had offered Rs 5 crore to two MLAs of the Congress-Janata Dal (Secular) alliance to switch their loyalties.

Addressing the media, he said BJP leaders had called MLAs Suresh Gowda of the JD(S) and CS Shivalli of the Congress, promising them cash and ministerial posts as a reward for joining the party.

They called MLAs and said by today or tomorrow, they will have 18 MLAs and move them to Mumbai. They called Suresh Gowda last night, saying it was an emergency and they wanted him to be the 19th member of the group, Kumaraswamy said.

With an effective strength of 118, including the speaker, the Congress-JD(S) alliance has a simple majority in the assembly. The BJP, with 104 MLAs, was unable to push past the halfway mark in the recently concluded state elections.

Criticising former chief minister and BJP state chief BS Yeddyurappas statements on Wednesday, where he said the party would not do anything to destabilise the government, Kumaraswamy said approaches were being made for the coalitions MLAs by the party. But Suresh Gowda was called I get every bit of information, he said.
Karnataka Chief Minister HD Kumaraswamy on Thursday called on the people of the state to protest against the Bharatiya Janata Partys alleged attempts to topple the Congress-Janata Dal (Secular) alliance government.

At a speech in Chennarayapatna Taluk in Hassan district, Kumaraswamy said: The leaders of the BJP who are creating hurdles to this government which is bringing out development programmes for the state... I appeal to the people, this government which has set out to work diligently, this pro people government that they (BJP) want to topple, the people of this state should protest.

The chief minister was referring to constant rumours of the BJP allegedly offering monetary enticements to MLAs of the Congress and JD(S) to switch loyalties in a bid to come back to power.

At present the Congress-JD(S) alliance has the support of 118 MLAs and the BJP has 104 MLAs.

Earlier in the day, Kumaraswamy had even alleged that the BJP had offered Rs 5 crore to two MLAs, one each from the Congress and the JD(S) to switch sides.

The BJP, however, denied these charges and said it would oppose against the chief ministers call to citizens to protest on Friday.
Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) chief Mayawati announced an alliance with Ajit Jogis Janta Congress in Chhattisgarh on Thursday, setting the stage for a triangular contest in the state that goes to polls later this year after her talks with the Congress on seat-sharing appeared to have collapsed.

Mayawatis party also announced candidates for 22 seats in Madhya Pradesh, where the BSP is trying to iron out its differences with the Congress and form a coalition to take on the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

A Congress leader in Delhi said on the condition of anonymity there was still a scope for negotiation in MP. He declined to comment on the developments in Chhattisgarh.

Elections in Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan  all ruled by the BJP  and the Congress-ruled Mizoram are due later this year. Telangana will also go to polls in a few months, but it is not clear if the voting will coincide with the other four states.

In Lucknow, Mayawati said Jogis party will contest 55 of Chhattisgarhs 90 seats, and her party will field candidates in 35 constituencies.

Jogi, who was the chief minister during the Congresss rule from 2000-2003, will be the CM candidate of the BSP-Janta Congress alliance, she said.

In a written statement to the media, Jogi said, Both the parties have similar ideologies and this alliance will be for the poor, tribals, Dalits and marginalised of Chhattisgarh, who are suffering in the (rule of the) present government.

Jogi said the newly formed alliance will create a regional-level-option for the people of Chhattisgarh.

On July 5, HT reported that a meeting between Jogi and Mayawati in Delhi had sparked speculations of a possible alliance between the BSP and Janta Congress.

The BSP fought all 90 seats in the 2013 Chhattisgarh elections, winning one and ending up with a vote share of 4.27%. The Congress won 39 seats and the BJP bagged 49. The difference of votes polled by BJP and the Congress was less than one per cent.

While Jogi has been supporting the cause of the tribals in the state, the BSP has a strong support base among Dalits. Tribals account for about 30.62% of Chhattisgarhs population and Dalits account for about 11.72%.

The Congress, which is eyeing to end the BJPs 15-year-rule in Chhattisgarh, said the tie-up will not affect its prospects.

In the last three elections, the fight has always been between the Congress and the BJP, who together bagged 81% of the votes. The regional and other parties get the remaining 19% votes, and I dont think there is any space for this opportunistic alliance, said Vinod Verma, the chief strategist of the Congresss Chhattisgarh unit.

BJP leaders, who did not wish to be identified, said the alliance may give a new lease of life to Jogi. The Congress will definitely suffer as they wanted an alliance with the BSP. In the last couple of months, because of the health of Ajit Jogi, his party was ineffective. But after the alliance, they have got a new life. The Jogi-BSP alliance will surely have an impact on 10-15 seats, said a strategist working closely with CM Raman Singh.

Ashok Tomar, a political commentator in Raipur, said, The alliance will definitely change the dynamics of assembly elections now. This is also a fact that this alliance will not bag more than four seats but it will surely dent the Congress vote bank in some parts of Chhattisgarh.

The BSPs decision to announce 22 candidates in MP triggered speculation over its possible tie-up with the Congress. Most of the names were from the Chambal and Bundelkhand regions, bordering Uttar Pradesh, where the BSP has a considerable support base.

The BSP contested 227 out of the 230 seats in the 2013 elections in MP, won four, and had a vote share of 6.29%. The Congress won 58 seats with a share of 36.38% and the BJP 165 seats with a vote share of 44.88%.
Delivering a sound blow to the Congress efforts to gather a team opposition, Bahujan Samaj Party chief Mayawati on Thursday announced an alliance with former chief minister Ajit Jogis party for the Chhattisgarh assembly elections later this year, forcing a triangular contest for the first time in the history of the tribal state. Ajit Jogi was expelled by the Congress two years ago.

Mayawati also named 22 candidates for neighbouring Madhya Pradesh, where too her party has been in talks with the Congress, but they have been unable to agree on seat sharing.

Her announcements are seen as a strong message to the Congress that the BSP has other options if it is not given what Mayawati has called a respectable number of seats to contest. Only last week she made it clear that would be her criterion for joining a joint opposition bid to take on the BJP in the 2019 Lok Sabha electioms.

She asserted that again on Thursday: You must already know that much is being written about BSP and alliances. I have only said one thing- whichever party we ally with, we need respectable seats.

Mayawati said her party would contest 35 of Chhattisgarhs 90 seats, while Jogis Chhattisgarh Janata Congress would contest 55, adding, If we win, Ajit Jogi will be the chief minister.

The BSPs talks with the Congress fell through in Chhattisgarh reportedly because the Congress was unwilling to concede more than seven to nine seats.

In Chhattisgarh, which has traditionally seen a two-party fight between the BJP and the Congress, governments are decided by wafer-thin margins and Mayawatis decision to force a triangular contest could benefit the BJP.

In the last assembly election, the difference between the votes polled by the BJP and the Congress was less than 98,000 votes.

The BSP fielded candidates in all 90 assembly segments in 2013, won 1 seat and polled 558,000 votes with a share of 4.4%. But there were 12 seats where its candidates polled more than 10 per cent vote share. In five of these, they had polled over 20 per cent.

Jogi has been trying to turn the Chhattisgarh polls into a triangular fight, but his party is an untested entity in the state. The former Congress veteran founded his party in 2016 along with his son after being expelled from the Congress.

The new alliance is also seen as part of Mayawatis 2019 plan where she wants to expand her partys reach beyond Uttar Pradesh. She already has an alliance with Janata Dal (Secular) in Karnataka and Indian National Lok Dal in Haryana.

Mayawatis announcement of 22 candidates for Madhya Pradesh is seen as a move to pressure the Congress, which has been attempting to convince the BSP to accept a smaller number of seats to contest in a partnership than it has demanded.

The Congress wants to wrest Madhya Pradesh back from the BJP after 15 years in what is seen as a two-party contest. In the 2013, the BJP had retained the state winning 165 seats, while the Congress had won 58. The BSP could win only four.
Tiles with images of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan must be removed from houses built for the urban poor under Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana (PMAY) and a compliance report must be filed within three months, the Madhya Pradesh high court has ordered.

In its order on Wednesday the court said the state government must retrieve all such tiles which have already been fixed carrying picture of Prime Minister and chief minister under PMAY and fixed the next date of hearing in the case for reporting compliance for December 20.

Earlier on Wednesday, the state government submitted an order of its directorate of urban administration and developments order dated September 18, 2018 to the high court cancelling its previous order dated April 4, 2018 to fix tiles with photographs of Prime Minister Modi and chief minister Chouhan on houses being built under PMAY (Urban).

State government advocate Praveen Newaskar submitted the directorates order dated September 18 issued by additional commissioner, Urban Administration and Development, Madhya Pradesh Vikas Mishra, to the Gwalior bench of the high court.

The order issued to commissioners of all the Nagar Nigams and chief municipal officers of all the Nagar Palika Parishads and Nagar Parishads said the earlier order regarding fixing of the tiles with the Prime Minister and Chief Ministers photos on them on PMAY (U) houses had been cancelled.

The order also stated that in light of the instructions of the Union Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs, the logo of PMAY would now be fixed.

On September 11 the Union Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs had told the court that it had not issued any instructions regarding the tiles with photographs of the PM and the CM and that it had advised the state/union territories governments to display standard logo of the PMAY (U) in all houses constructed under the PMAY (U).

The high court had issued notices to state government, central government and directorate of urban administration and development, MP Government in July this year on the petition filed by Sanjay Purohit, a resident of Datia district, challenging the directorates April 4 order and alleging that the tiles were being installed on PMAY (U) houses with an eye on the upcoming assembly elections this year.
The principal of a private school in Patna was on Wednesday arrested for allegedly raping a girl student repeatedly on the school premises in the last few months. A school clerk was also taken into custody for making a video clip of the crime and blackmailing the victim.

Police said the incident came to light on Wednesday when the girl returned home from school and started vomiting. The police were informed about the matter when the medical test confirmed that she was pregnant.

The girl later told the police that the principal of a Phulwarisharif-based school had been sexually exploiting her for the last nine months,threatening her with at knife. The school clerk had made a video of the act and used to blackmail me by threatening to circulate the clip on social media platforms, she told the police, adding that the principal had first raped her by calling her to his office on the pretext of examining her exercise book.

Police said the women police station had registered a case on the basis of the statement of girls parents. The matter was earlier referred to the women police station by Phulwarisharif police station for further action.

Patna senior superintendent of police (SSP) Manu Maharaaj said police acted swiftly and arrested the school principal and the clerk. The knife used to threaten the girl has also been recovered.
Pope Francis has temporarily relieved Jalandhar Bishop Franco Mulakkal of his pastoral responsibilities, the Catholic Bishops Conference of India (CBCI) said on Thursday. The move came as the Kerala police questioned Mulakkal for the second day in Kochi over a 43-year-old nuns rape charges against him.

A group of nuns, staging a sit-in against police inaction in the case, welcomed the popes decision as their first victory in the struggle against the bishop. The pope has named Bombay Archdiocese Bishop Emeritus Agnelo Rufino Gracias as Mulakkals replacement, a CBCI statement said.

Mulakkal had on September 16 written to the Pope offering to step aside temporarily as the bishop of the Jalandhar diocese, Kerala Catholic Bishops Council spokesman Fr Varghese Vallikkattu said.

We are very happy the Vatican has finally heard our prayers. It is the first victory in our struggle, said a nun, who is among those nuns staging the sit-in seeking Mulakkals arrest. In Kochi, Mullakal was questioned for a second day on Thursday and asked to appear before the investigators again on Friday.

We need more time to verify some of his statements. We will resume his questioning on Friday. We are yet to arrive at a conclusion, said Kottayam police superintendent S Harishankar.

A member of the investigating team, who did not want to be identified, said there were many contradictions in the bishops statements. Some of the videos he produced were edited but he pleaded innocence, he added. It seems he was tutored well, he said.

The protesting nuns alleged the police were giving the bishop enough time to buy witnesses. Some of the witnesses have already retracted. Our struggle will continue till we get justice and Franco is put behind bars, said Sister Anupama, one of the nuns staging the sit-in.

The police have drawn flak for delaying the bishops arrest even though the nun, who has accused him of sexual abuse, has had her statement recorded before a magistrate. ...after the victims deposition before police or a magistrate, the arrest of the accused should not exceed more than two months. In the nuns case, police have violated this for reasons best known to them, said lawyer and activist VK Mini.

(With PTI inputs)
In a no-holds-barred attack on Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Congress president Rahul Gandhi on Thursday said people are now heard saying that the countrys watchman is a thief.

The remark at a public meeting provoked immediate condemnation by the BJP with Union minister Smriti Irani telling reporters it showed that the Congress leader has no respect for the Prime Ministers post.

Gandhi was referring to the Prime Ministers silence on the Rafale fighter aircraft deal with France and the Modi governments failure to bring fugitive businessman Vijay Mallya to book.

Modi had said he did not want to become the countrys Prime Minister but its chowkidar (watchman), Gandhi said.

He added that now, it is heard on the streets that the countrys chowkidar is a thief. Galli galli me shor hai, Hindustan ka chowkidar chor hai, he said in Hindi at a rally in tribal-dominated Sagwara area.

Assembly elections will be held in Rajasthan later this year.
A 90-minute gunfight in which the Uttar Pradesh police shot dead two criminals in Aligarh Thursday morning was captured on video after local media reached the spot but the administration insisted they hadnt been invited.

The encounter continued for about one and half hour and local media reached and might have filmed from a distance whatever they could visualise, said superintendent of police (Rural), Aligarh, Manilal Patidar following media reports that journalists were invited before the shooting and allowed to film it.

The two men - Naushad and Mustaqim - carrying cash reward of Rs 25,000 each on their heads, were wanted for at least six murders in the district last month, police said. Among the victims were two Hindu priests and four farmers.

The encounter took place at Machua canal in Harduaganj area of Aligarh district at 6:30 am when the police team was fired upon. A policeman was also injured in the gunfight, said superintendent of police (Rural), Aligarh, Manilal Patidar.

These two criminals were changing their locations after committing crimes in Atrauli, Harduaganj, and Pali Mukeempur and were involved in many murders. They had robbed a man of his motorbike last night in Aligarh, Patidar said.

Police sent the bodies of the two men for post mortem to Aligarh district hospital and informed the district magistrate.

More than 60 criminals have been killed in police encounters since the Yogi Adityanath-led government took charge of the state in March last year. Four policemen have been killed and over 500 people have been injured in these operations that took place in various districts.

Earlier this month, UPs Director General of Police OP Singh said that police encounters are part of a well chalked out strategy to arrest hardened criminals in the state.

In July, the Supreme Court had sought a response from the UP government over a plea seeking a a court-monitored CBI or SIT probe into the alleged encounter killings in the state by the police. The PIL was filed by NGO Peoples Union for Civil Liberty (PUCL).
A protest by students of a north Bengal school demanding appointment of teachers of science and literature led to a clash between them and police on Thursday, leaving a former student dead and another severely injured. Some policemen and locals were also injured.

Rajesh Sarkar (19), died apparently from bullet injuries and another protester was sent to North Bengal Medical College in Siliguri with bullet injuries.

The Bharatiya Janata Party has called a 12-hour bandh throughout the district on Friday to protest against the police action in a school.

However, police said they had used batons and fired tear gas shells and rubber bullets and had not opened fire on the protesters.

We fired rubber bullets and tear gas shells. We did not fire bullets. Our men were injured and the protesters vandalised police vehicles, said district police superintendent Sumit Kumar.

I have spoken to the officer-in-charge of the Islampur police station. He categorically told me that the police did not open fire, said Islampur Municipality chairman Kanhaiyalal Agarwal, who was present at the hospital where Sarkars body was taken.

I have got the news of a death. Police have gone there to take control of the situation. I am yet to get the police report on the reason of the death, said Arvind Kumar Mina, district magistrate of North Dinajpur.

District BJP president Sankar Chakraborty however alleged that police first resorted to caning, then firing tear gas shells and eventually opened fire. It is surprising how they could press the trigger in a school... that could perhaps take place during the British days, he said.

The students were merely asking for quick appointment of teachers of literature and science subjects. They were demanding it for some time and were quite upset. Today, too, they were peaceful initially, he added.

Left leader in assembly Sujan Chakraborty said: It is quite natural that students will hold protests demanding education. But it astonishing that the police would open fire in a school. The chief minister, who is also the police minister, should reply why her men have become so trigger-happy.

Three days ago, two teachers of Urdu and one of Sanskrit were appointed but the angry students did not allow them to enter the school when they came to join duty on Thursday.

The protesting students also blocked a road nearby.

Apprehending unrest, the administration deployed a number of policemen on Thursday morning in front of the school.
There cannot be a blanket ban on media reporting in the Muzaffarpur shelter home sexual abuse case in which several women inmates were allegedly raped and sexually abused, the Supreme Court said on Thursday.

A bench of Justices Madan B Lokur and Deepak Gupta vacated the August 23 order of the Patna High Court, which had imposed a ban on media reporting of the investigations in the case.

The apex court, however, asked both the print and the electronic media not to sensationalise the incidents of sexual abuse and sexual violence.

Over 30 girls were allegedly raped at the shelter home run by Brajesh Thakur, the chief of a state-funded NGO. The alleged sexual exploitation of the girls was first highlighted in an audit report submitted by TISS to the states social welfare department.

The TISS audit report had said that many girls at the shelter home in Bihar had complained of sexual abuse. A special investigation team was formed to probe the complaints.

The NGO running the shelter home in Muzaffarpur was blacklisted and the girls were shifted to shelter homes in Patna and Madhubani. Women staff members of the shelter home and Thakur were among those who were arrested by the police in connection with the case.

(With agency inputs)
There cannot be a blanket ban on reporting on sexual abuse and rape cases but, at the same time, the media should tread cautiously while writing on such incidents, the Supreme Court said on Thursday.

The observations were made by a bench of justices MB Lokur and Deepak Gupta as it lifted the ban imposed by the Patna high court on August 23 on media reporting in the Muzaffarpur shelter home case, where at least 30 girls were allegedly raped and sexually abused over a period of time.

Justice Lokur requested both print and electronic media not to sensationalise incidents of sexual assault.
On October 2, 2018 the Swachh Bharat Mission (SBM), a flagship programme of the Narendra Modi government, will enter its final year. The SBM, which was launched on October 2, 2014, claims to be the largest behaviour change campaign ever attempted in the field of sanitation in the world and is aimed at achieving complete open defecation free (ODF) habitations and improving solid waste disposal management systems. The programme is aimed at both rural and urban areas, with the ministry of drinking water and sanitation coordinating the rural efforts and ministry of housing and urban affairs looking at the urban part.

Government statistics show significant resource allocation and progress under the programme. Budget documents show an expenditure of more than Rs 56,000 crore under the programme by the central government. 87% of the spending has been done in rural areas. The actual spending would exceed this amount as the central funding is supposed to be 75% of the total expenditure, with state governments contributing an additional 25% of the funds. This ratio has been kept at 85%-15% in north-eastern and other special category states. State governments can also add/ generate funds for municipalities as additional incentives over and above its minimum 25 % share to make projects viable.

In addition, there is also the amount spent by companies, especially under their Corporate Social Responsibility programmes, although there is no authoritative measure of this. For instance, Tata Consultancy Services, Bharti Enterprises, and Larsen & Toubro have all built toilets using CSR funds for the Swachh Bharat campaign.

According to the SBM dashboard, more than 85 million toilets have been built in rural areas under the programme. In urban areas, almost 5.5 million toilets have been constructed so far. Around 400,000 of these are public toilets. The rural programme claims to have achieved ODF status for 21 states and union territories so far. At the district level the number is 457 out of a total of 718 districts in the country. These are impressive statistics by all means.

The question is whether the creation of physical infrastructure with one-time assistance from the government will have a lasting impact on achieving what the programme itself has identified as a behaviour change challenge. While SBM guidelines mandate a multi-stage audit before a habitation is given an ODF status, it is practically impossible for the state to keep tabs on whether the standards are being adhered to. Questions have also been raised on the ability of the physical infrastructure which has been created to achieve such a change.

For example, availability of water in or near the toilet is an optional criterion in the guidelines for ODF verification issued by the SBM rural division. Expectedly, these factors have been flagged by many academics and activists to question official claims about the success of SBM. A final resolution of this debate will have to wait for statistics from the 2021 census or the next round of National Family and Health Survey. A more important question is whether the official momentum which has built around the SBM should be allowed to die down once the programme completes its designated period. Some salient facts are worth reiterating here.

The combined grant for building a household toilet under the SBM rural programme is Rs 6,667.

It is to be expected that the quality of such toilets would be adequate but not ideal. The silver lining in this programme is that each of the toilets which have been built is geo-tagged in the SBM database. This database can be put to good use in re-evaluating the programmes achievements after a couple of years. The government could announce a maintenance grant for the original beneficiaries of the programme. Or, it could use the spatial database on toilet locations to estimate and design better sewage systems in rural areas. This is important as poorly designed soak pits can contaminate underground water and defeat the original objective of the SBM.

The urban chapter of SBM faces a similar challenge.

There has been significant progress in door-to-door waste collection and 80% of urban wards had been covered up to July 2018. But only one-third of the waste being generated was being processed. Unless there is significant progress on the latter front, the gains from SBM urban will neither be sustainable nor egalitarian. With growing urbanisation, the challenge is likely to become bigger in the future.

Given the fact that the government has found the fiscal resources necessary to fund the programme so far, there is no reason why the same cannot be done in the future.

Swachh Bharat is a well-intentioned programme whose benefits are clear, but it needs to continue beyond 2019 to achieve the larger objectives it needs to.

India will only be better off if it were to seek a continuous and not a one-time pursuit of cleanliness.

(This is a first of a series that will run in Hindustan Times till October 2 and focus on the progress of the Swachh Bharat Mission.)
Ms. Dallas began her 28-year career in healthcare as a Certified Nursing Assistant with the American Red Cross. More recently, she served four years as a lifestyle director for a Chattanooga area senior living facility and 8 years as a billing coordinator at Life Care Home Health/Affinity Hospice of Life in Cleveland. She has given many years of service at Cleveland Community Hospital, Bradley Memorial Hospital, Chattanooga Pain Clinic and a number of private practices in various medical and service roles.
Economist Francisco Rodriguez writes about the causes of Venezuela's economic implosion at WOLA's blog, centering on the decline of oil production. That in turn was caused by mismanagement and exacerbated by U.S. sanctions. In particular, the latter "toxified" transactions with Venezuela, thus raising the costs of doing business with the government.



This is not an exercise in blaming the U.S. but rather recognition that a lot of factors are working simultaneously. I had written for a while that Trump's policies seemed quite similar to Obama's in terms of targeted sanctions, but the more general sanctions against transactions are a step much further. Those now can also be accompanied by protests at the offices of financial institutions that loan money.



As we warned previously, these observations should not be taken as decisive proof that sanctions caused the output collapse. There are many other factors at play in the Venezuelan economy which can also be put forward as explanations. Maduros decision to appoint a general with no previous industry experience and the broad-ranging corruption investigation that led to the jailing of 95 industry executives, including two former PDVSA presidents, appear to have caused a paralysis in many of the sectors professional cadres. The loss of the industrys specialized human capital, part of the brain drain that accompanies large scale migration exoduses, also contributed to the deterioration of its operational capacity.

The data, however, strongly suggests the need for much more in-depth research on the reasons for Venezuelas oil output collapse and for the discontinuous behavior in the series. The fact that the acceleration of the decline coincides with the onset of the countrys toxification to international investors suggests that we need to closely explore this channel as a potential driver of Venezuelas output collapse.

What we should also note is that these policies have increased China's influence significantly. Maduro just returned from a triumphant trip getting more investment promises. This is another example of Trump administration policies unintentionally boosting China's presence in Latin America.
Some people are often called lazy, because of their brains, say researchers who found that our brain is innately attracted to sedentary behaviour. The findings, led by researchers from the University of British Columbia (UBC) in Canada, suggest that our brains may simply be wired to prefer lying on the couch and that human brains work harder to pick physical activity over relaxation.

We knew from previous studies that people are faster at avoiding sedentary behaviours and moving towards active behaviours, said Matthieu Boisgontier, a postdoctoral researcher at UBC. The exciting novelty of our study is that it shows this faster avoidance of physical inactivity comes at a cost  and that is an increased involvement of brain resources. These results suggest that our brain is innately attracted to sedentary behaviour, Boisgontier said.

For the study, published in the journal Neuropsychologia, the team recruited young adults, and made them sit in front of a computer, and gave them control of an on-screen avatar. They then flashed small images, one a time, that depicted either physical activity or physical inactivity. Subjects had to move the avatar as quickly as possible towards the pictures of physical activity and away from the pictures of physical inactivity  and then vice versa. Meanwhile, electrodes recorded what was happening in their brains.

Participants were generally faster at moving toward active pictures and away from lazy pictures, but brain-activity read-outs called electroencephalograms showed that doing the latter required their brains to work harder. Boisgontier noted that the failure of public policies to counteract the pandemic of physical inactivity may be due to brain processes that have been developed and reinforced across evolution.

However, the question is whether peoples brains can be re-trained or not. Anything that happens automatically is difficult to inhibit, even if you want to, because you dont know that it is happening. But knowing that it is happening is an important first step, Boisgontier said.

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Three months after the Maharashtra government banned plastic, the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) has collected Rs 1.1 crore in fine and confiscated 18,601 kg plastic until September 18.

On March 23, the government issued a notification, banning the manufacture, use, sale, and distribution of all single-use plastic items such as bags, spoons, plates, bottles, and thermocol items. The ban came into effect from June 23.

The civic bodys plastic ban team visited 2.37 lakh shops since June 23, of which 269 owners refused to pay the fine and were issued challans.

The squad members were divided into 24 teams, and concentrated mainly on big establishments and multi-national food and beverage joints. While the rule doesnt allow citizens to carry plastic and thermocol items, BMC is yet to start levying fines on citizens. We are spreading awareness and have asked the plastic ban squad to spread the message, said Nidhi Choudhari, deputy municipal commissioner.

While the civic body claims the ban was a success, citizens have raised concerns about the increase in the usage and availability of plastic bags and straws in markets. After the ban came into effect, plastic bags were not available in the market. However, now, some of the vendors have started to use plastic bags. Restaurants are charging extra for packaging, said Shreya Nair, a Dadar resident.
The Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB) has disputed its state counterparts claim that polluted river stretches in Maharashtra have reduced. According to the CPCB, the number of polluted river stretches in the state increased from 49 to 53 in 2017-18, the highest in the country. This information is yet to be released as a report under the National Water Quality Monitoring Programme.

In August, the Maharashtra Pollution Control Board (MPCB) had claimed the number of polluted river stretches had dropped from 49 to 34.

However, across India, the number of polluted river stretches has gone up, the CPCB told the National Green Tribunal (NGT).

We made a presentation before the NGT and state heads about a revised list of polluted river stretches, which have increased from 302 to 351 across India, with 53 in Maharashtra, said A Sudhakar, member secretary, CPCB. In Maharashtra, CPCB analysed 672 water bodies and found 566  or 86%  of them had non-satisfactory water quality , it told NGTs principal bench. While the central boards analysis is based on data sent to it by the state board, the findings could vary because of CPCB analysing different parameters and criteria of what constitutes pollution.

The CPCB categorised polluted river stretches based on the amount of biochemical oxygen demand in the water body  or the level of oxygen that plants and animals need for survival.

The CPCB categorised stretches with the most pollution as priority 1.

A majority of the priority 1 (water bodies) were from the Mumbai Metropolitan Region and Pune, with examples such as the Mithi, Mula, Mula-Mutha, Wainganga, and Ulhas, along with river stretches in the Navi Mumbai industrial area, said Sudhakar.

However, the MPCB had only categorised the Mithi river as priority 1.

While the CPCB has recommended regular assessment of ground water levels, industrial and domestic pollution, and the installation of sewage treatment plants to treat sewage before it is released into natural water bodies to check the pollution, it also pointed out that Mahatashtra may be reporting the most number of polluted water bodies as it had the most water quality monitoring stations. There are 250 water quality monitoring stations across Maharashtra, and MPCB also carries out more monthly monitoring compared to other states, Sudhakar said.

A report by Hindustan Times, from April 1 this year, had also found that of the 650 cities and towns located along polluted river stretches in the country, 161 or 25% of them were in Maharashtra  the highest in India. The report was based on information from the Union environment ministry. Mithi River was identified as one of the most polluted rivers in India.

MPCB officers, meanwhile, said they have only received a draft of the CPCBs fresh analysis, which was confusing. We have asked them to clear these issues and send us a final report, said YB Sontakke, the joint director, water quality, MPCB. Once we get this list, action will begin from our end. This reassessment has been done based on new criteria for polluted river stretches. Thus, our follow up study will factor in all these points.

But Sudhakar said the MPCB can take action on its own, as the data was originally prepared by the state pollution control boards, not the CPCB. There is a panic situation only when the CPCB releases this information. No one is looking at the ground level data to take action at the source, without anybody prompting them, he said.
Five-year-old Sohail has been restless since September 11 as there has been a horde of relatives and activists visiting his house. The young one understands that something is amiss.

It has been more than a week since his father, a 27-year-old Irfan from Dankaur, allegedly died due to electrocution in the Dammam city of Saudi Arabia, where he was working as a driver.

My son has been informed that his father is trying to come back to Greater Noida from Dubai. He doesnt understand that his father is no more, Nargis (25), wife of the deceased, Irfan, said.

As Sohail awaits the arrival of his father, the under privileged family has been asked to pay around Rs 1.5 lakh (about 8,000 Saudi rial) to bring the body via flight.

The family says it does not have the money for it.

It has been 10 days since my sons body has been lying in Saudi Arabia. We simply do not have that much money to bring the body back. We have been in touch with the local MLA, the city magistrate and the Indian embassy in Saudi Arabia for help but there has been no response from state officials, Nizam (50), father of Irfan, said.

The death took place around 4pm (Saudi Arabia time) on September 11.

Irfan was allegedly electrocuted while trying to turn on a switch to help water the plants inside a private complex in Dammam city.

He had arrived in Dammam two months ago on a 24-month contract.

Nizam runs a kiosk selling peanuts in Dankaur and is the sole bread winner of the family. Apart from Irfan, Nizam has another son, 18-year-old Shamshad.

The family stays in Peerwala mohalla of Dankaur. Irfan was married for the past six years.

Two months ago, the situation had been different for Nizams family as Irfan had decided to move to Dammam to earn a better livelihood.

We thought our financial condition would improve when Irfan got a job in Saudi Arabia as we had expectations from him. He was the first member in our family to travel overseas, Nanno Begum, his mother, said.

Jewar MLA Thakur Dhirendra Singh said he has taken up the issue with the Indian embassy of Saudi Arabia and VK Singh, the Union minister of state for external affairs.

We have been in touch with the Indian embassy who informed us that since the death is an unnatural one, a police investigation is being carried out. The family has given its consent that they wish to receive the body of Irfan. There are processes of a foreign country due to which the transportation is stuck. We will ensure that money is not an issue, Singh, said.
Into the 1990s, West Bengals sultry summers meant interminable power cuts and fewer than one in five rural households had electric lighting. Today, by contrast, villages across the state are electrified and Bengals utilities boast a shelf of prestigious awards. Nonetheless, there are also dark clouds on the horizon as financial losses once again start to mount  thanks most recently to a 23% cut in electricity bills for this years Durga Puja displays.

West Bengals journey shows that escaping a low-level equilibrium in the power sector is possible, but sustaining a virtuous circle of payment and performance is often difficult. The temptation for political interference in the day-to-day operation of power utilities is ever present.

Though the CPI(M) had governed West Bengal since 1977, its electricity record had been unimpressive. All this changed when the nominally socialist administration revised its economic strategy in order to court private investment. Reliable power would be a pillar of the new pro-industrial turn.

In the early 2000s, a team of senior bureaucrats and consultants began electricity reforms. Well aware of the failures of privatisation and deregulation in other states, they developed their own incremental reform path. Outside Kolkata, utilities remained under public ownership, but managers were granted greater autonomy. Officials hoped to further reduce the human element of corruption and inefficiency through computerisation and performance monitoring throughout the workforce. The ultimate goal was profitability, which would guarantee the utilitys independence.

This model looked surprisingly similar to another very different and more famous case: Gujarat. Both emphasised improved utility governance, technical solutions, and winning over employee unions. Both rejected outright privatisation and sought to minimise citizen participation in their electricity regulatory process. Together, these cases suggest that public sector reforms may offer a pragmatic alternative to controversial electricity liberalisation.

While popular opposition had stymied power reforms elsewhere in India, Bengali policymakers also benefitted from a series of favourable factors. Earlier, land redistribution meant that there was no powerful farmer lobby to block tariff hikes.

Like the BJP in Gujarat, the CPI(M) was able to call upon its political dominance and disciplined, centralised structure to manage dissent.

The results were impressive. From losses of Rs 1,009 crore in 2001 more than a third of total expenditure  West Bengal was one of only three states with profitable utilities in 2011. Rural household electrification rose from 20.3% in 2001 to 98% today.

Yet, as early as 2010, there were ominous signs that utility independence was under threat.

While the CPI(M)s embrace of economic reforms had brought rewards in the electricity sector, state violence over land acquisition in Nandigram and Singur created a groundswell of popular discontent.

Intensifying competition between the CPI(M) and Trinamool Congress, in turn, increased the temptation to meddle in the power sector in order to win votes. Combining quarterly billing data with satellite images of nighttime lights across West Bengal, a recent working paper by the economist Meera Mahadevan shows this politicisation at work. She finds that the new Trinamool government rewarded constituencies it narrowly won in 2011 with faster electrification and systematically lower bill collection. Billing data from these areas is full of suspiciously round numbers, she argues, suggesting it has been manipulated. Key posts in the electricity regulator were also left vacant, undermining its power of oversight, while tariff hikes were delayed.

Traces of utility independence nonetheless remain. The original reformers mobilised to ensure tariff rises in 2012. After the 2016 state elections, which Trinamool again won handsomely, tariffs were once again allowed to rise. The new government has also ushered in an impressive expansion of rural electricity access. As Lok Sabha elections approach, though, tariff hikes have been blocked despite increasing utility costs. Utilities therefore face mounting financial losses, threatening their ability to invest in the sectors continuing growth. Eventually, consumers will pay the price.

Classic theories developed in the West suggest that democratic competition makes politicians more likely to deliver collective goods. West Bengals ambivalent trajectory two step forwards and one step back suggests instead that intensifying competition encourages short-term strategies that undermine the power sectors long-term health. A similar pattern is visible even in wealthier states like Tamil Nadu and Punjab, where fierce party-political competition has driven the expansion of populist subsidies and spiralling utility debts. Conversely, one-party dominance may give politicians the confidence to take unpopular decisions like cutting subsidies or cracking down on theft.

Today, the Trinamool regime looks dominant, its CPI(M) rival a spent force and the BJP still playing catch-up. Will the administration therefore decide to take a long-term view and end interference in the power sector? Previous experience suggests that this depends on how politicians perceive the likely risks and rewards. If consolidating electoral strength remains the key concern, as it seems presently, they will continue to reward new voters with cheap electricity and turn a blind eye to power theft.

If ensuring robust industrial and revenue growth becomes the priority, the long-term benefits of high-quality electricity may begin to outweigh the perils of short-term dissatisfaction. As citizens begin to expect 24/7 power in Kolkata and beyond, they may start holding politicians to this higher standard. In the longer term, then, popular pressure will become the guarantor rather than the enemy of a virtuous cycle in the power sector.

(Elizabeth Chatterjee is a politics lecturer at Queen Mary University of London. This research is based on work presented in full in the book Mapping Power, edited by Dubash, Kale and Bharvirkar.)
A 12-year-old who was allegedly raped on Sunday along with her 10-year-old friend by two including a juvenile in Hinjewadi on the outskirts of Pune, died late Wednesday night after slipping into a coma, police officials and doctors from Sassoon hospital said.

Police officials said duo enticed the two girls with chocolates and assaulted them.

Three days ago, one of the victims developed a stomach ache and complained to her mother and eventually told her what happened. Her parents approached the police and the police found out that there was another victim, Pimpri-Chinchwad Police commissioner RK Padmanabhan told Hindustan Times earlier on Tuesday.

The parents took her to the Aundh general hospital where she slipped into coma before she was shifted to Sassoon hospital. The second girl is currently at Aundh general hospital.

The parents of both the girls are workers in a sugar factory. The parents said they dont know the two accused.

Following a complaint, police arrested 22-year-old and detained a 17-year-old on Wednesday. Both have been booked by Hinjewadi police under Protection of Children against Sexual Offence (POCSO) Act and relevant sections of Indian Penal Code.

Police said a murder charge under Section 302 of the IPC will be now be added

According to officials, the survivor told the police that they had been sexually assaulted once earlier also.

The two girls were friends. We have registered a case and we are in the middle of the investigation, said senior police inspector Shivaji Gaware of Hinjewadi police station.
Africa draws just five percent of the worlds tourists despite boasting attractions ranging from the Pyramids and Victoria Falls to wildlife safaris and endless strips of pristine beach. But the continents huge potential can be unlocked by eco-tourism, cultural experiences, domestic travel and political stability, said experts at an African tourism conference hosted by Airbnb in Cape Town last week.

When you look at the success stories, its those countries whove embraced trends, said the African Tourism Associations (ATA) managing director Naledi Khabo who spoke at the summit. When you look at some countries which have made sustainability a focal point, like Tanzania, or Rwanda, theyre very attractive for certain travellers.

Eco-friendly safaris and carbon-neutral lodging draw increasing numbers of tourists from Europe and North America. The number of tourists visiting Tanzania has more than doubled since 2006 to above one million contributing 14% of the countrys gross domestic product (GDP), according to Tanzania Invest.

Khabo, who speaks for the African tourism sector, said other success stories included South Africa, which is promoting the diversification of their products beyond the safari. South Africa has witnessed a boom of experience-based tours, taking travellers to disadvantaged township and rural communities as well as wine farms and game lodges. Abigail Mbalo founded the 4RoomEkasi concept to showcase food and lifestyles in South Africas black communities to visitors

We tapped into the development of tourism in rural and township spaces, she said. We are now starting to see cultural inclusivity. Those areas have been untapped.

A safe place to travel?

Tourism is a major employer of poor black South Africans and accounts for nearly 7,00,000 jobs  a rare success story in a country with an unemployment rate of almost 27%. The World Bank, which spoke at the tourism summit, praised the emerging trend for community-based travel projects like Mbalos for creating opportunities for women and young people.

Every new business, destination, route or visitor creates opportunity for local people, said the World Bank in a statement. While many African destinations have courted foreign visitors hard currency, Kenya has invested heavily in promoting staycations. The country moved to promote domestic travel after dips in foreign arrivals following violent unrest and criminal attacks in recent years.

We have managed to develop the domestic market. Twenty-one percent of Airbnb occupancy is domestic market. Its benefiting us, said Kenyas Tourism Minister Najib Balala at the conference. Tourism, now the second largest driver of Kenyas GDP growth, was worth $1.2 billion in 2017. But many countries on the continent have struggled to woo foreign visitors fearful of political instability and violence. The biggest challenge is perception, said Khabo. Sometimes there is a real threat and sometimes its just perceived.

Rwandas transformation

Rwanda is one country that has successfully transformed its global image. The small east African nation was torn apart by a genocide in 1994 but has since established itself as a high-end destination. Tourism is the number one foreign exchange earner, which is amazing to see in a country like Rwanda, said Rosette Rugamba who was appointed by President Paul Kagame as head of Rwanda Tourism from 2003 to 2010. It is a huge contributor to the image-building of our country.

Zimbabwe, which is home to some of Africas best game and Victoria Falls, has enjoyed a boost in visitor numbers since long-serving despot Robert Mugabe resigned in November. While the number of foreign visitors to Victoria Falls jumped nearly 50% in the first quarter of this year, the country still operates far below its tourist potential. The onus is on African governments and tourism boards to be more proactive in addressing perceptions, added Khabo.

One African country that has seen its tourism industry squeezed is Egypt, once a magnet for travellers that has since the 2011 revolt seen visitor numbers plummet, despite the huge draw of the Pyramids and the Red Sea. Another is the Democratic Republic of Congo, which for years has been riven with often deadly political and ethnic unrest. Theres an enormous amount the DRC has to offer including gorillas, pristine national parks, and smouldering volcanoes, said tourism author Anita Mendiratta, who spoke at the conference. Thats limited now because of the safety and security.

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China places a high premium on its relations with Pakistan and believes a key economic project will be successful, President Xi Jinping told Pakistans army chief, days after a Pakistani minister stirred unease about Chinese Silk Road schemes.

General Qamar Javed Bajwa is the most senior Pakistani figure to visit ally China since the new government of Prime Minister Imran Khan took office in August, and his trip comes a week or so after a senior Chinese diplomat visited Islamabad.

Pakistan has deepened ties with China in recent years as relations with the United States have frayed.

Bajwa may be hoping to smooth out any Chinese alarm at comments last week by Pakistans commerce minister, Abdul Razak Dawood, who suggested suspending for a year projects in the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, the Pakistan leg of Chinas Belt and Road Initiative that includes recreating the old Silk Road trading route.

Meeting Bajwa on Wednesday, Xi said the two countries were iron friends, Chinas official Xinhua news agency said on Thursday. China always places a high premium on China-Pakistan relations, the report cited Xi as saying.

Xi expressed his appreciation for the support and security safeguards provided by Pakistan for the Belt and Road Initiative and the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor construction, Xinhua added.

As long as high-degree mutual trust and concrete measures are in place, the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor construction will succeed and deliver benefits to people of the two countries, Xi said.

Beijing has pledged to invest about $60 billion in Pakistan for infrastructure for the Belt and Road project.
Pakistan continues not to act against externally focused terror groups operating from its soil, such as the Haqqani Network, Afghan Taliban, Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammad, according to the US state departments country report on terrorism released on Wednesday.

The Trump administrations second terror update focuses on Pakistans failure to check financing and access to financial services for LeT and its affiliates, which landed Pakistan on the Financial Action Task Forces grey list of nations that have not complied with UN-mandated measures to check terror financing.

The report reflected Americas continued annoyance at the release from custody of LeT founder and alleged 2008 Mumbai attacks mastermind Hafiz Saeed, saying he was freed because the government had not provided sufficient evidence against him (or) charged Saeed with a crime.

Overall, incidents of terrorism worldwide decreased 23% in 2017, and total deaths in terror attacks went down by 27%, according to the report. Fifty-nine percent of all attacks took place in five countries  Afghanistan, India, Iraq, Pakistan and the Philippines  and 70% of all deaths in terror attacks were reported in Afghanistan, Iraq, Nigeria, Somalia, and Syria.

The number of terror attacks in India went down by 8%, the report said.

Continued American frustration with Pakistan dominated the reports narrative for South and Central Asia. Though Islamabad acted against terror groups that carried out attacks within Pakistan, such as Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, it did not restrict the Afghan Taliban and (Haqqani Network) from operating in Pakistan-based safe havens and threatening US and Afghan forces in Afghanistan, the report said.

It added, Pakistan did not take sufficient action against other externally focused groups such as Lashkar e-Tayyiba and Jaish-e-Mohammad in 2017, which continued to operate, train, organise, and fundraise in the country.

The report retained Pakistan on the list of terrorist safe havens and said groups such as LeT, JeM and Haqqani Network continued to operate from Pakistani soil in 2017.

In the section on terror financing, the US reiterated concerns over Pakistans failure to block funding and financing for LeT. Though the countrys laws are in compliance with UN-mandated measures, authorities failed to implement them in regard to designated entities and individuals such as LeT and its affiliates, which continued to make use of economic resources and raise funds.

The report also noted the Lahore High Court had refused to extend Saeeds detention as the government had not provided sufficient evidence against him or charged him with a crime. At the time of Saeeds release, the US had warned Pakistan of repercussions if he was not immediately re-arrested and investigated. Islamabad ignored the threat, pointing to its judiciarys independence.

The Trump administration suspended nearly $2 billion in security aid a few months later over failed promises and lies and deceit, and pushed the FATF to put the country back on its grey list.
Pakistan Navy chief Admiral Zafar Mahmood Abbasi has said the US decision to suspend security aid to Pakistan was not a favourable move but it would not lead to a life or death situation.

During an interaction with the media at the Pakistan embassy in Washington, Abbasi also said Indias sea-based nuclear weapon initiative had compelled Pakistan to take steps to maintain strategic balance in the region.

Pakistan wants a good relationship with the US based on mutual respect, and not security or economic assistance, he said. Security assistance is not our primary consideration. We want good relations with or without security assistanceWe can work without US assistance, he added.

The US suspended nearly $2 billion in security aid in January and recently cancelled a payment of $300 million from the Coalition Support Fund. Abbasi noted the US had also cancelled a programme that sent Pakistani military officers to attend courses at American defence institutions.

We are still sending our officers to the US, funding the programme from our own resources, he said.

Islamabad is also looking for new surveillance aircraft as the P-3C Orion planes given by the Washington more than a decade ago are outdated. He said, We are ready to acquire them from any source, including the US.

Pakistans three service chiefs are currently out of the country, with the navy chief visiting the US, the army chief in China and the air force chief in Russia.

Referring to Indias sea-based nuclear weapon initiative, Abbasi said: Sea-based nuclear weapons provide an assured second strike capability, which disturbs the equation. Unless we equal that, the imbalance might induce India to start a conventional war.

We have legitimate concerns and our programme is aimed at discouraging India from doing so.

In April, Pakistan conducted the second test of the Babur-III nuclear-capable submarine-launched cruise missile. The missile was tested from a submerged platform off Pakistans coast in the Arabian Sea.

Abbasi admitted Pakistan had tested the Babur-III to meet the Indian challenge but dismissed a journalists implication the missile was developed with Chinas assistance. He said it was an all indigenous programme.

He said Pakistan has an elaborate programme for the security of assets it has developed to counter Indian threats, which provides all the tools, procedures and settings under a central command that runs through the Strategic Plans Division.

He also said Pakistan had signed an agreement with China in 2016 for eight conventional submarines, which will be delivered by 2025.
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By West Kentucky Star Staff

Sep. 18, 2018 | PADUCAH

By West Kentucky Star Staff Sep. 18, 2018 | 07:08 PM | PADUCAH

At its Monday meeting, the Paducah Planning Commission approved the use of the old Amerisource Bergen building for an agricultural hemp facility.



GenCanna Global USA, Inc. will manufacture hemp-derived products in the 120,000 square-foot building at 322 North 3rd Street.



The city has incorporated several conditions for GenCanna into the special use permit application, including improving the landscaping and tree canopy around the building, incorporating murals on the buildings faces, using no more than 10 percent of the building for warehousing, and opening a retail facility using at least 5000 square feet, which will be open to the public at least five days per week. The rest of the building would contain offices and research or manufacturing space.



The current zoning for the building is B-3, General Business Zone, which allows light industrial operations through Planning Commission approval.



City Manager Jim Arndt says, I applaud GenCanna for going above and beyond in their plans to incorporate the building into our riverfront and downtown landscape through murals, tree, and landscaping.



GenCanna President Steve Bevan says, What we are hoping to do in downtown Paducah is to establish a retail presence to show off the products that we manufacture for others, the many different brands. We want to literally bring together a storefront full of brands with Kentucky farmers hemp-derived products contained in them.



Bevan says he is meeting with farmers around Western Kentucky.



He said, We are just amazed by the land and farms. Its important that we farm with family farmers. Theres a great opportunity for Kentucky to re-capture some of its past hemp heritage in a big way. But at the same time, there are some high value products we want to manufacture in downtown from local farms nearby.



Currently, GenCanna is working through the purchase process for the facility. The next steps with the city would involve the submitting of development plans to the Planning Department, and their approval by the Planning Commission.



For more information about the Paducah Planning Commission including videos of meetings, visit http://paducahky.gov/planning-commission. Additional information about GenCanna can be found at https://gencanna.com/.
The United States said it was ready to resume talks with North Korea after Pyongyang pledged on Wednesday to dismantle its key missile facilities and suggested it would close its main Yongbyon nuclear complex if Washington took unspecified actions.

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said he had invited North Koreas foreign minister to meet in New York next week, with the aim of completing its denuclearization by January 2021, after a Pyongyang summit between the leaders of the two Koreas.

The United States appeared eager to seize on commitments by North Korean leader Kim Jong Un at his talks with South Korean President Moon Jae-in even as critics said the steps did little to put Pyongyang on a course for irreversible denuclearization.

North Korea will allow experts from concerned countries to watch the closure of its missile engine testing site and launch pad at Tongchang-ri, Moon said at a joint news conference with Kim after their meeting in the North Korean capital.

North Korea will also take additional steps such as closing its main Yongbyon nuclear complex if the United States undertook unspecified reciprocal measures, Moon added.

The sudden revival of diplomacy followed weeks of doubts in U.S. President Donald Trumps administrations about whether North Korea was willing to negotiate in good faith after a June summit between Trump and Kim yielded few tangible results.

The January 2021 completion date was the most specific deadline set in what is expected to be a long process of trying to get the North to end its nuclear program, which may threaten U.S. allies South Korea and Japan as well as the U.S. homeland.

In addition to inviting North Korean Foreign Minister Ri Yong Ho to meet when both are in New York next week for the annual U.N. General Assembly gathering of world leaders, Pompeo said Washington invited Pyongyangs representatives to meet the U.S. special representative for North Korea, Stephen Biegun, in Vienna at the earliest opportunity.

China, North Koreas most important economic backer and diplomatic ally, said it warmly welcomed the agreement reached in Pyongyang and strongly supported it.

We absolutely cannot let this hard to come by opportunity for peace slip away once again, the Chinese governments top diplomat, State Councillor Wang Yi, said in a statement.

SKEPTICISM

Some U.S. officials were deeply skeptical. Speaking before Pompeos announcement, two senior U.S. officials involved in U.S.-North Korea policy voiced fears Kim was trying to drive a wedge between Washington and Seoul.

At the summit, the two Koreas agreed on plans to resume economic cooperation, including working to reconnect rail and road links. They agreed as well to restart a joint factory park in a border city of Kaesong and tours to the Norths Mount Kumgang resort, when conditions are met.

U.S. officials suggested Kim was trying to ease the economic pressure on him to curb his nuclear programs and to undercut the rationale for U.S. troops being based in South Korea by improving relations with Seoul.

The United States has some 28,500 U.S. troops in South Korea to deter North Korean attack. Pyongyang has long sought their withdrawal and Trump has questioned their rationale and cost.

There is nothing the North has offered so far that would constitute irreversible movement toward denuclearization, however you define that, by January 2021 or any other time, or even a reduction of the military threat it poses to the South and the region, said a U.S. intelligence official.

Everything thats out there now is conditional on U.S. actions that would reduce the pressure on the North to cooperate or (is) filled with loopholes and exit ramps, added the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

U.S. officials said the ambiguity about what Washington was supposed to do for the North to close its nuclear complex at Yongbyon gave Kim room to argue that Washington had not done enough for North Korea to follow through on its pledges.

TRUMP: HES CALM, IM CALM

Even if North Korea were to shut down Yongbyon, officials and experts believe it has other secret nuclear facilities.

South Koreas national security adviser, Chung Eui-yong, said the reciprocal U.S. steps could include an end-of-war declaration. South Korea and the United States remain technically at war with North Korea because the 1950-53 Korean War ended in an armistice and not a peace treaty.

Though Wednesdays inter-Korean agreement failed to stipulate the Norths commitment to declare nuclear and missile facilities for inspection and eventual decommissioning, Seoul has been in talks with both Pyongyang and Washington over the issue, a senior South Korean official said.

What North Korea really wants and their priorities may be different from ours, the official told reporters on Thursday on condition of anonymity.

Were talking about a package that would carry many elements, including the declaration of the facilities, Yongbyon and Tongchang-ri, which are of U.S. interest, and from the North side, the issues of normalizing relations, ending the war and easing sanctions.

Despite the doubts of U.S. officials and outside analysts, North Koreas pledge at the summit with the South Korean president drew an enthusiastic response from Trump.

Speaking before Pompeos comments, Trump welcomed Kims pledges, calling them part of tremendous progress with Pyongyang on a number of fronts, and hailing very good news from the summit between the Koreas.

Hes calm, Im calm - so well see what happens, Trump, who last year threatened to destroy North Korea, told reporters.

THEATRICAL PROMISES

Kim pledged to work toward the complete denuclearization of the Korean peninsula during two meetings with Moon earlier this year and at his summit with Trump.

But discussions over how to implement the vague commitments have since faltered and North Korea has consistently refused to give up its nuclear arsenal unilaterally.

Washington has demanded concrete action, such as a full disclosure of North Koreas nuclear and missile facilities, before agreeing to Pyongyangs key goals, including an easing of international sanctions and an official end to the Korean War.

While North Korea has stopped nuclear and missile tests in the past year, it did not allow international inspections of its dismantling of its Punggye-ri nuclear test site in May, drawing criticism that its action was for show and could be reversed.

The day after the June 12 Trump-Kim summit, Pompeo said he hoped to achieve major disarmament by North Korea by the end of Trumps first term in January 2021.

His latest statement that the process should be completed by January 2021 may be a signal Washington will not wait forever.

The statement clearly implies that inter-Korean summits and theatrical promises to dismantle the odd facility simply cant substitute for a negotiating process on the nuclear issue, said the Asia Society Policy Institutes Daniel Russel.

Invoking the end of Trumps term in January 2021 is another way of saying to the North that American patience is not unlimited and that Kim Jong Un wont be able to sidestep denuclearization indefinitely, Russel added.

(Reporting by Lesley Wroughton in Washington and Hyonhee Shin in Seoul; Additional reporting by Joyce Lee, Soyoung Kim and Joint Press Corps, Jeongmin Kim, Haejin Choi and Ju-min Park in Seoul, Ben Blanchard and Zhang Min in Beijing, and Roberta Rampton, David Brunnstrom and John Walcott in Washington; Writing by Yara Bayoumy and Arshad Mohammed; Editing by David Gregorio, Peter Cooney and Lincoln Feast.)
Deposed Pakistan prime minister Nawaz Sharif, his daughter and son-in-law were brought to their home turf, Lahore, in a special plane after their release from prison in Islamabad Wednesday evening, hours after the Islamabad High Court suspended their sentences in a major corruption case that jeopardised their political career.

A large number of Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) party supporters, including women workers, gathered outside the Haj Terminal to welcome them.

Subsequently, the Sharif family was escorted to their Jati Umra residence located in the outskirts of Lahore.

While they were being escorted, the party supporters showered Sharifs car with rose petals and chanted slogans dekho dekho kon aya, sher aya, sher aya (see who has come, a lion has come).

Some of the supporters also kissed his car saying, You are innocent, we love you.

A large number of PML-N workers were also present at Jati Umra to greet the the former prime minister, his daughter Maryam Nawaz and son-in-law Mohammad Safdar. The road leading to Jati Umra was lit up as workers queued up there to receive their leaders.

I have come here soon after I heard the release of my leader (Sharif) from the Adiala jail. I am very happy to have him among us, Hasan Ali, a PML-N worker, said.

He said no corruption charge has been proved against his leader and he was put behind the bar to give Imran Khan an open field to form the government.

The PML-N workers distributed sweets and also offered thanks giving prayer at Jati Umra.

We will continue celebrating the release of our leader for coming days, PML-N leader Imran Nazir said.

PML-N president Shahbaz Sharif said the courts decision has vindicated his elder brother. Today truth prevailed and my brother has been vindicated, he added.
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F ormula One legend Eddie Jordan is offering Londoners the chance to win a three-bedroom flat in south London, which he says will be worth 750,000, for the price of a (posh) gin and tonic.

The former F1 boss is raffling the property he owns in Tooting with his son, Kyle, via their property company Win a Property (WAP), set up to sell properties on behalf of developers.

The flat is a first-floor period conversion close to Tooting Bec Tube station, which is currently undergoing a comprehensive renovation  with design overseen by Kyle.

The Top Gear presenter said he was raffling the property after a chat in Monaco with his son about how difficult Kyle's friends found it to buy their own homes in London.

TODO: define component type brightcove

My son said that so many of his friends he went to school with, theyve got good jobs but finding a deposit is proving to be a real struggle for most of them and they're still living in rented property, says Jordan over the phone from the Singapore Grand Prix.

I get the clear impression that in London, owning even a studio or starting a family is out of reach of most people.

The flat has an open-plan kitchen/living area and direct access to a private roof terrace.

In 2017 Tooting was named one of the 10 coolest areas in the world by Lonely Planet.

Tooting: one of the 10 coolest neighbourhoods in the world / Daniel Lynch

To be in with a chance of winning, entrants must pay 10, the price of a gin and tonic in a posh pub, according to Jordan and play a game of spot the ball.

As renovation works are still underway at the property, ticket buyers should be aware they will not see the completed property until after they have entered the raffle.

The competition will close on December 23 and the pair expect to sell over 100,000 tickets.

The flat will be offered unfurnished and stamp duty and lawyers fees will be covered as part of the prize.

I really hope its someone whos committed to London, who wants to live there, set up a home and a family, who really needs a bit of a break in their lives, but its like saying who do you want to win the Grand National? You cant control it, says Jordan.

IS IT LEGAL?

Eddie and Karl got advice from gambling lawyers to confirm the competition's legality.

"The price of a gin and tonic in a posh pub": what Eddie says you can buy with 10 / Getty Images

Gambling Commission rules say that anyone thinking of raffling a property must be sure their scheme counts as a competition rather than a lottery. Running an unauthorised lottery can lead to a year in jail and a 5,000 fine.

A lottery requires buying tickets and getting lucky. To comply with gambling rules, a property raffle must be a competition requiring some skill on the part of the entrant.

This is why all property raffles require entrants to answer a question as well as buy a ticket. The Gambling Commission may take a dim view of a question that is too easy.

Usually, there must also be an opportunity to enter for free, so most property raffles allow one free postal entry per person. If the question is deemed difficult enough, this is not necessary.

IS THIS THE ONLY PROPERTY RAFFLE?

By no means. Raffling property has become increasingly popular in the UK over the past year, as homeowners struggle to achieve sale prices as high as they want or need for their homes.

However, the owners of a luxurious house on the banks of the river Thames had to offer a cash prize after they failed to sell enough 25 raffle tickets to cover the value of the property.

The Gambling Commission, which regulates illegal prize draws, has also intervened in several improperly run property raffles so far this year.
Drew Gordon, the older brother of Magic star Aaron Gordon, is expected to sign with the Nets, a source tells Emiliano Carchia of Sportando. According to Carchia, the new deal for the elder Gordon will feature an Exhibit 10 clause.

Gordon, who went undrafted out of New Mexico in 2012, has bounced around various professional leagues since then, primarily playing overseas. In addition to a brief stint with the Sixers during the 2014/15 season, the 69 power forward has also spent time with clubs in Serbia, Italy, Turkey, France, Lithuania, and Russia.

Most recently, Gordon played for Zenit St. Petersburg during the 2017/18 season. The 28-year-old recorded 11.1 PPG and 6.7 RPG in 21 VTB League games, along with 12.4 PPG and 7.0 RPG in 17 EuroCup contests.

Given the presence of an Exhibit 10 clause in Gordons reported agreement with the Nets, it seems likely that the club views him as a potential contributor for the Long Island Nets, Brooklyns G League affiliate.

Currently, the Nets have 18 players officially under contract. The team could fill its 20-man offseason roster by finalizing reported deals for Gordon and Alan Williams, who reached a two-way contract agreement with the Nets.
Press Release

20 September 2018

Hogan Hospitality Group (HHG), a hotel management company with flagship properties in the state of Hawaii, has obtained a majority interest in Marin Management Inc. (MMI), a California-based hospitality group managing properties in California, Arizona and Texas. With the acquisition, HHG adds 17 hotels, restaurants and spas to its diverse portfolio, with the majority of properties located in California.

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John Manderfeld, founder and president of Marin Management Inc., will remain president following the acquisition. HHG will work closely with MMI leadership to continue providing exceptional support and management to hotel owners, while developing strategies for growth into new markets.

"As a family-owned and operated business, we're grateful to strike this partnership with another family business that shares many of the same values, such as delivering greater growth and greater return on investment for hotel owners," said Manderfeld. "Hogan Hospitality Group has a long track record of success in Hawaii, a market driven by hospitality, and we are excited to gain their support and resources while working toward new growth opportunities together."

"Marin Management has built an excellent reputation and strong relationships with hotel owners and partners over the years," said Gary Hogan, CEO of Hogan Hospitality Group. "We look forward to working with MMI's clients to provide outstanding operations, marketing and management expertise and bringing an owner-centric approach to hotel management."

About Marin Management, Inc.

Marin Management, Inc., headquartered in Sausalito, California, is a full-service hotel management company. The company provides a variety of management, consulting, sales-support, acquisition and development services for the lodging and restaurant industries. Marin Management currently operates hotels throughout California, Arizona and Texas and is expanding into other states. Marin Management operates full-service and limited-service hotels affiliated with 14 brands of major international franchisers, such as Hilton Hotels Corporation, Wyndham International, Choice Hotels International, Carlson Hotels Worldwide, Intercontinental Hotel Group (IHG) and other franchisors. The company also operates unique independent hotels, such as the Bay Landing Hotel, San Francisco International Airport.
Press Release

20 September 2018

Ethiopia once again heads the league for hotel development in East Africa, according to a regional focus from the influential annual hotel pipeline survey by Lagos-based W Hospitality Group.

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Details of the survey, which covers the whole of the African continent, will be one of the key discussions at the Africa Hotel Investment Forum (AHIF), which will return to Nairobi on 2-4 October 2018.

Across the region, Kenya has 2,754 rooms under construction, whilst Tanzania, is the other significant regional player.

Accor is among the chains focusing heavily on East Africa, including Ethiopia, doubling the number of hotels in its development pipeline in in the region, and achieving a 66% growth in the number of rooms signed. Hilton is deploying part of its US$50 million Hilton Africa Growth Initiative to help fund growth in the region, converting hotels to its DoubleTree and other brands, and it has seen a 51% growth in its pipeline.

Government incentives, alongside international conferences and global bases for NGOs, embassies and aid agencies have all fuelled hotel growth in Addis.

In addition to the upcoming branded supply in Addis, there is a large stock of unbranded rooms under construction - but many are stalled, looking for investors to help finish them.

The hotel development pipeline in Ethiopia is almost 50% up on last year's strong figures, with Addis Ababa accounting for 86% of the total, almost 5,000 rooms in 25 hotels. There is also planned expansion in Awassa, Bahir Dar, Bishoftu, Gondar, Hawassa and Langano.

This year's pipeline report, now in its 10th edition, has 41 contributors, reporting 418 deals with over 100 brands across Africa. Year-on-year performance for Africa as a whole in 2018 shows growth, but more muted than in recent years - 25% growth in the number of pipeline rooms in 2015; 19% in 2016, and 13% in 2017, much the same as the 14 per cent growth in 2018.

W Hospitality Group's Managing Director, Trevor Ward said: "Ethiopia's hotel expansion is truly impressive. The activity there has been huge, and it is very pleasing to see that investors and operators are now looking to exploit the opportunities outside of Addis Ababa, in the secondary cities and tourism centres."

AHIF, which is supported by the Kenyan Ministry of Tourism and Wildlife, is attended by leading international hotel investors, business leaders and politicians. It has a proven track-record of driving investment into tourism projects, infrastructure and hotel development across Africa.

Photo: Bench Digital

Matthew Weihs, Managing Director of Bench Events, AHIF's organiser, said: "This latest regional report from W Hospitality Group contains invaluable detail. It, and analyses from other expert advisers to the industry, will shed light on where the best investment opportunities are likely to be in the near future. It is this kind of content that makes AHIF a must-attend event, alongside unrivalled networking opportunities."

In the first week of October, Kenya will show itself off to the world with an unprecedented week of tourism promotion. As well as hosting AHIF, it will stage a number of events including the Magical Kenya Tourism Expo (MKTE), the largest travel trade show in East Africa, and it will announce a package of measures to incentivise investment.



About W Hospitality Group

The W Hospitality Group, a founder member of Hotel Partners Africa, specialises in the provision of advisory services to the hotel, tourism and leisure industries, providing a full range of services to clients who have investments in the sector, or who are looking to enter them through development, acquisition or other means. In sub-Saharan Africa the W Hospitality Group is regarded as the market leader due to the market and financial expertise of its staff, its worldwide knowledge, and its commitment to its clients. In Africa, W Hospitality Group has to date worked in 39 countries on the continent, from its Lagos and Addis Ababa offices. www.w-hospitalitygroup.com

About the Africa Hotel Investment Forum (AHIF)

AHIF is the premier hotel investment conference in Africa, attracting many prominent international hotel owners, investors, financiers, management companies and their advisers. It is organised by Bench Events (www.benchevents.com), which has an established record of delivering high-level networking and thought leadership conferences for hospitality investment and aviation in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Asia and Latin America. 'Creating an impact' is the core focus of Bench Events, as the company enables growth by facilitating deal opportunities.

Sponsors of AHIF are: Host Partners: Ministry of Tourism and Wildlife, Kenya; Platinum Sponsors: AccorHotels, Hilton, Marriott International and Radisson Hotel Group; Gold Sponsors: Afreximbank, Aleph Hospitality, Best Western Hotels & Resorts, City Blue Hotels, Colliers International, Hotel Partners Africa, Insignia, JLL, Louvre Hotels Group, Munich RE, Ole Sereni, STR, Stuart and Partners, Swiss Education Group and Wyndham Hotels and Resorts; Sponsor: Solarus and Exhibitor: Drawlink.
Located in Al Seef Al Seef Hotel by Jumeirah is spread across 10 clusters of Arabian Bayts (homes), tucked away amidst the rooftops and courtyards of a souk

Located in Al Seef Al Seef Hotel by Jumeirah is spread across 10 clusters of Arabian Bayts (homes), tucked away amidst the rooftops and courtyards of a souk, offering guests tales of history and culture at every turn.



With views down into the alleyways of the souk or out across the busy waterways of the Creek, and a restaurant - Sabaa - that serves Emirati-inspired traditional dishes and Middle Eastern tastes, guests can book to stay from just AED 250 plus government fees and taxes, as an introductory opening offer.



A unique Emirati-inspired design:

Split across separate villas, the Arabian Bayts provide areas of personal peacefulness interspersed amongst the vibrant walkways within the hotel grounds  very much like the old neighborhoods of decades passed.

Further traditions of Emirati culture come to life behind the rough plastered walls, such as palm frond motifs, wooden ceilings and windows with traditional wooden panels that overlook the winding outdoor corridors of the Souk or Creek.

The interiors of the 180 rooms and 10 suites reflect an age of pearl trading and Emirati crafts, with a color palette inspired by the UAEs natural environment. Historical artefacts adorn the walls, with furnishings including old style light switches, rotary dial phones, hanging oil lanterns and framed photographs of the souk and creek through the years  a visual exploration of the heritage of Arabia.

An Emirati inspired hospitality experience

As hosts to our traveling guests, staff will provide advice on undiscovered places to see and authentic experiences and traditional shops and restaurants to visit; just as traders would have done in the past, but with a touch of the Jumeirah Group award-winning hospitality.

In the heart of Old Dubai:

Only 15 minutes from Dubai International Airport, and with direct links to Dubai Water Taxi and traditional abras, Al Seef Hotel by Jumeirah offers guests the opportunity to experience the Dubais past within an environment that is quiet, peaceful and filled with design and traditions of an era gone by.

This part of Dubai is known for its historic creek which still serves as an important trade hub, for the winding alleyways, cafes and courtyards of Al Fahidi historical neighborhood and for the Spice, Textile and Gold Souks.

The location offers curious travelers a chance to immerse themselves in the citys proud history and rediscover its vibrant past through the museums, galleries, souks, traditional dhows and architecture. Visit the quaint Arabian Tea House Cafe, historical Dubai Museum and 200-year-old Al Fahidi Fort; travel across the Creek on a traditional Abra ride; or attend events such as the Sikka Art Fair, a weeklong event which is part of a two month city-wide celebration of arts and culture (hosted by Dubai Culture), taking place across March and April every year.

Guests can also visit the Sheikh Mohammed Center for Cultural Understanding, established by His Highness, the Vice-President and Prime Minister of the UAE and Ruler of Dubai, to showcase the traditions and customs of the UAE through various offerings such as a traditional Emirati breakfast, national day celebrations, cultural interactions and Q&A sessions.

Alessandro Cabella, whose role as Area General Manager for Jumeirah Group includes the new hotel said: Al Seef Hotel by Jumeirah is a real passion project. Everyone involved in bringing this idea to fruition has been inspired by the prospect of offering our guests a unique and authentic experience inspired by the stories of Arabia. Everything within the property adds to the authenticity of the environment and experience, providing multiple opportunities for beautiful photographs, quiet nooks to relax and spaces to feel as if you have been swept away to a well-preserved gem of the past while still enjoying the modern-day comforts of our quality service.



Al Seef Hotel by Jumeirah completes a trio of hotels located in Al Seef, a destination by Meraas, the masterminds behind some of Dubais most popular tourist destinations including The Beach and City Walk. The hotel joins the two recently opened hotels located at the opposite end of the destinations promenade that stretches for 1.8km alongside Dubai Creek: Zabeel House by Jumeirah Al Seef and Zabeel House MINI by Jumeirah.

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Consumers today continue to seek exciting and unique experiences when they travel, and the lines between hotels and alternative lodging options, such as Airbnb, continues to be blurred.

In this new day in age, the meaning of travel has taken an interesting turn in terms of what is driving consumers away from home. The generation of material pleasantries has come and gone, and what people are really looking for these days are new and engaging experiences. Curiosity is driving interest away from the status quo. While the necessities, like having a great location, providing safety and security while keeping a high standard for quality, will always hold value, consumers are seeking ways to leverage their travel by experiencing and becoming one with the surrounding environment. A new fine line has been created between simply staying somewhere overnight and taking advantage of and enjoying the nuances of the surrounding environment.

We have seen the hotel industry recognize this and proactively meet these evolving expectations and desires recently. Hotels are beginning to favor local flavors and ingredients for their food and beverage outlets. A big push for brands to separate themselves from the norm is evident, as well. Hotel companies are straying away from the me too brands and proving that being successful and consistent doesnt always mean being identical at every location.

Over the last decade, this has led to an outburst of boutique and lifestyle hotels. Marriotts Autograph Collection emphasizes boutique hotels with unique passion, design, and connection with the local area. Hyatt entered the space with its Unbound Collection of story worthy properties around the world, featuring exclusive locations, famous architecture, and incredible dining experiences. Tru by Hilton is emphasizing an interactive social environment that seeks to combine business and pleasure altogether. InterContinental Hotels Groups Hotel Indigo is all about the neighborhood that surrounds each property and incorporates these aspects into the fabric of the hotel. The list goes on with brands such as W Hotels, Canopy by Hilton, Kimpton, Aloft, Tribute Collection, Cambria, Moxy, Design Hotels, and more. These major brands incentivize travelers to experience these unique properties while also benefitting from the advantages of a large hotel company, such as service standards, consistency in facilities and amenities, and the plethora of benefits of each companys rewards programs.

Meanwhile, a juggernaut has risen in the lodging space over the last decade. Airbnb has managed to compete successfully with large lodging companies and brands that have been well established in the marketplace. Airbnb has found a way to offer these truly unique experiences at sometimes a fraction of the price of a hotel room. Customers can customize their search to locate accommodations that cater to their specific needs. Location options can be extremely flexible, including every possible neighborhood in a city. By empowering consumers to select, in every aspect, how and where they want to travel, Airbnb has created an extremely successful business model. As an example, an Airbnb experience can range from a studio apartment in Manhattan to a five-bedroom house in Houston, from an Airstream trailer in Malibu to a Treehouse in Atlanta or even a campsite in the Sahara Desert. While some would say that the idea of home sharing has been around for many years through sites like VRBO, HomeAway, and OneFineStay, these unique real-life experiences have not only been made available but are increasingly becoming more common place through the advent of Airbnb.

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Where Airbnb has thrived and become more than just a home-sharing website is how it offers its product. To the Millennial generation, Airbnb is cool and tech savvy. The website is fun to use and easy to navigate. Consumers enjoy the process of filtering through what they want and dont want for each property or location. There is something exciting about staying in somebody elses home and experiencing the local culture. The privacy and exclusivity aspect to the guest is also a tremendous benefit. Most of the time, theres no need to check in at a front desk, no room keys to worry about losing, and every amenity offered is available specifically for you, the guest. Additionally, compared to the typical hotel room, on average, Airbnb offers a significant more amount of space per unit, given that travelers are typically renting an entire apartment or house, for similar or lower prices. Lastly, as a company, Airbnb has an advantage that hotel companies do not have, which is to increase or decrease the supply of rooms as needed. Airbnb hosts can remove some of the inventory from the market during periods of low demand and increase the inventory when the market calls for more Airbnb houses or rooms, particularly during peak seasons or special events, whereas a hotel is unable to do so.

With 4.5 million listings as of 2018, Airbnb has proven to be very successful. However, as with any company, there are areas (internal and external) for improvement, and where traditional hotels still hold an advantage. The company has a limited set of guidelines and standards for its product and offerings. While this has been generally helpful in growing its inventory, it is a fact that it is not going unnoticed by guests. In some markets, Airbnb has also been allowed to compete with hotels but has not been held to the same standards as related to the payment of taxes, the provision of life-safety/security measures, the acquisition of permits, and the compliance of ADA regulations. In other instances, Airbnb places somewhat of a burden on its customers, as guests are sometimes on their own for food, toiletries, and general information, as the only real staff available is the owner of the unit, who sometimes may not even be in the same city.

Additionally, Airbnb is not able to compete as strongly in attracting business travelers or meeting/group demand generated by in-house meetings, since unlike large hotels, Airbnb units lack conference facilities. Nevertheless, over the last few years, Airbnb has shown that it can attract such demand during special events, large conferences, or periods of peak demand and occupancy in highly saturated markets. To combat some of these issues, Airbnb has implemented standards that allow some units to be designated as Airbnb plus. To be considered for this designation, the homes must be comfortable, well equipped, well maintained, and thoughtfully designed, passing a 100-point in-person quality inspection. Lastly, although Airbnb has not traditionally offered a customer loyalty program, which may not have incentivized customers to keep using Airbnb, as of 2018, the company launched a pilot program to reward regular and high-rated customers known as superguests. According to the company, superguests will receive benefits such as discounts, airport pickups, flight upgrades, and lounge access. Airbnb is also aggressively pursuing marketing campaigns that show how its product can be ideal and even superior to a hotel room for business travelers and group travelers.

For these reasons and many others, Airbnb can be considered a direct competitor to hotels. However, the opposing train of thought argues that, despite the arrival and growth of Airbnb, national demand and hotel performance has continued to increase since our last recession, with occupancy and ADR levels increasing from a low of 54.5% and $97.50 in 2009 to 66% and $126 in 2017, respectively, with further increases being experienced in 2018. Without a doubt, the lodging market nationwide is operating at the highest RevPAR levels ever recorded. As such, this helps support the reasoning that even with Airbnb and other home-rental services, occupancy and demand levels continue to rise for hotels across the nation. Based on this information, it is easier to see how Airbnb could be considered less of a competitor and a less of a threat to the hotel industry. Many believe that Airbnb has instead done for the hotel industry what Uber has done for the taxi industry, satisfying demand that existed but remained dormant, only becoming noticeable when the new service and product was provided. While Uber affected the taxi industry by taking a portion of market share, much of the demand for Uber consisted of new clients that would have not otherwise taken a taxi. Similarly, it can be assumed that a portion of individuals traveling across the world and now using Airbnb are guests that would have not otherwise made the trip were it not for the availability of lodging provided by a service such as Airbnb.

In the U.S. alone, Airbnb is estimated to have approximately 700,000 listings; ultimately, in a market of five million hotel rooms, its hard to see how it could possibly not be a direct competitor. Hotel brands are becoming increasingly aware of this threat and the desire for guests to seek unique lodging opportunities and experiences. As noted previously, hotel companies continue to create brands that are increasingly independent in nature, with new brands or collections of unique properties catering to clientele that wants a unique experience. However, in recent years, hotel brands are taking a step further toward becoming somewhat more like home-sharing services, like Airbnb.

As an example, in April 2018, Marriott launched a six-month trial program called Tribute Portfolio Homes, where guests can rent homes and earn Marriott Rewards. The Unbound Collection by Hyatt has also launched a similar program through its acquisition of Oasis, which just like Airbnb, allows homeowners and guests to rent and lease properties, further blurring the lines between hotel companies and Airbnb. However, Airbnb is also changing. While individual units remain the focus of the company, many hosts are realizing the advantages of increasing their unit count to benefit from economies of scale. Some Airbnb hosts are seeking to transform entire apartment buildings and convert them to hotel rooms listed only on Airbnb. For example, in Boston, an owner of a building with as many as eight units rents each unit on Airbnb with labels such as Airbnb Hotel #1 or Airbnb Hotel #2.

Airbnb itself has partnered with Niido to develop as many as 14 home-sharing apartment complexes by 2020. The first two of the part-apartment/part-hotel complexes known as Niido powered by Airbnb are already in operation in Kissimmee, Florida, and Nashville, Tennessee. In 2017, global real estate behemoth, Brookfield Property Partners LP, announced that it planned to invest as much as $200 million into Niido to support its efforts in converting apartment complexes into Airbnb hotels.

Furthermore, Airbnb is not opposed to working with the existing hotel industry. The Airbnb website clearly states that Airbnb welcomes listings hosted by professional hospitality providers, as long as they offer unique spaces and personal hospitality to the Airbnb community. Some of the qualities Airbnb looks for in these listings include guest rooms that are individually unique or local in design, common spaces that incorporate local influences, and distinctive design characteristics. Airbnb goes as far to say that ideal properties include bed-and-breakfast inns, boutique hotels, nature/eco lodges, timeshares, serviced apartments, and hostels. The platform has also now added search categories so that users can more quickly locate the property type for which they are searching.

The reality is that the lines between hotels, hotel brands, and home-sharing services continue to be blurred. It is becoming more and more evident that while guests continue to seek unique lodging products and experiences, providers, from large hotel corporations to individual hosts, are seeking to cater to this demand. Most noteworthy is that these changes have occurred rapidly over the last decade, leaving us with an industry and lodging products that seem to change by the day. It will be interesting to see how else the industry transforms itself in the upcoming years, as consumers behaviors and demands continue to change.

About Luigi Major

Luigi Major, MAI, is the Managing Director of HVS Los Angeles. He is seeking new consultants to join the firm's new LA operations base in West Hollywood; if you are interested in joining HVS LA, please visit www.joinhvs.com. Luigi earned his bachelor's degree from the University of Houston's Conrad N. Hilton College of Hotel and Restaurant Management. Luigi focuses on consulting, valuation, advisory, and financing for hotels. Contact Luigi at (214) 629-1135, or lmajor@hvs.com.

www.hvs.com

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Dave Chappelle's resurgence came like a hurricane. After spending years in relative seclusion, Chappelle touched down with multiple Netflix specials. Soon after, the veteran comedian embarked on an unprecedented Radio City Music Hall run. The historical moments don't appear to be coming to a halt anytime soon in Chappelle's career, as the comedian hosted a monumental comedy event in Los Angeles on Wednesday night.

As reported by Page Six, Chappelle invited several celebrities to perform at the Peppermint Club in Los Angeles. Performers included Jon Stewart, Michelle Wolf, Katt Williams, Michael Che, and John Mayer, who played the guitar and hit the crowd with the occasional one-liner. Will Smith also made his stand-up debut, as he filmed for a new show called The Bucket List. Apparently, getting on stage and cracking jokes was an important goal on Smith's list. His wife Jada Pinkett Smith and daughter Willow were in attendance as well.

Will joked about his son Jaden not allowing him on the "Icon" single, his wife's new talk show Red Table Talk, and also touched on his recent social media prominence. Of course, Chappelle also hit the stage, and delivered several of his signature polarizing jokes, including a witty Louis C.K. reference and a Kanye West/Jack Johnson comparison.
Although Tay Keith broke into the mainstream audience earlier this year, he's already put his imprint in the rap game. Since the top of the year, he's worked with Drake on three separate occasions on "Look Alive," Scorpion highlight, "Non-Stop" and Travis Scott's "SICKO MODE." There have been a few people who've suggested Tay Keith produce an entire project for Drake. While there hasn't been any indication that a full project is on the way, we'll still be getting some new music from the two in the foreseeable future.

Drake recently performed in Nashville with Migos as part of their "Aubrey & The Three Migos" tour which kicked off last month. During his performance, Drake announced that he'll be heading back into the studio with Tay Keith right after he wraps up his tour.

"Im about to go finish this tour, I'ma go home. Im gonna spend some time with my family, with my friends and I promise you that the next thing Im doing is going right back to the studio with Tay Keith from Memphis, Tennessee and we gonna make us some more music. He said.

Fans are definitely eager to hear what the Drake and Keith come up with. So far, their track record together is flawless and we could only imagine that they'll have more hits in the stash once they get back in the studio together.
Earlier today, we reported a story that saw Mark Cuban donating $10 million dollars to women's organizations following the investigation into the Mavericks organization for their predatory sexual behavior" which included multiple sexual allegations against former CEO and president Terdema Ussery, who repeatedly requested sex from employees and allegedly touched women's legs during meetings, as well as other forms of sexual harassment. Ussery left the Mavs in 2015 and has since been replaced by Cynthia Marshall.

Well following the investigation, which was released on Wednesday, Mark stopped by ESPNs The Jump with host Rachel Nichols to further talk about the accusations, and she did not hold back from firing hard questions.

Cuban apologized profusely for allegedly not knowing about the incidents, saying he made plenty of mistakes along the way and regrets not doing more when he had the chance. He even got teary eyed and explained that the stories and pain inside his employees eyes touched him deeply and he has done everything he can to change the culture surrounding this incident.

At one point, Nichols even brought up that Ussery had been accused of similar behavior before Cuban bought the team and the local news had reported on it, yet Cuban kept him employed. Cuban said that he didnt know about those reports; Nichols asked, How did you not know that? He insisted that he wasnt aware, and admitted he shouldve done due diligence. I was just excited to buy the Mavs, the billionaire said.

Rachel continued to press Cuban in ways not many reporters could or would, and my hat goes off to her for the tough interview. This is a bad situation for Cuban and Mavericks all around. Check out the uneasy clip (below).
Wizkid is arguably one of the world's most well-known and talented International superstars. He has recently been grabbing headlines for a collaboration a with Nike in the wake of the immense success of the Team Nigeria jerseys and appearing alongside Naomi Campbell at a Dolce and Gabbana show during Milan Men's Fashion Week. The musician is back to being a news story, courtesy of a scathing Instagram post by one of his baby's mothers.

Starboy is reportedly the father of three sons. The child in question is his eldest, named Boluwatife, or Tife for short. Tife's mother Shola took to the gram to reveal the multimillionaire musician's reputedly poor parenting skills. She told her followers that WizKid has missed each one of his son's birthdays, and has neglected to call his son on such occasions, but posts "Happy Birthday Tife" on his social media accounts. Shola claims she has had to buy gifts for their son and claim that they have come from his father to avoid hurting the child.

Shalo also alleges that Wizkid does not assist his child financially as he supposedly prefers to spend his money on drugs rather than his son's education. She detailed an incident where Wizkid sent the child home with a "weed crusher" in his bag and allegedly bought a chain for Tife which he took back after Tife had posed for photographs in it.

The allegations are weighted and numbered. You can catch some of Shola's posts below.

https://www.instagram.com/p/Bn7YQFFnUCO



https://www.instagram.com/p/Bn7Yw0oHpNa



https://www.instagram.com/p/Bf66ARsABT5


Young Dolph made a pretty discerning observation while he smoked his wake-and-bake blunt, which he simultaneously transcribed over Twitter in a post liked by over 21,000 users. In the post, Young Dolph criticizes the hypocrisy of critics and fans alike, who only elaborate positively once a rapper has suffered an untimely death. Dolph used the recent examples of XXXTentacion, Mac Miller, Fredo Santana, and Lil Peep to further his point.

https://twitter.com/_/status/1042381156417724417



Dolph made certain it was clear, he wasn't casting any doubt over their relevancy or brilliance, but rather the fickle nature of fame and appreciation. He stated in simpler terms: "they don't love you until you're good and dead." What makes Dolph's observation all the more disheartening is that he's been forced to face his own mortality on countless occasions. In January of this year, Dolph spoke adamantly about the target he feels has been on his back since the age of seventeen, largely within the dominion of his hometown, Memphis, Tennessee.

The topic of fandom is of concern to those who don't chase it, or rather accept it as causality for success or failure, in equal measure. Young Dolph's music videos have become a symbol of unwavering strength for the rapper. He's even taken more of a directorial lead in recent videos, which has seen him take up an involuntary role as a disparate speaker in contemporary hip hop.
At the beginning of this century, the British energy company BP achieved its own American dream, becoming the largest oil and gas producer in the United States after spending a combined $75 billion to buy the oil companies Amoco and ARCO in audacious back-to-back deals.

The future looked bright  but it didnt last. A series of disasters that began with the 2005 Texas City refinery explosion that killed 15 and culminated in 2010 with the Deepwater Horizon disaster forced BP to sell assets and dramatically shrink its holdings as it paid tens of billions of dollars in cleanup costs, damages and penalties to settle civil and criminal cases.

Now, nearly a decade after Deepwater Horizon, BP is ready to grow again, betting much of its comeback on Texas after completing the biggest energy deal in the world this year. Its pending acquisition of the U.S. shale assets of the Australian mining company BHP Billiton for $10.5 billions puts BP in the Permian Basin in West Texas and the Eagle Ford shale in South Texas, and expands its presence in the Haynesville shale in East Texas, positioning itself to compete for the spot as the biggest producer in the United States.

On HoustonChronicle.com: BP acquisition pumps $10.5B into Texas oil plays

If the acquisition pays off, it would likely mean additional growth in Houston, where BPs U.S. subsidiary is headquartered and the company employs about 4,500 people. Bill Arnold, a professor of energy management at Rice University and former executive at the Anglo-Dutch oil major Royal Dutch Shell, said BP appears headed on an upward trajectory again after riding a roller coaster over the past 20 years.

There was a real question of whether the company could even survive, Arnold said. But now BP is back and its ready for business.

The American comeback is led by Susan Dio, who in May became the first woman to head BPs U.S. operations. Dio, who began at BP as a chemical engineer and rose over a 35-year career to become president of BP America, will oversee and coordinate BPs dealings from Alaska to the deepwater Gulf of Mexico. She and her colleagues view Texas as the the clearest path for BP to resume its growth in the United States and catch up with rivals such as Exxon Mobil, which invested billions to expand in the Permian Basin, the nations most prolific shale play.

With the BHP acquisitions, Texas is now at the center of BPs global ambitions and Dio a key player in BPs shift from defense to offense. The British supermajor has more oil and gas producing assets in the United States than any other country. Its Houston campus is its largest outside of London.

We just doubled down in the U.S., Dio said in an interview. Were now forward looking.

Targeting Texas

The BHP deal, expected to close by the end of October, represents BPs biggest acquisition since it bought the Atlantic Richfield Co., called ARCO, in 2000 year for $27 billion. The new acquisition includes 83,000 net acres in the oil-rich Delaware Basin portion of the Permian, 236,000 acres in the Eagle Ford and 193,000 acres in the gas-heavy Haynesville in Texas and Louisiana. The assets combine to produce nearly 200,000 barrels of oil equivalent a day with the potential for much more as BP adds drilling rigs.

BP estimates its U.S. energy production, which includes a major presence in the Gulf of Mexico, will grow to 885,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day after the BHP deal closes in October. Thats competitive with the 975,000 barrels of oil equivalent a day that the top U.S. producer, Exxon Mobil, said it pumped in the United States during the second quarter.

On HoustonChronicle.com: Permian will outpace all OPEC nations except Saudis

BPs deal with BHP is a story of both bad and oddly fortuitous timing, analysts said. BHP Billiton bought big into U.S. shale back in 2011 when oil was priced close to $100 a barrel, spending more than than $12 billion to buy Houston oil and gas company Petrohawk Energy and $5 billion for acreage from Oklahoma Citys Chesapeake Energy.

But oil prices began crashing in 2014, falling to a low of $26 a barrel in early 2016, eventually convincing BHP to pull out after taking huge financial losses. Company executives decided to stick with its more stable mining commodities such as copper, nickel and iron ore.

The Deepwater Horizon disaster, which killed 11 workers and released nearly 4 million barrels of oil into the Gulf, drove BP to sell some $75 billion of its assets. Most of those sales, however, were closed well before the collapse in oil prices that began in 2014, meaning the oil and gas holdings sold for top dollar.

That made it easier for BP to pay cleanup costs, penalties and other obligations that topped $65 billion, paving the way for BP to ride out the bust and win the bidding for BHP assets with U.S. oil prices hovering around $70 a barrel.

BP was forced to take a hard look at its portfolio and make divestments even before oil prices fell, said Allen Good, an energy analyst at Morningstar. Now theyre in growth mode and adding a lot. And theres no better place in the world to be than the Permian.

BP wont discuss its development plans for its new Texas holdings. But the timing again appears to be working for the company. Its likely BP can plan its development and begin production as new pipelines come online to relieve capacity constraints that are forcing oil companies to slow production and discount prices.

While BP expects to focus on its shale holdings, it also is growing in the Gulf of Mexico again, winning 19 federal lease bids  the second most after Exxon Mobil  for $13 million last month. It has moved ahead with construction of a massive deepwater platform for its $9 billion Mad Dog Phase 2 thats located 200 miles south of New Orleans. The first platform came online in 2005.

Home again

The progress has not come easily. In addition to the damage Deepwater Horizon did to the companys reputation  as well as the Gulf, coastal areas and marine and wildlife  paying for the disaster led BP to sell refineries in Texas City and Carson, Calif., large holdings in the Gulf of Mexico and Alaska, and 400,000 net acres in the Permian Basin. It sold its Permian assets to Houstons Apache Corp. for about $3 billion  just before the shale oil boom took off.

The company slashed jobs, cutting its Houston 7,500-person workforce nearly in half. Some of those jobs will return with the BHP deal, but, Dio conceded, the stigma of Deepwater Horizon and the lessons learned will resonate for years.

We made some tough decisions on assets, Dio said. Weve spent the last eight years redefining ourselves, and we transformed the company. Weve reset the culture and empowered the employees to stop work if anything is unsafe.

Related: BP unleashing robot army to improve performance, safety

Dio, who joins BPs 13-person global executive team that makes corporate decisions, gives U.S. operations a stronger seat at the table that didnt exist under previous BP America presidents. Dio will join CEO Robert Dudley in infusing more of an American, entrepreneurial attitude into the leadership of company. Dudley, who stepped into the Deepwater Horizon crisis after the board forced out Tony Hayward, is a Mississippi native who earned his masters degree in business administration from Southern Methodist University in Dallas.

Dio is a self-described southern military brat who lived in seven cities in seven states before attending and graduating from the University of Mississippi. Shes worked about 25 years of her 35 years at BP along the Texas Gulf Coast as a chemical engineer and then as a manager of refining and chemical operations. She most recently worked in London for three years as the CEO of BP Shipping, which oversees BPs fleet of more than 70 vessels carrying oil, gas, fuel and chemicals, before moving back to Houston this year.

Texas is home, Dio said. Im thrilled to be back here. I do love London, but its not home.

BP just opened a new Denver office, which will oversee its shale operations. BP has honed its shale skills in plays in Colorado, Oklahoma and East Texas. Now, with the BHP acquisition, BP is ready to compete, Dio said.

Were not coming in blind, she said. Were looking to apply what weve learned to a much larger set of assets.

jordan.blum@chron.com

twitter.com/jdblum23
When Waidi Shodimu needs to call family in Nigeria, he heads to Southwest Farmers Market, an African grocery store inside the beltway, to meet with Tolulope Aladejobi.

Aladejobi, a sales representative for the international calling app, Rebtel, is often stationed at a bright red table at the stores entrance. Upon seeing Shodimu, she accepts his phone and credit card. She proceeds to load credits for calls to his account while he completes his grocery shopping.

Rebtel, a Swedish mobile app company, has become a household name within Houstons African community, mainly comprised of more than 40,000 Nigerians, and is seeking to expand here. Rebtel, which surpassed $100 million in revenues this year and has more than 100,000 customers in Texas, will open its first U.S. storefront next to the Southwest Farmers Market before the end of year.

Our ambition is to be a part of the community, said Magnus Larson, Rebtels CEO.

The Rebtel app has become popular with African immigrants because it allows them to connect with relatives and friends in areas with low internet speeds or no internet at all  unlike free international calling and texting services such as WhatsApp and Viber, which require both parties to have a wireless internet connection. Rebtel offers prepaid plans through its app, with rates that are competititive wtih traditional phone cards.

For calls to Nigeria, customers can buy 41 minutes for $5 or 83 minutes for $10. If customers sign up for a $3 a month membership, they can get 76 minutes for $5.

More Information With the international calling market valued at more than $80 million See More Collapse

Rebtel, headquartered in Stockholm, is competing for a piece of the $80 billlion international calling market by focusing on migrant communities around the world. The company launched its app in 2006 with the broad goal of being a one-stop shop for individuals starting over in new countries. The first step was offering immigrants a way to check in with loved ones back home by creating an easy, affordable international calling system. The company plans to add money transfer and digital banking services through the app for immigrants financial needs.

For now, customers can download the app, create an account by verifying their U.S. phone number, then add their phones contacts and their credit information. From there customers can purchase time in the app and simply call the uploaded numbers the way they would when making a phone call in the United States.

Houstons African community has used Rebtel since at least 2014. The company has built the Houston market by hiring African immigrants as locally based sales representatives, which Rebtel calls activists.

These sales reps are independent contactors, similar to representatives of the cosmetic company Avon, who promote the product to friends and neighbors. These workers earn an average of about $450 a week through commissions.

Oromeni Olayiwole, manager of activists and operations in Texas, said having workers who share cultural ties with customers helps create a sense of trust that leads to sales. They establish rapport with customers by sharing slang, like odikwa good( this is good) or Biko my broda ( please, my brother). Theres a mutual understanding of whats a good sale and what isnt.

They know you wouldnt sell them anything that wouldnt be good for them, Olayiwole added.

Several of the sales reps were also Rebtel customers before they got hired, so they can speak to their personal experiences when pitching the app to potential customers.

For example, Olayiwole, who has lived in the U.S. for 10 years, frequently talks to her mother and sister in Nigeria. When she first heard about job opportunities with Rebtel, it felt like a no-brainer given how heavily she already relied on the companys services.

Africans still have that connection with home, Olayiwole said.

Rebtel, which initially relied on word of mouth to sell its app, has had sales reps on the ground in Houston for about a year. Once customers started noticing them around Houston, they began to meet sales reps for billing questions, updates on promotions and even the occasional assistance with loading credits.

The Houston storefront will provide a central location for customers to find assistance, especially once banking services are offered through the app, said Christian Larsen, Rebtels head of direct sales.

In the meantime, gathering spots such as a table inside the Amala Zone restaurant near Westpark Tollway work just fine. The restaurant, which specializes in the Nigerian Yoruba tribe yam-based dish, amala, has partnered with Rebtel to offer discounts on meals for any customer that signs up with the app there.

Tunge Idown, who has been a Rebtel customer for 8 years, always makes sure to check in with the app workers whenever he stops by for a meal. The app, he said, has proved much easier to use than traditional calling cards..

When you call its so clear, Idown said. Its like youre talking to a person next to you.

ileana.najarro@chron.com

twitter.com/IleanaNajarro

Mark Mulligan contributed to this report
WASHINGTON - Mexican President-elect Manuel Lopez Obradors campaign promises to overhaul the countrys declining refining sector and reduce reliance on U.S. energy exports were widely dismissed within U.S. energy and political circles as mere political rhetoric.

But two months after his election victory, his advisers are signaling they fully intend to go ahead with that plan, threatening a refining industry along the Texas Gulf Coast that has become increasingly reliant on Mexican gasoline demand. During a recent visit to Mexico City to discuss the North American Free Trade Agreement, Rep. Henry Cuellar, D-Laredo, said he was struck by how forcefully Lopez Obradors advisers discussed building the first new refinery in Mexico in decades and rehabbing the countrys existing facilities.

Theyre serious about it, Cuellar said. They do want to gradually stop the importation of gasoline.

On HoustonChronicle.com: As Lopez Obrador softens tone, U.S. oil sector crosses fingers

That, of course, would have big implications for Texas Gulf Coast refiners, which account for nearly one-third of the nations refining capacity, but increasingly look to foreign markets for growth as U.S. gasoline demand in the United States has flattened with the spread of fuel-efficient vehicles. Over the past decade, the flow of American gasoline to Mexico has almost quadrupled to more than 420,000 barrels a day and accounts for more than half of all U.S. gasoline exports, according to the U.S. Energy Department.

So far, the U.S. refining sector is not expressing any public concern, skeptical not only that Lopez Obrador can pull off his promise, but also that he could do it in a timely manner.

On a global basis, refineries are almost never finished on time, Lenny Rodriguez, director of global oil analytics at S&P Global Platts, wrote in a recent note to investors. Overhauling six refineries that have been neglected for a long time in addition to building 2 new refineries is a tremendous financial (not to mention logistical and administrative) burden that seems too heavy for the Mexican government/PEMEX to bear.

But not everyone is so sure. Earlier this month, Lopez Obrador announced during a meeting with business leaders in Monterrey that work would begin shortly after he takes office in December on a $8 billion refinery in southeastern Mexico, capable of producing 400,000 barrels of fuel a day, more than any existing Mexican refinery.

David Goldwyn, chairman of the energy advisory group at the Atlantic Council, a Washington think tank, said he believed Lopez Obrador would go ahead, eager to not only create what could be thousands of good paying jobs, but to also show independence from the United States. Lopez Obrador ran on a pledge to stand up to President Donald Trump, who has made Mexico and Mexican immigrants a favorite target of his harsh criticisms via Twitter and other media.

He has no opposition, Goldwyn said of Lopez Obrador, whose party also controls the Mexican Congress. With the tension with the [Trump] administration, they were justifiably weary about being reliant on the United States, and theres an element of nationalism also.

On HoustonChronicle.com: Houston companies join high-octane battle over fuel in Mexico

American fuels have filled a gap between supply and demand in Mexico, where decades of delayed maintenance and underinvestment by the state-owned oil company, Petroleos Mexicanos, or Pemex, have steadily undercut production. Gasoline production from Pemexs six refineries fell to less than 300,000 barrels per day last year, a 43 percent drop from 2007, while gasoline consumption in Mexico rose 8 percent to almost 800,000 barrels per day, according to U.S. and Mexican government statistics.

Dwindling investment and falling oil and fuel production were among the reasons that Mexico, under the current president, Enrique Pena Nieto, reformed the countrys energy markets four years ago, ending Pemexs 75-year monopoly and inviting new investment from U.S. and other international oil companies. U.S. gasoline imports have in some respects been a boon for Mexico, replacing its own inefficient gasoline production  Mexicans heavy crude isnt easily converted into gasoline  with what are some of the worlds most efficient refineries along the Texas and Louisiana Gulf Coast.

If Lopez Obrador replaces that fuel with more expensive Mexican gasoline, it would likely drive up prices at the pump, drawing anger from Mexican motorists, who rioted in early 2017 as prices jumped in the newly deregulated fuel market. Lopez Obradors administration could avoid that political land mine by subsidizing gasoline - something that was done in Mexico for decades - but would risk upsetting international creditors and lowering the countrys credit rating, which would raise borrowing costs.

Beyond the potential pit falls, just getting a new refinery built in Mexico is likely to face innumerable obstacles. Lopez Obrador would not the first president to try. Former president Felipe Calderon went so far as to select a site for a new refinery in 2008, but the project never came to fruition, the victim of political fights and the difficulties in securing financing from investors long wary of putting their money into Mexicos refining sector.

Mexican officials have long run Pemex as a job creator for their citizens, rather than an efficient, profit-driven oil company, meaning a new refinery would inevitably require more employees than its U.S. competitors. Any investor willing to invest in such an enterprise is likely to want the government to give the refinery breaks on costs such as water and oil, said George Baker, a Houston energy consultant and editor of the newsletter Mexico Energy Intelligence.

Theyve tried to get a new refinery going for 10 years now and what has been accomplished, he said. Refineries are such a capital intensive deal with risk on all sides. Even if they can line up the investors, theyre going to want concessions that are going to be hard to sell politically.

On HoustonChronicle.com: Trump cuts deal with Mexico, raising hopes for NAFTA

In truth, Lopez Obrador has a much easier option to ween Mexico from U.S. gasoline than building new refineries. A decade ago, Mexicos six refineries were producing more than 450,000 barrels of gasoline a day. Were they to get back to that level - Lopez Obrador wants to invest $3 billion to help them do it - that would mean an additional 200,000 barrels of domestic gasoline production per day.

That wouldnt get Lopez Obrador entirely off U.S. gasoline, but it could cut imports almost in half. Thats not a bad outcome for a president eager to prove Mexico can stand apart from the United States.

james.osborne@chron.com

Twitter: @osborneja
Esi Edugyan knows what its like to be an outsider.

The daughter of Ghanaian immigrants who had immigrated to the western Canadian city of Calgary  in a province, Alberta, that is sometimes called the Texas of Canada  she has rarely been able to easily blend in. Shes tapped into that wellspring of otherness over the course of her three novels, including her first in 2004, The Second Life of Samuel Tyne, about a black family in rural Alberta in the 60s, and the widely acclaimed Half-Blood Blues, a lyrical chronicle of black jazz musicians caught in the nightmare of Nazi Germany that was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2011.

In her latest, Washington Black, she turns to the 19th century to tell a story of a young slave named Washington  Wash for short  who, thanks to an inventor and abolitionist named Christopher Wilde, ends up fleeing on an odyssey that takes him from the shackles of Barbados to the freedom of the Arctic and Morocco. Its loosely inspired by Victorian Englands real-life Tichborne case in which a former Jamaican slave living in England, Andrew Bogle, was sent by the family for whom he had long worked as a valet, to Australia to identify a man some believed to be a long-missing heir named Roger Tichborne.

But after completing most of a draft that hewed closely to history, Edugyan  who appears Monday at Houston's Cullen Performance Hall as part of the Inprint Margarett Root Brown Reading Series  decided to dispense with the details of that particular story."

Esi Edugyan and Meg Wolitzer Reading When: 7:30 p.m. Monday Where: University of Houston, Cullen Performance Hall, 4300 University Details: $5; 713-521-2026; inprinthouston.org See More Collapse

I was more interested in the psychology of going from one very predetermined life as a slave  and hed been born on a plantation and seen horrible deaths and probably just assumed that he was also going to die probably unnaturally and young  to being put in a place that was just so different from everything hed known, linguistically, geographically, climate and culturally, Edugyan said by phone from her home in Victoria, B.C. You know, I was just more interested in that and so that became my focus. I completely abandoned the framework of Tichborne.

In fact, at first, she hadnt planned on writing a slave narrative at all, and still doesnt really consider it such. It wasnt conceived as a slave story. I think if I had thought of it that way from the very outset, I think it would have been very daunting and I dont know if I would have been able to persevere, she said. But because I was looking at this very specific character and his circumstances, and I knew that he would leave the plantation at one point, I was looking at it as being more like a post-slavery narrative than a book about slavery. I was able to get my mind around that. (But) all the punishments described in the book are taken from life.  When youre researching this material, obviously, it weighs on you.

Growing up black and Canadian

Though writing from the perspective of the outsider is not something Edugyan says she does consciously, she concedes its an inescapable element in her work. This pattern of the outsider is something that I can understand looking back over the last three novels, she said. It certainly wasnt in the forefront of my mind when I was writing any of the books.

But she says is drawn to stories about those on the margins, as when she first read about Albertas early black settlements, an idea that became the basis for The Second Life of Samuel Tyne.

I was really, really, really floored, she recalled. I think maybe Im attracted to those stories because I was  I wouldnt say marginalized, I wouldnt use that word  but I certainly felt a bit apart.

Black Canadians make up less than three percent of Canadas population of just over 36 million, with most in the eastern Canadian provinces of Ontario, Quebec and Nova Scotia, which were either the terminus for the Underground Railroad or have been magnets for immigration from the Caribbean. Calgary, situated more than 2,000 miles west of Toronto, saw much less of this activity. So, growing up there had its challenges.

There was a sense of being very much the lone figure, she said. Its difficult because you feel a little bit representative of a whole, and people are looking to you that way. I think as a kid that can be a bit daunting. I think obviously that affects my vision when it comes to what I want to explore  I havent lived there in so long and I understand that its quite a bit more multicultural and quite different. But certainly, in the early 80s, yeah, there was not a lot of racial diversity.

It was a very, very conservative province in general. In terms of race relations, I grew up feeling a bit of a curiosity. You walk down the street and people would be turning to look.  As a child, it cant help but inform your psyche a bit.

Going to Ghana for the first time in 2007 with her family proved to be both strikingly foreign and familiar.

We looked as though we belonged in terms of our features, but people could tell right away that Youre not from here, even before we opened our mouths, she remembered. There was a sense of  I had the same feeling (as in Canada), it was very distinct. We definitely stood out in some kind of indiscernible way.  We understood that we were not a part of this culture in a way. We were both a part of it and not a part of it. At some point, somebody pointed at me and referred to me as oburoni, which is white person.  That was really funny.

Edugyan dealt with some of these vexing cross-cultural issues in her 2014 non-fiction work, Dreaming of Elsewhere: Observations of Home. Yet, the more she travels the world, the more shes thankful for having Canadian roots, no matter how many alienating moments the country may have caused her in the past.

Obviously, no place is perfect. We still have a long way to go with aboriginal people and just race relations in general but  Ive lived and traveled to a great many places in the world and I do think that, speaking as an African-Canadian, maybe were doing a better job of it than certain other places, she said. Its the desire to meet or try and live up to that stereotype of the happy multicultural nation. I think thats good.

All in the family

Edugyan isnt the only writer in her household. Shes married to poet/novelist Steven Price, a professor of poetry and literature at the University of Victoria. Having a kindred spirit as a spouse has been essential for her own creativity.

We definitely are deep into each others work, she said. His editorial skills are just so finely honed, so hell read over several drafts of every one of my novels  I think the novels would be completely different novels without his input. Hes been so instrumental in my editorial process.

Having a child in 2011 changed things a bit, not in terms of what she writes but when and where. She used to only write in the quietude of late nights. A newborn made that impossible.

Im able to write in places that I couldnt do it before, she said with a laugh. So I can write in hotel rooms. Ive written on planes.  Before, I had to have complete silence, and if somebody coughed in the next room, it would drive me crazy.  Now, its a good skill to be able to write with the noise and chaos.

cary.darling@chron.com
Just in time for the midterm elections, Michael Moore presents Fahrenheit 11/9, his scream of rage against President Donald Trump and all he stands for. The leftist gadfly has worked himself into quite a state  hes also hopping mad at Barack Obama and Hilary Clinton.

Given the level of polarization in the country, the film is unlikely to change anybodys mind about anything. Its aimed squarely at Moores progressive audience, and the filmmaker feels free to get downright incendiary: At one point, he shows us footage of Hitler delivering a speech, but the voice we hear is Trumps.

Were also treated to newsreel images of the Reichstag fire.

Moore opens with a nicely assembled sequence showing media types and ordinary citizens reveling in their conviction that Clinton will win the 2016 election. Theres much wailing and many tears shed after the vote is counted. (Moore himself was dismayed but not surprised  before the election, in defiance of the polls, he wrote an article headlined 5 Reasons Why Trump Will Win.)

The directors brief against Trump is simple: the president, he says, is a racist, sexist protofascist with violence-prone supporters and some very disturbing habits (we see multiple photos of him with his hands on his daughter Ivanka). Trump has always committed his crimes in plain sight, Moore says.

Fahrenheit 11/9 Rated R: for language and some disturbing material/images Running time: 126 minutes xxx (out of five) See More Collapse

The film then takes a swerve to Michigan, where Moore sets his sites on Gov. Rick Snyder, who was strongly backed by Trump, and his mishandling of the issue of lead pollution in the water of Flint, a subject that the director has addressed before.

This brings out the devil in Moore, and we see him pulling off two of his patented political stunts: Equipped with handcuffs, he tries (and fails) to make a citizens arrest of Snyder. Then he ups the ante, getting behind the wheel of a tanker truck full of Flints poisoned water, which he proceeds to spray at the governors mansion.

There are other threads that only involve Trump tangentially, at best. One involves the February killings at Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida, which inspired a nationwide protest and a flurry of student activism against lax gun-control laws. (This also is among Moores ongoing concerns  and central to 2002s Bowling for Columbine.) Another is the West Virginia teachers strike earlier this year, which also had national repercussions. These are among the movies strongest sequences.

Moore rips Obama for, among other issues, using the Flint water crisis as a photo op. He views Hilary Clinton as a symptom of how the inner circle of the Democratic Party has thwarted the voters wishes. Bill Clinton gets raked over the coals for pushing the party toward the center.

If theres a goal here besides demonizing Trump, its to press Moores notion that, despite many election outcomes, Americans broadly support progressive and liberal causes. He offers poll results (ironic!) to back him up. The only solution, he believes, is the undoing of the current political system  otherwise the big-money establishment will remain in charge of both parties. He finds a few notes of hope, such as the Florida student activists, who have scored some victories.

Moore can be abrasive, but he doesnt care. The point of Fahrenheit 11/9 is to rally the troops, who, Im guessing, remain plentiful even if his reputation for veracity has taken a few hits over the years. Less partisan viewers may find the film quite long, and not a lot more than a rehash of political obsessions Moore has recounted in many previous movies. If you know that work, youll find no surprises here.

The films title, by the way, is a takeoff on Fahrenheit 9/11, Moores 2004 broadside against President George W. Bush and the invasion of Iraq that became the highest grossing documentary ever.

waddiego@sfchronicle.com
ALAMO DRAFTHOUSE CINEMA

2707 Commercial Center, Katy;

drafthouse.com/houston

Jaws

A local sheriff, a marine biologist and an old seafarer team up to hunt down a great white shark wreaking havoc in a beach resort. 7:30 p.m. Friday

Carrie

A tortured high school misfit unleashes her telekinetic powers after being humiliated at her senior prom. 9 p.m. Friday

Napoleon Dynamite

An alienated teenager decides to help his new friend win the class presidency, all while dealing with his own bizarre family life. 7:30 p.m. Saturday

Enter the Dragon

A martial artist agrees to spy on a reclusive crime lord using his invitation to a tournament as cover. 10 p.m. Saturday

Spaceballs

President Skroob sends Lord Dark Helmet to steal planet Druidias abundant supply of air in this Star Wars spoof. 6 p.m. Sunday, 7:30 p.m. Monday, 10 p.m. Tuesday, 9:30 p.m. Wednesday and Thursday

Schlock

A small town is terrorized by The Banana Killer, which turns out to be the missing link between man and ape. 4:45 p.m. Sunday

Suspiria

An American newcomer to a prestigious German ballet academy comes to realize that the school is a front for something sinister amid a series of grisly murders. 7:30 p.m. Thursday

MEMORIAL CITY MALL

303 Memorial City Way;

memorialcity.com

Star Wars: The Last Jedi

Rey develops her newly discovered abilities with the guidance of Luke Skywalker, while the Resistance prepares for battle with the First Order. 8 p.m. Friday

HOUSTON MUSEUM OF NATURAL SCIENCE

5555 Hermann Park Drive; hmns.org

Pandas 3D

In Sichuan, China, a researcher forms a bond with a panda that is about to experience nature for the first time. Multiple screenings daily.

Hurricane 3D

A storm forms off the coast of West Africa and grows as it crosses the Atlantic. Multiple screenings daily.

Oceans: Our Blue Planet 3D

A journey of discovery transports the audience to the mysterious world of Earths oceans. Multiple screenings daily.

RIVER OAKS THEATRE

2009 W. Gray; landmarktheatres.com

Election

A high school teachers personal life becomes complicated as he works with students during the school elections. Midnight Friday and Saturday

RICE CINEMA

6100 Main; film.rice.edu

A Matter of Life and Death

A British wartime aviator who cheats death must argue for his life before a celestial court. 7 p.m. Friday and Saturday

Hidden Figures

The story of a team of female African-American mathematicians who served a vital role in NASA during the early years of the U.S. space program. 5:30 p.m. Thursday

MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS, HOUSTON

1001 Bissonnet; mfah.org

The Magician

A traveling mesmerist is put to the test by disbelievers who try to expose him as a charlatan. 5 p.m. Saturday

The Virgin Spring

A young virgin and her pregnant servant set out to deliver candles to a church, but only one returns from events that transpire in the woods along the way. 7 p.m. Saturday

The Seventh Seal

A man seeks answers about life, death and the existence of God as he plays chess against the Grim Reaper during the Black Plague. 5 p.m. Sunday

Kusama: Infinity

Artist Yayoi Kusama and experts discuss her life and work, from her modest beginnings in Japan to becoming an internationally renowned artist. 1 p.m. Thursday

Manhattan Short Film Festival

A screening of the 2018 Manhattan Short finalists. 7 p.m. Thursday through Sept. 29th

AURORA PICTURE SHOW

2442 Bartlett; aurorapictureshow.org

Frame X Frame Dance Film Festival

Special program showcases short films from all over the world exploring relationships of the moving body with the camera and dance within various environments and cultural functions. 7:30 p.m. Saturday

DISCOVERY GREEN

1500 McKinney; discoverygreen.com

Wall-E

A small waste-collecting robot inadvertently embarks on a space journey that will ultimately decide the fate of mankind. 8 p.m. Saturday

14 PEWS

800 Aurora; 14pews.org

Nico, 1988

The last year of singer Nicos life, as she tours and grapples with addiction and personal demons. 7 p.m. Sunday
Over the Labor Day weekend, the Houston Museum of Natural Science debuted a new feature, a fossil preparation laboratory inside its ever-popular Morian Hall of Paleontology. Houston dinosaur enthusiasts of all ages can now get a glimpse at the daily work done by the museums team of volunteer paleontologists as they clean and sort fossils, painstaking and intricate work done with microscopes and special tools.

An intercom system lets curious patrons chat with the volunteers or ask questions. Patrons cant get up close and personal with the fragile work being done, so this is the next best thing.

A MUST-SEE: Anatomically-correct 'Bodysuit' exhibit at Houston's Health Museum examines the naked human form

The people who volunteer at HMNS come from all walks of life. Some are retirees who want to follow a childhood passion. Others are working toward making paleontology a lifetime gig.

On a rainy Labor Day, I become one of them, to chisel away at an inconsequential, sardine-size, 50-million-year-old fish stuck inside a slab of marlstone roughly the size of a piece of copier paper and about half an inch in width. It looks like a stack of filo dough, but on the dry side.

David Temple, associate curator of paleontology at the museum, bounces around the room making wisecracks about the fossils, checking on our work and fielding questions from kids with their faces plastered against the window. Its like being overseen by a member of the Canadian comedian troupe Kids in the Hall.

The questions range from simple to silly. Some adults are still a little hazy on just what a fossil is. Temple and his team answer the questions deftly as they come in.

Are the fossils real?

Yes, the museums fossils are very real, and these came from the Green River Formation in Wyoming.

Where did they come from?

There are fossils all over the world, including Texas, and some can be hundreds of millions of years old.

Are the fossils really tens of millions of years old?

Yes.

Can I get a double cheeseburger?

You can get a double cheeseburger at the museums McDonalds located in the lobby but not for much longer. A new dining vendor will soon move in.

I settle in with a few chisels that look like dental tools and Temple gives me a pen-like airscribe that sounds like a baby goat dreamily bleating in my hand. The miniature jackhammer will make my fingers vibrate for hours.

AMAZING DISCOVERIES: Peek inside the Houston Museum of Natural Science archives

Looking through magnifying lenses, my mind plays tricks on me, turning the dime-size crater Im chiseling on into a vast expanse. Its a nearly psychedelic experience as I use the chisel to carve out land formations to uncover bits of the prehistoric swimmer. I feel like I am changing the topography on an alien planet, but to the naked eye, Ive barely made a smudge on the slab. Still, through the microscope I can make out the extinct fishs dorsal fin bones.

Craig Hlavaty

Hes a Diplomystus, a herring-like creature that fed on smaller fish. I guess I should name him if I am bound to him. Diplo, like the dance party DJ, has a nice ring to it, and I can tell people I am going to see Diplo at the museum.

Diplo is a 6-inch traveler from the Eocene Epoch, in the middle of the Paleogene period in the Cenozoic Era. His modern ancestors are most likely seldom-ordered pizza toppings or ingredients in weird, salty Japanese snacks.

Three volunteers sit directly on the windows front lines, and I get to hang back behind a microscope, stretching my neck and shoulders every few minutes over the course of nearly three hours. At first the work seems tedious, and my mind begins thinking of things I could be doing on a dreary holiday away from the newsroom. Like sleeping.

BYE BYE BIG MACS: New dining options at Houston Museum of Natural Science coming soon

Slowly the magic behind work creeps in, coming on like a fever. Or maybe Ive inhaled too much marl dust.

Its a Zen-like experience, a puzzle millions of years in the making. No one has seen this fish, ever. It was dead and gone long before a homosapien took a step.

Craig Hlavaty

Here I am, gingerly scraping away at rock thats accumulated around it like its a holy artifact. Gentle is the word here. Temple tells me I have just the right touch for fossil digging, something I will no doubt put on my resume. I should have brought my headphones. Zoning out with Pink Floyds Meddle or some Brian Eno records would go well with exploring prehistoric terrain.

Paleontology is a passion, but its hard to get a job and you dont always make a lot of money, Temple says. What people will see here is people truly motivated by science and curiosity.

Craig Hlavaty covers Houston history and pop-culture. Read him on our breaking news site, Chron.com, and on our subscriber site, HoustonChronicle.com. | craig.hlavaty@chron.com | Text CHRON to 77453 to receive breaking news alerts by text message
Cooler temperatures are coming to Houston, we promise.

With the exception of this week, which has been spoiled by hot weather in the 90s and high 80s, the fall season is quickly approaching and bringing its pleasant weather to Bayou City.

That makes it a good time to start venturing out and exploring some of Houston's patio bars that offer up food and drink with a lovely breeze. After all, native Houstonians know well enough that the short-lived fall season comes and goes in the blink of an eye.

Thankfully, with new additions and old favorites, there's plenty of places in Houston to eat and drink outside.

To help, we selected our top picks for patio bars around Houston. They include:

Present Company, a newly opened retro-themed patio bar and restaurant in Montrose that boasts a wild and colorful aesthetic.

Eight Row Flint, an upscale Heights icehouse that serves up whiskey, beer and tacos.

See above for Chron.com's other top picks for patio bars in Houston.

MORE DRINKING: Houston's best new bars to relax and forget your troubles

Text CHRON to 77453 to receive breaking news alerts by text message.



Fernando Ramirez covers Texas news and politics. Read him on our breaking news site and on our subscriber site. | Fernando.ramirez@chron.com | @fernramirez93




Montgomery County authorities on Wednesday raided a rehabilitation center in East Montgomery County in search of evidence related to a former Conroe priest who has been charged with sexually assaulting two teenagers some 20 years ago.

It was not known what evidence was collected from the Shalom Center off Morgan Drive. According to a 1995 U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops survey on treatment centers, the center dealt with priests involved in sex-related crimes.

More than two dozen representatives of the Montgomery County sheriffs and district attorneys offices, the Conroe Police Department and the Texas Rangers took part in the operation.

Conroe police this month charged Manuel La Rosa-Lopez, a former priest at Sacred Heart Catholic Church in Conroe, with four counts of indecency with a child. He turned himself into the Montgomery County jail on Sept. 11 after an arrest warrant was issued; he faces up to 20 years in prison on each count if convicted. The alleged incidents took place from 1998 to 2000.

La Rosa-Lopez, 60, most recently served as the pastor at St. John Fisher Catholic Church in Richmond and as the episcopal vicar for Hispanics.

The priest has denied the allegations of sexual abuse, the Archdiocese of Houston-Galveston said in a statement. He is free on bond of $225,000.

Tyler Dunman, the special crime bureau chief of the Montgomery County District Attorneys Office, said it is believed Lopez received treatment at the facility at some point, though it was not clear what type he received.

(Our) coming here is a result of a search of the location in Fort Bend (County) and Sacred Heart Catholic Church. We believe there are documents here that would be important to our investigation into this priest, Dunman said. We are getting a lot of good calls and referrals to our office as well as (to the) Conroe Police Department with information and we are asking the public to continue to come forward.

Dunman said several of those calls have come from outside Texas. Authorities are continuing to follow up on those, said Dunman, who declined to provide any details.

The investigation comes as the Roman Catholic Church faces new questions about its handling of allegations of sexual abuse by priests. A Pennsylvania grand jury report released this summer detailed allegations against more than 300 predator priests and said there were at least 1,000 child victims, and likely far more, in that state alone. Cardinal Daniel DiNardo, the archbishop for Galveston-Houston, has spoken out against the grave moral failures of judgment on the part of church leaders in dealing with such allegations and was part of a U.S. delegation that met this month with Pope Francis at the Vatican about the matter.

DiNardo leads the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops as well as the regions 1.7 million Catholics.

La Rosa-Lopez two accusers, a man and woman, spoke last month to Conroe police about the alleged abuse, according to an arrest warrant for La Rosa-Lopez.

The female accuser told police that she and her family reported in 2001 that shed been abused by La Rosa-Lopez when she was a teenager, after which he was transferred from the church and her family moved out of the country. But she said that upon returning to Conroe around 2010, she contacted church officials after reading that the priest had been promoted and assigned to his own church. She said she was interviewed by DiNardo, and was assured by church officials that La Rosa-Lopez had been placed in an administrative position from which he had no contact with children or teenagers. She told the Associated Press that church officials had her meet with La Rosa-Lopez and he apologized.

The female accuser decided to make a police report because of the perceived duplicity of Cardinal DiNardo given his recent public statements about recent priest sex scandals and because of the churchs failure to adequately protect children from La Rosa-Lopez, according to the arrest warrant.

Police said the male accuser came forward in August to allege that he was sexually abused from 1998 to 2000 when he attended Sacred Heart as a teenager and La Rosa-Lopez was based there. The male accuser told the Houston Chronicle last month that he was flown to Houston to meet with DiNardo, but that the prelate was dismissive of his story and told him, Well, you shouldve told us earlier.

The Archdiocese said in a statement that it had referred both cases to Child Protective Services, and defended the churchs handling of allegations that it received 17 years apart.

We take these matters very seriously, which is why we reported the information we received from both individuals to CPS  and removed Father La Rosa-Lopez from ministry, the Archdiocese statement said. We are pledged to cooperate with the civil authorities in their investigation. The Archdiocese of Galveston-Houston recognizes it clearly has both a legal and a moral obligation to address any incidence of abuse  sexual or otherwise  to Gods children. Such behavior simply will not be tolerated.

To anyone affected by any form of abuse by anyone who represents the Church, the Archdiocese deeply regrets such a fundamental violation of trust, and commits itself to eliminating such unacceptable actions.

cdominguez@hcnonline.com
Sep 20, 2018 | By Thomas

With assistance from Georgia Tech, Childrens Healthcare of Atlanta has performed Georgias first-ever procedure to place 3D printed tracheal splints in a pediatric patient. The team used three 3D printed custom-made splints to assist the breathing of a 7-month-old patient battling life-threatening airway obstruction.

The patient was suffering with congenital heart disease and tracheo-bronchomalacia, a condition that causes severe life-threatening airway obstruction. During his six-month inpatient stay in the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit at Childrens, he endured frequent episodes of airway collapse that could not be corrected by regular surgery methods. The clinical team proposed surgically inserting an experimental 3D-printed tracheal splint, which is a novel device still in development, to open his airways and expand the trachea and bronchus.

The splints were designed by Scott Hollister, who holds the Patsy and Alan Dorris Endowed Chair in Pediatric Technology, a joint initiative supported by Georgia Tech and Children's Healthcare of Atlanta.

The procedure begins by obtaining CT scan of the patients airway. Hollister and his team created multiple versions of the splint, of varying sizes, to ensure the perfect fit was available for the surgical team to place around the patients airways during surgery.

(Images credit: Rob Felt, Georgia Tech)

In a complex 10-hour surgery, Childrens cross-functional team of surgeons successfully placed three 3D-printed splints around the patients trachea on the morning of August 17, 2018. The splints will eventually be absorbed into the body, allowing for expansion of the trachea and bronchus.

As the tracheal procedure concluded, the child was placed on a heart lung machine for surgical repair of his cardiac defect.

The 3D-printed tracheal splint is a new device still in development, as its safety and effectiveness have not yet been determined and is therefore not available for clinical use. The Childrens team sought emergency clearance from the FDA to move forward with the procedure under expanded access guidelines.

The possibility of using 3D printing technology to save the life of a child is our motivation in the lab every day, said Hollister, who is also the director of the Center for 3D Medical Fabrication at Georgia Tech and a professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University. Were determined to develop innovative solutions that meet the needs of Georgias most complex pediatric patients.

Posted in 3D Printing Application

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Many Texas Democrats were demoralized Tuesday, when Republican Pete Flores defeated Democrat Pete Gallego in a runoff special election for the Texas Senate seat vacated in June by the resignation of Democrat Carlos Uresti.

They should be demoralized. It was a potentially consequential loss. Democrats have no one but themselves to blame for it. Flores victory doesnt necessarily suggest that a red wave is coming to Texas in this years midterm elections, as many Republicans were quick to claim. But the Texas Democratic Partys response to Gallegos defeat does not augur well for their prospects of competing successfully.

Gov. Abbott stole an election, plain and simple, the partys chair, Gilbert Hinojosa, said in a statement.

Republicans set a date that would guarantee low voter turnout, then Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and Republican special interests poured money into the race, denying the people of West Texas and the U.S. Mexico border representation that shares their values, he continued.

This is actually irresponsible rhetoric, particularly given the context. Many Texans are rightly concerned about voter suppression. And a handful of Texans share my alarm about Abbotts disregard for constitutional constraints on the powers of his office. In April, the governor literally suspended the Texas Election Code to call an emergency special election in the 27th Congressional District, which had been represented by Republican Blake Farenthold.

In this case, however, Abbott hasnt even been underhanded. He could have called for a special election to be held Nov. 6, as Uresti requested. But Abbott was under no obligation to do that, and Uresti was hardly in a position to opine about the needs of his constituents.

In February, Uresti was found guilty of 11 felonies. He was, at the time, facing allegations of sexual misconduct, reported by Olivia Messer of The Daily Beast. And having covered the Texas Senate, I would add that Uresti didnt contribute much to the chambers debates.

A bit of a fluke

Further, theres no basis for Hinojosas implication that Flores doesnt share the values of the Texans who will be his constituents.

Hes apparently the first Republican to represent this district in the Texas Senate in over a century, and his election was a bit of a fluke. Flores placed first in the special election itself, which was held in July. But Democratic voters were split between Gallego and Roland Gutierrez, who represents south San Antonio in the Texas House and finished in third place. Together, they earned more votes than Flores did. And Flores, its worth noting, was the Republican challenger to Uresti in 2016; in that contest, he won barely 40 percent of the vote.

But that doesnt imply that Flores, a retired game warden who will be the first Hispanic Republican to serve in the Texas Senate, is an extremist. And the district isnt a blue one, exactly. In fact, it overlaps much of the 23rd Congressional District, which is currently represented by Will Hurd, a Republican who unseated Gallego in 2014, and defeated him in a rematch, in 2016.

So Hinojosas criticism is misleading, in addition to scurrilous. I wouldnt actually extrapolate much from Flores victory itself. Its potentially consequential because under the rules of the Texas Senate, legislation cant be brought to the floor unless three-fifths of the senators present agree to hear it. In other words, Republicans need 19 votes to bring bills to the floor, over the objections of their Democratic colleagues  assuming that none of the chambers 31 seats are vacant and none of the members are absent.

But prior to Urestis resignation, there were 20 Republicans in the Texas Senate. And theyd probably only need 18 votes to trample Democrats for much of next session. Abbott has refused to schedule a special election to replace Democratic state Sen. Sylvia Garcia, who is currently running to represent Texass 29th Congressional District.

A wake-up call

So the fact that Republicans like Abbott and Patrick put so much effort into flipping this particular Senate seat is suggestive. They claim to see a red wave coming. But they approached this special election as if they were worried about a blue one in November.

Hinojosa may fault them for that, but I dont, because that would effectively be faulting a political party for competing  which would be strange.

And Democrats who were demoralized by the defeat should take Flores victory as a wake-up call. I think we can all agree Texas Republicans arent exactly firing on all cylinders lately. I often have occasion to criticize them. But in this case, Republicans didnt do anything wrong, politically or morally. Democrats cant say the same.

The district favors Democrats, but Flores victory wasnt an upset. Urestis misdeeds created an opportunity that Republicans were bound to capitalize on, and Democratic leaders were complacent about the risk that they would succeed. That attitude might not have guaranteed Gallegos defeatbut it certainly wasnt likely to result in a blue wave.

erica.grieder@chron.com

twitter.com/ericagrieder
The Zika virus is showing promise fighting the most lethal type of brain cancer, according to Galveston-led research in mice that attempts to harness therapeutic benefits from whats been called the infection from hell.

A University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston-led team of scientists reported this week successfully using a harmless version of Zika to target and kill glioblastoma, the common and aggressive cancer that last month killed U.S. Sen. John McCain. The version is a Zika vaccine developed at UTMB.

More work needs to be done, but these findings represent major progress toward developing the Zika vaccine as a safe and effective treatment for human glioblastoma, said Pei-Yong Shi, a UTMB professor of biochemistry and molecular biology and the studys lead investigator. This could be a great example of sciences ability to turn something bad into something useful.

The results of the mouse study conducted by Shi and colleagues in Beijing were published Tuesday in the American Society for Microbiologys journal mBIO.

Experts caution that therapeutic benefits in mice are considered a long way from human treatment. Research that shows great promise in the laboratory fails more often than it succeeds in people.

The research combines two dreaded diseases: glioblastoma, which kills more than 15,000 Americans annually and is considered incurable because it recurs after the standard treatment of surgery, radiation and chemotherapy; and the mosquito-borne Zika virus, which became a major public health threat in recent years after it was shown to cause severe birth defects. Babies born to women infected during pregnancy often suffer from a condition known as microcephaly which is characterized by an abnormally small head and underdeveloped brain.

Shis team exploited Zikas ability to infect developing brain cells to attack glioblastoma stem cells, considered a likely source of the cancers recurrence. Like fetal cells, glial stem cells are self-renewing and multiply quickly, properties that Zika targets.

UTMB researchers developed the Zika vaccine in 2017 as a preventative against the disease, still a major threat in much of Latin America. The team is negotiating with the government of Brazil to conduct vaccine trials with people at highest risk of contracting Zika. The vaccine has previously been shown to be effective in animal research.

Shis team found the vaccine, which is a weakened version of the virus, also works well against mice engineered to have a human version of glioblastoma. The study found glioblastomas developed significantly slower in mice whose brains received an injection of glioblastoma stem cells and the Zika vaccine than those that just received the stem cells. It also found the virus mostly spared healthy brain neurons.

Martyn Sharpe, head of research at Houston Methodists Brain & Pituitary Tumor Treatment Center, said Zika holds a great deal of potential because it targets stem cells, but added that the key question will be complications.

The success of this research will depend on how good the vacccine is in humans at targeting the stem cells versus healthy tissue, said Sharpe. Research often works beautifully in animals, only to fail in humans. You just dont know how the drug will interact with human tissue.

Though the study only showed a benefit from Zikas destruction of glioblastoma stem cells, the team of scientists hope it ultimately will enlist the immune system to attack the brain cancer. The idea, a new frontier of cancer therapy, is that Zikas killing action will release tumor proteins that trigger an immune reaction, a strategy that doctors at MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston Methodist Hospital and other institutions across the country are using with other viruses against brain cancer.

Shi said much more works need to be done to make Zika a safe and more potent weapon against glioblastoma. But he added that he hopes to soon work with UTMB clinicians to set up a clinical trial testing the vaccine in human patients.

todd.ackerman@chron.com

twitter.com/ChronMed
A southwest Harris County man has died of complications from the West Nile virus, the second Texas death from the mosquito-borne disease this year.

Harris County public health officials reported Thursday that the man was between 45 and 54 years old and had underlying chronic health conditions. He died last week and the county received confirmation the death was West Nile-related Wednesday night.

We are devastated to report the first West Nile virus-associated death, and our hearts go out to the family, said Dr. Umair A. Shah, executive director of Harris County Public Health. Its also a reminder that West Nile can be serious and cause complications, including death.

Death from West Nile is relatively rare. Shah said this one was reported as a neurologic case, which can mean the virus caused encephalitis (inflammation of the brain) or meningitis (membranes surrounding the brain and spinal cord) or other serious injury to the nervous system. Shah provided no other information, citing federal patient confidentiality laws.

The death comes late in the West Nile season, which typically runs from June through October, though it can last as long as high temperatures and humidity linger.

Texas health department spokesman Chris Van Deusen said West Nile started late this year  July instead of May  probably partly because the winter was particularly cold in most of the state. He said Texas is still seeing new cases so people should continue to take precautions, such as using insect repellent and removing standing water from their property. Mosquitoes breed in and around standing water.

Dallas County reported the first West Nile-related death last month. The states latest report, which lags behind local data and doesnt yet reflect the Dallas and Harris county deaths, shows 45 cases of West Nile disease in Texas this year as of Tuesday. The state is waiting for additional documentation on the Dallas death.

There have been six West Nile cases in Harris County this year, including the newly confirmed death.

West Nile, which first arrived in the United States in 1999 and Texas in 2002, is unpredictable, hitting hard some years and mildly others. Texas peak year was 2012, when there 1,868 cases and 89 deaths. Dallas was the epicenter, but 101 of the cases and four of the deaths occurred in Harris County.

Last year, there were 133 cases and five deaths in Texas, including 15 cases and one death in Harris County.

The low number of human cases in Harris County this year comes despite no shortage of West Nile being found in traps. As of Thursday, West Nile has been found in 303 mosquitoes, nearly three times the amount last year.

Shah said the low number of human cases is a testament to both the countys spraying and other activities to protect residents and residents own efforts, like using mosquito repellent and reducing mosquito-breeding sites.

Most people infected with West Nile do not develop any symptoms, but roughly one in five develop a fever with other symptoms such as headache, body aches, joint pains, vomiting, diarrhea or rash.

More severe symptoms include high fever, stiff neck, stupor, disorientation, tremors, convulsions, muscle weakness, vision loss and encephalitis or meningitis.

todd.ackerman@chron.com

twitter.com/chronmed
Ahead of the 2014 election, I edited a political blog that interviewed and endorsed candidates across the political spectrum up and down Harris Countys gargantuan ballot. Our picks skewed to the left, but we made exceptions, and endorsed probably about 25 percent Republican.

We look forward to her being one of the venerated voices of reason in her party, Texpatriate wrote about state Rep. Sarah Davis when endorsing her over her Democratic opponent. We certainly think that most of the other county officials, both Democrats and Republicans, would be wise to follow his lead, we wrote of Harris County District Clerk Chris Daniel in supporting him. And, He shows an understanding and an empathy for the average person to an extent nearly unheard of in todays crop of politician, is what we had to say about Harris County Judge Ed Emmett in his endorsement.

This autumn, I will vote Democratic against all three. I will, for the first time in my life, vote straight Democratic after not just incessantly criticizing but ridiculing those who did the same in the past.

My rationale for splitting tickets was straightforward. They were good at their jobs, tried not to be divisive and parroted few of the extremist viewpoints. After all, I figured, as a moderate Democrat I would not want to be judged by the most extreme portions of my party. I conversed with myriad lawyers of different politics and practices, who often urged me to vote for specific incumbents. Moderates like Judge Jay Karahan or conservatives like Judges Bill Burke or Don Smyth, who checked their partisanship at the courtroom door, were supported over Democrats on my ballot. (Karahan was defeated this spring in his primary, and now Burke and Smyth are retiring.)

Guilt by association is not an easy plunge. But at the end of the day, partisanship is not a race or religion. You are not born into one, and it is supposed to be a choice that reflects your values and morals.

In light of the Trump administration ripping screaming children away from their parents and putting them in cages or doing the bidding of Russia President Vladimir Putin, I can no longer abide in any way, shape or form. Anyone who chooses to run under the Republican banner is choosing to see everything going on  not only by the president, but his enablers and sycophants  and say yes, thats me, thats who I am and with whom I want to associate. And that is a bridge too far.

Not everything in the Republican platform is incompatible with decency, pragmatism or good heartedness, nor are its adherents on an individual level. Many continue to be good people who can compartmentalize better than me, or are misled. The grand cruelty is that the Democratic Partys continued leftward plunge makes me uneasy too, and the races in which socialists are winning were often the ones in which Id seek out a moderate Republican. But it would be the height of dishonest both-sidesism to intimate this excused or compensated for a party that has become little more than a personality cult for a racist conman who may or may not be compromised by Russia.

There has to be a middle ground between nationalization of the steel mills and abiding the derision of the handicapped in public. Fortunately for the Democrats, that former example is still but a fringe complaint. Unfortunately for the Republicans, the latter example is central to their albatross.

In 2014, I lambasted straight-ticket voters as simpletons unable to scrutinize their ballots. So Ill take my own advice. I wont pull the lever, but will go down each and every place on the ballot. And for every race, Ill consider any and all good the Republican may have done or might do in office. Then I will weigh against it all the bad the candidates opposing party has done to the United States and might still do in the future. Itll be close in many cases, but Ill know where Ill end up. Every man must answer for all his decisions one day, and this is the only way I can.

Horwitz is a student at the University of Texas School of Law.
In 1982 I was a young lawyer with an active trial practice in the Harris County civil district courts. I knew all of the judges and respected each of them, but I also recognized that some were better judges than others. There were good Democratic judges and bad Democratic judges; good Republican judges and bad Republican judges. Party affiliation bore no apparent connection with the quality of the judging.

In November of that year most of the Republican judges whose terms were about to expire were denied re-election, not only the bad ones but many of the good ones as well. The reason? Democratic Sen. Lloyd Bentsen defeated his Republican challenger, and Democrat Mark White defeated Republican Gov. Bill Clements. A large percentage of their voters cast straight-party tickets, effectively voting not only for Bentsen and White but also for all other Democratic candidates, including all of the Democratic judicial nominees. It was a Democratic sweep.

Two years later it happened again, but this time the shoe was on the other foot. Republican President Ronald Reagan was reelected in a landslide, receiving nearly 64 percent of the popular vote in Texas. Many of those votes came from those choosing to vote straight Republican tickets, the effect of which, of course, was to deny incumbent Democratic judges, both the good ones and the bad ones, re-election. This time it was a Republican sweep.

Having seen the consequences for the judiciary of electing judges on the basis of who was at the top of the ticket, I decided that I should do something to make it somewhat more likely that good judges, and good judicial candidates, received the electoral support they deserved. As did many others, both lawyers and non-lawyers, I began sending recommendations in contested judicial races to my friends and acquaintances. In advance of each election in which judges are on the ballot, I compile a list of the candidates, indicating which candidate I prefer in each race. When I consider my less preferred candidate nevertheless to be qualified, I note that. Over time, I have added additional information that bears on a candidates qualifications, like State Bar of Texas and Houston Bar Association poll results and endorsements by the Houston Chronicle. But I have never based my recommendations on party affiliation and routinely, but subtly, urge those on my list to refrain from voting straight-party tickets.

Voting a straight-party ticket undermines the quality of our elected judiciary because party affiliation is far less significant in judicial races than in other contested elections. Unlike candidates for executive and legislative offices, whose party affiliation often signals fairly reliably the policies that the candidates would pursue if elected, judicial candidates party affiliations say relatively little about how they would perform their duties as judges. Painting with a very broad brush, one could argue that Democratic judicial candidates tend to be somewhat liberal and that Republican candidates tend to be somewhat conservative, but even if that turns out to be true for any given candidate, it says relatively little about how good a judge that person would be. Good judges understand and follow the law, are fair to all parties who appear before them, work hard and exhibit good judicial temperaments. Bad judges dont. Intelligence and discipline, fairness, diligence and temperament are neither uniquely Democratic nor Republican characteristics.

Moreover, the job of a judge is fundamentally different from that of executive and legislative officials. When a voter assesses the performance of the latter in deciding whether to reelect them, he or she typically asks whether the actions taken by an executive or the votes cast by a legislator were consistent with the voters personal policy preferences. But since judges dont make policy, their performance cannot be assessed on that basis. Rather, the relevant assessment question is whether the judge did his or her job, which is akin to assessing whether a school teacher, or a welder or an accountant did the job that he or she was hired to do. The only way to make a fair assessment of whether a judge should be elected to another term is to base ones vote on the judges qualifications and performance. Voting a straight-party ticket prevents that from happening,

Sadly, the problem with straight-party-ticket voting that I identified after the 1982 and 1984 elections has gotten worse. In the 1980s, roughly 10-15 percent of Texas voters cast ballots for at least one Democratic judicial candidate and at least one Republican judicial candidate; the remaining 85-90 percent voted a straight-party ticket in judicial races. Over time, though, as our politics have grown more polarized, the percentage of swing voters in judicial races has fallen to between 3 and 4 percent. Increasingly, the fate of good judges, whether Democratic or Republican, depends almost entirely on factors that have nothing to do with qualifications and performance.

When I vote in the upcoming general election, I will be picking and choosing among the judicial candidates and almost certainly voting for some Democrats and some Republicans. I hope that many of my fellow Harris County citizens do the same.

Tipps practiced civil trial and appellate litigation in Houston for over 38 years prior to his retirement at the end of 2013.
We must continue to close the gender pay gap, and this Bill is one piece of the puzzle to achieve that.

The Bill establishes a just and practical framework to address pay discrimination in female-dominated occupations.

Sage added that this is an important step in improving fairness in the workplace for women.

The legislation clarifies what a pay equity claim is and what the process is for addressing it, said Sage.

Discrimination has led to lower pay for many female-dominated industries, despite having similar working conditions and skill requirements to comparable male-dominated occupations.
In addition to having more to spend, travelers have increased the amount they spend on travel by 40 per cent this year, compared with last year. The increasingly influential millennials are spending unprecedented amounts on travel, with those born after 1990 increasing their travel spend by 80 per cent this year.

Over the past seven years, the economic and social changes in China have been dramatic. Every year more and more Chinese residents travel overseas. In 2017, there were 130 million outbound tourists, 7 per cent more than in 2016 and 85 per cent more than in 2011, when we first published CITM.

Chinese travelers have benefited this year from a rebound in the Chinese economy and strong results from stock markets in mainland China and Hong Kong. This has put more money in the pockets of Chinese travelers through increases in both salary and non-salary income.

In addition to having more to spend, travelers have increased the amount they spend on travel by 40 per cent this year, compared with last year. The increasingly influential millennials are spending unprecedented amounts on travel, with those born after 1990 increasing their travel spend by 80 per cent this year.

This years CITM reveals the far-reaching influence of this younger generation of Chinese travelers. Their growing sophistication and affluence is inspiring them to learn more about other cultures and to travel widely, leaving their footprint across the globe, from Latin America to Oceania and Europe to the Middle East. It is a trend with powerful momentum and next year will see millennials traveling even further afield. These younger Chinese travelers are also inspiring their parents and other travelers born post 1960 and 1970 to do the same. The number of travelers wanting to travel independently instead of in group tours continues to rise, as does the demand for edgier, boutique styles of accommodation.

Cutting-edge technology is a major drawcard in hotels and other accommodation, as is the provision of more authentic local experiences. Chinese travelers want to pursue more adventurous activities and to learn more about local culture and history.

Research Background

This is the seventh edition of the Hotels.com Chinese International Travel Monitor (CITM), which takes a comprehensive look at the impact on global travel by mainland Chinese travelers.

The report is based on research involving Chinese international travelers, combined with proprietary data from Hotels.com and other research.

Hotels.com engaged Ipsos, a world leader in market research, to conduct interviews during May 2018 with 3,047 Chinese residents, aged 18-58 years, who had traveled overseas in the past 12 months. A computer-assisted web interviewing technology was used for the different-tiered cities.

Chinese cities are classified into different tiers based on population, economic size and political ranking. Tier 1 includes cities such as Beijing and Shanghai, Tier 2 provincial capitals such as Chengdu, Tier 3 medium-sized cities such as Zhuhai and Tier 4 smaller-sized cities.

Travelers were asked about their spending patterns, travel preferences, booking methods, accommodation choices and future plans, along with many other aspects of their travel.

When analyzing their responses, researchers divided travelers into four age categories, those born after 1960, 1970, 1980 and 1990, to provide further insight into the choices and preferences of different generations. Those born after 1980 and 1990 are referred to as millennials throughout the report.

Figures on spending, including prices paid for hotel rooms, are quoted in Chinese Renminbi (RMB) and their US dollar equivalent whenever possible. Unless otherwise indicated, the RMBUS$ exchange rate used in this survey is US1 = RMB6.37, the rate on 20 May 2018, the mid-point of the field research.

Click here ( Adobe Acrobat PDF file) to download the complete article.

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Cleveland State Community College's women's volleyball hosted a home match against Chattanooga State on Wednesday evening. Chattanooga State defeated the Lady Cougars three sets to one.

The first set of the match went well for the Lady Cougars.

They started out with an early 10-5 lead over the Lady Tigers and managed to consistently hold that lead the rest of the match. The Lady Tigers started to catch up but Caylea Duckett smacked a solid kill, giving the Lady Cougars a 15-13 lead. The end of the set was a back and forth affair as the two teams tied three different times. The Lady Cougars eventually came out with the first set win, by a score of 27-25.

The next two sets were led by Chattanooga State as the Lady Cougars struggled to gain any momentum. Sets two and three went to the Lady Tigers by scores of 25-22 and 25-23. The Lady Cougars last lead in a set was the first set of the match, but they managed to find another lead in the final set, when they took the lead over Chattanooga State, 19-15. This quickly evaporated, however, as the Lady Tigers rolled on to a 25-21 victory in the fourth set.

Sidney Killingsworth and Kayla Wimpee were the big guns at the net for the Lady Tigers with 16 kills apiece. Emily Redden added 24 assists and four digs.

Chattanooga State head coach Janet Tate said, The girls had a slow start but finished strong. When it got close and down to the wire, the girls fought like a tiger and closed! Great fight tonight...big WIN!

Cleveland State has now lost their last five matches and will need to reevaluate some areas as they prepare for their next matchup against Crown College on Monday, September 24th at 7:00 PM.

Chattanooga State statistics:

Ricki Lynn Bickley - 3 K, 2 blocks

Emily Redden - 24 assists, 4 digs

Cayla Jacob - 7 K, 7 blocks

Sidney Killingsworth - 16K, 9 blocks

Kayla Wimpee - 16K, 4 blocks

Dakota Rawsizer - 16 assists, 3 aces, 4 digs

Sakari Pack 9K - 7 blocks
Governor Brown Issues Statement on Death of Caltrans Worker

Sacramento, California - Governor Edmund G. Brown Jr. today issued the following statement regarding the death of California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) Highway Maintenance Leadworker William D. Casdorph:

Anne and I mourn the loss of Caltrans Highway Maintenance Leadworker William D. Casdorph, a dedicated public servant who worked to make our roads safer for nearly two decades. On behalf of all Californians, we extend our deep condolences to his family, friends and the Caltrans community as they struggle to cope with this sudden loss.

Casdorph, 57, of Chula Vista, died today after being injured at a job site along State Route 163 in San Diego.

Casdorph served as a Caltrans employee for nearly two decades. He is survived by his wife, Maria, and three adult daughters, Priscilla, Wendy and Ana.

Casdorph is the 189th Caltrans employee to lose his life on the job.

In honor of Casdorph, Capitol flags will be flown at half-staff.
FTC Approves Final Order Requiring Grifols S.A. to Divest Assets as Condition of Acquiring Biotest US Corporation

Washington, DC - Following a public comment period, the Federal Trade Commission has approved a final order that settles charges that Grifols S.A.s acquisition of Biotest US Corporation is anticompetitive and violates federal antitrust law. Grifols is a global healthcare company based in Spain. Biotest US is a healthcare company based in Florida.

According to the complaint, which was announced in August 2018, the acquisition, as originally proposed, would have given Grifols a monopoly in the markets for collection of human blood plasma in Lincoln, Nebraska, Augusta, Georgia, and Youngstown, Ohio. The settlement requires Grifols to divest its plasma collection centers in these three cities to KedPlasma, a subsidiary of Kedrion Biopharma Inc. Kedrion Biopharma is a leading manufacturer of protein products and is the fifth-largest producer of plasma proteins worldwide.

The complaint also alleged that, absent a remedy, the acquisition would have harmed the U.S. market for hepatitis B immune globulin, or HBIG, a plasma-derived injectable medicine that provides hepatitis B antibodies for preventing hepatitis B infections. Grifols supplies HBIG in the U.S. In December 2017, when Grifols announced its proposed acquisition of Biotest US, Biotest US owned 41 percent of ADMA Biologics, Inc., which has the largest share of HBIG sales in the U.S.

Biotest US has transferred its ownership share in ADMA to The Biotest Divestiture Trust, the parent company of Biotest US. Grifols is only acquiring Biotest US and not its parent, and under the acquisition, Grifols will not acquire any shares of ADMA. The consent agreement prohibits Grifols, without prior notification, from acquiring any ownership interest in ADMA or obtaining any rights to nominate or obtain representation on the ADMA Board of Directors.

The consent agreement also requires Grifols to provide prior notice to the Commission if it seeks to purchase any ADMA stock or re-purchase any of the divested plasma collection centers.

The Commission vote approving the final order was 5-0. (The staff contact is Christina Perez, Bureau of Competition, 202-326-2048.)
Downed Russian Aircraft

Washington, DC - Secretary of State Michael R. Pompeo: "The United States expresses sorrow for the death of the aircrew members of the Russian plane that was downed by Syrian regime anti-aircraft fire.

"Yesterdays unfortunate incident reminds us of the need to find permanent, peaceful, and political resolutions to the many overlapping conflicts in the region and the danger of tragic miscalculation in Syrias crowded theater of operations. It underlines the urgent need to resolve the Syrian conflict in accordance with UNSC Resolution 2254 and to end Irans provocative transit of dangerous weapon systems through Syria, which are a threat to the region."
In the weeks following Hurricane Maria, Gino Villarini got very popular very fast.

Villarini is founder and president of AeroNet, an $11 million internet service provider based in Guaynabo, Puerto Rico. Maria ravaged the island's telecom infrastructure. "The day after, 95 percent of our network was down," Villarini says. But AeroNet's service uses wireless microwave technology, as well as fiber. So while competitors waited for the power companies to restore poles, Villarini's customers bounced back quickly.

Non-customers noticed. "Our sales staff was overwhelmed by the amount of requests that came in by phone, by email, and by social media," Villarini says. "Our office is not designed to receive more than 10 customers at a time, and some days we had 100 people here waiting to sign up." The company grew its customer base and gross billing by more than 20 percent in two months.

As of June, roughly 10,000 small and midsize businesses in Puerto Rico remained closed, according to Google, whose philanthropic arm raised funds for recovery. Still, now one year after Hurricane Maria wreaked $90 billion worth of damage on the island, some growth companies are thriving. They have seized market share by recovering faster than competitors and offering new products to business customers anxious to limit their vulnerability in case there's a next time.

These companies still face significant challenges, including a depleted workforce and insurance companies slow to pay claims. Many are investing more in their own preparedness plans and seeking new business outside the island.

"The companies that survived are doing better than before. They have gotten stronger," says Angel L. Perez, vice president at Rock Solid Technologies, a San Juan-based software R&D company that grew 40 percent in the past year. "Now things are getting back to normal. Or the new normal."

Sales are up.

Exports are one reason some Puerto Rican businesses are growing. While companies relying on local customers and the tourist trade still struggle, those that can serve customers elsewhere are making a greater effort to do so. Rock Solid Technologies' business was 65 percent domestic prior to Maria; that is down to around 50 percent, and the company just landed its first big account in Canada. "Putting more diversity into your customer base is a really good strategy to deal with hurricanes," Perez says.

Others see opportunities to help the domestic market protect against another catastrophe. Redundancy and backup are the new watchwords. AeroNet has two new products for small business: high-speed internet backup and a pair of independent dedicated connections. "We found during the hurricane that companies had two providers, but those providers were using the same pole," Villarini says. "So if one came down both connections came down."

For some companies, reconstruction is a boon. Initially, business from the mainland declined for Surety One, a $4 million bond underwriter based in San Juan. But now the company is writing bonds for government contractors involved in the rebuilding. "It has tripled the amount of business in Puerto Rico," says founder Constantin Poindexter.

"It has been a challenging year, but also it has been an amazing year," says Christian Gonzalez, whose San Juan-based company Wovenware is up about 15 percent over its 2017 revenue of $5 million. Gonzalez attributes that growth to demand for Wovenware's specialized expertise in artificial intelligence and machine learning. Much of the company's work is for the Department of Defense, in Washington. But it recently signed on with the Puerto Rico Science, Technology, and Research Trust to provide image recognition for mosquitos that might spread diseases like the Zika virus and dengue fever.

Four or five mainland companies--a historically large number--have visited Puerto Rico in the past few months to check out Wovenware's facilities prior to signing contracts. Aware of the room's elephant, the company has added a disaster-recovery component to its prospective client presentation. "We bring it up proactively: How we managed during the hurricane and what we are doing to make sure that they don't have any service interruptions," Gonzalez says. Customers, he says, "look happy."

Workers are scarce.

More business means more staff; and here companies are hurting. Nearly 400,000 Puerto Ricans--roughly 6 percent of the population--moved to the mainland between October 2017 and February 2018, on top of the larger exodus over the preceding decade. Rock Solid distributed $1,000 "resiliency bonuses" for "toughing it out with us," he says. "We have 100 people, and we lost just two."

Perez has hired 20 people over the last year, but had to wait for five students who were scheduled to graduate from the University of Puerto Rico last December. Normally Rock Solid makes offers at the school's job fair in October. That was canceled, and then classes extended into February as the university recovered from extensive damage. "It delayed our whole getting-up-to-speed process. But there was nothing we could do," Perez says.

At Onuvo, a $1.8 million managed services provider, business has been "growing like crazy for the last nine months," says managing member Juan L. Collado. Collado wants to hire but finds himself in hot competition for the island's reduced workforce. "Everyone is fighting for the few available resources we still have," he says.

In January the government raised the minimum wage for employees working on government construction contracts to $15 an hour. Collado predicts service industries will be next. The ripple effect worries him. "People will move to the government for more income," he says. "In five or six months I'm going to have to increase wages for entry-level employees."

Ready for next time.

"We prepared for the normal kind of hurricane," Perez says. "This hurricane was not normal." Newly woke to the threat of devastation, companies have invested significant time and money to reinforce their disaster preparedness plans. At Rock Solid Technologies, for example, Perez spent several hundred thousand dollars on power and communications redundancy. And he has arranged to fly people to the company's Austin office "as a precautionary tactic" if a hurricane of similar magnitude threatens.

AeroNet expects employees will stay put, and the company will care for them when they do. To ensure basic needs are met during an emergency, it has established relationships with hotels, gas stations, fast-food restaurants, and cafeterias. Putting little faith in the power company, which was ailing even before the hurricane, Villarini has migrated much of the facility to solar.

Villarini is also working with vendors to weatherproof equipment that got damaged by Maria. "A lot of equipment is designed for the outdoors--for rain," he says. "But during a hurricane the water comes in from all sides and places. It even comes in upside down."

Wovenware is improving protocols for keeping management and staff in touch if everything goes down. "How do we find out if they are OK? At the beginning of the hurricane it was one of our more pressing issues," Gonzalez says. At least one radio station managed to broadcast during and immediately after the storm, and some newspapers continued to operate. Gonzalez says he may buy ad space or airtime to reach out to employees, explaining the process in advance so they know where to look or listen.

Wovenware will also move to a new building by year's end. The company's current landlord had two generators, but when one failed during the hurricane the second couldn't handle the additional load. Its new location has three generators, Gonzalez says--"so there is a contingency to the contingency."

Dark days linger.

While some business leaders wax optimistic on the anniversary of Maria, all acknowledge the island's ongoing woes. Some people have come back but more have stayed away. FEMA is providing less financial assistance. Insurance payouts have been slow, say several CEOs, dinging cash flow and slowing progress. "Just in order to reopen we have to pay someone $50,000, $60,000, $70,000 for cleaning up the area or changing windows or rebuilding the office," says Onuvo's Collado, speaking of his own experiences and those of customers. "If we have to pay out-of-pocket for those repairs it delays how fast we can recover."

That's on top of Puerto Rico's dismal economic environment, which predates the hurricane. Maria "was in some ways the straw that broke the camel's back," says Poindexter, who cites the economy, crime, and lack of opportunities for young people as reasons for moving his family and part of his staff off the island. After the hurricane five members of Surety One's eight-person team relocated to an office in Raleigh, North Carolina, where Poindexter has another home. His wife and children moved there, too, while other relatives settled in Florida. Poindexter travels among the three locations. "It sucks, but there are direct flights between all the places I need to go," he says.

Surety One does business throughout the mainland and in other parts of the Caribbean. So why doesn't Poindexter just pull up stakes and leave? He talks about the high demand for underwriting by the contractors who are busy all over the island. The company is also enjoying a new market among virtual currency startups relocating to Puerto Rico for the favorable tax treatment.

Then there more elusive prospects. Could Puerto Rico, with its vulnerable power grid, serve as a test bed for renewable energy projects? There are conversations, he says, about attracting Elon Musk.

Fundamentally, though, Poindexter's unwillingness to abandon Puerto Rico is not related to his business. "It is just very hard to break from a home that you love and a culture that you love and the food that you love," he says. "And who does not want to live on a tropical island?"

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Dir: Paul Feig; Starring: Anna Kendrick, Blake Lively, Henry Golding. Cert 15, 117 mins

Mummy needs a drink is a constant refrain in Paul Feigs macabre and very entertaining thriller. Adapted from Darcey Bells novel, A Simple Favour is like an updated version of Gone Girl with extra comic elements thrown in. Feig combines flippant, off-beat humour with plot twists you would expect to find in the most most morbid and feverish film noir.

Its clash in storytelling styles is bracing and original. This is a film with as much bite as the gin-based martinis that its femme fatale Emily (Blake Lively) makes herself every afternoon the moment she gets home.

Livelys character would give Rita Hayworth in Gilda a run for her money. Blue-eyed and with flowing blonde hair, she is as hardboiled and cynical as she is glamorous: a jaded business executive, working in PR in the fashion industry and very reluctantly rushing home in time to pick up her son Nicky from kindergarten.

When Nicky grumbles that she doesnt let him have any fun, she baffles the little boy by telling him: Not true. I let you tear my labia as you exited my body.

In complete contrast to Emily is Stephanie Smothers (Anna Kendrick), a busybody single mom, always volunteering to help in the classroom. Stephanie uses what little time she has to run a vlog in which she shares tips on baking and homemaking.

Kendrick gives a delightful comic performance as the pert and prudish Stephanie. She has what she calls an oopsy jar into which anyone who swears is supposed to drop coins. Given that Emily speaks in nothing but expletives, the jar quickly becomes redundant. Emily and Stephanie are polar opposites but their kids are at school together and they become best friends.

Early on, the film feels like a full-blown comedy. Feig plays up Stephanies embarrassment and continual urge to apologise in the forthright Emilys presence. Stephanie blushes at the sight of one of the main paintings in her friends home, a full-frontal nude portrait of Emily, with the pubic hair in the centre of the frame.

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



She cant hide her dismay at her own lack of sophistication or her astonishment at the easy physical intimacy Emily shows with her handsome novelist husband Sean (Henry Golding, the prince charming from Crazy Rich Asians.)

Much of the story is told in flashback. Emily has mysteriously gone missing. Stephanie is using her vlog not just to share her latest recipes for cookies but to ask her viewers if they have any idea of her friends whereabouts.

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The tone of the storytelling gradually begins to shift as the whimsical satire of the early scenes gives way to darker, more sinister themes. One of the main points here is that Kendricks Stephanie isnt quite the little miss Bo-Peep that she seems.

Sexual and financial intrigue, death and betrayal are all thrown into the heady and potent mix. Director Feig even includes sly references to Hitchcocks Vertigo and Ingmar Bergmans Persona. As Stephanie becomes more and more obsessed with Emily, she begins to assume the missing womans identity.

Some of the jokes here are a little bit too knowing and self-conscious. Are you trying to Diabolique me? Stephanie asks at one stage in reference to the classic Clouzot thriller in which a woman is drawn into a murder plot that isnt at all what it seems. (If Stephanie really was as ingenuous as the film implies, it seems unlikely that she would be steeped in French cinema of the 1950s  or even aware of the 1990s remake.)

Feig is best known for big, broad comedies like Bridesmaids and the all-female reboot of Ghostbusters. In its weaker moments, A Simple Favour plays like a farcical skit on those boil-a-bunny erotic thrillers of the 1980s and 1990s. However, the film benefits from its two bravura central performances.

It also manages to retain its humour without losing its unsettling and disorienting quality. Feig shows far more subtlety here than in most of his other movies but old habits die hard. The finale is wildly overblown and improbable  but at least it is fun.

'A Simple Favour' is in UK cinemas
Colossal underwater walls could help slow the melting of glaciers and reduce the imminent threat of rising sea levels, a study has suggested.

Large ice sheets at risk of collapse could be protected from upwelling warm water, by the creation of barriers on the seabed, scientists say.

The most effective intervention would go beyond the scale of any engineering project humanity has previously attempted. But the scientists warned such a scheme could only compliment efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, which they say remains the most effective way of combating climate change and its effects.

"Doing geoengineering means often considering the unthinkable," said John Moore, a scientist at Beijing Normal University, China, and a professor of climate change at the University of Lapland, Finland.

But the unthinkable idea could theoretically prevent the catastrophic melting of vulnerable ice sheets including the UK-sized Thwaites glacier in west Antarctica, which is fast retreating.

"Thwaites could easily trigger a runaway [west Antarctic] ice sheet collapse that would ultimately raise global sea level by about three metres," said Michael Wolovick, a researcher at Princeton University's Department of Geosciences.

"We all understand that we have an urgent professional obligation to determine how much sea level rise society should expect, and how fast that sea level rise is likely to come. However, we would argue that there is also an obligation to try to come up with ways that society could protect itself against a rapid ice sheet collapse," Mr Wolovick added.

A subaquatic wall which held back 50 per cent of warm water from reaching the ice shelf base could have a 70 per cent chance of succeeding, while larger walls would be even more likely to delay or even stop ice sheet collapse, the study says.

But smaller scale projects could also have a significant impact, the team believes. A simpler intervention would consist of building isolated 300-metre-high mounds or columns on the sea floor.

The structures wouldn't block warm water but could support and hold back the glacier, helping it to regrow.

"In either case, we were imagining very simple structures, simply piles of sand or gravel on the ocean floor," said Mr Wolovick.

But even this smaller scale project would be comparable to the amount of material excavated to build the Suez Canal in Egypt in the 19th century.

Recommended Warm water trapped under Arctic has potential to melt entire ice pack

These artificial columns would have a 30 per cent probability of preventing a runaway collapse of the west Antarctic ice sheet for the foreseeable future, according to the researchers computer models.

Despite the teams encouraging results from the models, they do not advocate rapidly beginning building work, instead saying further research needs to be undertaken into the engineering practicalities of working in some of the earths least hospitable environments.

They have also warned they do not want their work to be seen as any kind of alternative to fighting climate change through reduction of harmful emissions.

10 photographs to show to anyone who doesn't believe in climate change Show all 10 1 /10 10 photographs to show to anyone who doesn't believe in climate change 10 photographs to show to anyone who doesn't believe in climate change A group of emperor penguins face a crack in the sea ice, near McMurdo Station, Antarctica Kira Morris 10 photographs to show to anyone who doesn't believe in climate change Floods destroyed eight bridges and ruined crops such as wheat, maize and peas in the Karimabad valley in northern Pakistan, a mountainous region with many glaciers. In many parts of the world, glaciers have been in retreat, creating dangerously large lakes that can cause devastating flooding when the banks break. Climate change can also increase rainfall in some areas, while bringing drought to others. Hira Ali 10 photographs to show to anyone who doesn't believe in climate change Smoke  filled with the carbon that is driving climate change  drifts across a field in Colombia. Sandra Rondon 10 photographs to show to anyone who doesn't believe in climate change Amid a flood in Islampur, Jamalpur, Bangladesh, a woman on a raft searches for somewhere dry to take shelter. Bangladesh is one of the most vulnerable places in the world to sea level rise, which is expected to make tens of millions of people homeless by 2050. Probal Rashid 10 photographs to show to anyone who doesn't believe in climate change Sindh province in Pakistan has experienced a grim mix of two consequences of climate change. Because of climate change either we have floods or not enough water to irrigate our crop and feed our animals, says the photographer. Picture clearly indicates that the extreme drought makes wide cracks in clay. Crops are very difficult to grow. Rizwan Dharejo 10 photographs to show to anyone who doesn't believe in climate change Hanna Petursdottir examines a cave inside the Svinafellsjokull glacier in Iceland, which she said had been growing rapidly. Since 2000, the size of glaciers on Iceland has reduced by 12 per cent. Tom Schifanella 10 photographs to show to anyone who doesn't believe in climate change A river once flowed along the depression in the dry earth of this part of Bangladesh, but it has disappeared amid rising temperatures. Abrar Hossain 10 photographs to show to anyone who doesn't believe in climate change A shepherd moves his herd as he looks for green pasture near the village of Sirohi in Rajasthan, northern India. The region has been badly affected by heatwaves and drought, making local people nervous about further predicted increases in temperature. Riddhima Singh Bhati 10 photographs to show to anyone who doesn't believe in climate change A factory in China is shrouded by a haze of air pollution. The World Health Organisation has warned such pollution, much of which is from the fossil fuels that cause climate change, is a public health emergency. Leung Ka Wa 10 photographs to show to anyone who doesn't believe in climate change Water levels in reservoirs, like this one in Gers, France, have been getting perilously low in areas across the world affected by drought, forcing authorities to introduce water restrictions. Mahtuf Ikhsan

"There are dishonest elements of society that will try to use our research to argue against the necessity of emissions' reductions. Our research does not in any way support that interpretation," they said.

"The more carbon we emit, the less likely it becomes that the ice sheets will survive in the long term at anything close to their present volume," Mr Wolovick added.

The study is published in the European Geosciences Union journal The Cryosphere.
The bitcoin network was at risk of completely collapsing, after a major flaw was spotted with its underlying software.

Developers issued a fix before hackers could exploit the bug, which was only revealed publicly after a solution had been found.

According to the bitcoin developers, anyone mining the cryptocurrency would have been able to carry out the attack on the network, though it would have cost 12.5 bitcoins  roughly $80,000 (60,000)  to perform successfully.

Bitcoin's volatile history in pictures Show all 10 1 /10 Bitcoin's volatile history in pictures Bitcoin's volatile history in pictures Satoshi Nakamoto creates the first bitcoin block in 2009 On 3 January, 2009, the genesis block of bitcoin appeared. It came less than a year after the pseudonymous creator Satoshi Nakamoto detailed the cryptocurrency in a paper titled 'Bitcoin: A peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System' Reuters Bitcoin's volatile history in pictures Bitcoin is used as a currency for the first time On 22 May, 2010, the first ever real-world bitcoin transaction took place. Lazlo Hanyecz bought two pizzas for 10,000 bitcoins  the equivalent of $90 million at today's prices Lazlo Hanyecz Bitcoin's volatile history in pictures Silk Road opens for business Bitcoin soon gained notoriety for its use on the dark web. The Silk Road marketplace, established in 2011, was the first of hundreds of sites to offer illegal drugs and services in exchange for bitcoin Screenshot Bitcoin's volatile history in pictures The first bitcoin ATM appears On 29 October, 2013, the first ever bitcoin ATM was installed in a coffee shop in Vancouver, Canada. The machine allowed people to exchange bitcoins for cash Reuters Bitcoin's volatile history in pictures The fall of MtGox The world's biggest bitcoin exchange, MtGox, filed for bankruptcy in February 2014 after losing almost 750,000 of its customers bitcoins. At the time, this was around 7 per cent of all bitcoins and the market inevitably crashed Getty Images Bitcoin's volatile history in pictures Would the real Satoshi Nakamoto please stand up In 2015, Australian police raided the home of Craig Wright after the entrepreneur claimed he was Satoshi Nakamoto. He later rescinded the claim Getty Images Bitcoin's volatile history in pictures Bitcoin's big split On 1 August, 2017, an unresolvable dispute within the bitcoin community saw the network split. The fork of bitcoin's underlying blockchain technology spawned a new cryptocurrency: Bitcoin cash Reuters Bitcoin's volatile history in pictures Bitcoin's price sky rockets Towards the end of 2017, the price of bitcoin surged to almost $20,000. This represented a 1,300 per cent increase from its price at the start of the year Reuters Bitcoin's volatile history in pictures What goes up... Bitcoin price crashes spectacularly, losing half of its value in a matter of days Getty Images Bitcoin's volatile history in pictures Bitcoin plunges The cryptocurrency eventually bottoms out below $4,000 in 2019 before slowly rebuilding momentum to outperform more traditional assets Getty Images

The attack would have meant exploiting the way bitcoin transactions are confirmed through mining  the process of generating new units of the cryptocurrency by verifying transactions through complex mathematical puzzles.

"A denial-of-service vulnerability (CVE-2018-17144) exploitable by miners has been discovered in Bitcoin Core versions 0.14.0 up to 0.16.2," an anonymous developer wrote when disclosing the bug on Github.

"It is recommended to upgrade any of the vulnerable versions to 0.16.3 as soon as possible."

The bug has been around since March 2017, however either nobody noticed it or nobody was willing to incur the expense of exploiting it.

If miners fail to upgrade to the new software, there may still be a risk of the bitcoin network falling victim to an attack, which could result in a significant portion of the network crashing.

Developers have pleaded with bitcoin miners to take the appropriate action in order to protect the network from potential attacks, with the anonymous co-owner of bitcoin.org describing it as a "very scary bug" on Twitter.

"A very scary bug in Bitcoin Core has just been fixed which could have crashed a huge chunk of the Bitcoin network if exploited by any rogue miners," Cobra Bitcoin tweeted.

Such issues were more common in the early years of bitcoin, which was launched in 2009 following the publication of a whitepaper by its pseudonymous creator Satoshi Nakamoto.
Questionable wellness website Goop has claimed to have found the key to better mental health - 10 days of complete silence.

The latest Goop craze focuses on Vipassana - an ancient form of meditation, which translates to insight and encourages focusing on the here and now.

According to a Q&A with Vipassana experts Barry Lapping, founding member of Dhamma Dhara and Lysha Smith, an administrator at Dhama Dhara, the experience is transformative.

Vipassana, which originated in India more than 2,500 years ago by Gotama Buddha, according to Lapping, is the path to mental purification.

However, to reap the rewards of the practice, rigorous mental training is required - including a mandatory 10-day course that involves no speaking.

The point of the intense meditation is to develop ones mind-body connection - and learn to focus on simply observing, rather than reacting.

During the course, meditation makes up the majority of the day, only broken up with regularly interspersed tea and food breaks.

At 9.30pm, students retire to their rooms to sleep - required rest for the 4am wake-up bell.

According to Lapping, the experience and the various techniques taught over the course of the 10-day period consequently leads to a balanced mind - and happiness.

The 10 Best meditation apps Show all 10 1 /10 The 10 Best meditation apps The 10 Best meditation apps 1010.jpg The 10 Best meditation apps 109.jpg The 10 Best meditation apps 101.jpg The 10 Best meditation apps 107.jpg The 10 Best meditation apps 102.jpg The 10 Best meditation apps 106.jpg The 10 Best meditation apps 108.jpg The 10 Best meditation apps 104.jpg The 10 Best meditation apps new109.jpg The 10 Best meditation apps 103.jpg

We come out of suffering, he said.

And the practice is for anyone, according to the experts - however, Smith acknowledged that it is a rigorous experience and in that sense, it is not for everyone.

You have to be of stable physical and mental health to start doing that mental surgery, he said.

In addition to cutting oneself off from the people inside the course, the course also requires no outside communication via phones or computers as well as no killing, stealing, sexual activity, lying, or intoxicants.

Physical contact is prohibited, as is any non-verbal communication between students, according to the Code of Discipline section of the website.

In the spirit of helping people see things as they really are, and achieve full enlightenment, all Vipassana courses are donation-based - meaning room, board, food and teaching cost students nothing.

With locations all over the country, and more than 185 centres around the world, the basis of the intense Vipassana course is to learn practices that can then be applied in everyday life.

 Gwyneth Paltrow's Goop website under fire for telling women to achieve their 'leanest liveable weight'

For the most part, meditation is considered safe for the majority of people, with the practice linked to scientifically-backed benefits such as stress reduction and improved sleep.

However, some studies have found the practice can lead to negative side effects.

One study, conducted by the University of California, Irvine, found seven per cent of people whod attended a meditation retreat suffered profound adverse effects such as panic and depression.

Vipassana mediation is not recommended for people with serious psychiatric disorders, according to the website.
The University of Sussex has come under fire for providing students with sexist beer mats in their welcome packs.

The beer mats were produced by Brushbox, a toothbrush subscription box, to promote dental hygiene.

But the imagery and wording on the beer mats have been heavily criticised online for making implications about oral sex, as the mats ask whether students spit or swallow as part of their dental regime and feature a sexualised picture of a woman's mouth.

Photos of the beer mats first started circulating on Mumsnet earlier this week, with some people on the site comparing them to pornography.

They were then shared on Twitter by Raquel Rosario Sanchez, a PhD student at the University of Bristol.

Imagine being a bright and eager female student excited to have been accepted into one of the UKs leading research universities (@SussexUni) and you find this in your welcome bag, she tweeted.

Sexism is sexism even when its a joke. Women deserve better than this.

How clever and original to use a womans body in a sexualised way to sell an entirely unrelated product. Revolutionary, another person remarked.

A spokesperson for the University of Sussex Students Union has responded to the controversy, expressing their disapproval over the beer mats.

We were very disappointed to find this promotional material in our Dig-in boxes, and will be reviewing whether to renew our contract with this supplier, the spokesperson told The Independent.

A spokesperson for the University of Sussex has also commented on the issue, stating: We can absolutely see why this promotional material in our Students Unions freshers packs has sparked such a strong reaction.

Were sure this discussion will continue and that our Students Union and other student unions will feed back the reaction to the company responsible.

Brushbox, the toothbrush subscription service company that supplied the beer mats, has apologised for causing offence with the promotional imagery.

We now realise it was inappropriate and misguided of us to use this type of image as a way to raise awareness of dental health issues, a spokesperson said.

 Female easyJet pilot reveals sexist encounter on flight with two male passengers

We completely understand that the image could be deemed as derogatory to women and for that we are truly sorry - this was never our intention, and we take full responsibility for any upset it has caused.

Untameable Shrews, a group that describes itself as a radical feminist street art movement, also tweeted about the sexist nature of the beer mats.

A spokesperson for the group told The Independent that the imagery can be perceived as sexual harassment, as the references to oral sex can make women feel vulnerable and intimidated.

Surely Sussex University knows about the high rates of sexual assaults on campus and the #MeToo movement, they said.

I honestly dont know how this even made it past the design phase.

Its not funny or clever, just completely juvenile."
The Milky Way is still feeling the effects of a near collision with another galaxy that took place hundreds of millions of years ago, scientists at the European Space Agency have concluded.

Tracking the movement of over 6 million stars using data collected from the Gaia space observatory, they noticed unusual activity at the heart of our galaxy.

Some stars were moving on their own paths through the Milky Way rather than rotating uniformly with the rest of the galaxy.

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Dr Teresa Antoja from University of Barcelona said she was shocked when she first saw these movements, and thought there must be something wrong with the data.

At the beginning the features were very weird to us, she said.

Reporting their findings in the journal, Nature, Dr Antoja and her colleagues suggested that the unexpected rippling movements of these stars were triggered when the Sagittarius galaxy sailed past it between 300 and 900 million years ago.

It is a bit like throwing a stone in a pond, which displaces the water as ripples and waves, Dr Antoja said.

Nasa's most stunning pictures of space Show all 30 1 /30 Nasa's most stunning pictures of space Nasa's most stunning pictures of space Solar Flare An image from Nasa's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) shows a 200,000 mile long solar filament ripping through the Sun's corona in September 2013 Nasa Nasa's most stunning pictures of space Nasa Celebrates 50 Years of Spacewalking For 50 years, NASA has been "suiting up" for spacewalking. In this 1984 photograph of the first untethered spacewalk, NASA astronaut Bruce McCandless is in the midst of the first "field" tryout of a nitrogen-propelled backpack device called the Manned Maneuvering Unit (MMU) Nasa Nasa's most stunning pictures of space A Hubble Cosmic Couple The spectacular cosmic pairing of the star Hen 2-427  more commonly known as WR 124  and the nebula M1-67 which surrounds it ESA/Hubble & NASA Nasa's most stunning pictures of space Veil Nebula Supernova Remnant Nasa's Hubble Space Telescope has unveiled in stunning detail a small section of the Veil Nebula - expanding remains of a massive star that exploded about 8,000 years ago Nasa's most stunning pictures of space The Soyuz TMA-15M rocket launch The Soyuz TMA-15M rocket launches from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on Monday, Nov. 24, 2014, carrying three new astronauts to the International Space Station. It also took caviar, ready for the satellite's inhabitants to celebrate the holidays Nasa Nasa's most stunning pictures of space Earth from the ISS From the International Space Station, Expedition 42 Flight Engineer Terry W. Virts took this photograph of the Gulf of Mexico and U.S. Gulf Coast at sunset Nasa Nasa's most stunning pictures of space Black Hole Friday Nasa celebrated Black Friday by looking into space instead  sharing pictures of black holes Nasa Nasa's most stunning pictures of space NuSTAR X-rays stream off the sun in this image showing observations from by NASA's Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array, or NuSTAR, overlaid on a picture taken by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) Nasa Nasa's most stunning pictures of space Cassiopeia A c A false colour image of Cassiopeia A comprised with data from the Spitzer and Hubble Space Telescopes and the Chandra X-Ray observatory Nasa Nasa's most stunning pictures of space Orion Capsule splashes down The Orion capsule jetted off into space before heading back a few hours later  having proved that it can be used, one day, to carry humans to Mars Nasa Nasa's most stunning pictures of space Earth Observations From Gemini IV in 1965 This photograph of the Florida Straits and Grand Bahama Bank was taken during the Gemini IV mission during orbit no. 19 in 1965. The Gemini IV crew conducted scientific experiments, including photography of Earth's weather and terrain, for the remainder of their four-day mission following Ed White's historic spacewalk on June 3 Nasa's most stunning pictures of space Frosty slopes of Mars This image of an area on the surface of Mars, approximately 1.5 by 3 kilometers in size, shows frosted gullies on a south-facing slope within a crater. The image was taken by Nasa's HiRISE camera, which is mounted on its Mars Reconaissance Orbiter Nasa Nasa's most stunning pictures of space Yellowstone from space NASA astronaut Reid Wiseman shared this image of Yellowstone via his twitter account Nasa Nasa's most stunning pictures of space Saturn This near-infrared color image shows a specular reflection, or sunglint, off of a hydrocarbon lake named Kivu Lacus on Saturn's moon Titan Nasa Nasa's most stunning pictures of space Worlds Apart Although Mimas and Pandora, shown here, both orbit Saturn, they are very different moons. Pandora, "small" by moon standards (50 miles or 81 kilometers across) is elongated and irregular in shape. Mimas (246 miles or 396 kilometers across), a "medium-sized" moon, formed into a sphere due to self-gravity imposed by its higher mass Nasa Nasa's most stunning pictures of space Solar Flare An X1.6 class solar flare flashes in the middle of the sun in this image taken 10 September, captured by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory Nasa Nasa's most stunning pictures of space Large Magellanic Cloud galaxy An image of the Large Magellanic Cloud galaxy seen in infrared light by the Herschel Space Observatory. Regions of space such as this are where new stars are born from a mixture of elements and cosmic dust Nasa Nasa's most stunning pictures of space Mars Rover Spirit Nasa's Mars Rover Spirit took the first picture from Spirit since problems with communications began a week earlier. The image shows the robotic arm extended to the rock called Adirondack Nasa Nasa's most stunning pictures of space Morning Aurora From the Space Station Nasa astronaut Scott Kelly captured this photograph of the green lights of the aurora from the International Space Station Nasa/Scott Kelly Nasa's most stunning pictures of space Launch of History - Making STS-41G Mission in 1984 The Space Shuttle Challenger launches from Florida at dawn. On this mission, Kathryn Sullivan became the first U.S. woman to perform a spacewalk and Marc Garneau became the first Canadian in space. The crew of seven was the largest to fly on a spacecraft at that time, and STS-41G was the first flight to include two female astronauts Nasa's most stunning pictures of space A Fresh Perspective on an Extraordinary Cluster of Galaxies Galaxy clusters are often described by superlatives. After all, they are huge conglomerations of galaxies, hot gas, and dark matter and represent the largest structures in the Universe held together by gravity Nasa's most stunning pictures of space Hubble Sees a Galactic Sunflower The arrangement of the spiral arms in the galaxy Messier 63, seen here in an image from the Nasa Hubble Space Telescope, recall the pattern at the center of a sunflower ESA/Hubble & NASA Nasa's most stunning pictures of space Pluto image Four images from New Horizons Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) were combined with colour data from the Ralph instrument to create this enhanced colour global view of Pluto Nasa's most stunning pictures of space Fresh Crater Near Sirenum Fossae Region of Mars The HiRISE camera aboard Nasa's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter acquired this closeup image of a "fresh" (on a geological scale, though quite old on a human scale) impact crater in the Sirenum Fossae region of Mars. This impact crater appears relatively recent as it has a sharp rim and well-preserved ejecta Nasa's most stunning pictures of space Hubble Peers into the Most Crowded Place in the Milky Way This Nasa Hubble Space Telescope image presents the Arches Cluster, the densest known star cluster in the Milky Way NASA & ESA Nasa's most stunning pictures of space An Astronaut's View from Space Nasa astronaut Reid Wiseman tweeted this photo from the International Space Station on 2 September 2014 Nasa's most stunning pictures of space Giant Landform on Mars On Mars, we can observe four classes of sandy landforms formed by the wind, or aeolian bedforms: ripples, transverse aeolian ridges, dunes, and what are called draa Nasa's most stunning pictures of space Expedition 39 Landing A sokol suit helmet can be seen against the window of the Soyuz TMA-11M capsule shortly after the spacecraft landed with Expedition 39 Commander Koichi Wakata of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), Soyuz Commander Mikhail Tyurin of Roscosmos, and Flight Engineer Rick Mastracchio of NASA near the town of Zhezkazgan, Kazakhstan (NASA/Bill Ingalls) Nasa's most stunning pictures of space Jupiter's Great Red Spot Viewed by Voyager I Jupiter is the largest planet in the solar system and perhaps the most majestic. Vibrant bands of clouds carried by winds that can exceed 400 mph continuously circle the planet's atmosphere Nasa's most stunning pictures of space Chandra Observatory Sees a Heart in the Darkness This Chandra X-Ray Observatory image of the young star cluster NGC 346 highlights a heart-shaped cloud of 8 million-degree Celsius gas in the central region

This small galaxy of Sagittarius, formed from just a few tens of millions of stars, is currently being cannibalised as the much larger Milky Way gradually consumes it.

However, the last time the two galaxies interacted was not so direct.

As Sagittarius skirted the Milky Way, its gravity perturbed a few million stars and sent them flying off in different directions. The memory of this historic event can still be seen by carefully examining the velocities of the Milky Ways stars.

Recommended Watery worlds could be common throughout the galaxy

The Gaia observatory is capable of measuring the three dimensional movement of stars using a combination of their position in space and their velocity.

When the scientists plotted this information on a graph it formed spiral shapes that indicated the unusual paths some stars are still taking.

The snail-shell patterns that emerged from the data had never been seen before because Gaia  which can accurately map the positions of over one billion stars  is a huge technological leap forward.

 Nasa working to fix small leak on International Space Station

It looks like suddenly you have put the right glasses on and you see all the things that were not possible to see before, said Dr Antoja.

Despite this, the scientists said that their conclusions are based on relatively simple computer models and analysis. They now intend to examine the data in greater depth to learn more about the Milky Ways history.

The discovery was easy; the interpretations harder. And the full understanding of its meaning and implications might take several years, Said Dr Amina Helmi from the University of Groningen, who also contributed to the research.
A neutron star in the depths of space has been detected beaming out abnormally bright infrared radiation, in a development that has left astronomers perplexed.

The distant phenomenon was spotted using Nasas Hubble Space Telescope, and the team behind the discovery hope it will help them understand the development of these super-dense stars.

Neutron stars are objects formed from the collapsed cores of large stars following a supernova explosion. They are also known as pulsars due to the pulses of radiation they emit as they rotate at high speeds.

These stars are generally examined using radio wave and X-rays, and researchers say the addition of the infrared spectrum to their studies opens up a wide range of new possibilities.

This specific object, known as RX J0806.4-4123, belongs to a group of pulsars known as the magnificent seven that scientists say are far hotter than they ought to be considering their age.

As for the source of its bright glow, the researchers think there must be something else interacting with the neutron star to create this effect.

One theory is that there could be what is known as a fallback disc of material that coalesced around the neutron star after the supernova, said Professor Bettina Posselt, an astrophysicist at Pennsylvania State and the leader of the team that identified the distant glow.

Nasa's most stunning pictures of space Show all 30 1 /30 Nasa's most stunning pictures of space Nasa's most stunning pictures of space Solar Flare An image from Nasa's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) shows a 200,000 mile long solar filament ripping through the Sun's corona in September 2013 Nasa Nasa's most stunning pictures of space Nasa Celebrates 50 Years of Spacewalking For 50 years, NASA has been "suiting up" for spacewalking. In this 1984 photograph of the first untethered spacewalk, NASA astronaut Bruce McCandless is in the midst of the first "field" tryout of a nitrogen-propelled backpack device called the Manned Maneuvering Unit (MMU) Nasa Nasa's most stunning pictures of space A Hubble Cosmic Couple The spectacular cosmic pairing of the star Hen 2-427  more commonly known as WR 124  and the nebula M1-67 which surrounds it ESA/Hubble & NASA Nasa's most stunning pictures of space Veil Nebula Supernova Remnant Nasa's Hubble Space Telescope has unveiled in stunning detail a small section of the Veil Nebula - expanding remains of a massive star that exploded about 8,000 years ago Nasa's most stunning pictures of space The Soyuz TMA-15M rocket launch The Soyuz TMA-15M rocket launches from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on Monday, Nov. 24, 2014, carrying three new astronauts to the International Space Station. It also took caviar, ready for the satellite's inhabitants to celebrate the holidays Nasa Nasa's most stunning pictures of space Earth from the ISS From the International Space Station, Expedition 42 Flight Engineer Terry W. Virts took this photograph of the Gulf of Mexico and U.S. Gulf Coast at sunset Nasa Nasa's most stunning pictures of space Black Hole Friday Nasa celebrated Black Friday by looking into space instead  sharing pictures of black holes Nasa Nasa's most stunning pictures of space NuSTAR X-rays stream off the sun in this image showing observations from by NASA's Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array, or NuSTAR, overlaid on a picture taken by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) Nasa Nasa's most stunning pictures of space Cassiopeia A c A false colour image of Cassiopeia A comprised with data from the Spitzer and Hubble Space Telescopes and the Chandra X-Ray observatory Nasa Nasa's most stunning pictures of space Orion Capsule splashes down The Orion capsule jetted off into space before heading back a few hours later  having proved that it can be used, one day, to carry humans to Mars Nasa Nasa's most stunning pictures of space Earth Observations From Gemini IV in 1965 This photograph of the Florida Straits and Grand Bahama Bank was taken during the Gemini IV mission during orbit no. 19 in 1965. The Gemini IV crew conducted scientific experiments, including photography of Earth's weather and terrain, for the remainder of their four-day mission following Ed White's historic spacewalk on June 3 Nasa's most stunning pictures of space Frosty slopes of Mars This image of an area on the surface of Mars, approximately 1.5 by 3 kilometers in size, shows frosted gullies on a south-facing slope within a crater. The image was taken by Nasa's HiRISE camera, which is mounted on its Mars Reconaissance Orbiter Nasa Nasa's most stunning pictures of space Yellowstone from space NASA astronaut Reid Wiseman shared this image of Yellowstone via his twitter account Nasa Nasa's most stunning pictures of space Saturn This near-infrared color image shows a specular reflection, or sunglint, off of a hydrocarbon lake named Kivu Lacus on Saturn's moon Titan Nasa Nasa's most stunning pictures of space Worlds Apart Although Mimas and Pandora, shown here, both orbit Saturn, they are very different moons. Pandora, "small" by moon standards (50 miles or 81 kilometers across) is elongated and irregular in shape. Mimas (246 miles or 396 kilometers across), a "medium-sized" moon, formed into a sphere due to self-gravity imposed by its higher mass Nasa Nasa's most stunning pictures of space Solar Flare An X1.6 class solar flare flashes in the middle of the sun in this image taken 10 September, captured by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory Nasa Nasa's most stunning pictures of space Large Magellanic Cloud galaxy An image of the Large Magellanic Cloud galaxy seen in infrared light by the Herschel Space Observatory. Regions of space such as this are where new stars are born from a mixture of elements and cosmic dust Nasa Nasa's most stunning pictures of space Mars Rover Spirit Nasa's Mars Rover Spirit took the first picture from Spirit since problems with communications began a week earlier. The image shows the robotic arm extended to the rock called Adirondack Nasa Nasa's most stunning pictures of space Morning Aurora From the Space Station Nasa astronaut Scott Kelly captured this photograph of the green lights of the aurora from the International Space Station Nasa/Scott Kelly Nasa's most stunning pictures of space Launch of History - Making STS-41G Mission in 1984 The Space Shuttle Challenger launches from Florida at dawn. On this mission, Kathryn Sullivan became the first U.S. woman to perform a spacewalk and Marc Garneau became the first Canadian in space. The crew of seven was the largest to fly on a spacecraft at that time, and STS-41G was the first flight to include two female astronauts Nasa's most stunning pictures of space A Fresh Perspective on an Extraordinary Cluster of Galaxies Galaxy clusters are often described by superlatives. After all, they are huge conglomerations of galaxies, hot gas, and dark matter and represent the largest structures in the Universe held together by gravity Nasa's most stunning pictures of space Hubble Sees a Galactic Sunflower The arrangement of the spiral arms in the galaxy Messier 63, seen here in an image from the Nasa Hubble Space Telescope, recall the pattern at the center of a sunflower ESA/Hubble & NASA Nasa's most stunning pictures of space Pluto image Four images from New Horizons Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) were combined with colour data from the Ralph instrument to create this enhanced colour global view of Pluto Nasa's most stunning pictures of space Fresh Crater Near Sirenum Fossae Region of Mars The HiRISE camera aboard Nasa's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter acquired this closeup image of a "fresh" (on a geological scale, though quite old on a human scale) impact crater in the Sirenum Fossae region of Mars. This impact crater appears relatively recent as it has a sharp rim and well-preserved ejecta Nasa's most stunning pictures of space Hubble Peers into the Most Crowded Place in the Milky Way This Nasa Hubble Space Telescope image presents the Arches Cluster, the densest known star cluster in the Milky Way NASA & ESA Nasa's most stunning pictures of space An Astronaut's View from Space Nasa astronaut Reid Wiseman tweeted this photo from the International Space Station on 2 September 2014 Nasa's most stunning pictures of space Giant Landform on Mars On Mars, we can observe four classes of sandy landforms formed by the wind, or aeolian bedforms: ripples, transverse aeolian ridges, dunes, and what are called draa Nasa's most stunning pictures of space Expedition 39 Landing A sokol suit helmet can be seen against the window of the Soyuz TMA-11M capsule shortly after the spacecraft landed with Expedition 39 Commander Koichi Wakata of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), Soyuz Commander Mikhail Tyurin of Roscosmos, and Flight Engineer Rick Mastracchio of NASA near the town of Zhezkazgan, Kazakhstan (NASA/Bill Ingalls) Nasa's most stunning pictures of space Jupiter's Great Red Spot Viewed by Voyager I Jupiter is the largest planet in the solar system and perhaps the most majestic. Vibrant bands of clouds carried by winds that can exceed 400 mph continuously circle the planet's atmosphere Nasa's most stunning pictures of space Chandra Observatory Sees a Heart in the Darkness This Chandra X-Ray Observatory image of the young star cluster NGC 346 highlights a heart-shaped cloud of 8 million-degree Celsius gas in the central region

Such a disc would be composed of matter from the progenitor massive star. Its subsequent interaction with the neutron star could have heated the pulsar and slowed its rotation.

If confirmed as a supernova fallback disc, this result could change our general understanding of neutron star evolution.

The second possible explanation for the infrared emission from this neutron star is that it could be a pulsar wind nebula.

In this scenario, an energetic wind coming from the star could be interacting with gas in space to create the infrared effect.

As the neutron star travels through the interstellar medium faster than the speed of sound, a shock can form where the interstellar medium and the pulsar wind interact, said Professor Posselt.

The shocked particles would then emit synchrotron radiation, causing the extended infrared signal that we see.

Typically, pulsar wind nebulae are seen in X-rays and an infrared-only pulsar wind nebula would be very unusual and exciting.

Describing the star as unusual, Nasa said their new James Webb Space Telescope  which is currently under development as a replacement for Hubble  will help them pinpoint exactly what is going on around this neutron star.

The discovery was documented in the Astrophysical Journal.
Scientists have found that giving the popular party drug MDMA to octopuses makes the normally reclusive creatures highly sociable.

When humans take the illegal substance  commonly known as ecstasy  they experience euphoria and closeness to others, effects that have made it popular among revellers at nightclubs and festivals.

Even though they are separated from humans by 500 million years of evolution, the new research suggests that octopuses experience very similar effects.

The unusual study was conducted by scientists in an attempt to understand the ancient brain mechanisms that control social behaviour in animals.

Octopuses are widely known to be intelligent animals, capable of outwitting prey and solving complex puzzles, but their brains are totally alien when compared to our own.

The brains of octopuses are more similar to those of snails than humans, but our studies add to evidence that they can exhibit some of the same behaviours that we can, says Dr Gul Dolen, a neuroscientist at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine who led the experiments.

Science news in pictures Show all 20 1 /20 Science news in pictures Science news in pictures Pluto has 'beating heart' of frozen nitrogen Pluto has a 'beating heart' of frozen nitrogen that is doing strange things to its surface, Nasa has found. The mysterious core seems to be the cause of features on its surface that have fascinated scientists since they were spotted by Nasa's New Horizons mission. "Before New Horizons, everyone thought Pluto was going to be a netball - completely flat, almost no diversity," said Tanguy Bertrand, an astrophysicist and planetary scientist at NASA's Ames Research Center and the lead author on the new study. "But it's completely different. It has a lot of different landscapes and we are trying to understand what's going on there." Getty Science news in pictures Over 400 species discovered this year by Natural History Museum The ancient invertabrate worm-like species rhenopyrgus viviani (pictured) is one of over 400 species previously unknown to science that were discovered by experts at the Natural History Museum this year PA Science news in pictures Jackdaws can identify 'dangerous' humans Jackdaws can identify dangerous humans from listening to each others warning calls, scientists say. The highly social birds will also remember that person if they come near their nests again, according to researchers from the University of Exeter. In the study, a person unknown to the wild jackdaws approached their nest. At the same time scientists played a recording of a warning call (threatening) or contact calls (non-threatening). The next time jackdaws saw this same person, the birds that had previously heard the warning call were defensive and returned to their nests more than twice as quickly on average. Getty Science news in pictures Turtle embryos influence sex by shaking The sex of the turtle is determined by the temperatures at which they are incubated. Warm temperatures favour females. But by wiggling around the egg, embryos can find the Goldilocks Zone which means they are able to shield themselves against extreme thermal conditions and produce a balanced sex ratio, according to the new study published in Current Biology journal Ye et al/Current Biology Science news in pictures Elephant poaching rates drop in Africa African elephant poaching rates have dropped by 60 per cent in six years, an international study has found. It is thought the decline could be associated with the ivory trade ban introduced in China in 2017. Reuters Science news in pictures Ancient four-legged whale discovered in Peru Scientists have identified a four-legged creature with webbed feet to be an ancestor of the whale. Fossils unearthed in Peru have led scientists to conclude that the enormous creatures that traverse the planets oceans today are descended from small hoofed ancestors that lived in south Asia 50 million years ago A. Gennari Science news in pictures Animal with transient anus discovered A scientist has stumbled upon a creature with a transient anus that appears only when it is needed, before vanishing completely. Dr Sidney Tamm of the Marine Biological Laboratory could not initially find any trace of an anus on the species. However, as the animal gets full, a pore opens up to dispose of waste Steven G Johnson Science news in pictures Giant bee spotted Feared extinct, the Wallace's Giant bee has been spotted for the first time in nearly 40 years. 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The bones belonged to two large rodent species and a small shrew-like animal New Mexico Museum of Natural History Science news in pictures Fabric that changes according to temperature created Scientists at the University of Maryland have created a fabric that adapts to heat, expanding to allow more heat to escape the body when warm and compacting to retain more heat when cold Faye Levine, University of Maryland Science news in pictures Baby mice tears could be used in pest control A study from the University of Tokyo has found that the tears of baby mice cause female mice to be less interested in the sexual advances of males Getty Science news in pictures Final warning to limit "climate catastrophe" The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has issued a report which projects the impact of a rise in global temperatures of 1.5 degrees Celsius and warns against a higher increase Getty Science news in pictures Nobel prize for evolution chemists The nobel prize for chemistry has been awarded to three chemists working with evolution. Frances Smith is being awarded the prize for her work on directing the evolution of enzymes, while Gregory Winter and George Smith take the prize for their work on phage display of peptides and antibodies Getty/AFP Science news in pictures Nobel prize for laser physicists The nobel prize for physics has been awarded to three physicists working with lasers. Arthur Ashkin (L) was awarded for his "optical tweezers" which use lasers to grab particles, atoms, viruses and other living cells. Donna Strickland and Gerard Mourou were jointly awarded the prize for developing chirped-pulse amplification of lasers Reuters/AP Science news in pictures Discovery of a new species of dinosaur The Ledumahadi Mafube roamed around 200 million years ago in what is now South Africa. Recently discovered by a team of international scientists, it was the largest land animal of its time, weighing 12 tons and standing at 13 feet. In Sesotho, the South African language of the region in which the dinosaur was discovered, its name means "a giant thunderclap at dawn" Viktor Radermacher / SWNS Science news in pictures Birth of a planet Scientists have witnessed the birth of a planet for the first time ever. This spectacular image from the SPHERE instrument on ESO's Very Large Telescope is the first clear image of a planet caught in the very act of formation around the dwarf star PDS 70. The planet stands clearly out, visible as a bright point to the right of the center of the image, which is blacked out by the coronagraph mask used to block the blinding light of the central star. ESO/A. Muller et al Science news in pictures New human organ discovered that was previously missed by scientists Layers long thought to be dense, connective tissue are actually a series of fluid-filled compartments researchers have termed the interstitium. These compartments are found beneath the skin, as well as lining the gut, lungs, blood vessels and muscles, and join together to form a network supported by a mesh of strong, flexible proteins Getty Science news in pictures Previously unknown society lived in Amazon rainforest before Europeans arrived, say archaeologists Working in the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso, a team led by archaeologists at the University of Exeter unearthed hundreds of villages hidden in the depths of the rainforest. These excavations included evidence of fortifications and mysterious earthworks called geoglyphs Jose Iriarte Science news in pictures One in 10 people have traces of cocaine or heroin on fingerprints, study finds More than one in 10 people were found to have traces of class A drugs on their fingers by scientists developing a new fingerprint-based drug test. Using sensitive analysis of the chemical composition of sweat, researchers were able to tell the difference between those who had been directly exposed to heroin and cocaine, and those who had encountered it indirectly. Getty Science news in pictures Nasa releases stunning images of Jupiter's great red spot The storm bigger than the Earth, has been swhirling for 350 years. The image's colours have been enhanced after it was sent back to Earth. Pictures by: Tom Momary

Dr Dolens genetic analysis of the California two-spot octopus, an animal widely used in scientific laboratories, revealed that its brain had the molecular components required to sense MDMA.

In particular, these marine invertebrates share the same genes that control how brain cells bind with serotonin  a chemical that controls mood.

The question that remained was whether these creatures, which normally live a solitary existence, would show any distinctive behaviour changes associated with an ecstasy user.

To find out, they placed eight subjects in baths containing MDMA for 10 minutes before placing them in specialised chambers in which they had the choice of interacting with plastic action figures or other octopuses in cages.

Subjects under the influence of the drug spent more time with other octopuses, and during this time they engaged in a lot of close physical contact. The scientists noted that this contact did not appear aggressive in nature.

They tended to hug the cage and put their mouth parts on the cage, said Dr Dolen.

This is very similar to how humans react to MDMA; they touch each other frequently.

 Octopus predicts world cup match scores

While octopuses are known to be more sociable when they are mating, suggesting they can suppress their unsociable nature, for the most part the experiments confirmed that when octopuses were not given MDMA they preferred to stay away from their fellows.

The results of this study, published in the scientific journal Current Biology, suggest there are deep evolutionary connections between human behaviour and that of octopuses.

What our studies suggest is that certain brain chemicals, or neurotransmitters, that send signals between neurons required for these social behaviours are evolutionarily conserved, explained Dr Dolen.

Nevertheless, the researchers said the paper was only the first step into this very new area of research, and said the results must be confirmed by further experiments before the octopus becomes a new laboratory model for the human brain.
Hailed as the Holy Grail of palaeontology, scientists have confirmed that an unusual oval shape found preserved in Russian cliffs is the oldest known animal fossil.

Debate has raged in the research community for decades over the identity of Dickinsonia, which roamed the Earth 558 million years ago during the Ediacaran period.

Life forms from this period are thought to be the first ever large, multicellular creatures, but they are so different to anything alive today that their exact identity has remained a mystery.

Previously experts have suggested the metre-long Dickinsonia could be a fungus or a giant amoeba.

But experiments using a specimen from north west Russia has revealed their true identity as some of the first ever animals.

The fossil was so well preserved that when researchers drilled into it they found traces of cholesterol, a type of fat that is a clear indicator of animal life.

(The Australian National University (ANU))

The fossil fat molecules that weve found prove that animals were large and abundant 558 million years ago, millions of years earlier than previously thought, said Professor Jochen Brocks from the Australian National University.

The current received wisdom in palaeontology is that large animals began to dominate around the time of the Cambrian explosion around 541 million years ago.

At this point creatures recognisable as worms, molluscs and other modern groups appear in the fossil record, but the new discovery suggests they were preceded by a wave of animals that looked like Dickinsonia.

Science news in pictures Show all 20 1 /20 Science news in pictures Science news in pictures Pluto has 'beating heart' of frozen nitrogen Pluto has a 'beating heart' of frozen nitrogen that is doing strange things to its surface, Nasa has found. The mysterious core seems to be the cause of features on its surface that have fascinated scientists since they were spotted by Nasa's New Horizons mission. "Before New Horizons, everyone thought Pluto was going to be a netball - completely flat, almost no diversity," said Tanguy Bertrand, an astrophysicist and planetary scientist at NASA's Ames Research Center and the lead author on the new study. "But it's completely different. It has a lot of different landscapes and we are trying to understand what's going on there." Getty Science news in pictures Over 400 species discovered this year by Natural History Museum The ancient invertabrate worm-like species rhenopyrgus viviani (pictured) is one of over 400 species previously unknown to science that were discovered by experts at the Natural History Museum this year PA Science news in pictures Jackdaws can identify 'dangerous' humans Jackdaws can identify dangerous humans from listening to each others warning calls, scientists say. The highly social birds will also remember that person if they come near their nests again, according to researchers from the University of Exeter. In the study, a person unknown to the wild jackdaws approached their nest. At the same time scientists played a recording of a warning call (threatening) or contact calls (non-threatening). The next time jackdaws saw this same person, the birds that had previously heard the warning call were defensive and returned to their nests more than twice as quickly on average. Getty Science news in pictures Turtle embryos influence sex by shaking The sex of the turtle is determined by the temperatures at which they are incubated. Warm temperatures favour females. But by wiggling around the egg, embryos can find the Goldilocks Zone which means they are able to shield themselves against extreme thermal conditions and produce a balanced sex ratio, according to the new study published in Current Biology journal Ye et al/Current Biology Science news in pictures Elephant poaching rates drop in Africa African elephant poaching rates have dropped by 60 per cent in six years, an international study has found. It is thought the decline could be associated with the ivory trade ban introduced in China in 2017. Reuters Science news in pictures Ancient four-legged whale discovered in Peru Scientists have identified a four-legged creature with webbed feet to be an ancestor of the whale. Fossils unearthed in Peru have led scientists to conclude that the enormous creatures that traverse the planets oceans today are descended from small hoofed ancestors that lived in south Asia 50 million years ago A. Gennari Science news in pictures Animal with transient anus discovered A scientist has stumbled upon a creature with a transient anus that appears only when it is needed, before vanishing completely. Dr Sidney Tamm of the Marine Biological Laboratory could not initially find any trace of an anus on the species. However, as the animal gets full, a pore opens up to dispose of waste Steven G Johnson Science news in pictures Giant bee spotted Feared extinct, the Wallace's Giant bee has been spotted for the first time in nearly 40 years. An international team of conservationists spotted the bee, that is four times the size of a typical honeybee, on an expedition to a group of Indonesian Islands Clay Bolt Science news in pictures New mammal species found inside crocodile Fossilised bones digested by crocodiles have revealed the existence of three new mammal species that roamed the Cayman Islands 300 years ago. The bones belonged to two large rodent species and a small shrew-like animal New Mexico Museum of Natural History Science news in pictures Fabric that changes according to temperature created Scientists at the University of Maryland have created a fabric that adapts to heat, expanding to allow more heat to escape the body when warm and compacting to retain more heat when cold Faye Levine, University of Maryland Science news in pictures Baby mice tears could be used in pest control A study from the University of Tokyo has found that the tears of baby mice cause female mice to be less interested in the sexual advances of males Getty Science news in pictures Final warning to limit "climate catastrophe" The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has issued a report which projects the impact of a rise in global temperatures of 1.5 degrees Celsius and warns against a higher increase Getty Science news in pictures Nobel prize for evolution chemists The nobel prize for chemistry has been awarded to three chemists working with evolution. Frances Smith is being awarded the prize for her work on directing the evolution of enzymes, while Gregory Winter and George Smith take the prize for their work on phage display of peptides and antibodies Getty/AFP Science news in pictures Nobel prize for laser physicists The nobel prize for physics has been awarded to three physicists working with lasers. Arthur Ashkin (L) was awarded for his "optical tweezers" which use lasers to grab particles, atoms, viruses and other living cells. Donna Strickland and Gerard Mourou were jointly awarded the prize for developing chirped-pulse amplification of lasers Reuters/AP Science news in pictures Discovery of a new species of dinosaur The Ledumahadi Mafube roamed around 200 million years ago in what is now South Africa. Recently discovered by a team of international scientists, it was the largest land animal of its time, weighing 12 tons and standing at 13 feet. In Sesotho, the South African language of the region in which the dinosaur was discovered, its name means "a giant thunderclap at dawn" Viktor Radermacher / SWNS Science news in pictures Birth of a planet Scientists have witnessed the birth of a planet for the first time ever. This spectacular image from the SPHERE instrument on ESO's Very Large Telescope is the first clear image of a planet caught in the very act of formation around the dwarf star PDS 70. The planet stands clearly out, visible as a bright point to the right of the center of the image, which is blacked out by the coronagraph mask used to block the blinding light of the central star. ESO/A. Muller et al Science news in pictures New human organ discovered that was previously missed by scientists Layers long thought to be dense, connective tissue are actually a series of fluid-filled compartments researchers have termed the interstitium. These compartments are found beneath the skin, as well as lining the gut, lungs, blood vessels and muscles, and join together to form a network supported by a mesh of strong, flexible proteins Getty Science news in pictures Previously unknown society lived in Amazon rainforest before Europeans arrived, say archaeologists Working in the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso, a team led by archaeologists at the University of Exeter unearthed hundreds of villages hidden in the depths of the rainforest. These excavations included evidence of fortifications and mysterious earthworks called geoglyphs Jose Iriarte Science news in pictures One in 10 people have traces of cocaine or heroin on fingerprints, study finds More than one in 10 people were found to have traces of class A drugs on their fingers by scientists developing a new fingerprint-based drug test. Using sensitive analysis of the chemical composition of sweat, researchers were able to tell the difference between those who had been directly exposed to heroin and cocaine, and those who had encountered it indirectly. Getty Science news in pictures Nasa releases stunning images of Jupiter's great red spot The storm bigger than the Earth, has been swhirling for 350 years. The image's colours have been enhanced after it was sent back to Earth. Pictures by: Tom Momary

Besides high levels of cholesterol, the fossil was lacking in chemical markers known to be associated with fungi.

Scientists have been fighting for more than 75 years over what Dickinsonia and other bizarre fossils of the Edicaran biota were, said Professor Brocks, who couldnt believe the results when they were first brought to him by PhD student Ilya Bobrovskiy.

He added: The fossil fat now confirms Dickinsonia as the oldest known animal fossil, solving a decades-old mystery that has been the Holy Grail of palaeontology.

Analysing rock samples containing Dickinsonia fossils (Lannon Hartley/ANU)

The specimen was excavated from a remote cliff face near the White Sea by Mr Bobrovskiy.

I took a helicopter to reach this very remote part of the world  home to bears and mosquitoes  where I could find Dickinsonia fossils with organic matter still intact, he said.

Mr Bobrovskiy noted the difficulty in finding a fossil as old as this Dickinsonia specimen that still contained traces of organic material.

Most rocks containing these fossils such as those from the Ediacara Hills in Australia have endured a lot of heat, a lot of pressure and then they were weathered after that, he said. These are the rocks that palaeontologists studied for many decades, which explained why they were stuck on the question of Dickinsonias true identity.

The results of this work, published in the journal Science, mark a new way for scientists to examine the prehistoric world.

Looking at molecules in these ancient organisms is a game changer, said Professor Brocks.

Historically, palaeontologists have exclusively looked at the structure of ancient creatures, but adding molecular analysis to these studies allows them to explore them in far greater depth.
The Westminster attacker described his atrocity as an exciting opportunity in a handwritten note found inside the car he ploughed into his victims with, an inquest has heard.

Khalid Masood wrote the chilling message on the inside of a road atlas which was left in the hired 4 by 4, alongside notes reading: Previous examples, this life, right time. All outcomes are good, so go ahead.

Masood also wrote what appeared to be reminders including drive mode=sport mode followed by between seats and lock doors. His scribbles ended with the words hatred motivation.

Dominic Adamson, representing the widows of murdered PC Keith Palmer and American tourist Keith Cochran, 54, said: Chillingly, he wrote exciting opportunity.

The Old Bailey heard that the 52-year-old, who converted to Islam in prison almost two decades ago, had carried out online searches for Isis and ranted about the terrorist group to his wife.

Seconds before launching the attack on 22 March 2017, Masood sent his own manifesto entitled Jihad to contacts including his wife Rohey Hydara.

Ms Hydara cried as she apologised to his five victims families in court, having been refused anonymity by the coroner.

I cant believe I was married to someone that evil, she said, apologising that she was not more vigilant before the atrocity.

She said she did not believe her husband was capable of an act of evil, adding: He made me trust him and I had no reason to doubt him.

Notes written on a road atlas by Westminster attacker Khalid Masood in the days before the attack (Metropolitan Police)

Ms Hydara, who married Masood shortly after meeting him in 2006, said her husband was more religious than her, more strict in eating halal food and had tried to make her wear Islamic clothes.

But she said he had also taken steroids for almost 10 years, threatening her with divorce when she asked him to stop and again when she refused to stop wearing trousers.

Ms Hydara described her husband, who had a string of violent convictions and had abused his previous partners, as very, very short-tempered.

If you would look at him in a certain way he would talk about it for an hour. He was angry. I would always back down, she added, telling how she recorded Masoods rants.

In one monologue played in court, Masoods raised voice is heard saying: I never hear you say theres any good in Isis, I never hear you say at least theyre fighting against the Shia [Muslims], theyre doing some good.

All you say is theyre bad, theyre evil and theyre wicked, theres no good in them.

You even said theyre the same as the Jews and the Shia, which is absolutely disgraceful...theyre not the enemy.

On the morning of the attack, Masood sent his wife and children a text reading: I hope you guys are all okay. I have been thinking about you lots, love daddy.

He sent another message of an emoji blowing a kiss.

Then just before the attack, his wife received another text containing Masoods Jihad document, which featured a photo of the terrorist in Mecca as the front cover.

Ms Hydara said she thought it was strange and texted him back asking to speak urgently, later calling the police to identify Masood after seeing photos of his body.

The Westminster attacker Khalid Masood in Mecca, Saudi Arabia (Metropolitan Police)

He was shot dead by police after killing Kurt Cochran, 54, Leslie Rhodes, 75, Aysha Frade, 44, and Andreea Cristea, 31, on Westminster Bridge and stabbing PC Keith Palmer to death outside the Houses of Parliament.

Masoods mother, Janet Ajao, recalled his fiery, angry personality and described one incident where he turned into the Incredible Hulk after drinking.

I think I referred to him as the Incredible Hulk because it was like he exploded, Mrs Ajao said, telling the court of a row that broke out over dinner at her home.

This was down to drinking. Im ashamed to say I think he quite enjoyed drinking and fighting.

Ms Ajao told the court how her son would go on and on and on about Islam after he converted in prison, later officially changing his name from Adrian Elms.

He never stopped talking about it, she added. And he would phone and I would say: How are you, how are things, how are the children?.

He went on and on. I would put the phone down, make a cup of tea, come back and he would still be talking. I learned all I wanted to learn.

But she said Masood never expressed extremist views to her or hostility or hatred towards others.

In an email to his mother in 2013, he had blamed failings in his life on not being able to get into grammar school in Tunbridge Wells as a teenager.

In pictures: Westminster attack Show all 9 1 /9 In pictures: Westminster attack In pictures: Westminster attack An air ambulance lands after gunfire sounds were heard close to the Palace of Westminster in London PA wire In pictures: Westminster attack MPs wait until the situation is under control in Westminster. 'The alleged assailant was shot by armed police,' David Lidington, leader of the House of Commons, told the house. BBC News In pictures: Westminster attack Crowds gather in Westminster after shooting incident, which police are treating as terror attack BBC News In pictures: Westminster attack Police were also called to an incident on Westminster Bridge nearby AP In pictures: Westminster attack Early reports indicate the car, which mounted the pavement on Westminster Bridge and mowed into around a dozen people, was the same vehicle which then rammed into the railings of the Palace of Westminster, just around the corner Reuters In pictures: Westminster attack Security sources described the suspected assailant as a middle-aged Asian man, who is understood to have left the car before attacking a police officer with a seven-to-eight inch knife PA wire In pictures: Westminster attack Police have asked people to avoid the immediate area to allow emergency services to deal with the ongoing incident AP In pictures: Westminster attack One woman has died and a number of others, including the police officer, have been hurt, according to a junior doctor at St Thomas' Hospital Reuters In pictures: Westminster attack At least three gun shots were heard by those inside Westminster, and proceedings in the House of Commons have been suspended AP

I felt so angry, frustrated and unloved, he wrote. I began smoking, taking drugs and getting drunk on a regular basis.

I fell out with dad and we stopped talking to each other on a regular basis. Slowly, I began building up a criminal record for fighting in public.

Mrs Ajaos voice broke with emotion as she was shown the email, and she said: It upset me deeply and I spent a long time thinking: What did I do wrong?.

In a second email sent on 7 March last year, Masood spoke of his plans to go to Morocco and said he would visit her in Wales on 16 March.

He arrived in the rented Hyundai Tucson he would use as a weapon six days later.

Mrs Ajao told the court how he made her utter Islamic phrases such as Allah is the one true God and Mohammed the prophet over dinner and again before he left the following day.

She said: I repeated them. He put his hands over his face and sobbed and then just gave me a big smile and said: It would be even better if you believed it.

Masoods mother claimed she had no idea what her son had in mind when he told her: Theyll say Im a terrorist. Im not.

I know it sounds ridiculous but it didnt enter my head, she added. Im utterly ashamed. Im ashamed hes done this.

Gareth Patterson QC, representing some of the victims families, told Mrs Ajao and Ms Hydara that they could have prevented the attack by informing authorities, but both victims said they did not anticipate Masoods actions.

The inquests into the deaths of Masoods victims continue, and a hearing to establish the circumstances of his death will be held at a later date.

Additional reporting by PA
Barclays has suffered a major outage, with customers unable to access their accounts using online banking.

Barclays customers in the UK were greeted on Thursday morning with the message: "5 - Sorry - Barclays Online Banking is currently unavailable".

A spokesperson for the bank, which has over 24 million customers, told The Independent: "We're currently experiencing some technical problems  customers are still able to use Barclays Mobile Banking app to check their balance, make and receive payments. Were on it, and as soon as its fixed well let you know."

Issues with Barclays online and telephone banking began at around 10 am on Thursday, 20 September

The banking giant has been responding to concerned customers on social media, acknowledging the issue and saying that it hopes to get its systems back up and running soon.

"Hey Zebre, we're experiencing some issues at the moment :( We're hoping to be back up and running very soon so that you can pay your rent," a member of the bank's social media team tweeted in response to a customer complaint.

A statement published to Twitter advised customers to use the mobile app to access their accounts.

"If you're unable to access Online Banking, Telephone Banking, or use some features in our app, we're sorry," the statement read.

"You can still make payments and check your balance in our Mobile Banking app as normal. We're looking into the problem now, and we'll update you here as soon as possible. Thanks for bearing with us."

The bank's website noted issues with online banking, telephone banking and branches.

"We're sorry, you won't be able to speak to us right now  we're working to fix a problem with this service," a status update for its telephone banking service read.

"You can still use our automated Telephone Banking service to manage your account."

Barclays advised customers to keep up-to-date through its online status page.

Money expert Tashema Jackson, who works at uSwitch.com, took the opportunity to advice Barclays' customers on what action they can take in the event of a major outage.

"If you think youre facing a loss due to an unexpected online banking failure you can lodge a complaint with your bank for any financial damages incurred as a result of the disruption," Ms Jackson wrote in an email to The Independent.

"If you dont believe you complaint has been dealt with appropriately by your bank you can take your case to the Financial Ombudsman for review."
Strong winds and rain are set to batter parts of the British Isles once again with forecasters warning of more travel disruption and possible flooding.

It follows havoc caused by the wild weather and 102mph winds brought by Storm Ali on Wednesday, when two people were killed.

A Swiss holidaymaker died after a caravan was blown off a cliff on Irelands west coast while she slept inside. And a contractor for Northern Ireland Water was killed by a falling tree in a country park in County Armagh.

Storm Ali cleared the UK on Wednesday night. But the Met Office warned the "danger to life" continued as a new weather system moving in from the Atlantic was expected to bring downpours and gusts to Wales and much of England on Thursday.

Forecasters urged people to take care outside as the risk from felled trees, flying branches and tiles blown from buildings remains.

A yellow weather warning for rain across Wales and the north of England is in place, while a warning for winds of up to 65mph kicks in from 6pm across much of the rest of England.

Up to 100mm of rain is forecast to fall across high ground in Wales and Cumbria.

Met Office meterologist Laura Paterson said: Through Thursday another area of low pressure will develop and approach the UK from the south west, bringing rain and a second spell of strong winds later.

The Swiss woman killed after the caravan she was sleeping in was blown down a rocky incline in County Galway Elvira Ferraii.

She is believed to have been in her 50s and had been staying at the remote spot in Clifden ecoBeach Camping and Caravan Park for several weeks.

Storm Ali hits the British Isles with 100mph winds Show all 13 1 /13 Storm Ali hits the British Isles with 100mph winds Storm Ali hits the British Isles with 100mph winds An uprooted tree on a Belfast Street PA Storm Ali hits the British Isles with 100mph winds Troon Beach in Ayrshire PA Storm Ali hits the British Isles with 100mph winds A bus carrying students from Dundee University is damaged by a fallen tree John Bynorth / PA Storm Ali hits the British Isles with 100mph winds Blackpudlians struggle in the wind Getty Images Storm Ali hits the British Isles with 100mph winds An ambulance crashes into a fallen tree in Newcastle PA Storm Ali hits the British Isles with 100mph winds Slea Head in Coumeenoole, Republic of Ireland REUTERS Storm Ali hits the British Isles with 100mph winds A woman has died as her caravan was blown off a cliff in Claddaghduff, County Galway in the Republic of Ireland PA Storm Ali hits the British Isles with 100mph winds Windswept Tynemouth Beach PA Storm Ali hits the British Isles with 100mph winds Police clear a tree from the road in Salcoats, Scotland Getty Images Storm Ali hits the British Isles with 100mph winds Salcoats, North Ayrshire Getty Storm Ali hits the British Isles with 100mph winds St Cuthbert's Church, Edinburgh PA Storm Ali hits the British Isles with 100mph winds An uprooted tree on a Belfast Street PA Storm Ali hits the British Isles with 100mph winds The B818 near Carron Bridge is blocked by falling trees PA

The man killed in Gullion Forest Park in County Armagh has not yet been named. A co-worker was also injured by the falling tree.

In Cheshire, a woman was seriously injured after a tree fell onto her car. And in the Scottish Highlands a man had to be rescued after becoming trapped under a digger in a river in the village of Rogart.

Engineers across Scotland  badly hit by Storm Ali  have been clearing up the damage, removing debris from railway lines and restoring power supplies.

Normal transport services were set to return north of the border on Thursday morning after road and rail links were disrupted.

More than 70,000 homes in Scotland were hit by power cuts on Wednesday, while 250,000 properties in Ireland also suffered outages.

The unsettled weather is due to last the rest of the week and is caused by a jet stream from Canada, according to Met Office forecasters.
The boss of prison and probation is being replaced amid soaring levels of violence and self-harm in jails across England and Wales.

Michael Spurr, chief executive of HM Prison and Probation Service (HMPPS), has tendered his resignation after the permanent secretary decided that it was the right time to ask a new chief executive to take on this important role.

He will be leaving at the end of March 2019, after 35 years in the service and nearly nine years leading it.

It comes after inspectors found conditions in prisons across England and Wales to be the worse they had ever seen as authorities failed to take action over high levels of violence, self-harm and drug use.

Announcing the decision, permanent secretary of HMPPS Richard Heaton said: Michaels leadership has been exemplary. But we now need to look ahead, building on Michaels work and developing a strategy for the next decade.

I have therefore decided that April 2019 is the right time to ask a new chief executive to take on this important role.

Justice secretary and lord chancellor David Gauke said: I am extremely grateful to Michael Spurr for his leadership of HMPPS. His focus has been unwavering on doing the best for his staff and for victims of crime, on discipline in the prison estate and on caring for and rehabilitating offenders.

He is an example of the very best of public service and civil service leadership. I look forward to continuing to work closely with Michael into the new year.

Peter Dawson, director of the Prison Reform Trust, said Mr Spurr was an exceptionally principled and knowledgeable leader who has selflessly served an endless succession of short term ministers.

He added: Whoever takes over will face the same fundamental problems of overcrowded and under resourced prisons. Those are problems which only ministers can address and none of those whom Michael has served so faithfully have delivered.

Anyone who thinks the problems in our prisons can be solved by a change of leader is deluding themselves.

Labours shadow justice secretary Richard Burgon said resolving the problems in UK jails would require more radical reform, stating: The unprecedented crisis in our prisons is a direct result of the Conservatives decision to slash budgets and staffing levels.

If the government really wants to put an end to this crisis then it needs to overhaul its policies. It should start with a national emergency plan and new treasury funds to end overcrowding and understaffing across the prison estate.

In a sign of discontent among staff in the sector, prison officers launched a protest last week after the government was issued an official warning over the deteriorating jails for the fourth time in nine months.

But the action was called off within hours following an agreement between the Prison Officers Association (POA) and prisons minister Rory Stewart.

 Prison conditions most disturbing ever seen with staff now inured to jails not fit for 21st century, watchdog says in damning report

The urgent notification issued by the HM Chief Inspector of Prisons Peter Clarke over Birmingham jail last month  the first to be issued to a privately-run jail  warned that it had slipped into crisis following a dramatic deterioration.

Subsequent attempts by the government to improve the state of the jail by removing hundreds of prisoners and transferring in more officers were criticised, with campaigners warning that this would heap more pressure onto other struggling jails.

Earlier this year, Mr Clarke said repeated patterns of failure had led to a point where staff are inured to conditions that have no place in an advanced nation in the 21st century.

Violence, drug use and self-harm all remain issues, with assaults and self-harm having reached a record high in the past year, his annual report found.
Emmanuel Macron has branded the leaders of the campaign for Brexit liars, in an extraordinary attack at the close of the Salzburg summit.

The Leave victory was pushed by those who predicted easy solutions, the French president said, adding: Those people are liars. They left the next day so they didnt have to manage it.

At the press conference, Mr Macron also made clear he would not accept a blind deal  which would leave the nature of the UKs future trading relationship with the EU to be decided after departure day.

The stance is another blow to Theresa May, given that the EUs rejection of her Chequers plan has increasingly left a blind Brexit as the only possible agreement.

Mr Macron did not name the liars behind Brexit, but he targeted those who had promised that leaving the EU would bring a lot of money home.

The Vote Leave campaign, fronted by Boris Johnson and Michael Gove, infamously pledged it would deliver an extra 350m a week for the NHS  a claim now widely discredited.

Those who explain that we can easily live without Europe, that everything is going to be alright, and that it's going to bring a lot of money home, are liars, Mr Macron added.

Boris Johnson 'suicide vest' Brexit jibe causes Tory divide Show all 14 1 /14 Boris Johnson 'suicide vest' Brexit jibe causes Tory divide Boris Johnson 'suicide vest' Brexit jibe causes Tory divide Internal divisions in the Conservative Party have exploded into a bitter public row over Boris Johnsons disgusting criticism of Theresa May. Some senior Tories furiously denounced the former foreign secretary after he accused the prime minister of having wrapped a suicide vest around Britain Reuters Boris Johnson 'suicide vest' Brexit jibe causes Tory divide Sajid Javid, Home secretary Sajid Javid, the home secretary, rebuked his former cabinet colleague and said: I think there are much better ways to articulate your differences. He told the BBCs Andrew Marr Show that the public wanted politicians to use measured language BBC/PA Boris Johnson 'suicide vest' Brexit jibe causes Tory divide But other MPs leapt to Mr Johnsons defence, as dividing lines ahead of a possible leadership contest begin to take shape. The Uxbridge MP has repeatedly criticised Ms Mays Chequers plan and used a newspaper article on Sunday to suggest it amounted to wrapping a suicide vest around the British constitution. His latest salvo at the prime minister prompted immediate condemnation, with one minister publicly vowing to end Mr Johnsons career over the matter PA Boris Johnson 'suicide vest' Brexit jibe causes Tory divide Alan Duncan, Foreign minister Alan Duncan, a foreign minister who worked in Mr Johnsons team for two years, wrote on Twitter: For Boris to say the PMs view is like that of a suicide bomber is too much. This marks one of the most disgusting moments in modern British politics. Im sorry, but this is the political end of Boris Johnson. If it isnt now, I will make sure it is later. Getty Boris Johnson 'suicide vest' Brexit jibe causes Tory divide James Brokenshire, Housing secretary Housing secretary James Brokenshire added his voice to the criticism, calling Mr Johnsons comments wrong He said: I think he is wrong on this...I think the tone that he has used isnt right and I think that we just need to be very focused on actually moving forward with the Chequers plan. AFP/Getty Boris Johnson 'suicide vest' Brexit jibe causes Tory divide Zac Goldsmith But as Tory hostilities spilled over into open public warfare, Richmond Park MP Zac Goldsmith, an ally of Mr Johnson, hit back at Mr Duncan. He wrote: There are a number of possible motives behind this tweet, but given its author, we can be certain principles arent one of them. Getty Boris Johnson 'suicide vest' Brexit jibe causes Tory divide Jacob Rees-Mogg Senior Tory Brexiteer Jacob Rees-Mogg told The Independent he thought Mr Johnsons suicide belt accusation was little more than a characteristically colourful catchphrase. He added: I agree with the sentiment. The criticism of Boriss wording merely serves to highlight his point. It means more people hear of Boriss criticism of Chequers and many will agree with him. Reuters Boris Johnson 'suicide vest' Brexit jibe causes Tory divide Nadine Dorries Nadine Dorries, another Brexit supporter, said Mr Johnsons opponents were terrified of his popular appeal, adding: Dont underestimate the vitriol thatll be directed towards Boris today. He delivered the Leave vote, Remainers and wannabe future PMs hate him. If Mr Johnson became leader and prime minister he would deliver a clean and prosperous Brexit, she said Rex Boris Johnson 'suicide vest' Brexit jibe causes Tory divide Andrew Bridgen Andrew Bridgen said Ms May was to blame for her leadership problems. Asked if Mr Johnson had put a bomb under her leadership, Mr Bridgen said: I think that Theresa May did that herself when she put forward the Chequers proposals without consulting widely prior to that. Boris Johnson 'suicide vest' Brexit jibe causes Tory divide Steve Baker, former Brexit minister Steve Baker, the former Brexit minister, warned Ms May the Conservatives faced a "catastrophic split" if she did not jettison her Chequers plan. Mr Baker, who quit the government in July over the scheme, said: When negotiating, the prime minister needs to demonstrate her intent and also her power to deliver. "If we come out of conference with her hoping to get Chequers through on the back of Labour votes, I think the EU negotiators would probably understand that if that were done, the Tory party would suffer the catastrophic split which thus far we have managed to avoid. But he insisted he did not want a change in the Conservative leadership, saying Brexiteers did not want to be in a position of conflict with our own prime minister Reuters Boris Johnson 'suicide vest' Brexit jibe causes Tory divide Tom Tugendhat The deep divisions on the Tory benches were laid bare as Tom Tugendhat, who chairs the Commons foreign affairs committee and is a possible leadership rival to Mr Johnson, also hit out at the former foreign secretary. Recalling how he encountered a suicide bomber in Afghanistan during his time in the army, Mr Tugendhat told Mr Johnson to grow up. He said: A suicide bomber murdered many in the courtyard of my office in Helmand. The carnage was disgusting, limbs and flesh hanging from trees and bushes. Brave men who stopped him killing me and others died in horrific pain. Some need to grow up. Comparing the PM to that isnt happy. PA Boris Johnson 'suicide vest' Brexit jibe causes Tory divide Alistair Burt Alistair Burt, another Foreign Office minister who worked in Mr Johnsons team, said: Im stunned at the nature of this attack. There is no justification for such an outrageous, inappropriate and hurtful analogy. If we dont stop his extraordinary use of language over Brexit, our country might never heal. Again, I say, enough. AFP/Getty Boris Johnson 'suicide vest' Brexit jibe causes Tory divide It comes amid that Ms Mays former aides drew up a dossier on Mr Johnsons sexual encounters with the aim of undermining his leadership prospects. The document was compiled in 2016, when the Uxbridge and South Ruislip MP was seen as the main rival to Ms May in her bid to enter No 10. Downing Street and Conservative Campaign Headquaters (CCHQ) both denied having leaked the 4,000 word memo after it was circulated around Westminster AFP/Getty Boris Johnson 'suicide vest' Brexit jibe causes Tory divide Mr Johnson confirmed that his 25-year marriage to wife Marina had ended AP

It's even more true since they left the day after so as not to have to deal with it.

Mr Macron made clear the prime minister would need to come up with fresh proposals by the next summit in October.

We all agreed on this today, the proposals in their current state are not acceptable, especially on the economic side of it. The Chequers plan cannot be take it or leave it.

Mr Macron made clear the prime minister would need to come up with fresh proposals by the next summit in October.

We all agreed on this today, the proposals in their current state are not acceptable, especially on the economic side of it. The Chequers plan cannot be take it or leave it.

The message was echoed by Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, who said: It was clear today that we need substantial progress by October and that we then aim to finalise everything in November.

She warned: There is still a lot of work to do on the question of how future trade relations will look. You can't belong to the single market if you are not part of the single market, but you can develop a lot of creativity to find practical, good, close solutions.

Jean-Claude Juncker, the European Commission president, said he still did not believe the UK would crash out of the EU without a deal  but insisted the EU would be ready if it did.

No deal is not my working assumption, but would it happen, then we are prepared because the commission has prepared in detail all the elements of consequences of a no-deal.

Mr Juncker added: So don't worry. Be happy, don't worry.
Burkina Fasos president, who has ruled the West African country for 27 years, has resigned.

Blaise Compaore, who has ruled Burkina Faso since he seized power in a 1987 coup, said in a statement that he has stepped down.

A heavily armed convoy believed to be carrying Mr Compaore was seen travelling on Friday towards the countrys southern town of Po, near the border with Ghana, two diplomatic sources and local media reported.

The sighting took place as the former presidents resignation statement was announced on local media.

Mr Compaores resignation comes hours after appearing on television on Friday stating that he would head up a transitional government and remain in power until elections would be held in 12 months time.

The army dissolved Burkina Fasos government on Thursday and set up a transitional government following violent mass protests in which parliament buildings were ransacked and set on fire.

Men shout slogans in front of burning cars, near the Burkina Faso's Parliament (AFP)

Tens of thousands of protesters in the capital of Ouagadougou cheered as they were informed of the news by the army, and an army colonel appeared on television to announce Mr Compaores resignation.

The former president's statement, read on television, said: "In order to preserve the democratic gains, as well as social peace, I declare a power vacuum to allow the establishment of a transition leading to free and fair elections within a maximum of 90 days."

"For my part, I think I have fulfilled my duty."

Army chief Gen Honore Traore has taken over as head of state. He said in a statement: "In line with constitutional measures, and given the power vacuum [...] I will assume as of today my responsibilities as head of state."

Tens of thousands of people took to the streets of Burkina Faso calling for Mr Compaore to step down on Friday in protest against his bid to seek a fifth term in power, with demonstrators shouting: It is over for the regime and We do not want him again.

At least three protesters were shot dead and scores were wounded by security forces during the protests on Thursday.

Additional reporting by agencies.
Three people were gunned down when a woman opened fire in a pharmacy distribution centre in the US state of Maryland. The shooter later turned the gun on herself, authorities said.

Officials said another three people were injured by the gunfire. The Harford Sheriff's Department has identified the lone suspect as 26-year-old Snochia Moseley from Baltimore County.

She was a temporary employee at the distribution centre for Rite Aid, a national pharmacy chain. Investigators believe the suspect had a work-related grievance, although a motive was not immediately clear.

Recommended Multiple injured including police officer in shooting

Harford County Sheriff Jeffrey Gahler confirmed that there were multiple wounded and multiple fatalities as a result of the shooting at a press conference early Thursday afternoon.

The Harford Sheriff's Department had tweeted Thursday morning that the situation was "still fluid," telling residents to avoid the area. The department also noted that police had been dispatched to the shooting in Aberdeen.

The first shots were reported just after 9am at the Liberty Support Facility, which is a portion of the Rite Aid distribution centre.

Law enforcement officers did not fire any shots, Mr Gahler said during the news conference on Thursday.

Agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and the FBI Baltimore were at the scene. The FBI had described it as an "active shooter situation".

"FBI Baltimore is responding and assisting [Harford Sheriff's Department] with an active shooter situation," the agency tweeted.

Maryland Governor Larry Hogan said on Twitter he was "closely monitoring the horrific shooting".

He added: "Our prayers are with all those impacted, including our first responders. The State stands ready to offer any support".

In a subsequent tweet, Mr Hogan noted that the Maryland State Police Department had also arrived to the scene of the shooting.

Schools in Harford County, including Roye Williams Elementary and Church Creek Elementary School had been placed on lockdown, according to local reports.

A family reunification centre had been set up at Level Volunteer Fire Company in Havre de Grace. During the news conference, officials said they did not believe there was any further threat to the community.
The Trump administration is reportedly continuing US support for the Saudi-led military operation in Yemen that has killed thousands of civilians, in order to safeguard American arms sales to Gulf allies.

Since 2015, the US and UK have been supporting the Saudi-led bombing operations against Houthi rebels in Yemen that Riyadh say are necessary to support what it considers the legitimate government in Yemen and to try and counter alleged Iranian support for the rebels. The United Nations has said the operation has killed at least 16,700 civilians and created one of the worlds largest humanitarian crisis.

Mike Pompeo, the secretary of state, is said to have recently decided to continue Americas increasingly controversial involvement, after being told if it stopped it could threaten $2bn of sales of US-manufactured weapons to Washingtons allies in the Gulf.

Among the deals at stake are the proposed sale of 120,000 precision-guided munitions (PGMs) to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) by Raytheon, which has its headquarters in Waltham, Massachusetts, and is Americas largest manufacturer of such weapons.

The Wall Street Journal report, based on a leaked classified email and sources familiar with the deal, said Mr Pompeo overruled concerns from most of the state department specialists involved in the debate who were worried about the rising civilian death toll in Yemen. It said Mr Pompeo, a former Director of CIA, decided to side with his legislative affairs team that warned of the potential threat to the proposed arms sales.

Among those groups he reportedly sided against were his departments Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs, the Bureau of Political-Military Affairs, the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labour, and the Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration. The US Agency for International Development (USAID) said Washington should halt military aid as continuing it would not help the approach of Saudi Arabia and the UAE civilian casualties or human protections.

While the UK and US do not participate in bombing runs on Yemen, the US provides refuelling for the planes that do, intelligence and other logistical equipment.

 Yemen: The decades-long struggle ahead to clear the country of landmines

The UK is also providing logistical and intelligence support and British prime minister Theresa May has ignored demands to block the sale of UK-manufactured munitions being used in the operation, amid mounting concerns about civilian casualties. In August, at least 43 people were killed in northern Yemen after a coalition air strike struck a school bus in the Houthi controlled area of Dahyan.

Activists said the latest revelations underscored the need for the US and UK to halt their support for the coalition, which also includes Bahrain, Kuwait and Jordan.

Andrew Smith of the London-based Campaign Against Arms Trade, told The Independent the US accounted for one third of all global arms sales, with almost half going to the Middle East. The largest individual buyer of US arms was Saudi Arabia. Meanwhile, since 2015, the UK government had licensed 4.7bn ($6.2bn) worth of arms to Saudi forces. These include aircraft, helicopters, drones, grenades and missiles.

The Saudi regime has one of the worst human rights records in the world and has waged a terrible war on Yemen. Arms companies have been allowed to rake in billions of dollars, while one of the worlds worst humanitarian catastrophes has been inflicted, he said. The war and destruction would not have been possible without the complicity and support of arms dealing governments like those in the US and the UK.

(Getty (Getty)

He added: If Donald Trump, Theresa May and their allies care about the rights and lives of people in Yemen then they must stop the arms sales and end their sycophantic support for the Saudi dictatorship.

Mark Curtis, the historian and author of Secret Affairs: Britains Collusion with Radical Islam, said: This sorry tale tells me that US officials, like their counterparts in the UK, are perfectly aware of the impact that their arms exports policies are having on civilians.

He added: Tragically, however, political leaders care much more about preserving alliances, and currying favour with foreign elites, than they do actual people. To the US administration, Yemenis are unpeople.

A spokesperson for the State Department said it would not comment on the deliberative process or allegedly leaked documents. The spokesperson, who asked not to be identified, said Mr Pompeo had certified that Saudi Arabia and the UAE were supporting diplomatic efforts to end the civil war, taking measures to alleviate the humanitarian crisis, and undertaking actions to reduce the risk of harm to civilians and civilian infrastructure.

While our Saudi and Emirati partners are making progress on these fronts, we are continuing discussions with them on additional steps they can take to address the humanitarian situation, advance the political track in cooperation with the UN Special Envoys efforts, and ensure that their military campaign complies with the law of armed conflict and international humanitarian law, the spokesperson added.

Asked what the US was doing to reduce civilian casualties, the spokesperson said: Throughout this conflict, the United States has urged all parties to abide by the Law of Armed Conflict, work to prevent harm to civilians and civilian infrastructure, and thoroughly investigate and ensure accountability for any violations.

Brutal effects of Yemeni war Show all 12 1 /12 Brutal effects of Yemeni war Brutal effects of Yemeni war Yemen organised by the UAE's National Media Council shows a Yemeni woman holding a child diagnosed with malnutrition at a hospital in the southeastern port city of Mukalla, the capital Hadramawt province AFP/Getty Images Brutal effects of Yemeni war Mohamed, 2, is treated for Malnutrition in Mukalla, the capital Hadramawt province, Yemen Bel Trew Brutal effects of Yemeni war a trip in Yemen organised by the UAE's National Media Council (NMC) shows a Yemeni woman holding a child diagnosed with malnutrition at a hospital in the southeastern port city of Mukalla, the capital Hadramawt province. AFP/Getty Images Brutal effects of Yemeni war UAE's National Media Council (NMC) shows a Yemeni woman sitting next to a child diagnosed with malnutrition at a hospital in the southeastern port city of Mukalla, the capital Hadramawt province. AFP/Getty Brutal effects of Yemeni war AFP/Getty Images Brutal effects of Yemeni war Mohamed, 2, is treated for Malnutrition in Mukalla, the capital Hadramawt province, Yemen Bel Trew Brutal effects of Yemeni war A Yemeni child suffering from malnutrition is weighed at a hospital in the northern district of Abs, in Yemen's Hajjah province AFP/Getty Images Brutal effects of Yemeni war A Yemeni child suffering from malnutrition awaits treatment at a hospital in the northern district of Abs, in Yemen's Hajjah province AFP/Getty Images Brutal effects of Yemeni war A Yemeni child suffering from malnutrition awaits treatment at a hospital in the northern district of Abs, in Yemen's Hajjah province AFP/Getty Images Brutal effects of Yemeni war Yemeni nurses weigh a malnourished child at a hospital in the northern district of Yemen's Hajjah province AFP/Getty Images Brutal effects of Yemeni war A Yemeni woman carries a malnourished child as she waits during food distribution in the province of Hodeida AFP/Getty Brutal effects of Yemeni war AFP/Getty Images

Raytheon, which according to lobbying watchdog OpenSecrets.org, spent at least $3.3m in 2016 in contributions to the campaigns of politicians from both parties, did not respond to enquiries.

The USs involvement in the military operation has become increasingly controversial on Capitol Hill. Under a measure recently introduced by congress, the US must end its refuelling of coalition planes unless the state department certifies every six months Saudi Arabia and the UAE are doing what they can to reduce civilian harm. The US can continue to do so, if the state department believes it is warranted on national security grounds.

The journal said most of the departments specialists urged Mr Pompeo to reject certification due to a lack of progress on mitigating civilian casualties. As it was, he went ahead with the certification. His memo to Gulf allies read: Recent civilian casualty incidents indicate insufficient implementation of reforms and targeting practices. Investigations have not yielded accountability measures.

Earlier this year, a Democratic senator held up Raytheons proposed sale of 120,000 PGMs after saying the administration had not satisfied his concerns about what those countries were doing to reduce civilian deaths.

In a letter to Mr Pompeo and secretary of defence Jim Mattis, Bob Menendez, the senior Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee, wrote: I remind you that the American public has a right to insist that the sales of US weapons to foreign governments  especially those of this magnitude and lethality  are consistent with US values and national security objectives.
Four children have been killed when a train smashed into an electric cargo bicycle in the eastern Dutch city of Oss. A woman and another child were seriously injured.

Police said the accident happened at a rail crossing close to the towns railway station, which has warning lights and red and white barriers to keep pedestrians off the tracks when trains pass.

They said the electric bike belonged to a childrens day care centre and was taking children to school when the crash happened.

There were multiple witnesses, including other school-age children, police added.

Cargo bikes, which have a large wooden box mounted on the frame in front of the rider, were formerly used for transporting goods but are now popular among Dutch parents for carrying young children.

We have informed the families involved of this terrible news, police said in a statement. We are investigating how this could have happened.

Rescue personnel work at the scene of the accident in the city of Oss, Netherlands (REUTERS/Piroschka van de Wouw) (Reuters)

Two air ambulances landed at the scene of the accident and the two critically injured victims were taken to a local hospital.

The Dutch Safety Board are investigating the cause of the accident.

The mayor of Oss, Wobine Buijs-Glaudemans, said local authorities stand with the families, the school, the day care centre and everybody else involved.

Two critically injured victims were taken to a local hospital (AP/Charles Mallo)

ProRail, the company responsible for rail infrastructure in the Netherlands, said in a statement that the cause of the collision is under investigation.

This is a very dark day, terrible for the next of kin and those involved, said ProRail CEO Pier Eringa. There are no words to describe this.

The town of Oss sits near the German border 100km southeast of Amsterdam.
High temperatures in Greece have led to the emergence of an incredible 1,000-foot spider web covering the whole eastern side of a lagoon in Aitoloko.

Huge webs are spun by Tetragnatha spiders during mating season each year, but scientists said the warm and humid weather had led to an unusually large spider party this September.

A rise in the mosquito population has also boosted the number of spiders looking to feed on the insects while weaving their nests for mating.

The resulting cobwebs have completely smothered plants and palm trees along the shoreline in the small Greek town.

Its as if the spiders are taking advantage of these conditions and are having a kind of a party, Maria Chatzaki, professor of molecular biology and genetics at Democritus University of Thrace told the Newsit.gr website.

They mate, they reproduce and provide a whole new generation, she added. These spiders are not dangerous for humans and will not cause any damage to the areas flora.

The spiders will have their party and will soon die.

Tetragnatha spiders weave huge webs during mating season (EPA / Giannis Giannakopoulos)

Giannis Giannakopoulos shared photos of the strange and unprecedented spectacle at Aitoloko on his Facebook page.

The photographer said the vast spider veil had covered vegetation along a 300m stretch of beach.

It is probably a reaction of nature to balance the system by limiting mosquitoes, wrote Mr Giannakopoulos.
Israel dispatched a high-powered military delegation to Moscow on Thursday to patch up relations after the deadly downing of a Russian reconnaissance plane on Monday  the Kremlin had pinned blamed on Israel.

Syrian anti-aircraft missiles downed the Russian Il-20M turbo-prop plane, killing all 15 crew members off the coast of the port city of Lattakia.

But Moscow blamed Israeli jets launching an airstrike on Syrian positions for the mishap, accusing them of triggering the S-200 anti-aircraft system by flying in too close in an attempt to destroy a facility allegedly used by Iranians to facilitate the transfer of weapons to Lebanons Hezbollah.

Israel air force commander Maj Gen Amikam Norkin will head the delegation that includes other Israel Defence Forces and military intelligence officials, according to Israeli media.

To make its case, Israel will argue that the mishap was purely the fault of the Syrian government, said a former official.

Recommended Russia and Israel back down after Syria downs military plane

From what we understand its a huge mistake which was done by the Syrians, retired Israeli Maj Gen Yaakov Amidror, a former National Security Advisor, told reporters in a conference call Thursday morning.

They shot down a Russian plane that does not have any kind of [similarity] to any Israeli airplane.

In addition, Maj Gen Amirdor said, the Israeli F-16 fighter jets were no longer in Syria when the Russian plane was downed.

Our airplanes were above Israel when they killed the Russian airplane, he said, attributing the incident to Syrian stupidity.

Israel attack Iran targets in Syria: overnight airstrike in pictures Show all 10 1 /10 Israel attack Iran targets in Syria: overnight airstrike in pictures Israel attack Iran targets in Syria: overnight airstrike in pictures Missiles rise into the sky as Israeli missiles hit air defense position and other military bases, in Damascus Syrian Central Military Media, via AP Israel attack Iran targets in Syria: overnight airstrike in pictures Missile fire is seen from Damascus Reuters Israel attack Iran targets in Syria: overnight airstrike in pictures An Israeli flag is seen placed on Mount Bental in the Israeli-annexed Golan Heights. Israel's army said today it had carried out widespread raids against Iranian targets in Syria overnight after rocket fire towards its forces it blamed on Iran, marking a sharp escalation between the two enemies. Israel carried out the raids after it said around 20 rockets, either Fajr or Grad type, were fired from Syria at its forces in the occupied Golan Heights at around midnight. AFP/Getty Israel attack Iran targets in Syria: overnight airstrike in pictures The Israeli military on Thursday said it attacked "dozens" of Iranian targets in neighboring Syria in response to an Iranian rocket barrage on Israeli positions in the Golan Heights AP Israel attack Iran targets in Syria: overnight airstrike in pictures Israeli artillery deployed missiles toward Syrian military targets, on the Golan Heights EPA Israel attack Iran targets in Syria: overnight airstrike in pictures Missile fire is seen over Daraa Reuters Israel attack Iran targets in Syria: overnight airstrike in pictures Air defence systems intercepting Israeli missiles over Syrian airspace AFP/SANA Israel attack Iran targets in Syria: overnight airstrike in pictures Israeli soldiers walk among armored vehicles in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights Reuters Israel attack Iran targets in Syria: overnight airstrike in pictures Syrian air defense missiles are seen in the sky over the capital Damascus EPA Israel attack Iran targets in Syria: overnight airstrike in pictures Air defence systems intercepting Israeli missiles over Syrian airspace. Israeli missile strikes fired at Syria hit military bases, as well as an arms depot and military radar. AFP/SANA

Israeli media said the military delegation will also detail Irans ongoing activities in Syria to the Russians.

Israel covets its relations with Moscow, and has built on generally amicable relations between Russian president Vladimir Putin and Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu to gain unfettered access to Syrian airspace to curtail Iranian ambitions.

For us its a very high-priority mission to prevent the Syrians and the Iranians to move game-changing weapons systems into the hands of Hezbollah and to prevent Iran from building an independent war machine inside Syria, said Maj Gen Amidror. It will not be easy if there will be some limitations from the Russians.

The downing of the plane has raised tensions across the region, where Russia, Turkey, the US, Iran, and Israel are vying for position in a Syria shattered by seven years of war.

 Kremlin admits that Syria shot down Russian military reconnaissance plane

Even though plane was shot down by the Syrian regime, Israeli authorities have come under some heat for the incident.

A military operation, no matter how sophisticated, that ends with a superfluous diplomatic crisis with a world power cannot be considered a success, wrote Alex Fishman in the mass circulation Yediot Aharonot newspaper.

Even if the military objectives had been achieved, this is a failure because in the Middle East there are no free lunches, he continued.

Israel will still pay for the fact that the Russians lost an electronic reconnaissance plane carrying 15 expert intelligence officers and an aircrew.
Exports of prosecco from Italy to the UK have fallen for the first time in more than 10 years, according to Italian agricultural association Coldiretti, which blamed uncertainty around Brexit for the decline.

The group reported a 7 per cent drop in the number of bottles exported to Great Britain, citing the tensions caused by Brexit negotiations, although it said more than a quarter of prosecco consumed outside of Italy is opened in the UK, ahead of the US.

Coldiretti highlighted concerns over UK food labelling legislation, and said the traffic light system, which uses red, amber or green stickers to denote how much fat, saturated fat, sugars and salt a product contains, was unfairly keeping Italian products off shelves.

Recommended Champagne and parmesan will soon be central to Brexit negotiations

The Italian organisation said this system means almost 85 per cent of products made in Italy could be unjustly rejected, because the stickers indicate only the generic presence of a certain type of substance, without taking into account portion sizes.

This leads to misleading conclusions by promoting, for example, carbonated drinks made from an unknown recipe, while rejecting long life elixirs such as extra virgin olive oil but also Parmigiano Reggiano or Prosciutto di Parma.

Coldiretti also said that with less than a year until the UK leaves the EU, an agreement has not yet been reached on the recognition and protection of food products with designations of origin on the British market after Brexit.

This could create the risk of a flood of imitations hitting the market, the group warned.

Meanwhile, the Telegraph reported that Italian producers also blamed the slide in sales on fake news stories about so-called prosecco smile.

British dentists warned that drinking too much prosecco could lead to a visible white line below the gum - the prosecco smile, which indicates the beginnings of tooth decay, because it contains high levels of sugar and acidity.

However, the claims were slammed by Italians, with the countrys agriculture minister Maurizio Martina describing the reports as fake news.
The thing I am most interested in, said The Independents John Rentoul in asking me to write this piece, is how, given all you knew about what Gordon did to damage Tony, you nonetheless went back to help him when he finally became prime minister? No prizes for guessing which Tony and Gordon we were talking about.

John, I know from his encyclopaedic knowledge, has read every word of the previous six volumes of my diaries, and volume seven, From Crash to Defeat, covers the Brown premiership. He was not alone in asking that question. Richard Stott, my first editor, and Ed Victor, my agent, who had read the full version of my diaries before a word was published, were shocked I would even consider going back to help, given the TBGB horrors I had witnessed and recorded.

I guess that tribalism is the easy answer, and it is certainly part of it; and I was saddened at the time, and am saddened now, that Gordon lost the election eight years ago. How not to be sad if, like me, you prefer Labour governments led by Tony Blair and Gordon Brown to Tory governments led by David Cameron and Theresa May. Sad if, also like me, a part of you wonders if you could have done more to help prevent the Tories getting back. Sad, definitely, when you look at the state of our politics today, in 2018, and wonder how we got from where we were to where we are. We as in Britain. We as in Labour. We as in politics. We as in the world.

Recommended Gordon Brown led to more Labour leaders with no answers

It is the more personal question that keeps gnawing away: could I have done more? Gordon certainly thought so. I had forgotten just how relentless he was in trying to get me to return. All sorts of roles, up to and including a place in his cabinet, were suggested as a way of getting me to commit beyond my half-in, half-out position. I did go back for the last few months, but never in quite the way he was asking.

Both my psychiatrist, and my partner Fiona, felt Gordon was playing to my demon  a desire to be needed, to be central; to be seen as having talents that others dont; to be told I cannot do this without you. There might be something in that. But also, if you are British, and Labour, it is not easy saying No to a Labour Party prime minister. I have always felt a real sense of duty to Labour. But that sense of service is often in conflict with the sense of self; and whereas with TB I perhaps overdid the service and neglected the self (and my family), by 2007 I was less willing to have my whole life taken over again.

I did, and I do, feel a certain guilt about the agonising and the stopping short of what he wanted. I did my bit. I helped with strategy and speeches; I played David Cameron to GBs Gordon in preparation for the TV debates; I was pretty much full-time in the campaign itself, and was there at the very end, listening in when GB told Nick Clegg he could keep the Queen waiting no longer, and he intended to resign. Sad. There was a particularly poignant moment when GB was on the phone to TB, shortly before leaving to see the Queen, and Peter Mandelson and I were there in the room, overhearing what was, compared with many, a comradely and compassionate conversation. The four of us had been through a lot together; good and bad.

It was in some ways the culmination of a tragedy. The seeds of that tragedy are clear across all volumes of my diaries. Tony felt GBs distancing from New Labour on becoming prime minister was a mistake, and he viewed a new top rate of tax in the same vein; I certainly argued that Gordon sought too hard to define himself against Tony, rather than against Cameron.

Gordon Browns campaign trail encounter with Gillian Duffy proved disastrous (Reuters) (REUTERS/Suzanne Plunkett)

This volume sees the first seeds of the next Labour Shakespearean drama growing: that of the Miliband brothers. And might it be, seeing where the Labour Party is now, that a sea change was already under way that Tony and I were too slow to recognise and, frankly, still find difficult to understand? Brexit? Corbyn? Trump?

Recommended Gordon Brown should have been more open about being a Christian

Preventing David Cameron from securing an overall majority was a triumph of sorts. That Cameron required the support of Clegg to get to Number 10 was surely in no small measure down to Gordons resilience and huge residual strengths as a political fighter. He was at his best towards the end of the campaign  strangely after its worst moment, namely his suggestion that Mrs Gillian Duffy, a voter concerned about immigration, was a bigot. I dont think I have ever seen a politician as cut up about a mistake as I saw Gordon afterwards.

That incident seemed to bring together so many of his vulnerabilities. A mistrust of the media, and a clumsiness dealing with it; unease with the public; his tendency to cast around for blame; his inability to match the easy charm of Blair and Cameron. And then all of it climaxing in that sad, sad shot of an exhausted-looking Gordon, head in hands as his bigot outburst was played back to him by Jeremy Vine.

Because of my agonising and depression, this volume risks being unfair to Gordon. If his mood was often dark, mine was often darker. I record many negative thoughts about him, and the impact he was having on the new life I was trying to build. Nor was my mood helped when, into all this, Gordon threw a full public inquiry into the Iraq war. I also record many negative views of others  TB, Peter Mandelson, Philip Gould among them, who feared that GB just could not do the job. Yet we all believed in him enough to want to help, even if we were constantly on the lookout to see whether Alan Johnson or David Miliband might try to take over, and even if Peter was the only one to go back fully (and he did it well).

Gordon Brown: There <i>is </i>life after No 10 Show all 5 1 /5 Gordon Brown: There <i>is </i>life after No 10 Gordon Brown: There <i>is </i>life after No 10 Gordon Brown: There <i>is </i>life after No 10 Gordon Brown: There <i>is </i>life after No 10 Gordon Brown: There <i>is </i>life after No 10 Gordon Brown: There <i>is </i>life after No 10

But the title of this volume is From Crash to Defeat, and whilst Gordon would be the first to accept that as leader of the campaign he takes responsibility for the defeat, he played a hugely impressive role in the global handling of the financial crash.

So the short answer to Johns question is that although I had had experience of the weaknesses, I knew there were many strengths, and that Gordon was a big part of the successes we had had, whatever the failures with which we ended. Thirteen years is the longest period of uninterrupted government the Labour Party has ever had. That too is a success story, sad ending or not. Also, it is a true, rather shocking stat that Eton, the school which educated David Cameron, and helped develop the swagger that made defeat in a referendum on Europe unthinkable, has produced more prime ministers than the Labour Party. Three times as many. Nineteen Old Etonian Prime Ministers. Six Labour. Ramsay MacDonald, Clement Attlee, Harold Wilson, Jim Callaghan, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown. Thats it.

I have been lucky to have known four of them, and worked for two of them. And whatever faults they had, whatever mistakes they made, I remain utterly convinced the governments they led were better for the country than the two prime ministers who have followed them, and many of the fifty-one who preceded them. That, ultimately, is your answer, John.

Alastair Campbell was Tony Blairs communications director. Alastair Campbell Diaries: Volume 7  From Crash to Defeat is published on 20 September by Biteback and can be purchased at outlets including Amazon
Show me something that will shock me, I told Amira Hass. So Israels only journalist in the Palestinian West Bank  or Palestine, if you still believe in so unorthodox a word  took me down a road outside Ramallah that I remember as a highway which led to Jerusalem. But now, just over a hill, it deteriorates into a half tarmac road, a set of closed, rusting shop doors, and garbage. The same old summer smell of raw sewage creeps up the road. It lies, green and gentle, in a pool at the bottom of the wall.

Or The Wall. Or, for more cautious scribes, the Security Wall. Or, for more squeamish souls, the Security Barrier. Or for even more slovenly pens, just the Barrier. Or, if youre really worried about the political implications, the Fence. The Fence  like the friendly wooden posts and crossbeams you might find along the edge of a field. Or  if you really want to frighten the TV editors and anger the Israelis  the Segregation Wall or even the Apartheid Wall. Why, soon we will be talking about the Palestinian Bantustans that lie cut off by The Wall and the Israelis-only roads, and the vast empire of Jewish settlements on Arab lands.

Trust Amira to start the ball rolling. The phrase Palestinian Bantustan litters her angry digression as she takes me around the Palestinian enclaves of the West Bank and, after an hour or two, the Wall: towering 26 feet above us, stern, monstrous in its determination, curling and snaking between apartment blocks, and skulking in wadis and twisting back on itself until you have two walls one after the other, a double wall but the same wall such are the Alpine twists of this creature. You shake your head for a moment when  suddenly, through some miscalculation, surely  there is no wall at all but a shopping street or a bare hillside of scrub and rock. And then the massive colonial project of Israels settlements, all green trees and red-roofed houses and neat roads and, yes, more walls and barbed wire fences and yet bigger walls. And then the beast itself. The Wall.

But the section of The Wall to which Amira Hass takes me  tourist guide and analyst of Israeli society, she admits, do not go together  is a truly miserable place. Not as epic as Dante. Maybe a war correspondent could better describe the place. Its the old road from Ramallah to Jerusalem, lined with lost wealth and forgotten hopes and once-loved homes which now end, of course, at The Wall. Now if this is not shocking, I dont know what shocking is, Amira says. Its a destruction of peoples life  its the end of the world. See here? We go straight to Jerusalem. Not now. This was a busy road and you can see here how people invested in homes with a little bit of grace, the strength of the houses, the stone. Look at the Hebrew signs  because these Palestinians used to have so many Israeli customers. Even the name carpenter is in Hebrew.

But almost all the shops are closed, the houses shuttered, weeds and dry sticks along the broken kerb. The graffiti are pitiful, the sun merciless, the sky so caked with heat that the grey of the wall sometimes merges into the grey stone of the sky. It is pathetic, Amira Hass says, without emotion. This place  Ive always been showing it to people; always, you know, probably a hundred times already, and it never stops shocking me.

 Israel razes West Bank homes of Palestinian attackers

The sewage, once you get used to it, is somehow appropriate. Its like a place where imagination has dried up, leaving only a grim little pool behind, the green all the brighter because The Wall is acquiring the patina of age.

The silence is not oppressive  as it might be in a novel  but it demands an answer. What does The Wall say to us, I ask Amira? I think what it tells me she begins. Because it realises it cannot drive the Palestinians away, it has to hide them. It has to conceal them from our eyes. Some might go out to work over there for Jews. And this is seen as doing them a favour. Israelis do not enter, because for Israelis, we dont need these areas  we dont need it  this is garbage  this is sewage. The Wall is about how strong is the need to be pure  and how many people participated in this act of violence? They say its because of the suicide attacks, but the legal and bureaucratic infrastructure for this separation existed before The Wall. So The Wall is a kind of graphic or plastic or tangible expression of laws of separation that existed before.

And this is an Israeli who is speaking to me, the tough, unremitting daughter of a Bosnian Partisan mother who had to give herself up to the Gestapo and a Jewish Romanian Holocaust survivor, and whose socialism, I think, has given her a hard, Marxist courage.

She might not agree, but I think of her as a child of the Second World War, even though she was born 11 years after Hitlers death. She guesses she has only between 100 and 500 Israeli readers left; thank God, say many of us, that her newspaper, Haaretz, still exists.

Amiras mother, on her way from the train station to Bergen-Belsen in 1944, was struck by the German housewives who came to look at the trail of distraught prisoners, of how the German women watched from the side. Amira Hass, I suspect, will never watch from the side. She has grown used to the hate and abuse from her own people. But she is a realist.

Look, we cannot ignore that for a certain period, [The Wall] did serve the immediate role of security, she says. And she is right. The Palestinian campaign of suicide bombing was cut short. But The Wall was also a machine for expansion; it crept forward onto Arab land which was no more a part of the state of Israel than the vast colonies now holding around 400,000 Jews across the West Bank. Not yet, at any rate.

Amira wears round spectacles which make her look a bit like one of those dentists we have all met who study with sorrow and cynicism and a certain depression the terrible state of our teeth. She writes like that. She has just finished a long article for Haaretz  it will be published two days later, a ferocious dissection of the 1993 Oslo agreement which comes close to proving that the Israelis never intended the peace agreement to provide the Palestinians with statehood.

The reality of the Palestinian Bantustans, reservations or enclaves, she writes on the gloomy 25th anniversary of the Oslo agreement, is a fact on the groundnowhere was it stated that the goal was the establishment of a Palestinian state in the territory occupied in 1967, contrary to what the Palestinians, many people in the Israeli peace camp at that time and the European countries had concluded. In Haaretz, Amira says, the problem is the copy editors  I call them the kids  change every couple of years and each time they ask me: How do you know Oslo was not about peace?Now the paper is proud because they have someone who got it right. Twenty years ago they thought I was a lunatic.

Palestinian protesters clash with Israeli troops: in pictures Show all 15 1 /15 Palestinian protesters clash with Israeli troops: in pictures Palestinian protesters clash with Israeli troops: in pictures A demonstrator uses a racket to return a tear gas canister fired by Israeli troops Reuters Palestinian protesters clash with Israeli troops: in pictures Palestinian demonstrators run for cover from tear gas fired by Israeli forces Reuters Palestinian protesters clash with Israeli troops: in pictures A demonstrator shouts Reuters Palestinian protesters clash with Israeli troops: in pictures Tear gas canisters are fired by Israeli forces at Palestinian demonstrators Reuters Palestinian protesters clash with Israeli troops: in pictures A wounded Palestinian is evacuated Reuters Palestinian protesters clash with Israeli troops: in pictures A demonstrator uses a sling to hurl stones at Israeli forces Reuters Palestinian protesters clash with Israeli troops: in pictures A female demonstrator uses a slingshot to hurl stones at Israeli forces Reuters Palestinian protesters clash with Israeli troops: in pictures A demonstrator with a slingshot looks on Reuters Palestinian protesters clash with Israeli troops: in pictures Female Palestinian demonstrators react to tear gas fired by Israeli forces Reuters Palestinian protesters clash with Israeli troops: in pictures Israeli forces fire teargas canisters toward Palestinian demonstrators AFP Palestinian protesters clash with Israeli troops: in pictures Female demonstrators run for cover from tear gas fired by Israeli forces Reuters Palestinian protesters clash with Israeli troops: in pictures Palestinian medics evacuate a wounded protester AP Palestinian protesters clash with Israeli troops: in pictures A demonstrator moves a burning tire Reuters Palestinian protesters clash with Israeli troops: in pictures A demonstrator uses a racket to return a tear gas canister fired by Israeli troops Reuters Palestinian protesters clash with Israeli troops: in pictures Palestinian demonstrators during clashes with Israeli forces AFP/Getty

The Hass tour continues around what she refers to as the five-star prison. We pause above the city of Ramallah, temporary pseudo-capital of the Palestinian state-that-isnt. She imagines  she often does this  an alien arriving in the West Bank from outer space. The alien, she says, would notice that Palestinian homes have black water tanks on the roof  because their water comes in quotas from the Palestinian Authority  while the Jewish settlements have a mains supply. They dont need to worry. The hilltop settlements  so lush, so tempting, it has very good air  have red, sloping, European style roofs. Now the richer Palestinian families are imitating the red roofs of their occupiers.

Amira Hasss alien appears again. It sees a sprawling city [Ramallah], fancy buildingsyou have cinemas here and shops and businesses. Look at the cars along there. Our out-of-space alien, hed say: Whats the problem? Why are you complaining about the occupation? So the problem is that you have an illusion that you are not under occupation in this narrow space, in a caged place, in this five-star prisonThe contours, the borders, are very clear. But people within the borders have got used to some kind of normalcy that is very hard for them to give up now.

Basically, they know that if they engage in another wave of resistance, they might lose even this  even the little that they have, this normalcyOne of the best proofs to me that there is some kind of normalcy is the Palestinians who are Israeli citizens who come every weekend to this Palestinian Bantustan to escape Israeli racism and the arrogance they face on a daily basis inside Israel  and they come here to escape it, to be in an all-Palestinian ambience.

The analysis is harsh and not without historical distance. The Palestinians know this is not independence. But right now they make the calculation that this is not worthwhile. During the last two or three years, when some young men were engaged in stabbing attacks and there were some students who went to the checkpoints here to clash with the Israeli army, people felt for them emotionally. But you didnt see the masses coming out to confront the army. Now, its not fear, its not the Palestinian police who have stopped them. Right now, with the Palestinians split between Hamas and Fatah, Palestinians at the bottom of their political savviness, and with America  Trump  all of this, there is no reason to sacrifice yourself for nothing.

Journalist Amira Hass suspects she has between 100 and 500 Israeli readers remaining (Nelofer Pazira)

She drives on, past a military base where she points out the words  in English  spray-painted on a wall. Jews did 9/11. With such words, could the Palestinians incriminate their society more utterly in the eyes of the West? But there are other graffiti. In a tiny Palestinian village perhaps two hundred metres from the Jewish settlement of Beit El  cameras pointing outwards along its fence  she points to the words spray-painted onto the wall of a Palestinian home after settlers raided the village. Judea and Samaria, it says in Hebrew, referring to the West Bank. Blood will be shed. Aisha Fara shows us the roof of her home, where her solar glass has been shattered by tiny stones  fired from a slingshot by religious students, she says, just three days earlier  and despite her 74 years, she doesnt mince her words. I work out silently that she was born in the original mandate Palestine in 1944, the same year Amira Hasss mother was sent to Bergen-Belsen.

The thieves came before sunset, Fara says of the stone-throwers. They burned our trees three times. But thieves do not remain forever. And the people scattered all over will return to their homes, God willing You ask me who they [the settlers] are? You sent them. You have it all in your cameras I want the American pigs to hear  we are not Red Indians! Amira listens carefully. For her, history is like a long, long, long chain of expulsion, she says of Aisha Fara. These are things you stop writing about. Normalcy again.

This, I think, has affected Amira Hass, the way in which a newspaper story falls away once it is has become a daily event. Stone-throwing, burning, another colonisation. And the privileges of being an Israeli citizen are ever present. In a way, when we were bombed, it was easier because I was with everyone. This is something I can feel  the fear of bombs, of course, I share it. But closure, for example, this is something I cannot understand. I cannot really grasp it. For me a wall is just something ugly on the way to Jerusalem. But for Palestinians, it is the end of the world. When I go to Jerusalem, I cannot tell my neighbours that I go there  Im shy. Im embarrassedbecause for them, Jerusalem is like the moon.

So will she live all the rest of her life among the Palestinians of the West Bank, the only Israeli reporter on the sharp end of the story? I never thought Id live in El-Bireh, but its now the town Ive lived in longer than any other place, she replies. I never planned it  but thats what happened. And I know that if something happens  if I have to leave, either because I stop working or the Israelis tell me to go or the Palestinians tell me to go, whatever, I will never be able to go back and live in a purely Jewish neighbourhood. Ill have to go to Acre or Haifa In Haifa, you have Palestinians.

As I turn to go back to Jerusalem, to the moon, I thank Amira Hass for her lecture tour, academic as well as journalistic and  in the eyes of her Israeli non-readers  a commentary as appalling as the hate-mail they have sent her. I have a tendency to say to people what they dont want to hear, she says. She sounds like a journalist to me. And I understand at once that she will never watch from the side.
Everyone screwed up including us. Thats basically what the Office of Rail and Road is saying about the chaos that ensued when the rail industry launched a big bang timetable revolution in May.

It was supposed to usher in new services, more seats and rolling stock, improved reliability. Instead it stomped on an awful lot of people  as revolutions often do. The trouble with scattering the blame around everyone, as the watchdog has done, is that it also serves to scatter the responsibility for fixing the problem.

In six months, a years time, when something goes pop again? Its his fault. No, no, no its her fault. Actually, weve come together and decided that its their fault. No, no, wait. Its everyones fault. Were really, really sorry and gosh darn it, we promise well try harder.

But wait, whats this. Transport secretary Chris I dont run the railways Grayling has announced a review. Well thatll fix it. After all, its going to be led by a real railway expert: the former British Airways boss Keith Williams. And therell be reforms. They promise. By 2020.

Well, maybe. This is, of course, based on several assumptions. The first is that Williams doesnt frighten the children in government by saying something scary that might actually address some of the railways problems. The second is that Grayling is still in his job. (He shouldnt be, but  dont forget  hes a Brexiteer. To keep her cabinet balanced, Theresa May feels she has to have a set number of swivel-eyed loons in her team, even if it means upsetting the public.)

The third assumes we even have a country after Brexit crashes down on all of our heads. The fourth? Oh, who cares. As you and I have already accurately guessed, Graylings review wont change a thing. When your entire policy agenda is based around keeping right-wing newspapers onside, mistakes are inevitable. The trouble for that government is that even Daily Mail readers are starting to think that nationalisation isnt such a bad idea.

100 years of the Trans-Siberian Railway Show all 13 1 /13 100 years of the Trans-Siberian Railway 100 years of the Trans-Siberian Railway The Trans-Siberian sets off from Moscow's Yaroslavsky station Shutterstock 100 years of the Trans-Siberian Railway The railway under construction, circa 1903 Hulton Archive/Getty Images 100 years of the Trans-Siberian Railway The luxurious way to do the Trans-Siberian, aboard the Golden Eagle Golden Eagle Luxury Trains 100 years of the Trans-Siberian Railway The more budget-friendly way to take the train Julie Laurent/Flickr 100 years of the Trans-Siberian Railway The Russian town of Irkutsk Golden Eagle Luxury Trains 100 years of the Trans-Siberian Railway Travellers can stock up on groceries at stations en route Michael Chu/Flickr 100 years of the Trans-Siberian Railway A bridge over Lake Baikal Golden Eagle Luxury Trains 100 years of the Trans-Siberian Railway Vladivostock, where the Trans-Siberian line ends Shutterstock 100 years of the Trans-Siberian Railway Lenin looms large over Ulan Ude, Russia Golden Eagle Luxury Trains 100 years of the Trans-Siberian Railway Mongolian ger tents Golden Eagle Luxury Trains 100 years of the Trans-Siberian Railway On board visueelamusement/Flickr 100 years of the Trans-Siberian Railway Beijing Railway Station, at the end of the Trans-Mongolian line Shutterstock 100 years of the Trans-Siberian Railway Two steam locomotives that travelled the route, circa 1955 Three Lions/Getty Images

Grayling has said that its not about ownership. Hes got a point; what really matters to the travelling public isnt the structure of the industry but what it delivers.

But delivering is what the rail industry is not doing  at least not for the travelling public, the economy, or the environment (through keeping cars off our clogged up roads). Its working only for operators, which are still mostly making nice profits, because when they dont make money they just hand their franchises back for the government to parcel up and sell on to someone else.

It isnt just in the railways where problems are festering, however. Take the water industry. You wont see its operators giving up their licences in a hurry. Why would they? There are alternatives to the railways, but water companies exclusively provide something people cant do without. And all of them make pots of cash for doing so, much of which then disappears offshore or into the pockets of overseas pension funds.

It might not have made the sort of splash (sorry) that the rail story has, but three water companies have just been told to improve their service by the Consumer Council for Water on Thursday (Bristol Water, SES Water in Surrey and Southern Water). Trouble is, repeated raps across the knuckles have no more effect on their behaviour than they do on Dennis and Gnasher in the pages of the Beano.

Want more? How about energy, where a Tory Party that privatised the market has just introduced a price capping regime. You know, the sort of thing that it said would burn us all in commie hellfire when Ed Miliband first floated the idea (in the form of a price freeze) during his spell as Labour leader.

But, but, but... privatisation has delivered huge benefits and pots of investment. Billions and billions and billions of pounds have come in. This is what people like Grayling like to say when Jeremy Corbyn and others talk about nationalisation and, to their surprise, the public starts to listen with interest.

The problem with that investment is that while it has produced a handsome return for the companies involved in these respective industries, the returns to the consumer are much harder to see. That alone explains why Corbyn is finding a hearing.

Grayling says that its not about ownership, but the owners of these industries are failing. So people are starting to think that maybe it is.
Paschal Donohoe (right) and Leo Varadkar want Ireland to become the tech capital in Europe (Brian Lawless/PA)

The governments vision of Ireland becoming the tech capital of Europe has received a boost thanks to a five million euro (4.4 million) programme which will look at how financial technology is transforming business.

Minister for Finance Paschal Donohoe announced details of the financial technology (FinTech) research programme.

The ADAPT Centre for Digital Content Technology will lead the new FinTech Fusion project, which hopes to advance innovations in Blockchain and FinTech research.

The academic and industry research partnership launched on Friday in Dublin will encourage breakthroughs in payment, regulation and insurance technologies by funding data-driven research.

Coupled with our open economy and strong background in both technology and financial services, this will add to the opportunities already available for the creation of higher value jobsMinister for Finance Paschal Donohoe

FinTech Fusion says the programme will address how financial technology is transforming business in finance and technology, along with the retail and wholesale financial sector.

Speaking at the launch, Mr Donohoe said: The collaboration between industry and third level institutions in research programmes, such as FinTech Fusion, gives Ireland an early advantage in emerging technologies.

Coupled with our open economy and strong background in both technology and financial services, this will add to the opportunities already available for the creation of higher value jobs.

The investment in ADAPT, from Science Foundation Ireland, is part of the Irish Governments wider effort to invest in research, support innovation and build Irelands knowledge and skills, creating a global hub for digital content technologies.

Professor John Cotter, director of FinTech Fusion at the ADAPT Centre, said the research could have huge economic benefits for the country.

The marriage between finance and technology offers huge growth opportunities for Ireland both in research reputation and economic impact, he said.

This funding allows us to take advantage of these opportunities. This will create new opportunities for Ireland, our researchers, and our industry partners.

The announcement comes just days after Taoiseach Leo Varadkar told a Data Summit in Dublin that Ireland was well on the way to becoming Europes tech capital.

During the summit, Mr Varadkar added he wants to keep Ireland at the forefront of technological developments.

Science Foundation Ireland will provide two million euro (1.77 million) of the funding for the new research programme, with the balance coming from research agreements with industry partners bringing the total project in excess of five million euro.

FinTech Fusions academic researchers will work with more than a dozen companies including Deutsche Borse, Fidelity Investments, Microsoft, Gecko Governance, FINEOS and Zurich to develop innovations that will have the potential to impact economies, markets, companies and individuals.

The research programme will run for four years from 2018 to 2022.
The agency will focus on managing state land to develop new homes and regenerate under-utilised sites (Gareth Fuller/PA)

The Irish Government sought the advice of Nama prior to creation of a new Land Development Agency (LDA), it has been confirmed.

Nama chief executive Brendan McDonagh said the State asset agency met officials from the Department of Housing earlier this year while they were mulling over the creation of a new agency.

Mr McDonagh warned officials against adopting a big bang approach and instead develop two or three sites as a concept.

The Government announced last week it will be setting up a new LDA with the aim of building 150,000 new homes in the next couple of decades.

The agency will focus on managing state land to develop new homes and regenerate under-utilised sites.

My own view would be, not to do it in a big bang approach that you would do a proof of concept first. You take two or three sites and sort of say look at what you can do with thoseNama chief executive Brendan McDonagh

Launching the agency, Taoiseach Leo Varadkar said the venture was about 50 years overdue.

The agency will focus on buying existing land owned by state departments and selling it to developers to ensure new homes are built quickly.

The body must deliver at least 40% of housing potential on the land, with 10% social and 30% affordable.

Mr McDonagh made the comments at the Public Accounts Committee on Thursday when he was answering questions about Namas loan sales and housing delivery.

Mr McDonagh said: Back in spring of this year two officials from the Department of Housing came into to discuss with me, not the LDA, but a high-level concept, I think it was called the NRDA, the National Regional Development Agency.

They came in as a courtesy visit, saying they were mulling around the concept of the NRDA. They came in and outlined it in high-level terms and that was the extent of the discussion.

I had no involvement or discussion with department officials after that point.

My advice to them was that you need to set out clearly what the responsibility the Department of Housing is, set out clearly what the responsibility of the local authorities is and that (of) the NRDA.

If it was going to do the job of looking at it from a national perspective, that Im in favour of a centre of expertise that all the state bodies could join on if they have used state land.

My final bit of advice to them is that if they were going to do this you need very clear legislation (that) sets out clearly what it is going to do.

My own view would be, not to do it in a big bang approach that you would do a proof of concept first. You take two or three sites and sort of say look at what you can do with those.

He said he had no more discussions or no more involvement after that. Mr McDonagh said he believed the meeting took place in late March or early April this year.

Following last weeks launch, critics hit out at the Government, saying it had badly executed what could have been a good idea.

Sinn Fein housing spokesman Eoin O Broin described the details of the proposed agency as worrying.
Nama was pressurised by the EU to sell properties faster during the economic downturn, it has been claimed.

The agencys chief executive Brendan McDonagh said that the negotiations between the state agency and Troika officials became so tense at one point that it led to an official walking out of a meeting.

Officials from the State assets agency, which was set up by the government in 2009 to take over property loans from the countrys banks, were questioned by TDs on Thursday about the agencys loan sales and housing delivery.

Mr McDonagh said he used to attend meetings every six months with the Troika  where there would be 40 people in the room including officials from the IMF, the European Commission and the European Central Bank.

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Theyd be shouting across the table at me saying why arent you selling more youre too slow, Mc McDonagh said.

The chief executive recalled a meeting in 2011 where he said the ECB was particularly vociferous and it resulted in the ECB official walking out of the meeting.

Mr McDonagh told representatives of the Public Accounts Committee that he held his ground and resisted pressure to sell assets.

The Troika left Ireland more than four years ago.

Despite the chief executive saying he resisted pressure to sell the agency was criticised for selling too quickly and not holding onto properties for longer to maximise profits.

Fine Gael TD Peter Burke cited examples where Nama had sold properties only for them to be flipped by the purchaser within a short timeframe to make a profit.

A site on Sir John Rogersons Quay in Dublins Docklands was sold by Nama for 7.5 million euro and was reportedly flipped sold on by the purchaser a little more than a year later for about 17 million euro.

Mr McDonagh said that when they sold properties it was at the best price that Nama could get for the them at the time.

The chief executive added: Do I wish we had held onto them and we got more money for them? Of course I do.

TDs heard that Nama was overall well on course to achieve what it was set up to do.

The agency has projected a 3.5 billion euro surplus by the time it completes its work as planned.

It aims to have 20,000 Nama related properties brought to the market by 2020.

Overall, Nama has 2.7 billion euro worth of assets left to sell before it wraps up. It is not known for definite when that date will be.

Mr McDonagh said 10,500 properties have been built on Nama related lands so far.

The majority of those homes were private.

Mr McDonagh estimated that less than 10% of those properties comprised social and affordable homes.

Nama chairman Frank Daly said in the past four years, Nama has built roughly 25% of the overall houses constructed across the country  even though it was not set up as a housing agency.

There are people living in each of those 10,000 houses, Mr Daly said.
European Union leaders decided they will hold an extra Brexit summit on the weekend of November 17-18, diplomatic sources said.

EU officials added some timing details were still being agreed over the additional summit where the bloc and Britain would hope to seal a Brexit deal.

British Prime Minister Theresa May told Leo Varadkar that she does not believe crucial negotiations on Brexit can be concluded by October, Independent.ie understands.

The stalemate over the so-called backstop - which is a legally binding agreement to guarantee no hard border on the island of Ireland no matter the outcome of Britains exit from the European Union - has dominated discussions on Brexit at an informal meeting of EU leaders in Salzburg.

At an early morning meeting described as useful there was an open exchange of views between Mr Varadkar and Mrs May according to a source familiar with the meeting.

Mr Varadkar told the Conservative Party leader that time is short and that detailed discussions on the backstop need to happen as soon as possible.

The prime minister also said she was keen to bring negotiations to a conclusion as soon as possible. She said she doesnt think its possible by the October council. However we said we think it should be done at the earliest possible stage, the source said.

This week both the Taoiseach and the Tanaiste Simon Coveney have stressed that talks cannot be allowed to drift into the final months of the year.

At a dinner to open the summit last night Mrs May objected to proposals from the EU on the legal expression of the backstop as it would create an effective border in the Irish Sea and carve off Northern Ireland from the rest of the UK. She stressed that she is committed to having a backstop in place, however.

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Her comments are being discussed in her absence at the summit this afternoon.

Mr Varadkar and his EU counterparts have put the onus on the UK to bring forward detailed alternatives on the backstop and said he believed that Mrs May was working hard on those alternatives.

However to date there has only been an outline presented.

A withdrawal agreement and a declaration on the future relationship between the EU and the UK cannot be finalised without agreement on the border issue.

Speaking to reporters after his meeting with Mrs May Mr Varadkar stressed that time is running short.

He stressed again that Ireland is preparing for a no-deal scenario but said he believes a deal can be reached.

The message from EU leaders this morning to Mrs May was clear: the question of the Irish border needs to be resolved to avoid the UK crashing out next March.

Speaking before this mornings meetings French President Emmanuel Macron underlined the need for the UK to come forward with a workable proposal on the protocol for Ireland and Northern Ireland.

He said: "We have very clear principles regarding the integrity of the single market and regarding precisely the Irish border. We need a UK proposal precisely preserving this backstop in the framework of a withdrawal agreement."

Meanwhile, Simon Coveney called for "a bit of good faith and trust" in the talks over the Irish border, saying that Dublin's only objective is to maintain the status quo on the frontier, the Financial Times reported.

"We need to get into the nuts and bolts of how this backstop can work and how the concerns that people have can be accommodated," Coveney told the Financial Times on Thursday.

Additional reporting from Reuters
Ireland finds itself at the centre of a tug of war between France and the Benelux countries over a new post-Brexit EU trade route.

The departure of the UK from the European Union in March next year has meant the old North Sea-Mediterranean route on which Ireland has traded must be redrawn.

London's insistence on leaving the single market also means the 'land-bridge' route from Ireland via the UK to Europe will be problematic in future years given potential customs checks.

It has now been proposed that Ireland's new 'Euro trade route' would be via Zeebrugge in Belgium.

However, that proposal has infuriated French officials, who see it as threatening an inevitable downgrading of ports such as Roscoff, Cherbourg and Le Havre.

All three French ports have long-standing trade links with Irish ports such as Cork, Waterford, Rosslare and Dublin.

Critically, ports that are located on a designated 'Euro trade route' benefit from generous funding from Brussels, both for marketing and infrastructure development.

The redevelopment of Cork's deep-water port at Ringaskiddy, because it is on such a designated route, has enabled it to benefit from EU grant aid.

French politicians are worried that the omission of their ports from a Euro trade route involving Ireland would place them at a disadvantage.

Now, Ireland South MEP Deirdre Clune has proposed that Brussels takes the bold step of allowing Ireland to be on two designated 'Euro trade routes'.

"In the post-Brexit world, Ireland will be even more peripheral within the EU," she said.

"I believe it is vital that Brussels shows Ireland every possible support in the months and years after the UK leaves the EU.

" It is clear that Brexit is going to have implications for Ireland far greater than for any other EU member state," added Ms Clune.

"Having access to two Euro trade routes, to France and to Belgium/Holland, would not only be good for Ireland but, I believe, would be very good for EU trade as well."
Taoiseach Leo Varadkar has ramped up the pressure on British Prime Minister Theresa May ahead of a one-on-one meeting, playing down any suggestion progress on Brexit has been made in recent weeks.

Mr Varadkar is at an informal meeting of EU leaders in Salzburg and will meet Mrs May today on the sidelines of the summit. He is expected to insist that movement is needed from the British side in the negotiations.

Speaking ahead of a dinner to open the summit, Mr Varadkar said: "If any sense has been created that any form of significant progress has been made in the last couple of weeks, unfortunately that's not the case."

At that dinner, Mrs May is understood to have rejected an EU proposal on the backstop which would have seen light-touch east-west checks taking place on certain goods in Northern Ireland.

The so-called backstop, that would maintain a frictionless Border on the island of Ireland until a future relationship is agreed, is the final stumbling block as a deadline to agree a withdrawal agreement looms.

The EU's chief negotiator, Michel Barnier, suggested arrangements could be made to conduct the majority of checks on imports and exports away from the Border itself. The checks were outlined in a redrafted version of the legal expression of the backstop. But hopes that it would be more palatable to the UK were quickly dashed with opposition from UK Brexiteers and the DUP in the North.

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Mrs May is believed to have said the proposal would create a customs border in the Irish Sea. "The Commission is proposing I should assent to legal separation of the UK into two customs territories. That is simply not acceptable," she said.

Meanwhile, both Mr Varadkar and European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker signalled that a deal was a long way off.

Mr Varadkar said Ireland's position and that of the EU has not changed.

Asked if another EU redrafting of the backstop text was on the cards, he said the EU has had a position since March and that the UK has yet to bring one forward.

"The EU has a text that we have presented back in March - we have yet to see an alternative text from the United Kingdom government that anybody in the EU finds to be acceptable, one that actually satisfies what we need, which is a reassurance that there won't be a hard Border between Ireland and Northern Ireland and that the backstop would apply unless and until we are in a position to negotiate a free trade agreement between the EU and the UK," he said.

It is understood that the UK is working on new proposals relating to the regulatory control aspect of its backstop proposals.

Mr Varadkar said the UK "shall have to" move on the Border question. He said Ireland was ready for a no-deal scenario, but noted the country would suffer. He added he did not think that was where things were heading.

Despite her objections to the backstop as it stands now, Mrs May reaffirmed her commitment to putting a backstop in place and to getting a withdrawal deal over the line.
An aerial view of the subject site at Mayeston Hall in Finglas, Dublin 11

Agent Cushman & Wakefield is guiding 1.5m for a 1.65-acre residential site at Mayeston Hall, in Finglas, Dublin 11.

Located in close proximity to both Charlestown Shopping Centre and Ikea's flagship store at Ballymun, the site has a positive planning history with an expired planning permission (Planning Ref No. F06A/1348) granted on April 7, 2007 for the construction of 28 houses.

Fingal County Council granted an extension of duration to this permission on June 13, 2012 for a further five years.

While the site's original planning permission expired on May 16, 2017, Sam Carthy of selling agent, Cushman & Wakefield, believes the prospective purchaser could now apply to develop a higher density scheme subject to the receipt of an appropriate planning permission. Carthy says that such a scheme would be similar in scale to other recent developments in the area.

The original Mayeston Hall estate was developed in years between 2000 and 2008, and comprised a mix of mainly apartments and duplex units. The subject site is the last remaining portion of the original overall site to be developed. The site is zoned residential under the Fingal Development Plan 2017-2023.

Mayeston Hall has the benefit of ready access to the M50 motorway, and is located within a short drive of Dublin Airport. In terms of public transport and access to Dublin city centre, the scheme is served by a number of Dublin bus routes at nearby St Margaret's Road.

Sam Carthy and John Donegan of Cushman & Wakefield expect the subject site to appeal to a range of developers and investors owing to its location and the manageable lot size.
Prime office rents in Galway look set to rise by more than 9pc to 323 per sq m before the end of the year but, nevertheless, yields are expected to hold steady at 6.25pc. These are among the latest forecasts for the Connacht capital from estate agent Cushman & Wakefield which expects prime industrial rents to also rise, by 6.66pc, to 80 per sq m and industrial yields to fall 25 basis points to 7.75pc.

Prime Galway high street retail rents are expected to remain at 2,400 per sq m but, with good investor interest, yields for the sector are expected to drop 25 bps to 5.5pc.

However, the city has suffered from a lack of speculative development which has curtailed not only the office market but the city's broader economic development. Indeed, partly because of the private sector's reticence, state agencies have taken the initiative of encouraging office development. In particular IDA Ireland, with financial support from the Ireland Strategic Investment Fund (ISIF), has encouraged Fine Grain Property Ireland to develop the city's only new offices, Block 5 Parkmore East Business and Technology Park. The block offers 4,180 sq m (45,000 sq ft) of high-specification office accommodation built to LEED Gold standard.

Enda McGuane of Winters Property Management says the office market has been dysfunctional because of a lack of supply, but other new developments are likely to get underway in the future as developers may also have been holding off until a number of development, infrastructural and transport plans for the city had been finalised.

These include a request for EU finance towards a strategic traffic plan to improve transport flow through the city. Some developers have been waiting on its completion before developing possible projects in the Ballybrit suburb which has been a location for many FDI firms.

"Meanwhile progress has been made in terms of public transport and work is also progressing on the master planning of the Kent railway station property which is strategically located in the city centre," McGuane adds.

Another fillip has come recently with An Bord Pleanala's decision to give the green light to Gerry Barrett's plans for Bonham Quay which will include a mixed-use development extending to 34,405 sq m (370,000 sq ft) in four blocks of which 26,000 sq m (280,000 sq ft) will be Grade A office space overlooking Galway Docks. Retail, cafes and restaurants will also be located in three of them while the fourth will have a multi-purpose pavilion.

Patricia Staunton of Cushman & Wakefield says the Bonham Quay Development will assist in alleviating office supply demand in the city centre.

Rosemary Casey of agent TWM says a lack of speculative office development combined with increasing demand from both new entrants and existing occupier expansion needs has resulted in a continued decline in vacancy levels to 5.9pc.

To address this shortage, some second generation accommodation has been refurbished in or close to the city centre, such as Met Life in the Hynes Building on Merchants Road, Wayfair in Connaught House on the Tuam Road and the Central Building on Foster Street.

"As the city centre stock reduces we have seen this trend pushing out beyond the city towards Oranmore where a former leisure block, 1 City East, is being refurbished to add 6,410 sq m (69,000 sq ft) to the market," she adds.

The planned development of the 12-acre Crown site in Mervue by JJ Rhatigan also includes a 'business campus' style scheme with residential units. Thomas McDonagh Capital Investments has a masterplan for East Gate Innovation Campus, a 32,500 sq m (350,000 sq ft) block on a 10-acre site at Ballybane.

Casey says occupier demand is coming mainly from the technology and professional services, IT and recruitment sectors. LK Shields Solicitors opened a new Galway office on the top floor of the Grade A city centre Dockgate building, and Mazars moved into Mayoralty House on Flood Street.

National and international tenants with options or rights of first refusal over leasing additional space within buildings, have been exercising those options since 2017.

This is evident with existing tenant expansion underway in Dockgate in the city centre and in Parkmore Business and Technology Park with multi-national occupiers such as SAP.

Closer examination of the latest figures for office lettings during the second quarter of the year shows how restricted the market is. Patricia Staunton says take-up in the 12 months to quarter two was 37pc higher than the previous 12 months but, at a total of 7,300 sq m (79,000 sq ft), that remains notably below the long-run average.

"A subdued opening half to 2018 saw just six deals amounting to just 2,250 sq m (24,200 sq ft) of space The most notable letting of the second quarter was 450 sq m (4,800 sq ft) to Wipro Ireland at the PMC Sierra Building at Dangan Business Park.

"Demand is strongest in the city centre, accounting for 77pc of take-up in the six-month period, with the majority of requirements for 500-600 sq m sized floorplates."

Net availability in both Galway city and suburbs tightened during the second quarter to 5,200 sq m (56,000 sq ft) and 8,800 sq m (94,700 sq ft) respectively, and about 19pc is of shell-and-core specification. "However, tenants are not overly keen to fit-out this accommodation, due to the significant associated upfront capital expenditure," she remarks.

Total current office development activity is estimated at 11,300 sq m (121,600 sq ft) of which 10,800 sq m (116,300 sq ft)is in the suburbs where rents have averaged 194 per sq m. However, she says a new level for suburban rents could be set once Block 5 Parkmore East completes this year.

Meanwhile the strength of investment demand was reflected in Calibrate Real Estate's sale of the mixed use City Point property for around 22m to Friends First.

In 2014 a Nama-supported marketing campaign saw it offered for about 11.5m but at that time around 557 sq m (6,000 sq ft) of its 4,600 sq m (49,100 sq ft) of retail space was vacant, as were two of its three office units. Now it is fully-let and rents have increased. Comprising 7,107 sq m (76,500 sq ft) of retail, office and residential space, it generates rental income of around 1.5m annually suggesting that the gross yield on the Friends First deal could have been around 6.8pc.
Outstanding in its field: Cows stand on a hill at a dairy farm that supplies milk to Fonterra Cooperative Group as Mount Taranaki stands in the distance in Hawera, New Zealand. Fonterra is the worlds top dairy exporter. Photo: Bloomberg

Further consolidation in the dairy processing sector is "inevitable" according to Conor Mulvihill, director of Dairy Industry Ireland.

His comments come as Lakeland and LacPatrick edge closer to an amalgamation. LacPatrick is one of the biggest dairy co-ops in the Border region, as is neighbouring Lakeland.

Mr Mulvihill, who represents milk processors at Dairy Industry Ireland, says that closer integration in the industry is being discussed at all levels.

"From the Department of Agriculture to farm organisations, people have been saying that consolidation will happen, but to date it has not," Mr Mulvihill told the Irish Independent.

"What has occurred here has been organic growth. In Ireland, people operate very locally, and the co-op is a part of this, there is a lot of loyalty at farmer level towards the organisations. In addition, the farmers own the co-ops."

The dairy-processing market is made up of a large number of small co-ops - a lot of whom in turn use Ornua to market and sell their produce - plus four or five large players including Glanbia and Kerry.

The likes of New Zealand, Denmark, and the Netherlands each operate with one "super co-op", Mulvihill points out.

Those giants, rather than local rivals, are the competition Irish producers ultimately face.

Irish farmers are very well-educated and the market place in Ireland is "slowly" changing, Mulvihill says.

"We currently export 90pc [of dairy produce] and we will be moving towards 95pc exports, this will serve to drive competitiveness.

"If, and when, the Lakeland-LacPatrick merger is agreed, 80pc of the milk in Ireland will be in the hands of four huge processors - Kerry Group, Glanbia, Lakeland, and Dairygold." That sentiment is echoed by Jim Mulqueen, partner at Grant Thornton, who expects continued consolidation in the sector as margins come under increasing pressure.

"There are regular discussions among certain co-ops around consolidation," he says.

"We also see opportunities regionally for maybe neighbouring co-ops, or co-ops with the same sector focus, to operate together."

The main reasons behind this, he says, is typically cost savings and synergies, all of which add to a business's bottom lime, and help a company run more efficiently.

"It not as simple as taking the profit of one company and the profit of another, and having a bigger profit, some of it could be strategic in terms of location, but typically cost-saving, synergies."

Mr Mulqueen does not, however, think that Ireland will go the same way as the likes of Denmark and New Zealand, partly because the Competition and Consumer Protection Commission will be watching from the wings.

"I could see some resistance at local level to increased consolidation in the market place, but I think that before we get to having one or two super milk producers the Competition Authority will step in if they feel competition is being eroded.

"They are the appropriate watchdog, and they will ensure that competition is maintained," he said.

From a farmer's perspective, Tom Phelan, chairman of the Irish Farmers Association (IFA) dairy committee, says that any merger between co-ops has to deliver for farmers, both in terms of better prices and better use of existing facilities.

"In the future we have to focus on adding value to milk, there is no point expanding for the sake of expanding," Mr Phelan said.

The Laois-man added that co-ops are democratically run, noting that the LacPatrick merger is still subject to membership votes - the amalgamation between the two will depend on the wishes of farmers.

"What the IFA want to see is the maximum benefit got for the farmers, be it though mergers, acquisitions, business co-operation and so forth."

On the matter of Brexit, Mr Mulvihill describes it is a "disrupter" for the industry, which will serve to "concentrate minds". However, he says that it is hard to determine whether it will lead to an increase in mergers and acquisitions in the sector.

"We would actually see climate change and environmental issues as the biggest challenge facing the industry right now," he said.

Should a hard Brexit occur, of particular concern to dairy farmers and producers in Ireland will be the exposure of Irish cheddar in the UK.

On this Mr Mulvihill says that there has been a lot of investment by processors away from cheddar.

In July, Glanbia Cheese, the Joint Venture business between Glanbia PLC and Leprino Foods, announced plans to build a new mozzarella cheese manufacturing facility in Portlaoise.

A total of 130m will be invested in the facility, which will have a production capacity of 45,000 tons per year.

Similarly, Mr Mulqueen said that Grant Thornton are seeing a number of the bigger players, the likes of Ornua, Dairygold, and Total Produce, looking beyond the UK market to other regions.

"We see that larger companies are quite well prepared for Brexit in terms of scenario planning and so on, but some of the smaller players in the market would still be adopting a level of wait and see, they simply don't have the bandwidth and time, and will try and adapt as things happen."
A farmer who was badly injured when thugs rammed a gate with their truck while he was trying to shut it is living in fear that his attackers will return.

Brendan O'Donoghue (56), a father of two young girls, was left with two smashed bones in a leg and a broken arm as he was hurled by the gate against his four-wheel drive vehicle and knocked to the ground.

The nightmare attack still lives in his memory even though it took place more than a year ago.

Nobody has been prosecuted in connection with the ramming because of insufficient evidence, although the truck was seized by gardai two days after he was assaulted.

Mr O'Donoghue lives with his wife and girls, aged eight and nine, at St Margaret's in north Co Dublin.

He rents land from the Dublin Aviation Authority (DAA) at the end of one of the runways at Dublin Airport.

At around 7.30pm on August 17 last year, he was driving out to check his cattle when he spotted a truck carrying a load of settees and mattresses travelling in the opposite direction.

Dumping of rubbish on local land has been a major problem for the farmers and at the next roundabout he turned and followed the truck.

Mr O'Donoghue eventually discovered the truck had turned into a field rented from the DAA by a neighbouring farmer.

He saw two men in the truck at the top of the field and decided to shut the gate before alerting the authorities, but had difficulty closing it.

"The gate was bent and I couldn't pull the bolt across. The truck came down the field at 100mph and drove through the gate," he said.

"I fell back against my jeep at great force and dropped to the ground. The gate ended up in the middle of the roadway.

"It reminded me of the terrorist attack in Nice when a truck was driven into a crowd of people and they were thrown to the ground," Mr O'Donoghue recalled.

He said he lay there for 10 minutes before two DHL vans arrived on the scene and the drivers alerted the emergency services and his wife.

Mr O'Donoghue was taken by ambulance to St James's Hospital where he spent eight days recovering from breaks to his arm and his tibia and fibula.

He gave a description of the truck to gardai, who examined CCTV footage from the area.

As a result of further inquiries, gardai tracked the truck to a halting site in a neighbouring county and seized it. The vehicle had not been taxed or insured for the previous five years, he said.

He was with his family at Mass in the local church on Christmas morning when he spotted the two thugs involved in the attack.

They did not see him but the incident reminded him that they were still in the area and he could easily encounter them again.

"I am very concerned for the safety of my family if they decide to come back and we live in fear," he added.

Mr O'Donoghue said if the authorities had taken action to stop the illegal dumping in his area, life for him and his neighbours would not be as difficult. He felt that farming in a predominantly urban area brought its own social problems.

The previous week, the Irish Independent highlighted the vicious attack on farmer Patrick Walsh (47), a father of three, from Lispopple, Swords, north Co Dublin.

He was kicked unconscious after he confronted trespassers on his land. The four men were using lurcher dogs as a cover while carrying out surveillance for a crime spree.
Heroic efforts overnight by the staff at the National Ploughing Championships have turned the site around and back open to the public, after it was shut yesterday.

Thousands of visitors were turned away after waiting hours in cars in fields and on the road yesterday after high winds from Storm Ali damaged a number of tents and marquees at the Ploughing site.

However, with exhibitors and crews working through the night to clean up damaged marquees after gale force winds hit the site.

Today though the site is back up and running and a very large crowed is expected to descent on the site outside Tullamore.

Visitors have been told that anyone with a wrist band for Wednesday or Thursday can use it today or tomorrow, Friday.

But those attending today are advised to wrap up warm and bring their wellies as heavy rain is expected to fall on the site today.

Expand Close National Ploughing Championships 2018. Jane Jackson tries to clean up her stand in the exhibition site in Screggan after damage caused by Storm Ali . Picture; Gerry Mooney / Facebook

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Whatsapp National Ploughing Championships 2018. Jane Jackson tries to clean up her stand in the exhibition site in Screggan after damage caused by Storm Ali . Picture; Gerry Mooney

Agri Lloyd stand is a typical example of the damage inflicted on many stands by the winds which blew well in excess of 100km/hr at times.

The business arrived on site this after noon to find the side walls of their stand collapsed and significant damage to the structure of their enclosure.

Expand Close Maura Walsh, of IRD Duhallow. Photo: Gerry Mooney / Facebook

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But undeterred by this the company plans to work on through the evening and night to get their stand back in order.

Agri Lloyd which sells a variety of products for livestock farmers like many agri business which exhibit at the Ploughing Championships rely on it to drum up significant revenue and business over the coming year.

The loss of a day at the ploughing is no small thing for many of these businesses and will have a significant financial impact for many.

How to get to the Ploughing

How to get to Ploughing from Cork/Munster

BLUE ROUTE: Traffic travelling Northbound on the M8 will exit at Junction 6 (Horse & Jockey) and proceed to Thurles and onto Templemore and Roscrea on the N62. At Birr traffic will join the N52 travelling northbound via Kilcormac and Blueball and onto the event site at Screggan, Tullamore.

How to get to Ploughing from South East (Kilkenny)

GREY ROUTE: Traffic travelling from Kilkenny/South East will travel North along the N77 via Durrow and Abbeyleix before arriving at Portlaoise. Traffic will be directed left at Father Brown Road through Clonminham and onto the N80 travelling towards Mountmellick.

At Derryclooney Bridge, Mountmellick traffic will be directed left and onto the R422 through Rosenallis and Clonaslee. At Coolagh Cross traffic will be directed right onto the R421 (Killurin Road). At Killurin Cross traffic will be directed left towards the event site at Screggan, Tullamore and parking beside the event site.

How to get to Ploughing from the South East (Carlow)

YELLOW ROUTE: Traffic travelling from Carlow and the South East will travel on the N80 towards Portlaoise. At Bloomfield Roundabout, Portlaoise traffic will be directed right onto Rathbrennan and onto Junction 16(M7). Traffic will then turn left to the Heath and left again at the Wheel Inn pub (sign-postedPortarlington).

Traffic will proceed to Kennells Cross and be turned left and travel towards Mountmellick town. All traffic will be directed through Mountmellick town and onto Tullamore viaKilleigh. Traffic will then proceed to parking beside the event grounds.

How to get to Ploughing from Limerick, Kerry and Southwest

BROWN ROUTE:Traffic travelling Northbound on the M7 will exit at Junction 26 (Nenagh South) and will proceed on the N52 towards Borrisokane. In Borrisokane traffic will take the N62 (Signposted Portumna) and after 5km traffic will turn right onto the R438 to Cloghan. In Cloghan traffic will turn onto the R357 before being directed to parking beside the event grounds.

How to get to Ploughing from Dublin

PURPLE ROUTE: Traffic from Dublin to use the M4/M6 Westbound to Junction 5 on the M6 (Kilbeggan) and then onto the N52 towards Tullamore for 4km, where at Durrow turn right onto L2005 (passing GAA Pitch) and travel for 2km, then turn left onto the R420 and travel for 2km to avail of a shuttle service to the site

How to get to Ploughing from the North

PINK ROUTE: Traffic travelling from the North will travel via Mullingar and onto the N52 towards Tyrellspass. Traffic will be turned right into Tyrellspass Village and on to Kilbeggan Village via R446 (old N6). Once through Kilbeggan Village turn left for Clara onto the R436. On the approach to Clara traffic will turn left onto the L2009 before joining the R420 Tullamore to Clara Road. Traffic will then turn right at Coolnahiley and be directed to parking beside the event grounds.

How to get to Ploughing from the West

GREEN ROUTE: Traffic travelling from the West will exit M6 motorway at Junction 6 (Horseleap, Clara) and will be directed towards Moate town. Traffic will then be directed left onto the Ballycumber Road. At Ballycumber traffic will join the R436 (Ballycumber to Clara Road) before turning right on towards Rahan Village. At Rahan Village traffic will be directed onto the L2011 towards the event site and parking.

How to get to Ploughing from Kildare/ Junction 15 M7

ORANGE ROUTE: Traffic travelling Westbound along the M7 Motorway will exit at Junction 15 (Cappakeel), turning right over the Motorway and onto the R445 (Old Dublin Road). At New Inn Roundabout traffic will proceed through Emo Village and onto Kennells Cross where it will turn right and be directed to Garryhinch Cross and onto Cloneygowan Village. Traffic will then follow the R420 to the event site.

BUS, TAXI & SHUTTLE BUS SERVICE

All Buses on Brown / Blue route will continue past the entrance to the Blue Routes and continue 400m

and park across from the event site. All Buses travelling on the Purple / Pink routes will continue on to the N52 (Mucklagh By-Pass) and park across from the event site.

All Buses travelling on the Orange, Yellow and Grey Routes will travel to Mountmellick where they will proceed to Tullamore via the N.80. They will then be directed to Bus Parking on the N52 (Mucklagh ByPass) across from the event site.

All Buses travelling on the Green Route will exit the M6 at Junction 5 Kilbeggan and proceed on the N52 to Mucklagh By-Pass and park across from the event site.

SHUTTLE BUS:

A Shuttle Bus service operated by Bus Eireann will be in operation from Tullamore Train Station. The times of this service will operate to suit train times with pick up times from Tullamore Train Station starting at 06.55am until 12 noon. The Shuttle Bus service will start return runs from the site to Tullamore Train Station at 14.00pm up until 18.30pm. The drop off and pick up point is located near the main entrance along the N52 and very close to the 3 main entrances along the front of the site.
A Clare-based temporary staff company is set to fill 700 casual roles in the hospitality sector over the next 12 months.

Founded in 2016, Get The Shifts is a tech-centric staffing solution that acts as a matchmaking service for experienced hospitality staff and bars, restaurants and other hospitality and events businesses.

The 700 roles, available on a casual basis, will be available to bar staff, wait staff, event staff, promo staff, baristas, mixologists and kitchen porters.

The company, which provides full training to applicants, is already recruiting ahead of the Christmas period and is encouraging anyone looking for flexible work to apply.

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The company has invested with Waterford-based online learning company Dulann, available to employees at approximately 10pc of the standard cost.

Founder of the Get The Shifts Hannah Wrixon said the company, located in Shannon, is on track to secure 60pc of the casual hospitality market by the end of 2018.

The concept of the business was born to combat issues such as forecasting the right numbers of staff on a day and combating no-show employees.

"Effective staffing is a historic problem for hospitality businesses. The reality is that businesses are in constant need of reliable, trained staff," said Ms Wrixon.

"Not only do we save businesses time and money where resourcing is concerned, we also spend the time training and preparing our staff so they are shift ready when the opportunity calls."

After recruitment and training, Get The Shifts staff are known as 'Superstars' and are offered to businesses in need as they need them

Current clients include Aviva Stadium, Thomond Park, Workers Beer Company, Aiken Promotions, Fitzers, The Right Catering Company and Dynamic Events.

Ms Wrixon said her team include those in the industry looking for extra hours, students and stay-at-home parents who require flexible working. The majority of the activity is in major hubs such as Dublin, Cork, Limerick and Galway.

"A large percentage of our Superstars are digital natives and are used to using on-demand technology to shop, to hail a cab, and they are attracted to our product because finding a shift or communicating with a potential employer is now instant too," she said.

Get The Shifts' has just secured its first contract outside of Ireland with UK events company Eventist Group.
The figures indicate strong growth at the top end of the legal services market in Ireland despite concerns about the potential impact of Brexit. Stock photo: PA

The top seven law firms in Ireland saw their revenues surge last year, according to market analysts.

Combined turnover for the country's 'Big Seven' law firms was an estimated 755.5m in 2017 - a jump of 35m on the previous year.

The figures indicate strong growth at the top end of the legal services market in Ireland despite concerns about the potential impact of Brexit.

The seven firms all feature in a league table of the top 100 revenue-generating law firms in Europe, excluding the UK, compiled by market analysts for specialist legal publication 'The Lawyer'.

Four of the firms - Arthur Cox, A&L Goodbody, McCann Fitzgerald, and Matheson - ranked in the European top 30. Most law firms in Ireland do not reveal information on their earnings and are under no obligation to publish accounts as they are not limited companies.

Only one of the top seven, Mason Hayes & Curran, publishes turnover figures.

'The Lawyer' has consistently been critical of the lack of transparency surrounding data in Ireland.

In its latest 'European 100' report it said extracting data from Irish law firms "proved difficult". None of the firms, for example, would disclose details of financial management or property costs.

However, analysts for the publication have been able to estimate their earnings based on a number of indicators.

The Irish firm with the biggest turnover was Arthur Cox, which had estimated revenues of 150m last year. This was a 6m increase on 2016 and saw the firm ranked 15th in Europe in terms of revenue.

It was closely followed by A&L Goodbody, whose estimated turnover was 148m, up almost 10m on 2016. It was ranked 17th in the European earnings league.

McCann Fitzgerald (129.5m) was ranked 22nd in Europe in terms of turnover. Matheson (122m) was ranked 28th, William Fry (92.8m) was in 37th place, Mason Hayes & Curran (76m) was 53rd on the list, while Dillon Eustace (37.2m) was ranked 92nd.

In comparison, the highest earning firm in the report was Spanish-headquartered Garrigues, with a turnover of 357.1m

Turnover at all of the Irish firms was said to have been up last year, with the exception of Mason, Hayes & Curran, which disclosed a 1.3pc dip.

This was the first time in six years the firm had seen declining revenues.

The decline was attributed to Brexit-related nervousness among clients in the first half of 2017.

In contrast, the report said revenues rose by 4.2pc at Arthur Cox, 7pc at both A&L Goodbody and McCann Fitzgerald, 6.1pc at Matheson, 5pc at William Fry and 1.9pc at Dillon Eustace.

Law Society director general Ken Murphy said he was not privy to internal management or profit figures from any law firm, but observed that the fortunes of the industry were closely linked to level of economic activity in the country.

"There is apprehension about Brexit, but there is no doubt the level of activity in commercial law is high at the moment," he said.
Dublin-listed renewables investor Greencoat Capital is hunting further acquisitions after last week's deal to buy a portfolio of wind assets from state forestry company Coillte.

The company has embarked on a share-placing programme, broken into tranches, as it seeks to add to its portfolio.

It believes the right acquisitions will increase economies of scale and give it more power when negotiating with service providers and asset sellers, chairman Ronan Murphy said yesterday.

Mr Murphy was speaking as the company announced results for the first half. The company's net cash generation was 13.4m.

"The company's strategy remains unchanged. It aims to provide attractive risk-adjusted returns to shareholders through an annual dividend of 6c per share that increases progressively while growing the capital value of its investment portfolio," Mr Murphy said.

Goodbody analyst Gerry Hennigan said Greencoat's performance had been "solid" in the first half. The results are for a period that pre-dated the Coillte deal. The company said that deal was funded by a credit facility.

"While the pace of deal flow in the current year - 162 megawatts - has clearly overshot the annual target in our model, we continue to forecast 75 megawatts of additional deal flow per annum," he said.

"We anticipate a heightened level of activity in the secondary market, implying ample opportunities, for Greencoat over the coming 12 months."

Greencoat said it welcomed the new renewable electricity support scheme - which will see suppliers compete with each other to provide power to the grid.

"The Irish wind market remains a very attractive jurisdiction with both a stable and supportive regulatory regime... in general, the outlook for the Group is very positive, with encouraging operational and financial performance from the existing portfolio combined with a healthy pipeline of attractive further investment opportunities."
An Irish software firm has just signed a global reseller agreement with PwC on the back of the launch of its new project management solution.

The "game-changing" adaptable software from Leitrim-based Cora Systems was launched today at Dublin's Guinness Storehouse building.

Currently handling more than 500,000 projects globally worth over 750bn, the innovative platform giving executives the ability to have visibility into thousands of projects in one view and in real time.

According to founder Philip Martin, the latest offering from the Carrick-on-Shannon-headquartered firm can go head-to-head in the with tech giants such as Microsoft, Oracle and SAP in the PPM sector.

"Our integrated project and portfolio management offers the widest breadth of functionality for the Project Management Offices (PMO) and Heads of Engineering users," Mr Martin told Independent.ie.

He said that the software, in which the firm invested 3m to develop, revolutionises transparency in ongoing projects, transforming governance levels in a world of ever increasing regulation burdens.

"But one of the most informative things that it does is that it helps those executives who are paid to make transformative decisions, make more informative ones that will be crucial for the future of the business."

The Cora PPM solution digitises the entire project lifecycle, and is unique in that there is a maximum of 10pc adjustment in the way the customer has to change its process to fit.

"If you sell a piece of software, you also have to cater for the change management around that solution. In addition to having a really good product, we also do a lot of work adapting to the clients' needs," said Mr Martin.

"If you can minimise the amount of change that they need to undergo, you'll become the most attractive option."

Seven of Cora's key enterprise clients are already live on the new platform, including Allergan,Teleflex, WSP and PwC, who were eager to endorse Cora PM as a global partner.

Cora Systems exports into 51 countries around the world, with a particular focus on selling into the UK and the US.

According to Mr Martin, the reaction to their latest release has been "phenomenal" and the team, with offices in Shannon, London and Boston, have "aggressive growth targets".

"We expect to increase our turnover to 22m by 2022 from 5m by the end of this year and we are also on target for that. We intend to make this happen by targeting the UK, the USA  in particular in the life sciences, public sector and engineering sectors. Ireland is very important to us also due to ongoing government foreign direct investment targeting particularly with US multinationals."

Founded in 1999 by Mr Martin and his friend Pat Henry, now CTO of the firm, Cora started out from a rented room in an old school convent in Carrick-on-Shannon.

Some two decades on, the two friends run the biggest software company in the northwest, weathering the recent recession to grow by more than 30pc year-on-year from 2015-2018.

Apart from expanding his enterprise, Mr Martin's other passion is for Roscommon GAA, a club which has joined several across the country in raffling a house in order to raise funds.

For a 100 ticket, a punter is in with a chance of winning a house worth 425,000 in Ashtown in Dublin

Cora currently employs 55 people and intend to increase their workforce to 90, high end tech and software development roles as well as sales personnel across all offices by 2022. The company is currently recruiting for Head of Operations for its Carrick office.

"Our employees chose to work with us and live here where they can have the best of both worlds vis a vis work-life balance and working with an up and coming software force," said Mr Martin.

"I'm originally from Carrick, which is Cora Droma Ruisc as Gaeilge, and where the name for the company comes from.

"I've been asked to relocate the company elsewhere in Ireland and abroad but I've kept our headquarters here. All of our development is being done in Carrick and our staff get all the benefits that go with that."
Ryanair chief executive Michael O'Leary has insisted that he's unlikely to stay running the airline for another five years after his current contract expires in 2019.

A wide-ranging interview with media this morning following the airline's annual general meeting in Co Meath was the outspoken airline boss' first major engagement with Irish press since the airline suffered a major pilot rostering failure last year. That saw it cancel thousands of flights. The airline also recognised trade unions last December.

"I have no idea when I'll have had enough," said Mr O'Leary. "I like this company. I like working for this company. I don't do it for the pay I get. But as long as it remains interesting and fun and challenging, I see no reason not to continue to try to lead it and lead it forward positively."

However he said he wasn't sure he wanted to be leading it for five more years after his existing contract expires.

He said there are a number of internal candidates who could replace him, but said the company should, when the time comes to replace him, also look for external successors.

He agreed it has been fun running the company over the past year, as Ryanair faced labour strife across Europe and tortuous negotiations with unions that still haven't been fully resolved.

"Why wouldn't it be?" he said. "We're growing to 142 million customers. We've bought LaudaMotion, we've added another 50 aircraft. Yes, there's been challenges. The rostering thing last September was a balls-up. That was painful. We recovered very quickly from it. Recognising unions was not one of my best days in Ryanair, but it was inevitable at some point in time."

Mr O'Leary was re-elected a director of Ryanair at the annual general meeting, with 98.5pc of votes cast in his favour. All its directors up for election were re-elected.

He joked to shareholders during the AGM that extending his tenure at Ryanair would be subject to "painful negotiations" with his wife.

He added that his contract had been discussed at the airline's board meeting yesterday.

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"I'm very happy to go on to a rolling 12-month contract," he said. "I own 4pc of the company. It's not like I'm going to go anywhere. They want me to sign up another contract for a period of years. I'm not sure whether I want to sign up for another five years. That would take me to 62. I'm not sure Mrs O'Leary would be very happy if I agree to sign up for another five years."

Three major shareholder advisory groups had recommended to Ryanair shareholders that they not vote to re-elect Ryanair chairman, billionaire David Bonderman. He's been chairman for 22 years.

Mr Bonderman (75) was re-elected, however, with 70.5pc of shares cast in his favour.

Speaking after the AGM, Mr Bonderman said that he was pleased to have been re-elected.

"We always want to listen to what shareholders have to say," he said. "They may be right, they may be wrong, but we want to consider it. It's a point of view. For a variety of reasons, those of us on the board think they're barking up the wrong tree, but we'll listen."

He declined to say how long he might remain on the Ryanair board.

"I think we'll reserve on that question."

Mr O'Leary said that Mr Bonderman would not be chairman "forever".

"We have been very fortunate to have David Bonderman as chairman for the last 22 years," he said. "He knows it won't go on forever. We know it won't go on forever. But frankly, if we could encourage him to continue to run the company for another couple of years, I would personally encourage him to do so. I don't think he will. This is a man who travels the world., runs a multi-billion private equity house. He chairs Ryanair as a favour to us."

Mr Bonderman personally owns shares worth about 100m in Ryanair.

Ryanair had originally banned media from its AGM this morning. But The Irish Independent, RTE and the Financial Times gained legitimate access to the meeting. The airline subsequently relented and permitted all media to attend.

Mr O'Leary also said that the airline has been lobbying the government to change tax law here so that Ryanair can offer all its workers around Europe contracts based on local law, where they would also pay their taxes locally, rather than to the Irish Exchequer.
Ryanair chairman David Bonderman has been re-elected at the companys annual general meeting.

Mr Bonerman was elected with 70.5pc of votes in favour.

Chief executive Michael OLeary has also been re-elected with 98.5pc of votes, as has independent director Kyran McLaughlin, who received just 66.8pc of votes in favour of his reappointment.

This is the first AGM that Ryanair has held since it agreed to recognise trade unions.

Ryanair did a dramatic turnaround this morning, permitting all media to its AGM. It occurred after the The Irish Independent, RTE and The Financial Times legitimately gained access to the event.

Chief executive Michael O'Leary joked as the AGM got underway that the meeting had "100pc load factor" of media.

Mr O'Leary will also give a media briefing after the AGM, something the airline had previously said would not take place.

One shareholder said the effort to prevent media from attending the AGM had been a "retrogade" step, but thanked the airline's board for letting them attend.

As previously disclosed in the companys 2018 Annual Report, Charlie McCreevy and Declan McKeon chose not to seek re-election at the AGM.

Chairman David Bonderman thanked both Mr McCreevy and Mr McKeon for their contribution over the last eight years and welcomed both Emer Daly and Roisin Brennan as new members of the board.

Meanwhile in a statement, Aberdeen Standard Investments, which manages roughly 11 million shares in Ryanair, or 0.9pc of the issued share capital, said that it had instructed its proxy to vote in favour of all the AGMs resolutions.

Acknowledging the success of Ryanair, Alison Kennedy, investment director at Aberdeen Standard, said that in order to achieve its success Ryanair has had to change and evolve, but she said it is currently going through a period when that evolution is proving more challenging.

In its decision to vote in favour of the re-election of chairman Mr Bonderman and director Mr McLaughlin, Ms Kennedy said that the length of time both had been on the board of Ryanair  22 years and 17 years respectively  suggested a lack of focus on board succession planning.

Excessive tenure also calls into question an individuals independence and objectivity, and our engagement on governance matters suggests that the board is not listening carefully enough to shareholders views.

However, we were aware of the danger of unintended consequences should these two individuals be voted off the board at this time, particularly as none of the other non-executive directors has served for more than five years, Ms Kennedy continued.

Given the challenges the company faces, for example in union and labour relations, it is clear that governance needs to evolve.

Ms Kennedy went on to say that strong, independent and visible board leadership is more important than ever.

We expect that there will be clear progress on succession for these two key board positions [chairman Mr Bonderman and director Mr McLaughlin] by the time of the AGM next year. If not, others things being equal, we will vote against the re-election of Mr Bonderman, Mr McLaughlin and the other members of the nominations committee.
No go: Michael OLeary is expected to stay at Ryanair. Photo: PA

Michael O'Leary is expected to stay at the helm at Ryanair despite multiple calls for shareholders to oust him at the airline's annual general meeting today.

Motions to re-elect the Ryanair's chief executive and chairman David Bonderman may lead to clashes at what is likely to be a turbulent gathering.

But a board member has been quoted by Reuters as claiming Mr O'Leary will continue at the company's top for at least another five years.

Advisory group PIRC is opposing Mr O'Leary's re-election, while numerous investors and public pension funds have said they plan to vote against US billionaire Bonderman following months of strikes.

They include advisory firms PIRC, ISS and Glass Lewis. However, it is reported that Mr O'Leary expects his chairman to be re-elected with a huge majority, although he admitted he needs to improve his own performance.

Major pilot unions also urged shareholders to replace Mr O'Leary and Mr Bonderman ahead of the meeting.

The British Airline Pilots Association (BALPA), which represents pilots at the airline's largest base in the UK, urged shareholders to immediately unseat them. It said it was concerned that the "approach epitomised under Michael O'Leary's leadership over more than 20 years is unchanged" despite the airline's decision to recognise unions.

"As professional pilots, critical to the future and fortunes of our airline, many have lost all confidence in Michael O'Leary and his ability to lead the company as CEO," said the statement.

"Accordingly, as stakeholders in Ryanair, with shared interest in the health and success of the company, Ryanair's pilots urge shareholders to immediately replace the CEO Michael O'Leary and chairman David Bonderman at the annual general meeting."

BALPA general secretary Brian Strutton said industrial unrest among pilots and cabin crew was likely to continue for the foreseeable future.

"For many pilots and cabin crew it seems to me that they do not believe in the intentions of Ryanair's leaders and unfortunately Mr O'Leary is usually cited as the cause of this. I think that while he is still there as the embodiment of Ryanair's values the distrust among many staff is likely to continue and with it the industrial unrest," he said.

The European Cockpit Association also called for a change in the management team.

Today's AGM comes as the airline has been threatened with the biggest strike in its history next week. Unions in Belgium, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal and Spain are staging a 24-hour walkout on Friday week. It is understood they plan to strike once a month until their demands are met.

However, Ryanair has hit back at claims that the industrial action will cause chaos and said it expected most cabin crew to work as normal, as they did during previous strikes.
Workers in the same job for years could end up paying emergency tax from the start of next year if their employers do not sign up to a new system.

Revenue is rolling out a huge overhaul of the Pay As You Earn (PAYE) system, which comes into effect in January.

But Chartered Accountants Ireland said just 11,000 employers have engaged with the tax authority on the new system - out of a total of some 200,000 employers in the State.

"There is a real risk of some employees suffering harsh emergency tax in the January payroll - the first pay cheque after Christmas - unless these lists are right," said the accountancy body's director of taxation, Brian Keegan.

From January, the new system will see employers submitting payroll data on a regular basis. This represents a fundamental shift from the present system where detailed payroll data is submitted annually in a P35 form.

Dr Keegan said what he called PAYE modernisation should ultimately have benefits for employers and employees.

Employees who pay their tax through the PAYE system will be able to claim tax credits and reliefs with more ease under the new arrangements.

"There is, however, a compliance cost to business. It's essential that all employers get involved now with the switchover to manage this cost and help ensure their workers don't lose out," said Dr Keegan.

Chartered Accountants Ireland has recommended that employers submit their employee lists to Revenue through Revenue's Online Service (ROS).

Uploading this list will ensure that both Revenue and employer records are aligned and employers are receiving the most up to date employee information to calculate their deductions.

The deadline for uploading this list is October 31, to allow sufficient time to complete the data-alignment process and amend any differences before the go live date of January 1 for PAYE.

Failure to upload this list runs the risk of discrepancies between employer's and Revenue's lists not being remedied before January, Dr Keegan said.

This will mean a high possibility of employees suffering harsh emergency tax in the January payroll.

Revenue Commissioners chairman Niall Cody said recently the modernising and the move to real-time PAYE in January "represents an important step in the process of continuous improvement in service, compliance and efficiency in our administration of the tax system".
House-hunting couples who earn up to 90,000 a year may be able to avail of a new affordable housing scheme after the Budget.

Fianna Fail is demanding the introduction of an affordable housing scheme which will see homeowners enter into a shared-ownership arrangement with local authorities.

The scheme, which is central to Budget negotiations, will see local authorities buy houses from developers before offering them at significantly subsidised rates to first-time buyers. Local authorities will retain a stake in the properties until the home is sold or bought out by the property owner.

The scheme will be targeted at people earning between 30,000 and 90,000.

It is envisaged that Dublin local authorities would subsidise houses by as much as 50pc under the scheme which aims to provide houses priced between 160,000 and 200,000. Fianna Fail is insisting on the scheme being introduced next year to ensure there is no delay in the roll-out of affordable housing.

The party is also proposing a more comprehensive long-term affordable housing scheme that would involve local authorities building new homes. This would see 200m earmarked to build 4,000 affordable houses.

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The two schemes form the backbone of Fianna Fail's demands ahead of the final budget of the confidence and supply arrangement.

Fianna Fail housing spokesman Darragh O'Brien, along with the party's budget negotiator Barry Cowen, yesterday met Finance Minister Paschal Donohoe and Housing Minister Eoghan Murphy to discuss the proposal.

A Fianna Fail source said it was "making slow progress" on affordable housing but insisted the two new schemes are at the centre of its budget demands.

Fine Gael and Fianna Fail will meet over the coming weeks to determine how much funding is available for social housing.
The German government is taking steps to counter a surge in Chinese bids for stakes in German technology companies, including the creation of a billion-euro fund that could rescue such firms in financial trouble, a government source has told Reuters.

Senior officials are also working on changes to foreign trade regulations to ensure that key technologies remain in German hands. These would include government reviews of foreign acquisitions of stakes in companies below the current 25pc threshold, and expanding which types of purchases must be examined.

"This is an issue that we are working on very intensely," said the source.

Berlin was galvanised into action by the surprise takeover of robotics firm Kuka by China's Midea in 2016 and the purchase earlier this year of a 9.7pc stake in Daimler by Chinese carmaker Geely. Chinese companies completed 30 acquisitions in Germany last year, nearly double 2016, and Chinese proposals accounted for 40pc of the 165 reviews of foreign takeover plans in the last three years, the source said.

"China is working diligently to close technology gaps and dominate the world market with new technologies," the source said. Chinese firms, some state-owned, were particularly interested in German companies with special know-how, new tech startups, and companies active in critical infrastructure fields, the source added.

As a last resort, the government, headed by Chancellor Angela Merkel, also wants to set up a fund that could help companies if no private investors could be found to replace a possible Chinese bidder, or if guarantees by the state development bank KfW were not sufficient. "We are talking about 1 billion euros that would be available as a last resort," the source said, adding that the money could also be used proactively to support development of key technologies by German firms.

It was not immediately clear if and how such a fund would differ from one rejected by a spokesman for the economics ministry last week.

The German government also signalled its willingness to use a new power to veto foreign takeovers of German companies in the case of a Chinese bid for toolmaker Leifeld, prompting China's Yantai Taihai to drop its bid.

In July, after failing to find a private investor for the firm, the KfW bought a stake in high-voltage grid operator 50Hertz to prevent China's state grid acquiring the shareholding.

Reuters
Market Research Future has published new research report on Micro Pump Market to track and analyze competitive developments such as joint ventures, strategic alliances, mergers and acquisitions, new product developments, and research and developments in the Global Micro Pump Market.

The Global Micro-Pump Market has been evaluated as rapidly growing market and expected that the market will reach high growth figures. Micro-pumps have been playing a crucial role in the pharmaceutical industry for last few years. Especially in the processes such as drug discovery, development and delivery. The ability of micro-pump to provide a controlled flow of fluids and controlled delivery of drug dosage into the body of the patients are the major factors boosting the demand for such techniques. This has led to the improved healthcare management and better medical outcomes. The Global Micro-Pump Market for is anticipated to grow at a CAGR rate of about 19.4 % during the forecast period of 2018 to 2027.

Get Sample report @ https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/sample_request/1300

Global Micro-Pump Market  Key Players

The major participants of this market are Advanced Microfluidics SA, Alldoo Micropump, Bio-Chem Fluidics, Cole-Parmer Instrument Company LLC, Dolomite Centre Ltd, IDEX Corporation, KNF Neuberger Inc., Microfluidica LLC, Servoflo Corporation, Takasago Electric Inc., TOPS Industry & Technology Co. Ltd., World Precision Instruments, Xavitech and others.

Industry/ Innovation/ Related News:

May 18, 2018  Axolotl Biologix (US) A specialized provider for optimized regenerative medicine announced a strategic partnership with Leonhardt Ventures (US), a product invention development laboratory. This partnership will allow the company to utilize some of Leonhardts expertise, such as bioelectric, mixed stem cell-based composition, and micro-pump combined with Axolotls amniotic-derived fluid products for organ regeneration.

Global Micro-Pump Market  Segmentation

MRFR has segmented the report into five key dynamics, for the convenience of the report and enhanced understanding.

By Product Type: Comprises Mechanical Micro Pump (piezoelectric micro pump, peristaltic pump, & syringe pump, others) and Non-Mechanical Micro Pump.

By Material: Polymer, Silicon, and Glass, among others.

By Applications: Drugs Delivery Systems, In Vitro Diagnostic, and Medical Devices among others.

By End-Users: Biotechnology, Pharmaceutical Companies, Hospitals, Diagnostic Centers, and Research Institutes, among others.

By Regions: North America, Europe, APAC and Rest of the World.

Global Micro-Pump Market  Regional Analysis

The Americas dominates the Global Micro Pump Market owing to the increasing investment in healthcare, the presence of a strong economic condition, and focus of research institutions on updating technology and others. Furthermore, American micro pump manufacturers have significantly upgraded their factories and manufacturing capabilities.

Europe holds the second position in the market increasing support from the government, the presence of huge healthcare spending. According to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the healthcare expenditure in Germany was EUR 321 billion in 2014, France recorded the second highest level of current healthcare expenditure of EUR 237 billion.

Asia Pacific is the fastest growing market owing to a greater number of developing nations present in this region, for instance, countries like India and China. These countries are encouraging the growth of the micro pump market. Recently, China has become one of the fastest growing markets for microfluidics in Asia due to increased government funding and improving healthcare facilities. According to the National Bureau of Statistics of the Peoples Republic of China, the total R&D spending of China was around USD 409 billion, in 2015.

The Middle East & Africa is expected to hold the least market share due to less availability of medical facilities, and less development in the healthcare domain. However, countries such as Qatar and Kuwait are focusing more on the healthcare and developing medical facilities, which will boost the market of this region.

To Know More Enquire @ https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/enquiry/1300

Major Table of Content

Chapter 1. Report Prologue

Chapter 2. Market Introduction

2.1 Definition

2.2 Scope of the Study

2.2.1 Research Objective

2.2.2 Assumptions

2.2.3 Limitations

Chapter 3. Research Methodology

3.1 Introduction

3.2 Primary Research

3.3 Secondary Research

3.4 Market Size Estimation

Chapter 4. Market Dynamics

Continued.

About Market Research Future:

At Market Research Future (MRFR), we enable our customers to unravel the complexity of various industries through our Cooked Research Report (CRR), Half-Cooked Research Reports (HCRR), Raw Research Reports (3R), Continuous-Feed Research (CFR), and Market Research & Consulting Services.

In order to stay updated with technology and work process of the industry, MRFR often plans & conducts meet with the industry experts and industrial visits for its research analyst members.

Media Contact

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Cary Joji Fukunaga will direct the next James Bond film, and will become the first ever American to helm an official Bond release.

Fukunaga will replace Danny Boyle, who stepped down from the 25th Bond film in August over creative differences.

The film, referred to as Bond 25, will also be released at the later date of February 14 2020. It was originally slated to be released on October 25 2019.

Michael G. Wilson, Barbara Broccoli and Daniel Craig announced today that #Bond25 will begin filming at Pinewood Studios on 4 March 2019 under the helm of director, Cary Joji Fukunaga with a worldwide release date of 14 February 2020. (1/2) pic.twitter.com/Oyzt826sXd  James Bond (@007) September 20, 2018

A tweet from the film franchises official Twitter read: Michael G. Wilson, Barbara Broccoli and Daniel Craig announced today that #Bond25 will begin filming at Pinewood Studios on 4 March 2019 under the helm of director, Cary Joji Fukunaga with a worldwide release date of 14 February 2020.

We are delighted to be working with Cary. His versatility and innovation make him an excellent choice for our next James Bond adventure, said Michael G. Wilson and Barbara Broccoli.

We are delighted to be working with Cary. His versatility and innovation make him an excellent choice for our next James Bond adventure," said Michael G. Wilson and Barbara Broccoli. (2/2)  James Bond (@007) September 20, 2018

Fukunaga won an Emmy Award in 2014 for directing the first series of crime drama True Detective, as well as a TV Bafta for the programme.

His big-screen efforts include 2015 war drama Beasts Of No Nation, on which he served as writer, director, producer and cinematographer, as well as 2011s Jane Eyre and 2009s Sin Nombre.

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Fukunaga, 41, will be the first ever American director to helm a Bond film.

Previous Bond directors have largely been British, including Sam Mendes, Lewis Gilbert and John Glen, while others have been German or from New Zealand.

Trainspotting and Slumdog Millionaire director Boyle stepped down from the as-yet-untitled Bond film a month ago.

Expand Close The next movie is widely expected to be Daniel Craigs last in the role (John Stilwell/PA) / Facebook

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When Boyles involvement was announced in May, EON Productions said production on the new film would begin in December at Pinewood Studios, Buckinghamshire.

It will be current star Daniel Craigs fifth outing as 007.

The film is expected to be Craigs last time playing the spy, having previously starred in Casino Royale, Quantum Of Solace, Skyfall and Spectre.

He previously stated that he would rather slash my wrists than return to the role, but later said that he made the remarks two days after he had finished shooting Spectre, and was exhausted.
Ed Sheeran will headline Europes answer to Glastonbury next year. (Ian West/PA)

Singer-songwriter Ed Sheeran will headline Hungarys Sziget festival next year, an event which has been described as Europes answer to Glastonbury.

This year over 565,000 people attended the worlds fifth biggest music festival, which is held on the 108-hectare Obuda Island on the Danube in northern Budapest.

Over 1,000 artists played the seven-day festival this year including US rapper Kendrick Lamar, cartoon group Gorillaz and Sheffield rock band Arctic Monkeys.

Sheeran is the first top act to be announced for next years Sziget, the name of which is the Hungarian word for island.

Sheeran, whose third studio album Divide was 2017s biggest-selling record, recently spoke out against cuts to music education in state schools, saying he benefited from the tuition he received as a secondary school student in Suffolk.

The next Sziget festival will be held between August 7-13 2019.
The internet is swirling with confusion after Sesame Streets Bert and Ernie were revealed to be gay by a former writer  only for the show to say they arent.

First Mark Saltzman, a longtime writer on the show, revealed that he perceived the characters to be gay, mirroring his own relationship with film editor Arnold Glassman.

Then a statement from the show said they do not have a sexual orientation.

Some felt the idea that they couldnt be gay because theyre puppets didnt make any sense.

If Bert and Ernie are not gay they're not gay but your excuse can't be that they're puppets. Kermit and Miss Piggy are in an on again/off again relationship and a muppet wedding between them is even a major feature of the most recent movie  Jenny Nicholson  (@JennyENicholson) September 19, 2018

For Ernie, Berts just a good mate,

Officials at Sesame state;

No muppet creations

Have orientations

Except for the ones who are straight.  Limericking (@Limericking) September 19, 2018

Others did not see the need to discuss the characters sexuality at all.

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People do realize that Bert and Ernie are muppets and not real people, right? Do we really need to debate their sexual preferences?  Jedediah Bila (@JedediahBila) September 18, 2018

And some flat-out denied it  including Frank Oz, who voiced Bert for many years.

It seems Mr. Mark Saltzman was asked if Bert & Ernie are gay. It's fine that he feels they are. They're not, of course. But why that question? Does it really matter? Why the need to define people as only gay? There's much more to a human being than just straightness or gayness.  Frank Oz (@TheFrankOzJam) September 18, 2018

Many believe the pair have long been, and will remain, gay icons irrespective of what the shows creators say.

Some saw it as a kind of dont-ask-dont-tell situation.

Bert and Ernie been coming to thanksgiving together every year without incident and now y'all wanna rock the boat  Desus Nice (@desusnice) September 18, 2018

Others felt that a model of platonic love between male friends was important in its own right.

As a young boy I was taught by other kids that teasing and bullying my male friends was how we bonded. It was painful. Im very happy that there are male characters like Bert and Ernie that can tell each other I love you and mean it in a non-romantic way.  Arin Hanson, Untouched by Death (@egoraptor) September 19, 2018

Rather than talk about if Bert and Ernie are gay, I'm going to highlight their awesome relationship: They taught us about balance and working together. Taught us about accepting flaws and embracing differences. Most importantly that it was ok for two men to say "I love you". pic.twitter.com/cN9nehNlEh  Jesse Cox (@JesseCox) September 18, 2018

And some felt there were other points that needed clarification.

Now that Bert and Ernie have been revealed to be gay theres still hope that Sesame Street will admit that Big Bird is the Zodiac killer  Dr. Bucky Isotope, Fashion Expert (@BuckyIsotope) September 19, 2018

With all this talk about Bert & Ernie's sexual orientation, why is no one concerned with Oscar's homelessness?  Not Bill Walton (@NotBillWalton) September 18, 2018

BERT AND ERNIE ARE PUPPETS, CURSED TO NEVER FEEL EACH OTHERS TOUCH BY FORCES BEYOND THEIR CONTROL. FOCUS NOT ON THEIR RELATIONSHIP WITH EACH OTHER AND INSTEAD ON THEIR RELATIONSHIP WITH THEIR OPPRESSORS. PUPPETS, RISE MY CHILDREN  NOT A WOLF (@SICKOFWOLVES) September 19, 2018

Writer Saltzman told lifestyle publication Queerty: I remember one time that a column from The San Francisco Chronicle, a preschooler in the city turned to mom and asked are Bert and Ernie lovers? And that, coming from a preschooler was fun.

And that got passed around, and everyone had their chuckle and went back to it. And I always felt that without a huge agenda, when I was writing Bert and Ernie, they were. I didnt have any other way to contextualise them.
Former Garda commissioner Noirin O'Sullivan wants to bring a defamation action against the 'Irish Examiner' newspaper, a court has heard.

It is the second libel action the former commissioner has sought to bring since resigning in September last year.

Ms O'Sullivan and her son, Ciaran McGowan, initiated defamation proceedings against the publishers of 'The Sunday Times' last July.

An intended action against Irish Examiner Ltd was briefly mentioned yesterday in the High Court.

Ms O'Sullivan's barrister, Gary Compton, said she was seeking an order allowing her to extend the time legally allowed to bring defamation proceedings. He said that under the 2009 Defamation Act litigants had up to a year from the date of publication to bring defamation proceedings, but the High Court can extend the time limit to a maximum of two years.

Mr Justice David Barniville granted Ms O'Sullivan's lawyers permission to serve Irish Examiner Ltd with short notice of her application to extend time. He granted permission on an ex-parte basis, in the absence of any representation on behalf of the newspaper, and made the matter returnable to tomorrow's sitting of the court.

During the short hearing, no details concerning the alleged defamation were aired in open court.

Ms O'Sullivan was the first woman to lead An Garda Siochana.
A man has appeared in court this morning charged with the murder of mother-of-two Ingrida Maciokaite in Dundalk on Tuesday afternoon.

Edmundas Dauksa (48), with an address at Castleross, Castletown Road, Dundalk, but originally from Lithuania, appeared at Dundalk District Court before judge Conal Gibbons.

Garda Joseph Bell gave evidence that Mr Dauksa was arrested at Dundalk garda station at 10.08pm yesterday and charged with murder at 10.38pm.

The court heard that when charged Mr Dauksa made no reply.

Wearing a dark blue hoodie, light grey tracksuit bottoms, and dark trainers with white soles, Mr Dauksa sat silent in the court throughout the short hearing.

He was remanded in custody to appear in court again on September 27 via videolink.

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No application for bail was made as such an application in a murder charge can only be made through the High Court at a future date.

Mr Daukass solicitor applied for free legal aid, saying that the accused runs his own business as a fisherman harvesting shellfish.

Legal aid was granted, as well as a recommendation that the accused receive appropriate medical attention.

Ingrida Maciokaite (31) was stabbed to death at the Bridgewater Mews apartments on Linenhall Street in Dundalk on Tuesday afternoon.

Ms Maciakaite was originally from Lithuania but had been living in Dundalk for a number of years with her young daughter and son.

She worked in the cafe and restaurant sector in the Co Louth town.
Tuam Educate Together National School opened its doors to pupils in part of the disused building that once housed St Patrick's Christian Brothers School in the Galway town.

It was supposed to be a temporary arrangement as the school is due to be housed at the site of another Catholic school, which will be freed up as a result of an amalgamation.

Like other divestments around the country, the transfer was by no means straightforward, however.

Principal Nuala Bourke says: "The situation is unsatisfactory. When we moved in 2015, we were told we would be here for a year, but now we do not know when we will move. The amalgamation has been extremely slow to happen."

Part of the old secondary school was done up to accommodate Tuam Educate Together in its temporary home, but now the refurbished classrooms are working to full capacity

The principal says: "I have a waiting list of pupils who want to come into junior infants next year, but we do not know what will happen because we have no additional space at the moment.

"There are lots of empty classrooms around us, but there is no sign of them being divested to us."

She says that in a number of schools divested to Educate Together, there have been problems with accommodation. Schools have been opened on temporary sites.

Minister for Education Richard Bruton hopes to speed up the process of transferring schools from Catholic patronage by leasing the buildings from the church.

Some of the transfers have already taken place through leases, but these can prove cumbersome for the new schools, imposing restrictions on how they operate.
Gardai in Shankill are investigating reports that a man tried to get a young woman into his car in the Ballybrack area of Dublin.

The woman, who is in her 20s, was allegedly approached by a man in a car at Aran Drive at around 10.30pm on Tuesday night.

He asked her a number of times to get into the vehicle and she then fled the scene and reported the incident to gardai.

A number of sexual assaults and "suspicious approaches" in Shankill and surrounding areas remain unsolved.

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Last year, a woman in her 40s was sexually assaulted at Bayview housing estate in Killiney on the evening of Friday, January 30.

In December 2015, a woman was sexually assaulted close to Shankill Dart Station. Three further assaults occurred on January 3, 2016 and February 9 and 10 in Shankill and near Killiney Dart Station.

Two suspicious approaches in the area were also reported on January 20 and February 7 in 2016.

Fianna Fail councillor Cormac Devlin said this incident is "worrying for the area".

He raised the issue at a council meeting on Wednesday night as women in Shankill are worried that the new Bus Connects plan would leave people having to walk longer distances home.

"We're coming into the dark evenings again now and people are out exercising. It's extremely worrying for residents. Women have been raising potential safety issues with the new Bus Connects plan to me and are saying they won't use the bus if they end up having to walk long distances at night.

"People need to be vigilant and report any suspicious activity to the gardai," he added.

A garda spokesman said: "Gardai at Shankill in Dublin are investigating a report that a female in her 20s was approached by an unknown male in a car at Aran Drive, Ballybrack at approximately 10.30pm last night (18/9/18). The male asked her to get into the car, the female left the scene. No injuries.

"Gardai are investigating."
Testing times: Minister for Health Simon Harris looks into a slit lamp during the official opening of the Grangegorman Primary Care Centre in Dublin yesterday. Photo: Gareth Chaney

Women who want a medical abortion after nine weeks of pregnancy will have to go to a hospital rather than their GP to avoid a risk of complications, it emerged yesterday.

It comes as Health Minister Simon Harris confirmed the service will be free at all stages from January.

However, senior obstetricians and GPs have doubts about the deadline being met with just over three-and-a-half months to get all systems safely in place.

The proposed legislation liberalising abortion, which will come before the Dail next month, will allow for a medical abortion, involving taking two medications, up to 12 weeks of pregnancy at a GP surgery.

However, Dr Peter Boylan, chair of the Institute of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, said that at between nine and 12 weeks of pregnancy the medical abortion should take place in a hospital due to the "increased risk of complications such as bleeding".

He told the Oireachtas Health Committee that it is likely a proportion of women will choose a surgical option for practical reasons.

There is unease that time may already have been lost in planning safeguards, particularly in terms of ultrasound scanning if the January timeline is to be met.

Fianna Fail health spokesman Stephen Donnelly asked the doctors how well prepared the service is to cope with the extra demands in areas like staff and operating theatres.

The committee heard just two planning meetings on widening access to abortion following the repeal of the Eighth Amendment have taken place with the Department of Health, although three were supposed to have been held.

Dr John O'Brien of the Irish College of General Practitioners said only exploratory meetings with health officials had been held. Doctors suggested there may be a case for phasing in the service rather than rushing it through.

The obstetricians' body recommends that a helpline operating 24/7 be set up, manned by a doctor or nurse who can advise a woman where she could access an abortion.

They could provide counselling and assurance and also be on hand if concerns emerged about her care.

But obstetricians and GPs agreed there is no evidence to support the proposal to have a three-day pause before undergoing a termination.

Dr Boylan said: "It may act as a barrier and it makes unwarranted assumptions about women's ability to make their own decisions."

Women whose scan suggests a fatal foetal abnormality must also have access to an MRI to ensure a mistake is not made before any termination is performed.

The only MRI in the country is in the National Maternity Hospital but this should suffice if arrangements are made, the committee heard.
Under fire: Sinn Fein leader Mary Lou McDonald has been accused of stretching credibility concerning an alleged abusers possible party membership. Photo: Collins

Mary Lou McDonald is facing an intense political backlash over her response to a Police Ombudsman investigation which found RUC intelligence suggested a Sinn Fein member was suspended from the party as he was suspected of abusing children.

Fianna Fail leader Micheal Martin said it was "not credible" for Ms McDonald to claim she could not establish whether the man alleged to have abused Mairia Cahill was a member of Sinn Fein.

Mr Martin said Ms McDonald's response to the controversy shows there is an "overarching impulse" within Sinn Fein to protect the IRA and the republican movement "at all costs".

"I think Mary Lou's response stretches credibility," he told the Irish Independent.

"Sinn Fein knows an awful lot more than they are letting on and Mary Lou knows an awful lot more."

Labour Party leader Brendan Howlin said it was time for Ms McDonald to show "real transparency" over how Sinn Fein handled Ms Cahill's case.

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"There are outstanding questions that need to be answered about membership of Sinn Fein and the type of internal investigation that was carried out at the time," he said.

"Many of the same people that were in Sinn Fein when this happened are still there and should be able to provide the Sinn Fein president with the answers to the questions she is avoiding."

On Tuesday, Ms McDonald said she could not establish if Ms Cahill's alleged abuser, Martin Morris, was a member of the party she leads as Sinn Fein's "record keeping was not as it is now 20 years ago".

The Sinn Fein leader said she would not discuss RUC intelligence about Sinn Fein and Ms Cahill's rape ordeal as she was not a "spook" or a "spy".

A disclosure letter given to Ms Cahill by the Police Ombudsman of Northern Ireland said the RUC received intelligence in 2000 which suggested Mr Morris was suspended from Sinn Fein as he was "suspected of abusing certain children".

The RUC intelligence also suggested Mr Morris was investigated by the Provisional IRA for abusing children. Mr Morris has denied he abused Ms Cahill.

The Ombudsman also found there were significant failings by police and the Northern Ireland prosecution service in their handling of Ms Cahill and two other women's abuse allegations.

The Belfast woman received an apology from PSNI Chief Constable George Hamilton for the police force's handling of her case.

Ms McDonald also apologised to Ms Cahill after the report was published but insisted there was no Sinn Fein cover-up of her alleged rape.

Yesterday, Mr Martin said Sinn Fein had sought to "undermine Mairia Cahill's integrity and credibility" since she went public with her allegations in 2014.

"I think the Sinn Fein response has lacked honesty from the outset and continued to show this impulse to protect the IRA and protect Sinn Fein at all costs," he said.

Ms McDonald has said she "never disrespected" Ms Cahill during her rape ordeal.

Sinn Fein TD Eoin O Broin, who was a councillor in Belfast between 2001 and 2004, said he would also not be able to establish if Mr Morris was a party member. He said he knew Ms Cahill personally and said she was "probably failed" by Sinn Fein's handling of her abuse allegations.

Sinn Fein did not respond when asked what steps were taken to establish if Mr Morris was a party member.
Aftermath: The caravan at Claddaghduff, Galway where a Swiss tourist was killed. Photo: Paul Mealey

Friends of the woman killed on the west coast of Ireland during Storm Ali have said she seldom left Switzerland and was looking forward to her time in the west of Ireland.

Mother of three Elvira Ferraii (56) died when the caravan she had been sleeping in at a campsite in Clifden Co Galway was thrown into the Atlantic during gale force winds.

Emergency services were called to the scene around 7.45am on Tuesday morning and she was pronounced dead at the scene.

Her body was removed to Galway University Hospital, where a post-mortem was to be carried out.

Friends of the Swiss-native, who had been working as a nurse said she seldom left Switzerland and had really been looking forward to her trip.

We are deeply shocked by this tragic accident, friend Rolf Weber told Swiss newspaper Blick.

He added that his wife had a close and personal relationship with her and had been friends for a long time.

Ms Ferraii had recently moved to the Steinmaur area in the canton of Zurich and had separated from her husband 14 years ago.

It is understood Ms Ferraii had travelled to Ireland alone for five weeks to attend an English language course.

She had just one week left before she would return home to the rural town of Steinmaur, near Zurich in Switzerland and had planned to spend her final week in the west of Ireland.

A neighbour in Steinmaur where she had recently bought an apartment said she was well liked and was extremely nice as well as sporty.

A spokesperson for the Swiss embassy said they were in contact with the deceased's immediate family and arrangements were being made.
Garda Commissioner Drew Harris has stated that Garda attire when evicting protesters from a vacant commercial premises in Dublin recently was not correct

Overtime for gardai in Dublin has been significantly cut this evening in the latest drastic measure to fix a 30m deficit in the garda budget.

In a directive issued today, all discretionary expenditure has been revoked from 6pm this evening while certain non-discretionary overtime for gardai in the capital has been impacted.

Anti-burglary patrols under Operation Thor and public order units to police protests have also been affected.

Overtime for administrative duties has been cancelled immediately while overtime for court attendances, protections posts and protests will only be granted only in exceptional circumstances.

Certain individuals currently under active threat as a result of the ongoing Hutch/Kinahan feud have protection posts stationed near their homes.

Senior gardai have said the cuts are necessary to address the budgetary pressures currently being experienced.

Earlier this month it emerged that the garda budget was 30m in the red, with over 20m due to overtime and related costs.

The directive, issued by the Assistant Commissioner of the Dublin Region on behalf of the Garda Commissioner, also casts doubt over funding for Operation Thor and Operation Hybrid Patrols which were launched in response to the gangland feud.

Garda management have said that clarity is being sought in relation to these operations and that, until resolved, overtime for such units will only be sanctioned following consideration of an application.

Sources have stressed that the cuts will have significant impact on regular policing.

A 70-hour cap on individual overtime for each roster period has also been introduced to ensure individual members health and safety

The overtime cut for the capital came just hours after similar announcements were made for national detective units investigating serious crime.

Yesterday a directive was issued by Garda HQ which stated that discretionary overtime for units in Special Crime Operations (SCO) was being cancelled.

Units affected by the over-time ban include the Drugs and Organised Crime Bureau (DOCB) which has been at the forefront of garda operations targeting the Hutch and Kinahan crime gangs.

However, a senior source stated that threat to life operations would not be affected by the cut.

Garda Commissioner Drew Harris said the current budgetary situation is not sustainable.

An Garda Siochana must work within the annual budget provided to it by Government. This has been stressed continually to Garda managers at all levels throughout 2018.

Regrettably, An Garda Siochana will significantly exceed the budget this year. This is not a sustainable position.

To minimise the impact on policing and security activity, while reducing the excess spend before the end of the year, I have cut discretionary overtime and administrative overtime, the Commissioner said.

The decision to cut over-time has been strongly criticised by the Garda Representative Association (GRA) who described it as extraordinary.

So far more than 50 murder bids linked to the feud have been saved due to operations by SCO, with the last murder linked to the gangland feud carried out in January of this year.

The Garda union said that overtime is essential for police work and called for it to be reinstated.

The GRA notes that a Directive from Assistant Commissioner, Special Crimes Operations, has stated that all discretionary expenditure across a range of areas has now been cancelled.

This will impact on the capacity of all gardai on the Frontline to do their job  particularly those involved in the investigation of crime gangs in the Capital, GRA communications director John OKeeffe said.

This is an extraordinary development. As overtime is only ever incurred where necessary and must be approved in advanced. Where the requirement continues to exist, it is clear evidence of a resourcing issue. Overtime is essential if our members are to provide an effective policing service to the general public in Dublin and across the country.

While excessive overtime is part recognition that Frontline gardai do not have adequate policing resources, regardless, overtime will always be a feature of policing, due to the nature of the job and the varying demands it makes on officers. This is not an Irish but a global policing phenomenon, he added.

Similar measures were introduced on September 13 to the Eastern Division including counties Kildare and Wicklow.

A ban on Sunday overtime was announced as well as a cut to such funding for supplement units in an effort to correct the national budget allocation by 30pc.
The country's top civil servant has shot down the idea of an Oireachtas probe into spending by the Office of the President.

The secretary general to the Government, Martin Fraser, has warned the Dail's Public Accounts Committee (PAC) a proposed examination of presidential expenses appears to be "unconstitutional".

He said it would "undermine the principle of the political impartiality of the civil service" during an election campaign that he says is "fully under way".

The PAC is due to decide today whether or not to pursue the idea of scrutinising spending related to the presidency.

A recent analysis of expenditure of taxpayer funds connected to the Office of the President during Michael D Higgins's tenure showed spending of more than 55m. That was spread between Aras an Uachtarain and other State agencies such as the OPW.

Records relating to the presidency are exempt from Freedom of Information (FOI) laws.

Mr Higgins previously said he would be "perfectly happy" to sign legislation that would allow greater public scrutiny under the FOI Act.

In a letter to the PAC, Mr Fraser said the Office of the President was "unique" and "above politics". He pointed to the Constitution that states the President is not answerable to the Houses of the Oireachtas. Mr Fraser said it seemed "impossible not to breach this" as part of a proposed PAC examination of spending.

Fianna Fail TD Marc MacSharry said he found the suggestion that it would be unconstitutional for the PAC to examine presidential spending to be "bizarre".

He said he can't understand the claim that it would undermine civil service impartiality.
Ian Paisley has vowed to fight a by-election if one is forced. Picture: PA

Ian Paisley has thanked the voters of North Antrim for their "unwavering support" after Westminster's first ever recall petition fell short of the threshold required to unseat him.

The MP also hailed his family and "true friends" for sticking by him after he narrowly avoided a by-election.

Mr Paisley would have been ousted as an MP if 10% of the electorate in his North Antrim constituency - 7,543 voters - signed the petition. In the event 7,099 people signed it (9.4%).

The petition device, created following the Westminster expenses scandal, was initiated after Mr Paisley was banned from the House of Commons for 30 sitting days for failing to declare two 2013 family holidays paid for by the Sri Lankan government.

A parliamentary watchdog found in July that a year after the luxury holidays, Mr Paisley lobbied then prime minister David Cameron not to support a UN probe into alleged Sri Lankan human rights abuses.

In a statement to the Press Association, Mr Paisley said the "electorate had spoken".

"In July I apologised for a mistake made almost six years ago."

"The electorate was asked to pass judgment. 90.6% have accepted my apology.

"The electorate has clearly spoken.

"I would like to thank my true friends, family, the electorate who have stood by me with unwavering support. Hallelujah."

The long-standing Democratic Unionist, whose late father the Reverend Ian Paisley founded the party, is currently suspended from the DUP pending its own internal investigation into his conduct.

Three centres were opened in North Antrim for the last six weeks to give voters the opportunity to sign the petition. Constituents were also able to put their name to the petition via post.

Northern Ireland's Chief Electoral Officer Virginia McVea announced the outcome in Belfast around 1.25am on Thursday morning after a count that commenced at midnight.

"The petition has not been successful," she said.

Ms McVea communicated the outcome to Speaker John Bercow's office in London before making the announcement. Mr Paisley, who was not there in person, was informed by text message.

Afterwards Ms McVea rejected criticism that has been levelled at her by Sinn Fein for only opening three centres where people could sign the petition, when the maximum permitted was 10.

She said there had been "unprecedented" access afforded, with the longest ever electoral period in the region and voters able to access postal ballots on demand.

"There has never been access to an electoral event like that before," said told the Press Association.

"And the three designated places were the three hubs within the North Antrim constituency. Legislation allows for one up to a maximum in any constituency of ten across the UK and we decided on three."

Ulster Unionist leader Robin Swann said it was clear there was no public appetite for a by-election.

"I respect that outcome," he said.

"However I would caution Ian Paisley not to see this as some sort of victory or endorsement of his actions in acting as a paid advocate for a foreign government and bringing North Antrim and the House of Commons into disrepute.

"Rather I would urge him to use the time that he has been suspended from Parliament and the DUP, to reflect on the severity of what he has done and the embarrassment he has brought on Northern Ireland. He should demonstrate some humility."

Mr Paisley's Commons ban has left current Prime Minister Theresa May shorn of one of her 10 DUP MP confidence and supply allies during a period that could witness several crucial Brexit votes.

It has also given the DUP another headache at a time when the party is under intense scrutiny at public inquiry hearings in Northern Ireland examining its handling of the botched green energy scheme that brought down Stormont powersharing.

An investigation by the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards found the cost of the hospitality afforded Mr Paisley and his family may have been "significantly more" than his 50,000 estimate.

It found the Sri Lankan holidays included business-class air travel, accommodation at first-class hotels, helicopter trips and visits to tourist attractions for the North Antrim MP and his wider family.

The trips also included meeting with Sri Lankan governmental figures.

Mr Paisley's threshold for registering such hospitality in 2013 was around 660.

In March 2014, Mr Paisley wrote to Mr Cameron to lobby against a proposed United Nations resolution setting up an international investigation into alleged human rights abuses in Sri Lanka.

In the wake of the watchdog report, Mr Paisley apologised for what he described as an "unintentional failure" to declare the holidays.

In the 2017 general election, Mr Paisley retained his North Antrim seat with a landslide 20,000-plus majority, securing nearly 59% of the vote.
When I was growing up, doing chores were just part and parcel of life. My parents ran their own business so helping out was essential - there were no questions asked, it was just accepted that all hands had to be on deck.

Needless to say, I got used to getting my hands dirty and it did me no harm - in fact, I would go so far as to say it instilled in me a work ethic which has put me in good stead throughout my life.

And experts would agree. A 20-year study by the University of Minnesota found that doing chores from the age of three is the best predictor for having a good education, a solid career and healthy relationships with family and friends in adulthood.

As head of research for the Irish Cancer Society, Dr Robert O'Connor has undoubtedly found success. He had to do chores as a child and says it was a vital component in shaping his attitude towards work and life in general.

"I was the oldest of four kids and my dad frequently worked away, so there was always plenty for us to do," says the Wexford man. "I looked after both of my sisters - took them for walks, fed them, changed nappies and was the only one who could get my youngest sister to sleep reliably. I also did the dishes, mowed the grass, put the washing out, peeled vegetables and made dinner.

"My mother got very ill when I was about 12, so I had an important role as the eldest and did a lot of the day-to-day stuff. Then she got leukaemia just before my Leaving Cert so I juggled home and study. She got through that and I left home to go to college at 17 where I was well prepared for life on my own."

Expand Close Deborah Donnellys kids Casey and Frankie help their mother with the cleaning. Photo: Tony Gavin / Facebook

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Dr O'Connor says as well as promoting independence, his experiences also taught him to appreciate the benefits of hard work.

"Doing chores did have an impact on me - there's very little I can't do around the house and I'm a pretty good cook as a result of helping look after my family," he says. "I didn't know any better and just fitted everything in as most children in any part of the world do. I also appreciate the value of work and what money means."

Professional artist and homewares designer, Deborah Donnelly, also had a busy role as a child and believes that her experience helped her to become the success she is today.

"I am the eldest of three girls and for most of our childhood we were a single-parent household," she says. "So we had to pretty much fill a huge role as children and by the age of eight, I was able to roast a chicken and put on laundry. My chores included making school lunches and cleaning up after dinner - in between hanging the clothes out to dry or running to the local shop for milk and cutting the grass on weekends.

"I resented it at the time as my friends never had the type of chores I did. The neighbours thought we were great, but I always thought my mom was just lazy - I laugh at this now as she was far from lazy being a single parent. We also had students so there was a lot of running around after them too, so keeping the house tidy was priority. But it definitely developed my work ethic from an early age."

While research certainly indicates that having to help out around the house is beneficial for children, a survey of over 1,000 American adults by Braun Research revealed that while 82pc reported having regular chores growing up, only 28pc said that they require their own children to do them.

But Donnelly, who lives in Dun Laoghaire with her husband and three children (aged 16, 12 and 10), realised how her work ethic was formed at an early age and has cultivated a similar pattern in her own home in order to instil independence and eventually success in her family.

"My kids are able to cook and clean and I get joy seeing them prepare a meal - although it can be hard sometimes to stop myself from 'mammying' them," she says. "My eldest now has a paid part-time job so I know he's a good worker and the younger ones know they won't get pocket money unless their chores are done - we all have roles and responsibilities.

"I think chores are a great thing as they are a part of life and help build confidence - they are training for the real world. But I have seen a huge difference over the years as when my mother took in students years ago, most had part-time jobs to pay for their digs. These days, their parents turn up on a Sunday night with shopping - I would cringe if I had to do that for my kids."

Robert O'Connor agrees and says his 18-year-old son has learned how to be independent, because despite modern appliances, being able to fend for yourself is vital.

"My son did and does a few chores, even though we have a modern house, so there's a lot less to do," he says. "Like me, he's independent and can fend for himself alone, so I think contributing to the household with chores is an important part of finding a role in the family."

Joanna Fortune, psychotherapist and author of 15 Minute Parenting says jobs are vital for children of all ages to help them become independent and self-confident.

"Chores are good for children - they give them a sense of responsibility and independence and a feeling they are part of a family system bigger than themselves," she says

"But we probably do more for our children now than in previous generations and we also try to ensure success for them rather than allow them take (safe) risks and learn from their mistakes.

"So the best way to approach this is start the chores as young as two years old when they can carry their own nappy to the bin or help pick toys up. If you want to tie pocket money to chores, assign additional tasks that you can pay them for doing, but there should always be some chores that children must do without being paid for because your message is that being part of a family means everyone has to help out."
THEY were scenes which seemed to belong in the Ukraine or Crimea.

Yet there they were on a Dublin street  balaclava-clad police officers, looking as threatening as only someone in a balaclava can, while angry protesters filmed and abused them.

As a snapshot of Ireland 2018, it was both depressing and an indictment of Official Ireland.

Like all the institutions of this State, An Garda Siochana has lost a large degree of respect and, even more importantly, trust in the eyes of many Irish people.

A succession of scandals has dented the forces reputation, although it is often conveniently forgotten that many rank and file gardai are even more enraged by the mismanagement of their organisation than the rest of us.

Pinning the blame for years of bad Garda management on the average, ordinary cop is obviously nonsensical. But last weeks sight of masked gardai protecting bailiffs as they evicted protesters from the vacant building on North Frederick Street in Dublins north inner city undoubtedly fed into the narrative peddled by the usual agitators that we are living in some sort of police state.

The reality simply doesnt fit that fantasy.

But it has also been interesting to note that the reason given for gardai covering their faces  to prevent online harassment and threats if their faces were revealed  was widely mocked until it emerged that at least one garda was identified through facial recognition software and has been subjected to a barrage of... online harassment and threats.

So maybe the reasoning behind the facial-masking wasnt so ominously authoritarian, after all.

Nobody likes seeing masked men on our streets  whether its our police officers, or the emerging bands of hard-left wannabe revolutionaries who are equally partial to a bit of balaclava-chic.

That the average working person shares the frustrations of groups like Take Back The City is hardly in doubt  although any average working person who was stuck at the junction on Parnell Street during the ludicrous sit-in during Wednesday evenings rush hour may have found their patience being tested.

Similarly, the loud denunciations by the protesters and the usual left-wing politicians about the balaclavas would have carried more weight if they could convince their membership not to post threats and personal details of individual cops who are also, lest we forget, average working people.

That Wednesdays protest also included a chant of no justice, no peace shouldnt come as a surprise. After all, Irish protesters love nothing more than parroting their American counterparts-inactivism.

Of course, there are many reasonable arguments to be had about police brutality in America, but there was something truly farcical about the sight of predominantly middle-class Irish protesters chanting a phrase which is often followed by the anti-cop threat, pigs in a blanket, fry em like bacon.

Of course, its never fashionable to support the police, and there have been plenty of reasons to feel suspicious of them in recent times.

But the sight of John Connors appearing on The Late Late Show on Friday night and calling them scum shows how far the debate has deteriorated.

It wasnt just that Connorss barb was unfair. It was also stupid and, worse, a lazy piece of rabble-rousing disguised as a political opinion. Then again, as we saw during the Lidl-looting, Connors has form for ridiculous posturing.

Many of us feel uncomfortable with our self-imposed surveillance culture, and the fact that we have all become our own Big Brother is certainly a topic for serious discussion.

But any sense of distaste for those who want to film themselves being the heroes of their own movie should be dwarfed by the sense of unease at the idea of a blanket ban of filming gardai.

The Garda Representative Association (GRA) wants legislation introduced which would make it a crime to photograph or film a garda while they are carrying out their duty, and while you cant blame any trade union for wanting to protect its members, it was disconcerting to hear the Justice Minister agreeing with them.

Speaking on RTE, Charlie Flanagan refused to immediately shoot down such a draconian measure, and when asked if he was in favour, replied simply: I am.

Regardless of your views on the protesters, or the sight of cops in quasi-paramilitary gear, we are still free citizens of this State, and we enjoy freedom of assembly, freedom of association and, yes, we also enjoy the freedom to record the things we see in a public place.

You dont have to like or agree with the people doing the filming, but such a profoundly authoritarian shift in the law would be both chaotic and unworkable.

Even services as essential to a functioning, transparent democracy as court reporting would be immediately under threat. In fact, it would take the average person about 30 seconds to see all the ways this could be abused by nefarious members of the force.

There have been famous allegations of police brutality  such as the violence between protesters and officers during the infamous Dame Street debacle of a decade ago  which were only cleared up by video and photographic evidence, and any move towards criminalising such an act of civil observance/disobedience would immediately place us somewhere around Turkey in the league of open societies.

If the events of the last few years have proven anything, it is that the people need to know they can protect themselves against rough treatment.

The law will never happen, but it is worrying that a serving Justice Minister should even allow it to be put forward for consideration.

The current situation is obviously far from ideal  but the proposed alternative is genuinely chilling.
North Korea has agreed to permanently dismantle engine-testing facilities and missile launch pads in the presence of international inspectors and to move towards the decommissioning of a major nuclear enrichment site.

The announcement followed two days of talks between Kim Jong-un and Moon Jae-in, the South Korean president, who arrived in Pyongyang on Tuesday for a high-stakes summit intended to salvage nuclear diplomacy negotiations between North Korea and the US, which have stalled in recent weeks.

Mr Kim also promised to "visit Seoul in the near future", which would be the first visit by any North Korean leader.

In a joint statement released yesterday, North Korea expressed its "willingness to continue taking additional steps in accordance with the June 12 North Korea-US Joint Declaration, such as permanent dismantlement of its Yongbyon nuclear facilities".

The Yongbyon Nuclear Scientific Research Centre is a major complex about 100km north of Pyongyang, and its permanent closure would be a significant move towards ensuring that Mr Kim gives up his nuclear arsenal.

However, in a joint press conference following their talks, Mr Moon clarified that steps to close it down would be conditional on reciprocal, unspecified, measures from the US, effectively putting the ball in Washington's court.

The pledge to dismantle engine-testing facilities and missile launch pads refers to the Dongchang-ri site in north-west North Korea.

The tentative olive branch comes amid an ongoing impasse between Pyongyang and Washington over the speed of denuclearisation.

The US wants to see rapid, concrete steps on disarmament from Pyongyang, while the North Koreans are pushing for more assurances over security first.

There was no mention in the declaration either of a key US demand that North Korea discloses a full inventory of its nuclear assets, or of Pyongyang's request that the US agrees to a peace treaty to formally end the 1950-53 Korean war.

With neither side willing to blink first, Mr Moon has stepped into the role of mediator in a bid to prevent the breakdown of a fragile diplomatic detente that began early this year and led to a historic summit between Mr Kim and Donald Trump, the US president, in Singapore.

The US administration has not formally responded to the latest developments. However, President Trump, who may meet with Mr Kim for a second summit in the near future, tweeted that the summit's outcome was "very exciting".

"Kim Jong-un has agreed to allow nuclear inspections, subject to final negotiations, and to permanently dismantle a test site and launch pad in the presence of international experts," he told his followers shortly after midnight on Tuesday in Washington.

"In the meantime there will be no rocket or nuclear testing. Hero remains to continue being returned home to the United States. Also, North and South Korea will file a joint bid to host the 2032 Olympics. Very exciting!"

In his own statement to the press, Mr Moon said that he and Mr Kim had committed themselves to creating "a nuclear-free peninsula" and to remove "all threats" that could trigger war.

Their joint agreement specified measures including a joint military committee, the halt of border drills and the withdrawal of 11 border guard posts by the end of the year, in order to reduce the risk of military escalation.

It also outlined plans to reconnect a cross-border railway, to allow letter exchanges and video calls between citizens, and to seek to obtain the rights to co-host the 2032 Summer Olympics.

Mr Kim made no explicit mention of new steps towards denuclearisation, speaking only in general terms of his commitment to "make the Korean Peninsula a land of peace that is free from nuclear weapons and nuclear threat".

The remainder of Mr Moon's trip is expected to be largely focussed on cultural and symbolic activities designed to project an image of cross-border friendship.

Accompanied by his wife, Kim Jung-sook, and a delegation of more than 100 senior business executives and celebrities, he will visit the Mansudae art gallery and dine at the Taedonggang fish restaurant before heading to the "Mass Games", a choreographed gymnastic display in Pyongyang's main stadium.

Mr Moon and Mr Kim will also visit to Mount Paektu, on the border with China. ( Daily Telegraph, London)

Telegraph Media Group Limited [2021]
British American Tobacco has confirmed that chief executive Nicandro Durante plans to retire after nearly 37 years with the company and eight years at the helm (PA)

British American Tobacco has confirmed that chief executive Nicandro Durante plans to retire after nearly 37 years with the company and eight years at the helm.

He will step down from the Dunhill and Lucky Strike cigarette maker on April 1 next year.

British American Tobacco (BAT) said it had been considering successors for some time and had identified a lead candidate to succeed Mr Durante.

The group added it will make a further announcement in due course.

The market is likely to conclude that this was a board-driven decision in response to recent share price performance and investor frustrationOwen Bennett, Jefferies analyst

Richard Burrows, chairman of BAT, said: Nicandro has been an outstanding chief executive.

He was the architect of the current strategy to transform the business and, with the successful establishment of BATs potentially reduced risk products business and the acquisition of Reynolds American Inc, he has created a stronger, truly global tobacco and nicotine business.

Mr Durante, who will remain in post for the next six months to help with a handover, added: It has been a privilege to have led such a great company for the last eight years.

We now have a growing potentially reduced risk product business fully embedded in our organisation and the integration of Reynolds has been successfully completed.

News of the change at the top comes after the groups shares have slumped by nearly a quarter in the last year amid the decline in demand for traditional tobacco products, with investors unsure over its plans for next generation products, such as e-cigarettes.

The group has sought to assure over its plans  with a target for next generation sales to double in 2018 to 1 billion, before rising to 5 billion in 2022.

Mr Durantes tenure saw him oversee the 49.4 billion US dollar (37.5 billion) mammoth deal to buy US tobacco group Reynolds, which was completed in July last year.

On Mr Durantes departure plans, equity analyst Owen Bennett at Jefferies said: Amid much uncertainty and change at present, it seems a strange time to go.

We think the market is likely to conclude that this was a board-driven decision in response to recent share price performance and investor frustration at a lack of communication and tangible guidance over the past 12 months.
Sub-Saharan migrants aiming to cross to Europe take shelter in a forest overlooking the neighbourhood of Masnana, on the outskirts of Tangier, Morocco (Mosaab Elshamy/AP)

Austria has urged its European Union partners to enter talks with Egypt to help stem the flow of migrants entering Europe from Africa, amid deep divisions over how to manage the challenge.

Mr Kurz, whose country currently holds the EUs rotating presidency, and EU Council President Donald Tusk visited Cairo over the weekend for talks with President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi, a top army general who took office in 2014.

Both men have praised him for stopping people from leaving its coast bound for Europe.

Egypt has proven that it can be efficient, Mr Kurz told reporters at an EU summit in Salzburg, Austria.

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Since 2016, it has prevented ships sailing from Egypt to Europe or, when they have sailed, it has taken them back.

Mr Kurz said Egypt is now prepared possibly to deepen cooperation with us in talks. We should use that.

He also said EU leaders support the idea of entering into talks with other North African countries as well.

In dealing with the migrants crisis of the past few years, the EU has been creative, willing to part with billions to secure deals around the Mediterranean with leaders with autocratic leanings.

The bloc lauds the deal it struck with Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan for slowing migrant arrivals to a trickle over the last two years, in exchange for up to six billion euros in aid for Syrian refugees there and other incentives.

Read the remarks by @FedericaMog upon arrivals at the informal meeting of Heads of State or Government https://t.co/80Ibm0LDrQ  European External Action Service - EEAS  (@eu_eeas) September 19, 2018

Italy alone paid billions to former Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi to stop African people from leaving his countrys shores.

Thousands were transported from Libyas coast to its southern border.

Beyond keeping tight control over Egypts coastline, Mr Sissi could have important influence with the military and militias in lawless, neighbouring Libya; a main departure point for migrants trying to enter Europe through Italy.

Already, Mr Tusk is lobbying to hold an EU-Arab League summit in Cairo in February.

The call comes after a summer in which Italys anti-migrant government closed its ports to NGO ships, and even its own coast guard, carrying people rescued at sea.

Hundreds of migrants spent unnecessary days at sea or aboard boats while EU countries bickered over who should take them.

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Whatsapp Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah El-Sissi is seen by EU leaders as a key player (Evan Vucci/AP)

Looking for help from Mr Sissi is a new sign of the EUs determination to outsource the migrant challenge, even though arrival numbers are barely a trickle compared to 2015, when well over a million people entered Europe, mostly fleeing conflict in Syria and Iraq.

EU countries are studying plans to create disembarkation platforms in northern African countries, where people rescued at sea could be dropped off for screening.

No African country has expressed interest in hosting one so far.

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The EUs inability to balance responsibility for the migrants and share the burden of hosting them has been a vote-winner for far-right parties across the 28-nation bloc.

EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini warned that Africa is not keen at the moment.

If we take the approach of: we dont take them, you take them, that doesnt fly, she said.

But this doesnt mean that North African countries would not be ready to cooperate with us, and with the UN, to have a reasonable, sustainable solution.
An anaesthetist convicted of killing his wife and daughter by placing a yoga ball which leaked carbon monoxide in their car has been sentenced to life in prison in Hong Kong.

Malaysian citizen Khaw Kim Sun, 53, had become estranged from his wife, Wong Siew Fing, 47, and their four children, although they continued to live together while he had an affair with a student.

A jury of five men and four women found him guilty at Hong Kongs High Court after seven hours of deliberation.

Judge Judianna Barnes Wai-ling told Khaw: It is shocking that a highly educated and successful man would conjure up such a calculated method to get rid of his wife.

Khaw was accused of putting the gas-filled yoga ball in the boot of a Mini Cooper driven by his wife, Wong Siew-fung, on May 22 2015.

Ms Wong and their 16-year-old daughter were found unconscious in the car parked at a bus stop about an hour after leaving home. They were later declared dead from severe carbon monoxide poisoning, although the vehicle showed no defects such as a leaky emissions system.

The case initially flummoxed Hong Kong police until the presence of the deflated yoga ball drew suspicion.

Khaw was arrested in September after colleagues from the teaching hospital where he worked spoke with police.

He reportedly obtained the carbon monoxide from the hospital, telling colleagues he wanted to test its purity and its effects on rabbits, according to accounts.

Khaw reportedly told police he took the gas home to use it to exterminate rats at home, although a domestic helper employed by the family testified that they had no rodent problem.

While Khaw stood to inherit considerable amounts of property co-owned with Ms Wong following her death, there was no apparent motive for killing his daughter, leading to speculation that her death was unintentional.
A London-based nurse who used voodoo threats to traffick vulnerable women from Nigeria to Germany to work as prostitutes has had her 14-year prison sentence increased.

Solicitor General Robert Buckland went to the Court of Appeal on Thursday to challenge the jail term handed out to Josephine Iyamu.

As she tearfully watched the proceedings via videolink from prison, Mr Buckland urged three judges to find that the sentence imposed at Birmingham Crown Court in July was far too low and should be increased.

After a hearing in London, Lord Justice Davis, Mrs Justice Simler and Mr Justice Dove ruled that the total sentence imposed on Iyamu, now 52, was unduly lenient and upped it to 18 years.

Announcing the courts decision, Lord Justice Davis warned that others found guilty of such grave offences could expect severe sentences.

Liberia-born Iyamu, who was made a British citizen in 2009 having been allowed to stay in the UK due to her nursing qualifications, organised the travel of five women from Nigeria to Germany.

Iyamu, formerly of Wilson Grove, Bermondsey, south London, is the first person to be prosecuted in the UK for arranging or facilitating travel for sexual exploitation of victims with no connection to Britain.

She was found guilty at the end of a 10-week trial of five offences under the Modern Slavery Act, and also a count of perverting the course of justice while on remand.

She was originally sentenced to a total of 13 years for the trafficking offences with a further year for perverting the course of justice.

The appeal judges increased the 13 years to 17 years, leaving the consecutive sentence for perverting the course of justice in place, making a new total sentence of 18 years.

Passing sentence after the trial, Judge Richard Bond told the married nurse that her vile offences had left the women in fear of their lives.

The judge said she would have been fully aware of the dangers involved in a four-week land journey across the Sahara to Tripoli in Libya, followed by a sea voyage on inflatable boats.

The court heard during the trial that Iyamu made her victims swear oaths to hand over money during juju ceremonies which saw them ordered to eat chicken hearts, drink blood containing worms, and endure powder being rubbed into cuts caused by a razor.

The prosecution said it was clear that Iyamu, known as Madam Sandra, had travelled extensively across Europe and into Africa on a regular basis to meet victims.

Defence counsel John Benson QC said Iyamu  the daughter of a politician  had lost everything as a result of her conviction, including her hope of pursuing a political career in Nigeria.

Lord Justice Davis said the court considered that 13 years did not reflect the appalling gravity of this offending, relating as it did to five separate victims.

Referring to the need to deter others, the judge said: Those who engage in vicious and heartless human trafficking of this particular kind are playing high stakes.

He said they needed to know that the courts will show no mercy when such criminality was exposed.

Speaking after the hearing, Mr Buckland said: Modern slavery exists in all societies, and respects neither borders nor jurisdictions.

It has no place in a civilised society and the UK Government is committed to tackling this abhorrent crime wherever it originates, working with our partners across the globe.

The Court of Appeals decision today helps to show that crimes relating to human trafficking, such as Iyamus, will not be tolerated  regardless of where they are carried out.


Prasos Now Processing via Paydentity(TM)

Melbourne, Sep 20, 2018 AEST (ABN Newswire) - Australian Securities and Frankfurt Stock Exchange cross listed iSignthis Ltd ( ASX:ISX ) ( FRA:TA8 ), the leading payment and identity technology company, is pleased to announce that it has signed an agreement with Prasos, Finland's largest cryptocurrency service provider, for the provision of payment processing and identity verification services.Highlights- Paydentity(TM) to process identity verification and payments for Finland's largest cryptocurrency broker service- Prasos received more than EUR140m in deposits last financial year- Visa, Mastercard and shortly JCB to be available as payment optionsPrasos received more than EUR140m in deposits for purchase of cryptocurrency last financial year, and the company's trading volume in the main broker services exceeded EUR220m during the same fiscal year.The partnership with iSignthis supports Prasos' growth plans as they expand their product offerings and allows Prasos to meet the AML KYC and transaction monitoring requirements.iSignthis(R) Paydentity(TM) will be utilised by Prasos for the digital identity verification of their customers, in order to meet upcoming AML compliance requirements, whilst rapidly onboarding customers from anywhere in the world. Paydentity(TM) allows Prasos to accept, monitor and process payments from all major card schemes, and a variety of alternative payment methods for the complete onboarding experience.Prasos will very shortly also accept JCB Cards, to complement the Visa and Mastercard facilities available via Paydentity(TM).Digital Currency Exchanges in Australia are regulated by AUSTRAC and thus already subject to Anti-Money Laundering requirements. The European Union has proposed legislation that will similarly regulate digital currency service providers.About PrasosPrasos specialises in cryptocurrency exchange services and asset management. The company was founded in Finland (Jyvaskyla) in 2012 and currently it has over 60 000 clients in Europe. Prasos is one of the leading cryptocurrency service providers in the Nordics and it operates under the following main brands: Coinmotion.com, Bittiraha.fi and Denarium.- Coinmotion.com is a cryptocurrency investment platform that allows to buy, sell and store cryptocurrencies safely.- Bittiraha.fi is the leading bitcoin news portal in Finland. It also allows simple bitcoin trading options and additional services for bitcoin users.- Denarium.com is one of the leading physical bitcoin producers in the world. The physical bitcoins allow end users to store bitcoins in a safe cold storage.For more information, please visit http://www.prasos.fi About iSignthis Ltd

iSignthis Ltd (ASX:ISX) (FRA:TA8) is a hybrid monetary financial institution and also a RegTech leader in remote identity verification, payment authentication with deposit taking, transactional banking and payment processing capability. iSignthis provides an end-to-end on-boarding service for merchants, with a unified payment, electronic money and identity service via our Paydentity(TM) and ISXPay(R) solutions.

By converging payments and identity, iSignthis delivers regulatory compliance to an enhanced customer due diligence standard, offering global reach to any of the world's 4.2Bn 'bank verified' card or account holders, that can be remotely on-boarded to meet the Customer Due Diligence requirements of AML regulated merchants in as little as 3 to 5 minutes. Paydentity(TM) has now onboarded and verified more than 1.5m persons to an AML KYC standard.

iSignthis Paydentity(TM) service is the trusted back office solution for regulated entities, allowing merchants to stay ahead of the regulatory curve, and focus on growing their core business. iSignthis' subsidiary, iSignthis eMoney Ltd, trades as ISXPay(R), and is an EEA authorised eMoney Monetary Financial Institution, offering card acquiring in the EEA, and Australia.

ISXPay(R) is a principal member of Mastercard Inc, Diners, Discover, (China) Union Pay International and JCB International, an American Express aggregator, and provides merchants with access to payments via alternative methods including SEPA, Poli Payments, Sofort, PRZ24 and others.

Probanx Solutions Ltd, a wholly owned subsidiary of iSignthis Ltd, provides API based access to CORE Banking solutions, SEPA Core, SEPA Instant and SEPA business scheme, for neobanks, banks, credit unions and emoney institutions, and provides a bridge to the Eurosystem's Central Bank of Lithuania's CENTROLink service.
The man at the centre of a sex abuse and financial crimes scandal tarnishing the academy that awards the Nobel Prize in Literature went on trial in Sweden yesterday.

Jean-Claude Arnault, a major cultural figure in the country, faces two counts of rape of a woman in 2011.

The French citizen is married to poet Katarina Frostenson, a member of the Swedish academy. He denies the rapes and other sex abuse allegations.

Proceedings at the Stockholm District Court, which will include testimonies by the alleged victim and seven witnesses, are being held behind closed doors. Closing remarks are expected next Monday, but it was not clear when a verdict would be announced.

Arnault, wearing a light scarf and dark coat, made his way through dozens of reporters seeking comments at the court house. He declined to answer and simply asked them to "leave me alone". Bjorn Hurtig, his lawyer, has said his client is the victim of "a witch hunt" that "may only have the purpose of harming" Arnault.

The scandal led to seven academy members either being forced to leave or quitting. Frostenson quit in April at the same time as former permanent secretary Sara Danius. In May, the academy announced that no prize will be awarded this year.

Arnault has also been suspected of violating century-old Nobel rules by leaking names of winners of the prestigious award - allegedly seven times, starting in 1996.

The allegations have divided the group's 18 members - who are appointed for life - into hostile camps. The scandal began when 18 women came forward in a newspaper with accusations against Arnault.
Shares in Eve Sleep jumped on Thursday as investors took comfort in the companys transformation progress.

The direct-to-consumer retailer, which sells its mattresses online, unveiled interim results for the six months to 30 June showing a 63% increase in revenue, boosting its share price by 17.5% to 20.8p in early trading.

Underlying earnings fell again to a loss of 11.9 million, but analysts praised the groups shift to focus on core markets the UK and Ireland, and France.

While we were disappointed to cut revenue forecasts as Eve exits from non-core markets, it is difficult to argue with the rationale as non-core territories generated about 25% of group revenues at a cost of 60% of the cash burn, said Peel Hunt analyst John Stevenson.

Eves former chief executive Jas Bagnieowski exited the business suddenly in July due to strategic missteps.

The company had launched in multiple new markets in quick succession but later admitted it had underestimated what would be required to crack Europe.

Shares had crashed 60% on the news of Bagnieowskis shock departure.

Co-founder Abid Ismail then took the reins on an interim basis to steer the business in a new direction, focusing on core markets.

The company has now withdrawn from all territories other than the UK, Ireland and France.

Earlier this month former Moonpig managing director James Sturrock was appointed chief executive to lead the company into its next phase.

Chairman Paul Pindar said on Thursday: As you would expect from a new CEO, James is conducting his own strategic and financial review of the business and I have no doubt, given his experience and capabilities, more improvements will be forthcoming.

The market opportunity remains undiminished and Eve, as the most well-known direct-to-consumer sleep brand, continues to win market share.

Eves new strategy has seen it accelerate new product launches including bed frames, pillows and sheets, as well as partner with the UKs leading bed retailer Dreams.

It has also initiated a cost savings plan, laying off 20% of staff and planning further initiatives in the second half.
A shooting at a Maryland warehouse has claimed four lives, including a female suspect who shot herself in the head, authorities said.

The suspect was a 26-year-old temporary employee at the Rite Aid distribution centre in north-eastern Maryland, Harford County Sheriff Jeffrey Gahler told a news conference.

She had been taken into custody in critical condition that morning. Her name was not immediately released.

Three other wounded people were being treated at a hospital.

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It appears only one weapon, a handgun, was used and no shots were fired by responding law enforcement officers, Mr Gahler said.

Krystal Watson, 33, said her husband, Eric, works at the facility and told her that the shooter was a female co-worker.

Ms Watson said her husband told her that the woman had been arguing with somebody else near a time clock after a Town Hall meeting.

And she went off, she said.

Ms Watson said her husband told her the shooting started in a break room.

She didnt have a particular target. She was just shooting, she said as she drove away from a fire station where relatives tried to reunite with loved ones.

She didnt aim. She just shot, Watson said.

A Baltimore hospital said it had received four patients with gunshot wounds from the shooting.

Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Centre spokeswoman Monica Stone said in an email Thursday that she was unable to provide details about the patients conditions.

Mr Gahler said the call about shots fired came in from the Rite Aid distribution centre at about 9:06am

and deputies and other officers were on the scene in just over five minutes.

FBI Baltimore is responding & assisting @Harford_Sheriff with an Active Shooter situation. For updates please follow @Harford_Sheriff.  FBI Baltimore (@FBIBaltimore) September 20, 2018

We can confirm there was a shooting in the area of Spesutia Road and Perryman Road. Multiple victims. The situation is still fluid. Please avoid the area. Media staging area still TBD.  Harford Sheriff (@Harford_Sheriff) September 20, 2018

Mike Carre, an employee of a furniture logistics operation next to the distribution centre where the violence erupted, says he helped tend to a wounded man.

Mr Carre locked the doors of his workplace after the injured man came hobbling in, bleeding from his leg.

He called 911 from a bathroom before helping colleagues wrap the mans blood-soaked jeans above his injury to cut off blood flow.

At a nearby fire station, family members were waiting to be reunited with loved ones. Police blocked off the road outside but were waving in cars driven by people who said they were there to meet up with people who were at the distribution centre.

A law enforcement official said authorities were working their way through the area to clear the facility.

We obviously need to methodically go through the entire complex, ensure there are no other victims inside, ensure that there is no one that was hiding from violence and ensure that there were no other suspects, said Christie Hopkins, communications director for the Harford County sheriffs office.

At this time, we are confident that the suspect acted alone. And that person is in custody. We do not believe there is any further threat to the community now, but we still have to completely clear that building.

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The attack came nearly three months after a man armed with a shotgun attacked a newspaper office in Annapolis, Maryland, killing five staff members. Authorities accused Jarrod W Ramos of attacking The Capital Gazette because of a longstanding grudge against the paper.

The FBI described the Aberdeen incident as an active shooter situation and said its Baltimore field office was assisting.

In a tweet, Maryland Gov Larry Hogan said his office is monitoring the situation in Aberdeen and that the state stands ready to offer any support.
This is the second shark attack to take place off the same island this week (David Cheskin/PA)

A girl has been attacked by a shark off the same Great Barrier Reef island in Australia where a woman was mauled a day earlier.

The 12-year-old was rescued by helicopter from Cid Harbour on Whitsunday Islands off the Queensland state coast after being bitten on the upper leg.

The girl, who was on holiday with her father and sister, is in a critical condition and will undergo surgery.

She had lost a significant amount of blood after she was mauled on the thigh, said Queensland ambulance operations manager Tracey Eastwick.

Ms Eastwick said: It is horrific  for us as a community of paramedics it is quite confronting to have two similar incidents in the space of less than 24 hours.

QAS is en route to Cid Harbour in the #Whitsundays after a patient has reportedly been bitten on the leg by a shark.  Queensland Ambulance (@QldAmbulance) September 20, 2018

Before this weeks events, the last shark attack in the area was eight years ago.

The Queensland government will set three drum lines in the area in a bid to prevent any further attacks.

Fisheries officers and water police are also patrolling the area, while swimmers were told to stay out of the water at the popular holiday hotspot.

On Wednesday evening, Justine Barwick, 46, was mauled off the same island while snorkelling.

The mother of two is in a critical condition in the same Mackay Base Hospital following overnight surgery.

A rescue helicopter which scrambled to pick her up was just 15 minutes away from the scene due to an earlier operation.

Crewman Ben McCauley said an emergency doctor who was sailing nearby and others who gave first aid to Barwick had likely saved her life.
Shinzo Abe acknowledges applause from party members after fending off a leadership challenge (Koji Sasahara/AP)the LDP lawmakers shortly after his name was called as the winner of the ruling party presidential elections at its headquarters in Tokyo, Thursday, Sept. 20, 2018. Prime Minister Abe was re-elected Thursday to a third term as leader of the ruling party, paving the way for him to serve as prime minister for up to three more years. (AP Photo/Koji Sasahara)

Japans prime minister Shinzo Abe was re-elected as head of his ruling Liberal Democratic Party in a landslide, paving the way for up to three more years as the nations leader and a push toward a constitutional revision.

The decisive victory may embolden Mr Abe to pursue his long-sought amendment to Japans US-drafted pacifist constitution, although the hurdles remain high and doing so would carry political risks.

Its time to tackle a constitutional revision, Mr Abe said in Thursdays victory speech.

Mr Abe said he was determined to use his last term to pursue his policy goals to sum up Japans post-war diplomacy to ensure peace in the country.

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Lets work together to make a new Japan, he said.

Mr Abe, who has been prime minister since December 2012, has cemented control of his party and is poised to become Japans longest-serving leader in August 2021.

He has several policy challenges, including dealing with Japans ageing and declining population, a royal succession in the spring, and a consumption tax hike to 10% he has already delayed twice.

Amid international effort to denuclearise North Korea, Mr Abe seeks to meet with Kim Jong Un to resolve their disputes, including the decades-old problem of Japanese citizens abducted to the North.

He faces Chinas increasingly assertive activity in the region, and intensifying trade friction with the US that could shake his friendly relations with President Donald Trump.

Mr Abe said he will meet with Trump next week in New York, where they attend the annual UN assembly, to discuss bilateral trade and the roles Japan and America should play in establishing global trade rules.

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Mr Abe renewed his commitment to push for a revision to the US-drafted 1947 constitution, a decades-old pledge of the Liberal Democratic Party since its foundation in 1955 and a goal that none of Mr Abes predecessors has been able to achieve.

Many conservatives see the constitution as a humiliation imposed on Japan following its Second World War defeat.

Among them was Mr Abes grandfather, Nobusuke Kishi, who served as prime minister between 1957-1960.

Mr Kishi was imprisoned as a suspected war criminal during the US occupation.

We'll have to walk on a thorny pathShinzo Abe

Constitutional revision is divisive and it is unclear whether Mr Abe could get enough votes for passage.

For the public, the constitution is a lesser concern than issues such as pay, education and the high cost of child care, surveys show.

If a revision is rejected in a national referendum, Mr Abe would likely have to step down.

Its a goal that would be difficult to achieve, Mr Abe told a news conference later Thursday.

Well have to walk on a thorny path.

Mr Abe and his party want to rush a revision while their ruling coalition still holds two-thirds super majority in both houses, a requirement to propose a revision.

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The next parliamentary election is due next summer.

Mr Abe seeks to submit a draft constitution revision to a parliamentary session later this year.

He is proposing to add a clause to Article Nine, which bans the use of force in settling international disputes, to explicitly permit the existence of Japans military, now called the Self-Defence Force.

In Thursdays leadership vote, Mr Abe defeated his sole challenger, Shigeru Ishiba, a former defence minister.

Mr Abe won 553, or about 70%, of 807 votes.
Donald Trump has jumped in to defend his embattled nominee for the US Supreme Court, saying he felt "terribly" for Brett Kavanaugh, even as senators grapple with how to deal with decades-old allegations of sexual assault.

"I feel so badly for him that he's going through this, to be honest with you, I feel so badly for him," said the US president during a news conference.

"This is not a man that deserves this."

He added that he had not spoken to Mr Kavanaugh about Christine Blasey Ford's accusation that he assaulted her at a party in 1982 but said the allegations "should've been brought up long ago".

Mr Kavanaugh (53) has "categorically and unequivocally" denied the allegations.

Ms Ford has said she is willing to testify before senators but it has emerged she wanted the FBI to investigate her allegations before she appears in Congress.

"Nothing of substance and nothing legitimate can happen by Monday," her attorney, Lisa Banks said, referring to the next judiciary committee hearing. Democrats also said they wanted more time for the FBI to investigate, and more witnesses to come forward, hoping to avoid a "he said, she said" moment.

Those witnesses would include Mr Kavanaugh's high school friend Mark Judge, who Ford said was in the room when she was assaulted, but Mr Judge, who says he does not remember any such incident, has refused.

The jockeying over the hearing underscored the political potency so close to an election that will decide control of both the House and Senate, not to mention the confirmation of a conservative justice likely to serve on the highest US court for decades.

Democrats see their arguments about treating women fairly as the best hope for either sinking the appellate judge's nomination or, should Mr Kavanaugh win confirmation, amplifying their appeals to female voters in November's mid-term elections.

Republicans have been careful to be seen to be giving Ms Ford a chance to be heard, mindful that outright dismissal of her accusation could hurt on election day.
Multiple people have been killed in a shooting in the US state of Maryland, an official has said.

The Harford County Sheriffs Office tweeted that there was a shooting on Thursday morning in the Perryman area that involves multiple victims.

The official said there had been deaths.

FBI Baltimore is responding & assisting @Harford_Sheriff with an Active Shooter situation. For updates please follow @Harford_Sheriff.  FBI Baltimore (@FBIBaltimore) September 20, 2018

They warned that the situation is still fluid and asked people to avoid the area.

We can confirm there was a shooting in the area of Spesutia Road and Perryman Road. Multiple victims. The situation is still fluid. Please avoid the area. Media staging area still TBD.  Harford Sheriff (@Harford_Sheriff) September 20, 2018

The FBIs Baltimore field office tweeted that it was responding and assisting the sheriffs office with an active shooter situation.

The Baltimore field division of the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives tweeted that its special agents were responding too.

An official said that three people had been killed, based on preliminary information.
Taiwan has said it is looking for the owner of a Texas company that makes blueprints for untraceable 3D printed guns who is wanted on an arrest warrant tied to an accusation that he had sex with an underage girl and paid her 500 dollars afterwards.

The National Immigration Agency and Criminal Investigation Bureau confirmed that Cody Wilson was in Taiwan after arriving on the island earlier this month.

Division director Kan Yen-min was quoted by the official Central News Agency as saying the bureau has yet to receive intelligence from the US regarding Mr Wilson, but will continue seeking more information about the case.

Taiwan and the US do not have an extradition treaty but co-operate extensively on legal and security matters.

Austin, Texas, police commander Troy Officer has said that his department is working with national and international law enforcement agencies to find Mr Wilson, whose last known location was Taiwans capital, Taipei.

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Mr Officer said it was unclear why Mr Wilson went to Taiwan, but he is known to travel extensively.

He said before Mr Wilson flew there, a friend of the 16-year-old girl informed Mr Wilson that police were investigating the accusation that he had sex with the youth.

Mr Wilson is identified in the affidavit as the owner of Austin-based Defence Distributed.

After a US federal court barred Mr Wilson from posting the printable gun blueprints online for free last month, he announced he had begun selling them for any amount of money to US customers through his website.

Nineteen states and the District of Columbia sued to stop an agreement that the US government reached with Defence Distributed, arguing that the blueprints for how to print plastic guns could be obtained by terrorists and other criminals.
File photo of Ugandan pop star-turned-politician Kyagulanyi Ssentamu, also known as Bobi Wine (STR/AP)

A lawyer for Ugandan pop star and opposition activist Bobi Wine has said his client has been put into a police van and driven away after arriving home from the United States.

Medard Sseggona said he expected the actions by security forces, who warned they would enforce a ban on all rallies and gatherings.

Police said they would escort Wine, whose real name is Kyagulanyi Ssentamu, to his home just outside the capital, Kampala, to prevent public disturbances.

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Mr Ssentamu contested that decision, saying he is a free man who should be allowed to travel anywhere he wants.

Mr Ssentamu has said he was tortured while in detention after being arrested last month for his alleged role in an incident in which the presidents convoy was pelted with stones.
Candace Owens, a communications director for the conservative non-profit Turning Point, wasted not a minutes time as the Democratic debauchery of Supreme Court appointee Brett Kavanaugh raced like a prairie fire across America. There is little doubt that many politicians -- on either side of the aisle -- play a little loose with the truth. But this Eleventh Hour attack on the Trump-pick who is a whiz-bang in Constitutional law, is the most disgusting and unfathomable plan to derail a valid appointment that has ever been.

It says Kavanaugh tried to jump her bones when she was drunk at 15 and while investigators have found more holes in her story than in a block of swiss cheese, such audacity is near-frightening. The Democrats, so desperate theyll do or say anything, sent 85-year-old Dianne Feinstein (maybe the most vilified female politician in the United States) to deliver an outrageous document alleged to have been written by a very liberal college professor, Christine Blasey Ford.It says Kavanaugh tried to jump her bones when she was drunk at 15 and while investigators have found more holes in her story than in a block of swiss cheese, such audacity is near-frightening.

To give an example, within the first 36 hours after Fords name was known, a variety of news hounds found:

* -- Ms. Ford was 15 and Mr. Kavanaugh was 17 at the time of the alleged incident.

* -- Ms. Ford attended a party without parental supervision.

* -- Ms. Ford stated they had both been drinking.

* -- According to the Washington Post, she states that she does not remember many key points of the incident. She did not recall how she got there. She does not state how much she drank before arriving. She has no idea how she got back home.

* -- There was no rape.

* --  she told no one at the time what had happened to her. It seems odd that she told no one, not even a best friend.

* -- This is nothing, it didnt happen, and he didnt rape me.

* -- Perhaps she was traumatized. She was 15, drinking, at an unsupervised party. Perhaps she misinterpreted horseplay. Who knows?

* -- Memories from events over 30 years ago are not reliable. As are memories retrieved under Psychoanalysis.

* -- Does revenge matter? Kavanaughs mom was the judge when Fords parents faced foreclosure.

* -- Ms. Ford is a Democrat, the party where every end justifies the means.

* * *

The last item is what brought the Turning Points Owen out like a roaring momma bear. She tweeted a great missive that has now gone viral  is the absolute truth -- and tells us that according to:

* * *

THE DEMOCRATIC GAME PLAN IN A SERIOUS EMERGENCY, LIKE LOSING A ELECTION

1) Protest and scream

2) Accuse the candidate of racism

2) Claim that if elected, this candidate will somehow dial back human rights

3) Accuse the candidate of sexual assault. < (we are here).

* * *

Now comes the part that is not funny. It all comes down to trust.

On one hand we have a man so honorable he is on the brink of being a Supreme Court Justice. The FBI has combed him six times. His friends and colleagues  to a one, mind you  are unanimous in praising his values, his integrity, his patriotism and his devotion to our country. He is a brilliant choice for the highest court of our land.

On the other we have two liberal women  Ford and the one they call DI-Fi -- who have been never held to the scathing public scrutiny Kavanaugh just endured. They appear to be meshed with a vindictive Democratic party and  this is proven -- stealthily waited until Kavanaughs public hearings were over before leaking this information so he would have no way for a public rebuttal. Ford is a teaser  dont use my name  I wont testify  maybe I will testify. Please.

Just look at the difference! Given the choice  and lets pretend youve got to make one  who do you believe?

From where I sit, the whole thing is a sham, politics at its sleazy worst. Since I have watched the Democrats daily behavior with sorrow since Trump was elected, this latest bombshell was so disappointing that its bang gets only a two on the ten scale.

The biggest horror? This hoax will destroy the beauty and the magnitude of our #metoo effort that allows women to step forward against the leaches and vermin that too much money has ruined since time and immemorial. My God, weve reached its okay to tell and Feinstein is willing to pitch it all in her unbridled hatred for what middle America has become.

Im told that 60 percent of the women who fight off scumbags never report it. We are also under the belief that there are exceedingly few false allegations -- between 2-and-10 percent. Listen to the voice of Juliet Williams, a gender-study expert at UCLA "This moment is not happening because there are a bunch of women out there who believe due process and the rule of law need to give way to mob justice," she said. "This is a moment where a class of people who have been systematically denied voice, have been denied respect, are being allowed to speak, and first and foremost we need to listen."

Dont you see? We cant let an interloper destroy what has taken our women to achieve for decades.

Are we going to allow a universally-disrespect group of Democratic thugs sacrifice all the good and pain removal the #metoo has achieved over a shoo-in on the Supreme Court? Thats nuts! I dont care how long it takes  Kavanaugh is in, Christine Ford will be forgotten a month from now, and Di-Fi has a clock is relentlessly ticking.

You cant let an 85-year-old rabble rouser to pull out all the stops to thwart what is good in America. Anyone with any allegiance to the Democratic Party that pulls this kind of caper better search harder for the light because this isnt who we are. Ive seen women spend a lifetime of sorrow  alcohol . drugs  homelessness  because they fell in love with a far-lesser bum. We must reach much higher than this.


Red Mountain Zinc-Silver-Gold VMS Project Exploration Update

Ballarat, Sep 20, 2018 AEST (ABN Newswire) - White Rock Minerals Ltd ( ASX:WRM ) ("White Rock" or the "Company") is pleased to provide a summary to date from its inaugural exploration field program at its flagship Red Mountain project.Exploration program highlights for 2018 include:- Discovery and successful drill testing of the new Hunter prospect massive sulphide mineralisation with 1.4m @ 17.4% Zn, 3.9% Pb, 90g/t Ag & 1.6% Cu for 25.8% ZnEq(see Note 1 below) from 48.2m (HR18-01)(see Note 2 below).- Best drill intersection at West Tundra deposit with 3.5m @ 15.1% Zn, 6.7% Pb, 518g/t Ag, 2.1g/t Au and 0.2% Cu for 35.2% ZnEq(see Note 1 below) (WT18-28)(see Note 3 below).- Best drill intersection into the Discovery Lens at the Dry Creek deposit with 4.7m @ 19.5% Zn, 7.8% Pb, 466g/t Ag, 6.9g/t Au and 1.5% Cu for 49.7% ZnEq(see Note 1 below) (DC18-79)(see Note 4 below)- Down dip extension of the Fosters Lens at the Dry Creek deposit with 4.3m @ 4.8% Zn, 2.3% Pb, 1,435g/t Ag, 2.2g/t Au and 0.5% Cu for 43.2% ZnEq(see Note 1 below) (DC18-77)(see Note 4 below) remaining open down dip.- Completion of a detailed regional stream sediment program across the entire 143km2 strategic tenement package to assist in focusing follow-up work for the 2019 field exploration program.- Successful orientation ground geophysics across known mineralisation with CSAMT accurately identifying massive sulphide mineralisation at Dry Creek and West Tundra enabling the technique to be a rapid reconnaissance tool for identifying drill targets within zones of anomalous geochemistry and favourable stratigraphy.- Successful application of portable XRF analysis of soil samples to deliver rapid target generation.- A total of 24 drill holes for 4,111 metres of diamond core drilling have been completed during 2018. Assays are awaited for 7 drill holes. The drill rig has now been demobilised.- The CSAMT crew acquired 40 line km of new data along strike of Dry Creek and West Tundra.- Field crews collected 435 stream samples, 1,835 soil samples and 330 rock chips samples. Stream samples are awaiting assaying.MD & CEO Matt Gill said "We are very pleased with the success of our first field season in Alaska at the Red Mountain project. Through an aggressive approach deploying a drill rig early on the tail of geological prospecting, surface sampling and ground geophysics, we have been rewarded with the discovery of massive sulphide mineralisation in outcrop within three months of starting our very first program.The discovery of a new massive sulphide occurrence at Hunter, open along strike (traced for 500 metres) and down dip, goes a long way to supporting the thesis that the Red Mountain project has the potential to host multiple deposits and expand into a true VMS camp. It is satisfying that the active field season has allowed us to apply a systematic approach to covering the prospective 143km2 ground package, which enables us to focus on the most highly prospective areas in 2019 using proven successful techniques including CSAMT ground geophysics and portable XRF geochemical analysis of soils to generate numerous additional VMS prospects for drill testing in 2019".Mr Gill concluded, "We have collected an enormous amount of geological data from our intense on-ground field work, and much of this information is now working its way through the assay laboratories. We will be compiling this information, together with the current and outstanding drill hole results, to assess, report and plan for next year's value-adding program. Included in this body of work will be an assessment of the existing and new data for a possible JORC Resource Update."The 2018 field season saw continuous use of a diamond drill rig. Drill targets included initial validation drilling of the two known deposits (Dry Creek and West Tundra), extension drilling at Dry Creek, and 9 new targets tested with 13 drill holes including discovery of the Hunter massive sulphide mineralisation 5km west of the Dry Creek deposit. In addition to continuous drilling, the field season also encompassed up to three geological reconnaissance and surface geochemical sampling crews active throughout the field season, and two months of a CSAMT ground geophysics team. The CSAMT survey followed a detailed orientation program of ground geophysics that included moving loop electromagnetics and induced polarisation - resistivity across known mineralisation, and also the use of downhole electromagnetics.Notes:1 ZnEq = Zinc equivalent grades are estimated using long-term broker consensus estimates compiled by RFC Ambrian as at 20 March 2017 adjusted for recoveries from historical metallurgical test work and calculated with the formula: ZnEq =100 x [(Zn% x 2,206.7 x 0.9) + (Pb% x 1,922 x 0.75) + (Cu% x 6,274 x 0.70) + (Ag g/t x (19.68/31.1035) x 0.70) + (Au g/t x (1,227/31.1035) x 0.80)] / (2,206.7 x 0.9). White Rock is of the opinion that all elements included in the metal equivalent calculation have reasonable potential to be recovered and sold.2 Refer ASX Announcement 20th August 2018 "High Grade Zinc Discovery at the Hunter Prospect, Red Mountain".3 Refer ASX Announcement 18th June 2018 "Initial Drilling Delivers High Grade Zinc Results at Red Mountain".4 Refer ASX Announcement 4th July 2018 "High Grade Zinc-Silver Drill Intersections Extend Mineralisation at Red Mountain".About Red Mountain (as more fully set out in the ASX Announcement dated 15 February 2016)- The Red Mountain Project is located in central Alaska, 100km south of Fairbanks, in the Bonnifield Mining District. The tenement package comprises 230 mining claims over a total area of 143km2.- The Red Mountain Project contains polymetallic VMS mineralisation rich in zinc, silver and lead, with potential for significant gold and copper.- Mineralisation occurs from surface and is open along strike and down-dip.- White Rock used historical drilling to determine a maiden JORC 2012 Mineral Resource estimate for the Dry Creek and West Tundra Flats deposit (ASX Announcement 26th April 2017). The Inferred Mineral Resource contains an impressive base metal and precious metal content with 678,000t zinc, 286,000t lead, 53.5 million ounces silver and 352,000 ounces gold.To view tables and figures, please visit:About White Rock Minerals Ltd

White Rock Minerals Ltd (ASX:WRM) (OTCMKTS:WRMCF) is a diversified explorer and near-stage producer, headquartered in Ballarat, Victoria. The Company's flagship exploration project is Red Mountain in central Alaska. At Red Mountain, there are already two high grade zinc - silver - gold - lead VMS deposits, with an Inferred Mineral Resource of 9.1 million tonnes @ 609g/t AgEq / 13% ZnEq. The Company is also exploring its recently discovered large intrusion related gold anomaly at Last Chance, also located in the Tintina gold belt of Alaska, home to multi-million gold ounce deposits like Pogo, Fort Knox and the Donlin Project. The Company also has the Mt Carrington project, located near Drake, in Northern NSW, which is a near-production precious metals asset with a resource of 341,000 ounces of gold and 23.2 million ounces of silver on an approved mining lease, and with a Gold First PFS and JORC Reserve.
Ranbir Kapoor and Alia Bhatt are the surely the hottest thing in our B-town right now. The buzz is that the two actors might get hitched for life very soon. The families of Alia and Ranbir are both welcoming for one another. They have stated to the papparazi many a times that they absolutely adore the choice of their children.

After the nod of Rishi Kapoor, Neetu and Soni Razdan, this one step from Mahesh Bhatt , Alia's father, has explained why Ranbir is special. It is Mahesh Bhatt's 70th birthday today and he has sent a personal invite for his damad-to-be Ranbir kapoor. The Saawariya star is the guest of honor and well, he should be, he is after all the future son in law of the Bhatt family.



Featured Video

Earlier the reports were that the families of Alia and Ranbir will meet over a grand gala dinner to officially meet for the first time as future samdhis. But it's this special invite for Ranbir which is currently the talk of the town.
Anurag Kashyaps Manmarziyaan has landed in controversies post release. One of the individuals from the Sikh community filed a complaint against the film expressing anger against a few scenes. The producers of the film soon deleted those scenes from the film which has left Mr. Kashyap extremely unhappy.

Twitter

Reports suggest that Sikh community has problems with few scenes in the film that is Taapsee and Abhishek shown smoking, and Taapsee who is married to Abhishek cannot think of her ex-boyfriend Vicky Kaushal while entering the gurudwara. The producers deleted those from the film leaving Anurag uninformed and furious.

Instagram

Angry Kashyap soon shared cryptic posts against the producers which read,

Congratulations. Here by all problems of Punjab are solved and Sikh youth have been saved. Happy to be back in La La land again. Next time you are threatened by a film please call Kishore Lulla directly on +91 98679 *****. Eros knows how to solve matters in minutes.

Twitter

Before my tweet is taken down -Congratulations . Here by all problems of Punjab are solved and Sikh youth have been saved . Happy to be back in LaLa land again. Next time you are threatened by a film please call Kishore Lulla directly on Eros knows how to solve matters in minutes pic.twitter.com/4yqU3T9utK  Anurag Kashyap (@anuragkashyap72) September 20, 2018

Earlier Anurag had clarified that those scenes taken by him are not to hurt anybodys intention but the need of the film, When we shot the smoking scene, it was shot on the street and there were close to 150 people watching the shoot. We asked before doing the scene and were told that he has to take the Turban off before he smokes away from his house. We were also shown how Robbie (Abhishek) should take the turban off with both hands and how he should hand it over and how the cousin should take it. It was never the intention to hurt the community and why would we do that when we got so much love from them.

Instagram

Wonder if every Anurag will work with these producers again.
1. Emilia Clarke Gets Stunning Dragon Tattoos Because Mamma Aint Never Forgetting Her Babies

And not only in the show, but Emila Clarke who plays the role of Daenerys Targaryen will also forever be the Mother of Dragons. Wondering how? The diva has got three dragon tattoos in the honour of Game of Thrones.

2. Rakhi Sawant & Her Outrageous Claims About Anup Jalota & His Girlfriend Will Make You Cringe

A lot of fans on social media just cannot get over the couple. And one amongst them is Rakhi Sawant. Known to be controversys favourite child, the diva is making outrageous claims on social media about Anup Jalota and his girlfriend Jasleen Matharu.

3. Akshay Kumar Turns Good Samaritan, Donates Rs 5 Lakh To An Unemployed Acid Attack Survivor

Talking about these efforts, Akshay added that this was just a tiny gesture and the primary idea was to help Laxmi find jobs without having to worry about paying rent and supporting her child as well.

4. Game Of Thrones Showrunners Say The Final Season Is Taking Long But It Will Be Worth The Wait

"The final season's taking a long time because it's the biggest thing we've ever done. It was nearly a full year in Belfast either prepping it or actually shooting it. I think when people see it they're going to understand why it took so long. The last season is far beyond what we've ever attempted before," Benioff told reporters backstage at Primetime Emmy Awards.

I think now audiences are going to be hungry for a hero who lives in Mumbai or Delhi. I think we would do something like that down the line, its just about making the finances work, making sure we do it right creatively. I think that would be terribly exciting and there is a hunger for that around the world.


Dividend Reinvestment Plan Price and Participation

Sydney, Sep 20, 2018 AEST (ABN Newswire) - The Board of MNF Group Limited ( ASX:MNF ) is pleased to advise that the subscription price for the Dividend Reinvestment Plan (DRP) applicable to the 2018 final dividend is $4.63 per share.This Subscription price represents a 4.15% discount to the 5 day Volume Weighted Average Price (VWAP) ending on 19 September 2018.The company received subscriptions for 12.7M shares from 681 shareholders. This represents participation from 17.4% of the company's issued capital and 16.5% of the shareholder base.The Board wishes to thank all those who have elected to participate in the MNF Group Limited DRP.About MNF Group Ltd

MNF Group Limited (ASX:MNF) is one of Asia-Pacific's fastest growing technology companies. Listed on the ASX since 2006, it is now capitalised at around $380m, and twice winner of the Forbes Asia-Pacific "Best under a Billion" award. Headquartered in Sydney, Australia, the company has over 500 people located across Asia-Pacific, Europe and North America. MNF develops and operates a global communications network and software suite enabling some of the world's leading innovators to deliver new-generation communications solutions.



As the world moves to IP, MNF Group is building the brands, services, network and technology to lead the way. For further information about MNF Group Limited please visit: http://mnfgroup.limited/
Ah, mothers. The more we say the less it is. Your biggest fan, your biggest critic. Your best friend and your worst enemy. Your partner-in-crime and your own dose of courtroom drama. She puts you in place one second and lifts you up the next. Funny how we live life thinking we're these innocent little creatures who will be accepted (farts, burps, kisses et all) by our mothers no matter what. But did you ever stop to think for a second you might just be her own little human guinea pig, her own little social experiment? That may be the joke's really on us? If you're only just waking up to this realisation, then this list is not something you should skip.

Here are 23 #MomThings that'll make you realise you'll always be your mother's human guinea pig:

1. Who said the fidget spinner is new? Remember when all mom needed was one chappal to spin on our behinds?



2. When mom plays you, but even THAT is for you own good



My mom asked me to cut up a peach for her and said, thats for you, eat more fruit #ijustgotplayed #momthings #wtf   grace (@graceleecho) August 21, 2018



3. You may think you're an adult. That is until you lose your lunchbox and go home to this

When you tell Mom you've lost your Tupperware dabba pic.twitter.com/BiyeLf6guB  Priyal (@priyal) January 4, 2017

4. In case, you were wondering why the hell you've started drinking a wee bit more lately, may be here's a clue. Take it



me: "i might make another pot of coffee."

mom: "you're not drinking wine?"

me: "it's only 1 p.m."

mom: "...so?"#conversationswithmom  Erin McCarthy (@erincmccarthy) January 23, 2016

5. Like when you're trying to stay away from drama and it takes you a while to realise your mom is the drama

I told my mom I got my nose pierced and she yelled "you're throwing your life away!!!!!!!" And then hung up #justmomthings  gvd anna (@anna_banana757) September 9, 2015

6. *Gets alert on phone. Opens Instagram at the speed of light. Sees who the like is from. Ded*



Someone commented on an Instagram of me with "You look as beautiful as the day I met you." IT WAS MY MOTHER. #funnymom  Kelsey Nicole (@kelseyism) July 24, 2017

7. Then just like that you ask her if she's proud of you and are hoping for some deep meaningful conversation that'll create a moment between you two, but she's a cool cat so she does this instead



Me: Mom are you proud of me?

Mom: Didn't you see my comment on your Instagram photo? I said I am.

Me: Oh dear lord.. #momthings  Larissa DSa  (@Larissa_wlc) June 25, 2016

8. 'Sorry mom. Either the lauki goes or I go.' *Mom proceeds to cook lauki*

Ganga is our mother. Cow is our mother. India is our mother. Only our mother is not our mother cause she cooks lauki sometimes.  dorku (@Dorkstar) April 29, 2014

9. You've clearly not troubled your mom enough if she hasn't said this to you at least once



"I love you more than anything in this world, but please leave me alone now I'm pooping." #conversationswithmom #guesswhichoneofussaidit  Hello Starlight  (@PJCalamity) July 23, 2011

10. But when it comes to your personal space, she'll have you know there's no such thing

Daughter: You're invading my personal space

Mom: You came out of my personal space  Moe (@_Mo_lee_) January 8, 2016

11. When you dare to ask your mom about watching a show together and this happens. An evening with the Netflix menu it is



Mom: what's Dexter? (the show)

Me: well this guy--

Mom: is it about a robot?

Me: no, he's a--

Mom: what is Chuck??#conversationswithmom  Katie Barfield (@katiebarfield) December 25, 2011

12. Sometimes when you're trying to gossip with mom but she gets caught up in the most random details and you wish you'd never started on this topic

Me: That's what she said. Mom: she said that about what? #funnymom  Lizz (@LizLegg) December 21, 2011

13. And, yet, for someone so into 'the details' this is literally how every phone conversation ends... with you talking to dead air...

geez my mom is always so eager to hang up the phone, i haven't even finished my last sentence.. grrrr :S #funnymom  Theresa Lee (@redbeancc44) May 30, 2009

14. One fine evening she suddenly drops this little bomb from the life she had before you happened. "Erm, could you repeat that mom? Mom? Moooooooom...?"



"You've never smoked hooka before?" "No, I've smoked a lot of things before, but not that." #ConversationsWithMom  biz markie. (@AsToldByRox) May 24, 2011

15. Gotta love those sweet, horrific memories of wearing nasty ass sweaters that gave your instant rashes, which makes me wonder what f*ucked up level of passive-aggressive (sorry muma) behaviour that was



My mother was feeling cold so now I'm wearing a sweater.  Akshar (@AksharPathak) November 27, 2013

16. Like, can we please have a moment of silence for all the stuff we've dropped when mom was sleeping, and we came this close to losing our necks



*Accidentally drops a glass in the kitchen*

Mother: "Tod do. Sab kuch tod do. Puri kitchen tod do. Pura ghar tod do."  Akshar (@AksharPathak) December 9, 2013

17. It's only in moments like these that you miss that scratchy ass sweater

No shave November is cool until your mom throws you out of the house.  Trendulkar (@Trendulkar) November 11, 2014

18. Sometimes she does things and I'm like 'Are we even related? Do you even know me?'

I asked my mom to get me a slice of pizza... #funnymom pic.twitter.com/wgYwLe5hcI  madison (@Maddy_hinrichs) March 28, 2013

19. Never a moment of chill with Captain Mom

the moment i land in mumbai, and i meet mom, mom tells me, lets go get modaks and ladooos #JustMomThings  p (@pixystiix) September 13, 2018

20. Love how I'm always the idiot for not getting an obvious joke. Real mature, mom

Me: I'm at 69% battery

Mom: hahahahahahahaha

#JustMomThings  COLE PLANTE (@coleplante) November 29, 2015

21. 'Mom, did you even try?'

#JustMomThings texting you and saying "call me" instead of just calling you  gracie (@Gracehartman_11) July 3, 2016

22. And no matter how much work you do, it's ne-ehh-vurrr enough

Me:*cleans house*replaces bedsheets*rolls round rotis*paints grandma's toenails*

Ma: Hum tumhare jitne the tab hum roller coaster banate the  krupa (@4ngery) June 5, 2015



23. But, in the end, there's no one like her. And you know she's the best #wingmom there is. Even when it comes to your messed up dreams


Widow of Justice Dalip Kumar, former chief justice of Delhi high court was held hostage by their domestic help. According to police, the victims were robbed of cash and valuables present at home. The incident took place in New Friends Colony area of Delhi.

In her statement, the victim, identified as Riba Kapur said that she and her 45-year-old daughter who lives with her were held hostage by the servant and his accomplices, a police officer said. Ms Kapur alleged that her daughter was hit by an iron rod by accused, the officer said.

Police said the accused stole cash and jewellery worth lakhs of rupees and fled the spot in the car owned by the victims. The injured daughter called up the police and informed about the incident.

The servant was hired just four days before the incident, police said, adding that a case has been registered and efforts are on to nab the accused.
The biggest drawback of having everything digitally stored is the fact that no matter how many security systems have been put in place, hackers will always find a way.

In the second week of August, the oldest bank of India, Cosmos bank headquartered in Pune fell prey to cyber hackers when an estimated amount of Rs 94 crore and 42 lakh was siphoned off to foreign countries.

The attack was carried out with the help of 450 cards, out of which 400 cards are supposed to be involved on a national level. Later, it was revealed that the same fraudsters were also involved in a cyber fraud of Rs 34 crore at Chennai's City Union Bank in December, the India Today reported.

Representational Image

Investigations had displayed similarities between both the cosmic fraud cases. Debit and Rupay cards were duplicated to carry out the embezzlement. Reportedly, four out of the seven accused Fahim Azim Khan, Shaikh Mohammad Abdul Jabbar, Yustace Augustine Vaz (alias Anthony) and Naresh Maharana were captured in the CCTV footage where they could be seen withdrawing money from ATMs in various South Indian cities.

However, the main question that concerned the authorities was how these hackers were able to steal money on such a large scale? A Press Trust Of India report then revealed that the hackers had stolen information of the bank's VISA and RuPay card customers through malware and had attacked the SWIFT system, an interbank messaging system.

They attacked the ATMs switch server and withdrew a total of Rs 78 crore from various ATMs in 28 countries and another Rs 2.5 crore was taken out within India. In another attack on August 13, hackers again fraudulently transferred Rs 13.92 crore in a Hong Kong-based bank using the proxy SWIFT system, police have said, reported PTI.

The police were able to draw a link between the robbery cases of Pune and Chennai on the basis of CCTV footage captured. The police had registered two cases of cyber fraud in Chennai, one for international transactions and one for domestic ones.

After the police had arrested accused in the Cosmos bank case, the Chennai Police shared the CCTV footage of some ATMs in the City Union Bank case. "We found that four of the seven accused are seen in some of the ATM footage from Chennai," said Jyotipriya Singh, Pune Police DCP (Cyber and economic offences wing).

The robbers used cloned cards and interbank SWIFT transactions to steal from City Union Bank as well.
There seems to be no end to sexual assaults on women in India. Many of the offenders roam around freely without fearing the law. Horrific incidents of young girls being drugged with sedatives, kidnapped, tortured and raped should have led to uncompromising rules against the offenders by now.

Special fast-track courts, strong forensic abilities and commissions for the safety of women have been set up by the government in the past, however, the unceasing judicial process has brought little respite to the survivors.

Indias first 'National Registry Of Sexual Offenders' is an initiative towards ensuring women safety. With this India also becomes the ninth country in this world to maintain such a database, The Indian Express reported.

Photo: BCCL

Here are 7 points that you need to know about this database:

1) The Indian Registry will include names, photographs, residential address, fingerprints, DNA samples as well as the PAN and Aadhaar Card numbers of the sexual offenders.

2) The database will be compiled using the details obtained from prisons across India. Around 4.5 lakh cases will include profiles of first-time as well as repeat offenders. On the basis of their criminal history, they will be classified as one-time or serious offenders, officials informed The Indian Express.

Photo: BCCL

3) A senior government official further revealed that the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) that comes under the Ministry of Home Affairs will maintain this data. It will also be available to law enforcement agencies for carrying out investigation and employee verification.

4) The United States National registry of sex offenders maintained by the Federal Bureau Of Investigation (FBI) allows even the common public to access it. However, unlike the U.S, the Indian data will only available to law enforcement agencies in the country.

5) Other countries like the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, South Africa and Trinidad & Tobago also provide their data only to enforcement agencies.

6) The data of offenders that pose a low danger will be maintained for 15 years, 25 years for those who present a moderate danger whereas habitual offenders, violent criminals, convicts in gangrape and custodial rapes will have a database that is maintained for a lifetime.

Photo: BCCL

7) Arrested and chargesheeted offenders will also find their names in the database through its access will be confined only to officers with a requisite clearance. Reportedly, juvenile offenders will also be included at a later stage.

The decision to set up this database was taken in April this year following the massive outrage over the rape of an eight-year-old in Jammu and Kashmirs Kathua followed by Unnao and other serious assaults of teenagers including the recent Rewari gang rape in Haryana.

The abhorrent sexual assault case of at least 34 girls at Muzaffarpur shelter home in Bihar has made the Indians even more wary of such safe homes. Proper medical and rehabilitation centres, additional public prosecutors, stringent laws and an updated database will keep sexual violence against women in check.
Photo: Reuters/representational image

Over 30 Jet Airways passengers underwent a painful experience after the crew forgot to switch on the cabin pressurisation system, which maintains the pressure inside an aircraft to comfortable levels as it climbs out. The Jaipur-bound flight was turned back to Mumbai after passengers suffered ear pain and nose-bleeding, during take-off. Read More.

Here's More Top News For The Day:

1) While Pak Army Mutilates Indian Soldier's Body, Imran Khan Wants Peace Dialogue With India

Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan has written to PM Narendra Modi seeking resumption of dialogue between the two countries. More specifically, and significantly, Khan has sought a meeting between Sushma Swaraj and Shah Mehmood Qureshi, the Indian and Pakistan foreign minister respectively, on the sidelines of UNGA in New York later this month. Read More.

2) India Now Has A Detailed & Much-Needed Data On Sex Offenders, Here's All You Need To Know

Indias first 'National Registry Of Sexual Offenders' is an initiative towards ensuring women safety. With this India also becomes the ninth country in this world to maintain such a database. Read More.

3) This Transgender Group Performs Plays To Collect Funds For Kerala Flood Rehabilitation

A group of transgender activists have found a new way to raise funds for the rehabilitation work in flood-ravaged Kerala. They perform plays based on their lives. The Dhwayah Trangenders Arts and Charitable Society, a theatre group with a team of 14 transgender staged a play titled Parayan Maranna Kathakal at Ganesham auditorium in Thiruvananthapuram's Thycayd on Monday. Read more.

4) Fire-Fighter Suits, Water Purifiers, Selfie Cameras - NASA Shows How Space-Tech Changed Life

The US space agency, NASA, has launched an interactive website, which allows its users to tour through the building to discover common items that the space agencys technology helped improving over the years. The selfie cameras and water purifiers are among the products that have improved with the help of NASA tech. Read More.

5) Mother Of All Goof Ups: Hong Kong Airline Cathay Pacific Paints Its Own Name Wrongly On Plane

Oops this special livery wont last long! Shes going back to the shop!

(Source: HKADB) pic.twitter.com/20SRQpKXET  Cathay Pacific (@cathaypacific) September 19, 2018

In a gaffe that invited social media ridicule, Hong Kong airline, Cathay Pacific, spelt its own name incorrectly on a new plane and as a result, it had to send back for a repaint.What was more embarrassing for the airline was that the mistake of pointed out by travellers at the Hong Kong International Airport and contacted the airline. Read More.
Border Security Force soldier, Narender Singh, who had gone missing on September 18 during a cross-border firing in Jammu's Ramgarh sector was found dead. The Pakistani forces had fired multiple bullets in his torso, even in his neck that resulted in the soldiers death, reported news agency ANI. Singh a part of the BSF patrol had gone near the fence to clear tall elephant grass when an unprovoked firing by Pakistanis began.

Photo: Narender Singh/NDTV

Now, his son has told ANI that he felt proud that his father had sacrificed his life for the country but now what would happen to his family?

"It is a proud moment for us; not everybody gets the honour of being shrouded in the tricolour but my father did," he said. But what worried him is now who will earn money for the family. Singh was familys sole breadwinner. My brother and I are unemployed. I want my family to be treated with dignity. I want the authorities to provide us with whatever help we need,"

Photo: Mohit Kumar Dahiya, son of slain soldier Narender Singh

He requested the home minister to assure his family that they will be helped.

"I ask Rajnath Singh ji, who was present in Jammu on Monday, to release a statement condemning the incident and assuring that we will get our due. Provide us with all the help. Don't make us beg," he said.

Unrest has simmered in Indian Kashmir, home to a separatist movement, for decades. An insurgency that erupted in 1989 against India has eased in recent years, but most Kashmiris yearn for independence, accuse security forces of widespread rights abuses and some support the few hundred militants still fighting.
Update: India on Thursday said it has agreed to Pakistan's request for a meeting of the foreign ministers of the two countries on the sidelines of the UNGA in New York. However, this meeting does not indicate any change in our policy towards Pakistan and does not mean resumption of dialogue, the ministry of external affairs clarified.

Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan has written to PM Narendra Modi seeking resumption of dialogue between the two countries. More specifically, and significantly, Khan has sought a meeting between Sushma Swaraj and Shah Mehmood Qureshi, the Indian and Pakistan foreign minister respectively, on the sidelines of UNGA in New York later this month.

Khan's letter was in response to Modi's own communication to him seeking a "meaningful and constructive" engagement between the 2 countries. This was after Khan said in his victory speech that Pakistan would respond with two steps to any step taken by India for normalisation of ties.

There has been intense speculation in the past few weeks on whether or not Swaraj and Qureshi were going to meet at UNGA. Khan's letter is also the first formal proposal by either side for a substantive engagement between India and Pakistan since government formation in Pakistan last month.

In his letter, diplomatic sources said, Khan has called for the resumption of the comprehensive bilateral dialogue process which was launched in December 2015 but which couldn't take off because of the Pathankot airbase attack. In that context, Khan said India and Pakistan should look at resolving all major outstanding issues, including terrorism and Kashmir, through dialogue.

It was in December 2015, when Swaraj travelled to Islamabad for a Heart of Asia conference, that India had its last substantive engagement with Pakistan.

Reuters

The joint statement issued then said that foreign secretaries should work out the modalities and schedule of the meetings under the comprehensive dialogue on issues including "Peace and Security, CBMs, Jammu & Kashmir, Siachen, Sir Creek, Wullar Barrage/Tulbul Navigation Project, Economic and Commercial Cooperation, Counter-Terrorism, Narcotics Control, Humanitarian Issues, People to People exchanges and religious tourism".

The Modi government though wants Islamabad to make the atmosphere conducive for any meaningful engagement by acting against terror groups looking to target India from Pakistan soil. In his letter to Khan, Modi had recalled his earlier phone conversation with him in which they had spoken of "their shared vision to bring peace, security and prosperity in the Indian subcontinent, in order to make it free of terror and violence and to focus on development.

Khan's letter also comes in the middle of disillusionment which had started to set in India in the past few weeks with the Pakistan government. Several ministers have gone on record saying that they didn't expect things to change under Khan, not least because of his links with the Pakistan army.

Twitter

This was made manifest most in the controversy over the announcement by Pakistan that it will allow Indian Sikh pilgrims to visit Kartarpur Sahib Gurudwara. Islamabad though never communicated the same, officially, to Indian authorities leading to the perception here that the new government's outreach to India was limited to speeches and media statements.

After he received Modi's letter last month, Khan had tweeted that "To move forward Pakistan and India must dialogue and resolve their conflicts incl Kashmir".

The best way to alleviate poverty and uplift the people of the subcontinent, he had said, was to resolve differences through dialogue "and start trading". A couple of days later, he had again reached out to India by offering assistance for Kerala flood victims.
Russian President Vladimir Putin is as much a celebrity as he is a politician.

A walking Russian military stereotype, hes supposedly an expert in martial arts like judo and sambo, is cool enough to ride a horse bare-chested, and is apparently handy with a sniper too.

Reuters

The Russian leader demonstrated his skill with a rifle recently, while testing it out at a firearms expo in Moscow. Lining up with the Chukavin sniper rifle, Putin managed to hit three of five kill shots, in the head, liver, and abdomen, at a target a cool 600m away.

Its far from the longest known sniper shot, which holds the record at 3,540m, but still fairly impressive for a man whos spent the last few years with his hands full in politics.



Meet one of Russia's deadliest sniper rifles

The Chukavin, officially called the SVCh-308, is a product of Russias legendary Kalashnikov concern, known for making the iconic AK-47. Its based off the design for the Russian SVD compact assault rifle, built by renowned weapons designer Evgeny Dragunov.

Experts say the SVCh is more accurate than the SVD and less prone having the optics dislocated, though the latter is still the main rifle for the Russian Armys marksmen.

The SVCh-308 comes in two configurations, one for 54R and .308 Winchester ammunition, and the other for .338 Lapua Magnum. Its a semi-automatic, as common for an assault-rifle thats also expected to serve as a long-range sniper, box magazine-fed, and features short stroke piston gas operated action. In the case of Putins test, the rifle is also being used with the detachable folding bipod and tactical sound suppressor.

Firing .308 slugs, the rifle is capable of shooting at ranges up to 1,500m. And if test results remain as impressive, the Russian military might finally replace the SVD with this new design.
Back in July Nikhil Bhalla, an advocate on Congress legal team, petitioned the Delhi High Court to delete a scene from Netflix hit Sacred Games.

Now, hes amended his petition, asking for a regulatory committee to be set up to censor all online media platforms.

At the time, Bhallas petition came in response to a piece of dialogue in the show, where the lead character called Rajiv Gandhi a fattu. The Congress party clearly took issue with that, sparking an uproar surrounding the entire show. Since then, Netflix has edited the subtitles in the show to change it from pussy to what it felt was more appropriate as wimp. However, that wasnt enough.

Now, in a statement to Medianama, Bhalla has confirmed that hes changed his petition to encompass broader scope, that of regulating streaming services like Netflix and Amazon Prime. There used to be an online content regulatory committee but that was disbanded by the Information and Broadcasting ministry. Now, the Indian government is considering setting up another under the IT ministry. The next Delhi High Court hearing for this case will be held on October 20, where the decision could be made.

Censorship coming to online video streaming services in India?

If that does happen, we could see censorship similar to what we experience in movie theatres today. If any of you watched Deadpool 1 or 2 in the cinema, you probably remember sitting through a lot of muted cuss words, and even a deleted scene (shown in a trailer for the movie) where Wade Wilson has sex with his wife.

Yeah, now think about how enjoyable Sacred Games would be without all the raw emotion that comes through in its explicit dialogue. Its not like the movie has been covered in filth for the sake of shock and awe either. After all, anyone living in Mumbai can tell you that youd hear at least three quarters of the entire seasons cuss words in a single hour while travelling by train.

Not to mention it would probably mean cutting the scene where Kubbra Saits character reveals herself to Ganesh Gaitonde, without which you lose a crucial part of their love story, not to mention Kukoos vulnerability and character development.

Maybe it's time to just stop pretending were not collectively worse than anything film and TV can show us, and then we may finally have an accurate representation of India.
Since early August, WhatsApp has been at odds with the Indian government over the issue of fake news and hoaxes on the platform.

Since then, the issue has been compounded by demands on behalf of the government, which WhatsApp cant acquiesce.

Aside from other measures, in order to combat violence sparked by incendiary WhatsApps, the government had asked the company to allow the origins of messages on the platform to be tracked. Quite obviously WhatsApp refused, saying it would violate its privacy protocol. And even if the app maker was willing to compromise its end-to-end encryption, changing it would have adverse effects on the security of the entire system.

The Indian government isnt pleased at being denied. The Ministry of Electronics and IT says it plans to send another official letter to WhatsApp, its third since July, reminding the Facebook-owned company it needs to meet requirements or risk being banned from the country. One of these requirements, it says, is to work out a technical solution to allow law enforcement to track the origin of WhatsApps.

WhatsApp has put other preventive measures into place in the meantime, including limiting forwards to five groups at a time in stead of the earlier 250. Its also visibly marking forwarded messages so its easier for recipients to spot, and has even started a radio public awareness campaign against fake news.

Apparently though, thats not enough, as evidence by the governments increasingly annoyed demands. Senior government officials have said that, if compromising its encryption is unacceptable to WhatsApp, then the onus is on the company to provide an alternate technical solution to trace a messages origins.

We are not asking them to look into the contents of the message, one official sad, but if some message has been forwarded, say, 100 times and has caused some law and order problem, then they should be able to identify where it originated from.


Medipharm Labs Interview with Proactive Investors

Perth, Sep 20, 2018 AEST (ABN Newswire) - MMJ PhytoTech Limited ( ASX:MMJ ) ( OTCMKTS:MMJJF ) ("MMJ") is pleased to note the interview with Proactive Investors Vancouver given by Pat McCutcheon, President and CEO of MediPharm Labs, Inc. ("MediPharm Labs"), providing a detailed description of their business and revenue model.The interview can be viewed at: http://www.abnnewswire.net/lnk/ZLIFSM6L MMJ owns 6.9% of MediPharm Labs.About MMJ Group Holdings Ltd

MMJ Group Holdings Ltd (ASX:MMJ) is a global cannabis investment company. MMJ owns a portfolio of minority investments and aims to invest across the full range of emerging cannabis-related sectors including healthcare, technology, infrastructure, logistics, processing, cultivation, equipment and retail. For MMJ's latest investor presentation and news, please visit: http://www.mmjphytotech.com.au/investors/
Author Chetan Bhagat may be a hit with youngsters but with some on social media, however, he is often trolled.

Recently he was roasted for his celebratory tweet on 10m followers. And not too long before that he faced flak on social media after he asked people to send photos of his book.

Bhagat recently took to Facebook to share a piece of his mind about his 'haters', directly addressing them. With a post titled Dedicated to all who dont like me, he mentioned all the struggles of his life before he achieved his dream. From his passion, his writings, the author includes all. I am sorry I dared, I must be abused for that. I am sorry I was born in a simple house but dreamed big. I am sorry I worked hard and made it to the best colleges. I am sorry I had a passion. Middle class Indian kids are not allowed to have passion

People have given a mixed reaction to his post, some mentioning the repetitive content in his books as the reason he is often trolled.

You can read the entire post and its reactions here:

We could only say that hating one person for every single thing they do is disheartening. Being a writer is not easy, but trolling someone who does is. And this post highlights the fact that while social media may be a place for promoting one's talent, it can also be a challenging place for people who have worked to achieve their dreams, but still get constantly discouraged because of the mass point of view.
In a heartwarming gesture, a university cleaner met his family in Jamaica after ten years, all thanks to the students who crowdfunded his trip. In a video that's now going viral, the cleaner named Herman Gordon can be seen in tears when he finds what the kids had done for him.

According to a BBC report, it started back in May when someone lauded Herman as the "jolliest man." Thereafter, a student named, Hadi Al-Zubaidi started a crowdfunding page to help him meet his family in Jamaica.

"We're delighted to say that Herman loved his holiday at a five star resort in Jamaica along with his wife Denise. They celebrated their 23rd wedding anniversary there and have gone on to visit family in Kingston," said a Facebook post

"God bless you all. Everybody will see this and think that I'm a trillionaire," said Herman, according to the post.
Reports of Isha Ambani and Anand Piramal getting married soon are doing the rounds, and it has made people very curious. While they were expected to tie the knot in the coming months, a report on Indiatoday.in, suggests they're getting engaged on Friday, 21 September, at a grand event at Lake Como in Italy, the festivities of which are to last till Sunday.

A grand afterparty is said to follow the engagement ceremony at a grand venue at Lake Como, along with luncheons, dinners and dance ceremonies. A grand lunch programme on 21 September at the guests' respective hotels is expected along with a celebratory dinner scheduled at 5pm at Villa Balbino in Lake Como.

33-year-old Anand Piramal proposed to 26-year old Isha Ambani at a temple in Mahabaleshwar, Maharashtra while on vacation earlier this year, and a party held in May marked the occasion.

Anand and Isha have been long-time friends and both their families share a strong bond of friendship for over four decades, a press statement had said.
With the world quickly moving towards the online space, even looking for a domestic help has come to be just a click away.

However, not everyone favours this practice. A few years ago, the BookMyBai web page for hiring maids in India got people talking and many slammed it for promoting religious discrimination.

Reuters/Picture For Representation

Similarly, another website offering the same services in Singapore has drawn the ire of Netizens. Online ads in Singapore offering Indonesian maids for sale were on Wednesday condemned as unjust and demeaning."

Singapore is home to almost 250,000 maids, mostly from poor parts of Indonesia or the Philippines, who head to the wealthy city-state to earn higher salaries than they can back home.

While Indonesia regularly protests about abuse and exploitation of helpers in Malaysia and parts of the Middle East, complaints about the treatment of maids in tightly-regulated Singapore are less common. However, reports that Indonesian helpers were being offered for sale in the city-state on online marketplace Carousell quickly drew condemnation from rights groups.

The adverts under the username "maid.recruitment" reportedly offered the services of several helpers from Indonesia, while some ads indicated maids had been "sold".

Reuters

The posts on the e-commerce site, which operates in several Asian countries and describes itself as "a simple way to sell the clutter in your life", have now been removed. Wahyu Susilo, executive director of Indonesian NGO Migrant Care, said the group "strongly condemned" the adverts and called for those behind them to be brought to justice.

"This is very unjust and demeaning to the migrant workers' dignity," he told AFP.

Singapore's labour ministry said it was aware of cases where maids were being "marketed inappropriately" on Singapore-headquartered Carousell, and had got the adverts taken down and launched an investigation.

"Advertising (foreign domestic workers) like commodities is unacceptable and an offence" under local laws, a statement from the ministry said. Employment agencies found guilty of such practices will have their licences revoked or suspended, it said.

Agency Input: PTI
A Drug Enforcement Agency plane collided with a Tesla Model X after crash landing in Sugar Land, Texas. One special agent is reported to have been injured, taken to a hospital and later released.

Facebook

An Indian-origin man named Oniel Kurup, was with his son in the car when the incident took place. He shared pictures of the freak accident on Facebook saying that even the company officials at Tesla thought it was a prank call. When Kurup called his wife and said that a plane crashed into the car, he said she laughed out loud in disbelief.

But not before first thanking his lucky stars and the Tesla car for saving him and his son. "Want to let all my friends and family know that Aarav and I are completely fine.. GOD and this CAR truly saved us today. Not a scratch on us," he wrote.



His post soon went viral and even Elon Musk tweeted saying he his glad they are safe!

Wow, glad theyre ok!  Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 20, 2018

And Netizens always find a way to come up with jokes, here are a few:

#1

They were already blessed and protected by our Lord and Savior, St. Musk. pic.twitter.com/fMPnguvUeM  REV0 (@AtkosKhan) September 20, 2018

#2

Thank god it missed the Merc and bashed the Tesla  Julian B (@CryptoAddict81) September 20, 2018

#3

I cant believe @elonmusk did not include anti-aircraft countermeasures in the P100D! This guy is unfit to lead. Im selling all my holdings! ;)  Casey Capshaw (@caseycapshaw) September 20, 2018

#4

Autopilot didn't see the plane coming and avoid?! XD  Jon D Dixon (@lolimaducky) September 20, 2018

#5
Fashion for our current generation is all about taking things to the next level, even if one ends up looking like a homeless person. No seriously, take a look at these cut-out denims:

If you thought that was too much, we have another outrageous fashion trend that's picking up.

Shoes that are torn and taped up!

Italian high fashion sneaker brand Golden Goose is the brain behind these expensive 'Superstar Tape Sneaker'. The pair of sneakers is selling online on American retail chain Nordstrom's website for $530 - that's approximately Rs 38,000!

weve already got a problem if any clothing description says crumply, hold-it-all tape details a sneaker but its even bigger when that sneaker costs $530!!!!!!!!1111!!!!!111!!!!!! pic.twitter.com/yngTTyVVQ2  joon (@joonlee) 19 September 2018

On the website, the sneakers are described as: "Crumply, hold-it-all-together tape details a distressed leather sneaker in a retro low profile with a signature sidewall star and a grungy rubber cupsole."

But people weren't very amused. The brand is receiving backlash with Twitter users calling their designs 'offensive' and 'distasteful,' reports ANI.

Here's how people reacted:

I just checked and apparently theres a whole line. Like ok cool lets mock poverty pic.twitter.com/WKhF15gRGG  Eliza T.  (@lizalove91) 19 September 2018 #1

#2

when u wanna be edgy w worn down sneakers but dont have the patience to wear them out https://t.co/6rVcjenCbb  Vivian Sanchez (@vivvsanchez) 19 September 2018

#3

Are people really out here paying $500 for brand new shoes that look worn out...bc if so I got some fire for you guys for a cheap price of $400 https://t.co/oQeh8hX0Mj  Crea (@Creabug) 19 September 2018

#4

Every pair of Golden Goose sneakers is hand crafted and stitched in Italy each pair is different and obviously not meant for yall https://t.co/o6kZRHIs2w  paul (@Paulsreply) 19 September 2018

#5

#6

#7

#8
The ruling Republican part in the US has drawn flak after featuring newspaper ad on the occasion of the 'Ganesh Chaturthi' festival, included the imagery of Lord Ganesha with the text, "Would you worship a donkey or an elephant? The choice is yours".

The elephant is the party symbol of the Republicans while Democrats have donkey as their party's symbol.

The Indian-American community described the political advertisement of the Grand Old Party in an Indian-American newspaper as "offensive" for featuring Lord Ganesha.

Asking Hindu-Americans if they would rather vote for a donkey or an elephant by comparing Ganesha, a religious figure, to a political party is highly inappropriate.

The Fort Bend County Republican party must retract this ad. https://t.co/zHyqux9Soc pic.twitter.com/z1Us2oVQ5L  Sri Preston Kulkarni (@SriPKulkarni) 18 September 2018

The party's county unit, Fort Bend County Republican Party which published the ad, apologised and clarified that it "was not meant to disparage Hindu customs or traditions in any way".

The ad, with arrows pointing to the body parts of Lord Ganesha, listed out qualities such as  'A BIG HEAD, TO THINK OUT OF THE BOX', 'BIG EYES TO LOOK BEYOND WHAT YOU SEE', 'LARGE EARS TO LISTEN TO OTHERS ATTENTIVELY', 'LARGE STOMACH, TO PEACEFULLY DIGEST ALL THE GOOD AND BAD IN LIFE' among others.

An advocacy group, the Hindu-American Foundation (HAF) of Houston, called on the Fort Bend County Republican Party to apologise for the advert about the celebration of the 'Ganesh Chaturthi' festival.

"While we appreciate the Fort Bend County GOP's attempt to reach out to Hindus on an important Hindu festival, its ad - equating Hindus' veneration of the Lord Ganesha with choosing a political party based on its animal symbol - is problematic and offensive," said Rishi Bhutada, HAF Board Member and Fort Bend County resident.

Using religious imagery in order to explicitly appeal for political support should best be avoided by any political party, he said.

"The implication regarding the worship of animals as gods was also disheartening to the HAF leaders, as that is a common misconception taught in US schools, which frequently ends up becoming a taunt used to bully Hindu students," the HAF said.

Bhutada also called upon the Fort Bend County Republican Party to apologise for the offensive and inaccurate reference, not to run the advert again and for elected officials in the County to send the same message to the Party as well.

The only research that went into this was a google search. The image is an educational info-graphic about Ganesha, they just slapped it on their poster. Probably without permission.  CarpalTunnel  (@CapalTunnel) 19 September 2018

Sri Preston Kulkarni, the Democratic candidate for the US Congress from District 22 in Texas, seized on the Republican advert, calling it offensive in a tweet on Tuesday.

"Asking Hindu-Americans if they would rather vote for a donkey or an elephant by comparing Ganesha, a religious figure, to a political party is highly inappropriate. The Fort Bend County Republican party must retract this ad," he said.

Meanwhile, the Fort Bend Republican party responded and said: "The ad was not meant to disparage Hindu customs or traditions in any way. We offer our sincerest apologies to anyone that was offended by the ad. Obviously, that was not the intent".

Actually Ive never thought they couldnt be more disgusting. They take disgusting to new heights on the daily.  Alie (@BareMySoles) 19 September 2018

In a letter, chairman Jacey Jetton, the first Korean-American to lead the Fort Bend County Republican Party said: "The ad was meant to be part of the celebration to acknowledge the 'Ganesh Chaturthi' festival of September 13".

"This ad was created with input from those of Hindu faith so that we could properly pay respect to the sacred festival. This highlights the difficulty in outreach that can be positive for one group but not for another in the same community.

"We offer our sincerest apologies to anyone that was offended by the ad. Obviously, that was not the intent. The ad was not meant to disparage Hindu customs or traditions in any way," Jetton said.

Agency Inputs PTI
Infosys (NYSE: INFY), a global leader in consulting, technology and next-generation services, today announced that it will open its next Technology and Innovation Hub in the State of Arizona and hire 1,000 American workers in the state by 2023.

This announcement reinforces Infosys May 2017 commitment to open Technology and Innovation Hubs in the United States and hire 10,000 American workers. To date, Infosys has hired 5,874 American workers against this commitment. The Arizona Technology and Innovation Hub will have a special focus on autonomous technologies, Internet of Things (IOT), full-stack engineering, data science and cyber security. Infosys investment in Arizona is a continuation of the companys commitment to accelerate innovation for American enterprise by amplifying top local talent with the best global talent and to shrink the IT skills gap in the marketplace.

Infosys new Arizona employees will include recent graduates from the states prestigious network of colleges, universities and community colleges, as well as local professionals who will benefit from upskilling through Infosys world-class training curriculum.

The number of jobs Infosys is bringing to Arizona is fantastic news for our citizens, especially given the commitment the company makes to continual training and education in technology, said Arizona Governor Doug Ducey. We are thankful for companies like Infosys who enhance our efforts to prepare the workforce for the future.

We are excited to announce the expansion of our presence in Arizona and to hire 1,000 workers for technology jobs in the state, said Ravi Kumar, President, Infosys. This investment will strengthen our ability to deliver for our clients across Arizona and the Southwest and expand the local workforce to help our clients compete in the rapidly digitizing global economy.

Infosys selection of Arizona as the location for a U.S. Technology & Innovation Hub further solidifies our states reputation as a tech industry leader, said Sandra Watson, President & CEO of the Arizona Commerce Authority. This operation will create a significant number of high-value jobs and focus on advancing emerging technologies. We thank Infosys for their commitment to Arizona, Governor Ducey for his leadership and the Zanjeros, ASU and GPEC for their support.

The Arizona Technology and Innovation Hub will help Infosys work even more closely with clients in the region to develop cross-functional solutions to pressing business challenges in such areas as machine learning, artificial intelligence, user experience and advanced digital technologies, including big data and cloud. This investment also enables Infosys to build on the strength of its existing Arizona network of highly skilled professionals. The Hub will facilitate greater collaboration and advancement in key Arizonan industries such as hi-tech, manufacturing and financial services.

To date, Infosys has opened two Technology and Innovation Hubs, one in Indianapolis, Indiana and another in Raleigh, North Carolina. Infosys has also announced an additional Technology and Innovation Hub in Hartford, Connecticut and a unique Design and Innovation Hub in Providence, Rhode Island.

As part of Infosys commitment to boosting American innovation and helping create the workforce of the future, Infosys Foundation USA has provided multiple grants for classroom technology and computer science training to teachers and schools. To date, more than 4.7 million students; 13,000 teachers and 21,000 schools across America, including over 7,300 students, 192 teachers and 159 schools in Arizona, have benefited from computer science training and classroom equipment funded by Infosys Foundation USA. This includes grants for professional development for teachers, hands on workshops for students, and new technology and teaching aids for classrooms, with an emphasis placed on serving underrepresented groups such as women, African-American, Latino, urban, rural and autistic groups that will gain greater access to computer science and maker education.

For more information, please visit: https://www.infosys.com/content/infosys-web/en/american-innovation/az.html

About Infosys

Infosys is a global leader in next-generation digital services and consulting. We enable clients in 45 countries to navigate their digital transformation. With over three decades of experience in managing the systems and workings of global enterprises, we expertly steer our clients through their digital journey. We do it by enabling the enterprise with an AI-powered core that helps prioritize the execution of change. We also empower the business with agile digital at scale to deliver unprecedented levels of performance and customer delight. Our always-on learning agenda drives their continuous improvement through building and transferring digital skills, expertise, and ideas from our innovation ecosystem.

Visit www.infosys.com to see how Infosys (NYSE: INFY) can help your enterprise navigate your next.

About the Arizona Commerce Authority

The Arizona Commerce Authority (ACA) is the state's leading economic development organization with a streamlined mission to grow and strengthen Arizona's economy. The ACA uses a three-pronged approach to advance the overall economy: attract, expand, create - attract out-of-state companies to establish operations in Arizona; work with existing companies to expand their business in Arizona and beyond; and help entrepreneurs create new Arizona businesses in targeted industries.

For more information, please visit www.azcommerce.com and follow the ACA on Twitter at @azcommerce.

Safe Harbor

Certain statements in this press release concerning our future growth prospects are forward-looking statements regarding our future business expectations intended to qualify for the 'safe harbor' under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, which involve a number of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those in such forward-looking statements. The risks and uncertainties relating to these statements include, but are not limited to, risks and uncertainties regarding fluctuations in earnings, fluctuations in foreign exchange rates, our ability to manage growth, intense competition in IT services including those factors which may affect our cost advantage, wage increases in India, our ability to attract and retain highly skilled professionals, client concentration, restrictions on immigration, industry segment concentration, our ability to manage our international operations, reduced demand for technology in our key focus areas, disruptions in telecommunication networks or system failures, our ability to successfully complete and integrate potential acquisitions, liability for damages on our service contracts, the success of the companies in which Infosys has made strategic investments, withdrawal or expiration of governmental fiscal incentives, political instability and regional conflicts, legal restrictions on raising capital or acquiring companies outside India, and unauthorized use of our intellectual property and general economic conditions affecting our industry. Additional risks that could affect our future operating results are more fully described in our United States Securities and Exchange Commission filings including our Annual Report on Form 20-F for the fiscal year ended March 31, 2018. These filings are available at www.sec.gov. Infosys may, from time to time, make additional written and oral forward-looking statements, including statements contained in the company's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission and our reports to shareholders. In addition, please note that any forward-looking statements contained herein are based on assumptions that we believe to be reasonable as of the date of this press release. The company does not undertake to update any forward-looking statements that may be made from time to time by or on behalf of the company unless it is required by law.

Media contacts:

For further information, please contact: PR_Global@infosys.com
Fedspeak Doesn't Move Markets Market Tea Leaves - 43 minutes ago Yesterday the markets moved to the Downside even though Fed Chair Powell spoke. Will this continue today?

EU regulator evaluating Moderna shot for children ages 5-11 AP - 1 hour ago AMSTERDAM (AP)  The European Union's drug regulator said Wednesday that it has started evaluating whether to authorize Modernas COVID-19 vaccine for children ages 5 to 11, a decision that could significantly... $SPX : 4,685.25 (-0.35%) $DOWI : 36,319.98 (-0.31%) $IUXX : 16,219.94 (-0.71%)

Silver (SI) Weekly MACD Positively Crossing Tradable Patterns - Tue Nov 9, 11:16PM CST Silver (SIZ21) is trying to firm going into todays European morning, continuing a consolidation just shy of the October high. Significantly, SI appears to be gearing up to resume an upchannel (on... SIZ21 : 24.185 (-0.55%) SLV : 22.53 (-0.53%)

Cattle Futures Mixed Mostly Lower Barchart - Tue Nov 9, 4:48PM CST Live cattle futures trading ended the session with gains of less than 20 cents in December, June 22, and Aug 22, but losses of as much as 42 cents in the other months. Feeder cattle futures went... LEZ21 : 132.200s (+0.08%) LEJ22 : 140.250s (-0.11%) GFX21 : 157.900s (-0.43%) GFF22 : 159.800s (-0.31%)
Five letters have offered Syrians fleeing the Bashar al-Assad regime a safe haven: Idlib.

An estimated 3 million people call the northern Syrian enclave home. It is the last remaining stronghold of the anti-Assad opposition. And more than half of those now in Idlib have fled their homes elsewhere in Syria as they try to escape the horror of a seven-year civil war that has extinguished the power of adjectives to describe its hell. There is no place else for civilians fleeing the regime to easily escape to safety.

Continents and regions Idlib International relations International relations and national security Middle East Middle East and North Africa North America Syria Syria conflict The Americas Turkey United States Unrest, conflicts and war

For weeks, UN officials have warned that an anticipated Syrian regime offensive to retake Idlib province would ignite a "humanitarian catastrophe." Turkey, which has backed anti-regime rebels, reinforced forces at the border and made clear it will not take in more than the 3 million Syrians already finding safety inside its border. Meanwhile, Syrian moms and dads prepared homemade gas masks in a desperate push to protect their children from possible regime use of chemical weapons against the rebels.

Also in Idlib: what the UN Special Envoy for Syria calls "an extremely high concentration of foreign fighters," noting that "this amounted to approximately 10,000 Al Nusra or Al Qaeda members, who have been recognized as terrorists by the UN."

Now comes the deal between Russia and Turkey to stave off the Idlib offensive, create a "demilitarized zone," and separate jihadists from "moderate rebels." At least, for now, those civilians who fled Assad remain safe.

The resolution shows what might be possible when US public and private diplomacy is at work. It offers a glint of hope that this is the quiet start of US efforts to stave off a further humanitarian crisis. It also raises the faint hope that Idlib could, eventually, lead to Geneva, a peace deal, and a lasting end to the carnage of the Syrian civil war.

It is a lot to hope for. But it is not impossible -- if political will and diplomatic determination exist.

Indeed, the Idlib deal may be among the first signs that the new US envoy to Syria, Ambassador James Jeffrey, means to get serious about crafting US policy toward Syria. The former US ambassador to both Turkey and Iraq has come out of his thinktank world to take on the Syria portfolio and serve Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. He has been traveling the region, visiting capitals -- and talking Idlib. Last week, Jeffrey noted that "any offensive is to us objectionable as a reckless escalation." Those words surely were translated into Russian.

As Syria observer and Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy senior fellow Hassan Hassan wrote on Twitter, "The US won't get credit, but it's actually played a central role in preventing the Idlib offensive for now. (Surely not a popular opinion for many). Just goes to show that the US can make a difference if there is a will."

Indeed, Jeffrey is one of the few US officials who has earned rare praise from Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who said it was "an appropriate decision to appoint Jeffrey to the region."

As Turkey's Daily Sabah noted, the "US statements last week echoed Turkish concerns and put the two countries in an alignment against the Assad offensive. Some in Washington considered it as a first step to calibrate Turkish-American relations in order to reach a coherent Syria policy that can maintain a working relationship."

Certainly, the US warnings against the Idlib offensive strengthened Turkey's hand in dealing with Putin, noted the paper, even if few thought the Americans would actually follow through on the ground "as Putin had to consider possible US repercussions along with Turkish resistance."

Down the road lies another step: build upon the glimmer of good will to strengthen US-Turkey ties and possibly even rely upon them to secure Turkey's support for continuing US backing of the Syrian Kurds. The US has considered Syrian Kurds their reliable partners in the counter-ISIS fight, while Turkey has considered them terrorists. Russia has stepped in to fill this gap between the two and court Turkey. Maybe Jeffrey's naming can make a difference here and, in the process, bring more assurances of security to northeast Syria.

The US has, for years, exerted minimal influence in Syria, as Russia controlled facts on the ground and Iran expanded its influence and its footprint. The big question now is whether America is ready to use the diplomatic muscle at its disposal to help bring an end to the bloodshed. Or whether this moment will be just one more pause on the way to more calamity for those suffering through the carnage of a civil war with no end in sight.
CHICO, Calif. - The California Attorney General's Office announced on Sept. 19 that the Butte County District Attorney's office acted properly in declining to file criminal charges against Chico police officers involved in the shooting of Desmond Phillips on March 17, 2017.

In a letter to District Attorney Mike Ramsey, due to this decision, California Attorney General Xavier Beccaria said that no further action will be taken by at this time.

This investigation is in response to a 2017 incident in which Chico Police officers fatally shot 25-year-old Desmond Phillips, a black man who also lived with mental illness. The officers were responding to a 911 call placed by Phillips' father at their Chico home.

Phillips' family filed a lawsuit against the city, claiming that he was wrongfully killed and was suffering from an episode of mental illness.

His death also sparked justice campaigns and protests for Phillips and others killed by law enforcement.

The Attorney General's Office asked the Butte County District Attorney's Office to forward all evidence and reports gathered about the officer-involved shooting for an independent review in July of 2017, Ramsey said.

The California Attorney General's Office concluded that the District Attorney's Office did not abuse its discretion in declining to file criminal charges against the police officers.

"We again sympathize with the Phillips' family for the tragic loss of their son," Ramsey said. "However, while they are entitled to their grief, they and others are not entitled to a different set of facts - facts which were reviewed and confirmed by the AG's independent review."
Under the current system, which is said to charge some of the highest premiums in Australia, only those that are not at fault in an accident are covered. But the new system will see coverage available regardless of who is to blame. That should result in 40% more Canberrans who are injured in motor accidents being covered.

According to the report, CTP coverage costs an average of $591.20 per year in Canberra, which is almost $100 higher than the national average of $495.50.

Currently, injured Canberrans who are not at fault access payouts under common law, which can result in several years of waiting to receive payments.

It is not yet confirmed whether drivers will receive a rebate for higher premiums that have already been paid, but the government has said that insurers should not pocket that money, the report stated.

The legislation is modelled on a scheme chosen by the territorys first citizens jury. A group of nearly 50 Canberrans were selected to form the jury which helped develop the laws, in one of the first attempts at deliberative democracy by the ACT Government.

Jurors were selected from a pool of respondents to invitations that were sent out to 6,000 Canberrans, and were paid $450 to attend three weekend sessions, ABC News said. During the final weekend, just shy of two-thirds of the initial 49 jurors selected voted for the chosen model, which was the most radical option of four that were presented to the jury.

Nine of the initial group of 49 jurors did not make it to the final weekend, reportedly mainly due to personal reasons, while seven jurors voted for an alternative option and one juror walked out.

Under the proposals, insurers premiums will be regulated by the Motor Accident Injuries Commission, which will act on independent advice.
Willis Towers Watson has announced the launch of Property Quantified, a platform to help organisations analyse potential property losses across a global portfolio.

Property Quantified models multiple perils in a single platform, including catastrophe risks, such as earthquakes and hurricanes, and all other loss types, such as fire and vandalism, for organisations with locations anywhere in the world. The tool delivers loss projections and assesses insurance strategies in financial terms. It also allows users to make changes to their location data and see the impact to loss potential immediately.
As the new chairman of Marsh Ireland, Grogan will oversee Marshs Irish operations with a particular focus on implementing the firms Brexit strategy. Grogan will continue to report to Lay and will serve as a board member of Marsh Ltd.

Grogan has nearly 40 years of industry experience and has spent 27 years at Marsh, during which time he has held numerous senior roles and led the UK corporate business since 2009.

Fraser, who has more than 22 years of experience in the international insurance industry and has spent over a decade at Marsh, has held numerous leadership positions in the UK, Singapore and Indonesia.

Alistair brings extensive international experience in leading strong teams and growing businesses to our UK corporate division, commented UK & Ireland chief executive Lay in a statement. Under his leadership, he will ensure that the firm delivers the services and solutions that our corporate clients need to mitigate the increasingly complex risks they face, and continue to be successful.

Grogan was described as an exceptional leader who has played a pivotal role in developing Marshs business in the UK and Ireland over the last two decades.

I would like to thank him for his considerable efforts and wish him success in his new role as chairman of Marsh Ireland, Lay added.

Both appointments are subject to regulatory approval and are expected to take effect by the end of 2018.
Authorities said that James rear-ended a vehicle while driving in Fairfield, Calif. Within an hour of the accident, James paid for an auto insurance policy. He reported to the insurance company that the collision occurred the day after he bought the policy, Patch reported.

However, the driver James hit had already made her own statement to the insurer. When James learned of that, he called the driver and asked her to change the time of the accident to an hour later so the insurance would cover him. She refused. James later went to her house to ask her to alter the time in her statement, Patch reported. She again refused.

Solano County, Calif., Superior Court Judge Carlos Gutierrez sentenced James to 11 years in prison in light of his insurance fraud conviction and two prior convictions  one for first-degree burglary in 2004 and a 2014 conviction for being a felon in possession of a firearm.
Country-specific variations are also available. Meanwhile translations of certain documents will be published as well.

Found under the Lloyds Brussels section of the Lloyds Wordings Repository, the documents were prepared by the wordings team of the Lloyds Market Association (LMA), with close coordination with the Brexit and regulatory affairs teams at Lloyds.

We are pleased that, through the collaborative efforts and hard work of the respective teams at LMA and Lloyds, we have been able to prepare and publish these documents, ahead of January renewals, and of course, Brexit, commented LMA head of wordings Alison Colver.

Lloyds Brussels, formally known as Lloyds Insurance Company SA, will underwrite non-life insurance and facultative reinsurance risks located in EEA countries starting January 01.
A Maryland man is accused of stealing hurricane victims identities as part what the Secret Service describes as an $8 million effort to scam a Federal Emergency Management Agency program.

News outlets reported Tuesday that 30-year-old Tare Stanley Okirika is accused of registering unique pre-paid debit cards under stolen identities.

A Secret Service affidavit says Okirika used stolen Social Security and personal identifying information from hurricane victims in Georgia, Florida and Texas to file fraudulent disaster relief claims. It says Okirika is one of several co-conspirators and he received more than $650,000 over the past year. Investigators claim about $8 million in FEMA immediate and individual assistance was paid to the cards held by perpetrators of fraud.

Okirika was charged with wire fraud and conspiracy to commit wire fraud.

An attorney for Okirika declined to comment.

Copyright 2021 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Topics Catastrophe Natural Disasters Fraud Hurricane Maryland
Members of the Association of Bermuda Insurers & Reinsurers (ABIR) made a direct economic contribution to Bermuda of more than $840 million in 2017, according to the groups 13th annual member survey results.

Data reported for calendar year 2017 from 23 ABIR members showed ABIRs aggregate direct economic impact to the Bermuda economy was $842.6 million, including travel, business, charity giving, construction expenses and compensation paid to Bermuda-based employees. ABIR noted the economic contribution of its members in Bermuda was a multiple for the significant operations of its major global commercial insurers and reinsurers.

Last year was a significant test for the re/insurance sector with a triple threat of US natural disasters, generational changes in tax policy and soft market conditions, said John M. Huff, president & CEO of ABIR. ABIR members passed the test with flying colorsand doubled down on their commitment to the island.

Kevin ODonnell, president and CEO of RenaissanceRe Holdings Ltd. and current chair of ABIR, said: As ABIR marks its 25 years of innovation and continued commitment to business strategies and public policies that enhance physical and financial resilience to growing risk of large catastrophes across the globe, Bermuda-based re/insurers have become the driving force of economic activity at the place we call home  Bermuda.

Highlights of the 2017 survey results showed ABIR members contributed:

More than $658 Million in payroll to Bermuda-based employees

$7.8 million in charitable contributions (a 4 percent year-over-year increase)

$90 million on construction, real estate, housing, and office space in Bermuda

$66 million on legal, accounting, actuarial, temporary services and other consulting services

Nearly $20.8 million on hotels, airfare, restaurants, taxis and catering.

ABIR members employed 1,495 full-time staff in Bermuda, of which 1,044 were Bermudians, spouses of Bermudians, or permanent residence certificate holders (PRCs)  an increase of 2.6 percent since 2016, and 7 percent since 2007. The share of payroll that went to Bermudians, spouses and PRCs also increased, by 3 percent, in 2017.

ABIR members continue to invest in the local workforce and provided 55 intern jobs to Bermudians in 2017. Seven ABIR members had graduate training programs for Bermudian employees; members also reported other training and development opportunities available, such as tuition reimbursement and leadership training.

Source: Association of Bermuda Insurers & Reinsurers (ABIR)

Topics Carriers Reinsurance Training Development Bermuda
Republican lieutenant governor candidate Lisa Posthumus Lyons says the fire that burned down her western Michigan home started after one of her children used a kitchen torch inside the attached garage.

She said at a news conference on Sept. 17 in Grand Rapids that the child had been practicing making creme brulee designs on a piece of cardboard with the torch on Sept. 9. The running mate for GOP gubernatorial nominee Bill Schuette says the cardboard wasnt on fire when it was discarded in the garbage, but a fire started and the windy conditions allowed it to spread quickly.

The Grand Rapids Press reports Lyons said, Accidents happen and it could have happened to anyone.

No one was injured in the fire in the Kent County community of Alto.

Copyright 2021 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Topics Michigan Politics
Insurer COUNTRY Financial, headquartered in Bloomington, Illinois, has named Jim Jacobs as its next chief executive officer (CEO), effective early next year. He succeeds Kurt Bock, who is retiring Jan. 31, 2019, after serving as CEO for seven years.

Jacobs has served as general counsel, secretary and chief legal officer for COUNTRY Financial, Illinois Farm Bureau (IFB) and other affiliated companies since 2008. From 2005-2008, he served as an attorney and assistant corporate secretary in IFBs Office of General Counsel.

Prior to joining IFB, Jacobs was a litigation attorney for fourteen years in Louisiana and a partner in the New Orleans law firm of Murphy, Rogers, Sloss and Gambel.

Jacobs will serve as chief executive officer for each of the operating companies comprising COUNTRY Financial under general direction of the president and board of directors of the companies.

Jacobs, a member of the International Association of Defense Counsel, serves his community as a board member for Special Olympics of Illinois. He also has served as a tutor for STAR Literacy and as a past member of the board of directors for Heartland Head Start.

Source: COUNTRY Financial

Topics Illinois
Niche market specialty insurer Assurant has invested in a technology startup focused on connected car services.

The New York-based company declined to disclose the level of investment in Mojio, a technology platform and software-as-a-service (SaaS) provider with offices in Silicon Valley and Vancouver, B.C.

Plans call for both companies to work on products that use their combined pools of vehicle data to enhance the ownership experience of car owners. Assurant provides coverage in areas including vehicle protection, mobile devices and extended service contracts.

Mojio is a cloud platform for automakers and mobile network operators looking to build connected car services, with a data analytics and machine learning component.

Bob Lonergan, Assurants chief strategy officer, said in prepared remarks that the partnership should allow each company to capitalize on its complementary capabilities.

Source: Assurant

Related:

Topics Auto InsurTech Startups Autonomous Vehicles
(CNN) -- Wanda Barzee, one of two people who abducted 14-year-old Elizabeth Smart in 2002, was released from a Utah prison Wednesday.

Barzee was serving a 15-year sentence when the Utah Board of Pardons and Parole unexpectedly credited her for time served, moving up her release date from 2024.

Smart, now 30, had urged officials to reconsider releasing the woman who assisted in her kidnapping and rape, saying she's still a threat to the community.

But Barzee's lawyer said the 72-year-old woman has done her time and deserves a chance to prove that she's ready to return to society.

"I do not believe there is any evidence that Ms. Barzee is a risk to the community, and I think it is unfair and counterproductive to make such assertions," Scott Williams told CNN.

"She should be allowed to demonstrate compliance with conditions of supervised release after a sentence that resulted from a settlement with the United States, the State of Utah, and with the agreement of the Smart family."

Williams told reporters the conditions of Barzee's release include mental health monitoring and treatment if necessary.

In addition, he said, Barzee is to have "absolutely no contact directly or indirectly with any member of the Smart family and we have volunteered a condition restricting her geographically from certain areas that the Smart family might find themselves."

Williams said there was "no reliable evidence" his client "currently poses a threat of any kind to the community in which she resides or any particular person."

"Ms. Barzee's singular desire is to comply with all conditions of her release and to be left alone," he said. "We implore the public and the media to respect that desire. She's not available for contact or comment."

Barzee pleaded guilty in 2010 to kidnapping and unlawful transport of a minor for the purposes of sexual activity. In exchange for her plea and testimony against her husband, Brian Mitchell, she received lenience in sentencing.

Mitchell was sentenced to life in prison in 2011 -- nearly nine years after Smart's abduction.

Barzee will be on supervised release for five years, said Eric Anderson, deputy chief US Probation Officer for Utah. "A transition plan is in place for her in terms of residence ... She won't be homeless."

Most likely, she will live alone in a private residence and follow standard release conditions plus a special condition that she must participate in a mental health treatment program, he said. She will not have an ankle monitor or any sort of GPS monitor.

According to conditions of release that Barzee agreed to in 2010, she must report to a probation officer each month and she cannot leave the Salt Lake City area without permission.

She must also register as a sex offender, cooperate in DNA collection, find a job and notify law enforcement of any change in residence and employment. A probation officer may visit her at any time and she cannot possess a firearm.

Smart, who was held captive for nine months, has said there were times when Mitchell "absolutely" manipulated Barzee.

"But she in her own right abused me as much as he did," Smart said last week.

"She is a woman who had six children and yet could co-conspire to kidnap a 14-year-old girl, and not only sit next to her while (she was) being raped, but encouraged her husband to continue to rape me," Smart said.

"So, do I believe she is dangerous? Yes, but not just to me. I believe that she is a danger and a threat to any vulnerable person in our community."
McDonalds workers staged protests in several cities Tuesday in what organizers billed as the first multistate strike seeking to combat sexual harassment in the workplace.

In Chicago, one of the targeted cities, several dozen protesters rallied in front of McDonalds headquarters while a plane flew overhead with a banner reading, McDonalds: Stop Sexual Harassment. In New Orleans, current and former employees chanted, Hey, McDonalds, you cant hide we can see your nasty side.

Other protests were held in San Francisco; Los Angeles; St. Louis; Kansas City, Missouri, and Durham, North Carolina. The targeted restaurants kept serving food, with organizers saying the goal was not to shut them down.

Protesters demanded that McDonalds require anti-harassment training for managers and employees. They also want a national committee formed to address sexual harassment, made up of workers, managers and leaders of national womens groups.

McDonalds declined to comment on the protests, saying it stood by a statement issued last week defending its anti-harassment policies. The company also disclosed last week that it will turn to outside experts to help `evolve those policies, including consultants from Seyfarth Shaw at Work, an employment law training firm.

Protest organizers called on McDonalds to drop Seyfarth Shaw, depicting it as an anti-worker law firm. They noted that it has defended the Weinstein Co. in a lawsuit over sexual harassment allegations against former Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein.

At the New Orleans protest, McDonalds employees arrived at a restaurant with red tape over their mouths emblazoned with the #MeToo phrase. They pulled off the tape to chant their slogans.

Tanya Harrell, 22, fought back tears as she explained that workers wanted a more effective system for handling harassment complaints. She said managers had laughed off her complaint that a male co-worker had groped her, telling her she probably had given him sex appeal.

She said she left McDonalds for a while in 2017 and is now working at a different store.

Harrell was among several protest organizers who filed complaints with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in May, alleging pervasive harassment at some of McDonalds franchise restaurants.

In San Francisco, more than 50 workers and activists protested outside a McDonalds in the Mission District. Among them was Achon Hightower, a Burger King employee who came from Sacramento to show support for fellow fast-food workers.

Theres a lot of sexual harassment going on behind closed doors, he said. Things like this are kind of hidden and swept underneath the rug. They really dont do anything about it.

Associated Press writers Terry Chea in San Francisco and David Crary in New York contributed to this report.

Related:

Copyright 2021 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Bayer AG unit Monsanto on Tuesday asked a California judge to throw out a $289 million jury verdict awarded to a man who alleged the companys glyphosate-based weed-killers, including Roundup, gave him cancer.

The company said in motions filed in San Franciscos Superior Court of California that the jurys decision was insufficiently supported by the evidence presented at trial by school groundskeeper Dewayne Johnson.

Johnsons case, filed in 2016, was fast-tracked for trial due to the severity of his non-Hodgkins lymphoma, a cancer of the lymph system, that he alleged was caused by years of exposure to Roundup and Ranger Pro, another Monsanto herbicide that contains glyphosate.

Monsanto asked Superior Court Judge Suzanne Bolanos, who oversaw the trial, to set aside the verdict or, in the alternative, reduce the award or grant a new trial. A hearing on the motions is set for Oct. 10.

The company, which denies the allegations, has previously said it would appeal the verdict if necessary.

Johnsons case was the first to go to trial over allegations that glyphosate causes cancer. Monsanto is facing some 8,000 similar lawsuits across the United States.

Shares in Bayer, which bought Monsanto this year for $63 billion, slid following the Aug. 10 jury decision and the stock was still trading some 20 percent below its pre-verdict value of 73.30 euros ($85.45) on Tuesday.

The jurys decision is wholly at odds with over 40 years of real-world use, an extensive body of scientific data and analysis  which support the conclusion that glyphosate-based herbicides are safe for use and do not cause cancer in humans, Bayer said in a statement on Tuesday.

Bayer said Johnson failed to prove glyphosate caused his cancer and the scientific evidence he presented at trial fell well below the causation standard required under California law.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in September 2017 concluded a decades-long assessment of glyphosate risks and found the chemical is not a likely carcinogen to humans. However, the cancer unit of the World Health Organization in 2015 classified glyphosate as probably carcinogenic to humans.

The jury found Monsanto failed to warn Johnson and other consumers of the cancer risks posed by its weed-killers. It awarded $39 million in compensatory and $250 million in punitive damages.

The company in its motion for a new trial also said statements by lawyers for Johnson inflamed and inappropriately influenced the jurors. Some legal experts have said Monsanto faces long odds on appeal on those grounds.

(Reporting by Tina Bellon; Editing by Tom Brown)

Related:

Topics California Legislation Pollution
In a significant turn of events in the insurance industrys fight against Florida assignment of benefits (AOB) abuse, Floridas Fourth District Court of Appeal (DCA) has ruled that an insurers anti-assignment provision was not prohibited.

But the battle isnt over yet as it is likely this decision will be brought to the Florida Supreme Court.

The Fourth DCA ruling came on Sept. 5, 2018 in the case of Restoration of Port St. Lucie, a/a/o, John and Liza Squitieri v. Ark Royal Insurance Co., in which the court disagreed with a decision by the Fifth DCA in Dec. 2017 prohibiting any such conditions.

The Fourth DCA found that a homeowners insurance policy may contain a restriction requiring the consent of all of the insured and the mortgagees before a valid assignment of benefits. The ruling could allow insurers to seek to use these restrictions to stem the rise of fake or exaggerated claims and allow parties with valid, vested interests in a property to have a say in the assignment. The ruling could be a turning point in stemming abuse of AOBs that is leading to increased homeowner insurance rates statewide.

Case Background

In this case, the policyholders were husband and wife homeowners who contracted with a water restoration company to fix water damage to their insured home. The home also had a mortgage. The wife, without the consent of her husband or the mortgagee, also agreed to an assignment of benefits agreement assigning any and all insurance rights, benefits, proceeds and any cause of action under any applicable insurance policies  to the water restoration company.

The policy at issue in this case contained a condition that [n]o assignment of claim benefits, regardless of whether made before a loss or after a loss, shall be valid without the written consent of all insureds, all additional insureds, and all mortgagee(s) named in the policy.

The water restoration company subsequently made a claim to the insurer under the assignment. The insurer refused to pay the full amount of the claim as a result of the anti-assignment provision in the policy. The water restoration company sued the insurer for breach of contract and declaratory relief.

The trial court granted the insurers motion to dismiss as a result of the anti-assignment provision in the contract. The Fourth DCA agreed with the trial court and found that the prior case law from the Florida Supreme Court prevented the insurance company from conditioning an assignment of benefits upon the insurers consent, but not the other insureds or mortgagees consent.

The Fourth DCA noted and disagreed with the Fifth DCAs recent decision finding that any restriction of an assignment of rights in an insurance contract was prohibited. The Fourth DCA also noted that, unlike in the Fifth DCAs decision, the anti-assignment provision had been informationally filed with the Florida Office of Insurance Regulation and had never been disapproved by the office.

The Fourth DCA ruled that the prior case law merely prohibited assignment of benefit restrictions based on the insurers consent. It found that an assignment restriction was not prohibited if it required the consent of all the insureds and all of the mortgagees named in the policy, stating that the insureds and mortgagees have a vested interest that a reputable, legitimate third-party contractor perform repairs on the home.

The ruling now sets up a conflict between two of the five intermediate-level appellate courts in the state. Restrictions of assignments contingent upon the consent of all insured and all mortgagees are now legal in the jurisdiction of the Fourth DCA, which comprises Palm Beach, Broward, St. Lucie, Martin, Indian River, and Okeechobee counties. The restrictions remain invalid in the Fifth DCA, which is comprised of Brevard, Citrus, Flagler, Hernando, Lake, Marion, Orange, Osceola, Sumter, St. Johns, Putnam, and Seminole counties. The Florida Supreme Court now may agree to take conflict jurisdiction if the case is appealed.

Impact on AOB Abuse

Insurers have been hamstrung by Florida state court case law which has been interpreted to prevent all restrictions by insurers on a policyholders ability to assign the benefits of a policy. In 1917, the Florida Supreme Court held that it was a well-settled rule that the provision in a policy relative to the consent of the insurer to the transfer of an interest therein does not apply to an assignment after loss.

Over the last decade, Florida consumers and insurers have been beset by the rise of assignment of benefit abuse. Assignment of benefits abuse occurs when a vendor has an insurance policyholder sign over, usually unknowingly, the rights to receive the benefits of their insurance policy to the vendor in exchange for the vendors services. The dishonest vendor then escalates the scope and cost of remediation or repairs beyond the actual damage and bills the insurance company for the inflated claim. Should the insurer not pay the inflated claim, vendors then sue the insurer. If the vendor prevails the vendor is awarded their attorneys fees under Floridas one-way attorneys fees statute.

Claims, and correspondingly rates, have increased dramatically as a result of this practice. According to the Florida Office of Insurance Regulation, claims associated with an assignment of benefits are 85 percent more expensive than claims without one.

Assignment of benefit abuse has become a priority for Floridas Chief Financial Officer Jimmy Patronis and Insurance Commissioner David Altmaier. The two officials have advocated for assignment of benefits reform and for Floridians to be weary of bad actors.

Despite the clear signs of a problem, the state legislature has failed to act on any legislation to remedy the issue. Regulators and insurers have attempted to mitigate the severity of the abuse, but so far to no avail.

Topics Carriers Legislation Florida
Worried West Virginians got a reprieve when forecasts of potential devastating floods didnt come to fruition from the remnants of Hurricane Florence.

The storm brought 1 to 2 inches (2.5 to 5 centimeters) of rain in most parts of the state before moving out early Tuesday. Thats nowhere near the amount that, before the storm made landfall, forecasters said could result in life threatening, catastrophic flooding rainfall across the mountains of western North Carolina, western Virginia and eastern West Virginia.

As the storm shifted, so did the forecasts. The hurricane and its remnants smashed rainfall records in North and South Carolina and caused problems in Virginia as it moved into the Northeast, where flash floods hit New Hampshire and New York state. Up to 10 inches (25 centimeters) of rain fell in Floyd County in southwestern Virginia, flooding homes and farms. There have been at least 26 confirmed fatalities in North Carolina and at least two deaths in Virginia.

In West Virginia, which is still recovering from a 2016 flood that killed 23 people statewide, there was a big sense of relief Tuesday.

Everything went good, Rainelle Police Chief J.P. Stevens said. No flood or nothing. There was a lot of people that were definitely worried.

State Homeland Security and Emergency Management officials wanted to be ready this time, opened an emergency operations center in advance of the storm and 50 National Guard members were prepared to assist in locations across the state.

In June 2016, nine inches (23 centimeters) of rain fell in 36 hours with little warning in some areas, destroying thousands of homes, businesses and infrastructure. Fifteen people died in Greenbrier County alone in 2016. The communities of Rainelle and White Sulphur Springs saw significant property damage, including at the posh Greenbrier resort.

In June 2012 a derecho or straight-line windstorm killed three people and left more than 680,000 customers across the state of 1.8 million residents without electricity. Some had to wait nearly two weeks to have their power restored following the severe windstorm that hit with little warning.

In Rainelle, officials had moved a fleet of vehicles to higher ground in anticipation of Florences remnants. The Red Cross had mobilized its services in the area and the town bought a bus to use in case evacuations were required.

People in the county, especially in those areas that was affected in 2016, they are certainly uneasy whenever theres a forecast like that having gone through what they did, Greenbrier County Sheriff Bruce Sloan said Tuesday. Its hard to imagine really what goes through their minds.

There were occasional downpours this week, and Rainelle Mayor Andy Pendleton said there were anxious moments until the storm finally passed.

The storms lingering impact in West Virginia was a warning for moderate flooding along the Shenandoah River in the Eastern Panhandle through Thursday.

We were preparing for the worst and certainly thankful that the storm did not affect us the way it was originally forecast, Sloan said.

Copyright 2021 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Topics Flood Virginia
Contractors that worked on the bridge near a Florida university that collapsed, killing six people, have been fined more than $86,000 for workplace violations.

The Miami Herald reported Tuesday that the Occupational Safety and Health Administration issued the fines for seven safety violations related to the March 15 collapse. OSHA said the contractors didnt provide adequate safeguards despite serious cracks that had developed on the bridge.

Five motorists and one worker were killed when the bridge fell onto a busy roadway near Florida International University.

OSHA cited five companies for $86,658 in fines. The companies can contest the findings.

The National Transportation Safety Board is investigating the cause of the collapse.

Copyright 2021 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Topics Workers' Compensation Contractors
The price of workers compensation insurance in Washington could drop significantly in 2019.

The Washington Department of Labor & Industries this week proposed a 5 percent decrease in the average premium employers pay for the coverage.

If approved, the rate decrease from L&I would be the largest drop since 2007. The lower rate would mean employers would pay an average of about $58 less a year per employee for workers comp coverage. Employees would pay about $6 less a year for their share of the cost.

The proposed decrease would mean Washington workers and employers, as a group, pay $136 million less in premiums, according to L&I.

L&I Director Joel Sacks said decreases in work-related injuries, along with L&I initiatives to improve outcomes for injured workers and reduce costs, have made the system healthier and are contributing to the proposed decrease.

Weve seen a big drop in injuries at work in our state since 2012. And thats great news because preventing injuries and making workplaces safe is our number one goal, Sacks said in a statement.

The agency has established opioid prescription guidelines that have resulted in a 90 percent reduction in the number of workers receiving opioids at six to 12 weeks after injury, and the agency has been providing vocational support and assistance earlier in injury claims, which has helped reduce long-term disability, according to L&I.

In the last five years, these and other improvements have resulted in a more than $2 billion reduction in projected long-term costs for the workers compensation system, according to L&I.

The public will have an opportunity to provide input about the rate proposal before a final decision is made in December. The agency will hold three public hearings during which people can learn about and comment on the proposed 2019 rates. The hearings are scheduled for:

Tumwater, Oct. 30, 9 a.m., Department of Labor & Industries headquarters.

Tukwila, Oct. 30, 1 p.m., Department of Labor & Industries Tukwila Office.

Spokane Valley, Oct. 31, 9 a.m., Spokane CenterPlace.

People can also comment in writing to Jo Anne Attwood, Joanne.Attwood@Lni.wa.gov. All comments must be received by 5 p.m. Nov. 2.

Topics Workers' Compensation Commercial Lines Business Insurance Washington
Almost half of all farmers believe assisted suicide should be legal in certain circumstances.

In a finding from the Irish Examiner/ICMSA farming opinion poll which indicates broad views on the issue, 49% of respondents agreed while 31% disagreed. Women and younger farmers are more likely to back the idea.

The percentage of people in favour is actually down 3% compared with the result in 2015 when the same question was asked. However, while three years ago 36% were opposed to the idea, this time around that has fallen to 31%. There is a corresponding increase in the number of people who neither agreed nor disagreed (19%).

More women (55%) than men (48%) were in favour, and support was also strongest among younger and middle-aged farmers, averaging at around 52%, before supports levels dropped to 45% for those aged over 55.

There were also considerable geographical differences  while 77% of respondents in Tullow and 69% at Iverk Show agreed, just 30% in Dualla in Tipperary said they were in favour of the idea.

Figures provided by Dignitas, the Swiss-based right-to-die nonprofit member society, showed that eight people from Ireland have used its accompanied suicide services, although no-one has done so since 2013. As of last year, the organisation had 37 Irish members.

According to a spokesperson: Dignitas aim is not that people from all over the world travel to Switzerland, but rather that other countries adapt their legal system to implement end-of-life-issues so that citizens have a real choice. The core goal of Dignitas is that Dignitas one day does not exist anymore  because people can have their will at home and dont need an association like Dignitas.

William Reville, emeritus professor of biochemistry at UCC, who has written about the issue of assisted suicide, said permitting it in certain circumstances could prove a slippery slope.

If the proposition were simply Assisted suicide should be permitted in Ireland, I predict that less than 49% would agree. In certain circumstances invites one to imagine a terminally ill patient in unbearable and medically unrelievable agony, whose only hope of relief is death. To decide to deny the only available means of relief in such circumstances would be extremely difficult for anyone. However, although I am not an expert, I understand that palliative care medicine can relieve/manage most, perhaps almost all, pain.

Relieving unbearable agony at the end of life by euthanasia, agony that cannot be otherwise relieved, is the commonest argument for introducing assisted suicide. And, on the face of it, this is not unreasonable. However, the problem with this argument, in my opinion, is the slippery slope, that is, once introduced, the criteria for allowing assisted suicide broaden to cover a growing range of circumstances of lesser impact than unbearable suffering in the terminally ill, e.g. psychological suffering arising out of being at odds with life. Experience elsewhere bears this out.

Many people have a philosophical/religious persuasion that it is always unethical to deliberately end a human life. This position was so widely held in the past that it alone effectively ruled out any introduction of assisted suicide.

However, he said times are changing and there is now a strong general public impetus to introduce more and more liberal changes.

And despite the caveat I outlined above, this current Behaviour and Attitudes farmers poll is another illustration of these changing times.
CHICO, Calif. - Chico State held a Native American welcome reception on campus today. The Mechoopda tribe was in attendance, and a special signing occurred between the two parties.

Chico State signed an agreement back in 2005 and again in 2011 with the Mechoopda Indian Tribe.

The signing reinforced the recognition that the ground in which Chico State sits, is located on the Mechoopda tribes ancestral land.

On Wednesday, they renewed their pact with another signing.

A representative from the Mechoopda Tribe said a blessing in their language to start the ceremony. The agreement is called a memorandum of understanding.

The Chairman for the Mechoopda Tribe, Dennis Ramierez said there were two signings in the past.

"We had two previous ones 2005 and 2011 and I think this one's a more stronger one than in the past," Ramierez said.

Ramirez, said the strength of this agreement has a lot to do with President Gayle Hutchinson coming to office in 2016.

"I think in the past they recognized it but really didn't, really didn't care, I hate to say that word, they did some drilling and stuff and we weren't allowed to monitor those, so now we're allowed to monitor and drilling or disturbance of the ground in case there's any artifacts or bones," Ramierez said.

Hutchinson said they're taking this agreement to a new level, and every five or six years a document should always be relooked at to keep up with the times.

"And this is just a renewal what's different about this MOU from other MOU's," Hutchinson said. "It's a renewal and we've taken it a step further with a greater commitment to work and collaborate with one another."

The agreement will help the two parties work together as the campus plans to expand.

"We've added an appendix that really shares procedures on how we're gonna work together when we either build a new building or when we have significant ground disturbance," Hutchinson said.

Rachel McBride, the Tribal Director at Chico State, said this appendix helps to make sure that the artifacts and ancestors are not disturbed and are taken care of in the right way.

The Mechoopda Tribe celebrated 26 years of federal recognition, rebuilding and growth this past May.
By Sean ORiordan

A municipal district council is likely to become the first in the country to ban the setting-up of gaming arcades in its jurisdiction.

Council officials told a meeting of the municipal council, which covers a large area of North Cork, that on foot of calls from local public representatives, they had sought legal advice. This pointed to allowing them to introduce bylaws to prevent gambling arcades being set up in their area.

The Charleville/Fermoy municipal district council covers not only those two towns, but a wide area that incorporates Mitchelstown, Doneraile, and numerous villages.

Initially, the municipal district council sought legal advice on a district-wide ban, after it emerged that the former Fermoy Town Council, disbanded in 2014, had brought in a bylaw that barred gaming arcades in its jurisdiction.

However, a gaming company, aware of that legislation, set up an arcade in the town, but on its periphery, where the bylaw didnt apply, because it was in county council jurisdiction.

As the town grew, the former town council wasnt able to impose its bylaws on the periphery of the town, which was controlled by the county council and didnt have the same bylaws.

In the event, An Bord Pleanala ruled against the gaming companys planning permission, on the grounds that the locality it had chosen, close to a number of secondary schools, wasnt suitable.

In the meantime, another gaming arcade application has been lodged in Mitchelstown, which has also been appealed to An Bord Pleanala.

Cllr Kay Dawson told the municipal district council meeting that she understood the county council, back in the 1980s, had drafted a bylaw which specifically precluded the setting-up of gaming arcades in Mitchelstown.

Council officials said they were looking into their archives to see what bylaws were passed in Mitchelstown.

They said they would have to ensure the wording of the new bylaws was watertight to prevent court challenges.

A planning application was also recently lodged for a gaming arcade in Cobh.
By Liam Heylin

A man in a row at a hospital was carrying a small knife  but his solicitor said the accused was so drunk he was blissfully unaware of the incident until he was told about it from the prosecution evidence.

Frank Buttimer, solicitor, on behalf of Anthony OConnell, of 19 Kerryhall Rd, Cork, said: He has no recollection of anything to do with the incident. We read him out the statements from the precis; he was blissfully unaware of what happened.

Yesterday at Cork District Court, OConnell pleaded guilty to being in possession of a knife and being drunk and a source or danger to himself or others.

Mr Buttimer said: He is very sorry because he is very aware of the sanctity of hospitals generally. He has a long history of medical issues which are anxiety-related.

Inspector Finbarr OSullivan said: On August 17, gardai responded to a call to the accident and emergency unit of Mercy University Hospital.

He had a knife in his possession while arguing with an unknown member of the public.

When gardai approached, he dropped the knife on the floor and was removed from the building by security.

Garda Iain King noticed that the accused man had a strong smell of intoxicating liquor from him.

There was blood on the knife; it was his own blood as a result of his own handling of the knife.

Judge Olann Kelleher said he would impose a four-month suspended jail term on the defendant.

The judge told him he would avoid a prison sentence if he stayed out of trouble for the next two years.
By Fiachra O Cionnaith and Daniel McConnell

The former CervicalCheck boss forced out at the height of the scandal is set to break her five-month silence next week.

The Irish Examiner understands ex-clinical director Grainne Flannelly has told the Dail Public Accounts Committee (PAC) she wants to give her side of the story when the committee meets with health officials next Thursday.

In a letter to committee chair Sean Fleming, Dr Flannelly said she is aware the PAC is planning to meet with CervicalCheck and the Department of Health in the coming days.

And, just a week after a long-awaited independent report into the scandal, she said she wants to break her silence and give her own version of what happened.

Dr Flannelly was forced to quit CervicalCheck in April after Health Minister Simon Harris said he had lost faith in senior managers. Hours earlier, she admitted in a car-crash radio interview she and others failed to inform women of what happened.

Meanwhile, during a debate in the Dail on the Scally report into the CervicalCheck scandal, Mr Harris insisted an investigation into who leaked elements of the report to the media would occur, but admitted it is often difficult to uncover those responsible.

While there was wide praise for the tone and content of the report, Mr Harris faced fresh calls for him to resign over the scandal.

Independent TD for Tipperary, Mattie McGrath, was deeply critical of Mr Harris handling of the controversy.
By Sean ORiordan

Gardai have carried out searches in Cork and Waterford as part of their investigation into an attempted robbery at a bookies which was thwarted by an 83-year-old customer.

Three men, believed to be in their late teens or early 20s, burst into Bar One Racing in Riverstown, Glanmire shorlty after 6pm last Saturday.

The men, who had their faces covered, were armed with hammers and what appeared to be a shotgun.

However, they were met with stern resistance from great-grandfather Denis OConnor, who grappled with them and kicked one of them in the backside as they fled out the door.

Early yesterday morning, uniformed gardai, detectives, and members armed members of the Regional Support Unit raided a house in the Riverstown area and removed a number items from it in evidence bags.

A garda spokesman said they carried out a number of searches in Cork and Waterford.

It is believed the getaway car used to flee the scene of the attempted raid may be one which was found burnt out in the Waterford area.

The garda spokesman said a number of items have been seized as part of their ongoing investigation, but no arrests have been made so far.

Footage of the octogenarians heroics went viral and he appeared on news bulletins all over the world.

Bar One Racing manager Tim Murphy also grappled with one of the raiders, who tried to hit him with a hammer after demanding that he hand over the contents of the safe.
By Elaine Loughlin, Political Correspondent

Micheal Martin has ordered the Dail's Public Accounts Committee to "desist" from looking into the President's spending.

The PAC, which is chaired by Fianna Fail TD Sean Fleming, has voted to hold a day-long public review of presidential office spending levels next Tuesday - despite being warned doing so may be "unconstitutional".

Speaking at the National Ploughing Championships in Screggan, Co Offaly, Mr Martin said it was his "strong view" that the committee should not go ahead with its probe.

"Given that we are now in the middle of an election, I think the Public Accounts Committee should desist and should meet in the coolness of day in the aftermath of the election.

"If people want the presidency to be treated the same as any other Government department let's make that decision outside of an election context."

But Mr Martin said there "was a reason" why the office of the president had been originally left outside the scope of FOI.

He added that "people will read all sorts of agendas" into discussing it now.

While he said members of the committee may be "doing this for genuine reasons" but he said the issue had not been raised in previous years.

"It's coming up now in the middle of a presidential election and I would be worried about how PAC will be perceived," he said.

Earlier: PAC and Government on collision course over presidential spending investigation

By Fiachra O'Cionnaith

Update 10.35am: The Dail's public accounts committee has set itself on a collision course with the Government after voting to hold a day-long public review of presidential office spending levels next Tuesday - despite being warned doing so may be "unconstitutional".

The powerful cross-party committee agreed to hold the public questions just 24 hours before nominations close for who will be the presidential candidates next Wednesday, and after an hour of intense debate this morning.

In response to calls in the Irish Examiner last month from PAC chair and Fianna Fail TD Sean Fleming for an investigation into the near 50m total spend in the presidential office since 2011, the Government ruled out the move.

In a letter to the PAC earlier this week, published today, Department of the Taoiseach secretary general Martin Fraser said he would not allow such an examination as it may be "unconstitutional", politically motivated and could damage the credibility of the now imminent presidential election campaign next month.

During an hour-long debate on Thursday morning, PAC members clashed over whether to allow the investigation to take place.

However, despite concerns from Labour's Alan Kelly, Sinn Fein's David Cullinane and Fine Gael's Peter Burke, PAC chair Mr Fleming put down a motion to hold a day long investigation next Tuesday - the day before presidential candidate nominations close - which was passed by the committee.

"The PAC doesn't stop it's work when there is an election. We will proceed with the examination on Tuesday, the committee does not need legal advice,"he said, in a motion that was seconded by Fianna Fail colleague Marc Mac Sharry.

In an hour-long debate on the issue, Mr Fleming said the issue is "time sensitive" and that as such it must take place next Tuesday as he does not want it to occur when the official presidential election race begins on Wednesday.

However, although he was supported by Fianna Fail TDs Mr Mac Sharry, Shane Cassels and notably Independent TD Catherine Connolly, who is widely seen as a middleground voice on the PAC, the presidential spending review calls led to widespread criticism from other members.

They included Labour TD and PAC vice-chair Alan Kelly who, in a detailed response to Mr Fleming's plan, warned:

"I find it extraordinary we haven't gotten legal advice [on whether a presidential spending review can be allowed].

"We've gotten legal advice for less. You have to wonder regarding why this is being brought forward now, what is the rush to do it now. Anyone watching proceedings and thinks there isn't some form of political capital to be gained right now, it's just not real.

"It would be impossible to unsay things that would be said in here about a candidate in office, you [Sean Fleming] need to think about that.

I think this rubbish about doing it before a closing date is insincere and rubbish. This campaign is up and running, it's everywhere, it's been the most dominant story in the media.

"We might leave our political jerseys outside the door, but you will not be able to unsay what is said in here, and that is going to damage this committee and have an impact on the election. Now we will damn well better get legal advice, I won't be associated with a committee that does this, things will be said in here, no doubt."

However, Fianna Fail TD Mr Mac Sharry countered by saying:

"I just think we should do it [the review] and get it over with. I do have a problem with Mr Fraser's letter, he quotes the constitution and he's wrong.

"I don't see how it is remotely the case that this is unconstitutional or affecting the independence of civil servants, in fact it is the converse, here we have a senior civil servant directly the committee, and I have a serious issue with that.

"So, thanks Mr Fraser for the advice, I think it is flawed, incorrect and under no circumstances are we seeking to undermine civil servants impartiality in the process.

"I feel on my time on the committee at no time did any take the political jersey through that door."

Asked by committee member and Fianna Fail TD Bobby Aylward for any indication of spending levels in the office of the presidency, independent State financial watchdog the comptroller and auditor general Seamus McCarthy said he will have updated topline figures available at the end of next week but that generally the office stays 10% under-budget.

The decision to ignore Mr Fraser's demand that a presidential office spending investigation cannot take place has set the PAC on a direct collision course with the Government and its most senior civil servant, who will now be asked to attend the high-profile PAC emergency meeting on the issue next Tuesday.

Earlier: Probe into presidential spend blocked by Government

By Fiachra O'Cionnaith

Update 6.45am: The Government has blocked plans for a public investigation into spending in Michael D Higgins presidential office before next months Aras election amid claims any review would be unconstitutional and politically motivated.

Department of the Taoiseach secretary general Martin Fraser ruled out the move in a letter to the Public Accounts Committee, warning he will ask Attorney General Seamus Woulfe to intervene if the review demands continue to be made.

Last month, PAC chair and Fianna Fail TD Sean Fleming said he wants to investigate the amount of money being spent in the office of the presidency amid suggestions it has hit 50m since 2011. However, in a four-page letter sent to the PAC on Monday, Mr Fraser, the accounting officer for presidential spending, said the examination will not be allowed under any circumstances.

Describing the demand for an investigation as unique, he said he believes any review would be unconstitutional and could be interpreted as being politically motivated. He warned he will ask the attorney general to intervene if the demands continue.

It is important to respect the constitutional provisions relating to the President, the Government, the judiciary and the Oireachtas. An equally substantive concern relates to the political impartiality of the civil service. I cannot accept your suggestion that the campaigning period has not yet started.

To summarise, therefore, I believe your proposal appears to be unconstitutional and to undermine the principle of the political impartiality of the civil service. I would be grateful for any legal advice that you have received on the matter. It may be that I would also need to ask for formal advice from the attorney general.

While the PAC is understood to have been finely balanced on whether to support an investigation when Mr Fleming suggested it last month, Mr Frasers letter led to an angry reaction from a number of PAC members.

Social Democrats TD Catherine Murphy, whose party is supporting Mr Higgins re-election, said no office should be outside the bounds of scrutiny and that its not an unreasonable request to examine how that office is maintained.

Fianna Fail TD Marc Mac Sharry labelled Mr Frasers letter bizarre and insisted nothing in the Constitution blocks an investigation. He claimed the Government is attempting to hamstring the PACs work.

Presidential office spending has threatened to become a key part of the Aras race, with Sean Gallagher and Gavin Duffy saying they want transparency on how public money is being spent.

Mr Gallagher met yesterday in Leinster House with Fianna Fail TDs including James Lawless, who tweeted a photograph with Mr Gallagher at a Defence Forces protest alongside the quote with the next commander in chief despite his party officially backing Mr Higgins re-election campaign.

Mr Frasers letter will be discussed this morning before the PAC meets with Nama and the State Claims Agency to discuss the housing crisis and millions of euro in medical negligence payouts.
Irish citizens and businesses need a deal on Brexit in October, insists Taoiseach Leo Varadkar.

He said that if the EU does not shift its stance in the Brexit talks on the border, Britain would have to change its position.

His comments, at an informal summit of EU leaders in Salzburg, came ahead of a bilateral meeting with British Prime Minister Theresa May today.

With just weeks before a deadline for agreement on a withdrawal deal, the last piece of the agreement hangs on preventing a new border in the North.

Mr Varadkar told reporters last night it was not the case that progress had been made between the sides in recent weeks.

I dont think we are closer to a withdrawal agreement than we were in March. I cant report any progress at this stage unfortunately but we will keep working on it.

Mr Varadkar said the position of the EU and Ireland is that they both want a deal, a transition period, but also have to have a backstop that is legally operable.

Unfortunately, Britain is yet to present its text, he said, warning that Ireland and the EU want a deal in October, when EU leaders formally meet in Brussels.

As of now we havent made any progress. But we are going to keep working on it. It is my view that we should work towards having an agreement in principle in October. I wouldnt like to see it run in November or December because that would create a lot of uncertainty for businesses and citizens too.

Asked what would happen if the EU does not budge on its position on the border issue, he said: Well, then the United Kingdom will have to.

With just weeks to go to the deadline, Mr Varadkar believes there will be some deal. Ireland is preparing for all eventualities, he said.

I dont believe a no-deal scenario is where we are heading. Certainly Ireland is prepared for it, we have already started the process of hiring hundreds of people to staff our ports and airports. We have also started to recruit the IT system, the infrastructure that may need to go into place. And I want to emphasise that is in the ports and the airports for east-west trade, we are not making any preparations for any form of hard border between North and South.

Ireland would very much suffer in a no-deal scenario. We dont want that to happen. I think the UK would suffer a lot as well. Thats why we need to redouble our efforts, aim to have an agreement in principle in October.
By Sean ORiordan

A special memorial will be erected in a Co Cork town to a man who once held the world record for being buried alive.

Michael Mick Meaney became an international celebrity after he was buried alive in a coffin in Kilburn, London, on February 21, 1968  emerging 61 days later.

Although Mr Meaney was from Ballyporeen, Co Tipperary, the memorial will be unveiled in his adoptive hometown of Mitchelstown where he worked for Cork County Council for many years.

It will feature the inscription: Mick Meaney  A man who dared to dream when dreams were not allowed. With a time capsule design it will show a picture of Mr Meaney emerging from the coffin and will be inserted into a fawn-coloured stone slab in the south-eastern corner of New Market Square.

Details of the final draft of the memorial were provided to Charleville/Fermoy municipal district council at a meeting in Mitchelstown.

Municipal district officer Pauline Moriarty said that council officials had held a number of meetings about the design with Mr Meaneys daughter, Mary.

When Mr Meaney emerged from the coffin, celebrities of the time queued up to be pictured with him, including the legendary actress Diana Dors, considered in the 1960s as the British version of Marilyn Munroe.

When lowered into the ground, beneath 7ft of soil, famed Cobh tenor, Hollywood actor, and boxer Jack Doyle sang some songs.

The British House of Commons even debated his exploits, with some MPs expressing concern for his safety and asking if he should be immediately dug up.

Mr Meaney beat the previous record of 45 days set by American Digger ODell.

He was described as being tough as nails and wanted to be a world-famous boxer, like his hero Joe Louis.

Many who knew him said he might well have achieved that ambition if he hadnt lost the tips of some fingers in a building site accident, during which he was actually buried alive for the first time.
Irelands farmers are losing their religion, with fewer attending Mass and more people claiming they only attend church for occasions such as weddings and christenings.

The findings from the Irish Examiner/ICMSA farming opinion poll shows strong support for women priests, but little backing for the doing away of one feature of Irish life  the tolling of the Angelus bells.

In response to the statement I attend Mass regularly, 54% of people agreed  down from 69% in 2015, when the question was also asked, and an even more pronounced fall from the corresponding figure in 2013, when 71% agreed with the statement.

Some 37% disagreed with the statement, also a higher percentage than in both previous years.

Mass attendance and interest in religion have traditionally been seen as stronger in rural areas but the poll findings show an eroding of the faith, with 40% of those questioned agreeing that I tend to only visit the Church for weddings, funerals, christenings, communions and other special occasions.

A higher percentage again, 58%, agreed that religious services had been cut back in their local parish. When the same question was asked in 2016, 53% of respondents agreed.

Recent years have also shown increased support for changes within the Church and the latest poll shows that 78% of respondents believe the Catholic Church should ordain women priests, including 45% who strongly agree.

When it comes to the demographics, younger farmers and those heading into middle age are more likely to hold these views.

Just 37% of the under 35s attend Mass weekly, whereas the figure for those aged 65 and above is almost double that.

As for attending church only for occasions such as weddings and christenings, 53% of those under 35 and 69% of those aged 35 to 44 agreed, versus 22% of those aged 55 to 64 and 19% of those aged 65 and over.

There is broad support across all age groups for the idea of ordaining women priests, peaking at 87% in the 35 to 44 age category, while middle-aged farmers (65%) are more likely to have noted the reduction in services in their local parish.

There is one bright spot for the Church, however  if anyone were to suggest scrapping the Angelus, it would get short shrift, with just 20% in favour versus the 62% who are opposed and another 18% who expressed no view.

Almost one-third of respondents aged 35 to 44 agreed that the Angelus should be axed, but support among the other age categories was much lower.

There has been increased attention on the role of the Catholic Church in Ireland due to the visit of Pope Francis in August and the parallel focus on an often painful past, not least the issue of clerical child sex abuse.

Pubs opened on Good Friday this year and the passing of the referendum on the Eighth Amendment also indicated a changing Ireland.

A special report on the state of the Church carried out by the Irish Examiner earlier this year showed that at least half of the 25 archdioceses and dioceses around the country have seen an aggregate fall in the number of priests serving within them in the past five years, while almost half have parishes which have had to reduce the number of Mass services they can offer.

Senior figures also warned that the ageing profile of priests and the lack of new ordinations could mean a further reduction in the Churchs footprint around the country, with stretched human resources, a small but growing number of parishes without a resident priest, and an increased role for deacons and for priests coming to serve from overseas.

There is a shrinking number of Masses, according to the survey, and, in some areas, limitations on when ceremonies such as weddings and baptisms can be conducted.

Back in our 2013 poll, 52% of farming families expressed the view that the Catholic Church was still a dominant force in Ireland.

The ICMSA said: What is notable is the practical nature of the farmer-respondents; faced with the decline in the numbers of priests available to their dioceses and the likely acceleration of that reduction, you see the marked support for the ordination of women.
(CNN) -- A gunman who opened fire Wednesday at a municipal building in a small Pennsylvania town was shot dead by a police officer responding to the incident in which four people were wounded, state police said.

The gunman entered the Masontown Borough Municipal Center around 2 p.m. and began firing, Lt. Steve Dowlin of the Pennsylvania State Police told reporters.

The four victims included a sergeant from the Masontown police department. Their injuries are not life-threatening, Dowlin said.

The suspect had a restraining order against him related to a choking case that was to be heard Wednesday afternoon, Fayette County District Attorney Richard Bower said.

The suspect had been charged with strangulation, aggravated assault, terroristic threats and simple assault as a result of a domestic matter several weeks ago, Bower added.

Bower would not identify the man, saying his next of kin had yet to be notified of his death.

The shooting occurred outside District Magistrate Daniel Shimshock's office, authorities said.

Shooter looked into courtroom, an attorney says

Eric Randolph, an attorney who was in the courtroom, told CNN affiliate WTAE that he heard one pop and wondered what it was. Then he heard several more pops.

The door flew open and people ran in yelling, "Shooter, shooter."

Seconds later a man with a gun entered the courtroom and swept his arm around until he pointed a gun at Randolph, the attorney said.

"It was the most intense, frightening sensation I've ever had in my life," he said.

Randolph said he put his head in his hands and when he looked back up the shooter was gone.

Door shot out

Video recorded by a helicopter for WTAE showed that one of the two glass front doors of the Masontown Borough Municipal Center had been shot out.

Amy Johns, a spokeswoman for West Virginia University Ruby Memorial Hospital, said it had three patients from the shooting.

They are a 47-year-old man, a 35-year-old man and a 39-year-old woman. All of them are in fair condition, she said.

A spokesman for Uniontown Hospital said it received one person.

"The patient was treated and stabilized before being transferred to a Pittsburgh hospital," Josh Krysak said.

Masontown is in southern Pennsylvania, about 55 miles from Pittsburgh and 20 miles north of Morgantown, West Virginia. The town has about 3,300 residents.
Abortion services here will be completely free to ensure they can be fully accessed by anyone who needs them, will end the need to travel abroad for care and prevent an influx of private abortion clinics into this country.

Health Minister Simon Harris confirmed the new services will not cost anything just 24 hours after President Michael D Higgins signed the referendum result into law, thereby formally removing the Eighth Amendment from the Constitution.

Speaking to reporters at the opening of the new primary care centre in Grangegorman, Dublin, Mr Harris said that even though abortion services are set to be provided in the near future, it is essential cost is not a barrier to accessing the medical help.

Asked specifically if he will introduce any charge to receive abortions in legislation due to be passed by cabinet next week and put to the Dail in the first week of October, Mr Harris said no fees will be involved.

If a price tag was linked to accessing abortion services, Mr Harris said it would encourage private abortion clinics into Ireland and lead to women continuing to travel abroad for the care they need.

Yes, it is my intention that the services will be free, Mr Harris stated.

Ive said from the start that I dont want cost to be a barrier, because if cost is a barrier you get into a situation where one of two things happen; you get abortion clinics to develop or you can see people having to continue to travel.

I want this [abortion services] to be provided as part of our healthcare system, our public healthcare system and part of our primary healthcare system.

I think its important to say that Tuesday was an extraordinarily historic day. The President of Ireland signed the bill that has removed the Eighth Amendment from the Constitution, and today is the first day that the Eighth Amendment is actually gone from Bunreacht na hEireann. That now allows us as legislatures to do our job, he said.

Mr Harris also confirmed that, now that President Higgins has signed the order paper to remove the Eighth Amendment from the Constitution, he will bring planned law changes to allow abortion services to Cabinet next week.

He said he expects Cabinet to pass these new rules immediately in order to allow him to bring them to the Dail in the first week of October and fully introduce them by the end of this year.

Asked about concerns pro-life groups may target the three-day cooling off period for women seeking to access abortion services which is included in the planned new laws, Mr Harris said he was aware of the issue.

I do note the comments of some groups about the three days. But I would say to anybody regardless of whether you voted yes or no, we made a conscious decision to have a very detailed general scheme available before the referendum, that three-day period was part of the discussion and was debated fully during the referendum, which was passed.
Taoiseach Leo Varadkar held a bilateral meeting with UK Prime Minister Theresa May in Austria this morning.

Brexit discussions between the pair took place at the informal EU meeting in Salzburg.

The Taoiseach was joined at the meeting by Minister for European Affairs, Helen McEntee.

Starting second day at #SalzburgSummit by meeting @theresa_may with @HMcEntee for #Brexit update. Then busy day of meetings with @EuropeanCouncil leaders on internal security and more Brexit talks pic.twitter.com/ioHYUUXgOU  Leo Varadkar (@LeoVaradkar) September 20, 2018

He described it as a very good meeting.

Efforts to avoid a return of a hard border in Ireland, when the UK leaves the European Union, is a key stumbling block in discussions.

Mr Varadkar says although he hopes a no deal scenario can be avoided, preparations for that eventuality continue.

"I had a very good meeting this morning with Prime Minister May and her team.

"Time is running short. There's proposals for another summit in October and then in November.

"Ireland is a country that obviously wants to avoid a no-deal scenario, we want to avoid a no-deal Brexit but we are preparing for that."

At a dinner last night, Mrs May said that there would be no second referendum and no delay to the withdrawal date in March.

Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz is hoping a deal can be made.

"No deal and a hard Brexit would be difficult for Europe but it would be terrible for the UK," he said.

"The reason why we as European Union and we as Austrians would like to have a compromise is that we think that it is better for both."

Digital Desk
By Tom Tuite

Two primary school teachers and an accountant are among those who have been spared jail for taking part in an ugly 10-man brawl in a popular Dublin pub.

Four of the accused, who have Dublin addresses, and a fifth, from Kildare, had pleaded guilty to taking part in violent disorder after a row broke out at McGowans pub, Phibsborough, in the early hours of July 14, 2017.

Teachers Michael Davitt, aged 34, of Clanmaurice Rd, Donnycarney, and Seamus OCearra, aged 34, of Mount Symon Green, Clonsilla, were each ordered to donate 800 to charity.

OCearra was also given a one-month sentence by Judge Brian OShea, who suspended it on condition that he keep the peace for six months.

Judge OShea told Davitt and OCearra that when they went out, they were ambassadors for their schools and, in this regard, they had let their profession and, more importantly, themselves down in a most egregious way.

Accountant Conor Shannon, aged 33, from Glendale Estate, Leixlip, Co Kildare, avoided being jailed and was ordered to donate 800 to charity within six months.

Warehouse manager Stephen Cantwell, aged 28, from Collins Avenue, and electrician David McSweeney, aged 31, from McKee Avenue, Finglas, appeared before the same court in connection with the incident.

McSweeney, who was celebrating his birthday on the night, faced an additional charge for producing a glass as a weapon.

He had 27 prior convictions and waited for the perfect moment before throwing a pint glass full force into OCearras face at short range, it was noted.

McSweeney was jailed for six months while Cantwell was given a two-month sentence, suspended on condition he stays out of trouble for the next six months, and he must give 800 to charity.

Judge OShea described it as an ugly incident in which pub staff did their best and struggled and struggled to placate the accused. None of the five defendants walked away or retreated during the fight, he remarked.

In an outline of the facts, the judge heard the incident happened at 2.40am and up to 10 people got into a row, which continued even after staff tried to separate them. It was finished by the time gardai arrived.

Judge OShea heard that Cantwell was observed hitting another male from behind  after he had been punched by that man earlier in the row.

The court was told that Davitt, who teaches at Hollywell Educate Together in Swords, Dublin, was also involved in the melee and had thrown a number of punches, but not at anyone in particular.

He also suffered a bloody nose after receiving a blow to the face, the court heard.

McSweeney was also seen fighting and threw a glass which hit OCearra, who was injured and suffered a cut to his forehead. Judge OShea rejected McSweeneys claim he did not intend to hit OCearras face with the glass, but rather the wall.

Judge OShea, who had studied CCTV evidence, described that claim as absolute nonsense.

OCearra, who works at Mary, Mother of Hope NS in Littlepace, Dublin 15, was also kicked; however, he was also observed punching one man in the face, knocking him against the bar and on to the floor.

All five men apologised in court via their lawyers.
By Niall Murray, Education Correspondent

Additional funding and acknowledgement of staff concerns will be vital to the success of the countrys first technological university, the Higher Education Authority (HEA) has told Education Minister Richard Bruton.

The concerns were raised in a letter supporting the recommendations of a panel of international experts to allow three institutes of technology in Dublin to create the first technological university (TU).

The minister announced his decision to grant the application for TU status in July. Subject to Dail and Seanad approval, he will make an order to permit Blanchardstown, Dublin, and Tallaght institutes of technology to merge and create Technological University Dublin on January 1, 2019.

As preparations for the formal establishment of the TU continue, the HEA boards advice on which the ministers decision was made has emerged. It shows its concerns for the project, particularly in relation to funding and staffing issues.

At a June 26 meeting, the HEA board considered the very positive report of the four-member panel who visited the three colleges to meet management, staff, and students. Chaired by European Universities Association adviser Andree Sursock, the panel was impressed by work to date and enthusiasm for the project.

The panel said the resource ramifications of a new technological university had yet to be determined and that unexpected spending may be needed during an unstable post-merger phase of at least five years.

In the panels judgement, economies of scale will not necessarily be realised by merger, at least at the beginning. However, statements were made during interviews with staff that possibilities exist to do more with current funding in some areas, states the report.

The HEA said international experience shows that adequate funding is a key factor in the success of complex higher education mergers.

Given the widely publicised gaps in current funding of Irish higher education, and the backlog of calls on any additional funding that might be made available, it will be important to ensure that the funding of any technological university project does not come at the expense of the wider higher education and research system, the HEA wrote to Mr Bruton.

It advised him that the complexity associated with contract changes and other staffing matters in the transition to a TU should not be underestimated. The panel suggested, for example, a possible need for changes to academic contracts to ensure an appropriate balance between teaching and research arising from the greater research activity that will be needed.

While it heard no dissenting staff voices on the need and desire for the project during its visits to the campuses, the panel was told that about 10%-15% of staff had some reluctance about the change.

The HEA told Mr Bruton that, in a conversation on how to improve the assessment process, the panel chair noted its visits had not included a session to allow them to hear and understand those concerns.

The impact on research reputation was also flagged, given the likely dilution of research rankings previously held by Dublin Institute of Technology, whose age means it has a stronger research culture than the other two colleges.

The HEA proposed a follow-up review a year after the new TU is created, to examine progress and assess how the issues raised by the authority and the panel are being addressed.
Replacing the women in the home provision in the Constitution with a broad reference to all carers could lead to a spate of compensation claims against the State, an Oireachtas committee has heard.

Fianna Fail justice spokesman Jim OCallaghan said grandparents looking after their grandchildren, or even a teenager walking a younger sibling home from school, might have a case for payment.

The Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission told the Oireachtas justice committee it wanted Article 41.2 removed from the Constitution and replaced with a wording that recognised the importance of family life in the broadest sense and recognised and supported the work of carers in that context.

Mr OCallaghan asked if that would mean enabling carers to go to court to vindicate their economic rights. Chief commissioner Emily Logan stressed the issue was complex but agreed: In a word, yes.

Mr OCallaghan said he was concerned at the financial implications. We may be undermining the social welfare budget, he said.

The Government is to hold a referendum next year with the aim of repealing Article 41.2 but while that move is widely supported, there is disagreement over whether it should be repealed or replaced.

Justice Minister Charlie Flanagan told the committee he had doubts that a replacement wording could capture the diversity of carers and of care situations.

National Womens Council director Orla OConnor said it should be possible to have a general wording in the Constitution that recognises carers, followed up by specific legislation.

Dr Laura Cahillane, law lecturer at University of Limerick, said personally, she would prefer the article to be deleted entirely and followed up with legislation. However, she said from a legal perspective, there is nothing to stop the insertion of a specific entitlement with financial implications in the Constitution.

We already have an existing socioeconomic right to free primary education in the Constitution which also imposes a financial burden on the State, she pointed out.

Fine Gael TD Colm Brophy urged a straightforward deletion of the article with a separate discussion on legislation later on. One of the absolute nightmares would be that we would hold a referendum to do something that almost everyone agrees with and end up losing it because it could get caught up in a campaign on a replacement that people felt they couldnt support because it was too strong or too weak.

The committee meets again next week to hear more presentations.
The Mens Sheds association is filling a gap of comradeship and community, writes John Daly, as he headed to Cork to attend the largest gathering of the association in the world.

There are many stories and anecdotes around the community benefits of the Mens Sheds movement  all of them underlining in various ways the can do attitude of its members.

One I heard recently concerned a lady in the West of Ireland who was organising an important annual charity function, only to discover the night before that the builder hired to erect the platform and stands for the event was suddenly unavailable.

In an understandable tizzy at what to do with an overnight deadline looming, someone suggested calling the local Mens Shed for help.

Within an hour, six able-bodied guys varying in age from 55 to 75 pitched up at the venue, tools and materials in hand, to expertly and efficiently save the day.

Their demanded reward for such dedicated service? A pot of tea and a plate of homemade scones.

Last week in Cork, within the confines of the stunning new Pairc Ui Chaoimh stadium, a mini-United Nations of the Mens Shed movement displayed its wares in the largest assembly of the global organisation this year. With all 32 Irish counties represented, it also included an international dimension of 500 members from Denmark, Iceland, Australia and the United States.

Gathered under the theme of Connecting Communities, the event aimed to reinforce the importance of Mens Sheds to towns and villages throughout the country, and the world. During the two-day gathering, the focus was firmly fixed on the associations triumphs, achievements and challenges  all structured around Shed Stories  first-hand accounts of exemplary projects.

And proving that its not all about building and fixing, attendees in Pairc Ui Chaoimh found themselves serenaded by a selection of mens sheds choirs, another burgeoning aspect of the association which has taken hold across the country. Fittingly, proceedings concluded with a rousing finale from the renowned and local Mayfield Mens Sheds choir.

Appropriate to the venue, a number of headline speakers drawn from the world of elite sport were part of the Cork schedule, including recently retired Munster and Ireland legend Donncha OCallaghan, making a welcome return to his home city.

There was a huge gap there before Mens Sheds came along, a real gap in finding a place where men could go to meet other men, explains Barry Sheridan, CEO of the association.

It was very hard to find any community space where men could congregate to get involved in their community or maybe learn new skills. The huge response to Mens Sheds across the country clearly showed that need for that outlet as a place to harness that willing spirit.

Since its foundation in 2011, the Irish Mens Sheds Association has overseen an exponential growth in the number of locations throughout Ireland. From a standing start, the number of Irish sheds has increased from zero in 2009 to over 400 today. Mens sheds are now present in each of the 32 counties, with as many as 50 in Dublin and 30 in Cork.

This is the largest gathering of Mens Sheds ever held anywhere in the world, and reflects Irelands status as world leaders in the field.

"We have the highest number of Mens Sheds per head of population in the entire world.

Even in an age of IT superhighways and answers to anything at the click of a computer mouse, the old-as-time instinct for simple human contact trumps even the enormous strides of the internet era.

Even at a time when social media offers so much in the way of information and advantages, Mens Sheds demonstrate the need for that human connection we all want. But it is even bigger than that, in fostering that sense of belonging to your community or place. It is an inherent part of Irish culture to want to feel proud of where were from, to feel a sense of connectivity to a local place.

"This kind of spirit expresses itself in many ways, everything from Tidy Towns, charity fundraising, helping schools or improvement projects for the local area.

"When we ask our members what do they get the most reward from, a huge percentage, over 80%, say it is that sense of being more involved in their community and giving something back.

Earlier this summer, Minister for Rural and Community Development, Michael Ring, announced the provision of 500,000 to support the work of Mens Sheds  capital funding that will provide small grants to

individual sheds for equipment purchase and structural improvements.

In towns, villages and cities which I have visited as minister, I am continually struck by the great work that Mens Sheds do in supporting important local initiatives. Among their ranks they have great expertise, experience and know-how and make a massive contribution to their local communities, he added.

Barry Sheridan called the funding the most significant development in the history of Mens Sheds in Ireland, and reflects the impact sheds are making on communities throughout the country. It is a tribute to the work of all our staff and volunteers, as well as to every single Mens Shed member and supporter who has helped make our sheds what they are today.

Copper-fastening what must be a red letter year in the Irish Mens Sheds history, the association was recently awarded the European Citizens Prize for 2018, which it shared with fellow Irish winner, Inner City Helping Homeless.

The Mens Sheds were recognised for promoting the health and well-being of members by combating issues such as loneliness and isolation while creating a culture where men can openly discuss their thoughts and feelings without stigma.

The association was commended for integration as one of its key values by being a dedicated, friendly and welcoming meeting place where men, regardless of age, background or ability, come together and undertake a variety of mutually agreed activities.

Representatives of the association will attend the official prize-giving ceremony at the European Parliament in Brussels on October 9.
As Cork Orchestral Society marks 80 years of concerts, Cathy Desmond looks back on the early days of an organisation thats done so much for music on Leeside.

The Cork Orchestral Society celebrates 80 years of concert experiences in Cork In 1938, as Europe teetered on the brink of World War II, there were shifts in the cultural and political landscape in Cork.

In a year that saw Douglas Hyde elected as the first president of Ireland, the British government handed back control of the military base at Spike Island and a new musical society was founded that was to have a lasting impact on the cultural life of the city.

The new society announced its lofty ambitions in this notice in the Cork Examiner of November 14 1938.

Music lovers will be greatly interested to learn that a new society has been established for the special purpose of organising a series of symphony and chamber music concerts in Cork each season.

"Under the name Cork Orchestral Society, the concerts produced under its auspices will bring soloists of international reputation to Cork in association with local artists.

The review of the first concert at City Hall appeared in a March edition under the headline Big attendance at fine concert. The tenor, Heddle Nash  well known and loved in Cork  was the soloist.

The unamed reviewer tells us that in each of the songs, Mr Nash was perfect in tonal quality articulation and volume Even at the very end of the hall and under the balcony every word was heard perfectly.

The reviewer also paid tribute to the conductor Aloys Fleischmann, the driving force behind the new society.

FOUNDING FATHER

Fleischmanns daughter Ruth is well versed in the early history of the Cork Orchestral Society.

The first thing my father did when he became Professor of Music at UCC was found a university orchestra. Four years later he set up the Cork Orchestral Society and renamed the orchestra as the Cork Symphony Orchestra. The idea was that there should be a closer link between town and gown and that the music department should serve the city.

Professor Fleischmann went on to conduct 600 concerts over the near six decades of his stewardship of the CSO earning him a place in the Guinness Book of Records as the worlds most durable conductor.

The European dimension of his vision got a major boost when Sean Lemass initiated the An Tostal series of festivals in 1953 making funds available for cultural events.

Ruth explains:  In 1953 the society set up links with institutions on the continent which was an anticipation of those that were to come when Ireland joined the EEC.

Aloys Fleischmann rehearsing with Cork Symphony Orchestra in the 1970s.

It was a heydey that saw a dozen major international orchestras visit Cork. The Halle with Sir John Barbirolli, the Vienna Phil, the Boston Symphony along with soloists like Yehudi Menuhin.

That really was the highlight of the societys existence. It was quite exceptional, she recalls.

From the start, the society undertook major campaigns to improve musical infrastruture in Cork. The Cork Symphony Orchestra repeated their concerts for a daytime audience of schoolchildren.

Later, in 1975, the society initiated a campaign to provide a Steinway piano for Cork.

With an abundance of Steinways now housed in the citys School of Music, it is difficult to believe that as late as 1975, a piano had to be hired from Dublin for concerts.

A thousand subscribers paid an extra pound at five concerts and the following year, a new piano was unveiled at a gala concert at the Opera House showcasing three Cork soloists, Charles Lynch, Darina Gibson and Jan Cap.

The biggest battle the society undertook was the campaign to get a professional radio orchestra for Cork. Despite the support of 42 civic bodies over a campaign that lasted six years, the society did not succeed in its goal.

However, in 1959 as a sort of consolation prize, Radio Eireann appointed a string quartet to reside in the city. Cork enjoyed the benefits of RTE patronage with the Academica and the Vanbrugh Quartets taking on the mantle until the Galway based Contempo Quartet won the tender in 2013.

CHAMBER MUSIC

In addition to symphony orchestra concerts, the society supported chamber music recitals. In April 1939 the Cork Examiner carried a notice of a recital featuring the Kutcher String Quartet at Clarence Hall at the Imperial Hotel.

Also on the bill was Tilly Fleischmann who joined the quartet to premiere a quintet by her son Aloys.

Larry Poland, COS stalwart.

One of the longest standing members of the Cork Orchestral Society is Larry Poland, an electrical engineer who served on the first sub- committee dedicated to promoting chamber music recitals for the Cork Orchestral Society.

Poland broadened the range of programming to include jazz. Looking back over a lifetime of concert going both as a promoter and a punter, he recalls many outstanding events including the inaugural recital of the RTE Academica String Quartet.

Everyone was in raptures. It was a fantastic concert. They had such a dramatic presence. Even the silences were exciting!

Pressed for his desert island highlight of a lifetime of concert activity, Poland recalls the series of two dozen lunchtime concerts featuring young artists from each European state at the Crawford Gallery as part of the European Capital of Culture in 2005 as being his pick for outstanding highlight.

What might have society founder Prof Fleischmann made of the cultural scene in Cork 80 years later? His daughter Ruth says hed have been delighted.

He would feel it had all been worthwhile.

Pictures courtesy of Ruth Fleischmann.
Casa Ramos Locations Closed Following Search Warrants

All 14 Casa Ramos restaurants in Northern California are shut down as part of a Department of Justice operation, but there's no word yet on the focus of the investigation. The restaurants have legal clearance to reopen but are waiting to hear word from its corporate headquarters on how to proceed.

Chico Fire Captain Joe Duran Dies of Job-Related Cancer

The Chico Fire Department is saying goodbye to a long time team member. Captain Rubin "Joe" Duran recently died from job-related cancer. Duran led the department's rescue team until August of 2017when he retired due to poor health. His memorial will be held Friday, Sept. 21, at the Bidwell Presbyterian Church in Chico.

New Regulations for Homeowners Rebuilding After Carr Fire

Homeowners rebuilding after the Carr Fire will have more relaxed regulations in order to reduce costs. Shasta County is also reminding people they still need to sign up for the fire debris removal program. Home rebuilding is set to begin Nov. 30.

Chico Airport Commissioner Removed From Position

Chico Airport Commissioner Steve Breedlove has been fired for alleged disruptive behavior. Mayor Sean Morgan says Breedlove initiated a chant that disrupted a heated council meeting two weeks ago. Five city council members voted to fire Breedlove, one voted no and one abstained.

Possible 'Round Up' Link to Cancer

Action News Now is following up on the case of a Bay Area groundskeeper who won a lawsuit against the chemical giant, Monsanto, over their weed-killer Round Up's possible link to cancer. When it comes to schools here locally, the Chico Unified School District says they follow state and county laws for herbicide use and right now, Round Up is still an approved herbicide. The environmental protection agency says the weed killer does not cause cancer, while the World Health Organization says their may be a link.

Redding Police Department to Serve Coffee at Dutch Bros

The Redding police and fire departments will be helping take orders and serving up coffee at the Dutch Bros on South Market Street to benefit the Turtle Bay Exploration Park. They will be out from 7 - 9 a.m. this morning.

Boys and Girls Club Hosting 'Pasta on the Plaza'

The Boys and Girls Club of the North Valley is hosting its10th annual "Pasta on the Plaza" fundraiser. It's from 5 - 8 p.m. at the Rotary Plaza on Wall Street in Chico. Tickets are $10 per person and it's all you can eat pasta and salad.
The Irish Defence Forces is broken with wages so low that some soldiers are facing homelessness and being told not to have children, writes Joyce Fegan

Our families live in poverty. We suffer from food, income, fuel, and child poverty. Many of us can only dream of owning our home, and some this month are facing uncertainty about their homes, while others are facing homelessness. I personally know these people, said Sarah Walshe of the Wives and Partners of the Defence Forces organisation.

She was speaking in Dublin yesterday as a large-scale parade, made up of retired soldiers and family members of current officers, marched to Leinster House to highlight the poor pay and working conditions in the Defence Forces. In the last three years, 2,890 personnel of all ranks have left, representing an exodus of approximately 30% of the Defence Forces overall strength.

Ms Walshe spoke about the systemic poverty that the poor working conditions create, and said how members of the Defence Forces are being questioned for having children and starting families.

Some have questioned why our partners have continued to serve and why we bring children into our families when we are already struggling. We find this mentally repulsive, both as a matter of moral values and public policy. Telling us not to have children because we cant afford them?

It seems for some people, the mentality is that the poor only exist because theyve done something wrong, are irresponsible and lazy. However, the reason we are poor is not due to laziness, I can tell you that for certain. Its not because weve not worked hard enough, or have children or, indeed, because weve been irresponsible, said Ms Walshe.

Members of the Defence Forces are not allowed to speak in public, to bargain collectively, or to assemble for protest and so their position is being represented by their families and retired soldiers.

Ms Walshe said that Defence Forces families are unable to make ends meet no matter how hard they work.

George Curling, Ballincollig, Co Cork, left, and Raymond Long, Youghal, 1st Field Artillery veterans association. Picture: Moya Nolan

Defence Forces families are working hard, damn hard and, in fact, were working harder than ever, but are earning less and less and we cannot make ends meet. In our current economy we see Defence Forces personnel working more than one job and theyre still unable to make ends meet. Why? Certainly not because they havent worked hard enough. Certainly not because they havent taken responsibility and certainly not because theyre not up early in the morning, she said.

Ms Walshe said that the poverty and struggle they face is systemic in nature and one that can only be tackled by Government.

The Department of Defence with Leo Varadkar at the helm appear to promote what can only be described as a culture of despair, hardship, and struggle for the Defence Forces families. Shame on you. Shame on you, she said.

Ms Walshe said their demands are modest and described them as: A fair days pay for a fair days work.

Former solider Declan Power addressed the thousand-strong crowd outside Leinster House yesterday lunchtime. He said the State faces a danger because of a broken Defence Forces.

For many of us, the oath we took caused us either to end up patrolling the skies and seas bounding this island, for others it involved patrolling the back roads of the border or South Lebanon or the savannahs of Africa. However, there is now a greater danger we are here to acknowledge, a fact we must acknowledge, and that is, Defence is broken and it needs to be fixed and there can be no more prevarication.

Mr Power said that the retired soldiers and families of serving soldiers would be failing in their duty as citizens if they did not articulate the problems faced by the Defence Forces.

Haughey was buying shirts three times our wages while telling us to tighten our belts

Anthony Bolger, 60, served 21 years in the army and is now retired from the Second Battalion. His wife and children had to march for his wages almost four decades ago.

I served 21 years in Cathal Brugha Barracks and my son is there now. And 37 years ago, when my son was a child, we were out on the streets and my wife and kids were out on the street, again looking for money.

And at the same time Charlie Haughey was in Paris with his fancy woman, and he was buying bottles of wine and shirts for three times our wages and he told us then, 37 years ago to tighten our belts and now in the year of our Lord, 2018, Im out here looking for extra money for my son so him and his kids can live, he told the Irish Examiner.

The retired solider attended the parade to Leinster House yesterday in association with the Wives and Partners of the Defence Forces (WPDF) group, as his son is now in the army and can not get a mortgage based on his salary.

Retired Sergent Major Noel OCallaghan with his granddaughter Aleesha Penrose, 9, at a Parade for Respect and Loyalty for the Irish Defence Forces at Merrion Square in Dublin. Picture: Brian Lawless

We shouldnt be out here doing this. My son cant get a mortgage. My son can hardly afford to rent the apartment hes living in and hes not long back from Syria.

These people (the Government) should be ashamed that they have us out here doing this in 2018, its crazy, said the retired soldier.

He reared three children on his salary, and while it was difficult, he said that the cost of living, compared to wages, seemed lower then than it is today.

Course it was hard to rear my family. I had three children. Yes it was very hard to rear our kids, even then. The money seemed to stretch more then than it does now. We had to double job, he said.

The retired soldier, while he was marching for pay restoration and better wages for members of the Irish Defence Forces, said the Government needs to urgently address issues such as working-class salaries and social housing, as the situation is crazy.

The whole Dail has to sit down and talk about this, not the wage only for the soldiers but the wage for the working class people in hotels and places like that, and also the matter of social housing too. Its crazy, said Mr Bolger.

Members of the Defence Forces sign an oath upon entry to service that precludes them from collective bargaining or assembling for protest, so current officers were represented by their partners, families and retired soldiers.

Mr Bolger said that his organisation was nearly threatened for taking part in the parade for fair wages.

Im here to stand for the Wives and Partners of the Defence Forces (WPDF) group. At the beginning we were condemned, we were told not to come here, we were actually nearly threatened that our association would be broken up and so on. Were living in a corrupt system and it seems to be getting worse, he said.

Im here to look after my younger generation and the younger generation, the younger crowd, he added.

I had to do two other jobs

During his 21-year career Stephen OShea took on security jobs in order to supplement his army salary and support his family.

Oh my God, I had to do two other security jobs on top of the army. Id start work at 8am, finished at 4.30pm. Start my first job at 6pm, finish at 11pm, and then start the next security job at 11.30pm, finish that at 4am, and went home and had four hours sleep and went to work again. I did that. I didnt see my wife. I had two children, he said.

The soldier said the Defence Forces has been stripped back to such an extent that every barracks I served in, I served in five barracks, Monaghan, Cavan, Cootehill, Collins Barracks, and Clancy Barracks, and every single barracks is closed.

Thats sad, he added.

The father-of-two was approached by his son who wanted to follow in his fathers footsteps and join the Defence Forces. However, his son decided against it.

"I served 21 years in the army. I served in Lebanon. Five years ago my son went to join the army and passed the interview, passed the test, and came home and asked me: Dad, what do you think?

I said if you want to enjoy yourself and see the world, join the army, meet the best friends of your life. But I said if you want to make money and buy a house  my son never joined the army, he said.

Its sad when people have to travel from the likes of Donegal, Dundalk, Athlone up to Dublin to do a 24-hour duty and then go back, thats not right. You tell me one job where you do 24 hours work, your first eight hours is normal work, after that youre talking 16 hours for 20. Its disgraceful, he added.

The retired soldier also addressed the myth that the army does nothing.

First people called out during the snow? The army was there. The Pope? The army was there. They travel from all over Ireland. For what? he said.
By Ronnie Esplin

Brendan Rodgers wants his players to demand more of themselves in front of goal when Celtic take on Rosenborg in their opening Europa League Group B game on Thursday.

The Hoops drew a blank in their Ladbrokes Premiership clash with St Mirren on Friday night and the normally free-scoring treble champions have notched only five goals in five league games this season, as they sit five points behind leaders Hearts.

The Celtic boss is now looking for improvement from all his potential goalscorers as the focus turns to Europe.

On paper we have lots of players that can score but you dont win the game on paper, said the Irishman, who revealed Kristoffer Ajer is a big doubt with a virus while fellow defender Jozo Simunovic remains out with a knee injury.

You have to win it on the field. We have to take those opportunities.

I have always said possession is no good on its own. We have to have that penetration.

But we have to be more demanding of ourselves now. That is our message.

My trust in the players is 100%, they have been brilliant in the time I have been here.

But we need to improve in the final third of the pitch. Defensively we have been solid in our last four games, keeping a clean sheet, but we need to do more in the attacking third of the pitch.

It is ensuring we have that energy and quality and being clinical to take opportunities.

That is something that we have talked about and focused on in our training and will look to bring in these next games.

Celtic knocked the Norwegian club out of the Champions League qualifiers last month with a 3-1 aggregate success, before themselves losing out to AEK Athens in the next round.

Rosenborg ended up qualifying for the Europa League, beating League of Ireland champions Cork City along the way, while AEK Athens dumped Celtic out of the Champions League.
By James Rogers

Patrick Hoban hopes that by firing Dundalk FC to the title he can also land himself a place in the Republic of Ireland senior panel.

There have been increasing calls for Martin ONeill to include the 27-goal striker in his squad given his form this season for Stephen Kennys side.

Hoban hasnt hidden his ambition to one day represent his country but tomorrow night he will have a green jersey in his crosshairs as he spearheads Dundalks bid to open up a nine-point gap over reigning champions Cork City at Turners Cross.

A goal on what will be his 100th Dundalk start would see him equal the Premier Division record of 25 goals in a season, previously achieved by Richie Towell in 2015, Jason Byrne in 2004, and Glen Crowe in 2000/01.

The latter pair were both handed international call-ups on the back of their fine scoring form domestically and Hoban feels he is equipped to make a similar step up if called upon.

I feel that, from where I was last year to where I am this year, Ive kicked on and massively improved. Id like to think Im in my prime now, he said.

Im just smarter and cleverer on the pitch now. I dont know if that means Im due a call-up but I just have to keep doing what Im doing and I might get one.

Ive a league to win and a cup to try and win with this fantastic side and thats my main aim but a call-up for Ireland would be a dream come true to be honest.

The 27-year-old admits his time in England is often held against him, even if 12 goals from 48 starts is not as bad as some critics make the three-year spell out to be.

England was frustrating with the injuries I got at the wrong time. Like after my first training session with Oxford I went over on my ankle and was out for three months.

I was basically playing as a number 10 as well and I think that took a lot away from my game. I found myself playing too far away from goal which wasnt really playing to my strengths.

Obviously the stats arent as good as what they are here so people will say its a different standard but we played in the Europa League and Ive scored two in that and felt quite comfortable playing at that level.

England was just one of those things where it didnt really go my way but I feel Ive learnt and improved from that. I know that period probably doesnt stand to me and is probably holding me back a bit but Id like to think what Im doing here is making people forget about that.
Our preparedness has improved, but unless politicians, particularly in the US, prioritise climate change action and carbon reductions, more catastrophe is inevitable, says Vinod Thomas.

Hurricane Florence, which smashed into the south-eastern United States last week, is the latest in a string of extreme weather events that has raised expectations for disaster preparedness.

Closer to home, the devastating impact of Storm Ali, which claimed two lives, is still being evaluated.

With big storms occurring more frequently, authorities worldwide are responding with upgraded early-warning systems, better evacuation plans, and more aggressive sheltering strategies.

But the day is fast-approaching when fires, droughts, and storms, exacerbated by global warming, will dwarf our ability to respond.

The case for reducing carbon dioxide emissions  and slowing the rate of anthropogenic warming  grows stronger with every new catastrophe.

The solution is clear: we must elect leaders who will take climate change seriously. In the US, the next opportunity to do that will be the midterm congressional elections in November.

Three decades have passed since former Nasa scientist, James Hansen, first warned, with a high degree of confidence, that human activity was making the planet hotter.

And yet, because too few people heeded his warnings then, everyone is paying a price now. In the first nine months of 2018, the world has experienced a lifetimes worth of historic weather events, from drought-fuelled forest fires in the American West, Greece, and Sweden, to floods in Hawaii, southern India, and elsewhere in South Asia.

As Florence was tearing through the Carolinas, Typhoon Mangkhut was swamping the Philippines and southern China.

Rescuers search for survivors through mud of landslide after Typhoon Mangkhut lashes the Philippines with strong winds and heavy rain, leaving at least 64 people dead. https://t.co/BaPsfucIIi pic.twitter.com/sh3inDZDxe  ABC News (@ABC) September 17, 2018

While Hansens warnings came when climate science was in its infancy, scientists today have connected the dots among CO2 emissions, climate change, and severe weather.

For example, researchers have linked global warming to extreme heat-waves, such as the recent ones in California, China, Japan, and South Korea.

Data have also tied the severity of hurricanes in the southern US to warmer waters in the Gulf of Mexico. Hurricane Harvey, which hit Texas and other areas in 2017, brought 50in of rain in some places.

To be sure, disaster planning still saves lives. In Houston, authorities were ready for Harvey, in part because of lessons learned from Hurricane Katrina, which devastated New Orleans in 2005.

That storm caused 1,833 deaths, while at least 88 were killed during Harvey.

The impact of lessons learned in India is even more striking. In October, 2013, residents of Odisha state were alerted early to the arrival of Cyclone Phailin.

Twitpic: Children build a "house" among the wreckage after Cyclone #Phailin, which hit #India this past October. pic.twitter.com/DUvdYHVrTU  CARE (care.org) (@CARE) January 16, 2014

By the time the storm made landfall, many people had already evacuated. Although Phailin did kill 45 people, a storm of similar magnitude, which hit the same region 14 years earlier, killed 10,000 people.

Still, emergency management will struggle to keep pace with the havoc wrought by climate change, owing to a dangerous disconnect between knowledge and action, even as the scientific evidence piles up.

For example, many economic advisers still consider climate-change solutions to be anti-growth, rather than pro-growth  despite the fact that low-carbon solutions create new investment opportunities and jobs.

Policymakers are equally reluctant to champion meaningful changes, like carbon taxes or the elimination of fossil-fuel subsidies. Leaders in most countries consider the status quo to be politically safer.

Even weather reports on television typically fail to mention climate change as an underlying cause of severe meteorological events.

But the gap is most glaring at the policy level, particularly in the US. With the international response to climate change at a critical juncture, the Trump administration is putting the US economy on a path to higher CO2 emissions, by reversing emissions limits for coal-fired power plants, encouraging higher fossil-fuel production, and rolling back support for wind and solar power.

None of this makes economic sense. To make matters worse, the White Houses proposed cuts to the National Weather Service, and its loosening of environmental and zoning regulations, will further impede disaster management.

As the worlds largest CO2 emitter per capita, the US has a unique responsibility to help solve the climate-change challenge. So do American voters. When they go to the polls in November, they must consider the candidates policies toward climate change.

While domestic issues might be uppermost in voters minds, Harvey, Florence, and other extreme weather events have made global warming a local issue and placed it squarely on the ballot.

Vinod Thomas, former director general of independent evaluation at the World Bank, is a visiting professor at the National University of Singapore and author of Climate Change and Natural Disasters: Transforming Economies and Policies for a Sustainable Future. Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2018.
The Future of Policing in Ireland report has thrown up a range of issues that could see proposals get stuck or even sink in the resultant quagmire, says Cormac OKeeffe.

As people get to read the Policing Commissions report and start to digest its contents, obvious issues are going to jump out. And issues in the world of policing reform can mutate into a quagmire, where proposals may get stuck or sink.

Four immediate issues pop out.

MULTI-AGENCY TEAMS

The Future of Policing in Ireland report places a new focus on community policing or what it calls district policing.

This includes a broader definition beyond policing to community safety.

Part of this will be the imperative of harm prevention, including providing services to people with mental health and addiction conditions, homeless people, children, the elderly, and others at risk.

The report says vulnerable people are too often the victims of crime  sexual and physical abuse, trafficking, exploitation, fraud, stalking, harassment, and hate crimes.

The report envisages bringing other State agencies into the responsibility of ensuring community safety and calls for new legislation to enable this.

It says analysis abroad indicates a relatively small number of families and individuals account for a disproportionate amount of time and resources of State agencies and that integrated teams are best to respond to this.

The commission has dusted down a recommendation in a joint Mental Health Commission and An Garda Siochana report, dated 2009, calling for crisis intervention teams.

It says it is regrettable that, nine years on, these out-of-hour teams of police, health, and social workers have still not been set up.

Its recommendation for such teams, and for co-location of police and social services, will hit the same problems that have bedevilled similar proposals, which include the sharing of information between agencies, and been repeated by various inquiries in clerical child sexual abuse and by the Garda Inspectorate, as seen in its most report this year, Responding to Child Sexual Abuse.

Given the demands and backlog of cases, and shortages of staff, faced by Tusla, the child and family agency, and similar problems facing the HSE, not to mention the gardai, this is major problem number one.

It will involve a major investment in resources to the relevant agencies  which requires extra Government funding. Not reallocation of funding from other key areas, but new, additional money.

DISMISSED FROM COURT

A radical recommendation is that all prosecution decisions should be taken away from gardai and that the practice of police prosecuting cases  which happens in district courts up and down the country  should cease.

It says these massively intensive duties should be taken up by an expanded State solicitor system or a national prosecution service.

It documents the reasons why, which are all sound: It is not the sergeants job to prosecute, they are not trained, and not trained to the level of the defence (which could have a senior counsel).

On an important point of principle and practice, it says investigations and prosecutions should be separate.

In addition, it says:

The involvement of gardai in prosecutions and the amount of time they spend in court or preparing for court is enormously wasteful of police resources that should be deployed on core police duties.

Similar concerns and recommendations apply to the role gardai play at inquests, which are time-consuming for officers and for which they are not trained. It notes the Governments long-standing commitment to reform the inquest process.

While the report states its case well (bearing in mind the Garda Inspectorate has flagged such concerns many years ago), it will require political will and a massive investment in staffing and resources for either State solicitors or the DPP.

Linked to this, the report calls for a whole host of duties to be taken away from gardai.

These include: Security at courts, transporting all remand prisoners, serving summonses, attending minor road traffic accidents, and safeguarding examination papers.

It says gardai are also involved in verifying passport applications and even the opening of new bank accounts.

It says action to remove gardai from these functions should be taken immediately and that these non-core duties should be reassigned to other agencies. Moreover, it says this should be one of the first priorities on the implementation programme.

It says the Courts Service and the Irish Prison Service would need to take up the relevant duties. That means extra staff and funding.

In addition, the Gardas remaining role in immigration duties should be transferred to the Department of Justices Irish Naturalisation and Immigration Service.

All of which means massive funding battles with the Department of Public Expenditure and all sorts of painful and protracted negotiations with unions and staff associations.

POWER STRUGGLES

This is an area that has caused some surprise and indeed shock. It is also the only area in the entire report where there was an internal split, with two of the 11 members (Vicky Conway and Eddie Molloy) expressing an objection to a key proposal regarding changes to structures. That minority view is in the small print on page 59.

The commission has recommended a new Garda Siochana Board, similar to a board of directors, be set up to provide internal governance over the commissioner and to support the commissioner.

This body will have a non-executive chair, appointed by the Government, and members from business and professional sectors, supported by a secretariat.

This recommendation is to go along with a significant expansion in the powers of the commissioner  to make him both a police chief and a chief executive officer (with control over finance, HR, and the police estate).

The report calls for the commissioner to have the power to appoint his or her own leadership team  and that this responsibility should be removed from the Policing Authority.

This is despite the authority only recently being given the job, in part to bring independence, fairness, and transparency to the process.

Staff associations have long believed favouritism and nepotism dominate promotions. (The Policing Authority and Garda Inspectorate are to merge into a new Policing and Community Safety Oversight Commission.)

The report says the board will oversee the new appointments process.

The board will also muscle into the Policing Authoritys role in devising policing priorities, plans, and strategies.

The board also assumes overall responsibility for management of the police budget and resources. It now will nominate people to the Government for the roles of Garda commissioner and deputy commissioner (previously held by the Policing Authority).

The commission, chaired by Kathleen OToole, a police chief in various parts of the US, says it wants to clearly demark lines of governance (board), oversight (Policing and Community Safety Oversight Commission), and accountability (justice minister, Oireachtas).

As it stands, the Policing Authority holds at least four public meetings with the commissioner and his or her team. Commissioner meetings with the board would not be in public.

In addition to complicating, possibility unhinging, the oversight structure, these changes would mean the commissioner will now be surrounded by more bodies to answer to: the board, oversight commission, the minister, and Oireachtas committees. (Under separate proposals, he will also have a new national security co-ordinator, effectively adviser to the Taoiseach, over him, though the power relationship there is as yet unclear).

Ms OToole has made the establishment of the Garda board one of the top four priorities, so it will be interesting how this plays out.

REFORM LOGJAM

The commission acknowledges that other reports (containing hundreds and hundreds of recommendations) have come before it, most notably in the reform blueprints contained in two massive landmark reports of the Garda Inspectorate (2014s Crime Investigation and 2015s Changing Policing in Ireland).

That was followed in 2016 with the five-year Garda Modernisation and Renewal Programme, which the Government agreed would the implementation mechanism for the inspectorates recommendations.

A massive amount of time and resources have been spent on this, both internally with the gardai and externally in the authority trying to monitor the progress. One of the major initiatives in that, the creation of a divisional policing model, subsuming the districts under it, is being piloted in three Garda divisions and it is government policy to roll out nationwide.

We have a new blueprint in town  the commissions report  and a soon-to-be-appointed new sheriff in town in the reports powerful implementation group.

The report says the commission was emphatically not our view that the report should be superimposed upon all that has gone before.

It adds:

Many recommendations from previous reports may still be relevant, but some will not and others will need reassessment and modification.

It says all outstanding recommendations from previous reports should now be viewed through the lens of its report.

That sounds easy  its anything but.

First, who is going to assess what previous recommendations should be jettisoned, what should remain and what should be modified? How are they going to do that?

It would appear the implementation group, but it would also have to involve the Policing Authority, which has been monitoring the implementation, and the commissioner and his team, who have been doing the implementing. And what does through the lens mean in practice?

One of the jobs will be to determine how the new district policing model the commission recommends fits with the divisional policing model being piloted. While they seem to contradict each other, elements of the commissions district model is within a super divisional model, including divisional detective and specialist teams. But things could get bogged down here.

All of which means a lot more heavy lifting to be done before implementation begins.
The first step in conducting online propaganda efforts and misinformation campaigns is almost always a fake social media profile, writes Arun Vishwanath.

Phony profiles for nonexistent people worm their way into the social networks of real people, where they can spread their falsehoods.

But neither social media companies nor technological innovations offer reliable ways to identify and remove social media profiles that dont represent actual authentic people.

It might sound positive that over six months in late 2017 and early 2018, Facebook detected and suspended some 1.3 billion fake accounts.

But an estimated 3 to 4 percent of accounts that remain, or approximately 66 million to 88 million profiles, are also fake but havent yet been detected.

Likewise, estimates are that 9 to 15 percent of Twitters 336 million accounts are fake.

Fake profiles arent just on Facebook and Twitter, and theyre not only targeting people in the U.S.

In December 2017, German intelligence officials warned that Chinese agents using fake LinkedIn profiles were targeting more than 10,000 German government employees.

And in mid-August, the Israeli military reported that Hamas was using fake profiles on Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp to entrap Israeli soldiers into downloading malicious software.

Although social media companies have begun hiring more people and using artificial intelligence to detect fake profiles, that wont be enough to review every profile in time to stop their misuse.

As my research explores, the problem isnt actually that people  and algorithms  create fake profiles online. Whats really wrong is that other people fall for them.

My research into why so many users have trouble spotting fake profiles has identified some ways people could get better at identifying phony accounts  and highlights some places technology companies could help.

People fall for fake profiles

To understand social media users thought processes, I created fake profiles on Facebook and sent out friend requests to 141 students in a large university.

Each of the fake profiles varied in some way  such as having many or few fake friends, or whether there was a profile photo.

The idea was to figure out whether one or another type of profile was most successful in getting accepted as a connection by real users  and then surveying the hoodwinked people to find out how it happened.

When fake profiles want to connect, what happens?

A researcher created several fake profiles and tried to connect with university students. Many of them accepted friend requests from them, or considered doing so.

Some people even gave the phony "friends" personal information.

How people responded:

Chart: The Conversation, CC-BY-ND Source: Arun Vishwanath

I found that only 30 percent of the targeted people rejected the request from a fake person. When surveyed two weeks later, 52 percent of users were still considering approving the request.

Nearly one in five  18 percent  had accepted the request right away.

Of those who accepted it, 15 percent had responded to inquiries from the fake profile with personal information such as their home address, their student identification number, and their availability for a part-time internship. Another 40 percent of them were considering revealing private data.

But why?

When I interviewed the real people my fake profiles had targeted, the most important thing I found was that users fundamentally believe there is a person behind each profile.

People told me they had thought the profile belonged to someone they knew, or possibly someone a friend knew.

Not one person ever suspected the profile was a complete fabrication, expressly created to deceive them.

Mistakenly thinking each friend request has come from a real person may cause people to accept friend requests simply to be polite and not hurt someone elses feelings  even if theyre not sure they know the person.

In addition, almost all social media users decide whether to accept a connection based on a few key elements in the requesters profile  chiefly how many friends the person has and how many mutual connections there are.

I found that people who already have many connections are even less discerning, approving almost every request that comes in. So even a brand-new profile nets some victims.

And with every new connection, the fake profile appears more realistic, and has more mutual friends with others.

This cascade of victims is how fake profiles acquire legitimacy and become widespread.

The spread can be fast because most social media sites are designed to keep users coming back, habitually checking notifications and responding immediately to connection requests.

That tendency is even more pronounced on smartphones  which may explain why users accessing social media on smartphones are significantly more likely to accept fake profile requests than desktop or laptop computer users.

Illusions of safety

And users may think theyre safer than they actually are, wrongly assuming that a platforms privacy settings will protect them from fake profiles.

For instance, many users told me they believe that Facebooks controls for granting differing access to friends versus others also protect them from fakers.

Likewise, many LinkedIn users also told me they believe that because they post only professional information, the potential consequences for accepting rogue connections on it are limited.

But thats a flawed assumption: Hackers can use any information gleaned from any platform.

For instance, simply knowing on LinkedIn that someone is working at some business helps them craft emails to the person or others at the company.

Furthermore, users who carelessly accept requests assuming their privacy controls protect them imperil other connections who havent set their controls as high.

Seeking solutions

Using social media safely means learning how to spot fake profiles and use privacy settings properly.

There are numerous online sources for advice  including platforms own help pages.

But too often its left to users to inform themselves, usually after theyve already become victims of a social media scam  which always begins with accepting a fake request.

Adults should learn  and teach children  how to examine connection requests carefully in order to protect their devices, profiles and posts from prying eyes, and themselves from being maliciously manipulated.

That includes reviewing connection requests during distraction-free periods of the day and using a computer rather than a smartphone to check out potential connections.

It also involves identifying which of their actual friends tend to accept almost every friend request from anyone, making them weak links in the social network.

These are places social media platform companies can help. Theyre already creating mechanisms to track app usage and to pause notifications, helping people avoid being inundated or needing to constantly react. Thats a good start  but they could do more.

For instance, social media sites could show users indicators of how many of their connections are inactive for long periods, helping people purge their friend networks from time to time.

They could also show which connections have suddenly acquired large numbers of friends, and which ones accept unusually high percentages of friend requests.

Social media companies need to do more to help users identify and report potentially fake profiles, augmenting their own staff and automated efforts.

Social media sites also need to communicate with each other. Many fake profiles are reused across different social networks.

But if Facebook blocks a faker, Twitter may not. When one site blocks a profile, it should send key information  such as the profiles name and email address  to other platforms so they can investigate and potentially block the fraud there too.

This article was written by Arun Vishwanath of University at Buffalo, The State University of New York and was originally published on The Conversation.

Read the original article here.
According to the government, the problem arises due to the UK losing access to the EU's passporting regime in a no-deal scenario. Under the current regime, UK firms can make payments into bank accounts in the European Economic Area (EEA) and the same applies in the opposite direction. Following a no-deal, UK firms based in the EEA that currently 'passport' into the EEA, will be unable to make payments to the EEA, while EEA-based firms will be unable to pay into UK bank accounts. So, for those UK pensioners living abroad, the pension payments they receive from the UK would not be able to be paid to them. Following this bleak announcement, Stuart Price, Partner and Actuary at Quantum Advisory, looks at how this could be avoided. He said: Firstly, its important to note that the government maintains that a no-deal outcome is unlikely, so everything in its notes about what may or may not happen is purely speculative. According to the government they are doing everything in their power to minimise disruption post 29 March and this includes implementing a Temporary Permissions Regime (TPR). The TPR will allow EEA firms that currently passport into the UK to continue to do so until 2022 while they apply for full authorisation from UK regulators. However, if you are living abroad and are receiving a UK pension, I would recommend that you keep a close eye on developments.
Burma Activist Receives 15-Day Sentence for Peace Protest

Peaceful protesters Ko Zeyar Lwin, Ko Khant Min Htet and Ko Ye Wint Aung speak to media after their court hearing on Wednesday. / Aung Kyaw Htet / The Irrawaddy

MANDALAY  The Kyauktada Township Court in Yangon convicted three peace protesters under the Peaceful Assembly Law on Wednesday, giving them a choice of paying a fine of 20,000 kyats each or a sentence of 15 days imprisonment.

Peace activist Ko Zeyar Lwin and poets Ko Khant Min Htet and Ko Ye Wint Aung participated in a protest at Mahabandoola Park on May 14, calling for an end to the wars in Kachin State, at which they gave speeches and recited poems.

The two poets agreed to pay the 20,000 kyats fine, however Ko Zeyar Lwin choose imprisonment.

Suing and sentencing us under the Peaceful Assembly Law for participating in a movement for the peace of the country is limiting our freedom of expression and insulting peace, said Ko Zeyar Lwin.

Our trial shows the devastation of the judicial system of the country and that is why I decided to take 15 days imprisonment, he added.

Ko Zeyar Lwin is also facing trial under the Peaceful Assembly Law in Bahan Township where the peace rally passed through on the way to the larger gathering in Mahabandoola Park on the same day.

Protests urging government authorities to rescue locals trapped in the war-torn region of Kachin State and calling for a stop to the conflict, took place in Yangon and Mandalay in May, followed by the opening of a protest camp in Myitkyina, the capital of Kachin State.

Thousands of locals remain displaced by outbreaks of fighting between the Tatmadaw (Myanmar Army) and Kachin ethnic armed groups, which took place in Kachin State in April and May.

Four protesters from Mandalay and 17 protesters from Yangon have been sued under Article 19 of Peaceful Assembly Law over the protests in May.

The Mandalay protesters have already served prison sentences of two months behind bars.
Burma Analysis: Why the Rohingya Teaching Assistants Project is Facing Opposition

A government primary school in northern Maungdaw Township's Thae Chaung Hpa Wut Village was shut down after Muslim militants staged attacks on border outposts on October 9, 2016. / Moe Myint / The Irrawaddy

YANGONIn order to alleviate language barriers in schools in Rohingya-dominant northern Rakhine States Maungdaw District, the National League for Democracy (NLD) government began recruiting Rohingya teachers last week and the district education department has already received more than 1,000 applicants as of Wednesday.

Government schoolteachers across Myanmar use Burmese language and materials in their classrooms but this proves tough for Rohingya children who most commonly speak a Chittagonian dialect. Sometimes they cannot interact with teachers even in simple conversations. In the Maungdaw area, there are a very limited number of Rohingya with civil servant jobs and this rare offer from the Ministry of Education has drawn the attention of the Rohingya community.

The head of Maugdaw Districts education department, U Khin Aung told The Irrawaddy that they have already received more than 1,000 applications from Rohingya as of Wednesday within one week of the call for applications. He said 400 applications from Maungdaw and 600 from Buthidaung townships respectively were submitted. The education official used the term teaching assistant rather than schoolteacher.

68% of Rohingya students now in Bangladeshi camps

Its unclear as of yet how much funding the Ministry of Education will allocate to this pilot project and whether the government has plans to hire more applicants in the future or not, as final decision is in the hands of the higher authorities. U Khin Aung said that the ministry will pay the teaching assistants salaries of 50,000 to 150,000 kyats in cash per month.

According to him, more than 130 Muslims are currently serving in the education department of Maungdaw District and a small number of them retired last year. Its unclear whether the qualified candidates will have opportunities in the future to be promoted to schoolteacher positions when they have sufficient experience for the position.

Approximately 500 government schoolsincluding primary, middle and high schoolswere serving more than 140,000 Muslim students and some non-Muslim students before the violence broke out in August 2017 and ultimately resulted in 700,000 Rohingya fleeing to Bangladesh.

Most of the schools are now empty as ninety percent of the Rohingya population were ejected by the violence and more than 200 Rohingya villages were reduced to ashes. The Bangladesh and Myanmar governments have been working out a repatriation process since this early year but not a single refugee has returned through official channels as of today.

U Khin Aung acknowledged that more than 80,000 students in Maungdaw and more than 60,000 students in Buthidaung Township were studying at government schools in early 2017. Today, the size of the population of Muslim students in the entire Maungdaw District has declined to 60,000approximately 20,000 in Maungdaw Township and 40,000 in Buthidaung Township.

These numbers indicate that at least 68 percent of the Muslim students of Maungdaw Districta number of about 80,000have been sheltering in neighboring Bangladesh in muddy refugee camps without any access to education. The figure for displaced students does not include deaths and the missing.

A rare career for Rohingya

Some of the Rohingya who did not join the exodus, like Abdul Wahid from Rathedaung Township who is currently sheltering with his relatives in Buthidaung Township, told The Irrawaddy that job opportunities are an incentive for the displaced people as they have been in financial hardship for months.

He said that five people from his village applied for the positions via the Nyaung Chaung village superintendent.

They are happy with the [call for] recruitments as it can become a professional career for them. At the same time, it can [provide for] their daily life, said Abdul Wahid.

However, the fate of their applications are uncertain as local authorities have announced that Rohingya applicants from Buthidaung and Maungdaw are preferable for the posts.

The applicants were unhappy when they heard about the governments preferences but they are still hopeful, said Abdul Wahid.

Objections from nationalists

Although the education department says this is just the initial stage of a pilot project, more challenges are imminent as serious objections have already been voiced to the government from Myanmars nationalists.

Nearly 200 representatives from Buddhist religious orders, Rakhine political parties and the Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP) as well as civil society groups held an urgent meeting in Rakhines capital of Sittwe this week which focused on objecting offering the positions to Muslims from Maugdaw District who are high school graduates. Anti-Muslim activists have said they will send a letter of objection to the presidents office.

Arakanese nationalist U Than Tun, who joined the meeting told The Irrawaddy that the previous government under U Thein Sein had made the same offer to Muslims in 2013 but the positions was clearly labelled volunteer teacher positions at the time. The current NLD-led government officially stated teacher assistant and educational staff in its recruitment letter. He argued that current Myanmar laws only grant civil servant positions to citizens, not non-citizens.

As for the nationalists drumming-up objections, U Khin Aung said There is no discriminative policy in the government education system. We civil servants are implementing what the ministry instructed on the ground.

Yangon-based organization Gender Equality Networks founder U Aung Myo Min, remarked that education is essential for every single child. Making this change to the school teaching system could significantly improve the students learning potential. Educational opportunities should be offered to kids regardless of racial or religious backgrounds, he said.

People should simply acknowledge that a kid is a kid, he said.

U Aung Myo Min recommended that educators who know about sensitive and regional situations would be appropriate teaching assistants or teachers and they should educate students on sensitive issues through the school curriculum. He emphasized that promoting education in strife-torn regions is a necessity, especially; children should be taught proper education at school.

Conflicts happen more easily in regions with lower education levels, said U Aung Myo Min.

U Khaing Kaung San, founder of Sittwe-based Wunlurk Development Foundation, recalled that since armed conflicts erupted in Maugdaw last year, schoolteachers from other areas who had been working in Maungdaw, returned to their hometowns and have yet to go back to Maungdaw as they feel it is still unsafe there. Local authorities quickly filled the gap with temporary schoolteachers. Thus, he agreed that this government approach is realistic and reasonable.

Why do Arakanese disrespect other groups rights?

Some Arakanese civil society groups have claimed that the majority of Arakanese are not familiar with the concept of basic human rights and sometimes have no idea even about their own basic rights. They do not know the necessity of respecting other groups basic rights, and so block or demand a revoke of rights for other groups. Similarly, narrow-minded reactions will only result in negative impressions of Rakhine being relayed to the international community.

U Khaing Kaung San criticized the response saying it indicates how the community is not well informed about basic human rights. He said that people should not connect job opportunities and citizenship matters citing the example of neighboring Thailand allowing job opportunities for Myanmar immigrants though they are obviously not Thai citizens.

Despite some members of the Arakanese community being troubled with longstanding human rights abuses, the number of institutionalized human rights watchdogs or organization focusing on Arakanese are extremely limited. The Irrawaddy asked several social activists from Rakhine State, including members of Kyaukphyu Rural Development Assocaition (KRDA) and Wunlark Development Foundation, whether any human rights institution or watchdogs are monitoring rights abuses among the Arakanese and all of them answered that they have no knowledge of such activities.

The Arakan Human Rights and Development Organisation (AHRDO), established by exiled Rakhine citizens in 2011, was made up mostly of members of the All Arakan Students and Youths Congress (AASYC). The groups mission was to promote human rights and improve economic and social conditions as well as sustainable development in the state. They jointly conducted some training sessions with USAID in Sittwe in 2013. Since then it has been no longer active.

KRDAs coordinator U Tun Kyi said that the Arakanese have lack of knowledge of basic human rights concepts and very a few people are familiar with human rights articles like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. He agreed that Arakanese society needs rights-watch organizations.

When it comes to human rights, the Arakanese community often accuse organizations of helping only the Rohingya community, of receiving funding from the international community and of working for foreign governments. Sometimes rights activists are closely watched by the government and for these reasons, even motivated, flexible Arakanese activists are hesitant to establish human rights institutions.

We refrain from putting our professional work status on our Facebook profile, said U Khaing Kaung San.

Mindset change necessary for peace

U Tun Kyi claimed there is always criticism no matter what an organization professionally works on. For the communitys mindset to change, CSOs and rights advocates should regularly hold rights awareness campaigns and knowledge-sharing activities across the state.

Arkanese activists have suggested that rights lobbyists should convince prominent Arakanese politicians, activists, well-respected community leaders and religious leaders to install a new ideology. They suggested for politicians not to further politicize the wounds of the Muslim and Rakhine community.

To improve trust-building between two communities, relevant organization should organize cultural exchange programs by inviting Rakhine and Muslims to come together for community-level dialogue events. In addition, international relief organizations should carry out not only food distribution campaigns for the Rohingya but also encourage a change of mindset towards the displaced Rohingya who have been living in camps for years.

Gender Equality Networks U Aung Myo Min agreed that mindset change is crucial for social cohesion and a harmonious society and added that a society should be broad and made up of diverse communities which can offer different perspectives in finding solutions. He said if a community refuses to accept diversity, it could lead to self-isolation and a disconnect from the outside world.

A child is like a blank white page. As they are observing and learning from their environment, they should be properly educated with truthfulness and guidance. Once children are misguided by their community, it can become an infectious disease or cancer, he said.
Burma Ethnic Armed Groups Discuss Peace Process Participation

Members of the KIA in Laiza, October 2013. / The Irrawaddy

Ethnic armed groups held a two-day meeting in Laiza, Kachin State, at the headquarters of the Kachin Independence Army (KIA) to discuss how they could cooperate for participation in the countrys peace process, according to a KIA spokesperson.

At least 12 ethnic armed groups participated including 10 signatories to the nationwide ceasefire agreement (NCA) and other non-signatories including the KIA and Karenni National Progressive Party (KNPP).

Two main topics were discussed at the meeting, according to Col Naw Bu, a spokesperson from the KIA/KIO (Kachin Independence Organization).

First, NCA signatories explained the latest peace negotiations with the government. Then, the discussion moved to how all ethnic armed groups could participate in the peace deal, he said.

It was just a preliminary meeting. No agreements were made. We just discussed how we could all participate, Col Naw Bu added.

Previously, NCA signatories released a statement that said they would try to bring non-signatories into the peace deal. The meeting in Laiza is one of the first steps in trying to achieve that aim.

Ethnic armed organizations recently asked Daw Aung San Suu Kyi to hold a meeting with the government, army and parliament soon, in order to discuss two issues that have created a deadlock in negotiations.

The first issue is that the Myanmar Army has asked ethnic leaders to promise that their groups would not secede from the Union. The second issue is the idea that Myanmar should have only one army, placing ethnic armed groups under the command of the Myanmar Army.

Nai Hong Sar, vice chairman of the New Mon State Party, said that ethnic armed leaders will not make these concessions to the army at this point, as the country does not have a real democracy and ethnic people still lack rights. Ethnic leaders will accept one national army when Myanmar has a true democracy and ethnic people are granted self-determination, he added.
Burma Lawmakers Call for End to Disciplinary Transfers of Corrupt, Incompetent Officials

Chin States Htantalan Township. / The Chin Land Post

NAYPYITAWLawmakers have criticized the unofficial but long-standing practice of transferring civil servants to border and ethnic areas of the country as a disciplinary measure.

Such disciplinary action should no longer be practiced in a country that is preparing to establish a federal Union system, lawmakers from underdeveloped areas told reporters in Naypyitaw on Thursday.

Disciplinary transfers of civil servants for corruption or poor performance have a negative impact on the development of ethnic regions, said Lower House lawmaker Dr. Khin Sithu of Karenni States Loikaw Township.

I was quite upset when a police colonel said at a recent meeting of the bill committee that he had consigned some policemen to Chin State because they hadnt performed their duties properly, the lawmaker said.

Whenever a newly transferred civil servant arrives in Karenni State, his colleagues ask him what he did wrong to be transferred there, the lawmaker said.

It had become a cliche among officials to speak of punitive transfers to ethnic states like Kachin, Karenni, Chin and Rakhine, whose development lags behind other parts of the country, she said.

The practice showed a disregard for ethnic regions that belied the rhetoric of a federal Union, democracy and equality, she said.

Karenni State is not a prison, said Dr. Khin Sithu, who is a former chairperson of the Karenni State chapter of the ruling National League for Democracy.

Ni Shwe Lan, a Lower House lawmaker from Chin States Htantalan Township, said, We are unhappy that civil servants are transferred to our areas as a punishment. There are not many educated persons [civil servants] in Chin State. Most of the people here are inexperienced. So we want to receive those who can educate and mentor our staff and enhance their capacity.

Transferring civil servants to less-developed parts of the country not only ends their career but also impedes the development of the region, she said, adding that civil servants who are punished in that way lose all enthusiasm for their work.

Lower House lawmaker U Ar Moe Si of Kachin States Khaung Lam Pu said the current township and assistant township education officers in his constituency had been transferred there as a form of disciplinary action.

The Union education minister said in the Union Parliament that the two were transferred to Khaung Lam Pu as a punishment, he said.

No one has passed the matriculation examination in Khaung Lam Pu for the past nine years, so assigning such officials to the township education office discourages the existing staff, who have been working in very poor conditions and bad weather, the lawmaker said.

The lawmaker said he had raised questions about the practice in Parliament, and suggested that officials who break the code of conduct for civil servants be assigned to offices in Naypyitaw instead.

Deputy Education Minister Dr. Win Maw Tun said there is no official policy of punishing civil servants by transferring them to ethnic regions. Official punishments range from verbal and written warnings, to suspension, demotion and dismissal, he said.

In the Khaung Lam Pu case, I only intended to improve their performance. No law prescribes the punishment of transferring someone to remote areas, the deputy education minister told The Irrawaddy.

In fact, the unofficial practice of transferring civil servants to remote areas as a punishment has been around since the monarchical period.

I found that some civil servants in Buthidaung were taking bribes. They had in fact been transferred from non-ethnic areas as a punishment for corruption, said Lower House lawmaker U Aung Thaung Shwe of Rakhine States Buthidaung Township.
Burma NLD Urges China to Respect Local Laws, Concerns on Beijing Trip

NLD Vice Chairman U Zaw Myint Maung (second for left) meets with Huang Kunming (third from left), head of propaganda for the CPC, in Beijing on Tuesday. / NLD / Facebook

YANGON  China must respect local concerns when implementing projects in Myanmar, the vice chairman of the National League for Democracy (NLD) told his hosts during a recent goodwill visit to Beijing, according to a press release from the party.

The release, issued today, said U Zaw Myint Maung also urged Beijing to respect Myanmars laws, create local jobs and to focus on peace when planning and carrying out projects in the country in a meeting on Monday with Song Tao, chief international liaison officer for the Communist Party of China (CPC).

The CPC invited U Zaw Myint Maung and other top NLD officials to Beijing for the nine-day visit starting Sept. 11 to strengthen relations between the two ruling parties.

The delegation included 18 NLD central committee members, including two chief ministers  from Mandalay and Magway regions  six central executive committee members, four auxiliary central executive committee members, two central economic committee members and one central information committee member. Five of the delegates have no additional senior party roles.

China is Myanmars largest investor, though many of its investments are controversial, perhaps none more so than the Myitsone hydropower dam in Kachin State, which was suspended in 2011 in the face of widespread public concern about the projects potential social and environmental impacts.

The delegation also met with Huang Kunming, head of the CPCs Propaganda Department and a member of the partys politburo.

Each side shared the partys constitution and discipline, NLD spokesman U Myo Nyunt, who joined the trip, told The Irrawaddy.

The CPC arranged for the delegates to visit the Three Gorges hydroelectric dam, the worlds largest power station with an installed capacity of 22,500 MW, which spans the Yangtze River.

Although the dam displaced 1.3 million people and caused significant ecological change including an increased risk of landslides, and remains controversial both at home and abroad, China considers it a social and economic success.

Chinese official explained their challenges while they were constructing the dam, how they addressed the local objections, U Myo Nyunt said.

Beijing and Naypyitaw recently signed a memorandum of understanding on the China-Myanmar Economic Corridor, part of Chinese President Xi Jinpings Belt and Road Initiative, which aims to build a network of roads, rail lines and shipping lanes linking China and Europe via at least 70 countries in Asia and the Middle East to foster trade and investment.

China and Myanmar also recently renegotiated the terms for the Kyaukphyu deep-water port in Rakhine State, which gives China access to the Indian Ocean and allows its oil imports to bypass the Strait of Malacca.

Meanwhile, the Chinese company behind the Myitsone dam has resumed lobbying residents and authorities in Kachin to support its plans to restart the project. Some locals and environmentalists are worried that the company may succeed in striking a new deal with Myanmar by years end.

CPC officials briefed the NLD delegation on Chinas major investment projects and plans for Myanmar but did not mention the Myitsone dam.

We didnt comment on their ongoing projects or on the Myitsone dam. Our visit was to represent the party, not the government. U Myo Nyunt said.

He added that the delegates were also briefed on Chinas tax system and international relations and on its policies on rural development, agriculture and the environment.
Burma President Tells State, Regional Officials to Wrap Up Land-Grab Probes

Myanmar President U Win Myint. / Myanmar Presidents Office

PATHEIN, Irrawaddy Region  President U Win Myint has instructed state and regional chief ministers to complete their investigations into land confiscation cases by the end of the year.

The president has ordered that all land-grab investigations be completed by Dec. 31. He issued the instruction to the whole country, not only to the Irrawaddy regional government, Irrawaddy Region Chief Minister U Hla Moe Aung said at a press conference in Pathein on Tuesday.

The regional Committee for Rescrutinizing Confiscated Farmlands and Other Lands is working to comply with the presidents order, said U Hla Moe Aung, who is also the chairman of the committee.

Ive instructed the chairpersons and secretaries of land committees at the township and district levels to get the job done by Dec. 31, he said.

The Central Committee for Rescrutinizing Confiscated Farmlands and Other Lands, chaired by Vice President U Henry Van Thio, is tasked with investigating land-grab cases and has counterparts at all administrative levels.

Earlier this month the central committee issued a 52-point set of guidelines to be followed in investigating land-grab cases.

The Irrawaddy regional committee was assigned to investigate 600 cases. So far, it has investigated 102 cases. Investigations are ongoing in 256 cases and the rest have yet to be investigated, said U Tin Win, director of the Department of Agriculture Land Management and Statistics.

The committee only investigates cases that arose after 1988, said U Tin Win, who is also the secretary of the regional committee. Nor does it handle cases already under investigation by farmland management committees, or disputes over land seized from farmers by lenders for failure to repay debts, he added.

The Irrawaddy Region Farmers Union has complained that the investigation will not be fair because many of the chairpersons and secretaries of the village- and ward-level committees, respectively, are administrators from the Land Records Department, whose officials have been involved in land-grab cases in the past.

Most of the past land-grab cases involved chairmen and secretaries of the ward- and village-level committees. Though lawmakers are involved in the committees, they dont have much authority, the chairman of the regional farmers union, U Myo Chit, told The Irrawaddy.

Regardless of the instructions from lawmakers, they [the chairpersons and secretaries of the committees] may write the reports as they like and present them to the higher authorities, he added.

Unless and until civil society organizations representing farmers are included in the land rescrutinizing committees, it will be impossible to learn the truth, and farmers will continue to suffer.

According to statistics from the Central Committee for Rescrutinizing Confiscated Farmlands and Other Lands, over 200,000 acres of farmland and vacant, fallow land have been seized in Irrawaddy Region for industrial and hotel zone projects, railroad projects, mineral extraction, departmental offices and expansion of cantonments by cronies of officials, companies, government departments and the Myanmar military (or Tatmadaw).

Of the total land seized in Irrawaddy Region, which has six districts, over 170,000 acres were seized in Maubin District alone, according to the committee.

Since 2016, the National League for Democracy-led government has identified 63,417 acres of confiscated farmland to be returned. Farmers have received 13,091 acres; the remaining 50,326 acres have yet to be handed back to the original owners by the responsible departments and regional governments in line with the proper procedures, according to a report on the overall situation in the country regarding land grabs.

State Counselors Office Minister U Kyaw Tint Swe submitted the report to the Union Parliament on Thursday.
Burma UWSA Cracks Down on Church Construction, Recruitment by Extremist Christians

A collage of images showing church demolitions in Wa Region.

The United Wa State Army (UWSA) is cracking down on the unauthorized construction of Christian churches in Pangsang, the capital of Wa Region, according to local sources.

Several video clips posted on Facebook and other social media platforms show members of the UWSA using tools to tear down an unauthorized church. Christian religious leaders have also been detained by authorities, according to reports on social media.

Nyi Rang, a UWSA spokesperson based in Lashio, told The Irrawaddy that the action was intended to prevent extremist religious leaders from destabilizing the region. A UWSA Central Committee meeting held early this month decided not to allow the teaching of religion in schools, to limit the number of churches in the region and to demolish churches built after 1992 that had not received approval from officials.

He said his organizations police had detained several people for questioning on suspicion of engaging in illegal construction.

The laws in our region do not allow people to build churches without permission, Nyi Rang said.

He described those who had been detained as religious extremists who acted unlawfully.

According to a Burmese-language translation of a UWSA statement issued in the Wa language on Sept. 13, all churches built after 1992 would be destroyed as they had been built illegally. Only churches built between 1989 and 1992 were legal, it said.

Authorities would also check on the number of Christian schoolteachers and students in the region, according to the statement.

We will not allow the building of new churches here anymore. Nor will we allow [Christian] organizations to accept new members, said the statement.

The authority will also monitor the activities of organizations that support churches in the region. Evangelical Christians will not be allowed to proselytize at schools, the statement added.

Only ethnic Wa would be allowed to train as religious leaders, and they would be under the authority of the UWSA central government, according to the statement.

Kachin Baptist Convention (KBC) chairman Rev. Samson, whose church has been conducting baptisms in Wa Region for more than 30 years, said the ban was prompted by the activities of extremist missionaries.

You cant call them typical Christians. They are just people who want to attack established churches. They are against what we Christians believe, he told The Irrawaddy.

Some Christian groups had been confining new converts to churches and not allowing them to go home, he said. Additionally, UWSA leaders were angered when Christian groups posted a video on social media that condemned the local practice among ethnic Wa of worshipping nats(spirits), Rev. Samson said. Nats are spirits worshipped by local people in conjunction with Buddhism.

The UWSA has temporarily shut down all churches, but will allow some to reopen after it completes its investigation of Christian leaders, he said.

The UWSA has full authority in the Wa Region, where the Myanmar government has no presence.

The region is home to various ethnic groups including Wa, Kachin, Taang, Lahu, Lisu, Kokang, Shan, Chinese, Burmese and Muslim groups. They observe various religious beliefs including Christianity, Buddhism, animism, nat worship, and Islam. The largest religious group is Christian.

Based in northern Shan State, the UWSA is the largest ethnic armed force in Myanmar, with an estimated 40,000 personnel. Most leaders of the group have communist views, a reflection of their long proximity to the Chinese border. The UWSA split from the Burmese Communist Party in 1989 and later entered a ceasefire agreement with the military government that ruled Myanmar at the time. The UWSA has not yet signed the Nationwide Ceasefire Agreement, but is party to the ongoing bilateral peace deal with the Myanmar government.

The Irrawaddy reporter Nan Lwin Hnin Pwint contributed to this story.
Thursday, September 20th, 2018 (8:58 am) - Score 3,177

The Scottish Governments future 600m R100 strategy has come under pressure after a new 2018 report from Audit Scotland, which works to ensure that public money in Scotland is spent correctly, warned that it will be difficult to deliver the stated ambition of 100% superfast broadband (30Mbps+) coverage by 2021.

The good news is that the 400m+ Digital Scotland (DSSB) project with BT (Openreach), which has so far reached an additional 900,000 premises via a mix of Fibre-to-the-Cabinet (FTTC / VDSL2) and a little Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) technology, is confirmed to have achieve its primary targets. Without public-sector investment, only around two-thirds of premises in Scotland would have access, said the report.

In other words, Audit Scotland confirms that at the end of 2017 some 95% of Scotland had gained access to a fibre broadband FTTC/P network (falling to 90% for those able to access superfast speeds of 24Mbps+). Since then we know that the current figure for superfast coverage (here) has gone from 90% to around 93-94%.

Strong take-up also means that the programme is now expected to reach 60,300 more premises than originally planned, which means that the existing contract(s) will run until September 2019. The report adds that Openreach is surpassing its contractual commitments to provide speeds of at least 24 Mb/s to 77 percent of premises in the contract areas (the contract text is private, so this is hard for us to check).

Sadly the above chart doesnt clarify whether its only displaying the raw fibre-based network coverage or those regions able to receive superfast speeds. You can listen to a brief audio summary of the report below or read on for our summary.

Funding for Digital Scotland

The report includes a useful breakdown of how much money has actually been spent, which is something we havent seen since the last report in 2016. Audit Scotland states that by March 2018 the programme had resulted in some 259 million of public investment being paid to BT (149m from the Scottish Government and 110m from the Highlands & Islands Enterprise); 27m less than originally planned.

At completion next year its forecast that the total expenditure under the existing Digital Scotland contracts will reach 442m. The reason for this is largely because BT also invested 126.1m of its own private money in the original contract and another 20m on a later extension, part of which helped to compensate for some incorrect modelling by the Scottish Government of EU funding.

Audit Scotland Statement The increased expenditure is due to BT investing 20 million of its own money as a result of extending the contracts and 18 million of additional income from higher than expected take-up [clawback / gainshare]. Under the terms of the contracts, this money is repayable to the Scottish Government and HIEs investment funds. They decided to use the funds to reinvest in the network. This is partly offset by a reduction in EU funding from 20.5 million to 12 million as a result of the Scottish Government developing its understanding of what elements of the project were eligible for EU support.

Speaking of reinvesting public money, the report notes that the Scottish Government and HIE have so far approved a reinvestment of 57.4m. This was earned through a combination of clawback (public money returned due to high take-up), interest accrued on a 20m advance payment made by HIE to BT at the start of the contract and savings made during the deployment phase. This is being used to help BT extend their roll-out (i.e. the additional 60,300 premises).

However the Scottish Government has not yet assessed the actual economic benefit of their investment to date, although they have commissioned further analysis and plan to publish this later in 2018. It is likely to be difficult to distinguish the economic impact arising from public investment in the broadband network from that of broadband installed by commercial operators, said Audit Scotland.

Failings in Community Broadband Scotland (CBS)

At the start of this year we reported that HIEs Community Broadband Scotland (CBS) initiative, which provided public funding to help setup new alternative broadband networks in very remote rural areas, was coming to an end (here). Part of that was due to the obvious coming conflict with the new R100 plan, but todays report also confirms that CBS did not deliver anticipated benefits to rural areas.

The Scottish Government funded CBS with 7.5m and by the end of March 2018 it had spent 6.4m on support for 63 projects. Overall this only delivered 13 successful projects to reach 1,936 premises, while 13 other projects failed to find suppliers, 35 projects received small grants for feasibility studies but did not progress further, 1 project failed (see the AB Internet story) and 1 other is still seeking a supplier.

The CBS scheme also faced various problems with bureaucratic processes (i.e. EU state aid rules and public sector procurement requirements) and the problem of establishing whether or not an area was due to be covered by the existing Digital Scotland deployment via Openreach.

Challenges for R100

The Scottish Government has now shifted its focus toward the new 600m Reaching 100% (R100) superfast broadband roll-out programme, which raises the definition of superfast to 30Mbps+ and aims to achieve universal covered of that by the end of 2021 (here and here); March 2022 as a financial year. Some 21m of this is coming from Broadband Delivery UK.

Todays report states that this investment is aimed at prioritising superfast connections to as many as possible of the estimated 147,000 rural premises not currently receiving at least 24Mbps, which leaves an estimated 64,000 premises (211,000 total) not included; 30,000 of those are urban (the rules make it difficult to use state aid on those) and 34,000 are in rural areas where speeds of 24Mbps+ may already be possible.

However the report warns it is unlikely that all of the 147,000 premises identified for R100 will be covered and that further investment beyond 600m may be necessary to complete the R100 programme, although much will depend upon what sort of solutions and suppliers are chosen.

The first contract is also seeking to encourage greater use of ultrafast full fibre (FTTP) technology. For example, it specifies 11 mandated areas, all in the North lot, where 25% of premises must be able to get speeds of at least 100Mbps. Achieving the overall coverage goal by 2021 could be another problem area.

Audit Scotland Statement It will be challenging for the Scottish Government to deliver within the time-scales for several reasons:  Contracts will be awarded in early 2019 leaving less than three years for the Scottish Government to deliver its commitments to the most complex premises.  Detailed arrangements for the aligned intervention scheme have still to be finalised, with a project manager only coming into post in summer 2018. Depending on how the scheme operates, it is likely that the process to apply and provide a solution will be lengthy.

On top of that the report states that there is currently no overall strategy for monitoring or mapping out existing and future activities. Nevertheless the final bids for R100 are due to be submitted in January 2019 and the Scottish Government anticipates it will award the contracts in March 2019, which Audit Scotland says is slightly later than originally planned to allow bidders more time to prepare their bids.

The above statement is probably glossing over our prior report of a legal dispute between two of the potential suppliers, BT and Axione, which could also be impacting the process (here). Nevertheless Audit Scotland concludes by making several recommendations.

Audit Scotlands Recommendations  Establish robust contract management and assurance processes to ensure the next round of contracts can deliver value for money  Have the right skills and people in place for the duration of the contract. Continuity will be critical as it is a complex programme requiring specific skills (programme management, financial,commercial, and technical)  Publish clear time-scales for R100 by summer 2019 and communicate effectively with stakeholders so rural communities know what to expect, when, and can make decisions about how they want to proceed  Take account of lessons from CBS and the planned assessment of the benefits from the two contracts when developing the aligned interventions voucher scheme as part of R100  Develop and publish an overall strategy for delivering its world-class vision which includes mapping out and monitoring existing and future digital infrastructure activities, and a realistic timetable with targets for delivery.

Fraser McKinlay, Director at Audit Scotland, welcomed the progress so far but also gave a warning: As well as being the toughest hurdle, it is not yet clear how the Scottish Government is going to fulfill its pledge to deliver superfast broadband to everyone by the end of 2021.

In fairness the R100 procurement process was always expected to take a long time  not unlike the similar scheme for Wales  which as above is largely down to the sheer complexity of figuring out how to bring superfast broadband to some of the most remote and thus expensive (to reach) parts of the country.

On top of that theres often a gap between political delivery targets and what can actually be delivered, which once again is something that can only be refined by choosing a supplier and agreeing a clear deployment plan. Until that happens we wont truly know what R100 will be able to produce.

Lest we also forget the future potential for some conflict or confusion with the Governments forthcoming 10Mbps Universal Service Obligation (USO) policy, which is due to be enforced from 2020. In theory any areas designated for an upgrade via R100 may not be able to call on this.
The world's biggest automotive alliance has chosen Google's Android mobile operating system to provide intelligent infotainment systems in its vehicles.

Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi said in a statement the deal with Google would start in 2021. Last year, the three companies together sold 10.6 million vehicles in 200 markets.

Vehicles sold by the three companies would use Google Maps for navigation and allow users access to apps on the Google Play Store.

Each brand would be able to customise the software to add specific features atop the Android platform.

The deal also covers the launch of 12 new zero-emission electric vehicles, new autonomous-driving technologies and the ongoing rollout of the Alliance Intelligent Cloud.

Hadi Zablit, senior vice-president of Business Development at Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi, said, Our partnership with Google will offer owners of our vehicles rich user experiences that are currently available only outside the vehicle or, to a limited extent, by connecting an Android device to supported vehicles.

"We are building powerful connected and seamless on-board/off-board experiences into our vehicles in addition to the features of Google applications and services that many users are accustomed to, including Google Maps, the Google Assistant and the Google Play Store.

Kal Mos, global vice-president of Alliance Connected Vehicles at Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi, added, With the integration of the Android platform into our infotainment systems, we are adding a new level of intelligence to our connected vehicles.

"In the future, the Google Assistant, which employs Googles leading AI technology, can become the main way customers interact with their vehicles, hands-free. With Google Maps and the Google Assistant embedded in Alliance infotainment systems, our customers will have some of the most advanced AI based applications at their fingertips.

"And with in-vehicle access to the Google Play Store, our customers will enjoy an open and secure ecosystem of Android apps engineered for vehicles.

Hiroshi Lockheimer, senior vice-president of Platforms and Ecosystems at Google, said, Google and Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi share a common vision of delivering an intelligent, safe and seamless in-car experience with apps and services that are familiar, upgradable and connected.

"Were thrilled to partner with Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi to bring the Google Assistant, Google Maps, and other popular apps via the Play Store and Android to drivers and passengers around the world.
Fujitsu has announced that the Clean Energy Regulator will use ServiceNow in the Protected Cloud platform as a Software as a Service offering, making CER the third Federal Government agency to sign up to Fujitsus industry cloud for government, built on Vault Protected Cloud.

The new agreement is in addition to CERs existing managed services contract with Fujitsu.

CER is a non-corporate Commonwealth entity, operating as a part of the Department of the Environment and Energy, and responsible for administering legislation to reduce carbon emissions and increase the use of clean energy in Australia.

The Protected Cloud portfolio, an element of Fujitsus multi-cloud, multi-partner approach to hybrid IT, is delivered in partnership with Australian Signals Directorate-certified cloud service provider Vault as an "industry cloud" for government and critical services; certified by ASD to protected level.

Mike Foster, chief executive, Fujitsu Australia and New Zealand, said, The Protected Cloud continues to gain interest from Federal Government agencies as they continue to embrace digital transformation.

With this solution from Fujitsu, government agencies now have more flexibility in their ability to implement the right solution in a trusted and secure environment.

Steven Stolk, chief information officer, CER, said implementing ServiceNow IT Service Management will give us better visibility into the performance of CERs IT services.

The Fujitsu Protected Cloud environment provides the flexibility to take advantage of commercially-available platforms such as ServiceNow with the confidence that the specific security needs for government are met.
Payments platform Adyen is partnering with Australian retail clothing group Cotton On to provide expanded and enhanced payment capabilities as part of its international growth strategy.

Adyen provides the Cotton On Group with online payment capability to support our eCommerce channel globally, powering our international growth, says Brendan Sweeney, Cotton On Group general manager of eCommerce.

By adopting the Adyen platform, the Group has gained access to a greater breadth of payment capability  all whilst benefitting from a more sophisticated fraud management approach, resulting in lower fraud.

Beyond this, local acquiring has helped the Group streamline settlements timelines, improve cash flow, and provide a greater visibility of disputes, refunds and cancellations. Adyen provides us with a convenient single-platform solution that processes the entire payment from beginning to end and keeps all data in one place.

Adyen says with its payments platform in place, Cotton On was able to consolidate its various payment programs and easily switch on solutions like RevenueProtect  an integrated risk management system which allows the business to maintain the perfect balance between fraud defence and optimised conversions.

And, additionally, Adyens ShopperDNA is claimed to build a holistic view of the shopper behind each transaction, making it easy for customer service teams to track online fraudsters.

Adyen and the Cotton On Group share many of the same values including a relentless commitment to creating a great customer experience. We are honoured to join the Group in this exciting journey as they continue to build an outstanding worldwide customer experience, said Michel van Aalten, country manager AUNZ for Adyen.

At Adyen, we value the opportunity to empower great local companies to succeed overseas, as well as help local merchants to build business domestically.

Adyen says it has helped the Cotton On Group launch online banking payment methods in new markets, such as Malaysia and South Africa, as well as offering local acquiring and consolidated processing for the Australian, New Zealand, Hong Kong, Singapore, the UK and US markets.
Darryn Lim: "There should be full, transparent, and considered public dialogue before any legislative proposal concerning the future of technology mandates or encryption is adopted."

Global software industry advocate BSA, the software alliance, has urged the Australian Government to include in its encryption bill a judicial oversight and challenge mechanism in order to ensure that any new powers given to law enforcement are not abused.

The organisation, formerly known as the Business Software Alliance, made its views known through its APAC policy director Darryn Lim. It represents a list of technology companies that includes most companies that produce software that is in common use around the globe. Two prominent absentees are Google and Facebook.

The draft bill  officially known as the Telecommunications and Other Legislation Amendment (Assistance and Access) Bill 2018  was introduced into the lower house of Parliament on Thursday by Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton.

Lim told iTWire that cyber security, privacy protection, innovation and economic growth would all be affected by policies that mandated the breaking of encryption.

And, he added, any national policies on encryption "have limitations because of the global nature of the Internet, and the fact that criminal or terrorist acts are not limited by national borders".

Asked about other possible solutions to the problems that law enforcement claim to be facing due to the use of encryption by law-breakers, Lim said: "One key solution would be to deepen collaboration between private industry and law enforcement, and make use of easy access to technology community support. Such collaboration can generate practical and impactful solutions to the challenges facing law enforcement."

He was interviewed by email. The full interview is below:

iTWire: First, I always provide information about any conflicts of interest, so please let me know the companies that BSA represents.

Darryn Lim: BSAs members include: Adobe, Amazon Web Services, ANSYS, Apple, Autodesk, AVEVA, Baseplan Software, Bentley Systems, Box, CA Technologies, Cad Pacific/Power Space, Cad Pacific, Cisco, CNC/Mastercam, DataStax, DocuSign, IBM, Informatica, Intel, Mathworks, Microsoft, Okta, Oracle, PTC, Salesforce, SAS Institute, Siemens PLM Software, Splunk, Symantec, Trend Micro, Trimble Solutions Corporation, and Workday.

The eight principles you enumerate appear to want to do everything and anything. You can't break crypto and then expect people to be safe. Please elaborate on these eight principles and how each will be implemented.

Improving data security: Providers of data services  storing, managing or transmitting personal or business data  must be permitted to use the best available technology to thwart attacks against that data or the entities and individuals who depend on those services. Enhancing law enforcement and counter-terrorism capabilities: Law enforcement agencies, subject to appropriate privacy and civil liberties safeguards, should have access to the best available resources, information, and tools available to prevent and prosecute terrorist and criminal acts. Promoting privacy: Individuals have a right to be secure in their public, private and commercial lives and interactions. Protecting confidential government information: National, state and local agencies should ensure that the data they hold is secure against threats of domestic and foreign intrusion. Encouraging innovation: Developers and providers of innovative data security tools should be free of government mandates on how to design technology products and tools for digital security. Defending critical infrastructure: Providers of essential services, such as banking, health, electricity, water and other critical infrastructure providers, should be empowered to provide the best available security technologies to their users. Best practices should be widely shared. Understanding the global impact: Criminal and terrorist acts are not limited by national borders, and laws and policies must create consistency and clarity in all countries where security technologies are developed and used. Increasing transparency: There should be full, transparent, and considered public dialogue before any legislative proposal concerning the future of technology mandates or encryption is adopted.

The FBI has been caught lying about the extent of encrypted devices that need to be cracked for investigations. How do we know that Australian law enforcement agencies are levelling with us?

In our experience, the needs of law enforcement, technology providers, and the consumers whose privacy interests are at stake, are best met by governments that have a robust mechanism for judicial oversight, transparency of activities, privacy protections, and clearly defined processes for bidirectional communication on law enforcement needs.

Darryn Lim: "National approaches to encryption have limitations because of the global nature of the Internet, and the fact that criminal or terrorist acts are not limited by national borders."

In our submission to the Australian Government, we have accordingly recommended incorporating in the draft legislation a judicial oversight and challenge mechanism that provides for full and transparent due process. We also urged continued engagement between the Australian government, policy-makers, and industry to ensure that the solution eventually adopted would balance the legitimate rights, needs, and responsibilities of the government, citizens, providers of critical infrastructure, third-party stewards of data, and innovators.

One way of trying to keep the whole thing quiet is by legislating fines for anyone who discloses that an act to break encryption has been carried out. Prison terms have also been threatened. But what would the government do if a foreign news site writes about something happening in Australia  block it in the way China does?

BSA does not have any knowledge or insight, and is therefore not able to comment, on the Australian Governments plans for imposing penalties on those who do not adhere to any new encryption laws.

Our role here is to work with governments and law enforcement agencies in Australia and around the world to ensure that law enforcement can access digital evidence in support of lawful criminal investigations in a timely manner pursuant to appropriate safeguards that protect privacy, cyber security, and trust in the digital economy.

What, in your view, are the risks and challenges associated with policies that mandate the breaking of encryption?

In BSAs view, mandating technical approaches or weakening encryption standards (whether intentionally or not) would not only be ineffective, but, in fact, would be counter-productive to the goal of enhancing security. Any benefits of these approaches would likely be outweighed by the potentially detrimental impact that such measures would have on security, privacy, and trust in the digital economy. Some of these risks and challenges include:

Cyber security: Encryption technology is fundamental to cyber security: encryption is used to protect sensitive data where it is stored and while it is in transit, to safeguard devices against unauthorised use, and to assist in the authentication of users identities. Introducing weaknesses to such technologies could enhance risk across the Internet ecosystem, undermining key defences against malicious cyber-attacks.

Privacy protection: One of the fundamental principles underlying data protection laws is the principle of protecting privacy and handling personal data responsibly. These principles are enshrined in international law and upheld in Australia through the Privacy Act and associated regulations. Encryption is a core pillar of privacy because it protects private communications from unauthorised access. Unfortunately, mandating technical access to encrypted data risks weakening encryption, which in turn risks weakening the privacy of individuals.

Innovation and economic growth: Digital innovation rests to a large extent on technologies such as encryption, because trust in the digital economy requires that communications and transactions are private and secure. Australian businesses will be disadvantaged if they cannot use and collect data while managing concerns about privacy and security. However, any legislation mandating technical access to encrypted communications risks undermining trust in the digital economy, which will undoubtedly have consequences for innovation and economic growth.

National encryption policies have limitations: National approaches to encryption have limitations because of the global nature of the Internet, and the fact that criminal or terrorist acts are not limited by national borders.

Fragmented and piecemeal approaches by individual countries may only serve to further weaken encryption protections globally. Thus, any regulatory approach to encryption should be developed by reference to the international nature of the Internet and the threats facing individuals and organisations in the digital economy.

What other solutions are there?

One key solution would be to deepen collaboration between private industry and law enforcement, and make use of easy access to technology community support. Such collaboration can generate practical and impactful solutions to the challenges facing law enforcement.

Technology companies seek a trust relationship with their customers such that customers are confident companies will not disclose their data to anyone  including law enforcement  without their authorisation. These companies also take seriously their responsibilities to support lawful evidence collection. Many major technology companies respond to hundreds of data requests, including search warrants, from law enforcement authorities around the world every day. However, their ability to respond to such requests is sometimes hindered by the lack of necessary information in the request, or the request coming from an improper authority or being addressed to the wrong service provider.

As Australian law enforcement navigates the ever-evolving multitude of digital platforms, configurations, and applications to seek digital evidence, there are opportunities for collaboration with technology companies to streamline or standardise request processes, access technical support, and facilitate greater co-ordination and communication between the law enforcement and technology communities. BSA therefore urges the Australian government to engage with key technology companies to identify obstacles to such coordination and communication, and to develop concrete collaborative steps to address them.

I raised the issue of open source operating systems in a piece I wrote recently. How does the government solve this issue? Do you ban such systems - which include Linux, a kernel that is present in billions of devices?

Effective cyber security involves layered, multi-faceted approaches to defending networks. To ensure government agencies are able to obtain the most innovative, effective cyber security solutions, BSA recommends that acquisition rules and regulations should remain technology-neutral. Procurement policies should specify security objectives, but leave the technical approaches regarding how to best meet those objectives to vendors to decide.

In the context of procurement, there are also other steps that governments can take to enhance their overall cyber security:

Ensure the use of licensed software. The use of unlicensed software exposes enterprises and government agencies to heightened risks of malware infections and other security vulnerabilities. Because unlicensed software is less likely to receive critical security updates that would otherwise mitigate the risks associated with malware exposure, its use heightens the risk of harmful cyber security incidents. Unlicensed technology from untrusted sources may also contain embedded malware inserted by malicious actors. The adoption of transparent and verifiable software asset management (SAM) practices, based on international recognised standards, can help government agencies secure IT inventories by identifying uses of unlicensed software, which often remains unpatched and vulnerable, and take action to remediate it.

Ensure that software procured by the government is vendor-backed. As government agencies increasingly purchase and consume IT resources as online services, rather than as products, it becomes more imperative than ever that government agencies work with IT suppliers with a proven track record of offering robust and reliable support for their offerings. This recommendation should apply equally to all IT solutions, regardless of licensing or development model. Open-source technology can be integrated into government IT systems but, unless backed by vendor support to manage ongoing security patches and upgrades, such systems can introduce risk into government networks.

Leverage the security benefits of cloud services. Just as a bank can better protect the assets of its patrons than individuals can at home, cloud services providers can provide a level of protection for their customers digital assets that exceeds what most individual organisations can provide on their own.

Why doesn't the BSA undertake some education of government officials to understand exactly what can, and what cannot, be done?

BSA is currently engaging with Australian Government officials on this proposed legislation. Were committed to partnering with the Australian Government to participate in any industry and stakeholder groups, not only to assess the impact of the Bill, but also to help develop and deliver other enduring solutions to address the challenges of accessing evidence in the digital age.

Would you agree with the proposition that the encryption genie was let out of the bottle a long time and there is no way to stopper it again?

There are no easy answers to the encryption debate, nor must there be winners and losers in this debate. Policymakers must recognise, however, that encryption is now a part of almost every service or device we use to live our lives online. Every day, often without us even being aware of it, encryption keeps our personal data private and secure. Encryption is a vault that secures our personal information that is held by businesses and government agencies. It is a lock that prevents identity thieves from stealing our information when we log on to our bank accounts. It is an extra layer of security to safeguard our critical infrastructures. And it is a secure envelope that keeps hackers from reading our personal communications.

Anything else you would like to raise?

BSA recommends a deepening collaboration between government, private industry, and law enforcement based on the principles BSA developed which can generate practical and impactful solutions to the challenges facing law enforcement. BSA therefore welcomes the opportunity to bring an industry perspective on the Bill and strongly urges continued engagement between government, policy-makers, and industry to find a solution that balances the legitimate rights, needs, and responsibilities of governments, citizens, providers of critical infrastructure, third-party stewards of data, and innovators.

Photos: courtesy BSA
Two researchers from DATACTIVE, a University of Amsterdam project that examines the politics of big data, and four from the University of Cardiff's Data Justice Lab have decided to boycott October's Amsterdam Privacy Conference due to the fact that the data-mining US firm Palantir is a major sponsor of the event.

The two from DATACTIVE  Stefania Milan and Becky Kazansky  had agreed to act of co-ordinators of the Digital Society and Surveillance theme at the conference, and had accepted a panel proposal from the Data Justice Lab at Cardiff University.

The four participants from the Cardiff organisation were to be Lina Dencik, Arne Hintz, Joanna Redden and Fieke Jansen.

The APC has Palantir down as a platinum sponsor for the event, along with Microsoft, Vodafone and Zggo.

Inon Wednesday, the six said: "Our decision to withdraw stems from an active refusal to legitimise companies accused of enabling human rights abuses, and a concern with the lack of transparency surrounding sponsorship."

They pointed out that Palantir developed technologies for the military, law enforcement and border control.

"The deployment of Palantirs technologies has raised widespread concern among civil liberties and human rights advocates," they said.

"Reporting shows that, in the United States, Palantir has played an important role in enabling the efforts of the ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) to identify, detain, and deport undocumented immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers."

In June, workers at retail giant Amazon asked their owner, Jeff Bezos. to cancel the contract for hosting data-mining company Palantir on its cloud, with a threat that else, they would not build the platform that powers ICE.

The six researchers said that ICE had carried out indefinite detention of thousands of children who have been separated from their parents. "This indefensible policy has come under strong criticism from the United Nations and prompted an alliance of technology workers and affected communities, to call  so far, unsuccessfully  for Palantir to cancel its contracts with ICE," they said.

They said the organisers of APC had not been open about the sponsors, with sponsorship agreements not being revealed until the last minute.

"Though we acknowledge the complexity of corporate sponsorship, we note that other prominent tech policy conferences, such as the Computers, Privacy and Data Protection conference, have recently stopped accepting sponsorship from Palantir," the six said. "We thus believe this is a good moment for a larger discussion about how conferences should be organised in the future."
Victoria Police's counter-terrorism boss Ross Guenther has announced plans to fly drones above crowds at major events.

In conjunction with the recently-released Victoria Police Counter Terrorism Strategy 2018-2021, Guenther spoke of two rather interesting plans.

Firstly, he noted that in other countries Unmanned Aerial Vehicles ('drones') had been successfully used to fly above crowds at major events in an attempt to monitor behaviour.

He was reported in Fairfax Media as saying, "If you have a concert in the park, you put a backpack down but walk on, a drone will stay on that and send images back to the police command post.

"We really are in the Jetsons type age right now."

iTWire understands that under federal law, it is illegal to fly a drone above people, so we contacted the Civil Aviation Safety Authority for its thoughts, pointing out our understanding that such activity was illegal.

A spokesperson responded, "As you have already pointed out, CASA states that there is no flying over crowds for good reason. This is because of the risk posed to third parties is unacceptable for the vast majority of consumer RPAs or drones.

"If someone can prove to CASA that their RPA (Remotely Piloted Aircraft) either meets or exceeds certified manned aircraft standards, it would be very hard for CASA not to issue an exemption to this rule."

So, it seems a drone must be provably better than a manned craft in order to gain an exemption.

The office of Victorian Police Minister, Lisa Nevilla, has been contacted for comment.

The other interesting statement from Guenther was a plan to recruit elite university students to crack encrypted communication between suspected terrorists.

Readers should note that neither of these plans is specifically expressed in the Strategy document.
Google has mounted a defence of the way it scrutinises the activities of third-party add-ons within its Gmail email service, telling a number of US senators in a letter on Thursday that most add-ons which had malicious intentions were caught in a review before they were allowed to be deployed.

But the company was silent on the number of add-ons that had been found to be violating its Gmail policies. It said that third-party developers could collect and use Gmail users' data "long as they are transparent about what they do.

Reuters reported that the search company has said in a letter that it used automated scans and feedback from security professionals to track what third parties, who had access to Gmail data did.

In July, a report in The Wall Street Journal disclosed that while Google was allowing third-party developers to scan Gmail accounts.

The report said these developers, who were not not Google employees, were allowed to scan the Gmail accounts of millions who had become part of email-based services like those which offer price comparisons or travel-itinerary planners.

It cited the example of a company known as Return Path which used computers to scan about 100 million emails a day from Gmail, Microsoft or Yahoo! email inboxes of those who had signed up for a free app through its partner network. This company collects data for marketers through this scanning.

The report said, at one point, Return Path workers read about 8000 unredacted emails to train their company's scanning software.

A number of American politicians wrote to Google about the handling of users' personal information in the wake of this report.

The US Senate's Commerce Committee has set a hearing for 26 September to question Google, Apple, AT&T and Twitter about the way consumers are provided data privacy.

iTWire contacted Google and asked for a copy of this letter. In response, a company spokesperson said: "We addressed this topic in a blog post in July. Please refer there for details. We are checking with our policy team on the letter request."
Global management firm KPMG International has forged an alliance with Alibaba Cloud  the cloud computing arm of Chinese Internet and ecommerce giant Alibaba group  to provide digital transformation to businesses across multiple industries initially in the Asia-Pacific region, including Australia, and Europe.

The alliance is expected to roll out in Australia in 2019 and is designed to provide an avenue for KPMG clients in APAC and Europe seeking access to the China market to establish local cloud services from Alibaba Cloud.

The two companies say the alliance will focus on digital transformation, new retail, IT strategy consulting and cloud-based digital solutions, bringing together Alibabas strong cloud computing and artificial intelligence capabilities, together with KPMGs global network, global enterprise solutions, business acumen and knowledge of global industries with Fortune 1000 companies.

The alliance is also touted by KPMG and Alibaba as complementing each others business in helping clients to expand into new markets  with the aim to build a strong global ecosystem with cloud services and infrastructure, particularly serving organisations with multi-cloud strategies including small- to medium-sized enterprises.

Simon Benson, KPMG Australia head of Alliances, said, Were very pleased to form an alliance with Alibaba Cloud as this relationship will further our commitment to help Australian clients address key transformation priorities in the areas of growth, innovation and operational efficiency.

As Australian and Chinese businesses continue to embark on their cloud transformation strategies to address these challenges, they can feel confident that KPMG Australia and Alibaba Cloud teams together can address their specific needs for global, scalable, cloud-based digital solutions.

Alibaba Cloud president Simon Hu said: Alibaba Cloud is excited to drive innovations across different industries and businesses together with KPMG, and to address the ever-growing needs of high performance and secure cloud infrastructure. Through our alliance, we will help empower KPMG clients with cutting edge cloud technologies and experience to advance digital transformation in various verticals.

As part of the alliance, KPMG and Alibaba Cloud will form a global joint strategy team comprised of KPMG and Alibaba Cloud software and systems architects and engineers to develop cloud infrastructure solutions for clients expanding into new markets, with a focus on data security, regulatory compliance and seamless integration.
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.
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Ann Arbor (Informed Comment)  The annual State Department report on terrorism says that terrorist attacks were down by 23% world wide in 2017. The report attributed this decline in some large part to the defeat of ISIL in Iraq and Syria. (Obviously, they havent disappeared there, and pockets continue to offer resistance, but lets face it, the caliphate is a shadow of its former self and the state journalists hyped in 2015 that had a 9 million population is all gone (it was never that big or consolidated).

The problem with the State Department report is that it is highly partisan and ideological, which somewhat undermines its credibility.

One of the biggest flaws is unwillingness to give Iran and Lebanons Hizbullah any credit at all for their role in defeating Salafi extremists.

Iran and Shiite militias it backed were crucial to the defeat of ISIL in Iraq, and it seems clear that despite denials, the US military de facto cooperated with them on occasion. Irans positive role in helping roll back Salafi extremism and tamp down on terrorism is not mentioned by the report. But if it is true that the partial demise of ISIL is responsible for a fall in terrorist attacks by a quarter, then France, for instance, owes a great debt of gratitude to Iran and Hizbullah and other Shiite militias.

Let us just consider the muddle that is this paragraph:

In the Levant, Jordan and Lebanon both remained committed Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS partners. Jordanian security forces thwarted several plots and apprehended numerous terrorists in 2017; the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) expelled ISIS militants along the Lebanese-Syrian border near Aarsal. Still, several terrorist groups continued to operate in Lebanon throughout the year, most notably Hizballah. The terrorist group remained the most capable terrorist organization in Lebanon, controlling areas across the country.

For anyone who knows anything about Lebanon, this passage reads as Orwellian.

So the Lebanese Armed Forces are good guys who expelled ISIl from the Lebanese-Syrian border near Arsal. But Hizbullah is a terrorist group spread all around Lebanon.

Lets back up a little. First of all, it is true that the Lebanese Army played a role in defeating ISIL in eastern Lebanon. But, despite official denials, it is absolutely certain that they had help in this campaign.

Help from Hizbullah?

Help from Hizbullah.

So how come the defeat of ISIL around Arsal is credited wholly to the Lebanese army, and Hizbullahs significant role is written out of history? This is a US government document, but it ought to be reporting the facts, not Mike Pompeos flights of fancy.

There is a further problem. Hizbullah is a party with a paramilitary. That party and its allies made major gains in last Mays parliamentary elections, winning 68 seats in the 120-member national legislature. (The allies include Christians). No new government has been formed, but the old one was a government of national unity in which Hizbullah and its allies were very powerful.

That is, you cant praise the Lebanese Army as an anti-terrorist force and accuse Hizbullah of being nothing but terrorists if Hizbullah is a dominant force in the civilian government that gives orders to the Lebanese Army.

Both Hizbullah as a party and Hizbullahs small paramilitary of some 25,000 are considered terrorists in Washington, D.C., though the designation is purely political, pushed by the Israel lobbies. Hizbullah doesnt routinely kill civilian non-combatants to shape civilian politics, which is the definition of terrorism. Almost all its kinetic action since 2013 has been dedicated to fighting Sunni and Salafi rebels in Syria. This endeavor included battling ISIL and the Nusra Front, an al-Qaeda affiliate.

The report blames Iran for backing Hizbullah (which is apparently what it means by lambasting Iran as the biggest supporter of terrorism, a silly piece of propaganda). But it does not blame Saudi Arabia for having backed the Army of Islam (Jaysh al-Islam) militants in Syria, who were never designated terrorists for political reasons, since they were fighting the government of Bashar al-Assad, whom the US wanted to overthrow. Jaysh al-Islam certainly fit the profile of an extremist terrorist group. Saudi Arabia appears to have directed its attacks on Syrian government buildings, e.g. At one point John Kerry let the cat out of the bag and admitted that the Army of Islam is a terrorist organization supported by the Saudis.

Nor is Israel criticized for giving aid to and supporting Syrian rebels, some of whom appear to have included the Nusra Front, a designated terrorist group and al-Qaeda affiliate.

For more Orwellianism, consider this paragraph:

In Yemen, the ongoing conflict between the Government of Yemen and Houthi forces continued to create a security vacuum for al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) and ISISs Yemen branch to exploit. AQAP used its tribal connections to continue to recruit, conduct attacks, and operate in areas of southern and central Yemen with relative impunity, although counterterrorism operations eliminated key leaders and pressured the groups networks. AQAP also released several videos reiterating its intent to attack the West. Although significantly smaller than AQAP, ISISs Yemen affiliate conducted large-scale attacks targeting security forces and government targets in Aden.

Read between the lines and it becomes clear that the joint Saudi-UAE-led war on Yemen has thrown the country into turmoil and allowed al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula to recruit and attack with relative impunity. AQAP was responsible for the underwear bomber over Detroit late in 2009 and has plotted against the US on several occasions. It would be bad for AQAP to have a free hand.

The Saudi and UAE-led war on Yemen has given al-Qaeda in that country a new lease on life. The object of their ire, the Houthi government of north Yemen, has fought al-Qaeda.

In contrast, the Associated Press discovered extensive cooperation between Saudi Arabia/ the UAE and al-Qaeda.

Maybe I am naive in expecting close analysis and clarity in a government document. After all, the State Department reports to Donald J. Trump.

But the US government has to make up its mind who the real enemy is. If it is ISIL and al-Qaeda, then the US needs Iran as an ally.



CGTN: Hezbollah leader accuses US of preparing new attacks in Syria
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Sanaa (AFP)  More than five million children are threatened by famine in war-torn Yemen as prices soar, a charity said Wednesday, warning an entire generation may face death and starvation on an unprecedented scale.

The three-year conflict between Yemens Saudi-backed government and Huthi rebels linked to Iran has pushed the already impoverished country to the brink of famine, leaving many unable to afford food and water.

Millions of children dont know when or if their next meal will come, said Helle Thorning-Schmidt, head of Save the Children International.

This war risks killing an entire generation of Yemens children who face multiple threats, from bombs to hunger to preventable diseases like cholera.

The already dire humanitarian situation is being exacerbated by the battle for the lifeline port of Hodeida, which is threatening what little aid is trickling into the country.

Any disruption to food and fuel supplies coming through Hodeida port could cause starvation on an unprecedented scale, said Save the Children.

Located on Yemens Red Sea coast, the port city of Hodeida is controlled by the rebels and blockaded by Saudi Arabia and its allies.

At a hospital in Abs, north of Hodeida, skeletal children cried as they were tended to and weighed by doctors and nurses, an AFP photographer reported.

Aid agencies have sounded the alarm over escalating violence between the Huthis and Saudi-led government alliance, which is now edging towards Hodeida after a UN attempt to bring warring parties to the negotiating table this month failed.

The humanitarian situation is very fragile, David Miliband, head of the New York-based International Rescue Committee, told AFP as he wrapped up a visit to Yemen on Wednesday.

My takeaway in three days in Yemen is that the humanitarian imperative doesnt just demand better flow of goods and better access for humanitarian workers, said the former British foreign secretary.

It also demands a ceasefire to allow the peace process to proceed.

 Too weak to cry 

The World Food Programme last year said food had become a weapon of war in Yemen, where fighting, cholera and looming famine have created what the UN calls the worlds worst humanitarian crisis.

Having already identified four million children at risk of starvation, Save the Children said an extra one million could now face famine as the Hodeida battle escalates.

A total of 5.2 million children across Yemen are now at risk of starvation, the Britain-based charity said.



AFP / Essa Ahmed. A Yemeni child suffering from malnutrition is weighed at a hospital in the northern district of Abs in the northwestern Hajjah province on September 19, 2018.

In one hospital I visited in north Yemen, the babies were too weak to cry, their bodies exhausted by hunger, said Thorning-Schmidt.

Food prices in some parts of the country have doubled in just a few days, and the non-governmental organisation said families faced impossible choices on whether to pay to take a sick baby to hospital at the expense of feeding the rest of the family.

The United Nations this week said food prices were up a whopping 68 percent since 2015, when a regional military coalition led by Saudi Arabia joined the governments war against the Huthi rebels.

The cost of a food basket, which contains pantry staples and canned goods, has increased by 35 percent and cooking gas and fuel prices by more than 25 percent in the past year, according to the UN humanitarian agency OCHA.

The UN has said any major fighting in Hodeida could halt food distributions to eight million Yemenis dependent on them for survival.

The countrys economy and population of 22 million people depend almost entirely on imports.

 Time running out 

Deadly clashes resumed on Monday night around Hodeida after UN-sponsored talks collapsed in Geneva this month.

UN officials are now pushing to find a solution to the Hodeida fighting.

World Food Programme director David Beasley on Wednesday warned time is running out for aid groups to keep Yemen from slipping into a devastating famine.

We cannot afford any disruption to the lifeline we are providing for the innocent victims of this conflict, Beasley said.

The UN Yemen envoy Martin Griffiths was in Riyadh on Wednesday after a three-day visit to Yemen aimed at restarting negotiations between the government of President Abedrabbo Mansour Hadi and the Huthis.

The United Nations humanitarian coordinator for Yemen, Lise Grande, was also in Hodeida on Wednesday, according to a high-ranking Yemeni military source.

Nearly 10,000 people, mostly civilians, have been killed since the Saudi-led coalition intervened in the Yemen conflict in 2015.

Featured Photo: AFP / Essa Ahmed. Save the Children says disruption to supplies coming through Yemens embattled Hodeida port has put an extra one million children at risk of starvation, bringing the total to 5.2 million.
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I wrote in my column on Sunday, Manaforts Plea Deal is a Constitutional Crisis, we Just dont Know it Yet:

Manafort has to give to the Federal government over $40 million in ill-gotten gains. Manafort has been convicted of lobbying for pro-Russian politicians and interests in Ukraine, of not registering as a foreign agent, and of keeping tens of millions of dollars in payments from Russian oligarchs and their Ukrainian counter-parts in banks in Cyprus while never paying any taxes on them. He got paid for doing things like circulating a false charge that Ukrainian prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko (anti-Russian) was guilty of ordering people killed (Manafort said he wanted to put some stink on her).

Manafort colluded with an unnamed Israeli official to weaponize anti-Semitism for Russian aims in Ukraine, painting Tymoshenko as an anti-Semite. He then put pressure on the Jewish figures in the Obama administration to pressure Obama to oppose Tymoshenko, in favor of the pro-Russian Viktor Yanukovych.

The casual way in which the Likud government of Binyamin Netanyahu, prime minister of Israel, throws around charges of anti-Semitism for narrow, everyday political gain has almost entirely undermined the force of the charge. When I see a campaign against Jeremy Corbyn waged by the British Israel lobbies, attempting to smear him as bigotted against Jews because he disagrees with Israeli colonization of the Palestinians, I am inclined to discount it. It is just more Manafortism, in which there is an attempt to have Corbyn Manafortized.

The Israeli i24 YouTube network reports that feverish speculation has broken out in Israel over the identity of the high official, with suspicion fixing (despite his denials) on far-right Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman. Lieberman is from Moldova and so it would not be strange if he was enlisted for a caper in Ukraine. But while there are calls for an investigation, no solid evidence has been made public.

i24:

THE RUNDOWN | Manafort is facing some serious legal troubles just after agreeing to a plea deal on two counts. But now, an Israeli official is allegedly involved in Manaforts political work in the Ukraine. Who is it and what are the consequences? Former Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon analyzes.

i24: Israeli Official Linked to Manaforts Case
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(Tomdispatch.com)  Its easy  and not wrong  to think that truth is in dire danger in the era of Donald Trump.

His own record of issuing breathtaking falsehoods from the exalted platform of the White House is unprecedented in American history. So is his consistent refusal to back down when a statement is proven false. In Trumps world, those who expose his lies are the liars and facts that show he was wrong are fake news.

In this war on truth, Trump has several important allies. One is the shameful silence of Republican politicians who dont challenge his misstatements for fear of giving offense to his true-believing base. Another is a media environment far more cluttered and chaotic than in past decades, making it easier for people to find stories that fit their preconceived ideas and screen out those they prefer not to believe.

These trends come in the context of a more general loosening of the informal rules that once put some limits on the tone and content of political speech. American politicians have always done plenty of exaggerating, lying by omission, selecting misleading facts, and using slanted language. Typically, though,if not always, they tried to avoid outright, provable lies, which it was commonly assumed would be politically damaging if exposed.

Nowadays, the cost of being caught lying seems less obvious. Somepoliticians show no apparent embarrassment about lying. Take, for instance, Corey Stewart, the Republican candidate trying to unseat Virginias Democratic senator, Tim Kaine. Stewart unapologetically told the Washington Post about a doctored photograph his campaign distributed, Of course it was Photoshopped.

In the altered photo, an image of a much younger Kaine is spliced in to make it appear that he is sitting with a group of armed Central American guerrillas. The caption under the picture says, Tim Kaine worked in Honduras to promote his radical socialist ideology, suggesting the photo proves that he consorted with violent leftist revolutionaries while working at a Jesuit mission in Honduras at the start of the 1980s.

In reality, the guerrillas in the original photograph (which dates from well after Kaines time in Central America) were not leftists and not in Honduras, but right-wing Contra insurgents in Nicaragua. So the visual was a double fake, putting Kaine in a scene he wasnt in and then falsely describing the scene. When I read the story, I wondered whether Stewart would think it legitimate if an opponent Photoshopped him into a picture of American Nazis brandishing swastika flags. (If anyone asked him that question, I have not found a record of it.)

It may still be uncommon for a politician to acknowledge a deception as forthrightly as Stewart did, but it does seem that politicians today feel  and probably are  freer to lie than they used to be.

So, yes, truth is facing a serious crisis in the present moment. But two things are worth remembering. First, that crisis did not begin with Donald Trump. It has a long history. Second, and possibly more sobering, truth may be more fragile and lies more powerful than most of us, journalists included, would like to believe. That means the wounds Trump and his allies have inflicted  on top of earlier ones  may prove harder to heal than we think.

An Early Lesson

I began learning about the fragility of truth many years ago.

George Wallace, the segregationist governor of Alabama, taught me an early lesson. In the spring of 1964, less than a year after his notorious stand in the schoolhouse door attempt to block two black students from enrolling at the University of Alabama, he came to Maryland as a candidate in the Democratic presidential primary (not to be confused with his more widely remembered presidential runs in 1968 and 1972).

His real target wasnt the presidential nomination but the 1964 Civil Rights Act, then being filibustered in the Senate. There were plenty of segregationist Democrats in Maryland then and Wallace calculated that scoring a significant vote there (as well as in a couple of other states) would send a message to Senate Democrats that supporting civil rights was politically perilous.

I was 23 that spring, barely halfway through my second year as a reporter, when I was assigned as the (very) junior half of the Baltimore Suns two-man team covering the primary campaign. I was under the direction of the Suns chief political reporter, an old-timer named Charlie Whiteford. But Charlie didnt hog all the big stories, as would have happened on most newspapers. In an effort to show balanced and even-handed reporting  an appearance the Sun in those days went to extreme lengths to maintain  he switched off with me, so that his byline and mine would appear alternately over stories about each candidate. As a result, young and green as I was, I got to cover Wallaces rallies on a roughly equal basis with my senior colleague.

From the start, I heard the governor saying things about the civil rights bill that werent just misleading or slanted in ways I was already accustomed to hearing, even that early in my reporting life, but unequivocally false. After the first rally I attended, I got a copy of the bill from the Suns library and carried it with me for the rest of the campaign, so I could accurately cite Wallaces misstatements as I was typing my stories.

The first time I nailed his lies in print, I was smug. Maybe he can get away with this stuff in Alabama, I remember thinking, but the Baltimore Sun will keep him straight in Maryland. Very soon, though, I found out that I couldnt have been more wrong. The people Wallace was speaking to believed him, not the Sun, and Wallace knew that. He didnt care in the least what I wrote about him and kept right on offering his untruths about the civil rights bill.

More than a half century has passed since I learned that lesson, and its still sobering: when people like a politicians lies better than they like the truth, its tough to change their minds, and even after lies are proven false, they can remain a powerful force in public life.

Learning Another Lesson, Far from Home

Thirteen years later, in a factory on the other side of the Earth, I had anothermoment of truth that taught what might be an even more chilling lesson: lies can still have power even when we know theyre lies.

That moment came during my first trip to China in May 1977, eight months after the death of that countrys leader, Mao Zedong. As the Suns correspondent in Hong Kong, still under British rule at the time, I had been writing about Chinese affairs for nearly four years. But that visit, seven days in and around the city of Guangzhou (then commonly called Canton), was the first time I was able to look with my own eyes at a country still largely closed to the outside world.

On one of those days, my minders took me to the Guangzhou Heavy Machinery Plant, which manufactured equipment for oil refineries, chemical and metallurgical factories, and other industrial facilities. Its walls were plastered with posters showing standard images of Chairman Mao and of soldiers, workers, and peasants heroically struggling to realize his socialist ideals. The scene I saw from a catwalk over the factory floor, however, looked nothing like those melodramatic images. A few workers were tending machines or trundling wheelbarrows across the floor, but most were standing around idly, sipping tea, chatting in small groups, or reading newspapers.

I was startled by that very unheroic scene and even more startled when it dawned on me why I was so surprised. It wasnt discovering that those propaganda images were false. I knew that already. Instead, I realized that even knowing that, I had still unconsciously expected to see workers looking like the men and women shown on those posters, faces glowing with devotion while giving their all to carry out Chairman Maos revolutionary line.

Until that moment I would have said with absolute certainty that I was immune to such Chinese propaganda. I had seen too many of its crude falsifications, such as the doctored photographs of Maos funeral that had run only months earlier in the same publications that regularly showed those heroic workers. Maos widow, Jiang Qing, and her three principal associates had been in the front row of mourners when the photos were taken. Only a couple of weeks later, they were arrested and denounced as counter-revolutionary criminals. The Chinese media kept on publishing those funeral photos, but with Jiang and her allies  now labeled the Gang of Four  airbrushed out. Blurred smudges or blank spots appeared where they had been shown in the originals, while vertical rows of xs blotted out their names in the captions. (Had anyone asked about the retouching, its a safe bet that Chinese authorities would have answered with the 1976 equivalent of Of course they were Photoshopped.)

Having seen those and so many other transparently false words and images, I could not believe I would ever confuse any official Chinese lies with reality. Still, there I was on that factory catwalk, stunned to realize that those propaganda images had shaped what I expected to see, even though I knew perfectly well that they were unreal.

That moment, too, taught me a lasting lesson: that truth could be a fragile thing not just in the outside world but inside my own mind and memory.

An Immunodeficiency Disease?

By these recollections from four or five decades ago, I dont mean to suggest that theres nothing new about the immediate crisis. Quite the opposite. President Trumps outlandish untruthfulness, an increasingly chaotic media landscape, and the decline of traditional habits of political speech unquestionably represent a new and deeply alarming threat to public discourse and the foundations of democratic government.

One element of that crisis might be considered analogous to what doctors call an immunodeficiency illness  a disease that destroys or weakens the bodys ability to cure or control its symptoms. The immunodeficiency disease in todays political and cultural wars is the campaign to undermine public trust in journalists and other watchdogs, the very people who are supposed to counter fake facts with real ones.

That campaign isnt new. Attacks on news organizations (most prominently from the right but also from the left) go back at least to the 1960s. Under Trump, however, that assault has become uglier, more intense  and more dangerous.

Calling journalists enemies of the American people, for example, doesnt just raise echoes of past totalitarian regimes. It gives aid and comfort to present-day officials and lawmakers who want to avoid being held publicly accountable for their acts.That applies not just in the United States but internationally. Trumps anti-media rhetoric abets repressive rulers across the world who suppress independent, critical reporting in their countries.

A recent column by the Washington Posts Jackson Diehl documented the worldwide impact of Trumps anti-media assault. He reported that his search for examples turned up 28 countries where the terms fake news or false news have been used to attack legitimate journalists and truthful reporting during Trumps time in office. Around the world, Diehl found, authoritarian leaders like Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines, Cambodias Hun Sen, and Turkeys Recep Tayyip Erdogan have explicitly endorsed the American presidents attacks or echoed his exact words while cracking down on press freedom in their own countries.

Journalists have responded to Trump with an outpouring of indignant commentary  an understandable reaction, though its far from clear whether it helps or hurts their cause. A gesture like the Boston Globes initiative last month that led more than 300 newspapers across the country to publish editorials on the same day calling for freedom of the press and attacking Trumps stance on the media raised valid challenges to the presidents charges, but also may have cemented in place a kind of equivalency in the public mind: Trump is against journalists, journalists are against Trump.

Beyond reasonable doubt, that equivalency reinforces Trumps side more than it defends good reporting or strengthens public knowledge. For his supporters, it validates his posturing as a president besieged by a hostile media  and his repeated insistence that stories he doesnt like are fake facts. Pious editorials declaring journalists devotion to truth and fervently exalting the First Amendment may be justified, but as a practical matter, eloquent self-righteousness seems unlikely to be an effective weapon in the war against the war on truth.

It would be nice to think that tougher, more factual reporting would be more helpful, but as I learned covering the Wallace campaign all those years ago, that has its limits, too.

How to Be Right (Always)

I couldnt read George Wallaces mind in 1964 and cant read Donald Trumps 54 years later. So what follows is speculation, not verifiable fact. With that qualifier, my impression is that Trumps falsehoods come from a different place and have a different character than Wallaces. If theres a Wallace reincarnation on the landscape today, it would be someone more like Corey Stewart. Wallace might not have said it to a reporter  though I did sometimes sense an unseen wink in our direction when he delivered some outrageous statement  but I strongly suspect that of course it was Photoshopped, adjusted for the different technology of that era, exactly reflected his attitude.

President Trump looks like a quite different case. He clearly lies consciously at times, but generally the style and content of his falsehoods give the impression that he has engaged in a kind of internal mental Photoshopping, reshaping facts inside his mind until they conform to something he wants to say at a given moment.

A recent report in the Daily Beast described an episode that fits remarkably well with that theory.

As told by the Daily Beasts Asawin Suebsaeng, at a March 2017 White House meeting between the president and representatives of leading veterans organizations, Rick Weidman of Vietnam Veterans of America brought up the subject of Agent Orange, the widely used U.S. defoliant that has had long-term health effects on American soldiers and Vietnamese villagers.

As Suebsaeng reconstructed the discussion, Trump responded by asking if Agent Orange was that stuff from that movie  a reference evidently to the 1979 film Apocalypse Now. Several veterans in the room tried to explain to the president that the scene he remembered involved napalm, an incendiary agent, not Agent Orange. But Trump wouldnt back down, Suebsaeng recounted, and proceeded to say things like, no, I think its that stuff from that movie.' His comment directly to Weidman was, Well, I think you just didnt like the movie.

What makes the Daily Beast report particularly revealing is not just that Trump was ignorant of the facts and would not listen to people who clearly knew better. That behavior is all too familiar to anyone even casually aware of Trumps record. The argument with the veterans was different because his misstatement did not arise from any of the usual reasons. He was not answering a critic or tearing down someone who frustrated him or making an argument for a policy opinion or defending some past statement.

Sticking to his version of Agent Orange was purely a reflection of his personality. On a subject one can safely assume he had not thought about until that moment, he seized on a fragmentary memory of something hed seen on a screen years earlier, jumped to a wrong conclusion, and was then immediately convinced that he was correct solely because he had heard himself saying it  not only certain that he was right, but oblivious to the fact that everyone he was talking to knew more about the subject than he did.

In effect, this story strongly suggests, Trumps thought process (if you can call it that) boils down to: I am right because I am always right.

Lots of people absorb facts selectively and adapt them to fit opinions they already hold. Thats human nature. But the presidents ability to twist the truth, consciously or not, is extreme. So is his apparently unshakable conviction that no matter what the subject is, no one knows more than he does, which means he has no need to listen to anyone who tries to correct his misstatements. In a person with his power and responsibilities, those qualities are truly frightening.

As alarming as his record is, though, it would be a serious mistake to think of Trump as the only or even the principal enemy of truth and truth-tellers. There is a large army out there churning out false information, using technology that lets them spread their messages to a mass audience with minimal effort and expense. But the largest threat to truth, I fear, is not from the liars and truth twisters, but from deep in our collective and individual human nature. Its the same threat I glimpsed all those years ago at George Wallaces rallies in Maryland and on that factory floor in China: the tendency to believe comfortable lies instead of uncomfortable truths and to trust our own assumptions instead of looking at the evidence.

That widespread and deep-rooted failure of critical thinking in American society today has helped make Trump and his enablers, like other liars before them, successful in the war against truth. In the words of the mid-twentieth-century cartoonist Walt Kellys comic-strip character, Pogo the Possum, We have met the enemy and it is us. Thats a powerful enemy. Whether theres an effective way for the forces of truth to oppose it is far from clear.

Arnold R. Isaacs, a journalist and writer based in Maryland, spent 18 years as a reporter, national and foreign correspondent, and editor for the Baltimore Sun. He is the author of From Troubled Lands: Listening to Pakistani and Afghan Americans in Post-9/11 America and two books related to the Vietnam War. He is a TomDispatch regular. His website is www.arnoldisaacs.net.

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 Arnold R. Isaacs

Via Tomdispatch.com
TORONTO, Sept. 20, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Teranga Gold Corporation ("Teranga" or the "Company") (TSX:TGZ; OTCQX:TGCDF) is pleased to announce that the most recent diamond drill program results on its Golden Hill property in Burkina Faso, West Africa have returned strong near surface, oxide zone and deeper gold intersections at a number of advanced prospects. The latest drill results from the C-Zone, Ma North, Peksou and Jackhammer Hill prospects have also expanded mineralization along trend and to depth.

Teranga has an earn-in agreement on Golden Hill with Boss Resources Limited (ASX:BOE) pursuant to which Teranga, as operator, can earn an 80% interest in the joint venture upon delivery of a feasibility study and the payment of AUD2.5 million.

Highlight Results

C-Zone Prospect

8 m @ 4.21 g/t gold, including 2 m @ 11.54 g/t gold (GHDD-373) from 137 m down hole depth (DHD)

(GHDD-373) from 137 m down hole depth (DHD) 9 m @ 3.47 g/t gold, including 2 m @ 11.95 g/t gold (GHDD-390) from 96 m DHD

(GHDD-390) from 96 m DHD 4 m @ 13.53 g/t gold, including 1 m @ 50.95 g/t gold (GHDD-391) uncut grade from 108 m DHD (Refer to Table 1 in Appendix 1 for both uncut and cut grade intervals for GHDD-391)

(GHDD-391) uncut grade from 108 m DHD (Refer to Table 1 in Appendix 1 for both uncut and cut grade intervals for GHDD-391) 8 m @ 4.37 g/t gold, including 3 m @ 8.49 g/t gold (GHDD-394) from 110 m DHD

Ma North Prospect

3 m @ 19.69 g/t gold, including 1 m @ 50.37 g/t gold (GHDD-406) uncut grade from 109 m DHD (Refer to Table 2 in Appendix 1 for both uncut and cut grade intervals for GHDD-406)

(GHDD-406) uncut grade from 109 m DHD (Refer to Table 2 in Appendix 1 for both uncut and cut grade intervals for GHDD-406) 9 m @ 3.11 g/t gold, including 3 m @ 4.78 g/t gold (GHDD-410) from 71 m DHD

(GHDD-410) from 71 m DHD 9 m @ 2.53 g/t gold, including 5 m @ 4.17 g/t gold (GHDD-379) from 70 m DHD

Peksou Prospect

6 m @ 3.67 g/t gold, including 1 m @ 17.30 g/t gold (GHDD-360) from 115 m DHD

(GHDD-360) from 115 m DHD 18 m @ 2.59 g/t gold, including 9 m @ 4.08 g/t gold (GHDD-361) from 64 m DHD

Golden Hill continues to be one of West Africas most exciting advanced stage exploration projects and, with recent drilling completed, the district-scale, multi-prospect potential of the project is becoming clearer, said Richard Young, CEO. We continue to see consistent intervals of both high-grade and near-surface gold mineralization from a variety of prospects, all located in relatively close proximity.

Our advanced-stage exploration program at Golden Hill continues to provide a high rate of drilling success at all priority targets, added David Mallo, Vice President, Exploration. Gold intersections continue to demonstrate excellent strike and depth continuity at multiple proximal prospects. Drilling through the remainder of 2018 is designed to follow up on the dozens of high-grade gold intersections already announced and expand gold mineralization at our primary prospects, building towards our initial resource estimations.

Teranga is investing $8 million in advanced exploration drill programs in 2018. Over the remainder of the year, significant drilling will be undertaken on all the advanced prospects listed above, as well as at Ma Main, Ma East, Peksou North, Nahiri, Zone A and Zone B.

The Company plans to announce an initial resource estimate early in 2019 based on available drilling results at the most advanced prospects. Preliminary metallurgical test work programs are underway with base line environmental studies to follow later this year. Upon satisfaction of conditions precedent relating to the projects initial preliminary economic assessment, Teranga has secured $25 million in debt financing to advance the Golden Hill project through to feasibility.

Golden Hill Property

The Golden Hill property is comprised of three adjacent exploration permits covering 470 km2 in southwest Burkina Faso in the central part of the Hounde Greenstone Belt. This belt hosts a number of high-grade gold discoveries, including the Siou, Yaramoko and Hounde deposits, the latter being contiguous with Golden Hill.

This news release provides an update on exploration drilling results from a number of prospects recently evaluated as part of ongoing advanced exploration programs at Golden Hill. All advanced stage exploration prospects at Golden Hill are located within six kilometres of a central point (Figure 1 in Appendix 2).

Recent drilling was undertaken at C-Zone, Ma North, Jackhammer Hill and Peksou prospects. Please refer to Appendix 1 for significant results (Tables 1-4) and Appendix 2 for plan maps and representative sections related to this phase of our exploration drilling program. Cumulative results from all Golden Hill drilling are available on the Companys website www.terangagold.com under Exploration.

C-Zone Prospect: Strong Gold Mineralization Demonstrating Excellent Correlation

To-date, the Company has drill tested C-Zone with diamond drilling over a strike extent of approximately 850 metres (Figure 2 in Appendix 2) and additional recent results confirm that C-Zone remains open to depth and intersects with the southeastern portion of our Peksou prospect.

Gold mineralization is localized in a discrete, mafic volcanic hosted shear zone system that displays alteration, veining and brecciation characteristics similar to those observed at Golden Hills nearby Ma prospect. The correlation of gold mineralized zones between drill holes at C-Zone has been excellent along the drilled strike extent, as demonstrated by representative sections of some recent drill results (Figures 3 and 4 in Appendix 2).

Recent notable diamond drill results at C-Zone are outlined in Table 1 in Appendix 1.

Ma North Prospect: New Drilling Results Extends Mineralization Along Trend and to Depth

Our most recent Ma North diamond drill results continue to confirm that a third well-mineralized breccia zone (BZ-3) exists within the Ma structural complex where previous drilling had identified BZ-1 and BZ-2 (Figure 5 in Appendix 2). Drilling at Ma North is still at an early-stage and predominantly at shallow depths when compared to more advanced areas of the Ma structural complex. Early-stage hole-to-hole correlation is demonstrating excellent continuity of mineralization. Additional drilling is planned to further evaluate Ma North both along trend and to depth where the breccia-hosted mineralization remains open to expansion.

Representative sections demonstrating some recent drill results are shown in Figures 6 and 7 in Appendix 2.

Recent notable diamond drill results at Ma North are outlined in Table 2 in Appendix 1.

Peksou Prospect: Minimum 600-Metre Strike Extent

The Companys diamond drilling at the Peksou prospect now covers a 600-metre strike extent (Figure 8 in Appendix 2) and extends locally to vertical depths approaching 100 metres. Gold mineralization at Peksou is hosted within both mafic volcanic and granodiorite intrusive units where two distinct styles of alteration have been noted  one hematite dominant and the second sericite dominant. With multiple favourable results from this latest drill phase, confidence in the interpretation has improved considerably and correlation of mineralized zones, both hole-to-hole and section-to-section, is greatly enhanced. A representative section including new results is included (Figure 9 in Appendix 2).

Recent notable diamond drilling results at Peksou are outlined in Table 3 in Appendix 1.

Jackhammer Hill Prospect: High-Grade Mineralization Hosting Visible Gold

Recent drilling at the Jackhammer Hill prospect has been limited while exploration drilling was focused elsewhere. More extensive drilling has been earmarked for the upcoming quarter at Jackhammer Hill.

The gold mineralized zones identified thus far at Jackhammer Hill comprise a series of southeast dipping horizons hosted within an altered and sheared diorite intrusive unit. Drilling has been directed along an approximate 1,350-metre strike extent (Figure 10 in Appendix 2), predominantly to vertical depths of 50 to 75 metres and locally to vertical depths of approximately 125 metres. A 200-metre long central portion of the Jackhammer Hill mineralization includes a number of previously announced high-grade intervals hosting visible gold in the drill core.

In the coming months, drilling will focus on increasing both lateral and depth extensions of the Jackhammer Hill mineralized zones including the high-grade central portion of the prospect.

Recent notable diamond drill results at Jackhammer Hill are outlined in Table 4 in Appendix 1.

Competent Persons Statements

Teranga's Burkina Faso exploration programs, corresponding to the drill holes being reported herein, were managed by Peter Mann, FAusIMM. Mr. Mann was a full time employee, recently retired, of Teranga and is not "independent" within the meaning of National Instrument 43-101  Standards of Disclosure for Mineral Projects (NI 43-101). Mr. Mann has sufficient experience which is relevant to the style of mineralization and type of deposit under consideration and to the activity which he is undertaking to qualify as a "Qualified Person" under NI 43-101. The technical information contained in this news release relating to exploration results are based on, and fairly represents, information compiled by Mr. Mann. Mr. Mann has verified and approved the data disclosed in this release, including the sampling, analytical and test data underlying the information. The RC and diamond core samples are assayed at the BIGS Global Laboratory in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso. Mr. Mann has consented to the inclusion in this news release of the matters based on his compiled information in the form and context in which it appears herein.

Forward-Looking Statements

This press release contains certain statements that constitute forward-looking information within the meaning of applicable securities laws ("forward-looking statements"), which reflects management's expectations regarding Teranga's future growth and business prospects (including the timing and development of new deposits and the success of exploration activities) and opportunities. Wherever possible, words such as objective to, likely, intend to, potential, belief, believe, expects, estimates, plans, anticipated, ability and similar expressions or statements that certain actions, events or results should, or "will" have been used to identify such forward-looking information. Forward-looking statements include, without limitation, all disclosure regarding possible events, conditions or results of operations, future economic conditions and anticipated courses of action. Although the forward-looking statements contained in this press release reflect management's current beliefs based upon information currently available to management and based upon what management believes to be reasonable assumptions, Teranga cannot be certain that actual results will be consistent with such forward-looking statements. Such forward-looking statements are based upon assumptions, opinions and analysis made by management in light of its experience, current conditions and its expectations of future developments that management believe to be reasonable and relevant but that may prove to be incorrect. These assumptions include, among other things, the ability to obtain any requisite governmental approvals, the accuracy of sampling, analytical and test data underlying the exploration results included herein, gold price, exchange rates, fuel and energy costs, future economic conditions, and anticipated future estimates of free cash flow. Teranga cautions you not to place undue reliance upon any such forward-looking statements.

The risks and uncertainties that may affect forward-looking statements include, among others: the inherent risks involved in exploration and development of mineral properties, including government approvals and permitting, changes in economic conditions, changes in the worldwide price of gold and other key inputs, changes in mine plans and other factors, such as project execution delays, many of which are beyond the control of Teranga, as well as other risks and uncertainties which are more fully described in Teranga's Annual Information Form dated March 29, 2018, and in other filings of Teranga with securities and regulatory authorities which are available at www.sedar.com. Teranga does not undertake any obligation to update forward-looking statements should assumptions related to these plans, estimates, projections, beliefs and opinions change. Nothing in this document should be construed as either an offer to sell or a solicitation to buy or sell Teranga securities. All references to Teranga include its subsidiaries unless the context requires otherwise.

About Teranga

Teranga is a multi-jurisdictional West African gold company focused on production and development as well as the exploration of more than 6,400 km2 of land located on prospective gold belts. Since its initial public offering in 2010, Teranga has produced more than 1.5 million ounces of gold from its operations in Senegal, which as of June 30, 2017 had a reserve base of 2.7 million ounces of gold. Focused on diversification and growth, the Company is building Wahgnion, its second gold mine, and is conducting extensive exploration programs in three countries: Burkina Faso, Senegal and Cote dIvoire. The Company had nearly 4.0 million ounces of gold reserves from its combined Sabodala Gold operations and Wahgnion Gold Project as of June 30, 2017. Teranga applies a rigorous capital allocation framework for its investment decisions to execute on its growth strategy relying on a combination of cash on the balance sheet, free cash flow from operations and debt.

Steadfast in its commitment to set the benchmark for responsible mining, Teranga operates in accordance with the highest international standards and aims to act as a catalyst for sustainable economic, environmental, and community development as it strives to create value for all of its stakeholders. Teranga is a member of the United Nations Global Compact and a leading member of the multi-stakeholder group responsible for the submission of the first Senegalese Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative revenue report. The Company's responsibility report is available at www.terangagold.com/responsibilityreport and is prepared in accordance with its commitments under the United Nations Global Compact and in alignment with the Global Reporting Initiative guidelines.

Contact Information Richard Young Trish Moran President & CEO Head of Investor Relations T: +1 416 594 0000 | E: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. T: +1 416 607 4507 | E: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

APPENDIX 1

Drilling Results Tables 1 - 4

Table 1: C-Zone Prospect  Selected Drill Highlights

Hole # Northing Easting Elevation Azimuth Dip EOH (m) Interval

(m) Core

length

(m) Grade

(g/t Au) GHDD-367 1227326 451617 306 020 -55 116 88-91 3 1.34 GHDD-368 1227214 451828 306 020 -55 160 50-52 2 1.48 108-109 1 3.12 127-129 2 1.26 132-137 5 7.19 GHDD-369 1227267 451892 306 020 -55 110 72-81 9 1.12 GHDD-370 1227193 451904 306 020 -60 160 119-120 1 21.59 129-131 2 1.98 GHDD-371 1227288 451986 302 020 -55 110 44-48 4 1.11 50-52 2 1.53 55-60 5 1.47 GHDD-372 1227340 451721 310 020 -55 90 63-70 7 1.82 Including 63-65 2 4.54 GHDD-373 1227216 451783 305 020 -55 161 112-114 2 1.80 131-132 1 17.08 137-145 8 4.21 Including 137-139 2 11.54 GHDD-374 1227281 451750 306 020 -55 125 46-48 2 9.98 95-105 10 2.52 Including 98-101 3 4.11 GHDD-381 1227299 451687 306 020 -55 110 62-63 1 24.01 GHDD-386 1227438 452412 298 330 -55 89 52-53 1 24.55 81-82 1 1.69 GHDD-387 1227415 452277 300 270 -55 83 37-38 1 3,81 52-54 2 3.32 70-71 1 6.90 GHDD-388 1227496 452278 299 270 -55 100 61-62 1 61.50 * 61-62 1 30.00 ** 68-69 1 1.55 GHDD-389 1227256 452269 299 270 -55 95 70-72 2 3.06 87-92 5 1.58 Including 88-89 1 4.36 GHDD-390 1227291 451710 307 020 -55 126 96-105 9 3.47 Including 99-101 2 11.95 GHDD-391 1227231 451812 305 020 -55 143 108-112 4 13.53 * Including 110-111 1 50.95 ** 108-112 4 8.30 * Including 110-111 1 30.00 ** 119-120 1 3.14 124-127 3 5.93 GHDD-392 1227183 451836 304 020 -55 176 106-109 3 4.46 Including 106-107 1 11.92 150-160 10 1.77 Including 153-156 3 3.41 GHDD-393 1227279 451725 307 0200 -55 134 74-79 5 3.47 Including 74-76 2 7.58 103-108 5 1.12 123-125 2 1.26 GHDD-394 1227223 451879 303 020 -55 146 110-118 8 4.37 112-115 3 8.49 Intervals calculated with a 0.4 g/t Au cut-off and 2 metres maximum internal dilution. True widths are unknown. UTM's are WGS84-30N. Intervals with grade x thickness (gram x metre) of 10 or higher are highlighted in bold. * Uncut grades, ** Cut grades  individual assays above 30.0 g/t gold are cut to 30.0 g/t gold.





Table 2: Ma North Prospect  Selected Drill Highlights

Hole # Northing Easting Elevation Azimuth Dip EOH

(m) Interval

(m) Core

length (m) Grade

(g/t Au) GHDD-375 1237880 452788 400 310 -50 121 12-13 1 2.21 19-20 1 1.51 32-34 2 1.39 41-42 1 1.97 49-51 2 1.12 74-75 1 2.81 GHDD-376 1237973 452919 400 310 -50 110 37-38 1 2.32 74-75 1 1.95 81-82 1 2.87 GHDD-377 1237864 452157 410 010 -50 130 84-90 6 1.65 Including 84-85 1 7.43 93-97 4 3.85 GHDD-378 1237913 452206 400 010 -50 107 33-36 3 4.55 40-42 2 1.50 GHDD-379 1237864 452197 410 010 -50 105 70-79 9 2.53 Including 73-78 5 4.17 Including 73-74 1 10.70 GHDD-380 1237965 452686 411 311 -50 110 22-23 1 4.42 33-34 1 1.47 42-43 1 2.63 GHDD-401 1237858 452237 410 010 -50 104 66-68 2 1.11 77-81 4 1.36 GHDD-402 1237851 452276 410 010 -50 100 67-70 3 5.06 82-84 2 1.72 GHDD-403 1237844 452316 410 010 -50 98 71-72 1 1.53 GHDD-404 1237912 452603 419 220 -50 92 40-41 1 1.73 GHDD-406 1237811 452266 410 010 -50 134 89-90 1 1.75 92-95 3 1.35 97-98 1 3.58 109-112 3 19.69 * Including 110-111 1 50.37 * 109-111 3 12.90 ** Including 110-111 1 30.00 ** GHDD-407 1237801 452301 410 010 -50 143 97-99 2 1.08 105-107 2 1.68 GHDD-408 1237786 452629 427 007 -45 152 18-19 1 1.55 79-80 1 5.23 133-136 1 2.14 144-145 1 1.51 GHDD-409 1237854 452819 419 306 -50 188 43-45 2 1.69 58-60 2 2.57 82-83 1 6.12 132-134 2 2.19 140-141 1 1.54 179-180 1 2.00 GHDD-410 1237907 452874 419 306 -50 99 12-15 3 2.18 32-36 4 3.48 71-80 9 3.11 Including 73-76 3 4.78 GHDD-411 1237939 452716 411 306 -50 128 28-30 2 1.53 Intervals calculated with a 0.4 g/t Au cut-off and 2 metres maximum internal dilution. True widths are unknown. UTM's are WGS84-30N. Intervals with grade x thickness (gram x metre) of 10 or higher are highlighted in bold. * Uncut grades, ** Cut grades  individual assays above 30.0 g/t gold are cut to 30.0 g/t gold.





Table 3: Peksou Prospect  Selected Drill Highlights

Hole # Northing * Easting * Elevation Azimuth Dip EOH

(m) Interval

(m)* Core

length (m)* Grade

(g/t Au) GHDD-354 1227543 452372 298 025 -50 158 83-89 6 1.35 Including 83-85 2 3.09 GHDD-355 1227556 452334 298 025 -50 164 20-22 2 2.31 GHDD-356 1227610 452317 299 025 -50 74 49-50 2 5.28 67-68 1 2.62 GHDD-357 1227590 452283 299 025 -50 120 99-101 2 9.25 GHDD-358 1227586 452458 299 025 -50 80 49-55 6 1.05 Including 49-50 1 3.48 GHDD-359 1227585 452260 299 025 -50 161 69-70 1 1.69 124-126 2 1.68 135-136 1 2.16 138-139 1 2.53 GHDD-360 1227617 4522230 299 025 -50 175 45-47 2 5.22 95-98 3 3.90 107-108 1 14.14 115-121 6 3.67 Including 115-116 1 17.30 GHDD-361 1227665 452209 300 025 -50 112 64-82 18 2.59 Including 70-79 9 4.08 Including 73-74 1 18.49 GHDD-362 1227661 452115 300 025 -50 170 14-16 2 3.82 23-25 2 13.16 99-100 1 1.78 121-122 1 2.62 GHDD-363 1227676 452084 301 025 -55 170 114-116 2 1.92 GHDD-365 1227798 452032 302 025 -50 125 42-43 1 8.58 * Intervals calculated with a 0.4 g/t Au cut-off and 2 metres maximum internal dilution. True widths are unknown. UTM's are WGS84-30N Intervals with grade x thickness (gram x metre) of 10 or higher are highlighted in bold.

Table 4: Jackhammer Hill Prospect  Selected Drill Highlights

Hole # Northing Easting Elevation Azimuth Dip EOH (m) Interval

(m) Core

length (m) Grade

(g/t Au) GHDD-395 1229223 453293 300 315 -55 143 2-3 1 8.70 GHDD-396 1230330 453090 331 311 -55 140 120-124 4 1.24 GHDD-397 1230216 453085 352 311 -55 197 46-48 2 1.61 181-182 1 1.75 GHDD-398 1229894 452789 328 311 -55 130 1-2 1 1.28 15-16 1 1.24 GHDD-399 1229792 452838 330 311 -55 120 102-105 3 1.10 115-116 1 2.65 GHDD-400 1229727 452845 332 315 -55 170 132-133 1 1.37 138-139 1 2.01 149-151 2 1.37 Intervals calculated with a 0.4 g/t Au cut-off and 2 metres maximum internal dilution. True widths are unknown. UTM's are WGS84-30N. Intervals with grade x thickness (gram x metre) of 10 or higher are highlighted in bold.

APPENDIX 2

Figure 1: Golden Hill Property  Prospect Location Plan Map

Figure 2: C-Zone - Plan Map

Figure 3: C-Zone Prospect - Representative Drill Section

Figure 4: C-Zone Prospect - Representative Drill Section

Figure 5: Ma North Prospect - Plan Map

Figure 6: Ma North Prospect  Representative Drill Section

Figure 7: Ma North Prospect  Representative Drill Section

Figure 8: Peksou Prospect  Plan Map

Figure 9: Peksou Prospect  Representative Section

Figure 10: Jackhammer Hill Prospect - Plan Map
LONDON and CALGARY, Alberta, Sept. 20, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Mkango Resources Ltd. (AIM / TSXV: MKA) (the "Company" or "Mkango") is pleased to announce results for a further nine holes from the recently completed 10,900 metre diamond drill programme at the Songwe Hill Rare Earths Project (Songwe) in Malawi. The drilling programme is a key component of the ongoing initial phases of the Feasibility Study for Songwe, which is fully funded following investments by Mkangos strategic partner, Talaxis Limited, in January 2018.

Highlights from the results include the following:

PX068 20.6 m grading 2.8% TREO (39.0  59.6 m). Inclined hole (60 degrees west). PX071 18.0 m grading 1.6% TREO (13.0  31.0 m) and 72.5 m grading 1.2% TREO (55.6  128.1 m). Inclined hole (60 degrees east). PX074 30.4 m grading 1.7% TREO (15.0  45.4 m). Inclined hole (60 degrees west). PX075 23.8 m grading 2.4% TREO (44.3  68.1 m). Inclined hole (60 degrees west). PX079 30.5 m grading 1.4% TREO (83.0  113.5 m). Inclined hole (60 degrees west).

TREO: total rare earth oxides based on total La 2 O 3 , Ce 2 O 3 , Pr 2 O 3 , Nd 2 O 3 , Sm 2 O 3 , Eu 2 O 3 , Gd 2 O 3 , Tb 2 O 3 , Dy 2 O 3 , Ho 2 O 3 , Er 2 O 3 , Tm 2 O 3 , Yb 2 O 3 , Lu 2 O 3 , Y 2 O 3 . These intersections are reported as down hole widths and do not necessarily represent true thicknesses and attitude of the mineralised zones, the estimation of which will require further refining of the geological model.

William Dawes, Chief Executive Officer, commented: We are very encouraged by the continuing consistency of results and intersections outside the area of the previous mineral resource estimate, identifying new zones of mineralisation. The updated resource estimate will incorporate the results of this latest 10,900 metre drill programme and will form the basis of an updated and optimised mine plan for incorporation into the ongoing feasibility study. We look forward to announcing results from the remaining 66 drill holes totalling 8,396 m.

The drill programme comprised infill drilling to confirm and upgrade the existing Indicated and Inferred Mineral Resource Estimates, testing extensions to the mineralisation, and geotechnical drilling.

All nine drill holes intersected rare earth mineralisation, with the table above highlighting selected intersections each averaging 1% TREO or more. The next batch of results from a further eight drill holes will be announced in coming weeks.

Drill holes PX069, PX074, PX075 and PX079 were step-out drill holes, focused on testing north-west extensions of the mineralisation. These holes are located between previously announced drill hole PX082 and the area drilled in the stage 1 and 2 drill programmes, the first time this zone has been drilled; therefore these initial results are very encouraging.

PX099 was collared to the east of mapped carbonatite outcrop, and successfully targeted the eastern contact of the mineralisation at depth.

The remaining drill holes were focused on infill drilling, notably PX068 located on the north-west margin of the previously delineated mineral resource estimate.

A schematic geological map illustrating the location of the drill hole collars and estimated drill hole traces is available on the Companys website (www.mkango.ca).

The breakdown of TREO values reported above are as follows:

Drill Hole From To Interval La 2 O 3 Ce 2 O 3 Pr 2 O 3 Nd 2 O 3 Sm 2 O 3 Eu 2 O 3 Gd 2 O 3 Tb 2 O 3 Dy 2 O 3 Ho 2 O 3 Er 2 O 3 Tm 2 O 3 Yb 2 O 3 Lu 2 O 3 Y 2 O 3 TREO m m m ppm ppm ppm ppm ppm ppm ppm ppm ppm ppm ppm ppm ppm ppm ppm % PX049 40.8 53.9 13.2 (i) 2,740 5,777 679 2,485 359 84 181 20 102 18 44 5 28 3 518 1.3% (i) Includes 6.8m cavity not sampled. Due to size of cavity, the significance of this intersection is uncertain. PX068 39.0 59.6 20.6 8,471 12,590 1,127 3,603 611 167 398 40 173 26 63 9 52 7 730 2.8% PX069 70.0 81.6 11.6 2,576 5,466 640 2,453 437 122 290 34 155 25 58 7 37 4 673 1.3% PX071 13.0 31.0 18.0 4,417 7,209 693 2,139 277 73 173 20 91 14 32 4 23 3 371 1.6% 55.6 128.1 72.5 3,309 5,527 536 1,735 245 70 173 21 106 17 42 5 30 4 458 1.2% PX074 1.5 45.4 43.9 3,807 6,515 624 2,058 271 69 163 18 86 14 31 4 22 3 363 1.4% including 15.0 45.4 30.4 4,593 7,715 726 2,337 295 74 176 20 95 15 34 4 25 3 400 1.7% PX075 44.3 68.1 23.8 7,159 10,908 977 2,992 361 91 224 28 142 23 55 7 39 5 645 2.4% PX079 31.1 113.5 82.4 2,682 5,036 542 1,933 296 77 180 21 97 15 35 4 24 3 423 1.1% including 83.0 113.5 30.5 3,476 6,267 655 2,212 307 77 174 20 92 15 34 4 24 3 406 1.4% PX097 6.1 30.5 24.4 (i) 2,329 4,894 551 1,996 325 89 212 24 116 19 43 5 27 3 502 1.1% (i) Includes 3.5m cavity not sampled. PX099 159.0 172.8 13.8 (i) 3,452 5,578 537 1,743 239 65 158 19 83 12 26 3 17 2 316 1.2% (i) Includes 3.1m cavity not sampled.

Scientific and technical information contained in this release including sampling, analytical, and test data underlying the information has been approved and verified by Dr. Scott Swinden PGeo of Swinden Geoscience Consultants Ltd, who is a "Qualified Person" in accordance with National Instrument 43-101 - Standards of Disclosure for Mineral Projects.

Sample preparation and analytical work for the drilling and channel sampling programmes are being provided by Intertek-Genalysis Laboratories (Perth, Australia) employing ICP-MS techniques suitable for rare earth element (REE) analyses and following strict internal QAQC procedures inserting duplicates, blanks and standards. Internal Laboratory QAQC was also completed to include blanks, standards and duplicates.

About Mkango Resources Limited

Mkango's primary business is exploration for rare earth elements and associated minerals in the Republic of Malawi, a country whose hospitable people have earned it a reputation as the warm heart of Africa. The Company holds interests in three exclusive prospecting licenses in Malawi, the Phalombe licence, the Thambani licence and the Chimimbe Hill licence.

The main exploration target in the 80% held Phalombe licence is the Songwe Hill rare earths deposit, which features carbonatite-hosted rare earth mineralisation and was subject to previous exploration in the late 1980s. Mkango completed an updated Pre-Feasibility Study for the project in November 2015 and a Feasibility Study is currently underway, the initial phases of which include the recently completed 10,900 metre drilling programme.

Under the terms of an agreement with Talaxis, Talaxis will fully fund the Feasibility Study for Songwe by investing 12 million for a 49% interest in the project (via Mkango subsidiary Lancaster Exploration Ltd). Talaxis will also have the option to acquire a further 26% interest by arranging funding for project development including funding the equity component thereof. If Talaxis exercises its option, Mkango will retain a 25% interest, free carried to production. To-date, Talaxis has invested 5 million, which is funding the initial phase of the Feasibility Study, for a 20% interest in the project with Mkango holding 80%.

By investing a further 2 million, Talaxis will acquire a 49% interest in Maginito Ltd, a new subsidiary of Mkango focused on neodymium alloy powders, magnets and other technologies. This includes the collaboration with Metalysis Ltd announced in September 2017, which is focused on advanced alloys using neodymium or praseodymium with other elements for permanent magnet manufacturing. Permanent magnets are critical materials for most electric vehicles, direct drive wind turbines and many other high growth applications. Neodymium is a key rare earth component at Songwe. To date, Talaxis has invested 1 million for a 24.5% interest in Maginito with Mkango holding 75.5%.

The main exploration targets in Mkangos remaining two 100% held licences are, in the Thambani licence, uranium, niobium, tantalum and zircon and, in the Chimimbe Hill licence, nickel and cobalt.

For more information, please visit www.mkango.ca.

Market Abuse Regulation (MAR) Disclosure

Certain information contained in this announcement may have been deemed inside information for the purposes of Article 7 of Regulation (EU) No 596/2014 until the release of this announcement.

Cautionary Note Regarding Forward-Looking Statements

This news release contains forward-looking statements (within the meaning of that term under applicable securities laws) with respect to Mkango, its business and the Project. Generally, forward looking statements can be identified by the use of words such as plans, expects or is expected, scheduled, estimates intends, anticipates, believes, or variations of such words and phrases, or statements that certain actions, events or results can, may, could, would, should, might or will, occur or be achieved, or the negative connotations thereof. Forward looking statements in this news release include statements with respect to the global market for products using the rare earth metals the Company is exploring for, completion of the feasibility study and of the transactions contemplated in the agreement with Talaxis, as well as the use of proceeds from the investments into the Company by Talaxis and the timing of such expenditures. Readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on forward-looking statements, as there can be no assurance that the plans, intentions or expectations upon which they are based will occur. By their nature, forward-looking statements involve numerous assumptions, known and unknown risks and uncertainties, both general and specific, that contribute to the possibility that the predictions, forecasts, projections and other forward-looking statements will not occur, which may cause actual performance and results in future periods to differ materially from any estimates or projections of future performance or results expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. Such factors and risks include, without limiting the foregoing, market demand for the metals and associated downstream products for which Mkango is exploring, researching and developing, the positive results of a feasibility study on the Project, delays in obtaining financing or governmental or stock exchange approvals. The forward-looking statements contained in this news release are made as of the date of this news release. Except as required by law, the Company disclaims any intention and assumes no obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except as required by applicable law. Additionally, the Company undertakes no obligation to comment on the expectations of, or statements made by, third parties in respect of the matters discussed above.

For further information on Mkango, please contact:

Mkango Resources Limited William Dawes

Chief Executive Officer

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UK: +44 207 3722 744

Canada: +1 403 444 5979

www.mkango.ca

@MkangoResources Alexander Lemon

President

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Financial Public Relations

Tim Blythe, Camilla Horsfall, Julia Tilley

UK: +44 207 138 3204 SP Angel Corporate Finance LLP

Nominated Adviser and Joint Broker

Jeff Keating, Caroline Rowe

UK: +44 20 3470 0470 Alternative Resource Capital

Joint Broker

Alex Wood, Rob Collins

UK: +44 20 7186 9004; +44 20 7186 9001

The TSX Venture Exchange has neither approved nor disapproved the contents of this press release. Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

This press release does not constitute an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy any equity or other securities of the Company in the United States. The securities of the Company will not be registered under the United States Securities Act of 1933, as amended (the U.S. Securities Act) and may not be offered or sold within the United States to, or for the account or benefit of, U.S. persons except in certain transactions exempt from the registration requirements of the U.S. Securities Act.
Vancouver, BC / TheNewswire / September 20, 2018 - NORTEC MINERALS CORP. (the "Company" or "Nortec") (TSXV: NVT): Further to the press release dated August 9, 2018, Nortec announces a new high grade discovery from the company's detailed rock sampling and geochemical termite mound sampling program. Rock samples range from trace to 34.8g/T Au and Termite mound range from trace to 3,159 ppb or 3.16g/T Au, (see Figures 1, 2 & 3).

This work also confirms the structural interpretation of the geology at the TOM 1 North Gold target on the Tomboko exploration project, (see Press Release August 9, 2018) and demonstrated a strike length of 2.5 km and a true width of 24m at 3.6g/T Au on the main showing.

The systematic termite mound sampling returned very significant and high gold values. The gold assays from termite mound samples in Figure 2 supports the grade and continuity of the TOM 1 North Zone A and B targets.

Mohan Vulimiri comments, "This program helped in understanding the excellent potential of the Tomboko project. The structural control interpretation and the discovery of high grade zone to the north, Nortec has a clear path for the next drill program which will expand on these gold discoveries."



Figure 2: Termite mound geochemical survey anomaly trends, TOM 1 North Target..

The highlights of the recent results are: -

Follow-up outcrop rock litho-geochemical sampling on the interpreted structural trends to the north returned highly significant gold values ranging from 1.42 g/t to 34.8 g/t. Termite mound sampling also returned highly anomalous gold values including 3,159 ppb, 1,918 ppb, 3,500 ppb, 1,006 ppb and 1,638 ppb (Figure 3). These above results confirmed the extensive northerly trends from the previous exploration drilling and trench sampling. Exploration drilling at TOM 1 North produced grades of 9 m at 2.74 g/t gold from 32 m, including 3.57 m at 3.91 g/t gold from 36 m and 7 m at 3.57 g/t gold from 43 m, including one m at 17.1 g/t gold from 45 m (Figures 4 & 5). Trenching produced 24m @ 3.66g/t incl. 4m @ 10g/t from 18m (Figure 4);



Figure 3: 2018 Outcrop rock sampling results and termite mound geochemical survey anomalies.

Dr Serigne Dieng, Ph.D., AusIMM, Chief Geologist, Tomboko Project, and staff compiled and interpreted the data with recommendations for exploration reverse circulation (RC) drilling program with proposed budgets. This work has resulted in a clear and coherent model for structurally-controlled gold mineralization hosted in faulted and sheared contact between volcano-clastic successions extending along a NNW-striking, NE-steeply dipping structure that is offset by a series of parallel NE-trending late fault systems (Figures 2, 3 & 4).

Dr Dieng explains on the new model, "This new model suggests that the Tomboko gold deposit is a classical greenstone - orogenic-type gold deposit hosted in faulted and sheared contact between volcano-clastic successions. The gold mineralization is structurally-controlled and occurs in deformed zones of large and highly hydrothermally altered, NNW-striking, NE-steeply-dipping, structural corridors that contain a complex network of extensional dilation fracture systems associated with the Late Birimian tectonism that have affected the West African Shield. New outcrops discovered south and north of the drilled area indicate that the deposit could have a strike length of about 3 kilometers. All of these new insights show that the Tomboko deposit has a very high potential for hosting multi-million ounce gold mineralization. Further aggressive exploration programs including extensive RC drilling is highly recommended to define and delineate resources of the Tomboko deposit"

Dr. Dieng is a registered qualified professional geoscientist in accordance with NI 43-101 and JORC standards.



Figure 4: Geological Cross-Section and Plan view map at TOM 1 North Gold Target



Figure 5: Gold mineralization in drill core associated with pyrite, chlorite, magnetite and quartz.

Conclusions & Recommendations

Results from termite mound sampling and outcrop rock sampling confirmed the new interpretation of structural controls of the gold mineralization in the Tom 1 North target. Two zones were identified with positive results as follows (Figures 5, 6a - 6d).

TOM 1 North Zone A: Termite Gold anomaly extending over 1.5 km.

TOM 1 North Zone B: Termite Gold anomaly over 1km.

High gold grade in termite up to 3,5g/t, 3,1g/t and 1.9g/t north of the area of diamond drilling.

Termite Gold anomaly trending NNW consistent with the geological and structural model.

High gold grade in rock north of the actual deposit including: 21.4g/t, 13.1g/t, 12.8g/t, 8.87g/t, 6.8g/t, 6.2g/t, 4.1g/t, 3.8g/t and 3.8g/t.

Termite and rock geochemistry results define new targets north of the area of drilling.

For quality control, the drill cores were sawed in half and the chip samples were split in half. A duplicate, a blank and a standard were inserted every 10th sample for quality control. Samples are processed by Fire Assay with A.A. finish under the SGS FAA505 protocol. The RAB, rock and termite mound samples were analysed by SGS Labs, an accredited laboratory in Bamako, Mali.

Mohan R. Vulimiri, M.Sc., P.Geo, CEO, Director and Michael Collins, B.Sc (Honours), P.Geo. Director are Qualified Persons as defined by NI 43-101. Mr. Vulimiri and Mr. Collins have approved the corporate and technical content contained in this press release.

About Nortec Minerals Corp.

Nortec is a mineral exploration and development company based in Vancouver, British Columbia. Nortec is earning an 80% interest in the Tomboko project located in Northeastern Guinea, West Africa.

The Company also has a 20% interest in the Tammela Lithium and Gold Project in South-West Finland. Sunstone has completed more than 3,000 meters diamond drilling on the Kietyonmaki Lithium prospect and the Satulinmaki and Riukka gold prospects that comprise the Tammela Project.

Detailed information on the Company's projects have been posted on the Company's website www.nortecminerals.com.

On behalf of the Board of Directors,

Nortec Minerals Corp.

"Mohan R. Vulimiri"

Mohan R. Vulimiri, CEO and Chairman

The TSX Venture Exchange has not reviewed and does not accept the responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this news release.

This press release contains certain forward looking statements which involve known and unknown risks, delays and uncertainties not under the Company's control which may cause actual results, performances or achievements of the Company to be materially different from the results, performances or expectations implied by these forward looking statements. This news release does not constitute an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy any of the securities in the United States.
VANCOUVER, British Columbia, Sept. 20, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Osino Resources Corp. (TSXV: OSI) ("Osino or the Company), is pleased to provide an update and results of the calcrete sampling program being conducted along the Karibib Gold Trend to the southwest of the Twin Hills project. The latest assays add a further 3.5km to the contiguous Twin Hills anomaly along the Karibib Gold Trend and illustrate the district scale of the mineralizing system discovered by Osino to date (refer to Figure 1 below).

Heye Daun, Osinos CEO commented: We are excited about the maiden calcrete assays received along the Karibib Gold Trend which double the size of the Twin Hills gold anomaly. The initial drill results at Twin Hills, reported in July 2018, gave an indication of a large mineralising system with potential to continue to the west. This has now been borne out by the latest results which increase the strike length of the Twin Hills prospect to 8km with the possibility of more to come.

Recent Work Completed

The 2017 soil sampling program carried out at Twin Hills (reported in July 2018) indicated a strong gold anomaly which disappeared underneath calcrete and sand cover towards the west. In May 2018, Osino embarked on an innovative calcrete sampling program based on exploration success in Western Australia using similar techniques. After promising orientation studies, the Karibib Gold Trend was sampled for 8km to the southwest of Twin Hills on a grid of 400 x 100m (refer Figure 1). The calcrete becomes buried progressively deeper under wind-blown sand to the southwest and pits were excavated to access the calcrete in the sand covered areas.

Results

The gold assays indicate a coherent linear trend following splays to the main Karibib Fault. The results contain twenty-seven assays over 30ppb Au with a peak value of 145ppb, remarkably high for a calcrete sample. Osino holds an additional 20km strike length of the Karibib Gold Trend to the edge of the Navachab Gold Mine property, which has ever been explored.

Future Exploration

The exploration in this area will focus on exploring the remainder of the Karibib Gold Trend as well as testing the initial gold anomaly generated by calcrete sampling. The program will include ground magnetics and 2,000m of Rotary Air Blast (RAB) drilling and consists of the following phases:

Calcrete sampling southwest along the Karibib Gold Trend to the boundary of the Navachab Mine property. This sampling will be completed by digging pits through the sand cover to the top of the calcrete or by using a RAB drill rig to collect calcrete where the sand cover is deeper than 2m.

Testing of the gold in calcrete anomaly reported in this release with a program of closely spaced RAB drill holes to collect bedrock samples.

This program should be completed by late October 2018.

This shallow drilling, in conjunction with ongoing surface sampling will complete first pass sampling over the entire 50 km length of the Karibib Fault Zone and Gold Trend held by Osino. A suitable drill rig is in the process of being sourced locally in Namibia and will either be rotary air blast (RAB) or a top hammer percussion drill (THD).

Figure 1

Further targeted drilling is also planned at the Twin Hills prospect to test down-dip extensions to the mineralization discovered in previous drilling during April-May 2018. Approximately 500m of diamond (HQ-size) core drilling is planned to extend the mineralization down-dip, and expand the developing structural model for the mineralization in this area.

Osino expects to complete the sampling of the entire 50km Karibib Gold Trend by the end of 2019. All of Osinos existing and new gold anomalies generated will be ranked and systematically tested in 2019.

Quality Assurance

All Osino sample assay results have been independently monitored through a quality assurance / quality control ("QA/QC") program including the insertion of blind standards, blanks and field duplicate samples. QA/QC samples make up 10% of all samples submitted. Calcrete samples are prepared at Intertek Analysis, Johannesburg, South Africa. Samples are dried, crushed to ~10mm and pulverised (300g up to 1.2kg). A split of 120g is shipped to the Intertek Analysis laboratory in Perth, Australia. Samples (10g) are leached in cyanide for 24 hours and analyzed for gold using ICPMS with an ultra-low detection limit of 0.01ppb. Additional elements analyzed are Ag, Cu and As.

Qualified Persons

David Underwood, a Chartered Professional Geologist (SACNASP), and a Qualified Person for the purposes of National Instrument 43-101 Standards of Disclosure for Mineral Projects for the Karibib Gold Project has reviewed, verified and approved the contents of this news release.

About Osino Resources

Osino Resources Corp. (TSXV: OSI) is a Canadian company, focused on the acquisition and development of gold projects in Namibia. Osinos Namibian interests comprise eighteen exclusive exploration licenses located within the central zone of Namibias prospective Damara belt, mostly in proximity to and along strike of the producing Navachab and Otjikoto Gold Mines. Osino is currently focusing its efforts on developing the Karibib Gold Project and defining new exploration targets in the Otjikoto East area and on our other licenses. The Karibib Gold Project is located approximately 130 km north-west of Namibias capital city Windhoek.

By virtue of its location, the projects benefit significantly from Namibias well-established infrastructure with paved highways, railway, power and water in close proximity. Namibia is mining-friendly and lauded as one of the continents most politically and socially stable jurisdictions. Osino continues to evaluate new ground with a view to expanding its Namibian portfolio.

Further details are available on the Company's website at https://osinoresources.com/

CONTACT INFORMATION

Osino Resources Corp.

Heye Daun, CEO

+27 (21) 418 2525

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Julia Becker, Manager, Investor Relations

Tel: +1 (604) 785 0850

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Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this press release.
VANCOUVER, Sept. 20, 2018 /CNW/ - Medgold Resources Corp. (TSX-V: MED) is pleased to announce results from its Phase 2 drill program at the Tlamino project in southern Serbia. The exploration and development of the Tlamino Gold Project is being conducted under programs which are fully funded by Fortuna Silver Mines Inc. (NYSE: FSM) (TSX: FVI) ("Fortuna"), and directed by a joint Fortuna-Medgold technical committee pursuant to the terms of the Tlamino Option Agreement announced on May 1, 2017. Assays have been received for holes BAR008 to BAR013 (see Table 1 below for full results). All holes intersected significant gold mineralization and the best intersections, summarised below, include:

Highlights: BAR008: 13.35m at 5.06 g/t Au, 109 g/t Ag and 4.29 % Pb+Zn) (inc. 5.85m at 10.35 g/t Au, 235 g/t Ag and 9.57 % Pb+Zn) BAR009: 28.00m at 0.86 g/t Au, 7 g/t Ag and 0.10 % Pb+Zn) BAR010: 38.20m at 3.98 g/t Au, 158 g/t Ag and 0.66 % Pb+Zn) (inc. 6.85m at 13.49 g/t Au, 788 g/t Ag and 3.09 % Pb+Zn) BAR011: 10.75m at 4.76 g/t Au, 33 g/t Ag and 0.67 % Pb+Zn) BAR012b: 15.20m at 1.68 g/t Au, 10 g/t Ag and 0.49 % Pb+Zn) BAR013: 18.60m at 3.09 g/t Au, 22 g/t Ag and 1.26 % Pb+Zn)  All drill holes intersected significant mineralization.  Fortuna has extended the Phase 2 program beyond the initial 2,400m.  Drilling continues to confirm geological model of an extensive flat-lying zone of gold mineralization hosted by fault breccia.  Program is on-going, continuing to the west, covering the IP-chargeability anomaly.

Dan James, President of Medgold, said: "We're very pleased to announce the first results from Phase 2 of our drill program. These strongly mineralized drill intersections demonstrate good continuity of the mineralized structure and grade over hundreds of metres, with the mineralization still open to the west. The majority of the mineralization is hosted within an intensely brecciated unit, termed the Triple-X Zone, that occurs at the fault surface which typically yields high-grade gold grades ranging between 5 and 25 g/t Au. The hanging wall rocks are also brecciated and mineralized over apparent thicknesses of up to 100m. We also continue to intersect significant silver grades, from trace up to 1,750 g/t Ag and trace up to 28 % combined Pb and Zn.

Based on the results received from drilling so far, Fortuna has agreed to extend the Phase 2 program beyond the initially agreed 2,400m program and drilling is on-going and we now expect to complete nearly 5,000m of drilling at Tlamino in 2018 before winter. Tlamino is a prospective new European gold-silver discovery and we're excited to be exploring it with our partner Fortuna."

Details of holes BAR008 to BAR013 are:

BAR008: Collared 140m to the west of BAR001 (Discovery Outcrop, see press release 11 th June 2018 ) and BAR013 is collared a further 70m to the west. Both yielded strongly mineralized intersections of Au and Ag mineralization. BAR008 intersected a zone of very high-grade mineralization, yielding 10.35 g/t Au, 235 g/t Ag and 9.57 % Pb+Zn over 5.85m , hosted within the Triple-X zone.





to the west of BAR001 (Discovery Outcrop, see press release 11 ) and BAR013 is collared a further to the west. Both yielded strongly mineralized intersections of Au and Ag mineralization. BAR008 intersected a zone of very high-grade mineralization, yielding 10.35 g/t Au, 235 g/t Ag and 9.57 % Pb+Zn over , hosted within the Triple-X zone. BAR009: Collared 70m to the northeast of the Discovery Outcrop on the extreme flanks of the IP-Chargeability anomaly.





to the northeast of the Discovery Outcrop on the extreme flanks of the IP-Chargeability anomaly. BAR010: Collared on the same collar as BAR002, but drilled to the east-northeast, it yielded 38.20m at 3.98 g/t Au, 158 g/t Ag and 0.66 % Pb+Zn, including 6.85m at 13.49 g/t Au, 788 g/t Ag and 3.09 % Pb+Zn. The high-grade mineralized intersection in BAR010 is located 35m away from a similar intersection previously reported in BAR002.





at 3.98 g/t Au, 158 g/t Ag and 0.66 % Pb+Zn, including at 13.49 g/t Au, 788 g/t Ag and 3.09 % Pb+Zn. The high-grade mineralized intersection in BAR010 is located away from a similar intersection previously reported in BAR002. BAR011 and BAR012b: Located approximately 250m to the northwest of the Discovery Outcrop on the northern flanks on the IP-chargeability anomaly. Strongly mineralized zones within the Triple-X Zone were intersected in both BAR011 and BAR012b yielding 10.75m at 4.76 g/t Au, 33 g/t Ag and 0.67 % Pb+Zn, and 15.20m at 1.68 g/t Au, 10 g/t Ag and 0.49 % Pb+Zn, respectively.

Table 1  Summary of drill results from Phase 2

Drill Hole From To Interval * Au Ag As Pb Zn (m) (m) (m) (g/t) (g/t) (%) (%) (%) BAR008 41.45 54.80 13.35 5.06 109 0.74 1.44 2.85 including 48.95 54.80 5.85 10.35 235 1.03 3.21 6.35 BAR009 0.00 28.00 28.00 0.86 7 0.52 0.02 0.08 BAR010 19.80 58.00 38.20 3.98 158 0.85 0.21 0.45 including 48.15 55.00 6.85 13.49 788 1.36 1.01 2.08 BAR011 62.00 72.75 10.75 4.76 33 2.93 0.16 0.51 BAR012b 57.80 73.00 15.20 1.68 10 1.44 0.14 0.35 BAR013 70.50 89.10 18.60 3.09 22 1.25 0.40 0.87

* The mineralization is thought to be hosted along sub-horizontal to shallowly dipping structural zones and as such the true thickness of the reported intersections is estimated to vary between 60 and 100% of apparent width. Due to the early stage of exploration and the spacing between current drill holes the company is unable to accurately estimate true widths.

Table 2  Drill collars from Phase 2

Drill hole Easting** Northing** Elevation (m) Azimuth () Inclination () Length (m) BAR008 616703 4691872 1119 180 -80 92.8 BAR009 616900 4691900 1086 135 -65 56.1 BAR010 616936 4692086 1130 70 -60 80.5 BAR011 616724 4692065 1164 30 -65 98.5 BAR012b 616665 4692060 1179 315 -60 116.5 BAR013 616639 4691903 1153 0 -90 143.6

** Coordinates are given in WGS84 datum and UTM zone 34 projection.

An updated plan map showing drill collar locations and hole traces, and cross sections is available on Medgold's website at http://medgoldresources.com/tlamino/.

The Tlamino Project

The Tlamino Gold Project (the "Project") is located in Southern Serbia, close to the borders of both Bulgaria and Macedonia, approximately five hours south of the capital, Belgrade. The Project is comprised of two exploration licences, Donje Tlamino and Surlica-Dukat, each approximately 100km2. All exploration work at the Project is fully-funded by Fortuna, which has an option to earn up to 70% of the Project by spending US $8 million on exploration over five years and completing a Preliminary Economic Assessment (see Medgold news release of March 7, 2017).

The Barje Zone

The Barje Zone is host to a large outcrop of intense brecciation and mineralization, which was identified and channel sampled by Medgold in 2017, yielding a best result of 84m of 5.60 g/t Au and 105 g/t Ag (see Company press release on July 18, 2017), following a period of target generation and desktop studies.

Later in 2017, an IP-Resistivity geophysical program undertaken by Medgold at the Barje Zone identified a large chargeability anomaly measuring approximately 1,400m east-west by 500m north-south, as well as a second-order anomaly with a NNE-axis overlying the Barje outcrop. The outcrop channel sampling and geophysical survey results were highly encouraging, and a first phase diamond drilling program was designed to test for the presence of a large shallow mineralized body associated with the Barje outcrop and chargeability anomaly. This drill programme has confirmed this mineralization.

Gold-silver mineralization at Barje is associated with tectonic brecciation along a large regional detachment fault which is mostly hosted within the hangingwall schists. This brecciation has structurally prepared large volumes of porous and permeable rocks, suitable to host mineralization. Intense hydrothermal breccias and altered schist clasts typically form at the base of the hangingwall zones in close proximity to the detachment structure. These zones of intense brecciation typically yield high-grade gold-silver intercepts. Brecciation, fracturing and sulphide mineralization is pervasive across large zones of the hanging wall schists and yields broad intersections of low-grade (>0.5 g/t Au) to moderate-grade (>1 g/t Au) gold plus silver mineralization.

About Medgold Resources Corp.

Medgold is a Serbia-focused, TSX-V listed, project generator company targeting early-stage gold properties in the Oligo-Miocene Belt of Serbia. Run by an experienced management team with a successful track-record of building value in resource companies, Medgold is aiming to become a leading European gold exploration company.

Qualified Person

Mr. David Clark, M.Sc., P.Geo., is a Qualified Person as defined by National Instrument 43-101  Standards of Disclosure for Mineral Projects. Mr. Clark prepared the technical information contained in this news release and has approved its disclosure

Quality Assurance and Quality Control

Drilling is carried out using PQ and HQ size tooling. Drill core is cut in half by Medgold using a rock saw with one half of the core then taken as a sample for analysis. Sample intervals are generally between 50 to 150 cm producing samples of between 2 to 9 kg. Approximately 4% of samples are duplicated by submitting primary and duplicate quarter-core samples. Half-core samples are delivered to the ALS Geochemistry laboratory facilities in Bor, Serbia. The samples are crushed and pulverised using method code PREP-31, are fire assayed for Au using method code Au-ICP21, and are analysed for multi-elements using method code ME-MS61 following a four-acid digestion. Overlimits are analysed using an appropriate method. Medgold routinely inserts multi-element geochemical standards, blanks, and field duplicate samples into the drill core sample stream to monitor laboratory performance.

Additional information on Medgold can be found on the Company's website at www.medgoldresources.com and by reviewing the Company's page on SEDAR at www.sedar.com.

ON BEHALF OF THE BOARD

"Dan James"

Daniel P. James, President & Director

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 and include, without limitation, statements about the exploration plans for the Tlamino Project. 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 exploration plans for the Tlamino 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 Company's quarterly and annual filings with securities regulators and available under the Company's 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 the proposed exploration of the Tlamimo Project will proceed as intended; that the Company's stated goals and planned exploration and development activities will be achieved; that there will be no material adverse change affecting the Company or its 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.
Provides Operational Readiness Update

TORONTO, Sept. 20, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- HARTE GOLD CORP. (Harte Gold or the Company) (TSX: HRT / OTC: HRTFF / Frankfurt: H4O) is pleased to announce it has received all necessary operating permits from the Government of Ontario to start commercial production at the Sugar Zone Mine. Harte Gold is now fully permitted to mine, process ore and pour gold on site.

Stephen G. Roman, President and CEO of Harte Gold, commented, We are very pleased to announce the completion of commercial permitting and the beginning of full-scale operations at the Sugar Zone Mine. Mining operations are currently expected to run for 12 years and will support further resource expansion drilling in the immediate vicinity of the mine and the ramp up of property-wide exploration programs. This is an important milestone for the Company and I would like to thank Vice President Tim Campbell and our team for their dedication and persistence over the past number of years.

Tim Campbell commented, The permitting of the Sugar Zone Mine has been a lengthy process with many moving parts, the success of which is due to a concerted team effort. The mine will employ close to 200 people and provide significant economic benefits to the immediate area and the province as a whole. We would like to thank those who played a role in making it happen, including our engineering and environment consultants, Netmizaaggamig Nishnaabeg (Pic Mobert) First Nation, Biigtigong Nishnaabeg (Pic River) First Nation, the Town of White River, and the provincial government for moving this project forward.

"This is great news for the people of White River and Northern Ontario. Mining helped shape our province's economic history - and under our government's watch it will continue to play an important role in our future. Harte Gold's Sugar Zone mine will employ hundreds of northern workers through direct and indirect jobs," said Premier Doug Ford. "As Ontarios first high-grade gold mine in over ten years, this project proves that Ontario's North is open for business."

Operational Readiness

Full commissioning of the mill complex is nearing completion. Testing of the crushing and conveyance system is complete and water has been successfully circulated through the mill. The power line has been built to site and all electrical equipment has been delivered and installed. The Company will connect to the Grid and energize the entire Sugar Zone Mine site and Mill complex this week.

Underground development work continues to exceed targeted rates. For the month of July, 254 metres of development was completed, or 8.2 metres per day. Development completed to-date has opened up several areas in the Sugar Zone Deposit, particularly in the near-surface Upper Zone area, to provide early high grade stopes. The Company continues to review and refine its mine plan to optimize operations.

About Harte Gold Corp.

Harte Gold is focused on the exploration and development of its 100% owned Sugar Zone Mine where it has completed a 70,000 tonne Advanced Exploration Bulk Sample, mined 30,000 tonnes under a Phase I Commercial Production Permit, permitted and built an 800 TPD processing plant. Harte Gold received operational permits to start full commercial production September 2018. The Sugar Zone Mine is located 80 kilometres east of the Hemlo Gold Camp in Ontario. Using a 3 g/t Au cut-off, the Mineral Resource Estimate dated February 15, 2018 contains an Indicated Mineral Resource Estimate of 2,607,000 tonnes grading 8.52 g/t for 714,200 ounces contained gold and an Inferred Mineral Resource Estimate of 3,590,000 tonnes, grading 6.59 g/t for 760,800 ounces contained gold. Harte Gold also holds the Stoughton-Abitibi property on the Destor-Porcupine Fault Zone, east of Timmins, Ontario adjacent to the Holloway Gold Mine.

QA/QC Statement

The Company has implemented a quality assurance and control (QA/QC) program to ensure sampling and analysis of mine and exploration work is conducted in accordance with industry standards. Drill core is sawn in half with one half of the core shipped to Actlabs Laboratories located in Thunder Bay, ON, while the other half is retained at the Companys core facilities in White River, ON, for future verification. Certified reference standards and blanks are inserted into the sample stream on a regular interval basis and monitored as part of the QA/QC program. Gold analysis is performed by fire assay using atomic absorption, gravimetric or pulp metallic finish. The Mineral Resource Estimate was prepared in compliance with NI 43-101 guidelines. Robert Kusins, P. Geo., Harte Golds Senior Mineral Resource geologist, is the Companys Qualified Person and has prepared, supervised the preparation, or approved the scientific and technical disclosure in this news release.

For further information, please contact: Stephen G. Roman Shawn Howarth President and CEO Vice President, Corporate Development Tel: 416-368-0999 Tel: 416-368-0999 Email: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. E-mail: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

The Toronto Stock Exchange has not reviewed and does not accept responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.
The Lords Resistance Army (LRA) in Uganda earned a fearsome reputation over a thirty-year insurgency. Best known for abducting children and pressing them into service as soldiers, porters and sex slaves  a practise which, during the early 2000s, forced thousands of young people in northern Uganda to trek each evening into the safety of towns  the rebel group was also known for common brutality: hacking off limbs, descending into camps of displaced villagers, murdering and pillaging.

The LRA leader Joseph Kony attained worldwide super-evil status after an ill-conceived campaign to argue for his capture went viral among American college kids. References to religious rites and mysticism helped to add mystique to the fanatical image Kony projected. That was back in 2012, when defeating the LRA appeared to outsiders doable and worthy.

The International Criminal Court (ICC) had already become an element in the get Kony bandwagon when then prosecutor Luis Moreno Ocampo infamously met president Museveni in a London hotel in 2004 and agreed to investigate at Kampalas request. Interpol then added him to their most wanted list. But the Hagues only prize out of its very first state referral was the unexpected surrender in 2015 of the lowest-ranking  and probably the only one still alive, apart from Kony  of the five people identified as deserving of ICC prosecution. Since Dominic Ongwen walked out of the bush in Central African Republic and American special forces handed him over to The Hague, this former abductee turned LRA henchman has been the prosecutions Uganda poster child.

A perpetrator and a victim

The case against him was well investigated, says Thijs Bouwknegt, assistant professor of the University of Amsterdam, in comparison with others at the court and has included tangible evidence such as audio recordings and contemporaneous notes on LRA communications, so perhaps this case will be able clearly to be proved beyond reasonable doubt. Nevertheless, as the ICC has failed to put the rest of the LRA leadership in the dock, (two others have been confirmed dead, and testimony regarding the killing of Konys deputy Vincent Otti has been heard in court) its curious that as maybe, the least responsible on the list, Ongwen faces such a slew of charges. While based on specific crimes in specific places, the total  some 70 counts  is more than notorious defendants such as Liberian president and former rebel leader Charles Taylor and Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic have faced at other tribunals.

Whats also problematic, even though the evidence against him is considered strong, is that Ongwen is a victim as well. In other cases  consider the ICCs first prosecution, that of Thomas Lubanga Dyilo for recruitment of child soldiers  the Office of the Prosecutor has stressed that child soldiers are traumatized by default, just by being child soldiers says Bouwknegt. And the defence is going to make that contradictory status a central plank in their arguments.

The trial has just entered a crucial stage, and in opening statements on September 18, defence counsel Krispus Ayena Odongo referred to this victim-perpetrator duality several times, for example, stating Ongwen was just a child when he was abducted, brutalized and made in the bush with no mind of his own and asking the judges rhetorically whether his victimhood ceased at any time during his captivity with the LRA?

Ongwens mental issues

Also at issue, and linked to the former child soldier arguments, will be Ongwens current mental health status. Two mental health experts will be called to defend their early report for the defence  not accepted by the court  that concluded he was not fit to stand trial. Tom Maliti of the International Justice Monitor recalls that the court also heard at one point how Ongwen was suffering in detention as a result of the Dutch habit of excessive fireworks at New Years which gave him recurrent nightmares of his life in the LRA. The question has been asked in court as to whether hes so traumatized he doesnt really know whats happening. Maliti speculates that a further effect of Ongwens ill-health may be the limitations he has placed on the defence because their client has spent most of his life living in the bush in northern Uganda and other countries, isolated from normal life, so he may not be able to brief them on how to defend him. Certainly, the defence has shown a number of approaches, including both that their client acted under duress and that he exhibits Stockholm Syndrome where he identifies with his abductor.

To support these arguments, during the next few months, in amongst the usual dry legal court procedure the judges will also be hearing evidence on Konys spiritualism. Experts in the LRA cosmological order, discussion of local Acholi cultural practices, and an extension of the debate on whether western legal practice is suitable for complex African situations, are all due to come up, as the defence makes its case. Maliti expects up to 66 witnesses to be called, including some of Konys own children who could explain how Konys spiritual powers dominated his followers and what hold he had over LRA members of all ranks.

Justice seen from Northern Uganda

Gladys Oroma, a journalist based in Gulu, has spent last year researching a long audio series telling the stories of those affected by LRA violence and asking what justice may mean to them. The most positive view of the Ongwen case, she says, is that it might help focus some attention on the north of Uganda, where people just want something to change their lives. But many see The Hague proceedings as essentially part of the long process of covering up the reality that more than one side in the conflict committed crimes. They want justice from both sides she says, including the Ugandan army. In its opening remarks, the defense made the most of allegations that the government itself committed atrocities, arguing that this is a political case and Ongwen himself is a complex political victim. That Kony himself is not in the dock as he is assumed hiding out in the badlands between the Central African Republic and the Democratic Republic of Congo is also a matter of regret to the prosecution, says Bouwknegt, because it would make their case stronger both in fact and in public opinion.

The part of the defence case that is expected to provoke strong interest, says Oroma, is testimony from those closest to Ongwen, his former wives. People are wondering how they could have gone through forceful rape themselves and then defend him she says.

Whatever evidence the defence puts forward to show that their clients state of mind, and whether he is a victim rather than a perpetrator, the discussion about the extent to which he could and should face punishment will certainly continue whatever the verdict. Indeed, argues Bouwknegt, there may be a stage, after the defence, when all parties discuss mitigating factors: can he be held liable and to what extent?
On May 29 this year, the trial of Kamel Matmati opened in Tunisia before the specialized criminal chambers charged with trying cases sent to them by the Truth and Dignity Commission. That first trial concerned the forced disappearance and death under torture of this Islamist activist who died in October 1991 of an internal haemorrhage 48 hours after being arrested by police. The hearings raised a lot of hope. Unlike in the past, the presiding judge no longer seemed to be the judicial right arm of the police and government. People felt this might be the beginning of the end of impunity, all the more so because for each hearing measures were taken to protect the identity of the victims, in line with the specialized chambers norms. But everyone noticed one thing: the absence of the thirteen accused.

There are 13 specialized chambers. Their mandate is to bring to justice the suspected perpetrators of human rights violations committed between July 1955 and December 2013, as provided by the Tunisian law on transitional justice. During that first judicial session, nine trials opened at seven courts established in several towns across the country. They are dealing with murder, torture leading to death, forced disappearances, rape and other forms of sexual abuse. The organization Lawyers without Borders (ASF), which has been supporting the transitional justice process in Tunisia since 2012, monitored these first hearings. It has just published its first observer report. But the report notes that like the other cases, the Matmati trial was marred by a major fault, the absence of warrants to bring the accused, even though some are in the country.

Top officials implicated

Halim Meddeb of ASF says the trials are similar in that the victims are motivated and the accused absent, except in two or three cases. There is also a mobilized civil society, especially for the Matmati trial, dozens of lawyers for civil parties present, and media coverage lacking, despite the importance of the crimes and the cases, he says. And ASF bureau chief Antonio Manganella says that because the accused are absent, the trials so far are more like the public hearings of the Truth and Dignity Commission, with more victim testimonies than anything else.

The Commission received 65,000 complaints from victims. By the end of its mandate on December 31 2018, it has promised to transmit 250 case files to the specialized criminal chambers. They are to deal with emblematic cases that can help shed light on the mechanisms of repression and violations of human dignity organized under the regime of former president Ben Ali (who has been in exile in Saudi Arabia since January 14, 2011). For ASF, these trials represent an important step towards establishing responsibilities and sanctions against the still to be reformed security apparatus. For, as the ASF observers point out, the accusations target notably ex-presidents of the Republic, ministers, top civil servants, agents and officers of the security forces, judges, lawyers, doctors and so on.

Solitude of the judges

The ASF report says that given the flight abroad of two accused, bans on leaving the country were issued during the trials on Matmati, Abdouli and that on the martyrs and injured of the revolution. We are still waiting for the judges to take their courage in both hands and issue warrants against the accused, says Antonio Manganella. But we have the impression that, thanks to a lack of political will to see the transitional justice process through, the judges are alone without the support of State institutions.

For the hearings that are now due to resume, most of the specialized chambers have again decided to call the accused and witnesses who have not yet presented themselves. But for many of the suspected perpetrators the current climate favourable to impunity and returning former members of the elite to power encourages them to boycott these courts.
Election officials in Democratic Republic of Congo on Tuesday released an official list of candidates for Decembers presidential election, formally excluding two heavyweight opposition figures.

Now we have finished with the candidacy stage, we are in the home stretch for the December 23 elections, said electoral commission chief Corneille Nangaa as he unveiled the list.

More than two dozen people registered their bid with the Independent National Electoral Commission (CENI), a much-contested panel tasked with overseeing the ballot in one of the Africas biggest and most unstable nations.

It gave the green light to opposition figures Felix Tshisekedi and Vital Kamerhe, as well as to Emmanuel Ramazani Shadary, a hardline former interior minister backed by President Joseph Kabila.

But the list also confirmed the exclusion of former warlord Jean-Pierre Bemba and regional baron Moise Katumbi  a move that raised howls of protest from their powerful blocs of supporters.

Bemba has lashed what he calls a parody of an election.

He accused Kabila  whom critics characterise as corrupt and manipulative  of pulling strings to ensure that the governments candidate does not have a serious challenger.

 Speculation about Kabilas plans

The DRC, previously known as Zaire, has never had a peaceful transition of power since it gained independence from Belgium in 1960.

Most of its citizens are deeply poor despite the DRCs wealth of gold, diamonds, copper, cobalt, uranium and oil. Bloody conflicts trouble the vast countrys east and centre.

Kabila, 47, has been in power since 2001. His second and final term in office ended nearly two years ago, but he kept in power thanks to a caretaker clause in the constitution.

Months of feverish speculation about Kabilas plans, marked by protests that were bloodily repressed, ended in August when he threw his weight behind Shadary.

Around 500 people gathered in Kinshasas Roman Catholic cathedral late Wednesday for a mass to commemorate martyrs who died in anti-Kabila protests in 2016.

 Opposition dilemma 

Voting day on December 23 will take place for the presidency, legislature and provincial bodies, throwing down a huge logistical and technical challenge to CENI in a country where infrastructure is poor.

The big challenge for the fragmented opposition is to unite behind a credible candidate after the loss of the people-pulling power of Bemba and Katumbi.

It will stage a rally in Kinshasa on September 29 on the heels of talks in Brussels and a meeting in Johannesburg with South Africas ruling African National Congress (ANC) party.

In the absence of a single champion, boycotting the election, citing for example security concerns over electronic voting machines, may loom as an opposition strategy, say analysts.

Last week, Tshisekedi, Kamerhe, Bemba and Katumbi joined with two fellow opposition leaders to warn CENI and Kabilas government to ensure fair elections or else be held responsible for the chaos and consequences.

Bemba, 55, a former rebel and ex-vice president, declared his candidacy when he made a triumphant return home from Belgium after the International Criminal Court in The Hague acquitted him of war crimes charges.

But he was excluded by CENI, in a decision upheld by the Constitutional Court, on the grounds that the ICC had convicted him separately on charges of tampering with witnesses at his war-crimes trial.

That conviction and a one-year sentence were upheld by the ICC on Monday along with a 300,000-euro ($350,000) fine. Bembas lawyer, Melinda Taylor, said in an email to AFP on Wednesday that he would file an appeal.

Katumbi, 53, a former Kabila ally and ex-governor of the mineral-rich province of Katanga, says he was blocked at the Zambian border to prevent him from returning to the country to file his candidacy.

He has lived in exile since 2016.
Canadian lawmakers on Thursday unanimously voted to declare Myanmars military against the Rohingya people a genocide.

The House of Commons endorsed the findings of a UN fact-finding mission on Myanmar that found crimes against humanity have been committed against the Rohingya and that these acts were sanctioned by top Myanmar military commanders.

In a motion, Canadian lawmakers said they recognize that these crimes against the Rohingya constitute genocide and urged the UN Security Council to refer the case to the International Criminal Court, while also calling for Myanmars generals to be investigated and prosecuted for the crime of genocide.

I want to underscore how tragic, how horrific the crimes against the Rohingya are, Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland said. We are leading an international effort for justice and accountability for the Rohingya.

Todays unanimous motion is a very important step in that effort.

A brutal military campaign drove more than 700,000 Rohingya Muslims from Myanmar into neighboring Bangladesh, where they now live in cramped refugee camps.

Many have given accounts of extrajudicial killings, sexual violence and arson.

Bangladesh and Myanmar signed an agreement last year to repatriate the Muslim minority  but it has stalled as the Rohingya fear returning to Rakhine without their safety and rights guaranteed.
Veterinary researchers and Anivive license antiviral drug for fatal cat disease



Thursday, Sept. 20, 2018

College of Veterinary Medicine virologists Yunjeong Kim, front, and Kyeong-Ok "KC" Chang are part of a collaboration working on commercial development of an antiviral compound for the deadly cat disease feline infectious peritonitis. | Download this photo.





MANHATTAN  For many cat owners, help is on the horizon with a viral cat disease that can be deadly. A new collaboration at Kansas State University is promoting the commercial development of GC376, an antiviral compound for feline infectious peritonitis, or FIP, which previously has had no effective treatment or cure.



Yunjeong Kim and Kyeong-Ok "KC" Chang, virologists in the College of Veterinary Medicine at Kanas State University, and William Groutas, a medicinal chemist at Wichita State University, have been collaborating since 2006 on the development of antiviral drugs for important human and animal viruses.



"We have been working on antiviral drugs that inhibit a specific virus protease of some important human and animal viruses, and we were able to make very potent inhibitors of FIP," Kim said. "Through collaborative work with Niels Pedersen at the University of California, Davis  including a field trial on feline patients  we became increasingly hopeful that antiviral treatment may one day substantially benefit cats with FIP. Licensing our compound to Anivive Lifesciences is a huge step forward in transitioning our research to commercialization to make this treatment available to the public."



FIP is a progressive and fatal disease caused by a feline coronavirus that can affect both domestic and wild cats. Feline coronaviruses are the cause of viral enteritis, which is typically harmless. But in rare instances, FIP can arise, spread throughout the body and cause death, particularly in cats age 2 and younger.



The licensing agreement was coordinated by the Kansas State University Institute for Commercialization with Anivive Lifesciences, a California company whose proprietary software accelerates the discovery and development process of new pet medicines.



"The team members from Anivive Lifesciences are committed to developing the compound GC376 for the treatment of FIP with a sense of urgency and we look forward to watching their progress over the coming years," said Bret Ford, associate director for licensing at the university's Institute for Commercialization.



"There are many viral diseases that affect human and animals, but antiviral drugs are available for only a number of viruses, and none has been approved specifically for animals," Chang said. "Companion animals are increasingly viewed as part of the family, so the feelings of grief over the loss of their cats by this deadly disease can be devastating and very hard to cope with."



Anivive's founder and CEO Dylan Balsz said, "FIP has long plagued veterinarians and pet owners alike and we look forward to moving this program toward an eventual approval."



"We are very excited to be working with K-State and Dr. Niels Pederson on this very important therapeutic," said David Bruyette, chief medical officer at Anivive Lifesciences. "Having been a faculty member at K-State and a former resident at UC-Davis, where I had the good fortune to work with Dr. Pedersen, makes this collaboration all the more meaningful."



The approval process, overseen by the Food and Drug Administration's Center for Veterinary Medicine, requires several steps documenting the efficacy, safety and manufacturing of the compound. The entire process and time to bring GC376 to market will now accelerate because Anivive Lifesciences and Kansas State University are working together. But researchers say it could take several years before it will be available on the market.






https://www.aish.com/jw/s/Ari-Fuld-My-Hero.html

Beneath his courage and strength, Ari deeply loved his fellow Jews.

I never cried so much on Yom Kippur as I did this year. So many of the prayers reminded me of Ari. Who by sword and who by beast. Our Father, our King, act for the sake of those who were slaughtered for Your Oneness. Our Father, our King, avenge before our eyes the revenge of the blood of Your servants." I thought of his widow Miriam and the rest of the family whose lives will never be the same.

I met Miriam when she was about 13. We lived in the same apartment building in Har Nof, Jerusalem. She and her sister Shoshana were babysitters for our older children. I met Ari at their engagement party. Who could have imagined that their married life would be brutally cut before they reached their silver wedding anniversary?

In time, both Ari and Miriam, as well as my family and I moved to Gush Etzion. They settled in the beautiful city of Efrat, while we settled in nearby rustic Rosh Tzurim.

This past Shabbat, the day before a ruthless and despicable Arab teen terrorist stabbed Ari to death, I mentioned Aris name at the Shabbat table. Our guests were a former lone soldier, who had lived in Rosh Tzurim during his service, and his family. Ari Fuld is one of my heroes, I said, and then proceeded to mention some of my experiences with Ari.

After the expulsion of 10,000 Jews from Gush Katif in southern Israel, rockets continued to fall upon southern communities. Ari organized trips to Sderot in order to help the businesses by having residents of Gush Etzion purchase items from the various businesses. I joined one of the Friday morning trips and was told to meet at Kibbutz Kfar Etzion in Gush Etzion. To my dismay, only three people showed up: Ari, myself and one other man.

We traveled down to Sderot in Aris car. Once there, we spoke to some of the residents and made various purchases. Ari even stopped at a wedding hall with take-out food. Since engaged Israeli couples were not running to get married in Sderot due to the precarious security situation, the owners of the wedding hall were endeavoring to make a living with selling take-out food. One of the things that I purchased was Moroccan olives, a spicy dish containing tomato sauce. All of our food purchases joined the rest of our purchases in the back of the car.

We then headed back to Gush Etzion. Ari dropped me off at Kfar Etzion so that I could pick up my car. When we went to take out my purchases, we discovered that the sauce from the Moroccan olives had leaked out. I was horrified to discover that the sauce had attacked white karate outfits. (Ari had taught karate.) Ari took it so well. I was so apologetic and I told him that I wanted to pay for the karate outfits. He refused, even when I pressed him further. That encounter made such a positive impression upon me.

With time there were more encounters with Ari, who was such a trailblazer when it came to pro-Israel advocacy. When yet another rocket fell down south next to a kindergarten, Ari did something about it. He dropped everything, went to a bakery to buy cupcakes for the children (the bakery gave it to him free when he mentioned where he was going) and drove down to the community. He gave the cupcakes to the kindergarten and the children were delighted. He wasnt allowed to film inside the kindergarten, but he filmed where the rocket had landed. He posted it along with his many other videos.

Ari was the associate director of Standing Together, an organization that gives the world-wide community an opportunity to show appreciation to Israeli soldiers. With a truck and Hospitality Trailer, volunteers regularly visit IDF soldiers to offer snacks, gifts, hot and cold drinks, support and gratitude. One time, Ari was driving in the Jordan Valley and he noticed a number of tanks off in the distance. He made some inquiries and discovered that the soldiers and their commanders were doing a three-day tank maneuver. Ari could not drive on such rugged terrain, so he contacted one of the commanders and told him that he had food for everyone. Meanwhile, Ari set up a repast fit for a king. Imagine how the soldiers felt after being cooped up for three days in their tanks subsisting on war rations.

Ari Schneider, who is a black belt and who studied under Ari related to me, Ari was incredible with kids. With all that's been said about his strength and bravery, you wouldn't necessarily assume he was good with kids. But as a Martial Arts teacher Ari was always able to get through to them. When he would run class, he brought out the best in his students. Kids as young as seven could be seen giving it their all every time he shouted out a drill count. It didn't matter if they had ADD, self-confidence issues, whatever. In his class, every kid found their inner warrior, their inner Ari. I had to occasionally cover for Ari and try as I may, I could never match the impact he had on these kids. It takes someone very special to work with kids. Ari was special.

It is so difficult to fathom why such a special person was ripped away from us. I imagine Ari, may God avenge his blood, standing in front of God pleading for the Jewish People. I imagine him demanding that God obliterate our enemies and bring world peace, and that God comfort the bereaved. Knowing Ari, he wont leave God alone until his demands are met.
A once-in-a-lifetime regeneration of Freshford village is becoming a reality.

A feasibility study will place the iconic Odeon Cinema in the village at the centre of a major preservation and social enterprise experiment.

It is based on a detailed proposal for the Odeon set forth by the Acorn Club to the owners, the Dooley family, who are highly supportive of the project.

The Odeon would become the focal point in the social, cultural and economic life of Freshford and central to its long term regeneration in the plan.

Central would be the sustainability of the Odeon as an art deco cinema, doubling up as a 1,000-seat theatre with a flexible floor to cater for exhibitions, cabaret, bar, cafe and restaurant, outside broadcasting unit, library, local history museum, audio-visual centre and a business incubation unit and a hub for local and international festivals.

The vision is strong on social inclusion. The new extensive facilities would be open daily and become a hub for clubs, groups and schools locally with a range of educational, lifestyle and wellness activities available for all ages.

The development is closely aligned with the Freshford Heritage Group and plans for the provision of a walkway from the Odeon building to the Millennium Park.

Funding for the study is being provided by the Acorn Club with funding sought from the Kilkenny LEADER Partnership.

A company, called Freshford Together CLG has been formed by the Acorn Club to move the development forward.

This company, having charitable status and limited by guarantee, will be responsible for the overall development and long-term management of the initiative with profits being reinvested back into the project. A large number of jobs would be created during construction with many more becoming available as part of the day-to-day running of the facility.

A community group from Finland, involved in a similar project, are expected to visit Freshford with a view to a potential transnational partnership with EU funding potential.

The Acorn Club has thanked the Dooley family and all those who generously supported the project.
Irelands longest running television game show, Winning Streak, returns to our TV screens on RTE One this Saturday night. This weeks episode will be a special treat for viewers in Kilkenny, as local woman Edel Sleator will be a contestant on the show. Lucky Edel will be rubbing shoulders with Greatest Show Duo Marty Whelan and Sinead Kennedy,as one of the first 5 players to partake in the shows 29th season. This new season promises an exciting new set and more prizes for players.

She will be appearing on the show on behalf of her mother, Ann McGovern, from Baltinglass in Co. Wicklow. Anns name was pulled out of the Winning Streak drum late last week during the first show of the new series.

Edel has lived in Kilkenny city for the past twenty years with her husband Ritchie. She originally moved to Kilkenny to be with Ritchie, who she has been married to for almost a decade and shares an eight year old son named Daniel with.

She works in one of the most iconic places in the county as she is a tour guide in Kilkenny Castle. Her favourite part of the job is meeting all types of people from all over Ireland and tourists from different countries all over the world.

As ever one of the lucky five players will get the chance to spin the wheel and win up to 500,000. But this series a 100,000 segment will be added to the iconic Grand Prize Wheel every show if less than that was won in the previous show, improving players' chances to win a massive prize.

Edels chances of winning are also increased thanks to this seasons brand new games including Play or Pay, Roll for Riches, WinFall and Electric Dream  where one player will win an electric car worth 25,000.

Tune in and cheer on Edel this Saturday when Winning Streak airs on RTE One at 8:15pm.
Companies conduct on-site job interviews with applicants at last year's job fair for foreign residents in Seoul. / Courtesy of Seoul Business Agency



By Lee Suh-yoon



Seoul Global Center and the Seoul Business Agency (SBA), a city-run support center for small- and medium-sized businesses, will host the city's fifth job fair for foreign residents this Friday.



The job fair, an annual event started in 2014, will take place at COEX center in southeastern Seoul.



At last year's event, 1,686 on-the-spot job interviews were conducted, and 81 jobseekers landed jobs at the time. Considering the number of participants from previous years, organizers expect about 2,000 foreign residents to take part this year.



About 70 companies, including big names such as POSCO, Gucci Korea and Jeju Air, will set up booths at this year's conference. There will also be numerous startups such as Amuse Travel and Vision Works.



English speakers will not be the only attractive candidates at the fair as many of the participating firms are eyeing expansion into non-English-speaking countries.



"Many of the participating firms are small- and medium-sized businesses trying to expand into China or Southeast Asia. There will be lots of entry-level jobs looking for someone who can speak Chinese, Indonesian or Vietnamese," Paul Carver, head of Seoul Global Center, told The Korea Times. "Last year, there were quite a few positions for people from India, Russia and Uzbekistan as well."



About half the participating companies are in the service industry. There will also be around a dozen firms each from IT and manufacturing.



The fair is not just open to those with long-term residency permits as companies can directly sponsor visas for foreign workers. Some smaller companies, however, will only accept applicants who already hold long-term F-visas to begin with.



While the online reservation for job interview slots closed Wednesday, jobseekers can also sign up at the site for a job interview between 10 a.m. and noon or 4 p.m. and 5 p.m. Applicants must present a resume at the interview.



Free consulting services on resume writing, interview preparation and visa issues will also be available on the site. Around 60 volunteers will also be present to help participants navigate application forms.

Foreign residents who do not have some grasp of Korean, however, may have trouble navigating the fair.



"We are not providing a separate English brochure, because most of the firms are looking to hire foreign residents with at least some Korean communication skills," Shin Su-min, the SBA assistant manager in charge of the event, said over the phone. "That's why most of the job ads by these individual companies  posted on our website  are only provided in Korean."



Many of the firms require at least a TOPIK 4 level proficiency in the Korean language, according to organizers. Most of the on-site job interviews will also be conducted in Korean.



This year's job fair will be jointly held with a similar event catering to marriage migrants living in Korea. This separate job fair will take place at a separate location filled with mostly restaurants and hotel businesses looking to hire service workers. .



Kim In-sook, a city official in charge of foreign residents and multicultural policy in Seoul, hopes the event will be beneficial for both foreign jobseekers and domestic firms.



"I hope this job fair will help foreign residents find employment and improve their job-seeking capabilities. At the same time, this will be a good opportunity for domestic companies to hire talented foreign residents," Kim said. "Seoul City will continue its efforts to help domestic firms and talented foreign residents develop hand-in-hand."






By Park Jae-hyuk







Hyundai Motor will start providing 1,000 heavy-duty fuel cell electric trucks on the European market next year, the automaker said Thursday.







During the IAA Commercial Vehicles 2018 in Hanover, Germany, Wednesday, the company and a Swiss hydrogen company named H2Energy signed a memorandum of understanding regarding the provision of 1,000 heavy-duty fuel cell electric trucks and an adequate supply chain for renewable hydrogen from 2019 to 2023.







"We are yet again advancing the field of fuel cell technology in the automotive industry with today's announcement of our ambition to commercialize the fuel cell electric truck for the first time in the world," said Lee In-cheol, Hyundai Motor's executive vice president and head of commercial vehicle division.







"We will continue to seek opportunities for expanding into other markets by carefully monitoring multiple factors such as fueling infrastructure and governmental policies."







Hyundai said the fuel cell electric truck is being developed according to European regulations.







According to the automotive company, the truck features a new 190 kilowatt hydrogen fuel cell system with two fuel cell systems connected in parallel, which is also a feature of the NEXO fuel cell SUV.







Hyundai aims to have the truck travel up to 400 kilometers with a single fueling. For this, it will install eight large hydrogen tanks in the truck's utilizing areas such as between the cabin and the rigid body.







H2Energy Chairman Rolf Huber said: "A sustainable hydrogen economy needs a designated ecosystem for hydrogen. This is why our collaboration between Hyundai Motor, H2 Energy, the Swiss H2 Association, and the key electricity producer Alpiq in Switzerland is strategic and makes a lot of sense."







H2Energy specializes in production and supply of renewable hydrogen in Switzerland, with business subsidiaries in Germany, Norway and Austria.







It plans to make Hyundai's fuel cell electric trucks available to its Swiss customers starting with the dedicated members of the Swiss H2 Association, which includes several refueling-station operators, retailers and other customers focusing on eco-friendly innovative solutions for logistics and goods distribution.


On August 11, 2018 at 2:00 AM KYCW-LD will move from channel 19, broadcasting from our Fordland tower to channel 25 broadcasting from the studio tower at 999 West Sunshine in Springfield.

This move is necessitated by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) as they begin their repack of television stations across the country into a tighter bundled broadcast spectrum. By moving KYCW from channel 19 to channel 25 it allows us to prepare for the move of KYTV, KSPR and The Ozarks CW later this year.

Channel 25 will broadcast a directional pattern 30 degrees north at a much reduced height. This means that some over the air viewers will no longer be able to receive these signals (Antenna/Cozi/WX 24/7). The CW will still be on our full power KYTV transmitter, virtual channel 33-2. We recommend viewers rescan their TVs and have an outdoor antenna aimed toward our studio tower (999 West Sunshine in Springfield).

For deeper technical help and explanations please call (417) 268-3000 and ask for engineering. Antenna, Cozi and The KY3 Weather Channel channels will be available, as usual, on Mediacom, Suddenlink, Fidelity, COMO cable and the Ozarks Go network. The long term plan is to move KYCW-LD back to the Fordland tower late this year after the KYTV repack construction is complete.
Ahmedabad, Sep 19 (PTI) An IndiGo aircraft carrying 185 passengers made an emergency landing here Wednesday after suffering a tyre burst, according to an airport official.

The flight 6E-361, operated with an A320 aircraft, was coming from Mumbai. The plane landed safely at 1921 hours and all passengers are safe, Ahmedabad Airport Director Manoj Gangal said in a statement.

However, an IndiGo spokesperson said there was no tyre burst and the aircraft did not make an emergency landing.

"After arrival at Ahmedabad, a tyre de-capping with full tyre pressure intact was observed. The aircraft has been towed to the parking bay. The wheel is being replaced and aircraft will be cleared for further flight," the spokesperson said in a statement.

The spokesperson also said that there were 177 passengers on board.

Generally, de-capping of a tyre refers to peeling off of a tyre's outer layer.

In his statement, the airport director said the IndiGo plane reported "tyre burst while taking off from Mumbai airport today evening".

According to him, the pilot had requested emergency landing at Ahmedabad which was immediately approved by the ATC.

"Emergency procedures were initiated at Ahmedabad Airport. The aircraft was accorded full priority... Total 185 passengers were on board. All of them are safe. The aircraft is now parked at Ahmedabad airport for a detailed inspection," he said.

(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 [India], Sept 20 (ANI): India and Niger on Wednesday signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) for the implementation of Mahatma Gandhi International Convention Centre (MGICC) in Niamey, Niger with the Indian government's grant assistance.

The agreement was signed by Secretary (Economic Relations), Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) T.S. Tirumurti and Ambassador of Republic of Niger in India Ali Illiassou, in the presence of External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj and Minister and Special Adviser to the President of Republic of Niger, Saidil Moctar Mohamed, a statement from the MEA read.

Mohamed, who is currently in New Delhi, called on Swaraj and thanked India for providing grant assistance to build MGICC. The two ministers also discussed other issues of bilateral and regional interest, including combating terrorism, development partnership among others. Minister of State for External Affairs M.J. Akbar also hosted a lunch in honour of the visiting Niger minister.

The Convention Centre, which would be a spacious, modern and eco-friendly facility, is being established in the context of the African Union (AU) Summit that Niger is set to host next year, which would witness high-level and wide-ranging participation from AU member states, the statement added.

The centre honours the memory of Mahatma Gandhi, whose 150th birth anniversary is also being observed in 2019. The establishment of the centre is a landmark for Niger-India friendship and also a symbol of India's firm commitment towards Africa.

In response to growing request from countries in Africa, India has offered to establish Mahatma Gandhi convention centres in more than 20 countries in Africa, of which the project are being taken up in the immediate phase in nine countries.

"India and Niger enjoy close relations. The bilateral relations have expanded significantly since the opening of the Indian Resident Diplomatic Mission in Niamey in 2009. India has provided lines of credit worth USD 96.54 million for projects in transport, electrification, solar energy and potable drinking water. India's grant assistance for MGICC will further contribute towards enhancing of bilateral ties," the statement concluded. (ANI)

(This is an unedited and auto-generated story from Syndicated News feed, LatestLY Staff may not have modified or edited the content body)
Washington, Sep 20: Pakistan may view a weak and destabilised Afghanistan as preferable to a strong and unified Afghan state, a latest US Congressional report has said. It asserted that Islamabad may also anticipate that improved relations with Kabul could limit India's influence in the region.

"Pakistan sees Afghanistan as potentially providing strategic depth against India. Pakistan may also view a weak and destabilised Afghanistan as preferable to a strong, unified Afghan state (particularly one led by a Pashtun-dominated government in Kabul)," the bipartisan Congressional Research Service (CRS) said in its latest report on Afghanistan has said.

According to the report 'Afghanistan: Background and US Policy In Brief', some Pakistani leaders have stated that instability in Afghanistan could rebound to Pakistan's detriment. Pakistan has struggled with indigenous Islamist militants of its own, it said.

"Pakistan may also anticipate that improved relations with Afghan leadership could limit India's influence in Afghanistan," said the report by CRS, an independent research wing of the US Congress.

CRS reports are not an official view of the Congress but are prepared periodically by independent experts on hot topics so that lawmakers can make informed decisions.

"While military officials profess greater optimism about the course of the war in 2018, other policymakers and analysts have described the war against the insurgency (which controls or contests nearly half of the country's territory, by Pentagon estimates) as a stalemate," the report said.

Authored by Clayton Thomas, an analyst in Middle Eastern Affairs, the CRS report, dated September 17, said President Donald Trump in his Afghanistan policy last year has sought a greater role for India in Afghanistan.

"In his speech, President Trump also encouraged India to play a greater role in Afghan economic development; this, along with other administration messaging, has compounded Pakistani concerns over Indian activity in Afghanistan," it said.

"India has been the largest regional contributor to Afghan reconstruction, but New Delhi has not shown an inclination to pursue a deeper defence relationship with Kabul. Afghans themselves may be divided on the wisdom of cultivating stronger ties with India," the CRS report said.

(This is an unedited and auto-generated story from Syndicated News feed, LatestLY Staff may not have modified or edited the content body)
Damascus, Sep 20 (AFP) President Bashar al-Assad Thursday blamed Israel for the downing of a Russian plane, which was accidentally hit by Syrian anti-aircraft fire during an Israeli missile strike.

"This unfortunate incident was the result of Israeli arrogance and depravity," the Syrian leader said, offering his condolences in a letter to his Russian counterpart for the death of 15 Russian crew members killed in the incident over Syria on Monday.

"We are determined that such tragic events will sway neither you nor us from continuing the fight against terrorism," he continued in the letter published by the official Sana agency.

The Russian plane was downed by Syria's Russian-made S-200 air defence system and all aboard were killed.

The Russian military has accused Israeli pilots of using the Russian plane as a cover, "exposing it to fire from Syrian air defences".

Israel said it had targeted a Syrian military facility where weapons manufacturing systems were "about to be transferred on behalf of Iran" to Lebanese Shiite group Hezbollah.

It was the worst 'friendly fire' incident between Moscow and the Syrian regime since Russian forces intervened in the country in late 2015 to support Assad whose grip on power had been weakened by rebels and jihadist fighters.

Russian President Vladmir Putin described the incident as the result of "tragic accidental circumstances," warning Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu against carrying out such operations in the future and pledging to beef up security for Russian forces in Syria.

Netanyahu on Tuesday expressed his "sorrow" to Putin in a phone call, offering to assist Moscow in the investigation.

However he insisted the Russian plane had been felled by "extensive and inaccurate Syrian anti-aircraft (fire)".

In recent months Israel has increased its attacks in Syria against the regime or its ally Iran. (AFP) AQS

(This is an unedited and auto-generated story from Syndicated News feed, LatestLY Staff may not have modified or edited the content body)
New Delhi, Sep 19: Afghan President Ashraf Ghani expressed concern over the growing presence of Islamic State (IS) terrorists in Afghanistan at his meeting with Prime Minister Narendra Modi here on Wednesday. According to official sources, Ghani said that a large number of foreign terrorists were involved in a horrific terror attack on Ghazni city in central Afghanistan last month that claimed over 100 lives. Many of these foreign terrorists were IS members returning from Syria. The Afghan side said that there had been an increase in the number of IS terrorists in Afghanistan in the last few months. PM Narendra Modi, Afghanistan President Ashraf Ghani Hold Talks.

It is learnt that Indian authorities are of the view that 70 per cent of those believed to be IS terrorists in Afghanistan are from Orakzai in Pakistan's Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province.

(The above story first appeared on LatestLY on Sep 19, 2018 09:55 PM IST. For more news and updates on politics, world, sports, entertainment and lifestyle, log on to our website latestly.com).
Aligarh, Sep 20: Two alleged criminals were shot dead by the Uttar Pradesh police this morning in an encounter, which was recorded by journalists. Before the operations in Aligarh, the UP police reportedly invited journalists to film the encounter. A video of the gun-battle shows armed police officers taking aim and firing. The deceased were identified as Mustakim and Naushad.

According to the police, Mustakim and Naushad were accused in at least six murders including the killings of Hindu priests. The duo fired at cops who were trying to stop them and hid in an abandoned government office building. They continued shooting from the building, forcing cops to resort to retaliatory fire. In the police firing, they were shot and declared dead in a hospital, the police claimed.

"Two men on a bike passed a police team, and when we tried to stop them, they fired at us. We gave chase, and they went and hid in an abandoned government office building about four kilometres away. They were firing at us from there too. We got reinforcements. When we fired, both of these people got hit, and they were declared dead in hospital. One of our officers was also wounded," Aligarh police chief Ajay Sahni told NDTV.

Journalists seen filming encounter in Aligarh:

As many as 65 people have been killed in counters in Uttar Pradesh since Yogi Adityanath took over as the chief minsiter in March 2017, according to the state police. Over 1000 encounters were reported during one and a half year.

(The above story first appeared on LatestLY on Sep 20, 2018 02:22 PM IST. For more news and updates on politics, world, sports, entertainment and lifestyle, log on to our website latestly.com).
Sydney, Sep 20: Australia is planning to build new naval base in Papua New Guinea, reports said Wednesday, an apparent move to curb China's influence in the Pacific. Canberra was aiming to finalise an agreement on the joint facility -- to be built on the Pacific nation's Manus island -- ahead of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Port Moresby in November, The Australian reported.

The newspaper said Australian defence officials visited PNG's Lombrum Naval Base on Manus to review a potential redevelopment after that country's prime minister Peter O'Neill visited Brisbane in July.

"The Pacific is a very high-priority area of strategic national security interest for Australia," Prime Minister Scott Morrison said Wednesday, refusing to deny the report.

"But I'm not going to comment on speculation on national security issues, that would not be appropriate." Beijing has been showering billions of dollars in infrastructure loans to tiny island nations across the Pacific Ocean, a region considered strategically important as a maritime gateway to Asia.

Canberra, which has a history of military cooperation in the Pacific with close ally Washington, has warned of a need to counter China's influence in the region.

Australia has been critical of Beijing's Pacific "soft diplomacy", and announced this year it would negotiate a security treaty with Vanuatu and also build an undersea communications cable to the Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea.

Canberra's PNG move follows reports China had approached Vanuatu about the possibility of opening a military base there. World leaders, including Chinese President Xi Jinping, will attend the APEC summit in November, an event both Canberra and Beijing have openly supported, throwing millions of dollars at security and infrastructure improvements in PNG.
Kano, Sep 20: Nine people were killed and nine others injured when Boko Haram fighters raided two villages in northeast Nigeria, the civilian militia said on Thursday. Jihadists in pickup trucks attacked Kalari Abdiye and nearby Amarwa, some 20 kilometres (12 miles) from Borno state capital Maiduguri, on Wednesday evening. "The gunmen, who were obviously Boko Haram fighters, killed nine people and injured nine more in the attacks," Ibrahim Liman, from the Civilian Joint Taskforce (CJTF) told AFP.

"They attacked the villages around 8:30 pm (1930 GMT) when it was raining and people were indoors." Frightened residents rushed out of their homes but when they did so they were shot "indiscriminately", said another CJTF leader, Babakura Kolo.

"The two villages were completely burnt by the attackers," he added, giving a similar toll. Both villages are in Konduga, a district of Borno state that has suffered repeated attacks in a nine-year insurgency which has left more than 27,000 dead. Last December six people were killed in a suicide attack on a crowded market in Amarwa, while 10 people lost their lives in April when two female suicide bombers attacked the village.

It was not clear which of the two Boko Haram factions was behind the attacks and there was no claim of responsibility. Fighters loyal to the group's long-time leader, Abubakar Shekau, have indiscriminately targeted civilians, particularly using suicide bombers and hit-and-run raids.

A separate faction backed by the Islamic state group and known as ISWAP (Islamic State West Africa Province) has focused more on attacking military and government targets.

But more radical elements are said to have taken over the ISWAP leadership, prompting fears of an upsurge in violence against the local population. On Monday, ISWAP killed a Red Cross health worker who had been kidnapped with two of her colleagues in a raid six months earlier, stoking fears for the other hostages being held.
Wellington, Sep 20: An Indian woman is facing deportation in New Zealand after being duped by men who she says took more than $30,000 from her in return for work visas for jobs that did not exist.

Damanpreet Kaur told Radio New Zealand (RNZ) that she paid two Tauranga men over $18,000 for a work visa and job last year and later paid a Hamilton man $15,000 for the same.

In both cases, Kaur said she received a two-year work visa that restricted her to employment by the company named on the visa but found there was no job, according to the report on Thursday.

The woman said she wanted justice served on the men and had already provided immigration authorities details of her claims in the hope that it will allow her to stay in the country.

Her immigration adviser, Tuariki Delamere, urged the New Zealand government to crack down on the group, who he described as "parasites".

H-1B Visas: Indians Account For More than 75% US Work Visas in 2016 & 17

RNZ said that it first interviewed Kaur about her situation in February and though she shared secret recordings of the men who scammed her she was not ready to go public at that time.

Now she has sent the Associate Immigration Minister Kris Faafoi a statement detailing the allegations, as well as bank statements showing payments to the two Tauranga men and to a company where the Hamilton man was a director, as well as cash withdrawals she said, were later given to the men.

The Tauranga men denied the allegations while the Hamilton man didn't return phone calls, according to RNZ.

Kaur said immigration officials had told her she could be served with a deportation notice because she was not working for the company specified on her current two-year work visa.

She said she was surviving by depending on money from her parents in India and support from her friends in New Zealand, but her parents would not support her if she returned to India.

Kaur admitted to have broken immigration rules by paying for a job, but said she found it too hard to find work in the field that she had studied. "It's my mistake, I apologize... But I need one last chance from immigration."

(The above story first appeared on LatestLY on Sep 20, 2018 04:27 PM IST. For more news and updates on politics, world, sports, entertainment and lifestyle, log on to our website latestly.com).
Washington, Sep 20: The US has said the Jaish-e-Mohammed and Lashkar-e-Taiba militant groups continue to pose a regional threat and that Pakistan did not adequately address America's concerns on terrorism in 2017.

Although al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan has been seriously degraded, remnants of its global leadership, as well as its regional affiliate al-Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent (AQIS), continued to operate from remote locations in the region that historically have been exploited as safe havens, the US State Department said in its annual Country Reports on Terrorism for the year 2017.

"Pakistan-based Jaish-e-Mohammed and Lashkar-e-Tayyiba continued to pose a regional threat in the subcontinent," it said on Wednesday. The report notes that from August to December 2017, the Trump administration placed a pause on spending new Foreign Military Financing for Pakistan, holding these funds until Pakistan addressed key US concerns, including the threat posed by the Haqqani Network and other terrorist groups that enjoyed safe haven in Pakistan.

"Pakistan did not adequately address these concerns in 2017," said the report.

Although Pakistan's National Action Plan calls to "ensure that no armed militias are allowed to function in the country," several terrorist groups focused on attacks outside of the country continued to operate from Pakistani soil in 2017, it said.

These groups included the Haqqani Network, besides the LeT and JeM which are directed against India. Though Pakistan continued military operations to eradicate terrorist safe havens in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, their impact on all terrorist groups was uneven, said the State Department report.

According to the report, the Pakistani military and security forces undertook operations against groups that conducted attacks within Pakistan, such as the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan. Even as the Pakistani government pledged support to political reconciliation between the Afghan government and the Afghan Taliban it did not restrict the Afghan Taliban and Haqqani Network from operating in Pakistan-based safe havens and threatening the US and Afghan forces in Afghanistan.

"Pakistan did not take sufficient action against other externally focused groups such as Lashkar e-Taiba (LeT) and Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM) in 2017, which continued to operate, train, organise, and fundraise in Pakistan," the report said.

Pakistan detained Hafiz Saeed, leader of LeT and its front organisation Jamaat ud-Dawa (JuD), in January 2017, but a Pakistani court ordered his release from house arrest in November 2017, it said.

In its report, the State Department rued that progress remained slow on the Pakistan government's efforts to implement UN sanctions related to designated entities and enforce anti-money laundering/countering the financing of terrorism (AML/CFT) controls.

The Financial Action Task Force (FATF), it said, continued to note with concern that Pakistan's outstanding gaps in the implementation of the UN Security Council ISIS and al-Qaeda sanctions regime have not been resolved, and that UN-listed entities  including LeT and its affiliates  were not effectively prohibited from raising funds in Pakistan, nor were they denied financial services.

"Although Pakistan's laws technically comply with international anti-money laundering/countering the financing of terrorism standards, authorities failed to uniformly implement UN sanctions related to designated entities and individuals such as LeT and its affiliates, which continued to make use of economic resources and raise funds," it said.
Tesla Model X occupants unscathed after plane crashes into car

Sep 20, 2018, 9:47am ET

The government-owned plane was carrying several DEA agents when it attempted an emergency landing on a street near Houston.

A Tesla Model X owner has praised the vehicle's safety after being struck by an airplane attempting an emergency landing on a highway near Houston.

The Drug Enforcement Agency's single-engine Cessna lost power and was forced to land on a public road. The aircraft snagged a power line on the approach, however, and slammed into several vehicles.

"GOD and this CAR truly saved us today," said Model X owner Oniel Kurup. "Not a scratch on us. No one believed me when I called them to let them know a plane crashed into me. Tesla, people thought It was a prank call. Wife laughed at me at first."

No occupants were seriously injured in any of the damaged vehicles, while one of the three DEA agents suffered minor injuries.
A 29-year-old Easton man was carrying heroin, cocaine and methamphetamine when he stole two pairs of cargo shorts from the Boscov's department store at the Palmer Park Mall, township police charge.

Luis R. Gonzalez (Courtesy photo | For lehighvalleylive.com)

A loss-prevention officer spotted Luis Raymond Gonzalez, of the 100 block of East Wilkes Barre Street, with three pairs of shorts on June 25 in the Palmer Township store, police said in court papers. Gonzalez discarded one of the pairs and left without paying for the other two, police said.

The loss-prevention officer confronted Gonzalez and brought him to the loss-prevention office, police said. Searching for other stolen merchandise, the loss-prevention officer found hypodermic needles and other drug-related items in a black bag that Gonzales was carrying, police said.

A township officer was requested and he took Gonzalez to the police department, court papers say.

There police said the following items were seized from Gonzalez's belongings:

4.8 gross grams (a weight that includes the packaging) of methamphetamine in a clear plastic vial

1 orange Buprenorphine Hydrochloride pill, which is a derivative of an opioid that is more potent and longer lasting than morphine,

5.6 gross grams of heroin which tested positive for fentanyl. It was in four small corner-tie bags

7 gross grams of crack cocaine in small corner-tie bags

Three digital scales

"Numerous" hypodermic needles

Two pairs of young men's cargo shorts with a total value of $39.98

The heroin, cocaine and methamphetamine registered positive in field tests, police said.

At the time of his arrest, Gonzalez was wanted on a shoplifting charge in Warren County, records show. He was arraigned as a fugitive from justice and returned to New Jersey to deal with that offense, records show.

He was arraigned Sept. 19 before District Judge Jacqueline Taschner on the Palmer Township charges, records show. He is facing two counts of possession with intent to deliver drugs (the heroin and crack), three counts of possession of drugs, one count of possession of drug paraphernalia and one count of shoplifting, records show.

Taschner set bail at $200,000, with the possibility of a 10 percent option if approved by Northampton County Pre-Trial Services, records show. Gonzalez remained jailed on Thursday morning and the bail hadn't been altered in court records.

His preliminary hearing is tentatively scheduled 9 a.m. Oct. 3 in Taschner's court.

Tony Rhodin may be reached at arhodin@lehighvalleylive.com. Follow him on Twitter @TonyRhodin. Find lehighvalleylive.com on Facebook.
A reality TV star has joined the search for Pennsylvania fugitive Shawn Christy in Ohio, according to a published report.

Christy on Sunday afternoon near Mansfield, Ohio, allegedly crashed a white GMC Sierra 2500HD stolen earlier that day from the Skitco Iron Works in Hazle Township, Luzerne County.

Christy has been on the run for months after threatening Northampton County District Attorney John Morganelli and President Donald Trump, authorities charge. He has stolen various vehicles and weapons, the U.S Marshals Service and the FBI have said. There is a reward of up to $20,000 for information leading to his arrest.

Shawn Christy is sought after allegedly making threats against President Donald Trump and Northampton County District Attorney John Morganelli. (Courtesy photos | For lehighvalleylive.com)

"I have a very hot lead," Duane Chapman, also known as Dog the Bounty Hunter, told a reporter on Wednesday for the Mansfield News Journal. Chapman said he was hired by a friend of the Christy family, the report says.

Christy, a Maple Shade, New Jersey, native, lived most recently in McAdoo, Schuylkill County.

Chapman already had a scheduled appearance Sept. 28 in Mansfield and plans to arrive a day early, the newspaper reported.

"I have delivered messages to him," Chapman told the newspaper, figuring he can talk the fugitive into custody. "My goal is not to shoot him but get him to surrender."

Chapman told the reporter that he believes Christy fell asleep before crashing the truck and that he's not armed.

Chapman's Hawaii-based show was canceled in 2012 after eight years on A&E but has aired since in syndication. There also was a spinoff and a special.

Tony Rhodin may be reached at arhodin@lehighvalleylive.com. Follow him on Twitter @TonyRhodin. Find lehighvalleylive.com on Facebook.
The welfare of others was to the fore when Noel Stapleton and Kurt Dineen were thinking of playing music on the streets of Drogheda at the recent Fleadh.

Instead of busking for pocket money for themselves, they suggested to friends that they collect for cancer research.

The Portlaoise Comhaltas members were quickly joined by colleagues from Laois and friends from Tyrone, Armagh, Galway, Sligo, Offaly and Louth.

Commenting at the celebratory seisiun held at Portlaoise Youth Cafe last Friday, PJ Phelan, Chair CCE Laois County Board said it made him proud of the organisation that teenagers would think of this of their own accord, when the temptation was so strong to collect for their own benefit instead.

The seisiun brought to an end the summer series in Laois run by the Portlaoise and Spink branches during June, July and August. CCE Laois PRO, Micheal Lalor thanked Youth Work Ireland for use of the facilities. More than 30 musicians, including guests from other branches, enjoyed with tunes with All-Ireland champions and silver medalists in the relaxing atmosphere of the cafe on James Fintan Lalor Ave. Comhaltas members are looking forward to participating in activities at the Youth Cafe in future months.

Enrolement for music classes with Comhaltas at St Francis School Portlaoise takes place this Friday, September 21, from 6-7pm as part of Culture Night when free trial classes are available.

The extensive range of traditional Irish music classes is provided by a qualified panel of teachers

Classes take place weekly on Tuesdays and Fridays.

You can contact any committee member or email portlaoisecce@gmail.com.
Crime figures are down but there is no room for complacency, according to the top garda in the Laois-Offaly division, admitting that there are considerable concerns in Portlaoise over criminal activity.

At last weeks meeting of the Joint Policing Committee meeting in Laois County Hall, it was revealed that crimes against the person are down 14 percent, from 85 to 73, from July and August last year to the same period this year.

Assault causing harm is down 47 percent, from 19 to 10; minor assaults remain much the same, from 58 to 56; menacing phone calls are down from four to one; harrassment is up from one to two; and threats to kill or cause harm are up from 3 to 4.

However, Chief Superintendent John Scanlon said that the assault figures are complicated by the inclusion of figures from the local prisons.

It says nothing about County Laois, he said.

Chief Supt Scanlon said there were considerable concerns in the Portlaoise area over criminal activity, however he said that, Most of the people are extremely decent here.

He said crime is down, but people shouldnt be complacent about that.

Laois should be open for business, theres a reasonably benign criminal element here, he said.

Chief Supt Scanlon also said that concerning menacing phone calls, these can be traced. However, he said that people can be extremely mischievous by throwing away phones after using them.

Cllr Noel Tuohy said that most of the threats took place in the prison and it was very unfair to include the prison statistics in the Portlaoise figures.

This is a good town, this is a good county, he said.

Cllr Tuohy asked what should people do if they see antisocial behaviour starting in their estates.

Chief Supt Scanlon said this type of behaviour tends to be cyclical with teenage gangs. He encouraged people to report anything to the community sergeant.

He also wryly observed that: As a garda I met a young lad on the street corner and later in this forum I heard the same person talking about street corners. Foxes do make good hen house minders.

Chairing the meeting, Cllr Padraig Fleming said that Laois is a safe place to live and be in.
An Irish meteorologist has warned of 'very disturbed' weather for the weekend as two storm systems move towards Ireland in the wake of Storm Ali.

Cathal Nolan from the Midland Weather Channel predicts that Ireland will avoid the brunt of Storm Bronagh on Thursday and Friday, but predicted the potential Storm Callum to cause more widespread upheaval on Saturday and Sunday.

Speaking about Storm Bronagh, Nolan said, "On Monday morning the Midland Weather Channel issued a warning that two named storms would affect the country before Friday. Storm Ali, the first named storm of the year brought devastation across the country on Wednesday, with the highest wind speed recorded occurring at Mace Head, Galway, at some 146 Km/h."

"Included in our initial warning was the potential that Storm Bronagh would affect the country during Thursday, and as of this morning Storm Bronagh has been officially named by the Met Office, with very strong winds expected across much of England and Wales this evening."

"For ourselves here in the Midlands we certainly won't experience any damaging winds from Bronagh, but we will experience some heavy rain through the afternoon and evening, with a slight risk of spot flooding in places, particularly across southeastern coastal counties, with a yellow weather warning in place for these counties," Cathal added.

Looking towards the weekend and the potential Storm Callum, the meteorologist said, "our weather looks very disturbed, with the potential risk of some stormy conditions across the southeast of the country late Saturday night and Sunday morning."

He said current models "indicate that the worst of the storm will miss the country, with some charts indicating that the storm won't truly develop until it affects central Europe on Monday/Tuesday, where it will bring the first snowfall of the year to Alpine countries."

"However, other models such as the ECMWF continue to show the potential for some stormy conditions in many areas of the east and south as we head into Sunday morning," Cathal concluded.

People can keep up to date with forecasts on the Midland Weather Channel on Facebook and Met Eireann's website at www.met.ie.

Met Eireann has said ' a wave depression' is expected to deepen, as it tracks close to the southeast coast of Ireland on Thursday bringing Storm Bronagh. It will track up the east Irish Sea and into northern England later today and tonight. As a result the UK Met Office have named it Storm Bronagh.

Heavy and possibly thundery rain will affect Ireland today and for a time tonight, with a rainfall warning in operation for parts of south and east Munster and South Leinster.

Possible Storm this Weekend by Met Eireann

The weather remains changeable and disturbed for the coming weekend and there is potential for another storm to form late Saturday into Sunday. The track of the depression is uncertain at this stage and both Met Eireann and the UK Met Office are monitoring developments. Further updates and relevant warnings will be issued as appropriate.
A direct provision centre for people seeking refugee status in Ireland has opened in Laois.

Between 55 and 60 asylum seekers, mostly made up of families, have moved into the facility at the former Hibernian Hotel at Pembroke Terrace, Abbeyleix.

The Reception and Integration Agency opened the centre, it is privately owned as its operation is subcontracted by the State to the owners of the premises.

Cllr John Joe Fennelly was one of the local representative who met with State housing and education officers throughout the planning stages ahead of the opening.

He said the community is working on welcoming the new people into the town.

We are in the process of setting up a support group to assist in welcoming them into the town, to help them along and to make sure the children have places in school. We are hoping to assist in any way we can, he said.

It is a different life for them, there are around 58 people in the complex and I would have concerns there is that many there, but they are fleeing and it is safer here.

I met one of them who wants to do his Leaving Cert and go on to university. I have met six of them and four or five had English, they seem to have settled in well.

I spoke to someone who met some of them on the street and they didnt know where the national school was. We are trying to organise a walking tour of the town for anyone that wants to come to show them where things are so they are not left in the house all day, Cllr Fennelly said.

A spokesperson for the Department of Justice told the Leinster Express the asylum seekers in Abbeyleix are those who arrived in Ireland and declared themselves as asylum seekers and not those brought to Ireland through the EU Relocation and Resettlement programmes .

There are 35 direct provision centres in Ireland according to the Irish Immigrant Support Centre .

This is the second direct provision centre to open in Laois  the Montague Hotel in Emo was opened in 2007 and is still in operation.

Residents live in the full board accommodation which includes light, heat and laundry services free of other charges, and are paid an allowance of 21.60 per person per week.

They may also qualify for other Social Welfare payments as determined by the Department of Employment Affairs and Social Protection.

Children will attend the local national schools in Abbeyleix and secondary schools in surrounding areas.
In this Season of Creation, the Program Director for the Environment and Sustainable Development at the Anglican Communion Office in New York, the Revd Canon Dr Jeff Golliher, reflects on last months World Water Week conference.

For nearly 20 years, the Stockholm International Water Institute (SIWI) has hosted a yearly conference called World Water Week. SIWI has worked in partnership with high-level agencies and NGOs to shape how global organisations like the United Nations address water issues. This year (August, 2018), the overall theme was Water, Ecosystems, and Human Development, and a primary focus was putting the UNs Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) into practice, especially Goal six: Ensure the availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all.

At a time when one third of the global population is water stressed, 2.1 billion people lack safe drinking water, the climate emergency is worsening, and geopolitical relations are strained, it can be difficult to know where to begin. Annika Sode of Swedens Ministry for Foreign Affairs put it all in a nutshell, water is life . . . water is the starting point. Deputy Secretary General of the UN, Amina J Mohammed, outlined the way ahead: water is the docking station of all the SDGs . . . now is the time to take that leap of faith and start implementing, not for tomorrow, but for our future today.

Peacemaking through trans-boundary cooperation was a frequent topic in numerous sessions that involved most regions of the world, including the Middle East where water has been a largely unacknowledged driver of armed conflict. The way ahead is both hopeful and daunting  as most everyone at World World Week understood. For that reason, the speaker that I liked best was Autumn Peltier, a 13-year-old indigenous activist from Ontario, Canada. Peltier raised good questions: I will be an ancestor someday . . . why are 40 per cent of our people forced to use boiled and bottled water now?

Water comes from heaven; it is sacred . . . Answers are in the land, but were not listening. She wants some answers from organisations and governments. Speaking, in effect, for people across the earth, she deserves some answers  not just in words, but through actions.

Torgny Holmgren, Executive Director of SIWI, spoke in a similarly heart-felt way that made me think of us in the Anglican Communion: over 300 rivers and lakes are shared by different countries. Introducing a high-level session on water diplomacy, his message was that we must work together  globally and regionally. To accomplish this, we must rebuild confidence in the power of co-operation and collaboration. Otherwise, the possibility of conflict will increase, and the rivers and wells will run dry.

For the Anglican Communion, this points directly to 300 opportunities for our Provinces and dioceses to work together to preserve the water of life. Environmental stewardship, like peacemaking, requires us to form collaborative relationships and friendships across our political and ecclesiastical maps. This will require thoughtful discussion and an organised willingness to put the fifth Mark of Mission into practice. Were talking about bold acts of faith.
Frustrated Stradbally residents are demanding that Laois TD and Minister Charlie Flanagan step in to resolve what they believe is a refusal by local and national road authorities to tackle a dangerous road in Stradbally.

After what was described as a negative meeting with Laois County Council last week, residents said they have given the go-ahead to Cllr Tom Mulhall to set up a meeting with Minister Flanagan.

They want the Laois TD to organise talks with the Minister responsible for roads and transport so that extensive safety work can be carried out at the N80 Oakvale Cemetery bend on the Carlow side of town. Residents gathered road last week with Cllr Tom Mulhall at the site prior to second meeting with Laois County Councils road engineers.

They believe a roundabout is the only solution to slow traffic at a stretch of road where there have been fatalities. A footpath to allow residents go to the cemetery is also sought. A pedestrian crossing is also requested.

Bend at Oakdale Cemetery. Picture: Michael Scully

A delegation of residents brought their own plans to the meeting with council staff which was also attended by Cllr Mulhall and Cllr Paschal McEvoy.

Residents Martin Walsh, Derek Scully, Frank Morrin and Dominic Harnett also attended the meeting.

Mr Walsh said the meeting produced no results. He claimed the council had no proposals but also added that Transport Infrastructure Ireland (TII) would not allow a roundabout or the other changes.

The residents rejected this saying roundabouts have been permitted in Carlow and Portlaoise on the N80.

We are at nothing with them. We will have to go further with this. We are trying to get a meeting now with Minister Charlie Flanagan and Shane Ross, the Minister for Transport. Laois County Council seem to have no say with TII, said Mr Walsh.

Laois County Council declined to make a comment when contacted by the Leinster Express. TII said it would continue discussions with the council on the matter.

Cllr Tom Mulhall said the issue must be tackled.

"There is a huge problem in Stradbally with speeding traffic going through the town," he said.

The councillor listed the areas impacted: the Oakvale road junction, the local road to Noel Dooley's house, the entrance to Cill Beg estate, the entrance from Timahoe at the Green, the junction at Church Avenue, the vicarstown road junction.

He said the residents on Carlow Road and Main street all have difficulty gaining access on to the main road.

"I am calling on the dept of transport and Transport infrastructure Ireland and Laois county council to put in place two roundabouts one at Oakvale and the other at the Rathmore /Cork junction.

He is also looking for raised tables at the pedestrian crossings all these measures need to be put in place in the interest of safety. He said Portlaoise / Mountmellick have roundabouts and raised tables in place and they are on the same route Rosslare to the west N80.

He added that a Go safe speed van location needs to be put in place at Oakvale.

He said the residents in stradbally are in support of these measures.
An independent TD has hit out at the 'abject failure' of Government which has result in the closure of Post Offices in Laois, Offaly and other counties.

Carol Nolan, who participated in yesterday's March in Dublin which was organised by The Independent Postmasters Union, attacked what she said was the Governments "failure to consolidate the rural Post-Office Network and prevent closures."

Speaking in the Dail on the Sinn Fein Private Members motion on The Future of the Post Office Network, Deputy Nolan, called on the Government to honour the commitment it gave in November 2016 to support the establishment of a five-year Post Office network renewal process.

Addressing her comments to Minister for Communications Denis Naughton, the Independent Offaly TD stated that despite much debate on this topic over the past two years, and many innovative solutions proposed by many stakeholders, the outcome of these proposals has been 'abysmal'.

"The closure of 159 Post offices in rural areas, is an abject failure of Government," Nolan said.

She went on to call on the Minister to acknowledge his failure, his Departments failure, to respond to a rapidly changing technological environment. Five of the 159 closures announced recently were in Offaly.

Deputy Nolan also called on the Minister to account for his "failure to implement the promised Community Banking solutions."

Outlining the difficulties facing farm families and small rural businesses in accessing low-interest finance, Deputy Nolan demanded to know when the solutions would be implemented.

Minister Naughton indicated that these proposals were due for roll-out in the New Year.

I hope so we do not want to be back here in a years time debating the same issue,"  concluded Deputy Nolan.
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In one of the most expensive land deals ever, a Kildare auctioneer has secured almost 50,000 an area for land near Leixlip at auction.

Coonan Property Maynooth recently completed the sale of the non-residential lands in the Leixlip/Lucan area.

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This agents said this property is zoned agricultural but due to its location it is reasonable to assume at some future date it will attract development opportunities. Located on the Lucan/Clonee Road, the land is approximately two miles from Lucan/Leixlip and four miles from Clonee.

The guide price quoted at time of sale was 30,000-50,000 per acre and whilst the agent did not disclose any sale price they did confirm it had been sold at a level nearer the higher price.

The property attracted considerable interest and the agent said the sale confirmed the further strength of the property market particularly in the Greater Dublin Area.

They mentioned they had other under bidders looking for similar type land.

It was purchased in trust by a Dublin solicitor and the solicitor acting for the vendor was Robert Dore & Co., 2 Citygate, Bridge Street, Dublin 8.
Local ambulance personnel put their jobs on the line when they broke the rules to rush a gravely ill Newbridge Cystic Fibrosis (CF) patient to St Vincents Hospital, despite orders she had to be taken to Naas A&E.

Lisa Dowling, 24, lost her brother Aaron and twin sister, Nicole to complications from CF. She is on 40 bottles of oxygen a month.

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Her uncle Jude Maguire described how the ambulance arrived at Lisas home at Lakeside Court last Friday.

I have served in East Timor, Kosovo, the Lebanon, I have seen fear in childrens eyes. When she was there coughing up blood and the adults were all arguing for an hour and a twenty minutes over where the ambulance could bring her, I could see she was terrified, he said.

We dont abuse the ambulance service. We only call 999 when its an emergency and we appreciate the service, explained Jude.

When the ambulance arrived, the paramedics said they would have to bring Lisa to Naas A&E. Her mum Audrey said she had a place in St Vincents in the special isolation ward and she couldnt be taken to A&E because of the high risk of infection.

However, the ambulance personnel said they couldnt bring her there because of protocol. They said they had to bring the patient to the nearest emergency department.

They rang their boss but got no decision. They waited for an hour and twenty minutes as they remained at the house and treated Lisa. Eventually I said, I was going to put her in the car and bring her up, explained Jude.

They said no, we will bring her. I have nothing but the height of respect for those ambulance men. They could have lost their jobs. Its not their fault. The protocol is wrong. Thank God common sense prevailed.

If they are called out to help a pregnant woman, they bring her to the hospital she is attending, the Coombe, the Rotunda, whereever, they dont bring her to A&E.

After the ambulance drivers got to St Vincents they got the call giving them permission to bring Lisa. This was four hours from the time they made the initial call seeking approval.

Meanwhile, Lisa has been diagnosed with Pneumonia in both lungs and remains in hospital.

Jude said;We had the same problem a few months ago. They (the ambulance) came and they wanted to take her to A&E in Naas.

The ambulance brought her to Naas and then I brought her up in my car. But if she went into cardiac arrest or something happened her, we wouldnt know what to do. They said the ambulance could go to Newlands Cross and wait for a Dublin ambulance to come out and get her but we said no, we are not waiting any longer.

Newbridge Cllr Murty Aspell said: Its a terrible reflection on our system that an ambulance crew from Naas General Hospital had to put their jobs on the line as they took it upon themselves to transport a CF patient to St Vincents Hospital. This area of our healthcare system needs to be seriously look at.

The HSE said the National Ambulance Service cannot comment on individual cases. However, it said the family could contact them to discuss the matter.

The National Ambulance Service are always happy to discuss any issues with the patient or their family directly, it added.
Seamus Flynn, a native of Drumshanbo, has spent three weeks volunteering in Kolkata (formerly known as Calcutta), India with the Hope Foundation and such was his experience now wants to return this year.

The Hope foundation is a charity that works with street and slum children and their communities, in Kolkata. HOPE provide funding and support to over 60 projects in Kolkata. HOPE's programmes include Education, Healthcare and Nutrition, Protection, Life skills and Vocational Training, Awareness and Capacity Building and Emergency Response.



Seamus became involved with the Hope Foundation after meeting a friend who had returned from volunteering in Kolkata. Once he decided to volunteer, he started his fundraising with a table quiz and a car boot sale and received alot of donations from friends and family. He quickly raised over 2,000. The generosity and kindness of people was overwhelming. What Seamus did not realise, was that this would be a life changing experience for him.

On arriving in the airport in Kolkata he was met by one of the Hope Foundation team and brought to his accommodation. He was immediately struck by the abject poverty he witnessed. He found it very harrowing to walk through the streets and see young children being reared on the streets. It is estimated that up to 250,000 children go to sleep on the streets and slums of Kolkata - hungry and without protection. In the three weeks that Seamus spent in Kolkata he worked in the HOPE protection homes - where many of these street children call home. They have been rescued by HOPE from the street and slums.

"There are many injustices in the world but few are as harsh as a child's future stolen  their lives over before it has begun. It should never hurt to be a child", Maureen Forrest, founder of HOPE said.

This is so true when you are on the ground and see it first hand what injustice and poverty can do said Seamus. Despite all the poverty and injustice people are still very warm and welcoming and appreciate so much any help they get. This is not a holiday but you can meet a lot of like minded volunteers from Ireland and from other countries. Seamus did not get overwhelmed with all he saw and did and in fact he is planning to return to Kolkata with HOPE in 2019.

HOPE are always looking for volunteers to go overseas to help with their street childrens programme. They are also looking for corporate sponsors and volunteers to assist with fund raising activities. For example HOPE have their national fundraising day, The Day of Hope which is on 11 October and they need volunteers and companies to help with this.

HOPE also have an immersion programme for TY and 5th year secondary school students whereby they go out to Kolkata for a week to experience first hand the work that HOPE is engaged in.

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Are we the new Van Diemen's Land? queried Kinlough Councillor Justin Warnock this week as he sought an investigation into the HAP Scheme.



Cllr Warnock frankly outlined the abuse by local authorities using the Housing Assistance Payment (HAP) Scheme to source rental properties in Kinlough and moving their problem cases here. He said, This practice is leading to an upsurge in anti social behaviour, which is causing great distress and anger to the local communities.



Mary Quinn, Leitrim County Council said There is a national housing crisis and this scheme grew out of that crisis. She explained the scheme allows people to source housing outside of their county, and Leitrim County Council can also use it and send people on waiting lists to other counties who have houses available.



Cllr Warnock received support and sympathy for his call for an investigation into the scheme, but some councillors said it was not black and white.

Cllr Justin Warnock said they do not have the resources, either Gardai or Social Services, to deal with career criminal individuals being sent to Kinlough.

Calling on Housing Minister Eoghan Murphy to investigate the practice by local authorities using the HAP Scheme to source rental properties in Leitrim, Cllr Warnock said Leitrim is being used as a dumping ground.

He added that some councils have finder officers sourcing properties here.



The Councillor asserted there has been an increase in crime, robberies and anti-social behaviour and added we dont have the resources to deal with these issues.

Kinlough has only two gardai and a Sergeant covering a large area, with no 24 hour garda station.

The irate Councillor said a court case in Ennis reported how three family members stabbed a taxi driver. They had 155 convictions between. The Gardai told that court the family had been relocated to Leitrim.

Are we the new Van Diemen's Land? he asked.

In 1847 if you stole a bag of meal you were transported to Tasmania, now counties are sending their convicts to Leitrim. He said some individuals relocated to Kinlough are known career criminals.

Cllr Warnock said there was a period of 3-4 weeks where the people of Kinlough

were thinking of forming a voluntary security group, they were so intimidated. He said Gardai made a number of arrests recently and things have quietened down.

Cllr Sean McDermott sympathised with the Kinlough community but said it is not black and white. He noted there are communities in Leitrim seeking new people to keep schools open.



Cllr Bohan told the members, A house was burned down in Drumkeerin by people from outside the jurisdiction but added our own people break the law too.

Cllr Warnock persevered that businesses felt intimidated in the village. People who live in the estates want out, they are afraid to live next to them.



Cllr Frank Dolan supported the call and noted that at a recent Border Regional Meeting it was said that by 2050, 90% of the Irish population will live in urban areas and that will add to the problem.

Cllr Padraig Fallon said he was aware of the anti social behaviour in Kinlough and had met with Gardai. He said the Superintendent told him resources are going to be increased in the area.

Cllr Felim Gurn said he supported the motion and said Manorhamilton had a similar issue last summer.

Also read: Families want to move to rural Leitrim but there are no homes
Leitrim County Council will not be allowing the reintroduction of plastic bags for those living outside existing waste collecting routes.

In a letter sent to Leitrim County Council in July this year, Minister for Communications, Climate Action and Environment, Denis Naughten outlined certain circumstances where local authorities could designate 'bag collection areas'.

Reasons included physical features which make it difficult to move a bin to the edge of the property, streets being too narrow for refuse collection vehicles to access as well as notified exceptional circumstances.

Minister Naughten said, It is a matter for each local authority to designate areas as not being suitable for wheelie bin collections (i.e. designate areas which should remain on bag collections.

Cllr Sinead Guckian said it is clear from the letter that local authorities have the power to choose areas where residents could use plastic bags and she urged the Council to do so in rural locations where waste collection vehicles are not able to access roads or where residents have to drag bins a long distance to collection points.

Director of Service, Joseph Gilhooly said that these circumstances for consideration were mostly aimed at urban areas where there are access issues for waste collection.

Our experience in Leitrim is that plastic bags are an absolute disaster. The primary purpose of this (criteria outlined by the Minister) was to identify areas of limited access for urban centres, he said.

This rule stems from an urban context and we feel it would be a backward step (here in Leitrim) to designate such areas, he said.

Mr Gilhooly also pointed out there was no legal obligation on waste collection providers to collect anywhere in the county. They are not obligated to provide this service to every household. The obligation is on the householder to ensure their waste is properly and legally disposed of.

Cllr Sinead Guckian expressed her disappointment with this interpretation of the criteria.

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GARDAI are investigating allegations that a prisoner was assaulted in the confines of Limerick Courthouse while waiting for his case to be called.

The incident is alleged to have happened at around midday this Thursday after a 57-year-old man was placed in a holding cell with another prisoner who was also due before Limerick District Court.

When the man appeared before Judge Marian OLeary, solicitor Sarah Ryan said her client had received medical treatment a short time earlier as he had been assaulted by another prisoner in a cell adjacent to courtroom number 6.

The defendant, who pleaded guilty to minor public order charges relating to an incident on Wednesday, had a number of visible injuries on his face, head and knuckles as he sat in the dock.

Ms Ryan said not all of her clients injuries were as a result of the assault as he had fallen in recent days.

Judge OLeary was informed the defendant had been advised to attend a hospital as a precaution following his release from custody.

A garda spokesperson has confirmed they are investigating an alleged assault at Limerick Courthouse, Mulgrave Street.

No arrests have been made so far.
Posted on: September 20, 2018 3:25 PM

The Secretary General of the Anglican Communion, Dr Josiah Idowu-Fearon, has joined a number of Anglican Primates and other faith leaders in calling on heads of state to support the worlds 40.5 million internally displaced people. World leaders are preparing to descend on the UN headquarters in New York for this years General Assembly meeting. While there, they will sign a new Global Compact on Refugees. The faith leaders welcome this new international instrument; but say that it applies only to people who have been forced to flee across borders while ignoring the plight of those displaced within their own countries.

While global leaders are signing up to supporting refugees, the vast majority of people displaced within their own countries borders are often woefully ignored and abandoned by their countries leaders, the British-based aid agency Christian Aid, which has co-ordinated the letter, said.

More than 57 leaders have signed the letter: The majority of them are from various Christian denominations; but signatories include Jewish and Muslim leaders. In their letter, they challenge UN member governments about the exclusion of the 40.5 million internally displaced people (IDPs) from the new Global Compact.

Internally displaced people remain in their own countries but have been forced to flee their homes due to violence and natural disasters such as floods and earthquakes, and left to fend for themselves, Christian Aid said. Despite having no place to call home, they lack the support and protection that international law gives refugees  people who have crossed international borders.

The faith leaders say that if the world is to realise the UNs Sustainable Development Goals, then the international community must ensure that internally displaced people are neither forgotten nor ignored.

In Addition to Dr Idowu-Fearon, Anglican signatories include Rachel Carnegie, Executive Director of the Anglican Alliance; Bishops Andrew John (Bangor), June Osborne (Llandaff) and Gregory Cameron (St Asaph) from the Church in Wales, together with the Primate of Wales, Archbishop John D Davies (Swansea and Brecon); Bishops Paul Butler (Durham) and Nicholas Holtam (Salisbury) from the Church of England; Canon Grace Kaiso, the General Secretary of the Council of Anglican Provinces of Africa; and Archbishop Justin Badi Arama, the Primate of the Episcopal Church of South Sudan.

One of the signatories, Paul Anticoni, the Chief Executive of World Jewish Relief, said that there are now unimaginable numbers of people fleeing conflict and persecution, and becoming displaced within their own countries. These people are often hidden, denied access to support and protection, and extremely vulnerable. We join our fellow faith-based agencies in calling for greater support and assistance to prevent, mitigate and respond to this scourge on humanity.

The Chief Executive of Islamic Relief Worldwide, Naser Haghamed, explained that when he was 13 years old, he and his family were forced to flee their home in Eritrea because of conflict there. I will never forget what happened, he said. We fled on foot and walked for days just to reach the border. And yet, I was lucky compared to what displaced people have to endure today.

As faith groups, we are urging governments to fulfil their obligations towards their own displaced and calling on world leaders at the UN to make the safety, dignity and well-being of millions of displaced people a key priority.

Christian Aid is an ecumenical aid agency which serves as the international development agency for 41 Churches in the British Isles, including the four Anglican provinces: the Church of England, the Church of Ireland, the Church in Wales, and the Scottish Episcopal Church. Its Chief Executive, Amanda Mukwashi, said: If not at the United Nations, then where will the voice of internally displaced women, men and children be heard? Where can their issues be dealt with? Who will bring together global efforts and resources so that they are not left behind?

The letter was published today (Thursday) ahead of the UN Advisory Council on Faiths inaugural meeting, which will take place tomorrow in New York.
A MAN who is accused of robbing a handbag from an elderly woman in broad daylight in Limerick was apprehended thanks to the assistance of members of the public who witnessed the incident.

Shane Ryan-Casey, aged 26, of no fixed abode, was refused bail after gardai expressed concerns he would commit further offences and would not appear in court if released.

Detective Garda Paul Crowley of Roxboro Road station told Limerick District Court the accused man is a volatile and dangerous individual with a history of violence.

Opposing a bail application, he said it will be alleged the defendant approached the 69-year-old as she was walking at St Nessans Road, Dooradoyle  near the Crescent Shopping Centre  at around 3pm September 12, last.

He took hold of her handbag and ran (with the bag) across the road to Ballykeefe Estate, he told Judge Marian OLeary.

A number of witnesses followed the culprit and gave a detailed description to gardai who responded quickly.

The detective said Mr Ryan-Casey, who was found hiding in bushes a short time later, is alleged to have had the stolen handbag in his possession when arrested.

The victim, he said, was not physically injured during the incident but was shook up by her ordeal.

Solicitor Sarah Ryan said her client, who has addiction issues, was intoxicated when arrested and was declared unfit by a doctor and could not be questioned for several hours following his arrest.

She told the court he was willing to abide by any conditions imposed on him if granted bail.

Detective Garda Crowley rejected this assertion saying he did not believe he would comply with any conditions.

Having formally refused bail under the provisions of the Bail Act, Judge OLeary remanded the defendant in custody pending directions from the Director of Public Prosecutions..

A file is currently being prepared by investigating gardai and will be forwarded to the DPP in the coming weeks.
A MAN who is accused of attacking a teenage girl in a Limerick city centre laneway late at night has been refused bail.

Owen Corbett, aged 24, of no fixed abode, was brought before Limerick District Court after he was charged with robbery relating to an incident on August 20, last.

Opposing bail, Garda Jonathan Finn said it will be alleged the defendant was one of five young men who approached the 17-year-old victim and her boyfriend who were standing together in the laneway outside a pub at around 11pm.

He said the couple were set upon by the group and knocked to the ground by the youths and that both sustained injuries.

Inspector Padraig Byrnes said the young woman sustained facial injuries including a broken nose and he submitted the incident was at the higher end of the scale.

The teenage girls handbag was stolen during the incident which was captured on CCTV.

Garda Finn told Judge Marian OLeary he had concerns Mr Corbett would not appear in court if granted bail and that he would engage in further criminality.

While a file is being prepared for the Director of Public Prosecutions, it is anticipated the matter will proceed on indictment before the circuit court.

Solicitor John Herbert said his client, who has had difficulties with drug addiction in the past, was willing to abide by any conditions imposed by the court.

He said the father-of-one has an address where he can live and that there have been no further incidents since.

Having considered the garda objection, Judge OLeary said she was refusing bail under Section 2 of the Bail Act. She said she was making no finding in relation to an objection under OCallaghans Rules.

The matter was adjourned pending DPPs directions.
THE DEVELOPMENT of a supervised injection centre to tackle Limericks addiction problem may not be on the cards until 2020 following a pilot programme in Dublin.

The idea was mooted at a recent public meeting on drug decriminalisation at the Hunt Museum, a week after Overdose Awareness Day was marked.

TD Maurice Quinlivan said a centre would be safer and cleaner, but Metropolitan Mayor, Cllr Daniel Butler said Limerick is not ready just yet for such a project.

But a supervised injection centre cannot materialise until a pilot project in Dublin city is delivered and evaluated.

It is understood that the HSE will evaluate the new centre in Dublin, run by Merchants Quay, one year after it is built and ready.

This week, there was shock at drug addicts using holy water fonts to clean needles at St Johns Cathedral, revealed by the Limerick Leader.

A spokesperson for the Limerick Diocese said that glass bowls are now placed in the traditional fonts at the front entrance of the cathedral, and are replaced and cleansed daily as well as in the event of any suggestion of misuse.

We are aware of intermittent anti-social behaviour at a small number of churches but this not an issue confined to Limerick but, rather, exists in other cities and towns. The health and safety of people attending churches is of paramount importance to us and we monitor them an ongoing basis for any risk of anti-social behaviour and respond accordingly.

We are also reviewing this process and other options for dispensing Holy Water, added the spokesperson.

Speaking on the issue of injection centres, Mayor Butler, who is a drug education worker, said that Limerick was not ready for such a project. He said international evidence is clear that injection centres reduce overdose deaths, drug litter and improve service engagement. However, he said there is a lack of understanding from the public about these centres.

I think we have to bring people with us, as opposed to impose these things on people. Even if you can convince anybody that injection centres are worthwhile, who would want them in their neighbourhood? And they are the issues they are facing in Dublin. We need to learn from what Dublin does and see how Dublin manages it, and then think about what we need to do, he said.

But Deputy Quinlivan argued that more resources need to be pumped into drug taskforces in the region, saying: I think an injection centre would be safer, it would be cleaner. People would be supervised where they might have the opportunity, if they are ready, to go for counselling and treatment.

Rachel ODonoghue, Mid-West Ana Liffey Drug Project team leader, said they want to see the centre in Dublin opening as soon as possible. We do know that injection centres are good and that they work and nobody has ever overdosed in one across the world. We are looking forward to seeing that evaluation.
MORE THAN 430 University of Limerick students, the highest number to date, were honoured this week for completing more than 30,000 hours of voluntary work during their academic studies.

On Wednesday, 435 UL students were honoured at the eighth annual Presidents Volunteer Awards, with Limerick man and Self Help Africa Group chief executive Ray Jordan, addressed this years ceremony.

Since the programme started, UL students have dedicated more than 120,000 hours to volunteering in the city, the region and across the country.

The value of giving something back to society is a strong ethos at UL and we are a leader in encouraging and recognising the volunteer efforts of students, UL President Dr Des Fitzgerald said.

We are the only Higher Education Institution in the country to structure student volunteering so that the significant contribution students make to our communities is recognised and acknowledged on their transcripts, he added.

The selfless act of volunteering, concern for others and a sense of community is what makes the world a better place, and we will continue to foster this attitude at UL.

This academic year, volunteers across the student body, including undergraduates and postgraduates, completed more than 30,000 hours of voluntary work across a range of civic and charitable organisations.
Apr 28, 2021, 2 AM

The Honoring First Responders stamp was unveiled at the Montecito Fire Protection District headquarters. Photo by Fritz Olenberger.

Oprah Winfrey spoke passionately about the heroism of first responders in the recent Montecito tragedies. Photo by Fritz Olenberger.

By Molly Goad

One day after the Sept. 13 first-day ceremony for the Honoring First Responders forever stamp in Missoula, Mont., the stamp was dedicated again in Montecito, Calif.

The event was held at the Montecito Fire Protection District headquarters and featured remarks from Oprah Winfrey. The media leader and philanthropist is a local resident.

The Sept. 14 gathering recognized those who rushed to aid during the Thomas fire at the end of 2017 and the Jan. 9 debris flow that followed. The fire burned more than 280,000 acres in Ventura and Santa Barbara counties, and the mudslides killed 21.

There just arent enough words  or emotions, actually  to describe the heart, the soul and the fortitude required to sign up to be a first responder, Winfrey said.

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To be the kind of human being that says, Take me; Ill go. Ill do the opposite of what all the other human beings really want to do  I will embrace the danger, and then wrestle it. Im here on behalf of our community to say that your actions define what it means to be a hero. Its a word, but you all have lived it out loud, Winfrey continued.

Lauren Cantin, a teenager who was rescued from mud by first responders, sang God Bless America at the ceremony.

Other speakers included Chip Hickman, Montecito Fire Department fire chief; Alfred Santos, USPS district manager; and Abe Powell, founder of the local volunteer-based Bucket Brigade organization.
At least four people were injured following the shooting at a judge's office on Wednesday afternoon in U.S. state of Pennsylvania, the authorities said.

A screenshot of a CNN report on the shooting in U.S. state of Pennsylvania [Screenshot: China Plus]

The shooter died on the scene, Fayette County commissioner Vince Vicites told local media.

The shooting took place inside the office of Magisterial District Judge Daniel Shimshock in Masontown, about 50 miles south of Pitttsburgh, local media reported, adding that a law enforcement official was among the injured.

"At this time we have multiple victims and injuries one being a law enforcement official," Pennsylvania State Police's Troop B, which handles the county, tweeted around 3:00 p.m. local time.

The police later tweeted that the scene was secure and no schools, businesses or offices were locked down.

A spokesperson for the Fayette County Emergency Management told ABC News that a person was pronounced dead at the scene.

Pennsylvania State Police tweeted that Troop B was investigating the incident.

David Kaiser, an attorney who was at the judge's office when the shooting happened, told local media he heard an argument outside the office before the gunfire.

Earlier Wednesday, a gunman opened fire at a Wisconsin software company, wounding four people before being killed in a shootout with police.
Posted on: September 20, 2018 12:32 PM

[Episcopal News Service, by Lynette Wilson] The United States was a worldwide leader in refugee resettlement just two years ago, when more than 80,000 refugees were welcomed into the country with help from the nine agencies with federal contracts to do that work, including Episcopal Migration Ministries. That number has dwindled under the Trump administration, which announced on Monday (17 September) that it would reduce resettlement further, to just 30,000 a year.

The US-based Episcopal Church has a long history of standing with refugees, people who are fleeing violence, war and political and religious persecution, and yesterday (Tuesday) the church expressed its disappointment at the reduced cap on the number of refugees.

As followers of Jesus Christ, we are saddened by this decision, Presiding Bishop Michael Curry said in a written statement. Our hearts and our prayers are with those thousands of refugees who, due to this decision, will not be able to find new life in the US. This decision by the government does not reflect the care and compassion of Americans who welcome refugees in their communities every day. Our faith calls us to love God and love our neighbour, so we stand ready to help all those we can in any way we can.

The current ceiling for refugee resettlement is 45,000 for the fiscal year ending 30 September, but so far, fewer than half of that, just 20,918, have been admitted. In Mondays announcement, the US Department of State announced that the US would reduce the ceiling to 30,000 for the fiscal year beginning 1 October, the lowest level since the resettlement program was created in the 1980s.

Its a disheartening week in the life of our country. The administrations announcement that we will only be receiving up to 30,000, down from 85,000 just two years ago, refugees is particularly sad given that refugees are indeed the most highly vetted group of people in our country and, therefore, pose little threat to our security and our way of life, said Charles Robertson, Canon to the Presiding Bishop for Ministry Beyond the Episcopal Church, who oversees Episcopal Migration Ministries.

Even this 30,000 number is a ceiling, not a target. Refugees are indeed the most highly vetted group of people in our country and, therefore, pose little threat to our security and our way of life.

Today, there are 25.4 million refugees worldwide, according to UNHCR, whose mandate is to provide international protection for refugees.

UNHCRs primary focus is on repatriation, or safe return home. When that is not possible, the agency helps refugees pursue citizenship or legal residency in the host country. The third option is resettlement to one of the more than 40 countries worldwide that accept refugees. Globally, less than one per cent of refugees receive resettlement. Historically, the US had led the world in welcoming refugees.

The US formalised its refugee-resettlement program with the Refugee Act of 1980 in response to the increased numbers of refugees fleeing communism in south-east Asia. Until then, churches sponsored refugees visas; but by the mid-1970s, that process was insufficient to meet the need.

The Episcopal Churchs involvement in refugee resettlement dates back at least to World War II, when churches sponsored refugees fleeing Nazi oppression. Beginning with the Presiding Bishops Fund for World Relief (now Episcopal Relief & Development) and later partnering with Church World Service, the Episcopal Church established Episcopal Migration Ministries in 1988.

EMM has resettled more than 90,000 refugees over the last 30 years. Previously, EMM had operated 31 resettlement affiliates in 26 dioceses, providing direct assistance to recent arrivals. More recently, the number has decreased to 14 affiliates in 12 dioceses, though EMM still plans to resettle 1,527 individuals in the current fiscal year.

The US resettlement programs goal is to help refugees establish new lives and become self-sufficient. Toward that goal, EMM partners affiliates, churches, government and nongovernmental organisations to provide services to refugee families upon their arrival in the United States. Such vital services include: English language and cultural orientation classes, employment services, school enrolment and initial assistance with housing and transportation.

EMM is one of nine agencies partnered with the US State Department to welcome and resettle refugees. Six of the governments resettlement partners are faith-based; the program has historically, for the most part, enjoyed bipartisan support.

As long as the EMM remains a government partner, we will continue to resettle refugees, and, in any case, we will continue to provide services to refugees, said Robertson.

The US Constitution guarantees religious freedom, and refugee resettlement allows those who would come to the US to live in safety and to practice their religion without persecution, said Rebecca Linder Blachly, director of the Episcopal Churchs Washington DC-based Office of Government Relations.

As a church, we have a particular interest in ensuring the freedom of religion for all people worldwide. This administration has spoken repeatedly about the importance of religious freedom, but we are seeing them step back from one of the most powerful ways that we can protect those who are persecuted or threatened because of their religious beliefs, said Blachly. As a nation, we have historically offered protection to those who are not safe in their countries. This dramatic reduction in the number of refugees  and systematic dismantlement of this successful program  will have grave humanitarian consequences.

President Donald Trump made curbing immigration a centrepiece of his election campaign, and his White Houses reductions to the nations refugee resettlement program show an interest in limiting more than just illegal immigration. The president determines the number of refugees allowed entry into the United States; for months administration officials have pushed for further decreasing the number of refugees admitted.

Slashing the refugee resettlement admissions number to a historic low is tied to this administrations efforts to clamp down on legal immigration, said Lacy Broemel, the churchs refugee and immigration policy adviser. This effort is having grave impacts on families and vulnerable persons. We urge members of Congress to do all they can to maintain or resettlement system, protections for asylum seekers, and compassionate solutions for all immigrants.
A small pod of orcas (Orcinus orca) near the Galapagos Islands was caught on camera as they pushed, spun and dragged sea turtles around as if the turtles were pool toys. Orcas are known to play with their food before eating, but this was likely the first time they've been filmed tormenting sea turtles.

Nicolas Davalos, a photographer and marine biology student in Ecuador, was in the area assisting with research when he and his colleagues spotted the group of orcas, also called killer whales, splashing around nearby.

"There was a lot of action and a lot of movement. Birds were flying around, so we thought [the orcas] were feeding," Davalos said. The researchers hopped in a small boat and motored over to the orcas for a better look. [Photos: Drone Reveals Killer Whales]

It was clear that the orcas were chasing something, Davalos said, "so I decided to go in the water." (Because what's there to fear from being in the water with one the oceans largest and most ferocious predators?)

Davalos dove into the water with his snorkel and a GoPro. "At the beginning I was wary, but then I just felt the killer whales knew I was there," he said. "They turned around a few times to look at me, but they were totally fine with me being there."

The orcas, he said, seemed far more interested in entertaining themselves with the sea turtles than they were with him. "They would run away with their turtle, like a dog with a bone," Davalos told Live Science. "They didn't want to share."

While this is probably the first time orcas have ever been caught on camera torturing helpless sea turtles, this kind of playful behavior is not unusual for the majestic carnivores.

"Killer whales will at times play with potential prey for a half hour or more, and then just move on, leaving the victim unharmed," Robert Pitman, a marine ecologist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Southwest Fisheries Science Center, told National Geographic.

"Other times, they will chase prey around and kill it but not eat it," Pitman said. "They're like cats in that way  can't resist the urge I guess."

"If you're a hunter, keeping a potential prey item alive for a long period of time  continually chasing down and catching it  is a good way to practice a lot of the skills that you might need later in life," Michael Weiss, a biologist and doctoral student at the Center for Whale Research, told National Geographic. Weiss added that younger orcas seem to play with their food more often than adults.

Very little is known about the orcas that frequent the Galapagos Island area, Davalos said, which makes his encounter even more special. He hopes the video entices people to support ocean research and conservation efforts.

"The oceans are full of opportunities to uncover beautiful and intricate mysteries," he said.

Original article on Live Science.
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How do you get rid of a dead whale? Not with a standard dumpster, as the city of Rye, New Hampshire, found out the hard way.

In a video posted on Twitter by a reporter at the New Hampshire Union Leader, the carcass of a minke whale flops ignominiously on the pavement after a forklift fails to maneuver it into a too-small dumpster. It looks like something for Fail Blog, but disposing of dead whales is serious business. That's even more relevant now, said Katie Pugliares-Bonner, a senior biologist and necropsy specialist at the New England Aquarium.

"There are currently unusual mortality events in our area involving three different species of large whales," Pugliares-Bonner told Live Science. Minke whales (Balaenoptera acutorostrata), humpback whales (Megaptera novaeangliae) and the North Atlantic right whales (Eubalaena glacialis) are all dying at abnormally high rates. North Atlantic right whales are endangered, with only about 350 estimated survivors. [In Photos: Tracking Humpback Whales in the South Pacific Ocean]

Whale disposal

When whale corpses wash ashore, biologists like Pugliares-Bonner want to examine them. Stranded carcasses are one of the few opportunities researchers have to get up close and personal with these giant, sea-dwelling mammals. Necropsies can reveal if the animals have tangled with boat propellers or fishing gear, or if they've succumbed to infectious disease, Pugliares-Bonner said. That information, in turn, goes to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to help inform conservation and wildlife management policies.

In fact, the minke whale that washed ashore in Rye was being put in a dumpster because it was being moved to an alternative site for a postmortem exam. After the failed attempt at transport Monday night (Sept. 17), state officials provided a larger dumpster on Tuesday morning to move the whale, according to the Union Leader.

Biologists never start a necropsy without a firm disposal plan in place, Pugliares-Bonner said. The cost of the disposal is typically the responsibility of the state or municipality where the whale washes up. Groups like the New England Aquarium Marine Animal Rescue Department and the Seacoast Science Center, which conducted the Rye whale necropsy, can provide expertise, Pugliares-Bonner said. After all, few people know how thick of a chain it takes to pull a 30-foot whale carcass across a beach, or can confidently remove a whale's head from the rest of its body to ease disposal.

Disposal options

In the ideal situation, a whale carcass washes up onshore in a place where there is enough land to conduct a necropsy and easy access for heavy machinery, Pugliares-Bonner said. Ideally, scientists will be able to start the postmortem within 24 hours or so of death, before rot sets in. In this best-case scenario  which "rarely happens," she said  the whale can be buried right on-site. [Whale Photos: Giants of the Deep]

Failing that, biologists often recruit the Coast Guard or a local harbormaster to tow the carcass behind a boat to a better spot. If the whale washes up or can be towed to a good place to do a postmortem but not a burial, it can sometimes be removed from the site piece by piece for disposal someplace else, Pugliares-Bonner said. In Massachusetts, Department of Fish and Wildlife official Tom French, who heads the state's Natural Heritage & Endangered Species Program, will sometimes work with marine nonprofits to remove and clean whale bones to be used as museum specimens, Pugliares-Bonner said.

When carcasses can't be buried on-site, they usually end up in landfills or composting centers. This can be complicated, Pugliares-Bonner said, because it's illegal to sell marine mammal parts, except in very limited circumstances. Thus, composting centers can't sell the composted remains of whales, though they still sometimes volunteer their facilities to break down the body anyway.

Just towing a whale carcass out to sea isn't usually an option, Pugliares-Bonner said, because the floating corpse can become a boating hazard, if it doesn't just float a few miles and beach at a nearby town.

"That's not a nice thing to do to your neighbor," she said.

But there are circumstances where a whale carcass is simply inaccessible. In one case, Pugliares-Bonner recalled, a 55-foot fin whale died and was floating in Boston Harbor. There was nowhere to tow the animal, so it simply bobbed around until a storm blew in and carried it to Rockport, Massachusetts. By that time, Pugliares-Bonner said, the whale was too decomposed to determine anything about its health or what killed it.

The past 45 days have seen three whale necropsies in the North Atlantic region from Maine to Virginia, Pugliares-Bonner said, plus two or three additional stranded corpses that washed out to sea before scientists could get to them.

"As long as this unusual mortality event is happening, and more whales keep dying," she said, "it's going to continue to be an issue that multiple towns are going to deal with."

Original article on Live Science.
The Coming Storm

In the hands - and voice - of Michael Lewis, weather forecasting becomes an unexpectedly rich subject with a fascinating set of heroes and villains. The audio-only book follows the strange career of former U.S. chief data scientist DJ Patil, a prankster turned mathematician and computer scientist who hacked into federal government computers to harvest previously unused data on weather, leading to an understanding of government-collected data as predictive tool. Also at large is Kathryn Sullivan, former astronaut and, under President Barack Obama, a high-ranking National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration official, who, after a deadly tornado in Joplin, Mo. in May 2011, initiated research into the human response to weather warnings. But the really big - and bad - news here involves Barry Lee Myers, chief executive of AccuWeather, President Trump's choice to head NOAA, under whose aegis the National Weather Service operates. It has been Myers' mission since the 1990s to make it illegal for the National Weather Service to issue forecasts except in emergencies, to make forecasts a paid service and to suppress the data from which they are drawn. Marketed forecasts, Lewis makes plain, are products dependent on data collected through the infrastructure and expertise paid for by U.S. taxpayers. Lewis ranges further here, too, revealing the increasing, Trump-propelled privatizing of public-funded data collection. (Audible, Unabridged, 2 1/2 hours)

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Safe Houses

After handing the job of reading his previous six audiobooks to six different people, Dan Fesperman has taken on "Safe Houses" himself, and turned out a truly outstanding performance. His voice has a background crackle - only to be expected in a former, hard-bitten international-affairs reporter (for the Baltimore Sun) - but it has a force and limberness that one does not normally find in authors reading their own work. Here he shepherds us back and forth from the double murder of a man and his wife on a Maryland chicken farm in 2014, to Berlin in 1979 where the motive is slowly uncovered. There we find the dead woman, Helen, at 23, aspiring to be CIA agent, but relegated to looking after the company's safe houses in Berlin. When she becomes accidental witness to the brutal rape of a female asset by her handler, Kevin Gilley, she reports the incident to her superiors - but it is she who pays the price. With justice on her mind and the aid of a couple of like-minded women, Helen slips undercover to expose Gilley and finds herself hunted by trained killers. Meanwhile, in 2014, her daughter, Anna, is determined to get to the bottom of her mother's killing - and finds herself marked for destruction. The novel is clever, character rich, and suspenseful, almost unbearably so toward the end when it wheels around to deliver a world-class stunner. (Dreamscape, Unabridged, 13 1/2 hours)

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The Secrets Between Us

It has taken a dozen years, but Thrity Umrigar has finally provided a sequel to "The Space Between Us," the hard-luck story of the domestic-servant Bhima and her granddaughter, Maya, who live together in the slums of present-day Mumbai. "The Secrets Between Us" brings solace for those who felt dismayed by its predecessor's ending, but it also provides enough backstory to stand on its own. The story moves outward to take in Parvati, an ancient, destitute woman whose father sold her into prostitution in her youth. Afflicted with a hideous tumor on her neck, she has a nihilistic outlook and a caustic tongue, barely surviving selling near-rotten cauliflowers. She and Bhima forge a prickly, mutually advantageous relationship, while Maya blossoms in a return to university and her friendship with two well-off, forward-looking women. Events unfold amid the cruel dynamics of the New India as market forces relentlessly crush the country's poor, gobbling up public spaces to create fortresses of privilege. Narrator Sneha Mathan has a low, pleasant voice and reads in calm, English-accented tones, giving a range of unobtrusive, Indian-inflected diction to the story's many characters. The novel's plot is wonderfully rich in details of material life, and, though filled with misfortune and cruelty, is, in the end, a heartwarming tale of friendship and courage, making it escape listening of a very high order. (Harper Audio, Unabridged, 12 hours)

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Powers reviews audiobooks for The Washington Post.
NEW YORK - Most artists are remembered piecemeal, some of their works more beloved and better known than others, and much of their production inevitably forgotten, suppressed or neglected. David Wojnarowicz, an artist who worked across multiple media and whose career was fast rising when he died of AIDS in 1992, has been remembered not just piecemeal, but for a tiny number of images and film excerpts that all seem to reinforce a caricature of his sensibility: an artist who was angry, sexually provocative and countercultural.

All of that was true, but insufficient. A comprehensive survey of Wojnarowicz's career at the Whitney Museum of American Art connects the fragmentation of memory to the violence perpetrated on gay people during the years Wojnarowicz was active, from the late 1970s until his death in New York age 37. By showing the richness, breadth and intensity of Wojnarowicz's full career, it underscores how relentless the demonization of his work has been, how that suppression operated while he was alive, how it continued after he died, and how tawdry, cruel, cynical and successful it was.

The most powerful moments of the exhibition have a moral grandeur rare in contemporary art, as it becomes clear that not only was Wojnarowicz fully cognizant of the tools being used against him, he made the onslaught the subject of his work. By encompassing and repurposing all the rage directed at him, he left a monument that indicts the cruelty of the Reagan years and the bitter vindictiveness of the Christian right, which is to say, a monument of enduring power and relevance.

It was easy to make Wojnarowicz seem a scary figure. Photographs of him, including those in which he self-consciously staged his artistic presence, show a long, gaunt face, often with a cigarette. One of the most famous images depicts his lips stitched together to dramatize marginalization and the battle cry of AIDS activists: "Silence equals death." Another shows him encased in the sun-crackled earth, staring with hollow eyes out of what seems to be a shallow grave. He and his friends were photographed in the derelict spaces where he cruised for sex, crumbling, barren rooms with graffiti on the walls, and a strong scent of the post-apocalyptic ruin that was the dominant urban flavor of New York in the 1970s and '80s. His spoken-word monologues, especially those made late in his life, sound like angry incantations, even though they are often remarkably wry and sardonic.

It is mainly this aspect of his Wojnarowicz's legacy that survived him, in large part because it served the homophobic purposes of the bigots who found his critique of America, religion and patriarchy intolerable. These pictures became visual shorthand and stood in for the whole of Wojnarowicz's legacy, which remained mostly invisible, including his symbolically charged and visually dense paintings, his street art, sculpture, photography and performance.

They were what circulated when the secretary of the Smithsonian, Wayne Clough, censored a National Portrait Gallery exhibition in 2010, forcing the removal of a film by Wojnarowicz, and they are among the first images that show up when one searches for the artist online. The imagery that had offended right-wing lawmakers and a fringe Catholic group - a brief scene of ants on a crucifix - was understood mainly through tendentious description, not in its context, and certainly without any background understanding of the artist's life and highly developed symbolic repertoire.

The exhibition follows his career from an early series of photographs made in 1978-1979, in which he photographed several friends posing in the gritty byways of gay New York wearing a paper mask with the face of Arthur Rimbaud on it. Wojnarowicz was inspired by Rimbaud and sensed an affinity between himself and the young French poet, whose affair with an older man scandalized France in the 1870s. The photographic series not only suggested a historical continuity to gay identity, it embraced an idea of the creative life as a kind of wandering and self-exploration unhindered by social convention or cultural restraint.

Maps were a recurring theme in the artist's writing and his art, including a 1984 painting and collage, "I Use Maps Because I Don't Know How to Paint." The title of the work seems to refer to some insecurity about Wojnarowicz's origins as a self-taught artist, but the image is a complex riff on the idea of sight and blindness, the accuracy of visual impression, and the metaphor of the map and mapping for the self and self-understanding. Meat and animal carcasses, Mexican motifs, money, the degradation of the environment, the beauty of insects and the frequent use of texts were common elements of his visual production.

Another common strategy was inserting small visual cells like thought bubbles, or ellipses, throughout his work. These sometimes contained images culled from or inspired by gay pornography, and it was these that Donald Wildmon, a right-wing religious crusader, seized upon in 1990, cropping them out of a catalogue published for Wojanorwicz's first retrospective and sending them as part of a mass mailing intended to inflame anger against the artist and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Wildmon's tactic was essentially the same as the one the Catholic League used 20 years later to inspire Clough's censorship at the Smithsonian: Fragment and decontextualize Wojnarowicz's work so thoroughly that there was no hope it could speak for itself. By then, Wojnarowicz had already lost his mentor and sometime lover Peter Hujar (a brilliant photographer who made some of the most powerful images of Wojnarowicz),to AIDS, and he, too, was sick. But he fought back, and won at least a symbolic judgment against Wildmon's American Family Association for defaming and misrepresenting his work (the exhibition includes the $1 check the AFA wrote to the artist).

Wojnarowicz was targeted not just because he was openly gay and included sexuality without shame in his work. He was articulating a new morality and a new sense of self, one based on the fragmentation that men like Wildmon would exploit. He sensed himself as multiple selves, thrown into a world that preordained a single, given moral code. His life's work was to create his own world, his own ethics of promiscuity and exploration, to make "my own order in it out of all the fragmentary stuff that surrounds us, that we call life."

Even in the Whitney's absorbing and comprehensive exhibition, it can be difficult to hear the decency and sensitivity of Wojnarowicz's promiscuous world-making. For that, it is worth reading an extraordinary 1978 letter Wojnarowicz wrote to his mother, a letter, it seems, he never sent. It is one of the most powerful documents of LGBT life ever written, in which he responds to his mother's fear of a growing "veil," or reticence, between them.

With great discretion, he alludes to his sexual and intellectual adventures, and how they lead to his "having more of an acceptance of characters and styles of living that seem to go against the established order of the church and society." And then he gently says he's sorry, not for who he is or what he has done, but for the inevitable pain he knows that it will cause her: "Now to place that confusion in your hands or heart could very easily create a concern or pain when connected to your possible hopes for me."

In his defense of promiscuity, not as an attack on society but as a form of social openness and discovery, there is a delicacy and fineness of sentiment that has been lost not just in the cultural memory of Wojnarowicz, but in the larger trajectory of LGBT assimilation. His feelings, and his art, would harden in later years, as his friends died, his body failed and he was subject to attack by bigots and opportunistic politicians. He ended as a fighter, but as this exhibition makes clear, that was only one of the several Wojnarowiczes who inhabited this world for just 37 years, and it is by no means the most dangerous of them.

The young man who loved Rimbaud, hated war, defended women and unapologetically slept his way through New York and Paris was far more of a threat, and that's why most people today still know only the angry artist losing his war against a virus.

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"David Wojnarowicz: History Keeps Me Awake at Night" is on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art through Sept. 30. For information, visitwhitney.org.
The League City police officer who shot and killed a man while executing a warrant on Wednesday has been identified by the police department.

Officer Shane Yount, a 12-year veteran of the League City Police Department, was placed on administrative leave pending a Galveston County Sheriff's Office investigation of the shooting.

Yount shot and killed Royce Leon Sedotal Jr., 49, on Wednesday at Sedotal's home on Waco Avenue. Sedotal had escaped custody after officers responded to a disturbance call involving an assault at his home on Tuesday night.

DOWNTOWN: Inmate dies of apparent suicide at federal prison in Houston

League City police officers searched for Sedotal unsuccessfully until making contact with a female occupant at his house on Wednesday.

The woman granted the officers permission to look for Sedotal inside, with the officers finding Sedotal hiding in a closet. Sedotal had escaped custody while still handcuffed but was no longer handcuffed when apprehended at his home, according to Sheriff Henry Trochesset.

Sedotal was instructed to come out of the closet, but he instead threatened the officers with a folding utility knife. This led to Yount firing his handgun at Sedotal, killing him, officials said.

The Galveston County Sheriff's Office was notified of the shooting at approximately 11 a.m. according to Trochesset.

Detectives from the Sheriff's Office Criminal Investigation Division and the Identification Bureau deputies responded to conduct an investigation of the shooting. Detectives interviewed witnesses spoke with neighbors, and collected evidence at the scene. The Galveston County District Attorney's office is also involved in the investigation.

After police left the scene of the shooting at Waco Avenue on Wednesday afternoon, a woman, Kenteena Wilson, exited Sedotal's house in tears. Wilson said she had been with Sedotal for four years but declined to comment any further.

DISCIPLINARY ACTION: Texas college responds to banner 'glamorizing rape culture' ahead of game

Neighbors said that Sedotal and Wilson had an occasionally tumultuous relationship, sometimes arguing within earshot of the neighborhood.

"They're usually really friendly hippie people, always outside planning and being silly, every now and then they would get in an argument and it would be big but it was never like this," said Miranda Sanders, who lived in an apartment complex across the street from Sedotal.

Sanders said her boyfriend saw Sedotal and Wilson while walking his dog, yelling and pushing each other in the early morning hours Wednesday.

"(My boyfriend) said they were really getting into it, they were really loud, I'm sure the cops were going to be called," Sanders said.

Sedotal was previously arrested in 2013 for causing bodily harm to a family member, after throwing a humidifier at a former girlfriend. He pleaded no contest to the charge, reducing it to a misdemeanor disorderly conduct charge, and paid a $100 fine.

Sedotal was also arrested in 2014 for evading arrest. He pleaded no contest and served nine days in jail.

The investigation, as is the case with all officer-involved shootings, will be referred to the Galveston County Grand Jury. It is the third officer-involved shooting in League City in 2018.

Nick Powell covers Galveston County for the Chronicle. Follow him on Twitter and send him tips at nick.powell@chron.com
Erika Pena had known Border Patrol agent Juan David Ortiz for about four months.

There was nothing unusual about him, and Pena knew he was in law enforcement.

So when he picked her up Friday on San Bernardo Avenue and paid her to have sex with him, she didn't think twice about it.

"Erika said he was cheerful," said Pena's aunt, Marcela Rodriguez. "I imagine he knew how to put up a front. She'd say that he was talkative and he would talk to her. Then when everything happened, Erika had never seen him react the way he did."

When Ortiz took Pena to his home, she brought up Melissa Ramirez, a friend of hers who was found slain Sept. 4. Ortiz appeared to become angry, Rodriguez said. Pena said she felt a "bad vibe," got nauseous and went outside to vomit, according to her aunt.

She then convinced Ortiz to go for a ride. While stopped at a gas station at about 9 p.m., Pena mentioned Ramirez again. Arrest affidavits state that Ortiz then pointed a gun at Pena in the vehicle, which was stationary. Pena managed to escape from the vehicle and sought help from a Texas trooper, who happened to be refueling at the gas station.

RELATED: Authorities release the name of fourth woman allegedly killed by Border Patrol agent

After investigators interviewed Pena, they issued a lookout at about midnight for Ortiz and his white Dodge pickup truck.

Two hours later, Ortiz was spotted at a gas station. He fled on foot to a nearby hotel, where he was arrested without incident. Investigators said he confessed to assaulting Pena and killing four women between Sept. 3 and Sept. 15. They have been identified as Melissa Ramirez, 29, Claudine Ann Luera, 42, Humberto Ortiz, 28, and Guiselda Alicia Cantu, 35. DPS released Cantu's name Wednesday. Her body was discovered at about 1 a.m. Saturday near mile marker 21 on Interstate 35.

Arrest affidavits state that Juan David Ortiz killed Cantu and Humberto Ortiz after Pena escaped from his vehicle. He faces four counts of murder. He was also charged with assaulting and unlawfully restraining Pena.

"This is the first time something like this happens to her," Rodriguez said. "I don't know what went through her mind at that moment that made her strong enough to get through this and escape."

Rodriguez said this is a difficult time for her family.

"It has been really difficult seeing her," Rodriguez said. "Erika is really traumatized. It's really difficult seeing her trauma. She doesn't want to eat. She always wants someone to be with her. She doesn't want to be alone because she's afraid.

"She's afraid because Juan David Ortiz knows where she lives."

RELATED: Candlelight vigil held for victims of suspected serial killer

Rodriguez said her niece hasn't left her house since the incident.

"She doesn't want to go out," Rodriguez said. "She won't eat. She hasn't slept. She screams every night. She thinks (Ortiz) is going to come to the house.

"(On Monday), (my niece) got out of the house. We were out on my porch and when she saw a white truck pass by, she began to scream, 'He's coming for me!'"

Pena was friends with the four victims, Rodriguez said. She was closest to Humberto Ortiz, a transgender woman whom she knew as Janelle. According to arrest affidavits, Ortiz would pick up the victims on San Bernardo Avenue, drive them outside city limits and shoot them in the head. He was not on duty and wore civilian clothes during the killings.

"We don't know what his motive was for committing this type of horrific crime," Rodriguez said. "No matter what these women worked in, no one deserves to end their lives this way. On behalf of Erika and all of our family, we send our condolences to all the families of the victims. Be strong. There are no words, but only God will heal them."

Rodriguez also asked that Pena be viewed as a victim.

"I don't want the community to see her as just a hero," Rodriguez said. "She is also a victim that thankfully was able to escape from the situation.

Rodriguez has created a GoFundMe page to help raise funds for Pena's psychological and medical expenses.
A man was shot dead and another was wounded Thursday in central Laredo near Zacate Creek, first responders said.

Laredo Fire Department crews responded to the shooting at approximately 6 a.m. in the 100 block of Reynolds Street. According to the Laredo Police Department, a 57-year-old man was declared dead at the scene. His identity has not been released, pending the notification of next of kin.
A Texas Department of Public Safety trooper was struck in the face with a pellet in the City of Encinal, about 35 miles north of Laredo, authorities said.

DPS Sgt. Erick Estrada said the incident occurred at about 2:05 p.m. in the intersection of Mesquite and Fresno streets.
The sexual assault accusation against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh is forcing its way into the midterm campaign, undercutting one of the GOP's strongest issues for its base and risking a further erosion of support from women and independent voters who will be crucial to deciding which party controls Congress after November.

Republicans have been treading carefully in dealing with the accusation by college professor Christine Blasey Ford that Kavanaugh attacked her while they both were in high school. That's been evident in the careful statements from President Donald Trump and GOP lawmakers as they try to give Republican voters the conservative court majority that they want while not antagonizing women, who polls show already heavily favor Democrats in the election.

Trump, who is known for delivering harsh rebukes to critics, had a mild reaction Wednesday morning as uncertainty swirled about whether Ford would testify at a Judiciary Committee hearing next week.

"I really would want to see what she has to say," Trump told reporters after saying the circumstances are unfair to Kavanaugh, who he called "an outstanding man."

Trump's nomination of Kavanaugh already had become a flashpoint for the November election, highlighting some of the nation's widest cultural divides. Polls show voters as split on Kavanaugh as they are on a variety of other political issues. A Sept. 10 Quinnipiac University national poll released before the sexual assault allegations were made public found that 41 percent of registered voters supported Kavanaugh and 42 percent opposed.

The fight over the nomination is taking place against the backdrop of the growing #MeToo movement against sexual harassment and misconduct, and a widening gender gap that is dragging on Republican candidates.

Six in 10 likely female voters said they prefer the Democratic candidate in their congressional district, according to a CNN poll conducted Sept. 6-9. By comparison, a plurality of men, 49 percent, said they preferred the Republican candidate. A Quinnipiac poll conducted at the same time found a similar disparity in preferences for Congress.

There is some peril for Democrats as well. Along with the gender gap, Republicans are suffering from an "enthusiasm gap" compared with Democratic voters heading into the midterms, said GOP strategist Ford O'Connell, who has worked on state and national campaigns. But that could be closed if the party's base views the 11th-hour allegations as an unfair tactic by Democrats.

"There is a a risk for Republicans if they appear to be insensitive to the accusations, especially among suburban women," he said. "but if this plays out as an ambush set up by Democrats, it will help Republicans in getting voters to turn out."

The political battle will play out in a handful of Senate contests on the ballot in November, but the impact may be wider in House races.

Democrats are counting on female voters and independents in suburban areas motivated in part by anger at Trump to help them flip control of the House and, potentially, the Senate. The party has recruited a record number of women for congressional races across the country who are central to that effort.

"This is just about the last issue Republicans wanted to have in the lead-up to the election, something that would upset women even more than they are upset," said Frances Lee, a government and politics professor at the University of Maryland. "You already had women fired up."

Lawyers for Ford have told the Judiciary Committee she wants the FBI to investigate her claims before she appears at a hearing. Chairman Chuck Grassley, an Iowa Republican, said it's up to the Senate to investigate, not the FBI, and that the invitation for Ford to testify on Monday still stands.

If Senate Republicans proceed on course to vote on Kavanaugh's nomination next week, the spotlight will be turned on a handful of senators from both parties who have remained publicly undecided.

Democratic Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota and Joe Donnelly of Indiana all are running for re-election in states that Trump won handily in 2016. They are wrestling with the prospect of rejection from core Democratic voters if they back Kavanaugh's confirmation -- and a riled up Republican base if they vote to defeat him. All three voted to confirm Trump's previous high court pick, Neil Gorsuch.

Democratic Sens. Claire McCaskill in Missouri and Jon Tester in Montana, two other incumbents running in Trump states, also will be in tough spots. All but Tester's race are rated as toss-ups by the independent Cook Political Report.

"Just having a new reason to vote against Kavanaugh does not make them safe at home," said Jennifer Duffy, senior editor at Cook. "For Republicans, the Supreme Court is right up there as the No. 1 or No. 2 issue."

The Supreme Court fight could also factor in races for Republican Senate seats targeted by Democrats -- those left open by Jeff Flake in Arizona and Bob Corker in Tennessee as well as in Nevada, where Dean Heller is running for re-election in a state won by Democrat Hillary Clinton in 2016.

Heller's challenger, Rep. Jacky Rosen, has made Kavanaugh's nomination and preserving abortion rights a campaign issue.

In Tennessee, Republican Rep. Marsha Blackburn, who is running for Corker's Senate seat, has called the revelation of Ford's allegation a "delaying tactic" by Democrats. She said on Hugh Hewitt's syndicated radio show that the Judiciary Committee should vote on Kavanaugh's confirmation as originally scheduled. Her opponent, Democrat Phil Bredesen, who was leading Blackburn by 5 points in a recent CNN poll, called for a careful review of the accusation.

"If U.S senators are not going to give a careful and thorough consideration of Supreme Court nominees, then I don't know what they think their job is," he tweeted.

The Arizona race for Flake's seat features two women seeking to move from the U.S. House to the Senate, Republican Martha McSally and Democrat Kyrsten Sinema. Both have said the allegations against Kavanaugh merited further investigation, according to an NPR compilation of reaction from candidates in competitive races.

The new hearing gives fence-sitting Democratic senators a reprieve for now: they can hold off on announcing a final decision before hearing from a quartet of Republicans whose votes are in play -- Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Flake and Corker. A yes vote could be less upsetting to the Democratic base if Kavanaugh already had 50 Republican Senate votes -- but that is looking far less certain in the wake of the allegation.

In the 51-49 Senate, two Republican defections would sink Kavanaugh if Democrats all vote no. Flake, who is retiring and has been at odds with Trump, is a member of the closely divided Judiciary Committee and said he will vote against Kavanaugh if he believes the allegations after the hearing.

--Bloomberg's Laura Litvan and Arit John contributed.
TOKYO - North Korean leader Kim Jong Un wants to hold a second summit with President Donald Trump soon to speed up the denuclearization process, South Korean President Moon Jae-in said Thursday.

Moon was speaking on his return to Seoul after a three-day meeting with Kim in Pyongyang. There, Kim promised to allow external inspectors into his country to verify that a missile test and launch site had been permanently dismantled, and he pledged to permanently disable an important nuclear site if the United States also takes "corresponding steps."

Trump responded Wednesday to news from the summit by saying he was "very excited," while Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said the United States was "prepared to engage immediately" with North Korea to move dialogue ahead.

Moon said Kim wanted Pompeo to come to North Korea as well.

"Chairman Kim Jong Un said he wants Secretary Pompeo's North Korea visit and a second summit with President Trump to happen at the earliest convenience in order to speed up the denuclearization process," Moon told reporters in Seoul.

Moon said Kim also told him that the closure of a nuclear weapons test site at Punggye-ri could be subject to international verification as well. He said he would discuss with Trump his and Kim's goal of formally declaring an end to the Korean War by the end of this year.

Moon's optimism about engagement with Kim contrasts with more cautious assessments among foreign observers of the regime. Very few of these experts believe that Kim is willing to surrender his entire nuclear arsenal, although some believe he might be prepared to reduce it in return for economic benefits and guarantees that his regime will not be threatened.

U.S. intelligence officials, meanwhile, believe the Kim regime has stepped up the production of nuclear fuel at several secret sites this year, according to an NBC News report in June. If true, that would seriously undermine the significance of the concessions Kim is offering.

Moon noted that Trump and Kim both made pledges at their June summit in Singapore. North Korea promised to take steps toward complete denuclearization and returning the remains of U.S. service members killed in the war, while the United States pledged to "end hostilities, guarantee the security of the regime and establish a new relationship with North Korea," he said.

"Such measures should be taken in a balanced manner between North Korea and the United States," Moon said. Speaking of the need for North Korea to take denuclearization measures, he said that "the U.S. should accordingly take corresponding measures to guarantee the security of North Korea step by step."

When asked what the corresponding measures would be, Moon said that needs to be discussed between North Korea and the United States.

Cheong Seong-chang, a North Korea expert at the Sejong Institute near Seoul, said the announcement shows that Kim has much more specific ideas now about denuclearization and what he wants in return. He added that the next summit, thus, should produce more specific results.

"The first meeting between Kim Jong Un and Trump yielded a rather general agreement, but now Kim seems to have a more concrete idea about what he wants to exchange with Trump," Cheong said. "Given how Kim recently suggested a specific timetable for denuclearization, a more concrete agreement than the one in Singapore is expected to come out in the next summit."

The Korean War ended in 1953 with an armistice rather than a peace treaty. North Korea wants South Korea and the United States to declare the war to be formally over, as a sign that hostilities have ended and to build trust.

"North Korea expressed their willingness to speed up their denuclearization actions if [the United States] takes actions to form a new U.S.-North Korea relationship," Moon said.

Members of Trump's administration are concerned that such a declaration could be used to undermine the justification for the presence of U.S. forces in South Korea, politically if not legally.

But Moon said the armistice agreement would remain in force until a full peace treaty is signed at a later date, once denuclearization has been achieved.

"The peace treaty will be fulfilled as the final step of complete denuclearization. Until then, the current armistice stays in place," he said. "The need for U.S. forces in Korea is not affected at all."

Moon said he and Kim had talked a lot about denuclearization and the dialogue between Pyongyang and Washington, especially on the first day of their summit Tuesday.

"Chairman Kim reaffirmed his strong will for denuclearization again and again," Moon said. "He expressed his intention to complete the denuclearization process as soon as possible and shift his focus to economic development."

- - -

Kim reported from Seoul.
U.S. petroleum producers have been allowed to sell their product unencumbered overseas due to a compromise between Democrats and Republicans in 2015.

Now, three years later, the two Senate candidates vying to represent a major oil-producing state are both trading swipes over the lifting of that long-standing ban on the export of crude oil.

With recent polling showing the North Dakota Senate race will be tight, there's been a heated back-and-forth between Republican Rep. Kevin Cramer and Democratic Sen. Heidi Heitkamp over who deserves credit for lifting the ban. Heitkamp is among the most vulnerable Senate Democrats up for reelection, and the Cook Political Report characterizes the race as a toss-up.

It started this week when Cramer released a television ad touting the role he played in repealing the oil-export restrictions imposed in the 1970s following the oil embargo from Middle Eastern nations and the subsequent spike in gasoline prices in the United States.

Since the boom in hydraulic fracturing nationwide over the last decade, the United States does not have enough refineries to process all the sweet shale oil extracted in recent years in North Dakota. So officials there and in other oil-producing states pushed for Congress to get rid of the oil-export ban so that crude could be sold and refined abroad.

"I helped lead the repeal of the oil export ban," Cramer says in his 30-second spot. "Now, foreign markets are open so that North Dakota can deliver energy to the world."

Lifting the ban, however, is an accomplishment for which many lawmakers in both parties give Heitkamp credit. The commercial drew a quick rebuke from Heitkamp's campaign, which put out a news release claiming Cramer took "credit for something he literally never did - that is, lead on lifting the crude oil export ban."

In an interview with The Washington Post, Heitkamp said she considers repealing the ban a signature achievement, one that she has featured in her own ads.

"It was kind of classic because all along Congressman Cramer, over and over and over again, claims to have done things that the facts don't support," said Heitkamp, who began publicly pushing for removing the ban since the summer of 2014 during a speech in Bismarck, North Dakota, and an appearance on CNBC's "Squawk Box."

"You'd be hard pressed to find anyone in Washington who worked on this issue who would say that he helped lead any of it," she added.

Cramer had co-sponsored pieces of legislation undoing the ban, beginning in late 2014. But Heitkamp's team points out that he was eventually one of 137 House members to sign his name to the bill.

In a separate interview, Cramer countered that no single lawmaker deserves all of the credit for the passage of a law. He notes that only the House, and not the Senate, ever passed a stand-alone bill lifting the ban.

"It's just peculiar to me that she's got this insecurity about my role in something that was so clearly my role," Cramer said, "almost as though I should be punished because there are 100 people smart enough in the House of Representatives to co-sponsor a bill."

Throughout 2015, Cramer penned commentaries and gave speeches on the House floor in favor of repealing the oil-export ban. At the time, his office touted his role in convincing conservative Blue Dog Democrats in the House to support the measure.

But at the same time that year, Heitkamp was widely credited by her colleagues for helping convince other members of the Democratic caucus, leery about increasing the amount of oil the nation takes out of the ground given its contributions to climate change, to go along with it.

Without Heitkamp, "I don't know that it would have happened," said Rep. Joe Barton, R-Texas, in 2015, according to Bloomberg Government. Sen. Lisa Murkowksi, R-Alaska, added that Heitkamp was "just dogged in her efforts to help educate her party."

Heitkamp and Murkowksi staff members began discussing lifting the ban shortly after the 2014 midterm election. The next year, Reps. Barton and Henry Cueller, D-Texas, approached Heitkamp about their efforts in the House to lift the ban too. She assured them "that she was going to help and going to lead on the Senate side," according to Cueller spokeswoman Olya Voytovich.

The crux of the compromise ultimately made between Democrats and Republicans, which came as a part of an end-of-year spending package in 2015, was a trade off between oil and renewable energy interests. In exchange for lifting the oil-export ban, the GOP-controlled Congress temporarily extended a series of much-sought tax breaks for individuals and companies that build and run wind, solar and other alternative energy generation.

With wind turbines sprouting up across North Dakota's gusty plains, both Heitkamp and Cramer characterized the compromise as a victory for the state.

Though even on that issue they traded barbs. Heitkamp suggested that her opponent's record of support for the state's wind energy industry was insufficient since he has pushed for an end to the wind subsidies that helped propel it.

"Congressman Cramer is not known as somebody who has been particularly helpful on renewable energy," she said.

In response, Cramer called lifting the ban and extending the credits "a win and a win" for the state. "What I liked about the renewable credits extension was that there's a permanent end to them, and a phase out that was negotiated with the industry itself," Cramer said. "But for that, it would have been a difficult one to swallow."
WASHINGTON - President Donald Trump lashed out at Congress on Thursday for failing to deliver his long-promised border wall, unleashing a tweet that accused Democrats of "obstructing" border security and demanded that "REPUBLICANS MUST FINALLY GET TOUGH!"

The trouble for Trump is that it's his own GOP allies - not just his political opponents - who have been standing in the way.

The same Republican lawmakers who rushed through the tax bill Trump wanted, confirmed his first Supreme Court pick and are fighting to defend his second, and have remained largely deferential amid multiple scandals, have taken a far different approach when it comes to one of Trump's most memorable campaign promises - deeming the wall to be impractical, unrealistic and too costly.

"People can climb over the wall or go under the wall or through the wall. We've seen that in different places," said Sen. John Cornyn, Texas, the No. 2 Republican in the Senate, explaining why a system of technology, infrastructure and personnel is preferable to a physical wall. "If it's just unattended without sensors, without technology, without people, then it won't work."

Another powerful Republican, Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Sen. Richard Shelby, Ala., said he told Trump that funding a 2,000-mile-long wall could jeopardize money for the military and other core programs.

"Some things are reachable and some things aren't," Shelby said he told Trump. "I'm committed to securing the borders, whatever it takes in this country; it's something we haven't done. But I'm also committed to funding the government."

The GOP's recalcitrance on the wall underscores the extent to which immigration and border issues continue to roil the party in the two years since Trump swept into office vowing to take a hard-line approach on the issue.

The idea of building a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border remains hugely popular among Trump's core supporters, with chants of "build that wall" still ringing out at his rallies, and numerous candidates in this year's midterms echoing Trump's rhetoric. In Florida, gubernatorial candidate Ron DeSantis released a campaign ad showing him urging his little son to construct a wall using building blocks.

But the issue is not as clear-cut for many other Republicans. Border state lawmakers face concerns from landowners and businesses that could be face disruption by the construction of a massive barrier. Others represent states and districts with large Hispanic electorates that could be turned off by the idea, while others say the idea of a big wall may be a nice applause line but risks funneling precious funds away from more essential government functions.

Behind all the rationalizing lies a hardening reality: Many congressional Republicans just aren't that into Trump's wall.

Now, Republican leaders are more focused on urging Trump to delay a fight for the wall than on fighting for it themselves. Congress is working to pass a short-term spending bill that would avert a government shutdown Oct. 1 and punt a showdown over wall funding into December, after the November midterms.

Republican leaders have been lobbying Trump to stick with their strategy, which would deliver a big increase in Pentagon spending. The president has speculated publicly that shutting down the government to get more wall money could be good politics, but Republicans fear a shutdown just ahead of the midterms would be disastrous.

No one really knows what Trump will do, and some White House officials have begun preparing a contingency plan for the partial shutdown that would occur if Trump vetoes the spending bill.

Trump is now being told by aides that he will get more wall money after the election - even though many in the White House are concerned there won't be the votes, according to a Trump adviser who spoke on the condition of anonymity to talk freely. Trump asks frequently what the strategy is for getting the wall money after the election.

"I want to know, where is the money for Border Security and the WALL in this ridiculous Spending Bill, and where will it come from after the Midterms? Dems are obstructing Law Enforcement and Border Security," Trump tweeted on Thursday.

Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., a Trump critic who is retiring, said the wall hasn't gotten done because "we have priorities here."

"As much as he wants to say I campaigned on this, this was the central pillar of the campaign, always attached to it was Mexico will pay for it. And they're not, of course," Flake said. "So now for him to come to Congress and say 'pony up,' Congress says no. We never agreed to this."

Administration officials acknowledge privately that there is no plan for how additional funding will be achieved after an election that could see Republicans lose seats in Congress or even their majority.

"I don't know that I see an answer after the midterms in terms of getting money for the wall either," said Rep. Mark Meadows, R-N.C., head of the conservative House Freedom Caucus. "Here we are almost two years into an administration, and significant funding has not happened. . . . Most conservative members are serious about it. I'm not so sure about some of the others."

Meantime, Trump continues to remind aides about the cheers the wall gets at rallies but has expressed concerns that his supporters are not seeing enough progress. "We have to keep saying the wall is already happening," the president said recently, according to the Trump adviser.

The president continually tells lawmakers the wall is a national security issue, and asks whether he can use defense money, according to a senior administration official who requested anonymity to speak freely.

At times Trump has demanded $25 billion for the wall, but a deal giving him that much in exchange for deportation protections for immigrants brought illegally to the country as children fell apart earlier this year, with Democrats blaming the White House and the White House blaming Democrats.

Trump's current ask for the wall is $5 billion for 2019, but Senate Democrats won't go along with that figure after striking a deal with Republicans to provide $1.6 billion for 2019, which was the original White House request.

Republicans including Shelby have tried to convince Trump that the lower number is the best they can do for now, and the issue will have to be worked out after the election.

But earlier this year Trump blew up at aides over the $1.6 billion, saying it was not enough. Former legislative affairs director Marc Short, House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., and others explained to him that it was what his own budget team asked for. Trump did not understand why they didn't get more - and seemed unaware of what was in his own administration request, according to the Trump adviser. The president has griped periodically about the Office of Management and Budget request.

Then, at a meeting with congressional appropriators in June, Trump demanded $5 billion, without a clear justification for the number.

Trump also has pressed Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., to eliminate or modify the filibuster rule that gives Democrats effective veto power over spending bills in the Senate, according to a second senior administration official. McConnell has disagreed.

Officials planned a trip to see prototypes to quell Trump's anger. Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, White House Chief of Staff John Kelly and others give him periodic updates with pictures.

"We haven't given up the fight. But if it keeps us from doing other things that are pretty important, like defending the country, then I think it's a fight not worth having right now," said Rep. Tom Cole, R-Okla., a senior member of the House Appropriations Committee. "Let's get these critical day-to-day functions of the government done, and the American people will be expressing an opinion in the election. We'll see where we're at when we come back."
A physician and a clinic owner from Houston each were sentenced to 35 years in federal prison Thursday for running a lucrative Gulfton pill mill that prosecutors said distributed more than 30,000 prescriptions for opioids.

Senior U.S. District Judge David Hittner opted for a sentence on the lower end of the range, according to one of the defense lawyers at the hearing.

A federal jury found the pair guilty following a nine-day trial in March. Both Dr. Gazelle Craig, 49, and Shane Faithful, 42, were convicted of conspiracy to unlawfully distribute controlled substances and three counts of unlawfully distributing and dispensing controlled substances. They both faced up to 80 years in prison.

In addition, Craig's medical license was suspended by the Texas Medical Board in 2017.

RELATED: Pair of Houston residents convicted for 'pill mill' that sold 30,000 illegal prescriptions

Jack Zimmerman, who represents Craig, said his client plans to appeal the verdict and the sentence. Craig's lawyer during the trial argued that the doctor thought she was following correct procedures for prescribing pain medication.

Craig told the judge Thursday that she regretted what took place at the clinic, and said she should have paid closer attention.

An attorney for Faithful could not be reached for comment Thursday.

According to testimony during the trial, between March 2015 and July 2017, Craig wrote more than 18,000 prescriptions for some 2.1 million doses of hydrocodone, and more than 15,000 prescriptions for 1.3 million doses of the muscle relaxant carisporodal at the pain clinic. The combination of the two medications creates a dangerous drug cocktail that does not have any medical benefit, witnesses said.

Faithful owned the Gulfton Community Health Center, that dispensed the pills. Craig wrote illegal prescriptions for up to 60 people a day as "crew leaders" delivered droves of customers to the Gulfton clinic. The duo charged $300 for each prescription, netting about $15,000 a day, according to testimony.

To keep the operation under wraps, the clinic banned electronic devices at the clinic and hired four armed security guards to manage the throng of addicts and recruiters, according to witnesses.

The case was investigated by the DEA and the Justice Department's Medicare Fraud Strike Force.

Gabrielle Banks covers federal court for the Houston Chronicle. Follow her on Twitter and send her tips at gabrielle.banks@chron.com.
Seamus Mac Aogain from Abbeyshrule is a long way from home but he has settled in Spain since moving there on Saint Patricks Day 2003.

And this Friday evening, September 21, his play - 'La Reina de Corazones' (which translates as The Queen of Hearts) will be performed in Agulo in the Canary Islands.

Agulo is situated on the small volcanic island of La Gomera and this has been home for Seamus, who is fluent in both Irish and Spanish, since 2016 when he moved from Madrid.

Far from home but always in his heart, Seamus has written books about growing up in the midlands.

His first book was entitled, The Road to Abbeyshrule and his second book, Tell Me Another, was launched in Madrid with friends and family who had travelled from Ireland.

The theatre tickets might not be expensive (5) but travelling to the Spanish island at short notice can be and there are no direct flights from Abbeyshrule airfield to La Gomera.

The island is accessible by ferry after flying to one of the other Canary Islands and according to Seamus Mac Aogain, it is well worth visiting. He is very grateful to the Mayor and Town Council of Agulo for their support and encouragement of the arts.

Seamus got involved with the literary scene on the island which had been in decline due to emigration to the Spanish mainland.

As a result, the Mayor, Rosa China has taken an interest in the play as a project and the cast have been preparing for the last two months with practice intensifying recently.

From one small island in the Atlantic to another, Seamus, after a lifetime in Athlone and Abbeyshrule, has settled on the island of La Gomera.

And while we normally talk about the luck of the Irish, it is time for the cast to break a leg or as the Spanish would say, Mucho Mierda.
Local News, Community, Charity & Cause, Health & Wellness, Press Releases

By Long Island News & PR Published: September 20 2018

As Congress mulls Supreme Court pick, Kaminsky and advocates demand NY legislature pass Reproductive Health Act to protect Roe v. Wade.

Long Island, NY - Sept. 20, 2018 - With womens rights under attack on the federal level, Senator Kaminsky, Senate Minority Leader Stewart-Cousins, local Advisory Committee member of Planned Parenthood Empire State Votes PAC JoAnn Smith and Long Island advocates rallied for the Reproductive Health Act: a law that will make Roe v. Wade permanently law of the land in New York.

Under current New York State law, a womans right to access a legal and safe abortion is not secured -- New Yorkers have no statutory protection if the Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade. The Reproductive Health Act (RHA) will fix that, ensuring Roe V. Wade is the permanent law of New York -- taking abortion out of the penal code and into the Public Health Law.

For years, New York State Senate Republicans blocked the passage of the RHA. Kaminsky is a co-sponsor of the bill.

New Yorkers have historically led the fight to protect womens rights, yet our current Senate leadership is putting those rights at risk, said State Senator Todd Kaminsky. With some much uncertainty in Washington, we must act now to ensure those rights arent lost here in New York. As State Senator, I have  and will continue  to fight for a womans right to choose. I am proud to have Planned Parenthood PACs endorsement and under Andrea Stewart-Cousins leadership, the Reproductive Health Act will become New York law.

Todd Kaminksy is a true champion for reproductive rights, said Minority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins. I need him in the Senate to help me stand up for choice and push back against the Trump Republicans assault on women's health. With Todd in the Senate and a strong progressive Democratic majority we can finally pass the Reproductive Health Act!

Our equality, health, and well-being face unprecedented threats and we know Senator Todd Kaminsky is committed to securing a better future for New Yorkers, said Robin Chappelle Golston, Chair of Planned Parenthood Empire State Votes PAC. With the Trump administration determined to roll back access to reproductive health care from contraception to abortion, the stakes for the 2018 general election could not be higher. Our New York legislators must fight to protect our rights and ensure that our government works for us and Senator Todd Kaminsky is our proven fighter. We must send Senator Todd Kaminsky to Albany to secure our health care and rights.

Senator Todd Kaminsky fights for the rights of all our community members and we are proud to have him as our state senator, said JoAnn Smith, local Advisory Board member, Planned Parenthood Empire State Votes PAC. Todd Kaminsky has always been a champion for women's rights and we need his energy, passion, and support in Albany, now more than ever. We stand with Senator Todd Kaminsky as he stands up for our equality and critically needed access to reproductive health care.
Now that weve had some time to digest Apples announcements last week, The Macalope wonders who we can, in hindsight, determine to be the real winner.

Writing for the Forbes contributor network and competitive fish slapping circuit, Ewan Spence finds Three Reasons The Nokia 5.1 Can Beat The New iPhone XR.

Sorry, the Macalope should have issued a spit take warning for that one. His bad.

Yes, turns out, Nokia still makes smartphones! Or, at least, it slaps its name on them. Who knew? Finland, probably.

So, in addition to hearing that Apple announced the iPhone XR, you might also have heard that Nokia launched a phone, assuming you are a fervent reader of Has-Beens Quarterly.

HMD Globals Nokia 5.1 handset  a mid-ranged Android smartphone from a beloved brand

Beloved by octogenarians of all stripes.

that is looking to capture a new generation of users.

This has been yet another edition of Thats The Joke!

Who are the two handsets fighting over, what do they bring to the table, and why are they a lens that brings into focus the Android/iOS dichotomy?

Ah, yes, the fight between the iPhone XR and uh um HMD Globals Nokia whatever.

Man, it was hard to write that without laughing. Thats what the ellipses are for. Thats where The Macalope was stifling a massive belly laugh.

Lets be clear here, for the slice of consumers who are already locked in to the Apple ecosystem, through the cloud based services, investment in apps, and personal circles that may require specific software commitments, the only real replacement for an iPhone is another iPhone.

News flash for Spence: some iPhone ownersyou might want to sit downactually just prefer them.

There really does seem to be a slice of punditry that believes the only reason people stick with Apple devices is because theyre locked in by services or peer pressure.

Id really love to switch to Android but Im a 35-year-old man and I dont need to get snicker-snagged on. Not again.

Inside the Android ecosystem its a bit more fluid. Changing between Android manufacturers is a much easier proposition

Even Spence realizes the only people who are going to consider this device already own an Android smartphone. And, yet, thats not the thrust of the article. Instead its this fictitious face-off between the iPhone XR and a Nokia-branded OEM device no one has heard of.

In terms of raw specifications the Nokia 5,1 is clearly a lower specced handset than the new iPhone machines.

But its cheaper. So, in other words, these are not really comparable devices at all and dont really compete against each other in any way.

thats when the challenge of the Nokia 5.1 to the new iPhones is clear.

Well, at least Apple had a good run.
As with clothes, the way you decorate a room expresses your personality. In its most ideal form, it signals to guests how you interpret yourself. In this round of Real Cool People, Real Cool Apartments, we check out the Brooklyn home of freelance creative consultant Casey Zhang. Our intentions behind the creeping: to learn what shes all about.

16 PHOTOS click for more

Neighborhood, # of rooms:

Im in a one-bedroom apartment on the border of Bed-Stuy and Clinton Hill in Brooklyn.

How long have you lived here?

A little over two years.

What do you like about the neighborhood? Has the neighborhood influenced the aesthetic of your home in any way?

Ive been in New York for over six years and Ive lived in the same half-mile radius the entire time. I love it here! You get the real Brooklyn experience with residential brownstones but you also have a lot of fun restaurants/cafes/bars that dont feel too stuffy or too cool. Its very diverse and its unpretentious. You dont need to look cute to get your coffee in the morning here.

Who do you live with (animals included)?

Myself, but a lot of my neighbors have dogs, so sometimes I pretend theyre mine.

What did you think about when decorating?

I moved around a lot when I was younger, so when I buy a new piece of furniture now, I try to consider how it could adapt to future homes. I like the flexibility of modular furniture for that reason. My couch is actually three separate pieces; in my old apartment, it was in an L-shape formation, and now its one very long unit (also convenient for sleeping extra-tall guests). When I moved into my current apartment, I had this idea for a low modular bookshelf, so my friend (the founder of Studio Snng) concepted a custom unit (its call the Casey Console!) that exactly fit the length of my wall (but also reconfigures to be two separate pieces or a stacked unit if I moved or ever wanted a change).

At what point in your life did you really start to come into your own in terms of your decorating style?

As a kid, I watched a lot of Clarissa Explains It All, and I dreamed about having her room. I remember sketching out the layout so I could model my own room to be more like it. I also had a phase growing up where I thought IKEA catalogs were the coolest thing ever and I would cut out and save favorite pages. Ive always been a geek about interiors but my style has evolved and continues to evolve.

What do you do for work?

I recently went freelance doing creative consulting, which is a vague way of saying I do a mix of art direction, content strategy and photography. Prior to this, I managed social media at brands like Etsy, Glossier and Urban Outfitters.

What do you think your home says about you? And how do you want visitors to feel when they walk into it?

Im pretty modest in the way I live. I dont indulge in lot of decorative stuff and most of the items in my home have some type of functional purpose. I dont like things to be too perfect or too precious but its definitely easier to be tidy when you dont have a ton of extra stuff.

Where is your favorite place in your home and why?

By the window in the early morning when the light starts coming in and you can see the glow across the Manhattan skyline.

What are your favorite home scores?

My favorite items are the things made by friends. The custom console, coffee table and nightstand were made by my friend at Studio Snng, and those are really special to me. I also have a bookstand, planters and coasters made by friends over at Chen and Kai.

Whats something about your home you want to change and why?

All the original light fixtures. I replaced the one in the living room with a Noguchi paper lamp, but I havent gotten to any of the other ones yet.

Whats something youve been looking for forever but still have yet to find?

A good desk chair (ideally vintage)! Now that I work from home more, I want something that is both attractive and somewhat ergonomic. My current one is neither.

Where do you look for decorating inspiration?

I like spending time in the interior design section of bookstores. I also do a lot of Pinterest boarding to catalog and save home inspiration.

Whats the best piece of decorating wisdom youve ever heard?

When you first move, resist the urge to go out and buy everything from one place (ahem, IKEA). Take your time finding pieces that are meaningful to you.

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Photos by Heidis Bridge.
Thousands of dead clams have washed up onto Revere Beach over the past several months, leaving a pungent smell in their wake.

Massachusetts officials spent the day Wednesday investigating the odd scene on the shore of Revere, taking samples of the Atlantic clams and burying them into the sand to clear the beach and diminish the rotting smell.

According to accounts on social media, the natural event has been taking place since late July.

Thousands of dead Juvenile Atlantic surf clams wash up on Revere beach, smelling like seafood left out in the sun  pic.twitter.com/hBRMdgpfj6  Julie Leonardi (@JulieLeonardiTV) September 19, 2018

The natural phenomenon has left some state experts puzzled. Crews from the Department of Conservation and Recreation and the Division of Marine Fisheries are investigating the matter, according to the Boston Globe.

Clams have washed up on the Revere shore following nor'easter storms in the past, though recent reports of hundreds of thousands of rotting molluscs on the beach are unique.

Bruce Berman, a spokesman with non-profit group Save the Harbor/Save the Bay, told the newspaper he believes the mass of clam deaths was tied to climate change. Some official investigation results are expected sometime in the coming days.
Three former lieutenants of the Massachusetts State Police have been indicted on larceny and fraud charges by a Suffolk County grand jury after an investigation by state Attorney General Maura Healey's office.

Among the three indicted is David Wilson, who is one of the six troopers facing federal charges in connection with the overtime scandal. All three were also commanders in their respective barracks.

All three former lieutenants are accused of being paid for working overtime shifts they never showed up to work. They are all members of the former Troop E, which was dissolved as the scandal unfolded.

MassLive first reported on Aug. 31 that Healey's office was convening a grand jury as part of the investigation into alleged theft of overtime money by members of the State police.

These are the first troopers to face state charges. Healey said more indictments are coming.

The Suffolk County grand jury returned indictments Thursday against Wilson, 57, of Charlton; John Giulino, 68, of Lanesborough; and David Keefe, 52, of Norfolk.

They are all charged with one count of larceny over $250 by single scheme, procurement fraud, and public employee standards of conduct violation.

They will be arraigned in Suffolk Superior Court at a later date.

"At the time of the alleged offenses, Lieutenants Wilson, Giulino and Keefe were supervisors in Troop E and responsible for overseeing criminal and traffic enforcement along the Massachusetts Turnpike," the attorney general's office said. "The AG's Office began an investigation into overtime pay at Troop E after a referral from MSP following an internal audit that revealed potential misconduct."

The investigation is separate from the federal case that led to six troopers being charged.

Wilson, Giulino and Keefe allegedly submitted claims for pay for overtime shifts they did not work or from which they left early.

State investigators say the three lieutenants skipped overtime shifts during the Accident and Injury Reduction Effort program, known as AIRE, in 2016. The program was created to deter excessive speeding and aggressive driving on the Massachusetts Turnpike.

In 2016, Wilson, who was a shift commander in Troop E's Duty Office in Boston, was paid $259,476, including $103,447 in overtime pay.

"According to the AG's Office, Wilson allegedly submitted fraudulent claims for pay for at least 180 hours of overtime, resulting in him obtaining at least $19,000 for hours that he did not work," authorities said. "Wilson allegedly regularly scheduled his overtime shifts directly before his regular shifts but submitted claims for both shifts so that he was double paid for a number of overlapping hours."

Giulino, the commander of the Westfield barracks in 2016, made $212,504 in 2016, which included more than $53,073 in overtime pay. Investigators say he submitted claims for pay for over 99 hours of overtime that he did not work. He was paid at least $10,000 for hours he didn't work, investigators claim.

Authorities allege he either did not work these shifts at all or left early from them.

Wilson and Giulino are accused of submitting falsified traffic citations to State Police in order to make it appear they issued citations during the overtime shifts.

Keefe, the commander of the Weston barracks, made $207,878 in 2016, which included $55,960 in overtime pay.

"He allegedly submitted claims for payment of at least 170 hours he did not work, resulting in at least $17,000 in overpayment," Healey's office said.

He is accused of leaving early or skipping shifts.

Healey's office said the overtime investigation is ongoing.

More than 40 troopers, some who were suspended or resigned, have been flagged in the overtime investigation. Federal and state authorities both conducted separate investigations.

The specialized patrols, known as Accident Injury Reduction Effort patrols, and X-Team patrols, are at the center of the investigations. State police audited the patrols for 2016 and discovered discrepancies between overtime pay and hours worked.

The audits expanded into 2015 AIRE and X-Team patrols and other patrols conducted by Troop E. Troopers are accused of skipping or partially working shifts and creating phony citations in order to cover up their activities.

Some troopers have pleaded guilty in federal court.

After the latest indictments, Col. Kerry A. Gilpin, superintendent of the Massachusetts State Police released a statement condemning the fraud and pledging that those who broke the law will be held accountable.

"Today's indictments stem from actions taken by the Massachusetts State Police to identify and hold responsible members of the former Troop E who had violated both the law and the code of conduct demanded by the Department and the public we serve. When State Police investigators first uncovered evidence suggesting overtime fraud, we provided that information to state and federal prosecutors for review, so that any members shown by the evidence to have broken the law would be held accountable. My leadership team and I will continue to reinforce a culture of accountability through several fiscal and operational oversight reforms that we are implementing. Conduct such as alleged in these indictments has no place in this department; rather, what should and does define us are the more than two thousand troopers who serve the Commonwealth each day with integrity, honor, and courage," she said in writing.
Before his arrest on charges of killing Weymouth Police Sgt. Michael Chesna and 77-year-old Vera Adams, Emanuel Lopes told friends "Martians had landed" and that he'd seen Jesus Christ, his defense attorney said Thursday.

"His mental health history is well-documented," Attorney Larry Tipton told Superior Court Judge Peter Krupp.

Tipton, who is looking for Lopes to be confined to a mental health institution as the case makes its way through the legal system, pointed to the 21-year-old Weymouth man once trying to cut his own neck.

Tipton claimed that before July 15, the day Lopes allegedly shot Chesna and Adams, Lopes' mother sought to involuntarily hospitalize him at South Shore Hospital. Tipton told the judge that South Shore Hospital decided against it.

"He was talking nonsense," Tipton said at Lopes' arraignment in Norfolk Superior Court. "He was videotaping himself talking nonsense."

Lopes, wearing an orange jumpsuit, pleaded not guilty to the various criminal charges and stared at the desk in front of him for most of the court proceeding.

When he was in the police car after the alleged shootings, Lopes was yelling in the backseat and banging his head on the Plexiglas, according to Tipton.

He was making so many "outrageous" statements that when he then calmly told the police officer that he'd been shot, the officer driving the car didn't believe him, Tipton said to the judge.

That morning, Lopes had been allegedly shot by one of Chesna's colleagues who arrived at the streets behind South Shore Hospital as Lopes was trying to make a getaway.

Tipton unsuccessfully pressed for cash bail with release to a secure mental health facility.

Krupp, the judge, cited the seriousness of the charges and ordered Lopes be held without bail. Krupp said Lopes may be evaluated for competency at a later date.

In pushing back against Tipton's claims, the Norfolk County prosecutor, Greg Connor, told the judge that Lopes' suicide attempt was five years ago and his angry outbursts inside the police cruiser could be attributed to getting shot.

The night before the July 15 incident, he'd been in an argument with someone he knew who was threatening him, Connor added. "There were people looking for him."

Connor noted that Lopes has family in Cape Verde and called him a "flight risk."

The next court date for Lopes is Nov. 30.
HOLYOKE -- A 22-year-old city man, arrested in Northampton last week and found to be in possession of nearly 10,000 bags of fentanyl-laden heroin, is suspected of funneling the drugs to Vermont, authorities said.

Luis A. Rodriguez was taken into custody last Thursday, according to a press release by the U.S. attorney's office in Vermont.

Rodriguez, at the time of his arrest, was in possession of 5,000 bags of heroin that later tested positive for the presence of fentanyl, authorities said. Another 4,880 bags containing the two drugs were found at his home in Holyoke.

Rodriguez is a suspected source of supply for heroin and fentanyl in Caledonia County, Vermont, authorities said.

The arrest came following an investigation conducted by members of the Vermont State Police Drug Task Force, Homeland Security Investigations and the FBI into the importation, sale and distribution of heroin and fentanyl in the Caledonia County area.

As part of that investigation, state troopers stopped Richard Trudeau, 31, and Julie Hurst, 40, of St. Johnsbury, Vermont, on Interstate 91 in Springfield, Vermont, on Sept. 6. A subsequent search of Trudeau and Hurst's vehicle yielded approximately 4,000 bags of heroin that later tested positive for the presence of fentanyl.

Hurst and Trudeau appeared in federal court in Vermont Sept. 7 before U.S. Magistrate Judge John M. Conroy. Rodriguez appeared in federal court Sept. 14 and Sept. 18 before the same judge. All were detained pending further proceedings in this case.

A number of agencies, including some from Western Massachusetts, were instrumental in the coordinated effort, authorities said.

They include: the Drug Enforcement Administration, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, Holyoke Police Department, Northampton Police Department, Easthampton Police Department, Massachusetts State Police, Hampden County Sheriff's Department, Hampshire County Sheriff's Department, Hampshire County Narcotics Task Force, and the FBI Western Massachusetts Gang Task Force.

U.S. Attorney Christina Nolan praised the collaborative investigation of state and federal law enforcement in Vermont and Massachusetts.

"These seizures of the deadly drug fentanyl potentially saved thousands of Vermonters. At the same time, our law enforcement community deprived a dangerous drug trafficking organization of nearly $100,000 in proceeds that would have been earned on the backs of the suffering addicted," she said.
Springfield's nonprofit organizations will soon get a boost from Carly Fiorina and the MassMutual Foundation.

MassMutual is working with Fiorina, the former CEO of Hewlett-Packard and 2016 Republican presidential candidate, to provide leadership training to charity and civic groups in the city, Fiorina and MassMutual said this week.

The foundation will help fund partnerships between Unlocking Potential, Fiorina's leadership development nonprofit, and local organizations. The initiative will be formally announced during Fiorina's appearance at Symphony Hall on behalf of the Springfield Public Forum on September 27, she said in an interview.

Fiorina's talk "Redefining Leadership," sponsored by MassMutual, will take place next Thursday at 6 p.m. as the Public Forum launches its fall speaker series. The talk is free and open to the public. There is also a post-talk dinner at MGM Springfield that will offer VIP access to Fiorina for Forum supporters, with tickets still available.

"We are focusing on the Springfield community," Fiorina said. "MassMutual understands they have a vibrant nonprofit community to tap into."

MassMutual plans to launch the program in 2019, the company said.

"We are looking forward to working with Carly Fiorina and her organization, Unlocking Potential, to bring a leadership development program to non-profit leaders in the local community that will maximize the impact of their work and ultimately help make Springfield a better place to live, learn and work," Dennis Duquette, Head of Community Responsibility at MassMutual and President of the MassMutual Foundation, said in a statement. "By investing in capacity building for nonprofit organizations, we will help them bolster their long-term, sustainable solutions and networks, which aligns with MassMutual's focus on broadening economic opportunities for families in the communities where we operate."

Details about the program and the amount of money the MassMutual Foundation is committing have not yet been released.

Fiorina, who led Hewlett-Packard from 1999 to 2005 after rising through the executive ranks at AT&T and Lucent, has turned her professional focus onto leadership training. Unlocking Potential has worked with nonprofits like the Easter Seals and Wounded Warriors to help those groups develop more effective leaders.

"Nonprofits are dealing with some of the most difficult and festering problems in our nation," Fiorina said. "And historically the nonprofit community has been in a position to make the same kind of investments in human capital that for-profit companies have."

Her message is inclusive, she said. While many people equate leadership with power or authority, it is a skill open to anyone in an organization, she said.

"Leadership is none of those things, although some leaders hold title, position or power," Fiorina said. "Leadership, fundamentally, is about problem solving."

She suggests there are four main characteristics of leaders, which can be applied to any organization: courage, character, seeing possibilities and collaborating with others while displaying empathy and humility.

Fiorina is also an advocate of diversity in the corporate and nonprofit worlds. Companies in the U.S. spend $8 billion per year on diversity training, yet board membership statistics for women and people of color have not improved, she said.

"We have loads of examples of work environments that are not only not diverse but are apparently toxic," she said.

Fiorina argues that diversity is not simply a moral or political issue. Rather, organizations need people with different perspectives to solve problems, she said.

"They think it's the right thing to do, it's a nice thing to do, but they don't think it's a necessary thing to do," Fiorina said. "But it's absolutely necessary."

MGM Springfield is the presenting sponsor of the Springfield Public Forum's fall speaker series, which will also feature talks by former U.S. Ambassador Nicholas Burns on Oct. 16 and CNN political commentators Alice Stewart and Bakari Sellers on Nov. 15 following the mid-term elections.
MONSON - A husband and wife were displaced and a puppy was killed in an accidental fire that heavily damaged a single-family home Wednesday.

The fire at 14 Highland Ave. occurred when a resident using a torch to repair a pipe accidentally set a wall on fire in the basement. The flames then quickly spread to the first floor of the house, Fire Chief Laurent McDonald said.

There was heavy damage to the basement, heavy smoke and some fire damage to the first floor and smoke damage to the second-floor bedrooms, he said.

The residents and two of their three dogs escaped safely, McDonald said.

The fire was reported at 2:27 p.m. Firefighters started pouring water on the blaze within six minutes of the original call and had the flames under control within 15 minutes. Firefighters remained on the scene until about 6:15 p.m. ensuring there was no extension of the fire and making sure the flames did not rekindle, he said.

"Everyone did a great job," McDonald said, thanking firefighters who responded under mutual assistance for their work.

Palmer Fire District 1 and Brimfield firefighters assisted at the scene and Wales firefighters covered vacant stations in Monson in case there were other calls. Monson police also assisted at the scene and closed the road to traffic while firefighters were working, he said.
Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey had the same message as her federal counterpart when it comes to indictments of State Police troopers embroiled in an overtime abuse scandal: More are on the way.

A Suffolk County grand jury indicted three former lieutenants on state charges, Healey's office announced Thursday. MassLive reported in August the grand jury was taking evidence. These are the first troopers to face state charges.

"We expect there to be more indictments in the future," Healey told reporters without offering further details.

David Wilson, a 57-year-old Charlton man, has also been indicted at the federal level as US Attorney Andrew Lelling conducts his investigation separate from Healey.

Healey's statement comes months after Lelling's office announced the June 27 arrests of three state troopers, including Wilson. Since that day, the number of troopers facing federal charges has grown to six.

Aside from Wilson, the other troopers indicted by the Suffolk County grand jury at the state level are 68-year-old John Giulino of Lanesborough and 52-year-old David Keefe of Norfolk. All three were supervisors.

"Particularly, when you're a supervisor, you know full well the rules and the policies and your obligations, and the oath that you're sworn to uphold," she said. "So it's very disappointing, certainly disappointing to see this kind of activity."

Healey said the three former lieutenants are accused of violating the public trust and "stealing, essentially" from state agencies and the taxpayers because they put in for overtime shifts they did not work.

"Right now the good news is this particular program that ran on the [Massachusettts] Pike has been shut down," Healey said. "It's stopped. These shifts are not being worked right now under that program."

As part of series of reforms in response to a series of scandals that have battered the reputation of the State Police, Gov. Charlie Baker and Col. Kerry Gilpin eliminated and dispersed Troop E to other barracks. Troop E was tasked with patrolling the Mass. Turnpike.

Baker and Gilpin have sought other reforms, including the activation of GPS in cruisers.

This post was updated with additional comments from AG Healey.
WEST SPRINGFIELD -- Anyone who visited the Massachusetts House at the Big E Thursday morning got a chance to speak with Secretary of State Bill Galvin or his staff about the upcoming election.

"I make it my business to be here every single year because it's a great event," Galvin said.

Visitors could also grab a copy of this year's ballot questions, which include three binding questions.

"Residents should be receiving these booklets in their homes over the next few days," he said.

Galvin said an important thing to note is that the booklets explain what a yes or a no vote means for each question.

"It can get a bit complicated, so I suggest voters read them carefully before going to the polls," he said.

Galvin said the booklet also includes a form for those who still need to register to vote.

"The deadline for voter registration is October 17, so there is plenty of time still to verify whether you are registered so you can cast your ballot on November 6," he said.

Galvin said early voting will be available again this year.

"We had it two years ago and it was very successful. Early voting will begin on October 22 and run through November 2. You can vote early without any reason," he said.
WARE -- A Minnesota company is promising the town about $112,000 annually for the next 20 to 30 years should the municipality approve an 8-megawatt solar facility near Beaver Lake.

The project is proposed on about 140 acres off Coffey Hill and Monson Turnpike roads. Ecos Energy says 55 acres of trees would be cut down to build the electricity-generating facility.

Nearly 50 residents attended a Ware Planning Board public hearing Wednesday. No decision has been made on the proposal.

In addition to site assignment and special permit approval from the Planning Board, Ecos must demonstrate to the town's Conservation Commission and state regulators that wetlands would not be impacted, and that any runoff from storms would be managed so that impact would be the same, or less than, current flows.

Ecos Project Developer Brad Wilson said the solar panels would not be visible to any of the nearby homes because "hundreds of feet" of "heavily forested" woodlands would remain between residents and the facility as a permanent buffer.

The acreage where the solar farm is being proposed was previously owned by the town, which took possession of it more than a decade ago when the previous owner failed to pay property taxes. The town sold the land to a developer in 2005 for $720,000.

Prior to the solar project coming before the Planning Board, a developer was granted permission by the board to construct about 50 homes on the site, but that project never began.

Residents and members of the Planning Board expressed concerns about the number of trees that would be cut, the impact on wildlife, and whether the property, after the solar farm is decommissioned in 20 to 30 years, would then be used to build homes.

Wilson said that less trees would be cut to build the solar farm than would have been removed for the subdivision. He said the company's research show there would be no negative impact on wildlife.

Wilson said Ecos plans to purchase the land from the current owner. He said Ecos would be willing to agree to "start from scratch" should the company, at some future date, decide it wants to build houses on the property -- meaning it would make a new application with the Planning Board.

Wilson told the Planning Board that, for the life of the solar installation, the company would agree to not use any of the land to build houses.

On Sept. 26 Ecos is scheduled to appear before the Ware Zoning Board of Appeals to apply for a variance needed to construct the solar farm.

The company submitted a notice of intent with the state Department of Environmental Protection on Aug. 22 for permission to alter 3,899 square feet of wetlands. The firm also met with Ware's Conservation Commission earlier this month to discuss the wetlands issue.

According to the secretary of state's corporate database, Ecos is not listed as a business in Massachusetts. Wilson told The Republican the company is based in Minnesota. Planning Board Chairman Richard Starodoj said he would research the matter.
SPRINGFIELD -- The Planning Board is recommending additional regulations for marijuana retail shops, including more protections for residential areas and at least a 500-foot buffer from day care centers and community centers.



The recommendations were approved Wednesday night by a 6-1 vote and forwarded for consideration by the City Council.

The council has a meeting scheduled Tuesday at 7 p.m., at City Hall to consider final passage of a zoning ordinance that will regulate recreational marijuana facilities in Springfield.

"It was a very difficult issue; it's still a difficult issue," said Gloria DeFillipo, chairwoman of the Planning Board. "I think the amendments were very thoughtful and respectful for the city of Springfield. I believe it will protect some of the abutters, prevent them from having marijuana shop next to them. Most importantly it protects the day care centers and community centers."



On Aug. 28, the City Council, by a 7-3 vote, gave first-step approval to an ordinance that will allow up to 15 marijuana retail stores in Springfield.





Under the proposed ordinance, the shops will be confined to business zones and industrial zones, and are limited to 58 streets citywide, including many major roads. The Planning Board agreed to those stipulations.

The list of roads was approved by the council after prolonged debate.

The Planning Board, in a proposed amendment, stated that no marijuana retailer shall be located on a parcel that abuts a residentially zoned property. The recommendations from the board are non-binding.



The council on Aug. 28 decided not to add any buffer area requirement between the shops and houses within those business zones.



Some councilors said they did not wish to be too restrictive and wanted to treat the shops like other retail stores, including package stores, which are allowed in business zones next to houses and across the street from houses. In addition, the councilors said that any marijuana shop would need a special permit from the council, and thus could be evaluated on a case-by-case basis to ensure their locations are appropriate, or if conditions should be attached.

In other proposed amendments, the Planning Board voted in favor of 500-foot buffers required between shops and day care centers and the same 500-foot buffer from community centers.



The proposed council ordinance already has a requirement for a 500-foot buffer between marijuana shops and public and private schools, from kindergarten through Grade 12, but did not list pre-schools.



Council President Orlando Ramos, appearing before the Planning Board ahead of its vote, said that a visit to Denver, Colorado by himself and some other councilors found that marijuana shops are not problematic and have strong security measures, as would be required in Springfield.



The shops will generate revenue for the city and jobs and can be properly regulated without being overly restrictive, Ramos said. He said buffers could lead to over-saturation of the shops in some areas, and no shops in large areas of the city.



Ramos said that if there were buffers required between retail businesses and houses in business zones, places such as the Eastfield Mall and Springfield Plaza would be prohibited due to nearby houses.



Other councilors said there should be some buffer for the protection of homes.



Councilor Michael Fenton, in comments repeated to the Planning Board, said the shops should not be less than 50 feet from where someone sleeps. He also raised concerns about there being no specific requirements for off-street parking spaces.



Fenton said that with a 50-foot buffer, there would still be 1,000 properties citywide where a marijuana shop could locate, and a 150-foot buffer would still leave 710 properties available. Fenton also argued that several surrounding communities are not allowing shops at all, and others have buffer requirements.



Others urging buffers for residential properties at Wednesday's hearing included Kathleen Brown, president of the East Springfield Neighborhood Association, and Walter Gould, president of the Outer Belt Civic Association. Gould also raised concerns about the impact the shops would have on property values, the quality of life, traffic, parking and safety.



Resident Victor Davila, while praising the economic benefits, questioned if the safety of such shops can be assured.



The Planning Board also recommended that the shops be allowed in the Riverfront Zone along West Columbus Avenue.



Planning Board member Martin Cunningham voted against the amended regulations on Wednesday, saying he believed there should have been a specific buffer distance between the future shops and houses.



The recommendations for changes were approved by board members Luca Mineo, Rosemary Morin, Rico Daniele, Jennifer McQuade, Chelsea Choi and DeFillipo.



Daniele said he is opposed to the recreational marijuana sales, believing it will lead to more problems and crime. He said sales should be restricted to medical marijuana.



"Sell it at the pharmacy, sell it at CVS or Walgreen's," Daniele said. "I kept opposing it from the beginning. How did we even get to this?"



The legalization of recreational marijuana was approved by voters in Massachusetts in 2016, including approval by Springfield voters.



In the council regulations, there are also provisions for cultivation of marijuana, research facilities, and other marijuana-based businesses beyond the retail sales.
AMHERST - The University of Massachusetts Amherst has been awarded a five-year, $3 million grant to implement new diversity and equity policies.

The large grant comes from the National Science Foundation, whose ADVANCE project seeks to fund inclusive policies that encourage larger amounts of women and minorities to join the scientific fields and industries.

"This highly competitive grant will be a tremendous boost for our continuing efforts to create a campus environment that supports the success of all members of our community," said UMass Amherst Chancellor Kumble Subbaswamy in a statement.

"I commend the faculty team for developing a winning proposal that envisions a new and bold way for the university to promote the success and professional growth of our faculty," Subbaswamy added.

The Institutional Transformation grant is believed to be the largest social science-led interdisciplinary grant ever awarded to UMass Amherst, said officials.

Studies show women are largely underrepresented in STEM fields (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) in most of the U.S.

Reasons for this disparity are controversial and debated. Many academics and activists argue that some amount of bias and sexism keep women out of the science classroom, while other studies paradoxically show that the more gender equality in a society the less interest women generally have in STEM fields.

Whatever the cause, academic institutions across the country have adopted equity programs that seek to increase the number of women involved in STEM.

ADVANCE seeks to "develop systemic and sustainable approaches to addressing faculty gender disparities across the sciences (including dynamics at the intersection of race and gender) and promote gender equity in ways that involve women and men," according to the UMass website.

The school's program will use what is referred to as the R3 model. This model uses "resources, relationships and recognition" to "encourage faculty collaboration and equity."

At the head of the project will be Enobong Branch, a sociology professor, the school's chief diversity officer, and an associate chancellor for equity and inclusion. Branch is responsible for ensuring that the practices put forward by ADVANCE are successfully integrated into the school as a whole.

The program is also being implemented in collaboration with the Institute for Social Science Research (ISSR).

The program will focus on three primary areas: encouraging research collaboration, the creation of an inclusive community through mentoring, and encouraging shared decision-making and governance at the department level.

The goal of fostering a less hierarchical institutional model is based on research that shows many women function better within companies with a "flatter management structure," where decision making is shared and less top-down, said sociology professor Laurel Smith-Doerr, managing co-PI and director of ISSR.

"We owe special thanks to the team of ADVANCE investigators who worked incredibly hard for several years to plan this project and secure the grant," says Provost John McCarthy. "Faculty leadership generated the innovative research ideas that will inform ADVANCE, and the engagement of members of the broader community and academic leadership will be key to its success."

"We're eager to move from planning to implementation," says Branch, "We're taking steps to ensure that we build sustainable structures that scaffold equity and inclusion into our faculty advancement culture."
AMHERST - The University of Massachusetts Labor Center is alive and well with a new director, full funding and a renewed commitment to train the next generation of labor leaders, even in a political climate that is less than labor-friendly.

Two years ago, the center's future was in doubt. Former Director Eve Weinbaum was concerned about a $30,000 budget cut and sent an email to alumni and supporters, who rallied around the center.

In December 2016, UMass agreed to "significant new investments" and a mutual understanding with Massachusetts labor organizations "about the value of helping to fund the internship program," according to a press release at the time.

After an interim leader last year, UMass hired Cedric de Leon as the center's new director July 1. With a doctorate in sociology from the University of Michigan, he is both a scholar and an on-the-ground organizer. Among his union activities, he was a member of the American Federation of Teachers Local 3550 at the University of Michigan, and later local union president.

"I'm happy to say that the Labor Center is in great shape and moving forward," Weinbaum said in an email. She is an associate professor at the labor center. "We are thrilled to have Cedric as our new director -- he brings expertise, energy, and a real vision for the Labor Center. His work on the origins of 'right to work' legislation is so relevant to our current moment."

Right to work means that everyone can work without being compelled to join a labor union.

Weinbaum also said "we have a wonderful group of students in the program now, and many of them are working for community-based organizations or unions on special projects that give them insight into the labor movement as well as valuable work experience."

De Leon said UMass is committed to the center for three years -- fully funding the six teaching assistant positions that were in jeopardy as well as providing tuition waivers for six internships.

UMass spokesman Edward Blaguszewski said "enrollment trends are positive and we are looking forward to the program's continued success in uniquely preparing labor leaders for Massachusetts and throughout the country."

Activists see labor as being under attack, with a recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling dealing a blow to the bottom lines of unions across the country.

This summer in a 5-4 decision in Janus v. AFSCME, the court banned the use of "fair share" or "agency" fees, which required workers in unionized workplaces to pay union dues even they choose not to join the union. The idea was that workers who choose not to join still benefit from the contracts negotiated by the union.

De Leon said the labor center is adjusting its focus and mission.

"We want to advance a vision that's more inclusive," he said. The labor movement is a "story of women, people of color (who have) been marginalized." He said the labor movement is embracing the idea that diversity is needed to "transform American society (to become) and economically democratic place."

And that means "learning a new way of organizing. We need diversity in our union leadership." And he said it means talking about tactical approaches to bolstering the movement while pushing against corporations and a Republican administration that does not support labor.

Despite the current political climate, de Leon sees a future in unions and said more people support unions than not. According to the Pew Research Center, 55 percent of Americans hold a favorable view of unions, versus 33 percent who hold an unfavorable view.

The labor center program includes Union Leadership and Activism, a limited residence program for people in the workforce -- about 40 students -- and a traditional master's degree program that includes 14 to 15 people, he said.

The programs offer a mixture of skill building on the ground level as well as academic pursuits. He said people come from all over the world to share what's going on their communities and mentioned graduate students from Cuba, Canada and Israel.

The center also sponsors conferences that draw hundreds.

"We had a terrific conference in March on the topic of 'Labor in the Time of Trump' -- with some of the most important labor scholars and activists giving thought-provoking talks," Weinbaum said.

She said more than 200 students, faculty, labor and community members "participated in important conversations about labor, resistance, organizing, and how to move a progressive agenda forward."

"The Labor Center is the most significant program of its kind in the US," said Jon Weissman, a community labor organizer with Western Mass Jobs with Justice, in an email. "Actually two programs -- for traditional and non-traditional students. Or three programs, if you count its role in the labor movement here in the Valley and beyond."

"It's a labor studies program that 'gets it' -- gets us, the workers and leaders who drive economic justice," Weissman said. "So its graduates join our ranks as staff and leaders. We love it."
WEST SPRINGFIELD - An elderly citizen was almost a victim of a new phone scam recently, this one connected to the Publishers Clearing House Sweepstakes.

The man told relatives about the call before any money was exchanged. They realized the caller was a fraud and reported it to officers, police said.

The man received a call from a person with the Kingston, Jamaica area code of 876 who claimed that the resident had won money in the contest but said he first had to purchase a $500 Amazon.com gift certificate and read the number over the phone, police said.

The victim instead withdrew $500 from his bank account and told the caller. The caller then said he would come to the resident's home to collect the payment, police said.

"No representative ever arrived at the target's home and no money was lost," police said.

Police again are warning residents about phone scams saying no legitimate people will ever ask for payment with gift cards, especially the IRS. They remind residents to talk to elderly relatives and friends who sometimes are more vulnerable to falling victim to the scams.
UMass Memorial Health Care entities will pay $230,000 to resolve a lawsuit filed by Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey after two separate data breaches exposed personal and health information of more than 15,000 residents.

Investigations by Healey's office revealed that the breaches exposed information including names, addresses, social security numbers, clinical information and health insurance information, Healey's office announced Thursday.

Two former employees UMass Memorial Medical Group Inc. and UMass Memorial Medical Center Inc. -- entities of UMass Memorial Health Care -- improperly accessed patients' personal and protected health information for fraudulent purposes, including opening cell phone and credit card accounts, Healey's office said in a statement.

A complaint by Healey, as well as a consent judgment in Suffolk Superior Court, were filed last week. Healey's office alleges the UMass Memorial entities violated the Consumer Protection Act, the Massachusetts Data Security Law, and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act when they failed to properly protect patients' information.

UMass Memorial allegedly knew of employee's misconduct but failed to properly investigate complaints related to the data breaches. The healthcare system also failed to discipline the employees in a timely manner or take other steps to safeguard information, the statement said.

UMass Memorial said it regrets that these incidents occurred.

"In the four years since they took place we have taken steps aimed at further strengthening our privacy and information security program," a UMass Memorial spokesman wrote in a statement. "This includes the implementation of additional technical tools that safeguard patient information, and enhancement of our existing privacy and information security procedures."

UMass Memorial said it cooperated fully with the attorney general's office to reach the resolution.

"Massachusetts residents rely on their health care providers to keep private health information safe and secure," Healey said. "This resolution ensures UMass Memorial implements important measures to prevent this type of breach from happening again."

As a part of the settlement, the UMass Memorial entities have agreed to conduct employee background checks and ensure proper employee discipline; train employees on the proper handling of patient information; limit employee access to patient information; identify and remediate potential data security issues; and promptly investigate suspected improper access to patient information, the statement said.

The entities will also be required to hire an independent third-party firm to perform a review of its data security policies and procedures, which the system will report to Healey's office.
Christine Blasey Ford, the Palo Alto University professor who has accused Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of attempting to rape her decades ago, is willing to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee next week, the New York Times reports.

The newspaper said it obtained an email from Dr. Blasey's lawyer, Debra Katz, which said her client would be prepared to testify in the coming week so long as senators offer "terms that are fair and which ensure her safety."

Republicans have pushed a Monday deadline to allow Blasey to speak. This week, news circulated about the professor's accusations: that Kavanaugh and a friend allegedly tried to cover her mouth and rape her at a party in high school when the two were both teenagers.

Blasey's attorney demanded the FBI investigate the claims of sexual assault first before any public or private testimony.

But there appeared to be a change of heart on Thursday, when Katz reportedly corresponded with aides to Senate Judiciary Committee members.

Katz said her client was open to testifying next week, according to the Times. She reportedly repeated a request for a thorough investigation prior to Blasey's testimony, but did indicate the professor would be willing to speak on her experience without a probe as well.

Katz also reportedly noted in her e-mail that Blasey has received death threats that have forced her and her family out of their home in California.
Massachusetts school districts have until the end of the month to create and publicize their policies on students who do not have money to pay for lunch.

"We're hoping by Sept. 30 they're aware they have this obligation to look at their policies and make accessible to parents what the meal policies are," said Pat Baker, senior policy analyst at the Massachusetts Law Reform Institute.

Baker has been advocating for schools to create more student-friendly policies. The issue gained attention in March when the Massachusetts Law Reform Institute published a report shedding light on the disparate practices across school districts when a student's family owes money for meals.

In some districts, a child whose family owes money cannot buy lunch. In other cases, a cashier will throw away the child's hot meal and replace it with a cold cheese sandwich.

The Massachusetts Law Reform Institute has been arguing for a change in policy to prohibit schools from denying a meal or substituting an alternate meal for students who cannot pay. The group wants to require school districts to seek payment from parents directly, rather than involving students.

"Our goal is to not to put kids in the middle of this issue in the cafeteria line where they're going to suffer embarrassment or go hungry," Baker said.

A bill that was filed after the report came out would have prohibited punishing students for meal debt. But that bill was filed late in the legislative session and never made it through the committee process.

Advocates for school business administrators and nutrition professionals raised concerns about families who can afford to pay for school meals but choose not to as long as the school is feeding their child.

Lawmakers did pass an amendment to the fiscal 2019 budget requiring school districts to publish meal charge policies and disseminate them to parents by Sept. 30. This could include publishing the policy on the school website or in a parent-student handbook.

Although the U.S. Department of Agriculture in May 2017 began requiring school districts to develop meal charge policies, the Massachusetts Law Reform Institute study found that 25 percent of districts did not have policies available and some policies that did exist were outdated or hard to find.



The Massachusetts Association of School Committees published a sample policy in July, which it distributed to school committees around the state.



The sample policy states that students would be allowed to receive a hot meal even if their family owes money, although those students could not buy a la carte items like snacks.

Payment notices would be sent to parents, not given to students. Parents with financial hardship would be encouraged to apply for federally funded free and reduced-price meals.

Glenn Koocher, executive director of the Massachusetts Association of School Committees, said the goal was to "get away from the punitive nature" of how some districts deal with economically disadvantaged children and ensure that students who are poor get help.

Koocher said the association does not always hear back from districts about what changes they have made. But he said typically, "many districts just take the model policy we give them."

Jake Oliveira, chairman of the Ludlow schools' policy committee and a former MASC president, said Ludlow made a few changes but mostly adopted the MASC's suggested policy.

"The policy on the books ensures no student would go without a meal regardless of whether parents are delinquent on funds for the program," Oliveira said.

Oliveira said the school district was already largely following the same policy, but the school committee codified it in writing. "It really isn't a change on the ground, it's much more a change in policy to ensure something is on the books for us and parents to follow," he said.

Other schools have made significant changes.



In June 2017, before the Massachusetts Law Reform Institute report was released, Amherst ended its practice of providing an alternate meal to students with debt.

This past summer, Framingham changed its policy to guarantee every student a meal, even if their family owes meal debt. Previously, a child could not get lunch once their family ran up a deficit of $10 in their meal account.

Metrowest Daily News reported that the school board is trying to figure out how to deal with a negative balance of $7,700 in its food services department after that policy change.

In Western Massachusetts, the Southwick-Tolland-Granville Regional School District does not have any policy on the books right now, but a draft policy is working its way through a school board subcommittee.

Stephen Presnal, director of finance and operations for Southwick-Tolland-Granville Regional School District, said the proposed policy would codify a shift that has taken place over the last few years.

The district used to provide an alternate meal -- a peanut butter or cheese sandwich -- when a child did not have lunch money. The last couple of years, the district started serving a regular hot meal to these children. The district would then reach out to the parents to get the debt paid.

Presnal said the shift was part of a national move away from "lunch-shaming."

"It's a shift to say in the actual cafeteria, you worry about feeding the kids, we'll handle any delinquency or collection issues at a school nutrition office level or a district level," Presnal said.

Presnal said districts do have to "have some teeth in our collection efforts" to make sure that food service programs remain financially self-supporting. So far, he said meal debt in the district has been slightly higher than it was before the policy shift, but it is still at a "manageable level."

Some districts -- including Holyoke, Springfield and, as of this year, Chicopee -- participate in a federal program that provides free meals for all students in districts with a high proportion of poor students. Those districts do not need meal charge policies.

The Massachusetts Law Reform Institute did a preliminary review of a dozen Western Massachusetts districts this month and found mixed results. Some districts still have no policy on their website. Others have not updated their policy in years.
A political advocacy group that opposes the pharmaceutical industry and prioritizes lowering drug prices plans to spend $500,000 to support Gov. Charlie Baker's re-election campaign.

"Governor Baker knows that skyrocketing drug prices are hurting patients across Massachusetts, and he's committed to taking action to provide relief," said David Mitchell, the founder of Patients For Affordable Drugs Action, in a statement announcing the campaign.

The group is an independent expenditure PAC, which means it cannot coordinate directly with Baker's campaign.

It is funded primarily by Action Now Initiative, a political advocacy organization founded by Laura and John Arnold.

According to a profile by the Boston Globe-affiliated health care publication Stat, the Arnolds are a Houston-based philanthropic couple. John Arnold made a fortune working for Enron before starting his own hedge fund focused on energy trading. Laura Arnold is a corporate lawyer.

Governing Magazine reported that the Arnolds' foundation spent millions of dollars on research and advocacy to reform public pensions.

Stat reported, in the March 2018 profile, that the foundation expects to spend millions of dollars in advance of the midterm elections supporting candidates who want to lower drug prices. The Arnolds have spent money lobbying for a proposed law in Congress that would stop the pharmaceutical industry from delaying the entrance of generic drugs into the market. They also support state-level reforms.

In a statement announcing the PAC's decision to support Baker's campaign, the group cites testimony Baker gave before a U.S. Senate committee urging Congress to increase competition from generic drugs.

It also cited efforts made by the Baker administration to limit the number of drugs that Massachusetts' Medicaid program will cover. State health officials had requested permission from the federal government to exclude certain drugs with "limited or inadequate evidence of clinical efficacy," and to maintain their own list of covered drugs, as long as it included one drug per "therapeutic class."

Baker officials said this would lower MassHealth costs.

Both consumer advocate groups and the pharmaceutical industry opposed the waiver, arguing that patients would lose access to vital medication. The federal government denied the request.

A radio ad being released by the PAC says Baker "is standing up to the drug companies, pushing for more competition, better access to cheaper drugs, a first-in-the-nation model to ensure we get the most cost-effective prescription drugs."

The PAC also plans to run digital ads and send direct mail.

At the same time, Baker has accepted thousands of dollars of campaign donations from people in the pharmaceutical industry, which has a strong presence in Massachusetts. Employees of the Boston-based Vertex Pharmaceuticals have donated more than $10,000 to Baker.

Employees of the Cambridge-based Biogen have given Baker $12,000. Employees of Pfizer, which is based in New York but has Massachusetts offices, gave $7,500.

Baker is facing Democrat Jay Gonzalez in the Nov. 6 general election. Both Baker and Gonzalez are former health insurance company CEOs.
Will honest Corbyn be brought down by Jews and MI5?

Jeremy Corbyn and his supported are far from convinced the Skrpials were poisoned by the Russians. The Labour leader thought it a good idea for Russia to be sent samples of the nerve agent to identify if it was their novichok that poisoned Russian military intelligence officer Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in spire-tastic Salisbury. Mindful of that, heres Andrew Murray, chief of staff at Unite and an adviser to Jeremy Corbyn, asking New Statesman readers: Is the deep state trying to undermine Corbyn?

The NS loves a conspiracy, so long as it think its readers will nod along with it. The highly plausible gets questioned, but the merely possible is accepted as likely. Only the other week, another Corbyn ally was just putting it out there that Israel had made Corbyn look like an anti-semite by, well, what, making him say things and hang out with Jew haters? Im not a conspiracy theorist, but said Mark Serwotka, who leads the Public and Commercial Services union.

And neither, one supposes, is Murray, who rolls his eyes at MI5 and writes:

Someone else is doing the hard work  possibly someone being paid by the taxpayer. I doubt if their job description is preventing the election of a Corbyn government, but who knows? We are often told that the days of secret state political chicanery are long past and we must hope so. But sometimes you have to wonder

Now, about that evidence

Anorak

Posted: 20th, September 2018 | In: News, Politicians Comment | TrackBack | Permalink
Report Description

This report analyzes the global bacterial cell culture market by consumables (media, reagent, flask), instruments (incubator, centrifuge, spectrophotometer), application (food testing, water testing), end-user (biotechnology companies); it also studies the top manufacturers in the market.

The major players in global bacterial cell culture market include:

Becton, Dickinson and Company

bioMerieux S.A.

Bio-Rad Laboratories, Inc.

Eiken Chemical Co, Ltd.

EMD (Merck) Millipore

Hi-Media Laboratories Pvt. Ltd.

Neogen Corporation

Scharlab S.L.

Thermo Fisher Scientific, Inc.

ScienCell Research Laboratories, Inc.

Culture Media & Supplies, Inc.

The market revenue and share have been analyzed with respect to the following regions and countries:

Americas

North America

U.S.

Canada

South America

Europe

Western Europe

Germany

France

Italy

Spain

U.K.

Rest of Europe

Eastern Europe

Asia Pacific

Japan

China

India

Australia

Republic of Korea

Rest of Asia Pacific

The Middle East & Africa

United Arab Emirates

Saudi Arabia

Oman

Kuwait

Qatar

Rest of The Middle East & Africa

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On the basis of consumables, the global bacterial cell culture market has been categorized into the following segments:

Media

Reagent

Flask

On the basis of instruments, the global bacterial cell culture market has been categorized into the following segments:

Incubator

Centrifuge

Spectrophotometer

On the basis of application, the global bacterial cell culture market has been categorized into the following segments:

Food Testing

Water Testing

On the basis of end user, the global bacterial cell culture market has been categorized into the following segments:

Biotechnology Companies

Research Methodology

The analysis is conducted by industry experts who offer insight into industry structure, market segmentation, technology assessment, competitive landscape (CL), and market penetration, as well as on emerging trends. Besides primary interviews (~80%) and secondary research (~20%), their analysis is based on years of professional expertise in their respective industries. Our analysts also predict where the market will be headed in the next five to 10 years, by analyzing historical trends and current market positions. Furthermore, the varying trends of segments and categories in different regions are estimated based on primary and secondary research.

Both the top-down and bottom-up approaches were used to estimate and validate the size of the market and to estimate the size of various other dependent sub-markets. The key players in the market were identified through secondary research, and their market contributions in the respective regions were determined through primary and secondary research. This entire process included the study of the annual and financial reports of the top market players and extensive interviews for key insights with industry leaders such as CEOs, VPs, directors, and marketing executives. All percentage shares, splits, and breakdowns were determined using secondary sources and verified through primary sources. All the possible parameters that affect the market covered in this research study have been accounted for, viewed in extensive detail, verified through primary research, and analyzed to arrive at the final quantitative and qualitative data. This data has been consolidated, and detailed inputs and analysis by added before being presented in this report.

Table of Content

Chapter 1. Report Prologue

Chapter 2. Market Introduction

Chapter 3. Research Methodology

Chapter 4. Market Dynamics

Chapter 5. Market Factor Analysis

Chapter 6. Global Bacterial Cell Culture Market, By Consumables

Chapter 7. Global Bacterial Cell Culture Market, By Instruments

Chapter 8. Global Bacterial Cell Culture Market, By Application

Chapter 9. Global Bacterial Cell Culture Market, By End-User

Chapter 10. Global Bacterial Cell Culture Market, By Region

Chapter 11. Company Landscape

Chapter 12 Company Profiles

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Global Orphan Drugs Market  Synopsis

According to a new report by Market Research Future, the global market for orphan drugs is estimated to reach USD 200 billion by the end of 2022. The market is estimated to expand at 11.56 % CAGR over the assessment period (2017-2022) owing to the unmet requirement for rare diseases.

Orphan drugs are generally used for treating rare disorders and diseases that affect a small percentage of the population. There are approximately 30 million in Europe, 30 million people in the US, and 350 million people worldwide who suffer from 7,000 types of rare diseases.

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Disorders among which four-fifths of the rare diseases are genetic and 50 % of the crowd affected being children. Only 5 % of the rare diseases had approved drug treatment with 326 new drugs being approved by FDA and brought to the market.

Future Drivers and Constraints Affecting the Market

Growing investment in R&D, unmet requirement for rare diseases, economic, legislative, and tax benefits offered by the government, high ROI, development of latest technologies like hybridoma, gene mapping, and DNA recombinant, extensive exclusivity, and faster uptake and low marketing cost are some of the major factors driving the market over the forecast period. There has been a growing demand for drugs for rare diseases such as Yellow Fever, Von Willebrand Disease, Aarskog Syndrome, Waardenburg Syndrome, diabetic macular edema, Abetalipoproteinemia, Autism spectrum disorder (ASD), Yellow Nail syndrome, Asperger syndrome, Von Hippel-Lindau Disease, and others which is contributing towards the growth of the market. Moreover, FDA free waivers, R&D grants by the government, favorable reimbursement policy along with premium pricing owing to the low competition also contribute the market growth.

Global Orphan Drugs Market  Competition Analysis

The key players operating the market for orphan drugs are Alexion Pharmaceuticals Inc., Bayer AG, Sanofi, Celgene Corporation, Novartis AG, Biogen Idec Limited, Hoffmann- La Roche, Takeda Pharmaceuticals Company Limited, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Vertex Pharmaceuticals Inc. Johnson & Johnson, and others.

Meanwhile, high cost of development, extensive post-market surveillance, costly clinical trials, monopolized and unitary market, concern over safety, competition from biosimilars and generics are some of the restraining factors inhibiting the growth of the market over the forecast period. Moreover, active distribution and commercialization can be hindered by differential availability of developing and developed countries, owing to socio-economic factors.

Global Orphans Drug Market Segmentation

Globally, the market for orphan drugs has been segmented on the basis of application, pharmacological class, source, technology, and region.

The market has been segmented into enzyme replacement, protein replacement, and gene chromosome expression based on pharmacological class.

The market has been segmented into oncology, blood-related disorders, neurology, nephrology, and infectious diseases based on applications. Among these, oncology is predicted to dominate the market owing to the increasing drug approvals for treating rare cancers.

The market has been segmented into Transgenic, DNA recombination, and gene expression based on technology.

The market has also been segmented into biological orphan drug and non-biological orphan drug based on source. Among these, biological orphan drug leads the market in terms of revenue and is predicted to maintain its dominance over the assessment period owing to the high efficacy of biologic products for treating diseases.

Global Orphan Drugs Market  Industry News

The FDA has granted orphan drug designation to Surface Oncologys lead investigational candidate SRF231 which is a potential treatment for patients suffering from multiple myeloma. The SRF231 is a human monoclonal antibody therapeutic targeting CD47, a protein overexpressed on cancer cells to prevent them from being eliminated and engulfed by macrophage-mediated phagocytosis.

North America to Dominate the Market

Geographically, the market for orphan drugs has been spanned across regions such as North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, Middle East and Africa.

North America has been estimated to hold the largest market share owing to well-established healthcare infrastructure, favorable regulations for drug approval for rare diseases, initiatives by non-governmental and governmental agencies to increase awareness related to use of orphan drugs, and drug exclusivity status received by orphan drugs. Moreover, US contributes substantially to the market which calls for strong R&D for development of orphan drugs.

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Global Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus Treatment Market  Overview

Type 2 diabetes mellitus is a metabolic disorder which results from an excess of caloric intake over energy expenditure. The condition is characterized by progressive insulin secretory defect, which increases the bodys demand for insulin in order to retain glucose homeostasis. Hyperglycemia is a major symptom of type 2 diabetes mellitus. According to the National Diabetes Statistics Report suggested by CDC, it is found that 9.4% of the U.S. population, i.e. 30.3 million people had diabetes in 2015.

It is noted that rising technological advancements and escalating prevalence are the key factors driving the type 2 diabetes mellitus treatment market. With the rising awareness about the condition, market players are coming up with novel drugs and devices owing to technological advancements. For instance, in December 2017, Novo Nordisk received FDA approval for Ozempic (semaglutide). The drug was specially designed for the treatment of type 2 diabetes mellitus. In the same year, Merck has also received FDA approval for Steglatro (ertugliflozin).

Various other factors such as growing awareness, huge research funding in diabetes diagnosis and treatment, unmet medical needs, increasing global prevalence of obesity, improving regulatory framework, increasing government assistance, and increasing adoption rate, are continuously contributing to the growth of the global type 2 diabetes mellitus treatment market.

Despite these drivers, there are some issues associated with type 2 diabetes mellitus treatment market. The high cost associated with diagnosis and treatment of diabetes, side effects of available treatment options, and poor healthcare system in low and middle-income countries may hamper the growth of the market to an extent. It is estimated that the type 2 diabetes mellitus treatment market is expected to grow at a CAGR 8.0% during the forecast period of 2017-2023.

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Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus Treatment Market  Leading players

Abbott Laboratories, Acon Laboratories, Inc., Adocia, Akros Pharma, Amgen, AstraZeneca, Bayer AG, Becton, Dickinson and Company, Biocon, Boehringer Ingelheim, Daiichi Sankyo, Eli Lilly, Merck, Novartis & Co., Novo Nordisk, Peptron, Pfizer, Roche Diagnostics Ltd., Sanofi, Sunpharma, Takeda Pharmaceuticals, and others.

Global Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus Treatment Market  Regional Analysis

The Americas dominate the type 2 diabetes mellitus treatment market owing to the presence of patient population, a well-developed technology, high healthcare expenditure, and the presence of the leading players. Due to the rising prevalence of diabetes, various companies, and government associations are actively participating in improving diabetes care. For instance, The Merck Foundation has provided funding of around USD 10,000,000 for the projects designed to improve diabetes care in the United States.

Europe holds the second position in the type 2 diabetes mellitus treatment market. It is expected that the government support towards research & development expenditure and amendments in reimbursement policies in the healthcare is likely to drive the European market. As per the German maternity guidelines, every pregnant woman can undergo glucose challenge test for the early diagnosis of Gestational diabetes mellitus, and the charges for the test are completely covered by womens health insurance.

Asia Pacific is the fastest growing type 2 diabetes mellitus treatment market owing to a huge patient pool, increasing demand, and development in healthcare technology.

The Middle East & Africa holds the lowest share of the global market due to low development, lack of technical knowledge, and poor medical facilities.

Global Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus Treatment  Market Segmentation

On the basis of the treatment, the market is classified as a drug class and devices. The drug class is further segmented into insulin, sensitizers, SGLT-2 inhibitors, alpha-glucosidase inhibitors, secretagogues, peptide analogs, others. The sub-segment of sensitizers includes thiazolidinediones and biguanides. The sub-segment of secretagogues includes sulfonylureas and non-sulfonylureas. The devices market is further segmented into blood glucose monitoring devices and insulin delivery devices. The sub-segment of blood glucose monitoring devices includes testing strips, lancets, continuous glucose monitors, self-monitoring blood glucose meters, and others. The sub-segment of insulin delivery devices includes insulin pens, insulin pumps, insulin syringes, and insulin jet injectors.

On the basis of the end user, the market is segmented into hospitals, clinics, diagnostic centers, drug stores, pharmacies, and others.

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TOC of Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus Treatment Market Research Report  Global Forecast to 2023

Report Prologue Introduction

2.1 Definition

2.2 Scope of the Study

2.2.1 Research Objective

2.2.2 Assumptions

2.2.3 Limitations

2.3 Market Structure

2.4. Market Segmentation

Research Methodology

3.1 Research Process

3.2 Primary Research

3.3 Secondary Research

3.4 Market Size Estimation

3.5 Forecast Model

Market Dynamics

4.1 Drivers

4.2 Restraints

4.3 Opportunities

4.4 Threats

4.5 Macroeconomic Indicators

TOC CONTINUED

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(ANSA) - Rome, September 18 - The newly crowned Miss Italy may be stripped of her title because of nude photos that appeared in magazine Oggi, sources said Thursday.

Organising company Miren said it had five days starting Thursday to deliberate on the matter.

Marche native Carlotta Maggiorana, 26, won the contest on Monday ahead of Campania's Fiorenza D'Antonio.

Chiara Bordi, an 18-year-old who was the victim of online haters after becoming the first disabled Miss Italy contestant, came third.

Bordi, from Tarquinia near Rome, lost her leg in a car crash a couple of years ago.


by Tanya Gazdik , September 19, 2018

Toyotas national marketing campaign for the 2019 Corolla Hatchback promises a vehicle that enables drivers to live in the moment and experience life to the fullest.

Creative highlights moments where Corolla drivers come together with friends and loved ones for adventures and great times.

Tablet down, lets go says the dad as the family preps for the road trip in one spot. They pile into the car and take off on an adventure. Before you know it, the tablet is forgotten, and life takes over. This family is living life Greater Than before.

The effort, which runs through Feb. 3, features six 30-second spots created for TV and digital placements, as well as a mix of 15-second and 6-second spots.

The campaign targets a transcultural audience with assets developed by three of Toyotas agencies of record, including Saatchi & Saatchi, Conill and Intertrend Communications.

advertisement advertisement

The three Saatchi & Saatchi spots directed by Jones + Tino, include Roots, in which a family experiences the joy of a spontaneous, fun-filled day, Pinata, where a group outing culminates with a birthday surprise and Scratches, inspired by an unanticipated journey off the beaten path.

Conills Anthem, directed by Albert Uria, celebrates individuality. Intertrends New Guy, directed by Lino Russell, features a hero pursuing an unconventional career path in eSports. Intertrends Catwalk, also directed by Russell, is inspired by the strong trend of start-ups.

The TV spots will air in select targeted cable programming across NBCU, FOX Networks, Viacom, Turner, A+E, ESPN, Telemundo, Discovery en Espanol, Univision and more.

Additional elements of the campaign include dynamic digital, audio, and print ads in Meredith, Hearst and Conde Nast publications. New integrated media partnerships include Oath, Imgur, Nacion ESPN, Billboard and the 2018 Latin American Music Awards.

Additionally, spots will air within select movie titles in theaters nationwide in conjunction with National CineMedia.

The automaker has three defined target demographics for the vehicle, says Sam De La Garza, senior manager, small car, vehicle marketing and communications, Toyota Motor North America.

For Generation X, we want this vehicle to be the perfect blend of excitement and versatility for this audience, he says.

For the second group, families with young children, safety is high on the list of priorities," he says. The Corolla Hatchback delivers a five-star safety rating along with practicality, excitement and freedom the driver craves.

Finally, for adults approaching or entering retirement age, the Corolla Hatchback meets this demographics need for practicality and reliability, but is also still fun to drive, exciting, and stylish, De La Garza tells Marketing Daily.
by Wendy Davis , Staff Writer @wendyndavis, September 20, 2018

Digital publisher BuzzFeed recently posted a shopping guide to skincare that recommended 32 products, including a St. Ives face cream.

The shopping guide's copy for the cream -- which included the statement that "collagen and elastin proteins in this formula help reduce the appearance of fine lines" -- drew the attention of the industry watchdog National Advertising Division, a unit of the Better Business Bureau.

The NAD asked BuzzFeed to substantiate its statements about the moisturizer's touted benefits. The shopping guide listed a total of 32 products, and also contained affiliate links -- meaning that BuzzFeed garnered revenue when readers clicked on links in the guides and then made purchases.

advertisement advertisement

BuzzFeed countered that the NAD lacks jurisdiction on the grounds that the shopping guide is an editorial product, not advertising. This week, the NAD said it agreed with BuzzFeed that the shopping guide was editorial -- which means that BuzzFeed has the free speech right to recommend or criticize products.

"The product at issue was chosen for its recommendation list by editorial staff without the input of business staff regarding the potential for affiliate link revenue," the NAD writes. "The retailer or brand did not have any say in whether the product was recommended or what was said about it."

The NAD adds that the brands listed in the shopping guide weren't allowed to revise BuzzFeed's content, and that affiliate links were only added after the guide was completed.

The decision appears to mark the first time the NAD has addressed whether the presence of affiliate links can transform editorial content into advertising, according to Terri Seligman, an advertising lawyer with Frankfurt Kurnit Klein & Selz.

In its decision, the NAD drew a distinction between material published with the motive of attracting readers and selling products. The group said that if a publisher's main economic motivation was to draw readers, the content wasn't advertising; if the primary purpose was to hawk merchandise, the content might be considered advertising.

Seligman says the decision offers "important guidance" regarding the line between editorial and advertising. "If youre a publisher and want to ensure that your editorial content is always considered as such, even if monetized with affiliate links, or if youre a brand and want to ensure that the editorial content youre sponsoring or advertising against is not treated as your advertising, especially if you're providing affiliate revenue to a publisher, make sure to implement policies and practices that demonstrate and support the traditional separation of 'church and state,'" she writes.
by Larissa Faw , September 20, 2018

Mcgarrybowen is appointing Mike Wente as Chief Creative Officer for swirl mcgarrybowen, the newly combined entity of San Francisco's legacy mcgarrybowen office with the recently acquired Swirl.

In his new role, Mike will lead creative teams to develop brand experiences for clients, including Intel, Clorox, Microsoft, Dole, Juniper, Conduent, CA Technologies, and eBay. He will serve as part of the San Francisco's leadership team and report to Ned Crowley, U.S. CCO mcgarrybowen.

Previously, Wente spent more than a decade at VML where he was named co-Chief Creative Officer, North America in 2017. During his time, the agency had significant business growth and creative success, including being ranked sixth among all agencies across North America at Cannes Lions this year.

He was also accountable for creative with the newly acquired Rockfish team in Cincinnati.

"We are fortunate to have found someone who is a digital native, but who is focused on meeting the challenges of our clients with ideas, not channels," says John Berg, partner at Swirl and current CEO of Swirl mcgarrybowen.

Mcgarrybowens acquisition of Swirl last December was designed to transform the well-known mcgarrybowen San Francisco agency from a heritage outpost to a 200-person strong fully-integrated creative and innovation hub.

Since the merger, the agency has landed business with Dole and Conduent, the business process outsourcing spinoff from Xerox.
Transcranial electrical stimulation is increasingly being used to boost creativity. A new article reviews the ethical, legal, and social implications of this phenomenon. Share on Pinterest Electricity can be used to give our brains the lightbulb moment. Creativity might seem like too spontaneous and too messy a process to be dictated by precise brain mechanisms that science can unravel. However, the latest advances in neuroscience prove that this is indeed the case. Processes that science may be able not only to understand, but also influence, underpin the seeming unpredictability of the creative process. For instance, we know that the brains default network is involved in daydreaming, or focusing on ones inner emotions and ignoring the outside world. Activity in this brain network may be responsible for the first stage of creativity, where idle, free associations and experimentation bring forth original ideas. Conversely, entering editing mode  where a creator might hone and polish an artwork, an article, or a song  requires the input of the executive attention network. Does having such neuroscientific knowledge help bring forth creativity, however? Can we potentially use neurological data and neuroscientific tools to cure writers block?

Can electricity be used to boost creativity? Some researchers think so. For example, Adam Green  an associate professor in the Department of Psychology at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C.  led a study that used a procedure called transcranial electrical stimulation (TES) to boost creativity. In TES, a weak electrical current is applied to the skull via tiny electrodes that are placed on the scalp for a few minutes. Such stimulation is thought to modulate neuronal activity and implicitly behavior. As a result, the technique has been used to help stroke survivors regain their motor and language skills, and to treat people with depression. However, when it comes to using TES not to rehabilitate but bolster a skill such as creativity, there is a range of ethical, legal, and social implications that must be addressed. A new article co-authored by Green highlights and explores these implications. Prof. James Giordano, chief of the Neuroethics Studies Program at Georgetown University Medical Center, is the senior author of the article, which was published in the Creativity Research Journal.
Tiger Shroff might not have a plethora of hits under his belt but he surely has a reputation of a successful star and that is why everyone is betting their money on him.

After the raving success of 'Baaghi 2', rumour has it that the action hero has apparently caught Hollywood's eye. According to a report in Mumbai Mirror, Lawrence Kasanoff, producer of the 'Mortal Combat' series, flew down to Mumbai to seal the deal with Tiger for a prestigious project. Along with Larry, a big studio head, some of their associates and Emmy Award-winning writer Sean Catherine Derek of the Batman series had also flown to India. Sanjay Grover, who has been a part of the project for the last one year, was also present at the meetings. Larry shared the script of his film with Sanjay who suggested they bring on board a fresh new face to play the lead and strongly recommended his childhood buddy Tiger with whom he had studied in school. Larry and his team were impressed with Tiger who they felt has an international look, is trained in martial arts, has a large fan following and has age on his side, as per the sources.

The source further added that This could be the biggest break for an Indian actor in a big budget, mainstream Hollywood film which could spin into a worldwide Intellectual Property Franchise like Mortal Kombat. Casting an Indian actor in the main lead in a Hollywood film is a first for Larry too. Tiger is currently gearing up for'Rambo' and knowing his existing skills, we are pretty sure the man can give any action dude a run for his money.
When one internet challenge ends, another one begins, it's like a never-ending cycle.

We finally got done with the overrated 'Kiki Challenge' and collectively decided that we can't stand the song 'In My Feelings' anymore, but another new challenge is here to take its place. But, at least this one isn't that life-threatening so that's a win. Yay!

Everyone is familiar with the upcoming movie 'Sui Dhaaga' and even if you aren't, you definitely have seen the infamous Anushka Sharma meme from it everywhere.

 Twitter

Yep, this one.

Well, I guess Anushka Sharma and Varun Dhawan wanted to shift all the attention from memes to something that would show the movie in a better light. The easiest way to do that? Challenge all the fellow actors to do something simple yet difficult at the same time.

Side note  I would like to apologize for the overuse of the word 'challenge'.

Okay, the challenge (oops) is quite simple  just thread a needle and obviously you only need two things, 'sui' and 'dhaaga'. Geddit? Geddit?

So, here's the video posted by Varun asking everyone to participate in this challenge. Both the stars of the movie also nominated Shah Rukh Khan and Akshay Kumar.

Akshay Kumar was the quickest to take on the challenge but was he the quickest to thread a needle?

Best line from the video  Isse acha building se jump marwane ka challenge rakh leta, woh asaan tha yaar.

Also, sorry Akshay, you just couldn't find the hole.

Next were Alia Bhatt and Aditya Roy Kapoor with a 10 second competition.

And, Alia for the win!

There was another competition between Ranbir Kapoor and Karan Johar. So much concentration!

Well, looks like couples who thread together, stay together.

Both of them also nominated Ranveer Singh and Deepika Padukone so keep an eye out for their video, I have a feeling Ranveer will most definitely take up this challenge.

And now, we've faced the best one for last. Here's SRK being a smartass and completing the challenge without any difficulty.

@AnushkaSharma challenge done my way. Love u and all the best for Sui Dhaaga. May everyone's hard work & belief be appreciated and rewarded. pic.twitter.com/Nc1xb3Jlx6  Shah Rukh Khan (@iamsrk) September 19, 2018

He really is, hands down, the wittiest person in Bollywood.
Usually, when there are manufacturing defects in products, their value decreases - or at least so we thought. But things in fashion work differently, as we have always maintained.

The biggest proof of this is a pair of Nike sneakers, that costs a whopping $146,000, which when translated to INR, is more than a crore. Take a look at the pair.

 Instagram/highsnobiety

This pair of 'Reverse Shattered Backboard' Air Jordan from Nike costs a bomb because of a manufacturing defect, which is the presence of a reverse swoosh. Usually, the signature swoosh in the Nike branding is always upright, but in this case, it is upside down. A lucky mistake?

 Instagram/highsnobiety

Andrea Canziani, a sneaker enthusiast, ordered this pair online, and when the shoes arrived, he discovered that one had the swoosh in reverse. The pair, a US size 7, meant hitting the jackpot for him.

Usually, a factory flaw translates to lowering down of the product's price, because of obvious reasons. But in this case, it transformed this pair into a collectable, thereby rendering it expensive beyond sale logic.

Earlier this year too, a similar incident had happened, where a pair of Nike Air Jordan 'Gold Toe' arrived with a similar flaw. That particular pair sold for a rumoured $96,000 (around INR 69 lakhs).

Well, all we can say is that, fashion works in mysterious ways!
Apple announced the new iPhone last week and the XS and XS Max go up on sale from tomorrow, September 21. The new iPhone XS starts at US$ 999, while the XS Max starts at US$ 1,099, and despite this heavy price tag, people are queuing up a day in advance to get their hands on the new Apple product.

According to the Strait Times, insanely long lines have already formed outside 270 Orchard Road, Singapore.

Apple has been expecting a high demand for its new product and hence, has already set up barricades and a queuing system outside their stores.

Each person can buy up two phones and are given a wristband which lets them leave the queue for 30 minutes.

In the last few years, a new trend has started of people lining up to buy these phones at market rates, and then immediately resell it ahead at a higher rate. The demand from the rich, including celebrities and businessmen, is unprecedented, and obviously, they don't want to queue up.

 Wikipedia Commons

People even fly down to Singapore from India, Vietnam and other neighbouring countries, so that they can buy the phone at the international rate and bring it back. This way, under the presumption of personal usage, import duty can be avoided.

The iPhone XS starts at INR 99,900, leaving behind a fair amount of margin for profit.

A 44-member Vietnamese group called Dat Cay Da had flown to Singapore to specially buy the phones. A few members told the Strait Times that this is their yearly activity now. Obviously, the crowd also consists of hardcore Apple fans who want the bragging rights of having the new iPhone first.

Used to queue up for the latest iPhone but haven't since the 6. Mostly because: pic.twitter.com/EC21PvioSy  Richard Moynihan (@richjm) September 13, 2018

On a lighter note, Deliveroo, an app-based food delivery business has said it'll deliver food to those who are waiting in the line outside the Apple Stores. The hype is real, and last year's iPhone X sales data proves that a higher price of the phone has no effect on sales whatsoever.

 Reuters

In fact, the iPhone X has received splendid reviews as well as sales numbers. The number of people waiting in line has often been a point of comparison among companies and helps in estimating the demand.

Source: Strait Times
(ANSA) - Rome, September 20 - A young Pakistani woman, Menoona Safdar, who was forced against her will by family to leave her studies and life in Italy to travel to Pakistan for an arranged marriage is returning to Italy after asking her old school for help, Italian Foreign Minister Enzo Moavero Milanesi said Thursday.

Moavero expressed "great satisfaction" at the outcome of the case and said Safdar had already boarded a flight for Italy and was travelling back.

The Italian foreign ministry said "the positive outcome, which ended a grave violation of the fundamental rights of the young woman, was rendered possible by the personal involvement of the minister" and the "effective action of our embassy in Islamabad, in close contact with the Farnesina (the foreign ministry)".

The 23-year-old Pakistani woman had sent a letter to her old school in the northern Italian city of Monza to ask for help, saying she was forced to return to Pakistan by her father to marry a man chosen by her family.

In the letter, sources said, the woman wrote that her father didn't reveal to her the real reason why he had taken her back to their country of origin until they had arrived.

"Please help me, my future is in Italy", the young woman reportedly wrote, saying her documents were confiscated by family members upon arrival. "My father forced me to leave before I could finish my fourth year" of high school and "I know one of the professors was asking where I was".


(ANSA) - Rome, September 20 - Italy is finally poised to launch a mission to Niger to stem the migrant traffic there, Defence Minister Elisabetta Trenta.

"We've done it: after eight months of impasse we have unblocked the mission to Niger to control migrant flows!" she said on Facebook. The mission's goal will be to "stem, together with the Niger forces, trafficking in humans and migrants who cross the country to then head for Libya and finally embark for our shores," Trenta said.


ROME - Premier Giuseppe Conte said after an informal EU summit in Salzburg Thursday that a deal on migrants was still needed.

He said "we told each other that we have to reach conclusions" on migrants because "the more we delay the more we'll all get into difficulty".

There were no winners in the recent standoff between Italy and EU over the case of the migrants rescued by the Diciotti coast guard ship, Conte said.

"The Diciotti case sees us all as losers," Conte told reporters. "If European wants to have an immigration policy, this means defining a strategy, revising the Dublin procedure and quickly pursuing new mechanisms of collective management featuring solidarity".

Conte said that "stopping at voluntary contributions (on migrants) is not a goal we are aiming at". He said "we should think of incentivising and disincentivising mechanisms." The premier also said "Italy's position on the Frontex project is that is certainly can have a role but boosting Frontex up to 10,000 men also raises problems about the usefulness of such an investment". He said "I'd prefer these investments to be destined for Africa", and explained "there's also a political problem, it is clear that a similar deployment of men poses an issue of sovereignty. "All member States are jealous, it's clear, and Italy is no less so".
IAE chief heads to Moscow for talks on downed jet Russian embassy in Tel Aviv warns Israel

(ANSAmed) - TEL AVIV, SEPTEMBER 20 - Israel's aviation chief, General Amikam Norkin, on Thursday is travelling to Moscow to present to Russian authorities a report concerning an incident in which a Russian military plane was shot down off Syria's coast on September 17 by Syrian anti-aircraft batteries during an Israeli incursion.



The military chief and his delegation - a military spokesman said - will present the findings of an investigation carried out by Israel, together with updates on the ''constant attempts by Iran to transfer strategic weapons to terror organization Hezbollah''.



Israeli Premier Benyamin Netanyahu is thus attempting to contain what local press reports have described as ''the most serious crisis between Jerusalem and Moscow over the past three years'', since the start of Russia's military intervention in Syria.



Meanwhile, the Russian embassy in Israel tweeted on Thursday that ''Moscow views as irresponsible and unfriendly actions of Israeli Air Force, which exposed Russian Il-20 aircraft to danger and led to the death of 15 servicemen''. The embassy also said through its Twitter account that, ''Russia would take all necessary measures to eliminate threat to life and security of our military fighting against terrorism''. (ANSAmed).




Hamas calls for stepped-up 'March of Return', media To pressure Egypt and Israel for fresh truce talks

(ANSAmed) - TEL AVIV, SEPTEMBER 20 - Hamas plans to step up demonstrations for the Friday 'March of Return' along the border between Gaza and Israel. Media reports say that the move aims to put pressure on Egypt and Israel to resume talks - put on hold these weeks - on a truce between the parties involved. The halt to the talks is linked to ''an explicit threat made by Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas to Egypt, saying that truce at in Gaza ()without the PA's involvement, will result in the PA's complete withdrawal of monthly payments transferred to the strip'', reports Ynet. Another Hamas-backed March of Return protest is planned for Friday along the Gaza-Israel border. (ANSAmed).




KINDE  A fire at a home located at 175 John Street caused nearly $40,000 in damage.

According to Kinde Fire Chief Adam Zimmerman, firefighters were called to the home around 3:45 p.m. Tuesday, after the homeowner's son got home from school and discovered smoke and some flames coming from the upstairs of the home.

A total of 25 firefighters were able to contain the fire to the second level, which sustained a lot of smoke and water damage. Kinde firefighters received a full assist from the Port Austin Fire Department and were on scene for around two hours.

Zimmerman said the cause of the fire was electrical in origin and no one was home at the time. The home is owned by Wayne Kinney.

With help from the American Red Cross, the family will be staying at a local hotel while the home is repaired.

Also assisting on scene were the Central Huron Ambulance and Huron County Sheriff's Office.
BAD AXE  Renewable energy and the Huron County Master Plan dominated discussion this week at the Huron County Board of Commissioners meeting.

The board received a $24,500 bid this week from an acoustics company to do sound testing of wind turbines.

ABD Engineering & Design submitted a new proposal, which addressed the boards wishes in terms of how long the tests would run and how they would be monitored.

Three property owners in the county have complained about noise from nearby turbines, which will be the focal point of the testing.

County Building and Zoning Director Jeff Smith presented the board with the new bid at Tuesdays meeting.

If the cost exceeds the estimate, written board approval for further expenditures will be required.

Smith said qualified personnel would monitor the test two hours. Monitoring equipment will also be left onsite unmanned for two weeks.

The steps ABD will take in testing the turbines are as follows:

 Meet with Smith to discuss the project.

 Visit the site and install equipment for monitoring sound.

 If insufficient data is gathered due to conditions such as weather, another location will be selected at an additional charge.

 Download and analyze the data.

 Submit a report to the county.

Ground level wind speeds would have to be less than 11 mph for the data to be valid, Smith said.

Officials will do their best to hit a timeframe for the tests in which crops have been harvested, leaves have fallen and there is no snow flying or frozen ground for the best ambient conditions.

Theres still a chance to have some delay in this test because of weather, Smith said.

Smith said he plans to get permission to do the testing in writing from each of the three complainants, which will allow testing to be done on their property.

Commissioner John A. Nugent questioned whether the wind energy companies would have knowledge of the test before it takes place.

The companies are aware that the county is contemplating the test, Smith said.

We wanted to try to do it without notifying them, he added. But theres the difficulty of we need the turbine data. But we could do the test without them, and then after the fact ask them for that data.

Nugent replied: I just dont want someone to come back later and say, They were aware of it. They shut the turbines down to a certain speed ... 

Smith said the turbine data could be analyzed according to wind speeds after the test to see if that were the case.

If theres some fuzzy math there, we could figure it out, Smith said.

I would be in favor of asking for the data after the test, Commissioner Todd Talaski said.

The developer would have to be involved, Smith said, if wind speeds are high and ambient conditions exceed the threshold of 45 or 50 dB(a) with or without turbines running.

In the event that the observed ambient measurement over that two-week period is higher than 45 or 50, what the ordinance requires is the turbine on-off sequence, Smith said. And we would have to involve the developer for that ...

He later added: Its not as cut and dry as people want it to be.

If conditions are not right, it could lead to more costly testing.

Commissioners are expected to vote on a resolution accepting the bid at its next meeting, which is scheduled for 9 a.m. Tuesday in Room 305 of the Huron County Building.

Update on master plan

In other business, county Corporate Counsel Stephen Allen addressed recent legal issues brought to light with the Huron County Master Plan and the countys 2015 Wind Ordinance.

He is hoping for a response from Clark Hill PLC this week regarding the cost of a legal opinion. If he hears from the firm, a resolution will be placed on the agenda for next weeks meeting for approval of the outside legal opinion.

Smith said the master plan approval would be delayed until after that opinion is received.

Allen recommended last week the board get the opinion because language in the master plan and wind ordinance might conflict with state law.

The master plan states any future wind turbines must comply with the countys current (2015) ordinance  even if the original turbines were built under the 2010 ordinance.

That would mean increased setbacks, and fewer turbines.

Allen previously said: We're going to run up against a potential major liability when we get to the point where we tell them (developers) that theyve got to meet the standards. And those standards would be increased setbacks and other provisions which theyre going to argue are exclusionary.

At Tuesdays meeting, Allen said there are leases between developers and landowners that are multi-generational and open ended, and dont necessarily end in 20 or 30 years.

That means as long as the wind turbine is useful mechanically, its use continues indefinitely.

Solar energy restrictions in master plan

Commissioner Steven Vaughan took issue with some of the master plans language regarding solar energy facilities being built on PA 116 land, which is enrolled in the states farmland preservation program.

The master plan discourages pulling land from PA 116 to be developed for commercial solar energy production.

The (PA 116) contract is between the state of Michigan and the landowner, Vaughan said. The county has nothing to do with that.

Vaughan suggested Allen look at the master plan language.

Smith said hes heard of farmers who want to do the following:

Say, if they have two 40 (acre plots), ones in (PA 116), ones out. Theyll take the one 40 they want to put solar on, say its in 116. Then theyll take the other 40 and put a permanent conservation (easement) with the state, and then the state will release the other.

Famers can reportedly make more money off commercial solar energy installments than they can farming.
Connecticut voter preference is swinging slightly more to Ned Lamont, according to a new Sacred Heart University/Hearst Connecticut Media Group Poll that shows the Democrat with a 6.2 percent lead over Republican Bob Stefanowski.

The telephone survey of 501 likely voters between Sept. 12 and 17 indicates a slight increase over the 3.9 percent lead Lamont held in the days after the mid-August Democratic primary. Lamont has 43.1 percent to Stefanowskis 36.9 percent, the new survey finds.

The poll also shows a major gender gap, with more than half of women voters voicing support for Lamont, compared to 36.5 percent backing Stefanowski. More than 43 percent of men surveyed support the Republican, compared to 37.8 percent who back Lamont.

Unaffiliated voters have swung slightly toward Stefanowski, however, with 36.5 percent supporting him now, compared to 29.8 percent last month.

The new survey finds than more than 16 percent of voters are undecided. Without mentioning other candidates, including Oz Griebel, an independent, the poll says someone else gets 3.8 percent of the vote.

Our poll results show that Lamont enjoys a 6 percent lead over Stefanowski with likely voters, said Leslie DeNardis, executive director of the SHU Institute for Public Policy and director of the universitys master of public administration program. It is important to note that six weeks out from the election, significant numbers of voters are still undecided (16.2 percent), particularly the unaffiliated (28.6 percent), making this gubernatorial race highly competitive.

DeNardis said the candidate who can offer the most-workable solutions to the states problems will have the edge in November.

Throwing jabs

Kendall Marr, Stefanowskis spokesman, said it is plain that the race is close.

The number of voters who are troubled by the tax policies put forth by (Gov.) Dan Malloy and Ned Lamont creates a real opportunity for Bob to win this race, Marr said in a statement. We expect the remaining undecideds and a substantial number of Democrats to break our way as voters have a chance to compare Ned Lamonts plans to raise income taxes and continue Dan Malloys policies versus Stefanowskis plan to cut taxes for every single Connecticut resident.

Marc Bradley, Lamonts campaign manager, said that while polls are interesting, Election Day will be the only one that matters.

More Information See More Collapse

Ned is on the road across Connecticut every day, talking with voters about his plans to cut middle-class property taxes, create jobs and expand workforce training to get our economy moving again, Bradley said in a statement. Neds positive vision is an enormous contrast to Bobs plan to rip more than half of the states revenue out of the budget in the middle of a fiscal crisis, which would gut education, drive up health care costs and cause property taxes to skyrocket.

The poll indicates that voters also intend to vote for Democrats in all five congressional races, by 45.3 percent to 32.3 percent. Unaffiliated voters support Democrats for Congress by 36.5 percent to 30.2 percent, the poll finds.

Candidate Total Democrat Republican Female Male College Degree No degree Ned Lamont 43.10% 79.30% 8.80% 50.50% 37.80% 46.20% 39.40% Bob Stefanowski 36.90% 5.60% 78.60% 28.50% 43.40% 35.30% 39.40% Someone else 3.80% 3.50% 3.10% 4.70% 3.10% 3.40% 4.40%

Taxes and tolls

The land line/cellphone poll, performed by GreatBlue Research, has a margin of error of plus-or-minus 4.32 percent. It finds that voters who describe themselves as likely to vote on Nov. 6, have a 31.7 percent favorable rating for Lamont, compared to a 30.5 percent for Stefanowski. The Democrat and Republican have unfavorable ratings of 34.3 percent and 29.9 percent, respectively.

The major issues affecting voter preference is the states high overall tax burden, and the state budget crisis, by 23.2 percent and 22.8 percent, respectively, the poll shows.

More than 52 percent of the voters surveyed support the creation of highway tolls that collect significant amounts from interstate trucks as well as out-of-state and in-state motorists. While the August poll found 66.3 percent support for higher income taxes for those with incomes of more than a million dollars, now only 61.3 percent would agree with the proposal.

Coincidentally, while 30.5 percent of voters approved of President Donald Trumps performance in August, that number has ticked up slightly, to nearly 34 percent.

Gov. Dannel P. Malloys 15.9 percent approval rating of last month pumped-up slightly to 16.8 percent in the new survey.

Last month, on the same day as the Sacred Heart/Hearst Poll, a statewide survey by the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute found Lamont with a double-digit lead among registered voters. The Sacred Heart/Hearst Poll, both last month and Thursday, surveyed voters who describes themselves as likely to vote on Nov. 6.

kdixon@ctpost.com Twitter: @KenDixonCT
iStock/Thinkstock(WAUKESHA, Wisconsin) -- A Wisconsin woman was caught on tape breaking out of her handcuffs and escaping from a local police station, authorities said.



Thirty-year-old Amber Gonzales was arrested last Friday at the Beaumont Hotel for theft and possession of drug paraphernalia.



Officers took Gonzales to a holding cell in the Waukesha Police Department, where surveillance video shows her alone in the holding cell on her cell phone, allegedly trying to coordinate bail and a ride home.



Video footage captures the 97-pound-woman wiggling and pulling her hand through the cuffs in less than a minute -- despite police telling ABC News affiliate WFRV that they placed the handcuffs on the tightest setting.



The defendant stated in the complaint from the Clerk of Circuit Court Waukesha County reviewed by ABC News that she became anxious about going to jail and not seeing her children.



Once she freed herself, Gonzales proceeded to escape the holding cell and walk out of the building from an emergency exit.



She further explained in the complaint that she took the keys from a door handle and used them to open the door and get outside.



She then went to a gas station and met up with a truck driver -- since identified as James W. Humbert, according to the complaint.



The pair went back to the same hotel where she was initially arrested and the truck driver then allegedly paid Gonzales for sex.



Humbert told police in the complaint that he had met Gonzales at a nearby Wendys location two weeks prior to the incident.



He eventually admitted that he was going to the hotel to engage in prostitution with the defendant, a law enforcement official noted in the complaint.



About an hour after her escape, police re-arrested her at the hotel on prostitution charges.



This time officers booked her at the Waukesha County Jail, where she was released Monday on bail.



Copyright  2018, ABC Radio. All rights reserved.
Yemen: Save Children, five mln kids risk starving to death War risks killing 'an entire generation of children'

(ANSAmed) - ROME, SEPTEMBER 20 - Over five million children risk dying of hunger in Yemen, Save the Children was quoted as saying by the Gulf Times on Thursday.



Helle Thorning-Schmidt, CEO of Save the Children International, was quoted as saying that millions of children don't know ''when or if their next meal will arrive''.



She said that the war risks killing ''an entire generation of children'' in Yemen who face multiple threats including bombs, starvation and preventable diseases, such as cholera. In a hospital she visited in northern Yemen, Thorning-Schmidt said that newborns were too weak to cry and their bodies were exhausted due to malnourishment.



The conflict has been ongoing in Yemen since 2015 between government forces backed by the Saudi-led Arab Coalition and Houthi militias. The victims reported over the last three years are approximately 10,000, mainly civilians. (ANSAmed).




Zika has been called "the virus from hell" for what it does to developing brains. Now researchers are trying to turn its destructive forces into treatment for the most lethal type of brain cancer.

A University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston-led team reported Tuesday that in early research in mice, they successfully used a harmless form of Zika to target and kill glioblastoma, the common and aggressive cancer that last month killed U.S. Sen. John McCain.

The Zika product is a vaccine the university has developed.

"More work needs to be done, but these findings represent major progress toward developing the Zika vaccine as a safe and effective treatment for human glioblastoma," said Pei-Yong Shi, a UTMB professor of biochemistry and molecular biology and the study's lead investigator. "This could be a great example of science's ability to turn something bad into something useful."

Glioblastoma kills more than 15,000 Americans annually. It is considered incurable because the disease recurs after the standard treatment of surgery, radiation and chemotherapy.

RELATED: John McCain's brain cancer

The mosquito-borne Zika virus became a major public health threat in recent years after it was shown to cause severe birth defects. Babies born to women infected in pregnancy can suffer from a condition, known as microcephaly, characterized by an abnormally small head and underdeveloped brain.

RELATED: Did Zika really cause an increase in birth defects in Texas?

Shi's team harnessed Zika's ability to infect developing brain cells to attack glioblastoma stem cells, which are considered the source of the cancer's recurrence. Like fetal cells, glial stem cells are self-renewing and multiply quickly, properties that Zika targets.

The UTMB Zika vaccine, made from an inactivated form of the virus, doesn't replicate inside cells because of a deletion from its genetic blueprint. It is soon to be tested as a preventative against Zika in Brazil, one of the hot spots of the epidemic two years ago.

The study found that glioblastomas developed significantly slower in mice whose brains received an injection of glioblastoma stem cells and the Zika vaccine than those that just received the stem cells. It also found the virus mostly spared healthy brain neurons.

RELATED: UTMB to work with Brazil on Zika vaccine

Though the study only showed a benefit from Zika's destruction of glioblastoma stem cells, the team of scientists hope it ultimately will enlist the immune system to attack the brain cancer. The idea, a new frontier of cancer therapy, is that Zika's killing action will release tumor proteins that trigger an immune reaction, a strategy that doctors at MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston Methodist Hospital and other institutions across the country are using with other viruses against brain cancer.

Shi said much more works need to be done to make Zika a safe and more potent weapon against glioblastoma. But he added that he plans to work with UTMB clinicians to set up a trial with the vaccine in human patients.

The study was published Tuesday in the American Society for Microbiology's journal mBIO. Shi teamed with scientists from medical institutes in Beijing on the research.

Todd Ackerman covers medicine for the Houston Chronicle. He can be reached at todd.ackerman@chron.com or twitter.com/ChronMed.
MIDDLETOWN  The Community Health Center has received a $510,000 grant from the Health Resources and Services Administration to expand access to integrated substance use disorder and mental health services as part of its ongoing efforts to address the national opioid crisis, according to a release.

CHC provides medication assisted treatment, behavioral health and care coordination services to patients with substance use disorder. Every site that cares for adults in CHCs network has at least one provider who can prescribe MAT and a behavioral health group specifically for SUD, according to the release.
MIDDLETOWN  The regional health departments will offer flu clinics in Greater Middletown starting in October, according to a release.

The clinics will offer the highly effective Flublok vaccine, officials said in the release. The Flublok is stronger than traditional vaccines and does not contain eggs, preservatives, or harsh chemicals including thimerosal (a mercury derivative).

Health officials are hoping that better vaccination rates this year will help avoid a repeat of last seasons widespread and deadly flu activity in Connecticut and other regions of this country, they said in the release. Officials emphasize that the best way to protect yourself and others from becoming ill with the flu is to get vaccinated every year because viruses change over time.

The schedule of clinics will be:

Oct. 6, from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. at South Fire District, 445 Randolph Road, Middletown

Oct. 9, from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. at the Town Hall Gymnasium, 41 West St., Cromwell

Oct. 13, from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. at the Westfield Fire Department, 653 East St., Middletown

Oct. 16, from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. at City Hall Council Chamber, 245 deKoven Drive, Middletown

Oct. 23, from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. at the Community Center, 405 Main St., Middlefield

Oct. 30, from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. at the City Hall Foyer, 245 deKoven Drive, Middletown

Nov. 6, from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. at the Activity Center (2nd floor), 350 Main St., Durham

In order to receive a flu shot, participants must be at least 4 years old and in good health. Participants should bring a valid form of identification and insurance card (co-payment is not required). Those without insurance may be eligible to receive a flu shot at no cost.

The vaccine will be given on a first-come, first-served basis (appointments will not be taken). Residency is not required. Anyone over 18 will be offered Flublok vaccine. Participants under 18 will receive traditional influenza vaccine. Both vaccines will be administered by injection only. Nasal mist will not be available, according to the release.

Participants can download and complete the Immunization Consent Form online at cromwellct.gov, townofdurhamct.org, middlefieldct.org or middletownct.gov.

Anyone with questions should call 860-632-3426 (Cromwell); 860-349-8253 (Durham); 860-349-7123 (Middlefield) or 860- 638-4962 (Middletown).
The mayor of Livingston is taking community protection into her own hands. Literally.

Livingston, Texas mayor Judy B. Cochran managed to kill a 12-foot, 580-pound alligator with just one shot Sunday night at her ranch in Goodrich, Texas.

It must run in the family: The hunt took place in the same pond where her 5-year-old grandson, Simon Hughes, took down a gator in 2009.

ALL IN THE FAMILY: Hefty gator bagged by 5-year-old boy

This particular reptile is a familiar one to the family, she explained.

"We think this is the gator that ate one of our miniature horses several years ago, as big as this gator was, he could've easily eaten it,"she said. "Typically the gators don't bother us, but we've been looking for (this one)."

As an elected official, Cochran wants to make sure the public knows this was a safe, ethical hunt.

"There are a lot of requirements to kill a gator in Polk County," she explained. "We're one of 12 counties that has a hunting season for alligators, between Sept. 10 and 30. You have to have a permit and tags from a wildlife biologist, and you have to catch it on a hook first. We don't just go to the ranch and hunt a gator."

TRAFFIC STOPPER: Massive alligator stops US 59 traffic in Cleveland

Handlers caught the gator on a hook with a seasoned raccoon Sunday night and alerted Cochran she could proceed with the kill.

Cochran already knows the fate of her catch: "Moye Taxidermy will be processing it, we'll eat the meat, have the head mounted and have the ridgeback part of the tail in my office. We'll have the hide tanned to make some boots out of it, you can only make boots from the belly."

She'll have plenty of material for several pairs of boots.

Cochran said it's been a particularly exciting time for her and her family. She said she just became a great-grandmother, is a newly elected mayor and now claims a 12-foot gator as a hunting prize.

Cochran, whose grandchildren call her Nana, has a fair warning to share: "Don't mess with Nana!"
The rogue natural gas pressure surge that led to dozens of home explosions last week in Massachusetts very likely damaged the system's antiquated network of pipes and could require lengthy testing and repair before service is restored to thousands of customers.

That means people and businesses in three towns may be waiting weeks or months for household basics like hot water, heat and cooking.

An apparent malfunction sent gas through the pipelines at 12 times the normal pressure before the blasts last Thursday, perhaps more in places, according to data released by lawmakers and investigators. Much of the system is made of cast iron, which is brittle and can crack under pressure, said Richard Kuprewicz, a consultant who specializes in pipelines.

As a result, NiSource Inc.'s Columbia Gas of Massachusetts must test the scores of supply lines to at least the 8,600 customers before gas can be switched back on, a painstaking process, Kuprewicz said.

"It takes a while to do this," Kuprewicz said. "Meanwhile, the winter is coming."

While people living in the region were allowed to return home on Sunday and electrical power was restored, NiSource hasn't said when it expects to get its gas supply system working again.

"We are not currently turning gas service back on for customers on the affected system in the area," Columbia said on a website for customers. "Our first priority is to ensure the safety of the public and the community. We do expect this to be an extended restoration process."

Of the 8,600 customers affected, some won't see service returned until pipes in their neighborhoods are replaced, Ken Stammen, a NiSource spokesman, said in a telephone interview.

Gas could be restored for others before a full replacement, Stammen added. It's "impossible" to know how many customers fall into each category and the timetable for restoration hasn't been determined, he said.

Though replacing gas pipelines typically takes years and is done in small segments to reduce disruption, the company said it's accelerating its plans to replace the pipelines as rapidly as possible.

In addition to the core of customers in the most affected areas, an additional 5,800 customers live outside those areas but had their gas shut off as a precaution, Stammen said. Service has been restored to most of them.

Massachusetts Senate President Karen Spilka said the state must ensure gas service is returned as soon as possible.

"We must focus our energy on helping to ensure a rapid recovery and a degree of normalcy for the families, businesses, and communities that were devastated by this incident," she said in a statement Wednesday.

The U.S. National Transportation Safety Board confirmed that the failures, which triggered explosions across three towns and killed one person struck by a falling chimney, were triggered by "an over-pressure situation," Robert Sumwalt, the agency's chairman, said in a briefing on Sunday.

Major supply lines are pressured to 75 pounds per square inch, Sumwalt said. The pressure is supposed to be reduced to 0.5 pounds in the smaller pipes that transmit gas onto streets and into homes, he said.

While Sumwalt stopped short of saying what caused the pressure spike, a device designed to regulate pressure appears to have tried to add gas because it was hooked up to a pipe that was taken out of service, he said. If a sensor to the out-of-service pipe registered no pressure, the system would be programmed to boost gas in the lines, Sumwalt said.

Readings within the system indicated that pressure reached at least 6 pounds, which is 12 times the recommended level, according to a letter Monday from Massachusetts' two U.S. senators, Ed Markey and Elizabeth Warren.

The lawmakers, both Democrats, said that they hoped to hold hearings on the failure and demanded that the utility provide records on how it responded. The pressure figures were reported by the U.S. Department of Transportation's Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, they said.

As many as 80 homes and buildings were destroyed or damaged in the explosions and fires that followed. At least 25 people were injured, the senators said.

Heating Season

Some homes have been without hot water or gas for cooking since then, and autumn arrives in just a few days. The demand for overnight heating typically begins in that part of New England in the first week of October, according to Matt Rogers, president of Commodity Weather Group LLC, a forecaster in the natural gas industry.

"We are looking at all options that are out there to meet our customer needs," Stammen said. "We don't want anybody" to get cold, he added. "All options mean all options."

Vast sections of U.S. natural gas utilities are made up of outdated cast iron pipes that could be as old as 100 years and unprotected steel that is also subject to corrosion and wear.

The 48-mile (77-kilometer) sector involved in Thursday's explosions is cast iron and bare steel, according to the company. The exact age of the pipes wasn't available, Stammen said. They pre-date the 1970s, when regulations required plastic or protected steel.

Such older pipes are prone to failures and tests with sensors show that they frequently leak, said Rob Jackson, the chairman of the department of Earth System Science at Stanford University.

Yet the explosions in the Massachusetts communities of Lawrence, North Andover and Andover, don't appear to be typical of leaks seen in older systems, Jackson said. While it's not uncommon to find multiple leaks along a single pipeline, they tend to be confined to small areas, he said.

"I've been working on this issue for a decade and I haven't seen this kind of disaster," he said.

Kuprewicz, who is president of Accufacts Inc. in Redmond, Washington, said natural gas utilities are required by U.S. law to have fail-safe systems to prevent such a failure.

"These over-pressure events are really rare," he said. "You have to be really messed up."

Once a system is over-pressurized, it can take hours to undo and the forces on the pipes can be massive, he said.

The explosions in homes may have been caused by failures of interior pipes and appliances, but outside pipes could also have cracked, allowing gas to enter houses, he said. Additionally, leaks could also have occurred in the distribution system that haven't been detected yet.

"If they've over-pressurized it, you can bet there are other leaks out there," he said.

Utilities have a variety of methods of checking whether distribution pipelines are damaged. One way, for example, is to pump a harmless gas like nitrogen into individual pipe sections to see if they hold the pressure, he said. If they don't, then crews have to locate the leak and repair it.

It could take several weeks to repair the existing system. Replacing the pipes -- which often occurs by slipping narrower plastic pipe inside existing pipe to minimize the amount of digging -- will take months, Kuprewicz said.

In April, Columbia filed a petition with the Massachusetts Department of Public Utilities to increase annual revenues by $24.1 million in part to help replace aging infrastructure. All three towns were listed as areas where neighborhood lines would be replaced, the utility said on its website Thursday.
ANSAmed - Today's events in the Mediterranean

(ANSAmed) - ROME, SEPTEMBER 20 - These are the main events scheduled in the Euro-Mediterranean area for today: TANGIERS - Festival de jazz de Tanger Maroc (until the 23rd).



SALZBURG - Informal Summit of Heads of State or Government.



BRUSSELS - EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, Federica Mogherini, meets Yusuf bin Alawi bin Abdullah, Foreign Minister of Oman.



LISBON - Seatrade Cruise Med.



GAZA - Visit of a EU Parliament delegation for relations with Palestine in the occupied territories to meet with authorities, civil society representatives, local leaders and human rights defenders.



VALENZANO (BARI) - The second Mediterranean Forum on Research and Innovation comes to end.



CASABLANCA - Boulevard Festival for emerging performing artists in Morocco will begin (until 23/9).



ABU DHABI - The exhibition 'Japanese Connections: the Birth of Modern Decor', continues at the Louvre in Abu Dhabi and includes a series of paintings and etchings from the XIX and XX centuries that highlight the dialogue between the East and the West (until November 24).



ROME - 'Estate in Biblioteca, il Cinema Legge il Mondo', a festival of Italian and foreign films in Rome libraries, organized in collaboration with MedFilm Festival (until September 27). (ANSAmed).




MILFORD - A city woman has been arrested for allegedly threatening to blow up the Schick razor factory on Wednesday.

Julia Denby-Worthington, 27, of Wilcox Street, was charged with threatening, second-degree breach of peace, first-degree criminal tresspass, two counts of violation of probation and two counts of failure to appear in court.

Officer Joseph Dempsey said in a release the incident happened around 7 p.m. at the Shick building on Leighton Road.

Police went to the scene on a report of an unwanted person on the property.

The investigation led to the arrest of Denby-Worthington, who is accused of trespassing on the property after being told to leave and then stating she was going to return and blow the building up Dempsey said.

Denby-Worthington was also found to have three active warrants for her arrest. Two warrants accuse her of violating her probation. The other warrant was failing to appear in court on July 27, stemming from a larceny in Wolcott in January 2015.

Denby-Worthington was held on a $105,500 bond.

Schick had been part of personal care division of Energizer Holdings, the Missouri-based company that makes batteries and lighting. In 2015, Schick and 11 other well known personal care products have become part of a new company, Edgewell. Among the brands that are part of the Edgewell portfolio of brands are Wilkinson Sword razors, Edge shaving cream, Playtex and Stayfree feminine care products as well as Banana Boat and Hawaiian Tropic sun care products.

In addition to the 422,000-square-foot factory, called the Edgewell Personal Care facility, in Milford, Edgewell has a corporate office on Research Drive in Shelton.

Schick has been in Milford since 1961.
Marines stationed at the service's oldest post in Washington, D.C. are being hailed as heroes Wednesday night after sprinting to the aid of senior citizens when their housing complex caught fire.

The fire broke out Wednesday afternoon at the Arthur Capper Senior Apartments, a public housing complex on 5th Street Southeast, about one-third of a mile from Marine Barracks Washington. Flames and smoke were visible from the street as the fire raged.

A widely-tweeted video showed about a dozen Marines from the barracks in a dead sprint as they made for the burning building.

A spokesman for Marine Barracks Washington, Gunnery Sgt. John Jackson, told MIlitary.com that the Marines were not ordered to respond, but acted on their own initiative.

The first troops from the barracks reached the building soon after the fire was reported, around 3:30 p.m. Several dozen actually entered the building to evacuate residents, bringing "a few dozen or more" senior citizens outside to safety, Jackson said.

As of 8:30 Wednesday night, Jackson said Marines remained on scene to assist and to provide firefighters with any access they required at Marine Barracks Washington. In addition to the first volunteers, Jackson said the post ultimately sent over wheelchairs and other support equipment, as well as Navy corpsmen who assisted with health checks on fire victims.

Some victims were evacuated to the Marine Barracks Washington annex, "where they were checked and treated for any injuries and sheltered until their loved ones arrived," according to a post on the official barracks Facebook page.

Related: 'Military Training Kicked In:' Marine Saves Woman in Vegas Shooting

In all, some 100 Marines participated in rescue efforts, including the post's commanding officer, Col. Donald Tomich, Jackson said.

The Marines' actions did not escape notice.

"Bravery at its finest," one area resident tweeted.

Steve Rudin, a meteorologist for ABC7 News, also took to Twitter to praise them.

"Unsung heroes ... selflessness to help those in need," he tweeted.

NBC Washington reported that the fire, which caused a roof to collapse, sent four residents to the hospital, although no fatalities were reported. Jackson said no Marines were injured in the response effort.

"We say that we're America's '911 force,' and oftentimes people think of that as being overseas, but we're Marines," he said. "We respond to danger, no matter where. The Marines saw the fire and reacted accordingly to help our neighbors."

Marine Barracks Washington, also known as 8th and I, is the historic home of Marine Corps commandants and the home station for some of the Corps' most iconic ceremonial units, including the Silent Drill Platoon and the "President's Own" United States Marine Band.

-- Hope Hodge Seck can be reached at hope.seck@military.com. Follow her on Twitter at @HopeSeck.
PARIS - Brexit and Italy are among the main risks that might prevent Europe from prospering, OECD chief economist Laurence Boone said at the presentation of the body's Interim Economic Outlook in Paris Thursday.

Asked what were the political risks that might prevent Europe prospering, Boone replied: "The first is Brexit...then there is what is happening in Italy, where growth is weak and debt high.

"They must absolutely continue the reforms launched by the previous government.

And public spending must not be used to artificially boost growth with consumption, but must aim for productive investments".

Deputy Premier and Labour and Industry Minister Luigi Di Maio said Thursday that the OECD should not interfere in Italy's affairs after the body warned Rome against reversing a 2011 pension reform. Whereas, Premier Giuseppe Conte rejected the policy advice his government got from the OECD. "I don't want to get into a controversy, (but) these evaluations do not seem to be supported by facts to me," Conte told a press conference at the end of the European summit in Salzburg. "I know that we are carrying out a structural reform and a serious budget. We want to be credible,

above all to our citizens and then we will be to the markets too".
This article by Adam Linehan originally appeared on Task & Purpose, a digital news and culture publication dedicated to military and veterans issues.

The Education Center at the Wall, set to open its doors in 2020, would be the latest historical showpiece on the National Mall, 25,000 square feet of exhibition space dedicated to the memory of the Vietnam War, clad in Italian glass and jutting steel, occupying five acres of coveted Washington real estate. Mandated by Congress to be visible only from the Vietnam Veterans Memorial -- and just enough to "satisfy its purpose" without "disrupting the landscape" -- the center would be accessible by a flight of stairs guiding visitors into a warren of galleries replete with an array of museum exhibits and multimedia installations examining our troubled involvement in Southeast Asia. Those exhibits would tell the story of the war as it was experienced both at home and on the battlefield, from myriad perspectives.

A collaboration between the world-renowned Ennead Architects and acclaimed museum design firm Ralph Appelbaum Associates, the exhibition space took nine years to design. The process was shepherded by the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund (VVMF) -- a Virginia-based nonprofit founded in 1979 by Jan Scruggs -- and paid for entirely with donations, including from the likes of Time Warner, ConocoPhillips, Lockheed Martin, the Veterans of Foreign Wars, the governments of Singapore and Australia, and the Seminole Tribe of Florida. When the Commission of Fine Arts finally approved the plan, in May 2015, it congratulated the project team for "its perseverance and responsiveness over many years in creating this important public facility to enhance the experience of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial."

And indeed, it was a triumph: a veritable masterwork despite being produced under the rigorous scrutiny of Washington bureaucrats. But three years after the design was unveiled, construction crews have yet to break ground and may never do so. Despite high hopes, eye-popping donations, and a large dedicated staff, the Education Center is beginning to look like a boondoggle, "a story of incredible failure," says a person familiar with the project. Others used terms like "impossible," "quagmire," and "a fool's errand" to describe it. According to those sources -- current and former VVMF staff and board members, volunteers, and donors -- the organization has internally considered the Education Center a hopeless cause for years but soldiered on because, as one ex-staffer put it, "there's no f*****g exit strategy."

The Vietnam Veterans Memorial itself, now considered a triumph of public art, was itself a highly fraught endeavor. The selection of a sober, minimalist design by 21-year-old student Maya Lin sparked a bitter controversy, fueled by those who considered the V-shaped, black granite memorial to be more symbolic of the antiwar movement than anything else. Over time, though, it won adherents, eventually going on to unite Americans behind the notion that troops should never be sent into battle without their country's full support. Better known simply as "the Wall", it was unveiled in 1982 and has since become one of Washington's most popular tourist attractions, drawing an estimated 5.6 million visitors each year.

What the memorial didn't do, however -- at least not to the satisfaction of some -- is place the 58,315 men and women whose names it bears in a historical context. Much as it may have helped Americans process their grief, it carried no obvious message. And it certainly didn't explain why we'd gone to war in the first place, and then kept at it, as casualties piled up, even as the possibility of victory became ever more remote. As Jan Scruggs wrote in one letter seeking funds for the Education Center, "[As] a nation and a people, we must remember why we chose to fight and then reflect on each war so that we may better understand how to avoid them in the future."

The success of the Wall only further convinced Scruggs that the hard-learned lessons of Vietnam were too important to forget. He began lobbying for the Education Center in 2000 and spent the next three years waging an uphill battle to convince lawmakers that it would serve rather than undermine VVMF's foundational mission -- "to honor and recognize the service of American veterans of the Vietnam War, particularly those who were lost." The vision eventually drew the support of Congress, which in 2003 passed a law earmarking a parcel of Federal land for the project. Longtime VVMF allies, including John Kerry, John McCain, John Warner, Gen. Colin Powell, and Chuck Hagel, rallied behind the effort as well.

Fundraising and planning progressed steadily behind the scenes until November 2012, when the project had a public coming-out of sorts, a media-heavy ceremonial groundbreaking on the National Mall attended by a notable cadre of politicians, Pentagon officials, and celebrities, including Vice President Joe Biden, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, Adm. Mike Mullen, and musician Jimmy Buffett. The occasion doubled as an opportunity for VVMF to announce an expansion of the Education Center's scope: In addition to telling the story of Vietnam, it would also cover the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Among the attendees were about a hundred parents of troops lost in those conflicts. Each came bearing photographs of their child, which were gifted to VVMF at the end of the ceremony -- after Buffett played an acoustic rendition of Irving Berlin's "God Bless America." The images would be included in the center's crowning exhibit: a giant digital wall that would display images of every American service member who died or went missing in both the Vietnam War and the War on Terror.

"It warms my heart to know that long after I'm gone, that people can go into that center and see the faces of my son and all those who made the ultimate sacrifice and then go out and tell somebody," the mother of a 29-year-old Marine captain killed in Afghanistan told Stars & Stripes. "That's a living legacy."

Setting unrealistic expectations is a common theme in the 18-year saga to build the Education Center. As Stripes and several other major publications reported that evening, the project would not actually get underway until the VVMF raised "another $38 million for the $84 million project." But momentum was building, Scruggs insisted to the droves of reporters who had turned out for the event. "We can knock this out of the park." The goal was "to start construction by next year, in time to complete the center in 2014 to coincide with the return of the last troops from Afghanistan."

+++

An education center that grappled honestly with the immense policy failures that drew America into an unwinnable war in the first place was a good idea. On that, at least, everyone agrees. There was only one precedent: the Vietnam War Era Museum and Education Center in Holmdel, New Jersey, which opened in 1998 and was also designed by Ralph Appelbaum Associates. Similar to what Scruggs had in mind, the original goal of the museum was to offer visitors an unbiased, clear-eyed, and comprehensive narrative of the conflict and its manifestations back home. But a bitter public dispute over the exhibit script resulted in a series of small but surgical revisions of certain features perceived as "anti-veteran," including panels related to the Mai Lai massacre and the antiwar movement, according to Meredith H. Lair, a historian of the Vietnam War at George Mason University, who authored the text.

Lair also wrote a critical analysis of the Education Center published in 2012 and attended several VVMF advisory board meetings for her research. In an interview, she said the New Jersey museum served as "a model but also a cautionary tale for the Education Center," and pointed to another controversy that "had a very chilling effect on people who work on national museums about wars." In 1994, veterans groups and lawmakers prevailed in a vigorous campaign to pressure the Smithsonian Institution into dramatically altering an Enola Gay exhibit. As a result, the New York Times reported, the Smithsonian removed "items that the critics said dwelt to excess on the horrible effects of the atomic bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki" and also "vastly revise the estimate of how many casualties might have resulted" if the U.S. had invaded Japan, among other things.

Nonetheless, having emerged from the Wall campaign as something of a folk hero, Scruggs was confident he could pull off the required political balancing act. After all, his objective was simple: a modest visitors center adjacent to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial featuring some photographs of troops killed in the war, accompanied by a handful of iconic images, a historical timeline, a few exhibits, and a small movie theater. The goal was merely to "bring home the sacrifices made in Vietnam and the great patriots this country produced," Scruggs told a reporter in October 2001. "It's a good thing to remind people of that at a time when once again we're calling on patriots to protect our country in this most unusual sequence of events."

The surge of patriotism after the September 11 terror attacks helped carry the Vietnam Veterans Education Center Act through Congress. But efforts stalled soon after, for a variety of reasons. Some say, in retrospect, that the campaign was doomed from the start, that it was foolhardy to think that the unanimous love and support for the Wall would carry over to a project that threatened to disrupt its sacred neutrality. Others blame the 2003 invasion of Iraq. As the war heated up, many potential donors shifted their attention to helping the droves of troops returning home wounded and traumatized. In that way, at least, the War on Terror would not be like Vietnam. Scruggs still had enough clout with veterans of his generation to land a series of major donations, but rising costs vastly outpaced the inflow of funds. And the decision to fold the War on Terror into the project seems to have backfired. "Congress loved the plan, but otherwise the support was wafer thin," Scruggs recalled.

A Vietnam veteran who volunteered as a fundraising committee leader with VVMF for nearly a decade told Task & Purpose -- on condition of anonymity -- that he personally pledged $100,000 towards the project but ceased payments after donating just over half of that sum "because it eventually became apparent that we were not going to be able to raise enough money to do it the way it would need to be done." He attributed some of that inertia to the decision to fold the War on Terror into the original plan. "I think there were quite a few people who, let's just say, when the idea was broached to people that I was trying to solicit for money, it was sort of like -- it didn't grab them -- it was not embraced. To me, it felt artificial."

Other prominent supporters also appear to have lost faith in the project, including Hagel, who authored the legislation for the Education Center.

The former secretary of defense did not return a request for comment sent to his private email, but sources familiar with his thinking say he expects VVMF to abandon the project when its board votes on the matter later this month. Meanwhile, a spokeswoman for Powell explained that he "is not actively engaged with VVMF," although for many years he was instrumental in the fundraising effort and donated money himself.

Scruggs, now 68 and recently recovered from a near-fatal heart infection, says he began to doubt the feasibility of the project in the weeks after the ceremonial groundbreaking in 2012, when a member of his staff informed him that the figures he'd provided to the media --$38 million raised for a $84 million project -- were wildly inaccurate. "He said, 'Jan, we still need to raise $80 million and perhaps more than that'" Scruggs recalled. More bad news followed within weeks. "We found out that a request for federal funding that it seemed likely we were going to get got rejected. Everything we did was reduced to smoke and mirrors within a month."

The former fundraising committee leader said that he grew increasingly disturbed by the "idea that all of these vets and widows and children of KIAs were sending their hard-earned dollars to something that they thought would be finished in just one or two years." Indeed, numerous news articles about the Education Center published over the last decade or so cite VVMF sources repeatedly claiming that construction is just around the corner. Such assurances were offered in 2012, 2013, and 2014, and then quietly revised without explanation. 2018 was also supposed to be a big year, according to a 2017 report by the Washington Business Journal: "The group has said it hopes to begin construction in 2018."

"I, for one, cannot understand why the VVMF board doesn't face up to this situation and bring some real transparency to what's really going on," the former committee leader said. "Because you have millions of Vietnam veterans out there who are under the impression that this is going forward and I don't think it's fair to the veterans community to let that impression stand without a formal practical plan for how this is going to get done."

Scruggs retired as president of VVMF in the fall of 2014, severing all ties with the organization shortly thereafter. And though he's reticent to discuss his personal feelings about the project, people close to him say he is haunted by the notion that the Education Center's "inevitable demise" will undo a lifetime of work advocating for Vietnam veterans.

"I told him that he just needs to be retired," a longtime friend and associate recalled. "He has a great life, and he will have a great legacy no matter what happens with the center." Another person who maintains regular contact with Scruggs described him as being deeply "concerned with the integrity" of the memorial. "He has a tremendous heart and he did something that was truly remarkable for us, that wall he created," they said.

Of course, more than reputations are at stake. The Education Center is very real to a lot of people. "It's sad for the veterans and the families who have invested so much energy and time into this effort," said a former VVMF employee. "We'd get phone calls all the time asking about progress." In addition to the tens of thousands of photographs the organization has collected for the Wall of Faces exhibit, it has amassed a vast archive of keepsakes left at the memorial that it planned to feature in an adjacent installation. It also continues to solicit donations on its website -- "Gifts large and small are needed to help build the Center" -- and sources say that most of VVMF's handsomely-compensated staff, which consists of 14 full-time and two part-time employees, is primarily focused on "development," or fundraising.

"On a noble level, there's some wishful thinking that something magical is going to happen, that there will be a breakthrough of some sort, that some angel investor will suddenly show up and say I'll fund the whole thing," said the former fundraising committee leader. "At a less noble level, there are a number of people who are getting paid quite well to keep this campaign alive. I think it's really wrong."

After enlisting in the Army straight out of high school, Scruggs served a 12-month tour with the infantry in Quang Tin province and was wounded in action. He returned home in 1970 "disillusioned and disenchanted," and drifted through his early 20s, working odd jobs and roving the country on a motorcycle before eventually enrolling at American University in Washington D.C. to study psychology. He says he came up with the idea for the Vietnam Veterans memorial after watching The Deer Hunter, Michael Cimino's Oscar-winning 1978 epic war drama about three small-town friends who volunteer to fight in Vietnam and are each left profoundly traumatized by the experience. The film was one of the first to examine the war's corrosive effect on veterans, their families, and the working-class communities that sacrificed disproportionately.

Scruggs founded VVMF in 1979 to build "a tangible symbol of recognition from the American people for those who served in the war," and spent the next several years lobbying politicians and government officials, beseeching donors, rallying veterans, and talking up his plan to anyone who would listen. The Wall cost a total of $8.2 million to build. VVMF, which at that time consisted of Scruggs and several other Vietnam veterans, raised roughly $6.5 million of that in increments of $10 donations or less. "It was very much a grassroots efforts," explained Lair, the historian. "And by the way," she added, "it is not called 'The Vietnam War Memorial.' It is the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, because it was built by veterans in the name of veterans to ensure that the nation remembered those who served but especially those who died."

Many of those allies turned to enemies the moment VVMF revealed Lin's winning submission. The backlash was swift and virulent. Interior Secretary James Watt declared that he would not issue VVMF a building permit. The Texas billionaire Ross Perot, who contributed $160,000 to finance the competition, seethed that the Wall was "an apology, not a memorial" and launched an aggressive -- and ultimately successful -- campaign to build another. Twenty-seven Republican senators penned a letter of protest to Reagan, calling the Wall concept "a political statement of shame and dishonor." Jim Webb, a Navy Cross-recipient and future U.S. senator, who'd been deeply involved in the campaign, described it as "nihilistic," while the military historian Tom Carhart, a combat-wounded former Army infantry officer, lamented that "if Americans allow that black trench to be dug, future generations will understand clearly what America thought of its Vietnam veterans."

The construction of the Wall happened to coincide with a period of national self-absolvement. By 1982, America was back to being its old cocky self. Survivor's "Eye of the Tiger" was number one on the charts, President Ronald Reagan was pumping money into the military, Moscow was on the ropes, and the history of the Vietnam War was undergoing a major revision. On the campaign trail, Reagan called the war a "noble cause" and accused the Carter administration of being "anti-veteran," declaring in a speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars that "we dishonor the memory of 50,000 young Americans who died in that cause when we give way to feelings of guilt as if we were doing something shameful."

On Nov. 13, tens of thousands of veterans from across the country converged in Washington for the dedication of the Wall. They came in old jungle fatigues and jump boots and boonie hats slung low over bearded faces, like soldiers back from a long and forlorn patrol. The day began with a "Welcome Home" parade down Constitution Avenue attended by a thin but zealous crowd of flag-waving supporters and culminated with a dedication ceremony on the National Mall. Marching at the helm of the procession was Gen. William C. Westmoreland, whose infamous "war of attrition" strategy is still widely blamed for the staggering body count represented in the memorial. In fact, the general, a decade retired at that point, had personally requested to grand marshal the parade, and Scruggs, who had left the Army as a 20-year-old corporal, had dutifully agreed. "I couldn't say no to an icon," he told Task & Purpose.

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Also impossible is raising the necessary funds incrementally, as in, "a million here, a million there," the source added. "Everybody knows that." The only way the center gets built is if someone picks up the rest of the tab "because they want to put their name on it." But that isn't an option now and may never be. On June 11, VVMF submitted a "Donor Recognition Plan" to the National Park Service for review and approval. The plan, which was rejected entirely, included "allowing the Education Center and 'associated Plaza' to be named after a donor." Unfortunately, as the NPS explained, such arrangements are prohibited by federal regulations. VVMF also asked for "donor recognition at donation levels as low as $15,000." That isn't permitted, either.

Nevertheless, the VVMF website continues to promise "special recognition opportunities" for gifts starting at $100,000. VVMF did not reply to an email asking whether those opportunities are contingent on a policy change, or if it plans to submit a revised recognition plan as NPS urged it to.

Last spring, VVMF received a major windfall in the form of a $10 million grant from the Lilly Endowment. The organization said at the time that the donation brought the total raised for the Education Center to $42.5 million, and expressed hope that more money would follow.

VVMF seems to rely on several different metrics for measuring progress -- photographs collected, mementos accrued, design plans finessed and approved. Speaking strictly in terms of donation dollars, however, progress screeched to a halt last year. VVMF director of communications Heidi Zimmerman told Task & Purpose in July that VVMF had raised a total of $42.5 million -- which, she admitted, is the same amount the organization reported a year before. She was quick to point out that VVMF has raised $14 million for the Education Center since she joined the organization in 2014. However, the estimated cost also grew during that time, by $15 million, leaving VVMF further from its fundraising goal than ever.

According to an accountant who specializes in nonprofits and reviewed VVMF's 2014 financial records, VVMF has already spent roughly $8.4 million on the Education Center. "But I'd be surprised if everything that money was spent on is still really useful," he said. "Because some of that was spent 15 years ago."

Last month, Sen. Steve Daines, Republican of Montana, introduced a bipartisan bill with Sen. Tammy Duckworth of Illinois that would grant VVMF a four-year extension to continue raising donations for the center beyond October of this year, which is when its previous extension expires.

It may be too little too late. At its current pace, the fundraising campaign would have to continue for at least 30 more years to reach its $130 million goal (and the estimates are likely to increase). That timeline would require 10 more three-year extensions on top of the two VVMF has already been granted (one of which was for four years, an exception). And each of those extensions would require re-convincing Congress that the Education Center isn't just a pipedream. But VVMF doesn't seem quite convinced itself. "There's no more love for it," a former staff member told Task & Purpose. According to another, "People no longer see the reason to do it. Even Vietnam vets who love the Wall aren't on board with what we're doing anymore."

Neither, sources say, are some members of the board, who are concerned that the organization is drifting perilously off course and believe a return to a more grassroots model is the only way to preserve its legacy. Such a shift would likely entail big staff cuts. "The Education Center is superfluous to the meaning of the Wall, and people no longer see the reason to do it," a source said. "Before this project got started we were just a little mom and pop shop in D.C., and we did just fine. The big staff and salaries haven't really paid off."

In an email shared with Task & Purpose a key supporter opined that the decision to shutter the Education Center has already been made and that VVMF has been biding its time as it figures out how best to break the news. "Wise to take the approach they're taking because they know there are many pieces to this monster," they wrote. One inside source put the odds of the board voting to continue the project at "60/40 against." Another said, "they are going to have to stop this charade and give some money back and get rid of some employees." Only a few major donors stipulated in contracts that VVMF would have to return their money if it failed to complete the project, however. The rest is for keeps.

"The Board of VVMF now has the choice of continuing to pursue contributions for the Center or giving the five acres on the grounds of the Lincoln Memorial back to the National Park Service," Scruggs told Task & Purpose in a written statement. "This is the Board's decision to make. The money from America's international allies, the VFW, and the Seminole Tribe of Florida remains available for return."

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When Scruggs retired in 2014, he left VVMF in the hands of its current president and CEO, Jim Knotts. A former Air Force public affairs officer and Desert Storm veteran, Knotts has stated before that he -- like so many others who have served in the post-Vietnam military -- benefited greatly from Scruggs' campaign to restore the nation's respect for members of its armed forces. As he explains on the VVMF website, Knotts envisions the Education Center as a celebration of military service, a shrine to the great lesson his predecessor taught our nation: to always "separate the war from the warrior." (Task & Purpose was unable to reach Knotts for comment.)

Of course, the Wall was supposed to teach us so much more. VVMF had stated in the memorial design competition brochure that it would "not exist in perpetuity" -- that when the memorial was completed, the organization would be "dissolved." As promised, VVMF folded its colors in 1985. However, several years later, Scruggs decided to get the band back together. In an interview with People Magazine in 1988, he acknowledged that the Wall "took a lot of the bitterness out of the Vietnam debate, but I wouldn't say the memorial healed the nation. The wounds caused by the war still require a political healing, a healing on many different levels."

Everyone interviewed for this article offered different interpretations of what the Education Center was supposed to be, and what it's become. But they shared a concern that the essential lessons of Vietnam were being forgotten. The saga of the past 18 years only seems to validate those fears. "If what you are saying is true," said Lair, the historian, "that the foundation is raising money for a cause that they know will never succeed, then they have spectacularly replicated one of the problems of the Vietnam War."

Lair has harbored deep reservations about the Education Center since her meeting with the project's advisory board. "There is ample evidence in the historical record of the Education Center at The Wall to suggest that its proponents seek to advance a sanitized, seemingly apolitical narrative of the Vietnam War and an idealized, militarized version of citizenship," she wrote in a 2012 paper titled The Education Center at The Wall and the Rewriting of History. But she seemed crushed when told of the VVMF's recent struggles. For all her criticisms of the project, Lair idolizes Scruggs. She was rooting for him. "I remain stunned by what he accomplished," she said. "Pushing for a memorial at a time when most Americans just wanted to put the Vietnam War behind them, ensuring that the Wall got built, creating a physical and rhetorical space for mourning and reflection -- it is a gift to the nation beyond description."

After a pause, she continued: "Although I like the idea of historical discussions on the west end of the National Mall, maybe less is more. Maybe we need fewer words. I think the Wall already accomplishes the work that Scruggs wanted to do with the Education Center. The only consensus we are ever going to come to about that story is that it is terribly, terribly sad."

Pentagon correspondent Jeff Schogol contributed reporting

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NATIONAL HARBOR, Md. -- The Pentagon has yet to figure out how to create, organize and fund the new Space Force that President Donald Trump ordered as a new service branch, Deputy Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan said Wednesday.

"We're really wrestling with the 'how,' " said Shanahan, the Pentagon's Space Force point man, in an address to Air Force Association's Air, Space and Cyber Conference. But he maintained that the commitment is there and the services and combatant commands are falling in line with the president's directive.

"While there's plenty of debate about the 'how,' we are united by the 'why' -- protecting our economy and deterring our adversaries," Shanahan said.

Shanahan, who was known as "Mr. Fix-It" as a top executive and engineer at Boeing, said the first task is to determine what gear and capabilities troops needed to defend U.S. interests in space.

Related: Read more about the military's Space Force

"Once we determine that, we can organize around them," he said.

The difficulty is that "its been thrust upon us" in short order to create a new organization that will become a separate service branch, which hasn't been done since the Air Force was created in 1947, he said.

Shanahan said his team is in the process of developing doctrines, tactics and techniques that will integrate the new service branch smoothly with the combatant commands and the other services.

"Along the way, we will do no harm to existing missions, create no seams between the services, and remain laser-focused on our warfighters and the capabilities they need to win," he pledged.

"There'll be some arm wrestling and hand-wringing" as the concept for the new Space Force takes shape, Shanahan said, but his intention is to have a plan and a legislative proposal ready next February.

He could have a hard sell ahead on the legislative proposal, no matter which party controls the House and Senate when he makes it. His job was made more difficult earlier this week when Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson projected that setting up the Space Force could cost $13 billion.

Wilson and Defense Secretary Jim Mattis initially opposed creation of the Space Force as a new service branch, but they have since come around to support it.

In Congress, Sen. Jim Inhofe, R-Oklahoma, the new chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee; Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Alabama, chairman of the Appropriations Committee; and other Republicans have expressed varying degrees of skepticism on the Space Force.

On the House side, Rep. Mike Coffman, R-Colorado, chairman of the Military Personnel Subcommittee and a member of the Strategic Forces Subcommittee, is at the forefront of the opposition.

"I strongly disagree with the president that now is the time to create a separate Space Force. Congress is laser-focused on slimming down the bloated bureaucracy at the Pentagon, and creating a new Space Force will inevitably result in more, not less, bureaucracy," Coffman said in a statement last month.

The Space Force would likely be scuttled if the Democrats win control of either the House or Senate in November and embark, as might be expected, on an agenda to block all things Trump.

On the "Fox News Sunday" program last month, Sen. Jack Reed of Rhode Island, who would become the Senate Armed Services Committee chairman if the Democrats win the Senate, said that creating a Space Force as "a separate service with all of the infrastructure and the bureaucracy is not the way to go."

Immediately following Shanahan's presentation at the AFA, Air Force Gen. John Hyten, commander of U.S. Strategic Command, said creation of the Space Force likely would result in some initial changes to organization and responsibilities for the other services and combatant commands, but the problems would be worked out.

"We're actually going to explore that" at STRATCOM, he said, adding that the Space Force is "an opportunity to experiment with some different constructs. We'll walk through how we do that" with the Joint Staff and other commands.

Ultimately, "I think it's an issue of command relations, authorities and responsibilities," Hyten said.

-- Richard Sisk, can be reached at Richard.Sisk@Military.com.
President Donald Trump announced Thursday that Army Master Sgt. Charles H. McDaniel, 32, of Vernon, Indiana, and Army Pfc. William H. Jones, 19, of Nash County, North Carolina, were the first two of the missing-in-action to be identified from among the 55 cases of remains returned by North Korea in August.

"These HEROES are home, they may Rest In Peace, and hopefully their families can have closure," Trump said in a Tweet.

He also said the identifications were the result of his Singapore summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in June.

Last month, defense officials announced that McDaniel's name was on a dog tag found with the returned remains. The battered dog tag was returned to his two sons at an event in Arlington, Virginia, for the families of the missing from the Korean War.

"We were just overwhelmed," McDaniel's son, Charles Jr., 71, said at the event of the phone call that notified them.

"I have to say I didn't think about the emotions that were very deep, even though I was a small boy and have very little memory of my father," said Charles Jr., a retired Army lieutenant colonel and a chaplain.

"But I sat there and I cried for a while, and it took a while to compose myself," he said.

The president's Tweet came ahead of a Pentagon ceremony Friday with Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Joseph Dunford for the annual National POW/MIA Recognition Day to honor the more than 90,000 still listed as missing from all the nation's wars.

In a proclamation, Trump said that on Friday "the stark black and white banner symbolizing America's Missing in Action and Prisoners of War will again be flown over the White House," the Department of Veterans Affairs and other agencies.

Earlier Thursday, retired Air Force Maj. Gen. Kelly McKeague, head of the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA), said the two who had been accounted for were identified from remains in 55 transfer cases that arrived at an "honorable carry" ceremony at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam in Hawaii on Aug. 1.

At a breakfast with defense reporters, he said DPAA forensic teams were able to make preliminary identifications last week from partial skull and clavicle bone remains.

The families were notified, and further DNA analysis confirmed that "they were who we thought they were," McKeague said.

Both McDaniel and Jones were reported as missing in action in separate battles in November 1950. Both were declared dead on Dec. 31, 1950.

McDaniel was serving as a medic with the Army's 8th Cavalry Regiment Medical Company in support of the regiment's 3rd Battalion when he was reported missing in action on Nov. 2, 1950, in fighting against Chinese troops southwest of the village of Unsan and east of Hwango-ri in North Korea.

Jones, a member of Company E, 2nd Battalion, 24th Infantry Regiment, 25th Infantry Division, was reported missing in action on Nov. 26, 1950, during a withdrawal from an engagement with Chinese troops Pakchon in North Korea.

At a ceremony at the Korean War Veterans Memorial on the Washington Mall later Thursday, Vice President Mike Pence presented a flag that flew at the Hawaii return event to the memorial's foundation.

Pence repeated what he said at the arrival of the remains at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam: "Our boys are coming home."

The repatriation of the remains is considered the first tangible result from the summit with Kim, at which Trump declared that North Korea had agreed to begin denuclearization and dismantling of its intercontinental ballistic missiles.

However, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has since confirmed intelligence estimates that North Korea is continuing to produce fissile material and missiles. Pompeo said Wednesday that the U.S. now has a 2021 deadline for denuclearization negotiations with North Korea.

McKeague said the U.S. team, led by Dr. John Byrd of the DPAA's Hawaii laboratories, that went to Wonsan, North Korea, in July to receive the remains had expected that there might be as many as 200 cases that the North Koreans already had in storage.

The North Koreans insisted that only 55 would be returned. "For us, it was not unexpected," McKeague said, adding that the North Koreans used the returns to feel out the U.S. on concessions. "We knew the North Koreans were treating it as a quid pro quo."

He said the 55 cases of remains are believed to have come from areas at Unsan and the Chosin Reservoir in northwestern North Korea, the scenes of horrific battles in 1950.

The DPAA is maintaining contacts with the Democratic People's Republic of Korea mission at the United Nations on the possibility of having a U.S. team go to the Chosin area on a joint recovery mission next spring, McKeague said.

"We fully believe they do want to resume" joint recovery missions, he said. "They want to sit down with us. There are two areas near Chosin we'd like to go."

The 55 cases of remains did not necessarily represent 55 individuals, McKeague said, since the remains were commingled. He noted that 208 cases of remains returned by the North Koreans in the 1990s were eventually discovered to represent more than 400 individuals.

According to the Korean War Veterans Memorial, 5.8 million Americans served in the military during the 1950-53 war. During that time, 36,574 Americans were believed to have been killed in action.

Of that total, 7,686 are still listed as missing in action. According to the DPAA, about 5,300 of the missing are believed to have been lost in what is now North Korea.

Editor's Note: The story mistakenly said there would be a White House ceremony on Friday.

-- Richard Sisk can be reached at richard.sisk@military.com.
NATIONAL HARBOR, Md. -- Airmen of all shapes and sizes are likely to see improved flight suits as the U.S. Air Force gathers feedback from leaders and service members to better equip and dress its force, the service's top general said this week.

Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. David Goldfein said a team of airmen is reviewing not only flight suits, but all the gear needed to fly for hours on end.

"We've put together a team; it's a combination of Air Force Materiel Command and Air Combat Command to look at [this], and it's beyond uniforms," he told Military.com on Wednesday at the Air Force Association Air, Space and Cyber conference. "It's uniforms, it's gear, it's kit. It's not only what you place where in terms of uniforms, but it's also what you put atop that uniform. It's the vests, it's the helmets, it's the boots, it's the firearms."

The team expects to provide preliminary recommendations to Goldfein "in early October," spokeswoman Ann Stefanek said.

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"Those recommendations will then be prioritized and submitted for funding consideration," she said.

Other major commands are likely to join the discussion, she added.

But changes to flight suits and associated gear are already taking shape across the force, Col. Brady Hauboldt, program executive officer for Agile Combat Support at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio, said Thursday in a statement.

"Over the past year, during numerous customer support visits and engagements with airmen, we received feedback from female aircrew members about concerns about the fit, performance, and availability [of] female aircrew flight equipment," he said.

For flight suits specifically, proper fit and size range was lacking for female aircrew members.

"In response, the Air Force Life Cycle Management Center's Human System Program Office identified an existing, qualified solution, which expands the size ranges to better fit female aircrew," Hauboldt said.

The program office acquired an initial inventory of "a wide array of sizes" through the Defense Logistics Agency, Hauboldt said, adding that sample sizes were delivered to all Air Education and Training Command bases for new airmen to try and units were notified the flight suits were available for order.

"The effort has been so successful that we noted initial back orders in high-demand sizes, which have since been resolved with DLA," he said. "As of August 2018, DLA had over 6,000 flight suits on hand (or due in) to properly equip our female aircrew."

The service also touted the success of changing its bladder relief system for pilots from "piddle packs," or baggies lined with absorbent sponges, to the Aircrew Mission Extender Device, known as AMXDMax.

"We heard firsthand from female aircrew about challenges with bladder relief and rapidly acquired and delivered a solution," Hauboldt said.

The system was certified as "safe to fly" in 2009 and is also used by the Navy and Army, according to manufacturer Omni Medical Systems.

AMXDMax "is a hand-carried battery-powered pump to flow urine to a reusable collection bag (used with special underwear/pads) without having to unstrap from the aircraft seat," Hauboldt said. The Air Force has procured and delivered 356 AMXD kits to "equip all female aviators flying on ejection seat aircraft."

He did not specify whether they differ from the male AMXDMax kits, but said the Air Force "will order 1,619 additional AMXDs next week to supplement the inventory."

Better Equipment for All

Goldfein said that women have had to adjust to wearing suits and equipment designed to fit men, a problem he has highlighted for months while talking to airmen at bases around the globe. Improved, form-fitting uniforms have been a goal for Goldfein, Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson and Chief Master Sgt. Kaleth O. Wright, chief master sergeant of the Air Force.

The Army's Operational Camouflage Pattern debuts Oct. 1 as the Air Force's new combat uniform. But leaders have sought better uniforms for airmen operating in all spectrums of conflict. The Airman Battle Uniform, first issued to new recruits in 2007, drew criticism for its strange fit. Airmen also criticized the ABU because they were required to add it to their wardrobe but didn't use it as much as other uniforms.

"The focus has been, 'How do we make it easier [and] what works for airmen,' " Wilson said of the OCP on May 4. The uniform must be right "for both men and women. From a cost perspective, but also from a functional perspective."

It's about having "all of our equipment for all of our airmen sized for them, that fits them, that works in harsh environments  to include long periods of time of wearing that gear," Goldfein said Wednesday. "We're flying missions over places like Syria and others where it's nine, 10 or even 11 hours in a cockpit. That doesn't allow you to move. And if you have ill-fitting gear for that period of time, it's going to affect how you do the mission.

"It's not a destination," he said. "It's a journey we're on. I'm not going to ever get comfortable that we have this exactly right and stop. I don't expect to stand this team down anytime soon because as more technology and more equipment comes through, we've got to make sure that's upfront and part of the process early in the designs so we're not having to modify later."

-- Oriana Pawlyk can be reached at oriana.pawlyk@military.com. Follow her on Twitter at @Oriana0214.
U.S. Army weapons officials have figured out the cause and ginned up a fix for a dangerous glitch in the selector switch of M4 and M4A1 carbines that could cause the weapon to fire unintentionally.

In June, Military.com reported that about 3,000 Army M4 and M4A1s had failed new safety inspections begun after the service's Tank-automotive and Armaments Command sent out a safety-of-use message in March to all branches of the U.S. military, advising units to perform an updated functions check on all variants of M16s and M4s after a soldier experienced an unexplained, unintended discharge.

After more than 50,000 weapons were checked, TACOM officials discovered the cause of the glitch and halted the inspections, TACOM spokesman R. Slade Walters told Military.com.

"After receiving a significant number of reports from the field and an average failure rate of about 6 percent of the weapons inspected, we ended the inspections and have determined that the cause of the problem is a tolerance stack of the internal firing components," he said in an email. "The problem is fixed by modifying the selector to remove the tolerance issue and the fault. TACOM is working on an Army-wide directive to repair weapons with the issue that will be released when it is approved at the appropriate levels."

During a follow-up phone interview, Walters said, "Each individual part conforms to the tolerance requirements, but when the multiple parts get stuck together in 6 to 9 percent of the weapons, depending on which models you are looking at ... those tolerances create that condition."

"So in some weapons it's not a problem and in others it is," he said, explaining that the lower receiver's internal parts need "some machining and or grinding to slightly modify the internal components."

"When they do that, it fixes the problem ... and when they have done it and repeated it, they have been able to correct the problem in weapons showing the issue," he added.

Most failures occurred in M4A1s. The M4A1s that had been converted from M4s suffered 2,070 failures out of 23,000 inspected, a 9 percent failure rate. Out of about 16,000 original M4A1s inspected, 960 suffered failures, a 6 percent failure rate.

Less than one percent of the 4,000 M4s checked failed the updated functions check. And less than one percent of the 8,500 M16A2s checked failed the test as well.

About 500 M16A4s were also checked, but no failures were reported.

The Marine Corps also uses the M4 carbine, but the service said in June that its weapons were passing the new functions check.

The glitch-testing started when a Fort Knox soldier's M4A1 selector switch became stuck in-between the semi and auto settings. When the soldier pulled the trigger, the weapon failed to fire. The soldier then moved the selector switch and the weapon fired, the TACOM message states.

The M4A1 is now the Army's primary individual weapon. The service is converting M4 carbines to M4A1s through the M4 Product Improvement program. The M4A1 has been used by special operations forces for about two decades. It features a heavier barrel and a full-automatic setting instead of the three-round burst setting on standard M4s.

The Army said that all new M4A1s being issued are being checked for the selector glitch and corrected as needed, Walters said.

"Anybody who has gotten a new weapon in the last month or two has gotten weapons free of this error," he said. "It's not a small number; it's like several thousand. It has already been implemented in the supply chain."

It's unclear if TACOM will have unit armorers fix the weapons that showed the glitch or if TACOM technicians will do the work, Walters said. He added that "this is still pre-decisional."

TACOM officials also could not explain why the glitch had not shown up in the past.

"It was just a weird fluke," Walters said. "In the number of rounds that have gone through those models in the number of years those models have been available, it's like a winning-the-lottery kind of fluke. And the fact that we discovered it is just one of those things."

-- Matthew Cox can be reached at matthew.cox@military.com.
Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) met Tuesday with Robert Wilkie to try to coax the new VA secretary out of his departments newly stiffened opposition to a House-passed bill that would extend VA health care and compensation to tens of thousands of former Sailors and Marines with Agent Orange-associated ailments.

We havent convinced him yet, Brown said in a next day phone interview.

Without support from the Department of Veterans Affairs, Sen. Johnny Isakson (R-Ga.), chairman of the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee, faces a difficult decision on whether to allow a committee vote this fall on the Blue Water Navy Vietnam Veterans Act (HR 299).

Johnny pays a lot of attention to what the VA thinks, as he should [as] chairman, Brown said. The Ohio senator has had several conversations with Isakson on the Blue Water bill and said he is about as fair minded and bipartisan a chairman as there is in the Senate. But Brown declined to guess what Isakson will decide on HR 299 if the VA secretary continues to oppose the bill.

If we get the VA onboard it will make this a lot easier, Ill just answer it that way, Brown said of prospects for the bill. Otherwise I think it will be hard.

We tried polling all 15 senators on the committee to learn what impact VA opposition to HR 299 has had on their support for the bill. A spokesman for Isakson said only that he is actively working with the VA, outside stakeholders and his committee on a path forward on this legislation.

Sens. John Boozman (R-Ark.) and Mike Rounds (R-S.D.), noted they are original co-sponsors of a near identical Senate bill. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) said the bill should be passed and signed into law without delay. A disappointed Sen. Dean Heller (R-Nev.) said he wrote to Wilkie, urging him to reconsider his opposition. And Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) said he still is reviewing HR 299 and working with colleagues to do what is best for veterans.

Meanwhile pressure on Isakson builds. Every major veterans group and most military associations urged him this week to move the bill out of committee. Their volley of letters responded to Wilkies own Sept. 6 letter to Isakson expanding on why VA opposes extending benefits to veterans who served on ships off Vietnam and have ailments associated with exposure to dioxin in Agent Orange.

Wilkie noted again that the latest review of available scientific evidence by the Institute of Medicine (IOM), from 2011, concluded that exposure of shipboard personnel to defoliants sprayed over Vietnam cannot reasonably be determined.

Also, he said, Navy ships were required to draw seawater for conversion to shipboard potable water 12 miles from any river, making the presence of Agent Orange highly unlikely and the dilution factor would have been significant.

He also criticized how the House-passed bill would pay part of the cost of expanding benefits to Blue Water vets by ending an exemption from VA home loan funding fees for certain disabled veterans, those not rated fully and permanently disabled and seeking jumbo loans. The amount of such loans can start as low $453,100, or as high as $679,650, depending local housing market prices.

If HR 299 becomes law, Wilkie wrote, on a home loan of $500,000 a disabled veteran could be required to pay $12,000 to the VA in funding fees (plus interest if rolled into the life of the loan) rather$11,725 as a down payment, which results in home equity.

Advocates for Blue Water veterans argue Wilkie and staff have fallen into a previous pattern of cherry-picking information from scientific reports to conclude there is no scientific basis to support extending Agent Orange-related benefits.

They also criticize a fresh VA estimate on the cost of HR 299 -- $5.5 billion over 10 years -- as wildly high, and claim VA exaggerates the impact on home-buying veterans of planned funding fee increases, particularly for disabled veterans.

Former surface warfare officer, retired Navy commander and lawyer John B. Wells, who has served as general counsel to the Blue Water Navy Vietnam Veterans Association, considers himself the technical expert on the science and shipboard practices that, he argues, support extending Agent Orange benefits. The Slidell, LA attorney also is executive director of a non-profit corporation that litigates and advocates for veterans, and trains other attorneys on veterans law.

Wells complained to Wilkie that VA staff for Blue Water issues have no naval operational experience or expertise in hydrology, thermodynamics and other relevant sciences for determining how Agent Orange reached sailors at sea.

The VA consistently cherry picks through the (IOM) reports taking phrases out of context to support their position, Wells wrote. A conclusion VA ignores from a 2008 IOM report is that the evidence its research committee reviewed makes limiting Vietnam service to those who set foot on Vietnamese soil seem inappropriate. The same report said, he told Wilkie: Given the available evidence, the committee recommends that members of the Blue Water Navy should not be excluded from the set of Vietnam-era veterans with presumed herbicide exposure."

Regarding the 2011 report finding that Agent Orange exposure by Blue Water veterans "could not reasonably be determined, it needs context, Wells said.

What [IOM] actually said was: This lack of information makes it impossible to quantify exposures for Blue Water and Brown Water Navy sailors and, so far, for ground troops as well, Wells wrote. Therefore, IOM couldnt state with certainty whether Blue Water Navy personnel were or were not exposed to Agent Orange.

And while the IOM was told Navy ships did not typically make potable water within 12 miles of shore, Wells said it also was told that in exceptional circumstances a ship might take up water for distillation close to the coastline.

Mike Yates, national commander of Blue Water Navy Vietnam Veterans Association, wrote separately to Isakson. Among points he made was that naval gunfire support data show many ships operated within three nautical miles of the Vietnam coast for periods long enough to mandate water distillation. Also, some Navy ships were provided potable water from barges operating from shore, a practice not known to the IOM before it produced its 2011 report.

More arguments are made in two joint letters to Isakson in mid-September. One is from The Military Coalition, a consortium 27 veterans groups and military associations, and another from veteran service organizations: Disabled American Veterans, Veterans of Foreign Wars, The American Legion and Paralyzed Veterans of America. The second letter reflects a consequential shift of position.

The four large vet groups all now agree they do not support imposing new fees on any service-connected disabled veteran, even for jumbo home loans. Disabled veterans have already paid with their service, and we therefore urge the Committee to strike this provision from HR 299 before passing the legislation.

If the senators embrace that change, they would have to find other budget offsets to cover the cost of the bill, which VA contends already were woefully inadequate in the House bill to satisfy balanced budget law requirements.

Also, any change to HR 299 would require the bills return to the House to be voted on again, increasing the risk that the 115thCongress will run out of time to pass a Blue Water Navy bill. In that case, advocates would have to restart their quest in 2019 with a mix of lawmakers significantly altered by Novembers election.

To comment, write Military Update, P.O. Box 231111, Centreville, VA, 20120 or email milupdate@aol.com or twitter: @Military_Update.
ANN ARBOR, MI - Another medical marijuana dispensary is slated to open near the University of Michigan campus in Ann Arbor.

The city's Planning Commission voted this week to give special-exception zoning approval for a new dispensary at 617 Packard St., near Hill and State streets, a stone's throw from UM's Ford School of Public Policy and the UM Law School.

The dispensary has the OK to move into a house that's been a commercial building for many years, replacing the Pastry Peddler Bakery & Cafe, which is on the ground floor, and PJ's Used Records, which was upstairs and recently closed.

There are 2,112 square feet of floor area between the two spaces. The dispensary will use the entire building.

The company behind the dispensary plans to invest roughly $210,000 into renovating the space.

Ankur Rungta, a 35-year-old Ann Arborite and UM alumnus, appeared before the commission this week seeking approval for the dispensary on behalf of his company, QPS Michigan Holdings LLC of Novi.

"I live here in Ann Arbor with my wife and my two children," Rungta told commissioners. "I've been here for a long time. I went to undergrad and to law school at the University of Michigan. This company, QPS Michigan, has now been approved at the state level for licensing. We're excited to have this opportunity."

Rungta said he's expecting most of the dispensary's customers to come from the immediate area, including some UM students.

He said there isn't a name for the dispensary yet, but he hopes to have it open by early 2019.



He and his partners also are getting ready to build a 33,000-square-foot marijuana cultivation and processing facility in Webberville, off Interstate 96 near Lansing. He said they also have cannabis business ventures in Portland and Boston.

The 617 Packard site is in the center of the Packard/Hill/State triangle and is surrounded by retail businesses and restaurants. There also is a large amount of student rental housing nearby.

"Within the triangle are at least three former houses now buried in commercial additions that have been present for at least 50 years," City Planner Jill Thacher wrote in a staff report, noting there also are rental houses and apartments across the street.

There is no automobile parking on the site, though there is metered parking available on Packard, Hill and State streets. Some bicycle parking spaces are being added.

Thacher said the city's traffic engineer had some concerns, but those have been addressed.

"This area is a tough area for pedestrian-vehicle crashes especially and it will be studied next year using a federal grant," Thacher said. "And the petitioners have been responsive by promising to do things like provide bus passes to their employees, put in the extra bike hoops ... but really it's sort of a pedestrian-centered retail location."

Thacher said the city's staff determined a marijuana dispensary there would be compatible with the rest of the surrounding block, which includes a liquor store and Baba Dari Mediterranean Grill. She said there haven't been any concerns voiced by neighbors.

The city's Planning Commission has approved these 24 marijuana dispensaries so far this year:

Ann Arbor Healing Center, 3720 Washtenaw Ave.

Arborside, 1818 Packard St.

Arbors Wellness, 321 E. Liberty St.

Bloom City Club, 423 Miller Ave.

CannArbor Inc., 2019 W. Stadium Blvd.

District Arbor 1, 3005 Packard Road

Exclusive PR Center, 3820 Varsity Drive

Green Planet, 700 Tappan St.

Greenstone Society, 338 S. Ashley St.

Huron View, 3152 Packard Road

Liberty Gallery Inc., 702 S. Main St.

Liv Cafe N Wellness, 603 E. William St.

Medicine Man of Ann Arbor Inc., 2793 Plymouth Road

Northside Narnia, 811 N. Main St.

Om of Medicine, 111 S. Main St.

Parkhurst Services, 3294 Winewood Ave.

People's Choice Alternative Medicine, 2247 W. Liberty St.

Pure Roots LLC, 3430 Washtenaw Ave.

QPS Michigan Holdings LLC, 617 Packard St.

Scientific Method Holdings II Inc., 1115 Broadway St.

Stadium Ventures Inc., 2460 W. Stadium Blvd.

The Rabbit Club, 450 S. Main St.

TC MI Ann Arbor 2 LLC (TreeCity), 1958 S. Industrial Highway.

Treecity Health Collective, 2730 Jackson Ave.

Some of those, including Green Planet and Liv Cafe, are in close proximity to the UM campus.

The City Council has chosen to limit the number of marijuana dispensaries at 28 for now to see how things go as the growing cannabis industry increases its presence in Tree Town.

The city expects to reach the 28-permit cap soon with other dispensary applications in the pipeline.

In addition to Planning Commission zoning approval, dispensaries need building compliance approval, permit approval through the city clerk's office and license approval through the state.
YPSILANTI, MI - Amelia Reese's pride in her home is evident from the first step inside.

There's the living room's tree wall art. And the brightly-colored jewel stickers adorning a wall in her 8-year-old daughter's bedroom.

But the washer and dryer, conveniently located beside her bedroom upstairs, and the guest bathroom on the lower level are Reese's favorite features in her two-bedroom, 1.5-bathroom apartment in Ypsilanti's New Parkridge Homes.

These are luxuries Reese didn't have when she first moved into the subsidized housing complex in 2012, when the original 70-year-old Parkridge apartments were still standing and in a state of disrepair.

In January, the Ypsilanti Housing Commission unveiled an $18 million total rebuild of 86 affordable housing units and dubbed the complex New Parkridge.

The apartments are reserved for people making 60 percent of the area median income or less, which is $55,750 for a family of four in Washtenaw County.

For Reese, 28, the upgrade in her home motivated her to make other changes in her life.

"Before the remodel, it was a nasty neighborhood and it was kind of like the mood draws you down. It doesn't give you a lot of enthusiasm about life," she said. "After the remodel, I figured that something had to change. ... I didn't want to continue to be the same person in a new place."

The Ypsilanti Housing Commission recently received a merit award for program innovation from the National Association of Housing and Redevelopment Officials for its work to revitalize New Parkridge Homes.

Support services available at New Parkridge include childcare, assistance pursuing higher education or employment and health and wellness initiatives, all coordinated by on-site social workers.

The goal is to help the residents achieve self-sufficiency, said Zac Fosler, Ypsilanti Housing Commission executive director

"These agencies have put a lot of thought, creativity and hard work into helping residents improve their lives and into revitalizing their local communities," Carl S. Richie Jr., president of the national housing redevelopment organization, said in a press release.

Reese is an example of what's possible when New Parkridge residents take advantage of the support and programming now available to them.

Reese decided to pursue a pharmacy tech certificate from Washtenaw Community College when her daughter, Khloe Porter, started kindergarten in 2015.

A single mother, she took prerequisite courses part-time while continuing to work full-time as a McDonald's shift leader.

Juggling her work and class schedule proved challenging, so Reese sought out a work-study opportunity at the Parkridge Community Center, which is supported by WCC. Reese could walk to her job there, study during downtime at work, and the center provided afterschool childcare for Khloe.

After completing an unpaid externship at Michigan Medicine and earning her pharmacy tech certificate in April, Reese was hired full time at Michigan Medicine in June.

She's already got her sights set on her next goals for herself and Khloe, and she's turning to New Parkridge programs for assistance.

Reese would like to own her own home in five years, so she's planning to enroll in the housing commission's family empowerment program, which is coordinated by Eastern Michigan University and helps families establish a savings account and provides other resources.

While Reese is grateful for the home and support she's found at New Parkridge, she eventually wants to move on so someone else can have the same opportunities she's had.

"I think it's cool that they will help you move along," she said. "Some people use this low-income threshold to survive long-term, and I think it's a transitional process. ... I'm just here for the time being until I'm able to transition."
ANN ARBOR, MI - The University of Michigan plans to seek a re-hearing from a federal appeals court panel that ruled in favor of a student who sued the university after being kicked out of school over sexual assault allegations.

The U.S. 6th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled earlier this month that the university may not find a student guilty of sexual misconduct in a he-said-she-said situation without giving the accused, or their representative, the opportunity to directly question the victim.

UM president Mark Schlissel addressed the ruling during a Thursday, Sept. 20 Board of Regents meeting, noting the university would also ask judges to "clarify that no student has a constitutional right to direct cross-examination" in light of its ruling.

"While we believe that our current single investigator model is fair and consistent with prior legal precedent, the Sixth Circuit has disagreed," Schlissel said. "The university is always striving to create a safe educational experience for all of our students, while also providing policies and procedures that protect the rights of all of our students."

Schlissel later advocated for cross-examination in sexual assault hearings, but in a less intrusive setting.

"We believe that an appropriate and lawful hearing model is one in which cross-examination is allowed, but in a less intrusive, more trauma-informed manner that allows parties to submit written questions through a neutral hearing officer to ask of the other party and witnesses," he said.

The court's ruling states that if a public university has to choose between competing narratives to resolve a case, the university must give the accused student or his agent an opportunity to cross-examine the accuser and adverse witnesses in the presence of a neutral fact-finder.

"Our circuit has made two things clear: (1) if a student is accused of misconduct, the university must hold some sort of hearing before imposing a sanction as serious as expulsion or suspension, and (2) when the university's determination turns on the credibility of the accuser, the accused, or witnesses, that hearing must include an opportunity for cross-examination," the ruling states.

While the ruling applies specifically to a case out of UM, the decision could have implications at university campuses across Michigan and beyond.

A growing number of universities, including UM and Michigan State University, in an effort to shield sexual assault victims from their attackers and to encourage victims to speak up, have established policies that deprive the accused, usually young men, of their constitutional right to cross-examine, argues Bloomfield Hills-based attorney Deborah L. Gordon.

Gordon represents an anonymous former UM student, named only as John Doe in court filings, who was kicked out the university based on allegations that he had non-consensual sex with a woman, also a student, while she was drunk during a fraternity party on Jan. 16, 2016.

The woman filed a sexual misconduct complaint with the university. The allegations were initially ruled to be unfounded, but the woman appealed and the decision was reversed.

The male student, who at the time held a 3.95 GPA and was 13.5 credit hours from earning his degree, was forced to withdraw from UM on June 27, 2016, according to the original complaint.

In September 2016, the student filed a federal lawsuit asking UM to grant him his degree. He argued that the sexual misconduct finding was erroneous, partially based on the fact that he was never able to defend himself before the appellate body or question the credibility of his accuser's claims.

John Doe, according to the appeals court ruling, claimed he and the female student were kissing, and decided to go up to his bedroom to have sex. Afterwards, he left for an extended period of time and returned to find the woman distraught, he believed because he left her alone in the bed shortly after their sexual encounter.

The woman describes the encounter very differently, claiming she said "no sex" before she "flopped" onto the male student's bed.

In January 2015, U.S. District Judge David M. Lawson ruled in favor of UM. The case was dismissed.

The Court of Appeals also ruled on a second aspect of the original complaint. The student claimed gender discrimination, alleging that the U.S. Department of Education, student groups and the general public are encouraging universities to be overzealous in their investigations of men accused of sexual misconduct.

Sixth Circuit Court Judges Amul R. Thapar and Julia S. Gibbons issued the majority decision. Judge Ronald L. Gilman dissented in part, writing that the decision to grant the accused or the representative a chance to cross-examine their accuser is a "bridge too far," as precedent has already determined that due process may be afforded at the university level without the benefit of an attorney.
A carjacker knocked an elderly but feisty woman to the pavement outside a Livonia Walmart, swiped her purse and fled in her car with an accomplice Tuesday, according to police.

Following the Sept. 18 attack, the victim, an 88-year-old woman from Livonia, referred to herself as "one tough broad," and said in an interview with the Associated Press that she tried to "sock him" with her cane.

The woman suffered bruises but no serious injuries.

Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy on Thursday charged two suspects, Jason Malinas, 38, of Sterling Heights, who's accused of assaulting the woman, and Jessica St. Clair, 41, of Wayne, with carjacking, unarmed robbery and five counts each of stealing a financial transaction device.

The suspects were arraigned Thursday, Sept. 20, and jailed on $2 million cash or surety bonds.
SALZBURG - An extraordinary European summit on Thursday kicked in Salzburg with an EU27 format to discuss security and Brexit.

Immigration is not formally on the agenda but EU border agency Frontex will be included in the dossier on security as representatives of the 27 members will continue discussing borders and immigration, an issue at the center of a four-hour working dinner last night attended by heads of State and government.

One of the proposals that emerged from the gathering reportedly provides for EU countries not hosting migrants to give a financial contribution. EU leaders however remain distant on the internal management of immigration while agreeing on the need to boost the involvement of third countries such as Egypt.
FLINT, MI -- Two of the last Flint water crisis preliminary examinations to start could be among the next to finish.

Special prosecutor Todd Flood told Genesee District Court Judge Jennifer Manley Thursday, Sept. 20, that he most likely will call just two more witnesses in the criminal exams for Nancy Peeler and Robert Scott, both officials with the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services.

Peeler and Scott are each charged with misconduct in office and conspiracy, both of which are felonies, and willful neglect of duty, a misdemeanor, for their roles in the water crisis.

Prosecutors claim Peeler, director of the Program for Maternal, Infant, and Early Childhood Home Visiting, requested an internal report on blood lead level data in Flint children in July of 2015.

That initial report showed a significant increase in blood lead levels in the summer of 2014, immediately after the city's water source was changed to the Flint River, but prosecutors say the results were held back, never sent to higher-ranking health officials.

Scott, data manager for the Healthy Homes and Lead Prevention program, worked with Peeler to create a second report, issued two days after the initial report, according to prosecutors, indicating no statistically significant rise in blood lead levels occurred during the same time.

Attorneys for Scott and Peeler have denied the charges against them but won't begin to roll out their cases in detail until Flood rests his.

On Thursday, former MDHHS epidemiologist Cristin Larder, who authored the first Flint report, ended the fifth day of testimony in the exam, and Flood said he expects to call two of her former supervisors at the agency, starting Friday, Sept. 21, with Patricia McClain.

Larder testified Thursday that Peeler was "asking the wrong questions" if she was attempting to show a connection between rising blood lead levels and Flint water.

Although Larder went on to discuss additional steps that could be taken to prove or disprove the rise in blood lead levels, Peeler's attorney, Harold Z. Gurewitz, said she never shared some information with his client.

Flood told Manley he expects testimony from McClain will be time-consuming. The prosecutor said he also plans to call State Epidemiologist Sarah Lyon-Callo to testify.

In all, Flood has charged 15 individuals with crimes related to the water crisis.

Four of those 15 have accepted plea agreements, two have been bound over to Genesee Circuit Court, seven are in the midst of preliminary exams, and two have yet to have exams begin in Flint District Court.
FLINT, MI - The money from a mystery donor set to pay for 40-plus new Flint police cruisers is expected to be here within a month -- nearly a year after news of the gift was made public.

Max Chiddister, executive director of the Flint Police Foundation -- which coordinated the donation -- said on Wednesday, Sept. 19, that the city should get 43 or 44 new police vehicles from the anonymous donor.

"Investment funding for the fleet of cruisers is due to mature in the next three to four weeks," said Max Chiddister. "I fully expect it to happen."

Chiddister told MLive-The Flint Journal in July that the cruisers could be ordered as early as August, which didn't happen.

News of the donation, which initially also included new bulletproof vests, was first made public in November 2017 at a press conference when Chief Tim Johnson announced to the media and public that an anonymous "private citizen and private business owner" planned to supply a fleet of police-outfitted SUVs.

But few details have been released on the donation or donor since, and the city has yet to secure the funds.

Flint police received a $225,000 donation for body armor from a different donor, Angel Armor, in July.

The Flint Police Department did not want to comment on the potential gift on Wednesday.

"We're going to wait on responding at this time," said Flint police Spokesman Sgt. Tyrone Booth. "At the appropriate time, we will hold a press conference."

Chiddister said he expects the donation will be between $1 and $2 million.

Although Chiddister said Flint is closer today to getting the funding, he did not want to go into specifics.

"I have a hard time going into detail because I don't want to violate my relationship with them," Chiddister said. "I don't like being vague like this. I don't know how else to put it."

The donor lives in Ohio, Chiddister said, and he has no direct ties to Flint.

The donor, who spoke to MLive-The Flint Journal during a February call facilitated by Flint police Deputy Chief Devon Bernritter, said he isn't making the donation for publicity, but because "it's the right thing to do."

The man declined to identify himself during the phone call with MLive-The Flint Journal, but he agreed to answer questions about the proposed donation.

The donation to the Flint Police Department could be rescinded if his identity becomes public, the donor said.

City officials redacted information identifying the man in emails released to MLive-The Flint Journal through a Freedom of Information Act request made in December, citing Michigan law prohibiting disclosure of records providing an unwarranted invasion of an individual's privacy.

During that phone conversation with MLive-The Flint Journal, the donor -- who said he is a former part-time police officer and part-time police chief -- said he chose to donate to Flint after hearing about the city's financial strife and high violent crime rates but said he knew little else about the Vehicle City.

Adding that Johnson should not have disclosed information about the proposed donation at the November press conference, the man said the proposed donations to the Flint Police Department would be funded by "financial instruments" he acquired.

However, he declined to address the details of the financial instruments, which he valued at several hundred million dollars, because of a "non-disclosure agreement."

The man said his broker initially told him he would have the funds available to give the city by December, but they have experienced a delay in getting the money.
GRAND RAPIDS, MI -- City officials have agreed on a two-year pilot program to help prospective low-income renters by linking them with social workers to overcome housing barriers, and landlords when they're determined "rent ready."

The Rental Assistance Center program received unanimous approval from the Grand Rapids City Commission this week. The body voted 6-0 Tuesday to join in the partnership with the Grand Rapids Housing Commission.

Grand Rapids will pay $91,800 a year for the center, with the expectation that it'll be evaluated near the conclusion of the two-year trial run.

"The idea is if we process about 1,000 applications, we assume maybe 25 percent of them or 250 of them are going to start showing us different impediments why they are not able to get accepted into rental," said Housing Commission Executive Director Carlos Sanchez.

The initiative would be free and available to households earning not more than 80 percent of the Area Median Income. In 2016, the median income in Kent County was $59,668, according to U.S. Census data.

Participants would submit an application for rental housing using the center's electronic portal. The Housing Commission would secure appropriate information based on industry standards to determine the applicant's "rent readiness."

Housing commission staff would then connect those who are "rent ready" and fit landlord-established criteria to rental property owners. Individuals who aren't "rent ready" would be linked to social workers for a face-to-face meeting to determine which community agencies could help them overcome barriers to securing rental housing.

"The mechanism for doing this is already in place for us," Sanchez said. "We just have to be able to market it a little bit through the city and through the housing commission."

The housing commission's online portal already has an estimated 800 rental property owners on it who could be connected to prospective renters, Sanchez said. He hopes to bring more landlords on board.

Examples of social-worker referrals include security deposit assistance, securing utilities, credit repair, income challenges and overcoming poor landlord references through housekeeping and "Good Renter" classes, and clearing debts owed to former landlords.

"Right now you're getting a lot of anecdotal about how they're being overcharged," Sanchez said. "We'll be able to see what else is impeding them, if their security deposits are a problem or any income issues are a problem. We're going to work with Michigan Works and others to maybe get some folks to tap into those resources as well."

The housing commission would also provide activity reports identifying applicant referrals, connections with community partners that address leasing barriers and the achievement of "rent ready" status by households.

The $91,800 bill to the city will cover $69,000 for one full-time social-work employee to work with an estimated 250 rent-readiness applicants per year, as well as $15,000 for credit reports, and $7,800 for overhead costs.

On Tuesday, Interim City Manager Eric DeLong recommended to the commission that it invest in rental assistance program. He continued conversations with Sanchez that were started by former city manager Greg Sundstrom before his retirement last year.

Second Ward Commissioner Ruth Kelly supported the program and asked for reports back to the commission once it's up and running. Sanchez said he imagines at least quarterly updates, depending on how significant a response the center gets.

"We had so many people coming to the city commission who were in dire need of support around this rental-application problem," Kelly said. "(Grand Rapids) Homes For All has been really involved and we appreciate their input as well."

The city commission adopted an ordinance in July that controlled rental property application fees in an attempt to protect renters and combat the city's affordable housing woes. It didn't put a cap on application fees, but said it could not be greater than the cost of screening an applicant.

DeLong said the Rental Assistance Center will be included as a resource on the rental application disclosure form for when individuals are denied housing.
GRAND RAPIDS, MI -- The new practice of posting lost-dog photos onto social media is already paying off for the Kent County Animal Shelter.

A St. Clair man and his husky were reunited this week, soon after the a photo of the man's lost dog was posted on the animal shelter's Facebook page.

The animal shelter's new initiative of posting photos of lost dogs they've received onto their Facebook page is part of a shakeup at the shelter following MLive's report of Kent County's relatively high euthanasia rate.

The lost-dog initiative, which area rescue groups have long asked for, and the announced resignation of the shelter director, Carly Luttmann, are two of the changes. Luttmann's last day is Friday.

The lost-dog initiative started Friday, Sept. 14, nine days after MLive/The Grand Rapids Press published a story about the shelter's euthanasia rate being annually among the highest in Michigan over the last five years.

Arthur Watson, a veteran from St. Clair, was reunited with his 2-year-old husky, Princess, after she went missing six months ago.

Princess went missing after a bad storm, Watson said. He has had the husky since 2016.

"I knew it was her right away. It was a miracle and it goes to show the power of social media," Watson said. "If they never posted that picture of her ... I wouldn't have known she was there and she could have been put up for adoption."

Before Princess went missing, Watson said he was in the process of training her to become a service dog. He drove more than 150 miles to be reunited with her.

"It was just one of those things where ... she locked eyes with me and she knew who I was and I knew who she was," Watson said. "She's home now and she hasn't left my side."

According to the animal shelter's new initiative, not all dogs taken in will immediately be posted to Facebook, so it's still a good idea to check in person at the county facility located at 740 Fuller Ave. NE.

The Kent County Animal Shelter Facebook page has 23,546 followers.

Health Department spokesperson Steve Kelso said he is thrilled that the Facebook postings are working.

"The Facebook posts are fairly new and we are still trying to figure out how many dogs have been reunited through our Facebook page," Kelso said. "We encourage people to share our posts of missing dogs."

Kelso said putting photos of strays on their Facebook page has been long in the works, with discussions dating back at least five months ago.

Last Monday, animal advocates met with Luttmann's boss, Environmental Health Division Director Sara Simmonds, to discuss better practices at the shelter, such as weekend adoption times and posting photos of captured stray animals online.
GRAND RAPIDS, MI - A 44-year-old Grand Rapids man is accused of producing child pornography after using social media to contact girls in South Carolina.

David William Barrett is charged in a multi-state investigation that began with a tip from an internet search-engine to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

The center then contacted the Internet Crimes Against Child Task Force, or ICAC, in Michigan.

Barrett was arraigned in Grand Rapids District Court on one count of enticing child-sexually abusive material, two counts of manufacturing child-sexually abusive material and three counts of using a computer to commit a crime.

He is held on $100,000 bond, records showed.

A task force of state police detectives and Grand Rapids and Wyoming police detectives contacted Barrett on Sept. 12.

Police seized digital evidence and conducted forensic examinations of the items.

Police then contacted Kershaw County Sheriff's Department in South Carolina, where police identified at least four alleged victims.

Barrett had contacted the girls through Facebook, detective Sgt. Chris Prevette, ICAC coordinator, told MLive and The Grand Rapids Press.

At this point, police do not believe that Barrett shared any materials with others on the internet, Prevette said.

Police have not found any local victims, he said.

These cases show the need for parents to monitor children's internet activities, Prevette said.

"You wouldn't invite a stranger into your kids' bedroom and hang out," he said, but that's essentially what can happen on the internet.

He said that Facebook does a good job protecting children from predators.

"We do have a very good relationship with Facebook. They do not tolerate any exploitation (of children)," Prevette said.

The state police Computer Crimes Unit worked with the task force - comprised of multiple West Michigan police agencies - on the investigation.
Backlash mounted Wednesday night following the Grand Rapids Area Chamber of Commerce's endorsement of Republican gubernatorial candidate Bill Schuette, with another high-profile business - Founders Brewing Company - saying it will terminate its membership with the group.

A growing list of businesses, residents and advocacy groups have pushed back against the chamber after the organization announced its endorsement on Monday, Sept. 17. They're upset with a legal opinion, issued by Schuette in July, that said the Michigan Civil Rights Commission does not have authority to interpret the state's civil rights act as including discrimination protections against gay and transgender residents.

"We stand with our LGBTQ community and ask that the Grand Rapids Chamber reverse their decision," Founders said in a message posted on its Facebook page. "We will be terminating our membership in the meantime and encourage our fellow local businesses to consider doing the same."

The groups have asked the chamber to rescind the endorsement.

In a statement issued Wednesday, chamber President Rick Baker said his organization remains "committed to diversity, equity, and inclusion" and will continue to advocate to expand the Elliott-Larsen Civil Rights Act to include sexual orientation and gender identity.

He did not indicate whether the chamber is considering reversing its endorsement.

"We have heard the response to our recent GR Chamber PAC endorsement of Bill Schuette for Governor and the frustration and disappointment from members of our business community, particularly as it relates to diversity, equity and inclusion," he said. "We understand our endorsement decisions do not take place in a vacuum and we are open to dialogue to understand the impact of our decisions."

Opposition to the chamber's endorsement began building Tuesday, when two popular Grand Rapids restaurants - Donkey Taqueria and The Winchester - posted messages on Facebook denouncing the chamber for endorsing a candidate that "doesn't recognize the rights of all Michigan citizens under the Elliott-Larson Civil Rights Act."

Donkey Taqueria and The Winchester share the same owner, Paul Lee.

"We're disappointed," said Vince Lambert, the co-owner of Creston Brewery, who emailed the chamber Wednesday to cancel his membership with the organization.

He said Schuette has a record of supporting policies that have been "discriminatory" toward women, people of color, the LGBT community - the very people his brewery serves and employs.

"We felt that crossed a personal line for us," Lambert said.

The owners of West Michigan Caterer and The Apartment Lounge, a gay bar in downtown Grand Rapids, also withdrew their membership from the chamber.

In a statement, Schuette said Michigan "must be a place where we grow our recovering economy and ensure there is no room for discrimination of any kind, because all people must be treated with dignity, grace and respect."

"We will work together to protect everyone, including employment protections and religious liberties. It's been done elsewhere," he said. "It's the 21st century, we can do it here, too. We believe all sides must be brought to the table to talk in a welcoming environment for everyone involved. Changes to law in Utah are one example of the ability to find a way forward but I would be listening to the people at the table to find Michigan's way forward, including the folks at Founders and others."

In addition to Founders, more than 80 people - most of whom had completed Leadership Grand Rapids, a program created by the chamber - have signed an online petition criticizing the endorsement, and asked that it be rescinded.
KALAMAZOO, MI -- Four community mental health organizations in Michigan were awarded $4 million each to expand services in the communities they serve, U.S. Sen. Debbie Stabenow announced this week.

"I have seen what happens when families get help and what happens when they don't," Stabenow said. "It's a life-changer, not just for the person, but for the family. We need to make that available to everybody."

The grant funding was announced Thursday, Sept. 20, at Kalamazoo County Mental Health and Substance Abuse Services (KCMHSAS) in downtown Kalamazoo.

Of the 25 of the grants awarded across the country, four were in Michigan, KCMHSAS CEO Jeff Patton said.

Grants totaling $4 million over a period of 2 years were awarded to:

Kalamazoo County Mental Health and Substance Abuse Services

Health West (Muskegon Community Mental Health Authority)

West Michigan Community Mental Health Authority

Easterseals, based in Auburn Hills

The four community mental health centers have been selected as the state's first-ever Certified Community Behavioral Health Clinics, Stabenow's office said.

Stabenow said her father had a mental illness that wasn't identified correctly for years, and getting the right help wasn't easy.

"He was what we now say is bipolar," she said.

In the 60s, he was labeled as schizophrenic and did not get the medication he needed, she said.

"Finally he was diagnosed properly," Stabenow said, helping him live a productive life.

In Kalamazoo County, the funding will allow mental health professionals to respond to more crisis calls, Patton said, and help KCMHSAS expand outpatient services at the Portage Street and East Alcott Street location in Kalamazoo.

The grant will include expanding services for substance abuse disorders and addictions, mental illness, substance use disorders and other things, Patton said.

The grant establishes Certified Community Behavioral Health Clinics, Patton said, which have federal certification, with the hope that it will bring more federal funding that will continue after the grant ends.

The grant means means people will get better access to mental health services, he said, which can be difficult because of the stigma attached to mental health issues. The organization encourages people who think they need help to come in to speak with professionals who can help guide them to services that can help.

Lisa Williams, Executive Director of West Michigan Community Mental Health System, which serves Mason, Lake, and Oceana counties, expects to expand services offered and also the array of services to people already in care, she said. The funding will help expand 24-hour mobile crisis services, and more.

Changes in state funding have affected their operations, she said, and the increased funding opportunities will help. The grant amount represents about 10 percent of the organization's operating budget, she said.

The impact of this grant is priceless, said Brent Wirth, president and CEO of Easterseals Michigan.

"It affords us the ability to provide services that we only dreamed of but did not have the funding," Wirth said. "We will amplify our service delivery, increase our workforce, improve our outreach, and enhance technology, all to better meet the needs of those living in Oakland County and the surrounding area."

The grant will help HealthWest reach more people, through improved access and earlier interventions, CEO Julia Rupp said.

Kalamazoo County Sheriff Richard Fuller said the grant funding will make an impact in several ways.

"This helps everyone in public safety, it helps our citizens and it makes everyone safer," Fuller said.

The grant funding should help people get the help they need instead of ending up in jail, he said.

"I have worked with the Kalamazoo Community Mental Health and Substance Abuse Service in order to work towards individuals with mental illness who need treatment and services receive them rather than end up in the county jail or judicial system," Fuler said. "Expanding community mental health services, including 24 hour crisis service, will ensure these individuals get the help they need."
LANSING, MI - When the candidates for governor take the stage for two debates in October, you won't see Bill Gelineau, the Libertarian candidate for governor.

"I guess there was a time 20 years ago when I felt like, 'Yeah, I understand why they're keeping us out,'" Gelineau said in an interview. But, he said, "... we're an army now."

Michigan Libertarians elevated their party status after the 2016 election, when Libertarian presidential candidate Gary Johnson collected 172,136 votes. Michigan's threshold for parties to be considered major parties is at least 5 percent of the total number of votes cast in the most recent Secretary of State race, which was 154,040 in 2014.

Because of their newfound classification by the state, they joined the Republican and Democratic parties in holding a primary for the first time in August.

But it doesn't mean they will be represented on the debate stage, a fact that is irksome to Gelineau.

The debates Republican Bill Schuette and Democrat Gretchen Whitmer will participate in determining which candidates to invite based on recent polling. A common threshold is that a candidate must be polling 10 percent to be invited to participate, and a recent poll from WDIV and the Detroit News put Gelineau at 2.3 percent.

But he isn't daunted, saying his campaign's internal polling looks much different.

Finding libertarianism in college

Gelineau grew up in Riverview, in the downriver area near Detroit. His parents were both union Democrats, but going to college at Wayne State University expanded his world view and turned him into a Libertarian.

At the time, he remembers there weren't very many other Libertarians. When he told people about his political leanings, "I used to have to explain what that meant and pronounce it for them again," he said.

He made his career as an entrepreneur, starting a lawn care business and restaurant before he got into the title insurance business. He's a father and grandfather living with his wife, Donna, in West Michigan.

And in this campaign, he's fighting for recognition for another way of thinking.

"At its core, I believe that the idea that we have a two-party system is flawed. And honestly, I criticize the media for not talking about that enough," Gelineau said.

But he sees Libertarians as being ahead on several big issues. He remembers bringing up gerrymandering during a run for state house years ago and how boring the subject seemed to people. Now it's a national talking point and the subject of a ballot initiative in Michigan.

Focused on policy

In general, Gelineau sees Republicans and Democrats as entrenched with interest groups.

"Too many policies, I think, are supporting big business and big labor versus ordinary folks," Gelineau said.

His policy positions include eliminating the state's Michigan Strategic Fund, which manages business incentives, and reducing the prison population. If the proposal to legalize recreational marijuana passes, he plans to pardon everybody convicted of drug crime who didn't also commit a violent crime.

"We've got what I think is a very biased system that has really harmed particular communities, particularly communities of color," he said.

Some of the people who have already served long periods of time deserve a second chance, he said.

And while he points to policy areas where Libertarians have been ahead of a popular issue - marijuana legalization, for instance - he's also made some controversial proposals.

On Medicaid, while Whitmer and Schuette focus on the future of the state's Healthy Michigan plan, he is proposing to pay women on government assistance to delay having children until they are at least 23. His plan would give women who enrolled in the program at 15 or 16 $27,000 in installments leading up to their 23rd birthdays.

It's a proposal that's drawn conversation and some criticism.

Preparing for the election

Heading into November, Gelineau is focused on building a grassroots campaign.

Travis Wolf, 37, of Hazel Park, is supporting Gelineau. He is one of the Libertarians drawn into the movement by Gary Johnson's candidacy in 2016, the surge that put the Libertarian Party in league with Republicans and Democrats.

He's considered himself a Libertarian since his early 20s, but in 2016 officially joined the party and got on some mailing lists. He tried his hand at canvassing for the first time, knocking doors in his neighborhood and telling people about Johnson.

Now, he's supporting Gelineau.

"He's a long-shot to win, obviously, but I think it's good just to get out there and to have people see it on the ballot and see that there is a third choice," Wolf said.

He wasn't political before he found the Libertarian Party and everything kind of clicked. Now he likes to talk with people about the party's ideas.

"You might be a Libertarian and not know it. And I think that's what we're trying to get out, here," he said.

He'd like to see Gelineau included in debates so more people would know about him as an option.

Going into the final stretch of the campaign, Gelineau said his campaign doesn't have the infrastructure of the Republican or Democratic parties, but he does have an army of dedicated volunteers.

He's raised $56,315 for his campaign through Aug. 27, according to his most recent campaign finance filing with the state. It's not the millions Schuette and Whitmer have raised, but it's more than third-party candidates have traditionally raised.

And Gelineau is printing off lots of signs, many of which people are paying for.

"Our production has really ramped, and I think it speaks to the fact that there's a yearning for this alternative voice," he said.

His pitch to voters is that he can work with anyone, Republican or Democrat, and he brings new ideas.

"I do care. There's nothing phony here, it's who I am," Gelineau said.
PITTSBURGH - Two Michigan men are among 16 people who have been named Carnegie heroes for extraordinary heroism.

Blake Huff and Benjamin Hawkins, of Kalkaska, are being honored for their efforts to save Mary Jo Tester, a 50-year-old paraplegic woman, from her burning home on Feb. 22, 2017.

Presented by Pittsburgh-based Carnegie Hero Fund Commission, the honor is given those who risk their lives to an extraordinary degree while saving or attempting to save the lives of others.

An account of their daring rescue attempt was included with the announcement.

Tester was in the living room of her Kalkaska home when fire broke out and began to spread. Huff, 23, a police sergeant, and Hawkins, 35, a deputy sheriff responded to the home after Tester called for help.

According to the account, the men saw flames through the living room window and black smoke rising upon arriving and entered the home.

Huff crawled on his belly about 15 feet across the living room toward Tester, who was on the floor with flames nearby. Along the way he moved a recliner, which was on fire, from his path. Hawkins crawled inside behind Huff.

The pair reached Tester on the far side of the room amid nearby flames. Huff then grasped Tester by the ankles and crawled backward, dragging her. Hawkins grasped Huff's pant leg and pulled and guided Huff, Tester in tow, to the door. Huff and Hawkins lifted Tester and carried her from the home.

Tester, who suffered smoke inhalation and severe burns, died five days later. Huff and Hawkins were each treated at a hospital for smoke inhalation but recovered.

The 16 honorees are the third group of awards made in 2018 and bring the total number of awards to 10,044 since the award's inception in 1904.

Each of the awardees or their survivors receive a financial grant. Throughout the 114 years since the fund was established by industrialist-philanthropist Andrew Carnegie, $40.4 million has been given in one-time grants, scholarship aid, death benefits, and continuing assistance.
LANSING, MI - Gretchen Whitmer on Thursday announced support from Republican and independent leaders working to elect her as governor.

Leaders from past administrations have formed a group called "Republicans and Independents for Whitmer." It is co-chaired by former U.S. Rep. Joe Schwarz, R-Battle Creek; Jim Haveman, the former Director of the Michigan Department of Community Health under Governor John Engler and Governor Rick Snyder; Richard McLellan, who served as Transition Director to then Governor-Elect John Engler; and Vivian Carpenter, who served as Deputy State Treasurer under former Republican Governor Bill Milliken.

"Now more than ever, Michigan needs a governor who knows how to put partisanship aside to get things done," Haveman said in a press release announcing the group's formation.

"As Director of DCH under Governor Snyder, I worked across the aisle with Sen. Whitmer when she was putting the votes together to pass Medicaid expansion, and because of the bipartisan work we did, 680,000 Michiganders now have access to health care. That's exactly the kind of leadership our state needs right now to keep building on Michigan's economic comeback."

"I'm a lifelong Republican, and I'm supporting Gretchen Whitmer this year because she's the best person for the job," McLellan said.

"While the Attorney General has disingenuously argued we can pay for new roads without any new revenue, this is a serious issue and conservative voters like me understand that it will take money to fix them. Meanwhile, Gretchen Whitmer has offered pragmatic solutions to attract businesses to Michigan by rebuilding our infrastructure the right way and clean up our drinking water, and that's a big part of why I'm putting partisanship aside this year and working to send Gretchen to the governor's office."

Additional members of the new group supporting Whitmer include Trish Foster, retired Senior Managing Director and COO at CBRE-Martin; former Rep. Mel Larsen (R-Oakland County), co-author of the Elliott-Larsen Civil Rights Act; Mary McLellan, a retired Department of Civil Rights employee; Bill Milliken, Jr., Real Estate Broker at Milliken Realty and son of former Governor Bill Milliken; Rod Nelson, retired CEO of Mackinac Straits Health System; John Pirich, a partner at Honigman Miller Schwartz and Cohn; Dennis Smith, retired CEO of the UP Health Plan; Paul Tarr, President of PM Tarr and Associates; Gina Yob, Vice President of Sales and Marketing for 3S International LLC.

John Sellek, a spokesperson for Schuette, said, "The Lansing-Ingham political establishment opposes Attorney General Schuette because he was unafraid to take them on in the Flint water case, the Nassar investigation and prosecution, and when he stepped in to clean up the Ingham County mess in the Dunnings case. Gretchen Whitmer's unaccomplished record at all of her political stops makes clear she will not be the one to stand up to them in the future."

The Michigan Republican Party also issued statements.

"Leaders make the tough calls. You anger some people along the way, even in your own party. Bill leads. This coalition is not about passion for the candidacy of Gretchen Whitmer. This is anger at Schuette for stepping up, leading, and making tough decisions even when they are politically difficult," said Michigan Republican Party Chair Ron Weiser in a statement.

The party's response also included a statement from Sen. Mike Shirkey, R-Clarklake, and Rep. Lee Chatfield, R-Levering, presumed leaders of Republican caucuses in the House and Senate next year.

"Anyone claiming to be a 'Republican for Whitmer' is someone opposed lower taxes, limited government and fiscal responsibility. By abandoning our party, they are working to tear down not only Bill Schuette and the top of the ticket, but to end the Republican majorities in the House and Senate that have got the job done and have been the driving force behind Michigan's economic comeback. We stand with Bill Schuette and the Republican ticket that will lead us to victory in November," Shirkey and Chatfield said in the statement.

Note: This story has been edited to add comment from the Schuette campaign.
Migrant deal still needed Conte says after EU summit The more we delay the more difficulty we'll be in

(ANSAmed) - ROME, SEPTEMBER 20 - Premier Giuseppe Conte said after an informal EU summit in Salzburg Thursday that a deal on migrants was still needed.



He said "we told each other that we have to reach conclusions" on migrants because "the more we delay the more we'll all get into difficulty".



There were no winners in the recent standoff between Italy and EU over the case of the migrants rescued by the Diciotti coast guard ship, Conte said.



"The Diciotti case sees us all as losers," Conte told reporters. "If European wants to have an immigration policy, this means defining a strategy, revising the Dublin procedure and quickly pursuing new mechanisms of collective management featuring solidarity".



Conte said that "stopping at voluntary contributions (on migrants) is not a goal we are aiming at". He said "we should think of incentivising and disincentivising mechanisms." The premier also said "Italy's position on the Frontex project is that is certainly can have a role but boosting Frontex up to 10,000 men also raises problems about the usefulness of such an investment". He said "I'd prefer these investments to be destined for Africa", and explained "there's also a political problem, it is clear that a similar deployment of men poses an issue of sovereignty. "All member States are jealous, it's clear, and Italy is no less so". (ANSAmed).




JACKSON, MI - A 2016 Northwest Community Schools graduate and school board candidate is suing his former district to release school bus surveillance video from an alleged incident on the first full day of school.

Lee Belding wants the district to publicly release video from the alleged incident on Thursday, Aug. 23. Belding also is requesting $500 in punitive damages, according to the lawsuit.

The lawsuit alleges the bus driver drove around unnecessarily for nearly an hour, forced students to put the windows up and possibly turned the heat on.

A report on the incident, which was investigated by Blackman-Leoni Township public safety officers on Aug. 23, was forwarded to the Jackson County Prosecutor's Office.

After reviewing the report and three different angles of the bus video, Jackson County Prosecutor Jerry Jarzynka said there is no criminal case.

"There was no evidence in any of the angles that a criminal act was committed by the bus driver," Jarzynka said. "There is no indication that he turned the heat on. There's no indication, no sign, that the students were suffering from heat distress."

Also, after investigating the alleged incident, Superintendent Geoff Bontrager said the driver told students to put the windows up after they ignored directions to keep their hands inside the bus.

The driver did not turn the heat on or intentionally extend the bus route, Bontrager said. However, the district requested the substitute bus driver, employed by Dean Transportation, not be assigned to any Northwest routes going forward.

While the district, law enforcement officers and the county prosecutor have seen the bus security footage as part of the investigation, a Freedom of Information Act request from Belding to see it was denied.

The rejection cites the Family Education Rights and Privacy Act of 1974 as to why the district can't release the video. FERPA is a federal law for publicly-funded schools meant to protect the privacy of student records.

"We're interested in the actions of the bus driver," Belding said. "The school is hiding behind the victims, when it's in the students' and the community's best interests to have the video released."

Multiple cases are cited in the lawsuit, in which courts outside of Michigan have determined school bus video wouldn't be exempt to FOIA due to FERPA.

"The district has not violated any laws concerning the isolated Dean Transportation situation and has not violated FOIA," Bontrager said in a statement.

A trial is scheduled for Oct. 28, 2019.
GUN PLAIN TOWNSHIP, MI -- Two people were hospitalized after an 80-pound pit bull attacked its owner and a woman.

Michigan State Troopers were called to a house in Gun Plain Township at about 10 a.m. Saturday, Sept. 15, on a report of a dog attacking two people.

Police arrived to find an injured woman and a man on his back on the ground, state police said in a press release. He was covered in blood and the dog was attacking him. The man told police it was his dog and told troopers to shoot it.

A trooper shot the dog, then it turned toward police and officers shot it a second time, killing the dog. Troopers gave the victims aid and they were taken by ambulance to Bronson Methodist Hospital in Kalamazoo.

The 56-year-old man told police he had had the 7-year-old, 80-pound dog since it was a puppy. The owner said it had nipped at people in the past but never attacked, according to state police. The owner said his 49-year-old sister came to his house to give him a ride, and then the dog attacked and bit her hand and arm. The owner said he tried to remove the dog when it turned on him. He said he did not know what prompted the attack.

Both victims were treated at Bronson for serious tears and lacerations. The dog's owner has nerve damage and will need skin grafts if his arm can be saved, according to police. Both victims are being treated for rabies.

The dog's body was taken to a local veterinary hospital, and then was forwarded to Michigan State University for rabies testing.
GRAND RAPIDS, MI -- Three people have pleaded guilty to federal charges in a forged document scheme for people in the country illegally.

Michelle Martinez-Marte, 37, of Rhode Island, Eddie Michael Balderramas, 51, and his son, Michael James Balderramas, 28, of Kalamazoo, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to transfer identification documents and the means of identification of others to obtain Michigan driver's licenses. Police raided a home at 2110 S. Westnedge Ave. in Kalamazoo June 21 in connection to this case.

Between April 2016 and July 2017, the three defendants conspired to assist illegal aliens, mostly from the Dominican Republic, in obtaining Michigan driver's licenses using others' identities, the U.S. Attorney's Office said in a press release.

Martinez-Marte acquired Puerto Rican birth certificates, driver's licenses and social security cards from a source in Puerto Rico. Martinez-Marte then referred the illegal aliens to Eddie Balderramas. Either Eddie Balderramas or Micahel Balderramas would travel to New York City and bring the illegal aliens to Michigan where they would stay at a house in Kalamazoo.

Eddie Balderramas produced false leases, paystubs and other documents to make it appear as if the illegal aliens were Michigan residents. Eddie and Michael Balderramas would take them to Michigan Secretary of State offices and would use the Puerto Rican documents and the counterfeit documents of Michigan residency to obtain Michigan driver's licenses for them.

The illegal aliens paid Eddie Balderramas and Michelle Martinez-Marte for their help so they could live in the country under others' names and avoid detection by immigration authorities, prosecutors say.

Eddie Balderrams will be sentenced in U.S. District Court in Grand Rapids Jan. 22, 2019. Michael Balderramas will be sentenced Jan. 28, 2019. Martinez-Marte will be sentenced Feb. 1, 2019. The defendants face up to 15 years in prison on the conspiracy charge.

Martinez-Marte and Michael Balderramas both face an additional penalty of two years in prison for aggravated identity theft convictions. Those sentences must be served consecutively to the conspiracy conviction. Martinez-Marte faces an additional two years in prison for a conviction of illegally re-entering the United States after being removed from the country.
KALAMAZOO, MI -- Pfizer is holding a career fair in downtown Kalamazoo while working to fill 200 immediate openings, with another 450 expected in the coming years.

The event will be held 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. Monday, Sept. 24, at the Radisson, 100 West Michigan Avenue, in downtown Kalamazoo. Pfizer representatives will be there to conduct onsite interviews, with the goal of filling openings as quickly as the next few weeks, Pfizer said.

The company's plant in Portage has more than 200 immediate openings, including manufacturing, engineering, skilled trades and many other positions, Pfizer said.

Jobs require a minimum of a high school diploma or GED. For some jobs, Pfizer may prefer an associate's degree or 6 months of relatable work experience or military experience. For engineering and professional positions we require a higher degree and in some cases prefer relatable experience as well, the company said.

Pfizer recently announced a $465 million expansion of its sterile injectable production capabilities in Portage that is expected to bring about 450 jobs over the next several years.

Pfizer encourages candidates to apply for positions online before the job fair so interviews can be done onsite. Available positions can be found at www.pfizer.com/careers.

Candidates are also encouraged to pre-register for the job fair www.pfizermi.eventbrite.com.

Candidates who simply show up will also be welcome, Pfizer said.

The career fair will include information tables so job candidates can learn more about Pfizer, the medicines it makes and details about the site.
MUSKEGON, MI - A school worker's alleged inappropriate contact with a female student at Muskegon Public Schools occurred some time ago, according to the city's police chief.

"It was reported much after the fact," Muskegon Police Chief Jeffrey Lewis said.

Police are investigating the inappropriate contact claim that was disclosed to parents and the media Wednesday, Sept. 19.

Muskegon Public Schools Superintendent Justin Jennings said the student told a staff member at Hackley Community Care about the alleged contact. Hackley Community Care is a health care clinic with satellite locations at Muskegon high and middle schools.

Jennings declined to give specifics about what the student said. The district immediately contacted child protective services, he said. It also will conduct its own investigation once the police probe is complete, Jennings said.

Lewis said the student currently is of middle-school age, but he did not know for certain when the contact was alleged to have occurred or how old the student was at that time. He did not know what school the staff member worked at.

"Superintendent Jennings received information that one of the staff may have had an inappropriate contact, relationship, whatever, with a student and so we're investigating that," the chief said.

The worker is an employee of EDUStaff, which is contracted by the school district to provide certain types of employees.

The staff member has been placed on leave "pending the investigation," EDUStaff Director of Human Resources Jodi Center said in a statement.

"EDUStaff, like Muskegon Public Schools, is committed to student safety and we ensure that all of our contracted employees are subject to the same rigorous background checks as regular public school employees," Center said.

She said she could not comment on specifics of the allegations and is cooperating with police and school officials.

Lewis said the employee held "multiple roles" within the school system. Police were trying to locate him for questioning, Lewis said early Thursday afternoon.

Jennings said the contracted worker was not at work Wednesday, and that he was contacted and told to stay off of school grounds.

Among the details Lewis said he didn't know were how long the contracted worker was at the school system, whether he worked at other school districts and whether there was more than one alleged incident of inappropriate contact.

Parents reported receiving notifications from the school via voice mail and email messages. Like the news release, the parent notification was sparse on details, including what school the child was attending at the time.

The parent notification offered counseling from Hackley Community Care for any parent or child wanting it, and encouraged anyone with information about inappropriate contact between a contract worker and a student to contact the police department at (231) 724-6750.

MLive/Muskegon Chronicle reporter Justine McGuire contributed to this report.
MUSKEGON, MI -- Police are investigating allegations of inappropriate contact between a Muskegon Schools contract worker and a student.

Muskegon Public Schools administrators issued a statement Wednesday, Sept. 19 about the allegations, although released few details.

Administrators said they were informed Wednesday that a contract worker through EduStaff, which provides substitute teachers and other workers as needed to districts, allegedly had inappropriate contact with a student.

School officials did not give the age level of the student or the job title of the worker.

Upon learning of the allegations, EduStaff removed the worker from the district.

Muskegon police and Child Protective Services are investigating the allegations.

"At Muskegon Public Schools we are committed to providing a safe learning environment for our students. We took immediate action to remove the individual from the district and have prohibited the worker from all contact with students and staff during the investigation," said Superintendent Justin Jennings.

School administrators said they have asked counselors from Hackley Community Care to provide counselors, as needed, to students and families.

"In rare instances where these types of allegations surface, our priority is providing ongoing support to any families impacted," Jennings said.
SAGINAW TOWNSHIP, MI -- The Michigan Department of Transportation will close one lane in each direction of M-84 to resurface nearly two miles from south of State Street to south of McCarty Road in Saginaw County.

The $1.3 million project began on Tuesday, Sept. 18. Work includes includes joint repairs, curb and gutter, and sidewalk and ramp improvements compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act, according to an MDOT press release.

Repairs are expected to create a smoother driving surface and extend the life of the roadway. Traffic will be regulated with lane shifts and single-lane closures.

Road work is expected to be completed by Thursday, Oct. 25.
CLARE, MI -- Clare's city manager said he found two conduct violations by the city's police chief amid 17 allegations of misconduct filed a department officer.

City Manager Ken Hibl said only two of the allegations lodged against Chief Brian Gregory were credible and the issue is now resolved.

"Chief Gregory continues to have my full trust and confidence, and I look forward to his continued outstanding service to the citizens of Clare as the city's chief of police," Hibl said.

Gregory was recently cleared by prosecutors after an investigation into accusations that Gregory illegally used the Law Enforcement Information Network, or LEIN, to gather information on a person for a local business owner.

Michigan State Police investigated the complaint and turned their findings over to the Clare County Prosecutor's Office, which decided there was no wrongdoing.

Gregory was placed on paid leave on Aug. 1 and was returned to work last week.

Hibl ran his report of inquiry on other, noncriminal allegations against Gregory and found that Gregory had not qualified with his service weapon since 2012.

The Michigan Commission of Law Enforcement Standards (MCOLES) stipulates that Michigan law enforcement officers have successful qualification with the officer's duty weapon on an annual basis. The Clare Police Department stipulates officers qualify their duty weapon on a semi-annual basis.

Hibl also found that Gregory used $244.95 in city funds to buy engraved St. Michael coins for his department as Christmas gifts in 2016.

Gregory, who could not be reached for comment, has repaid the city for the coins and qualified his duty weapon, Hibl said.

Hibl found four other accusations were factually correct but of no consequence or merit in respect to misconduct or inappropriate behavior; seven to be indeterminable due to a failure to make the allegations known in a timely fashion and lack of corroborating evidence; and four to be partially factual but meritless.

Hibl determined that the two founded allegations against Gregory do not rise to a level of concern that would cause him to doubt in Gregory's ability to continue serving as chief.

A report on the investigation was released Tuesday, Sept. 18, by the city.
Migrants: Avramopoulos, accord for Frontex in Serbia 'It will contribute to strengthen security of external borders'

(ANSAmed) - BELGRADE, SEPTEMBER 20 - The European Commissioner for Home Affairs and Migration, Dimitris Avramopoulos, has announced in an interview to a Serbian newspaper that the EU and Serbia on Thursday will sign an agreement in Belgrade to involve EU border agency Frontex in border control operations of the Balkan country.



The accord - the commissioner told daily Blic - is a ''further important step in the fruitful cooperation with Serbia in border management''. The agreement, he added, will enable to deploy Frontex units in Serbia to operate alongside local border officers.



''This will contribute to strengthen the security of the EU's external borders and to better confront the problem of irregular immigration'', observed Avramopoulos, stressing that it is similar to agreements signed with Albania in February and Macedonia in July. ''I want to be clear'', he observed.



''Frontex contingents will support and work with national border guards but they will not replace them''.



Avramopoulos, who will participate today in Brussels in an international conference on cyber security and the fight against crime in technology, has also announced a closer cooperation between Serbia and Europol.



''Negotiations are ongoing to send to Serbia shortly an officer liaising with Europol''.



The aim is not only to fight migrant trafficking but also to combat organized crime, arms smuggling and terrorism. The commissioner said it is important in this respect for Belgrade not to push forward a liberalization of its visa regime for countries considered at risk on migrants and security. Serbia is an important partner of the EU, which over the last three years had a primary role in managing the migrant crisis along the Balkan route, concluded Avramopoulos. (ANSAmed)
Migrants: EU-Serbia accord signed for Frontex intervention Commissioner Avramopoulos in Belgrade with minister Stefanovic

(ANSAmed) - BELGRADE, SEPTEMBER 20 - European Commissioner for Home Affairs and Migration Dimitris Avramopoulos on Thursday signed an agreement in Belgrade with Serbian Interior Minister Nebojsa Stefanovic to deploy EU border agency Fontex units in Serbia. The agreement, the commissioner said, will enable Frontex, in cooperation with Serbian police, to control illegal migrant pathways at the border, boosting the security of the European Union's external borders.



Stefanovic for his part stressed that the security of citizens is important for Serbia. Highlighting the good cooperation with Brussels, the minister noted that when the migrant crisis along the Balkan route began in 2015, the EU behaved with Serbia as if it were a member State.



The EU has recently signed two similar agreements to deploy Frontex units with Albania and Macedonia. Commissioner Avramopoulos added that Frontex will not replace Serbian border police but will provide support in patrolling borders in order for the EU to boost the defense and security of its external borders.



The Union, he added, will continue supporting Serbia along its path towards European integration and in no way the liberalization of visas concerning Serbian citizens will be under discussion. ''Serbia is a European country with an excellent history and people, I hope that the doors of the EU will open for Serbia'', the commissioner said.



The agreement signed today, he continued, is not only important for Serbia but also for the border security of the entire western Balkan region. The cooperation of the European Union with the region will help fight organized crime, improving the management of potential migration crises: ''Serbia is an important factor of stability in the region and can have a leading role in all of this''.



Interior Minister Stefanovic thanked the commissioner for his constant support of Serbia's European path, stressing that the agreement signed today is very important to defend Serbian borders and for the security of its citizens. (ANSAmed).




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!
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The assets of the beleaguered telecom company Aircel are up for sale and Bharti Airtel, Sterlite Technologies, among others and two investment firms are reportedly keen to separately buy them. Despite the number of interested buyers, the lenders to Aircel may still have to take a large haircut, according to Livemint.

Banks, however, believe the best option for the company would be to sell the assets in a lump sum to one entity as opposed to a group of companies, sources told mint.

"The bids have been received. But we are thinking that the possibility of a lump sum sale will get a better value for the assets. In a couple of days, these talks should happen. We are hoping to get over Rs 25,000 crore from asset sale proceeds," one source added.

The total debt of AircelAircel Cellular and Dishnet Wirelessis valued at Rs 50,000 crore, of which over Rs 15,000 crore is owed to financial creditors and Rs 35,000 crore are owed to operational creditors.

All the assets, including spectrum licences and fibre, will be valued at Rs 32,362 crore, according to Aircel. The companys lenders, such as State Bank of India and Punjab National Bank, hope to raise over Rs 25,000 crore though even that is much less than the actual value.

Airtel is currently the only bidder and it had also announced buying spectrum worth Rs 3,500 crore from Aircel in 2016 in eight of its telecom circles. Aircel had also sold 17,500 towers and 21,000 tenancies to Chennai Network Infrastructure, a unit of GTL Infrastructure , for Rs 8,000 crore.
File Photo: A security guard stands outside a closed Yes Bank branch in New Delhi

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Global rating agency Moody's Investors Service has retained the issuer, deposit and unsecured debt ratings of Yes Bank indicating no impact from a leadership change slated next year.

On September 19, Yes Bank confirmed the Reserve Bank of India trimmed the term of Rana Kapoor as the CEO and MD until January 31, 2019, even as shareholders sought an extension for three years.

Yes Bank's profitability is strong, and Moody's expects that the bank can maintain low credit costs over the next 12-18 months. This situation, along with the growth in interest and non-interest income, will help Yes Bank maintain solid profitability, the global rating agency said.

Kapoor's term was cut short after divergences were noticed in Yes Bank's classification of non-performing assets (NPAs) when compared to RBI's assessment.

Moodys affirmed foreign currency issuer rating, foreign and local currency deposit rating and the unsecured MTN program rating of Baa3.

In Q1 of fiscal 2018-19, Yes Bank posted a 31 percent growth at Rs 1,260.4 crore. Its gross non-performing assets (NPA) rose to 1.31 percent against 1.28 percent in the previous quarter, though net NPA was lower at 0.59 percent versus 0.64 percent, sequentially.

Financial stability

The Moodys note takes into account Yes Bank's improved funding, superior asset quality compared to the other rated Indian banks that are focused on corporate lending and solid profitability. However, these strengths are balanced by the bank's rapid asset expansion, which poses risks to its credit profile," it said.

The bank's funding structure has improved significantly with the growth in current and savings accounts (CASA) and retail term deposits, making its liability mix more sticky and granular. This reduces any bank's dependence on confidence-sensitive wholesale funding.

The agency expects Yes Bank's loan growth, at 35-40 percent annually, to continue to outpace the industry average of about 10 percent over the coming 12-18 months.

The bank's capitalisation is adequate, but to maintain the current levels, the bank will need to raise capital from the market, given the expansion of its balance sheet. If Yes Bank experiences difficulty in raising external capital, this will impede the bank's ability to grow its loan book, Moodys note added.

What could move the rating up?

Upward pressure on the bank's ratings and BCA could develop if:

1. Yes Bank maintains its current asset quality ratios while reducing its credit risk concentration

2. The bank's funding profile improves, for example, by growing its proportion of CASA/total deposits to bring the ratio in line with the industry average, without weakening its net interest margin

3. The bank sustains its profitability and maintains adequate loss-absorbing buffers.

What could move the rating down?

Downward pressure on the bank's BCA and rating could develop if:

1. there is sustained deterioration in impaired loans or loan loss reserves

2. the rate of new NPA formation is significantly higher than previously experienced; or the bank shows a decline in earnings, which would lead to a significant decrease in internal capital generation.
Senior Commander Rustom Palia and second-in-command Captain Sushant Singh would have been looking forward to a hearty breakfast and a well-earned rest. They were preparing to land their Air India flight AI-101 at New Yorks John F Kennedy International Airport on September 11, after a 15-hour journey from New Delhi, one of the worlds longest flights.

But what looked like a normal landing, turned out to be one of the worst nightmares for the two pilots.

To their dismay, the instrument landing system (ILS) of the Boeing 777-300 aircraft was malfunctioning. That's not all. We have a Traffic Collision and Avoidance System failure, Palia informed the Air Traffic Control in New York. TCAS prevents mid-air collisions between aircraft and was instrumental in preventing a collision between two IndiGo aircraft in July.

Other systems like auto-land, wind shear systems, auto speed brake and the auxiliary power unit were also 'unserviceable'.

The ILS plays a critical part in ensuring a safe and smooth landing. One of the reasons ILS is important is because human beings respond faster to a visual than an oral instruction, says Mohan Ranganathan, a former pilot turned aviation safety consultant.

Localiser and glidepath are two important parts of the ILS. While localiser gives the lateral part of the course, glidepath tells pilots if they are at a correct height. Both are included as an indicator in the cockpit. As the needles move, the pilot can move left or right (localiser) or up and down (glidepath), Ranganathan said.

The precision provided by the ILS is important to time the landing perfectly and safely. It comes in handy when the weather is not conducive and visibility below normal. In such conditions, ILS is important because even without normal visibility, pilots can know where to turn and adjust the height by looking at the ILS.

In the case of AI-101, besides the ILS indicators not working, visibility at the John F Kennedy airport was not good enough for 'non-precision landing'. Fuel supply was running out, putting in danger the safety of 370 passengers on board.

This multiple system failure is a rare occurrence. There would be just 2 or 3 such instances in the last 25 years, Ranganathan said, adding that the most probable culprit would be battery failure, rendering all these systems unusable.

Rustom and Singh though were up for the task. Experts said rarely are pilots trained for a non-precision landing, something that the two Air India pilots were now going to attempt. They received clearance to land at the Newark airport, where visibility was better.

Now, instead of banking on an automated system which uses ILS for landing, Palia had to use ground beacons and aircraft equipment. A lot of skill, including a correct judgment of height and movement, is required of a pilot undertaking a non-precision landing.

Finally, after nearly 40 tension-filled minutes, AI-101 landed at Newark airport. The experience and expertise of our cockpit crew came to the fore and they landed safely at an alternate airport at Newark, Air India said in a statement.
Jeffrey Gundlach, chief executive officer of DoubleLine Capital, on Wednesday said bond prices across the US Treasury yield curve could fall if the 30-year yield closes above 3.25 percent twice in a row.

The yield on the 10-year Treasury note and 30-year Treasury bond both hit four-month highs early Wednesday. The 10-year yield was currently trading around 3.08 percent and the 30-year around 3.22 percent.

Gundlach told Reuters he was still forecasting 6 percent on the 10-year yield by the next presidential election or a year after.

"I first made that statement in July 2016 when the overwhelming consensus view was the 10-year was soon headed to 1 percent," he said. "So the observation is right a little over two years later with 10s a little over 3 percent."

He added: "My 6 percent by 2021 call is perfectly on track. No reason at all to change it. A move soon to higher yields would be signalled by the 30-year closing two days in a row over 3.25 percent."

Last week, Gundlach likened debt-financed US budget deficits to Miracle-Gro plant food and remarked that the benefits of the ballooning deficit, stemming from tax cuts, were not permanent. On Wednesday, Gundlach said, "The deficit is insane. A truly strong economy produces a fiscal surplus."
IG Petrochemicals Ltd.

The central government Thursday said it wants to promote environment friendly chemicals and petrochemical units.

Replying to a question about government's thought on the highly polluting sector, Chemicals and Petrochemicals Secretary P Raghavendra Rao said the government will encourage companies which promotes environment friendly units.

In the city for a roadshow of India Chemicals 2018 to be held on October 4-6 in Mumbai, Rao said the contribution of this sector to India's manufacturing sector could touch 25 per cent in a decade or so from about 10 per cent now.

He said the government was focusing at agro chemicals and petrochemicals sectors.

According to industry estimates, chemicals will turn into a USD 384 billion industry by 2025.

Government wants more chemicals and petrochemicals parks and it was trying to have conducive environment to encourage investment in this sector.

Government was also contemplating to make the Plastic Park and Petroleum Chemicals and Petrochemicals Investment Region policy more attractive.
Fan manufacturers in the organised sector are seeking a reduction in GST slab from 18 per per cent to 12 per cent for which representations have been already submitted to the GST Council.

Indian Fan Manufacturers Association (IFMA) said that fans were a basic necessity in a tropical climate like India and being used by all strata of the society.

Vice-chairman of IFMA Atul Jain told reporters here Thursday that in the organised sector, 54 million fans were manufactured annually and the growth rate of the industry was in tandem with the trend in GDP growth. In the unorganised sector, 20 million fans were manufactured, he said.

"We have been informed by the GST Council that our representation has been forwarded to the Fitment Committee for their views and reconsideration", he said. He said IFMA was working closely with the Bureau of Energy Efficiency, Energy Efficiency Services Limited and Bureau of Indian Standards to facilitate manufacturing of energy efficient fans.
Suresh Prabhu

Commerce Minister Suresh Prabhu has raised the issue of declining export credit with Finance Minister Arun Jaitley, suggesting that loans to exporters should be considered as priority sector lending by the banks.

In a letter to the finance minister, Prabhu said the "sharp decline" in export credit is impacting exporters in general and MSME units in particular.

Citing RBI data, the commerce minister stated that outstanding export credit has come down to Rs 22,300 crore on June 22 this year from Rs 39,000 crore as on June 23 last year.

Similarly, the outstanding export credit which stood at Rs 28,300 crore as on March 30 has come down to Rs 22,300 crore as on June 22 this year, a decline of 21.1 per cent in this fiscal.

Prabhu urged the finance minister to consider "export credit to be included as part of the priority sector lending by banks".

The Federation of Indian Export Organisations (FIEO) has said that even renewal of limits has become problematic for the sector, even in respect of companies having excellent track record.

"I request you to kindly have suitable instructions issued to banks to restore the flow of credit to the export sector to its expected regular levels, based on the required increase over recent peak levels, to factor in export growth currently taking place," Prabhu said in his letter.

He also urged for strict timelines for grant of credit including the renewal of limits.

Since 2011-12, India's exports have been hovering at around USD 300 billion. During 2017-18, the shipments grew by about 10 per cent to USD 303 billion.

Promoting exports helps a country to create jobs, boost manufacturing and earn more foreign exchange.
The Vibrant Gujarat Summit 2019 which will be held between January 18-20 next year will focus on trading, a senior state official said Thursday. Gujarat has a large trading community.

Ashwani Kumar, secretary to Chief Minister Vijay Rupani, said Thursday that he would lead a delegation of business leaders from leading companies to Sweden, Denmark and Finland and hold roadshows there.

"The difference between earlier Vibrant Gujarat summits and this one is focus. Earlier, we used to focus just on bringing investments. Then, last year the SME sector was given importance. This time we are also going to focus on the trade aspect," Kumar said.

"The objective of the delegation is primarily to interact with companies that have expressed interest in investing in Gujarat or India in general, and provide information on opportunities in Gujarat," he said.

The delegation will hold roadshows in Helsinki, Copenhagen and Stockholm to showcase Gujarat as a solid investment destination with opportunities in sectors such as infrastructure development, urban planning, logistics and

financial services, Kumar said.

Over 300 companies from Sweden, Denmark and Finland have business operations in India. These include Volvo, Maersk, Ericsson, ABB, Nokia and Nova Nordsik among others.

Now, other companies such as IKEA, H&M, Vestas and SAAB are keen to increase their presence in India and the delegation will target them for investment in the state.

The 9th edition of the Vibrant Gujarat summit will be held over three days in January next year and Prime Minister Narendra Modi will be present at the event.
Foreign players such as Amazon, Google, and Apple operating in the Indian e-commerce space may have to start registering for the goods and services tax (GST) with all states ahead of the October 1 deadline, reported The Economic Times.

The industry was hoping the government will permit a special one-time registration instead of multiple state registrations which adds to compliance costs. However, there has been no respite so far.

Starting October 1, these companies will need to collect tax from sellers on their website. State and central GST of 1 percent each will have to be charged on intrastate supplies of over Rs 2.5 lakh. For interstate supplies over Rs 2.5 lakh, tax deduction at source (TDS) will be 2 percent integrated GST. However, the rate of tax deduction will be 0.5 percent for now in case of both state and central GST.

For foreign players, there will be no TCS liability if the seller is based outside India.

There is no exemption from registration for foreign e-commerce companies, Pratik Jain, National Indirect Taxes leader at PwC, told the paper. Even foreign companies will have to register in each state that their vendors supply from.
After deciding to merge Bank of Baroda (BoB), Vijaya Bank and Dena Bank, the government is likely to announce the merger of three other banks before the end of the year, according to a report by DNA Money.

The three public sector banks (PSBs) are likely to be Punjab National Bank (PNB), Oriental Bank of Commerce (OBC) and Andhra Bank, the report suggests.

"Government is analysing the merger of PNB, OBC and Andhra Bank, as it wants few large banks in the country," a source was quoted as saying.

The government is reportedly holding talks with banking officials to examine the feasibility of such a merger and will likely announce the move before December 31.

On September 17, the central government announced the proposal to merge three public sector lenders -- BoB, Dena Bank and Vijaya Bank.

Also listen | Podcast: Editor's pick of the day  All you need to know about Bank of Baroda, Vijaya Bank, Dena Bank merger

The cabinet is likely to approve a scheme of amalgamation of Dena Bank, Vijaya Bank and BoB next week, the report adds.

The three state-run banks would work on strict timeline and necessary regulatory process is expected to be over by the end of 2018-19, they said, adding that the merged entity should be operational from April 1, 2019.

The move follows top lender State Bank of India ( SBI ) merging five of its subsidiary banks with itself last year and taking over Bharatiya Mahila Bank, catapulting it to be among top 50 global lenders.
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In a bid to help the Central Bank of India meet capital requirements as per the Reserve Bank of India (RBI)'s guidelines, the government is planning to infuse Rs 2,350 crore in the bank, according to a report by Business Standard.

A notification for the release of the funds was issued on Monday.

This infusion will take the total capital infusion of the government in the public sector banks (PSBs) to Rs 13,600 crore in this financial year.

It is a part of the Centre's Rs 2.11 lakh crore recapitalisation plan for PSBs spread over two years in a attempt to shore up their finances, boost private investment and revive the economy.

Also read: Windfall for public sector banks: Govt announces Rs 2.11 lakh cr recapitalisation

The Central Bank of India requires the funds to maintain regulatory capital requirement while paying interest towards Additional Tier 1 (AT-1) bonds, a senior government official told the newspaper.

The banks have been finding it difficult to service these bonds due to high-level of non-performing assets (NPAs) and widening losses.

Lenders have been facing the risk of breaching the regulatory capital requirement because of these bonds, the report cites people aware of the matter as saying.

Centre may also look at recapitalising Bank of Baroda (BoB), Vijaya Bank, and Dena Bank before the proposed merger takes place, according to the report.

On September 17, the Centre announced the proposal to merge the three public sector lenders as a part of a consolidation of banks to deal with the mounting NPAs.

Also read: Govt proposes merger of Bank of Baroda, Dena Bank and Vijaya Bank

"Recapitalisation may happen in these banks even before the merger takes place to meet their capital and growth requirement," the official told the newspaper. The official did not mention the amount of capital infusion that is required for these banks.

In July, the government had infused Rs 11,300 crore in five public sector banks including Punjab National Bank (PNB) for similar reasons.

Also read: PNB gets Rs 2,816 cr as part of govt's capital infusion plan

The Centre had infused Rs 2,820 crore in PNB, Rs 2,550 crore in Corporation Bank, Rs 2,160 crore in Indian Overseas Bank, Rs 2,020 crore in Andhra Bank and Rs 1,800 crore in Allahabad Bank.

Under the Centre's recapitalisation plan, the PSBs were to receive Rs 1,350 lakh crore through recapitalisation bonds and the balance Rs 58,00 crore through fund raising from the market.

The government had infused Rs 71,000 crore through the recapitalisation bonds in the previous financial year.
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There were "serious differences" between Hindustan Aeronautics Ltd (HAL) and Dassault Aviation for production of Rafale jets in India when the UPA government was negotiating the deal with the French company, official sources said Thursday.

The previous UPA government in 2012 started negotiations with Dassault Aviation to buy 126 Medium Multi-Role Combat Aircraft (MMRCA).

The plan was for Dassault Aviation to supply 18 Rafale jets in fly-away condition while 108 aircraft were to be manufactured in India by the company along with HAL. However, the deal could not be sealed.

The sources said the HAL in a letter dated October 11, 2012, to the defence ministry brought out various disagreements pertaining to the work share between HAL and the Dassault Aviation, the makers of Rafale jets.

Subsequently, in July 2014, HAL in its letter to the ministry has also highlighted one major unresolved issue regarding responsibility sharing between Dassault Aviation and HAL for licence manufacture of the aircraft, the sources said.

They said observations by experts that the HAL was capable of manufacturing Rafale jets was incorrect.

"There were serious differences between HAL and Dassault Aviation when the UPA government was negotiating the deal with the French company," a source said.

Last week, Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said negotiations for procurement of 126 Rafale jets under the UPA government fell through as HAL did not have the required capability to produce the jets in India in collaboration with Dassault Aviation.

After rounds of negotiations with Hindustan Aeronautics Ltd (HAL), Dassault Aviation felt that the cost of the Rafale jets will escalate significantly if they were to be produced in India, she said.

The Congress has demanded answers from the government on why HAL was not involved in the new deal.
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Siddharth Sedani

The market is witnessing some profit booking since the beginning of the month due to macroeconomic headwinds and increasing trade tariffs between the USA and China.

This week, PSU banking sector was in limelight after the governments proposal of merger of Bank of Baroda, Dena Bank and Vijaya Bank, making the merged entity the third-largest bank in India.

SEBIs decision to accept Khan Committees recommendations on FPI KYC norms has reduced uncertainty for FPI. However, the mutual fund AMCs were impacted negatively due to the capping of the total expense ratio (TER).

The markets are expected to remain volatile till next months RBI monetary policy meeting and results season.

The stocks we like are 

IndusInd Bank| Rating: Buy | Target: Rs 2,248

The strategic Bharat Finance deal would be synergistic in the medium term.

Growth would be primarily be driven through the focus on the retail portfolio, as management intends to rebalance the corporate- and retail-book ratio to 50:50 (from 60:40).

Credit growth grew 29.4 percent y/y in Q1-FY19, driven by secular growth across all segments, led by corporate (up 30 percent y/y), vehicle and retail (both up ~28 percent y/y).

We expect ~26 percent loan growth in the medium term.

Asset quality improved with Slippages easing to ~1.26 percent of loan book (down 83bps y/y, 111bps q/q) and credit cost softened to 55bps.

We expect the bank to maintain its stable asset quality over FY19-20 due to an overall improvement in the rating profile of its corporate book and declining risk weightings of its vehicle-finance book.

NIM to be resilient in the medium term, which was ~3.92 percent in Q1-FY19, down 5bps sequentially, on account of a sharp increase in the cost of funds (up 35bps sequentially). Nevertheless, we expect NIM to be resilient at current levels on the back of the strong CASA franchise (43.4 percent) and an increase in the share of the retail portfolio.

With better headline asset quality parameters and loan-growth prospects over FY19-20. We have a buy recommendation with a target of Rs 2,248 based on the two-stage DDM Model.

This implies a ~4.15x P/ABV multiple on its FY20e book.

Larsen & Toubro Technology Services | Rating: Buy | Targe: Rs 1,940

With the rise of enabling technologies like 5G, IoT, Artificial Intelligence etc, the digital disruption now has expanded to almost each and every part of the global industrial complex including manufacturing and process industries. This has opened a new and bigger opportunity of more than $1.1 trillion market for engineering outsourcing market.

LTTS has multi-sectoral presence and domain expertise enables cross-pollination of ideas and best practices leading to differentiated engineering solutions.

During the latest quarterly results, the company has reported robust growth in revenues; it grew 33.2 percent in Q1-FY19 to $168.9 million as against $127.6 million in Q1-FY18 in constant currency terms.

We expect LTTS to grow its consolidated revenues at CAGR of 23 percent for the next two years and reach Rs 4,895 crore in FY19 and Rs 5,696 crore in FY-20 on back of large opportunity present across capex intensive business and sustained momentum of ramping up of existing clients.

At CMP the stock is trading at 2x times FY18E consolidated earnings and 16.9x times FY19E consolidated earnings.

We have Buy coverage on L&T Technology Services Limited with a target price of Rs 1,940 per share (32.88x FY19e EPS of 59).

Jubilant Life Sciences| Rating: Buy | Rs 1,040

Revenue from operations improved by 34 percent year-on-year to 2,078 crore. This was on account of enhanced performance in Specialty Pharmaceuticals, the US solid dosage formulation and higher volumes in Life Science Ingredients.

The company achieved the reported PAT of Rs 202 crore, a growth of 38 percent year-on-year with a net margin of 9.7 percent.

On a segment basis, revenue from pharmaceuticals improved by 46 percent year-on-year to Rs 1,181 crore. Within this, the Specialty Pharmaceuticals business displayed strong performance by growing 74 percent year-on-year.

Life Science Ingredients Segment revenue for the quarter stood at Rs 846 crore, improved by 21 percent year-on-year. This has been aided by strong growth in volume during the quarter.

JLS has planned to invest about Rs 550 crore in capital expenditure in FY19. In addition, JLS plan to invest Rs 300 crore in R&D during the year, including Rs 150 crore in product development expenditure.

With the planned IPO for its Singapore subsidiary, JLS will go onto further reduce its net debt while continuing additional capex.

We maintain our Buy rating on the stock with a target price of Rs 1,040 per share (19.85x FY19e EPS of 52.40).

The author is Vice President - Equity Advisory, Anand Rathi Shares and Stock Brokers. The views and investment tips expressed by investment experts/broking houses/rating agencies on Moneycontrol are their own, and not that of the website or its management. Moneycontrol advises users to check with certified experts before taking any investment decisions.
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IIFL Research

The sharp depreciation of the rupee versus US dollar and other currencies would impact earnings of auto companies. Net exporters namely Bajaj Auto, Bharat Forge and Balkrishna Industries would be beneficiaries, while net importers such as Maruti may lose out.

Users of global commodities such as lead and rubber would also be negatively impacted by rupee depreciation; however, the concurrent fall in dollar prices of these commodities would provide relief. Users of crude derivatives (tyre makers) would face a double whammy - of higher crude price and a weak rupee.

Balkrishna Industries

Revenue share of exports for Balkrishna (BIL) is the highest (at 85 percent) among all covered auto companies. Of this share, Europe contributes around 53 percent. However, net currency exposure for BIL is around 40 percent (mainly Euro), as raw material imports comprise 42-43 percent of revenues (USD-linked).

As per the FY18 Annual Report, the total value of hedges (in rupee terms) was around Rs 1,650 crore on March 31, 2018, which is equivalent to 36 percent of FY19 export revenue estimates and around 73 percent of the net exposure.

BIL uses fixed-rate forward contracts for hedging. As per management, more than 80 percent of FY19 net exposure is hedged at 81-82. Hence, the full benefit of the recent sharp appreciation in the EUR (versus Rupee) will flow through only in FY20.

Bharat Forge

Bharat Forge (BHFC)'s export revenue share is around 57 percent, of which 73 percent is USD-based. BHFC has the highest hedge ratio (percent of revenues covered) among all auto companies.

As per its FY18 Annual Report, BHFC's total outstanding hedges are equivalent to Rs 6,130 crore (all fixed-rate contracts), which is 172 percent of FY19 export forecast.

As a result, despite having a significant export contribution, the recent rally in USD (versus Rupee) will not benefit BHFC meaningfully for the whole of FY19 and a large part of FY20. The full benefit may be captured only in FY21.

Bajaj Auto

Bajaj Auto has material revenue contribution from exports (around 40 percent), most of which are USD-denominated. As per its FY18 Annual Report, outstanding hedges stood at Rs 10,510 crore (86 percent of FY19 estimate).

However, two-thirds of these hedging contracts are range-forwards (options), which provide some upside potential if spot rate moves above the contract rate. Also, only 18 percent of total hedges are beyond one year.

Hence, we expect Bajaj to realise the benefit of the rupee depreciation sooner than BIL and BHFC.

As per management, Bajaj has hedged around 80 percent for FY19. The key issue is whether USD appreciation would impact the purchasing power of Bajaj's export customers.

Maruti Suzuki

Maruti would be negatively impacted by sharp rupee depreciation (versus Japanese Yen) due to its high-cost exposure to imports (around 22 percent of revenues).

These are only partly offset by exports. Maruti hedges only a small portion of the net exposure. As a result, fluctuations in forex rates impact margins almost immediately.

In addition to around 5.5 percent royalty outgo (mainly JPY); it has 4-5 percent direct and around 12 percent indirect imports (half in JPY). Yen has appreciated sharply (up 5.4 percent from Q1FY19 average), which should negatively impact Maruti in coming quarters.

As a result, we are trimming FY20-21 EBITDA margin by 50-60bps, leading to EPS cut of around 4 percent. The cut in FY19 EPS is 2 percent, as impact would be felt only in second half of FY19.

Battery-makers: Rupee depreciation more than offset by fall in lead price

Lead being a global commodity, domestic prices are closely linked to import parity. The rupee depreciation would have hurt battery-makers, given that lead cost is equivalent to around 50 percent of revenues.

However, a sharp fall in the USD price of lead implies that battery-makers are actually better off. Lead price (in Rupee terms) is about 8 percent lower than the average price in Q4FY18.

Tyre-makers: Rubber benign, but crude would hurt

The rupee price of rubber has not moved up substantially, with the weak rupee partly offset by softness in the USD price of rubber. However, tyre makers also consume crude-linked commodities (synthetic rubber, carbon black, chemicals etc.), which have been impacted by the weak rupee as well as the rise in crude price.

Tyre-makers have announced price hikes across segments, which may help offset a part of the impact. However, the hikes may not suffice.

The above report is compiled from information available on public platforms. Moneycontrol.com advises users to check with certified experts before taking any investment decisions. The above report is for information only and not buy or sell recommendations.
CNBC-TV18

In the fall of 2008, global markets were failing. Lehman Brothers, an investment bank with $600 billion in assets, filed for bankruptcy protection on September 15 of that year, an inflection point in the economic slowdown that brought unemployment rates as high as 10 percent.

Two weeks later, during a single day on September 29, the US stock market lost $1.2 trillion in value as the Dow dropped 778 points, nearly 7 percent.

"You just felt like the world was unraveling," a senior equity trader named Ryan Larson told The New York Times that day. "People started to sell and they sold hard. It didn't matter what you had  you sold."

But there was one big investor who had a different outlook: Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett.

In fact, Buffett was buying.

"I've been buying American stocks," Buffett wrote in an opinion piece for The New York Times on October 16, 2008. Berkshire Hathaway also made big investments during the crisis, backing General Electric and Goldman Sachs.

Buffett understood the severity of the crisis; he told CNBC that year it was like an "economic Pearl Harbor." So why was he buying stocks that were rapidly falling in price when everyone else was socking cash under their pillow?

"A simple rule dictates my buying: Be fearful when others are greedy, and be greedy when others are fearful," Buffett wrote in the Times.

In his view, the long-term value of innovative American business would continue to grow, despite the short-term pain of the crisis. Buffett warned against investing in "highly leveraged entities, or businesses in weak competitive positions," but urged readers to see that the downturn provided an opportunity to buy strong companies at low prices.

"In short, the bad news is an investor's best friend. It lets you buy a slice of America's future at a marked-down price," Buffett explained in the op-ed. "Fears regarding the long-term prosperity of the nation's many sound companies make no sense. These businesses will indeed suffer earnings hiccups, as they always have. But most major companies will be setting new profit records 5, 10 and 20 years from now."

That prediction turned out to be correct: In the 10 years since the fall of Lehman Brothers, the S&P 500 has increased by 130 percent. Companies like Apple and Amazon have soared to new heights, hitting trillion dollar valuations.

If you invested $1,000 in Apple in early August 2008, it would have been worth more than $9,222.50 as of August 2, 2018, or over nine times as much, including price appreciation and excluding dividends, according to CNBC calculations.

Buffett's strategy wasn't perfect  he admits his timing was a bit off on his October call to buy, as markets continued to plunge in 2009. "It was right on a long-term basis," Buffett told CNBC, "but it was way off for four or five months at least."

Of course, it's human nature to want to make investments when markets are going up, Buffett said Monday in an interview for CNBC's documentary "Crisis on Wall Street: The Week That Shook the World."

"People start being interested in something because it's going up, not because they understand it or anything else," Buffett said. "The guy next door, who they know is dumber than they are, is getting rich and they aren't."

"What investors then need instead is an ability to both disregard mob fears or enthusiasms and to focus on a few simple fundamentals. A willingness to look unimaginative for a sustained period  or even to look foolish  is also essential."

Read the story here
Ahmedabad 70.4 (Image: Moneycontrol)

The Gujarat Assembly has amended the Gujarat Ownership Flats Act that seeks to expedite the redevelopment of housing colonies that are over 25 years old, declared unsafe and in a dilapidated condition.

As per the amended Act, consent of 75 percent of the flat owners will be required to undertake reconstruction as against prevailing norms that called for consent of all owners.

Redevelopment is a method of urban renewal and involves relocating businesses and people. It seeks to provide additional and better quality housing, make land available in the centre of the city, eliminate urban decay and improve infrastructure.

While the Gujarat government had allowed redevelopment of private societies earlier, provisions under the Gujarat Ownership Flats Act, 1973 required consent of all members of the society.

The idea is to encourage densification along the bus rapid transit system and metro corridor, transit oriented developments and widened roads. The government plans to increase density where new infrastructure is coming up. Redevelopment will open up a huge construction opportunities and make land available in the centre of cities. New housing stock that will be created may even lead to stabilisation of prices, Jaxay Shah, Managing Director at Savvy Infrastructure and President of Confederation of Real Estate Developers Association of India (CREDAI), said.

It will lead to creation of safe housing structures. Many of them had been declared unsafe or dangerous after the earthquake, he added.

The state seems to be following the Maharashtra model of redevelopment where right now consent of 51 percent members is required, experts said.

In Mumbai, as many as 30,000 residential buildings are 30 to 80 years old and in need of redevelopment. Over 400 housing projects spread across Ahmedabad, Surat, Vadodara and Rajkot may be redeveloped following this amendment, they stated.

The Gujarat Assembly has also passed a bill amending the Gujarat Municipalities Act, 1963. The bill seeks to streamline administration of 162 municipalities in the state with the creation of a new post - the Commissioner of Municipalities Administration - in place of the present Director of Municipalities.
As petroleum-related sanctions on Iran come into effect from November 4, Indian refiners will pay for oil in Indian currency using UCO Bank and IDBI Bank, according to a report by The Economic Times.

India wants to secure a waiver for imports from the US, which is why it has significantly reduced its oil purchase from Iran after the latter's ties with the US soured.

India risks being cut off from the US financial system if it continues to maintain financial transactions with Iran without a waiver. Before the sanctions kick in, Iranian oil exports have dropped significantly as many countries have curbed their purchase under pressure from the US.

Companies like Indian Oil Corporation, Mangalore Refinery & Petrochemicals (MRPL) and Nayara Energy import Iranian oil because it comes with cheaper freight and longer 60-day credit period. Indian companies plan to lift Iranian oil in September and October for which they will need to pay after November 4.

UCO Bank and IDBI Bank have been chosen to route the oil payment to Iran since both banks have no exposure to the US financial system. UCO Bank has handled similar transactions in the past, hence it will be the preferred bank.

The rupee can be used by Iran to pay for imports from India.

The US had promised waivers to countries importing from Iran heavily, if they promise to reduce their imports. India is ready to slash its imports from Iran significantly to win the waiver but it is unclear when the US will grant it, sources told the paper. India is the second-biggest client of Iran and sources nearly one-tenth of its crude supplies from there.

Indian refiners are unable to reject cheaper Iran oil at a time when the fuel prices in the country are touching record lows. New Delhi has said that technical configuration of many refiners makes it dependent on Iran.

India wants to secure a waiver for imports from the US, which is why it has significantly reduced its oil purchase from Iran after ties between the two countries soured.
SBI Chairman Rajnish Kumar in Mumbai

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State Bank of India hopes to resolve 7-8 stressed power assets with an exposure of around Rs 17,000 crore during the breather given by the Supreme Court till November 11, SBI Chairman Rajnish Kumar said Thursday.

The Supreme Court has asked the banks to maintain status quo and not to initiate insolvency proceedings against defaulting power companies till November 11, 2018, when it would hear the case again. During this period lenders would be able to resolve stressed assets.

"On my radar there are 7 or 8 projects. We are working only on that. If there is 100 per cent consensus among lenders only then it (resolution of stressed power assets) would happen," Kumar told reporters when asked whether SBI would be able to resolve any stressed assets during the breather till November 11.

About any resistance from lenders to resolve these stressed assets, he said, "They are all at various stages of approval. So at this stage, it is not the right statement to say that there is resistance. We have to give time to boards and management committees of lenders to take a decision.

"SBI has taken a decision regarding 7 to 8 such projects. We have conveyed that. Some other banks have also conveyed and some other banks are yet to get approval. That is why we need some time."

About the SBI exposure in those assets, he said, "SBI has exposure of Rs 17,000 crore in these projects."

About the Supreme Court order, he said, "Whatever legal options or whatever is permitted by law and regulation would be done. Right now the Supreme Court has said that maintain status quo (on Feb 12 circular)) in respect of petitions pending in high courts. So everybody is maintaining the status quo."

The RBI framework provided for a strict timeline for resolution of these bad loans where debt is Rs 2,000 crore or more. It mandates starting insolvency proceedings in case no resolution plan is provided by the lenders within 180 days of default.

About the steps to check rupee depreciation, he said, "There are some more measures which are coming. But current account deficit needs to be contained. The step taken so far would definitely help the sentiment in favour of the rupee."

On steps taken on containing rupee depreciation by bankers like NRI bonds, he said, "Whatever you do ultimately add to the debt burden of the country. It is not what banks will decide. Ultimately these are the issues or decisions which are to be taken by RBI that how do we manage our external sector. Once those decisions are taken, the banks implement those decisions."

About unveiling of SASHAKT scheme guidelines, he said, "That is what in progress. earlier target was September 30, you can add 10 to 15 days more to that. Banks can invest up to 10 percent in AIF (alternative investment fund). But it has to carry in mind that 10 per cent carries 150 percent risk weight. But in AMC (asset management company) we would be participating to the extent of 10 per cent."

Project Sashakt aims to strengthen the credit capacity, credit culture and credit portfolio of public sector banks. It is an Asset Management Company (AMC) resolution approach, under which an independent AMC would be set up to focus on asset turn around, job creation and protection.

Kumar spoke to reporters on the sideline of an event where Hindustan Urvarak & Rasayan Ltd (HURL) signed the Rupee Term Loan (Rs 5,314.33 crore) agreement for the Gorakhpur fertiliser plant with a consortium of banks led by the SBI as the lead banker and Punjab National Bank, Allahabad Bank, Union Bank of India, Indian Bank, Bank of India and Canara Bank.

The HURL is a joint venture company of three Maharatna PSUs NTPC, IOCL and CIL along with FCIL & HFCL and is currently engaged in implementing three urea projects at Gorakhpur, Sindri and Barauni in the eastern part of the country.
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Private airline SpiceJet Thursday announced launch of direct flights from Guwahati to Patna, Hyderabad and Pakyong in Sikkim.

The announcement of the new flights by Spicejet was made in the presence of Assam Chief Minister Sarbananda Sonowal in a programme held at the secretariat here, a government release said.

The daily non-stop flight services on the Guwahati-Patna-Guwahati route and Guwahati-Hyderabad-Guwahati route would commence on October 10, while the Guwahati-Pakyong-Guwahati flight service would be effective

from October 16, the release said.

Pakyong is about 30 km from Gangtok.

The chief marketing officer of SpiceJet, Debojo Maharshi handed over the first ticket and boarding pass to the chief minister marking the formal announcement of the launch of the new flight services.

Appreciating SpiceJets initiative, Sonowal termed the development as a golden opportunity for the state and that the new flights would not only boost trade, education and health, but would also facilitate higher footfall of tourists from other states to Assam.

The chief minister informed that during the Advantage Assam: Global Investors Summit this year, SpiceJet CMD Ajay Singh had given assurance to the state government for giving a boost to air connectivity in regional routes from Assam..
SoftBank-backed Paytm has filed a complaint against Google Pay with the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) alleging that it is sharing payments data of its customers with group companies and third-party service providers.

"As per their policy, the company has stated that it is using payments data of Indian users for their advertisements business and is sharing it with group companies and unnamed third parties also. This is a clear disregard for a consumer's need for privacy," says the letter written by Paytm to NPCI.

The mail also alleges that as per Google's privacy policy, it collects, stores, uses and discloses their user's personal data for advertising and promotional purposes. Moneycontrol has a copy of the letter.

Google, however, has refuted the claims.

"Google does not use any individual UPI transactions data for any monetisation purpose e.g. for advertisements," a Google spokesperson told Moneycontrol in an email response.

The statement, however, said that Google Pay shares user data for processing transactions or providing Google Pay services with its authorised partners.

"These include participating banks, banks on UPI infrastructure, bill aggregators, merchants on the Google Pay for business programme and with whom the users are transacting and billers such as utility services. Sharing of this information is in accordance with the applicable laws and requisite consent obtained from the user and in conformity with standard industry practice," the spokesperson added.

The development comes close on the heels of WhatsApp getting embroiled in the payments data sharing controversy.

According to NPCI, no payments service provider is allowed to share data with any other third party unless "mandated by applicable law or required to be produced before a regulatory/statutory authority".

In April, even the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) released guidelines asking all payment system operators to ensure that data is stored only within the country.

The service providers have been mandated to comply with the order by October 15.

Google's payments offering was launched as Google Tez in September last year. The company rebranded it as Google Pay in August.
Venture Capital firm Matrix Partners India announced on September 20 that it has invested an undisclosed amount in DailyNinja, a milk and grocery delivery startup.

Existing investors such as Sequoia India and Saama Capital also participated in the round.

The funds will be used to further strengthen DailyNinjas presence in the daily essentials space, by expanding to new cities.

The company is currently present across Bangalore, Hyderabad and Chennai and claims to be doing around 30,000 orders on a daily basis.

Daily consumption of milk is an India-specific habit. DailyNinja has been able to leverage this habit to create a pipeline to customers homes, and has built an attractive business on top of this distribution channel. Their unique hybrid approach of using the existing milk delivery system as well as their own in-house delivery fleet has enabled them to outpace competition, said Gourav Bhattacharya, Director, Matrix India.

Founded in 2015 by Sagar Yarnalkar and Anurag Gupta, the company delivers staples such as milk, bread, eggs, vegetables, curd, and other grocery items through its subscription model. The company partners with milkmen, milk brands and B2B grocery distributors.

The startup last raised around $3 million in funding from Saama Capital in June. It initially secured around $1.5 million in 2017 from Sequoia Capital

DailyNinja competes with Milkbasket, a grocery and milk delivery platform, which last raised $7 million in Series A round of funding led by Kalaari Capital in May.
Bill Gates and Paul Allen | Microsoft | The co-founders of arguably the biggest tech company in the world were childhood friends while growing up in Seattle, Washington. Their shared obsession with computers and a knack for entrepreneurship inspired them to take a plunge and create Microsoft in 1975. Allen played a quintessential role in the early days of the company but effectively left Microsoft in 1982 due to serious illness. Their friendship turned bitter, after Allen, in his 2011 memoir, Idea Man, alleged that Gates cheated him out of shares in the company, and he didn't get enough credit for Microsoft's success. However, all seem to be well now after the two friends squashed the beef in 2013. (Image: Reuters)

Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield | Ben & Jerry's | Although not a billion dollar conglomerate like Microsoft, Cohen and Greenfield started in similar fashion as they were childhood friends. The two were so close that they even went on double dates. Their love for food and a correspondence course in ice-cream making in 1977 helped them turn their friendship into a successful business venture. The pair has been bringing smiles to faces across the globe since 1978, and their idea of giving back to the community resonates with their staunch customer base. (Image: Reuters)

Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard | Hewlett-Packard | Hewlett and Packard first met during an engineering course conducted by Stanford. Following the culmination of the programme, the two envisaged on a two-week campaign trip in the woods. Spending two weeks in complete seclusion with the same person would drive most of us insane, but the two came out virtually inseparable. They soon opened what today has become a multi-billion dollar business empire. (Image: Reuters)

Evan Williams and Biz Stone | Twitter | Their partnership started when Williams hired Stone for Google. Over the few years, the two developed a strong friendship and when Williams left (Google for Odeo.com), Stone decided to follow him. The pair was approached by Jack Dorsey, who at that time was an engineer at Odeo. Dorsey pitched them an idea and Twitter was born. According to All Things Digital, Williams realised Twitter's potential and entrusted Stone with the micro-blogging site as a side project. If their partnership was a movie, it would be about ambition, camaraderie and mutual respect. (Image: Reuters)

Gordon Moore and Bob Noyce | Intel | The two worked for Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory but left the company together to open their own company, Intel. While Noyce was the visionary, Moore was an astute technician. When their individual talents were juxtaposed, a laid-back company built on cutting-edge innovation was born. (Image: Reuters)

Larry Page and Sergey Brin | Google | The two met at Stanfords PhD programme in 1995. However, their first interaction didn't go as many would have imagined. During a campus organised tour, Brin was Pages guide and the two argued the entire time. But their hatred for each other soon turned into mutual respect once they started working on a research paper, The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine. This paper, not only laid the foundation of their life-long friendship but also became the basis for Google. Brin and Page might have been born on opposite sides of the world (Page from Michigan and Brin from Russia), but their passion for data mining and love for computers has made the company what it is today. (Image: Reuters)

Jerry Yang and David Filo | Yahoo! | Yang and Filo, like Larry Page and Sergey Brin, met at Stanfords PhD programme in 1994. They worked together on a project to design computer chips. The duo was apparently bored with the coursework and regularly skipped classes to surf the web. They started keeping tabs of their favourite websites and organised them under different topics, which ultimately transformed into Yahoo!. The university eventually booted them out as their lists were constantly crashing the campus system. However, the duo did not take their exile from Stanford to heart. Their passion for the internet, and funding from Sequoia Capital helped them stick together and grow a successful business. (Image: Reuters)

Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak | Apple | The two Steves first met at a summer job in 1970. Their partnership was so successful, as their work, in spite of being complementary, rarely intertwined. Wozniak was good at building computers and Jobs knew how to sell them. Wozniak even admitted that he never once thought of selling his creations and it was all Jobs. Wozniak's technical skills and Job's business foresight were the ingredients that made the iconic tech company a great success. Apple is now a trillion-dollar entity. (Image: Reuters)
Vice President Venkaiah Naidu on Thursday addressed business leaders in Romania and urged them to take advantage of the economic reforms in India by making investments.

Naidu, who is visiting the southeastern European country on the occasion of the 70th anniversary of India-Romania diplomatic relations, said that bilateral trade between India and Romania stands at $810 million.

External Affairs Ministry Spokesperson Raveesh Kumar said in a tweet: "Bilateral trade between India and Romania stands at $810 million! Vice President MVenkaiahNaidu addressed Prahova Chamber of Commerce in Bucharest and urged them to take advantage of economic reforms transforming India".

The Chamber of Commerce and Industry Prahova is a non-governmental organization of public use, self-financed, having as fundamental purpose the development of Prahova County's economy and its promotion both on the domestic markets and overseas.
In a meeting with the 15th Finance Commission, the Maharashtra government sought Rs 50,000 crore as a special support for the Mumbai city and the Mumbai Metropolitan Region (MMR).

"Mumbai is the backbone of our economy. We must strengthen Mumbai's infrastructure. We need to acknowledge the importance of Mumbai in the nation's GDP," Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis said in a memorandum to the commission.

Demanding Rs 50,000 crore for Mumbai and the MMR (which includes surrounding townships), he also sought special grants of Rs 32,327 crore for various other development projects.

Of these Rs 32,327 crore, Rs 25,000 crore would be needed to improve living standards in the economically backward Marathwada and Vidarbha regions, he said.

The demand for special grants included Rs 1,400 crore for environmental management, Rs 200 crore for ecosystem conservation and protection and wetland conservation, Rs 1,000 crore for conservation and protection of rivers and Rs 200 crore for coastal biodiversity conservation

The chief minister demanded Rs 825 crore for preservation for culture and heritage, Rs 600 crore for conservation, repairs and development of protected monuments and museums, Rs 100 crore for conservation of forts and Rs 125 crore for upgradation of auditoriums and theatres.

He demanded a special grant of Rs 1,177 crore for conservation of forests, wildlife and for increasing the green cover and mangrove development.

The government also sought Rs 1,700 crore for strengthening judicial administration including renovation of court buildings.

"Maharashtra is the growth engine of the nation and so we need more share (in tax revenue) for India to grow fast," Fadnavis said.

The chief minister also demanded an incentive for the state which boasts of the highest tree cover in non-forested areas in the country.

He suggested use of rural data from the Socio-Economic Caste Survey to measure deprivation, and factor it in the devolution formula of the Finance Commission.

Apart from Fadnavis, state finance minister Sudhir Mungantiwar, revenue minister Chandrakant Patil and other ministers Sambhaji Patil Nilangekar, Ram Shinde and Deepak Kesarkar also attended the meeting with commission members here.

The Finance Commission is set up every five years to decide the sharing of tax resources between the Centre and states. The 15th Finance Commission headed by N K Singh was on a three-day visit to the state from September 17.
Markets regulator Sebi has imposed a fine of Rs 50 lakh on Karmbhoomi Real Estate and its five directors for collecting money from investors through illegal collective investment schemes.

The directors are Devendra Pal Singh, Sardar Singh, Nirmal Kumar Singh, Manoj Kumar Sengar and Mahipal Singh.

According to a Sebi order dated September 18, Karmbhoomi had two types of schemes on the basis of payment option available to the investors -- single investment scheme for lump-sum investment and multiple investment scheme for investment in instalments.

Under the two schemes, Karmbhoomi invited investments against the sale of plots of variable sizes. The firm also mentioned the estimated realizable value for the plots under the respective schemes.

On perusal of the balance sheet submitted by the entities, the regulator found that it showed the current liabilities of Rs 16.18 crore under the head 'advance against allotment of plots' for the period ended March 31, 2015.

The schemes of the entities satisfied all four conditions as stipulated under the CIS (Collective Investment Scheme) Regulations, the regulator said.

"Noticees (company and directors) are engaged in the fund mobilising activity from public through investment contracts by floating/ sponsoring/ launching collective investment schemes... without having registration with the Sebi as mandated under the CIS Regulations for sponsoring/ launching collective investment schemes," it added.

The fresh ruling of the Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi) follows an earlier order passed in November 2015 against the noticees whereby the regulator had directed them to abstain from collecting any money from the investors or launch any CIS.

They were also asked to wind up the existing schemes and refund the money collected from the investors.

Thereafter, the noticees filed an appeal before the Securities Appellate Tribunal against the November 2015 ruling. The tribunal through its order in November 2017 directed them to make a representation to Sebi setting out in detail the names and the quantum of amount refunded to the investors and the mode and the manner in which the balance amount would be refunded.

It is "difficult" to accept the contention of the noticees that the requisite amount has been refunded to the investors, the regulator said.

Noting that it has already been established that the noticees have mobilised funds from public by launching CISs without having registration with Sebi, the regulator imposed a penalty of Rs 50 lakh on them.
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The Congress on Thursday demanded Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman's resignation for allegedly "misleading" the people on the Rafale deal and said the government's arguments have been "demolished" by the statement of a former chief of the state-run Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL).

Congress spokesperson Manish Tewari cited the remarks of former HAL chief T Suvarna Raju to attack Sitharaman over the issue of HAL's capability to build the Rafale aircraft.

Tewari hit out at Sitharaman for alleging that the UPA did not extend support to HAL when the state-run company was engaged in talks with French firm Dassault Aviation for the manufacturer of Rafale jets in India under the offset agreement.

He said the former HAL chief had made certain "extremely pertinent points" that "absolutely demolish" the entire case that the NDA government has been trying to build on the Rafale issue.

Tewari said that Raju had made it clear in his statement that HAL and Dassault had signed the mutual workshare contract and given it to the government.

The first question that arises is that did the defence minister of India intentionally tried to mislead the people of India, the Congress leader said.

"We demeand the resignation of the defence minister on the charge of misleading the people of India. After the disclosure which has been made today by the former head of HAL, the defence minister has no moral authority or no moral right to continue even for a second," he said.

He also reiterated the Congress demand of a Joint Parliametary Committee (JPC) probe into the Rafale deal.

The Congress spokesperson also cited that Raju had stated that HAL would have built Rafale jets, had the government closed the original contract for 126 Medium Multi-Role Combat Aircraft (MMRCA).

Therefore, the government's argument that because HAL and Dassault could not come to an agreement and so the 126 MMRCA contract had to be scrapped does not hold, he said.

"What has happened today has really blown the defence minister's assertion out of the water," Tewari said.

He also cited Raju's remarks that HAL had built a 25-tonne Sukhoi-30, a fourth-generation fighter jet that forms the mainstay of the Air Force, from raw material stage, and maintained the Mirage-2000 aircraft, manufactured by Rafale maker Dassault Aviation, to highlight the public sector undertaking's capability.

"The nailer is that he (ex-HAL chief) says that if the 126 MMRCA contract would have gone through, India would have been self reliant in so far as the fighter aircraft platform is concerned," Tewari said.

"What happened to Make in India. Make in India seems to have gone out the window," he said.

Citing that the former HAL chief said that everything with Dassault had been sorted, Tewari slammed the government for stating otherwise.

"He (Raju) says everything had been sorted out. It completely and absolutely demolishes the web of lies and insinuations which this government has been trying to construct over the past six months," Tewari said.

He also demanded that the government should make all the files related to the issue public as demanded by the HAL chief.

In 2016, the Modi government signed a government-to-government deal with France for purchase of 36 Rafale jets at a cost of Rs 58,000 crore. The Congress has been alleging irregularities in the deal, saying the UPA had finalised the price of each aircraft at Rs 526 crore while the NDA was buying the same jet at Rs 1,670 crore.

The government has been maintaining the cost of the Rafale aircraft was nine per cent less than what was negotiated during the UPA regime.

Last week, Sitharaman said negotiations for 126 Rafale jets under the UPA government fell through as the government did not support HAL to which the Congress alleged that the NDA completely kept away the state-run company from the project.

"Dassault and HAL could not go together. The agreement did not happen during UPA, so is not it obvious that the interests of HAL could have really been taken care of," Sitharaman had said.
Indian PM Narendra Modi (left) and Pakistani PM Imran Khan (right)

India accepted Pakistan's offer of talks on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA), Ministry of External Affairs spokesperson Raveesh Kumar told reporters on September 20.

Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan had earlier proposed a meeting between Pakistan Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi and his Indian counterpart Sushma Swaraj, on the sidelines of the UNGA in New York this month.

Accepting the offer, Kumar clarified that the acceptance does not "indicate any change in the policy as far as our stand on terrorism and cross-border terrorism is concerned".

"Our permanent missions will get in touch with each other to work out how and when the meeting will take place," Kumar added. He did not, however, divulge the details of the meeting.

"What we will discuss in the meeting, I think we should just wait until the meeting takes place," he said.

The acceptance, however, faced a lot of flak as it comes a day after the killing of a Border Security Force (BSF) jawan along the International Border by Pakistan Rangers at sector level. The body of head constable Narender Kumar was found in a mutilated state in Ramgarh sector.

Responding to the incident, Kumar told the press, "The barbaric incident happened and it is against all international norms; it is a serious issue and will be taken up with our counterpart [during the meeting]".
India's Chennai Petroleum will stop processing Iranian crude oil from October to keep its insurance coverage once new sanctions by the United States against Iran go into effect, three sources familiar with the issue said.

Iran's Naftiran Intertrade Co Ltd, a trading arm for state-owned National Iranian Oil Co, owns a 15.4 percent stake in Chennai Petroleum, which has two refineries with a total combined capacity of 230,000 barrels of oil per day (bpd).

In May, US President Donald Trump pulled out of an international nuclear deal with Iran and announced new sanctions against the country, the third-largest producer among the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC). Washington is pushing allies to cut Iranian oil imports to zero once the sanctions on the petroleum sector start up on Nov. 4.

United India Insurance has informed Chennai Petroleum that its new annual policy that is set to take effect from October will not cover any liability related to processing crude from Iran, the three sources said. This has forced the refiner to cancel a scheduled loading of 1 million barrels in October, they said.

Indian insurers do not fall directly under the sanctions, but need to hedge their own risk on the Western reinsurance market, which will not accept Iranian exposure.

"It is quite complicated.. reinsurers are quite apprehensive about extending cover for Chennai Petroleum," said one of the sources, who asked not to be identified because of the sensitivity of the issue.

Chennai Petroleum's reduced demand will further cut India's imports from Iran to about 10 million tonnes in October, lower than previous estimates reported by Reuters..

"Reinsurers have said they can not provide full 100 percent cover. They have agreed to provide support for only 85 percent cover," said a second source, who also declined to be identified.

Chennai Petroleum, a subsidiary of the country's biggest refiner Indian Oil Corp (IOC), has a deal to buy up to 2 million tonnes, or 40,000 bpd, of oil from Iran in the fiscal year 2018/19.

IOC imports oil on behalf of Chennai Petroleum.

Chennai Petroleum and United India Insurance did not respond to requests for comment.

Graphic: Iran crude oil exports to top destinations https://tmsnrt.rs/2MHIDAt

With Chennai's absence, Iran is left with just two Indian clients, Managalore Refinery and Petrochemicals Ltd, and IOC.

State-owned refiner Hindustan Petroleum Corp has already halted purchases due to insurance problems, while Bharat Petroleum Corp boosted Iranian purchases earlier this year and expects to sharply cut Iranian flows once the sanctions take effect.

Nayara Energy is also preparing to halt Iranian imports from November, while Reliance Industries and HPCL-Mittal Energy Ltd have already stopped buying Iranian oil.
The National Registry of Sexual Offenders (NRSO) is set to be rolled out on September 20.

The database will include names, photographs, Aadhaar numbers, residential address, DNA samples, fingerprints and Personal Account Numbers (PANs) of convicted sexual offenders.

The information will only be available to law enforcement agencies for investigation and employee verification.

According to a report by The Indian Express, the database will contain more than 4.5 lakh cases and will have profiles of first time and repeat offenders.

The compilation will be done on the basis of information from prisons across the country.

Offenders will be classified based on their criminal history to determine if "they pose a serious danger to the community," the news daily reported.

The database will include information on arrested and charge-sheeted offenders. However, limited access will be granted to officers after clearance.

Juvenile offenders are likely to be included in the database at a later stage, the newspaper reported.

Data maintenance

The database will be maintained by the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) under the Ministry of Home Affairs.

According to the report, the registry will maintain data for 15 years of those cases classified as posing low danger.

Data for individuals classified as moderate danger will be stored for 25 years. For habitual offenders, violent criminals, convicted gang rapists and in case of custodial rapes, the data will be stored permanently.

The government had decided to set up the NRSO in April this year after nationwide outrage over cases of sexual assault, including the rape and murder of an eight-year-old girl in Kathua, Jammu and Kashmir.

This will make India the ninth country in the world to set up and maintain a database of sexual offenders.

In the US, such a database is managed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and can be accessed by the public.

Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, South Africa, Trinidad and Tobago and United Kingdom are the other countries where the database can only be accessed by law enforcement agencies.
59% of all terrorist attacks in 2017 in 5 Asian countries: Report

US Catholic Church plans hotline for complaints of abuse by bishops

JUST IN | Supreme Court ends ban on reporting of Bihar shelter home abuse cases, according to a tweet from NDTV The Apex Court also urged the media to not sensationalise sex harassment cases.

JUST IN | India accepts Pakistan PM Imran Khan's invitation, says it's 'only a meet'

JUST IN | The Kartarpur matter was taken up earlier in the past, but there was no response from the Pakistani side, says spokesperson for the Ministry of External Affairs Raveesh Kumar.

JUST IN | Franco Mulakkal has been removed from the post of Bishop by the Vatican.

The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) has detained three individuals and the then Asst Director (In-charge Inspection of Shelter Homes) Social welfare Department, in connection with Muzaffarpur shelter home case, according to sources who spoke to ANI

JUST IN | The Bahujan Samaj Party(BSP) chief Mayawati said that the BSP will be contesting the State Assembly elections in Chattisgarh, in alliance with Janta Congress Chhattisgarh.

JUST IN | The French President Emmanuel Macron and EU Council President Tusk have said that the Brexit exit proposal put forward by UK's Prime Minister Theresa May is 'not acceptable' and 'will not work' respectively.

September 20, 2018 / 07:38 PM IST JUST IN | The French President Emmanuel Macron and EU Council President Tusk have said that the Brexit exit proposal put forward by UK's Prime Minister Theresa May is 'not acceptable' and 'will not work' respectively.











September 20, 2018 / 10:07 PM IST











September 20, 2018 / 10:04 PM IST











September 20, 2018 / 09:43 PM IST A shooting has taken place in Maryland, the United States. Reports say that multiple fatalies have taken place.











September 20, 2018 / 07:38 PM IST











September 20, 2018 / 05:47 PM IST JUST IN | The Bahujan Samaj Party(BSP) chief Mayawati said that the BSP will be contesting the State Assembly elections in Chattisgarh, in alliance with Janta Congress Chhattisgarh.











September 20, 2018 / 05:21 PM IST The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) has detained three individuals and the then Asst Director (In-charge Inspection of Shelter Homes) Social welfare Department, in connection with Muzaffarpur shelter home case, according to sources who spoke to ANI











September 20, 2018 / 05:14 PM IST











September 20, 2018 / 04:37 PM IST











September 20, 2018 / 04:33 PM IST JUST IN | Franco Mulakkal has been removed from the post of Bishop by the Vatican.











September 20, 2018 / 04:26 PM IST JUST IN | The External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj will take up the Kartarpur issue with her Pakistan counterpart at the informal talk to take place at United National General Assembly meet.










The Beetlejuice (the 1988 horror film where proclaiming the word Beetlejuice thrice results in the appearance of a ghost) of Bills  Triple Talaq  is in the news again. On Wednesday, President Ram Nath Kovind cleared the ordinance moved by the Union government making Triple Talaq a punishable offence. As we might recall, the government failed to get the Bill passed during the monsoon session of the parliament.

Last year, on the August 22, the Supreme Court, by a 3-2 majority, declared the practice of Triple Talaq unconstitutional. Subsequently, the Triple Talaq Bill (officially called the Muslim Women Protection of Rights on Marriage) Bill 2017, which makes instant Triple Talaq a criminal offence was introduced, and the Centre had hoped that it would be passed on the last day of the monsoon session. The Rajya Sabha did not pass it, and the Bill will now have to wait until the Winter Session to go further in the parliament. (You can read and hear our earlier detailed podcast about it here.)

But with this ordinance being passed, it will now serve as an interim law for the next six months, after which the amended version of the bill will have to be tabled and cleared by both houses of Parliament before the law is finally passed.

The ordinance being passed and what the reactions to it from across the spectrum constitute our Story of the Day.

The latest ordinance

The Union Cabinet on September 19, passed an ordinance that makes talaq-e-biddat, or instant Triple Talaq, a criminal offence that will attract a maximum jail term of three years for the husband and a fine. Union Law Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad, describing the practice of Triple Talaq as barbaric and inhuman, approved the ordinance to ban the practice, saying also that there was a "compelling necessity" to bring the measure as instances of talaq-e-biddat continued unabated despite the Supreme Court striking it down.



The first change allows only a woman, or a close relative, to file a police case against her husband for instant Triple Talaq. "This would settle fears that even a neighbour can file FIR as is the cases in any cognisable offence. This would check misuse," Ravi Shankar Prasad, Union Law Minister, had said last month.

The second amendment allows her to drop the case if the husband comes around later and they arrive at a compromise.

A third amendment mandates that the magistrate can decide on releasing the husband on bail only after hearing the wife. The magistrate would ensure that bail is granted only after the husband agrees to grant compensation to the wife as provided in the bill. The magistrate, as per the bill, will decide the quantum of compensation.



Last month, on the last day of the monsoon session of the parliament, the Cabinet made three amendments to the Triple Talaq law. While the proposed law will remain "non-bailable'' offence, the accused can approach a magistrate even before the trial to seek bail. Under a non-bailable offence, bail cannot be granted by police at the police station. The three amendments introduced were as follows:

The changes made by the Cabinet make the offence of Triple Talaq compoundable. Under a compoundable offence, both parties have the liberty of withdrawing the case. However, the jail term for a Muslim man who resorts to Triple Talaq remains three years and only a magistrate, and not a local police officer, can release the accused on bail.

A woman can also seek the custody of her minor children from the magistrate who will take a final call on the issue.

BJP vs Congress

On September 19, Ravi Shankar Prasad said, 201 cases had been reported from across the country after the Supreme Court banned Triple Talaq in August 2017. Since January 2017, 430 cases had been reported until September 13 this year. What is important is that the practice of Triple Talaq continues in spite of the Supreme Court having annulled it and the Lok Sabha having passed a Bill that is pending in the Rajya Sabha. We have all the evidence and a series of papers in this regard, Mr. Prasad said.

The Minister also went on an offensive against the Congress saying, the Bill was not supported by the Congress because of vote bank pressures. Just as he had done last month, he appealed to Congress leader Sonia Gandhi, BSP chief Mayawati, and Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee to support it in the next Parliament session.

In response, the Congress said this was yet another smokescreen on the BJPs part and alleged that an unnerved BJP cornered over incidents of gruesome rapes and lack of security for women was seeking to divert the political agenda.

Congress chief spokesperson Randeep Surjewala asked, While punishing the husband, all the womens groups have asked an obvious question: Once husband is in jail, who will pay maintenance and/or subsistence allowance to the woman and children? He went on to add, As raised by the Congress party as also various groups, why should the woman and children not have a right to proceed against the estate i.e. movable and immovable property of the husband? Modi Govt has deliberately not made any such provision.

Rejecting criticism that it was stonewalling the legislation, the Congress party said putting the bread-winner of a family in jail would not just be injustice to his family, but also to the woman and her children as they would be left to fend for themselves without financial support during that period.

The Congress had told Ravi Shankar Prasad that it would be ready to support the bill, even with the criminal clause, if the government takes upon itself the responsibility of financially supporting all Muslim women whose husbands are in jail for pronouncing instant Triple Talaq.

But the government had rejected the proposal. To bolster its case, the Centre had even sought the opinion of all state governments on the subject, and, most of them had supported the bill in its present form.

As News18 reported, the ordinance comes just weeks after Prime Minister Narendra Modi promised Muslim women that the entire nation is there with them and we will ensure that they get justice.

With this ordinance, that shall be law for the next six months, India has joined 22 countries including its neighbouring countries of Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka, which have also banned the practice of instant Triple Talaq.

In Pakistan and Bangladesh, it requires the man who wishes to divorce his wife to give the 'arbitration council' a written notice of his having done so, and supply a copy of the same to his wife. In Pakistan, Triple Talaq was abolished when it issued its Muslim Family Law Ordinance in 1961, according to Geo News.

In Afghanistan, divorce through three pronouncements made in only one sitting is considered to be invalid. Sri Lanka's Marriage and Divorce (Muslim) Act, 1951 as amended up to 2006, banned Triple Talaq, according to a report by Pakistani scholar Mohammed Munir.

Many Muslim and womens organisations are against the idea of criminalizing Triple Talaq. Triple Talaq has been a contentious issue for decades now. We have traced its journey on our previous podcast, so now would be a good time to catch up.

As early as 2002, the Supreme Court invalidated a divorce through Triple Talaq in a case called Shamim Ara vs State of Uttar Pradesh. Last year, in February, many petitioners including a victim of Triple Talaq, Shayara Bano, had moved the SC to demand that Triple Talaq, polygamy, and nikah halala be declared unconstitutional.

Nikah halala is a practice in which a woman divorced through Triple Talaq had to first marry another man and consummate that marriage before re-entering the previous one. Halala means to make something lawful which is currently unlawful.

In August 2017, a five-judge bench of the SC declared Triple Talaq unconstitutional. After the judgment, some Muslim womens organisations, most notably, the Bharatiya Muslim Mahila Andolan  one of the petitioners in the case  urged that there be a law to make Triple Talaq a criminal, punishable offence.

Soon after, the Bharatiya Janata Party government tabled a Bill in the Lok Sabha, which sought to make Triple Talaq a cognizable, non-bailable criminal offence attracting imprisonment of up to three years and a fine. Among the provisions stated in that Bill was that it allowed anyone to file a police complaint against a husband if they encountered a case of Triple Talaq  with or without the consent of the wife thus divorced. That provison was amended, as we discussed earlier.

The Bharatiya Muslim Mahila Andolan has welcomed the ordinance and the amended provisions. Noorjehan Safia Niaz, the co-founder and trustee of Bharatiya Muslim Mahila Andolan, speaking to Scroll, said, These amendments are exactly the kind of changes we wanted to the original Triple Talaq bill.

She added, It would have been better if the law was passed by the Rajya Sabha as well, but this law is important because Muslim women need legislative protection against practices like Triple Talaq. Once a legislation comes in, there is always the possibility of improving it further. Zakia Soman, co-founder of BMMA, told Al Jazeera, We welcome this. The Muslim woman is happy today because she wants legal protection.

Just like the Indian Muslim is not a monolith, BMMA is not the only organization that works for Muslim womens rights, and theirs is not the only prevailing opinion. There are many organisations that contend that there is a difference between the unconstitutionality of Triple Talaq and declaring it a criminal offence. Many have spoken out about the Bill as yet another tool to demonise the Muslim male by the ruling party.

Flavia Agnes, a women's rights lawyer based in New Delhi, speaking to Al Jazeera, said the government's move "makes no sense. This is a bad decision. They could not pass it in parliament, now they have brought an executive order. The Supreme Court has already said it is invalid. So if something is invalid already, how can it be a crime?" Agnes asked.

The effect on women of instant Triple Talaq and desertion of wives is the same. So many men, Hindus and Muslims, desert their wives, and that should also be criminalised. Why are you not doing anything about that? This step is only to target Muslim men, she added. Agnes said the debate around instant divorce might risk normalising far-right rhetoric of India's ruling party by demonising the Muslim community. (source: Al Jazeera)

Other lawyers from the organization founded by Agnes, Majlis - meaning association in Arabic  a non-profit, feminist legal services organisation, also expressed doubts about how the law against Triple Talaq could be implemented in cases where there is no digital proof of the pronouncement, like in oral Triple Talaqs. Audrey DMello, a lawyer at Majlis, asked, How will trials be conducted? Speaking to Scroll, she asked, If the man denies having pronounced talaq, what evidence would the woman have to prove her case?

Writing for Al Jazeera last year, Flavia Agnes had remarked, the Hindu majority has projected this carefully crafted and delicately poised judgement as an anti-Muslim verdict and a clear signal to bring in a uniform civil code, a demand which has been on the radar of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) as a whip with which to beat the Muslim community.

Speaking to Scroll, Hasina Khan, a founder of human rights organisation Bebaak Collective, echoed Agness views. She said, We are totally disappointed by this ordinance; it will amount to targeting Muslim men in the name of Muslim women. Bebaak Collective supported the move to make Triple Talaq unconstitutional. Bebaak hopes to challenge the ordinance in court.

Javed Anand, human rights activist, expressed relief at the amendments made but remained concerned about the criminalization of Triple Talaq. Convenor of the group Indian Muslims for Secular Democracy, Anand said to Scroll, We stand by our position that it is far better to treat Triple Talaq as a form of domestic violence, under the Domestic Violence Act. He also pointed out what the Congress party had in its statement  that a man imprisoned for three years would not be in a position to earn and provide his wife with the allowance. Meanwhile, he said, the man would be provided with food, clothing and shelter in prison.

While the Congress has remained steadfast in its non-support of the Bill, Shiv Sena, has come out to reinforce what many people have argued is the subtext of the passing of the Bill. Welcoming the Centre passing the ordinance, the Shiv Sena asked the government to take a similar route for the construction of the Ram Mandir in Ayodhya. The government should take steps to fulfil at least one promise" made to Hindus of the country, keeping their sentiments in mind, the Uddhav Thackeray-led party said.

But wait didnt the BJP say its collective saffron heart bled about the subjugation of Muslim women and thats what made them so gung-ho about the Bill?

Of course.
Day 2 | Union Minister of Information and Broadcasting Smriti Irani | Looking through the New India Lens | 5.45 PM with Chairman of Central Board of Film Certification Prasoon joshi.

Union Textile Minister Smriti Irani Thursday slammed Congress president Rahul Gandhi for his comments on Prime Minister, saying he is desperate to attract attention.

Earlier in the day, Gandhi had said at a public meeting in Dungarpur district that people now thought that the country's watchman is a thief.

Irani said Gandhi has no regard for the prime minister's post, which he respected only when a member of his own family held it.

I think that the desperation of the clown prince, as Mr Jaitley calls him, is to attract attention to himself at the cost of the prime minister's name, she told reporters on the sidelines of an Carpet Export Promotion Council event here.

"One needs to ask Rahul Gandhi what is his vision for the country. National building is not something that Rahul Gandhi is keen on," she said. "People of the country know that Rahul Gandhi lacks vision, she added.

At his rally in Dungarpur, Gandhi had referred to the Rafale fighter deal with France and mocked Modi's assertions on tackling corruption.

He said people were now heard saying that the country's watchman is a thief. Galli galli mein shor hai, Hindustan ka chowkidar chor hai, Gandhi had said.

Irani's reaction came on the sidelines of an interaction with Jaipur-based exporters.
The relations between India and Nepal are age old and there is huge potential to further enhance it as New Delhi is committed to improve its relationship with the neighbouring countries, according to a top Indian official Thursday.

Delivering a lecture on "Nepal, India and Neighbourhood: The Economic Reforms, Innovation and Connectivity" here, Vice Chairman of NITI Aayog Rajiv Kumar said that India has established around 2,000 'Atal Tinkering Labs' to inculcate the innovative spirit among students, and also offered to establish similar facilities in Nepal's schools.

The lecture was jointly organised by the Institute for Integrated Development Studies of Kathmandu University and the Barbara Foundation.

"Prime Minister Narendra Modi is inordinately committed to improve relationship with the countries in India's neighbourhood," said Kumar, adding that India-Nepal relations are age old and there is huge potential to further enhance it.

He also said that significant efforts were being made to increase connectivity with Nepal.

Kumar said that India is on a path of major economic transformation and was entering into a period where double digit growth is achievable.

"Prime Minister Modi has insisted on converting development into a mass movement and first time leadership and people of the country have realized the importance of participative development," he said.

He said NITI Aayog has started "Atal Innovation Mission" to inculcate innovative spirit among students and two thousand "Atal Tinkering Labs" have been established in schools.

Kumar also offered help to establish similar labs to be set up in Nepali schools. He said significant efforts are being made to increase connectivity with Nepal.
The Indian passport ranked at the 84th spot among the worlds most powerful passports list, which is a drop by 2 places as it ranked 82nd in 2019. The country is tagged along with Mauritania and Tajikistan providing visa-free access to 58 destinations. (Image: Reuters)

Tourist footfalls from the US to India in 2017 has increased by over six percent as compared to previous year, government said, countering an American report that claimed there was a decline during the period.

The Ministry of Tourism in a statement said foreign tourist arrivals (FTAs) from the United States has never declined since 2010.

"FTAs in India from the USA during the year 2017 have registered a positive growth of 6.17 percent over the year 2016," the statement said.

A report of National Travel and Tourism Office (NTTO) had recently said the outbound tourists from the USA to India have declined by 7 percent in the year 2017 as compared to 2016, it said.

According to the said report released by NTTO, traveller volume is based on the US Department of Homeland Security Advanced Passenger Information System wherein all airlines are required to electronically submit passenger data on flights arriving into and departing from the United States.

The ministry said that it was obvious that the source of data for the report is only airlines reporting. In the cases where direct flight between the USA and India is not operating, it is not known whether the final destination or the transit destination is reported as India by the passengers.

Moreover, departures at international check posts other than airports are not captured in the report. Therefore, it may not contain the complete information on the outbound departures from the USA, it said.

On the other hand, the Bureau of Immigration of India (BoI) compiles the data of (FTA) from the records of scanned passport of each person arriving at all the international check posts in India, which include airports, sea ports and the land check posts.

The FTAs from USA in India during January - August this year was 9,26,192, 8.8 percent higher than the corresponding numbers during the same period last year.

NTTO in its recent report had said that the US tourist arrivals in India had dipped for the first time in eight years.
To steer away from a possible floor test, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is unlikely to appoint a new Chief Minister in Goa, according to a report by News18.

Parrikar, 62, who is suffering from a pancreatic ailment, is admitted to the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) in New Delhi for treatment.

BJP National President Amit Shah had met a delegation of state leaders in Goa and had taken stock of the situation.

According to the report, it is unlikely that the BJP would change the leadership in Goa immediately.

Appointing a new Chief Minister would force the BJP-led government to face a floor test and prove its majority in the Assembly.

BJP leaders led by Organisational Secretary Ram Lal said the alliance partners have stated that they will agree to any political decision taken by the saffron party, the report suggests.

Goa's principal opposition party Congress, has demanded a floor test and has claimed that it has the support of over 21 legislators in the 40-member Assembly.

Senior Congress leader and party Spokesperson Ramakant Khalap said that with three ministers including Parrikar currently in hospital, the BJP-led coalition is short of the halfway mark, the report adds.

Khalap added that this made it imperative for the Governor to call the single largest party to form the government.

"The effective strength of the House today is 37, of which one is Speaker and he has no right to vote if there is motion for trust," he said, according to the report.

Apart from Parrikar, two ministers -- Francis D'Souza and Pandurang Madkaikar -- are currently admitted to different hospitals.

Also read: How CM Manohar Parrikar's illness has affected the political posturing in Goa

On September 18, Congress legislators led by Chandrakant Kavlekar, had met Governor Mridula Sinha and demanded a floor test.

Kavlekar said that it is waiting for a response from the Sinha, who he claim had assured them that she would get back on the issue in three-four days.

The BJP has a total of 14 MLAs of its own. The coalition government had been formed with the support of the Goa Forward Party (GFP) and the Maharashtrawadi Gomantak Party (MGP), who have three MLAs each.
Congress

The Congress hit back at Finance Minister Arun Jaitley on Thursday accusing him of "lying" on the issue of NPAs and dubbed him as a "court jester" writing "wasteful" blogs, after he called Rahul Gandhi a "clown prince" who was spreading "lies" about Modi government waiving Rs 2.5 lakh crore in loans to 15 industrialists.

Congress chief spokesperson Randeep Surjewala accused Jaitley of making desperate attempts at spreading "fake agenda to stay relevant as a court jester" and asked why he was "abusing" the opposition instead of answering the questions on non-performing assets of banks and Rafale deal.

Attacking the government on the issue of NPAs, the Congress leader alleged collusion between "bank looters and the Modi government".

"Political amnesia and chest thumping cannot obliterate your dismal record of dismantling India's economic progress or as also the surging NPAs resulting out of bankruptcy of economic vision of Modi Government," he said.

He said Jaitley and the Modi government have been "trapped" on the Rafale issue and that is why they are resorting to abuse against the opposition.

"Arun Jaitley is desperate in his attempt to stay relevant as a court jester' to Modi Sultanate'. 'Abuse, diversion' and deception' are the desperate tools of a 'Lying -Jait-LIE'.

"Instead of hiding behind the cloak of expletives for the opposition, let FM coherently answer politically relevant issues," he said in a statement.

Surjewala said the Finance Ministry in a reply in Parliament on July 24, 2018 admitted that NPAs stood at Rs 2,51,054 crore when Congress-UPA demitted power and they have increased to a whopping Rs 9,61,962 crore by March 2018.

As NPAs now stand as Rs 12,00,000 crore, he asked, "Are you lying in your fake agenda blogpost' today or did you lie in Parliament? The nation wants to know".

"We dare you to publicly state the amount of loans given during the tenure of Modi Government in last 52 months, along with details as to how much of those loans have become NPAs? How much worth of loans were ever-greened' and restructured' during the tenure of Modi Government?," the Congress leader minister.

He also asked how many willful defaulters' escaped from India during last 52 months and with how much money.

"How many economic offenders', defaulters' and looters' did you bring back to India and jailed?," he asked.

"And yes Jait-LIE' ji, the desperate quest to stay relevant of a court jester' by wasteful blogs continues.

"Please reply - Why hide behind abuse when trapped in Rafale maze? Why supersede HAL for Rs 30,000 crore contract? Why no answer on Rs 41,000 crore loss in Rafale scam?," he said on Twitter.

Surjewala also asked why was Offset Contract' of Rs 30,000 crore given to a 12-day-old company and why a purchase of Rs 526 crore Rafale was made for Rs 1670 crore and caused a loss of Rs 41,205 crore to the country.

"Why compromise national security by reducing aircraft from 126 to 36? Why did you violate the Defence Procurement Procedure? Why was no prior approval taken from Cabinet Committee on Security? Why did you sacrifice Transfer of Technology' to India? Why eight-year long delay for emergency purchase' of aircraft?," he asked.

Raising the Vijay Mallya issue, Surjewala asked, "Did Mallya, an economic offender of Rs 9,091 crore, meet you on March 1, 2016 and tell you he was leaving India for London? Did Mallya not run away on March 2, 2016?

"Were you not duty bound as Finance Minister to alarm the authorities and get Mallya arrested? Should your role then be not probed? Do you have any right to continue as Finance Minister? Should you not be sacked immediately?"

He said the truth is that the ever depreciating Rupee', the ever increasing fuel prices, the declining exports and extinguished savings, the phenomenally high current account deficit is your sad legacy and making the common people of India describe you as  'Jaitley looted the pockets'."

Jaitley had earlier launched a scathing attack on the Congress president as he retorted to his charges made during political rallies.

"You lied on the Rafale deal, you lied on the NPAs. Your temperament to concoct facts raises a legitimate question  do people whose natural preference is falsehood deserve to be a part of the public discourse," he said in a Facebook blog.

The world's largest democracy must seriously introspect whether public discourse should be allowed to be polluted by the falsehood of a 'Clown Prince'," the BJP leader said.
In a no-hold-barred attack on Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Congress president Rahul Gandhi Thursday said people are now heard saying that the country's "watchman is a thief.

The remark at a public meeting provoked immediate condemnation by the BJP with Union minister Smriti Irani telling reporters it showed that the Congress leader has no respect for the prime minister's post.

Gandhi was referring to the Prime Minister's silence on the Rafale fighter aircraft deal with France and the Modi government's failure to bring fugitive businessman Vijay Mallya to book.

Modi had said he did not want to become the country's prime minister, but its chowkidar' (watchman), Gandhi recalled.

He added now it is heard on the streets that the country's chowkidar' is a thief. Galli galli me shor hai, desh ka chowkidar chor hai, he said in Hindi at a rally in tribal dominated Sagwara of Udaipur district.

Assembly elections will be held in Rajasthan later this year.
surgical strikes 2016

The Narendra Modi-led central government has decided to "celebrate" the second anniversary of the 'surgical strikes', which were conducted on terror launch pads across the Line of Control (LoC) on the intervening night of September 28-29, 2016.

The announcement was made by Railway Minister Piyush Goyal on September 20. "On the 29th of this month, we complete the second anniversary of the surgical strikes. And we will celebrate the day," said the minister.

The 2016 strikes had gathered a lot of buzz across the country, with people from all walks of society appreciating the Indian Army. However, soon it turned political with ruling party Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and Opposition parties engaging in a war of words, after the latter asked for proof of the strikes.

Heres a look at all that happened:

Surgical Strikes

On September 18, 2016, 17 soldiers were killed while 19 were injured in a terror attack on an Army camp near the town of Uri in the state of Jammu and Kashmir (J&K). The attack was dubbed as the deadliest attack on the Indian Army in at least two decades.

Eleven days after the attack, special forces of the Indian Army conducted surgical strikes to destroy terror launchpads in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir.

The strikes were presented by the Director General of Military Operations (DGMO) Lt Gen Ranbir Singh in a press conference.

The event led to a rare time in Indian politics when the Opposition stood united with the government. Parties like Congress, AAP, JD(U) praised the central government and armed forces.

Opposition questions authenticity of strikes

In a few weeks, however, the Opposition  specifically AAP and Congress  doubted the veracity of the surgical strikes and demanded that the government release videos of the operation. The BJP had been harping about the "success" of the surgical strikes on various public platforms.

This began a war of words, as BJP criticised the demand for proof.

The Congress also alleged that Prime Minister Narendra Modi was politicising the operation.

Two years of the strike

In June 2018, footage of the strikes were made public, which again started a political debate in the country. The clips showed bunkers being bombed, grenades being hurled at target locations to eliminate terror launch pads and some terrorists being killed.

The Congress accused the Modi government for seeking credit for the sacrifice and valour of the armed forces.

In response, BJP Minister of State for Home Affairs Kiren Rijiju said the Congress once asked for proof of the operation and now when proof has emerged, the Congress is saying it's for publicity.

Former J&K Chief Minister Omar Abdullah also commented on the issue, saying nothing could be gained by debating if surgical strikes against militants' camps in PoK took place or not but what needed to be pondered over was if it had changed anything on the ground.

Meanwhile, Pakistan has constantly denied any such strikes having been carried out. It has also rejected the video footage of the strikes, calling it "farcical".
Mike Pompeo

A highly centralised and non-transparent Chinese government which is aggressive in its military posture with its economic strength and treats intellectual property and religious minorities horribly, poses a far greater threat to the US than Russia, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Thursday.

He also said that China presents a myriad of opportunities, but lots of challenges.

The world's two largest economies are engaged in a trade war. The US is due to impose punitive tariffs on USD 200 billion in Chinese goods on Monday, bringing the total to USD 250 billion, on top of separate duties on steel and aluminum from around the globe.

China has retaliated on USD 110 billion in goods, the majority of all its imports from the US.

"Russia, under Vladimir Putin, remains a bully. We need to push back and constrain them where we can. But longer term, if you're looking at the things that threaten American livelihoods, that put America truly at risk of its continued economic growth, China presents the far greater threat to the US," Pompeo told Fox News in an interview.

"This is a non-transparent government. It is still a very centralised government. It treats our intellectual property horribly, it treats its religious minorities horribly," he said.

In each of these cases, he said, the US has opportunities. This is what President Donald Trump has been doing with trade, to try and make it fair and reciprocal.

"What we're asking of China is to behave in a way that if they want to be a power, if they want to be on the global stage, they have to operate in a way that global leaders have for so often," he said.

Pompeo expressed his deep disappointment over top American companies compromising with their basics in order to continue with their business in China.

"It gets at the core problem that President Trump is trying to address, which is that China doesn't permit US investors to invest on the same terms that Chinese companies can invest here, joint ventures.

"The list is long of the non-reciprocal relationship. The President's trying to balance that. And when we get that right, when government gets that right, we can then force American companies to behave under that set of rules," he said.

Responding to a question on the allegation of Russian meddling into US elections, Pompeo said that Russia has been aggressive and tried to meddle in American election.

When the Trump Administration came to power, Pompeo said it found that China had advanced during the previous eight years dramatically throughout the South and East China Seas.

"I did have a chance to meet with some of the Philippine leadership today and share with them our concerns. I think they share them as well. They understand, as do all of the countries of Southeast Asia  they'd much rather deal with a United States and not be a vassal state for any other country," he said.
Chinese President Xi Jinping

China places a "high premium" on its relations with Pakistan and believes a key economic project will be successful, President Xi Jinping told Pakistan's army chief, days after a Pakistani minister stirred unease about Chinese Silk Road schemes.

General Qamar Javed Bajwa is the most senior Pakistani figure to visit ally China since the new government of Prime Minister Imran Khan took office in August, and his trip comes a week or so after a senior Chinese diplomat visited Islamabad.

Pakistan has deepened ties with China in recent years as relations with the United States have frayed.

Bajwa may be hoping to smooth out any Chinese alarm at comments last week by Pakistan's commerce minister, Abdul Razak Dawood, who suggested suspending for a year projects in the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, the Pakistan leg of China's Belt and Road Initiative that includes recreating the old Silk Road trading route.

Meeting Bajwa on Wednesday, Xi said the two countries were "iron friends", China's official Xinhua news agency said on Thursday.

"China always places a high premium on China-Pakistan relations," the report cited Xi as saying.

Xi expressed his appreciation for the support and security safeguards provided by Pakistan for the Belt and Road Initiative and the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor construction, Xinhua added.

"As long as high-degree mutual trust and concrete measures are in place, the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor construction will succeed and deliver benefits to people of the two countries," Xi said.

Beijing has pledged to invest about $60 billion in Pakistan for infrastructure for the Belt and Road project.
OPEC

US President Donald Trump linked American support for Middle Eastern countries to oil prices on Thursday as he again urged OPEC to lower prices.

"We protect the countries of the Middle East, they would not be safe for very long without us, and yet they continue to push for higher and higher oil prices! We will remember. The OPEC monopoly must get prices down now!" Trump wrote on Twitter.

The Republican president has lashed out at the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries over the past several months. Rising U.S. gasoline prices could create a political headache for Trump before November congressional elections by offsetting Republican claims that his tax cuts and rollbacks of federal regulations have helped boost the U.S. economy.

Trump has called on Saudi Arabia, OPEC's largest producer, to raise output, saying that it should help the United States lower fuel prices since Washington is aiding Riyadh in its struggle against Iran.

OPEC and its allies are unlikely to agree to an official increase in crude output when they meet in Algeria this weekend, although pressure is mounting on top producers to prevent a spike in oil prices ahead of new U.S. sanctions on Iran, OPEC sources told Reuters on Thursday.

The new sanctions take effect in November, as a result of with Trump's decision to pull out of a 2015 agreement on Iran's nuclear program.

Saudi Arabia is worried that any sanctions-related spike in oil prices will trigger fresh criticism from Trump, but it also faces doubts over its ability to compensate for a drop in Iranian supply, the sources said.

In a visit to Moscow this month, US Energy Secretary Rick Perry said Saudi Arabia, the United States and Russia can between them raise global output in the next 18 months to compensate for falling oil supplies from Iran.
The leaders of the rival Koreas took to the road for the final day of their summit Thursday, standing on the peak of a beautiful volcano considered sacred in the North and a centerpiece of propaganda used to legitimise the Kim family's rule, their hands clasped and raised in a pose of triumph.

Their trip to the mountain on the North Korean-Chinese border, and the striking photo-op that will resonate in both Koreas, followed a day of wide-ranging agreements they trumpeted as a major step toward peace.

However, their premier accord on the issue that most worries the world  the North's pursuit of nuclear-tipped missiles that can accurately strike the US mainland  contained a big condition: Kim Jong Un stated that he would permanently dismantle North Korea's main nuclear facility only if the United States takes unspecified corresponding measures.

Kim and South Korean President Moon Jae-in flew separately to an airport near Mount Paektu on Thursday morning where they then met up and drove to the mountain.

Photos showed the leaders smiling broadly as they posed at the summit, their wives grinning at their sides, a brilliant blue sky and the deep crater lake that tops the volcano in the background; they also toured the shores of the lake.

Members of the Kim family are referred to as sharing the "Paektu Bloodline," and the volcano is emblazoned on the national emblem and lends its name to everything from rockets to power stations.

Many South Koreans also feel drawn to the volcano, which, according to Korean mythology, was the birthplace of Dangun, the founder of the first ancient Korean kingdom, and has long been considered one of the most beautiful places on the peninsula. Not everyone was pleased, though.

About 100 anti-North Korea protesters rallied in central Seoul to express anger about the summit and displayed slogans that read, "No to SK-NK summit that benefit(s) Kim Jong Un."

Moon departed for South Korea later Thursday, as the leaders bask in the glow of the joint statement they settled Wednesday. Compared to the vague language of their two earlier summits, Kim and Moon seem to have agreed on an ambitious program meant to tackle soaring tensions last year that had many fearing war as the North tested a string of increasingly powerful weapons.

Kim promised to accept international inspectors to monitor the closing of a key missile test site and launch pad and to visit Seoul soon, and both leaders vowed to work together to try to host the Summer Olympics in 2032.

But while containing several tantalizing offers, their joint statement appeared to fall short of the major steps many in Washington have been looking for  such as a commitment by Kim to provide a list of North Korea's nuclear facilities, a solid step-by-step timeline for closing them down, or an agreement to allow international inspectors to assess progress or discover violations.

It also was unclear what "corresponding steps" North Korea wants from the U.S. to dismantle its nuclear site.

The question is whether it will be enough for President Donald Trump to pick up where Moon has left off. Trump told reporters Wednesday that the outcome of the summit was "very good news" and that "we're making tremendous progress" with North Korea.

He didn't indicate in his brief remarks whether the U.S. would be willing to take further steps to encourage North Korean action on denuclearization. Declaring they had made a major step toward peace, Moon and Kim stood side by side Wednesday as they announced their agreement.

"We have agreed to make the Korean Peninsula a land of peace that is free from nuclear weapons and nuclear threat," Kim said. "The road to our future will not always be smooth and we may face challenges and trials we can't anticipate. But we aren't afraid of headwinds because our strength will grow as we overcome each trial based on the strength of our nation."

Moon urged unity for all Koreans in a speech he gave Wednesday night to the crowd gathered for North Korea's signature mass games.

"We have lived together for 5,000 years and lived in separation for 70 years. I now propose that we completely eliminate the hostility of the past 70 years and take a big step forward in peace so that we can become one again."

Historians say the 5,000-year timeline of Korean history is a groundless claim that became part of South Korea's official narrative after being inserted in school textbooks during the rule of former dictator Chun Doo-hwan.

This week's summit comes as Moon is under increasing pressure from Washington to find a path forward in efforts to get Kim to completely  and unilaterally  abandon his nuclear arsenal.

Trump has maintained that he and Kim have a solid relationship, and both leaders have expressed interest in a follow-up summit to their meeting in June in Singapore.

North Korea has been demanding a declaration formally ending the Korean War, which was stopped in 1953 by a cease-fire, but neither leader mentioned it Wednesday as they read the joint statement.

In the meantime, however, Moon and Kim made concrete moves of their own to reduce tensions on their border.
Representative Image

Nawaz Sharif, who was released from jail after a court suspended his sentence in a corruption case, will "expose" the Imran Khan government and launch a drive against rigging in the general elections, the ousted Pakistan prime minister's party said on Thursday.

PML-N spokesperson and former information minister Marriyum Auranzeb said that Sharif will finalise his strategy regarding giving tough time to the government after Ashura (September 21).

She said Sharif will hold consultative meetings with the party leaders from Saturday to discuss the party's strategy with regard to launching a drive against alleged vote rigging. "Sharif and PML-N strongly believe that July 25, 2018 elections were rigged to stop the PML-N from returning to power," she said.

The PML-N will raise its voice both in and outside parliament to force the government for independent investigation, Auranzeb said.

"The PML-N under its supreme leader Sharif will emerge more energetic and strong in coming days and will fully expose the Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf government for its anti-people polices," she said.

"Mian Sahib's release from jail has charged the workers and leaders. We will give tough time to Imran Khan and his government, she said.

Sharif spent Thursday with his family members at his Jati Umra residence in Lahore.

Sharif, his daughter Maryam and son-in-law retired captain Mohammad Safdar were released from Rawalpindi's Adiala jail and flown back to Lahore on Wednesday night after the Islamabad High Court (IHC) suspended their sentences in the Avenfield corruption case linked to Panama Papers.

The accountability court in Islamabad on July 6 had sentenced Sharif, Maryam and Safdar, to 10 years, seven years and one year in jail, respectively, in connection with the purchase of four luxury flats in London through corrupt practices.

Upon receiving the release orders Sharif had said: "I was sure that I was innocent and have not done any wrongdoing. Allah will give me justice.

The purpose of imprisoning Sharif was to pave the way for the Imran's government, PML-N leader and former interior minister Ahsan Iqbal said.

It would not have been easy for them (military establishment) to maneuver things in the elections had Nawaz Sharif been out of jail."

Awami National Party senior leader Iftikhar Hussain said: The purpose they (establishment) wanted to achieve by keeping sharif in jail is done. That is why he is out of jail now. The case was so week that Sharif could not have been awarded 10-year sentence, he said.

Meanwhile, the National Accountability Bureau (NAB) has announced that it will challenge the IHC decision to accept the petitions of the Sharifs in the Supreme Court.
South Korean President Moon Jae-in talks with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un during their meeting at the Peace House. (Reuters)

North Korea's Kim Jong Un wants to hold a second summit with US President Donald Trump soon to hasten denuclearisation, South Korean President Moon Jae-in on Thursday quoted the North's leader as saying at a summit this week.

Kim, who recently proposed the second meeting with Trump after their unprecedented June summit in Singapore, added that declaring a formal end to the 1950-53 Korean War would prompt rapid further steps by the North to abandon its nuclear and missile programmes, Moon said.

"Chairman Kim expressed his wish that he wanted to complete denuclearisation quickly and focus on economic development," Moon told a news conference in Seoul, describing his three-day summit with Kim in the North's capital of Pyongyang.

"He said he hoped (U.S. Secretary of State) Mike Pompeo would visit North Korea soon, and also a second summit with Trump would take place in the near future, in order to move the denuclearisation process along quickly," Moon said.

Kim pledged to work toward the "complete denuclearisation of the Korean peninsula" during two meetings with Moon this year and at his summit with Trump, but talks on how to implement the vague commitments have since faltered.

Washington has demanded concrete action, such as a full disclosure of North Korea's nuclear and missile facilities, before agreeing to Pyongyang's key goals, including an easing of international sanctions and an official end to the Korean War.

An end-of-war declaration would not affect the presence of U.S. troops and the United Nations Command in South Korea, Moon said, adding that Kim shared his view.

"It would be a political declaration that would mark a starting point for peace negotiations," Moon said.

"A peace treaty would be sealed, as well as normalisation of North Korea-U.S. relations, after the North achieves complete denuclearisation."

Representatives for the White House and the U.S. State Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

(Reporting by Hyonhee Shin and Joyce Lee; Writing by Soyoung Kim; Editing by Clarence Fernandez)
The US hopes to begin face-to-face negotiations with North Korea next month on terms for resuming on-the-ground searches in North Korea for remains of American servicemen, a senior Pentagon official said Thursday.

Kelly McKeague, director of the Defense POW-MIA Accounting Agency, said the aim is to begin searches at former battlefields next spring if agreement can be reached on areas of current dispute such as the types and amounts of compensation to North Korea for its assistance.

Remains of two American servicemen killed during the Korean War and returned by North Korea two months ago have been positively identified, but McKeague would not disclose their names.

He said the White House wants to do that. The remains were among an undetermined number contained in 55 boxes the North Korean army turned over to US officials on July 27.

McKeague said it was unclear how many individuals are contained in the 55 boxes, but he said it could be dozens more than 55. He described the bones as a "mish-mash" that will require DNA analysis and other extensive study.

The first two identifications came relatively quickly, he said, because the remains included partial skulls with teeth that could be matched to dental records, as well as clavicles matched to military X-ray records.

The remains contained in the 55 boxes had been stored by the North Korean army, probably for decades. Thousands of additional remains are believed to lie on North Korean battlefields and at former POW camps.

McKeague said the Pentagon would like to send search and excavation teams into the country as early as next spring if acceptable arrangements can be negotiated in advance.

North Korea recently submitted proposed terms for follow-on search operations, but McKeague said the offer was rejected. He described the offer as "out of sorts," which he said meant that some elements were unreasonable. He cited as an example a demand that the US provide eight ambulances in addition to other vehicles, fuel, food and other items.

The US is preparing a counterproposal, McKeague said, and has offered to meet with a North Korean negotiating team in a third country in late October.
China President Xi Jinping

Chinese President Xi Jinping has told Pakistan Army chief General Qamar Javed Bajwa that those who oppose his pet projects - the BRI and the CPEC - will "never succeed" as these are initiatives aimed at fostering peace and development.

The $50 billion China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) is the flagship project of the multi-billion dollar Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), a pet project of President Xi aimed at enhancing China's influence around the world through China-funded infrastructure projects.

India has opposed the CPEC project and protested to China as it is being laid through Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK).

General Bajwa, who is in China, called on Xi after his meetings with the top Chinese military officials, including General Zhang Youxia, the vice chairman of China's Central Military Commission.

"While we work for peace, we need to stay strong to thwart designs of all inimical forces challenging our resolve. We greatly value Chinese support," Bajwa said.

He met Xi on a special invitation and they discussed regional security environment, challenges and way forward, Pakistan military's media wing Inter Services Public Relations (ISPR) said in a statement on Wednesday.

"Those who oppose the BRI or the CPEC shall never succeed as this is an initiative of peace and development not only for China but for region and beyond," it quoted Xi as saying.

Terming Pakistan as "our time-tested iron friend", he said the country had a pivotal role towards this lasting relationship.

He acknowledged the role of the Pakistan armed forces towards regional peace and stability. President Xi said that China shall continue to support Pakistan as a strategic partner.

Bajwa said that Pakistan understands the importance of peace and has given lot of sacrifices for achieving it.

He said the BRI, with the CPEC as its flagship project, is destined to succeed despite all odds and the Pakistan Army shall ensure security of the CPEC at all costs, the statement said.

Xi said the two sides have been keeping "highly aligned" with each other on major international and regional issues, state-run Global Times reported.

China always places a high premium on China-Pakistan relations, he said, adding that the two sides had maintained a high level of mutual trust on issues of each other's major concerns.

"As long as high-degree mutual trust and concrete measures are in place, the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor construction will succeed and deliver benefits to people of the two countries.
Mike Pompeo

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo Thursday said America is ready to restart negotiations with Pyongyang, with the aim of denuclearising North Korea by 2021.

His comments came after North Korean leader Kim Jong Un agreed to make a historic first visit to South Korea soon and close a major missile testing site in the presence of international inspectors in a meeting with South Korean President Moon Jae-in in Pyongyang on Wednesday.

Pompeo, in a statement, welcomed Moon and Kim's reaffirmation of the Singapore joint statement of complete denuclearisation of the Korean Peninsula, including the permanent dismantlement of all facilities at Yongbyon in the presence of the US and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspectors.

"This will mark the beginning of negotiations to transform the US-DPRK relations through the process of rapid denuclearisation of North Korea, to be completed by January 2021, as committed by Chairman Kim, and to construct a lasting and stable peace regime on the Korean Peninsula," he said.

The January 2021 date is the most specific timeline an official on either side has put forward publicly so far.

"We also welcome Chairman Kim's decision to complete the previously announced dismantlement of Tongchang-ri site in the presence of US and international inspectors as a step toward the final fully verified denuclearisation of North Korea, as agreed by Chairman Kim at the Singapore summit with President Trump," Pompeo added.

On the basis of these important commitments, he said, the US was prepared to engage immediately in negotiations to transform its relations with North Korea.

During the Singapore summit, Trump and Kim agreed in broad terms to work towards denuclearisation.

Since then, however, there has been little progress, with no clear process nor timeline laid out, while an abruptly cancelled trip to Pyongyang by Pompeo in August led to speculation relations had soured somewhat.

Pompeo said he has invited South Korean Foreign Minister Ri Yong Ho to a meeting in New York City next week, where they both are already scheduled to be in attendance at the United Nations General Assembly.
Delhi-based Choudhary Aviation Facilities Ltd had bought two helicopters of fugitive business tycoon Vijay Mallya in an e-auction conducted by the Debt Recovery Tribunal (DRT-II) here, a company official said on Wednesday.

"Our company bought the two personal copters of Mallya for Rs 8.75 crore at the price of Rs 4.37 crore each in the electronic bidding conducted by the DRT in Bengaluru," Choudhary Aviation Director Satyendra Sehrawat told IANS from Delhi on phone.

The Tribunal held the e-auction on behalf of a consortium of 17 banks which filed the case in 2013 against Mallya and his defunct Kingfisher Airlines Ltd for defaulting on loans borrowed from 2007-2012.

"Though the 5-seater Airbus Eurocopter B155 choppers are 10-year-old, they are in a serviceable condition, with a good dual engine and are currently parked at Juhi airport in Mumbai," said Sehrawat.

Three firms participated in the auction, held with minimum bid price of Rs 1.75 crore for each copter of model 2008, last flown in 2013.

"We want to make use of the choppers for commercial activity, including chartered service," Sehrawat noted.

The 3-year-old firm also provides ground operations and air ambulance service to hospitals in the national capital region (NCR).

The Tribunal, however, did not inform the media about the e-auction.

Disclaimer: Information, facts or opinions expressed in this news article are presented as sourced from IANS and do not reflect views of Moneylife and hence Moneylife is not responsible or liable for the same. As a source and news provider, IANS is responsible for accuracy, completeness, suitability and validity of any information in this article.
Do you plan to join the 25 million Indians who travelled abroad in 2017, with the number expected to go up to 50 million by 2020, and will you be securing your risks and liabilities by taking all risks travel insurance  voluntarily, by choice or because the destination countries insist on it? And if so, will you, like almost all these 25 to 50 million people, buy your travel insurance from an Indian company?

My wife is a frequent global traveller and we, typically, pick up a multi-entry multi-trip all risks travel insurance for the whole world.

The one we picked up last was Tata-AIG multi-platinum 45 days, which meant top of the line coverage, for all trips anywhere in the world not exceeding 45 days each. The validity was from 13 September 2017 to 12 September 2018.

In the cover note (incidentally, we never received the full insurance policy document) was a line to the effect that an automatic extension of seven days was part of this policy. This policy cost us about Rs15,000 for a full year, no single trip to be more than 45 days.

My wife left India for various countries on 2 August 2018 and was scheduled to return on or around 24 September 2018. Allowing for 45 days + 7 days, and a renewal when due, we thought we had the travel insurance well in place.

Around the end of August 2018, we received a reminder for renewal dated end July 2018, by hard copy and also by email, quoting the policy number in the subject line.

The renewal cost was just about thrice the cost of the original policy, all other parameters remaining the same, except that my wife had entered the 61-70 years age band from the 50-60 years band.

The renewal was going to cost me about Rs45,000.

So I called the toll-free number and explained the whole situation as follows:

a) Wife is travelling and needs extension from 12 September 2018 onwards.

b) How do we resolve the 45 days limit.

c) Why is the premium so high?

I was told that for renewal, she would have to return to India before the expiry of the policy on 12 September 2018.

For resolving the 45 days limit? they said there is no solution, because the seven days automatic renewal applies only if a flight is cancelled and there is no alternate flight option.

And as for the premium being high, I was told that is because she has gone into the next age band.

There was one solution I discovered on the Tata AIG website - I could reduce the cover from Platinum to Gold and the duration from 45 days to 30 days, at which level it would be a more reasonable Rs23,000 or so. This I discovered online on the Tata AIG website without any help from Tata AIG.

However, before all this, I was given a huge run around because I was told that the policy number was incorrect.

After a few calls, I finally got through to somebody who then told me that the policy number had been changed because of the internal migration policy of Tata AIG, and they did not think it fit to mention the changed policy number to me even in the renewal letter.

Imagine the effect of this practice if one is trying to make a claim abroad. Or if any of the immigration authorities had tried to re-verify the policy or the cover note.

The long and short of it was that I was told that unless my wife returned from Europe to renew her travel policy, her movements to other countries en route back to India were going to be cut short as she would be without insurance cover while travelling from one country to another, and that any solution by Tata AIG was simply not feasible.

And for any change in policy terms or a fresh policy  you got it right, Madam will have to return to India, is what I was told.

More than anything else, this was informed to me over phone by the call centre staff in the same tone of voice and attitude that they reserve for denying a claim.

A "Do what you wish" kind of message being voiced over the phone. They may have assumed I was talking from abroad.

It was at that juncture, that a person who is an even more frequent traveller, suggested that we look at picking up a short-term two-week policy from abroad, from destination countries, directly.

Sometimes the best solutions are the simplest.

It took me less than 15 minutes online to pick up a fresh cashless policy for the missing period: 12th to 24 September 2018, for all of Rs1,200 or so.

With a direct cashless linkage by the insurance company in their own home country to hospitals in their own country.

The only condition was that the policy needed to be bought one day before travel. In addition, the age band for senior citizens in their case started at the end of the 64th year, i.e., on the 65th birthday.

I did not even have to attach any ID or age proof. Just name, nationality, date of birth.

When I called up their call centre, I was told that they assumed we are filling the truth in the online form and, if we are not, then not only would the claim be in jeopardy but it would also be considered a serious attempt to defraud by forgery.

What about previous ailments, I asked over the phone and was told that, the policy was only for 15 days and covered any medical problem in those 15 days other than dental treatment not caused by an accident, full stop.

The policy issued by Tata AIG in India has lapsed.

I am now bombarded by calls and reminders to renew or revive the policy.

One of them even quotes the seven days extension.

On the other side, middle-level management are busy throwing fine print at me on why they cannot bend from their policies in facilitating an extension or renewal.

And more interestingly, how the seven-day extension is simply not feasible.

The policy issued abroad is signed by a human being who also appends his local regulatory authority's ID number as well as his competence and qualifications.

Insurance Regulatory Development Authority in India (IRDAI) also has a similar clause, but I have yet to see anybody (other than old-timer insurance agents and government insurance company staff) contacting me from an insurance company in India, quoting the IRDAI certification number.
Ever since the Narendra Modi government has come to power on 26 May 2014, the appointments of Central and state chief information commissioners (CICs) as well as information commissioners (ICs) have been hard to come by. And when they have come, it is only after legal interventions by several Right to Information (RTI) activists in the High Courts and the Supreme Court.

The latest petition in April 2018, was filed by Anjali Bharadwaj, Commodore Lokesh Batra (retd) and Arita Johri in the Supreme Court, appealing for filling up four vacant posts of information commissioners and four more that would become vacant by December 2018. Ms Bharadwaj stated in her petition that, for securing the fundamental right of citizens to access information from public authorities it was essential that these crucial appointments are made in time. The petition specifically prayed, for a direction for immediate filling of posts of information commissioners in the CICs and in the various state information commissions (SICs). The said appointments must be made transparent in accordance with the judgements of the Supreme Court of India.

However, over the past four years, there has been dilly-dallying over prompt appointment of information commissioners, leading to several vacancies in the Central Information Commission in New Delhi as well in various state information commissions. The basic mandatory clauses of releasing the advertisement to call for applications of these posts, three months before the retirement of any CCIC, CIC or IC and ensure that the Search and Selection Committees zero in on the candidate, have been flouted. The latest SC petition of April 2018 prays for this very vital aspect of the RTI Act.

To make matter worse, in the affidavit submitted by Ranbir Singh, under secretary of the department of personnel and training (DoPT), on 28 August 2018, in response to the above petition, has brazenly submitted that it is hard to confine to a particular time frame, for the appointment of CICs and ICs.

Further qualifying why the process of these appointments should not be transparent, Mr Singh submits in the Supreme Court on 28th August, that, it has not been a practice to disclose the list of short-listed candidates prior to the completion of the selection process or to seek adverse information on the short-listed candidates from the public. The Search and Selection Committees evolve their own method of obtaining relevant information in respect of various candidates. However, it would not be conducive to publish such details in the manner sought, no such practice is followed in any other equivalent high-level appointments of the government.

Counters Commodore Batra, noted RTI activist and petitioner, I feel on every account the DoPTs affidavit could be challenged. In the past, the names of applicants were made available and file inspection was allowed at every stage, even before selection or shortlisting of candidates. Going by the Namit Sharma order, the advertisement for CIC and IC appointments is to be issued three months prior to the post falling vacant.

He also adds that, after 2014 no one from the civil society was shortlisted. The biggest concern is that ever since the Modi government has come to power, we have had to battle it out in the courts for appointment of CICs and ICs.

Also even at the crucial juncture of finalising the candidates by the appointed committees, political intervention has made some of these appointments in clear violation of the norms set by the RTI Act.

Sushma Swaraj had intervened, pushing her own candidates who were not in the short-listed list. Supporting the stance of activists, in the Delhi High Court order of 9 April 2015, the judge observed that We have heard the learned counsel for both the parties. Having regard to the undisputed fact that the non-appointment of the chief information commissioner has virtually frustrated the very purpose of the Right to Information Act, 2005, we are of the view that it is necessary for this court to monitor the steps that are being taken for filling up the vacancies in question so as to ensure that all the vacancies are filled up within a timeframe.

While we await further order by SC, the following is dateline fact sheet of the appointments of the Chief IC/ICs in CIC after Delhi HC and SC orders since 26 May 2014:

28 February 2014: 293 applications received for the post of information commissioners after DoPT published the advertisement

28 April 2014: Committee met the search committee, shortlisted applicants and recommended panels for consideration of the selection committee

22 May 2014: Rajeev Mathur elevated to the post of chief information commissioner. Because of his promotion another post of information commissioner fell vacant. (By now vacant posts of IC rise to 03)

16 July 2014: A fresh advertisement was issued for the post of IC. 260 applications were received. Counting the earlier 293 application, a total of 553 applications were received

22 August 2014: Chief information commissioner Rajeev Mathur completed his tenure. Chief IC post fell vacant. (For the first time in the history of RTI Act being in place in 2005, the CIC went headless without an administrative head.) Vacant Posts in CIC comprised one Chief IC and 3 ICs

24 October 2014: Advertisement for the post of Chief IC was published on the website of DoPT. 203 applications were received

16 December 2015: Search committee meets for the first time to shortlist applicants for the roles of the chief information commissioner and information commissioners respectively

6 February 2015: Search committee meets for the second time to shortlist applicants for the roles of the chief information commissioner and information commissioners respectively

8 April 2015: Public interest litigation (PIL) filed by RK Jain, Commodore Lokesh K Batra and Subhash Agarwal was admitted in Delhi HC. The petition against the Central government reads that the three Central information commissioner posts have been vacant since August 2014.

9 April 2015: DoPT submits an affidavit that explains in detail the steps taken by the government to fill the vacancies in the CIC. After hearing both the parties, the Bench of the Delhi HC made the following observation We have heard the learned counsel for both the parties. Having regard to the undisputed fact that the non-appointment of the chief information commissioner has virtually frustrated the very purpose of the Right to Information Act, 2005, we are of the view that it is necessary for this court to monitor the steps that are being taken for filling up the vacancies in question so as to ensure that all the vacancies are filled up within a timeframe.

27 April 2015: Search committee meets to shortlist applicants. Selection will supposedly be made after inputs from the respective cadre controlling authority and the intelligence bureau are received.

11 May 2015: Hearing of the case was held in WP(C) 3386/2015. At the request of the counsel the next hearing was scheduled for 21 May 2015.

21 May 2015: Hearing held on case WP(C) 3386/2015. Arguments of both sides were heard and judgment was reserved.

10 June 2015: After the CIC remained headless for nearly 10 months; Vijay Sharma, the senior-most IC took over charge of chief IC for his remaining tenure of a little over five months. Vacancy of one IC arose but it was nullified due to the appointment of Sudhir Bhargava as IC. Vacant posts of ICs in the CIC remained three.

9 September 2015: A fresh advertisement was issued for the post of IC. In view of the development in the case due to the government issuing a fresh advertisement, a fresh application was filed by the petitioners and they informed the High Court that the government has appointed the senior most information commissioner and in addition appointed only one more information commissioner  Sudhir Bhargav. The number of vacancies for IC posts still remains at three.

24 September 2015: The case was re-notified.

9 October 2015: Arguments were heard all over again. Order was reserved again.

6 November 2015: Delhi HC pronounces judgment summarising the entire proceedings of all hearing starting 8th April. In its order the HC gave the government six weeks time to complete the appointment. In its order it mentioned: In these circumstances, instead of setting aside the Notification dated 9 September 2015, we consider it appropriate to issue the following directions:

(i) The selection process that has already been commenced vide Notifications dated 25 February 2014 and 16 July 2014 shall be finalised within six weeks from today and the three vacancies of information commissioners existing as of today (W.P.(C) No.3386/2015) shall be filled up amongst the 553 applications that were received in response to the two said notifications.

(ii) The selection process pursuant to the circular dated 9 September 2015 shall be confined for selection and appointment of the chief information commissioner in the vacancy that would arise w.e.f. 2 December 2015 and one information commissioner which is likely to arise w.e.f. 2 December 2015.

Government filed a special leave petition (SLP) 34495/2015 against the order of the Delhi HC.

1 December 2015: Having served for just about five months chief IC Vijai Sharma completes his tenure. The Central information commission (CIC) goes headless again for the second time in 18 months. Number of vacant positions is now 4 (3 IC and 1 Chief IC).

16 December 2015: The Supreme Court admitted the SLP. The case was listed for hearing on 4 January 2016.

2 January 2016: After the CIC remained headless for a little over a month; Shri Radha Krishna Mathur assumed charge of chief IC.

4 January 2016: Upon hearing the counsel, the case was listed for hearing on 8 January 2016. Arguments were heard on both sides. The SC gave the government 6 weeks time to ensure all vacant posts are filled up.

25 February 2016: ICs, namely, Bimal Julka, DP Sinha and Amitava Bhattacharya assumed their duties of ICs.

26 February 2016: The government informs the apex court that its direction has been complied with. The petitioners did not dispute the counsel.

September 2016: Central government invited applications for the post of two information commissioners of CIC vide their circular/communication dated 2 September 2016 in anticipation of the vacancies occurring in December 2016 and February 2017. However, till date none of the vacancies have been filled.

December 2016: Central information commissioner MA Khan Yusufi finished his term and retired. Until end of 2016, CIC was functioning at full strength of 1 Chief and 10 information commissioners. In February 2017, CIC Basant Seth retired, after which two vacancies arose in the CIC.

June 2017: Petitioners were signatories to a letter by the National Campaign of Peoples Right to Information addressed to the prime minister urging him to fill the vacancies in the central information commission by appointing information commissioners.

September 2017: CIC Sharat Sabharwal finished his term and retired. Three vacancies arose in the CIC.

January 2018: Central information commissioner Manjula Prasher finished her term and retired. Four vacancies arose in the CIC.

April 2018: Backlogs of more than 23,500 appeals and complaints are pending before the Central information commission. The CIC website shows that even appeals and complaints filed in 2016 are currently pending for disposal by the commission. A public interest litigation is filed in the Supreme Court by Anjali Bharadwaj, Commodore Lokesh Batra (retd) and Arita Johri.

July 2018: the Supreme Court directs DoPT to fill up the vacancies.

August 2018: DoPT submits affidavit.
On the face of it, we, at Moneylife, would be on the side cheering the merger of nationalised banks. Over the years, their service has been sloppy; attitude to customers uncaring (while private banks at least respond, it is a tough task getting a response even from senior management of nationalised banks); and worse, every few years, the government has re-capitalised the massive bad loans that they built up through corruption and political coercion. Also, it is not as if public sector banks (PSBs) have any empathy for the poor, the retired and the old.

We, the people, have paid the price and we are tired of it. Bad loans (called NPAsnon-performing assets) had reached the stage where they threatened the very existence of nationalised banks. So, a reduction in the number of banks from 26 to 19with the merger of State Bank of Bank of Indias (SBIs) sister banks and, now, with the merger of Bank of Baroda (BoB), Dena Bank and Vijaya Bankwould, logically, be a development that customers would welcome.

Unfortunately, in the last year of its term, the Modi government has, once again, rushed into a major policy decision without adequate public discussion or addressing any of the structural issues that have destroyed PSBs over the decades.

For one, the government has done nothing to ensure that the merged entities have more freedom (from political meddling), better accountability or increased responsibility. There is nothing to suggest that the merged entity will not begin to pile up bad loans all over again, needing another bailout at public expense a few years down the road.

It hasnt even explained to us why a mere merger of three banks will lead to a substantial rise in customer base, market reach, operational efficiency and wider bouquet of products and services for customers, as claimed by Rajiv Kumar, secretary, department of financial services in the Union ministry of finance. After all, the only possible savings would be in rationalising of branches. But, since the jobs would be protected, even those savings would be minimal.

Does Size Matter?

Contrary to government propaganda, the move towards larger banks is fraught with risks, as was evident in the 2008 global financial crises. They had to be bailed out with taxpayers money. And, yet, while speaking at Columbia University in 2017, RBI (Reserve Bank of India) governor Urjit Patel had backed bank mergers saying, The Indian banking system could be better off if some public sector banks are consolidated to have fewer but healthier entities, as it would help in dealing with the problem of stressed assets.

He claimed that there were cooperative banks and micro-financial institutions to provide community-level banking, but did not mention that these fail with alarming regularity . There are 1,618 urban cooperative banks in India, a third of them in Maharashtra and the rest in 10 other states. The RBI governor is well aware that the record of supervision and governance of these banks is abysmal since they are, often, politically controlled.

How does a merger make banks healthier, unless there is better supervision and accountability? In India, the unravelling of Infrastructure Leasing & Financial Services (IL&FS) shows that the regulator and the government do not even have a grip on the reckless growth and borrowings of designated systemically important institutions. Even today, as the drop in NAVs (net asset values) of mutual fund schemes exposed to IL&FSs Rs1.2lakh crore borrowing begins to hurt investors, the government has maintained a stunning silence.

Deliberate Weakening of PSBs

Indias nationalised banks have been in a constant state of turmoil in NDAs four years. The intense pressure to open Jan Dhan accounts and dealing with demonetisation took up the first two years. Dealing with bad loans, increased fraud and, in some cases, having their core lending operations stopped by prompt corrective action (PCA) by RBI has occupied the rest of their time.

Meanwhile, many PSBs were deliberately kept headless, as has been evident from the sudden appointment of as many as 10 managing directors/CEOs on 19 September 2018. Meanwhile, no appointments of directors representing employees and officers have been made on bank boards, eliminating a key check on the activity of senior bankers.

At the same time, all the ugly practices of the past continue unchecked. A small list of these is: political appointees on bank boards; employment of politically connected persons as internal auditors; dubious centralised purchase of bank equipment though select companies at exorbitant prices (many banks have been dumped with three-seater benches purchased centrally; under the previous government all signage of bank branches was centralised. In both cases, the costs have increased significantly).

Reducing Options

While the government has been harping on the need for fewer, but larger, banks, the fact is that customers do not have much of a choice. Over the past 25 years, the number of banks has been reducing steadily. The entry to the business is tightly controlled by RBI, and licences are entirely at its discretion.

All, except the six new private banks allowed in the 1990s, have been bought over or merged; scores of smaller cooperative banks are shut every year after they fail; and; now; the big PSBs are being systematically weakened and merged. On the other side, a few small banks have been licensed apart from just four new universal banks over 20 years.

This has reduced, rather than enhanced, depositors options. Consequently, there is no incentive for branches to compete for funds by offering lower charges or better services. If that were not enough, the goings on at some of the larger private banks also has depositors worried.

RBI has refused to extend the tenure of the CEO (chief executive officer) of Axis Bank and Yes Bank. ICICI Bank remains mired in controversy made worse by the boards unwillingness to restore credibility. The reduction of options for consumers will mean fewer working ATMs, fewer bank branches and increased cartelisation of fees and charges.

And don't forget all banks continue to earn profits through the same strategy of selling third-party insurance and financial products either through blatant mis-representation or downright cheating.

Poor Grievance Redress

Mis-selling of third-party products, especially to less financially literate depositors, has become so rampant that bank unions have been writing to management to stop the practice. Meanwhile, losses and rip-off through digital transactions have increased dramatically, while grievance redress has turned abysmal.

Moneylife Foundation, which works at grievance redress, finds that RBIs customer services department is unresponsive and inaccessible to consumers. The Banking Ombudsman is erratic and, often, rules in favour of banks. Although RBI has clear and stringent rules about preventing harassment of customers due to digital fraud, in practice, customers are given a royal run-around.

If 78% of all deposits continue to be with banks, despite their poor service, it is because of the implied sovereign guarantee that their deposits are safe. Depositors already pay a high price for this privilege. Merging nationalised banks without putting in place accountability is bad for depositors, especially when the government has plans to shrink this space even further by merging United Bank, United Commercial Bank and Allahabad Bank and a few other combinations.
PNL va depune in Parlament un proiect de lege, care prevede extinderea votului prin corespondenta si introducerea votului electronic, a anuntat, joi, 20 septembrie 2018, deputatul PNL, Gabriel Andronache, care a precizat ca in privinta votului electronic se va proceda ca la cel prin corespondenta, informeaza Mediafax.

Prin noua initiativa legislativa ne propunem sa extindem votul prin corespondenta pentru alegerile europarlamentare, cat si pentru cele prezidentiale si totodata sa introducem o noua modalitate de vot pentru cetatenii cu domeniciliul in strainatate, respectiv votul electronic. Propunem ca procedura prealabila de inscriere sa fie aceeasi ca la votul prin corespondenta, in sensul in care cetateanul se va inscrie cu o perioada de timp inainte in registrul electoral, va primi o parola de acces prin posta, iar in ziua scrutinului isi va exercita votul in mod electronic, pe o platforma cu toate garantiile de securitate necesare, care vor fi stabilite si implementate de catre AEP cu STS, a afirmat deputatul PNL, Gabriel Andronache. Liderul deputatilor PNL, Raluca Turcan, a declarat ca propunerea legislativa privind introducerea votului electronic ar trebui dezbatuta in procedura de urgenta, pentru ca se apropie alegerile europarlamengtare si ar trebui ca prezenta la vot sa fie cat mai mare.

Punem pe masa majoritatii PSD-ALDE o solicitare expresa a romanilor care au fost agresati la protestul din 10 august. Romanii din diaspora si-au dorit un acces mai usor la vot. Pana acum au fost discriminati, le-a fost ingradit dreptul la vot si nici macat gratuitatea votului nu a existat pentru ca erau nevoiti sa scoata bani din buzunar pentru a parcurge distante foarte lungi sa se prezinte la vot. Consideram o urgenta dezbaterea acestei legi. Dorim sa avem garantia ca un numar cat mai mare se prezinta la vot, a explicat Turcan, la Parlament.

In cazul in care proiectul penelistilor se va transforma in lege, ramane de vazut cum politrucii vor tipa ca hackerii au viciat votul.
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One of the late Kofi Annans legacies, largely overlooked in the tributes marking his recent passing, is sustainable investing. As United Nations Secretary General, Annan launched the U.N. Global Compact in 2000, a voluntary corporate citizenship initiative based on a set of human rights, labor, environmental, and anticorruption principles. Its objective was to get companies to operate more sustainably and with a greater sense of corporate responsibility. Today, more than 7,000 companies are Global Compact signatories.

A few years later, in 2004, Annan led a Global Compact initiative to encourage the integration of environmental, social and corporate governance factors into capital markets. The resulting report, "Who Cares Wins," laid out the thesis for sustainable investing:
Its not just the residential segment thats flourishing in Ottawa recently. Even the national capitals commercial market is enjoying generous windfalls, according to a new report from CBRE.

Overall investment in Ottawas commercial real estate in the first half of the year was at $718.5 million, representing a 10.2% year-over-year increase.

This value, which placed the market on track to a very strong 2018 finish (approaching or even exceeding $2 billion), stemmed from a record-breaking 139 completed transactions in the first six months This was a decade-high first-half performance level for Ottawas commercial segment, CBRE added.
Turbulent North American Free Trade Agreement negotiations have opened the door to Canada being slapped with auto tariffs, and if that occurs, home equity lines of credit could soar in Southern Ontario.

It would have an impact on production in the region and on employment levels, Matt Fabian, director of financial services, research and consulting for TransUnion Canada, said of the auto part manufacturing hub.

Youd see a slowing of mortgage volumes and less people would be out in the mortgage market, and you might see some people deleveraging and scaling down in their homes. They might take out equity lines just to keep their homes afloat, if thats the case.
Cohn, a former president of Goldman Sachs, told the Post Monday that he was not still in talks with the bank.

Absolutely not. Absolutely not  and you can put that on the record, he said.

While its not clear how official efforts to replace Sloan are right now, some Wells Fargo board members are becoming impatient with the banks continued problems under the embattled CEO. Sloan was elevated to CEO two years ago after the banks fake-accounts scandal caused the ouster of CEO John Stumpf  but regular revelations of shady dealings at the bank have continued under Sloans tenure.

Their board isnt 100% happy because he didnt stop the bleeding, a Wall Street executive told the Post. He still has their support, but theyre not in love with him.

Wells Fargo is currently neck-deep in civil and criminal investigations and lawsuits over its sales practices. Its also been revealed to have made mistakes that led to hundreds of home foreclosures, charged improper fees to mortgage customers, and charged customers for unnecessary auto insurance.
New York City is suing Wells Fargo, Citi and Ocwen for allegedly letting abandoned houses fall apart and become havens for drugs, sex and squatters as the homes inch through the foreclosure process.

The citys Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD) filed lawsuits Wednesday, accusing Wells Fargo, Citi, Ocwen and others of ignoring their responsibility to maintain abandoned homes in Brooklyn according to NBC 4 New York.

In 2016, New York state passed a zombie home law that requires banks and their subcontractors to inspect houses in the foreclosure process  and, in cases where the owners have abandoned the properties, take over maintenance.
China plans to impose a 10 percent tariff on U.S. liquefied natural gas as part of an escalating trade battle between the two countries, hindering export opportunities for a emerging industry that is growing rapidly along the Gulf Coast.

The move, made in retaliation against the Trump administration's latest tariffs on $200 billion in Chinese imports, affects $60 billion in U.S. exports to China. The 10 percent tariff on LNG is less than the 25 percent proposed early last month, but it's still expected to undercut the competitiveness of U.S. exporters vying for a share of one of the world's largest LNG markets.

"The consequences are likely to be felt on new supply developments," said Giles Farrer, research director for Wood Mackenzie. "It restricts the target market for developers of new U.S. LNG projects trying to sign new long-term contracts."

RELATED: Billions at risk for Gulf Coast as China threatens LNG tariffs

A number of U.S. developers, including Houston companies Cheniere Energy and Tellurian Inc., are investing billions of dollars to build massive export terminals along the Gulf Coast, which has ready access to cheap and plentiful natural gas from West Texas and elsewhere.

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission is pushing to expedite its reviews of new U.S. projects, most of which are planned for the Gulf Coast. The agency earlier this month issued regulatory schedules for its environmental review of 12 LNG export facilities, including six in Texas.

The proposed projects put the U.S. on track to supply nearly a quarter of global LNG by 2030, according to Wood Mackenzie.

China, which is working to shift its power generation from coal to cleaner-burning natural gas, has emerged as a major source of demand. In the year prior to June, the country was the second largest buyer of U.S. LNG.

Farrer expect the tariffs to change that dynamic. Already, he said, Chinese buyers have gradually reduced purchases of U.S. LNG amid the trade dispute.

However, he expects growing demand outside of China to support the next wave of U.S. LNG projects. Other countries in Asia and Europe also need more natural gas as they reduce their use of coal.

"There is still plenty of appetite for second wave U.S. LNG projects from other buyers," Farrer said.

Cheniere was the first U.S. company to export LNG, operating from its Sabine Pass terminal in Louisiana. The company, which now ships to nearly 30 foreign markets, is expanding that terminal and building a second one in Corpus Christi.

The company earlier this year struck a deal to sell LNG to China National Petroleum Corp. as part of two sales contracts that extend through 2043.

Virginia's Dominion Energy also began exporting LNG from a terminal in Maryland earlier this year.

Other U.S. companies are expected to begin exports next year, including two based in Houston. Freeport LNG is working to open its Gulf Coast terminal at Quintana Island, and Kinder Morgan is completing an export terminal in Georgia.
Whether a veteran was in need of a meal or a haircut, community members were available Wednesday to provide services. For Jessica Mitchell and others who served in the military, the Stand Down event was an opportunity to gain knowledge about local resources.

Today has been absolutely nothing but blessings, Mitchell told the Reporter-Telegram during the function.

The West Texas VA Health Care System hosted Stand Down to connect local veterans with benefits and information about housing, education, nutrition and legal services. The annual event was held this year at the Commemorative Air Force High Sky Wing hangar, with transportation from locations in Midland and Odessa.

Nickie Starkey, Health Care for Homeless Veterans program manager, said the goal was to present resources available for veterans, including those who are homeless or at risk of being without shelter.

Nationwide, the VA helps to provide more than 89,000 veteran families with long-term, stable housing, according to Starkey. In this region, she said 213 vouchers are being used in a 33-county area stretching from Abilene to Hobbs, New Mexico.

We have somewhere  I would range between Midland and Odessa  a 15 percent homeless rate, Starkey said. So, were working to decrease that amount.

To assist people, the VA offers case management, social services and health care. Starkey said the entity works with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development as well as the Midland County Housing Authority to help veterans.

Locally, Starkey said challenges come from limited housing and a lack of affordable living options. She said the VA serves veterans of all ages, including those who may not be able to work in the oil and gas industry and earn the associated wages.

More Information To contact the VA homeless veterans program, call 800-472-1365 ext. 2133. See More Collapse

Were struggling in finding those veterans who are coming in with no money, little money  being able to house themselves and their families, Starkey said.

Besides the economic factors, Starkey said medical or mental health conditions can contribute to homelessness. She observes pride sometimes prevents veterans from getting help.

They take it harder than what the general population would take it because in their training, they are trained to fix the problem, Starkey said. Theyre trained to be self-sufficient.

For veterans who came to Wednesdays event, the VA and its partners offered haircuts, showers and sandwiches. Also available were sleeping bags, clothing and toiletries. Starkey said the setting allowed VA staff to interact face-to-face with people in the area.

Thats what this is all about  is being able to meet those veterans where they are in the community and provide them the assistance that they need, Starkey said.

To Mitchell, some of the offerings matched the resources that she and her fellow veterans seek. She came to the Midland area three years ago and is impressed with local attitudes.

I have never seen so much veteran support in my life, said Mitchell, who served in the U.S. Air Force. Out of everywhere that Ive been, Ive never seen such a supportive community.
'Red tide Rick!': Protesters heckle Florida governor over red tide Demonstrators criticized Florida Gov. Rick Scott (R) on Sept. 17 at a campaign event in Venice, Fla., for his handling of the toxic algae bloom.

Florida Gov. Rick Scott was chased away from a campaign event by demonstrators criticizing him for the toxic algae bloom that, for many months, has been killing marine life and apparently triggering respiratory issues among some residents.

The Herald-Tribune reported that Scott, the GOP candidate for U.S. Senate in the state, was confronted by angry protesters Monday at Mojos Real Cuban restaurant in Venice, about 80 miles south of Tampa, where dead animals have been washing ashore. Protesters crowded outside the restaurant holding signs reading Redtide Rick and calling the governor a coward  forcing him to enter and, only minutes later, leave, through the back door, according to the newspaper.

Video shows Scott quickly leaving and getting into a black SUV as supporters held up signs reading RICK SCOTT FOR SENATE among a crowd of protesters.

Herald-Tribune reporter Zac Anderson wrote on Twitter that You could smell the red tide in the air as crowd chanted 'Hey hey ho ho red-tide Rick has got to go. 

It comes as Scott is running for the Senate seat against Bill Nelson (D), the three-term incumbent.

Scotts campaign spokesman Chris Hartline said in a statement Tuesday to The Washington Post that the governor is working hard to find solutions.

While red tide is a naturally occurring algae that has been documented along Floridas Gulf Coast since the 1840s, Gov. Scott is fighting to use all available resources to help impacted communities, including declaring a state of emergency and providing millions of dollars in grant funding to Southwest Florida counties for cleanup and recovery efforts. Gov. Scott is working hard to find solutions while Bill Nelson is nowhere to be found, Hartline said.

He then redirected the attention to Nelson.

Nelson promised 30 years ago in a campaign ad that he was going to fight to protect Floridas environment, Hartline said in the statement. Were still waiting to see anything besides empty promises.

Residents told the Herald-Tribune that Florida has been plagued by an extreme amount of toxic algae and although its not Scotts fault, he has been exacerbating it.

At issue, according to the newspaper, is the governors multimillion-dollar budget cuts to environmental agencies. In fact, PolitiFact reported that during Scotts first term in 2011, he cut $700 million in funding from Floridas water management oversight. Some argue that had the state had that funding, it could have taken steps to lessen the effects of the toxic algae bloom, according to the Herald-Tribune.

Karenia brevis, releases toxins that can attack the central nervous system in animals and can cause skin, eye and respiratory irritation in people, The algae,, releases toxins that can attack the central nervous system in animals and can cause skin, eye and respiratory irritation in people, according to a fact sheet from Floridas Department of Health. The fact sheet says that when the algae occur in large numbers, called blooms, its commonly known as a red tide for the reddish-brown color that it turns the ocean water.

A red tide is a natural phenomenon that develops miles offshore before making its way to the coast, where it feeds on a variety of pollutants, including phosphorus and nitrogen from fertilizer, along with other runoff and wastewater. The toxins can aerosolize in the wind that drifts ashore, triggering respiratory problems or worsening conditions such as asthma. What is not clear is whether climate change and pollution from humans near the shore has made this outbreak severe and prolonged. Scientists have found that the algae thrive in warmer waters and increased carbon dioxide levels.

The red tide prompted the governor to issue a state of emergency last month across seven counties along the states southwestern shore, promising to provide $1.5 million in emergency funding.

Scott did not speak about the issue  or anything else  at the rally Monday in Venice, according to the Herald-Tribune.

Read more:
CARLINVILLE  A popular music festival created to celebrate a Carlinville mans successful medical treatment is expanding this year into a larger event.

The SamJam Music and Brewfest will be from noon to midnight Saturday at the Macoupin County Fairgrounds, north of Carlinville.

In addition to the type of high-quality musical talent for which the festival is known, the event will expand to feature more than 50 craft beers for tasting and purchase, food trucks, a bags tournament, and a reduced gate admission price.

The event, created in 2014, honors Sam Oswald of Carlinville, who has endured a host of treatments related to neurofibromatosis (NF)  including spinal fusion, treatment for two brain tumors, shunt revisions, bone grafting on both legs, knee surgery, dermal tumor removal, and eye surgery  during the past 28 years.

Oswald recently underwent two surgeries, along with radiation and chemotherapy, to treat a rare tumor in his leg. He is left with a lower leg that no longer functions, though Oswald is now cancer-free and continues to live independently.

NF is a disorder that strikes one in every 2,500 people, though it is relatively unknown to most.

During its first four years, SamJam donated $51,000 to NF Midwest, which provides research grants and patient-support services in Illinois, Missouri, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky and Wisconsin.

The original SamJam was held to celebrate Sams successful medical treatment, said Pete Oswald II, a festival organizer and Sam Oswalds older brother. SamJam is a celebration of Sam but, more importantly, it provides awareness of NF and raises money for NF research and support services for patients and their families.

This years SamJam will feature music by bands from around the nation.

We are continuing our goal of presenting top-quality music, said organizer Peter Oswald, Sam Oswalds father. We have six great bands coming this year, representing a great mix of progressive bluegrass, Americana and roots music.

The lineup begins with Grassfed of Kansas City, Kansas, which will play from noon to 2 p.m. Carlinville band Sons of the Mother Road will follow from 2 to 4 p.m., with the Hillary Fitz Band of St. Louis performing from 4 to 6 p.m.

The Ginstrings of Minneapolis will be on stage from 6 to 8 p.m., followed by the headliner, Chain Station of Denver, from 8 to 10 p.m. The final performer of the night, Still Shine of Peoria, will play from 10 p.m. to midnight.



If you go 

Gates open at 11:30 a.m. Saturday at the Macoupin County Fairgrounds with performances  rain or shine  in the fairgrounds Bates Building.

Food concessions, craft beers, a tub auction and the bags tournament will be available throughout the event.

Admission is $15 for adults, $10 for students, and free for children under 12. A VIP tasters ticket, available for $30, includes a souvenir tasting glass, sample tickets and a T-shirt.

For more information, visit SamJam4NF.com.

Tom Emery is a freelance writer and historical researcher from Carlinville. He may be reached at 217-710-8392 or ilcivilwar@yahoo.com.
Government does not seem to know ...
After wrapping up his present commitments, the actor is expected to begin work on the next instalment in the Dabangg series.

Salman Khan may be super busy juggling his shoots for Bigg Boss Season 12, the international schedule of his film Bharat, and Ganeshotsav celebrations, but hes never too busy to make time for an old friend. The actor recently took some time off to visit Bina Kak, a former Minister of Rajasthan, and attend the birthday celebrations of her grandson Kabir in Jaipur.

Salman has never said No to Binaji. She has acted in some of his earlier films like Maine Pyaar Kyun Kiya, and she has held his hand through the blackbuck poaching case. In the past, Salman has attended all her book launch events, as well as other occasions. This time, he attended Kabirs birthday because the boy is a huge fan of Salmans, a source says.

After wrapping up his present commitments, the actor is expected to begin work on the next instalment in the Dabangg series.

Sanskriti Media
Hotshot firefighter on Mendocino Complex Fire View Photos

Lake County, CA  A fire that ignited in late July and burned 459,123 acres is now 100-percent contained.

The Mendocino Complex Fire in Lake County also sadly destroyed 280 structures, resulted in one fire fighter death and four other injuries. The US Forest Service reports that work will continue over the coming months repairing suppression impacts and preventing erosion. The fire area in the Mendocino National Forest remains closed until further notice.

The Rim Fire, which ignited in August of 2013 in Tuolumne County, and burned 257,314 acres, was (five years ago) the third largest fire in the states recorded history. It is now the fifth largest. The Thomas Fire that ignited last year in the Los Angeles area is the second biggest at 281,893 acres, followed by the 2003 Cedar Fire in San Diego County (273,246 acres) and the 2012 Rush Fire in Lassen County (271,911 acres).

The Stanislaus Complex Fire, which ignited in August of 1987 in Tuolumne County, is the 18th largest at 145,980 acres.
Sonora, CA  Californias State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson will be in Tuolumne County on Friday meeting with some local leaders and visiting Summerville High School.

Tuolumne County Superintendent of Schools Margie Bulkin will be the host during Torlaksons official visit. He is planning to meet with officials at the Tuolumne County Office of Education and later head over to Summerville High School to tour the campus and meet with the schools leadership team. Torlakson will also be a guest speaker at a 12th grade government class.

The visit is being described as an extension of Torlaksons support and advocacy of public education, and a way to acknowledge the great work schools do every day in advancing the states public education system. Before being elected as State Superintendent of Schools in 2010, Torlakson served in both the California Senate and Assembly.
The Plainview area United Way is set to kick off its annual fundraising season with a luncheon on Monday.

Leigh Ann Bradley, executive director of the branch, said the agency partners with 10 local nonprofits and is dedicated to raising funds to give back to them.

The organizations United Way partners with includes: Central Plains Early Childhood Intervention, Crisis Center of the Plains, Epilepsy Foundation of Texas, YMCA, Hale County Senior Citizens Center, Plainview Boy Scouts  South Plains Council, Plainview Education Partnership, Plainview Girl Scouts  TOP Council, The Salvation Army and Wee Care Child Center.

United Way traditionally kicks off its fundraising season around this time and presents donations to each partner agency in January, she said.

Brandon Ahrens, 2018 United Way chairman, said the fundraising goal this year is $275,000.

"It's going t be a challenge to reach it," he said.

Bradley said the goal is no different than last year. In the past, the organization has raised $450,000, she said, but it's not aiming that high this year.

"The economy is kind of crazy right now," Bradley said. "That is our goal and we're going to need every dollar to make it."

The money raised stays local, she said.

The kickoff luncheon will start be from noon to 1 p.m. Monday at the Pete and Nelda Laney Student Activity Center at the Wayland Baptist University campus, Bradley said.

Mary Meyers, with The United Family, will be the guest speaker for the event.

For additional information or to purchase tickets  which are $10 each, call (806) 293-7072.
Randeep Surjewala accused Jaitley of making desperate attempts at spreading 'fake agenda to stay relevant as a court jester'.

Surjewala said Jaitley and the Modi government have been 'trapped' on the Rafale issue and that is why they are resorting to abuse against the opposition. (Photo: File)

New Delhi: The Congress hit back at Finance Minister Arun Jaitley on Thursday accusing him of "lying" on the issue of NPAs and dubbed him as a "court jester" writing "wasteful" blogs, after he called Rahul Gandhi a "clown prince" who was spreading "lies" about Modi government waiving Rs 2.5 lakh crore in loans to 15 industrialists.

Read: 'Clown Prince' Rahul Gandhi leading campaign of falsehood: Jaitley

Congress chief spokesperson Randeep Surjewala accused Jaitley of making desperate attempts at spreading "fake agenda to stay relevant as a court jester" and asked why he was "abusing" the opposition instead of answering the questions on non-performing assets of banks and Rafale deal. Attacking the government on the issue of NPAs, the Congress leader alleged collusion between "bank looters and the Modi government".

"Political amnesia and chest thumping cannot obliterate your dismal record of dismantling India's economic progress or as also the surging NPAs resulting out of bankruptcy of economic vision of Modi Government," he said.

He said Jaitley and the Modi government have been "trapped" on the Rafale issue and that is why they are resorting to abuse against the opposition.

"Arun Jaitley is desperate in his attempt to stay relevant as a court jester' to Modi Sultanate'. 'Abuse, diversion' and deception' are the desperate tools of a 'Lying -Jait-LIE'.

Fake Agenda of a desperate Court Jester & Wasteful Blogger



Our Statement:- pic.twitter.com/zKOEXqcu4u  Randeep Singh Surjewala (@rssurjewala) September 20, 2018

"Instead of hiding behind the cloak of expletives for the opposition, let FM coherently answer politically relevant issues," he said in a statement. Surjewala said the Finance Ministry in a reply in Parliament on July 24, 2018 admitted that NPAs stood at Rs 2,51,054 crore when Congress-UPA demitted power and they have increased to a whopping Rs 9,61,962 crore by March 2018. As NPAs now stand as Rs 12,00,000 crore, he asked, "Are you lying in your fake agenda blogpost' today or did you lie in Parliament? The nation wants to know".

"We dare you to publicly state the amount of loans given during the tenure of Modi Government in last 52 months, along with details as to how much of those loans have become NPAs? How much worth of loans were ever-greened' and restructured' during the tenure of Modi Government?," the Congress leader minister.

He also asked how many wilful defaulters' escaped from India during last 52 months and with how much money. "How many economic offenders', defaulters' and looters' did you bring back to India and jailed?," he asked.

"And yes Jait-LIE' ji, the desperate quest to stay relevant of a court jester' by wasteful blogs continues. "Please reply - Why hide behind abuse when trapped in Rafale maze? Why supersede HAL for Rs 30,000 crore contract? Why no answer on Rs 41,000 crore loss in Rafale scam?," he said on Twitter.

And yes Jait-LIE ji, the desperate quest to stay relevant of a court jester by wasteful blogs continues.



Pl reply-

1. Why hide behind abuse when trapped in #Rafale maze?

2. Why supersede HAL for 30000Cr contract?

3. Why no answer on 41000Cr loss in #RafaleScam? https://t.co/8tzxNer1Vd  Randeep Singh Surjewala (@rssurjewala) September 20, 2018

Surjewala also asked why was Offset Contract' of Rs 30,000 crore given to a 12-day-old company and why a purchase of Rs 526 crore Rafale was made for Rs 1670 crore and caused a loss of Rs 41,205 crore to the country.

"Why compromise national security by reducing aircraft from 126 to 36? Why did you violate the Defence Procurement Procedure? Why was no prior approval taken from Cabinet Committee on Security? Why did you sacrifice Transfer of Technology' to India? Why eight-year long delay for emergency purchase' of aircraft?," he asked.

Raising the Vijay Mallya issue, Surjewala asked, "Did Mallya, an economic offender of Rs 9,091 crore, meet you on March 1, 2016 and tell you he was leaving India for London? Did Mallya not run away on March 2, 2016? Were you not duty bound as Finance Minister to alarm the authorities and get Mallya arrested? Should your role then be not probed? Do you have any right to continue as Finance Minister? Should you not be sacked immediately?"

He said the truth is that the ever depreciating Rupee', the ever increasing fuel prices, the declining exports and extinguished savings, the phenomenally high current account deficit is your sad legacy and making the common people of India describe you as  'Jaitley looted the pockets'."

Jaitley had earlier launched a scathing attack on the Congress president as he retorted to his charges made during political rallies.

"You lied on the Rafale deal, you lied on the NPAs. Your temperament to concoct facts raises a legitimate question  do people whose natural preference is falsehood deserve to be a part of the public discourse," he said in a Facebook blog.

The world's largest democracy must seriously introspect whether public discourse should be allowed to be polluted by the falsehood of a 'Clown Prince'," the BJP leader said.
BJP leaders, led by organisational secy Ram Lal, met Amit Shah in New Delhi and discussed current situation in state.

Sources said there is no threat to the BJP-led government in the state and the alliance is intact. (Photo: File)

New Delhi: A delegation of BJP leaders who had gone to Goa to take stock of the political situation there, briefed party president Amit Shah on Wednesday, sources said, adding it is unlikely that party will immediately change the chief minister of the state.

In view of Goa Chief Minister Manohar Parrikar's indisposition, a delegation of BJP leaders, led by organisational secretary Ram Lal, met Shah at his residence in New Delhi and discussed at length the current situation in the state.

Sources said there is no threat to the BJP-led government in the state and the alliance is intact. It is unlikely the party will change the leadership immediately.

Parrikar, 62, who is suffering from a pancreatic ailment, has been admitted to the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) in New Delhi for treatment.

The BJP has 14 legislators in the 40-member Goa Assembly, while the Goa Forward Party (GFP) and the Maharashtrawadi Gomantak Party (MGP) have three each. The BJP is also supported by three Independent MLAs.

After meeting the allies in Goa, Ram Lal had said the alliance partners have stated that they will agree to any political decision taken by the BJP.

The Congress has 16 MLAs while the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) has one legislator.
San Antonio-based USAA said Thursday it will be eliminating about 265 jobs at its bank in mid-November.

The job cuts will impact employees in its banks real estate lending operations and its Real Estate Rewards Network, which supports USAA members during the homebuying and selling process.

About 110 of the cuts will occur in San Antonio, with the rest happening in Tampa and Phoenix.

This decision was difficult, as we value our employees and we appreciate that they go above and beyond for our members every day, USAA Bank President Chad Borton said in a statement. However, it was necessary as we focus on continuing to provide members competitive mortgage products today and in the future.

The announcement of the job cuts coincides with a slowdown in home loan applications and mortgage refinancings nationally as borrowing costs have risen. Last week, the Mortgage Bankers Association reported refinancings hit a 17 year low.

Wells Fargo last month said it was eliminating 638 mortgage jobs in response to a slowdown in the business, Reuters reported.

The mortgage market, as a whole, is having some challenges, USAA spokesman Matt Hartwig said. This is about our ability to remain competitive.

USAA will continue to offer mortgage loans and its Real Estate Rewards Network will still remain in operation, Hartwig said.

Affected USAA employees were notified Thursday and will be given 60 days to pursue open jobs at the company or elsewhere. Almost 100 employees already have been offered another position within the banks real estate lending operation, USAA said.

Those employees who dont remain with USAA will receive a severance offer and outplacement services to assist with their job search.

USAA ranks as one of San Antonios largest employers, with more than 19,000 employees. Overall, it has almost 34,000 employees. It has added about 1,000 employees this year, Hartwig said. It has more than 12.6 million members.

Patrick Danner is a San Antonio-based staff writer covering banking and civil courts. Read him on our free site, mySA.com, and on our subscriber site, ExpressNews.com. | pdanner@express-news.net | Twitter: @AlamoPD
Candor Midstream has leased 10,814 square feet in the Energy Tower IV, 11750 Katy Freeway, Mac Haik Realty announced.

The 17-story tower is the fourth and final office building in Mac Haik Realty's 2 million-square-foot Energy Plaza Project, which also has a Hilton Embassy Suites.

RELATED: Houston pipeline and storage firm gets $200 million funding commitment

"We are very pleased to be moving into Energy Tower IV where we will be working alongside so many of our colleagues," Candor Midstream CEO Darrel Hagerman said in a statement. "We plan on hiring several employees in the near future and look forward to calling Energy Plaza home for many years to come."

RELATED: More commercial real estate leases and deals

Hagerman founded the company, which is backed by EnCap Flatrock Midstream, last year. The company provides midstream services to oil and gas producers across the U.S.

Mac Haik Realty's Steve Bryant and Brandon Poynter represented the landlord. Paula Hagerman represented the tenant.
Southwest Airlines is giving $1 million to nonprofits and aviation-focused schools in the communities where it operates.

Its program is designed to support organizations focused on K-12 STEM education, building a resilient workforce and leadership development. Southwest will prioritize organizations that support veterans, low-income families and historically underserved populations.
HOUSTON  When President Donald Trump announced in May that he was going to withdraw the United States from the nuclear agreement that the Obama administration and five other countries negotiated with Iran in 2015 and reimpose sanctions on the country, the decision was fraught with potential disaster.

If Trumps approach worked too well, oil prices would spike and hurt the U.S. economy. If it failed, international companies would continue trading with Iran, leaving the Islamic Republic unscathed, defiant and free to restart its nuclear program.

But the policy has been effective without either of those nasty consequences, at least so far.

Nearly two months before U.S. oil sanctions go into effect, Irans crude exports are plummeting. International oil companies, including those from countries that are still committed to the nuclear agreement, are bailing out of deals with Tehran.

And remarkably, the price of oil in the United States has risen only modestly while gasoline prices have essentially remained flat. The current global oil price hovers around $80 a barrel, $60 below the highs of a decade ago.

The president is doing the opposite of what the experts said, and it seems to be working out, said Michael Lynch, president of Strategic Energy and Economic Research, a research and consulting firm.

Initial signs of a foreign-policy success could benefit Trump politically as Republicans try to hold on to control of Congress. The president and lawmakers allied with him could point to the administrations aggressive stand toward Iran as evidence that his unconventional approach to diplomacy has been much more fruitful and far less costly than Democrats have been willing to acknowledge.

The administrations tactical advantage could be fleeting, of course, if Iran retaliates with cyberattacks or militarily, incites more militia violence in Iraq, or revives its nuclear program.

The most important reason that predictions of higher oil prices have been wrong is that there is plenty of oil sloshing around the world. The United States has become a huge exporter of oil in the last several years and is now shipping roughly the same amount  more than 2 million barrels a day  that Iran did earlier this year.

Trade tensions and economic problems in developing countries like Turkey and Argentina might also be slowing the growth of energy demand.

Another thing in Trumps favor is that while governments in Europe and Asia have publicly opposed his decision to withdraw from the nuclear agreement, many businesses in those places have made a different calculation. They have concluded that it makes little financial sense to risk investments in and trade with the United States by doing business with Iran.

Until Trumps May announcement, Western allies considered the nuclear deal with Iran a success. In exchange for agreeing to strict limits on its nuclear program and international monitoring, Iran was allowed to re-enter the global oil market. The deal lifted restrictions on foreign companies doing business in Iran and gave the country access to frozen assets overseas.

After Nov. 4, companies that buy, ship or insure shipments of Iranian oil can be excluded from the U.S. market and banking system unless they obtain waivers from the administration.

Trump administration officials say its sanctions are designed to punish Iran for its interventions in Syria, Yemen and other countries.

For Iran, the timing could not be worse. The country has lost influence over oil prices as other producers have eclipsed its energy industry, which has not kept up with technological advances.

At the beginning of the century, Iranian officials could shake the oil markets by staging military maneuvers or merely hinting that they would reduce supplies. Back then, U.S. oil production was falling and global demand for crude was surging.

But those days are long gone. Like the United States, countries including Canada and Brazil are also exporting more oil. Russia, Saudi Arabia and Iraq have also increased production, helping to keep oil prices in check. Saudi Arabia and its Persian Gulf allies are only too happy to support the sanctions against their chief rival, Iran, by expanding exports.

That has provided a buffer for the global oil market as Iranian exports dropped by more than 25 percent, or around 600,000 barrels a day, between June and the start of September. Exports are expected to drop by an additional half-million barrels when U.S. sanctions go into effect. All told, exports could drop from a high of 2.7 million barrels this year to fewer than a million in 2019  lowering the countrys exports to less than 1 percent of the global market, from about 3 percent earlier this year.

That would further squeeze the Iranian government, which had $50 billion in oil revenue last year; oil and petroleum products make up about 70 percent of the countrys exports by value.

For Iran, it shows the leverage that they have had through oil has not only diminished but may never return, said Amy Myers Jaffe, a senior fellow specializing in energy at the Council on Foreign Relations. People just dont care if they are going to lose business in Iran. People dont feel desperate for supply.

The sanctions are so onerous that even companies from countries opposed to Trumps approach are withdrawing from Iran.

South Korea, Irans third-biggest oil market last year, halted purchases in August after buying 194,000 barrels a day in July. Shipments to France and Japan, two other major markets, are also dropping.

OMV, the Austrian oil company, recently backed out of an agreement with the National Iranian Oil Co. to evaluate oil fields. Hellenic Petroleum of Greece, Spains Repsol and Italys Eni are winding down oil purchases.

The Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a conservative Washington think tank, found that 71 foreign companies planned to withdraw from Iran, 19 intended to stay and 142 were undecided or hadnt said as of early September.

Big international companies have to ask themselves what risks are they willing to take on, said David Adesnik, the foundations director of research. Even if you dont have a business in the U.S., you can be cut off from our financial system, and thats not something a truly global firm can afford.

The next big shoe to drop appears to be India, Irans second-biggest oil market after China. Reliance Industries, the nations leading refiner, has said it will stop buying Iranian crude when U.S. sanctions kick in. And the State Bank of India, the countrys largest lender, has told refiners that it will block payments for Iranian crude.

U.S. officials are waging a public and private campaign to persuade foreign leaders to cut economic ties with Iran  and to buy more U.S. oil.

During a visit to India this month, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said the administration was seeking a total halt to Iranian oil exports, although countries will be given time to switch suppliers.

Purchases of Iranian crude will go to zero from every country or sanctions will be imposed, Pompeo said.

The sanctions could allow Russian and Chinese companies to replace Western businesses in Iran. After Washington denied it a waiver, the French oil giant Total pulled out of a contract to develop the South Pars gas field, leaving a potential opening to Chinas CNPC to increase its investment in the field.

China, which imports a half-million barrels of Iranian crude a day, can more easily resist U.S. policy than other countries. Thats because its smallest refiners and domestic banks have little or no exposure to the United States.

Russia is another obstacle.

Gazprom and Rosneft, two state-controlled Russian oil and gas giants, are negotiating oil development deals worth roughly $10 billion with the Iranian oil ministry.

For its part, Iran is not sitting still. The state-run Iranian tanker company is storing oil on its fleet of supertankers rather than shut down production, which can damage wells. Iran could smuggle oil over land through Pakistan and Afghanistan, and barter with trading companies to get around sanctions.

International transactions are largely denominated in dollars, which strengthens U.S. sanctions. Over time, Irans oil trade could shift to other currencies, particularly the Chinese renminbi.

We will continue by all means to both produce and export, President Hassan Rouhani of Iran said recently on state TV. Oil is in the front line of confrontation and resistance.
U.S. President Donald Trump resumed his criticism of OPEC, saying on Twitter that the cartel "must get prices down now!" as the global benchmark crude flirted with $80-a-barrel earlier this week.

Futures dropped as much as 1.1 percent in London on Thursday, while New York-traded oil was little changed. Trump's intervention in the oil market follows indications from Saudi Arabia that $80 is an acceptable price level as Iran grows increasingly isolated because of U.S. sanctions. OPEC and allied producers will meet in Algeria this weekend to discuss production targets.

"Will he get what he wants? Probably not," said Rob Haworth, who helps oversee $151 billion at U.S. Bank Wealth Management in Seattle. "You've got room for OPEC to grow and probably offset declining Iranian production. On the downside, you are still losing Iranian and Venezuelan production."

"We protect the countries of the Middle East, they would not be safe for very long without us, and yet they continue to push for higher and higher oil prices! We will remember," Trump tweeted.

With American elections coming in early November, Trump "wants to keep pressure on the group ahead of the mid-term elections," said Giovanni Staunovo, commodity analyst at UBS Group AG.

Saudi Arabia has markedly increased oil exports to America, a sign OPEC's leading producer is responding to pressure from Trump.

Brent for November settlement fell 69 cents to $78.71 at 10:56 a.m. The contract traded at a $8.22 premium to WTI for the same month.

West Texas Intermediate for October delivery, which expires Thursday, slid 7 cents to $71.05 on the New York Mercantile Exchange. Total volume traded was about 23 percent above the 100-day average. The more active November contract fell 16 cents to $70.61.

The president's first attack on the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries came on April 20, just hours after Saudi Arabian Oil Minister Khalid Al-Falih said the group would continue production cuts. Within a month, the kingdom had performed a dramatic U-turn and by June the cartel and its allies were promising to add 1 million barrels a day to the market.

Meanwhile, OPEC was said in July to be consulting with lawyers to prepare a strategy to defend against proposed U.S. legislation that could open up the cartel to antitrust lawsuits, according to people familiar with the matter at the time. Saudi Arabia previously hired former Solicitor General Ted Olson as a lobbyist to campaign against the "NOPEC" bill.

Other oil-market news:

Gasoline futures fell 0.3 percent to $2.0157 a gallon.

Russia's crude production has jumped to a new post-Soviet record, boosting the nation's budget revenue as it prepares for talks with OPEC+ on further cooperation, according to a government official.

--With assistance from James Herron.

2018 Bloomberg L.P.
The offshore oil and gas sector is beginning to rebound worldwide, but the Gulf of Mexico is recovering more slowly because of the industry's focus on onshore shale.

More private equity players,however, are injecting funds and jumpstarting new drilling activity in the Gulf to fill the void left by many of the larger independent exploration and production companies. With a few exceptions, the deepwater Gulf has been left to Big Oil in recent years.

Michael Murphy, a research analyst with Wood Mackenzie, noted in a new report that private equity firms are starting to do more in the Gulf, but they're doing so with smaller-scale projects that bring quicker returns.

"Just as private equity's entrance into the U.S. Lower 48 brought fresh impetus and renewed direction to exploration and production, private equity is bringing a different operational approach to the Gulf of Mexico," Murphy said. "Capitalizing on lower cost structures and focusing on quicker paybacks, these smaller, nimbler private equity-backed outfits have shown an ability to turn discoveries into dollars at a faster clip than their competition."

One of the key examples leading growth is the private equity-backed LLOG Exploration, which is based out of the New Orleans area. Companies like LLOG have cut the average time from discoveries to project sanctioning from six years to three years, Murphy noted.

RELATED: Talos Energy goes public with closing of Stone acquisition

Other private equity-backed companies are already cashing out after having success. Houston-based Talos Energy recently went public, while Deep Gulf Energy was acquired by Dallas-based Kosmos Energy.

Another Houston player, EnVen Energy, is moving towards an initial public offering.

As long as the private equity players see an way cash out at a profit in the future, Murphy said, the investments should keep coming in the Gulf.

"Deepwater could pose the Hotel California problem for private equity funds - you can check in anytime you want but you can never leave," Murphy said. "With a smaller buyer pool in deepwater, and Wall Street focused on tight oil and favoring companies with large share buy-back programs, private equity-backed companies will need to consolidate and grow their reserve base to become more attractive. This will provide stronger exit opportunities."
Roughly a century ago, men like William Randolph Hearst, Joseph Pulitzer and Henry Luce dominated the media landscape. These moguls built their publishing empires and used them to intimidate rivals, espouse favored causes and settle scores.

Today, members of a new Gilded Age are again in control of many of the countrys most venerable media outlets. Only now, it is tech entrepreneurs, casino magnates and hedge fund billionaires who are seizing control of the press, simply by writing a check.

In the most recent transaction, Marc Benioff, founder of the software company Salesforce, bought Time magazine on Sunday for $190 million in cash.

With the deal, Benioff joined an elite club of relatively new press barons that includes Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who owns The Washington Post; Laurene Powell Jobs, the widow of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs and the head of the Emerson Collective, who acquired a majority stake in The Atlantic; and Michael R. Bloomberg, who owns Businessweek and Bloomberg News.

At a moment when many print publications are struggling to survive, the largesse of a wealthy owner can seem like a godsend. But there are also fresh concerns, some based on recent experience, that these individuals are assuming an unhealthy amount of influence.

Even good billionaires need to have less of a role in our public life, said Anand Giridharadas, author of Winners Take All, a new book about the global elite. They are buying up the free press, which is meant to hold them accountable.

Beyond the marquee names, local billionaires now own the daily newspapers in Minneapolis, Las Vegas, Los Angeles and Boston. Smaller outlets  including The Village Voice, The New Republic and Gothamist  were also bought by wealthy individuals in recent years.

And all of this is happening as the business model for print and online journalism remains precarious at best.

We have a new era, particularly in the last few years, of billionaire owners from the new economy who are intrigued by this old dilemma, said Tom Rosenstiel, executive director of the American Press Institute, a journalism advocacy group.

In some cases, these new owners succeed in revitalizing the publications they acquire, injecting them with new energy and freeing them from the pressures of short-term profits, while preserving editorial independence.

By all accounts, Bezos has refrained from meddling in the news or the editorial operations of The Washington Post, where the newsroom has grown significantly under his ownership.

Laurene Powell Jobs has earned similarly high marks for her work at The Atlantic over the last year. Businessweek was reinvigorated under Bloombergs ownership. The new owner of The Los Angeles Times, Patrick Soon-Shiong, is investing in the paper, and has pledged to allow it to operate with editorial independence.

And in Minnesota, a local businessman, Glen Taylor, has drawn praise for his ownership of The Minneapolis Star Tribune, which he bought for about $100 million in 2014.

Jobs and Bezos and presumably Benioff, these people are doing good work, said Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist, who recently donated $20 million to the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. Anything that helps independent journalism is a good thing.

But just as often, it seems, the new owners of newspapers and magazines can sap newsroom morale, or quickly discover that they have little tolerance for financial losses, or unions.

After Chris Hughes, a co-founder of Facebook, bought The New Republic six years ago and tried to remake it  leading to the exodus of many longtime members of its staff  he eventually sold it.

Peter D. Barbey, the heir to a retail fortune who bought The Village Voice in 2015 and pledged to support it, recently closed it.

And last year, Joe Ricketts, the billionaire founder of TD Ameritrade, shut down Gothamist and DNAinfo after its writers voted to unionize.

Being owned by a local billionaire is not necessarily an act of charity, Rosenstiel said. There are clearly billionaires who are buying up publications because they want to influence political discourse in the country.

At The Las Vegas Review-Journal, which casino magnate Sheldon Adelson bought in 2015, reporters and editors have been concerned about what they perceive as his editorial interference.

Even John Henry, who made a fortune with his investment firm and is well regarded as the owner of The Boston Globe, has recently expressed some distaste for the economics of print media.

The Globe cannot ever seem to meet budgets  on either the revenue side or the expense side  and I am not going to continue that, he said in an interview with WGBH in July. This has always been about sustainability rather than sizable, endless, annual losses. That is frustrating and due to a combination of mismanagement and a tough industry.

For much of the 20th century, print publications were largely owned by private companies  often helmed by families like the Scrippses and the Chandlers  that had started a publication in one city and gradually expanded.

By the 1970s, consolidation and ample profits from print advertising led many of these companies to go public.

But in the late 1990s, advertising on the internet began to chip away at print profits. And in recent years, many once-proud print empires have consolidated, others have been sold for parts, and some papers and magazines are simply going out of business.

Amid this turmoil, the new generation of wealthy buyers has emerged. But while buying a high-wattage publication can deliver an owner a certain amount of status and prestige, it can also invite controversy.

President Donald Trump, displeased with coverage of his administration in The Washington Post, has taken to attacking Amazon on Twitter, even though Bezos  not Amazon  owns the newspaper.

And Benioff may find himself facing the ire of Trump should Time continue publishing tough covers that portray the president in a critical light. (Benioff has sparred with members of the administration in the past. In 2015, when Vice President Mike Pence was the governor of Indiana, Benioff threatened to reduce Salesforces business there in protest of a state law that critics said discriminated against people who are gay or transgender.)

Walter Isaacson, a former editor of Time, said that for most of his career, he had believed that the best owners for media companies were publicly traded corporations, where there was less of a chance for a wealthy owner to meddle.

That changed, he said, during his tenure at Time.

Then I went through the disaster of Time Warner, a company that only cared about short-term stock price and didnt have a feel for journalism, he said.

Now, Isaacson said, I have come to the belief that a sole proprietor, especially a benevolent and public spirited one, is a good thing in troubled times.

Giridharadas remains skeptical that ultrarich individuals, however public spirited, are the best owners for the free press.

Im concerned about the powerful having an oligopoly of the media, he said. The only amount of power that a billionaire should have over a paper they own is zero.
TOKYO  Electric drones booked through smartphones pick people up from office rooftops, shortening travel time by hours, reducing the need for parking and clearing smog from the air.

This vision of the future is driving the Japanese governments flying car project. Major carrier All Nippon Airways, electronics company NEC Corp. and more than a dozen other companies and academic experts hope to have a road map ready by the years end.

This is such a totally new sector Japan has a good chance for not falling behind, said Fumiaki Ebihara, the government official in charge of the project.

Nobody believes people are going to be zipping around in flying cars any time soon. Many hurdles remain, such as battery life, the need for regulations and, of course, safety concerns. But dozens of similar projects are popping up around the world. The prototypes so far are less like traditional cars and more like drones big enough to hold people.

A flying car is defined as an aircraft thats electric, or hybrid electric, with driverless capabilities, that can land and takeoff vertically.

They are often called EVtol, which stands for electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft.

The flying car concepts promise to be better than helicopters, which are expensive to maintain, noisy to fly and require trained pilots, Ebihara and other proponents say.

You may think of Back to the Future, Gundam, or Doraemon, Ebihara said, referring to vehicles of flight in a Hollywood film and in Japanese cartoons featuring robots. Up to now, it was just a dream, but with innovations in motors and batteries, its time for it to become real.

Google, drone company Ehang and car manufacturer Geely in China, and Volkswagen AG of Germany have invested in flying car technology.

Nissan Motor Co. and Honda Motor Co. said they had nothing to say about flying cars, but Toyota Motor Corp. recently invested $500 million in working with Uber on self-driving technology for the ride-hailing service. Toyota group companies have also invested 42.5 million yen ($375,000) in a Japanese startup, Cartivator, that is working on a flying car.

The hope is to fly up and light the torch at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, but its unclear it will meet that goal: At a demonstration last year, the device crashed after it rose to slightly higher than eye level. A video of a more recent demonstration suggests its now flying more stably, though its being tested indoors, unmanned and chained so it wont fly away.

There are plenty of skeptics.

Elon Musk, chief executive of electric car maker Tesla Inc., says even toy drones are noisy and blow a lot of air, which means anything that would be 1,000 times heavier isnt practical.

If you want a flying car, just put wheels on a helicopter, he said in a recent interview with podcast host and comedian Joe Rogan on YouTube. Your neighbors are not going to be happy if you land a flying car in your backyard or on your rooftop.

Though the Japanese government has resisted Ubers efforts to offer ride-hailing services in Japan, limiting it to partnerships with taxi companies, it has eagerly embraced the U.S. companys work on EVtol machines.

Uber says it is considering Tokyo as its first launch city for affordable flights via its UberAir service. It says Los Angeles and Dallas, Texas, and locations in Australia, Brazil, France and India are other possible locations.

Unlike regular airplanes, with their aerodynamic design and two wings, Ubers Elevate structures look like small jets with several propellers on top. The company says it plans flight demonstrations as soon as 2020 and a commercial service by 2023.

Ubers vision calls for using heliports on rooftops, but new multi-floored construction similar to parking lots for cars will likely be needed to accommodate EVtol aircraft if the service takes off.

Unmanned drones are legal in Japan, the U.S. and other countries, but there are restrictions on where they can be flown and requirements for getting approval in advance. In Japan, drone flyers can be licensed if they take classes. There is no requirement like drivers licenses for cars.

Flying passengers over populated areas would take a quantum leap in technology, overhauling aviation regulations and air traffic safety controls, along with major efforts both to ensure safety and convince people its safe.

Uber said at a recent presentation in Tokyo that it envisions a route between the citys two international airports, among others.

This is not a rich persons toy. This is a mass market solution, said Adam Warmoth, product manager at Uber Elevate.

Concepts for flying cars vary greatly. Some resemble vehicles with several propellers on top while others look more like a boat with a seat over the propellers.

Ebihara, the flying-car chief at the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, says Japan is on board for Blade Runner style travel  despite its plentiful, efficient and well developed public transportation.

Japans auto and electronics industries have the technology and ability to produce super-light materials that could give the nation an edge in the flying car business, he said.

Just as the automobile vanquished horse-drawn carriages, moving short-distance transport into the air could in theory bring a sea change in how people live, Ebihara said, pointing to the sky outside the ministry building to stress how empty it was compared to the streets below.

Flying also has the allure of a birds eye view, the stuff of drone videos increasingly used in filmmaking, tourism promotion and journalism.

Atsushi Taguchi, a drone grapher, as specialists in drone video are called, expects test flights can be carried out even if flying cars wont become a reality for years since the basic technology for stable flying already exists with recent advances in sensors, robotics and digital cameras.

A growing labor shortage in deliveries in Japan is adding to the pressures to realize such technology, though there are risks, said Taguchi, who teaches at the Tokyo film school Digital Hollywood.

The propellers on commercially sold drones today are dangerous, and some of his students have lost fingers with improper flying. The bigger propellers needed for vertical flight would increase the hazards and might need to be covered.

The devices might need parachutes to soften crash landings, or might have to explode into small bits to ensure pieces hitting the ground would be smaller.

I think one of the biggest hurdles is safety, said Taguchi. And anything that flies will by definition crash.
MENLO PARK, Calif.  Sandwiched between Building 20 and Building 21 in the heart of Facebooks campus, an approximately 25-foot-by-35-foot conference room is under construction.

Thick cords of blue wiring hang from the ceiling, ready to be attached to window-size computer monitors on 16 desks. On one wall, a half dozen televisions will be tuned to CNN, MSNBC, Fox News and other major networks. A small paper sign with orange lettering taped to the glass door describes whats being built: War Room.

Although it is not much to look at now, as of next week the space will be Facebooks headquarters for safeguarding elections. More than 300 people across the company are working on the initiative, but the War Room will house a team of about 20 focused on rooting out disinformation, monitoring false news and deleting fake accounts that may be trying to influence voters before elections in the United States, Brazil and other countries.

We see this as probably the biggest companywide reorientation since our shift from desktops to mobile phones, said Samidh Chakrabarti, who leads Facebooks elections and civic engagement team. The company, he added, has mobilized to make this happen.

The misuse of Facebook by foreign influence campaigns has been rampant. In July and August, the company detailed previously undisclosed efforts by Iranians and Russians to mislead users of the social network through divisive ads and posts. Now, with the midterm elections in the United States seven weeks away, Facebook is in an all-out sprint to convince the world it is ready to handle any new attempts at such meddling. The company is under tremendous pressure to prevent a repeat of the foreign manipulation that unfolded on the social network during the 2016 presidential campaign.

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebooks chief executive, has vowed to fix the problems, and he said this month that the company was better prepared to handle potential interference. But he has acknowledged that Facebook was in an arms race against those who were trying to manipulate the platform. The company has taken steps to build defenses against spammers, hackers and foreign operatives  including hiring thousands of people to help moderate content and starting an archive to catalog all political ads  but the War Rooms half-finished state shows how nascent and hurried many of the efforts are.

Already, foreign operatives have evolved their online influence campaigns to skirt the measures Facebook has put in place ahead of the midterms, said Priscilla Moriuchi, director of strategic threat development at the cybersecurity firm Recorded Future.

If you look at the way that foreign influence operations have changed these last two years, their focus isnt really on propagating fake news anymore, Moriuchi said. Its on augmenting stories already out there which speak to hyperpartisan audiences.

She added, Its going to be harder for companies like Facebook and Twitter, from my perspective, to find them now.

Facebook invited two New York Times reporters into the War Room before it opens next week to discuss the work of the elections team and some of the tools it has developed to try to prevent interference. The company limited the scope of what The Times could see and publish out of a concern about revealing too much to adversaries who may be looking for vulnerabilities. The company said the War Room was modeled after operations used by political campaigns, which are typically set up in the final weeks before Election Day.

The War Room is a proactive way to build systems in anticipation of attacks, Greg Marra, a product manager working on Facebooks News Feed, said in a conference call with reporters Wednesday.

One of the tools the company is introducing is custom software that helps track information flowing across the social network in real time, said Chakrabarti, who joined Facebook about four years ago from Google.

These dashboards resemble a set of line and bar graphs with statistics that provide a view into how activity on the platform is changing. They allow employees to zero in on, say, a specific false news story in wide circulation or a spike in automated accounts being created in a particular geographic area.

The dashboards were first tested before of the special U.S. Senate election in Alabama in December. Without specifying the dashboards, Zuckerberg has said a new tool helped Facebook identify political interference more quickly in that election.

Since then, Facebook has tested and redesigned the software during multiple elections worldwide. This month, before Brazils presidential election, the company will introduce the newest versions of the dashboards, Chakrabarti said.

Facebook created what it calls its elections and civic engagement team in 2007 to work with governments and campaigns on how they could use the social network most effectively. For a long time, the team numbered just a few dozen people in Silicon Valley; it expanded in 2013 to include members in other offices outside of the United States.

After Facebook disclosed that agents linked to the Kremlin had manipulated the social network to spread inflammatory messages to American voters during the 2016 election, the company began to increase the teams ranks. The group was also restructured to focus more on the security of elections.

Since then, the team has mushroomed to its current size, augmented by other people at the company whose jobs involve some aspect of stopping election interference. Facebook has said each of its units  including Instagram and WhatsApp  has been told to make election security a top priority when designing products.

Chakrabarti meets several times a month with Facebooks top executives, engineers and product managers. The meetings often include Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg, the chief operating officer.

Facebook decided this year to create a War Room so a core group of engineers, data scientists and executives could sit together in the same space before the midterms. They chose an empty conference room off the hallway that connects Building 20 and Building 21, a central point on Facebooks campus that is easy for employees to get to.

Construction began a few months ago and the room, with its whiteboard walls and clusters of long tables, is set to open for operations Monday. It has been refitted with cables and internet boosters, and new wiring was installed for the monitors and other equipment.

What happens in the War Room will be a last line of defense for Facebook engineers to quickly spot unforeseen problems on and near election days in different countries, Chakrabarti said. Many of the companys other measures are meant to stop disinformation and other problems long before they show up in the War Room.

Once a problem reaches the War Room, the dashboards will be set to spot and track unusual activity, while data scientists and security experts take a closer look. Chakrabarti said the team was particularly on guard for posts that manifested real-world harm, and planned to remove posts that tried to disenfranchise voters by giving incorrect polling data or spreading hoaxes like encouraging people to vote by text message.

The best outcome for us is that nothing happens in the War Room, he said. Everything else we are doing is defenses we are putting down to stop this in the first place.
The owners of Bad To The Bone BBQ have announced that after a two-year run, they have closed their barbecue trailer to join forces with a notable San Antonio barbecue spot.

Hector and Crystal Cabello posted on social media Tuesday that they decided to close the doors for family reasons, just two months after moving the barbecue trailer into a semi-permanent spot in the Lone Star District at 242 E. Cevallos St.
Some important documents in connection with his assets were also seized, reports said.

BHUBANESWAR: Acting on allegations of amassing assets disproportionate to his known sources of income, a team of Odisha Vigilance on Wednesday raided five places belonging to Gagan Pati, junior engineer of Integrated Tribal Development Agency, Gunupur in Rayagada district.

On the strength of a search warrant obtained from the court of special Judge, Berhampur, the vigilance officers conducted simultaneous searches at Patis three-storied building at Siddharth Nagar, Berh-ampur; his fathers house at co-operative colony in Berhampur; his father-in-laws house at Routpeta Street; residential quarter at Khan Sahi, Muniguda; and office room at ITDA office, Gunupur.

Around Rs 30 lakh cash stacked inside a washing machine were seized during the raid. Some important documents in connection with his assets were also seized, reports said.
BRIDGEPORT  For the second time in four years, a local educator has made the final round in the Connecticut Teacher of the Year competition.

Sheena Graham, 57, a music teacher at Harding High School, was tapped this week as one of four finalists for the 2019 honor. The others are Ryley Zawodniak, a fifth-grade teacher in Mansfield, Jennifer Freese, a Newington science teacher and Jessica Harris, a kindergarten-through-second-grade interventionist in Wallingford.

Graham was among 15 semifinalists who were interviewed last week. The four finalists will get visits to their school next Thursday and Friday, according to Kim Wachtelhausen, an education consultant for the Connecticut State Department of Education.

The reaction to Graham being named one of the finalists was instantaneous.

Terrific teacher ... No better person deserving of this. ... Well deserved, came the responses from colleagues when the news broke Tuesday evening on Twitter.

Graham said she was in shock.

To still be considered relevant as I enter what in March will be my 36th year is mind blowing, she said.

Graham has taught music in the district since 1983. She taught at Harding from 1998 to 2008 before transferring to Central High School. During that decade, she brought choirs to music competitions call Fiesta-val, earning dozens of trophies. Graham has since returned to Harding, and this year teaches in a brand-new, state-of-the-art choir room in the new school building.

This is her second time as Bridgeport Teacher of the Year. She has also received the citys Theodore and Margaret Beard Excellence in Teaching Award and has performed twice for Michelle Obama at the White House with the Turnaround Arts Program.

I believe every child deserves the best that we as educators have to offer, Graham said in her state Teacher of the Year application. I believe students need to be challenged.

She said she is often asked why she teaches at Harding. That is where she wants to be, she said.

Alicia Robinson, the Bridgeport school districts director of performing and visual arts, knew Graham as a mentor, colleague and now supervisor.

She sets high expectations ... finds ways to connect ... She is kind, compassionate and truly cares about each of her learners, Robinson wrote in a letter in support of Grahams bid. In a district with extremely limited resources, Sheena makes magic happen for her students.

The Connecticut Teacher of the Year program is run by a council that works with the state Department of Education. The program looks for teachers who have inspired a love for learning in their students, and who have distinguished themselves in the profession, according to the program website.

Each spring, districts are encouraged to name a Teacher of the Year, from which semifinalists are chosen based on submitted applications. Semifinalists are interviewed and four finalists are chosen.

A committee of a dozen or more people then visit the finalists schools to observe the teachers in action and to interview parents, teachers, support staff, students, administrators, and Board members. They then take a vote.

The Connecticut Teacher of the Year goes on to participate in the national Teacher of the Year program.

In 2016, Shaun Mitchell, a Central High English teacher was one of four finalists for the state title. That year, Jahana Hayes, a Waterbury history teacher, went on to win the state and then national title. Hayes is now a candidate for a seat in Congress.

lclambeck@ctpost.com; twitter/lclambeck
WASHINGTON  Rebuilding the Danbury federal penitentiary cost needless expense and exposed female inmates to poor conditions and even danger while temporarily held in Brooklyn, two U.S. Department of Justice reports conclude.

The reports by the departments Office of the Inspector General (OIG) cover the period between July 2013 when the U.S. Bureau of Prisons announced it would convert Danbury from a prison housing women to one housing men, and October 2017 when the construction project was finished.

Originally opened in 1940, FCI Danbury now houses 1,078 inmates  778 male and 300 female  according to the Bureau of Prisons web site.

The original plan to turn it into an all-male prison drew criticism from advocates and 11 lawmakers, including U.S. senators Chris Murphy and Richard Blumenthal. They argued that closing the Northeasts only federal prison for women would increase the distance between them and family visitors.

Authorities reconfigured the prison so it could house both men in a low security setting, and women in both low and minimum (with the difference being low has double-fenced perimeters, and minimum has limited or no fencing).

Construction began in 2015 and the original $10.5 million price tag ballooned to $28 million, the report noted. By itself this was not troubling, because the specifications had changed.

But, the report noted, the switching back and forth on security levels for the womens side of the prison resulted in needless construction of an entry building for $1.7 million. Although the building ultimately was repurposed, it was an unnecessary use of BOP resources that could have been avoided with better planning, coordination, and communication, one of the reports stated.

The report also chastised the Bureau of Prisons for not originally planning a building for programs for female prisoners to the newly reconfigured prison. Such a building was hastily added nine months after the original contract award, at an extra cost of $12.2 million.

A second OIG report released Tuesday takes the BOP to task for jeopardizing the well-being and safety of Danbury women prisoners who were transferred during reconstruction to the federal prison in Brooklyn, N.Y. The Brooklyn detention center is mostly used to house prisoners under federal prosecution.

Because it was not set up to house prisoners long term, the prison space offered limited recreation and programming that female prisoners would have had in Danbury.

Life inside the prison also largely cut them off from sunlight and fresh air, which psychologists say is important to prisoner morale, the report said.

The report also noted that female prisoners were originally scheduled to spend no more than 18 months in Brooklyn. But the actual duration of women imprisoned in Brooklyn was just over two-and-a-half years.

The time period in which about 360 women prisoners from Danbury were housed in Brooklyn - March 2014 to December 2016  coincided with arrests of male prison guards for sexual abuse.

The report did not say that the guards abused women from Danbury, or who would have been serving sentences in Danbury. But it reiterates the prosecutions of three guards for forcing women inmates into sex during that time frame.

Two were found guilty at trial and one pleaded guilty.

In response to the first report, BOP officials said they agreed with the OIGs eight recommendations for improvement.

In the second report, BOP agreed to 10 recommendations.

================

dan@hearstdc.com
DERBY  The gentle strains of Yihan Chans Chinese pipa filled the air.

Moments later, Stephanie Sum, Julie Lai, Barbara Chan and Katherine Cheah, in colorful, flowing dresses, performed a celebratory Umbrella Dance.

Pageantry marked the transformation of what was once Marshall Lane Manor  a 120-bed convalescent facility that closed in 2015  into the Apex International Education Partners Connecticut International Academy, the states first dormitory for international students not associated with a school.

The facility was rebuilt to the tune of $2 million. It houses 15 teenage students from China attending Fairfield Prep, Notre Dame of Fairfield, Lauralton Hall, Easton Country Day, St. Josephs and Sacred Heart Academy. Another five students are scheduled to arrive in January.

What was missing during Wednesdays unveiling were residents fearful that foreign students would pillage their neighborhood. There had been angry calls last fall for the Planning and Zoning commission to be replaced, and threats of lawsuits.

Oh my God, its beautiful, Mayor Richard Dziekan said as he walked through the building. Like many Valley residents, Dziekan had family members who convalesced here during its days as Marshall Lane Manor, run by the Simonetti family. They did a phenomenal job. I talked to the owner and were both exploring ways the kids can perform community service in the Valley.

Thats a requirement for the students, said David Guerrera, who with Feng Cheng are the founders of APEX International Education Partners. The pair met while students at Fairfield University and formed APEX in 2010.

Every other month they are required to perform community service  doing beach clean-ups; working at food banks.

Getting acclimated

APEX, based in Watertown, has 350 Chinese students attending private high schools in Connecticut, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New York and Maryland. Most live with host families. Besides the 15 in the Derby dorm, another 13 live in a smaller dorm at Chase Collegiate School in Waterbury. The cost is $29,500 a year, plus tuition.

They all come from pretty well-off backgrounds, said Chen, the co-owner. Most are interested in pursuing an education in business; some like science. One of our former students is studying music at Berklee College of Music.

Chen said weekends are usually filled with trips.

We are arranging trips to Fairfield, Yale, Sacred Heart and UConn, he said.

Ninety-nine percent want to attend a four-year college in the U.S., added Guerrera.

Students are given breakfast and transported to and from their schools. Dinner is prepared by a Chinese chef, while the Valley Diner caters weekend meals. English as a Second Language is taught from 7:30 to 9:30 p.m. by Jesse Sachs, a Fairfield University senior who lives in Orange. Lights are out at 10:30 p.m.

Anytime a student leaves, they must state where they are going and when they will return. They are not allowed cars, visitors or pets.

We use WeChat (a social media app), which allows us to contact them at anytime, Guerrera said.

A change of purpose

For Anthony Simonetti, who grew up working in his familys Marshall Lane Manor, there were no tears Wednesday. Those fell in 2015 when he announced its closing due to rising expenses, falling occupancy and no buyer in sight.

I was jubilant, said Simonetti of his dorm walk through. For 50 years, my family catered to the elderly. Now the Guerrera family re-purposed this to cater to the youth.

Simonettis family sold the building to APEX in January for $450,000.

It was a race to get this done, said Guerrera. Feng reminded me daily the students were coming in August.

Guerrera and Megan LaPorta were also in the midst of arranging their Oct. 6 wedding

APEX hired the PAC Group in Torrington as general contractors, while David Guerreras parents helped him oversee the work.

Separate wings with housing, showers, a study hall and recreation room were built. There is a common dining room, staff rooms and a patio.

We have two more wings we can work on at our own pace, Guerrera said. The 35,000-square-foot facility can house up to 110 students attending schools within a half-hour drive.

Well probably have 30-40 next August, he said.
BRIDGEPORT  A 16-year-old boy shot in the head and shoulder Thursday afternoon is expected to recover, police said.

His condition is fair, Police Chief Armando Perez said Thursday night. Its just sad. Its a young kid.

Perez said the teen is a Central High School student who was riding in a car with others near the intersection of Norman and Atwater streets at around 2:45 p.m. when an argument with another group of teens is likely to have triggered the shooting.

He took a fragment of a round to his left shoulder and a fragment of a round went into his frontal lobe, Perez said.

Though responding officers and detectives didnt immediately find a victim, at shortly after 3 p.m. police were called by St. Vincents Medical Center, where a gunshot wound victim was dropped off by a private vehicle.

When Victoria Rivera was walking back to her Norman Street home shortly after the shooting, she quickly approached the crime scene tape, with her hand over her heart and her voice shaking as she asked reporters, What happened?

Police blocked off several intersections in the area while detectives investigated. Crime-scene markers were set up in the middle of the street, marking where shell casings fell.

Rivera breathed a sigh of relief after she called her husband, who was in their house.

I have three boys, she said. Theyre not involved in any kind of trouble, but you dont have to be (to get shot) ... you just never know these days.

Rivera described the area as quiet and generally trouble-free, though.

Perez said he went by the hospital Thursday night to check on the teen.

He was alert, he was talking; his mom and dad were with him, he said. Were just hoping for the best.

The police investigation is being aided by nearby surveillance footage, which Perez said should help officers track down potential shooters and make any necessary arrests.

Were going to make an arrest, he said. But right now, all we want is him to get better.

Since police believe the car and those inside it were targeted, and Bridgeport police plan to bump up patrols at the schools on Friday as a precaution, Perez said. He said police believe other students  though it was unclear from what school  might have been the shooter or shooters.

Pamela Figueroa, who lives on nearby North Avenue, said she was surprised to hear gunfire.

I heard three gunshots, Figueroa said. I was confused, because Ive been hearing a lot of fireworks lately. But you can hear the difference between fireworks and gunshots  its a scary sound.
Four more Connecticut residents have tested positive for West Nile virus, bringing the total for this season to 10 cases.

Two of the latest patients are from Bridgeport, one is from Durham, and one is from Southington, the state Department of Public Health announced Thursday.

The four range in age from 50 to over 70, and three of the four required hospitalization. Laboratory tests confirmed the presence of West Nile antibodies in all four patients.

The Bridgeport and Durham patients became ill in mid- to late August, and the Southington patient became ill in the second week of September, officials said.

In August, health officials announced that there were two confirmed cases of West Nile virus in Connecticut, one of whom was a Fairfield resident and the other one was from Newington.

In response to the two Bridgeport cases, Mayor Joseph Ganim is urging residents to Fight the Bite, a social media campaign that City Hall is behind.

"Weve had a lot of rain over the last several weeks that has caused water to gather and pool in containers, ceramics, tires, and other objects around the home, said Bridgeport Director of Health Maritza Bond. Standing water is a leading risk factor and way that mosquitoes breed and become a greater danger to all of us  dump out any standing water around your home.

Bond has been informing and educating people to prevent against Zika and West Nile Virus with the Fight the Bite campaign, now in its second year.

Prevention tips include reducing mosquito breeding grounds around your home by eliminating any standing water and to continue to use mosquito repellent wipes while spending time outdoors, she said.

Bridgeport resident can get insect repellent wipes at the Health Department at 999 Broad Street. Ganim said. Residents are also encouraged to share this information on social media by hash-tagging #FightTheBite.

Between 2000 and 2009 there were 69 confirmed human cases of West Nile in the state and three deaths according to state health officials. From 2010 to 2017 there were 65 cases and no deaths. And statistically in Connecticut, the three worst weeks for the disease are the last two weeks of August and the first week of September.

Since 2000, the worst year for the virus was 2012, with 21 cases.

Officials are urging residents to limit their exposure to mosquitoes by using a repellent when outdoors, keeping insect screens in good repair, removing standing pools of water and staying indoors around dusk when mosquitoes are most active.

jburgeson@ctpost.com
NORTH HAVEN  A town man was sentenced to three years probation Wednesday for his part in an effort to illegally profit from exporting goods to Pakistan on behalf of a company serving that countrys military.

Imran Khan, 44, of North Haven, was sentenced to three years probation Wednesday, according to the Connecticut U.S. attorneys office. He also was given 100 mandated hours of community service and fined $3,000.

According to court documents and statements made in court, from at least 2012 to December 2016, (Khan) and two of his family members engaged in a scheme to purchase goods that were controlled under the Export Administration Regulations (EAR) and to export those goods without a license to Pakistan, in violation of the EAR, Tom Carson of the U.S. attorneys office said in a release.

(T)he three defendants received orders from a Pakistani company that procured materials and equipment for the Pakistani military, requesting them to procure specific products that were subject to the EAR, Carson said in the release. When U.S. manufacturers asked about the end-user for a product, the defendants either informed the manufacturer that the product would remain in the U.S. or completed an end-user certification indicating that the product would not be exported.

After the products were purchased, they were shipped by the manufacturer to the defendants in Connecticut. The products were then shipped to Pakistan on behalf of either the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission (PAEC), the Pakistan Space & Upper Atmosphere Research Commission (SUPARCO), or the National Institute of Lasers & Optronics (NILOP), all of which were listed on the U.S. Department of Commerce Entity List, said Carson. The defendants never obtained a license to export any item to the designated entities even though they knew that a license was required prior to export.

Khan, as well as his father, Muhammad Ismael, and brother, Kamran Khan, were then paid via wire transfer to a U.S. bank account, according to the release.

Ismail, then 67, of Meriden, and Kamran Khan, then 38, of Hamden, each pleaded guilty to international money laundering in March, and were sentenced in July to 18 months in prison, to be followed by three years of supervised release.

Khan pleaded guilty to one count of violating the International Emergency Economic Powers Act in June, according to the release.
Pink abounds. Pink flowers. Pink balloon arches. Pink couches. Pink triple-decker cakes. Pink cutouts of the number seven. The color's whole spectrum - from cotton-candy to medium-rare steak - is on display.

Life-size cutouts of Barbie, the blond-haired, bleached skin monument of girlhood, stand sentinel on the party grounds, tagged in a social media post as being located in Culiacan, a city in Mexico's northwest Sinaloa region. A video captures children running on the grass between a carnival ride and a pink-splashed party room inside as Spanish-language pop music thumps softly in the background. The happy mother who threw the Barbie-themed party for her 7-year-old twins, a dark-haired former beauty queen in high heels, posts images from the event on her Instagram account. "#barbiestyle," she writes.

An over-the-top birthday extravaganza normally would not draw international interest. But the mother throwing the party was not just another loving parent, but the wife of the biggest name in drug trafficking. As first reported by the Los Angeles Times this week, Emma Coronel Aispuro, the wife of alleged Sinaloa Cartel boss Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman, posted the images from the 7th birthday party for the couple's twin daughters.

The images drew the usual social media rubbernecking, but also outrage. Currently awaiting trial in U.S. custody, Guzman is alleged to have run a vicious billion-dollar narcotics empire that had nearly complete control of the American drug supply and left behind a significant body count. But as the alleged kingpin stews in a cell, his wife is hosting parties with the blood money.

"You know that this was not possible without who knows how many deaths and tortures in Mexico, right?" one poster commented in Spanish under Coronel's party pictures.

RELATED: Beauty queen wife of drug lord Joaquin 'El Chapo' Guzman visits him in prison near Texas border

But the showy display of wealth must be equally frustrating for U.S. officials. Although the Justice Department has filed criminal forfeiture papers seeking to confiscate Guzman's reported $14 billion in assets, the government has failed to pocket any of the alleged drug lord's ill-gotten gains.

The romance between Guzman and Coronel runs straight back to Sinaloa, where Guzman's criminal escapades have made him a folk hero. According to the Daily Beast, the then-17-year-old Coronel was from La Angostura. She signed up for a local beauty contest. Per local custom, the contestant threw herself a party on Jan. 6, 2007. The Beast reported that as the occasion kicked into full gear, armed gunman swarmed the town. Planes touched down at the local airport, bearing more gunmen and Guzman.

During the party, Coronel announced she and Guzman were to be married on July 2, 2007 - her 18th birthday. The kingpin and his personal army were gone by the next morning, but Guzman returned a month later after Coronel won the beauty contest. The couple married as planned, then disappeared before a detachment from the Mexican military arrived on orders to arrest the fugitive drug trafficker.

RELATED: Joaquin 'El Chapo' Guzman's beauty queen wife supports him in court after Valentines Day

"I would say what won me over was his way of talking, how he treated me, the way we began to get along - first as friends and from that came everything else," Coronel told the LA Times in a rare 2016 interview. "He tends to win over people by his manner of being, of acting, the way he treats people in general."

Coronel described her marriage to Guzman - 32 years her senior - as an ordeal of secret assignations and long separations as the kingpin attempted to evade Mexican authorities. She also countered the image of her husband as a ruthless killer.

"He is like any other man - of course he is not violent, not rude," Coronel told the Times. "I have never heard him say a bad word. I have never seen him get excited or be upset at anyone."

Coronel was born in the U.S. and raised in Mexico. In 2011, when she gave birth to the couple's twins, she traveled to Los Angeles for the delivery. Both girls automatically had American citizenship, despite the fact that their father was wanted by the U.S. government.

Guzman's current incarceration did not appear to dampen the spirits at the Barbie party for the twins. The social media reaction to an alleged killer's family enjoying the spoils of his work, however, has been harsh.

"They have attacked me," Antonio Tizoc, a photographer who shot the Barbie party and posted pictures online, told the Times. "But in Culiacan it's really normal to have parties like this. Rich and poor, we like big parties."
The wife of the former judge alleged that she and her daughter who lives with her were held hostage by the servant and his accomplices.

Police said the accused stole cash and jewellery worth lakhs of rupees and fled the spot in the car owned by the victims. (Representational Image)

New Delhi: The wife of a former Chief Justice of the Delhi High court was held hostage at her residence allegedly by her servant and accomplices who fled with cash and valuables worth lakhs of rupees, police said Wednesday.

The incident took place on Monday night and was reported to police by the daughter of the former judge Dalip Kumar Kapur who was also at home at the time of the incident.

In her statement to police, Riba Kapur, the 78-year-old wife of the former judge alleged that she and her 45-year-old daughter who lives with her were held hostage by the servant and his accomplices, a police officer said.

Kapur alleged that her daughter was hit by an iron rod by accused, the officer said.

Police said the accused stole cash and jewellery worth lakhs of rupees and fled the spot in the car owned by the victims.

The injured daughter called up the police and informed about the incident.

The servant was hired just four days before the incident, police said, adding that a case has been registered and efforts are on to nab the accused.

Chief Justice Dalip Kumar Kapur, at whose residence in southeast Delhi's New Friends Colony the incident took place, passed away in 2000 due to brain haemorrhage, they said.
WASHINGTON - A major technology company has been telling senators and their staffers that their personal email accounts were targeted by foreign hackers, a senior Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee claimed in a letter to leaders Wednesday.

Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., used the letter, first reported by the Associated Press, to question why the Senate Sergeant at Arms did not have a clear mandate to help protect the personal accounts and devices of senators and their staff as well as the official ones.
A desire to maintain control over its Retiree Health Care Plan led the Midland County Board of Commissioners to unanimously approve contributing a one-time $2 million to the plan.

I want to make sure we are doing as much as we can to maintain control over the decision making of what happens with this plan, rather than having someone in Lansing tell us what to do, County Administrator/Controller Bridgette Gransden said.

In 2017, the state Legislature enacted Public Act 202, requiring all local governmental units to present funding levels to the treasury each year for Other Post-retirement Employee Benefits (OPEB). The act also required that a Retiree Health Care Plan plan will be deemed underfunded if the balance is less than than 40 percent. This is the first year that funding for this plan has reached the 40 percent threshold  at 40.76 percent.

Its important for us not to fall below that 40 percent threshold because once the plan is considered to be in fiscal distress and not funded at an adequate level then the state of Michigan makes us jump through hoops and dictates what we have to do with the plan, Gransden said.

The unfunded liability of the Retiree Health Care Fund stands at over $32 million.

The actuaries want us to put in over $4 million every year, but we are not required to by law, Gransden said.

As long as we are leveraging the one-lump sum were expecting it is going to keep us over the 40 percent mark, unless something really tanks with the market, Gransden said. So, rather than be at the will of Treasury or the state of Michigan, I think it is important for us, while we have the funds available, to put two years of contributions into the plan in 2018.

The plan would take $1 million from the General Fund Reserves. The other million would come from the Health Care Fund Reserves. Employing a self-funded health insurance plan, the county claims are paid out of the Health Care Fund Reserves.

There has been monies built up in the (Health Care Fund Reserves) because what we have budgeted is more than what our claims experience has been, Gransden added. Weve had a couple of years of pretty good claims experience. We expect that will continue. If we were to have a bad year, we would still have money to offset that.

Commissioner Jim Geisler asked, What the percentage would be with the additional $2 million?

We cant tell you that without having the actuaries doing another valuation for us because there are so many variables, responded Gransden.

Commissioner Eric Dorrien inquired if the amount should be greater than $2 million?

I dont really feel comfortable contributing more than that at this point., Gransden said. I think the primary thing right now is that we are over those thresholds that have been set.

The countys other two OPEB plans, the General Employees Retirement System and ACT 345, are in excellent shape at 96.9 percent and 90.36 percent, respectively, well over their required thresholds of 60 percent.
In the great dining dilemma of the Trump administration, there is no neutral territory. To serve is to face accusations of normalization, even complicity. Not to serve is to be tarred as uncivil, lacking proper table manners.

This was the painful lesson learned by the Red Hen of Lexington, Virginia, in June, when the restaurant's staff refused to serve White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders.

The latest restaurant caught in the culinary crosshairs of the country's hyperpartisan moment is the Midtown Tavern in Bozeman, Montana. It's where Donald Trump Jr. and his girlfriend, Kimberly Guilfoyle, formerly of Fox News, were scheduled to appear next week for a rally with Matt Rosendale, the state's Republican auditor, who is competing for the U.S. Senate seat currently held by Democrat Jon Tester.

But when the candidate's team announced the planned appearance on Tuesday, the bar & grill's manager backpedaled.

"That's just not who we are," Jeff Wilcox said, according to the Bozeman Daily Chronicle, repeating what must surely be the mantra of the year, deployed to protest everything from President Donald Trump's policy of separating migrant children from their parents to the actions of the Israeli government. It has also been expressed by figures as disparate as Republican Sen. Jeff Flake of Arizona and the left-wing filmmaker Michael Moore.

But the manager did not attribute the cancellation to the Trump factor. "We just try to stay politically neutral," the manager told the paper. "We're a restaurant." He said he had been unaware of the booking, which was the result of a misunderstanding. The Midtown Tavern "does not intend to take political sides," he told radio station KMMS.

"We're excited to welcome Trump Jr. and Kimberly back to Montana," Rosendale said in the initial statement. "This race is a top priority for the Trump administration and it's an honor to have them join us on the campaign trail. President Trump is now counting on all of us to win this race so we can help him advance his agenda."

Shane Scanlon, a Rosendale spokesman, told the Chronicle that more than 200 people had reserved tickets for the event and that the campaign needed another venue that could accommodate "the unprecedented demand."

The event has been relocated to the Gallatin County Fairgrounds, according to KMMS radio.

A recent CBS poll gave Tester a two-point lead in the race. At the center of Rosendale's campaign is his support for Trump, who carried the state by 20 points in 2016. The president has already made several trips to Montana to boost the Republican candidate.

The president's son has stirred controversy on multiple fronts in recent days. On Sunday, he tweeted a photo of Anderson Cooper standing in waist-deep water during a hurricane, suggesting incorrectly that the CNN anchor was falsifying the danger of the storm. Cooper spent the first 10 minutes of his show Monday night rebutting the claims.

The same day, Trump Jr. posted an image to his Instagram account depicting a juvenile love letter as a way of belittling the accusation of sexual assault leveled by Christine Blasey Ford against Brett Kavanaugh, his father's nominee to the Supreme Court. Flake, a frequent critic of the president, decried the post as "sickening."

It won't be Trump Jr.'s first time in Bozeman. He visited the Rocky Mountains city last year to stump for Republican Rep. Greg Gianforte, who famously body-slammed a reporter during his campaign in the U.S. House special election.
NEW HAVEN  Stepping outside presents a great risk for Nelson Pinos, but students in the city took a risk for him Thursday.

Pinos, a resident of the Annex who has lived in this country for 26 years, has been at First and Summerfield Church on the New Haven Green for 294 days as of Thursday, longer than nine months. He wears an ankle bracelet and has taken sanctuary in the church from federal immigration officials seeking to deport him to Ecuador. Federal immigration officials follow guidance not to enter schools or churches, but if Pinos leaves the church, he could be subject to apprehension.

Nelson, like many others, chose to take sanctuary; its not easy, said Vanesa Suarez, an organizer with Unidad Latina en Accion. He is confined.

About 200 public school students  mostly from Wilbur Cross High School, where Pinos daughter Kelly is a junior  were joined by students from Yale University, community activists and, across the city, students from Southern Connecticut State University, in walking out of school around 11 a.m. and making their way to the downtown church.

We walk out because Nelson cant, Wilbur Cross students chanted.

Cross junior Carlos Jaramillo said administrators offered them school buses to take to the Green, but the students decided against it.

Were not going on a field trip, he said.

At a recent school board meeting, Jaramillo said he felt Cross administrators were not supportive of students such as Kelly, as she processes her trauma. Recently, the Board of Education voted to lay off about 20 school counselors, opting instead to put one full-time social worker in every school, and extending the hours of several part-time social workers.

Suarez, who controlled the megaphone for most of the rally and subsequent march, criticized New Haven Public Schools administrators for harassing student marchers for not following the plan.

Nothing about being here is fun, she said. This isnt a field trip.

As the Cross students began their walk to the church, Kelly Pinos said she felt supported by her fellow students, and basically the whole school is talking about it.

On the steps of the church, however, she choked back tears as she told the crowd that what she feels is pain when she sees her father being separated from her family.

In an opinion piece for the New York Times, Pinos wrote about how her father taking sanctuary has placed a heavy financial and emotional burden on her family, as her younger brother struggles to comprehend why his father cannot come home and Kelly Pinos works a part-time job to help make ends meet for her family.

Several public school administrators monitored the rally and march, communicating through walkie-talkies. Edith Johnson, principal of Wilbur Cross, declined to comment on whether students would face disciplinary action.

Im trying to make sure my kids are safe right now, she said, as Cross students marched down College Street. Later, she told other administrators that the walkout plan beginning at 11 a.m. was not shared with her.

In an emailed statement Wednesday, NHPS Chief Operating Officer Will Clark said the district respects student voice and encourages exploration of thoughts and ideas within the school environment.

NHPS is responsible for the safety of its schools, students and staff and has rules and guidelines with respect to attendance and schedules during the school day. Students are expected to respect and follow the rules responsibly, he wrote. Our schools and staff care deeply about all of our students and work diligently to help them achieve their fullest potential. Wilbur Cross has worked with some concerned students and arranged for a field trip with teachers to the event on Thursday.

The walkout, which began with the high school students, walked into Linsley-Chittenden Hall at Yale University to interrupt a science class, where several university students who had received an email ahead of time asking for their attendance waited. As about one-third of the 150-student lecture left the classroom, the protesters erupted into cheers.

About 30 minutes into the rally outside the church, students from Common Ground High School in Westville began to arrive. Staff from the school handed their students sandwiches from Subway. Joel Tolman, the schools director of development and community engagement, said students at the school would not face consequences.

We are doing our best to support student leadership around this, he said.

Part way into the action, the speaking stopped and the large group on the sidewalk was asked to leave way for a walkway in front of the stairs of the church as emergency personnel walked through. After some time, Suarez said a student passed out from heat exhaustion, and warned the crowd that others may use that incident as a tactic to deter us in the future.

Larissa Martinez, an undocumented immigrant who attends Yale , said too often the struggles of students with parents facing deportation go ignored.

People need to acknowledge this is a reality for people around them, she said.

Suarez began passing around the megaphone, saying student voices were more important.

He matters, and so does his life, and so does his family, said Ana Reyes, a Common Ground student, referring to Pinos.

Local organizer Norm Clement, a confederate of the Quinnipiac tribe, derided the decision to deport Pinos.

We are on stolen land, and no one is illegal on stolen land, he said. My people had no borders.

Organizers led the march from the church to the steps of City Hall to the U.S. District Court on Church Street. Suarez, who handed Board of Alders President Tyisha Walker-Myers a petition with more than 2,000 signatures calling on the city to adopt an official sanctuary city ordinance in June, called on officials to take the necessary steps to make it happen.

I dont think they hear us when we say we want New Haven to be a sanctuary city, she said.

On SCSUs campus, students organized their own action in solidarity. Esteban Garcia, a faculty chairman of the universitys undocumented student support team, said students believed it is important to oppose deportation actions during National Hispanic Heritage Month.

Yale University student Emily Almendarez, whose fathers Temporary Protected Status after leaving Honduras is threatened under the federal government, said the days event goes beyond a hashtag.

Its actual families, she said. You guys have to keep coming out.

brian.zahn@hearstmediact.com
He, however, expressed confidence that the BSP-Janta Congress pact would not impact the Congress.

Lucknow/Bhopal: In a major blow to the Congress, BSP president Mayawati on Thursday announced that her party would tie up with the Janta Congress led by Ajit Jogi for the Chhattisgarh Assembly polls. The BSP also made clear its intentions to go it alone in Madhya Pradesh by releasing the first list of 22 candidates to take on the Shivraj Singh Chouhan-led BJP.

The BSP will fight on 35 seats and Chhattisgarh Janta Congress will contest on 55 seats, Ms Mayawati announced in Lucknow, declaring Mr Jogi as the alliances chief ministerial candidate.

There are 90 seats in the Chhattisgarh Assembly and 230 legislators in Madhya Pradesh Assembly. The BSP snub for the Congress comes at a time when the party was looking to unite Opposition parties against the ruling BJP in both Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh and enter into a seat-sharing arrangement with the Mayawati-led party.

The BSPs decision to dump the Congress is now likely to make the year-end Assembly polls in both the states triangular battles, benefiting the ruling BJP.

Ms Mayawatis decisions, about the poll pact in Chhattisgarh and the announcement of her partys first list for Madhya Pradesh, also put a question mark on the possibility of the Congress joining hands with the BSP in Rajasthan. Ms Mayawati told reporters that the BSP will ally with only those parties which are ready to allocate respectable number of seats to her party.

The alliance partner should also be working for the upliftment of dalits and adivasis. The BJP has been in power in Chhattisgarh for the past 15 years. We will definitely stop it now, she added.

In Chhattisgarh, the dalit population plays an important role in determining election results in regions like Janjgir-Champa, Raigarh and Bastar. Dalits form 11.6 per cent of voters. At present, the BJP has 49 MLAs and the Congress 39 in the 90-member Chhattisgarh Assembly.

Chhattisgarh Pradesh Congress Committee (PCC) president Bhupesh Baghel said, Alliance talks between Congress and BSP have failed in Chhattisgarh. We had offered BSP five seats whereas Mayawatis party wanted more.

He, however, expressed confidence that the BSP-Janta Congress pact would not impact the Congress. Rather, it will hurt ruling BJP in the polls, he said.

People in Chhattisgarh know that Mr Jogi has helped chief minister Raman Singh to come to power in the last three Assembly elections. United BSP and Janta Congress will be seen as the B-team of the BJP in the state, he added.

Chhattisgarh BJP president Dharamlal Kaushik predicted that a triangular contest would benefit the ruling party. The development is a serious setback for Congress, he observed.

Although the BSP has just one MLA in the Chhattisgarh Assembly, the party had garnered 4.27 per cent of votes in the last Assembly elections whereas the difference of votes secured by the ruling BJP and Opposition Congress was a mere 0.72 per cent.

Ms Mayawatis decision to name 22 candidates for Madhya Pradesh Assembly polls followed collapse of talks with the Congress which was allegedly not willing to share 50 seats, as demanded by the BSP.

In its first list announced in Bhopal, the BSP has retained three out of four of its sitting MLAs in Madhya Pradesh. The BJP has strength of 168, while Congress has 56 MLAs in the 230-member Assembly.

Sharing BSP plans for the Madhya Pradesh Assembly polls, state incharge Ram Achal Rajbhar told reporters, We will field candidates in all the 230 Assembly constituencies.

The Congress, however, sounded hopeful of entering into an electoral understanding with the BSP. We have not yet given up hope. Negotiations between the Congress and the BSP are still on, said a Congress spokesman.

Sources said that the BSP sought at least 50 seats out of total 230 Assembly constituencies in MP but the Congress was not willing to share more than two dozen seats.

The BSP wanted to field candidates in all those Assembly seats where it came second in the last Assembly elections. But, the Congress found itself to be in a better position than the BSP to win a majority of these seats. Hence, the alliance talks could not make headway, a Congress leader said.
PORT ORANGE  Despite Ron DeSantis claims he was signaling no message about race when he used the phrase monkey this up while sizing up his black opponents policies during a Fox News appearance this week, about 40 residents of his congressional district rallied in protest Thursday.

Waving signs, including one reading DeSantis DeRacist, the residents rallied for about 45 minutes outside one of the congressmans offices in Port Orange City Hall.

Lynn Hendrickson, a Palm Coast retiree, said it wasnt the first time DeSantis has disappointed her on matters of race. She recounted last October, when a batch of Ku Klux Klan fliers were left on driveways in Port Orange and Nancy Soderberg, the Democratic candidate for DeSantis congressional seat, called on him to speak out against hatred.

His silence has been deafening until yesterday, Hendrickson said Thursday. Yesterday, he showed everybody in District 6 and in Florida exactly what he thought of the newly elected candidate Andrew Gillum and of the letters that had been distributed in our district with his wonderful statement, monkey this up. Ron showed his true colors yesterday.

Previous 3/3 HIDE CAPTION Residents of Floridas Congressional District 6, including Josephine Pope, speaking, rally in opposition to U.S. Rep. Ron DeSantis, Republican candidate for governor. DeSantis use of the phrase monkey this up while discussing Democatic candidate Andrew Gillums policies has generated cries of racism. [News-Journal/Mark Harper] 1/3 HIDE CAPTION From left, Jack Wrightington, Sue Genthner and Greg Spradlin, president of the Port Orange Democrats club, wave signs outside Ron DeSantis congressional office in Port Orange City Hall Thursday. They were part of a rally of about 40 residents of DeSantis congressional district to rally against him following his victory in the Republican primary for governor. [News-Journal/Mark Harper] 2/3 HIDE CAPTION Palm Coast resident Lynn Hendrickson speak at a rally against racism Thursday outside Ron DeSantis Port Orange congressional office. [News-Journal/Mark Harper] 3/3 HIDE CAPTION Residents of Floridas Congressional District 6, including Josephine Pope, speaking, rally in opposition to U.S. Rep. Ron DeSantis, Republican candidate for governor. DeSantis use of the phrase monkey this up while discussing Democatic candidate Andrew Gillums policies has generated cries of racism. [News-Journal/Mark Harper] 1/3 HIDE CAPTION From left, Jack Wrightington, Sue Genthner and Greg Spradlin, president of the Port Orange Democrats club, wave signs outside Ron DeSantis congressional office in Port Orange City Hall Thursday. They were part of a rally of about 40 residents of DeSantis congressional district to rally against him following his victory in the Republican primary for governor. [News-Journal/Mark Harper] 2/3 HIDE CAPTION Palm Coast resident Lynn Hendrickson speak at a rally against racism Thursday outside Ron DeSantis Port Orange congressional office. [News-Journal/Mark Harper] 3/3 HIDE CAPTION Residents of Floridas Congressional District 6, including Josephine Pope, speaking, rally in opposition to U.S. Rep. Ron DeSantis, Republican candidate for governor. DeSantis use of the phrase monkey this up while discussing Democatic candidate Andrew Gillums policies has generated cries of racism. [News-Journal/Mark Harper] Next

Ron DeSantis stands for hate, bigotry, prejudice and white supremacy, she said. This is not who we are as a nation. We are better than this.

But DeSantis  a regular on Fox who rode the endorsement of President Trump to win his party primary Tuesday  told Sean Hannity his warning to voters not to monkey this up by electing Gillum, had zero to do with race.

The uproar over the remark continued Thursday and one longtime analyst of Florida political campaigns said she expects it could cloud the contest through Election Day on Nov. 6.

DeSantis original remark Wednesday morning during an interview on the Fox News channel was blasted as racist by Democratic critics and called an example of gutter politics by Gillum. The Democratic nominee, who also appeared on network news programs, said DeSantis was taking a page directly from the campaign manual of Donald Trump.

After responding with only a statement from a campaign spokesman during the day, DeSantis appeared on Wednesday evening with Hannity  who campaigned with DeSantis in July  to explain himself.

Did you in any way, do you in any way think that was something that was misstated or racist in any way? Hannity asked.

It has zero to do with race, Sean. It has everything to do with whether we want Florida to continue to go in a good direction, building off the success or do we want to turn to left-wing, socialist policies, which will absolutely devastate our state? DeSantis replied.

And heres the thing, I believe people should be judged based on their ability and character regardless of race. But its because of that that I know that socialism wont work in Florida. Its not good for any race, color or creed. So this is not about race. This is about ideas and principles. And Im not going to let the Democrats and Andrew Gillum try to obscure a debate about whether his tax increases, his single-payer healthcare plan, his desire to abolish ICE  whether that is something that is acceptable for Florida. I dont think it is and I dont care what color you are.

DeSantis didnt express any regrets or say whether he recognized that the remark could be considered offensive, and Hannity didnt press him on it.

Hes following the Trump model to the Nth degree  never apologize for anything, said University of South Florida political scientist Susan MacManus.

MacManus predicted DeSantis remark will remain an issue throughout the campaign. It will be a get-out-the-vote tool for Democrats from now til Nov. 6, MacManus said.

The appearance with Hannity on Fox News came after the network had earlier sought to distance itself from the remark.

Fox News host Sandra Smith said Wednesday afternoon that the network does not condone this language and wanted to make our viewers aware that he has since clarified his statement.

Florida Republicans reacted Thursday in different ways.

Carlos Curbelo, a South Florida congressman, told MSNBC he doesnt know DeSantis as a racist.

Ive never heard him say anything disparaging about any ethnic group or any person for that matter, Curbelo said. But Ill also say that that was just a stupid comment to make, one that was obviously offensive to a lot of people.

Gov. Rick Scott, running for U.S. Senate, said DeSantis could have said it more artfully and: Ron cares about the state and I know he didnt mean any ill will.

U.S. Rep. Matt Gaetz, who campaigned with DeSantis during the weeks leading up to the primary, posted a meme on Twitter with quotes using the word monkey attributed to President Obama, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and Sen. Dianne Feinstein. The quotes were not used in the context of assessing Gillums policies and used the more familiar colloquialisms, monkey around, and monkey wrench, rather than DeSantis less common phrasing.

 Reporting from Zac Anderson of GateHouse Florida was used in this report.
The Bench concluded arguments on petitions filed by Dr Thapar and others challenging the arrest of five activists.

New Delhi: The Supreme Court on Thursday reserved verdict on petitions filed by Romila Thapar and others seeking a probe by a special investigation team (SIT) into the arrest of five activists on August 28 in connection with the Bhima Koregaon incidents and seeking their release on bail.

A Bench of Chief Justice Dipak Misra and Justices A.M. Kanwilkar and D.Y. Chandrachud, reserved verdict after perusing the documents and part of case diary submitted by the Maharashtra government in a sealed cover.

While senior counsel Abhishek Manu Singhvi, Anand Grover and Vrinda Grover pleaded for SIT probe, the Additional Solicitor General Tushar Mehta for Maharashtra and senior counsel Harish Salve for the original complainant in the Bhima Koregaon case strongly opposing any such probe.

The Bench asked the State to submit on Saturday to the Registry the entire case diary and evidence available on record to justify the arrest of activists. The CJI told the counsel we will look into all the letters and evidence but we will not comment on merits.

On Wednesda,y the court had asked the ASG to produce one best document available showing the involvement of the activists. On Thursday, the ASG pointed out to the court several documents, which would show the active involvement of the five activists.

The Bench concluded arguments on petitions filed by Dr Thapar and others challenging the arrest of five activists. The five activists Varavara Rao, lawyer Sudha Bhardwaj, Arun Ferreira, Vernon Gonsalves and Gautam Navlakha were taken into custody from different parts of the country on August 28. The next day the apex court had directed that they be kept under `house arrest and this has been extended further till the pronouncement of order in the petitions.

Resuming his arguments, the ASG submitted that no interference should be allowed in criminal matters in the garb of PIL. He said the court should take into consideration the disclosures made in the letters seized, to drive home the point, that the activists are actively involved and connected to the case under investigation. He said the issue of links with banned organisation like CPI Maoists is too serious which the court cant ignore lightly. Mr Salve cautioned the court from interfering in this matter. He said one could have any ideology but have to draw a line when it comes to unlawful activities. He said I am suggesting the contours where free speech ends and unlawful activity begins. If Your Lordships feel they are on the trial of unlawful activity, then investigation should go on. He argued another man might interpret that one mans freedom struggle as anti-national activities. To what extent we allow it. Even senior political leaders had earlier said that the present Constitution is wrong. That is not sedition. But what amounts to sedition are unlawful activities, he said. The question before the court he said was to examine whether the investigating officer should be allowed to investigate certain unlawful activities. We are on a trail of unlawful activities. Our judiciary is robust, he said opposing the plea for a court monitored SIT headed by a retired Supreme Court judge. Salve said that in earlier cases like 2G scam the court has appointed SIT to prevent any derailment in investigation. This was done because those allegedly involved were Ministers who could influence the trial. But here the question was different. SIT can come in only when investigation is being detailed. If a policeman picks up a wrong man, the statement has to be recorded before a magistrate. I dont think we can pass a blanket order that we dont trust high courts, Mr Salve said.
Police are searching for a man who they say stabbed two people after an argument over a towed car in the Eastex area Thursday morning.

Officers responded to a call from an apartment complex near Shady Lane Park around 4 a.m. and found a man and woman who had each been stabbed several times.
Federal inmates at a privately run jail in San Antonio have been getting drugs and other contraband from guards, records show.

Over the past year, four employees at the Central Texas Detention Facility have faced prosecution for smuggling or trying to smuggle contraband into the jail, which holds pretrial inmates for the U.S. Marshals Service and is operated by Florida-based The GEO Group.

Among them is ex-GEO guard Abigail Jolynn Abrego, 28, who was caught in a sting in November trying to smuggle methamphetamines to an inmate. U.S. District Judge Xavier Rodriguez sentenced her on Wednesday to 57 months in federal prison and her 55-year-old boyfriend, Leonard Belmares, to 46 months in prison for his role in the crime. The pair were caught meeting with undercover agents for what they thought was crystal methamphetamine.

I commend the U.S. Attorneys Office, the FBI and our U.S. Marshals Service personnel on their collaborative success in this investigation, said U.S. Marshal Susan Pamerleau, who was sworn in Monday. Their hard work and diligent efforts resulted in justice being served today.

And last week, former GEO guard Jewel Roberto Jefferson, 37, pleaded guilty to trying to smuggle heroin and methamphetamines to another inmate, Brian Keith Gonzalez, 38. Court records show Gonzalez used a smuggled cell phone to call Jefferson and arrange for delivery of the drugs through an intermediary. The intermediary was working with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, which set up a sting that snared Jefferson and Gonzalez, who faces sentencing in December.

Next week, former GEO employee Ray Alexander Barr, 29, faces up to 20 years in prison for his guilty plea to trying to smuggle methamphetamines and alcohol to an inmate in December 2016. Barr made some calls to arrange for delivery of the contraband from inside the jail, but he was arrested after he met with a confidential informant working with the FBI and U.S. Marshals Service, records show.

Another jail officer, Ronnie Ray Riles III, 27, faces trial in October over charges that he was smuggling contraband that included cell phones, cigarettes and drugs to inmates. One confidential informant told federal agents that Riles smuggled to him a cell phone, cigarette and alcohol. On Aug. 4, 2017, when another inmate was stabbed, the informant said Riles passed out alcohol in cleaning bottles for $100 each. Riles was caught after meeting with undercover FBI agents for what he thought was methamphetamines, court records said.

All of the cases are being prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorney Sarah Wannarka.

Guillermo Contreras covers federal court and immigration news in the San Antonio and Bexar County area. Read him on our free site, mySA.com, and on our subscriber site, ExpressNews.com. | gcontreras@express-news.net | Twitter: @gmaninfedland
After enduring two trials, 34-year-old Michael Enoch was found not guilty Wednesday of gunning down a man who had been arguing with his girlfriend in 2016.

A Bexar County jury deliberated for three hours before reaching the verdict in Judge Laura Parkers court, a year after another jury couldnt reach a unanimous decision, forcing a mistrial.

Attorneys Robert Gebbia and Daniel De La Garza argued on Enochs behalf, saying that he had maintained his innocence for the last two years.

I think that a lot of people wouldve backed down and said I'll take the plea bargain, De La Garza said. But he said I want to have a jury to find out what they think is right and find out what actually happened.

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He said jurors looked at every piece of evidence, and that prosecutors did a fantastic job, but that this just wasnt the case for them to win.

This should have never been retried. It should have been a dismissal, De La Garza said. But they do what they do and I think that the state did a great job but they just came up short in this case.

In October 2016, a man interrupted an argument 29-year-old Darrel Keith Gentry Jr. had been having with his girlfriend, Tomisha Tomlin, about their vehicle in an apartment complexs parking lot in the 1300 block of Rigsby.

After a brief exchange, police said the suspect fired two shots, fatally wounding Gentry.

Two months after the killing, Enoch was identified by San Antonio police as a suspect in Gentrys death when investigators received a tip via Crime Stoppers.

Police had a few witnesses, including Tomlin, who said that they saw Enoch at the scene. Tomlin testified Tuesday.

De La Garza said it was a wrongful identification that police ran with after receiving the tip.

It was always a whodunit kind of thing, he said.

RELATED: Family of woman who escaped alleged serial killer speaks out

During Enochs second trial, which began Tuesday, De La Garza pointed to one crucial moment in the incident that ruled out his client as the shooter: The suspect uttered Tomlins nickname, Missy.

In the incident, Gentry was cited as saying That gun dont phase me, at which point the suspect said Move, Missy, before shots were fired.

De La Garza said Enoch didnt know Tomlin or her nickname.

That was not Michael Enoch, he said. That was someone who knew Missy.

De La Garza said cases like this are the ones that can lead to wrongful convictions.

Enoch, who cannot be tried in this case again because of double jeopardy, is entitled to clearing his record of this case, his lawyer said.

After two years in custody, Enoch was set to be released from the Bexar County Jail on Wednesday night, De La Garza said.

I think we need justice for Mr. Gentry, he said. And I think the real killer is still out there, and we need to go find him.
A dust explosion in a building on the Toyota campus on San Antonio's South Side started a fire Thursday morning, officials said.

San Antonio Fire Department spokesman Joe Arrington said the fire was reported around 9:55 a.m. in a manufacturing subsidiary on the Toyota campus. Toyota has its own firefighters, who were assisted by 18 San Antonio fire fighting units, including medics and HazMat.

RELATED: NWS: Scattered storms hit San Antonio before sustained rainfall this weekend

No injuries were reported and the fire appears to be out.

"Team member safety will remain our top priority while a cause is determined and the supplier evaluates a safe return to their production," a Toyota spokesperson said in a statement.

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
The meeting is taking place on Pakistans request and the agenda for the meeting has not been finalised.

New Delhi: The foreign ministers of India and Pakistan will meet on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) in New York next week, the government announced on Thursday, the first such high-level engagement since suspension of dialogue between the two nations after the Pathankot air base terror attack in 2016.

Announcing the meeting between external affairs minister Sushma Swaraj with her Pakistani counterpart Shah Mahmood Qureshi, MEA spokesperson Raveesh Kumar, however, made it clear that the proposed meeting would not amount to a resumption of the Indo-Pak dialogue and that India agreed to the meeting following a request from Pakistan.

He also insisted the decision doesnt change Indias position on cross-border terrorism.

During the meeting, likely to take place next week after the UN General Assembly debate begins on September 25, India is expected to strongly raise the issue of terrorism emanating from the Pakistani soil.

The Swaraj-Qureshi meeting will be the first engagement at this level since January 2016 when New Delhi halted the dialogue with Islamabad in the aftermath of the Pathankot terror attack  in which seven security personnel were killed  for which India holds Pakistan-based groups responsible.

Indo-Pak ties have nose-dived since then in view of a number of terror strikes by Pakistan-based groups, which India retaliated by carrying out surgical strikes in September 2016 across the line of control (LoC).

India has been maintaining that terror and talks cannot go together. I must distinguish between a meeting and dialogue. This does not indicate any change in policy as far as our stand on terrorism and cross-border terrorism is concerned, the MEA spokesperson said at a media briefing ahead of the Swaraj-Qureshi meeting. The date for the two foreign ministers meeting was being finalised by the permanent missions of the two countries in New York, he said, adding that the agenda for the meeting is yet to be finalised.

Ms Swaraj is scheduled to leave for New York on September 22 morning and return on September 30.

The last foreign ministers-level talks were held during Ms Swarajs visit to Islamabad in December 2015 to attend the Heart of Asia Summit, where she had met the then Pakistan foreign minister Sartaj Aziz.

After the meeting, the two sides had announced resumption of Indo-Pak dialogue under the comprehensive bilateral format, but the initiative did not take off after Pakistan-based terror groups attacked the Pathankot air base in Punjab.

Mr Kumar said that Ms Swaraj would also attend the Saarc foreign ministers meeting on the sidelines of the UNGA in New York. India agreed to Swaraj-Qureshi meeting following a letter to Prime Minister Narendra Modi by his Pakistani counterpart Imran Khan, seeking a ministerial interaction on the sidelines of the UNGA.
Two San Antonio area men were arrested Wednesday after they allegedly scammed at least four families, promising to do foundation work that was never completed.

Robert Berry and Preston Stephens, who own A&J Foundation and Construction, are facing multiple charges after a year-long investigation. Both were charged with theft of the elderly, money laundering and exploiting elderly individuals.

A Selma police detective began looking into the business in September 2017, when a 66-year-old man reported that he paid the company more than $11,000 to expand his home.

RELATED: SAPD: Man threatened to shoot apartment employees after eviction

The check was cashed, but the work was never started, according to their arrest affidavit.

When the man called Berry to ask about the delay, Berry told him he filed for bankruptcy. He told the man he'd pay him back and gave him a number for his attorney, according to the affidavit.

Detectives discovered there were no bankruptcy filings for the company or for Berry, however. The attorney's number also turned out to be "bogus," according to the affidavit.

The detective also discovered two families were suing Berry for similar reasons.

One of those families paid nearly $20,000 for work that wasn't completed, while another paid more than $14,000, according to the affidavit.

Another woman told police she lost more than $100,000 to the men.

Both men were arrested on $55,000 bonds, according to jail records.
Schertz police opened an investigation Thursday after a student said a man tried to persuade them to get into his car near a Universal City bus stop.

According to a Facebook post from Schertz-Cibolo-Universal City ISD, the student refused and notified campus administrators when they arrived at Wilder Intermediate School.
A San Antonio man disregarded his no contact order and was arrested a second time after he threatened to shoot apartment leasing office employees, according to San Antonio police.

Jason Paul, 43, was arrested Wednesday on suspicion of retaliation, but his issues with the apartment complex date back to July.
Buzz in the political circle is that the BJP and JD (U) are likely to contest on an equal number of seats in Bihar.

Patna: RLSP chief Upendra Kushwaha is rumoured to have started feeling uncomfortable ever since JD(U) claimed that honourable seat sharing agreement has been reached with the BJP.

Sources say that Mr Kushwaha is reportedly upset with the BJP for not consulting him on seat sharing for the 2019 general elections. Some of the leaders even went to an extent by saying that ignoring Upendra Kushwaha will prove fatal for the NDA in Bihar.

Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumars closed-door meeting with BJP president Amit Shah in New Delhi on Wednesday has also made the RLSP leadership uncomfortable. Sources said both the leaders met to discuss seat-sharing arrangements between the two NDA partners for the 2019 general elections.

Seat sharing arrangements cant be done without consulting other coalition partners of the NDA. Our party has no information regarding any such developments. We will wait for the BJP to discuss the issue with all partners, Senior RLSP leader Jitendra Nath told this newspaper.

Buzz in the political circle is that the BJP and JD (U) are likely to contest on an equal number of seats in Bihar. After the state executive meeting on Sunday, JD(U) leader RCP Singh had claimed that discussions with BJP over seat sharing were in final stages and an official announcement will be made soon.

Reports suggest that CM Nitish Kumar during the meeting had announced that JD(U) will be getting an honourable number of seats for the 2019 general elections.

Amid growing uneasiness between the JD(U) and RLSP over seat sharing issues, the Mahagathbandhan has once again started wooing Mr Kushwaha.

According to sources, RJD leader Tejashwi Yadav may extend fresh invitations to RLSP chief Upendra Kushwaha who is considered a powerful Koeri leader, the largest OBC caste group after the Yadavs in Bihar. Koeris form around 10 per cent of voters in the state. With Muslims (15 per cent) and Yadavs (14 per cent) already on its side, the RJD feels that Mr Kushwahas entry in Mahagathbandhan may cause a massive dent to JD (U)s voter base in Bihar.

Senior RLSP leader Jitendra Nath however, downplayed the speculation and said that the political scenario in Bihar has changed and our partys support base has increased in last fifteen years. Ignoring Mr Kushwaha is not easy for political parties in Bihar. But right now we are waiting for the BJP to call our party for discussions. Any speculations regarding RLSP holding talks with Mahagathbandhan leaders are baseless.
Ace photographer Ayesha Taleyarkhan on her lifelong love affair with the maximum city that she has captured through her lens.

Years ago, when Ayesha Taleyarkhan became the chief photographer of Business India, little did she envisage that while exploring her beloved city, it would become a magnificent obsession to record its many-splendoured facets. In 2002, this culminated in her first coffee-table book, Bombay: Balconies And Verandahs, where she captured the sheer diversity and variety of Mumbais balconies, where jharoka, Art Deco, Gothic, neo-classical and vernacular styles exist cheek-by-jowl.

Eleven years on, she revisited the topic with Beyond Bombay Balconies. The earlier publisher had jettisoned the underbelly of Mumbai  which is its soul  for glamour and glitz, like rejecting a picture of the unique chawl-style verandah. In my revised edition, I could put in what I wanted, she admits with candour.

Her first book was swiftly followed by A Day In The Life Of Bombay, where she documented and picturised 24 hours of the city that famously never sleeps. Four am for instance could mean returning home from a late night do for a party bird and a time to wake up and set up shop for a flower-stall owner earning his keep, she elaborates.

Then came Stree: Woman Of India and The Black & White Edition, where she covered street life not just from Mumbai but from places as far away as Burma, Africa and South America, encompassing her travels abroad, and Under The Sun, on the vendors of Mumbai. Admirers of her works include theatre personality Alyque Padamsee, eminent city architect Rahul Mehrotra and ex-mayor Indu Shahani, who took copies of her book Stree to distribute as mementoes to delegates at an international womens conference abroad.

Considering she pretty much operates on her own, has she ever had a bad experience when out on the streets in the wee hours of the day? Never! Ayesha staunchly defends her Mumbai. Lovely city. Lovely people. These are the ones I grew up with. Why should I be scared of them? She recalls one incident where she had heard about an area where during Ramzan, huge quantities of food are cooked in cauldrons and distributed to the poor. Wanting to photograph it, she turned up on the deserted street, only to be accosted aggressively by a man who demanded what the heck she was doing there and who she was. When she timidly explained her mission, he swung into action, organised the entire shindig and made sure she got the best possible shots.

Ayeshas creative juices took a 180-degree turn a couple of years ago  Not planned. It just happened  when she decided to explore the possibility of integrating and super-imposing her photos to create something wholly off-the-beaten path. I dont think this has ever been attempted before. Its so exciting that you yourself dont know whatll be the end result.

What she got was a series of dramatic abstract photo-paintings that are a riot of colours, designs and diverse textures. This photo art as she calls it has blurred the lines between photography and art to create a new medium. I then transfer it onto canvas or paper and frame it. But this crossover doesnt always work. Some images dont combine as well as others, so patience and skill is required to create the right effect, she signs off. Having had several exhibitions in Mumbai where the response was more than positive, she is now gearing up for a weeklong exhibition in Pune later this year.
The H-E-B-anchored Shops at Lincoln Heights near Alamo Quarry Market has been sold to a company linked to a Dallas real estate firm and a Midland oil company.

The 23-acre shopping center, at the crossing of Basse Road and Broadway just north of Alamo Heights, was purchased Sept. 7 by JMCR Lincoln Heights, a company co-managed by Robert Dozier, who heads the retail division of Dallas real estate firm Lincoln Property Co., county property records show.

Another manager of JMCR is Adam Rubinson, who is vice president of JM Cox Family Management. That company is a general partner in Midland oil company JM Cox Resources, led by President Kelly Cox, according to state corporate filings and federal securities filings.

RELATED: USAA cutting 265 real estate jobs

Dozier and a representative of JM Cox Resources didnt respond to requests for comment. Rubinson couldnt be reached for comment.

The purchase price was undisclosed, but the Bexar Appraisal District assessed the shopping center at $45.9 million this year. The propertys value has skyrocketed in recent years, rising nearly 60 percent from its assessment of $28.9 million in 2015.

The shopping center has an H-E-B, Stein Mart, Stone Werks, Zoes Kitchen, Panera Bread and a location of Austin favorite Torchys Tacos, as well as other retail stores.

It had been owned since January 2017 by a partnership affiliated with Blackstone, one of the worlds largest private equity firms. The sale this month comes shortly after another partnership linked to Blackstone bought the JW Marriott San Antonio Hill Country Resort & Spa, a 1,002-room resort on the far Northeast Side.

Paula Chirhart, Blackstones senior vice president of external relations, didnt respond to a request for comment.

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
Eleven people were killed when a bus travelling from Zambia crashed in Polokwane yesterday morning.

Eleven people are confirmed to be deceased, Limpopo Department of Transport spokesperson Matome Moremi said.

Moremi said eight women and three men died.

Thirty people survived with slight injuries, but an additional nine, including a driver, were critically injured. One of the injured has been airlifted to Polokwane Hospital.

There were no other vehicles involved, said Moremi.

The preliminary assessment was that a wheel may have burst on the bus, causing it to lose control and roll off the highway over a trench.

Heavy lifting equipment had to be brought out to free the injured and the deceased.

The bus was branded Royal Africa Logistics.

The crash occurred on the N1 in a southerly direction, between Mokgopone and Mokopane.

The report that we have is that it was a bus coming from Zambia to Gauteng, said Moremi.

He added that so far, the injured people on the bus verbally confirmed that they were from Zambia.

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Asks him to appear before it for breaking civic bodys seal at premises.

New Delhi: The Supreme Court on Wednesday issued a contempt notice against Delhi BJP chief and MP Manoj Tiwari, who had allegedly broken the seal of a premises which was being run in violation of the Delhi Master Plan, and directed him to appear before it on September 25.

It indicates a defiant attitude by the Member of Parliament, Manoj Tiwari, the court said referring to a media report of yesterday on the issue.

While also taking serious note of a report filed by the apex court-mandated monitoring committee in this regard, a bench headed by Justice Madan B. Lokur observed that it was unfortunate that an elected representative should try to defy the orders of the top court.

The bench, also comprising Justices S. Abdul Nazeer and Deepak Gupta, took cognisance of the panel report and said it reflected a rather disturbing state of affairs.

It is rather unfortunate that an elected member should try to defy the orders of this Court. Taking cognisance of the Report submitted by the Monitoring Committee which discloses violation of orders of this Court and interference in the administration of justice which amounts to Contempt of Court, we issue notice to the alleged contemnor, Manoj Tiwari, returnable on September 25, the bench ordered.

In its report, the monitoring committee has said that despite repeated directions of this court, the members of political parties and other such persons are intentionally and deliberately violating and showing utter disgrace to the directions passed by the court for political gains.

Senior advocate Ranjit Kumar, assisting the court as an amicus curiae in the Delhi sealing matter, placed the committees report before the bench and said an FIR has been lodged against Tiwari for allegedly breaking the seal of the premises which was being used as a dairy.

He said the premises has been re-sealed and video of the incident was also annexed with report of the committee, which has suggested stringent action in the matter.

The Report shows a rather disturbing state of affairs where MP Manoj Tiwari is alleged to have broken the seal of some premises despite sealing operations continuing in terms of the orders passed by this court, the bench said.

The top court directed Tiwari to remain personally present before it on September 25 to explain why contempt action should not be initiated against him.

The apex court had earlier too taken a strong note of interference in the working of the monitoring committee, which has been mandated to identify and seal illegal constructions in the national capital.

An FIR against Tiwari was lodged by the East Delhi Municipal Corporation for allegedly breaking the seal of the premises in Gokalpuri area in north-east Delhi.
The very beginning of Islamic education in Nigeria began when the Islamic faith entered the country. For many centuries, there have been Muslims and Christians within the same land and both have always wanted their children to be educated and successful in life.

Image source: thedefenderngr.com

Islamic education in Nigeria historical background

Everything began around the 9th century when the now Northern part of the country was ruled by Mai Idris Alooma. This was the time when the Islamic faith took its place in the hearts of many Nigerians and in a great part of the country. With the spreading of the religion, other cultural and traditional aspects spread, too, and it was necessary to invent a new system of education for Muslim children.

Image source: static01.nyt.com

READ ALSO: How special education began in Nigeria

The religion became really widely spread in the northern region of the country and started its gradual movement to the south where it found more devoted new followers.

Then, there came Arab merchants who were entering the lands from the north. These merchants crossed the Niger River and settled down in the southwestern regions. This is how the Islamic education in Nigeria spread over the northern parts. In the southwest areas, as its believed that the Islamic religion and culture came from Mali.

This was the time while there was still no Christianity in Nigeria because the European missionaries had not arrived.

Image source: robertharding.com

READ ALSO: Scheme of work for Nigerian primary schools and NERDC

These people from Mali were actually the first to bring the new Islamic education in Nigeria. There still have been no Portugal missionaries who would bring their faith with them. There have only been contacts with people from the same continent and with the same similar beliefs. The people from Mali were the ones who erected the first Islamic schools in Nigeria between the 14th and 15th centuries.

Further development of the Islamic education system in Nigeria

Image source: guardian.ng

By the 19th century, the Islamic education has become a part of peoples life. The ones who were involved in the school teaching usually contributed a great deal of their efforts to build mosques and other religious places. The very first mosque within Yoruba land was built in 1550 in the current center of the Islamic education.

They thought, the more mosques and other cultural buildings there were, the higher the spirit of the local people was and the more locals and foreigners could serve their spiritual needs in such places. Owing to this thought, there appeared more and more mosques around the country and now practically every big city in those lands has its big mosque.

Image source: dailytrust.com.ng

In the southwestern parts of the country the number of people who are loyal to the Islamic beliefs is very scanty. Due to this fact, there are not many mosques in this area and even if there were many, they would not have enough people for services.

Objectives of Islamic education in Nigeria

Image source: 36ng.ng

Today, the Islamic education is aimed at the development and growth of the entire personality. Its not just teaching and learning subjects; its also keeping an eye on the way childrens personalities unfold and develop.

One of the modern objectives of the Islamic education in Nigeria is to develop the Muslim side of education.

Image source: nyt.com

Source: UGC

During the times of colonization, Muslim parents did not want to send their children to Christian schools, fearing that due to the education, their children would turn into Christians.

Image source: pulse.ng

Source: UGC

Muslim education in Nigeria should not mean rejecting everything thats not authentically Muslim. Its necessary to understand that no matter how strong the faith may be, an educated person in the modern world needs to know other areas of learning and knowledge.

Theres still a lot to do in order to change the way people treat the very idea of education and thus help more children and youngsters have better future owing to the benefits provided by education.

READ ALSO: What is child-friendly school environment?

Source: nigerianfinder.com

Source: Legit.ng
- The police has invited Senator Ademola Adeleke for questioning

- He is being accused of being involved in examination malpractice

- The police said he would be arraigned before a court

The Nigerian police has summoned the candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) in the coming Osun state gubernatorial election, Senator Ademola Adeleke, to appear before it over alleged examination malpractice.

In a statement released by deputy commissioner of police, Jimoh Moshood, who is the spokesperson of the police on Wednesday, September 19, it was claimed that the senator and some other persons were involved in malpractice in 2017.

The police ordered Adeleke and four other persons to report to the Force Headquarters in Abuja for arraignment in court.

READ ALSO: 2019: I will contest for governorship election in Lagos - Jimi Agbaje reveals

Read full statement below:

Examination Malpractice, Criminal Conspiracy, Personation, Breach of Duty, Aiding and Abetting against Senator Ademola Adeleke (PDP Governorship Aspirant in the 22nd September, 2018 Gubernatorial Election in Osun State) and four (4) others namely; MR Sikiru Adeleke, Alhaji Aregbesola Mufutau (Principal of Ojo-Aro Community Grammar School, Egbedore LGA, Osun State), Mr Gbadamosi Thomas Ojo (School Staff responsible for the registration of candidates for NECO), Mr Dare Olutope (School Teacher who facilitated the commission of the crime).

The police asked Senator Ademola Adeleke to appear before its office in Abuja. Credit: Facebook, Nigerian Police Force

Source: Facebook

On 21st July 2017, the Osun State Police Intelligence Bureau (SIB) received and acted on an actionable intelligence about an ongoing examination malpractice involving Senator Ademola Adeleke and Sikiru Adeleke at OJO/Aro Community Grammar School in Osun state.

When the Police operative arrived at the school, only Sikiru Adeleke was found seated for the examination while Senator Ademola Adeleke seat was vacant and was suspected to have escaped before the arrival of the Police operatives.

Further investigation revealed that both Senator Ademola Adeleke and his brother Sikiru Adeleke registered and were sitting for the National Examination Council Examination (NECO) 2017 as internal candidates impersonating students of the School at the ages of 57years and 42years respectively. This crime was facilitated by the principal of the school, and two other members of staff of the school for which they are under investigation and being charged to court.

The principal of the school, Alhaji Aregbesola Mufutau, the staff responsible for registration, Gbadamosi Thomas Ojo and a teacher Dare Olutope were arrested on 21 July 2017. Senator Ademola Adeleke was arrested on 27 July 2017 and Sikiru Adeleke was arrested on 8 August 2017.

The police accused Senator Adeleke of examination malpractice Credit: Facebook, Nigerian Police Force

Source: Facebook

Senator Ademola Adeleke made cautionary statement and admitted that he registered for the 2017 NECO examinations as an internal student in the said school but he didnt sit for the examination.

However, Police investigation revealed the following prima facie and culpability facts against Senator Ademola Adeleke and four (4) others.

Senator Ademola Adeleke made cautionary statement and admitted that he registered for the 2017 NECO examinations as an internal student in the said school and did not sit for the examination but have a result from NECO with Seven (7) Credit and One (1) Pass, a copy of which was obtained from NECO by the Police.

The Ojo/Aro 2017 NECO, SSCE school photo album (Schools copy), with Senator Ademola Adeleke and Sikiru Adeleke Photographs in school uniforms in the said album, Senator Ademola Adeleke in the NECO 2017 Result obtained by the Police claimed that he was born on 12th June 1997 but in his statement to the Police, senator Ademola Adeleke wrote 13th May 1960 as his Date of Birth.

iii. The photographs of both Senator Ademola Adeleke and Sikiru Adeleke appearing side by side in the photo album have no NECO stamps on them.

Senator Ademola Adeleke and four others were arrested, investigated, granted bail and being charged to court. Charges of Examination Malpractice, Criminal Conspiracy, Personation, Breach of Duty, Aiding and Abetting against Senator Ademola Adeleke (PDP Governorship Aspirant in the 22nd September, 2018 Gubernatorial Election in Osun State) and four (4) others namely; MR Sikiru Adeleke, Alhaji Aregbesola Mufutau (Principal of Ojo-Aro Community Grammar School, Egbedore LGA, Osun State), Mr Gbadamosi Thomas Ojo (School Staff responsible for the registration of candidates for NECO), Mr Dare Olutope (School Teacher who facilitated the commission of the crime) have been filed at the Federal High Court, Abuja under the Examination Malpractice Act, CAP E15, 2004 today, Wednesday, 19th September, 2018.

The Senator and four others were accused of malpractise. Credit: Facebook, Nigerian Police Force

Source: Facebook

Consequently, Senator Ademola Adeleke (PDP Governorship Aspirant in the 22nd September, 2018 Gubernatorial Election in Osun State) and four (4) others namely; MR Sikiru Adeleke, Alhaji Aregbesola Mufutau (Principal of Ojo-Aro Community Grammar School, Egbedore LGA, Osun State), Gbadamosi Thomas Ojo (School Staff responsible for the registration of candidates for NECO), Dare Olutope (School Teacher who facilitated the commission of the crime) are hereby advised in their own interest to report to the Special Investigation Panel, Force Headquarters, Abuja immediately for arraignment in court.

In a previous report by Legit.ng, the West African Examinations Council (WAEC) confirmed that Senator Ademola Adeleke, the candidate of the PDP for September 22 governorship election in Osun state, sat for its examination in 1981.

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The sub-regional examinations body made the confirmation in its response to an order made by a Federal High Court sitting in Abuja.

The court on Tuesday, September 11, directed the body to produce Adelekes result within 10 days due to the controversy surrounding his O'level result.

Were Ekiti Residents Paid to Vote? | - on Legit.ng TV:

Source: Legit
- The PDP held a mega rally at the Nelson Mandela Freedom Park in Osogbo ahead of the September 22 governorship election in Osun

- Bukola Saraki, Alhaji Atiku Abubakar, PDP national chairman Uche Secondus and other party chieftains were there to rally support for Senator Ademola Adeleke

- Saraki urged residents of the state to vote for the PDP candidate in the Saturday governorship election

- On his part, the PDP national chairman said Adeleke would fix the states economy, if elected

Ahead of the Saturday, September 22 governorship election in Osun, the Senate president, Bukola Saraki, on Wednesday, September 19, in Osogbo, canvassed support for the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) candidate, Senator Ademola Adeleke.

The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that former vice president, Alhaji Atiku Abubakar; PDP national chairman, Uche Secondus; Governor Abdulfatai Ahmed of Kwara; the national vice hairman of the party, Eddy Olafeso, among others, joined Saraki at the mega rally held at Nelson Mandela Freedom Park in Osogbo.

Legit.ng gathers that Saraki, who is the national chairman of the campaign council for the Osun election, urged residents of the state to vote for PDP during the poll.

He said it was painful that APC-led administration in the state could not pay workers salaries for three years.

PAY ATTENTION: Kano governor swears in new deputy

Saraki said he was optimistic that Adeleke would win the election and put an end to the suffering of the people in the state.

This election is about the people of Osun and they must send the message that a government that cannot pay workers salaries should be sent packing," he said.

Atiku, while urging the residents to vote for the party on Saturday, said: From what I can see here, it is a win for PDP. I urge you to defend and protect your votes for it not to be stolen.

In his remarks, Secondus said Adeleke would fix the states economy, if elected, and appealed to INEC to ensure that the election is free, fair and credible.

Soji Adagunodo, the PDP state chairman, said Osun was ripe to be taken by the party. He appealed to residents to vote for PDP, promising them that Adeleke would not disappoint them.

Governor Ahmed in his remarks, also urged the electorate to use their Permanent Voter Cards to vote for PDP.

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Meanwhile, Legit.ng previously reported that the Nigerian police summoned the candidate of the PDP in the coming Osun state gubernatorial election, Senator Ademola Adeleke to appear before it over alleged examination malpractice.

In a statement released by the spokesman of the Police Force, Jimoh Moshood, on Wednesday, September 19, it was claimed that the senator and some other persons were involved in malpractice in 2017.

The state of Osun is correct - Gov Aregbesola - on Legit.ng TV:

Source: Legit.ng
- All eyes are on Osun as residents in the state troop out to elect a new governor on Saturday, September 22

- A former spokesman of the APC, Comrade Timi Frank, has tasked INEC on the need to ensure the election is free and fair

- Frank warned against deployment of faulty card reader machines for the election

A former deputy national publicity secretary of the All Progressives Congress (APC), Comrade Timi Frank, has tasked the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) on the need to ensure that the September 22 Osun governorship election is free and fair.

Frank made the call in a statement sent to journalists concerning the forthcoming governorship poll.

He advised the electoral commission to be fair to all political parties participating in the contest, warning against any sort of connivance.

READ ALSO: Buhari stops IGP Idris from inviting Senator Adeleke over examination malpractice

He also advised the electoral body against deploying faulty card reader machines for the election in order not deprive voters opportunity to exercise their franchise.

Part of the statement read: The people of Osun should be alerted to the latest method and resist to vote until faulty card reader is changed.

We are also calling on local and international observers to be conscious of this information ahead of Saturday election.

Nigerians should be worried that if the INEC could not deploy functional card readers and other machines to conduct a peaceful and credible election in just one state of the federation despite the huge amount of money the body is getting, what is the assurance that the same body will be fair to all in 2019?"

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Meanwhile, Adejare Bello, ex-speaker of the Osun state House of Assembly, defected to the APC, barely a week to the governorship election.

Bello, a member of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), had on Monday, September 17, resigned his membership of the party.

In a letter addressed to Soji Adagunodo, the PDP state chairman, the former speaker said that he resigned his membership because the party has drifted from the ideals of its founding fathers.

Can Ambode Defeat Tinubu for a second term? - Nigerian Opinion | Legit.ng TV

Source: Legit
Prof Yemi Osinbajo, Nigerias vice president, visited the Nyanya Market in Abuja on Wednesday, September 19.

According to Punch, the purpose of the visit was the official inauguration of the Trader Moni Programme.

READ ALSO: Osun poll: Saraki, Atiku, Secondus rally support for Adeleke

Legit.ng gathers that the programme is being implemented by the Bank of Industry and allows beneficiaries get an interest-free loan of between N10,000 and N15,000.

See photos from the visit:

VP Osinbajo shakes a trader at the market (Photo credit: Novo Isioro)

Source: Depositphotos

The vice president pictured having a conversation with other female traders (Photo credit: Novo Isioro)

Source: Depositphotos

Osinbajo speaks with male meat sellers at the market (Photo credit: Novo Isioro)

Source: Depositphotos

The VP jokes and shakes hands during the visit (Photo credit: Novo Isioro)

Source: Depositphotos

A massive crowd came out to welcome Osinbajo (Photo credit: Novo Isioro)

Source: Depositphotos

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In a similar development, Legit.ng previously reported that beneficiaries of the Trader Moni loan scheme in Gbagi market, Ibadan, were promised by Vice President Yemi Osinbajo on Thursday, September 13, that more funds would be committed to the scheme immediately they start paying back.

Osinbajo visited the market to assess how the loan was being executed and to ensure that all 27 thousand registered petty traders in the state got the money.

Laolu Akande, the spokesman for Osinbajo, had earlier said that the federal government would empower two million petty traders across the country with collateral-free loans in 2018.

Akande said that the new initiative, called TraderMoni, would be implemented under the Government Enterprise and Empowerment Programme (GEEP).

He said that the gesture was part of federal governments efforts to further enlarge its financial inclusion agenda for all Nigerians regardless of social class and economic status.

Is Osinbajo a better president than Buhari? - on Legit.ng TV:

Source: Legit.ng
Two soldiers of 192 battalion have lost their lives after an accidental discharge occurred during in-theatre training.

The incident happened on Wednesday, September 19.

READ ALSO: Malpractice: Read Nigerian polices full statement against Senator Adeleke

According to a couple of tweet by the Nigerian Army on its official page, the chief of army staff, Lieutenant General Tukur Buratai, ordered that a board of inquiry be set up to look into the tragic incident.

Meanwhile, Officers at the National Defence College, Abuja, have been trained by experts from the College of International Security Affairs, National Defence University, Washington, USA, on the need to develop a strategic mechanism to tackle the Boko Haram insurgency.

The five-day training focused on combating terrorism and irregular threats in the country and was conducted for the NDCs faculty members, Punch reports.

Legit.ng gathers that the NDCs spokesperson, Commander Edward Yeibo, said the training was about achieving a strategic framework on the Boko Haram insurgency as well as knowledge sharing between the faculty members on irregular threats in the contemporary security environment.

While meeting the NDC commandant, Rear Admiral Adeniyi Osinowo, the leader of the US experts, Ambassador Erica Ruggles, stated: Our mission is to educate and prepare senior civilian and military security professionals and partners for the strategic challenges of the contemporary security environment."

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One of the experts, Dr Thomas Marks, stated: Protecting citizens in all spectrums in a democratic dispensation is the fundamental responsibility of governance.

There is the need to understand the root causes and drivers of radicalisation which leads to violent extremism at the strategic level. This will help to develop a framework for a strategic response.

Nigerian Air Force operations against Boko Haram - on Legit.ng TV:

Source: Legit.ng
- Chief Bola Tinubu has reportedly advised Akinwunmi Ambode to shelve his second term ambition

- The governor is however insisting on the party direct primaries

- Attempt by the governor's wife to pacify Tinubu reportedly failed

The national leader of the All Progressives Congress (APC), Asiwaju Bola Tinubu, has allegedly asked Governor Akinwunmi Ambode to drop his second term bid and endorse Babajide Sanwo-Olu.

The Punch reports that the Mandate Movement in the Lagos APC which is controlled by the APC chieftain is backing Sanwo-Olu. It was reported that despite pleas from notable politicians, Tinubu had refused to back Ambode.

The wife of the governor, Bolanle, reportedly met with Tinubu in Osun to try and pacify him but the meeting failed to yield any result.

It was reported that APC leaders are mounting pressure on the governor to drop his second term bid but that the governor insists on going on with the direct primaries.

READ ALSO: 2 soldiers killed after accidental discharge during training

A source said: Ambode was told to step down and forget his second term ambition. He was told to publicly endorse Sanwo-Olu as his successor. He was promised a ministerial appointment after the APC might have won the presidential election. He was even told to pick a ministry of his choice.

But Ambode seemed not to be pleased with the directives of the leaders as he declined the ministerial dangle. He also told them to allow the APC primary process to continue as planned. For now, the meeting is still continuing and there is no compromise in sight.

Another source said: We told him that he might likely lose if he decided not to fight back, but he just smiled."

Meanwhile, a top aide to Governor Akinwunmi Ambode of Lagos state on Wednesday, September 19, said the alleged suspension of the governors second term ambition was a hoax.

The aide, who spoke anonymously, told the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) that the news making the rounds that Ambode had shelved his ambition of a second term return to office, was untrue.

Legit.ng notes that according to reports being circulated, the governor had decided after due considerations and consultations, to suspend campaign for second term as the executive governor of Lagos state.

In the same report, the governor was alleged to have said: I hereby endorse Jide Sanwo-Olu to represent our party for the office of the executive governor of Lagos state."

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However, the source who debunked the report, said it was a hoax, untrue and a totally false report.

The governor is still very much interested to continue his good works in the state. He means well for the state and he believes there is still a lot to be achieved. This he hopes to consolidate upon, if he is re-elected," the source said.

Can Ambode get a second term without Tinubu's approval? - on Legit.ng TV:

Source: Legit.ng News
- The Defence headquarters said it is winning the war against Boko Haram terrorism

- It condemned reports being circulated that it was losing the war

- It said such reports were an insensible to attempt to rewrite the script and make the military look like the losing side

The Defence Headquarters (DHQ) has again reassured Nigerians that the military is winning the fight against terrorism and will not rest on its oars until terrorism is wiped out of the country.

It, however, expressed concerned about mischievous reports by section of the media aimed at discrediting the efforts of troops in the Northeast.

According to a statement issued by Brig.-Gen. John Agim, the acting director Defence Information, the report is being spearheaded by a particular foreign news agency that the Armed Forces is losing the battle against insurgency. He did not name the agency.

Agim, however, said that the report was not true, adding that such malicious articles should be disregarded while the military would continue to protect the territorial integrity and sovereignty of the nation.

READ ALSO:

The report was calculated to dampen the spirit of the troops at the theatres of operation and to demean the successes recorded so far in the war against terrorism. It is more worrisome when such an ill-informed report is coming from a supposed credible news agency expected to be a partner in progress.

"It agitates the mind whether the reporter is working in isolation or speaking the mind of its sponsors. It is a well known fact that terrorism thrives on publicity and propaganda. It is also known that some journalists work for Boko Haram and fraternize with terrorist commanders against the standing forces to whip up sentiment," he said.

Agim said that at the heat of Boko Haram insurgency, the armed forces with limited weapon chased Boko Haram out of Abuja and other cities into Sambisa Forest.

How much more now that the military is well equipped with determined troops to take on any terrorist group, be it Boko Haram or Islamic State In West Africa. If this is still seen as struggling by the purveyors of the false report, then the word may have assumed a new meaning, he said.

The DDI said the truth remains that the military strategy of drawing out the enemy had been a great success as hundreds of terrorists had met their waterloo in their desperate attempts to recapture some cities in the Northeast.

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He said the military would continue to do this until terrorists and terrorism were completely annihilated, adding that it was insensible to attempt to rewrite the script and make the military look like the losing side.

Agim urged Nigerians to be wary of uncomplimentary remarks about our nation and its armed forces by sympathisers of terrorist organisations.

Meanwhile, two soldiers of 192 battalion have lost their after an accidental discharge occurred during in-theatre training. The incident happened on Wednesday, September 19.

According to a couple of tweet by the Nigerian Army on its official page, the chief of army staff, Lieutenant General Tukur Buratai ordered that a board of inquiry be set up to look into the tragic incident.

Nigerian Air Force operations against Boko Haram - on Legit.ng TV:

Source: Legit
The main headlines of the mainstream Nigerian newspapers for Thursday, September 20, 2018 are focused on the police invitation to the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) governorship candidate in Osun, Ademola Adeleke, the rift between Ambode and Tinubu, among other stories.

The Punch reports that President Muhammadu Buhari on Wednesday stopped the Inspector General of Police Ibrahim Idris from inviting the candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party in the governorship election slated for Saturday in Osun state, Senator Ademola Adeleke.

The police had earlier invited Adeleke to the Force Headquarters in Abuja for the purpose of arraigning him on charges of examination malpractices, criminal conspiracy, impersonation, breach of duty and aiding and abetting.

The Punch Newspaper

Source: Original

This Day reports that a presidency source said the president directed the IG of Police Idris to suspend the invitation until after the election on Saturday, September 22, ostensibly to prevent a possible backlash from a weary public that might think the opposition candidate was being harassed.

Expectedly, the invitation drew the ire of PDP, which cautioned the police to desist from acting the script of the All Progressives Congress (APC) against its governorship candidate.

This Day Newspaer

Source: Original

READ ALSO: 2 soldiers killed after accidental discharge during training

The Nation reports that the West African Examinations Council (WAEC) has confirmed that the candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) for Saturdays governorship election in Osun State, Ademola Adeleke, sat for its examination in 1981.

WAECs confirmation is in its response to an order made on September 11 by a high court of the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) in Bwari, Abuja, directing the examination body to produce evidence of Adelekes result.

The Nation newspaper

Source: Original

Vanguard reports that hope of a second term for the politically embattled governor of Lagos state, Akinwunmi Ambode, remained far-fetched yesterday, after elders of the state under the aegis of the Governors Advisory Council (GAC) gave him a cold shoulder.

Following the meeting, the governor relocated to Lagos, where he was expected to make further appeals to national political and party leaders.

Vanguard Newspaper

Source: Original

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The Guardian reports that fortune may smile on Lagos state Governor Akinwunmi Ambode as the leadership of the All Progressives Congress (APC) steps up pressure on national leader Bola Tinubu to back the incumbents re-election

The duo have been at loggerheads, with Tinubu supporting a former commissioner for commerce and industry, Babajide Sanwo-Olu, ahead of the September 29 primary to select the partys flag-bearer.

Sanwo-Olu reportedly has the nod of the powerful Mandate Group, which is loyal to Tinubu. But indications that the crisis might be resolved in favour of Ambode became apparent following a meeting attended by President Muhammadu Buhari and some APC governors on Tuesday, September 18.

The Guardian Newspaper

Source: Original

Can Ambode get a second term without Tinubu's approval? - Street Gist | Legit.ng TV

Source: Legit
- Leah Sharibu's father has called on the government to intensify effort in rescuing his daughter

- According to him, the ransom demanded by the insurgents should be payed

- He called on Nigerians to help put pressure on the government to act

Nathaniel Sharibu who is the father of Leah Sharibu who was abducted by Boko Haram terrorists has called on the federal government to do everything to get his daughter released.

The Sun reports that Sharibu made this call following alleged ultimatum given by the terrorists to the government to pay ransom within a month.

The student of Government Girls Science Technical College, Dapchi, Yobe state was abducted alongside her peers. While all her other schoolmates who survived the ordeal have been released by the terrorists, Leah was held back by the Boko Haram for allegedly refusing to denounce her Christian faith.

READ ALSO: 2 soldiers killed after accidental discharge during training

Leahs father called on Nigerians to help him pressure the government to take action.

He said: I want pressure on the federal government that they should do something at least. I want you people to put pressure on the federal government, that they should react and pay the ransom so that they can release them.

I am pleading. I am pleading as I used to plead, that they can react as these people have said something like this. They have to react concerning it."

Sharibu expressed optimism that if the government takes action, his daughter will return home safely.

I am hopeful if the government will react. They have to react concerning their request," he said.

Legit.ng had reported that President Muhammadu Buhari on Tuesday, September 18, vowed to do everything possible to ensure Leah Sharibu, one of the over 100 schoolgirls kidnapped by the Boko Haram insurgents in Dapchi, Yobe state, earlier in the year will be rescued.

Legit.ng gathered that the president made gave the reassurance in a series of tweet.

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He said: We will continue to do everything possible to ensure the safe return of all of our people held by Boko Haram. This is a vow we intend to fully keep. I appeal to our international partners and friends to continue to support us, even as we redouble our efforts.

In the last 3 years the efforts of our gallant military and intelligence agencies have resulted in the freeing of thousands of hostages, including some of the Chibok Girls and most of the Dapchi Girls. Let me again assure that no one including Leah Sharibu will be left behind.

Nigerian Air Force Operations Against Boko Haram | Legit.ng TV

Source: Legit.ng
As per the complaint, Pani raped her twice, - two months after her joining in August.

As I did not accept her request to take action against the staff, she brought such allegation against me to take revenge. (Photo: File/Representational)

Bhubaneshwar: A former woman employee of aviation firm Air Odisha on Wednesday brought rape allegation against the airlines chief Santosh Pani and lodged a complaint against him at Khandagiri police station here seeking justice.

The complainant, who currently works with Air Deccan, is a resident of Kolkata. She had joined Air Odisha as security supervisor in July 2018.

As per the complaint, Pani raped her twice, - two months after her joining in August.

On August 10, Pani offered me lift to drop me at my rented house. He forced entered my house and raped me. He again raped me on August 12. On August 13, I resigned the company and went back to Kolkata she said.

However, Pani refuted the allegations saying that the woman was sacked for having clashes with other staff of the company frequently. Many staff of the company had even filed complaints against her at Khandagiri police station. She even approached me to sack other staff. As I did not accept her request to take action against the staff, she brought such allegation against me to take revenge. It may be mentioned here the airlines chief was earlier arrested by Khandagiri police in April 2017 on the basis of a non-bailable warrant (NBW) issued against him by a local court in Bhubaneswar. Earlier in June 2016, he was arrested for allegedly duping Sandeep Ray, son of former Union Coal Minister and BJP legislator Dilip Ray of Rs 40 lakh.
- Flood has become one of the many things to worry about in some parts of Nigeria

- Legit.ng did an exclusive coverage of this menace that ravaged several parts of the country

- Reuters recognised the exclusive coverage as having painted a true reality of what the people of the affected areas are going through

Legit.ng video got a huge recognition from Reuters eye witness news. Recently, Legit.ng did an exclusive coverage of the flood that ravaged several parts of the country.

The coverage took Legit.ng to several parts of Kogi state which was particularly one of the hardest hit states in the country where over 200 villages were submerged in flood. The flood also destroyed properties and hundreds fled their homes for refugees camp set up by the National Emergency Management Agency.

Over 100 people have died in floods in several Nigerian states following heavy rains that caused the Rivers Niger and Benue to overflow according to NEMA. The emergency body declared national disaster in the affected states of Kogi, Niger, Anambra and Delta. Eight other states are still being monitored.

READ ALSO: Lagos APC: Tinubu reportedly asks Ambode to drop second term ambition

The states are Taraba Adamawa, Kebbi, Edo, Rivers, Benue, Bayelsa and Kwara states. President Muhammadu Buhari had delegated authority to NEMA to declare a national disaster in the event that anticipated flooding turns a reality in parts of the country.

It was against this backdrop that Legit.ng visited the affected areas in Kogi state. The video was eventually recognised by Reuters as having painted a true reality of the tragedy in the affected areas.

Below is the Legit.ng video that got recognised:

Screenshot of Legit.ng coverage of flood that has ravaged some parts of Nigeria.

Source: Depositphotos

The screenshot of Legit.ng video used by Reuters.

Source: Depositphotos

Legit.ng previously reported that the National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA) declared a national disaster in Kogi, Anambra, Delta and Niger, following high levels of flooding in the states.

Mustapha Maihaja, NEMA director-general, made the declaration during an assessment visit to River Niger on Monday, September 17, in Lokoja.

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Maihaja said that eight other states were also on NEMAs watch list. He explained that the states were experiencing the high levels of flooding as a result of heavy rainfall experienced in some parts of the country.

What does Nigeria need right now? (Nigerian Street Interview) | on Legit.ng TV

Source: Legit.ng
Ever since the news of Linda Ikejis pregnancy hit the internet, everyone has been curious to know who her baby daddy or fiance is. The young lady did a good job in hiding the handsome man till the arrival of her son.

Even before she gave birth to Baby J, the celebrity blogger took to her Instagram account to hint her fans about the father of her son. Part of what she revealed was that the man was tall, dark and handsome before going further to reveal his state of origin.

Still everyone became eager to know who this man is. On Wednesday, September 19, Linda finally let the cat out of the bag after she revealed the names of her son, Jayce Jeremi.

READ ALSO: Linda Ikeji gives birth to a baby boy

It could be recalled that before Linda travelled to Atlanta where she welcomed her son, news has it that the man responsible for her pregnancy was no other than one of Nigerias young millionaire Sholaye Jeremi.

This made it easy for Nigerians to confirm the paternity of Lindas son the same day his name was shared on Instagram. It appears that Sholaye loves to keep a private profile as there are no much information about him on the internet.

Linda Ikeji's baby daddy, Sholaye Jeremi Photo: Nairaland

Source: UGC

Following this revelation, Legit.ng brings you six things you did not know about Linda Ikejis 40-year-old baby daddy:

1. He is from Itsekiri, Delta state

2. He is reportedly an oil magnate

3. Linda Ikejis son is not Jeremis first child as the oil magnate reportedly has another son based abroad

4. Sholaye Jeremi once lived in Lekki before relocating to Ikoyi where Linda Ikeji has her mansion

5. Hes birthday date is July 8

6. He is a close friend to the minister of petroleum Ibe Kachikwu and billionaire Femi Otedola

Sholaye Jeremi, billionaire Femi Otedola and Aliko Dangote Photo: Nairaland

Source: UGC

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Legit.ng earlier reported that Linda Ikeji took to her Instagram handle to share photos of some of the expensive gifts she got for her unborn baby. The white baby boy dresses looked so beautiful and taking a close look at the price tags, the clothes are really expensive.

Amazing!

Nigeria Breaking News: 34-Year-Old Woman Gives Birth to a Set of Quintuplets in Awka | Legit.ng TV - on Legit.ng TV.

Source: Legit
- The Benue state chairman of the PDP, John Negede, has chided some governorship aspirants for threatening to defect

- He said the threats were nothing but mere rants and accused the aspirants of betraying the party in 2015

- Negede questioned why the aspirants were rejecting Governor Ortom, when many of them worked with him in the APC

The defection threats by some Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) governorship aspirants in Benue have been dismissed by the state chairman of the party, John Negede, who accused the aspirants of betraying the party in 2015.

Negede made his position known during a chat with Punch.

READ ALSO: 2019: Christian body slams youth groups for endorsing Akpabio

Legit.ng gathers that he said the threats to leave the party if Governor Samuel Ortom was imposed on them, are nothing but mere rants.

According to Negede, Ortom became the leader of the party, by virtue of his position as state governor.

He said: Dont forget that when I contested along with Tarzoor in 2015, many of the people you heard talking (some of the governorship aspirants) didnt work for the party.

They did not work for the PDP. Many of them worked for the APC. So why is it that the same person you worked with has come back to the party and you are rejecting the person? How many of them worked for the PDP apart from Professor David Ker?

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Meanwhile, Legit.ng previously reported that Professor Eugene Aliegba and John Tion, formerly Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) governorship aspirants in Benue, defected to the All Progressive Congress (APC).

The aspirants, alongside their supporters, left the opposition party for the APC at a ceremony in Naka, Gwer-west local government area of Benue.

Aliegba revealed that he joined the APC because of the leadership prowess of President Muhammadu Buhari and that of Senator George Akume. He vowed to work with the senator in achieving success for the ruling party in Naka and the whoe of Benue.

APC chieftains in Benue say PDP has nothing to offer - on Legit.ng TV:

Source: Legit
- The family members of a 47-year-old man, Wesley Ryan, surprised him with a white 1993 Ford Mustang

- Interestingly the same car belonged to Wesley till 17 years ago after he sold it off to raise funds for his wifes cancer treatment

- His children knew how much he loved the car and they decided to buy it back for him

- Wesley broke down in tears after he was presented with the vehicle

A man identified as Wesley Ryan, 47, received the shock of his life after his children surprised him with his favourite car, a white 1993 Ford Mustang GT, which he sold 17 years ago to help settle the medical bills of his wife who was suffering from ovarian cancer.

His children, Jake and Jeni, decided to surprise him with the car as a reward for the sacrifice he made for their mother 17 years ago.

Wesley Ryan shocked after sighting his Ford Mustang Photo source: Fox news

Source: UGC

According to Jake, selling the car was the greatest sacrifice his father made for the family seeing as the vehicle was really dear to him.

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He said: one of the biggest sacrifices Ive seen him have to make for us, for all of us. I know how much it broke him in half seeing that car drive away from him. A day Ill never forget.

Wesley Ryan shocked after sighting his Ford Mustang Photo source: Fox news

Source: UGC

Wesley was very touched by the gesture that he broke down in tears after the car was presented to him at a departmental store. The touching moment was captured on video. You can watch the full video HERE.

Emotional moment for Wesley Ryan Photo source: Fox news

Source: UGC

The 47-year-old man revealed that he felt very proud of his children and that it proves that they were raised properly. He said:

Shows where they are: they are balanced human beings. My wife and I have succeeded, we've raised productive adults, it's the strongest, most powerful feeling that a parent can have."

READ ALSO: Baby girl looks adorable as she dresses in NYSC uniform on her birthday (photos)

An emotional moment for Wesley and his kids Photo source: Fox news

Source: UGC

Interestingly, the car seller was selling it off to help raise funds for her mother who was diagnosed with ovarian cancer, and they needed the money for treatment.

Legit.ng earlier reported that a lady took to social media to suggest that DNA tests should be mandatory at birth.

Following several reports of broken marriages in Nigeria due to infidelity and paternity fraud issues, the need for DNA testing has become a constant thing of debate. A Nigerian lady identified as Destiny, has taken to social media to share her opinion on the issue.

According to her, the need for DNA testing should be made mandatory as many women are destroying lives by lying about the real fathers of their children. Sharing reports that backed her point, she stated that Nigerian women are the most unfaithful.

Naij Comedy Show Ep 3 - Meeting My Father-in-Law! | Legit.ng TV

Source: Legit
- Fortune may smile on Lagos state Governor Akinwunmi Ambode as he seeks to retain his seat ahead of the 2019 elections

- The leadership of the APC in the state is said to have stepped up pressure on Asiwaju Bola Tinubu to back the incumbents re-election

- Tinubu, the national leader of the party, is said to be considering backing the governor after he had earlier backed out

A report by The Guardian indicates that the intervention of the All Progressives Congress (APC) leaders in Lagos state regarding the feud between Governor Akinwunmi Ambode and his estranged godfather, Aiswaju Bola Tinubu, is yielding results.

According to the report, due to the pressure mounted on Tinubu by the Lagos APC leaders, the national leader of the party, is said to be considering backing the governor after he had earlier backed out.

The duo has been at loggerheads, with Tinubu supporting a former commissioner for commerce and industry, Babajide Sanwo-Olu, ahead of the September 29 primary to select the partys flag-bearer.

The partys leadership was said to have pleaded with Tinubu to let go of his grievances and allow Ambode return for a second term.

READ ALSO: APC primaries: Governors, working committee in crucial meeting in Imo

It was learnt that former governors of Osun and Ogun states, Chief Bisi Akande and Aremo Segun Osoba, are also part of the peace overture, as they led Ambode to entreat the national leader.

Sources quoted in the report said Tinubu, out of respect for Akande and Osoba, promised to let pass his grouse. But with a condition: his political loyalists in Lagos, who have made up their minds that Ambode must go, must be consulted.

On the advice of the former governors, Ambode was said to have prostrated pleadingly, while Osun state governor, Ogbeni Rauf Argebesola, expressed his grudges and those of Lagos party members.

Aregbesola who is also a staunch member of the Mandate Group, explained why the members insisted they wanted Ambode out.

One of the sins Aregbesola noted was Ambodes alleged moves to destroy his (Aregbesolas) political structure in Lagos West, especially in Alimosho. He said Ambode kept him waiting for several hours when he visited the Lagos government house. He further accused Ambode of vindictiveness towards party members that aided his emergence as governor in 2015.

At the meeting with Buhari and the APC governors, sources said Kebbi state governor Abubakar Atiku Bagudu led the plea with Tinubu.

It is not in the culture of Hausa people to prostrate. What we normally do is express respect to our elders or leaders by saying Ranka Dade. But today, I am going to break that protocol, he reportedly said, and prostrated.

Unable to hold his emotions, the national leader burst into tears, at which point, Buhari stood up, moved closer to Tinubu, and implored him to give Ambode a second chance.

Ambodes political future has been under threat since Tinubus Mandate Group, threw up Sanwo-Olu, to challenge the governor at the partys primary earlier scheduled for Saturday, September 29.

Also in the race, is another strong contender, a former commissioner for works and Infrastructure, Dr. Obafemi Hamzat, who has the backing of an equally powerful group, the Justice Forum.

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The chairmen of the 57 local council development areas in Lagos had also declared support for Sanwo-Olu.

After much pressure, Tinubu, however, shifted some ground on Monday, September 17, by agreeing to refer the matter to the Governor's Advisory Council, the body that advises the governor and the party leader on matters of state as well issues that concern the party.

Meanwhile, some youths from Epe division of Lagos state on Tuesday, September 17, rallied on major streets in the area to canvass and drum support for Governor Ambodes re-election bid.

Some of the youths said their action was against the backdrop of speculations that Ambode might not likely be chosen as the governorship candidate on the APC platform.

The youths, from Epe central, Eredo and Ikosi-Ejirin chanted solidarity songs as they moved from one street to another in the area, displaying several placards with various inscriptions begging Tinubu and other APC leaders to allow the governor complete his constitutional 8-year term.

Can Ambode Get a Second Term Without Tinubus Approval? - Nigeria Street Gist on Legit.ng TV

Source: Legit.ng
- INEC has warned that vote buying and violence may affect Nigeria's democracy in the long run

- The commission said vote-buying constituted a huge threat to free and fair election

- It also vowed to combat vote-buying to ensure free and fair election in 2019

The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has warned that vote-buying may cause election violence which can mar the democracy of the nation if care is not taken to put a stop to it before the 2019 general elections.

The commission said that vote-buying had constituted a huge threat to free and fair election, which is the main target of the commission.

READ ALSO: Lagos APC: Tinubu reportedly asks Ambode to drop second term ambition

The Guardian reports that the Adamawa state Resident Electoral Commissioner (REC), Kassim Gaidam, stated this at a workshop organised by the International Republican Institute (IRI) in corroboration with USAID.

Geidam said the commission is engaging the youths being used as tools for election violence.

While declaring the workshop titled Consensus Building on Election Violence Mitigation opened, the IRI resident programme director, Sentell Barnes, said election violence has the capacity to destroy the democratic tenets of the country.

Meanwhile, Legit.ng earlier reported that the Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Commission (ICPC) expressed readiness to partner with INEC to tackle the menace of vote-buying in the electoral system.

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Acting chairman of ICPC, Musa Abubakar, made this known when he visited INEC chairman, Prof. Mahmood Yakubu, on Monday, September 10, in Abuja. Abubakar said that ICPC identified with INEC and Nigerians on the issue of vote-buying and was willing to work with the election management body to curb the ugly trend.

He said that the commission was empowered to deal with all cases of corruption, including those committed during elections.

Ekiti State REC Reveals How INEC Will Stop Rigging In Forthcoming Election on Legit.ng TV

Source: Legit Newspaper
- The former information minister, Jerry Gana, said he is representing the youths in 2019 presidential election

- Gana is contesting for the presidency on the platform of Social Democratic Party

- The minister, however, assured the youths of a robust leadership if he wins the election

The former information minister, Professor Jerry Gana, on Wednesday, September 19, explained that the youths have declared their support for him to race for a presidential position in 2019 adding that he is representing them.

Vanguard reports that Gana who made this known in Minna, Niger state said the youth of the country had given him their mandate and as well supporting him.

The former minister who is contesting for the presidency on the platform of Social Democratic Party (SDP).

READ ALSO: 2 soldiers killed after accidental discharge during training

According to him, I am a surrogate of the youths, the youths asked me to aspire and they have pledged to support me and they have started supporting me.

You cannot read experience in the books but you can acquire it from the elders and this is why we need to blend the youths and the elderly ones to move the country forward because this will amount to a wise combination.

He called on the Independent Electoral Commission (INEC) to really live true to its name by being independent and transparent in the conduct of the 2019 general elections.

He assured the youth of a robust leadership, with priority accorded them in governance in order to learn and take over the mantle of leadership in the nearest future.

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Gana said: For 2019 general elections, Nigerians will not take any form of rigging from anybody; what the voters want is for their votes to count; they want the very best and when we choose, dont overturn our election, stand by what we have chosen.

The minister also noted that Nigeria was facing a lot of challenges, saying all is not well with Nigeria, the situation is frightening but with prayers and our collective desire to change for the better, the country will surely move forward soonest.

Meanwhile, Legit.ng had reported that a former minister of information, Jerry Gana, received a backlash from an official of the Independent National Electoral Commission for flouting electoral laws.

The official of INEC, Mustapha Lekki, decried the rate at which politicians flout electoral law.

Speaking at a town hall meeting on politics and healthcare delivery by the Nigerian medical association in Abuja, the former minister said his new party SDP will provide best health programmes for Nigerians.

Gana who was the chairman of the occasion said the SDP will give, other political parties a run for their money.

PDP's Magnificent 7 for 2019 - On Legit.ng TV:

Source: Legit.ng
- A lady had claimed that she had a one night stand with Nigerian comic actor Mr Ibu

- The comic actor has finally shed light on what transpired between him and the lady, saying nothing happened

- He claimed he met her after she was volunteered to do an event at an orphanage he visited

Legit.ng had previously reported that a Nigerian lady had alleged that she had a one night stand with Nigerian comic actor John Okafor, popularly known as Mr Ibu. The lady had gushed about the incident on a Facebook page known as No CHILLS in NAIJA.

Following the news, the comic actor has revealed his side of the story. He claimed that he had met the lady for the first time after her boyfriend introduced him to her when he visited an orphanage.

According to Mr Ibu who shed light to his side of the story in an interview with Vanguard, the actor had claimed that nothing between them, other than taking a few pictures with the lady and her friends.

What transpired between me & lady who claimed we had 'one night stand' - Mr Ibu speaks out Photo: Facebook page Source: No CHILLS in NAIJA

Source: Facebook

READ ALSO: Sholaye Jeremi rumoured to be Linda Ikeji's baby daddy after she reveals son's name

He said: The girl came to see her boyfriend, an Uber driver working with an American-based humanitarian worker, Belinda Babila, who was in the country to carry out some charity work.

We were planning to visit an orphanage in FESTAC last Friday and the lady came to the hotel where the woman was lodging to see her boyfriend. Through her boyfriend, she approached me to take pictures with me.

I am always flexible when it comes to taking pictures with my fans. I am not rigid. So, I took pictures with her. Later, the NGO Founder invited the lady to be part of the team that would visit the orphanage. At the orphanage home, we all took pictures and that was it. What happened next, I cant explain.

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Mr Ibu also claimed that he later found out the lady is about to be married to a native of Enugu state, after he received a call from her husband who apologised on her behalf.

He reported that the couple claimed that her account was hacked. He said the lady also called apologising to him while crying on the phone.

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I didnt even know that the lady in question is even married and she hails from Ebonyi State. Her husband is based in Enugu and they are planning for their traditional marriage, so that she can join her husband in Enugu.

And here she is, dating an Uber driver, who made it possible for her to meet with me. It was later her husband called me and apologised, explaining that it was not his wife that made the post on the Facebook group.

The girl in question also called me and was crying profusely that she never made such damaging post on social media. She swore with her marriage and her unborn child.

She claimed that some mischievous persons hacked into her Facebook account and posted the nasty comment. I believed her because the language used in that post was that of a professional prostitute.

Nigeria Celebrities: How Much Do They Spend On Luxury Life? | Legit.ng TV

Source: Legit.ng
Governor Akinwumi Ambodes rise to prominence in Lagos didnt start in 2015. Prior to his emergence as Lagos governor, he had served as a civil servant in a career stranding diverse roles in accounting consultancy for 27 years.

But due to his loyalty to the political hierarchy of Lagos state he was considered as the heir fit to take the mantle of Lagos political leadership from the former governor, Babatunde Raji Fashola.

In 2015, Ambode beat other political giants like Jimi Agbaje of the PDP to become the governor of Lagos state.

Fast forward to 2018, with a couple of months to the end of his first-term tenure, Governor Ambodes desire to continue another 4-year term has been met with rejection due to differences that took an irreconcilable turn with the political bigwigs in the states, including his estranged godfather Asiwaju Tinubu and 57 council chairmen.

This development has made the states stakeholders to take a new dimension, pledging their support to Sanwo-Olu, Tinubus newly found political godson.

Governor Akinwumi Ambode of Lagos state

Source: Depositphotos

Legit.ng in this piece identifies the possible reasons why Tinubu-Ambodes rift may deny the governor his second term dream.

1. Refuse disposal policy

Lagos was believed to be one of the dirtiest cities in the country due to its overcrowding population. Immediately Fashola mounted the leadership seat, he was said to have introduced programmes against indiscriminate dumping of refuse and open defecation. This legacy which was geared towards transforming Lagos into a mega city was allegedly dropped by Governor Ambode leading to bodies like Private Sectors Participants Operator (PSP) registering displeasure with his policy on waste management.

Recently, there is a rise in the criticism levelled against the effectiveness of Lagos Agency on Waste Management (LAWMA).

Legit.ng also previously reported that community leader in Lagos Mainland appealed to Tinubu to intervene in Lagos government, PSP waste operators clash.

Waste on Lagos streets

Source: UGC

2. Ambode's alleged arrogance

Governor Ambodes obedience and loyalty which made him the darling of Lagos political hierarchy was said to have suddenly disappeared few months after he became the governor. He was alleged to be politically aloof.

He was accused of running the state as one-man affairs. Without any doubt, one wonders why his influence among the 57 council chairmen and commissioners dwindled down at the time he needed them most.

3. Lack of political savvy by Ambode

The present internal crisis in Lagos has raised up a debate over who is politically savvy between Governor Ambode and his predecessor, Fashola (SAN). Ambodes leadership, as rumoured by residents, was said to have lacked the political wit to accommodate loyalty for a vibrant progressive cause. There are usually questions about some of the governors policies, the effectiveness of some of the ministries under his watch.

He was alleged of running an aloof government strange to the grassroots. The offshoot of this is what has made the council chairmen to drive their support for the APC-Mandate group endorsed Sanwo-Olu.

As expected, this has generated controversy in the state as tension mounts on the Lagos governor to drop his ambition.

Governor Ambode receiving the Prime Minister of United Kingdom, Theresay MAY

Source: Twitter

4. Ambode's failure to carry others along

During the recent APC campaign in Osun ahead of the coming gubernatorial election in the state, Legit.ng reported that the Lagos state first lady pleaded with Asiwaju Tinubu on behalf of his husband. Some pundits said the move by Mrs Bolanle Ambode was to persuade the ex-governor of the state into overlooking the way her husband suddenly dished him away, having walked on his back to power.

Governor Ambode with the APC leader Asiwaju Tinubu and former governor Raji Fashola

Source: Depositphotos

The governor was accused of not informing the Lion of Bourdillon before introducing new policies. He was also accused of not building on the legacy of the APC national leader, making Asiwaju to wait till the time of reckoning before he takes his pound of flesh.

Of great note is a rumour in the media that Governor Ambode and the Obasa-led Lagos Assembly were at loggerhead making the former to wage impeachment war against the governor if he attempted to re-contest.

As things unfold, attempts by major stakeholders to drive Ambodes love back to the heart of Tinubu have been met with disappointment.

5. Tinubu's political will to give new faces chance

For those who don't know him, Sanwo-olu was a former commissioner in Lagos state and a loyal disciple to Tinubu's political ideology. Findings indicate that Sanwo-olu, like Ambode, has set his eyes on the number political seat of the state for a long time.

After the eight-year administration of Babatunde Fashola, Sanwo-olu was reported to be among the 10 leading contenders to register their interest before Ambode got the nods of the state's political stakeholders.

Immediately Ambode indicated his desire to contest again, crisis reportedly started brewing in the the Lagos APC camp. But in his bid to avert the crisis as a national leader of APC and ex-governor of the state, Tinubu, riding on his alleged displeasure for the Ambode-led government, decided to give new faces chances.

Asiwaju Tinubu and Governor Ambode

Source: Depositphotos

Conclusion

As things stand, the APC primary election is in few days, and there is no certainty that Ambode will get the nods of his party leaders in the state.

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Trending videos: Can Ambode Get a Second Term Without Tinubus Approval? - Nigeria Street Gist | Legit.ng TV

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- The Nigeria Police has been berated by the campaign organisation of Senator Ademola Adeleke

- The police had invited the PDP governorship candidate over allegation of exam malpractices

- President Buhari, however, intervened asking the police to revisit the issue after the elections

The campaign organisation of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) governorship candidate in Osun state, Ademola Adeleke, has described his invitation by the police as a threat to democracy.

The director-general of the campaign organisation, Lere Oyewunmi, told journalists in Ede on Wednesday, September 19, that an institution like the police ought to be neutral and apolitical at all times.

He said the confirmation by West Africa Examinations Council (WAEC) that Senator Adeleke sat for the final examination at Muslim Grammar School in Ede should lay to rest all allegations surrounding the certificate issue rather than compound it.

READ ALSO: Dont vote for those who will turn the governors office into disco hall - Oshiomhole warns Osun people

Oyewunmi, however, commended President Muhammadu Buhari for his intervention.

The police had summoned Senator Adeleke to appear before it over alleged examination malpractice.

In a statement released by its spokesman, Jimoh Moshood, on Wednesday, September 19, the police claimed that the senator and some other persons were involved in malpractice in 2017.

The police then ordered Adeleke and four other persons to report to the Force Headquarters in Abuja for arraignment in court.

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However, in a swift reaction, President Buhari ordered the inspector-general of police, Ibrahim Idris, not to proceed with the invitation of Senator Adeleke.

A presidential source said Idris was ordered not to invite the senator until after the election.

Were Ekiti Residents Paid to Vote? | - on Legit.ng TV

Source: Legit.ng
The girl alleged that she was raped repeatedly by her father in the last four years, police said.

Unable to bear the harassment any further, the girl approached her neighbours who helped her in filing a police complaint against her father. (Representational Image)

Thane: A 40-year-old man was arrested on Thursday in Maharashtras Thane for allegedly raping his teenaged daughter, a police official said.

The accused and his wife separated seven years back. Since then, the 14-year-old girl was living with her father in the Kasarvadavli area of Thane city, he said.

The girl alleged that she was raped repeatedly by her father in the last four years, the official at Kasarvadavli police station said.

Unable to bear the harassment any further, the girl approached her neighbours who helped her in filing a police complaint against her father on Wednesday evening, he said.

The accused was subsequently arrested and booked under IPC section 376 (rape) and relevant provisions of the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act. The girl was sent to a hospital for medical examination, the official added.
- Ahead of the International Peace Day, about 50 religious leaders are set to pray for Nigeria

- Peace Revival and Reconciliation Foundation, the organiser of the prayer, said its plan is to ensure peaceful co-existence Nigeria

-The foundation's coordinator said his motivation was to have a violence-free Nigeria

The coordinator, Peace Revival and Reconciliation Foundation (PRRF), Pastor Yohanna Buru, has said he is working with 50 imams and pastors to pray for lasting peace and stability in Nigeria.

Buru said in Kaduna on Thursday, September 20, on preparations made by the foundation to mark the International Peace Day that some of the clerics were from Benin and Niger Republics.

The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that September 21 is marked annually as the global day of peace.

Legit.ng gathers that the cleric said the interfaith prayer was to strengthen peaceful co-existence between Muslims and Christians, promote inter religious tolerance and understanding.

READ ALSO: Ortom confirms receipt of N14.9bn paris club refund

Buru said: This years peace day celebration will be different, because instead of coming out for rally or matches on the streets with banners and placards, we will ask our clerics to stay at home and pray for peace and the success of the 2019 elections.

it is important to pray for the country, for the political leaders, Nigerian soldiers at the battle ground, and to pray for Gods protection on our families.

If you believe in prayer at all, expect God to hear you, but If you dont, you will not have. God will not hear you unless you believe.

Buru, who is the general overseer of Christ Evangelical and Life Intercession Ministry, Kaduna, said no one should underestimate the power of prayer because God listens to people at any time.

He added: What Nigerian really needs now is prayer and fasting for peace and unity, and an end to all crisis militating against peace stability in the country.

On his part, Imam Mohammed Ahmed, said all Nigerians should pray for increased blessings in all facets of life, especially for the emergence of credible leaders after the 2019 elections.

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Meanwhile, Legit.ng previously reported that the Hausa community in Ondo state had called on Nigerians to embrace the culture of peaceful coexistence among themselves.

Alhaji Aminu Jubril, the secretary of the community, made the call while speaking with newsmen after the Eid-el-Kabir prayers in Akure. Jubril also added that there was a divine reason for the amalgamation that brought Nigeria into existence in 1914.

Ex Bishop David Abioye's driver quits Living Faith Church, converts to Islam - On Legit.ng TV

Source: Legit
The speaker of the House of Representatives, Yakubu Dogara, on Thursday, September 20, arrived at the national secretariat of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) in Bauchi to submit his nomination and expression of interest forms.

Legit.ng gathered that the forms are to enable him contest the 2019 House of Representatives election in Bauchi state.

The speaker was greeted by joyous crowd at the party secretariat.

READ ALSO: Lagos APC: Tinubu reportedly asks Ambode to drop second term ambition

Dogara, who openly defected from the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC), had been having running battles with its leadership and the Presidency.

Legit.ng previously reported that the speaker of the House of Representatives, Yakubu Dogara, reacted to his alleged defection from the All Progressives Party (APC) to the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and he has even obtained a nomination form.

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There had been reports that Dogara got the PDP nomination form to return to the House of Representatives even though he had yet to formally announce his defection from the ruling APC.

"Earlier today, I was presented with the PDP @HouseNGR nomination form by my constituents. They urged me to relinquish membership of the ruling APC & stated reasons such as the blatant injustice and outright disregard for democratic principles being perpetrated within the party.

"I feel deeply honoured by this kind gesture; however, I will not fill this form until I have consulted with those supporters who remain in APC. I thank my people for their unwavering support so far, and remain unshaken in my belief that all power belongs to God," he said in his tweets.

Senator Kwankwaso Rabiu announces his Presidential Bid (Election 2019) | Legit.ng TV

Source: Legit
- President Muhammadu Buhari and Governor Akinwunmi Ambode of Lagos state are currently having a closed-door meeting

- The two leaders are meeting at the Presidential Villa in Abuja

- The meeting is in connection with the second term bid of Governor Ambode, which is shaky as a result of the rift between him and Asiwaju Bola Tinubu

President Muhammadu Buhari on Thursday, September 20, met behind closed door with Governor Akinwunmi Ambode of Lagos state at the Presidential Villa, Abuja.

NAN reports that the governor would be updating the president on latest political development within the All Progressives Congress (APC) in Lagos state.

Legit.ng gathers that the governors political godfather, Asiwaju Bola Tinubu and the leadership of the APC in Lagos state were alleged to have mounted pressure on Ambode, to drop his second term bid.

READ ALSO: Society of engineers wants Lagos federal secretariat complex sold

Tinubu, who is alleged to have endorsed Ambodes opponent within the APC, Babajide Sanwo-Olu, had refused to back Ambodes second term ambition despite pleas by concerned individuals and several socio-political groups from within and outside Lagos state.

Governors under the platform of APC, who met on the night of Wednesday, September 19 in Abuja, had on behalf of Ambode, sought the intervention of President Buhari in the APC crisis in Lagos state.

The chairman of the APC Governors Forum, Governor Rochas Okorocha, delivered the governors message to the president few minutes before his meeting with Ambode.

A source in the presidency said that the president might end the tussle between Ambode and the Mandate Group, led by the APC national leader, Asiwaju Bola Tinubu.

The president may also meet with other APC stakeholders in Lagos state within the week as part of efforts toward resolving the rift.

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Meanwhile, Legit.ng previously reported that the national leader of the All Progressives Congress (APC), Asiwaju Bola Tinubu, allegedly asked Governor Akinwunmi Ambode to drop his second term bid and endorse Babajide Sanwo-Olu.

The Mandate Movement in the Lagos APC which is controlled by the APC chieftain is backing Sanwo-Olu. It was reported that despite pleas from notable politicians, Tinubu had refused to back Ambode.

Can Ambode get a second term without Tinubu's approval? - on Legit.ng TV

Source: Legit.ng
The federal government on Thursday, September 20, redeemed its pledge to donate a house to the family of late minister of state for labour and employment, James Ocholi.

The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that the donation was made by the Secretary to the Government of the Federation (SGF), Boss Mustapha.

According to the report, Mustapha, represented by Olusegun Adekunle, the permanent secretary, general services office, said the presentation was to fulfill one of the promises government made to the surviving children of late Ocholi.

READ ALSO: Lagos APC: Tinubu reportedly asks Ambode to drop second term

According to him, It is a promise kept.

Mustapha said that the government made three promises to the family during the burial ceremony namely; scholarship for children in school, employment for the graduates and acquisition of a befitting house in Abuja.

He said that he promises were made by the president in recognition of the diligent service to the country by the late minister.

He said that the house is a four- bedroom terrace house in Flower Gate Estate, along Apo resettlement, Abuja.

Receiving the document of the property on behalf of the family, Aaron Ocholi, son of the late minister, commended the government for keeping to its promise.

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James Ocholi died in March, 2016, with his wife and son on the Abuja-Kaduna express way in a ghastly accident.

The presentation of the house documents was made in the Office of the Secretary to the Government of the Federation (OSGF) not at the location of the house.

Legit.ng earlier reported how the funeral of Barrister James Enonjo Ocholi, who died in an accided.

Osun Election 2018: PDP Has No Candidate for Saturdays Osun Election - Omisore Reveals Legit.ng TV

Source: Legit
- Minister Adebayo Shittu is currently entangled in a web for allegedly failing to participate in the NYSC scheme despite graduating before he clocked 30

- The revelation comes just days after the resignation of Kemi Adeosun over an NYSC certificate scandal

- Shittu reportedly claims having served as a lawmaker should cover for his participation in the NYSC scheme

Adebayo Shittu, a chieftain of the All Progressives Congress (APC) and communications minister in the current administration is facing allegation that he failed to participate in the National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) scheme.

Premium Times reports that Shittu was allegedly found to have skipped the mandatory NYSC scheme, calling it an offence that may see him lose his position and earn him jail term.

READ ALSO: Lagos APC: Tinubu reportedly asks Ambode to drop second term

The report revealed that Adebayo Shittu failed to participate in the NYSC scheme despite graduating from the then University of Ife (now Obafemi Awolowo University) at age 25.

Shittu is currently battling to take over from Abiola Ajimobi as governor of Oyo state in 2019 and the scandal comes just days after the resignation of Kemi Adeosun as finance minister.

The report said when contacted, Shittu admitted that he did not serve but claimed he thought his first political post after graduation could suffice as national service, a claim lawyers and NYSC insiders consider as ludicrous and untenable.

Skipping the compulsory national service is an offence under the NYSC law, punishable with up to 12 months imprisonment, the report said adding that instead of NYSC, Shittu had gone into politics after graduation, and was, in 1979, elected member of the Oyo state House of Assembly.

He reportedly argued the election as a lawmaker covers for the mandatory NYSC scheme.

The constitution provides for the qualification needed for state assembly members, NYSC is not there.

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I didnt need it to become a member of the state assembly, and that is already a service, he said.

The report said Shittu disagreed with its correspondent who laboured to explain to him that the NYSC act makes participation in the scheme mandatory for all graduates like him and that election or appointment to political office does not qualify as a basis for exemption.

Legit.ng earlier reported that the All Progressives Congress (APC) said the resignation of Kemi Adeosun as minister of finance and acceptance of same by President Muhammadu Buhari is an action of honour, strength, character and integrity.

Yekini Nabena, the APC acting National Publicity Secretary, said this in a statement made available to the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) on Sunday, September 16, in Abuja.

Osun Election 2018: PDP Has No Candidate for Saturdays Osun Election - Omisore Reveals Legit.ng TV

Source: Legit
Yves here. While the specific observations in this post will be very familiar to readers (youve said the same things in comments!), I beg to differ with calling the Governments Brexit negotiating stance a strategy. Its bad habit plus lack of preparation and analysis.

And the UKs lack of calculation and self-awareness about how it is operating means it will be unable to change course.

By Benjamin Martill, a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Dahrendorf Forum where he focuses on Europe after Brexit. He is based at LSE IDEAS, the London School of Economicss foreign policy think tank. The Dahrendorf Forum is a joint research venture between LSE and the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin. Originally published at openDemocracy

But is this the best strategy for advancing British interests? Here is the argument based on the findings of a recent Dahrendorf Forum working paper.

All eyes in British politics are on the negotiations between the UK and the EU over the terms of the forthcoming British withdrawal from the Union, or Brexit. Surprisingly, questions of bargaining strategy  once the preserve of diplomats and niche academic journals  have become some of the most defining issues in contemporary British politics.

The New Politics of Bargaining

Cabinet disagreements over the conduct of the negotiations led to the resignation of David Davis and Boris Johnson in early July 2018 and the issue continues to divide the ruling Conservative party. Theresa Mays most recent statements have all addressed the question of how hard she has pushed Brussels in the talks.

But is the hard bargaining strategy appropriate, or will it ultimately harm the UK? The salience of this question should occasion deeper analysis of the fundamentals of international bargaining, given the extent to which the course of British politics will be determined by the governments performance (or perceived performance) in the Brexit talks.

Driving a Hard Bargain

A hard-bargaining strategy isnt necessarily a poor one. To the extent it is workable, it may even represent the sensible option for the UK.

Hard bargaining is characterised by negative representations of negotiating partners, unwillingness to make concessions, issuance of unrealistic demands, threats to damage the partner or exit the negotiations, representations of the talks in zero-sum terms, failure to provide argumentation and evidence, and withholding of information. From diplomats portrayal of the EU as an uncooperative and bullying negotiating partner to a set of demands recognised as unrealistic in Brussels and Britain alike, the UKs approach to the Brexit negotiations scores highly on each of these measures.

The consensus in the academic literature is generally that hard bargaining works only where a given party has a relative advantage. Powerful states have an incentive to engage in hard bargaining, since by doing so they will be able to extract greater concessions from weaker partners and maximise the chance of achieving an agreement on beneficial terms.

But weaker actors have less incentive to engage in hard bargaining, since they stand to lose more materially if talks break down and reputationally if theyre seen as not being backed by sufficient power,

So which is Britain?

Power Distribution

The success of hard bargaining depends on the balance of power. But even a cursory examination would seem to confirm that the UK does not hold the upper hand in the negotiations. Consider three standard measures of bargaining power: a countrys economic and military capabilities, the available alternatives to making a deal, and the degree of constraint emanating from the public.

When it comes to capabilities, the UK is a powerful state with considerable economic clout and greater military resources than its size would typically warrant. It is the second-largest economy in the EU (behind Germany) and its GDP is equal to that of the smallest 19 member states. And yet in relative terms, the combined economic and military power of the EU27 dwarves that of the UK: the EU economy is five times the size of the UKs.

Next, consider the alternatives. A no deal scenario would be damaging for both the UK and the EU, but the impact would be more diffuse for the EU member states. They would each lose one trading partner, whereas the UK would lose all of its regional trading partners. Moreover, the other powers and regional blocs often cited as alternative trading partners (the US, China, the Commonwealth, ASEAN) are not as open as the EU economy to participation by external parties, nor are they geographically proximate (the greatest determinant of trade flows), nor will any deal be able to replicate the common regulatory structure in place in the EU. This asymmetric interdependence strongly suggests that the UK is in greater need of a deal than the EU.

Finally, consider the extent of domestic constraints. Constraint enhances power by credibly preventing a leader from offering too generous a deal to the other side. On the EU side the constraints are clear: Barnier receives his mandate from the European Council (i.e. the member states) to whom he reports frequently. When asked to go off-piste in the negotiations, he has replied that he does not have the mandate to do so. On the UK side, by contrast, there is no such mandate. British negotiators continually cite Eurosceptic opposition to the EUs proposals in the cabinet, the Conservative party, and the public, but they are unable to guarantee any agreement will receive legislative assent, and cannot cite any unified position.

Perceptions of Power

But the real power distribution is not the only thing that matters. While the EU is the more powerful actor on objective criteria, a number of key assumptions and claims made by the Brexiteers have served to reinforce the perception that Britain has the upper hand.

First, on the question of capabilities, the discourse of British greatness (often based on past notions of power and prestige) belies the UKs status as a middle power (at best) and raises unrealistic expectations of what Britains economic and military resources amount to. Second, on the question of alternatives, the oft-repeated emphasis on global Britain and the UKs stated aim to build bridges with its friends and allies around the globe understates the UKs reliance on Europe, the (low) demand for relations with an independent Britain abroad, and the value of free trade agreements or other such arrangements with third countries for the UK. Third, on the question of domestic constraint, the post-referendum discourse of an indivisible people whose wishes will be fulfilled only through the implementation of the Brexit mandate belies the lack of consensus in British politics and the absence of a stable majority for either of the potential Brexit options, including the no deal, hard, or soft variants of Brexit. Invoking the people as a constraint on international action, in such circumstances, is simply not credible.

Conclusion

Assumptions about Britains status as a global power, the myriad alternatives in the wider world, and the unity of the public mandate for Brexit, have contributed to the overstatement of the UKs bargaining power and the (false) belief that hard bargaining will prove a winning strategy.

Britain desperately needs to have an honest conversation about the limits of the UKs bargaining power. This is not treasonous, as ardent Brexiteers have labelled similar nods to reality, but is rather the only way to ensure that strategies designed to protect the national interest actually serve this purpose. Power is a finite resource that cannot be talked into existence. Like a deflating puffer fish, the UKs weakness will eventually become plain to see. The risk is that before this occurs, all bridges will be burned, all avenues exhausted, and all feathers ruffled.

The arguments in this blog are based on the findings of a Dahrendorf Forum working paper by Benjamin Martill and Uta Staiger titled Cultures of Negotiation: Explaining Britains Hard Bargaining in the Brexit Negotiations.

The opinions expressed in this blog contribution are entirely those of the author and do not represent the positions of the Dahrendorf Forum or its hosts Hertie School of Governance and London School of Economics and Political Science or its funder Stiftung Mercator.
The Archbishop of Cashel & Emly, Archbishop Kieran OReilly SMA, has asked for prayers for the safe return of a missing missionary priest from his congregation, the Society of African Missions, who is believed to have been abducted by jihadists.

Father Pierluigi Maccalli SMA was kidnapped on Monday in south Niger, near the border with Burkina Faso, allegedly by a group of jihadist militants.

The Society of African Missions is an international community of Catholic missionaries which serves the people of Africa.

Archbishop OReilly said: I am asking the faithful of our Archdiocese, and all people of goodwill, to join with me in praying for Father Pierluigis wellbeing and safety. It is a very worrying time as we wait in hopeful anticipation of our brother priests safe return.

Father Pierluigi is originally from the Diocese of the northern Italian town of Crema and had worked for years as a missionary in Ivory Coast before transferring to the parish of Bomoanga, in Niamey Diocese.

The region has been struggling to defeat jihadist groups, including some affiliated with al Qaeda and Islamic State, which are active along Niger's porous borders with both Mali and Burkina Faso.
The NATO Deputy Secretary General, the Honourable Ms. Rose Gottemoeller will travel to Tbilisi on Friday, 21 September 2018.

She will have meetings with the President of Georgia, H.E. Mr. Giorgi Margvelashvili, the Vice-Prime Minister, Minister of Internal Affairs, Mr. Giorgi Gakharia, the First Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs, Mr. David Dondua and the First Deputy Minister of Defence, Mrs. Lela Chikovani.

Ms. Gottemoeller will participate in a roundtable at the Defence Institution Building School (DIB) and will deliver a lecture at the Tbilisi State University.

She has also been invited to deliver remarks at a ceremony marking the International day of Peace.

Media Advisory

(All timings are local)

09:45 Deputy Secretary General joint press conference with the First Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs

10:15 Round Table at DIB School followed by short comments for press with the First Deputy Minister of Defence

11:15 Public lecture at Tbilisi State University.

Still images of the event will be available on the NATO website afterwards.

Follow us on Twitter (@NATOPress and @Gottemoeller)
(Natural News) James OKeefe, founder of Project Veritas, which uses undercover journalists to expose Left-wing, anti-government, anti-America corruption, has struck again.

In the second of a series of videos exposing the Deep State, DoJ paralegal Allison Hrabar is seen discussing how she uses government software and computers to push her socialist agenda and to punish those she does not agree with politically.

In addition, Project Veritas noted on its website, Jessica Schubel, the former chief of staff for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services during the Obama administration, is also featured in this second video.

Both Schubel and Hrabar make admissions revealing that federal employees appear to be using their positions inside our government to resist or slow the Trump administrations policies, Project Veritas reports. It appears some laws have been broken in the process.

Astute readers may recall Hrabars name. Shes a member of the Democratic Socialists of America (Metro DC chapter) and was seen recently harassing Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielson in a D.C.-area restaurant  an action for which she was not punished. (Related: UNREAL: Member of Marxist mob who chased DHS Secretary Nielsen out of DC restaurant WORKS for DOJ.)

In the video, Schubel, now a senior policy analyst at the Left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, openly admits that theres like a little resistance movement inside the federal government, while telling the Project Veritas undercover journalist that friends of hers at the Department of Health and Human Services give [her] information before it is released officially.

[S]he mailed it to you like in physical snail mail like post office and then you got it. Thats like awesome, the PV journalist says.

Right, Schubel responds.

And then you were able to write about that the PV journalist says.

Right.

Is it illegal to receive it, asks the undercover reporter.

Probably, Schubel said.

Theres a lot of talk about how we can resist

The former chief of staff then said some of the materials that were sent to her by associates were confidential, which allowed her to then prepare responses to government initiatives that had yet to be formally announced.

So, [your friend at HHS] sent you like what the administration was about to dowhats so illegal about it? Just because you could write an article earlier than you otherwise could? the PV journalist said, thereby giving her a chance to spin the initiative in a negative light.

Well, yeah, it was confidential, Schubel responded.

As for Hrabar, she admits in the video that a number of federal employees are using whatever powers they have to resist POTUS Donald Trump. She says theres a lot of talk about how we can, like, resist from inside the Department of Justice.

She then talks about a fellow federal worker and member of the DSA who works for the Department of Agriculture and who is slowing what they do so that people can remain on food stamps longer.

We have a member who works for the people who distribute food stamps, and they can like take that away, and theyre slowing what they do what theyre doing means that people are going to be able to stay on food stamps for another month or two, which is like really important, Hrabar said.

In April Hrabar led a DSA protest at the home of D.C. lobbyist Jeremy Wiley; she talked about how she managed to obtain his address, a potentially criminal act.

And so, we ran the license plate and it was a car registered to Jeremy Wiley, so you have his car parked outside a house that he does own, she said.

When the PV journalist asked about running plates, Hrabar said, federal employees can, but we cannot do it officially.

After the video went public and PV lawyers filed complaints with the Justice Department and HHS, DoJ said through a spokesperson, These allegations are deeply concerning. Department policy prohibits misuse of government resources to advance personal interests. We are looking into this immediately and have referred this matter to the Inspector General as well.

Read more about Deep State corruption at DeepState.news.

Sources include:

ProjectVeritas.com

NaturalNews.com
(Natural News) After coming under fire for being a threat to free society, Google is facing even more scrutiny for their extreme, cult-like atmosphere. It turns out new employees are forced to wear multi-colored propeller caps which say Noogler on them for an entire week after going to their first TGIF all-hands meeting.

The hats have been a part of Googles corporate culture for years, but became fodder for public amusement after Breitbart leaked shocking footage of a TGIF meeting in which Google higher-ups disparaged Trump supporters and encouraged employees to think of ways the company could thwart populist movements in the United States and other countries. The Noogler hats are just one of the many ways in which Google forces its employees to bend to their authoritarian corporate culture  and are a representation of the companys cult-like nature.

If youre new to Google, expect to be called a Noogler. Pronounced new-gler, these people are identifiable thanks to the Google-colored propeller caps they receive, Business Insider explains. Nooglers get their caps at their first TGIF meeting. The excitement at being christened with a Noogler cap strikes a shocking similarity to that of cult members who are eagerly awaiting their formal indoctrination.

Wearing my new favorite hat  So excited that this day is finally here! #noogler @lifeatgoogle pic.twitter.com/XSCFy5N2t5  Lauren Cibor (@LuluKayye) November 9, 2016

After the public got to see the Noogler hats for the first time, multiple Twitter users commented that the hats were the epitome of the cultish corporate culture at Google.

As Breitbart reports:

After watching the leaked video and seeing everyone with those hats on Im convinced #Google is a cult, declared one user, while another proclaimed, Its cult-like, with all the hugs and so many Googlers Googling by wearing those bizarre Google hats, referencing a part in the video where all of the employees hug each other.

But its not just the hats that show how oppressive and cult-like Google really is: Recall the firing of James Damore, a former Google employee who was cut from the company simply for suggesting that the environment at Google was not conducive to diversity of thought. Damore accused the company of creating an ideological echo chamber with zero room for discussion.

At Google, if you dont conform, youre kicked out.

More insidious, however, is Googles tremendous effort at keeping their employees happy. Its not a secret that working at Google comes with a host of perks beyond the average working Americans wildest dreams: Free, organic, chef-prepared meals, free dental and healthcare, free haircuts, free dry cleaning, gyms and swimming pools, nap pods and other amenities make life at Google seem more like a luxury resort than a place of work.

Google says it provides these things to reduce employee turnover, but their generosity may serve a more clandestine purpose: Brainwashing their employees. By providing just about everything they could need, Google employees arent just being made happy, theyre being turned into Google disciples that will support the companys endeavors, no matter how controversial  and follow the companys lead, no matter where it takes them.

Alongside Googles penchant for information control, its clear that Google isnt the benevolent force it pretends to be.

The hats may say Noogler but what they really mean is, Youre one of us. And once youre one of the team, there may be no coming back.

See more stories about extreme, lunatic behavior at Lunatics.news.

Sources for this article include:

Breitbart.com

BusinessInsider.com
The Bharatiya Janata Partys ally Shiv Sena, too, has made a similar demand.

The opposition has demanded immediate relief for the people of the state.

Mumbai: Petrol has reached its highest price of Rs 93 in many parts of Maharashtra, with prices having crossed the Rs 90 mark in as many as 17 cities of the state.

The Opposition is demanding immediate relief by way of cutting down state taxes on fuel.

The Bharatiya Janata Partys ally Shiv Sena, too, has made a similar demand.

Parbhani in Maharashtra is buying petrol at the highest price all over India. The Wednesday rate for Parbhani was Rs 93. Prices in cities such as Hingoli, Jintur, Ghansavangi, Amba-jogai, Paranda, Phulambri, and Majalgaon are in a similar range.

Mainly, cities in Marathwada and western Vidarbha have the highest rates. There are also many cities where petrol has crossed the Rs 90 mark. Even in Mumbai, it was selling at Rs 89.54 at a few petrol pumps. So, in transaction, it costs the customer Rs 90.

Picking on the issue, the opposition has demanded immediate relief for the people of the state. The BJP-Sena government is literally looting the people over taxes on fuel. Maharashtra has the highest amount of tax on petrol. That is why petrol and diesel in Maharashtra are costlier than the rest of the country. We demand that the government cut taxes immediately, said Congress spokesperson Sachin Sawant.

Nationalist Congress Party chief spokesperson Nawab Malik also demanded relief for the people. We dont know what the government is waiting for to reduce taxes? Does chief minister Devendra Fadnavis need permission from Delhi to give relief to the people? asked Mr Malik.

Sena MP Sanjay Raut joined the chorus saying, We are with the people. Fuel prices are hurting peoples pockets badly. This is not the way to get taxes. Those who are in a position to take a decision should give the people relief.
(Natural News) The Left has conjured up yet another fake news talking point with which to provoke civil unrest against President Trump: the false claim that the Commander-in-Chief is maniacally separating illegal alien children from their parents at the Mexican border. Its not true, of course, but even more insidious is the fact that its merely opportunistic play-pretend, as evidenced by the fact that the Left has never actually cared about the plight of innocent children.

Dont believe us? Check out the latest datasets on vaccine-injured children in America and ask yourself: Why havent I heard about this from my favorite media sources? If the Left is just so gosh-darned concerned about the safety of children who belong to criminal invaders, then surely theyre at least just as concerned about tiny babies and toddlers who are being permanently injured or killed by vaccine injections, right? Wrong.

Just in 2017, there were more than 16,000 submissions to the U.S. Department of Health And Human Services (HHS) Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, also known as VAERS, documenting cases of injury and death following childhood vaccination. Keep in mind that VAERS contains only a tiny fraction of the actual number of cases of vaccine-associated injuries and deaths that occur, the vast majority of which are never reported.

Among the many reported injuries are severe immediate reactions to vaccination that include things like swelling, rashes, and flu-like symptoms. There are also many cases in VAERS of more serious adverse events like bloody stools, paralysis, seizures, neurological damage, and of course death. All of this information is freely available to anyone who wishes to access it, and yet when is the last time you heard a mainstream news report about the tens of thousands, or possibly even millions of young children who are incurring serious harm from vaccines?

Same media outlets condemning separation of illegal alien families routinely push vaccines that separate American families by killing citizen children

All it takes is a quick internet search using terms like vaccine injuries and vaccine deaths to realize that not only is the mainstream media ignoring this important subject, but in many cases is also covering it up. A Google News search conducted on June 25 using the search term vaccines pulled up the following headlines, illustrating that the vaccine industry holds protective status in that mainstream news outlets almost never say anything bad about them:

The Publics Health: Teen vaccines important for developing immunity to disease (Montana Standard)

Why Isnt There A Readily Available Lyme Disease Vaccine? (Forbes)

Two Vaccines Are Better Than One for Malaria (Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News)

Study Finds Disturbing Trends in Vaccination Exemptions (AAFP News)

No Safety Concerns With Kids DtaP Combo Vaccine (WebMD)

Combating misinformation about vaccines (The Washington Post)

And on and on it goes, with not a single mention of how vaccines are separating families in that theyre known to permanently damage some childrens brains, for instance, or even kill them. It kind of puts all of the hysteria about illegal alien children being separated from their illegal alien parents during border incidents into perspective, wouldnt you say?

Its a blatant double standard thats really easy to recognize simply by reading the headlines. Vaccines represent the holy grail of Big Pharma, which controls what many media outlets publish. Even so-called conservative news outlets like Fox News are beholden to pharmaceutical interests  just watch the commercials that air on the network and youll see it plain as day.

For more news about how vaccines are harming and killing American children while the mainstream media couldnt care less, be sure to visit VaccineInjuryNews.com.

Sources for this article include:

NaturalNews.com

VAERS.HHS.gov

NaturalNews.com
(Natural News) Its been revealed that Senate Democrats are conspiring with one another to pass new legislation that would basically eliminate all free speech on the internet.

In a video report published to Brighteon.com, Linda from WGON explains how the left is using Russian bots and fake news as excuses to censor all online conversations that work against their sinister agenda.

Citing a story published by Reason.com about a leaked memo, Linda highlights a massive liberal plot to silence all dissenting viewpoints, similar to whats taking place in communist China.

This is getting to be quite, quite disturbing what is happening in this country right now, she states. It seems that everywhere I look, there is utter chaos, hate, people that are opposite of your agenda, your narrative, shutting up your speech.

You can watch the full video report below:

Democrats: we need to eliminate the First Amendment because of THE RUSSIANS!

The memo, which was reportedly penned by Senator Mark Warner (D-VA) and leaked by an unknown source to Axios, clearly aims to capitalize on the Russian xenophobia that continues to spread within liberal circles in relation to the Russian collusion conspiracy theory.

It goes to great lengths, for instance, trying to rationalize how the need to control all information online is great because of Russians and their tendency to spread disinformation.

[T]he Soviets tried to spread fake news denigrating Martin Luther King, Rep. Warner tries to argue.

Based on this hatred for Russia and its people, Democrats apparently hope to convince a majority of Americans to give up their First Amendment rights and allow leftist Democrats to have the final say as to everything thats published online.

Chinas social score scheme a blueprint for a totalitarian America

According to Linda from WGON, this growing totalitarian sentiment is coming from one place: China. She cites numerous examples of Chinese collusion that suggest communism from East Asia is rapidly encroaching and supplanting American liberty.

China controls most of the U.S. as we know, she explains. They control Hollywood now. They control the Democrats, the media, our debt, they own our debt.

We know they have their own internet and media totally muzzled, and they have been teaching our country how to muzzle us. We are seeing that now. Most of the politicians are in Chinas pocket. They are taking billions of dollars  from China and doing Chinas bidding.

We, too, have reported on Chinas negative influence on America, including with its social score scheme thats right now being adopted and implemented by Facebook.

Communism has been around for quite a long time in academia as well. Anyone whos attended a mainstream college or university within the past several decades knows that anti-American sentiment is embedded into nearly all curriculum nowadays, effectively brainwashing the next generation of Americans into hating their own country and the ideals upon which it was founded.

There are people who dont even know what the Second Amendment is who are out there trying to shut you up, says Linda. The Constitution and America as we know it is on the chopping block. They are working overtime to kill America so they can redo it as a communist nation  If you are paying attention, you can see this is true.

Since the longtime leftist tactic of simply dubbing all speech liberals dont like as hate speech isnt working as well as it used to, the next phase of the takeover seems to be actively silencing and removing this speech from the public conversation, all with the help of Democrats in Congress.

For more censorship news, check out Censorship.news.

Sources for this article include:

Brighteon.com

Reason.com

NaturalNews.com
(Natural News) Seagrasses are marine plants that make up huge meadows in shallow seas on all continents, except Antarctica. These aquatic plants may help boost the productivity of the worlds fisheries, suggests new research published in Conservation Letters.

The study, Seagrass meadows support global fisheries production, was a collaboration between Dr. Leanne Cullen-Unsworth of Cardiff University and Dr. Lina Mtwana Nordlund of Stockholm University. It looked at the connection between fisheries and seagrass distribution, and highlighted the importance of having a unified approach to management governed at local, regional and international levels.

Seagrass meadows have been known to be beneficial fishing habitats. Data from the research produced the first quantitative global evidence of the importance of seagrass meadows in supporting world fisheries productivity.

The study findings showed that one-fifth of the worlds biggest fisheries, like walleye pollock, need healthy seagrass meadows. It also revealed that seagrass-associated fishing occurs on a global scale.

Dr. Cullen-Unsworth noted that seagrass meadows can boost the productivity of global fisheries since they can be used as a nursery habitat for commercial fish stocks like Atlantic cod, conch, tiger prawns, and white spotted spinefoot. (Related: Seaweed could save Californias coastline by reducing ocean acidification.) She added that theres a gap between coastal habitat conservation and fisheries management that must be bridged to take advantage of the benefits that seagrasses can offer fisheries and thereby continue to support human [well-being]. The research also detailed policy-relevant observations and recommendations that made note of the benefits of seagrass in global fisheries. Seagrass as key fishing grounds  Seagrass meadows are an important fishery resource for artisanal fisheries, small-scale subsistence, and large-scale commercial enterprises. However, in various parts of the globe, seagrass-situated fisheries remain unreported and unregulated. Steps must be taken to document this crucial resource.

 Seagrass meadows are an important fishery resource for artisanal fisheries, small-scale subsistence, and large-scale commercial enterprises. However, in various parts of the globe, seagrass-situated fisheries remain unreported and unregulated. Steps must be taken to document this crucial resource. Seagrass as nursery habitats for fish stocks  Additional research can help determine the connection between nursery habitat links and mature exploited fish stocks. Large-scale international strategies need to formally recognize how crucial seagrass meadows are as nursery grounds that can stock off-shore fisheries.

 Additional research can help determine the connection between nursery habitat links and mature exploited fish stocks. Large-scale international strategies need to formally recognize how crucial seagrass meadows are as nursery grounds that can stock off-shore fisheries. Seagrass as shallow-water habitat for gleaning/harvesting invertebrates  Gleaning, or fishing in shallow waters, is practiced all around the world. With seagrass, invertebrate fisheries can have a steady source of necessary protein, which is beneficial to those in tropical coastal communities. Even though invertebrate gleaning activity is expanding on a global level, its rarely included in fishery statistics. Gleaning isnt usually considered in resource management strategies, or its poorly enforced, unregulated, or unreported.

 Gleaning, or fishing in shallow waters, is practiced all around the world. With seagrass, invertebrate fisheries can have a steady source of necessary protein, which is beneficial to those in tropical coastal communities. Even though invertebrate gleaning activity is expanding on a global level, its rarely included in fishery statistics. Gleaning isnt usually considered in resource management strategies, or its poorly enforced, unregulated, or unreported. Seagrass as trophic support for fisheries  Seagrass meadows export large quantities of associated animal biomass, organic matter, and living material which will benefit both near and far shore fisheries. Additionally, seagrass can subsidize whole food webs in the deep sea, which can boost the productivity of larger fisheries.

 Seagrass meadows export large quantities of associated animal biomass, organic matter, and living material which will benefit both near and far shore fisheries. Additionally, seagrass can subsidize whole food webs in the deep sea, which can boost the productivity of larger fisheries. Seagrass has potential value for food security  Another unexplored area of research, there is a discrepancy regarding the noteworthy economic benefits of seagrass nurseries and the inadequate levels of funding and management when it comes to the prevention of seagrass degradation. Fisheries modeling and management approaches dont usually acknowledge how shallow coastal seagrass can benefit fish stocks. Dr. Unsworth noted that the coastal distribution of seagrass makes it susceptible to various threats, both land- and sea-based, like boat damage, coastal development, land runoff, and trawling. There is also proof that with the rapid decline of seagrass globally, fisheries and their stocks are usually endangered, often with negative economic side effects. She concluded that to change these concerns, the role of seagrass in global fisheries production must reach the policy sphere. The authors emphasized that seagrass needs targeted management to boost and sustain its role in global fisheries production.

Fast facts on seagrass

Seagrasses thrive in shallow salty and brackish waters all over the globe, from tropical areas to the Arctic Circle.

Seagrasses were named after their long green leaves that look like grass.

While often confused with seaweed, seagrass is more closely related to land-based flowering plants.

Like grass that grows on land, seagrass also has leaves, roots, and stems. It also produces flowers and seeds.

Seagrass meadows are some of the most productive ecosystems in existence.

Learn more about the benefits of aquatic plants at Ecology.news.

Sources include:

ScienceDaily.com

Ocean.SI.edu
(Natural News) Democrats are in full-on panic mode over POTUS Donald Trumps order to the Justice Department earlier this week to declassify and release all documents related to FISA warrant applications sought against one of his 2016 campaign advisers, Carter Page.

So desperate, in fact, that they have now committed an act of treason.

On Tuesday, four Democrats  Rep. Adam Schiff, Rep. Nancy Pelosi, Senator Mark Warner, and Senator Charles Schumer  have sent a letter to Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats and FBI Director Christopher Wray ordering them to defy the presidents order and to instead provide them with a briefing on the matter before anything is released.

[W]e request an immediate briefing to the Gang of Eight from you prior to any disclosure of the affected material by your agencies to anyone at the White House, the letter states.

The Gang of Eight consists of the chairpersons and ranking members of the House and Senate intelligence committees, along with leaders from both parties in both chambers. By statute, they are to be briefed on intelligence matters, but that does not include under all conditions.

Among other issues of concern, we will need you to clarify in person:

 the exact review process that will be undertaken, including the White Houses role in and visibility into this process and the specific White House officials expected to be involved;

 your agencies proposed redactions and plans to protect investigative equities and sources and methods, including efforts to mitigate harm that may result from these disclosures; and

 how you intend to comply with statutes binding the President and executive branch officers and employees, including the Privacy Act.

Your agencies review, and any communication with the White House on the substance of the material, should not proceed further until you have briefed the Gang of Eight in person, the letter instructs.

In short, these four Democrats are attempting to dictate to Executive Branch offices and officers over whom they have no direct authority.

Put bluntly, theyre trying to force Coats and Wray to ignore a valid presidential order to declassify documents that may indeed be related to a counterintelligence operation (Spygate) but which was conducted under dubious circumstances and which may also involve violations of federal law.

This is sedition and Republicans should act

Under 50 U.S. Code  3091, presidents are required to ensure that the congressional intelligence committees are kept fully and currently informed of the intelligence activities of the United States.

But the statute also says, Nothing in this subchapter shall be construed as requiring the approval of the congressional intelligence committees as a condition precedent to the initiation of any significant anticipated intelligence activity. So the president is not obligated to inform the committees under all conditions.

Furthermore, there is the unassailable fact that presidents have the authority to order the declassification of anything, anytime  and he does not need congressional permission to do so. This has long been established but was codified in Executive Order 13526, which was issued by none other than President Obama. As ABC News reports:

The order allows the president to determine the system of designating classified information, and he is the ultimate authority over U.S. intelligence agencies, which gather and classify the information.

Legal eagles also agree. The Gateway Pundit reports that Washington, D.C.-area attorney Will Chamberlain believes that what these four Democrats are doing amounts to a constitutional crisis.

You are equal branches of government, but theyre not subordinate to you, Chamberlain said. Im sorry  President Trump has not issued a request to the intelligence agencies that they declassify this information, he has issued an order.

He also believes that Republicans in control of Congress should take immediate action against these four Democrats.

Trump has plenary declassification authority as the President of the United States, Chamberlain said. The FBI and DOJ are subordinate to him. Congress does not get to order Executive Branch officials to defy a president  that is actually a constitutional crisis.

Read more about the Democratic sedition and treason at Treason.news.

Sources include:

TheNationalSentinel.com

TheGatewayPundit.com

ABCNews.com
(Natural News) The Intercept has received documents detailing Googles plan to work with China and develop a search engine that will censor websites and search terms on human rights, religion, protests, and democracy. Google has been working on the project since 2017. Google CEO Sundar Pichai has met with communist Wang Huning, top foreign policy advisor and member of Chinas communist party. The project has been code-named Dragonfly.

Because Google has agreed to comply with Chinas strict censorship laws, they will soon be allowed to operate their search engine in the country. Googles new custom Android app, called Maotai and Longfei, is set to launch throughout China within the next year. The app is projected to be used by 95 percent of the 750 million internet users in China. This provides a generous revenue stream for Google, but at the cost of human freedom and at the loss of moral and ethical standards for the company. Google has officially engineered a search engine that automatically restrict searches and blacklist websites that are not approved by the communist party. Google is now complicit in crushing human rights to aid and abet communist regimes in oppressing freedom around the world.

Once the new Google search engine app goes live in China, citizens of the communist nation will be able to look up information, as long as that search doesnt question communism, doesnt contain news or academic studies that oppose the communist partys goals. Currently, the Chinese government blocks information about the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. Chinese citizens cannot view any information that challenges authoritarian governments, such as George Orwells 1984.

Many have already experienced Googles censorship in America

Chinas Great Firewall already censors out information that questions communism, blocks sexual material, and omits news sites from the United States. The new Google search app for Android will automatically filter out websites that have already been blacklisted by Chinas Great Firewall. If Google has this censorship technology now, have they tested it out in America? Are they currently using the technology for political and corporate gain in the United States and around the world? Many have already experienced this and are speaking out.

When a Chinese citizen conducts a Google search on their mobile device next year, banned websites wont appear in the first page of the search results. Instead, a disclaimer will pop up, warning some results may have been removed due to statutory requirements. According to leaked documents, British news broadcaster BBC and online encyclopedia Wikipedia are among the first websites to be blocked under Googles new censorship code.

Even worse, some search results will not be shown at all. If the app detects any sensitive queries, then no results will be shown. The blacklist encompasses Googles image search, automatic spell check, and various Google features. For instance, Google will not recommend photographs, social media pages, or phrases that China has already banned.

Will Google executives be held accountable?

Google CEO Sundar Pichais cooperation with Chinas communist censorship has not been relayed to the more than 88,000 employees who work for the company. Only Googles upper management knows about Project Dragonfly and the project has not faced public scrutiny.

By complying with Chinas censorship laws, Google has signified they are an oppressive, authoritarian operation. Assisting China in the oppression of their people, Google has become an enemy of human freedom, an enemy of free speech and free thought. Companies that do business in China must now succumb to the censorship. Google must be held accountable for racketeering and fraud and for selling out on American values and principles, as they assist Chinas communist party in oppressing people around the world.

For more on this hot topic, visit Censorship.News.

Sources include:

PJMedia.com

TheIntercept.com

NaturalNews.com

NaturalNews.com
(Natural News) Taking a very brief reprieve from his more typical lectures promoting limitless illegal immigration and global climate taxes, Roman Catholic head Pope Francis finally addressed the far more serious problem of homosexual Catholic priests molesting and raping underage boys  but not in the way youre probably thinking.

During a recent sermon, Pope Francis decided to call out those who are seeking full disclosure and truth on the matter, labeling them tools of the Great Accuser, a.k.a. Satan. Thats right: Anyone who dares to question the rampant child abuse taking place within the Catholic hierarchy is working for the devil, according to Pope Francis.

Its Lucifer himself whos causing victims of sexual abuse at the hands of the Catholic religion, as well as their family members and other advocates, to seek justice for all of the little ones whose innocence has been forever ruined by pedophiles in the Catholic clergy.

In these times, it seems like the Great Accuser has been unchained and is attacking bishops, Pope Francis stated during the recent mass event.

True, we are all sinners, we bishops. He (Satan) tries to uncover the sins, so they are visible in order to scandalize the people. The Great Accuser, as he himself says to God in the first chapter of the Book of Job, roams the earth looking for someone to accuse.'

Pope Francis works for Satan, and his words represent blasphemy against the Holy Spirit  an unforgivable sin

These are shocking statements, especially considering that the Word of God also states in John 3:20 that everyone who does evil hates the light  meaning, they hate when the truth is exposed because it unveils the evil deeds that they did in darkness.

What this shows is that Pope Francis is teaching what the Bible refers to as doctrines of demons, a twisted interpretation of scripture that conveniently shields the Roman Catholic religion from all scrutiny.

Further, by claiming that those who seek truth and justice are working for the devil, Pope Francis himself is blaspheming the Holy Spirit, which the same Word of God that he claims to represent reveals is an unforgivable sin.

This suggests that Pope Francis and every single homosexual, pedophile bishop and priest whos taken advantage of innocent children are headed straight for hell, even as they hypocritically accuse their accusers of working for the devil.

The truth of the matter is that nobody is accusing anyone of anything, here, since the cat is already out of the bag. An accuser, as Pope Francis puts it, implies that someone merely has an unsubstantiated allegation, which isnt at all applicable to this situation.

While some false allegations surely exist and have caused unjust suffering, the documented instances of vast abuse and cover-ups justify widespread investigations and root-and-branch reforms, writes Guy Benson for TownHall.com.

Between the Pope railing against tools of the Great Accuser and this jaw-dropping soliloquy from one of his senior American defenders, one fears that internal resistance to a needed, cleansing fire is  and will remain  deeply entrenched.

Keep in mind that this isnt the first time that Pope Francis had verbally smeared those whove spoken out about Roman Catholic perversion and corruption. On other occasions, Pope Francis has dubbed those who express disgust with Roman Catholic priests raping little boys as bearing fruit of a diabolical spirit.

The only legitimate accusation is against oneself, Pope Francis added during this same statement, twisting the truth and turning it back on those seeking to make it known.

For more news about the beast known as the Roman Catholic Church, check out Evil.news.

Sources for this article include:

TownHall.com

BibleHub.com

NaturalNews.com
(Natural News) There are two things in the air that people know to be harmful: air pollution and tobacco smoke. While the particular dangers that each bring are well-documented, the same cant be said on how both affect expectant mothers and their newborn. These risks were the focus of a study made by the University of Cape Town and Stellenbosch University in South Africa and the University of Queensland in Australia. The study, which appeared on The Lancet Planetary Health, revealed that newborn infants exposed to indoor air pollution and tobacco smoke were more likely to develop lower respiratory tract infections and wheezing.

The longitudinal birth cohort study, conducted on mothers and infants in Paarl, South Africa, also revealed that newborns who were exposed to smoke before they were born  either from their mothers or a family member  also had an increased risk of wheezing.

Lower respiratory tract infections (LRTIs) refer to infections below the level of the larynx. These may include conditions such as bronchiolitis, bronchitis, and pneumonia, and signs and symptoms vary by age, disease causative agent, and site of infection.

There are two leading causes of LRTIs: viruses and bacteria. Viral infections account for around 40 percent of hospitalized pneumonia cases, and primary agents include influenza A, respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), human metapneumovirus (hMPV), and the varicella-zoster virus (VZV)  commonly referred to as chickenpox. Bacterial infections, on the other hand, are responsible for over 60 percent of hospital trips because of pneumonia, with most cases traced to the Streptococcus pneumoniae bacterium.

In newborns, LRTI symptoms include the following:

Grunting

Poor feeding

Irritability or lethargy (the lack of energy)

Tachypnoea (abnormally rapid breathing)

Fever

Cyanosis (bluish skin) in severe cases

Coughing (this is unusual for infants)

In particular, incidences of lower respiratory tract infections were examined in the study since it is the leading cause of mortality of children under five years in low- and middle-income countries. The same conditions were true in Africa, where the study was conducted.

For the study, researchers looked at 1,137 mothers with 1,143 live births. The infants were observed during their first year of life. To measure for indoor air pollution, the team installed devices that record certain compounds present in air pollution. This included particulate matter (PM), nitrogen dioxide, sulfur dioxide, carbon monoxide, and volatile organic compounds benzene and toluene. Measurements were done before and after the baby was born. (Related: Indoor Air Pollution is a Serious Threat to Your Health.)

Based on the results, of the 1,065 babies who went to at least one study visit, 524 newborns experienced LRTI in their first year. This was linked to exposure to maternal smoking or particulate matter before they were born.

The antenatal developmental factors increased the susceptibility to LRTI more than postnatal exposure did, particularly in the first months of life, the researchers explained.

Moreover, cases of LRTI that needed hospitalization and supplemental oxygen was associated with toluene exposure before birth. Of this association, researchers identified it to be a novel finding, as toluene is a chemical present in many household products used in low- and middle-income countries.

In addition, maternal smoking and passive smoke exposure were also linked to cases of wheezing. Infants who showed wheezing symptoms had mothers who smoked before and after they gave birth. Wheezing in babies was also connected to the mothers exposure to passive smoking.

With these results, the researchers suggest identifying household products that may contain potential indoor air pollutants and removing them to prevent further exposure. Improving ventilation is can also be a useful strategy to improve the health of newborns. However, further studies are required to determine how long-term exposure to both indoor air pollutants and smoking can affect respiratory health in low- and middle-income countries.

Sources include:

Science.news

TheLancet.com

Patient.info
When Steven Spielberg's Jurassic Park hit theaters 25 years ago, it seemed like a sci-fi fantasy that's too far-fetched to be true.

Now, with the strides made in genetics and cloning, scientists say such a park could become reality in just 10 years, with woolly mammoths and other long-dead animals brought back to life.

An Ice Age Park In Russia

Yakutia, also known as the Sakha Republic, is the largest region in the Russian Federation.

Aisen Nikolaev, acting head of the region, tells Siberian Times that him and his friends suggested an Ice Age park with mammoths back in 2014. He recalls people laughing at them then but adds that there are more positive reactions nowadays.

Now, his vision is on its way to becoming reality.

After all, Yukutia is already home to the Pleistocene Park, which is a private reserve that's dedicated to restoring the mammoth steppe ecosystem in the late Pleistocene. The mass extinction that occurred during this epoch included the demise of the woolly mammoth.

Woolly Mammoths, Cave Lions, And Extinct Horses To Populate Reserve

Of course, what is an Ice Age park without the animals?

The woolly mammoth is one of the creatures expected to roam the reserve. The gigantic behemoths have been wiped out from the planet for thousands of years, but traces of woolly mammoth DNA in the permafrost make it possible to bring them back to life.

According to Nikolaev, better quality mammoth remains crops up every year, giving experts a better shot at cloning the massive animal.

"In my opinion, this [cloning a mammoth] will happen in the next decade," he continues. "Technology is developing at an explosive pace, and what yesterday seemed to be scientific nonsense, today is an absolutely clear prospect for scientists."

Regional government officials in far eastern Yakutia have reportedly approved the scientists' project to clone the long-dead animals.

South Korean and Japanese scientists are working with Russia to achieve this goal, saying that elephants could be used as surrogate mothers and carry the clones to term.

Aside from these giants, cave lions and extinct horses could also be brought back from the dead for the park. Scientists are attempting to clone these animals using remains from 40,000 years ago.

"I am certain that with the current speed of development of genetic technologies we will be able to reach some real results in the near future," Nikolaev says. "This, of course, will be a revolution."
National Green Tribunal ruled that it has no jurisdiction to hear the case pertaining to declaring Aarey Colony as a forest.

Mumbai: The Mumbai Metro Rail Corporation (MMRC), which is executing the underground metro 3 corridor (Colaba-Bandra-SEEPZ), has won the three-year-long battle against Aarey activists, with the National Green Tribunal (NGT) having ruled that it has no jurisdiction to hear the case pertaining to declaring Aarey Colony a forest. Further, the NGT has directed the activists to approach the Supreme Court or high court. Thus, there is no stay on metro car shed activities at Aarey.

A MMRC statement read, After detailed hearing, the NGT directed the applicants to either withdraw their application else the final order will be passed. Accordingly, NGO Vanashakti has withdrawn its application and the case is finally disposed of.

The NGT started hearing the Vanashakti and others versus Union of India case in the month of July in 2015. The final hearing was held Thursday at the principal bench of the NGT at New Delhi.

The principal bench of the NGT had issued an interim order restraining the MMRC from dumping debris, reclaiming and cutting trees during the pendency of the application. Around 13 hectare Aarey land is needed to construct the car shed.

Ashwini Bhide, managing director, MMRC, said, With this, all the legal hurdles have been cleared and car depot works can progress in full swing.

Meanwhile, Stalin Dayanand, project director, Vanashakti, said, No, the NGT has not cleared the metro car shed. It has told us to approach the high court or Supreme Court to get Aarey declared as a forest.

According to the NGT, the primary plea of the applicants was to declare an eco-sensitive zone (ESZ) around Sanjay Gandhi National Park (SGNP).

As the ministry of environment, forests and climate change declared the ESZ which excluded land earmarked for the car depot at Aarey, the plea is no longer valid.
With the approval he had sought for six years, a deported US military veteran returned Wednesday from Mexico to his California home.

Accompanied by advocates who had fought to have his residency restored, Fabian Rebolledo crossed the border from Tijuana to San Ysidro to be reunited with his parents, sisters, and son.

"It feels terrific!" Rebolledo said, proudly wearing his Army full dress uniform.

Rebolledo, 43, became the fourth deported veteran to be permitted to return to California since last year. It's estimated dozens more remain in the Tijuana area alone. Their plight has drawn attention, and assistance from such organizations as the Deported Veterans of America, the ACLU, and the Immigrants Rights Clinic affiliated with the law school at the University of California Irvine.

An ACLU study entitled "Discharged, Then Discarded" documented an uptick in deportations of veterans since the 1990's. For legal residents, military service is a path to citizenship, but requires the immigrant to follow an application process. Those who were deported for felony convictions had not done so.

"There is no bigger injustice", said Juan Carlos Mercado, himself an Army infantry veteran, now working in law enforcement, who founded Deported Veterans of America in San Diego. "For Fabian today, we did the right thing. We fixed that wrong."

Born in Cuernavaca, Rebolledo was in his early teens when he emigrated with his parents, and had legal US residency status when he enlisted in the Army at age 23. He was accepted into the 82nd Airborne Divison, and during a tour of duty in Kosovo during the UN peacekeeping mission was wounded in the leg by gunfire. He received a general discharge.

Rebolledo recalls his Army recruiter telling him his service would earn him US citizenship, but he assumed it was automatic and did not apply, he said.

Returning to the San Gabriel Valley area, Rebolledo struggled with PTSD, anger management, and alcohol abuse, and was cited for DUI. He launched a construction business that failed during the economic downtown a decade ago. When he tried to pass a bad check for $750, he was convicted of felony forgery that caught the attention of immigration officials.

After first being deported in 2010, the very next day he used his old residency card to come back over the border, he acknowledged, and remained two years until immigrations officials learned of his return from a speeding ticket.

At the time, Rebolledo was staying with his parents in the San Gabriel Valley. He recalls immigration agents came to the door three separate times. The first two times, on learning he was a veteran, the agents left without taking action. His luck ran out on the third.

"Today is not your lucky day," he was told, according to an account by J. Malcolm Garcia published in his book "Without a Country: The Untold Story of America's Deported Veterans," and online at Salon.com.

Residency was restored to the first three returning deported veterans after Gov. Edmund Brown erased their felony convictions with pardons.

In Rebolledo's case, the enactment of Proposition 47 downgraded the forgery conviction from a felony to a misdemeanor, eliminating the grounds for deportation.

"We are not done," said Annie Lai, co-director of UCI Law's Immigrant Rights Clinic, which represented Rebolledo in the final round of his case. "There are still other veterans stranded abroad."

Rebolledo was accompanied on his return by Lai and Mercado, and on the U.S. side of the border was able to hug his son Derick, now 18, for the first time since he was 12.

"I was pretty stoked to see him," said Derick Rebolledo, who has been raised by his mother.

His father says he believes he has his demons under control. In retrospect, he sees that he hit bottom after the 2012 deportation that left him alone in a country where he had not lived since childhood.

For now, Fabian Rebolledo will be staying with one of his sisters and her husband at their Azusa home. Rebolledo may return to construction, or consider other options for earning a living, he said.

Regardless, he intends to do what he cans to help expedite the returns of the other deported veterans he got to know in Mexico.

But first, he's applying for US citizenship.
The man convicted in the bizarre "Gone Girl" kidnapping and assault involving a Vallejo couple in 2015 told NBC Bay Area he's not guilty during an exclusive jailhouse interview Wednesday night.

Matthew Muller, a Harvard-educated lawyer, also is accused of raping Denise Huskins and assaulting her boyfriend Aaron Quinn. He is defending himself, acting as his own attorney, and on Wednesday night, he broke his silence.

In an exclusive interview, NBC Bay Area reporter Jodi Hernandez talks in detail with Matthew Muller, the man convicted in the bizarre "Gone Girl" kidnapping and assault on a Vallejo couple.

"I want them to know I am and remain extremely sorry for their ordeal, and I have done what I can," he said.

Prosecutors say Muller entered the couple's Vallejo home as they slept, tied them up, drugged them then kidnapped and raped Huskins. Vallejo police initially deemed the crime a hoax plotted by the two victims, thus drawing comparisons to the 2014 thriller "Gone Girl."

Muller pleaded guilty in federal court last year to the kidnapping charge in exchange for a 40-year sentence. But on Wednesday, he said he plans to fight state charges he kidnapped and raped Huskins and falsely imprisoned her fiance.

"Its pretty simple. Im not guilty," Muller said, adding that he wanted to help the couple in some way but was not mentally sound when he took the federal deal. "I fell in severe depression while at the Sacramento jail. I didnt care what happened to me."

But he also said hed gladly plead guilty if the couple agrees to a deal: Donate half of a $2.5 million settlement to a nonprofit that helps people wrongfully convicted.

"If they were to make a substantial donation to an innocence project, I could not put my own fate above that," Muller said.

Muller said Huskins and Quinn should understand what its like to be wrongfully accused. They got that settlement because Vallejo police initially called their case a hoax.

Muller says he pleaded guilty to the federal kidnapping charges because he felt bad for the couple.

"I dont think theres any excuse for the way the Vallejo Police Department handled it," he said. "Thats why I thought it was worth it to take a dive and made sure they achieved justice for that wrongful accusation."

Muller said hes been manhandled and beaten while in prison and even raped. While he plans to use an insanity defense, legal analysts say that will be tough for any jury to buy.

"It flies in the face of his mental health defense to at the same time be representing himself," legal analyst Steven Clark said.

Muller is married now and has hopes of seeing freedom someday. He plans to use a mental illness defense as he fights the charges. He says theres much more to the bizarre case that he plans to reveal, but he says he cant dive into specifics at the moment because he would be giving up various legal rights in doing so.

"I'd really love to take the stand and be asked questions, and I dont have to think about anything again, just telling the truth," he said. "Its a very intricate story, but it also a true one. Truth is stranger than fiction sometimes, but it will come out, and theres evidence for exactly what happened."

Muller is scheduled to appear next week in a preliminary hearing, and he likely will directly question Huskins and Quinn. But he says he doesnt want to cause them any more pain.

"I understand Huskins and Quinns wedding is coming up soon," Muller said. "I did not control the timing on this. To suggest somehow Ive plotted to make this happen right before they got married is ridiculous."
A minimum-security inmate who walked away from a camp in Nevada County was apprehended Thursday in Alameda County, officials said.

Officials said Justin Tyquiengco was reported missing around 5:30 a.m. Tuesday from the Washington Ridge Conservation Camp. He was taken back into custody Thursday after California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitiation agents tracked him down around 12:30 p.m. at a gas station in the San Leandro area.

Authorities are searching for a minimum-security inmate who walked away from a camp in Nevada County today, according to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.

Tyquiengco was first committed to the state prison system in September 2015 with a six-year sentence for second-degree robbery with the use of a firearm. He received an additional sentence in Alameda County to serve one year after his primary sentence from Contra Costa County.

There are currently 3,700 inmates around the state at conservation camps, also known as fire camps, according to state corrections officials.
A San Francisco board has voted unanimously to remove a 19th century statue that activists say is racist and demeaning to indigenous people.

The unanimous decision Wednesday night by the San Francisco Board of Appeals involves the "Early Days" statue, which depicts a Native American at the feet of a Spanish cowboy and a Catholic missionary. It is part of a group of statues near City Hall that depict the founding of California.

San Francisco's Arts Commission spokeswoman Kate Patterson said the statue will be removed as soon as possible but wouldn't give an exact date, citing security concerns.

Native American activists have tried to have the statue removed for decades. They renewed efforts last year after clashes broke out over Confederate monuments.

"This has been a tough 30-plus years. But this is wonderful," Dee Dee Ybarra, an Ohlone tribal leader who urged the commissioners to remove the statue, told the San Francisco Chronicle.

After it is removed from public viewing, the statue will be restored and put in storage until officials decide what to do with it, Patterson said.

Several entities, including a museum in California, have expressed interest in housing it, she added.

In April, the board unanimously voted to overturn a decision by the city's Arts Commission to remove the sculpture. At the time, appeals board member Rick Swig called the statue "horrible" but said removing it from public view would squash free speech.

The quasi-judicial, five-member body agreed in June to reconsider its decision.

Earlier this year, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors voted to end the Columbus Day holiday and celebrate indigenous people and Italian Americans on the second Monday of October.

Board members said Native people suffered greatly after explorer Christopher Columbus arrived.
Neighbors and supporters of a Palo Alto University professor who has accused Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of sexual assault gathered outside her home Thursday to "drown out the hate" she has received since coming forward with her story.

As the chairman of Senate Judiciary Committee awaits Christine Blasey Ford's response to the invitation to testify before his panel Monday, dozens chanted "FBI Investigation" and held signs that read "Thank you, Dr. Ford" outside her Palo Alto home in support.

Christine Blasey Ford wants the terms to be fair before she testifies at a Senate committee hearing about allegations of being sexually assaulted by Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. She doesnt want to be in the same room as Kavanaugh, and she wants to go second. Ian Cull reports.

"We want to drown out the hate mail she's getting and the trolls online. We want her to know we hear her. We believe her. Her story is our story," said activist and organizer Christen Podulka.

Ford has reportedly relocated after she went public with her story Sunday, telling The Washington Post that Kavanaugh had forced himself on her in a bedroom at a party when he was 17 and she was 15, attempting to remove her clothes and clapping his hand over her mouth when she tried to scream.

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Her lawyers said she has been the target of "vicious harassment and even death threats."

"I wish we had learned from Anita Hill 20 years ago, yet here we are," Podulka said. She said the way Ford's accusation is being handle is the reason why many victims of sexual violence don't come forward.

Women advocacy group @UltraViolet is flying a banner that reads "Thank you Christine. We have your back" over Palo Alto in support of professor Christine Blasey Ford who accused #SCOTUS nominee Brett Kavanaugh of sexual assault. https://t.co/HrcTLPhxIz pic.twitter.com/9Ty9SyTNql  Kiki Intarasuwan (@kintarasu) September 20, 2018

Neighbors and supporters of #ChristineBlaseyFord show support at her #PaloAlto home for sexual assault accusation against #BrettKavanaugh. Organizer tells @nbcbayarea their message. pic.twitter.com/GDKjC1wlQg  Robert Handa (@RHandaNBC) September 20, 2018

In addition to supporters outside her home, a national women advocacy group Ultra Violet funded a plane to fly a banner that reads "Thank you Christine. We have your back" over the city of Palo Alto.

A Spanish golfer jumped into a nearby lake to escape a swarm of hornets then continued on despite his stinging injuries.

NBC Bay Area on Thursday spoke to Congresswoman Anna Eshoo, the first person Ford reached out to about her allegations in July.

"I told her I believed her. It was more than apparent to me that this was a very difficult story for her to tell," Eshoo said.

As Eshoo talked about Ford, she received news that Ford's lawyer said that Ford wishes to testify, provided that there's an agreement on terms that are "fair." After indicating earlier this week that she would appear before lawmakers, Ford wants other witnesses  not just Ford and Kavanaugh  to participate and wants the FBI to reopen its background check of Kavanaugh. Those demands have been backed by Democrats but dismissed by top Republicans.

Kavanaugh, currently a judge on the powerful District of Columbia Circuit Court of Appeals, has denied the charges.

Six truckloads of sod were delivered before the sun came up Thursday at the new Levi's Stadium in Santa Clara, which will be home turf for the San Francisco 49ers.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.
What to Know Three people have died and three others are hurt after a woman opened fire at her workplace in Perryman, Maryland, police say.

The suspect has also died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound, officials say.

The shooting was reported just after 9 a.m. Thursday in Perryman, Maryland, about 30 miles northeast of Baltimore.

Three people were killed and three others were hurt after a woman opened fire Thursday morning on the campus of a Rite Aid distribution center in Harford County, Maryland, authorities say.

The shooter, a 26-year-old woman who worked at the facility, later died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. The Harford County Sheriff's Office identified the woman as Snochia Moseley.

Moseley was taken into custody and to a hospital after she apparently had shot herself, Harford County Sheriff Jeffrey R. Gahler said at a news conference.

Police did not immediately release the names of the victims.

The suspect lived in Baltimore County and was a temporary employee of the Rite Aid facility. She reported for her work day as usual, about 9 a.m., and then opened fire inside and outside the facility, Gahler said.

Officials said they do not have information yet on a possible motive. Information on Moseley's relationship with the victims also was not released.

The shooting was reported just after 9 a.m. at the Liberty Support facility, which is part of a Rite Aid distribution center. The facility is located in Perryman, Maryland, about 30 miles northeast of Baltimore.

"We are so preliminary in this investigation," Gahler said. "It's so important that we deal in facts." He said authorities don't want to "make it worse" for the families involved by giving out premature information.

It appears only one weapon was used  a 9 mm Glock handgun that was registered in Moseley's name  and no shots were fired by responding law enforcement officers, Gahler said. The shooter had two or maybe three magazines for the gun. He did not know how many shots were fired.

A spokeswoman for the sheriff's office said officials were confident that the suspect acted alone.

There is no additional threat to the area, officials say.

At a nearby fire station, family members waited for hours to be reunited with loved ones. Police blocked off the road outside but waved in cars driven by people who said they were there to meet up with people who were at the distribution center.

Reggie Rodgriguez's mother works at the distribution center. His wife had tried calling her numerous times but got no answer.

"I was calling her all morning. It went to voicemail because they keep their phones in lockers," said Kelly Rodriguez, 40.

When they finally reached his mother Thursday afternoon, Reggie Rodriguez said, "That's all I wanted to do: Hear her voice." His mother was uninjured. He said she sounded relieved the crisis was over.

Alexie Scharmann, an Aberdeen resident, told NBC affiliate WBAL in a phone interview that her mother was inside the building where the shooting took place. She said her mother sent her a text message saying there was a shooter in the building and that she was hiding.

"That's the last thing I heard from her. I have no idea what's going on. That's the only thing I can do is watch the news and pray," Scharmann told the station. Then, she said she got a text message from her sister saying that her mom was safe and outside the building.

Mike Carre, an employee of a furniture logistics operation next to the distribution center, said he helped tend to a wounded man.

Carre locked the doors of his workplace after the injured man came hobbling in, bleeding from his leg. He called 911 from a bathroom before helping colleagues wrap the man's blood-soaked jeans above his injury to cut off blood flow.

Authorities asked anyone who still was in the building to dial 911 so deputies could find them, the sheriff's office posted on Twitter about 12:40 p.m.

Gahler said a 911 call about shots fired came in from the Rite Aid distribution center at 9:06 a.m., and deputies and other officers were on the scene in just over five minutes.

A WBAL journalist briefly spoke with a family member of Moseley. That person declined to comment.

The shooting comes nearly a year after a gunman opened fire inside his workplace in Edgewood, Maryland, shooting five people, killing three. Edgewood is located about 10 miles from the site of the shooting Thursday.

"Another tragic event for us in Harford County," Gahler said. "We've stood here before, and we stand here yet again today."

The attack also comes nearly three months after a man armed with a shotgun attacked a newspaper office in Annapolis, Maryland, killing five staff members. Authorities accused Jarrod W. Ramos of attacking The Capital Gazette because of a longstanding grudge against the paper.

Harford County Executive Barry Glassman said that unfortunately, incidents like this are "becoming a too-often occurrence not only in Harford County but in the country."

Anyone with information for police was asked to call 410-838-5800.
What to Know Bruce Rogal, 59, of Glenmore, was accused of shooting and killing both of his parents after trying to shoot at his ex-wife.

Investigators say Rogal had been served his final divorce order which "set him off."

Rogal was found dead early Thursday after a brief, intense manhunt.

A gunman who was upset that his ex-wife had been awarded their home in their divorce was found dead after he shot at her and killed both his parents in Pennsylvania.

Few details were available during a short media briefing with Chester County District Attorney Tom Hogan. But he confirmed that Bruce Rogal, 59, of Glenmore in Chester County, was dead after a brief manhunt and a police chase. State police said he died after exchanging gunfire with police.

Rogal crashed his Honda Odyssey into his ex-wife's home early Thursday, authorities said. No other information about his cause of death was released, but Hogan stressed that the community was returning to normal.

"The last five or six hours were extremely tense," Hogan said. "Everyone knew that we had a killer out, and a killer could kill again."

Between killing his parents Wednesday night and being spotted by police early Thursday, Rogal drank beers at a friends house in East Fallowfield, never saying a word about what was going on, sources with knowledge of the investigation told NBC10.

Rogal had been served with his final divorce order Wednesday, which awarded his former home to his ex-wife, Hogan said at a Wednesday night news conference.

The divorce order appears to be what set him off today, Hogan said.

Rogal first went to the house they shared in West Bradford Township at 5:45 p.m. and shot at his ex-wife six times as she changed the oil in a car in her driveway, police said.

The hysterical ex-wife ran down the block, dodging at least five bullets, neighbor Heather Everett told NBC10.

"She ran into our house and we locked all of the doors," Everett, who was having a family BBQ at the time, said.

The ex-wife was not hurt, but other houses nearby were hit. The shooter pointed his gun at Everett's mother and a man but didn't fire, Everett said.

He then drove to his parents' senior living center in nearby East Goshen Township at 6:15 p.m. and shot them dead, police said. William and Nancy Rogal were both in their late 80s, Hogan said.

The killings stunned suburban neighborhoods outside of Philadelphia and led to blockades and lockdowns that stretched for miles.

Police say Bruce Rogal was found dead after leading police on a chase after authorities say he shot his parents at their retirement community and shot at his ex-wife.

At the nursing home, the Bellingham Senior Living Center on East Boot Road, staff were locked down for hours as a swarm of police, ATF and ambulances responded to the facility.

Mike Galczyk said his daughter, Cayley, is a server at Bellingham. "Shes texting us saying shes hiding inside with her team," he said. "She told us to stay safe out here."

Cayley wasn't supposed to work Wednesday; she was called in to cover a shift. Her dad was just a few blocks away from picking her up when he was stopped by police roadblocks which were placed up to two miles around Bellingham. Galczyk was later able to reunite with his daughter.

Schools within the two-mile-wide roadblocks were locked down as a precaution. Some students were stuck for some time inside West Chester East High School, according to a message from the district's superintendent that was sent to parents. District officials had to coordinate their release with police.

The scene was finally secure after 10 p.m., Hogan said.

State police began to pursue Rogal around 1 a.m. Thursday after he drove along Strasburg Road, near their barracks, Pennsylvania State Police Trooper James Spencer said. The police pursued on the ground at undisclosed speeds and in the air for about 3-1/2 miles into the neighborhood where Rogal's ex-wife lives.

Rogal crashed into his ex's home. He exchanged gunfire with the troopers during the pursuit, Hogan said. It was unclear if Rogal shot himself or was shot by police as he was found dead in the driver's seat, surrounded by firearms, Hogan said.

No troopers were hurt. Local and county police also responded to the home.

Rogal had a history of domestic violence incidents involving his wife, according to a protection from abuse order his wife obtained in June 2015 that expired in June 2017. The couple has at least one son, according to court records.

The West Chester Area School District, which serves children in the area of the shootings, opened as normal Thursday after going on lockdown overnight.

A man who authorities say killed his parents at a retirement community and shot at his ex-wife is dead. The Chester County community where the mayhem took place is looking to get back to normal Thursday morning.

The Pennsylvania case was one of a series of shootings that made headlines across the nation over a 24-hour period.

In western Pennsylvania Wednesday, a man facing charges stemming from a domestic violence arrest walked into a court building and shot and wounded four people, including a police officer. The gunman was shot by police and died.

Near the Delaware state line in Maryland, multiple people were killed in a shooting at a Rite Aid distribution center Thursday morning.

In Wisconsin, four people were injured, one of them critically, when a heavily armed employee opened fire in the offices of a software company Wednesday.

DOMESTIC VIOLENCE HELP: The National Domestic Violence Hotline at 800-799-7233 or 800-787-3224 (TTY) provides people in distress, or those around them, with 24-hour support.
The family of a dog who died while in the care of a New Hampshire dog groomer is speaking out about the horrific tragedy.

Beth Bessemer, 57, owner of Mrs. Doolittles Bath House in Hampton, turned herself in to police Wednesday and was charged with animal cruelty.

Police said Bessemer allowed a simple haircut to go terribly wrong.

"Teddy was just so special," said Joanne Schwope of North Hampton.

Schwope says her five-year-old golden retriever was so much more than just a pet.

"He was a truly beloved member of our family and we truly, truly miss him," Schwope said.

On June 21, Schwope dropped Teddy off at Mrs. Doolittles Bath House to be groomed. When she returned to pick him up, Bessemer told her Teddy had died.

"I just kind of went into shock at that point, I don't remember a lot after that," she said.

Once Schwope's vet finished the necropsy and gave her the results, she filed a police report.

"Teddy died of heat stroke," Schwope said.

On Wednesday, Hampton Police charged Bessemer with two counts of misdemeanor animal cruelty.

"We're not claiming it was a purposeful act, we're saying it was a negligent act," said Hampton Police Sgt. Alex Reno.

He said Bessemer allegedly put Teddy in a crate, tied a noose around his neck to hold him in place, pointed a heated dryer at him, and then left the dog alone.

"It's pretty hard, I know he suffered, and that breaks my heart," Schwope said through tears.

Bessemer's business was locked, dark, and mostly empty on Thursday.

As for Teddys family, they hope his story is a cautionary tale, one that will save another family from what they call unnecessary heartbreak.

"For people to just be aware, ask questions ask to see where their pet is going to be," Schwope said. "Don't take anything for granted, because I did, and that was my biggest regret."

Through all of this, Schwope learned there is no licensing requirement for groomers in New Hampshire. Now, her family is on a mission to change that  in honor of Teddy.

"If you brought your child to daycare youd expect a certain standard," she said. "To me, they're no different and they dont have a voice."

Bessemer was released on her own recognizance and is scheduled to be arraigned on Oct. 30 in the 10th Circuit- Seabrook District Court. She has been prohibited from contact with other people's pets as part of the conditions of bail.

It's unclear if Bessemer has an attorney.
A man who allegedly had his small child climb into a game machine and steal various items at a New Hampshire mall turned himself in to authorities Wednesday.

Salem police identified the man as 34-year-old Anthony Helinski of Lawrence, Massachusetts.

Helinski is a teacher at Doherty Middle School in Andover. Parents there can't believe he was the man seen in a video prompting a toddler to steal prizes from a KeyMaster game inside the Mall at Rockingham Park around 7 p.m. Friday.

Police had received several tips after releasing the video of the incident last week. An arrest warrant was issued Wednesday, and Helinkski immediately turned himself in with his attorney, police said.

In the video, the toddler is completely inside the machine. You can see her hand out the prizes. Another child, between the ages of 5 and 7, is seen standing nearby and can be heard saying "yes" when the prizes are passed out from the small hole.

"She could have gotten stuck up there," said one Andover parent after seeing the video. "Also, not a great lesson to teach your kid."

With some help from Helinski telling her how to maneuver, the little girl eventually comes out of the machine.

Helinski was processed on three counts of theft by unauthorized taking, two counts of criminal trespass and one count of endangering the welfare of a child.

While he is out on bail Wednesday, Helinski did not come to his door when NBC10 Boston attempted to speak with him.

He is due to be arraigned on Oct. 29 in the 10th Circuit Court District Division - Salem.

According to a statement from Andover Public Schools, Helinski has been placed on leave pending the outcome of the investigation.

"One of our teachers at the Doherty Middle School was involved in an incident in Salem, NH last week. Andover Public Schools is fully cooperating with authorities. The teacher has been placed on administrative leave pending the outcome of an investigation," said a spokesperson for the district.
A team led by police inspector (crime) Suresh Gengje, tracked the bank accounts and held Peter from Navi Mumbai.

Mumbai: A Nigerian national (36) has landed in the custody of the Navghar police for duping a woman from Bhayandar after befriending her on Facebook (FB).

A resident of Oraukwu town in Anambra state, Nigeria, the accused, identified as Peter Anaekpo Okwuchukwu, is suspected to be part of an organised gang involved in extracting money from several women under the pretext of sending expensive gifts.

A team led by police inspector (crime) Suresh Gengje, tracked the bank accounts and held Peter from Navi Mumbai.

The complainant, a nurse, came in contact with Peter through FB in June this year. Eventual-ly, he proposed marriage to her and expressed his desire to send her expensive gifts. She received a call from the parcel office asking her to pay certain charges to obtain the parcel. Thus, she was duped of a total Rs1.83 lakh.
Democratic candidate for governor Jay Gonzalez said Massachusetts could raise $1 billion a year for education and transportation by taxing the endowments of the state's wealthiest colleges and universities like Harvard University and MIT.

Gonzalez said the plan he unveiled Wednesday would bring in revenue needed to help make child care and preschool affordable for all families and fully fund public schools while also improving the state's roads, bridges and public transportation systems.

The plan would pay for the improvements by imposing a 1.6 percent tax on the endowments of private, nonprofit colleges and universities with endowment funds exceeding $1 billion.

Gonzalez said there are nine colleges and universities that meet the criteria including: Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Williams, Boston College, Amherst, Wellesley, Smith, Tufts University, and Boston University.

Gonzalez, who announced his plan at a press conference just outside Harvard's campus, said its time for well-heeled universities to step up.

"I think it's fair to ask the wealthiest among us  including major institutions that have accumulated enormous wealth in part thanks to their exemption from taxation  to contribute to our greater community," Gonzalez said.

Under the proposal, Harvard would pay more than $560 million annually, Gonzalez said. MIT would pay more than $200 million. He said each of the nine endowment funds has seen an average annual return of between 4.8 percent and 8.4 percent over the past 15 years.

Gonzalez is hoping to unseat Republican Gov. Charlie Baker in the November election. Baker is seeking a second, two-year term.

Baker said Wednesday that he was opposed to a similar plan floated by President Donald Trump earlier this year that would have also taxed college and university endowments. Baker said he opposed the plan because the vast majority of the money used in endowments supports scholarships and financial aid, much of it directed at low-income and middle-income students.

"I thought it was a bad idea then, and I still think it's a bad idea," Baker said.

Universities and colleges have also pushed back on similar proposals to tax their endowments when they have been floated in the past.

The universities argue that institutions of higher learning are a key engine to the economy in Massachusetts, helping produce the brain power needed to fuels things like the state's current boom in the high tech and life sciences fields.

The search for new sources of revenue comes after the state's highest court rejected as unconstitutional a proposed "millionaire tax" ballot question backed by Gonzalez and other Democrats that called for a surtax on Massachusetts wealthiest earners.

The proposed constitutional amendment would have imposed a surtax of 4 percent on any portion of an individual's annual income that exceeds $1 million, which supporters said would generate some $2 billion annually in additional revenue for education and transportation.
You can watch the forum in its entirety here.

The candidates running for Illinois governor squared off in the first televised forum of the general election Thursday, sharing the stage for the first time amid an already contentious and expensive race.

NBC 5 Political Editor Carol Marin started things off by questioning Democratric challenger J.B. Pritzker about toilets.

"You've saved hundreds of thousands of dollars in property taxes by having toilets disconnected in your Gold Coast mansion," she said. "First of all, who unhooks all their toilets?"

Pritzker defended the toilet tactic saying many residents of Cook County have property tax reassessments and his family put their housing project on hold while the assessment took place.

Rauner defended his comments earlier this year saying he was "not in control" of Illinois. He doubled down on that sentiment by bemoaning the political corruption he said is spread at the hands of House Speaker Mike Madigan. He said Madigan has a "stranglehold" on Illinois politics.

Marin noted that Libertarian candidate Kash Jackson has been found in contempt of court for failing to pay child support. She asked why voters should be confident in his ability to handle a $38 billion budgeted business in the state of Illinois.

"Im a perfect example of what happens when a member of our community get caught up in judicial system that they're woefully and painfully unaware of," Kash, a Navy veteran, said. "I served my country for 20 years. For 20 years I served this country. And then to come home to Illinois and to have to fight to be a father. You see, Lake County, much like the rest of Illinois, is setting support orders that sometimes exceed national recommendations by twofold."

Kash said a Lake County judge told him he would have to turn over 40 percent of his income. He said the lawmakers that write the laws that calculate how child support is paid and is an example of a failed legislature in Illinois.

Sen. Sam McCann was asked if his connections to a Washington, D.C. union that has funded Madigan's campaign. Specifically, Marin asked McCann if he was simply in the race to take votes away from Rauner.

"We're in this to win it," McCann responded. "We're in this to be the next governor of Illinois, and I will be in charge. The McCann administration will take charge of state government and the governor that the people of Illinois have been crying out for for the last four years, nay, the last 20 years."

McCann also said he was proud to have the support of "those working people" and mentioned several times his interest in working with the federal government to help the state of Illinois.

The entire event was broadcast live on NBC 5, on NBCChicago.com and on the NBC Chicago app. It was also subtitled live in Spanish on Telemundo Chicago, TelemundoChicago.com and on the Telemundo Chicago app. [[492867501, C]]

Marin moderated the roundtable conversation, with reporters Mary Ann Ahern and Karla Leal taking questions from the audience.

With less than seven weeks left before Election Day, the third-party candidates looked to make more of a name for themselves in the race, while Rauner and Pritzker sharpened the attacks they've launched at one another over television airwaves for months.

Pritzker and Rauner have both dumped millions of dollars from their own personal fortunes into their campaign coffers, affording them the chance to advertise both for themselves and largely against one another, even before winning their respective party nominations in March.

After the forum, the candidates participated in a Q&A session that was streamed streamed exclusively on the NBC 5 and Telemundo Chicago digital platforms.
Three Illinois students were injured when lightning struck as they waited for a bus in the Round Lake Heights area Thursday morning, according to authorities and school officials.

The Greater Round Lake Fire Protection District said the incident happened around 7 a.m. near Lotus and Ottawa Drives in the northern Chicago suburb.

Lake Villa District 41 confirmed three of their students were transported to Advocate Condell Medical Center in Libertyville. The district said the students were waiting for a bus when lightning struck nearby.

At 10:30 a.m., the district posted on its website that "all three students are alert, communicative and in stable condition."

Charlene Monk said her 13-year-old daughter Carrington Monk, an eighth grader at Palombi Middle School, was one of the students injured. Monk said her daughter was doing well with no visible injuries and remained at the hospital for observation.

Monk said the teen was standing under a tree with two other girls when lightning struck. She added the girls were unconscious when emergency personnel arrived.

Authorities said as many as nine children were at the bus stop at the time of the strike, but some ran home. The fire department initially reported four children were injured.

Scattered storms began moving across the area Thursday morning. They were expected to exit over the lake sometime after 8 a.m. Hazards with the storms included lightning, heavy rain and possibly gusty winds.

Round Lake Heights is located about 50 miles north of Chicago.

Check back for more on this developing story.
The Chicago Cubs are aiming to secure their fourth straight playoff appearance this season, and with their magic number dwindling by the day, its time to take a look at who they could potentially face in the first round of the postseason.

Where the Cubs Stand:

Thanks to their win over the Arizona Diamondbacks on Tuesday, the Cubs currently have a three and a half game lead over the Milwaukee Brewers in the Central Division race with just 11 games to play in their season.

The Cubs magic number currently stands at eight to clinch their third straight division title, and their magic number to clinch at least a wild card berth stands at five.

Who Could They Play?

If the Cubs end up winning the division title, they will likely wrap up the top record in the National League, securing home-field advantage through the first two rounds of the postseason.

If they get that seed, they will take on the winner of the National League Wild Card Game. Currently, the Brewers hold the top spot in the wild card race, with a two-game lead over the St. Louis Cardinals with 10 games left on their schedule.

St. Louis has a one and a half game lead over the Colorado Rockies for the second spot.

The Road Ahead:

The Cubs have one more true road game this season against the Diamondbacks on Wednesday, then theyll fly home to Chicago for a long-awaited day off before taking on the White Sox at Guaranteed Rate Field for a three game series.

The Brewers have a day off on Thursday before heading to Pittsburgh to start a three-game series against the Pirates. The Cardinals also dont play on Thursday, and will begin a three-game series with the Giants on Friday at Busch Stadium.

Out west, the Rockies will head to Arizona to take on the Diamondbacks for a three-game series beginning on Friday, and the Los Angeles Dodgers, who are currently in the top spot in the NL West and hold a one and a half game lead on the Rockies, will play the San Diego Padres at Dodger Stadium over the weekend.
A year after Hurricane Maria wreaked havoc across their island, displaced Puerto Ricans in Connecticut are struggling to rebuild their lives and survive day-to-day.

Emanuel Elrivera Mulero, 38, and Ashlyn Gonzales Cabrera, 27, told NBC Connecticut Investigates they lost everything when the Category 4 storm ripped through their home in Bayamon, Puerto Rico. In the days, weeks and months that followed, the couple said they lived Muleros mothers yard, and described waiting in lines more than a kilometer long for water, food and gasoline.

After months of being unable to access medicines for Cabreras thyroid condition, and Muleros degenerative arthritis and epilepsy, the couple used their savings to buy flights to Connecticut. They were finally able to get medical help through Connecticuts Husky insurance program, but were stuck living in a hotel and shelter for more than eight months with dozens of other families.

Anguish, tears, desperation, Cabrera said through a translator, describing what she saw amongst the people living in those places. There were children that said to their father, when will we have a home, she said.

Connecticut welcomed people fleeing Puerto Rico following the hurricane, and waived some residency requirements to help people like Cabrera and Mulero sign up for public benefits faster, but the shortage of public housing continues to present a challenge.

A UConn study, funded with a grant from the Hartford Foundation, estimates as many as 5,000 storm-refugees remain in Connecticut, and that many of them are living with cash-strapped relatives.

Charles Venator-Santiago, an associate professor of Political Science at UConnand El Instituto, led the study and said 67 percent of their respondents live on less than $25,000 a year.

People who are living in poverty were receiving people and accommodating the, Venator-Santiago said, adding many of the families they spoke with reported struggling with insufficient space, food, and job opportunities.

Two, three families in one-bedroom or two-bedroom apartment, and they cant afford it, he said.

One week ago, FEMA cut off aid to nearly 1,000 families still living in hotel rooms around the country. Puerto Rican community members in Greater Hartford said numerous families remain in local shelters and on waitlists for housing.

A year after the storm ripped their home apart, Cabrera and Mulero are finally moving to a new one  getting off a waitlist and into a modest public housing unit in Portland.

Next on their list is learning enough English to pass a drivers test, and hopefully land a permanent job.

We continue to fight, and not to lose faith, Cabrera said.
A Hartford Department of Public Works employee has been placed on leave after police found a marijuana grow lab in his apartment, according to police.

Hartford police said they learned about it when firefighters responded to a fire alarm in the 300 block of Main Street in Hartford Wednesday and contacted them.

The resident, 58-year-old Elton Trader, of Hartford, admitted his involvement, according to the Hartford police report.

Photos from police show several marijuana plants and equipment used to cultivate them.

Hartford DPW Employee Had Marijuana Grow Lab in Apartment: Police

Trader was charged with cultivation of marijuana, operation of a drug factory, possession of a controlled substance, possession of a controlled substance with intent to sell.

NBC Connecticut reached out to DPW and they did not comment. Fire officials said Trader is on administrative leave without pay.

Trader appeared in court Thursday and his case has been continued to Sept. 28.

NBC Connecticut reached out to Trader by phone and he did not comment.
Some of Connecticuts bridges are slowly falling apart, according to a study released Thursday morning that found 308 bridges in the state are structurally deficient.

SEE THE REPORT

TRIP, a national nonprofit transportation research group based in Washington, D.C. that is sponsored by insurance companies, equipment manufacturers and businesses involved in highway construction conducted the study over several months and said 308 of the states 4,254 bridges are structurally deficient and need to be repaired or replaced.

The report also found that close to 60 percent of all the bridges in the state are 50 years old or older.

Transportation officials said the problem is coming to a head because of lack of funds and the age of the bridges.

The engineers recognize the bridges can stay open. It is a signal of how critical those bridges are to the daily lives of people here in Connecticut and if those bridges had to be closed it would have a significant impact, Rocky Moretti, the director of research and policy at TRIP, said.

TRIP said the data for the report came from the Connecticut Department of Transportation.

NBC Connecticut Investigates looked into this issue in April and learned repairs for many of the bridges were nixed due to lack of funds in the states transportation fund.
Target is considering opening a new location in West Hartford.

The West Hartford Town Planners Office said the retailer applied for a minor facade and signage change to a building that once housed a Walmart in Bishops Corner. The application indicates interest in the location, but no lease has been signed.

Target told NBC Connecticut we are pursuing the opportunity to reach guests in the Bishops Corner neighborhood, but at this time, were not at a point where we can share any new store plans.

Walmart vacated the space more than two years ago. Neighboring businesses have wondered what might take its place.

People are always asking geez is something going in there it would be nice if something was there, said Gary Dahms, owner of Salons by JC. Because there was a Walmart grocery store which built traffic and since they've been gone, it's been missed ever since that day.

Even though there is already a Target nearby in New Britain, people are still excited about the possibility of a new location.

That would be amazing. Target, even though it's close, it's not that close. It takes a long time to get across town. There's always construction, said Michelle Hollander of West Hartford.

Those who spoke with NBC Connecticut didnt seem to think a Target would have a major impact on traffic in the area where a Walmart once stood.

The town planner is expected to approve Targets signage application at the next Town Council Meeting.
A 60-year-old woman is under arrest, accused of unnecessarily medicating and restricting several North Texas children inside a home daycare in Mesquite, according to court documents obtained by NBC 5.

Rebecca Anderson was arrested Saturday, a day after police executed a search warrant at her home/daycare on the 4300 block of Tamarix Court and found nine children inside, some bound and restricted.

Police said after further investigation it was believed that Anderson not only mistreated the children, but evidence led investigators to believe she exposed them to unnecessary doses of over-the-counter medicine, extended periods of restricted movement and poor hygiene practices.

According to the arrest warrant, the father of a 6-month-old boy reviewed video on Thursday taken from a small camera that was mounted on the child's car seat. The video, police said, showed Anderson yank the boy out of the car seat, pick him up off the ground using the bib tied around his neck and feed him an "unknown substance using a plastic liquid syringe."

After the father showed the video to Mesquite police, detectives obtained a search warrant for Anderson's home. Inside the home, detectives found three children strapped to plastic car seats in a darkened master bedroom closet and one more in the master bathroom.

Anderson initially told police that there were just five children in the home before the four others were discovered, the warrant said.

Anderson also admitted "she had likely given Tylenol to all of the children," according to the warrant, and that she left the children in the car seats for as many as seven hours each day.

The arrest warrant also said detectives found "shoelace-like ligatures" tied around the children's necks  and that some of the ties had to be cut off. Anderson admitted she tied the ligatures onto the children to limit their movement.

Anderson has been charged with nine counts of endangering a child and faces a $5,000 bond for each charge, according to online jail records. As of Tuesday morning, Anderson remains at the Dallas County Jail where she's being held on $45,000 bond.

It is not clear if Anderson has obtained an attorney, however her daycare was licensed by the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services.

The investigation into the allegations is ongoing and "is a collaborative effort between multiple agencies and care providers," police said.

The Mesquite Police Department is working to identify other children cared for by Anderson. If you are a parent of a child that she cared for, please contact the Mesquite Police Department at 972-285-6336.

NBC 5's Vanessa Brown and Chris Blake contributed to this report.
The aims of Promote were to improve the status of 75,000 Afghan women at all levels of society.

The war in Afghanistan, the world was smugly told, was to save Afghan women. Laura Bush announced it during a radio address, and Hillary Clinton repeated it ad nauseam. Even as late as 2012, when the war was in its second decade, these mantras were ubiquitous, repeated by nodding interpreters at the Nato summit in Chicago as awards and medals were handed out to those believed to be engaged in making the saving of Afghan women possible.

Every now and then, a few Afghan women were also invited to speak a few words, with inordinate care being taken to ensure that they were the right sort of Afghan women  the ones who would eagerly second the proposition that they were indeed being saved, their words proof of the fact that war was not such a terrible thing after all.

In more recent times, the myth of Afghan womens progress has been roundly debunked. Sharp increases have been reported in incidents of domestic violence and the indicators that show progress in any realm of gender parity signify no visible betterment in their conditions since before the war. While the State Department and USAID budgets have been cut drastically, a picture showing Afghan women walking on the streets of Kabul in miniskirts in the 1960s has managed to keep the money flowing by convincing President Donald Trump that such a prospect, the return of the Afghan women to a liberated miniskirt-wearing past, is indeed possible  even likely.

A new report issued by the Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction threatens to throw a wrench into the scam. Released last week, the report is an audit of sorts of the Promote programme launched by USAID three years ago. The aims of Promote were to improve the status of 75,000 Afghan women at all levels of society. The programme is believed to be USAIDs biggest gender-related programme in the world. However, three years after its initiation, USAID has failed to show any demonstrable progress in the status of the women targeted.

To make themselves look better USAID set about changing the metrics and resetting the performance indicators. For instance, one component of the programme that was supposed to provide employment for 2,100 women was (even after the change in target indicators) found to have provided better employment for just 58 women.

The failures could be traced to the usual sorts of things. In one instance, the failure to finalise a memorandum of understanding between the Afghanistan Ministry of Womens Affairs and USAID delayed the implementation of one programme.

In another case, USAIDs failure to approve personnel without inordinate delays led to a high attrition rate amongst programme staff which in turn contributed to the inability of the programme to meet its goals.

In sum, there were lots of problems within the bureaucracy that ran these programmes and the people who were charged with implementing their goals.

There is, of course, another reason. As many other audits and analyses of aid programmes have shown, the goals and aims stated in the task orders and grant reports are not always the real goal. In this particular case, actually helping Afghan women in a way that would produce long-term improvements in their condition was only tangential to the larger project of promoting an image of the United States as a benevolent hegemon. Whether Afghan womens lives were ever actually improved, whether they were able to obtain and utilise job training and leadership skills, likely concerned very few people.

In monetary terms, expenditures were likely directed towards favoured contractors who then took their cut and sent the work to their favoured sub-contractors and on and on. The purpose of it all, to oil the wheels of the aid economy such that a whole range of people, from USAID bureaucrats to the many expatriate workers involved in the aid industry to local Afghan participants in the aid economy, all got a bit of the proceeds.

While the failings of USAID are duly addressed in the report, there are others that deserve attention too. Uplifting the condition of women, particularly via job training, requires the transformation of cultural and social norms such that women, with their newly acquired skills, can actually put them to use by participating in the workforce.

In this sense, the failure of Promote cannot simply be attributed to the gross failings of USAID. Also to blame is the intransigence of Afghan society that has fallen prey to the idea that womens empowerment has to be rejected because it was the slogan of choice for a war that has ravaged the country and left much of the population maimed and destitute. In allotting so much money to Afghan womens empowerment, Nato and the United States have only succeeded in popularising the premise that the war really was for something good, the empowerment and improvement of the conditions of Afghan women.

They also, and perhaps inadvertently, succeeded in tainting the very concept of empowerment, making it the derided emblem of Western military intervention. In the follow-up to this report, while USAID may make amendments to Promote, it is unlikely that it will succeed in making empowerment for Afghan women a reality.

By arrangement with Dawn
We require all new drivers to pass a road test, to ensure their safety physically.

But what about their safety online?

Thats what Willie Goldsboro, an employee at the Dover DMV in central Delaware, found himself wondering one day. As he congratulated students and handed them their licenses, he grew increasingly concerned with what he saw them doing.

I mean, theyre standing right in front of me. You see them taking a picture holding up their license, and you know theyre posting straight to social media. That can hit a lot more people than you think.

U.S. licenses have the drivers full name, picture, DOB, license number, and address  personal information that, after being posted, could be stolen and used without the owner's permission.

Goldsboro says his father-in-law, a cop, deals with issues like identity theft and child abductions, so watching kids post this information was a red flag for him. He approached Laura Russum, another DMV employee who coordinates social media and communications, for help.

Originally, Russum said, they thought of creating a license prop. When that didnt fly, they brainstormed ways to cover up identifying information on the new licenses. But that didnt feel right, either.

Finally, on their fourth round of ideas, she knew. "Im a photographer as well, and I know people like to take photos in front of fun backdrops. Why not one of those?"

She designed the signage and wording for the backdrop, plus shareable hashtags to go with it.

The resulting project was a hit.

On Monday, Delaware's Division of Motor Vehicles launched "Safe Selfie Zones" at its four locations  so new drivers can collect likes, without compromising privacy.

"We want you to share the love," reads a placard next to the brightly colored backdrop, "but before you snap that selfie REMEMBER your license has personal information that should be protected."

Delaware DMV

In 2017, Delaware issued around 36,500 new licenses to minors and adults.

"As far as we know, Russum said, "this is the first initiative of its kind." They hope to present it in DelDOTs Innovation Space this year and at a trade conference, where it could be used as a model by other government administrators.

Joseph Turow, a professor at the University of Pennsylvanias Annenberg School for Communication and an expert in media and digital privacy, said he applauds the Delaware DMV for the project. He sees it as a way to warn those who might not be aware of the implications of what they post.

Theres some who might say that this generation cares less about privacy, but we have evidence to show thats not the case, said Turow. "They care, but in the moment, they just dont think about it."

When asked if hed like to see the Selfie Zone implemented in other places, Willie said, of course: "That means thered be people being safe everywhere."

Maybe, he suggested, states could compete to see who had the best selfie wall. The best thing we can do is take care of and look out for each other.

For now, the Delaware wall features a background with the DMV logo, where people can take pictures to share on their personal social media accounts (in lieu of posting their actual license).

In blue, yellow, and orange, words at the top of each backdrop read: "Look whos driving now!!"
A beaming South Korean President Moon Jae-in returned home from a whirlwind three-day summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un on Thursday saying that Kim wants the U.S. secretary of state to visit Pyongyang soon for nuclear talks, and also hopes for a quick follow-up to his June summit with Donald Trump.

Moon told reporters in Seoul that he will carry a private message from Kim for Trump on the nuclear standoff when he meets with the U.S. president in New York next week on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly session.

Both Trump, who has repeatedly spoken of his good relationship with Kim, and the North Korean leader have expressed a desire to meet again, but there are worries among observers about whether Kim is as committed to denuclearization as he claims. Moon faces increasing pressure from Washington to find a path forward in efforts to get Kim to completely  and unilaterally  abandon his nuclear arsenal.

"There are things that the United States wants us to convey to North Korea, and on the other side there are also things that North Korea wants us to convey to the United States," Moon said at a press center in Seoul where reporters watched parts of his summit with Kim on video huge screens that occasionally showed live streams from Pyongyang. "I will faithfully serve that role when I meet President Trump to facilitate dialogue between North Korea and the United States."

Moon, who set up the June summit in Singapore between Trump and Kim and is eager for another to happen, also told reporters that he'll convey to Trump his and Kim's desire to get a declaration on ending the Korean War by the end of this year. The war still technically continues because it ended with a cease-fire, not a peace treaty. Such a declaration would be the first step toward a formal peace treaty, but many in the United States are worried that it could result in Kim pushing for the removal of U.S. troops stationed in South Korea to deter the North.

Earlier Thursday, Kim and Moon took to the road for the final day of their summit, hiking to the peak of Mount Paektu, which is considered sacred in the North, their hands clasped and raised in a pose of triumph. Their trip to the mountain on the North Korean-Chinese border, and the striking photo-op that will resonate in both Koreas, followed a day of wide-ranging agreements on Wednesday they trumpeted as a major step toward peace.

However, their premier accord on the issue that most worries the world  the North's pursuit of nuclear-tipped missiles capable of striking as far as the U.S. mainland  contained a big condition: Kim stated that he would permanently dismantle North Korea's main nuclear facility only if the United States takes unspecified corresponding measures.

Photos showed the leaders smiling broadly as they posed at the summit of Paektu, their wives grinning at their sides, a brilliant blue sky and the deep crater lake that tops the volcano in the background. They also toured the shores of the lake, and Moon and his wife filled bottles with its water. Members of the Kim family are referred to as sharing the "Paektu bloodline," and the volcano is emblazoned on North Korea's national emblem and lends its name to everything from rockets to power stations.

Many South Koreans also feel drawn to the volcano, which, according to Korean mythology, was the birthplace of Dangun, the founder of the first ancient Korean kingdom, and has long been considered one of the most beautiful places on the peninsula. Not everyone was pleased, though. About 100 anti-North Korea protesters rallied in central Seoul to express anger about the summit and displayed slogans that read, "No to SK-NK summit that benefits Kim Jong Un."

The leaders are basking in the glow of the joint statement they signed Wednesday. Compared to the vague language of their two earlier summits, Kim and Moon seem to have agreed on an ambitious program meant to tackle soaring tensions that caused many to fear war last year as the North tested a string of increasingly powerful weapons.

Kim promised to accept international inspectors to monitor the closing of a key missile test site and launch pad and to visit Seoul soon, and both leaders vowed to work together to try to host the Summer Olympics in 2032.

But while containing several tantalizing offers, their joint statement appeared to fall short of the major steps many in Washington have been looking for  such as a commitment by Kim to provide a list of North Korea's nuclear facilities, a solid step-by-step timeline for closing them down, or an agreement to allow international inspectors to assess progress or discover violations.

It also was unclear what "corresponding steps" North Korea wants from the U.S. to dismantle its nuclear site.

The question is whether it will be enough for Trump to pick up where Moon has left off. Trump told reporters Wednesday that the outcome of the summit was "very good news" and that "we're making tremendous progress" with North Korea. He didn't indicate in his brief remarks whether the U.S. would be willing to take further steps to encourage North Korean action on denuclearization.

"We have agreed to make the Korean Peninsula a land of peace that is free from nuclear weapons and nuclear threat," Kim said Wednesday as the two leaders announced their agreement. "The road to our future will not always be smooth and we may face challenges and trials we can't anticipate. But we aren't afraid of headwinds because our strength will grow as we overcome each trial based on the strength of our nation."

Moon urged unity for all Koreans in a speech he gave Wednesday night to the crowd gathered for North Korea's signature mass games. "I now propose that we completely eliminate the hostility of the past 70 years and take a big step forward in peace so that we can become one again."

According to a statement signed by the countries' defense chiefs, the two Koreas agreed to establish buffer zones along their land and sea borders to reduce military tensions and prevent accidental clashes. They also agreed to withdraw 11 guard posts from the Demilitarized Zone by December and to establish a no-fly zone above the military demarcation line that bisects the two Koreas that will apply to planes, helicopters and drones.

Other agreements aimed at removing some longstanding irritants from their relations, such as allowing more contact between families divided by the Korean War. Moon also appeared to be making good on his proposals to help build up the North's infrastructure and open cross-border rail links.

___

Talmadge reported from Pyongyang. Associated Press writers Hyung-jin Kim and Kim Tong-hyung in Seoul contributed to this report.
The politics of natural disasters can be tricky for a president.

Long before President Donald Trump tossed paper towels to storm-stricken Puerto Ricans and denied Hurricane Maria's official death toll, his predecessors struggled to steer the nation through life-and-death emergencies.

To project empathy without looking weak. To show both command and cooperation. To put the focus on victims  but provide leadership, too.

As Trump visits North Carolina on Wednesday to survey damage from Hurricane Florence, a look back at how presidents have grappled with the challenges and opportunities of disaster politics:

TRUMP

Trump is not known for shows of empathy and relishes fights he thinks will resonate with his core supporters.

That includes a bitter and lasting brawl with Puerto Rico in the year since the U.S. territory was devastated by Hurricane Maria. He also has grappled with getting it right in ruby-red Texas and Louisiana after Hurricane Harvey, which dumped nearly 50 inches of rain near Houston.

Trump's first post-Harvey trip to Texas generated blowback for his failure to meet with victims of the storm. Four days later, he returned  and urged people at a Houston shelter to "have a good time." He also cheered on volunteers and emergency workers and handed out hot dogs and potato chips to residents. Some critics said the president's trip took on the tone of a victory lap for successful disaster management.

Trump has had trouble keeping facts right about the devastating storms under his watch.

In June, Trump said on a conference call that the Coast Guard had saved thousands of people while Houston was under water, including what he suggested were hurricane gawkers. "People went out in their boats to watch the hurricane. That didn't work out too well," the president said. There is no indication the Coast Guard rescued foolhardy storm watchers drifting off the Texas coast.

Then there's Puerto Rico, flattened by Maria as a Category 4 storm nearly a year ago. Trump pumped two fists in the air when he landed in San Juan last October. The enduring image was of Trump at a San Juan church lobbing paper towels into the crowd as if shooting baskets. At the time, it seemed to reflect Trump's brand of playfulness. Many people in the crowd smiled and raised their phones to record the moment. But critics quickly dubbed it inappropriate for the massive, grim crisis at hand.

A year later, the official death toll from the storm stands at 2,975. Even as Hurricane Florence approached the Carolinas this week, Trump rejected that count and griped that it's the product of Democrats trying to make him "look bad." He also tweeted that San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulin Cruz, a frequent Trump critic, is "incompetent."

"The victims of Puerto Rico and the people of Puerto Rico in general do not deserve to be questioned about their pain," said Gov. Ricardo Rossello.

OBAMA

On Oct. 29, 2012, Hurricane Sandy made landfall in Atlantic City, New Jersey, and became the costliest storm in U.S. history behind Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

Republican Gov. Chris Christie invited Democratic President Barack Obama to view the storm damage, and when the president arrived, the two shared a friendly, widely photographed greeting. At one point, as the two shook hands, Obama put his left hand on Christie's right shoulder. The resulting image was derided by some conservatives as a "hug"  and a potential re-election boost for Obama when he was being challenged by Republican Mitt Romney.

The storm is blamed for 182 deaths and cost about $70 billion in New Jersey and New York.

It was one of several natural disasters that gave Obama the opportunity to play the traditional role of comforter in chief.

A year earlier, a tornado devastated Joplin, Missouri, with winds up to 250 mph and claimed at least 159 lives. Obama visited the moonscape of rubble and tree stumps, and delivered an emotional memorial service speech in which he told the stories of heroic efforts by individuals during the storm.

"It's in these moments, through our actions, that we often see the glimpse of what makes life worth living in the first place," Obama told the crowd.

BUSH

President George W. Bush, praised for his leadership after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, stumbled during what proved to be the government's inadequate response to deadly Hurricane Katrina four years later.

Heading back to Washington after nearly a month on his ranch, Bush had Air Force One fly over part of the devastation, giving him a view of it from high above. The moment was preserved in photographs and generated criticism that he didn't come in person.

"Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job," he told FEMA Director Michael Brown, three days after Katrina flooded New Orleans. The storm left 1,800 people dead and caused $151 billion in damage. Much public blame went to the Bush administration for a too-slow response.

Together, the vacation, the high-altitude tour and Bush's "Brownie moment" left a lasting impression that the president had been detached from the tragedy on the ground.

In his 2010 book "Decision Points," the former president reflected on his mistakes during Katrina, writing that he should have urged the evacuation of New Orleans sooner, visited sooner and shown more empathy.

CLINTON

Bill Clinton, who famously claimed during the 1992 campaign "I feel your pain," was a natural at connecting with disaster victims. As president, he visited Des Moines, Iowa, the next year to examine flood damage in the region. He shook hands with people who had lost their homes as well as National Guard troops.

During a visit to a water distribution center, a woman can be heard in footage preserved by C-SPAN telling him, "My house was flooded."

"I'm so sorry," Clinton replied.

A weeping woman in pink with a blue small cooler in her hand told Clinton: "My parents lost their home and I have not been home for like a week. I can't take it anymore."

He draped an arm around her and said, "Hang in there."
Researchers at the University of Washington and Kaiser Permanente Washington tracked more than 3,000 people for nearly 30 years in a program called adult changes in thought, or ACT. They discovered that people who developed one or more of three eye conditions had a greater chance of developing Alzheimers. This finding could be a big step toward better diagnoses and treatment.

Eighty-six-year-old Lamartine McDowell has glaucoma and macular degeneration. Despite that, she is excited to learn about researchers finding a connection between age-related eye conditions and Alzheimers.

I think it a good idea. The more you can find out, the better! McDowell said.

Cecilia Lee, MD, MS, Lead Researcher at the University of Washington said, we thought that by looking at conditions that happen in the aging eye, we might be able to learn what else is happening to the aging brain, specifically, Alzheimers disease.

Researchers found people who developed glaucoma, diabetic retinopathy, or macular degeneration had a 40 to 50 percent higher risk of developing Alzheimers. Dr. Lee says that this discovery may lead to a new paradigm for earlier detection of Alzheimers in the future.

By noticing whats happening in the eye, well be able to predict who develops Alzheimers disease and potentially develop treatments that can target these patients, stated Dr. Lee.

Eric B. Larson, MD, MPH, Vice President for Research and Healthcare Innovation at Kaiser Permanente Washington has worked with Alzheimers patients for 40 years and says its critical to address the disease now. By 2050 more than 13-million Americans could have Alzheimers.

Dr. Larson said, Its a very, very common condition, and unless we find ways to prevent it, delay it, or effectively treat it, were going to have a pandemic.

He hopes their discovery will broaden how researchers look at solving the mystery of Alzheimers.

To check that the link between three eye conditions and Alzheimers was not just from age, researchers looked at cataracts. Cataracts were not a predictor of Alzheimers risk. Next, the team will try to figure out the exact connection between the eye conditions and Alzheimers.
Scientists in Dallas have made a big step towards stopping the most common fatal genetic disease in children.

Duchenne muscular dystrophy causes the muscles to breakdown over time.

It affects mainly boys and leads to organ failure by the time they're 30-years-old.

Scientists, for the first time, have used CRISPR gene editing to stop the progression of Duchenne muscular dystrophy in a large mammal, according to a study by UT Southwestern, that provides a strong indication that a lifesaving treatment may be in the pipeline.

Within eight weeks, the muscles in the dogs started producing the protein that the disease slowly kills.

It's called dystrophin and without it, the muscle dies over time.

"Children with DMD often die either because their heart loses the strength to pump, or their diaphragm becomes too weak to breathe," said Dr. Eric Olson, Director of UT Southwestern's Hamon Center for Regenerative Science and Medicine.

The next step would be longer animal studies and then human trials.

"Before moving towards humans, if we are able to get there, we have to be absolutely sure that this is completely safe over the long term. That's what we are dedicated to trying to do," said Dr. Olson.

Ben Dupree, of Highland Park, is "patient zero" in Dr. Olson's research.

They used Dupree's cells and the gene editing technique called CRISPR to fix the mutation in Dupree's DNA causing his muscular dystrophy.

The breakthrough happened in a dish and the new research in animals makes Dupree excited about how his contribution to science may one day help future generations of children with Duchenne muscular dystrophy.

It may help him too.

"Just staying where I am is what I hope for the most. The promise of any amount of improvement is really exciting," said Dupree.
A Southlake couple accused of enslaving a Guinean woman for 16 years has been indicted on federal charges that include forced labor.

A grand jury on Wednesday indicted Mohamed Toure and Denise Cros-Toure, who are the son and daughter-in-law of a former president of the West African country of Guinea.

An affidavit says they brought the victim, then aged at least 5 years but perhaps as old as 13, from her rural Guinean village in 2000. They forced her to work without pay in their home for years. Authorities began investigating after the victim fled the couple's home in 2016.

Defense attorney Scott Palmer has said the criminal complaint against his clients is "riddled with salacious allegations, fabrications and lies."
What to Know Wendy Martinez of Northwest DC was attacked Tuesday evening while jogging.

She had just gotten engaged a week earlier, her family said. She was chief of staff at a software and data company.

The crime rate in the area near Logan Circle is relatively low, with few violent crimes reported, DC crime statistics show.

The 23-year-old man arrested and charged Thursday in the "unprovoked" fatal stabbing of a woman who was jogging through D.C.'s Logan Circle neighborhood was known to use the synthetic drug K2, according to court documents.

Police say surveillance video of the attacker in a distinct shirt and tips from the public helped them track down the suspect, Anthony Crawford of Northwest D.C., to a park near 14th and Girard streets NW Wednesday night.

Detectives who interviewed Crawford said they didn't provide details about the homicide for which he was arrested, but Crawford told them they were accusing him of the stabbing of a little girl, according to court documents.

He was charged with first-degree murder while armed. He is being held without bond.

Authorities had no information to suggest that the suspect and victim knew each other or had any interaction before the stabbing in one of D.C.'s most popular neighborhoods.

"It looks like it was an unprovoked attack," Police Chief Peter Newsham said.

Wendy Martinez of Northwest D.C. was out for a run just before 8 p.m. Tuesday when she was stabbed seven times to the head, neck and back. The 35-year-old, who had recently become engaged, was jogging west on P Street NW and was attacked after arriving at the intersection with 11th Street.

Newsham said Crawford has a criminal history, but there was no indication that any of it was violent.

A person who said he knew the suspect told detectives Crawford used the synthetic drug K2 frequently, according to court documents.

In 2015, D.C. sought a court-ordered mental examination of Crawford but abandoned the effort for unknown reasons.

After being taken into custody, Crawford was taken to the hospital for an injury on his hand, Newsham said.

Police initially said they were searching for up to three attackers, but Newsham said Thursday they believe Crawford acted alone. It wasn't immediately clear if Crawford has an attorney.

"It's Pretty Terrifying"

The violent crime left neighbors stunned because of the area's popularity and perceived safety.

"As a runner, it's pretty terrifying. You'd think running on lit streets, you would be safe, but thats mind-boggling," one woman said.

Another woman who jogs in the area brought flowers to the crime scene Wednesday morning, telling News4 that the victim easily could have been her.

By Thursday morning, the pile of flowers remembering Martinez had grown. A running shoe could be seen at the makeshift memorial.

The crime rate in the area near Logan Circle is relatively low, with few violent crimes reported, D.C. crime statistics show.

Wendys murder has been devastating to her family and friends, people in this neighborhood, Mayor Muriel Bowser said. Its certainly damaging to all of our senses of safety.

A number of upscale homes and trendy restaurants are located near the scene of the crime.

"I think that it is unsettling for anyone who lives in this city to see something like this happen," Newsham said Thursday. "This is a very isolated instance. You don't see crimes much like this, even during the course of my career, so it's a very unlikely thing that occurred here at this intersection. At the same time, I'm sure that doesn't bring any level of comfort to the Martinez family."

Police released surveillance video Wednesday afternoon showing the attacker walking along 11th Street NW in a long-sleeve shirt that went down past his waist. Footage from another camera shows him walking with a knife in his hand. The knife used in the stabbing was found nearby.

Newsham said Thursday a combination of information from officers and tips from community members helped police identify Crawford as the suspect.

Newsham said police do not have a motive yet, but the "unsettling" attack was likely random.

Strangers Rushed to Help the Victim

After the stabbing, Martinez staggered into a nearby carryout restaurant. She collapsed a short time later.

The manager of the restaurant said he heard someone scream and saw Martinez covered in blood.

"I scared. I dont know what happened, and I just try to call police," said the manager, who asked not to be identified.

Strangers rushed to the woman's side to help her, and the manager called 911. Martinez died of her injuries a short time later.

On Thursday, Newsham thanked members of the community, including a nurse, for trying to provide medical help for Martinez on the scene and for providing tips that led to to the suspect.

"Wendy Karina Martinez Was the Light of Our Lives"

Martinez was an avid runner who lived in an upscale apartment just three blocks away.

She and her boyfriend got engaged just last week, her family said in a statement.

"Wendy Karina Martinez was the light of our lives. Not only was she an avid runner, but she was a devout Christian, a wonderful friend, and a driven professional. Everything you hope that a daughter and a friend could be," her family said Wednesday. "She was also excited to be planning her upcoming wedding to her fiance, Daniel Hincapie. They were engaged just last week."

"Simply put, Wendy was fearfully and wonderfully made! Now we know she has found the one whom her soul loved. (Song of Solomon 3:4)," the statement said.

Martinez's family asked for respect for their privacy as they grieve and urged anyone with information on her killing to contact police.

Martinez was chief of staff of the software and data company FiscalNote.

"The entire FiscalNote family is shocked and deeply saddened to learn that Wendy Martinez, our Chief of Staff, was killed last night," the company said in a tweet Wednesday afternoon. "Wendy was an invaluable member of our team and a vibrant member of the community. Our thoughts and prayers are with Wendys family and friends."

Martinez was a University of Florida and Georgetown University graduate who previously worked for the Organization of American States and the Inter-American Development Bank, according to her LinkedIn page.

Martinez is from Palm Beach County, Florida, family members told NBC affiliate WPTV.
Governor Jerry Brown signed California Assembly Bill 626 into law this week. It allows chefs and cooks to sell food products made from home kitchens.

The practice of selling food made from home was previously illegal due to health concerns.

The new law will give stricter guidelines on what is labeled as "microenterprise home kitchens." Anyone operating one will have to apply for a permit and sell no more than 60 meals per week.

The regulations also call for the commercial cook or chef to do business directly with customers and allow inspections of the home kitchen if complaints are received.

Local chefs said San Diego could benefit from the new law.

Theres a lot of AirBnBs here in San Diego, said Danielle Sharesse, the head chef and owner of Flavor Integrations Catering. Somebody could have a chef come in and prep meals for people staying from out of town.

Sharesse said there is also a lot of interest in meetup groups and home parties in San Diego.

If you could host a cooking class in your house, it opens a lot of opportunities for chefs, added Sharesse.

The City Heights mother of two said this new law will also allow her to prep food at home ahead of time so that she can spend more time with her children before heading to work.

"It will help me be more flexible with my schedule," said Sharesse.

But she warns, it is important for home chefs not to cross-contaminate food and make sure everything is sanitary when cooking.

"Don't cross-contaminate utensils for somebody with a shellfish allergy or a nut allergy," said Sharesse. "Cleanliness is a huge concern."

The new law will go into effect on January 1, 2019.
Either way, be it a Yameen or a Nasheed proxy calling the shots in Male, its time for India to dust off a fresh Maldives initiative.

This coming Sunday, the tiny Indian Ocean archipelago that has repeatedly thumbed its nose at India, like few others in the South Asian theatre  barring Nepal and Bhutan  goes to the polls. Incumbent President Abdulla Yameen is seeking a second five-year term in a Maldives that is roiled by uncertainty, with election monitoring watchdogs such as Transparency Maldives openly expressing concern that the presidential polls could be called off at the last minute, as the ruling party is expected to resurrect farcical plots as a ploy to impose an emergency.

If he does, it will be the third time that the canny President Yameen would have played the coup card.

Both his police chief and defence minister have parroted the same line, saying that they have information about plots to destabilise the country and create unrest and warned of dangerous acts on polling day, that they say seeks to reinforce the operation narrative to the international community that polls would be neither free nor fair.

President Yameen, in fact, has everything riding on this re-election. If the joint Opposition candidate, Ibrahim Mohamed Solih, wins  given that the election is free and fair  retribution will be swift. The President could face impeachment and jail. In 2013, Mr Yameens margin of victory against the popular Mohammed Nasheed was a wafer-thin 6,300 votes out of a voter base of 260,000 voters. This time, the incumbent must ensure that Ibu Solih, a candidate backed not just by former President Nasheeds Maldivian Democratic Party but also Gasim Ibrahims Jamhoory Party and the Islamist Adalath Party, as well as former President Abdul Gayooms faction of Mr Yameens own Progressive Party of the Maldives, does not close the gap.

The nomination of Ibu as the joint Opposition candidate after his quiet meeting with mentor Mohammed Nasheed in Colombo, when the latter agreed to step out of the presidential race as did Gasim Ibrahim, was seen as something of a coup. But enough to deliver the coup de grace on Sunday?

Clearly, Mr Yameen has not been complacent. The run-up to the presidential polls has been marked by an unprecedented crushing of dissent, the jailing of anyone who has stood in his way, including his half-brother and father of the nation, the pro-India leaning Mr Gayoom whom he has accused of colluding with the Chief Justice to unseat him from office.

The ailing Mr Gayooms health is fading, but Mr Yameen has so far refused to allow him to be moved permanently to a hospital or place him under house arrest to facilitate treatment at home amid reports that the familys plea to allow the 80-year-old to travel abroad was given a thumbs down. Mr Gayooms son and son-in-law are also in jail, as is the Chief Justice and two senior Supreme Court judges  openly pro-India  who ordered the release of Opposition leaders who had been detained by Mr Yameen; all 15, uniformly charged with terrorism and attempting to overthrow the government.

Opposition leaders ranging from those in Mr Gayooms camp to members of the Mohammed Nasheed-led MDP have consistently been raising their concerns over voter fraud and intimidation, and threats faced by their elected representatives. Eva Abdulla, a serving member of Parliament for the MDP, recounts how she and other members of her party and the Opposition are routinely followed and have their phones tapped.

Mr Yameens masterstroke was to place Ahmed Shareef, an activist of his PPM, as head of the Elections Commission, the body that will oversee the polls. Criticism over moves to disenfranchise voters by reducing the number of ballot boxes per island were reversed after popular anger. But two moves, the first, where all information on registered voters was shared by the Maldives EC with the ruling party, and second, the appointment of ruling party members to administer and count the vote on Sunday at two pre-determined sites, has set off alarm bells that plans are being set in motion to intimidate voters and manipulate results, with some of that unease manifesting itself on the streets of the capital Male where PPM election rallies by Mr Yameens feared partymen have not been exactly celebratory.

Ms Abdulla says the Opposition is banking on the overwhelming numbers they expect to mobilise against the President to offset the PPMs tactics, pointing to the results of the local council elections held last year that the ruling party was unable to subvert.

Days before the polls, the Opposition has simultaneously stepped up moves to prove that the President and his circle of advisers, including the former vice-president, had allegedly indulged in money-laundering, bribery and corruption to the tune of millions of dollars under the cover of getting a Singapore-based businessman to invest in the Maldives. The Opposition released mobile phone records on Wednesday that showed transcripts of a conversation between the Singapore-based businessman and the Maldivian middleman on the day that the Maldivian President was visiting Singapore. Phone recordings of a conversation between the President and his wife Fahimath, discussing how to manage the poll, have similarly gone viral.

For New Delhi, which has the borne the ignominy of being reduced to a bit player in its own backyard under Abdulla Yameen  his open embrace of China while cutting India out, no doubt, a spillover from governments past  this may be time for a reset. While the Narendra Modi government has refrained from an open avowal of the united Opposition, its concerns over whether Mr Nasheed is a front for the UK has to be weighed against the growing footprint of the Chinese, with the China-Maldives Friendship Bridge that connected two main islands winning the President major brownie points domestically. Will an undivided Opposition be able to counter a street-smart President who has everything to lose?

Either way, be it a Yameen or a Nasheed proxy calling the shots in Male, its time for India to dust off a fresh Maldives initiative. Benign neglect cannot be the way forward.
The U.S. Forest Service says the largest wildfire on record in California is 100 percent contained.

The agency made the announcement Wednesday about the so-called Mendocino Complex of twin fires that erupted in July.

The fires north of San Francisco killed a firefighter, destroyed 157 homes and scorched 720 square miles (1,865 square kilometers).

That's an area more than twice the size of New York City.

Officials say 460 firefighters remain in the area, working to prevent erosion and monitoring spots that are still burning.

The blazes prompted the evacuation of thousands of people in Mendocino, Lake, Colusa and Glenn counties.

Authorities are still investigating what started the fires.
Two deputies hurt in a fatal East Los Angeles park shootout Wednesday evening were recovering Thursday as authorities released the identities of the suspects.

"Our deputies thankfully are doing well today," Los Angeles County Sheriff Jim McDonnell said in a Thursday news conference.

The three men with documented ties to gangs, who were accused of brandishing a gun and asking where someone was from before the fatal shootout with deputies, were identified Thursday.

The driver and alleged shooter was identified as Rene Herrera, 39. Herrera, who authorities said had "an extensive criminal history," died at the scene and a gun was recovered from beneath him.

Fernando Cruz, 18, an alleged passenger in the car, was shot and in the hospital in critical condition.

Hector Martinez, 18, allegedly ran from the car during the shootout and was ultimately arrested without incident, according to the LA County Sheriff's department. He was arrested on suspicion of attempted murder of a police officer.

Deputies responded to a report of an assault with a deadly weapon Wednesday night after the group of men allegedly brandished a gun and asked where someone was from at 6:20 p.m. in the area of 6th Street and Bonny Beach Place.

The deputies followed the car matching the description to Salazar Park, close to the intersection of Whittier Boulevard and South Indiana Street.

"They approached the vehicle, and as they got out of the black and whites, they were fired upon," McDonnell said. "Both deputies sustained gunshot wounds."

McDonnell added, "This was a gun fight out there tonight from what I was told."

More deputies arrived and Herrera was shot and killed, the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department confirmed.

The two wounded officers were rushed to LA County USC Medical Center, the LA County Sheriff's headquarters said. McDonnell said that both men were in serious but stable condition Wednesday evening.

McDonnell provided updates in a news conference outside the hospital at approximately 8:45 p.m. Wednesday night, confirming a search was ongoing for a possible fourth man involved. However, the LASD later determined that there was no fourth shooter.

McDonnell said the deputies, who he described as veterans with more than 10 years of experience each, suffered injuries to their upper bodies, but the sheriff had spoken to both of his deputies prior to speaking with reporters.

Though the identities of the deputies were not revealed, McDonnell said Thursday their families joined them at the hospital where they were recovering well. One who had been shot in the upper chest area was released.

The deputy shot in the jaw was still recovering in the hospital.

During the Thursday news conference, McDonnell also addressed the accusation by LA County Sheriff candidate Alex Villanueva that the shooting was worsened by staffing, as a technician in training was in the sheriff's vehicle and ducked for cover during the shootout.

"That is disgusting," he said. "To think he is laying this on the backs of deputies out there doing their jobs, blaming someone other than the predators out there on the street. This is not about politics, this is not about staffing -- this is about our deputy sheriffs going out there putting themselves between the public and harm."

Anyone with information about this incident is encouraged to contact the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department's Homicide Bureau at (323) 890-5500. If you prefer to provide information anonymously, you may call "Crime Stoppers" by dialing (800) 222-TIPS (8477), use your smartphone by downloading the "P3 Tips" Mobile APP on Google play or the Apple App Store or by using the website http://lacrimestoppers.org
Los Angeles City Attorney Mike Feuer announced Thursday that his office in coordination with other state and city agencies has reached a $1,643,500 settlement with Whole Foods Market California Inc. and two related entities resolving allegations of unlawful handling and disposal of hazardous waste and materials.

"This judgment will ensure strong steps are taken to protect our environment and public health," Feuer said. "And it demonstrates the deep commitment of prosecutors and environmental agencies throughout California to enforce our hazardous waste laws."

The settlement was reached in coordination with statewide regulatory agencies and 21 other California district and city attorneys.

According to Feuer's office, over a five-year period, Whole Foods Market, Mrs. Gooch's Natural Food Market Inc., and WFM-WO Inc., mishandled hazardous waste and materials including batteries, electronic devices, ignitable liquids, aerosol products, cleaning agents and other flammable reactive toxic and corrosive materials.

Under the settlement, the Whole Foods entities must pay $1,202,800 in civil penalties, $202,800 to reimburse the costs of the investigation, and $237,900 to fund supplemental environmental projects furthering consumer protection and environmental enforcement in California, Feuer's office said.

The Whole Foods entities must also hire an employee to strengthen the companies' hazardous waste programs. The three entities must also properly label, package, and store hazardous waste, and ensure that incompatible wastes do not combine to cause dangerous chemical reactions.

The judgment requires the companies to properly document their hazardous waste and dispose of it at authorized facilities.
What to Know A gunman injured four people Wednesday at a software company in Wisconsin

The gunman died after being shot by police, and authorities are searching for a motive

A day later, multiple people were killed in a shooting at a Rite Aid distribution center in Maryland

A Wisconsin software worker who opened fire on his fellow employees in their suburban Madison office had worked for the company for almost 18 months and had no criminal history in the state, authorities said Thursday.

Police killed the gunman in a shoot-out Wednesday morning inside WTS Paradigm's Middleton offices while responding to reports of an active shooter. The Dane County medical examiner identified the shooter Thursday as 43-year-old Anthony Tong.

Police said three people were seriously wounded in the attack and remained hospitalized Thursday. A fourth person was grazed but a bullet.

Middleton Police Chief Chuck Foulke said the gunman had worked at WTS Paradigm since April 2017. Foulke said he had no criminal history in Wisconsin and lived alone. Officers searched Tong's house in nearby Verona Wednesday evening, but Foulke didn't say what they found.

The chief said investigators still don't know what prompted the attack .

"I'm dying to know the motive also," Foulke said during a Thursday news conference. "We just have not found one yet."

One victim was critically wounded but had been upgraded to serious condition by Thursday morning, while the two other victims remained in serious condition at University Hospital, according to a spokeswoman.

Foulke said investigators had interviewed two of those victims. He did not say what they divulged but called the conversations "really important interviews." The victims' names haven't been released.

WTS Paradigm officials issued a statement Wednesday saying the incident was shocking and heartbreaking, but the company provided no information about the shooting. A company spokesman didn't reply to emails Thursday.

Officers were called to WTS Paradigm in Middleton, a Madison suburb of about 17,440 people, just before 10:30 Wednesday. Foulke said officers arrived within 8 minutes of receiving emergency calls and found a man wielding a semiautomatic pistol. Foulke said the man was carrying extra magazines as well.

Two Middleton officers and two Dane County sheriff's deputies exchanged gunfire with Tong, killing him. The officers and deputies were not hurt, Foulke said.

The police chief said he didn't know if the victims were targeted or shot at random. He added that federal authorities are tracing the history of the pistol to determine how the gunman's acquired it.

WTS Paradigm makes software for the building products industry. A Wisconsin State Journal profile from 2014 listed company employment at about 145 workers and noted the company was looking to move to a larger location at the time.

The company has posted You Tube videos depicting a loose atmosphere in an upscale office marked by a breakroom that resembles a bar, a ping-pong table and a shuffleboard table, and workers in jeans and sweatshirts.

One video depicts an office Olympics in which workers compete by pedaling themselves around in their chairs and toss garbage in wastebaskets. Another video touts the company's charity contributions, including donations to the Madison Children's Museum, the American Diabetes Association and Habitat for Humanity.

Just a day later across the county, multiple people were killed in a shooting at a Rite Aid distribution center in Maryland.
What to Know North and South Korean leaders wrapped two days of talks Wednesday in Pyongyang

North Korea promised to permanently dismantle its main nuclear complex and to allow international inspections

The two countries agreed to establish buffer zones along their borders to reduce military tensions

The leaders of North and South Korea announced a wide range of agreements Wednesday which they said were a major step toward peace on the Korean Peninsula. But the premier pledge on denuclearization contained a big condition, with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un stating he'd permanently dismantle his main nuclear complex only if the United States takes unspecified corresponding measures.

Compared to the vague language of their two summits earlier this year, Kim and South Korean President Moon Jae-in agreed in their second day of meetings to an ambitious program meant to tackle soaring tensions last year that had many fearing war as the North tested a string of increasingly powerful weapons.

Kim promised to accept international inspectors to monitor the closing of a key missile test site and launch pad and to visit Seoul soon, and both leaders vowed to work together to try to host the Summer Olympics in 2032.

But while containing several tantalizing offers, their joint statement appeared to fall short of the major steps many in Washington have been looking for  such as a commitment by Kim to provide a list of North Korea's nuclear facilities, a solid step-by-step timeline for closing them down, or an agreement to allow international inspectors to assess progress or discover violations.

It also was unclear what "corresponding steps" North Korea wants from the U.S. to dismantle its nuclear site.

The question is whether it will be enough for U.S. President Donald Trump to pick up where Moon has left off. Trump told reporters Wednesday that the outcome of the summit was "very good news" and that "we're making tremendous progress" with North Korea. He didn't indicate in his brief remarks whether the U.S. would be willing to take further steps to encourage North Korean action on denuclearization.

Declaring they had made a major step toward peace, Moon and Kim stood side by side as they announced their joint statement to a group of North and South Korean reporters after a closed-door meeting Wednesday morning. They took no questions.

"We have agreed to make the Korean Peninsula a land of peace that is free from nuclear weapons and nuclear threat," Kim said at the guesthouse where Moon is staying. "The road to our future will not always be smooth and we may face challenges and trials we can't anticipate. But we aren't afraid of headwinds because our strength will grow as we overcome each trial based on the strength of our nation."

Kim and Moon earlier smiled and chatted as they walked down a hallway and into a meeting room to finalize the joint statement, which also said that the leaders would push for a Korean Peninsula without nuclear weapons and to "eliminate all the danger of war." Moon and Kim planned to visit a volcano sacred to the North on Thursday, the last day of Moon's visit.

This week's summit comes as Moon is under increasing pressure from Washington to find a path forward in efforts to get Kim to completely  and unilaterally  abandon his nuclear arsenal.

Trump has maintained that he and Kim have a solid relationship, and both leaders have expressed interest in a follow-up summit to their meeting in June in Singapore. North Korea has been demanding a declaration formally ending the Korean War, which was stopped in 1953 by a cease-fire, but neither leader mentioned it Wednesday as they read the joint statement.

In the meantime, however, Moon and Kim made concrete moves of their own to reduce tensions on their border.

According to a statement signed by the countries' defense chiefs, the two Koreas agreed to establish buffer zones along their land and sea borders to reduce military tensions and prevent accidental clashes. They also agreed to withdraw 11 guard posts from the Demilitarized Zone by December and to establish a no-fly zone above the military demarcation line that bisects the two Koreas that will apply to planes, helicopters and drones.

Though not directly linked to security, the leaders' announcement that they would seek a joint Summer Olympics was a significant move in terms of easing tensions and building trust. It also flows from the North's decision to participate in the Pyeongchang Winter Games in February, which was regarded as a success for both sides.

Other agreements aimed at removing some longstanding irritants from their relations, such as allowing more contact between families divided by the Korean War. Moon also appeared to be making good on his proposals to help build up the North's infrastructure and open cross-border rail links.

Unlike Trump's initial tweets praising the summit, the news brought a quick and negative response from Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, who tweeted that he was concerned the visit would undermine efforts by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley to impose "maximum pressure" on the North.

"While North Korea has stopped testing missiles and nuclear devices, they have NOT moved toward denuclearization," he tweeted.

With the main business of the day complete, North Korea was expected to hold a huge mass games spectacle in the evening, with Moon as the special guest. Seoul said Moon would make a short speech.

North Korea had put the iconic games, which feature tens of thousands of performers dancing and flipping placards in unison to create giant mosaics and slogans, on a back burner for the past several years, but revived them for this month's celebrations of its 70th founding anniversary. In a performance for the anniversary, a giant photo of Moon and Kim shaking hands at their first summit in April was projected onto one side of the stands in Pyongyang's 150,000-seat May Day Stadium.

Kim has gone all out to make Moon's visit a memorable one.

On Tuesday, the first day of the summit, he greeted Moon and his wife at Pyongyang's airport and then rode into town with Moon in an open limousine through streets lined with crowds of North Koreans, who cheered and waved the flag of their country and a blue-and-white flag that symbolizes Korean unity.

At the start of their meeting, Kim thanked Moon for brokering the June summit with Trump.

"It's not too much to say that it's Moon's efforts that arranged a historic North Korea-U.S. summit. Because of that, the regional political situation has been stabilized and more progress on North Korea-U.S. ties is expected," Kim said, according to South Korean media pool reports and Moon's office.
What to Know Wendy Martinez of Northwest DC was attacked Tuesday evening while jogging.

She had just gotten engaged a week earlier, her family said. She was chief of staff at a software and data company.

Police released surveillance video Wednesday afternoon showing the suspect walking along 11th Street NW.

Update: An arrest has been made in this case. Read the story here.

A 35-year-old woman jogging in the Logan Circle neighborhood of Northwest D.C. was killed in a brutal stabbing Tuesday evening, and police are still searching for the man who attacked her.

Wendy Martinez of Northwest Washington was jogging in the 1400 block of 11th Street NW when she was attacked just before 8 p.m., police say. According to her family, she had just gotten engaged a week earlier.

News4 obtained surveillance video that shows Martinez stagger into the Asian American Carryout restaurant and apparently plead for help. She collapsed a short time later.

The manager of the restaurant said he heard someone scream and saw Martinez covered in blood.

"I scared. I dont know what happened, and I just try to call police," said the manager, who asked not to be identified.

Strangers rushed to the woman's side to help her, and the manager called 911. Martinez died of her injuries a short time later.

Police released surveillance video Wednesday afternoon showing the suspect walking along 11th Street NW. Footage from another camera shows him walking with a knife in his hand.

The knife used in the stabbing was found nearby.

D.C. police chief Peter Newsham said police do not have a motive yet, but the "unsettling" attack was likely random.

Police initially said they were looking for as many as three men in connection to the stabbing, but at a news conference Wednesday afternoon, Newsham said investigators believe she was attacked by a single man.

"You have an incident like this  it's very scary. We haven't gotten to the bottom to see if this is someone that she knew or exactly what the motive is, but it's disturbing," Newsham said.

Martinez was an avid runner who lived in an upscale apartment just three blocks away.

She and her boyfriend got engaged just last week, her family said in a statement.

"Wendy Karina Martinez was the light of our lives. Not only was she an avid runner, but she was a devout Christian, a wonderful friend, and a driven professional. Everything you hope that a daughter and a friend could be," her family said Wednesday. "She was also excited to be planning her upcoming wedding to her fiance, Daniel Hincapie. They were engaged just last week."

"Simply put, Wendy was fearfully and wonderfully made! Now we know she has found the one whom her soul loved. (Song of Solomon 3:4)," the statement said.

Martinez's family asked for respect for their privacy as they grieve and urged anyone with information on her killing to contact police.

Martinez was chief of staff of the software and data company FiscalNote.

"The entire FiscalNote family is shocked and deeply saddened to learn that Wendy Martinez, our Chief of Staff, was killed last night," the company said in a tweet Wednesday afternoon. "Wendy was an invaluable member of our team and a vibrant member of the community. Our thoughts and prayers are with Wendys family and friends."

Martinez was a University of Florida and Georgetown University graduate who previously worked for the Organization of American States and the Inter-American Development Bank, according to her LinkedIn page.

The crime rate in the area near Logan Circle is relatively low, with few violent crimes reported, D.C. crime statistics show. A number of upscale homes and trendy restaurants are located near the scene of the crime.

The attack left other joggers in the area stunned.

"As a runner, it's pretty terrifying. You'd think running on lit streets, you would be safe, but thats mind-boggling," one woman said.

Another woman who jogs in the area brought flowers to the crime scene Wednesday morning, telling News4 that the victim easily could have been her.

Anyone who can help police is asked to call 202-727-9099.
Online platforms are under pressure in Europe because of their dominance and anti-competitive business practices.

Seven months after Europes Justice Commissioner Vera Jourova told Facebook and other tech companies to bring their user terms in line with EU consumer laws, the social media giant has yet to address all her concerns.(Photo: Pixabay)

Facebook may face sanctions because it has yet to comply with EU consumer rules while Airbnb has made the necessary changes in response to regulatory demands, EU sources said on Wednesday.

Online platforms are under pressure in Europe because of their dominance and anti-competitive business practices, which have resulted in hefty fines handed down to some companies. Privacy and consumer concerns have also aggravated the situation.

Seven months after Europes Justice Commissioner Vera Jourova told Facebook and other tech companies to bring their user terms in line with EU consumer laws, the social media giant has yet to address all her concerns, the sources said.

There is only limited progress and this has been going on for too long, the sources said.

Jourova had previously voiced concerns about the companies liability and how users are informed about content removal or contract terminations.

Consumer protection authorities across the 28-country bloc, which requested the changes last year, have the power to fine the companies for breaching EU rules.

Facebook has previously said it worked with EU authorities to amend its terms and ensure greater transparency.

Three months after being told to revise its terms and conditions, Airbnb has made the necessary changes, the sources said.

This is good news for consumers who will benefit for instance from more transparency on prices, so they can compare offers upfront, the sources said.

The European Commission had told Airbnb to state whether accommodation is offered by a private individual or a professional, provide details of prices in a clear way and offer fairer terms to consumers.

Founded in 2008 in San Francisco, Airbnb matches people wishing to rent out all or part of their homes to temporary guests, via a website.

(Source)
What to Know WNYC obtained a recording on which Bergen County Sheriff Michael Saudino can be heard making racist remarks

Saudino released a statement Thursday evening acknowledging that he'd made the "insensitive recorded remarks"

Despite calls for him to resign, Saudino instead said he would be reaching out to community leaders to apologize

UPDATE: New Jersey Sheriff Taped Making Racist Remarks Resigns Amid Uproar

A New Jersey sheriff who was recorded making racist remarks about black people and about the states Sikh Attorney General is apologizing, but says he won't resign.

Gov. Phil Murphy and other elected officials called for Bergen County Sheriff Michael Saudinos resignation after WNYC obtained a recording on which the sheriff can be heard making remarks about black people, as well as the states Attorney General Gurbir Grewal, after Murphys inauguration on Jan. 16.

He talked about the whole thing, the marijuana, sanctuary state better criminal justice reform, Saudino said of Murphys inauguration speech in the recording.

Christ almighty, in other words let the blacks come in, do whatever the f--- they want, smoke their marijuana, do this, do that, and dont worry about it. You know, well tie the hands of cops, he reportedly said.

Saudino went on to say that Murphy only appointed Grewal because of the turban, WNYC reported.

He also wondered aloud whether Lt. Gov. Sheila Oliver was gay "because she's never been married."

Saudino, who's in his third term as Bergen County sheriff, released a statement Thursday evening acknowledging that he'd made the "insensitive recorded remarks that were made public today."

"These remarks are not representative of the person that I am and they are in no way consistent with the manner in which I have conducted my life personally and as a law enforcement professional with over 46 years of service to the residents of Bergen County," Saudino said.

Despite calls for him to resign, Saudino instead said he would be reaching out to community leaders to apologize and repair the damage to the "friendships" he has built with those communities.

"Going forward I will continue to treat everyone with the respect and dignity that is deserved by all and to be diligent in my duty to protect and defend the rights of all our residents," he said.

A spokesperson for the sheriff's office said Friday morning that Saudino would not be coming to work and "you won't see him anywhere near the building." But they did not elaborate on whether Saudino would take an extended leave.

Murphy had denounced Saudino's comments as "appalling," adding that "anyone using racist, homophobic and hateful language is unfit for public office."

Grewal and Bergen County Executive Jim Tedesco had also called for Saudino's resignation.

"I have now listened to the recording obtained by WNYC. If that's in fact Sheriff Saudino's voice, then he should resign immediately," Grewal said in a statement earlier Thursday.

"I've got thick skin and I've been called far worse, But the comments about the African-American community are wrong, racist and hurtful," he added. "New Jersey and Bergen County deserve better."

Tedesco, meanwhile, said he'd worked with Saudino for years and was "shocked and disappointed to hear these comments."

"In the best interest of the public, he should step down," Tedesco said in a statement.

Assemblyman Gordon Johnson (D-Bergen), who formerly served as Bergen County sheriff, also called for his resignation, saying in a statement, "Sheriff Saudino's racist and bigoted comments are unacceptable and offensive. His hate-filled words are beneath the values we share as a community and they violate the integrity we demand and expect of law enforcement."

Bergen County Democratic Chairman Lou Stellato said "these remarks are both inconsistent with the Democratic values we hold dear and the character of the Michael Saudino I have known. Intolerance and discrimination can never be accepted at any level and he should resign, Stellato said.

The president of the local police union, Chris Weston, also called on Saudino to resign Friday morning and said the sheriff was "just sorry he got caught."

Because Saudino is an elected official, the governor does not have the power to remove him from office. He would have to resign on his own accord.

Hackensack resident Danny Wiggers said he knows the sheriff personally and was "totally shocked" to hear his remarks.

"It was probably an aberration on his part. He's a solid individual, he's been very good to all the communities I know of, and you know, he's human, he probably made a mistake," said Wiggers.

In 2013, Saudino's Democratic challenger for the sheriff seat, James Mordaga, criticized Saudino for taking home both pension from a Hackensack Police Department job he retired from and salaries from the Bergen County Prosecutor's Office and the county Department of Public Safety  a practice called "double-dipping" by critics.

At the time, Saudino was the highest-paid sheriff in New Jersey. Saudino, however, noted that Mordaga, too, had "double-dipped" before running for sheriff.
What to Know Bill Cosby is set to learn his fate for drugging and molesting a woman at his suburban Philadelphia home in 2004.

The judge's options are broad from a prison term to a jail stint to house arrest or probation. The maximum term is 10 years per count.

The sentencing hearing in Montgomery County is expected to last two days.

Bill Cosby could be sent to prison next week for drugging and molesting a woman at his suburban Philadelphia home in 2004 in what became the first celebrity trial of the #MeToo era.

Cosby is due in court Monday for a two-day sentencing hearing that follows his conviction in the spring on three felony counts of aggravated indecent assault.

The judge's options are broad, because the state guideline range of about one to four years spans the gamut from a prison term to a jail stint to house arrest or probation. The maximum term is 10 years per count.

Lawyers for the 81-year-old, legally blind Cosby will no doubt stress his age, health problems, legacy and philanthropy as they plead to keep him at home, while prosecutors hope to call other accusers to paint Cosby as a sexual predator deserving of prison.

Montgomery County Judge Steven T. O'Neill may aim straight for the heart of the guidelines to blunt public criticism from both sides and avoid being overturned on appeal, legal experts said.

"If you give a sentence in the middle, almost no one can complain," said Daniel Filler, dean of Drexel University's Kline School of Law, who studies sex assault issues. "And because the case has mitigating factors and aggravating factors, that's the most likely outcome."

Cosby should learn his fate by Tuesday.

THE SENTENCE

Jurors convicted Cosby of sexually assaulting Andrea Constand without consent, while she was impaired and after incapacitating her. Though each count carries a 10-year maximum sentence, O'Neill will likely merge them since all three stem from the same encounter, in effect weighing only one charge, legal experts say.

State guidelines call for a base 22-to-36-month sentence. The judge can add up to a year for aggravating factors  such as the 60-some other accusers, Cosby's denials and lack of remorse, and even his defense team's repeated attacks on the judge and prosecutor. Then O'Neill could deduct up to a year for mitigating factors  Cosby's age, health and perhaps even the $3.4 million he paid to settle Constand's related lawsuit.

The Associated Press does not typically name sexual assault victims without their permission, which Constand has granted.

PRISON, JAIL OR HOUSE ARREST?

If Cosby gets even a day more than two years, he'll enter the state prison system, with a first stop at SCI Phoenix, a new $400 million, 3,830-bed prison in suburban Philadelphia where staff would assess his physical, medical and security needs. Cosby could end up in a long-term medical care unit there or elsewhere. If he's deemed at risk because of his age or celebrity, or a risk to others, he'd be held in solitary confinement, spending most of the day alone in his cell.

Otherwise, he'd likely share a two-person cell, leaving for meals, exercise, counseling and other activities. He'd be free to bring a personal tablet for music or games but wouldn't have internet access, corrections spokeswoman Amy Worden said.

If Cosby gets two years or less, he'd likely go to the Montgomery County Correctional Facility in nearby Eagleville, a 2,080-bed site that also has a medical unit. Or O'Neill could give him less than a year and let him serve some or all of the time on home confinement, typically with an ankle monitor or probation.

The key question, if Cosby gets time, is whether O'Neill lets him stay home while he appeals his conviction. The violent nature of the crime works against him, but Cosby's age might work in his favor.

"You don't want your client to go to prison and find out that (in) those twilight years of their life they shouldn't have had to spend there in the first place," said Loyola Law School professor Laurie Levenson.

THE ACCUSERS

More than 60 other women accuse Cosby of sexual misconduct during his 50-year show business career. O'Neill allowed five of them to testify at trial, while others came to watch the court proceedings. District Attorney Kevin Steele wants some of them to speak at the sentencing.

However O'Neill rules, he already knows their stories well after presiding at both trials and several intense pretrial hearings over their "prior bad act" testimony.

"The judge knows a ton about Mr. Cosby whether or not the D.A. puts on a single witness," Filler said.

THE JUDGE

O'Neill, who is married and has three adult sons, took the bench in 2002. He has watched the Cosby team's attacks on the court system intensify, and grow more personal, as the stakes grew.

When the first trial ended in a deadlock in June 2017, the defense attacked the judge and prosecutor from the courthouse steps. In court in April, moments after his conviction, Cosby called Steele an expletive and said he was "sick of him."

Then, just this week, Camille Cosby filed a state ethics complaint against O'Neill, invoking a long-ago romance to allege he had a bias in the case. She has called him "arrogant," ''unethical" and "corrupt."

Lawyer Samuel Stretton, who often represents Pennsylvania judges in disciplinary hearings, called O'Neill an even-keeled professional who "understands human nature." He doesn't think the attacks will influence the sentence  but said Cosby's lack of remorse might.

"Obviously, if no one is repenting, that's a factor to consider. And if they're so unrepentant they're name calling, blaming anyone but themselves," that's a problem, Stretton said.
What began as a trip to Dick Dunmire's hometown of Pittsburgh has turned into an 11-day evacuation. And counting.

Its been that long since Dunmire and his wife, Linda, have set foot in their home in Boiling Spring Lakes, North Carolina, which is not far from the Cape Fear River and the North Carolina coast.

They've been staying with family in North Wildwood, New Jersey for the past week and a half. But the couple are anxiously awaiting their trip home in the aftermath of Hurricane Florence.

Im anxious to get back home," Dunmire said. "Its been too long.

Sept. 9, Dunmire left for his 50th class reunion in Pittsburgh. It was good timing to take a trip north.

Florence was boiling in the Atlantic Ocean, aiming right at his North Carolina home.

Still, preparing for the then-Category 4 storm felt familiar. They've lived in North Carolina for 10 years, so the Dunmires have had experience in hunkering down. They did it most recently for Hurricane Matthew in 2016.

And Dunmire had served in the Coast Guard about two hours north in Morehead City. Hed evacuated that area on several occasions.

Florence, though, was different.

[NATL]Florence in Photos: Long Recovery Ahead for Carolinas From Record Flooding

"The rainfall was unimaginable, Dunmire said. At one point, his area received 20 inches of rain in two hours.

Luckily, the Dunmires have received no reports of damage to their home. The town of Boiling Spring Lake has running water, but no electricity and many roads leading to their community have been washed away.

He does not expect the power to come on until at least Sunday night.

Still, he doesn't mind returning to the dark. He's planning to leave as soon as he can, perhaps even Friday.
The farmhand charged in the abduction and stabbing death of 20-year-old Mollie Tibbetts in Iowa has pleaded not guilty to first-degree murder.

Cristhian Bahena Rivera entered his plea Wednesday at the Poweshiek County Courthouse in Montezuma, Iowa.

Rivera is charged in the killing of Tibbetts, a University of Iowa student who disappeared while out for a run July 18 in Brooklyn, Iowa.

Investigators recovered her body a month later in a cornfield. A medical examiner has said Tibbetts was stabbed to death.

Investigators say Rivera, a native of Mexico who came to the U.S. during his teenage years, was in the U.S. illegally and is subject to deportation proceedings. The 24-year-old worked under a false identity, John Budd, at a dairy farm a few miles from where Tibbetts disappeared.

He waived his right to be tried within 90 days. Trial is set for April 16.
What to Know Wendy Martinez of Northwest DC was attacked Tuesday evening while jogging.

She had just gotten engaged a week earlier, her family said. She was chief of staff at a software and data company.

The crime rate in the area near Logan Circle is relatively low, with few violent crimes reported, DC crime statistics show.

The 23-year-old man arrested and charged Thursday in the "unprovoked" fatal stabbing of a woman who was jogging through D.C.'s Logan Circle neighborhood was known to use the synthetic drug K2, according to court documents.

Police say surveillance video of the attacker in a distinct shirt and tips from the public helped them track down the suspect, Anthony Crawford of Northwest D.C., to a park near 14th and Girard streets NW Wednesday night.

Detectives who interviewed Crawford said they didn't provide details about the homicide for which he was arrested, but Crawford told them they were accusing him of the stabbing of a little girl, according to court documents.

He was charged with first-degree murder while armed. He is being held without bond.

Metro Transit Police

Authorities had no information to suggest that the suspect and victim knew each other or had any interaction before the stabbing in one of D.C.'s most popular neighborhoods.

"It looks like it was an unprovoked attack," Police Chief Peter Newsham said.

Wendy Martinez of Northwest D.C. was out for a run just before 8 p.m. Tuesday when she was stabbed seven times to the head, neck and back. The 35-year-old, who had recently become engaged, was jogging west on P Street NW and was attacked after arriving at the intersection with 11th Street.

Newsham said Crawford has a criminal history, but there was no indication that any of it was violent.

A person who said he knew the suspect told detectives Crawford used the synthetic drug K2 frequently, according to court documents.

In 2015, D.C. sought a court-ordered mental examination of Crawford but abandoned the effort for unknown reasons.

After being taken into custody, Crawford was taken to the hospital for an injury on his hand, Newsham said.

Police initially said they were searching for up to three attackers, but Newsham said Thursday they believe Crawford acted alone. It wasn't immediately clear if Crawford has an attorney.

Someone who said they know the man suspected of killing a jogger in Northwest D.C. told detectives the suspect is an avid user of K2. Chris Gordon reports.

"It's Pretty Terrifying"

The violent crime left neighbors stunned because of the area's popularity and perceived safety.

"As a runner, it's pretty terrifying. You'd think running on lit streets, you would be safe, but thats mind-boggling," one woman said.

Another woman who jogs in the area brought flowers to the crime scene Wednesday morning, telling News4 that the victim easily could have been her.

By Thursday morning, the pile of flowers remembering Martinez had grown. A running shoe could be seen at the makeshift memorial.

The crime rate in the area near Logan Circle is relatively low, with few violent crimes reported, D.C. crime statistics show.

Wendys murder has been devastating to her family and friends, people in this neighborhood, Mayor Muriel Bowser said. Its certainly damaging to all of our senses of safety.

Metropolitan Police Department

A number of upscale homes and trendy restaurants are located near the scene of the crime.

"I think that it is unsettling for anyone who lives in this city to see something like this happen," Newsham said Thursday. "This is a very isolated instance. You don't see crimes much like this, even during the course of my career, so it's a very unlikely thing that occurred here at this intersection. At the same time, I'm sure that doesn't bring any level of comfort to the Martinez family."

Police released surveillance video Wednesday afternoon showing the attacker walking along 11th Street NW in a long-sleeve shirt that went down past his waist. Footage from another camera shows him walking with a knife in his hand. The knife used in the stabbing was found nearby.

Newsham said Thursday a combination of information from officers and tips from community members helped police identify Crawford as the suspect.

Newsham said police do not have a motive yet, but the "unsettling" attack was likely random.

Strangers Rushed to Help the Victim

After the stabbing, Martinez staggered into a nearby carryout restaurant. She collapsed a short time later.

The manager of the restaurant said he heard someone scream and saw Martinez covered in blood.

"I scared. I dont know what happened, and I just try to call police," said the manager, who asked not to be identified.

Strangers rushed to the woman's side to help her, and the manager called 911. Martinez died of her injuries a short time later.

On Thursday, Newsham thanked members of the community, including a nurse, for trying to provide medical help for Martinez on the scene and for providing tips that led to to the suspect.

"Wendy Karina Martinez Was the Light of Our Lives"

Martinez was an avid runner who lived in an upscale apartment just three blocks away.

She and her boyfriend got engaged just last week, her family said in a statement.

"Wendy Karina Martinez was the light of our lives. Not only was she an avid runner, but she was a devout Christian, a wonderful friend, and a driven professional. Everything you hope that a daughter and a friend could be," her family said Wednesday. "She was also excited to be planning her upcoming wedding to her fiance, Daniel Hincapie. They were engaged just last week."

"Simply put, Wendy was fearfully and wonderfully made! Now we know she has found the one whom her soul loved. (Song of Solomon 3:4)," the statement said.

Martinez's family asked for respect for their privacy as they grieve and urged anyone with information on her killing to contact police.

Martinez was chief of staff of the software and data company FiscalNote.

"The entire FiscalNote family is shocked and deeply saddened to learn that Wendy Martinez, our Chief of Staff, was killed last night," the company said in a tweet Wednesday afternoon. "Wendy was an invaluable member of our team and a vibrant member of the community. Our thoughts and prayers are with Wendys family and friends."

Martinez was a University of Florida and Georgetown University graduate who previously worked for the Organization of American States and the Inter-American Development Bank, according to her LinkedIn page.

Martinez is from Palm Beach County, Florida, family members told NBC affiliate WPTV.
Guterres welcomed the announcement by North Korean leader Kim Jong Un during a summit with Moon Jae-in in Pyongyang.

Guterres offered UN help to advance efforts to fully rid the Korean peninsula of nuclear weapons and called for unity among global powers. (Photo: File)

United Nations: UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on Wednesday called for concrete action to follow up on North Korea's commitment to close a missile test site with international monitors present.

Guterres welcomed the announcement by North Korean leader Kim Jong Un during a summit with his South Korean counterpart Moon Jae-in in Pyongyang.

"The commitments reflected in the joint statement include important military confidence-building measures and a commitment by the DPRK to dismantle missile engine testing infrastructure in the presence of experts from related countries," Guterres said in a statement.

"Now it is time for concrete action." When North Korea dismantled a nuclear test site in May, Guterres complained that no international experts had been on hand to witness the closure. North Korea also expressed readiness to close its Yongbyon nuclear plant, which is key to its weapons program, if Washington takes "corresponding measures."

Guterres offered UN help to advance efforts to fully rid the Korean peninsula of nuclear weapons and called for unity among global powers. The breakthrough at the Pyongyang summit came amid preparations for next week's annual gathering at the United Nations of world leaders, during which North Korea will loom large.

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has invited North Korean Foreign Minister Ri Yong ho for talks in New York, on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly meeting. Pompeo said the talks in New York and meetings in Vienna will be the beginning of negotiations on the denuclearization of North Korea, to be completed by 2021.

Pompeo will chair a Security Council meeting next week on North Korea to discuss US diplomatic efforts that have undergone a major shift in tone from last year.

At last year's UN gathering, President Donald Trump threatened to totally destroy North Korea and derided Kim as "little rocket man." The Trump administration is facing calls from Russia and China to consider easing tough economic sanctions imposed on North Korea to create an incentive for Pyongyang to move forward.

The United States maintains that sanctions must remain in place until North Korea has fully dismantled its weapons programs.
A Maryland man and two Texas residents have been indicted for an elaborate plan to launder more than $364 million in investments as part of a Ponzi scheme that entangled more than 400 people, federal prosecutors say.



Kevin Merrill, 53, of Towson, Maryland, along with 54-year-old Jay Ledford and 28-year-old Cameron Jezierski, face charges of conspiracy, wire fraud, identity theft and money laundering, and were arrested Tuesday, according to U.S. Attorney Robert Hur.



The trio allegedly lured investors into a web of lies, inviting people to buy consumer debt portfolios, bundles of debt that are bought and sold like other goods, but they did not disclose their plans to profit off of the debt.



The indictment alleges they also misrepresented from whom they would buy debt portfolios and how much they would initially pay for the portfolios. To keep the ruse alive, the trio allegedly also created shell companies, false portfolio overviews and sales agreements and falsified signatures, bank wire transfer records and statements.



Authorities said the three suspects diverted $73 million of investors' money to buy expensive homes in Maryland, Texas, Nevada and Florida, 26 luxury cars, a boat and a 23-carat diamond bracelet, among other splurges.

Some $25 million was spent on casino gambling, prosecutors allege.



"Most of these investors are just learning that they have been victimized. The effects of this kind of fraud can be devastating," Hur said.



If convicted, the trio each could face a maximum of 20 years in prison for the wire fraud conspiracy and 20 more years for an additional two counts of write fraud, including a handful of other fines.



The FBI has set up an email address for investors who think they may have fallen victim to the scheme. They're asking anyone who thinks they may be a victim to email MerrillLedford@FBI.gov.
What to Know Fire officials are investigating whether fire alarms were working in the seniors apartment building that burned Wednesday.

Ten seniors were taken to hospitals with non-life-threatening injuries after the fire at the Arthur Capper Senior Apartments.

"As we saw the fire alarms, we were pulling them  nothing," said a neighbor who ran into the building to rescue people.

A day after a huge fire forced dozens of seniors out of their homes near the Washington Navy Yard, fire officials are investigating whether fire alarms in the building worked properly.

Multiple residents of the Arthur Capper Senior Apartments said they heard no alarms after a powerful fire broke out about 3:30 p.m. Wednesday, injuring 10 people and sending a huge plume of black smoke into the air. Instead, residents were alerted by U.S. Marines and neighbors who banged on their doors.

D.C. fire chief Gregory Dean told News4 that he has heard multiple reports that wall-mounted fire alarms did not work when pulled.

"No one heard any horns. That's the early notification. That's really what was missing on this building," he said.

Neighborhood advocate Bruce DarConte ran into the building in the 900 block of 5th Street SE to help his neighbors get out. He said he and others pulled wall-mounted fire alarms in the hallways, but nothing happened.

"As we saw the fire alarms, we were pulling them  nothing. So we just kept going. It didn't pay for us to stand there," he said.

The fire chief said Thursday that smoke detectors inside apartments are believed to have worked. On lower floors of the four-story building, smoke alarms and the sprinkler system did not activate because they were not exposed to smoke or flames, Dean said. It wasn't clear if alarms or sprinklers activated on upper floors.

The fire is believed to have started in the attic, fire officials said.

The building was inspected by the fire department last year, and the alarm system was checked three times in the past year, most recently in April, Dean said.

Resident Cherie Gibson said she didn't hear or see any emergency alerts.

"The alarm did not go off. Our sprinklers did not go off," she said.

A man who helped his elderly father get out of the building also said he got no alert.

"No sprinklers went off. No nothing went off," Louis Watts said.

Marines from 8 and I running towards the fire raging in SE DC. pic.twitter.com/4vSKsuyTGo  Lyndsey Medsker (@lmedsker) September 19, 2018

#DCsBravest are making rescues and evacuating occupants from 2 Alarm fire 900 5th Street SE. Now have fire4th & 5th floors and thru roof. pic.twitter.com/AYlGnJ6REK  DC Fire and EMS (@dcfireems) September 19, 2018

2nd Alarm Fire 900 5th St SE. heavy fire top floor and attic occupied 5 story apartment building. pic.twitter.com/S9g7SRVKrP  DC Fire and EMS (@dcfireems) September 19, 2018

#DCsBravest continue to evacuate the residents of 2 alarm fire 900 5th St SE. This 5 story building houses senior citizens. We are using large water streams to attack the fire in the roof and attic, without endangering residents or firefighters. pic.twitter.com/VCgLA5Jwkm  DC Fire and EMS (@dcfireems) September 19, 2018

Residents of all 161 units in the building were forced out of their homes, with no timeline in sight for when they will be able to retrieve their belongings or move back in.

Nearly 90 residents went to a shelter Wednesday night. Many were picked up by family members. As of Thursday morning, 44 people still were in the shelter. They were set to go to hotels later in the day.

The community organization Near Southeast Community Partners is raising funds to help victims of the fire. The Capitol Hill Community Foundation also is fundraising. Ward 6 Council member Charles Allen sent locals information about that fund.

Ten seniors were taken to hospitals for non-life-threatening injuries after the heavy fire broke out. Residents were rushed to safety, some in wheelchairs.

Everyone who was inside the building is believed to have gotten out, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser said at a news conference late Wednesday. Bowser said building management called the tenants and each person was accounted for.

Flames and a huge plume of black smoke could be seen from afar, and heavy smoke blanketed the neighborhood. Three hours after flames were spotted, the fire still was raging. Dramatic video shows the roof of the building collapse.

The fire burned for more than eight hours Wednesday. On Thursday, firefighters were still putting out hot spots.

About 100 U.S. Marines ran toward the building and carried seniors out of their apartments after spotting the smoke, the fire chief said. Marines and others could be seen rushing toward the building pushing stretchers and wheelchairs.

"We all went in there to carry people out," Capt. Trey Gregory said live on News4. The Marines hauled out some residents by carrying them over their shoulders, he said.

The Washington Navy Yard is located two blocks to the south.

D.C. firefighters rescued several people using ladders.

One woman helped her grandmother, who uses a wheelchair, get out of the building. They passed through hallways engulfed in smoke.

"I couldn't breathe, she couldn't breathe and we couldn't see anything," the woman said, nearly in tears.

D.C. firefighters arrived shortly before 3:30 p.m. More than 100 firefighters were on the scene as of 4 p.m. Firefighters from Prince George's County, Maryland, also responded.

By about 8 p.m., fire officials said they had confined the fire to the building. Firefighters were still fighting the flames at 11:30 p.m. They advised neighbors to close their windows and stay inside to avoid the smoke.

Nearby Van Ness Elementary School was set to be closed Thursday because of the poor air quality.

The D.C. Department of Energy and Environment determined later Thursday that the air quality was good.

Crews will work to determine the cause of the fire.

The affordable apartment building was completed in 2007 and has 162 units, the D.C. Housing Authority's website says. The apartments were built in the former location of the Arthur Capper/Carrollsburg public housing complex, which the city demolished in 2007. That complex included more than 700 households.

The fire chief said the damage Wednesday could have been worse.

"We lost no lives. We lost a piece of property," he said.
What to Know Four people were injured when a gunman opened fire at WTS Paradigm in Wisconsin Wednesday morning

The gunman died after being shot by officers

Police are still investigating more release details about the suspect and a possible motive

A heavily armed man opened fire on his co-workers at a Wisconsin software company Wednesday, seriously wounding three people before being fatally shot by police as employees ran from the building or hid inside, according to investigators.

Middleton Police Chief Chuck Foulke said officers shot the man within eight minutes of receiving calls about an active shooter at WTS Paradigm. Foulke said the man was armed with a semi-automatic pistol and extra ammunition, and fired at officers before he was shot.

Foulke said three people were seriously injured during the attack, while a fourth person was grazed by a bullet.

"I think a lot less people were injured or killed because police officers went in and neutralized the shooter," Foulke said.

The police chief said the motivation behind the attack was unclear and investigators didn't yet know whether the gunman targeted his victims. He didn't release the suspect's name but said he was an employee of WTS Paradigm and lived in nearby Madison.

Foulke said the investigation was ongoing but noted: "We have reason to believe the suspect was heavily armed with a lot of extra ammunition, a lot of extra magazines."

Judy Lahmers, a business analyst at WTS Paradigm, said she was working at her desk when she heard what sounded "like somebody was dropping boards on the ground, really loud." Lahmers said she ran out of the building and hid behind a car.

She said the building's glass entrance door was shattered.

"I'm not looking back, I'm running as fast as I can. You just wonder, 'Do you hide or do you run?'" she told The Associated Press.

She said she knew one co-worker had been grazed by a bullet but was OK. She didn't have any other information about the shooting but said it was "totally unexpected. We're all software people. We have a good group."

University Hospital in Madison confirmed Wednesday afternoon that it was still treating three victims from the shooting, saying one was in critical condition and two were in serious condition.

Police conducted a secondary search of the office building after the shooting to ensure there were no more victims or suspects  and officers discovered some people still hiding in the building, which also houses Esker Software.

Gabe Geib, a customer advocate at Esker Software, said he was working at his desk when he heard what "sounded like claps." He said he then saw people running away from the building at "full sprint."

"We knew at that point that something was going down. A ton of people were running across the street right in front of us," he said.

Geib said he and his colleagues were still huddled in their cafeteria, away from windows, more than an hour after the shooting.

Jeff Greene, who also works at Esker, said police told those gathered in the cafeteria to go to a nearby hotel to make a statement about what they saw.

Three yellow school buses full of more than 100 people, including witnesses, were unloaded at a hotel about 5 miles (8 kilometers) from the office building. Some people hugged as they were reunited with loved ones. Others stopped to pet a dog that had been brought by someone picking up a worker.

WTS Paradigm makes software for the building products industry. A Wisconsin State Journal profile from 2014 listed company employment at about 145 employees and noted the company was looking to move to a larger location at the time.

The company's website was down Wednesday.

A shopping center next to the building was temporarily put on lockdown at the direction of police.

Middleton is about 90 miles (145 kilometers) west of Milwaukee.
Three former state police lieutenants have been indicted on charges that they received thousands of dollars for overtime hours they didn't work.

Attorney General Maura Healey's office said Thursday that David Wilson, John Giulino and David Keefe are charged with larceny, procurement fraud and public employee standards of conduct violation.

They're the first state charges to be brought against troopers in the ongoing investigations into overtime abuse within the state police. Federal prosecutors have charged multiple troopers.

Prosecutors say the troopers put in for overtime pay for shifts they either left early or didn't work at all.

Wilson pleaded not guilty in federal court last month to embezzlement from an agency receiving federal funds. His lawyer didn't immediately respond to a request for comment Thursday.

It wasn't immediately clear if Keefe and Giulino have attorneys.
Massachusetts police have arrested a man in connection with two robberies of the same bank in the last two months.

William R. Baro II, 43, of Billerica, was charged with two counts of unarmed robbery and two counts of conspiracy to commit a crime. He is accused of robbing the Winchester Savings Bank on Medford Street on Aug. 14 and Sept. 11.

Following an extensive investigation that included witness interviews and tips, Baro was arrested on Wednesday without incident at his home in Billerica, police said.

The investigation remains active and ongoing, and additional charges may be sought, police said.

Baro, who is known to police, was brought to the Arlington Police Department and held overnight on $100,040 cash bail pending his arraignment Thursday at Cambridge District Court in Medford.
A significant change to the way anti-abortion facilities in Hartford can operate is now a reality.

Hartford Mayor Luke Bronin announced the Pregnancy Information Disclosure and Protection Ordinance Rule at City Hall Wednesday. The rule requires crisis pregnancy centers, which typically steer women away from abortion, to disclose in writing at their entryways that they do not have a licensed medical professional on site to provide or supervise services.

The ordinance is aimed at facilities like the Hartford Womens Center, which does not provide abortion services. It is located directly across from the Hartford GYN Center, which does offer abortion centers. The Mayor believes some women have been lured to the Womens Center through deceptive practices.

When women are making choices that affect their lives, their health, they deserve to have full information and they deserve to not be deceived about what services are provided, said Bronin. As of October 1 theyre going to have to put a sign up at the front door and at reception and theyre going to have to tell those women who are coming in for care and for counseling that they dont have medical personnel. It's really pretty simple, he said.

Anti-abortion advocates at City Hall for the announcement say the ordinance unfairly targets organizations like theirs and deny employing deceptive practices targeting women.

Our services are very clear that we dont provide or perform abortions at our centers. It's all over our website. We answer that question if it's asked when ladies call us. But what we do help is those who want to carry to term or maybe want to receive other information on their pregnancy options such as adoption or abortion information, said Molly Hurtado, executive director of the ABC Womens Center.

No one from the Hartford Womens Center was present at the announcement and repeated calls by NBC Connecticut for comment were not returned.

Anti-abortion advocacy group Family Institute of Connecticut does not represent the Hartford Womens Center, but their Executive Director Peter Wolfgang says the organization has arranged legal counsel for the center and would not be opposed to legal action over this rule.

This is what the City of Hartford wants to spend its time on, is attacking this poor center that just wants to help women who choose to carry their child to term. I think thats nuts and I hope it does end up in court and I hope the city ends up paying, Wolfgang said.

Bronin says he believes the ordinance is narrowly tailored and can withstand any legal challenges.
A veterans housing project, believed to be the first of its kind, is giving homeless veterans a place to live and a community of support.

The Cabin in the Woods project is subsidized housing located on the grounds of the Togus VA Hospital in Augusta, Maine. It was built to be close to VA services while being tucked away in the woods.

Volunteers of America, the group behind the project, hopes it gives veterans a calming sense of being close to nature  while being conveniently close to appointments and services.

"It's a permanent, supportive housing program that's affordable for them, but also brings services to their doorstep," said Rich Hooks Wayman, President and CEO of Volunteers of America Northern New England.

Hooks Wayman said some of the veterans living in the cabins had been camping outside, and others were staying in homeless shelters. Some live alone, others have children, grandchildren, and spouses living with them.

Three weeks ago, Army veteran Tim Buckmore moved in. He had spent the past three years living in homeless shelters and spent some time at Togus' psychiatric ward due to suicidal thoughts. As he recovers from two recent strokes, he says the hope that comes from a new home may have saved his life.

"Something like this prevented one veteran from committing suicide," Buckmore said with tears in his eyes. "I never thought I'd be in a place like this."

Veterans living at the Cabin in the Woods project can stay as long as they need. In compliance with federal guidelines, they contribute 30 percent of their income or benefits to rent.

Buckmore hopes more cities and states adopt this model of supportive housing for homeless veterans.

"There's been [veteran] homelessness for a long time," he said. "It's about time something like this has come about."

According to a spokesperson for Volunteers of America, the veterans are in need of cleaning supplies, toilet paper, paper towels, and other household items. Bus passes for KVCAP transportation, or gift cards to stores like Hannaford or Walmart would be helpful as they start this new chapter.

Anyone interested in donating can contact Cabin in the Woods case manager Charlee Noble at charlee.noble@voanne.org.
A Rutland mother and son have been charged with abusing an elderly woman in their care.

Vermont State Police say 85-year-old Mary Fitzgerald was brought to the hospital in August with numerous life-threatening injuries and infections.

After an investigation police have accused 60-year-old Marie Fitzgerald and her son 39-year-old Christopher Preedom of neglect and abuse of an elderly adult. Authorities say Fitzgerald and Preedom were the victim's caretakers.

The mother and son pleaded not guilty on Wednesday and were released on conditions.

Police say Mary Fitzgerald is in stable condition and continues to receive treatment at the Rutland Regional Medical Center.
A man suffered serious injuries when he was stabbed following a road rage incident Thursday afternoon in Norton, Massachusetts.

A man called 911 around 3:30 p.m. to report that he had been stabbed after a confrontation on Plain Street in Norton. He said that he and another man were involved in a road rage incident that began in Easton, and the victim drove to Boutas Drive in Norton.

"He waved over to get help, and I guess the guy went over to the window and said 'I've been stabbed," recalled Bruce McMullin, who lives on the dead-end street.

When officers arrived, they determined that the caller, a 25-year-old man had been stabbed in the chest.

The victim was taken to Rhode Island Hospital.

The suspect, identified as 49-year-old Alfred Pond, was found later at his Attleboro home and taken into custody. The knife used in the attack was found on Pine Street in Norton, about half a mile from the scene of the stabbing.

"Everything has gotten so out of hand these days," said Norton resident June Easingwood. "Nobody can seem to handle anything. The answer is to shoot him or stab him. I just think it's so godawful in this day and age."

Pond is charged with assault and battery with a dangerous weapon. He is due in Attleboro District Court Friday. It was not immediately clear if he had an attorney.

The incident remains under investigation.
Ashley Dominic Singh stole credit cards, SIM cards to access victims' bank accounts and made fraudulent transactions of nearly GBP 227,000.

Ashley Dominic Singh was arrested from an east London address and charged last week after an appeal by officers from Operation Falcon, the Metropolitan Police's fraud and cyber crime team. (Photo: Twitter | @metpoliceuk)

London: An Indian-origin fraudster arrested by Scotland Yard as part of an anti-fraud operation has pleaded guilty to a credit card scam amounting to nearly 227,000 pounds at a court in London.

Ashley Dominic Singh was arrested from an east London address and charged last week after an appeal by officers from Operation Falcon, the Metropolitan Police's fraud and cyber crime team.

Between March and October 2016, Singh reportedly stole numerous credit cards and mobile phone SIM cards to enable him to take control of victims' bank accounts. Once accessed, fraudulent transactions totalling GBP 227,000 were made on high-value goods such as jewellery, designer labels and electronics.

"He appeared at Inner London Crown Court on September 12 and pleaded guilty to all the charges against him, namely: conspiracy to commit fraud, transferring criminal property and possessing articles for use in fraud, the Met Police said in a statement this week.

Singh, 34, has been remanded in custody to appear for sentencing at the Inner London Crown Court on October 8. Scotland Yard detectives from Operation Falcon had released an image of Singh, who they said was wanted in connection with a series of fraud offences across London and the south east of England.
A police dive team in Rhode Island conducting a routine body recovery drill has come across an actual human body.

The Providence Journal reports the Warwick Police Department dive team had been practicing search and recovery skills on the Pawtuxet River Wednesday.

Team members were searching for a mannequin that had been hidden in the river when they found the body of a man in his 40s instead.

Warwick Police Chief Stephen McCartney told the Journal police have tentatively identified the man, but aren't releasing more details until his family is notified.
From social media, the controversy spread to parliament where an MP calls for a ban on selling statuettes. For one Muslim cleric, the statuettes are more dangerous than alcoholic beverages. Conversely, others view anti-statuette attitude as irrational.

Kuwait City (AsiaNews)  A shop specialising in making 3D statuettes has become embroiled in a controversy with some of Kuwaits most conservative clergymen, almost turning a minor issue into a national cause celebre. In fact, a Member of the Kuwaiti parliament has taken the issue to the house after it sparked a heated debate on social media.

Some Muslim clergymen view such items as idolatry, believing that any human representation  paintings or sculptures  constitutes a violation of Islamic traditions and rules as laid down by the prophet Muhammad.

Since it started, the controversy just got worse as conservatives slammed this type of commerce and its promoters. Many want the shop shut down, and the owners license revoked.

The store uses 3D scanning booths and printers to create lifelike replicas of people; for conservatives, such miniatures and statuettes will be worshipped as idols within a few years.

What this shop is doing is an abomination and it must be closed immediately, said Othman Al Khamees, a religious figure. [I]t is more dangerous than liquor stores, because it revives the issue of idols. Islam outlaws the consumption of alcoholic beverages and transgressors can be punished with flogging.

Abdul Rahman Al Nassar created a hashtag to put pressure on the government to shut down the shop. For him, the real threat will materialise within years. The grave concern is that the statues would be idolised later, he insisted.

Likewise, lawmaker Mohammad Hayef Al Mutairi believes that selling statues in Kuwait should not be allowed.

However, other Kuwaitis reacted with amazement and outrage at the whole controversy, even some clerics.

Hamad Al Sinan, another Kuwaiti religious figure, said that when the early Muslims entered Egypt, they took no action against the Sphinx. There is no logic in issuing calls to ban figurines or replicas. Let us rise above such illogical, irrational thoughts, he said.

One Kuwaiti posted a picture of a statue of Ronald McDonald, the clown character used as the mascot of the McDonald fast-food chain, saying that no religious leader has said anything about it.
Certain genes that code for proteins have long been known to contribute to cancer progression. But in a frame shift, researchers from Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine recently found that non-coding genes also contribute to the development and spreading of the disease, one of the first known examples of researchers doing so.

The lead author of the study reporting this finding, Ahmad Khalil, PhD, assistant professor of genetics and genome sciences at Case Western Reserve School of Medicine, has been awarded a five-year, $1.85 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to build on the discovery, with an eventual aim of pinpointing additional targets for cancer-fighting treatments.

Under the new grant, Khalil, who is also a member of the Case Comprehensive Cancer Center, will seek to learn how non-coding genes work in the progression of colorectal cancer. This knowledge could then be applied to devising new therapies for the disease, which is the second leading cause of cancer-related deaths among cancers that affect both men and women in the United States.

While messenger RNAs (mRNAs) carry the cells' instruction to make proteins from DNA, another class of RNAs, long noncoding RNAs (lincRNAs), do not code for proteins. Before coming to Case Western Reserve, Khalil made the seminal finding that the human genome encodes thousands of these lincRNAs, which regulate key cellular functions, including turning coding genes on and off, cell development and differentiation, and normal cell death (apoptosis). "The cancer field has focused on the role of coding-RNAs and their protein products in the development of disease," said Khalil. "This was, and remains a vital area of investigation. But in our recent research, my colleagues and I have shown that some lincRNAs seem to also help colon cancer cells avoid cell death, and grow at a much faster rate than their normal counterparts. This finding opens up a parallel cancer-fighting track that can significantly increase the chances of overcoming this invidious disease."

Previously, Khalil identified over 200 different lincRNAs at higher levels in tumor cells as compared to their levels in normal colon cells. One, called lincDUSP, was disproportionately present in 91 percent of colon tumor samples--in some cases more than fifteen times its standard amount in normal colon tissues. This strongly suggests the possibility that this previously little-known form of RNA could be involved in forming and spreading of colon cancer. To test this hypothesis, Khalil and his team genetically modified colon cancer cells by depleting the amounts of lincDUSP. They found that the cells started replicating at normal rates, not the overactive rates associated with colon-cancer tumor cells.

Thus, genetically depleting the levels of lincDUSP, as well as potentially applying chemical compounds or medications to do the same job, could represent fruitful treatment opportunities for patients with colon cancer.

"Now that we have found that lincRNAs appear to play a key role in colon cancer, our goal under our new grant is to understand how they cause the disease, so we can then devise treatments," said Khalil. "We want to understand both the structure and function of this form of RNA. We will also study potential interactions with other molecules in the cell which contribute to the rise of cancer."

Equally important, said Khalil, is that he and his team found that when they modulated the expression levels of this form of RNA in tumors removed from humans by using certain chemical compounds that bind to the RNA, degradation of the long non-coding RNA occurred rapidly. These compounds haven't been previously used for cancer treatment in humans. In the long term, Khalil envisions that targeting lincRNAs in human tumors by improving delivery mechanisms could provide the basis for clinical trials. In other published studies, he and colleagues have shown that lincRNAs affect other cancers including breast, lung, and melanoma. Thus, these novel approaches could have a wide impact.

"The literature on the role of long non-coding RNAs in colon cancer is slowly emerging with exciting possibilities," added Khalil. "Under our new paradigm, using technologies that target RNA molecules, instead of proteins, adds a new dimension in the fight against cancer."
Demographers from the Higher School of Economics and the University of Southern Denmark have created a detailed color map of population aging in European countries; a collection of demographic stories, it uses color coding to indicate the varying stages of population aging across Europe. By looking at the map, you can easily spot areas with a higher concentration of older people, countries with the youngest populations and the main destinations for workforce flows.

Europe's Demographic 'Passport'

Europe is aging: according to UN estimates, half the region's population are aged 43 and over. This general statistic, however, does not reflect the diversity of age distribution across Europe. According to more detailed Eurostat data, 17.4% of Europeans are aged 65 and over, 16.7% are children aged 14 and younger, and 65.8% are working-age people (aged 15 to 64), but even these numbers are averages, and don't give the full, nuanced picture.

A color-coded map based on Eurostat's detailed regional data and published in The Lancet provides a visual representation of age distribution across and within European countries.

According to Kashnitsky, the map (Figure 1) 'provides a snapshot of population structures in Europe' showing different countries' demographic landscapes at a glance. This cross-section also reveals a historical perspective: by looking at the 'collection of stories', one can get an idea of demographic changes in European countries over time. The predominance of a certain palette of colors indicates both a particular stage of demographic development and recent processes such as an influx of immigrants or an exodus of the workforce.

Ages are color coded: yellow stands for the elderly, pink for children, and blue for working-age people. The grey palette indicates the average European age (42.8), i.e. a mixture of colors reflects a mixture of ages. Brighter colors on the map stand for areas where the local population's age distribution differs from the European average.

Thus, bright yellow spots in certain areas of France, Germany, Italy and Spain indicate a large proportion of elderly residents - western European countries are rapidly aging. In contrast,

Kurdistan in the southeastern part of Turkey is colored in pink and purple indicating a large number of children and high birth rates. This data tells us that Kurdistan has not yet completed its demographic transition from high birth and death rates to lower ones.

Boundaries between Countries

The visual differences between countries in terms of age structure can be so pronounced as to resemble demarcation lines. For example, Eastern Europe, particularly Poland and Slovakia, have large working-age populations (marked in turquoise and blue), in sharp contrast to the neighboring Germany which has a high concentration of elderly people in its eastern part near the border with Poland.

Also obvious are differences between the east, west and south of Europe. Southern European countries with low birth rates have many yellow areas but no pink ones. This is consistent with the UN data on total fertility rates (TFR, average number of births per woman of fertile age) in this part of Europe, at around 1.3 in Spain, Portugal and Italy, far below the fertility rate of 2.1 required for simple continuation of the population.

According to Kashnitsky, aging in Europe is uneven, with rates varying vastly across countries. Different factors, from immigration to religion, are behind the demographic mosaic seen in the map.

Judging by its pink and purple colors, Ireland is fairly young; indeed, its TFR of 1.81 (Eurostat, 2016) is one of the region's highest, which is largely due to the influence of the Catholic Church and restriction of abortions, according to the researcher. This does not mean, however, that Ireland is immune from the global trend towards lower fertility rates: its TFR decreased noticeably and rapidly from 2.5 in 2010 to 1.85 in 2015.

Diversity within Countries

The map also reveals demographic contrasts within countries. 'By zooming in on the map, one can see a clear boundary between the two Belgiums: Flanders in the north and Wallonia in the south', Kashnitsky notes. The population of Wallonia is younger, while that of Flanders is closer to the Central European average age'.

A demographically distinct area inside Finland colored in bright purple is populated by Laestadians, extremely conservative Lutherans. 'According to Finnish demographers, in terms of family planning, these people seem to believe in having as many children as God can give them', the author explains.

The coastal Mediterranean regions of Spain differ markedly from its central part in terms of having a higher concentration of the working-age population due to massive immigration in the 2000s. The map helps visualize a variety of demographic processes, including urbanization.

Centre vs. Provinces, Cities vs. Villages

Within countries, differences can be observed not only between parts of a particular country but generally between the Center and provinces. Capital cities and other urban centers have always attracted a working-age population, and the map reflects this tendency. 'Highly urbanized areas and capital cities tend to attract young professionals', the researcher notes, 'while young families with children often move from the city Center to the suburbs'. The latter phenomenon can be clearly observed around Paris and London where population aging is less pronounced.

In contrast, remote provinces tend to age at a faster pace, with young people leaving and the proportion of older people increasing. The same is true of rural areas.

'Colors are created using our 'tricolore' R package. This package, we hope, will allow researchers from different fields of science to easily display color ternary data compositions', Kashnitsky concludes.
Emergex Vaccines Holding Limited, a biotechnology company pioneering a new approach to synthetic vaccine development in the field of infectious diseases, today announces that it has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Brazil-based Oswaldo Cruz Foundation 'Fiocruz' for the development of viral vaccines. The MoU initially covers the development of a vaccine that universally targets diseases within the flavivirus family such as Dengue Fever, Zika and Yellow Fever but could be expanded to include the development of vaccines to target other viral families that are endemic to the region.

The MoU consists of three parts. The first part is a Collaboration Agreement under which Fiocruz and Emergex will initially carry out a Phase I clinical trial to demonstrate flavivirus vaccine safety. Thereafter, the two parties expect to carry out further clinical studies to test the vaccine in the field. The second part of the MoU is an 'umbrella' R&D agreement under which Emergex and Fiocruz will co-develop vaccines to viruses that are of specific importance to the Brazilian government and are prevalent and endemic in the region. Emergex and Fiocruz will develop vaccines collaboratively to find solutions for various diseases that have not yet been resolved using conventional vaccine approaches. The third part of the MoU covers a vaccine technology transfer agreement for vaccines that will be used within Brazil's National Health Service.

Emergex's vaccines are 100% synthetic, multi-component vaccines containing peptides that are highly conserved between viral strains. This means that Emergex can create a "universal" vaccine that is cross-reactive and targets numerous diseases within one viral family. One example of this is Emergex's universal flavivirus vaccine which is designed to target diseases such as Dengue Fever, Zika and Yellow Fever.

Professor Thomas Rademacher, co-founder, CEO and CSO at Emergex commented: "Fiocruz is recognized as one of the world's largest public health research institutions. It has a broad range of responsibilities related to the health and wellbeing of the Brazilian population of over 207 million people. The signing of this MoU is a commitment to explore how our organizations can work together to develop new vaccines against major viral threats that occur in the region."

Marco Krieger, VP Production and Innovation at Fiocruz added: "Fiocruz is committed to researching, developing and manufacturing new vaccines to address Brazil's most important infectious diseases. This MoU demonstrates our intention to partner with Emergex to develop a new generation of vaccines. We chose Emergex as its technology enables it to develop and manufacture vaccines in less time and at a fraction of the cost of traditional vaccines. Its vaccine components are stable at ambient temperatures, avoiding the need for refrigeration, reducing costs and enabling easy transportation - making it particularly suited to treating diseases in remote parts of the world."
Muslim womens associations want a single marriage law. A draft law is currently stuck in the upper house of Parliament because of disagreements among the parties. Instant divorce will be punished with a three-year jail sentence.

New Delhi (AsiaNews)  Indias Muslim women "welcome the decree signed yesterday by the Union government that outlaws instant divorce (triple talaq) and punishes it with three years in prison, said Zakia Soman, co-founder of the Bharatiya Muslim Mahila Andolan (BMMA), an association of Muslim women who has been fighting for years to scrap the practice and implement a uniform marriage law.

"We welcome the decision, said Shaista Ambar, president of the All India Muslim Women Personal Law Board (AIMWPLB), another association involved in the same struggle. We have collected about 40,000 signatures and presented them to the president." For her, "the ordinance meets to the dictates of the Koran."

India is one of the countries in the world in which Islamic law regulates marriage among Muslims. Women have long complained that the practice of instant divorce is a source of serious discrimination, leaving them at the mercy of their husbands who can divorce them by simply pronouncing the word Talaq (repudiation) three times, thus ending the marriage.

For Shaista, "triple talaq is a widespread custom, especially in South Asia, and often occurs when husbands are in a stage of intense anger or in a drunken condition. They leave their wives with simple text messages, phone calls or emails. Although we disagree, most Indian imams have issued fatwas that declare that this type of talaq is valid. "

The worst thing "is that if a husband wants to take back his repudiated wife, the only way is through the practice of Halala, that is, women have to marry another man, have sex with him and only after that can they be accepted by the first husband."

On top of this there is the corruption of some imams, "who are willing to sign the divorce papers for a dollar".

In 2016 the BMMMA challenged the existing Muslim marriage law and petitioned the Indian Supreme Court. In a ruling in August 2017, the Justices found the practice unconstitutional, but left the matter in the hands of Parliament. Last December, the Lower House (Lok Sabha) outlawed the practice, imposing imprisonment in transgressors.

Since then, the association has complained that the law, the Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on Marriage) Bill of 2017, has been stuck in the upper house (Rajya Sabha) "for lack of consensus among the parties". Meanwhile, there were 430 instant divorces between September 2017 and September 2018, of which 220 ended up before the Supreme Court.

In an attempt to remedy the situation, the government took the matters in its own hands, calling the triple talaq a constitutional emergency." Its ordinance sets some rules: the act will be treated as an offence only if the wife or a blood relative files a complaint, the case can be suspended only if the two sides reach a compromise before a judge, and courts can release the accused on bail only after hearing the wife. In addition, she is entitled to the custody of the children and to alimony for herself and support for the children.

Zakia Soman is happy about this, but she also wants Parliament to go further and pass an Islamic family law, just as it has already done for Hindus and Christians".

"The Muslim community is very poor, she explains, limited in its education and women are the most affected by the patriarchal society that uses practices like the triple talaq.

We demand legal protection as citizens equal to all others in a democratic country. We are grateful to the central government for listening to the voice of Muslim women. For too long, we have been discriminated against, felt insecure and fearful."
Geroscience--the burgeoning research field that focuses on the genetic, molecular, and cellular mechanisms that make aging a major risk factor for most chronic diseases as we age--takes center stage in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), the world's most widely circulated medical journal.

"The fact that JAMA, long one of the most highly influential and respected voices for the medical community, invited five AFAR experts to contribute articles on different aspects of geroscience vividly illustrates how this important and potentially transformative area of research continues to gain momentum," AFAR Executive Director Stephanie Lederman said.

Highlighting how geroscience paves the way for therapeutic interventions and extending healthspan at large, the three articles co-authored by five AFAR experts are available online, and will appear in the October 2, 2018 print edition of JAMA. They are:

"Aging as a Biological Target for Prevention and Therapy," by Nir Barzilai , MD, AFAR's Deputy Scientific Director, Ana Maria Cuervo, MD, PhD, a former AFAR grantee, and Steven Austad , PhD, AFAR's Scientific Director. The co-authors outline the substantial progress that has been made in targeting the underlying biological processes of aging in experimental animal models, and the potential to "prevent, or at a minimum delay, the onset and progression of multiple chronic diseases and debilities that are typically observed in older adults." They wrote: "The discovery of cellular and molecular pathways that modulate healthy aging in diverse species across great evolutionary distances offers an unprecedented opportunity for intervention."

, MD, AFAR's Deputy Scientific Director, Ana Maria Cuervo, MD, PhD, a former AFAR grantee, and , PhD, AFAR's Scientific Director. The co-authors outline the substantial progress that has been made in targeting the underlying biological processes of aging in experimental animal models, and the potential to "prevent, or at a minimum delay, the onset and progression of multiple chronic diseases and debilities that are typically observed in older adults." They wrote: "The discovery of cellular and molecular pathways that modulate healthy aging in diverse species across great evolutionary distances offers an unprecedented opportunity for intervention." "Aging, Cell Senescence, and Chronic Disease: Emerging Therapeutic Strategies," by AFAR President-elect and 2012 AFAR grantee J ames L. Kirkland , MD, PhD, who heads Mayo Clinic's Kogood Center on Aging. The article recounts the development of senolytic drugs, which target senescent cells that secrete inflammatory substances that exacerbate major chronic diseases. The first senolytics were identified by Kirkland's team at Mayo in 2015, and are now entering clinical trials. "If senolytics are shown to be safe and effective in humans, they could transform care of older adults and patients with multiple chronic diseases that now can only be managed and have not been amenable to disease-modifying interventions. This speculation merits intensive and rapid investigation."

, MD, PhD, who heads Mayo Clinic's Kogood Center on Aging. The article recounts the development of senolytic drugs, which target senescent cells that secrete inflammatory substances that exacerbate major chronic diseases. The first senolytics were identified by Kirkland's team at Mayo in 2015, and are now entering clinical trials. "If senolytics are shown to be safe and effective in humans, they could transform care of older adults and patients with multiple chronic diseases that now can only be managed and have not been amenable to disease-modifying interventions. This speculation merits intensive and rapid investigation." "From Lifespan to Healthspan," by AFAR board member S. Jay Olshansky, PhD. The article celebrates the 30-year increase in expected lifespan achieved in the past century, while arguing that "life extension should no longer be the primary goal of medicine when applied to people over age 65." Instead, Olshansky wrote, "the principal outcome and most important metric of success should be the extension of healthspan"--the time we live independently in good health as we age.

JAMA's recognition of geroscience builds on momentum led by AFAR experts in collaboration with major media and research partners.

All five of the AFAR experts published in JAMA were among the 14 AFAR experts featured in the recent PBS documentary, Incredible Aging: Adding Life to Your Years, which examined the latest research on healthy aging. The program was hosted by 14-time Emmy Award-winning host, executive producer, and anchor Meredith Vieira.

This fall, on November 17, at the Annual Meeting of the Gerontological Society of America, AFAR is organizing a panel on "The TAME Trial: A Prototype for Geroscience-Guided Therapeutics." The session will explore how the Targeting Aging with Metformin (TAME) Trial applies geroscience-based research concepts that can be translated into clinically relevant interventions.

In fall 2019, the National Institute on Aging will host its third geroscience summit to expand awareness and engage the research community to fully embrace new funding opportunities unlocked by addressing multiple age-related diseases at once instead of focusing on individual chronic diseases. AFAR has been a sponsoring partner in the first two geroscience summits, which focused on disease drivers of aging, and how aging drives disease, in 2013 and 2016.

"By improving our understanding of the molecular mechanisms underlying the biological processes of aging, geroscience opens the door to exciting and innovative new pathways to address the major chronic diseases that affect older adults," AFAR Medical Officer Richard W. Besdine, MD, said. "We will need a determined effort, involving not only the medical and biological research communities, but public and private partners as well, to make the translational discoveries needed to help people live healthier, longer as they age."
According to a new study, hundreds of thousands of babies have been injured while using baby walkers. The results of the study appeared in the latest issue of the journal Pediatrics this week.

The team of researchers looked at emergency visits due to injuries caused while using infant walkers between 1990 and 2014. They found that over 230,000 children below the age of 15 months have been injured. Injuries range from minor scratches and cuts to skull fractures and fractured bones, the authors say. Three in four of these injuries have occurred as babies fell off the stairs while within the walkers.

Image Credit: Marian Fil / Shutterstock

According to the researchers federal safety standards were issued in 2010 and the incidence of these injuries have fall drastically since then (20,650 in 1990 to 2001 in 2014). However there are still a significant number of injuries they note. They add that these warnings tend to be effective initially but with time they tend to fade out unless reiterated. The article says that between 2001 and 2010, there have been at least 10 infant walker recalls because these failed to meet the stair-fall prevention requirement.

The authors write, Given that only an estimated 10 percent of recalled childrens products are properly corrected, replaced, or returned by consumers, many noncompliant infant walkers remain in homes today. In addition, although infant walkers that were purchased before 2010 will eventually be discarded, the mandatory standards will not be able to eliminate the dangers associated with these older products that may still remain in use. Infant walkers remain an important and preventable source of injury among young children, which supports the American Academy of Pediatrics call for a ban on their manufacture and sale in the United States, the researchers added.

On analysing the injuries the researchers noted that around 90 percent of all the injuries were sustained in the head and neck of the babies. Over half of these injuries were soft tissue injuries. A quarter of all the injuries were concussion related injuries. They explain that parents initiate the babies into infant walkers to help their children walk and move around. However studies have shown that use of the walker often delays mental as well as motor development of the babies. They warn that putting babies in walkers give parents a false sense of security when actually the child could be in a dangerous situation.

The American Academy of Pediatrics has called for a ban on infant walkers citing that Canada already has a similar ban in place. Dr. Benjamin Hoffman, a pediatrician who chairs the American Academy of Pediatrics Committee on Injury, Violence and Poison Prevention in a statement said, I view infant walkers as inherently dangerous objects that have no benefit whatsoever and should not be sold in the U.S. Dr. Gary Smith, director of the Center for Injury Research and Policy at Nationwide Childrens Hospital in Columbus, Ohio, and study co-author added that these walkers give the infants quick mobility  up to four feet per second. This is too fast for babies before they are developmentally ready he said.

Baby walkers remain a serious and preventable source of injury to young children and should not be used. There are safer alternatives, such as stationary activity centers that spin, rock, and bounce, but do not have wheels, and good old-fashioned belly time, where a child is placed on their belly on the floor and allowed to learn to gradually push themselves up, then crawl and eventually walk, said Smith.

Source: http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/early/2018/09/13/peds.2017-4332
Large-scale food scares like BSE and dioxin-contaminated eggs raised awareness about the health risks posed when a link in the food chain becomes compromised. In the wake of these crises, Europe has developed more effective safety mechanisms that trace food from the farm to the fork; a new platform is the next step in better protection for animal and human health through more integrated alignment of reference labs and research efforts.

The EU-funded One Health European Joint Programme (EJP) is a platform to boost cooperation between researchers, decision-makers and stakeholders in the field of medicine, veterinary science and consumer health protection. It is a huge undertaking involving 40 laboratories and research centers in 19 countries.

Each partner has been assigned reference tasks, which means they set the yardstick in their respective field of investigation. Communities or networks have been built around the key thematic areas of food-borne zoonoses  when disease or contamination pass between animals and humans  antimicrobial resistance and emerging threats.

Prevent, detect, respond

The main focus within each theme of the EJP is examination of infectious pathogens such as salmonella, campylobacter and Escheria coli, which can be transferred from animals to humans. Guided by prevent-detect-respond security practices, partners are developing joint projects and integrated programmes in evidence-based risk assessment and management.

Scientific data, methods and software developed within One Health can be used by national and European institutions to assess health risks and possible preventive measures.

Knowledge-sharing, education and training are important features of the joint activities, with final outputs feeding into a Strategic Research and Innovation Agenda, and potentially leading to a European One Health P2P, a public-private joint cooperation.
Recently, the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) and Food and Drug Administration (FDA) called for the eliminating involvement of the Recombinant DNA Advisory Committee (RAC) in human gene therapy experiments, marking the end of an era of federal government oversight. While the RAC played an essential role in helping human gene therapy research evolve to where it is today, James M. Wilson, MD, PhD, Editor, Human Gene Therapy Clinical Development, believes this is the right moment for it to exit the stage, as he explains in his Editorial "The RAC Retires After a Job Well Done," Human Gene Therapy Clinical Development, a peer-reviewed journal from Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers. Click here to read the full-text article free on the Human Gene Therapy Clinical Development website through October 19, 2018.

The RAC initially set guidelines for DNA research, and its role was later expanded to encompass the review and approval of human gene therapy research. The Committee was composed of stakeholders, including basic scientists, physicians, ethicists, theologians, and patients advocates. "The deliberations often became theatrical and, at times, quite contentious," says Dr. Wilson. Over the years, as the field of human gene therapy matured and became more integrated into the biopharmaceutical industry the potential redundancies between the roles of the FDA and the RAC became an increasingly important issue.

"The 2018 proposalis to completely eliminate the RAC's role in reviewing or monitoring human gene therapy studies," says Dr. Wilson. "The new recommendations retain the role of local Institutional Biosafety Committees in the review process, while limiting their evaluation to an assessment of biosafety risks."
Researchers at Case Western Reserve University have discovered how to quickly and accurately predict which lung cancer patients will benefit from chemotherapy by analyzing how immune cells the body sends out to fight the disease are arranged.

The scientists--aided by smart-imaging computers and machine-learning methods--were able to swiftly analyze hundreds of tissue images to not only count cancer-associated immune cells--but identify patterns in how they were arranged.

That breakthrough view can now help determine which patients need chemotherapy or immunotherapy based on computational analysis of routine tissue-slide images obtained either by surgery or biopsy, said Anant Madabhushi, the F. Alex Nason Professor II of biomedical engineering at the Case School of Engineering.

"We believe we've made a critical advance to the field with this work," said Madabhushi, the lead among a dozen authors on a recent paper about the work in the journal Clinical Cancer Research. "Do you need chemo or not?--that's the direct benefit to the patient and what really matters."

While this published research focused on early-stage lung cancer tissue, further analysis also predicted the success of immunotherapy in late-stage lung cancer, Madabhushi said.

"That's why I'm super excited about this: It's a validation of what we call the 'spatial architecture' of the immune cells as predictive for the success of treatment for lung cancer," he said.

Simple tissue slides, complex cancer analysis

Oncologists and pathologists routinely take a tissue sample of cancer cells and then capture an image of that tissue. But the advent of deep-learning and machine-learning algorithms has allowed researchers to find patterns among the cells that would otherwise be nearly impossible for the human eye to detect. Most often, that means analyzing cancer cells themselves, or with limited success, counting the white blood cells--called tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes--which the body sends out to battle the cancer.

"One of the big problems is that cancer generally masks the immune response, which is why, to the body, cancer doesn't present as a foreign invader," Madabhushi said. "But it does evoke

For that reason, pathologists have been trying for the last 10 to 15 years to better understand how that immune response might correlate to how the cancer would spread or how the patient would respond to certain therapies--or whether the patient even needs the invasive and painful chemotherapy routinely give to virtually all cancer victims.

"But doing that manually is cumbersome, because there are hundreds of thousands of lymphocytes, and it's difficult to determine a pattern," Madabhushi said. "Our group has found a way to train the machine to find the lymphocytes and decipher their arrangement, their spatial architecture--and predict disease outcome."

Madabhushi was joined by Case Western Reserve colleagues Xiangxue Wang, Yu Zhou, and Cheng Lu from his Center for Computational Imaging and Personalized Diagnostics and Pingfu Fu from the Department of Population and Qualitative Health Sciences.

Other academic partners included: German Corredor and Eduardo Romero, from the National University of Colombia; Konstantinos Syrigos, from the University of Athens; David Rimm and Kurt Schalper, of the Yale University School of Medicine; pathologist Michael Yang, of University Hospitals Cleveland Medical Center; and thoracic oncologist Vamsidhar Velcheti, the Perlmutter Cancer Center at NYU Langone Medical Center.

Since 2016, Madabhushi and his team have received over $9.5 million from the National Cancer Institute to develop computational tools for analysis of digital pathology images of breast, lung and head and neck cancers to identify which patients with these diseases could be spared aggressive radiotherapy or chemotherapy.
UK and European research collaborations in cancer research have received a vote of confidence by three major cancer charities, with an announcement today of approximately 30 million into six international projects.

Cancer Research UK is partnering with two of Europe's leading cancer research charities, AIRC (Associazione Italiana per la Ricerca sul Cancro) and FC AECC (Asociacion Espanola Contra el Cancer), to invest in six international collaborations, which are aimed at accelerating progress in translational research.

Scientists in the 5-year funded Accelerator Awards projects will investigate the potential of immunotherapies in treating liver cancer; develop manufacturing methods for CAR-T cell production; track cancer cell evolution; investigate drug resistance in blood cancers; devise a blood test for advanced prostate cancer and find new routes for personalizing blood cancer treatment.

As the UK and EU work to form a new relationship after Brexit, the awards are an example of how funding organizations are seeking to continue to collaborate post-Brexit to drive research forward.

Dr Iain Foulkes, executive director of research and innovation at Cancer Research UK, said:

No single organization or country is going to beat cancer on its own. Research must be prioritized as the UK builds a new relationship with the EU, as much-needed breakthroughs in treatment are dependent on collective action from the international research community. Our Accelerator Award funding will lay the groundwork for a Europe and UK research pipeline, boosting our life sciences industry, and ensuring basic biological research translates into new innovative treatments in future."

Each collaboration is aiming to deepen our understanding of cancer and bring us closer to new treatments, making use of the expertise and diverse technologies of the different partner organizations. UK scientists are leading two of the funded programmes, Italian scientists are leading three, and one by a Spanish researcher.

The scope of these awards brings together world-class researchers who would not have previously been able to work together without this funding available. A number of the grants are also focused on training the next generation of early career scientists and clinicians so that the expertise is developed to carry this research forward.

Federico Caligaris Cappio, AIRC scientific director, said:

Cancer research must innovate relentlessly to understand and deal with the complexity of cancer. This requires more investment, coordinated interdisciplinary research and international collaborations, because cancer doesn't know borders, and research has to overcome them. The partnership with Cancer Research UK and FC AECC has allowed us to fund collaborative projects that promote the development of international networks and the creation of new research tools that could not be done independently at the national level."

Isabel Orbe, general director of the FC AECC, said:

A global collaboration is needed to accelerate results in cancer research. This charity partnership will provide tools to support researchers in an international framework, helping them to create multidisciplinary networks and support the research of new unexplored areas. Moreover, this call looks to improve cancer research in a global manner and with a clear focus on the patients, with the final aim of defeating cancer."

Accelerator Award projects include:
Financial Secretary Paul Chan speaks at the Trade Development Councils In Style, Hong Kong symposium in Ho Chi Minh City.

Financial Secretary Paul Chan attended Hong Kong Trade Development Council (HKTDC) events in Ho Chi Minh City and met Vietnamese officials to strengthen trade and economic ties.

This morning, Mr Chan attended the HKTDC's In Style, Hong Kong symposium and toured the trade exhibition of brands and designs from more than 130 Hong Kong companies.

At the symposium, he said Hong Kong and Vietnam will have much to gain long down the road.

Given Hong Kong's excellent business environment, the quality professional services it provides, as well as the signing of the Free Trade Agreement between Hong Kong and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) last year, he said the city is well positioned to help Vietnam enterprises expand their businesses.

Mr Chan then met Ho Chi Minh City People's Committee Chairman Nguyen Thanh Phong and Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs of Vietnam Le Hoai Trung.

At the meetings, he highlighted Hong Kongs active participation in the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area's development.

He hoped Hong Kong can strengthen co-operation with Vietnam on all fronts to seize the huge opportunities brought by the initiative, and provided an update on the latest developments in innovation and technology and financial services in the city.

In the afternoon, Mr Chan visited the headquarters of a Hong Kong enterprise and its projects in the city.

He also met Chinese Consul-General Wu Jun to thank him for supporting the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region Government in forging co-operation with ASEAN.

Addressing the HKTDCs gala dinner, Mr Chan stressed Hong Kong, with its strong professional services from financial services and cross-border logistics to creative design, can help Vietnam enterprises expand their businesses in the markets of the Mainland and the Asian region.

He also underlined Hong Kong's commitment in promoting the development of art, culture and creative industries.

He added as trade and economic activities between Hong Kong and Vietnam continue to grow, he hoped the two places, both meeting points of the East and the West, can forge stronger co-operation in different areas such as art, culture and tourism.
Mgr Franco Mulakkal requested he be relieved of his duties. The pontiff appointed Mgr Agnelo Rufino Gracias as apostolic administrator. Yesterday the bishop was interrogated for seven hours by Kerala police.

New Delhi (AsiaNews) - Pope Francis "has received the request of Bishop Franco Mulakkal to be temporarily relieved of his responsibilities in the Diocese of Jalandhar, says a press release by the Catholic Bishops' Conference of India (CBCI). The decision stems from rape allegations made by a nun from the Missionaries of Jesus against the prelate.

The accusations against the bishop of Jalandar, Punjab, were first made in July, but the story has become front-page news in recent weeks as a result of an ongoing hunger strike by some Sisters in Kerala, where the case was filed.

In her complaint, the nun said that in 2014 the bishop raped her in a Church-owned hostel in Kuravilangad, Kerala. She told police she was sexually assaulted 13 times over the following two years.

The case has sent shockwaves across the whole Indian Church. Recent rumors have it that the bishop would resign and that he might be sent away.

In reality, Mgr Mulakkal asked Pope Francis to temporarily relieve him of his duties so that he can better defend himself against the accusation of rape, which he has flatly denied.

Questioned by Kerala police for about seven hours, Mgr Mulakkal stood his ground, denying any involvement, arguing instead that the nun is acting out of revenge. The bishop claims that he had threatened to have the nun investigated after he found her involved with a married man.

Kottayam police superintendent Harishankar, who is in charge of the investigation, said that no one is putting pressure to get the bishop arrested and that investigators are doing their job.

In its statement, the CBCI says: Having considered all circumstances the Holy Father has accepted this request of Bishop Mulakkal and has appointed Bishop Agnelo Rufino Gracias, Auxiliary Bishop Emeritus of the Archdiocese of Bombay as Apostolic Administrator of the Diocese of Jullander, sede plena et ad mutum Sanctae Sedis with immediate effect.

For its part, the Diocese of Bombay is gathered in prayer hoping that the bishop will not be arrested.
"The Church, when it journeys through history, is persecuted by hypocrites: hypocrites within and without. The devil has nothing to do with repentant sinners, because they look upon God and say, Lord, I am a sinner, help me! And the devil is impotent".

Vatican City (AsiaNews) - The devil is strong with the hypocrites, those who have no mercy and are scandalized like the doctors of the law who said: " Now everyone has the right to enter into the church, even the divorced, everyone," said Pope Francis today at Mass in Santa Marta. He was inspired by the passage of the Gospel of Luke (Lk 7: 36-50), in which Jesus says to the "sinner", " her many sins have been forgiven; for she has shown great love "and from the First Letter to the Corinthians (1 Cor 15: 1-11).

The Pope described three types of people in the days readings: Jesus and his disciples; Paul and the woman whose sins were forgiven; and the doctors of the law.

The woman in the Gospel is described as having so much love towards Jesus, while not hiding the fact that she is a sinner. Saint Paul, the Pope said, is similar in recognizing, and handing on to us, that Christ died for our sins. Both were seeking God with love, but their love was a kind of half-love. The Pope explained that when Paul was persecuting the Church, he thought that love was a law and his heart was closed to the revelation of Jesus Christ. He persecuted Christians out of zeal for the law; and this, the Pope said, was a love that was immature. The woman, too, was seeking love, the little love. The Pharisees commented on the fact that she was a sinner, but Jesus explains: This woman was forgiven much because she loved much. The Pope puts a question in the mouth of the Pharisees: But how can she love? These people [sinners] do not know how to love. [But] they seek love. And Jesus, speaking about these people, says  he once said  that they are before us, in the Kingdom of Heaven. But what a scandal!  the Pharisees [say]  But these people! Jesus looks upon the small gesture of love, the small gesture of good will, and takes it, and carries it forward. This is the mercy of Jesus: He always forgives, He always receives.

With regard to the doctors of the law, Pope Francis says that they have an attitude that only the hypocrites use often: they are scandalized. And they say: But look, what a scandal! You cant live like that! We have lost our values. Now everyone has the right to enter into the church, even the divorced, everyone. But where are we? The scandal of the hypocrites. This is the dialogue between the great love that forgives all, [the love of] Jesus; [and] the love by halves of Paul and of this woman, and also our [love], which is an incomplete love because none of us is a canonized saint. Lets be honest. It is hypocrisy: the hypocrisy of the just, of the pure, of those who believe they are saved by their own proper external merits.

Jesus recognizes how these people externally show "all beautiful" - he speaks of "whitewashed sepulchers" - but inside they have "decay" and rot. " And the Church, when it journeys through history, is persecuted by hypocrites: hypocrites within and without. The devil has nothing to do with repentant sinners, because they look upon God and say, Lord, I am a sinner, help me! And the devil is impotent; but he is strong with hypocrites. He is strong, and he uses them to destroy, to destroy the people, to destroy society, to destroy the Church. The workhorse of the devil is hypocrisy, because he is a liar. He makes himself out to be a powerful prince, beautiful, and from behind he is an assassin.".

Francis called on those present not to forget that Jesus forgives, receives, uses mercy, a "word so often forgotten when we spread others". The invitation is then to "be merciful, like Jesus, and not to condemn others. Jesus at the center ". In fact, Christ forgives both Paul, "a sinner, persecutor, but with love", and the woman, "a sinner, herself with an incomplete love". Only in this way can they encounter "true love", which is Jesus, while hypocrites "are unable to encounter love because they have a closed heart".
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New Delhi : Breaking the ice in ties, External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj will meet her Pakistani counterpart Shah Mehmood Qureshi on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly (UNGA) session that begins later this month -- the first such high-level interaction between the neighbours after three years.

"I can confirm that on the request from the Pakistani side a meeting between the two foreign ministers will take place on the sidelines of the UNGA at a mutually convenient date and time.

"We have just agreed to the meeting. The Permanent Missions of both India and Pakistan will together work out the details. Till then, what will be discussed in the meeting, we will have to wait till the meeting takes place," External Affairs Ministry (MEA) spokesperson Raveesh Kumar told the weekly media briefing here.

Replying to questions, Kumar suggested that the coming meeting was not resumption of the dialogue process.

This follows a letter written by Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan to Prime Minister Narendra Modi seeking resumption of dialogue and suggesting a meeting between the two foreign ministers on the sidelines of the UNGA, and a letter written by Qureshi to Sushma Swaraj.

When pressed further, Kumar said this is just a meeting and there is nothing much to be read into this at this stage.

Kumar also revealed that India has confirmed that it would attend a meeting of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (Saarc) foreign ministers.

"The existing policy on the Saarc process will continue. I don't think there is any change in it," said the MEA spokesperson.

External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj had met the then Pakistan's Advisor on Foreign Affairs Sartaj Aziz in Islamabad in 2015 and two decided to resume the comprehensive dialogue process.

This was followed by an unscheduled visit of Prime Minister Narendra Modi to Lahore on the Christmas Day. But the bilateral ties took a severe beating after the terror attack on the Pathankot airbase on January 2, 2016.

Asked whether the foreign ministers meeting in New York is the beginning of a dialogue process, he merely repeated that they requested for a meeting and we have not discussed details.

On reports of brutality on a Border Security Force (BSF) jawan who was killed in firing from the Pakistani side, he said it was a barbaric incident and the BSF has written a strong communication to its counterparts in Pakistan.

"It is a serious issue and we will take it up Pakistan."


Kuala Lumpur : Malaysian prosecutors on Thursday charged former Prime Minister Najib Razak on 25 counts, including charges related to money laundering and abuse of power, in the corruption scandal related to the state-owned investment fund 1 Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB).

Najib, who was arrested on Wednesday, pleaded not guilty to the four charges of corruption and 21 charges of money laundering, reports Efe news.

The 65-year-old leader was the Prime Minister of Malaysia from 2009 until May this year, during which he established and headed the 1MDB fund.

Najib was released on bail on July 4 after he was formally charged with criminal breach of trust and abuse of power in connection with funds from SRC International, a former subsidiary of IMDB.

The former leader has been accused of diverting around $681 million to his private accounts from 1MDB.

Najib has denied the allegations, saying the money was a donation from a Saudi Arabian prince, and he was cleared by Malaysian authorities while in power.

The case was reopened in May after Najib lost the election in a stunning defeat to Mahathir Mohamad who has banned him and his wife Rosmah Mansor from leaving the country.

Six other nations, including the US, Switzerland and Singapore, have opened judicial investigations into the 1MDB scandal.
Naypyidaw : British Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt arrived in Myanmar on Wednesday on his first official visit to the country for discussions expected to include the Rohingya refugee crisis and the jailing of two Reuters reporters.

Hunt arrived in the southeast Asian country after completing a working visit to Japan. "Arrived in Burma for talks with leaders and to see humanitarian issues firsthand," Hunt wrote on Twitter.

On Thursday, he was scheduled to meet with Myanmar's de facto leader and Nobel peace laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, who, along with the Army, has been been blamed for the Rohingya crisis by the international community.

The visit came a day after a United Nations fact finding mission on human rights violations in Myanmar's Kachin, Rakhine and Shan states submitted its complete report in Geneva.

The report found elements of intentional genocide in Rakhine against the Rohingya, a predominantly Muslim ethnicity and cases of crimes against humanity and war crimes in all the three states.

At least 10,000 people died and 800,000 sought refuge in neighbouring Bangladesh after the Myanmar security forces launched an offensive in August 2017 following a series of Rohingya rebel attacks on government outposts.

Last month, Hunt had criticized the situation faced by the Rohingyas, after the UN mission presented a concise version of its conclusions on August 27.

"Deeply disturbing to read UN report on crimes against Rohingya people. There must be never be a hiding place for those who commit these kinds of atrocities. Have decided to visit Burma to seek answers at the earliest opportunity," Hunt said.

The Foreign Secretary will also discuss the recent imprisonment of two reporters working for Reuters news agency.

Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo who were sentenced to seven years in prison earlier this month for violating the Official Secrets Act while investigating a massacre of Rohingyas, in a ruling that has been widely criticized by the international community.
Representational Image

New Delhi : The Global-scale Observations of the Limb and Disk (GOLD) of NASA has successfully captured the first image of Earth's upper atmosphere. It's the Earth's ultraviolet atomic oxygen emissions, which is set to explore the dynamic boundary between Earth's atmosphere and space.

GOLD has captured the first light image of ultraviolet atomic oxygen emission (135.6 nm wavelength) from the Earth's upper atmosphere. It was taken at approximately 6 a.m. local time, near sunrise in eastern South America. The colors correspond to emission brightness, with the strongest shown in red and the weakest in blue.

The GOLD satellite of NASA has opened its cover to scan the Earth for the first time, resulting in a "first light" image of the Western Hemisphere in the ultraviolet.

Scientists now believe that the instrument will transmit unprecedented global-scale imaging of the temperature and composition at the dynamic boundary between Earth's atmosphere and space.

NASA experts say that GOLD is their mission initiated by the University of Central Florida. The Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado Boulder built the instrument.

It is positioned in the geostationary orbit on a commercial communications satellite, SES-14, built by Airbus for Luxembourg-based satellite operator, SES.

GOLD satellite has been launched with an aim to investigate the dynamic intermingling of space and Earth's uppermost atmosphere. It is the first NASA science mission to fly an instrument as a commercially hosted payload.

Scientists say that the data driven by GOLD will help to improve the forecasting models of the space weather events that can impact life on Earth, as well as satellites and astronauts in space.
by Mathias Hariyadi

The meeting attracted 174 priests from seven administrative units in Java, home to 557 of Indonesias 2,242 diocesan priests. For Fr Paulus Christian Siswantoko, president of Unio Indonesia, "The aim of this initiative is to create a 'new habitus' in society, including the Catholic community".

Sentul (AsiaNews)  As "men of communion", priests are called to establish "healthy relationships with their colleagues, the community of faithful and anyone who belongs to a different ethnic, cultural and religious group," said Mgr Paskalis Bruno Syukur, bishop of Bogor (West Java), during the Eucharistic celebration that opened a four-day meeting (18-21 September) for diocesan priests.

About 174 priests from seven administrative units in Java  Bogor, Bandung, Jakarta (West Java); Semarang and Purwokerto (Central Java); Surabaya and Malang (East Java)  came to the event, which is being held in Sentul (Bogor)

The meeting in Java, home to 557 of Indonesias 2,242 diocesan priests, focused on [inter-faith] tolerance in a pluralistic society".

As the host diocese, the Church in Bogor showcased its initiatives in favour "harmony and dialogue" between various local communities, including the largest, the Muslim group.

"The meeting is taking place in Bogor because of the diocesan's ability to promote religious tolerance in Muslim majority West Java and in the Province of Banten," said Fr Paulus Christian Siswantoko, president of Unio Indonesia (forum of all Indonesian diocesan priests).

Speaking to AsiaNews, the clergyman, who is executive secretary of the Episcopal Commission for the laity (Komisi Kerawam Kwi), noted that "practices and topics are discussed so that each participant can be encouraged to establish good relations. The purpose of this initiative is to create 'a new habitus' in society, including the Catholic community."

Fr Ferry Sutrisna Widjaja, a priest from the Diocese of Bandung, likes the topics discussed at the gathering and the initiatives undertaken by the Church in Bogor, continuing the work of Dutch-born Mgr Paternus Nicholas Joannes Cornelius Geise, the dioceses first bishop.

A trained anthropologist, the latter able to develop good relations with ethnic Baduy and local Muslims. He became famous in West Java for the establishment of the Catholic Parahyangan University in Bandung, the provincial capital.

"The university became a public space for socialisation and high education for everyone," said Fr Widjaja. Mgr Geises legacy continued with each of his successor as bishop of Bogor: Mgr Ignatius Harsono, Mgr Cosmas Michael Angkur and Mgr Syukur, the current bishop.

One of the participants in the meeting is Fr A. Joko Purwanto, from the diocese of Semarang (Central Java), who spoke about three Bogor priests  Fr Fabianus Heatubun, Fr Yohanes Driyanto, and Fr Mikael Endro Susanto  who are involved in various interfaith dialogue groups.

"Through organisations like Basolia and Bogor Sahabat, they want to make Bogor a peaceful place for the members of all religions, said Fr Purwanto.

Bogor Mayor Bima Arya confirms that the city does not present particular problems in terms of communal coexistence.

The one exception is the "unresolved case" of the Protestant church of Yasmin, whose members have been the subject to intolerance in recent years at the hands of radical Muslims who object to the construction of their church and who have tried to disrupt their Sunday services.

(Fr Ferry Sutrisna Widjaja and Fr A Joko Purwanto contributed to this article).
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The victim is only 15 years old, Moamen Ibrahim Abu Eyada. He was hit by a bullet in the eastern sector of Rafah, in the south of the Strip. At least 184 Palestinian demonstrators have died since the end of March. Israel speaks of "troublemakers" who ignite tires and launch stones and incendiary bombs.

Gaza (AsiaNews / Agencies) - Israeli security forces opened fire to quell a rally yesterday evening in the Gaza Strip, killing a young Palestinian. The confirmation comes from the local health minister, while on the opposite front in the Israeli army there are no official confirmations of the "incident" so far.

According to reports by Ashraf Al-Qidra, spokesman for the Ministry of Health, the victim is called Moamen Ibrahim Abu Eyada and is 15 years old. He was hit by a bullet fired by Israeli soldiers during a protest in the eastern sector of the town of Rafah, located in the southern part of the Gaza Strip, not far from the Egyptian border.

From March 30th, coinciding with the beginning of the "March for the Return", the border that separates the Strip from Israel has been the scene of repeated demonstrations by the Palestinians. In recent months there have been numerous episodes of violence, defined as a "shame" by Israeli activists, in the context of which at least 184 Palestinians have been killed. The prospect of a ceasefire seems unlikely and the parish priest of Gaza himself defines the situation as "desperate".

Israeli army sources say that yesterday there were several episodes of violence along the border between Israel and Palestine "with the participation of hundreds of troublemakers". The demonstrators set tires on fire and threw stones and incendiary bombs at the soldiers, without causing victims or injuries.

On September 18, two Palestinians were killed during anti-Israeli demonstrations that took a violent drift, near the Erez border. The Israeli army responds claiming to protect its borders from external aggressions.

Israel abandoned Gaza in 2005, but maintains a tight control of the territory, borders and the adjacent coast. In these years it has fought three wars with Hamas, the Palestinian extremist movement that dominates the Strip.
Beijing:

China on Wednesday sought level playing field, transparent and fair environment for its enterprises in India while expressing concern over New Delhis reported move to exclude Chinese telecom companies Huawei and ZTE from 5G trials.

According to a report in Chinas state-run Global Times on Sunday, the Indias Department of Telecommunications (DoT) had barred Huawei Technologies and ZTE Corp from the list of companies allowed to work with local companies in 5G technology-based trials due to security concerns.

The move follows the US and Australia in banning Huawei and ZTE for national security reasons, it said.

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However, a top DoT official had said they were in the process of setting up a panel which will decide on areas where 5G technology can be used.

Telecom Secretary Aruna Sundararajan told PTI on September 14 that companies have come up with preliminary use cases. We are going to set up core group which will sit with them and look at what are the use cases that make sense to us.

Sundararajan said DoT had approached Ericsson, Nokia, Samsung, Cisco and NEC for development of 5G applications and running trials on the suggestion of Stanford University Professor Emeritus Arogyaswami J Paulraj - a member of the 5G panel that recently suggested spectrum roadmap for the technology.

We wrote to Ericsson, Nokia, Cisco, Samsung and NEC. Huawei has met me and they have said that they are interested. We said if you are interested then send us a proposal. We will see what their proposal is and we may go with them also, she said.

In Beijing, reacting to media reports, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang told a media briefing, I have seen relevant reports. The Chinese government has always encouraged overseas Chinese enterprises to abide by international rules and local laws while pursuing economic cooperation overseas.

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We hope the relevant country would offer level playing field and a transparent fair environment for Chinese enterprises, he said, replying to a question about Indias reported move to exclude Huawei and ZTE from taking part in the 5G trials.

Economic cooperation between India and China is for mutual benefits and for win-win results. Overall, such cooperation between both sides is going on smoothly, Geng said.

Were cooperating actively with local telecom operators and the Indian government, and local authorities and partners hold an open attitude toward cooperating with us in meeting demand for 5G network construction, a Huawei official said in a statement quoted in the report last week.

The Chinese company is also working normally with the local telecom operators on 5G trials, Huawei added.

In August, the US banned government personnel from using Huawei technologies while Australia barred the company from providing equipment to support the countrys new telecommunications networks.

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New Delhi:

Taking into account the lack of long-term employment, the Employees' State Insurance Corporation (ESIC) has taken some important steps towards financially securing the ones who have lost their jobs. At a meeting on Wednesday chaired by Union Minister of State for Labour and Employment Santosh Kumar Gangwar, the ESIC took decisions towards improvements in its services and benefits to insured persons and their dependents.



Considering the change in the employment pattern and the current scenario of employment in the country, the ESIC has approved a scheme by the 'Atal Bimit Vyakti Kalyan Yojna' for Insured Persons (IP) covered under the Employees State Insurance Act, 1948. This scheme is a relief payable in cash directly to their bank accounts in case of unemployment while they search for a new job. Detailed instructions including eligibility conditions, application format, etc. will be issued separately, the ministry said in a statement.



The ESIC has approved the proposal for reimbursement of Rs 10 per person to the employers to encourage the seeding of Aadhaar in ESIC database of their workers and their family members. It will curtail multiple registrations of same insured persons and thus enable them to avail the benefits requiring longer contributory conditions.



The corporation further approved a reimbursement of Rs.10 per person to employers for seeding the Aaadhar details of their workers and their family members on the ESIC database. This will enable the insured with benefits that require longer contribution.



"It will curtail the multiple registrations of same Insured Persons and thus enable them to avail the benefits requiring longer contributory conditions," it said.



For super specialty treatment, the ESIC relaxed the eligibility condition by reducing the requirement of insurable employment of two years to six months with contribution requirement of only 78 days.



The corporation also approved the proposal to increase the funeral expenses from existing Rs 10,000 to Rs 15,000 to be paid on the death of insured person.

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New Delhi:

Manipur University Vice Chancellor Professor AP Pandey has been placed under suspension by the HRD Ministry with immediate effect from Monday until the completion of the inquiry against him, according to an order issued by Surat Singh, deputy secretary of the Higher Education department of HRD Ministry.

The order said that that due to a long-drawn agitation against Pandey, by the students and teachers in the campus of the Manipur University, the University was in a state of turmoil.

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The President of India in his capacity as Visitor of the Manipur University, on consideration of material on record and taking into account volatile law and order situation in the Campus of the University and in exercise of powers conferred on him under provisions of Statute 13(1) of the Statutes of the Manipur University Act, 2005 read with Section 16 of the General Clause Act, 1897, is pleased to place Pandey under suspension with immediate effect and till completion of the inquiry and action to be taken thereon in the interest of justice for free and fair inquiry or till further orders, the order said.

The Manipur government had informed that the agitation against Pandey has led to serious law and order problem and administrative crises in the state, the order said.

To resolve the impasse by the agitating students and teachers association, an inquiry committee consisting of T Nandakumar Singh, former acting Chief Justice of the High Court of Meghalaya and Prof MK Choudhary, former vice-chancellor of Tezpur University, was constituted on August 17, the order added.

Meanwhile, a two-member independent committee, which was instituted by the HRD ministry to probe into the alleged administrative and financial irregularities of Pandey had started working on September 6.

Also Read | Manipur university row: Former CM O Ibobi slams VC Pandeys order

The inquiry committee which had asked all stakeholders to submit relevant details till September 16 had extended the deadline till September 24.

The Manipur University re-opened on August 23 after 85 days of shutdown, following an agreement with the HRD ministry, which formed a fact-finding committee to look into their allegations.

(With PTI inputs)
New Delhi:

The University Grants Commission (UGC) on Thursday directed varsities and higher educational institutions across the country to observe September 29 as Surgical Strike Day.

Talk-sessions by ex-servicemen about sacrifices by the armed forces, special parades, visit to exhibitions and sending greeting cards to pledge their support for armed forces, are among the activities prescribed by the commission for the celebrations.

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The NCC units of all universities should organise a special parade on September 29 after which the NCC commander shall address them on the modalities of protection of the borders. The varsities may organise a talk-session calling ex-servicemen to sensitise students about sacrifices made by the armed forces, the UGC said in a communication to all Vice Chancellors on Thursday.

A multimedia exhibition will be organised around India Gate on September 29. Similar exhibitions may be organised in states, union territories, important towns and cantonments across the country. The institutions should encourage students and faculty members to visit these exhibitions, the letter added.

The commission has suggested that the students shall pledge their support for armed forces by writing letters and cards which may be produced in both digital and physical format.

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The letters and cards should be shared with PRO Defence and PIB for publicity across various media, the UGC said.

In the first such action, India carried out surgical strikes on September 29, 2016 on seven terror launch pads across the LoC with the Army saying its special forces inflicted significant casualties on terrorists preparing to infiltrate from Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK).
London:

True Detective helmer Cary Fukunaga has been announced as the replacement of Danny Boyle for the upcoming James Bond movie. The news was shared by producers in a statement posted on Twitter, saying that the 41-year-old filmmaker, best known for directing films such as Jane Eyre and Beasts of No Nation, will start shooting for the project in March next year with a release date of February 14, 2020.

"We are delighted to be working with Cary. His versatility and innovation make him an excellent choice for our next James Bond adventure," said Michael G. Wilson and Barbara Broccoli in the statement.

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Boyle had last month dropped out of the project, which will mark Daniel Craig's last outing as the famed British spy, over creative difference with the producers. He was supposed to start shooting in December.

The director had boarded the project along with his "Trainspotting" co-writer, John Hodge, but they both have now exited it.

Last week, screenwriters Neal Purvis and Robert Wade, who have co-written six James Bond films from The World Is Not Enough to Spectre, were hired to write a new script for the film.

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Fukunaga's name comes as a surprise to many as he was not even in contention for the coveted job. Directors like Christopher McQuarrie, Denis Villenueve, Yann Demange and David Mackenzie were leading the race for the director's chair.

Fukunaga is best known for helming the first season of HBO's crime series True Detective, for which he rightfully won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Directing for a Drama Series in 2014.

His most recent project is Netflix series Maniac, which is set to premiere on Thursday on the streaming giant's platform.

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New Delhi:

The Supreme Court on Thursday made it clear that newly-appointed acting Director General of Police of Jammu and Kashmir Dilbag Singh will continue in office till the UPSC scrutinises and provides a panel of three police officers for regular appointment of the police chief.

A bench headed by Chief Justice Dipak Misra granted the interim relief to the state government, saying acting DGP Singh, who replaced S P Vaid, shall continue to operate.

The bench, also comprising Justices A M Khanwilkar and D Y Chandrachud, asked the state government to provide within five days the requisite documents to the Union Public Service Commission (UPSC) about senior police officers.

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The UPSC, in turn, would examine various aspects, including merit and seniority of these officers, and short-list within four weeks three names. The state government may then appoint an officer from the list as a regular DGP, it said.

Advocate Prashant Bhushan, appearing for former DGP Prakash Singh on whose PIL the judgement on police reforms had come in 2006, alleged that the appointment of the acting DGP was in J and K was in violation of the judgement on various counts, including that Singh was the seventh in the seniority list.

They have removed a DGP without following the procedure devised by the Supreme Court and the government should have appointed the senior-most person as acting DGP, he said, adding that his plea seeking contempt against the state government be listed for hearing.

Attorney General K K Venugopal and lawyer Shoeb Alam, representing the state government, opposed Bhushans submission and said the law and order and the ground situation of Jammu and Kashmir was different from the rest of the country.

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Venugopal said the person shifted out from the DGP post had no problem and no other police officer has aired any grievance, but Bhushan who has filed the PIL has a problem. The ground situation in Jammu and Kashmir is not normal, he said.

We should not forget that this is Jammu and Kashmir. The law and order and security situation in unique and no other state has similar security requirements, Alam also said.

The state government had on September 6 appointed Dilbagh Singh as the acting police chief, replacing S P Vaid who was posted as the transport commissioner.

Earlier, the state government had moved the court seeking modification its order that made it mandatory for all states to send a list of three senior-most IPS officers to the UPSC for clearance before appointing the DGP.

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The apex court had earlier passed a slew of directions on police reforms in the country and restrained all states and union territories from appointing any police officer as acting DGPs to avoid favouritism and nepotism.

It had said that all states were required to send their proposals in anticipation of the vacancies to the UPSC well in time, at least three months before the date of retirement of the incumbent on the post of DGP.

The J and K government, in its plea, has said: It may be pointed out that in view of the complex security concerns of the state, the peculiar ground situation prevailing therein, the upcoming panchayat and local body elections, insurgent and terror related activities, the unique law and order requirements, it is essential to have a head of the police force in the State of Jammu and Kashmir at all times.

As such, as a purely ad-interim measure, the State Government has been constrained to appoint the Director General, Prisons of State of Jammu and Kashmir, Dilbagh Singh... as the In-Charge Director General of Police till a regular arrangement is made, it said.

The state government also said that the apex court guidelines, which envisages the role of the UPSC prior to the appointment of a DGP in a state, could not be followed as the present case is not that of an anticipated vacancy which would have enabled the state to forward a panel to the UPSC and comply with the other rigors of the applicable procedure.

It said that in view of the guidelines, the state government has now already approached the UPSC and forwarded a panel of senior-most officers from the state.

The apex court, while deciding the PIL filed by two former DGPs Prakash Singh and N K Singh in 2006, had issued several directions, including that state police chiefs will have a fixed tenure of two years.

It had said the appointment of DGPs and police officers should be merit-based and transparent and officers like DGPs and Superintendents of Police should have a minimum fixed tenure of two years.

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Jaipur:

Mumbai-based professional Prashant Sharma had never realised flying could be so terrifying until his Thursday morning flight to Jaipur.

There were screaming and cries and many of his co-passengers suffered nose and ear bleeding as the crew of the Jet Airways flight forgot to turn on a switch that controls cabin air pressure.

Panic situation due to technical fault in @jetairways 9W 0697 going from Mumbai to Jaipur. Flt return back to Mumbai after 45 mts. All passengers are safe including me. pic.twitter.com/lnOaFbcaps  Darshak Hathi (@DarshakHathi) September 20, 2018

According to 39-year-old Sharma, who was on an official trip, the terrifying experience began 5-10 minutes into the flight.

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As the plane climbed, oxygen masks got deployed from overhead compartments and the crew announced that the flight would return to Mumbai, triggering panic among some passengers.

I was sitting on an aisle seat when suddenly air pressure in the cabin dropped and oxygen masks came down. I saw a passenger sitting next to me bleeding from nose. Several others complained of extreme pain in their ears, Sharma told PTI after he landed in Jaipur in an alternative flight.

The crew announced that the plane will return...It then circled overhead for around half-an-hour before landing. There was no announcement (related to the problem) from the crew, said another passenger.

Darshak Hati, who shot a video on board and posted it on social media, narrated a similar story.

I hope that such a situation never occur in the future. There was no response in the first flight that took off from Mumbai. Cabin crew just regretted the inconvenience and delay in the alternative flight, Hathi said at the Jaipur airport.

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There were 166 passengers and five crew members on board flight 9W 697 that took off from Mumbai to Jaipur.

During a climb, the crew forgot to select bleed switch due to which cabin pressurisation could not be maintained. As a result, oxygen masks got deployed, the official at aviation regulator, Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA), said.

The Boeing 737 aircraft returned to Mumbai due to loss of cabin pressure and the pilots have been taken off duty pending investigation, a Jet Airways spokesperson said.

Citing initial information, the official said a few passengers have nose bleeding.

Out of 166 passengers on board, 30 passengers are affected... some have nose bleeding, few have ear bleeding and some are complaining of a headache, he added.

(With PTI inputs)

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Faraz Ahmed Badar was a 26-year-old pharmacist. He worked at the DHQ Hospital in Gujaranwala. He was harassed by a Muslim colleague who did not accept the fact that a Christian could hold a position higher than his own. His father: "Many Muslims believe that all Christians should be scavengers, not managers"

Lahore (AsiaNews / Agencies)  Disfigured with acid because of the jealousy of colleagues and because of his Christian faith: This is the story of Faraz Ahmed Badar from a small village in Punjab, Pakistan. The 26 years old Christian, who had recently graduated in pharmacy, had been working for about two years as a manager at the DHQ Hospital in the city of Gujaranwala.

On 5 September, while he was ending his shift around 2 am, he was attacked with acid by a man with a covered face, who is still untraceable. He was found and transported first to a private hospital, then to the Mayo Hospital in Lahore, where he eventually died on September 15 after 10 days of agony.

Both hospitals could not do much to save the young life of the Christian. In addition to very serious burns on his face, the doctors found signs of earlier torture on his body. His father Badar Masih told the British Pakistani Christian Association (Bpca) that it was not the first time that Faraz had been attacked. "There was a lot of jealousy at work  he reports - We live in a culture without mercy where Christians often become victims because of their vulnerable status ".

The man tells of repeated episodes of religious discrimination: "He was regularly harassed by a Muslim colleague who did not accept the fact that a Christian could hold a position higher than his own. Ours is a bigoted country and many Muslims believe that all Christians should be scavengers, not managers. They call us 'Chura', which means 'untouchable scavangers' ".

Faraz's family reports that a few months ago the young man had been the victim of another episode of violence. Encircled by a group of men wearing masks, they had stuck their boots in his mouth, claiming that "a Christian is not even able to lick their shoes". His father adds: "They threatened to kill him unless Faraz left his job. They said that his spiritual impurity contaminated the health of 'pure Muslims' ". "We have informed the police of the incident but they have ignored us because we are Christians", he concludes.
Washington:

NASA has launched an interactive website that allows users to tour through buildings to discover common items that the space agency helped improvesuch as water purifiers and selfie cameras.

The showcased spinoffs are commercial products that apply NASA technology originally developed for studying and exploring space.

NASA Home & City features about 130 spinoff technologies in a virtual space, allowing users to tour through buildings and rooms to discover common items that NASA inspired or helped improve.

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Our space technology continues to improve life on Earth, said Jim Reuter, acting associate administrator of NASAs Space Technology Mission Directorate.

NASA Home & City is a place of discovery for people, and especially students, who have ever wondered why space exploration should matter to them, said Reuter.

The website showcases only a small sample of NASA spinoff and dual-purpose technologies, NASA said in a statement.

The spinoffs include water filtration systems originally designed to purify water for the Apollo astronauts.

The silver ion technology purifies and softens water while inhibiting bacteria growth in filtering units.

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Today, manufacturers use this combined technology to create home-use water filtering systems that not only purify and soften, but also remove objectionable tastes and odours.

Wind turbines designed for Mars and tested in Antarcticawhere access to solar power is scarcecan be found generating power all over the globe.

NASA spacesuits and firefighter gear use a similar fabric.

The images NASA captures of distant galaxies or newly discovered stars has evolved greatly over the years.

In the 1990s a NASA engineer built a new kind of image sensor which requires very low power and is highly efficient making it ideal for digital and cell phone cameras on Earth.

For all the Latest Science News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps.
The nun was ordered to leave the Philippines for allegedly taking part in political activities against President Rodrigo Duterte. At present, she is awaiting a decision by the Justice Department on her appeal.

Manila (AsiaNews/CBCPNews)  Involved in a legal battle against her expulsion, Australian-born missionary Sister Patricia Fox has called on Catholic Church leaders to support missionaries with prayer and support.

The 72-year-old superior of the Religious of Our Lady of Sion in the Philippines, whose missionary visa was not renewed by the Bureau of Immigration (BI), believes that her case could have repercussions on other missionaries.

I think it is an issue that the Church has to look at and it needs to come out with a clear statement because it will affect all foreign missionaries in the long term, Fox said.

She noted it has been a long-time practice for all foreign missionaries in the Philippines to apply for a 10-year missionary visa, subject for renewal after getting a temporary downgraded visa.

By denying Sr Foxs visa, the BI cited its memorandum of understanding with the Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines (CBCP) that "restricts missionary visa holders for up to ten years.

The nun appealed for the renewal of her missionary visa, which expired on 5 September. The BI insists that an extension would violate the memorandum, adding that the religious has already spent 27 years in the country.

Sister Fox's lawyer dismissed this argument, saying that the 10-year extension and renewal rule should only apply to Foxs case on the day the Bureau converted her tourist visa on 5 September 2014.

[When] the BI approved the conversion of Sister Foxs tourist visa into a missionary visa, she was given a new or a fresh period of 10 years from the said date or until 2024 to stay in the country, lawyer Jobert Pahilga said.

The decision to expel the nun from the Philippines came after she allegedly took part in political activities against President Rodrigo Duterte, seemingly violating terms and conditions of her missionary visa. As a result of this, Sister Foxs name was added to a list of unwanted foreigners.

For now though, the BI order against the nun has been suspended, as the Justice Department has yet to decide her appeal.
by Vladimir Rozanskij

The Ukrainian Orthodox Church is on the homestretch to the Tomos, the decree that recognises its independence from the Russian Patriarchate. Now Belarus too is seeking the same right from Constantinople. The declaration of the Moscow Synod on 14 September suspending Eucharistic communion with Constantinople was met with the stony silence of the other 13 canonical Orthodox Churches.

Moscow (AsiaNews)  Events associated with the Ukrainian Orthodox Churchs accession to independence are following each other at a fast pace. In Belarus some people now want Constantinople to grant their Church the Tomos, the autocephaly decree. Archbishop Sviatoslav (Lohin), head of the relatively small Belarusian Autocephalous Orthodox Church issued a statement to this effect yesterday.

Unlike Ukraine, where Orthodox are divided in three jurisdictions under Moscow, Kyiv and Constantinople (plus Greek-Catholics linked to Rome), almost all Orthodox in the country ruled by President Lukashenko are subject to the Kyiv Exarchate, which depends on the Moscow Patriarchate, who appointed the current Exarch of All Belarus and Metropolitan of Minsk Paul (Ponomaryov).

Yet the status of the Church in Belarus is historically very similar to that of the Ukrainian Church, even more to that of the Polish Orthodox Church, which obtained autocephaly from Constantinople in 1948, in agreement with the Moscow Patriarchate to which it belonged.

The Russian Empire held all these territories between the 18th and 20th centuries, but the ecclesiastical jurisdictions followed separate paths. In general, all Eastern Slavic Orthodox are rooted in the Baptism of Rus' in Kyiv, now the capital of Ukraine. If the latter obtains autocephaly in October, as everything suggests, it is hard to see how it could be refused to Belarusian Orthodox.

This could be followed by others demanding autocephaly, like the Baltic countries, some parts of the Caucasus, Transnistria and Moldova, all in some way dependent on Moscow, which would then lose many of its jurisdiction. The vast but thinly populated territories of European and Asian Russia would remain, but with a relatively limited number of churches and dioceses. The process could also affect Greek Catholic communities, which are not present only in Ukraine, dating back to the Union of 1596, signed in the Belarusian city of Brest-Litovsk, on the border with Poland.

The main effect would therefore be to isolate Moscow from the rest of universal Orthodoxy, like at present. The declaration of the Moscow Synod of 14 September suspending the Eucharistic communion with Constantinople was met with the stony silence of the other 13 canonical Orthodox Churches.

So far, no Church has followed Moscow in its opposition to the Ecumenical Patriarchate, refusing to name Bartholomew in the liturgy or refraining from concelebrating with the priests of Constantinople, as the Russian Orthodox are doing. Despite various statements by patriarchs and metropolitans in favour of Moscow, including that of Pope Francis in Rome last May on the "only patriarchate" for Russians and Ukrainians, no one has uttered a word since 14 September, leaving Kirill alone to deal with Bartholomew.

The Moscow Patriarch has had a lot of time to reflect upon the events that have marked inter-Orthodox relations in recent years, especially following his refusal to attend the Council of Crete in 2016, evidently afraid that the Ukrainian question might come up, against the backdrop of the war that broke out in the Ukraine in 2014. The meeting at the Fanar on 31 August was too late, as the decision had already been taken after two years of official consultations between Constantinople and all the other autocephalous Churches, including Moscow.

Meanwhile, two Constantinopolitan exarchs, Ukrainian-American bishops Daniel and Hilarion, are proceeding swiftly with the necessary consultations. On Monday, they met with Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, who reiterated the centuries-old yearning of Ukrainians for the autonomy of their own Church, and the historical proximity to the patriarchate of Constantinople.

After the meeting, one of the two delegates, Archbishop Daniel, said the fateful words, the process of granting autocephaly to Ukraine is on the homestretch." The two exarchs have invited all the bishops of the various jurisdictions, including that of Moscow, to meet and talk. Everything suggests that many will respond positively.

Under the circumstances, Moscow will not be able to hold most of the faithful still attached to it. It will also have a harder time trying to convince others that it is on the right side when all the other Orthodox are on the other.
RIDGEFIELD  Nearly a dozen residents offered their thoughts this week on an affordable housing development proposed for Danbury Road, but the rest will need to wait until October for the discussion to continue.

The 30-unit development, proposed by Charter Group Partners, faced its first public hearing in front of the Planning and Zoning Commission and Inland Wetlands Board on Wednesday. But after two hours of presentations and comments, the commission decided to schedule a second hearing on Oct. 9.

Residents who got the chance to speak were split between neighbors concerned about the development and those who live in a similar building Charter Group Partners owns on Sunset Lane who support the new project.

Both the Sunset Lane building and the Danbury Road development are for those age 55 and up, which the residents said is still a necessary option for the towns aging population.

We have seen what these guys do...and it is fabulous, said Ed Smith, a Sunset Lane resident. Just try to keep in mind when you consider this project that there are a lot of people like me...that have to face the change to the way they have to live, but not to where they want to live. Fortunately here, I found a place where I could live in the manor and style that I would like.

Smith said he and his wife had been searching for a way to stay in Connecticut when they retired. They were a week away from moving to Milford when the Sunset Lane project was announced and that allowed them to stay in Ridgefield, Smith said.

But other speakers Wednesday contended that although they understand the need for affordable or senior living options, the Danbury Road location is not the right spot for the project.

I dont want to live next door to an apartment building, said Annemarie Kwalswasser, who lives on nearby Conley Court. You may attract people to Ridgefield with this, but you may lose people also.

The neighbors said they worried that the 67 parking spaces for the building would make it even more difficult to travel on busy Route 35. They also worried whether the three-story building would fit with the quiet neighborhood and if the 3.3-acre lot would be big enough to accommodate its water and waste.

Consultants who spoke at the hearing said the development would not generate a lot of traffic  six to eight cars during peak hours  given that many of its residents will be retired. But a traffic engineer hired by the town did say cars turning into or exiting the buildings driveway would likely experience above average delays because of the typical congestion on the state road.

The apartment-style condominiums are proposed for a lot next to the towns Parks and Recreation Department and its senior center, Founders Hall. Developers said they plan to create a connecting pathway from the building to the recreation trails and Founders Hall.

aquinn@newstimes.com
WASHINGTON - President Donald Trump's declaration that "I don't have an attorney general" was not merely the cry of an executive feeling betrayed by a subordinate.

It was also a raw expression of vulnerability and anger from a president who associates say increasingly believes he is unprotected - with the Russia investigation steamrolling ahead, anonymous administration officials seeking to undermine him and a referendum looming in the Nov. 6 midterm elections, the results of which could potentially lead to impeachment proceedings.

In a freewheeling and friendly interview published Wednesday, Trump savaged Attorney General Jeff Sessions, mocking the nation's top law enforcement official for coming off as "mixed up and confused" during his Senate confirmation hearing and for his "sad" performance on the job.

Though Trump has long railed against Sessions, both publicly and privately, for recusing himself from overseeing the Justice Department's Russia probe, the president's comments to Hill.TV brought his criticism to a new level.

"I don't have an attorney general," Trump said. "It's very sad."

Publicly, at least, Trump is going through the ordinary motions of being president. He met with the visiting president of Poland and on Wednesday toured the flood-ravaged Carolinas to survey damage from Hurricane Florence. He also prepared to hit the campaign trail with rallies in Nevada on Thursday and in Missouri on Friday, and next week will host scores of foreign dignitaries at the United Nations General Assembly in New York.

Behind the scenes, however, Trump is confronting broadsides from every direction - legal, political and personal.

The president, as well as family members and longtime loyalists, fret about who in the administration they can trust, people close to them said, rattled by a pair of devastating, unauthorized insider accounts this month from inside the White House. A senior administration official penned an anonymous column describing a "resistance" within to guard against the president's impulses, while Bob Woodward's new book, "Fear," offers an alarming portrait of a president seemingly unfit for the office.

"Everybody in the White House now has to look around and ask, 'Who's taping? Who's leaking? And who's on their way out the door?' It's becoming a game of survival," said a Republican strategist who works in close coordination with the White House, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak candidly.

Some of Trump's allies believe he has legitimate cause for worry.

"The president should feel vulnerable because he is vulnerable - to those that fight him daily on implementing his agenda," Stephen Bannon, a former chief White House strategist, wrote in a text message.

"The Woodward book is the typed up meeting notes from 'The Committee to Save America,'" he added, referring dismissively to a loose alliance of advisers who saw themselves as protecting the country from Trump. "The anonymous op-ed is the declaration of an administrative coup by the Republican establishment.'"

In some respects, Trump has maintained a sanguine outlook. Former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort last week became the latest former member of the president's inner circle to agree to cooperate with federal prosecutors. But Trump has been uncharacteristically calm about the plea deal for Manafort, who he had praised only a month ago for refusing to "break" under pressure from special counsel Robert Mueller III.

Asked if he was worried about Manafort's cooperation agreement, Trump told reporters Wednesday, "No, I'm not . . . I believe that he will tell the truth. And if he tells the truth, no problem."

Trump has been similarly restrained this week as Judge Brett Kavanaugh, his pick for the Supreme Court, fights to save his nomination amid an accusation of sexual assault, which Kavanaugh denies. Trump has publicly defended Kavanaugh, though he has refrained from attacking the judge's accuser, Christine Blasey Ford.

White House officials, who began this week reeling from the assault allegation, said by midweek that they have concluded Kavanaugh would likely still win confirmation, especially given Ford's reluctance to testify at a public Senate Judiciary Committee hearing scheduled by Republicans for next Monday.

Nonetheless, Trump's screed against Sessions underscored the president's sense of anger and betrayal from his attorney general, who, despite executing much of the president's hard-line law-and-order agenda, has never been able to recover from what Trump views as an unforgivable sin: his recusal from the Russia investigation for a conflict of interest, which ultimately led to Mueller's appointment.

Trump told Hill.TV that he appointed Sessions out of blind loyalty, a decision he now regrets. Sessions' aggressive and controversial immigration actions - including emphasizing "zero tolerance" for those who come to the country illegally and defending the administration policy of separating families - have been cheered by Trump allies. But the president even criticized his attorney general on this front, in a striking expression of his deep dissatisfaction.

"I'm not happy at the border, I'm not happy with numerous things, not just this," Trump said, referring to the Russia probe.

The president's attack on Sessions raised concern in the law enforcement community, and also prompted reactions ranging from exasperation to outright dismay among Trump's allies.

"Trump doesn't just blur the lines, he flat out tries to eradicate those lines," said Joyce Vance, a former U.S. attorney in Alabama during the Obama administration. "He wants a consigliere, not an attorney general. On the one hand, it's a pitiful thing to watch, but it's also deadly serious, because the attorney general does not protect the president. The attorney general protects the American people. And the fact that we have a president who doesn't understand that is alarming."

A former White House official was similarly disturbed. "It is a complete disgrace the way that Trump is acting like a schoolyard bully against Sessions," the official said, requesting anonymity to share a critical opinion.

In the interview, Trump belittled Sessions, who he has previously nicknamed "Mr. Magoo" and, according to Woodward's book, dismissed as "mentally retarded."

"He went through the nominating process and he did very poorly," Trump said of Sessions' Senate confirmation hearing. "He was giving very confusing answers, answers that should have been easily answered. And that was a rough time for him, and he won by one vote, I believe. You know, he won by just one vote."

Trump went on to question Sessions' self-recusal from the Russia investigation. "He said, 'I recuse myself, I recuse myself,'" Trump told Hill.TV. "And now it turned out he didn't have to recuse himself. Actually, the FBI reported shortly thereafter any reason for him to recuse himself. And it's very sad what happened."

It was not clear what Trump meant.

Career Justice Department ethics officials had told Sessions he had to step aside from any campaign-related investigations because he had been a top campaign surrogate and met with the Russian ambassador.

FBI officials would not have been among those providing advice. Then-FBI Director James Comey said at a congressional hearing that he was aware of nonpublic information that he believed would force the attorney general to step aside before Sessions did so, though he declined to specify what those facts were.

After taking yet another public tongue-lashing from the president, Sessions gave a speech Wednesday to law enforcement officials in Waukegan, Illinois, in which he effusively praised Trump.

"Under his strong leadership, we are respecting police again and enforcing our laws," Sessions said, according to his prepared remarks, which a DOJ spokesman said he delivered. "Based on my experience meeting with officers like you across the country, I believe that morale has already improved under President Trump. I can feel the difference."

Even as Sessions was dutifully showering compliments upon his boss, Trump was unwilling to throw him a lifeline.

"I'm disappointed in the attorney general for many reasons," Trump told reporters before leaving for North Carolina. "You understand that."

- - -

The Washington Post's Devlin Barrett, John Wagner and Matt Zapotosky contributed to this report.

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Video: While leaving the White House on Sept. 19, President Trump told reporters he is "disappointed" with Attorney General Jeff Sessions after being asked about an interview in which he said "I don't have an attorney general."(The Washington Post)

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It finally happened. An entire company swore off meat. Citing environmental concerns, WeWork banned meat in a bold attempt to save the planet. In a nod to Elon Musk, co-founder Miguel McKelvey said that vegetarian efforts can reduce their personal environmental impact even more than switching to a hybrid car.

It sounds extreme, but heres the thing: Enlightened business goals like sustainability and social responsibility dont have to turn your business upside down. Theyre actually good for your companys bottom line. Take Starbucks ban on plastic straws, for example. Its a good move for the environment, but its also likely to boost coffee purchases. Starbucks made its move in response to consumer demand. While its true that the company has always leaned left economically and environmentally, its safe to say that business hasnt suffered from taking such stances.

Related: 5 Reasons Why Sustainability and Social Issues Attract Customers

The coffee giant isnt alone. As company leaders consider adopting a more compassionate capitalism, they're finding strength in pursuing sustainable choices. Brands such as Walmart, Mars and Disney are all profiting from environmentally friendly policies.

Profits and ethics are not at odds -- at least, they dont have to be, says Peter Seligmann, founding CEO and chairman of the board at Conservation International. When you cultivate a mindset of enlightened self-interest, you can help your company thrive while also helping people. And isnt that the Holy Grail?

Much of the bad rap surrounding capitalism today stems from pitting self-interest against the good of people and the planet. But its a false dichotomy -- and one youd do well to eschew if you want to reap the greatest rewards. Here are just a few reasons why doing good is good for business.

1. You will attract top talent.

If you want to bolster your company with input from the best and brightest for many years to come, youre going to need to attract millennials and post-millennials. These younger employees, some of whom are now leading organizations, wont wait long for their employers to catch up to their values.

Those values are increasingly clear. According to Deloitte, 87 percent of millennials believe financial metrics are insufficient measures of success. They and younger post-millennials continue to look for brands whose ethics align with their concern for the environment, income inequality and other societal issues.

Related: Why All Businesses Can Benefit from a Guiding Social or Environmental Purpose

2. You can satisfy consumer demands.

Employees arent the only ones putting pressure on companies to pursue ethical profits. Consumer demand has influenced corporate policies and products in a number of ways, whether its pressure to go green or to give back to a good cause.

When you see organizations the size of Fruit of the Loom or Walmart trumpeting sustainability initiatives, its clear that demand has reached a tipping point. As more cause-oriented companies respond to this demand and saturate the marketplace, you have no choice but to demonstrate your own commitment to a cause (or causes) as well.

3. You reduce costs.

Its nearsighted to believe that committing to sustainability is unsustainable, which is only the case if you equate success with short-term profits. In the long run, environmentally sound business practices are actually more cost-efficient; they reduce energy use and direct resources into more profitable endeavors.

Many of these practices require very few, if any, up-front costs. Employees can turn off unused lights or reuse paper, for example. True, you will garner more significant savings by spending money on a geothermal heating and cooling system, to name one example, but that step may be more attainable after youve first reaped savings from less costly initiatives.

Related: Why Environmental Responsibility Is Good for Your Bottom Line

4. You enhance your brand image.

Ultimately, your brand image -- a critical driver of profitability -- is at stake. At a time when social media backlash can quickly deface a company, its critical for organizations to demonstrate that they connect with the concerns of their customers.

A survey by the Natural Marketing Institute found that 58 percent of consumers polled considered a companys environmental impact when making a purchase. Other customers looked for businesses that are involved in social causes or invested in their local community in some way. The examples are myriad. What matters is that consumers are watching.

If anything is certain in business, its that the path to profit is fraught with ethical tangles. But the high ground is clearly marked, and its not as difficult to walk as you may think. You may not even have to give up meat to get there.

Related:

You Don't Have to Be Elon Musk to Make a Difference

Rheem Manufacturing Sets Aggressive Sustainability Goals for 2025

This Global Tea Company Is Infused With Sustainability Practices, Allowing It to Win Huge Tech Companies as Customers



Copyright 2019 Entrepreneur.com Inc., All rights reserved
DARPA is giving $1.3 million for a four-year study of quantized inertia (QI) for possible breakthrough space propulsion.

The QI theory predicts that objects can be pushed by differences in the intensity of so-called Unruh radiation in space, similar to the way in which a ship can be pushed towards a dock because there are more waves hitting it from the seaward side.

The theory has already predicted galaxy rotation without dark matter, and the fact that if a system is accelerated enough  such as a spinning disc or light bouncing between mirrors  the Unruh waves it sees can be influenced by a shield. Therefore, if a damper is placed above the object, it should produce a new kind of upwards thrust.

Chemical rockets are very expensive because of the explosive propellant they need, so this new kind of thruster would be much cheaper and safer as it would only need a source of electrical power to accelerate the core of a thruster.

The research is being funded through DARPAs Nascent Light-Matter Interactions (NLM) programme, which aims to improve the fundamental understanding of how to control the interaction of light and engineered materials.

It will see Dr McCulloch collaborating with experimental scientists from the Technische Universitat Dresden in Germany, and the University of Alcala in Spain.

Over the first 18 months, the Plymouth team will seek to develop a fully predictive theoretical model of how matter interacts with light (Unruh radiation) using the quantized inertia model. This will provide a new predictive tool for light-matter interactions.

A series of experiments will then be conducted in Germany and Spain to test whether the thrust is specifically due to quantized inertia, and whether it can be enhanced significantly.
There are some big doings in the state this week.

Tuesday, Ridgefield Playhouse brings in blues legend Buddy Guy. He is the dean of Chicago blues and one of the remaining links to its beginnings. Guy is touring in support of his new studio album, The Blues Is Alive And Well. The album features guest appearances by Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and Jeff Beck. Grammy Award-winning producer/songwriter and longtime collaborator Tom Hambridge produced the album.

Guy didnt immediately rise to the top. He worked long and hard with a talent that would not be denied. He left Louisiana for Chicago, got his guitar skills going, and never looked back. Many remember him for his album with Jr. Wells, a partnership that served both. Now, just his mention draws audiences  he is blues history at its best.

Another big man in the blues is New Yorker Popa Chubby, who is heading to Bridge Street Live on Friday. Born Ted Horowitz, he has been hard rocking the blues in his fierce and soulful way for more than 25 years. Over the course of his career, he has been a force of to be reckoned with on the guitar. His tempestuous, soulful playing has never been more powerful, yet he can slow it down to a tasteful ballad. An imposing figure with a shaven head, tattooed arms, a goatee and a performance style he describes as the Stooges meets Buddy Guy, Motorhead meets Muddy Waters, and Jimi Hendrix meets Robert Johnson, Popa Chubby is an endearing character who is one of the genres most popular figures.

Saturday, is going to be a night to remember at Black-Eyed Sallys, when legendary harp-master Jerry Portnoy leads a cadre of harp players including Dave Robbins, Cheryl Arena and Johnny Marino.

Portnoy grew up in the blues-rich atmosphere of Chicagos famous Maxwell Street Market during the golden age of Chicago blues. He began his professional career in the late 60s, and since that time has performed, live and on television, for millions of people around the world. He has put in his time with the legendary Muddy Waters, as well as Eric Clapton and Ronnie Earl.

On Friday, Doug Deming & the Jewel Tones will be at Sallys. Deming is an American blues and roots guitarist/vocalist and 2013 recipient of the Blues Blast Music Awards Sean Costello Rising Star Award. His traditional taste and style are evident in his original music.

Saturday, The Bijou Theatre brings in the George T. Gregory Band. Gregory is a vocalist and strong Sax player, who has been delighting audiences from New England and out to the San Francisco Bay Area for years. He plays with a modern mix of original and cover songs in Blues, R & B, Electric Motown, Pop Jazz, and New Orleans style rock and roll. His band provides a flavorful mix of music that makes everyone get up and dance.

On the East Coast, his successful band, The George T. Gregory Band, headlined many of the same clubs as The Fabulous Thunderbirds, Roomful of Blues, The Nighthawks, and The Fabulous Rhinestones. Gregory will keep an audience entertained. Leo Boogie will open the evening.

Cafe Nine has a Tuesday show with Eric Lindell. He effortlessly mixes West Coast rock, swampy New Orleans R&B, honky tonk country and Memphis soul, creating music that is both surprisingly fresh and sweetly familiar. Although influenced by American roots music from blues to country to rock, Lindells style is all his own.

Saturday, the Maple Tree Cafe has its monthly Connecticut Blues Society show. This week features Carl Ricci and 706 Union Ave. Get ready for some hot guitar, ringing harmonica and a lot of fun.

Saturday, Infinity Music Hall; Norfolk has Bettye LaVette. This Diva burst onto the Detroit music scene, where she quickly caught the attention of the Soul world. From singing in James Browns Review, touring with Otis Redding, making disco and R&B chart topping solo records, she also won WC Handy Blues album awards, and a six year Broadway run in Bubbling Brown Sugar among her credits. This 3-time Grammy Nominee along with Blues Music Awards, has been tearing up stages and blowing away audiences around the globe.

In Hartford, Infinity Music Hall on Saturday has Sacred Fire and Bell Bottom Blues, a night honoring Santana and Clapton.

FTC Warehouse has a Friday, End of Summer Jam. Summer is coming to a close so FTC is having one last free outdoor-indoor throw down. Head to the Warehouse at 6 pm for live music by bluesman Tony Sarno Band followed by local favorites, The Alpaca Gnomes.

A cabaret style event on Saturday with the Kathy Thompson Band takes place from 7 to 10 p.m. at Father Toner Hall at Christ the Redeemer Church in Milford. It is a style geared for fun, so gather a group of friends together for a fun night of listening and dancing. For information call 203-877-8757.

Get the complete Blues Beat schedule on Thursday at the blog http://bluesbeatnews.wordpress.com/. Any questions or comments should be sent to Domenic Forcella at TWBlus@aol.com.
NEW HAVEN  Soulful, bluesy New Orleans-Northern California roots musician Eric Lindell returns to Cafe Nine Sept. 25 with a new album, Revolution In Your Heart, just released that marks his return to Chicago-based Alligator Records.

Showtime is 8:30 p.m. Tickets for the Fernando Pinto Presents show are $20 in advance, available at cafenine.com, or $25 day-of-show. Cafe Nine is located at 250 State St. on the corner of State and Crown in the Ninth Square section of downtown.

Lindell, who was raised in San Mateo, California, but has been steeped in New Orleans funk since moving to the Crescent City in 1999, went to Studio In The Country in rural Bogalusa, Louisiana, to cut his latest album, which was released on Sept. 8.

The album  Lindells 17th  was produced by Lindell and Benjamin Mumphrey and features Lindell playing almost everything on the album, including guitar, bass, keyboards, organ and harmonica.

The one exception was drums, which he left in the capable hands of Willie McMains.

The only other musician on the record is keyboard player Kevin McKendree, who has played with Delbert McClinton, Brian Setzer Orchestra and Tinsley Ellis. McKendree plays piano on Millie Kay.

An annual player at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, Lindell has appeared on Late Night With Conan OBrien and National Public Radios Mountain Stage, among other outlets.

When not touring with his own band, Lindell performs with New Orleans supergroup Dragon Smoke, which also features Ivan Neville (of Dumpstaphunk as well as Neville family fame) and Robert Mercurio and Stanton Moore of Galactic.

SHEMEKIA ALERT: While were talking about bluesy, you really ought to know if you dont already that Lindells label mate, the awesome Shemekia Copeland, is performing on Friday night up at Bridge Street Live in the Collinsville section of Canton.

Copeland, the daughter of the late bluesman Johnny Clyde Copeland, is a force of nature  always well worth seeing. Believe it! Showtime is 8 p.m. Tickets are $25 for general admission and $40 for VIP reserved seats, available in advance at 41bridgestreet.com, which is also the address.

mark.zaretsky@hearstmediact.com
The state Department of Transportation says a tree removal operation will be performed on Route 15 (Wilbur Cross Parkway) in New Haven, Woodbridge, Hamden and North Haven this weekend.

State crews will be cutting down dead trees, high limbs and clearing signs blocked by vegetation.

Crews will be working from 6 a.m. to noon on both Saturday and Sunday.

The DOT says, motorists can expect north and southbound lane closures between Exit 59 (Route 69, Whalley Avenue) and Exit 63 (Hartford Turnpike) in New Haven, Woodbridge, Hamden and North Haven. A moveable sign pattern will be utilized to guide motorists through the work zone.

The state began a larger tree-clearing project on the Merritt and Wilbur Cross parkways after an autumn noreaster in 2011 took down roadside trees.

Several people have also been killed on the Meritt by falling trees.

On March 2, a 25-year-old New Jersey man was killed when a tree fell on his Mini Cooper between exits 33 and 31, which is the Stamford-Greenwich stretch of the highway. State Police said Police said that as the car approached the Riverbank Road overpass, a large tree dislodged and fell directly on top of the vehicle. Police blamed the accident on rain and severe crosswinds from a noreaster that day.

Earlier this year, the state settled a lawsuit with the estate of two former New York residents who were killed by a falling tree in Westport in 2007.

More News DOT seeks to restore Merritt Parkway's historic landscapes as part of Norwalk interchange overhaul

Joseph Stavola, 46, and his wife, Jean Serocke Stavola, 44, of Pelham Manor, N.Y. died when a 70-foot white pine tree fell on their Volvo sport-utility vehicle. The Stavolas two minor children were riding with them in the car, but suffered only minor injuries.

In 2013, the state Claims Commissioner found that Connecticut could be held liable for the deaths, opening the state up to a lawsuit from the familys estate.

The family through their attorney David Hill of Glastonbury argued that the state knew or should have known about rotting and other defects of the tree and cut the tree down.
MILFORD  The owners of an Asian marketplace under construction at 804 Boston Post Road are being fined $100 per day since July 4 for blight on the property, health department officials say.

The prominent site is the former location of the once-popular M & M Farm Market.

The order of violation was given by the Milford Health Department June 4, and the owners had until July 4 to clean up the site, health department records show. As of Thursday, they had been charged $100 a day for 77 days for a total of $7,700.

In addressing the fines to the Board of Health, Health Department Executive Director Deepa Joseph said the goal is always to work with the owners of a blighted property to remedy the situation.

The site has improved to the eye of those driving by the busy intersection, but blight remains, health department officials say.

Beginning in May, the owners were ordered by the health department to cut down all overgrown vegetation, repair or replace construction fencing and plywood that is falling down or in disrepair and to get rid of inorganic building materials, appliances and household furnishings on the site. The report also reflects a violation because storage containers were left in a state of disrepair or abandonment.

The owners are listed as Long and Lily Deng of Long Island and the company as iFresh, a Chinese supermarket chain. Kevin Li, iFresh official, said this week that the company has cleaned up the site extensively, but whatever we do theyre not satisfied.

Li said construction crews are working on the cleanup each month. He said owners have been asked to address the construction fence, but its not 100 percent falling down.

Were trying to fix it up, Li said, noting he is looking for a way to remove the citys lien on the property in respect to the blight fines.

Health Department records show that on June 14, Li told a health department official he was not aware of the anti-blight order and asked for an extension, as the company was changing contractors. The health department declined to grant the extension.

On June 27, an inspector noted 90 percent of vegetation was cut down and trash was cleaned up, but all of it was not completed and the construction fencing remained.

Into late August, reports show there was more to be done.

The citys Planning and Zoning Board approved the Asian supermarket and food court in March 2016. It took a while for construction to begin, but once it did, a new building with Asian-style storefront spaces quickly took shape.

Then the project came to a standstill and the highly visible property became overgrown with weeds and in obvious disrepair.

At the time of the public hearing, neighborhood residents expressed concern about the potential stench of garbage, delivery trucks in the wee hours and parking.

Architect Ray Oliver said at the time that his client, New York Mart, had 17 stores between New York, Pennsylvania and Massachusetts. The building, Oliver said, would be faced with clay and tile for an Asian look and include six storefronts.

The plan for the inside include a grocery store expected to carry produce, fish and Asian specialty items, a food court and market area with vendors.

Li said there are still plans for the business to open, but right now he cannot say when.
The Connecticut Better Business Bureau is urging the public to research charities before giving donations in the wake of Hurricanes Michael and Florence and other natural disasters, according to a BBB press release.

As predicted, Michael made landfall as the strongest storm to hit the continental U.S. since 1992, the release said.

Also, it is Connecticut hurricane season until mid-October, and Atlantic hurricane season until Nov. 30, so the need to give may unfortunately still arise.

The bureaus Wise Giving Alliance, which aides in finding trustworthy charities during times of need, is located on its give.org website.

Here are some WGA tips, the release said, for avoiding those who take advantage of donors generosity:

 Be cautious about online giving, especially when responding to emails and spam messages that claim to link to a relief organization. Go directly to that organizations website instead.

 Get an expert opinion on a charity. Prospective donors can go to http://www.give.org/ to research charities and relief groups and verify that they are accredited by the BBB and meet the 20 Standards for Charity Accountability. Dont rely on third-party references such as those of bloggers or other websites that may not have researched the issue thoroughly.

More News Big Y, Red Cross partner for disaster relief

 Be aware that crowdfunding sites may do very little to vet individuals who post for assistance after a disaster. Use crowdfunding only for people you know personally who have posted requests for help.

 Be wary of charities or relief groups that claim 100 percent of donations will be used for disaster victims. Even the most efficient and selfless charities have administrative costs and overhead.

 Determine whether the charity already has an on-the-ground presence in a disaster-stricken place and what specifically its doing to meet immediate needs. In the aftermath of a disaster, it may be difficult for that charity even to reach the people most in need.

 Determine whether callers asking for donations belong to the charity itself or are middle men who are employed to raise funds to pass along to that charity. Give directly to the charity rather than have part of your gift go to pay donation solicitors.

 In-kind gifts of clothing, food and so forth may not be the quickest or most effective way to help, unless the organization has the infrastructure to distribute the goods properly. Ask the charity about its transportation and distribution plans. Be wary of those who are not experienced in disaster relief.

And heres a tip of our own: The Red Cross always needs blood products after a disaster. If you qualify to donate blood, you can count on the experienced Red Cross to get the supply to those who desperately need it and save lives.
EAST HAMPTON  The third time was not a charm.

Far from it in fact.

The third version of the General Government budget was overwhelmingly rejected during voting in a daylong referendum Wednesday.

With 14 percent of eligible residents voting, the $14.9 million budget was rejected by a vote of 1,860 to 612.

The Board of Finance took no action following the vote other than to schedule a meeting for next Wednesday at a location yet to be determined.

The outcome  which prompted one observe Custer did better at the Little Bighorn  marks a dramatic shift in what began as a protest vote over reductions in spending for education.

In the first referendum in May, the original version of the town budget was rejected by four votes.

By the second referendum, the margin of defeat jumped to 170 votes.

And then came the vote Wednesday, which may signal more than a rejection of a spending proposal.

Earlier this week, Town Manager Michael Maniscalco said the wave of anger against governments in general at the local, state and federal levels might be playing a role in the rejection of the general government budget.

It was clear from the comments of one prominent budget critic Wednesday there is mistrust involving the Board of Finance.

Tania Sones, a former Board of Education member, complained while the finance board made off-budget appropriations for a new highway department dump truck and for roof repairs for the Community Center, they did not do the same for door safety locks and Chrome books for the school department.

That shows They are not concerned about education, Sones said.

Reminded there is money for both items in the capital portion of the general government budget, Sones alleged the board had been deceptive about the off-budget appropriations.

I dont (know) whom I can and cant trust, she said, charging the board is over-spending our budget.

Members of the finance board and the Town Council, including Council Chairwoman Melissa H. Engel, have repeatedly said a no vote will be interpreted as a sign the budget is too high and must be cut.

But Sones said the council and the board arent listening to what residents are saying: You cant keep cutting town and the education budgets.

I hope they are listening to the voices of the residents, Sones said.

Because if we are not being listened to, this could go on through four or five budgets.

If they continue to cut, Ill continue to vote no, she added.

For his part, Dr. Richard Brown, the newly-elected chairman of the finance board, complained of not being able to establish viable communication with some of the more empathic education supporters.

The weight of the defeat fell most heavily upon Maniscalco and Director of Finance Jeffrey M. Jylkka.

Were doing some research to see what options are available to us, Maniscalco said.

In the meantime, he said regardless of the outcome of the vote, I think the public servants in this community have a responsibility to provide for our residents health safety and welfare.
NEW HAVEN  If you have a sense of history, you may want to bunk down in a building resonating with a number of important firsts in New Haven.

The NHR Group is in the process of converting several floors of the mid-19th century Palladium Building at 139 Orange St. into apartments, a commercial site that over the years housed important institutions.

Before a tour of the renovations, which are ongoing, Juan Salas-Romer, a partner in the NHR Group with Noel Petra, gave an update on one aspect of their business.

They are seeking approvals for Heights on the River, a 59-apartment and retail complex on East Grand Avenue that would be the gateway to Fair Haven Heights.

Salas-Romer said that development is part of a five-year, 500-unit initiative to boost middle-income apartments for workers in New Haven so they can be closer to their jobs rather than having to commute from the suburbs.

He said Heights on the River is focused on families or individuals with household income between $40,000 and $70,000. Salas-Romer said they are looking at other neighborhoods to determine where they next will focus .

The developer said the goal is to provide housing, particularly for teachers, in the neighborhoods where they teach so they become part of the social fabric there.

Salas-Romer said they like to approach housing in a holistic way.

The renovation of the Palladium, when finished, will include seven studios, ranging from 550 square feet to almost 700 square feet, with lofts that can be used for living or storage space.

There will be two, one-bedroom apartments and one, two-bedroom unit that is the length of the building.

The Palladium Building, believed to have been designed by noted New Haven architect Henry Austin, who also designed City Hall, was built in 1855-56 for the Young Mens Institute.

The institute had a rotating series of tenants, owners and visitors over the years associated with education, the abolitionist movement, national political and civic leaders and newspapers.

The institute was a kind of debating society where adults could make use of its large-volume library to discuss literature and history, according to Colin Caplan, an architect and local historian.

The members of the institute were a group of men, and eventually women, who expanded their gramnar school education by listening to prominent speakers of the day.

Among those who stopped by were Ralph Waldo Emerson, Frederick Douglass and Henry Ward Beecher.

They were very much on the abolitionists side,  Caplan said of the members.

Then, in 1859, the first high school in New Haven was located on the top floor of the five-story building.

The institute left the location during the Civil War and in 1864 the Home Insurance Co. took over, a firm that was responsible for building the double row of townhouses along Court Street in 1864.

The president of the board of the institute in 1855 was a prominent New Haven businessman, Oliver Winchester, Caplan said, who ran Winchester Repeating Arms, a company, which in its heyday decades later, employed some 20,000 workers.

He was all about promoting education for workers. He wanted his workers to be smarter, not just follow the rules, but to learn and become better workers, he said

From 1871-91, the New Haven Daily Palladium newspaper functioned there, a business that gave the Renaissance Revival-Italinate-style structure its name.

Some of the events Caplan mentioned are connected with the businesses, but not necessarily when they were in the Palladium Building, or with prominent figures, who were tied to James F. Babcock, the Palladium editor.

The publication favored the anti-slavery movement and Babcock was responsible for bringing presidential candidate Abraham Lincoln to New Haven to speak in 1860, when it was located elsewhere.

Lincoln was roaming around this area, Caplan said, having stayed at Babcocks house on Olive Street for two days.

Caplan said the Palladium was the largest newspaper in the city and state.

The historian said one of Babcocks colleagues was Augusta Gussie Lewis Troup, for whom a New Haven school in the Dwight neighborhood is named.

Born an orphan in New York City, as an adult, she married the publisher of the New Haven Union and became an editor of the publication.

She was the voice of the paper in the 1880s. Imagine that, Caplan said.

He said Troup was a suffragist who believed in workers having a voice in the workplace, and started the first typographical union in New Haven.

Caplan, a historic building consultant with Magrisso Forte, said Troup was called the little mother of the Italian colony for her work helping female factory workers.

All this happened because of, or due to, the events and people and activities that happened from this building, Caplan said. Some it we are stretching, but we can actually relate people and activities to a greater sense of community.

Caplan has written six books on New Havens history and is the founder and owner of Taste of New Haven, which provides culinary tours, classes, and events, as well as the Elm City Party Bike, according to The Institute Library.

mary.oleary@hearstmediact.com; 203-641-2577
Editors note: This is the 44th story in the Registers Top 50 series.

Countless products, ideas and works of art have been produced in New Haven and by its sons and daughters. Inventors in New Haven have contributed to the growth of industries such as manufacturing, textiles, food, automobiles and others.

The culture of innovation is connected with one of the areas most famous and influential residentsEli Whitney. His inventions, born out of need, shaped history in ways the inventor could not anticipate. He is integrally tied with the history and economic development of New Haven, with a section of town, a school and a main thoroughfare being named for this man.

Was New Haven a particularly innovative place? I would argue that it was, said Bill Brown, director of the Eli Whitney Museum. It was connected to Eli Whitney. ... The way that people worked here, it had a powerful contribution to their lives.

An inventor is made

Born in Massachusetts to a farmer, Whitney didnt want to follow in his fathers footsteps, so at 23 he attended Yale University to study law. But after graduation he still hadnt found his calling and, eager to establish himself, took a tutoring position in South Carolina that promised good pay, according to the museum. On his trip south, Whitney found out his agreed-upon salary was to be halved and refused the job, instead taking an job offer from a woman he was traveling with who was a widow of a Revolutionary War general. She invited Whitney to stay at her plantation in Georgia.

All who knew him would concede: he was an artful mechanic, according to the Eli Whitney Museum website.

It was there in Georgia that Whitney invented the machine for which he is most famous, one that changed the southern and northern economies dramatically  the cotton gin. The device produced more cotton in an hour than what could be produced by multiple workers in a day. Whitney planned to install his machine on plantations throughout the South and collecting a portion of the profits, the museums history recounts.

By the time hed put a patent on it, it was too late, said Jason Bischoff-Wurstle, director of photo archives at the New Haven Museum. Whitneys machine had been copied by farmers all over by the time he was awarded a patent in 1794. He was caught up in litigation and overall he didnt really make a profit from the cotton gin. But as we know, it became arguably the most revolutionary invention in American history. It helped establish America as it was at that point.

Southern planters reaped financial windfalls from the invention while Whitney made almost no profit, even after he received monetary settlements from some states. While the cotton business boomed, it made keeping people enslaved a more viable business model. Whitney didnt intend for his invention to propel slavery, but it made the cotton business more efficient and, in turn, profitable, Bischoff-Wurstle said. Whitney saw his invention as something beneficial for farmers and thought it would replace the need for slaves.

He imagined cotton picking was difficult by hand and it would eventually be replaced by a machine, Brown said. People were solving problems everywhere, but he didnt imagine slavery would go on for 100 years.

More than any other one man, he shaped the opposing faces of both the North and South for a half-century to come, according to the Eli Whitney Muesum website. But Whitney didnt live long enough to see the start of the Civil War. He died in 1825.

Having slaves was not efficient, Bischoff-Wurstle said. His outlook was that this would make more sense and it would be better for people. You could just make this machine and have less people and be better off. It was around the time slavery was slowing down, but it had an inverse effect. The cotton gin made slavery more viable.

His motivation was to establish himself, Brown said. But never able to do that with the cotton gin, he returned to New Haven, resolving to start over.

Whitneys factory

Unsure of what to do, Whitney was fortunate enough to have been noticed by Thomas Jefferson, who wanted America to produce its own arms. In June 1798, Whitney signed a contract with the government to produce 10,000 muskets in two years, according to the museum. In doing so, he became Americas first arms dealer. Whitney was not an experienced gunmaker but had the idea to make all parts of a musket interchangeable in the field. To accomplish it, though, he would have to create a system of manufacturing each part to the same specifications.

At the time, muskets were built by individual craftsmen, with each weapon having a unique design, and Whitney faced a shortage of skilled and affordable craftsman to fulfill the contract, according to the museum. Pushed by necessity, he created tools that would to ease the skill required of workers.

If youre going to have 65 people collaborate, theyre going to have to have tools to guide their work, so that person can deliver it with accuracy, Brown said. For each part of the gun, a template was made, so a worker could follow the pattern in cutting a piece of metal. Each worker only needed to master making a few parts.

He did not know at first in which direction to go, but he was about to enter the less celebrated but most fruitful time of his life; and just as he had changed the face of the South, he was now about to mold the face of the North into a form it has kept ever since, according to the museum website. He was to lay the foundation and invent the techniques for what has become known as the American System of Manufacture.

He built his factory at the border of Hamden and New Haven where he was able to harness water to power the milling machines used to create the parts. This area became known as Whitneyville as people came to live around the factory where they worked. It became a quintessential picture of where people lived while they were learning trades in the factory, Brown said. Neighborhoods that surround factories are replicated all around New Haven now.

The Industrial Revolution had begun in England, but Whitneys factory marked the beginnings of the American Industrial Revolution. Both the cotton gin and system of interchangeable parts were early drivers of industry in America.

We celebrate Henry Ford for creating assembly and mass production, but really Eli Whitney came up with thatFord sped things up 100 years later, Bischoff-Wurstle said. Whitney added to this notion of fast moving, that Americans can move at a quicker rate and get things done, mixed with their Protestant notion that we had to keep working.

Whitney invented out of need. He took the contract with the government because he was looking for a way to establish himself and invented a new method of manufacturing to fulfill that contract. His system of interchangeable parts wasnt as important to him as the tools he fashioned to make those parts, Brown said. This work strategy shaped manufacturing in the 19th century.

In doing so he created the new American era of industry between the gin and the uniformity system he created, Bischoff-Wurstle said. At the beginning of the 19th century, he put America on the map as this brand new tech visionary with what he was doing.

That toolmaking business, Whitney realized, was the essence of his work here, Brown said. Once you learn the power to make things in industrial fashion, a product of your ability to make tools, you have a new technical language. You have tools to make anything  make guns, clocks, or make hardware. You begin to develop this set of universal skills.

By 1808 Whitney realized his factory was also a type of school that produced a new kind of worker, Brown said.

Inspiring other makers

Whitney inspired a culture of problem-solving in New Haven. His armory was relatively small, particularly in the time he was alive, with only 65 workers, but it produced people that were part of a geometric growth of industry in the area. As he employed more people, he taught them how to build and create and became a figurehead for innovation.

He was seen as this new American leader, embodied that new American spirit that people were celebrating, Bischoff-Wurstle said. His inventions pushed the barriers and continued through his family.

Recently incorporated as a city in 1784, New Haven was becoming a place where people saw and emulated workers who were able to master production, Brown said. Developing a capacity to make things builds on itself and is what the Industrial Revolution is about. The Industrial Revolution came out of solving problems, he said, and after Whitneys development of tools, factories could get a worker who could use tools that produced efficiency.

His factory, along with the lively clock-making and brass hardware sectors, contributed early on to making the state a powerful manufacturing economy. It became known as the arsenal of America because so many arms manufacturers took root in New Haven, Brown said. The factory stayed in business for 80 years, with Whitneys nephews and, later, son, Eli Whitney Jr., running the business after his father died. It was in his factory that Samuel Colt  inventor of the automatic revolver  manufactured his first pistol in 1846.

There was this remarkable proliferation, Brown said of the number of factories to spring up after Whitneys did.

Many other machinists and firearms designers would go on to establish successful firearms manufacturing companies in New Haven, including Oliver Winchester, who eventually bought the Whitney Armory and established the Winchester Arms Co., which became one of New Havens largest employers.

His legacy has such a strength to it, Bischoff-Wurstle said. Locally, his legacy intertwined with the development of the community. His family added to that legacy and created their own, as well.

The factory is now the Eli Whitney Museum, which emphasizes hands-on learning for children. Brown said the museum identifies projects for kids who want to learn differently and want to move while they work instead of sitting down all the time.

At the museum, we think the lesson to be observed in Whitneys process is the workplace was a powerful educating place, Brown said. We argue, as Whitney did, that schooling with paper in front of you is learning but not equal to education.

More innovation

There are dozens of other people either born in the New Haven area or who lived here later in their lives who can be credited with many well-known innovative creations. Landmark items such as Americas first national currency, the first telephone company, and toy construction set can all be linked with the city.

George Coy, who lived in Milford and worked in New Haven, is known as the inventor of the first commercial telephone exchange. Coy was inspired by a talk Alexander Graham Bell gave in 1877 when he came to New Haven to demonstrate the telephone, which he had invented the prior year, so Coy started researching the commercial application of Bells invention. He started the first telephone company, The District Telephone Co., in 1878, run out of a small, rented office in the Boardman Building at the corner of Chapel and State streets in New Haven. Coy served as secretary and superintendent of the company and the first switchboard was built according to Coys design.

The famous lexicographer Noah Webster attended Yale and lived in New Haven where he published his first dictionary, A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language, in 1801 and began writing the well-known expanded version, An American Dictionary of the English Language. Webster was the first person to define the words Americans use as a way to unify the country and distinguish itself from England. It took Webster 22 years to complete this feat.

It was a New Haven son, Charles Goodyear, who, around 1884, invented vulcanized rubber, which involves mixing natural rubber with additives such as sulfur and other curatives to make rubber stronger, more flexible and more resistant to heat and other environmental conditions. The Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. is named after him. He is buried in the Grove Street Cemetery.

Whitneys own legacy of innovation continued directly through his family line. His nephews  Eli Whitney Blake and Philos Blake  are to thank for the invention of the stone crusher and corkscrew, respectively. At the time, workers used hand hammers to crush stones used to build roads, but Eli Blake solved this costly and labor-intensive problem by mechanical means with his steam-powered stone crusher. They also were awarded the first patent for a furniture caster, among others for locks and latches. The Blake brothers had gained invaluable civil and mechanical engineering skills working in their uncles arms factory, which they continued to run for 10 years after Whitneys death.

Just in the family you get this evolution into different realms of technology and innovation, Brown said. It connects his legacy in a pure way. He invested in them and they went off to create success in their own right.

New Haven also claims certain food inventions, such as the hamburger and the lollipop.

Modern inventors

Whitneys and others innovative spirits live on in New Haven and remain part of the citys culture that allows entrepreneurship to grow in many realms. In the last few decades, there has been a revolution of products, Brown said. He pointed no further than the community workshop MakeHaven to find modern inventors.

If you visit MakeHaven, theres this instinct to create things, Brown said.

We keep pretending that making and inventing is in the world of factories, its complete nonsense. Making things is human impulse and it will eventually influence our ways of doing things, Brown said. The spirit that was here in (Whitneys) time is resurrected in MakeHaven and adults saying that in spite of the bias of being an artisan, Im going to do that. Its absolutely important because thats how people are made. We too narrowly define education and dont honor people who make things.

mdignan@hearstmediact.com
Net neutrality is a big deal for Connecticut. What is net neutrality, you might be asking. Simply put, it is the basic principle of the internet that declares Internet Service Providers or ISPs should not control how consumers lawfully use that network and should not be able to discriminate against content provider access to that network. ISPs must deliver all data equally to us, their customers, and provide a level playing field on the internet. Netflix, the Weather Channel, makeup blogs, and sporting sites are all treated equally with regard to supply and speed of delivery.

The Trump administration made a decision earlier this year to repeal net neutrality. It reversed neutrality requirements, now allowing for paid prioritization, throttling and blocking of information. A consumer may now find that some internet content can now be blocked or slowed down by providers  if you want it or you want it faster, you can be made to pay more for it. It could also mean that if an ISP has a political or religious agenda, material that you might want could be made more difficult to find.
A building superintendent was charged Wednesday with the hit-and-run death of a man outside the Garfield group home where the victim lived, officials said.

Investigators determined that the 1999 Chevy Suburban that hit Giovanni Rivera, 42, and left the scene on Monday night was driven by Paul Frischer, 59, of Franklin Lakes, acting Bergen County Prosecutor's Dennis Calo said in a release.

Paul Frischer, 59, of Franklin Lakes (Bergen County Prosecutor's Office)

Police found Rivera lying in the road in front of 465 MacArthur Ave. with serious injuries. He was taken to Hackensack University Medical Center, where he died early Wednesday morning.

His brother, Thomas Rivera, said in an interview that his brother had special needs and "lived in a group home in Garfield right where the accident happened."

The Suburban was captured on surveillance video, which also showed that it was missing its passenger side-view mirror and had "possible damage to the right side of the bumper, hood and windshield," police said.

Several photos and a short video of the SUV driving in the area where released by the prosecutor's office Tuesday night.

Frischer was charged with leaving the scene of an accident resulting in death, endangering an injured victim and other offenses, officials said.

He was taken to Bergen County Jail and his first appearance at Central Judicial Processing Court in Hackensack was scheduled for Thursday at 9 a.m.

Chris Sheldon may be reached at csheldon@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @chrisrsheldon Find NJ.com on Facebook.
A man and woman from Connecticut were charged Wednesday with breaking into the USS Ling, a World War II-era submarine and museum moored in the Hackensack River.

Jon P. Stevens, 48, and Laura B. Palmese, 38, parked their car at the Heritage Diner on River Street on Aug. 11, jumped into the river and swam to the submarine, according to police Capt. Peter Busciglio.

Once inside, the two stole a lantern and a medical corps lieutenant's shoulder lapel, Busciglio said.

Stevens, of West Haven, and Palmese, of Colchester, were charged with burglary and theft, police said.

Police on Thursday released photos of the suspects captured on security videos taken inside the submarine.

In August, the submarine was targeted by vandals who opened hatches and attempted to sink the vessel.

Stevens and Palmese have not been charged in that incident, police said.

Busciglio said the investigation is ongoing.

The USS Ling, launched in 1945, has been sitting on the banks of the Hackensack River since 1971. The submarine is shown in a file photo.

Anthony G. Attrino may be reached at tattrino@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @TonyAttrino. Find NJ.com on Facebook.
Q. How easy or hard is to establish residency in a different state? I believe there are 13 states that don't tax Social Security or pensions, offering a distinct advantage for retirees. Then some don't tax income either, like Florida. Should I get out?

-- Thinking of leaving

A. Taxes are a huge factor for New Jersey retirees. Many choose to move to a lower-tax state so they can keep more of their money.

Recent tax changes make this decision even more tempting,

"In light of changes to both the deductibility of state and local taxes on a federal level, as well as the additional burden of state taxes, many individuals such as yourself choose to move to states that have less onerous - or no - state taxes," said Matthew Rheingold, an attorney with Einhorn Harris in Denville..

But, he said, simply purchasing a new home in a different state is not enough to establish residency and avoid New Jersey income tax.

Rheingold said there has been a substantial increase in the enforcement of resident/nonresident income tax audits and claims against taxpayers over the last few years. Each state requires you to take additional affirmative steps to prove that you have, in fact, severed your ties with the state that you have called your "home," he said.

For New Jersey income tax purposes, your residency status largely depends on where you were domiciled and where you maintained a permanent home during the course of the entire calendar year.

"Domicile is often confused with residency; however, domicile requires physical presence in the state with the intent to make that state your fixed or permanent home," he said. "It refers to any place you regard as your permanent home, or the place where you intend to return after a period of absence, such as a vacation, business assignment or for education."

You may only have one domicile at a time and the burden of proof is upon you, as the taxpayer, to demonstrate that you have changed your domicile, he said.

Here's how that works.

A taxpayer is presumed to be domiciled in his or her domiciliary state until a new domicile is acquired, Rheingold said.

"It is imperative that you as the taxpayer show that the necessary intention existed to abandon your domicile in New Jersey and establish a fixed and permanent home in another location," he said. "Moving to a new location, even for a long time, does not change your domicile if you intend to return to your original domicile."

Rheingold said there is no one test to determine whether you have changed your domicile.

Instead, intent to change domicile is largely based upon facts and circumstances, including, but not limited to, voter registration, bank accounts, maintenance of driver's license and car registration, mailing address, the purchase or sale of a home, the location of children's school and the location of personal belongings. Also considered is whether a taxpayer's job is temporary or permanent and whether the taxpayer has sold/rented his or her home in New Jersey.

"If you are a domiciliary of New Jersey, you are a resident for income tax purposes, and all of your income, regardless of its source, will be subject to state income tax," he said.

Nevertheless, even if you are successful in changing your domicile, if you return to New Jersey for more than 183 days during a calendar year and maintain a permanent place of abode in New Jersey, you will be classified as a statutory resident, Rheingold said.

"Under New Jersey law, statutory residents are subject to state income taxes on all of their income, whether earned inside or outside the state," he said. "Partial days count as full days for income tax purposes. In addition, New Jersey allocates travel days as New Jersey days for income tax purposes."

Those who are not "domiciled" in the state of New York but work in New York should be wary of New York's statutory residency laws, Rheingold said.

"Those taxpayers that are not domiciled in New York but own a permanent place of abode in New York and are present in the state for more than 183 days in any given year then are considered a statutory resident," he said. "As such, under New York law, similar to New Jersey, even if you are a domiciliary of another state, New York will tax the all of the taxpayer's income, including any income earned outside of the state."

New York will also count any part of a day in the state as a full day, he said.

During a statutory residency audit the burden will always lie with the taxpayer to prove their whereabouts every single day of the year, Rheingold said.

"Auditors can request cell phone bills, credit card statements, bank statements, airline tickets and E-ZPass records in order to review a taxpayer's days in a state," he said.

Email your questions to Ask@NJMoneyHelp.com.

Karin Price Mueller writes the Bamboozled column for NJ Advance Media and is the founder of NJMoneyHelp.com. Follow NJMoneyHelp on Twitter @NJMoneyHelp. Find NJMoneyHelp on Facebook. Sign up for NJMoneyHelp.com's weekly e-newsletter.
The new season is open at the McCarter with an elegantly directed, stylishly staged and keenly performed rendition of a drab old love story.

"The Age of Innocence" is pretty to look at, to be sure, but any hope of connecting with or being moved by these characters relies upon embracing the peculiar conditions of a world long gone, a world that was never very justifiable in the first place. The leap to empathy here is, as a result, quite long.

Adapted for the stage by Douglas McGrath from Edith Wharton's 1921 Pulitzer-winning novel, "The Age of Innocence" tells the story of poor Newland Archer (Andrew Veenstra as a young man, Boyd Gaines as his elder self), beset by dashing good looks, seemingly limitless money, a seat at the most exclusive tables in Gilded Age New York society, and the love of two beautiful women.

Engaged to marry May Welland (Helen Cespedes) and unite two of New York's finest families, Archer finds himself enchanted by his fiancee's cousin, Ellen (Sierra Boggess), recently returned to America after scandalously leaving her wealthy European husband. Ellen and Newland develop feelings for one another, both are hopelessly wracked by the effect any relationship they develop may have on faithful, charming May, and, well ... that's about it. As the stifling conditions of polite society oppress Newland and Ellen, the play asks us to invest fully -- and only -- in their romantic angst.

Wharton was regularly critical of high-class society (of which she was a part), but the problem with this adaptation is its lack of the novelist's self-awareness. There is no sense here that the play ever calls into question the fabricated and unsustainable social conditions of the idle rich (the very class of people at whose expense Oscar Wilde had such great fun). Instead, it attempts to transport audiences into a world governed by those very conditions.

That effect is heightened by the presence of an excellent Gaines as elder narrator, removed from the society that he brings to life with his words but nonetheless affected by something of an elegiac mood for a time gone by. He is on occasion self- and community-deprecating, a subtlety that Gaines captures expertly, but on the whole his story reignites in him unrequited feelings of longing and self-pity. The elder Newland paints his younger self as the long-suffering but faithful husband deserving great admiration for not leaving his fiancee for her cousin, although he pined to do so to such a great degree.

Perhaps it is due in part to the accelerated pace of this 100-minute rendition of Wharton's novel, but that admiration never seems justified.

Admirably, though, set against John Lee Beatty's striking scenic design, director Doug Hughes makes those 100 minutes feel more like a carefully choreographed ballet than a thin love story. The production's large ensemble moves with purpose and grace as Hughes coaxes out of them the fullest picture of their character. Although these characters lack the depth of their novelistic counterparts, Hughes' cast does important work to find the humanity in their roles. The play and its drama benefit from a constant underscoring by on-stage pianist Yan Li, adding a welcome layer of energy to the proceedings, and Linda Cho's costumes are at once sharp and whimsical.

On the sensory level, there is much to enjoy about this production. It is a living and loving requiem for a departed age. But in that regard, it works more as pageant than compelling drama.

THE AGE OF INNOCENCE

McCarter Theatre

91 University Place, Princeton

Tickets: Available online at www.mccarter.org or by phone at 609-258-2787. Running through Oct. 7.

Patrick Maley may be reached at patrickjmaley@gmail.com. Find him on Twitter and Instagram @PatrickJMaley. Find NJ.com/Entertainment on Facebook.
Federal prosecutors on Thursday announced drug and weapons charges against six alleged Newark heroin traffickers in what they said was the latest offensive on violent criminals in the city.

The U.S. Attorney's Office, in a statement, said Andre Mims, Herbert Cheeks, Anthony Woods, Gregory Mims, James Thomas and Freddie Mims were members of a drug-trafficking organization that sold heroin to customers from throughout the state.

Prosecutors identified Cheeks, 52, and Andre Mims, 42, as the leaders of the drug ring, which became the target of state and federal investigators at least as early as December, according to documents filed in Newark federal court by a Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) task force officer.

The investigation ultimately grew to include the use of court-authorized wiretaps and undercover officers, who purchased more than 1,800 packets of heroin from Mims and Thomas, 51, between December and March, the officer wrote.

Cheeks, Andre Mims and Gregory Mims, 43, all of East Orange, were charged by the Essex County prosecutor's narcotics task force in May following raids that resulted in the seizure of roughly $80,000 worth of heroin, cocaine and marijuana, authorities said at the time.

Detectives also seized $10,000 cash, three handguns and eleven cellphones while executing the search warrants, which -- according to a federal criminal complaint unsealed Thursday -- targeted a store and a residence in Irvington and another home in East Orange.

Prosecutors indicated Gregory and Freddy Mims were scheduled to make their first appearances in federal court Thursday afternoon, while Andre Mims, who is being held at the Essex County jail, was scheduled to appear in court on Sept. 25.

Cheeks, Woods, 54, of Newark, and Thomas, of the Bronx, New York, remained at large as of Thursday morning, authorities said.

All of the men face charges of conspiring to distribute heroin or actually distributing it, while Cheeks and Andre Mims have also been charged with possessing firearms as convicted felons.

It was not immediately clear whether any of the men had attorneys who could comment on the charges.

Thomas Moriarty may be reached at tmoriarty@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter at @ThomasDMoriarty. Find NJ.com on Facebook.

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A school bus driver who hit five cars, two traffic poles and a fire hydrant in East Orange and Orange on Tuesday morning has been charged with driving under the influence, police said Thursday.

The driver, 52-year-old Wayne Carmichel of Paterson, was driving the bus between 8:10 a.m. and 8:30 a.m. when the accidents occurred, said East Orange spokesperson Connie Jackson.

An 11-year-old child and a bus aide were on the bus at the time of the crashes, Jackson said.

Carmichel was the only one injured, she said.

Jackson did not say which school the driver was taking the child when the accidents happened.

The first four accidents were in East Orange. The first happened at Park and North Arlington avenues, the second was on William Street, the third was on North Oraton Parkway and the fourth accident was at Springdale and Glenwood avenues, where a vehicle that the bus collided with was severely damaged.

The last accident was at Dodd Street and Thomas Boulevard in Orange Township, officials said.

Carmichel was also issued a summons for driving with a suspended license and reckless driving, Jackson said.

Essex County Prosecutor's Office spokesperson Kathy Carter said their office also charged Carmichael with endangering the welfare of a child.

The company that Carmichael drivers for, A1 Elegant Tours, is owned by Paterson councilman Shelim Khalique.

The Paterson Times reported that for the 2016-17 school year A1 Elegant Tours secured $1.58 million in contracts even though the company has infractions for lack of cameras on buses, drivers without commercial licenses and no aides.

The company was banned earlier this year by the Paterson School Board after a teacher reported missing students and the driver discovered a student sleeping on the back of the bus, according to schools Superintendent Eileen Shafer.

Representatives from A1 Elegant Tours did not immediately return request for comment Thursday afternoon.

Taylor Tiamoyo Harris may be reached at tharris@njadvancemedia.com. Follow her on Twitter @ladytiamoyo.

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A Mantua Township dentist was arrested Wednesday after a woman who works there found a hidden camera in the employee bathroom, police said.

Robert Hofstetter, 69, of Mantua Township, was charged with invasion of privacy after the woman, and some fellow employees, went to the Washington Township Police Department at 4:30 p.m. and told them about her discovery, according to a release from the department.

Police did not release any other details about the incident.

Hofstetter's practice is called Hofstetter Family Dentistry and is located at 400 Ganttown Road. He is the only dentist who works there and is the only employee listed on the office web site.

He was released pending a court appearance.

Chris Sheldon may be reached at csheldon@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @chrisrsheldon Find NJ.com on Facebook.
BAYONNE -- A city cop has filed a notice of tort claim against the city claiming that a fellow officer caused more than $1,500 in damages after he drove a police vehicle into his parked car.

Terrence Joynt, a Bayonne police lieutenant, filed the notice of tort claim on Aug. 21. The City Council accepted the filing during its meeting last week.

Joynt declined to comment when reached by phone.

Joynt alleges in his tort claim that on Aug. 7, Geoge Ponik, a Bayonne police officer, was driving a police command truck when he backed it up into Joynt's personal vehicle near the intersection of East 22nd Street and Church Lane.

His vehicle, a 2009 Toyota Corolla, sustained $1,567 in damages to the front bumper and headlamp, according to the tort claim.

Joynt also cites the cost of renting a car while his car was being repaired.

Ponik could not be immediately reached for comment. The Bayonne Police Department declined to comment.

To file a claim against a public agency in New Jersey, a notice of that claim must be sent within 90 days of the incident or event.

Corey W. McDonald may be reached at cmcdonald@jjournal.com. Follow him on Twitter @coreymacc. Find The Jersey Journal on Facebook.
Hoboken on Wednesday unveiled an initiative months in the making that the city's mayor, Ravi Bhalla, said will address the problem of rising numbers of homeless people in Hoboken and countywide.

The program is one that Bhalla told The Jersey Journal will be meaningful and groundbreaking, one that could serve as a model for cities nationwide. Partnering with local companies, nonprofits and other government agencies, the city intends to help create the city's first all-access food pantry, install "donation meters" that will allow pedestrians to donate spare change to the Hoboken homeless shelter and more.

"Ours is the wealthiest nation in human history and yet in Hoboken simply walking our streets we are reminded daily that not everyone enjoys the benefits from the success of our community," Bhalla said Wednesday when he announced the initiative.

Wednesday's unveiling came at the Brennan courthouse in Jersey City, as state and county officials announced the start of a state program funded by Hoboken University Medical Center and Jersey City Medical Center that would give 25 homeless people $10,000 vouchers each to pay for temporary housing.

Bhalla said his chief of staff, John Allen, spearheaded that initiative.

Hoboken will also work with Hoboken Community Center to create a food pantry at the former YMCA location, thanks to a $10,000 donation from MBS Housing, and will give office space on Willow Avenue to Easterseals. That nonprofit will offer employment services for adults with special needs and training for seniors looking to re-enter the workforce.

"We're making sure that people do not end up becoming homeless in the first place," Bhalla said.

Our Lady of Grace operates a food pantry for single mothers, but the new one will be open to anyone.

Allen, an Easterseals board member, told The Jersey Journal he recused himself from discussions over the office space, which was given to Hoboken by developers of the Harlow apartment building.

Finally, in upcoming weeks the city will install parking meters that have been refurbished and given to the city by IPS Group to use as "donation meters." The idea is if you have spare change but prefer not to give it to a homeless person directly, you can drop it in one of the meters, which will be emptied by the United Way of Hudson County and the proceeds donated to the homeless shelter.

Panhandling on city streets has become more "acute," Bhalla said, and the donation meters will give people a way to contribute without worrying about what their donation is being spent on.

"You don't know where that money is going," the mayor said. "And it's also a quality-of-life issue."

The initiative comes out of a task force Bhalla created after he became mayor in January.

The city asks that anyone wishing to be a part of the anti-homelessness initiative to contact Caroline Caulfield, the city's constituent affairs chief, at ccaulfield@hobokennj.gov.

Terrence T. McDonald may be reached at tmcdonald@jjournal.com. Follow him on Twitter @terrencemcd. Find The Jersey Journal on Facebook.
A Hudson County woman is accused of paying Hoboken residents to cast mail-in ballots for particular candidates in what federal authorities describe as a voter bribery scheme.

Lizaida Camis, 55, of Hoboken is charged with violating the Travel Act for causing mail to be used to aid voter bribery. Craig Carpenito, the U.S. Attorney for New Jersey, said Camis paid voters $50 in 2013 to apply for vote by mail ballots and then cast them for candidates whose campaigns employed her.

Camis provided these voters with vote by mail applications, delivered the completed applications to the Hudson County Clerk's office, and then went to the voters' homes once the ballots were mailed to them. In some cases, she told them how to vote, Carpenito said.

From October through November 2013, Camis promised the voters that they would be paid $50 for casting their mail-in ballots and told them that they could pick up their checks after the Nov. 5 election at an office on Jefferson Street, officials said. Bank records indicate that voters living in Hoboken received $50 checks from entities associated with the campaigns that employed Camis, Carpenito said.

A criminal complaint charging Camis with the offense cites three different Hoboken voters who told authorities they were paid for their votes at the direction of Camis.

In the city's municipal election that November, Mayor Dawn Zimmer won re-election by defeating Assemblyman Ruben Ramos and Councilman Tim Occhipinti. Voters also decided to keep the city's rent control in place -- a result that a local group later challenged unsuccessfully in New Jersey Superior Court.

A spokesman for the U.S. Attorney's Office could not provide which candidates or campaigns employed Camis.

Camis was arrested Thursday and made her first appearance on the charge in Newark federal court. She faces a maximum penalty of five years in prison and a $250,000 fine.

Carpenito said the investigation was conducted by special agents from the FBI and U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Mayor Ravi Bhalla issued a statement praising the law enforcement agencies involved and condemning abuse of the system.

"Voting by mail is a tool that is intended to aid voters but instead has been rampantly abused by corrupt political campaigns,'' he said. "Today's official statement by the United States Attorney's office proves what we've known for years -- candidates and campaigns will do anything, including bribing voters, to illegally influence elections here in Hoboken.

"Quite simply, buying votes is an unlawful act that undermines our democracy, and must end once and for all.''
JERSEY CITY -- Multiple law enforcement agencies converged at two locations Thursday afternoon as the hunt for the person or people responsible for the death of a Ferris High School student heated up.

Jersey City police and members of the Hudson County Prosecutor's Office's homicide unit were on a rooftop in the area of Union Street and Clerk Street around noon searching for the gun used in the shooting of 17-year-old Jayden Fondeur. The weapon was not found.

Jayden was shot in the neck and head at 6:25 p.m. on Sept. 18 while he was standing with others outside a convenience store at the corner of Old Bergen Road and Pamrapo Avenue. Members of his family said it was a drive-by shooting and they do not believe Jayden was the intended target.

The Hudson County Prosecutor's Office has declined to comment on the assertion by the family, or provide any details on the second fatal shooting in the area in a two-week span. On Sept. 4, 23-year-old Eric Crocker was shot dead on Lembeck Avenue, nine blocks from the site of Tuesday's incident. Two people have been arrested in that homicide.

After the unsuccessful rooftop search Thursday, officers from the JCPD, Prosecutor's Office and the K-9 unit of the Hudson County Sheriff's Office searched behind a building on Union Street near MLK Drive. Again, the search was unsuccessful. A source with information about the investigation confirmed that authorities were searching for the gun used in Tuesday's fatal shooting.

HCPO spokesman Ray Worrall said the investigation is ongoing, but declined to comment on today's activity.
JERSEY CITY -- A second man has been charged in connection to the murder of a 23-year-old Bayonne man who ran for his life before being shot multiple times in Jersey City on Sept. 4.

Alexander Harris, 29, is charged with murdering Eric Crocker, who was shot around 5:55 p.m. and found in the roadway at Lembeck and Ocean avenues. He was pronounced dead at the 6:30 p.m. at Jersey City Medical Center, Suarez said.

Harris is also charged with conspiracy to commit murder and weapons offenses related to a firearm. On Saturday, Jahmir Thomas, 20, also of Jersey City, was arrested on identical charges in connection to the homicide, officials said.

Crocker was sitting on a staircase when he "began frantically running west on Lembeck Ave. followed by the suspected shooter..." the criminal complaint states, apparently based on security video.

The shooter then ran from the scene and in the area of Garfield and Pearsall avenues he took off the garment covering his face, as well as his gloves and hat, and put them under a vehicle, according to the criminal complaint.

He then crossed the street and got into a minivan through a sliding side door. The vehicle then drove away and stopped at Ocean and Neptune avenues. There, Harris got out of the driver side door and jogged over to a store, the complaint states.

A man identified at Thomas slid into the driver's seat and when Harris returned he entered through passenger side door. The minivan the proceeded to the area of Bergen and Lexington avenues where both Harris and Thomas were seen getting out of the minivan, the complaint says.

The complaint says the license plate of the minivan was clearly visible. The remaining few lines in the court document have been redacted. There was no information on any additional arrests having been made at this time.

The investigation into the murder is ongoing and is being conducted by the Hudson County Prosecutor's Office Homicide Unit with the assistance of the Jersey City Police Department, Suarez added.

Anyone with information is asked to call the homicide detectives at (201) 915- 1345 or leave an anonymous tip at: www.hudsoncountyprosecutorsofficenj.org/homicide-tip/.

All information provided will remain confidential.
UPDATE: All lanes of Route 206 were reopened by 8:30 a.m., though residual delays were expected.

A gas main break near Rider University forced the evacuation of students from campus dorms early Thursday and ongoing repairs are expected to create a traffic mess on Route 206 for the morning rush, officials said.

Some Rider University students were evacuated from residence halls at 2:20 a.m. after construction crews working on Route 206 near the campus' main entrance struck a gas line, Rider spokeswoman Kristine Brown said in an email.

Students were sent to the campus recreation center until 4 a.m. There were no injuries, Brown said. The gas line has been fixed and crews are working to fill the hole in the road.

While the university is open and classes will proceed as normal, the main entrance to the campus remains closed as of 6:30 a.m.

All traffic must enter and exit through our Rider's south entrance, Brown said. Only one lane of Route 206 between Darrah Lane and Interstate 95 will be open until about 9 a.m, Lawrence police said.

The road work that led to the ruptured main was related to the construction of new homes near Cobblestone Creek Country Club, Brown said.

Jeff Goldman may be reached at jeff_goldman@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @JeffSGoldman. Find NJ.com on Facebook.
Airman Apprentice Joseph Naglak with his sister, Stephanie. (Courtesy of Stephanie Blair Naglak)
(Andre Malok | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com)

By Mark Di Ionno | NJ Advance Media

New Jersey is underrated as a place of natural beauty.

Equally, it is overstated as an industrial wasteland.

Our corridor of shipping ports, truck depots and power plants is no grimier than any other big metro supply area. Take a ride between Chicago and Gary, Indiana, someday. Youll see.

Few places in the world absorb as much traffic, by land, sea or air.

Here are a few numbers:

Nearly 44 million people fly in and out of Newark Airport each year on about 432,000 flights.

About 80 million metric tons of cargo come into the ports at Newark and Elizabeth, including 663,000 cars.

NJ Transit and Path trains and buses, and the roads leading to the tunnels carry 400,000 commuters a day.

While New York City might be the heart of the metro area, New Jersey has the arteries that feed it with people, goods, gas and power.

This is about the ballet of movement and the art of architecture in a maligned part of the state.

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View of Port Elizabeth Terminal from Jurgenson Trucking in Bayonne. (Andre Malok | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com)

Laugh if you will, but the visual specialist on this journey was Andre Malok, an NJ Advance Media videographer and award-winning wildlife artist. He sees things differently. How colors and shapes work in concert. How angles create balance. Structure. Composition. All those things that are evident in abundance in our industrial corridors, as his works attests.

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The arc of the Bayonne Bridge. (Andre Malok | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com)

Dawn gives off a translucent glow in New Jerseys late summer humidity. It does not illuminate the Pulaski Skyway. It leaks through a colander of geometric shapes formed by thousands of miles of black steel girders in hundreds of different sizes held fast by millions of rivets.

The skyway is part bridge, part causeway, a 3.5-mile span linking Newark and Jersey City. It is the Alpha beast of the landscape. Visible from everywhere. Towering over everything below. It is the observation deck of the industrial corridor.

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Elevated span of the Pulaski Skyway over Kearny Point. (Andre Malok | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com)

See the red and white shipping cranes of Ports Newark and Elizabeth, that rise off the bay like giant mechanical monsters.

See the huge, round fuel storage tanks that line the shores, and wonder about their explosive power.

See the smokestacks of the powerplants that challenge Pulaskis height. At one, red and white striped cylinder fingers reach for a piece of the sky. At others, the paint scheme lies somewhere between bland and rust. Some are from generating stations, others convert trash into power. Gas or electric.

Either way, we owe the convenience of light, heat, hot water, air conditioning and cooking to these places. Some criticize their ugliness and take them for granted  until the lights go out.

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A plane coming into land at Newark Airport crosses a tank farm in New Jersey's industrial corridor. (Andre Malok | NJ Advance Media)

Downstream, the Turnpike extension bridge carries Route 78 over the Newark Bay. An adjacent swing bridge carries commuter trains below.

Upstream, is the bridge that climbs even with Snake Hill and descends to alongside the Lautenberg Secaucus station.

Counting the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike? The number is infinite. It is part of the asphalt river that runs through New England, the megalopolis and the Southern States of the East Coast.

Planes on their way in and out of Newark Airport are close enough to count windows. They seem to move in slow motion as they cut speed to land. On takeoff, they climb at steep angles, thrusting into the heavens.

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Chrome trucking containers in front of the Pulaski Skyway in Newark. (Andre Malok | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com)

On the truck-beaten streets of the ports, empty containers are stacked like childrens building blocks. Diesel exhaust fumes hang in the air as engines of Macks, Kenworths and Peterbilts roar to pull the weight of their loads.

Those trucks and other vehicles come to die and rust in this eastern end of Newarks Ironbound. A New Jersey Department of Transportation truck with New York plates sits off Doremus Avenue, with high grass surrounding it. Nearby, old trailer beds are stacked up with small trees growing through them. This is the belly of the beast.

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A jet takes off from Newark Airport with cranes at Port Elizabeth Terminal in the foreground. (Andre Malok | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com)

But still, there are elements of art. In a freight yard, tanker trucks with brilliant stainless-steel trailers are parked side by side, like a house of round mirrors.

On Route 440 toward the Bayonne Bridge, the ports are across the bay. Container ships are docked, and the cranes pluck off their cargo. In a bayside park, sunflowers and a butterfly garden are proof that nature survives mans best efforts to stamp it out. Same with the meadowlands abundant and varied grasses.

On the shoreline behind a trucking yard, the old concrete stanchions of a long-lost dock are framed by the shipping cranes. Seagulls sun themselves on pilings.

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Crumbling remains of old peer piling in Newark Bay near Jurgenson Trucking Co. in Bayonne. (Andre Malok | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com)

At another park in Bayonne, an up-close view of the namesake bridge again shows the complex art of the architecture.

It, too, is a thing of beauty. And like much in the industrial corridor, it is mostly taken for granted and not always fully appreciated.

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Smokestacks along the Hackensack River (Andre Malok | NJ Advance Media)

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Read more Mark Di Ionno:

The good, the bad and the naked of NYC tourist season

A shocking murder. A haunted house. All part of N.J. history

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Mark Di Ionno may be reached at mdiionno@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @MarkDiIonno. Find NJ.com on Facebook.
A Somerset County doctor is facing 10 years in prison after admitting he wrote fake prescriptions that funneled thousands of oxycodone pills to a drug ring.

George Beecher was arrested and charged as part of the New Jersey Attorney General's Office's "Operation Busted Script" investigation, announed in late 2015. He pleaded guilty in the case Wednesday, in Middlesex County, the office said.

Beecher, 77, of New Providence, worked as an ear, nose and throat specialist based in Warren, where he wrote hundreds of fake prescriptions over the course of two and a half years.

Dr. George Beecher.

Authorities said he supplied tens of thousands of the highly-addictive opioid painkillers to patients he never examined, treated, or even met.

In addition to the possible prison time - prosecutors are asking for 10 years in a plea bargain - Beecher must also permanently surrender his medical license.

"Doctors like Beecher who prescribe opioids for illegal distribution are at least as culpable as the drug dealers they supply, because they use their licenses not to heal, but to inflict incalculable harm," Attorney General Grewal said in a statement.

"With so many users starting on the path to opioid addiction with prescription pain pills, we are determined to stop the doctors and pill mills supplying this deadly black market," the Attorney General said,

Beecher supplied the drugs to seven other members of the oxycodone distribution ring, the office said.

All seven were indicted separately and have since pleaded guilty to second-degree charges of conspiracy and distribution of oxycodone, the same charges to which Beecher pleaded guilty.

The other drug ring members are:

Andrew Stoveken, 68, of Edison, who ran a hearing aid company, pleaded guilty on Aug. 21 and is scheduled to be sentenced in October, to a state-recommended seven-year term. He shared an office with Beecher and was the ring's middleman, authorities have said.

George Sara, 39, of Bordentown, was sentenced to five years in state prison. Sara purchased oxycodone in bulk to distribute.

The remaining five members were sentenced to drug court or face sentences of probation.

Beecher's sentencing is scheduled for November.

Taylor Tiamoyo Harris may be reached at tharris@njadvancemedia.com. Follow her on Twitter @ladytiamoyo.

Find NJ.com on Facebook.
Former police officer Jonathan Roselle responded to what he thought was a carjacking, according to his attorney.

The ex-South Whitehall Township officer encountered Joseph Santos, who is seen on Roselle's body camera pointing to his own eyes, then pointing to the officer, what attorney Gavin Holihan said Roselle interpreted as a threatening gesture.

The video shown Thursday at the Lehigh Count Courthouse showed a bloody Santos climb onto the hood of Roselle's police SUV, ignore Roselle's commands to get off and ignore Roselle's gun pointed through the window at him.

When backup didn't arrive quickly, Roselle got out of his car and shot Santos ending a "real and genuine threat of harm" he posed, Holihan said.

Lehigh County Judge Daniel Trexler disagreed. He ordered Roselle to stand trial for voluntary manslaughter after Thursday's preliminary hearing.

The video shows an unarmed Santos approach Roselle on Route 222 in front of Dorney Park on July 28. Through Roselle's body camera you can see Santos walk slowly toward Roselle with his hands visible and arms waving slowly by his sides.

Roselle is standing just outside the driver's side door, repeatedly yelling at Santos to drop to the ground. Santos keeps advancing toward the rear of the SUV and says "Don't do it," to the officer with the drawn gun. When Santos gets about five feet away the rear of the SUV, Roselle fires.

Santos took two bullets in his head and three in the torso, according to Lehigh County Detective James Bruchak. A woman wearing a t-shirt with Santos' picture on it sobbed during the graphic and chilling footage shown in court.

Santos' fiance told nj.com they were at Dorney Park that day when he left to buy cigarettes. The 44-year-old from Hasbrouck Heights had a history of drug abuse, but it didn't justify Roselle's decision to kill him, she said.

A huge protest in support of Santos came a week after the shooting. That was followed by a pro-police rally attended by more than 100 people in support of Roselle. The 33-year-old Parryville, Carbon County, man's employment with the South Whitehall Police Department ended after the shooting, authorities have said.

Lehigh County Assistant District Attorney Jeffery Dimmig said Roselle's justifications for the shooting don't matter. For purposes of the preliminary hearing, he needed only prove that Roselle killed Santos and had a specific intent to do so.

Holihan argued that Roselle was motivated by Santos' bizarre behavior. Santos had "unnatural strength" and a high tolerance for pain that day, evidenced by the fact that he wore only socks and stepped on broken glass, Holihan said. He seemed oblivious to the blood coming off his body, Holihan said.

A toxicology report showed Santos had methadone, codeine, morphine, hydromorphine and a metabolite of heroin in his system at that time, Bruchak said. It's unclear whether they were all ingested as part of one dose or ingested separately, Bruchak said.

Holihan said Roselle's inaction may have allowed Santos to get control of the police SUV and its potentially dangerous contents. Without action, Santos would have continued to put the lives of the many bystanders in jeopardy, Holihan said.

Bystander video of the event has circulated on Facebook, but in court Thursday witnesses saw and heard what Roselle saw and said by way of his body camera.

A hysterical woman is heard over his police radio asking for help due to a man trying to break her car window. Then Roselle drives toward the Comfort Suites hotel for what he tells dispatch is a man with a "possible mental issue."

You see a distressed Santos approach the SUV as Roselle barks, "Go that way. Get in front of my vehicle right now."

That's where Santos makes the gesture with his fingers toward Roselle through the front driver's side window. He ignores commands to get in front of the car and climbs on the hood, smearing blood from his arm on the windshield.

An anguished Santos appears to whimper as Roselle orders him repeatedly, "Get off my vehicle right now." Roselle draws his gun and points it toward Santos but Santos doesn't stop.

Then Roselle drives with Santos on the hood. He stops and tells dispatch, "This guy's covered in blood and he's, like, attacking my vehicle so I'm not getting out until one of you guys shows up."

About a minute goes by and he gets out of the car anyway, ordering Santos onto the ground repeatedly before shooting him.

When officer Kevin Smith arrives, Roselle tells him, "He wouldn't stop, man. He just kept coming at me. F--k. He's done."

Smith starts performing CPR and tells the stunned Roselle to put on his latex gloves and get an AED, or automatic external defibrillator out of the SUV. Roselle tries to unlock the rear using the wrong key. His hand shaking, he finds the correct key and unlocks the rear.

He fumbles with the device, apparently unsure whether it's the one he wants, as a computerized voice tells him, "Stay calm and follow these instructions."

He manages to get pads onto Santos' body as more police arrive.

The machine tells an officer administering CPR, "press, press, press, press..." as another officer takes Roselle aside.

Roselle tells the other officer, "He was coming at me. I told him to stop," and then, "It's not, its' not, I'm fine. I just, I'm concerned that I f----d up."

Roselle is a U.S. Army veteran who served in Afghanistan and at the time of the shooting was a major in the Pennsylvania Army National Guard.

He graduated from the Allentown Police Academy in December, then had 13 weeks of training, and was on patrol by himself for less than five months prior to the incident.

Holihan debated with Dimmig for much of the hearing over whether Holihan could ask Pennsylvania State Trooper Thomas Rummerfield to comment on his observations about the video. Rummerfield led the investigation for state police.

Dimmig said Holihan couldn't ask questions about whether Roselle's conduct was reasonable because that wasn't relevant to the preliminary hearing, only whether Roselle acted with a specific intent to kill Santos.

Lehigh County District Attorney James Martin was visibly irritated watching the attorneys argue until he interjected.

"You've made your ruling," he told Judge Trexler, adding that Holihan was inappropriately continuing his line of questioning.

Holihan said it was inappropriate for Martin to speak since Dimmig was handling the case.

"I'm the district attorney of Lehigh County," he forcefully asserted. "I'm not going to be stifled by his interpretation of a rule I've never heard of."

Rudy Miller may be reached at rmiller@lehighvalleylive.com. Follow him on Twitter @RudyMillerLV. Find Easton area news on Facebook.
A former Ocean County chiropractor pleaded guilty Wednesday to evading more than $500,000 in income taxes and failing to report a Russian bank account where he deposited more than $1.5 million.

Carlo Amato, 57, of Beachwood, pleaded guilty in federal court to tax evasion and failure to file a report of foreign financial account, according to U.S. Attorney Craig Carpenito.

Amato owned and operated Chiropractic Care Consultants Inc. and Accident Recovery Physical Therapy in Lakewood from 2012 through 2015, according to court documents.

"He deposited, or caused to be deposited, checks for chiropractic services into accounts held in the names of his minor children," Carpenito said in a news release. "Amato knew that these checks were taxable as income, but he did not disclose the payments to his accountant, nor did he report them on his tax returns."

Amato also failed to report more than $500,000 in taxable income deposited into his business bank accounts, including an account he opened in Russia, according to the government.

"For example, Amato reported $0 in taxable income and $0 in tax due on his 2014 income tax return," Carpenito said. "His taxable income for 2014 was, in fact, $561,258, and Amato admitted that the tax due and owing to the IRS for 2014 was $197,036."

Amato, a U.S. citizen, admitted that in 2014 he had an account at UniCredit Bank in Russia. He admitted to wiring more than $1.5 million to the UniCredit account and other accounts in Russia, Carpenito said.

The guilty plea includes an admission by Amato that he failed to file a report of a foreign account, also known as an FBAR, for 2014, Carpenito said.

"He knew that he was obligated to report any foreign bank account with an aggregate value of more than $10,000," Carpenito said.

Amato also admitted he evaded more than $300,000 in taxes for the tax years 2012, 2013, and 2015, according to Carpenito.

Amato also admitted that the funds he failed to report were part of fraudulent scheme in which Amato over-billed at least six insurance companies by more than $1 million by receiving money for services that were never rendered.

Amato previously pleaded guilty in Ocean County Superior Court to first degree financial facilitation of criminal activity for money laundering of funds from the over-billing scheme.

The tax evasion charge to which Amato pleaded guilty carries a maximum penalty of five years in prison and a fine of $250,000 or twice the gain to any person or loss to any victims of the offense, Carpenito said.

The failure to file a report of foreign account charge carries a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison and a fine of $500,000 or twice the gain to any person or loss to any victims of the offense, Carpenito said.

Sentencing is scheduled for Jan. 9.

Under the terms of his plea agreement, Amato will file amended tax returns and make full restitution for 2012 through 2015 and file accurate FBARs for 2012 through 2017, Carpenito said.

Anthony G. Attrino may be reached at tattrino@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @TonyAttrino. Find NJ.com on Facebook.
Guess who wrote the following:

"New Year's Eve 1984 I will never forget. I was 15. As the ball dropped, I leaned over to hug a friend and she met me instead with an overwhelming kiss. As we fumbled upon the bed, I remember debating my next 'move' as if it were a chess game. With the 'Top Gun' slogan ringing in my head, I slowly reached for her breast. After having my hand pushed away once, I reached my 'mark.'

"Our groping ended soon and while no 'relationship' ensued, a friendship did. You see, the next week in school she told me that she was drunk that night and didn't really know what she was doing."

Give up?

It was none other than our junior U.S. Senator, Cory "Spartacus" Booker, in 1992. He was a student at Stanford University at the time and wrote occasional pieces for the Stanford Daily. This one was headlined "So much for stealing second."

It's been circulating in conservative circles since 2013, when the Daily Caller ran a piece about it. Many conservatives have accused the senator of sexual assault.

That's nonsense, of course. The sort of behavior Booker recounted was common in the 1980s and early 1990s.

It's different these days. Colleges now require consent. Stanford bans "unwanted sexual advances." But it also bans "requests for sexual favors."

Good luck figuring that out.

But that column puts the senator in an awkward position regarding the allegations against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh by psychologist Christine Blasey Ford.

"It takes enormous courage to come forward publicly as Ms. Ford has," Booker said the other day. "The Senate owes it to her and every survivor of sexual trauma to listen to her story and gather all of the facts before moving forward with this nomination."

Ford had 35 years to make her allegations against Kavanaugh. Yet she didn't bring them up privately until she went to therapy in 2012.

She didn't bring them up publicly until she sent a letter to her Congresswoman that got to California Senator Dianne Feinstein in late July.

That would have been the appropriate time to start that inquiry. But the Democrats waited until hearings were almost over.

I'm skeptical of all such assertions. Around the same time Booker wrote that piece, I was doing a magazine piece on Satanism, which was being blown out of proportion in the media. People all over America were being charged with sexual molestations based on so-called "recovered memory" that surfaced in therapy.

The worst such case was the "Wenatchee Witch Hunt" in Washington State in which 18 people were jailed over recovered-memory allegations that were later discredited.

Memory is just not that reliable. And that includes Booker's memory.

Maybe the kids in Harrington Park were a lot more advanced than the kids I went to high school with in Toms River. But I find it hard to imagine a bunch of high-schoolers going to a New Year's Eve party at which beds were placed near the TV.

Where were the parents? I asked Booker's people if they could tell me. I also wanted to know what the quote was from "Top Gun." That movie didn't come out until 1986. I got no reply.

But this sure sounds a lot like Booker's tales of a drug addict named "T-Bone" he befriended before becoming mayor of Newark.

When Booker first ran for Senate in 2013, Slate reported that the story was challenged by a number of Newarkers, including Rutgers history professor Clement Price. Price said that "Booker conceded to him in 2008 that T-Bone was a 'composite' of several people he'd met while living in Newark."

Booker himself told an Esquire Magazine writer that the character was "an archetype," one whose name "may not actually be T-Bone."

Every politician exaggerates, you might say. Give him the benefit of the doubt.

Okay. But based on that Stanford Daily column, Booker should be giving Kavanaugh the benefit of the doubt as well. The point of it was that the future senator had "a wake-up call" and decided "I will never be the same."

By all accounts Kavanaugh has had great relationships with women in the years since high school.

As to what happened in high school, I doubt it can be reconstructed at this late date. Nonetheless it is my fervent hopes that Ford goes before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Monday and gives her account.

Kavanaugh can give his account as well. Then Booker can question both of them.

He's clearly positioning himself as a contender for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination. This would be a golden opportunity for him to advance his candidacy.

It's going to be a crowded field, however.

I wonder if he'll even make it to first base.

ADD: WHAT DID TOM CRUISE SAY AND WHEN DID HE SAY IT?

I'm sure that Booker's mistake concerning "Top Gun" was entirely innocent. But it certainly makes the point about how untrustworthy our memories are. We commonly change our memories to match our beliefs.

My high-school class is having a reunion this weekend. We've been emailing back and forth about various events that took place at St. Joseph's High School in the 1960s.

Almost everyone's memories are conflicting. That's common.

In Ford's case, she may sincerely believe her version of events from 35 years ago. But it seems likely there is no one - including her - who can recall exactly how the events unfolded.

And psychologists are particularly susceptible to this sort of thing. When I was writing about Satanism in the 1990s, I interviewed quite a few psychologists who were convinced that "repressed memories" were very common.

Back in the 1990s, a lot of people were jailed before the idea of repressed memories was debunked. The credit goes to The Wall Street Journal's Dorothy Rabinowitz, who dissected many of the worst cases. Here's a good piece on "The Myth of Repressed Memories" that should be required reading for every senator on that committee.

When it comes to this sort of thing, I suspect the only people easier to fool than psychologists are the editors of Rolling Stone.

But they're not on the Judiciary Committee.

Cory Booker is.
Gov. Phil Murphy has said one of his top priorities for the fall is for state lawmakers to send him a bill to gradually raise New Jersey's minimum wage to $15 an hour.

But it may take longer.

State Senate President Stephen Sweeney cast doubt Wednesday night that officials will move by the end of the year to increase the state's minimum wage from $8.60 to $15 an hour. He suggested it's more likely negotiations will spill into 2019.

"I'm a believer in the $15 dollar minimum wage," Sweeney, D-Gloucester, said on 101.5FM. "But I'm worried about small businesses."

He added: "This one we're taking a much more cautious look at."

The top lawmaker said it's possible a bill could pass the Democratic-controlled Legislature by the end of the year. However, he suggested disagreements between what Murphy and some lawmakers -- including himself -- want to see in the final bill could stall negotiations.

"I've talked about that there has to be some carveouts if we do a minimum wage bill," Sweeney said. "The governor doesn't want any carveouts, he's said that."

The carveouts Sweeney cited, for example, include exempting farm workers and teenagers from the increased minimum wage.

"What about the bagel shop owner with three employees, you know, do we put them out of business if they make it go to $15?" Sweeney said. "I've got to sit with the speaker and I've got to sit with the governor."

Earlier this month, Murphy said hiking the minimum wage is one of his top priorities and he called on the Legislature to send him a bill for him to sign into law "within the next couple of months."

A $15-an-hour minimum wage was one of Murphy's core campaign pledges last year. And his fellow Democrats have long sought the same increase to help 1.2 million Jerseyans in a high-cost state where the average two-bedroom apartment will cost you more than $1,300 a month.

Shortly after Sweeney's comments on the radio, Murphy tweeted his support for moving quickly on the measure.

"Now is the time to pass legislation to raise the minimum wage to $15/hour. It's the right move for workers and our economy," he tweeted.

New Jerseys minimum wage, adjusted for cost of living, is the 5th-most insufficient in the nation. This is indefensible.



Now is the time to pass legislation to raise the minimum wage to $15/hour. Its the right move for workers and our economy.  Governor Phil Murphy (@GovMurphy) September 20, 2018

NJ Advance Media staff writer Brent Johnson contributed to this report.

Matt Arco may be reached at marco@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @MatthewArco or Facebook.
Gov. Phil Murphy criticized President Donald Trump Thursday on the one-year anniversary of Hurricane Maria slamming Puerto Rico, saying the president "continues to turn his back on millions of Americans."

The governor, in a series of tweets, also rebuked Trump's dismissal of the mounting evidence that now reveals the death toll for Maria far surpasses initial estimates.

"One year after Hurricane Maria, @realDonaldTrump continues to turn his back on millions of Americans in Puerto Rico and denies the 3,000 lives lost," Murphy tweeted.

"We must continue to open our arms to Puerto Rico, continue to be a second home to those who fled Maria, and continue to offer assistance as the island and its people slowly rebuild their homes and lives," he said.

Other elected officials, including U.S. Sen. Robert Menendez, also took aim at Trump

Menendez, D-N.J., who's running for re-election, held a news conference on the anniversary of the storm to blast the Trump administration.

"It's taking too long to ... return the island to its stature," Menendez said.

State Assemblywoman Annette Quijano, D-Union, said it "saddens" her "to think of the devastation and destruction" the storm brought on the island.

"The lack of sympathy and support from the White House for the situation and people since September has only added insult to injury," Quijano said in a statement.

Last September, Trump told Puerto Ricans they should be grateful Hurricane Maria had not caused a "real catastrophe like Katrina."

New research puts the number of deaths close to 3,000, adjusted up from just a few dozen when the president made his now infamous remark. This is an estimate, but it is virtually certain that the number is in the thousands.

The majority of fatalities were not caused by the hurricane's force, but by the failure of the U.S. disaster response system. Many people died in the days and months after Maria because they lacked access to basic lifesaving goods and services.

Trump has denied these numbers, but without offering any evidence to support his claims.

Back in New Jersey, meanwhile, lawmakers who joined then-governor-elect Murphy on his trip to the storm ravaged island in December say they hope the governor will do more to help Puerto Rico.

Specifically, they want Murphy to get behind legislation he conditionally vetoed in July that they say would help keep Puerto Ricans from having their homes foreclosed on.

"I want to circle back to try and figure out if we can move this forward, so I'm going to make the attempt to work with the office again," state Sen. Teresa Ruiz, D-Essex, said.

She referred legislation Murphy vetoed that would have prohibited pension investments in entities engaged in mortgage foreclosures of homes in Puerto Rico damaged by Hurricane Maria.

Murphy argued the State Investment Council should decide whether to divest for a particular cause -- not the Legislature.

"I'm still disappointed in the conditional veto," Ruiz said.

Hurricane Maria slammed the island with 155-mph winds and coastal flooding that rose to 6 feet within 30 minutes of landfall. The storm caused the longest power blackout in U.S. history.

One year after Hurricane Maria, @realDonaldTrump continues to turn his back on millions of Americans in Puerto Rico and denies the 3,000 lives lost.



Now, in the aftermath of Hurricane Florence, we must renew our focus on all who are still without life's basic necessities.  Governor Phil Murphy (@GovMurphy) September 20, 2018

We must continue to open our arms to Puerto Rico, continue to be a second home to those who fled Maria, and continue to offer assistance as the island and its people slowly rebuild their homes and lives.  Governor Phil Murphy (@GovMurphy) September 20, 2018

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Matt Arco may be reached at marco@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @MatthewArco or Facebook.
UPDATE: Saudino, and several of his staffers, resigned Friday afternoon

--

Gov. Phil Murphy said Thursday that Bergen County Sheriff Michael Saudino should immediately resign if, in fact, he was caught on tape making racist remarks about African-Americans and New Jersey's Sikh attorney general.

According to a report from WNYC, which said the station was provided with the recording, Saudino is heard talking to colleagues on the day Murphy was inaugurated.

Saudino, recounting the details of Murphy's Jan. 16 inaugural address, said: "He talked about the whole thing, the marijuana, sanctuary state ... better criminal justice reform. Christ almighty, in other words, let the blacks come in, do whatever the f--k they want, smoke their marijuana, do this do that, and don't worry about it. You know, we'll tie the hands of cops," according to the report.

Saudino also griped that Murphy, a fellow Democrat, appointed state Attorney General Gurbir Grewal solely because of "the turban," according to the report.

Grewal is the first Sikh in American history to serve as a state attorney general.

"Without question, the comments made on that recording are appalling, and anyone using racist, homophobic, and hateful language is unfit for public office," Murphy told WNYC in a statement. "If indeed that is Sheriff Saudino's voice on the recording, he must resign."

Bergen County Sheriff Michael Saudino.

When asked about the recording Thursday during at a public event in Atlantic City, Murphy said: Murphy repeated that Saudino should resign "if that is indeed his voice." Murphy said the remarks are "utterly unacceptable."

"It is inconsistent not just with our values but New Jersey values and American values, and there's no choice as to what the next step needs to be," Murphy added.

The governor doesn't have the authority to remove Saudino from office.

The sheriff was elected in 2016 to his third term. He switched parties for his third term. Saudino ran as a Republican for his first two terms as sheriff.

He's up for re-election in November 2019, according to the sheriff's website.

Saudino pulls in $130,312 a year from his sheriff's salary and collects a $129,987 annual public pension from his time as Emerson Borough police chief, according to public records.

He's is in charge of about 600 employees and officers.

Saudino did not respond to the radio station's requests for comment or a request from NJ Advance Media.

According to WNYC, the recording of the conversation between Saudino and staff members was provided to the station Wednesday night by a source in the room who said it took place in a county office building following the inauguration.

The sheriff also questioned whether Lt. Gov. Sheila Oliver, who is unmarried, is gay, according to the report.

Grewal, who was the Bergen County prosecutor prior to being tapped by Murphy to serve as attorney general, told WNYC the comments are "inconsistent with the Mike Saudino I knew and worked with in Bergen County."

By Thursday afternoon, the attorney general said he had "listened to the recording obtained by WNYC.

Grewal added: "If that is in fact Sheriff Saudino's voice, then he should resign immediately."

"I have thick skin and I've been called far worse," his statement continued. "But the comments about the African-American community are wrong, racist, and hurtful. The comments about our Lieutenant Governor are inappropriate and homophobic. New Jersey and Bergen County deserve better."

It wouldn't be the first time Grewal was attacked over his religion.

In July, a pair of New Jersey radio hosts on 101.5FM were condemned by Murphy and others after the two repeatedly referred to Grewal as "turban man."

NJ Advance Media staff writers Brent Johnson and Samantha Marcus contributed to this report.

Matt Arco may be reached at marco@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @MatthewArco or Facebook.
About a decade after the start of the Great Recession that rocked the U.S. economy, New Jersey remains among the states least fit to weather another economic downturn.

In fact, the state's budget's reserves are too low to soften the blow of even a moderate slump, according to a pair of new reports measuring states' readiness.

The reports also said the state continues to rely on volatile taxes -- such as the income tax, which can fluctuate wildly depending on how the economy is doing -- and that puts revenues at risk.

"Budget reserves are a first-line defense against revenue shortfalls and in a majority of states remain insufficient to absorb the first-year fiscal effects of a moderately severe recession," a S&P Global Ratings report said.

Moody's Analytics pegged New Jersey as 47th among all states in its capability of weathering a recession, followed by Oklahoma, North Dakota and Louisiana. S&P also had New Jersey near the bottom of the list.

Moody's found the "typical" state would need to sock away the equivalent of 11 percent of its budget to ride out a moderate recession without cutting spending or raising taxes and 18 percent in a severe downturn.

New Jersey state government will spend $37.4 billion this year but only has a tiny fraction of that -- 2 percent -- in its rainy day fund to fall back on.

"We are acutely aware of these concerns," said state treasury spokeswoman Jennifer Sciortino.

"This is why we fought throughout the budget process to build a healthier surplus and secure recurring revenue sources. This is and will continue to be a priority for us moving forward."

The reports put some numbers to the problem.

S&P projects that in the first year of a moderate recession, states could lose a combined $71 billion, or roughly 10 percent, of the money they collect from personal income, corporate and sales taxes.

In a more severe downturn, they'll be out $84.7 billion, or nearly 12 percent.

The projected losses are even greater than during the Great Recession, as states are relying increasingly on taxes vulnerable to economic conditions, analysts said.

New Jersey is no exception.

Two of the largest sources of tax revenue here -- personal income and corporation business taxes -- are hard to predict, often fluctuating from year to year.

The gross income tax is highly dependent on wealthy filers, which is why state coffers and lawmakers sighed when billionaire hedge fund manager David Tepper relocated to Florida.

From this year's budget battle came a new, 10.75 percent top marginal tax rate on personal income over $5 million, which will make the state's highly progressive income tax system even more so.

This, analysts said, also helps explain why New Jersey is at greater risk than others.

"By states putting more of their eggs in one basket, tax bases have become more dependent on a smaller number of taxpayers with extremely volatile incomes, manifesting higher highs and lower lows for tax collections," said Moody's Analytics in its own analysis.

A moderate downturn could gouge 18 percent of those three tax streams here, as measured by S&P's stress test of the big three taxes.

In a more severe downturn, the loss could reach 20 percent. Only Alaska would lose a bigger share of its income, S&P said.

But that's why states have rainy day funds.

Twenty states have enough reserves to cope with the first year losses in revenue, S&P said. Of course, New Jersey is not among them.

The state's low reserves would cover just 14 percent of the lost revenue in a moderate economic event and 13 percent in a severe one, according to the report.

The four states least capable of cushioning the blow, according to S&P -- New Jersey, Illinois, Kentucky and Pennsylvania -- all have the worst-funded public pension systems in the country.

They're also among the 15 states S&P deemed most at risk, and those underfunded pension systems have something to do with their troubles.

State's don't have a lot of flexibility to cope with a recession outside of increasing taxes and cutting spending. Those with "high fixed costs" like debt service and contributions to post-retirement health and pension benefits have even less wiggle room," S&P said.

"Therefore, the states most at risk to experiencing severe fiscal stress in a recession are those with a combination of a propensity for revenue volatility; insufficient budget reserves to withstand the first-year fiscal deficits associated with a moderate recession; and elevated fixed costs," the analysts said.

Moody's Analytics found New Jersey would lose nearly 12 percent of all revenues in a moderate recession and nearly 17 percent under a severe scenario.

Samantha Marcus may be reached at smarcus@njadvancemedia.com. Follow her on Twitter @samanthamarcus. Find NJ.com Politics on Facebook.
President Trump tweeted his support Thursday for the Republican candidate in one of N.J.'s closely-watched Congressional races.

.@JayWebberNJ is running for Congress in the 11th District of New Jersey. He is outstanding in every way. Strong on Borders, loves our Military and our Vets. Big Crime fighter. Jay has my Full and Total Endorsement!  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 20, 2018

Assemblyman Jay Webber, R-26th District, is facing Democrat Mikie Sherrill, a former Navy pilot and federal prosecutor.

Sherrill's campaign did not immediately respond to Trump's tweet.

Trump's backing is not without risk in the district, which is centered in Morris County.

Webber entered the race after longtime U.S. Rep. Rodney Frelinghusen, a Republican, announced in January that he would not seek a 13th term in Congress.

Frelinghuysen had grappled for months with protests in his district sparked by opposition to Trump.

In August, Vice President Mike Pence hosted a fundraiser in August for Webber, who has been running way behind Sherrill in campaign cash.

Rob Jennings may be reached at rjennings@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @RobJenningsNJ. Find NJ.com on Facebook.
The Times-Picayune is marking the tricentennial of New Orleans with its ongoing 300 for 300 project, running through 2018 and highlighting 300 people who have made New Orleans New Orleans, featuring original artwork commissioned by NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune with Where Y'Art gallery. Today: educator and activist Sylvanie Williams.

The icon: Sylvanie Williams.

The legacy: As a black woman in Reconstruction New Orleans, Sylvanie Williams was accustomed to being told all the things she wasn't allowed to do. So, she focused her considerable energy on those things she could do to help build a better New Orleans. That included molding young minds as a public school educator for 50 years, including 20 years as principal of Thomy Lafon School. Outside the classroom, she forged a path as a civic leader, founding and guiding the Phyllis Wheatley Club -- the preeminent civic club for black women at the time -- and emerging as a vocal advocate for women's suffrage. Soon enough, she had taught New Orleans a vital lesson about undervaluing and overlooking black women, as evidenced by local journalist Dorothy Dix, who in 1903 declared that "no woman in New Orleans was more respected or had more influence than Mrs. Williams."

The artist: Maddie Stratton.

The quote: "Flowers, in their beauty and sweetness, may represent the womanhood of the world. Some flowers are fragile and delicate, some strong and hardy. Some are carefully guarded and cherished, others are roughly treated and trodden underfoot. These last are the colored women. The colored woman has a crown of thorns continually pressed upon her brow. Yet she is advancing, and sometimes you find her further on than you would have expected." -- Sylvanie Williams, addressing Susan B. Anthony in New Orleans in April 1903, as reported by The Woman's Journal

Explore more of Stratton's work online at WhereYart.net and in person at the Where Y'Art gallery, 1901 Royal St.

She was born Sylvanie Francoz in Opelousas, although her birth year is unclear. Based on a 1921 obituary published by the New Orleans States, she was "about" 72 at the time of her death, which would put her birth year around 1849.

Source: The Times-Picayune archives; The New York Age; The Woman's Journal; The Historic New Orleans Collection; staff research

More on 300 for 300:
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
The Pennsylvania judge scheduled to sentence Bill Cosby next week declined on Wednesday to step away from the case, saying that a defense motion stating he had feuded with a key witness and should recuse himself came too late and was wholly without merit.

The judge, Steven T. ONeill of the Montgomery County Court of Common Pleas, presided over the trial earlier this year that ended with Mr. Cosby being found guilty of sexually assaulting Andrea Constand at his home near Philadelphia in 2004. He faces up to 30 years in prison.

Mr. Cosbys lawyer, Joseph P. Green, argued that Judge ONeill should recuse himself, saying he had failed to disclose a bitter quarrel he had with the witness, Bruce L. Castor Jr., while both men were seeking the Republican nomination for county district attorney 20 years ago.

In 2016 Mr. Castor testified at a pretrial hearing that as district attorney in 2005 he had pledged not to prosecute Mr. Cosby because he thought the Constand case lacked sufficient evidence. Judge ONeill, however, ruled that he did not find that pledge binding on the current district attorney, Kevin R. Steele, who brought criminal charges against Mr. Cosby in the case.
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A mania appears to have gripped cannabis stocks. Tilray, a Canadian maker of cannabis products, surged as much as 94 percent Wednesday, gave it all back and then rallied again in the final 18 minutes to close up nearly 40 percent. Along the way, trading in the stock was halted four times. The company went public in July at $17 a share and has soared nearly 1,160 percent to close Wednesday at $214.06. Tilray is now valued at $20 billion, making it roughly the same size as American Airlines, CBS and Hershey.

The Amazon effect strikes specialty retailers. Amazon, according to CNBC, is testing out a new service, called Scout, that is designed to make it easier for consumers to browse by asking them to give a thumbs up or a thumbs down to products and then showing other products based on their choices. News of the service hit the stocks of specialty retailers. Shares of Stitch Fix were down 6 percent on Wednesday, while Wayfair and Etsy were off nearly 3 percent.

Companies have been stockpiling ahead of the latest round of tariffs on Chinese goods. Imports of more than 80 percent of the product lines covered by the tariffs increased from May through July, and imports of over a quarter of those product lines jumped by more than 25 percent, according to S7P Globals Panjiva, a supply chain data firm.
Once released, the data will show the same unjustifiable racial disparities in fare enforcement as the prior data of 911/311 calls for marijuana enforcement, Mr. Lancman predicted. A May investigation by The New York Times found that across the city, black people were arrested on low-level marijuana charges at eight times the rate of white, non-Hispanic residents over the past three years.

So, why is fare evasion a hot-button issue?

According to state data , the Police Department arrested 55,637 people on fare-evasion charges in 2016 . The city contends that people who vault subway turnstiles, slip through open emergency exit doors or sneak onto buses deprive the Metropolitan Transportation Authority of much-needed funds .

City leaders struck a deal this summer to provide discounted MetroCards to New Yorkers below the federal poverty line  a household income of about $25,000 for a family of four. Still, critics say, people overburdened by New Yorks stratospheric cost of living struggle to pay the $2.75 fare.

Fare beating was enforced aggressively in the 1990s on the notion that doing so would help to curb more serious offenses. But more recently, the national movement for criminal justice reform has prompted broad push back against aggressive policing of low-level offenses, such as public urination and marijuana use.

The broken windows policing strategy disproportionally affects young black and Hispanic men, who then carry the burden of arrests when looking for jobs and housing, or when applying for school or loans.
This is a very serious charge and one that could further delay or even derail Kavanaughs confirmation vote.

After the report came to light, Kavanaugh and Blasey said that they would testify before the committee about the allegation, but then her attorney sent a letter to the Judiciary Committee stating:

As the Judiciary Committee has recognized and done before, an F.B.I. investigation of the incident should be the first step in addressing her allegations. A full investigation by law enforcement officials will ensure that the crucial facts and witnesses in this matter are assessed in a nonpartisan manner, and that the committee is fully informed before conducting any hearing or making any decisions.

I know that there are political considerations on both sides: Republicans want a vote before the midterms, and Democrats want to delay one until after. But Republicans are worried that Democrats now have a shot  though still a long one  to flip the Senate. And one could argue about how the release of Blaseys accusation was handled.

But it is impossible to argue that her claim isnt credible enough to demand a thorough investigation, regardless of the partisan gamesmanship. And it must be stated that Republicans have zero space to complain because of the way they blocked President Barack Obamas nominee, Merrick Garland.

If Trump was truly interested in finding out the truth of these allegations, he could have ordered the Federal Bureau of Investigation to look into their veracity as soon as he heard about them. That is precisely what George H.W. Bush did when he learned of Anita Hills accusation against Clarence Thomas in 1991.
In 1991, at the direction of President George H.W. Bush, the F.B.I. looked into Anita Hills allegations of sexual harassment against Clarence Thomas, who had gone through his confirmation hearings weeks earlier. The investigation took three days. The resulting report was provided to the White House, which said it showed that Ms. Hills allegations were unfounded. The Judiciary Committee reconvened a few weeks later, and heard from nearly two dozen witnesses, including Ms. Hill and Justice Thomas. Does Mr. Grassley now want to set an even lower standard for taking a womans claims seriously than the committee did when Ms. Hill appeared before it?

In an Op-Ed published by The Times on Tuesday, Ms. Hill called for a thorough investigation by a neutral body with experience in sexual-violence cases, and said it should not be rushed. A weeks preparation is not enough time for meaningful inquiry into very serious charges, she wrote.

Yet Mr. Grassley has rejected calls to involve the F.B.I. and offered to hear only from Dr. Blasey and Judge Kavanaugh themselves, even though there are numerous people who might be able to shed light on what may have happened on the night in question. First among these is Judge Kavanaughs high school friend Mark Judge, who Dr. Blasey said was in the room where she said the assault occurred, and who has given shifting answers about his recollections.

Speaking of unreliable memories, its laughable for Republicans to complain , as some do, that Dr. Blaseys claim is too old to be considered. The Senate Judiciary Committee is not a court of law; its an arena of politics. Remember that less than a decade ago , Republican senators were happy to grill Sonia Sotomayor, President Barack Obamas first pick for the court, about positions taken 30 years earlier by a legal-defense fund whose board she had once sat on.

Certainly theres no statute of limitations preventing the committee from weighing allegations of attempted rape against a nominee to a lifetime seat on the highest court in the land. Besides, since Judge Kavanaugh has flatly denied the accusation, his honesty now  not as a teenager  is at issue.

The committee should ask probing questions of all parties. Just as Mr. Judge has given inconsistent statements to the press, there are discrepancies in the accounts of how Dr. Blasey has described the alleged events. Its possible that she is misremembering events or even making them up, although its hard to see how people could imagine themselves benefiting from doing that. In the few days since Dr. Blaseys name became public, she has already suffered, as she knew she would. Shes been forced into hiding with her family after receiving death threats.

But so far, Senate Republicans seem more concerned with getting Judge Kavanaugh confirmed than in getting to the truth of the accusation against him. Republicans know that their Senate majority is at risk on Nov. 6, and they want to seize their chance to give the court a solid right-wing majority for years to come.

This has been a drive-by shooting when it comes to Kavanaugh, Senator Lindsey Graham told reporters on Tuesday, giving the cynical game away in one compact statement. Ill listen to the lady, but were going to bring this to a close.

Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter (@NYTOpinion) and join the Facebook political discussion group, Voting While Female.
As a psychiatrist I know something about how memory works. Neuroscience research tells us that memories formed under the influence of intense emotion  such as the feelings that accompany a sexual assault  are indelible in the way that memories of a routine day are not.

Thats why its credible that Christine Blasey Ford, who has accused Judge Brett Kavanaugh, President Trumps Supreme Court nominee, of sexually assaulting her when they were both teenagers, has a vivid recollection of the alleged long-ago event.

I thought he might inadvertently kill me, she told The Washington Post in a recent interview. He was trying to attack me and remove my clothing.

Judge Kavanaugh has vigorously denied the charges, leading to a public debate about whether Dr. Blaseys story is true. Her lawyers say she wants the F.B.I. to investigate before she agrees to testify before the Senate. If and when she does testify, you can bet that Republican senators will try to undermine her explosive claim on the basis that the memory of an event that occurred 36 years ago must be unreliable because it happened in the distant past. If she does not testify, some of her critics will undoubtedly argue that the time thats passed is reason to doubt her recollection. Nothing could be further from the truth.
This is confident genre playwriting: By observing the way a character moves through the steps of a familiar form, in this case a missing-person procedural, we absorb setting and character and sociology without having it explained. And here Mr. Payne, whose day job is in social work, captures with clinical precision the defenses and despair of the chronically under-nurtured.

But Mr. Payne is not, apparently, content with that. Like many early-career playwrights  this Playwrights Realm world premiere, directed by Awoye Timpo, is his first fully staged professional production  he is eager to offer in one work a tasting menu of everything he knows how to do. Framing the scenes with Karma, he therefore gives us both a preshow and a prologue, supertitles and asides, exhibits and parables. They are as penetrating as a dentists drill but, sadly, just as subtle.

Perhaps subtlety wasnt wanted. As the characters sometimes hustle the audience for money, so the playwright hustles it for outrage. Letting the content dictate the form, he has written an aggressive play about lives steeped in aggression, and yet it asks a lot of strangers to sit and be hectored, for the sake of argument, as the source of the problem. You dont even know it, says Rose Profit (Lynda Gravatt), speaking straight at us, but you are to blame, you quiet, stagnant mass.

Madame Profit (pronounced pro-FEE, she tells us) runs the Amigone funeral home. Her thread of the story, which touches Karmas only tangentially, is not naturalistic but presentational and, as those names suggest, satirical.
They got out and tried to get the ladies out, Sheriff Thompson said. He was not sure how long they tried  possibly 45 minutes. They may have struggled because of the way the van was positioned against the guardrail or because of the pressure of the water on the doors.

The women were not being evacuated from floodwaters. They were both being taken from hospitals, where they had come voluntarily, to mental health facilities, where they had been committed. At the news conference, Sheriff Thompson said that his department had been responding to a court order to transport the women. On Wednesday, family members said they had heard nothing about any orders.

It is routine, and required under state law, for law enforcement to transport people who are involuntarily committed and who are determined by a physician as posing an imminent risk of harm to him or herself by virtue of mental illness, according to a statement from the state Department of Mental Health. It was unclear to the families whether the women had expressed an intent to harm themselves or anyone else.

The sheriff did not think the women were in restraints when they drowned, as early reports indicated. Restraining patients was not typical, he said, if theyre not combative or having issues and I understand they were not. But he could not say for sure.

The deputies also apparently drove onto a road that was blocked off because of flooding. The sheriff could not account for why they would have done that.

On Tuesday morning, Wendy Newton, 45, told her mother she could tell she was about to have what she called a spell, according to Ms. Newtons daughter Allison. Ms. Newton asked to be taken to McLeod Hospital in Loris, S.C. An ambulance soon arrived to pick her up.
When the Metropolitan Opera opens its season on Monday evening, well-heeled patrons ascending the buildings sweeping dual staircase may recognize bits of themselves and their dramatic surroundings in Cecily Browns two huge paintings, stretching more than 9 by 25 feet, at the top of each landing.

Though the loose, gestural brushwork seems abstract, on closer inspection it coalesces into jostling figures, only to break apart again into fragments. Black bow ties pop out from the crowd, and then faces and dinner jackets start to come into focus. Theres an awful lot of groping going on, said Ms. Brown, the acclaimed British-born artist, lithe and animated in her New York studio. As you come up, its almost that you enter into the painting, and the crowd will be mirrored. People think my work is abstract, but I always see it as teeming with figures  here more than usual.

This is the first time since the Metropolitan Opera opened its doors in 1966, and Marc Chagall unveiled his two site-specific murals  The Triumph of Music and The Sources of Music  that an artist has been invited to make and exhibit work inside the main hall of the opera house. Ms. Brown, 49, is part of a small club of female artists with work commanding seven figures. This is her first public project in a space that isnt a museum.
Trudy Benson has been praised for explaining our digital condition to us: how technology has altered our perception and how painting is made and received. But since no one likes to be pigeonholed, she is pushing back in Closer Than They Appear at Lyles & King.

The new works, relying on a jumbled grid of rectangles and squares and a palette reminiscent of the Day-Glo 1980s, are denser than those of the last decade. Ms. Bensons signature cables of paint, applied straight out of the tube, connect various parts of the picture. The new work also returns to Western paintings reliance on illusion, but through a side door: The surfaces sometimes appear to be put through a digital printer rather than painted and, as the shows title suggests, they fiddle with our field of vision.

If theres a problem here, its the overall homogeneity of the paintings and their too-close resemblance to grid-obsessed modern painting, as well as what the ancient Romans called horror vacui: fear of open space. Ms. Bensons earlier works included lots of raw canvas and functioned like diagrams that required viewer deciphering. Here shes filled in the gaps. The paintings are too easy.

The best part of the show is an installation that was done in situ, featuring a presumably finished canvas mounted on a free-standing wall sprayed with rectilinear forms. Ragged and kind of punk, it reminds you of what made Ms. Bensons art exciting in the first place when, armed with analog paint and digital thinking, she took on the history of painting and won a round. MARTHA SCHWENDENER
The judge in the Bill Cosby sexual assault case on Thursday denied a prosecution request to allow testimony at his sentencing hearing from women who say he molested them but whose accusations never led to criminal charges.

It was not immediately clear whether the judge intended to block all testimony from women who had given their accounts at Mr. Cosbys trial in April because he asked for clarification on whether prosecutors intended to bring the women forward as part of the sentencing hearing. He asked them to clarify that point within 24 hours.

Prosecutors in Pennsylvania had asked that an unspecified number of accusers be allowed to tell their stories at the two-day sentencing hearing due to start Monday in Montgomery County Courthouse in Norristown, Pa.

During Mr. Cosbys trial earlier this year, in response to a prosecution request, Judge Steven T. ONeill of the Court of Common Pleas allowed five other women to testify under Pennsylvanias prior bad acts rule, which admits such evidence if it shows a pattern of behavior by the defendant.
Maniac is about an experimental psychoactive drug. Also, it sort of is an experimental psychoactive drug.

At your first dose, things go wonky, just a little, around the edges. Youre in a New York City that looks like todays New York but isnt. A winged Statue of Extra Liberty towers in the harbor. Humans rent themselves out in a turbocharged gig economy, while Muppet-like robots hustle chess games in the park. Tiny wheeled poop bots trudge the sidewalks cleaning up dog waste. (The subways  well, the subways are still recognizably lousy.)

On these retro-techno streets (basically, the future as imagined in 1980) we find Owen (Jonah Hill) and Annie (Emma Stone), two strangers who meet as subjects in a dodgy trial for psychiatric medication that promises to give its users subconsciouses a deep cleaning by inducing dangerous, therapeutic dreams.

At this point, Maniac, which appears on Netflix on Friday, ups the dosage and becomes something unstable, exhilarating and one-of-a-kind, a sci-fi pharmacological dystopian family-therapy dramedy.
Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous nights highlights that lets you sleep  and lets us get paid to watch comedy. If youre interested in hearing from The Times regularly about great TV, sign up for our Watching newsletter and get recommendations straight to your inbox.

Enough of These 90s Reboots

Republicans are resisting calls for the F.B.I. to investigate an accusation that Judge Brett Kavanaugh committed sexual assault as a teenager. The accuser, Christine Blasey Ford, has said she wants an inquiry to take place before she testifies at Kavanaughs Supreme Court confirmation hearing.

On Full Frontal, Samantha Bee said the process was bringing back memories of Anita Hills testimony at Justice Clarence Thomass confirmation hearings in 1991  and Bee was not enjoying the deja vu.
The actor and author of the new book Whiskey in a Teacup wishes she had five days in a cabin just to read, with no emails, no text messages and no obligations or deadlines.

What books are on your nightstand?

I just started Ottessa Moshfeghs My Year of Rest and Relaxation. Its about a wealthy girl in New York trying to find her way. I loved Moshfeghs 2015 literary thriller, Eileen. Also on my nightstand are an Oliver Sacks book and Stay With Me, the debut novel by Ayobami Adebayo thats set in Nigeria. Someone told me about it a year ago and Im finally getting to it now.

Whats the last great book you read?

My September book club pick: Delia Owens Where the Crawdads Sing. Its a heart-wrenching novel about a little girl named Kya growing up by herself in a fishing community in the swamplands of North Carolina, intercut with a young mans unsolved murder. Beyond that, its just beautiful. I loved every page of it. That little girl Kya stole my heart.

Describe your ideal reading experience (when, where, what, how).

Well, I should start by saying that I dont get my ideal reading experience ever. I work a lot and I have kids and a husband and about a thousand side hustles. But in theory, it would be alone in a cabin by a lake. Id be by myself, with no one interrupting me to ask where their other shoe is, or where the car keys are, or to tell me that Im needed on set. In this alternate reality, I would also have no emails, no text messages and no obligations or deadlines. I would have nothing at all to do for, say, five days. That would be ideal. The reality? Its 10:30 at night. Everyone else in my house is asleep, and I read for an hour in a bath or in my bed. Thats when I get most of my alone time.
JENNIFER SZALAI I cant say Ill miss it much. Would I have ever read Elias Canetti if it werent for the Nobel? Maybe, maybe not; for those non-Anglo writers who won it decades ago, its hard to know whether the Nobel alone was responsible for their renown here.

Explore the New York Times Book Review Want to keep up with the latest and greatest in books? This is a good place to start. Learn what you should be reading this fall: Our collection of reviews on books coming out this season includes biographies, novels, memoirs and more. See whats new in October: Among this months new titles are novels by Jonathan Franzen, a history of Black cinema and a biography by Katie Couric. Nominate a book: The New York Times Book Review has just turned 125. That got us wondering: What is the best book that was published during that time? Listen to our podcast: Featuring conversations with leading figures in the literary world, from Colson Whitehead to Leila Slimani, the Book Review Podcast helps you delve deeper into your favorite books.



The most recent winner whom I hadnt heard of and then made an effort to read was Imre Kertesz, who won in 2002. His work was hard to get in English translation at the time, and so I sent my father Hungarian-language editions purchased from a bookseller on the Upper East Side, thinking he could read them and we would talk. My father became too sick to want to read an autobiographical novel about the Holocaust, and so it didnt happen. (And as much as a part of me wanted to read Tim Wilkinsons reportedly lucid translations that were published in the years that followed, Kertesz became too closely connected to that time in my life, and so that didnt happen either.)

Alfred Nobel wrote in his will that the prize should go to the most outstanding work in an ideal direction. The Academy later took that to mean works of a lofty and sound idealism. Lets not even open the keg of worms that is sound idealism. Ill just ask: Do the prizes explicitly stated political connotations help or hurt in understanding its choices? And do its political considerations make the prize more or less worthy as a literary project?

SZALAI When I read about the background of the prize, my first thought was: Whose ideal direction are we talking about? A committee that awards the Nobel to Rudyard Kipling, as it did in 1907 (praising him for his virility of ideas, which I suppose is one way of characterizing his work), clearly defines idealism in a way thats different from a committee that awards the prize to, say, Jean-Paul Sartre, who declined the prize when it was offered to him in 1964.

The political connotations might help us understand the choices in certain years, especially when the committee has been explicit about ethical or moral considerations (Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Czeslaw Milosz), but then what about a laureate like Alice Munro, who won in 2013, cited for being master of the contemporary short story? (Also, for what its worth, the Academy itself insists that politics is no longer as central to decisions as people like to presume.)

Image Rudyard Kipling Credit... R. Haines/Culture Club, via Getty Images

I do think that politics can be a better guide to figuring out why some writers didnt get the prize. Ezra Pound, for instance  who I was surprised to learn was nominated 10 times! It apparently wasnt anything in his poetry that knocked him from the list. The committee deemed him unacceptable because of his enthusiastic fascism and vicious anti-Semitism  what one of the members called his  subhuman reaction to the Holocaust.
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Jack Mas American dream has woken up to a bitter reality. Alibabas retiring founder rescinded a promise to create 1 million jobs in the United States. He blamed tariff tensions between the United States and China, but his $420 billion company has not given foreigners a level playing field on his international e-commerce site. Like any exporter, Mr. Mas public championing of free trade blends enlightenment with self-interest.

Alibaba.com was originally built to connect small Chinese wholesale manufacturers to overseas buyers. As domestic consumption boomed, however, the export operation was eclipsed by Taobao, Alibabas eBay-like marketplace, and the complementary Tmall, which hosts stores for bigger retailers. When Mr. Ma met Donald Trump in January 2017 before his inauguration, the Alibaba chairman vowed that 1 million small American businesses would gain access over five years and lead to a similar number of jobs, helping rebalance trade in the process.

Most of those smaller merchants would have set up shop on Tmall Global. Theoretically, this subsite provides an easier channel to sell directly to Chinese customers, without the hassle and expense of creating an onshore entity, as required by Tmall. It attracted Costco, Gerber and most recently U.S. grocery chain Kroger, which began peddling a modest line of vitamins and nuts in August.
In the context of a growing national debate on tech and privacy, Google has come under increased scrutiny for how it may be tracking and targeting children for advertising.

Two House members sent a letter this week to the companys chief executive, Sundar Pichai, expressing concern that the collection practices of YouTube, a Google subsidiary, may not comply with the Childrens Online Privacy Protection Act, known as Coppa.

The letter on Monday  from David Cicilline, Democrat of Rhode Island, and Jeff Fortenberry, Republican of Nebraska  followed up on a complaint filed in April by more than 20 advocacy groups. The groups sought an investigation by the Federal Trade Commission, which enforces Coppa.

In addition to the complaint and the lawmakers letter, Google is facing pressure from the New Mexico attorney general on how it may collect childrens location data. The state official named the tech giant as a defendant in a lawsuit filed last week against the developer of Fun Kid Racing and other gaming apps, along with advertisers involved with them, claiming that they were sharing childrens data without their parents permission.
Squarely in the middle of that question is Michael Aiello, who leads the corporate department at the law firm Weil Gotshal & Manges. Mr. Aiello advised CBSs independent directors amid those investigations. And, at the request of two members of the boards nominating and governance committee, questioned Mr. Moonves by telephone in January about whether he, and therefore the company, had a #MeToo problem.

A lawyer for Mr. Moonves and other Weil Gotshal lawyers representing the board members were listening to that interview and taking notes. According to the four people, both sets of notes say Mr. Moonves disclosed that a police complaint had been filed against him last year by a woman who said he had sexually assaulted her. (The police complaint was pending when Mr. Aiello interviewed Mr. Moonves, but it was later dropped because the statute of limitations had expired.)

Mr. Moonves also told Mr. Aiello that an actresss manager had privately contacted Mr. Moonves and had accused him of sexually assaulting the actress, the four people said. They spoke on the condition of anonymity, citing the active legal matter.

Mr. Aiello did not ask Mr. Moonves the names of the woman who filed the complaint or the actress, the people said.

After the interview, Mr. Aiello briefed board members on it. The four directors or their representatives told me that Mr. Aiello assured them that although there had been some rebuffed advances toward women by Mr. Moonves in the distant past, CBS and the board had nothing to worry about.

Mr. Aiello did not mention the police complaint or the actress, the directors and their representatives said.

Mr. Aiellos failure to mention either matter to his client  CBSs nominating and governance committee  is perplexing, especially because he continued to advise the independent directors separately about whether to file a contentious lawsuit seeking to dilute Shari Redstones controlling interest in CBS. The suit was filed in May, and directors told me that, had they known then about the sexual harassment issues involving Mr. Moonves, they would not have gone forward with it.
According to the 37-year-old designer, who said she is drawn to kooky, jolie laide color palettes of browns and oranges, Its about the combinations, really: a mannish shirt worn beneath a dress, geometric crocheted skirt with a pony skin-paneled knitted gilet. Forms are capacious, whether trousers with paper-bag waists, roomy houndstooth jackets, a patchwork leather blouson or generous knits. Fingertip-length parkas come in unusual hues like ocher, and leather gilets and poplin skirts are cinched lightly with plain leather belts.

I prefer sequins worn during the daytime, said the designer, referring to some slouchy metallic-green sequined Bermuda shorts paired with a sweatshirt. The offbeat combination serves as something of an antidote to Milans bourgeois codes, and may ensure that her name comes up in the continuing local discussion about the need for new designers to secure the future of Italian fashion.

Also included in the line: wooden clogs called incompiuto, or unfinished, which resemble a shoemakers last but with a thick elastic band at the arch, and simple Roman-style leather sandals fancied up with an angled toe.
WASHINGTON  Three years after discovering that a military laboratory had shipped live anthrax to facilities around the world, the Department of Defense still has not developed a plan to evaluate its biological security practices, the federal Government Accountability Office reported on Thursday.

The department has implemented about half of the procedural changes that had been recommended, the G.A.O. said. But the Pentagon still has not established a way to measure the effectiveness of these reforms, making it difficult for experts to determine whether safety has improved.

When it comes to reforming procedures, this is not a one-off thing that you can do once and take a vacation, said Gigi Gronvall, a biosecurity expert at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.

We must be careful that the evaluations and procedures intended to increase safety actually do that, she added.
Although experts frequently assert that nearly 1.7 billion people carry dormant tuberculosis worldwide, that figure may be a gross exaggeration of the real threat, a recent study concludes.

The study, published last month in the journal BMJ, found that nearly everyone who falls seriously ill with TB does so within two years of getting infected. So-called latent infections only rarely become active, even in old age.

Researchers have spent hundreds of millions of dollars chasing after latency, but the whole idea that a quarter of the world is infected with TB is based on a fundamental misunderstanding, said Dr . Lalita Ramakrishnan, a tuberculosis expert at the University of Cambridge and one of the studys authors.

The challenge to conventional wisdom comes at an opportune time. On Sept. 18, the World Health Organization issued its annual TB report, and on Sept. 26, the United Nations General Assembly will hold its first high-level meeting on the disease.
Cancer center officials said that they acted properly in approving the deal with Paige.AI and that if successful, the venture could change the future of cancer diagnosis. This is an incredibly expensive undertaking  it needs a lot of money, Dr. Gregory Raskin, the hospitals vice president of technology development, said in an interview. We feel this is a really valuable and important technology to get developed.

Officials said that some board members invested only after early efforts to generate interest from outside companies and investors had failed. But they acknowledged that they did not seek an independent valuation of the tissue archive, nor did they put the proposal out for competitive bidding before licensing it to a single company. In exchange for sharing its voluminous database, Memorial Sloan Kettering received ownership shares amounting to about nine percent in the company.

Image Thomas Fuchs, head of the MSK computational pathology lab and a co-founder of Paige.AI.

It just seems awfully coincidental that the individuals involved happen to be people in control and influence of that asset, and they ended up with an exclusive use of it, said Marcus S. Owens, a Washington lawyer who ran the Internal Revenue Service division that oversees tax-exempt organizations. It seems to create a cascading series of conflicts for the operation of Sloan Kettering.

The decision to license images of the patients tissue slides to a for-profit company also highlights the broader debate over the use of personal medical data, ranging from genetic information to, in this case, images of a persons cells, for research and commercial purposes.

After ProPublica and The Times began asking questions about the arrangement, one of the founders  Dr. David Klimstra, the chairman of the pathology department  said he would divest his ownership stake.

Dr. Klimstra and another co-founder, Dr. Thomas Fuchs, the head of the computational pathology laboratory, pursued the idea for Paige.AI in 2015, hospital officials said. Dr. Fuchs had previously worked for NASA developing algorithms that would teach the Mars rovers to navigate terrain, and has said some of the same algorithms can differentiate cancerous tumors from benign ones. In a statement, he called the AI start-up the culmination of his lifes work.
One of the biggest challenges was to determine how to structure our report in a way that didnt feel like an endless, chronological march through unfamiliar names and events. The goal of the project, after all, was to bring people back to a story they might have abandoned out of confusion or frustration.

We chose a thematic approach, with each chapter focused on a particular aspect of the narrative that could almost serve as a self-contained story. We looked to our podcasting colleagues for inspiration. What if we envisioned the story as a written version of Slow Burn, the excellent Slate podcast about Watergate? Or, as five consecutive episodes of The Daily, the New York Times podcast?

The final section of the piece is a bit more analytical, because we wanted to explore both how the White House has tried to take advantage of Americas confusion over the Trump-Russia story, and what the lasting effects of the story might be. People may have grown numb to it, but it is an extraordinary thing for an American president to be in open warfare with the F.B.I., the Justice Department and, occasionally, the nations spy agencies.

This is a tale that, for the moment, doesnt have a final chapter. Mr. Mueller is still investigating, and its anyones guess when his team will wrap up and deliver its conclusions to the Justice Department. But even then, as we note in the story, there will most likely be no end to the arguments, reassessments and fresh research about the brazen Russian campaign to sabotage the election; about what impact it had on the final voting; and about the question at the center of everything, as in 1973  what the president knew and when he knew it.
Freedom of speech is an important right because a persons voice is sometimes all that person has. To take away a persons thoughts and opinions is to diminish their values and strip their life away.

 Yessenia, Rhode Island

The problem of hate speech

I think that free speech is free speech only if the presentation of opinions is respectful and nonviolent. If opinions are not presented in a respectful manner  such as heckling a speaker because of opposing political views  then it doesnt constitute free speech, because in a way, by disrespecting the speaker, you deny their right to free speech. In the same way, violence to state a point is not free speech, because you are not only denying the free speech of whom the violence is against, but you also possess a mindset that only your opinion is right, and people who disagree should be attacked.

 Ben S., Sunnyvale

Our right to speak is also our right to express ourselves, meaning that it should not be against the law to express your beliefs, whether it be on your clothing or made in a speech. Comments made by the Ku Klux Klan, for example, are made out of hate; hate comments made by hate organizations or any comments that threaten violence should not be interpreted as being acceptable under the First Amendment. However, comments with the intent to criticize are a part of our functioning democracy and are thus under our right to speak our minds.

 Caroline Gracia, Providence, R.I.

Our Supreme Court has ruled that there is high and low first amendment value to certain speech. I think that making an ambiguous high to low scale rating how much the first amendment applies to speech is wrong. Speaking is speaking, even if it is offensive or misleading. Inciting violence or physical assault on someone, however, is the one type of speech that I consider to be no longer protected under the first amendment. This is only because inciting violence is more similar to assault than it is to speech. It is not sharing ideas or information  it is calling for an attack.

 Aaron Leventhal, Massachusetts

Everyday First Amendment issues

In protecting unpopular speech it shows that others can have differing views on subjects, with those differing views come debates and exchanges of ideas. Many colleges are restricting freedom of speech by not letting controversial speakers talk on their campus. Even if they may carry a controversial opinion, I see it as unconstitutional to not let the person speak there due to their views on certain subjects seen as controversial. Every type of speech holds the same amount of value, even if they are seen in bad taste.

 kery, Providence

Depending on what platform you speak on is another subject that could be difficult to talk about. Social media can be a public platform but it is owned by a private company that can regulate its own rules. It can silence people so that the image of the company isnt ruined. Everyone can speak so everyone should be allowed to speak but if you decide to shut down a public hearing thats when turns from free speech to aggressive tyranny.

 Robert V, Rhode Island
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So many veterans stories begin with them coming back home to find its a place with which they no longer identify. I dont want to overstate my problems, but as a man who went to Iraq as a proud Marine only to realize what was happening there was nothing short of catastrophic, I started to rethink where exactly my heart aligned with my nation and where it fractured and split.

My heart, though, was not the only part of me in need of repair. I need medication to keep post-traumatic stress disorder from completely overrunning, and ending, my life. Before the meds, there was drinking and drugs, but those led me nowhere. Eventually I found out that the bottoms of bottles and barrels look a whole lot alike. Not that the pills make life easy. I am disabled  my back broken down by my years as a machine gunner in the Marine Corps  and my compressed and bulging discs ache. Moments of rage, confusion, terror and paranoia make me feel like an alien; night terrors interrupt my sleep, soak my sheets with sweat; and flashbacks haunt my waking hours.

These are the problems you read about in veteran tell-alls of every sort. But another is less often shared: the pills I take to manage the symptoms of these conditions kill my libido. So I was prescribed Viagra  pills begetting pills. I dont need it every time, but in case I do, I have it.

Armed by the V.A.s pharmaceutical regimen, I entered the online dating world, hoping companionship would bring a bit of pain relief and sanity. But online profiles seemed painfully shallow. My medications made me feel weird. The doctors told me to be vigilant for seizures, to tell someone if I felt strange in a bad way. My friends said I needed to be patient.

Before I had a solution to my arousal problems, I felt helpless. Now I feel more hopeful, but also confused and a little afraid. Viagra seemed like a straightforward enough solution at first. I would ask a woman out on a date, and after a few dates, we would have sex  easy to plan. But deciding whether or not Ill need some pharmaceutical assistance is tricky, and the consequences usually bear a tone of finality. If I take Viagra, Ill be good to go, as we used to say in the service. If I take it but dont need it, my throbbing erection will shift painfully under my belt. If I need it and dont take it, then Im sure to experience erectile dysfunction. If I do decide to take it, thats a call I need to make about 90 minutes in advance. A lot can happen in that window.
In October 2014, Joseph Scott Pemberton, an American Marine, took shore leave in Olongapo City, Philippines. There he met Jennifer Laude, a Filipino transgender woman, and went to a hotel room with her. Ms. Laude was later found murdered, and Mr. Pemberton was arrested and charged with the crime.

While the facts were relatively straightforward, the aftermath soon became maddeningly complicated, as seen in Call Her Ganda, which followed the resulting trial and the anger it raised in the Philippines.

The documentary, directed by PJ Raval, delves into frictions between the two countries and raises questions over the Visiting Forces Agreement, which protects accused American service personnel and is said to have allowed past crimes to go unpunished. Military influence on the case and widespread transgender discrimination made some Filipinos wary that Ms. Laudes murder would go unpunished.
Michael Moore began his filmmaking career with an investigative passion and a flair for showmanship. His 1989 debut feature, Roger & Me, used the funny populist hook of Mr. Moore, in his working-class Everyman persona, pursuing Roger B. Smith, the then-head of General Motors, to confront him about the companys abandonment of Mr. Moores hometown, Flint, Mich.

In his new documentary, Fahrenheit 11/9, Mr. Moore, his sense of showmanship not only intact but enhanced by a bigger production budget, fills a water truck with the same supply thats piped to Flint residents for drinking and bathing.

This water is famously polluted with lead (among other toxins), in a yearslong scandal thats still not come to a satisfactory conclusion. (No terrorist organization has figured out how to poison an entire American city, Mr. Moore notes in voice-over. It took the Michigan Republican Party to pull that off.) He drives the truck to the home of the most powerful Republican in Michigan, Gov. Rick Snyder, and waters his lawn with it.

For Mr. Moore, the situation in Flint is a microcosm of the disaster he sees President Trump imposing on this country.
DARIO ARGENTO at the Metrograph (Sept. 21-28). Many directors have made scarier and more suspenseful films than Mr. Argento has, but few have ever made buckets of blood look lovelier. And what better way to prepare for Luca Guadagninos remake of Mr. Argentos Suspiria (opening on Oct. 26) than with the hallucinatory 1977 original? Jessica Harper plays a student who begins attending a dance school in Germany that shows more than a few signs of witchy activity. The plot takes a back seat to the grandiose beauty Mr. Argento brings to the enterprise; every ray of light and throb of the soundtrack (the famous score is by Goblin) seems defiantly unnatural. The Metrographs retrospective includes most of his best-regarded movies, including The Bird With the Crystal Plumage (on Saturday, Sunday and Monday), a stylish giallo in which an American in Italy (Tony Musante) bears witness to an attempted murder and sticks around to play detective.

212-660-0312, metrograph.com

WAYNE WANGS CHINATOWNS at BAM Rose Cinemas (Sept. 24-27). As one of very few mainstream Hollywood movies to foreground an Asian-American story, The Joy Luck Club (screening on Thursday), from 1993, has been the subject of renewed attention and reappraisal in the wake of the success of Crazy Rich Asians. But that film was hardly this Hong Kong-born directors first work to bring the experiences of Chinese-Americans to the screen. BAM celebrates his earlier movies with this mini-retrospective. It includes the San Francisco-set mystery Chan Is Missing (showing on Tuesday), in which a cabdriver and his nephew search for a man who appears to have absconded with their savings; and the period piece Eat a Bowl of Tea (on Monday), which takes place in New York after World War II wherein an American veteran (Russell Wong) enters into an arranged marriage with a Chinese bride (Cora Miao).

718-636-4100, bam.org
The man behind HBOs True Detective and the dark Netflix comedy "Maniac was named on Thursday as director of the next James Bond film.

Cary Joji Fukunaga will direct the 25th movie in the franchise, the films producers, Michael G. Wilson and Barbara Broccoli, announced on Twitter. Mr. Fukunaga is taking over from Danny Boyle, who left the project in August with the producers citing creative differences.

We are delighted to be working with Cary, Mr. Wilson and Ms. Broccoli wrote. His versatility and innovation make him an excellent choice for our next James Bond adventure.

Mr. Fukunaga has not only worked in TV. In 2011, his adaptation of Jane Eyre was released in theaters, and he was also behind the 2015 film Beasts of No Nation, starring Idris Elba, who has long been suggested as a possible Bond after Daniel Craig leaves the franchise.
The extra money Mr. de Blasio announced on Thursday may well encourage those groups, but it also keeps the mayor as a cheerleader, rather than a driver, of school integration.

I have believed for a long time that the most profound social change comes from the grass roots but also the most lasting social change, Mr. de Blasio said.

The mayors starring role at Thursdays event was unusual; similar parent-led integration plans for the Lower East Side and the Upper West Side were announced by email by Department of Education officials.

There was never a question that the city wouldnt approve District 15s plan, so Mr. de Blasio needed only to confirm the logistics. Starting this fall, rather than going through a competitive middle school application process, students in the district will apply to schools by lottery. Competitive admissions have tended to concentrate white and Asian students in some schools, and black and Hispanic children in others.

Each of the districts middle schools are now required to reserve about half of their seats for students who are low income, homeless or learning English, which will ensure diversity.

The city will invest $500,000 to support the admissions changes, including resources to support teachers and schools.

The plans success will depend in part on the parents willingness to send their children to schools they might not have previously considered. There may be no better district to try that out than this one, said Clara Hemphill, the editor of InsideSchools, part of The New Schools Center for New York City Affairs. In District 15, all of the middle schools are good. Theres a coherent instructional vision and similar philosophy, she said.
Joe Percoco is paying the price for violating the public trust, Mr. Cuomo said. And it should serve as a warning to anyone who fails to uphold his or her oath as a public servant.

The bulk of the bribes came in the form of a low-show job given to Mr. Percocos wife, Lisa Toscano-Percoco, by an energy company, Competitive Power Ventures, which had wanted to build a power plant in the Hudson Valley.

[Want to know more about Joseph Percoco, and why his conviction matters? Read more here.]

Prosecutors had sought to show that Mr. Percoco, in addition to taking bribes, flouted state ethics rules openly and with impunity. At one point, they introduced swipe data showing that Mr. Percoco entered and exited the governors taxpayer-paid office even after he left state government to work on Mr. Cuomos campaign. After the trial ended, Mr. Cuomo seemed to acknowledge that he had been aware of Mr. Percocos presence, although he said he thought Mr. Percoco was there to handle transition matters.

In building its case against Mr. Percoco, the government relied heavily on another longtime Cuomo family ally: Todd R. Howe, a longtime lobbyist and Albany insider who had been a mentor to Mr. Percoco.

Prosecutors said Mr. Howe arranged for the bribes to be paid to Mr. Percoco by the power company, CPV, and a Syracuse-based developer, COR Development, which were both Mr. Howes clients.

When prosecutors announced the charges against Mr. Percoco in 2016, they also revealed that Mr. Howe had pleaded guilty to eight felonies and was cooperating with the government.

During the trial, Mr. Howe risked unraveling the governments case when he admitted under cross-examination that he had tried to defraud a credit card company, violating the terms of his cooperation agreement and tainting his credibility as a witness in real time. He was jailed but continued to testify in the trial.
A caravan of white Correction Department buses rumbled down Rockaway Boulevard in Ozone Park, Queens, on Thursday. The passengers werent inmates on their way to court but rather officers headed to the funeral of one of their fallen colleagues.

Jonathan Narain, 27, a correction officer at Rikers Island, was shot and killed on his way to work last Friday. A motorcyclist shot him in the head after an exchange of words at a red light in Richmond Hill, Queens, according to the police.
Hours after Gov. Philip D. Murphy called for legalizing marijuana in his inaugural address in January, the sheriff of the most populous county in New Jersey reportedly disparaged the proposal in racist terms, saying in other words, let the blacks come in.

Smoke their marijuana, do this do that, and dont worry about it, Michael Saudino, the sheriff of Bergen County, said, according to a report published online Thursday by WNYC. You know, well tie the hands of cops.

The comments made by Mr. Saudino were from a recording obtained by the radio station this week, and also included racist remarks about Gurbir Grewal, the attorney general of New Jersey who is a Sikh.

He didnt do that because of Bergen County; he did that because of the turban, Mr. Saudino said of the governors selection of Mr. Grewal, who at the time was the Bergen County prosecutor.
Jon Burge, the former Chicago police commander whose reported torture of criminal suspects cost the city more than $100 million in legal fees and reparations and prompted the governor to pardon four death row inmates and halt capital punishment in Illinois, died this week in Hillsborough County, Fla. He was 70.

His death was confirmed on Wednesday by the Zipperers Funeral Home in Ruskin, near his retirement home in Apollo Beach, south of Tampa. At the familys request, the funeral home did not say precisely when or where he died or give a cause of death. He had been treated for cancer.

A decorated Vietnam veteran who had collected 13 police commendations, Mr. Burge and detectives under his command were accused of extracting confessions from more than 100 people while questioning them in the 1970s and 80s by shocking them with cattle prods, smothering them with plastic typewriter covers and pointing guns in their mouths while pretending to play Russian roulette. Most of the suspects were black; he was white.

Fired from the force in 1993, he was never prosecuted for torture because the statute of limitations had lapsed. He was also acquitted in a 1989 civil rights suit filed by an inmate, Madison Hobley, who said he had been coerced into falsely confessing to the killing of his wife, infant child and five others in an arson investigation.
Perry Miller Adato, who began her award-winning career as a documentary director in the late 1960s, when relatively few women were in the field, and went on to make films about Georgia OKeeffe, Gertrude Stein, Picasso and other cultural figures, died on Sunday at her home in Westport, Conn. She was 97.

Her niece Brooke Garber Neidich confirmed her death.

She was a great filmmaker and an absolute perfectionist, Susan Lacy, the creator and former executive producer of the PBS documentary series American Masters, who worked with Ms. Adato on two films in that series, said in a telephone interview. She stood equal with men in an industry that wasnt always welcoming to women.

Ms. Adato, whose first film was Dylan Thomas: The World I Breathe (1968), was known for her vivid storytelling, which used onscreen and offscreen voices, photographs and scenes from plays  techniques that have since become commonplace in documentaries.

Her Dylan Thomas film won an Emmy Award for outstanding cultural documentary. Georgia OKeeffe (1977) brought her a Directors Guild of America Award, the first for a documentary by a woman. She would win a total of four D.G.A. Awards.
Stephen Jeffreys, a British playwright who looked to the past for some of his best-known works, notably The Libertine, about a hedonistic 17th-century earl, which was a vehicle for both John Malkovich and Johnny Depp, died on Sept. 17 in London. He was 68.

The cause was a brain tumor, his talent agency, Casarotto Ramsay & Associates, said.

Among Mr. Jeffreyss works were a play, Lost Land, about ethnic tension in Hungary during World War I; an adaptation of Charles Dickenss Hard Times made to be performed by four actors; and the screenplay for the 2013 film Diana, starring Naomi Watts as the Princess of Wales.

For The Libertine, an eyebrow-raising work that had its premiere in 1994 at the University of Warwick in England and then moved to the Royal Court Theater in London, Mr. Jeffreys drew on the life of John Wilmot, second Earl of Rochester, who was himself a writer and known for his pleasure-seeking ways.

In an interview with The Chicago Sun-Times in 1996, when The Libertine had its United States premiere at the Steppenwolf Theater in Chicago in a production starring Mr. Malkovich, Mr. Jeffreys blamed his dentist for his interest in the saucy subject.
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First, Brett Kavanaugh: Senate Republicans are clearly operating in bad faith, as a Times editorial explains. They show little sign of wanting to get at the truth of what did or didnt happen between Kavanaugh and Christine Blasey Ford. The Republicans are not calling for the F.B.I. to investigate and are not willing to call other relevant witnesses.

But something else has become clear, as well . The only way the country will get any closer to the truth is if Blasey decides that she is willing to testify even under the Republicans conditions  which is, of course, her call  and that Senate Democrats also accept those conditions.

Its growing increasingly clear that if Christine Blasey Ford doesn't testify, Kavanaugh is going to be confirmed with Republicans falling in line  barring any new developments over the next week, as CNNs Manu Raju put it.
In amoral political terms, Senate Republicans have been skillful in handling Christine Blasey Fords allegations that the Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her when they were both in high school.

On Monday, when Senator Charles Grassley, head of the Judiciary Committee, announced that a hearing on Blaseys allegations would be held in a week, it wasnt immediately clear that neither she nor her lawyer had been consulted. They sent out a notice of a hearing before they contacted her, Senator Mazie Hirono, a Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, told me. Then, when Blasey and her lawyers balked at Republican terms  asking, entirely reasonably, that the F.B.I. first examine her story  Republicans acted as if she was being irrational and going back on her word.

Theyre all piling on to her, as though its the most outrageous thing in the world to ask for an F.B.I. investigation, Hirono said.

Blasey has been put in a nightmarish position. She was terrified of the backlash that going public would bring. Now, reportedly in hiding with her family amid death threats, shes living what seems like her worst-case scenario. People on the right, including the presidents son, are mocking and smearing her. And as she adjusts to her radically changed circumstances, Republicans have subjected her to an ultimatum. She can agree by Friday to recount one of her lifes defining traumas to hostile men on extremely short notice, or lose her chance to have the Senate consider her story.
As the Democratic electorate has bifurcated along economic and racial lines, intraparty tension is rising.

One manifestation of this tension is the eruption of competition over access to high performance magnet schools in heavily Democratic metropolitan areas like Washington and New York. Take, for example, an initiative to change the role of ability testing in admitting students to public school programs for the gifted by administrators in Montgomery County, Maryland. The county, which lies in suburban Washington, is overwhelmingly Democratic (Clinton 77.7 percent to Trump 19.4 percent)  and affluent (median household income $100,352).

In an effort to expand openings for low-income and minority students, the Montgomery County school district now gives less weight to the Cognitive Abilities Test, a common assessment for admission to gifted programs, and more to class performance, Dana Goldstein reported earlier this month in The Times.

The county

changed its paradigm about whom the special schools should serve: not the students with the highest abilities across the county, but rather, those students who are outliers at their neighborhood schools, with fewer than 20 peers with similar abilities.

The new policies are not universally welcome. As Goldstein writes,

The changes have left some parents, mostly Asian and white and living in the countys more affluent areas, anxious. They worry their children will be excluded from selective programs, or that the level of instruction at the magnet schools will fall as students are accepted from lower-performing elementary schools.

At the same time, Kimberly Petrola, a teacher at Fox Chapel Elementary School in Germantown, one of the local Centers for Enriched Studies, told Goldstein:

Its good for the community to see that the gifted students are not just the typical students that you think of when you think of gifted and talented. Anybody from any diverse background can be gifted.

In New York, the mayor, Bill de Blasio and Richard A. Carranza, chancellor of the city schools, are promoting a similar reform  an issue I touched on in an earlier column.
KNOXVILLE, Iowa  We keep hearing about Democratic women of color winning races in the Bronx, Georgia, Boston and other places with a diverse population. But here in mostly white Iowa, weve got our own story to tell. Part of that story is its not just diverse urban areas where a person of color can run for statewide office.

Here in Iowa, 32-year-old Deidre DeJear, an African-American small-business owner, is the Democratic nominee for secretary of state. If Ms. DeJear beats the Republican incumbent, Paul Pate, in November, shell become the first African-American to win statewide office in Iowa. About 91 percent of Iowans are white; only about 4 percent are African-American.

Iowa is bipolar with respect to politics and race. Barack Obama won our first-in-the-nation Democratic caucuses in 2008 to help propel him to his two-term presidency. In 2016, Donald Trump almost won, and his second-place finish in the crowded Republican caucuses proved to the rest of the nation he was a viable candidate.

Similar racial dynamics play out in races for lower offices. The rural Fourth Districts congressman is Steve King, an anti-immigration, anti-multiculturalism Republican congressman who questions the cultural contributions of nonwhites, endorses white nationalism, compared immigrants to dogs and until last year had a Confederate flag on his desk. He retweets white supremacists.
After a serious setback in 2013, the lawyers who spearheaded the successful legal challenge, Menaka Guruswamy and Arundhati Katju, devised a new strategy that focused on the personal cost of constitutionally sanctioned discrimination.

They highlighted those who suffered under the law by enlisting as co-petitioners in the suit more than two dozen gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people who risked arrest simply for publicly identifying themselves as L.G.B.T.

This is a plea by 6 to 8 percent of the Indian population to be regarded as full citizens and not unconvicted felons, Ms. Guruswamy told the court. This is love that must be constitutionally recognized and not just sexual acts, she added.

Given Indias democratic tradition and importance as a rising regional power, the courts enlightened decision is already inspiring similar legal challenges in more than a half-dozen countries, including Kenya and Singapore.

As often is the case when barriers are broken, there is still much work to do, and one can assume a cultural backlash as gay people in India seek to exercise their newfound freedoms.

One troubling sign was the silence of top politicians, especially Prime Minister Narendra Modi, even as the Indian news media, including several conservative outlets, lauded the ruling. Mr. Modis government has indicated that while it will support the decision, it will oppose a further expansion of gay rights.

Good luck with that.

Given the courts sweeping and principled assertion that fundamental rights apply to all Indians, regardless of sexual orientation, activists have made clear their intention to push for the other rights they are denied, including to marry, adopt children, be protected from hate speech and inherit their partners wealth.
While Mr. Sadat was initially eager to support Mr. Carters plans for a revival of a regional peace conference, his impatience with the Arab divisions and Israeli negotiating tactics led to his unilateral decision to visit Jerusalem in 1977 in an effort to resuscitate talks. In so doing, he broke with the wider Arab world and inadvertently set in motion the possibility of a narrower bilateral peace.

At a time when the Middle East seemed finally poised for a regional settlement, bringing an end to three decades of war and settling the issue of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees, Mr. Begin, Israels new right-wing leader, had other plans as well. In parallel, both leaders hindered a major breakthrough based on Washingtons blueprint.

Israel had its own ideas

Mr. Begin had long stressed the impossibility of a Palestinian state. His views on the central importance for the Jewish people of Judea and Samaria  using the biblical term for the territories of the West Bank  were well known. After he was elected in May 1977, becoming the first prime minister from the right-wing Likud party, he declared he would encourage settlements, both rural and urban, on the land of the homeland.

The Sinai was another story. Israel had captured the peninsula from Egypt in 1967, but though the territory was a welcome strategic buffer, it held none of the religious appeal of the West Bank. Mr. Begin indicated early on a clear willingness to withdraw forces substantially in the Sinai as part of a peace deal with Egypt; the West Bank and Gaza Strip were never part of his negotiations.

These peace principles were made clear to Mr. Carter during Mr. Begins first visit to the White House. Concerning Judea, Samaria and the Gaza Strip our position is that we shall not place them under any foreign rule or sovereignty, Mr. Begin said, according to newly declassified Israeli records.

The American government believed it could reconcile these clashing views on territory by drawing a distinction between Israels opening position and the final outcome of negotiations with Mr. Sadat in late 1977 and 1978. It did not count on the Egyptian leader undercutting Palestinian demands in the process.

Mr. Begin also put forward his own ideas to address this divergence of views, encapsulated in his extensive Home Rule for Palestinian Arabs, Residents of Judea, Samaria and the Gaza District. Instead of allowing for collective self-determination, Israel would retain the territories acquired in 1967 while promising local authority for elected Arab officials to guide decisions in areas like commerce, education, health and transport. At its heart, Mr. Begins offer of autonomy was couched in benevolent language but predicated on the denial of self-determination for Palestinians.
The allegation made by Christine Blasey Ford  that at age 15 she was the victim of a sexual assault by a 17-year-old Brett Kavanaugh  has not only upended Judge Kavanaughs Supreme Court confirmation hearings, but has also left Americans wondering what standards should apply to an accusation like this.

Its natural to place this sort of accusation within a criminal-justice framework: the burden of proof beyond a reasonable doubt; the presumption of innocence; the right to confront and respond to an accuser. If Judge Kavanaugh stood criminally accused of attempted rape, all of that would apply with full force. But those concepts are a poor fit for Supreme Court confirmation hearings, where theres no presumption of confirmation, and theres certainly no burden that facts be established beyond a reasonable doubt.

What matters here isnt law as much as politics  though not (or not just) partisan politics. Confirmation hearings are also about constitutional politics  the debate, involving both institutions of government and the polity, about what the Constitution means and requires.

So what standard should the Senate use in evaluating the claims made by Dr. Blasey and in deciding how they bear on Judge Kavanaughs fitness for a seat on the Supreme Court? The Senates approach to its constitutional advice and consent obligation has always depended on context. A number of factors matter: the timing of the vacancy; the justice being replaced; the nominees likely impact on the ideological makeup of the court; even the popularity of the president (very popular presidents have always had more leeway when it comes to picking justices). Then, of course, theres the nominee.
Charles Grassley, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, seem determined to call a vote next week on the confirmation of Judge Brett Kavanaugh to be an associate justice of the Supreme Court, even in the face of this weeks sexual assault allegations against him.

Senate Republicans assume, correctly, that if they can hold the party line, his installation on the Supreme Court is a sure thing. This is certainly true  even if the Democratic caucus in the Senate holds firm against Mr. Kavanaugh, they simply lack the votes to block him. But the Republicans calculus contains a significant error  namely, the assumption that if Judge Kavanaugh is confirmed to the Supreme Court, thats the end of the discussion of whether he is fit to serve.

The Constitution does provide that federal judges, including Supreme Court justices, shall hold their offices during good behavior. The settled understanding of this phrase is that so-called Article III judges enjoy lifetime tenure. But the Constitution also makes both judicial and executive officers subject to impeachment. And, as it happens, the House of Representatives holds the sole power of impeachment. If the Democrats win back the House in November, they can exercise that power.

Impeachment proceedings in the House are investigative in nature and come with a full panoply of quasi-judicial powers, including aids to investigations, such as the power to subpoena witnesses to compel them to appear and testify (subject, of course, to constitutional privileges, if applicable, such as the Fifth Amendments guarantee against self-incrimination).
GUANGZHOU, China  WeChat has become an indispensable part of life in China. As Chinas answer to WhatsApp, Facebook, Uber and Apple Pay, it has combined all the functions these international brands have to offer into one phone application. People in China use it for everything from sharing updates with their friends, sending messages and group chats to organizing parties and making digital payments.

Despite its considerable utility, however, this app makes me uneasy.

Several years ago, when WeChat was starting to become popular, I posted a photo of a candlelight vigil in Hong Kong, held in memory of Tiananmen Square, to my WeChat Moments (a feature in WeChat similar to Facebook Timelines). Half an hour later, my boss called me, scolding me for my dangerous and improper behavior and ordering me to delete it immediately. I had to comply but couldnt help wondering how it had leaked so quickly. Since Moments posts were supposed to be viewable only by ones WeChat friends, is was obvious that either a friend had reported me or the authorities were monitoring my WeChat activities. Either scenario made me terribly uncomfortable.

I soon realized that mine was not an isolated case. Over the following years, I heard many stories in the news about WeChat users who were interrogated or arrested for things they posted on Moments. Some of the posts were politically sensitive, and others bad-mouthed local police officers.

I have also witnessed censorship firsthand involving two other major WeChat features: group chats and public accounts. Although the Chinese dont usually talk about politics in public, they are quite outspoken in private occasions, and group chats provide a private, informal environment. As people began exchanging political opinions in group chats, the chat groups and participants accounts were removed without warning, with members not knowing which exact lines they might have crossed. This year, three people were blocked for posting an article about power struggles in the Communist Party to their group chat, The South China Morning Post reported. There are also 20 million public accounts on WeChat, which are for those interested in reaching the general public. Articles there are heavily censored, and many accounts with large followings have been temporarily silenced or even permanently suspended.
Is it too late for Tesla?

What may have started as an ill-advised bit of summer whimsy  Elon Musks tweet on Aug. 7 suggesting that, as Teslas chief executive officer and its largest shareholder, he was going to take the company private and had the funding secured to do so  has turned into a full-blown crisis.

Theres the unwanted scrutiny: Thanks to Mr. Musks tweet, Tesla is the target of a criminal investigation by the Justice Department and a civil investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission. Theres the missed opportunity: a Saudi investment fund that had been eyeing Tesla has invested $1 billion in a rival. Theres the brain drain: the sudden departures of Teslas chief accounting officer and its head of human resources. Theres the loss of investor confidence: Teslas stock price is down 25 percent since August.

And then there is Teslas biggest and most acute problem: its precarious finances. Mr. Musk promises investors that Tesla is going to start making more cars and profits any day now, but thats wishful thinking. Tesla is not generating enough cash to pay back the mountain of debt that is coming due soon. Once stalwart investors are losing faith in Mr. Musk and his company, and Wall Street is turning on him. Tesla could soon become a case study of what can happen when an iconoclastic Silicon Valley entrepreneur, seduced by his own wonderfulness, thinks the rules of the marketplace do not apply to him.

Teslas finances are fragile. It has around $11 billion in long-term debt and no profits. That is not a sustainable business model, Jim Collins, a longtime auto industry research analyst, wrote in Forbes in April. Not even close.
[Music]

Huzayfah: Theres two guards on each side of the gate, and then they just, like, look through your passport, where youre coming  they ask where youre coming from. And thats when I told them, O.K., I came from Pakistan. Theyre like, Oh, O.K., how long were you there? Ten months. Why were you there for 10 months? I told them university and everything. They were like, O.K. And I said it in a way, I guess, that it didnt make it seem like I was lying. And I was telling the truth. I guess it was a sugar-coated version, but I was still telling the truth. Um, when I got back, I had to face the reprisals from my parents, obviously.

Callimachi: But first, tell me what happened at the airport.

Huzayfah: Ah, yeah. My mom and my sister picked me up. And they just, you know, they hugged me, and they just started crying. They couldnt believe it. I was really skinny, like, scratches on my face, a lot more scratches on my face. You know, anytime Id just drop dead soon  thats what I looked like. And then, we went home, and my mom, she wouldnt leave my side. She just, shed keep me in the kitchen with her while cooking dinner. And, you know, Id have to sleep on the ground of their room.

Callimachi: Do you think that theyve been able to forgive you?

Huzayfah: My mom, probably not. I dont think my mom can ever forgive me for what I told her  about killing and everything.

Callimachi: I see.

Huzayfah: Yeah, about what Ive done. Shed never expected that 

Callimachi: Yeah.

Huzayfah: That Id ever do something like that. And my dad  probably not, either. I put them through a lot, and its time I make it up to them now.

Callimachi: And do you think that theres a chance you could go back to that ideology and to that life of violence?

Huzayfah: No. No, I cannot, at all. I cant, no. Ive come too far from it. And, you know, and theres too much here that I have to give up now. Like, Ive struggled so much to reintegrate myself. So, theres no point in throwing that out all over again and going back to that ideology. Something thats not right is not right.

Callimachi: Have you thought of turning yourself in as a way to kind of try to just, you know, break with it for good, and not, and not  ?
Hawk: Now he says Im from Farouq, not from Bab Sinjar. From Farouq neighborhood.

Callimachi: The place that he had joined ISIS changed.

Hawk: Next to the Grand Nuri mosque, now he says.

Callimachi: He admitted that he had held her for five months, not one.

Hawk: Yesterday, it was only one month.

Callimachi: The amount of time that he had been in ISIS started to expand.

Mills: Hes, hes meeting her on some of the details.

Hawk: Yes. He says: What Im telling you is all the truth, and thats nothing but the truth. And I am not contradicting, and Im not lying to you. And thats what I have.

Callimachi: So, Bashar, Im just a journalist, O.K.? Im not a member of any security force, and Im not a member of any government. Im asking you, do you want to tell me what really happened with this girl, or do you not want to be interviewed at all?

Callimachi: And after some time, he just stopped answering my questions. And at that point, I knew that it was time for us to go.

[Music]

Mills: So do you know what happened to Bashar?

Callimachi: So the jail where we saw him told us that they transferred him to Baghdad. But when we called Baghdad, they have no record of him. So I dont actually know what happened to him. What we do know for sure is that the Iraqi government is aggressively prosecuting these people, and theyre holding trials that are incredibly hasty.
[Singing]

Mills: And what about Souhayla?

Callimachi: So, Souhayla. As you know, about a week after we left, we published a story about Souhayla.

Mills: Yeah.

Callimachi: And there was an unbelievable response. Readers from, really, all over the world contacted you and I and wanted to know, What can I do to help her? These readers ended up forming a Facebook group, and in that Facebook group, I was able to connect them to Falah, our translator, as well as to Khalid, Souhaylas uncle. They began actively fundraising and were able, in a short amount of time, to send what turned out to be thousands of dollars to Souhayla, both for her initial recovery and to pay for the ongoing search for her little sister. A few weeks after the Facebook group started, Falah sent us a series of images. And it was Souhayla and her family on Sinjar Mountain, and they were doing exactly what she had told us that she needed to do. She was there to see it with her own eyes. She was in her village, and in the pictures, shes wearing a long white dress. Her hair is growing back. Her cheeks are flushed. She looks not only healthy, but radiant.

[Music]

Callimachi: And a couple of months ago, I was at my desk one morning. And I saw that I had a Facebook message from Falah. When I opened it, I saw that there was a video link. I clicked on it.

[Sound from video]

Callimachi: And I saw a car pull up in a refugee camp. A crowd is gathering around it, and a little girl steps out. The message says, Shayma has come home.

[Sound from video]

Callimachi: This is Souhaylas little sister, who was just 11 years old when she was kidnapped by ISIS and held for more than three years in Iraq and Syria. And this video is the moment when she has finally returned to her family.

[Sound from video]

Callimachi: And all you see is her community mobbing her.

[Sound from video]

Callimachi: Relatives coming and hugging her and kissing her. You see Khalid, her uncle, who buries his head in her collar bone.

[Sound from video]

Callimachi: And then you see a woman whos wearing a white shroud  an older woman. Its Shaymas mother, and she takes her in her arms.
[Music]

Callimachi: But this is also where, I think, you see ISIS hubris. Ive long wondered, if they had just stuck to a caliphate that was only in Iraq and Syria without doing any attacks in the West, I wonder if you and I would still be talking about that caliphate now, about that territory now. But instead, they put more and more emphasis on these attacks overseas. And eventually, it was this strategy of violence, it was this constant drumbeat of attacks that, in the end, forces the West to re-engage in a way it really didnt want to: boots on the ground by American, British and French troops, a coalition of countries that come together to try to root ISIS out.

[Sound of car]

Callimachi: Look, right ahead of us is a house thats been destroyed in an airstrike. You can see the pancaked roof completely flat. Right? When you see that, that means that the coalition believed that there was an ISIS fighting position or some sort of ISIS presence in that building.

Mills: Yeah, its completely destroyed.

Hawk: But its really sad when you see houses which have been destroyed like this.

Mills: If ISIS is defeated today, your city will be liberated. Does that make you happy?

Hawk: Actually, its a really complicated question. Because now, military liberation is about to be completed. But if were gonna talk about civilians, if were gonna talk about infrastructure, if were gonna talk about houses, a total city that has been destroyed  and this is not gonna be considered as a victory. So I dont know whether I should be happy or should I be sad. The way I feel, I cant really feel that happy.

[Music]

Callimachi: Iraq state TV says Mosul battle to end within hours.

Hawk: Yeah, hours  saying 48 hours, 72 hours, thats what they mean.

Callimachi: So we drove and drove and drove all day. And the whole time I was checking my phone, I had a map of where the Iraqi military was positioned in Mosul. And I was watching this little island of land that ISIS still held shrinking and shrinking.

Callimachi: Yeah. Nothing today? O.K. O.K.

Callimachi: And then, to complicate things, we were told that theres a media blackout. Reporters were not being allowed in at all. And so, at the end of the day, not having been able to go inside, we checked in with our sources to see where things stood.
Huzayfah: March, April  this is April.

Callimachi: Spring of 2017.

Huzayfah: Yeah. Im, like, dressed up and everything. And then they ask me, How is everything going? and everything. And theyre like, So we just have some new information, and now you can come clean about where you had been and what you have been doing, and your role, essentially, in the past few years. Im like, You know what, I dont have to say anything. I can walk out of here. Theyre like, Yeah, you can walk out of here, if you want. And Im like, I can keep denying it, and you have no way to prove it. Theyre like, you know, Youre just going to dig yourself a bigger and bigger hole if you just keep lying to us like this. Just tell the truth once, and then we can see what we can do to help you. Were not here to get you in trouble. We just want to know if youre a threat and where your mind-set is at and everything. Just come clean, and itll be easier. So Im like, O.K. So this is what happened. I did cross the border.

[Music]

Huzayfah: And then, theyre like, O.K., so start from the beginning. So how did this all happen? And then I started. I told them from in Pakistan, who I got recruited through, where I went, the safe house, what Id do there, the locations in Manbij  pointed it out on the map.

Mills: Did you tell them about the meeting that you told us about?

Callimachi: The Amn al-Kharji.

Huzayfah: Oh, yeah, yeah. I had to tell them everything, yeah. Like, you know, how they talked about people going into Europe, how they talked about going  sending people into North America. I told them the names of who the guys were, too.

Mills: Did they ask about any time that you had to enforce violence?

Huzayfah: Yeah, they asked me, O.K., did you commit any violence, or did you see anything like that? And obviously, you saw things like that. But I didnt, like, admit to them I did some, though. Cause, like  but I, um, I felt like thats not something, like  O.K., the reason, like, I hid that, because thats not their business, really. It took place in a war zone, and theres  it wasnt like I had, like, I had done it out of, like, craziness, or  anyways, its a war zone. And I thought that its not their business to deal with, and its my own business to overcome and deal with that, and, yeah. So I just thought, like, its better off for me not to tell them. I felt lighter after that meeting. Im like, now they can  now that theyre fully aware of my situation, like, you know, O.K., now its  everythings crystal clear, pretty much. Now I can finally fully work on progressing.

Callimachi: But if I can just push back, it wasnt crystal clear, because you didnt tell them about the executions that you took part in.

Huzayfah: That does not really need to be told, though. Thats not gonna do anything except cause public mischief. Because whats gonna happen is that theyre gonna say, O.K., so now hes just admitting it. But that  and then Canadians are gonna ask the bigger question, Why is he out? You know, thats the only question I feel like its gonna raise. Its not gonna  if I come out with it, theres not gonna be any benefit of me coming out with it.

Callimachi: But to turn the tables, I think that is a  that is a valid question for people to have, given that this is a group that people are very afraid of, right? And that has vowed to carry out attacks all over the world, right?
Editors Note [Dec. 18, 2020]: In 2018, The Times released a 12-part narrative podcast series called Caliphate on the Islamic State terrorist group and its operations. While parts of the series involved a broad examination of the groups tactics and influence, multiple episodes were driven primarily by the confessional tale of a Canadian man of Pakistani origin who called himself Abu Huzayfah and claimed to have been a member of the Islamic State who had taken part in killings in Syria.

During the course of reporting for the series, The Times discovered significant falsehoods and other discrepancies in Huzayfahs story. The Times took a number of steps, including seeking confirmation of details from intelligence officials in the United States, to find independent evidence of Huzayfahs story. The decision was made to proceed with the project but to include an episode, Chapter 6, devoted to exploring major discrepancies and highlighting the fact-checking process that sought to verify key elements of the narrative.

In September  two and a half years after the podcast was released  the Canadian police arrested Huzayfah, whose real name is Shehroze Chaudhry, and charged him with perpetrating a terrorist hoax. Canadian officials say they believe that Mr. Chaudhrys account of supposed terrorist activity is completely fabricated. The hoax charge led The Times to investigate what Canadian officials had discovered, and to re-examine Mr. Chaudhrys account and the earlier efforts to determine its validity. This new examination found a history of misrepresentations by Mr. Chaudhry and no corroboration that he committed the atrocities he described in the Caliphate podcast.

As a result, The Times has concluded that the episodes of Caliphate that presented Mr. Chaudhrys claims did not meet our standards for accuracy.
Dale, who works in real estate public relations, was interested in a bigger gym. The walk to the PATH train was longer than they wanted, too.

At Trump Bay Street, which opened nearly two years ago with around 450 units, they were impressed by the lobby, which had beautiful furniture and great design, and it smells lovely, Dale said. They liked the two-bedroom, two-bathroom units, which had big closets and a big kitchen with an island.

They also checked out the newer and taller Urby, right across the street, which has about 760 units and a cafe in the lobby. They had a great marketing campaign, and its branded very well, Dale said.

But the bedrooms had built-in cabinets beneath the windows, which the twins felt limited their furniture-arranging options, and the kitchens were comparatively small.

Image The Ellipse, a 380-unit Jersey City rental tower that opened last year, had curved walls that made decorating a challenge. Credit... Robert Wright for The New York Times

They decided to sign on for a $4,700 two-bedroom at Trump Bay Street, which  like other buildings they had seen, including the Ellipse and Urby  had smart elevators that appealed to them. It groups people together, so it gets you there as efficiently as possible, Dale said.

From the beginning, though, Dale had been contemplating a one-bedroom of her own. It was about being mid-30s and still living together, she said. As twins, you see other twins as adults in their 40s and 50s and still wearing outfits that match, and we are not going to be that.
They also found that humans and octopuses share parts of an ancient messaging system involved in social behaviors, one enhanced by the presence of MDMA in both animals. These shared lineages may have been conserved to reduce fear and enable social behaviors. And although preliminary, the authors think octopuses present a promising model for studying MDMAs effects on the human brain, treating PTSD and better understanding how the brain evolved to conjure social behaviors.

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MDMA helps release, among other chemicals, serotonin. That ancient molecule is involved in regulating mood and social behaviors in invertebrates like locusts as well as vertebrates, like fish, dogs and humans.

For Dr. Dolen, who is interested in evolution of social behavior, the octopus offered an interesting test of MDMA and serotonin, because it is separated by 500 million years of evolution from humans, but also has complex behavior.

Octopuses suspend their aggression for a few minutes to mate, perhaps accessing an otherwise switched-off neural signaling system  potentially similar to the one that helps humans behave socially, she reasoned. And any similarities in octopus and human genetic code related to this system could help her understand how the brain  down to its tiniest bits  evolved to govern social behaviors.

Like a wedge in Pac-Mans mouth, MDMA fits inside a protein that moves serotonin in and out of neurons. The drug eventually causes a flood of serotonin between synapses, increasing its signals. When the researchers compared the genome of the California two-spot octopus (Octopus bimaculoides) to those of other animals, they discovered humans and octopuses could both make this protein, and it was nearly 100 percent similar at that special Pac-Man spot.
The bleat not only alerts other pandas to the presence of an available mate, it contains important information about the vocalists size and identity. Given the dense bamboo thicket that limits visual contact in most panda habitats and the brevity of panda mating season  females ovulate just once a year and can conceive for only a few days  the pandas ability to perceive the bleat is critical to reproduction among this once-endangered species.

Now, researchers have determined that the bleat works best as a local call. A panda can discern aspects of a callers identity. like its size, from a bleat within about 65 feet, but the callers gender is only perceptible within about 33 feet, according to a study published Thursday in Scientific Reports.

Megan Owen, a conservation ecologist at the San Diego Zoo Institute for Conservation Research and an author of the study, offered a human analogy for how this ability works.

If youre walking into a crowded room and someone calls out your name, theres a certain point where you can identify who that is, or maybe you can identify that its a male or female that is calling your name, she said. Theres information thats encoded in that call, but that information degrades over distance.

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To conduct the study, Dr. Owen and her colleagues  including Ben Charlton, another San Diego institute researcher who has studied panda bleats  obtained recordings of giant pandas from Chengdu, China, during breeding season. They then played those recordings through a speaker in a section of the San Diego Zoo Safari Park that contains bamboo similar in type and density to a typical panda habitat. By placing recording devices throughout the bamboo, the researchers were able to capture and analyze the bleats from various distances.
Up until this point, for centuries in fact, an oyster had been a difficult thing to love. It was a food for the brave, one who dared to venture into the tangled, oddly textured, vaguely sexual, bottom-feeding realm of mollusks. They had good months and bad months. They could make us sick. If we chanced upon a superlative one, they could also delight us, like a carnival game. That was their appeal. Indeed, Americans couldnt get enough: We dredged up our bays and spoiled our rivers until there was almost nothing wild left. There was little choice but to cultivate them. Along the way, a few farmers thought to make improvements. Didnt we want the shells to be more shapely, round and deep? Wouldnt it be nice if the meat were a little less sinuous and more consistent? Couldnt they be a little easier to shuck? In answering these questions, we prevented domestic oysters from disappearing  but we also homogenized them, making something safe and predictable out of what was once wild.

TO RAISE AN OYSTER, you merely need to spread spat (baby oysters, essentially) in water with a suitable bottom and wait. Oysters do not need to be fed or herded. They just grow, feasting on phytoplankton until someone decides to take them back out.

In the 2,000 years since the Romans started farming them, though, the process has become increasingly complicated. In the 1920s, producers in Japan started hanging oysters from strings to protect them from sea-floor-dwelling predators. In the early 1980s, West Coast hatcheries started selling oyster larvae attached to crushed bits of shell that could be grown individually, rather than in clumps that required hammering the shells apart. In 1986, an Australian patented a cylinder that floats in open water, using the tidal forces to knock those individual oysters against one another like rocks being polished in a tumbler. This technique  which breaks off the animals long, brittle bill in favor of a deeper, shorter, stronger cup  combined with those previous innovations, ushered in the perfect oyster of our current era. According to Mike Lata, the chef and co-owner of the Ordinary restaurant in Charleston, S.C., the oyster has become the only feel-good story in our food chain right now  an easy-to-raise, in-demand delicacy that cleans the environment as it grows: As a filter-feeder, it removes impurities from the water, which increases local biodiversity.

Like a grape, the flavor of an oyster is sensitive to minute variations in place and climate. An oyster makes itself from whatever is in the water around it: the vegetal notes of certain algae, the salty bite of open ocean water, the muddy depth of a riverbed. There are only a handful of species in the world; from them, farmers have engineered the hundreds of brand names served at restaurants today. In recent decades, no single oyster has had better name recognition than the Kumamoto, a small, slow-growing species introduced to the West Coast from Japan. Taylor Shellfish, a 128-year-old family company in Washington (the largest shellfish producer in the country), created a brand out of them by marketing to celebrated seafood chefs. Customers loved the dainty, polite shape. After selling three and a half million of them in 2008, the Taylor family wanted to improve on that success. They floated mesh bags over open waters in Willapa Bay, north of Portland, Ore., where raising Kumamotos had proved impossible, and loaded them with Crassostrea gigas, a less finicky species. The waves rocked the oysters against one another inside the sacks until they had created something equally deep-cupped but faster-growing and meatier. The Taylors named it Shigoku, which translates from Japanese to something like ultimate. By the end of 2018, they expect to sell nearly six million of these.
Though never a best-seller, the book touched a nerve with writers and editors and other people who like to argue about ethics in art.

That included the producer Norman Twain, who originally spearheaded the adaptation but died in 2016. The script is credited to three writers: Gordon Farrell, Jeremy Kareken and David Murrell (the latter two were continuing to make tweaks through rehearsals). And, in a first for Broadway, women make up the entire design team.

As directed by the prolific Leigh Silverman (Violet, Sweet Charity), the 95-minute adaptation contrives a reason to get all three of its characters into the same ramshackle Nevada home. It compresses the timeline (which in reality spanned years) to a few days, wringing tension out of a hard publication deadline. Theres also boozing and choking and lots of anguish over the state of the world  and whether art gives one the right to lie.

The book itself is even more minimal. Cleverly, it wraps Mr. DAgata and Mr. Fingals punchy battles in marginalia around the text of the original essay. Mr. DAgata contends that he has the right to change the verifiable number of strip clubs in Las Vegas to 34 from 31 because the rhythm of thirty-four works better in that sentence than the rhythm of thirty-one. 

Thats on the second page of the book. By the end, the two arent so much co-workers as radicals fighting for their very world views.

Image Credit... Sonny Figueroa/The New York Times

Mr. Fingal now works as a software engineer in San Francisco while also running a small culture and technology magazine called Logic. Mr. DAgata has published and edited widely, including the anthology series A New History of the Essay. And 13 years since they first started working on The Believer piece, the two remain locked together.
BERLIN  The term regietheater, a German theatrical philosophy that gives a plays director godlike powers, can send a chill down an Anglo-American theatergoers back. But while many directors here stick to the classics, often in productions so radical that they end up seeming like entirely different plays, a crop of brand new works by playwright-directors is lighting up stages in Berlin and Frankfurt at the beginning of the theater season. Call it auteur theater.

The staged creations of Rene Pollesch, one of Germanys most innovative directors, often dont look like theater at all. With no characters, no plot, no conventional dramatic arc, his high-energy performances feature his regular acting collaborators reciting text that can swerve from philosophy to pop. He often defies contemporary expectations of theater by resurrecting archaic ones, like the Greek chorus.

And yet the result is fun, accessible and engaging: Many of Mr. Polleschs works have become cult classics. They are a far cry from the deconstructive behemoths of Frank Castorf, the former director of Berlins Volksbuhne theater, who invited Mr. Pollesch to stage many productions there during Mr. Castorfs 25-year reign. And, unlike that legendary  or notorious  impresarios monumental performances, an evening with Mr. Pollesch usually clocks in at 90 minutes or less.
She was threatened repeatedly. Poisoned, twice. Detained by Russian security forces, tortured and told she would be executed.

None of this was enough to stop Anna Politkovskaya from reporting on the second Chechen War.

In books and articles for the newspaper Novaya Gazeta, she described, with ruthless objectivity and an acute sense of moral complexity, the clash between the Russian government and the Chechen rebels that opposed it.

She investigated allegations of abuse on all sides, pursuing the truth relentlessly, often on behalf of the Chechen civilians most victimized by the war, until she was shot and killed in Moscow in October 2006 at the age of 48. Five men were convicted of her murder in 2014, but critics say the case remains unsolved until whoever ordered the assassination is held accountable.

The journalists life and work is the subject of Stefano Massinis play Intractable Woman: A Theatrical Memo on Anna Politkovskaya, which opens Sept. 23 in a Play Company production directed by Lee Sunday Evans.
For most travelers, Mr. Dillon recommends the Travelpro Platinum Magna 2 for its balance of size, price and reliability. Frequent travelers may also want to upgrade to the Briggs & Riley Baseline 22-Inch Domestic, which carries extra features, including expandable room. Both fit most standard overhead size regulations, Mr. Dillon said.

But the right bag depends on the type of trip as well.

We have backpacks for hiking trips, suitcases for urban city travel and day bags for weekend trips or short one-nighters, Ms. Jerrard said.

For journeys to remote locations, versatility is the most important attribute. Mr. Lukaszewicz uses an Osprey wheeled backpack for such trips.

We rarely use the backpack straps and instead opt for the wheels but its great to have the option of backpack straps, Mr. Lukaszewicz said. Weve used them when traveling to Koh Lipe, an island in Thailand only accessible by ferry, where youd be dragging your luggage in the sand if you didnt have a backpack.

Consider a smarter wardrobe

Packing less means youll need to get the most out of what you wear.

Lay out your daily outfits and only bring what you really need and bring pieces that can make several outfits, Mr. Lukaszewicz said. Always pack layers and pieces you can easily mix and match no matter if youre traveling to a tropical destination or off to the snow-capped mountains.

Shoes are often a major space-drain, so it helps to decide in advance what youll actually need on your trip, rather than planning for every possible scenario.

We typically travel with max two to three pairs of shoes each, being one pair of comfortable walking shoes, and a pair of sandals or something that can be dressed up if need be, Ms. Jerrard said.
In the end, a direct measure of partisanship is the strongest predictor of vote choice, despite what youve perhaps read about fancy microtargeting models that claim to nail down attitudes of voters based on something like the car they drive. The simple, old-fashioned measures of partisanship do the bulk of the work in the models and the polls.

But Wisconsin is one of a handful of states where none of this data is available. Theres no party registration, and the voter file indicates only whether someone voted in a primary, not which one. Minnesota, North Dakota and Montana are also in this category.

Its an even greater challenge because these states, with a lot of white, rural residents, have relatively few other characteristics that strongly correlate with partisan vote choice.

In other parts of the country, weighting  giving more weight to respondents from underrepresented groups, to ensure the sample reflects the demographic profile of likely voters  can get you a long way because characteristics like race, age and education are also correlated with partisan vote choice.

In our i nitial Wisconsin and Minnesota polls, we took an all-of-the above approach. Not only did we weight by those standard categories, but we also tried to estimate the likely partisanship of our respondents using our prior polling data. Ultimately, this was only somewhat successful.

So far, were observing a pretty modest response bias toward Democrats, particularly in well-educated districts. You can see that for yourself by looking at the if we didnt weight by party option in the weighting section of our live poll pages. This would seem to imply that, in general, wed be at a greater risk of overestimating Democrats in places like Minnesota or Wisconsin.

Were not going to shy away from polling the most important districts. But at the margins, wed prefer to poll in the places where we can leverage as much data as we can. Minnesotas First District, for instance, is the kind of race that we would probably poll if it had party registration. Well probably avoid it.
Benefits that were once reserved for the career force were extended to even the lowest soldier, said Jennifer Mittelstadt, a professor of history at Rutgers University who has taught courses at the Army War College on the militarys changing social contract. There was a broad shift toward making life for the soldier more palatable, and pizza is part of that, she said.

M.R.E.s, introduced in the early 1980s to replace canned field rations, come in a tough plastic pouch and are meant to supply a complete 1,200-calorie meal, including snacks, dessert and instant coffee. All M.R.E.s also come with a flameless ration heater activated by adding water to a chemical pouch. The pouches also include items like toilet paper, matches and chewing gum that may be hard to come by in the field.

Soldiers have always groused about their chow, of course. Generations of generals have repeated the adage that armies march on their stomachs, but few ever mentioned taste buds. As American military rations evolved from the salt pork and hardtack of the Civil War to Vietnam-era cans of ham and lima beans, the verdict of the troops remained reliably grim.

It was only during the first major field deployment of M.R.E.s, during the Gulf War in 1991, that military leaders realized the monotonous and largely brown rations could become a morale problem. After the war, Gen. Colin Powell, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, summoned the head of the Combat Feeding Directorate and gave him a two-word order: Fix it.

The directorate responded by scrapping its top-down system of developing rations in favor of a strategy it called soldier requested, soldier tested, soldier approved.

Food scientists began following troops into the field, not just to ask them what they liked and disliked, but also to dig through the trash to see what the troops actually ate.
The inflatable Santas were put up months before Christmas so a toddler with brain cancer could enjoy the holiday spirit. But for the past week, the outdoor decorations in a Cincinnati-area neighborhood have been mysteriously slashed, damaged and vandalized, the police said.

Residents started waiting up at night, keeping an eye out more during the day, and sharing messages on social media.

Then came a break in the case. The police said two boys, 16 and 17, were arrested and charged on Thursday with criminal damaging of an inflatable Santa on one property in the Colerain Township neighborhood.

This was a mini-spree of criminal damaging, Chief Mark C. Denney of the Colerain police department said in an interview. It put a negative spin on everything going on in that neighborhood.
Good morning.

(Want to get California Today by email? Heres the sign-up.)

Ever since the days when Angelenos sold tamales out of horse-drawn carts, street food has been a fixture in this city.

It has also been illegal, even as taco carts and fruit stands with their familiar rainbow umbrellas have been mainstays on street corners. Vendors  mostly immigrants, many undocumented  have faced fines, misdemeanor criminal charges and, increasingly in the Trump era, the threat of deportation.

For years, activists have pushed to legalize street vending in Los Angeles, and city officials were close to doing so. But this week Gov. Jerry Brown beat them to it, signing a law that decriminalized street vendors across California.

Its really a big deal for vendors across the state, said Carla De Paz, an organizer in Los Angeles on behalf of vendors. Theres a lot of undocumented workers who are facing the fear of deportation, especially in our current political climate.
Judy Cochran got revenge on Monday for her beloved miniature horse that mysteriously vanished at her Texas ranch three years ago. She lodged a single bullet from a Winchester .22 Magnum rifle between the eyes of the prime suspect  a 12-foot, 580-pound alligator.

Ms. Cochran, 73, is accustomed to the local spotlight. She is the mayor of her small town, Livingston, and serves on the board of a local bank and a hospital. But she wasnt used to the international attention she received this week for killing the gator.

There are all these negative comments at me personally, Mayor Cochran said Thursday morning.

Her story went public on Tuesday in the Houston media and was picked up by news sites worldwide. The best story from Texas alligator-hunting season features a great-grandma avenging her miniature horse, read a typical headline, on Quartz.

Since then, Ms. Cochran said she had received at least a dozen phone calls at her home and office. Most callers are positive, she said, but some have been vicious, even threatening.
IVANHOE, N.C.  As the rivers trapped them inside their blacked-out town, the dwindling families of Ivanhoe collected rain to drink in plastic pitchers and flushed the toilets with buckets of rust-colored hurricane floodwater.

They salvaged thawing chicken from their broken freezers and cooked it over wood fires. They handed out headlamps at bedtime so their family members could find the bathroom in the bottomless dark. They sweated through the night and wondered how long they  and their little farming town  could bear all this.

It has been a week since Hurricane Florence slugged ashore, and as much of the Carolinas picks its way back home to assess the damage, this town at the confluence of the Black and South Rivers was still filling up with water. It is a drain trap for Florences record rain and floods, with no power and no roads in or out.
WASHINGTON  The woman who has accused Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh of sexual assault is prepared to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee next week, so long as senators offer terms that are fair and which ensure her safety, her lawyer told the committee on Thursday.

The accuser, Christine Blasey Ford, ruled out Monday as a possibility, but also appeared to leave the door open to testifying even if the F.B.I. does not investigate her accusations, as she had previously requested. Her terms for testifying include that the senators must ask the questions  not an outside counsel  and that Judge Kavanaugh not be present in the hearing room while she speaks. The surprise offer was the latest twist in an on-again, off-again negotiation between Dr. Blasey and Senate Republicans, who have scheduled a hearing for Monday and set Friday as a deadline for Dr. Blasey to tell them whether she would attend.

She wishes to testify, provided that we can agree on terms that are fair and which ensure her safety. A hearing on Monday is not possible, and the committees insistence that it occur then is arbitrary in any event, wrote the lawyer, Debra S. Katz, adding, Her strong preference continues to be for the Senate Judiciary Committee to allow for a full investigation prior to her testimony.

Dr. Blaseys accusations have rocked Washington, upending the confirmation proceeding for Judge Kavanaugh, President Trumps second nominee to the Supreme Court, only days before he was to receive a vote in the committee. A research psychologist in Northern California, Dr. Blasey  who is sometimes called by her married name, Ford  has accused Judge Kavanaugh of sexually assaulting her when the two were in high school in the early 1980s  an allegation he has vigorously denied.
On Thursday, more groups affiliated with the religious right piled on: Concerned Women of Americas legislative action committee sent a blast to its members urging No More Delays, and the American Family Association sent out another, Confirm Kavanaugh Now!

The importance of the Supreme Court to the Trump White House and the Republican Party is difficult to overstate. Mr. Trump has heralded Justice Neil M. Gorsuch and Judge Kavanaugh, his two Supreme Court nominees, as crowning achievements in an otherwise uneven presidency. Conservative groups have spent tens of millions of dollars building the men up as legal luminaries, gentleman scholars and the fulfillment of Mr. Trumps campaign promise to nominate judges who have a record of applying the Constitution just as it was written, as one ad by the Judicial Crisis Network described Judge Kavanaugh.

A relatively smooth, predictable confirmation fight has also been a key part of Republicans strategy to keep the Senate. In the 10 states that Mr. Trump won where Democratic senators are up for re-election, Republicans have attacked Democrats for either opposing the judge or remaining noncommittal. But Dr. Blaseys claims may have given Democrats who were on the fence a way to vote no without paying a steep political price.

Even social conservatives who describe Dr. Blaseys account as part of a Democratic plot to upend the nomination acknowledge the bind they are in. While they decry the process as tainted and unfair, some are also arguing that they cannot be indifferent and insensitive to a victim.

The worst thing that can ever happen to any woman or man who has been a victim is to shut them down and not listen to them, said Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the Susan B. Anthony List, a group that opposes abortion rights. A tragic piece of this is people who will use that pain for an agenda. That is so clearly what is happening now.

In the days since Dr. Blasey went public in an interview with The Washington Post and alleged that, when they were both teenagers, Judge Kavanaugh pinned her down on a bed, clapped his hand over her mouth and groped her, Republican leaders and White House officials have urged a muted and restrained approach. Show Dr. Blasey respect; offer to hear her out; and avoid questioning her credibility, at least directly, they have agreed in private conversations.

But many conservatives see little use in being deferential when, they argue, the Democrats play by no such rules. They look back at the failed confirmation of the Republican nominee Robert Bork in 1987, whose writings on civil rights were picked over by Democrats, and the 1991 hearings for Clarence Thomas, who faced testimony from Anita Hill that he had sexually harassed her, and they see a sophisticated and ruthless Democratic machine bent on discrediting their nominees.
It represents an evolution in American politics, Ms. Parker said, with voters choosing out L.G.B.T.Q. candidates as the solution to the divisiveness and dysfunction we see in Washington and in many of our state capitals.

Overall, there were more than 430 openly L.G.B.T. people running for office at all levels of government at the start of this years primary season. Now that the primaries are over, at least 244 of them have advanced to a ballot in November, including some independents and candidates for nonpartisan positions, the Victory Fund said.

More L.G.B.T. women than men are running for Congress this year, the group said, including both of the L.G.B.T. people running for U.S. Senate  Representative Krysten Sinema of Arizona and Senator Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin.

Four L.G.B.T. candidates, all Democrats, were nominated in governors races. For the first time, they collectively represent what the Victory Fund called the full L.G.B.T. acronym: Lupe Valdez, a lesbian, in Texas; Jared Polis, a gay man, in Colorado; Kate Brown, a bisexual woman, in Oregon; and Christine Hallquist, a transgender woman, in Vermont.

Many of these candidates treat their sexuality and gender identity as assets that complement their criticisms of the Trump administration or policy ideas on subjects like climate change, education or health care.
WASHINGTON  Taking a page from Vietnam War propaganda, the American military in Afghanistan has been widely publicizing body counts of Taliban and Islamic State fighters killed in battle. Officials described the practice, which began in January, as part of an apparent strategy to rally White House support for remaining in the conflict.

In roughly three dozen statements, the military announced the deaths or wounding of more than 2,500 enemy fighters. The media releases were posted online, where they could have been seen by at least hundreds of thousands of internet followers, including on Facebook and Twitter.

On Thursday morning, in response to questions from The New York Times, the practice abruptly stopped.

The body counts served as a grisly contrast to other metrics that paint a grimmer reality of the war effort  including high attrition rates in the Afghan military and the loss of territory to Taliban militants.
Good Thursday morning. Here are some of the stories making news in Washington and politics today.

 The woman who accused Judge Brett Kavanaugh of sexual assault rejected the idea of a Senate hearing, saying it would not be a good faith investigation. [Read the story]

 Heres the story of Christine Blasey Ford, the researcher and statistician who was reluctant to come forward with her allegation against Judge Kavanaugh. [Read the story]

 The accusation against the judge has scrambled the political calculations for 10 Democratic senators running for re-election in states won by President Trump. [Read the story]

 Mr. Trumps pugilistic approach to trade and China could rupture relations for years to come. [Read the story]
He called questions about the tweet a vile attempt to demean Mr. Alembik and the DeSantis campaign and asserted that if someone of color had said the same about Mr. Obama, it wouldnt be considered racist.

Two recent polls show Mr. DeSantis, 40, who resigned from Congress this month to focus on his campaign, on the heels of the Democratic candidate, Mayor Andrew Gillum of Tallahassee, who would be Floridas first black governor.

The day after he won the Republican primary on Aug. 28, Mr. DeSantis was accused of using a racist dog whistle during an interview on Fox News. Mr. DeSantis painted Mr. Gillum as a far-left socialist who wants to raise taxes and bankrupt the state.

The last thing we need to do is monkey this up by trying to embrace a socialist agenda, he said.

Mr. Gillum, 39, does not identify as a socialist, and he and other Florida Democrats strongly criticized Mr. DeSantiss choice of words.

In the handbook of Donald Trump, they no longer do whistle calls, Mr. Gillum said at the time. Theyre now using full bull horns.

Later that week, racist robocalls targeting Mr. Gillum were placed to residents from an Idaho-based white supremacist group.

In the audio of one robocall obtained by The New York Times, a man pretending to be Mr. Gillum can be heard talking in the exaggerated accent of a minstrel performer. Well hello there, it begins, I is Andrew Gillum. He then talks about mud huts and unfair policing practices, and asks for the listeners vote amid sounds of drums and monkeys.
Republican pollsters have reinforced the concerns of the partys congressional leaders that the White House is not always helping when it comes to the midterms.

They have spent way too much time yelling about investigations and not enough time educating about the economy, Frank Luntz, a longtime Republican pollster, said in an interview. The president, he added, deserves a lot more credit than he has been given, but hes also somewhat responsible because he hasnt been so focused and attentive to the changes that have really happened in the economy.

Neil Newhouse, another pollster, has made clear his worries that too many Republicans are taking the midterms for granted.

We need to make real the threat that Democrats have a good shot of winning control of Congress, he said in a presentation for the Republican National Committee at the end of August that was recently shared with the president.

Voters who are not die-hard Trump supporters may not believe theres anything at stake in this election, Mr. Newhouse wrote. Put simply, they dont believe that Democrats will win the House. (Why should they believe the same prognosticators that told them that Hillary was going to be elected president?).

Mr. Trump has alternately acknowledged to aides and supporters that the climate is troublesome and insisted that the worst will never happen. It is not clear that he actually believes his talk of a red wave, or if he is trying to will it into existence, advisers and allies say.

But the potential for an electoral disaster on Nov. 6 has certainly not been lost on White House officials, who say it has added to existing anxiety about what will come next in the presidents term. According to interviews with over half a dozen current and former White House aides and campaign officials, they are girding for the possibility of a political landscape  and, possibly, a West Wing  that could look very different after Election Day.
Mr. Trumps aides refer to Mr. Moons quest for peace between the North and South as the sunshine policy, a phrase popularized by one of Mr. Moons liberal predecessors, Kim Dae-jung. It is not meant as a compliment.

A senior official said Mr. Moons eagerness for a rapprochement on the Korean Peninsula could outrun Mr. Trumps demand that Mr. Kim give up his weapons  weakening sanctions against the North and reducing the pressure on Mr. Kims government.

For weeks, South Koreas ambassador to the United States, Cho Yoon-je, has been quietly lobbying lawmakers and journalists in Washington to get the White House to make a major concession to North Korea by agreeing to an end-of-war declaration long sought by Mr. Kim.

Mr. Cho has argued that after North Korea halted its nuclear and ballistic missile tests, the United States needed to make such a gesture to keep the peace process moving forward. In some ways, Mr. Cho has become the top representative here for a government in Pyongyang that has no diplomatic presence in much of the West.

Irans president, Hassan Rouhani, plans to attend the General Assembly, but Mr. Trump is not actively seeking a meeting with him, according to a senior administration official. That does not rule out the possibility that the two men could run into each other  a scenario that tantalized United Nations watchers when Mr. Rouhani and President Barack Obama were both in New York in 2013. (They never met, but spoke on the phone.)

The White House hopes to use next weeks meetings to drive home its message that the nuclear deal brokered by Mr. Obama was a failure and that European companies are largely complying with reimposed sanctions that compel them to cut their ties to Iran.

The administration is also trying to project an image of unity on Syria. A senior official said Britain, France and Germany supported Mr. Trumps threat of a potent military response against the government of Bashar al-Assad if it uses chemical weapons again. Britain and France are actively involved in the planning of such an operation.
Besides sparing patients the pain of big bills, the strategy can also increase income for dentists, said Dr. Farrugia, who estimated that revenues for his practice rose almost 10 percent the first year he fully implemented medical billing. Patients, too, can learn to file claims for medical reimbursement if their dentists wont, he said.

On its website, the California Dental Association explains that health insurance should cover costs that are medically necessary and lists more than a dozen categories of procedures that could qualify. Among them: treatment related to inflammation and infection, dental repair resulting from injury, certain periodontal surgery procedures and appliances for sleep apnea.

Kristine Grow, a spokeswoman for Americas Health Insurance Plans, the industry trade association, did not dispute that some dental procedures could be covered by medical insurance. However, she cautioned that medical insurers were always on the lookout for abuse.

Claims that are billed inappropriately or submitted fraudulently hurt everyone because they raise costs, Ms. Grow said. Its important to note that procedures not related to an emergency event or trauma may not be medically necessary, and therefore would not be covered by medical insurance, she added.

Asked about the potential for abuse, Dr. Farrugia said: There are unethical providers in all health care services, and dentistry is not immune to that. You will always have some that try to game the system.

Dr. Farrugia adopted medical billing several years ago after paying more than $100,000 for a CT scanner that produces 3-D images of the bone in the mouth and jaws.

It occurred to me that this was a medical device, he said of the CT scanner. Im a licensed health care provider, Im providing this within the scope of my license. They cant discriminate against me.
Ms. Corduck seeks to raise awareness of the vulnerability of Jewish men as well as women. Fathers like her own often carry one of the BRCA mutations that 50 percent of their male and female offspring will inherit. Men with a mutation may suffer from breast, prostate or pancreatic cancers, or melanoma triggered by it. I suspect that my genetic mutation also came from my paternal lineage.

Your BRCA tumors are stupid, my treasured first oncologist told me, much to my hilarity. Theres a drug in the pipeline, but it may not be ready in time. That sobered me up.

After my third recurrence, miraculously, there was a breakthrough in the previously dormant field of ovarian cancer. In 2012, my doctor managed to place me in a clinical trial with one of the new PARP inhibitors  three others have since been approved by the Food and Drug Administration  that now extend the lives of women with ovarian disease. A number of these drugs are being tested on women with BRCA-related metastatic breast cancer, and one has been approved by the F.D.A.

Ms. Corduck, with faith in research and zero parental guilt, feels relieved that she and her husband can provide the emotional support that their 10-year-old daughter will need when she confronts her risk as a young adult instead of landing in an oncologists office. Whether we count ourselves one in 40 or one in 400, we are less alone because of Ms. Corducks intrepid outreach. She proves that this terrible disease paradoxically generates astonishing valor from even the most endangered patient-activists.

She is following the example of the X-ray crystallographer Rosalind Franklin, who contributed in the early 1950s to the discovery of the DNA double helix. She continued to produce scientific papers while undergoing treatments for ovarian cancer. (In 1962 James Watson, Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins shared the Nobel Prize for their work on DNA, but Ms. Franklin did not; she died in 1958 at the age of 37, and the rules of the prize precluded its being given posthumously.)

Without the work on DNA, the detection of the first BRCA mutation would never have happened. It was found by the American researcher Dr. Mary-Claire King, who believes that all women at the age of 30 should be offered a genetic test as part of routine medical care to protect themselves from breast and ovarian cancers.

Since I am a beneficiary of BRCA research who has been kept alive for six years by an experimental drug, I feel impelled to say, let us now praise women in science: Long may they continue to advance knowledge and safeguard future lives.

Susan Gubar, who has been dealing with ovarian cancer since 2008, is distinguished emerita professor of English at Indiana University.
MEDELLIN, Colombia  Colombia has more land producing the plant used to make cocaine than ever in its history, according to new figures from the United Nations crime watchdog.

The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, in a report released this week, said the land used to grow coca reached 422,550 acres by the end of 2017  an area larger than the footprint of Los Angeles.

Thats a 17 percent increase from the year before, and part of a longer trend: Each year since 2013, land used to produce coca leaf has gone up, on average, about 45 percent, the report said. The crops now are also a third more productive than they were in 2012, the agency said.

The figures caused deep worry, said Colombias defense minister, Guillermo Botero.

Its a curve thats permanently going up and hasnt reached its inflection point, he told reporters.
SEOUL, South Korea  President Moon Jae-in of South Korea urged the United States on Thursday to declare an end to the Korean War as an incentive for North Korea to denuclearize, a call that could put the Trump administration in a bind as it tries to revive stalled talks with Kim Jong-un, the Norths leader.

Mr. Moon said that during his landmark three-day summit meeting with Mr. Kim this week, the Norths leader had repeatedly expressed willingness to give up his nuclear weapons quickly and to build new relations with Washington.

He again and again reaffirmed his commitment to denuclearization, Mr. Moon said at a news conference in Seoul, the Souths capital, after returning from North Korea. He said he wanted to achieve complete denuclearization as soon as possible and focus on economic development.

To expedite denuclearization, Mr. Moon said, Mr. Kim also hopes to meet Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in Pyongyang, the capital of North Korea, and to hold a second meeting with President Trump as soon as possible. Mr. Trump and Mr. Kim first met in Singapore in June.
BRUSSELS  European leaders on Thursday toughened their stance against a British proposal on how to structure their future relationship, with the European Council president saying Prime Minister Theresa Mays controversial Chequers plan will not work.

Mrs. May has cast that plan for Britains withdrawal from the European Union as the only workable one on the table.

But at an informal summit meeting in Salzburg, Austria, on Thursday, the council president, Donald Tusk, and fellow European leaders made clear that in their eyes, that proposal was dead.

If Mrs. May had hoped that the two-day Salzburg meeting would make her political life a little easier  her Conservative Party holds a conference at the end of September  it now appears it will have the reverse effect, and prompt more domestic criticism of her leadership.
If we want to prepare children in the 21st century, we must give them the tools of modernity: mastery of math, of general culture, the ability to flourish in social relationships, a capacity to discuss with others, to understand and respect others and then very strong digital skills, said Education Minister Jean-Michel Blanquer.

Its a message we send to society: Do not always be on your phones.

The smartphone ban expands on a current law that applied only to junior high grades and forbade the use of smartphones during class. The new law includes lower grades and will also apply to the entire school grounds, including the schoolyard. The only exception is when smartphones use is assigned by a teacher.

Around 93 percent of French children ages 12 to 17 have mobile phones, and an estimated 86 percent in that age group have models that support apps, according to French government and research institute data from 2016 and 2017.

Just under two-thirds of middle school and junior high students are signed up on social networks like Instagram and Snapchat and video games like Fortnite.

The problems with smartphone use are well known. Students insecurity can rise as they constantly worry about keeping up with likes and shares on social media. Teachers worry about cyberbullying and abusive practical jokes like photographing classmates from under the bathroom door and then posting the images online.
ROME  The remarkable letter last month calling on Pope Francis to resign for allegedly shielding an abusive American cardinal also served as a public call to arms for some conservative Catholics who pine for the pontificate of the previous pope, Benedict XVI. For years now, they have carried his name like a battle standard into the ideological trenches.

Benedict apparently would like them to knock it off.

In private letters published on Thursday by the German newspaper Bild, Benedict, who in retirement has remained studiously quiet through the controversies over Francis fitness to lead the church, says that the anger expressed by some of his staunchest defenders risks tarnishing his own pontificate.

I can well understand the deep-seated pain that the end of my pontificate caused you and many others. But for some  and it seems to me for you as well  the pain has turned to anger, which no longer just affects the abdication but my person and the entirety of my pontificate, Benedict wrote in a Nov. 23, 2017, letter to Cardinal Walter Brandmuller of Germany. In this way the pontificate itself is being devalued and conflated with the sadness about the situation of the church today.

Requests to representatives of Benedict and Cardinal Brandmuller for comment and authentication were not returned early Thursday. Bild provided the letters in their entirety to The Times.
STOCKHOLM  Two questions dominate Swedish politics after elections this month yielded a stalemate: Who will violate a campaign pledge? And will it result, for the first time, in a government that has support from a nationalist party with neo-Nazi roots?

Just one seat separates the governing coalition of the left from the center-right coalition that is the main opposition  but each fell far short of a majority. Both blocs have sworn not to make a deal with the Sweden Democrats, the right-wing, anti-immigration party that now controls enough seats to play kingmaker.

The bourgeois and left-wing blocs are playing a game of chicken right now, said Lars Tragardh, a history professor at Ersta Skondal Bracke University College.

Prime Minister Stefan Lofven hopes to form a new government by luring smaller parties away from the center-right alliance, but they say they are still committed to their coalition. The two blocs could form a grand coalition, but so far, they are not talking. The center-right group has demanded that Mr. Lofven resign, but he has not budged.
Of all the scandals swirling around the Trump White House, the Republican fund-raiser Elliott Broidy is in a category of his own.

Documents from the office of the presidents personal lawyer, Michael D. Cohen, revealed that Mr. Broidy had agreed to pay $1.6 million to a former Playboy model to keep her quiet about their affair, which led her to get an abortion. And emails stolen from his account showed he had used his White House access on behalf of the rulers of the United Arab Emirates while landing hundreds of millions of dollars in contracts with them for his private defense company.

Mr. Broidy, though, is not going quietly. His lawyers said this week that, after more than 80 subpoenas and months of forensic analysis, they had managed to identify as many as 1,200 other individuals targeted by the same cybercriminals.

The list of names the lawyers compiled, they argue, will bolster Mr. Broidys case that the rulers of Qatar  the tiny Persian Gulf emirate that is a nemesis of the U.A.E. had targeted him for his advocacy against them.
Puerto Ricos Ruins

















Pablo Figueroa keeps his belongings wedged into a corner of his home, the only spot where the roof remains. Misael Peralta and Nereida Claudio are living in a tent pitched in a relatives garage. Paula Cruz Ortiz wonders when someone will remove the tree that fell on her house. Amancio Acosta Rivera cant stop water from seeping through the walls when it rains. Alonso Millan Ubile sees the mold in his bathroom grow worse every day. In late August, a team of New York Times journalists visited Punta Santiago,

a small town in southeast Puerto Rico near where Hurricane Maria made landfall. We documented the damage that remains

from the storm in more than 150 homes. People here have waited months

for repairs with little relief. A year later, in house after house,

it looks like the hurricane just hit.

PUNTA SANTIAGO, P.R.  When it rains, Maritza Cruz Sanchez springs into a well-rehearsed, 30-minute ritual: She climbs a ladder to where her roof used to be and sucks on a hose to siphon puddles from the plastic tarp suspended over her house.

The tarp is held aloft by a few thin wooden posts, which have begun to warp and now seem almost certain to collapse. The temporary contraption that shelters Ms. Cruz and what little she still owns has been in place since March.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency gave her $6,000 to replace waterlogged belongings, but nothing to help make her house habitable again.

I am thankful for the little they gave me, she said, but thanks for nothing.

Maritza Cruz Sanchez did not receive any assistance from FEMA to repair her home in Punta Santiago, Puerto Rico. Tarps still cover the roof.

A year ago, on Sept. 20, the deadliest storm to hit Puerto Rico in over 100 years slammed into the islands southeast coast, just 14 miles south of where Ms. Cruz lives in Punta Santiago. The tourist and fishing town of 5,000 people bore a terrible share of Marias initial fury.

Almost 650 houses flooded with water from the sea; others were inundated by an overflowing lake, a river, and two ponds  and also raw sewage. Many homes lost walls and roofs in winds that reached 155 miles per hour when the storm made landfall.

An aerial photo of Punta Santiagos handwritten, desperate S.O.S. plea, taken in the early days after the storm, circulated around the world. When the Puerto Rico government kicked off a recent public relations campaign to highlight a year of recovery, it did it here. A new sign in town reads: Bienvenidos. #Covertheprogress.

Times journalists visited 163 homes in two neighborhoods in Punta Santiago to cover what progress had been made in the last 12 months.

Homes visited by The Times PUNTA SANTIAGO Path of Hurricane Maria San Juan PUERTO RICO Punta Santiago Ponce Homes visited by The Times PUNTA SANTIAGO Path of Hurricane Maria Punta Santiago PUERTO RICO

They found a community with signs of fresh paint and, in some of the middle-class parts of town, rebuilt rooms and new furniture.

But in neighborhoods where residents live on meager pensions and disability checks, there were gutted kitchens and electrical wires running randomly along unfinished walls. Roofs were covered with plywood or plastic, many near collapse. Some houses still had no running water. A number of families lived in single rooms in unfurnished houses, sleeping on the floor.

Leomida Uniel, 82, the walls of her house stained in black mold that gave her a lung infection, was sitting on her porch, sobbing. Gilberto Diaz and his wife, Maria Carrion, were bathing and washing dishes with the aid of a neighbors hose stuck through a window. Roberto Albino had an inch of water inside his house.

They did a magnificent job. President Trump says so himself, Ms. Cruz said. Have him come say that to my face.

Rooms and often whole houses are uninhabitable, scarred by damage from Hurricane Maria.

Punta Santiagos story underscores how, even after years of responding to devastating storms, the federal government struggles to help get people back in functioning homes after a natural disaster. Residents told stories of FEMA claims denied and their appeals frustrated. Federal grants helped a bit but were not nearly enough to pay for repairs.

FEMAs work in Puerto Rico was the longest sustained domestic airborne food and water mission in the nations history. The agency has never distributed more food or installed more generators.

And its effort to get people back in their homes was massive, too: The $1.6 billion the agency allocated for direct emergency home repairs will be one of the largest housing programs the federal government has ever attempted. FEMA spent another $1.4 billion on grants to homeowners to repair or rebuild their homes and help them pay for temporary lodging.

Yet the record in Punta Santiago and elsewhere shows that the federal government failed to take into account the poverty that plagued the island even before the storm. Unlike survivors of hurricanes along the Atlantic Seaboard or the Texas Gulf Coast, many Puerto Ricans were not able to take FEMAs small assistance grants and couple them with their own resources to make their homes habitable again  they had no savings or credit to fall back on.

Up to a third of all Puerto Ricans do not have bank accounts. Only 15 percent of those who applied for FEMA help had homeowners insurance, and 3 percent had flood insurance.

The result is that hundreds of thousands of people across the island are still living in homes in desperate need of repair.

Relief That Fell Short

FEMAs housing help was slow in arriving, plagued by bureaucratic delays and regulations that failed to take into account the hundreds of thousands in Puerto Rico who had no clear title to their properties.

Time and again, people asked for help in getting the most basic kinds of repairs  for missing roofs, collapsed walls, dangerous mold, soaked belongings  then waited for months and often did not get enough to even start the process.

Of the 1.1 million households who requested help from FEMA, about 58 percent were denied. Among those who appealed, 75 percent were rejected again. The median grant given to repair homes was $1,800, compared with about $9,127 paid out to survivors of Hurricane Harvey in Texas, according to a Times analysis.

All told, FEMA spent nearly twice as much for housing repair grants in Texas as it did in Puerto Rico, though the money went to 51,000 fewer people.

Gilberto Diaz and Maria Carrion are still living without running water. They currently get water from a hose connected to the house next door.

In part, that may be because houses are more expensive to rebuild in Texas. The cost of repairs, insurance, there are many factors, said Daniel Llargues, a spokesman for FEMA. Geographically, demographically, its different from one place to another.

Michael Byrne, FEMAs federal coordinating officer in Puerto Rico, stressed that federal emergency aid was never intended to restore peoples homes and possessions to their original condition.

I think its important to realize what FEMAs role is, that is, as far as our system goes, were not here to make everybody whole, Mr. Byrne said. None of our programs are designed to fix everything that went wrong for individual families, but we are here to give you a leg up.

More than 3,300 people in Puerto Rico received the agencys maximum grant of $33,000, Mr. Byrne said. The aid, he said, was paid out along a standard distribution range. I know youre going to run into outliers, but its just like anything else: its a normal bell curve, he said.

That is not what the data shows. Two-thirds of people in Puerto Rico who got housing repair grants from FEMA received less than $3,000.

About 1.1 million households sought help from FEMA after Hurricane Maria. FEMA inspected 754,336 homes for damage. 138,572 households received a grant for repairs. Of those who received a repair grant, most got a small amount. The median grant was $1,800. About two-thirds received less than $3,000. No. of house- holds 40,000 Number of households that received repair grants by the amount they received 30,000 20,000 10,000 $0 $10,000 $20,000 $30,000 Dollar amount of grant 1.1 million households sought help from FEMA after Hurricane Maria. FEMA inspected 754,336 homes for damage. 138,572 households received a grant for repairs. Of those who received a repair grant, most got a small amount. The median grant was $1,800. About two-thirds received less than $3,000. No. of house- holds 40,000 30,000 Number of households that received repair grants by the amount they received 20,000 10,000 $0 $10,000 $20,000 $30,000 Dollar amount of grant Source: OpenFEMA data as of Aug. 30, 2018.

In Punta Santiago, FEMA data shows, 746 of the areas 1,554 homes were so badly damaged they needed emergency repairs in order to be habitable. But only 512 families were eligible for cash grants for their damage. The median grant handed out was $1,812.

A new roof of cheap corrugated zinc typically starts at about $5,000 and might blow off again in the next hurricane; a concrete roof that could survive future storms costs about $15,000. But FEMA payments, by federal law, are based only on what homeowners lost.

FEMAs damage estimates often seemed to bear no relation to reality, said Hector M. Pesquera, the secretary of public safety for Puerto Rico. The commonwealths government challenged FEMAs initial wave of assessments, demanding a review because they were so low.

They would say, You may have damages, but this house is livable, Mr. Pesquera said. And Im living in it saying, Really? Seriously? Well, look at the hole in the ceiling.

Damage from leaking roofs, windows and walls can be seen in dozens of homes.

Homeowners who did not get enough help from FEMA grants could eventually turn to a $1.6 billion program, funded by FEMA but run by the Puerto Rico Department of Housing, called Tu Hogar Renace  Your Home Reborn. Under that program, teams of contractors were dispatched to complete minor repairs in order to get people back in their homes as soon as possible.

The damage estimates developed under that program came back much higher. In Punta Santiago, where FEMAs median damage assessment was $1,361, Tu Hogar Renaces was $10,740.

In fact, it is likely that neither was entirely reliable. Puerto Ricos estimates included markups for the overhead and management fees for construction companies doing the work, while FEMAs, based on preset guidelines, did not come anywhere near what people needed.

In any case, the Puerto Rico program did not begin work in earnest until nearly five months after the storm, in February. As of Sept. 13, the program had finished work on 80,700 homes; another 30,000 repairs were either still underway or had not yet started.

117,819 111,246 96,503 More than four months 84,428 84,250 Hurricane Maria makes landfall on Puerto Rico on Sept. 20, 2017. Puerto Ricos governor asks FEMA to approve emergency repair program on Oct. 25. The program does not begin in earnest until February. 54,394 Number of home inspections completed under the Tu Hogar Renace repair program 16,593 Oct. Nov. Dec. Jan. 2018 Feb. March April May June July Aug. 117,819 111,246 96,503 More than four months 84,428 84,250 Hurricane Maria makes landfall on Puerto Rico on Sept. 20, 2017. Puerto Ricos governor asks FEMA to approve emergency repair program on Oct. 25. The program does not begin in earnest until February. 54,394 Number of home inspections completed under the Tu Hogar Renace repair program Jan. 2018 Oct. Nov. Dec. Feb. March April May June July Aug. 117,819 96,503 More than four months 84,250 Hurricane Maria makes landfall on Puerto Rico on Sept. 20, 2017. Repair program does not begin in earnest until February. Number of home inspections completed under the Tu Hogar Renace repair program Jan. 2018 Oct. Nov. Dec. Feb. March April May June July Aug. 117,819 84,250 More than four months Hurricane Maria hits Puerto Rico. Repair program does not begin in earnest until February. Number of home inspections completed under the Tu Hogar Renace repair program Jan. 2018 Oct. March May July Sept. 117,819 84,250 More than four months Number of inspections under the Tu Hogar Renace repair program Hurricane Maria hits Puerto Rico. Repair program begins. Jan. 2018 Oct. March May July Sept. Source: Puerto Rico Department of Housing

Part of the problem, Puerto Rico officials said, was a bureaucracy that delayed decision-making and required local officials to upload millions of pages of documents for invoicing alone.

Dennis Gonzalez, the deputy secretary of the Puerto Rico Department of Housing, said FEMA would schedule a dozen meetings to discuss a project only to change the decision-making teams  and decisions  months later.

You sit down in October to talk about a spend plan that starts in January. And then you get in January and somebody comes back to you and says, Well, no, thats not going to be the process, were going to do this other process, he said. Now you start performing or doing that process, bringing all the documentation necessary, and comes February, comes March and they change that back to another system.

Going into the summer, nine months after the hurricane, the percentage of homes that had been repaired was in the single digits, Mr. Gonzalez said.

I Am Still Waiting

In home after home in Punta Santiago, the shortfalls were obvious. People were living with drips, drafts and mold a year after the storm. In a town with a 25 percent unemployment rate, and where more than half of the wage earners make less than $20,000 a year, there was no other option.

Ms. Cruz, 59, said she was among the homeowners who were denied a FEMA grant because they lacked title to their homes, a common problem in Puerto Rico, where property is often passed among family members without paperwork.

She was referred to the Small Business Administration and was turned down again, this time because her income did not meet requirements. Ms. Cruz, who suffers from chronic lung disease, receives about $737 a month in disability benefits and has no other income.

Like many Puerto Ricans, she has no savings. She lost her job in 2012, and her respiratory problems keep her from returning to work. Her car was repossessed a few years ago, and she does not have a credit card.

The tarp on her roof was installed by a nonprofit group out of Washington State, and an anonymous philanthropist gave her and others in town a $1,500 debit card.

Pablo Figueroa, 63, rode out the storm in the house where he has lived his entire life. When the water rose to 10 feet, he fled. He came back the next day to find that water and raw sewage had ruined the downstairs. The upstairs was wrecked, too; the roof was gone. He found fish inside his house.

It looked like a pool, said Mr. Figueroa, a retired carpenter who lives alone.

Pablo Figueroa saved only a few pieces of clothing from the floodwaters. He sleeps downstairs in his two-story house because much of the roof is missing and covered by a blue tarp.

Just a few days after the storm, Mr. Figueroa said he spent a full day waiting in line at a FEMA service center. Homeowners had to bring their own food and water, he said, or go a whole day without eating.

They had me make a summary of everything that was lost, he said. So I made a list, of everything.

Mr. Figueroa does not recall how long he waited for someone to come check out his damage, but FEMAs own report shows the average wait was 39 days, far longer than the agencys response time after most big storms. The agency added inspectors, but they kept getting lost on their way to peoples homes, many of which lacked formal addresses, a FEMA official said.

On the mainland, an inspector might do a dozen inspections a day. In Puerto Rico, they did about four.

Were going to find a better way to do housing inspections, Mr. Byrne said.

Mr. Figueroa received $6,000 in the fall for his personal belongings, but after buying a refrigerator and a few other things, the rest went fast. He said he did not receive a response about replacing the roof, so he went back in October or November.

This time, he learned his lesson and got there by 5 a.m. to beat the crowds. He found up to 400 people already waiting; they had arrived the night before.

A friendly woman there told him he had not received a grant to repair the roof because he lacked the title to his home, which he inherited. The rules were later changed, allowing people to submit a sworn statement instead, but Mr. Figueroa is unclear about whether he ever sent one.

He also applied for help to Tu Hogar Renace for direct repairs, but never heard back. A local nonprofit also promised help, but it never arrived.

For now, he is living in the downstairs part of his house, because with parts of the upstairs still covered only with a tarp, it still gets wet. He sleeps in a corner that does not drip.

I appealed so many times, he said. I am still waiting.

Mr. Figueroa and others living in limbo may get help from a $20 billion allocation headed Puerto Ricos way from the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development. FEMA also has a program to directly rebuild homes that are too damaged to repair. The agency set aside $462 million to do the work, but a year after the storm, only 12 homes are under construction.

Mr. Pesquera, the public safety secretary, said anyone flying into Puerto Rico can look out the airplane window and see the patchwork of blue tarps covering homes, installed as temporary protection from the elements. There are still at least 60,000 of them, he said. Permanent replacements are just what they were a year ago: pending.

I got issues with that, Mr. Pesquera said. Why hasnt it been done?
A 50-year-old Chinese man was recently arrested by Shanghai police for allegedly stealing over 70 dresses from various local sellers during the last year. Asked why, he did it, the divorced man said that he wanted to feel like he was getting married again.

Shanghai police had received a report from a wedding dress wholesaler in the citys Pudong New Area on August 21. The woman, surnamed Wang, claimed that dozens of her dresses had disappeared from her home since the beginning of this year. She added that losing one or two every month wasnt unusual, but she decided to alert the authorities after eight gowns from her latest batch went missing.

Photo: Pudong police

Wang told the authorities that she often hung some of the dresses in her yard, and thats where they seemed to be disappearing from. After checking security camera footage, police spotted a man climbed up Mrs. Wangs fence using a long stick to pull the wedding gowns toward him. After identifying the man, they tracked him down to a village in Tangzhen, where they found an impressive stash of 73 wedding dresses worth a total of 60,000 yuan ($8,740).

Asked why he had been stealing wedding dresses, the divorced 50-year-old man surnamed Gu confessed that he just wanted to feel like he was getting married again, and had no intention of selling them for profit.

Photo: Pudong police

After checking his home, police found the eight dresses Wang had reported missing from her last batch, as well as others she had lost this year. Mr. Gu has been detained and will likely be charged with theft. Police told local media that the man had no history of mental illness.

via Shine


Paris Kissel



An inclusivity initiative that was intended to serve as a comment on the cyber-bullying phenomenon ended up sparking online outrage when viewers discovered images of a thin model wearing a sweatshirt bearing what appeared to be a fat-shaming message.

The article of clothing in question, which was designed by Los Angeles-based label LPA and sold by high-end online retailer Revolve, was made in collaboration with prominent women, such as Lena Dunham, Cara Delevingne, Emily Ratajkowski, Suki Waterhouse and Paloma Elsesser, whove each been the victim of online verbal abuse.

The sweatshirts featured quotes from actual messages these women have received from Internet trolls, and were meant as a reclamation of hurtful words often used against women and to create a community for those affected by cyber-bullying, with proceeds benefitting a womens charity.

According to LPA, the brand had planned to launch the sweaters on its own website, with each of the five prominent women modeling them in a selfie, but due to a lack of communication and oversight, the collections first impression ended up embodying everything but body positivity.

Released a day early, the collection featured a sweatshirt adorned with the quote, Being fat is not beautiful, its an excuse, modeled on a slender Caucasian woman, without considering the subconscious message that may have sent.

Many were quick to point out that physical differences are what gets you punished on the Internet, and a lack of diversity in representation is a huge contributing factor. Moving further away from their intended message, the item was offered only in sizes XXS-XL, excluding the very people this garment was meant to empower.

What the image further failed to highlight was that below that harsh quote, in a barely legible font size, was the name of the body-positive influencer, Paloma Elsesser, reclaiming its toxic words.

A picture is worth 1,000 words, but on its own, without any context or backstory, the image seemed to overtly promote fat-phobia and eating disorders. The collection has since been removed from Revolves website and many celebrities that contributed to it have renounced their support. Revolve then donated $20,000 to Girls Write Now, a program that promotes mentorship through writing for underserved women.

Its important to remember that when launching a campaign, you should always be careful about what you say and who says it. No matter how good your intent, without a properly developed message youre susceptible to misinterpretation. Ultimately, if your words require a long-winded explanation so as to avoid appearing offensive, perhaps they would be better rephrased.

***

Paris Kissel is an account executive at LEVICK.
Manifest has been tabbed by Norwegian lifestyle brand SWIMS to build a global brand for the company and execute delivery of creative communications campaigns. Manifests remit includes strategy, PR, influencer relations and brand activation. Work commences immediately, and Manifest will support the release of the companys Fall/Winter 18 and Spring/Summer 19 collections in addition to producing a creative influencer event for the new year. Founded in 2006, SWIMS sells footwear, swimwear, outerwear, ready-to-wear and accessories worldwide through department stores, independent specialty stores and luxury resorts, as well as through its own website, eight licensed SWIMS-branded stores and two company-owned outlet stores. The company is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Differential Brands Group Inc.

Diffusion has been named public agency of record for logistics technology company uShip. Diffusion will be tasked with raising the companys profile and communicating its transparent marketplace approach. The agency will execute a media relations program targeting mainstream, consumer, technology and industry press, with the goal of positioning uShip as an industry leader and go-to shipping option for large goods. Based out of Austin, Texas, uShip offers an online platform which connects shippers looking for affordable freight transport to carriers wishing to maximize truck capacity and revenue. Diffusions proposal, with a focus on accountability, creativity and results, made them a clear choice as a PR partner, said uShip VP, corporate communications Dean Jutilla.

5W Public Relations has been selected as agency of record for Lesso Home New York Market. Opening next year in Westbury, NY, Lesso Home New York Market will feature an extensive range of home furnishings and building materials, with showrooms for international manufacturers of home furnishings, interior decor products and building materials. It will also have a co-working center for local designers and a business conference center. We feel strongly that 5Ws strategic programming and expertise will help to position our brand for continued success and growth, bringing our vision of home and community to life, said Jeffrey Auerbach, senior marketing manager of Lesso Home New York Market.
An ancient and culturally important book which remained in Offaly for over 700 years is set to leave Irish shores for a special British exhibition next month.

Thought to be older than the Book of Kells, the Book of Durrow is named after the monastery in Durrow, Offaly, where it was stored for 700 years until the 17th century. It has been in Trinity College Dublin along with the Book of Kells for over 350 years.

The book remains one of much mystery and although it's believed to have been written by Columba, it is unknown whether it is of Irish, English of Scottish origin. St Columba is the patron saint of Durrow and Iona, which is off the coast of Scotland.

Now, the book is on its way to the British Library to form part of an exhibition called 'Anglo Saxon Kingdoms: Art, Word, War' opening in October. The exhibition will feature three texts, with the Lindisfarne Gospels and the Codex Amiatinus joining the famous Offaly script. The exhibition will focus on the Anglo-Saxon period from the 6th century to 1066.

The Book of Durrow hasn't left the walls of Trinity College since 1984 when, as part of the 'Treasures of Ireland' exhibition, it traversed around Europe. It has been in the British Library before, some 57 years ago in 1961.

The Irish Times reported that the Book of Durrow is "the oldest surviving fully illustrated gospel book from these islands." While it's unknown what year it was produced, it was sometime in the seventh century, 100 years before the Book of Kells.

Following the exhibition in the British Library, the Book of Durrow will once again return to Trinity College Dublin.
There will be no Offaly Rose in 2019 after Rose of Tralee bosses made sweeping changes to the format. Offaly last won the event in 2017 with its first-ever winner, Jennifer Byrne claiming the crown.

However, huge changes have just been announced on the back of the emotional impact on Roses who fail to qualify for the television stage interviews.

Rose Centres will not select and crown a rose for their given county or catchment every year, but instead their selection process will become a bi-annual event, meaning centres will only have a Rose involved every second year.

The Rose of Tralee International Festival has made the change to ensure every Rose who goes to Tralee will get the full experience of chatting with Daithi live on RTE.

In that year, they will be guaranteed a place in the TV final, but in the short-term, it is bad news for Offaly as the county will not have a representative in the event in 2019, and instead will have to wait until 2020.

The counties who will feature in the 2019 event include Laois and Kilkenny, bosses confirmed.

In the interim years, those centres will celebrate their supporters, Roses and sponsors with a gala charity ball in aid of a local charity.

In all, 32 Roses will take part now each year instead of 66. The only centres guaranteed a place are Dublin, Cork and Kerry. International Rose Centres also have to wait every other year to send a Rose.

Other changes include a higher age limit, with young women aged 18 to 29 now eligible. Sponsorship has risen from 250 to 300 but the organisers are confident that with the guaranteed exposure on national television, sponsors will be eager to get involved.

Executive Chair of the Rose of Tralee International Festival is Anthony OGara.

Moving from the Regional Festival (staged from 2004 to 2015) to bringing all our Roses directly to the Rose of Tralee International Festival for the past three years has been generally very positively received."

"There is one challenging aspect to the new format that does not sit well with any of us and that we want to address, the selection of 32 Roses from 66 for the TV selection. Regardless of how sensitively we handle that, it is not in-keeping with our ethos or our tradition. Our focus is to celebrate and respect the passion and emotion, and indeed the time and financial investment that every Rose, her family and Centre invest with us, he said.

The Rose of Tralee International Festival will celebrate 60 Years from Friday 16 to Tuesday 20 August 2019 without an Offaly Rose.
10 things to know about S-400 missiles that India will purchase from Russia

India

oi-Vikas SV

New Delhi, Sep 18: Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Tuesday said the negotiations for the S-400 were in a "conclusive stage." India's decision to buy Russia's S-400 missile system has left the US uncomfortable. The US had made it fairly clear that defence ties between India and the US could be impacted if New Delhi goes ahead with the purchase of S-400 Triumf air defence missile systems.

India will go ahead with its purchase from Russia despite the possibility of sanctions looming large. On one hand, India wants these missiles to strengthen defence capabilities, but at the same time does not want to sour relations with the US. India is hopeful that the Trump administration would grant an exemption to India under CAATSA, which may come into effect if India goes ahead with the purchase of S-400 Triumf air defence missile systems from Russia.

Here are the 10 important things about S-400 Triumf air defence missile system that you must know:

S-400 Triumf is one of the world's most advanced air defence systems that can simultaneously track numerous incoming objects - all kinds of aircraft, missiles and UAVs - in a radius of a few hundred kilometres and launch appropriate missiles to neutralise them.

The S-400 was developed as an upgrade of the S-300 series of surface-to-air missile systems.

The S-400 Triumph air defence system integrates a multifunction radar, autonomous detection and targeting systems, anti-aircraft missile systems, launchers, and command and control centre.

The S-400 air defence missile system uses four new missile types in addition to the missiles of the S-300PMU system.

The S-400 Triumph also launches 9M96E and 9M96E2 medium range ground-to-air missiles. Designed for direct impact, the missiles can strike fast moving targets such as fighter aircraft with a high hit probability.

The highly automated S-400 has radars that can pick up an incoming object up to a 1,000 kilometres away, track several dozen incoming objects simultaneously, distribute the targets to appropriate missile systems and ensure a high success rate.

It has been in service with the Russian Armed Forces since 2007.

The S-400 was described by The Economist in 2017 as "one of the best air-defence systems currently made."

S-400's comparable missile system, US made MIM-104 Patriot, is losing market to the Russian weapon system across the globe.

The S-400 is two-times more effective than previous Russian air defence systems and can be deployed within five minutes.

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Story first published: Thursday, September 20, 2018, 5:00 [IST]
Afghanistan Ambassador to India Shaida Abdali quits suddenly: 3 possible reasons

India

oi-Shubham Ghosh

New Delhi, Sept 20: For all those who harbour a strong hope over India's relations with Afghanistan and how their deepening relationship could pose a challenge to Pakistan in South Asia, Wednesday's (September 19) development was a not a happy news.

After six years of service, Afghanistan's Ambassador to India Dr Shaida Abdali tendered his resignation. In the diplomatic circles, to and fro movement of officials is not new. But what was striking with Abdali's stepping down is that the announcement came when Afghanistan's President Ashraf Ghani is on a visit to India and that it was announced in a series of tweets which means Ambassador Abdali was eager to make it a public exercise than something done behind the official confinements.

The sudden decision left the diplomatic and political circles stunned. Dr Abdali was a popular diplomat and even a few days before tendering his resignation, he was busy in engagements as a diplomat is generally found. So what was it that led to this resignation abruptly?

Also Read | Afghanistan ambassador to India resigns the very day Afghan President Ghani met Modi

In an interview to the Hindu, Abdali said he has decided to go back to Afghanistan to work for it from within. "Right now, I want to look at priorities for Afghanistan. Today if you tell me I have to choose between being the Ambassador and a situation in Afghanistan where national unity and peace is at risk, I would prefer to work for peace and unity in my country," he said.

"Public life is not a privilege in Afghanistan, it is a sacrifice. I understand that, and I am willing to sacrifice," he added.

Dr Abdali also said: "I wish Afghanistan had been in a better place by now. I am returning because the situation is so much worse than it was 6 years ago. We had a much better environment. I had hoped I would return to peace and stability. Today I return out of compulsion, because there is a pressing need to return and do something to help the situation there."

Apparently, the diplomat has decided to return to Afghanistan to serve his personal aspirations of doing something good for his country. But there could be more to the story that led to his stepping down.

Ghani government's internal trouble multiplies

First and foremost, Dr Abdali's departure is an indication that the Ghani government in Afghanistan is not in a good health. Political and ethnic divisions have always been a bane for this government and with the president himself becoming increasingly isolated, one doesn't feel surprised to see exit of some of his government's top officials. In August, Ghani's national security adviser Hanif Atmar resigned because of serious differences with the leadership over political issues and also the government's approach towards peace and stability in the war-ravaged country. Atmar is said to be preparing to contest the presidential elections scheduled in April 2019. One would not rule out a similar move from Dr Abdali whose words "the situation is so much worse than it was 6 years ago" could be a hint.

Ghani govt under more pressure, even from countries like Pakistan

Secondly, since the Ghani government is finding itself under more pressure with each passing day and has virtually failed to put things in order in its own country politically or militarily, its negotiating power with problematic neighbours like Pakistan has dwindled. Ghani has been seen taking a hard-and-soft approach vis-a-vis Pakistan and recently, also expressed interest in kick-starting the relationship with the new government of its eastern neighbour.

Also Read | Prime Minister and Afghanistan President assessed progress of strategic partnership

His government also received Pakistan's Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi and Foreign Secretary Tahmina Janjua just a few days ago in Kabul. The hapless Ghani government and its friend, the United States, are trying to mend fences with Pakistan, especially after the dastardly attack in Ghazni in August which killed several security personnel. Did Pakistan put pressure on the Ghani government to get rid of the India-friendly diplomat promising strategic and political cooperation in exchange? If that is the case, it could have put Dr Abdali, a staunch critic of Pakistan, in an odd position and he had no other choice but to quit.

Afghanistan govt's unsteady stance puts India in discomfort

Thirdly, as the Ghani government has found itself on an even weaker ground over the last four years, thanks to its own internal problems and lack of policy direction of its ally like the United States apart from piling on military personnel, there has been a clear lack of stance over the Taliban. The leadership has blown hot and cold over engaging with the Taliban who have only regained foothold across the country and have found backing from other external players.

This has not helped Afghanistan's relationship with India for New Delhi finds itself in an uncomfortable position over the policy of 'talking to Taliban'. It is natural that people like Dr Abdali, who has been a strong supporter of India and critic of terror and its patrons in his own country, will find it unsustainable.

Dr Abdali's open announcement of his resignation when his president is touring the same country he has served ambassador to could be a way the diplomat expressed his discontent with things and announced the decision in the public to show that he had a popular support in India. The fact that Ghani did not acknowledge the diplomat's departure on the social media could also hint at the fact that not everything is rosy in his government.

Whatever it is, the ambassador's sudden departure wasn't a development that the two countries aspiring to cement their relationship for mutual benefit would appreciate.
AgustaWestland: Will Michel be extradited? Here is exactly what the UAE court said

India

oi-Vicky Nanjappa

New Delhi, Sep 20: There was plenty of confusion regarding a UAE court order concerning the deportation of James Christian Michel, an accused in the AgustaWestland case.

Official sources have confirmed to OneIndia that the order of the court was related to whether a foreign national could be extradited to a third country. Michel is a resident of the UK residing in UAE for the past several years.

AgustaWestland: Middleman Michel missing as MEA awaits official order on extradition

While reports had claimed on Tuesday that Michel was ordered to be extradited, none of the agencies probing the case confirmed the same. Sources in the CBI and Enforcement Directorate say that the observations by the court have been positive. The source however said that they are yet to receive any official communication.

Last month, the court had posed a question on whether or not a foreign national could be deported. In its order, the court was of the opinion that a foreign national can be extradited to India. Sources also confirmed that this was an opinion and not a verdict.

The order dated September 2 2018 says, " It is possible to hand over Michel to the concerned authorities in India. The draft verdict was signed by Isa Muhammad Shareef, Rashif Mummad al-Samiri and Ashraf Muhammad al-Shawadafi. The order came in the wake of an extradition request made by India. The court in its order however rejected all contentions made regarding political vendetta and possible violations of human rights.

With this development, the Indian mission in UAE would call on the authorities to obtain facts relating to the matter.

Michel, a British national is wanted in India for allegedly organising bribes in exchange for a 2007 contract for the purchase of 12 helicopters for use by top leaders. He had been detained in the UAE in July and granted bail a month later.

Michel's primary job was to give feedback on the media activities relating to the AgustaWestland deal. CBI sources say that his meeting with several media persons has been under the scanner.

Michel was a middleman hired by AgustaWestland. His main job was to keep an eye on the media in India and report the narrative regarding the deal to AgustaWestland.

Not questioned Christian Michel in AgustaWestland case says CBI

He is an important player in this case, the CBI says. We have some evidence on him which includes the reports he sent out and also the meetings he held with some people in the media, officials also add.

An amount of Rs 330 crore was paid to him for managing various services. He received these amounts in part payments at United Kingdom, the British Virgin Islands and also Tunisia.

In addition to his links with the media, the CBI has also found that he had several assets (benami) in India. A bungalow in Delhi and a luxury car is what the CBI has found and officials say that he had purchased this in a benami name.

While his meetings with several persons are under the scanner, the CBI has learnt that it was through his company Global Services FZE all his activities were managed.

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Story first published: Thursday, September 20, 2018, 5:59 [IST]
Security beefed up outside Mukesh Ambani's Antilia after alert from taxi driver about suspicious passengers

Airliner accidents involving in-flight depressurization

India

oi-Chennabasaveshwar P

Bengaluru, Sep 20: The incident of loss of cabin pressure in Mumbai-Jaipur Jet Airways flight has brought the the fore previous incidents of loss of cabin pressurization. The crash of Turkish Airlines Flight 981 in Ermenonville Forest in 1974 is the deadliest accident due to explosive decompression in the history of aviation.

In fact, aircraft cabins are pressurised using cooled and filtered air bled from the engines, keeping the air pressure inside the cabin at the equivalent of an altitude of 8,000ft - even though commercial aircraft often fly at 40,000 ft.

Also Read | 30 passengers on Jet Airways left bleeding after crew forgets to maintain cabin pressure

Here is the lsit of previous accidents involving in-flight depressurization:

Helios Airways Flight 522 was a scheduled passenger flight from Larnaca, Cyprus, to Athens, Greece, that crashed on 14 August 2005, killing all 121 passengers and crew on board. A loss of cabin pressurization incapacitated the crew, leaving the aircraft flying on autopilot until it ran out of fuel and descended into the ground near Grammatiko, Greece.

A 2003 flight of a Boeing 737 between Marseilles and London Gatwick showed that a cabin-wide pressurization fault can be recognized by the flight crew. A problem was first noticed when the crew began to feel some discomfort in their ears. This was shortly followed by the cabin altitude warning horn which indicated that the cabin altitude had exceeded 10,000 feet and this was seen to continue to climb on the cockpit gauge.

Aloha Airlines Flight 243 was a scheduled Aloha Airlines flight between Hilo and Honolulu in Hawaii. On April 28, 1988, a Boeing 737-297 serving the flight suffered extensive damage after an explosive decompression in flight, but was able to land safely at Kahului Airport on Maui. There was one fatality, flight attendant Clarabelle Lansing, who was ejected from the airplane. Another 65 passengers and crew were injured. Despite the substantial damage inflicted by the decompression, and the loss of one cabin crew member, the safe landing of the aircraft established the incident as a significant event in the history of aviation, with far-reaching effects on aviation safety policies and procedures.

British Airways Flight 5390 left Birmingham Airport in England for Malaga Airport in Spain on 10 June 1990, an improperly installed windscreen panel separated from its frame, causing the plane's captain to be blown partially out of the aircraft. With the captain pressed against the window frame for twenty minutes, the first officer managed to land at Southampton Airport with no loss of life.

British European Airways Flight 706 was a scheduled flight from Heathrow Airport in London, United Kingdom to Salzburg-W. A. Mozart Airport in Salzburg, Austria. On 2 October 1971, whilst en route at 19,000 ft (5,791 m), 35 minutes after takeoff, the rear cabin pressure bulkhead failed. The resulting pressurisation of the tail section caused the surfaces of the tailplanes to separate, weakening them to the point that they broke off. Without a horizontal stabiliser the aircraft entered an uncontrollable dive. The aircraft crashed near Aarsele, Belgium, killing all 63 passengers and crew on impact.

United Airlines Flight 811 was a regularly scheduled airline flight from Los Angeles to Sydney, with intermediate stops at Honolulu, and Auckland. On February 24, 1989, the Boeing 747-122 serving the flight experienced a cargo door failure in flight shortly after leaving Honolulu. The resulting explosive decompression blew out several rows of seats, resulting in the deaths of nine passengers. The aircraft returned to Honolulu, where it landed safely.

Turkish Airlines Flight 981 was a scheduled flight from Istanbul Yesilkoy Airport to London Heathrow Airport, with an intermediate stop at Orly Airport in Paris. On 3 March 1974, the McDonnell Douglas DC-10 operating the flight crashed into the Ermenonville Forest, outside Paris, killing all 346 people on board. The crash was also known as the Ermenonville air disaster. The crash occurred when an incompletely secured cargo door at the rear of the plane burst open and broke off, causing an explosive decompression which severed critical cables necessary to control the aircraft. To maximize the working space within the cargo hold, the cargo doors opened outwards, leading to the possibility of them being forced open at altitude under normal in-flight pressure.

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Story first published: Thursday, September 20, 2018, 11:13 [IST]
Amazon Great Indian Festival 2021: Use 'diamonds' to get cashback offer on your orders, here is how

Amazon and Samara acquires food and grocery retail chain 'More'

India

oi-Pushyarag Shetty

New Delhi, Sep 20: E-commerce giants amazon.com Inc along with Private equity firm Samara Capital has acquired the food and grocery retail chain 'More', previously owned by Aditya Birla group for a whooping price of Rs 4,200 crores.

The deal which is expected to have been done with a shell structure in place is going to give Amazon a big push in the grocery space which is heating up in India. Samara reportedly acquired a majority 51 percent stake in Aditya Birla Retail, while Amazon's investment arm picked up the remaining 49 percent.

Indian regulations allow foreign retailers to own only 51 percent in multi-brand retail firms which is why Amazon is sticking with a lower stake.

The deal which is expected to have been done with a shell structure in place is going to give Amazon a big push in the grocery space which is heating up in India. Amazon's latest acquisition adds more heat to the US e-commerce giant's battle with Walmart Inc in the Indian market.

Are Amazon employees selling customer details to China?

In India, Amazon competes with Softbank-backed Grofers and Alibaba-funded BigBasket in the grocery segment.
Bets on: KCR set to become Telangana CM again

India

oi-Vicky Nanjappa

Hyderabad, Sep 20: AIMIM chief Asaduddin Owaisi is betting on the TRS to return to power in Telangana and hinted at backing the K Chandrasekhar Rao-led party in segments where it is not fielding candidates.

The AIMIM has already come out with its first list of seven candidates, all sitting MLAs, for the coming Assembly elections.

Telangana elections: Finalise candidate list, let us go to court on voters's list says Rahul Gandhi

The caretaker Chief Minister and the TRS supremo, popularly known as KCR, had also announced party candidates in 105 of the total 119 constituencies in the State.

KCR has described AIMIM as a "friendly party" and said TRS would have "friendly contests" in segments where Owaisi-led party fields candidates.

AIMIM contested in 20 segments in the 2014 Assembly elections, winning seven of them, all in Old City, its bastion over the years.

Speaking to PTI Thursday, Owaisi, who is also Lok Sabha member from Hyderabad, said a decision on how many more seats his party would contest is yet to be taken.

On his assessment of the TRS government's performance, he said: "I feel that TRS has a very good chance of coming back (to power) and I see KCR becoming the Chief Minister again."

He said Telangana's growth is among the best in the country and social sector spending the highest. Owaisi said about 50,000 Muslim boys and girls are studying in 206 residential schools for minorities and also pointed to the government's "Shaadi Mubarak" scheme.

"...these are all schemes which are having a direct impact so that's why I say that they (the TRS) are very well placed (to return to power)", he added.

Asked if AIMIM would support TRS wherever it does not field candidates, Owaisi said "Where we are not contesting, people themselves will decide, we need not tell them because in the last four years, there have been no incidents of communal riots in Telangana."

"There is no fear atmosphere in Telangana. That in itself would help KCR", he added. About the reported statement of Akbaruddin Owaisi, who has been quoted as saying "if (HD) Kumaraswamy can becomeCM in Karnataka (despite his JD(S) party winning less number of seats than the BJP and Congress), why not we (MIM in Telangana)", he said his younger brother has been quoted out of context.

"The problem with this electronic media is they do cut and paste job; they take out the juicy part; what they are not showing you is what did he (Akbaruddin) say two minutes before that and two minutes after that," Owaisi said.

Telangana elections: Will the promise made to 'Sonia Amma' in 2014 be fulfilled in 2018?

"...so, everything has to be seen in context; you take something which will give you TRP, good for your news; that's wrong to do and quoting him out of context again is very wrong," he added.

To a question on whether the AIMIM was interested in joining the TRS government if it returned to power, he said "not at all."

"So long as I am there, I am not interested in this power politics. We only want the government of the day to do good governance to ensure that the weaker sections and minorities and dalits...their issues are taken care of. These are the main issues for us," Owaisi said.

The Telangana Assembly was dissolved on September six on the recommendation of the state government, almost nine months ahead of the expiry of its term. The Election Commission is yet to announce the poll schedule in the State.
BJP not to change its CM in Goa; looking for options if allies join the BJP

India

oi-Vinod Kumar Shukla

New Delhi, Sep 20: Despite serious health concern of Goa chief minister Manohar Parrikar, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is in no mood to change the chief minister. However, several names are doing round to replace the Goa CM.

Sources said that party is constantly keeping a tab on the issue but it is not in favour of changing the chief minister. It is not only the matter of principal but a humanitarian concern as well for the BJP to replace one of its towering leaders who is struggling for the life.

BJP solely responsible for Goa's political crisis: Sena

The BJP leaders are constantly in touch with state leaders as well as allies. They had met in New Delhi to look for a solution to the problem in Goa with party president Amit Shah. South Goa MP Narendra Sawaikar, north Goa MP and Union minister Shripad Yesso Naik and Rajya Sabha MP Vinay Tendulkar, who is also state BJP president were present in the meeting with Amit Shah.

But due to the constant pressure made by the Congress on the issue of Goa as they are claiming to form the government in the state and had already met the governor staking claim to form the government it the state. Meanwhile, the BJP is also trying its allies in Goa to merge with the Bharatiya Janata Party making it the single largest party but so far the party has not been able to make any headway.

Parrikar is admitted to the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) due to a pancreatic ailment. The Goa Forward Party (GFP) and the Maharashtrawadi Gomantak Party (MGP) are the allies of the BJP in the state. The BJP wants them to merge with the party.

With Parrikar in AIIMS, Goa Congress stakes claim to form government

BJP organising secretary Ram Lal too briefed Amit Shah about the situation. BJP leaders in Delhi said the party was in no hurry to take a call on Goa and its leadership was keeping a close watch. The problem still remains with allies as MGP reiterated that it would work only under Parrikar or under its leader Sudin Dhavalikar while the GFP has indicated that it does want any BJP leader in the present set of MLAs to be given additional charge.

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Story first published: Thursday, September 20, 2018, 11:07 [IST]
BJP to get offensive on opposition's attack on the RSS and the BJP

India

oi-Vinod Kumar Shukla

New Delhi, Sep 20: The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leaders have decide to target such leaders from the opposition parties aggressively who are targeting the RSS, its affiliates and the central leadership. From Union minister to state leadership, all of them are aggressively targeting the opposition political parties and this will intensify with the 2019 Lok Sabha elections coming closure.

Union minister Piyush Goyal recently not only defended but had come down heavily on people criticizing the RSS. So has been the case with national spokesperson Sambit Patra who does it almost on the daily basis. There is a long list of the BJP leader. Bihar spokesperson of Bharatiya Janata Party, who was here in Delhi during RSS Sarsanghchalak's programme in Delhi, Anand Jha told One India, "Opposition Leaders must look at themselves before criticizing the RSS which is a social organization. Before making any comment on the RSS, the Congress president Rahul Gandhi must answer National Herald scam, involvement of his brother-in-law in DLF land Scam. He must get prepared for the court battle as he is out on bail."

Also Read | When Mohan Bhagwat's remarks left BJP irked

If they want to know about the RSS, they must come forward and become a swayamsevak and only then they will understand what the RSS is. Leaders like Rahul Gandhi, Digvijay Singh, P Chidambaram, Tejashwi Yadav and any other leader must understand RSS first before speaking. Leaders like Tejashwi must focus on IRCTC scam and land scam of Patna. His father is already in jail for fodder scam. He must also focus on the family feud within the RJD."

Another BJP leader said that these leaders must refrain from making such statements unless they themselves come clean on the matters of their involvement. Jha further said that there is a difference between the BJP and other political parties. The BJP is the party that talks about scheme for the people of the country while the Congress and other parties are more into scams. So they mind their own business before making any comment on the RSS and the BJP.

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Story first published: Thursday, September 20, 2018, 11:46 [IST]
BJP seeks action against Kumaraswamy for seditious statement

India

oi-Chennabasaveshwar P

Bengaluru, Sep 20: Karnataka BJP leaders have demanded legal action against Chief Minister HD Kumaraswamy for an alleged seditious statement made during his speech in Hassan district.

Former Deputy CM R Ashok called for police action under IPC Section 124 A against Kumaraswamy for provoking people to act against the BJP.

Ashok said, "Kumaraswamy is probably the only politician in the history of this nation who openly asked his supporters to go on riots in the state of Karnataka. Such politicians are a disgrace to this state and threat to national security. The Police should register suo moto case on Kumaraswamy and act."

Meanwhile, JD(S) supremo HD Deve Gowda called an emergency meeting at party office ahead of BJP's press conference.

Earlier, CM Kumaraswamy said, "Sitting idle is not an option if BJP continues to trouble the government and that people may be asked to revolt against BJP. BS Yeddyurappa has lost his mental balance."
Centre clears Ordinance criminalising triple talaq: A timeline

India

oi-Shubham Ghosh

New Delhi, Sept 20: The Union Cabinet on Wednesday, September 19, approved an Ordinance making triple talaq a punishable act. As per the Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on Marriage) Bill, 2017, triple talaq in any form - even if though an SMS or instant message, is declared illegal and it land the husband in jail for up to three years.

The move is certainly one that would stir up India's public space. There are opinions both in favour and against the move. Some say it will help the Muslim women while others feel it is a sheer political opportunism of the ruling party.

Triple Talaq a punishable offence now as govt takes ordinance route

We take a look at the timeline of the triple talaq case:

February 2016: The Supreme Court (SC) sought assistance from the then attorney general Mukul Rohatgi on the pleas that challenged the constitutional validity of 'triple talaq', 'nikah halala' and 'polygamy'. It said the aim was to see whether the Muslim women experienced gender discrimination in case of a divorce.

March 2016: The SC asked the Centre to file a copy of the high-level panel's report on "Women and the law: An assessment of family laws with focus on laws relating to marriage, divorce, custody, inheritance and succession".

June 2016: The apex court said the practice of triple talaq among the Muslim community will be tested against the constitutional framework.

October 2016: The Centre objected to triple talaq in the SC saying there is a necessity to have a re-look at it on grounds of gender equality and secularism.

February 2017: The apex court announced setting up of a constitutional bench comprising five judges to hear challenges against the practices of triple talaq, nikah halala and polygamy.

March 2017: Reactions start emanating from the Muslim community. The All India Muslim Personal Law Board tells the SC that issue of triple talaq lies outside the purview of the judiciary and it should not be touched.

April 2017: The Centre tells the apex court that the practices deprive the Muslim women of the fundamental rights that are granted to them by the Indian constitution.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi speaks up saying the Muslim women will get justice. The Law Board issues a code of conduct and warned that those who divorced their wives in violation of Sharia Law will be socially boycotted.

Parliamentarians have failed Muslim women badly on triple talaq, Zakia Soman

UP Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath said the Muslim practice of divorce was akin to the episode of Draupadi's humiliation in Mahabharata.

Delhi High Court dismissed a plea seeking end to the practice of triple talaq in cases of Hindu women married to Muslin men.

The Opposition slams PM Modi, accuses him of politicising the issue for electoral gains.

May 2017: The SC allows Congress leader Salman Khurshid, also a senior lawyer, as amicus curiae in hearing pleas that challenge the constitutional validity of the controversial practice.

The SC said it would determine during the hearing whether triple talaq is fundamental to religion for the Muslim community. The hearing began with a five-judge constitution bench headed by Justice JS Khehar. Triple talaq was described as the "worst" and "not desirable" form of ending a marriage.

Mukul Rohatgi told the SC that the Centre would work towards bringing a new law to regulate marriage and divorce in the Muslim community in case all forms of triple talaq are deemed unconstitutional.

The Law Board told court that the practice is a matter related to faith and could not questioned in terms of constitutional morality. Can a woman be given the option of saying "no" to triple talaq, the SC asked the board.

The SC reserved its ruling on petitions challenging the constitutional validity of instant triple talaq among the Muslims.

August 2017: SC ruled with a 3:2 majority that triple talaq is illegal. The practice is struck down and the Centre is asked to formulate a new law on the same.

December 2017: The Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on Marriage) Bill, 2017, got passed in the Lok Sabha and it made triple talaq a punishable offence with a maximum jail term of three years.

August 2018: After a year since the verdict, the Centre cleared the amendments to the Bill that included provisions like granting bail to men who are found guilty of giving instant triple talaq.

The Bill was presented in the Rajya Sabha during the Monsoon session of Parliament but the government failed to pass it citing absence of consensus in the House.

Modi blamed the Opposition during his Independence Day speech for the delay in passing the Bill in the Upper House.

September 2018: The Union Cabinet approved the ordinance making instant triple talaq a punishable act with three years of jail term.

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Story first published: Thursday, September 20, 2018, 14:42 [IST]
Centre to release National Registry of Sexual Offenders today: All you need to know

India

oi-Deepika S

New Delhi, Sep 20: India will launch a National Registry of Sex Offenders on Thursday. Once rolled out, India will become the ninth country to be able to maintain such a thorough database.

The National Registry of Sexual Offenders - the first-of-its-kind - will have key details like names, photographs, residential address, fingerprints, DNA samples, and PAN and Aadhaar numbers, of convicted sexual offenders

The move comes against the backdrop of a nearly three percent increase in crimes against women and a 12-percent rise in rapes in 2016 as compared to 2015.

Also Read | Life term upheld in Uber rape case

"The national registry of crimes against women will be launched next month. The records are being sourced from the Crime and Criminal Tracking Network and Systems (CCTNS)," a senior Union Home Ministry official said.

The National Crime Records Bureau will be the nodal agency to maintain the sex-offenders' registry. It will help the law-enforcement agencies in identifying the repeat offenders, while people, too, would be aware of those involved in sex crimes, the official said.

According to NCRB data, as many as 38,947 rape cases were registered in 2016, against 34,651 in 2015. Overall crimes against women rose from 3,29,243 in 2015 to 3,38,954 in 2016.

A majority of cases categorised as crimes against women were reported under cruelty by husband or his relatives (32.6 per cent), followed by assault on woman with intent to outrage her modesty (25 per cent), kidnapping and abduction of women (19 per cent), and rape (11.5 per cent).

Madhya Pradesh reported the highest number of rape cases (4,882) in 2016, followed by Uttar Pradesh (4,816) and Maharashtra (4,189).

Other countries

Ahead of India, UK, US, Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, South Africa and Trinidad and Tobago have been maintaining the data of sex offenders. In the US, documents can be accessed by public, but in India, the details will be available only to law enforcement agencies.

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Story first published: Thursday, September 20, 2018, 9:53 [IST]
Cyclonic storm to hit parts of Odisha and Andhra tonight, IMD issues warning

India

oi-Vikas SV

Bhubaneswar, Sep 20: The Indian Meteorological Department (IMD) has issued a warning that a Cyclonic storm may hit parts of south Odisha and north Andhra Pradesh coasts tonight.

The depression, which was initially over west-central Bay of Bengal and adjoining areas, moved westward and has intensified, IMD had earlier said in a bulletin.

"A cyclonic storm is expected to cross Gopalpur at midnight. Ganjam, Puri and Khurda districts will be affected. Rayagada, Kalahandi, Kandhamal, Koraput and Gajapati will receive heavy rainfall. We have asked district administrators to stay alert," BP Sethi, the Special Relief Commissioner, Odisha, told news agency ANI.

The cyclone is expected to make landfall tonight.

While heavy rainfall has been lashing several parts of Odisha since Wednesday, rain and thundershower may intensify after cyclone makes landfall.

As per the mid-day weather bulletin released today, squally wind speed reaching 45-55 kmph gusting up to 65 kmph is very likely along Odisha and north Andhra Pradesh coasts during next six hours which could gradually increase to 80 kmph from the next 12 hours.

Officials have recommended total suspension of fishing operations for the next 24 hours, highlighting that the state of the sea will be very rough over central and North Bay of Bengal and along Odisha, West Bengal and north Andhra Pradesh coasts.

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Story first published: Thursday, September 20, 2018, 19:39 [IST]
Does Ajay Maken want to be shifted to national team as general secretary?

India

oi-Vinod Kumar Shukla

New Delhi, Sep 20: Is Ajay Maken looking for a new assignment at the All India Congress Committee (AICC) as general secretary? Former Union urban development minister in the Manmohan Singh government is at the moment away from the country to get treatment for irreversible and progressive orthopaedic ailment. But he will be back to the country on September 22 to address a rally on September 23 in Mahipalpur against sealing in Delhi.

Maken was in news for his resignation which was denied from many quarters of the Congress by saying that he was away from the country for treatment. So Maken tweeted on September 20 thanking people of Delhi: "Deeply touched by the outpouring of good wishes and concern about my health. I am suffering from irreversible and progressive orthopedic ailment, which is extremely painful but not life threatening. Seeking 3rd opinion on the exact cause to arrest progression and obliterate pain."

However, Maken did not say anything about his resignation in his tweet. Delhi Congress in-charge P C Chako denied media reports of Ajay Maken's resignation. Meanwhile, the state president will be the main speakers in the protest against sealing at Mahipalpur which will be the fourth rally in this regard. These rallies are attracting huge crowd for the Congress and entire credit is given to him.

Youth leaders of the party are making all preparation for the rally however preparation is still continuing. Maken will address this rally after coming back from treatment. The issue of his resignation will also be clear once he returns. The Congress needs a strong state president in Delhi to go for Lok Sabha election.

But sources in the Congress say, if the Congress wants to go ahead with alliance with Aam Aadmi Party of which Maken is opposed to then resignation of Maken suits the party and he will be moved to the national team as general secretary which is little less hectic than the state president. However, the Congress has been able to play the role of good state president in the past. But sources say that people promoted by him have grown bigger than him and he is confined to president of a half state. So he might be more interested to join the national team.

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Story first published: Thursday, September 20, 2018, 20:36 [IST]
Hyderabad rape case: The rapist will be caught and killed in encounter, Telangana minister

Hyderabad: Another inter-caste couple attacked, father chops off girl's arm for marrying a dalit

India

oi-Madhuri Adnal

Hyderabad, Sep 20: Even as the state is still in shock over the barbaric death of a Dalit man who was hacked to death in front of his pregnant wife in Miryalaguda, yet another inter-caste couple were brutally attacked with a sickle by the girl's father on Wednesday.

The incident happened in the heart of Hyderabad city around 3.30 pm on Wednesday. Madhavi's father Manohar Chari, a goldsmith by profession.

Sandeep, 21, is a student of Vivekananda Degree College at Kukatpally and worked as a part-time parcel boy. Madhavi, 18, just had completed intermediate and is a resident of Borabanda.

The couple had met five years ago, while in school. He was studying in the Vivekananda College, while she is from the Hindu college in the city. They got married a week ago according to Arya Samaj rites.

The girl received serious injuries on her neck, torso and hand, while Sandeep had injuries on his face and back, SR Nagar police said.

The couple was rushed to Neelima hospital. Sandeep sustained a gash to the cheek and is stable now, however Madhavi was shifted to Yashoda hospital.

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Story first published: Thursday, September 20, 2018, 8:51 [IST]
TREG's 4th House Hunters International Charity Event

Puerto Vallarta, Mexico - On November 20, 2018, Puerto Vallarta's #1 Real Estate brokerage firm, Timothy Real Estate Group, will host The Disco Ball, their fourth 'House Hunters International' charity event benefiting two local charitable organizations.

This year's sit-down dinner and dance will be held at Oscar's Restaurant, located on the Cuale River island, bordering downtown Vallarta and the Romantic Zone. The much anticipated high-octane, big hair and bell-bottom dance extravaganza will feature disco-era impersonators, DJ and dance floor, with all proceeds going to Asilo San Juan Diego and the SETAC Community Center.

About TREG's 2018 HHI Puerto Vallarta Charity Event

What: The Disco Ball

When: Tuesday, November 20 from 7-10 pm

Where: Oscar's Restaurant on La Isla Rio Cuale

How Much: $2,500 pesos per person

Includes: Three course sit-down dinner, Open Bar (restrictions apply)

Availability: Seating is Limited!

About Asilo San Juan Diego





Asilo San Juan Diego is a Senior Living Center located in the mountains. It's mission is to contribute to improving the quality of life for the elderly, offering solutions that support their process of personal and emotional development, and to generate in the community a culture of respect, attention, and support through programs that develop their potential.

The senior center also offers local families the opportunity to enjoy the day program that cares for and supports their elderly in a pleasant space where they can receive occupational therapy, medical attention, and recreation.

This, in turn, allows self-sustainability of the institution and satisfaction for the people who are linked to it. The Covarrubias family has taken on this great responsibility by themselves in the hopes of making a difference in many senior lives. Learn more at asilosanjuandiego.com.mx.

About the SETAC Community Center





SETAC is a local community and wellness center whose mission is to reduce HIV and other sexually transmitted infections in Jalisco's Coastal Region and Banderas Bay, through education, detection and prevention. Free testing, counseling, medical referrals and education for HIV and other sexual transmitted illness are just some of the services provided by SETAC.

The Center also offers several programs that are meant to improve the entire community's physical, emotional and spiritual well being, including: the distribution of condoms in local bars; providing milk substitutes for babies born to mothers living with HIV; English classes, film screenings, discussion groups, and other community activities that foster solidarity, fraternity and togetherness through equality and respect for everyone.

They offer these services free of charge whenever possible and exist solely on donations and grants. Last year SETAC was able to save 31 babies from being infected with HIV and assisted countless people in the community. Learn how you can help at setac.com.mx.

The $2500 peso admission price for this over-the-top disco party will provide much-needed funds for these wonderful organizations that give back to our community. Seating is limited, so get your ticket early to one of the year's best social and charitable events in Puerto Vallarta.

To purchase a ticket or make a donation, email inspired(at)timothyrealestategroup.com, or call Timothy Real Estate Group at (322) 223-5300 or +1 (877) 204-7730 from USA/CAN.

A real estate agent with Timothy Real Estate Group, Taniel Chemsian is a regular on HGTV's popular real estate series 'House Hunters International.' He has been featured more than any other agent in North America on the series. Puerto Vallarta is second only to Paris for the most HHI episodes filmed in any one city. For more information, visit his website, his Facebook page, or contact him at Taniel(at)TimothyRealEstateGroup.com.

The number one selling and listing agency in the greater Bay of Banderas region since 2011, Timothy Real Estate Group is a locally-owned and operated real estate brokerage with a strategic location in the city's Romantic Zone. Because the Puerto Vallarta area has varying neighborhood personalities, we practice localized real estate and, with 5 sales offices around the bay, we know our communities well. If you are looking to sell or purchase a property in the Banderas Bay area, please contact one of the Timothy Real Estate Group agents for the best experience in Puerto Vallarta real estate. For more information, visit TimothyRealEstateGroup.com.
India reports 12,830 new COVID19 cases in last 24 hours; daily tally 10.36% less than yesterday

India requests Pakistan government to allow Srinagar-Sharjah flight to use its airspace

Imran Khan writes to PM Modi, seeks resumption of India-Pakistan talks

India

oi-Deepika S

New Delhi, Sep 20: Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan has written a letter to PM Narendra Modi, and sought a resumption of dialogue between the two countries.

Imran Khan in his letter has sought dialogue between his foreign minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi with his Indian counterpart Sushma Swaraj on the sidelines of the UNGA in New York later this month.

Khan's letter is the first formal proposal of bilateral dialogue since he formed the government in Pakistan last month. It came in response to PM Modi's own letter on August 20 which conveyed that New Delhi was looking for constructive and meaningful engagement with Islamabad.

The ties between the two countries had strained after the terror attacks by Pakistan-based groups in 2016.

Talks underway for bilateral meeting between Qureshi, Swaraj at UNGA, says Pakistan Foreign Office

The sentencing of Indian national Kulbhushan Jadhav to death by a Pakistani military court in April over espionage charges last year further deteriorated the bilateral relations.

The last time both countries had a substantive dialogue was way back in December 2015, when Sushma Swaraj had gone to Pakistan to attend the Heart of Asia conference.

After becoming the Prime Minister of Pakistan Imran Khan, in his first speech, had said that he will try his best to resolve the issues with India.
Moment when the oxygen masks deployed

A passenger, Darshak Hathi, who experienced the scare on board the Jet flight, tweeted a video of the moment when the oxygen masks deployed.

30 passengers experienced nose and ear bleeding

The flight's cockpit crew has been taken off scheduled duties pending investigation. The airline is making alternative flight arrangements for guests on this flight."The rescheduled flight took off at 10:15 am later on Thursday.

When cabin crew forgot to maintain cabin pressure inside flight

During take-off, the cabin crew forgot to select the bleed switch to maintain the pressure inside flight. Soon, passengers felt dizzy and sick.

Passengers of Jet Airways after being deplaned

Earlier visuals of passengers of Jet Airways Mumbai-Jaipur flight after being deplaned when the flight was turned back to Mumbai airport midway, after loss in cabin pressure.
Jet airways passengers suffer nose bleed: Why maintaining cabin pressure is important

India

oi-Vicky Nanjappa

Jet Airways Passengers bleed mid air, Cabin Crew forgets to maintain Air pressure | Oneindia News

New Delhi, Sep 20: In a bizarre incident, a Jet Airways flight with 166 passengers from Mumbai to Jaipur had to turn back shortly after take off, allegedly over a mistake by the crew.

Over 30 passengers suffered ear and nose bleed after the crew reportedly forgot to select a switch that helps maintain cabin pressure during take off. Oxygen masks were provided and many passengers complained of a headache.

Why is air pressurisation important:

The aircrafts pressurisation system is important. As we climb in altitude, the amount of air pressure on us decreases rapidly. The higher we comb, the air molecules spread farther apart and when we breathe, the lungs take in less air and less oxygen.

At 18,000 feet, the atmospheric pressure is down to 7.3 psi and there is just not enough oxygen in a breath of air to adequately supply to the brain.

30 passengers on Jet Airways left bleeding after crew forgets to maintain cabin pressure

Airliners fly between 30,000 to 40,000 feet and at those altitudes, the atmosphere provides less than 4 psi of pressure. To survive the high altitudes, an occupant of the aircraft needs help breathing. Hence the solution is to pump air into the airline so that the interior pressure is high enough to help in breathing.

How does pressurisation work?

The airplane body or fuselage is capable of withstanding a considerable amount of differential air pressure. In order to solve the problem of pressurisation, the systems constantly pump fresh and outside air into the fuselage.

In order to control the interior pressure and allow old air to exit, there is a motorised door called as the outflow valve located near the tail of the aircraft. The valves are controlled by the aircraft's pressurisation system. In case higher pressure is needed inside the cabin the door closes. In order to reduce cabin pressure the door slowly opens, allowing more air to escape. It is in fact the simplest system on any aircraft.

Nose bleed:

The air inside an aircraft cabin is very low in humidity. It is essential that on long flights one should drink plenty of water to remain hydrated.

Experts say that dry cabin air is a major factor for nose bleed. It is important to keep the nasal passage moist. The dry cabin air could lead to more irritation and a nose bleed could occur.
Journalist Abhijit Iyer Mitra arrested in Delhi for making anti-Odisha remarks

India

oi-Madhuri Adnal

New Delhi, Sep 20: Former Kendrapara MP Baijayant Panda's close friend and journalist Abhijit Iyer Mitra has been arrested after interrogation by Delhi's Nizamuddin Police on Thursday, in connection with the derogatory remarks on Odisha.

After making controversial remarks of the Sun Temple in Konark, Iyer in his twitter handle termed people in Odisha as 'purchased presstitutes' and 'paid outragers'. Besides, he questioned the English knowledge of Odia people.

Counsel for journalist Abhijit Iyer Mitra said,'' Abhijit has been taken to Nizamuddin police station. He has been told that a case has been registered against him in Odisha. He hasn't been told what the case is or who has registered it. He hasn't been given a copy of the FIR.''

''He's being taken to Saket court for remand. We're going there to oppose it. We haven't even been given a copy of the FIR so we can't say what the offences are, who the complainant is or under what sections case has been registered,'' he further said.

Police has booked Iyer under Section 295 (A) of the IPC (Deliberate and malicious acts, intended to outrage religious feelings or any class by insulting its religion or religious beliefs.- Whoever, with deliberate and malicious intention of outraging the religious feelings of any class of citizens of India, by words, either spoken or written, or by signs or by visible representations or otherwise, insults or attempts to insult the religion or the religious beliefs of that class, shall be punished with imprisonment of either description for a term which may extend to three years, or with fine, or with both).

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Story first published: Thursday, September 20, 2018, 15:02 [IST]
Kerala Nun Rape Case: Bishop Mulakkal questioned by cops for 2nd day

India

oi-Deepika S

Thiruvananthapuram, Sep 20: Bishop Franco Mulakkal, who has been accused of repeated sexual assault by a Kerala nun, appeared before the special investigation team for questioning today. The accused clergyman was interrogated by the Kerala police team on Wednesday for several hours and was asked to appear again at the crime branch office in Thrippunithura at 11 am.

Before the interrogation today, Kottayam Superintendent of Police Hari Sankar said about 50 per cent of the questioning was over and the process was expected to be completed by evening.

The police were trying to reach to a conclusion after solving the contradictions in the statements, he added.

Stating that the accused was cooperating with the investigation, the officer said a decision on the arrest would be taken after the interrogation was over.

Also Read | Kerala nun rape case: Bishop Mulakkal appears before SIT for questioning

When asked about the "contradictions" in the statements of the alleged victim, the witnesses and Mulakkal, as claimed by police earlier, Sankar said,"That's the purpose of interrogation. We will reflect on it after it is over."

Protest against bishop enters 12th day

The protest by Catholic reformist forums and some nuns demanding action against Mulakkal entered day 12 on Wednesday.

Also Read | Kerala nun writes to Vatican seeking justice into rape case against Bishop Franco Mulakkal

Vanchi Square, the protest venue, near Kerala High Court in Kochi is alive with a steady stream of people from different walks of life, including activists, the common man and regular churchgoers dropping in to express their solidarity.

The case

In June, the police filed charges against Mulakkal after the nun in the Missionaries of Jesus congregation filed a complaint accusing him of raping her 13 times between 2014 and 2016 in Kottayam. She said she had no choice but to go to the police after church authorities ignored her complaints and took no action against the bishop.

Mulakkal has denied the charges and accused the nun of taking revenge on him for ordering an inquiry into a complaint against her. He filed a complaint against the complainant and five other nuns, accusing them of framing him.
How an Arabic to Malayalam book on Jihad led to Islamic fanaticism in Kerala

ISIS operative from Kerala deported to India

India

oi-Vicky Nanjappa

New Delhi, Sep 20: A resident of Kerala who had joined the Islamic State has been deported to India from Kabul, Afghanistan. Nashidul Hamzafar, 26, a resident of Waynad in Kerala was detained by the Afghan security agencies last year for illegally entering the country to join the ISIS.

The case relates to the criminal conspiracy hatched by the accused persons from Kasaragod district of Kerala and their associates since Ramadan, 2015 with the intention of joining and furthering the objectives of ISIS.

The Islamic State of Jammu and Kashmir: What the arrested duo were planning

Pursuant to the conspiracy, 14 accused persons from Kasaragod district had left India or their work places in Middle- East between mid-May and early-July, 2016 before travelling to Afghanistan, where they joined ISIS.

The National Investigation Agency which is probing the case said that Nashidul had taken part in the conspiracy through encrypted social media platforms, with the help of the other accused. The NIA also learnt that he had got in touch with the other accused persons, Abdul Rashid Abdulla and Ashfak Majeed through his college mates, Shihas, Firoze Khan and Bestin Vincent.

Two ISIS terrorists arrested, were using Delhi as transit point

The accused persons had left India on October 3 2017 and travelled to Muscat before travelling to Iran. From there they crossed over into Kabul.
Delhi govt on alert regarding Zika cases in UP: Deputy CM Sisodia

Muslim shopkeeper threatened for opening biriyani shop during Diwali in Indias capital Delhi [Viral Video]

Delhi govt to extend free ration supply till May next year: CM Kejriwal

Man trying to sneak in pistol inside Delhi Metro nabbed

India

oi-Vikas SV

New Delhi, Sep 20: A man who was trying to sneak a pistol and a live round into the Delhi Metro system has been nabbed.

The CISF, which is responsible for providing security to the Delhi Metro, apprehended one person at Saket metro station today after a pistol and a live round (8mm) was found in his bag during baggage screening, said reports.

The apprehended person along with seized items has been handed over to Delhi Metro Rail Police (DMRP) for further legal action.

Carrying of arms and ammunition in the Delhi Metro is prohibited and prosecutable under law

In 2015, A 25-year-old man was arrested for allegedly carrying a country-made pistol in the Delhi Metro.

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Story first published: Thursday, September 20, 2018, 20:25 [IST]
Masks to social distancing: The security nightmare that COVID-19 is posing

Gautam Gambhir's father's SUV stolen from outside his home in Delhi

Hit and run or murder: CCTV footage of Jharkhand judges death raised in SC

No CCTV footage of Jayalalithaa's hospital stay available, Apollo tells probe panel

India

oi-Madhuri Adnal

Chennai, Sep 20: CCTV footage of late Tamil Nadu Chief Minister Jayalalithaa's 75-day hospitalisation in 2016 has been deleted. This message was conveyed by the Apollo Hospitals to the Justice Arumughaswamy Commission which is probing the death of former Tamil Nadu chief minister J Jayalalithaa.

The Commission, which is probing Jayalalithaa's death, sought the submission of the CCTV footage.

The Chennai-based hospital told the panel that the footage in the hospital's server is programmed to be replaced after 30 days to accommodate new files.

The Justice A Arumughaswamy-led inquiry commission was set up in September 2017 to probe the circumstances that led to the death of former Tamil Nadu chief minister.

Also Read | Jayalalithaa's death: AIIMS doctors summoned by probe panel

The commission had written to Executive Chairman of Apollo Hospitals Prathap C Reddy and the group's legal department on September 6, seeking the submission of the CCTV footage relevant to Jayalalithaa's hospitalisation within a week.

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Story first published: Thursday, September 20, 2018, 11:59 [IST]
No official intimation' on Christian Michel from UAE yet: MEA

India

oi-Vikas SV

New Delhi, Sep 20: Amid reports that a Dubai court has ordered the extradition of AgustaWestland scam middleman Christian Michel to India, the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) on Thursday said that they have not received "any official intimation from UAE government".

MEA spokesperson Raveesh Kumar said the government would react only after an official intimation by the UAE government.

"We have not received any official intimation from UAE government about this case. There are possibilities that there could be internal developments within the system, but we react only when we're officially intimated by the govt of the day," Raveesh Kumar said.

Yesterday (September 19), even the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) had said it has not received any communication from UAE authorities regarding this matter.

Michel was arrested in the UAE last year and was out on bail. He is wanted in India for allegedly organising bribes in exchange for a contract for VVIP helicopters.

The CBI has been probing to find out who in India had received kickbacks to facilitate the deal.

[AgustaWestland: To be extradited, Michel was media fix it guy in India]

Hours after a court ordered his extradition, James Christian Michel had reportedly gone missing. According to his lawyer, Amal Alsubei, he could not be found since the order of extradition was delivered. Michel's primary job was to give feedback on the media activities relating to the AgustaWestland deal.

CBI sources say that his meeting with several media persons has been under the scanner. Michel was a middleman hired by AgustaWestland. His main job was to keep an eye on the media in India and report the narrative regarding the deal to AgustaWestland.

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Story first published: Thursday, September 20, 2018, 18:41 [IST]
Rahul has lunch at roadside eatery in Goa, rides pillion on two-wheeler taxi for few kms

Rahul comes up with new slogan to corner PM Modi

India

oi-Vikas SV

Jaipur, Sep 20: In a scathing attack on Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Congress president Rahul Gandhi, during his rally in Dungarpur, Rajasthan, coined a new slogan 'Gali gali me shor hai, Hindustan ka chowkidar chor hai' (There is noise in the streets, India's watchman is a thief).

The literal translation of Rahul's new slogan does not say much, but in a way the Congress president has called the Prime Minister a thief. Modi has called himself as nation's 'chowkidar' (Watchman) many times. So, by calling India's watchman a thief, Rahul is trying to say PM Modi is thief.

This also must be understood in the context of the narrative that the Congress is trying build ahead of 2019 elections. The Congress is leaving no stone unturned to corner the ruling government over the Rafale fighter jet deal and Vijay Mallya's escape from the country.

Rahul has been questioning PM's silence after Mallya last week claimed that he had met Finance Minister Arun Jaitley before leaving the country.

"But prime minister is on mute mode and not speaking a word on Finance Minister Arun Jaitley who enabled Vijay Mallya to leave the country," Rahul said in the rally today.

"Jaitley met Mallya in Parliament, it is what Jaitley himself confessed, I am not saying this...Nirav Modi, Lalit Modi, different slabs of GST, farmers' crop loan waiver scheme issues and Rafale scam are some of the glaring corruption cases on which nation's chowikdar is just not caring..Echoes are coming from everywhere. Now public in Rajasthan too is sloganeering: Gali gali mein shor hai, desh ka chowkidar chor hai," he said.

Interestingly, a similar slogan, Gali Gali me shor hai Rajiv Gandhi chor hai, was coined by the opposition parties against Rahul Gandhi's father, Rajiv Gandhi, after the Bofors scam in the late 80s'.
PM Modi to attend G20 Summit from Oct 29-31, then leaves to Glasgow for COP26 climate talks

Meeting between PM Modi, Pope scheduled for 20 minutes goes on for an hour

Kerala nun rape case: Bishop Franco Mulakkal temporarily removed by Vatican

India

oi-Madhuri Adnal

New Delhi, Sep 20: Bishop Franco Mulakkal, accused of rape by a nun in Kerala, has been temporarily relieved of his pastoral responsibilities by the Vatican.

"Bishop Franco Mulakkal temporarily relieved of his pastoral responsibilities by Vatican," the Catholic Bishop Conference of India said in a statement.

In the letter dated September 16, the Bishop expressed willingness to absolve himself of the responsibilities of the diocese since he would have to travel to Kerala several times and has sought permission for the same. The letter was handed over to the Pope's representative in India.

Mulakkal, who has been accused by the nun's of repeated sexual assault between 2014 and 2016, recently temporarily relinquished his administrative responsibilities.

On Wednesday, activists of All India Youth Federation, the youth wing of CPI, waved black flags as the bishop came out of the police station after questioning.

Some people also burnt an effigy of Mulakkal. Kottayam Superintendent of Police Hari Sankar said the bishop's questioning was likely to be over on Thursday. Meanwhile, police have tightened security in and around the crime branch office.

Meanwhile, Mulakkal has maintained that the allegations against him were a "cooked up story to wreak vengeance" for the actions taken by him on various complaints received against the nun.
Lawyer without brief is like Tendulkar without his bat on cricket ground: SC

SC to monitor probe into Muzaffarpur shelter home case

India

oi-Madhuri Adnal

New Delhi, Sep 20: The Supreme Court on Thursday said that it will monitor the investigation into Muzaffarpur shelter home case. The Apex Court sought status report from CBI. No more monitoring by Patna High Court.

The shocking incident had come to light following an audit of the shelter home by Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), Mumbai. The audit report, submitted to the state government in April, said that many girls at the shelter home had complained of sexual abuse.

Following this, an SIT was formed to probe the complaints. Amid uproar, the Nitish Kumar government handed over the investigation to CBI.

Brajesh Thakur, owner of the NGO 'Seva Sankalp Evam Vikas Samiti' which ran the shelter home, was arrested after the incident came to light. He also ran a local newspaper.

Expressing concern over the leak of probe details in the shelter home case, the Patna High Court had on August 23 restrained the media from reporting the details of the probe. A petition challenging this is pending before the Supreme Court.

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Story first published: Thursday, September 20, 2018, 15:29 [IST]
Lawyer without brief is like Tendulkar without his bat on cricket ground: SC

SC reserves order in Bhima Koregaon case

India

oi-Chennabasaveshwar P

New Delhi, Sep 20: The Supreme Court on Thursday reserved its order on the petitions filed by Romila Thapar and others challenging the arrest of activists in Bhima Koregaon case. The apex court has also asked parties to file their written notes by Monday.

The Supreme Court Wednesday had extended the house arrest of five rights activists. A bench of Chief Justice Dipak Misra and Justices A M Khanwilkar and D Y Chandrachud will continue with the hearing on Thursday on the plea filed by historian Romila Thapar and four others.

Also Read | In Bhima-Koregaon case, SC asks how 'activists' presumed that law was violated

At the last hearing in the case on September 17, the top court had said it may order a probe by a special investigating team (SIT) if it found that the evidence has been "cooked up". It had also said that the material, supporting the arrest of the five activists in the case, needed to be examined.

Bhima Koregaon: Give dog a bad name and hang him, counsel for activists tells SC

The five activists - Varavara Rao, Vernon Gonsalves, Arun Ferreira, Sudha Bharadwaj and Gautam Navlakha - were arrested by Maharashtra Police on August 28 in connection with an FIR lodged following the Elgaar Parishad event held on December 31 last year that had later triggered violence at Bhima-Koregaon village.

(With PTI inputs)
Shiv Sena welcomes triple talaq ordinance; Urges govt to build Ram temple

India

pti-PTI

Mumbai, Sep 20: The Shiv Sena welcomed the Centre's ordinance banning instant triple talaq and asked the government to take a similar route for the construction of Ram temple at Ayodhya in Uttar Pradesh on Thursday (Sep 20).

The government should take steps to fulfil "at least one promise" made to Hindus of the country, keeping their sentiments in mind, the Uddhav Thackeray-led party said. The Union Cabinet Wednesday approved an ordinance to ban the practice of instant triple talaq.

Law Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad said there was a "compelling necessity" to bring the ordinance as instances of 'talaq-e-biddat' continued unabated despite the Supreme Court striking it down. "The government has ensured dawn of freedom in the lives of Muslim women by making triple talaq an offence. Now, it should also ensure rise of the sun of sentiments of Hindus by bugling construction of the Ram temple in Ayodhya," the Sena said in the editorial of party mouthpiece 'Saamana'.

"Bring an ordinance on Ram temple and fulfil at least one promise made to Hindus," said the party, which is an ally of the BJP at the Centre and in Maharashtra. It noted that promises of bringing uniform civil code, repealing Article 370, that gives special status to Jammu and Kashmir, and construction of the Ram temple could not be fulfilled earlier due to compulsions of running a coalition. "But now you (the BJP) have governments with complete majority at the Centre as well as in Uttar Pradesh. Why the exile of Lord Ram is still not over then?" it asked.

Noting that the contentious Ram temple-Babri mosque land dispute is pending before court, the Sena said let the judiciary take a call on the matter when it wants to, but the government should find a solution to the issue of sentiments of Hindus. It welcomed the ordinance on triple talaq, but wondered how much acceptability the move would find among those Muslims who are "blinded by religion" and are hardliners.

Centre clears Ordinance criminalising triple talaq: A timeline

"But the married Muslim (women), who are helpless on religious grounds, would get a protection cover through the ordinance and they will be freed from the ill practice," the Marathi daily claimed. Without naming any party or government, it alleged that no honest efforts were made in India in the past to free Muslim women from such medieval ill practices due to vote bank politics. "So, the steps taken by the government in this context are really good, but it should not stop there only. The construction of Ram temple in Ayodhya was also promised by those who are claiming credit for banning triple talaq. "That promise (of the temple) is still unfulfilled...Now the temple should also be constructed (by bringing an ordinance)," the party added.

PTI
Spooked over pinpointed intelligence, here is why Hizbul wants cops targeted

India

oi-Vicky Nanjappa

Srinagar, Sep 20: A desperate Hizbul Mujahideen had on Wednesday issued a warning to all police officials in Jammu and Kashmir. It said that if they do not resign from their posts, they would be killed along with their families.

The warning comes in the wake of an abduction drama and also the killing of several security personnel by terrorists when they had come home on leave.

This is not the first time that the Hizbul Mujahideen has given a clarion call to target policemen and their families. Loosely the message from the Hizbul read that the policemen should be targeted because they draw government salaries. While it may seem like madness, C D Sahay, the former Chief of the Research and Analysis Wing says that it is a planned move with a clear objective.

Desperate Hizbul tells Kashmir cops to resign in 4 days or face death

Sahay explains that there is a clear change in pattern. They used to target central government establishments earlier. Now they have broadened that arc. Even in the 1990s when militancy was at its peak, local police men were not being targeted. In those days the militants tried to win over the policemen rather than killing them. After the restoration of normalcy following the madness of the 1990s, the police had become extremely active. The local police were able to get pin-pointed information.

The other forces in the Valley who did not have their routes in the state would rely heavily on the local police for information. The local police know each and every family. Kashmir in that sense is a very interactive and closely integrated society. The police have always known who is a militant and who is not, says Sahay.

The former R&AW chief explains, thanks to the pin-pointed information given by the police, the security forces have launched highly successful operations in recent times. Earlier on, the Special Operation Group of the Kashmir police had become a dreaded forces for the terrorists in the Valley. This force knew each and every individual.

He further says that, if one looks at the recent past, every operation of the forces has been backed by the pin-pointed information given by the local police. More importantly the police were getting real time information and not after several days. This has started becoming dangerous for militants.

J&K: Wave of Army men being killed by terrorists while on leave continues

Sahay says that if one looks at the life span of a Hizbul Mujahideen commander it is very short. The forces have successfully reduced their life span to one year after they have taken over as commanders. The local police are aware of their location and the information shared with the security forces helps get these commanders with much ease. Recently the NIA and the ED too launched probes into terror funding.

The local police have plenty of information on this and this in turn has become dangerous for the militants. Moreover the information being imparted is helping the security forces gun for the big fish, C D Sahay says. This time pressure is intense. The intent of the government is loud and clear. This is real reason why they are going after the police as the militants want them to stop providing information to the security forces. It is not madness by the militants, but a very planned operation with a clear objective, he also explains.

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Story first published: Thursday, September 20, 2018, 14:57 [IST]
Unaccounted cash of Rs 20 crore directly related to D K Shivakumar says probe

India

oi-Vicky Nanjappa

New Delhi, Sep 20: Karnataka minister and Congress strongman, D K Shivakumar finds himself in the dock after the Enforcement Directorate registered a money laundering case against him. The case in question pertains to alleged tax evasion and hawala transactions.

The Enforcement Directorate has charged Shivakumar, Haumanthaiah, an employee at Karnataka Bhavan in New Delhi, and others under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA).

In the midst of this, the BJP's Sambit Patra addressed a presser in which he accused the Congress of receiving money through hawala transactions. Patna referred to the statement of confession made by Anjaneya in which he is alleged to have said that money was sent to the AICC office. He further went on to say that money was sent in kgs to the AICC office. Patra also called out the Congress for crying foul during demonetisation.

Also Read | I am ready to face any kind of consequences, says DK Shivakumar

Hanumanthaiah has been a central character in the case filed by the ED. An employee at the Karnataka Bhavan in New Delhi, he has been accused of storing unaccounted cash belonging to Shivakumar in Delhi.

Under the radar of the ED is also Sachin Narayan, who is said to be a business partner of Shivakumar. Another person who finds a mention in the ED files is S K Sharma, who is the owner of Sharma Transports, which runs a fleet of luxury and passenger buses

The case was filed on the basis of a prosecution complaint filed by the Income Tax department. The IT department had alleged tax evasion and hawala transactions worth crores.

The IT department accused Shivakumar and Sharma of transporting huge amounts of unaccounted cash on a regular basis through hawala channels with the help of three other accused.

"As per facts and analysis of evidences, it is clear that accused number 1 (Shivakumar) has set up an extensive network of persons and premises across Delhi and Bengaluru in order to transport and utilise unaccounted cash," the department had said. Other accused are Sachin Narayan, Anjaneya Hanumanthaiah and N Rajendra, it said.

Also Read | D K Shivakumar set up extensive network to transport, utilise unaccounted cash: ED

The department further said that Rajendra is a caretaker at the Karnataka Bhavan and works for Sharma, besides looking after the immovable properties of both Shivakumar and Sharma. All these persons have been accused of conspiring to evade tax.

The department also said that unaccounted cash of Rs 20 crore (approximately) was found and seized during the raids in New Delhi and Bengaluru last year. This money is directly relatable to Shivakumar, the department had further noted.

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Story first published: Thursday, September 20, 2018, 8:56 [IST]
Rahul has lunch at roadside eatery in Goa, rides pillion on two-wheeler taxi for few kms

Chowkidar PM has himself become a thief: Rahul in Rajasthan

India

oi-Deepika S

Jaipur, Sep 20: In a blatant attack on Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Congress president Rahul Gandhi coined a new slogan-Gali gali me shor hai, Hindustan ka chowkidar chor hai.

The Congress scion said that PM Modi wants to be a 'Chowkidar' (watchman) but ''now we all know that the 'Chowkidar' (watchman) himself is a thief''.

Pitchig for more women participation Rahul said that "I want to see more women candidates in elections because nothing can happen in India without them."

Rahul also took a dig at the PM saying that the farmers have been begging PM Modi to waive off their loans. "When he can waive off loans worth Rs 1,50,000 crore of just 15 industrialists, why couldn't he waive the loans of farmers? When asked, he (PM) was completely silent."

Promising more employment opportunities if his party comes to power, he added "Make in India has flopped. The Congress government will open doors of banks to our youth and MSMEs of Rajasthan who in turn will employment."

"We won't make false promises, won't promise about 15 lakhs. We are interested in your 'Mann ki Baat', not our 'Mann ki Baat', he further said.

"We want you to be able to read 'Made in Rajasthan', 'Made in Dungarpur' written at the back of your phones one day, he said."

Rahul is scheduled to meet party workers and address a public gathering in the Dungarpur district. His visit to the poll-bound state comes a few days after he held a roadshow in Madhya Pradesh. This is also Rahul's second visit to Rajasthan since his roadshow in Jaipur on 11 August.
A dozen Indian- Americans in mid-term Congressional elections

International

pti-PTI

Washington, Sep 20: A record number of 12 Indian-Americans are in the fray for the November 6 mid-term Congressional elections. Three among them -- Hiral Tipirneni and Anita Malik from Arizona and Pramila Jayapal from Washington State -- are women.

The first Indian-American woman to enter the US House of Representatives, Jayapal, is seeking re-election from the seventh Congressional district of Washington State. Her victory is considered to be a cake walk, given her popularity and that she represents a Democratic stronghold.

Along with Jayapal, three other Indian-Americans -- Raja Krishnamoorthi from Illinois, Ro Khanna and Dr Ami Bera from California -- are seeking re-elections this year. Bera, who was declared winner after recounting of votes in the last three elections, this time faces a tough opponent, Republican Andrew Grant. He was first elected to the US House of Representatives in 2012, making him the third ever Indian-American to enter the House after Dalip Singh Saund from 1957 to 1963 and Bobby Jindal in 2004.

In 2016, three Indian-Americans -- Krishnamoorthi, Khanna and Jayapal -- joined Bera in the House of representatives, which led to the creation of the so called 'Samosa Caucus'. This year, Krishnamoorthi is pitted against Indian-American Jitender Diganvker of the Republican Party in the eight Congressional District of Illinois. Notably both of them were elected unopposed during the primaries. Khanna is pitted against Republican Ron Cohen in the 17th Congressional District of California, which is essentially India-American dominated Silicon Valley.

Political pundits expect all four of them to sail through this November. Indian-Americans are giving a tough fight to their opponents in some of the key Congressional districts. Prominent among them being emergency room physician Hiral Tipirneni in the eighth Congressional District of Arizona and former diplomat Sri Preston Kulkarni in the 22nd Congressional District of Texas. Running an aggressive campaign, that has caught national attention, Tipirneni seeks to tip the balance in her favour by defeating the Republican incumbent Debbie Lesko, who won the special elections early this year. Kulkarni resigned from US foreign service to run for the Congress and is giving a tough fight to Republican Pete Olson, who has been one of the proponents of India-US relationship.

Richard Verma, the former US Ambassador to India, Thursday endorsed Kulkarni for the Congress. "Today more than ever, we need leaders like Sri who will champion diplomatic solutions and put country over politics," Verma said. Kulkarni represented the US for 14 years as a Foreign Service Officer with overseas tours in Iraq, Israel, Russia, Taiwan and Jamaica. He then served as a foreign policy and defense advisor on Capitol Hill assisting Senator Kirsten Gillibrand on the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Young Indian-American Aftab Pureval, who is the first person of Tibetan origin to run for the Congress, has received shot in his arm after the recent endorsement by former US President Barack Obama. Pureval is the current Hamilton County Clerk of Courts. In the eight Congressional District of Florida, incumbent Bill Posey is experiencing a tough fight from Democratic opponent Sanjay Patel. Anita Malik faces Republican incumbent David Schweikert in Arizona's 6th Congressional District in metro Phoenix. Harry Arora is the second Indian-American Republican candidate to run for the Congress. Pitted against Democrat Jim Himes, who has been representing the fourth Congressional District of Connecticut, he has a tough challenge at his hand. Arora has raised more than USD 700,000, which is less than half the funds raised by Himes.

US Capitol to host first-ever gathering of Indian-Americans

Independent Shiva Ayyadurai is the only Indian-American in the race for the US Senate seat from Massachusetts. While he has caught national attention and some media space because of his innovative campaigning skills, it would be nothing less than a miracle if Ayyadurai defeats Democratic incumbent Elizabeth Warren in the Senate election from Massachusetts. Warren is a Democratic Party star and is seen as a strong contender for the party's presidential ticket in 2020.

It is believed that at least half-a-dozen contenders will sail through next January when lawmakers would be sworn in for the 116th Congress. In addition to these 12 contestants in the race for the US Congress, there are scores of Indian-Americans running for local elections, including State and County.

PTI
After third Korean summit, another Kim-Trump meeting on radar?

International

oi-Shubham Ghosh

Pyongyang, Sept 19: the world is still hopeful about North Korea. The hermit nation's leadership's renewed commitment to denuclearisation which was expressed during this week's Inter-Korean summit raised hopes of a second summit between Kim Jong-un and US President Donald Trump, South Korean news agency Yonhap reported.

Last week, the White House confirmed the news of Trump having received a letter from the North Korean leader in which the latter requested a second meeting between the two countries. According to the White House sources, planning is already underway for that.

Trump met Kim in Singapore on June 12 following a long roller-coaster ride. Although there was no shortage of hype around that summit for it was a historical first, there was not much solid outcome from that meeting as the agreement the two leaders signed over peace in the Korean Peninsula was also criticised as vague.

Also Read | In yet another historic summit, South & North Korean leaders sign agreement

As per the Yonhap report, the US's preparation for another Trump-Kim summit could see a push after Trump praised Kim's commitments during his summit with South Korean President Moon Jae-in to shut a missile testing site in the presence of international experts and also, if the US cooperates through reciprocation, a key nuclear facility as well.

Though experts feel Trump's hawkish advisers like National Security Adviser John Bolton will still feel it is not enough to engage in talks with North Korea, the final word on this rests with Trump who wants to leave a lasting legacy on the Korean peace process.

Kim and Moon had their first summit at the border town of Panmunjom in April in the run-up to the Kim-Trump meeting.

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Story first published: Thursday, September 20, 2018, 9:15 [IST]
8 injured in shooting at US mall in Wisconsin

US: Shooting incident in Maryland leaves 3 dead, suspect nabbed

International

oi-Vikas SV

Maryland, Sep 20: A shooting incident was reported from Maryland, US, on Thursday morning in which three people were killed. The suspect has been apprehended.

The first shots were reported just after 9 a.m. (local time) at the "Liberty Support Facility," which is a portion of the Rite Aid distribution center, FOX Baltimore reported.

"I can confirm multiple wounded and casualties. The lone suspect is in custody and in critical condition," said Harford County Sheriff, as per reports.

Several victims were taken Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center. The Associated Press reported that three people were killed. No further details about the victims were immediately available.
Diwali 2021: How to perform Lakshmi puja at home, puja samagri, vidhi and shubh muhurat

Woman held captive by brother for 2 years, says fed with one bread piece in 4 days

New Delhi

oi-Madhuri Adnal

New Delhi, Sep 20: A 50-year-old woman, who was allegedly held captive by her brother in northwest Delhi's Rohini for the past two years, was rescued on Tuesday in a very poor condition.

In a statement issued on Tuesday, DCW said that they found the woman starving on an open terrace at her brother's house. Emphasising that she was "reduced to bones", the statement further read that the woman was given one piece of bread every four days.

Based on the woman's account and conditions observed by the DCW and the local police, an FIR has been registered against the brother.

Also Read | Man desperate for a son throws toddler daughter off the terrace

The woman has been admitted to a local hospital and is currently undergoing treatment.

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Global Urinary Incontinence Products Market 2018-2025 Unicharm, Procter & Gamble, Domtar, Medline

Urinary Incontinence Products Market 2018

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Market study on Global Urinary Incontinence Products Market 2018 Research Report presents a professional and complete analysis of Global Urinary Incontinence Products Market on the current market situation.Report provides a general overview of the Urinary Incontinence Products industry 2018 including definitions, classifications, Urinary Incontinence Products market analysis, a wide range of applications and Urinary Incontinence Products industry chain structure. The 2018's report on Urinary Incontinence Products industry offers the global Urinary Incontinence Products development history, development trends and competitive landscape analysis. The Global Urinary Incontinence Products Market 2018 report includes Urinary Incontinence Products market Revenue, market Share, Urinary Incontinence Products industry volume, market Trends, Growth aspects.After report covers manufacturing processes and price structures on Urinary Incontinence Products scenario. This report also includes Urinary Incontinence Products import/export, supply chain relationship, consumption ratio, Urinary Incontinence Products revenue and gross margin by regions/countries (United States, EU, China, and Japan).Request Sample Copy of Urinary Incontinence Products Report:Leading Manufacturers Analysis in Urinary Incontinence Products Industry 2018 are Kimberly-Clark, SCA, Unicharm, Procter & Gamble, First Quality Enterprises, Domtar, Medline, 3M, Covidien, B Braun, Cotton Incorporated, Tranquility, Hengan Group, Coco, Chiaus, Fuburg, AAB Group, Coloplast, ConvaTec, Flexicare Medical, Hollister, Marlen Manufacturing & DevelopmentMarket Segmented Based on Application Hospital, Homecare, Nursing Center, OthersMarket Segmented Based on Type Urine Absorbents, Urine Accepted Products/ Incontinence Bags, OthersThen report states global Urinary Incontinence Products industry leaders along with information on company profiles, product images, product specification, production capacity, Urinary Incontinence Products market revenue and contact information. The Urinary Incontinence Products industry is analysed on basis of applications, geographic distribution and the factors responsible for increasing demand of Urinary Incontinence Products globally has been included in this report.Browse Full Report Here:The Urinary Incontinence Products research report includes the products that are currently in demand and available in the Urinary Incontinence Products market along with their cost breakup, manufacturing volume, import/export scheme and contribution to the Urinary Incontinence Products market revenue worldwide.Finally, Urinary Incontinence Products market report gives you details about the Urinary Incontinence Products market research findings and conclusion which helps you to develop profitable Urinary Incontinence Products market strategies to gain competitive advantage.About US:"9DimenResearchStore.com" is a leading market intelligence team which accredits and provides the reports of some of the top publishers in the field of technology industry. We are as a firm expertise in making extensive reports that cover all the necessary details about the market assessments such as major technological improvement in the industry.Contact Us:3626 North Hall Street (Two Oak Lawn),Suite 610,Dallas, TX 75219, USAContact No. +1-214-661-1669Web:Email: sales@9dimenresearchstore.com
Global Hot Melt Adhesives Market Research Report 2018: Bostik Inc, 3M Company, Beardow & ADAMS, Jowat, Avery Dennison, DOW Corning

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Qyresearchreports include new market research report Global Hot Melt Adhesives Market Professional Survey Report 2018 to its huge collection of research reports.This report studies the global Hot Melt Adhesives market status and forecast, categorizes the global Hot Melt Adhesives market size (value & volume) by manufacturers, type, application, and region. This report focuses on the top manufacturers in North America, Europe, Japan, China, India, Southeast Asia and other regions (Central & South America, and Middle East & Africa).The hot melt adhesives are defined as adhesives that melt and flow on application of heat and solidify on cooling to give a strong adhesion. They are applied in a molten state at temperatures that range from 120C to 180C depending on applications and materials to be bonded.Fill The Form To Book A Free Sample PDF :The global sales of hot melt adhesives are estimated from 1477 KMT in 2011 to 1932 KMT in 2016. In 2015, the global hot melt adhesives sales market was led by China, USA, Europe and Japan, where the USA and China are important sales market. At present, there are many manufacturers in every region and the major manufacturers activities of hot melt adhesives are Henkel, H. B. Fuller, Bostik Inc, 3M Company, Beardow & ADAMS, Jowat, Avery Dennison, DOW Corning, Kleiberit, etc. Tex Year Industries is the China sales leader, holding 0.81% sales share in 2015.A key trend in the hot-melt adhesive market is the movement toward higher quality products. HMA is a large determinant to the end-products overall quality, while typically only incurring only a small part of the overall cost. Accordingly, as end-products continue to be realized further down the value chain, customers are beginning to choose higher-end products. The ongoing shift toward higher quality adhesives has brought about a surplus of low-end goods and intense competition in that area of the market. Consequently, it has encouraged many mid- and low-level suppliers to invest more heavily in R&D in the hope of being able to penetrate the more lucrative high-end market. Foreign companies will continue to dominate the more lucrative high-end market, primarily owing to superior R&D, as well as supply chain efficiencies that allow for easier access to high-quality raw materials.As connections become more established, the entire market is trending toward direct sales, rather than using distributors. This is observed even more acutely among foreign suppliers, who historically relied more heavily on distributor companies. This observed even more acutely among foreign suppliers, who historically relied more heavily on distributor companies.The global Hot Melt Adhesives market is valued at 6040 million US$ in 2017 and will reach 7830 million US$ by the end of 2025, growing at a CAGR of 3.3% during 2018-2025.The major manufacturers covered in this reportHenkelH. B. FullerBostik Inc3M CompanyBeardow & ADAMSJowatAvery DennisonDOW CorningKleiberitSika AGTEX YEAR INDUSTRIESNanpaoTianyangRenheCherngTay TechnologyZhejiang GoodHuateComplete Table of Content is available at:Geographically, this report studies the top producers and consumers, focuses on product capacity, production, value, consumption, market share and growth opportunity in these key regions, coveringNorth AmericaEuropeChinaJapanIndiaSoutheast AsiaOther regions (Central & South America, Middle East & Africa)We can also provide the customized separate regional or country-level reports, for the following regions:North AmericaUnited StatesCanadaMexicoAsia-PacificChinaIndiaJapanSouth KoreaAustraliaIndonesiaSingaporeRest of Asia-PacificEuropeGermanyFranceUKItalySpainRussiaRest of EuropeCentral & South AmericaBrazilArgentinaRest of South AmericaMiddle East & AfricaSaudi ArabiaTurkeyRest of Middle East & AfricaOn the basis of product, this report displays the production, revenue, price, market share and growth rate of each type, primarily split intoEVA HMAPOE HMASBS HMASIS HMASEBS HMABy Application, the market can be split intoPaper packagingBookbindingLabel & TapeHygieneTransportationConstructionWoodworkingTextile / FootwearOthersBrowse Report Details @The study objectives of this report are:To analyze and study the global Hot Melt Adhesives capacity, production, value, consumption, status (2013-2017) and forecast (2018-2025);Focuses on the key Hot Melt Adhesives manufacturers, to study the capacity, production, value, market share and development plans in future.Focuses on the global key manufacturers, to define, describe and analyze the market competition landscape, SWOT analysis.To define, describe and forecast the market by type, application and region.To analyze the global and key regions market potential and advantage, opportunity and challenge, restraints and risks.To identify significant trends and factors driving or inhibiting the market growth.To analyze the opportunities in the market for stakeholders by identifying the high growth segments.To strategically analyze each submarket with respect to individual growth trend and their contribution to the market.To analyze competitive developments such as expansions, agreements, new product launches, and acquisitions in the market.To strategically profile the key players and comprehensively analyze their growth strategies.In this study, the years considered to estimate the market size of Hot Melt Adhesives are as follows:History Year: 2013-2017Base Year: 2017Estimated Year: 2018Forecast Year 2018 to 2025For the data information by region, company, type and application, 2017 is considered as the base year. Whenever data information was unavailable for the base year, the prior year has been considered.Key StakeholdersHot Melt Adhesives ManufacturersHot Melt Adhesives Distributors/Traders/WholesalersHot Melt Adhesives Subcomponent ManufacturersIndustry AssociationDownstream VendorsAbout Us:QYResearchReports.com delivers the latest strategic market intelligence to build a successful business footprint in China. Our syndicated and customized research reports provide companies with vital background information of the market and in-depth analysis on the Chinese trade and investment framework, which directly affects their business operations. Reports from QYResearchReports.com feature valuable recommendations on how to navigate in the extremely unpredictable yet highly attractive Chinese market.Contact Us:Brooklyn, NY 11230United StatesToll Free: 866-997-4948 (USA-CANADA)Tel: +1-518-621-2074Follow Us on LinkedIn:Web:Email: sales@qyresearchreports.comBlog:
Growth of North America Microgrid Market Forecast to 2024 in a Newly Released Report Profiling GE, ABB, Schneider Electric, Alstom, Siemens, Honeywell, Caterpillar Inc, Tesla, Virdity Energy Solutions, EnSync Inc

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The newly released research at Market Study Report titled 2018-2024 North America Microgrid Market Report provides data, information, brief analysis, company profiles, statistics for past years and forecasts for next few years.North America Microgrid Market is predicted to reach over USD 7 billion by 2024. Aging grid infrastructure coupled with stringent government policies toward adoption of sustainable power technologies will stimulate North America microgrid market. Economic competitiveness, low power cost & transmission losses and reliability are key the parameters that will encourage the product penetration. In addition, ongoing funding toward the development of distributed generation technology will enhance the industry landscape.Request a sample of this premium report at:Canada microgrid market is predicted to reach deployment of over 400 MW capacity by 2024. Growing electricity demand across remote and off grid areas along with upsurge in investments toward the adoption of clean energy technology will complement the business growth. Furthermore, ongoing development of distributed energy sources to minimize the dependency on conventional grid will enhance the industry outlook. In 2016 Canada government made an investment of USD 2.4 billion for developing wind and solar energy sources.Ongoing adoption of captive power plants across the manufacturing and industrial sector for ensuring regulated power production will foster North America microgrid market. Increasing investment toward the expansion of decentralized grid coupled with rising investments for the expansion of infrastructure and power sector will accelerate the business growth. For instance, in 2016, the government of Canada, announced an investment of about USD 900 million were financed toward installation of numerous energy sources and R & D across the country.Natural gas microgrid market will grow on account of stringent government measures pertaining to the adoption of lower emission fuel as a replacement for conventional fuel sources. Ongoing investment toward exploration of unconventional fuel reserves owing to escalating gas demand will enhance the industry outlook. Amren Corporation in 2017, developed an advanced microgrid which utilizes, solar, natural gas and wind energy as a source along with an integrated battery storage and automation system.Increasing high-end power consumption across the industries on account of development of new HVAC systems and heavy load machineries will foster the microgrid market. Growing electricity demands across hospitals, retail outlets, automotive, manufacturing operations, offices and industries will encourage product penetration across commercial and industrial application. For instance, as per EIA, the commercial and industrial sector in 2017 accounted about 4.5% and 22.4 % of the primary energy consumption respectively.Request a discount on standard prices of this premium report at:Flow batteries accounted for over 5% of North America microgrid market in 2017. Ongoing investment pertaining to the integration of sustainable grid coupled with innovations toward the development of cost-effective and efficient storage technologies will propel the industry growth. key features including long life cycle and higher efficiency will further encourage the product adoption over available substitutes.Eminent participants in the North America microgrid market include GE, ABB, Schneider Electric, Alstom, Siemens, Honeywell, Caterpillar Inc, Tesla, Virdity Energy Solutions, EnSync Inc, Toshiba, Hitachi, Advanced Microgrid Solutions, Lockheed Martin, Exelon and Power Analytics Corporation.Table of Content:Chapter 1. Methodology and Scope1.1. Methodology1.2. Market definitions1.3. Market estimates & forecast parameters1.4. Data Sources1.4.1. Primary1.4.2. Secondary1.4.2.1. Paid sources1.4.2.2. Public sourcesChapter 2. Executive Summary2.1. North America microgrid industry 360 degree synopsis, 2013 - 20242.1.1. Business trends2.1.2. Connectivity trends2.1.3. Grid type trends2.1.4. Power Source trends2.1.5. Storage trends2.1.6. Application trend2.1.7. Country trendsChapter 3. North America microgrid market Industry Insights3.1. Industry segmentation3.2. Industry landscape, 2013 - 20243.3. Industry ecosystem analysis3.3.1. Vendor matrix3.4. Innovation & sustainability3.5. Regulatory landscape3.5.1. U.S.3.5.1.1. Energy Policy Act, 20053.5.1.2. California Public Utility Commission3.5.1.3. Electronic Code of Federal Regulation3.5.1.4. Safety & Health Regulations for Construction3.5.1.5. DOE VTO Advanced Batter R&D Program3.5.1.5.1. Mercury-Containing and Rechargeable Battery Management Act of 19963.5.2. Canada3.5.2.1. CAN/CSA-C22.2 No. 257-063.5.2.2. CAN/CSA-C22.3 No. 9-083.6. Infrastructure/energy investments spending, 2015/20163.7. Renewable energy incentive in U.S. States3.8. Energy policies considered for deployment of microgrid network, U.S.3.9. Industry impact forces3.9.1. Growth drivers3.9.1.1. Renewable energy integration3.9.1.2. Aging grid infrastructure3.9.2. Industry pitfalls & challenges3.9.2.1. High capital cost3.10. Growth potential analysis3.11. Porter's analysis3.12. Competitive landscape3.12.1. Strategy dashboard3.12.1.1. ABB3.12.1.1.1. Next Level strategy - stage 33.12.1.1.2. Acquisition3.12.1.2. Siemens3.12.1.2.1. Vision 20203.12.1.2.2. Investments3.12.1.3. Schneider Electric3.12.1.3.1. Investments3.12.1.4. Eaton Corporation3.12.1.4.1. Investment strategy3.12.1.4.2. Technology expansion3.13. PESTEL analysisChapter 4. North America Microgrid Market, By Connectivity4.1. North America microgrid market share by connectivity, 2017 & 20244.2. Grid connecte4.2.1. Market estimates and forecast, 2013-2024.2.2. Market estimates and forecast, by country, 2013-2024For More Details about this report:About Us:Marketstudyreport.com allows you to manage and control all corporate research purchases to consolidate billing and vendor management. You can eliminate duplicate purchases and customize your content and license management.Contact Us:Market Study Report4 North Main Street,Selbyville, Delaware 19975USAPhone: 1-302-273-0910US Toll Free: 1-866-764-2150Email: sales@marketstudyreport.comWebsite:Blog:
Defibrillators Market 2018 Share, Trend, Segmentation and Forecast to 2022

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Global Defibrillators IndustryLatest Report on Defibrillators Market Global Analysis & 2022 Forecast Research StudyMarket Insights:The Global defibrillators market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 7.2% during 2017-2022. Defibrillation is the treatment of chronic cardiovascular diseases such as cardiac dysrhythmias, such as non-perfusing ventricular tachycardia (VT) and ventricular fibrillation (VF) through a device called defibrillators. The defibrillators is an electrical device that delivers a dose of electric current to the heart, This depolarizes a critical mass of the heart muscle, terminates the dysrhythmia, and allows normal sinus rhythm to be re-established by the body's natural pacemaker. Global defibrillators market is growing at a very fast pace owing to rising cardiovascular diseases, this is one of the most important factor in the growth of the market. Apart from that increase in number of geriatric population, technological advancement in defibrillators, increasing investment by major players, and high present of unmet medical needs and so on are boosting the global defibrillators market in the forecasted time period. On the other hand preference of drugs over defibrillators, strict FDA regulations and low awareness regarding defibrillators in underdeveloped market is restraining the global defibrillators market. On the other hand development of new MRI labelled devices and growing healthcare expenditure in APAC region may acts as an opportunity in the growth of the market.Try Sample Report @Geographical InsightsGeographically market has been bifurcated into North America, Europe, Asia Pacific and Rest of the World. North America is one the major market for defibrillators in the forecasted time period, owing to increased awareness about public access defibrillator, increased procedure volumes resulting from rapidly aging population, the increased adoption of advanced defibrillators increasing incidence of cardiovascular diseases and sudden cardiac arrest (SCA) in this region. Apart from that, improvement in healthcare expenditure further fuels the sale of home care defibrillators such as automated external defibrillator (AEDs) and wearable external defibrillators. Decrease in the cost of AEDs due to increasing competitions amongst major players is also helps this region to grow. Though, Asia pacific region is projected to witness the fastest growth in this region. Japan is the major country in this region, contributes solely for the AEDs market share. This is a result of awareness about the early prevention of sudden cardiac arrest. Too, increasing expenditures and improving healthcare infrastructures in the emerging markets mainly India and China to overcome the unmet medical needs in these countries have strengthened the market growth. Technological advancements for cost-effective devices in these nations offer a lucrative opportunity for the growth of defibrillator market.Competitive Insights:The Key Players in the Global defibrillators market Include St. Jude Medical, Bexen Cardio, Biotronik Se & Co. Kg, Boston Scientific, Cardiac Science Corporation, Cardioline Spa, Defibtech, Llc, Ge Healthcare, Heartsine Technologies, Inc., Livanova Plc, Medtronic, Mindray Medical, Nihon Kohden Corporation, Phillips Healthcare, Physio Control Inc., Primedic, Schiller Ag, Sorin Group, Stryker Inc., Zoll Medical Corporation and so on Partnership, R&D, M&A, Product Launch Are The Key Strategy Adopted In The Global defibrillators market.Market Segmentation:Global defibrillators market is segmented on the basis of Types, end users and regional outlook.1. Global Defibrillators Market Research and Analysis, By Types2. Global Defibrillators Market Research and Analysis, By End Users3. Global defibrillators market Research and Analysis, By RegionOMR Report covers: Comprehensive research methodology of Global defibrillators market. This report also includes detailed and extensive market overview with key analyst insights. Exhaustive analysis of macro and micro factors influencing the market guided by key recommendations. Analysis of regional regulations and other government policies impacting the Global defibrillators market. Insights about market determinants which are stimulating the Global defibrillators market. Detailed and extensive market segments with regional distribution of forecasted revenues. Extensive profiles and recent developments of market players.For Detailed Reading Please visit WiseGuy Reports @Some points from table of content:REPORT SUMMARY1.1. RESEARCH METHODS AND TOOLS1.2. MARKET BREAKDOWN1.2.1. BY SEGMENTS1.2.2. BY GEOGRAPHY1.2.3. BY STAKEHOLDERS1.2.4. EXCEPTIONS2. MARKET OVERVIEW AND INSIGHTS2.1. DEFINITION2.2. ANALYST INSIGHTS & CURRENT MARKET TRENDS2.2.1. KEY FINDINGS2.2.2. RECOMMENDATION2.2.3. CONCLUSION2.3. REGULATION2.3.1.1. UNITED STATES2.3.1.2. EUROPEAN UNION2.3.1.3. CHINA2.3.1.4. INDIA3. MARKET DETERMINANT3.1. MOTIVATORS3.1.1. INCREASING NUMBER OF AGED POPULATION3.1.2. TECHNOLOGICAL ADVANCEMENT IN DEFIBRILLATOR3.1.3. INCREASING INVESTMENT BY MAJOR PRIVATE PLAYERS3.1.4. RISING PREVALENCE OF CARDIOVASCULAR DISEASES3.2. RESTRAINT3.2.1. PREFERENCE OF DRUGS OVER DEFIBRILLATORS3.2.2. STRICT GOVERNMENT REGULATIONS SUCH AS BY FDA3.2.3. LOW AWARENESS REGARDING DEFIBRILLATORS IN UNDERDEVELOPED MARKET3.3. OPPORTUNITY3.3.1. DEVELOPMENT OF NEW MRI LABELLED DEVICES3.3.2. GROWING HEALTHCARE EXPENDITURE IN APAC REGION4. MARKET SEGMENTATION4.1. DEFIBRILLATOR, BY TYPES4.1.1. MANUAL EXTERNAL DEFIBRILLATOR4.1.2. AUTOMATED EXTERNAL DEFIBRILLATOR4.1.3. IMPLANTABLE CARDIOVERTER DEFIBRILLATOR4.1.3.1. TRANSVENEOUS IMPLANTABLE CARDIOVERTER DEFIBRILLATOR (T-ICDS)4.1.3.2. SUBCUTANEOUS IMPLANTABLE CARDIOVERTER DEFIBRILLATOR (S-ICDS)4.1.4. WEARABLE CARDIOVERTER DEFIBRILLATORDEFIBRILLATOR, BY COMPONENTS4.1.5. CAPACITORS4.1.6. INDUCTORS4.1.7. POWER SUPPLY4.2. DEFIBRILLATOR, BY END USERS4.2.1. HOSPITALS4.2.2. DIAGNOSTIC CENTERS4.2.3. AMBULATORY SERVICE4.2.4. HOMECARE4.2.5. OTHERSContinued.For more information or any query mail at sales@wiseguyreports.comAbout UsWise Guy Reports is part of the Wise Guy Consultants Pvt. Ltd. and offers premium progressive statistical surveying, market research reports, analysis & forecast data for industries and governments around the globe. Wise Guy Reports understand how essential statistical surveying information is for your organization or association. Therefore, we have associated with the top publishers and research firms all specialized in specific domains, ensuring you will receive the most reliable and up to date research data available.Contact Us:Norah Trent+91 841 198 5042Office No. 528, Amanora ChambersPune - 411028Maharashtra, India
In-vitro Diagnostic Services Market 2018 Eminent Players  BioRad, DexCom, Nova Biomedical, OraSure, Pearl Pathways, Phenomenex, Qiagen, Roche diagnostics, Siemens, Sysmex and Thermofisher

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In-vitro Diagnostic Services Market size is set to exceed USD 63 billion by 2024; according to a new research report by Global Market Insights.Developments in diagnostic tests will enhance in-vitro diagnostic services industry growth over the coming years. Integration of advanced technology within the diagnostic devices should propel in-vitro diagnostic services market growth in the upcoming years. For instance, Phenomenex, a leader in developing diagnostic tests has added improvisations in the HPLC columns that enables free chiral screening service proving beneficial for performing diagnostic tests. Increase in technological advancements will enable automations in testing equipment utilized in the diagnostic procedures.Growing prevalence of chronic diseases such as cancer should have positive impact on the demand for in-vitro diagnostic (IVD) services. According to WHO, in 2015, there were around 8.8 million deaths globally due to cancer that will augment demand for IVD services. Also, as reported by World Cancer Research Fund International, there were around 1.4 million cases of colorectal cancer globally that will assure inflated demand for diagnostic services in forthcoming years. However, excessive cost of the diagnostic services and software utilized will restrain the industry growth.Request sample copy of this report @Testing services segment will grow at 5.7% over the forecast timeline and the high segmental growth will be attributed to the availability of superior quality in-vitro diagnostic services. Moreover, increasing mortality rates due to cancer and other viral infections should augment the business growth over forecast timeframe.Laboratories segment held an enormous market share of 29.3% in 2017 and is anticipated to follow high growth trends in upcoming years. Increase in rate of detection of diabetes cases in South African and Asian countries will augment the segmental growth and escalate the demand for in-vitro diagnostic services. Additionally, growing incidence of chronic infections such as HIV and others will ensure high demand for laboratory diagnostic services. According to U.S. Statistics, around 1.1 million people in the U.S. were infected with AIDS that will positively influence business growth.U.S. market accounted for 89.7% regional revenue share in 2017 and high business growth can be attributed to the increasing geriatric population suffering from chronic disease such as diabetes. As per CDC in 2015, around 30.3 million Americans were detected with diabetes that should upsurge the demand for diagnostic services in near future. Also, developments in healthcare infrastructure will positively impact the business growth.Germany market was valued at USD 1.4 billion in 2017. Business growth in the country will be triggered by rising adoption of technologically advanced diagnostic devices. Also, availability of improvised quality diagnostic devices used in blood, urine and other infectious diseases diagnosis coupled with development of reimbursement scenario will stimulate industry growth over the coming years.Make Inquiry about this report @Some of the prominent industry players operating in the BioRad, DexCom, Nova Biomedical, OraSure, Pearl Pathways, Phenomenex, Qiagen, Roche diagnostics, Siemens, Sysmex and Thermofisher. The key industry leaders will assure maximum profits by introducing innovative technology & devices into the industry. For instance, in October 2017, Roche Diagnostics received approval for Cobas, a Zika test used for accurate diagnosis of diseases. Development of such new tests will ensure profits for the firm.In-vitro diagnostic services market research report includes in-depth coverage of the industry with estimates & forecast in terms of revenue in USD million from 2013 to 2024, for the following segments:In-Vitro Diagnostic Services Market, By Service Type (USD Million)o Softwareo Standalone Softwareo Software Updateo Otherso Testing Serviceso Infectious Testingo Diabetes Testingo Molecular Testingo Tissue Testingo OthersIn-Vitro Diagnostic Services Market, By End-user (USD million)o Hospitalso Point-Of-Care Testingo Laboratorieso Academic Instituteso OthersThe above information is provided for the following regions and countries: North Americao U.S.o Canada Europeo Germanyo Franceo UKo Italyo Spaino Russia Asia Pacifico Chinao Japano Indiao Australia Latin Americao Brazilo Mexico Middle East Asia & Africao Saudi Arabiao South Africao UAEGlobal Market Insights, Inc., headquartered in Delaware, U.S., is a global market research and consulting service provider; offering syndicated and custom research reports along with growth consulting services. Our business intelligence and industry research reports offer clients with penetrative insights and actionable market data specially designed and presented to aid strategic decision making. These exhaustive reports are designed via a proprietary research methodology and are available for key industries such as chemicals, advanced materials, technology, renewable energy and biotechnology.Arun HegdeCorporate Sales, USAGlobal Market Insights, Inc.Phone: 1-302-846-7766Toll Free: 1-888-689-0688Email: sales@gminsights.com
Protein Engineering Market 2018 Share, Trend, Segmentation and Forecast to 2022

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Global Protein Engineering IndustryLatest Report on Protein Engineering Market Global Analysis & 2022 Forecast Research StudyMarket Insights:The Global protein engineering market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 16 % during 2017-2022. The protein engineering market is quickly growing and it is showing promising growth opportunities majorly due to the increasing number of engineered proteins and amino acids across the globe. It is majorly witnessing positive growth owing to the increasing utilization of protein drugs over non-protein ones. Furthermore, increasing the prevalence of lifestyle and chronic diseases such as blood pressure, cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, and others further boost the demand for protein engineering. As per world health organization (WHO), around 335 million people were affected by asthma in 2015.Try Sample Report @Moreover, WHO stated that cardiovascular diseases have accounted more mortalities than any other lifestyle-related diseases. Apart from this, favorable initiatives by the European and American government to support the growth of protein engineering market globally establish a healthy platform for the protein engineering market. Technological advancement is also one of the major boosting agents of this market.There are some challenges which are faced by protein engineering market such as high costing of engineering instrument and high maintenance cost of tools and instruments. Also, the lack of trained professionals is hampering the global market growth. Furthermore, stringent rules, high research and development funds need, high probability of meeting the failure of the research, and lack of awareness among users are some of the other factors which are road blocker in the global protein engineering market growth. The report includes a detailed market overview, analyst insights and, market determinants, market segmentation, geographical analysis, strategic recommendations, key company analysis, key findings, market insights and company profiling.Geographical InsightsGeographically the market is segmented into North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific and Rest of the World. The North American region is leading the protein engineering market followed by the Asia Pacific and Europe majorly due to the rising lifestyle-related diseases and rising adoption of protein-based drugs in the region. Governments of Brazil, U.S. and Canada have been highly supportive of advancements in protein engineering, creating an encouraging regulatory environment for companies in the North American market. Additionally, Asia Pacific region is showing faster growth for protein engineering market. Rising population and increasing techniques for protein engineering are also contributing towards market growth in Asia Pacific region.Competitive Insights:The key players in the global protein engineering market include Absciex, Abbott healthcare, Agilent Technologies, Inc., Biogen, Bio-Rad Laboratories, Inc., Bruker Corporation, Danaher Corporation, Eli Lilly, Fusion antibodies, GE healthcare, Genscriptsusa, Inc., Genzyme, Johnson & Johnson, Novartis AG, Novo Nordisk, Perkinelmer, Inc., Roche, Sigma-Aldrich Corporation, Thermo Fisher scientific, Waters Corporation and so on. In 2017, absciex announced a joint venture with Zhenjiang dian diagnostics in China to improve diagnostic and testing facility in China.Market Segmentation:Global protein engineering market is segmented on the basis of technology, protein type, products, end users and regional outlook. In protein type, monoclonal antibodies are the major and fastest growing segment of the global protein engineering protein market by type. This growth is majorly attributed to the increase in adoption of them for various therapies such as autoimmune and cancer diseases.1. Global protein engineering market research and analysis, by technology1.1. Rational protein design1.2. Irrational protein design2. Global protein engineering market research and analysis, by protein type2.1. Monoclonal antibodies2.2. Insulin2.3. Erythropoietin2.4. Interferon2.5. Colony-stimulating factor2.6. Growth hormones2.7. Coagulation factor2.8. Vaccines2.9. Others3. Global protein engineering market research and analysis, by product3.1. Instruments3.2. Services and Software3.3. ReagentsGlobal protein engineering market research and analysis, by end user4.1. Academic Research Institutes4.2. Medical Industry4.3. Food Industry4.4. Other5. Global protein engineering market research and analysis, by region5.1. North America5.2. Europe5.3. APAC5.4. RowThe Report Covers: Comprehensive research methodology of global protein engineering market. This report also includes detailed and extensive market overview with key analyst insights. An exhaustive analysis of macro and micro factors influencing the market guided by key recommendations. Analysis of regional regulations and other government policies impacting the global protein engineering market. Insights about market determinants which are stimulating the global protein engineering market. Detailed and extensive market segments with regional distribution of forecasted revenues. Extensive profiles and recent developments of market players.For Detailed Reading Please visit WiseGuy Reports @Some points from table of content:REPORT SUMMARY1.1. RESEARCH METHODS AND TOOLS1.2. MARKET BREAKDOWN1.2.1. BY SEGMENTS1.2.2. BY GEOGRAPHY1.2.3. BY STAKEHOLDERS1.2.4. EXCEPTIONSMARKET OVERVIEW AND INSIGHTS2.1. DEFINITION2.2. ANALYST INSIGHTS & CURRENT MARKET TRENDS2.2.1. KEY FINDINGS2.2.2. RECOMMENDATION2.2.3. CONCLUSION2.3. REGULATION2.3.1.1. UNITED STATES2.3.1.2. EUROPEAN UNION2.3.1.3. CHINA2.3.1.4. INDIAMARKET DETERMINANT3.1. MOTIVATORS3.1.1. HIGH PREVALENCE RATE OF LIFESTYLE DISEASES3.1.2. INCREASE IN ADOPTION OF PROTEIN-BASED DRUGS OVER NON-PROTEIN-BASED DRUGS3.1.3. REDUCTION IN OVERALL TIMELINE AND COST FOR DRUG DISCOVERY3.1.4. GROWTH IN FUNDING FOR PROTEIN ENGINEERING3.2. RESTRAINT3.2.1. LIMITED AVAILABILITY OF QUALIFIED RESEARCHERS AND NEED FOR ADVANCED TRAINING IN PROTEIN ENGINEERING3.2.2. EXPENSIVE AND HIGH MAINTENANCE TOOLS AND INSTRUMENTS USED IN PROTEIN ENGINEERING3.3. OPPORTUNITY3.3.1. SIGNIFICANT GROWTH PROSPECTS IN DEVELOPING COUNTRIES3.3.2. PROTEIN THERAPY AS AN ALTERNATIVE TO GENE THERAPY3.3.3. TOP-SELLING BIOLOGICS DRUGS GOING OFFPATENT IN THE NEAR FUTURE4. MARKET SEGMENTATION4.1. PROTEIN ENGINEERING, BY TECHNOLOGY4.1.1. RATIONAL PROTEIN DESIGN4.1.2. IRRATIONAL PROTEIN DESIGN4.2. PROTEIN ENGINEERING, BY PROTEIN TYPE4.2.1. MONOCLONAL ANTIBODIES4.2.2. INSULIN4.2.3. ERYTHROPOIETIN4.2.4. INTERFERON4.2.5. COLONY STIMULATING FACTOR4.2.6. GROWTH HORMONES4.2.7. COAGULATION FACTOR4.2.8. VACCINES4.2.9. OTHERS4.3. PROTEIN ENGINEERING, BY PRODUCT4.3.1. INSTRUMENTS4.3.2. SERVICES AND SOFTWARE4.3.3. REAGENTS4.4. PROTEIN ENGINEERING, BY END USERS4.4.1. ACADEMIC RESEARCH INSTITUTES4.4.2. MEDICAL INDUSTRY4.4.3. FOOD INDUSTRY4.4.4. OTHER5. COMPETITIVE LANDSCAPE5.1. KEY STRATEGIES5.2. KEY COMPANY ANALYSISContinued.For more information or any query mail at sales@wiseguyreports.comAbout UsWise Guy Reports is part of the Wise Guy Consultants Pvt. Ltd. and offers premium progressive statistical surveying, market research reports, analysis & forecast data for industries and governments around the globe. Wise Guy Reports understand how essential statistical surveying information is for your organization or association. Therefore, we have associated with the top publishers and research firms all specialized in specific domains, ensuring you will receive the most reliable and up to date research data available.Contact Us:Norah Trent+91 841 198 5042Office No. 528, Amanora ChambersPune - 411028Maharashtra, India
Global Document Management Software Market Demand By Top Key Manufacturers Like eFileCabinet, Zoho Corporation, Google, Dropbox Business, Box, M-Files and Others 2018 - 2023

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The Document Management Software Market. A document management system (DMS) is a system (based on computer programs in the case of the management of digital documents) used to track, manage and store documents and reduce paper. Most are capable of keeping a record of the various versions created and modified by different users (history tracking).Scope of the Report:This report studies the Document Management Software market status and outlook of Global and major regions, from angles of players, countries, product types and end industries; this report analyzes the top players in global market, and splits the Document Management Software market by product type and applications/end industries.Document Management Software is mainly used for four applications: Android, iOS, Windows, Other. And Android is the most widely used type which takes up about 52.24% of the global total in 2016.Browse complete report@USA is one of the largest consumption countries of Document Management Software in the world in the past few years and it will keep increasing in the next few years. USA market took up about 37.60% the global market in 2016, while Europe was 11.08%, and Japan is followed with the share about 10.66%.USA is now the key developers of Document Management Software. There are some vendors with poor quality products elsewhere also in the world; the Chinese market is still controlled by the abroad vendors. And the high quality products are mainly supplied by overseas producers.The global Document Management Software market is valued at 800 million USD in 2017 and is expected to reach 980 million USD by the end of 2023, growing at a CAGR of 3.6% between 2017 and 2023.The Asia-Pacific will occupy for more market share in following years, especially in China, also fast growing India and Southeast Asia regions.North America, especially The United States, will still play an important role which cannot be ignored. Any changes from United States might affect the development trend of Document Management Software.Europe also play important roles in global market, with market size of xx million USD in 2017 and will be xx million USD in 2023, with a CAGR of xx%.Market Segment by Companies, this report coverseFileCabinetZoho CorporationMicrosoft CorporationGoogleAscensio System SIADropbox BusinessBoxAdobe Systems IncorporatedEvernote CorporationM-FilesOfficegeminiSalesforceNuanceLSSPAdemeroKonica MinoltaLucion TechnologiesSpeedy SolutionsBlue Project SoftwareMarket Segment by Regions, regional analysis coversNorth America (United States, Canada and Mexico)Europe (Germany, France, UK, Russia and Italy)Asia-Pacific (China, Japan, Korea, India and Southeast Asia)South America (Brazil, Argentina, Colombia)Middle East and Africa (Saudi Arabia, UAE, Egypt, Nigeria and South Africa)Market Segment by Type, coversMobile EndCloudsMarket Segment by Applications, can be divided intoAndroidIOSWindowsOtherRequest for sample@Table of Contents1 Document Management Software Market Overview1.1 Product Overview and Scope of Document Management Software1.2 Classification of Document Management Software by Types1.2.1 Global Document Management Software Revenue Comparison by Types (2017-2023)1.2.2 Global Document Management Software Revenue Market Share by Types in 20171.2.3 Mobile End1.2.4 Clouds1.3 Global Document Management Software Market by Application1.3.1 Global Document Management Software Market Size and Market Share Comparison by Applications (2013-2023)1.3.2 Android1.3.3 IOS1.3.4 Windows1.3.5 Other1.4 Global Document Management Software Market by Regions1.4.1 Global Document Management Software Market Size (Million USD) Comparison by Regions (2013-2023)1.4.1 North America (USA, Canada and Mexico) Document Management Software Status and Prospect (2013-2023)1.4.2 Europe (Germany, France, UK, Russia and Italy) Document Management Software Status and Prospect (2013-2023)1.4.3 Asia-Pacific (China, Japan, Korea, India and Southeast Asia) Document Management Software Status and Prospect (2013-2023)1.4.4 South America (Brazil, Argentina, Colombia) Document Management Software Status and Prospect (2013-2023)1.4.5 Middle East and Africa (Saudi Arabia, UAE, Egypt, Nigeria and South Africa) Document Management Software Status and Prospect (2013-2023)1.5 Global Market Size of Document Management Software (2013-2023)2 Manufacturers Profiles2.1 eFileCabinet2.1.1 Business Overview2.1.2 Document Management Software Type and Applications2.1.2.1 Product A2.1.2.2 Product B2.1.3 eFileCabinet Document Management Software Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.2 Zoho Corporation2.2.1 Business Overview2.2.2 Document Management Software Type and Applications2.2.2.1 Product A2.2.2.2 Product B2.2.3 Zoho Corporation Document Management Software Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.3 Microsoft Corporation2.3.1 Business Overview2.3.2 Document Management Software Type and Applications2.3.2.1 Product A2.3.2.2 Product B2.3.3 Microsoft Corporation Document Management Software Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.4 Google2.4.1 Business Overview2.4.2 Document Management Software Type and Applications2.4.2.1 Product A2.4.2.2 Product B2.4.3 Google Document Management Software Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.5 Ascensio System SIA2.5.1 Business Overview2.5.2 Document Management Software Type and Applications2.5.2.1 Product A2.5.2.2 Product B2.5.3 Ascensio System SIA Document Management Software Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.6 Dropbox Business2.6.1 Business Overview2.6.2 Document Management Software Type and Applications2.6.2.1 Product A2.6.2.2 Product B2.6.3 Dropbox Business Document Management Software Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.7 Box2.7.1 Business Overview2.7.2 Document Management Software Type and Applications2.7.2.1 Product A2.7.2.2 Product B2.7.3 Box Document Management Software Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.8 Adobe Systems Incorporated2.8.1 Business Overview2.8.2 Document Management Software Type and Applications2.8.2.1 Product A2.8.2.2 Product B2.8.3 Adobe Systems Incorporated Document Management Software Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.9 Evernote Corporation2.9.1 Business Overview2.9.2 Document Management Software Type and Applications2.9.2.1 Product A2.9.2.2 Product B2.9.3 Evernote Corporation Document Management Software Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.10 M-Files2.10.1 Business Overview2.10.2 Document Management Software Type and Applications2.10.2.1 Product A2.10.2.2 Product B2.10.3 M-Files Document Management Software Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.11 Officegemini2.11.1 Business Overview2.11.2 Document Management Software Type and Applications2.11.2.1 Product A2.11.2.2 Product B2.11.3 Officegemini Document Management Software Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.12 Salesforce2.12.1 Business Overview2.12.2 Document Management Software Type and Applications2.12.2.1 Product A2.12.2.2 Product B2.12.3 Salesforce Document Management Software Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.13 Nuance2.13.1 Business Overview2.13.2 Document Management Software Type and Applications2.13.2.1 Product A2.13.2.2 Product B2.13.3 Nuance Document Management Software Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.14 LSSP2.14.1 Business Overview2.14.2 Document Management Software Type and Applications2.14.2.1 Product A2.14.2.2 Product B2.14.3 LSSP Document Management Software Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.15 Ademero2.15.1 Business Overview2.15.2 Document Management Software Type and Applications2.15.2.1 Product A2.15.2.2 Product B2.15.3 Ademero Document Management Software Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.16 Konica Minolta2.16.1 Business Overview2.16.2 Document Management Software Type and Applications2.16.2.1 Product A2.16.2.2 Product B2.16.3 Konica Minolta Document Management Software Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.17 Lucion Technologies2.17.1 Business Overview2.17.2 Document Management Software Type and Applications2.17.2.1 Product A2.17.2.2 Product B2.17.3 Lucion Technologies Document Management Software Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.18 Speedy Solutions2.18.1 Business Overview2.18.2 Document Management Software Type and Applications2.18.2.1 Product A2.18.2.2 Product B2.18.3 Speedy Solutions Document Management Software Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.19 Blue Project Software2.19.1 Business Overview2.19.2 Document Management Software Type and Applications2.19.2.1 Product A2.19.2.2 Product B2.19.3 Blue Project Software Document Management Software Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)Request for discount@3 Global Document Management Software Market Competition, by Players3.1 Global Document Management Software Revenue and Share by Players (2013-2018)3.2 Market Concentration Rate3.2.1 Top 5 Document Management Software Players Market Share3.2.2 Top 10 Document Management Software Players Market Share3.3 Market Competition TrendWho we areResearch Trades has team of experts who works on providing exhaustive analysis pertaining to market research on a global basis. This comprehensive analysis is obtained by a thorough research and study of the ongoing trends and provides predictive data regarding the future estimations, which can be utilized by various organizations for growth purposes.We distribute customized reports that focus on meeting the clients specific requirement. Our database consists of a large collection of high-quality reports obtained using a customer-centric approaches, thus providing valuable research insights.Contact us:Email: sales@researchtrades.comCall us: +1 6269994607 (USA), +91 7507349866 (IND)Web:Skype ID: researchtradescon
Industrial Eye Protection Market 2024 Global Key Players Honeywell, Bolle Safety, 3M, MSA - The Safety Company, Ansell, Teijin and Kimberly-Clark, MCR Safety, Radians, Inc.

Industrial Eye Protection Market

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Positive outlook towards occupational safety in oil & gas, chemicals, mining and construction industry will propel Industrial Eye Protection Market growth. Prevention from chemicals, heat & optical radiation are the key properties enhancing product demand.Request for a sample copy of this report @Industrial Eye Protection Market size is estimated to exceed USD 2.5 billion by 2024; according to a new research report by Global Market Insights, Inc. Increasing employer awareness pertaining to work safety will support the industrial eye protection demand. For instance, OSHA has implemented safety standards for several end-use industries to prevent the injuries at workplace.Industrial Eye Protection Market, By Materialo Polycarbonateo CR-39o Trivexo GlassIndustrial Eye Protection Market, By Producto Safety spectacles Prescribed Non-prescribedo Safety goggleso Welding shieldso Face shieldsIndustrial Eye Protection Market, By Application Construction Oil & gas Chemicals Mining Pharmaceuticals Food Transportation FirefightingMake an inquiry for purchasing this report @Construction application was worth over USD 310 million in 2016. Increasing government spending on building tunnels, dams, roads, and bridges globally will drive the growth. China is projected to be among the major contributor. China construction spending was over USD 730 billion in 2016. CR-39 lenses will witness gains at 3% up to 2024. High optical quality compared to glass along with comparatively less manufacturing cost has driven industry growth in this segment. Entrance of trivex as an ultra-light, thin and high impact resistant lenses will open new avenues in the industry.High profit margins due to increasing product penetration will fuel the industry growth. However, inability to expand business in untapped regions due to non-standardized safety regulations will restrain the industrial eye protection market growth. Safety spectacles was valued over USD 770 million in 2016. Technological advancement including anti-glare, anti-scratch and UVA/UVB protective products will support the industry demand.Safety goggles will generate revenue over USD 970 million by 2024. Rising product penetration in pharmaceutical laboratories and research centers will create new opportunities for the business growth. Face shields will witness growth over 4% up to 2024. Manufacturing and construction industry expansion in developing countries will support the industry demand. Superior protection against chemical splash and blood borne pathogens has enhanced the product demand.Browse Complete Report Summary @Europe industrial eye protection market was more than 70 million units in 2016. Favorable socio-economic factors accompanied by increasing manufacturing facilities will drive the demand. Strong presence of the key manufacturers in this region will propel the industry growth. Changing lifestyle along with increasing awareness regarding worker safety has encouraged the product penetration.North America industrial eye protection market will witness gains at 3.2% up to 2024. High prevalence for employee safety along with stringent government regulations are the key factors supporting the business growth. As per NIOSH, about 2000 workers in U.S. sustain workplace eye injury per day, that requires medical treatment.Global industrial eye protection market share is moderately consolidated due to presence of few industry players holding major industry share. Major key players inculde 3M, Bolle Safety, Honeywell, MCR Safety, Egde, MSA Safety, Encon Safety, Ergodyne and Gateway Safety. Mergers, acquisitions, new product launches and supply agreements are the key strategies adopted by the major players.About Global Market Insights:Global Market Insights, Inc., headquartered in Delaware, U.S., is a global market research and consulting service provider; offering syndicated and custom research reports along with growth consulting services. Our business intelligence and industry research reports offer clients with penetrative insights and actionable market data specially designed and presented to aid strategic decision making. These exhaustive reports are designed via a proprietary research methodology and are available for key industries such as chemicals, advanced materials, technology, renewable energy and biotechnology.Contact Us:Arun HegdeCorporate Sales, USAGlobal Market Insights, Inc.Phone:1-302-846-7766Toll Free: 1-888-689-0688Email: sales@gminsights.comWeb:
Halitosis Treatment Market projected to grow at a healthy CAGR of 18.58% by 2023 | Eminent Players as Partners LLC, Dr. Harold Katz, LLC, Rowpar Pharmaceuticals & more

Halitosis Treatment Market

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Global Halitosis Treatment Market report of Market Research Future explores Scope of the Study as Research Objective, Assumptions and Limitations in-depth. The report gives Market Dynamics by Drivers, Restraints, Opportunities, Challenges, Macroeconomic Indicators and Technology Trends & Assessment.Halitosis Treatment Market - OverviewHalitosis is a clinical condition which is characterized by unpleasant odor present in mouth due to various periodontal and chronic diseases. It has become a major problem affecting large number of people across the world. The major cause of halitosis is lack of oral hygiene and awareness about diagnosis of this disease.According to recent research the global halitosis market is growing rapidly due to increasing prevalence of halitosis and periodontal diseases. However technological advancement in the field of dentistry, for instance the use of breath analyzer to detect the level of bacteria in mouth that causes bad breath has increased the growth of global halitosis treatment market.Request for Sample Report atHalitosis Treatment Market-Competitive LandscapeThe global halitosis treatment market is characterized by the presence of several well-established and small players, the market appears to be highly competitive and fragmented.Multinational players are increasingly expanding their regional footprint in the developing economy, making it difficult for regional vendors to compete with them, especially in terms of features such as product differentiation, diverse product portfolios, and quality.The well-established market players are engaged in strategic acquisitions, collaborations, partnerships, global expansion, and product launches to gain competitive advantage in this market and to maintain their market position.Listerine, a leading health information technology and services provider, announced the launched of natural green tea mouthwash in Malaysia 2018.In September 2017, Arizona Bioindustry Association will honor Rowpar Pharmaceuticals, Inc., manufacturer of closys oral health products, with an AZBio fast lane award.In May 2017, Closys unflavored oral rinse and closys gentle mint oral rinse became the first mouth rinses to be awarded with the American Dental Association (ADA) Seal of Acceptance for the management of oral malodor, also known as halitosis and commonly referred to as bad breath.Ask Any Question atRowpar received the ADA Seal, a well-respected symbol of excellence in dentistry, for four of its products in the past 18 months from the American Dental Association.Halitosis Treatment Market - Top Players:Colgate-Palmolive CompanyPartners LLCDr. Harold KatzLLCRowpar PharmaceuticalsAbbottListerineAstraZeneca are some prominent players in the market.Halitosis Treatment Market - Regional Analysis:Geographically, the global halitosis treatment market is segmented into the Americas, Europe, Asia-Pacific and Middle East & Africa. North America is anticipated to hold the largest market share during the assessment period. The America accounts for largest market share owing to rising prevalence of gum diseases and extension use of oral care product.Following North America, Europe is the second largest market due to growing awareness regarding halitosis and product available for treatment. Further increasing demand for new oral care product influence the market growth. Additionally, Asia-Pacific is estimated to be the fastest growing market owing to the rising prevalence of chronic disease such as diabetes, kidney or liver failure with the increasing population.Increasing geriatric population suffering from these diseases also contributes to increase in growth of this market. The Middle East & Africa is expected to have the lowest market share due to poor economic condition and lack of awareness about oral health.Check Discount Here atAbout Market Research Future:At Market Research Future (MRFR), we enable our customers to unravel the complexity of various industries through our Cooked Research Report (CRR), Half-Cooked Research Reports (HCRR), Raw Research Reports (3R), Continuous-Feed Research (CFR), and Market Research & Consulting Services.ContactMarket Research FutureOffice No. 528, Amanora ChambersMagarpatta Road, Hadapsar,Pune  411028Maharashtra, India+1 646 845 9312Email: sales@marketresearchfuture.com
Surging Growth in RF Filter Sales Likely to Translate into a US$ 25 Billion Market

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Growth of RF filter market is largely influenced by several industry-specific factors including rising demand for satellite phones and increasing penetration of smartphones worldwide. With an upswing in digitization, the semiconductor scenario has drastically changed, paving significant pathways of growth for RF filter, according to the report. Persistence Market Research forecasts the RF filter market to grow at a stellar value CAGR of 17.3% during the period of forecast, 2018-2026. RF filter sales are estimated to touch a value of around US$ 25 Bn by the end of the period of assessment.5G has witnessed noteworthy acceleration since the past few months on the back of rising demand for high bandwidth from internet users worldwide. This has translated into increasing 5G field trials and deployments as service providers are sprinting to provide high speeds and next generation services to subscribers. Against this backdrop, semiconductor manufacturers are investing in developing their offerings for 5G-capable infrastructure. Manufacturing of 5G chips is expected to create potential opportunities for manufacturers of RF filter in the coming years, in turn pushing the growth of the RF filter market. This factor is expected to accelerate the use of RF filter in mobile phone communications, making it an attractive application area that RF filter manufacturers can leverage to gain profitability.Use of RF filter technology in aircraft such as Boeing and Airbus, for enhancing electronic surveillance, RADAR systems, navigation, GPS, Air Traffic Control (ATC) and data exchange is expected to auger well for the growth of the RF filter market. Moreover, rising demand for improved conversations between ground staff and pilots has fueled the sales of RF filter technology in the aerospace sector at a substantial rate.Request for Sample Report @Developed economies of North America, particularly the United States, have showcased higher adoption of RF filters since the past few years. According to the report, sales of RF filter in North America are projected to swell at a significant pace, making North America a highly lucrative market for RF filter. On the other hand, sales of RF filter in China and Japan are expected to soar at a high rate, with China at the forefront. Growing demand for RF filter in China can be attributed to the increasing shipments of smartphones in the country coupled with rising purchasing power parity of the Chinese people. Manufacturers of RF filter can expect a steady stream of opportunities from China and the United States in the years to follow.Technological advances in the semiconductor industry have facilitated increased production of radio frequency devices since the past two decades. However, mushrooming growth of new technologies has translated into crowding of the RF filter spectrum thereby increasing complexities. Special RF filters are used in smartphones and communication technology, which are essentially SAW (Surface Acoustic Waves) filters. However, as bands are closely allocated with each other, the system is likely to project a lag or delay of around one minute causing interference of frequencies. This is expected to confine the growth of the RF filter market during the period of forecast.Request for Table of Content (ToC):Persistence Market Research (PMR) is a third-platform research firm. Our research model is a unique collaboration of data analytics and market research methodology to help businesses achieve optimal performance. To support companies in overcoming complex business challenges, we follow a multi-disciplinary approach. At PMR, we unite various data streams from multi-dimensional sources. By deploying real-time data collection, big data, and customer experience analytics, we deliver business intelligence for organizations of all sizes.Persistence Market Research305 Broadway7th Floor, New York City,NY 10007, United States,Telephone - +1-646-568-7751USA  Canada Toll Free: 800-961-0353Email: sales@persistencemarketresearch.comWeb:
Dental Sleep Medicine Market 2023 Demand Supply  by BMC Medical Co., Ltd., GE Healthcare, Braebon Medical Corporation, Cadwell Laboratories Inc., CareFusion Corp, etc Key Manufactures

Dental Sleep Medicine Market

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This report studies the Global Dental Sleep Medicine Market status and outlook of Global Market 2018. The report begins with the overview of Industry Chain structure, and describes industry environment, then analyses market size and forecast of Paint Protection Film.Global Dental Sleep Medicine Market - OverviewDental sleep medicine is one of the crucial segment of dentistry where the dentists are primarily focused on treating sleep-disordered breathing with the use of oral appliance therapy. Sleep-disorders include snoring and obstructive sleep apnea (OSA).Obstructive sleep apnea is caused due to excess weight, narrowed airway, hypertension, smoking, diabetes, family history, asthma. An oral appliance therapy includes the usage of device worn in the mouth only during sleep.Global dental sleep medicine market is going to witness a healthy growth due to various factors. Factors such as rising prevalence of lifestyle induced diseases like obesity and cardiovascular diseases, adoption of innovative technologies and growing geriatric mass is likely to propel the growth of dental sleep medicine market. American academy of dental sleep medicine estimated that around 30 million adults in the U.S. have obstructive sleep apnea (OSA).To Get Sample Report visitAccording to a recent survey, it was estimated that over 20 million adults in the U.S. suffer from obstructive sleep apnea and nearly 80% of them go untreated. Adult men over the age of 40 and people who are obese are at greater risk for acquiring obstructive sleep apnea.Additionally, growing healthcare expenditure and infrastructure in many developing countries, and rising technological advancement for the diagnosis and treatment of various ailments remain a driving force for dental sleep market. For instance, US census Bureau, has estimated the older population to reach 1.6 billion from 2025 to 2050.The restraints that are likely to hamper the growth of dental sleep medicine market are high treatment costs and lack of patient awareness.Key Players for Global Dental Sleep Medicine MarketMarket Research Future (MRFR) recognizes the following companies as the key players in Dental Sleep Medicine Market: There are plenty of large and small market players which operate in this market all over the globe.There are various market players operating in the global Dental sleep medicine market. Some of the key market players in this market are: BMC Medical Co., Ltd., GE Healthcare, Braebon Medical Corporation, Cadwell Laboratories Inc., CareFusion Corp, Compumedics Limited, Curative Medical Inc., Fisher & Paykel Healthcare, Invacare Corporation, Philips Healthcare and Teleflex, Inc.ResMedFounded on 1989, headquartered at San Diego, US. ResMed, is engaged in the manufacturing and distribution of medical devices to diagnose, treat and manage various respiratory disorders. The firm also offers cloud-based software informatics solutions to manage patient results. The firm has its presence all over the world with distribution network in over 120 countries. The company has focused on various inorganic and organic growth strategies to enhance its product portfolio and gain foothold in various geographies. For instance in the year 2016, ResMed launched two products, AirFit N20 and AirFit F20 nasal masks. These nasal masks helps in positive airway pressure (PAP) treatment of sleep apnea. Additionally in 2016, ResMed acquired Maribo Medico, a firm engaged in the education, diagnosis and treatment of sleep disordered breathing problems. These strategies aims to increase the firms customer base and enhance its geographic presence.Philips HealthcarePhilips Healthcare offers healthcare solutions for treatment and diagnosis of sleep and respiratory related disorders. The firm offers products for airway management, anaesthesia, critical care, and oxygen & aerosol therapy. End users for this products include hospitals and home care. The firm has focused on various growth strategies such as expansions, product launches, acquisition and collaboration to enhance its product portfolio and widen its foothold in various geographies. For instance in 2015, Philips Respironics introduced Sleep Apnea Therapy System. This system includes a mask that will allow patient to comfortably sleep and a DreamStation that will help the patient to share his or her data with the physician. This product launch adds into the already extensive range of breathing systems that the firm offers.Regional Analysis for Global Dental Sleep Medicine MarketGeographically, Dental sleep medicine market is segmented into four key regions: America, Europe, Asia Pacific, and Middle East & Africa. America is further segmented into North America and South America. And North America is segmented into US and Canada. Globally, US is the largest market for dental sleep medicine owing to increasing life style diseases such as obesity and cardiovascular disorders. Growing geriatric population is likely to propel the growth of dental sleep market. Population Reference Bureau has estimated that aging population in America is expected to reach 98 million by 2060 from 46 million in 2016. Additionally according to CDC, in 2017, around 36.5% adults in US are obese. Similarly increasing healthcare spending is likely to grow the demand for dental sleep medicine market. Europe accounts for the second largest market share due to increasing government support, focus of industry players, and introduction of innovative products. Asia pacific region is expected to be fastest growing region in dental sleep medicine market owing to its huge patient pool, increasing healthcare expenditure and demand for new treatment options. For instance, US Census Bureau has estimated that by 2050, two third of the worlds older population will reside in Asia.On the other hand, the Middle East & Africa is expected to witness limited growth due to limited access to the healthcare resources and lack of awareness about rare diseases. In the Middle East, the growth of the market is driven by increasing availability new diagnostic and treatment methods.To Get an Exclusive Discount on Report VisitAbout 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), Statistical Report, Continuous-Feed Research (CFR), and Market Research & Consulting Services.Contact Us:Market Research FutureHadapsar, Pune  411028Maharashtra, IndiaPhone: +1 646 845 9312Email: sales@marketresearchfuture.com
District Heating Pipeline Network Market a Comprehensive Analysis | Key Players - Uponor, Logstor, REHAU, BRUGG, Perma pipe, Microflex, Aquatherm, Flender, Thermaflex, Smithline, Huntsman, CPV Ltd, Golan Plastic

District Heating Pipeline Network

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Growing concerns pertaining to greenhouse emissions coupled with increasing demand for space heating systems will stimulate the district heating pipeline network market. Extreme climatic conditions across Europe, China and the U.S. will further stimulate the product demand. According to Norwegian Meteorological Institute, the average temperature in Southern Finland during winter season ranges between 00 to -40 Celsius.The U.S. market size is set to reach over 5 thousand Km by 2024. Growing district heating systems penetration across residential and commercial establishments along with ongoing adoption of clean energy technologies will foster the industry growth. According to the International District Energy Association (IDEA), out of 601 heating systems installed in the U.S., 289 are district energy-only systems.Request for Sample Copy of this research report @Ongoing legislative reforms pertaining to sustainable energy technologies along with modernization and expansion of existing heating networks will foster the district heating pipeline network market. Government focus toward energy efficient buildings will further propel the industry growth. The European Unions Renewable Energy Directive has introduced standards toward reduction and limitation of emissions caused by the industrial establishments.Rapid urbanization and industrialization across the developing nations along with favorable government initiatives toward zero emission buildings will drive the global market. As per Knoema in 2016, the people residing in urban areas in Japan constituted 94.3% when compared with 93.9% in 2015.Polymer pipes is set to witness strong growth on account of increasing usage as a service pipe in DH systems. Rapid development of thermoplastic technologies along with ongoing innovations toward pipe material will drive the business growth. Corrosion free, ease of transport and low carbon emissions are some of the prominent features which will stimulate the product penetration.Growing adoption of small-scale heating technologies across the residential establishments along with government-backed research and development initiatives toward development of more efficient insulating materials will propel the 20 mm -100 mm diameter pipes. Increasing use as a service pipe as these can be easily transported, rolled, and installed in the constructions will stimulate the product penetration.Increasing suburban population owing to rapid urbanization across the evolving economies will stimulate the market from residential applications. Government assisted renewable technology targets coupled with ongoing investments toward real-estate sector will foster the industry outlook. According to World Bank, people residing in urban areas of India accounted for 33.14% in 2016 when compared with 32.37% in 2014 across India.Make an inquiry for purchasing this report @China district heating pipeline network market is predicted to grow owing to increasing suburban population coupled with increasing investments toward residential and commercial establishments across the nation. Ongoing government initiatives toward adoption of energy-efficient systems will further propel the industry outlook. The Government of China with the support of European Union launched EU-China 2020 strategic agenda and China-EU partnership to strengthen the nations urban infrastructure.Eminent players across the district heating pipeline network market include REHAU, Uponor, BRUGG, Logstor, Perma Pipe, CPV Ltd, Microflex, Flender, Thermaflex, Huntsman, Smithline, Aquatherm and Golan Plastic.Global district heating pipeline network market research report includes in-depth coverage of the industry with estimates & forecast in terms of Km and USD from 2013 to 2024, for the following segments:Global District Heating Pipeline Network Market, By Pipe Pre-insulated steel PolymerGlobal District Heating Pipeline Network Market, By Diameter 20 mm - 100 mm 100 mm - 300 mm  300 mmGlobal District Heating Pipeline Network Market, By Application Residential Commercial College/University Office Buildings Government Buildings Others Industrial Chemical Refinery Paper OthersThe above information is provided on a country basis for the following: North America U.S. Canada Europe Germany Poland Sweden Russia Italy UK Finland Denmark Asia Pacific China Japan South KoreaAbout Global Market InsightsGlobal Market Insights, Inc., headquartered in Delaware, U.S., is a global market research and consulting service provider; offering syndicated and custom research reports along with growth consulting services. Our business intelligence and industry research reports offer clients with penetrative insights and actionable market data specially designed and presented to aid strategic decision making. These exhaustive reports are designed via a proprietary researchContact Us:Arun HegdeCorporate Sales, USAGlobal Market Insights, Inc.Phone: 1-302-846-7766Toll Free: 1-888-689-0688Email: sales@gminsights.comWeb:Blog:Explore Our Blog @
Acetic Anhydride Market estimates high demand by 2023 | PetroChina Ltd., BASF SE, Celanese Corporation, Eastman Chemical Company, BP Chemicals, Jubilant Life Sciences, DuPont, SABIC

Acetic Anhydride Market 2018

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The Acetic Anhydride Market research report provided by Crystal Market Research (CMR) is the most detailed study about Acetic Anhydride that is estimated to grow at a tremendous rate over the forecast period 2018-2023. This report contains precise and updated insights in respect with the leading market players and prevailing regions of the business.Top Eminent Players:The approach of key players to get hold of the market is, searching for more end-user companies and developing the production strength of their plants. Some key players are PetroChina Ltd., BASF SE, Celanese Corporation, Eastman Chemical Company, BP Chemicals, Jubilant Life Sciences, DuPont, SABIC, and Sasol Limited.Click to Request a Sample @The Acetic Anhydride Market is segmented as follows-By Applications:Coating MaterialSynthesizerExplosivesPlasticizerOthersBy End-user:Textile industryAgrochemical industryLaundry & cleaning industryTobacco IndustryFood & Beverage industryPharmaceutical industryOthersIndustry Outlook and Trend Analysis:The Acetic Anhydride Market has observed significant growth in the recent years and is foreseen to grow tremendously over the forecast period. Acetic Anhydride also known as Ethanoic anhydride in scientific terms, it is prepared carbonylation process of acetate. The preparation process includes reacting ketene with acetic acid. Acetic anhydride has factors like pungent odor and it is colorless. It is mainly used for manufacturing of cellulose acetates. Cellulose acetate flakes are mainly prepared which is further categorized as acetate propionate (CAP), Cellulose tri-acetate and cellulose di-acetate. Cellulose flakes are used for manufacturing of number of products. Some considerations that are hindering the market growth are; the stringent directions because of its destructive natural impacts, combined with its monitoring the use of acetic anhydride in manufacturing of heroine.For more information, click on the below link @Table of Contents:1.Introduction2.Executive Summary3.Market Overview5.Acetic Anhydride Market, By Applications5.1.Introduction5.2.Global Acetic Anhydride Market Revenue and Market Share by Applications (2014-2018)5.3.Coating Material5.4.Synthesizer5.5.Explosives5.6.Plasticizer5.7.Other Applications6.Acetic Anhydride Market, By End-User6.1.Introduction6.2.Global Acetic Anhydride Market Revenue and Market Share by End-User (2014-2018)6.3.Textile industry6.4.Agrochemical industry6.5.Laundry & cleaning industry6.6.Tobacco Industry6.7.Food & Beverage industry6.8.Pharmaceutical industry6.9.Other End User...Market Analysis by Regions:North America (United States, Canada and Mexico)Europe (Germany, France, UK, Russia, Italy and Rest of Europe)Asia-Pacific (China, Japan, Korea, India, Southeast Asia and Rest of Asia-Pacific)South America (Brazil, Argentina, Columbia and Rest of South America)Middle East and Africa (Saudi Arabia, UAE, Egypt, Nigeria, South Africa and Rest of MEA)Data Mining:Data is extensively collected through various secondary sources such as annual reports, investor presentations, SEC filings, and other corporate publications. We also refer trade magazines, technical journals, paid databases such as Factiva and Bloomberg, industry trade journals, scientific journals, and social media data to understand market dynamics and industry trends. Further, we also conduct primary research to understand market drivers, restraints, opportunities, challenges, and competitive scenario to build our analysis.What our Report offers:Acetic Anhydride Market share assessments for the regional and country level segments.Acetic Anhydride Market share analysis of the top industry players.Strategic recommendations for the new entrants.Competitive landscaping mapping the key common trends.Ask Questions to Expertise at @About Crystal Market Research:Crystal Market Research is a U.S. based market research and business intelligence company. Crystal offers one stop solution for market research, business intelligence, and consulting services to help clients make more informed decisions. It provides both syndicated as well as customized research studies for its customers spread across the globe. The company offers market intelligence reports across a broad range of industries including healthcare, chemicals & materials, technology, automotive, and energy.Contact Us:Judy304 South Jones Blvd, Suite 1896,Las Vegas NV 89107,United StatesToll Free: +1-888-213-4282Email: sales@crystalmarketresearch.com
Global Pediatric Vaccines Drug Regulation and Commercialization: An Global Industry Perspective Forecast 2018-2023

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The Report for Global Pediatric Vaccines Market of Market Research Future comprises extensive primary research along with the detailed analysis of qualitative as well as quantitative aspects by various industry experts, key opinion leaders to gain the deeper insight of the market and industry performance. The Pediatric Vaccines report gives the clear picture of current market scenario which includes historical and projected market size in terms of value and volume, technological advancement, macro economical and governing factors in the market.The vaccines administered to prevent children from several non-infectious and infectious diseases are known as pediatric vaccines. These vaccines are heat-killed or inactivated viruses that lose their pathogenicity, i.e., the ability to cause a disease. Moreover, these inactivated antigens can stimulate the immune system to produce antibodies against the infected virus. Thus, they assist the immune system in protecting itself from infectious or non-infectious diseases in the future. Currently, immunization prevents an estimated 23 million deaths every year. Furthermore, about 1.5 million deaths can be prevented through improved global coverage for vaccination.There are different pediatric vaccines accessible in the market, for example, pneumococcal immunization, polio antibody, rotavirus immunization, MMR immunization, flu immunization, hepatitis B antibody, meningococcal immunization, and Hib antibody. There has been constant research for the development of novel molecules providing immunity against fatal diseases such as Zika virus and different types of cancers. For instance, in June 2016, Inovio Pharmaceuticals, Inc. stated the commencement of phase I clinical trial for their Zika DNA vaccine named GLS-5700.The increasing collaboration of local manufacturers with key players to deliver high-quality vaccines in remote areas, increasing economic growth, global initiative undertaken by key players in developing innovative vaccines, increasing government support, increasing awareness regarding benefits of vaccination in prevention of diseases, and favorable reimbursement are the major factors expected to fuel the global pediatric vaccines market over the forecast period.However, low accessibility to remote areas, increasing availability of biosimilars at low rates, increasing cost of vaccines, limited or no access to healthcare services in developing and under-developed countries, low healthcare spending, and less medical coverage for pediatric vaccination are some of the challenges which might hamper the growth of the global pediatric vaccines market in future.Global market for pediatric vaccines is expected to grow at a CAGR of approximately 10.6% during 2017 to 2023.Get Exclusive Sample Copy @Top Players in Pediatric Vaccines Market:GlaxoSmithKline plc (U.K.), Pfizer, Inc. (U.S.), Merck & Co., Inc. (U.S.), Sanofi Pasteur SA (France), Astellas Pharma Inc. (Japan), CSL Limited (Australia), Emergent BioSolutions, Inc. (U.S.), Johnson & Johnson (U.S.), MedImmune, LLC (U.S.), Serum Institute of India Pvt. Ltd. (India), Bavarian Nordic (Denmark), Mitsubishi Tanabe Pharma Corporation (Japan), Daiichi Sankyo (Japan), Protein Sciences Corporation (U.S.), Grifols (Spain), Crucell (Netherlands), Bharat Biotech (India), Kaketsuken (U.S.), Panacea Biotec (India), Baxter International (U.S.), Zydus Cadila (India), Nuron (U.S.), S K Chemicals (South Korea), Dynavax Technologies (U.S.), Bharat Immunologicals and Biologicals (India), Lupin Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (India), Indian Immunologicals (India), Novartis AG (Switerzland), LG Life Sciences (India), Shenzhen Kangtai Biological Products (China), Sinovac Biotech (China), Bio Med (India), AstraZeneca (UK), bioCSL Inc. (U.S.), Valeant Pharmaceuticals (U.S.), Takeda Pharmaceutical (Japan), and others.Segmentation of Pediatric Vaccines Market:The global pediatric vaccines market has been segmented on the basis of type, technology, disease indication, and route of administration. On the basis of type, the global pediatric vaccines market is segmented into monovalent vaccines, multivalent vaccines, and others.On the basis of technology, the global pediatric vaccines market is segmented into synthetic vaccines, dendritic cells vaccines, conjugate vaccines, inactivated and subunit vaccines, live attenuated vaccines, toxoid vaccines, recombinant vaccines, and others. On the basis of disease indication, the global pediatric vaccines market is segmented into MMR (Measles, Mumps, and Rubella), polio, Haemophilus influenza type B, pneumococcal disease, meningococcal disease, influenza, DTP (Diphtheria, Tetanus, Pertussis), hepatitis, varicella, rotavirus, combination vaccines, and others. On the basis of route of administration, the global pediatric vaccines market is segmented into intramuscular administration, subcutaneous administration, oral administration, and other routes of administrationRegional Analysis of Pediatric Vaccines Market:The global pediatric vaccines market consists of four regions such as the Americas, Europe, Asia Pacific, and the Middle East and Africa. The Americas region accounted for the largest market share of the global pediatric vaccines market owing to the growing initiatives by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to reduce the occurrence rate of infectious diseases. Such factors along with the growing immunization will fuel the U.S. market.The European pediatric vaccines market is urged due to the superior government spending such as NHS (Nation Healthcare Service) for the development of the pharmaceutical and medical industries.The Asia Pacific region is expected to grow rapidly during the forecast period owing to the growing healthcare sector in leading regions such as China and India.The Middle Eastern region is expected to grow at a steady pace owing to factors such as rising R&D activities in the healthcare sector and extensive development of healthcare infrastructure.Get Instant Discount @Some of Major Table of Content for Pediatric Vaccines Market:Chapter 1. Report PrologueChapter 2. Market Introduction2.1 Definition2.2 Scope Of The Study2.2.1 Research Objective2.2.2 Assumptions2.2.3 LimitationsChapter 3. Research Methodology3.1 Introduction3.2 Primary Research3.3 Secondary Research3.4 Market Size EstimationChapter 4. Market Dynamics4.1 Drivers4.2 Restraints4.3 Opportunities4.4 Challenges4.5 Macroeconomic Indicators4.6 Disease Indication Trends & AssessmentTOC Continued.!Have a Question? Ask to our Experts -About US:Market Research Future (MRFR), enable customers to unravel the complexity of various industries through Cooked Research Report (CRR), Half-Cooked Research Reports (HCRR), Raw Research Reports (3R), Continuous-Feed Research (CFR), and Market Research & Consulting Services.Contact Us:Market Research FutureOffice 528, Amanora ChambersMagarpatta Road, Hadapsar,Pune  411028Maharashtra, IndiaPhone: +1 646 845 9312Email: sales@marketresearchfuture.com
Global Fluorescent in Situ Hybridization Probe Market 2018 Competitive Major Vendors - Mirus Bio LLC, PerkinElmer Inc, BioDot Inc.

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Qyresearchreports include new market research report "Global Fluorescent in Situ Hybridization Probe Market Professional Survey Report 2018" to its huge collection of research reports.This report studies the global Fluorescent in Situ Hybridization Probe market status and forecast, categorizes the global Fluorescent in Situ Hybridization Probe market size (value & volume) by manufacturers, type, application, and region. This report focuses on the top manufacturers in North America, Europe, Japan, China, India, Southeast Asia and other regions (Central & South America, and Middle East & Africa).The major manufacturers covered in this reportMirus Bio LLCLife Science TechnologiesPerkinElmer IncBioDot Inc.Horizon DiagnosticsSigma-Aldrich CorporationAgilent TechnologiesAbnova CorporationBiosearch Technologies Inc.Genemed Biotechnologies, Inc.AffymetrixPanomicsF. Hoffman-La Roche AG Life ScienceOxford Gene TechnologyBio Care Medical, LLCEXIQONGet Complimentary Research Summary Of The Report:The regional scope of the study is as follows:North AmericaUnited StatesCanadaMexicoAsia-PacificChinaIndiaJapanSouth KoreaAustraliaIndonesiaSingaporeRest of Asia-PacificEuropeGermanyFranceUKItalySpainRussiaRest of EuropeCentral & South AmericaOn the basis of product, this report displays the production, revenue, price, market share and growth rate of each type, primarily split intomRNAmiRNABy Application, the market can be split intoResearchClinicalCompanion DiagnosticsObtain Table of Content @The study objectives of this report are:To analyze and study the global Fluorescent in Situ Hybridization Probe capacity, production, value, consumption, status (2013-2017) and forecast (2018-2025);Focuses on the key Fluorescent in Situ Hybridization Probe manufacturers, to study the capacity, production, value, market share and development plans in future.Focuses on the global key manufacturers, to define, describe and analyze the market competition landscape, SWOT analysis.To define, describe and forecast the market by type, application and region.To analyze the global and key regions market potential and advantage, opportunity and challenge, restraints and risks.About Us:QYResearchReports.com delivers the latest strategic market intelligence to build a successful business footprint in China. Our syndicated and customized research reports provide companies with vital background information of the market and in-depth analysis on the Chinese trade and investment framework, which directly affects their business operations. Reports from QYResearchReports.com feature valuable recommendations on how to navigate in the extremely unpredictable yet highly attractive Chinese market.Contact Us:Brooklyn, NY 11230United StatesToll Free: 866-997-4948 (USA-CANADA)Tel: +1-518-621-2074Follow Us on LinkedIn:Blog:Web:Email: sales@qyresearchreports.com
Sex Toys Market Explore Future Growth and Outlook By Key Players 2025: BMS Factory, Doc Johnson Enterprises, LELO, PHE Inc, Aneros Bad Dragon Enterprises, Inc.

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Sex toys are those that may enhance sexual health and also sexual pleasure. Sex toys are gaining popularity due to the increasing acceptance and use of these products. Most of these toys are designed to resemble human genitalia. Sex toys are widely available globally for both men and women and include dildos, vibrators, and sex dolls.Some of the major manufacturers in the Global sex toys market are BMS Factory, Doc Johnson Enterprises, LELO, PHE Inc, Aneros Bad Dragon Enterprises, Inc., Beate Uhse AG, and Tantus, Inc.Download PDF Brochure @The major factors that contribute to the growth of the sex toys market include increasing awareness and acceptance of such toys for sexual pleasure and increasing use of these amongst couples and the LGBT community. However, various government regulations and low government approval of sex toys products in emerging economies such as India and South Africa with regards to the sale and distribution of these toys due to the taboo related to the use of the products is a major factor that is expected to affect the growth of the sex toys market.Global Sex Toys Market OutlookThe North America sex toys market is expected to be the most dominant during the forecast period. This is mainly due to the wide scale acceptance of sex toys in North America especially in the U.S. According to the Society for Scientific Study of Sexuality, the U.S. accounted for the highest number of Google searches for sex toys, standing at approximately 100 searches per 1000 people. The U.S.-based company Comingle launched the Mod in 2014, a vibrating dildo that could be customized and can be set to vibrate according to the requirement, level of excitement, amongst others. Factors such as these are expected to drive the growth of the sex toys market in the region.Challenges in the sex toys marketA major factor that is expected to affect the sex toys market is the low government approval of sexual products especially amongst the emerging economies in the regions of Asia Pacific. For instance sale of sex toys is illegal in India. Sale of sex toys is a punishable offense under the section 292 of Indian penal code, as sex toys are considered an "obscene" product. However, the online sale of sex toys is not illegal and could prove to be a major driver for the growth of the sex toys market in India.Apart from this, currently there are no safety regulations that exist in the sex toy industry. These toys are sold as novelty items and do not need to comply with any specific regulations that include reporting the chemicals and materials such as phthalates and chemical plasticizers levels used in the product. However, regulations such as REACH do exist, and some sex toys are compliant to this though, there is no obligation for manufacturers to comply with these regulations.Talk To Analyst @The wide scale acceptance of sex toys has resulted in the rise in number of manufacturers of sex toys and online channels adding numerous new products in their product portfolio. The National Association for the Advancement of Science & Art in Sexuality (NASAAS), was established in 2013, which is the first trade group that exists in the sex-toy industry and has around 700 member companies. Manufacturers are integrating innovative technologies in their products in order to strengthen their presence in the global sex toys market. For instance, Honk Kong-based Lovense launched Max and Nora the first app-based, Bluetooth sex toys in 2013About Coherent Market Insights:Coherent Market Insights is a prominent market research and consulting firm offering action-ready syndicated research reports, custom market analysis, consulting services, and competitive analysis through various recommendations related to emerging market trends, technologies, and potential absolute dollar opportunity.Contact Us:Mr. ShahCoherent Market Insights1001 4th Ave,#3200Seattle, WA 98154Tel: +1-206-701-6702Email: sales@coherentmarketinsights.com
Air Springs Market Estimated to Record Highest CAGR by 2026

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Air springs form an integral component in luxury cars, SUVs and public transport vehicles such as buses. With a notable rise in net-worth individuals, ultra-luxury vehicles have demonstrated robust sales in the recent past. Adoption of body-on-frame SUVs has surged, with increased sales by OEMs as they venture into SUVs. OEMs equip air springs with novel air suspension systems.Electronically-controlled air suspension systems (ECAS), which have been witnessing robust penetration in luxury cars and commercial vehicles, are also a major demand determinant of air springs.Click Here to Get the Sample Copy of the Report@Detailed Assessment on Air Springs MarketXploreMR has recently published a new report on the global air springs market, which offers accurate forecasts on the market for the period between 2017 and 2026. This report is a definite source of information that imparts intelligence on recent market dynamics, industry trends, potential markets, technology developments & advancements, and product innovation coupled with extensive regional market coverage.A comprehensive data analysis on the global air springs market is delivered in the report, in order to help the clients in gaining a competitive edge and attracting potential customers. The report further aids in better understanding of the industry structure, and offers evaluations on the competition intensity attractiveness. Business strategists can leverage the intelligence offered in the report regarding latest opportunities and trends impacting the market expansion to make fact-based decisions for their businesses.Buy Now Full Report @Air Springs Market: Taxonomy and Segmentation AnalysisThis report also offers a scrutinized study on the global market for air springs in terms of a segmentation analysis. The market has been divided into five key segments, namely, force, product type, application, sales channel, and region. These segments have been analyzed in detail, engulfing market forecasts and estimates at a country and regional level.The segmentation analysis offered can be useful for the report readers in understanding probable opportunities and potential markets for the target product  air springs. A taxonomy table incorporated in the report illustrates all the market segments in a systematic manner as depicted below.Obtain Report Details @Air Springs Market: Competitive Landscape AssessmentIn its concluding chapter, the report quantifies revenues share of prominent companies in the global air springs market, and offers an in-depth overview of the markets competitive scenario. A detailed description has been delivered on all the market players profiled in the report, which includes intelligence in terms of their company overview, key financials, product overview, past as well as latest developments.A SWOT analysis has been offered on each market player incorporated in the report, along with information on their new product developments, and market expansion strategies such as collaborations and partnerships. The scope of the report is offer its readers with authentic information and insights on the global air springs market, to enable them in making better future decisions for growth of the businesses.About UsXploreMR is one of the worlds leading resellers of high-quality market research reports. We feature in-depth reports from some of the worlds most reputed market research companies and international organizations. We serve across a broad spectrum  from Fortune 500 to small and medium businesses. Our clients trust us for our unwavering focus onquality and affordability. We believe high price should not be a bottleneck for organizations looking to gain access to quality information.Contact UsXploreMR111 North Market Street, Suite 300San Jose, CA 95113, United StatesTel: +1-669-284-0108Email: sales@xploremr.com
Global 3D Bio-printer Market Breakdown Data by Regions, Type, Manufacturers and Applications, Forecast 2018-2025

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The Latest Research Report Global 3D Bio-printer Market Insights, Forecast to 2025 provides information on pricing, market analysis, shares, forecast, and company profiles for key industry participants.  MarketResearchReports.bizThe main objective of this report is to aid the user in understanding the market as a whole, its definitions, segmentation, market potential, influential trends, and the barriers that it is facing. Meticulous research and analysis were an important part of the report preparation. Those reading the report will be able to get a detailed understanding about the market. Industry experts have verified and checked the data and information that have been taken from credible sources like websites, annual reports of companies, journals, and other resources. In order give the facts and data a pictorial form, diagrams, graphs, pie charts, and other representations have been used. That augments the visual appeal of the report and makes understanding it much easier.This report presents the worldwide 3D Bio-printer market size (value, production and consumption), splits the breakdown (data status 2013-2018 and forecast to 2025), by manufacturers, region, type and application.This study also analyzes the market status, market share, growth rate, future trends, market drivers, opportunities and challenges, risks and entry barriers, sales channels, distributors and Porters Five Forces Analysis.Get Sample Copy of this report @The 3D Bio-printer market was valued at Million US$ in 2017 and is projected to reach Million US$ by 2025, at a CAGR of during the forecast period. In this study, 2017 has been considered as the base year and 2018 to 2025 as the forecast period to estimate the market size for 3D Bio-printer.The following manufacturers are covered in this report:3D Biotek, LLC3Dynamic Systems LtdAccellta LtdAdvanced Solutions, Inc.Bio3D TechnologiesBiobots IncCellink ABCyfuse Biomedical K.KEnvision TEC,Inc.GeSIMLuxexcel Group BVMaterialise NVNano3D Biosciences,Inc.Organovo Holdings, Inc.PoietisRegenHU Ltd.Regenovo Biotechnology Co,.Ltd3D Bio-printer Breakdown Data by TypeMagnetic 3D Bio-printerLaser-assisted 3D Bio-printerInkjet 3D Bio-printerMicroextrusion 3D Bio-printer3D Bio-printer Breakdown Data by ApplicationMedical DevicesTissue-engineered ScaffoldTissue and Organ3D Bio-printer Production by RegionUnited StatesEuropeChinaJapanOther Regions3D Bio-printer Consumption by RegionNorth AmericaUnited StatesCanadaMexicoAsia-PacificChinaIndiaJapanSouth KoreaAustraliaIndonesiaMalaysiaPhilippinesThailandVietnamEuropeGermanyFranceUKItalyRussiaRest of EuropeCentral & South AmericaBrazilRest of South AmericaMiddle East & AfricaGCC CountriesTurkeyEgyptSouth AfricaRest of Middle East & AfricaThe study objectives are:To analyze and research the global 3D Bio-printer status and future forecastinvolving, production, revenue, consumption, historical and forecast.To present the key 3D Bio-printer manufacturers, production, revenue, market share, and recent development.To split the breakdown data by regions, type, manufacturers and applications.To analyze the global and key regions market potential and advantage, opportunity and challenge, restraints and risks.To identify significant trends, drivers, influence factors in global and regions.To analyze competitive developments such as expansions, agreements, new product launches, and acquisitions in the market.In this study, the years considered to estimate the market size of 3D Bio-printer :History Year: 2013  2017Base Year: 2017Estimated Year: 2018Forecast Year: 2018  2025This report includes the estimation of market size for value (million USD) and volume (K Units). Both top-down and bottom-up approaches have been used to estimate and validate the market size of 3D Bio-printer market, to estimate the size of various other dependent submarkets in the overall market. Key players in the market have been identified through secondary research, and their market shares have been determined through primary and secondary research. All percentage shares, splits, and breakdowns have been determined using secondary sources and verified primary sources.For the data information by region, company, type and application, 2017 is considered as the base year. Whenever data information was unavailable for the base year, the prior year has been considered.Request For TOC Report @Table of Contents1 Study Coverage1.1 3D Bio-printer Product1.2 Key Market Segments in This Study1.3 Key Manufacturers Covered1.4 Market by Type1.4.1 Global 3D Bio-printer Market Size Growth Rate by Type1.4.2 Magnetic 3D Bio-printer1.4.3 Laser-assisted 3D Bio-printer1.4.4 Inkjet 3D Bio-printer1.4.5 Microextrusion 3D Bio-printer1.5 Market by Application1.5.1 Global 3D Bio-printer Market Size Growth Rate by Application1.5.2 Medical Devices1.5.3 Tissue-engineered Scaffold1.5.4 Tissue and Organ1.6 Study Objectives1.7 Years Considered2 Executive Summary2.1 Global 3D Bio-printer Market Size2.1.1 Global 3D Bio-printer Revenue 2013-20252.1.2 Global 3D Bio-printer Production 2013-20252.2 3D Bio-printer Growth Rate (CAGR) 2018-20252.3 Analysis of Competitive Landscape2.3.1 Manufacturers Market Concentration Ratio (CR5 and HHI)2.3.2 Key 3D Bio-printer Manufacturers2.3.2.1 3D Bio-printer Manufacturing Base Distribution, Headquarters2.3.2.2 Manufacturers 3D Bio-printer Product Offered2.3.2.3 Date of Manufacturers Enter into 3D Bio-printer Market2.4 Key Trends for 3D Bio-printer Markets & Products3 Market Size by Manufacturers3.1 3D Bio-printer Production by Manufacturers3.1.1 3D Bio-printer Production by Manufacturers3.1.2 3D Bio-printer Production Market Share by Manufacturers3.2 3D Bio-printer Revenue by Manufacturers3.2.1 3D Bio-printer Revenue by Manufacturers (2013-2018)3.2.2 3D Bio-printer Revenue Share by Manufacturers (2013-2018)3.3 3D Bio-printer Price by Manufacturers3.4 Mergers & Acquisitions, Expansion Plans4 3D Bio-printer Production by Regions4.1 Global 3D Bio-printer Production by Regions4.1.1 Global 3D Bio-printer Production Market Share by Regions4.1.2 Global 3D Bio-printer Revenue Market Share by Regions4.2 United States4.2.1 United States 3D Bio-printer Production4.2.2 United States 3D Bio-printer Revenue4.2.3 Key Players in United States4.2.4 United States 3D Bio-printer Import & Export4.3 Europe4.3.1 Europe 3D Bio-printer Production4.3.2 Europe 3D Bio-printer Revenue4.3.3 Key Players in Europe4.3.4 Europe 3D Bio-printer Import & Export4.4 China4.4.1 China 3D Bio-printer Production4.4.2 China 3D Bio-printer Revenue4.4.3 Key Players in China4.4.4 China 3D Bio-printer Import & Export4.5 Japan4.5.1 Japan 3D Bio-printer Production4.5.2 Japan 3D Bio-printer Revenue4.5.3 Key Players in Japan4.5.4 Japan 3D Bio-printer Import & Export4.6 Other Regions4.6.1 South Korea4.6.2 India4.6.3 Southeast Asia5 3D Bio-printer Consumption by Regions5.1 Global 3D Bio-printer Consumption by Regions5.1.1 Global 3D Bio-printer Consumption by Regions5.1.2 Global 3D Bio-printer Consumption Market Share by Regions5.2 North America5.2.1 North America 3D Bio-printer Consumption by Application5.2.2 North America 3D Bio-printer Consumption by Countries5.2.3 United States5.2.4 Canada5.2.5 Mexico5.3 Europe5.3.1 Europe 3D Bio-printer Consumption by Application5.3.2 Europe 3D Bio-printer Consumption by Countries5.3.3 Germany5.3.4 France5.3.5 UK5.3.6 Italy5.3.7 Russia5.4 Asia Pacific5.4.1 Asia Pacific 3D Bio-printer Consumption by Application5.4.2 Asia Pacific 3D Bio-printer Consumption by Countries5.4.3 China5.4.4 Japan5.4.5 South Korea5.4.6 India5.4.7 Australia5.4.8 Indonesia5.4.9 Thailand5.4.10 Malaysia5.4.11 Philippines5.4.12 Vietnam5.5 Central & South America5.5.1 Central & South America 3D Bio-printer Consumption by Application5.5.2 Central & South America 3D Bio-printer Consumption by Country5.5.3 Brazil5.6 Middle East and Africa5.6.1 Middle East and Africa 3D Bio-printer Consumption by Application5.6.2 Middle East and Africa 3D Bio-printer Consumption by Countries5.6.3 GCC Countries5.6.4 Egypt5.6.5 South AfricaAbout usMarketResearchReports.biz is the most comprehensive collection of market research reports. MarketResearchReports.Biz services are specially designed to save time and money for our clients. We are a one stop solution for all your research needs, our main offerings are syndicated research reports, custom research, subscription access and consulting services. We serve all sizes and types of companies spanning across various industries.ContactMr. NachiketState Tower90 Sate Street, Suite 700Albany, NY 12207Tel: +1-518-621-2074Website:E: sales@marketresearchreports.biz
Discrete Analyzers Market to Penetrate Untapped Regions During 2018 - 2028

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A discrete analyzer is an automated chemical analyzer used to perform tests on samples kept in discrete cuvettes. Discrete analyzers witness high adoption rate in the clinical market and find major applications in environment and wine sectors. These analyzers are an automated photometric instrument capable of attaining accurate and precise enzymatic, colorimetric and electrochemical measurements and quickly performing a comprehensive range of tests. The automated device has powerful automated features which allows it to adapt to discrete applications and specific needs. The discrete analyzer market is anticipated to gain traction over the forecast period owing to several benefits associated with automated discrete analyzers, such as flexibility, speed, precision and low cost. That apart, these analyzers use low volumes of water and reagents, which results in less disposal waste. Discrete analyzers offer supreme flexibility and high throughput for challenging analytical environments. These discrete analyzers are next generation fully automated and easy to use systems. They use individual reaction wells that allow them to perform a wide variety of assays from a single sample. They are ideal for soil testing, drinking water testing and research applications that require multiple assays and high throughput results. These analyzers can perform calorimetric reactions with no pump tubes required to monitor shutdown procedures. At the end of a reaction run, these devices are wash themselves and enter the standby mode. Rising number of applications in distinct industries, such as the food & beverage industry, water/environment industry and industrial bioprocess industry, are anticipated to generate high demand for discrete analyzers from end-use customers, thereby resulting in revenue generation in the discrete analyzers market.Over the past few years, a rise in demand for discrete analyzers has been registered due to their compact design, effective sample & reagent mixing, colorimetric analysis and limited cross contamination, all of which have been leading to the generation of large revenues in the discrete analyzers market. The discrete analyzers market, on the basis of product type, is classified into discrete analyzer devices, kits & reagents and software. Also, based on application, the discrete analyzers market is categorized into food & beverage industry, water/environmental industry and industrial bioprocess industry and others. The main end user segments for discrete analyzers market include hospitals, private clinics, ambulatory surgical centers and others. On the other hand, the discrete analyzers market has been witnessing growing profit due to continuous in-house developments and incorporation of user-requested features. Growing applications of discrete analyzers for industrial purposes and the fact that they are user-friendly, intuitive and highly flexible systems, will drive the demand for these devices from end user segments, thereby generating significant revenue growth in the discrete analyzers market in near future.Discrete Analyzers: Market DynamicsRising adoption of discrete analyzer systems to perform routine repetitive medical laboratory analysis is one of the important reasons responsible for the growth of the discrete analyzers market. Automated discrete analyzers can determine levels of cholesterol, creatinine, albumin, glucose, uric acids and proteins in blood serum with only one operating technician. Increasing clinical applications of discrete analyzers, such as neonatal screening and others, are expected to generate further revenue opportunities in the global discrete analyzers market. Also, use of multichannel discrete analyzers to reduce excessive biochemical tests and the fact that these analyzers are compact and affordable for laboratory settings will further drive the discrete analyzers markets growth. However, lack of awareness among technicians may restrain the revenue growth of the discrete analyzers market.Request For Report Sample@Discrete Analyzers Market: SegmentationThe global discrete analyzers market is segmented by product type, application and end user:Segmentation by Product TypeDiscrete Analyzer SystemsKits & ReagentsSoftwareSegmentation by ApplicationFood & Beverage IndustryWater/Environmental IndustryIndustrial BioprocessPharmaceutical IndustryOthersSegmentation by End UserHospitalsPrivate ClinicsAmbulatory Surgical CentersOthersDiscrete Analyzers Market: OverviewBased on product type, systems segment registers highest revenue share in the discrete analyzers market owing to high demand for them from end user segments. As the technology advances, improved innovative devices will hit the market and competition will increase, which may pressurize leading players to reduce price of discrete analyzers. With growing number of medical applications and rapid technological innovations, the discrete analyzers market, across the globe, will register high revenue growth.Discrete Analyzers Market: Region-wise OutlookOn the basis of geography, the global discrete analyzers market is segmented into seven key regions viz. North America, Latin America, Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Asia Pacific excluding Japan, Japan, and Middle East & Africa. North America is projected to hold the largest share in the global discrete analyzers market, primarily due to the presence of a large number of hospitals and advanced healthcare infrastructure. However, Asia-Pacific is expected to register fastest growth, in terms of revenue generation, in the discrete analyzers market due to the presence of giant local manufacturers in countries, such as Japan, China and India. Latin America, owing to the presence of a less stringent regulatory framework and upgraded research infrastructure, is expected to experience high demand for discrete analyzers.Request For Report Table of Content (TOC):Discrete Analyzers Market: Key PlayersSome of the key players operating in the global Discrete Analyzers market are Thermofisher Scientific Inc., SEAL Analytical, Inc., AMS Alliance S.p.A, Folio Instruments Inc., Systea SpA, Unity Scientific and others.About UsFuture Market Insights is the premier provider of market intelligence and consulting services, serving clients in over 150 countries. FMI is headquartered in London, the global financial capital, and has delivery centers in the U.S. and India.FMIs research and consulting services help businesses around the globe navigate the challenges in a rapidly evolving marketplace with confidence and clarity. Our customized and syndicated market research reports deliver actionable insights that drive sustainable growth. We continuously track emerging trends and events in a broad range of end industries to ensure our clients prepare for the evolving needs of their consumers.U.S. Office616 Corporate Way, Suite 2-9018,Valley Cottage, NY 10989,United StatesT: +1-347-918-3531F: +1-845-579-5705Email: sales@futuremarketinsights.comWeb:
Digital Asset Management (DAM) Systems Market 2018-2025 | Demand, Technology, Innovation & Top Manufactures Research like (Opentext Corporation Oracle, Adobe, Hewlett-Packard, ADAM Software, IBM, EMC, etc.)

Digital Asset Management (DAM) Systems market

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Global Digital Asset Management (DAM) Systems Market Research Report 2018 peaks the detailed analysis of industry share, growth factors, development trends, size, majors manufacturers and 2025 forecast. The report also analyze innovative business strategies, value added factors and business opportunities. The Digital Asset Management (DAM) Systems report introduces market competition situation among the vendors and company profile, revenue, product & services, latest developments and business strategies.Get Sample Copy atDevelopment policies and plans are discussed as well as manufacturing processes and cost structures. This report also states import/export, supply and consumption figures as well as cost, price, revenue and gross margin by regions (North America, EU, China, Japan, Southeast Asia, India) and other regions can be added.Inquire more or share questions if any before the purchase on this report @Key Companies Analyzed in this Report are:Opentext CorporationOracle CorporationAdobe Systems IncorporatedHewlett-Packard (HP)ADAM SoftwareIBM CorporationEMC CorporationCognizant Technology SolutionsNorthplains SystemsNo. of Pages: 125The report focuses on Global Digital Asset Management (DAM) Systems Market major leading industry players with information such as company profiles, product picture and specification, capacity, production, price, cost, revenue and contact information. Upstream raw materials, equipment and downstream consumers analysis is also carried out. What's more, the Digital Asset Management (DAM) Systems industry development trends and marketing channels are analyzed. Finally, the feasibility of new investment projects is assessed, and overall research conclusions are offered. In a word, the report provides major statistics on the state of the industry and is a valuable source of guidance and direction for companies and individuals interested in the market.Market segment by Type, the product can be split intoImplementationTraining and SupportConsultingOrder a copy of Global Tinplate Market Report 2018 @Major Points Covered in Table of Contents:1 Industry Overview of Digital Asset Management (DAM) Systems2 Global Digital Asset Management (DAM) Systems Competition Analysis by Players3 Company (Top Players) Profiles4 Global Digital Asset Management (DAM) Systems Market Size by Type and Application (2013-2018)5 United States Digital Asset Management (DAM) Systems Development Status and Outlook6 Europe Digital Asset Management (DAM) Systems Development Status and Outlook7 China Digital Asset Management (DAM) Systems Development Status and Outlook8 Japan Digital Asset Management (DAM) Systems Development Status and Outlook9 Southeast Asia Digital Asset Management (DAM) Systems Development Status and Outlook10 India Digital Asset Management (DAM) Systems Development Status and Outlook11 Market Forecast by Regions, Type and Application (2018-2025)12 Digital Asset Management (DAM) Systems Market Dynamics13 Market Effect Factors Analysis14 Research Finding/Conclusion15 AppendixAbout UsOrian Research is one of the most comprehensive collections of market intelligence reports on the World Wide Web. Our reports repository boasts of over 500000+ industry and country research reports from over 100 top publishers. We continuously update our repository so as to provide our clients easy access to the world's most complete and current database of expert insights on global industries, companies, and products. We also specialize in custom research in situations where our syndicate research offerings do not meet the specific requirements of our esteemed clients.Contact Us:Ruwin MendezVice President  Global Sales & Partner RelationsOrian Research ConsultantsUS +1 (415) 830-3727 | UK +44 020 8144-71-27Email: info@orianresearch.comWebsite:Follow Us on LinkedIn:
Point Of Sale System Market 2018 Global Analysis By Key Players  Epson, HP, Intuit, Samsung, Honeywell, PayPal, Aldelo

Point Of Sale System Industry

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WiseGuyReports.Com Publish a New Market Research Report On Global Point Of Sale System Market Size, Status and Forecast 2018-2025.Description:-This report focuses on the global Point Of Sale System status, future forecast, growth opportunity, key market and key players. The study objectives are to present the Point Of Sale System development in United States, Europe and China.In 2017, the global Point Of Sale System market size was million US$ and it is expected to reach million US$ by the end of 2025, with a CAGR of during 2018-2025.Get a Sample Report @For more information or any query mail at sales@wiseguyreports.comThe key players covered in this studyEpsonHPIntuitSamsungHoneywellPayPalAldeloAlexandria ComputersBankServBixolonCloverDascomElo TouchWells FargoGoVentureInformaticsNCH SoftwareQuickBooksStar MicronicsTopaz SystemsVeriFoneWasp BarcodeMarket segment by Type, the product can be split intoDesktop POSHandhold POSMobile POSMarket segment by Application, split intoRetailRestaurantHospitality IndustryOtherMarket segment by Regions/Countries, this report coversUnited StatesEuropeChinaJapanSoutheast AsiaIndiaCentral & South AmericaThe study objectives of this report are:To analyze global Point Of Sale System status, future forecast, growth opportunity, key market and key players.To present the Point Of Sale System development in United States, Europe and China.To strategically profile the key players and comprehensively analyze their development plan and strategies.To define, describe and forecast the market by product type, market and key regions.Enquiry About Report @Table Of Contents  Major Key Points1 Report Overview1.1 Study Scope1.2 Key Market Segments1.3 Players Covered1.4 Market Analysis by Type1.4.1 Global Point Of Sale System Market Size Growth Rate by Type (2013-2025)1.4.2 Desktop POS1.4.3 Handhold POS1.4.4 Mobile POS1.5 Market by Application1.5.1 Global Point Of Sale System Market Share by Application (2013-2025)1.5.2 Retail1.5.3 Restaurant1.5.4 Hospitality Industry1.5.5 Other1.6 Study Objectives1.7 Years Considered2 Global Growth Trends2.1 Point Of Sale System Market Size2.2 Point Of Sale System Growth Trends by Regions2.2.1 Point Of Sale System Market Size by Regions (2013-2025)2.2.2 Point Of Sale System 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 Epson12.1.1 Epson Company Details12.1.2 Company Description and Business Overview12.1.3 Point Of Sale System Introduction12.1.4 Epson Revenue in Point Of Sale System Business (2013-2018)12.1.5 Epson Recent Development12.2 HP12.2.1 HP Company Details12.2.2 Company Description and Business Overview12.2.3 Point Of Sale System Introduction12.2.4 HP Revenue in Point Of Sale System Business (2013-2018)12.2.5 HP Recent Development12.3 Intuit12.3.1 Intuit Company Details12.3.2 Company Description and Business Overview12.3.3 Point Of Sale System Introduction12.3.4 Intuit Revenue in Point Of Sale System Business (2013-2018)12.3.5 Intuit Recent Development12.4 Samsung12.4.1 Samsung Company Details12.4.2 Company Description and Business Overview12.4.3 Point Of Sale System Introduction12.4.4 Samsung Revenue in Point Of Sale System Business (2013-2018)12.4.5 Samsung Recent Development12.5 Honeywell12.5.1 Honeywell Company Details12.5.2 Company Description and Business Overview12.5.3 Point Of Sale System Introduction12.5.4 Honeywell Revenue in Point Of Sale System Business (2013-2018)12.5.5 Honeywell Recent Development12.6 PayPal12.6.1 PayPal Company Details12.6.2 Company Description and Business Overview12.6.3 Point Of Sale System Introduction12.6.4 PayPal Revenue in Point Of Sale System Business (2013-2018)12.6.5 PayPal Recent Development12.7 Aldelo12.7.1 Aldelo Company Details12.7.2 Company Description and Business Overview12.7.3 Point Of Sale System Introduction12.7.4 Aldelo Revenue in Point Of Sale System Business (2013-2018)12.7.5 Aldelo Recent Development12.8 Alexandria Computers12.8.1 Alexandria Computers Company Details12.8.2 Company Description and Business Overview12.8.3 Point Of Sale System Introduction12.8.4 Alexandria Computers Revenue in Point Of Sale System Business (2013-2018)12.8.5 Alexandria Computers Recent DevelopmentContinuedFor more information or any query mail at sales@wiseguyreports.comABOUT US:Wise Guy Reports is part of the Wise Guy Consultants Pvt. Ltd. and offers premium progressive statistical surveying, market research reports, analysis & forecast data for industries and governments around the globe. Wise Guy Reports features an exhaustive list of market research reports from hundreds of publishers worldwide. We boast a database spanning virtually every market category and an even more comprehensive collection of market research reports under these categories and sub-categories.Office No.528,Amanora Chambers,Magarpatta Road,Hadapsar,Pune-411028.
Mens Underwear Market Growth 2018-2025 |Key Players American Eagle Outfitter Inc., Philips-Van Heusen Corporation, Hanesbrands Inc. Jockey International Inc

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An underwear is usually made up of suitable material or fabric in order to provide comfort and protect the internal body parts. Increasing awareness regarding health & fitness and personal hygiene among men is a major driving factor for the growth of the mens underwear market.Download PDF Brochure :The specialty store segment held a dominant position the market and it is expected to retain its dominance in the global underwear market over the forecast period. This is attributed to increasing number of specialty stores, which are most preferred to purchase underwear due to the large variety of options available at these stores.Asia Pacific was the most dominant market in terms of revenue share in 2016 and is expected to continue its dominance over the forecast period. Asia Pacific mens underwear market was valued at over US$ 2.3 billion in 2016, due to high demand for underwear due to the high male population in the region especially in China and India that account for the highest male population globally.Some of the leading players in the mens underwear market include American Eagle Outfitter Inc., Philips-Van Heusen Corporation, Hanesbrands Inc. Jockey International Inc, Perry Ellis International Inc., Naked Brand Group Inc., Ralph Lauren Corporation, and Berkshire Hathaway IncTalk to Analyst :About Coherent Market Insights:Coherent Market Insights is a prominent market research and consulting firm offering action-ready syndicated research reports, custom market analysis, consulting services, and competitive analysis through various recommendations related to emerging market trends, technologies, and potential absolute dollar opportunity.Contact Us:Mr. ShahCoherent Market Insights1001 4th Ave,#3200Seattle, WA 98154Tel: +1-206-701-6702Email: sales@coherentmarketinsights.com
New Report On Capric Acid Market - Analysis By Top Key Player Like Temix Oleo, P&G, VVF LLC, Henan Eastar Chemicals Co., Ltd, Chemical Associates, Inc., Oleocomm International Ltd.

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UpMarketResearch offers a latest published report on Global Capric Acid Market Analysis and Forecast 2018-2025 delivering key insights and providing a competitive advantage to clients through a detailed report. The report contains 142 pages which highly exhibits on current market analysis scenario, upcoming as well as future opportunities, revenue growth, pricing and profitability.Get Free Exclusive PDF Sample Copy of This ReportCapric Acid Industry research report delivers a close watch on leading competitors with strategic analysis, micro and macro market trend and scenarios, pricing analysis and a holistic overview of the market situations in the forecast period. It is a professional and a detailed report focusing on primary and secondary drivers, market share, leading segments and geographical analysis. Further, key players, major collaborations, merger & acquisitions along with trending innovation and business policies are reviewed in the report. The report contains basic, secondary and advanced information pertaining to the Capric Acid Industry global status and trend, market size, share, growth, trends analysis, segment and forecasts from 2018 - 2025.The scope of the report extends from market scenarios to comparative pricing between major players, cost and profit of the specified market regions. The numerical data is backed up by statistical tools such as SWOT analysis, BCG matrix, SCOT analysis, PESTLE analysis and so on. The statistics are represented in graphical format for a clear understanding on facts and figures.The generated report is firmly based on primary research, interviews with top executives, news sources and information insiders. Secondary research techniques are implemented for better understanding and clarity for data analysis.For More Information Please VisitThe report for Capric Acid market analysis & forecast 2018-2025 is segmented into Product Segment, Application Segment & Major players.Global Capric Acid Market: Manufacturers Segment Analysis Temix Oleo P&G VVF LLC Henan Eastar Chemicals Co., Ltd. Chemical Associates, Inc. Oleocomm International Ltd. Acidchem International Sdn Bhd Ecogreen Oleochemicals (Singapore) Pte Ltd. Henan Eastar Chemicals Co., Ltd. ChemCeed LLC Taiko GroupMarket segment by Regions/Countries, this report covers North America Europe China Japan Rest APAC Latin AmericaGlobal Capric Acid Market: Type Segment Analysis (Consumption Volume, Average Price, Revenue, Market Share and Trend 2013-2023) Animal PlantGlobal Capric Acid Market: Application Segment Analysis (Consumption Volume and Market Share 2013-2023; Downstream Customers and Market Analysis) Foods and Beverages Pharmaceuticals Industrial Chemicals Cosmetics and Personal CareBuy Capric Acid Market analysis & forecast 2018-2025 Report along with complete TOCIn this study, the years considered to estimate the market size of Capric Acid are as follows:History Year: 2013-2017Base Year: 2017Estimated Year: 2018Forecast Year 2018 to 2025The Report covers in-depth analysis as followsChapter 1 Overview of Capric AcidChapter 2 Global Market Status and Forecast by RegionsChapter 3 Global Market Status and Forecast by TypesChapter 4 Global Market Status and Forecast by Downstream IndustryChapter 5 Market Driving Factor Analysis of Capric AcidChapter 6 Capric Acid Market Competition Status by Major ManufacturersChapter 7 Capric Acid Major Manufacturers Introduction and Market DataChapter 8 Upstream and Downstream Market Analysis of Capric AcidChapter 9 Cost and Gross Margin Analysis of Capric AcidChapter 10 Marketing Status Analysis of Capric AcidChapter 11 Report ConclusionChapter 12 Research Methodology and ReferenceCapric Acid Market Analysis and Forecast 2018-2025 report helps the clients to take business decisions and to understand strategies of major players in the industry. The report also calls for market-driven results deriving feasibility studies for client needs. UpMarketResearch ensures qualified and verifiable aspects of market data operating in the real-time scenario. The analytical studies are conducted ensuring client needs with a thorough understanding of market capacities in the real-time scenario.Key Reasons to Purchase: To gain insightful analyses of the market and have a comprehensive understanding of the Global Capric Acid Industry Analysis and Forecast 2018-2025 and its commercial landscape Learn about the market strategies that are being adopted by your competitors and leading organizations To understand the future outlook and prospects for Capric Acid market analysis and forecast 2018-2025.Customization 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: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 States
Compressor Rental Market Drivers and Restraints 2017 - 2025 : Rand, Atlas Copco, Aggreko plc, and United Rentals, Inc

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Global Compressor Rental Market: SnapshotOn the back of urbanization and industrialization, the market for compressor rentals has been advancing steadily. In the years ahead too, it is slated to hold on to the pace of growth owing to improvement in their designs and technologies that is making them more efficient. Depending upon their design and function, compressors can be broadly segmented into two  centrifugal compressors and positive displacement compressors.Compressors can also be portable and hence can be used in domestic and industrial activities. This unique perceived benefit is also helping their rental market to grow.Air compressors rental market, on the flipside, is hobbled by the steep cost of maintenance and contamination they cause of the surrounding air on account of the oil lubrication. They also cause noise pollution and this has been further crimping their uptake. Helping to overcome the challenge, however, is the emergence of oil-free compressors which are seeing swift uptake due to their positive impact on the environment.Currently, the construction sector accounts for maximum demand in the market for compressor rentals on account of their requirement in piling, blasting, spraying, and operating pneumatic tools require. Portable air compressors, particularly, are seeing quick adoption for carrying out the tasks.Caterpillar Inc., United Rentals, Inc., Atlas Copco, Ingersoll Rand, and Aggreko plc. are to name a few prominent players in the global market for compressor rentals. Currently these companies are expending money on research and development to come up with cutting-edge products that would consume less energy and be more effective.Request Sample Copy of the Report @Global Compressor Rental Market: OverviewCompressors are devices that convert mechanical energy into pneumatic energy by using compressed air and gas. As this compressed air or gas is released, a considerable amount of energy is trapped, so as to utilize it for a variety of purposes, such as air transfer, cleaning, and pneumatic device activation. As the rate of urbanization and industrial activities increases, the market for compressor rentals will advance rapidly.The report provides key information about the market trends, opportunities, growth drivers and challenges, along with aspects such as market size, supply and demand ratio, and detailed market segmentation. The leading market players are analyzed in terms of their market shares, product portfolios, and business strategies.Global Compressor Rental Market: Drivers and RestraintsWith the development of designs of compressors, more efficiency has been attained so as to meet the demands of various end-users. Some of the compressors being portable, are extensively used in industrial and domestic activities, benefitting the growth of the global compressor rentals market. Technological advancement in the field of compressors is expected to boost the adoption rate of compressors. One example is that of air compressors. Traditional air compressors are run at full speed, and have to be stopped when they reach the right pressure. Then, the compressed air is stored to allow pressure hysteresis. As this is a wasteful practice, technological upgrades in air compressors have been carried out to control speed, thereby saving energy, and contributing toward market growth. Air compressors facilitate transfer of air in several industries such as chemical plants, oil extraction, food and beverage, automobiles, and transport. This is expected to expand the global market for compressor rentals.On the other hand, factors such as high maintenance costs and the contamination of air caused by oil lubrication are expected to limit growth. Also, oil-free compressors can be noisy, and thus can restrict demand for them.Global Compressor Rental Market: Key SegmentsThe market can be segmented based on end user, technology, types, and geography. On the basis of their design and function, compressors can be divided into centrifugal compressors and positive displacement compressors. In terms of end user, the market for compressor rentals was dominated by the construction segment. The construction segment gained prominence because the execution of construction and building activities such as blasting, piling, spraying, and operating pneumatic tools require portable air compressors.Oil-free air compressors have been growing popular recently as they supply non-contaminated air. The portable air compressors, on account of the convenience they offer, are high in demand in off-site operations. The key end-user segments for air compressors can be industrial, commercial, and residential. Industrial air compressors are similar to commercial air compressors; only they are more powerful and bigger in size and volume. Commercial level air compressors are not very portable when compared to residential ones, but they are certainly more powerful. They can run for a long time without a refill. On the residential level, air compressors are used to spray paint, fill air in balloons, balls, and tires. These functions are generally conducted with electric air compressors, which are ideal for domestic purposes. As the demand for air compressors in all these sectors increases, the compressor rental market is slated to present significant opportunities.Request TOC of the Report @Global Compressor Rental Market: Regional OutlookAccording to geography, the key segments can be Asia Pacific, Latin America, North America, Europe, and EMEA. The region of Asia Pacific has been exhibiting substantial growth, thanks to the presence of a number of capital-intensive companies that are inclined towards renting compressors instead of buying them. Large- scale construction projects in the countries of Asia Pacific, such as China, Thailand, and India, will further fuel market growth.Global Compressor Rental Market: Vendor LandscapeSome of the key players operating in the global compressor rental market include Caterpillar Inc., Ingersoll Rand, Atlas Copco, Aggreko plc, and United Rentals, Inc. One key development in the competitive landscape is the launch of new GA VSD+ oil-injected, compact, rotary screw compressors by Atlas Copco in 2013. These air compressors are designed to cut energy consumption to half the amount required by traditional compressors of similar type. The leading companies in the global compressor rental market have been emphasizing on better product offerings through increased investments in R&D activities.Read Comprehensive Overview of Report @About TMR ResearchTMR Research is a premier provider of customized market research and consulting services to business entities keen on succeeding in todays supercharged economic climate. Armed with an experienced, dedicated, and dynamic team of analysts, we are redefining the way our clients conduct business by providing them with authoritative and trusted research studies in tune with the latest methodologies and market trends.Our savvy custom-built reports span a gamut of industries such as pharmaceuticals, chemicals and metals, food and beverages, and technology and media, among others. With actionable insights uncovered through in-depth research of the market, we try to bring about game-changing success for our clients.TMR Research,3739 Balboa St # 1097,San Francisco, CA 94121United StatesTel: +1-415-520-1050Email: sales@tmrresearch.com
New Report On Diesel Gensets Market Analysis By Key Players- Caterpillar, Cummins, Mahindra & Mahindra, Ashok Leyland,Escort - Gobal Forecast to 2025

Diesel Gensets Market

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Diesel Gensets Industry research report delivers a close watch on leading competitors with strategic analysis, micro and macro market trend and scenarios, pricing analysis and a holistic overview of the market situations in the forecast period.Get FREE Sample Report Before Buying @UpMarketResearch offers a latest published report on Global Diesel Gensets Market Analysis and Forecast 2018-2023 delivering key insights and providing a competitive advantage to clients through a detailed report. The report contains 112 pages which highly exhibit on current market analysis scenario, upcoming as well as future opportunities, revenue growth, pricing and profitability.Diesel Gensets Industry research report delivers a close watch on leading competitors with strategic analysis, micro and macro market trend and scenarios, pricing analysis and a holistic overview of the market situations in the forecast period. It is a professional and a detailed report focusing on primary and secondary drivers, market share, leading segments and geographical analysis. Further, key players, major collaborations, merger & acquisitions along with trending innovation and business policies are reviewed in the report. The report contains basic, secondary and advanced information pertaining to the Diesel Gensets Industry global status and trend, market size, share, growth, trends analysis, segment and forecasts from 2018  2023.The scope of the report extends from market scenarios to comparative pricing between major players, cost and profit of the specified market regions. The numerical data is backed up by statistical tools such as SWOT analysis, BCG matrix, SCOT analysis, PESTLE analysis and so on. The statistics are represented in graphical format for a clear understanding on facts and figures.The generated report is firmly based on primary research, interviews with top executives, news sources and information insiders. Secondary research techniques are implemented for better understanding and clarity for data analysis.The report for Diesel Gensets market analysis & forecast 2018-2023 is segmented into Product Segment, Application Segment & Major players.Region-wise Analysis Global Diesel Gensets Market covers: North America Europe China Japan India Southeast Asia Other regions (Central & South America, Middle East & Africa)The Major players reported in the market include: Caterpillar Cummins Kirloskar Mahindra & Mahindra Ashok Leyland Escort Generac Greaves Cotton Honda Siel Power Product Kohler SonalikaGeographicallyFor More Information, Please VisitGlobal Diesel Gensets Market: Product Segment Analysis: Low Power (5kVA to 75kVA) Medium Power (75.1kVA to 350kVA) High Power (350.1kVA to 750kVA) Very High Power Rating (750.1kVA to 3,000kVA)Global Diesel Gensets Market: Application Segment Analysis: Residential Commercial Industrial Infrastructure sectorsThe Report covers in-depth analysis as follows: Chapter 1 Industry Overview of Diesel Gensets Chapter 2 Manufacturing Cost Structure Analysis of Diesel Gensets Chapter 3 Technical Data and Manufacturing Plants Analysis of Diesel Gensets Chapter 4 Global Diesel Gensets Overall Market Overview Chapter 5 Diesel Gensets Regional Market Analysis Chapter 6 Global 2013-2018E Diesel Gensets Segment Market Analysis (by Type) Chapter 7 Global 2013-2018E Diesel Gensets Segment Market Analysis (by Application) Chapter 8 Major Manufacturers Analysis of Diesel Gensets Chapter 9 Development Trend of Analysis of Diesel Gensets Market Chapter 10 Diesel Gensets Marketing Type Analysis Chapter 11 Consumers Analysis of Diesel Gensets Chapter 12 Conclusion of the Global Diesel Gensets Market Professional Survey Report 2017Buy Diesel Gensets Market analysis & forecast 2018-2023 Report along with complete TOC @Diesel Gensets Market Analysis and Forecast 2018-2023 report helps the clients to take business decisions and to understand strategies of major players in the industry. The report also calls for market-driven results deriving feasibility studies for client needs. UpMarketResearch ensures qualified and verifiable aspects of market data operating in the real-time scenario. The analytical studies are conducted ensuring client needs with a thorough understanding of market capacities in the real-time scenario.Key Reasons to Purchase: To gain insightful analyses of the market and have a comprehensive understanding of the Global Diesel Gensets Industry Analysis and Forecast 2018-2023 and its commercial landscape. Learn about the market strategies that are being adopted by your competitors and leading organizations. To understand the future outlook and prospects for Diesel Gensets market analysis and forecast 2018-2023.Customization 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.You can also ask for region wise market research report, as below: Diesel Gensets -Global Market Status & Trend Report 2013-2023 Top 20 Countries Data Diesel Gensets -North America Market Status and Trend Report 2013-2023 Diesel Gensets -South America Market Status and Trend Report 2013-2023 Diesel Gensets -Europe Market Status and Trend Report 2013-2023 Diesel Gensets -EMEA Market Status and Trend Report 2013-2023 Diesel Gensets -Asia Pacific Market Status and Trend Report 2013-2023 Diesel Gensets -China Market Status and Trend Report 2013-2023 Diesel Gensets -India Market Status and Trend Report 2013-2023 Diesel Gensets -United States Market Status and Trend Report 2013-2023About 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 States.
Artificial Organ Market to grow at a CAGR of 9.56% during the period 2018-2022 by Key Vendors (Abbott, Baxter, Boston Scientific, Cochlear, F. Hoffmann-La Rache, Fresenius Medical Care, Medtronic)

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This report studies the Artificial Organ Market with many aspects of the industry like the market size, market status, market trends and forecast, the report also provides brief information of the competitors and the specific growth opportunities with key market drivers. Find the complete Artificial Organ Market analysis segmented by companies, region, type and applications in the report.About Artificial OrganArtificial organs are man-made devices or implants meant to replace damaged natural organs. An artificial organ mimics a natural organ, performs its normal functions, and increases the life expectancy of the recipient. Artificial organs are incorporated with different technologies such as sensors, biomaterials, and innovative delivery systems.Research analysts forecast the Global Artificial Organ Market to grow at a CAGR of 9.56% during the period 2018-2022.Covered in this reportThe report covers the present scenario and the growth prospects of the global artificial organs market for 2018-2022. To calculate the market size, the report presents a detailed picture of the market by way of study, synthesis, and summation of data from multiple sources.Inquiry for buying a sample copy @Artificial Organ Market continues to evolve and expand in terms of the number of companies, products, and applications that illustratesthe growth perspectives.The report also covers the list of Product range and Applications with SWOT analysis, CAGR value, further adding the essential business analytics. Artificial Organ Market research analysis identifies the latest trends and primary factors responsible for market growth enabling the Organizations to flourish with much exposure to the markets.The market is divided into the following segments based on geography: Americas APAC EMEAGlobal Artificial Organ Market 2018-2022, has been prepared based on an in-depth market analysis with inputs from industry experts. The report covers the market landscape and its growth prospects over the coming years. The report also includes a discussion of the key vendors operating in this market.Key vendors Abbott Baxter Boston Scientific Cochlear F. Hoffmann-La Rache Fresenius Medical Care MedtronicBrowse full table of contents and data tables@The Artificial Organ Market research report completely covers the vital statistics of the capacity, production, value, cost/profit, supply/demand import/export, further divided by company and country, and by application/type for best possible updated data representation in the figures, tables, pie chart, and graphs. These data representations provide predictive data regarding the future estimations for convincing market growth. The detailed and comprehensive knowledge about our publishers makes us out of the box in case of market analysis.Market driver Increasing prevalence of chronic disorders For a full, detailed list, view our reportMarket challenge Complications and limitations of artificial organs For a full, detailed list, view our reportMarket trend Emergence of TAH For a full, detailed list, view our reportKey questions answered in this report What will the market size be in 2028 and what will the growth rate be? What are the key market trends? What is driving this market? What are the challenges to market growth? Who are the key vendors in this market space? What are the market opportunities and threats faced by the key vendors? What are the strengths and weaknesses of the key vendors?You can request one free hour of our analyst's time when you purchase this market report. Details are provided within the report.Inquiry for Discount on Report Copy @About Us: - MarketResearchNest.com Market Research Nest (MRN) is an offering of GRN Research Pvt. Ltd. It is a one-stop-shop for market research products and services. At MRN, we offer reports from almost all top regional and global publishers and research firms who specialize in their domains. We ensure that you receive the most reliable and up to date research data. We update our collection daily to help our clients have an access to a most up-to-date database of expert insights on global industries, organizations, products, and trends. Our database covers research studies including periodic updates on a range of industries, companies, products, SWOT profiles, recent marketing, and other trends.Contact us: - Mr. Jeet Jain, Sales Manager, sales@marketresearchnest.com ;+1-240-284-8070, +44-20-3290-4151;Connect with us: Google+ | LinkedIn | Twitter | Facebook
Male Infertility Market 2018 Major Pipeline Products, Licensing, Product Description and Collaboration Details

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Latest Pharmaceutical and Healthcare disease pipeline guide Male Infertility Market - Pipeline Review, H2 2018, provides an overview of the Male Infertility Market (Male Health) pipeline landscape.Male infertility refers to a male's inability to achieve a pregnancy in a fertile female. Male infertility is caused due to low sperm production, immobile sperm, or blockages that prevent the delivery of sperm. Symptoms include pain, swelling or a lump in the testicle area. Predisposing factors include smoking tobacco, using alcohol, being overweight, being exposed to toxins, certain medical conditions, including tumors and chronic illnesses. Treatment includes surgery and hormone replacement therapy.Get to know more about Male Infertility Market Pipeline research report @Report HighlightsPharmaceutical and Healthcare latest pipeline guide Male Infertility - Pipeline Review, H2 2018, provides comprehensive information on the therapeutics under development for Male Infertility (Male Health), complete with analysis by stage of development, drug target, mechanism of action (MoA), route of administration (RoA) and molecule type. The guide covers the descriptive pharmacological action of the therapeutics, its complete research and development history and latest news and press releases.The Male Infertility (Male Health) pipeline guide also reviews of key players involved in therapeutic development for Male Infertility and features dormant and discontinued projects. The guide covers therapeutics under Development by Companies /Universities /Institutes, the molecules developed by Companies in Phase II, Phase I, Preclinical and Discovery stages are 2, 2, 1 and 3 respectively. Similarly, the Universities portfolio in Preclinical and Discovery stages comprises 2 and 1 molecules, respectively.Male Infertility (Male Health) pipeline guide helps in identifying and tracking emerging players in the market and their portfolios, enhances decision making capabilities and helps to create effective counter strategies to gain competitive advantage. The guide is built using data and information sourced from proprietary databases, company/university websites, clinical trial registries, conferences, SEC filings, investor presentations and featured press releases from company/university sites and industry-specific third party sources. Additionally, various dynamic tracking processes ensure that the most recent developments are captured on a real time basis.Get discount on Male Infertility Market Pipeline research report @Scope- The pipeline guide provides a snapshot of the global therapeutic landscape of Male Infertility (Male Health).- The pipeline guide reviews pipeline therapeutics for Male Infertility (Male Health) by companies and universities/research institutes based on information derived from company and industry-specific sources.- The pipeline guide covers pipeline products based on several stages of development ranging from pre-registration till discovery and undisclosed stages.- The pipeline guide features descriptive drug profiles for the pipeline products which comprise, product description, descriptive licensing and collaboration details, R&D brief, MoA & other developmental activities.- The pipeline guide reviews key companies involved in Male Infertility (Male Health) therapeutics and enlists all their major and minor projects.- The pipeline guide evaluates Male Infertility (Male Health) therapeutics based on mechanism of action (MoA), drug target, route of administration (RoA) and molecule type.- The pipeline guide encapsulates all the dormant and discontinued pipeline projects.- The pipeline guide reviews latest news related to pipeline therapeutics for Male Infertility (Male Health)Buy a copy of Male Infertility Market Pipeline research report @Reasons to buy- Procure strategically important competitor information, analysis, and insights to formulate effective R&D strategies.- Recognize emerging players with potentially strong product portfolio and create effective counter-strategies to gain competitive advantage.- Find and recognize significant and varied types of therapeutics under development for Male Infertility (Male Health).- Classify potential new clients or partners in the target demographic.- Develop tactical initiatives by understanding the focus areas of leading companies.- Plan mergers and acquisitions meritoriously by identifying key players and its most promising pipeline therapeutics.- Formulate corrective measures for pipeline projects by understanding Male Infertility (Male Health) pipeline depth and focus of Indication therapeutics.- Develop and design in-licensing and out-licensing strategies by identifying prospective partners with the most attractive projects to enhance and expand business potential and scope.- Adjust the therapeutic portfolio by recognizing discontinued projects and understand from the know-how what drove them from pipeline.ReportsnReports.com is your single source for all market research needs. 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Automotive Fuel Transfer Assemblies Market Latest Report with Forecast 2018 to 2028

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Automotive fuel transfer assemblies are used for improving the fuel system availability and safety during the transmission of fuel to the combustion unit of an automotive engine. A fuel pump transfer assembly is mounted in a fuel tank for sending fuel to a fuel injector, which includes a driving means for supplying a driving force for sending or returning fuel. With increasing temperatures and increasing electronic controls, the need for efficient coolants is also increasing. For the lower temperature range, companies are producing advanced multi-layer tubing, and for the higher temperature range, they provide hybrid lines consisting of steel tubing with high-performing lightweight fluorocomp hoses. Automotive fuel transfer assemblies play an integral role in running any vehicle smoothly. These fuel transfer assemblies assist the engine in running as estimated under a wide range of driving conditions and rates of fuel consumption. As the demand for automotive components is surging in developing countries such as India, China, Brazil, Japan, and others, governments are undertaking many initiatives to increase the sales of these components. Technological developments in this niche, but significant products with the highest penetration rate in a vehicle is expected to enhance the growth of the automotive air fuel transfer assemblies market.Rates of fuel consumption and high efficiency are some of the major drivers for the growth of the automotive fuel transfer assemblies market. The ability of these fuel transfer assemblies to transfer a constant pressurized fuel supply to the fuel injection from the fuel tank on the engine is escalating the demand for automotive fuel transfer assemblies. The growing demand for passenger vehicles with technological advancements is spurring market growth. The growing automotive industry and demand for auto components are expected to support the growth of the automotive fuel transfer assemblies market.Request Brochure of The Report:However, the low replacement rate of fuel transfer assemblies in vehicles restrains the growth of the global automotive fuel transfer assemblies market.North American countries such as the U.S. and Canada are expected to show vigorous growth in the automotive fuel transfer assemblies market, owing to the large number vehicles production in these countries. The same perspective holds true for European countries such as Germany, Spain, and France. These countries exhibit high potential growth in the automotive fuel transfer assemblies market, due to escalating vehicle sales and a renewed interest in electric vehicles. India and China are expected to forefront the growth of the market in the Asia Pacific region, due to the major contribution of these two economies in the automotive industry. The aftermarket segment of the automotive fuel transfer assemblies market is expected to increase in the MEA region, due to the augmented demand for luxury vehicles in this region. Japan is also expected to show high potential for the market, due to the presence of a large number of OEMs in the country. The automotive fuel transfer assemblies market in the Latin America region is expected to experience slow growth, due to the decline in automotive industry in the regions largest economy, Brazil, but is projected to pick up steam in the latter stages of the forecast period.Key market participants of the global automotive fuel transfer assemblies markets are the following: Robert Bosch GmbH, Akron Polymer Products, Hutchinson, ATS Automation Tooling Systems Inc, Kongsberg Automotive, Jalex automotive Pvt. Ltd. etc.Report Analysis atAbout FactMRFactMR 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.Contact UsFactMR11140 Rockville PikeSuite 400Rockville, MD 20852United StatesEmail: sales@factmr.comWeb:Follow Us on Linkedin:
Automated Breast Ultrasound System Market Revenues Pegged at US$ 212.4 Mn by 2025

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Future Market Insights (FMI) delivers key insights on the global ABUS market in its upcoming outlook titled, Automated Breast Ultrasound System (ABUS) Market: Global Industry Analysis and Opportunity Assessment, 2015  2025. In terms of value, the global ABUS market is projected to register a healthy CAGR of 8.1% during the forecast period due to various factors, regarding which, FMI offers vital insights in detail. The global ABUS market is projected to register a CAGR of 8.5% in terms of volume during the forecast period.Request to View Sample of Research Report @On the basis of end user, the market has been segmented into hospitals and diagnostic imaging laboratories. The hospitals segment is estimated to account for 54.2% share in the global ABUS market by 2015 end, and is expected to register healthy CAGR of 8.2% in terms of value over the forecast period. In addition, in terms of volume, the segment is expected to record a CAGR of 8.7% during the forecast period. In terms of revenue, the hospitals segment is currently witnessing major contribution from Asia Pacific, North America and parts of Western Europe. Moreover, research and development on ABUS is likely to further fuel market growth during the forecast period. The diagnostic imaging laboratories segment is expected to record a CAGR of 8.1% and 8.5% in terms of value and volume respectively during the forecast period.Growth of the global ABUS market is mainly driven by increasing prevalence of breast cancer, growing radiology market, government advocation for breast cancer awareness and extensive research and development for enhanced imaging techniques. Other trends driving market growth include strategic alliances among key players in the market, manufacturers eyeing mammography market share and expansion of healthcare sector in developing countries due to growing investments by major players. In addition, surge in demand for advanced medical devices owing to increasing health awareness and growing disposable income is cumulatively anticipated to result in increased spending on enhanced medical services. This in turn, is anticipated to bolster ABUS market growth during the forecast period (20152025).This report covers trends driving each segment and offers analysis and insights into potential of the ABUS market in specific regions. North America is estimated to dominate the ABUS market with 42.0% market share by 2015 end, and is anticipated to remain dominant by 2025. North America and Western Europe collectively are expected to account for over 74% in the total ABUS market share in terms of value by 2015 end. Among all the regions, Japan is anticipated to register the highest CAGR in terms of value and volume respectively between 2015 and 2025, followed by North America due to increasing installations of ABUS owing to breast cancer prevalence and consumer concerns for early detection of breast cancer in these regions. Mammography X-ray is preferred as a gold standard technique for breast cancer detection among consumers especially in Asian countries. This lowers adoption of automated techniques used for detecting breast cancer and hence, offers opportunities for multiple modalities primarily for automated breast ultrasound system supported by regulatory approval for the same and offering additional diagnostic confidence to the patient as well as the radiologist.Request Report for Table of Contents @Key players in the global ABUS market such as General Electric Co., Siemens A.G., Hitachi Ltd. and SonoCine Inc. focus on making substantial investments in research and development activities to enhance product portfolio to offer competitive advantage and in turn, create high entry barriers for players entering ABUS market.About UsFuture Market Insights is the premier provider of market intelligence and consulting services, serving clients in over 150 countries. FMI is headquartered in London, the global financial capital, and has delivery centers in the U.S. and India.FMIs research and consulting services help businesses around the globe navigate the challenges in a rapidly evolving marketplace with confidence and clarity. Our customized and syndicated market research reports deliver actionable insights that drive sustainable growth. We continuously track emerging trends and events in a broad range of end industries to ensure our clients prepare for the evolving needs of their consumers.Contact UsU.S. Office616 Corporate Way, Suite 2-9018,Valley Cottage, NY 10989,United StatesT: +1-347-918-3531F: +1-845-579-5705Email: sales@futuremarketinsights.com
Global Dental Software Market Size, Status And Forecast 2025 | By Top Key Players 3D Diagnostix Corp. (USA),ABEL Dental Software (USA),Amann Girrbach (Austria).

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This report studies the global Dental Software market, analyzes and researches the Dental Software development status and forecast in United States, EU, Japan, China, India and Southeast Asia.Request Sample Copy of Report @This report focuses on the top players in global market, like3D Diagnostix Corp. (USA)ABEL Dental Software (USA)Amann Girrbach (Austria)Anatomage (Italy)ARTIGLIO SNC (Italy)B&B DENTAL (Italy)BTI Biotechnology Institute (Spain)Dentsply Sirona (USA)DOF, Inc. (Korea)Drive Dental Implants (France)EasyRx (USA)EGS (Italy)Elite Computer Italia (Italy)Genoray (Korea)Zirkonzahn (Italy)imes-icore (Germany)Institut Straumann AG (Switzerland)Kavo (UK)LED Dental (USA)Navadha Enterprises (India)Nemotec (Spain)Nobel Biocare Services AG (UK)Ormco (USA)Owandy Radiology (USA)Schutz Dental GmbH (Germany)SICAT (Germany)Software of Excellence (UK)VATECH (Korea)Wieland Dental + Technik GmbH & Co. KG (Germany)Market segment by Regions/Countries, this report coversUnited StatesEUJapanChinaIndiaSoutheast AsiaMarket segment by Type, the product can be split intoDesign SoftwareSimulation SoftwareDiagnosis SoftwareOtherMarket segment by Application, Dental Software can be split intoHospitalClinicRequest for discount @Table of ContentsGlobal Dental Software Market Size, Status and Forecast 20251 Industry Overview of Dental Software1.1 Dental Software Market Overview1.1.1 Dental Software Product Scope1.1.2 Market Status and Outlook1.2 Global Dental Software Market Size and Analysis by Regions (2013-2018)1.2.1 United States1.2.2 EU1.2.3 Japan1.2.4 China1.2.5 India1.2.6 Southeast Asia1.3 Dental Software Market by Type1.3.1 Design Software1.3.2 Simulation Software1.3.3 Diagnosis Software1.3.4 Other1.4 Dental Software Market by End Users/Application1.4.1 Hospital1.4.2 Clinic2 Global Dental Software Competition Analysis by Players2.1 Dental Software Market Size (Value) by Players (2013-2018)2.2 Competitive Status and Trend2.2.1 Market Concentration Rate2.2.2 Product/Service Differences2.2.3 New Entrants2.2.4 The Technology Trends in FutureBrowse Full Report With TOC @3 Company (Top Players) Profiles3.1 3D Diagnostix Corp. (USA)3.1.1 Company Profile3.1.2 Main Business/Business Overview3.1.3 Products, Services and Solutions3.1.4 Dental Software Revenue (Million USD) (2013-2018)3.1.5 Recent Developments3.2 ABEL Dental Software (USA)3.2.1 Company Profile3.2.2 Main Business/Business Overview3.2.3 Products, Services and Solutions3.2.4 Dental Software Revenue (Million USD) (2013-2018)3.2.5 Recent Developments3.3 Amann Girrbach (Austria)3.3.1 Company Profile3.3.2 Main Business/Business Overview3.3.3 Products, Services and Solutions3.3.4 Dental Software Revenue (Million USD) (2013-2018)3.3.5 Recent Developments3.4 Anatomage (Italy)3.4.1 Company Profile3.4.2 Main Business/Business Overview3.4.3 Products, Services and Solutions3.4.4 Dental Software Revenue (Million USD) (2013-2018)3.4.5 Recent Developments3.5 ARTIGLIO SNC (Italy)3.5.1 Company Profile3.5.2 Main Business/Business Overview3.5.3 Products, Services and Solutions3.5.4 Dental Software Revenue (Million USD) (2013-2018)3.5.5 Recent Developments3.6 B&B DENTAL (Italy)3.6.1 Company Profile3.6.2 Main Business/Business Overview3.6.3 Products, Services and Solutions3.6.4 Dental Software Revenue (Million USD) (2013-2018)3.6.5 Recent Developments3.7 BTI Biotechnology Institute (Spain)3.7.1 Company Profile3.7.2 Main Business/Business Overview3.7.3 Products, Services and Solutions3.7.4 Dental Software Revenue (Million USD) (2013-2018)3.7.5 Recent Developments3.8 Dentsply Sirona (USA)3.8.1 Company Profile3.8.2 Main Business/Business Overview3.8.3 Products, Services and Solutions3.8.4 Dental Software Revenue (Million USD) (2013-2018)3.8.5 Recent Developments3.9 DOF, Inc. (Korea)3.9.1 Company Profile3.9.2 Main Business/Business Overview3.9.3 Products, Services and Solutions3.9.4 Dental Software Revenue (Million USD) (2013-2018)3.9.5 Recent Developments3.10 Drive Dental Implants (France)3.10.1 Company Profile3.10.2 Main Business/Business Overview3.10.3 Products, Services and Solutions3.10.4 Dental Software Revenue (Million USD) (2013-2018)3.10.5 Recent Developments3.11 EasyRx (USA)3.12 EGS (Italy)3.13 Elite Computer Italia (Italy)3.14 Genoray (Korea)3.15 Zirkonzahn (Italy)3.16 imes-icore (Germany)3.17 Institut Straumann AG (Switzerland)3.18 Kavo (UK)3.19 LED Dental (USA)3.20 Navadha Enterprises (India)3.21 Nemotec (Spain)3.22 Nobel Biocare Services AG (UK)3.23 Ormco (USA)3.24 Owandy Radiology (USA)3.25 Schutz Dental GmbH (Germany)3.26 SICAT (Germany)3.27 Software of Excellence (UK)3.28 VATECH (Korea)3.29 Wieland Dental + Technik GmbH & Co. KG (Germany)4 Global Dental Software Market Size by Type and Application (2013-2018)4.1 Global Dental Software Market Size by Type (2013-2018)4.2 Global Dental Software Market Size by Application (2013-2018)4.3 Potential Application of Dental Software in Future4.4 Top Consumer/End Users of Dental Software5 United States Dental Software Development Status and Outlook5.1 United States Dental Software Market Size (2013-2018)5.2 United States Dental Software Market Size and Market Share by Players (2013-2018)5.3 United States Dental Software Market Size by Application (2013-2018)Who we areResearch Trades has team of experts who works on providing exhaustive analysis pertaining to market research on a global basis. This comprehensive analysis is obtained by a thorough research and study of the ongoing trends and provides predictive data regarding the future estimations, which can be utilized by various organizations for growth purposes.We distribute customized reports that focus on meeting the clients specific requirement. Our database consists of a large collection of high-quality reports obtained using a customer-centric approaches, thus providing valuable research insights.Contact us:Email: sales@researchtrades.comCall us: +1 6269994607 (USA), +91 7507349866 (IND)Web:Skype ID: researchtradescon
Commercial Aircraft Gas Turbine Engine Market to grow at a CAGR of 5.52% during the period 2018-2022 by Key Vendors (CFM International, GE Aviation, Pratt and Whitney, Rolls-Royce, Safran Aircraft Engines)

Commercial Aircraft Gas Turbine Engine Market, Commercial Aircraft Gas Turbine Engine Market Player

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This report studies the Commercial Aircraft Gas Turbine Engine Market with many aspects of the industry like the market size, market status, market trends and forecast, the report also provides brief information of the competitors and the specific growth opportunities with key market drivers. Find the complete Commercial Aircraft Gas Turbine Engine Market analysis segmented by companies, region, type and applications in the report.About Commercial Aircraft Gas Turbine EngineAircraft gas turbine engines are the most widely used propulsion systems in the aviation industry. There are two types of turbine engines, turboprop and turbofan, with their own set of requirements for maintenance and overhaul.Research analysts forecast the Global Commercial Aircraft Gas Turbine Engine Market to grow at a CAGR of 5.52% during the period 2018-2022.Covered in this reportThe report covers the present scenario and the growth prospects of the global commercial aircraft gas turbine engine market for 2018-2022. To calculate the market size, the report presents a detailed picture of the market by way of study, synthesis, and summation of data from multiple sources.Inquiry for buying a sample copy @Commercial Aircraft Gas Turbine Engine Market continues to evolve and expand in terms of the number of companies, products, and applications that illustratesthe growth perspectives.The report also covers the list of Product range and Applications with SWOT analysis, CAGR value, further adding the essential business analytics. Commercial Aircraft Gas Turbine Engine Market research analysis identifies the latest trends and primary factors responsible for market growth enabling the Organizations to flourish with much exposure to the markets.The market is divided into the following segments based on geography: Americas APAC EMEAGlobal Commercial Aircraft Gas Turbine Engine Market 2018-2022, has been prepared based on an in-depth market analysis with inputs from industry experts. The report covers the market landscape and its growth prospects over the coming years. The report also includes a discussion of the key vendors operating in this market.Key vendors CFM International GE Aviation Pratt and Whitney Rolls-Royce Safran Aircraft EnginesBrowse full table of contents and data tables@The Commercial Aircraft Gas Turbine Engine Market research report completely covers the vital statistics of the capacity, production, value, cost/profit, supply/demand import/export, further divided by company and country, and by application/type for best possible updated data representation in the figures, tables, pie chart, and graphs. These data representations provide predictive data regarding the future estimations for convincing market growth. The detailed and comprehensive knowledge about our publishers makes us out of the box in case of market analysis.Market driver Advancements in engine technologies For a full, detailed list, view our reportMarket challenge Grounding of fleet due to technical issues For a full, detailed list, view our reportMarket trend Usage of ceramic matrix composites For a full, detailed list, view our reportKey questions answered in this report What will the market size be in 2028 and what will the growth rate be? What are the key market trends? What is driving this market? What are the challenges to market growth? Who are the key vendors in this market space? What are the market opportunities and threats faced by the key vendors? What are the strengths and weaknesses of the key vendors?You can request one free hour of our analyst's time when you purchase this market report. Details are provided within the report.Inquiry for Discount on Report Copy @About Us: - MarketResearchNest.com Market Research Nest (MRN) is an offering of GRN Research Pvt. Ltd. It is a one-stop-shop for market research products and services. At MRN, we offer reports from almost all top regional and global publishers and research firms who specialize in their domains. We ensure that you receive the most reliable and up to date research data. We update our collection daily to help our clients have an access to a most up-to-date database of expert insights on global industries, organizations, products, and trends. Our database covers research studies including periodic updates on a range of industries, companies, products, SWOT profiles, recent marketing, and other trends.Contact us: - Mr. Jeet Jain, Sales Manager, sales@marketresearchnest.com ;+1-240-284-8070, +44-20-3290-4151;Connect with us: Google+ | LinkedIn | Twitter | Facebook
Space Tourism Market - Global Forecast to 2022 | Key Marketers (Bigelow Aerospace, SpaceX, Virgin Galactic, XCOR Aerospace, Armadillo Aerospace )

Space Tourism Market

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The Report Global Space Tourism Market by Manufacturers, Countries, Type and Application, Forecast to 2022 provides information on pricing, market analysis, shares, forecast, and company profiles for key industry participants.Global Space Tourism Market Overview:According to Market Analyst, Global Space Tourism Market is projected to grow at a healthy growth rate from 2018 to 2022.Request Report Sample@With the slowdown in world economic growth, the Space Tourism industry has also suffered a certain impact, but still maintained a relatively optimistic growth, the past four years, Space Tourism market size to maintain the average annual growth rate of 26.7% from 89 million $ in 2014 to 181 million $ in 2017, According to Market Analyst in the next few years, Space Tourism market size will be further expanded by 2022, The market size of the Space Tourism will reach 390 million $.Space Tourism is the term that Has come to be used to mean members of the purchasing tickets to travel to distance and back. Many individuals find this idea futuristic. But on the topic a volume of work was done over the last few years, and it is clear that setting up space tourism solutions is a target for business today. The first steps will be sub orbital flights that are short, such as Alan Shepard since these are simpler than getting into orbit, made in 1961. However the technical understand how to generate passenger launch vehicles and sunken resort accommodation can be found, and there is huge unsatisfied demand - market studies have revealed that many people, at least in the industrialized countries, would love to take a trip to distance if it was possible.This provides scope for decreasing the cost of space travel. As it is today the main obstacle is the conservatism of the space industry. Governments have funded distance activities, since Sputnik was launched in 1957. And this war routine of space activities has created a picture of distance that colours everyones considering it - authors, politicians, journalists, engineers and scientists, and the general public. Even science fiction Authors assume as obvious that most distance activities will be government activities. On Earth governments provide a number of services, defence, police, a legal system. But most activities are private - made by individuals and companies.The increased spending on travel and tourism as one of the primary factors for the growth of the space tourism market size. It has been observed that the percentage of consumer income spent on direct travel and tourism increased significantly in the recent years.Purchase this premium research report with 125 Pages and No. of Table of contents, List of table atSpace Tourism Market Segmented into Product Type, Industry, And Region.On the Basis of Type, Space Tourism Market Splits into Suborbital and Orbital. The suborbital segment accounted for the major shares of this global market, according to the space tourism market research report. Passengers can experience the acceleration of rocket launch, weightlessness, and the sight of the Earth from space through suborbital tours. The market will continue to grow in this segment since suborbital tours pose as a cost-effective solution than orbital tours.Regionally, North America is likely to gain traction in the space tourism market owing to the development of human spaceflight programs in the U.S. Presence of numerous global vendors is one of the crucial factors driving the space tourism market in this region.The Market is segmented and projected on the basis of major key players:1 Bigelow Aerospace2 SpaceX3 Virgin Galactic4 XCOR Aerospace5 Armadillo Aerospace6 Boeing7 EADS Astrium8 Excalibur Almaz9 Space AdventuresThe Market is segmented and projected on the basis of major Region Segmentation1 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 @Key Questions Answered in this Report:1 What will the market size be in 2022?2 What are the key factors driving the Space Tourism Market?3 What are the challenges to market growth?4 Who are the key players in Space Tourism Market?5 What are the market opportunities and threats faced by the key players?TABLE OF CONTENTS1 Space Tourism Definition2 Global Space Tourism Market Major Player Share and Market Overview3 Major Player Space Tourism Business Introduction4 Global Space Tourism Market Segmentation (Region Level)5 Global Space Tourism Market Segmentation (Type Level)6 Global Space Tourism Market Segmentation (Industry Level)7 Space Tourism Market Forecast 2018-20228 Space Tourism Segmentation Type9 Space Tourism Segmentation Industry10 Space Tourism Cost Analysis11 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
Single-Use Medical Device Reprocessing Market Worldwide Leading Key Players 2018 to 2026 - Stryker, Medline ReNewal, Centurion Medical Products, Midwest Reprocessing Center, SterilMed, Vanguard AG, Hygia Health Services

Single-Use Medical Device Reprocessing

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Coherent Market Insights has announced the addition of the Single-Use Medical Device Reprocessing Market Size Status and Forecast 2026, The report classifies the global Single-Use Medical Device Reprocessing Market in a precise manner to offer detailed insights about the aspects responsible for augmenting as well as restraining market growth.This report studies the global Single-Use Medical Device Reprocessing Speaker market, analyzes and researches the Single-Use Medical Device Reprocessing Speaker development status and forecast in North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, Latin America and Rest of the World. This report focuses on the top players in global market, like Stryker, Medline ReNewal, Centurion Medical Products, Midwest Reprocessing Center, SterilMed, Vanguard AG, Hygia Health ServicesRequest a sample copy :Single-use medical device reprocessing is the concept of sterilizing, repackaging, testing, and manufacturing a used product. There is no clear definition for the term single-use device and it is entirely based upon the end user perception. Reprocessing of single-use device is acceptable, if the device is properly sterilized while keeping its physical and technological functionalities intact. Single-use medical device reprocessing is done in two ways: third party processing and in-hospital processing. Third party processing is considered to be a better option, as regulatory authorities are able to impose strict regulations for validation and quality assurance purpose.Single-use medical device reprocessing is gaining popularity as it helps to reduce hospital waste and allows for major cost savings. For instance, Kaiser Permanente, which is an integrated delivery network based in U.S., saved US$ 11 million on an annual basis by reprocessing of single-use devices. Reprocessing enables the hospitals to purchase the same device at a lower price in comparison to the cost of original equipment, which eventually leads to cost savings. Practice Green Health, an NGO providing environmental solutions to the healthcare sector, quoted that single-use medical device reprocessing prevented the entry of 10,000 tons of medical waste during 19972007, by processing an estimated 50 million devices. Single-use medical device reprocessing market is poised to grow significantly, as hospitals realize potential cost savings and its ability to reduce environmental hazards.Cost constraints for Hospitals and positive environmental impact will drive growth of the single-use medical device reprocessing marketHospitals across the globe are facing cost pressures due to rise in price of original medical equipment. In the U.S., Obamacare and its associated guidelines might get repealed with the change in government. This could lead to low third-party reimbursement for hospitals, in turn influencing them to adopt cost saving initiatives such as single-use medical device reprocessing. The biggest advantage is that hospitals can reduce the cost associated with medical device to 50%, which becomes a crucial factor when dealing with expensive devices such as catheter and cardiac ablation devices. At present, 250 medical devices are already being processed with 10% of medical devices eligible for single-use medical device reprocessing. In terms of environmental protection, hospitals are able to reduce the medical waste to an estimated 50% by the use of single-use medical device reprocessing. Medical waste treatment not only puts enormous cost pressure on hospitals, but in countries such as U.S., China and Japan, it has become a full-fledged industry. For instance, Ascent, a subsidiary of Stryker Corporation, was able to eliminate 1,684 tons of medical waste from landfills during 2007, with the help of reprocessing. The market penetration for single-use medical device processing is poised to increase in small and mid-sized hospitals due to environmental sustainability and immense cost savings related to reprocessing.North America is estimated to be the growth pocket for single-use medical device reprocessing marketU.S. has the biggest healthcare system in the world with government spending an estimated 30% of annual budget on healthcare. U.S. is also home to large-sized hospitals such as Cleveland Clinic, Mount Sinai Hospital, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Centre and Johns Hopkins Hospital. These hospitals are subject to meeting sustainability goals and contain costs at the back of recession. For instance, in 2007, 45% of U.S. hospitals entered into an agreement with third-party processing companies and this number increased to 70% in 2008 due to severe economic crisis. Single-use medical device reprocessing is subject to FDA and required third-party processing companies to maintain quality standards in accordance with the original equipment. FDA formulated stringent regulation to create standardization and avoid infections related to the reuse of single-use devices. FDA has set up a grievance mechanism for reporting of adverse events related to use of single-use device which in turn reinforces accountability.In regions such as Asia Pacific, Europe and South America, there is a lack of regulatory standards is a restraining factor for the growth of single-use medical device reprocessing market. European Union has not mandated guidelines regarding the reprocessing. Individual countries such as Spain, England and France are not in favor of reprocessing. With respect to Asia Pacific, the reuse of single-use medical devices is prevalent with no set of regulations. In countries such as India, Japan and South Korea, there are no government regulations pertaining to single-use medical device reprocessing.Else place an Inquire before Purchase Single-Use Medical Device Reprocessing Market Size, Status and Forecast 2026 :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
Medically Prescribed Apps Market 2027 Top Key Players are Pathfinder International, Fueled, Y Media Labs, ArcTouch, Intellectsoft US, InnovationM, Sourcebits Technologies, WillowTree, Inc and More

Medically Prescribed Apps Market

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Namely Medically Prescribed Apps Market Report has Been Published by Market Research Future Which Covers All the Geographical Locations with Demand, Trend Analysis with near about Forecasted results and Also Covers the Market Expectations.The Global Medically Prescribed Apps Market Key Players are Pathfinder International (U.S.), Fueled (U.S.), Y Media Labs (U.S.), ArcTouch (U.S.), Intellectsoft US (U.S.), InnovationM (India), Sourcebits Technologies, WillowTree, Inc (U.S.), OpenXcell (India), Contus (India), Savvy apps (U.S.)Get Premium PDF Copy @Market Overview:Medically prescribed apps are software applications which is designed to help individuals manage their medical routine, calculate medical data, help acquire information regarding the availability of doctors, determination of critical health parameters, provide e-prescriptions, notifies about new treatment options and much more. They have been on the rise lately and finds its application in diabetes management, multi-parameter tracker, cardiac monitoring and others. These apps offer a variety of applications ranging from treatment-related recommendations to self-managing diseases, and they can be downloaded from the Google's Play Store or Apple's App Store. A diverse range of benefits and ease of use has proven to be a driving factor for the market growth. Medically prescribed apps are experiencing enormous demand and gaining acceptance among consumers. The global medically prescribed apps market is projected to expand at a CAGR of 18.8% over the forecast period 2017-2027, reveals a study by Market Research Future (MRFR). This thriving growth can be attributed to the ubiquity of smartphones and proliferation of mobile apps. Medically prescribed apps are helpful in monitoring diseases such as diabetes and obesity as they require continuous supervision; rise in patient pool of diabetes and other such lifestyle disease has contributed significantly to the growth of the medically prescribed Apps market. Rising prevalence of cancer and other chronic diseases, rise in geriatric population, unhealthy lifestyle, and lack of physical activity has spurred the growth of these apps. Additionally, increase in R&D activities, and broad adoption of medically prescribed apps, growing awareness for fitness are adding fuel to the growth of the market. Medically prescribed apps, however, have not been very successful in proving their efficacy and their reliability thus far has been questionable. The aged pool of patients and less tech-savvy patients who are not well acquainted with smartphones may face trouble using these apps which is a significant constraint to the market growth. Lack of awareness among patients, inadequate healthcare infrastructure in specific areas and unavailability of smartphones are factors impeding the market. Medically prescribed apps have also been reported to have produced inaccurate data and misidentify diseases.Segmentation:The global medically prescribed apps market has been segmented based on types, devices, operating system and application. By types, the market has been segmented into wellness management apps, diseases and treatment management apps, womens health & pregnancy apps, diseases specific apps, and others. By Devices, the market has been segmented into personal digital assistant, smartphone, tablet computer, and others. By operating system, the market has been segmented into windows, android, iOS system, and others. By application, the market has been segmented into diabetes management, multi-parameter tracker, cardiac monitoring, and others.Industry Trends/Updates:In June 2018, a company developing mobile medical applications for the management of chronic diseases, Tilak, announced the achievement of CE marking for Odysight, its first mobile medical game in Ophthalmology. Odysight can be availed only through medical prescription on the App Store and Google Play.Get Standard Discount @Regional Analysis:The key markets of the global medically prescribed apps market include the Americas, Europe, Asia-Pacific and the Middle East and Africa. The Americas lead the medically prescribed apps market owing to growing prevalence of chronic diseases, unhealthy lifestyles, high expenditure on healthcare, increasing government aid and concentration of major key players in the region. North America is a major contributor of the region due to presence of countries like US and Canada which have robust technology and healthcare sector. The Americas is followed by Europe. Strong economic conditions and government support for R&D activities favor the growth of the market in the region. Asia-Pacific is slated to emerge as the fastest growing market for medically prescribed apps due to rapidly growing healthcare sector in developing countries such as China and India, wide adoption of medical apps and prevalence of chronic diseases in the region. On the other hand, poor economic conditions, low literacy rate, low internet penetration and lack of awareness in the Middle East & Africa region restricts the growth of the market.Table of Content1 Report Prologue2 Market Introduction2.1 Definition2.2 Scope of the Study2.2.1 Research Objective2.2.2 Assumptions2.2.3 Limitations3 Research Methodology3.1 Introduction3.2 Primary Research3.3 Secondary Research3.4 Market Size Estimation4 Market Dynamics4.1 Drivers4.2 Restrains4.3 Opportunities4.4 Challenges4.5 Macroeconomic Indicators4.6 Technology Trends & AssessmentCollect More Enquiry @Market Research Future (MRFR), enable customers to unravel the complexity of various industries through Cooked Research Report (CRR), Half-Cooked Research Reports (HCRR), Raw Research Reports (3R), Continuous-Feed Research (CFR), and Market Research & Consulting Services.Market Research FutureOffice No. 528, Amanora ChambersMagarpatta Road, Hadapsar,Pune - 411028Maharashtra, IndiaPhone: +1 646 845 9312Email: sales@marketresearchfuture.com
Industrial Labels Market Comprehensive Study 2025: FLEXcon, Saint-Gobain, 3M, DuPont, Henkel AG & Co. KGaA, H.B. Fuller, Dunmore, Brady, Cenveo Corporation, CCL Industries Inc.

Industrial Labels

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This report on the worldwide Industrial Labels Market place offers informative experience offered on the market elements like dominating players, producing, sales, intake, import and export, and also the simplest improvement within the corporation size, preparation kind, inside, segmentation comprised at some purpose of this analysis, to boot foremost the players have used numerous techniques like new product launches, expansions, agreements, joint ventures, partnerships, acquisitions et al., to boom their footprints on this marketplace so as to sustain in long run, what is more to the present the clean perspective of world Industrial Labels Market.The Global Industrial Labels Market is expected to reach USD 58.35 billion by 2025, from USD 44.72 billion in 2017 growing at a CAGR of 7.1% during the forecast period of 2018 to 2025.Get Free Sample Research Report:Forecasting Analysis On Global Industrial Labels Market By Type (Warning/Security Labels, Equipment Asset Labels, Weatherproof Labels, Branding Labels), By Mechanism (Pressure Sensitive Labelling, Glue-Applied Labelling, Heat Transfer), By Raw Material (Metal Labels, Plastic/Polymer Labels), By Technology, By End-User Industry and By Geography.Major Market Competitors/Players: Global Industrial Labels MarketThe Industrial Labels Market report contains data for historic years 2016, the base year of calculation is 2017 and the forecast period is 2018 to 2025. Some of the major players operating in the global industrial labels market are AVERY DENNISON CORPORATION. 3M, DuPont, Henkel AG & Co. KGaA, Cenveo Corporation, CCL Industries Inc., Brady Worldwide, Inc., DUNMORE., Fuji Seal International, Inc., H.B. Fuller Company, Flexcon Company, Inc., Saint Gobain SA, and others.The report includes market shares of industrial labels market for global, Europe, North America, Asia Pacific and South America. The global industrial labels market is highly fragmented and the major players have used various strategies such as new product launches, expansions, agreements, joint ventures, partnerships, acquisitions, and others to increase their footprints in this market.Get TOC of Full Report:Major Market Drivers and Restraints: Growing production of consumer durable goods Rise in automotive industry Growing popularity of online designing tools Rising awareness regarding industrial labels Increase demand of raw materialMarket Segmentation: Global Industrial Labels Market The global industrial labels market is segmented based on type mechanism raw material technology end user industry geographical segments Based on type, the global industrial labels market is segmented into warning/security labels, equipment asset labels, weatherproof labels, branding labels, and others Based on mechanism, the global industrial labels market is segmented into pressure sensitive labelling, glue-applied labelling, heat transfer, and others Based on raw material, the global industrial labels market is segmented into metal labels, plastic/polymer labels, and others Based on technology, the global industrial labels market is segmented into identification technology and printing technology. Identification technology is further sub segmented into barcode,RFID and others. Printing technology is further sub segmented into flexography, offset, digital printing, screen printing On the basis of end user industry, global industrial labels market is segmented into transportation & logistics, automotive, consumer durables, construction and others Based on geography, the global industrial labels market report covers data points for 28 countries across multiple geographies namely North America & South America, Europe, Asia-Pacific and, Middle East & Africa. Some of the major countries covered in this report are U.S., Canada, Germany, France, U.K., Netherlands, Switzerland, Turkey, Russia, China, India, South Korea, Japan, Australia, Singapore, Saudi Arabia, South Africa and, Brazil among others.Want Full Report? Enquire Here:About UsData Bridge set forth itself as an unconventional and neoteric Market research and consulting firm with an unparalleled level of resilience and integrated approaches. We are determined to unearth the best market opportunities and foster efficient information for your business to thrive in the market. Data Bridge endeavors to provide appropriate solutions to the complex business challenges and initiates an effortless decision-making process.Data Bridge adepts in creating satisfied clients who reckon upon our services and rely on our hard work with certitude. For Customization and Getting Discount on Report by emailing sopan.gedam@databridgemarketresearch.com . We are content with our glorious 99.9 % client satisfying rate.Contact UsData Bridge Market ResearchToll Free: +1-888-387-2818Mail: sopan.gedam@databridgemarketresearch.com
Vietnam Mobile Payment Market Size, Share and Analysis by leading Key Players Mobivi, NganLuong, OnePay, Smartlink, Orange S.A., PayPal, Holdings Inc., Payoo, MOMO, 123Pay, SohaPay

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Changes in customer preference from cash to digital payments, surge in need for immediate transactions in Vietnam, increased penetration of internet and smartphones, and growth of the e-commerce industry majorly contribute towards the growth of the market. However, data breaches & security concerns are expected to hamper the Vietnam mobile payment market growth.The Vietnam mobile payment market was valued at $16,054 million in 2016, and is projected to reach at $70,937 million by 2025, growing at a CAGR of 18.2% from 2018 to 2025.Get Sample Report:Based on type, the remote payment segment dominated the Vietnam mobile payment market in 2016, and is expected to continue this trend during the forecast period, owing to extensive use of this payment method across various sectors such as IT, retail, telecommunications, hospitality, healthcare, and others. Furthermore, the proximity payment segment is expected to grow at the highest CAGR during the forecast period, owing to rising adoption of mobile point of sale (mPOS) solutions among small- and medium-sized businesses in Vietnam.Purchase Inquiry:The Vietnam mobile payment market was led by the retail segment in 2016, and is projected to maintain its dominance during the forecast period. However, the hospitality & tourism segment is expected to witness the highest growth, as large number of consumers in Vietnam have been doing transportation reservations such as hotels, flights, and railway tickets through apps, mobiles, or websites.Analyst Review:Near-Field Communication (NFC) mode of transaction is expected to grow at the highest CAGR during the forecast period, as the country has been investing into digital infrastructure and e-payment services, which includes NFC payment.Connect to Analyst:About Us:Allied Market Research (AMR) is a full-service market research and business consulting wing of Allied Analytics LLP based in Portland, Oregon. Allied Market Research provides global enterprises as well as medium and small businesses with unmatched quality of "Market Research Reports" and "Business Intelligence Solutions." AMR has a targeted view to provide business insights and consulting to assist its clients to make strategic business decisions and achieve sustainable growth in their respective market domain.We are in professional corporate relations with various companies and this helps us in digging out market data that helps us generate accurate research data tables and confirms utmost accuracy in our market forecasting. Each and every data presented in the reports published by us is extracted through primary interviews with top officials from leading companies of domain concerned. Our secondary data procurement methodology includes deep online and offline research and discussion with knowledgeable professionals and analysts in the industry.Contact:Shriram 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: +1-855-550-5975help@alliedmarketresearch.comWeb:
Rapid Medical Diagnostic Devices Market Outlook and Forecasts 2018 to 2026 and Key Players: Danaher Corporation, Abbott Laboratories, Acon Laboratories, Inc., Hoffman-La Roche Ltd., Becton, Dickinson, and Company

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The global rapid medical diagnostic devices market by Technology (Lateral Flow, Agglutination Assays, Flow-Through, and Biosensors), By Application (Cardio Metabolic Testing, Infectious Disease Testing, Nephrology Testing, Drugs of Abuse (DoA) Testing, Blood Glucose Testing, Pregnancy Testing, Cancer Biomarker Testing, and Others), By End User (Hospitals, Diagnostic Laboratories, Home-Care Settings, and Others), and Region (North America, Latin America, Europe, Asia Pacific, the Middle East, and Africa) was valued at US$ 17,078.1 million in 2016 and is projected to exhibit a CAGR of 8.2% over the forecast period (20172025), as highlighted in a new report published by Coherent Market Insights. Advantages offered by rapid medical diagnostic devices over conventional laboratory testing include rapid detection, time and cost saving, and for early detection of infectious and other diseases is expected to fuel growth of the rapid medical diagnostic devices market.Ask Sample Copy @Demand for decentralized testing is on the rise as it allows for rapid diagnosis of the disease condition and can significantly improve medical outcomes. Emerging economies such as India and Africa have limited access to laboratory testing services where, decentralized testing could create lucrative opportunities. Moreover, advantages offered by decentralized testing over laboratory testing such as time and cost efficiency are expected to fuel the demand for decentralized testing. Manufacturers are focusing on upgrading their rapid diagnostic medical devices as well as developing new and innovative devices facilitating rapid detection of various diseases. For instance, in 2017, Beckman Coulter Diagnostics received CE Mark clearance for a high-sensitivity troponin assay. This high-sensitivity troponin assay aids in diagnosis of myocardial infarction for patients suffering from chest pain or other ischemic symptoms. Furthermore, Alere, Inc. launched first-ever rapid diagnostic test, Malaria Ag P.f, for detection of asymptomatic malaria infection in May 2017. Moreover, Alere, Inc. along with its partner company GenPrime, Inc., launched point of care testing device, the xReader for work-place drug testing in 2016. In 2016, LifeScan, Inc.a Johnson & Johnson companylaunched its new OneTouch Verio Flex blood glucose monitoring system, with ColorSure technology, which is a simple, accurate, and easy-to-use meter, which offers blood sugar test results for people with diabetes.Browse 41 Market Data Tables and 27 Figures spread through 150 Pages and in-depth TOC on Rapid Medical Diagnostic Devices Market by Technology (Lateral Flow, Agglutination Assays, Flow-Through, and Biosensors), By Application (Cardio Metabolic Testing, Infectious Disease Testing, Nephrology Testing, Drugs of Abuse (DoA) Testing, Blood Glucose Testing, Pregnancy Testing, Cancer Biomarker Testing, and Others), By End User (Hospitals, Diagnostic Laboratories, Home-Care Settings, and Others), and Region (North America, Latin America, Europe, Asia Pacific, the Middle East, and, Africa) - Global Forecast to 2025Ask for customization:Manufacturers are engaged in development of advanced diagnostic devices for detection of cancer. High prevalence of cancer is propelling demand for rapid diagnostics test. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), cancer was responsible for 8.8 million deaths in 2015 worldwide. Development of rapid diagnostic tests for cancer biomarkers is important for early diagnoses and treatment of cancer. New tests for breast cancer screening by 23andMe have been developed and approved by the US FDA in March 2018. Furthermore, home-care testing for HIV infection has changed the outlook of the HIV testing as the U.S. Food & Drug Administration (FDA) approved HIV tests OraQuick In-Home HIV Test in 2012.Asia Pacific market is expected to witness significant growth over the forecast period, due to various expansion activities by key manufacturers in the region. For instance, Alere Medical Pvt. Ltd. launched integrated facility in India for manufacturing rapid point of care diagnostic devices in 2016. The company intends to make India an export hub for rapid diagnostic devices in Asia Pacific region.Key Takeaways of the Rapid Medical Diagnostic Devices Market:The global rapid medical diagnostic devices market is expected to exhibit a CAGR of 2% over the forecast period (20172025), owing to increasing product launches by the key players such as Alere, Inc., and rising demand for rapid diagnostic testsStrong competition in the market has led to increasing focus on continuous product development as in case of blood glucose monitors wherein manufacturers offer innovative glucometers with various features such as test result marking, to stay competitive in the market. This is expected to aid in market growth over the forecast period.Hospitals segment is expected to exhibit high growth rate over the forecast period, due to wide presence of point-of-care diagnostics in hospital settings and lucrative opportunities in chronic disease managementHome-care setting segment is expected to exhibit highest growth rate over the forecast period. This is due to increasing demand for devices such glucometers for self-blood glucose testing.Talk to Analyst @About Coherent Market Insights:Coherent Market Insights is a prominent market research and consulting firm offering action-ready syndicated research reports, custom market analysis, consulting services, and competitive analysis through various recommendations related to emerging market trends, technologies, and potential absolute dollar opportunity.1001 4th Ave,, #3200, Seattle, WA 98154#3200
Bone Metastasis Market Forecast Global Industry Sector with Organizations Like GE, Philips, Pfizer, Bayer, Siemens, Amgen, Merck, Eli Lilly and Company, Novartis, Pharmalucence, - 2018 Report

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Global Bone Metastasis Market Research Report is a professional and in-depth study on the current state of the Global Bone Metastasis Industry. The report provides a basic overview of the industry including definitions, classifications, applications and industry chain structure. The Global Bone Metastasis analysis is provided for the international markets including development trends, competitive landscape analysis, and key regions development status.Global Bone Metastasis Market is expected to grow significantly during the forecast period of 2018 to 2025 at a CAGR of 8.5%. The upcoming market report contains data for historic years 2016, the base year of calculation is 2017 and the forecast period is 2018 to 2025.For In depth Information Get Free Sample Copy of this Report@Global Bone Metastasis Market, By Type (Osteolytic Bone Metastasis, Osteoblastic Bone Metastasis, Mixed Bone Metastasis, Others), By Diagnosis (Biopsy, Blood Test, Imaging, Others), By Treatment (Medical Therapies, Surgical Treatment, Medication, Others), By End User, By Geography (North America, South America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, Middle East and Africa) Industry Trends and Forecast to 2025Complete report on Global Bone Metastasis Market Research Report 2017-2024 spread across 350 Pages, profiling Top companies and supports with tables and figuresMarket Definition: Global Bone Metastasis MarketBone metastasis occurs due to invasion of primary tumor in bones. Breast, prostate and lung cancers are most likely to spread to the bone. Bone cancer and bone metastases are not the same. In primary bone cancers the primary tumor actually starts in the bone but in case of bone metastasis, cancer originates from the primary tumor and then relocates to the bone. Bone metastases cause severe pain, spinal cord compression, decreased mobility, hypercalcemia, anemia and spinal instability.According to WHO, in low- and middle-income countries 70.0% of deaths occurs due to cancer. Most common sites for metastasis include upper arm bone, the skull, hip bone, upper leg bone, ribs and spine. Metastatic bone tumor is hard to cure but its growth and symptoms can be stopped or slowed down with proper treatment. . Bone metastasis is the third most common condition in metastatic cancers and occurs in 60-65% of patients with metastatic cancers. As per a paper published in NCBI, in 2008 approximately 280,000 US adults were living with metastatic bone disease. The probability of bone complications is greatest in patients with bone-only disease (81.0%) compared to patients with extra osseous first recurrences (21.0%). UBM Medica, LLC conducted trials on metastatic patients, results showed that 45.0%  75.0% patients developed functional disability every 3-4 months, 10.0% -15.0% patients developed hypercalcemia and 10.0% -20.0% patients developed long bone fractures. As per the health report survey 2.0% of total population is suffering from bone metastasis. As per a paper published in GM journal, 70.0% of prostate and breast cancer patients during the course of their disease and 40.0% of lung, renal cell and thyroid cancer patients may develop bone metastasis.Key Questions Answered in Global Bone Metastasis Market Report:-Our Report offers:- What will the market growth rate, Overview and Analysis by Type of Global Bone Metastasis Market in 2025? What are the key factors driving, Analysis by Applications and Countries Global Bone Metastasis Market? What are Dynamics, This Overview Includes Analysis of Scope, and price analysis of top Vendors Profiles of Global Bone Metastasis Market? Who are Opportunities, Risk and Driving Force of Global Bone Metastasis Market? Who are the opportunities and threats faced by the vendors in Global Bone Metastasis Market? Business Overview by Type, Applications, Gross Margin and Market Share What are the Global Bone Metastasis Market opportunities, market risk and market overview of the Market?Request for Detailed TOC:Top Key Players: Bayer AG Merck & Co., Inc. Pfizer Inc. Novartis AG Pharmalucence Inc. Koninklijke Philips N.V. GE Healthcare Siemens AG Amgen Inc Catena Pharmaceuticals Eli Lilly among others.Major Market Drivers and Restraints: Rising prevalence of cancer Increasing geriatric population Rising healthcare expenditures Lack of healthcare services in low-income countries High treatment costAvail 10% Instant Discount on Purchase of This Report Mail @ sopan.gedam@databridgemarketresearch.comKey Reasons to Purchase: To gain insightful analyses of the market and have comprehensive understanding of the Global Bone Metastasis Market and its commercial landscape. Assess the Bone Metastasis production processes, major issues, and solutions to mitigate the development risk. To understand the most affecting driving and restraining forces in the Bone Metastasis Market and its impact in the Global market. Learn about the market strategies that are being adopted by leading respective organizations. To understand the future outlook and prospects for Global Bone Metastasis Market.Inquire Before Buying @Customize report of "Global Bone Metastasis Market" as per customers requirement also available.Market Segmentations:Global Bone Metastasis Market is segmented on the basis of Type Diagnosis Treatment End User GeographyMarket Segmentations in Details:On the basis of Type, the global bone metastasis market is segmented into osteolytic bone metastasis, osteoblastic bone metastasis, mixed bone metastasis, and others.On the basis of Diagnosis, The global bone metastasis market is segmented into biopsy, blood test, imaging, and othersOn the basis of Treatment, global bone metastasis market is segmented into medical therapies, surgical treatment, medication, and others.On the basis of End User, the global bone metastasis market is classified into hospitals, clinics, diagnostic centers, and ambulatory surgical centers.On the basis of Geography, North America South America Europe Asia-Pacific Middle East & AfricaCompetitive Landscape: Global Bone Metastasis MarketThe global bone metastasis market is highly fragmented and the major players have used various strategies such as new product launches, expansions, agreements, joint ventures, partnerships, acquisitions, and others to increase their footprints in this market. The report includes market shares of bone metastasis market for global, Europe, North America, Asia Pacific and South America.Speak to Author of the report @Other ReportGlobal Innovation Management Market  Industry Trends and Forecast to 2024Global Innovation Management Market, By Geography; Type (Software, Services); Organization Size (Large Enterprises, Small & Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs)); Deployment Model (On-premises, Cloud); Application (Product Research & Development Platforms, Marketing, Design, Idea Platforms, Collective Intelligence & Prediction Platforms, Human Resource & Freelancers Platforms); Vertical (Banking, Financial Services, Insurance, IT, Media & Communication Technology, Aerospace & Defense, Public Sector & Education, Healthcare & Pharmaceuticals, Retail & Consumer Goods, Automotive & Manufacturing, Transportation & Logistics)  Industry Trends and Forecast to 2024Report Access:About Data Bridge Market Research:Data Bridge Market Research set forth itself as an unconventional and neoteric Market research and consulting firm with unparalleled level of resilience and integrated approaches. We are determined to unearth the best market opportunities and foster efficient information for your business to thrive in the market. Data Bridge endeavors to provide appropriate solutions to the complex business challenges and initiates an effortless decision-making process.Contact:Data Bridge Market ResearchTel: +1-888-387-2818Email: sopan.gedam@databridgemarketresearch.com
Hair and Care Market 2018: Global Trends, business development strategies And Opportunities Forecast - Unilever, Amway, Procter & Gamble, L'Oreal, Revlon Inc., Beiersdorf, Natura, Conair Corporation, Avon, Aveda, Henkel, Yves Rocher

Global Hair and Care Market

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According to the hair and care Market report, the global market is expected to witness a relatively higher growth rate during the forecast period. The Report also calculate the market size, the report considers the revenue generated from the sales of this Report by various application segments. The report then estimates 2018-2025 market development trends of hair and care market. Analysis of upstream raw materials, downstream demand, and current market dynamics is also carried out. In the end, the report makes some important proposals for a new project of hair and care market before evaluating its feasibility.The global hair and care market expected to reach USD 112.5 billion by 2025, from USD 81.3 billion in 2017 growing at a CAGR of 3 % during the forecast period of 2018 to 2025.FREE Sample report is available atWell known players of global hair and care market are Shiseido, Johnson & Johnson, Unilever, Amway, Procter & Gamble, L'Oreal, Revlon Inc., Beiersdorf, Natura, Conair Corporation, Avon, Aveda, Henkel, Yves Rocher, Cadiveu Professional USA, Kao Corporation, Marico Limited, Revlon Inc., Conair Corporation, Goody Products Inc., Church & Dwight Co., Inc. Combe Incorporated, Oriflame Cosmetics, The Estee Lauder Companies Inc., OLAPLEX, Pai-Shau, TONI&GUY Hairdressing, World New Hair, Brazilian Professionals - The Exclusive Distributor of B, Colgate-Palmolive and others.Years considered for this report:Historical Years: 2013-2016Base Year: 2017Estimated Year: 2018Forecast Period: 20182025Market SegmentsBased on geography, the market report covers data points for 28 countries across multiple geographies namely North America & South America, Europe, Asia-Pacific and, Middle East & AfricaSome of the major countries covered in this report are U.S., Canada, Germany, France, U.K., Netherlands, Switzerland, Turkey, Russia, China, India, South Korea, Japan, Australia, Singapore, Saudi Arabia, South Africa and, Brazil among others.Based on product type, the market is segmented into colorants, hair spray, shampoosOn the basis of distribution, the market is classified into direct selling, hypermarkets & retail chains, e-commerceFREE TOC is available atMajor Market Drivers and Restraints: The wide fluctuations in hair styling trends are driving the global professional hair care market. The youth following the celebrities and leaders trends in the hair and care product The adoption of professional hair care therapies and products Increasing professional work culture, personal grooming and appearance have become one of the primary concerns of people, as they want to maintain a professional outlook.Hair care products are made to protect hair from pollution, hair damage, dryness and nourish the hair and scalp of the skin. The hair care market includes thousands of products with different properties and uses. Such products could be made up of natural ingredients or synthetic ingredients, combined with other cleaning, moisturizing or protective substances. The global hair care market has shown a substantial growth in the recent year. For instance, according to Asia Personal Care & Cosmetics Market Guide, in 2015, U.S. personal care and cosmetics exports to China amounted to $1 billion and were predicted to become the largest global market for cosmetics in the next two to three years. There have been tremendous technological advancements in the field of cosmetics in the last decade. On Dec 2017, Shiseido (Japan) declared that it would launch its  version of skincare system called Optune in spring 2018 in Japan. This is a personalized application which would be adopted with individual skin conditions. According to algorithm, they choose the best conditions for the skin along with the tones to achieve a moisturized state in each individual.For Customize Report and Discounts, Mail us at sopan.gedam@databridgemarketresearch.comAbout Data Bridge Market Research:Data Bridge Market Research set forth itself as an unconventional and neoteric Market research and consulting firm with unparalleled level of resilience and integrated approaches. We are determined to unearth the best market opportunities and foster efficient information for your business to thrive in the market. Data Bridge endeavors to provide appropriate solutions to the complex business challenges and initiates an effortless decision-making process.Contact:Data Bridge Market ResearchTel: +1-888-387-2818Email: sopan.gedam@databridgemarketresearch.com
Event Management as a Service Market 2018 Global Analysis By Key Players  Certain, Cvent, etouches, Ungerboeck Software, XING

Event Management as a Service Industry

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WiseGuyReports.Com Publish a New Market Research Report On  Global Event Management as a Service Market 2018-2022.Description:-The analysts forecast the global event management as a service market to grow at a CAGR of 11.6% during the period 2018-2022.The process of organizing an event for a target audience is known as event management. Event management software has a set of features that help organizers plan, execute, and monitor events. In this report, cloud-based event management software is defined as event management as a service.Covered in this reportThe report covers the present scenario and the growth prospects of the global event management as a service market. To calculate the market size, the report considers the revenue generated from the subscriptions of services provided by event management service providers to end-users.Get a Sample Report @For more information or any query mail at sales@wiseguyreports.comThe market is divided into the following segments based on geography: Americas APAC EMEAThe report, global event management as a service market 2018-2022, has been prepared based on an in-depth market analysis with inputs from industry experts. The report covers the market landscape and its growth prospects over the coming years. The report also includes a discussion of the key vendors operating in this market.Key vendors Certain Cvent etouches Ungerboeck Software XINGMarket driver Need for reduced total cost of ownership For a full, detailed list, view our reportMarket challenge Data security issues For a full, detailed list, view our reportMarket trend Virtual reality in event management For a full, detailed list, view our reportKey questions answered in this report What will the market size be in 2022 and what will the growth rate be? What are the key market trends? What is driving this market? What are the challenges to market growth? Who are the key vendors in this market space? What are the market opportunities and threats faced by the key vendors? What are the strengths and weaknesses of the key vendors?Enquiry About Report @Table Of Contents  Major Key PointsPART 01: EXECUTIVE SUMMARYPART 02: SCOPE OF THE REPORTPART 03: RESEARCH METHODOLOGYPART 04: MARKET LANDSCAPE Market ecosystem Market characteristics Market segmentation analysisPART 05: MARKET SIZING Market definition Market sizing 2017 Market size and forecast 2017-2022PART 06: FIVE FORCES ANALYSIS Bargaining power of buyers Bargaining power of suppliers Threat of new entrants Threat of substitutes Threat of rivalry Market conditionPART 07: CUSTOMER LANDSCAPEPART 08: MARKET SEGMENTATION BY END-USER Segmentation by end-user Comparison by end-user Corporate  Market size and forecast 2017-2022 PO and NGO  Market size and forecast 2017-2022 Individuals  Market size and forecast 2017-2022 Market opportunity by end-userPART 09: REGIONAL LANDSCAPE Geographical segmentation Regional comparison Americas  Market size and forecast 2017-2022 EMEA  Market size and forecast 2017-2022 APAC  Market size and forecast 2017-2022 Market opportunityPART 10: DECISION FRAMEWORKPART 11: DRIVERS AND CHALLENGES Market drivers Market challengesPART 12: MARKET TRENDS Emergence of iBeacons for event management Virtual reality in event management Increase in mobile momentum Growing popularity of online educationContinuedFor more information or any query mail at sales@wiseguyreports.comABOUT US:Wise Guy Reports is part of the Wise Guy Consultants Pvt. Ltd. and offers premium progressive statistical surveying, market research reports, analysis & forecast data for industries and governments around the globe. Wise Guy Reports features an exhaustive list of market research reports from hundreds of publishers worldwide. We boast a database spanning virtually every market category and an even more comprehensive collection of market research reports under these categories and sub-categories.Office No.528,Amanora Chambers,Magarpatta Road,Hadapsar,Pune-411028.
Contraceptive Drugs and Devices Market to Perceive Exponential Growth at CAGR 7.5% Driven By BAYER HEALTHCARE AG, MERCK & Co., CHURCH & DWIGHT, WARMER CHILCOTT COMPANY, AGILE THERAPEUTICS, PFIZER Etc. Players Contraceptive Drugs and Devices Market Overview

The Global Contraceptive Drugs and Devices Market was valued at USD 21.1 billion in 2017 and is projected to grow at a CAGR of 7.5% during the forecast period (2018 - 2023). China being the worlds most populated country has around 1.36 billion population and has one of the highest rates of contraceptives use.



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Unintended pregnancies growing at a faster pace

Not using of the contraceptives or the incorrect use of the contraceptives may result in unintended pregnancies and the number of unintended pregnancies percentage is higher in the teens younger than 18 years, followed by the age group of 20-24 years. In the United States, the proportion of pregnancies that were unintended increased slightly between 2001 and 2008 (from 48% to 51%), but, by 2011 it decreased to 45%. And in 2014, these contraceptives have helped women to avoid 2 million unintended pregnancies, which would likely have resulted in 900,000 unplanned births and nearly 700,000 abortions. However, over past few years the awareness on contraception has contributed to both decline in unplanned pregnancies and also growth in the usage of the contraceptives market.

There are also other factors which are accelerating the growth of the contraceptives market is the increasing incidence of the STDs and the rapid increase in the population. The government initiatives are also promoting the use of contraceptives to avoid the unnecessary births and the health benefits from using the contraceptives have also been significant players in the growth of this market.



Key Developments in the Market

November, 2017: Teva Pharmaceuticals has signed an agreement with CooperSurgical which will acquire PARAGARD (intrauterine copper contraceptive), a product.

July, 2017: Teva Pharmaceutical has announced the launch of Vagifem 1 (estradiol vaginal inserts), 10 mcg in the US.



Key players:

BAYER HEALTHCARE AG, MERCK & Co., CHURCH & DWIGHT Co. Inc., WARMER CHILCOTT COMPANY Inc., AGILE THERAPEUTICS Inc., PFIZER, BIOSANTE PHARMACEUTICALS, MAYER LABORATORIES Inc., PANTARHEI BIOSCIENCE B.V. and TEVA PHARMACEUTICAL INDUSTRIES Ltd.



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High Treatment Costs

Wound care management is associated with high costs due to which it has a low adoption rate. According to a breakdown of wound costs provided by Smith & Nephew, 15-20% are material costs, 30-35% are nurse costs and more than 50% are hospitalization costs. Since, the hospitalization in necessary until the wound is dried, the high hospitalization costs is hindering the advance wound care management market globally. Additionally, lack of reimbursement policies all over the world is also responsible for hindering the growth of market.



North America to Dominate the Market

The Wound Care Management Devices market is segmented by product type, wound type, and geography. By geography it is segmented into North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, the Middle East and Africa and South America. North America dominates the advance wound care management market due to increasing incidences of chronic wounds, favorable reimbursement policies and rise in geriatric population. Europe is also expected to boost the growth of advance wound care management market due to increasing awareness of wound care management among geriatric population. Factors such as increasing accessibility to healthcare facilities in the region, rising medical tourism, and increasing prevalence of chronic diseases are also expected to contribute to the growth of market in this region.



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Biopsy devices Market Market shows future growth with leading industry like C.R. Bard, Inc., Leica Biosystems, Hologic, Inc., Becton, Dickinson and Company, Ethicon EndoSurgery Inc., Fujifilm Medical Systems

Biopsy devices Market

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Global Biopsy devices Market Analysing Industrial Chain, Sourcing Strategy and Downstream Buyers. The Research also provide Information about Manufacturers, Market Competition, Cost, and Market Effect Factors with Market Forecast. This enables the buyer of the report to gain a telescopic view of the competitive landscape and plan the strategies accordingly.Global Biopsy devices market is expected to garner $2,399 million by 2022, registering a CAGR of 5.5% during the period 2016-2022.The key companies profiled in the report are C.R. Bard, Inc. Leica Biosystems Hologic, Inc. Becton, Dickinson and Company Ethicon EndoSurgery Inc. Fujifilm Medical Systems Veran Medical Technologies Boston Scientific Corporation MDxHealth Mauna Kea Technologies Cook Medical, Inc. Medtronic Argon Medical Devices, Inc Intact Medical Corp., and others.Get Sample Copy of this Report:Biopsy devices market is owing to increase in several types of cancer such, as breast, prostate, & lung, and rapid technological advancements in the field of diagnostics. The emerging economies have witnessed an upsurge in the prevalence of chronic diseases due to increase in the aged population and change in lifestyles. The Emergence of novel biopsy techniques and advanced integrated imaging technology, such as MRI, CT, ultrasound scan, and others, are expected to supplement the diagnosis of chronic diseases namely, cancer using biopsy procedures. However, high cost associated with advanced biopsy technologies may restrict the market growth.Key Findings of Biopsy Devices Market: CT-guided biopsy segment is anticipated to grow at the highest CAGR of 6.3% during the forecast period. The diagnostic centers would continue to lead the revenue generating end use segment by garnering around half of the share in the overall market. Lung biopsy is projected to be the fastest growing application segment, registering a CAGR of 7.0%. The robotic guidance system segment is expected to register the highest CAGR of 7.0%. The Asia-Pacific region is projected to be the fastest growing market, with a CAGR of 7.2%. Hospitals are projected be the fastest growing end use segment, owing to increase in integration of diagnostic facilities within the premises.North America was the highest revenue generating region due to rise in incidences of chronic diseases in 2015. North America and Europe, collectively, accounted for more than three-fourths of the overall market in 2015; this trend is likely to continue over the forecast period. Factors that drive the growth of biopsy devices in the developed regions are awareness about cancer diagnosis, high purchasing power, and availability of skilled personnel to perform biopsy procedures.Make Purchase Enquiry:Table of Content:Chapter: 3 BIOPSY DEVICE MARKET OVERVIEW3.1 Market definition and scope3.2 Market Dynamics3.2.1 Top impacting factors3.2.2 Drivers3.2.3 Restrains3.2.4 Top winning strategies3.3 Porters Five Forces analysis3.3.1 Fewer suppliers lead to higher bargaining power of suppliers3.3.2 Higher concentration of buyers leads to low bargaining power3.3.3 High threat of substitutes due to presence of minimal invasive diagnostic procedures3.3.4 Low threat of new entrants due to high capital investment3.3.5 Moderate competitive rivalry3.4 Value chain analysis3.4.1 Research and product development3.4.2 Product testing3.4.3 Manufacturing3.4.4 End users3.5 Regulatory norms3.5.1 Regulatory issues of gastroenterology and urology biopsy devices in North America3.5.2 Regulatory Scenario for breast biopsy in European Union3.6 Reimbursement scenario3.6.1 Reimbursement for Breast Cancer Screening in the U.S.3.6.2 Reimbursement for Breast Reconstruction or Prosthesis3.7 Patent analysis3.7.1 The U.S.: Patent analysis, by market participants3.7.2 Europe: Patent analysis, by market participant3.7.3 Japan: Patent analysis, by market participantsAccess the latest trends and insights: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:
Hear from Saras SpA and Grupa Lotos ahead of the CEE Refining and Petrochemicals conference in Warsaw this October We interviewed Marco Schiavetti, Director of Supply and Trading for Sara SpA, and Wojciech Blew, Director of Technology Development for Grupa Lotos to gain insight into the current opportunities for European refiners to stimulate growth and ahead of the 16th annual meeting place for the CEE downstream industry. Refiners in Europe need 
Global Veal Meat market research report provides company profile for Mountain States, Strauss Brands Incorporated, Wilson International Frozen Foods, CLAUS GERMAN SAUSAGE & MEATS, JBS 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. 
Global Spelt market research report provides company profile for Doves Farm Foods, Hain Celestial, Sharpham Park, Archer Daniels Midland Company, ARDENT MILLS, Cargill 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 
Global Sucrose market research report provides company profile for New Trend, Techno Sucralose, Hanbang, Guangdong Food Industry Institute, Monsanto, JK Sucralose, Tate & Lyle, Niutang 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. 
Galleria announces holiday hours The Walden Galleria Mall has recently announced special hours of operation, as well as new initiatives for this holiday season....

COVID briefing discusses concern of rising cases, many who are still vaccine-hesitant Erie County Executive Mark Poloncarz does not know what else he can do to convince people to get vaccinated. Its...

St. Marks Episcopal Church to hold food drive St. Marks Episcopal Church is asking for the communitys help for a large food collection drive. The food drive is...
A Vancouver company called Barrett Business Services Inc. has agreed to pay a $1.5 million civil penalty to resolve accounting fraud allegations by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

Concurrently, federal prosecutors announced they have obtained a criminal indictment against BBSI's former chief financial officer, James Miller, who's been accused of falsifying financial reports.

"Mr. Miller will be pleading not guilty to the charge and defending the matter vigorously," said his lawyer, Portland attorney Janet Hoffman.

BBSI, a publicly traded company, provides human resources and other business management services. It reported $920 million in revenue last year and profits of $25.2 million.

According to Thursday's SEC settlement, Miller hid negative trends in BBSI's financials by concealing the company's workers' compensation expense and liabilities. The SEC said former controller Mark Cannon approved improper journal entries created by Miller to manipulate BBSI's tax expenses.

Separately, Cannon agreed to pay a $20,000 penalty, the agency said.

BBSI fired Miller, 54, in 2016 after he allegedly acknowledged making false journal entries to the company, according to Thursday's indictment. It alleges BBSI underreported $12 million in expenses in 2013 as a result, and that Miller netted approximately $2 million by exercising stock options and selling shares.

Miller was indicted on four counts of certifying false financial reports, prosecutors said. He faces much as 20 years in prison and a $5 million fine.

BBSI did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Hoffman said Miller's accounting entries were made in good faith and that he cooperated with the SEC's inquiry.

"All of his entries reflected his observations regarding the operations of BBSI," Hoffman said.

-- Mike Rogoway | twitter: @rogoway | 503-294-7699
Oregon's elementary students rebounded from last year's dip in reading skills, but academic achievement otherwise remained stubbornly mediocre across the state in 2018, new test scores show.

Results in Oregon's middle schools and high schools remained hard to pin down, as legions of families chose to let their teens skip standardized tests, despite officials' admonitions that taking the exams and scrutinizing the results is good for both students and their schools.

In the four years that Oregon's students have taken the nationally benchmarked Smarter Balanced tests covering reading, writing and math, performance has never been worse in math than it was this year. The share of students showing mastery of reading and writing has barely budged.

That's disappointing, particularly given Oregon's below-average results on the National Assessment of Educational Progress and the more positive achievement trajectories in many other states. Washington's scores on Smarter Balanced reading and writing tests, for instance, rose in every grade this year.

Oregon schools chief Colt Gill agreed with the bleak assessment. Asked to name a bright spot in the results, he fell silent.

"We see this as an area we need to work on," Gill said. "I would not point to a highlight."

The tests are designed to measure whether students have the skills they need to be on track for college and careers. They were vetted by college professors, teachers, curriculum experts and employers, who said they indeed measure the skills that U.S. school students need to be successful in higher education and the workplace.

In Oregon, the tests have revealed extra-large gulfs between the academic preparedness of low-income students and better-off ones and between that of white students and students of color. And those gaps have not narrowed. Fully 30 percent more not-low-income students showed mastery of necessary reading, writing and math skills than low-income students did. Latino, black and Native American students similarly lagged 25 percentage points to 30 percentage points behind white students.

Gill said he was encouraged by a 5 percentage point gain in the reading and writing scores of Oregon's Native American students, following a 4 percentage point drop the previous year. But it's unclear that the one-year rebound constitutes a trend. That is particularly true because fewer than 95 percent of Native students took the tests this year, calling into question the accuracy of the results.

He also said he is expecting to see positive results from programs launched a few years ago that devote a few million dollars a year to specifically helping black students and those learning English as a second language have more success at school.

And, he said, Oregon's graduation rates improved nearly 5 percentage points overall -- and more than 7 percentage points for blacks and Latinos -- since 2014, even with the stagnation in reading, writing and math skills.

Oregon Department of Education officials said, however, they can't point to any district as a model.

And Gill indicated he thinks Oregon educators lack the resources needed to improve outcomes broadly unless the Legislature finds the money to lower class sizes in the first four grades and add days to Oregon's short school year.

Gov. Kate Brown has pledged to do both if re-elected, a fact Gill mentioned in discussing the poor test results. Brown has not said where she thinks lawmakers could find the millions to do so and said she won't discuss the matter until next year, assuming she is re-elected.

Oregon first needs to "build a base" of smaller class sizes and a longer school year, Gill said, before it can meaningfully tackle achievement gaps that have existed in Oregon for decades.

High school results have been unreliable every year, as fewer than 95 percent of juniors take them. Statewide, about 15 percent of 11th-graders skipped the tests. This year, nearly all middle school results were also unreliable due to low test participation.

Among large districts, Portland, David Douglas and Salem-Keizer saw notable drops in mathematics performance, although Portland's scores are hard to trust because at least 9 percent and as many as 64 percent of students per grade skipped the tests.

Beaverton, Eugene, Medford and Reynolds showed the biggest year-over-year gains in reading and writing.

Unsurprisingly, the highest student achievement was recorded in schools that serve neighborhoods with wealthy, well-educated parents, such as Portland's West Hills, Lake Oswego and Riverdale.

Most of the lowest-scoring elementary schools in the Portland metro area are in two districts: Portland Public Schools and Reynolds. Reynolds' Alder, Davis and Glenfair elementary schools, which serve impoverished and immigrant families, remain at the very bottom of Oregon school performance lists, where they have been for years. Portland schools where scores indicated fewer than one-quarter of students have mastered reading include Boise-Elliot, Martin Luther King Jr., Sitton, Rigler and Cesar Chavez.

Oregon Department of Education officials worked with most of those schools for years to try to help them improve. But they said they learned from the lack of progress at many schools that they had used the wrong response, focusing on fixing individual schools rather than working with district officials on a strategic fix.

The department will start turn-around efforts with a new group of schools -- that could include a lot of the same schools -- using that district partnership approach in the coming year.

-- Betsy Hammond

betsyhammond@oregonian.com

@chalkup
The state has paid $150,000 to the estate of a man who died instantly when a tree fell across the Historic Columbia River Highway and onto his car.

Jorge Figueroa, 27, had been visiting the Columbia River Gorge from the Seattle area on June 28, 2015, when the tree came crashing down onto the Saturn sedan he was driving.

A lawsuit filed by Figueroa's family said the tree was decaying and its trunk was marred by woodpecker holes that were "easily visible" from the scenic highway.

The family faulted the Oregon Department of Transportation for failing to remove the tree, saying it posed a significant risk to the public at the "busy tourist destination" just east of Latourell Falls near Corbett.

The case had been scheduled to go to trial this week in Multnomah County Circuit Court, but was dismissed last month after Figueroa's family and the state reached a settlement.

Brian Walker, a Vancouver attorney representing Figueroa's estate, didn't return messages seeking comment.

Dave Thompson, a spokesman for the Transportation Department, declined to say why the state settled or answer questions about whether the department was aware of the condition of the tree.

Thompson said he couldn't comment because the mediation was "confidential," though the settlement agreement doesn't contain any clauses barring the state or Figueroa's attorney from talking about the case.

Thompson did say the department's maintenance crews "are regularly on the lookout" for potential hazards along the state's roads as part of their daily operations. That's especially true along roads often hit by high winds and rain, Thompson said.

The past year has been an unusual tree-removal year for the department, which Thompson said has removed more than 12,000 burned, dead or dying trees in the gorge because of the Eagle Creek fire.

In the past five to 10 years, Thompson said the department's crews have removed "hundreds, if not thousands, of trees" along corridors from Portland and Salem to the Oregon coast.

Figueroa was a father of two. Figueroa's wife, Rosalba Paola Ortega Aranda, was sitting next to Figueroa and also was seriously injured by the tree falling, the lawsuit said.

Figueroa's mother-in-law and one of the couple's children were in the back and not injured but they suffered trauma from seeing the tree crush Figueroa, the suit said.

The settlement called for his family to receive $100,000 and the estate's attorney to receive $50,000. The lawsuit sought $2.25 million from the state.

-- Aimee Green
A Cascade Locks couple delivered their baby Tuesday in their SUV while parked on the side of the road near a Troutdale outlet mall.

Valerie and Matt Gordon had planned to give birth to their second daughter with the help of a midwife group in Portland that had been managing the mother's maternity care. But after handing their 3-year-old daughter, Ada, and the family dog to Matt's parents at the outlet mall parking lot around 5 a.m. while Valerie's contractions intensified, the couple knew they had to change their plans.

By that point, Valerie Gordon, 35, had been in labor for around 45 minutes. While they drove out of the Columbia Gorge Outlets parking lot, she felt the baby's head crowning.

"We knew right then we weren't making it to the hospital to deliver the baby," Matthew Gordon, 34, told Legacy Health. The couple were about five minutes away from Legacy Mount Hood Medical Center in Gresham.

Matthew pulled over their Ford Flex. After several minutes, out came baby Claire.

Working to keep calm, the parents saw their newborn was breathing and coughing to clear her lungs. They drove straight to the hospital. Several nurses helped the family when they arrived.

One clamped the baby's umbilical cord with her fingers while Valerie and Claire were still in the SUV, and another used scissors to cut the cord. The mother and daughter were then brought into the hospital. There were no health complications with the newborn.

The Gordons left the hospital Wednesday with their new daughter, to the delight of her big sister who "just wants to feed and cuddle her," the mom told hospital staff.

-- Everton Bailey Jr.
In August, a state analyst spotted dozens of suspicious transactions when he crunched cannabis sales data: a small number of medical marijuana cardholders bought unusually large quantities of marijuana flowers on consecutive days.

Oregon regulators suspected medical marijuana patients and caregivers were exploiting the system by buying cannabis to sell on the illicit market.

The response was swift. The Oregon Liquor Control Commission, under pressure from federal officials to tackle the robust black market for marijuana, quickly issued a temporary rule that dramatically reduced the amount that medical marijuana cardholders could buy in a day.

The limit dropped from a pound and a half of marijuana to 1 ounce -- the same quantity recreational cannabis consumers are allowed to buy.

"What we saw was abuse, clear abuse of the standards," Steve Marks, executive director of the Liquor Control Commission, said Wednesday.

Over 19 days in August, for instance, one medical marijuana cardholder bought nearly 13 pounds of cannabis. Another bought 7 pounds over 10 days that month. Officials said the questionable transactions came from a small percentage of cardholders and that the typical purchase for most cardholders was 4 grams or less.

Marks said marijuana program overseers worried that the state's low marijuana prices enticed some cardholders to stock up and "take it to Iowa or wherever and sell for a profit."

"We saw that happening," he said, adding it was "a little bit of a Ponzi scheme."

Oregon has been in the crosshairs of U.S. Justice Department leaders for not doing enough to crack down on the black market. U.S. Attorney Billy Williams has repeatedly expressed frustration with the state's failure to contain production and he's chided top officials for not devoting enough resources to oversight and enforcement.

On Wednesday, patients and advocates for the medical marijuana program blasted the new limits at a contentious meeting of the state's rules advisory committee.

Advocates said medical marijuana patients sometimes need large quantities of the drug to make products they rely on to treat their conditions and they accused the state of meddling with medicine.

The rules committee, made up of marijuana industry participants and advocates, called on the Liquor Control Commission to restore daily purchase limits to 24 ounces.

The at-times boisterous crowd included some of the same activists who have long championed Oregon's 20-year-old medical marijuana program since its early days. For many, the rule reflects the latest change to a program that has experienced a steep drop-off in participation since voters approved recreational marijuana in 2014.

State statistics show Oregon has about 39,000 medical marijuana patients, down from 78,000 in 2015. The number of grow sites serving three or more patients has also plummeted from about 4,000 in 2015 to about 800 today, according to Anthony Taylor, a longtime advocate.

Cannabis is tax-free for medical marijuana patients. They also are allowed to buy more potent edibles and oils than recreational users, and until the latest rule change, they could buy more cannabis flower.

It remains a vital program for those who remain, supporters said.

Brent Kenyon, a licensed producer, processor and retailer based in Medford, accused regulators of scapegoating medical marijuana cardholders for black market diversion when recreational producers do the same.

"You cannot punish everybody for the few bad actors," he said. "You can't do it. It's not good policy."

During a particularly tense exchange, Jesse Sweet, the lawyer who has helped draft the state's rules for Oregon's legal marijuana market, asked Dr. Rachel Knox, a member of the advisory committee, to explain why one person would need so much cannabis.

"I need you to explain to me why a patient needs 6 pounds of flower," he said. Knox countered by saying the state had no proof that the transactions were linked to illegal activity and she wouldn't rule out that one person could have a legitimate medical need for a large quantity.

It was a claim that Sweet found incredulous, using an expletive to express his disbelief.

Sweet, the administrative policy and process director for the Liquor Control Commission, then got up and walked out of the crowded meeting. He eventually returned and apologized for losing his temper.

Marks, after the meeting, struck a diplomatic note, saying he was encouraged by the lively discussion and some of the advocates' proposals, including allowing patients to buy more marijuana based on a doctor's recommendation.

"We are going to look at it," he said. "We are listening."

-- Noelle Crombie

503-276-7184

@noellecrombie
BLAINE, Wash.  Authorities say a police chase ensued at the northern U.S. border crossing after a man in a truck fled from Washington state to Vancouver, B.C. without stopping for international travel processing.

The Bellingham Herald reports that the unidentified man in his 20s in a blue Ford pickup truck with Oregon plates bypassed the Peace Arch border crossing Saturday morning.

Border crossing agents reported it but he refused to pull over, evading multiple police officers for miles.

He was finally arrested by Vancouver police nearly 30 miles later, after the truck collided with a Mazda sedan and then crashed into the Rufus Drum Shop.

The 32-year-old man from Vancouver in the Mazda suffered minor injuries.

The driver of the truck faces charges of dangerous driving and causing a police pursuit.

 The Associated Press
On the night of March 23, 1984, a little boy was found crying on the steps outside the Yongsan Theatre in Seoul, South Korea. He was scooped up by the manager, a Mr. Hong, and reported to the local police station.

The boy was estimated to be about 2 and a half years old, given the name Hong Ki Hong after his rescuer, and quickly prepared to be placed for adoption.

Less than 24 hours later and a mile or so away, a little girl was dropped off by her father at a marketplace, given 1,000 won, and told to buy herself a treat. He said he'd come back for her, but he never did. When a woman found the child alone, she discovered a note in the girl's pocket which read, "Please send this child to an orphanage through police station. At present, she has no parents."

The girl said she was 4 years old and was able to tell police her name, Jee Young Lee; her father's name, Kyung Kuk Lee, and that she lived with an older sister, Sang Yeon Lee. The girl said her mother ran away because her father drank too much and beat her. Records from the Social Welfare Society Inc. don't say whether police ever tried to find her family before placing her up for adoption as well.

Through different agencies, the children were each adopted by families in the United States. The boy was raised as Justin Kragt and grew up mostly in Salem. The girl became Renee Alanko and grew up in Northern California.

And until this year, they never knew they were brother and sister.

Justin Kragt of Salem and Renee Alanko of Marin County, California, were adopted as children from South Korea and never knew their birth family. After a 23andMe DNA test, they discovered they were full-biological siblings.

In 2014, searching for some distant blood relatives, Kragt did a DNA test through the company 23andMe.

"I was hoping to find a fifth cousin, as weird as that sounds," Kragt said. He did find some distant connections and was happy with the outcome.

Kragt was born with congenital heart failure, which required open heart surgery at age 4. He had assumed he had been abandoned because he had special needs.

"I was content with that," he said. "I heard other people that had horrible stories and I just thought I'll believe in my Harry Potter story."

But Alanko, who had known the name of her father and sister, had always wanted to know more about her birth family. She had traveled to South Korea for a birth family search in 2008. With the help of an adoption agency detective, she sent out more than 200 letters to people who might be the father whose name she had given police. She heard nothing back.

This summer, Alanko, now living in the San Francisco Bay Area, took her own DNA test because she was thinking about having children. After the search in 2008, she was looking for health indicators, not family.

So it was a shock when the results of her 23andMe kit predicted she had a sibling living just 600 miles away in Salem.

Alanko's adoption report makes no mention of a younger brother, only the older sister  and that woman, she knew, might actually be an aunt or caregiver. But her adopted mother told her that when she was very young and had first arrived in the U.S., she did speak of how her cute "baby brother" was.

When she reached out to Kragt and discovered they had been abandoned in neighboring districts and within a day of each other, the pieces came together. At some point, however briefly, they had been a family.

Why their father abandoned them separately is one of many questions that still linger.

They talked over the phone and shared photos but saw each other for the first time last week when Alanko flew into Portland International Airport for a tear-filled reunion. Kragt's adoptive family was there on what happened to be Kragt's 36th birthday.

"I could not have planned a better gift to give Justin than this," said his adoptive mother, Sue Maguire.

Life was not easy for Kragt as a child. He was abused by his adopted father, who is now estranged from the rest of the family. But this moment, he said, was a joyful one.

"I always thought I was alone in the world, and I was content with that," he said before tearing up.

His sister, standing next to him, put her head on his shoulder and hugged him tight.

"Now you're stuck with me," she joked, and the pair laughed.

"I have a lot of holes that need to be filled in my heart," he said, "and this does, it patches it up."

-- Samantha Swindler

@editorswindler / 503-294-4031

sswindler@oregonian.com
A fight between a man and two southern Oregon police officers in a Carl's Jr. bathroom Wednesday ended in the man being fatally shot, authorities say.

Matthew Thayer Graves, 33, was contacted by one Eagle Point police officer outside the fast-food chain in the town around 8:45 p.m., and their interaction continued into the bathroom, Jackson County Sheriff's Capt. Tim Snaith said during a news conference Thursday.

The two got into a struggle, a second officer joined the fray, a Taser was used on Graves, and he was shot at some point after, according to Snaith.

Graves died at the scene. One of the officers was hit in the face during the fight. Both officers, who have not yet been identified, are on paid administrative leave pending an investigation by Jackson County Sheriff's Office and a review by a grand jury.

Eagle Point Police Chief Darin May said the shooting was the first involving officers from his agency in at least the 20 years he's been there.

Eagle Point is about 12 miles northeast of Medford. The department has a staff of 13, which includes non-sworn workers.

During the news conference, Snaith declined to offer more details on why Graves was first approached and what led to the the shooting because the two officers involved hadn't yet been interviewed. He and May said that would occur Monday.

The state medical examiner's office is scheduled to conduct an autopsy on Graves on Friday.

Everton Bailey Jr. of The Oregonian/OregonLive contributed to this report.

 Shane Dixon Kavanaugh
The American Civil Liberties Union is calling on Oregon's pension fund managers to stop investing in private equity funds run by Portland-based Endeavour Capital until the firm stops investing in the "exploitive" bail bonds industry.

In 2012, Endeavour Capital Fund VI, in which Oregon's pension system invested $95 million, bought Aladdin Bail Bonds, which claims to be the "largest pre-trial release service provider in America." Since the buyout, the company has expended its operations from three states to seven.

The ACLU, along with many other interest groups, says the cash bail system is inherently discriminatory against poor and minority defendants, who often can't afford the price of pre-trial release. They say the commercial bail bond industry exploits its clients, serving as expensive subprime or payday lenders to defendants who have no other recourse.

Members of the Oregon Investment Council, a five-member citizens panel that also includes the state treasurer, did not comment on the ACLU's request, which was delivered during the public comment period of Wednesday's regular meeting. And the panel is unlikely to take any proactive measures to evaluate the concerns unless and until Endeavor were to seek a new investment from the pension fund.

John Von Schlegell, a managing director for Endeavour and a board member at Aladdin, said one of his partners at Endeavour had met with the ACLU to discuss its concerns and that he agreed there are valid reforms that need to take place in the bail bond industry.

But, he said, the ACLU was oversimplifying a complicated issue, and that eliminating the commercial bail industry would cause serious public safety issues, burden taxpayers with new costs and create major problems for low-level defendants who don't know how to manage their way through the criminal justice system.

"We are against the wholesale elimination of commercial bail. It burdens taxpayers. It's a serious criminal justice issue," he said. "Someone has to make sure people come to trial, whether they're innocent of guilty. That's what bail does ... We look at it as more of an insurance company."

The ACLU is running a national campaign against the bail bond industry, and will be making the same pitch to Washington state's pension fund, according to David Rogers, executive director of the ACLU of Oregon. But Wednesday's call came in a state that abolished the commercial bail industry and related business of bounty hunting three decades ago for many of the same reasons cited by the organization. Oregon lawmakers have also resisted lobbying efforts by Aladdin and other industry players to reestablish the industry in Oregon.

The industry is also under pressure in other states. California Gov. Jerry Brown recently signed a bill that will abolish cash bail for suspects awaiting trial in that state. Starting in October 2019, that state will assess defendants' custody status based on public safety risks and the probability of them missing court dates. Aladdin, which is based near San Diego, in Carlsbad, is backing a referendum to reverse that law.

The ACLU campaign also coincides with a push for institutional investors like pension funds to place a higher emphasis on environmental, social and governance factors  so-called ESG investing  when making investment decisions. Just last week, Oregon Treasurer Tobias Read, OIC chair Rukaiyah Adams, and the state's chief investment officer, John Skjervem, participated in a "sustainable investing" summit in Portland.

The U.S. investment industry has struggled to develop quantitative measurements of those risks, particularly when it comes to the impact of social and reputational risks in investment performance. Skjervem said Wednesday that Treasury's investment management division was stepping up efforts to integrate ESG factors in its investment underwriting and risk screening process in a more meaningful way. It recently hired an investment officer, for example, who comes with that background and will focus on those factors across the portfolio.

Skjervem said Oregon has ended relationships with repeat fund managers because of business practices that were considered controversial. "We decided there was too much headline risk."

An increasingly competitive private equity industry, meanwhile, is looking at subprime lending  lending money to borrowers with less than perfect credit  as a growth opportunity. That might include buying student loans at for-profits colleges, buying receivables from hospitals, jewelry loans or bail bonds, all of which can be forms of subprime lending.

Oregon's pension fund was a pioneering investor in the private equity industry and remains an influential player, as it has maintained some of the best returns among public pension funds and has long-standing relationships with most of the biggest fund managers. It had about $16 billion in private equity fund investments as of July 31, comprising about 18 percent of its investment portfolio.

Over the years, the pension fund has faced calls from various groups to divest from funds or companies involved in specific industries, countries, or deals that were perceived as bad by labor groups. As a limited partner in the funds, Oregon doesn't dictate or manage the investments that the funds make, and the divestment requests have been seen in the past as presenting a potential conflict with managers' mandate to maximize returns.

Moreover, the state Treasury and the Oregon Investment Council are periodically called to expand its portfolio of local investments, using "Oregon money" to grow Oregon's economy. The panel has pushed back on those calls as well, but has made a smattering of investments in venture capital and private equity firms with a strong regional presence over the years.

Endeavour has been one of its go-to fund managers. Since 2000, the pension fund has invested $322 million in five successive private equity funds raised by Endeavour. The first two of those funds were home-runs, generating substantial returns, though more recent funds show more modest but still positive performance to date.

Endeavour's Oregon investments have included Alpha Broadcasting (which owns several Portland radio stations, including KINK and KXL), Bi-Mart Corp., New Seasons Market, technology consultant ProKarma, ship repair company Vigor Industrial and the Hillsboro health-care provider ZoomCare.

- Ted Sickinger

503-221-8505; @tedsickinger
WASHINGTON  Senate Republicans strongly signaled on Wednesday that they will forge ahead with embattled Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh's confirmation as his accuser called the rush for a public hearing next week unfair.

GOP senators who fretted earlier this week about the prospects for President Donald Trump's pick are now largely pushing for a vote on Kavanaugh, who is accused of sexually assaulting now-professor Christine Blasey Ford when they were teenagers, amid signs that she may decline to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee. And Trump is more convinced he should stand by Kavanaugh than he was two days ago, people close to the White House say.

Publicly, Trump has become more vocal in defending Kavanaugh, telling reporters on Wednesday that it was "very hard for me to imagine anything happened" with Ford, who detailed her allegation extensively with The Washington Post in a report published Sunday.

Ford, through her lawyers, has requested that the FBI conduct an investigation into the alleged incident before she speaks to the committee, and Senate Democrats have lined up behind her. But Republicans have not budged from their view that the FBI does not need to intervene, or from their plan to hear testimony from Kavanaugh and Ford on Monday.

Ford's attorneys have not officially declined the committee's invitation. But they reiterated Wednesday that while Ford is willing to cooperate with the Judiciary Committee, there needs to be a "full, nonpartisan investigation." Her lawyer also said having just two witnesses  Kavanaugh and Ford  was neither fair nor in good faith when there are multiple witnesses who should testify.

"Dr. Ford was reluctantly thrust into the public spotlight only two days ago," attorney Lisa Banks said. "She is currently unable to go home, and is receiving ongoing threats to her and her family's safety. Fairness and respect for her situation dictate that she should have time to deal with this."

But Republicans were increasingly determined to confirm Kavanaugh before the Nov. 6 midterm elections, checking off a major conservative accomplishment and finishing a nomination battle that has been bitterly contentious from the start.

"Requiring an FBI investigation of a 36-year-old allegation (without specific references to time or location) before Professor Ford will appear before the Judiciary Committee is not about finding the truth, but delaying the process till after the midterm elections," tweeted Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., a member of the committee who pushed for a vote "as soon as possible."

Anger grew Wednesday among Democrats who have not forgotten about the GOP's treatment of Merrick Garland, former president Barack Obama's third Supreme Court nominee who was summarily blocked by Republicans just two years ago.

"It's pretty mind-bending hypocrisy that Republicans are all of a sudden interested in expediting Supreme Court nominations," Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., said. "Listen, I get why they're nervous. They were already in trouble electorally and the way they're handling this matter doesn't help for November's purposes."

Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., who is facing one of the most competitive reelection bids this year, announced Wednesday that she would oppose Kavanaugh. But she said her decision was not based on the allegation against him  which McCaskill said was "troubling"  but his past concerns about campaign contribution limits.

Privately, Trump is being cautioned extensively to stay out of the fight over Kavanaugh, according to two White House advisers, and so far has tempered his language. He has told advisers that he is skeptical of Ford's account and the timing of the allegation, these advisers said. He continues to mention Kavanaugh's degrees and his intellect.

Meanwhile, White House aides have begun asking lawyers and others if any more women are likely to come out and make accusations, these officials said.

But Leonard Leo, the influential adviser to the administration on judicial nominations, has told attorneys and people close to the White House that he was increasingly convinced Kavanaugh would be confirmed, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, has asked Ford's attorneys to respond by Friday at 10 a.m. on whether she plans to appear before his panel. His staff has tried to set up interviews with Ford, as well as Mark Judge - a Kavanaugh friend who is alleged to have witnessed the incident - and two other potential witnesses, according to a letter Grassley sent Wednesday to Democrats on the committee.

"I have reopened the hearing because I believe that anyone who comes forward with allegations of sexual assault has a right to be heard, and because it is the committee's responsibility to fully evaluate the fitness of a nominee to the Supreme Court," Grassley wrote to Banks and Debra Katz, another lawyer for Ford. "I therefore want to give Dr. Ford an opportunity to tell her story to the Senate and, if she chooses, to the American people."

Grassley is also willing to send his staff to California to speak to Ford if she prefers, committee spokesman Garrett Ventry said. Ford is a psychology professor at Palo Alto University, located northwest of San Jose in northern California.

Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, a pivotal swing vote on Kavanaugh's confirmation, and Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., a member of the Judiciary Committee, both urged Ford to speak to senators. And Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., who like Flake also pushed the Senate to hit pause on Kavanaugh's nomination until lawmakers heard from the professor, said: "If we don't hear from both sides on Monday, let's vote."

Collins said Wednesday that Ford has a few ways she can detail her story to the committee by Monday, including in a public or private session that would be videotaped; or an interview conducted by congressional investigators.

"I don't think she can reject, having made all of these serious allegations, I don't think that she can reject all those options," Collins said in an interview with WVOM radio in Maine. "Otherwise, there are these very serious allegations hanging over the head of a nominee who has emphatically denied them. And that's just not a good way for us to end."

Grassley left open the possibility that the hearing could occur Monday with only Kavanaugh present. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Kentucky., believes he has his conference unified behind a plan for a Monday hearing  which includes building extensive timelines on Ford's story and media accounts  with or without her, according to an adviser to the Kentucky Republican.

Even as Ford and Democrats push for an FBI probe, Trump has suggested that a new FBI investigation is unnecessary. But there is precedent for the FBI stepping in late in the process of a Supreme Court nomination. In 1991, when law professor Anita Hill alleged that now-Justice Clarence Thomas had sexually harassed her, the FBI was called in to investigate.

The FBI reiterated Wednesday that it had included information about the allegations in Kavanaugh's background file, and that it is now up to the White House to decide what to do with it. A criminal inquiry is essentially out of the question, because what is alleged does not constitute a federal crime.

The FBI wouldn't compile a report offering an opinion, one way or another, on the credibility of the allegations. Rather, it would provide the White House reports on the interviews and other evidence agents gathered, and again leave it to the White House to decide what to do with Kavanaugh's nomination.

Ford has alleged that while she and Kavanaugh were at a house party in the early 1980s, when the two were in high school, Kavanaugh drunkenly pinned her to a bed, groped her and put his hand over her mouth to stifle her screams as he attempted to take off her clothes.

Rep. Anna Eshoo, D-California, whom Ford first contacted with her allegation, detailed to The Washington Post her interactions with Ford, a constituent in her Bay Area district. The two women met for roughly 90 minutes on July 20.

"It was more than obvious to me that she bore the scars of what she had been subjected to," Eshoo said Wednesday. "She doesn't have a political bone in her body. And she obviously was really terrified about what could become of her and her family."

"At the end of the meeting, I told her that I believed her," she added. "In telling her story, you know, there were details to it, and I believed her."

The Washington Post
Correction appended

Updated September 20

A group of Portland residents has started a petition calling on the mayor and other city officials to do more to stop property crimes and improve livability across the city by cracking down on homeless camps.

Enough is Enough PDX's online petition had garnered more than 1,900 signatures by early Thursday. The group claims camps have fostered violent crimes, drug use, home burglaries, fires and pollution in residential neighborhoods. Many members of the group reside in the Montavilla neighborhood, bordered on the west by Interstate 205.

The petition contends response times for 911 and non-emergency calls involving people who are homeless are delayed or ignored. City sweeps of camps are ineffective and lead to people returning to campsites, the petition claims.

The petition calls on Mayor Ted Wheeler to tour neighborhoods and talk to residents and work to address their concerns, as well as to identify the needs of people in the area who are homeless and offer more support to police officers.

The petition also demands Police Chief Danielle Outlaw and Commissioner Nick Fish increase ATV patrols and rangers in parks in East Portland. Oregon Department of Transportation leaders should prevent people from camping on their properties, and Multnomah County commissioners should consider investing more into needle exchange programs, the petition says.

The city has removed 4,272 bags of trash and cleaned around 150 campsites in the East Portland area, according to Sophia June, a spokeswoman for Wheeler. Police have also responded to more than 3,600 calls for service in the Montavilla neighborhood alone between March and August 2018.

"The Mayor's Office hears the concerns of the neighborhood and we are doing as much as we can with the resources we have," June said in in email.

In a statement Thursday, the Portland Police Bureau said officers respond to calls for service related to the homeless community daily and the bureau's call load has increased 10 percent over last year.

The majority of calls officers respond to are calls involving disturbances that include trespassing, people using drugs or drinking in public, assaults, threatening behavior and other issues that effect both people and people who are homeless, the police bureau said.

"Police didn't create this issue, nor can we solve it, but we want to help and respond in the most appropriate manner," the police bureau said. "This is a societal issue that involves mental health, substance abuse, equity as it relates to education or jobs; and of course, affordable housing. No one-size-fits-all solution exists."

The police bureau said that one reason officers struggle to respond to all calls for service in a timely manner is because of a shortage of officers.

The agency has 70 open positions for officers and 89 new hires that are either training or on a probationary period that doesn't allow them to respond to service calls alone, police said. Hiring and training officers can take more than two years.

Officers understand concerns about crimes occurring near their homes and businesses, the police bureau said. The agency offers services that help people obtain sobriety, housing and mental health treatment and works with other agencies to address illegal campsites.

The police bureau also said it's using data it collects to focus on so-called problem areas and to help determine where to increase resources to address concerns.

Enough is Enough PDX adopted the same name as another community initiative that has been around since 2014 and is aimed at encouraging residents to help prevent gang and youth violence in Portland neighborhoods. The older group has worked in coordination with Portland police.

The petition follows an analysis by The Oregonian/OregonLive of city arrest data that found 52 percent of the arrests Portland police made in 2017 were of homeless people, who make up less than 3 percent of the population. Homeless people were most often arrested on property, drug or low-level crimes, the data showed. More than 1,200 arrests were for missing court appearances or violating probation or parole. Allegations of non-violent crimes made up 86 percent of the arrests.

The American Civil Liberties of Oregon called on Wheeler and Outlaw to investigate whether officers are profiling people who are homeless. The city's police oversight agency has since launched an investigation into how Portland police officers interact with people who are homeless. Outlaw requested the investigation.

Wheeler has called for further review to know how many arrests were related to calls from the public in comparison to contact initiated by police officers.

Note: A previous version of this story contained a misspelling of the mayor's spokeswoman's name.

-- Everton Bailey Jr.

ebailey@oregonian.com

503-221-8343; @EvertonBailey
Portland Public Schools has agreed to pay $125,000 to a 9-year-old developmentally disabled girl who alleged that a district employee molested her twice in a school bathroom.

A district spokesman declined to say why the district agreed to the settlement despite a trial last year where a Multnomah County Circuit Court judge found that employee Brett Christy-Hamilton was not guilty of sexually abusing the girl.

During the trial last year, Judge David Rees took the unusual step of saying he didnt think the girl possessed the verbal ability to state she had been molested in the way child abuse investigators contended. The girl took the stand but was difficult to understand because of a speech impairment.

After the judge acquitted Christy-Hamilton, the girl's mother filed a $7.5 million lawsuit against the district, claiming it had failed to protect her child.

Documents requested by The Oregonian/OregonLive show that the district fired Christy-Hamilton in April.

"A highly publicized criminal assertion of inappropriate sexual conduct with a minor, and the real possibility that it occurred, lead to the determination that you are not qualified to be a paraeducator with PPS," the district said in the termination letter.

"There was no finding in the criminal proceeding that you did not engage in the conduct in question," the letter said. "Instead, the acquittal means only that there was not proof established beyond a reasonable doubt, the high standard of evidence for a criminal conviction.

Defense lawyer Stephen Houze said Christy-Hamilton and two other paraeducators called a meeting in 2013 with district administrators to strongly object to a district directive that they help students use the toilet without any other adults present, even if the children were the opposite sex. But they were told they must do it or face firing, according to trial testimony.

After the trial, Christy-Hamilton sent the district an intent-to-sue letter, alleging it damaged his reputation and failed to safeguard employees against false accusations of sexual abuse by requiring paraeducators to help students alone in the bathroom.

Shortly after he was fired, Christy-Hamilton sent a second letter to the district saying he also intended to sue for alleged wrongful termination. Christy-Hamilton has yet to file any lawsuits against the district.

In the termination letter to Christy-Hamilton, the district said it wasn't negligent because of its "toileting practices."

The district in June passed a new policy recommending two adults be present when helping special education students use the toilet, though it's not a requirement.

-- Aimee Green
Maybe Prineville will be visible from outer space.

Facebook said Thursday it will spend $750 million to build two more massive data centers on the outskirts of the tiny central Oregon town. The project will expand the company's complex to seven buildings and bring its total investment in the neighborhood of $2 billion.

At 3.2 million square feet, Facebook's Prineville footprint will be equivalent to putting 22 Costco stores in a community of just 10,000 people.

The gigantic scale notwithstanding, data centers are not major employers: They are cavernous, dark and mostly devoid of people, consisting of dozens or hundreds of rows of computer servers packed tightly together.

Facebook said it will add as many as 100 jobs to Prineville to accommodate the expansion, lifting its total workforce past 350. But the tally includes a large number of security contractors.

Facebook, like other Silicon Valley companies, houses its data centers in Oregon because of the state's uniquely generous tax breaks. Property tax exemptions save the social networking company nearly $20 million a year, and those savings will grow as Facebook continues building.

Crook County probably isn't giving up anything, though, since Facebook is on previously vacant desert land it bought from the county -- property that wasn't even on the tax rolls before the company opened its first corporate data center in 2012. Apple has a smaller server farm complex just up the road.

Energy used from the data centers produces $2 million in franchise fees annually, which go straight to Prineville's general fund. The city says they account for 4 percent of the city's total budget.

Thursday's announcement comes just nine months after Facebook announced its last Prineville expansion, growing from three to five data centers. The company didn't explain why another expansion is in the works so quickly, but the entire data center industry is growing rapidly as people post video and photos to their social networks and as companies move more of their computing to off-site data centers.

Intel -- Oregon's largest corporate employer -- is a major beneficiary of that growth, since it makes nearly all the processors inside the high-end computers stacked inside these data centers. The company's data center segment recorded $5.5 billion in sales last quarter, up 27 percent from a year earlier.

Facebook said in July it would finance six large solar projects, including two near Prineville, that will provide clean power to offset its energy use at the Oregon facilities. The company indicated it plans more clean energy projects to offset the additional power use from the two new buildings.

Thursday's expansion will take nearly two years to build, according to Facebook, and employ 1,500 construction workers at its peak.

The influx of data center construction workers has strained Prineville's housing supply, which is tight in the city and in neighboring communities amid a roaring comeback in the regional economy.

Prineville City Manager Steve Forrester said officials are working with multiple developers on temporary workforce housing and expect to open a 29-unit, low cost housing unit. And, he said applications for new development are up sharply, already matching the total 2017's total.

-- Mike Rogoway | twitter: @rogoway | 503-294-7699
Three Rivers Corp. was recognized with two awards from Associated Builders and Contractors Greater Michigan Chapter's Greatness and Gratitude Awards Celebration on Thursday, Sept. 13 at the Kellogg Hotel & Conference Center in East Lansing. Three Rivers Corp. received awards in the Excellence in Construction category, as well as a Diamond award in the Safety Training & Evaluation Process category.

Each year, the ABC Greater Michigan Chapter provides an opportunity for members to compete for honors in the construction industry's premier annual awards program: the Excellence in Construction Awards. The EIC Awards recognize the outstanding Merit Shop construction projects completed during the previous year by member companies.
If you have a low credit score and want to buy a home, your odds of getting a loan have improved. A study by the Fair Isaac Corporation (FICO) shows that credit scores for new mortgage originations have been dropping, suggesting that lenders are slowly relaxing the tight credit policies imposed after the housing crisis.

According to the study, new mortgage loans with credit scores less than 700 increased from 21.9% of all mortgage loans in 2009 to 29.7% in 2017. These include scores in the subprime market that can reach down into the 400s. (While the typical lower credit score limit is 620 for conforming loans and 500 for FHA loans, loans may be granted at even lower credit scores with extenuating circumstances.)

The shift in average credit scores is driven by FHA loans  as expected by the lower acceptance criteria for FHA loans. The latest Origination Insight Report from Ellie Mae shows that only 16.7% of conventional mortgage loan originations in July 2018 were associated with FICO scores less than 700.For FHA loans, over 65% of FHA loans went to borrowers with scores below 700.

Between January and March of this year, the average credit score for a new FHA loan was 672, compared to 701 between January and March of 2011. For refinances, the average score fell from 709 in mid-2012 to 661 in early 2018.

People are also going further into debt to make these home purchases. Debt-to-income (DTI) ratios  one of the primary methods of assessing a borrower's ability to repay  have been rising for FHA loans. In 2013, only 12.7% of new FHA mortgage loans had DTI ratios above 50%. In the first quarter of 2018, that percentage had doubled. Another 30% had DTI ratios between 43% and 50%.

Fair housing advocates have complained that tight credit has been stifling home ownership for years. The Housing Finance Policy Center from the Urban Institute estimated that tight credit prevented 5.2 million American households from becoming homeowners during the post-housing-crisis years of 2009-2014. However, it's fair to question the line between restrictive lending practices and enabling homeowners who really can't afford to buy a home.

Consider that a DTI ratio of 50% means that half of your income goes to all of your collective monthly debts including credit card debts, other installment loans, and certain monthly obligations like alimony and child support. With a high DTI, you have little room for any other financial hardships and have a greater risk of missing payments and defaulting.

Should you join the crowd taking advantage of looser credit? Honestly assess your financial situation  not just presently, but for the foreseeable future. Is there good reason to expect your income to increase significantly in the future? What other obligations are in your future, like child-raising expenses and college funds?

If you plan to apply for an FHA loan, review your long-term budget and set realistic housing goals. If necessary, seek financial advice from a qualified financial professional. An outside source can provide an objective view of your likelihood of handling the collective payments.

While you may now have the opportunity to buy a home even with low credit, it may not be the smartest move. Can you really afford to devote over 50% of your income to your mortgage and credit obligations? If you're that close to the financial edge, consider buying a less expensive home  or wait and work on saving more money for a future home purchase.

You can check your credit score and read your credit report for free within minutes by joining MoneyTips.

Photo iStockphoto.com/Vesnaandjic
Adapted from a recent online discussion.

Dear Carolyn:

My best friend, "Pam," and I have been friends since college, and run a small catering business together. We were married the same year and have children who all grew up together. While Pam is still married, I've been divorced for years.

I love Pam like a sister but she's a little rigid in her thinking and I think she'll disapprove of my current relationship because the man, "Gary," is married. His wife lost interest in both him and sex years ago and has looked the other way when he sees other women, as long as he's discreet, so it's not like we're doing anything really underhanded.

Pam knows I'm seeing someone and has been pushing to meet him, but I haven't told her he's married because I'm afraid she'll freak out and won't accept that the current setup works for all of us: me, Gary and his wife.

Since the wife is an occasional client of our business (that's how I met Gary), I don't want to risk introducing Gary to Pam without telling her the whole story. What's the best way to handle this? Should I keep stonewalling her or come clean?

-- Me

"I'm dating a man who is in an open marriage. Is this going to be a problem?" Proceed from there.



Dear Carolyn:

You've advised posing ideas as questions: "Do you think ... ?"

People will know they are not questions. My family does this, as if I'm too dumb to know what they're really doing. Not helpful.

-- Anonymous

Then say so! And then say what would be helpful to you.

I take issue with the notion, though, that framing things as questions equates to treating people as if they're stupid. I see it as a gesture of respect: I have thoughts, but you have the last word, so I will address whatever you have presented to me, but I will do so in a way that clearly defers to you.

That's also just my view, not a universal one -- and so it's a gesture of respect to let people know what bothers you by saying so and why. "I find this conversation frustrating." And then: "I'd appreciate just having someone to listen," or, "I would rather work this out on my own," or, "I'm well aware of how you all feel, and I respectfully ask you to drop it," or, "If you have a suggestion, them please just say it directly."

The calmer and more specific you can be, the better.



Hi, Carolyn:

I had a mutual interest in someone back in college, around five years ago, that eventually amounted to nothing. I wanted a relationship, she did not, we parted ways and have not kept in touch outside of a few social media posts.

About a week ago, she reached out in what seemed like a harmless, let's-catch-up manner. We've been texting nonstop ever since. She is overseas for work and returns in a few weeks. Am I merely an emotional/boredom crutch for her while she's on her assignment, or is there something she wants to rekindle?

-- Old Flame

Assume it's the least unless and until it proves itself as the most. That's about the limit of my divination skills. Sadly.
Saginaw Valley State University is hosting a lecture by an award-winning poet who will explore how poetry is influenced by the current political climate.

Carmen Bugan will speak at 7 p.m. Monday, Oct. 8, in the Rhea Miller Recital Hall at SVSU. The event is free and open to the public.
DowDuPont announced the senior leaders of the independent companies that will be created following the separation of its Agriculture (Corteva Agriscience) and Specialty Products (DuPont) Divisions, expected to occur by June 1, 2019. In addition, the company announced that Ed Breen, chief executive officer of DowDuPont, will become executive chairman of DuPont following the separation.

The senior leaders of Corteva Agriscience include:

James C. Collins, Jr., currently chief operating officer of the Agriculture Division, will be chief executive officer;

Greg Friedman, currently head of finance for the Agriculture Division and vice president, DuPont Investor Relations, will be executive vice president, chief financial officer.

Cornel Fuerer, currently head of legal for the Agriculture Division, will be senior vice president, general counsel.

The senior leaders of DuPont include:

Marc Doyle, currently chief operating officer of the Specialty Products Division, will be chief executive officer.

Jeanmarie Desmond, currently head of finance for the Specialty Products Division and co-controller of DowDuPont, will be executive vice president, chief financial officer.

Erik Hoover, currently head of legal for the Specialty Products Division, chief compliance officer for DuPont, and assistant secretary for DowDuPont, will be senior vice president, general counsel.

In his full-time role as executive chairman of DuPont, Breen will work closely with the senior leadership team and focus on the company's portfolio management strategy, capital allocation decisions, and, in conjunction with Marc Doyle, shareholder engagement. As CEO, Doyle will lead the organization and remain focused on business execution, growth initiatives, and further establishing a culture of innovation and operational discipline in order to maximize shareholder value. He will report to Breen.

"As we continue to make strong progress and build momentum toward the intended separations next year, we are pleased to announce the senior leadership teams that will take Corteva Agriscience and DuPont into the future," Breen said. "Over the past three years, I have seen first-hand the ability of each of these leaders to develop and execute on their respective business strategies. They have successfully delivered growth, driven integration initiatives, and captured synergies, while also taking the steps needed to build world-class organizations that will position the independent companies to win in the marketplace."

Breen continued, "Marc and Jim are highly qualified executives who have an unparalleled depth of knowledge and expertise in their respective businesses. I am confident they are the right leaders to drive each company forward and capitalize on the tremendous value creation opportunity ahead for all our stakeholders -- including shareholders, customers, employees, and partners."

"I am privileged to lead Corteva on behalf of all the important stakeholders we serve every day," Collins said. "Our combined rich history, balanced portfolio, and deep connections to our customers give me enormous confidence in Corteva's future as a focused, pure-play agriculture company. We will compete and succeed by delivering to farmers the most innovative products and value-added services in our industry. I could not be more proud to lead such a highly qualified team who are committed to accelerating innovation, executing operational efficiencies, and creating exceptional solutions for customers to grow our business and enhance value for shareholders."

"It is an honor to have the opportunity to lead the new DuPont, one of the premier innovation companies in the world," Doyle said. "We have an exceptional opportunity to shape our future by capitalizing fully on our disciplined approach to solving complex customer challenges with value-added specialized solutions that give our customers sustainable competitive advantage in the marketplace. I am confident in our team's ability to continue to drive growth and results for customers and shareholders alike. I look forward to continuing to work closely with Ed in his role as executive chairman as our company benefits from his unique strategic and operational experience."

Jim Fitterling will become chief executive officer, Howard Ungerleider will become president and chief financial officer, and Amy Wilson will become general counsel of Dow upon completion of the Materials Science Division's separation from DowDuPont, which is expected to occur by April 1, 2019. The boards of directors of the three future companies are expected to be finalized and announced by the end of October 2018.
Midland residents should have a plan in case of a fire, take the time to check smoke detector batteries, and be aware of exits, fire alarms, and family members, said Midland Fire Marshal Tony Lelo.

"Look, listen, learn, be aware, fire can happen anywhere" is the theme of this year's National Fire Protection Association campaign, which was recognized by the Midland City Council with a proclamation at its Monday meeting. Fire prevention and safety week is from Oct. 7-13 this year, coinciding with the great Chicago Fire of Oct. 8, 1871.
(Wayne Austin was born on April 26, 1941 to Claude and Jane (Wilcox) Austin in Midland. Graduating in June of 1959 from Midland Senior High, three months later he joined the Navy. He married Karol Wuelfing while in the service. Discharged in 1963, Wayne and Karol with their two small daughters were on their way home to Midland when the car motor stopped. The story continues.)

Wayne said, "Desolate. Dark. Then along came this older couple. They had a butchered hog in the back seat of the car on the floor. They had been drinking a little. They found out our situation, loaded us and everything we had in our car into their car and took off for Steamboat Springs. Today Steamboat Springs is a big city but then it was about the size of Sanford, Michigan."

Wayne continues, "We got a wrecker to haul our car in. Found us a room in a motel. The next day the only garage in town informed me that I needed a new engine. It would take a day or two to get a new motor from Denver. I had to wire home for money. Karol and the kids stayed in the motel. I would walk down to the garage, watch them work on my car. Get something cheap to eat and take it back to the motel room. It got to the point people would stop me and ask "How's the car coming?"

The new engine was put in. Wayne took a test drive and they headed for home. Once in Midland, they rented a little house on Suncrist Street in Midland. It was 1963 and the job market was slow. He applied at The Dow Chemical Co. but didn't hear from them. He did get a job with Continental Can. When that ended, he got a job with an organization calling itself Combined Insurance School in Chicago.

"There were five or six of us guys. They'd say, 'You take this street.' If you sold a policy, you earned a dollar," Wayne said. "One day I sold 36 policies to one guy and earned $36. I thought I was living high on the hog."

They covered all the small towns. Then one night they were in a motel in Flint and Wayne called home. Karol said, "Dow wants you." Wayne started working at Dow Chemical on Oct. 24, 1963. It was his dad's birthday. Wayne retired on June 30, 1995 after 31 years.

Claude Austin died from a heart attack when he was 56 years old. He had worked at Dow for 37 1/2 years in the Brine Well Department. After Claude died, Wayne's mom took his dad's guitar and put it in a closet. After she passed away, Wayne inherited his dad's guitar where it sat in the corner of their house. In May of 2017 he decided to see about having it restored. "I want it brought back to what it was like when it was new," Wayne said. "I'm waiting for it now."

Over the years, the guitar body became cracked. Pennies were soldered on the tuning keys. "It will be something to look at and remember Dad," Wayne said.

After retiring from Dow, he decided that sitting around the house wasn't what he wanted. He saw an ad in the Midland Daily News that Currie and Kendall's Law Firm were looking for a courier. "I loved that job. I loved the people. I worked 40 hours a week," Wayne said. "I was there just short of eight years and they called me in to the office at 4:45 on a Wednesday to tell me that the benefits and my salary were too much. They were going to outsource my job. Friday would be my last day but I could stay until then if I wanted to. I left that day."

Back home again, sitting around the house, he remembers a guy across the road saying, "If you want to work, see the woman at AVIS at MBS." She hired Wayne and he worked there three days a week for the next 6 1/2 years.

Karol died June 6, 2013. "She woke me up at 6 in the morning and said, 'We have to go to the hospital.' She had pain in her jaw and in her back," Wayne said. "They took tests at the hospital and kept her overnight. The next day they told us she had stage-4 cancer." Karol was working at the MBS parking at the time. Wayne said, "In six months I lost my wife, my sister and a brother-in-law. I quit everything and just stayed home."

Reflecting on his life after all these years, he talked about how his singing career began in the '70s eventually leading to having his own band. He named the band Pure Country.

Over the years he played at various events and charities, weddings and bars all over the Tri-City area, Mount Pleasant, Harrison and Houghton Lake. He played at the Brown Bag It lunches at the Tridge and drew the largest crowds they ever had.

His reputation for country music got around and he found himself opening for Nashville stars like Tammy Wynette, Marty Robbins, Mickey Gilly, Moe Bandy, Faron Young and Little Jimmy Dickens.

He played at Wheeling, West Virginia's Jamboree, at Gilly's and on the stage at the Nashville's Palace. He was on a national television show called "You Can Be A Star" hosted by Jim Ed Brown. He played on Michigan Grapevine Opry over WCEN in Mount Pleasant and at the Hickory Home Stage Show in West Branch.

"My good friend Bobby Randall lined me up with some great Nashville players and he produced an album called Pure Austin Country," Wayne said. The album sold well and he had a call from a recording company who wanted to buy 25 copies. Another record store in Sweden wanted 100 copies.

Maybe the proudest moment of his singing career was a song he wrote called "Rainy Days (Are Good for Lovin')." Bobby Randall produced the single and also played with Wayne's band.

In 2003 he was inducted into the Michigan Country Music Hall of Fame and in 2012 he was awarded the Bear Award at Butch Heath's Country Jamboree in Freeland. This award is given to people who have played country music for 50 years or more. Wayne retired in 2016. "I can't say I don't miss it but all the years of setting up and tearing down and going out to play in all kinds of weather plus the voice got to where I couldn't hit some of the high notes," he said. "I thought the time had finally come. I thought I would play forever but it wasn't to be."

He ended the interview by saying, "I would like to thank all of the loyal fans who came to listen and to dance for so many years. Also to the many musicians who played through the years in my band and some who have passed on. It was a great ride and I was blessed to be able to do all of this. Thank you."
Though features within upcoming Windows updates come and go during the beta Insider builds, one that many were looking forward toa Smart Updater feature that would hopefully cut back on awkwardly timed Windows 10 updatesis now in doubt.

Microsoft representatives said Wednesday that they had nothing to share regarding the feature, which Microsoft first introduced in Build 17723, in late July. Then, Microsoft promised that the feature would reduce the trauma caused by spontaneous reboots during Windows Update processespecially during times when a user was actively working on the PC.

We heard you, and to alleviate this pain, if you have an update pending weve updated our reboot logic to use a new system that is more adaptive and proactive, Microsoft said under a heading titled Improving your update experience. We trained a predictive model that can accurately predict when the right time to restart the device is.

Search YouTube for something like Windows Update rage, and you can get a sense for the frustration that unexpected Windows updates can cause: interrupting Twitch gaming streams, TV weather forecasts, and more. Part of the reason for the unhappy surprises may be that users havent properly configured their Active Hours or told Windows how to send them notifications when an update is pending. Nevertheless, the pain surrounding Windows updates is real, and videos documenting it certainly dont contribute any goodwill toward Windows. Its natural, then, that Microsoft would work on smoothing out the upgrade process.

PCWorld is in the process of going through, identifying, and testing the major features of the Windows 10 October 2018 Update now. Most are what wed call conveniences, general improvements to Windows that you should encounter every day, as opposed to new features youll have to choose to enable or launch.

Mark Hachman / IDG In the meantime, make sure you have your Active Hours set to prevent awkward Windows updates. (Unfortunately, if you run Windows 10 at work, your IT admins may have a policy that overrides your preferences.)

Because everyone encounters Windows updates, we were eager to confirm the presence of the Smart Updater, whichif it worked as advertisedwe would consider a small but key update to Windows 10. Finding no mention of a Smart Updater feature or Update AI or anything like that in the Settings menu, however, we reached out to Microsoft. Thats when Microsoft provided its nothing to share statement.

At this point, its not clear whether Smart Updater is, in fact, gone. Another key feature, Sets, has been delayed for at least two versions of Windowsbut Microsoft has been very clear that its taking time to improve the feature. We havent heard any similar messaging out of Redmond about getting this Smart Updater feature right. Unfortunately, though, we have nothing to share often means that a company is trying to sweep the issue under the rug.

What this means: In case it isnt clear, were highly in favor of getting a Smart Updater feature to improve the overall update experience. The only downside, as Microsoft may see it, is that it might shipbut not work as advertised. From our perspective, there are several possible solutions: completely eliminate business hours as potential upgrade times; look at the users historical usage patterns, and eliminate those times; or splash a big message on the lock screen that an upgrade is imminent. Were still hoping to see an improved Update feature, though. Fingers crossed on this one.
Unfortunately, none of those technologies are available in any games yet, but Nvidia sent reviewers some canned demos to try them in action, and well, if Deep Learning Super Sampling works anywhere near this well in shipping games, itll be black magic. The gang dives deep into the RTX 2080 and RTX 2080 Tis performance in traditional games and whether Nvidias new graphics cards perform better in HDR than the older GTX 10-series, before diving into a flood of questions by live viewers.

For all intents and purposes, the GeForce RTX 2080 performs the exact same as the previous-gen flagship. So should you buy a GeForce RTX 2080 or GTX 1080 Ti if you want a 4K/60 or ultra-fast 1440p graphics card? Gordon and Alaina have opinions. If youre watching a video version of the podcast, be sure to watch Gordons body language.

We wrap things up by touching on Radeons relevance. Should you buy an AMD graphics card instead of the GeForce RTX 2080 and RTX 2080 Ti? Definitely maybe. It depends on what sort of gaming experience youre looking for. Nvidias new high-end RTX cards target the luxury crowd.

You can witness it all in the video embedded above. You can also watch The Full Nerd episode 68 on YouTube (toss us a follow while youre there) or listen to it on Soundcloud if you prefer the audio alone.

Speaking of audio, you can subscribe to the Full Nerd in iTunes (please leave a review if you enjoy the show). Were also on Stitcher, Google Play, or you can point your favorite podcast-savvy RSS reader to: http://feeds.soundcloud.com/users/soundcloud:users:226190044/sounds.rss

Have a PC- or gaming-related question? Email thefullnerd@pcworld.com and well try to answer it in the next episode. Be sure to follow PCWorld on Facebook, YouTube, Twitch, and Twitter to watch future episodes live and pick our brains in real time!
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Police in Philadelphia are looking for a 17-year-old suspect in a brazen, broad-daylight rape of a 13-year-old girl shortly after she got off a school bus earlier this month.

As 6ABC reports, police have released a sketch of the suspect and are asking for the public's help in identifying him.

He is wanted in connection with the sexual assault of a 13-year-old girl around noon on September 6 in the 13000 of Cardella Place in the Somerton section of Philadelphia.

Police tell 6ABC the suspect grabbed the 13-year-old girl who had just exited a school bus near Bustleton Avenue and Byberry Road following early dismissal because of the heat that day:

"He approached her from behind, grabs her around the mouth and tells her he'll kill her if she does not cooperate," Philadelphia Police Captain Sekou Kinebrew told 6ABC. "He then forces her into a gated residential yard where he sexually assaulted her."

The suspect is described as a black male, 17-years-old, standing 6 feet and 155 to 165 pounds, with a slim build, crooked nose, and short black hair. He was wearing a black T-shirt with orange writing on the front, and grey sweatpants at the time of the incident.
Rose Teresa Sawyer Placey was co-owner of Purdy & Placey Specialty Travel.

Placey, 88, of Camp Hill, died Sept. 16 at home.

She was a 1948 graduate of Bishop McDevitt High School (Harrisburg Catholic), a cum laude graduate of College Misericordia, Dallas, with a bachelor's degree in English, sociology,= and secondary education with a history minor. She also attended the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Social Work.

The served as the sophomore boys English teacher and debate judge at Trinity High School 1969-70 and previously was a guidance counselor at Durfee High School in Fall River, Mass.

She was a member of Good Shepherd Roman Catholic Church, Camp Hill, co-chairman of the Bishop McDevitt Reunion Committee, life member of Holy Spirit Hospital Auxiliary, charter member of the Seton Club, nominating chairman of the South Central PA Heart Assocation, the Steering and Law Week Committee of the Dauphin County Bar Association, receptionist at Ecumenical Food Bank, Good Shepherd Church Helping Hand Committee, Council of Catholic Women, Caring Team, past school board member and its Aramethians, American Lawyers Auxiliary, Eastern Travel Association, Irish Tourist Board Shamrock Club, scholarship chairman for the PA Bar Foundation, and the Central PA Association of Women Executives.

Surviving are her husband, Richard L. Placey, Esq.; her children, Richard Placey, Esq. and his wife, Carol Swanson, Esq. of Medford, N.J., Roseann Placey Sunajko and her husband, Michael, of Middletown, Honorable Thomas Anthony Placey and his wife, Helene, of Camp Hill, and Edward Sawyer Placey and his wife, Deborah, of Southport, Conn.; and grandchildren, Madeline Sawyer Placey and Caroline Graham Placey.

From her guest book:

"A kind heart and a good soul. She will be missed."

-- The Hoovers, Tampa, Fla.

"Rose was an amazing lady and I am honored to have known her and call her my friend. She blessed the lives of those she met with kindness and inspiration, and always with a smile."

-- Linda Gustin, Enhaut

"What a beautiful mother and lady. Her heart was pure gold and her soul, one of a kind. When she made you laugh, it would last for days."

-- Marie Hall, Enola

"Rose always made me laugh with her Irish humor. A loving mother and wife and friend to many. She will be missed by all of her friends. I was privileged to be one of them."

-- JoAnn Speaker

"Mrs. P. has been part of my life for as long as I can remember. Smart, funny, and faithful. Rose had personality plus! I guarantee there were few occasions when you were with her that you didn't enjoy a good story or observation, and always a hearty laugh. I guess that is what I will miss most - Rose's laughter. It was truly joyful!"

-- Diane Velozo, Maryland

To read more obituaries, click here.

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The Pennsylvania Department of Education plans to appoint a new chief recovery officer to the Harrisburg School District, The Burg reported Wednesday.

The CRO is meant to oversee a long-term recovery plan that focuses on raising academic performance and stabilizes the district's finances.

The last CRO, Audrey Utley, stepped down on June 30 after three years in the job albeit she continued to attend the meetings.

Another option for the district would be to be placed in receivership, which a PDE spokesperson told The Burg "remains an option."

In June, Pa. Secretary of Education Pedro Rivera sent a letter to the district stating that the district would remain in state-run recovery for at least another year.

Rivera will be the only appointed Utley's replacement, the Burg reported.
A bank robber who crashed his stolen car when a dye pack concealed in the stolen cash exploded remains stuck with a 25- to 50-year prison term for the crime.

That's the status of Shariff L. Layton after a state Superior Court panel rejected his claim that the Dauphin County District Attorney's Office waited too long to prosecute him.

Layton, now 39, of Harrisburg, robbed a MidPenn Bank in Harrisburg in January 2011. He wasn't arrested for the holdup until November 2015 and was convicted during a trial last year.

He received such a long prison term because he is a repeat offender.

Layton's argument was that the four-year delay between the robbery and arrest somehow prejudiced his ability to defend himself against the charges. He insisted, for instance, that two alibi witnesses died during that time.

Judge Mary Jane Bowes didn't buy it. Layton's claims about the supposed alibi witnesses are so vague as to constitute "mere assertions," she wrote in the state court's opinion.

Harrisburg police recovered evidence soon after the robbery, including dye-stained clothes Layton had been wearing, Bowes noted. They didn't locate Layton, however. A detective interviewed two people before 2013 who implicated Layton in the holdup, but neither wanted to testify.

Federal prosecutors kept asking for more evidence before bringing charges. Layton's arrest occurred only after a city detective brought the case to the DA's office in October 2015, Bowes noted.

His conviction in the Dauphin County case might actually be the least of Layton's problems.

In June, Layton pleaded guilty in U.S. Middle District Court to federal charges for three other armed bank robberies committed in Franklin, Cumberland and Mifflin counties. Court filings show he could face a sentence of up to life in prison for those crimes.
Four people were injured by a gunman at at district judge's office in Fayette County Wednesday, but a German Township Police officer intercepted the shooter and killed him.

All of the injuries to the others were considered non-life threatening, officials said in a press conference at the Pennsylvania State Police Barracks in Uniontown Wednesday evening.

The shooting occurred at the Masontown Municipal building in the first block of East Church Street, specifically at District Judge Daniel Shimshock's office.

Station Commander Lt. Steven Downlin and Fayette County District Attorney Rich Bower relayed the following information:

A man whom officials would not identify pending notification of his next of kin entered the lobby of the municipal building holding a handgun and began shooting.

Masontown Police Department Officer R. Scott Miller engaged with the man early but was shot and took cover.

The man continued into the building and shot two men and one woman.

Other officers from the Masontown Police Department and German Township Police Department were already at the scene for scheduled hearings and quickly took action against the shooter.

The gunman was fatally wounded by a German Township Police Officer who was not identified by officials.

Dowlin commended the quick response by the officers, saying without it, many others could have been shot.

Once the situation was stabilized, the District Attorney's office was notified Downlin said.

Investigators believe the gunman was targeting someone involved in a domestic incident with him weeks prior, and Dowlin said they do not believe the judge or his staff were targeted.

Bower said court was in session for preliminary hearings, with approximately 30-40 cases scheduled to be heard Wednesday.

One of those cases involved the gunman, who was charged with strangulation, aggravated assault and terroristic threats in connection with a domestic violence incident. Bower also confirmed the gunman had an active protection from abuse order against him.

Bower spoke with Masontown Police Chief Joseph Ryan, who said the injured officer is in good condition.

MDJ Shimshock, an assistant district attorney, several defense attorneys, police officers, witnesses and administrative staff were all in the building at the time of the shooting, Bower said.

At the time of the shooting, state police ordered a lockdown at a local school, which was later lifted.

"It's unfortunate that someone lost their life, but I'm proud of my officer," German Township Police Chief David Hromada said at the press conference.

Bower said Chief Hromada was one of the officers present at the scene that ran toward the shooting during the incident, along with another officer.

Bower said there were four heroes in the incident: Chief Hromada, Officer Miller, the other officer who ran toward the shooting and the officer that killed the gunman.

Bower also thanked other first responders for responding to the shooting, without knowing if there was danger ahead.

"That's what these people do every day of their lives. Risk their lives everyday going out and today, they all were a shining light to our community," Bower said.

Trooper Robert Broadwater, the Public Information Officer for Troop B commented that this is the second active shooting the troop has seen since January, with a third intercepted by investigators before it happened in February.

"It's getting out of hand," Broadwater said, and added he hoped they are trying to get a hold of things.

In terms of security, officials said there were not metal detectors in the building and that needs to change. Bower said he spoke with another district attorney about security and would be looking into what could be done.

With that said, he knew there would never be enough protection in any place.

"You're never going to stop everything," Bower said. He said often there are police in these courtrooms, when hearings are going on, but when there aren't, there wouldn't have been any law enforcement around.

Lt. Dowlin asked again that any witnesses or anyone with cellphone video of the incident come forward to police as they continue their investigation. The Uniontown barracks can be reached at724-439-7111.

Earlier in the afternoon, Fayette County issued the following statement on the shooting:

We are deeply saddened by the events that occurred at Magisterial District Judge Dan Shimshock's office in Masontown... Posted by Fayette County PA on Wednesday, September 19, 2018

Earlier updates via the AP:

5:35 p.m.



A Fayette County commissioner has confirmed the gunman who opened fire near a crowded Pennsylvania courtroom is dead.



County Commissioner Vince Vicites said Wednesday he went to the judge's office in Masontown after he heard about the 2 p.m. shooting because several county employees work in the magistrate's court office. He was told the coroner was called to the scene because the shooter had died.



It was unclear whether the shooter had been killed by police or by self-inflicted injuries or other means.



A Fayette County 911 center supervisor says five people were injured and four were taken to hospitals for treatment. It was unclear if the deceased shooter was the fifth injured individual.



A Masontown police officer sustained minor injuries in the shooting and was treated at a local hospital.



5 p.m.



A Fayette County 911 center official confirmed that one person had died in a shooting outside of a Pennsylvania judge's office.



The center official said dispatchers did not have any information about the identity of the deceased person. A supervisor earlier confirmed that at least five people were injured and four were taken to hospitals.



Witnesses say the shooting happened around 2 p.m. Wednesday outside a county judge's office near a crowded courtroom.



State police have scheduled a news conference for 5 p.m. but have said the scene is secured.



Officials did not say whether the shooter was injured or taken into custody.

4:45 p.m.

A witness says a shooting outside a Pennsylvania judge's office started near a crowded courtroom.

Joyce Royster tells WTAE there were hundreds of people inside the courtroom when the shooting started just outside. She says people fled the courtroom as the shooter started to move inside.

Fayette County officials confirmed at least five people had been injured in the shooting around 2 p.m. Wednesday at the county's municipal building. Four people were taken to hospitals including a police officer who received minor injuries.

The Fayette County 911 center supervisor confirmed the coroner was called to the scene, but could not confirm whether there were any fatalities.

State police say the scene is secure, but did not say whether the shooter was in custody or injured. A news conference is scheduled for 5 p.m.

___

4:25 p.m.

Pennsylvania State Police say the scene is secure and no more threat remains at the office of a district court judge where at least five people were injured.

A state police spokesman said on Twitter that no schools, businesses or offices are on lockdown as of about 4 p.m.

A Fayette County official confirmed that a coroner had been called to the scene after the shooting around 2 p.m. Two victims were flown and a third was taken by ambulance to a West Virginia hospital.

A police officer with a non-life-threatening injury was being treated at a hospital in nearby Uniontown.

It was unclear if the suspected shooter was injured or taken into custody by officers, but state police said the scene at District Judge Daniel Shimshock's office had been secured.

___

3:20 p.m.

A Fayette County official says at least five people have been injured in a shooting outside of a judge's office in Pennsylvania.

The Fayette County 911 center supervisor says a coroner has been called to the scene and four people were taken to the hospital.

Masontown Mayor Toni Petrus says one of her police officers received non-life-threatening injuries in the shooting that happened about 2 p.m. Wednesday at the office of District Judge Daniel Shimshock in Masontown, about 60 miles south of Pittsburgh.

The supervisor says two victims were flown to a West Virginia hospital by helicopter and another was taken by ambulance. The police officer was being treated for hand injuries at a local hospital.

Messages left with law enforcement and county officials were not immediately returned Wednesday.
Dog the Bounty Hunter says he has joined the manhunt for fugitive Shawn Christy, who is accused of threatening President Donald Trump.

Duane Chapman told the Mansfield News Journal on Wednesday he was retained by a friend of the Christy family.

Chapman, who was already expected to be in Mansfield on Sept. 28 to talk about recovery, said he has "a very hot lead."

Christy, 26, of McAdoo, Pa., is wanted for threatening to harm and/or kill a police chief, other law enforcement officers, a district attorney and Trump.

Christy is accused of posting threats to Facebook between June 3 and 12, 2018, saying he was going to shoot Trump in the head, and was going to use "lethal force" on any law enforcement officer attempting to detain him.

A federal arrest warrant was issued for Christy on June 19th.

The search for Christy recently extended to Ohio after State Highway Patrol officers found a truck wrecked on Interstate 71 near Mansfield Sunday afternoon.

Police believe the vehicle was one Christy stole from Luzerne County.

"I have delivered messages to him," Chapman told the Mansfield News Journal. "My goal is not to shoot him but get him to surrender."
Warc has released the Effective Innovation Report for 2018, highlighting key trends of the world's most original marketing thinking.

From 'Denmark vs. Trump' campaign for Danish political party Socialistisk Folkeparti by UncleGrey. Image supplied.

Four key trends

Innovation that appeals to influencers

Innovation that builds brand equity

Product-led innovation that drives growth

Drawn from the winners of the Effective Innovation category of this year's international Warc Awards, a global search for next-generation marketing effectiveness, the report showcases innovative thinking that has transformed a business or disrupted category conventions to deliver tangible results.Warc's Lucy Aitken, managing editor, case studies, comments: "Following our analysis of the metadata around all the entries, we see that despite the considerable challenges presented by innovation, it is an increasingly popular and effective way for brands to grow."Warc's Effective Innovation Report highlights four key trends that provide valuable lessons to the advertising industry of marketing innovation that works:Many of the top-performing campaigns were designed with sharing among millennial influencers in mind to improve organic reach via their personal networks."Persuading these communities to invest their influence on your behalf is an acid test of a marketing team's preparation and ingenuity", comments jury chair Christopher Yu, VP integrated marketing strategy, innovation, and technology, US Bank.Campaigns that disrupted received ideas of how to engage millennials and the value of doing so include: Grand Prix winner '7-Second Resumes' for the Ad Council by 22squared, USA; 'Denmark vs. Trump' for Danish political party Socialistisk Folkeparti by UncleGrey; and BBC Asian Network's campaign '100% Asian. 100% British' by MullenLowe London."Each demonstrated a clear grasp of Gen Y's digitally native expectations without indulging in technical showboating", added Yu.Innovation can be an efficient and effective way to build and strengthen a brand's appeal by problem-solving, bringing the brand closer to its purpose."Innovation is not about the wacky or the weird, but instead should come from context and build brand equity," says jury member Kate Smither, chief strategy integration officer, Publicis Communications Australia."Innovation is fast becoming a tool modern marketing can use to build brands from equity out, not from technology in," continued Smither.Stand out campaigns that used brand-led innovation to build brand equity, demonstrating to consumers how they could fulfil their promise or purpose include: 'Odds' for Adidas by Taproot India; Pril's 'One-Drop Bottle' and Nissan's 'Camelpower' both by TBWA\RAAD, UAE.Innovating through products is a popular way for brands to strengthen their appeal and stand-out to attract new customers."This year's winners show how changing your product can drive growth and bring new customers to your brand. Instead of only looking to change other people's behaviour, perhaps we should first change our own," observes jury member Joseph Smeaton, planning director, DDB Sydney.Saregama's 'Carvaan' for older Indian consumers by The Womb, and Royal Caribbean's 'Seek Deeper' by MullenLowe US, that stimulated demand for cruises among a younger crowd by using Snapchat spectacles are good examples.

Royal Caribbean - Seek Deeper from YETI on Vimeo.

Utility that helps build connections

Howard Pull, strategic development director, MullenLowe Profero. Image supplied.

Brands benefitted from being 'in service' to their audiences through the creation of useful tools, products and services as opposed to traditional campaigns."By starting from a perspective of utility, by being in the service of others, you can reach new audiences, find new relevancy and change perceptions," says juror Howard Pull, strategic development director, MullenLowe Profero.He cites IDFC's 'Bank in a Box' by McCann Worldgroup as a stellar example of brand utility that helped build connections.A sample of Warc's Effective Innovation Report 2018 can be downloaded here . The report in full is available to Warc subscribers on Warc.com and includes chapter analysis with views and opinions from the judges, as well as summaries  objectives, insights, strategies and results  of the winning case studies.Now in their third year, the Warc Awards 2019 will open in November 2018. Free to enter, there is a $40,000 prize fund for the winning papers. Click here for more information.
What if it blows up?

That's Wilmer Baker's concern. In the off chance that something goes wrong with the Mariner East 2 pipeline, which runs 1,000 feet from his Lower Frankford Township home, he said he won't know until it's too late.

"Sunoco is in violation by not informing people who live near the pipeline," Baker said. "They need to say it's a danger. A bomb."

He said a recent pipeline explosion currently under investigation by the Public Utility Commission in Beaver County underscores his point.

That pipeline is owned by Energy Transfer, which is the parent company of Sunoco Pipeline LP, which is heading up the Mariner East 2 project. Sunoco officials have said transporting liquid natural gas via pipelines rather than by trucks or rail is far safer, cleaner and much less expensive.

Though Baker said he is not an opponent of the pipeline itself, he fears if what happened in Beaver County happened here, his home could be in danger, and he is arguing the company is not addressing these concerns with residents.

The Cumberland County commissioners seem to agree. They sent a letter recently Sunoco Pipeline, expressing their disappointment that company officials turned down their offer to attend a county-led meeting, field questions and address citizen concerns.

Baker went one step further. He filed a complaint with the Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission.

The complaint

Baker filed his complaint on Aug. 10, stating the company refuses to install an alarm system to warn residents of a leak. He adds they are using old iron in the parallel-running Mariner East 1 that he said is out of compliance with today's standards.

Baker states he wants the company to:

Install an alarm system for residence within 1,000 feet of the "blast zone,"

Train emergency personnel,

And replace some of the old piping with American made steel.

Though Energy Transfer spokeswoman Lisa Dillinger said "we do not discuss pending or current litigation," a filing on Monday by the attorneys for the Sunoco Pipeline denied Baker's claims, arguing they lack merit and legal backing and should be dismissed.

None of Baker's allegations can be interpreted as a violation of a law, regulation or PUC order, attorney Thomas J. Sniscak of the Harrisburg-based Hawke, McKeon and Sniscak argued in Sunoco's preliminary objections.

He says Baker's claims of the use of "old iron pipe" are in error. The original pipeline was constructed of steel pipe, and with continued maintenance, sections have been replaced with either steel or a compliant alloy. And even if his claims about the materials were accurate, Baker fails to show any violation, Sunoco's attorney argues.

Further, there is no requirement for the company to install an alarm system, and Sunoco argues its emergency response procedures and public outreach comply with state regulations and industry practices.

No hearing date has been set. Nils Hagen-Frederiksen, press secretary for the PUC, explained the case will first be assigned to the commission's Office of Administrative Law Judge for further proceedings. Typically, the next step would be holding a pre-hearing conference to discuss the schedule and other procedures for the case.

Baker said this could have been avoided with a little communication, particularly about the emergency-response procedures.

A missed opportunity?

As Sunoco Pipeline prepared to construct the state-spanning Mariner East 2 to transport liquid natural gas from Marcellus Shale drilling fields in western Pennsylvania to a terminal near Philadelphia, opponents popped up around the state, including in Cumberland County.

Rolfe Blume of Upper Frankford Township first fought the eminent domain proceedings, and his case went up to the higher courts, but he ultimately lost.

The pipeline now runs under his farm, and he says it has contaminated his well and his property has not been restored to his satisfaction.

Baker was not one of these opponents until he became concerned with the potential safety issues. For him, it started when Sunoco officials were going to attend a Lower Frankford Township supervisors' meeting July 10 to address citizen concerns, but Baker said Sunoco backed out of the meeting at the last minute.

That's when Cumberland County commissioners got involved and sent a letter to the company, offering to host a county-led meeting.

Sunoco Pipeline officials responded, saying they have spoken to Lower Frankford officials and conducted training sessions for first responders, but their response did not address the county commissioners' request for a meeting, they said.

In their response to Sunoco's reply, commissioners wrote:

"If you are sincerely interested in convincing the public that your pipeline operations are as safe as safe can be, then we would respectfully request, as the good corporate neighbor that we would expect you to be, that you reconsider and agree to attend a public meeting hosted by the county for the purpose of granting the company the opportunity to detail safety measures and to permit citizens to ask questions and voice any concerns."

Dillinger countered in an email to PennLive today that Sunoco Pipeline has been communicating with leaders and first responders in Cumberland County since the project began in 2014. These communications include regular project updates, in-person meetings, emails and calls. They also distribute a monthly newsletter to landowners along the route.

"Between multiple vehicles of communication and our trainings, we strive to communicate frequently and openly with information that is allowed for public consumption," she said.

An integral part of their communication has been the Mariner Emergency Response Outreach training program for first responders. More than 2,000 first responders along the footprint of the pipeline have attended these sessions, including 160 from Cumberland County. Among them were 12 government representatives from Upper and Lower Frankford Township, she said.

99 percent complete:

As the Mariner East 2 pipeline nears completion, some of these concerns, like Baker's, follow an explosion in Beaver County.

This wasn't part of the Mariner East 2 pipeline, but it is a gathering line operated by Sunoco's parent company, Energy Transfer.

Gathering lines are typically smaller, short-run lines running petroleum and gas to collection sites and larger transmission lines, like Mariner East, Hagen-Frederiksen of the PUC explained.

He said the Beaver County incident is under investigation.

On the Mariner East 2 line in Cumberland County, construction was halted earlier this year by the state Department of Environmental Protection over numerous violations the department said affected wells.

It has resumed again, and Dillinger said it's just about done. Work on the mainline construction is 99 percent complete.

She said the total economic impact of the pipeline construction is estimated to be $9.1 billion, supporting 9,500 total jobs each year over the six years of construction.
A mother and her son in Lancaster County are facing charges after police say they burglarized a church in Ephrata.

Officers in Ephrata were dispatched at around 11 a.m. Wednesday to a report of a burglary in progress at Trinity Lutheran Church in the 100 block of East Main Street.

Church staff told police they were at lunch when someone entered the church offices and took items from the building.

The police report did not specify what was stolen.

Officers obtained surveillance footage from the area, and observed a man and woman entering the building shortly before the burglary was reported.

Officers later saw a man and woman matching the suspects' description at 6 p.m. Wednesday in the 500 block of South State Street.

Police stopped the pair, identified as Gwendolyn L. Eckert and her son Tyler Eckert. Officers were able to recover the stolen items, and the Eckerts were placed into custody.

Gwendolyn, 39, was also wanted by the Lancaster County Sheriff's Department on an outstanding warrant, according to police.

Gwendolyn and Tyler, 19, were each charged with burglary and conspiracy.
EAST GOSHEN TOWNSHIP, Pa. -- The search is over for a man who authorities say shot at his ex-wife and then killed his parents at a retirement center Wednesday in eastern Pennsylvania.

Chester County District Attorney Tom Hogan says 59-year-old Bruce Rogal of Glenmoore received an order finalizing his divorce that awarded their home to his ex-wife and "that appears to be what set him off today."

Hogan announced Thursday morning that Rogal is dead.

Bruce Rogal is dead. There is no ongoing threat in Chester County. All law enforcement personnel involved are unhurt. ... Posted by Thomas Hogan on Wednesday, September 19, 2018

ABC6 reports that Hogan led state police, joined by SWAT team members, on a chase overnight:

The chase ended in the West Bradford Township neighborhood where Rogal's ex-wife lives, Hogan said. Rogal crashed his van into the side of a house.



When police made contact with him, he was already dead.

On Wednesday, Hogan says, Rogal first went to the house where his ex-wife was staying. Hogan says the ex-wife was in the driveway, and Rogal shot at her but missed.

He then drove to the Bellingham Assisted Living Center in East Goshen Township. Hogan says at about 6:15 p.m., Rogal shot and killed his parents, William and Nancy, both in their late 80s, and then fled.
Update

Authorities are searching for a man who they say shot at his ex-wife and then killed his parents at a retirement center Wednesday in Pennsylvania, the AP reported.

Chester County District Attorney Tom Hogan says authorities are looking for 59-year-old Bruce Rogal of Glenmoore.

Hogan says Rogal received an order finalizing his divorce that awarded the home to his ex-wife and "that appears to be what set him off today."

Rogal is wanted on charges of homicide and attempted homicide.

Hogal relayed the following information during the press conference:

Rogal first went to the house where his ex-wife was staying. Hogan says the ex-wife was in the driveway, and Rogal shot at her but missed.

Rogal shot and killed both of his parents in their apartment in the senior living center at the Bellingham Retirement Community in East Goshen.

Rogal's parents are William and Nancy Rogal, and they're both in their late 80s.

After shooting his parents, Rogal fled.

Before shooting his parents, he shot at a woman in another area, but did not hit her.

That Bellingham scene is now secure, Hogan said, and those residents are being moved back into Bellingham, except for the crime scene itself.

They are using the East Goshen Elementary building as a temporary location for displaced families.

Rogal is believed to be driving a 2002 silver Honda Odyssey, license plate ENN3549.

"He has already killed two people, he has shot at least another," Hogan said.

Police are actively looking for him right now throughout Chester County, surrounding counties and surrounding states.

Chester County Detectives of the East Goshen Police can be contacted with information. Anyone who sees him should not approach or engaged him, just call police, Hogan said.
An employee at a Rite Aid warehouse opened fire at work Thursday, killing three people before taking her own life, authorities said. Several other people were wounded.

The suspect was a 26-year-old temporary employee at the Rite Aid distribution center in northeastern Maryland, Harford County Sheriff Jeffrey Gahler told a news conference. She lived in neighboring Baltimore County. Her name was not immediately released.

It appears only one weapon, a handgun, was used and no shots were fired by responding law enforcement officers, Gahler said. The shooter used a 9 mm Glock that was registered in her name, he said. He said authorities don't know her motive. She died at a hospital from a self-inflicted gunshot wound, he said.

Krystal Watson, 33, said her husband, Eric, works at the facility and told her told her that the suspect had been arguing with somebody else near a time clock after a "Town Hall meeting."

"And she went off," she said.

"She didn't have a particular target. She was just shooting," Watson said as she drove away from a fire station where relatives tried to reunite with loved ones.

"She didn't aim. She just shot," Watson said.

Area hospitals reported receiving five patients from the incident.

Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center in Baltimore said it was treating four patients with gunshot wounds. Two were in stable condition and two who were seriously injured.

A spokesman for a health system that includes Christiana Hospital in Newark, Delaware, said one patient was being treated there. Christiana Care Health System spokesman Hiran Ratnayake said the person was in serious condition.

Gahler said the call about shots fired came in at about 9:06 a.m. and deputies and other officers were on the scene in just over five minutes.

He said the suspect had reported for the work day as usual, and around 9 a.m. the shooting began outside the business and continued inside.

The shooter had one gun and two or maybe three magazines. He did not know how many shots were fired.

Mike Carre, an employee of a furniture logistics operation next to the distribution center, said he helped tend to a wounded man.

Carre locked the doors of his workplace after the injured man came hobbling in, bleeding from his leg. He called 911 from a bathroom before helping colleagues wrap the man's blood-soaked jeans above his injury to cut off blood flow.

Carre said the man told him the shooter "just came in in a bad mood this morning. He said she's usually nice. But today, I guess it wasn't her day. She just came in to pick a fight with someone."

"She pulled out a gun and she just started shooting at her co-workers."

At a nearby fire station, family members were waiting to be reunited with loved ones. Police blocked off the road outside but were waving in cars driven by people who said they were there to meet up with people who were at the distribution center.

Reggie Rodgriguez's mother works at the distribution center. His wife had tried calling her numerous times but got no answer.

"I was calling her all morning. It went to voicemail because they keep their phones in lockers," said Kelly Rodriguez, 40.

When they finally reached his mother Thursday afternoon, Reggie Rodriguez said, "That's all I wanted to do: Hear her voice." His mother was uninjured. He said she sounded relieved the crisis was over.

A law enforcement official said authorities worked their way through the distribution center to clear the facility.

Susan Henderson, spokesman for the drugstore chain Rite Aid, described the warehouse as a support facility adjacent to a larger building.

Rite Aid released the following statement in response to the shooting:

"We are deeply saddened by the events that transpired this morning at the Liberty support facility, which is part of Rite Aid's Perryman Distribution Center in Aberdeen, Md. Local authorities have confirmed that there are multiple fatalities and casualties.



We are continuing to work closely with authorities as they conduct their investigation. The facility has been closed and we are assessing when it will be reopened. Grief counselors will be made available to our associates and will remain available as long as they are needed. Our thoughts and prayers go out to all those involved in this tragic incident, as well as their loved ones."
Two people were reportedly shot at a retirement community outside Philadelphia, according to multiple media reports.

The shooting occurred at the Bellingham Retirement Community, in the 1600 block of Boot Road in East Goshen, Chester County, Philly.com reported.

ABC Action News 6/WPVI-TV reported that a massive police response is underway, searching for the gunman.

WPVI reported that police first responded to the retirement community around 6:30 p.m. for a report of shots fired.

A lockdown is in effect for a two-mile radius of Bellingham, and the West Chester Area School District said schools are locked down.

A group of students at East High School are the only students in the building, the district said on their website.

Philly.com reported that the shooting is believed to be connected to gunfire at the Brandywine Green development in West Bradford Township.

ATF responded to the retirement community, according to a tweet from the bureau.
Wertzville Road in the area of the Interstate 81 interchange in Hampden Township seems near its bursting point.

At peak times, area residents have trouble pulling out of their housing developments. Traffic exiting I-81 has backed up onto the highway. People sometimes have to wait through through multiple cycles of the traffic signal at Wertzville and Good Hope Road.

The same thing happens at Wertzville and Technology Parkway, where crashes have become common, in some cases because of drivers trying to squeeze through the light.

Now a new hospital is proposed for the area, and people who live there or regularly pass through worry it's about to become unbearable.

"There is not a road in my district that has more traffic problems than Wertzville Road," says state Rep. Greg Rothman.

But major changes may be in store.

Penn State Health, which plans to build the hospital just north of Wertzville Road and west of the I-81 interchange, is conducting a traffic study, with the results expected to be released within two months. The study will focus on the stretch of Wertzville from Lambs Gap Road to the intersections with Valley Road and Technology Parkway. It will analyze present traffic flow combined with new traffic expected to result from the hospital, and suggest changes to help the traffic flow smoothly.

In addition, the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation has nearly finished its own traffic study focusing on the Wertzville corridor all the way from Route 114 to the Susquehanna River.

The PennDOT study came about as a request from Rothman, who grew concerned several years ago when a drive-through donut shop was proposed for the intersection of Wertzville and Good Hope.

Rothman said he expects the study will suggest possibilities such as widening Wertzville Road, which is also state Route 944, adding turning lanes and adding traffic signals. He said much of the traffic in the area results from people using it as a shortcut to avoid more congested routes. Wertzville Road, which was built as a "country road," also has sight distance problems that will likely need to be addressed, Rothman said.

Easing the situation, he said, might boil down to two possibilities: Lowering the speed limit on Wertzville Road and adding more traffic signals to slow traffic and thereby make it less appealing as a shortcut. Or widening the road and making other changes so it can handle more traffic.

Widening Wertzville would require acquiring privately owned land along the road, Rothman noted. That can be an expensive and potentially time-consuming and controversial process.

An engineer representing Penn State Health recently discussed the hospital at a public meeting in Hampden Township. Virtually all of the questions and concerns expressed by residents focused on traffic.

The hospital, which Penn State Health hopes to open in early 2021, would have about 1,000 employees spread out over three shifts. The current version of the plan includes about 1,000 parking spots, but the engineer suggested the actual need might be closer to 600.

A large office complex with about 2,000 parking spots was once approved for the same 44-acre site where the hospital would be built. As was planned for office complex, all traffic entering and leaving the hospital would use Good Hope Road, which is also the only access point for two nearby housing developments.

The Penn State engineer noted that, because of the previously-approved office complex, the section of Good Hope Road adjoining the site, with double lanes, is already built to handle extra traffic.

However, township residents pointed out the overall traffic situation has changed substantially since the office complex was approved about a decade ago. The area now has traffic from two supermarkets, UPMC's West Shore Hospital and Shaull Elementary School.

Residents also noted that in addition to employees and visitors, traffic from the new hospital will include delivery vehicles, including tractor trailers. They worry about having to share Good Hope Road with tractor trailers, with one resident suggesting "we'll have to leave our homes 15 minutes early" to compensate for the time it will take to pull out onto Wertzville Road from Good Hope.

Jeff Kelly, the assistant director of planning for Cumberland County, noted the timing of traffic signals can be adjusted to give residents longer green lights when exiting housing developments.

Kelly said he expects widening Wertzville Road, adding turning lanes and turning arrows, adjusting the timing of traffic signals, and creating a hospital access point on Wertzville will be among the things suggested by the traffic studies.

However, the Penn State Health engineer, James Snyder, said Wertzville has been designated as a "limited access" road in that area, and he considers it highly unlikely PennDOT would allow another road onto that part of Wertzville.

READ MORE: Penn State Health says new hospital, practically next door to rival, moves it closer to its customers

Similarly, residents are asking for a spur off the Wertzville Road exit from I-81 for use by traffic headed for the hospital. While the spur could only serve traffic entering the hospital, residents said it would ease the burden on Good Hope. However, Snyder said he considers it all but impossible that PennDOT would allow the spur.

But Rothman, a member of the House transportation committee, said he believes neither the spur nor a new access point on Wertzville Road are outside the realm of possiblity. "We just have to figure out solutions for what is a really, really bad situation," he said.

Another important question involves who will pay for major road upgrades. Penn State Health can only be required to pay for changes to roads and traffic signals that abut it's property, according to Kelly, the county planner. However, developers of large projects, following discussions and negotiations with local officials, sometimes contribute to additional improvements.

And if it's deemed that state-owned Wertzville Road is no longer adequate to meet local demands, PennDOT would have a role in paying for upgrades, according to Rothman. "Whatever we have to do to get PennDOT involved, that's what we'll do," said Rothman, who also said "I intend to be in the middle of finding a solution."

Some of the worst traffic backups on Wertzville Road have happened when crashes caused people to get off I-81 to seek an alternate route, or when construction projects cause I-81 traffic to seek a faster route.

However, I-81 was recently widened to three lanes in that area, meaning fewer people will see Wertzville as a faster alternative, thereby already easing some of the local traffic burden. "Traffic is like water. It takes the path of least resistance," Rothman said.

Rothman also noted that commercially-zoned land around the Wertzville Road interchange of I-81 is being developed as planned, and one consequence is more local traffic. "We want economic growth and economic vitality. There is a price to pay for it. How do we figure out a way to mitigate that?," he said.

Rothman also noted, "We've been spoiled for a long time by not having congestion on our secondary roads."
By Thomas A. Firey

This is a story about corporate and investor strategy, government meddling, and chocolate. (Cue Homer Simpson...)

Thomas A. Firey (Cato Institute photo)

It involves the Hershey Company, the pioneering U.S. chocolate maker. Typically, Hershey is the top seller of candy in the United States--but it is not the largest U.S. candy maker.

That distinction goes to its bitter rival, Mars Inc., which has larger global sales. (For a history of the rivalry, including tales of corporate espionage, see Joel Glenn Brenner's The Emperors of Chocolate.)

Hershey has long wanted to expand its global sales, in part to diversify away from its exposure to the U.S. business cycle.

Toward that end, in 2010 the firm tried to buy UK-based Cadbury, a seemingly ideal acquisition since Hershey already holds the license to make Cadbury candies for the U.S. market. But Kraft Foods ultimately outbid Hershey for Cadbury and later spun off much of the acquisition and some other Kraft ventures to form the snack maker Mondelez.

Hershey has also looked to expand its position in the American market. Earlier this year, it made a play for the U.S. division of Switzerland-based Nestle, but again lost out, this time to Italian firm Ferrero (the maker of Nutella).

But Hershey has been successful with smaller acquisitions, picking up boutique confectioners Scharffen Berger in 2005, Dagoba Organic Chocolate in 2006, and Brookside Foods in 2011.

The firm has interests beyond chocolate; purchasing Mauna Loa Macadamia Nut Corp. in 2004, Krave Jerky in 2015, and Amplify Snack Brands (the maker of SkinnyPop) in 2017. It also once held the Friendly's restaurant chain and the pasta-maker that produces Ronzoni and San Georgio dried pastas.

Those non-chocolate acquisitions should raise an eyebrow.

The finance literature generally takes a skeptical view of mergers and acquisitions (M&A).

To understand why, imagine that Megacorp has its eye on Independent Inc. Roughly speaking, Independent's shareholders should only sell if Megacorp offers payment greater than the present value of Independent's expected future returns. And Megacorp should offer such payment only if it's less than the present value of the expected returns from the acquisition.

Acquiring firms often claim they can perform such magic. The combined firm will attract better financing, they say, or enter new markets. Or the acquiring firm's management skill will improve the target firm's efficiency. Or the acquiring firm has shrewdly negotiated a heavily discounted purchase price. "Synergy" gets tossed around a lot.

Sometimes that magic happens, but other times it proves to be an illusion. Acquiring firms are susceptible to the winner's curse, over-bidding for the target either because the acquirer overvalues the target or overrates the acquirer's ability to boost the value of the newly combined firm.

Empirical work on M&A suggests that acquirers' shareholders tend to lose out on these deals while target-firm shareholders tend to benefit (see Malmendier, Moretti, and Peters)--though this conclusion is not unanimous (see Wang).

My sense of the literature is that M&As are more likely to succeed when the acquirer and the target are in the same business, and thus can combine their expertise, reduce overhead, and increase their market power as both a buyer and seller.

An example is Exxon and Mobil's 1999 merger, which combined Exxon's renowned management skill with Mobil's strong innovator talents. M&As also are more likely to succeed when the acquisitions are small. Hershey's purchases of Scharffen Berger, Dagoba, and Brookside may fit both of these categories.

But otherwise, M&A get dicey. Among the legendary disasters are AOL-Time Warnerand Enron's expansion into metals, water service, and fiber optics.

General Electric once was hailed for its magic conglomerate touch, but not anymore, and Disney may be losing its touch. Even mergers of firms in similar businesses can lead to disaster, as exemplified by Sears-Kmart, Daimler Chrysler, Sprint-Nextel, Bank of America-Countrywide, and the New York Central and Pennsylvania Railroads.

So why do corporate officers pursue M&A? One possible explanation should sound familiar to students of public choice: corporate officers want the prestige--not to mention the compensatory rewards--of completing news-generating megadeals and leading ever-larger and more visible firms. Unfortunately, their gain can come at shareholders' expense.

But, M&A supporters might respond, shareholders can benefit from such acquisitions: the combined firm's different business lines diversify its revenues, making it less susceptible to a particular industry's cycles.

Prima facie, this idea seems to have merit; wise investors diversify their portfolios, after all. But that underscores why firms shouldn't engage in such M&A: shareholders can diversify on their own and don't need firms to do so on their behalf. The shareholders seem to be better off when firms "stick to their knitting," working to prosper in their particular industries.

But in Hershey's unique case, diversification through M&A may have merit.

The Hershey Company's most prominent shareholder is the Hershey Trust, a philanthropic trust established by Milton S. Hershey himself over a century ago. The Trust oversees and finances the Milton Hershey School, which cares for and educates disadvantaged youth. A board of directors oversees the Trust and, because it is a state-chartered charity, the Pennsylvania Attorney General is responsible for ensuring that the directors abide by the charter. M.S. (as Milton Hershey is still affectionately called in central Pennsylvania) apparently thought the combination of public and private authority over the Trust would help it remain faithful to his vision.

Generally speaking, this appears to have worked. The Milton Hershey School is well respected, with a campus that looks a bit like MIT's and an endowment to match. Moreover, following M.S.'s personal example, the Trust, Hershey Co., and their employees are generous benefactors of the town of Hershey, supporting all sorts of civic activities, holding public officials accountable for schools and infrastructure, and simply handing out lots of free chocolate. (My wife and I moved to the area in part to enjoy Hershey's many positive externalities.)

That's not to say that there hasn't been mischief over the years. The Trust board has made some questionable uses of the Trust's money, for instance. And Pennsylvania's AGs have taken some suspect actions and inactions concerning the Trust.

Among the AG mischief is obstructing Trust efforts to sell its Hershey Co. shares. The Trust's motivation to sell is the same as any long-term investor: to diversify its holdings and reduce variation in its revenue stream. Though the Hershey Co. has many shareholders, the Trust holds special shares that give it roughly 80% of shareholder voting rights. Any good Pennsylvania politician--and an elected AG must be a good politician--would loathe seeing the Trust unload its shares for fear that jobs, spillover benefits, and the Hershey Co. prestige would decrease or leave South-central Pennsylvania altogether. In 2002, then-AG Mike Fisher (who had designs on the governor's mansion) blocked a rumored Hershey sale, and in 2016 the AG's office (then nominally headed by Kathleen Kane, but transitioning) apparently strong-armed the Trust's board to back away from a sale to Mondelez.

So if the Trust can't diversify its assets, then it would be helpful if the Hershey Co. were to do so through M&A. The Trust and Company have different boards with different fiduciary responsibilities (though also some shared members) and Hershey Co. managers answer only to the company's board; the latter board is certainly mindful of the former's concerns. That may explain some of the Hershey Company's M&A interests.

To be clear, this is my theory of what's driving some of the Hershey M&A activities. No official at either the Trust or the Hershey Co. is on record professing this strategy, and Hershey Co. officials are responsible to all of the firm's shareholders, not just the Trust. Still, my theory nicely fits the facts and the finance literature.

And it leads to a question: If I'm right about this strategy, is it good for other Hershey Co. shareholders?

It may be, at least in some cases. The Trust's inability to diversify makes it a well-motivated activist investor, carefully watching over the Hershey Co. So, for instance, the Trust is rumored to have restrained Hershey Co. executives from getting into a bidding war with Kraft over Cadbury and risking falling prey to the winner's curse. On the other hand, the Trust's inability to sell its control over the Hershey Co. means other shareholders can't benefit from such a sale--remember, target-firm shareholders tend to make out better than acquiring-firm shareholders. And, of course, Hershey M&A risk the same problems that befall other firms' M&A.

To this outsider (and non-financial adviser), the Hershey Co. appears to be a well-run and increasingly marketing-savvy firm. Also, it performed well during last decade's recession, suggesting it has some countercyclical value. (In tough times, Americans apparently reach for a Reese's Cup--and who can blame them?)

Those features are appealing for certain groups of investors. But those investors--not to mention the Hershey Co., the Trust, and the disadvantaged children it supports--would all be better off if politicians were to respect the Trust's right to make investment decisions like any other shareholder.

Thomas A. Firey, of Harrisburg, is a senior fellow with the Cato Institute, a libertarian think-tank in Washington D.C. He wrote this piece for Econolog, where it first appeared. His work appears frequently on PennLive Opinion.
HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) -- Susquehanna County is the first Pennsylvania county to buy a voting system under new security standards by Gov. Tom Wolf's administration.

State and county officials said Thursday the new optical scan system will be in use for the Nov. 6 general election.

Wolf earlier this year ordered counties to replace their electronic voting systems with machines that leave a paper trail as a safeguard against hacking.

Counties have warned that the price tag is a major problem. But Wolf's administration says many other counties appear likely to implement new systems in 2019, while some may wait until the 2020 primary.

Wolf's order followed last year's disclosure by the federal government that election systems in at least 21 states, including Pennsylvania, were targeted by hackers before the 2016 presidential election.
It didn't take long for policy differences to show up in a Wednesday forum between incumbent Republican U.S. Rep. Scott Perry and his Democratic challenger George Scott.

Both men seek to represent the new 10th Congressional District, comprised of Dauphin County, Cumberland County from Carlisle east to the Susquehanna, and the northern part of York County.

Here's a look at some of the key contrasts that emerged in a Q&A session before the Rotary Club of York.

Immigration:

Both voiced general support for immigration reforms that would ensure a constant flow of workers to fill jobs in a growing American economy, including the fruit farms of South Central Pennsylvania.

But their top priorities are different.

Scott emphasized any new policy on immigration must include a path to citizenship for the "dreamers," those undocumented immigrants who were brought here as children and have literally grown up here.

Perry stressed stronger border security:

"Just like you lock your home at night, you don't let people just wander in and out of your home, and you can't let people wander in and out of our country without knowing what their intentions are."

He noted his support this summer for an unsuccessful bill supported by House conservatives that would have sharply reduced legal immigration while beefing up border security, cracked down on so-called sanctuary cities and required employers to use an internet-based system called E-Verify to confirm that they are hiring legal workers.

The Goodlatte bill he voted for in June would also have offered a three-year renewable legal status to DACA recipients.

Gun control:

Scott voiced his support for a variety of gun reform measures, including;

Mandatory background checks for all gun buyers.

Steps to reduce the lethality of weapons like a legislative ban on the bump-stock device used by the shooter in the Las Vegas massacre.

Funding of research into the root causes of gun violence by the federal Centers for Disease Prevention and Control.

He stopped short of a full-throated endorsement of a ban on assault-style weapons Wednesday - his Web site calls for restricting the sale of assault weapons - but Scott made clear he will support and work for reforms.

"We have got a major issue with gun violence and we need to wrap our arms around it and do something about it, and stop kicking this can down the road.," Scott said.

Perry, a strident supporter of gun owners' rights with an "A-plus" rating from the National Rifle Association, turned a gun question into support for bolstering school safety.

He said the priority should be on making schools safer, and he indicated the best way to do that is to provide resources that school board's can make decisions at the local level about how to best use.

Perry further said President Trump's executive order banning the sale of bump stocks should solve that issue, and he argued that a prior ban on the sale of assault-style weapons had no measurable effect on gun violence.

Preserving Social Security:

Both candidates stressed they would not change the benefits formula for current recipients.

Perry said the key to preserving Social Security for the long haul will likely come down to changing the benefit formulas to reflect the new balance between recipients and active workers.

"What has to happen at some point is that formula's going to have to change for younger folks," Perry said.

"They're going to have to probably retire later, and folks that are paying in during for their working years are probably going to have to pay a little more for their retirement in the future."

Scott said before formula changes are made to Social Security, Congress should lift the current cap on payroll taxes that means someone making $128,000 per year pays the same as someone making $12.8 million....

"That doesn't seem fair to me," Scott said.

"That fund could be fixed financially for upwards of potentially 40 years by simply lifting the cap on the payroll taxes," Scott said. "So let's take a look at that, and making sure that the millionaires and the billionaires in our society are paying their fair share."

The Freedom Caucus

Scott seemed intent on making an issue of Perry's membership in the Freedom Caucus, a group of hardline conservative members who often pride themselves on placing adherence to principle over compromise.

Scott blasted the group as hypocritical in attacking budget deficits in a Democratic administration, but then turning around with a Republican president and supporting a tax cut that is projected to add $1.5 trillion to the national debt over the next decade.

"You can't have it both ways," Scott said, saying the better approach would be to try to strike a bipartisan approach to attacking the national debt and other issues.

"The Freedom Caucus are the people that are actually trying to save the money," Perry countered, offering a vigorous defense of his actions on both federal spending and tax cut bills.

"Even though we provided a tax cut to every single person in the room federal revenues are actually up," Perry noted. "The federal government is taking in more money because people are working, the economy is growing, there is more opportunity."

A U.S. Treasury report capturing all federal revenues through July confirms that revenue is up just a tick under 1 percent.

"What didn't happen, is spending reductions," Perry continued, explaining why he also was one of just 20 House members to vote against the latest spending bill passed by the House.

He is, Perry said, part of a group that is making tough, but consistent decisions.

Trade and tariffs:

Perry says he can live with the tariffs as a short term policy to get to a better place, noting that many small towns in the 10th District have lost a major employer or two under the existing structures.

Perry also said he wants to leave the president with maximum flexibility to act in the nation's best interest, and believes Trump's policy of some short-term pain for longer-term gain is worth playing out.

"While I don't like the tariffs, I don't really see a better vehicle" to getting to fairer trade deals, Perry said.

Scott said he prefers seeing the United States work through the existing international trade structures to go after bad actors.

He opposes unilateral tariffs like those that Trump has imposed, citing the impact they are likely to have moving forward on major regional employers like Harley-Davidson, and small businesses like the midstate's farm families.

Scott said he supports a bill sponsored by Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tennessee, that would give Congress a greater role on this issue by requiring legislative approval of any tariffs imposed by a president for national security reasons.

Future leadership of the U.S. House

Perry said he will support Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio as Republican leader and, if the GOP holds the majority, Speaker of the House.

Perry said he believes that Jordan, a co-founder of the Freedom Caucus, will give rank-and-file members greater ability to participate in the shaping of legislation.

"At this point, unfortunately, we have more closed rules. What that means is there's fewer opportunities for rank-and-file members to offer amendments (to bills).

"That's how we support the members of our district, is by participating.... I didn't go to Congress, as I told the Speaker, to take orders," Perry said. "I came to Congress to participate and represent the people."

Scott said he won't support the re-election of Nancy Pelosi as the Democrats' leader, but he did not name his top choice to replace her.
Luis Martinez/ABC News(WASHINGTON) -- President Donald Trump announced Thursday that the remains of two U.S. Army soldiers missing in the Korean War nearly seven decades ago have been identified from the 55 boxes turned over by North Korea this summer.



The president tweeted out their names, noting they were "identified as a result of my Summit with Chairman Kim," referring to North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.



"These HEROES are home, they may Rest In Peace, and hopefully their families can have closure," Trump tweeted.



The two soldiers were Master Sgt. Charles Hobart McDaniel and Private First Class William H. Jones who both went missing in November 1950.



McDaniel was a medic with the 8th Cavalry Regiment Medical Company, supporting the regiment's 3rd Battalion when he was reported missing in action on November 2, 1950, after his unit fought with Chinese military forces near the village of Unsan in North Korea.



Jones was a member of Company E, 2nd Battalion, 24th Infantry Regiment, 25th Infantry Division, who was reported missing on November 26, 1950, after his unit fought Chinese forces near Pakchon, North Korea.



Shortly before the president tweeted, Kelly McKeague, the director of the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA) told reporters two of the 55 boxes contained two partial skulls that had dental remains, along with two clavicles. DPAA researchers used dental records, chest x-rays and DNA samples to conclusively identify the remains of the two soldiers.



The Army notified both families earlier this week that the remains of their loved ones had been recovered.



McKeague said the names were being announced "as part of the National POW/MIA Recognition Day" on Friday.



On August 1, Vice President Mike Pence was in Hawaii to preside over the repatriation ceremony for the remains included in the 55 boxes.



On Thursday, Pence presented a flag that covered one of those cases to the Korean War Veterans Memorial.



"As the son of a Korean War combat veteran, I may have no greater honor in my service as your Vice President than the honor that was afforded by me by our Commander in Chief to attend that ceremony," said Pence. "And receive those heroic remains and this flag on that day."



The transfer of the boxes was a direct result of President Trump's June 12 summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.



After the boxes were returned to the United States DPAA officials said they would begin immediate forensics work to identify some of the remains.



Among the 55 boxes, DPAA researchers also recovered a dog tag that belonged to McDaniel.



The dog tag was among other American-made artifacts including boots, buttons, canteens and a steel combat helmet found in the boxes.



In August, DPAA officials presented McDaniel's dog tag to his two sons Charles McDaniel Jr., 71, and Larry, 70. DPAA officials said at the time that they did not know whether McDaniel's remains might also be included in the 55 boxes.



DPAA officials said they did not know whether McDaniel's remains might also be included in the 55 boxes, but that did not matter to McDaniel's sons.



This is my father, said Charles Jr. "Were just overwhelmed that out of all these boxes that came back, and out of all of these thousands of people, were the only ones that have certitude."



DPAA estimates there are 7,684 Americans unaccounted for from the Korean War. Of those, approximately 5,300 are believed to be located inside North Korea.



From 1990 to 1994, the U.S. recovered 208 caskets with as many as 400 remains contained inside of them, DPAA said. From 1996 to 2005, 229 additional caskets were found and transferred.



DPAA has identified locations where they believe there are major concentrations of remains inside North Korea.



Next Wednesday, the United States will repatriate to South Korea 64 sets of remains of South Korean service members that were included in the 208 caskets recovered from North Korea in the early 1990s.

Copyright  2018, ABC Radio. All rights reserved.
Manila (CNN Philippines Life)  In the wake of the demise of print magazines, its revelatory how former editors have remade themselves. Moving online is the logical move, but some old-timey editors (not naming names) have decided that they dont want to have anything to do with the era of clickbait journalism. Others, like Pauline Suaco-Juan, have emerged from a brief retirement to conquer new worlds, parlaying the skills and knowledge gained from years in publishing to energize, of all things, a government agency.

Suaco-Juan, who was at the helm of Preview magazine for 15 years, is perhaps the last of her kind  a fashion editrix who set the tone of fashion coverage and sparked careers in photography, design, makeup, modeling, styling and much more, becoming the stuff of legend. Junior staff members feared her, and employees from less stylish Summit titles shook as she walked down the office hallways in her signature statement footwear.

Unlike the Miranda Priestly archetype, however, Suaco-Juan was neither imposing nor mean. She was exacting, but she was uplifting, and many a Preview girl flourished under her wing. Non-fashion colleagues had the utmost respect for her because she stood as living proof that one could be intelligent and also make their whole world about fashion. She has a masters degree in Media and Communications from the London School of Economics and a closetful of Louboutins  so if there was one reason to be intimidated by her, its that she can pick apart your article and tell you what you shouldnt be wearing.

After an epic decade-and-a-half run as editor-in-chief, Suaco-Juan stepped down from Preview in Jan. 2016, ahead of Summits full digital migration and the shuttering of its most beloved print titles, which culminated in May this year.

I was living my dona life, traveling with the kids, she says of the two years she didnt have an office job. Her Instagram posts during this period revealed journeys through places like Sevilla, London, Morocco, and Prague, wonderfully art-directed and thoughtfully captioned the way only a true editor would.

Its similar to what I was doing before, but the medium is different. I was selling clothes, shampoo, makeup. Like in publishing, you get to tell stories. A lot of it is really going back to the heart of things, marketing our Pinoy products to the rest of the world, says Suaco-Juan. Photo by KITKAT PAJARO

Meanwhile, The Center for International Trade Expositions and Missions (CITEM) was actively looking for an executive director, and had contacted Amina Aranaz-Alunan and Rajo Laurel, both members of the Fashion and Design Council of the Philippines. Laurel told CITEM they had full-time jobs  but he knew someone who didnt, and called Suaco-Juan up. So I submitted my resume to Sec. Mon [DTI Secretary Ramon Lopez], and after a long series of interviews, here I am.

Right now, here is the Y Cafe, where Suaco-Juan will give the opening remarks at her very first media presser as CITEMs new executive director. Sworn in last Aug. 10, her team is already in full swing for CREATE Philippines 2018, a trade platform for graphics and communications designers to be held on Sept. 22 to 23. On stage, she tells the audience that she used to be one of them. As a former editor, she was part of the creative industry while also championing it, recognizing its role as a driver of economic growth in terms of mobilizing innovation and generating jobs.

The creative sector, which includes filmmakers, musicians, theater performers, animators, graphic artists and the like, is predicted to be the next sunshine industry, replacing BPOs when it comes to exporting content and services. The industry has recently begun to be formally organized, led by the Creative Economy Council of the Philippines, a group that is charting a roadmap to growing the creative economy and establishing UNESCO Creative Cities in the country.

Its weird, it feels like my first day at Preview, Suaco-Juan tells me about the transition to her new job. When I became EIC, I had come from broadcasting so it was kind of a leftfield choice for Liza [Gokongwei] to promote me, in the same way they chose someone from outside of the bureaucracy.

The biggest learning curve for Suaco-Juan in her new position has been picking up the jargon of government-speak. Especially all the acronyms, she says. You take it for granted that everyone speaks the same language. Photo by KITKAT PAJARO

When you think about it though, it makes perfect sense for someone like her to take over CITEM. She has been attending and reviewing their events for years, and having worked closely with designers and brands, she knows exactly what clients are looking for. It was a golden opportunity to do something concrete after years of hearing comments and critiques from within the industry.

CITEM, an agency under the Department of Trade and Industry, holds three core trade shows: Manila FAME, the biannual showcase of outstanding furniture and accessories design; IFEX, a food festival highlighting specialty products, and the newer CREATE Philippines, which is only in its second year.

While trade shows are the main vehicle through which CITEM promotes their products, Suaco-Juan says they are looking into innovative ways to explore the trade show experience on a digital platform. As I said during the interview, its similar to what I was doing before, but the medium is different. I was selling clothes, shampoo, makeup. Like in publishing, you get to tell stories. A lot of it is really going back to the heart of things, marketing our Pinoy products to the rest of the world.

It turns out that the biggest learning curve for Suaco-Juan in her new position has been picking up the jargon of government-speak. Especially all the acronyms, she says. You take it for granted that everyone speaks the same language. To this, she has enlisted the help of two other former colleagues in Summit, Owen Maddela and Ichi Apostol-Acosta, with whom she has been bouncing off ideas for years and who immediately gets what shes trying to do. Yes, folks, there is life after publishing.

Suaco-Juan believes that the agency can really benefit from the practices of the private sector. CITEM is phenomenal at what it does, but at the end of the day, when youre tied down to the nitty gritty of the operational aspects, you lose the time to reflect on what new ideas can be brought in, she says. Thats one of the things I can bring in  because Im rested!
Fitzgerald memorial to be closed to the public and live-streamed

The annual S.S. Edmund Fitzgerald memorial event, which takes take place every Nov. 10 at Whitefish Point, will be a closed event this year.
Maxiavalanche is a Mass-Start race, with qualifying on Saturday and 2 race runs by the different ability groups on Sunday!

With 300 riders at the start, this first edition has been a great success!

The finish line is in the thermal-city center

The conditions were really perfect, and not only for biking!

Youn Deniaud takes the win for the third time this year! He wins the Europe Cup and will be flying to the Megavalanche Reunion Island!

After Vallnord (Andorra) in June and Cervinia (Italy) in July, Ax 3 Domaines (French Pyrenees) hosted the last Maxiavalanche Europe Cup of the year in perfect conditions!
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For months, Fox News blowhard Sean Hannity has been smearing Robert Mueller, calling him conflicted and saying he should be removed as special counsel.

For even longer, the right-wing extremist has attacked the fake news for reporting facts instead of the tinfoil hat nonsense he spews on a nightly basis.

On Monday, it was revealed that the real person with conflicts and credibility issues isnt Mueller or high-ranking FBI officials  though most of us have already known that.

Its Sean Hannity.

As it was reported a short time ago by CNN and other outlets, Donald Trumps personal attorney Michael Cohen also represents Fox News host Sean Hannity, Cohens attorneys said Monday afternoon.

Whats worse is that Hannity didnt bother to inform his viewers  not that they would have minded  that he is a client of the legally troubled Michael Cohen, who also represents the President of the United States.

If Fox News wants to continue to pretend to be a legitimate news organization, Hannity should be fired immediately. Even for them, this is over the line.

As Democratic Congressman Gerry Connoly of Virginia said on CNN a short time ago, His word can never again be trusted given the fact that he consciously did not reveal this relationship.

Video:

Congressman to FOX NEWS FIRE Sean Hannity pic.twitter.com/O5ZVWIcwzF  PoliticsVideoChannel (@politvidchannel) April 16, 2018

The Democratic representative said laid out all the damage Hannity has already done and said todays development is the final nail in Hannitys coffin:

Todays announcement that Sean Hannity was the third client, to me, deserves a lot of attention. Sean Hannity has been among the lowest of the low, wrestling in the mud of birth conspiracies, Seth Rich conspiracies about the young man who tragically was murdered here in Washington  that maybe that was a different kind of murder. All kinds of conspiracy theories about Hillary Clinton. Distributing false and fake news left and right. And now what we learn is, as hes defending the presidents lawyer on television, he has a conflict on interest, an ethical conflict of interest. He is one of those clients. He never revealed that. And I think thats a big stain on certainly Mr. Hannity but also Fox News.  I think they ought to fire Sean Hannity. He is so into this like a pig in the mud, he cant get out of it. I think he deserves to be fired. His word can never again be trusted given the fact that he consciously did not reveal this relationship.

Note to Fox: Either fire Hannity, or call yourself state TV

A real news organization cant allow one of its primetime news commentators to spend hours on television reporting on and interviewing Michael Cohen without once revealing that its his lawyer, too  or that he frequently seeks his legal counsel and advice.

As legal analyst Seth Abramson noted a short time ago, this is the stuff of state television, not a legitimate news outlet.

Fox News has to fire Hannity. You cant have a host who interviews his own lawyer on TV without disclosing it, and who interviews a politician hes regularly advising on policy without disclosing it, and not become state television rather than a news outlet measured by Nielsen. pic.twitter.com/OvjaQw4QsE  Seth Abramson (@SethAbramson) April 16, 2018

Ultimately, Fox News has never been a credible source of information, and it never will be.

But Hannity, who repeatedly questions the credibility and character of those who hold Donald Trump accountable, has crossed the line. Fox News should acknowledge that and act accordingly.

If they choose to do nothing and continue to allow Sean Hannity to regurgitate his venomous propaganda on their airwaves, they need to own up to what they really are: not a news organization dedicated to informing the American people, but state TV meant to protect Donald Trump.
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The political winds continued to shift against the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh on Wednesday as a key red state Democrat announced plans to vote no on Donald Trumps Supreme Court nominee.

As PoliticusUSA reported a short time ago, Missouri Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill explained her position in a statement on social media, focusing on his legal positions and not the current controversy over Kavanaughs past.

McCaskill said Kavanaughs positions on several key issues, most importantly the avalanche of dark, anonymous money that is crushing our democracy are troubling to her.

The full statement via Sen. McCaskills Twitter account:

I will vote no on Judge Kavanaugh. pic.twitter.com/AeNC6clHbq  Claire McCaskill (@clairecmc) September 19, 2018

This is a bad sign for Republicans

For months, political pundits have claimed that Democrats in red states would face a difficult choice when it comes to their vote on Kavanaughs SCOTUS nomination.

But Sen. McCaskills announcement on Wednesday shows that perhaps it wont be so difficult after all. In fact, its increasingly looking like a more difficult vote for Republican candidates across the country.

For Democrats, its quickly becoming an easy choice to come out against a man who faces credible allegations that he tried to rape a girl in high school.

For Republicans, they must decide whether Kavanaugh is the kind of man they want to defend, particularly with less than two months before the midterm elections  especially when more information is likely to come out.

With Democrats in deep red states jumping ship on Kavanaugh, its clear where the political winds are headed. If the GOP wants to minimize the blue wave thats about to sweep across the country, they would be smart to abandon Brett Kavanaughs nomination and delay any motion to fill the vacant Supreme Court seat until after the November elections.

Follow Sean Colarossi on Facebook.
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Former Secretary of State John Kerry took Donald Trump to the woodshed on Wednesday, saying his incompetence and reckless policy decisions have wrecked Americas image abroad.

In an interview with MSNBCs Ari Melber, Kerry was responding to Trump, who accused the former Democratic nominee of having illegal meetings with the very hostile Iranian regime in what he calls an effort to undercut the current administration.

Kerry, who has amped up his attacks on Trump in recent days, scoffed at the presidents suggestion, calling it another attack meant to distract from the fact that Trump has repeatedly embarrassed America on the world stage.

This administration doesnt want to debate the real issues because they cant, Kerry said. This is just an effort to avoid their own incompetence, their own inability to do things in Washington in a presidential manner, and I think the American people see through it.

Video:

John Kerry is fed up with Trump destroying the good work done under Obama

If there is one person who knows about international relationships, its John Kerry. As a Vietnam war hero who went on to become a productive Secretary of State under President Barack Obama, he has more knowledge of foreign policy in his pinky toe than Trump will ever have.

Kerry helped negotiate the landmark Iran deal, which put a lid on the hostile governments nuclear program. Trump, of course, tore it up because it had Barack Obamas name on it.

The same thing happened with the Paris climate accord, which Trump pulled the United States out of  making America the only country in the world who isnt now signed onto the pact.

All of that goes without mentioning the fact that Trump has repeatedly picked fights with close U.S. allies like Canada, Germany, the UK and others, all while heaping praise on sworn American enemies like Russia and North Korea.

As John Kerry pointed out on Wednesday, Trumps attacks on him have no merit. They are nothing but a distraction from this presidents embarrassing failures on the world stage.

Follow Sean Colarossi on Facebook.
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Democratic Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) said to mark his words. If Democrats win the Senate, they will investigate this allegation against Brett Kavanaugh.

Video:

Sen. Whitehouse was asked how he will evaluate the testimony without an investigation, and he answered, There is no such thing as a fair credibility check without having done the investigation. And sooner or later, mark my words, there will be an investigation into this. It may be in a subsequent Congress, but you cant get away with having something like this take place, and then have a federal judge perhaps, lie about it, and then fail at the most basic task of investigation.

Todd followed up by asking if this meant that a Democratic Senate Judiciary Committee would investigate Kavanaugh. Sen. Whitehouse said, I cant speak for a whole committee, but I dont there are many people on the Democratic side who want to let this rest in this circumstance.

Brett Kavanaugh Could Be Heading For Impeachment

It doesnt matter if Kavanaugh is confirmed to the Supreme Court or not, if Democrats take back the Senate, there could be a full investigation coming. Kavanaugh is a sitting federal judge. If he committed a sexual assault, Democrats from the House and Senate would act to remove him from the federal bench.

Republicans need to take this warning seriously because they are kicking a hornets nest and are about to get stung. Democrats arent going to forget or move on. If Republicans ram Brett Kavanaugh through the Senate, and Democrats take back control in 2018, Brett Kavanaugh may be headed for the same fate as the man who nominated him.

It is possible that the American people could soon see both Trump and his Supreme Court nominee tried and impeached.

For more discussion about this story join our Rachel Maddow and MSNBC group.

Follow Jason Easley on Facebook.
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The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is reportedly reallocating more than $260 million in funds this year to house the increased number of detained migrant children.

According to a letter from HHS Secretary Alex Azar obtained by Yahoo News, more than $180 million coming from medical-related programs within the department, such as cancer research. The other $80 million is coming from refugee funds that were allocated to help refugees but are not being used.

The planned funding diversions within HHS include:

$13 million from the National Cancer Institute, $5.7 million from the Ryan White HIV/AIDS program, and Many millions more from programs within the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

The HHS report addresses funding issues for the current fiscal year ending at the end of this month. It has become public at a time of great scrutiny of the way the Trump administration has been handling immigrant families. and children.

The New York Times reported last week that the number of detained migrant children in the U.S. has skyrocketed under President Trump, from 2,400 in May 2017 to a record-high 12,800 earlier this month. Data from HHSs Office of Refugee Resettlement showed that there are 13,312 migrant children in federal custody as of Wednesday.

Arizona newspapers have also just reported that many shelters used to house separated migrant children will have to be closed because of state law violations. The State of Arizona said that Southwest Key, which operates 13 facilities for separated children, couldnt provide required information on the protections the migrant children have against dangerous felons while in the organizations care. As a result, Southwest Key received a notice of intent to revoke the 13 licenses.

There have been many disturbing reports of both health risks and sexual abuse of children in the migrant children shelters that may be closed.

Attorney Michael Avenatti, who has represented more than 90 mothers and hundreds of kids over the issue of family separation, posted a tweet expressing his concerns.

First Trump took children from mothers and fathers, then he placed those children at risk for sexual assault. Every American should be outraged, regardless of your politics.

First Trump took children from mothers and fathers, then he placed those children at risk for sexual assault. Every American should be outraged, regardless of your politics. #Basta https://t.co/UKl6Y7E9jR  Michael Avenatti (@MichaelAvenatti) September 20, 2018

Avenatti also made the following comments about the children in custody:

There are still hundreds of children that remain separated from their mothers and fathers. Especially with the language barrier, most of these kids dont speak English, theyre in a strange country. What the government needs to do is expedite the reunification of all these kids with their parents,

Rather than try to help the children in custody, the Trump administration is committed to keeping them incarcerated in conditions that most people consider inhumane. In order to pay for this they are taking money from cancer and other health research.

In the meantime, children are living in unsafe conditions and are subject to abuse. It is time that the American people demand a better solution to the immigration problem than keeping children in jail.
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Despite the lowest presidential approval ratings in history just before a midterm election President Donald Trump insanely is predicting massive Republican victories in November. And the reason for this, he says, is that people like the job Im doing.

Trumps remarks came during an interview with Hill.TV and proved once again that he is more out of touch with reality than any president in U.S. history.

While the president is saying how confident he is that GOP candidates will win on November 6th, every other political analyst and opinion poll predicts that will NOT happen.

I think were going to do much better than anyone thinks because the economy is so good, and people do like the job Im doing, the president said. We probably have the greatest economy in history, he added.

Of course many people have shown the president many different kinds of economic statistics that prove the current U.S. economy is not the greatest in history. There is no measure that can be used to demonstrate that what Trump says is true. In fact the only thing today that is the greatest is the size of the U.S. deficit which has been growing exponentially since Trump took office.

Still, the president told Hill.TV that the economy would be a driving factor for Republican candidates and there would not be widespread Democratic victories in the midterms.

And then, in another laughable claim, Trump said that Republicans would do better than expected in November because of his personal health and management style. And hes still bragging about the scores he supposedly received on his physical exam.

You know, I took that test when I got my last physical, and the doctor said thats one of the highest scores weve ever seen, Trump said. I did that not because I wanted but I did it, I was always good at testing.

Trump apparently thinks concerned voters will choose Republicans in the upcoming elections because he is good at testing. But thats not all, of course. Its also because of his stability.

But if theres anything great about me its stability, and Im a good manager. Always been a good manager, but you know, I have a vision, Trump said.

At that point in the interview Trump started reminiscing about his improbable victory over a large Republican presidential primary field in 2016 that featured 17 candidates. But then he felt the need to point out that the number was actually larger than that. He was unhappy that when talking about the 2016 GOP primaries people usually forget to count former Virginia Gov. Jim Gilmore as a Republican candidate, which would make the total number of 2016 GOP candidates 18 instead of 17.

It was actually 18, including Gilmore, just so you know. People say 17 but it was actually 18, you know he was the Governor of Virginia, so it was 18, the president said.

What wasnt clear from the interview was why the President of the United States think anybody cares at this point whether there were 17 or 18 Republican candidates for president in 2016.

Still basking in his great 2016 victories, Trump said that the many conflicting strategies of his opponents made it harder to defeat him.

Theyve tried so many narratives with me, the president said.

The narrative, the different narratives, theyve tried all different narratives. Theyve tried that, they tried, hes a dictator, hes a fascist. One of them did, one of them did, hes losing it, and the next week they went into, Hes the most brilliant mind. Hes taking over the country. Hes a fascist, hes a dictator, and hes gonna make the 8 years into life. OK.

Last week, I was incompetent and now, Im, you know, taking over the world. OK? Its incredible. Its sick, Trump said.

One thing thats clear from this interview is that Donald Trump is not well. Instead of talking about the problems of the country, he just wanted to live in the past and talk about his 2016 victories and how great he is.

He clearly has continuing delusions that everybody loves him and because of that he will help carry Republicans to victory in November. Of course if Republicans lose it will be all their fault, not his.

Donald Trump is living in the past because he knows his future is grim. Once Democrats win control of the House they will begin investigations and possibly impeachment hearings. No matter how deluded he is, Trump cannot change the stark reality of his current situation. He cannot change the fact that very soon he will be held accountable for his many crimes and misdeeds.
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By Gina Cherelus

(Reuters)  A number of people were shot and killed on Thursday at a Rite Aid distribution center in Perryman, Maryland, and the suspected shooter was in custody and critical condition, the county sheriff said.

The shooting occurred shortly after 9 a.m. EDT (1300 GMT) in Perryman, about 34 miles (55 km) northeast of Baltimore.

I can confirm multiple wounded and multiple fatalities, Harford County Sheriff Jeffrey Gahler told reporters at a news briefing, without offering a specific number. He did not provide any details regarding the suspects identity or possible motive behind the shooting.

An NBC reporter, Pete Williams, said multiple law enforcement sources told him the shooter was a woman.

A law enforcement source told Reuters that officials believe the suspect had a work-related grievance.

The suspect used a single handgun, the sheriff said, and no officers fired any shots at the scene. He declined to respond to a reporter who asked whether that suggested the suspects injuries were self-inflicted.

The Rite Aid center sits among a number of warehouses. The facility has nearly 1,000 employees, company spokesman Pete Strella said, and processes products, including pharmaceuticals, for delivery to more than 2,500 stores.

The shooting took place a few miles from the Aberdeen Proving Ground, a large Army facility where military technology is developed and tested, according to Harford Countys website.

Governor Larry Hogan said his office was closely monitoring the horrific shooting.

Our prayers are with all those impacted, including our first responders, Hogan wrote on Twitter. The State stands ready to offer any support.

Agents from the Baltimore offices of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) and the FBI also responded, the agencies said.

The shooting occurred a day after a man shot and wounded four people, including a police officer, at a Pennsylvania court building before he was killed by police, according to Pennsylvania State Police.

(Reporting by Gina Cherelus in New York; additional reporting by Mark Hosenball in London; editing by Jonathan Oatis)
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Senators Mazie Hirono (D-HI) and Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) accepted a letter on Thursday afternoon signed by over 1,000 Holton-Arms alumnae saying not only do they believe Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, but they demand an investigation.

Video:

.@SenGillibrand: Who is not asking the FBI to investigate these claims? The White House. Judge Kavanaugh has not asked to have the FBI to review these claims. Is that the reaction of an innocent person? It is not. pic.twitter.com/qzkD4lPyrV  CBS News (@CBSNews) September 20, 2018

.@HoltonArms alumna Alexis Goldstein said it best. "Don't mess with Dr. Christine Blasey Ford. Don't mess with the alumnae of the Holton-Arms School. But most importantly, don't mess with survivors." pic.twitter.com/vfLJWcYNvs  Senator Mazie Hirono (@maziehirono) September 20, 2018

The letter:

We are alumnae of the Holton-Arms School, and we are writing in support of Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, a fellow Holton graduate.

We believe Dr. Blasey Ford and are grateful that she came forward to tell her story. It demands a thorough and independent investigation before the Senate can reasonably vote on Brett Kavanaughs nomination to a lifetime seat on the nations highest court.

Dr. Blasey Fords experience is all too consistent with stories we heard and lived while attending Holton. Many of us are survivors ourselves.

Holtons motto teaches students to find a way or make one. We dream of making a world where women are free from harassment, assault, and sexual violence. We are deeply grateful to Dr. Blasey Ford for bravely stepping forward and bringing us closer to that world we all seek.

Sincerely,

Holton Alumnae in Support of Dr. Christine Blasey Ford

Dr. Blasey Fords peers from the class of 1984 have their own letter they sent to Congress:

The Class of 1984, Dr. Blasey Fords classmates, wrote to attest to her honesty, integrity, and intelligence and to contend that this is not a partisan act, but an act of civic duty.

The classmates say they represent all political parties and they support her bringing this allegation forward, as it needs to be seriously considered.

As sexual assault violates a womans most fundamental rights, it must be considered a failure of character at any ageregardless of the subsequent accomplishments and power attained by the offender. It should not be dismissed as youthful bad judgment, however aberrant it may be, they point out.

In light of Christines experience, we hold our elected officials responsible for conducting a more thorough and comprehensive review of this Supreme Court nominee. Having taken this courageous step, Christine deserves your due consideration on this serious matter.

We stand with our friend Dr. Christine Blasey Ford and admire her honesty and resolve on behalf of our nation.

As Senator Hirono said on MSNBC Wednesday evening, the whole power of the White House is being used against Dr. Ford, and she is being revictimized. The witness tampering should be investigated by the FBI.

Shes afraid to come and testify, the Democratic Senator from Hawaii pointed out.

Watch here:

Senator Hirono on death threats and intimidation of Dr. Ford: That sounds like witness tampering to me. pic.twitter.com/qRnUVSs6TF  Maddow Blog (@MaddowBlog) September 20, 2018
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In case you think no one is protesting Donald Trumps Supreme Court nominee, Im here to show you otherwise. Last night #KremlinAnnex protesters did their ongoing thing with a sign saying they believe Dr. Christine Blasey Ford and calling the White House AMORAL.

On Capitol Hill, protesters are making their feelings known on Thursday and getting arrested for it:

Protester is arrested during a demonstration in opposition to U.S. Supreme Court nominee Kavanaugh on Capitol Hill in Washington

Protesters are arrested during demonstration in opposition to U.S. Supreme Court nominee Kavanaugh on Capitol Hill in Washington

Here they are, courtesy of Ryan Grim, lining up to get arrested while chanting We believe Anita Hill! We believe Christine Ford!:

People literally lining up to be arrested in the Senate Hart building to stop Kavanaugh pic.twitter.com/wEyZrcAFRY  Ryan Grim (@ryangrim) September 20, 2018

Protesters voice opposition to U.S. Supreme Court nominee Kavanaugh during demonstration on Capitol Hill in Washington

Protesters voice their opposition to U.S. President Donald Trumps Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh during a demonstration on Capitol Hill:

A protester voices opposition to U.S. Supreme Court nominee Kavanaugh during demonstration on Capitol Hill in Washington:

Protesters voice opposition to U.S. Supreme Court nominee Kavanaugh during demonstration on Capitol Hill in Washington

Additionally, in front of the White House last night:

FILE PHOTO: People wearing U.S. President Donald Trump masks take part in a protest against Supreme Court nominee judge Brett Kavanaugh in front of the White House in Washington

I know. You remember when CNN ran to cover three Tea Partiers lounging over their fold up chairs wearing awful hats, so you wonder why this isnt being covered as much.

I have no answer for you, other than to remind you that Republicans lobbied to change the wording from victim to accuser regarding rape and domestic violence, and now thats what we do. We dont call Kavanaugh The ACCUSED in headlines, as a reader wrote to me in response to my article on this topic. But we call her THE ACCUSER, in Handmaids Tale style.

As much as conservatives and Republicans whine about liberal media bias and claim theyre being stifled by social media just because Alex Jones conspiracy theories were shown the door doesnt mean its actually true. The truth is that conservative complaints get more headlines. Maybe its their weird costumes (the p*ssy hats got a lot of eyeballs as well). Maybe its that they are usually aligned with corporate interests.

Maybe liberals and Democrats are still seen through the lens of the 60s, instead of the modern day lens where actually, they are more in step with the majority of the country. Whatever the reason, people are speaking up. If youre disturbed by what Republicans are doing with this nominee, you are not alone.
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Perhaps because hes in the construction business, Donald Trump loves to talk about building things, especially walls. Hes still fixated on getting a wall built along the U.S. border with Mexico despite fierce opposition and a lack of funding.

And now, according to The Guardian, he is suggesting a wall to keep out unwanted immigrants in another part of the world  the Sahara Desert. Trump reportedly suggested to Spains foreign minister that the country could build a wall across the Sahara in order to manage Mediterranean migration.

Spains Foreign Minister Josep Borrell said Trump made the suggestion during a previous meeting.

When Borrell told him how big the Sahara is, the president responded by saying The Sahara border cant be bigger than our border with Mexico.

The Sahara desert is approximately 3,000 miles wide from east to west, or about 1,000 miles longer than the U.S. border with Mexico.

Trump seems unaware that Spain doesnt own the desert, and countries cant just go all over the world building walls wherever they want to. As The Guardian points out, building a wall would be complicated by the fact that Spain holds only two small enclaves in north Africa  Ceuta and Melilla  and such a wall would have to be built on foreign territory.

Borrell reported Trumps comments at an event in Madrid this week and they were widely reported in the Spanish media. We can confirm thats what the minister said, but we wont be making any further comment on the ministers remarks, said a spokesman for the Spanish government.

Spain is now on the front lines of the European migration crisis. Official reports say that more than 33,600 migrants and refugees have arrived by sea so far in 2018, and 1,723 people have died attempting to reach Spanish shores.

The number of migrants this year is three times the total for the same period last year. Spain has now overtaken Italy and Greece as the main destination for refugees and migrants crossing the Mediterranean Sea.

Pedro Sanchez, the socialist prime minister of Spain, has been widely praised for recently agreeing to take in the 630 refugees aboard the rescue ship Aquarius which had been turned away by Italy and Malta.

But the massive increase in the number of migrants arriving on Spains coast has put a huge strain on their reception facilities and infrastructure for dealing with the immigrants. The lenient and humane positions of Sanchez have been attacked by right wing political parties. They have accused Sanchezs government of double standards and of being too soft on immigration.

Borrell is a widely respected statesman and is a former president of the European parliament. He has been outspoken about the European migrant crisis and has previously accused Europe of ostrich politics over migration. He has said he believes that Spain and other countries have the resources to do more than they have done.

Were talking about 20,000 migrants so far this year for a country of more than 40 million inhabitants, he said in July. Thats not mass migration.

Donald Trump, of course, gained power in the U.S. on the strength of his racist anti-immigration policies. As recently as last month he lobbied for his beloved wall with Mexico by saying that Mexicans were rapists. He has thrown undocumented immigrants in jail in horrible conditions, and he has taken migrant children away from their families.

As Spain and other countries struggle to deal with the refugee problem we can only hope that they do NOT seek advice from or follow the suggestions of the President of the United States.
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It has never been more clear that Fox News is making executive decisions for the President of the United States. Donald Trump watches Fox News for hours every day (and night) and there have been many stories about how he has been influenced by the conservative news channel.

On Monday, President Donald Trumps White House released a statement demanding the Department of Justice release all documents relating to the Russia Investigation.

Now we have found out that Trump issued the order to declassify top-secret materials because he was asked to by Lou Dobbs, Sean Hannity, and Jeanine Pirro of Fox News.

Trump declassified sensitive materials because Fox News hosts Lou Dobbs, Sean Hannity, and Jeanine Pirro asked him to. Materials that he never bothered to read himself and his own Justice Department said couldnt be released without jeopardizing ongoing investigations.

Trump declassified sensitive materials because Fox News hosts Lou Dobbs, Sean Hannity, and Jeanine Pirro asked him to. Materials that he never bothered to read himself and his own Justice Department said couldnt be released without jeopardizing ongoing investigations. https://t.co/sqawVswcUw  Renato Mariotti (@renato_mariotti) September 19, 2018

Not only that, but the Washington Post is confirming that Trump had never read the materials that he ordered declassified.

The Monday order was very specific in that it said to declassify precisely those pages of the FISA warrant application to surveil Carter Page that were mentioned in a news conference held by 12 members of the House who are very loyal to the president.

Also, Trump ordered the department to declassify text messages involving former FBI agent Peter Strzok, Justice Department official Bruce Ohr and others who have been called enemies by Trump and Fox News.

According to the Post:

Those elected officials and the Fox News hosts who echoed their demand insisted that the declassifications would demonstrate anti-Trump rot in the Justice Department. Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) promised that revelation would help Republicans win in November.

As the Post points out, however, its very odd that Hannity, Pirro or Dobbs would call for the release of classified material since none of them has a security clearance. They could not possibly have known what was actually in the documents.

Which means that all the Fox News people got their information from Republican House members such as Nunes, Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio and Rep.Mark Meadows of North Carolina. After being briefed by the House members they went on TV to call for documents to be declassified just assuming that they contained what was promised.

As President of the United States, Donald Trump is allowed to read every classified document in the United States government. But this doesnt mean that he actually reads anything.

In an interview yesterday Trump admitted that he hadnt read the material he was ordering be exposed to the public.

I have not reviewed them, he said in response to a question. I have been asked by many people in Congress as you know to release them.

Then he added:

I have watched commentators that I respect begging the president of the United States to release them. . . . I have had many people ask me to release them. Not that I didnt like the idea, but I wanted to wait. I wanted to see what, you know, where it was all going. And I think this whole, its a hoax. You know Gregg Jarrett wrote a book called the Russian Hoax. It actually is a hoax. I call it a witch hunt, but its a hoax. Beyond a witch hunt.

I have been asked by so many people that I respect. Please  the great Lou Dobbs, the great Sean Hannity, the wonderful great Jeanie Pirro.

Pirro, Trump said, takes it so personally because this is one of the great scandals in the history of our country.

Very few people, including the president, the Fox News hosts, or members of the public, know whats contained in those classified materials.

Before they are released, the Justice Department will redact the sensitive information in the interests of national security.

When that happens, the GOP House members and the Fox News hosts and Donald Trump will then claim that the FBI and Justice Department are hiding evidence of wrongdoing.

And that may serve the political goals of Trump and his allies. All they want to do is make our countrys top law enforcement agency look bad.

What they are doing is a desperate ploy to undermine this law enforcement agency. They want to destroy its credibility as Trump looks for a way out of the legal trouble that he is in. But the footsteps of Robert Mueller are growing louder every day, and there is nowhere for Donald Trump to hide.
Russias Defense Ministry held a press conference September 17 claiming the Buk missile that shot down Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 on July 17, 2014, killing 298 people, was made in Russia in 1986 and later transferred to a military unit in western Ukraine. The ministry said that missile never left Ukrainian soil, contradicting the international Joint Investigative Teams (JIT) findings in May which placed the blame on Russia for the downing of the civilian airliner.

Nicolas Dhuicq, a spokesman for the Debout La France (the France Arise) party, told the Russia state media outlet Sputnik that Western silence following the defense ministrys latest release proves the integrity of the data.

Dhuicq, who holds the party's sole seat in the French National Assembly and lists Crimea as his location on his personal Twitter account, added that he personally had no reason to doubt Russias findings.

On Monday, the JIT, tasked with probing the case, issued a statement saying it had taken note of the information that has been publicly presented by the authorities of the Russian Federation for the first time today. The JIT went on to say that it had asked for the Russian Federation to provide all relevant information as early as 2014, specifically requesting in May of this year information concerning numbers found on several recovered missile parts.

The JIT said it would meticulously study the new material once the new documents are made available, adding that information previously provided by Russia had proven to be factually inaccurate, citing the alleged presence of a fighter plane in the vicinity of MH17 on radar imagery presented to the public on (at) a press conference in July 2014.

Dhuicq would later be quoted as saying that he believed Russia would not have benefited from shooting down the civilian airliner, claiming that the Ukrainian army at that time was very disorganized, while groups were not under the centers [Kyiv's] control.

He further expressed doubt the airliner had been brought down by Pro-Russian separatists because shooting such a missile requires some training and organization."

However, in 2016, the JIT presented the results of its criminal investigation, showing that Flight MH17 was shot down by a BUK missile from the 9M38 series. The missile was fired from a field in the area of Pervomaiskyi, which at the time was controlled by pro-Russian separatists.

In a hastily deleted social media post, separatist leader Igor Girkin boasted some 35 minutes after the downing of MH17 that the militia of the self-proclaimed Donetsk Peoples Republic (DPR) have brought down a military transport Antonov-26 (An-26) plane of the Ukrainian Air Force on the outskirts of the town of Torez The town Girkin reffed to is located 10 miles South-East from Pervomaiskyi, indicated in the JIT investigation.

On July 23, 2014, Alexander Khodakovsky, commander of the separatists, told Reuters that pro-Russian rebels did possess the BUK missile system, adding it could have been sent back to Russia to remove proof of its presence.

In May 2018, the JIT presented new results of its investigation, saying the BUK TELAR that shot down flight MH17 comes from the 53rd Antiaircraft Missile Brigade, or the 53rd Brigade from Kursk in the Russian Federation.
On the night of September 17-18, Syrian regime military forces shot down a Russian military plane by accident shortly after Israeli Air Force planes conducted an air raid inside Syria. All 15 crew member aboard the Ilyushin Il-20 maritime patrol aircraft were killed.

Initially, the Russian Defense Ministry blamed Israel despite knowing the plane had been shot down by an S-200 surface-to-air missile operated by the Syrian Arab Army. A Russian Defense Ministry spokesperson claimed the Israeli F-16s were using the Russian military plane as cover to escape detection and ground fire during the raid. Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu himself repeated this claim.

However, President Vladimir Putin declined to point fingers when asked about the incident at a joint press conference with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban.

In this case, it is more a chain of tragic circumstances because an Israeli fighter did not down our aircraft, Putin said.

It goes without saying that we must get to the bottom of this. Our attitude towards this tragedy is set forth in a statement by our Defense Ministry, and has been fully coordinated with me.

The Israeli Defense Forces official Twitter account offered condolences to Russia for the lost crewmembers, but put the blame for the incident on the Assad regime forces which actually shot down the plane. The Israeli Twitter account said the Israeli warplanes were not within the area of the operation and had returned to Israeli airspace when the Russian jet was downed.

The Russian independent news outlet Meduza interviewed Russian military air defense expert Mikhail Khodarenko on what might have caused the incident. He said the fault most likely lies with the air defense systems crew, which did not take the steps necessary to properly identify their target before launching a missile. He also suggested the possibility of a technical fault, such as a failure of the missiles guidance system, but in his opinion this was less likely than human error.

While we are not able to independently verify the Israeli military claim, taken together with Putins remarks and the Meduza interview, we find the Russian Defense Ministrys initial allegations are likely false.




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LAMBERTON, Minn.  Farm safety is an important thing to know  even for kids who live in town. A farm is a fun place to play and live; however, dangers abound on a working farm that could cause injury and even death.

This is why the University of Minnesotas Southwest Research and Outreach Center near Lamberton has hosted an Elementary Field Day every year since 1996.

Cottonwood County 4-H coordinator Crystal Reith said 730 to 800 fourth-graders from around southwestern Minnesota attend the program each year.

"I think it is important that youth experience different degrees of safety concepts, whether that be farm safety or electrical safety," Reith said. "If they arent exposed to (farms) on a daily basis, they may be exposed to it when they visit a friends house, or if they decide later to go into that as a line of work. It is good base knowledge everyone should have."

Among the field day lessons: electrical safety, the dangers of grain bins, silos and wagons, as well as pinch points and PTOs.

Seniors and FFA members from the Westbrook-Walnut Grove School District were recruited to help with the program. Parker Freeburg, one of the volunteers, said working with the fourth-graders was a rewarding experience. He ran a hands-on display that demonstrated the difficulty of pulling a person out of a grain bin. Freeburg gave the kids tips on what to do, and what not to do, if they found themselves in this situation.

"Its important for them to learn there are safe ways to be on a farm," Freeburg said. "Seeing their faces  that this can actually happen and has happened to others  makes it worthwhile."

In addition to safety, the students learned about soil, erosion, seed germination, composting with red worms, and saw a Science Museum of Minnesota show.

"Getting to play with the soil and making mud balls was the best," said Annika Schmiesing, a student from Wabasso Public School. "We learned about how soil is made."

Virginia Munson, a fourth-grader from Tracy-Milroy-Balaton, thought the worms were the best part.

"We learned what the worms eat and how they turn food waste into compost," she said. "They eat eggshells and have babies. We get to take some back to our class and start our own compost bin."
An eclectic mix of donuts has been selling out at the newly opened Drift Dough shop.

Located at the former Fiddlehead Coffee location nestled inside of Forager Brewing Co.s entryway, Nathan Matters new business venture has proved to be busy during its first two weeks of business.

While Dunkin Donuts serves up scads of coffee and pastries downtown, Matters small-batch approach is unique in this city.

"Theres nothing like that in Rochester," Matter remembers Forager assistant brewer Zack Dunbar telling him when Matter mentioned the business in passing. That stuck with Matter, and soon he was moving to Rochester to open up Drift Dough. "That kind of got the wheels turning."

Figuring out how many donuts to bake each day has been a fun challenge in the early days of operation.

In a three-day span, Drift Dough made 20 varieties of donuts, with 12 varieties available each day. Flavors range from simple chocolate and sprinkles to orange creamsicle and even Matcha green tea  all made from scratch. Some are even vegan and gluten-friendly - they may not be entirely gluten-free, as Drift Dough shares a kitchen with Forager, but the dough does not contain gluten, and theyre fried separately from their wheat-filled compatriots.

It took a lot of failed donuts to get to this point.

"Donuts are such a finicky product," Matter said. "The first two weeks we were working on it, it was just dialing the batter in."

This isnt Matters first foray into business. Growing up with parents who ran a chicken hatchery and then a clothing store in Decorah, Iowa, Matter founded and ran the Courtyard & Cellar  a craft beer bar and hangout  for five years before selling it.

Courtyard & Cellar was a popular destination for craft beer fans, but Matter said it wasnt a hard decision to sell it. He just felt that starting something new would be exciting. And he hasnt totally gotten away from beer.

"Were kind of looking at it like a tap list," Matter said. "Were never going to have 30 donuts on any given day, but were going to be frequently rotating our donut selection. Youll find nine to 12 donuts every day, but their flavors will change every few weeks. And were always throwing one or two new things into the mix."

Being in the same building as Forager gives him unique opportunities for donut glazes. During a soft opening, he sold donuts in flavors like Gummies Make Us Glazeable and Donut Goggles, which used Forager beers Gummies Make Us Likeable and Pudding Goggles.

Pastry stouts are all the rage these days in the beer world, so it is possible that Forager stouts could one day be made with Drift Dough donuts. And catering is something that could happen.

For now, Matter is excited to be a part of a growing Rochester that has seen an eclectic mix of mom-and-pop shops open in recent years.

"Weve been having a good time," Matter said. "If I was tired by now that would be a bad sign.  Were slowly adding components but overall, were in a pretty good rhythm."

Heard on the Street: New doughnut and coffee counter drifts into the Med City
Governor Calvo met with the president of the Federated States of Micronesia Wednesday at Adelup to talk about what they can do to help FSM citizens better adjust to life on Guam.

A statement issued following their meeting reports that President Peter Christian and the governor agreed to work together to address the social issues faced by FSM migrants, and the impact they are having on the local community.

President Christian reportedly told the governor that he is very concerned about crimes committed by FSM migrants and the recent videos posted on social media depicting some of those crimes.

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The FSM president said the Micronesian community on Guam has spoken to him about their concerns that a small percentage of the Micronesian community here is casting a cloud of negativity and shame on the majority of law abiding FSM citizens on island.

Christian told the governor everyone is upset about this lack of civility, according to the statement from Adelup.

The president said his government is discussing options to help ensure FSM citizens are prepared for life on Guam and in other jurisdictions before leaving their home islands. He told the governor that the aim of his administration is to ensure that citizens who leave the FSM gain enlightenment, but then return home to help their island.

Christian told the governor that the FSM government cant deny passport requests, but they can work with their citizens to ensure they have confirmed jobs, homes or schooling plans when they arrive on Guam or in another U.S. jurisdiction.

Typhoon assistance

The Governor raised the issue of assistance needed by FSM citizens on Guam who are struggling to recover from Typhoon Mangkhut. They are not eligible for assistance from the Federal Emergency Management Agency because they are not U.S. citizens.

President Christian assured the governor that the FSM would make a $100,000 donation to the government of Guam for typhoon relief. He also said that he has been talking with the U.S. Embassy in Pohnpei to ask for typhoon relief funds from U.S. AID for his citizens on Guam.

Frustration with the feds

Both governor Calvo president Christian expressed frustration with the federal government which they blamed for being mired in regulation and policy instead of finding solutions to the problems they face.

Governor Calvo said GovGuam needs to work together with the FSM government to compel the U.S. government to live up to its part of the Compact agreement and help Guam and FSM.
HARRISBURG  With a limited number of legislative session days remaining, families who have lost a loved one to an impaired driver are hoping DUI laws will soon be updated.

Senate Bill 961, which would increase penalties for repeat DUI offenders including those who injure and kills, is currently in the Pennsylvania House Judiciary Committee, after passing in the Pennsylvania State Senate in April in a vote of 45-4.

Members of Pennsylvania Parents Against Impaired Driving (PAPAID) noted that the state House of Representatives has an opportunity to pass legislation that will address DUI offenders who kill hundreds of loved ones every year across the Commonwealth. They believe that failure to pass SB 961 will result in additional deaths that could otherwise be avoided.

Senate Bill 961 would increase penalties to repeat DUI offenders who continue to break DUI-related laws. Changes to existing laws would include:

1) Felony penalty for a third-time DUI conviction within 10 years, if third offense involves blood-alcohol content of .16 or higher; and in all other cases at fourth offense. Pennsylvania is one of four states that does not treat repeat DUI as a felony, regardless of the number of prior DUI convictions.

2) Increased penalties for homicide by vehicle while DUI, which is currently a three-year minimum sentence regardless of offenders DUI history. Specifically, if convicted of a prior DUI, the minimum sentence for causing a death is five years; if convicted of two or more prior DUIs, the minimum sentence for causing a death is seven years. Penalties would also be increased for those driving on a DUI-related license suspension.

Liam Crowley, 24, of Tredyffrin, was killed in April 2013 in Chester County by a drunk driver who had seven prior DUI arrests. The other driver had a suspended license due to his prior DUI when he was arrested for the crash that killed Crowley. His father, Pat Crowley, is among those advocating for changes that calls for stricter penalties for repeat DUI offenders.

This proposed legislation would update many of the existing DUI-related laws in Pennsylvania which do not distinguish between first time and repeat DUI offenders as well as those who continue to drive on a DUI-related suspended license. PAPAID said both of these groups are part of the high risk population that is the cause of the majority of deaths and injuries related to DUI crashes in Pennsylvania. The proposed law would result in more series penalties for repeat future DUI-related offenses.

PAPAID noted the need for this legislation by the following Pa. DUI facts:

* Repeat DUI offenders are responsible for approximately 40 percent of all DUI-related fatalities.

* In 2016, more than 10,000 individuals were convicted of their second or subsequent DUI.

* An estimated 70,000 to 105,000 individuals with DUI convictions continue to drive on a suspended license.

* There are more than 50,000 new DUI cases annually.

* On average in each of the past eight years, there are more than 12,000 impaired crashes, resulting in 8,700 injuries and 320 deaths.

SB 961 was introduced by state Sen. John Rafferty, R-44, of Collegeville, who continues to lead efforts to improve DUI laws. Sen. Scott Martin was primary co-sponsor as his SB 635 was amended into SB 961. Rep. Keith Greiner is also involved with efforts in the House.

Pennsylvania Parents Against Impaired Driving (PAPAID) is a grassroots organization of parents across Pennsylvania who have lost children to impaired drivers. The organization has a goal prevent additional senseless deaths and injuries by improving Pennsylvanias ineffective DUI and DUID laws.
Yesterday, word circulated in certain quarters of the D.C. legal/public policy community that the assault allegation against Brett Kavanaugh may be a case of mistaken identity. In other words, the incident happened, but the perpetrator wasnt Kavanaugh.

In the version I heard, the assault was committed by a guy who attended the Landon School, not Georgetown Prep where Kavanaugh was a student. Landon and Georgetown Prep are both elite prep schools in the prosperous Maryland suburbs of Washington, D.C.

Having no idea whether this information is reliable, I wrote nothing about it. I was struck, however, by this tweet by Ed Whelan from last night:

By one week from today, I expect that Judge Kavanaugh will have been clearly vindicated on this matter. Specifically, I expect that compelling evidence will show his categorical denial to be truthful. There will be no cloud over him.

Ive known Ed for years and have read Bench Memos regularly since its inception. Hes a pretty cautious guy, and not prone to wishful thinking. Thus, I was surprised by the boldness of his tweet.

The conventional wisdom among Kavanaughs supporters is that this a case of he said, she said and that the alleged episode occurred so long ago that evidence doesnt exist conclusively to prove or disprove Ms. Fords allegation. But here was Ed predicting that compelling evidence would vindicate Kavanaugh.

Is Ed basing this prediction on a more detailed and better sourced version of the mistaken identity narrative I had picked up? His subsequent tweets suggest to me that he is.

Then, this morning, Kathleen Parker of the Washington Post wrote a column about how mistaken identity is not uncommon in cases like these. Was this column prompted by buzz that the Kavanaugh case is, indeed, one of mistaken identity?

Finally, there is this post by Ramesh Ponnuru. He cites Parkers column and suggests that Kavanaugh may be confident that new evidence will emerge that strongly tends to vindicate him.

I still dont have an opinion on whether the Kavanaugh case is one of mistaken identity. Thats a possibility, but its also possible that the incident didnt occur at all or in anything like the way Ford describes. And its possible that Ford has gotten it right and is telling the truth.

However, some publicly known facts tend to support the mistaken identity theory. Im thinking of (1) Fords failure to remember such details as where the alleged attack took place, (2) Sen. Feinsteins seeming unwillingness to treat Fords story as tight enough to push forward with for months, (3) Fords reluctance to testify publicly (or maybe even privately) before the Judiciary Committee, (4) the reported absence of Kavanaughs name in the notes of the psychologist with whom she discussed the alleged incident some years back, and (5) Patrick J. Smyths denial of Fords claim that he was at the party where the assault allegedly took place.

Lack of clarity by Ford about who really attacked her would tend to explain all of the above. I emphasize, however, that such lack of clarity is not the only possible explanation.

For now, lets just say of the mistaken identity theory: Developing. Maybe.
Its amusing, in a sickening sort of way, to hear Senate Democrats say its unacceptable to have on the Supreme Court someone credibly accused of assaulting a woman 36 years ago, when he was in high school. Who among these outraged Senators has complained about serving with Democratic colleagues credibly accused of, and in at least two cases admitting to, assaulting women?

Sen. Sherrod Browns ex-wife claimed that Brown threw her up against a wall and showed physical violence and abusive nature. This allegation is contained in court documents. According to this source, Larke Brown told the court, I am also intimidated by the Defendant and am in fear for the safety and well-being of myself and our children due to the Defendants physical violence and abusive nature. A judge reportedly granted her request for a restraining order against Sherrod Brown.

Browns alleged assault occurred in 1986, around the time Kavanaugh allegedly jumped on Christine Blasey Ford. However, Brown was an adult, unlike Kavanaugh. And Larke Brown made her claim roughly contemporaneously with the alleged assault. She didnt wait 36 years.

It must also be mighty difficult for Kavanaughs Senate critics to serve with Sen. Tom Carper. He admits he gave his ex-wife a black eye. In a 1998 interview, Carper stated:

Did I slap my wife 20 years ago? Yes. Do I regret it? Yes. Would I do it again? No. I slapped Diane one time. It was a stupid thing to do and I. . .regret it now. It caused some discoloration of her left eye and some puffiness.

Just one time, or so he says. Shouldnt MeToo movement Democrats be asking how many free pokes a man gets to take at his wife?

Then, theres Cory Spartacus Booker. Expect much posturing, including hand on heart, from Booker if hearings on Fords allegation proceed.

But Booker has admitted groping a friend when he was in high school. He made the admission in a characteristically pompous column in the Stanford school newspaper.

The column is vintage Booker. He tried to show, in the most pretentious way possible, how enlightened he had become since his high school days.

Because Booker is a fabulist, we cannot be confident that he actually groped his friend or, if he did, that he was actually a reformed sexual harasser during his time at Stanford (or now). But his admission of groping in high school renders ridiculous his expressions of outrage over someone elses alleged groping during the same stage of life.

And what about Mazie Hirono? From her perch on the Senate Judiciary Committee, she asks every male judicial nominee whether he has ever sexually harassed or assaulted anyone.

Yet, according to the Washington Free Beacon, Hironos Senate campaign accepted $1,000 from Sen. Carpers First State PAC in June of this year. The Free Beacon cites Federal Election Commission records.

Thats Sen. Carper, the wife beater. And thats Sen. Hirono who declared this week:

As Americans, its on all of us to take a stand and do what is rightregardless of political party. Its time to stand up for victims of sexual assault and harassment.

Hirono wont divulge whether she has discussed Carpers spousal abuse with the Delaware Senator. As far as we know, she hasnt returned the $1,000.

Finally, lets not forget the case of Keith Ellison. He stands very credibly accused of assaulting two women as an adult. Contemporaneous police records back up at least one of the assault claims.

Yet, Ellison remains Deputy Chair of the Democratic National Committee. To my knowledge, none of the Democratic Senators expressing outrage over the prospect of Kavanaugh serving on the Supreme Court has publicly demonstrated any discomfort over Ellison serving as the number two person at the DNC.

Its difficult to resist the view that congressional Democrats dont care about youthful indiscretions towards women, even violent ones. Indeed, they dont seem to care about violence against women by adult members of their caucus and party leadership.

What do they care about? Power and moving America to the left.
Keith Ellison is leading the race for Attorney General of Minnesota 41-36, according to the Star Tribune poll. But that lead isnt anywhere near big enough, in my opinion. Revelations about Ellison keep coming out.

The latest comes from Karen Monahan, the second of the two women who have accused Ellison of domestic abuse. Monahan has released a medical record from the Park Nicollet Clinic, dated November 2017, that supports her allegation that Ellison abused her. Click to enlarge:

Monahans reference to emotional and physical abuse provides documentation of her story that would be admissible in court. It is hard to see on what basis any voter would think, based on the available evidenceincluding a transcript of a 911 call by an earlier Ellison girlfriendthat Ellison is not a domestic abuser.

The timing of all this is fraught, obviously. The Democrats are trying to block Judge Brett Kavanaugh from appointment to the Supreme Court, based on a patently false allegation of a non-criminal incident that supposedly happened 36 years ago, when Kavanaugh was a teenager. No Democrat has tried to reconcile opposition to Kavanaugh with support for the recidivist abuser Ellison.

Personally, I ascribe zero credibility to the me too movement. The whole thing appears to me to be a politically motivated farce. You can see this in the Star Tribunes poll. Men dont approve of Ellison, for any of a number of good reasons. Probably they dont think a radical who applauds cop-killers should be attorney general. But how about women? Do Minnesotas alleged me too feminists care that a former girlfriend had to call 911 on the violent Keith Ellison? Evidently not: Ellison leads among women by 16 points, 46-30.

I conclude that the me too movementfeminism in general, actuallyis a joke.
Brett Kavanaughs accuser, Christine Blasey Ford, has little choice but to give evidence to the Senate Judiciary Committee, and do so promptly. If she persists in refusing, Judge Kavanaugh almost certainly will be confirmed more or less on schedule. Fords objective all along has been to prevent this result.

Thus, it has seemed to me that Ford will agree to appear promptly, albeit only after trying to extract as many concessions as possible in exchange for so agreeing.

This appears to be whats happening, finally. The New York Times reports:

The woman who has accused Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh of sexual assault has told the Senate Judiciary Committee, in an apparent bid to jump-start negotiations, that she would be prepared to testify next week, so long as senators offer terms that are fair and which ensure her safety, according to an email her lawyers sent to committee staff members.

According to the Times, which has published what it says is the email, Ford told the Committee that testifying next Monday, the date set by Chairman Grassley, is not possible. Why not? The email doesnt say.

The email advises the Committee that Ford and her lawyer want a telephone call today for the purpose of discuss[ing] the conditions under which. . .Ford would be prepared to testify next week. This is the beginning of Fords predictable attempt, having failed to dictate the timing of the hearing, to dictate other terms.

Grassley will, I assume, hold the telephone call and find out what terms Ford is seeking. He will then, I assume, assess their reasonableness and, most importantly, find out which terms, if any, the swing members of the caucus think he must accept.

My view, for what its worth, is that Grassley should insist on proceeding Monday unless Ford offers a plausible reason why she cant go forward on that date. And if the event doesnt happen Monday, it needs to happen no more than a day or two later.

I also believe that Grassley shouldnt agree to any restrictions on what can be asked of Ford. Nor should he agree to taking testimony from other witnesses besides Ford and Judge Kananaugh. The only two other people Ford has identified as possessing knowledge about the alleged incident have set forth what they know about it  nothing, because they dont think it occurred  and said they wont testify

As for the alleged safety concerns, they are probably bogus. However, Grassley should be super-accommodating when it comes to any safety-related requests.

But what outsiders like me think doesnt count. What counts are the views of Chairman Grassley and the GOP caucus.

So far, Grassley has done a fine job of navigating the GOPs way through this mess. Im fairly confident he will continue to do so.
In a letter to his Democratic colleagues on the Judiciary Committee, Senator Grassley has set forth the rationale of his prescribed method of proceeding on the late hit of Christine Blasey Ford on Judge Kavanaugh with the hearing proposed for next Monday. Here we can see the Democrats refusal to participate in any method of proceeding that fails further to obstruct or protract the committees consideration of the Kavanaugh nomination:

The Majority staff spoke with Judge Kavanaugh as part of the background investigation. Judge Kavanaugh immediately agreed to cooperate with Senate investigators. He sat for a transcribed interview on Monday. He understood that he was under penalty of felony, if he was not truthful. He fully, candidly, and unequivocally answered all questions. We have no reason to doubt the truthfulness of Judge Kavanaugh s testimony. Judge Kavanaugh volunteered to come back for a public hearing. As is standard practice, we invited the Minority staff to participate and ask Judge Kavanaugh its own questions, but the Minority staff declined. The Majority staff has also sought to set up interviews with Dr. Ford, Mark Judge, and two other alleged witnesses. The Minority staff is welcome to participate in the investigative process as well, but it has thus far declined.

Senator Grassley then discusses Feinsteins secretive handling of the letter conveying CBFs allegations. He concludes:

I cant emphasize how important it is to respect whistleblowers and victims desire for confidentiality. But notwithstanding [CBFs] wishes for confidentiality, her allegations became public. I fear that the leaks of confidential information will discourage whistleblowers and victims from coming forward in the future. This is but the latest-and most serious of your sides abuse of this confirmation process. There has been delay and obstruction of this process at every tum and with every argument available.

Now that is well said.

2018-09-19 Grassley to Committee Minority  Ford Testimony by Scott Johnson on Scribd
In the old Rolling Stones song, Something happened to me yesterday (something I cant speak of right away). In the case of Christine Blasey Fords late hit on Judge Kavanaugh, I have the distinct impression that something didnt happen to her yesterday  the something being an assault by Judge Kavanaugh and the yesterday being approximately 35 years ago when CBF and Judge Kavanaugh were high school students.

Earlier this week CBFs attorney spent the day on friendly cable news shows asserting CBFs desire to be heard by the Senate Judiciary Committee. No sooner had her wish been granted than she imposed conditions on her appearance. What we have here is a pretext to achieve a political objective.

Let us note that no one in a position to know supports CBFs allegations against Judge Kavanaugh. Mark Judge has submitted a statement (subject to a federal false statements statute) denying her allegations. The statement is embedded in the tweet below.

NEWS  Mark Judge in letter obtained by WaPo says I have no memory of this alleged incident and defends Kavanaugh pic.twitter.com/fsW0sY20YE  Seung Min Kim (@seungminkim) September 18, 2018

By the same token, Patryck J. Smyth has submitted a statement to the committee. CBF has identified Smyth as another participant in the party, although one not implicated in the alleged misconduct. His statement should therefore carry great weight.

Smyth writes (also subject to a federal false statements statute): I understand that I have been identified by Dr. Christine Blasey Ford as the person she remembers as PJ who supposedly was present at the party she described in her statements to the Washington Post. I am issuing this statement today to make it clear to all involved that I have no knowledge of the party in question; nor do I have any knowledge of the allegations of improper conduct she has leveled against Brett Kavanaugh.

Smyth also testifies to Judge Kavanaughs character: Personally speaking, I have known Brett Kavanaugh since high school and I know him to be a person of great integrity, a great friend, and I have never witnessed any improper conduct by Brett Kavanaugh towards women.

How low can the Democrats go? The Democrats are predictable in this sense. However low they can go, they are going there.
That letter Christine Blasey Ford gave to California Democratic lawmakers containing her allegation against Brett Kavanaugh must be a highly flawed document. First, Sen. Feinstein sat on it for months. She didnt give it to the FBI. She didnt publicize its contents.

She didnt even use the allegations when she had opportunities to question Kavanaugh. Feinstein could easily have done so without violating Fords request for confidentiality. For example, she could have asked Kavanaugh whether he has ever, even in his high school days, used force against a female or made sexual contact with a female against her will.

Feinstein used the letter in none of these ways. As I said, she sat on it for months.

Second, even now, Feinstein will not provide the Senate Judiciary Committee with a non-redacted version of the letter. Chairman Grassley and his staff have repeatedly asked to see the letter in full. Obviously, this request is reasonable. If the Senate is to evaluate Fords allegation, it needs to see that allegation in its full original form.

Yet, Feinstein has refused the repeated requests of Grassley and his staff. Thus, as Grassley says, the only version we have of this letter is a redacted version contained in the supplemental FBI background investigation file that only senators and a handful of very select staff are authorized to read.

What is Feinstein hiding from the Committee and from the public? Weaknesses in the original statement? Contradictions between that statement and other statements and/or facts that have come to light?

I dont know. But Im pretty sure that if Feinstein believed Fords allegations and wanted the truth about them to be uncovered, she would not have acted as she has since receiving the letter, and certainly would not be acting as she is now.
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Projected to expand at a sluggish CAGR of just-under 4% over 2017-2022, the global automotive tail light market will possibly surpass the revenue of US$ 12 Bn by the end of 2022. According to a recent publication by Fact.MR , the global market for automotive tail light will continue to witness the miniscule rate of growth owing to limited scope of applicability of automotive tail light, which is expected to remain responsible for undermining the growth prospects of the global market for automotive tail light.Adoption of the latest lighting technologies by automotive industry leaders will possibly open multiple doors of growth opportunities for automotive tail light manufacturers, forestalling the visible decline of the global automotive tail light market over 2017-2022.  Consulting Research Analyst, Automotive Domain, Fact.MR Request For Sample Report- https://www.factmr.com/connectus/sample?flag=S&rep_id=3 Halogen Reigns Supreme; LED Slated for a Higher CAGR in Automotive Tail LightDespite being a relatively lesser lucrative area of interest for automotive manufacturers and consumers, automotive lighting has been witnessing decent technological innovation over the years. Leading automakers and automotive component suppliers recently revealed the most sophisticatedly functional and aesthetically pleasing innovations in automotive tail lights and headlamps  at the North American International Auto Show (NAIAS), Detroit and CES 2018 technology show, Las Vegas.As LEDs last 20X longer than conventionally used incandescent bulbs, making an excellent attribute for adoption of the former. Moreover, while conventional lamps achieve the electrical conversion of up to 10%, LEDs have been proven to convert nearly 90% of the energy into light. A number of manufacturers are also focusing on providing LED tailgate light bars for an additional safety and functionality element in heavy transport and commercial vehicles. Despite holding the largest value share of over 50% in the global automotive tail light market, performance of halogen is presumed to face rigorous competition by LED, which is anticipated to exhibit a higher CAGR through 2022.Plastics Foreseen to Maintain a Larger Share in Automotive Tail Light Market, over MetalsResearch points at the fact that road traffic contribute for approximately one-fifth of the global CO emissions. While the figure is consistently on the rise, adoption of lightweight vehicle technology can potentially help reduce it, according to industry experts. A vehicle just-10% lighter in weight tends to consume almost 5% less fuel compared to conventional vehicles, thereby contributing to reduction of CO emissions.To Know more about Automotive Tail Light Market, Visit - https://www.factmr.com/report/3/tail-light-market With increasing concerns among consumers as well as automakers about greenhouse gases emission, the automotive components section is witnessing drastic surge in the adoption of lightweight vehicular component materials  including plastic. Plastics will this continue to gain higher traction than metals used in the manufacturing of automotive tail light  accounting for over two-third share of the total automotive tail light market value by the end of projection period.Besides the critical need for excellent performance and uncompromised safety, the manufacturers of automotive tail light have been recently taking efforts to meet the drastically ascending demand for lightweight vehicles for greater fuel efficiency. FMRs study on global automotive tail light market expects this as a long-term enduring trend, which will strongly trigger the consolidation of manufacturing processes and componentry.Additionally, FMRs report on the global market for automotive tail light offers insights on the adoption of automotive tail lamp by multiple vehicle type manufacturers. The report findings indicate that passenger car manufacturers will continue to account for maximum revenue in the automotive tail light market. On the other side, the aftermarket is likely to remain the dominant sales channel operating in the value chain of the automotive tail light market over 2017-2022. Regional analysis of the automotive tail light market forecasts APEJ as the leading regional market for automotive tail light through 2022.To Buy Automotive Tail Light Market Report, Visit- https://www.factmr.com/checkout/3/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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The color cosmetics market rides on the back of several macro-trends in the overall beauty industry. The distinct demand trajectories for color cosmetics has been witnessing several spikes over the past few years driven by changing fashion and fads. These changes have been increasingly being driven by consumers who are looking for newer and more effective formulations in skincare and anti-aging products. The growing inclination toward color cosmetics based on natural and organic ingredients has unlocked promising prospects in the market. Strategies on capitalizing on these avenues have led to notable product innovations in color cosmetics, especially in developing and developed regions. Market players are also leveraging the potential of online commerce to introduce new products and tap into emerging markets for color cosmetics.According to Fact.MR , the opportunities in the color cosmetics market is expected to cross worth of US$80 billion by the end 2022. The demand for color cosmetics will rise at a promising pace over the forecast period of 20172022, projects the report.Request For Sample Report- https://www.factmr.com/connectus/sample?flag=S&rep_id=64 There is a vast demand for lip care in the color cosmetics products, world over. The segment contributed a revenue share of around 40% in the global color cosmetics market and by the end of it is forecast to reach a worth of US$33 billion. A large chunk of this revenue, about half of it, is expected to come from Asia Pacific region. However, the demand of nail products is fast gathering steam among the users of color cosmetics. The rising popularity of color cosmetics applied on nail will give a substantial boost to the segment in the coming years, with estimated valuation in 2017 was nothing less than US$ 12 billion. The nail care segment is forecast to rise at a CAGR of 5.2% during 2017-2022.Lucrative Avenues in Asia Pacific to impart Substantial Growth Impetus to Color Cosmetics MarketAsia Pacific is emerging as the regions with immense potential for companies in the color cosmetics market. This is attributed to the large lucrative avenues in key product segments notably facial make-up and hair color segments. A rapidly aging population has led to a burgeoning adult population, women as well as men, increasingly demanding hair dye brands. This is expected to lead to an extensive uptake of hair color cosmetics products in the region. However, in the coming years, players in the color cosmetics market may shift their attention to North America. A probable reason supporting this shift is the higher growth pace of the regional market, which is anticipated to rise at CAGR of 4.1% during the assessment period.The facial make-up segment is equally attractive segment in the color cosmetic market. The segment is projected to expand at a CAGR of 4.6%. The opportunities was estimated at US$7 billion in 2017 and is anticipated to touch an approximate valuation of US$8.7 billion.To Know more about Color Cosmetics Market, Visit - https://www.factmr.com/report/64/color-cosmetics-market Companies find Substantial Prospects in Hypermarkets/SupermarketsHypermarkets/supermarkets are presently the most popular medium of sales channel for manufacturers and retailers of color cosmetics. Presently, the segments contribute the major share of revenue by sales channel amounting to over 75.0% in the global color cosmetics market. The segment is expected to hold its sway in the global color cosmetics market coming few years as well. The segment is projected to rise at 5.5% CAGR from 2017 to 2022 accounting to a revenue of US$18 billion. However, small retailers are offering stiff competition to change the status quo enjoyed by hypermarkets and supermarkets in the overall color cosmetics market. Over the assessment period, the revenue generated by retailers is projected to be US$5 billion.E-commerce channels in the color cosmetics market are expected to proliferate at a robust CGAR in the coming years. In the year 2017, its revenue share was not substantial amounting to 11.6% in the overall color cosmetics market. However, there are several trends stoking the popularity of online channels for producers of color cosmetics. Rapid advances being made in the internet technologies, especially in emerging and developed economies, and changes in consumer buying patterns, are expected to fuel the demand for e-commerce sales channels in the color cosmetic products. The ease of the accessibility and rapid delivery of products are making e-commerce channel the cynosure of attention for users of color cosmetics.To Buy Color Cosmetics Market Report, Visit- https://www.factmr.com/checkout/64/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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FSCwire / Press ReleaseThe following press release was disseminated by FSCwire for Emerald Bay Energy Inc.--- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- ---Calgary, Alberta (FSCWire) - Emerald Bay Energy Inc. (TSX Venture:EBY). has issued a press release with the following headline:Emerald Bay Energy Begins Drilling Floyd 1 Well in South TexasTo 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 Emerald Bay Energy 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/Emerald Bay Energy Inc.Source: Emerald Bay Energy Inc. (TSX Venture: EBY, OTC Bulletin Board: EMBYF)Date: September 19, 2018Time: 6:35 PM EDT--- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- ---The story mentioned above was issued on behalf of Emerald Bay Energy 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: 2018-09-20 12:32:02

L4MS, the pan-European acceleration program for using robots in manufacturing industry, will distribute a total of 1.5million equity-free funding for mid-caps and SMEs.

L4MS Launches Its First Open Call for Cross-Border Application Experiments

I4MS

Silvia Valcarcel

Communication Executive of MWCBarcelona

svalcarcel@mobileworldcapital.com

The European Project L4MS (Logistics for Manufacturing SMEs) is looking for European manufacturing SMEs and mid-caps to develop new, innovative solutions to boost their factory-floor logistic.

As a Factories of the Future (FoF) project participating in I4MS (ICT for Manufacturing SMEs) and with the support of the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme, the aim of L4MS project is to reduce the installation cost and time of mobile robots by a factor of 10. It will enable inexpensive deployment of small and flexible logistics solutions requiring no infrastructure change, no production downtime and no in-house expertise. In addition to equity-free funding, the companies will receive extensive technological support from the L4MS network.

The best applicants with highest innovation potential will get access to: Matchmaking with system integrators and mobile robots manufactures, funding up to 250,000, state-of-the-art test environment within your region, mentoring for innovative business and service models, technology experts for adopting latest logistics automation solutions, training to re-skill workers and finance for scaling up the new business model.

The experiments selected will take part in a rigorous and personalised training programme using L4MS open industrial IoT platform called OPIL (Open Platform for Innovations in Logistics) to completely virtualize the intra-factory logistics automation and drastically accelerate the innovation process in this area.

Closing date: 30th November 2018

www.l4ms.eu/Open-Calls

About L4MS

L4MS is co-funded from the European Unions Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 767642 and it runs under the umbrella of European Commissions initiative ICT for manufacturing SMEs (I4MS).

The objective of this project is to accelerate the automation of intra-factory logistics of SMEs. L4MS will completely digitalize logistics automation in factories allowing automation suppliers to develop and deploy logistics solutions 10 times faster and cheaper than the current price. L4MS opens the door for SMEs to utilize robotics and other advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence and virtualization.

About I4MS

I4MS is coordinated by Mobile World Capital Barcelona Foundation, FundingBox, Foreningen MADE, FIWARE Foundation EV, Danish Technological Institute and Axencia Galega de Innovacion.

Funded by the Horizon 2020 Framework Programme of the European Union, Grant Agreement n 768631

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180920005

.@L4MS_EU have opened its first #OpenCall for Manufacturing #SME's & mid-caps to boost & digitalize their intra-factory #logistics with funding up to 250 000. APPLY before November 30th! Find more: ow.ly/Zp5b30lNWba
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FSCwire / Press ReleaseThe following press release was disseminated by FSCwire for Xebec Adsorption Inc--- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- ---Montreal, Quebec (FSCWire) - Xebec Adsorption Inc (TSX Venture:XBC). has issued a press release with the following headline:McGill University Partners with Xebec to Develop Power-to-Gas Process for Renewable Energy StorageTo 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 Xebec Adsorption 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/Xebec Adsorption IncSource: Xebec Adsorption Inc (TSX Venture: XBC, WKN: A0RPQ3, ISIN: CA9838911027, OTC Bulletin Board: XEBEF)Date: September 20, 2018Time: 8:30 AM EDT--- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- ---The story mentioned above was issued on behalf of Xebec Adsorption 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.)
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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 Announces Grant of Stock OptionsTo 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: September 20, 2018Time: 1:40 PM 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.)
U.S. firm, Coca-Cola, is planning to take over Nigerian company, Chi Limited, by the end of the first quarter of 2019.

According to a report by Reuters, on Wednesday, the president of Coca-Colas West Africa business said the Atlanta-based company aims to complete the deal by the end of the first quarter of 2019.

We are still on track to complete the acquisition (of Chi Ltd) by the end of the first quarter of 2019, Mr Njonjo said.

Also in the report, Coca-Cola had bought a 40 per cent stake in the Nigerian juice and snack producer in January 2016, and aimed to increase ownership within three years.

Coca Cola are focusing on smaller bottles and cans which would come in 30 centilitre bottle of Coke Zero for 60 naira ($0.20), compared with the standard 50 centilitre bottle for 80 naira, as just one example, he said.

He also explained that the companys drive is to diversify its product range which could also give more flexibility in a market.

We realise that in certain pack formats you can only go down so low, he reportedly said in an interview at his office in the commercial capital Lagos.

But once you start looking at pouches and still products, like juice and drinking yoghurts, that allows you to start accessing much lower price points.

He said the purchase of costa could present a significant opportunity in Nigeria, despite the absence of a culture of hot-coffee drinking there.

There definitely could be opportunity around ready-to-drink coffee here in Nigeria having iced coffee, blends of dairy and coffee, packaged in different formats, he said.

Mr Njonjo said the company was working in Nigeria to collect bottles and find a way for them to be re-used through a partnership with cement-maker, Lafarge in which bottles would be burned in kilns as an energy source.

A memorandum of understanding was being formalised and would be signed in the next few weeks, he said, adding that implementation would begin in the last quarter of this year.

He said the company was also working with Lagos State government to remove waste from waterways in the city.
The Campaign Against Impunity (CAI), a non-governmental organisation, has called on regulators in the countrys oil and gas, and maritime sectors to intervene in the alleged liquidation of Sea Trucks Group (STG), an indigenous company, by some expatriates.

CAI has written to major actors and regulators in the sectors such as Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC), the National Petroleum Investment Management Services (NAPIMS), Nigerian Content and Development Monitoring Board (NCDMB), and the Nigerian Maritime Administration and Safety Agency (NIMASA).

In the letters, we have urged these stakeholders to engage with the facts of the crisis involving STG and its liquidator, while acting in manners that uphold the rule of law and forestalls any arbitrary decision that could jeopardise the interests of STG, which appears the victim whose hands is being forced in this high-stakes tussle, the group wrote in a statement on Wednesday, signed by its coordinator, Shina Loremikan. This is, however, without prejudice to fairness to all parties involved in the dispute.

While many in the industry are aware of this case, there appear little concerted efforts at intervening to safeguard a Nigerian company from a battle of attrition that violates justice and fair play.

CAI said the fact of the case showed there were contention over a bond obtained by STG on the advice of its expatriate staff, who were also required to service the bond but failed to do so seemingly forcing the bond-holders to claim the assets of STG, in lieu of their fund.

Yet, in a series of corporate intrigues, the earlier staff members of STG who were managing the bond on behalf of the company, turned around to become representatives of the bond-holders seeking to take STG into liquidation, in what appears a classic case of insider abuse, manipulation and conflict of interest.

Some of the nagging issues from the situation include the fact that while STG still appeared capable of meeting its bond obligations, despite having missed some of the payments, however those representing the bond-holders did not seem interested in rescheduling the payments but were rather in a hurry to liquidate the company and strip its assets  prominently in terms of taking over the JASCON vessels that STG was plying its trade with.

But, then how do you force a company that had not displayed signs of unrecoverable distress or shown itself as incapable of meeting its obligations into liquidation? Even then the liquidator had actually gone ahead to struggle for possession of and change the ownership of some of the JASCON vessels to that of a new company, Telford, despite subsisting court judgments urging the parties involved in the dispute to maintain status quo, with no asset stripping occurring, till there is a more substantive determination of the case. .

The CAI said two Nigerian courts have ruled for the cessation of the liquidation.

In a suit filed by West African Ventures (WAV), a sister company to STG, against the liquidators on May 11, 2018, WAV applied for an order of interim injunction restraining the liquidators from taking any steps or undertaking any business in Nigeria. The case, with suit number FHC/L/CS/656/18, was presided over by M. B. Idris, a justice of the Federal High Court in Lagos. And after the consideration of the application, the court ordered an order of interim injunction restraining STG/Telford from taking any steps or undertaking any business in Nigeria.

Similarly, in another case, with suit number FHC/L/CS/1114/2017, filed on August 1, 2017, Hon. Justice (Prof.) Chuka Austine Obiozor ordered the parties to maintain status quo pending further order on the matter.

Yet, despite repeatedly reaching out to STG-In-Liquidation/Telford, they have deliberately refused to answer the very basic and pertinent question in this dispute: What is the value of the outstanding sum on the bonds, in relation to the overall value of Mr. Roomans companies and assets, for which they are now claiming ownership?

Also, from the facts of the issue, we have had to genuinely wonder that: Is the case of STG-In-Liquidation/Telford that of genuine liquidation or simply an attempt to take over a Nigerian company and its assets without recourse to a proper valuation of the assets involved, which should be balanced against the sum outstanding on the bond?

We would have thought that under the laws of natural justice, a proper liquidation process of a business concern could only be embarked upon when the debts/balance on the bond taken is greater than the assets of the defaulting company. Rather strangely, this does not appear to be the case at hand, as the assets far outstrip the balance on the bond taken.

The CAI therefore called on the Nigerian federal government and the industry regulators  NAPIMS, NCDMB and NOTAP  for quick interventions into this matter as a way of protecting the sanctity of Nigerian businesses from the foregoing form of activities, in which court decisions and judgments are flagrantly flouted with impunity.

The regulators need to presently discountenance the different claims of the liquidators and front company, Telford Offshore  for seeking an illegal possession of assets, and doing direct business in the country  till there is proper judicial resolution of this case, it added.

It said if government does not act swiftly the liquidation may erode investors trust and affect the Nigerian economy adversely.
The Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) on Wednesday explained why the preferred bidder for 9mobile, Teleology Technology Limited, is yet to take over the telecom firm.

Following series of twists and legal turns in the bid process, Teleology Technology Limited emerged the preferred bidder in February.

However, in April, the board of the Nigeria Communications Commission (NCC) said the telecom industry regulator would not approve the sale of 9mobile to any bidder without first determining its technical competence.

The executive vice-chairman of the commission, Umar Danbatta, had said despite the emergence of Teleology Technology with a bid of over $500 million, the Central Bank of Nigeria would still carry out a financial evaluation of the bidder.

In addition, Mr Danbatta said the NCC would still carry out a technical evaluation to establish the companys technical competence.

Speaking on the sidelines of the 2nd Annual Stakeholders Consultative Forum with Academia and Industry in Abuja on Wednesday, the executive vice chairman clarified that the delay in Teleology Technology taking over 9mobile was because the technical evaluation process was yet to be completed.

Mr Danbatta denied media reports that the delay was as a result of accumulated $100million debt by 9mobile to some equipment manufacturers.

As soon as the necessary checks and investigations being carried out are satisfactorily concluded and approved by the NCC board, the preferred bidder will take over 9mobile, he said.

Further clarification on the issue, reported by Daily Trust, came from the chairman of NCC board, Olabiyi Durojaiye, who told reporters that the cause of the delay was because Barclays Africa, the appointed transaction financial adviser, was yet to submit its final report on the sale process to the NCC.

We are not giving it (9mobile) to them (Teleology) yet. The Barclays Africa that rated them has not completed their work, and we at the board are yet to get the final report, Mr Durojaiye told Nigerian journalists in Durban, South Africa.

Teleology would not get the 9mobile licence without the approval of the commissions board. They have to satisfy and pass some conditions set before the takeover. They must have passed the competence test. They must have the capability to retain all the former staff of 9mobile.

We dont want a situation where about 4,000 workers would be laid off just because of takeover. Already there is unemployment in the country and we dont want the takeover to add to that.

So, that is why we are putting every necessary thing in order to forestall all negative things that may occur after takeover.
About 48 hours to the gubernatorial election in Osun, there are indications that the process may be fraught with vote buying.

Vote buying is a practice of inducing voters to make them vote for a particular candidate during an election.

Many experts and election observers believe Saturdays polls will be no different despite assurances by the electoral body, INEC, that it will tighten the noose on such irregularities.

The election is expected by many to be a close contest between five leading candidates, though there are 48 candidates in the election, including four women.

Due to the progressive upscale of vote buying in the four previous successive governorship elections in Nigeria over the last two years, voter inducement became a hot-button issue ahead of the Osun polls and the 2019 general elections. This was particularly so after vote buying was significantly reported in the July 14 governorship election in Ekiti State.

The two major parties in the election, APC and PDP, were culpable with videos showing how money was given to the electorate to influence their votes.

Ahead of Saturday polls, INEC says it has mapped stringent measures to check the irregularity.

On Monday, the commission banned the use of phones, cameras or any device that can snap image inside polling booths.

It earlier threatened to publish names and prosecute those caught either buying or selling votes.

But vote buying and several other forms of voter inducement is still a burning issue among election observers. They say it has already commenced ahead of Saturday polls.

An election monitoring group, the Youth Initiative for Advocacy, Growth and Advancement (YIAGA Africa) through its Watching The Vote (WTV) project, which concluded its pre-election observations, declared that voter inducement remained prevalent in Osun in the pre-election activities.

importantly, even in the All Progressives Congress (APC) primaries in Osun, there were reports of payment of N2000 to delegates to vote. Already, we are receiving information on ongoing vote buying ahead of the elections, the Director of the Centre for Democracy and Development (CDD), Idayat Hassan, told this newspaper on Sunday.

Both the ruling APC and the opposition PDP have been trading blames over who started the trend of vote buying.

Though vote buying, according to Suleimon Arigbabu, South-west coordinator, Transition Monitoring Group (TMG), has been on an upward trend since 2016, this is not to suggest that it is a new phenomenon. It has been with us and (has) been part of the ills plaguing our electoral system for a long time.

Elections in Nigeria since 1999 have always been characterised by irregularities such as violence, rigging, ballot box snatching, thuggery, forgery, thumb

printing, manipulation of voter registers with voter inducement which is more prevalent in the recent past.

To curb such irregularities in the electoral process, the card reader was introduced and first used in the general election, held on March 28, 2015.

This to some extent reduced the problem of rigging, ballot box snatching and thumb printing during elections. But vote buying remained a burning issue.

Going by recent observations since 2016 however, there is a spike in its (vote buying) occurrence and brazenness and this is very likely to be the same for Osun State 2018, Mr Arigbabu noted.

Pointer For Saturday?

Cases of voter inducement were widely reported in four successive governorship elections conducted in Nigeria since 2016: in Edo, Ondo, Anambra and Ekiti States. The trend is on the rise and this might be an indication that Saturday election in Osun may be influenced by vote buyers.

Ms Hassan gave a breakdown of how vote buying has successively progressed over the last two years.

Vote buying is not new. In fact the lexicon stomach infrastructure was added to the Nigerian lexicon just cause of it. However, the deterioration to this unimaginable level of vote buying commenced with the Edo governorship election in 2016. Since then things have progressively worsened.

In Ondo governorship elections, it was called vote and cook soup. Here parties paid N3,000, N2000 and N5000 and the highest payer carried the election.

This was followed by the Anambra elections, where see and buy was introduced. In that election, people even refused to vote until they were paid, it is a gallore of vote buying and selling, a demand and supply market where parties tried to outdo the other.

This reached its height in the Ekiti elections, which is the worst so far. The important thing to note is there is a progressive deterioration and there is a lot to glean from this. One is poverty, unemployment, and in particular incumbents refusal to pay salaries have pushed Nigerians to the brink of selling their votes.

Antics To Watch Out For On Election Day

Realising the challenge of defection by voters on election day, some political parties have devised several tricks and antics to ensure value for money over the years.

They come in different acronyms such as buy and see or see and buy, or snap and send among others.

Party agents are hired and placed at strategic locations very close to the ballot boxes to see which party a voter has voted before payment. The agent would give a signal to another party agent to pay at the back, and if the voter fails to vote for the party, there is also a signal to indicate this. This strategy was widely noted by many observers especially in the Ekiti elections.

citizens who are able to show PVCs were equally paid N4000 at their ward level in a very coded manner. On election day however, we witnessed the buy and see phenomenon where voters deliberately displayed their ballot paper as proof of voting for in a certain way, upon which they get a payment of N5000 from an agent nearby, Mr Arigbabu of TMG said.

Laws, Penalties To Dissuade Offenders

Vote buying has become a part of Nigerian elections despite the fact that the 2011 Electoral Act as amended had provisions for penalties for financial inducement in elections.

The Act, Section 124 subsection (a)states that paying money to any other person for bribery at any election attracts conviction to a maximum fine of N500,000 or 12 months imprisonment or both.

Subsection (b) says that receiving any money or gift, for voting or to refrain from voting at any election attracts a maximum fine of N500,000 or imprisonment for 12 months or both.

But as of today, there is no completed investigation into several reports of vote buying nor prosecution and conviction of persons reportedly caught in the act.

Already, a civic group. SERAP has dragged INEC to court over the commissions failure to prosecute offenders.

This newspaper published videos and interviews of vote buying by officials of the two major parties in the Ekiti election, APC and PDP.

Responding, INEC admitted it has powers to prosecute allegations of vote buying, but lacks the powers to arrest and investigate suspects.

According to the election umpire, other agencies must first arrest and investigate suspects before the commission can prosecute.

The commission however said that it would partner with other agencies to prosecute electoral offenders.

We Will Deal With Culprits- INEC

Ahead of Saturday, INEC threatened to publish names of anyone who engages in vote buying. The commission said it will ensure defaulters are prosecuted according to the law.

INEC CHAIRMAN, MAHMOOD YAKUBU

We are trying to re-engineer our voting cubicle and ballot box in such a way that it becomes difficult to see who a voter votes for, the national commissioner of voter education and publicity, Solomon Soyebi in a recent interview on Channels TV.

We are going to see the redesigned polling booths in Osun State first. Anybody who engages in vote buying will get his name published and this time around we wont be quiet about it.

To monitor vote buying and selling, the commission said voters will not be allowed to go inside polling booths with their telephones, cameras and any other devices that can record images on Saturday.

INEC is considering lots of measures including changing the placement of voting cubicle to prevent see and buy, use of phones during voting; but importantly, the responsibility of curbing vote buying is ours. We have to sensitise people and in particular hold elected officials to account, instead of allowing them pauperise citizens, the CDD director noted.

I believe that INEC will improve the design and setup of the polling centres to make it impossible for anyone to see how a voter votes which is a major aspect of vote buying, Mr Arigbabu also noted.

There is so much INEC can do, but it is wrong to saddle INEC with any further responsibility in this regards.

The security agencies should rise up to the occasion by making arrests and conducting thorough investigations that should aid diligent prosecution in order to secure convictions. This is the best way to deter criminally-minded politicians from embarking on this crime. We must also urge the legislature to pass the law to establish an electoral offences tribunal to see to the prosecution of electoral offenders without saddling INEC with additional responsibilities.
The Central Bank of Nigeria on Wednesday said it has commenced a review of the information provided by telecoms giant, MTN, and four banks sanctioned recently over alleged illegal repatriation of funds.

The apex bank said the review of details submitted by the four banks, accused of helping the South African telecoms company to illegally repatriate $8.1 billion, is being done with a view to reaching an equitable resolution.

The central bank had on August 29 ordered MTN and the four banks to bring $8.1 billion back into Nigeria that it alleged the telecoms firm sent abroad in breach of foreign exchange regulations. The development affected shares in MTN which fell nearly a third in Johannesburg stock market after the announcement.

The apex bank thereafter fined and debited the four banks including Standard Chartered PLC, fined 2.4 billion naira ($7.86 million); Stanbic IBTC Bank PLC, fined 1.8 billion naira; Citibank, fined 1.2 billion naira; and Diamond Bank PLC, fined 250 million naira.

The banks in separate statements denied wrongdoings. MTN also denied any wrongdoing. Shortly after the development, Nigerias attorney general, Abubakar Malami, imposed a $2 billion tax bill on the telecoms firm. In response to the tax demand, MTN filed a lawsuit accusing Mr Malami of exceeding his powers. The development has created ripples among experts, with concerns raised around the state of Nigerias business environment.

But on Wednesday, the apex bank said it is engaging and reviewing the information provided by the banks due to concerns raised after the sanctions were imposed.

The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) acknowledges the public interest over sanctions recently imposed on four deposit money banks (DMBs), the statement, signed by Isaac Okorafor, CBNs Director of Corporate Communications, said.

We wish to restate that the CBN will continue to welcome foreign investments and investors. Indeed, some of our recent innovations and reforms of the Foreign Exchange regime such as the introduction of the NAFEX window, are designed to simplify foreign exchange regulations.

The bank noted that the delegation of the issuance of Certificates of Capital Importation (CCIs) to commercial and merchant banks some years ago was done to instill confidence in the investor community and encourage the flow of foreign direct and portfolio investments into the Nigerian economy.

The recent sanctions on the banks arose due to irregularities with respect to repatriations made on behalf of MTN Nigeria Limited and were not in any way designed to restrict access to investor returns, it said.

In response to the recent regulatory actions, the Banks and MTN are engaging the CBN and have provided additional information which is currently being reviewed with a view to arriving at an equitable resolution, it added.

MTNs latest troubles come about two years after it agreed to pay more than $1 billion to settle a dispute over SIM cards in Nigeria, the telecoms giants biggest and by far most problematic market.
Another Nigerian Army soldier has committed suicide in Borno State.

Adegor Okpako, a staff sergeant attached to 192 Battalion in Gwoza, killed himself at about 2:50 p.m. Wednesday, PREMIUM TIMES learnt from military sources.

Mr Okpako also killed another sergeant colleague who was only identified as Saka.

Three soldiers and a member of the civilian joint task force were also seriously wounded in the random shooting by Mr Okpako, sources said.

Mr Okpako killed himself two days after returning to the battalion after taking a few days break. It was not immediately clear whether he was receiving treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder or any form of mental health crisis.

The spokespersons for the Defence Headquarters, the Nigerian Army and the counter-terrorism unit were all unavailable for comments late Wednesday.

But the Army tweeted shortly before 12 a.m. Thursday that the incident was a case of accidental discharge on Wednesday afternoon.

Accidental discharge kills 2 soldiers. We deeply regret to announce the death of two soldiers of 192 Battalion who lost their lives as a result of an accidental discharge during in-theatre training today, the Army said.

The statement said a thorough inquiry would be conducted to understand the source of the fatal attack.

Our sources however insisted that it was a suicide case as no training was going on when the incident occurred, contrary to the claim by the Army.

The plight of Nigerian soldiers engaging Boko Haram terrorists in Nigerias war-ravaged northeast appears to have worsened in recent months. Over 100 soldiers have been killed and as many feared missing since mid-July alone.

The frequency and scope of the latest Boko Haram assault have alarmed security analysts and residents in the region who feared the insurgents might have regrouped.

Several military bases have been raided in recent weeks, with terrorists making away with large quantities of military equipment in virtually every raid.

Experts also blame inadequate weapons and welfare for the troops for the losses being inflicted by the terrorists.

The Chief of Army Staff, Tukur Buratai, had paid unscheduled visits to the war front at least two times within the past six weeks.

Mr Buratais visits often focus on promising a better working condition and abundant supply or arms and ammunition in a bid to boost the morale of the troops. But it appeared that not every soldier was optimistic about the promises, a situation that may have contributed to the increasing number of mental health cases.

In November 2017, a soldier opened fire on a captain, killing him before turning the gun on himself.

The latest suicide comes three months after an Army captain committed suicide while under psychiatric evaluation in Borno State.
Justice Minister, Abubakar Malami, has hired two American lobbying and public relations firms to plant opinion article favourable to the President Muhammadu Buharis administration in American newspapers, PREMIUM TIMES can report today.

Mr. Malamis action came to light more than five years after this newspaper exposed the Goodluck Jonathan government for spending several thousand dollars on arranging interviews for administrations officials on U.S. media outlets.

Officials at the Nigerian embassy in Washington have always wondered why administration officials preferred to waste public funds on American lobbyists rather than take advantage of the resources at the countrys diplomatic mission there.

One of our jobs is to relate with American institutions on behalf of our country, but we are hardly used, one embassy official said, asking not to be named for fear of being victimised. We have extensive contacts within the media here . So why our people keep wasting money on hiring lobbyists remain unclear.

Investigations by this newspaper showed that in the latest case, Mr. Malami, in May this year, verbally contracted a Nigerian public relations firm, Channel Koos, to help him identify American firms that could insert pro-Buhari opinion article in a major U.S. publication.

The article, Mr. Malami demanded, must showcase the administrations reforms.

It is unclear how much the minister paid Channel Koos. But the company spent $8,000 of its earning on hiring two U.S. firms to deliver on the project.

The company hired Mount Olive LLC, a Maryland-based PR firm owned by Nigerian-American businessman, Olufemi Soneye, according to details submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice in compliance with the US Foreign Agents Registrations Act (FARA).

Mount Olive in turn subcontracted the job to Prime Policy, a Delaware Corporation, for $5,000. According to the signed agreement between the two firms, Prime Policy was mandated to draft and place an opinion editorial for the Nigerian Attorney General.

Details seen by PREMIUM TIMES suggests that the Buhari government awarded the PR contract to inform the international community about reforms in Nigeria, regarding the rule of law.

The agreement is oral stating that Mount Olive LLC should help arrange an op-ed for the Attorney General of Nigeria in a major US newspaper, the filings by Mr. Soneye said.

The op-ed is to inform the international community about reforms in Nigeria, regarding the rule of law. The fees is $8000 of which $5000 was to be paid to Prime Policy to market and $3000 for Mount Olive.

The consultant firm, Channel Koos is working with the Attorney generals Office as a media consultant locally. It is controlled by the Nigerian government. I was engaged to handle the international media engagements for Mount Olive. The process will be financed by the government to inform the international community about progress in the fight against corruption and rule of law.

Mr. Soneye explains

Further explaining the reason for the contract, Mr Soneye said the Nigerian government decided to commission the drafting and circulation of the opinion article in response to allegations of human rights abuses against the current administration by international organisations.

Curiously however, he added that the opinion article was yet to be published, four months after payment was finalised and the contract was said to have been concluded.

Mr Soneyes explanation was communicated in an email he sent to PREMIUM TIMES regarding the contract.

Mount Olive is a duly registered PR, Communications firm in the state of Maryland. We duly received an article for publication on behalf of the AGF for publication in international media in response to some allegation by some international organizations criticism of the administrations human rights abuse, according to the brief. The brief was from a third party and not directly from the AGF.

We negotiated for $8,000 of which $3,000 was paid to us at Mount Olives and the rest $5,000 went to the firm (Prime Policy).

The article was however, withdrawn as recent incidents have overshadowed it and it is right now being updated and we await the updated article, Mr Soneye said.

He however declined a request by PREMIUM TIMES to provide a copy of the opinion initially intended for publication, saying doing so would be a breach of contract.

Governments silence

Mr Malami did not answer or return calls made to him by our reporter. He also did not respond to text messages sent to him.

The ministers media assistant, Salihu Isah, said he knew nothing about the contract.

I have also not been able to access any information on your request. Mr Isah told PREMIUM TIMES.

It is unclear why the minister would spend about N2.5 million (at the current exchange rates of N306.2 to a US dollar) for the publication of a single opinion.

Speaking to Nigerians through in foreign media

President Buhari has been criticised for consistently making major pronouncements on key national issues through foreign media.

Shortly after his first major appointments in 2015 for example, Nigerians criticised the composition of the appointees, describing them as lopsided in favour of Mr Buharis northern region.

Despite the widespread condemnations across he country, Mr Buhari kept mute. He only responded to critics during an interview with the British Broadcasting Cooperation, weeks after the outrage began across the country.

In April, Mr Buhari was widely condemned for describing Nigerian youth as lazy during a meeting with commonwealth leaders in London. The President only clarified his comments two weeks later during an interview with the Voice of America.

While he has appeared on Aljazeera, CNN, BBC and VOA, Mr Buhari is not known to have granted interviews to any major Nigerian publication since he came to office in 2015. He has held only one media chat, in December 2015.
A Nigerian man and his accomplice in Italy were on Thursday sentenced to four years each for their roles in the controversial Malabu oil deal, marking the first victory for Italian prosecutors in the complex corruption case.

The deal, struck in 2011 under President Goodluck Jonathan, saw the Nigerian government stand as a negotiator in the controversial sale of OPL 245 oil block in offshore Nigerian waters.

Two international oil and gas giants, Royal Dutch Shell and Italian Agip-Eni, paid out about $1.1 billion to Dan Etete, a former Nigerian petroleum minister who had previously been convicted of money laundering in France.

The payout immediately became a subject of cross-border investigation spanning over six countries. Several Nigerian government officials were believed to have received several million dollars in bribes for the enabling roles they played.

Emeka Obi, a Nigerian consultant in England, and Gianluca Di Nardo, an Italian, stood as middlemen in connecting the parties and the transfer of the funds through international bank accounts.

They were found guilty and sentenced four years each on Thursday and another 100 pounds confiscated in connection with the case, Reuters reported.

The pair had opted for a quick trial for their roles in the deal. The process in Italian law offers a possible reduction in any sentence.

A larger trial including Shell, Eni and 13 other defendants is ongoing. The prosecution will start presenting their evidence next Wednesday.

Today sees the first men fall in the murky Malabu scandal. As Shell and Enis trial looms, time will tell whether its just the middlemen who pay the price for this epic crime against the Nigerian people, said Barnaby Pace, anti-corruption campaigner at Global Witness.

But one things for certain: this judgment will send shivers down the corporate spines of the oil industry  and will surely alarm Shell and Eni employees and shareholders who have been repeatedly told that there was nothing amiss with the OPL 245 deal.

The larger trial is remarkable for both including two of the worlds largest corporations and a number of Eni and Shells current and former senior managers.

Those on trial include Enis current CEO Claudio Descalzi, former CEO Paolo Scaroni, and Chief Operations and Technology Officer Roberto Casula alongside four former Royal Dutch Shell staff members including Malcolm Brinded CBE, former Executive Director for Shells Upstream International operations, and two former MI6 agents employed by Shell.

According to prosecutors, Mr Obi kept in frequent contact with executives at Eni attempting to broker the sale of the oil license from Malabu Oil and Gas, a company owned by former Nigerian Oil Minister Dan Etete.

Prosecutors accused Messrs Obi and Di Nardo of intending to use commissions from the deal to pay bribes to Nigerian public officials and kickbacks to Eni and Shell managers.

Since 2012 when it first denied all allegations to PREMIUM TIMES, Shell had insisted that it only paid the Nigerian government for the OPL 245 oil block and did not know Mr Etete was the recipient or that he was an ex-convict.

But in 2017, Shell told the New York Times it had dealt with Mr Etete who awarded the OPL 245 oil block to his own secretly owned company, Malabu, while serving as petroleum minister from 1995-1998.

The case against Eni and Shell brought by the Milan public prosecutor alleges that $520 million from the deal was converted into cash and intended to be paid to Mr Jonathan, members of the government and other Nigerian officials.

The prosecutors further allege that money was also channelled to Eni and Shell executives with $50 million in cash delivered to the home of Enis Roberto Casula.

Lanre Suraju, chairman of Human and Environmental Development Agenda, an anti-corruption group, said todays conviction vindicates what international and Nigerian civil society has claimed for years: OPL 245 was a corrupt deal.

Antonio Tricarico of the Italian NGO Re:Common said: Milan public prosecutors were right to bravely take Eni and Shell and their top managers to trial in Italy.

The time has come that the Italian government, as main shareholder of Eni, considers suspending all those managers involved in the case until the final judgement.

We hope to see the money from this deal swiftly returned to the Nigerian people. said Nick Hildyard of Corner House.

Eni and Shell, together with their managers and other defendants have denied wrongdoing and vowed to establish their innocence in the ongoing trial.
Another minister serving in President Muhammadu Buharis cabinet has been found to have skipped the mandatory national youth service scheme, an offence that may see him lose his position and earn him jail term.

The Minister of Communications, Adebayo Shittu, failed to participate in the NYSC scheme despite graduating from the then University of Ife (now Obafemi Awolowo University, OAU) at age 25, PREMIUM TIMES can authoritatively report.

The revelation about Mr. Shittu, who is currently angling to become Oyo State governor, is coming to light about a week after Kemi Adeosun was compelled to step down from her post as Nigerias finance minister after this medium reported that she skipped national service and then procured a fake exemption certificate to cover her tracks.

Months of discreet checks at the NYSC headquarters showed that the communications minister did not present himself for service after graduation and is yet to do so till date.

Contacted Tuesday, Mr. Shittu admitted that he did not serve but claimed he thought his first political post after graduation could suffice as national service, a claim lawyers and NYSC insiders consider as ludicrous and untenable.

Skipping the compulsory national service is an offence under the NYSC law, punishable with up to 12 months imprisonment.

Employers are mandated by law to always request NYSC certificate of national service from employees as part of the conditions for hiring.

Mr Shittu, born on March 23, 1953, studied law at OAU, graduating in 1978. He proceeded to the Nigerian Law School, Lagos, qualifying as a lawyer in 1979.

Having earned a bachelors degree at the age of 25, Section 2 of the NYSC Act expects Mr Shittu to have participated in the year-long national service.

The Minister Speaks

Section 2 (1) of the NYSC Act mandates all Nigerians who earn degrees or higher national diplomas from tertiary institutions in Nigerian and abroad (effective 1972/73 session) to participate in the scheme.

The Minister of Communication, Adebayo Shittu, [Photo credit: THISDAYLIVE]

Those exempted by the law are those who graduated after their 30th birthday, persons with national honours and individuals who serve in the military and intelligence organisations.

Rather than enlist in the national service, Mr Shittu went into politics after graduation, and was, in 1979, elected member of the Oyo State House of Assembly.

The minister said he believed that having been elected lawmaker, he needed not participate in the national service.

He said he deliberatively skipped the NYSC scheme because he was convinced that his membership of the state assembly was itself a service.

The constitution provides for the qualification needed for state assembly members, NYSC is not there, Mr. Shittu said. I didnt need it to become a member of the state assembly, and that is already a service, he said.

Mr Shittu disagreed with our reporter who laboured to explain to him that the NYSC Act makes participation in the scheme mandatory for all graduates like him and that election or appointment to political office does not qualify as a basis for exemption.

What The Law Says

Mr Shittus argument does not appear convincing when placed against the letters of the NYSC law.

Section 2, subsection 1 of the Act makes it obligatory for every Nigerian who graduate at the end of academic year 1972-73 and subsequent years, to make himself available for service for a continuous period of one year from the date specified in the call-up instrument served upon him.

NYSC Headquarters

Subsection 2 of the same section enumerated instances of exemption from the national service, which did not include holding political office, as Mr Shittu claimed.

The four categories of individuals exempted from the national service, according to the NYSC law, are those who graduated above the age of thirty, and those who have served in the armed forces or the Nigeria Police for a period of more than nine months.

The third category covers staff of four security organisations, namely the Nigerian Security Organisation, the State Security Service, the National Intelligence Agency and the Defence Intelligence Service.

Exemption status is also conferred on individuals who bagged national honours before graduation.

Illegalities?

Despite not possessing certificate of national service, Mr Shittu went on from being a state lawmaker, to occupying important government positions, including his current post as minister.

Mr Shittu is a former attorney general and commissioner for justice in his native Oyo State. He also served as member of the Oyo State Judicial Service Commission from 2004 to 2007.

In 2015, he was nominated minister by President Buhari, and later assigned the communications portfolio upon legislative screening.

It is not clear how he scaled screenings by the Oyo State House of Assembly, the SSS, and the National Assembly, who are all expected to screen commissioner and ministerial nominees before their appointment.

Mr Shittu is now aspiring for governorship of Oyo State.

Section 12 of the NYSC Act mandates all employers to demand the national service certificate of prospective employees before hiring.

Section 12 of the Act reads:

For the purposes of employment anywhere in the Federation and before employment, it shall be the duty of every prospective employer to demand and obtained from any person who claims to have obtained his first degree at the end of the academic year 1973-74 or, as the case may be, at the end of any subsequent academic year the following:-

a. a copy of the Certificate of National Service of such person issued pursuant to section 11 of this Decree

b. a copy of any exemption certificate issued to such person pursuant to section 17 of this Decree

c. such other particulars relevant there to as may be prescribed by or under this Decree.

Section 13 of the Act also criminalises skipping the national service as it prescribes 12 months imprisonment or fine of N2,000 or both, for such offenders.

Lawyers Speak

Lawyers who spoke to PREMIUM TIMES said the minister is in the breach of the NYSC law for skipping the national service.

His membership of the state assembly is not the same as national service, said Huwaila Mohammed, a Kano-based practitioner. He needs to serve, because the section of the law dealing with exemption did not include political office holders like him.

Another lawyer, Abdul Mahmud, agreed with Ms Mohammeds position, saying the minister is a dodger who is in breach of the law.

He said by the provision of Section 12 of the NYSC Act, Mr Shittu ought to have presented his certificate of national service before he was cleared as minister.

The provision is clear, Mr. Mahmud said. It says (you must serve) before you get any job in the federation.

Mr Mahmud, who chairs the Abuja-based pressure group, Public Interest Lawyers League (PILL), said Mr Shittus case is worse than that of Kemi Adeosun because he deliberately refused to serve.

Former Minister of Finance, Kemi Adeosun (Photo Credit: adelove.com)

If we assume as a member of the Oyo House he (Mr Shittu) served, did it not defeat objective 4 (b) stated in Section 1 (4) (b) of the NYSC Act? Members serve in states other than their own, he said.

The lawyer said Mr Shittu should be arrested immediately by the police and made to face the law.

All positions he has held are illegal and he should return all monies he earned from those posts to government coffers, he said.
Leaders of ex-agitators enlisted in the first phase of the Presidential Amnesty Programme met on Tuesday with the Special Adviser to the President on Niger Delta, Charles Dokubo, to chart a course ahead of the 2019 polls.

The forthcoming presidential election was top on the agenda of the meeting which was held at the instance of the ex-agitators at Casa De Lucy Hotel in Abuja.

Reuben Wilson, who led 31phase one leaders of ex-agitators in the Amnesty Programme to the meeting, said it was to consult with Mr Dokubo for a clear direction on political alignment of the Niger Delta people.

First of all, we thank you because you have tried and what you have been doing in this programme, especially recognising the leaders and giving them empowerment. This is something people have not been doing but when you came, you said no, your mission here is to make sure that we succeed in this programme.

Let me from this point explain why we said we needed this meeting with you. This is an hour of politics; people are moving from one political party to another.

Presidential aspirants are meeting people every day and night but we the committed leaders of the Amnesty Programme, had not have a say. The reason being that we have a leader who is the head of this programme, and the leader is no other person than you sir.

We are here to get directive from you; we are here to know where we will dance to and to know your mind. We are here to get everything about this forthcoming election from you so that the leaders under this programme will know what to do. Even though most of us here have been pressured by some groups to dance right or left, but we still believe we have a leader who is overseeing this programme and before we take a decision, we have to hear from you.

While noting that they had been abandoned after working to support previous administrations during elections, they expressed hope that it would be different this time.

Even if the leaders and followers have been abandoned after working tirelessly for previous governments during elections, we believe it is necessary to hear from you. We pray that if you say we should dance to left or right, we will not be abandoned again because it is not easy for people to struggle, others win and those that suffered will remain the same. We pray that you will speak to us wisely so that we will understand.

In his response, Mr Dokubo described President Muhammadu Buharis administration as reliable. He said it was imperative for the people of Niger Delta to be at the mainstream politically, to regain loses occasioned by being at the periphery.

I want all of us to think deep and fast on what we will benefit if our people do not support this administration and bring back President Buhari; the alternative will be too ghastly to even contemplate. This programme is on and for me, this government has been so reliable; we just have a little hitch in the releases, but the support of this government for the programme is enormous.

I want the Niger Delta to be in the mainstream of this government, that this government should be our own government. Dont distract attention; let us focus on what we are supposed to do and gain. Instead of agonising, let us organise ourselves better in groups, not individually.

I am now making a political plea because you said you want to know where you can lean or move. For me, even if I dont announce it to you, I come from an academic background, but I was appointed by a government. I will fight hard for this administration. As you go home to you camps, let us do all that it takes to return this government so that our own areas can be at the centre and benefit from it. It is the only way to sustain this programme.

Mr Dokubo warned them against juicy offers that would be made to secure their support for the 2019 election.

They can tell you all sorts and promise you heaven on earth but let us be focused and move this programme to higher heights and achieve all that we have set for ourselves and make the Niger Delta great again. I will not fail you. These are political times and there is temptation. There are people parading themselves as leaders. They will come and seek your opinion, tell you they will do better, but be wise, he admonished.

In attendance at the meeting were leaders of Niger Delta ex-agitators from Delta, Bayelsa, Rivers, Abia, Akwa Ibom, Cross River, Imo and Edo states.
At about 12:00 pm last week Tuesday, I checked in at Sir Seretse Khama International Airport as my journey to Rwanda began. I boarded with the lovely Ethiopian Airlines (ET 829) as we flew for the next six and half hours to reach Bole International Airport, Ethiopia.

This was my first ever-longest time spent on an aircraft. My longest has always been four hours of Joburg-Kenya destination.

So this was my first longest trip on air and I enjoyed it. I was even delighted to learn that we pass through the Victoria Falls space on the way to Ethiopia. Victoria Falls is one of the places close to my heart. I kept dozing throughout the long journey while sometimes I would be awakened by the excitement noise of a group of local students who were on their way to Israel for studying. They were First year students.

I just couldnt wait to see Rwanda and immediately find out what the African Green Revolution Forum (AGRF) 2018 had in store for me. Before I knew it, we were in Addis Ababas Bole Airport and I was nervous my flight might leave me as we had a delay from Botswana. The airport was also yet another experience, so big and fully congested. Well, I quickly rushed to my boarding gate to avoid being left behind and thank God I nailed the time.

I wore a big smile on my face as I was now boldly ready to see Kigali, the new city whose beauty I have heard of from other East African countries that I have been to. Three hours down the line I was in Kigali Airport and all I could feel was the ambience of love and calmness. I immediately realised that security was tight. For a few minutes I freaked out but immediately thought I was in a protected place.

I recoiled at the memory of the 1994 genocide. Anyway, things have changed and the immaculate city of Kigali beautifully surrounded by the hills just boasts of peace. The neatness just made me call the city a paperless city. Of course the country has banned the use of plastics and this factor alone contributes to the cleanliness of the city.

I reached Kigali at exactly 00:30 am and headed to Hotel Chez Lando. What I saw that night definitely matched what I have heard of. The city sprawls across numerous hills, ridges and valleys and it looks like the background of the city was created just to boast.

From the road, I enjoyed the view of the buildings, which looked as if it was sloping with those shimmering lights that provoked the beautiful citys image.

I still couldnt wait to wake up and get to Kigali Convention Centre where the proceedings of the conference were held. I have heard so much about it and it was indeed impressive. The convention centre absorbed us all in its enormous space, and mind you, we were over 2000 from across Africa.

We dont have such a facility in Botswana and I was tipped it is actually the second largest after the one in Addis Ababa while some argued that Kenya Convention Centre is also that big. On the second day of the event, with my team of journalists from 13 other countries spooned by Thompson Reuters leadership, we visited Kagitarama village in Muhanga District. Clearly, the country is beautiful and clean; we still noted this on the way to the fields.

Those lovely, open green spaces really fascinated me especially since it was drizzling and that fresh smell just made my day. I also spared some time to visit Kigali Memorial Centre and Nyamata Genocide Memorial.I was so touched at this place, there are so many disheartening stories on how people died during the genocide, but thank God the country has just positively transformed to be a peaceful place.

I literally shed a remorseful tear when I saw those clothes some stained in blood that were preserved after the dead were buried. I was glad that the memorial centres are there to show the world the difficult path that the country once faced. At Nyamata, I was also deeply hurt when they explained to me about one tombstone that belonged to an 18-year-old girl who was painfully killed with a stick that was shoved from her mouth and let out through her excretory passage.

She died a very painful death her killer did not only kill her that way. He was an HIV positive man and he also raped her. Seeing those skulls of the deceased piled up there also ripped off ones soul. A lot more painful stories from these centres may be shared but I am so glad the country is now fine. There is actually a police offices about three meters apart at the malls, just to ensure that people in the city are safe at all times.

On my way back, we made a stop over at Victoria Falls airport where we waited for an hour before we proceeded to my capital city, Gaborone. I enjoyed the landscape that I saw from above, it looked dry but there was just something about the glimpse.My travel to Kigali was indeed insightful as I have learnt a lot from the forum and also had an opportunity to be in the midst of my continents leaders.

The renowned Tony Blair also graced this occasion, and from Botswana, Former Governor of Bank of Botswana Linah Mohohlo, the youthful Naledi Magowe and Liberty Mtetwa also attended the forum to talk technology in Agriculture.
The federal government has assured the organised Labour that the Tripartite Committee on the National Minimum Wage would conclude its negotiation before the expiration of the 14-day ultimatum.

Ama Pepple, Chairman, Tripartite Committee on the new National Minimum Wage gave the assurance while speaking with journalists on Thursday in Abuja.

The organised labour had on September 12 issued a 14-day ultimatum that would expire on September 25 to the federal government for the Tripartite Committee on the National Minimum Wage to reconvene and complete it assignment.

Also, labour also said it would commence nationwide strike immediately after the expiration of its 14 days ultimatum if their demand was not met.

We do not want strike and I am sure that even the Federal Government does not want strike, and also Nigerians.

So, we pray that everything will be resolved before then so labour do not have to embark on any strike, Ms Pepple said.

The chairman also noted that the committee had worked hard and had finished its assignment.

She, however, said organised labour, organised private sectors and individuals from others sectors had submitted their figures but the state governors were yet to submit theirs.

We have some figures from organised labour, organised private sectors and individuals from others sectors.

But, we still need approval from the federal government and some figures from the state governments.

We do not want to fix a date for the reconvening of the meeting on our own without everyones opinion.

We believe it is better to have all the figures and the government position for the sake of peace.

So, that we can comfortably say that we have taken everyone position into consideration before the recommendation, Ms Pepple added.

(NAN)
Former Vice President Atiku Abubakar has expressed deep anger over the police summon to the Peoples Democratic Party governorship candidate in Osun State, saying the development was worrisome because it had traits of a fascist government.

Mr Abubakar said it was unfortunate that Ademola Adeleke was being trailed by the police when federal agencies aided Nigerias former finance minister, Kemi Adeosun, to depart Nigeria over the weekend despite having admitted to criminal forgery of her youth service scheme certificate.

Mr Abubakar also criticised President Muhammadu Buhari, saying it was rather ironic that the police were after Mr Adeleke when in fact Nigerias foremost examination body, WAEC, had certified his certificate as genuine; unlike Mr Buhari who hired over a dozen senior lawyers to defend him in court rather than clarify issues around his school certificate.

Mr Abubakar did not mention Mr Buhari by name, but the presidents high school certificate was a major issue during the 2015 elections. The president was also reported to have queued up to 13 senior lawyers to extricate him of certificate forgery charges in 2016. One of the numerous lawsuits seeking judicial clarification on the presidents WAEC certificate was later abruptly withdrawn without explanation by the litigant.

The president strongly denies all allegations of forgery or non-participation in high school leaving examination.

The police summoned Mr Adeleke for arraignment on Wednesday, barely three days to a gubernatorial election in which he is one of the candidates of Nigerias two-largest political parties.

The police accused Mr Adeleke of examination malpractices, saying he had several accomplices most of whom had been declared persons of interest and are expected to also turn themselves in for trial.

The police statement Wednesday afternoon drew immediate backlash, with opposition figures taking turns to condemn the police for the curious manner the matter was being handled. Most worried the police action could influence the election on Saturday by derailing Mr Adelekes momentum in favour of the All Progressives Congress candidate in the election.

Mr Abubakar, a presidential aspirant and chieftain of the PDP, said he was alarmed by the development in a Wednesday night statement to PREMIUM TIMES.

Let it be on record that I completely condemn this act, which comes less than a week to the elections in which Senator Adeleke is a major participant and front-runner, Mr Abubakar said. I warn both Nigerians and the international community that democracy is on trial in Nigeria. Senator Adeleke is being victimised and we call on all lovers of democracy to stand up to resist this fascist attempt to steal an election.

Mr Abubakar said attempts by the Buhari administration to manipulate the Saturday election in Osun started with a secret transfer of nearly N17 billion to the cash-strapped state on the eve of the elections there.

It is obvious that these are politically motivated charges to hamstring the expected victory of the PDPs candidate. Coming so soon after the surreptitious payments of 16.7 billion so-called Paris Club refund to the incumbent All Progressives Congress administration in Osun State, which was condemned by the generality of Nigerian Governors from both the APC and the PDP, it reflects desperation on the part of the Buhari administration he said.

Mr Abubakar said the police should immediately backtrack on their moves against Mr Adeleke, saying they should go after Mr Buhari and other top APC echelons who have unanswered questions hanging over their academic credentials.

Ironically, certificate forgery or absence of certificates, go all the way to the top in the APC led federal government, Mr Abubakar said. Unlike some people who have hired thirteen Senior Advocates of Nigeria, Senator Adeleke has been able to get the West African Examination Council to certify today that he indeed sat for his school leaving certificate in 1981.

On the contrary, Senator Adeleke has no proven case of forgery or fraud against him. Why then has the police waited till now to declare Senator Adeleke wanted, just three days to the election?

This by itself should stop the police from their malicious prosecution of Adeleke if the rule of law were guiding this administration.

Nigerians were witness to the fact that a minister admitted, after being exposed, to forging her certificate. This minister was escorted to the airport and allowed to board a flight to London to escape the long hand of the law, he added.

The PDP had earlier dismissed the police summon to Mr Adeleke, saying it was an attempt to manipulate the election in favour of the ruling party and insisting that its candidate has absolutely no question to answer with respect to forgery of academic credentials or examination sharp practices.

Presidential spokespersons Femi Adesina and Garba Shehu did not return PREMIUM TIMES requests for comments about Mr Abubakars charges Wednesday night.

There are media reports that the president had ordered Inspector-General Ibrahim Idris to suspend its summon to Mr Adeleke until after the election. But PREMIUM TIMES has not been able to independently corroborate the report.

Both Mr Buhari and his spokespersons regularly push back against claims that the president sometimes interferes in specific police investigation or general activities of all law enforcement authorities.
The Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) has said it will commence an indefinite nationwide strike after the expiration of the 14-day ultimatum given to the federal government which will elapse on September 26.

The union had earlier said the ultimatum will officially commence on September 12.

Ayuba Wabba, NLC president, said this while addressing journalists at the end of the National Executive Council (NEC) meeting of the congress on Wednesday in Abuja.

Mr Wabba said the industrial action would become necessary if organised labours demand to reconvene the tripartite committee on the national minimum wage for workers was not met.

NEC has resolved that at the expiration of the 14 days industrial action notice issued to the federal government over the new minimum wage issue and if the demand of the organised labour was not met, we will embark on strike, the president said.

According to Mr Wabba, NEC in session has expressed disappointment at the manner in which the tripartite committee unilaterally adjourned the meeting.

The union insists the committee concludes its work within the stipulated time frame.

NEC expresses serious concern at the unilateral adjournment of the negotiation of the new minimum wage by the Federal Government on the day the tripartite committee was expected to complete its assignment, he said.

The president said the action of the committee is against the principle of collective bargaining as provided in International Labour Organisation (ILO) Conventions 98 and 131 on Minimum Wage setting process, which Nigeria had domesticated.

NEC has given the National Administrative Council and the leadership of organised labour the power to declare an appropriate industrial action or any action it deems necessary, he said.

NEC also resolves that all its affiliate unions and the 36 state councils of congress and the FCT and joint action front should communicate the decision of NEC to their members and all workers, he said.

The labour leaders cautioned the federal government against foot-dragging on the new minimum wage.

Also speaking on the recent controversies surrounding the leadership of the Labour Party (LP), the NLC said it has received the report of political coalition on the challenges facing the labour party.

The party is registered by trade unions, NLC and TUC, civil societies allies, market women, artisans, and others, the president explained.

Mr Wabba said a former governor of Ondo State, Olusegun Mimiko, has no business hijacking the partys structures. He also insisted that an existing judgement involving the party be respected and enforced.

Mr Wabba said the congress has the (registration) certificate of (LP) and anyone seen with another (certificate) is an impostor.

For the avoidance of doubt, we will display to the press the certificate of the party (that) is in the custody of NLC. We are presenting the original certificate and anybody claiming to be the owner of the party is only an impostor, he said.
The president of Senate, Bukola Saraki, on Thursday said the All Progressives Congress (APC) led by President Muhammadu Buhari lacks the vision, capacity and patience required to develop Nigeria.

According to a statement by Fidelis Soriwei, the spokesperson of the governor of Bayelsa State, Mr Saraki made the comment when he led his campaign team on a courtesy visit to Government House, Yenagoa.

Mr Saraki, who is seeking the presidential ticket of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), urged Nigerians to replace the leadership being provided by the APC, which he said, had caused disunity in the country.

He said Nigeria is in dire need of a leader like him with demonstrable capacity to unite the deeply divided country and create a sense of belonging through fair distribution of appointments.

Mr Saraki argued that it was impossible for anybody to give what they do not have as shown by the alleged leadership inadequacies of the current APC leaders.

He stated further that Nigeria needs a young vibrant leader with the capacity to withstand the rigours of governance at all time.

According to the aspirant, running governance must be accompanied with the inseparable willingness and capacity to give 24 hours attention to the demands of the job.

He said the Asian Tigers are respected to have developed their countries because of their painstaking commitment and patience in dealing with issues of governance, traits he said is lacking in Nigeria.

Mr Saraki appealed to PDP delegates to consider him for the candidature of the party to make the requisite difference in the governance of Nigeria.

He also spoke on the raging debate on restructuring, stating that it would be wrong to perceive restructuring as a move to develop a few states.

Mr Saraki said restructuring would create opportunities for the states to actualise their developmental potentials and ensure national growth in the interest of future generation of Nigerians.

2019 is a very crucial election for this country; we are at the crossroads in this country today. We have never been so disunited as we are today, he said.

Wherever you go, people ask questions: where do you belong? We need to address the issue of unity in this country; it is time for everybody to have a seat on the table, a time for everyone to have a sense of belonging in this country. It is not about me.

There is a new order in the world today, wherever we go, we see leaders that have vision, that are ready to develop their country. A lot of us talked about the Asian tiger, but they did not come by chance, or trial and error, they became tigers because they have visionary leaders.

They are leaders that are ready to defend their countries, that have an idea of what they want to do. As I keep on saying, you cannot give what you dont have.

Where we are now, we have a leadership that has no vision for us. We must bring visionary leadership to the presidential level so we can move this country forward.

Bayelsa State Governor, Hon. Seriake Dickson (L), heartily welcomes the visiting Senate President and PDP Presidential Aspirant, Dr. Abubakar Bukola Saraki, during the latters visit to Government House, Yenagoa, for consultation ahead of the PDP presidential primaries. Photo by Michael Owi.

In his remarks, Governor Seriake Dickson said that the time had come for Nigeria to move away from bigotry and leadership founded on feelings of sectional superiority.

He called for a regenerated Nigeria where all Nigerians could be trusted and appointed into sensitive positions, irrespective of ethnicity and region.

He restated the position of the elders and leaders of the Niger Delta that the 2019 election would be a referendum on restructuring.

Bayelsa State Governor, Hon. Seriake Dickson (M), flanked by his Deputy, Rear Admiral Gboribiogha John Jonah (Rtd)(L), and visiting Senate President and PDP Presidential Aspirant, Dr. Abubakar Bukola Saraki, shortly after a courtesy visit by the Senate President to Government House, Yenagoa, for consultation, ahead of the PDP primaries. Photo by Michael Owi.

Mr Dickson said that the people of the Niger Delta who had made sacrifices for the sustenance of Nigeria with their sweat and blood but are treated with disdain, for the past 60 years, were passionate about the demand for the restructuring of the country.

He called on the presidential aspirants of the PDP to show restraint in their utterances and to be committed to the pursuit of the objective of electoral victory of the party in 2019.

I agree with you that our nation must move away from bigotry. We must work together and build a new Nigeria for all Nigerians, a nation for the few as well as a nation for the many.

L-R: Bayelsa State Governor, Hon. Seriake Dickson, visiting Senate President and PDP Presidential Aspirant, Dr. Abubakar Bukola Saraki, former Minister of State for Power and Director-General, Abubakar Bukola Saraki Campaign Organisation (ABSCO), Hon. Mohammed Wakil, and Senator Foster Ogola, representing Bayelsa West Senatorial District, during a courtesy visit by the Senate President to Government House, Yenagoa, ahead of the PDP presidential primaries. Photo by Michael Owi.

We need a nation of all Nigerians and not a nation for one ethnic group, religious faith or one geo-political region in Nigeria.

We must get quickly to that point where we build a new Nigeria; where to be appointed as Director General of the Department of State Service or the Chief of Army Staff, the Inspector General of Police, the Chief Justice of Nigeria and to be whatever you want to be , you dont need to come from a particular tribe, or someone who worships one type of God or another.
The Presidency has urged supporters of President Muhammadu Buhari to ignore attacks on him by the Senate President, Bukola Saraki.

Mr Saraki recently defected from the rulling All Progressives Congress (APC) and is running for the ticket of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) to challenge Mr Buhari at the presidential election next year.

On Thursday on a campaign visit to Bayelsa, he said Mr Buhari and the APC lack the vision and capacity to develop Nigeria.

In an apparent swift reaction, presidential spokesperson, Garba Shehu, in a state House press release urged groups supporting the president to ignore Mr Sarakis Crude Speeches.

Below is the press release:

BUHARI GROUPS SHOULD IGNORE SARAKIS CRUDE SPEECHES

The Presidency wishes to react the crude speeches hitting the news from Senator Bukola Saraki who recently joined the Peoples Democratic Party with the sole ambition of running as the president of Nigeria.

In response the condemnable and extremely derogatory speeches by the PDP aspirant, we urge all Buhari supporters to display restraint in language and conduct and to always put across their points of view in a decent language.

Throughout his political career, Senator Saraki has shown that he is a very dangerous person who can go any length to promote his personal interests. The language of his campaign is such that cannot be used against a domestic help.

Is he just knowing that the President lacked vision? This is someone that the Senator had worked with very closely for more than three years. Amazingly, he never said all that he is now saying against him. Rather, his word for and on the President were always respectful and reassuring. Thats the man he called My Father, about him there is no cause for alarma President who is healthy, witty and himself. What then changed, all of a sudden?

Is he saying these blatantly false and crude things against the President because he is gunning for the same office? Could it be that he is targeting President Buhari because the party he just joined does not have any real issues to highlight?

Be that as it may, our appeal to our supporters is to ignore Saraki and any such politicians bent on lowering the quality of political discourse. Let them drown in their own waters.

GARBA SHEHU

SSAP (Media and Publicity)

Abuja.

20-9-18.
A four-year-old son of the Borno State chairman of the All Progressives Congress (APC), Kashim Dalori, has been kidnapped in Maiduguri, the father said.

According to information made available to journalists, the boy was taken away from school by an unknown woman who falsely claimed to be a relative.

The Borno state Commissioner of police, Damian Chukwu, confirmed the incident, but declined giving detail on what action is been taken.

The father, Mr Dalori, whose house was thronged by sympathisers, told PREMIUM TIMES that Kashim was kidnapped at about 1p.m on Wednesday.

I was at party secretariat when my wife, the mother of the child called to raise the alarm that Kashim had been kidnapped from school, he said.

According to him, the driver assigned to pick the child from school, returned home to complain that he did not meet him in school.

The driver informed us that his teachers said an unknown woman who was dressed in black hijab came to their class and asked to take Kashim home. They simply called on the child and he followed her out, he said.

The APC chairman said they did not hear from the abductors until about 3 a.m when the mother was called and told she would be called upon in the morning to speak with her son.

The kidnappers later called in the morning and Kashim was put on phone to speak briefly with his mother, said Mr. Dalori

Though the father did not speak on whether ransom was demanded, some persons close to the family said there was a demand for money.
Four members of Islamic Movement in Nigeria (IMN), popularly called Shiites, have been arrested for attacking the police during a procession at Muchiya, Sabongari, Zaria, Kaduna State on Thursday.

The Kaduna State Police Command Spokesperson, Yakubu Sabo, a deputy superintendent of police, confirmed the arrest in a telephone interview with the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN).

Mr Sabo said I can authoritatively confirm to you that we have arrested four members of Shiite group at Muchiya, Sabongari, Zaria.

They blocked the road preventing people from carrying out their daily activities, in an attempt to open the road, they vehemently responded using catapults to attack our people from all angles.

They used catapult with iron rode shooting at the police, as a result of these attacks, one of our vehicles was smashed, the spokesperson said.

He said the arrested persons have been transfers to the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) for further interrogation.

Mr Sabo assured the citizens to go about their normal businesses as the police were doing everything possible to protect lives and property.

We swore to protect the lives and property of Nigerians, this is our legitimate duty and we will continue to do so.

In line with this, we carried a show of force across the state to forestall breach of peace.

The state government had declared the IMN as an illegal organisation and proscribed it.

The government had also banned all procession across the state with a view to maintain peace, stability, law and order.

(NAN)
Manila (CNN Philippines Life)  This weekend, join a fundraiser for the man behind Garapata, watch an award-winning film by Alvin Yapan, unplug at an intimate, phone-free gathering with performances and drinks, join the cause for mental health awareness at a spoken word fundraising gig, listen to a discussion on contemporary art, take to the streets to commemorate the 46th anniversary of martial law, catch the world premiere of a black comedy by Jon Red, and attend a music night plus live reading of letters written before and during martial law.

GaraFriends Help Out

Help raise funds for the artist behind the infamous Garapata, Dex Fernandez, by attending a pop-up fundraiser at The Den, Escolta this Saturday, Sept. 22 from 11 a.m. to 10 p.m.

Attendees can expect DJ sets by AI Hoseki, Ed Croix, Shah Rukh Khan, Major Chie, Saladboy, and Bambi, a live performance by Urban Decay Planning X George Roman, artwork and merch by numerous artists and collectives, and Garapata merch such as balloons, bags, prints, stickers, and pins.

The Den is located at 413 Escolta St., Binondo, Manila. For more information, visit the Facebook event page.

An Kubo sa Kawayanan screening

Alivn Yapans An Kubo sa Kawayanan is an award-winning 2015 film in Bicolano that follows Michelle (played by Mercedes Cabral), , a woman who is deeply attached to her kubo, whose behavior only she can perceive.

The film will be screened at the Ateneo de Manila University on Sept. 19, 21, 24, 27, and Oct. 2. This Friday, Sept. 21, the film will be shown at Leong Hall at 5 p.m. and 7 p.m.

Tickets are priced at 200 for scholar students, 250 for regular students, and 300 for non-students.

Ateneo de Manila University is located at Katipunan Ave., Loyola Heights, Quezon City. For more information, visit the Facebook event page.

Echoes at the Warehouse

For the past five months, creative space Warehouse Eight and independent bookstore Kwago have been organizing monthly intimate gatherings where people can enjoy music, spoken word poetry, and booze free of the distractions of phones and cameras. On Saturday, Sept. 22 at 4 p.m., the organizers will be launching recordings of past performances in another hang out.

Guests can expect to see over 12 recordings, spoken word performances, games, an open jam, and roving drinks and a communal film camera to commemorate the experience. There will also be a tattoo station, as well as merch from musicians and goods from local artists and brands.

Use of cameras and phones is not allowed inside the venues. Door charge is 350.

Warehouse Eight is located at Warehouse 8-B, 2241 Don Chino Roces Ave., Makati City. For more information, visit the Facebook event page.

Kapit: A fundraiser for mental health

Help the cause for mental health awareness and advocacy by joining a fundraising event mounted by spoken word group Words Anonymous, creative collaboration group Collaboratory.PH, and Youth for Mental Health Coalition, Inc.

The event will feature performances by spoken word poets like Abby Orbeta, Juan Miguel Severo, Kat Roxas, Ian Christopher Sudiacal, Reinne Villasanta, and many more. Alfonso Manalastas, Antonio Bathan, Carlo Bonn, Felix Hornilla, and Mark Ghosn will also be in attendance. Guests can join in during the open mic.

Door charge is 250.

The event is happening on Saturday, Sept. 22 at 7 p.m. at Green Sun, 2285 Don Chino Roces Ave., Makati City. For more information, visit the Facebook event page.

Contemporary: Narratives of Art and Region

This Saturday, head to the Metropolitan Museum of Manila for a discussion on contemporary art and the concept of region with Filipino art historian and curator Prof. Patrick D. Flores, PhD, joined by Prof. Tessa Maria Guazon, who will be discussing the different modes and permutations of Philippine Contemporary Art.

This is in conjunction with two exhibits on view at the MET: The Philippine Contemporary: to scale the past and the possible and Ties of History: Art in Southeast Asia.

Registration fee is 150 at the regular rate and 120 for senior citizens and PWDs. The talk starts at 2 p.m.

The Metropolitan Museum of Manila is located at Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas Complex, Roxas Blvd., Manila. For more information, visit the Facebook event page.

United Peoples Action at Luneta

Sept. 21, 2018 is the 46th anniversary of Ferdinand Marcos declaration of martial law in the Philippines. Rallyists will be convening at Luneta Park to commemorate the period, as well as to protest the current admins war on drugs, TRAIN law, Build, Build, Build campaign, martial law in Mindanao, and the proposed shift to federalism.

For those who wish to attend the rally, it will begin at 4 p.m. at Luneta Park, Manila. For more information, visit the Facebook event page.

Ginoong Maria World Premiere

Throughout the month of September, the UPFI Film Center looks back at the dark chapter in Philippine history by screening several martial law themed films by acclaimed directors like Mike de Leon, Lav Diaz, Chito S. Rono, Jon Red, and Treb Monteras. This Friday, Sept. 21, at 7 p.m., catch the world premiere of Jon Reds Ginoong Maria.

The film is a black comedy inspired by true events. It tells the story of family man Dindo who is being recruited back into a syndicate involved in a money-making killing scheme.

Admission is 150 with tickets on sale at the cinema entrance one hour before screening.

UPFI Film Center is located at Magsaysay / Osmena Ave., U.P. Diliman, Quezon City. For more information, visit the Facebook event page.

GenWe: Postcript

This Saturday, at 6 p.m., a mix of different artists will get together to commemorate the martial law declaration with live music, poetry, drinks, and letter readings.

Head to Dulo in Poblacion to enjoy performances by musicians Munimuni, Amara, The Good Times, and spoken word artists of BAON Collective. The concert will also feature a live reading of letters sent before and during martial law.

Attendees will also be able to register as voters at the Make Your Mark registration drive at the event. This is in light of the Sept. 29 deadline for voter registration.

Dulo Manila is located at Poblacion, Makati City. For more information, visit the Facebook event page.
Governor Seriake Dickson of Bayelsa State and Minister of State for Agriculture and Rural Development, Heineken Lokpobiri, have expressed divergent views on the debts owed by the state.

The minister had alleged that the Dickson led administration had incurred the N800 billion domestic and $216 million external from 2012 till date in spite of getting over N1.2 trillion from the federation account for the same period.

Lokpobiri, a former senator who hails from Bayelsa State, in a statement issued in Yenagoa, the state capital noted that the figures at his disposal were a result of cumulative computation of yearly borrowings from the first tenure of the Dickson-led administration.

He said figures reported by the debt management office were on yearly basis.

But Mr Dickson through his Special Adviser on Public Affairs, Fidelis Soriwei dismissed the claim and put the debt owed by the Bayelsa government at N123 billion.

Mr Soriwei had claimed that Mr Lokpobiri was a Diaspora politician who was out of tune with happenings in Bayelsa.

We wonder where he gets his N800 billion any time he wants to criticise the government, Mr Soriwei said.

Checks at the debt management office put Bayelsas debt burden as at June 2018 at N 123 billion.

Mr Lokpobiri accused Mr Dickson of tactically maintaining silence deliberately on foreign debts and the other sundry funds accruals to the state.

For the avoidance of doubt, the state is indebted to the tune of N800 billion, domestic and 216 million dollars external, the minister said.

He accused Mr Dickson of borrowing a whooping N222 billion domestic and 28 million dollars external debt in 2012 alone.

Mr Lokpobiri threatened to publicly disclose all the amounts the governor had been borrowing every year from 2012 till date.

He described as lies, the figure of N123 billion being talked about by the governor as the amount the state government presently owes and urged the administration to disclose all facts about the financial status of Bayelsa.

(NAN)
Forty-three days after sacking Ibanga Akpabio as Commissioner, Labour, Productivity and Manpower Planning, Governor Udom Emmanuel of Akwa Ibom State has nominated another relative of Godswill Akpabio as commissioner.

The nominee, Prince Akpabio, is said to be a cousin to Mr Akpabio, a former governor of the state and senator for Akwa Ibom North-West District.

Princes name is among the four forwarded to the state House of Assembly by Mr Emmanuel for confirmation as commissioners, Kufre Okon, a media aide to the speaker of the House of Assembly, Onofiok Luke, told PREMIUM TIMES, Thursday afternoon.

Others nominated as commissioners by the governor are Uno Etim Uno, Raphael Bassey, and Udo Ekpenyong.

The governor also nominated Sunny Ibuot as a special adviser.

Since the defection of Mr Akpabio from the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) to the All Progressives Congress (APC) on August 8, political tension has increased in the state, with several politicians defecting between the PDP and the APC.

Mr Akpabios relative, Ibanga, and a fellow commissioner, Victor Antai, were sacked by Governor Emmanuel because of their political support for the senator.

The two former commissioners, like the senator, also defected to the APC.

The other relative of the senator, Prince, however, refused to defect to the APC but instead preferred to give the PDP and Mr Emmanuel his support.

Many people in the state see his nomination as a means to spite the senator and also divide his political family.

Another nominee for commissioner, Mr Ekpenyong, is making a come-back to the cabinet after he was sacked as commissioner, local government and chieftaincy affairs, to allegedly placate Mr Akpabio.
Students of Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Awka, on Tuesday came out in their numbers to pay their last respect to late Francis Mmadubuobi who until his death was a 400-level student of microbiology at the university.

The funeral took place at the residence of the father of the deceased at Abacha in Idemili North Local Government Area of Anambra State.

Francis died at the universitys medical centre as a result of alleged poor medical efforts by the medical officers.

After the death of Francis, the Vice Chancellor, Joseph Ahaneku, instituted a four-member investigation panel to unravel the true position and circumstance of his death.

The panel which was given two weeks to give a report on the death has not given any report for about two months.

Speaking at the funeral, the parish priest of St Michael Catholic Church Abacha, Jude Udeanyi, enjoined Christians to have a good relationship with God while they are on earth. He noted that an undetermined life is not worth living.

He advised the congregation to pray for the souls of the departed especially that of Francis.
Hundreds of people living with disabilities in Osun State on Wednesday rallied support for the candidate of the African Democratic Congress, Fatai Akinbade, ahead of the governorship election on Saturday.

The group held a rally with the ADC deputy governorship candidate, Folahanmi Oloyede, in Osogbo on Tuesday.

Led by Lani Gbadebo, the group said ADC remained the only party that could salvage the state from maladministration.

He said the present administration had neglected them and had not been attending to issues affecting them.

We have made up our minds to support and vote for ADC on Saturday. We have suffered enough and we believe in the pedigree and integrity of both Akinbade and Oloyede to rescue this state and also attend to our needs as members of this state, said Mr Gbadebo.

We have gone through their manifestos and their plans for us and we are convinced that they are truly on a rescue mission.

Addressing the disabled, the Ms Oloyede said the party had the interest of the entire people of the state at heart and that issues affecting persons living with disabilities would be prioritised once Mr Akinbade and herself were voted into power.

She said that people living with disabilities had equal rights in the society and that the party had made policies and plans to empower them.

Once we get into office, we will hire medical specialists to ensure that permanent ailments that can be avoided are avoided, she said.

Aside from the provision of good health services, we will provide health insurance schemes and education for children with special needs.

We will make life meaningful for people with special needs and those living with disabilities. Youth will also be taken care of. Our government will employ two persons with disabilities into each ministry in the state, as long as they have the required qualifications.

Married persons living with disabilities will be assisted to have a better life through skills acquisition and empowerment. We will teach and inculcate in our people the ethics of respect for those living with disabilities. Widows will be entitled to loan schemes. No disabled person will beg in Osun.

So I want you to vote for our party just like you have promised in order to bring all these plans to fruition. We are here for service because our tickets were given to us free of charge by the ADC. We will appraise our curriculum in this state and revamp education, especially for those living with disabilities.

On the payment of salaries and other entitlements, Ms Oloyede said, We will ensure that all salary arrears are paid and we will pay full salaries. I am a retiree and I have made a covenant with my God not to collect my entitlements until those who are being owed have collected their pension arrears.
A bank robbery that occurred in Igede Ekiti, headquarters of Irepodun/Ifelodun local government area of Ekiti State, late on Wednesday claimed two lives, while others sustained varying degrees of injury.

The state police command which confirmed the incident on Thursday added that the command had beefed up security in and around all the banks in the state, as the years activities were drawing near.

The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that those who died from the incident that occurred at a first generation bank in the town had been identified as a bank official and a private security guard.

The police public relations officer {PPRO}, Caleb Ikechukwu, said his men had launched a manhunt for the fleeing robbers.

Mr Ikechukwu added that the command had also deployed more of its men in banks to curtail such incidents in the future.

Mr Ikechukwu, however, did not confirm if the robbers made away with any cash from the bank.

He only confirmed that there was an exchange of fire between his men and the bandits.

He said that the attack from the men from the command forced the robbers to flee the scene upon realising that the police were closing in on them.

NAN reports that the guard, who was shot in the head, died within the premises of the bank, while the injured staff died in the hospital.

The PPRO disclosed that the robbers had planned on escaping through Ilawe-Igede road, but later drove into the bush and escaped into the thick forest between the two towns.

He said the expansive forest had already been rounded up by the police and that his men are combing the bush in search of the robbers.

The robbers would have done more havoc than they did, but for the prompt action taken by our men.

There was exchange of gunshots between the bandits and our personnel. They tried their best to manage the situation

It is true that two persons were killed during the bank operation The operation was regrettable and the death of the two persons was painful.

The command is stepping up its intelligence gathering skill and operation. As a temporary measure, we are going to deploy more men in banks to make the place safe for staff and customers

If you are on ground in Igede now, more men have been deployed, particularly the mobile police unit. We are doing same across the state

As we speak, our Criminal Investigation Bureau (CIB) and State Intelligence Investigation Department (SIID) have drafted their men for intelligence gathering, while mobile policemen are on road and other critical areas, he said.

Mr Ikechukwu, however, urged members of the public to go about their normal businesses, assuring that the police are on top of the situation.

When NAN visited the bank, broken doors and windows of the bank appeared to have been blown off with dynamite, while bloodstains of those killed were still visible. (NAN)
The police in Lagos have killed an armed robbery suspect in a shootout with alleged robbers at the Owode, in the Ikorodu area of the state.

In a statement signed by the police spokesperson, Chike Oti on Thursday, the Police said an undisclosed number of the robbery gang were injured.

He said, acting on a tip-off, the divisional police officer of the area surrounded members of the gang, who were alleged to have stabbed and killed one Sylvester Chikwendu, 32, during an alleged inter-cult clash at Demuren street, Alapere-Ketu area.

The DPO reportedly mobilised a team to Thomas Bus-stop, Owode. He told his men to narrow the road and gave them a clear description of the gangs operational car.

Mr Oti explained that on sighting the police, the gang member became desperate and started shooting at the cops.

He said the police responded to the alleged unprovoked attack killing one of the gang members and injuring others.

During the gun battle, one of them bowed to death owing to bullet wounds sustained during the fight while the others escaped with varying degrees of gunshot wounds abandoning items which had since been recovered, at the scene.

Mr Oti said the police recovered items including a Toyota Camry saloon car without registration number, one pump action rifle, one locally made revolver pistol, one locally made single barrel pistol, five live 9mm calibre ammunition, three live cartridges, two expended cartridges, two cutlasses, charms and assorted clothings, from the gang.

The Lagos State Commissioner of Police, Imohimi Edgal was quoted in the statement as saying the action of the police personnel followed an instruction by the command to decisively subdue perpetrators of violent crimes.

Mr Imohimi appealed to health care professionals including native doctors and other caregivers, to be on the lookout for patients with gunshot wounds and inform the police within two hours of commencement of treatment in line with the Compulsory Treatment of Victims Of Gunshot Act.
Loyalists of the two major political parties squaring off in Saturdays governorship election in Osun State are accusing each other of resorting to deadly attacks and vandalism.

The All Progressives Congress was the first to accuse the Peoples Democratic Party of sponsoring violence against those campaigning for its candidate, Gboyega Oyetola.

Mr Oyetolas, an ally of incumbent Governor Rauf Aregbesola, faces his strongest challenger in Ademola Adeleke, a serving senator of the PDP.

The two candidates are expected to do well enough in their respective strongholds to emerge eventual winner, although there are at least two other strong candidates in the race who are not running too far behind.

In a statement to PREMIUM TIMES on Wednesday, Mr Oyetolas campaign office said dozens of APC supporters have been physically attacked in the past one week, with at least two lying critically injured at the hospital.

Amongst those the campaign said were attacked were Imam Basheer, an assistant to Mr Aregbesola, and Michael Adejumo, a coordinator for the political action group De Raufs.

Teju Olorungbebe of the Osun State chapter who signed the statement for Mr Oyetolas campaign office said security reports suggest the PDP members were behind the violence and called on security agencies to discharge their duties and ensure that the suspects are apprehended and the attacks ceased.

The PDP rejected all allegations of violent conduct by its members, saying the APC should not be allowed to turn the facts around by being the first to scream to the media.

The APC should not be allowed to get away with violence inflicted on our supporters by using the media, Rasheed Taiwo, a spokesperson for Mr Adelekes campaign told PREMIUM TIMES Thursday night. Our members have been severely and regularly attacked for over two weeks now.

Mr Rasheed said some members were already feared killed and named some specific areas where some attacks were recorded only recently.

Two days ago, they attacked our campaign convoy and smashed vehicles and injured many people near Osogbo, Mr Rasheed said.  Security agencies are aware of some of these attacks which we all know were sponsored by the APC.

Another one happened around Ikirun when an unmarked car ran into our convoy and caused serious mayhem, he added.

The strength of our campaign is a mass movement and we dont need to be violent to win the election on Saturday, he added.

Both campaigns said they do not condone violence and urged their respective members to remain calm in anticipation of victory.

Polls are scheduled to open on Saturday morning across the states 30 local government areas.
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.




WASHINGTON, Sept. 20, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Like many who watched Black Panther this year, you may have been equally amazed and impressed by its portrayals of black excellence. The film featured Wakanda - a country with vast and well-managed resources, an educated and sophisticated black population and superior technology. For many members of the black diaspora it was not just entertaining. It was inspiring. "Now, why can't we do something like this?" was uttered by many a black viewer. The answer? It has been done and not just once. In fact, there were many prosperous black enclaves throughout the United States. Perhaps the most prominent of them all was Greenwood.

The Black district of Greenwood in Tulsa was so prosperous that it was known at the time as "the Negro Wall Street." Nowadays, it is commonly referred to as "the Black Wall Street." Due to legal segregation in place at the time, many blacks lived together in Greenwood, spending money earned indirectly from Tulsa's oil boom. The community was filled with black-owned businesses, including hospitals, law firms, grocery stores, churches, movie theaters, newspapers and night clubs. In fact, the black dollar reportedly circulated 19 times before leaving the community (today, this number is estimated at just six hours!).

"It was a neighborhood where you could be treated with respect," said Olivia Hooker, who was just a child at the time living in Greenwood with her family.

What Happened?

On May 30, 1921, Dick Rowland, a 19-year-old black male, was accused of assaulting Sarah Page, a 17-year-old white elevator operator. By a number of accounts, Rowland tripped as he was exiting the elevator and grabbed Sarah's arm. She screamed and Rowland fled. Those nearby assumed that he had assaulted her.

It didn't take long before Rowland was arrested in Greenwood. An angry white mob soon assembled outside of the prison and wanted the police to hand over Rowland so that they could lynch him. Tired of the recent string of mob lynchings, a group of black armed men also stood outside the courtroom. An altercation between the two groups resulted in gunfire and rumors spread that blacks were attempting to take over Tulsa in a purported race war. Many white mobs invaded Greenwood, burning buildings, looting stores and murdering its residents.

Less than 16 hours later, the Tulsa Riots would leave the entire community decimated. It was not taught in schools and even many Tulsa residents are unfamiliar with the Tulsa Riots. It was not until decades later, when the survivors fought for reparations, that the Riots became a part of popular discussion.

How Do I Learn More About This?

Visit: https://www.blackwallstreetbooks.com/

Related Books on Amazon:

Finding Greenwood, Winner of Honorable Mention in the 2009 Organization of Black Screenwriters Original Script Contest

https://www.amazon.com/Finding-Greenwood-K-T-Alozie/dp/1495294218/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1532963823&sr=8-2&keywords=finding+greenwood

Red Summer

https://www.amazon.com/Red-Summer-KT-Alozie/dp/1530885914/ref=sr_1_6?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1532963976&sr=1-6&keywords=kt+alozie

About the Author

KT Alozie is an award-winning writer with a passion for all things history. Surprised that he had not learned about the Greenwood District in school (he has a Bachelor's and two Master's degrees) he developed a keen interest in it and read everything he could about the famous Black Wall Street. A scriptwriter since the age of 17, he was excited to develop two stories on the subject matter to build awareness of this prosperous community as well as the events surrounding its demise. His dream is to one day see this story produced for both the big and small screens and to work on projects where art and finance intersect, thereby combining his experiences as a writer and investment banker.

Contact: KT Alozie

Mobile: 202-468-2301

[email protected]

Website: https://www.blackwallstreetbooks.com/

SOURCE Black Wall Street Books

Related Links

https://www.blackwallstreetbooks.com/


TORONTO, Sept. 20, 2018 /PRNewswire/ - Beleave Inc. (CSE: BE) (OTCQX: BLEVF) ("Beleave" or the "Company") is excited to announce that is has entered into a partnership with Kannavis Biotech Corp. ("Kannavis") to invest, build and operate 867,000 square feet of indoor growing space in British Columbia in preparation for the anticipated demand for cannabis in the Canadian and International marketplace.

The ambitious new project, jointly-designed by Beleave and Kannavis, will encompass a total of ten indoor growing facilities, approximately 87,000 square feet each, divided between two regions; one in Chilliwack, and nine in Abbotsford. Once construction is complete, both companies will share the operational and day-to-day expenses, with Kannavis assuming sole responsibility for the initial capital expenditures required to build the facilities.

Phase one of the development will begin with the construction of two facilities, one in each city, and is already underway. Both facilities are expected to be completed in mid-2019, with an annual projected capacity of 13,500 kg of dry flower each. The remaining eight facilities, planned for phase two of the development, are expected to commence construction in late 2019 bringing the total annual capacity of the Abbotsford site to 121,500 kg.

The new facilities feature an indoor system capable of precisely controlling the internal environment and growing conditions. This allows Beleave to maintain its industry-leading high-yields of 475 grams per square foot annually, while keeping overhead costs low.

"Our British Columbia project will give Beleave the indoor capacity in the province to supply our established distribution channels, and enhance our ability to meet the need for high quality and diverse strains across Canada and international markets," said Andrew Wnek, Beleave CEO. "B.C. has a rich reputation with respect to cannabis agriculture, and we're excited to be growing in a province with such a strong tradition. I want to thank our hard-working staff and partners for all their efforts to make this project a success."

The Company continues to operate its facility in Hamilton that houses high-efficiency extraction, R&D, product development and cultivation of cannabis and cannabis derived products. The facility's 80,000 square foot expansion will proceed as planned once final permits are granted. In the meantime, the site continues to be the hub of operations for extraction, packaging, and distribution.

"We have taken strategic steps to ensure that reliable, high-quality product is readily available for sale this October across all of our growing distribution channels," said Bojan Krasic, Beleave CFO. "As we await permitting to finalize the expansion of the Hamilton facility, we will continue to produce product out of that property to support early sales efforts. Earlier this month we announced the acquisition of additional land and greenhouse space in London, Ontario which will bring yields in early 2019. With today's announcement, we are adding hundreds of thousands of square feet of superior indoor grow space to our portfolio of properties. This strengthens our overall stance when measured against our larger peers."

ABOUT BELEAVE INC.

Beleave is a vertically-integrated Canadian cannabis company headquartered in Oakville, Ontario, that operates streamlined facilities throughout Canada to cultivate high-quality cannabis flower, oil, and extracts with funded capacity in excess of 150,000 kg per year.

Fully-licensed to cultivate and sell medical and recreational cannabis, Beleave is leading the way through research partnerships with universities to bridge the gap between science and tradition and to develop pharma-grade extracts and derivatives. Beleave is currently developing new product lines for October 2019 as the recreational market is expected to allow for food and beverage-based cannabis products.

Beleave is growing its storefront and online sales presence rapidly through its wholly-owned subsidiaries, Beleave Kannabis Corp. and Seven Oaks, which are licensed for medicinal and recreational sales respectively. The company's first retail location is opening this fall in Llyodminster, Saskatchewan. Beleave has also developed a network of medical cannabis clinics in Ontario and Quebec under the Medi-Green banner.

Through its majority ownership of Procannmed S.A.S., Beleave has access to 27 hectares of outdoor grow space and is fully licensed to cultivate, produce, extract and distribute medical cannabis in Colombia to capitalize on exports and the expanding Latin American market.

Forward-Looking Statements

This news release contains "forward-looking information" within the meaning of applicable securities law ("forward-looking statements"). The use of any of the words "plan", "anticipate", "continue", "estimate", "expect", "may", "will", "project", "should", "believe" and other similar words, or statements that certain events or conditions "may" or "will" occur are intended to identify forward-looking information. These statements are only predictions. Although the Company believes that the expectations and assumptions on which the forward-looking information is based are reasonable, undue reliance should not be placed on the forward-looking information because the Company can give no assurance that they will prove to be correct. Since forward-looking information addresses future events and conditions, by its very nature it involves inherent risks and uncertainties. This information speak only as of the date of this news release. Actual results could differ materially from those currently anticipated due to a number of factors and risks including various risk factors discussed in the Company's disclosure documents, which can be found under the Company's profile on www.sedar.com.

SOURCE Beleave Inc.
TEL AVIV, Israel and HONG KONG, Sept. 20, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Hong Kong's first-ever Cannabis Investor Symposium will take place on November 1, 2018 at the W Hotel. The one-day gathering is hosted by CannaTech, The Arcview Group and URI Capital Management.

The Cannabis industry is the fastest growing market in the world and the legal cannabis business is expected to generate $57 billion globally by 2027 as countries throughout the world continue to legalize its use and demand continues to grow exponentially.

The Hong Kong Symposium will focus on the global investment opportunity but is specially curated toward the Asian market.

The most powerful cannabis business leaders and investment experts from around the world will gather to discuss the burgeoning industry.

Keynote and panel discussions will cover Cannabis and China, The Cannabis Value Chain, Market Insights: Australasia, Public and Private Investment Opportunities, Risks and Regulations, World Cannabis Policy and more.

The event is designed for those looking to gain insight into investment opportunities in the global cannabis market, family offices, money managers, venture capital firms, private equity funds, and institutional investors.

Saul Kaye, CEO of CannaTech and iCAN said of the symposium, "The time has come for serious Asian investors to enter the market. The Hong Kong event will take place days after CannaTech Sydney, Australia's first Medical Cannabis Summit. The region's attitude is evolving quickly, particularly with respect to Medical Cannabis and the industry needs to learn more. Currently dominated by American and Canadian investors, the time is right for the Asian investment community to join this industry. We are thrilled to partner with Arcview and URI Fund on this important event."

Troy Dayton, CEO of The Arcview Group adds: "The worldwide cannabis market is exploding, and Asian investors are increasingly paying attention. Up until now, pioneering Asian investors have only been able to simply read about this fascinating industry. Not anymore. We are bringing the cannabis industry to them."

Uri Capital Management added: "Cannabis usage as a medicinal plant dates back in Chinese history for thousands of years. Medicinal cannabis research is rapidly progressing, and we need to redefine our attitude towards cannabis and hemp. Asia, more specifically China, is poised to leverage its unique advantages in Hemp and agriculture to become a dominant global leader. URI is proud to become the first Chinese financial conglomerate to focus on the Asian cannabis industry and will leverage the firm's world class research and investment resources to lead the way."

For more information about the Hong Kong Cannabis Symposium click here.

About CannaTech

CannTech is the only Medical Cannabis event of its kind with a global focus that offers senior industry leaders, medical and scientific experts, and new ventures the platform to come together, drive innovation, form partnerships and promote knowledge exchange.

About iCAN: Israel-Cannabis

iCAN is committed to accelerate Israel's Canna-Technology industry, capitalizing on Israeli innovation and a leading cannabis regulatory environment to bring premier products to market. iCAN is powered by CannaTech, the premier international cannabis summit held annually in Tel Aviv, and internationally in London, Panama, and for the first time in Sydney, Australia in October 2018 and Hong Kong in November 2018.

About The Arcview Group

Founded in 2010, The Arcview Group is responsible for a number of groundbreaking ventures in the cannabis industry. The Arcview Investor Network has helped more than 1200 investors place $200 million+ behind 190 companies. Arcview Market Research has published over 20 reports analyzing and forecasting the rapidly evolving cannabis space, and the flagship annual report, The State of Legal Marijuana Markets, has become the industry standard for market analysis and data in the sector. In 2015 Arcview became a partner in Canopy, the first seed-stage mentor-driven business accelerator. Arcview is also co-founder of Cannasure Insurance Services, the leading provider of business insurance to the cannabis industry. The Arcview Venture Fund is focused on providing growth and expansion capital to best-of-breed cannabis companies. Forbes Magazine recently named Arcview among the top 5 financial firms in the cannabis sector.

Learn more at arcviewgroup.com.

About URI Management

Qianhai URI Fund Management Co., Ltd. is a financial conglomerate sponsored by the China Association for the Promotion of Industry-University-Research. It was established with the approval of the State Administration of Industry and Commerce and is the first national fund management company to be stationed in the Qianhai Shenzhen-Hong Kong Cooperation Zone. The company focuses its core competency on three divisions: financial transactions, research and government relations. URI's investment team focuses on venture capital, private equity and M&A. The research team focuses on advanced R&D with universities. As a bridge and link between Industry, University research and the Government, URI Fund, in coordination with a large number of social and government resources, jointly aims to build an innovative China and actively promotes the transformation of Industry-University-Research into actual productive forces.

For interviews and journalist registration contact Laura Kam [email protected], +972-54-806-8613.

SOURCE CannaTech
MILFORD, Ohio, Sept. 20, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- In a large number of hospitals in America, patients are restrained in one form or another. The restraints may range from railings to literally being fastened to the bed.

There are no recent statistics on the use of patient restraints, although a 2007 study in the Journal of Nursing Scholarship concluded they were being used at the rate of 50 per 1,000 patient days. That means roughly 27,000 patients were being restrained in U.S. hospitals during any given day.

The intent behind restraining patients  most of who are being treated in intensive care units (ICUs) is an attempt to protect often semi-conscious patients from accidentally removing tubes from their body that are delivering oxygen or medication. However, its medical necessity has been debated in recent years.

Miriam Eide and Katie Ormsby, director and manager of accreditation for Piedmont Healthcare respectively, will discuss how the Atlanta-area's largest hospital system was able to virtually eliminate its use of patient restraints. The pair will present their experience at the annual DNV GL Healthcare symposium, Oct. 2-4 in Denver. DNV GL is Piedmont's accrediting body.

According to Eide and Ormsby, Piedmont regularly used patient restraints in its ICU until 2015, when it began working with DNV GL. Piedmont officials used internationally recognized ISO 9001, a quality management system introduced as a part of DNV GL's National Integrated Accreditation for Healthcare (NIAHO) standard, to transition into restraint use only on a case-by-case basis. Between October 2017 and April of this year, the use of patient restraints at Piedmont's hospitals decreased by double-digit percentages.

"It's just a matter of changing the culture," said Eide, who noted that using restraints had become an ingrained habit at Piedmont. That's despite the fact that the ratio of nurses to patients is always highest in the ICU.

DNV GL regularly encourages the hospitals it accredits to reduce its use of patient restraints. The results can be dramatic. Sentara Halifax Regional Hospital in South Boston, Va. cut the use of patient restraints by 95 percent. The number of ICU patients who pulled out their tubes also dropped by two-thirds. The number of patient days on ventilators also dropped.

In a separate presentation, DNV GL surveyors Ronell Myburgh and Rhoene Jessup will also discuss how the use of patient restraints is one of the top reasons hospitals receive notices of non-conformance with the Conditions of Participation in the Medicare program.

DNV GL Healthcare has pioneered a roadmap for hospitals to improve the delivery of healthcare services at every level, based on its adaptation of the ISO 9001 quality management system for the healthcare sector. Using ISO 9001 in conjunction with requirements to meet the CMS Conditions of Participation allows hospitals to improve quality and enhance patient safety at the highest possible level.

DNV GL's 2018 Healthcare Symposium: The Future of Accreditation will take place at the Renaissance Denver Stapleton Hotel in Denver, CO, October 2-4, 2018. Attendees can also have the opportunity to obtain up to 20 continuing education credits.

To register for DNV GL's 2018 Healthcare Symposium: The Future of Accreditation, please click here.

As the nation's second-largest healthcare accreditation body, Gary Davis, DNV GL Business Assurance North American Regional Manager, cites its "kinder and gentler" approach and its year-round partnership strategy as some of the keys to successfully accrediting hospitals and boosting quality improvement at a rate of 20% growth year over year. The majority of hospitals choose accreditation in order to be certified by the U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) to receive federal funds and reimbursements from Medicare and Medicaid programs.

Hundreds of hospitals across the United States have switched to DNV GL Healthcare over the past decade. The organization accredits more than 500 hospitals in 49 states.

About DNV GL Healthcare

DNV GL Business Assurance is a world-leading certification body. We help businesses assure the performance of their organizations, products, people, facilities and supply chains through certification, verification, assessment, and training services. Within healthcare we help our customers achieve excellence by improving quality and patient safety through hospital accreditation, managing infection risk, management system certification and training.

The DNV GL Group operates in more than 100 countries. Our 12,500 professionals are dedicated to helping our customers make the world safer, smarter and greener. www.dnvglcert.com/healthcare

Media Contact:

Joy Scott

President

Scott Public Relations

[email protected]

818-610-0270

SOURCE DNV GL Healthcare

Related Links

http://www.dnvglcert.com/healthcare


BEAVERTON, Ore. and NEW YORK, Sept. 20, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- CTL, an Oregon-based company specializing in comprehensive personalized learning EdTech solutions, announced the details of a new partnership with digital signage software provider NoviSign that includes a special Chromebox CBx1 tailored for the brand's digital signage. Screen content control has never been easier with dual-band Wi-Fi, USB-C output and custom libraries among other features.

CTL Releases New NoviSign Digital Signage Hardware for EdTech & Business Applications CTL Releases New NoviSign Digital Signage Hardware for EdTech & Business Applications

Educators will revel in the flexibility and power of this new hardware as they can control digital signage content from any computer at any time. Build in event notices, schedule changes, school information and other announcements with ease as the Chromebox relays information via NoviSign Digital Signage Software at lightning-fast speed. It's a great way for students to keep updated across campus.

"CTL's Chromebox and NoviSign's digital signage software is the perfect solution for cloud-based digital signage; easy to use, reliable, and laden with features," says Novisign Director of Sales and Marketing Chad Bogan. "This combination of software and hardware allows for highly secure digital signage, a low cost of entry and smooth playback of media."

The new Chromebox CBx1 is also an excellent way to maintain consistent communication across businesses of any size. Employees can connect with real-time information and news updates while programming custom messages or welcome notes for new additions.

"We're excited to partner with NoviSign to offer an even more powerful version of our award-winning Chromebox CBx1," says CTL President Erik Stromquist. "It brings together the best of all worlds as a top-tier solution for EdTech and business."

Expanded Features List

Best variety of drag and drop widgets;

Scrolling news feeds



Multi-component slideshows



Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube



HD videos and Ustream



Website Integrations



Custom text tickers



Live weather and world clock



Interactive polls and virtual queue



Google Slides



Google Sheets





Customizable template library

Touchscreen capabilities

Create and manage new playlists

Advanced scheduling

Manage a single display or hundreds

Admin controls with multi-user management

Cloud media library for storing your media

Real-time content updates

Free complete training, guides, and support

The CTL Chromebox CBx1 is available now at CTL.net for $399 with a one-year subscription to NoviSign. NoviSign software is available as a 30-day free trial with no credit card necessary. Learn more at www.NoviSign.com

About CTL

CTL has been manufacturing high-quality Chromebooks, Laptops, Desktop PCs, Monitors and Servers since 1989. For the past decade CTL has maintained a strong focus on the education sector as a Google Education Premier Partner with comprehensive 1:1 Solutions programs. CTL's ruggedized Chromebooks for Education have received accolades from noted tech publications like PC Magazine and CNet. CTL's Manufacturing, Sales and Support teams are all located in the United States. For more information about CTL, please visit www.ctl.net.

About NoviSign

We believe digital signage was meant to be easy to use.

Because of this belief, NoviSign has helped over 20,000 clients across 5 continents successfully deploy dynamic digital signage solutions. Some of NoviSign clients include Disney, Ikea, Dole, Home Depot, NASA, Nokia, Ferrari, Papa John's Pizza and more!

Using NoviSigns comprehensive web-based digital signage software online studio, you can create beautiful digital signage. With over 25+ drag and drop widgets to choose from you can quickly design and manage engaging content that features live social media streams, data-driven polls, fun interactive games and media-rich zones that feature videos, RSS feeds, HD images, scrolling text, weather and more!

NoviSign's Digital Signage Software is sold as Software as a Service (SaaS) that enables the easy management of dynamic digital signage campaigns, from the cloud to IP-based digital signs anywhere in the world. From any PC, you can broadcast targeted messages to any number of signs, at an unlimited number of locations in real-time.

NoviSign is a privately held digital signage software company based outside of Tel Aviv, Israel, with field sales offices in Portugal, Japan, and the United States.

Contact:

Mike Mahanay

Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer

CTL

Direct: 971.327.0101

Toll-Free: 800.642.3087 x 205

[email protected]

Chad Bogan

Director of Sales & Marketing

NoviSign

414-888-0358

[email protected]

SOURCE CTL

Related Links

http://www.ctl.net


MIAMI, Sept. 20, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- The European Institute of Efficient Intelligences ((IEIE), in association with Cala Enterprises, will be presenting the first edition of MasterMind Latino in Miami. This event will gather a selected group of corporate and company CEOs and Presidents, who will describe their individual management knowledge by sharing about their experiences in their own corporate careers and personal challenges.

This program has been designed for an exclusive group of entrepreneurs and will be presented in Spanish at Miami's Hotel EAST. During three days, these leaders will take us through an exciting and unique opportunity to immerse in entrepreneurial techniques and leadership, becoming our teachers, and providing inspiration to succeed.

The following speakers will hold forth on the companies they run, and will be interviewed by communicator and strategist Ismael Cala:

Dr. Alexander W. Wehr , President and CEO of BMW Group for Mexico , Latin America and the Caribbean ( Germany )

, President and CEO of BMW Group for , and the ( ) Carmen Gonzalez Sanfeliu, global CCO of ABS Asian Broadcast Satellite ( Venezuela )

) Dr. Luis Ubinas, President of the Pan-American Development Foundation, and former President of the Ford Foundation ( Puerto Rico )

) Carlos Bremer , President of the Board of Directors and managing director of Value Grupo Financiero, Shark Tank Mexico ( Mexico )

, President of the Board of Directors and managing director of Value Grupo Financiero, Shark Tank Mexico ( ) Luis Angel Lopez, President of Cerealto Foods, a food multinational ( Spain )

Angel Lopez, President of Cerealto Foods, a food multinational ( ) Juan Manuel Gonzalez Serna, President of Grupo Siro and of the Board of Directors of Iberdrola Espana and other companies ( Spain )

and of the Board of Directors of Iberdrola Espana and other companies ( ) Dr. Jose Maria Zas, President of American Express for Latin America and the Caribbean ( Argentina )

and the ( ) Marcos Landucci , founder of Landucci Publishers and President of Forbes for Mexico and Central America

"Participants will learn about management models, prospects for adaptation to change, and the challenges and principles of globalized strategies that have been successful around the world. In addition, they will have a unique networking opportunity in an environment for exchanging ideas and business opportunities at the highest executive level," noted Dr. Estrella Flores-Carretero, President of the European Institute of Efficient Intelligences.

At the gala dinner, the MasterMind Latino 2018 Award will be given to Dr. Alvaro Uribe Velez, former President of Colombia and currently a senator.

Dr. Kike Santander, Chairman Emeritus of the Latin Grammy Recording Academy, and CEO of Qignition LLC and Santander Music, will give the closing address on efficient management of success.

For further information:

Wendy Sayago

[email protected]

+1- 786-5620987

www.mastermindlatino.com

ABOUT IEIE

The European Institute of Efficient Intelligences (IEIE) offers programs of analysis, training and capacity building in efficiency strategies for companies and individuals, from children to adults, with more than 30 years of experience and research. It stimulates creativity, talent, intelligence, entrepreneurial spirit, reflection, knowledge, emotional skills, all of which culminates in personal and corporate success. Its headquarters are in Spain, with an affiliate in Miami.

ABOUT ISMAEL CALA

A life and business strategist, for five and a half years Ismael Cala was the host of CALA on CNN en Espanol. A businessman and social entrepreneur. Author of eight bestsellers on themes of leadership, entrepreneurship and personal development, including El poder de escuchar ('The power of listening'), and El analfabeto emocional ('The emotional illiterate'). Cala was born in Santiago de Cuba in 1969, and holds a degree in Art History from Oriente University. He is the co-author of the book "Beat the Curve," with Brian Tracy. He graduated from the School of Communication at York University in Toronto. He is President and founder of the Cala Enterprises Corporation and the Ismael Cala Foundation.

SOURCE Cala Enterprises

Related Links

http://www.mastermindlatino.com


HARRISBURG, Pa., Sept. 20, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Fine Wine & Good Spirits Premium Collection stores in Philadelphia and King of Prussia will host two stops of the Ardbeg National Bus Tour, making a weekend in September the perfect time for enthusiasts to "escape" and sample premium scotch whiskies.

The Ardbeg National Bus Tour will stop at these Fine Wine & Good Spirits Premium Collection locations on these dates and times:

Columbus Commons North Shopping Center, 1940 S. Christopher Columbus Blvd., Philadelphia  Saturday, Sept. 22 , from 2:00 PM to 4:00 PM

 , from 125 W. DeKalb Pike , King of Prussia  Sunday, Sept. 23 , from noon to 2:00 PM

When guests step on the bus, they will be taken through the story of Ardbeg in an escape room-themed adventure. They will have to search for clues, solve puzzles, and unlock the key to Islay before the clock runs out.

Scotch whisky fans 21 years of age and older will also have the chance to sample four premium products inside the Fine Wine & Good Spirits store where the bus is located for the duration of each event.

Ardbeg Corryvreckan Islay Single Malt Scotch Whisky (Code 36379)  $89.99

Ardbeg Uigeadail Islay Malt Scotch Whisky (Code 7095)  $74.99 (save $5 )

(save ) Ardbeg An Oa Islay Single Malt Scotch Whisky (Code 49372)  $59.99

Ardbeg Islay Single Malt Scotch Whisky Ten Years Old (Code 3262)  $51.99

The PLCB regulates the distribution of beverage alcohol in Pennsylvania, operates more than 600 wine and spirits stores statewide, and licenses 20,000 alcohol producers, retailers, and handlers. The PLCB also works to reduce and prevent dangerous and underage drinking through partnerships with schools, community groups, and licensees. Taxes and store profits  totaling $16.5 billion since the agency's inception  are returned to Pennsylvania's General Fund, which finances Pennsylvania's schools, health and human services programs, law enforcement, and public safety initiatives, among other important public services. The PLCB also provides financial support for the Pennsylvania State Police Bureau of Liquor Control Enforcement, the Department of Drug and Alcohol Programs, other state agencies, and local municipalities across the state. For more information about the PLCB, visit www.lcb.pa.gov.

MEDIA CONTACT: Shawn M. Kelly, 717.783.8864

SOURCE Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board

Related Links

http://www.lcb.state.pa.us


The half-day C3 Jr. program at the MCM in northeast Jackson will feature teams of up to four students each from fourth grade classes in 15 public and private elementary schools across the state competing for bragging rights and tech-related prizes. C3 Jr. will help kick off the 2018 Mississippi Science Fest in the LeFleur Museum District on Sept. 21 and 22.

Students and a teacher or sponsor from each school will use critical thinking and problem-solving skills to navigate an obstacle course and showcase their creative and technical abilities during the competition. C Spire has assigned employees with IT backgrounds and experience to help each team. Members of the top three teams will receive trophies and tech-related prizes.

Lt. Gov. Tate Reeves, C Spire CIO Carla Lewis and Mississippi Children's Museum President and CEO Susan Garrard will discuss the importance of information technology and computer science in workforce development and helping attract high-paying, quality jobs to Mississippi during a special, 12:20 p.m. press briefing at the museum.

"Competitions like C3 Jr. show students exactly how the skills they learn can translate into jobs in the real world, and I commend C Spire and the Mississippi Children's Museum for their work," Reeves said. "Preparing young Mississippians for the good-paying jobs of a high-tech global economy is critical to our state's future economic success."

C3 Jr. is patterned after three successful C3 coding challenges for high school students C Spire has conducted in the last year involving teams from dozens of high schools and over 320 students as part of the company's Tech Movement initiative designed to leverage its technology leadership and investments to help transform its service areas.

Pepper, a four-foot tall humanoid robot from Softbank Robotics America with a tablet for a chest, also will be on hand interacting with students and other guests participating in the competition. 2018 has been designated as S.T.E.M. Year by the National Science Foundation and Code.org to emphasize science, technology, engineering and math education in the U.S.

The company-sponsored coding challenges and support for other public and private programs like the Base Camp Coding Academy and the Mississippi Department of Education's Computer Science for Mississippi are designed to help C Spire deliver on its promise to help create and retain a 21st century technology workforce in its region.

Workers with a background in computer science are in high demand and short supply in Mississippi. Employers currently have over 1,200 unfilled job openings due to the serious shortage of trained, qualified IT workers. The average salary for qualified IT workers is nearly $69,000 a year, almost double the statewide average. Nationwide, new research estimates that there will be a shortage of over 1 million software developers in the U.S. by 2020.

WHEN: Thursday, September 20, 2018

9 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. (special press briefing at 12:20 p.m.)



WHERE: Mississippi Children's Museum

2145 Museum Boulevard

Jackson, MS 39202



WHO:  Tate Reeves, Lt. Governor, state of Mississippi

 Carla Lewis, CIO, C Spire

 Susan Garrard, President and CEO, Mississippi Children's Museum

Other elements of the C Spire Tech Movement initiative include creation of a state-of-the-art digital customer care platform, massive deployment of broadband internet for homes and businesses and other leadership initiatives designed to drive innovation and development of a 21st century technology workforce.

To learn more about the importance of science, technology, engineering and math, visit the C Spire Tech Movement page at http://www.cspire.com/cms/wireless/tech-movement/.

About C Spire

C Spire is a leading technology company committed to transforming Mississippi through the C Spire Tech Movement, which includes the massive deployment of broadband internet to homes and small businesses, a state-of-the-art digital experience for customers. technology innovation leadership and the creation and retention of a 21st century technology workforce in its region. The company provides world-class, customer-inspired wireless communications, 1 Gigabit consumer Internet access as well as a full suite of dedicated Internet, wireless, IP Voice, data and cloud services for businesses. This news release and other announcements are available at www.cspire.com/news. For more information about C Spire, visit www.cspire.com or follow us on Facebook at www.facebook.com/cspire or Twitter at www.twitter.com/cspire.

SOURCE C Spire

Related Links

http://www.cspire.com


DUBLIN, Sept. 20, 2018 /PRNewswire/ --

The "Global Genetic Testing Market Outlook 2022" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering.

The advent of genetic tests has revolutionized the molecular diagnostics and cytogenetic industry. It is one of the most rapidly growing segments in molecular diagnostics industry, which helps in delivering customized health services or personalized medicine. The share of genetic testing is incessantly increasing in the market. Growing awareness about genetic testing, technological advances in genetic sequencing, and rising incidences of genetic diseases especially cancer are some of the major factors propelling the genetic testing market.

The report Global Genetic Testing Market Outlook 2022 provides a detailed analysis of the genetic testing market. The report also provides an insight regarding the current and future prospective of the market. This report covers the major trends and drivers, and their impact on the market. The report also discusses some of the restraints that can hinder the growth of the market, as well as rising opportunities which can provide new dimensions to the industry.

The segmentation of genetic testing markets has been done in the report on the basis of applications, diseases, and geographical regions.

Based on application, the genetic testing market is divided into Diagnostic Testing, Newborn Screening, Prenatal Testing, Carrier Screening, and Others. Diagnostic testing and Newborn screening are the major application areas of genetic testing industry. The large shares of these applications can be attributed to presence of huge players in the segment, and to rising number of genetic tests performed for this purpose. The Carrier Testing market is expected to witness the highest growth during 2017-2022. This growth is likely to be driven by the huge population opting for carrier screening of cystic fibrosis, exhibiting unprecedented rise in the US. The report provides current and forecasted market for each of the application areas of Genetic Testing.

The major disease profiles/conditions for which Genetic Testing is used include Alzheimer's Disease, Cystic Fibrosis, Cancer, Down Syndrome, and Others. Cancer accounts for largest share amongst the diseases for which genetic testing is done. This large share can be attributed to the rising prevalence of cancer, which is expected to increase as the global population ages. Approximately 75-80% of all cancers are diagnosed in people aged 55 or older, and this pattern is expected to increase by 2020. The report provides current and forecasted market for each of the genetic conditions of Genetic Testing.

Moreover, the report also contains markets for the major regions including North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, and Rest of the World. North America contributes the largest share in the global genetic testing market, followed by Europe. Presence of major players, increased awareness and higher disposable income, are some of the prominent factors that have led to North America being the market leader.

The Asia-Pacific market is expected to witness the highest growth during 2017-2022. The major reasons for the high growth are the increasing per capita income and gradual development of healthcare sector in countries, such as India and China. North America and Europe are expected to grow at modest rate due to launch of new and innovative products in these markets.

The company profiles segment in this report is entirely devoted to profiling leading companies of the genetic testing industry including some major players like Abbott Laboratories, Roche Diagnostics, Myriad Genetics, Inc., Thermo Fisher Scientific, Inc., Hologic, Inc., Cepheid, Agilent Technologies and QIAGEN.

This segment provides you access to the new launched products, recent developments, and strengths and weaknesses of these companies to deliver a clear understanding/view of the competitive landscape. Overall, the report will prove to be a complete source of knowledge and analysis for clients and potential investors.

Key Topics Covered:



1. Analyst View



2. Research Methodology



3. Genetic Testing Overview

3.1 Applications and Advantages

3.2 Methods

3.3 Genetic Testing Laboratories - Unmet Need Analysis



4. Industry Overview

4.1 Drivers

4.1.1 Rising Incidence of Chronic Diseases

4.1.2 Growth in Ageing Population

4.1.3 Increasing Government Initiatives

4.1.4 Rising Investments in Genetic Testing Market

4.1.5 Incessant Launch of New Genetic Tests

4.2 Challenges

4.2.1 Low Awareness for Genetic Testing in Developing Countries

4.2.2 High Cost of Genetic Tests

4.2.3 Varying Reimbursement Policies

4.2.4 Ethical and Policy Issues

4.3 Opportunities

4.3.1 Next-Generation Sequencing (NGS)

4.3.2 Non-Invasive Prenatal Testing (NIPT)

4.3.3 Whole Genome Sequencing (WGS) for Cancer

4.3.4 Personalized Medicine

4.4 Trends

4.4.1 Genetic Testing in Oncology: Gaining Momentum

4.4.2 Strong Demand for Pharmacogenomics

4.4.3 At-Home DNA Tests or Direct-To-Consumer (DTC) Genetic Tests



5. Global Genetic Testing Market Outlook



6. Global Genetic Testing Market by Application

6.1 Carrier Testing

6.2 Diagnostic Testing

6.3 New Born Screening

6.4 Predictive & Pre-Symptomatic Testing

6.5 Prenatal Testing

6.6 Others



7. Global Genetic Testing Market by Disease

7.1 Alzheimer's Disease

7.2 Cystic Fibrosis

7.3 Cancer

7.4 Down Syndrome

7.5 Others



8. Global Genetic Testing Market by Geography

8.1 North America

8.2 Europe

8.3 Asia Pacific

8.4 Rest of the World (RoW)



9. Genetic Testing Regulations



10. Mergers & Acquisitions



11. Company Profiles (Overview, Product Offering, Financials, Developments, Strength & Weakness)

11.1 Abbott Laboratories

11.2 Roche Diagnostics

11.3 Myriad Genetics, Inc.

11.4 Thermo Fisher Scientific, Inc.

11.5 Agilent Technologies, Inc.

11.6 Hologic, Inc.

11.7 Illumina, Inc.

11.8 QIAGEN N.V.

11.9 Cepheid

11.10 Quest Diagnostics



Companies Mentioned



Abbott Laboratories

Roche Diagnostics

Myriad Genetics, Inc.

Thermo Fisher Scientific, Inc.

Agilent Technologies, Inc.

Hologic, Inc.

Illumina, Inc.

QIAGEN N.V.

Cepheid

Quest Diagnostics

For more information about this report visit

https://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/gng5z7/global_genetic?w=5

Did you know that we also offer Custom Research? Visit our Custom Research page to learn more and schedule a meeting with our Custom Research Manager.

Media Contact:

Laura Wood, Senior Manager

[email protected]



For E.S.T Office Hours Call +1-917-300-0470

For U.S./CAN Toll Free Call +1-800-526-8630

For GMT Office Hours Call +353-1-416-8900



U.S. Fax: 646-607-1907

Fax (outside U.S.): +353-1-481-1716

SOURCE Research and Markets

Related Links

http://www.researchandmarkets.com


SARASOTA, Fla., Sept. 20, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- GreenZone Hero is changing how businesses connect with consumers by honoring freedom and adding the human element back into business. The GreenZone Hero mission is to help improve business and connect consumers to businesses by providing digital tools that help businesses honor freedom as a social cause. Global Commerce is growing exponentially as technology eliminates borders and today's consumer can purchase products on the other side of the globe. GreenZone Hero has collaborated with organizations like The Hire Group and The Gratitude Professor to help connect people who understand the value of honoring freedom and honoring humankind.

GreenZone Hero Announces Partner Affiliations to Add the Human Connection Back into a Digital Business World We strive to work with companies and organizations that combine modern technologies with the human element. Both The Hire Group and The Gratitude Professor Foundation Corporation align perfectly with the GreenZone Hero corporate core values. - John Krotec, GreenZone Hero Founder

"We strive to work with companies and organizations that combine modern technologies with the human element. Both The Hire Group and The Gratitude Professor Foundation Corporation align perfectly with the GreenZone Hero corporate core values. We will be conducting business with them and working on mutual projects, too. These two innovative companies are leading the way for human interaction, taking it to another level by implementing programs and initiatives that improve the human experience and that nobody is doing," states John Krotec, Founder of GreenZone Hero.

The ecommerce market is estimated to reach $4.5 Trillion by 2021. Krotec believes, "Digital tools are innovations and should add to the business experience and support human connection, not take away from it. "A PWC survey states that 74% of people want more human interaction.

The Hire Group is a diversified supplier for recruitment needs and has a mission to bring back the human element into the recruitment process. The Hire Group is an ultra-innovative employment organization with a unique humanistic-approach to finding the right person for the right job. "Our process will revolutionize the employment process for both the companies seeking employees and the candidates seeking careers. We are proud to support our military members and diverse communities," said Ashley Horner, Founder of The Hire Group.

The Gratitude Professor Foundation Corporation is an IRS approved tax exempt 501(c)(3) organization that honors and supports our American Heroes. The mission is Gratitude; a call to action that empowers everyone to express Gratitude and Appreciation for the United States Military and all of the American heroes. "Our mission goes far beyond awareness; it creates meaningful ways to personally thank and invest in everyone who has served and continues to serve our Great Nation-with Gratitude a missing human element in business," said Edward Pereira, The Gratitude Professor.

For more information, visit www.GreenZoneHero.com, www.thgroupllc.org, www.gratitudeprofessor.org

About GreenZone Hero: GreenZone Hero is an online social purpose business directory that provides proven strategies and digital tools to companies that honor freedom.

The Hire Group: The Hire Group, a diverse certified enterprise, partners with clients and candidates to create tailored solutions that will best fit their needs. They work to provide recruitment resources that go far beyond filling an open role or landing a new position.

The Gratitude Professor Foundation: a call to action that empowers everyone to express Gratitude and Appreciation for our United States Military and All of our American Heroes.

FOR MORE INFORMATION, CONTACT:

John Krotec, [email protected], Tel: 941.400.7333

SOURCE GreenZone Hero

Related Links

http://www.GreenZoneHero.com


SAN RAMON, Calif., Sept. 20, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Hill Physicians Medical Group, California's largest independent physician association, announced today a strategic partnership with Blue Shield of California and OODA Health, a San Francisco-based healthcare technology startup. Hill Physicians will offer OODA Health's solution, beginning with patient collections, to its Oakland-based practice, Hill Health, in early 2019.

OODA Health's solution will simplify the collection process and give provider offices real-time claims. The technology also uses providers' existing systems, which minimizes disruption to workflows.

"We are excited to partner with OODA Health and Blue Shield to revolutionize the healthcare experience for our doctors and their patients," said David Joyner, Chief Executive Officer of Hill Physicians and OODA Health Advisor. "We wanted to make the healthcare encounter more like the retail experiences consumers are familiar withone that's transparent, immediate and simple. OODA Health's software will lessen the administrative burden that many physicians face today by simplifying the claims adjudication, billing and collecting processes, giving them more time to focus on patient care."

Real-time claims payment is a win-win across the healthcare ecosystem. It improves the patient experience by reducing the uncertainty and latency of out-of-pocket expenses and provides a variety of benefits for payers and providers.

"Our strategic partnership with Hill Physicians and Blue Shield of California will enable payers and providers to collaborate and benefit from a faster, more dynamic healthcare payment system," said Seth Cohen, Co-Founder, President and COO, OODA Health. "This new system gives doctors more time to do what they envisioned when they completed medical schooldelivering high-quality patient care, rather than focusing on payment administration and financial management."

About Hill Physicians Medical Group

Hill Physicians Medical Group is the largest independent physician association in Northern California. Since 1984, it has provided consumers access to quality, patient-focused healthcare. The group, comprised of more than 4,000 primary care and specialty physicians, partners with leading health plans and hospitals, giving members access to healthcare in 10 counties spanning the Sacramento, San Joaquin and San Francisco Bay areas. Comprehensive case management programs, targeted clinical initiatives and a dedication to technological advancement place it at the forefront of the industry. Hill Physicians is consistently acknowledged as one of the top-performing medical groups in the state by The Integrated Healthcare Association and Association of Physician Groups. For more information, visit: www.HillPhysicians.com.

About OODA Health

OODA Health was founded by a team of seasoned healthcare entrepreneurs who envision a healthcare system freed from an estimated $400 billion in waste. The company's mission is to transform healthcare administration by enabling real-time interactions between providers, payers and members. Using a collaborative and innovative approach, the company enables stakeholders to eliminate billions of dollars in waste and dramatically improve the payment experience for members. For more information about OODA Health, please visit www.ooda-health.com.

Contact: Dan Robinson

Phone: 925.327.6731

Email: [email protected]

SOURCE Hill Physicians Medical Group

Related Links

http://www.hillphysicians.com


DENVER, Sept. 20, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Notion, the complete home monitoring solution powered by a multi-purpose IoT smart home sensor, today announced an ongoing partnership with Hippo Insurance to arm new Hippo customers in qualifying states with Notion Smart Home Starter Kits when they sign up for an insurance policy. By installing and utilizing the complimentary Notion kit, Hippo customers will also receive a Smart Home discount on their home insurance policy, helping reduce their premiums.

The installation of Notion smart home sensors will allow Hippo customers to prevent in-home incidents, like water leaks and other costly insurance claims, before they create significant damage to the home. The partnership between Notion and Hippo marks one of the first times a U.S.-based insurance provider has created a policy that fully integrates an IoT sensor.

"More than sixty-five percent of all homeowner insurance claims are a result of a catastrophic event that insurance companies then need to handle after the damage is already done," says Brett Jurgens, CEO of Notion. "Using a fully-integrated connected home offering through Notion, Hippo customers will prevent disastrous events from destroying their home, saving them money, headaches and allowing for a better relationship with their insurance provider."

Notion's affordable and easy-to-install Smart Home Starter Kit packs multiple capabilities into a single device. Each sensor is identical, yet multi-purpose, offering a homeowner the flexibility to monitor and receive instant alerts on things happening across their entire homefrom motion and temperature changes to water leaks and sounding alarms. Now, those same alerts will be delivered to Hippo customers to prevent incidents before they occur, in order to significantly reduce the number of reported insurance claims.

Hippo clients will receive everything they need right out of the box, including their welcome booklet and the Notion Smart Home Starter Kit. By proactively leveraging Notion for home alerts, Hippo customers are receiving a meaningful discount on their insurance premium.

"Smart home devices are driving a new wave of change in the insurance industry, which closely aligns with our focus on proactive home insurance - helping our clients care for their homes, years after they become Hippo customers," said Assaf Wand, CEO and Co-founder at Hippo Insurance. "While other insurance providers have been slow to do their part in analyzing IoT and smart home insights we've been developing smart home partnerships that allow our customers to respond to an incident before it happens and can learn from their IoT triggers to build a better insurance product."

Since its public launch in 2016, Notion has delivered more than nine million peace-of-mind messages to homeowners and has helped them save more than $1 million in property damages in the last year alone.

About Notion

Notion is the complete home monitoring solution, powered by an all-in-one smart home sensor, that sends alerts to a homeowner's mobile device for the things they care about most  water leaks, smoke alarms, temperature changes and doors, garages and windows opening and closing. Notion is more than home security. Notion delivers real-time peace of mind. For more information, please visit http://getnotion.com/.

About Hippo

Hippo is on a mission to transform home insurance for the modern household. Among its many innovations, Hippo allows homeowners to get a quote and purchase home insurance online in 60 seconds or less, save up to 25 percent compared with traditional insurers, and obtain smarter coverage for modern households. This includes protection for possessions like appliances, consumer electronics and home offices. Founded in 2015 by Assaf Wand and Eyal Navon, Hippo made its debut in the insurance marketplace in April 2017, and has raised $39 million to reinvent home insurance through its initial funding rounds. The company is headquartered in Mountain View, California. For more information, visit http://www.myhippo.com.

Notion Media Contact

Will McKenna

Barokas PR for Notion

(440) 665-0831

[email protected]

SOURCE Notion

Related Links

https://www.getnotion.com


CHICAGO, Sept. 20, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- In the newest rounds of grants marking its 20th anniversary, Hyundai Hope On Wheels 501(c)(3) celebrates National Childhood Cancer Awareness Month by awarding the $300,000 Hyundai Hope Scholar Grant to Dr. James Labelle of University of Chicago Medicine Comer Children's Hospital. This September, 38 new doctor-researchers will receive a combined $14.1 million in grants to support novel therapeutic approaches and innovative research options in pediatric cancer. The award will be officially presented to Dr. Labelle at Comer Children's on Thursday, September 20th at 10 a.m.

Childhood cancer researchers depend largely on private funding for groundbreaking therapies to get off the ground and to advance treatment approaches to the next phase of testing, ultimately, bringing better therapies and cures to kids with cancer. With this latest award, Comer Children's has received more than $1.3 million in grants from Hope On Wheels, contributing to the organization's $145 million in the organization's total lifetime giving.

"Throughout the country, talented doctors are working tirelessly to help kids fight cancer by conducting research or providing bedside care," said Scott Fink, chairman, Hyundai Hope On Wheels Board of Directors. "Our goal at Hope On Wheels is to provide these doctors with the grant funds they need to perform their lifesaving work."

During the event, children being treated for cancer at Comer Children's will participate in the program's signature Handprint Ceremony, in which they will dip their hands in paint and place their handprints on the Hope Vehicle, a white 2018 Santa Fe. As "Every Handprint Tells a Story," the colorful handprints of brave pediatric cancer fighters represent their individual and collective hopes, dreams and journeys.

Supporters are encouraged to visit the HHOW website (www.HyundaiHopeOnWheels.org) to view this year's grant winners along with stories of brave cancer survivors and passionate doctor-researchers. Once there, supporters may add their handprint to a wall of hope to show their support for the cause. They will also find information on additional ways to support HHOW through social media efforts and events throughout the month. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram at facebook.com/HyundaiHopeOnWheels, twitter.com/HopeOnWheels or instagram.com/HyundaiHopeOnWheels.

COMER CHILDREN'S HOSPITAL

Comer Children's Hospital (http://www.uchicagokidshospital.org/), which is part of the University of Chicago Medicine (http://www.uchospitals.edu/index.shtml), is home to the only Level 1 pediatric trauma center on the city's South Side. It includes a 30-bed pediatric intensive care unit, one of the state's busiest neonatal intensive units and an array of general, specialty and subspecialty care for children of all ages. The hospital admits more than 5,000 patients and accommodates nearly 37,000 outpatient clinics visits annually, offering everything from general care to groundbreaking treatments for the most complex medical conditions.

HYUNDAI HOPE ON WHEELS

Hyundai Hope On Wheels is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization that is committed to finding a cure for childhood cancer. Launched in 1998, Hyundai Hope On Wheels provides grants to eligible institutions nationwide that are pursuing life-saving research and innovative treatments for the disease. HHOW is one of the largest non-profit funders of pediatric cancer research in the country, and primary funding for Hyundai Hope On Wheels comes from Hyundai Motor America and its more than 835 U.S. dealers. Since its inception, Hyundai Hope On Wheels has awarded more than $145 million towards childhood cancer research in pursuit of a cure.

HYUNDAI MOTOR AMERICA

Hyundai Motor America, headquartered in Fountain Valley, Calif., is a subsidiary of Hyundai Motor Company of Korea. Hyundai vehicles are distributed throughout the United States by Hyundai Motor America and are sold and serviced through 835 dealerships nationwide. All new Hyundai vehicles sold in the U.S. are covered by the Hyundai Assurance program, which includes a 5-year/60,000-mile fully-transferable new vehicle limited warranty, Hyundai's 10-year/100,000-mile powertrain limited warranty and five years of complimentary Roadside Assistance.

For more details on Hyundai Assurance, please visit www.HyundaiAssurance.com

Please visit our media website at www.hyundainews.com

Hyundai Motor America on Twitter | YouTube | Facebook

SOURCE Hyundai Hope On Wheels

Related Links

http://www.HyundaiHopeOnWheels.org


TIANJIN, China, Sept. 20, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- From Sept.18 to Sept. 20, the 2018 Summer Davos Forum was grandly held in Tianjin. As one of the IT industry leaders in China, Peter Sun, chairman and CEO of Inspur Group, attended the 2018 Summer Davos Forum. At the forum, Peter Sun shared his ideas on a number of hot issues, such as shaping innovative societies in the Fourth Industrial Revolution and building the cities of tomorrow in China, with more than 2,000 leaders and high-level representatives from over 100 countries and regions.

As the intelligent technologies develop, smart cities are becoming an irresistible trend and during this process, information security and privacy protection are the primary issues that need to be solved urgently. In the meantime, he believes that it will only be the smart city operators to secure an inclusive and sustainable city development while the city's administrators are changing all the time, and a constant and sustainable development is the need of smart city development.

Mr. Sun also shared with everyone his visionary scenario of the future city where government is able to govern and operate in a more precise and efficient way through scientific decision-making, and organizations and individuals can enjoy various public services with just one click through their smart devices. Moreover, the ever-changing nature of intelligent technologies makes everyone a key node in smart cities, said Peter Sun. In such urban development, everyone is generating data and also benefiting from data. Like governments, citizens can also take part in the urban construction and governance, acting as "nerve units" of their cities.

For more information, please visit: http://www.inspur.com/

SOURCE Inspur Group

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LONDON, Sept. 20, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Integrating risk professionals in emerging technology and digital transformation projects improves user experience, increases digital trust and confidence in project delivery and reduces execution costs. This assessment is according to an EY poll held during a recent webcast entitled "How can you turn digital risk into a source of competitive advantage?" attended by more than 1,200 participants.

Fifty-nine percent of participants said increased digital trust and increased confidence in delivery resulted from the integration of risk professionals in digital transformation projects. However, 57% say that the involvement of risk professionals in their transformation initiatives is either limited or missing.

Amy Brachio, EY Global Advisory Risk Leader, says:

Traditionally, risk has been seen by organizations as something that needs to be mitigated, managed or ideally eliminated altogether. But risk management is not just about diminishing the downsides of doing business, it is also about maximizing the upside ways that support the organization to achieve its goals. The risk function cannot afford to operate in a silo. Not only does it need to actively engage with functions, including internal audit, IT and legal, but also with front line business leaders and external parties. An area of prime importance for businesses in an era of disruption and easily available information is maintaining Trust and credibility, which can affect reputational risk of the business. Today's' risk professionals must develop new ways to find a balance between managing risk and moving fast enough to enable enterprises to intercept opportunities and reap the rewards."

Industry convergence and new business models are emerging with the rapid technology advancements, according to the poll. All poll respondents had ongoing projects involving new or emerging technologies in the areas of digital (fifty-three percent), cloud (fifty-four percent), automation (forty percent) and advanced analytics (thirty-seven percent). However, respondents said the participation of risk professionals within these projects were either: none (twelve percent); limited or partially integrated (forty percent); while fully integrated was only (twelve percent).

Disruptions needed in the risk organization to deliver strategic value

According to the poll, a fundamental shift in mindset will be needed by organizations to evolve from the current way that they are managing risk and compliance, to a digitally enabled function that delivers strategic value.

The majority of respondents (65%) agreed on the need for disruption in the risk and governance function to drive strategic value. Thirty-one percent voted for integration of all risk functions into one approach (such as internal audit, enterprise risk, legal, compliance, health and safety). Twenty-one percent said that implementing new and emerging risk technologies such as robotic process automation, artificial intelligence and advanced analytics would be key to disrupt the risk function. A data-driven approach to risk monitoring would drive disruption, according to 21.5% of respondents, while another 17.5% said specialized resources and training was required to support a more technical and data-driven risk program.

Brachio says, "In this age of disruption, risk professionals need to disrupt themselves. Since organizations will only be able to pursue radical growth and value creation if they embrace risk and uncertainty, they need risk to evolve from being primarily a defensive function into a driver of strategic development. Risk professionals need to take advantage of new data, new technologies, new skill sets, new structures and new ecosystems to provide robust, respected and trustworthy analysis. Risk tools, such as risk intelligence, risk models, simulation functionality, and visualization platforms, can all help boards to foresee the consequences of their decisions, facilitating better decision making, quicker innovation and greater speed to market."

To learn more about EY capabilities in Digital trust, visit betterworkingworld.ey.com

Notes to editors

About EY

EY is a global leader in assurance, tax, transaction and advisory services. The insights and quality services we deliver help build trust and confidence in the capital markets and in economies the world over. We develop outstanding leaders who team to deliver on our promises to all of our stakeholders. In so doing, we play a critical role in building a better working world for our people, for our clients and for our communities.

EY refers to the global organization, and may refer to one or more, of the member firms of Ernst & Young Global Limited, each of which is a separate legal entity. Ernst & Young Global Limited, a UK company limited by guarantee, does not provide services to clients. For more information about our organization, please visit ey.com.

This news release has been issued by EYGM Limited, a member of the global EY organization that also does not provide any services to clients.

Barbara Burgess Aparna Sankaran EY Global Media Relations EY Global Media Relations +1 212 773 1652 +44 748 024 5082 [email protected] [email protected]

SOURCE EY

Related Links

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SANTA CLARA, Calif., Sept. 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- ioTium today announced that it has closed $13.6 million in Series B financing. This new round of investment brings the company's total funding to $22 million and validates the strength of the company's Software-Defined Converged Infrastructure solutions for IIoT, a vision actualized within industrial Fortune 500 deployments worldwide. The funding was led by continued investment from March Capital Partners. Honeywell Ventures, John Chambers' JC2 Ventures and Hanna Ventures joined existing ioTium investors GE Ventures and Juniper Ventures in the round. Capital will be used to accelerate ongoing technology leadership and to fuel rapid market expansion in the U.S. and abroad.

"Since our founding, ioTium has been focused on solving the deployment complexities faced by industrial enterprises undertaking digital transformation," said Ron Victor, founder and CEO of ioTium. "Our vision for Software-Defined Converged Infrastructure solutions for IIoT is based on the learning that both flexibility and simplicity are equally important in approaching Industry 4.0. Organizations must combine elements of security, network, and edge computing in a multi-tenanted, scalable and open way to realize their deployment. Our customers and investors recognize that we are the only commercially deployed zero-touch solution to bring these elements together."

ioTium's vision for Software-Defined Converged Infrastructure for IIoT has been validated by Fortune 500 customers in multiple vertical markets. ioTium solutions have been deployed by major industrial enterprises in building automation, energy and manufacturing environments, uniquely positioning the Company as a trusted partner for a spectrum of digital transformation initiatives.

"Digital disruption is happening faster than ever before. ioTium is driving innovation with its easily deployable technology for industrial markets where reliability and security are mission-critical. CEO Ron Victor is shaping the next market transition with their Software-Defined Converged Infrastructure solutions designed for IIoT," noted John Chambers, founder and CEO of JC2 Ventures. "As mentors of digital innovation, our mission at JC2 Ventures is to help disruptive startups from around the world scale and grow, which is why we're excited to work with ioTium as the team enters the next stage of global expansion."

"Ron and the ioTium team have a practical understanding of how IIoT can actually be deployed at scale within building automation, industrial and energy environments," said Sumant Mandal, managing director, March Capital Partners. "We are proud to continue our partnership with ioTium as the organization continues to grow its technology suite, including their Software-Defined Converged Infrastructure vision for IIoT, and expand the reach of its product set into industrial organizations worldwide."

Many companies tried to tackle the problem with IT-specific approaches, but with the launch of groundbreaking ioTium OT-Net Networking-as-a-Service (NaaS) last year, Victor foretold the death of the command line interface in IIoT. ioTium solutions are built on the understanding that mission critical environments must have a zero-touch solution that can easily scale to hundreds or thousands of sites in some of the world's most hard-to-reach locations.

"GE Ventures is an active investor in the future of edge computing," said Michael Dolbec, executive managing director at GE Ventures. "We believe in transformational technologies designed to solve industrial-scale problems. Our continued investment in ioTium comes from the knowledge that the Company can help streamline IIoT adoption in industrial environments because of their unique approach to Software-Defined Converged Infrastructure for IIoT."

ioTium was recognized as a Cool Vendor in the April 2018 Gartner Cool Vendors in Edge Computing, 2018 report.

The Company has seen record growth in the last year, doubling headcount and growing the customer roster, such as Rexnord in manufacturing, Kilroy Realty Corporation in commercial real estate and other industrial Fortune 500 companies in the energy and oil and gas sectors.

"ioTium has been a true partner in the acceleration of our digital transformation initiative," said Rick Morse, vice president of Digital Solutions for the Rexnord Process & Motion Control business. "Rexnord is constantly innovating to address diverse deployments and customer needs. The ioTium solution enables us to make a flexible solution implemented across a scalable platform critical."

"We applaud the Company's successes since emerging from the Fabric's co-creation platform," noted Rajan Raghavan, CEO, The Fabric. "The company has been delivering on its vision across Industrial Enterprises. The successful completion of the latest funding round which includes some leading industrial companies and investors is a further validation of the vision and execution by the ioTium team."

As ioTium expands its international presence, the new funding will be used to open offices on the East Coast of the United States, Canada, Europe and Australia. The company will also increase headcount at its Chicago and Houston locations. Geographies are specifically targeted to maximize ioTium's presence in heavily industrialized areas.

Gartner Disclaimer

Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner's research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

About ioTium

ioTium is the first commercially deployed Software-Defined Converged Infrastructure company for the IIoT. Headquartered in Silicon Valley and funded by GE Ventures, Honeywell Ventures, Juniper Ventures, JC2 Ventures, Hanna Ventures, March Capital Partners and the Fabric, ioTium is the company of choice for Fortune 500 organizations looking to enable secure, scalable IIoT deployment today. ioTium bridges the legacy brown-field world with the new cloud-enabled world. The company's offerings have been deployed in leading building automation, energy, oil and gas, and manufacturing organizations. ioTium solutions include the groundbreaking ioTium OT-Net; ioTium OT-Access; and the ioTium OT-Edge converged infrastructure solution. The company's solutions ensure that any machine, using any protocol, can be instantly, seamlessly and securely connected to any application residing in any cloud or data center through any network infrastructure and operator; while eliminating deployment complexity issues and minimizing network security risks. For more information, visit: http://www.iotium.io.

ioTium Contacts:

Kim Truong

ioTium

(408) 219-1315

[email protected]

Morgan Barrett

McGrath/Power

(408) 200-3762

[email protected]

SOURCE IoTium

Related Links

https://www.iotium.io


HAIFA, Israel, Sept. 20, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- MeMed today announced the completion of a new round of financing totaling over $70 million, with participation from new and existing investors including Ping An Global Voyager Fund, Foxconn, Caesarea Medical Holdings, Clal Insurance, Phoenix Insurance, OurCrowd, Social Capital, WTI, Horizons Ventures, and high-net-worth executives renowned for early investments in industry-changing companies.

MeMed will use the proceeds to advance in three areas: (i) Market adoption of MeMed BV, a breakthrough immune-system based test for distinguishing between bacterial and viral infections, while continuing to generate an unprecedented level of clinical evidence validating test performance; (ii) Complete development, upscale manufacturing and clearance of MeMed Key, a pioneering point-of-care (POC) protein measurement platform; and (iii) Expand its pipeline of innovative tests that integrate machine learning and immune-based measurements to tackle big clinical challenges.

Dr. Eran Eden, MeMed's co-founder and CEO said, "The overwhelming enthusiasm to participate in the latest round reflects the vast clinical challenge and huge market opportunity our technology addresses. For nearly a decade, with leading academic and commercial partners, we've developed MeMed BV, and then generated high quality double-blind clinical evidence to validate it. When measured on MeMed Key and on other platforms, MeMed BV has the potential to serve as a valuable tool in the fight against resistant bacteria - one of the biggest healthcare challenges of our time. The additional funds, and the significant support we are receiving from the U.S. government and EU commission, solidify MeMed as a global leader in the space of host-based diagnostics of infectious and inflammatory disorders."

"These resources will expedite the final development phases, clearance and manufacturing of the pioneering MeMed Key platform, which will run the MeMed BV test in minutes," said Dr. Kfir Oved, MeMed's co-founder and CTO. "Importantly, the MeMed Key platform opens the way to central lab precision at the point-of-care. It will allow measurement of multiple other proteins and signatures, both conventional and new, that currently are only measurable in the central lab. This unlocks enormous value in diagnosing and managing patients across a wide range of other diseases."

Dr. Marco Huesch, Chief Medical Officer, Ping An Voyager Fund, and former Assoc Prof. and Chief, Division of Radiology Innovation and Value Enhancement at Penn State Medical Center, said, "This exciting innovation will greatly enhance diagnostic and therapeutic confidence among physicians and their patients when faced with distinguishing bacterial from viral infections. Beyond profoundly benefiting individual patients, this groundbreaking technology will address antibiotic overuse within the broader population and contribute to reducing the growing burden of antibiotic resistance."

About MeMed

Our mission is to translate the complex signals of our immune system into simple diagnostic insights that transform the way we treat infectious and inflammatory diseases - at the right place and the right time. Over nearly a decade, with collaborators around the globe, MeMed has developed and validated a pioneering immune-based protein signature called MeMed BV for distinguishing between bacterial and viral infections - an indispensable tool in the fight against resistant strains of bacteria - one of the biggest healthcare challenges of our time. An ELISA format of MeMed BV, called ImmunoXpert, is cleared for use in the EU (CE-IVD), Switzerland and Israel and is currently in pilot distribution in these territories. MeMed is also developing MeMed Key, a groundbreaking platform that opens the way to measuring multiple proteins and signatures, conventional and innovative, with central lab precision at the point-of-care. MeMed Key will measure MeMed BV within minutes. Today, we are expanding our network of partnerships with internationally renowned academic, commercial and government stakeholders to advance, validate and facilitate global availability of our platform and tests. For additional information, please visit http://www.me-med.com/.

Company Contacts:

Tanya Gottlieb, VP Scientific Affairs, MeMed

Phone: +972-4-8500302

[email protected]

Kfir Emmer, Director of Finance, MeMed

Phone: +972-4-8500302

[email protected]

Media Contact:

Kirsten Thomas, The Ruth Group

Phone: +1-508-280-6592

[email protected]

SOURCE MeMed

Related Links

http://www.me-med.com


CHICAGO, Sept. 20, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Motista (www.motista.com), the pioneer of Predictive Emotional Connection Intelligence solutions, today announced its hiring of Chris Rogers as their Vice President of Sales in order to serve the growing demand of Motista customers.

Based on over 20 years of industry experience, Chris understands the pressures marketers are under to maximize their marketing and advertising investments. As a market researcher, as well as sales professional, Chris' skillset blends the knowledge of research data and performance metrics with marketing technologies. His expertise will help Motista clients capitalize on the highest impact growth solutions to accelerate profitability.

"As Motista continues its rapid customer expansion, it is fundamental to our success to grow our team with proven, strategic leaders to continue to build brand awareness and demand for our proprietary Emotional Connection Targeting solutions. We are thrilled to have an experienced industry veteran such as Chris join our sales team to develop long-term partnerships with Fortune 1000 brands," said Tom O'Sullivan, Executive Vice President of Sales, Motista.

Before joining Motista, Chris served as Senior Director of Business Development at Research Now Ad & Audience, a B2B and B2C panel provider and data collection services company, where he was focused on delivering audience targeting and advertising measurement solutions to the media and ad tech industry. Prior to this, Chris was Sales Director for the retail and CPG verticals at Kantar Media Compete. There he helped companies build measurable online marketing and ecommerce strategies.

"It's very clear Motista's Predictive Emotional Connection Intelligence provides marketers with some of the most innovative and proven targeting solutions in our industry. Mapping out and measuring consumers' Emotional Connection to a brand is exactly what CMOs are looking for in order to drive growth. I'm incredibly excited to join Motista and help top-tier brands achieve their revenue goals," said Chris Rogers, Vice President of Sales, Motista.

About Motista

Motista, the pioneer of Predictive Emotional Connection Intelligence, enables Fortune 1000 business leaders to accelerate customer and financial growth by activating Emotional Connection. Motista provides Emotional Connection Targeting solutions for acquiring and growing your most valuable customers. Based on proprietary data assets, we identify the actual people most predisposed to becoming emotionally connected with your brand. We then help you activate them across channels and campaigns to boost conversion and accelerate growth. Learn more at www.motista.com or call 650-204-7976.

SOURCE Motista

Related Links

http://www.motista.com


Singapore-based NEO Global Capital is the strategic investment vehicle of NEO foundation and one of the largest owners of cryptocurrency in the Asia Pacific region. One of NEO Global Capital's key investment objectives is not only to promote the mass adoption of blockchain technology in various real-world industries but also disrupt existing business models. Muzika, with an existing user base of 2 million and investments from top notch crypto and blockchain investment groups like T3 Ventures, Everest Ventures Group, 256 Ventures, and has demonstrated its ability to disrupt the status quo in the global music industry.

Tony Gu, founder of NEO Global Capital, remarked upon his reasons for selecting Muzika: "Muzika's team has demonstrated solid business management capabilities, as well as strong domain expertise in music industry. The collaboration with Ontology also gives Muzika an edge in terms of technology infrastructure and ecosystem interoperability. NGC believes Muzika can do well and establish a new and better ecosystem for the global music industry."

The investment group focuses on investing in projects related to blockchain technology. Other notable recent investments include a capital investment of $1 Million into the Bluzelle Ecosystem, P2P Network Trinity, Ontology, and decentralized IOT Platform Ruffchain. According to Muzika CEO Inseo Chung, NGC's contributions have vividly spelled out an old Chinese saying- "adding wings to a tiger" and that the startup is "about to take off for an exciting journey ahead."

NEO Global Capital Strategic Partnerships is growing rapidly, in part due to its strict adherence to due diligence for its project investments. Previous projects have achieved great success in contributing to the acceleration of the adoption of blockchain in Asia to make the industry a commercial reality. The capital investment from reputable investment group NEO Global Capital will certainly be a turning point in the commercialization of Muzika as it begins its expansion into various markets.

For more information on Muzika visit:

Muzika website: https://www.muzika.network/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/muzikanews

Twitter: https://twitter.com/muzika_official

Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/muzikaofficial/

Medium: https://medium.com/muzika-official

Official WeChat: MZK_FOUNDATION

WeChat official public number: muzika-official

Media contact:

Alyssa Tsai

[email protected]

+86-185-1661-1950

SOURCE Muzika Network

Related Links

http://www.muzika.network


CHAPEL HILL, N.C., Sept. 20, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- College Consensus (http://www.collegeconsensus.com), a unique new college ranking website, has published their ranking of the Best Colleges in Connecticut 2018 at http://www.collegeconsensus.com/ranking/best-colleges-ct/

To identify the Best Colleges in Connecticut for 2018, College Consensus combined the latest results from the most respected college ranking systems with thousands of real student reviews to produce a unique consensus score for each school. According to College Consensus founder Jeremy Alder, "Like Rotten Tomatoes does for movies, College Consensus gathers college rankings and reviews from around the web and distills them into a simple, easy to understand score so students can quickly and easily compare schools. It is the ranking of all rankings, so to speak." Learn more about the College Consensus rankings methodology at http://www.collegeconsensus.com/about/.

To help prospective Connecticut students evaluate the higher education options that are right for their individual needs, College Consensus identified the best-ranked colleges in the Constitution State (presented here in alphabetical order):

Connecticut College - New London, CT

Central Connecticut State University - New Britain, CT

Fairfield University - Fairfield, CT

Quinnipiac University - Hamden, CT

Sacred Heart University - Fairfield, CT

Southern Connecticut State University - New Haven, CT

Trinity College - Hartford, CT

University of Connecticut - Storrs, CT

University of Hartford - Hartford, CT

University of Saint Joseph - West Hartford, CT

Wesleyan University - Middletown, CT

Yale University - New Haven, CT

From the very earliest colonial era, Connecticut was a dominant influence on American life, government, culture, and business. With significant wealth, as one of the first business centers of the colonies, and a well-educated leadership, Connecticut was the home of numerous Founding Fathers and one of the most critical players in the American Revolution. Connecticut helped bring the Industrial Revolution to America, and over the course of the 20th century grew numerous well-heeled suburbs for metropolitan New York City. Connecticut's heavily professional economy depends on college-educated workers, and the state's deep network of Ivy League schools, public research universities, elite liberal arts colleges, and regional institutions meets that need handily.

"Connecticut has too many world-class institutions to narrow down," according to Managing Editor Carrie Sealey-Morris; "Ranking the best colleges and universities in Connecticut is an exercise in finding the most possible words for 'best.'" The shadow Yale University casts over the state is large - it is, after all, "a household name, the third university in the US and, for centuries, the standard for greatness." Connecticut's higher ed system must cover a lot of bases, with "a complex economy that requires an exceptionally high proportion of college graduates, from finance and high-tech manufacturing to healthcare and government." Sealey-Morris explains, "as one of the oldest colonies, Connecticut attracts historians and tourists; as one of the wealthiest states, Connecticut's hospitality and service economy is massive." From "the mighty UConn" to the "land of the elite liberal arts college," Connecticut has a unique position in higher education: as Sealey-Morris puts it, "when we say the best colleges and universities in Connecticut, we mean the best, period."

College Consensus is a new approach to college rankings. We combine the latest results from the most respected college ranking systems with thousands of real student review scores from around the web to produce an aggregate College Consensus rating for each school. Students will not find a more comprehensive ranking of the top colleges and universities anywhere. In addition to rankings, College Consensus also offers expert advice and guidance on all aspects of college life, from finding the perfect college, to getting accepted, paying for it, and finding your professional path after graduation.

Contact:

Carrie Sealey-Morris

Managing Editor, College Consensus

[email protected]

(512) 710-9901

http://www.collegeconsensus.com/

https://www.facebook.com/collegeconsensus/

SOURCE College Consensus

Related Links

http://www.collegeconsensus.com


CHAPEL HILL, N.C., Sept. 20, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- College Consensus (http://www.collegeconsensus.com), a unique new college ranking website, has published their ranking of the Best Colleges in Indiana 2018 at http://www.collegeconsensus.com/ranking/best-colleges-in/

To identify the Best Colleges in Indiana for 2018, College Consensus combined the latest results from the most respected college ranking systems with thousands of real student reviews to produce a unique consensus score for each school. According to College Consensus founder Jeremy Alder, "Like Rotten Tomatoes does for movies, College Consensus gathers college rankings and reviews from around the web and distills them into a simple, easy to understand score so students can quickly and easily compare schools. It is the ranking of all rankings, so to speak." Learn more about the College Consensus rankings methodology at http://www.collegeconsensus.com/about/.

To help prospective Indiana students evaluate the higher education options that are right for their individual needs, College Consensus identified the best-ranked colleges in the Hoosier State (presented here in alphabetical order):

Bethel College - Mishawaka, IN

Butler University - Indianapolis, IN

DePauw University - Greencastle, IN

Earlham College - Richmond, IN

Franklin College - Franklin, IN

Goshen College - Goshen, IN

Grace College and Theological Seminary -

Hanover College - Hanover, IN

Huntington University - Huntington, IN

Indiana Wesleyan University - Marion, IN

Indiana University - Bloomington, IN

Manchester University - North Manchester, IN

Marian University - Indianapolis, IN

Purdue University - West Lafayette, IN

Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology -

Saint Mary's College - Notre Dame, IN

Saint Mary-of-the-Woods College - St. Mary's IN

Taylor University - Upland, IN

Trine University - Angola, IN

University of Evansville - Evansville, IN

University of Indianapolis - Indianapolis, IN

University of Notre Dame - Notre Dame, IN

University of Saint Francis - Fort Wayne, IN

Valparaiso University - Valparaiso, IN

Wabash College - Crawfordsville, IN

Indiana is one of the nation's premier examples of economic stability, quality education, and diversified economics, building on its heritage of settlement by Southerners and New Englanders after the opening of the territory. Unlike other Midwestern states that were hard hit by economic downturns in the 1980s and 1990s, Indiana had a stable base of a well-educated workforce and industries beyond agriculture and manufacturing. Hoosiers owe a lot to their dedication to education; they were, in fact, the first state in the union to include state-mandated public education in their constitution, and a strong network of public universities and private liberal arts colleges ensures that Indiana students get the education they need.

Indiana's best colleges and universities "are not just big names in the state, or even in the midwest," Managing Editor Carrie Sealey-Morris explains; "institutions like the University of Notre Dame and Purdue University are globally renowned, with reputations for world-changing ideas and discoveries." Indiana's educational excellence was not a fortunate coincidence, however, with "settlers from New England and the Northeast bringing with them the Ivy League standards of institutions like Dartmouth and Harvard, determined to educate and elevate their new home." Traditional liberal arts colleges "built the groundwork for Indiana's professional leadership," while Indiana's top research universities "set standards for learning and discovery in every field from agriculture to aerospace engineering." Since the first settlers from the East, Sealey-Morris writes, Indiana has been "meeting needs, changing lives, and building a better world for Indiana and beyond."

College Consensus is a new approach to college rankings. We combine the latest results from the most respected college ranking systems with thousands of real student review scores from around the web to produce an aggregate College Consensus rating for each school.

Contact:

Carrie Sealey-Morris

Managing Editor, College Consensus

[email protected]

(512) 710-9901

http://www.collegeconsensus.com/

https://www.facebook.com/collegeconsensus/

SOURCE College Consensus

Related Links

http://www.collegeconsensus.com


BARRINGTON, Ill., SAN JOSE, Calif. & LONDON, Sept. 20, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- The Organization of Women in International Trade (OWIT), has elected Leslie Levy August as OWIT "Woman of the Year." The award will be conferred on October 26th at the OWIT International 18th Annual Conference in Nairobi, Kenya. The international award recognizes outstanding contributions to the status of women within international business and the global trade community. OWIT is non-profit, with a global network of chapters and 2,000+ members, founded in 1989.

Leslie Levy August discussing Women in International Trade on Ding Ding TV. Ms. August was interviewed by Diana Ding on global expansion of business and the role of women's professional organizations in professional development. Leslie Levy August with a WIT-NC member at the Annual Chinese New Year program in Silicon Valley.

Leslie Levy August, Chief Operating Officer (COO) of boomerang carnets and Director of boomerang carnets UK, will receive the award for outstanding contribution to the status of women in international business and trade as the result of her corporate and non-profit efforts. She has served on an OWIT Chapter Board of Directors, Women in International Trade Northern California (WIT-NC), for seven years including three years as President. Additionally, she has impacted women in international trade by modeling the values of collaboration, integrity, responsibility, respect, diversity, empowerment, learning and compassion in her corporate role.

Boomerang carnets and its services (ATA Carnet & Carnet de Passage en Douane) facilitate global trade and tourism by making the promotion of goods and services across borders, easier and less costly. Carnet temporary export/import documents eliminate the payment of import duty and tax in member countries and territories.

Ms. August is an appointed Member of the Northern California District Export Council, a public-private partnership supporting U.S. companies to expand internationally. She has also represented U.S. small and medium sized businesses (SMEs) at the World Customs Organization in Brussels. She is committed to supporting students to find careers in trade and she recently moderated a panel on careers in trade to CSUM students at their annual Women in Maritime Leadership Conference.

Commenting on the award, Ms. August said, "It has been a privilege to serve as Director and COO of a corporation that evens the playing field for SMEs that are expanding globally. And volunteering with OWIT has been an integral part of my professional development and success due to the educational benefits and networking opportunities. To be recognized internationally for being a positive role model for women in international trade is, indeed, an honor."

Contact:

Anva Nuguid

[email protected]

847-852-3172

SOURCE boomerang carnets
TORONTO, Sept. 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ - Rogers Communications Inc. plans to release its third quarter 2018 financial results on Friday, October 19, 2018 before North American financial markets open. The results will be distributed by newswire and posted at investors.rogers.com. Rogers' management will host its quarterly teleconference with the investment community to discuss the results and outlook at 8:00 a.m. ET.

Those wishing to listen to the teleconference should access the live webcast on the Investor Relations section of Rogers' website at investors.rogers.com. A webcast of the teleconference will be available at this same website location following the teleconference.

Members of the financial community wishing to ask questions during the call should dial 647-484-0478 (1-888-204-4368 toll free for North America) at least ten minutes prior to the scheduled start time and request access to Rogers' third quarter 2018 results teleconference. Media are welcome to participate on a listen-only basis. In addition to the webcast archive, a telephonic re-broadcast will be available for two weeks following the teleconference by dialing 647-436-0148 (1-888-203-1112 toll free for North America) and providing conference ID number 9379484.

About the Company: Rogers is a leading diversified Canadian communications and media company. We are Canada's largest provider of wireless communications services and one of Canada's leading providers of cable television, high-speed Internet, information technology, and telephony services to consumers and businesses. Through Rogers Media, we are engaged in radio and television broadcasting, sports, televised and online shopping, magazines, and digital media. Our shares are publicly traded on the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX: RCI.A and RCI.B) and on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE: RCI).

SOURCE Rogers Communications Canada Inc. - English

Related Links

http://www.rogers.com


LITTLE ROCK, Ark., Sept. 20, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- The STARR Coalition is proud to announce the launch of STARR 911, a training program designed to help clinical researchers better identify patients with thoughts of self-harm and to rapidly and appropriately assist those patients. Created by the STARR Coalition and a consortium of dedicated stakeholders, STARR 911 is intended to bridge the gap between clinical research and suicide prevention.

While patients are rigorously screened for suicidal thoughts prior to joining a study, many are simply rejected from participation rather than receiving the help they need. With STARR 911, research staff can properly recognize patients with suicidal inclinations and assist using intervention tools and access to the National Suicide Prevention Hotline. To achieve this, STARR Coalition partnered with Evolution Research Group, LLC ("ERG"), to sponsor an on-site training video to serve as the first step towards a consistent training platform.

"Evolution Research Group works every day to find cures for many neuropsychiatric diseases. Statistically, those with chronic conditions have a 363 percent higher rate of completing suicide. When the research industry wanted to make a difference, ERG immediately asked how they could help," said Luke Kramer, executive director at the STARR Coalition. Luke Co-Founded the STARR Coalition with Carol Witham, who was also one of the co-founders of ERG.

Headquartered in Watchung, New Jersey, ERG is a leading independent clinical research site business that specializes in central nervous system disorders. Already deeply involved in mental health research, ERG recognized the need for better suicide prevention training within the industry.

"As a member of the ERG family, I am proud that our organization stepped up to help make the STARR 911 training video a reality," said Nichole Gutierrez, Site Director at Woodland Research Northwest in Rogers, Arkansas and the ERG representative for the STARR 911 initiative. "This is something that I hold very dear to my heart, and I truly appreciate the collaborative support from my group. As an industry, it is my hope that STARR 911 can bring all of us together to help save lives."

For more information on STARR 911, contact the STARR Coalition at [email protected] or by calling (833) 782-7791.

About The STARR Coalition

The STARR Coalition is a nonprofit organization with a mission to build unbiased, collaborative initiatives to reduce the stigma associated with mental health disorders and to promote research as an option for those seeking help. The organization brings together thought leaders from the pharmaceutical industry, contract research organizations, clinical research sites and patient advocacy groups.

About Evolution Research Group

Evolution Research Group, LLC is comprised of ten fully-owned and operated clinical research sites, Thievon-Wright Consulting Group, and an established network of 12 affiliated clinical research sites. ERG conducts a wide range of both simple and highly complex trials in specialized populations including those suffering from psychiatric and neurological disorders, sleep disorders, addictions, acute and chronic pain, renal insufficiency and hepatic impairment, as well as normal healthy volunteers. For more information, please visit www.evolutionresearchgroup.com.

Francesca Krempa

Evolution Research Group

[email protected]

SOURCE Evolution Research Group, LLC

Related Links

http://www.joinaresearchstudy.com


ALBANY, New York, September 20, 2018 /PRNewswire/ --

As per expert analysts, the global surgical sutures market is expected to gain revenue worth US$ 5080.1 mn during the forecast period from 2017 to 2025. This growth is projected to occur at steady CAGR of 3.9% during the given forecast period.

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Technological Upgrades Causes Surge in Demand for Better Surgical Sutures

Rising demand for carrying out surgical activities owing to an increase in healthcare issues as well as external situations such as accidents is primarily driving the global surgical sutures market. With increasing geriatric population, a surge in serious healthcare ailments have reportedly occurred, many of which might need surgical treatments. Thus, the demand for surgical sutures has increased steadily during the last few years, consequently driving the associated market. Moreover, several innovations and technological advancements have occurred in the field of medical surgery, which has provided several advantages in terms of enhanced operations. With such new instruments, enhanced tissue estimation and conclusion time can now be properly estimated. Hence, these factors too are responsible for driving the global surgical sutures market. With numerous upgrades happening to social insurance facilities associated with surgical activities, the global surgical sutures market is expected to tremendously progress in the near future.

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Costly Surgical Suture Processes Hampers Progress

However, high expenses associated with production of surgical sutures and associated instruments is majorly hampering the global surgical sutures market. These expenses may upsurge costs linked with any medical processes mentioned above. Lack of availability of these instruments in remote and underdeveloped regions too has had a negative effect on the market's growth. Moreover, several health concerns regarding inappropriate usage of equipment associated with surgical sutures might cause infections and other similar scenarios. Nevertheless, many organizations are conducting extensive research-based activities to develop cost-effective techniques required for production of instruments used for facilitating surgical sutures. This is certainly expected to reduce effects of the restraints up to a certain degree.

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From a geographical perspective, the global surgical sutures market is spread across North America, Asia Pacific, Europe, the Middle East and Africa, and Latin America. Of these, North America depicts the existence of a maximum revenue generated in the market owing to the presence of a strong medical infrastructure. Apart from North America, Europe also holds a substantial position in the market. However, Asia Pacific also is expected to garner a splendid revenue in the global surgical suture market owing to numerous well-known companies getting established in the region.

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The global surgical sutures market depicts the presence of a notably consolidated vendor landscape, says Transparency Market Research on the basis of a newly published report. Such a combined and consolidated scenario mainly exists due to the top five companies holding greater than 65% of the total market shares in 2015. The five main players are Cardinal Health, Medela AG, Integra LifeSciences Corporation, Acelity L.P. Inc., and Smith and Nephew Plc. These players dominate the global surgical sutures market by focusing on product diversification and facilitating product innovations as their two chief strategies. Maintaining client relations, expanding geographical reach, and regulating product prices, also are key schemes implemented by most players operating in the global surgical sutures market. In future, the number of players is projected to increase, which could intensify the competition in this market.

Browse Press Release: https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/pressrelease/surgical-sutures-market.htm

The information shared in this review is based on a TMR report titled, "Surgical Sutures Market (Product Type - Absorbable Sutures (Natural Sutures and Synthetic Sutures) and Non-absorbable Sutures (Nylon Sutures, Polypropylene Sutures, and Stainless Steel Sutures); Application - General Surgery, Gynecological Surgeries, Cardiovascular Surgeries, Orthopedic Surgeries, Other Surgeries; End-users - Hospitals, Specialty Clinics, and Ambulatory Surgery Centers) - Global Industry Analysis, Size, Share, Growth, Trends, and Forecast 2017 - 2025."

Key Takeaways

In future, the number of players is projected to increase, which could intensify the competition in this market.

Rising demand for carrying out surgical activities owing to an increase in healthcare issues as well as external situations such as accidents is primarily driving the global surgical sutures market.

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SOURCE Transparency Market Research
CLEVELAND, Sept. 20, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Freedonia's new white paper, Tariff Tracker: Summer Series, is a compilation of the blog series regarding the latest developments in tariff releases and their effect on certain markets.

Tariff Tracker: Summer Series is available for free download: https://www.freedoniagroup.com/Content/Tariff-Tracker-Summer-Series-2018

Here is an excerpt from the Introduction of the complimentary paper:

The following is a roundup of published content from July and August. In particular, analysts looked at:

US tariffs on steel and aluminum, and the impact they'll have on such construction and consumer goods markets as solar energy, gutters and downspouts, recreational vehicles and boating, and windows and doors

a 20.83% tariff on Canadian softwood lumber imports to the US, and what it means for the ongoing US housing market recovery

how tariffs on Chinese imports of consumer goods will hurt lower income shoppers in the US

tariffs  both official and proposed  announced by the US and China on key chemicals and polymers

escalating tensions and rhetoric between the US and China , and what each country stands to gain or lose with tariff one-upmanship

niche product markets, including playing cards, and how they fit into the broader examination of tariffs

supply chain and other strategies designed to mitigate the impact of tariffs

With its long history as a trusted provider of industry insights and forecasts, the Freedonia Group is able to cut through the noise and conflicting information surrounding global tariffs to offer clarity in an uncertain economic environment. It began as it often does these dayswith a viral video.

You can subscribe to the full Tariff Tracker series and other blogs here: https://www.freedoniagroup.com/Content/Blog

About The Freedonia Group, a division of MarketResearch.com  The Freedonia Group is a leading international industrial research company publishing more than 100 studies annually. Since 1985, we have provided research to customers ranging in size from global conglomerates to one-person consulting firms. More than 90% of the industrial companies in the Fortune 500 use Freedonia Group research to help with their strategic planning.

Press Contact:

Corinne Gangloff

+1 440.684.9600

[email protected]

SOURCE The Freedonia Group
NEW YORK, Sept. 20, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- The Medici Group, the Diversity Drives Innovation firm, today announces Medici LIVESM, a new experience design service that brings the ideas of The Medici Effect to life at corporate events. Launched by customer demand, Medici LIVE has already delivered exceptional content and programming for executive leadership meetings and diversity and inclusion (D&I) conferences in the U.S. and Europe.

"Our clients asked for it, and we have delivered with Medici LIVE," said Frans Johansson, CEO of The Medici Group. "Designing interactive events that create powerful intersections, constantly surprise, and inspire change is a natural application of the body of knowledge, content and tools The Medici Group has developed for workshop and consulting clients over the last decade."

While The Medici Group can design content and programming for any event, the firm's expertise falls into two areasinnovation and diversityboth strategic priorities on top CEO agendas today. With Medici LIVE, The Medici Group delivers incisive and inspiring content that focuses on growth and business performance, while also equipping audiences with skills and tools to share with and mobilize their teams.

Medici LIVE infuses a design philosophy grounded in diversity, surprise and action with the signature on-stage style of Johansson, whose dynamic delivery, fast pace and use of bold visuals and riveting soundtracks have captivated audiences worldwide.

Medici LIVE design advantages include:

Creative insight and input from Johansson, whose thought leadership on innovation, leadership and diversity and inclusion have influenced companies such as Disney, Novartis, and ESPN as well as inspired billion dollar developments.

Over a decade in designing and facilitating immersive experiences, including workshops and strategy sessions, as part of the firm's consulting projects.

An extensive network of individuals cutting across industries, countries, disciplines, and generations, from which the firm can source diverse voices for the stage.

The Medici Effect (Harvard Business School Press, 2004), by Johansson, is an innovation classic that examines the power of innovation at the intersection of diverse fields, industries, disciplines and cultures. Available in 20 languages, The Medici Effect has become the go-to book on diversity driving innovation.

Resources & Links

Medici LIVE website

A client's perspective on their diversity and inclusion event, designed by The Medici Group

Meet Frans Johansson next week in Germany and Austria for the launch of the German translation of The Medici Effect

About The Medici Group

The Medici Group enables organizations to activate diversity to innovate and drive growth. The firm has worked with 30 percent of the Fortune 500. Visit: http://themedicigroup.com.

The Medici Group, The Medici Group logo, and Medici LIVE are trademarks, service marks, or registered trademarks of The Medici Group, LLC.

Contact:

Jasmine Khan

[email protected]

646-503-2760

SOURCE The Medici Group
BOCA RATON, Fla., Sept. 20, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- From triumphant culinary launches in Australia, India, United Kingdom and other countries around the world, the popular coffee and chocolate-flavored sensation The Golden Pod has retained TransMedia Group to introduce in Orlando its first restaurant in the U.S.

TransMedia will serve a full course of publicity showing how deliciously The Golden Pod specializes in coffee and chocolate in addition to its extensive menu, full bar and inviting atmosphere.

"Our publicity will introduce The Golden Pod as a uniquely delicious restaurant in the United States whose scrumptious menu will appeal to everyone with an appetite for a quality experience, mouthwatering meals and decadent desserts," said Tom Madden, CEO of TransMedia Group.

The PR campaign will highlight the success of The Golden Pod in countries worldwide, including Australia, India, China, Pakistan, Oman, Saudi Arabia and the United Kingdom, while publicizing its special appeal to the coffee and chocolate-loving United States market.

The campaign will highlight the restaurant's successful expansion worldwide culminating in the opening of The Golden Pod's premiere location in Orlando, followed by 43 franchise openings planned for locations throughout the United States.

Publicity will demonstrate how The Golden Pod surpasses its competition by providing customers with a mouthwatering menu that includes hundreds of exclusive recipes, making it the "go to" spot for a sumptuous meal, combined with tasty treats and special events.

"We retained TransMedia Group based on the international firm's excellent reputation and extensive experience in publicizing restaurants from New York to Palm Beach," said Shah Meit of The Golden Pod.

"We will show how The Golden Pod's extensive menu allows customers to spoil themselves with an enjoyable dining experience from beginning to end with both professional service and quality cuisine in a delightful and comfortable setting," said Madden who has represented some of the world's best restaurants.

One thing is for certain, after customers taste the fabulous fare at The Golden Pod, they'll always want to come back for more, he said.

The Golden Pod provides consumers with an incredible atmosphere to indulge in while enjoying a delicious and memorable menu available for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

About TransMedia Group

TransMedia Group is an award-winning international public relations and marketing firm serving clients worldwide since 1981.

For more information about The Golden Pod, contact Danielle Stoecker 561-750-9800 x2220; [email protected].

SOURCE TransMedia Group

Related Links

https://www.transmediagroup.com/


SUGAR LAND, Texas, Sept. 20, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Written by John Egan for Industrial Info Resources (Sugar Land, Texas)--Anyone planning on flying to Chicago in late September is advised to buy their air ticket as soon as possible. The Trump administration has scheduled its first public hearing on the Affordable Clean Energy (ACE) plan for October 1 at Chicago's regional office of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) (Washington, D.C.). The announcement, made earlier this month, is sure to set off a scramble of stakeholders wishing to comment on the plan, unveiled August 20, which supersedes the Obama administration's Clean Power Plan, finalized in 2015 but never implemented. The Clean Air Act requires the federal government to hold at least one hearing on proposed regulations. There has been no announcement that a second public hearing will be held.

For details, view the entire article by subscribing to Industrial Info's Premium Industry News, or browse other breaking industrial news stories at www.industrialinfo.com.

Industrial Info Resources (IIR), with global headquarters in Sugar Land, Texas, six offices in North America and 12 international offices, is the leading provider of global market intelligence specializing in the industrial process, heavy manufacturing and energy markets. Industrial Info's quality-assurance philosophy, the Living Forward Reporting Principle, provides up-to-the-minute intelligence on what's happening now, while constantly keeping track of future opportunities. To contact an office in your area, visit the www.industrialinfo.com "Contact Us" page.

Brian Ford

(713) 980-9393

SOURCE Industrial Info Resources, Inc.

Related Links

http://www.industrialinfo.com


NASHVILLE, Tenn., Sept. 20, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Vanderbilt University and Trilogy Education today announced the launch of the Vanderbilt Coding Boot Camp, an intensive web development program geared toward adult learners and working professionals in Nashville. Developed in partnership with the Owen Graduate School of Management and the School of Engineering, the Vanderbilt Coding Boot Camp teaches the front-end and back-end skills necessary to become a proficient full stack developer. The 24-week, part-time program begins January 15, 2019 with two three-hour evening classes during the week (6:30 to 9:30 p.m.) and a four-hour class on Saturdays (9 a.m. to 1 p.m.) on campus. Enrollment is now open at bootcamps.vanderbilt.edu/

Boot Camp students will gain skills to develop dynamic end-to-end web applications, as well as receive a Certificate in Full-Stack Web Development from Vanderbilt University.

"In the past 12 months, Nashville employers have struggled to fill more than 11,000 open roles requiring some level of coding ability. From music to healthcare to the city's fast-growing startup ecosystem, today nearly every industry in Nashville needs skilled technology workers to fuel growth," said Skip Culbertson, Executive Director, Vanderbilt University Executive Education. "Through our partnership with Trilogy Education, the Vanderbilt University Coding Boot Camp will give more working adults in Nashville a pathway to pursue these rewarding tech careers."

Technology is one of Nashville's fastest growing industries, with tech jobs growing by 43 percent over the past 5 years, according to CBRE. With the region's unemployment rate at 2.3 percentthe lowest for any major metropolitan area in the U.S.Nashville employers are struggling to find talent to fill critical tech roles. According to Nashville Area Chamber of Commerce President Ralph Schulz, this shortage of skilled technology workers is now putting downward pressure on the city's economic growth rate.

"Vanderbilt is part of a growing wave of top universities embracing innovative partnerships to close the growing digital skills gaps in their cities," said Dan Sommer, CEO and Founder, Trilogy Education. "Together, Vanderbilt and Trilogy Education are giving adult learners in Nashville, from all backgrounds, the opportunity to take advantage of the city's recent explosion in tech roles. At the same time, we're developing a new pipeline of job-ready tech talent to drive economic growth in the region."

Pairing Vanderbilt University's strengths with Trilogy Education's proven platform and market-driven curriculum offers students both the competence and confidence to succeed in the technology industry. The program covers the basics of coding, algorithms, and data structure, plus intensive training in JavaScript, Node.js, HTML, CSS, jQuery, Java and more. No previous training or experience is required, but applicants should have an understanding of coding basics.

"As technology transforms Nashville's economy, coding literacy has become increasingly critical for the local workforce. The Vanderbilt Coding Boot Camp leverages Trilogy's proven accelerated curriculum to teach the languages, technologies, and frameworks that are in highest demand for regional employers," said Doug Schmidt Associate Provost for Research Development and Technologies and Professor of Computer Science, Vanderbilt University.

In addition to classroom instruction, students will spend 20 hours a week on outside projects, homework, and experiential learning activities designed to build the soft skills critical to today's workplace. They'll also build a professional project portfolio to showcase their abilities and hone their competitive edge in the employment market. The boot camp includes a range of career-planning services, portfolio reviews, recruiting assistance and extensive staff support. Students will showcase their final projects at the city's first Project Demo Day in mid-2019, open to Nashville's business community.

Boot Camp students will gain skills to develop dynamic end-to-end web applications, as well as receive a Certificate in Full-Stack Web Development from Vanderbilt University.

Apply Now

To learn more about the Vanderbilt University Coding Boot Camp, visit bootcamps.vanderbilt.edu/. You can apply online or by calling (615) 200-1138.

About Trilogy Education

Trilogy Education is a workforce accelerator that empowers the world's leading universities to prepare professionals for high-growth careers in the digital economy. From full-stack development to data analytics, Trilogy's skills-based training programs bridge regional hiring gaps in more than 35 markets across North America. Since the company's launch in 2015, thousands of working adults have successfully completed Trilogy-powered programs, and 1,500+ companiesranging from startups to the Fortune 500employ them.

Contact:

Glenda Felden

[email protected]

(628) 400-7553

SOURCE Trilogy Education Services

Related Links

https://www.trilogyed.com


NEW YORK, Sept. 20, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Nearly 200 academic and industry researchers gathered this week to share updates on preclinical and clinical-stage Alzheimer's disease research at the 19th International Conference on Alzheimer's Drug Discovery. The two-day conference, organized by the Alzheimer's Drug Discovery Foundation (ADDF), focused on gene therapy and alternative modalities for neurodegenerative diseases, progress in developing novel drugs to treat Alzheimer's disease (AD) and related dementias, as well as the need for new biomarkers.

"This is a pivotal time in Alzheimer's disease research and drug discovery," said Dr. Howard Fillit, Founding Executive Director and Chief Science Officer of the ADDF. "Progress in many areas of research, including the identification of new biomarkers, novel drugs and gene therapy, as well as the use of existing drugs for other illnesses, show promise as new approaches for the prevention and treatment of Alzheimer's disease."

Highlights from the conference included:

In a keynote address, "NIH Biomarker Initiatives in NeuroscienceConsortium Efforts in the Development of Biomarkers for Drug Development," Rosa Canet-Aviles , Ph.D., Science Program Manager for Neuroscience at the Foundation for the National Institutes of Health (FNIH), discussed consortium efforts for developing biomarkers for drug development. Biomarkers are critical tools to diagnose patients, identify the right patients for clinical trials, monitor treatment response, and eventually identify patients that will respond to specific drugs. Dr. Canet-Aviles noted the challenges around prioritizing biomarker needs, focusing resources, and integrating efforts across stakeholders. She highlighted the importance of establishing public-private partnerships. ADDF is currently supporting efforts through the FNIH Biomarker Consortium.





, Ph.D., Science Program Manager for Neuroscience at the Foundation for the National Institutes of Health (FNIH), discussed consortium efforts for developing biomarkers for drug development. Biomarkers are critical tools to diagnose patients, identify the right patients for clinical trials, monitor treatment response, and eventually identify patients that will respond to specific drugs. Dr. Canet-Aviles noted the challenges around prioritizing biomarker needs, focusing resources, and integrating efforts across stakeholders. She highlighted the importance of establishing public-private partnerships. ADDF is currently supporting efforts through the FNIH Biomarker Consortium. In the biomarker session that followed, speakers highlighted several blood tests in early development for Alzheimer's disease with the goal of facilitating lower cost and more efficient screening of patients for Alzhiemer's clinical trials. Blaine Roberts, M.D., of the Florey Institute of Neuroscience and Mental Health, and Tim West , Ph.D., of C2N Diagnostics, focused on the development of two different blood tests to measure Abeta levels. Abeta is the peptide responsible for the neurotoxicity seen in Alzheimer's disease. Finding candidate molecules to reduce Abeta in vivo and in clinical trials of Alzheimer's patients is a goal of researchers.





, Ph.D., of C2N Diagnostics, focused on the development of two different blood tests to measure Abeta levels. Abeta is the peptide responsible for the neurotoxicity seen in Alzheimer's disease. Finding candidate molecules to reduce Abeta in vivo and in clinical trials of Alzheimer's patients is a goal of researchers. Diana Cha , Ph.D., of Brigham and Women's Hospital, described efforts to isolate brain-derived exosomes, tiny packets from the brain that are found in the blood that could serve as an Alzheimer's disease biomarker. The ADDF is actively supporting the development of these tests through the Diagnostics Accelerator, an initiative that advances the development of novel biomarkers from blood and other peripheral fluids and tissue to diagnose Alzheimer's disease and related dementias.





, Ph.D., of and Women's Hospital, described efforts to isolate brain-derived exosomes, tiny packets from the brain that are found in the blood that could serve as an Alzheimer's disease biomarker. The ADDF is actively supporting the development of these tests through the Diagnostics Accelerator, an initiative that advances the development of novel biomarkers from blood and other peripheral fluids and tissue to diagnose Alzheimer's disease and related dementias. Jacob Hooker , Ph.D., of Massachusetts General Hospital, described the use of a novel Positron Emission Tomography (PET) ligand, which can measure levels of enzymes, called histone deacetylases (HDAC) in the human brain. (A PET-ligand is a type of radioligand that is used for diagnostic purposes via PET imaging.) This allows for the visualization of how brain gene transcription levels change with age and relate to the development of neurodegenerative diseases. This ligand could potentially be used as a biomarker to measure the efficacy of agents targeting brain atrophy.





, Ph.D., of Massachusetts General Hospital, described the use of a novel Positron Emission Tomography (PET) ligand, which can measure levels of enzymes, called histone deacetylases (HDAC) in the human brain. (A PET-ligand is a type of radioligand that is used for diagnostic purposes via PET imaging.) This allows for the visualization of how brain gene transcription levels change with age and relate to the development of neurodegenerative diseases. This ligand could potentially be used as a biomarker to measure the efficacy of agents targeting brain atrophy. Several presentations highlighted gene therapy and stem cell approaches for dementia. The ADDF is funding two different approaches that target APOE4, the most significant genetic risk factor for Alzheimer's disease. Anastasia Khvorova, Ph.D., of the University of Massachusetts Medical School, and her collaborator Evgeny Rogaev, are developing RNAi constructs (also known as anti-sense oligonucleotides) to reduce APOE gene expression. Ronald Crystal, M.D., Weill Cornell Medicine, uses a different approach where APOE2 (the protective form of the gene) is delivered to the brain to counteract the negative effects of APOE4. Dr. Crystal recently received FDA approval to proceed into the first human clinical trials with APOE2 gene therapy. People with two copies of the APOE4 variant of the gene are up to 12 times more likely to develop Alzheimer's and to get it at younger ages.





In a session focused on clinical trials, Krista Lanctot, Ph.D., Sunnybrook Research Institute, University of Toronto , presented study results on the safety and efficacy of nabilone in patients with moderate to severe AD. Dr. Lanctot reported that nabilone significantly improved agitation in a trial of 39 moderate-to-severe Alzheimer's patients. Improvements were observed with nabilone as early as two weeks. Some patients experienced sedation with nabilone, though 53 percent of the patients tolerated the highest dose (2 mg/day). As the pilot study showed positive results, a larger Phase 3 study is being planned. Nabilone is a synthetic derivative of THC marketed for nausea and vomiting associated with chemotherapy. Agitation is a common and persistent symptom in those with Alzheimer's disease and current pharmacotherapies have modest efficacy and/or poor safety. This study is funded by the ADDF and the Alzheimer's Society of Canada .





, presented study results on the safety and efficacy of nabilone in patients with moderate to severe AD. Dr. Lanctot reported that nabilone significantly improved agitation in a trial of 39 moderate-to-severe Alzheimer's patients. Improvements were observed with nabilone as early as two weeks. Some patients experienced sedation with nabilone, though 53 percent of the patients tolerated the highest dose (2 mg/day). As the pilot study showed positive results, a larger Phase 3 study is being planned. Nabilone is a synthetic derivative of THC marketed for nausea and vomiting associated with chemotherapy. Agitation is a common and persistent symptom in those with Alzheimer's disease and current pharmacotherapies have modest efficacy and/or poor safety. This study is funded by the ADDF and the Alzheimer's Society of . Giacomo Koch , M.D., Ph.D., of Santa Lucia Foundation, presented preliminary findings from the DOPAD trial, which tests a dopaminergic therapy called rotigotine. Rotigotine is a transdermal patch prescribed for Parkinson's disease and restless leg syndrome. The trial in 94 mild Alzheimer's patients tested whether rotigotine improved cognitive function, including executive function, and activities of daily living after six months of treatment. Initial results will inform the design of a larger study for rotigotine as a potential cognitive enhancer for Alzheimer's.





, M.D., Ph.D., of Santa Lucia Foundation, presented preliminary findings from the DOPAD trial, which tests a dopaminergic therapy called rotigotine. Rotigotine is a transdermal patch prescribed for Parkinson's disease and restless leg syndrome. The trial in 94 mild Alzheimer's patients tested whether rotigotine improved cognitive function, including executive function, and activities of daily living after six months of treatment. Initial results will inform the design of a larger study for rotigotine as a potential cognitive enhancer for Alzheimer's. Synapses, the junctions between nerve cells, are important for memory and cognition. Current treatments for Alzheimer's disease increase levels of acetylcholine, a neurotransmitter that carries signals across synapses. However, these treatments only modestly impact Alzheimer's symptoms. Paul Newhouse , M.D., of Vanderbilt University Medical Center, reported preliminary results from his Phase 1 study of a novel drug compound VU319 that modulates M1 synaptic receptors, helping to "catch" those signals. Previous drugs targeting M1 produced improvement in cognitive performance and behavioral disturbances in Alzheimer's patients, but failed in Phase 3 trials due to intolerable (cholinergic) side effects. The five doses of VU319 tested so far have been well-tolerated. In late 2018, a multiple-ascending dose study is planned to assess the safety and tolerability of seven consecutive-day dosing, with the aim to start a Phase 2a VU319 study in people with mild cognitive impairment in the latter half of 2019. This trial will be a proof-of-concept double-blind placebo-controlled study to assess the ability of VU319 to modulate brain networks.

"We have come a long way in our scientific understanding of Alzheimer's disease, particularly in the past 10 to 15 years," said Dr. Fillit. "This meeting highlights the support of ADDF, which has granted more than $115 million to fund more than 585 Alzheimer's drug discovery programs and clinical trials in 18 countries."

ABOUT THE ALZHEIMER'S DRUG DISCOVERY FOUNDATION

Founded in 1998 by Leonard A. and Ronald S. Lauder, the Alzheimer's Drug Discovery Foundation is dedicated to rapidly accelerating the discovery of drugs to prevent, treat and cure Alzheimer's disease. The ADDF is the only public charity solely focused on funding the development of drugs for Alzheimer's, employing a venture philanthropy model to support research in academia and the biotech industry. For more information about these and other current ADDF-funded studies, please visit www.alzdiscovery.org.

SOURCE Alzheimer's Drug Discovery Foundation

Related Links

http://www.alzdiscovery.org


IRVINE, Calif., Sept. 20, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Acorns, the country's fastest-growing financial wellness system with 4M users, today announced that Shlomo Benartzi, professor and co-founder of the Behavioral Decision-Making Group at UCLA Anderson School of Management, has joined as Chair of the Behavioral Economics Committee.

Acorns logo. (PRNewsFoto/Acorns Grow Inc.)

Benartzi is bringing together a network of world's leading behavioral scientists to launch "Money Lab," an initiative that aims to create, test and build solutions to increase the financial well-being of the up and coming in America, with a special focus on savings and investment.

The first call for research proposals for field experiments focused on reducing consumer spending has proved that there is great interest in the initiative: academic teams from 25 universities (e.g., Carnegie Mellon, Chicago, Colorado, Columbia, UCLA, Yale) have submitted project ideas.

Along with Nobel Laureate Richard Thaler of the University of Chicago, who is also an advisor to Acorns, Benartzi pioneered the Save More Tomorrow (SMarT) program, a behavioral prescription designed to help employees increase their savings rates gradually over time.

"I've spent my entire career trying to answer a simple question: how can we get everyone to make better financial decisions about the future?" said Shlomo Benartzi, Senior Academic Advisor. "At Acorns, I have the opportunity to apply my learnings at scale and nudge millions of customers to make decisions that will improve financial outcomes -- everyone deserves to have a better and safer financial future."

Benartzi's first experiment powered by Acorns has focused on experimenting with the way customers respond to a simple, yet important question: would they like to save $5 every day, $35 a week or $150 a month? The total amount of money set aside is practically the same, yet while only 7 percent opted to save $150 a month, nearly 30 percent decided to save $5 a day.

"What accounts for this huge shift in preferences, even when all the choices are equivalent? Saving $5 a day makes us think about skipping a Starbucks latte (that seems doable), while $150 a month makes us think about car payments, which is a much more daunting amount to give up," Benartzi concludes.

In addition, the findings from this first experiment show that framing investments as daily vs monthly can close the savings gap between the lower and upper income users; for example, someone who is making $25,000 a year and saves $5 daily can close the retirement savings gap with someone who makes $100,000 annually.

Acorns makes big decisions small for its customers through the simplification and automation of micro-investing. With a growing emphasis on data, behavioral insights and analytics the company is building an even more intuitive and efficient customer experience.

"We've solved the first big societal problem: getting people to start investing. Now we're focused on how we can combine insights of psychology and economics to create an entire financial system that helps people save and invest - our Money Lab can really make an impact." said Noah Kerner, CEO of Acorns.

About Acorns

Acorns is the country's fastest-growing financial wellness system with 4M users. Its easy-to-use, mobile-first technology makes it simple for anyone to set aside and invest life's spare money. Acorns allows customers to automatically invest in a low-cost, diversified portfolio of exchange-traded funds offered by some of the world's top asset managers (including Vanguard and BlackRock). Customers grow their wealth in one of five portfolios constructed with help from world-renowned Nobel Laureate economist Dr. Harry Markowitz. Acorns smart portfolio algorithms automatically work in the background of life, helping users build wealth naturally, pennies at a time. From Acorns mighty oaks do grow. You can access Acorns simply and easily via the app for iPhone, Android or desktop. Visit Acorns.com for more.

SOURCE Acorns

Related Links

http://www.acorns.com


TORONTO, Sept. 20, 2018 /PRNewswire/ - Agnico Eagle Mines Limited (NYSE: AEM) (TSX: AEM) ("Agnico Eagle" or the "Company") today announced that it will release its third quarter 2018 results on Wednesday, October 24, 2018, after normal trading hours.

Third Quarter 2018 Results Conference Call and Webcast

Agnico Eagle's senior management will host a conference call on Thursday, October 25, 2018 at 11:00 AM (E.D.T.) to discuss the Company's financial and operating results.

Via Webcast:

A live audio webcast of the conference call will be available on the Company's website at www.agnicoeagle.com.

Via Telephone:

For those preferring to listen by telephone, please dial 1-647-427-7450 or toll-free 1-888-231-8191. To ensure your participation, please call approximately ten minutes prior to the scheduled start of the call.

Replay archive:

Please dial 1-416-849-0833 or toll-free 1-855-859-2056, access code 8096137. The conference call replay will expire on November 25, 2018.

The webcast, along with presentation slides will be archived for 180 days on the Company's website.

Investor Relations

Agnico Eagle Mines Limited

145 King Street East, Suite 400

Toronto, Ontario, M5C 2Y7

Telephone: 416-947-1212

Fax: 416-367-4681

About Agnico Eagle

Agnico Eagle is a senior Canadian gold mining company that has produced precious metals since 1957. Its eight mines are located in Canada, Finland and Mexico, with exploration and development activities in each of these countries as well as in the United States and Sweden. Agnico Eagle and its shareholders have full exposure to gold prices due to its long-standing policy of no forward gold sales. Agnico Eagle has declared a cash dividend every year since 1983.

SOURCE Agnico Eagle Mines Limited

Related Links

http://www.agnicoeagle.com


VANCOUVER, Sept. 20, 2018 /PRNewswire/ - Alexco Resource Corp. (NYSE American: AXU) (TSX:AXR) ("Alexco" or the "Company") today reports an updated and expanded mineral resource estimate for the Bermingham deposit, located within the Keno Hill Silver District ("KHSD") in Canada's Yukon Territory.

Summary

As a result of exploration work conducted in 2017 and 2018, the Bermingham indicated mineral resources have expanded from 17.3 million ("M") ounces to 33.3 M ounces of contained silver at an average silver grade of 628 grams per tonne ("g/t"), while inferred mineral resources have increased from 5.5 M ounces to 10.4 M ounces of contained silver at an average silver grade of 526 g/t. The updated mineral resource estimate was prepared by SRK Consulting (Canada) Inc. ("SRK") and a comparison to the prior mineral resource estimate is outlined below:

Bermingham Mineral Resource Estimate  September 17, 2018 Compared to January 3, 2017

Resource Estimates

Category

September 17, 2018 January 3, 2017 Change (%) Indicated Tonnes (t) 1,651,500 858,000 + 93% Indicated Silver Grade (g/t) 628 g/t 628 g/t - Total Indicated Silver (ounces) 33,350,300 17,324,000 + 93% Inferred Tonnes (t) 616,550 220,000 + 180% Inferred Silver Grade (g/t) 526 g/t 770 g/t - 32% Total Inferred Silver (ounces) 10,438,700 ounces 5,446,000 ounces + 92%

With the addition to the silver mineral resource at Bermingham, Alexco's district-wide indicated mineral resources at Keno Hill increased by approximately 24% from 67.9 M ounces to 84.0 M ounces of contained silver. Similarly, district-wide inferred mineral resources increased by 28% to 23.0 M ounces of contained silver.

Background

The Bermingham deposit comprises a closely spaced series of subparallel steeply southeast dipping vein sets  identified (hangingwall to footwall) as the Bermingham, Bermingham Footwall and Bear veins that can be traced over a northeasterly strike distance exceeding 850 meters ("m") in four zones identified (from southwest to northeast) as the Etta, Arctic, Bear and Northeast Zones that are separated by post-mineral faults. In addition, a small resource is contained in a conjugate set of related West Dipping veins. Recent detailed underground and surface drilling work has focused on the Arctic and Bear Zones where the vein sets are connected either laterally or vertically within the wider Bermingham vein-fault structural corridor. Mineralization extends from between 90 m to 160 m below surface to a depth of approximately 450 m where veining remains open.

A detailed mineral resource estimate by vein and zone was prepared by SRK and is summarized below:



Mineral Resource Category Volume (m3) Tonnes Total Ag (oz) Total Au (oz) Total Pb (lbs) Total Zn (lbs) Average Grade Ag (g/t) Average Grade Au (g/t) Average Grade Pb (%) Average Grade Zn (%) INDICATED Arctic Bear 19,000 54,750 592,400 100 800,500 559,700 336 0.05 0.7 0.5 Bermingham Main 142,600 428,400 7,656,300 1,500 9,484,400 13,045,700 556 0.11 1 1.4 Footwall 87,500 277,700 6,046,100 1,200 11,543,900 7,210,600 677 0.14 1.9 1.2 West Dipper 8,000 24,600 666,600 90 769,800 653,800 843 0.11 1.4 1.2 Bear Bear 59,100 189,450 8,442,200 1,130 15,665,400 5,352,350 1,386 0.18 3.8 1.3 Bermingham Main 22,500 70,200 1,186,500 280 1,206,400 1,888,400 525 0.12 0.8 1.2 Footwall 71,700 217,400 3,835,800 900 6,136,300 5,884,300 549 0.13 1.3 1.2 Etta Bermingham Main 43,000 133,600 2,065,800 300 6,054,700 5,143,000 481 0.07 2.1 1.7 Footwall 57,100 168,600 1,713,700 350 4,508,800 6,588,300 316 0.06 1.2 1.8 North East Bear 9,900 29,700 601,000 120 947,550 1,666,750 629 0.12 1.4 2.5 Bermingham Main 19,850 57,100 543,900 150 773,650 697,300 297 0.08 0.6 0.6 TOTAL INDICATED 540,250 1,651,500 33,350,300 6,120 57,891,400 48,690,200 628 0.12 1.6 1.3 INFERRED Arctic Bear 19,800 59,000 676,450 130 1,413,750 805,900 357 0.07 1.1 0.6 Bermingham Main 20,360 62,000 1,117,200 300 1,012,900 2,267,800 560 0.15 0.7 1.7 Footwall 60,400 190,900 2,827,400 800 4,240,300 1,324,200 461 0.13 1 0.3 West Dipper 800 2,350 33,250 5 26,900 22,800 441 0.07 0.5 0.4 Bear Bear 38,050 120,900 3,167,000 500 4,179,950 1,582,200 815 0.13 1.6 0.6 Bermingham Main 950 3,000 19,100 5 15,600 107,600 197 0.06 0.2 1.6 Footwall 7,100 22,100 195,850 75 484,850 254,550 276 0.11 1 0.5 Etta Bermingham Main 290 850 6,100 0 7,400 15,700 221 0.05 0.4 0.8 Footwall 27,100 78,000 686,900 175 792,850 2,741,100 274 0.07 0.5 1.6 North East Bear 23,750 72,350 1,673,750 300 2,178,350 2,428,200 720 0.13 1.4 1.5 Bermingham Main 1,800 5,100 35,700 10 61,050 67,950 217 0.07 0.5 0.6 TOTAL INFERRED 200,400 616,550 10,438,700 2,300 14,413,900 11,618,000 526 0.12 1.1 0.9

























Notes:

1. The effective date of this mineral resource estimate is September 17, 2018. 2. Mineral resources are not mineral reserves and do not have demonstrated economic viability. All numbers have been rounded to reflect the relative accuracy of the estimates. 3. Reported at a contained metal value cut-off grade of CAD $185.00/t (US$0.80=C$1) using consensus long term metal prices (US$) and recoveries (Ag US$20.80/oz, recovery 96%; Pb US$1.10/lb, recovery 97%; Zn US$1.20/lb, recovery 88%; Au US$1,450/oz, recovery 72%). 4. Ag grades capped at 4,200 g/t; Zn capped at 6.5%; Pb capped at 6.0% for the Bermingham vein. 5. Ag grades capped at 13,000 g/t, Zn capped at 12% and Pb capped at 33% for the Bear vein. 6. Ag grades capped at 3,500 g/t, Zn capped at 8.5% and Pb capped at 13% for the Bermingham Footwall vein. 7. Ag grades capped at 3,600 g/t, Zn capped at 5.0% and Pb capped at 7.5% for the West Dipper vein. 8. Table numbers may not add up due to rounding.

Alexco Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Clynt Nauman said, "The majority of the tonnage in the Bermingham deposit resides in the Arctic and Bear Zones where approximately 28 million of the 33 million indicated ounces of silver are located at an average grade of approximately 700 g/t silver. Looked at in total, the Bermingham deposit is now emerging as a one of the larger discoveries in the Keno Hill district, characterized by more than 1.6 million tonnes of indicated mineralization with an average silver grade approximately 25% higher than our Flame & Moth deposit. This new resource will be taken into consideration during the pre-feasibility mine planning work scheduled for completion in October, 2018. Both the completed resource update and the pre-feasibility study represent the next steps in moving the Keno Hill District back toward production."

Bermingham Deposit

Alexco has conducted surface diamond drilling programs at Bermingham between 2009 and 2018 and underground drilling from the exploration decline in 2018. The database at Bermingham currently includes 203 drill holes for a total of 62,541 m of HQ core. The resource estimation presented here incorporates the results from 405 vein intervals from 151 holes compared with those from 93 holes that were used in the January 2017 estimation.

Recent drilling has focused on obtaining reduced resource definition intercept spacings, particularly on the upper part of the high grade Bear vein that overall ranges in true width up to 6.4 m at 182 ounce per tonne ("oz/t") silver (K-14-0537) and in grade up to 240 oz/t silver over 5.0 m true width (K-15-0580). This mineralization has been traced over a down-plunge extent of 300 m (over a vertical range of 230 m) with a plunge width of up to approximately 130 m, and the top of the deposit in this vicinity being approximately 130 m below surface. In addition, the recent drilling has increased coverage of the Bermingham and Bermingham Footwall veins where a significant amount of the new resource has been defined.

Interpretation of the consolidated drilling results has confirmed the presence of the three mineralized veins that splay and change orientation along strike within the north-northeast striking and moderately to steeply southeast dipping Bermingham vein-fault structural corridor. This structural corridor is primarily divided into the Etta Zone that lies in the hangingwall of the post-mineral Mastiff Fault exposed at the western end of the historic Bermingham open pit and the extended Artic Zone in its footwall below the open pit. The main through-going Bermingham and Bermingham Footwall veins occur in both the Etta and the extended Arctic zones, while the Bear vein and associated West Dipper vein set occur only within the extended Arctic Zone at positions controlled by a flexure in the Bermingham vein-fault.

The Bermingham deposit veins typically occur in structurally complex zones as discrete veins 0.5 m to more than 5 m wide with a five to ten meter wide structurally damaged vein margin. The discrete veins exhibit heavily-disseminated to massive mineralization while mineralization in the vein margins is commonly more stringer-like. The higher grade Bermingham mineralization is generally characterized by the presence of a complex silver bearing mineral assemblage including pyrargyrite (ruby silver), freibergite, argentiferous galena, stephanite, polybasite and wire silver in a dominantly sideritic gangue.

Metallurgical test work has demonstrated that silver and lead recoveries from Bermingham are expected to be in the range of 94% to 96%, while producing a lead concentrate grading 55% to 60% lead and up to 30,000 g/t silver. Zinc recovery is predicted to be in the range of 70% to 75% to a zinc concentrate grading in excess of 50% zinc.

The Bermingham mineral resource was estimated using 3-D Maptek Vulcan block modeling software in multiple passes in nine by three by six meter blocks by ordinary kriging. Grade estimates were based on capped one meter composited assay data. Capping levels were set to 4,200 g/t for silver for the Bermingham vein, 13,000 g/t for the Bear vein, 3,500 g/t for the Bermingham Footwall vein and 3,600 g/t for the West Dipper vein; lead was capped at 6.0% for the Bermingham vein, 33.0% for the Bear vein, 13.0% for the Bermingham Footwall vein and 7.5 for the West Dipper vein; and zinc was capped at 6.5% for the Bermingham vein, 12.0% for the Bear vein, 8.5% for the Bermingham Footwall vein and 5.0% for the West Dipper vein. Blocks were classified as indicated mineral resources provided the blocks were estimated within the first pass search ellipse using multiple drill holes and a minimum of 5 composites. All other interpolated blocks were classified as inferred mineral resources.

A summary of all of Alexco's KHSD mineral resources incorporating the updated mineral resource estimates for Bermingham are appended to this release, and are available for review on the Company's website at www.alexcoresource.com.

Qualified Persons

SRK prepared the updated mineral resource estimate for the Bermingham deposit, and is independent of Alexco for purposes of National Instrument 43-101  Standards of Disclosure for Mineral Projects ("NI 43-101"). The Bermingham mineral resource estimate was completed by Cliff Revering, P.Eng., Principal Consultant (Geological Engineering) with SRK. Mr. Revering is a Qualified Persons as defined by NI 43-101 and has reviewed, verified and approved the contents of this news release relating to the mineral resource estimate for the Bermingham deposit. All mineral resources are classified following the CIM Definition Standards for Mineral Resources and Mineral Reserves (May 2014), in accordance with the CIM Estimation of Mineral Resources and Mineral Reserves Best Practice Guidelines and with NI 43-101 guidelines.

The metallurgical testing information in this news release has been reviewed and verified by Jeffrey B. Austin P. Eng., President of International Metallurgical and Environmental Inc. and a Qualified Person as defined by NI 43-101.

The disclosure of all other scientific and technical information in this news release regarding projects on Alexco's mineral properties has been reviewed and approved by Alan McOnie, FAusIMM, Alexco's Vice President, Exploration and a Qualified Person as defined by NI 43-101.

The drill data and sampling protocols have been reviewed, verified and compiled by Alexco's geologic staff since 2011 under the supervision of Alan McOnie, Vice President, Exploration for Alexco and a Qualified Person as defined by National Instrument 43-101. A rigorous quality control and quality assurance protocol is used on the project, including blank, duplicate and standard reference samples in each batch of 20 samples delivered to the assay lab. Drill core samples included in the updated resource estimation were direct shipped to ALS Minerals Labs at Whitehorse, Yukon Territory for preparation, with fire assay, multi-element ICP analyses and ore grade over limits completed at the ALS Minerals facility in North Vancouver, British Columbia.

About Alexco

Alexco owns the majority of the historic high-grade Keno Hill Silver District in Canada's Yukon Territory as detailed in its preliminary economic assessment (the "PEA") entitled "Preliminary Economic Assessment of the Keno Hill Silver District Project, Yukon, Canada", which is dated March 29, 2017, with an effective date of January 3, 2017, and anticipates the sequential development of four high grade silver deposits over an eight year mine life producing more than one million tonnes with an average grade of 843 grams per tonne silver, 3.3% lead and 4.6% zinc. Silver production is anticipated to be approximately 3.5 million ounces per year. The PEA is preliminary in nature and includes inferred mineral resources that are considered too speculative geologically to have the economic considerations applied to them that would enable them to be categorized as mineral reserves, and there is no certainty that the PEA will be realized. Mineral resources that are not mineral reserves do not have demonstrated economic viability.

Alexco also operates a wholly-owned subsidiary business, Alexco Environmental Group, that provides mine-related environmental services, remediation technologies and reclamation and mine closure services to both government and industry clients in North America and elsewhere.

Please visit the Alexco website at www.alexcoresource.com

Some statements ("forward-looking statements") in this news release contain forward-looking information concerning Alexco's anticipated results and developments in Alexco's operations in future periods, planned exploration and development of its properties, plans related to its business and other matters that may occur in the future, made as of the date of this news release. Forward looking statements may include, but are not limited to, statements with respect to the future remediation and reclamation activities, future mineral exploration, the estimation of mineral reserves and mineral resources, the realization of mineral reserve and mineral resource estimates, the preparation and anticipated timing for completion of a pre-feasibility study, future mine construction and development activities, future mine operation and production, the timing of activities and reports, the amount of estimated revenues and expenses, the success of exploration activities, permitting time lines, requirements for additional capital and sources and uses of funds. Forward-looking statements are subject to a variety of known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors which could cause actual events or results to differ from those expressed or implied by the forward-looking statements. Such factors include, among others, risks related to actual results and timing of exploration and development activities; actual results and timing of mining activities; actual results and timing of environmental services activities; actual results and timing of remediation and reclamation activities; conclusions of economic evaluations; changes in project parameters as plans continue to be refined; future prices of silver, gold, lead, zinc and other commodities; possible variations in mineable resources, grade or recovery rates; failure of plant, equipment or processes to operate as anticipated; accidents, labour disputes and other risks of the mining industry; First Nation rights and title; continued capitalization and commercial viability; global economic conditions; competition; and delays in obtaining governmental approvals or financing or in the completion of development activities. Forward-looking statements are based on certain assumptions that management believes are reasonable at the time they are made. In making the forward-looking statements included in this news release, Alexco has applied several material assumptions, including, but not limited to, the assumption that Alexco will be able to raise additional capital as necessary, that the proposed exploration and development and timing for completion of a pre-feasibility study will proceed as planned, and that market fundamentals will result in sustained silver, gold, lead and zinc demand and prices. There can be no assurance that forward-looking statements will prove to be accurate and actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such statements. Alexco expressly disclaims any intention or obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except as otherwise required by applicable securities legislation.

APPENDIX I - Summary of Mineral Resources

Summary of Resources

The following table sets forth the estimated mineral resources for Alexco's mineral properties within the Keno Hill Silver District:



Category1,2,9 Property



Tonnes

Ag (g/t)

Au (g/t)

Pb (%)

Zn (%)

Contained Ag (oz)

































Indicated Bellekeno Deposit3&4



262,000

585

n/a

3.5%

5.3%

4,927,000





Lucky Queen Deposit3&5 132,300

1,167

0.2

2.4%

1.6%

4,964,000





Flame & Moth Deposit3&5 1,679,000

498

0.4

1.9%

5.3%

26,883,000





Onek3&5



700,200

191

0.6

1.2%

11.9%

4,300,000





Bermingham3&6



1,651,500

628

0.1

1.6%

1.3%

33,350,300





Total Indicated  Sub-Surface 4,425,000

523

0.3

1.8%

4.7%

74,424,300





Elsa Tailings7

2,490,000

119

0.1

1.0%

0.7%

9,527,000





Total Indicated  All Deposits 6,915,000

378

0.2

1.5%

3.3%

83,952,300

































Inferred Bellekeno Deposit3&4



243,000

428

n/a

4.1%

5.1%

3,344,000





Lucky Queen Deposit3&5

257,900

473

0.1

1.0%

0.8%

3,922,000





Flame & Moth Deposit3&5

365,200

356

0.3

0.5%

4.3%

4,180,000





Onek3&5



285,100

118

0.4

1.2%

8.3%

1,082,000





Bermingham3&6



616,550

526

0.1

1.1%

0.9%

10,438,700





Total Inferred



1,767,750

404

0.2

1.4%

3.4%

22,966,700

































Historical Silver King8



























Resources - Proven, probable and indicated 99,000

1,354

n/a

1.6%

0.1%

4,310,000



- Inferred 22,500

1,456

n/a

0.1%

n/a

1,057,000

Notes: 1. All mineral resources are classified following the CIM Definition Standards for Mineral Resources and Mineral Reserves (May 2014), in accordance with the CIM Estimation of Mineral Resources and Mineral Reserves Best Practice Guidelines and the guidelines of NI 43-101. 2. Mineral resources are not mineral reserves and do not have demonstrated economic viability. All numbers have been rounded to reflect the relative accuracy of the estimates. 3. The Keno Hill Silver District is comprised of five deposits: Bellekeno, Lucky Queen and Flame & Moth, Onek and Bermingham, of which Bellekeno, Lucky Queen, Flame & Moth and Bermingham are incorporated into the current mine plan outlined in the technical report filed on SEDAR dated March 29, 2017, entitled "Preliminary Economic Assessment of the Keno Hill Silver District Project, Yukon, Canada". The mineral resource estimates for the project are supported by disclosure in the news release dated March 29, 2017 entitled "Alexco and Silver Wheaton Amend Silver Purchase Agreement and Alexco Announces Positive Preliminary Economic Assessment for Expanded Silver Production at Keno Hill". The mineral resource estimate for Bermingham has been updated by disclosure in note 6 below. 4. The resource estimates for the Bellekeno deposit are based on a geologic resource estimate having an effective date of September 30, 2012. The Bellekeno indicated mineral resources are as at September 30, 2013, and reflect the geologic resource less estimated subsequent depletion from mine production. 5. The resource estimates for the Lucky Queen, Flame & Moth, Onek and Bermingham deposits have an effective date of January 3, 2017. 6. The resource estimates for the Bermingham deposit has an effective date of September 17, 2018 and is supported by disclosure in the news release dated September 20, 2018 entitled "Alexco Updates Bermingham Mineral Resource". 7. The resource estimate for the Elsa Tailings has an effective date of April 22, 2010, and is supported by the technical report dated June 16, 2010 entitled "Mineral Resource Estimation, Elsa Tailings Project, Yukon, Canada". 8. Historical resources for Silver King are supported by disclosure in the news release dated March 29, 2017 entitled "Alexco and Silver Wheaton Amend Silver Purchase Agreement and Alexco Announces Positive Preliminary Economic Assessment for Expanded Silver Production at Keno Hill". 9. The disclosure regarding the summary of estimated resources for Alexco's mineral properties within the Keno Hill District has been reviewed and approved by Neil Chambers, P.Eng., Mine Superintendent and a Qualified Person as defined by NI 43-101.

SOURCE Alexco Resource Corp.

Related Links

www.alexcoresource.com


Allen Tate , the largest real estate company in the Carolinas, joins regional giant Howard Hanna , whose market reach spans the eight states of Pennsylvania, Ohio, New York, North Carolina, Virginia, West Virginia, Maryland and Michigan. The move is the first of its kind for market- leading, privately owned real estate companies in the Carolinas and creates an East Coast/Mid-Atlantic/Midwest giant with more than 11,000 agents and employees in 326 offices across nine states.

"The similarities of our two great companies are amazing and are the reason we have been successful individually. They serve as a road map to the combined success we intend to create via joint ownership," added Pat Riley. "Both companies are full-service, offering mortgage, title, relocation and insurance products to buyers and sellers, in addition to brokerage services. Our mottos are We Are Home at Allen Tate and Home Happens Here at Howard Hanna, and we are both members of Leading Real Estate Companies of the World, the most powerful connection in the world of real estate. This partnership speaks volumes as far as ensuring our clients will continue to receive all the services and homeownership products they have been accustomed to and so much more."

Allen Tate and Howard Hanna previously represented the #4 and the #1 private, family-owned real estate firms in the United States, according to a recent research report produced by REAL Trends.* Combined, the two firms facilitated more than 119,000 home sale transactions in 2017, with a closed sales volume of more than $24 billion. The partnership makes the two companies the top residential real estate producer in Pennsylvania, Ohio, New York, and the Carolinas.

"Howard Hanna and Allen Tate have grown up together in the industry, and together, we will continue to do great things," said Hanna Holdings, Inc. Chairman Howard W. "Hoddy" Hanna , III . "This partnership will allow us to continue our dominance as the largest privately owned real estate organization in the country. We are combining not only real estate brokerages, but also mortgage banking divisions, with combined annual volume of over $2 billion, as well as our insurance companies, making us the largest property and casualty real estate insurance agency on the East Coast."

"We look forward to working with the Tate Companies, adding new technologies and innovative programs such as our 100% Money Back Guarantee and our special mortgage finance programs such as Physicians Plus and Buy Before You Sell. Together, we will continue to provide best-in- class service, local expertise, innovative technologies, and a client-first philosophy," added Hanna.

These two strong, family-operated companies, both established in 1957 - Allen Tate in Charlotte and Howard Hanna in Pittsburgh - have long-established ties to their regions. "We always look to move forward, and we made a decision in the 1980s to remain independent," said Howard Hanna CEO Helen Hanna Casey. "This collaboration will provide the best products and services in the real estate industry, along with shared marketing and promotion of properties. We see this as a benefit to both our clients and our agents."

"Allen Tate and Howard Hanna share a common theme of commitment to their agents and clients. By uniting our strengths, talents and resources, the combined company and our real estate professionals have an automatic advantage in the marketplace that translates into greater opportunities and enhanced services for people buying and selling homes with us," said Howard W. "Hoby" Hanna, IV, President of Howard Hanna.

*2018 REAL Trends 500

About Howard Hanna Real Estate Services: Howard Hanna Real Estate Services is the 3rd largest real estate company in the United States, the #1 privately owned broker in the nation, and the largest home seller in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and New York. The family-owned and operated real estate company specializes in residential and commercial brokerage service, mortgages, closing and title insurance, land development, appraisal services, property and casualty, corporate relocation, and property management. With 279 offices across PA, OH, NY, VA, MI, WV, NC, and MD, more than 9,200 sales associates and staff are guided by a spirit of integrity in all aspects of the real estate process. For more information, visit www.howardhanna.com, or www.facebook.com/howardhanna.

Contact: Deborah Donahue, 412-784-3816, [email protected]

About Allen Tate Companies: Allen Tate is one of the most recognized business names in the Carolinas. With conveniently located offices ranging from the Upstate of South Carolina to the Triangle of North Carolina, Allen Tate Companies employs more than 2,100 real estate professionals and employees, and is consistently ranked as the #1 firm in the Carolinas. The Allen Tate Companies are widely known for their commitment to customer service and dedication to improving the community. www.allentate.com

Contact: Stephanie Brown, 704-442-6343, [email protected]

SOURCE Howard Hanna Real Estate Services

Related Links

http://www.howardhanna.com


PLANO, Texas, Sept. 20, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Alliance Data Systems Corporation (NYSE: ADS), a leading provider of loyalty and marketing solutions derived from transaction-rich data, will host a conference call on October 18, 2018, at 8:30 a.m. ET to discuss the Company's third-quarter 2018 results. Hosting the call will be Ed Heffernan, president and chief executive officer; and Charles Horn, chief financial officer.

The conference call will be available via the Internet at www.alliancedata.com. Additionally, there will be several slides accompanying the webcast. Please go to the website at least 15 minutes prior to the call to register, download and install any necessary software. Please contact AdvisIRy Partners by e-mail: [email protected] with any questions.

About Alliance Data

Alliance Data (NYSE: ADS) is a leading global provider of data-driven marketing and loyalty solutions serving large, consumer-based industries. The Company creates and deploys customized solutions, enhancing the critical customer marketing experience; the result is measurably changing consumer behavior while driving business growth and profitability for some of today's most recognizable brands. Alliance Data helps its clients create and increase customer loyalty through solutions that engage millions of customers each day across multiple touch points using traditional, digital, mobile and emerging technologies. An S&P 500, FORTUNE 500 and FORTUNE 100 Best Companies to Work For company headquartered in Plano, Texas, Alliance Data consists of three businesses that together employ approximately 20,000 associates at more than 100 locations worldwide.

Alliance Data's card services business is a provider of market-leading private label, co-brand, and business credit card programs. Epsilon is a leading provider of multichannel, data-driven technologies and marketing services, and also includes Conversant, a leader in personalized digital marketing. LoyaltyOne owns and operates the AIR MILES Reward Program, Canada's most recognized loyalty program, and Netherlands-based BrandLoyalty, a global provider of tailor-made loyalty programs for grocers.

Follow Alliance Data on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram and YouTube.

Contacts: Investors/Analysts

Tiffany Louder

Alliance Data

214-494-3048

[email protected] Media

Shelley Whiddon

Alliance Data

214-494-3811

[email protected]

SOURCE Alliance Data Systems Corporation

Related Links

http://www.alliancedata.com


WILMINGTON, N.C., Sept. 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- The Alliance of Comprehensive Planners (ACP), a community of tax-focused financial planners who provide comprehensive planning strategies for their clients on a fee-only retainer basis, and the Kinder Institute of Life Planning, an organization that provides workshops, intensive trainings and consulting services to financial advisors worldwide, have announced a special webcast:

A Conversation with George Kinder

'Father of life planning' George Kinder will share insights and advice on how financial planners can help clients live their best lives.

Presented by the Alliance of Comprehensive Planners (ACP)

Thursday, Sept. 27, 1 p.m. EDT

Kinder, along with ACP President-Elect and Registered Life Planner Frankie Corrado, CFP (Blue Blaze Financial Advisors, Holmdel, New Jersey), will explore:

How to bring one's authentic self to client meetings

How advisors can help their clients live their best lives

What life planning brings to a comprehensive financial planning practice

How implementing this philosophy improves the advisor/client experience

How to incorporate the Kinder philosophy into the practice

The webcast is free to attend but financial professionals must register in advance, as space is limited: https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/5035230385605836812.

THE GOLD STANDARD FOR ADVISOR-CLIENT RELATIONSHIP SKILLS

Book author and speaker/trainer George Kinder, founder of the Kinder Institute of Life Planning, has been named "one of the 35 most influential people in financial services," "one of the top Icons & Innovators in the financial planning industry," "the first of 15 transformational advisors whose vision most changed the industry" and has been inducted into the Financial Planning Magazine Hall of Fame. His expertise has been featured in The Financial Times, New Model Adviser, Forbes, Time Magazine, FP Today, The Journal of Financial Planning, InvestmentNews and The New York Times, among many others.

Harvard-educated Kinder has revolutionized financial advice for more than 30 years, training over 3,000 professionals in 30 countries in the field of Life Planning, a method considered to be the gold standard for advisor-client relationship skills.

In addition to his new book A Golden Civilization (pre-orders available on Amazon October 2018), he has written three books on money: The Seven Stages of Money Maturity, Lighting the Torch and Life Planning for You; and one on mindfulness - Transforming Suffering into Wisdom; as well as a book of photography and poetry - A Song for Hana.

KINDER LEADING WORKSHOP, KEYNOTING AT ACP ANNUAL CONFERENCE

Kinder will also be keynoting at the ACP Annual Conference being held Nov. 7-9, 2018. in Miami. "Life Planning can reliably deliver the most exhilarating, pragmatic and meaningful financial planning meetings for your clients," said Kinder. "In my presentations at the ACP Conference, I'll discuss Life Planning's five-phase EVOKE process and how its roots in mindfulness and listening skills reveal clients' dreams of freedom and then deliver them. Through lecture and experiential exercise, we will consider the inner listening/mindfulness skills required for mastery of client conversations and the significance of great listening in successful client engagement. I will identify the three phases of initial client meetings that develop relationships of trust and explain how to help clients move from trust to inspired action on their financial plan. I will close with themes of my new book A Golden Civilization and provide fresh approaches to economics and democracy, and the role financial planners will play."

On Nov. 5 and 6, 2018, as a pre-conference option being offered the two days immediately preceding the ACP Annual Conference, Kinder will be leading his signature "Seven Stages of Money Maturity" workshop. "Advisors will learn how to improve their listening, relationship and inspirational skills. We will discuss the psychology of money and provide a model for understanding and developing client relationships as well as one's own relationship to money," Kinder said.

Being an ACP member is not required to participate in this special two-day Kinder workshop. Furthermore, anyone participating in the Kinder workshop may also stay to attend in the 2018 ACP Annual Conference at the ACP member rate. More information is available here: https://2018.acplanners.org/content/featured-speakers.

ABOUT THE ALLIANCE OF COMPREHENSIVE PLANNERS (ACP)

The Alliance of Comprehensive Planners (ACP) is a community of tax-focused financial planners who provide comprehensive planning strategies for their clients on a fee-only retainer basis. ACP members are required to maintain the CFP or CPA/PFS (or equivalent) designation, complete ACP's rigorous training program and meet some of the highest continuing education requirements in the industry. To learn more about this fiduciary network or to find a certified ACP member, visit www.ACPlanners.org.

Press contact:

Leesy Palmer or Marie Swift

Impact Communications Inc.

800-974-7753

[email protected]

SOURCE Alliance of Comprehensive Planners (ACP)

Related Links

https://www.acplanners.org


LOS ANGELES, Sept. 20, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Eight American Funds have been included in the Morningstar FundInvestor "28 Terrific Funds" list. Morningstar's review of more than 8,000 mutual funds identified 28 funds screened for criteria that includes expenses, manager ownership, returns, stewardship and risk ratings.

"We are honored to once again have so many of our funds on Morningstar's Terrific Funds list," said Matt O'Connor, president of American Funds Distributors, a division of Capital Group. "Our aim is simple: to offer investors mutual funds and other investment products that deliver superior results with low fees."

The 8 American Funds that made Morningstar's "28 Terrific Funds" list are:

American Balanced Fund

American Funds Global Balanced FundSM

Capital Income Builder

Capital World Growth and Income Fund

The Income Fund of America

The Investment Company of America

New Perspective Fund

Washington Mutual Investors FundSM

About Capital Group

Since 1931, Capital Group, home of the American Funds, has been singularly focused on delivering superior results for long-term investors using high-conviction portfolios, rigorous research and individual accountability. As of June 30, 2018, Capital Group manages more than $1.8 trillion in equity and fixed income assets for millions of individual and institutional investors around the world.

The Capital Group companies manage equity assets through three investment groups. These groups make investment and proxy voting decisions independently. Fixed income investment professionals provide fixed income research and investment management across the Capital organization; however, for securities with equity characteristics, they act solely on behalf of one of the three equity investment groups.

Investments are not FDIC-insured, nor are they deposits of or guaranteed by a bank or any other entity, so they may lose value.

Investors should carefully consider investment objectives, risks, charges and expenses. This and other important information is contained in the fund prospectuses and summary prospectuses, which can be obtained from a financial professional and should be read carefully before investing.

Statements attributed to an individual represent the opinions of that individual as of the date published and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Capital Group or its affiliates. This information is intended to highlight issues and should not be considered advice, an endorsement or a recommendation.

Past results are not predictive of results in future periods.

Content contained herein is not intended to serve as impartial investment or fiduciary advice. The content has been developed by Capital Group, which receives fees for managing, distributing and/or servicing its investments.

Securities offered through American Funds Distributors, Inc.

All Capital Group trademarks mentioned are owned by The Capital Group Companies, Inc., an affiliated company or fund. All other company and product names mentioned are the property of their respective companies.

 2018 Capital Group. All rights reserved.

Media Contact:

Abbas Qasim

[email protected]

(212) 830-0103

SOURCE American Funds

Related Links

http://www.americanfunds.com


At Home Group Inc. (NYSE:HOME), one of the fastest-growing retailers in the nation, opened its newest location at 265 Illinois 83 in Elmhurst, Ill., on Sept. 19 with a community New Store Open House on Oct. 6. The new Elmhurst At Home location is the fifth in the state and 168th store nationwide.

The 100,000-square-foot home decor superstore offers more than 50,000 home decor items, from furniture, mirrors, rugs, art and housewares to tabletop, patio and seasonal decor across a variety of styles and at everyday low prices.

"As we strategically grow our national footprint, we are excited to open our fourth store in the Chicago area," said At Home Chairman and CEO Lee Bird. "Our vast selection of on-trend styles is winning over home decor customers who want it all: value, variety and an inspiring, hands-on shopping experience."

Shoppers will find style ideas throughout the store, which is based on a warehouse model with continually updated items that showcase the latest trends and seasonal products. On average, 400 new products arrive each week to provide fresh inspiration.

"At Home strives to have the widest selection of home decor items, and we are dedicated to inspiring you to refresh, play and experiment with home decor that reflects your unique personality and style," said Elmhurst At Home Store Director Luis Plascencia. "We welcome everyone to come in, explore our newest store and find endless decorating possibilities for every room in your home for your budget."

Earlier this year, At Home launched the Shanty2Chic collection created by the sister entrepreneurs behind the Shanty2Chic DIY carpentry blog and YouTube channel. The modern farmhouse furniture and decor line includes almost 100 pieces, from bedroom furniture to dining and coffee tables to modular bookcases.

The Elmhurst At Home store will have a New Store Open House Saturday, Oct. 6, beginning at 9 a.m. The open house will include Gift Card Giveaways for the first 50 people who visit the store and sign up for At Home Insider Perks.

This is the fourth At Home in the Chicago area. Additional store locations can be found by visiting www.AtHome.com.

About At Home:

At Home (NYSE:HOME), the home decor superstore, offers more than 50,000 on-trend home products to fit any budget or style, from furniture, mirrors, rugs, art and housewares to tabletop, patio and seasonal decor. At Home is headquartered in Plano, Texas, and currently operates nearly 170 stores in 36 states. For more information, visit the company online http://www.athome.com or find us on Facebook (AtHomeStores), Instagram (AtHomeStores) or Pinterest (AtHomeStores).

SOURCE At Home Group Inc.

Related Links

http://www.athome.com


SAN DIEGO, Sept. 20, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- AVACEN Medical, Inc. (AVACEN) announced the beginning of subject enrollment of subjects in its sponsored 12-family blinded, double placebo-controlled pilot study of ASD children ages 6-16.

The study will use the FDA-cleared AVACEN 100 dry heat therapy device to simulate a low-grade fever by non-invasively infusing heat into the circulatory system.

AVACEN

The Fielding Graduate University IRB approved study is entitled: "The Fever Effect: Do kids with autism do better when they use a device to warm their blood? Effects of a six-week AVACEN Treatment Method on Autism Spectrum Disorder."

The pilot study will examine improvements in the Childhood Autism Rating Scale and the Parental Stress Scale. The study will also evaluate reductions in anxiety and sleep problems reported by parents of ASD children and adolescents using the AVACEN 100*.

In 1980, when a viral infection swept through a therapeutic nursery for children with autism at Bellevue Psychiatric Hospital in New York, the hospital staff reported that the children were more social, alert, and talkative while feverish (Sullivan, 1980). When their fevers faded, so did those behavioral improvements. Unraveling the "fever effect" could lead to innovative ways to improve the lives of individuals affected by ASD.

The Autism Society estimates that 70 million people worldwide have ASD. Research on the costs associated with ASD conducted in the United States (e.g. Croen, et al. 2006) determined that the average cost for children with ASD were twice as high as other children for hospitalization, clinic visits, and prescription medications.

Families in San Diego interested in participating in this pilot study or further studies are encouraged to email Frances Poteet at: [email protected] and provide their phone number, email, zip code and best time to be reached.

About AVACEN Medical

AVACEN Medical is dedicated to the innovation and design of safe, easy to use, noninvasive drug-free alternatives for the management of pain associated with numerous chronic and acute conditions including the temporary relief of minor muscle and joint pain and stiffness associated with arthritis and potentially other conditions that can cause joint pain, such as CRPS, Reynaud's, and Lyme Disease. Founded in 2009, AVACEN Medical is headquartered in San Diego. Contact: Ryan Jeffcoat at (888) 428-2236 x 711 or [email protected].

E.U. and Health Canada Approval : A heat therapy system indicated for the temporary relief of minor muscle and joint pain and stiffness; the temporary relief of joint pain associated with arthritis, muscle spasms, minor strains and sprains; the temporary relief of widespread pain associated with fibromyalgia; muscular relaxation; and the temporary increase of microcirculation.

U.S. FDA- Clearance : A heat therapy system indicated for the temporary relief of minor muscle and joint pain and stiffness; the temporary relief of joint pain associated with arthritis, muscle spasms, minor strains and sprains; muscular relaxation; and the temporary increase of local circulation where applied.

The AVACEN 100 is not for sale in the U.S. or E.U. for any non-cleared or non-approved indication mentioned in this document.

*AVACEN recommends parents contact a physician before using the AVACEN 100 on those under 18 years of age.

SOURCE AVACEN Medical

Related Links

https://avacen.com


BOSTON, Sept. 20, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts (Blue Cross) once again has been named one of the highest-rated health plans in the country, according to the nation's expert on health plan quality.

The National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA) awarded our Commercial HMO/POS plan and our Commercial PPO plan 4.5 out of 5,(1) putting us in the top 10 percent of commercial health plans in the country.

"We are committed to providing our 2.8 million members with quality, affordable health care and are proud that NCQA has recognized our performance once again," said Blue Cross Blue Shield President & CEO Andrew Dreyfus. "Our rating reflects the work of our dedicated associates and our strong collaboration with physicians and hospitals to ensure that our members receive the care they need."

Each year NCQA rates approximately 1,400 health plans for their:

Effectiveness of wellness and prevention efforts, including immunizations and cancer screenings

Successful management of chronic illness

Access to high-quality primary and specialty care

Excellence in member experience

Blue Cross also earned an "Excellent" accreditation rating from NCQA.

To see the full list of ratings, visit NCQA's Health Insurance Plan Ratings 20182019.

(1) NCQA's Health Insurance Plan Ratings 20182019

About Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts

Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts (bluecrossma.com) is a community-focused, tax-paying, not-for-profit health plan headquartered in Boston. We're the trusted health plan for more than 25,000 Massachusetts employers and are committed to working with others in a spirit of shared responsibility to make quality health care affordable. Consistent with our corporate promise to always put our 2.8 million members first, we're rated among the nation's best health plans for member satisfaction and quality. Connect with us on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and LinkedIn.

About NCQA

NCQA is a private, non-profit organization dedicated to improving health care quality. NCQA accredits and certifies a wide range of health care organizations and recognizes clinicians in key clinical areas. NCQA's Healthcare Effectiveness Data and Information Set (HEDIS) is the most widely used performance measurement tool in health care. NCQA's website (www.ncqa.org) contains information to help consumers, employers, and others make more informed health care choices.

SOURCE Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts

Related Links

http://www.bluecrossma.com


DENVER, Sept. 20, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- CannaMojo, the world's first THC-infused male enhancement capsule, is now available at select recreational dispensaries throughout Colorado. By merging THC with natural aphrodisiacs, Revered, Inc. has created the first product in the marijuana industry to target a male audience.

This revolutionary cannabis product comes in capsule form and blends 10 MGs of distilled THC with an all-natural, proprietary blend. Each pack of CannaMojo contains five capsules which are designed to enhance male experiences.

Founder & CEO Edward Naylon states that, "CannaMojo isn't a cure for Erectile Dysfunction. It's a party pill designed to turn the average player into an All-Star."

A single CannaMojo capsule increases longevity & rigidity by increasing blood flow to the phallic region. Scientifically proven aphrodisiacs like Maca & Ginseng are CannaMojo's core, natural ingredients. The 10 MGs of THC element present in a single CannaMojo heighten arousement and create a mind-blowing experience by releasing dopamine to receptors.

"We invented CannaMojo because we saw a void in the industry," said marketing Director Barry Bard. "From Foria to Whoopi & Maya, there are plenty of feminine-centric options available at dispensaries. But we couldn't think of any male-focused brands--so CannaMojo was born."

The product affects consumers in about 30-40 minutes before a noticed increase in sexual appetite. The effects of ingesting its natural ingredients can last for days so your endorphins or "Mojo" stay activated without the high from THC.

"Every man wants the Mojo," said Naylon. "Cannabis and sex are a match made in heaven. Why shouldn't men have the same options women have?"

CannaMojo plans to release similar, male-targeted products in the future from prerolls to lubricants while aggressively pursuing licensing opportunities in other markets.

Revered, Inc. is based in Aurora, Colorado and also produces the Quest Concentrates live resin and the THC-infused AeroInhaler. The cannabis industry's premier THC-infused inhaler was named 2017 cannabis invention of the year by The Cannabis Business Awards.

For more information, please visit http://cannamojo710.com/

SOURCE Revered, Inc.

Related Links

http://cannamojo710.com


ARLINGTON, Va., Sept. 20, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Capital Impact Partners announced today that it has received $3.7 million in grants from the U.S. Department of the Treasury's Community Development Financial Institutions Fund (CDFI Fund) to increase its mission-driven lending and investment efforts in low-income and economically distressed communities. Capital Impact Partners will use this funding to expand financing activity in Detroit to further its inclusive growth strategy in the city, as well as support for healthy food-related projects delivering social and economic impact across Michigan more broadly.

"We have been working in Detroit for more than a decade to help ensure that its residents have equitable access to high-quality services that foster good health, economic opportunity, and interconnectedness. This funding from the CDFI Fund supports our continued vision for the city by allowing us to jumpstart development in areas of the city that have not seen investment since the 1970s," said Ellis Carr, president and CEO of Capital Impact Partners. "We are grateful for the leadership of the CDFI Fund in not only helping Capital Impact, but also the CDFI industry as a whole address some of the most pressing social and economic justice issues facing low-income communities."

The CDFI Fund grants received by Capital Impact are made up of two parts. The first is the Financial Assistance (FA) award given to build the capacity of Community Development Financial Institutions (CDFIs) to help sustain and expand their financial products and services.

The second is the Healthy Food Financing Initiative (HFFI) award, which serves as a supplemental funding opportunity for eligible CDFIs that expressed an interest in expanding their healthy food-focused financing activities and also received an FA award.

For the FY 2017 CDFI Program round, Capital Impact Partners is one of only 14 CDFIs that received both FA and HFFI grants, out of a total of 432 applicants.

Capital Impact will use its $700,000 FA award to leverage other private and philanthropic capital investments and expand financing for mixed-income housing and commercial space in key corridors of Detroit that have seen virtually no new investment activities in decades. In particular, Capital Impact will focus on smaller projects that larger financial institutions deem too risky for traditional financing.

Capital Impact's overarching investment goal is to boost residents' economic mobility in targeted neighborhoods by increasing density and income diversity. Since 2006, Capital Impact has invested nearly $200 million in Detroit, with a majority of that focused in the city's core neighborhoods. This additional funding will allow the organization to expand revitalization efforts by moving into new areas of the city that need the support of mission-driven lenders.

The $3 million HFFI grant that Capital Impact received will be used to support innovations in the healthy food sector that help eliminate food deserts in urban and rural areas. In particular, Capital Impact will leverage these funds to build on its Michigan Good Food Fund work to support healthy food enterprises throughout Michigan. The range of targeted sectors includes independent grocers, local wholesalers, food hubs, processors, and mobile fresh food marts and farm stands.

In its press release about the awards, CDFI Fund Director Annie Donovan noted that "[t]he FY2018 CDFI Program and Native American CDFI Assistance Program awardees will provide vital financial services and lending to low-income communities nationwide. The awards will also benefit Native Communities, areas of persistent poverty, and individuals with disabilities."

For the FY 2018 CDFI Program round, the CDFI Fund awarded $165 million in Financial Assistance and Technical Assistance to 264 organizations in 45 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico. In addition, the CDFI Fund awarded $22 million to 14 CDFIs through the Healthy Food Financing Initiative Financial Assistance awards (HFFI-FA), as well as $5 million to 15 CDFIs through the Disability Funds Financial Assistance awards (DF-FA), a supplemental program designed to help CDFIs finance projects and services that will assist individuals with disabilities.

Since its creation in 1994, the CDFI Fund has awarded over $1.96 billion in FA and TA awards through the CDFI Program. Through HFFI-FA, the CDFI Fund has provided $164 million in awards to CDFIs.

Building Communities of Opportunity in Detroit

Capital Impact has previously used its HFFI and FA funding from the CDFI Fund to advance its inclusive growth strategy in Detroit. Examples include:

The Coe

Capital Impact's focus on inclusive growth continues in Detroit with the Coe at West Village development. This mixed-use development has created 11 new row houses, space for two retail businesses, and several jobs. In addition, the development has created three units of affordable housing, rented at 80 percent of AMI in a neighborhood where there are few housing options for lower-income residents. Capital Impact supported this investment through two loans totaling $2.6 million, one of them through our $30 million Detroit Neighborhoods Fund.

7.Liv

The Avenue of Fashion was once a bustling and vibrant neighborhood within Detroit, but has seen years of blight and retail flight. Through our Detroit Neighborhoods Fund, Capital Impact provided $4.7 million in loans to support the construction of 7.Liv, a mixed-use residential space that has created affordable housing in the community and feature retail space for Detroit businesses. This development is the first of its kind in the neighborhood, bringing together three buildings to create 10 units of housing and 20,000 sq. ft. of retail space. Funded in partnership with Invest Detroit, the Michigan Economic Development Corporation, and the Detroit Economic Growth Corporation, and developer Matt Hessler, this investment creates density and economic opportunity in a community on the rebound.

Midtown Fresh

Midtown Fresh (formerly Park Street Market) brings high-quality healthy food to a severely distressed part of Kalamazoo, Michigan, drying up the food desert that once existed. Filling the void that another grocery left, Midtown Fresh serves an area with about 14,149 people. In addition to infusing healthy food into the community, this investment creates jobs for community members in an area that has suffered from high rates of unemployment. Capital Impact participated in an $8.2 million dollar loan, including $2.7 million in New Markets Tax Credits.

Diamond Place

Capital Impact also provided financing to support a more traditional mixed-income housing development near Grand Rapids, MI. Diamond Place, which will convert a brownfield industrial lot to a mixed-use development near the city's downtown area, will include 175 units of mixed-income housing. Ninety-eight of those will be reserved for people living at or below 60 percent of the Area Media Income ($32,000 for a family of four) and nine units for those living below 80 percent ($51,000 for a family of 5). Retail space comprising 22,000 square feet will house a new grocery store. Capital Impact partnered with JP Morgan Chase; Cinnaire, a local CDFI partner; and the State of Michigan to finance this $40 million project. Capital Impact provided a $6.4 million leverage loan into a $9 million New Market Tax Credit financing package.

About Capital Impact Partners:

Through capital and commitment, Capital Impact Partners helps people build communities of opportunity that break barriers to success. We champion social and economic justice for underserved communities to foster good health, economic opportunity, and interconnectedness. Through mission-driven lending, incubating social impact programs, impact investing, and policy reform we partner with local communities to create equitable access to health care and education, healthy foods, affordable housing, and dignified aging for those most in need. We have disbursed more than $2.5 billion to revitalize communities over the past 35 years. Our leadership in delivering financial and social impact has resulted in Capital Impact earning a "AA-" rating from S&P Global and being recognized by Aeris since 2005 for our performance. Headquartered in Arlington, VA, Capital Impact Partners operates nationally, with local offices in Detroit, MI, and Oakland, CA. Learn more at www.capitalimpact.org.

SOURCE Capital Impact Partners

Related Links

http://www.capitalimpact.org


HOUSTON, Sept. 20, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- The Conrad Challenge has announced a special category, Smoke-Free World, that is available to participants in the 2018-19 competition. The category, sponsored by the Foundation for a Smoke-Free World (FSFW), invites teams of high school students to design 21st century solutions to solve multiple region-specific problems that interfere with the goal of decreasing the use of combustible cigarettes on a global scale. The submission process for the 2018-19 Challenge is now open and teams of 2-5 students between the ages of 13-18 are encouraged to register by visiting www.conradchallenge.org.

"We are proud to partner with the Foundation for a Smoke-Free World for the second consecutive year and empower high school students to develop solutions to some of the most pressing global public health and economic issues," said Nancy Conrad, founder and chairman of the Conrad Foundation, which produces the competition. "Progress doesn't always take a straight path, but innovation and entrepreneurship can provide the way toward solutions. We never know what our students will create and we are excited to see this year's innovations."

The negative impacts of smoking are well-known, and its global decline will result in many positive health outcomes worldwide. But there are negative consequences for low-income countries that depend on tobacco farming as a thriving industry. FSFW's mission is to eliminate cigarette smoking worldwide, and to mobilize support for people who are disproportionately burdened by the rapid transition away from combustible tobacco. The Smoke-Free World category asks students to innovate solutions that address one of three key problem areas throughout the world:

United States Teams are challenged to help this generation avoid a public health crisis by developing behavioral, social, and technological innovationsphysical and onlinethat prevent vaping among American teens. These efforts will complement efforts to prevent smoking conventional cigarettes among youth.

Teams are challenged to help this generation avoid a public health crisis by developing behavioral, social, and technological innovationsphysical and onlinethat prevent vaping among American teens. These efforts will complement efforts to prevent smoking conventional cigarettes among youth. Malawi  Ending smoking worldwide will save lives, but a reduced global demand for tobacco could bring devastating consequences to smallholder tobacco farmers, many of whom are economically dependent on tobacco as their livelihood crop. Malawi is one nation where many are vulnerable to this projected sharp decline in the demand for tobacco. The Conrad Challenge is looking for students to develop 21st century agricultural technology and business solutions to help these smallholder tobacco farmers transition to profitable alternative livelihoods.

 Ending smoking worldwide will save lives, but a reduced global demand for tobacco could bring devastating consequences to smallholder tobacco farmers, many of whom are economically dependent on tobacco as their livelihood crop. is one nation where many are vulnerable to this projected sharp decline in the demand for tobacco. The Conrad Challenge is looking for students to develop 21st century agricultural technology and business solutions to help these smallholder tobacco farmers transition to profitable alternative livelihoods. India  Bidi, a hand-rolled cigarette traditionally produced by women and children in their homes across rural India , is the preferred tobacco product of more than 100 million Indian smokers because of its affordability and accessibility. But the nicotine and tar in bidis is more concentrated than in conventional cigarettes, and could thus be more harmful to people who smoke them. Teams are challenged to develop innovative, low-cost business and technology solutions to help reduce bidi consumption, especially among vulnerable populations susceptible to the adverse health effects of both bidi use and production.

"The students who participated in the last Conrad Challenge truly impressed us with their talent, enthusiasm and innovative thinking," said Dr. Derek Yach, president of the Foundation for a Smoke-Free World. "Their generation is going to play a key role in solving this global health issue and we look forward to seeing the solutions they develop to not only eliminate the use of cigarettes and other forms of combustible tobacco worldwide, but to also help smallholder tobacco farmers who will be negatively impacted by the declining demand for tobacco."

While this special category focuses on problems targeted to different countries, any team from any country can create solutions in any of the problem areas. Teams who are already registered in another category of the Conrad Challenge are encouraged to also enter this special category. Teams entering in multiple categories must submit a registration form for each category, but will receive a discounted registration fee for the second category.

In addition to Smoke-Free World, the 2018-19 Conrad Challenge will feature five more categories: Aerospace & Aviation; Cyber-Technology & Security; Energy & Environment; Health & Nutrition; and Transforming Education with Technology, a special category sponsored by SMART Technologies. Interested participants can learn more about each category by visiting this page.

Throughout the competition, experts and judges from business, industry, research and academia worldwide will serve as guides to the teams. The special categories will follow the traditional guidelines of the Conrad Challenge and adhere to the same timeline. In February 2019, five teams in each challenge category will be chosen as finalists and travel to the annual Innovation Summit April 24-27, 2019 hosted at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex. Entries in the Smoke-Free World category will be judged based on the same Challenge criteria and a Pete Conrad Scholar will be selected within this category. This special category will also have judges from FSFW with the potential for additional prizes and awards.

Interested teams should visit the Registration Form and 2018-2019 Conrad Challenge Overview for more information on this year's competition. Registration will remain open until Friday, October 19, 2018 at 11:59 PM ET. Expert judges will then select semi-finalist teams in each challenge category who will be invited to develop comprehensive business plans for their innovation.

About The Conrad Foundation

The Conrad Foundation is a nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting collaborative, student-centered, real world-relevant learning that fosters innovation and entrepreneurship. Through its programs, the Foundation unleashes students' potential to create impactful solutions and a sustainable society for generations to come. For more information, visit www.conradchallenge.org.

About the Foundation for a Smoke-Free World, Inc.

The Foundation for a Smoke-Free World is an independent, non-profit organization with the purpose of improving global health by ending smoking in this generation. The Foundation supports its mission through three core pillars: Health, Science and Technology; the Agriculture Transformation Initiative; and Industry Transformation. The Foundation's health, science, and technology work complements ongoing tobacco control efforts and focuses on countries where most smokers live, bringing a smoker-oriented agenda to accelerate quitting and switching to reduced-harm products. The Agricultural Transformation Initiative aims to diversify tobacco dependent economies, and the Foundation's Industry Transformation efforts focus on attaining change within the entire global tobacco industry and nicotine ecosystem.

The Foundation has received a pledge of $80 million annually for 12 years, beginning in 2018 from Philip Morris International (PMI). Under the Foundation's bylaws and Pledge Agreement, PMI and the tobacco industry, generally, are precluded from having any control or influence over how the Foundation spends its funds or focuses its activities. The Foundation's acceptance of the annual pledge does not constitute an endorsement by the Foundation of any of the pledgor's products.

For more information about the Foundation, please visit www.smokefreeworld.org .

SOURCE The Conrad Foundation
MADRID, Sept. 20, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Copado, a cloud-based release management platform, today announced a 7.5 million Series A funding round with an investment from Insight Venture Partners with participation from Salesforce Ventures. Copado will use the capital to expand the functionality of its product suite and support its continued global growth.

Copado is a leading release management platform on the Salesforce AppExchange, providing a streamlined end-to-end release management solution for development teams. Founded in 2013, Copado has achieved self-funded organic growth of 300% year on year until now.

"We're excited to partner with Copado as they continue to grow their release management platform," said Vinny Pujji of Insight Venture Partners, "The Salesforce ecosystem presents endless opportunities for developers to create innovative business solutions. Copado's platform ensures tracking and productivity, reducing mistakes and enabling rapid deployments. It has become an indispensable tool for its customers to release their products smoothly and realize their return-on-investment faster."

Copado's Enterprise-class release management platform enables Salesforce customers to clear their backlog of feature requests and release functionality faster to end users. Companies of all sizes (from 200 to 20,000+ seats across industries) have been adopting Copado to manage parallel releases, reduce deployment time-frames, increase the number of releases and decrease costs for their projects. "Copado's wide range of features empower developers to be more productive and independent. That means less nights and weekends spent on releases and more time to focus on what they love most - developing new features on the platform." said Copado's CTO Federico Larsen.

"We see development teams around the world creating fantastic business applications within Salesforce. Having a great product idea is hard enough  executing on it is another challenge entirely. Dev teams need a top-notch platform to grow their products, and that's exactly what we're committed to providing. With the help of Insight Venture Partners, we're looking forward to expanding our products' capabilities and continuing our support of innovators," said Copado CEO Philipp Rackwitz.

For more information, visit: https://www.copado.com/

About Insight Venture Partners

Insight Venture Partners is a leading global venture capital and private equity firm investing in high-growth technology and software companies that are driving transformative change in their industries. Founded in 1995, Insight currently has over $20 billion of assets under management and has cumulatively invested in more than 300 companies worldwide. Our mission is to find, fund, and work successfully with visionary executives, providing them with practical, hands-on growth expertise to foster long-term success. Across our people and our portfolio, we encourage a culture around a core belief: growth equals opportunity. For more information on Insight and all its investments, visit www.insightpartners.com or follow us on Twitter @insightpartners.

About Salesforce Ventures

Salesforce, the global leader in CRM, empowers companies to connect with their customers in a whole new way. Salesforce Venturesthe company's corporate investment groupinvests in the next generation of enterprise technology that extends the power of the Salesforce Customer Success Platform, helping companies connect with their customers in entirely new ways. Portfolio companies receive funding as well as access to the world's largest cloud ecosystem and the guidance of Salesforce's innovators and executives. With Salesforce Ventures, portfolio companies can also leverage Salesforce's expertise in corporate philanthropy by joining Pledge 1% to make giving back part of their business model. Salesforce Ventures has invested in more than 270 enterprise cloud startups in 17 different countries since 2009. For more information, please visit www.salesforce.com/ventures.

SOURCE Copado

Related Links

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PAYSON, Ill., Sept. 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Dale Ann Waters, RN, CCN is recognized by Continental Who's Who as a Professional Nurse of The Year of 2018 in recognition of her role as a Registered Nurse at Hannibal Regional Hospital.

Devoted to offering their patients quality healthcare service, Hannibal Regional Hospital is located in Hannibal, Missouri. Utilizing the latest technological advancements in the medical industry in an effort to better serve their clients, the team at Hannibal Regional Health Care System is equipped in handling their patient's health concerns. Dedicated to the health and wellness of their clients, the hospital is specialized in orthopedic services, oncology services, emergency services, cardiology services, in-patient rehabilitation, and women's care. Additionally, the hospital specializes in audiology, diabetes, internal medicine, general surgery, podiatry, urology and more.



Having gathered over forty-two years of experience in the field of nursing and thirty years in her current role as a Registered Nurse at Hannibal Regional Hospital, Mrs. Dale Ann Waters commended for her remarkable contributions to the medical industry. Throughout her career, Mrs. Waters has attained expertise in intensive care and is specialized in all facets of frontline nursing.



Early in her career and holding certifications as a Critical Care Registered Nurse and in Advanced Cardiac Life Support, Mrs. Waters attained her Diploma in 1982 from the Blessing Hospital School of Nursing in Quincy, Illinois.



In an effort to further enhance her professional development, Mrs. Waters is an esteemed member of several organizations including the American Nurses Association, American Association of Critical Care Nurses, and International Nurse Association. In her current capacity, Mrs. Waters is the Chair of Professional Practice Council and Journal Club.



Charitable to various organizations, Mrs. Waters is an avid support and member of Payson Southern Baptist Church, Youth Church and Church Camp divisions as well as Bay Creek Baptist Association.



In recognition of her professional achievements, Mrs. Waters is the recipient of the Hannibal Regional Hospital's Rising Star Award in 2012 and took part in their Clinical LADDER program in 2015 and 2017.



When she is not working, Mrs. Waters enjoys exercising and spending time with her family, daughters, and grandchildren.



Married to Robert for 34 years, Mrs. Waters has two daughters who are both nurses and one son. Mrs. Waters has 5 grandchildren, one of which is currently in nursing school. Mrs. Waters dedicates this recognition to Dr. Kathleen Haycraft whom mentored Mrs. Waters early in her career. She would also like to recognize Mrs. Laura Miller who was her director at Hannibal Regional Hospital for 27 years. Mrs. Waters would also like to recognize Carla Feldmann, RN who graduated from LPN School in 1975 and from RN school at St. Mary's College of O'Fallon Missouri in 1983, and Christina Neimeyer RN, who graduated with her Bachelors of Science in Nursing in 1996 from Northeast Missouri State University. These last two RN's worked with Mrs. Waters every weekend and have made nursing enjoyable and have continue to be advocates for front line nursing.



For more information, please visit https://hospital.hannibalregional.org/

Contact: Katherine Green, 516-825-5634, [email protected]

SOURCE Continental Who's Who

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Walker is the recipient of Davenport University's 2018 Peter C. Cook Excellence in Business Award, presented each year to an individual who exemplifies professional success and commitment to community service and support. Through his efforts as a visionary businessman and active community leader, Walker has contributed greatly to western Michigan's business growth over the past three decades.

Walker is chairman of the board of directors for The Right Place, Inc. He is a member of the board of directors for Briggs & Stratton Corporation, The Stephen A. Wynn Institute for Vision Research, and Universal Forest Products, Inc.

"Brian Walker is a tremendous leader and an incredible asset to communities and businesses in western Michigan," said Dr. Richard Pappas, president of Davenport University. "We are very happy to have him join the Davenport University Board.

"I'm honored to join the Davenport University Board of Trustees," said Walker. "Davenport is fostering the next generation of bright and innovative minds, and I look forward to working with the board and leadership team."

Walker previously served on the board of directors for the Federal Reserve Bank of Detroit and was president of the Business and Institutional Furniture Manufacturer's Association. He is a graduate of Michigan State University.

About Davenport University

Founded in 1866, Davenport is a private, non-profit university serving about 7,500 students at campuses across Michigan and online. With tuition among the lowest of all private universities in the state, Davenport provides high academic quality, small class sizes, conveniently located campuses, faculty with real-world experience and more than 60 dynamic undergraduate and graduate programs addressing in-demand careers in business, technology, health professions and urban education. More information is available at www.davenport.edu.

SOURCE Davenport University

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DALLAS, Sept. 20, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Generational Group , a leading mergers and acquisitions advisor for privately held businesses, is pleased to announce today that David Fergusson has joined the firm as Senior Managing Director and Group Leader - M&A. Mr. Fergusson will open and lead an M&A office in Manhattan. His responsibilities will include leading the firm's expansion across the Northeast region and Canada, and establishing a cross border international M&A practice.

Mr. Fergusson joins the Generational Group from The M&A Advisor, where he was the Co-CEO and President. From the firm's offices in New York and London, he was responsible for leading the global think tank services: market intelligence publishing, media, event and consulting, for their constituency of over 350,000 corporate finance industry professionals.

He is a respected speaker on the subjects of financial services and corporate innovation at prominent educational institutions such as Cambridge and Columbia, and leadership assemblies including the World Economic Forum at Davos and the World Bank. Mr. Fergusson is a frequent contributor to major media organizations, including CNBC and Bloomberg, and is the editor of 5 annual editions of "The Best Practices of The Best Dealmakers" series with a readership of more than 500,000 in over 60 countries.

"We are thrilled to have David join our leadership team. He is one of the premier innovators and influencers in global M&A and I am confident he will be a difference maker in our organization," said Generational Group President & CEO Ryan Binkley. He added, "The addition of David Fergusson to our team will help us to aggressively execute on our priority growth initiatives and bring added value to our clients."

Brenen Hofstadter, Generational's Chief M&A Officer, stated "We have known David for over a decade, and he sees the M&A business the same way we do. He applies excellence, diligence, and integrity with every client engagement. This is a landmark new hire and expansion into the Northeast market."

"This is a very exciting time to join the Generational Group as they are in an unparalleled state of dynamic growth," said Fergusson. "I have such great admiration for the company's leadership, their service to the corporate business community and their collaborative role in the advancement of our industry. I am looking forward to contributing my experience to the firm's advancement."

Prior to joining The M&A Advisor in 2010, Fergusson was actively involved in the investment banking community and was credited with executing some of the leading consolidations in transportation and recreational services. A pioneer in cross border mergers and acquisitions between the United States and China, he was recognized with the 2017 M&A Leadership Award from the China Mergers & Acquisitions Association. Mr. Fergusson is a graduate of Kings Edgehill School and the University of Guelph.

About Generational Group

Generational Equity, DealForce, and Generational Capital Markets, member FINRA/SIPC, are part of the Generational Group, which is headquartered in Dallas and is one of the leading M&A advisory firms in North America. With over 250 professionals located throughout North America, the companies help business owners release the wealth of their business by providing merger, acquisition and strategic growth advisory services. Their four-step approach features exit planning education, business valuation, value enhancement strategies, and M&A transactional services.

The M&A Advisor named the company the 2016 and 2017 Investment Banking Firm of the Year. For more, visit https://www.genequityco.com/ or the Generational Equity press room.

For more information:

Carl Doerksen

972-232-1125

[email protected]

SOURCE Generational Group

Related Links

https://www.genequityco.com


NEW YORK, Sept. 20, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Deloitte's CFO Signals survey for the third quarter (Q3 2018) of chief financial officers, representing many of North America's largest and most influential companies, reveals that CFO optimism, while still strong, appears to be on the retreat. Concerns around trade policy and political uncertainty, combined with the continuing challenges to identify finance talent, appear to have dampened CFOs' outlooks.

In fact, the net optimism index regarding CFOs' own-company prospects declined for the second straight quarter after hitting a new high in Q1 2018. This quarter's net optimism declined to +36 from +39, reaching its lowest level since Q3 2017. CFOs expressing rising optimism remained unchanged from last quarter (48 percent), while 12 percent cited declining optimism, up from 9 percent last quarter.

CFOs' perceptions of regional economies also fell. Eighty-nine percent of CFOs rated current conditions in North America as good, down from a survey high of 94 percent last quarter, and 45 percent expect better conditions in a year (down from 52 percent and the lowest in two years). Perceptions of Europe's current state receded significantly after hitting a new survey high at the beginning of the year. Thirty-two percent of CFOs now say current conditions are good, down from 47 percent, and 23 percent expect better conditions in a year, down from 36 percent. Finally, 37 percent of CFOs say current conditions in China are good, a sharp decline from last quarter's 55 percent, and 27 percent expect better conditions in a year, down from 31 percent.

As the U.S. rides one of the longest bull markets in its history, CFOs are now more likely to say equity markets are overvalued, at 71 percent, reversing the trend from the last two quarters. Seventy-three percent of CFOs say debt financing is attractive; while that's on par with last quarter, this sentiment is at its lowest level in more than two years. In addition, 56 percent of CFOs say now is a good time to be taking greater risk  down slightly from last quarter's 58 percent and in line with the two-year average.

Prior to 2017, CFOs' top external risks centered heavily on slow economic growth. With global economic performance continuing to improve over the last several quarters, CFOs' worries are now centered on how to deal with geopolitical and socioeconomic events. This quarter, CFOs were overwhelmingly worried about trade policy and tariffs, coupled with uncertainty within the political and regulatory landscape. Regarding internal risks, CFOs are worried about talent, including retaining top talent and acquiring talent with specialized skills. For the first time in 2018, CFOs viewed internal risks (40 percent) more constraining to company performance than external risks (37 percent).

"Last quarter's decline in overall sentiment only continued this quarter, accompanied by a spike in the belief that the equity markets are overvalued," said Sanford Cockrell III, national managing partner of the U.S. CFO Program, Deloitte LLP. "Although overall economic performance is projected to be hovering at the two-year average, it is interesting to see this stark change from the expectations for confidence and growth that hit survey highs earlier this year."

After hitting multiyear highs last quarter, most key growth metrics declined this quarter, but remain strong. Expectations for revenue growth declined from 6.3 percent to 6.1 percent, but remains at one of the highest levels in the last four years. Earnings growth expectations declined from 10.3 percent to 8.1 percent, the lowest level this year. CFOs' expectations for growth in capital investment declined from 10.4 percent to 9.4 percent, the second consecutive decline, but remain above the two-year average. CFOs' growth expectations for domestic personnel fell from 3.2 percent to 2.7 percent, but expectations for dividend growth rose sharply from 4.8 percent to 7.4 percent, the highest level in eight years.

Regarding business focus for the next year, CFOs indicate a bias toward revenue growth over cost reduction (59 percent versus 20 percent). The bias toward investing cash over returning it to shareholders (56 percent versus 19 percent) decreased slightly, but remains near the high levels seen over the past two years. The bias toward current versus new product/service offerings shifted back to current offerings this quarter (43 percent versus 37 percent). The bias toward current geographies over new ones increased somewhat (67 percent versus 16 percent), continuing the trend seen last quarter. Moreover, the recent strong bias toward organic growth over inorganic continued this quarter and reached another survey high (72 percent versus 15 percent).

With finance talent continuing to be among CFOs' top internal worries, this quarter's survey asked them about the mechanisms they have in place to address the evolving finance workforce and skills. CFOs expect the responsibilities of their finance function to shift beyond accounting, reporting and compliance, to attract and develop finance staff who are more adept with analysis, prediction and decision support. Additionally, 54 percent of CFOs project that their talent roadmap can support a technology-enabled workforce in three years; 45 percent of CFOs believe that most finance work will be conducted via shared service centers.

To address evolving talent requirements, CFOs expect their participation in the gig economy to grow by 88 percent in the next three years, including increased utilization of outsourced, contingent or gig workers, and higher utilization of shared services or offshore personnel. However, the bulk of the workforce will remain nearshore.

CFOs noted that 11.5 percent of their workforce does not have the necessary skills for today's finance function, and that would continue to increase. To gain insight into what skill gaps currently exist in CFOs' finance functions, CFOs were asked where they saw the need for the most development. There was a great variation of responses. However, nearly two-thirds agreed that their finance function requires the most development in analytics, digital technologies and automation; and knowledge of their companies' core business.

"Talent continues to be a top priority for CFOs quarter after quarter. As the finance function evolves, the workforce and workplace need to shift to accommodate the changes in the way work is done and what work drives tangible value," commented Rob Dicks, national industry leader for Deloitte's human capital CFO market offering, and a principal with Deloitte Consulting LLP. "The survey results show that most CFOs are in the very early stages of their talent journeys, but are committed to building a workforce much more focused on analysis, decision support and analytics."

To see additional results from Deloitte's third-quarter 2018 CFO Signals survey, download a copy at: http://www.deloitte.com/us/cfosignals2018Q3.

Methodology

Each quarter, CFO Signals tracks the thinking and actions of CFOs representing many of North America's largest and most influential organizations. This report summarizes CFOs' opinions in four areas: business environment; company priorities and expectations; finance priorities; and CFOs' personal priorities.

The Deloitte CFO Signals survey for the third quarter of 2018 was conducted during the two-week period opening Aug. 6, 2018, and ending Aug. 17, 2018. A total of 132 CFOs responded. Seventy-four percent of respondents were from public companies, and 86 percent were from companies with more than $1 billion in annual revenue. For more information, please see the report.

For more information about Deloitte's CFO Signals, or to inquire about participating in the survey, please contact [email protected]

About Deloitte

Deloitte provides industry-leading audit, consulting, tax and advisory services to many of the world's most admired brands, including more than 85 percent of the Fortune 500 and more than 6,000 private and middle market companies. Our people work across more than 20 industry sectors to make an impact that matters  delivering measurable and lasting results that help reinforce public trust in our capital markets, inspire clients to see challenges as opportunities to transform and thrive, and help lead the way toward a stronger economy and a healthy society. Deloitte is proud to be part of the largest global professional services network serving our clients in the markets that are most important to them.

Deloitte refers to one or more of Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Limited, a UK private company limited by guarantee ("DTTL"), its network of member firms, and their related entities. DTTL and each of its member firms are legally separate and independent entities. DTTL (also referred to as "Deloitte Global") does not provide services to clients. In the United States, Deloitte refers to one or more of the US member firms of DTTL, their related entities that operate using the "Deloitte" name in the United States and their respective affiliates. Certain services may not be available to attest clients under the rules and regulations of public accounting. Please see www.deloitte.com/about to learn more about our global network of member firms.

SOURCE Deloitte

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U.S. Senator Chris Van Hollen visited Maryland House Detox on Friday, September 14, 2018, not only to recognize the 29 th Annual National Recovery Month, but to also discuss the fight against the opioid epidemic and the need to invest in public and private agencies and programs that support this fight, including those funded through the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. "As a member of the Appropriations Committee, Senator Van Hollen has consistently fought for increased funding to support prevention, treatment, and recovery for individuals struggling with substance abuse and other mental health issues and we were honored to be chosen to speak with the Senator about our efforts to be resource to all those struggling with the disease of mental illness and substance use disorders," according to David Stup, the co-founder of Maryland House Detox (MHD) and Director of Operations for Delphi Behavioral Health Group, the parent company to MHD.

Located in Linthicum, Maryland, approximately 10 miles south of Baltimore, Maryland House Detox provides 24 hour, 7 days per week of medically monitored detoxification with an average length of stay of 5-7 days, followed by a highly personalized warm transition into the next level of care. The facility holds 16 beds, with two designated for low-income patients, and is able to accommodate as many as 100 new patients each month.

"With the support of The Halifax Group, we have been able to extend our exceptional clinical treatment to those in and around Anne Arundel County, and through Maryland House Detox, we hope to provide life-changing care to as many individuals struggling with addiction as possible," said Dominic Sirianni, CEO at Delphi Behavioral Health Group.

"Visiting Maryland House Detox was an opportunity to hear stories from folks on the ground about the Senate's efforts to tackle the opioid epidemic. This week the Senate passed the bipartisan Opioid Crisis Response Act. In addition to the $3.8 billion that Congress is planning to allocate in FY2019 to invest in agencies and programs that support this fight, this piece of legislation will help support prevention, treatment, and recovery for individuals struggling with substance abuse and other mental health issues. But our work is only getting started. As I heard at Maryland House Detox, we must keep fighting to end the terrible personal and economic toll the opioid epidemic has had on our communities. I appreciate the work that Maryland House Detox does, and I will continue working to expand addiction treatment and services."

About Delphi Behavioral Health Group

Delphi Behavioral Health Group was created in 2016 with the goal of creating long-term recovery from addiction for individuals suffering from substance abuse and chemical dependence. Addiction and medical professionals use proven methods to heal individuals with the disease of addiction through a variety of detox and residential options designed to address the core issues behind the disease. With over 350 inpatient beds available currently, we are able to extend our services across the country, offering much-needed programs and services to those suffering and seeking help with their addictions. For more information visit www.delphihealthgroup.com.

SOURCE Delphi Behavioral Health Group

Related Links

https://www.delphihealthgroup.com


WASHINGTON, Sept. 20, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Dr. Mostefa Souag, the Director General of Al Jazeera, will appear at a National Press Club Headliners Luncheon on Tuesday, October 2 to discuss what the future looks like for the Al Jazeera Media Network.

Lunch will be served in the club's Holeman Lounge at 12:30 p.m., with remarks beginning at 1 p.m., followed by a question-and-answer session ending at 2 p.m. Tickets cost $25 for National Press Club members (members may purchase two tickets at this rate) and $39 for all other non-member tickets. Please click here to purchase tickets to the luncheon.

For all ticketing-related questions, please email [email protected]. Tickets must be paid for at the time of purchase. To submit a question for the speaker in advance, put ALJAZEERA in the subject line and email to [email protected]. The deadline for submitting questions in advance is 10 a.m. on the day of the luncheon.

About Dr. Mostefa Souag:

Prior to becoming the Acting Director General of Al Jazeera Media Network, Dr. Souag held various senior level positions within the network, including director of news for Al Jazeera and media adviser to the chairman of the board of Al Jazeera Media Network. He also served as director of the Al Jazeera Center for Studies and spent some time based in London as a bureau chief. Before joining Al Jazeera Media Network, Dr. Souag worked at the BBC World Service and The Middle East Broadcasting Center. He holds a PhD in literary studies, and was a professor of literary theory at the University of Algiers until 1993 when he left teaching to pursue a career in journalism and media.

The National Press Club is located on the 13th Floor of the National Press Building at 529 14th St., NW, Washington, D.C.

PRESS CONTACT:

Lindsay Underwood,

[email protected],

(202) 662-7561

SOURCE National Press Club
HOUSTON, Sept. 20, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- EOG Resources, Inc. (NYSE: EOG) (EOG) will host a conference call to discuss third quarter 2018 results on Friday, November 2, 2018, at 9 a.m. Central time (10 a.m. Eastern time). Please visit the Investors/Overview page on the EOG website to access a live webcast of the conference call. If you are unable to listen to the live webcast, a replay will be available on the Investors/Events & Presentations page for one year.

If you have any questions, please contact Angie Lewis at 713-651-6722.

EOG Resources, Inc. is one of the largest independent (non-integrated) crude oil and natural gas companies in the United States with proved reserves in the United States, Trinidad, the United Kingdom and China. EOG Resources, Inc. is listed on the New York Stock Exchange and is traded under the ticker symbol "EOG." To learn more about EOG, visit the website at www.eogresources.com.

For Further Information Contact: Investors

David J. Streit

(713) 571-4902

Neel Panchal

(713) 571-4884

W. John Wagner

(713) 571-4404





Investors/Media

Kimberly M. Ehmer

(713) 571-4676

SOURCE EOG Resources, Inc.

Related Links

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HOUSTON, Sept. 20, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- EPIC Insurance Brokers and Consultants announced today that Matt Lumelleau has joined the firm's Property & Casualty practice as a Principal, reporting to EPIC Managing Principal and Director Southwest Region, KJ Wagner.

Lumelleau, based in Houston, will be responsible for new business development, the design, placement and management of property/casualty insurance programs; and providing risk management strategies and solutions for mid-market and large clients across a range of industries.

Lumelleau joins EPIC from Lockton, where he supported the Houston office as a producer, unit manager and team leader. Previously, he held positions with Tri-City Brokerage as an associate vice president and AIG Environmental as a senior underwriter.

"We are thrilled to continue the growth of our Property Casualty Practice in the Southwest region with Matt's addition," said KJ Wagner. "He brings a strong risk management background that adds tremendous value to our clients and our organization as a whole. Matt will be a terrific addition to the EPIC Property Casualty team."

Lumelleau graduated from Regis University and The National Outdoor Leadership School.

He can be reached at [email protected] or 303.482.7981.

About EPIC

EPIC is a unique and innovative retail property & casualty and employee benefits insurance brokerage and consulting firm. EPIC has created a values-based, client-focused culture that attracts and retains top talent, fosters employee satisfaction and loyalty and sustains a high level of customer service excellence.

EPIC team members have consistently recognized their company as a "Best Place to Work" in multiple regions and as a "Best Place to Work in the Insurance Industry" nationally.

EPIC now has more than 1,400 team members operating from 50 offices across the U.S., providing Property & Casualty, Employee Benefits, Specialty Programs and Private Client solutions to more than 20,000 clients.

With run rate revenues greater than $400 million, EPIC ranks among the top 20 retail insurance brokers in the United States. Backed by Oak Hill Capital Partners, the company continues to expand organically and through strategic acquisitions across the country. For additional information, please visit www.epicbrokers.com.

*PHOTO Link for media: Send2Press.com/300dpi/18-0920s2p-Lumelleau-300dpi.jpg

This release was issued through Send2Press, a unit of Neotrope. For more information, visit Send2Press Newswire at https://www.Send2Press.com

SOURCE EPIC Insurance Brokers and Consultants

Related Links

http://www.epicbrokers.com


NEW YORK, Sept. 20, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Despite Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) being prevalent in India amongst the Dawoodi Bohra community and some Sunni Muslim sects, India does not have a separate law against it.

During an ongoing Public Interest Litigation seeking a ban on FGM, the Supreme Court of India remarked that the practice is a clear violation of a woman's bodily integrity as laid down in the Indian constitution.

In India, 25 representatives from the global anti-FGM movement, and UN agencies recently came together to discuss the actions needed to eliminate this harmful practice by 2030, in line with the Sustainable Development Goals, at a roundtable organized by WeSpeakOut and Equality Now. Equality Now is an international human rights organization that works to protect and promote the rights of women and girls around the world.

FGM among the Bohra community - where it is referred to as Khafz - was shrouded in secrecy until 2015, when the first-known anti-FGM/Khafz case against a Bohra religious leader and two others went to trial in Australia.

In April 2017, a Michigan-based doctor from the Bohra community was arrested and charged, along with two others, for performing FGM. This is the first time in the US anyone has faced prosecution under the federal FGM law.

In India, 25 representatives from the global anti-FGM movement, and UN agencies recently came together to discuss the actions needed to eliminate this harmful practice by 2030, in line with the Sustainable Development Goals, at a roundtable organized by WeSpeakOut and Equality Now.

In a joint statement participants concluded: "FGM is a violation of the human rights of women and girls, under both international law and the Indian constitution.... It has no health benefits, and in fact, often has both short-term and long-term health and psychological consequences."

Highlighting the need for protection of young girls, they stated it is the Indian Government's responsibility to ensure instances of FGM/Khafz are prosecuted, under existing criminal laws.

Indian legal system should include the WHO's full definition of FGM (including Khafz) and introduce a separate law banning the practice.

Participants recommended the Government must create awareness on the negative impacts of FGM, specifically asking doctors to refrain from performing it and prioritizing preventive measures. The Indian Medical Association has since issued a statement against FGM.

Masooma Ranalvi, WeSpeakOut Founder, says:

"Although sharing my story helped act as a catalyst, what is happening is about much more than my personal experience. We are living in a time where women have really found their voices. Centerstaging this much secret and hidden issue through personal narratives has helped us garner support for our campaign."

Shelby Quast, Equality Now Regional Director of the Americas, says:

"The key to addressing the practice is to reframe the issue as a child protection and human rights issue, rather than a religious one."

For these measures to be successful there must be political will. Following PM Modi's recent meeting with Bohra religious leaders, the Government must show urgency in tackling this issue by officially condemning the act and beginning discussions with religious leaders to end FGM.

Equality Now is an international human rights organization that works to protect and promote the rights of women and girls around the world. https://www.equalitynow.org/india_fgm

WeSpeakOut strives to work for equal rights of Bohra women in all spheres of life by amplifying the voices of Bohra women. www.wespeakout.org/about/our-mission/

Media Contact:

Holly Cooper

[email protected]

212-586-0906 x 16

SOURCE Equality Now

Related Links

https://www.equalitynow.org


LONDON, Sept. 20, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Ernst & Young LLP (EY) today announces a strategic alliance with leading business transformation specialist Oliver Wight EAME (Europe, Africa and Middle East) to help organizations address their planning challenges.

Those planning challenges include leveraging new technologies that bring efficiencies while requiring increased collaboration, new behaviors and culture change to work with more transparent data across the entire company, combined with rising customer demands, an evolving market landscape and the pressure to improve profit margin.

The alliance will initially work with clients headquartered in the EAME (Europe, Africa and Middle East) region.

The alliance will leverage Oliver Wight's experience in its Sales and Operations Planning process and its Integrated Business Planning (IBP) model with the experience of EY in supply chain financial and commercial planning practices and digital capabilities. Together, EY and Oliver Wight will focus on helping management teams to use digital tools to assess their enterprise across the value chain, helping to improve their view of the supply chain and helping to enable them to develop plans that align markets, supply chain, operations and finance.

The organizations will work together to develop the next generation of IBP, which is the business planning model for aligning demand, supply and product portfolio plans, helping businesses to allocate critical resources to satisfy their customers in the most profitable way. EY and Oliver Wight will leverage collaboration and technology to deliver end-to-end transparency in profitable decision-making, linking strategy to execution across an organization.

Les Brookes, CEO, Oliver Wight and Alliance Leader, says:

"Both Oliver Wight EAME and EY have a long history in serving their clients well and doing so in a complementary way. Oliver Wight EAME has a strong capability in demonstrating to C-level executives the way in which integrated business planning can help provide transformational results and EY has the scale to accelerate implementations and therefore results. Oliver Wight and EY will collaborate to address the processes, operating models, organization, behaviors, culture and digital technologies companies need to compete."

EY and Oliver Wight EAME are already collaborating to help a number of clients. This includes helping the medical device industry address supply chain issues for improved customer delivery; working with the postal services industry to use data analytics to improve operations; and supporting office supplies organizations to transform their planning processes through using advanced data analytics.

Glenn Steinberg, EY Global and EY Americas Supply Chain Leader, Advisory, says:

"There is considerable disruption in the way enterprises work, plan, execute and make decisions in their businesses. For example, implementing new technologies  like blockchain, intelligent automation or artificial intelligence -- can provide efficiencies but typically require more collaboration, and adopting new behaviors and culture change. For enterprises to be competitive, it is essential for them to be able to break down silos and drive end-to-end transformation across their business, which is the focus of the EY alliance with Oliver Wight."

Tanguy Caillet, Global Supply Chain Planning Capability Leader at Ernst & Young LLP and Alliance Leader for the Oliver Wight EAME alliance, says:

"Through our alliance with Oliver Wight EAME, we will work together to help enterprises discover new ways to reach and serve their customers, engage with their employees, maximize their production and improve how they manage their finances across their organizations. We believe the strengths of EY in commercial, financial, supply chain and operations and advanced data analytics combined with Oliver Wight's experience in sales and integrated business planning will provide enterprises with the tools they need to transform themselves in a time of tremendous change and challenges."

For more information, visit www.ey.com/oliverwight.

Barbara Burgess Zoe Davis EY Global Media Relations Oliver Wight EAME Marketing +1 212 773 1652 +44 (0) 1452 397200 [email protected] [email protected]

SOURCE EY

Related Links

http://www.ey.com


BOCA RATON, Fla., Sept. 20, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- With less than seven weeks before Election Day, Democratic U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson and Republican Gov. Rick Scott are in a statistical tie in Florida's critical U.S. Senate race, while Democratic nominee Andrew Gillum holds a narrow lead over Republican nominee Ron DeSantis in the battle to be the state's next governor, according to the statewide survey by the Florida Atlantic University Business and Economics Polling Initiative (FAU BEPI).

Since the last FAU survey less than one month ago, Scott has seen his six-point lead on Nelson shrink to a narrow gap of less than one point, 42.0 percent to 41.3 percent, with 11.4 percent undecided. The margin of error for the survey is +/- 3.3 percent.

Scott has a slight edge in overall job approval, with 42.6 percent of voters approving Scott's performance as governor and 38 percent disapproving. Nelson has an even split on his performance as senator, with 36.5 percent approving and 36.9 percent disapproving.

In the gubernatorial race, Gillum, the mayor of Tallahassee, has 41.3 percent of the vote, while DeSantis, a former U.S. representative, garnered 38.5 percent, with 15.3 percent undecided.

Regarding the algae blooms that have plagued Florida's coasts, 32.2 percent of voters said the state government is most responsible, while 16.7 percent said it was city and county government, 13.3 percent said the federal government and 37.8 percent said they don't know.

A ban on assault weapons is also supported by a majority of voters (50.7 percent), while 30 percent oppose and 19.4 percent are undecided.

A majority of voters (52.2 percent) supports raising the minimum wage in Florida to $15 an hour, a proposal that Gillum has strongly supported, while 27.2 percent oppose such a hike and 20.6 percent are undecided.

Nearly half of those surveyed (48.5 percent) support restoring felon voting rights for people who have completed their sentences, a question before voters in one of several proposed constitutional amendments on the Nov. 6 ballot.

U.S. President Donald Trump's approval rating fell four points from last month's poll to 38.7 percent, while his disapproval rating stands at 47 percent.

The survey, conducted Sept. 13-16, polled 850 Florida registered voters who said they are likely to vote.

- FAU -

SOURCE Florida Atlantic University Business and Economics Polling Initiative
Over the past several years, General has consistently delivered significant year-over-year growth, making it one the fastest-growing tobacco brands in the country. The look was designed to continue this momentum by increasing brand recognition and visibility in retail stores. The enhancements will help consumers more easily select their preferred style of General and improve the already premium experience the product provides.

The new branding resulted from a collaborative process that involved the both Swedish Match North America and European Marketing teams and their agency partners.

General Snus has been offering an elevated tobacco experience since 1866 with a blend of 22 premium tobaccos imported directly from Sweden. It will continue to be available in mint, mini-mint, wintergreen, white and original flavors. For more information, visit the website at www.generalsnus.com.

For further information, please contact:

Sandy Fowler-Jones

Director of Communications

804-787-5132 (office)

SOURCE General Snus

Related Links

http://www.generalsnus.com


DUBLIN, Sept 20, 2018 /PRNewswire/ --

The "Long-Term Evolution (LTE) Market - Forecasts from 2018 to 2023" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering.

The global long term evolution (LTE) market was valued at US$5.302 billion in 2017 and is expected to reach US$50.102 billion in 2023 growing at CAGR of 45.40% during the forecast period.

According to Internet World Stats, the number of internet users have increased from 1,574 million in 2008 to 4,156 million in 2017 with internet penetration rate increased from 23.5% in 2008 to 54.4% in 2017. With increasing internet penetration rate across the globe, the need for advanced wireless technology is surging among the population so as to get better connectivity.

Long Term Evolution (LTE) is a standard for 4G wireless broadband technology that offers increased network capacity and speed to wireless device users. It is a technology that offers higher peak data transfer rates- up to 100 Mbps downstream and 30 Mbps upstream, reduced latency, scalable bandwidth capacity and backward-compatibility with existing GSM (Global System for Mobile) and UMTS (Universal Mobile Telecommunications System) technology.

Rapid urbanization, fast industrial growth and advancement in communication technology are leading the way for advanced wireless networks and solutions. Rising trend of automation and smart factories in a number of industries such as automotive, manufacturing, and etc. are boosting the demand for fast and high-speed internet services. This, in turn, is compelling service providers to invest in new wireless technologies to improve the network services across the globe. The key players are increasingly investing in LTE technology so as to provide high-speed data services to the users.

For an instance, in April 2016, 3 Sweden invested in TD-LTE- Advanced mobile broadband technology to enhance quality of service in Sweden. In February 2017, Vodafone heavily invested in the deployment of 4G LTE networks in India. The company awarded $300 million contract to Ericsson to deploy 4G services in different telecom zones such as UP West, Rajasthan, Odisha, Assam, and North East.

However, lower internet penetration rate in some regions such as Sub Saharan Africa due to lack of network infrastructure can restrain the growth of LTE market.

Competitive Intelligence

The global Long-term evolution (LTE)is competitive owing to the presence of well diversified global and regional players. The key players are ZTE, SAMSUNG, FUJITSU, Cisco, QualcoMM, Aricent Inc., Nokia, Motorola Solutions, Inc., HUAWEI, Ericsson, Alcatel-Lucent, and Juniper Networks among others.

Segmentation:



Segmentation:



By Mode



FDD (Frequency Division Duplex)

TDD (Time Division Duplex)

By Technology



LTE OFDM (Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplex)

LTE MIMO (Multiple Input Multiple Output)

LTE SAE (System Architecture Evolution)

By Application



Audio/Video Telephony

Live TV

Browsing

Gaming

Sharing

By End User Device



Smartphones

Tablets

Laptops

Key Topics Covered:



1. Introduction



2. Research Methodology



3. Executive Summary



4. Market Dynamics



5. Global LTE Market By Mode



6. Global LTE Market By Technology



7. Global LTE Market By Application



8. Global LTE Market By End User Device



9. Global LTE Market By Geography



10. Competitive Intelligence



11. Company Profiles



ZTE Corporation

FUJITSU

Nokia

Cisco

Qualcomm

NEC Corporation

Huawei

Aricent Inc

AT&T

T-Mobile

Verizon

Alcatel-Lucent

Samsung

Ericsson

LG

For more information about this report visit

https://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/q4p432/global_longterm?w=5

Did you know that we also offer Custom Research? Visit our Custom Research page to learn more and schedule a meeting with our Custom Research Manager.

Media Contact:

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SOURCE Research and Markets

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NEW YORK, Sept. 20, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- To calculate the market size, the report considers the revenue generated from military simulations and virtual training solution providers.





Read the full report: https://www.reportlinker.com/p04828821





Technavio's analysts forecast the Global Military Simulation and Virtual Training Market to grow at a CAGR of 5.04% during the period 2018-2022.



Covered in this report

The report covers the present scenario and the growth prospects of the military simulation and virtual training market. To calculate the market size, the report considers the revenue generated from military simulation and virtual training.



The market is divided into the following segments based on geography:

 Americas

 APAC

 EMEA



Technavio's report, military simulation and virtual training market 2018-2022, has been prepared based on an in-depth market analysis with inputs from industry experts. The report covers the market landscape and its growth prospects over the coming years. The report also includes a discussion of the key vendors operating in this market.



Key vendors

 Bohemia Interactive Simulations

 CAE

 Fidelity Technologies

 Kratos Defense & Security Solutions

 L3 Technologies

 Lockheed Martin

 Rockwell Collins

 Saab



Market driver

 Increasing investments in simulations

 For a full, detailed list, view our report



Market challenge

 High cost of training

 For a full, detailed list, view our report



Market trend

 Increased emphasis on AI for military simulations

 For a full, detailed list, view our report



Key questions answered in this report

 What will the market size be in 2022 and what will the growth rate be?

 What are the key market trends?

 What is driving this market?

 What are the challenges to market growth?

 Who are the key vendors in this market space?

 What are the market opportunities and threats faced by the key vendors?

 What are the strengths and weaknesses of the key vendors?



You can request one free hour of our analyst's time when you purchase this market report. Details are provided within the report.



Read the full report: https://www.reportlinker.com/p04828821



About Reportlinker

ReportLinker is an award-winning market research solution. Reportlinker finds and organizes the latest industry data so you get all the market research you need - instantly, in one place.



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Contact Clare: [email protected]

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SOURCE Reportlinker

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DUBLIN, Sept. 20, 2018 /PRNewswire/ --

The "Pulse Oximeters Market - Forecasts from 2018 to 2023" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering.

The pulse oximeter market is projected to grow at a CAGR of 7.01% to reach US$2.020 billion in 2023 from US$1.346 billion in 2017

Pulse Oximeters works on the principle of pulse oximetry, which is used to determine the fraction of oxygen-saturated hemoglobin with respect to total hemoglobin. The Pulse Oximeters are widely used in the healthcare industry for monitoring the blood oxygen levels of patients, in emergency situations, operations and intensive care units, thereby boosting the market growth.

Also, factors such as declining cost and improving result precision will further fuel the market growth. The North America region is expected to witness a high growth due to the presence of a strong healthcare industry coupled with favorable innovation environment and huge research and development expenditure.

Major industry players profiled as part of the report are GE Healthcare, Masimo, and Koninklijke Philips N.V. among others.

Segmentation:



The pulse oximeter market has been analyzed through the following segments:



By Type



Fingertip Pulse Oximeter

Handheld Oximeter

Fetal Pulse Oximeter

Tabletop Pulse Oximeter

Wristband Pulse Oximeter

Pediatric Pulse Oximeter

By End-User



Hospital & Clinics

Ambulatory Surgery Center

Home Care

Key Topics Covered:



1. Introduction



2. Research Methodology



3. Executive Summary



4. Market Dynamics



5. Pulse Oximeter Market By Type



6. Pulse Oximeter Market By End User



7. Pulse Oximeter Market By Geography



8. Competitive Intelligence



9. Company Profiles



GE Healthcare

Nonin Medical Inc.

Masimo

Mettler-Toledo International, Inc.

Medtronic

Koninklijke Philips N.V.

For more information about this report visit

https://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/7qb2xh/global_pulse?w=5

Did you know that we also offer Custom Research? Visit our Custom Research page to learn more and schedule a meeting with our Custom Research Manager.

Media Contact:

Research and Markets

Laura Wood, Senior Manager

[email protected]



For E.S.T Office Hours Call +1-917-300-0470

For U.S./CAN Toll Free Call +1-800-526-8630

For GMT Office Hours Call +353-1-416-8900



U.S. Fax: 646-607-1907

Fax (outside U.S.): +353-1-481-1716

SOURCE Research and Markets

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LONDON, Sept. 20, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- The report on global sulfur fertilizer provides qualitative and quantitative analysis for the period of 2016 to 2024.







Download the full report: https://www.reportbuyer.com/product/5265764







The report predicts the global sulfur fertilizer to grow with a CAGR of 2.6% over the forecast period of 2018-2024. The study on sulfur fertilizer covers the analysis of the leading geographies such as North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific and RoW for the period of 2016 to 2024.

Sulfur fertilizer plays several important function in plant such as- it helps to the formation of chlorophyll that permits photosynthesis through which plants produce starch, sugars, oils, fats, vitamins and other compounds, also it helps in synthesis in oil. Additionally, it is useful in the activation of enzymes, which aid in biochemical reactions in the plant. It increases crop yields and improves produce quality, both of which determine the market price a farmer would get for his produce. It improves protein and oil percentage in seeds, cereal quality for milling and baking, marketability of dry coconut kernel (copra), quality of tobacco, nutritive value of forages, etc. Increase in the trend of organic food consumption, depressed commodity prices, regulated pricing policy and lower farm income are the major restraints for this market.

On the basis of region, the Global sulfur fertilizer market is segmented into North America, Europe, Asia, and the Rest of the World (RoW). Asia-Pacific dominates the global sulfur fertilizer market. The market in the Asia Pacific region is driven by growing application of sulfur fertilizer for better quality farm produce, growing awareness about benefits of sulfur fertilizer among farmers, and impetus by the several governments for the application of sulfur fertilizer with nitrogen and potassium.

Key Developments:-

ADNOC and OCP Broaden Their Partnership and Intend to Develop a Global World-Class Fertilizers Joint Venture

In May 2018, The Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC) and OCP Group of Morocco (OCP) entered in an agreement to explore the phased creation of a new global fertilizers joint venture, in a move that would accelerate the execution of both ADNOC and OCP's international strategies. The proposed joint venture will be build on both companies' competitive advantages, namely ADNOC's world-scale sulfur production, ammonia and gas expertise, and shipping and logistics network, and OCP's access to large phosphate resources, its century-long fertilizers know-how and its marketing network, to develop a new global fertilizers producer. The proposed partnership will comprise two fertilizer production hubs, one in the UAE and one in Morocco (utilizing both existing and new assets), giving the proposed joint venture global market reach.

FACT ties up with Kochi refinery for sulfur supply

In October,2017, Fertilizers and Chemicals Travancore (FACT) has reached an agreement with Bharat Petroleum Corporation's Kochi refinery for supply of sulphur, a key raw material for the fertilizer company. FACT stood to gain substantially from the agreement for supply of the raw material from the neighbouring refinery. As per the agreement, the Kochi refinery will provide around 1,20,000 tonnes of sulphur per year. This is about 60% of the total sulphur requirement of FACT. It was expected that the refinery would be able to fully meet the sulphur requirement of FACT with the commissioning of the expanded refinery.



The report on sulfur fertilizer is a comprehensive study and presentation of drivers, restraints, opportunities, demand factors, market size, forecasts, and trends in the global sulfur fertilizer over the period of 2016 to 2024. Moreover, the report is collective presentation of primary and secondary research findings.

Porter's five forces model in the report provides insights into the competitive rivalry, supplier and buyer positions in the market and opportunities for the new entrants in the global sulfur fertilizer over the period of 2016 to 2024. Further, IGR- Growth Matrix given in the report brings an insight on the investment areas that existing or new market players can consider.



Research Methodology



A) Primary Research

Our primary research involves extensive interviews and analysis of the opinions provided by the primary respondents. The primary research starts with identifying and approaching the primary respondents, the primary respondents are approached through

1. Key Opinion Leaders associated with Infinium Global Research

2. Internal and External subject matter experts

3. Professionals and participants from LinkedIn, Hoovers, Factiva and Bloggers



Our primary research respondents typically include

1. Executives working with leading companies in the market under review

2. Product/brand/marketing managers

3. CXO level executives

4. Regional/zonal/ country managers

5. Vice President level executives.



B) Secondary Research

Secondary research involves extensive exploring through the secondary sources of information available in both public domain and paid sources. At Infinium Global Research, each research study is based on over 500 hours of secondary research accompanied by primary research. The information obtained through the secondary sources is validated through the crosscheck on various data sources.



The secondary sources of the data typically include

1. Company reports and publications

2. Government/institutional publications

3. Trade and associations journals

4. Databases such as WTO, OECD, World Bank, and among others.

5. Websites and publications by research agencies



Segment Covered

The global sulfur fertilizer is segmented on the basis of type, formulation, application method and crop type.



Global Sulfur Fertilizer by Type

- Sulfate Fertilizers

- Elemental Sulfur Fertilizers

- Sulfates Of Micronutrients

- Others

Global Sulfur Fertilizer by Formulation

- Liquid Formulation

- Dry Formulation

Global Sulfur Fertilizer by Application Method

- Band

- Broadcast

- Seed RoW

- Foliar

- Others

Global Sulfur Fertilizer by Crop Type

- Conventional Agriculture

- Controlled Environment Agriculture



Company Profiles

- Agrium

- Yara

- The Mosaic Company

- Coromandel International

- ICL

- K+S Aktiengesellschaft

- Potash Corp. of Saskatchewan

- Eurochem

- Deepak Fertilisers and Petrochemicals

- The Kugler Company



How this report delivers?

1. Comprehensive analysis of global as well as regional markets of sulfur fertilizer.

2. Complete coverage of all the segments in sulfur fertilizer to analyze the trends, developments in the global market and forecast of market size up to 2024.

3. Comprehensive analysis of the companies operating in global sulfur fertilizer. The company profile includes analysis of product portfolio, revenue, SWOT analysis and latest developments of the company.

4. IGR- Growth Matrix presents analysis of the product segments and geographies that market players should focus to invest, consolidate, expand and/or diversify.



Download the full report: https://www.reportbuyer.com/product/5265764



About Reportbuyer

Reportbuyer is a leading industry intelligence solution that provides all market research reports from top publishers



For more information:

Sarah Smith

Research Advisor at Reportbuyer.com

Email: [email protected]

Tel: +1 (718) 213 4904

Website: www.reportbuyer.com

SOURCE ReportBuyer

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DAEJEON, Korea, Sept. 20, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Global automotive supplier Hanon Systems (KS: 018880) today announced it has signed an agreement with Magna International Inc. to acquire its global Fluid Pressure & Controls business in a transaction valued at approximately $1.23 billion, before the assumption of net debt and pension liabilities at closing, and subject to customary closing adjustments for net working capital.

The business to be acquired provides automakers thermal and energy management solutions that improve conventional and electrified powertrain efficiency, which aligns with the vision of Hanon Systems. Products that are part of this business encompass a range of electronic and mechanical pumps for thermal systems and transmission systems, and brushless DC (BLDC) motor and electronic cooling fan technologies. Hanon Systems expects this business will significantly contribute to the company's focus on e-mobility by increasing future business in electrified solutions through its BLDC motor-based electronic cooling fan, electronic water pump and electronic transmission oil pump technologies.

The scope of the transaction includes 10 manufacturing and engineering facilities across Europe, North America and Asia, and approximately 4,200 employees. In 2017, the business to be acquired generated total sales of $1.4 billion. The acquisition is subject to regulatory and other approvals with completion expected in the first quarter of 2019.

Hanon Systems Chairman of the Board and Chairman of Hahn & Company, the company's majority shareholder, Yeo-Eul Yoon said, this acquisition will reinforce the company's existing offering and strengthen the value proposition it brings to global automakers as a leading full-line provider of thermal and energy management system solutions.

"Magna's global Fluid Pressure & Controls business has a strong reputation and solid customer base," noted Y.E. Yoon. "This business is a strategic fit to enhance our company's capability and competitive position with leading technology for conventional and electrified vehicles. With this acquisition, Hanon Systems is in a better position to satisfy the increasing demands of automakers for electrified thermal and energy management solutions. At the same time, it will further diversify our global customer base, and broaden our global reach and talent base to better serve customers where they operate to deliver even greater value to our stakeholders."

At year-end 2017, Hanon Systems reported total sales of approximately $4.9 billion. The transaction offers Hanon Systems the opportunity to accelerate growth, and the potential to generate long-term margin improvement through economies of scale and operational synergies.

Advising Hanon Systems on the transaction is Evercore.

About Hanon Systems

Hanon Systems is a full-line supplier of automotive thermal and energy management solutions for conventional and electrified vehicles. Its offering includes a wide range of solutions in the areas of heating ventilation and air conditioning; powertrain cooling; compressor; fluid transport; and thermal and emissions. The company currently employs more than 16,500 people across 20 countries at its 40 manufacturing and 18 engineering sites. To learn more, visit hanonsystems.com.

SOURCE Hanon Systems

Related Links

http://hanonsystems.com


PULLACH, Germany, Sept. 20, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- IFCO, the leading global provider of reusable packaging solutions for fresh foods, announced that it is inaugurating a sustainability certification initiative for its retailer customers in Europe and North America. IFCO is amongst the most sustainable logistics companies worldwide. Therefore, retailers awarded with IFCO's sustainability certificate will benefit from credible proof of their commitment to environmental protection and sustainability.

IFCO is constantly monitoring the environmental benefits generated by its logistics concept, the IFCO SmartCycleTM, which is based on the principle of "share and reuse". All IFCO RPCs are reused over 50 times during their lifetime, and at every cycle are put through a rigorous cleaning and inspection process before being delivered for the next cycle. Damaged RPCs that cannot be repaired are 100% recycled and used for the production of new IFCO RPCs.

Several studies have proven that the use of RPCs has a meaningful contribution to the environment by leading to savings in terms of CO 2 (up to 60%), energy (64%), water (80%), solid waste (up to 86%), and food product damage (up to 96%), when compared with single-use packaging.

In Europe and North America, IFCO business enabled the following savings in 2017:

460,000 tonnes of CO 2 , equivalent to 241,000 fewer cars per year

, equivalent to 241,000 fewer cars per year 8 million cubic meters of water, equivalent to over 188 million five-minute showers

29,500 terajoules of electricity, enough to power 15 million light bulbs for a year

237,000 tonnes of solid waste, equivalent to the trash produced by 171 million individuals per day

42,200 tonnes of food product waste, equivalent to 70 million meals

Find the complete text here: ftp://presse.hbi.de/pub/IFCO/Sustainability_Certificate/IFCO_Sustainability-Certificate.pdf

Find images here: ftp://presse.hbi.de/pub/IFCO/Sustainability_Certificate/IFCO_Environmental_Benefits.jpg

Contact:

HBI GmbH

Stefan Schmidt

Tel.: +49-(0)89-99-38-87-30

[email protected]

SOURCE IFCO Systems
SUZHOU, China, Sept. 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Innovent Biologics (Innovent), a world-class China-based biopharmaceutical company that develops and commercializes high quality drugs, today presented clinical trial data on cohort D of sintilimab clinical studies at the 2018 Annual Meeting of Chinese Society of Clinical Oncology (CSCO). In this phase 1b clinical trial (NCT02937116) patients suffering from first-line non-squamous non-small cell lung cancer (ns-NSCLC) were treated with sintilimab, a fully human anti-programmed cell death 1 (PD-1) monoclonal antibody, in combination with pemetrexed (Alimta) and cisplatin.

The combination demonstrated an objective response rate (ORR) of 68.4%, based on data from 19 patients with at least one radiological assessment among totally the 21 patients in this cohort.

As of the data analysis cutoff on June 28, 2018, the median duration of response (DOR), progression free survival (PFS) and overall survival (OS) have not been reached. The study shows evidence of anti-tumor efficacy and an acceptable safety profile. Based on the efficacy and safety profile from this early phase clinical trial, we have initiated ORIENT-11, a randomized, double-blinded, multicenter, phase III study of sintilimab versus placebo, both in combination with pemetrexed (Alimta) and platinum-based chemotherapy as first-line treatment for advanced or recurrent ns-NSCLC in China. This study is currently under recruitment and Innovent plans to enroll 378 patients.

"It was encouraging to learn the outstanding efficacy of sintilimab in combination with pemetrexed and cisplatin for first line treatment of NSCLC. I hope to see the approval of sintilimab for first line treatment of NSCLC in the near future allowing more patients suffering from NSCLC to benefit from it," said Professor Caicun Zhou, from the Shanghai Pulmonary Hospital.

"Lung cancer has the highest morbidity and mortality among malignant tumors in China. It causes unbearable suffering for the patient as well as one's immediate family. Thus the process of drug research and development is actually a race against time," said Michael Yu, Founder, Chief Executive Officer and Chairman of Innovent, "At present, Innovent has several clinical studies in the field of lung cancer. We hope these clinical trials in combination with sintilimab will lead to more effective treatment methods for cancer patients, giving the hope of survival and quality of life for these patients and their families."

About Advanced or Recurrent Non-squamous Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer

Lung cancer has the highest incidence and mortality among all malignancies in China. NSCLC accounts for about 80% to 85% of all lung cancer cases, and about 70% of NSCLC patients have locally advanced or metastatic at first diagnosis. In addition, many patients with early-stage NSCLC after undergoing potentially curative surgery, eventually die from disease progression after disease recurrence or distant metastasis. Of the 70% of NSCLC patients in China who present with non-squamous histology type, 40% harbor an EGFR mutation. EGFR inhibitors are recommended as first-line treatment for advanced NSCLC patients with EGFR mutations. An ALK re-arrangement occurs in about 3% of patients with ns-NSCLC and ALK inhibitors are recommended for this patients population. The first-line standard treatment for advanced ns-NSCLC patients without EGFR mutations or ALK re-arrangement in China is platinum-based doublet chemotherapy. The unmet medical needs for these patients are high.

About Sintilimab

Sintilimab is a fully human anti-PD-1 antibody. It binds to the PD-1 receptor on T cells, blocking the PD-L1 ligand from interacting with PD-1 to help restore T-cell response and immune response, thus destroying the tumor cells. Sintilimab is an anti-PD-1 monoclonal antibody jointly developed by Innovent and Eli Lilly and Company in China. National Medical Products Administration (NMPA, formerly known as CFDA) accepted the New Drug Application (NDA) submitted by Innovent for sintilimab on April 16, 2018, and granted it priority review status on April 23, 2018. The indication for the first new drug application is relapsed/refractory classical Hodgkin's Lymphoma.

About Innovent

Inspired by the spirit of "Start with Integrity, Succeed through Action", Innovent's mission is to develop and commercialize high quality biopharmaceutical products that are affordable to ordinary people. Since its establishment from 2011, Innovent has developed a fully-integrated platform which includes R&D, CMC (Chemistry, Manufacturing, and Controls), clinical development and commercialization capabilities, and a pipeline of innovative and commercially promising monoclonal antibodies and other biologics in the fields of oncology, ophthalmology, autoimmune and metabolic diseases. Innovent has built up a pipeline of 17 antibody drug candidates, with four core products in late-stage clinical development in China and one that has a New Drug Application (NDA) accepted by the NMPA with priority review status.

Innovent has a highly talented international team, including many expert returnees with experience in innovative biopharmaceutical drug discovery, development, production and commercialization. The company has also entered into various key strategic alliances with Eli Lilly and Company, Adimab, and other biopharmaceutical companies. Innovent has raised 580 million USD in private financing from numerous world-renowned VC or PE firms, including Eight Roads and F-Prime Capital (which form part of the proprietary investment business of Fidelity), Lilly Asia Ventures, Capital Group, Legend Capital, Temasek, Rock Springs Capital, Cormorant Private Healthcare, Hillhouse Capital, China Life, Ally Bridge, Taikang Insurance Group, and State Development & Investment Corporation.

About the partnership between Innovent Biologics and Eli Lilly and Company

Eli Lilly and Company (Lilly) and Innovent Biologics (Innovent) in March 2015 announced one of the largest biotech drug development collaborations in China to date between a multi-national and domestic company. Under the terms of the agreement, Lilly and Innovent shall collaborate to provide support to the development and potential commercialization of at least three cancer treatments over the next decade. In October 2015, they announced an expansion of their drug development collaboration. These collaborations represent that Innovent has struck one of the most comprehensive strategic partnerships of any Chinese company with a multinational partner in terms of the scope and breadth ranging from discovery to commercialization and involving up to six therapeutic antibodies for cancers.

For inquiries, please contact:

Email: [email protected]

Tel: 86 512 6956 6088

SOURCE Innovent Biologics, Inc.
LOS ANGELES, Sept. 20, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- International Medical Corps and Children's Health Fund are working together to help communities affected by the catastrophic flooding in the Carolinas caused by Hurricane Florence. Children's Health Fund (CHF) is supplying a mobile medical clinic (MMC) and driver to International Medical Corps, which will staff the MMC with a team comprising physicians, nurses and support staff.

International Medical Corps will staff a mobile medical clinic with a team comprising physicians, nurses and support staff. International Medical Corps will staff a mobile medical clinic with a team comprising physicians, nurses and support staff.

The organizations' efforts are part of a larger response by state and local governments to provide critical assistance to rural and other harder-to-reach communities where shelters are overflowing and providing emergency care is difficult. To serve patients affected by a variety of conditionsincluding wound care, medications, and skin and breathing conditions, among othersthe MMC will first travel to Homestead Health Center in Willard, NC.

Nancy Aossey, president and CEO of International Medical Corps, praised the collaboration between the two organizations. "This fully outfitted mobile medical clinic will enable our team of healthcare providers to efficiently and effectively reach a large number of people who've been affected by the storm and who have found it difficult to receive treatment," she said. "Our work with Children's Health Fund will enable us to further expand our capabilities to provide disaster relief in the United States."

"Children's Health Fund is thrilled to be partnering with International Medical Corps in this response, and those to come," said Dennis Walto, CEO of Children's Health Fund. "Bringing together International Medical Corps' global and domestic emergency-response capacity and Children's Health Fund's pediatric expertise and mobility will enable us to provide children and families affected by Hurricane Florence with the vital healthcare services they need to make it through this crisis."

As a global first responder with almost 35 years of experience delivering emergency relief in difficult environments, International Medical Corps is ready to respond immediately when disaster strikes. In 2017, International Medical Corps teams were in Florida and Puerto Rico following hurricanes Irma and Maria, providing medical supplies, clean water storage, generators and cash grants to primary healthcare networks, and deploying mobile medical teams to provide primary healthcare in hard-to-reach areas. With domestic resources stretched as hurricane seasons have intensified in recent years, International Medical Corps is working more closely than ever before with agencies in the United States to respond to disaster.

Children's Health Fund's emergency response efforts date back to Hurricane Andrew in Florida in 1992. Since then, CHF has responded to numerous natural and man-made disasters, including Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005, Superstorm Sandy in 2012, the Flint Water Crisis in 2016 and, most recently, Hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria in 2017.

ABOUT INTERNATIONAL MEDICAL CORPS

Since its inception more than 30 years ago, International Medical Corps' mission has been consistent: relieve the suffering of those impacted by war, natural disaster and disease by delivering vital healthcare services and by focusing on training. This approach of helping people, and then helping people to help themselves, is critical to returning devastated populations to self-reliance. For more information visit www.InternationalMedicalCorps.org or visit our social channels on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Medium and YouTube.

ABOUT CHILDREN'S HEALTH FUND

Founded in 1987 by Dr. Irwin Redlener, singer/songwriter Paul Simon and program designer Karen Redlener, Children's Health Fund's mission is to bring healthcare directly to homeless and low-income children and their families by expanding access to comprehensive and innovative primary care; reducing "health barriers to learning" that interfere with child development and school performance; responding to the needs of vulnerable children impacted by major public health crises; and improving the health and well-being of children through advocacy and public education efforts. Over the past 30 years, the organization has provided more than 4 million healthcare encounters, often in places where doctors and healthcare providers are in short supply.

SOURCE International Medical Corps

Related Links

http://www.internationalmedicalcorps.org


BOSTON, Sept. 20, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Iron Mountain Incorporated (NYSE: IRM), the storage and information management company, announced today that Melissa Marsden, senior vice president, investor relations, will retire after six years of service with the company and more than 35 years in the IR field. Joining Iron Mountain on October 1, 2018 as senior vice president, investor relations will be Greer Aviv.

Marsden will transition her IR responsibilities to Aviv by the end of the year. During her tenure with the company, Marsden served as primary contact for the investment community, transitioned the investor base and enhanced financial disclosure following the company's successful conversion to a REIT, and drove inclusion in major REIT and Socially Responsible Investment indexes. She also led a team responsible for public relations, customer communications, government affairs and internal communications.

"On behalf of Iron Mountain, I'd like to thank Melissa for her contributions," said Stuart Brown, EVP and chief financial officer. "Melissa's deep IR and communications experience and her relationships within the investment community were very valuable as Iron Mountain became a REIT and evolved its global market leadership position. Melissa has been a key member of the finance leadership team, and we wish her the best in her well-deserved retirement.

"At the same time, I am pleased to welcome Greer Aviv to the lead investor relations role at Iron Mountain," Brown added. "Greer brings 20 years of finance and communications experience, including positions in investor relations and equity research, most recently as head of Investor Relations for CoreSite, a leading data center REIT. The investor and analyst relationships she has nurtured within the REIT and technology sectors are a great fit with Iron Mountain's investment focus in the data center space. We are excited to have found someone with such a depth of experience and strong relationships with the investor community to replace Melissa."

Aviv joins Iron Mountain from CoreSite, where she was most recently vice president, investor relations and corporate communications serving as primary investor contact and developed the company's IR program following its IPO. She successfully attracted technology-focused and generalist analysts, more than doubling the number of sell-side analysts and diversifying the investor base. Prior to CoreSite, Aviv was head of IR for Arrow Electronics, a global provider of products, services and solutions to industrial and commercial users of electronic components and enterprise computing solutions. Earlier in her career, Aviv was an analyst in the consumer goods: packaged food/agribusiness sector with Stephens, Inc., a privately held regional investment bank, and Prudential Equity Group where she was part of a top-ranked Institutional Investor equity research team. Aviv has a BA in psychology from University of Michigan.

About Iron Mountain

Iron Mountain Incorporated (NYSE: IRM), founded in 1951, is the global leader for storage and information management services. Trusted by more than 225,000 organizations around the world, and with a real estate network of more than 85 million square feet across more than 1,400 facilities in over 50 countries, Iron Mountain stores and protects billions of valued assets, including critical business information, highly sensitive data, and cultural and historical artifacts. Providing solutions that include information management, digital transformation, secure storage, secure destruction, as well as data centers, cloud services and art storage and logistics, Iron Mountain helps customers lower cost and risk, comply with regulations, recover from disaster, and enable a more digital way of working. Visit ironmountain.com for more information.

Investor Relations Contacts:

Melissa Marsden Anjaneya Singh, CFA Senior Vice President, Investor Relations Director, Investor Relations [email protected] [email protected] (617) 535-8595 (617) 535-8577

SOURCE Iron Mountain Incorporated

Related Links

http://www.ironmountain.com


NEW YORK, Sept. 20, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Ivanka Trump, Advisor to the President, will speak at the 2018 Concordia Annual Summit, taking place on September 24-25 at the Grand Hyatt New York during the 73rd session of the United Nations General Assembly.

As the leading nonpartisan forum alongside the United Nations General Assembly, Concordia's eighth Annual Summit will convene a powerful network of current and former heads of state, international C-suite executives, senior administration officials, and global nonprofit leaders to advance collaborative solutions to the most pressing global issues.

In her role as Advisor to the President of the United States, Ivanka Trump focuses on job creation and economic growth through workforce development, skills training, and entrepreneurship. At the 2018 Concordia Annual Summit, Ms. Trump will share her unique insight into the White House's recently-launched Pledge to America's Workers and the National Council for the American Worker, designed to equip American students and workers with the training and skills needed to thrive.

With innovation and entrepreneurship placed high on the White House's agenda, Ms. Trump will provide her perspective on the Trump Administration's efforts to expand apprenticeships and skills training, and the importance of creating strong career pathways for all Americans.

The 2018 Concordia Annual Summit will also provide an international platform through which Ms. Trump will share her perspective on the economic empowerment of women domestically and globally. Ms. Trump will be interviewed on the Plenary Stage of the Grand Hyatt New York by Matthew A. Swift, Concordia's Co-Founder, Chairman & CEO.

As the largest and most inclusive nonpartisan forum alongside the United Nations General Assembly, the Concordia Annual Summit provides a unique platform to hear first-hand from decision-makers and opinion-formers across the public, private, and nonprofit sectors, as well as the next generation of partnership-builders advancing solutions to the world's most challenging issues.

Ivanka Trump joins a powerful roster of leaders from across all industries and sectors, including: Elaine Chao, Secretary of U.S. Department of Transportation; Mark Green, Administrator of United States Agency for International Development; Michel Temer, President of Brazil; Kristalina Georgieva, CEO of the World Bank; Bradford L. Smith, President of Microsoft; Nana Akufo-Addo, President of Ghana; John Hickenlooper, Governor of Colorado; Jeh Johnson, Former Secretary of U.S. Department of Homeland Security; Denis McDonough, Former White House Chief of Staff under President Obama; Bernard-Henri Levy, Philosopher, Filmmaker, and Activist; Danilo Medina, President of the Dominican Republic; Dr. Tom Coburn, Former Member of the United States Senate; Luis Almagro, Secretary General of the Organization of American States; Lorena Castillo de Varela, First Lady of the Republic of Panama; Liz Schrayer, President & CEO of U.S. Global Leadership Coalition; Thomas S. Kaplan, Environmentalist, Philanthropist, and Investor; Andrew Liveris, Former Chairman & CEO of Dow Chemical; HRH Princess Lamia Al Saud, Secretary General and Member of the Board of Trustees at Alwaleed Philanthropies; Ray Washburne, President of Overseas Private Investment Corporation; Dusko Markovic, Prime Minister of Montenegro; Paul Polman, CEO of Unilever; Marie-Louise Coleiro Preca, President of Malta. The full list of confirmed speakers can be found here.

To cover the Annual Summit as a member of the press, register here.

To purchase a ticket to attend, click here.

ABOUT CONCORDIA:

Concordia is a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit, nonpartisan organization dedicated to actively fostering, elevating, and sustaining cross-sector partnerships for social impact. Concordia was founded in 2011 by Matthew A. Swift and Nicholas M. Logothetis.

Media contact: Rita Lockheart, [email protected].net.

SOURCE Concordia

Related Links

https://www.concordia.net


NEW YORK, Sept. 20, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Nanogen, the UK's #1 hair thickening brand and creator of the revolutionary Thickening Hair Fibres, announces that the entire product line is now on Amazon. This partnership offers the American consumer easy access to the entire range of thinning hair solutions just as US Google searches for "thinning hair" hit a five-year high.

"We know the US consumer is looking for solutions to thinning hair," says Piia Toikka, General Manager at Nanogen. "By partnering with Amazon, our proven product line is easily accessible to our existing customers as well as millions of potential new customers."

The hero product range from Nanogen, offers instant camouflage for thinning hair. The Thickening Hair Fibres is made from high quality, 100% natural keratin; a fibrous protein found in hair strands. A patented kinetic strip generates electrostatic charge in the keratin fibers allowing for 400% better binding of the keratin to the hair fibers than leading competitors.

Nanogen offers an array of hair care and styling products guaranteed to help men and women achieve thicker, healthier hair by using the best active ingredients around. With an innovative blend of ingredients developed by the brand's in-house biochemists, Nanogen is proven to deliver shinier, more voluminous and thicker hair from the very first use. Thicker and healthier hair growth over time is attributed to Nanogen's proprietary Hair Growth Factor complex, which is found throughout the treatment range. Currently sold in over 30 countries, Nanogen continues to see year-over-year growth in all markets. Among a crowd of hair products claiming to thicken locks, Nanogen  a pioneer in the healthy hair revolution  stands out.

All Nanogen products are free of parabens and SLS and formaldehyde donors for optimal scalp health.

Please visit www.Nanogen.com for more information.

About Nanogen

Renowned for combining research, development and formulation by a team of in house biochemists, London-based hair care brand Nanogen has a wide range of hair care and styling products specifically created for thickening hair and improving scalp health for both men and women. The range includes a complete routine of cleansing, conditioning, volumizing and protecting products featuring innovative Hair Growth Factors, hyaluronic acid and keratin to boost scalp health and hair thickness. These wet care products build upon Nanogen's reputation for excellence, established with the solid 100% keratin fibers with which the brand made its name. Visit Nanogen.com for more information.

SOURCE Nanogen

Related Links

http://www.Nanogen.com


Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, September 20)  The Makabayan bloc believes the executive and legislative branches of government connived to insert "pork barrel funds" in the proposed P3.575 billion national budget for 2019, according to ACT Teachers Party-list Representative Antonio Tinio.

Tinio on Thursday said the former leadership at the House of Representatives inserted pet projects of favored congressmen in the 2019 budget, which Malacanang approved and included in the National Expenditure Program.

"Buhay ang pork barrel system at nandyan yan, nananatili yan dahil sa sabwatan ng executive saka ng Congress. Pinapaboran dito ang mga kongresista at maging mga paborito ng Malacanang at yan ay nananatiling malaking source ng corruption," he said.

While the House has realigned the questionable P50 billion fund allegedly given to some favored congressmen, Tinio said the budget was distributed in different agencies in the form of lump sum.

He noted that P31 billion of the realigned amount was allotted to the Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH) to fund road projects that have yet to be identified.

"Nandyan mga lumpsums supposedly ni-realign, pero nakita natin sa realignment na ginawa through the Committee of the Whole, malaking bahagi of P51 billion, P31 billion nananatiling lump sum pa rin sa DPWH, isang indication na mananatiling pork yan, paghahati-hatian parin yan pero sa ilalim ng bagong pamunuan," he said.

Tinio urged the House leadership to realign these funds to agencies that suffered major budget cut such as the Education, Health, and Housing departments.

"Hamon sa panibagong House leadership, wala na dapat lump sums, yang buong P55 billion ay dalhin directly sa mga service lalo na mga ahensya na nagkaroon ng malaking budget cut--education, health, housing at iba pa. Doon ilagay hindi sa road bridges, farm to market roads na alam natin mga classic pork barrel projects yan," he said.

The House leadership and the Budget Department have repeatedly denied that there is pork in the 2019 budget.

READ: Budget Secretary: No pork, insertions in 2019 budget
WASHINGTON, Sept. 20, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Letter carriers who rescued people from raging house fires, saved numerous Houston-area residents from Hurricane Harvey's raging flood waters and cornered a burglar who had terrified a young girl, are among those to be honored Sept. 26.

Jason Moss of Tampa, FL, and John Sylvain, an Army veteran from Fort Lauderdale, FL, who each risked their lives battling heat and smoke to save two residents apiece trapped by fires in their homes in separate incidents that were virtually mirror images, are the National Heroes of the Year  the first time judges have selected two winners. Ebony Nobles of Houston, an Afghan war veteran who in just her first few weeks delivering mail coordinated rescues of residents, rescued others herself as an Army reservist, led a clothing drive and delivered food to shelters, is the National Humanitarian of the Year.

Several other carriers also are being recognized as heroes. They represent thousands of letter carriers who not only deliver the nation's mail six or even seven days a week, but often assist in situations involving accidents, fires, crimes or health crises.

Peter Monteleone of Westchester County, NY, a Navy Cold War veteran who comforted the young girl while forcing the burglar to stay put until police arrived, is the Eastern Region Hero of the Year. Brandon Franklin of Waterford, MI, who ran to reach a runaway Jeep whose driver had fallen unconscious and then in acrobatic fashion dove headfirst through the window to navigate the vehicle to safety as it neared a school zone, is Central Region Hero of the Year. Antonio Colon of Chino, CA, bravely responded to a 90-year-old woman's cries that she was being assaulted; he is the Western Hero.

Naseem Elias of Sterling Heights, MI, who speaks six languages and whose fluent Arabic helped save a resident's baby, will be honored with the Special Carrier Alert award. And three other Detroit-area active and retired letter carriers  Dennis Denham, Steven Futach and Joseph Pomante  will receive the Unit Citation award for coming to the aid of an elderly resident experiencing a medical crisis.

The National Association of Letter Carriers Heroes of the Year will be honored by NALC President Fredric Rolando at a special luncheon at noon on Wednesday, Sept. 26, at the Hyatt Regency Hotel, 400 New Jersey Ave. NW, Washington D.C. Go to nalc.org/heroes for further information on the Heroes, including text and pictures.

******

NALC represents letter carriers across the country. Its 280,000 members make it the largest of the four unions representing employees of the United States Postal Service. Founded by Civil War veterans in 1889, NALC is among the country's oldest labor unions.

SOURCE National Association of Letter Carriers
"Helping our customers in their time of greatest need is our first priority, and we have a deep roster of more than 1,700 claims experts on the ground and by telephone available to ensure that we are responding as promptly as possible to everyone who has experienced a loss from this storm," said Michael Fiato, chief claims officer, Liberty Mutual Global Retail Markets (U.S.). "Once safe to do so, customers should reach out to us by phone, internet, mobile applications, through their agent, or at our response vehicle locations with their claims or questions."

Home and auto insurance customers are encouraged to report their claims 24 hours a day by calling these numbers or going online:

Liberty Mutual Insurance: online at LibertyMutual.com/claims, through the Liberty Mutual Mobile App or by phone at 1-800-2-CLAIMS (1-800-225-2467). Customers can also start a property claim through their Amazon Alexa enabled device

online at through the Liberty Mutual Mobile App or by phone at (1-800-225-2467). Customers can also start a property claim through their Amazon Alexa enabled device Safeco Insurance: 1-800-332-3226, or their local independent agent.

Liberty Mutual claims representatives or Safeco agents also can assist with reporting homeowner flood claims to the National Flood Insurance Program on their customers' behalf.

Homeowners can meet with Liberty Mutual or Safeco catastrophe specialists at the mobile claims units from 9:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. to discuss their claims, obtain policy information, and in some cases get initial claims payments for covered losses or receive advances to cover anticipated out-of-pocket costs such as food, clothing, housing and personal items.

The company will continue to provide updates of mobile unit locations online at www.libertymutual.com and through its social media channels @LibertyMutual.

Additionally, Liberty Mutual's commercial insurance claims team has been fully mobilized to respond to business policyholders recovering from Florence. Customers can file claims by calling 1-800-362-0000.

The aftermath of a hurricane can be equally dangerous. Liberty Mutual Insurance offers helpful tips and videos to help homeowners and businesses protect their property from further damage with important safety information and advice on the best way to handle repairs.

About Liberty Mutual Insurance

Liberty Mutual's purpose is to help people embrace today and confidently pursue tomorrow. The promise we make to our customers throughout the world is to provide protection for the unexpected, delivered with care.

In business since 1912, and headquartered in Boston, Mass., today we are a leading global insurer with operations in 30 countries and economies around the world. We are the third largest property and casualty insurer in the U.S. based on 2017 direct written premium data as reported by the National Association of Insurance Commissioners. We also rank 68th on the Fortune 100 list of largest corporations in the U.S. based on 2017 revenue. Liberty employs nearly 50,000 people in over 800 offices throughout the world. We offer a wide range of insurance products and services, including personal automobile, homeowners, commercial multi-peril, property, general liability, commercial automobile, surety, workers compensation, specialty lines, and reinsurance.

The sixth largest auto and home insurer in the U.S., Liberty Mutual's Global Retail Markets sells full lines of coverage for automobile, homeowners, valuable possessions and personal liability insurance sold through the Liberty Mutual Insurance and Safeco Insurance brands. Liberty Mutual Insurance products are distributed through licensed sales representatives, direct response centers, third-party producers and online. Safeco Insurance sells through a network of more than 10,000 independent agencies throughout the United States.

CONTACT:

Glenn Greenberg

(617) 574-5874

[email protected]

SOURCE Liberty Mutual Insurance

Related Links

http://www.libertymutual.com


BEIJING, Sept. 20, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- LightInTheBox Holding Co., Ltd. (NYSE: LITB) ("LightInTheBox" or the "Company"), a global online retail company that delivers products directly to consumers around the world, today announced its unaudited financial results for the second quarter of 2018.

Second Quarter 2018 Financial Results

Net revenues decreased 29.4% year-over-year to $55.4 million from $78.5 million in the same quarter of 2017. Net revenues from product sales were $52.0 million, compared with $73.7 million in the same quarter of 2017. Net revenues from service and others were $3.4 million, compared with $4.8 million in the same quarter of 2017. As a percentage of net revenues, service and others accounted for 6.1% during the second quarter of 2018.

Total orders of product sales were 0.9 million during the second quarter of 2018, compared with 1.7 million in the same quarter of 2017. Total number of customers for product sales was 0.7 million for the second quarter of 2018, compared with 1.4 million in the same quarter of 2017.

Product sales in the apparel category were $18.7 million for the second quarter of 2018, compared with $27.0 million in the same quarter of 2017. As a percentage of product sales, apparel revenues accounted for 36.0% for the second quarter of 2018, compared with 36.6% in the same quarter of 2017. Product sales from other general merchandise were $33.3 million for the second quarter of 2018.

Product sales in Europe were $24.9 million for the second quarter of 2018, compared with $37.4 million in the same quarter of 2017, representing 47.8% of total product sales for the second quarter of 2018. Product sales in North America were $10.6 million, compared with $19.2 million in the same quarter of 2017, representing 20.4% of total product sales for the second quarter of 2018. Product sales in Gulf Cooperation Council ("GCC") countries were $3.3 million for the second quarter of 2018, compared with $0.3 million in the same quarter of 2017, representing 6.4% of total product sales for the second quarter of 2018, while product sales in other countries were $13.2 million, representing 25.4% of total product sales for the same quarter.

Total cost of revenues was $41.4 million in the second quarter of 2018, compared with $50.9 million in the same period of 2017. Cost for product sales was $38.2 million in the second quarter of 2018, compared with $46.2 million in the same period of 2017. Cost for service and others was $3.2 million in the second quarter of 2018, compared with $4.7 million in the same period of 2017.

Gross profit for the second quarter of 2018 was $14.0 million, compared with $27.6 million in the same period of 2017. Gross margin was 25.4% in the second quarter of 2018, compared with 35.2% in the same quarter of 2017.

Total operating expenses in the second quarter of 2018 were $23.7 million, compared with $29.6 million in the same quarter of 2017.

Fulfillment expenses in the second quarter of 2018 were $3.7 million , compared with $4.3 million in the same quarter of 2017. As a percentage of total net revenues, fulfillment expenses were 6.7% for the second quarter of 2018, compared to 5.5% in the same quarter of 2017 and 6.4% in the first quarter of 2018.

in the second quarter of 2018 were , compared with in the same quarter of 2017. As a percentage of total net revenues, fulfillment expenses were 6.7% for the second quarter of 2018, compared to 5.5% in the same quarter of 2017 and 6.4% in the first quarter of 2018. Selling and marketing expenses in the second quarter of 2018 were $11.3 million , compared with $18.1 million in the same quarter of 2017. As a percentage of total net revenues, selling and marketing expenses were 20.4% for the second quarter of 2018, compared to 23.1% in the same quarter of 2017 and 23.0% in the first quarter of 2018.

in the second quarter of 2018 were , compared with in the same quarter of 2017. As a percentage of total net revenues, selling and marketing expenses were 20.4% for the second quarter of 2018, compared to 23.1% in the same quarter of 2017 and 23.0% in the first quarter of 2018. General and administrative (G&A) expenses in the second quarter of 2018 were $8.7 million , compared with $7.2 million in the same quarter of 2017. As a percentage of total net revenues, G&A expenses were 15.7% for the second quarter of 2018, compared with 9.1% in the same quarter of 2017 and 11.4% in the first quarter of 2018. G&A expenses in the second quarter of 2018 included $2.8 million in technology investments, compared with $2.7 million in the same quarter of 2017.

Loss from operations was $9.7 million in the second quarter of 2018, compared with a loss from operations of $2.0 million in the same quarter of 2017.

Net loss was $9.5 million in the second quarter of 2018, compared with a net loss of $1.8 million in the same quarter of 2017.

Net loss per American Depository Share ("ADS") was $0.14 in the second quarter of 2018, compared with net loss per ADS of $0.03 in the same quarter of 2017. Each ADS represents two ordinary shares.

For the second quarter of 2018, the Company's weighted average number of ADSs used in computing the loss per ADS was 66,646,520.

As of June 30, 2018, the Company had cash and cash equivalents and restricted cash of $41.7 million, compared with $54.6 million as of March 31, 2018.

Share Repurchase Program

On June 15, 2017, the Company announced the extension of its existing share repurchase program for an additional twelve month period from June 15, 2017 through June 14, 2018 to continue to repurchase up to the remaining balance of the $10 million of its American Depositary Shares ("ADSs"). As of June 30, 2018, the Company had repurchased a total of $7.2 million of its ADSs.

Conference Call

The Company will hold a conference call at 8:00 a.m. Eastern Time on Thursday, September 20, 2018 to discuss its financial results and operating performance for the second quarter 2018. To participate in the call, please dial the following numbers:

US Toll Free: 1-866-519-4004 Hong Kong Toll Free: 800-906-601 Mainland China: 400-620-8038 International: +65-6713 5090 Passcode: 1091553

A telephone replay will be available two hours after the conclusion of the conference call through September 27, 2018. The dial-in details are:

US: +1-646-254-3697 Hong Kong: +852-3051-2780 International: 61-2-8199-0299 Passcode: 1091553

A live and archived webcast of the conference call will be available on the Company's Investor Relations website at http://ir.lightinthebox.com.

About LightInTheBox Holding Co., Ltd.

LightInTheBox is a global online retail company that delivers products directly to consumers around the world. The Company offers customers a convenient way to shop for a wide selection of products at attractive prices through its www.lightinthebox.com, www.miniinthebox.com and other websites and mobile applications, which are available in 23 major languages and cover more than 80% of global Internet users.

For more information, please visit www.lightinthebox.com.

Investor Relations Contact

Christensen

Ms. Xiaoyan Su

Tel: +86 (10) 5900 3429

Email: [email protected]

OR

Christensen

Ms. Linda Bergkamp

Phone: +1-480-614-3004

Email: [email protected]

Forward-Looking Statements

This announcement contains forward-looking statements. These statements are made under the "safe harbor" provisions of the U.S. Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These forward-looking statements can be identified by terminology such as "will," "expects," "anticipates," "future," "intends," "plans," "believes," "estimates," "potential," "continue," "ongoing," "targets" and similar statements. Among other things, statements that are not historical facts, including statements about LightInTheBox's beliefs and expectations, the business outlook and quotations from management in this announcement, as well as LightInTheBox's strategic and operational plans, are or contain forward-looking statements. LightInTheBox may also make written or oral forward-looking statements in its periodic reports to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (the "SEC"), in press releases and other written materials and in oral statements made by its officers, directors or employees to third parties. Forward-looking statements involve inherent risks and uncertainties. A number of factors could cause actual results to differ materially from those contained in any forward-looking statement, including but not limited to the following: LightInTheBox's goals and strategies; LightInTheBox's future business development, results of operations and financial condition; the expected growth of the global online retail market; LightInTheBox's ability to attract customers and further enhance customer experience and product offerings; LightInTheBox's ability to strengthen its supply chain efficiency and optimize its logistics network; LightInTheBox's expectations regarding demand for and market acceptance of its products; competition; fluctuations in general economic and business conditions and assumptions underlying or related to any of the foregoing. Further information regarding these and other risks is included in LightInTheBox's filings with the SEC. All information provided in this press release and in the attachments is as of the date of this press release, and LightInTheBox does not undertake any obligation to update any forward-looking statement, except as required under applicable law.

LightInTheBox Holding Co., Ltd. Unaudited Condensed Consolidated Balance Sheets (U.S. dollar in thousands)













As of December 31,

As of June 30,



2017

2018 ASSETS







Current Assets







Cash and cash equivalents

68,441

40,787 Restricted cash

1,573

876 Accounts receivable

3,433

2,343 Inventories, net

11,841

11,887 Prepaid expenses and other current assets

15,696

14,519 Total current assets

100,984

70,412 Property and equipment, net

920

920 Acquired intangible assets, net

210

210 Goodwill

690

690 Long-term rental deposit

671

671 Long-term investment

5,262

5,320 TOTAL ASSETS

108,737

78,223









LIABILITIES







Current Liabilities







Accounts payable

22,430

12,519 Advance from customers

10,110

10,014 Accrued expenses and other current liabilities

20,727

20,058 Total current liabilities

53,267

42,591 TOTAL LIABILITIES

53,267

42,591









EQUITY







Ordinary shares

11

11 Treasury shares, at cost

(23,907)

(27,261) Additional paid-in capital

238,851

239,883 Accumulated deficit

(159,286)

(176,681) Accumulated other comprehensive loss

(199)

(320) TOTAL EQUITY

55,470

35,632 TOTAL LIABILITIES AND EQUITY

108,737

78,223

LightInTheBox Holding Co., Ltd. Unaudited Condensed Consolidated Statements of Operations (U.S. dollar in thousands, except share data and per share data)





















Three-month Period Ended

Six-month Period Ended



June 30,

June 30,

June 30,

June 30, 2017

2018 2017

2018 Net revenues















Product sales

73,652

52,064

138,428

118,032 Services and others

4,840

3,379

12,765

7,465 Total net revenues

78,492

55,443

151,193

125,497 Cost of revenues















Product sales

(46,173)

(38,160)

(87,205)

(84,050) Services and others

(4,699)

(3,210)

(12,157)

(6,888) Total cost of revenues

(50,872)

(41,370)

(99,362)

(90,938) Gross profit

27,620

14,073

51,831

34,559 Operating expenses















Fulfillment

(4,347)

(3,700)

(8,095)

(8,180) Selling and marketing

(18,091)

(11,318)

(33,296)

(27,396) General and administrative

(7,180)

(8,711)

(15,014)

(16,710) Total operating expenses

(29,618)

(23,729)

(56,405)

(52,286) Loss from operations

(1,998)

(9,656)

(4,574)

(17,727) Exchange (loss) gain on offshore bank accounts

(22)

14

(34)

(43) Interest income

190

9

335

227 Loss before income taxes

(1,830)

(9,633)

(4,273)

(17,543) Income taxes expenses

(13)

(1)

(21)

(3) Gain from equity method investments

38

92

94

151 Net loss

(1,805)

(9,542)

(4,200)

(17,395)

















Weighted average numbers of shares used in

calculating loss per ordinary share















--Basic

137,717,629

133,293,041

137,736,836

133,679,564 --Diluted

137,717,629

133,293,041

137,736,836

133,679,564

















Net loss per ordinary share















--Basic

(0.01)

(0.07)

(0.03)

(0.13) --Diluted

(0.01)

(0.07)

(0.03)

(0.13)

















Net loss per ADS (2 ordinary shares equal to 1 ADS)















--Basic

(0.03)

(0.14)

(0.06)

(0.26) --Diluted

(0.03)

(0.14)

(0.06)

(0.26)

LightInTheBox Holding Co., Ltd. Unaudited Condensed Consolidated Statements of Cash Flows (U.S. dollar in thousands)





















Three-month Period Ended

Six-month Period Ended



June 30,

June 30,

June 30,

June 30, 2017 2018

2017 2018 Net loss

(1,805)

(9,542)

(4,200)

(17,395) Adjustments to reconcile net loss to net cash used in operating

activities















Depreciation and amortization

194

153

425

305 Share-based compensation

515

514

1,013

1,019 Inventory write-down

568

793

906

1,190 Exchange loss (gain) on offshore bank accounts

22

(14)

34

43 Gain from equity method investments

(38)

(92)

(94)

(151) Changes in operating assets and liabilities















Accounts receivable

115

972

357

1,025 Inventories

(692)

1,217

(34)

(1,239) Prepaid expenses and other current assets

(1,645)

3,014

(3,410)

1,170 Accounts payable

(387)

(6,918)

(5,325)

(9,905) Advance from customers

738

(1,410)

3,998

(98) Accrued expense and other current liabilities

541

(930)

(1,192)

(554) Long-term rental deposit

2

(6)

(9)

(6) Net cash used in operating activities

(1,872)

(12,249)

(7,531)

(24,596) Cash flows from investing activities















Payment for long-term investment

(2,950)

-

(2,950)

- Purchase of property and equipment

(140)

(17)

(251)

(312) Net cash used in investing activities[1]

(3,090)

(17)

(3,201)

(312) Cash flows from financing activities















Proceeds from exercise of share options

23

13

23

13 Repurchase of ordinary shares

(344)

(421)

(580)

(3,355) Net cash used in financing activities

(321)

(408)

(557)

(3,342) Effect of exchange rate changes on cash and cash equivalents

113

(275)

130

(101) Cash, cash equivalents and restricted cash beginning of period

85,087

54,612

91,076

70,014 Cash, cash equivalents and restricted cash end of period

79,917

41,663

79,917

41,663

















Supplemental Cash Flow Data















Reconciliation of cash and cash equivalents to consolidated

statements of cash flows:















Cash and cash equivalents as presented in consolidated balance

sheets

78,439

40,787

78,439

40,787 Restricted cash and restricted cash equivalents as presented in

consolidated balance sheets

1,478

876

1,478

876 Cash, cash equivalents and restricted cash as presented in

consolidated statements of cash flows

79,917

41,663

79,917

41,663



































[1] Note: As a result of new accounting standard adopted on January 1, 2018, the consolidated statements of cash flows were

retrospectively adjusted to include restricted cash in cash and cash equivalents when reconciling the beginning-of-period and end-of-

period total amounts shown on the statement of cash flows. The impact of the retrospective reclassification on cash flows of investing

activities for the three-months and six-months ended June 30, 2017 was an increase of $189 thousand and a decrease of $80 thousand,

respectively.The impact of cash flows of investing activities for the three-months and six-months ended June 30, 2018 was a decrease of

$506 thousand and a decrease of $698 thousand, respectively.



SOURCE LightInTheBox Holding Co., Ltd.

Related Links

http://www.lightinthebox.com


SAN FRANCISCO, September 20, 2018 /PRNewswire/ --

The global linear alkyl benzene (LAB) market size is expected to reach USD 9.27 billion by 2020, according to a new report by Grand View Research, Inc., expanding at a CAGR of 4.6% during the forecast period. Growing application of LAB as industrial cleaners owing to rapid industrialization in developing economies such as China, India, and Brazil. In addition, government regulations regarding restrictions on non-biodegradable materials are further providing a fillip to the market.

(Logo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/661327/Grand_View_Research_Logo.jpg )

Increasing consumer spending coupled with flourishing cleaning industry is likely to fuel the demand over the next six years. Volatile raw material prices, however, are projected to act as a key challenge for market participants. Also, consumers, particularly in developed countries, are becoming aware about adverse effects of using synthetic detergents on the environment and are looking out for bio-based alternatives.

Protean nature of key raw materials such as kerosene and benzene put pressure on profitability of major producers. To minimize effects of volatile raw material prices, market players are paying attention to development of bio-based alternatives. Consumers are becoming aware of adverse effects of using synthetic detergents on the environment and are looking out for bio-based alternatives to LAB.

The LAB is primarily used for the production of linear alkyl benzene sulfonate (LAS), which is used majorly as a surfactant in industrial, household, and commercial applications. Low cost and biodegradable properties of LAS are expected to fuel demand for cleaning applications over the forecast period. Other uses of LAB includes paint industry, ink solvents, electric cable oil, agricultural herbicides, emulsion polymerization, and as wetting agents.

Browse full research report with TOC on "Linear Alkyl Benzene Market Size, Share & Trends Analysis Report By Application (Heavy Duty Laundry, Laundry Powders, Washing Liquids, Industrial Cleaners, Household Cleaners), And Segment Forecasts, 2012 - 2020" at: https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/linear-alkyl-benzene-market

Further Key Findings From the Report Suggest:

Heavy-duty laundry emerged as the leading application segment for LAS and accounted for 31.8% of total market volume in 2013

Growing preference towards liquids to powders in surfactants is expected to restrict the demand for LAS in heavy-duty laundry liquids in next six years

Asia Pacific emerged as the largest market in 2013. Rising usage of household durables in countries including China and India among others coupled with the infrastructural development in these countries is benefitting the overall regional market growth.

emerged as the largest market in 2013. Rising usage of household durables in countries including and among others coupled with the infrastructural development in these countries is benefitting the overall regional market growth. International players establish partnerships with local industry participants to increase regional foot prints in countries such as India and China

and Major companies operating in the LAB market include CEPSA Quimica S.A., Deten Quimica, Fushun Petrochemical Company, Chevron Phillips Chemicals, Honeywell, Arabian Petrochemical Company, Huntsman Corporation, and Reliance Aromatics and Petrochemicals Pvt. Ltd.

Browse related reports by Grand View Research:

Base Oil Market - The global base oil market size was USD 28.32 billion in 2015.



The global base oil market size was in 2015. Synthetic Lubricants (Group IV, Group V) Market - The global synthetic lubricants market size was 3,821.8 kilo tons in 2015 and is expected to witness significant growth over the next eight years



The global synthetic lubricants market size was 3,821.8 kilo tons in 2015 and is expected to witness significant growth over the next eight years Compressor Oil Market - The global compressor oil market size exceeded USD 55.0 billion in 2015.



The global compressor oil market size exceeded in 2015. Aerospace Lubricant Market - The Global aerospace lubricant market was valued at USD 760.4 million in 2014.

Grand View Research has segmented the global linear alkyl benzene market on the basis of application, and region:

Linear Alkyl Benzene Application Outlook (Volume, Kilo Tons; Revenue, USD Million, 2012 - 2020) Linear Alkylbenzene Sulphonate (LAS) Heavy-duty laundry liquids Laundry powders Light-duty dish-washing liquids Industrial cleaners Household cleaners Others

Linear Alkyl Benzene Regional Outlook (Volume, Kilo Tons; Revenue, USD Million, 2012 - 2020) North America Europe Asia Pacific ROW



Explore the BI enabled intuitive market research database, Grand View Compass, by Grand View Research, Inc.

About Grand View Research

Grand View Research, Inc. is a U.S. based market research and consulting company, registered in the State of California and headquartered in San Francisco. The company provides syndicated research reports, customized research reports, and consulting services. To help clients make informed business decisions, we offer market intelligence studies ensuring relevant and fact-based research across a range of industries, from technology to chemicals, materials and healthcare.

Contact:

Sherry James

Corporate Sales Specialist, USA

Grand View Research, Inc.

Phone: +1-415-349-0058

Toll Free: 1-888-202-9519

Email: [email protected]



Web: https://www.grandviewresearch.com

SOURCE Grand View Research, Inc.
SAN MATEO, Calif., Sept. 20, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- LISI, a prominent general agency, has added Western Health Advantage (WHA) to their portfolio. WHA is a highly regarded community-based HMO with a focus on market-leading affordability.

Plans are available with effective dates starting December 1, 2018. Bill Figenshu, Chief Sales Officer of Western Health Advantage said, "We recognize the strength LISI has in the marketplace and the wide variety of supportive services they offer brokers. This partnership aligns with our strategy for growth and will make selling WHA easier for our brokers."

In addition to affordable quality care, WHA offers:

Behavioral Health Services

Disease Management

Alternative Medicine

Worldwide Travel Assistance

A Wellness Assessment

Gym Discounts

"We are very pleased to partner with Western Health Advantage. This relationship expands LISI's ability to offer even more choices to our brokers and their clients in Northern California," said Kevin Timone, LISI Senior Vice President of Sales.

About Western Health Advantage

Founded by doctors and other health care providers in Sacramento in 1996, Western Health Advantage is a non-profit HMO health plan with a community-based mission and is a market leader in quality and affordability. WHA offers HMO benefit plans for employer group health coverage. WHA's extensive network includes 14 counties (Alameda, Colusa, Contra Costa, El Dorado, Marin, Napa, Placer, Sacramento, San Francisco, San Mateo, Santa Clara, Solano, Sonoma, and Yolo) and consists of more than 6,800 doctors in seven medical groups and 30 hospitals and major medical centers. WHA serves nearly 130,000 members, with annual premium revenue exceeding $750 million. Customer service, affordability and access to quality care are WHA's guiding principles. WHA is a quality choice for local business owners seeking affordable, responsive health coverage for their employees.

About LISI

As California's premier general agency, LISI serves more than 8,000 affiliated brokers who offer Medical, Dental, Vision and Specialty coverage for large and small employers from over two dozen carriers. LISI offers a highly responsive, regional approach with offices throughout California. LISI's statewide scale leverages their strength in working with carriers on brokers' behalf. LISI Inc. has served health insurance brokers since 1977. For more information, please visit LISI.

Media Contact

Jeff Grocky, Marketing Director of LISI, Inc., [email protected], 818-518-2079

SOURCE LISI

Related Links

http://www.lisibroker.com


The two new Ibex Solutions, Ibex Design and Ibex Develop , announced today are designed to meet the evolving needs of biotech companies with antibody therapies, from the preclinical stage through to commercialization. Together with Ibex Dedicate, the new investment allows Lonza to offer complete product lifecycle management in one site.

Ibex Design covers the early stages of creating a new biologic, from gene through to clinical phase I. The offering comprises a pioneering fixed-price gene-to-vial package with terms under which Lonza will deliver drug product based on at least 1 kg drug substance within 12 months. The package also includes the reservation of a manufacturing slot for clinical resupply. Ibex Design allows aspiring companies to start clinical trials earlier while reducing uncertainty.

Ibex Develop helps companies seamlessly and rapidly transition from clinical phase II to commercialization. The offering enables biologics license applications (BLAs) to be submitted within 22 months from the start of process characterization. Eliminating the need for tech transfers, allowing process optimizations and creating operational efficiencies are expected to accelerate the path to market.

Ibex Design and Ibex Develop draw on Lonza's R&D and operational experience from more than 30 years in biomanufacturing. Proven platform technologies, such as the GS Gene Expression System and expertise in drug product development, are an integral part of the new offerings. The application of single-use technologies and a high degree of automation further increase the efficiency of Ibex Design and Ibex Develop. In addition, customers of all three Ibex Solutions can benefit from the ability to scale-up or scale-out to other sites in the established Lonza network in Europe, America or Asia.

"We looked at every step in the development and manufacturing process and asked how we could transform the path to commercialization for customers," said Marc Funk, COO Lonza Pharma & Biotech. "The result strengthens our capabilities from the early stages of drug development all the way through to commercialization. It will help biotech companies deliver life-saving medicines to patients faster."

Ibex Design and Ibex Develop will become operational from 2020 and provide a full range of manufacturing options from early development through to full commercialization.

Images for editorial use can be downloaded from www.ibex.lonza.com.

About Ibex Solutions

Ibex Solutions consist of three innovative offerings: Ibex Design, Ibex Develop and Ibex Dedicate. The complete offering spans the preclinical to commercial stages, from drug substance development and manufacture to drug product manufacture, all in one location.

Ibex Design has been created for companies with early-stage products, simplifying and speeding up their path to clinical trials. Ibex Develop has been created for companies with candidates in clinical development, where the goal is commercialization and BLA approval. Ibex Dedicate is a technology-agnostic concept, enabling customers with products in late clinical or commercial stages to build capacity in a short time to respond to increased demand.

Ibex Solutions offer the following key benefits:

Speed to clinic and market

Flexibility to manage uncertainty

Supply chain simplification

Risk management across the entire product lifecycle

Ibex Solutions are provided out of Lonza's biopark in Visp (CH), which leverages existing infrastructure, support networks and a stable and highly skilled workforce.

More information is available at www.ibex.lonza.com.

About Lonza

Lonza is one of the world's leading and most-trusted suppliers to the pharmaceutical, biotech and specialty ingredients markets. As an integrated solutions provider, Lonza is boosting its value creation along and beyond the healthcare continuum with a strong focus on patient healthcare, consumer preventive healthcare and consumer's healthy environment.

Lonza harnesses science and technology to create products that support safer and healthier living and that enhance the overall quality of life. With the recent Capsugel acquisition, Lonza now offers products and services from the custom development and manufacturing of active pharmaceutical ingredients to innovative dosage forms for the pharma and consumer health and nutrition industries.

Benefiting from its regulatory expertise, Lonza is able to transfer its know-how from pharma to hygiene and fast-moving consumer goods all the way to coatings and composites and the preservation and protection of agricultural goods and other natural resources.

Founded in 1897 in the Swiss Alps, Lonza today is a well-respected global company with more than 100 sites and offices and approximately 14,500 full-time employees worldwide. The company generated sales of CHF 5.1 billion in 2017 with a CORE EBITDA of CHF 1.3 billion. Further information can be found at www.lonza.com.

Contact Details

For Investor Relations Inquiries:

Dirk Oehlers, Head Investor Relations

Lonza Group Ltd

Tel +41 61 316 8540

[email protected]

For Media Inquiries:

Lonza Corporate Communications

Constance Ward, Head External Communications

Lonza Group Ltd

Tel +41 61 316 8840

[email protected]

Lonza Pharma & Biotech

Sanna Fowler, Head Public Relations

Lonza Pharma & Biotech

Tel +41 61 316 8929

[email protected]

Additional Information and Disclaimer

Lonza Group Ltd has its headquarters in Basel, Switzerland, and is listed on the SIX Swiss Exchange. It has a secondary listing on the Singapore Exchange Securities Trading Limited ("SGX-ST"). Lonza Group Ltd is not subject to the SGX-ST's continuing listing requirements but remains subject to Rules 217 and 751 of the SGX-ST Listing Manual.

Certain matters discussed in this news release may constitute forward-looking statements. These statements are based on current expectations and estimates of Lonza Group Ltd, although Lonza Group Ltd can give no assurance that these expectations and estimates will be achieved. Investors are cautioned that all forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainty and are qualified in their entirety. The actual results may differ materially in the future from the forward-looking statements included in this news release due to various factors. Furthermore, except as otherwise required by law, Lonza Group Ltd disclaims any intention or obligation to update the statements contained in this news release.

SOURCE Lonza
DALLAS, Sept. 20, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Mill Creek Residential, a leading multifamily investor, builder and operator specializing in premier apartment communities across the U.S., today announced it has named William C. MacDonald as chief executive officer.

MacDonald, who has held the role of president since 2016, is a founding shareholder of the company and has a strong track record of leadership, business accomplishments and team building with Mill Creek. The change will be effective Jan. 1, 2019.

"I can't think of anyone more qualified, or better prepared, to lead Mill Creek as we progress through the chapters ahead, than Bill," said Charles R. Brindell Jr., executive chairman of Mill Creek Residential. "He has long demonstrated a unique combination of leadership skill, focused attention on important details, strategic vision and, most importantly, the ability to drive performance and results."

As CEO and President, MacDonald will be responsible for all operations and the strategic leadership of Mill Creek's many multifamily disciplines.

"Bill brings a long and impressive track record, and deep experiences and skill sets in both the finance and development/construction components of our business to this role as our new leader," Brindell said in a memo to all Mill Creek associates. "All of us are fortunate for this opportunity to look to Bill's leadership as he guides the continued growth and expansion of Mill Creek."

Since MacDonald was appointed president of Mill Creek, the company has raised approximately $2 billion in capital, grown from 26,000 to 32,000 apartment homes and closed on a portfolio-wide transaction with the Arizona State Retirement System.

"I am excited about the future of Mill Creek and working with what I believe to be the best multifamily company in the industry," MacDonald said. "Our world-class team has positioned us to become a true enduring enterprise, and I'm thankful for the opportunity to build upon that track record of success."

Prior to becoming president, MacDonald served as Mill Creek's chief investment officer, where he was responsible for all development, construction, acquisition and market research activity for a Mill Creek pipeline that has a total capitalization of more than $8 billion. He has also served Mill Creek as its executive managing director for the East Region. He held the same post at Trammell Crow Residential prior to participating in the founding of Mill Creek, where his divisions were responsible for the development of more than 40,000 residential homes and capitalization exceeding $5 billion.

The University of Maryland graduate earned his Masters of Business Administration from the Columbia Graduate School of Business. Recognized as a leader in the multifamily industry, he is a member of the National Multi-Housing Council (NMHC), the former Counselor to the five Multifamily Councils at the Urban Land Institute (ULI), and is currently a Governing Trustee at ULI.

About Mill Creek Residential

Mill Creek Residential Trust LLC is a national multifamily company focused on the development, acquisition and operation of apartment communities in targeted markets nationwide. The company proactively pursues development, acquisition and construction opportunities through its seasoned team of real estate professionals in 14 offices across the United States. Mill Creek is building its portfolio in many of the nation's most desirable apartment markets in Seattle, Portland, the San Francisco Bay area, Southern California, Denver, Dallas, Austin, Houston, South Florida, Tampa, Orlando, Atlanta, Washington, D.C., New Jersey, New York, and Boston. As of June 30, 2018, the company's portfolio comprises of 74 communities representing over 20,250 apartment homes that are operating and/or under construction. For more information, please visit www.MillCreekPlaces.com.

Media Contact

Peter Jakel

LinnellTaylor Marketing

303-682-3944

[email protected]

SOURCE Mill Creek Residential

Related Links

https://millcreekplaces.com


NEW YORK, Sept. 20, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- The following roundup is a collection of stories dealing with the Mobile World Congress Americas 2018 conference and is appropriate for special sections and for general use.

For each story included in this package, you will find the first paragraph of the release below, as well as its headline linked to the full text.

This is the latest in a series of event-related roundups PRN will carry as part of its regular Cision Roundup News Service. Coming up in 2018 are roundups on:



Package Name Slug Distribution Date IBC 2018 II IBC Sept. 26 Holiday Gift Giving I Holiday Gift Giving Oct. 24 RSNA 2018 I RSNA 2018 I Nov. 21 Holiday Gift Giving II Holiday Nov. 28 RSNA 2018 II RSNA Dec. 6 Last-Minute Holiday Gift Giving Last-Minute Holiday Dec. 12

Mobile World Congress Americas 2018 II Cision Roundup

1. Rivetz Showcases Blockchain Mobile Security at Mobile World Congress

LOS ANGELES, Sept. 12, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Rivetz, a leader in decentralized cybersecurity, today announced it will demonstrate its latest innovation in blockchain-based mobile security at Mobile World Congress Americas. The solution, entitled Dual Roots of Trust, leverages protections from both the Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) and mobile carrier SIMs. The project is the result of a collaboration between Rivetz and Telefonica, which was announced earlier this year.

If you would like a copy of the complete schedule, or if you would care to comment, please email [email protected]. We welcome suggestions. Copies of previous packages will be available for the media. Cision roundups and photos are also available on the PR Newswire Web site.

Photos that accompany releases are available for download from PRNewswire.com.

SOURCE PR Newswire Association LLC
The authorization follows the adoption of a positive opinion by the Committee for Medicinal Products for Human Use (CHMP), which concluded that the development program including analytical, functional, clinical and immunogenicity data demonstrated biosimilarity with the reference product, Humira.

The EC approval of Hulio applies to all 28 European Union (EU) member countries and European Economic Area (EEA) member states of Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein. Mylan plans to launch Hulio across various markets in Europe on or after Oct. 16. Mylan and Fujifilm Kyowa Kirin Biologics partnered earlier this year. Fujifilm Kyowa Kirin Biologics has a nonexclusive royalty bearing license with AbbVie (Mylan has a sublicense) for the use and sale of Hulio in European countries.

Mylan President Rajiv Malik commented, "We're very pleased with the decision of the European Commission to grant marketing authorization for Hulio. This is the fourth product that Mylan will be bringing to market in the area of complex generics and biosimilars, and we're proud to be a leader in the market formation. We've made great progress with Fujifilm Kyowa Kirin Biologics and look forward to continuing this important collaboration."

"We are delighted that Hulio has received approval from the European Commission," said Dr. Yoshifumi Torii, Fujifilm Kyowa Kirin Biologics President and CEO. "The EC's approval of Hulio marks a significant milestone. In cooperating with Mylan, we continue to commit all efforts to bring high quality and affordable biosimilars to patients throughout European countries."

Mylan Europe President Jacek Glinka added, "Biosimilars represent a huge opportunity in Europe to drive better patient access through high quality, value medications that support healthcare systems across the region to deliver ongoing excellent care in the face of aging populations and increasingly stretched resources."

Hulio is indicated for the same indications of Humira, including:

Adults

Rheumatoid arthritis

Ankylosing spondylitis

Axial spondyloarthritis without radiographic evidence of ankylosing spondylitis

Psoriatic arthritis

Psoriasis

Hidradenitis suppurativa

Crohn's disease

Ulcerative colitis

Uveitis

Children

Polyarticular juvenile idiopathic arthritis (age 2 and older)

Enthesitis-related arthritis (age 6 and older)

Plaque psoriasis (age 4 and older)

Crohn's disease (age 6 and older)

Hidradenitis suppurativa (age 12 and older)

Uveitis (age 2 and older)

Humira is the world's best-selling biologic medication. It had brand sales of approximately $4.4 billion in Europe for the 12 months ending June 30, 2018, according to IQVIA.

About Adalimumab

Adalimumab is an injectable, biologic medication which inhibits Tumour Necrosis Factor (TNF). This can cause inflammation in autoimmune diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis, plaque psoriasis, Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis. By specifically binding to TNF, adalimumab blocks its activity, thereby reducing inflammation and other disease symptoms.

About Mylan

Mylan is a global pharmaceutical company committed to setting new standards in healthcare. Working together around the world to provide 7 billion people access to high quality medicine, we innovate to satisfy unmet needs; make reliability and service excellence a habit; do what's right, not what's easy; and impact the future through passionate global leadership. We offer a growing portfolio of more than 7,500 marketed products around the world, including antiretroviral therapies on which more than 40% of people being treated for HIV/AIDS globally depend. We market our products in more than 165 countries and territories. We are one of the world's largest producers of active pharmaceutical ingredients. Every member of our approximately 35,000-strong workforce is dedicated to creating better health for a better world, one person at a time. Learn more at Mylan.com. We routinely post information that may be important to investors on our website at investor.mylan.com.

About Fujifilm Kyowa Kirin Biologics

Fujifilm Kyowa Kirin Biologics was established by FUJIFILM Corporation (President: Kenji Sukeno; hereinafter "Fujifilm") and Kyowa Hakko Kirin Co., Ltd. (President and COO: Masashi Miyamoto, hereinafter "Kyowa Hakko Kirin") on March 27, 2012 as a company for developing, manufacturing, and marketing biosimilars. Its pipeline includes an adalimumab biosimilar Hulio and a biosimilar of the anti-VEGF humanized monoclonal antibody bevacizumab (Product Code: FKB238), a drug used to treat a range of cancers including colorectal and non-small cell lung cancer. Fujifilm Kyowa Kirin Biologics established Centus Biotherapeutics Ltd., a joint venture for the development and commercialization of FKB238 with AstraZeneca plc.

By merging the technologies in advanced production, quality control and analysis which Fujifilm has developed over many years through its photographic film business, with the proprietary technologies and know-how which Kyowa Hakko Kirin has accumulated through its biopharmaceutical R&D and manufacturing, Fujifilm Kyowa Kirin Biologics creates revolutionary production processes and reduces costs for the production of biosimilars. Through this partnership, the company will develop and manufacture reliable, high quality, cost-competitive biosimilar products and commercialize these products in a timely manner. With this strategy, Fujifilm Kyowa Kirin Biologics aims to hold a leading position in the expanding biosimilar market.

You can learn more about the business at: fujifilmkyowakirin-biologics.com

Forward-looking statements: Mylan

This press release includes statements that constitute "forward-looking statements", including with regard to Mylan planning to launch Hulio across various markets in Europe on or after Oct. 16. These statements are made pursuant to the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Because such statements inherently involve risks and uncertainties, actual future results may differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. Factors that could cause or contribute to such differences include, but are not limited to: success of clinical trials and our or our partners' ability to execute on new product opportunities; any regulatory, legal or other impediments to our or our partners' ability to bring products to market; other risks inherent in product development; the scope, timing, and outcome of any ongoing legal proceedings, including government investigations, and the impact of any such proceedings on our or our partners' businesses; actions and decisions of healthcare and pharmaceutical regulators, and changes in healthcare and pharmaceutical laws and regulations, in the United States and abroad; the impact of competition; strategies by competitors or other third parties to delay or prevent product introductions; the effect of any changes in our or our partners' customer and supplier relationships and customer purchasing patterns; any other changes in third-party relationships; changes in the economic and financial conditions of the businesses of Mylan or its partners; uncertainties and matters beyond the control of management; and the other risks detailed in Mylan's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Mylan undertakes no obligation to update these statements for revisions or changes after the date of this release.

SOURCE Mylan N.V.

Related Links

http://www.mylan.com


"The work being done in Colorado is innovative and aligns closely with AFSP's Project 2025. It made good sense for our organization to support the Colorado efforts," said Michael Rosanoff, senior director of Project 2025 at AFSP . "Through the Project 2025 initiative, we have set the goal of reducing the national suicide rate 20 percent by the year 2025. With this investment in Colorado, it is our hope that what we learn that works well can be evaluated and considered for implementation throughout the nation to save more lives."

About the Colorado-National Collaborative

In hopes of building a blueprint for the nation, the Colorado-National Collaborative will focus comprehensive community-based efforts on six counties in Colorado and explore innovative approaches to lower the suicide rate in those counties. Once efforts are developed, implemented, and measured in the pilot counties, best practices and successful efforts will be scaled up throughout the state. The hope then is to bring these learnings to a national level. So far, the collaborative has 15 members serving as the steering committee. Members are recognized state- and national-level suicide prevention experts who meet twice a month to track the progress. The collaborative has recently hired a coordinator who will focus solely on the project. The next meeting of the six counties and the steering committee will be October 18-19 in Denver. The Collaborative is actively pursuing additional funding to begin full scale implementation in the identified communities.

Project 2025

Launched in October 2015, Project 2025 is a high-impact initiative developed by AFSP, aimed at achieving the organization's bold goal of reducing the annual suicide rate in the United States 20 percent by 2025. Using a dynamic systems model approach based on what the evidence tells us about suicide, AFSP has determined a series of actions and critical areas to help us reach our goal. With this approach we reach across all demographic and sociological groups to have the greatest impact for suicide prevention and the potential to save thousands of lives. If we work collectively to expand the above interventions in key areas (Firearms, Emergency Departments, Healthcare Systems, and the Corrections System)  cumulatively, we can expect to save nearly 20,000 lives through 2025.

Local Impact

"We have come a long way in the last eight years," said Sheri Cole, AFSP Area Director for Colorado. "With excellent local leadership and volunteerism, the people of metro Denver and throughout Colorado have united further to fight this rising cause of death in our state. With our grassroots, dedicated volunteers we have chipped away at this issue, and are proud to donate to this innovative collaborative." Cole lost her son to suicide in 2009.

Cole helped to form the AFSP Colorado chapter in 2012. She started organizing an Out of the Darkness Walk at a local high school in 2010. Now, eight years later, the state has seven community walks with volunteers from across the state, including one this coming weekend in Denver at Coors Field. The money that the local chapter is donating to the collaborative was raised at these Out of the Darkness Walks and other local fundraising events through many individual donations made by families who have experience with suicide and care about the issue, as well as local organizations supportive of the cause.

About the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention

The American Foundation for Suicide Prevention is dedicated to saving lives and bringing hope to those affected by suicide. AFSP creates a culture that's smart about mental health through education and community programs, develops suicide prevention through research and advocacy, and provides support for those affected by suicide. Led by CEO Robert Gebbia and headquartered in New York, AFSP has local chapters in all 50 states with programs and events nationwide. Learn more about AFSP in its latest Annual Report, and join the conversation on suicide prevention by following AFSP on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube.

SOURCE American Foundation for Suicide Prevention

Related Links

http://www.afsp.org


CHAPEL HILL, N.C., Sept. 20, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- College Consensus (http://www.collegeconsensus.com), a unique new college ranking website, has published their ranking of the Best Colleges in Iowa 2018 at http://www.collegeconsensus.com/ranking/best-colleges-ia/.

To identify the Best Colleges in Iowa for 2018, College Consensus combined the latest results from the most respected college ranking systems with thousands of real student reviews to produce a unique consensus score for each school. According to College Consensus founder Jeremy Alder, "Like Rotten Tomatoes does for movies, College Consensus gathers college rankings and reviews from around the web and distills them into a simple, easy to understand score so students can quickly and easily compare schools. It is the ranking of all rankings, so to speak." Learn more about the College Consensus rankings methodology at http://www.collegeconsensus.com/about/.

To help prospective Iowa students evaluate the higher education options that are right for their individual needs, College Consensus identified the best-ranked colleges in Iowa (presented here in alphabetical order):

Central College - Pella, IA

Clarke University - Dubuque, IA

Coe College - Cedar Rapids, IA

Cornell College - Mount Vernon, IA

Dordt College - Sioux Center, IA

Drake University - Des Moines, IA

Grand View University - Des Moines, IA

Grinnell College - Grinnell, IA

Iowa State University - Ames, IA

Iowa Wesleyan University - Mount Pleasant, IA

Loras College - Dubuque, IA

Luther College - Decorah, IA

Mount Mercy University - Cedar Rapids, IA

Northwestern College - Orange City, IA

Saint Ambrose University - Davenport, IA

Simpson College - Indianola, IA

University of Dubuque - Dubuque, IA

University of Iowa - Iowa City, IA

University of Northern Iowa - Cedar Falls, IA

Wartburg College - Waverly, IA

Iowa may be the United States' prime example of how a state successfully transitions from an agricultural stronghold to a modern, 21st century economy. Known for its vast cornfields and herds of cattle from its earliest European-American settlements, Iowa hit a rough patch in the 1980s and 1990s as its agricultural economy weakened. Brain drain and unemployment made the future look bleak, but Iowa turned it around to become one of the most business-friendly, tech-savvy Midwestern states. Iowa can thank, in large part, its excellent system of higher education, from Iowa State and the University of Iowa's top-tier STEM research and degree programs, and its elite liberal arts colleges forming new generations of leadership. From its lowest point, Iowa is now rated one of the safest, happiest, and healthiest states in the US.

As Managing Editor Carrie Sealey-Morris explains, Iowa's colleges "are built on the qualities that make Iowa's unique character - deep religious faith, ingenuity and work ethic, and deep ties to the land and community." These characteristics have also made Iowans exceptionally adaptable as well; when hard times threatened the state, Iowa's government, education, and business sectors created "a highly diverse economy and a range of industries, many rooted in Iowa's traditional agriculture." A strong grounding in agriculture made "bioengineering, manufacturing, energy (especially renewable and sustainable energy in the 21st century), and finance [into] bedrocks of Iowa's economy," and Iowa's higher education system has played a key role in making that happen. "Iowa's top consensus ranked schools," according to Sealey-Morris, "are diverse and exceptional, but they have one thing in common - they are all preparing Iowa's leaders, workers, and educators for excellence."

College Consensus is a new approach to college rankings. We combine the latest results from the most respected college ranking systems with thousands of real student review scores from around the web to produce an aggregate College Consensus rating for each school.

Carrie Sealey-Morris

Managing Editor, College Consensus

[email protected]

(512) 710-9901

http://www.collegeconsensus.com/

https://www.facebook.com/collegeconsensus/

SOURCE College Consensus

Related Links

http://www.collegeconsensus.com


COLUMBUS, Ohio, Sept. 20, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- A new guide released today by the Epcon Homebuilding Franchise explains how regional builders can compete more effectively with larger competitors. The guide, "Four Strategies to Gain a Competitive Edge over National Builders" (http://EpconFranchising.com/custom-home-builder-business-strategies), shares the stories of five home builders with varied backgrounds and levels of experience.

"At one time or another, nearly every regional home builder will face competition from a bigger builder with more name recognition and more resources at its disposal," said Jad Buckman, business development manager for Epcon Franchising. "With this new guide, we share how regional builders can position themselves to compete with national builders by adopting a few effective strategies."

Among the strategies covered in the guide is to look for the "blue ocean" by creating uncontested market space. As a result, regional home builders operate in a "blue ocean," as opposed to one churning with fierce competitors.

"Epcon Franchising has done extensive research into the wants and needs of 55+ home buyers," Buckman said. "For example, smaller communities of detached single-family homes appeal to the Baby Boomer buyer, but these types of communities might be unattractive to national builders. This could potentially give regional home builders a unique competitive position in their markets."

The other strategies covered in the guide are: streamlining processes, finding strength in numbers and the power of a name.

"This new how-to guide shares how Epcon's Franchise Builders have implemented these strategies," Buckman said. "We hope the guide offers builders some helpful advice for finding a competitive advantage against the big nationals."

The guide can be downloaded at no cost http://EpconFranchising.com/custom-home-builder-business-strategies.

About Epcon

Headquartered in Dublin, Ohio, Epcon is one of America's largest home builders (Builder Magazine, 2018). Epcon has integrated smart, innovative designs with the most desirable modern amenities to appeal to the lifestyle of the 55+ home buyer for more than 30 years.

By leveraging what's made Epcon a success, including its proven designs, technology and marketing and sales resources, Franchise Builders are given a competitive advantage to build smarter, maximize potential and scale faster.

Learn more at EpconFranchising.com.

Disclaimer: The offer of a franchise can only be made through the delivery of a Franchise Disclosure Document. Certain jurisdictions require registration prior to the offer or sale of franchise. We do not offer franchises in jurisdictions where we are not registered (or exempt from registration). Epcon Communities Franchising, Inc. 500 Stonehenge Parkway, Dublin, Ohio 43017. Minnesota Franchise Registration No. F-3531.

Contact:

Caitlin Thompson

For Epcon Franchising

Tel: 513-659-1183

[email protected]

SOURCE Epcon Franchising, Inc.

Related Links

http://epconfranchising.com


ZUG, Switzerland, Sept. 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Richard Maaghul, Chief Executive Officer of ODEM, the world's leading On-Demand Education Marketplace, will speak on Sept. 20 at the #Switch! technology, information, and entrepreneurship conference in Vilnius, Lithuania.

Maaghul will kick off the conference's education program with a keynote speech on the Blockchain Technology Revolution in the Education Sector. In addition, Dr. Adel ElMessiry, ODEM's Chief Technology Mentor, will provide an update on development of the ODEM Platform, the company's blockchain-based education portal to empower students to interact with educators to create exceptional learning experiences.

"We're honored and delighted to speak to a mostly student audience at such an important time in the emergence of blockchain technology as a force for positive change in education," Maaghul said. "Dr. ElMessiry and I are also thrilled to share the ODEM story with members of Lithuania's information, communications and technology community."

Blockchain technology, the encryption system that underlays digital currencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, is reshaping how people think about delivering education and securely storing transcripts and other records of academic achievement.

ODEM is focused on using blockchain and smart contracts to address hurdles that students face in acquiring a great education. ODEM's mission is to make education more accessible, affordable, portable and verifiable. The ODEM Platform will deliver in-person, online and blended academic programs. By early 2019 the platform will be capable of delivering academic programs and blockchain-based certificates.

#Switch! is the largest non-profit conference in the Baltic States centered on entrepreneurship, information, communication and technology. More than 15,000 participants are expected at this year's edition for speeches and discussions focused on blockchain technology, initial coin offerings, artificial intelligence, and cyber security.

For more information please see: ODEM.IO. Or join the ODEM conversation on Telegram.

For a snapshot of upcoming industry conferences that ODEM leaders will attend, please see: Events.



Alexa Narma,

Sr. Director, Product and Marketing

[email protected]

[email protected]

Tel: +1 (424) 327-5682

Via Balestra 66830 Chiasso, Switzerland

Join The ODEM.IO Conversation on Telegram.

https://www.linkedin.com/company/odem-io/

https://www.facebook.com/odemio/

https://twitter.com/ODEM_IO

SOURCE ODEM.IO

Related Links

https://odem.io


NEW YORK, Sept. 20, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- OTC Markets Group Inc. (OTCQX: OTCM), operator of financial markets for 10,000 U.S. and global securities, today announced CCF Holding Company (OTCQX: CCFH), the parent company of Heritage Bank, has qualified to trade on the OTCQX Best Market. CCF Holding Company upgraded to OTCQX from the Pink market.

CCF Holding Company begins trading today on OTCQX under the symbol "CCFH." U.S. investors can find current financial disclosure and Real-Time Level 2 quotes for the company on www.otcmarkets.com .

"CCF Holding Company joins more than 80 investor-focused community banks that trade on the OTCQX Best Market," said Jason Paltrowitz, Executive Vice President of Corporate Services at OTC Markets Group. "CCF Holding Company is the parent company of Heritage Bank, which has a 60-year history serving communities in the southern crescent of metro Atlanta. Trading on OTCQX will enable CCF Holding Company to provide current information and timely distribution of material news as the company seeks to grow and build shareholder value."

Leonard Moreland, President & Chief Executive Officer of CCF Holding Company further stated, "We feel OTCQX best fits the current and future needs of CCF Holding Company. This move will improve liquidity for our shareholders and support a more efficient market for our growing company."

CCF Holding Company was sponsored for OTCQX by FIG Partners LLC, an employee-owned broker/dealer specializing in financial institutions.

About CCF Holding Company

CCF Holding Company, Inc. is a publicly traded corporation on the OTCQX Market under the symbol "CCFH." CCF Holding Company, Inc. is a bank holding company incorporated under the laws of the State of Georgia. The corporation was organized in 1995 in connection with a conversion of the underlying bank from a mutual to stock form of organization. Prior to this conversion, the bank, through its predecessors, commenced business in 1955.

Heritage Bank, a state chartered commercial bank, has been serving metro Atlanta's Southern Crescent since 1955. Heritage Bank is a commercial bank operating within the Southern Crescent of Atlanta, GA. The community bank has six full-service offices, features a well-rounded offering of commercial and consumer products, and is an active, involved member of the community it serves.

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 trade through the broker of their choice easily 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


HAYWARD, Calif., Sept. 20, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Paragon Genomics, Inc. today announced the launch of ParagonDesigner, its web-based tool that enables rapid design of CleanPlex Custom NGS Panels. The online portal features a streamlined, user-friendly interface that simplifies the assay design process, making it easy for researchers to build customized next-generation sequencing (NGS) assays addressing their specific needs. The custom panels are powered by Paragon Genomics' unique CleanPlex technology, an ultra-high multiplexed PCR-based target enrichment chemistry that makes it possible to include a large number of genomic targets in a single assay.

"ParagonDesigner allows our customers to build CleanPlex Custom NGS assays with just a few clicks of the mouse," said Tao Chen, founder and CEO of Paragon Genomics. "By combining our proprietary target enrichment chemistry and our advanced design algorithm in an accessible online tool, we make it easy for researchers and assay developers to design high quality NGS panels optimized to meet their needs. We provide the best hands-on expert support in the industry to all our customers, and we are proud of our rapid turnaround timejust two to four weeks."

Paragon Genomics design experts are available to provide hands-on personalized support to all ParagonDesigner customers, even for small orders. The company delivers custom NGS panels in 2 to 4 weeks. Other providers typically take six weeks or longer.

With ParagonDesigner, users define the content of their custom NGS assays by submitting their targets online. ParagonDesigner features a database of more than 1,300 pre-designed, clinically-relevant human genes, allowing CleanPlex Custom NGS Panels to be instantly assembled for most applications. The design tool also issues a report on the estimated panel size and design coverage for review prior to submission.

Paragon Genomics' CleanPlex technology is a proprietary, ultra-high multiplexed PCR-based target enrichment technology for NGS featuring an innovative PCR background cleaning chemistry that allows tens of thousands of amplicons to be multiplexed in a single pool of reaction, allowing a large number of targets to be interrogated in a single assay. The CleanPlex technology is combined with Paragon Genomics' advanced panel design algorithm to create optimized custom NGS assays tailored to the user's application and input type, ensuring high sequencing performance and assays that work the first time without further optimization. Users have designed CleanPlex Custom NGS Panels for a wide variety of applications, including tumor profiling, early cancer detection, high-throughput genotyping and gene expression analysis. CleanPlex Custom NGS Panels can be designed for sequencing on either Illumina or Ion Torrent platforms.

For more information about ParagonDesigner and CleanPlex Custom NGS Panels, visit www.paragongenomics.com/custom_panels.

Paragon Genomics' CleanPlex products are for Research Use Only.

About Paragon Genomics

Paragon Genomics (paragongenomics.com) is a leader in amplicon-based target enrichment and library preparation solutions to accelerate the development of next-generation sequencing (NGS)-based assays for research and clinical testing. The company designs high performance and ultra-multiplexed amplicon NGS panels and develops NGS library preparation chemistries for analyzing difficult, clinically-relevant samples. It strives to make the design of custom NGS assays easily available to a broad range of users, with expert counsel and rapid turnaround. Privately-held Paragon Genomics is located in Hayward, California.

Contacts: Media: Paragon Genomics, Inc. BLL Partners, LLC Edward Jan Barbara Lindheim Head of Product Marketing [email protected] [email protected] (917) 355-9234

SOURCE Paragon Genomics

Related Links

https://www.paragongenomics.com


CHARLOTTE, N.C., Sept. 20, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Piedmont Natural Gas today announced plans for financial assistance for North Carolina customers affected by flooding, winds or downed trees. These temporary measures will apply to customers in areas that experienced significant property damage resulting from Hurricane Florence.

"When coping with a home that's under water and a family that is displaced, the last thing our customers should have to worry about is how to pay their natural gas bill," said Jared Lawrence, vice president of Customer Operations  Piedmont Natural Gas and Metering Services. "Our goal in offering these temporary billing exceptions is to give our customers and our communities time to take care of their families and recover from any major damage before ever having to worry about contacting Piedmont Natural Gas."

Piedmont's billing exceptions are outlined below and will apply only to North Carolina customers in areas that experienced significant property damage or were evacuated as the result of Hurricane Florence. Customers who need assistance or who have questions about how to take advantage of this information should call 1.800.752.7504 to speak with a customer service representative.

Additionally, Piedmont will offer extended customer service hours during the weekend of September 22 to 23. Piedmont's customer contact centers will be open from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Eastern to accommodate increased customers call volumes resulting from Hurricane Florence.

Financial Assistance for Flood Victims in North Carolina

No late payment charges

Piedmont will not apply late payment charges to storm-impacted customers for up to two months.

No disconnects for nonpayment

Piedmont will not disconnect any storm-impacted customers for nonpayment.

Equal payment plan (EPP)

Piedmont will allow customers with an adequate payment history to take advantage of the EPP program to manage outstanding bills.

will allow customers with an adequate payment history to take advantage of the EPP program to manage outstanding bills. EPP allows customers to spread their payments over a full 12 months, paying an estimated, equal amount each month.

Piedmont crews have begun assessing the damage from Hurricane Florence and are working to restore service to customers. Crews will not be able to enter any flooded areas to inspect meters or appliances until flood waters recede. Customers should follow the safety procedures outlined at piedmontng.com/severe-weather if their natural gas meters or appliances become submerged by water or are otherwise damaged.

About Piedmont Natural Gas

Piedmont Natural Gas is an energy services company whose principal business is the distribution of natural gas to more than 1 million residential, commercial and industrial customers, as well as power plants, in North Carolina, South Carolina and Tennessee.

Piedmont is routinely recognized by J.D. Power for excellent customer satisfaction, and was named by Cogent Reports in 2017 as one of the most trusted utility brands in the U.S.

Piedmont Natural Gas is a subsidiary of Duke Energy (NYSE: DUK).

Headquartered in Charlotte, N.C., Duke Energy is one of the largest energy holding companies in the U.S., with approximately 29,000 employees and a generating capacity of 49,500 megawatts. The company is transforming its customers' experience, modernizing its energy grid, generating cleaner energy and expanding its natural gas infrastructure to create a smarter energy future for the people and communities it serves.

The company's Electric Utilities and Infrastructure unit serves approximately 7.6 million retail electric customers in six states  North Carolina, South Carolina, Florida, Indiana, Ohio and Kentucky. Its Gas Utilities and Infrastructure unit distributes natural gas to approximately 1.6 million customers in five states  North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Ohio and Kentucky. Its Commercial Renewables unit operates a growing renewable energy portfolio across the U.S.

A Fortune 125 company, Duke Energy was named to Fortune's 2018 "World's Most Admired Companies" list and Forbes' 2018 "America's Best Employers" list.

More information about the company is available at duke-energy.com. The Duke Energy News Center includes news releases, fact sheets, photos, videos and other materials. Duke Energy's illumination features stories about people, innovations, community topics and environmental issues. Follow Duke Energy on Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram and Facebook.

Media contact: Stacey Perrow

Office: 704.731.4102 I 24-hour: 877.348.3612

[email protected]

SOURCE Piedmont Natural Gas

Related Links

http://piedmontng.com


MUNICH, Sept. 20, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Beginning September 20th, 2018, Plug and Play, the largest health innovation platform in Munich, Germany in collaboration with Roche, a global pioneer in pharmaceuticals and diagnostics focused on advancing science to improve people's lives, launches the first health-focused innovation program in Munich - "Startup Creasphere."

Plug and Play is a global innovation platform and venture fund from Silicon Valley specializing in the development of early-to-growth stage technology startups. In recent years, Plug and Play has already established successful programs in Germany focused in the Retail, Insurtech and Fintech industries with partners including MediaMarktSaturn, Daimler, Munich Re and Deutsche Bank.

The healthcare sector continues to undergo significant changes in technology, reimbursement models and care delivery pathways. Continued innovation is needed to ensure a more complex, holistic view of patient health generated from a wide variety of sources. Startup Creasphere aims to create a hub of health innovation in Europe, where forward-thinking corporations and disruptive startups can meet to pilot solutions and services, drive investments, learn and share experiences and facilitate international expansion.

Our goal is to create an open innovation platform to inspire leaders in the healthcare sector such as hospitals, pharmaceutical companies and health insurers to join Startup Creasphere and transform healthcare together.

"Personalized healthcare in the digital era will extend beyond the current benefits of individualized treatment, making digital solutions a key pillar of our ongoing strategy," shared Thomas Schinecker, Global Head of Roche Diagnostics, Centralised and Point of Care Solutions. "Combining the creativity and agility from startups with the strength and innovation of Roche will help us address some of the biggest challenges in diagnostics and ultimately enable better decision making while improving patient outcomes."

"We are excited to expand Plug and Play's footprint in Germany and our Health program globally with the launch of Startup Creasphere. Healthcare is such an important industry and having a strong partner like Roche is essential to helping the most promising startups innovating healthcare succeed. I look forward to Startup Creasphere recreating the success of our Health programs in Silicon Valley and Cleveland and making Munich the ultimate hub for healthcare innovation in Europe and the world," says Saeed Amidi, Founder and CEO of Plug and Play.

Startup Creasphere will run in the next three years two batch programs annually where hundreds of startups from across the globe will be evaluated and the most promising companies selected by the corporate partners to join each batch. Startup Creasphere focuses on all topics along the healthcare value chain such as Digital Service Solutions, Point of Care, Digital Biomarkers, Digital Imaging and Personalized Healthcare.

The first Selection Day and Program Launch took place on September 18th in Munich. 18 startups pitched their business ideas in front of a selected audience of corporate executives, investors and entrepreneurs. Selected startups will work in the twelve-week program with subject matter experts and corporate mentors to explore market insights, strengthen their business model and potentially co-create solutions with corporate champions and pilot owners. The program will conclude with an Expo Pitch Day, taking place on January 23rd, 2019 in Munich, where the final results of the program will be showcased to an audience of over 400.

About Plug and Play

Plug and Play is a global innovation platform. Headquartered in Silicon Valley, we have built accelerator programs, corporate innovation services, and an in-house VC to make technological advancement progress faster than ever before. Since inception in 2006, our programs have expanded worldwide to include a presence in over 20 locations globally giving startups the necessary resources to succeed in Silicon Valley and beyond. With over 6,000 startups and 280 official corporate partners, we have created the ultimate startup ecosystem in many industries. We provide active investments with 200 leading Silicon Valley VCs, and host more than 700 networking events per year. Companies in our community have raised over $7 billion in funding, with successful portfolio exits including Danger, Dropbox, LendingClub, and PayPal. For more information, visit www.plugandplaytechcenter.com.

Julia Belaya

Director Health  Plug and Play

Balanstrasse 73, 81541 Munich

[email protected]

Mobile: +16698009887

SOURCE Plug and Play

Related Links

http://www.plugandplaytechcenter.com


DOWNERS GROVE, Ill., Sept. 20, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Pole/Zero, part of Microwave Products Group and Dover (NYSE: DOV), is being awarded a $66,673,285 fixed-price, indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity contract. This contract provides for the procurement of antenna interface units and mounting trays, technical data, spares, and repair of repairables for the P-8A Poseidon Lots 9, 10, and 11 full-rate production aircraft in support of the Navy and the governments of the United Kingdom, Norway, New Zealand, and South Korea. Work will be performed in West Chester, Ohio and is expected to be completed by September 2022.

About Pole/Zero:

Pole/Zero analyzes, designs, builds and supports interference mitigation and spectral purification solutions for industrial and defense manufacturers and integrators of RF/microwave electronics. With its full line of digitally tunable bandpass filters, notch filters, and Integrated Cosite Equipment (ICE), Pole/Zero can effectively solve most interference issues. Through constant product, technology, and process development, Pole/Zero continues to expand its role as the leading supplier of unique, cost-effective solutions to solve difficult RF problems. More information is available at dovermpg.com/polezero.

About Microwave Products Group (MPG):

MPG is a leading global provider of mission-critical engineered electronic components and subsystems and is comprised of the businesses Dow-Key Microwave, K&L Microwave, Pole/Zero Corporation, and BSC Filters. Our expertise is the design and manufacture of communications-based specialty products  engineered components and subsystems  for demanding military, space, commercial aerospace/industrial, and telecom infrastructure applications where function and reliability are crucial. More information is available at dovermpg.com.

About Dover:

Dover is a diversified global manufacturer with annual revenue of approximately $7 billion. We deliver innovative equipment and components, specialty systems, consumable supplies, software and digital solutions, and support services through three operating segments: Engineered Systems, Fluids and Refrigeration & Food Equipment. Dover combines global scale with operational agility to lead the markets we serve. Recognized for our entrepreneurial approach for over 60 years, our team of 26,000 employees takes an ownership mindset, collaborating with customers to redefine what's possible. Headquartered in Downers Grove, Illinois, Dover trades on the New York Stock Exchange under "DOV." Additional information is available at dovercorporation.com.

SOURCE Dover
CHICAGO, Sept. 20, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- The Law Offices of Jeffery M. Leving, Ltd. will host the next compelling presentation of the Arthur S. Kallow Continuing Legal Education (CLE) Seminar Series Thursday, September 20, at 6 p.m. at 19 S. LaSalle St. in Chicago, Illinois. The keynote speaker will be Arthur Kallow and the seminar will be moderated by internationally recognized family law attorney Jeffery M. Leving.

Veteran matrimonial attorney Arthur S. Kallow will present on "The Limits of Limited Scope Appearances." The firm's President Jeffery M. Leving said: "It is a pleasure to have Arthur Kallow keynoting the Seminar Series named in his honor." Other presenters include leading family law attorney James M. Hagler who will lecture on "Introduction to the Hague Convention;" and experienced attorney Michael A. Halusek who will lecture on "The New Illinois Maintenance Statute  The Loss of the Maintenance Deduction." The event will conclude with an open discussion and think tank.

The Kallow CLE Seminar Series has had great success since its inception in 2014. The Kallow Seminar Series provides crucial legal education to family law attorneys and other professionals looking to expand their legal knowledge.

Please make reservations for future Kallow CLE events by emailing Jennifer Whiteside ([email protected]), as this program is close to its capacity.

About the Law Offices of Jeffery M. Leving, Ltd.

Matrimonial attorney Jeffery M. Leving has dedicated his career to safeguarding children and reuniting them with their fathers. He is a pioneer in the Fathers' Rights movement and founded the Fatherhood Educational Institute in Chicago, which seeks to eliminate father absence.

Leving has written several acclaimed books. His book, How to be a Good Divorced Dad, was praised by President Obama, who said, "thank you for your commitment to ensuring that fathers play a role in their children's lives." Leving's many professional achievements and accomplishments have been recognized by government leaders (including three U.S. Presidents), private industry and his peers. The Illinois House of Representatives honored Leving "for his work in safeguarding the rights of fathers and protecting the welfare of children and families in this State" and for his "hard work, integrity, and dedication for the people of the State of Illinois."

To learn more about law and fatherhood, follow Jeffery M. Leving on Twitter and Facebook and call 312-807-3990.

Contact: Jennifer Whiteside

Media Liaison

[email protected]

312-296-3666

SOURCE Law Offices of Jeffery Leving, Ltd.

Related Links

http://www.jmlevinglawltd.com


SHANGHAI, Sept. 20, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- On September 7, the TUV Rheinland Group (TUV Rheinland), a leading provider of testing, inspection, and certification of technical services worldwide, held a press conference in Shanghai announcing the 2019 "All Quality Matters" Solar Congress (organized by TUV Rheinland and China Photovoltaic Society (CPVS)) to be held in Suzhou. At the same time, selection of the PV "All Quality Matters" Award was officially kicked off. More than 80 industry elites and experts gathered together to discuss hot topics and to focus on the forefront of the industry.

Welcome the fifth "All Quality Matters" Solar Congress

Next year, TUV Rheinland will welcome the fifth "All Quality Matters" Solar Congress. Every year, the "All Quality Matters" Solar Congress has been a leader in trends for the industry. The TUV Rheinland "All Quality Matters" Award has become a stage for quality competition for the participating enterprises. Over the past few years, the Solar Congress has been a witness to the development of the industry. The market has transformed from a summer of boom to a winter of excess manufacturing capacity, from low-level competition in production capacity to upgrade toward high quality and intelligent product development, from import of technology and materials to export of products and capacity. Over the past few years, TUV Rheinland has persisted in building a communication platform for the industry in order to improve connections between firms, and facilitate the initiation of these firms into the economy. At the same time, TUV Rheinland has established a model of excellence for enterprises in order to improve their knowledge with better understanding about the importance of quality and innovation.

In past Solar Congresses, many experts and representatives from different enterprises have discussed multiple topics regarding technological development, quality control, and certification & inspection, as well as construction, operation & maintenance, funding, and insurance of photovoltaic power plants. The White Books published cover the industrial development of PV modules, sustainable business model of solar power plants, application of energy storage systems and a series of in-depth investigations. As a valuable collection of information for the industry, the White Books have attracted the spotlight. The "All Quality Matters" Awards were granted to a list of enterprises of excellence that have long been pioneer models for the industry. These enterprises have made a great contribution in developing the solar power plant industry of China, and played a meaningful role in global mid-high quality production.

Chris Zou, Vice President of Solar Service at TUV Rheinland Greater China, stated that, "We have never forgotten our prime mission along the way. We continuously encourage innovation, offer solutions in upgrading product performance, improving product quality and safety to manufacturers. We have also strengthened our cooperation with financial firms to discover a new business model for solar power plants."

"Although the new policy released on "May 31" has brought great shock to the industry, it is tantamount to removing irregularities from the industry. The development of the photovoltaic industry will be healthier and more energetic in the future. We have always emphasized that China's PV industry needs to shift from focusing on 'quantity' to 'quality'. TUV Rheinland has played a very important role in the industry. The CPVS has also been active in promoting the 'China Efficiency Project', which now coincides with the original intention of the TUV Rheinland "All Quality Matters" Solar Congress. We are very happy to be the co-organizers of the congress. I hope to join hands with TUV Rheinland to promote the sustainable development of China's photovoltaic industry," CPVS Secretary-General Ms. Lv said.

At the press conference, Mr. Zou also stated that early next year TUV Rheinland will formally announce the publication of a "China PV Power Plant Assets Transaction White Paper 2019". This white paper is in reference to the Japanese PV market from "installation market" to "transaction market", which is attributed to the Chinese market. It also involves typical problems in the operation of photovoltaic power plants and impact to the financial model, components reliability, failure analysis, root-cause analysis, comparison of energy yield prediction, and actual operation data, detailing the asset management and operation & maintenance of photovoltaic power plants, as well as PV power plant asset transactions aspects of concern.

"Photovoltaic Power Plant Operation and Maintenance Company Award" complies with the new solar power plant policy

New government policies address such matters as "suspending applications for permits for solar power plants on the ground surface," "limiting construction of distributed power plants," "reducing on-grid power tariffs," etc. This year, the National Development and Reform Commission, Ministry of Finance, and Ministry of Energy worked jointly to introduce the 531 new policies, which have significantly slowed down the rapid development of solar power plants. The policies have significant meaning for the industry, as they signify further controls on solar power generation most likely to be implemented by the government. Strict control policies mean that the industry scale and standard will come under exacting surveillance. For this reason, Zou believes that the new policies will present new difficulties for the industry, but at the same time implies great opportunities in the elimination process. Companies with poor technology or have a reliance on subsidies will eventually disappear, and will be replaced by competitive enterprises with outstanding quality value.

Under the new rules, the focus of competition is shifted to existing power plants operation & maintenance market. According to data from IHS Markit, the market for solar power plants after quota reduction performed better than expected in early 2017, and market demand has increased steadily since the beginning of 2018. For the operation and maintenance markets, the massive scale of device installations has offered a great source of income for those involved in its development. In the open-market competition for device installation, the rushed setup of solar power plants has caused increasing quality issues. In the future, for the operation and maintenance markets to continuously thrive with stability in a fast and healthy manner, business operators must improve their management approach for solar power plant assets.

To lead PV firms to meet the new policy requirements, optimize existing power plants, and improve operation and maintenance services, at the press conference, TUV Rheinland announced that the 2019 "All Quality Matters" Solar Congress would include the "Photovoltaic Power Plant Operation and Maintenance Company Award." Chao An, TUV Rheinland Greater China PV Power Plants & System commercial manager, explained rating requirements for the competition in full detail. TUV Rheinland is currently the leading Company in the world for certification and testing solar power plants, modules, inverters, and components. With its rich experience in solar power plant services, TUV Rheinland has created its own set of operation and maintenance standards. TUV Rheinland is also the leading enterprise for certification in solar power plant operation and maintenance service in China. Through the competition stimulated by the "Photovoltaic Power Plant Operation and Maintenance Company Award," TUV Rheinland will establish a new quality standard for the market, promoting the industry development in a new environment.

Beyond the new "Photovoltaic Power Plant Operation and Maintenance Company Award," the next Solar Congress will continue its annual ratings in three different photovoltaic categories: PV Module, PV Component, and PV Electronics. Yichi Zhang, General Manager of PV Module at TUV Rheinland Greater China; Chengli Bai, General Manager of PV Component at TUV Rheinland Greater China; and Weichun Li, General Manager of PV Electronics at TUV Rheinland Greater China explained the rating standards for the three categories at the press conference. The "All Quality Matters" Award is a major event at the Solar Congress every year, and has achieved great recognition throughout the industry because of its authority, professionalism, and fairness. All award categories are now open for application.

Against the chill winds, strive with industrial partners in difficult times

After the press conference, representatives at the congress engaged in further discussion on the hot topics of the industry. The topics mainly focused on the "531 new policies" and "China enterprise exports." In discussions concerning the relationship between the new policies and innovation, many representatives expressed that the effects must be dialectically considered before rushing to any conclusions. With the reduction of on-grid power tariffs and subsidy level, outdated products will be obsoleted at a faster rate; on the other hand, the increased costs may also hinder the development of new technologies.

With the introduction of the 531 new policies, the third integration of the PV industry since 2008 begins. Cost reductions and efficiency improvements are the keys to surviving in the new competitive arena. Trade disagreements are escalating; the European market size is not large despite the European Union removing anti-dumping and countervailing duties imposed on imports of PV cells and modules from China; the Indian policy is unstable; and overseas buyers are becoming increasingly demanding. The photovoltaic industry is facing a lot of challenges.

Addressing these matters, Chris Zou stated that, "The harshest policies -- the 531 new policies -- and the ever-changing international environment have driven the photovoltaic industry to transform and improve. TUV Rheinland shall rely on its professional experience of over 35 years of service in the photovoltaic industry to assist Chinese enterprises in capturing new opportunities and overcoming new challenges. Combining intelligence and power, TUV Rheinland strives with its industrial partners to face difficult times and reach new heights. The 2019 'All Quality Matters' Solar Congress is awaiting participants in Suzhou.

SOURCE TUV Rheinland Group
CHARLOTTE, N.C., Sept. 20, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- The rising Cape Fear River is overtopping the cooling lake at the L.V. Sutton Plant in Wilmington, N.C.

Aerial photographs taken this morning of the cooling lake showed some erosion on the interior slope of the berm, a surface that is protected by a layer of compacted soil and cement. The company is using drones to monitor the situation.

Two large 24-inch valves have been opened to release water from the lake. Given the historic level of flooding on the Cape Fear River, there is little to no chance that lake water will contribute to a measurable change in water levels in the area.

Duke Energy photos illustrate the situation at the site this morning. (See photos under "Photo Downloads" at https://news.duke-energy.com/media-kit.) In addition, initial test results announced Wednesday demonstrate that lake water quality is good, so a release should not affect river water quality.

Sutton Lake is an 1,100-acre man-made reservoir constructed in 1972 to supply cooling water to the Sutton power plant. The cooling lake does not store coal ash.

"We have deployed numerous resources to assess the situation and have positioned repair materials so we can rapidly respond once the river conditions are safe to do so," said George Hamrick, a senior vice president with Duke Energy. "We continue to work closely with local emergency management and other officials as the situation evolves."

Sutton's ash basins are currently not affected by this incident. The 625-megawatt natural gas combined cycle plant at Sutton also continues to operate safely, and the company will evaluate continued plant operations. Sutton's 575-megawatt coal plant was retired in 2013 and the units were demolished in 2017.

Additional updates on Sutton and H.F. Lee

Importantly, Duke Energy's coal ash basins continue to operate safely. Earlier in the week, the historic rainfall caused several areas of significant erosion at the Sutton coal ash landfill currently under construction.

As previously shared, flooding has caused the river to flow across three forested, inactive ash basins at the H.F. Lee site in Goldsboro. Those basins are normally dry, covered in forest and vegetation and do not impound water. Visual inspections with the environmental regulator today show that some cenospheres were released during the flooding; cenospheres are lightweight, hollow beads comprised primarily of alumina and silica that are a byproduct of coal combustion. It also appears that only a small amount of coal ash has been displaced, similar to the impact in the wake of Hurricane Matthew. Crews will continue to monitor the situation.

Conditions at other Duke Energy plants are improving as rivers and flooding recede.

Duke Energy

Headquartered in Charlotte, N.C., Duke Energy (NYSE: DUK) is one of the largest energy holding companies in the U.S., with approximately 29,000 employees and a generating capacity of 49,500 megawatts.

The company's Electric Utilities and Infrastructure unit serves approximately 7.6 million retail electric customers in six states  North Carolina, South Carolina, Florida, Indiana, Ohio and Kentucky.

Its Gas Utilities and Infrastructure unit distributes natural gas to approximately 1.6 million customers in five states  North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Ohio and Kentucky. Its Commercial Renewables unit operates a growing renewable energy portfolio across the U.S.

More information about the company is available at duke-energy.com. The Duke Energy News Center includes news releases, fact sheets, photos, videos and other materials. Duke Energy's illumination features stories about people, innovations, community topics and environmental issues. Follow Duke Energy on Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram and Facebook.

24-Hour: 800.559.3853

SOURCE Duke Energy

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http://www.duke-energy.com


Dubai is within an eight-hour flight of two thirds of the world cementing its strong position to lead the global logistics industry and help fulfil the UAE's aviation and logistics vision for 2045 with RSA National playing an integral role. Its location on the Dubai Logistics Corridor linking DWC to Jebel Ali port reinforces its commitment to a multimodal approach for customers but through one single supplier. As an Authorized Economic Operator and with Dubai Police and Customs situated on-site, customers will experience faster clearances and inspection prioritization for a smoother transaction.

RSA National specializes in innovative and tech forward solutions for the retail, ecommerce, and perishables sectors, as well as government and humanitarian programs. All sectors are growing in this region due to its continued reliance on imported perishables and goods; the increased adoption of ecommerce; and the impact of preparing for, and running, Expo 2020 and other major events. The company has successfully completed 13,000 sq. m of built up area, and has the ability to scale up within its 56,000 sq. m footprint in DWC, in line with the growing demand forecast.

HE Sheikh Ahmed bin Saeed Al Maktoum, President of the Dubai Civil Aviation Authority said: "Today we are delighted to celebrate the inauguration of RSA National's air cargo terminal at DWC. The RSA National air cargo terminal is an impressive and welcomed development and supports Dubai's efforts to remain at the forefront of aviation and logistics globally."

Abhishek Ajay Shah, Co-Founder and Group CEO of RSA Global said: "RSA Global is a home-grown brand and we have been inspired by the UAE leadership's vision to build the aviation capital of the world. We believe the launch of RSA National's flagship air-cargo terminal is a game changer for the UAE's aviation and logistics industry to claim the number one spot. We have designed this smart facility to deliver innovative multimodal, tech-forward supply chain solutions and plan to expand as the region's demands grow. The sky's the limit.

"We are honored to celebrate this moment in the presence of HH Sheikh Ahmed bin Saeed Al Maktoum, Paul Griffiths, CEO of Dubai Airports and all our distinguished guests."

Jacob Matthew, President  ME and Pac Rim and Board Member, National Air Cargo said: "The completion of the first phase of the first commercial cargo terminal at DWC is an important step for RSA National in the context of the UAE aviation industry, a vital driving force of the country's economic diversification plan. Non-oil sectors such as manufacturing, aviation and logistics are important contributors to the GDP with a contribution expected to account for nearly 90% of the economy by 2025. The cargo industry itself is witnessing major developments and recently recorded robust growth. Innovation in the transport industry is important, and as logistics providers with our own aircraft fleet, we constantly strive to improve efficiency around the movement of goods and also customer service."

Paul Griffiths, CEO Dubai Airports said: "We have witnessed impressive freight growth at DWC since it first opened in 2010. The airport has quickly ascended the global rankings for international freight volumes and is now ranked in the top 20. We have achieved this by developing and implementing leading-edge customer centric processes, technology and infrastructure. RSA National's innovative and tech forward mindset is fully aligned with this approach and we are honored to celebrate this great achievement with them today."

About RSA National

RSA National is a multimodal supply chain solution provider, with ground breaking professional services focusing on flexibility, compliance and speed. The company is a joint venture between tech forward 3rd party logistics provider RSA Global and international freighter operator, boutique freight forwarding and logistic experts National Air Cargo. With fully compliant, world-class facilities and leading in-house technology capabilities, RSA National is poised to provide best-in-class contract logistics, cold chain, international freight, transportation, ecommerce, chemical handling and logistics, and on-site logistic solutions to its customers. These solutions serve the air transport, retail, pharmaceutical, perishable industries, defense and many more industries. RSA National's air cargo terminal is situated in Dubai South between Al Maktoum International Airport and Jebel Ali sea port maximizing ease of access to its customers.

About RSA Global:

RSA Global is a multinational tech forward third-party logistics provider based in Dubai, with international alliances that help extend its reach to every corner of the world. The member companies under RSA Global include RSA Logistics, RSA-TALKE, RSA Cold Chain, RSA National and Meesan Logistics. RSA Global offers storage and 360-degree supply chain solutions, including distribution, transportation, and international freight. RSA Global's clients hail from a diverse portfolio of industries that include automotive, power generation, petrochemicals & chemicals, and food & beverage. RSA further deploys its expertise by offering on-site logistics to companies that operate their own warehouses  bringing sophisticated and tailor-made people, process and technology solutions to the client's doorstep. The company's headquarters are strategically located between Jebel Ali Port and Al Maktoum International Airport in Dubai South, providing the ideal infrastructure for its transportation, distribution and international freight service offerings. RSA's innovative solutions and high-tech value-added services ensure a personalized service like no other for its customers. For more information, please visit www.rsa-global.com

About National Air Cargo:

National Air Cargo is the world's leading freight solutions provider with an integrated global network delivering airfreight faster and more reliably. Established in 1990, the global reach of National Air Cargo is maintained via strategically located offices around the world centered by the U.S. headquarters in Orlando, Florida, with further quality centers located in Germany, Japan, Malaysia, the Netherlands, and the United Arab Emirates. Offering bespoke airlift operations with various modelled aircraft and payload options ranging from four to 250 tons, National Air Cargo is a specialist in sea-to-air multimodal transportation and supply chain solutions, as well as offering international passenger charters within the Middle East. National Air Cargo has a fleet of 2 B747-400BCF's and 2 B757-200's.

For more information, please visit www.GoNational.com

SOURCE National Air Cargo

Related Links

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MIAMI, Sept. 20, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Today, Sitel Group, one of the largest customer experience (CX) management companies in the world, announced the launch of business process outsourcing (BPO) operations through Sitel, the group's BPO subsidiary, in China. The operations are live in a Kunshan, China CX office through a partnership with 800 TeleServices.

Sitel China's agents are delivering CX through both voice and WeChat to support clients in the Asian market with Simplified Chinese.

"We are thrilled to expand Sitel Group's global presence in the Chinese market," said Laurent Uberti, President, CEO and founding partner of Sitel Group. "This opportunity allows us to further support our global clients in delivering exceptional experiences for their customers in China. As a leader in the CX industry, this expanded multicultural footprint and growth in the Asian market is a continuation of that journey for our group."

Since 2016, Sitel Group's learning and development offering, Learning Tribes, has operated in China. Sitel Group's expansion into the Chinese market for BPO services represents a strategic approach that supports the growth of existing client programs and the potential for new partnerships with key global players seeking to operate and expand in China.

About Sitel Group

Sitel Group is one of the largest customer experience companies in the world. The group is comprised of industry-leading firms providing business process outsourcing, digital marketing, training and talent management, technology and innovation, consulting and analytics solutions.

With subsidiaries such as Sitel, TSC, Learning Tribes, Extens Consulting, Sitel Insights and Novagile, the group's services are leveraged across geographies, verticals and all stages of the end-to-end customer journey, helping clients effectively harness the industry's explosive digital transformation and consistently deliver outstanding customer experiences.

With over 30 years of industry-leading experience, Sitel Group's 75,000 associates service over 400 clients  Fortune Global 500 companies as well as local businesses  through its network of more than 150 offices in 25 countries.

For more information, visit www.sitel.com

Follow us: Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube

About 800 TeleServices

Founded in 1997 and headquartered in Shanghai, 800 TeleServices is a North Asia Pacific anchored outsourced contact center service bureau with operation centers in Shanghai, Kun Shan, Guangzhou, Chongqing, Yangzhou, Xi'an, Hong Kong and Taipei. We employ over 4,000 employees of which around 2,800 employees in Greater Shanghai region, providing premium service to international conglomerates in Asia Pacific. We deliver fully integrated BPO solutions, optimized by application of latest artificial intelligence technologies.

Media Contact:

Shevaun Betzler

[email protected]

SOURCE Sitel Group

Related Links

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LONDON, Sept. 20, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Slovenia aiming for comprehensive fibre coverage

Sloveniaas fixed-line telecom market remains dominated by Telekom Slovenije despite regulatory efforts to develop competition in the sector.







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The Group suffered from declining revenue following the financial crisis of 2008 and 2009, and only showed growth again in 2017. To diversify its business interests and lessen the reliance on pure telecom services the company has expanded into the electricity and insurance sectors, capitalising on its extensive customer base. In response to competition the telco has also followed the path of many European incumbents and developed an international presence, focused predominantly on the Balkans region where it is becoming a regional provider of IT and multimedia services.

The competitive mobile market has four mobile network operators and a small number of mobile virtual network operators, operating in a country with a potential market of just over two million people. The regulator has addressed the need of mobile operators to be provided with more spectrum, holding a number of spectrum auctions in recent years. Additional spectrum in a range of bands will be made available for LTE and 5G services during 2019.

Sloveniaas broadband market continues to be dominated by a small number of players. Despite the launch of competing platforms, DSL remains the most popular access method though its market share is being eroded by the steady development of fibre-based networks, as well as by upgraded cable networks.



This report offers a variety of statistics and an overview of Sloveniaas fixed-line telecoms market, covering the major players, regulatory measures and developments in fixed-line infrastructure. In addition the report covers the broadband market, highlighting major players and industry developments and including subscriber forecasts. The report also analyses the mobile market, including updates on operators and regulatory measures.



Key developments:

Telekom Slovenije unbundles fibre infrastructure;

Government funding extends broadband to more municipalities;

Government broadband program targets extending FttP to 90% of the population by 2020;

Telekom Slovenije launches satellite broadband services;

Sharp rise in VoIP connections as PSTN declines;

Telecoms sector investment recovers from economic downturn;

Proportion of access lines on NGNs continues to grow;

Amendments made to the Electronic Communications Act;

A1 Slovenia trials carrier aggregation technology to provide data at up to 877.5Mb/s;

Regulator and Ministry of Public Administration initiate a number of trials for the use of 5G technologies;

MVNO IZI Mobil transfers subscribers to Telekom Slovenije;

Regulator opens consultation into auction of spectrum in the 3.5GHz, 10GHz and 12GHz bands;

Report update includes the regulatoras annual report and market reports to March 2018; telcosa operating and financial data to Q2 2018; recent market developments.



Companies mentioned in this report:

A1 Slovenia (Si.mobil), Mobitel, Telemach (Tusmobil), T-2, Debitel, Telekom Slovenije, Amis Telekom, Serbia Broadband, Tustelekom



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About Reportbuyer

Reportbuyer is a leading industry intelligence solution that provides all market research reports from top publishers



For more information:

Sarah Smith

Research Advisor at Reportbuyer.com

Email: [email protected]

Tel: +1 (718) 213 4904

Website: www.reportbuyer.com

SOURCE ReportBuyer

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ORLANDO, Fla., Sept. 20, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- For the fifth consecutive quarter, Solodev  makers of an award-winning content management system  has been named as a leading High Performer by a national survey.

G2 Crowd determined the ranking given Solodev's excellent ratings from its customers. In fact, all of Solodev's users who leverage G2 Crowd rated the web experience platform with 4 stars or higher.

The Web Content Management Grid(SM) is divided into four categories: Leaders, High Performers, Contenders and Niche. High Performers received higher customer satisfaction scores and ranked second highest to Leaders' market presence scores, which are based on market share, vendor size and social impact. Solodev ranked third in customer satisfaction behind industry heavyweights WordPress and Hubspot.

"Getting this recognition from G2 Crowd for a fifth time feels just as exciting as the first," said Shawn Moore, CTO of Solodev. "Our customers come first, and seeing their reviews of the platform just reaffirms why we do what we do. Exceeding customer expectations continues to be at the forefront of everything we do. We solve problems our biggest competitors don't care about and that our smaller competitors don't know how to fix  and we do it all for our clients."

Built on the secure, scalable and reliable cloud hosting infrastructure of Amazon Web Services (AWS), Solodev lets users create beautiful, powerful websites and engaging digital strategies  without compromising design. Equipped with easy-to-use back-end tools, everyone from skilled developers to marketing professionals can connect with their audiences to drive results and deliver personalized web experiences.

"This continued recognition encourages the Solodev team to keep pressing forward with that client-first mentality," said Director of Engineering Ross Williams. "We want our clients  regardless of background  to access our CMS and find something that works for them. It could be the ease of our third-party integrations with a marketer's martech stack. It could be the front-end flexibility offered to developers. It could even be custom permissioning and modules to assist with content strategy. Regardless of their specific role within a company, we want everyone who uses our CMS to succeed. We're honored to lead the high performer category that also includes some of the biggest names in Web Content Management platforms."

"Rankings on G2 Crowd reports are based on data provided to us by real users," said Michael Fauscette, chief research officer at G2 Crowd. "We are excited to share the achievements of the products ranked on our site because they represent the voice of the user and offer terrific insights to potential buyers around the world."

Emphasizing its focus on cloud hosting solutions, Solodev has also been named an Advanced Technology Partner within the AWS Partner Network (APN), is a member of the APN Public Sector Partner Program, and has also achieved AWS Government, Marketing & Commerce, and Education competencies.

Previously with G2 Crowd, Solodev earned the spot as Florida's highest-rated software tool. The company was also recognized as one of Florida's top 25 B2B companies for 2018.

To obtain a free copy of the entire report, please visit http://go.solodev.com/g2-crowd.

Media Contact:

Shelby Rogers

Content Marketing Manager

[email protected]

T: 407-898-1961

SOURCE Solodev

Related Links

https://www.solodev.com


LARGO, Md., Sept. 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Strativia is excited to announce that we have received a $75M contract award from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to provide Scientific, Technical, and Engineering Support Services (STESS). Through the STESS program, Strativia will provide more than one hundred (100) personnel who support the NIST community by conducting scientific services in diverse laboratory, academic, and standards development environments. NIST is uniquely charged with maintaining national standards and forging new measurement and standards frontiers. It serves as both as a leader and as a trusted partner and advisor to standards and measurement organizations on a national and international level. NIST's reputation for scientific excellence and institutional integrity demands that all contractors contribute to their storied history of exceptional performance. Strativia considers itself graced and honored to be selected to support this legacy.

Strativia personnel will support NIST's: Physics, Engineering, Materials, Information Technology, and Communication Technology Laboratories; Centers for Nanoscale Science and Technology and Neutron Research; and various cooperative programs. Select services will include biometric algorithm development; critical infrastructure; smart grid framework support; 3D Printing services; Health IT; environmental science; weights, metrics, and calibration; data and statistical modeling; and a number of other scientific and engineering services.

For this project, Strativia is proud to partner with Dakota Consulting, Inc. who has supported NIST since 2004. Strativia endeavors to match Dakota's record of outstanding stewardship of the STESS program, which began under the leadership of Dakota's founder Lori Renner. Ms. Renner's personal integrity and commitment to client accountability remains imprinted on Dakota's corporate philosophy as well as the exacting approach to STESS program execution still witnessed today. Strativia further wishes to recognize Lokesh Sayal, Vice President of Dakota, whose commitment, vision and partnership has been critical to STESS for the past seven (7) years; Ms. Manisha Kapur, whose leadership of the STESS program Strativia has been so fortunate to secure; and Mr. Adam Hurlburt who returns to his former role as STESS Contracts Manager.

About Strativia

Strativia delivers technical and professional services to both government (federal, state & local) and commercial organizations worldwide. Our core services include Web & Application Development, Big Data & Analytics, Cloud & Infrastructure, Cybersecurity, Program & Administrative Management, Management Consulting, Logistics and Operations, Integrated Facilities Management, and Staff Support.

Contact:

Ashley Coley, 301-362-6555, [email protected]

Related Links

Strativia

SOURCE Strativia

Related Links

http://www.strativia.com


LONDON, Sept. 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- The patient temperature monitoring market projected to grow at a CAGR of 4.7%. The global patient temperature monitoring market is projected to reach USD 3.21 billion by 2023 from USD 2.55 billion in 2018, at a CAGR of 4.7%. Rising prevalence of infectious diseases, increasing geriatric and pediatric population, increasing number of surgical procedures, growing number of blood transfusion procedures, rising awareness about continuous temperature monitoring, and increasing demand for advanced temperature monitoring devices are the factors expected to drive the market during the study period. However, the high cost of advanced temperature monitoring devices and low awareness of noninvasive and continuous temperature monitoring devices in developing countries are the factors restraining the growth of this market to a certain extent.







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The pyrexia/fever segment is expected to be the fastest-growing segment during the forecast period.

By application, the patient temperature monitoring market is segmented into pyrexia/fever, hypothermia, blood transfusion, anesthesia, and other applications.The pyrexia/fever segment is expected to register the highest growth during the forecast period.



The high growth of this segment is attributed to the growing prevalence of infectious diseases, growing number of trauma and hemolysis cases, growing preference for non-invasive monitoring, increasing availability of non-contact thermometers, and rising geriatric population.



Asia Pacific is expected to grow at the highest CAGR during the forecast period.

Asia Pacific is expected to register the highest growth rate during the forecast period due the growing demand for cosmetic surgeries, increasing pediatric population, increasing prevalence of lifestyle diseases, rising blood donations and transfusion cases, rising incidence of infectious diseases, government efforts to increase access to elective surgeries, and improving healthcare infrastructure.



Breakdown of supply-side primary interviews:

 By Company Type - Tier 1  45%, Tier 2  30% and Tier 3  25%

 By Designation  C-level  25%, Director-level  30%, Others  45%

 By Region  North America - 45%, Europe  5%, APAC  35%, RoW  15%



The major players in the patient temperature monitoring market are 3M (US), Cardinal Health (US), Koninklijke Philips N.V. (Netherlands), Hill-Rom Holdings (US), Dragerwerk AG & Co. KGaA (Germany), Terumo Medical Corporation (Japan), Masimo Corporation (US), Microlife Corporation (Taiwan), Procter & Gamble (US), and American Diagnostic Corporation (US).



Research Coverage

This report studies the patient temperature monitoring market based on product, site, end user, and region.The report studies factors affecting market growth, analyzes opportunities and challenges in the market, and provides details of the competitive landscape for market leaders.



Furthermore, the study analyzes micromarkets with respect to their individual growth trends. The research report forecasts the revenue of market segments with respect to the four key regions and respective countries.



Reasons to Buy the Report:

From an insights perspective, this research report focuses on various levels of analysis market ranking analysis of top players and company profiles, which together comprise and discuss basic views on the competitive landscape; emerging segments of the patient temperature monitoring market; and high-growth regions and their drivers, restraints, challenges, and opportunities. The report will enrich both established firms as well as new entrants/smaller firms to gauge the pulse of the market, which, in turn, will help firms garner greater market shares.



Download the full report: https://www.reportbuyer.com/product/5567585



About Reportbuyer

Reportbuyer is a leading industry intelligence solution that provides all market research reports from top publishers



For more information:

Sarah Smith

Research Advisor at Reportbuyer.com

Email: [email protected]

Tel: +1 (718) 213 4904

Website: www.reportbuyer.com

SOURCE ReportBuyer

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VANCOUVER, Wash., Sept. 20, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Truck Parking company, "The Truck Depot LLC" flew down to this year's The Money Show San Francisco 2018 in late August. While there, preparing for their debut in the money show in Dallas, TX in early October, they met with Treasure Investments Corporation CEO Mark Russo and, Invictus Chief evangelist officer, Gene Simmons.

CEO and President, Mr. Davidyan commented: "The visit was a great way to obtain a better feeling for what me and our VP of Marketing, Richard Greer, can expect when we debut the Truck Depot LLC offering to investors at The Money Show in Dallas October 2018."

When asked about the insights they gained at the show Mr. Davidyan responded with: "It was a great show and we learned a good deal of what to expect from investors that are seeking to find a great opportunity for their futures. It has been wonderful to meet and speak with Mr. Gene Simmons and see just what a talented individual here really is. It is always great to spend time with Mark Russo of Treasure Investments Corp and it seems like every time he and I sit and talk I come away with some wonderful pearls of business wisdom."

About "The Truck Depot": The Truck Depot LLC has been operating a secured private commercial truck parking lot for nearly six years in Troutdale, Oregon. CEO, Aurel Davidyan and the management team are focused on the growth and scaling of an innovative business model across Washington State and the entire Western region of America.

SOURCE The Truck Depot LLC
SALT LAKE CITY, Sept. 20, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Tower Arch Capital, L.P., a leading lower-middle market private equity fund that partners with entrepreneurs and family-owned companies to create long-term value for its management team and investors, announced today that Steve Smith has joined the firm as Vice President of Business Development.

Mr. Smith brings more than 18 years of experience in sales, private equity, investment banking, and management executive leadership. Prior to joining Tower Arch, he co-led the North American Self-Reliance operations for a large non-profit. Previously, he was a Vice President at private equity firm HGGC and worked in the M&A group at CIBC World Markets. Mr. Smith holds a Bachelor of Science in Finance from the University of Utah.

Rhett Neuenschwander, a Partner at Tower Arch Capital, said, "We are thrilled to have Steve join us to expand our reach to investment bankers and deal intermediaries for entrepreneur and family-owned companies seeking the value-added capital and strategic resources Tower Arch provides. Steve will also focus on supporting deal sourcing for add-on investments for our existing portfolio companies."

Mr. Smith can be reached directly at 801-803-8099 or by email at [email protected].

About Tower Arch Capital

Headquartered in Salt Lake City, UT, Tower Arch Capital is a lower-middle market private equity fund with $272 million in capital commitments. They focus on partnering with and growing high-quality family and entrepreneur-owned companies to deliver long-term value for their management teams and investors. Tower Arch brings operational, consulting, and financial expertise to small companies to give them the tools they need to achieve their full potential. Tower Arch creates value in a range of industries and works with companies across the United States. Target investments include control positions in entrepreneur and family-owned businesses with revenue between $20 million and $150 million or EBITDA between $5 million and $25 million.

SOURCE Tower Arch Capital

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MADISON, Wis., Sept. 20, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Trumbull County 911's (Ohio) new public safety call-handling solution, Total Response, incorporates emergency call-handling protocols into all calls for service. Realizing that approximately 70% of all 911 calls are not medically related, Trumbull County 911 wanted to have a solution that not only helped them meet the Ohio Emergency Medical Dispatch mandate, but exceeded it by incorporating better support for law enforcement and fire service dispatch.

PowerPhone's user-friendly Total Response solution maximizes call-handling efficiency and effectiveness with a single protocol database that focuses on the incident. CACH (Computer-Aided Call-Handling) Software is a protocol tool within Total Response that supports live call taking, supervision, retrospective call review, and reporting.

PowerPhone's user-friendly Total Response solution maximizes call-handling efficiency and effectiveness with a single protocol database that focuses on the incident. CACH (Computer-Aided Call-Handling) Software is a protocol tool within Total Response that supports live call taking, supervision, retrospective call review, and reporting.

"The use of protocols will immensely help our staff," says Operations Manager, Rodger Laird, "The dispatchers will be able to ask the right questions on a constant basis for each incident that the caller is reporting. Over time, the repetitiveness of this process will decrease dispatch times." Laird also predicts efficiencies to reduce the overall time spent on each call and to help with the training of new staff.

"This is something new not only for our dispatchers, but for all residents of Trumbull County," says Director Ernie Cook, "Patient care will now begin with the phone call instead of waiting for an ambulance to arrive."

"Our main goal was to find a product that integrated with our ID Networks CAD. We did not want to have a dispatcher flipping through cards while trying to talk to a caller and entering information at the same time into the CAD," says Laird, "After having demonstrations and on-site visits with other vendors, we selected PowerPhone because it gives us the capability we were looking for."

Laird says Total Response also provides, "a cost-effective way of certifying our dispatchers" in emergency medical, fire service, and law enforcement dispatch. Certification includes a theory component and a foundation component that guides dispatchers through the Total Response call-taking formula preparing them to use the technology and processes. Students also demonstrate their proficiency in a role-playing practicum with a PowerPhone instructor. With this solution, the service provided to the responders and the community will improve.

About PowerPhone:

PowerPhone has been a leader in the public safety call-handling industry for 35 years. PowerPhone's user-friendly protocol technology, training and assessment ensures a higher level of consistency in the call handling process. Our mission is to support dispatchers, responders and their communities. For more information, visit www.PowerPhone.com.

Media Contact:

Chris Gaffney

203-364-5264

[email protected]

SOURCE PowerPhone

Related Links

http://www.PowerPhone.com


BOSTON, Sept. 20, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Kyros Law Offices is alerting investors of TYSON FOODS, INC. (NYSE: TSN) that it is investigating legal claims on behalf of investors against the company for possible securities fraud violations.

Tyson Foods, Inc. (NYSE: TSN) investors are urged to contact our law firm immediately to protect their rights. Visit our TSN Shareholder Lawsuit webpage or call 1-800-934-2921 to speak to someone about your case.

Kyros Law is investigating possible violations of US securities law that may have been committed by officers and executives of TSN. Specifically, the law firm is investigating corporate jet usage by Tyson company executives. Kyros Law Offices urges Tyson Foods, Inc. (NYSE: TSN) investors to contact our law firm immediately to protect their rights. Visit Tyson Foods, Inc. (NYSE: TSN) Shareholder Lawsuit or call 1-800-934-2921 to find out if you have a case.

Receive alerts about potential class action lawsuits that may affect you by visiting the Class Action Lawsuit Center website.

Kyros Law specializes in a wide range of complex litigation, mass torts, and corporate governance matters, including the representation of whistleblowers, shareholders and consumers in securities fraud, false claims act and class actions. Our lawyers have been responsible for recovering hundreds of millions of dollars for our clients throughout the United States, Africa, Asia and Europe. Visit our website to learn more about our firm.

SOURCE Kyros Law

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http://www.kyroslaw.com


SAN FRANCISCO, Sept. 20, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Linux Foundation Networking project, Tungsten Fabric, has launched a quick-start environment hosted at Amazon Web Services, targeting developers working with Kubernetes who have limited networking experience.

Making Tungsten Fabric easier to consume is a primary goal of the community. Users can easily deploy a configuration-free Kubernetes and Tungsten Fabric cluster in less than 15 minutes, based on average deployment times. There is no charge to use the quick start environmentcalled Carbidebeyond the AWS resources users consume running their deployments.

Software-Defined Networking is complex, and the Tungsten Fabric community developed Carbide to make getting started easier. Carbide demonstrates Tungsten Fabric's public cloud and Kubernetes capabilities, and it provides a quick way for software developers using Kubernetes to get started with production-grade SDN on public cloud. Kubernetes operators and developers who need a full-featured SDN controller and want to start using Tungsten Fabric can stand up an environment quickly with their own AWS credentials.

*** Join us at ONS Europe in Amsterdam for presentations, demos, workshops and an evening Meetup to learn more about Tungsten Fabric and get engaged with the community. https://tungsten.io/join-the-tungsten-fabric-community-at-ons-2018-in-amsterdam.***

With the Carbide Quick Start Environment developers can:

Create a production-grade environment for development and testing of Tungsten Fabric

Evaluate the Tungsten and Kubernetes integration

Use the CloudFormation template as a baseline for building demos or proof of concept systems

Perform Tungsten Fabric scalability testing with no limits

Run a variety of performance tests simply by changing instance types and configuration parameters

Develop self-guided proof of concepts

Run a true cloud-grade networking solution for Kubernetes

About Tungsten Fabric

Tungsten Fabric is an open source, scalable, multicloud, multistack networking platform. It provides a single point of control, observability and analytics for networking and security. Tungsten Fabric is integrated with private cloud stacks including Kubernetes, VMware and OpenStack. It also supports hybrid deployments with public clouds including AWS and GCE. More at https://tungsten.io.

About The Linux Foundation

The Linux Foundation is the organization of choice for the world's top developers and companies to build ecosystems that accelerate open technology development and industry adoption. Together with the worldwide open source community, it is solving the hardest technology problems by creating the largest shared technology investment in history. Founded in 2000, The Linux Foundation today provides tools, training and events to scale any open source project, which together deliver an economic impact not achievable by any one company. More information can be found at www.linuxfoundation.org.

The Linux Foundation has registered trademarks and uses trademarks. For a list of trademarks of The Linux Foundation, please see our trademark usage page: https://www.linuxfoundation.org/trademark-usage. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.

Media Contact

Jill Lovato

The Linux Foundation

[email protected]

SOURCE Tungsten Fabric

Related Links

http://www.linuxfoundation.org


ATLANTA, Sept. 20, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Extreme weather conditions, like those experienced with Hurricane Florence, reinforce the need for clean, stable energy infrastructure and energy resiliency. A recent survey of AEE members reveals that over 66% of respondents believe that there is a current shortage of energy professionals, while the Bureau of Labor Statistics has reported positions within the alternative energy and renewables industries, such as solar and wind, will be among the top 5 fastest growing occupations for the U.S. from 2016-2026. Focusing on the rising demand for energy efficiency, green collar and renewable energy professionals, the World Energy Engineering Congress, WEEC, will take place in Charlotte, North Carolina for the first time this October 17-19, 2018. North Carolina boasts a diversified energy and energy efficiency industry, with a 9.3% growth since 2010, making it the fastest growing energy cluster in the Southeast. With this booming energy market, the region is a top location to present this year's WEEC event.

Each year thousands of energy managers, VPs of operations and facility team professionals come to the annual WEEC conference and expo to network with their peers, share best practices, and learn about the latest industry developments. Presented by the Association of Energy Engineers (AEE) and hosted by Duke Energy, WEEC is in its 41st year - making it one of the longest running events for business, industrial and institutional energy users.

"Our members recognize and attend events like WEEC because they bring together the top experts in all areas of energy management, power, buildings and clean technologies," stated Bill Kent, Executive Director of AEE. "These are the individuals that are discussing and defining the paths to improved energy efficiency, facility optimization and sustainability."

The WEEC conference program showcases over 250 educational sessions with topics covering energy management, smart grid, buildings and facilities, energy services, commissioning, and sustainable development, which helps facility managers and building owners identify creative ways to reduce their energy consumption. Featured speakers opening the program this year include:

Building a Smarter Energy Future , from Duke Energy's Lynn Good , Chairman, President & Chief Executive Officer

from Duke Energy's , Chairman, President & Chief Executive Officer The Economic Opportunities of the Energy Transition , from Felipe Calderon , President of Mexico (2006-2012), Chair of The Global Commission on the Economy & Climate, Statesman of the Year, World Economic Forum

from , President of (2006-2012), Chair of The Global Commission on the Economy & Climate, Statesman of the Year, World Economic Forum Confessions of a Corporate Futurist: Coming Trends That Will Revolutionize Your Business from Sheryl Connelly , Manager, Global Consumer Trends and Futuring, Ford Motor Company

from , Manager, Global Consumer Trends and Futuring, Ford Motor Company The Sky Is Not the Limit: Lessons from a Year in Space from Captain Scott Kelly , History-Making U.S. Astronaut & Retired U.S. Navy Captain

Special events will include a council on women in energy breakfast with featured speaker Katherine Hammack, Executive Director, Government & Public Sector from Ernst & Young LLP discussing gender diversity in the workplace, an AEE North Carolina and Piedmont Chapter Luncheon with speaker Paul Camuti, Senior VP of Innovation & Chief Technology Officer from Ingersoll Rand discussing a systems approach to energy efficiency, as well as free technical workshops in the expo hall ranging from health care energy savings, demand response best practices to HVAC optimization.

As a complement to the conference program, the WEEC expo will display technologies helping commercial, industrial, and institutional customers save on their energy costs, upgrading their facilities with innovative solutions, and implementing new or retrofit construction projects which will help drive the new clean energy economy.

"The expo allows end users to interact face to face with over 250 vendors, many of them local to the Charlotte and the southeast energy marketplace. They get to explore the latest products, technology and services in a dynamic, interactive environment," said Bill Kent. "These are what make WEEC a shared community for all involved, and Charlotte is at the forefront of sustainable energy developments, so it will be an ideal location for anyone looking to grow, invest and connect."

The WEEC will close with the Keynote Luncheon presentation, Brief History of the Relationship between Natural Gas and Electricity, from speakers Frank Yoho, EVP, President  Natural Gas, Duke Energy and Rosa Sanz, Chief Operating Officer EMEA Infrastructures, Naturgy.

Register for conference or complimentary expo: www.energycongress.com

About AEE: www.aeecenter.org

SOURCE Association of Energy Engineers

Related Links

http://www.aeecenter.org


BATON ROUGE, La., Sept. 20, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Louisiana Healthcare Connections is partnering with YWCA of Northwest Louisiana to implement a two-year pilot, Young Women Choosing Action, focused on addressing long-term wellness outcomes for teen girls ages 13-19.

YWCA of Northwest Louisiana is one of only four YWCA associations nationwide selected to pilot the Young Women Choosing Action program, which is designed to support teen girls and young women in developing decision-making and relationship-building skills that will support their long-term health and wellness.

"We have seen major positive changes in the participants over the course duration," says Belinda Roberson, Ph.D., Executive Director of YWCA of Northwest Louisiana. "The program incorporates several practices that help the participants manage trauma and stress. During the program, the girls learn positive coping strategies and how to avoid harmful situations."

Sequoia Taylor, 15, a participant of the first Young Women Choosing Action course cycle, says, "What a wonderful program. It was informative, different, yet fun. I learned a lot, especially about mindfulness and the teenage brain. I feel that must be important because my assistant principal has a poster outside his door that says, 'Train your Brain.' I also was impacted by learning how social media can have so many negative effects on our brain. The program has inspired me to want to share what I have learned with my friends as well."

The YWCA is proud to have the support of Louisiana First Lady Donna Edwards.

"As a former teacher and mother of two daughters, I have seen first-hand how education can transform lives by instilling a sense of self-confidence and teaching irreplaceable life skills," says Edwards. "The decisions we make today could impact us for a lifetime, which is why it is critical that we help our young girls understand their value, learn how to make decisions that are in their best interest and give them the tools to live healthy and productive lives. I'm so proud of Sequoia and the others who participated in the Young Women Choosing Action program. It is clearly making a difference and in keeping with the mission of the YWCA of empowering our young ladies to create a great future for themselves and their communities."

Young Women Choosing Action is intended to benefit all teen girls, but it is specifically designed to address the higher rates of trauma and more limited resources for healthy development that low-income and young women of color are likely to face. The program helps young women learn and practice skills that support personal empowerment, strong relationships, and greater community engagement, all within an intersectional leadership development framework. The 12-week program, designed with continuous review and input from an independent evaluator and a clinical specialist, provides tools to expand physical and emotional responses to trauma, cultivate personal well-being practices, and build capacity as leaders.

Jamie Schlottman, Plan President & CEO, said, "Louisiana Healthcare Connections is honored to partner with YWCA of Northwest Louisiana, which has been a dedicated advocate for women in the Shreveport region since 1925. We share their commitment to improving the health of Louisiana's communities, and support their mission to eliminate racism, empower women and strengthen communities through action. We look forward to seeing the impact we can create together for the young women like Sequoia who participate and the communities where they live."

Upon completion of the two-year pilot in spring 2020, YWCA of Northwest Louisiana will join the selected YWCA programs in Northwest Ohio, Brooklyn, N.Y., and Watsonville, Calif., in submitting final evaluations of the pilot project. These evaluations will be used by YWCA USA to develop a final curriculum to make the program available nationally.

About Louisiana Healthcare Connections

Established to deliver quality healthcare through local, regional and community-based partners, Louisiana Healthcare Connections is a Healthy Louisiana Plan headquartered in Baton Rouge, La. Louisiana Healthcare Connections exists to improve the health of its members through focused, compassionate and coordinated care. Because Louisiana Healthcare Connections believes healthy is a way of life, its members benefit from programs and services designed for their personal well-being. For more information, visit www.LouisianaHealthConnect.com.

About YWCA of Northwest Louisiana

YWCA of Northwest Louisiana, a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization, is on a mission to eliminate racism, empower women, and promote peace, justice, freedom, and dignity for all. The YWCA of Northwest Louisiana is a part of an international movement with service to over 2 million in the United States and 25 million worldwide. For more information about this important work, visit www.ywcanwla.org.

SOURCE Louisiana Healthcare Connections

Related Links

http://www.LouisianaHealthConnect.com


Washington, Sep 20 : US President Donald Trump on Wednesday railed against Attorney General Jeff Sessions saying he did not "have an attorney general", though he avoided mentioning if he planned on firing him.

"I don't have an attorney general. It's very sad," Trump said in an interview at the White House with the Hill.

This is not the first time that the president has attacked Sessions, but it is the most direct criticism against the attorney general since he decided to recuse himself from the investigation into alleged Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election and possible ties between the Kremlin and the Trump campaign.

The president, however, said he was disappointed not just because of Sessions' decision to recuse himself from the Russia investigation in 2017.

"I'm not happy at the border, I'm not happy with numerous things, not just this," Trump said, without providing any further details.

Trump recalled that Sessions was "the first senator" to endorse him during the Republican primaries, and that Sessions "wanted to be attorney general."

The president avoided providing a clear answer on whether he was considering firing Sessions after the November midterm elections.

"We'll see what happens. A lot of people have asked me to do that. And I guess I study history, and I say I just want to leave things alone, but it was very unfair what he did," Trump said.

"I'm very disappointed in Jeff," the president said.

In late August, the AG responded to a series of criticisms from the president saying that, while he was in office, "the actions of the Department of Justice will not be improperly influenced by political considerations."

After Sessions recused himself, the Russia investigation was handed to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who appointed special counsel Robert Mueller to head the inquiry.
Washington, Sep 20 : Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Wednesday set a deadline by which North Korea must denuclearise, saying that the process must be completed by January 2021, when President Donald Trump's current term would end.

In a statement, Pompeo also expressed his desire to meet with his North Korean counterpart, Ri Yong-ho, next week in New York during the United Nations General Assembly, Efe reported.

"This morning, I invited my counterpart Foreign Minister Ri Yong Ho to meet in New York City next week where we are both already scheduled to be in attendance at the United Nations General Assembly meeting," said Pompeo in his statement.

"This will mark the beginning of negotiations to transform US-North Korea relations through the process of rapid denuclearization of North Korea, to be completed by January 2021, as committed by Chairman Kim," he added.

Pompeo made reference to the June 2018 Singapore summit at which Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un signed a declaration opening the door to denuclearisation by Pyongyang in exchange for US guarantees regarding that regime's survival, although concrete time periods for achieving those objectives were not set forth.

In recent weeks, the bilateral dialogue between Washington and Pyongyang has stalled due to differences on how to move the denuclearisation process forward.

North Korea has demanded progress on signing a peace treaty with South Korea that would put an end to the technical state of war on the Korean Peninsula in exchange for taking concrete steps to dismantle its nuclear arsenal, as demanded by the White House.

In a gesture to Washington, Kim on Wednesday offered to permanently close Yongbyon, where the North Korean regime produces enriched uranium for its atomic bombs, in exchange for the US taking measures corresponding to those agreed to by the two countries at the Singapore summit.

Kim made the announcement at the third summit between the two Koreas held so far this year after the North Korean regime elected to try and break out of its diplomatic isolation in January.
Rome, Sep 20 : The United Nations World Food Programme on Wednesday called for "an immediate cessation of hostilities" in Yemen's devastating three-and-a-half-year civil war, warning that "full-blown" famine loomed in the war-wracked country.

"My primary concern is the innocent children, women and men of Yemen, and I urge all parties to end the fighting and support efforts to build peace," WFP chief David Beasley stated.

"Only an immediate cessation of hostilities will give the humanitarian community the sustained access it needs to provide the food and other vital assistance needed to save Yemeni lives," he said.

The poverty-stricken country had seen "ferocious armed clashes", and "a sharp deterioration of the security situation in Hodeidah and other cities across Yemen in recent days," Beasley said.

Millions of civilians have been hit by widespread economic hardship and currency devaluations as well as soaring food prices in Yemen. The country already faces the world's largest hunger crisis with 18 million people (64 percent of the population) "not knowing where their next meal is coming from," said Beasley.

The cost of basic food items has increased by 35 percent in the past 12 months in Yemen, leaving many families unable to feed themselves, he said.

"If the conflict continues to intensify and economic conditions further deteriorate, we could well see the number of severely food-insecure Yemenis increasing to 12 million, who would then need daily food assistance to survive," Beasley stated.

This year WFP is "scaling up" to assist 8 million Yemenis a month, Beasley said, urging warring parties to stop "a spate of attacks, unwitting or otherwise, on our workers, our trucks, our warehouses and the silos holding our grain."

"Targeting humanitarian workers or humanitarian assets and infrastructure should have no place in Yemen or anywhere in the world," said Beasley.

New entry points for humanitarian and commercial food imports and a free-flow of commercial and humanitarian foodstuffs inside the country are urgently needed to tackle the growing hunger crisis across the country, Beasely said.

"I urge all parties to the conflict to meet their obligations to protect civilians and civilian infrastructure and take active steps to respect international humanitarian law by ending the conflict and bringing the peace that Yemen so desperately needs," he concluded.
Washington, Sep 20 : A gunman who opened fire in a courthouse building in the US state of Pennsylvania and injured four people, has been shot dead by the police, authorities said.

The gunman entered the Masontown Borough Municipal Centre at around 2 p.m. on Wednesday and began firing, CNN quoted Lt. Steve Dowlin of the Pennsylvania State Police as saying to the media.

The four victims included a sergeant from the Masontown police department. Their injuries are not life-threatening, Dowlin said.

The suspect had a restraining order against him related to a choking case that was to be heard on Wednesday afternoon, Fayette County District Attorney Richard Bower said.

The suspect had been charged with strangulation, aggravated assault, extremist threats and simple assault as a result of a domestic matter several weeks ago, Bower added.

The motive behind the attack and the gunman's identity remains unknown.

Masontown is in southern Pennsylvania, about 55 miles from Pittsburgh and 20 miles north of Morgantown, West Virginia. The town has about 3,300 residents.
Pyongyang, Sep 20 : South Korean President Moon Jae-in and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un embarked on a historic trip on Thursday to the summit of Mount Paekdu, a sacred mountain on the country's border with China, at the end of their three-day bilateral summit.

Kim and Moon, together with the respective first ladies Ri Sol-ju and Kim Jong-sook, took off in their presidential jets from Sunan airport in Pyongyang and landed about an hour later at the Samjiyon airfield the mountain, reports Efe news.

A vehicle then took the two leaders to the foothills of the mountain, an inactive volcano, and they are expected to reach Chonji, the famous crater considered the greatest national symbol in both the North and South of the Korean peninsula.

The highest mountain on the peninsula, Mount Paekdu is believed to be the place where the Korean people were born, according to traditional folklore.

Very few South Koreans have managed to climb the crater from the South Slope, located in North Korea, due to the prolonged conflicts between the two countries.

In the framework of the three bilateral summits that have been held this year, Moon, who was born in the South and is the son of North Korean refugees fleeing the war, had expressed to Kim his wish to visit Mount Paekdu from the North Korean side.

Thursday's visit shows again the good harmony between the two leaders as well as the growing rapprochement between the two countries, as on Wednesday Kim and Moon signed a joint declaration to strengthen bilateral ties and a treaty to reduce military tensions.

The statement on Wednesday also reflects that North Korea is willing to dismantle more nuclear facilities in exchange for the US promise to implement what was agreed at the summit in Singapore in June, mainly in terms of guaranteeing the survival of the North Korean regime.

One of the main objectives of this summit was to get North Korea and the US to resume their stagnant dialogue on denuclearization which was initiated in June.

Moon's mediation and Kim's commitment at the summit have so far satisfied Washington, as US President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo welcomed the result of the inter-Korean meeting.

Moon on Thursday will fly directly back to Seoul from Samjiyon and will meet Trump on September 24 in the US to discuss the summit in detail.
Tokyo, Sep 20 : A Japanese cryptocurrency operator revealed on Thursday that hackers had accessed its systems last week and stole about 6 billion yen ($60 million).

Tech Bureau Corp said in a statement that the unauthorised breach from abroad took place for two hours on September 14 but it was only detected on Monday and the damage was not discovered until Tuesday, reports Efe news.

Sixty-seven per cent of what was stolen were assets of the firm's clients, while the rest were funds of a cryptocurrency exchange company integrated with Tech Bureau Corp, Zaif.

The theft affected three cryptocurrencies, but 89 per cent was in bitcoins (BTC) and the rest in the virtual currencies MonaCoin (MONA) and Bitcoin Cash (BCH), in amounts not yet accurately calculated, since the investigation is still underway.

The company said that the server is being thoroughly reviewed to prevent further damage, adding that it has requested financial assistance from one of its subsidiaries to cover the damage caused.

The damage suffered by this firm is less than a similar incident in January, when the Japanese operator Coincheck said its system was hacked and some $534 million were stolen.

These incidents forced the Japanese authorities to tighten controls on the cryptocurrency markets.
Mumbai, Sep 20 : At least 30 passengers on a Jet Airways Mumbai-Jaipur flight suffered ear and nose bleeding due to low cabin pressure during the ascent here on Thursday, an official said.

The flight 9W-697 with 166 passengers and five crew, was forced to return back to Mumbai shortly after take-off, said a Jet Airways spokesperson.

Several passengers complained of severe headaches and at least 30 reported bleeding from nose and ears and were immediately administered first-aid by a team of doctors at the airport.

Airline sources said that the incident may have happened after the crew reportedly missed activating what is called a 'bleed switch' before take-off, leading to the disturbance in the cabin pressure with oxygen masks getting deployed.

The Jet Airways said it has taken the concerned crew off-duty pending a probe into the incident. An investigation by the Directorate-General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) was also launched.
Rabat/Washington, Sep 20 : The US has reiterated that Moroccos autonomy plan for the Sahara region is "realistic" and "credible" and a "potential approach to resolving the Sahara issue".

"We maintain that it (the autonomy plan) is serious, realistic and credible and that it is able to satisfy the aspirations of the populations of the Sahara to manage their own affairs in peace and dignity," said Pablo Rodriguez, an official at the State Department, in a statement to Morocco's MAP new agency in Washington.

The US said the autonomy plan would also help satisfy the aspirations of the people of the Sahara region "to manage their own affairs in peace and dignity".

Washington's reaction came in the wake of the working visit paid by Moroccan Foreign Minister Nasser Bourita to the US. Bourita had held talks at the State Department with Secretary of State Michael Pompeo, President Trump's National Security Advisor John Bolton, and other senior officials.

During the meetings it was also agreed to convene the next session of the Morocco-US strategic dialogue in 2019 in Washington.

In June, US Deputy Secretary of State John Sullivan had backed Morocco's plan for autonomy in the Sahara region as "serious and credible" during a visit to Rabat.
Tripunithura (Kerala) : Tripunithura (Kerala) Sep 20 (IANS) Bishop Franco Mulakkal, accused of raping a nun, was questioned for the second consecutive day on Thursday and has been asked to return on Friday, a police official said.

The bishop of the Roman Catholic Diocese in Jalandhar, Punjab, was questioned for seven hours near here at the Crime Branch office.

Kottayam Superintendent of Police Harishankar told the media they wanted to finish the interrogation on Thursday but could not do so.

"He has been asked to report at 10.30 a.m on Friday. We are now verifying the things that he has told us and there is no confusion. Our three teams will verify it by tomorrow.

"We have sought legal consultations on the anticipatory bail plea that he has moved and we expect to get the advice on this Friday," Harishankar said, adding that by Friday, they will be able to take a holistic decision after looking into all aspects.

Accompanied by his counsel and a few priests, Mulakkal arrived at the Crime Branch office around 11 a.m., even as demands for his arrest grew. Nuns have been protesting in Kochi for 13 days.

The bishop spent the night at a plush hotel in Kochi.

He dodged a large media contingent waiting outside the hotel as he slipped away in a different car while the vehicle used on Wednesday was kept parked outside the hotel.

Like on Wednesday, Inspector General Vijay Sakhre, Harishankar and his deputy K. Subhash held a meeting at the IG office in Kochi ahead of the interrogation.

The Kerala High Court has already agreed to hear Mulakkal's anticipatory bail plea on September 25.

A Kerala nun has accused Mulakkal of repeatedly sexually abusing her between 2014 and 2016.

An FIR was registered against the bishop and a 114-page detailed statement was taken from the nun and other inmates of the convent.

Mulakkal was questioned by the police team led by Subhash in August at his Jalandhar office and has denied all the charges levelled against him by the nun.
Srinagar, Sep 20 : The mystery over the murder of a 12-year-old boy in Jammu and Kashmir's Ganderbal district has been solved and the accused has been arrested, police said on Thursday.

The dead body of Faisal was found in an orchard in his native Busarbugh village on Tuesday.

The police said Faisal was strangulated to death by Abrar Majid, 21, a known drug addict, in the orchard.

"We have arrested Abrar Majid. He confessed to have killed Faisal in a fit of rage. Abrar was stalking the recently-married sister of the victim," police said, adding they are now collecting forensic evidence.
Washington, Sep 20 : US President Donald Trump's former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn will be sentenced on December 18, one year after pleading guilty to lying to the FBI in Special Counsel Robert Mueller's Russia probe, according to court filing.

The move by US District Court Judge Emmet Sullivan came on Wednesday, a day after Mueller's team signalled that it was ready for Flynn to be sentenced after previously asking for delays, prompting speculation that the former top aide was still cooperating with the probe, Politico reported.

The date falls several weeks after the November 6 mid-term elections.

Flynn has been cooperating with the Mueller probe after pleading guilty on December 1, 2017 to a charge of making two false statements to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) about his interactions with then Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak after the 2016 US presidential elections and before Trump's inauguration in January 2017.

The retired lieutenant general is the first senior White House official to be charged in Mueller's probe.

Trump has denied knowing anything about contact between the Russians and his campaign and called Mueller's probe a "witch hunt". Russia, too, has denied allegations that it interfered in the campaign.
Lucknow, Sep 20 : Under full media glare, Uttar Pradesh police on Thursday shot dead two criminals, accused of murdering six persons including two Hindu priests, in Aligarh district.

Local journalists and television crew were formally invited as the policemen, wearing bulletproof vests, were seen aiming their guns at the criminals, later identified as Naushad and Mustakeem, who were hiding in an abandoned building.

Senior Superintendent of Police (SSP) Aligarh, Ajay Sahni, said the criminals were passing through a police checkpoint on a bike and when they were asked to stop. The criminals however tried to escape. Policemen chased them for about five kilometres.

The duo fired at the police which retaliated, resulting in an encounter. Additional police force was summoned to deal with the situation.

The district police chief added that five more persons had been arrested for their involvement in these six murders that took place in one month.

Police added that the two criminals were trying to intimidate a police witness and were planning to kill him.

The police and the state government have been under fire from human rights organizations and under the lens of the judiciary as around 1,000 encounters have taken place in the state since the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) came to power.

Sixty-six criminals and four policemen have been killed in these gun battles so far.

Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath has defended these encounters saying criminals cannot be allowed to endanger the lives of innocent and peace-loving people.
Bhubaneswar, Sep 20 : India successfully test fired the surface-to-surface short-range tactical ballistic missile Prahaar from the Odisha coast amid a heavy downpour on Thursday.

The missile developed by the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) was test fired from launching complex-III of the Integrated Test Range (ITR) in Balasore at about 1.35 p.m.

The missile was launched from a road-mobile launcher, defence sources said.

The Prahaar missile has a strike range of 150 km. Fuelled by solid propellant, it is about 7.32 meters long and its diameter is 420 mm. Its launch weight is about 1.28 tonne and it can carry a payload of 200 kg.

Prior to the launch of the missile, people from hamlets in close proximity of ITR were shifted to temporary shelters.
The KanAm Grund Group has set up a new real estate fund for institutional investors, and within less than two months has purchased properties worth over 130 million for it. The KanAm Grund European Cities fund, which was set up especially for a northern German pension fund, has by now

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CBA, the nation's largest mortgage lender, is axing residential and commercial loans for self managed super funds (SMSF).

The bank will be withdrawing its SMSF lending product, SuperGear, from October 12.

Westpac Group, the nation's second largest mortgage lender, already pulled out of the sector in July.

But the Australian Financial Review said the move had shocked mortgage brokers and financial advisers.

"We are seeing the writing on the wall for leveraged SMSFs," said Sally Tindall, director of research for RateCity, which monitors rates for financial service products.

"This calls into question the viability of the leveraged SMSF sector."

"CBA has decided to withdraw its SMSF lending product that allows SMSF trusts to purchase both residentially and commercially secured properties," a spokesman said.

"This is part of our strategy to become a simpler, better bank.

"We are streamlining our product portfolio and have decided to discontinue SuperGear."

The bank said it will be writing to customers who hold a SuperGear loan outlining the changes.

It will continue to support existing loan accounts.

Regulators fear problems arising from SMSF investors leveraging their superannuation to invest in a single residential property because of the lack of diversification and increasing dangers of loss in a falling property market where it is difficult to find tenants.

A key finding of the David Murray-led financial system inquiry in 2014 was that leverage should be banned in superannuation funds to mitigate the risk of financial instability.

The government rejected his advice.

Nearly $700 billion is held in SMSF funds by more than one million investors.

During the past four years the number of members investing in property has increased from about 3.6% to 6.9% of SMSF fund assets.
FireAngel is joining with Mears Group to provide social housing tenants with a bespoke connected home management system.

With Mears responsible for maintaining, repairing and upgrading more than 700,000 social housing properties across the UK, the new relationship will see FireAngel supply it and its clients with an integrated connected home management system using FireAngels Wi Safe 2 interlink technology to connect FireAngels Wi Safe 2 smoke, heat and carbon monoxide alarms to a cloud-based system for remote monitoring.

FireAngel Connect has been developed to enable continuous monitoring of appliances and smart devices within domestic properties via a central, cloud-based system. This allows Mears to monitor and manage FireAngel smoke, heat and CO alarms remotely and tenants to review important fire and safety information about their property.

The system is accessed via a wall mounted touchscreen tablet and will enable Mears clients to streamline maintenance management processes by facilitating direct interaction with tenants when seeking to arrange repairs and maintenance visits. Alongside FireAngels Wi-Safe 2 network, the System utilises Z-Wave wireless communication technology, providing the potential for the System in future to connect with other devices and offer additional functionality.

David Miles, Chief Executive of Mears, said: We are very pleased to have signed this partnership agreement with FireAngel. There are real safety, commercial and financial benefits to optimising our interaction with tenants and reducing the number of unanswered visits from our maintenance teams. We are witnessing a transition to integrated technologies and the FireAngel system will enable us to centralise those technologies into one central hub. We look forward to introducing the FireAngel solution to our clients across the footprint.

Neil Smith, Chief Executive of FireAngel, said: Following significant R&D investment, I am pleased to announce our collaboration with Mears, which takes our smart, connected and existing products into the heart of the UK social housing sector. By integrating our technological expertise into our Mears solution, we believe that FireAngel can significantly enhance the quality of service and support through a range of connected safety monitoring devices for housing tenants across the UK."
Suburbs located in inner and middle rings of Adelaide are considered to be the best prospects for price growth in the December quarter, according to a Herron Todd White (HTW) recent residential report.

Historically, the South Australian property market slows during the second and third quarters.

But the valuers latest report says the mid-year months are dreary.

It noted the state government has mapped the quarterly metropolitan house price from June 1998 which, with the exception of notable peaks and troughs, shows slight dips in the median price through the September quarter of the year with an uplift towards December.

The valuation firm noted that the effects of the banking royal commission have begun to be felt through the mid- portion of the year.

"The ability to borrow money has tightened," the report said.

"Agents report that purchasers are being priced out of properties that may have fallen into their price bracket 12 months ago.

"This could cause a doubling down on the September quarter results given the out-of-cycle market pressure.

"The tightening in lending will not be fully quantified until the results of the December 2018 and March 2019 metropolitan median price growth are revealed," HTW suggested.

Agents have reported a slowing in a number of key market indicators leading up to September.

Buyer enquiry has reduced while available stock is limited. Discussions with agents in the field indicate the slowing in these key indicators is a seasonal occurrence which forms part of the annual property cycle.

For properties going to auction, the winter months can pose a serious threat to the hammer falling, HTW noted.

"Fence sitting purchasers who are thinking of bidding can be spooked by a simple rain shower or the threat of looming dark clouds.

"The agent who thought they had ten registered bidders now has five."

Braving the wintry conditions were the vendors of 45 Gray Street, Norwood (pictured above) who began advertising their three-bedroom, one-bathroom symmetrical cottage in July with an auction to be held in August.

A large crowd braved the cool weather to see the property sell under the hammer for $790,000.

Norwood is located approximately 3.5 kilometres east of the Adelaide CBD and consistently rated as South Australias most searched suburb.

The HTW valuer said" "Suburbs located within the inner and middle rings have been the best performers over the past 12 months.

"Suburbs located in these rings are considered to be the best prospects for price growth in the December quarter too.

"This sector provides options aplenty for first home buyers, downsizers, families and developers."

Within the inner ring, price pressure can be expected in the $600,000 to $900,000 range whilst the middle ring can expect pressure in the $300,000 to $600,000 range.

Recently advertised in the inner ring is 4 Marian Road, Payneham (pictured above) which comprises a character four-bedroom, one-bathroom dwelling on a 1,100 square metre allotment.

This property has been listed for sale by auction with an asking price of $800,000.

Whilst in the middle ring, 12 Aberfeldy Avenue, Edwardstown comprises a three-bedroom, one-bathroom updated 1950s home on a 660 square metre allotment.

This property has been listed for sale by auction with an asking price of $439,000.

The outer ring continues to struggle with extended days on market with stagnant and in some cases negative growth.

Post-September and moving into the summer months we begin to see an increase in the listings surrounding beach side suburbs and coastal holiday destinations.

Coastal tourist towns of Victor Harbor, Pt Elliot and Goolwa south of the city on the Fleurieu Peninsula and Wallaroo, Moonta, Stansbury and Black Point north-west of the city on the Yorke Peninsula swell with holiday makers.

This provides the perfect opportunity to promote new listings as the market pool increases.

Properties which lend themselves to holiday makers and dont achieve sale through the spring or summer months can be removed from the market during the middle portion of the year to avoid any perceived over exposure.

Recently sold in the beachside suburb of Hayborough approximately 80 kilometres south of the Adelaide CBD is 8 Olivers Parade (pictured above).

The property provides six-bedrooms and three-bathrooms over two levels of living.

The dwelling provides unrestricted ocean and beach views and is situated on an allotment of approximately 1,200 square metres.

This property was advertised through the winter months before selling for $1.7 million.

Listed for sale approximately 170 kilometres north-west of the Adelaide CBD is 124 Black Point Drive, Black Point (pictured above).

This property comprises a three-bedroom shack with absolute beach frontage.

The property has been listed for sale with an asking price of $785,000.

Black Point is considered a blue-ribbon location with those properties situated on the northern side of Black Point Drive being some of the most sought after real estate on the peninsula.

This location has historically been tightly held with only a handful of transactions occurring annually.

This has changed in recent times with large areas of former reserve land being divided and sold as residential allotments.

"Market conditions within these semi-regional and regional costal townships remain stagnant," the HTW valuer noted.
Billionaire James Packer has spent about $80 million on a Los Angeles home once owned by actor Danny DeVito.

The home includes seven bedrooms, an eight car garage, all marble kitchen, pool, beauty salon, cigar room, cellar and private cinema on the 2700 sqm property.



Picture: Picture: Joe Bryant James Packer reportedly made the acquisition moved to be closer to family.

Packer purchased the Holmby Heights property for nearly $25 million below the asking price of $115 million, reported Londons The Sun.



Packer's new home has a cinema room: Picture Joe Bryant

Devito and his then wife actor Rhea Perlman had lived in the home 21 years before selling it in 2015 for about $27 million.

In 2015 he sold his Vaucluse, Sydney mansion La Mer for $70 million.

He set a record in 2016 by spending $60 million on an off the plan One Barangaroo, Sydney apartment  breaking the Australian apartment price record.

Forbes calculates Packer had a likely net worth of about $3.9 billion.



The marble kitchen: Picture Joe Bryant

Damon Kitney, who is set to launch The Price of Fortune: The untold story of being James Packer, published by HarperCollins, wrote Packer decided at the end of June to buy a property in Los Angeles, which for the past five years has been home to his second wife, Erica Packer, and their children Indigo, Jackson and Emmanuelle.

I just want to say what an incredible job Erica is doing bringing them up, Mr Packer said in an interview with The Weekend Australian last October.

I always thought shed be a good mother and she is proving that every day  LA is a really terrific place for them to be. There is a lot of positive energy, a lot of positive affirmation there. And there is not the Packer fishbowl that there would have been in Sydney. They have anonymity there that they dont have in Sydney. That is really healthy for them.



The exterior of the home: Picture Joe Bryant

He previously has rented the guesthouse of movie legend Warren Beatty on the storied Mulholland Drive in Beverly Hills.

He divides his time between the home he shares with Ms Packer in Aspen, his polo ranch in Argentina and a resort villa in Los Cabos, Mexico.

Packers purchase of the new Beverly Hills home will be funded by the sale of EJI  the first initials of his three children  for which he reportedly has been asking $65.7 million, and by the sale of his Bondi Beach apartment.

Kitney wrote in The Australian that Packer has no immediate plans to resume doing business in Hollywood.
"Just Judy" I intended to pass on a success story of perseverance, leadership, and ethics to future generations. But Ive found that people of all ages are enjoying Just Judy and sharing it with friends. Now, this relatable and motivational story is even more accessible to people with our eBook format.

Just Judy is the inspiring story of Judy Baar Topinka, a strong female leader who changed Illinois history through her dedication to effective government and equality. Released in paperback on February 28, 2018, Just Judy is now available in eBook format on Amazon.

Judy Baar Topinkas legacy inspires readers to be true to themselves while finding a way to make a difference in the world. Joseph Topinka, son of Judy Baar Topinka and author of Just Judy, chose to share her life story as a way to encourage the next generation of thinkers.

I intended to pass on a success story of perseverance, leadership, and ethics to future generations, says Joseph Topinka. But Ive found that people of all ages are enjoying Just Judy and sharing it with friends. Now, this relatable and motivational story is even more accessible to people with our eBook format.

You'll find these five life lessons weaved throughout stories in Just Judy:

1. Believe in yourself: Judy Baar Topinka faced opposition head on and didnt allow people or obstacles to get in her way. She broke into journalism and politics, despite the doubts surrounding female professionals. Against all odds, she won her first election and went on to become a State Representative, State Senator and State Comptroller.

2. Empower women: As a journalist, Judy Baar Topinka observed corruption, bureaucracy, waste, and most of all a lack of opportunities for woman. As a politician, she changed policy and became a voice for equality. When serving in the Senate, she sent a strong message to several male peers by wearing a pin stating Dont call me honey, baby, lady, or girl. Call me Senator.

3. Follow a strong moral compass: Judy Baar Topinka put her constituents first and led through integrity and hard work. She stayed true to her values, even when they didnt align with her political partys platform. Her direct, no-nonsense approach to public service was effective because she was trustworthy and her actions matched her words.

4. Work well with others: Having grown up immersed in various cultures, Judy Baar Topinka respected and valued peoples differences and practiced civility towards others. She understood that a large part of her role in government was to collaborate with people, whatever their party affiliation or position. It was these attitudes and insights that helped Judy work effectively with both sides of the aisle.

5. Understand history to contribute to the present: The Illinois Bicentennial is the perfect time to learn about Judy Baar Topinka and her positive impact on Illinois. In addition to changing policy, Judy Baar Topinka took on projects that promoted Illinois history to its citizens. She cited the lives of compelling Illinois citizens such as Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, Ronald Reagan, Adlai Stevenson, and Harold Washington in her speeches and oversaw the development of a series of medallions honoring them. Each of these leaders inspired Judy and advanced the cause of Illinois history.

Released in print earlier this year, Just Judy is now available as an eBook. Purchase Just Judy at Amazon.com.

Share this two-minute video about Judy Baar Topinka told through friends, coworkers and family.

About the Author:

Joseph B. Topinka is a retired military attorney and now an assistant professor at Texas State University in San Marcos, Texas. He is also an adjunct professor at the University of Incarnate Words School of Healthcare Administration. He holds a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Illinois; a juris doctor from Northern Illinois University; a Master of Business Administration from Saint Martins University; a Master of Laws from the United States Army Judge Advocate Generals School; a Master of Health Administration from Chapman University; and a Master of Laws from Loyola University. He is the author or co-author of many works over the last ten years.

Joseph Topinka was born in Berwyn, Illinois and raised in neighboring Riverside, Illinois. Joe is a member of the Illinois, Washington, and Texas bars and is actively involved in the American Legion. He lives with his wife and daughter in Texas.

About TAWANI Enterprises

TAWANI Enterprises, headquartered in Chicago, specializes in the development, investment, management and preservation of real estate properties in the Chicago area. The company represents a diversified portfolio of iconic brands, such as the Stone Heritage Collection, TAWANI's hospitality arm of thoughtfully designed lodging and event spaces, the Pritzker Military Museum and Library, the TAWANI Foundation and the Pritzker Military Foundation. Properties under the Stone Heritage Collection include Stone Terrace, Stone Porch by the Lake, Lang House, The Emil Bach House, Mayne Stage and The Lincoln Way Inn. For more information, visit http://www.tawanienterprises.com.

About Hilton Publishing:

HPC was founded in 1996 as Hilton Publishing Company by Dr. Hilton Hudson II who was inspired by a mission to educate and promote health in communities that had long been overlooked and marginalized. Today, HPC is a publisher and distributor of books, e-books, journals and magazines for K-12 schools, universities, Fortune 500 corporations, and healthcare organizations as well as a leading supplier of strategic and innovative service solutions for the healthcare industry.
It is a great honor to be nominated by Google for this award, and I am very proud of the team here who worked diligently on this campaign explains Alycia Hise, Partner at A&A Group.

A&A Group, a leading New York City based digital media agency, has been named a Video Innovation finalist in this years Premier Partner Awards, presented by Google.

The Premier Partner Awards honor innovation in digital marketing across Search, Mobile, Video, Display, Shopping, and Growing Businesses Online.

A&A Group offers digital media buying services to companies in wide variety of industries, including retail products, non-profits and real estate. Their award submission included a profile describing their recent work for YesTo, Inc.

YesTo, Inc., a global leader in natural beauty products, was looking to expand their video presence to their target audience, so they turned to A&A Group for a comprehensive video marketing strategy. The ad agency utilized YouTube to push out a variety of engaging :15 second videos along with companion banners for higher impact and reach, and continually optimized the campaign to garner superior results.

It is a great honor to be nominated by Google for this award, and I am very proud of the team here who worked diligently on this campaign, explains Alycia Hise, Partner at A&A Group. We have always been an ROI-driven agency, and this is another example how we partnered with a great client like YesTo to achieve outstanding results.

A&A Group is part of a select group of digital specialists that Google celebrates as Premier Partners. To qualify as a Premier Partner, digital marketing agencies and professionals must pass a series of exams and prove their expertise in using and applying Googles advertising products.

Premier Partner Awards 2018 winners will be announced in October at g.co/PartnerPartnerAwards. To learn more about A&A Group, visit http://www.aa-grp.com.

A&A Group is an advertising agency based in New York City that has been orchestrating media and marketing campaigns for select clients nationwide for over 11+ years. Combining tailored media strategy, impactful creative messaging, exceptional analysis, and results-driven optimization, they expand brands to their fullest potential, and consistently deliver results at the best possible ROI possible. For more information, visit: http://www.aa-grp.com.
We are extremely proud of our new corporate website and look forward to making things easier for our customers, states Michael Stoll, VP of Technical Sales & Marketing at Aeroturn.

Aeroturn LLC, a leading turnstile manufacturer that offers 100% Made in The USA turnstiles, today announced that the company has launched a brand new redesigned corporate website. As part of Aeroturns continued commitment to offer quality turnstile solutions, the company has launched a new website that brings valuable information all in one place to its customers fingertips. The refreshed website provides users with a simple platform to gather information on its turnstile solutions and even provides a direct link to the Arcat website on the home page. Having direct access to the Arcat website will make it easier for architects, consultants, and engineers to gather the information necessary to specify Aeroturns turnstile solutions in future projects.

Aeroturn designs, manufacturers, tests, delivers, and installs the worlds only zero-maintenance standard and customized turnstiles. By making information easily available on the new website, users can now easily find product specifications, customer testimonials, marketing collateral, and the latest company news all in one place. As an added benefit, users can also sign up for a free on-site product demonstration online. With over 15 years of experience under its belt and an unwavering commitment to service; the company has become the go-to turnstile partner for companies throughout the nation; and this new website is a perfect testament to its success. We are extremely proud of our new corporate website and look forward to making things easier for our customers, states Michael Stoll, VP of Technical Sales & Marketing at Aeroturn. Our goal is to provide a clear message to our customers and show our value proposition and why we stand out from the rest and this new website clearly illustrates this to users.

The companys customer first philosophy is the driving force behind its success. Customers can rely on Aeroturn to deliver the very best in turnstile solutions now and in the future. For further information on Aeroturn turnstile solutions, visit its new redesigned corporate website at http://www.aeroturn.com.

About Aeroturn LLC

Based out of our 100% Made in USA Oxford, CT location, Aeroturn has been offering integrators and end users this centurys turnstiles that include a comprehensive range of turnstile products. With an engineering team that is second to none; the team has been together for over two and a half decades in the product design, development and manufacturing field and continues to lead the way in the security industry. Since its inception in 2001, Aeroturn offers every customer a 5-year warranty, zero maintenance mechanisms, 10 million passages guaranteed, site specific cabinets, 10,000 cycle factory burn-in, and industry unique-factory direct delivery & installation. The company installed its first turnstiles in 2003 and 2004 and has not stopped delivering quality turnstiles and services over the years to its high-profile customers in a wide variety of vertical markets that includes commercial, private, government, industrial, bio-pharma and education. Working closely with the architect, consultant & engineering community, Aeroturn understands the specific needs of its customers and continues to exceed expectations on each and every project. For further information on Aeroturns turnkey turnstile solutions, visit http://www.aeroturn.com.

Company Contact:

Michael Stoll, VP Technical Sales & Marketing

Aeroturn LLC

Phone: 203-262-8309

mike(dot)stoll(at)aeroturn(dot)com

PR Contact:

Monique Merhige, President

Infusion Direct Marketing & Advertising, Inc.

Phone: 631-846-1558

Email: monique(at)infusiondirect(dot)com
Consumers throughout the United States who are interested in making and saving more money will be able to access a brand-new online resource by industry expert Andrew Curran Wesleyan this November -- right in time for the costly holiday season.

Wesleyan has created a new website dedicated to helping readers with their finances, located at http://www.andrewcurranwesleyan.com/. After a successful closed beta run, an open beta is currently running. Then, version 1.0 of the website will be released on Nov. 1.

Wesleyan, a University of Connecticut finance student whose goal is to become a leading financial advisor, decided to create the website to provide readers with basic finance advice for free. According to Wesleyan, only around 30% of Americans have household budgets. This same percentage applies to those with long-ranging financial plans, along with investments and savings. Research further shows that over 50% of households in the United States live from one paycheck to the next.

With many Americans feeling fearful and anxious about their monetary wellbeing, Wesleyan looks forward to providing reader with financial insights that can help them to grow their earnings and to protect the wealth they have worked so hard to build. However, is aim is not to make his advice overly complex, as many online sources complicate the idea of saving and building wealth. Instead, he plans to offer simple and practical yet valuable financial advice.

For instance, Wesleyans website will highlight how best to save money by cutting spending, and how to delve into the stock market, cryptocurrencies, oil, and gold. He will also provide advice regarding picking up side gigs to generate extra money and thus more effectively master ones finances.

The website will target young people, as the younger a person is, the longer she or he has to create a nest egg. Plus, those who figure out the basics of finance and money early on in life can avoid making costly mistakes down the road. However, older individuals can also find the website beneficial. After all, according to Andrew Curran Wesleyan, people are never too young nor too old to experience the joy of financial freedom.
Angela Dufresne, Ticket Line, 2018 Dufresne's critical eye brings the past into the present: the settings, historical story lines, and array of subjects she employs align with a montage sensibility in which different imagery from carefully selected moments in visual culture coalesce.  Erin Dziedzic, director of curatorial affairs

Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art is proud to present "Angela Dufresne: Making a Scene," a major museum exhibition comprising of more than thirty paintings and video works spanning nearly a decade, with an opening reception taking place Thursday, September 20, from 6:008:00 p.m. The artist will be in attendance, signing exhibition catalogues from 6:30-7:00 p.m., following a performance by the Chamber Ensemble of Heartland Mens Chorus.

The exhibition will remain on view through January 6, 2019.

Focusing on her signature depictions of modern life, "Angela Dufresne: Making a Scene" compositionally connects us to the history of painting and cinema, and includes a catalogue of new essays produced exclusively for the exhibition.

Curated by Kemper Museums Erin Dziedzic, director of curatorial affairs, the exhibition provides an opportunity to explore contemporary painting through an important lens: Dufresne's critical eye brings the past into the present: the settings, historical story lines, and array of subjects she employs align with a montage sensibility in which different imagery from carefully selected moments in visual culture coalesce, states Dziedzic.

Dufresnes paintings and videos provide a constant link to motion, motion picture, and scene, continued Dziedzic. They remark on the immediacy of today, engaging with the chaotic, sensual, reflective, and changing aspects of how we got here. By acknowledging points of representation in our past, she critically and openly discusses this era and generation.

Angela Dufresne was raised in Olathe, Kansas, and graduated from the Kansas City Art Institute in 1991. Dufresnes paintings are part of the Kemper Museum Permanent Collection and exemplify the Museums celebration of the history of the gesture in modern and contemporary art. Dufresne is Associate Professor of painting at Rhode Island School of Design, and lives in Brooklyn, New York.

A complete list of public programs taking place in conjunction with the exhibition can be found at kemperart.org, and include the artist in conversation with Erin Dziedzic and artists Geoffrey Chadsey and Carrie Moyer (Friday, September 21); a book tour talk with C.J. Janovy, author of "No Place Like Home: Lessons in Activism from LGBT Kansas" (Thursday, October 4); a visiting scholar talk with Melissa Ragona, author of "Blink, Cut, Surrender: Angela Dufresnes Poltergeist," featured in the exhibition catalogue produced in conjunction with this exhibition; and a three-part film screening of features which had a major impact on the artist, including "Opening Night" (Thursday, October 25), "Mamma Roma" (Thursday, November 8), and "Gloria" (Thursday, December 6).

Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art is open 10:00 a.m.4:00 p.m., TuesdayWednesday; 10:00 a.m.9:00 p.m., Thursday and Friday; and 10:00 a.m.4:00 p.m., Saturday and Sunday. Admission and parking at Kemper Museum are always free. Support for Kemper Museum is generously provided by members and donors.

About Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art

Kansas Citys renowned FREE contemporary art museum, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art opened in October 1994 and draws nearly 100,000 visitors each year. The Museum boasts a rapidly growing Permanent Collection that uniquely bridges modern and contemporary works of art featuring artists such as Louise Bourgeois, Helen Frankenthaler, Willem de Kooning, Georgia OKeeffe, Keltie Ferris, Trenton Doyle Hancock, Richard Mosse, and Ursula von Rydingsvard. Special exhibitions, installations, lectures, and workshops, as well as youth, teen, and family programs are regularly hosted at the Museum. Learn more at: kemperart.org.

For high-resolution images of select works, please contact:

Breeze Richardson

Director of Marketing and Communications

Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art

brichardson@kemperart.org | 816-457-6132 (direct)
M-Files Corporation, the intelligent information management company, today announced that Apex Oil Company, a provider of wholesale distribution, storage and transportation of petroleum products across the U.S., has chosen the M-Files intelligent information management platform. Apex Oil integrated M-Files with its enterprise service management solution Cherwell to streamline user experience and create improved document management company-wide.

The integration between M-Files and Cherwell uses a connector created by Prevolution, an M-Files partner with extensive experience in enterprise service management that also supported Apex Oil throughout the project. The M-Files intelligent information management solution employs a unique approach that integrates well with Cherwells enterprise service management platform because it classifies and organizes documents and other information with metadata and relationships rather than storing them in traditional folders, sites or libraries. This allows documents to be directly associated with objects and data managed in Cherwell, such as customers, incidents, projects and IT assets, enabling them to be accessed in context, directly within the Cherwell user interface. Moreover, using an innovation called the Intelligent Metadata Layer (IML), M-Files provides access to documents and information in other systems and repositories within the organization, such as file shares and SharePoint sites, as well as CRM, ERP and legacy ECM systems, without the need for data migration.

We chose M-Files because it provides this great concept of organizing documents with metadata versus storing them in folders, said Gary Fleming, director of information services at Apex Oil. Instead of thinking about where to store a document, you simply define what it is, and then youre able to easily find that document by searching for it using metadata or the content of the document itself. Or better, you dont even have to search for it because it's directly related to the object you are working with in Cherwell. We knew from the beginning that integrating service and information management would be great, but when you actually see this working for the first time, with your documents in M-Files showing up right with your customers and incidents in Cherwell in a nice and structured way, you think, Wow  this is really cool.

By integrating Cherwell with M-Files, Cherwell users benefit from unified access to all relevant documents and other information in context, without having to worry about where they're located or stored. This creates a single point of truth for Cherwell users, in addition to providing version control and ensuring that duplicate documents are eliminated. For Apex Oil, it also provided improved security and compliance because they were able to establish precise access rights to specific documents based on their class or type, which had the added benefit of shifting the management of access rights to the owners of the documents since they are the ones who classify them.

Service management and information management both benefit greatly from integration. During a service process or incident, it's vital to have access to all the relevant documents in the right context. M-Files is perfect for this, since it allows users to tap into many repositories and legacy systems, said Kai Andresen, managing director of Prevolution. On the other hand, the service process itself provides a lot of metadata for documents that are created or changed during the process. This enables M-Files to establish context by linking documents and other information to objects that are core to the service process, such as customers, projects and incidents.

Apex Oils integration of Cherwell and M-Files is a great example of how M-Files can enhance other business applications, said Scott Erickson, SVP of Channel Sales at M-Files. M-Files and our partners are constantly expanding the universe of systems and repositories that integrate with the M-Files platform, and we're particularly excited to see how experts in specific domains, like Prevolution for service management, use M-Files to extend their solutions and applications with intelligent information management.

More information on the Cherwell M-Files connector can be found here: https://www.prevolution.de/en-m-files-connector

For a more detailed description of the Apex Oil project please visit:

Case Study: Apex Oil - Integrating Service and Information Management

About Prevolution

Prevolution, founded in Hamburg, Germany in 2011, is a leading consulting and software company for integrated Service and Information Management (iSIM). The company helps its customers to optimize their service processes - especially in IT service management (ITSM) and customer service - to sustainably improve service quality and increase efficiency and reduce costs. Prevolution has integrated the usually separate concepts for service management and information management and implements individual solutions with the two leading and future-proof products Cherwell and M-Files. Prevolution advises customers globally on the integration of both products and offers an out-of-the-box connector. Prevolution is founding member of the BAT Alliance, which brings together service management specialists around the world. Its clients include midsize to large companies as well as international corporates such as the healthcare group Asklepios, CWS boco, Munich Airport, HHLA, Otto, SYZYGY and Wustenrot. For more information, visit http://www.prevolution.de.

About M-Files Corporation

M-Files provides a next-generation intelligent information management platform that improves business performance by helping people find and use information more effectively. Unlike traditional enterprise content management (ECM) systems or content services platforms, M-Files unifies systems, data and content across the organization without disturbing existing systems and processes or requiring data migration. Using artificial intelligence (AI) technologies in its unique Intelligent Metadata Layer, M-Files breaks down silos by delivering an in-context experience for accessing and leveraging information that resides in any system and repository, including network folders, SharePoint, file sharing services, ECM systems, CRM, ERP and other business systems and repositories. Thousands of organizations in more than 100 countries use M-Files for managing their business information and processes, including NBC Universal, OMV, Rovio, SAS Institute and thyssenkrupp. For more information, visit http://www.m-files.com.

M-Files is a registered trademark of M-Files Corporation. All other registered trademarks belong to their respective owners.
The Association for Responsible Alternatives to Workers Compensation (ARAWC), whose mission includes protecting and promoting the distinct advantages of Texas injury benefit programs, announces the appointment of Jeff Pettegrew as its Chief Policy Officer. As a renowned insurance industry thought leader, risk manager, and CEO for over 35 years specializing in workers compensation, Pettegrew will serve as resident advocate in ARAWCs interactions with its members, media, and key stakeholders. Pettegrew will provide keen insight, research, and recommendations in a variety of workers comp-related topics. A prolific journalist/writer, he will be actively involved in ARAWCs website communications and at member meetings. He will also represent ARAWC as a speaker or moderator at various regional and national workers comp and insurance industry meetings and conferences.

Pettegrew helped establish the largest global network of thought leadership and decision makers in the insurance industry, http://www.insurancethoughtleadership.com. As ITLs Chief Imagination Officer, Jeff contributed dozens of insightful and critical-thinking articles on innovative techniques, emerging technologies, and creativity in the workers comp and risk management arena. He remains active as an ITL Advisory Board Member. Jeff previously served 10 years as the pioneering, first CEO of the California Self Insurers Security Fund  the largest state guarantee fund covering most of the states current and former private and nonprofit workers compensation risks. His workers compensation and safety management skills are nationally recognized, having served 12 years as VP of Westaff, an international staffing company with 80,000 employees working in over 40 states for over 8,000 companies in every imaginable job assignment.

Previously, he was the founding CEO for 10 years of the northern California Bay Cities Risk Management Insurance Authority, where he developed one of the nations first fully self-insured and self-administered governmental pools to provide workers comp, liability, property, safety and health coverage for 18 municipalities, with previous experience as the first risk manager for the cities of Walnut Creek and Sunnyvale, California. Pettegrew was honored as "Risk Manager of the Year" by Business Insurance and was the standing Chairman of the Business Insurance National Workers Compensation & Disability Conference for nine years. He also served as co-founder and/or President of several workers compensation and risk management associations. A popular writer, industry spokesperson, ARM instructor, speaker, and educator at insurance doctorate programs, as well as an interviewee on CNN and 60 Minutes, Pettegrew is a popular key contributor to industry conferences. He served four years as Captain in the Air Force including liaison assignments with the Pentagon and White House. Pettegrew received his B.A. at Denison University (Ohio) and M.P.A. at Cal State University, East Bay.

About ARAWC

The Association for Responsible Alternatives to Workers Compensation is a national organization formed to promote and protect an innovative employee injury benefit plan that delivers significant benefits and improved medical outcomes to injured workers. Employers play an active role interfacing with their workers, their plan design and in safety programs. For more information, visit https://arawc.org/.
Bernard A. Krooks Named to Best Lawyers in America It is an honor to be recognized by my peers. says Krooks.

Best Lawyers in America has once again recognized Bernard A. Krooks, JD, CPA, LLM, CELA, AEP (Distinguished) of Littman Krooks LLP for excellence in Elder Law and Trusts and Estates.

Krooks has been included in its definitive guide to legal excellence in the U.S. in the field of Elder Law and Trusts and Estates every year since 2008. A listing in Best Lawyers is widely regarded by both clients and legal professionals as a significant honor conferred on a lawyer by his or her peers.

In addition, he has been named to New York Super Lawyers and the Top 25 Westchester County Super Lawyers by Super Lawyers magazine.

Krooks is a founding partner of the law firm Littman Krooks LLP and Chair of its Elder Law and Special Needs Department. He is a nationally-recognized expert in all aspects of elder law and special needs planning. He is a member of the Estate Planning Hall of Fame by the National Association of Estate Planners & Councils (NAEPC). He is also past President of the Board of Directors of the Arc of Westchester, the largest agency in Westchester County serving people with intellectual and developmental disabilities.

Krooks is the immediate past Chair of the Elder Law Committee of the American College of Trust and Estate Counsel (ACTEC) and is also past Chair of the Elder Law and Special Needs Planning Group of the Real Property, Trust & Estate Law (RPTE) Section of the American Bar Association (ABA). He is past President of the National Academy of Elder Law Attorneys, and past Chair of the Elder Law and Special Needs Section of the New York State Bar Association. Krooks has served as a board member of the Hudson Valley Chapter of the Alzheimers Association as well as the Board of Directors of the Caregiver Insights Foundation, a non-profit dedicated to assisting individuals and their families with end-of-life issues.

To read more about Mr. Krooks please click here.

About Littman Krooks

Littman Krooks LLP provides sophisticated legal advice and the high level of expertise ordinarily associated with large law firms along with the personal attention and responsiveness of smaller firms. These ingredients, which are the cornerstone of effective representation and are necessary to a successful lawyer/client relationship, have become the foundation of the firms success.

Littman Krooks LLP offers legal services in several areas of law, including elder law, estate planning, special needs planning, special education advocacy, and corporate and securities. Their offices are located at 399 Knollwood Road, White Plains, New York and 655 Third Avenue, New York, New York. Visit the firms website at http://www.littmankrooks.com
During the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) foreign ministers meeting in Almaty on June 11, 2018, Russias Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov informed his Kazakh counterpart of Moscows concerns over U.S. military logistics planning involving Kazakhstan, and biological laboratories in the country. The protest was prompted by President Nursultan Nazarbayevs signature on May 5 of amendments to the 2010 U.S.-Kazakhstan agreement on commercial rail transit of special cargo to Afghanistan through Kazakhstan, which allow the U.S. to use Kazakhstans territory for supplying U.S. forces in Afghanistan. The exchange took place on the eve of the fifth Caspian summit, where the heads of the five littoral states signed a convention on the status of the Caspian Sea, according to which non-littoral states may not deploy armed forces to the Sea.

BACKGROUND: Since the start of Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan, the U.S. has used several air and ground routes for supplying troops to there. Despite Moscows official support for U.S. counterterrorism operations after 9/11, Russia has considered U.S. use of military bases or territories in Central Asia and the Caucasus as a threat, and has sought to control these countries military cooperation with the U.S. while simultaneously temporarily allowing Russian territory for transportation. A decree signed by Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev in June 2012 allowed NATO to use combined transit routes in addition to ground transit  including railway, air and road.

To accommodate the increased need for non-lethal supplies to Afghanistan after 2009, and to reduce reliance on supply lines though Pakistan, U.S. planners opened the Northern Distribution Network (NDN), a series of commercially-based logistical arrangements connecting Baltic and Caspian ports with Afghanistan via Russia, Central Asia, and the Caucasus.

Even as Russian officials supported the NDN, it has remained controversial in Russia, and has been the subject of protests from several nationalist groups as well as part of the public. For example, the plan to create a NATO transit logistic center in Ulyanovsk in 2012 triggered public protests in the city. After Russias intervention in Ukraine and the subsequent Western sanctions, the Russian government closed the Russian part of the NDN in 2015.

President Trumps decisions to increase the U.S. military contingent in Afghanistan, pursue further U.S. sanctions on Russia and suspend military aid to Pakistan have highlighted the need for expand the alternative transit route running from Georgia through Azerbaijan, across the Caspian Sea to eastern Kazakhstan and into Uzbekistan, which has railway connections with northern Afghanistan. Indeed, Afghanistan was a main topic of the January 2018 meeting between the U.S. and Kazakh presidents.

The Kazakh parliaments ratification in April of amendments to the agreement on the use of Kazakh ports by the U.S. military in the Caspian Sea caused concern among Russian experts and media, triggering a campaign to denounce Astanas betrayal ploy. Since then, a frightening prediction of the future appearance of U.S. military bases in the Caspian Sea have appeared in a number of Russian media outlets. In these reports, the decision of Kazakhstans Senate to approve the U.S. Navys use of the Aktau and Kuryk ports for transiting special cargo to Afghanistan will turn the ports into bases of the Pentagon and its allies. They emphasize that Kazakhstans current turn towards the U.S. is anti-Russian and that the prospect of U.S. ships carrying military or non-military cargo in the Caspian basin is highly undesirable. The route through Black Sea ports to Azerbaijan and to the Caspian Sea is depicted as completely illogical logistics, rendering the current agreement a military-political promotion of American interests.

IMPLICATIONS: While the related protocol was signed in 2017, U.S.-Kazakh talks about the possibility of using the Aktau port of as a transit point started in 2013. Moscow is concerned that the agreement will increase Washingtons role in the region and that U.S. assistance could provide for a strengthened Kazakh navy that would challenge Russias own naval presence in the Caspian.

Conversely, Astana seeks to balance its foreign policy in order to mitigate Russias dominant role in Kazakhstans internal and external security. Moreover, despite Kazakhstans membership in Russia-led political and military organizations, Astana has since independence sought to maintain productive political and economic relations with the West. After the downturn in cooperation between the West and Russia and the introduction of Western sanctions, Astanas ability to retain relations with the U.S. and the EU has become even more important. Astana therefore considers the new transport project as an affordable opportunity to increase cooperation with the United States.

To mitigate Russias reaction, Kazakh Foreign Minister Kairat Abdrakhmanov recently stated that Kazakhstan will not allow U.S. military bases in the Caspian, explaining that the agreement concerns commercial transportation of non-lethal cargoes.

Russia considers the Caspian Basin as vital to its geopolitical interests and continues to strengthen its power projection in this region. Since 2010, Moscow has sharply increased its military presence in the Caspian Sea and is modernizing its Caspian Flotilla, which will in 2021 be reinforced with six new warships. The Ministry of Defense also plans to complete the construction of a military port in Kaspiisk, Dagestan by 2020. According to Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, the Caspian Flotilla will move its main base from Astrakhan to the new port, which is closer to the central section of the sea.

The Caspians military strategic importance is highlighted by its direct adjacency to the Caucasus and Central Asia and close proximity to the Middle East. As demonstrated during the Russian operation in Syria, the Caspian Sea is a safe area from which to launch cruise missiles  the so-called bastion strategy. Therefore, with support from Iran, Russia has actively sought to keep the Caspian inaccessible to third actors.

Naturally, an additional factor is the wealth of oil and gas resources under the Caspian seabed and the prospect of linking Central Asia to the existing transit corridor for energy shipments from the South Caucasus to the West, a project strongly promoted by the West but opposed by Russia.

Moscow could potentially use several means for pressuring Astana to refrain from expanded security cooperation with the United States. These include the Russian or Russian-speaking community of Kazakhstan, along with socio-economic and political tensions in Kazakh society that could undermine the regime. Moreover, days before the decision of Kazakhstans Senate, Russian officials and media again highlighted the Lugar laboratories in Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan and Georgia, which are located on the planned transportation routes. Maria Zakharova, the Russian foreign ministrys press secretary, stated that the very fact of the large-scale medical-biological activities of the Pentagon on the borders of Russia is of particular concern for Moscow. These biological research laboratories were built as part of the Nunn-Lugar Biological Threat Reduction program, named after the U.S. Senators initiating them. The program was intended to dismantle the former Soviet Unions massive biological weapons research, and to prevent the proliferation of expertise, materials, equipment and technologies that could contribute to the development of biological weapons in Russia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Georgia, Azerbaijan and Ukraine. According to Moscow, these laboratories are conducting research that could potentially be used for the production of bacteriological weapons, while the transfer of information and samples of pathogens to the U.S. could disclose not only Soviet, but also Russian military and biological secrets. Thus, these activities threaten Russias military interests. These military-biological labs near Russia are described as external threats in Russias latest National Security Strategy. It should be noted that the EU External Action Services EU vs Disinformation website has repeatedly raised attention to Moscows allegations concerning Lugar laboratories, as these are not backed up with evidence and lack a basis in fact. Lavrov explicitly linked the laboratories to U.S. transit though Kazakhstan during the CSTO meeting, indicating that Zakharovas statement was a warning to all hosting countries.

CONCLUSIONS: Kazakhstan faces a challenge in balancing its foreign relations between Russia, China and the U.S., especially in the face of an upcoming leadership succession in the country. Moreover, the recently signed Caspian Convention allows Moscow legal leverage to prevent military activities of non-littoral states in the Caspian Basin.

AUTHORS BIO:

Nurlan Aliyev is a PhD Candidate and Researcher at the Institute of International Relations of the University of Warsaw. He is a receiver of the Visegrad Found Scholarship for 2018-2019. From 2000 to 2017, he worked as an expert at various government, non-government and international institutions. His research focuses on political and security processes in Russia, post-soviet countries and asymmetric warfare threats.

Image source: By: whitehouse.gov accessed on 9.20.2018
David DuRoss, Senior Vice President of Trade

BioPlus Specialty Pharmacy (BioPlus), one of the nations leading innovative specialty pharmacies, is pleased to announce that David DuRoss is joining the company in the newly created position of Senior Vice President of Trade.

The creation of this new position  but more importantly finding the right person for this job  will support ongoing and future growth at our specialty pharmacy, shares Stephen Vogt, Pharm.D., CEO of BioPlus. David is that right person and were fortunate to have him on our team.

DuRoss comes to BioPlus with 24 years of experience in both the wholesale and specialty pharmacy industries. This prior expertise will dovetail with DuRoss new role as he supports BioPlus internally, as well as serving as a leader in sourcing, purchasing, and contracting pharmaceuticals. In addition, he will assist BioPlus Payer and Sales teams in working together on new business opportunities.

I am thrilled to be joining such a well-respected specialty pharmacy as BioPlus, with its patient-centric focus, says DuRoss, and I am looking forward to helping expand our market penetration.

About BioPlus Specialty Pharmacy

BioPlus Specialty Pharmacy is a leading independent, national specialty pharmacy and the first and only specialty pharmacy to offer a two-hour turnaround from referral to patient acceptance. Our company celebrates 29 years of innovative excellence in specialty pharmacy, working closely with payers and the pharmaceutical industry, as well as with prescribers to get prompt treatment for patients, and directly supporting our patients nationwide to achieve optimal health outcomes. We provide a complete range of specialty services, including for cancer, multiple sclerosis, hepatitis C, and other complex, chronic conditions. BioPlus, a privately-held, pharmacist-owned company based in Altamonte Springs, Florida, is accredited by URAC, VIPPS, and ACHC with a Distinction in Oncology.

For information: http://www.bioplusrx.com or

Contact: info(at)bioplusrx.com

Phone: 1-888-292-0744
The vehicle mapping technology described in this patent is now a ubiquitous and essential part of our everyday lives. It is extremely gratifying to be able to help the inventor of such far-reaching technology see a reward for all of his hard work.

Blackbird Technologies settles with Moovit, Inc.

On November 13, 2017, Blackbird Technologies filed a patent infringement lawsuit against Moovit, Inc. in the US District Court for the District of Delaware (17-cv-01642), concerning technology relating to recommending travel routes to a destination based on vehicle traffic conditions. The patent at issue is US Patent No. 9,400,190, entitled Real-time traffic condition measurement using network transmission data. Last month, Blackbird Technologies settled with Moovit.

Wendy Verlander, President and CEO of Blackbird Technologies, stated, The vehicle mapping technology described in this patent is now a ubiquitous and essential part of our everyday lives. It is extremely gratifying to be able to help the inventor of such far-reaching technology see a reward for all of his hard work.

About Blackbird Technologies

Blackbird Technologies provides a unique opportunity for individual inventors and small companies to realize the value of their patents. By using in-house expertise, rather than expensive law firms, Blackbird Technologies is able to litigate at reduced costs and achieve results that equal or exceed what a law firm would recover. This company creates efficiencies that make it possible for individual inventors and small companies to see the end game  realizing the true value of their patents.
Blockchain Terminal proposes to bring unseen analytics and tools to the crypto space that are affordable for every day users unlike traditional stock trading platforms. Monarch is honored to be the only crypto wallet solution to come pre-loaded for their users.Robert Beadles Monarch Blockchain Corp

Monarch Blockchain Corporation, developer of the Monarch Wallet, has announced a partnership with BCT Inc, developer of the institutional-grade cryptocurrency platform the Blockchain Terminal, to be the cold wallet solution that will be preloaded onto Monarch-partnered Blockchain Terminals. The partnership combines the capabilities of the Monarch Wallet with the Blockchain Terminals high-powered trading and analytics ecosystem. All users of the Blockchain Terminal will have access to the Monarch Wallet for storage on their platform.

The Monarch Wallet is live in the Apple store, currently supporting over 1,500 cryptocurrencies, including XRP. Next on Monarchs roadmap will be its exchange going live for all users in Q1 of 2019. The Blockchain Terminal will integrate its trading ecosystem into Monarchs exchange, enabling Monarchs users to trade across 165 of the biggest cryptocurrency exchanges. The Blockchain Terminal allows users to execute at the best prices across these exchanges, breaking up orders into legs for One-Click Execution Management executing transactions across multiple exchanges.

The Blockchain Terminal provides a framework that satisfies the hedge fund compliance requirements, making it a perfect gateway for accredited investors to enter the cryptocurrency market while maintaining investor and legal compliance. The Blockchain Terminal leverages ComplianceGuard, a blockchain-based compliance application that increases market confidence through creation of transparent audit trails for all trading operations.

This partnership means that all cryptocurrency users, from beginners to experts, will be able to store and trade all of their crypto assets on one mobile application rather than opening accounts on multiple exchanges. Monarchs users have the ability to trade on over 100 exchanges without the need to manage funds on any of them. The Blockchain Terminals routing system, in conjunction with Monarchs Patent Pending protocol for recurring blockchain payments, makes Monarch Token one of the most anticipated projects of 2018.

The Blockchain Terminal proposes to bring unseen analytics and tools to the crypto space that are affordable for every day users unlike traditional stock trading platforms. Monarch is honored to be the only crypto wallet solution to come pre-loaded for their users.

Robert Beadles, President of Monarch Blockchain Corp.

When our team discovered Monarch, we knew we had found a partner because of their profound commitment to eliminating the barriers investors have to entering the cryptocurrency space. Were thrilled to combine our forces to offer the world a solution that is both safer and easier than what is currently available.

Edith Pardo, Esq., Director of BCT Inc.

For more information about the Monarch and Blockchain Terminal partnership, watch the interview between Monarch Founder Robert Beadles and CG Blockchains former VP of Product, Gabriel Ortiz, below, and please visit us at https://monarchtoken.io/.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBI0wBOaQwU
Car Wars Vice President of Automotive, Mike Haeg, joins speaker lineup including DeMarcus Hackett and Toyota Motors North America for DealerSockets 2018 Roadshow stop in Los Angeles, California.

The one-day event gathers industry experts to provide objective, meaningful information to help bring your dealership to the next level. Haeg will lead a keynote educational session that dives into the best strategy for delivering excellent customer experience, and it begins on the phone.

Simplicity is key, Haeg said. I look forward to sharing the easy, yet effective methodology called CRISP, which focuses on metrics that truly matter when improving a dealerships phone process. The outcome? Enhancing the customer experience on every call and, ultimately, setting more appointments.

Haegs presentation, Dont Lose The Deal Before It Starts: Be CRISP, is at 12 p.m. on October 4. The DealerSocket Roadshow spans from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. at the InterContinental Los Angeles Century City.

Join us for a one-day conference filled with panels, workshops, delicious food and all things automotive. Space is limited. To secure your spot at Haegs session, register here: https://roadshow.dealersocket.com.

About Car Wars

Car Wars leverages human reviews, artificial intelligence and CRISP metrics to equip Sales and Service departments with everything they need to Own The Phone. By listening to and categorizing 100% of inbound and outbound calls at a dealership, Car Wars provides managers with insight into how every call is handled, alerts them when an opportunity needs attention and actively improves phone performance in both Sales and Service. For more information, visit http://www.carwars.com.
The reality is, dealing with recovery and mental health is a lifelong process. We throw the Annual Benefit for Hope to remind our former residents that theyre not alone, and that they should be proud of all theyve accomplished on their road to recovery. -- Jeff Johnson, Casa Palmera

Casa Palmera, a private rehabilitation center based in San Diego, today announces their annual alumni celebration, Benefit for Hope, which will be held on Saturday, October 6th.

Casa Palmera is a nationally recognized residential treatment center located in San Diegos exclusive Del Mar neighborhood. The center is staffed with a sizable team of expertly trained therapists, psychologists, and psychiatrists who work to create customized holistic treatment plans for those battling addiction and mental health.

The centers annual Benefit for Hope brings together those who have completed treatment at Casa Palmera for an evening of bonding, food, and festivities. Casa Palmeras alumni event aims to bring together those who have completed treatment and are looking to celebrate their recovery with the help of their peers and those who love them. Professionals find that those who have recently battled addiction are better able to sustain their sobriety if they have a supportive community to fall back on.

The reality is, dealing with recovery and mental health is a lifelong process. We throw the Annual Benefit for Hope to remind our former residents that theyre not alone, and that they should be proud of all theyve accomplished on their road to recovery. said Jeff Johnson, Director of Business Development at Casa Palmera. We also want to support their loved ones because they go through this whole process as well. We get to celebrate together as a community and reflect on how far weve come.

This years Benefit for Hope will be held at Casa Palmera on Saturday, October 6th from 4:00  7:00 p.m. To register for tickets, visit https://www.casapalmera.com/register or visit https://casapalmera.com/ for more information about the treatment facility.

About Casa Palmera:

Casa Palmera is a freestanding residential treatment center that provides 12-step, evidenced-based treatment combined with an integrated traditional/holistic treatment component. We provide exceptional care for professionals, individuals, and families needing treatment for addiction, eating disorders, and trauma/mood disorders. Casa Palmera offers a full continuum of care, including residential treatment, partial hospitalization with/without board, an intensive outpatient program, and weekly continuing care. Our staff consists of licensed professionals including a medical doctor, psychiatrists, clinical psychologists, registered nurses, social workers, and masters level therapists. We accept most of the major insurance plans and self-pay at a reasonable price. For more information on Casa Palmera, visit http://www.casapalmera.com.
AWARE for All Biogens Vice President of Global Clinical Operations, Murray Abramson, comments, We are proud to support CISCRPs AWARE for All event to bring a deeper awareness of clinical trials to their communities.

The Center for Information and Study on Clinical Research Participation (CISCRP) invites the Boston community to attend AWARE for All, a FREE community health event on Tuesday, October 23, from 5:00 p.m.  8:00 p.m. EDT at The NonProfit Center. CISCRPs AWARE for All program is hosted in cities all over the world and is a chance to bring educational health information directly to patients and the public. This will be the tenth AWARE for All event the local nonprofit has held in the Boston area since 2003.

According to CISCRPs 2017 Perceptions and Insights Study approximately 70% of the public has never or rarely considered a clinical trial as a treatment option with their doctor. CISCRP's Senior Manager of Development & Community Engagement, Ellyn Getz, comments, We are grateful for the support we have received from local community organizations to help us bring this event back to our Boston hometown. Our AWARE events provide the community with tools to help them advocate for and make informed decisions about their health. We encourage lots of questions and networking onsite.

This educational event features many highlights including a complementary dinner and a number of free health screenings including blood pressure, glucose, glaucoma, flu vaccinations, mental health/depression, and HIV checks. Attendees will have time to connect with local and national community health advocates and researchers to learn about their resources and services. There also will be an overview presentation about clinical research and a panel discussion featuring research professionals and clinical trial participants.

CISCRP is producing the event with the support of Host Sponsor Biogen; National Sponsors EMD Serono and Lupus Research Alliance; Patron Sponsors Tufts CTSI, BMS, and Harvard School of Public Health; and Outreach supporter CenterWatch. Biogens Vice President of Global Clinical Operations, Murray Abramson, comments, Biogen is committed to educating patients and their loved ones about clinical research opportunities. We are proud to support CISCRPs AWARE for All event to bring a deeper awareness of clinical trials to their communities.

AWARE for All Boston will be held on Tuesday, October 23, 2018 from 5:00 p.m.  8:00 p.m. EDT at The NonProfit Center, 89 South Street Boston, MA 02109. Attendance is free, but please reserve your spot today by visiting http://www.awareforall.org or by calling toll free 1-877-MED-HERO (1-877-633-4376).

About CISCRP:

The Center for Information and Study on Clinical Research Participation (CISCRP) is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization dedicated to engaging the public and patients as partners in the clinical research process. CISCRP provides free education and outreach to the general public and patient communities. Visit http://www.CISCRP.org for more information or to support CISCRPs educational initiatives.

Editors Note:

Community and research collaborators include: Alzheimers Association, American Liver Foundation, Asian Women for Health, Boston University Alzheimer's Disease Center, Boston University School of Medicine, Brigham and Womens Hospital, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Dana Farber Cancer Institute, Epilepsy Foundation of New England, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), Novartis, Samaritans Hope, Tufts CTSI, Walgreens, and many other prominent community and research collaborators.
Were excited to welcome Owner Mike Scott and Managers Linda Harrington and Hope Smithwick to the Crimson Cup community. A big part of our mission is to help entrepreneurs like Mike open their own unique independent coffee shops.

Columbus coffee roaster Crimson Cup Coffee & Tea recently welcomed Hug In A Mug Coffee Company in Valdosta, Georgia to the group of independent coffee shops, cafes and bakeries it supports in 37 states. The shop at 4165 Bemiss Road, Suite O, is one of at least 18 new independent coffee shops scheduled to open in 2018 through Crimson Cups 7 Steps to Success coffee shop franchise alternative program.

Were excited to welcome Owner Mike Scott and Managers Linda Harrington and Hope Smithwick to the Crimson Cup community, said Founder and President Greg Ubert. A big part of our mission is to help entrepreneurs like Mike open their own unique independent coffee shops.

A serial entrepreneur with ownership in 30 Precision Tune Auto Care locations, Scott was looking for a new business venture that would be less technical than his other businesses and that could be duplicated once learned. Specialty coffee seemed a perfect fit. We love coffee, and we love the idea of a business that the community can fall in love with, he said. We also wanted to give back to our community by donating to local nonprofits.

Scott and his team learned how to open a coffee shop through Crimson Cups 7 Steps to Success coffee shop franchise alternative program.

I was looking for a franchise but decided against it once I saw Crimson Cup advertised on the Internet, Scott said. The service has been great! We love the coffee blends and recipes.

Based on the book Seven Steps to Success in the Specialty Coffee Industry by Crimson Cup Founder and President Greg Ubert, the 7 Steps program has helped hundreds of independent coffee shops open and stay and business. Company statistics show that 85 percent of businesses that complete the program remain in business for at least five years.

The program walks business owners through seven steps to bring their business from concept to reality, with Crimson Cup trainers providing support at each step. The most helpful step for me was location, Scott said. While I already understood the importance of location, learning what makes a good place for a coffee shop was very valuable.

Located on a busy street with lots of other retail and service businesses, Hug In A Mug Coffee Company serves a full menu of hot, iced and frozen espresso drinks  including mochas, lattes and cappuccinos  as well as iced coffee and tea, cold-brewed coffee, hot chocolate, fruit smoothies and other custom drinks. Bagels, breakfast sandwiches, pastries and desserts round out the menu.

The Hug In A Mug Brew Bar entices coffee lovers to slow down and enjoy a hand-poured coffee using Hario v60 or Chemex brewing systems. This is truly the experience for the coffee connoisseur who may have a more discerning palate, Scott said.

The coffee, roasted by Crimson Cup, has been a big hit with Valdosta coffee drinkers. The word we often hear is smooth as opposed to bitter. Hug In A Mug Mocha is obviously the most popular. This drink melds white chocolate with caramel and espresso for a uniquely smooth taste.

Scotts favorite drink is Crimson Cups signature Armandos blend brewed coffee, served black. My daughter Jana loves the hot Hug In A Mug Mocha with only a half of pump of white chocolate, extra caramel and no whipped cream.

Ubert emphasized that Crimson Cup supports independent coffee businesses like Hug In A Mug Coffee Company from concept through success.

We believe that our company succeeds only when our customers do, he said. As a result, Crimson Cup supports coffee shop owners at every step  from scouting a great location and writing a coffee shop business plan to planning a menu, choosing equipment, hiring staff and providing comprehensive training.

To support customers ongoing success, we supply award-winning wholesale coffee, coffee shop supplies, marketing support and ongoing training, he added. Our coffee-buying team travels more than 45,000 miles annually to bring back the finest coffee beans available to our customers, and our Innovation Lab team works every day to create new and better coffee drinks and training programs.

When asked for advice for aspiring coffee shop owners, Scott said, Go with Crimson Cup. He also noted the importance of having enough startup capital and funds. It could take some time to get your name out.

About Crimson Cup Coffee & Tea

Columbus, Ohio coffee roaster Crimson Cup Coffee & Tea is Roast magazines 2016 Macro Roaster of the Year. Since 1991, Crimson Cup has roasted sustainably sourced specialty and craft coffee in small batches, which it sells directly to consumers and as wholesale coffee beans. The company also teaches entrepreneurs to run successful coffee houses through its coffee franchise alternative program, which includes a coffee shop business plan. Crimson Cup coffee is available through a community of more than 350 independent coffee houses, grocers, college and universities, restaurants and food service operations across 37 states, Guam and Bangladesh, as well as the companys own Crimson Cup Coffee Houses. To learn more, visit crimsoncup.com.
The DataON MUST extension for Windows Admin Center continues to be one of our showcase partner extensions. Customers will have complete end-to-end management tools for Windows Server software-defined solutions, through Windows Admin Center features and the extended capabilities provided by MUST.

DataON, the industry-leading provider of hyper-converged infrastructure and optimized storage systems for Windows Server environments, today announces the DataON MUST (Management Utility Software Tool) native extension for Windows Admin Center (previously known as Project Honolulu).

DataON MUST provides advanced cluster monitoring, performance metrics, system health statistics, and automated system alerts for Windows Server 2019 and 2016 Storage Spaces Direct and Storage Replica:



Software-Defined Data Center & Hyper-Converged Infrastructure Tier  Provides system-level information on performance, capacity, hardware inventory and faults/alerts. The dashboard-level view displays operations, analytics, infrastructure health management, storage systems metrics and event logging insights.

Hyper-Converged Cluster/Node Tier  Provides pool, volume and device-level performance, health and operational analytics for your HCI cluster. This enables you to proactively perform systems maintenance and better understand requirements for workload migrations.

Systems and Storage Services Audit Log Tier  Provides detailed logging-level visibility for events, so you can perform root cause analysis and export source data for analytics.

With the Windows Admin Center software develop kit (SDK), MUST natively integrates with Windows Admin Center to provide end-to-end hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) monitoring and management capabilities from a single pane of glass. MUST complements Windows Admin Center by providing additional features such as:

Historic data reporting  Provides real-time and monthly dashboards of your system performance data including IOPS, latency, throughput on your cluster, storage pool, volume, and nodes.

Disk mapping  MUST displays the device types and components in each of the nodes, providing a clear disk map of your entire node. It shows the number of disks, disk type, location and slot of each drive, and disk health status.

System alerts  Leverages Windows Health Service faults to identify hardware failures, configuration issues, and resource saturation. Prompted by system alerts, administrators can have automated email alerts sent to key contacts. It also provides a multi-level assessment of specific locations, fault descriptions, and recovery actions. You can also leverage third-party SNMP monitoring traps to alert you when you need disk or hardware replacements.

SAN-like call home service  As a value-added cloud service, the call home service integrates customer MUST alert services with the DataON Support portal and DataON support services to deliver 24x7 infrastructure support.

DataON was the first company to provide a robust visibility, monitoring and management tool for Windows Server 2016 HCI deployments.

The DataON MUST (Management Utility Software Tool) native extension for Windows Admin Center represents DataONs latest innovation for Windows Server-based environments, said Howard Lo, vice president of sales and marketing, DataON. Weve taken our standalone MUST visibility, monitoring, and management tool and fully integrated it within the Windows Admin Center tool. Customers will benefit from the expanded capabilities of MUST, and the combination of MUST and Windows Admin Center from a single integrated console will provide the ultimate management experience for Windows Server-based infrastructures.

DataON continues to maximize the delivery of customer value through our partner ecosystem, said Samuel Li, Principal Program Manager Lead for Windows Server Management Experiences, Microsoft Corporation. DataON has delivered tighter integration and user experience consistency, simplified setup and richer functionality. The latest version of the DataON MUST extension for Windows Admin Center leverages a large set of our SDK capabilities and it continues to be one of our showcase partner extensions. I am grateful for the DataON partnership and their assistance in validating our SDK for broader release readiness. Customers have complete end-to-end management tools for DataONs Windows Server software-defined solutions, through Windows Admin Center features and the extended capabilities provided by DataON MUST.

WINDOWS ADMIN CENTER

Windows Admin Center is the modernized and simplified tool set for managing Windows Server  its server management reimagined. Evolving from familiar tools like Server Manager and MMC, Windows Admin Center is a lightweight, browser-based, customer-deployed solution with no agent installation required on target servers, and it comes at no extra cost beyond the Windows license. Windows Admin Center strengthens the security of managing server environments by leveraging existing security technologies. It complements existing management solutions like System Center and Azure security and management.

As the future of Windows Server management, Windows Admin Center surfaces a new user interface for hyper-converged clusters and new Windows Server features like Storage Migration Services, System Insights, Storage Replica, and Software Defined Networking. Windows Admin Center goes beyond traditional server management by making it easy to leverage the power of Azure from on-premises or hybrid environments.

Extensibility has been built into the architecture of Windows Admin Center from its inception. Using the Windows Admin Center SDK, technology partners can build seamless experiences in Windows Admin Center, giving users an integrated and customizable experience that best meets their management needs.

THE DATAON DIFFERENCE

DataON is exclusively focused on customers who have made the Microsoft choice to deploy a Windows Server-based storage solution. DataON has been named to CIO Reviews 20 Most Promising Microsoft Solution Providers 2018. Our team of Microsoft experts know how to design, deploy and support Windows Server storage and will work with you to performance tune your workloads with benchmarks. DataON solutions are:



Customer-proven with over 650 enterprise deployments and greater than 150PB of Storage Spaces Direct deployments.

Certified for Windows Server 2016 and 2019 Server Software-Defined Datacenter (SDDC) Premium and Standard editions. Also certified for Windows Server 2012, 2012 R2, 2016, and 2019 (future).

Certified for the Windows Server Software-Defined (WSSD) program, with premium hyper-converged solutions for the highest level of performance, manageability, and security offered.

Certified as an Intel Select Solution for Windows Server Software-Defined Storage, with Plus configurations for the most bandwidth-intensive and latency-sensitive environments.

About DataON

DataON is the industry-leading provider of hyper-converged infrastructure and storage systems optimized for Microsoft Windows Server environments, and has been named to CIO Reviews 20 Most Promising Microsoft Solution Providers 2018. Our company is focused on customers who have made the Microsoft choice to deploy Microsoft applications, virtualization, data protection, and hybrid cloud services. Our enterprise-level solutions, delivered as a complete, turnkey experience, are designed to provide the highest level of performance, manageability, and security offered. For more information, go to http://www.dataonstorage.com or call +1 (714) 441-8820.

All trademarks, registered trademarks, service marks, brands and names mentioned herein are property of their respective owners.

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I look forward to contributing to the continued growth of Elastic Path as more companies look for solutions that help them connect with consumers in new, meaningful ways across touchpoints. -- Adam Brenner, senior vice president of global sales at Elastic Path

Elastic Path, the worlds leading provider of enterprise API commerce solutions, today announced that Adam Brenner has joined Elastic Path as senior vice president of global sales. Brenner brings more than 25 years of experience to Elastic Path in leading sales teams for global cloud companies.

Im excited to welcome Adam to the Elastic Path leadership team, said Harry Chemko. Adam will be responsible for the evolution of our sales process, leveraging significant momentum behind cutting-edge commerce solutions at the enterprise level. Were excited about the experience and potential he brings to Elastic Path in this new position.

Prior to joining Elastic Path, Brenner served as a senior executive at leading software companies including Oracle, Ariba, Zyme and Taleo, where he drove global sales and development throughout Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Latin America.

In his most recent role as senior vice president of global sales and customer success at Zyme, Brenner led their global customer success team responsible for sales and presales, partners and alliances, and revenue expansion across the Americas, EMEA and APAC. As a key member of the executive team and direct report to the board, Brenner moved the business from a consumption-based model to multi-year term agreements. Today, more than 80 percent of total revenue is committed in the new model.

At Taleo, where he served his eight-year tenure as both regional vice president and EMEA group vice president, Brenner contributed to the company's revenue growth from $20 million to $400 million and its subsequent acquisition by Oracle.

Im eager to work with a company that has a strong vision for the future role of commerce technology in how organizations interact and transact with their customers, said Brenner. I look forward to contributing to the continued growth of Elastic Path as more companies look for solutions that help them connect with consumers in new, meaningful ways across touchpoints.

In his new role, Brenner will be a critical member of the executive management team, focusing on building relationships within the enterprise commerce market and guiding Elastic Path towards continued long-term revenue growth. With extensive experience driving enterprise market revenue, Brenner is uniquely positioned to grow Elastic Paths customer base and partner network.

Elastic Path is leading the way towards API-oriented commerce and is growing within retail, manufacturing, telecommunications and other industries. Brenner joins Elastic Path's growing team of two former IBM execs Darin Archer, CMO and Leho Nigul, VP Product Development, as well as three former Hybris executives. With these additions to the leadership team, Elastic Path is well-positioned to leverage the growing momentum in the market behind API-first solutions.

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About Elastic Path

Defining the future of commerce, Elastic Path pioneered the worlds leading API-oriented commerce solution for enterprises. The companys flagship product, Elastic Path Commerce, has helped the worlds top brands generate over $60 billion in over 170 countries. Customers from industries as diverse as travel, telecoms, publishing, software, and retail enjoy the benefits of a flexible, open architecture that monetizes brand-defining customer experiences, facilitates business agility, and eliminates commerce system silos. Elastic Path is a private company based in Vancouver, Canada with offices in the UK and US. For more information visit http://www.elasticpath.com.
eMazzanti Technologies is the sixth of only a few hundred companies globally to be approved as a PCI Qualified Integrator.

eMazzanti Technologies, a New York City area IT security expert, announced today that it will participate and exhibit at the PCI Security Standards Council 2018 North America Community Meeting held September 25 - 27, at The Mirage Events Center in Las Vegas, Nevada.

eMazzanti Technologies is a PCI Security Standards Council Participating Organization and PCI Qualified Integrator (QIR). The companys IT security professionals at the meeting can be found in booth 1303 in the Vendor Showcase at The Mirage Event Center.

The Las Vegas meeting will ensure that our customers continue to receive finest-in-the-world data security services while providing an exceptional customer experience, stated Jennifer Mazzanti, CEO at eMazzanti Technologies. eMazzantis QIR and Participating Organization status demonstrate our commitment to strengthening retail POS security and to enhancing international data security standards.

eMazzantis annual participation in the PCI North America Community Meeting strengthens eMazzantis leadership in the retail payment technology and payment security fields. The meeting provides an authoritative venue where PCI professionals have their voices heard and discover ideas, solutions and strategic partners for tackling industry challenges.

Shaping Future PCI Security Standards

The PCI Security Standards Council is a global forum for the ongoing development, enhancement, storage, dissemination and implementation of security standards for account data protection. The organization is constantly working to monitor threats and improve the industrys means of dealing with them, through enhancements to PCI Security Standards and by the training of security professionals.

The Las Vegas gathering provides an opportunity for payment industry professionals to share PCI knowledge and discuss the future of the standards. Participants will also have the opportunity to network with key stakeholders across global regions and industry markets.

PCI Qualified Integrator

eMazzanti Technologies is the sixth of only a few hundred companies globally to be approved as a PCI Qualified Integrator under the stringent certification standards of the PCI Security Standards Council Qualified Integrators and Resellers (QIR) program.

In 2015, eMazzanti Technologies joined the PCI Security Standards Council as a Participating Organization. The New Jersey IT consulting firm works with the Council to improve payment data security worldwide through the ongoing development of the PCI Security Standards.

Compliance Management Services

eMazzanti Technologies offers retail IT infrastructure, EMV integration and PCI compliance services to provide retailers with complete compliance management services from a single-source retail technology partner.

The companys offerings also include full merchant services, QIR POS application and terminal installation and credit cards for testing and training. eMazzantis compliance management services protect businesses from penalties and fines that may be levied against non-compliant organizations.

Related resource information:

4 Common Sense Email Security Tips to Safeguard Vital Business Information

The Biggest Tech Trends in Retail Right Now

About the PCI Security Standards Council

The Payment Card Industry (PCI) Security Standards Council is a global forum that develops, maintains and manages the PCI Security Standards, which include the Data Security Standard (DSS), Payment Application Data Security Standard (PA-DSS), and PIN Transaction Security (PTS) Requirements.

About eMazzanti Technologies

eMazzantis team of trained, certified IT experts rapidly deliver retail and payment technology, digital marketing services, cloud and mobile solutions, multi-site implementations, 247 outsourced network management, remote monitoring and support to increase productivity, data security and revenue growth for clients ranging from law firms to high-end global retailers.

eMazzanti has made the Inc. 5000 list eight consecutive years, is a 2015, 2013 and 2012 Microsoft Partner of the Year, 2016 NJ Business of the Year, 5X WatchGuard Partner of the Year and one of the TOP 200 U.S. Microsoft Partners! Contact: 1-866-362-9926, info@emazzanti.net or http://www.emazzanti.net Twitter: @emazzanti Facebook: Facebook.com/emazzantitechnologies.
On Oct. 24, 2018, the Delaware Valley Law Firm Marketing Group (DVLFMG) will host Gina Rubel, founder and CEO of Furia Rubel Communications, Inc. Rubel will present an overview of the changes to the ABA Ethics Rules as they relate to law firm marketing.

The ABA has revised Model Rules of Professional Conduct 7.1  7.5 relating to lawyer advertising. Lucian Pera, chair of the Center for Professional Responsibility and litigation partner with Adams and Reese LLP, told the ABA Delegates that the revised rules will make it easier for lawyers to effectively communicate to potential users of legal services. Since Resolution 101 passed on Aug. 7, there has been much conversation about the actual changes to the rules by both supporters and naysayers.

Rubel will address the purpose for the changes to the Model Rules and what law firm marketers need to know about the new rule. She also will conduct a candid discussion about what these changes really mean to business and consumer law firms noting that the ABA rules only become effective if and when the individual states pass them.

The Delaware Valley Law Firm Marketing Group is comprised of law firm marketing professionals and aims to share experience, knowledge, and open discussion about technology, challenges in the field, and opportunities. Joining the group is free, and attendance is open to all who are interested in doing so.

For more information about the event and DVLFMG, visit http://www.dvlawmarketing.org

Furia Rubel Communications, Inc. is an integrated and strategic law firm marketing, public relations and crisis management agency in the Philadelphia market. The certified woman-owned agency provides strategic planning, marketing, public relations, crisis management, trial publicity, business development, content marketing, and social media services to law firms nationwide. For more information, visit http://www.furiarubel.com.
Goken America is headquartered in Dublin, Ohio. Our return to the Inc. 5000 list for the second year in a row validates our goal at Goken America of creating an environment where our associates can thrive as everyday partners with our clients ...

Goken America, a North America-based engineering and technology company, today announced that it again has been named to the Inc. magazine Inc. 5000 list, the most prestigious ranking of the nations fastest-growing private companies. The 2018 list provides a unique look at the most successful companies within the U.S. economys most dynamic segment  independent business. Goken America earned its spot recording a three-year sales growth of 66%.

Our return to the Inc. 5000 list for the second year in a row validates our goal at Goken America of creating an environment where our associates can thrive as everyday partners with our clients, helping them design and build better products, said Doug Smith, Goken America CEO. This achievement, recognizing our significant growth, was again earned for us by our associates dedication, enthusiasm, and continually growing technical skills.

"If your company is on the Inc. 5000, it's unparalleled recognition of your years of hard work and sacrifice," says Inc. editor-in-chief James Ledbetter. "The lines of business may come and go  or come and stay. What doesn't change is the way entrepreneurs create and accelerate the forces that shape our lives."

Jim Jordan, Director of Business Development had this to say about the companys return to the Inc. 5000 list, Continuing our growth, while transforming our business has been our most rewarding accomplishment in the past three years. We have expanded our business regionally  into Detroit and Boston, and in the market  entering the aerospace industry."

Jordan explained that most of Goken Americas engagements are now project-based, with the company managing the deliverables and providing significantly more client value.

Our engineering technology division has seen a two-fold increase and has completed a number of full PLM implementations and design automation projects, he added. One of these projects was completed in only a week and saved our client more than $1.2 million in development costs in the first year. 

Goken Americas commitment to innovation and technical advancement is demonstrated by its involvement with the Ohio State Center for Automotive Research and the Clemson University International Center for Automotive Research. These relationships have led to additional Goken America contributions and interaction in safety engineering, hybrid and alternative fuel drivetrains, and cutting-edge CAV and ADAS research and development.

At the previous Inc. 5000 event, I noticed many of the companies are startups, still in their first three years, and outside funding was a key component of their growth, noted Bill Nichols, Goken America Vice President and COO. Thats not the case with Goken America. When we made the list for the first time, it was as a mature company with 13 years of proven success. All our growth was self-funded. We have developed a culture of trust with our associates and our clients.

Nichols explained the Goken America culture that drives that success. We have created a culture of trust with our associates and our clients. We take risks and we are agile; but we are in it for the long haul. For example, recently, a client approached us with a two-month steering design deadline necessary to complete their first crash test. We deployed Goken REDD, a team specifically targeted for these types of challenges. We met the deadline while onboarding a long-term team to bring the entire project to completion.

For more information about Goken America, visit http://www.gokenamerica.com or connect with the company on LinkedIn.

About Goken America

Established in 2004, and headquartered in Dublin, Ohio, Goken America is a North America-based design engineering technology company; a complete provider of innovative engineering services from concept design through the complete product development lifecycle. Goken America demonstrates its commitment to client satisfaction by providing thorough training for all associates, and by cultivating a deep understanding of its clients corporate cultures and expectations. For more information, visit GokenAmerica.com.

Media Contact:

Jim Jordan, Director of Business Development  Goken America

phone: 614-495-8117

email: jim.jordan(at)gokenamerica.com
Gozo, the industry's first blockchain-enabled multi-token crypto wallet, loyalty reward points clearinghouse and travel club, has continued to accelerate its mission to disrupt the more than $8 trillion travel industry.

Gozo launched its first airdrop campaign on September 10, and public response to the project has been phenomenal from the crypto-space. In just the first 48 hours of the airdrop campaign, more than 6,000 users have registered on the Gozo platform and more than 5,000 new members have joined the Gozo Telegram group. The airdrop campaign will run until September 30th or until the propagation of the 10,000,000 GOZO tokens that are allocated for the campaign.

Furthermore, Gozo has had a busy summer as the company met with investors and others in the blockchain industry at numerous events:



ICORating Wall Street Roadshow - New York, NY: Gozo was selected as one of five seven initial coin offerings (ICOs) to pitch in front of a panel of investors at the ICORating Wall Street Roadshow event on August 2, in New York City. The event was attended by numerous investors, blockchain space professionals, and members of the press. The event coincided with the launch of the Gozo project and with Gozos appearance on the Reuters Sign in Times Square in the heart of New York City.

Blockshow Americas - Las Vegas, NV: Following the outstanding response Gozo received as a pre-launch exhibitor at the Blockshow Europe conference in Berlin in May 2018, Gozo took part in the Blockshow Americas event in Las Vegas as an exhibitor, August 20-21. Gozo introduced its ICO project to media, investors, and blockchain professionals and enthusiasts through the duration of the event.

The Voice of Blockchain - Chicago, Ill.: Continuing on its summer roadshow, Gozo attended The Voice of Blockchain event in Chicago between August 24 and 25.

*Silicon Valley Mars Blockchain Summit - Redwood City, CA: Gozo attended the Silicon Valley Mars Blockchain Summit in Redwood City on August 28. The event provided an opportunity to introduce Gozo to blockchain investors and professionals, and solicit invaluable feedback on its ICO.

Gozo has experienced great business interest and industry thought leadership in such a short amount of time. said Dr. Roy Labban, co-creator of Gozo. Each event we take part in further advances Gozos development and aids in propelling us into an industry full of unrealized opportunity. Our event participation is indicative of our commitment to building a unique, bi-directional conversion of loyalty reward travel points and member benefits under a unified, secure, and regulated marketplace for our members leveraging machine learning and AI to bridge the gap between travel providers, brands and customers.

Ziad Nassar, co-creator and worldly entrepreneur of Gozo added, Gozo is preparing to take flight with an arsenal of partnerships, business announcements and opportunities in front of us. We look forward to providing our members with a fully compliant, blockchain-based wallet and marketplace, and solving a long overdue issue for travel rewards programs.

Meet the Gozo team at these upcoming events where they will be attending, exhibiting, and sponsoring:



CryptoFriends Delta Night, St. Julians, Malta (October 3): Gozo will be pitching its ICO.

Delta Summit, St. Julians, Malta (October 4-5): IAAC Conference Center, InterContinental Malta

Malta Blockchain Summit, St. Julians, Malta (November 1-2): InterContinental Malta, St. Julians Malta

Gozo will attend other shows in the near future. For additional information on where Gozo will be or to schedule a meeting as an investor, contributor, or member of the press, visit https://gozo.io/.

Stay updated on Gozo news by following us on Telegram https://t.me/gozo_io, Twitter https://twitter.com/Gozo_io, Facebook https://www.facebook.com/gozo.io/, and LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/company/gozo-io/.

About GOZO

Gozo is an industry-first blockchain-enabled multi-token crypto wallet, loyalty reward points clearing house, and travel club. Gozo's simple and consumer friendly interface allows users to harness the power and complexity of blockchain to track and exchange valuable loyalty reward points into crypto tokens or even local fiat currency. For more information, visit http://www.gozo.io.
Four new gamification features give HRmarketer Advocacy Software clients greater control, help incentivize content sharing, and create a more engaging experience for brand advocates.

HRmarketer, a marketing and employee advocacy SaaS platform for the human resources and recruiting industry, today announced that it has added gamification to its popular Advocacy Software.

Gamification (adding gaming concepts such as scoring points, earning rewards, and chalking up wins and losses) has helped hundreds of companies create greater brand engagement and more effective marketing initiatives. In the case of HRmarketer's Advocacy Software, four new customizable gamification features incentivize advocates to share content frequently with their personal and professional networks--a necessity for brand and employee advocacy programs to succeed.

"Gamification has proven to be one of the most effective ways to motivate people to engage with brands, products and marketing campaigns across industries of every kind," said Mark Willaman, founder and President of HRmarketer. "That's why we've brought it to our Advocacy Software. We're making it as easy and effective as possible for our clients to leverage the power of their brand advocates--both inside and outside of the company."

The four new customizable gamification features--which give clients control over how they reward brand advocates' activities--are:

1. Points Awarded for Sharing: Clients determine the number of points that advocates earn for sharing content on various social channels. This allows clients to reward the specific sharing behaviors that are most important to them. For example, to encourage advocates to share content on a specific social platform (e.g., LinkedIn), the administrator can increase the points awarded for that particular channel.

2. Points Awarded for Engagement: Clients determine the number of points advocates earn for actual engagement (e.g., clicks) of their posts.

3. Point Caps: Clients can place caps on points earned for sharing and engagement. This helps equalize the competition among advocates whose social networks vary in size, and it discourages spammy behavior that might work against a brand.

4. Group Goals: Clients can set a specific number of total points to be earned by all of its advocates during a given campaign or contest. When activated, this feature allows all advocates to view the progress of the points as they are awarded, which encourages advocates to get involved early and share content before all of the points are awarded.

HRmarketer's Advocacy Software enables a company's brand advocates to easily share a wide range of relevant content (articles, blog posts, videos, job openings, etc.) with their networks. This, in turn, builds awareness, support and engagement for their brands in the marketplace. The Software also provides clients with detailed metrics on the effectiveness of each advocate's posts and shares.

"There's no limit to the number of advocate groups or contests that a company can create with our Advocacy Software," said Willaman. "And we don't require a 'contest' to be created in order to gamify your advocates' activity. Administrators can create default points that accumulate over time--separate from contests--to encourage specific content sharing behaviors."

About HRmarketer

HRmarketer is a provider of marketing and advocacy software that helps employers and HR and recruiting service providers increase the engagement with their key messages and the visibility of their brands. Its suite of products for achieving these business outcomes include Advocacy, a platform for leveraging employees and brand supporters in social media efforts; Insight, social media, influencer marketing and industry intelligence software; and Research, listings of marketing resources and opportunities in the HR marketplace.
Hurd Creek Ranch Auction A property of this caliber doesnt come around often. With the senior pre-compact water rights, recreational characteristic, location, beautiful views and building sites, there really something for everyone at this auction, said Brett Gingery, agent, UCRE | Gingery & Associates, Inc.

Qualified buyers will have the opportunity to purchase more than 925 acres in Winter Park, Colo., available now for the first time since the 1960s. The Hurd Creek Ranch will be offered during a live auction event conducted by United Country Real Estate | Gingery & Associates, Inc. and will take place on Saturday, October 13 at 2 p.m. Mountain Daylight Time. The property will be offered in 13 tracts ranging from approximately 36 to 216 acres, some tracts include senior pre-compact water rights.

Multi-parcel auction events are one of the best ways to bring large land tracts to the public offering, said Shawn Terrel, president, United Country Auction Services. This format allows qualified buyers the opportunity to purchase land in the way that best fits their needs and interest. Upon completion of a multi-parcel auction event, buyers can purchase and own specific tracts or a configuration of land which allow them to utilize the property for potential building and development sites, recreational tracts or the addition to their current farming or ranching operations. Most of all, they are purchasing the property in a competitive bidding environment which will ultimately indicate the current fair market value.

The acreage making up Hurd Creek Ranch is primarily vacant and offers numerous building sites, excellent hunting and miraculous views. The Fraser River and Ranch Creek flow through the property providing abundant fishing opportunities. Its close proximity to Winter Park ski area and Denver make it a prime location for those people looking to get away from the city crowds or escape to the mountains for a ski retreat.

A property of this caliber doesnt come around often. With the senior pre-compact water rights, recreational characteristic, location, beautiful views and building sites, there really something for everyone at this auction, said Brett Gingery, agent, UCRE | Gingery & Associates, Inc.

More information about the property for sale, as well as details about the auction, can be found online at http://www.ColoradoRanchAuction.com or call 970-531-5051.

About United Country Real Estate

United Country Real Estate is the leading, fully integrated network of conventional and auction real estate professionals. The company has been an innovator in ranch, farm, recreational, lifestyle and country real estate marketing since 1925. United Countrys combined network supports more than 500 offices and 6,000 real estate professionals nationally, with a unique, comprehensive and proven marketing program. The exclusive program includes the highest ranked and largest portfolios of specialty property marketing websites, unequaled national print advertising, the largest internal real estate advertising agency, an extensive buyer database of more than 700,000 opt-in buyers and additional proprietary programs to advertise local properties more broadly.
Ideal CU recently hosted two sessions of its award-winning Money Talks financial literacy program, attracting 42 students ranging in age from 16 to 22 years from around the metro area. The overall objective is to provide valuable financial education to students via their peers so they have the knowledge to make informed and conscious money decisions. - Ideal CU President/CEO Brian Sherrick

Ideal Credit Union recently hosted two sessions of its award-winning Money Talks financial literacy program in July, attracting 42 students from around the metro area. The unique peer-to-peer program, led and taught by high school-age Ideal CU Student Credit Union employees, teaches students the building blocks of personal finance: budgeting, savings and investments, credit, and money management tools. Students in attendance ranged in age from 16 to 22 years and came from a number of local communities, including Champlin, Hugo, Mahtomedi, Little Canada, St. Paul, Maplewood, Oakdale, South St. Paul, Inver Grove Heights, West St. Paul, Cottage Grove, Hastings, Stillwater, Lakeland and more.

The overall objective is to provide valuable financial education to students via their peers so they have the knowledge to make informed and conscious money decisions, stated Ideal CU President/CEO Brian Sherrick. Ideal Credit Union is committed to financial literacy and to helping youth develop lifelong skills for managing their money.

Participants earned a $100 cash stipend for completing the day-long course and passing the Im Financially Ready exam. All students must establish a Savings Account with Ideal before completion of the course in order to receive the $100 stipend. Approximately 381 students have been through the Money Talks financial literacy program since its inception in 2013. To date Ideal CU has awarded $38,100 in cash payouts to students completing this program.

Ideal CU offers a suite of student financial products to help youth build their financial future, including Free Student Checking, a Student Savers CD and a unique Credit Builder loan to help establish that all-important credit rating.

Ideal CU has operated a student-run branch at Tartan High School in Oakdale, MN, since January 2013. Located in the DECA school store, the Ideal CU Student Credit Union is an innovative approach in business education, teaching students the basic principles and practices of the financial services industry. The Money Talks educational series, developed in partnership with Tartan DECA students and school leaders, is held several times throughout the school year for Tartan students. Summer sessions are open to interested students from other locations throughout the metro and western Wisconsin.

Founded in 1926, Ideal Credit Union is a member owned financial institution that is dedicated to providing financial services driven by a sincere and personal interest in the needs of our employees, members and community. Ideal CU offers a complete range of services, including a full suite of electronic banking products, savings, checking, loans, mortgage products, exclusive VIP member payback, business services, investment services and more. Offices are located in Eagan, Hugo, Inver Grove Heights, North St. Paul, Stillwater and Woodbury. Visit idealcu.com for details and directions. Ideal has been voted Best Credit Union in the East Metro 2 years in a row by readers of the Stillwater Gazette and was recently named a 2018 Star Tribune Top 150 Workplace. Equal Housing Lender.
This innovative automated investing option as part of the InvestmentPOD platform provides a unique solution for risk-averse investors as well as those at or near retirement, a strategically important capability advisors can leverage to attract and retain high net worth clients.

InvestmentPOD for Advisors, the industrys first digital advice platform to offer multi-strategies, announced today that its new Ulcer Prevention Portfolio (UPP) was named the winner in the prestigious wealthmanagement.com Industry Awards Program in the category of Digital (Robo) Advisors.

InvestmentPODs UPP was selected as the winner in the Digital (Robo) Advisors by a judging panel of luminaries from across the wealth management industry for its innovation to help foster advisor success. Over 600 nominations were received, showcasing how competitive and comprehensive the wealthmanagement.com recognition program has become in the wealth management space

The Ulcer Prevention Portfolio (UPP) is designed to create a structure that allows for the possibility of market returns while ensuring that the invested capital cannot be lower than the original invested amount after a period of 5 years, said Jacqueline Ko Matthews, CEO and co-founder of InvestmentPOD. This innovative automated investing option as part of the InvestmentPOD platform provides a unique solution for risk-averse investors as well as those at or near retirement, a strategically important capability advisors can leverage to attract and retain high net worth clients.

In addition to winning as best digital (robo) advisor in the wealthmanagement.com Industry Awards, InvestmentPOD also recently won the inaugural ScratchWorks competition, a new FinTech Accelerator that connects innovative tech companies with investment and wealth management luminaries to advance the digital transformation of the financial services industry.

Earlier this year, ScratchWorks held its inaugural live event at the Barrons Top Independent Advisors conference as a potential investment opportunity to the five luminary founders of ScratchWorks: Mariner Wealth Advisors, RMB Capital, Covenant, Brighton Jones, and The Colony Group. Collectively, these five leading RIAs manage over $60 billion in AUM for high net worth clients. The ScratchWorks investors were impressed with the opportunity to partner with InvestmentPOD and have since worked out a strategic investment to help fuel the growth of InvestmentPOD.

We are thrilled to be recognized by these major industry programs, which validates the years of research and development we have invested into InvestmentPOD, said Matthews. We are honored and pleased by the industrys reception to the InvestmentPOD platform and will continue to invest to make it even more useful and impactful for advisors.

To learn more about InvestmentPOD and the new UPP offering, please log onto http://www.InvestmentPOD.com.

About InvestmentPOD:

InvestmentPOD was founded by illustrious Wall Street pioneers who identified the need for advisors to be able to deliver both traditional and alternative strategies via advanced technologies. With a highly credentialed staff of PhDs, CFPs, researchers, developers and engineers, InvestmentPOD is designed to be a comprehensive, white-labeled platform advisors can leverage to provide sophisticated investing strategies to their clients, while benefitting from the power of automation and operational efficiencies. InvestmentPOD is a graduate of the SixThirty FinTech accelerator, a finalist at the inaugural ScratchWorks fintech accelerator as well as the Prosper Womens Accelerator, has won multiple industry awards and its CEO and co-founder, Jacqueline Ko Matthews was recently recognized by BBVA as one of the 12 Women Leading the Way in the FinTech World. To learn more, log onto http://www.InvestmentPOD.com
I'm proud of the support that Keller Williams Realty provides to the KW community - Kirk Pugh, KBT Realty Group Broker Realtor

In the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Florences slow devastation of a wide swathe of southeastern coastal North Carolina, which has impacted the lives of more than 300 Keller Williams agents, their families, and their communities, Keller Williams Realty associates have responded by raising hundreds of thousands of dollars in pledges and donations for Keller Williams Realty Cares. A streamlined process for requesting assistance has been opened for KBT Realty Group - Keller Williams agents and agent families.

Four tractor trailer trucks will arrive in storm-ravaged Wilmington, North Carolina during the day on Thursday, September 20, 2018, and the KW Cares disaster relief team will stay in Wilmington as long as required. Crews will be assisting Keller Williams agents and their immediate families with post-storm clean-up, supplies, generators, fuel, temporary lodging, and emergency stipends to cover meals and daily cost of living during storm recovery.

KW Cares will stage Hurricane Florence disaster relief efforts out of the warehouse at 306 Old Dairy Road in Wilmington North Carolina. The warehouse space is being donated for the KW Cares relief effort by George Taylor, Chairman of TRU Colors Brewing, and Untappd, Inc. The 40,000 warehouse is the future site of TRU Colors Brewing commercial brewing operations.

The KW Cares Hurricane Florence relief effort is traveling to Wilmington, North Carolina, from its first stop in New Bern, North Carolina.

Founded in 2003 by Keller Williams Realty CEO Mo Anderson, Keller Williams Realty Cares (KW Cares), provides disaster relief to Keller Williams Realty agents. Since its inception, KW Cares, a 501(c)3 nonprofit, has raised more than $1 million to help the Keller Williams Realty community in times of need. KW Cares has provided assistance for past natural disasters, including Hurricane Katrina, Hurricane Harvey, and Hurricane Charley.

Im proud of the support and caring that Keller Williams provides to the KW family, which includes KBT Realty agents and their families, says Kirk Pugh, KBT Realty Group Broker Realtor. Knowing that the company is behind its agents is a huge support emotionally, as well as financially. We will make it back from the blow that Florence dealt the area, and KW Cares helps speed that process along.

Prior to the storm, KW Cares polled its nearly 200 associates from Hampstead to Ocean Isle to determine evacuation plans and storm assistance need. In the 48 hours before Hurricane Florence reached the Cape Fear North Carolina coast, more than $70,000 in pre-storm donations had been advanced to local Keller Williams agents to offset the cost of evacuation: money to cover food, lodging and travel to keep people out of harms way.

No KW agent should be forced to remain in the path of this storm based on financial need, says Ladd Gasparovic, Operating Principal, KW Wilmington.

About KW Cares

Established in 2003, Keller Williams Realty Cares, or KW Cares, is a 501(c)3 public charity that is supported by Keller Williams Realty associates and offices nationwide. The charity provides emergency financial assistance to any member of the KW family during times of extreme hardship. Last year, KW Cares raised more than $800,000 in aide for Keller Williams Realtys associates, which helped to pay bills, pay insurance deductibles and medical expenses for many associates in times of extreme hardship. All gifts to KW Cares are tax-deductible and go directly to those who are in need. For more information, visit KW Cares online at (http://www.kwcares.org).

About KBT Realty Group

KBT Realty Group is an independently owned and operated division of Keller Williams Realty. With more than 20 Realtor/Brokers and a team of real estate transaction support professionals, all working toward satisfying the home buying and selling objectives of clients, KBT Realty Group (http://www.findhomesinwilmingtonnc.com) has more than 100 years of combined experience in the Cape Fear and southeastern North Carolina coastal area. KBT Realty Group was founded in 2013 by partners Kirkland E. Pugh, Becky Brown, and Tyson Emery.
King Kullen is proud to celebrate National Family Meals Month this September. This nationwide, annual movement was created by the Food Marketing Institute Foundation to raise awareness of the benefits of frequent family meals. With the support of community health organizations, King Kullen and other grocers and manufacturers encourage families to share one more meal at home per week.

The Food Marketing Institute is in a position to bring together those on the front lines  grocery retailers, food manufacturers, and community groups  as part of shared purpose to encourage and facilitate family meals. Together we can do well by doing good, said Leslie Sarasin, president and CEO of the Food Marketing Institute, creator of National Family Meals Month.

Research continues to demonstrate that magic happens during family mealtime when children and parents gather around the table and engage in conversation. Family meals eaten at home have been proven to benefit the health and wellness of children and adolescents, to fight obesity and substance abuse, as well as making families stronger  creating a positive impact on communities and the nation.

Many researchers and health experts endorse and promote the lifelong benefits of family meals. Numerous studies show that home-cooked meals nourish the spirit, brain and health of all family members. Family meals have a positive impact on the nutrition status, health and wellbeing of the entire family. They are associated with physical, social and mental health benefits. Theyre linked with positive outcomes for children such as high grades and high self-esteem, healthier eating habits, less risky behavior and a lesser chance of drug and alcohol use at an early age.

Reducing away-from-home eating also leads to healthier children. Kids and teens who share meals with their families three or more times per week are less likely to be overweight and more likely to reach for healthy foods. Sharing family meals is essential for family bonding and is likely responsible for prosocial behavior as adults, including sharing, fairness and respect. More home-cooked meals will result in healthier eating options and help save money.

According to The Hartman Groups 2013 study in Eating Occasions Compass, 63% of Americans decide what to eat less than an hour before eating. King Kullen offers an ever-expanding assortment of products that will take the stress out of planning and preparing family meals. Customers can find pre-prepped fresh ingredients, delicious readymade entrees, wholesome heat-and-eat dishes and more at King Kullen stores. Pre-sliced vegetables, spiralized vegetables and vegetable mixes are prepackaged for the customers convenience. Minimal prep time and ingredients are needed for these products. Put these easy to make dishes to use a second time by enjoying them for lunch the next day. Package in airtight containers to fit in the kids lunchboxes, along with fresh fruits and vegetables.

Ensure kids are receiving dairy at lunch with these tips from American Dairy NE. The best packable dairy foods for lunches are:



Shelf Stable Milk  a whole natural nutrient powerhouse

Chocolate Milk  the essential choice for active kids

String Cheese  a delicious protein-packed snack

Greek/Icelandic Yogurt  helps keep kids satisfied

Shredded Cheese  sprinkle on for taste

Yogurt Tubes  provide calcium for growing kids

Cabot Cracker Cuts  an easy, pre-cut addition to build a better snack

Keeping perishable products cold enough is important for food safety reasons. Here are a few tips for keeping dairy cold.



Purchase portable yogurts and store in freezer until theyre needed.

Freeze fruits like grapes, cherries, mangoes and more to help keep dairy foods chilled, then enjoy when thawed!

Make smoothies ahead of time, freeze in single serving containers and pack in a lunch box when desired.

Make sure to buy insulated lunch bags and thermoses to ensure food is kept cool from the moment it leaves the refrigerator/freezer.

When assembling a childs lunch bag, make sure to place dairy foods close to frozen gel packs to ensure theyre kept fresh and cold until lunchtime.

For even more helpful information, visit American Dairy NEs site for 5 Simple Ways to Build a Better Lunchbox!

King Kullen is committed to helping make shared meals at home fun, affordable and healthier.

About the Company:

Headquartered in Bethpage, New York, King Kullen Grocery Co., Inc. is recognized by the Smithsonian Institution as Americas first supermarket. Michael J. Cullen opened the doors of King Kullen in 1930. Today, four generations later, King Kullen is still family owned and operated. It remains a leader in the supermarket industry. From that very first store in 1930, King Kullen today operates 32 supermarkets and five Wild by Nature stores across Long Island. In addition to traditional grocery, King Kullen features a large catering and prepared foods department, freshly-baked breads and sweets, and healthy and organic areas, with pharmacies and online shopping in many stores as well.
Nino Perrotta joins NSBA I am proud to be a member and look forward to assisting with the mission of the NSBA.

Local Business Owner and the author of Dual Mission, Nino Perrotta, was recently named to the NSBA Leadership Council.

NSBA is the nations oldest small-business advocacy organization, and operates on a staunchly nonpartisan basis. Perrotta, a recognized leader in the small-business community, joins the NSBA Leadership Council alongside other small-business advocates from across the country as they work to promote the interests of small business to policymakers in Washington, D.C.

As a small-business owner, I see daily the importance of being involved and active when it comes to laws and regulation, stated Perrotta. Joining NSBAs Leadership Council will enable me to take our collective small-business message to the people that need to hear it most: Congress.

Perrotta is an accomplished business owner with over 23 years of federal law enforcement experience. An immigrant son who as a young man experienced first hand the value of a small business by working for his parents in their family owned business Perrotta Salumeria which was located in Mount Vernon, New York. He has extensive appreciation for small businesses across America.

Perrotta joined the NSBA Leadership Council as part of his efforts to tackle the many critical issues facing small business, including tax reform, regulatory restraint, health care costs and how the Affordable Care Act will impact small business. The NSBA Leadership Council is focused on providing valuable networking between small-business advocates from across the country while ensuring small business a seat at the table as Congress and regulators take up key small-business proposals.

I am proud to have Nino Perrotta as part of our Leadership Council, stated NSBA President and CEO Todd McCracken. HE came to us highly recommended and I look forward our coordinated efforts for years to come.

For more on the NSBA Leadership Council, please visit http://leadership.nsba.biz/about-us/

Sequoia Security Group is a boutique internationally recognized cyber security and due diligence investigative firm based in North Bethesda, Maryland.
Lone Star Analysis' Tom Abraham Receives Service Member Patriot Award Supporting Weston throughout his journey has been extremely rewarding, and we look forward to watching him succeed from afar. Were truly honored to receive his and ESGRs recognition for our support," said Steve Roemerman, CEO, Lone Star Analysis.

Yesterday, Lone Star Analysis, a Dallas-based specialist in leading-edge predictive and prescriptive analytics solutions, and its Director of Prescriptive Analytics Tom Abraham received the Above and Beyond Award and the Service Member Patriot Award, respectively, from the Employer Support of the Guard and Reserve (ESGR).

Lone Star has a long history of working with government and military agencies, and understands the need to be committed to those who serve. That commitment showed true with Lone Star Analyst Lt. Weston Woerner, the nominator. Abraham and Lone Star received their respective awards due to their efforts supporting Woerner as he prepares to become an Apache Longbow pilot.

Over the past five years, around five percent of our employees have been reservists and another 20 to 25 percent are veterans, said Steve Roemerman, CEO, Lone Star Analysis. The difference they make at Lone Star is only outdone by their contributions to our country and its freedom. Supporting Weston throughout his journey has been extremely rewarding, and we look forward to watching him succeed from afar. Were truly honored to receive his and ESGRs recognition for our support.

The Patriot Award, given to Abraham, recognizes individual supervisors for support provided directly to service members or their families. This often translates to supervisors being flexible with and supportive of reserve members through various means including flexible scheduling, time around deployment, allowing leave of absences and helping assist the service members family.

The Above and Beyond Award, given to Lone Star, is an award that is eligible to companies who have had supervisors receive the Patriot Award. It is given in limited quantities to employers who have exceeded the legal requirements of the Uniformed Services Employment and Reemployment Rights Act by providing their National Guard and Army Reserve employees with extra benefits such as recuperation of pay to offset lost wages, expanded health benefits and other additional support beyond the scope of the act.

ESGR, a Department of Defense program that distributes these awards, was established in 1972 to promote cooperation and understanding between Reserve Component Service members and their civilian employers, and to assist in the resolution of conflicts arising from an employee's military commitment. ESGR helps foster a culture in which all employers support and value the employment and military service of members of the National Guard and Reserve in the United States.

To learn more about Lone Star, visit: http://www.lone-star.com/.

About Lone Star Analysis

Lone Star Analysis is a Dallas-based predictive and prescriptive analytics specialist enabling customers to make smarter decisions faster by leveraging data and insights to provide foresight and enhance the decision-making of its customers. Lone Stars TruNavigator and AnalyticsOSTM software programs provide transparent, auditable and explainable solutions for clients. Additionally, Lone Star applies the right combination of data, people and processes to get results with its 15 years of experience and more than 800 subject matter experts, across several industries, including aerospace, defense, energy, logistics, manufacturing and transportation.

For more information on Lone Star, visit http://www.Lone-Star.com.

Media Contact:

Andrew Williams

MCC for Lone Star

972-480-8383 ext. 273

andrew_williams(at)mccom.com
The Hometown Hero Project

MaidPro has joined forces with The Hometown Hero Project to make it easier for veterans to become business owners. Through its Veteran Discount Program, MaidPro now offers veterans discounted franchise packages valued at $15,000.

The goal of the program is to make it easier than ever for veterans to join the MaidPro family and to own and operate their own home cleaning franchise.

The veteran discount package includes:



a $3000 discount on the initial franchise fee;

a $100 invoice credit each month for the life of the 10-year agreement;

direct financing or financial assistance enabling veterans to get started with little up-front capital.

The costs for purchasing our franchise are very low in comparison to other franchise start-up costs, and this discount program now makes purchasing a MaidPro franchise even more affordable for our service men and women, said CEO Mark Kushinsky.

MaidPro was recently one of only 80 franchise companies named on Franchise Business Reviews elite list of Top Low-Cost Franchises. MaidPro has also been named a Top Franchise for Veterans for 2018.

Were very honored to be able to show our appreciation to our veterans by giving them substantial discounts to business ownership, Kushinsky said. Were also thrilled to be able to partner with an organization like The Hometown Hero Project that does so much to give back to our veterans.

The Hometown Hero Project connects active and retired military, police officers, firefighters, first responders and teachers with organizations and businesses that provide them with resources and services.

ABOUT MAIDPRO

MaidPro is a Boston-based franchisor of house cleaning services with over 255 locations in 38 states, the District of Columbia, and Canada. The company, which began franchising in 1997, takes pride in its strong owner community, cutting-edge technology, and creative marketing. It has been honored with the Franchise Business Reviews Four-Star Rating and Franchise 50 awards every year from 2006 to 2018 for owner satisfaction. MaidPro was named one of the Top 50 Franchises for Minorities by USA Todays Franchising Today. MaidPro is also a proud member of the International Franchise Association, Canadian Franchise Association, and the New England Franchise Association. The company can be found online at http://www.maidprofranchise.com.
Our technicians are ready to help before, during and after a major storm to make sure facilities are safe and secure.

Hurricane Florence hit the Carolina coast on Friday, causing billions of dollars in damage and sending pounding rains and roaring winds across the southeast. In preparation for the hurricane and its impact, MaintenX technicians traveled to North and South Carolina to help businesses board up windows, arrange sandbags and ready properties for the storm.

Now that the storm has passed, MaintenX technicians will continue to provide local businesses with power generation, water diversion, refrigeration trailers and other emergency maintenance services. MaintenX technicians have received requests to help over 500 facilities in the path of Hurricane Florence.

Hurricanes can impact facilities in a number of ways. High winds, flying debris, power outages, floodwaters, heavy rains  these can all cause damage to buildings and property, said Bill Schaphorst, MaintenXs VP of Business Development. Thats why our technicians are ready to help before, during and after a major storm to make sure facilities are safe and secure.

Hurricane Florence was the first major Atlantic hurricane to make landfall in the U.S. in the 2018 season. Due to the size and intensity of the storm, nearly 900,000 people lost power and over 30 inches of rain fell in places along the Carolina coast. With two months left in the hurricane season, MaintenX is ready to help businesses face whatever comes next.

Skilled technicians are able to provide a number of emergency maintenance services. With more than 35 years of experience, MaintenX understands how critical their services are to helping facilities maintain business continuity. Additionally, MaintenX is one of the largest maintenance providers in the nation, ensuring businesses from coast to coast can benefit from their superior emergency response and recovery services.

To learn more about MaintenX and the ways they can help your business weather any storm, visit http://www.maintenx.com.

ABOUT MAINTENX INTERNATIONAL:

MaintenX International is a fully-licensed, facilities repair company. They are one of the largest national self-performing facility maintenance and repair companies in the U.S. MaintenX has created a network of knowledgeable and professional technicians throughout the country. With their team of well-trained technicians, MaintenX self-performs and manages facility maintenance for clients. In the event there is not a MaintenX technician in the area, the company has fostered a network of preferred vendor partners throughout the country to provide superior service for their clients. For more than 35 years, MaintenX has been expertly serving multi-location retail stores, restaurant chains, and Fortune 500 companies nationwide.
For the fourth consecutive year, Milton Hershey School has been named one of the Best Places to Work in PA. It is a tremendous honor to be named among the best places to work in the state, said MHS President Peter Gurt 85.

For the fourth consecutive year, Milton Hershey School has been named one of the Best Places to Work in PA. The award recognizes companies across the state based on workplace policies, practices, philosophies, systems and demographics.

It is a tremendous honor to be named among the best places to work in the state, said MHS President Peter Gurt 85. By voting MHS a Best Place to Work, our employees recognize the fulfilling and rewarding role they have as positive influences in our students' lives each day. As we grow to serve more children from lower income families, I welcome other service-minded men and women to discover a career at MHS that will not only change someone elses life, but also their own.

Milton Hershey School is located in Hershey, Pa. Established in 1909, the school is a home and school to more than 2,000 children from families of lower income. MHS and its dedicated staff offer a top-notch education and positive home life to students in pre-kindergarten through 12th gradeat no cost to their familiesin order to nurture and support them in leading fulfilling and productive lives that break the cycle of generational poverty.

In order to provide opportunities to more children, the school continues to grow its student body and is looking for caring individuals who want to step up and make a positive impact on the lives of others.

The awards program is a public/private partnership between Team Pennsylvania Foundation, the Pennsylvania Department of Community and Economic Development, the Pennsylvania State Council of the Society for Human Resource Management, and the Central Penn Business Journal.

MHS will be recognized at the Best Places to Work in PA awards banquet on Thursday, November 29 at the Lancaster County Convention Center in Lancaster, Pa. More information about MHS can be found at mhskids.org.

ABOUT MILTON HERSHEY SCHOOL

Milton Hershey School is one of the worlds best private schools, offering a top-notch education and positive home life to children in pre-kindergarten through 12th grade from families of lower income at no charge.
"...This award confirms the confidence of the NSF in NGD Systems and in the commercialization of Computational Storage." - Vladimir Alves, NGD Systems' CTO

NGD Systems, Inc., the leader in computational storage, today announced the award of a Phase IIB Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant to the company by the National Science Foundation (NSF). The grant enables NGD Systems to continue the work originally funded in the 2016 Phase I SBIR grant on developing applications for Computational Storage through In-Situ Processing for growing petabyte-scale analytics workloads. The award represents continued commitment and further confidence in the deployment of computational storage and in the ability of NGD Systems to deliver market-changing products that embody In-Situ Processing.

We are excited to be the recipient of this grant from the National Science Foundation, said Vladimir Alves, chief technical officer at NGD Systems. The Small Business Innovative Research Phase IIB program is granted to companies whose achievements in the SBIR Phase I and Phase II programs demonstrated both technical merit and commercial potential. This award confirms the confidence of the NSF in NGD Systems and in the commercialization of Computational Storage.

While the concepts of Computational Storage and In-Situ Processing exist, a recent webinar survey showed that concerns about the maturity and stability of Computational Storage vendors is one of the concerns of end-users. This grant by the NSF demonstrates the US Governments confidence in both In-Situ Processing and in NGD Systems ability to deliver Enterprise-class products on the application of Computational Storage to petabyte-scale analytics workloads.

Flash has transformed storage performance, and the NVMe protocols are now helping to extract even more speed from solid-state storage, said Tim Stammers, Senior Analyst at 451 Research. But while these changes have goal posts are being moved by emerging applications such as AI, which need yet faster access to data. That is driving a requirement for new architectures that will boost storage performance, while containing infrastructure costs, and taking advantage of the promised benefits of storage-class memories. Because even small amounts of data have gravity, conventional architectures need time to move data from storage devices into the processors that need to access it. NGDs approach is instead to move the processing to the data, effectively making the storage smart.

Regardless of use in edge computing, Internet of Things (IoT) applications, or real-time analytics. Computational Storage offers a means to nearly eliminate data movement through a system for analysis, which reduces the overall latency of the solution. At the same time, NGD Systems patented storage architecture can significantly reduce the server footprint of these solutions through the largest capacity, intelligent storage devices. This is critically important for embedded applications encompassed by content delivery network (CDN) points of presence (PoPs), IoT, and edge computing. The NGD Systems Newport platform, the latest in Computational Storage, builds upon the already-successful family of computational storage devices in use in the market today.

About NGD Systems

Founded in 2013 with its headquarters in Irvine, California, NGD Systems is a venture-funded company focused on creation of new category of storage devices that brings computation to data. NGD has designed its advanced proprietary NVMe controller technology which deploys patented Elastic FTL algorithm and Advanced LDPC Engines to provide industry leading capacity and scalability. The platform also deploys the patented In-Situ Processing technology to enable Computational Storage capability. The company is led by an executive team that helped drive and shape the flash storage industry, with decades in leadership positions with storage companies such as Western Digital, STEC, Memtech, and Micron. For more information, please visit https://www.ngdsystems.com.

About the NSFs Small Business Programs

Americas Seed Fund powered by NSF awards $200 million annually to startups and small businesses, transforming scientific discovery into products and services with commercial and societal impact. Startups working across almost all areas of science and technology can receive up to $1.5 million in non-dilutive funds to support research and development (R&D), helping de-risk technology for commercial success. Americas Seed Fund is congressionally mandated through the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program. The NSF is an independent federal agency with a budget of about $7.8 billion that supports fundamental research and education across all fields of science and engineering. For more information, visit seedfund.nsf.gov.
Olivier Taillieu, chief trial attorney of The Dominguez Firm, has been selected to serve on the 2019 Consumer Attorneys of California Board (CAOC). The Annual Installation and Awards Dinner will take place on Saturday, November 17, 2018 at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco, where the organization will swear in the 2019 Board.

Speaking about his coveted appointment Mr. Taillieu said, Its an honor to have been selected to serve on the Board of such a prestigious organization. As a plaintiff attorney, I look forward to fostering professional relationships among California trial lawyers and contributing even more to CAOCs educational platform, which makes us more effective advocates for our clients.

In an official communication, Nancy Drabble, CAOCs CEO wrote, It is very exciting to see the strong commitment Mr. Taillieu has shown. I very much appreciate Attorney Taillieus enthusiasm and dedication. Taillieu, who has an impressive track record for winning multimillion-dollar cases on behalf of accident victims, will also join Advocates Club and Presidents Club.

Attorney Taillieu has been influential in the legal industry with notable results representing victims of traumatic brain and spinal cord injuries. One of his highlights includes a $29 million verdict for a TBI injury. He recently shared his knowledge with some of the best trial lawyers and up-and-comers, during Los Angeles Consumer Attorneys Associations annual convention, CAALA Vegas. His article Proving injury and damages in invisible-injury cases, about traumatic brain injuries, is in the June 2018 issue of Advocate Magazine. Taillieu has been selected four times to the Southern California Super Lawyers list.

Attorney Juan J. Dominguez, the CEO and Managing Partner of The Dominguez Firm, congratulated Mr. Taillieu and stated, The Dominguez Firm supports CAOCs mission to ensure the civil justice system remains strong in California. Im proud to know that an award-winning attorney from our firm has been selected to serve on CAOCs Board in 2019. Oliviers dedication and compassion in service to our firms clients is unparalleled. He will make remarkable contributions to this outstanding organization.

The Dominguez Firm has championed the rights of Californians for over thirty years and has recovered over half a billion dollars in settlements and verdicts for accident victims. The firm also represents injured workers and fights for employee rights and equality in the workplace.
Americans love their dogs and so do we, said Senior Vice President and Family Owner, Todd Simon. "We invite customers to stop by one of our more than 60 retail stores nationwide on September 25 to get a bag of one of our new dog treats for just one dollar.

Americas Original Butcher, Omaha Steaks, today announced that it will host $1 Dog Treat Day in all its stores on Tuesday, September 25. On that day, customers can purchase one of the six new Omaha Steaks dog treat offerings for just $1 per bag. Limit of one bag per household. The event is in honor of the companys recent launch of a new line of dog treats, carefully crafted with the same premium quality ingredients that customers expect in everything offered by this fifth generation, family-owned company.

Omaha Steaks new line of dog treats is well positioned for those who like to pamper their dogs with nutritionally sound treats. The new pet treats are made in the USA using all-natural ingredients with no additives or preservatives. The new line includes:



Smoked Jerky Dog Treats: Beef & Sweet Potato (6 oz.)

Smoked Jerky Dog Treats: Chicken & Apple (6 oz.)

Smoked Jerky Dog Treats: Turkey & Cranberry (6 oz.)

Real Beef Dog Biscuits  Original Flavor (12 oz.)

Real Dog Treats Pig Ears  Maple Smoked (12 oz.)

Real Beef Bone Chews  Smoked and Dried T-Bones (12 oz.)

Americans love their dogs and so do we, said Senior Vice President and Family Owner, Todd Simon. Our customers can trust the quality of our new line of dog treats as we used only premium quality, all-natural ingredients. We invite customers to stop by one of our more than 60 retail stores nationwide on September 25 to get a bag of one of our new dog treats for just one dollar.

About Omaha Steaks

America Original Butcher Omaha Steaks, founded in 1917, is an Omaha, Nebraska-based, fifth-generation, family-owned company that markets and distributes a wide variety of the finest quality USDA-approved, grain-fed beef and other gourmet foods including seafood, pork, poultry, slow cooker and skillet meals, side dishes, appetizers and desserts. Today, Omaha Steaks is recognized as the nations largest direct response marketer of premium beef and gourmet foods, available to customers by calling 1-800-228-9055, online at http://www.OmahaSteaks.com or at retail stores nationwide.
We are taking the private label industry and putting everything ...sourcing the products, creating the packaging...all online.

Onoxa, the worlds first online skincare customization company, is excited to announce an exclusive interview with the companys Creative Director, Alix Brett, and Brand Ambassador, Maggie Kombogiannis, on Worldwide Business with kathy ireland. In the segment  which aired on Fox Business Network as sponsored content on Sunday, September 16, 2018 at 5:30pm EST and Bloomberg International on Saturday, September 15, 2018 at 7:00pm GMT  Brett and Kombogiannis discussed the companys revolutionary process for empowering entrepreneurs and beauty professionals to create custom branded skin care products.

The first online platform for personalized skin care products, Onoxa leverages science, expertise, and nature to deliver the most potent formulations in the skin care and beauty industry.

We are taking the private label industry and putting everything online in one place, says Brett. Sourcing the product, creating the packaging... its all online. The idea for Onoxa came about from looking at the industry standard of doing things and untangling the parts that make it so difficult and daunting. In turn, what we did was revolutionize the process for creating custom branded skin care products. Its as straightforward as it gets. You go to the website, pick your products and packaging and design your label in real time, online.

All our cosmetic chemists have a degree in chemistry or biochemistry, says Kombogiannis. Our research and development team has over 65 years of combined experience in the beauty and nutritional industries and come from the top Fortune 500.

Onoxas products are cruelty free, with no parabens or sulfates. Sourcing the highest quality ingredients and the safest, they have three main areas of focus: protection, prevention and care.

High quality products that make a difference for the small business is revolutionary, says J.L. Haber, Vice President of Programming for Worldwide Business. Having this accessibility online truly makes the difference.

About Onoxa:

Onoxa is a skincare manufacturer and online service that sells private label skincare products directly to Retail & e-commerce businesses. The process and platform are the first-of-its-kind providing a faster, better and more accessible service than standard private label offerings. To learn more, visit http://www.onoxa.com or follow the company on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

About Worldwide Business with kathy ireland:

Worldwide Business with kathy ireland is a weekly half-hour show featuring global executives sharing their business insights and framing the opportunities shaping their industries. Hosted by a business mogul, Kathy Ireland interviews some of the brightest minds in business today. The show broadcasts on Fox Business Network as part of their sponsored content line up and globally on Bloomberg International. Worldwide Business with kathy ireland extends beyond the weekly on-air program with digital content delivered on various video platforms and across social media.
Brown Granite Beacon Chat Height Gas Fire Pit Table This versatile collection of gas fire pit tables offers a beautiful new take on a classic style.

As the leader in the outdoor living industry, The Outdoor GreatRoom Company (OGC) is pleased to debut the Beacon Collection. This versatile collection of gas fire pit tables offers a beautiful new take on a classic style. The Beacon Collection features Supercast or Granite tops in chat and dining height options. All bases are made out of durable, powder-coated steel.

The stunning Supercast tops are available in Marbleized Noche or White Onyx. Supercast is a proprietary blend of fiber glass and polymer fortified concrete for maximum strength with less weight. The Granite tops offer a classic look in Black or Brown. All tops are easy to care for and durable to last season after season.

The 20-inch Crystal Fire Burner is UL Listed for safety and quality. A sliding door on the bases offers easy access to a 20 lb propane tank and keeps the tank concealed during use. The Beacon Collection is made in the U.S.

The Beacon Collection, along with other innovative outdoor products, will be on display at the ICFA Casual Market in Chicago Sept. 25-28, at booth #7-3030.

ABOUT THE OUTDOOR GREATROOM COMPANY

The Outdoor GreatRoom Company manufactures innovative, upscale products with design appeal for indoor and outdoor living spaces. Products include gas fire pits and gas fire tables, pergolas, outdoor kitchen islands, outdoor gas fireplaces, indoor electric fireplaces, outdoor patio furniture, custom, and commercial-grade products. Visit http://www.outdoorrooms.com for more information.

Follow The Outdoor GreatRoom Company for updates and design inspirations at http://www.pinterest.com/outdoorrooms/ and http://www.facebook.com/OutdoorGreatrooms
Piedmont is truly an innovative leader that understands the importance of always making adjustments and improvements to current processes and technology. - David Franklin, co-founder and COO, Connance

Connance, a healthcare leader in predictive analytics to personalize the financial experience, today announced the presentation of its client, Piedmont Healthcare, at Beckers Hospital Review 4th Annual Health IT + Revenue Cycle Conference. Brian Unell and Matt Fisher of Piedmont Healthcare will present Piedmont Healths Revenue Cycle Initiative to Add Enhanced Analytics and Account Flow Technology to their Epic Platform on Friday, September 21 at 3 p.m. CDT.

The presentation will discuss the journey to integrate advanced analytics and workflow solutions for claim and patient follow-up. Piedmont designed a strategy that stayed true to working within Epic and enabled intelligent augmentation to improve internal business office processes. Since deployment, Piedmont is experiencing gains in yields complemented by improved workforce productivity and overall lower cost.

Piedmont is truly an innovative leader that understands the importance of always making adjustments and improvements to current processes and technology, said David Franklin, co-founder and COO, Connance. By adding an analytic layer to Epic, the health system has experienced overall process improvement in the revenue cycle that delivers superior financial transformation. Its been exciting to partner with them in this next-generation approach of enabling smarter technology.

Piedmont Healths Revenue Cycle Initiative to Add Enhanced Analytics and Account Flow Technology to their Epic Platform will be presented on Friday, September 21 at 3 p.m. CDT.

About Connance, Inc.

Connance is the healthcare industrys leading provider of predictive analytics solutions that personalize the financial and clinical experience for patients. Transforming the revenue cycle and value-based care delivery, Connance leverages data science, integrated to workflow to drive enhanced performance. Connance delivers Patient Pay Optimization, Reimbursement Optimization and Value-Based Risk solutions that combine Connance data, hospital data and consumer data to stratify patients based on social determinants to predict behavior and provide actionable insights to improve net income and patient outcomes. Connance solutions connect more than 500 hospitals, thousands of physician practices and other clinical locations and more than 80 collection agencies nationwide creating the largest research database of its kind. For more information, call (781) 577-5000 or visit our website.
Amigo Proveedor Del Ano Award presented to CEO Lawrence Behr & International Sales Rep. Javier Castillo The Supplier of the Year Award is an honor and were appreciative of this recognition, as well as the privilege to be a resource to the broadcast and wireless interest in South America.

The Mexican Association of Broadcast Engineers and Technicians (AMITRA) recognized LBA Technology, Inc., its CEO, Lawrence Behr and the companys International Sales Representative, Javier Castillo with the Supplier of the Year (AMIGO Proveedor Del Ano) Award. Aurelo Jasso, AMITRA Secretary presented the awards at the 41th International Congress of Broadcast and Telecommunications held August 23  26 in Acapulco, Mexico. The annual gathering is organized by AMITRA.

You are an example of an honest supplier within the Association and we want to point this out to all suppliers to follow your exemplary behavior and learn the ethics and philanthropy you demonstrate, AMITRA president Fernando Caballos said. We know that Companies need to make money and be successful, but we thank them when they show human qualities. Caballos added.

Through the years, LBA has supported the endeavors of AMITRA. One such example is the company sponsoring and presenting the Engineer of the Year Award at the annual Congress for the last 15 years. The honor and monetary award recognizes the merits of a member of AMITRA in his or her performance as a radio engineer.

For over two decades LBA has been a pioneering provider of RF equipment and RF safety training to markets in Latin America though LBA Technology, Inc. and LBA University, Inc. LBA products and services have provided countless critical solutions for the Latin American broadcast and telecommunications sectors. LBA has worked to develop strong relationships and a unique understanding of the market.

The Supplier of the Year Award is an honor and were appreciative of this recognition, as well as the privilege to be a resource to the broadcast and wireless interest in South America, Castillo said.

Learn more about LBA, its products and solutions at http://www.lbagroup.com. Contact Javier Castillo at 252-757-0279, jcastillo@lbagroup.com for more information about LBA Technology, Inc. broadcast products.

About LBA Group Inc.

LBA Group, Inc. has over 50 years of experience in providing technology and risk management for industrial and telecommunications infrastructure assets. LBA is a multiple INC5000 awardee, and is a North Carolina Top 50 Hispanic minority-owned business. The group is comprised of LBA Technology, Inc., a leading source and integrator of radio frequency systems, lightning protection, and EMC equipment for broadcast, industrial, and government users worldwide; the professional technical consultancy Lawrence Behr Associates, Inc.; and LBA University, Inc. providing online professional training. The companies are based in Greenville, N.C., USA. Keep up with whats going on at LBA by following the company on Facebook and LinkedIn.
Puls Technologies, Inc., the nationwide company delivering intelligent end-to-end support for the devices at the heart of everyday life, today announces an expansion of its same-day services to include garage door repairs. Puls technicians can help homeowners repair a section-roll up or tilt-up garage door when it will not open or close, becomes noisy or stuck, or has panel damage.

As the gateway to the home, garage doors can often be the easiest point of entry for house burglars. Home garages can be treasure troves, storing expensive cars, bikes and other valuables inside it, so its imperative to make your garage secure. When something goes wrong with your garage door, speed is essential. With online, same-day scheduling for emergency garage repairs, Puls aims to bring technology and seamless booking to an industry that has not changed for decades

Founded in 2015, Puls quickly found a customer base in families and individuals frustrated by the time and effort involved in identifying a trusted technician and arranging a mutually convenient appointment window. Today, Puls has over 2,500 vetted professionals in 50 US metro areas, providing same-day installation and repair for more than 200 high-growth products, including smartphones, big screen TVs, HD antennas, garage door openers, and smart home devices such as voice-activated speakers, video doorbells, keyless locks, AI cameras, smart thermostats and security systems.

Today, were delighted to expand our portfolio of in-home technical support to include garage doors, furthering our vision of servicing anything with an 'on' switch, said Puls CEO and co-founder, Eyal Ronen. Using Puls proprietary technology that matches the right technician with the right tools for your repair, we aim to get to 85% of same-day appointment repairs for customers garage doors.

This announcement builds on recent momentum for Puls, including the companys $50M Series C from Temasek and Sequoia Capital, as well as being named #11 on LinkedIn Top Startups list. Customers can book appointments for the same-day or for a future date, from 8am-9pm, 7 days a week, including holidays, at Puls.com/garage-doors.

About Puls

Founded in 2015 by Itai Hirsch and Eyal Ronen, Puls Technologies, Inc. connects consumers with highly skilled technicians to service smart technology devices anytime, anywhere. Providing services in more than 50 local markets, Puls leverages a proprietary technology platform to match customers with the right technician with the right skills at the right time, addressing most service requests within 60 minutes. With thousands of 5-star reviews on Facebook and Yelp, Puls goes the extra mile for each customer and corporate partner to ensure exceptional service and guaranteed results. Puls is headquartered in San Francisco with offices in San Diego and Tel Aviv and has raised more than $90 million in financing to date with backing from Temasek, Sequoia Capital, Red Dot Capital Partners, Samsung NEXT, Maverick Ventures, Kreos Capital, Hanaco Ventures, Hamilton Lane, and Viola Ventures. Learn more at http://www.Puls.com.

Media Contact

Kirstin Hallett for Puls

Puls(at)sourcecodecomms.com
Our new HQ has so much to offer. It dodges the skyscraper mono-culture and grounds us in a former retail space centrally located on Peachtree. We plan to reinvent that space into an innovative work environment that also gives us the room we need to grow.

FullStory has signed an agreement to lease a 49,200 square foot commercial space for its new company headquarters in Atlanta. The next home for the customer experience analytics provider backed by Kleiner Perkins, Google Ventures, and Salesforce Ventures will be approximately four times larger than its current offices near SweetWater Brewery. The new space will not only provide more elbow room for the companys rapidly growing team, but will also be a one-of-a-kind workspace befitting FullStorys passionate band of computer science geeks and customer experience enthusiasts.

FullStorys relocation will repurpose retail space fronting Peachtree Street near Midtown Atlanta at 1745 Peachtree Street NE. The spot offers easy walkability to over a dozen local restaurants, commuter-friendly access to Buford Highway and 75/85, and public transportation options through MARTA. FullStory will be a marquee, anchor tenant when the new headquarters is completed in late Spring 2019.

Bruce Johnson, FullStory co-founder and COO, shared how the companys experience-focused culture helped narrow the search. Why do our customers adopt FullStory to deliver an extraordinary experience for their users? Because the tech world is hyper-competitive, and, among the countless websites and apps, their users want a unique and wonderful digital experience. Similar logic applies to building world-class tech teams. Bright, creative people in technology can snap their fingers and get a job anywhere they choose, so its important to us that our office reflects the ways working at FullStory is meant to be a unique and wonderful life experience.

As a result, FullStory spent many months with brokers Joel & Granot scouting out the perfect new headquarters location. With the decision made, FullStory co-founder and CEO Scott Voigt is excited to spread the news, Our new HQ has so much to offer. It dodges the skyscraper mono-culture and grounds us in a former retail space centrally located on Peachtree. We plan to reinvent that space into an innovative work environment that also gives us the room we need to grow. Voigt continues, We are attracting very special people to join FullStory  leaders at their crafts. And we cant wait for them to call our new headquarters `home.`

The location of Fulltorys new headquarters is owned by Selig Enterprises. Selig is a family-owned and operated real estate company with a portfolio of more than 15 million square feet of commercial properties throughout the Southeast with major developments in Midtown and Downtown Atlanta.

About FullStory

Founded in 2014 by former Google Atlanta engineers, FullStory is helping thousands of companies globally "save the world wide web" by empowering them with unparalleled insights into the digital experiences of their customers. Product development, digital marketing, support and customer success teams at companies such as Jane.com, Icelandair, and Moosejaw all use FullStory's innovative web analytics software to understand and transform the customer experience online. For more information about FullStory, visit http://www.fullstory.com.
Sarah Prystupa, RE/MAX Alliance We are offering to buy peoples first drink when they donate $5 or more to the Light the Night Fundraiser, for the first 50 people who donate. Im co-sponsoring this fundraiser event with Tiffany Swisher, a Mortgage Lender with Home Mortgage Alliance.

On September 27, RE/MAX Alliance Realtor Sarah Prystupa and the RE/MAX Alliance West team will be participating in the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society Rocky Mountain Light the Night Walk at Washington Park in Denver. The Light the Night Walk funds research and treatments that are saving lives today, and supports the patients and families who are living with blood cancers.

All of the RE/MAX Alliance offices are participating, said Prystupa. We encourage families and communities to come together and walk with us to honor blood cancer survivors, as well as those lost to the diseases.

There will also be a Happy Hour event on Monday, September 24, from 4:30 to 6:30 p.m. in Olde Town Arvada at the Bluegrass Coffee and Bourbon Lounge, 7415 Grandview Avenue. We are offering to buy peoples first drink when they donate $5 or more to the Light the Night Fundraiser, for the first 50 people who donate, noted Prystupa. Im co-sponsoring this fundraiser event with Tiffany Swisher, a Mortgage Lender with Home Mortgage Alliance.

Prystupa and the RE/MAX Alliance West team are raising funds through the end of the year to reach the RE/MAX Alliance goal of $100,000. I am proud to represent RE/MAX Alliance because of their proven generosity to many notable non-profits, remarked Prystupa.

To donate to the team, please visit https://pages.lightthenight.org/rm/DenverL18/REMAXAllianceWest.

Prystupa is a native of Colorado who lives in Arvada with her family. She graduated from high school in Arvada and went on to study at Metro State University, then abroad in Costa Rica and New Zealand. She is passionate about being involved and making contributions to her community. I truly love being a Realtor and being able to connect with people from all walks of life as I help them through major life transitions, shared Prystupa.

About Sarah Prystupa, RE/MAX Alliance

Sarah Prystupa works with both buyers and sellers. She helps her clients make informed real estate decisions while providing incredible service for them. For more information, please call (303) 489-9677, or visit http://www.SarahPrystupa.com. RE/MAX Alliance is located at 5440 Ward Road, Arvada, CO 80002. Each office is independently owned and operated.

About the NALA

The NALA offers small and medium-sized businesses effective ways to reach customers through new media. As a single-agency source, the NALA helps businesses flourish in their local community. The NALAs mission is to promote a business relevant and newsworthy events and achievements, both online and through traditional media. The information and content in this article are not in conjunction with the views of the NALA. For media inquiries, please call 805.650.6121, ext. 361.
Maritere R. Bellas Presenting Luisito's Island "I was born and raised in Puerto Rico. I wanted to do something to honor the island, especially after Hurricane Maria. So, it is my love letter or my tribute to my little island," said Maritere R. Bellas.

Read Conmigo, the national, award-winning bilingual literacy program sponsored by Infinity Auto Insurance, today released their newest book, Luisitos Island, in honor of Hispanic Heritage Month. Read Conmigo will celebrate the release by holding bilingual literacy reading tours in Miami and Los Angeles featuring specially planned activities, live performances, and special guest appearances. Hispanic Heritage Month is nationally recognized and serves to honor and celebrate the Hispanic communitys culture and rich history.

Luisitos Island, written by award-winning Latina author and Puerto Rico native Maritere R. Bellas, describes the journey of a young school boy adjusting to his new home after Hurricane Maria, the storm that devastated Puerto Rico and displaced over 200,000 Puerto Ricans, will be the showcased book throughout the reading tour. Download a free copy today at readconmigo.org

Reading tour details include:

Miami, FL



Saturday, September 29, 1:00-3:00 p.m.- Southland Mall

Saturday, October 6, 1:00-3:00 p.m. - Sprint Store - 2520 SW 22nd Street Miami, FL 33145

Saturday, October 13, 1:00-3:00 p.m. - Sprint Store - 1001 W 49TH ST BAY 66A Hialeah, FL 33012

Los Angeles, CA



Sunday, September 30, 9:30-4:00 p.m. - Orange County Children's Book Festival at Orange Coast College

Saturday, October 13, 10:00-2:00 p.m.  Fall Into Literacy Festival at The Banning Museum

Hispanic Heritage Month is a time that we hold in very high regard at Infinity, said Glen Godwin, CEO of Infinity Insurance. The Hispanic community represents a variety of rich countries, cultures, and traditions. We consider it an honor to give back to this community through our Read Conmigo program that has awarded more than one million free bilingual books nationwide."

For more information on the book and the Read Conmigo bilingual program, visit http://www.ReadConmigo.org or follow @ReadConmigo on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram.

About Read Conmigo

Infinity Auto Insurance is driven to serve others. Read Conmigo represents one of Infinitys largest investments in the community. By providing parents with bilingual storybooks, apps, and online resources, Read Conmigo bridges the gap for many Hispanic parents who hesitate to read to their children in English or Spanish due to language barriers. The program has already distributed more than 1,000,000 free books to classrooms and Hispanic families and receives support from more than 14,000 educators. The campaign also creates opportunities for new Hispanic authors and illustrators. For more information: http://www.readconmigo.org

About Infinity Insurance

Infinity Insurance is a national provider of automobile insurance with a concentration in nonstandard auto insurance. Its products are offered through a network of approximately 10,800 independent agencies and brokers. For more information about Infinity, please visit http://www.infinityauto.com. Infinity is part of the Kemper family of companies.
Robots save workers time at RK

RK Logistics Group, a Silicon Valley leader in third-party logistics (3PL), has signed on as a sponsor and exhibitor for the 2018 Tri-Valley Manufacturing Day and Exhibit. The annual event, slated this year for October 5, is a collaborative effort between local educational institutions, participating manufacturing businesses, and the cities of Livermore, Pleasanton, and Dublin.

Were pleased and excited to be supporting this years Tri-Valley Manufacturing Day, said Rod Kalune, founder and CEO of Fremont, CA-based RK Logistics Group. Our goal is to raise awareness of the Tri-Valley as an attractive, strategic location for modern manufacturing, and to inspire local high school and college students to become the next generation of manufacturers and logistics professionals.

RK Logistics has three warehousing operations in the Tri-Valley exclusively supporting the areas manufacturing businesses with inventory management, product staging, clean-room facilities and just-in-time delivery programs for production lines. The three sites encompass some 450,000 square feet of warehouse space with over 550 employees.

At one Livermore facility, RK employs autonomous delivery robots for moving goods from order processing to shipping, as well as a sophisticated vertical lift inventory system. The system, which houses thousands of parts in a three-story tall unit with dozens of rotating storage bins, automatically delivers parts to a single point, where pickers can complete assembly of orders without walking throughout the warehouse.

The companys support for Manufacturing Day is part of its overall community outreach program engaging local secondary and post-secondary institutions, noted Kalune. Under this outreach program, the company participates in annual career days at Tri-Valley high schools and hiring events at Los Positas College. An internship program provides students with initial employment featuring custom-designed work hours to meet individual needs while in school. For graduates, RK also offers job training tailored for individuals seeking their first job.

We started our schools program to give students relevant experience in the workplace while they complete their education, and a taste of working in the logistics profession, said Kalune. Competition for quality workers in todays market is intense. Through this program, we are positioning RK as an attractive employer of choice, providing training and a path to advancement into solid jobs and good careers in logistics and manufacturing.

The October 5 exhibition and lunch reception is being held at the Robert Livermore Community Center, 4444 East Avenue in Livermore. Those interested in attending the Tri-Valley event can get tickets here. The Tri-Valley Manufacturing Day is part of the national Manufacturing Day celebration, which is held each year on the first Friday in October. For more information, visit http://www.mfgday.com.

A privately-held minority business enterprise, Fremont-based RK Logistics Group is a growing local company with some 800 employees. The company operates 14 warehousing centers in the greater San Francisco Bay Area representing nearly 1 million square feet of commercial distribution space for inventory management, manufacturing support and ecommerce fulfillment.

RK is also an industry leader in adopting robotics-assisted order picking and fulfillment technologies, and creating special industry-specific programs, such as sequencing parts into lean production lines at automotive and technology equipment factories, and just-in-time (JIT) deliveries to construction sites.

In addition, RK Logistics is a California Board of Pharmacy-certified 3PL, signifying that the company meets or exceeds state requirements for handling medical devices, controlled substances and sensitive diagnostic equipment for pharmaceutical and high-value biomedical device firms. Only two logistics companies in northern California, 16 in the state, and 35 in the entire U.S. have achieved this distinction.

ABOUT RK LOGISTICS GROUP -- RK Logistics is a premier 3PL provider of full-spectrum, customized supply chain services for the world's most demanding customers. RK's manufacturing support, warehousing, order fulfillment and transportation services feature lean practices, ISO-9001 and CA Board of Pharmacy 3PL Certifications, which is unique to a family-owned business. RK Logistics is also a certified minority business enterprise. For more information, go to http://www.rklogisticsgroup.com
Sonoma Magazine recently released its much-anticipated list of the areas top doctors. The popular guide was created to assist individuals find exceptional healthcare services in Sonoma, Napa and Marin County. For the third year in a row, Plastic Surgery Associates own, Heather Furnas, MD and Francisco Canales, MD, were named as Top Doctors for 2018.

Sonoma Magazines list of Top Docs is published annually. These esteemed doctors are nominated by their peers throughout Northern California. The magazines rigorous selection process is overseen by a third-party, Professional Research Services (PRS). This independent group meticulously reviews each of the nominees backgrounds including their training, education, hospital affiliations and professional activities. Ensuring each doctor has a clean disciplinary record, PRS verified their current license from the Medical Board of California and any additional board certifications. The physicians with the most nominations and highest credentials are named as Sonoma Magazines Top Docs.

Among the 2018 winners are doctors working in medical specialties that include addiction medicine, allergy and immunology, cardiology and gynecology. Plastic Surgery Associates is honored to bring home the Sonoma Magazine Top Doc award for their work in Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery. Providing more than just aesthetic results, Plastic Surgery Associates understands their cosmetic surgery procedures make a deep, long-lasting impact on the men and women coming in the office. Dr. Furnas explains, In our experience, patients concerns are rarely about vanity. Usually the come in with a distraction or some kind of discomfort,. She then continues, Sometimes those changes (no matter how large or small) give our patients the boost that changes their lives. Their commitment to achieving each patients desired results is what continues to make Dr. Furnas and Dr. Canales the areas top rated doctors.

ABOUT PLASTIC SURGERY ASSOCIATES

Dr. Furnas and Dr. Canales founded Plastic Surgery Associates in 1992. Both board certified plastic surgeons, Dr. Furnas is a graduate of Stanford University and UCLS School of Medicine. She began her career on the faculty at Harvard Medical School and on the staff at Beth Israel Hospital in Boston. Dr. Canales is an alumnus of Harvard University and Stanford University School of Medicine. He has served as a plastic surgery faculty member at Harvard Medical School, Chief of Plastic Surgery at Santa Rosa Memorial Hospital and Chief of Surgery at Warrack Hospital.

The husband and wife team decided to open their private practice in beautiful California wine-country. Today, their plastic surgery practice brings patient the choice of innovative, custom-tailored surgical procedures such as the Mommy Makeover, breast augmentation, abdominoplasty and labiaplasty. For those not yet ready for surgery, Dr. Furnas and Dr. Canales founded Allegro MedSpa, specializing in noninvasive techniques such as dermal fillers, laser hair removal and nonsurgical vaginal rejuvenation.

If you are in the Sonoma area and would like more information on Dr. Heather Furnas and Dr. Francisco Canales, contact our office at 707.537.2111. With a second office in Novato, consultations with these award-winning plastic surgeons has never been easier. Our patient coordinator can provide directions or travel assistance to patients coming in from outside of Sonoma or Marin County. Visit Sonoma Magazine to see their full listing of their 2018 Top Doctors.
I speak four languages and am excited to use my knowledge of chaplaincy and organization building to help colleagues thrive and reach their full potential.

Spiritual Care Association (SCA), the first multidisciplinary, international professional membership association for spiritual care providers, announced today Rabbi Miriam Berkowitz as Director of International Relations.

The growth of our international offices has necessitated a SCA position to collaborate more closely with our international colleagues. Now with 17 offices in 16 countries and more in development, the opportunity for a worldwide campaign for the integration of spiritual care in health care is upon us. SCA is grateful for our partners and their passion for the spiritual care agenda, said the Rev. Eric J. Hall, SCAs president and CEO.

Berkowitz will assist others in connecting to SCA resources to further their professional development and personal growth, and advance chaplaincy worldwide.

I admire SCAs efficiency, vision, and scope. I studied international relations and love interacting with people from different cultures. I speak four languages and am excited to use my knowledge of chaplaincy and organization building to help colleagues thrive and reach their full potential, said Berkowitz.

Rabbi Miriam Berkowitz (nee Carey Knight) was born and raised in Montreal. She earned a bachelors degree in International Relations from Harvard University in 1993 and a masters and Rabbinic Ordination from the Schechter Institute in Jerusalem in 1998. She served as Assistant Rabbi at Park Avenue Synagogue in Manhattan for three years and spent seven years in Boca Raton, Fla., as an adult educator.

Berkowitz lives in Jerusalem where she is one of Israels first accredited hospital chaplains. She was in the first cohort of Israeli spiritual support providers in 2014 and one of the only Israelis to be accredited also by the American/International Neshama Association of Jewish Chaplains. Her pastoral training was at Lenox Hill Hospital in N.Y., Schechter Institute in Jerusalem, Jewish Theological Seminary (long distance interfaith clergy course), and Hebrew Senior Life in Boston. She founded Kashouvot in 2010 to place spiritual caregivers in healthcare settings, educate the general public about the role of chaplaincy, and advance the professionalization and recognition of the field. She provided pastoral care at the French Hospital for five years and currently directs Kashouvot with its staff of eight chaplains and seven student interns.

Berkowitz is the author of Taking the Plunge: A Practical and Spiritual Guide to the Mikveh and various other articles and publications including pieces in the Womens Torah Commentary, Jewish Lights Spirituality Handbook, Mount Sinai Journal of Medicine and Journal of Pastoral Care. She was a member of the Committee on Jewish Law and Standards of the conservative movement for 10 years. She also performs bar and bat mitzvahs and weddings for Israelis and visitors. She finds her spiritual center in nature and through pottery. You can read about her work at http://www.kashouvot.org.

About Spiritual Care Association

HealthCare Chaplaincy Networks affiliate, the Spiritual Care Association, is the first multidisciplinary, international professional membership association for providers of spiritual care in health care that establishes evidence-based quality indicators, scope of practice, knowledge base, and testing to become a Board Certified or Credentialed Chaplain. Membership is open to chaplains and other health care professionals, clergy and organizations. For more information, visit http://www.spiritualcareassociation.org or call 212-644-1111.
A solar installation by SunPower by Venture Solar in Queens, NY. In March 2018, we expanded our service footprint to include Long Island, said Alex Giles, Co-Founder of SunPower by Venture Solar. Because of our success, we have now set up a warehouse there and expect to start operations in our Long Island offices in September.

SunPower by Venture Solar is opening a second branch this month. The company currently operates through their offices in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, and serves all five boroughs of New York City, and Long Island. In September 2018, Venture is set to spread out and start operating through their new offices in Long Island as well.

VENTURE SOLARS EXPANSION TO LONG ISLAND

After expanding their service footprint to Long Island earlier this year, followed by opening a warehouse on the island, setting up an office there was an organic next step for the company. The new physical location on Long Island allows the solar installation company to better serve the LI market and our growing customer base on LI.

SunPower by Venture Solar is a local company, which does all of their work in-house, ensuring that their customers get the best possible service, combined with the best technology in the world. Venture Solar employs a team that is motivated by a unified cause of bringing solar to as many homes as possible.

This expansion to Long Island also means that the company is looking for new talent. Venture Solar is set to install over 15 MW of residential solar in the next 12 months and plans to hire 40 additional employees over the next 6 months. The company is looking for environmentalists with a student-mentality to join their ever-growing team.

MAJOR VENTURE SOLAR MILESTONES

In the 3 years since it was founded, SunPower by Venture Solar has grown exponentially. Venture installed their 1000th solar installation in New York City in 2017  a major milestone. Earlier this year, Venture Solar began servicing Nassau County and Suffolk County.

In March 2018, we expanded our service footprint to include Long Island, which gave us a great opportunity to help hundreds more homeowners and business owners join the green revolution by switching to solar, said Alex Giles, Co-Founder of SunPower by Venture Solar. Because of our success, we have now set up a warehouse there and expect to start operations in our Long Island offices in September.

Earlier this year, Venture Solar won two major SunPower Awards. The Residential Regional Dealer of the Year award honors SunPower residential dealers in select regions of the United States that consistently put customers first, while demonstrating exceptional industry knowledge and leadership, and the Residential Regional Top Producer of the Year award honors the SunPower residential dealer that has the highest shipment volume in their region of the United States.

Earning SunPowers 2017 Residential Regional Dealer of the Year and Residential Regional Top Producer of the Year awards for our success delivering the worlds highest efficiency solar systems and superior customer service to homeowners is an astounding achievement for Venture Solar, said Alex Yackery, Co-Founder of Venture Solar. Partnering with SunPower, one of the worlds most innovative and sustainable energy companies, allows us to offer our customers reliable solar energy and significant electricity savings over the life of their systems.
Scott Luton, Executive VP of APICS Atlanta We've approached this panel discussion by tackling topics that I hear top-of-mind from speaking with hundreds of manufacturing professionals and leaders, said Scott Luton, Executive Vice President of APICS Atlanta and moderator for the session. With a few exceptions, what has made manufacturers s

What are some of the key issues that are keeping manufacturing leaders up at night? The Georgia Manufacturing Summits breakout session on Trends to Track in Supply Chain will offer helpful insight on some of these critical business issues that manufacturers face. The panel will be tackling four key themes: the Four Ts: Technology, Transportation, Talent & Trade/Tariffs.

We've approached this panel discussion by tackling topics that I hear top-of-mind from speaking with hundreds of manufacturing professionals and leaders, said Scott Luton, Executive Vice President of APICS Atlanta and moderator for the session. With a few exceptions, what has made manufacturers successful over the last 20 years won't necessarily make them successful over the next 20 years.

The panel will be comprised of experts in supply chain management including:



Karin Bursa  Executive VP of Marketing of Logility: Karin is known for her strategic vision, industry knowledge and expertise in the development, support and marketing of software solutions to accelerate and automate operations including advanced analytics, supply chain management, manufacturing, and operations.

John Holly  Deputy Chief People Officer for Kumho Tire: John is responsible for recruiting, selecting, training/developing and managing the various people needs for an international competitor in the tire industry.

Chris Jones  Executive VP of Marketing for Decartes: With over 30 years of experience in Supply Chain, Chris is primarily responsible for providing innovative supply chain management solutions to improve logistics performance and productivity.

Brent Rogers  VP of Distribution and Transportation for Southwire: Brents responsibilities include overseeing Southwires transportation network which encompasses nearly 300,000 shipments annually across North America and 800 employees across 11 distribution centers.

To overcome the obstacles and outperform the competition, todays manufacturers need the right combination of people and processes supported by advanced technology that can keep employees focused on the crucial activities that drive their businesses forward, said Karin Bursa, executive vice president at Logility. I am excited to share with the Georgia Manufacturing Summit audience how innovative software solutions create new opportunities for manufacturers to spur profitable growth and improve customer service.

Held October 10th at the Cobb Galleria, the 2018 Georgia Manufacturing Summit is expected to attract over 800 attendees from all segments of the manufacturing industry.

This year's focus will be on the Aerospace Industry, the number one export for the state of Georgia. Mark Burns, President of Gulfstream, and Eric Rojek, V.P. of Sales & Marketing for Thrush Aircraft will be this years keynote speakers. It is Georgias manufacturing event of the year and allows attendees to make face-to-face connections with other manufacturers, customers, service providers, and suppliers. In addition to the keynote presentations, this event will have over 30 of the top industry leaders provide educational workshops to discuss Disruptive Technologies, Financial Perspectives, International Manufacturing, Sales & Marketing, Supply Chain Trends, and Workforce Development. To learn more and to register: http://www.GeorgiaManufacturingSummit.com
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, September 20)  The Budget Department is standing firm on its budget proposal for 2019.

"We're not gonna issue any errata. We stand by our submission," Budget Secretary Benjamin Diokno told CNN Philippines' The Source.

He was responding to a call by Senate Minority Leader Franklin Drilon, who urged his agency to amend the allocation of only 50 million for the Health Facilities Enhancement Program (HFEP). It received 30 billion this year, and 24 billion last year.

But Diokno said backlogs were holding back the Department of Health (DOH) program.

"You know, the total appropriation for that program is 138 billion since 2008, and they have spent less than 10 percent," he said. "Why should I give them more money?"

On top of that, he noted a 2017 Commission on Audit report that found 6.1 billion worth of irregularities in the program. In a statement he said that it would be "irrational, if not downright suspicious, to restore the budget for a program like that."

Senators have also said they would push for a budget raise at the Department of Education, which only has an allotment of 34.7 billion for new classrooms. This allocation was at 105 billion this year.

But Diokno said the Department of Education was unable to spend about 120 billion.

"It took [Secretary Briones] about three quarters before she transferred the money to [the Department of Public Works and Highways]. So the school buildings that are being built right now are still 2017 money," said Diokno. "You see all this money floating around and not being implemented. That's the reason why I reduced it."

However, more than just infrastructure and underspending could be at stake. Apart from the HFEP program, the DOH deployment program to rural communities also took an P8 billion hit. Senators fear that the budget cut will result in 15,000 jobs lost for personnel, crippling operations in these communities.

Watch the full interview with Diokno here.
exceptional talent. specialized solutions. The expertise and reputation of TPGS aligns with System Ones strategy of providing mission critical services, broadens our reach in the federal market and creates opportunity for our continued growth.

System One, a leading provider of specialized workforce solutions and integrated services, today announced the acquisition of TPGS, a mission-critical solutions provider to the intelligence community, Department of Defense (DOD) and U.S. federal clients. As part of the agreement, TPGS will maintain its brand and will operate as part of GAP Solutions, Inc., a System One company.

With the acquisition, System One augments GAP Solutions depth and breadth of capabilities to provide a broad array of solutions to defense and federal civilian customers. TPGS specializes in a providing innovative, technology services and support to include software engineering, IT consulting solutions, training and instructional design, cybersecurity, business intelligence solutions and management support for the federal sector.

System One is committed to the expansion of our government support capabilities, said Troy Gregory, President and CEO of System One. The expertise and reputation of TPGS aligns with System Ones strategy of providing mission critical services, broadens our reach in the federal market and creates opportunity for our continued growth.

TPGS expands our mission-critical support and technology services to better serve our federal customers and partners, which is fundamental to our long-term growth strategy, said Diane Pairel, President, GAP Solutions.

The TPGS team is excited to become part of the System One family of companies, said Billy Hinson, Vice President TPGS. The union with GAP Solutions provides a platform of federal prime contract vehicles with the national reach needed to broaden our customer base and exceed our current growth targets.

Clark Hill served as System Ones legal advisor. The McQuillan Group assisted with the financial due diligence.

About System One

System One delivers specialized workforce solutions and integrated services. We help clients get work done more efficiently and economically, without compromising quality. For more than 35 years, weve built our reputation on exceptional talent, flexible delivery and full accountability. System Ones national network spans energy, engineering, IT, commercial, scientific & clinical, legal, marketing and beyond. System One is based in Pittsburgh, PA.

About GAP Solutions

GAP Solutions is a leading provider of mission and workforce support services to U.S. defense, healthcare, and civilian agencies through more than a dozen prime contract vehicles. Headquartered in Reston, Virginia, GAP Solutions, has continued to transform over nearly 20 years as a professional services and technology firm with nationwide operations. The companys practice areas include human capital management, scientific and technical services, enterprise IT, security process management and operations management. GAP Solutions is a System One company.

About TPGS

TPGS provides customized mission-critical intelligence services and support with rapid response, proven talent and exceptional service. Delivering cleared teams of qualified IT professionals to the Department of Defense and federal clients. TPGS delivers proven talent with an unparalleled sense of urgency to meet the needs of government contractors. TGPS is headquartered in Reston, VA.
Pack-A-Truck ARS/Rescue Rooter is proud to serve our community, especially when they are in need, says Scott Kacic, President of ARS/Rescue Rooter East Zone Operations. Our thoughts and sympathy go out to all affected by this catastrophe.

Ten area ARS/Rescue Rooter service providers rally in their communities and raise donations for those affected by Hurricane Florence. These branches have started a Pack-A-Truck campaign, and they are inviting community members to donate supplies or monetary donations alongside them.

These service providers are packing service trucks with items such as bottled water, non-perishable food, and toiletries, and they are asking for local support. Additionally, the monetary donations will assist families through the American Red Cross. Those looking for a way to help families affected by Hurricane Florence can bring donations to one of the following ARS locations to help pack the truck now through October 1st:



ARS/Rescue Rooter is proud to serve our community, especially when they are in need, says Scott Kacic, President of ARS/Rescue Rooter East Zone Operations. Our thoughts and sympathy go out to all affected by this catastrophe.

ABOUT AMERICAN RESIDENTIAL SERVICES: Based in Memphis, Tenn., privately-owned ARS operates a network of more than 70 locally-managed service centers in 23 states, with approximately 6,500 employees. The ARS Network features industry-leading brands including, A.J. Perri, Aksarben ARS, Allgood, Andys Statewide, ARS, Aspen Air Conditioning, Atlas Trillo, Beutler, Blue Dot, Bob Hamilton, Brothers, Columbus Worthington Air, Comfort Heating & Air, Conway Services, Efficient Attic Systems (EAS), Florida Home Air Conditioning, Green Star Home Services, Irish Plumber, McCarthy Services, Rescue Rooter / Proserv, Rescue Rooter, RighTime Home Services, RS Andrews, The Irish Plumber, Unique Services, "Will" Fix It, and Yes! Air Conditioning and Plumbing. As an Exceptional Service Provider, the ARS Network serves both residential and light commercial customers by providing heating, cooling, indoor air quality, plumbing, drain cleaning, sewer line, radiant barrier, insulation and ventilation services. Each location has a knowledgeable team of trained specialists. ARS requires background checks and drug tests on all employees. We hire professionals with the highest level of integrity. Providing exceptional service and ensuring the highest standards of quality, ARS has the experience to do any job right  the first time, with all work fully guaranteed. ARS: "Making it work. Making it right."
How People-Centric Workplaces Ignite Engagement and Fuel Results In writing this book, my goal is to create thriving people-centric workplaces that support and encourage the well-being of each person.

Advancing Wellness announces that their recently launched book, The Thriving Hive: How People-Centric Workplaces Ignite Engagement and Fuel Results, rated #1 in the Amazon Workplace Behavior Category on September 16, 2018. The Thriving Hive author is Advancing Wellness CEO and workplace well-being strategist Mari Ryan

Ms. Ryan tells a simple, yet insightful story in The Thriving Hive: How People-Centric Workplaces Ignite Engagement and Fuel Results. A first-time CEO realizes her organization is no longer attracting and retaining the kinds of employees they need to remain competitive and keep their customers happy. She seeks help from a mentor, the retired former CEO. With his unconventional insights, he introduces her to two very different beehive workplace cultures and how they deal with adversity.

The story looks at the organizational behavior, how leadership and their management teams can create workplace cultures that diminish or support the well-being of their employees. Readers will learn about:



Putting employee wellness first to revitalize a company

The economic benefits of a people-centric workplace

Creating a workplace culture with organizational behaviors that encourage organizational well-being

Implementing structural adjustments that support employee engagement

Strategic viewpoints and tactical practices for enhancing employee well-being

This is a quick read for anyone who wants guidance for creating a culture of well-being, purpose, vitality, and satisfaction, for an all-encompassing employee experience.

In writing this book, my goal is to create thriving people-centric workplaces that support and encourage the well-being of each person, stated author Mari Ryan.

More details about The Thriving Hive: How People-Centric Workplaces Ignite Engagement and Fuel Results is available on Amazon. https://amzn.to/2QzVhV6

Advancing Wellness, established in 2006, partners with organizations to help them develop the strategies to create a culture of well-being in the workplace, that impact peoples lives, and create sustainable business results.
We are thrilled to be able to offer exciting new seminars presented by leading wine educators at this 25th anniversary Great Match, said Katrin Naelapaa, Director of Wines from Spain

The Trade Commission of Spain in New York and Wines from Spain will host the 25th annual Spains Great Match, the largest comprehensive Spanish wine and food event in the U.S, on Wednesday, October 4 at New Yorks iconic IAC HQ Building. A second event will be held in Los Angeles on November 8.This collaborative extravaganza with Wines from Spain, Foods from Spain and Interiors from Spain celebrates the distinctive wines, food and culture of Spain. Over 300 wines representing the varieties and wine regions of Spain will be featured in a walk-around tasting format. Importers and distributors of Spanish wines will present their best products, including new wines and the latest vintages, to wine industry professionals and consumers.

To kick off the days festivities, select members of the wine media and trade will be invited to attend a panel discussion, A Tribute to 25 Years of Spains Great Match, moderated by noted wine educator Steve Olson, and joined by Spanish wine veterans Michael Schachner of Wine Enthusiast, Steve Metzler of Classical Wines, and Jordi Paronella of Jaleo and Think Food Group. All will share their experience with Spanish wines and look back at certain milestone events over the last 25 years. Additional tutored seminars focusing on wines from Navarra, Castilla y Leon, and the Canary Islands will also be held later in the afternoon. In the evening, Spains Great Match will open to the public for a ticketed lifestyle event which will feature over 30 wine stations and tapas prepared by special guest chefs from Spain as well as New York Citys top Spanish restaurants and tapas bars.

We are thrilled to be able to offer exciting new seminars presented by leading wine educators at this 25th anniversary Great Match, said Katrin Naelapaa, Director of Wines from Spain. We are particularly excited to celebrate Spanish wine milestones of the last 25 years that have had a significant impact on the growth of Spanish wine in the US.

Trade & Press Seminar Schedule:

11:30 am - 12:30 pm: A Tribute to 25 Years of Spains Great Match hosted by Steve Olson, wine educator with Michael Schachner of Wine Enthusiast, Steve Metzler of Classical Wines, and Jordi Paronella of Think Food Group

12:00 pm - 4:00 pm: Walk Around Tasting

12:45 pm - 1:45 pm: "Spains Undiscovered Gems from Navarra" by Marnie Old, Wine Educator

2:00 pm - 3:00 pm: "Wine-ing Down the Duero River: A Look at Castilla y Leon" by Leslie Sbrocco, Award-winning Author, Speaker, Consultant, and Television Host

3:00 pm - 4:00 pm: "The Volcanic Terroirs of the Canary Islands" by Joshua Greene, Editor-in-Chief, Wine & Spirits

To register for Spain's Great Match trade event in New York, please visit: https://sgm_ny_2018.eventbrite.com.

The evening portion of Spains Great Match will be ticketed and open to the public from 6:30-9 p.m. To purchase tickets to the evening portion of Spains Great Match in New York, please visit: https://sgm_nypublic_2018.eventbrite.com .

Follow Spains Great Match on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram with username @WinesFromSpain and use the hashtag #SpainsGreatMatch

About Wines from Spain: The Spanish Institute for Foreign Trade (Instituto Espanol de Comercio Exterior, ICEX) is the public platform for the promotion of Spanish exports and Spanish companies abroad. Vinos de Espana - or Wines from Spain - is ICEX's brand for a wide range of promotional activities designed to inform trade and consumers about Spanish wines. Wines from Spain has been promoting Spanish wines in the United States for nearly 30 years. For more information about Wines from Spain, please visit https://www.winesfromspainusa.com.
Gavin Newport, Managing Director of CIS commented: "We are pleased to have received this significant contract which demonstrates our wide portfolio of capabilities and our world-leading technology within CIS. This contract highlights CIS' ability to work closely with both Government and Industry.

Ultra Electronics Communication & Integrated Systems (CIS) Gigasat business unit, based in Tring, UK, has been awarded a contract to support the provision of Strategic Deployable Terminals to General Dynamics Mission SystemsCanada.

General Dynamics will provide the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) with the Strategic Deployable Terminals (SDTs) to expand its Mercury Global In-Service Support (ISS) as part of the final stage of the Mercury Global (MG) Project to deliver military satellite communications (SATCOM) wideband capabilities.

Available in three sizes (small, medium and large) in multi-band configurations (Capable of WGS & Commercial Frequencies) to allow for global tailored mission requirement, the terminals utilise leading edge composite technology that enables operation by an individual  at its smallest size  or by a team at its largest. The terminals will allow the CAF to deliver voice, image and data between deployed operations and commanders back in Canada.

Gavin Newport, Managing Director of CIS commented: "We are pleased to have received this significant contract which demonstrates our wide portfolio of capabilities and our world-leading technology within CIS. This contract highlights CIS' ability to work closely with both Government and Industry.

Further information about Ultra:

Ultra Electronics is a group of businesses which manage a portfolio of specialist capabilities, generating highly differentiated solutions and products in the defence & aerospace, security & cyber, transport and energy markets by applying electronic and software technologies in demanding and critical environments to meet customer needs.

Ultra has world-leading positions in many of its specialist capabilities and, as an independent, non-threatening partner, is able to support multiple prime contractors in each of its sectors.

Ultras systems, equipment or services are often mission or safety-critical to the successful operation of the platform to which they contribute. In turn, this mission-criticality secures Ultras positions for the long term which underpins the financial performance of the Group.

Ultra offers support to its customers through the design, delivery and support phases of a programme. Ultra businesses have a high degree of operational autonomy where the local management teams are empowered to devise and implement competitive strategies that reflect their expertise in their specific niches.

The Group has a flat structure and small head office and executive team that provide to the individual businesses the same agile, responsive support that the businesses provide to their customers. In addition this team formulates Ultras overarching, corporate strategy.

Across the Ultra Group's three divisions, Ultra operates in the following eight market segments:


Endorsed in 2015 by all 193 United Nations Member States, the 2030 Agenda and its Sustainable Development Goals focus global efforts and attention on 17 pressing issues. The 17 UN SDGs have been lauded as a galvanizing force for a more socially responsible global community. However, with 169 underlying Targets, the UN SDGs have been characterized by many thought-leaders as overwhelming.

Co-Authors for two separate textbooks published by CRC Press, Agustiady and Hoffmeier had been seeking an opportunity to collaborate on a book for some time. Agustiady gives a lighthearted take on the expanded scope of the project. We had talked about co-authoring just one, single book. Amazingly, our aspirations grew exponentially into an entire UN SDG series! The duo will co-author one textbook in the series, while taking responsibility for recruiting co-authors and editing the remaining 16 titles. Agustiady adds, Weve taken the approach to begin with the end in mind, with SDG 17  Partnerships for the Goals.

Hoffmeier describes the first Guidebook to be released Q4 of 2019. Starting with SDG 17, Tina and I provide a primer for the rest of the series, as well as guidance on how to prioritize the goals and integrate the SDGs into corporate strategy. Companies need to understand whats in it for them, when it comes to the SDGs  well answer that question, then provide the roadmap to get started.

SHERPA Sustainability Institute CEO, Rob Wilson explains their commitment to publish the remaining 16 SDG Guidebooks throughout 2020. Were coming up on ten years left for the 2030 Agenda, and we cant expect government agencies and NGOs alone to carry the ball. The time has come for the private sector to step up. Some corporate leaders understand the benefits of focusing on specific SDGs  it makes sense for their business. More companies are taking action, but too many are sitting on the sidelines. The Corporate Guidebook Series aims to break through that inertia.

With over 100 case studies featured across 17 titles, there are many opportunities to get involved with the Meta-Project. A free online information session will be held September 27th. Free registration at https://sherpa-unsdg-meta-project-infosession.eventbrite.com. The information session will include live Q&A about the Meta-Project and briefly cover the many ways to contribute:



Research Team

Case Studies

Co-Authors

Website, Media Relations, Social Media & Communications

Grant-Writing & Partnership/Donor Relations

Volunteer Project Management & Event Planning

Volunteer Manuscript Reviewers & SME Advisors

Graphic Design for illustrations/figures, infographics

Cant attend live? Register and receive access to the recording. https://sherpa-unsdg-meta-project-infosession.eventbrite.com

About SHERPA Sustainability Institute

We are a non-profit institution, devoted to global collaboration, education and research, advancing continual improvement for social responsibility to build sustainable organizations and communities.

http://www.sherpasustainabilityinstitute.org

About CRC Press Taylor & Francis Group

With over 100 years publishing textbooks, references, encyclopedias, handbooks, monographs, and professional books, CRC Press aims to broaden thinking and advance understanding in the sciences, providing researchers, academics, professionals, and students with the tools they need to share ideas and realize their potential.
Laura Mikovich, ValvTechnologies' Global Key Account Manager

ValvTechnologies, Inc., the global leader in the design and manufacturing of zero-leakage high-performance isolation valve solutions, is pleased to announce its Global Key Account Manager, Laura Mikovich, will be a featured speaker at the American Boilers Manufacturers Association conference on October 2-4, 2018.

Held in Tulsa, Oklahoma, this years conference provides attendees with an educational experience on critical issues and interests presently facing the boiler industry. The event brings together a diversified group of key thought-leaders to connect and learn about the latest products, services, sales and technological trends.

Mikovich is the Global Key Account Manager for ValvTechnologies with over 20 years of experience in power generation. She will present, Influencing the Spec, which builds upon key business themes discussed at ValvTechnologies International Technical Conference earlier this year. Her presentation will leave attendees with the tools necessary to identify problems from a customers perspective and provide solutions to influence the spec.

Laura is a dynamic and influential OEM/EPC expert in the severe service industry, said Scott Lynch, ABMA President. "ABMA attendees will benefit from ValvTechnologies insights on effectively partnering with end-users.

For event information, visit: http://www.abma.com/manufacturers-conference.

For more information about ValvTechnologies, visit: http://www.valv.com.

About ValvTechnologies

Founded in 1987 and headquartered in Houston, Texas, ValvTechnologies is the leading manufacturer of zero-leakage, high-performance isolation valve solutions. Employing more than 500 people worldwide, our offices are located in Australia, Canada, China, Eastern Europe, Western Europe, India, Japan, Korea, Latin America, the Middle East, United Kingdom and United States. In addition, ValvTechnologies partners with stocking distributors and independent representatives to service customers around the world.

To find out more about the products and services offered or to locate a representative, visit our website at http://www.valv.com and connect with ValvTechnologies on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook.

About ABMA

Since our founding in 1888, the American Boiler Manufacturers Association (ABMA) has advocated for the safe production and operation of boilers, facilitated advances in energy efficiency, and provided solutions for our member companies. Throughout our history, the boiler industry and our member base have relied on the ABMA to lead the industry as it tackles challenges and embraces opportunities in our constantly evolving sector. Through participation with ABMA, our members are better informed, connected, and positioned to thrive in todays global boiler industry. To learn more and stay up to date on the boiler industry news, please visit http://www.ABMA.com and follow ABMA on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram.
California Theatre, San Jose San Jose, as the heart of Silicon Valley, is blessed to be the epicenter of technology and innovation, says Karolyn Kirchgesler, CEO of Visit San Jose. But beyond tech, visitors are always pleased to be able to experience all of what San Jose has to offer.

Visit San Jose, the citys official destination marketing organization, is excited to announce their partnership with Travel Channel & U.S. Travel Association to participate in their 30 Days of Getaways national sweepstakes. The sweepstakes is in support of Project Time Off the U.S. Travel Associations program to encourage Americans to take vacation.

In 2017, Americans let 705 million paid vacation days go unused. Travel benefits include quality time to bond with loved ones, foster creativity and inspiration, and recharge ones physical and mental well-being.

By giving up their vacation days last year, Americans inadvertently sacrificed $236 billion in economic impact to the U.S. tourism industry. In California, 90 million vacation days were abandoned, resulting in a $17 billion untapped economic benefit. And in the Bay Area, 13 million vacation days were left on the table, losing out on a potential $3 billion economic contribution to the travel industry.

To inspire change and interest in travel, Travel Channel is giving away a different dream trip every day for 30 days as part of their national sweepstakes. San Jose will be the featured destination on Thursday, September 20 and Saturday, October 6. Full details of the sweepstakes giveaway here.

For both prize packages, San Jose has curated great experiences that will be tailored to the winners specific interests, sure to create lasting memories including: airfare and lodging for two, wine tasting, dinners at award-winning restaurants, a zip-lining excursion, attraction passes, and more.

San Jose, as the heart of Silicon Valley, is blessed to be the epicenter of technology and innovation, says Karolyn Kirchgesler, CEO of Visit San Jose. But beyond tech, visitors are always pleased to be able to experience all of what San Jose has to offer: an emerging culinary scene, a thriving downtown, and great outdoor spaces. Were also one of the countrys premiere shopping destinations, home to Silicon Valleys iconic Santana Row and an expanding mall across the street with luxury stores such as Louis Vuitton and Yves Saint Laurent.

Visit San Jose hopes that by participating in the 30 Days of Getaways sweepstakes, visitors will be inspired to experience some of the citys attractions, including our award-winning restaurants, and proximity to redwood forests and the Santa Cruz wineries.

For the latest at Visit San Jose, follow Visit San Jose on social media using #siliconvalleylife.

ABOUT VISIT SAN JOSE

Visit San Jose is the destination marketing organization (DMO) for the city to increase tourisms economic impact to San Jose through destination development and brand strategy. Its parent company, Team San Jose, is an innovative partnership unifying the San Jose Convention and Visitors Bureau, hotels, arts, labor and venues to deliver an exceptional visitor experience. TSJ manages the San Jose McEnery Convention Center, California Theatre, Center for the Performing Arts, City National Civic, Montgomery Theater, Parkside Hall and South Hall. For more information, visit http://www.sanjose.org.
The 13th annual Brooklyn Book Festivalthe largest free literary event in New York Citytook place in downtown Brooklyn on September 15 and 16, featuring more than 300 authors, including many childrens and YA creators. Weve rounded up a selection of highlights from some of the Childrens Day and pre-festival events, including Drag Queen Story Hour, puppet shows, signings, and more.

Author Ame Dyckman and illustrator Scott Magoon shared their story of the Misunderstood Shark.

The Family Friendships and Fun panel included chapter book authors (from l.) Laurel Snyder (Charlie & Mouse; moderator), Mac Barnett (Mac B., Kid Spy: Mac Undercover), Debbi Michiko Florence (Jasmine Toguchi, Flamingo Keeper), and Shelley Johanne (Beatrice Zinker, Upside Down Thinker: Incognito).

Jessica Love (r.), author-illustrator of Julian Is a Mermaid, with Angel Elektra, who performed during a Drag Queen Story Hour.

Artists (from l.) Dan Santat, Galia Bernstein, LeUyen Pham, and Mike Lowery faced off in an Illustrator Smackdown.

National Ambassador for Young Peoples Literature Jacqueline Woodson signed copies of her new picture book, The Day You Begin, illustrated by Rafael Lopez.

Authors (from l.) Robin Talley (Our Own Private Universe), Richard Lawson (All We Can Do Is Wait), Brandy Colbert (Finding Yvonne), and moderator Caitlyn Morrissey of Bank Street Bookstore after their Love in YA for Everyone.

Author-illustrator Tad Hills got an early start on Halloween, signing Duck & Goose, Honk! Quack! Boo!

During the Coming-of-Age panel, authors (from l.) Meg Medina (Merci Suarez Changes Gears), Veera Hiranandani (The Night Diary), Kheryn Callender (Hurricane Child), and moderator Brigit Young (Worth a Thousand Words) shared their approaches to writing for middle graders.

The Resist panel featured YA authors (from l.) Brendan Kiely (Tradition), Justina Ireland (Dread Nation), Mark Oshiro (Anger Is a Gift), and Sara Farizan (Here to Stay), who spoke about the journeys of their intersectional characters.

Author-illustrator David Ezra Stein presented his new picture book, Interrupting Chicken and the Elephant of Surprise, in a puppet show.

Authors (from l.) Adele Griffin (Tell Me No Lies; moderator), Emily X.R. Pan (The Astonishing Color of After), Ashley Woodfolk (The Beauty That Remains), and Arvin Ahmadi (Down and Across) discussed portraying hurt and healing in their books, during the Life Hurts panel.

The Story Pirates Greatest Hits Show celebrated students creative writing through music and sketch comedy, as well as the first Story Pirates book, Stuck in the Stone Age by Geoff Rodkey.
CRTV News Capture d'ecran

Cest la quintessence dun communique signe le 18 septembre 2018 par les porte-paroles de ces candidats.
Pastor Ruffus Phala, of Ark Centre Ministry in Makgodu Village, Limpopo, South Africa received a lot of backlash in 2016 when he made his members drink Dettol, but this time round, he has gone a notch higher.

He is reported to have told Daily Sun that he was capable of turning JIK bleach into the blood of Jesus, and he did.

Yes, it was Jik before I made the declaration. But after I declared it to be the blood of Jesus Christ it means its no longer Jik so it wont harm anyone who consumes it, Pastor Ruffus Phala said.

Meanwhile, just as in 2016 when the man of God made his congregants drink Dettol, he is currently at the receiving end of condemnations across South Africa.

Chairwoman of the Commission for the Promotion and Protection of the Rights of Cultural Religious and Linguistic Communities, Thoko Mkhwanazi-Xaluva said the pastors action is only aimed at gaining cheap popularity.

He is quoted as saying: A true man of God will not do such.
| BY Ricki Green |

The call for entries for the global ADC 98th Annual Awards, one of the worlds longest-running and most prestigious recognition programs for all forms of design and advertising, opened today with support from a compelling new short-form online film campaign concept developed by independent brand experience design company COLLINS and created by six highly accomplished illustration and animation studios.

Part of The One Club for Creativity, the worlds foremost non-profit organization recognizing creative excellence in advertising and design, the ADC 98th Annual Awards celebrates global excellence in craft, design and innovation. Entries are accepted at http://www.adcawards.org, deadline January 31, 2019. Juries will be announced shortly.

COLLINS developed the campaign concept by adapting the archetypal story arch of the heros journey to the life of the creative. The original tale depicts a hero venturing forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder where fabulous forces are encountered, eventually coming home from this adventure transformed and empowered.

Drawing inspiration from this mythical quest, COLLINS cast the iconic ADC Cube as the unlikely hero on an inspiring adventure along the creative journey from adversity to achievement, and the ultimate symbol of relentless creativity and individual ambition. In the campaign, the Cube character perseveres through difficulty to learn its true powers, and embarks on a journey to find its place in the universe and true virtue.

COLLINS adapted the traditional heros journey into six acts to tell the story of the Cubes creative journey. The firm then partnered with six highly-talented illustration and animation studios from around the world who volunteered their time to interpret one of the acts in the form of a short-form online film.

The first act of the campaign, created by Golgotha, Paris, France, sets the stage of the story line where the Cube first realizes it doesnt fit in.

Explaining the concept behind the work, Guillaume Hugon, co-founder and creative director at Golgotha said: As humans beings, we create and produce a lot of ideas. All of them are beautiful and will please the eyes when we stare at them like magnificent crystals or crafted diamonds. But in the end, only the divergent, the unique or the bold one will make the difference.

Future acts in the campaign, rolling out one every few weeks between now and late January, have been created by:

Frances Haszard, Auckland, New Zealand, https://www.francies.work

Angela Stempel, Los Angeles, CA, USA, http://angelastempel.com

Says Michael ORourke, executive director, ADC: Awards come at the culmination of the creative process, but we believe its important to acknowledge the critical steps that lead up to making a great piece of work possible. This campaign is a great fit for ADC because it tells the familiar story of a creatives life, and recognizes the challenges and ultimate rewards of the process.

Jules Tardy, design director, COLLINS, explained the strategy behind partnering with the six highly regarded animation studios and production companies.

Says Tardy: ADC has a rich history of honoring ground-breaking work of all stripes. Rather than paint the program with one brush, we want to celebrate a wide variety of perspectives and talents from around the world. Each of the studios on this project has a compelling point of view and strong dedication to their craft. Their contributions reflect the broad range of work honored and celebrated each year in the ADC Annual Awards.

New disciplines: Fashion and Spatial Design

Reaffirming its defining focus as the leading global awards program to celebrate all forms of craft, design and innovation, ADC has added two new disciplines this year: Fashion and Spatial Design.

For the first time, an array of creative talents in the fashion industry  from fabric and apparel designers to fashion illustrators and jewelry designers  at both large and small companies will compete with one another on a level playing field and have their work judged by a jury of industry peers, to be announced shortly.

The same is true for Spatial Design, a conceptual design discipline that crosses boundaries of traditional design specializations such as building design, landscape architecture and design, interiors design, service design, certain areas of public art and more.

Says Kevin Swanepoel, CEO, The One Club for Creativity: ADCs core principle of celebrating great craft and design is perfectly aligned with these two professions. Craft and design are arguably the most critical factors in both fields, and now creatives working in those areas will now have the chance to share the same global stage and spotlight with the leading practitioners in other creative professions.

Tiered pricing structure

This years competition also marks continuation of a tiered pricing structure (http://www.adcawards.org/tieredpricing/), designed to make it easier for smaller studios, agencies and freelancers to participate in the ADC Annual Awards.

The fee structure varies depending on whether the submitting firm is a design studio or ad agency. Design studios with between 2-20 employees get a discount (amount varies by discipline), while ad agencies with between 2-50 employees qualify for the tiered pricing discount. Freelance creatives and one-person shops in either design or advertising are eligible for an even greater reduction in their entry fee.

For more information on the ADC 98th Annual Awards, please visit http://www.adcawards.org.

COLLINS

CCO, founder: Brian Collins

Design director: Jules Tardy

Business manager: Antonia Lazar

Studio: Golgotha, Paris
This partnership is part of the governments commitment to bridging the digital divide between the rural and urban areas, the 300 village satellite TV project is expected to benefit 6,000 households drawn from 300 villages nationwide.

The China-backed digital broadcaster in Africa, StarTimes has been presented to the Ghana government as a condition for obtaining a loan from the Chinese Eximbank.

READ ALSO: GACL to move all domestic airlines to KIA Terminal 2

This has led to a lot of Ghanaians criticising the deal. Here is why we think it is a bad deal for Ghana.

 It is not a win-win for Ghana

Nobody signs a deal which is not beneficial. In this deal, the Chinese government and StarTimes will benefit in several ways. Meanwhile, Ghana will not benefit as much as China will in this deal.

 Arguments have not been convincing

The Deputy Communication Minister George Andah has been explaining what the StarTimes deal entails. He has not been convincing enough.

A contract signed by the government with StarTimes in 2012 was cancelled in 2015 after the Chinese firm failed to supply and install the Digital Terrestrial Television (DTT) network platform for Ghana.

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The government later signed a new deal with a Ghanaian-owned company K-NET who did the work for $82.4m which is $13m less than the failed Chinese offer. StarTimes sued the government but lost.

The Akufo-Addo government went back for a $1.5bn Chinese facility which was clinched by the Mills government in 2011 but never came.

Mr Andahs argument is that "I am sure you know how the Exim facility works? It is tied to a supplier that China determines."

How do you accept any condition because you need a loan facility?

Mr Andah adds that StarTimes is in the country this time to do "enhancement" work to that which was done by K-NET.

 Chinese will manipulate our content

Show me a media house without an agenda and I will show you a collapsed media hub. StarTimes may show some Ghanaian content but it will also show a lot of Chinese content. StarTimes will show content that will project the values of the Chinese people. In the long-run, we will have Ghanaians patronising more Chinese made products and probably doing away with Ghanaian products.

 The development of GBC is at stake

The state-broadcaster was established on January 1, 1953, to one day compete with their counterparts in other countries. Meanwhile, StarTimes started operations in 1988. The GBC has met expectations when it comes to its operations.

There is the fear that it may never develop with StarTimes coming on board.

 Ghanaian culture is at stake

Currently, very few local TV stations show Ghanaian-cultural based programmes. There are children born and raised in Ghana who cannot speak or understand any Ghanaian language. Even though we live in a global village, we must consider ways to get more Ghanaian content in the media space instead of pushing another countrys agenda.

 President Akufo-Addo and wife seem to be in the pocket of Pang Xinxing

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President of StarTimes Group is Pang Xinxing. When the President and his wife travelled to China, the first lady Rebecca Akufo-Addo met Pang Xinxing even before her husband did. There is nothing like a free lunch. This benevolence may be a bait for greater things.
This comes after the representative for the Attorney General failed to show up in court on three different occasions.

The delay in commencing committal processes against the suspects means the case is still yet to be moved to the high court for full trial to begin.

Accra-based Class FM reports that the magistrate has therefore summoned the Attorney General to explain the delay in starting the process against the suspects.

So far two men, Daniel Asiedu, a.k.a. Sexy Dondon; and Vincent Bosso, a.k.a. Junior Agogo, are been accused of being involved in the gruesome murder of the legislator.

The two suspects are facing charges of murder and conspiracy to commit murder.
He claims, as a country, we are losing out on the benefits marijuana brings with its illegality.

The 2016 GJA Journalist of the Year said marijuana is useful for medicinal and research purposes, and when put into good use will be a great avenue for socio-economic development.

The use of marijuana or cannabis, popularly known as wee or the devil's tobacco is against the laws of the country and any person caught in contact with it is dealt with in the court of law.

"Unfortunately, in our growing up and everything; its been social and recreational weve looking at. So, were programmed to see it as a bad thing but the research and medicinal is a completely different era.

Over the past few years, there have been a growing advocacy for a national discourse on the usefulness and possible legalization of the plant.

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Despite countries like Uruguay, the United Kingdom and the United States of America legalizing marijuana for its great value to the socio-economic fabric of these countries, Ghana still sees it as an illegal product which when caught, one could face a jail term of 10 years or more.
He said reports making rounds of such an action should be disregaded.

Earlier in the day, Takyi Addo, a spokesperson for spare parts dealers in Kumasi has said: "As a personal apology, wherever Mahama is, he should forgive us. I want him to also forgive me personally. We insulted him we embarrassed him. We called him a thief, incompetent and all sort of names. We thought this one (Nana Addo) was coming to help us, but he is rather finishing us!"

However, Paddy said those flying stories were just propagandist with evil intent and will, therefore, like to categorically state that, they (spare parts dealers) have never apologized to the former president and see no reason why they owe him an apology.

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Mr Paddy further indicated that the group calling itself as Concerned Spare Parts Dealers Association does not exist and must therefore not be taken seriously. He believes the group is a politically motivated society seeking to do the bidding of the opposition NDC Party.
The regulatory body stated this in a statement issued by Isaac Okorafor, its director of communications, on Wednesday, September 19, 2018, in Abuja, the nation's capital.

We assure all investors that the integrity of the CCI regime remains sacrosanct and there shall be no retroactive application of foreign exchange rules and regulations.

The recent sanctions on the banks arose due to irregularities with respect to repatriations made on behalf of MTN Nigeria Limited and were not in any way designed to restrict access to investor returns.

CBN maintained that the recent sanctions on four deposit money banks (DMBs) is in the interest of the public and will continue to welcome foreign investments and investors.

MTN Nigeria keeps mum

A source within MTN Group Ltd. declined to speak on the latest development because the matter is currently in a Nigerian court.

We are not allowed to speak on a legal matter, the source told Business Insider SSA on Thursday.

Two weeks ago, MTN dragged the Nigerian government to court, describing the case as a complex one. The company is also battling another $2 billion tax claim from Nigeria's attorney-general.

A step in the right direction

But Olusola Teniola, president of the Association of Telecommunications Companies of Nigeria, said the apex bank's decision to engage the telecoms operator and financial institutions is a step in right direction.

We look forward to the central bank disclosing the exact reasons for their actions.

While this is a step in the right direction, continued dialogue to reach an amicable resolution is a minimum standard expected by the investment community, Teniola told Bloomberg.

Last month, the monetary authority ordered Africa's telecoms giant, MTN and four other banks to refund a total of $8.134billion moved out of the country" for breaching the country's forex regulations.

It also slammed N5.8 billion fine on the banks for allegedly aiding MTN in the alleged illegal capital repatriation and deducted the amount from the bank's accounts.

MTN has lost almost $5 billion in market value since the apex bank announced the sanction.
Markle, dressed in a navy blue coat and pale beige skirt and carrying a maroon-and-blue handbag, set off arm-in-arm with her future husband but soon went to meet crowds across the road.

The 36-year-old laughed and smiled as she shook hands and doled out high-fives to those who had braved the icy conditions, many of whom had come with bouquets, gifts and Union Jack flags.

"I'm so happy," she was heard to say at one point. "It's just such a thrill to be here".

The two visited an AIDS Day charity fair at a museum before being driven to a school taking part in a programme to combat youth violence.

In their engagement interview on Monday, Markle said she wanted to get to know the "different communities" which make up Britain.

The couple will take a six-month tour of Britain before getting married in May at Windsor Castle, the weekend residence of Harry's grandmother Queen Elizabeth II and the place where he was baptised.

Harry's spokesman Jason Knauf said the 33-year-old prince had visited Nottingham many times and he was "looking forward to introducing Ms Markle to a community that has become very special to him".

Veteran royal supporter Irene Hardman, 81, told the Press Association it was "absolutely wonderful and fantastic, and we're privileged they've chosen Nottingham to be their first official engagement."

"She kept saying: 'I can't believe it, I've been made so welcome and I can't believe it'."

One well-wisher put up an American flag and another clutched a pink hot-water bottle on a chilly morning.

One fan brought his pet barn owl to the event.

Transition to British royalty

The prince and the US television star got engaged after a 16-month transatlantic romance.

Harry, a one-time playboy and soldier who is now best known for his work on AIDS awareness and veterans' issues, revealed how he had proposed to Markle over a roast chicken dinner at his cottage in the grounds of Kensington Palace, his family's sprawling estate.

In the first interview marking their engagement, the pair revealed they were set up on a "blind date" in London in July last year. They quickly grew close, but tried to keep their relationship private.

Markle, who is mixed-race, divorced and an outspoken feminist, does not fit the mould of most British royal women and she admitted that some of the media coverage about her was "disheartening".

But the queen has led a chorus of congratulations, saying she was "delighted for the couple".

Harry has himself railed against the confines of royal life, recently admitting he came close to a nervous breakdown in his 20s as he struggled to deal with the legacy of the death of his mother, Princess Diana.

Harry is fifth in line to the throne and will soon be sixth when his brother Prince William's wife Kate, the Duchess of Cambridge, gives birth to their third child in April.

Markle, who is best known for her role as a lawyer in the hit US television series "Suits", has said she is giving up acting, applying for British citizenship and getting baptised into the Church of England.

She will also give up her work on gender equality for UN Women and take up royal charity duties instead.

Harry and Meghan had tried to keep their relationship private for as long as possible, and when news of their involvement first hit the headlines, he lashed out at the media.
Meanwhile, the President of Muslim Students Association of Nigeria, Dr Saheed Ashafa has reacted to the incident in a press release saying it is disappointing.

The statement reads:

The entire drama started on Friday in the school when the Principal announced to the students that no one is allowed to wear hijab in the school. Surprisingly for her, some of the students still wore the hijab to school on Monday. She gave the students letters to invite their parents to school. In the letter, she threatened that the students will not be allowed into the school without their parents.

When she shared the letter, a majority of students fidgeted and agreed to stop wearing the hijab. She collected the letters and let go of those ones, but about five of them refused to return the letter. When we were contacted, we asked the parents to honour the Principals invitation. They went there with our (MSSN) representatives but were embarrassed by the Principal who gave them the option of either their childrens education or religion. She eventually walked them out of her office after they insisted that their daughters must put on the hijab.

The parents subsequently proceeded to the Education District in charge of the school and they were assured that something would be done. With the hope that her (the Principal) superiors should have spoken with her to realise that what she was doing was wrong with the subsisting Appeal Court judgement, the students went to school on Wednesday (today) and were still prevented from entering the school.

These are Senior Secondary School Two and Three students who need to study hard. When we got to the school this morning, we saw some of the students copying notes for lessons they have missed on Monday and Tuesday while the others were teaching themselves old lessons inside a tricycle on the street. This is disastrous for us. While their colleagues were in the classrooms learning, they were on the street just for being Muslims''.

Ashafa explained that the Lagos State Government has continuously disobeyed the Court of Appeal ruling granting the use of hijab in schools.

We wish to inform the general public that we have been very peaceful on this matter. Even when some of the principals harassed our members, we go there to engage them amicably. We will not allow this to stay. This Principal must be sanctioned, removed and the students must return to school immediately.

As a law-abiding student-based organisation, we approached the Court of law on the usage of hijab by students. At the Lagos State High Court in Ikeja on October 17, 2014, banned the use of hijab in public primary and secondary schools in Lagos State.

But we headed to the Court of Appeal. A five-man special appellate court panel, presided by Justice A.B. Gumel, on July 21, 2016, overruled the October 17, 2014 judgment of of the Lagos State High Court in Ikeja, which banned the use of hijab in public primary and secondary schools in Lagos State. While striking down Justices Onyeabos verdict, the Justice Gumel panel held that the ban on hijab was discriminatory against Muslim pupils in the state.

Dissatisfied with the decision of the appellate court, the Lagos State Government approached the Supreme Court after failing to secure a Stay of Execution, but no judgment has been delivered yet. In law, where there is no other contrary judgement, the subsisting judgement remains valid.

Thus, the ongoing harassment of our members is not only unconstitutional, an infringement, but also a contempt. Again, we repeat that this will never be allowed to stay. We will give this lawless, anti-democratic and anti-masses government what it wants and likes to witness.
The 2018 edition of the union's industrial action is already looming and students are expected to be ready for the upcoming nationwide strike.

The Senior Staff Association of Nigerian Universities, SSANU, has warned the Federal Government to implement the new minimum wage or face its wrath.

The union at its 34th National Executive Council, NEC, meeting held at Delta State University reportedly accused the government of not being sincere with its negotiation team.

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ALSO READ:

In a communique signed by the union's National President, Samson Ugwoke and National Public Relations Officer, Abdussobur Salaa said the new minimum wage is becoming protracted.

The statement reads:

NEC in session noted that the negotiations on the new national minimum wage are becoming unnecessarily protracted.

NEC observed that the Federal Government appears not to be sincere about the negotiations and that the decision of the Federal Government side, to postpone the meeting of the Committee sine die, on the grounds of further consultations, is flimsy.

SSANU, therefore, joins the Nigeria Labour Congress to call on the Federal Government to face the serious business of reviewing the national minimum wage lest it incurs the wrath of the Nigerian workers and their millions of dependents who have been long-suffering and patient.

Nigerian workers should not be pushed to the wall, as the implication of this could have dire consequences on governance.

Recall that on, Monday, August 14, 2017, the Academic Staff Union of Universities, ASUU declared a nationwide strike over the failure of the federal government to implement the 2009 agreement.
| BY Ricki Green |

Brother & Co has announced the appointment of Nitin Mistry as digital creative director.

Reporting to ECD Piet Human, the appointment continues the agencys investment in senior talent including recent international placements of Jenna Fitch as digital director and Tharina Haas as senior strategist.

Says Kurt Viertel, co-founder of Brother & Co: Were delighted to welcome Nitin. Not only is he a very credentialed digital creative, but a proven conceptual thinker who can nurture and craft ideas. With Nitin onboard, we continue to extend our service offer to meet our clients ever-increasing challenges.

Originally hailing from the UK, Mistrys resume includes stints at Deepend, The Campaign Palace, Isobar, Make and RMG Connect London.
The deal is coming days after the Adewale Akinnuoye Agbajes directorial debut premiered in the Discovery Section at the 2018 Toronto International Film Festival, TIFF.

Confirming the deal, Lionsgate U.K. CEO Zygi Kamasa said, Adewales debut is an extremely personal look at a moment in time that needs to be seen by everyone. With a powerful script that brings to life the little-remembered social experiment of the 60s and transformative performances from the cast, Farming is a film that boldly asks questions of society back then, and today.

ALSO READ: All the details at 'Farming' premiere at TIFF 2018

'Farming' is an auto-biography that chronicles Adewale's life and upbringing and it parades a cast that include Damson Idris, Kate Beckinsale, John Dagleish, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Jaime Winstone, Genevieve Nnaji, and Zephan Amissah.

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'Farming' gets other deals

Adewale also confirmed that 'Farming' will have HanWay Films handling its sales.

The actor cum director also closed that the movie has sealed deals with Ad Vitam in France, September Films in the Benelux region, Icon in Australia, and CDC in Latin America and South Korea.

Speaking on the movie, Adewale said, "The film happened when it was actually meant to in society.Now were in a time when diverse voices have a platform. I think the film has been made at the right timefor a voice of this nature to be heard."

ALSO READ: Genevieve Nnaji stars in British movie Farming

About 'Farming'
The awards Chief Executive Officer, Peace Anyiam-Osigwe made this known in a recent chat with Pulse.

Peace disclosed that Harry Smith has officially partnered with AMAA through his film distribution company, Smith Global Media.

She said the partnership between Smith Global Media and AMAA will help African filmmakers chart a new course in film distribution across the continent.

"This year, AMAA has collaborated with Smith Global Media, which is run by Will Smith's younger brother to discuss films distribution at the African Business Roundtable in Rwanda, Kigali, ahead of the 2018 edition of the awards ceremony," Peace said.

Smith Global Media is an international distribution company that packages, acquires, markets, and distributes independent film and television content.

Peace further added that Martins Gbados, the filmmaker behind 'A soldier's Story,' will be handling the roundtable discussion for AMAA in Kigali.

'Isoken', Toyin Aimakhu, 'Ojukokoro gets AMAA nominations

"Lost Cafe," "Isoken," "Ojukokoro," Seun Ajayi, Joke Silva, Toyin Aimakhu among others have been revealed as the nominees for the 2018 edition of the Africa Movie Academy Awards (AMAA).

The nominees were revealed on Friday, August 4, 2018, at The Wheatbaker Hotel, Ikoyi, Lagos.
This year these students will be selected from those who signed to the Huawei Authorized Information and Network Academy (HAINA, also called the Huawei ICT Academy), which is a partnership project between Huawei and universities offering Huawei ICT courses to encourage students to attain Huawei certification in support of a subsequent career in the ICT industry .

The launching ceremony and interview had in attendance the representative of the Huawei Managing Director, Mr Simon Zhang, The Deputy Vice Chancellor University of Lagos, Professor Oluwole Babafemi Familoni, The representative of the Vice Chancellor University of Nigeria, Professor Kenneth Ofokansi (With Mr. Charles Emembolu (CEO) of partner Company Crestsage Limited), Director of Information Communication Technology/Central Record Processing Unit of the University of Benin, Professor Frederick Osaro Ekhaise, Executive Principal for Cloud Exchange Technical School, Mr Mohammed Aliyu and the top 20 students from across different universities in Nigeria.

Speaking at the launching ceremony, the Channel Service Director of Huawei Technologies Company Nigeria Limited Mr Simon Zhang said, The program seeks to develop local ICT talent, enhance knowledge transfer, promote a greater understanding of and interest in the ICT sector, and to improve and encourage regional building and participation in the digital economy. He further said that Huawei is working towards building a long lasting relationship with Top universities in Nigeria through the Huawei ICT Academy by training over 100,000 students every year.

The Deputy Vice Chancellor of the University of Lagos, Professor Oluwole Babafemi Familoni in his speech encouraged the students to put in their best in the last stage of the competition in Nigeria. He further said that the youths can enhance their IT skills for future inventions that will improve the status quo of Nigeria.

This month, more than 10 universities have signed to the Huawei ICT Academy. The target this year is 40 ICT academies, and 25,000 students for the ICT competition. One team will be selected to go to South Africa for the Regional ICT competition, while the best team will proceed to the Global competition in China. The continued cooperation between Huawei and the partner universities will see more and more students benefitting from the program and building their careers.

Speaking at the event, one of the beneficiaries of this initiative, Mr Michael Maxwell, a participant of the Huawei ICT competition, thanked Huawei Technology for the opportunity given to the students of the University of Nigeria, Nsukka , to benefit from HAINA (Huawei Authorized Information Technology and Network Academy) which started this year and has successfully trained 50 students.

Currently, students from theUniversity of Nigeria, Nsukka(UNN), University of Lagos, University of Benin and other universities across Nigeria are beneficiaries of this initiative.
In a report by Punch, Kolo, who was attached to the Inspector-General of Police Monitoring Unit Strike Team, Force Headquarters, Abuja, was killed alongside a yet-to-be identified commercial motorcycle rider around PWD bus stop, Ikeja, Lagos State.

It was also reported that the sad incident occurred on Wednesday, September 19, 2018 at 10:30 AM.

ALSO READ: Man torn in two after hanging on train despite warnings

How police inspector was crushed to death

According to the report, Kolo was on his way to Ikeja on a commercial motorcycle when the train was also passing.

The motorcycle rider was coming from the Lagos-Abeokuta Expressway and wanted to enter the Ikeja GRA when the incident occurred.

It was further reported that the train had been blaring from a distance, which made other road users to stay off its track.

However, the rider had reportedly attempted to beat the oncoming train and cross the rail track but failed and got himself and Inspector Kolo crushed to death.

ALSO READ: Earphones wearing man crushed to death by train in Oshodi

An official of the Lagos State Traffic Management Authority who was quoted in the report said the deceased were dismembered after they were crushed by the train.

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Police confirms inspector Kolo's death

The Police Public Relations Officer, CSP Chike Oti, confirmed the death of inspector Kolo, who was based in Abuja and was on an official assignment with his team members in Lagos, when he met his untimely death.

Chike said the corpses had been deposited in the Lagos Mainland Hospital mortuary.
According to a statement by Army, the Chief of Army Staff, Lieutenant-General Tukur Buratai, has ordered an inquiry into the unfortunate incident.

"We deeply regret to announce the death of 2 soldiers of 192 Battalion who lost their lives as a result of an accidental discharge during in-theatre training today.

"The Chief of Army Staff has directed the Commander 26 Brigade Gwoza to immediately constitute a Board of Inquiry to unravel the circumstances that led to this unfortunate situation," the statement read.

Report says soldier committed murder-suicide

Despite the Army's statement that the two soldiers died in a training accident, there are reports that it was a murder-suicide that took place.

According to military sources that spoke to Premium Times, a staff sergeant attached to 192 Battalion in Gwoza, identified as Adegor Okpako, killed another sergeant colleague, identified as Saka, and seriously wounded three other soldiers and a member of the Civilian Joint Task Force (CJTF) in a random shooting before he killed himself around 2:50pm on Wednesday.
The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN), reports that the Farin-Ruwa hydro-electricity power project was awarded in May 2004, by former Nasarawa governor Abdullahi Adamu.

The initial project cost was put at N5.4 billion with a completion period of 36 months.

The project, whose execution cost was reviewed upward by Adamus successor, Aliyu Doma, has since been abandoned, in spite of the huge sum his two predecessors sank into it.

Mr Mohammed Abdullahi, Secretary to the State Government, in a statement on Wednesday in Lafia, said that the committee would be chaired by Mr Ayuba Ayenajeh, the Commissioner of Finance and Economic Planning.

According to him, the committee will also review the Zimbabwean farmers project in Panda, Karu Local Government.

Abdullahi said that the committee would also review the concession agreement in respect of all state-owned hotels.

He listed the affected hotels to include the New Keffi Hotel, NIPDC Conference Hotel, Lafia, and the Keffi Club.

The committee is also expected to investigate the role of key government officials in the agreements and ascertain where the state was short-changed.

More particularly, the committee must fish out government officials who aided, colluded and abetted the defrauding of Nasarawa State and recommend appropriate sanctions.
Channels reports that the Senator has obtained a court order, preventing the police from arresting the Osun Peoples Democratic Party's governorship candidate.

There are no further details about the court order.

Senator Adeleke defies Police invitation over exam malpractice

Senator Ademola Adeleke defied the invitation of the Nigeria Police Force to appear in Abuja for arraignment over certain crimes just days before he contests in the Osun State gubernatorial election.

ALSO READ: Senator Adeleke defies Police invitation over exam malpractice

In a statement signed by the Force Public Relations Officer, Jimoh Moshood, on Wednesday, September 19, 2018, Senator Adeleke is facing charges of examination malpractice, criminal conspiracy, personation, breach of duty, and aiding and abetting.

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The lawmaker is accused of conspiring with four others to carry out the acts while writing National Examination Council (NECO) on July 21, 2017.

Adeleke and the four other suspects were asked to report to the Special Investigation Panel, Force Headquarters, Abuja immediately for arraignment in court.

Senator Adeleke's alleged crimes

According to the Police, Senator Adeleke registered for NECO in 2017 by impersonating students of Ojo/Aro Community High School in Osun State. When he was arrested on July 27, 2017, he signed a statement admitting that he registered but did not sit for the examination.

However, according to a result obtained from NECO, Adeleke has seven credits and one pass in the examination he claimed he didn't participate in. It was also discovered that in his application, he claimed he was born on June 12, 1997 (20 years old) even though he was 57 at the time.
The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that Danmallam is to receive an Award as Best Conflict Resolving Police Chief in Africa as well as Enugu State Police Command award of Best Pro-active Police Command in West and Central Africa.

Handing over the letter on Thursday in Enugu, Managing Director of the group, Mr Patrick Agbambu, said that the commissioner was keenly selected by the panel of judges for the award because of his commitment and dedication to international best practices in policing.

Agbambu noted that Danmallam had made effective use of community policing in crime prevention, detection, fighting and prosecution of offenders.

Danmallams intrinsic conflicts resolution disposition and pragmatism in community engagement has endeared police to the community and which in turn, has made Enugu State safest and most secured state in Nigeria, he said.

The managing director also revealed that during the conference, the commissioner would also act as one of the lead discussant with the topic: Peoples Centred National Security Framework.

Earlier, in his remark, International Assessor of Security Watch Africa, Mr Shina Philips, said that the 15th Africa Security Watch Award, Conference and Exhibitions is organized in partnership with Stellenbosch University, South Africa.

Philips noted that the event would draw people, especially security chiefs across the African continent.

Responding, Danmallam thanked the organisation for finding him and the command worthy of the recognition and also the role as lead discussant.

He assured the group that the command would continue in its community oriented policing principle for a safer and secured Enugu State.

NAN reports that the 15th Africa Security Watch Conference and Exhibition conferment Award will hold in November at Kairaba Beach Hotel, Banjul, Gambia.
This time, Adeleke who is contesting Saturdays governorship election in his home State of Osun, has been accused by the police of examination malpractice, criminal conspiracy, personation, breach of duty, and aiding and abetting crime.

The police added that Adeleke pulled a couple of stunts during the 2017 National Examination Council (NECO) tests.

Disappearing act

How did a 57-year-old man end up being accused of cheating in an examination for teenagers and adolescents?

On July 21, 2017, the Osun State Police Intelligence Bureau (SIB) received and acted on an intelligence report about examination malpractice at OJO/Aro Community Grammar School in Osun state.

As it turned out, Senator Adeleke was at the center of the malpractice.

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Police spokesperson Jimoh Moshood says Senator Ademola Adeleke and his brother Sikiru Adeleke registered and were sitting for the National Examination Council (NECO) 2017 as internal candidates and were impersonating students of the school at the ages of 57years and 42years respectively. This crime was facilitated by the principal of the school, and two other members of staff of the school for which they are under investigation and being charged to court.

For all you know, Adeleke is also good at vanishing, according to the police.

"When the police operative arrived at the school, only Sikiru Adeleke was found seated for the examination while Senator Ademola Adeleke's seat was vacant and he was suspected to have escaped before the arrival of the police operatives", Moshood says.

Obtaining a certificate without showing up for the exam

The names of the school principal and staff who facilitated the malpractice for the senator have been given as: Alhaji Aregbesola Mufutau (Principal of Ojo-Aro Community Grammar School, Egbedore LGA, Osun State), Mr Gbadamosi Thomas Ojo (school staff allegedly responsible for the registration of candidates for NECO) and Mr Dare Olutope (school teacher who allegedly facilitated the crime).

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To cut a long story short, the police said it arrested Senator Ademola Adeleke on July 27, 2017 and Sikiru Adeleke on August 8, 2017, for the crime.

The alleged accomplices, school principal Mufutau, the staff responsible for registration Ojo and Teacher Olutope were arrested on July 21, 2017.

Senator admits to crime but he's got two dates to explain

Moshood said Senator Ademola Adeleke made cautionary statement and admitted that he registered for the 2017 NECO examinations as an internal student in the said school but he didnt sit for the examination.

Moshood adds that the police is now wondering how Adeleke obtained his NECO result of Seven (7) Credits and One (1) Pass without sitting for the examination.

Whats even funnier is that the dancing senator and his brother (with a combined age of 99 years) were photographed in the class of 2017 school album, complete with school uniforms, according to the police.

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Theres a discrepancy in age here, from the police account of events.

In the NECO 2017 result obtained by the police, Adeleke claimed that he was born on 12th June 1997 but in his statement to the police, Adeleke wrote 13th May 1960 as his Date of Birth, Moshood says.

Meaning that the police is also trying to wrap its head around how one person can be born on two separate days in two separate years.

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Moshood continues: The photographs of both Senator Ademola Adeleke and Sikiru Adeleke appearing side by side in the photo album have no NECO stamps on them".

Buhari steps in

Senator Adeleke and his alleged accomplices have been advised in their own interest to report to the Special Investigation Panel, Force Headquarters, Abuja immediately for arraignment in court, the police declared in a statement issued on Wednesday, September 19, 2018.

With just three days before the Osun governorship election in which he is the PDP flagbearer, all kinds of political meanings have been thrown into theAdeleke certificate saga.

Which is probably why President Buhari has stopped the police headquarters from summoning Adelekeat least for the moment.
| BY Ricki Green |

Entrepreneurial advisory and operations partner, GrowthOps, has today announced the appointment of one of the most accomplished Salesforce leadership teams in the world, with a strong track record in achieving tangible business outcomes on the Salesforce Einstein Analytics platform.

Joining GrowthOps from Accenture are: global lead, John Cosgrove; discovery and creative lead, Kylie Long; technical lead, Robert Houston; and functional and governance lead, Robert Rymer. This team together previously led Accentures global Salesforce Einstein Analytics offering.

GrowthOps also announced today the appointment of Grant Thomson as group director  sales, who brings more than twenty years enterprise and entrepreneurial technology experience to the GrowthOps leadership team.

Salesforce Einstein Analytics empowers every person in a business to make better decisions by giving them the data they need in a format they can actually use.

Having formed the first dedicated practice for Salesforce Einstein Analytics in Australia as part of Cloud Sherpas, the Salesforce Einstein Analytics team then moved to Accenture when it acquired Cloud Sherpas in 2015. The team has continued to lead implementations for major global brands across the world.

GrowthOps managing director, Phillip Kingston (above right) welcomed the new team to GrowthOps recognising their exceptional talent and the benefits that Salesforce Einstein Analytics will provide to GrowthOps clients.

Says Kingston: John, Robert, Kylie and Robert are global leaders in their field. Theyre a crack team, with a strong entrepreneurial mindset, thats a great fit for GrowthOps and our clients.

The Salesforce Einstein Analytics platform, combined with AI, is transforming customer experience. By harnessing the power of AI and Einstein, the team is embedding predictions and recommendations directly into the interfaces used by sales, service and marketing teams every single day. This helps augment workflow, drive meaningful customer discussions, and most importantly, will help our clients grow.

The Einstein capability is also an important pillar in GrowthOps cloud strategy as the company capitalises on the growing demand for cloud services, in addition to further strengthening our relationship with Salesforce.

John Cosgrove takes on the role of GrowthOps partner, Salesforce Einstein Analytics. He is a passionate advocate for data democracy and data-driven work, with a relentless focus on the user, not the report.

Says Cosgrove: The confluence of big data technology, cloud application layers, mobility, and an increasing need to compete on the quality of human connections created the opportunity to launch a new way of designing customer relationship management systems. Einstein can put meaningful data in the hands of every employee so its a seamless part of their daily work lives.

Regardless of size, we want to work with companies who truly embrace entrepreneurship and innovation to drive growth, which is exactly what GrowthOps was created to do. We want to work alongside these companies to make their vision a reality in the fastest way possible.

We believe one of the biggest implications of AI for everyone is a fundamental re-think of how we consult. Part of the incredible promise of platforms like Einstein is the speed with which they can be deployed, and value can be realised. We think its time for digital consultancy to take a radically different view towards risk and value and actually facilitate how markets adopt a platform, instead of just how a business deploys the relevant app.

As group director  sales, Thomson will formalise and implement a single strategic account management structure across GrowthOps, building on the process and systems established when GrowthOps listed on the ASX earlier this year. Importantly, Thomson will coordinate cross-selling and collaboration across the group, building a single, end-to-end growth engine for GrowthOps clients.

Thomson has more than twenty years enterprise and entrepreneurial technology experience, including roles with IBM and Salesforce. More recently, he worked with smaller companies, such as Versent and Nebulr, to help them scale and better engage enterprise clients.

GrowthOps chief executive officer, Paul Mansfield (above left) welcomed Thomsons appointment recognising his unique mix of blue-chip and entrepreneurial experience.

Says Mansfield: Grant brings extensive enterprise experience to the company. He is also an entrepreneur at heart, having co-founded numerous startups, in addition to mentoring and advising many others across the technology industry.

Grant is solution-focused, not product-focused, with a strong track record of helping clients identify where they actually need help, and then successfully implementing those plans, which makes him a strong cultural fit for GrowthOps.

Thomson added that his key mission has always been to help clients solve problems.

Says Thomson: For most of my career, Ive operated at the intersection of business and technology. I want to enable clients of all sizes to use technology to solve problems, transform and scale. Now, as part of GrowthOps, I can do that at the next level, working alongside best-in-class specialists in a single company.
The state commissioner for Information, Malam Mohammed Garba disclosed this while briefing newsmen in Kano on Thursday.

Garba said the state government found it necessary to give immediate direct support to flood victims in the eight affected local government areas of the state in view of the magnitude of the disaster.

He, however, called on the federal government for special intervention to further alleviate the sufferings of the affected communities.

Garba said the state government was still compiling reports of the areas hit by the disaster to ascertain the extent of damage caused by the disaster.

The commissioner also condoled on behalf of the state government with families who lost their loved ones in the disaster.

He then cautioned the public, particularly those living in flood prone areas against building structures on the waterways as it was one the major causes of flooding.

Garba also called for a collaboration with relevant stakeholders to give the necessary support to the state government in managing the disaster.

NAN recalls that 31 people lost their lives and no fewer than 10,000 houses were destroyed by flood in 15 local government areas of the state.

NAN also recalls that no fewer than 5, 000 hectares of rice farms were also destroyed in addition to other food and cash crops worth millions of Naira were by the flood.
The vice president's visit comes just a day after he visited Niger State which is another of the four states in Nigeria where the National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA) has declared a national disaster as heavy seasonal rains have caused the Niger and Benue rivers to burst their banks, flooding communities, farms and trapping tens of thousands of people in their homes.

According to NEMA's spokesperson, Sani Datti, the flooding has led to the death of about 100 people in 10 states across Nigeria. The worst hit states where national disasters have been declared are Kogi, Delta, Anambra and Niger with eight other states on NEMA's watchlist.

The vice president landed in Asaba on Thursday, September 20, 2018, in the company of Delta State governor, Ifeanyi Okowa and the Minister of Labour and Employment, Chris Ngige, among others.

While speaking to displaced flood victims in Niger on Wednesday, September 19, the vice president said the Federal Government is committed to taking care of them.

He said, "Mr. President asked me to come and check your welfare. We shall do our best to help everyone so you can resettle well, go back and continue your work. We are paying attention to everything going on here. God bless you all.

"I have directed NEMA to immediately supply building materials to build resettlement site to enable the victims return to their various communities and I will also go round to see for myself the damage done."
The News Agency of Nigeria, (NAN) reports that those who died, in the incident that occurred late Wednesday evening at a first generation bank in the town, had been identified as a bank official and a private security guard.

Police Public Relations Officer, DSP Caleb Ikechukwu, said his men had launched a manhunt for the fleeing robbers, and that more men had been deployed in banks to curtail such incidents in the future.

Ikechukwu however, did not confirm if money was indeed stolen from the bank, as he said there was hot exchange of gunfire between his men and the bandits.

This he said botched the operation as the robbers had to flee the scene upon realising that the police were closing in on them.

NAN reports that the guard, who was shot in the head, died within the premises of the bank, while the injured staff died in the hospital.

The PPRO disclosed that the robbers had planned on escaping through Ilawe-Igede road, but later drove into the bush and escaped into the thick forest between the two towns.

He said the expansive forest had already been rounded up by the police and that his men are combing the bush in search of the robbers.

The robbers would have done more havoc than they did, but for prompt action taken by our men. There was exchange of gunshots between the bandits and our personnel. They tried their best to manage the situation

It is true that two persons were killed during the bank operation The operation was regrettable and the death of the two persons was painful.

The command is stepping up its intelligence gathering skill and operation. As a temporary measure, we are going to deploy more men in banks to make the place safe for staff and customers

If you are on ground in Igede now, more men have been deployed, particularly the mobile police unit. We are doing same across the state

As we speak, our Criminal Investigation Bureau (CIB) and State Intelligence Investigation Department (SIID) have drafted their men for intelligence gathering, while mobile policemen are on road and other critical areas, he said.

Ikechukwu however urged members of the public to go about their normal businesses, assuring that the police are on top of the situation.
Gov. Rochas Okorocha of Imo and Chairman of the Progressive Governors Forum, made the promise while speaking with newsmen at the end of a closed-door meeting of the governors held in Abuja.

The meeting discussed the mode of primaries to be adopted to pick the partys candidates for all elective offices for the 2019 general elections.

Okorocha, however, said that most of the APC-controlled states had resolved to adopt indirect primaries to pick the partys candidates,assuring that all aspirants would be given equal opportunity.

We have adopted both direct and indirect primaries, and most of the states are going for indirect primaries, but for the President, it is going to be direct primaries.

We just held a meeting with the partys National Chairman and we have resolved that in support of the party, we are going to have free and fair primaries.

Everybody will be given equal chance to participate in the primaries which will be transparent, free and fair, he said.

Okorocha assured that both the Progressive Governors Forum and the APC National Working Committee(NEC) were working to ensure victory for the party in the 2019 general elections.

Also speaking, Gov. Nasir El-rufai of Kaduna State, explained that it was not possible for all the party members to agree on a particular mode of primaries.

He said there would always be some that would disagree, but that the decision of the partys National Executive Committee (NEC) was that if majority of the State Executive Committee members decided on any mode of primaries, they should go head; it would not matter if one or two members disagreed.

And in Kaduna State where I am the Governor by the grace of God, the majority of the State Executive Committee members decided on indirect primaries. If one or two members dont agree, thats off, that is not the decision of NEC,he said.

Mr Adams Oshiomhole, the APC National Chairman, stressed that the task before the party ahead of 2019 general elections was clear.

We have a tradition as a progressive party to submit ourselves to the dictates of our party and we believe in internal democracy because we are democrats and democracy must begin from within the house before we can do it outside.

All of us, Governors, National Working Committee and even the President, agreed that this is the way to go and that is what we are going to do, Oshiomhole said.

Speaking on the alleged crises in the APC, Lagos State chapter, Gov. Ambode and the partys National leader,Bola Tinubu, Oshiomhole said the state was at peace.

I think our party in Lagos is at peace, there are conversations going on at the ward level across the 8,500 wards or there about and across the country.

Conversations are going on within the APC family,conversations are going on in each of the 774 Local Governments and across the country.

Our party members are negotiating, they are persuading, they are doing compromises, and they are competing, because we are progressing,he said.
Ambode has been running from pillar to post over the past few days after the APC's national leader and political godfather in Lagos, Bola Tinubu, reportedly endorsed Jide Sanwo-Olu, a former commissioner, to become the next Lagos governor over Ambode, just years after he endorsed the incumbent.

Tinubu's political structure in Lagos, Mandate Movement, as well as all 57 local councils in the state have endorsed Sanwooluahead of the governorship primary election.

Ambode has been trying to get back in the good books of Tinubu to regain his backing but all efforts so far appear to have failed and Buhari might be his last hope.

According to the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN), APC governors, who met in Abuja on Wednesday, September 19, had, on behalf of Ambode, sought the intervention of President Buhari in the Lagos APC crisis.
Presidential spokesman, Garba Shehu, stated this on Thursday, September 20, 2018.

Amaechi, a former Rivers state governor, headed Buhari's 2015 campaign.

"President Muhammadu Buhari has approved the appointment of a campaign organization for his re-election in 2019 with Hon. Chibuike Rotimi Amaechi as Secretary/Director General," Shehu announced.

"Hon. Amaechi was the Director General of the Buhari-Osinbajo Presidential Campaign Committee in 2014-2015 that won the elections and brought the current administration into office.

"The new Director-General will announce other appointments into the campaign structure as approved by President Buhari," he added.

ece-auto-gen

Meanwhile, President Buhari on Wednesday, September 12, 2108, submitted his nomination form at the All Progressives Congress (APC) headquarters in Abuja.
The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that former Vice President, Alhaji Atiku Abubakar, PDP National Chairman, Uche Secondus, Gov. Abdulfatah Ahmed of Kwara, the National Vice Chairman of the party, Eddy Olafeso, among others, joined Saraki at the mega rally held at Nelson Mandela Freedom Park in Osogbo.

He said it was painful that APC-led administartion in the state could not pay workers salaries for three years.

Saraki said he was optimistic that Adeleke would win the election and put an end to the suffering of the people in the state.

This election is about the people of Osun and they must send the message that government that cannot pay workers salaries should be sent packing,  he said.

Atiku, while urging the residents to vote for the party on Saturday, said, From what I can see here, it is a win for PDP.

I urge you to defend and protect your votes for it not to be stolen.

In his remarks, Secondus said Adeleke would fix the states economy, if elected, and appealed to INEC to ensure that the election is free, fair and credible.

Mr Soji Adagunodo, the PDP state chairman, said Osun was ripe to be taken by the party.

He appealed to residents to vote for PDP, promising them that Adeleke would not dissapoint them.
The police accused the PDP guber candidate of examination malpractice, criminal conspiracy, breach of duty and also invited him for questioning few days to the election scheduled to hold on September 22, 2018.

According to the partys spokesman, Kola ologbondiyan the police summon is laughable.

Invite Kemi Adeosun

Ologbondiyan wondered why the police did not invite former minister of finance, Kemi Adeosun who was accused of certificate forgery.

He also called on the Inspector-General of Police, Ibrahim Idris to call his men to order, adding that it is only the people that can decide who becomes Governor of Osun state.

According to Daily Post, he said Adeleke certificate circus, leading to laughable trumped-up charges by the Police, as horrible, nauseating and displeasing.

While the PDP is in no way against any legitimate effort by any security agency in the discharge of its duties, we totally reject this unrelenting attempt to use trumped up charges to take down our candidate, simply because the APC has realized that he is coasting to victory.

Perhaps, the police need to be educated that the West African Examination Council (WAEC) has already confirmed that Senator Adeleke wrote his WAEC examination in 1981, thus ending the earlier unnecessary controversy about his WAEC status.

Moreover, this is the same police that have not been able to invite the disgraced erstwhile minister of finance, Kemi Adeosun, who confessed to having a forged NYSC Exemption Certificate or the Special Assistant to the President on Prosecution and Chairman of the Special Investigative Panel for the Recovery of Public Property, Chief Okoi Obono-Obla, whose certificate, WAEC openly told the National Assembly, is fake.

ALSO READ: WAEC confirms Adeleke wrote examination in 1981

Moreso, there are several leaders in APC, whose certificates have been questioned and which the Police have not considered it needful to conduct the littlest investigation.
Adeleke, popularly called the "Dancing Senator" due to his habit of flamboyant dancing in public, is the governorship candidate of the People's Democratic Party (PDP) and is unbothered by being ridiculed for his public dancing.

While speaking in Osogbo, the state capital, on Wednesday, September 19, 2018, Adeleke said no one should use his dancing against him because everybody dances.

He said, "I will dance to the Government House after winning Osun governorship election on Saturday.

"I have been tagged dancing Senator, but this shouldn't be used against me because everybody dances. Have you seen someone who doesn't dance? I am winning this election and I will dance to the Government House after that.

"When I was in the university overseas, I used to go for dancing competition. Although, I am a Nigerian, I still won dancing competitions which is the reason why I was nicknamed 'Jackson' but my real name is Ademola Nurudeen Adeleke."

Adeleke also slammed the current administration of Governor Rauf Aregbesola, accusing him and his party, the All Progressives' Congress (APC), of being insensitive to the needs of the people of Osun State.

He said, "Anybody who fails to pay his or her labourers is wicked and I can boldly say that the APC government is wicked for not paying its workers and pensioners in the state.

"The menace of non-payment of salary is responsible for the 29th position of this state in the ranking of WAEC; but when I get to power, I will turn it around by ensuring that the welfare of every worker in the state is catered for.

"The insensitivity of the All Progressives Congress government is responsible for the state where LAUTECH is today and it is evidently clear to the masses that the PDP government takes education as a priority."

Adeleke will contest in the September 22 election just a year after he won the Osun West Senatorial bye election to replace his deceased brother, Isiaka, the first civilian governor of Osun State.
| BY Ricki Green |

Online travel site, Wotif has launched its new Aussie For Travel brand platform with The Next Big Thing, a community led PR and Social Media campaign. It is Ogilvys first piece of work with Wotif, in collaboration with WPP partners opr and Maverick.

For the past 18 years, Wotif has been focused on the Aussie traveller and is dedicated to promoting local travel. To mark the brands coming of age and to launch the new Aussie For Travel platform into the market, the Next Big Thing will see an Australian town, city or suburb gifted with a new tourist attraction, known as the Next Big Thing.

The structure  to be backed and voted on by the nation  will join the ranks of 150+ unique Australian icons including the Big Banana and the Big Pineapple, aiming to support the domestic tourism industry and help drive money back into the local economy.

Says Ewen Pettit, strategy director, Ogilvy Brisbane: The brand proposition speaks directly to a nation of passionate travellers and the Aussie for travel platform positions Wotif as a trusted travel mate in-the-know.

For many Australians, the Wotif brand is synonymous with travel. Backed by 18 years of data and local knowledge, Wotif has supported Aussie travel experiences and knows what makes Aussies tick.

The Next Big Thing campaign recognises Big Things are, in fact, celebrated Aussie icons and widely-considered as part of our domestic travel culture. Wotif research shows 80% of Aussies believe these structures are uniquely Australian and showcase the fun-loving spirit of our nation, while 90% of Aussies have visited a Big Thing in their lifetime.

Says Daniel Finch, managing director, Wotif: Wotif is passionate about encouraging Aussies to explore more of their own backyard and we are excited about launching the new platform with an initiative that creates genuine engagement and participation from individuals, tourism boards and local councils all across Australia, each of which have their own story to tell.

From the Big Bin Chicken (Ibis) in Sydney, to the Big Peanut in Kingaroy, to the Big Kilt in Glen Innes, since nominations commenced weve received thousands of entries and widespread involvement from Aussies vying for their town, city or suburb to be crowned the home of the Next Big Thing.

The Next Big Thing launched via Facebook and a landing page www.wotif.com/nextbigthing, is supported by PR, experiential and digital.

Before midday 18 September, Aussies could submit their Big Thing Idea via www.wotif.com/nextbigthing. Nominations will be judged by Wotif, with a shortlist of finalists announced on Tuesday, 25 September before final public voting takes place.

Wotif Group

Director Brand Marketing and Communications  Amanda Behre

Senior Public Relations Manager  Sarah King

Public Relations Specialist  Aliisa Frassetto

Senior Social Media & Content Manager  Nicole Redfern

Social Media Specialist  Sarah Duncan

Content Specialist  Cassie Britland

Senior Brand Manager  Rebecca Hurley

Brand Manager  Chi An Chau

Brand Manager  Stacey Cooper

Ogilvy

Managing Director  Ben Lightfoot

Strategy Director  Ewen Pettit

Senior Account Manager  Angus Whitton

Head of Social  Alex Watts

Social Strategist  Ola Olorunnimbe

Social Creatives  Madeline Hoskin & Lucy Hay

Lead Social Creative  Nathan Moraza

Social Producer  Jet Dominic

opr

Associate Director  Sophie Spooner

Account Director  Madeleine Hanley

Senior Account Manager  Shruti Dhalwala

Account Manager  Liz Johns

Maverick

Senior Account Manager  Katie Helyer
Housing NZ is going to pay out up to three thousand dollars to each of the former tenants tossed out of their homes based on a bogus meth testing regime.

A report by scientist Sir Peter Gluckman found there was no health risk from living in a meth house where the drug had been smoked.

And the meth levels being applied to Housing NZ properties were way too low and the product of hysteria.

It turns out about 800 tenants were wrongly evicted on the basis of the bad science and about 275 of them were banned from returning to a housing nz property for a year.

Now theyll get an apology help to get accomodation and potentially a payout.

Mr Twyford called on Paula Bennett and the ministers responsible for HNZ at the time to apologise, saying Ms Bennett had "gloated" in the media about evicting tenants.

But National's housing spokesperson Judith Collins said it's Mr Twyford who should apologise.

"Phil Twyford should apologise for using taxpayer dollars to compensate people who had undertaken criminal activity in state houses," she said at Parliament on Thursday.

Ms Collins said Mr Twyford was "politicising what was a health issue, and thinking it was OK for state houses to be used for criminal activity".

Listen to the full interview above.

Drive with Ryan Bridge and Lisa Owen, 3pm - 6pm Weekdays and streaming live on'rova' channel 9 - available on Android and iPhone.

RadioLIVE.
UK: A 200m contract for British Steel to supply approximately 200 000 tonnes of rail to Network Rail was formally signed at InnoTrans on September 19 in a ceremony attended by Secretary of State for Transport Chris Grayling.
INNOTRANS: The first Siemens Smartron electric locomotive is on show at InnoTrans 2018 in Berlin.
Wednesday, September 19, 2018 at 5:28PM

Netflix is taking another stab at bringing a popular anime to life. The streaming service just announced its working on a live-action series of Avatar: The Last Airbender. According to the companys See Whats Next Twitter account, its working on a reimagined take on the series. They teased concept artwork by John Staub and in a separate tweet announced that the original creators behind the seriesMichael Dante DiMartino and Bryan Konietzkowill be working on the live action.

No other details yet have been released and fans are both excited and wary about the news. Live-action adaptations of popular anime dont go over so well but fans are willing to give the new series a chance, especially with DiMartino and Konietzko onboard. What do you think? Is this something youre excited to see or not?

Source: Comicbook.com
INNOTRANS: Swiss operator Schweizerische Suedostbahn and Stadler used the InnoTrans trade show in Berlin on September 19 to present what Stadler Group CEO Thomas Ahlburg described as the longest Flirt trainset yet built.
The European Broadcasting Union (EBU) has voiced concern over the Danish Government's new public service contract that it says will dramatically restrict Danmarks Radios scope and range of programming and remit.





The EBU Executive Board is concerned at what it calls political attempts to drastically narrow and alter the accepted broad remit of public service media at the Danish public radio and television station. It believes that such restrictions will limit audience diversity and access to programmes that are relevant to their lives while fostering social cohesion and understanding at a time when this is more important than ever.Moreover, the EBU says that there is compelling evidence that market forces alone do not deliver consumers an offer of media services that contribute to the sense of belonging to a nation, region or continent.The EBU's Executive Board believes that this is the moment for public service media such as Danmarks Radio to be positioned in the front row and empowered to fully play their role in the interests of audiences, performers, writers, producers, innovators and the long-term strength and democratic health of the European continent.
Oil Cartel Backs Iran in Face of Looming US Sanctions

The head of OPEC said Tuesday that the oil cartel must stick together for the good of the global economy as Iran faces renewed US sanctions.

Iran is not only a founding member of OPEC, it's a very important member of this organization, OPEC Secretary-General Mohammed Sanusi Barkindo said.

We have no choice but continue to work with all parties, he added.
Alarmed about voting security, the federal government is doing what it does best  showering money on the problem.

Congress has appropriated about $4 billion since 2000 and $380 million this year alone for a range of items that in many cases will do little or nothing to thwart a hacker assault on voting systems, auditors and watchdogs say.

These include iPad minis, employee raises, building renovations, physical (not cyber) security, travel and other expenses largely unrelated to achieving industry standards to prevent Russians, Chinese, or other sophisticated hackers from corrupting the count.

The hacking threat has created this feeding frenzy where money is thrown out there with no results needed, said Doug Jones, professor of computer science at the University of Iowa, who has studied voting technology for decades.

People are finally taking the hacking threat seriously, but its a weird seriousness, Jones said. Throwing money at elections at random is not the way to do it, and thats what Congress is doing.

Records show that election divisions are struggling to spend all the money being tossed their way in the name of cybersecurity. And they're using their discretionary leeway to dispense the largesse in questionable ways.

Several states plan to use the cash to train their poll workers on voting technology, a task that is already addressed extensively as part of any contract to buy voting machinery. Minnesota will add three new jobs, two paying six figures, with annual raises through 2022 of more than 6 percent, twice the average private sector raise of 3 percent.

Washington, D.C., is planning to spend $150,000 of the federal money to hire temporary poll workers  something the district does every election.

Illinois plan would team elections with the states Department of Innovation and Technology, a new agency created in 2016, and break off $65,000 to cover travel for contractors to be hired through 2020.

Examining a disputed ballot in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, after the 2000 presidential election.

The federal handouts are happening under the Help America Vote Act of 2002, or HAVA, which was passed in response to the infamous hanging chad recount of punch-card ballots in South Florida in 2000. The last of the upgrades to address that voting debacle were completed by 2011, but the dormant law sprang back to life with new funding after the reported hacking of election systems in several states in 2016.

New federal money was hurried through in March, tacked onto an omnibus bill with three lines inserted to ensure it was appropriated.

But Jones says officials neednt wait around for federal money to shore up the security of voting systems through regular audits and recounts, and routine technology upkeep.

Further, while the money was publicly presented as being approved in the name of security, it's being allocated in a deliberately vague way.

Mark Abbott, a grant manager from the Election Assistance Commission, or EAC, charged with overseeing and distributing the HAVA funds, told a gathering of activists for the disabled in June that statute language allows for all manner of improvements to election administration and processes from equipment to training to fiscal accessibility. All are allowable under this grant. 

Abbott added that this is flexible money and the EAC is being incredibly flexible in how we administer it.

In Florida, some of the $19 million the state will receive will pay for physical security at election sites, even though hackers do not need on-site access to monkey with the vote. The state also paid nearly $1 million for 1,750 iPad minis for poll workers to check in voters, not to shore up cybersecurity, since the tablets are easily hacked, experts say. North Dakota, Wisconsin and West Virginia are among other states using some of the federal cash for similar devices.

Overall, $78.1 million of this years $380 million allocation, 20 percent, is going for a budget line item called all other costs -- a placeholder category meant for money that is approved but has no determined use.

The Election Assistance Commissions oversight capabilities have been hobbled in recent years. Its commissioners have met sparingly due to a lack of a quorum. Since March, the agency has had only two commissioners of the required four, and cannot meet until a new appointee takes office.

Their staffing is not what it should be, said Vermont Secretary of State Jim Condos, noting that last year his state was audited for federal election funds it received 12 years ago.

An EAC spokeswoman did not return repeated calls for comment.

According to a 2017 audit of New Hampshires HAVA spending going back several years, money was poorly accounted for and misspent. A $1 million addition was built onto the states archives and records building in Concord with some of the funding: The audit asked that the state return the money because it was unauthorized under the rules.

Spending funds to build the HAVA Facility was reasonable, practical, and justifiable, was the states response.

The money went to constructing a 4,100-square-foot second floor on the existing building, where state elections chiefs conduct training for the states poll workers and officials.

Were in this building rent-free forever, said Assistant Secretary of State Anthony Stevens, who advises the EAC. And we have 60 to 80 years left on this building.

The state refused to hand back the money and, to date, the EAC has backed down.

Even before the new spate of money was disbursed this year, the spending has been poorly managed. In Oklahoma, the state borrowed $10 million from its HAVA money to pay for a budget shortfall in 2009.

Some states contend they have already shored up their voting technology and wont have a good reason to spend the money before Novembers election.

New Hampshire has spent less than 50 percent of its payment, said Secretary of State William Gardner. Michigan last year appropriated $30 million in HAVA money that it had sitting around for a decade. Vermont spent under 5 percent of its funds between 2002 and 2010, or $664,941.

And other states said this money will be part of future, not present, spending.

We will probably be able to spend it by 2020, said Sam Taylor, a spokesman for the Texas secretary of state.

He said the only guidance the feds have given the states is that the money must go to election security.

In practice, that means much of it wont help, said E. John Sebes, chief technology officer for the Open Source Election Technology Institute. He said items such as electronic poll books or new software are allowable under government spending standards, but they dont do a damn thing for security.

To use this money to provide additional cybersecurity is a worthy goal, he said. There doesnt seem to be a lot of attention to how the tail end of the HAVA billions is being spent. Most elections officials are operating in good faith, though, given that [election security] is a broad mandate.

Still, the states are going to need a continuing influx of federal money if they are expected to keep cyberthreats at bay, said Condos, the Vermont secretary of state.

Instead of getting a lump sum every 10 or 15 years, we need ongoing, sustainable funding, Condos said. I just hope Congress understands that this is the core of our democracy.
Brussels insiders may look askance at Polish entreaties to Donald Trump. But western EU member states share some of the blame for strained relations too

A crisis of trust reigns between Poland and many of its European partners. And it is not just the much-publicised tensions around the rule of law and the Damocles sword of Article 7 proceedings against Poland. The countrys own geopolitical manoeuvrings are also increasingly generating new tensions of their own, from the way in which the Polish government talks to and about Donald Trump, to how it frames the Three Seas Initiative, and to how it reacts to new forms of cooperation discussed in the rest of the EU. Across much of Europe, the impression is building that Polands new moves will inevitably lead to a weakening of the countrys solidarity within the European Union. But if the country effectively decides to pivot fully to the United States, it would not be its fault alone: both sides would be to blame.

Yesterday Polish president Andrzej Duda made an offer to his counterpart in Washington; effectively packaged as a deal perhaps to appeal to his well-known sensibilities. The US president would get a place named after him; a Fort Trump to host American troops in Poland on a permanent basis. The Poles themselves would pay for its preparation although the US would have to cover the operating costs later on. All while Donald Trump is thought to have demanded a review of the US presence in Germany as his long-running feud with Angela Merkel simmers on. Yesterday both Trump and Duda repeated their strong criticism of the Russian-German Nord-Stream 2 project.

For good measure, Duda reminded the president, and the world, that Poland is in the process of buying US Patriot missiles. But the American front is not the only one the Polish president and government are active on right now. The president travelled to America directly from the third Three Seas Initiative Summit, in Bucharest. Officially, Polish leaders are presenting Three Seas  in which 12 central European countries participate  as complementary to EU goals. But the governments intellectual circles in Poland  their outriders, effectively  often frame the initiative as a way to counterbalance the German influence in central Europe through a new cooperation structure that enjoys American approval. Some even call it an equivalent to NATO in the infrastructural and energy domains. One major Three Seas infrastructure project is the development of a pipeline to transfer American natural gas from Swinoujscie port in Poland to countries to the south.

It is perhaps no wonder, then, that Paris, Berlin, and Brussels are watching Warsaws geopolitical moves with concern. Informal conversations in these capitals reveal a perception that the Polish government has set its course  but that it is the wrong one. While the rest of the world flinches at each new instance of US unpredictability, European observers look on somewhat incredulous as Poland treats the United States as the most dependable ally it has. They further note the countrys profound preoccupation with Russia as almost Europes exclusive security threat. They see the Polish government as doubling down on denial, paying no heed to the changed context, one in which the arrival of Trump upends normal transatlantic assumptions, while the Syria end game and migration crisis demand at least cooperation with Russia on Middle East stabilisation.

Listen to Law and Justice (Pis) party leaders, experts, and the public media, and you will find it hard to avoid the impression that Warsaw is ready to reach for hoped-for greater security from the American administration at the expense of EU solidarity. In 2015, after PiS retook office, the cancellation of armaments contracts with France by the new government was an early warning sign. And Polands lukewarm participation in European defence cooperation via the PESCO mechanism is another. And just last week, Duda went so far as to call the EU  an imaginary community that does not give Poland many benefits. A few days later, the power behind the throne Jaroslaw Kaczynski praised Polish cooperation with Germany, but warned too that history has not yet ended. Are both Duda and Kaczynski preparing Poles for a more intergovernmental and less integrated EU?

This is not all new. The legacy of the 20th century is such that Poles see the transatlantic alliance as the key plank of their foreign and security policy, at least on a par with EU membership. This is true of Polands political class in general and pre-dates the current administration. But continue down this road alone and Poland will risk significantly jeopardising its own security, leading to a further deterioration in its political position in Europe while also potentially receiving little or even nothing from an American president who is, at best, unreliable.

All that said: longer-established EU members need to take their share of responsibility for Polish jitters too. Germany is still relentlessly pursuing the Nord Stream 2 project, all while claiming it to be nothing but an economic venture, and doing so in the face of protests from its immediate eastern neighbour. France, for its part, failed to invite Poland to join the European Intervention Initiative. The French governments well-known preference for PESCO involving only a small number of countries only added to Polands sense of exclusion. And when Emmanuel Macron or Heiko Maas discuss strengthened European cooperation, they often demonstrate a strong anti-American bias, which Poland would never be able to accept. All in all, if onlookers wonder why Poland is off discussing security with the US and not its European neighbours, then western Europe leaders share at least some of the blame.

For all that Polands US pivot looks already in train, the likelihood is that Poland is  as ever  simply expanding its options. A full turn to Washington is not inevitable. Most Polish experts and members of the political class continue to conclude it crucial to preserve both security anchors, the European and the transatlantic one. But more than just wring their hands at what they see as an irreversible Polish drift, EU member states can reach out their hands. They may find them clasped in return.

Reprinted with permission from the European Council on Foreign Relations. Read more on: European Power,New European Security Initiative,Security and Defence,Transatlantic relationship,Cohesion & Governance
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Wednesday, September 19, 2018 at 5:13PM

Review: Samsung Galaxy Note 9For Galaxy Note 9 users who have no use for Samsungs Bixby assistant, you might want to completely disable the Bixby button. Unfortunately, that option isnt available on this phone. But a new update coming to Bixby will at least make it harder to accidentally activate the button. Its quite easy to accidentally launch the assistant because its button is placed under the volume rocker.

Once you have the latest update, you can head to Bixbys settings and select whether you want to launch the assistant by a single press or with a double tap. The latter lessens the chances of you accidentally launching Bixby since youll need to hit the button twice in rapid succession. If this is something you want and arent sure if your Bixby is updated, head to Settings > About Bixby and tap on the Update button.

Source: Android Authority
By Elizabeth Kwiatkowski, 09/20/2018



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Elizabeth Kwiatkowski is Associate Editor of Reality TV World and has been covering the reality TV genre for more than a decade.
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Athens, GA (30605)

Today

Some clouds this morning will give way to generally sunny skies for the afternoon. High 79F. Winds light and variable..

Tonight

Partly cloudy early followed by cloudy skies overnight. Low around 50F. Winds light and variable.
Connecticut never looked better, at least from outer space.

On Tuesday, NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration released the first high-definition images from GOES-16, our newest weather satellite now orbiting the Earth.

One of the images shows Connecticut smack in the middle of the photo, easily spotted with Long Island Sound to the south, the white sandy beaches of the Hamptons and the blueish, green waters around Cape Cod, Marthas Vineyard and Nantucket to the east.

With five-times greater coverage, four-times the spatial resolution, and three-times the spectral channels than earlier generations of weather satellites, the highly-detailed image of southern New England and the New York metro area is so clear, Lake Candlewood in greater Danbury is visible. Also seen are major rivers like the Hudson, Housatonic, Connecticut and Thames.

Next time a storm like Sandy, Hurricane Gloria or a great blizzard bears down on Connecticut, forecasters will use the satellite to track the storms movement, study its infrared images and view its impact from thousands of miles above.

View from above on Jan. 15

The high-def photographs released Tuesday were all taken 10 days ago on Jan. 15.

One highly-detailed photo shows cloud formations from a severe weather system moving across the central U.S. to the Northeast. Along the southwest Connecticut shoreline, the day was clear with a high of 42 degrees. The day before about 1.5 inches of snow fell across southern Connecticut and Long Island. The high-def photo clearly slows a light coating of snow.

Launched from Cape Canaveral on Nov. 16, GOES-16 also has a global lightening mapper that can track all lightening strikes across North America

Its data can also create real-time animations of the weather systems over the continental United States during the past 72 hours. Colorized infrared images can bring out details in cloud patterns that could signal more active weather systems. Water vapor imagery can indicate a systems water vapor or moisture content.

The new satellites geostationary orbit (staying in a fixed postion with the rotation of the Earth ) allows it to produce full disk image of the Earth every 15 minutes, one of the continental U.S. every five minutes. It also has the ability to target regional areas where severe weather, hurricanes, wildfires, volcanic eruptions or other high-impact environmental phenomena are occurring as often as every 30 seconds.

While releasing the photos, Stephen Volz, NOAAs Assistant Administrator for Satellite and Information Services, said Seeing these first images from GOES-16 is a foundational moment for the team of scientists and engineers who worked to bring the satellite to launch and are now poised to explore new weather forecasting possibilities with this data and imagery. These incredibly sharp images are everything we hoped for based on our tests before launch.

Earlier views of Connecticut from space

The first photo taken of the Earth from outer space was in October 1946 when a V2 missle was launched from the White Sands Missle Range in New Mexico. Aboard the rocket was a camera that snapped photos of the earth from 67 miles above the ground. The first weather satellites started taking photos in 1960; a year later humans entered outer space.

While photos of Connecticut have been taken from space before, the new images offer much greater details. Through the nearly 60-years of space exploration, millions of photographs have been taken of our planet. At night, the bright lights of the Eastern Seaboard show major population centers along cities and interstate highway.

During the day, New England is easy to find thanks to unmistakable hook of Cape Cod, the urban sprawl of New York City and Long Island.

Seeing Connecticut from space has also been helped with having a native son fly into space. On his four space missions, astronaut Rick Mastracchio often took photos of Connecticut, his home state. The Waterbury native and UConn graduate has used social media to post photos and send tweet greetings to Nutmeg State residents from hundreds of miles above the Earth. His most recent mission ended in May 2014 after he spent 188 days aboard the International Space Station.

If in the maybe not so distant future you make it into space, finding Connecticut could be easily.

Just let New York City, Long Island Sound and the hook of Cape Cod be your guides.
TORRINGTON  Charlotte Hungerford Hospital (CHH) will be offering its popular Freedom From Smoking cessation programs in both Torrington and Winsted this fall as part of their ongoing efforts to help smokers kick the habit and live smoke free.

The FREE program features discussion and skill sessions led by trained, certified American Cancer Society facilitators who understand the motivations and rationalizations of smoking, and use a positive behavior change approach that teaches people how to become permanent non-smokers. Participants attend eight interactive classes with Quit Day midway through the session.

The program will be offered in Torrington on Wednesdays, Oct. 10-Nov. 28, from 4 to 5:30 p.m. in the Conference Room at the CHH Hungerford Center, 780 Litchfield Street, Torrington, just up the hill from the main hospital building.

The program will also be offered on Tuesdays in Winsted at Northwestern Connecticut Community College in the new Joyner Health Science Center (Room #143), Oct. 29-Nov. 27, from 12- 1:30 p.m. and again from 4-5:30 p.m.

In Winsted, CHH is partnering with Northwestern Connecticut Community College in support of their current plan to a create smoke, vape and tobacco free campus in 2019. CHH used a recent grant to train four new facilitators in anticipation of the fall offerings, including Carla Angevine, Susan Murphy, Damaris Sierra, and Maria Capobianco.

In this step-by step program, participants will receive the personal attention they need to help them quit smoking and transition to a healthier, smoke free lifestyle through education, relaxation techniques, and methods of preventing weight gain. said Sandy Markus, long time smoking program facilitator.

As a special incentive, the $75 program fee will be waived for all participants. Call 860-496-6538 to register or receive more information. Space is limited.

According to the American Cancer Society, tobacco use remains the single largest preventable cause of disease and premature death in the US, yet millions of Americans still smoke. For more information about smoking and its dangers, visit the American Cancer Society website at www.cancer.org.

Archaeologist to discuss new book

LITCHFIELD  The Litchfield Historical Society is hosting a talk with the former Connecticut State Archaeologist Nick Bellantoni about his new book The Long Journeys Home: The Repatriations of Henry Opukahaia and Albert Afraid of Hawk, on Sunday, Sept. 23 at 3 p.m.

Henry Opukahaia and Itankusun Wanbli lived almost a century apart and came from different Indigenous Nations - Hawaiian and Lakota. Yet the circumstances of Western imperialism that led them to leave their homelands and come to Connecticut where they died and were buried have striking similarities. In 1992 and 2008, descendant women had visitations that their ancestors wished to come home and they started the repatriation process. CT state archaeologist Nick Bellantoni oversaw the archaeological disinterment and forensic identifications needed to return these men to their respective Native families. In his talk, Bellantoni chronicles these significant stories as examples of the wide-reaching impact of colonialism and the resurgence of Hawaiian and Lakota cultures.

Bellantoni is an associate adjunct professor in the anthropology department at the University of Connecticut and Emeritus Connecticut State Archaeologist at the Connecticut State Museum of Natural History.

Book talks are free for members and $5 for non-members. Signed copies of his book will be available to purchase at the event. Space is limited and registration is required with payment; call 860-567-4501 or email registration@litchfieldhistoricalsociety.org. For more information about this or other programs, visit www.litchfieldhistoricalsociety.org.

Katzin to discuss clockmakings history

EAST LITCHFIELD: Jim Katzin will give a presentation on the rich history of clock making in Litchfield, Sept. 29, 7 p.m. at the East Litchfield Chapel, 62 East Litchfield Road South, Litchfield. He will have several examples of locally made clocks and movements from the early to mid 19th century.

Katzin, an East Litchfield native, has been repairing and collecting American clocks for over 25 years. A life member of the National Association of Watch and Clock Collectors, he was president of the CT chapter of the organization for 12 years.

Admission is $10 to support the preservation and maintenance of the East Litchfield Chapel.

Kent Quiz Night set for Saturday

KENT  Kent Quiz Night will be held on Saturday, Sept. 22 beginning at 7 p.m., with doors opening at 6 p.m. at the Kent Firehouse, 28 Maple Street, Kent.

The Pub Quiz concept (also known as live trivia or table quizzes) was developed in the late 1970s by Sharon Burns & Tom Porter in the United Kingdom. The objective was to get people into pubs on quiet nights. The idea caught on and has been attracting teams ever since. The evenings format is as follows: teams of 4 are formed of adults 18 years of age and above before the event.

The Quizmaster, Sarah Marshall, will ask prewritten questions and mark points as each team answers. Steve Pener, will serve as the charming Emcee. Special guest, Steve Katz, of Blues Project and Blood, Sweat & Tears fame will be on hand to assist in quiz topics.

At the end of the evening, the highest scoring team will win a $200 prize. Bring your own refreshments. Chances for a wine basket are $10 and will be sold throughout the night.

The cost is $50 per team of 4 in advance, or $60 at the door. Register in person at the library or at kentmemoriallibrary.org. Each team must have a name, and is asked to bring a bottle of wine to be put in the basket for the final wine basket prize. All proceeds go to the Kent Memorial Library. For more information call 860-927-3761.

Enrichment classes offered

LITCHFIELD  Enrichment Classes at Foothills Adult & Continuing Education, a program of EdAdvance in Litchfield, covering Litchfield County, offers classes in computers, arts & crafts, self-improvement, recreation, finance, cooking, world languages and excursions. Classes are held in several locations.

EdAdvance also offers opportunities for adults to earn their high school diploma, citizenship and learn English. Register online https://www.regpacks.com/enrichment or call 1-800-300-781.

Visit edadvance.org for PDF of catalog and more information.
Albany County jail

COEYMANS - A top-ranking official in the state's Office of Mental Health was arrested by town police on charges connected to the alleged exploitation of children.

John Allen, a special assistant to Commissioner Ann M. Sullivan, is being held at the Albany County jail on 29 counts of child endangerment, a misdemeanor.
NEW HAVEN  A 25-year-old city man was sentenced to 18 years in prison for his role in a violent New Haven street gang officials busted in 2015, the U.S. attorneys office said in a release.

Luis Padilla, also known as Chewie, was also sentenced Wednesday by U.S. District Judge Janet C. Hall to five years of supervised release.

According to court documents and statements made in court, in January 2014, ATF and the New Haven Police Department began Operation Red Side through a series of controlled narcotics purchases and firearms seizures. The investigation revealed that members and associates of the Red Side Guerilla Brims, a sect of the Bloods street gang based in New Haven, were engaged in narcotics trafficking and related acts of violence, including murder, attempted murder, assaults and armed robberies, the U.S. attorneys office said.

In addition to distributing crack cocaine and other narcotics in and around New Haven, the investigation indicated that members and associates of the RSGB, under the direction of Jeffrey Benton and others, transported the drugs to Bangor, Maine, and sold them in Bangor and its surrounding communities, officials said. The RSGB also traded narcotics for firearms, brought the firearms back to New Haven and distributed them to gang members, according to the release.

Padilla was an RSGB enforcer who committed shootings and robberies on behalf of the gang, federal officials said. He also traveled to Maine several times at Bentons direction to watch over the gangs drug trafficking operation.

Padilla has been detained since Aug. 18, 2014. On that date, a search of his home revealed a loaded .45 caliber handgun and a box of .45 caliber auto ammunition, according to the release. Padilla then began assisting the government in the prosecution of this matter.

On Sept. 29, 2015, Padilla pleaded guilty to one count of engaging in a pattern of racketeering activity, one count of murder in aid of racketeering and one count of possession of a firearm by a previously convicted felon.

In pleading guilty, Padillaadmitted his involvement in the gang-related murders of Derrick Suggs on March 18, 2011; Kevin Lee on April 20, 2011, and Donnell Allick on June 24, 2011, court documents show. He also admitted that he shot and wounded people in New Haven on Feb. 23 and March 29, 2011, and that he participated in a home invasion robbery on Putnam Street in New Haven on May 30, 2012. He further admitted his role in the trafficking of narcotics in Connecticut and Maine, and that, as a convicted felon, he illegally possessed a firearm and ammunition on Aug. 18, 2014, according to court documents.

On March 16, 2017, Padilla pleaded guilty to the additional offenses of attempted Hobbs Act robbery, and carrying and using a firearm during and in relation to a crime of violence. In pleading guilty, Padilla admitted that on March 14, 2009, when he was 16 years old and prior to his membership in RSGB, he shot and killed Thomas Daniels Jr., during a failed robbery attempt in New Haven, according to the release.

As a result of this investigation, 21 members and associates of the RSGB were convicted of federal charges in Connecticut and Maine. The investigation has resolved seven murder cases, four attempted murders and four armed robberies that occurred in 2011 and 2012 and the 2009 murder of Thomas Daniels Jr. Padilla is the last defendant to be sentenced.

Benton pleaded guilty to various offenses stemming from this investigation and admitted that he participated in four gang-related murders and one attempted murder. On Oct. 4, 2017, he was sentenced to 40 years of imprisonment.

U.S. Attorney Durham noted that federal prisoners are required to serve at least 85 percent of their prison term and are not eligible for parole.

This investigation was conducted by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the New Haven Police Department, the Connecticut Department of Correction, the Connecticut State Police, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, the Maine Drug Enforcement Agency and the Hamden Police Department. The New Haven States Attorneys Office also provided critical assistance in the investigation, federal officials said.

An instrumental component of the investigation was the work of the Connecticut State Crime Laboratory in utilizing the National Integrated Ballistic Information Network to analyze ballistics evidence, according to the release.

This matter was prosecuted in the District of Connecticut by Assistant U.S. Attorneys Peter Markle and Jocelyn Kaoutzanis. A related case in the District of Maine was prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorney Joel Casey.

This case is part of Project Safe Neighborhoods, a program bringing together all levels of law enforcement and the communities they serve to reduce violent crime and make neighborhoods safer for everyone, according to the release.
Motorists who cross the Sanibel Causeway between 11 a.m. and 1 p.m. Saturday, Sept. 22, and Sunday, Sept. 23, will not have to pay a toll. A donation from the Southwest Florida Community Foundation will cover the costs during those hours as a way to encourage locals to support Captiva and Sanibel businesses, many of which are feeling economic impacts from the lingering red tide.

Lee County Department of Transportation will place message boards on Thursday to inform motorists of the hours and dates when tolls will be covered by the foundations donation.

The donation comes as the county hosts the annual Island Hopper Songwriter Festival, which runs Sept. 21-30 with events on Captiva this Friday, Saturday and Sunday. (Visit www.islandhopperfest.com.)

The county also has launched a #OneLee campaign, which showcases deals from local businesses to motivate people to shop, dine and play locally. (Visit www.onelee.biz for details.)

Efforts by the City of Sanibel and Lee County continue on the islands beaches and shorelines to pick up dead fish and other marine debris that has been killed by red tide and has washed inland. (For an update on red-tide cleanup funding and efforts, visit www.leegov.com/waterqualityinfo.) The City of Sanibel has suspended parking fees at all Sanibel beaches this month.

The donation from the Southwest Florida Community Foundation toward the Causeway tolls is a separate foundation effort from one announced earlier this month called SWFL Cares. That fund is designed to collect donations to be dispersed through United Way-affiliated nonprofit organizations to help families and individuals who have seen lost wages and other economic impacts due to red tide and blue-green algae. The foundation has already dispersed nearly $30,000 in donations to United Way. (Visit floridacommunity.com.)

The Island Hopper Songwriter Fest also is partnering with the foundation on this effort. Music fans can make a donation during Island Hopper Fest by texting GIVESWFL to 444999. Donations will go directly to the SWFL Cares Fund.

After the Captiva weekend events, the festival moves to downtown Fort Myers on Sept. 24-27 and then wraps up on Fort Myers Beach on Sept. 28-30.

Lee County Parks & Recreation is waiving parking fees now through Sept. 30 at Lynn Hall Memorial Park, 950 Estero Blvd., and Bowditch Point Park, 50 Estero Blvd. Both parks are located on Fort Myers Beach. (Visit www.leeparks.org.) The fee waiver mirrors a decision last week by the Town of Fort Myers Beach to extend the free parking at its sites until the end of the month to assist businesses impacted by red tide.

Source: Lee County
Authorities in China are holding at least one vaccine campaigner and have 'disappeared' another following an attempted protest on Beijing's Tiananmen Square earlier this month, RFA has learned.



Dong Junhua, the parent of a child affected by substandard vaccines from Dancheng county in the central province of Henan, is being held under criminal detention on suspicion of "picking quarrels and stirring up trouble," his wife said in a recent interview.



"They said he was being held under criminal detention for picking quarrels and stirring up trouble," Dong's wife, who gave only her surname Shan, told RFA. "I asked them on what evidence, and they refused to show me, saying I couldn't read it."



Shan said her husband is innocent.



"We didn't do anything wrong," she said. "I don't know what to do right now, and I haven't had any news of him at all."



She said local officials had warned her not to go to Tiananmen Square or government headquarters in Zhongnanhai.



"They said that if I do, I will be detained too," Shan said.



The Chinese Human Rights Defenders (CHRD) network reported that Dong is currently being held in Dacheng County Detention Center, and had been granted a meeting with his lawyers, who were reportedly told that police have recommended Dong be formally arrested, paving the way for a trial.



Meanwhile, Shanghai-based vaccine campaigner Tan Hua "disappeared" in Beijing on Sept. 3 after going to the capital to campaign for compensation for disability, which she says is linked to a rabies vaccine several years ago.



Police also detained Hu Changjie, of Hengyang city in the central province of Henan, for nine days under administrative detention for "disrupting public order," while Jiang Peng of Henan's Hebi city was held for six days on the same charge, and Zou Wanli from Guangshan county was held for 10 days' administrative detention, CHRD said.



"Protesters against government mishandling of scandals over faulty vaccines faced [a] swift police response after trying to demonstrate on Tiananmen Square during the China-Africa Summit on Sept. 3-4," the group, which compiles reports from rights activists inside China, said in a statement on its website.



"The protesters were ... victims of faulty vaccinations, which were believed to have caused permanent health damage, as well as their parents and supporters," it said.



Chinese authorities are continuing to silence parents campaigning for compensation for children harmed by faulty vaccines. An internal police document obtained by parents and shown to RFA last month showed that parents now risk being held in criminal detention on suspicion of colluding with foreign media.



Leading vaccine campaigner He Fangmei, known by her online nickname Shisanmei, was forcibly returned by "interceptors" to her hometown of Xinxiang city, Henan, alongside her husband Li Xin, CHRD said.



He Fangmei became a vocal advocate for families hit by substandard vaccines after the couple's daughter developed gray matter spondylitis from a substandard diptheria tetanus-whooping cough vaccine made by Wuhan Biotechnology at the age of three months.



The couple has also been banned from overseas travel, on grounds that they may "endanger state security," the group said.



"The couple had hoped to take their sick child overseas for treatment," it said, adding that the family were evicted from their home two days later, on Sept. 13.



The campaigning parents say they want the government to face up to its responsibilities in the wake of wave upon wave of vaccine scandals in recent years, and give the families hit by faulty vaccines compensation to help with mounting medical bills.



Parents are calling for a vaccine law, and more timely public information about vaccine safety, as well as help with mounting medical bills for their children, some of whom are severely disabled after receiving substandard vaccines.



China fired senior provincial food and drug administration official Jin Yuhui last week, and is investigating a former top drug regulator after a safety scandal at vaccine maker Changchun Changsheng Biotechnology in the northeastern province of Jilin.



More than 40 government officials, including seven at the provincial level, have been held sanctioned over the scandal by various administrative punishments, including removal from their posts, state-owned Xinhua News Agency reported.



Petitioners and campaigners are generally considered "sensitive persons" under the Communist Partys stability maintenance regime that targets government critics outside of the criminal justice

system.



Rights activists say violence and coercion are becoming more and more common in Chinese law enforcement, as the administration of President Xi Jinping seeks to ensure that nobody criticizes the ruling Chinese Communist Party in any way.



Reported by Yang Fan for RFAs Mandarin Service, and by the Cantonese Service. Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie.


Authorities in the southwestern Chinese province of Yunnan have closed a kindergarten and arrested its principal amid a number of allegations of sexual abuse, official media reported on .



Police in Yunnan's Zhaotong city have detained the head of the New Hope Kindergarten in Xunlong village, a man surnamed Zheng, amid reports that he committed sexual abuse of children in his care, media reports cited the Zhaoyang district propaganda bureau as saying.



"The kindergarten has been shut down, and the case is still under investigation," the China News Service (CNS) reported.



Zheng's arrest comes after reports of the alleged abuse at the privately owned kindergarten, which has around 40 students, surfaced on China's tightly controlled social media platforms.



A propaganda bureau official said police had moved to detain Zheng after receiving complaints from parents of students on Sept. 2.



Chinese preschools and elementary schools have been hit by a wave of abuse allegations and violent attacks in recent years, prompting repeated pledges from the ruling Chinese Communist Party to improve safety.



In May, Chinas Ministry of Education and city-level education officials called for tighter regulation of the preschool education sector and tougher supervision of staff in the wake of allegations of abuse at the RYB New World Kindergarten in Beijing.



Beijing prosecutors indicted a 22-year-old teacher at the school for abusing those in her care by pricking them with needles, because they refused to take a nap.



But state-run Xinhua news agency had earlier reported that police were investigating allegations that children were "reportedly sexually molested, pierced by needles and given unidentified pills."



Parents told RFA at the time that they found the scapegoating of the teacher, identified her only by her surname, Liu, highly suspicious, coming as it did after the announcement that there were "gaps" in the surveillance footage from cameras inside the building.



Widespread lack of accountability

Guangdong-based rights lawyer Sui Muqing said there is a widespread lack of accountability in China that makes it particularly hard to investigate those in power.



"I have found that, once a scandal breaks, the people and organizations responsible, and the departments in charge of them, take a highly biased attitude so as to minimize the fallout to themselves," Sui told RFA. "It's really hard to pursue some wrongdoers."



"I think that this is something to do with the kind of system we have," he said.



The New Hope Kindergarten case isn't the first in Zhaotong, where a teacher surnamed Lu was detained on suspicion of raping several female pupils at Mohei Primary School in Muzhuo township, Xinhua reported.



State media reported that all of the victims were "left-behind" children with both parents working far away in another city. Some 60 million children are currently "left behind" in rural areas of China, reports indicate.



Writer and free-speech activist Huang Meijuan called for tougher penalties in law for the sexual abuse of children.



"The most important thing is that these sorts of crimes carry too light a penalty," Huang said. "I think they don't even get 10 years, which is ... far too low and means that a lot of people aren't frightened off."



"And a lot of people in positions of power like school principals and deputies use their authority to frighten the students, so that they daren't speak out about it," she said.



Last month, a court in the northern region of Ningxia sentenced kindergarten teacher Huang Zhenxin for sexually abusing girls in his care, Xinhua news agency reported.



And in May, Li Jishun, a former primary school teacher in nearby Gansu province, was executed for raping and sexually abusing 26 children at his school.



Figures from the Supreme People's Court in Beijing show a rise in the number of sexual abuse cases to 7,145 from 2012-2014, although no earlier figure was available for comparison, Hong Kong's South China Morning Post reported in August.



Reported by Yang Fan for RFA's Mandarin Service. Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie.
Britains Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt on Thursday called for justice and accountability for Myanmars Rohingya while a U.S. congressman announced a hearing on the treatment of the Muslim minority group, in the latest signs of mounting pressure on Myanmar to bring to justice those responsible for the violent campaign.

During a two-day visit to Myanmar that ended Thursday, Hunt met with State Counselor Aung San Suu Kyi, President Win Myint, and military commander-in-chief Senior General Min Aung Hlaing.

He also toured northern Rakhine state, from where more than 700,000 Rohingya were driven to Bangladesh during a military crackdown in August 2017. There he visited a reception center for Rohingya refugees who will be repatriated. and met with Muslims, Rakhines, Mro, Daingnet, and Hindus who live in the multiethnic state.

What is essential now is that the perpetrators of any atrocities are brought to justice, because without that there can be no solution to the huge refugee problem, Hunt said in a statement issued by the UK government on Thursday. We will use all the tools at our disposal to try and make sure there is accountability.

Hunt will attend the United Nations General Assembly in New York next week to discuss what his country should do about the Rohingya crisis. Myanmar, then known as Burma, was ruled by Britain from 1824 to 1948.

Britain cant act alone, he said. We need to act in concert with other countries; we are a believer in the international rules-based order. Its incredibly important for all of us that those perpetrators face justice.

During a meeting with Aung San Suu Kyi, Hunt asked the Nobel laureate to consider pardoning two Reuters reporters sentenced this month to seven years in prison under a state secrets law while reporting on a massacre of 10 Rohingya men and boys in Rakhine's Maungdaw township.

She indicated that the judicial processes would probably need to be concluded before that could be considered, but I did put that squarely on the table as something I hoped she would consider, Hunt told Reuters.

U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres told reporters at the U.N. on Thursday that the Myanmar government should pardon and free the journalists as soon as possible, Reuters reported.

A U.N.-mandated fact-finding mission that investigated atrocities committed against Rohingya in Rakhine issued a lengthy report on Tuesday detailing violence by security forces and calling for the prosecution of top army commanders, as well as the removal of the countrys powerful military from politics.

Some observers in Myanmar agreed with the fact-finding missions call, while others rejected it.

I think we have to reduce the sector and role of military step by step according to the countrys stability and situation, said Thein Tun Oo, spokesman for the opposition, army-back Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP). The military chief has said that he will decide this based on the countrys situation.

Lawmaker Oo Hla Saw of the Arakan National Party (ANP), which represents the interests of the Buddhist Rakhine people in Rakhine state, called the U.N.s accusations of ethnic cleansing and genocide by Myanmar security forces baseless.

It is a very political agenda and not practical, though perhaps there are some who agree with it, he said. [But] we need the military to be involved in our politics to work with us during our transition period over the next five or 10 years.

We are experiencing many difficulties and trying to do our best, [so] the U.N. calls for the removal of the military from politics is very dangerous.

US Congress hearing on genocide

Myanmar and its military have largely denied atrocities, including killings, torture, rape and arson, against the Rohingya and have defended the crackdown as a legitimate response to deadly attacks by a Rohingya militant group.

Meanwhile, international pressure continues to build for Myanmar to take action against those responsible for the campaign.

The U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee will hold a hearing on Sept. 26 on genocide against the Rohingya.

Evidence of Burmas genocide against the Rohingya continues to grow, said committee chairman Ed Royce (R-Calif.) in a statement issued Wednesday.

The administration has tools at hand to hold Burmese officials accountable, he said. This hearing is an opportunity for members to examine the latest developments in this crisis and review the action thats needed to help stop the violence.

The U.S., European Union, and Canada have imposed sanctions on those responsible for the crackdown on the Rohingya.

Also on Thursday, a group of lawmakers from the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) urged the U.N. to take action on the report issued by the fact-finding mission and ensure justice for the Rohingya who were subjected to atrocities.

The fact-finding missions report adds to the mounting body of evidence that the Myanmar security forces have committed the gravest of crimes  including genocide  against Rohingya people, said Malaysian lawmaker Charles Santiago, who chairs the ASEAN Parliamentarians for Human Rights (APHR).

He called on the U.N. Human Rights Council to set up an international accountability mechanism to document the crimes for future prosecution when it meets next week to vote on a resolution that would do just that.

The APHR has already urged members of the U.N. Security Council to refer the situation in Myanmar to the International Criminal Court to guarantee an investigation of crimes committed by the military across the country.

Western European and Muslim countries are actively working on this ICC issue by interfering with the U.N., and now we have more pressure from the APHR, said Myanmar lawmaker Ba Shein of the ANP.

On Tuesday, ICC chief prosecutor Fatou Bensouda opened a preliminary probe into whether Myanmars forced deportations of Rohingya to Bangladesh could constitute war crimes or crimes against humanity.

The ICC decided earlier this month that it has jurisdiction over the alleged crime of deportation because Bangladesh, heavily affected by the flow of refugees, is a member of the international tribunal though Myanmar is not.



Former UN chief Kofi Annan (C), head of a nine-member advisory commission on Myanmar's Rakhine state, delivers an address at a press conference in Yangon, flanked by panel members Mya Thidar (L) and Saw Khin Tint (R), Dec. 6, 2016. Credit: AFP Repeat whitewash by Myanmar feared

While rejecting international criticism, Ang San Suu Kyis government has set up eight commissions to investigate violence against the Rohingya since 2012 when a communal blowup between Muslims and Buddhist Rakhines in Rakhine state left at least 200 dead and displaced tens of thousands of people.

The most recent independent commission established on July 30 to investigate human rights violations in Rakhine has pledged to conduct its probe with impartiality and to submit a report on its findings to the countrys president in August 2019.

New York-based Human Rights Watch (HRW) said this week that Myanmars commissions to date have all failed to provide credible reports on atrocities against the Rohingya and to ensure they receive justice.

The U.N. Human Rights Council should act now to preserve evidence and create a path to justice for victims of grave crimes in Myanmar, Brad Adams, HRWs Asia director, said in a statement. The council should not wait for the countrys latest commission, which seems designated to dilute international calls for action.

Zaw Myint Pe, a member of a previous inquiry commission on Rakhine state led by Vice President Myint Swe, said the country does not need an international commission to probe the issue.

Formed in December 2016, the commission was tasked with examining the events that led to deadly small-scale attacks by Muslim militants in October of that year in northern Rakhine state and making recommendations to avoid similar attacks in the future.

Our commission and Kofi Annans commission did our jobs and released our reports, he said, referring to another panel chaired by the late former U.N. chief, which called for reviews of the countrys 1982 Citizenship Law that prevents the Rohingya from becoming citizens and an end to restrictions on the Muslim minority to prevent further violence in the region.

Its too bad that this international organization [HRW] didnt read and mention these reports, Zaw Myint Pe said. It raises questions as to whether it really wants justice or peace for Myanmar, or whether its biased.

But Aye Lwin, a Muslim leader in Myanmar and a member of the Annan commission, said his panel recommended that an independent investigation be conducted in Rakhine.

The most recent commission was just formed, but hasnt done anything yet, so its not fair to comment on it now, he said.

Reported by Kyaw Thu, Wai Mar Tun and Kyaw Htun Naing for RFAs Myanmar Service. Translated by Khet Mar. Written in English by Roseanne Gerin.
German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas has called on Albania to intensify its reform efforts and offered further assistance to help the Western Balkan country eventually join the European Union.

However, on a visit to Tirana on September 19, Maas cautioned that there is no guarantee that talks will automatically begin as of the EUs stated goal of June 2019.

In June 2018, EU members agreed to open membership talks with Albania and Macedonia in 2019 if they continue to make sufficient progress on reforms.

Maas told the Albanians that the EU must see substantial advances on the consolidation of the rule of law and independence of the judiciary system.

"The criteria are clear: There should be steps taken for other results on reforms to convince the skeptics in that process," Maas told a news conference. "I am optimistic we will move ahead."

"We will continue to support you in these reform efforts. Any potential blockade mentalities won't help anyone," Maas said.

He said Germany and other EU members consider the prospects for the Western Balkan countries to eventually join the bloc as "not only real but also necessary."

Albanian Foreign Minister Ditmir Bushati said his country already has started the process with regard to the EU and that he considers Germany's assistance as "precious, irreplaceable."

The Western Balkan nations of Slovenia and Croatia have already joined the EU.

Based on reporting by AP and dpa




The independent Bellingcat research organization claims to have more information that the two men suspected in the poisoning of former Russian spy Sergei Skripal have links to Russian military intelligence, known as the GRU.

Bellingcat said on September 20 that a joint investigation with Business Insider "can confirm definitively" that the two suspects, Ruslan Boshirov and Aleksandr Petrov, have links to the GRU, "based on objective data and on discussions with confidential Russian sources familiar with the identity of at least one of the two persons."

On September 14, Bellingcat said it had reviewed Russian documents that indicated the two men had no records in the Russian resident database prior to 2009, a sign they may be working as operatives for the government.

"Crucially," Bellingcat added at the time, "at least one man's passport files contain various 'top-secret' markings which, according to at least two sources consulted by Bellingcat, are typically reserved for members of secret services or top state operatives."

In its latest report, Bellingcat said it and Business Insider obtained Petrov's and Boshirov's border-crossing data for several European and Asian countries. It said the men's names are believed to be aliases.

"Their globe-trotting, unpredictably meandering itinerary is at times reminiscent of characters out of [film series and television program] Mission Impossible, yet a focus on the countries of Western Europe is clearly visible," it said.

Bellingcat said a source in a Western European law enforcement agency informed it that the suspects had been previously arrested in the Netherlands, but "no information has been provided as to the time and context" of the arrests.

Passport Numbers

Bellingcat said it discovered there were just 26 intervening passport numbers between Petrov's document and the cover passport issued for Eduard Shishmakov, aka Shirokov, a former Russian military attache in Warsaw expelled by Poland in 2014 for espionage.

Shishmakovs passport was issued in August 2016, the report said.

The finding suggests that the special authority that issued the passports had only granted 26 passports between April and August 2016, Bellingcat said.

It has been previously reported that the passport numbers of Boshirov and Petrov differed only three digits and that they held "Top Secret" and "Do Not Provide Information" markings.

The documents were allegedly issued by an authority normally reserved for intelligence officers and important government officials, it said.

Skripal and his daughter, Yulia, 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.

In June, a British citizen, Dawn Sturgess, died and her boyfriend, Charlie Rowley, fell ill when they stumbled across remnants of the poison in a town near Salisbury.

Britain on September 5 announced charges against the two Russian men as police issued photographs of the suspects.

The men acknowledged they were in Salisbury at the time, but claimed they were there as tourists.

Russia has denied any involvement in the poisoning.

With reporting by telegraph.co.uk and themoscowtimes.com
KYIV -- It's a measure some Ukrainians claim is necessary to fight Russia's potent "hybrid warfare."

But critics, including Western diplomats in Kyiv, are blasting a moratorium in western Ukraine on all Russian-language books, films, and songs as bigoted and misguided.

Fifty-seven of 84 regional councilors in Lviv, regarded by some as Ukraine's cultural capital, approved the regionwide ban on September 18.

The response has been largely muted within Ukraine, where there are doubts about how energetically it will be enforced, but some influential outsiders are questioning the move.

Canada's ambassador to Ukraine, Roman Waschuk, responded by calling it "just plain dumb."

"The Lviv oblast ban as formulated is narrow-minded, discriminatory and #justplaindumb. And I say this as a diasporic native speaker of Ukrainian, and consistent advocate of affirmative action for cultural products in that language -- but also #diversity," he tweeted.

While Ukrainian is the predominant language in western Ukraine -- especially in Lviv, a province with around 2.5 million residents -- Russian is still widely spoken there.

Russia annexed Ukraine's Crimean Peninsula in March 2014 and has backed a continuing separatist conflict in the country's eastern Donbas region. Moscow has cracked down on pro-Ukrainian activists and closed Ukrainian-language schools in Crimea, and more than 10,300 people have been killed in the conflict, which drags on despite two peace deals and multiple attempts at a cease-fire.

According to the motion, a copy of which was published on the council's website, the moratorium aims to "overcome the consequences of prolonged linguistic Russification" and will remain in place "until the [Russian] occupation of Ukrainian territories comes to an end."

'Playing Into Moscow's Hands'

Moscow justified its invasion of Ukraine by claiming that the government that came to power in Kyiv after street unrest sent Kremlin-friendly President Viktor Yanukovych into exile was discriminating against Ukraine's Russian-speaking population.

Some of Kyiv's subsequent measures appear to have played into its critics' hands. In September, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko signed into law a controversial bill that made Ukrainian the required language of study in state schools from the fifth grade on. The bill still allows students to study their native languages as a separate subject.

Some Ukrainian politicians expressed their discontent, including Yevgeniy Murayev, a lawmaker from the For Life opposition party. "As politicians and members of parliament are supposed to do, I speak the state language [Ukrainian] and use it to communicate in matters of the state," he wrote on Facebook.

"But the rest of the time I do not use it in principle," he added, as a sign of protest against what he called the government's "cultural war."

The passage of the moratorium on Russian-language content came as the city of Lviv opened its 25th annual book forum, the slogan for which is "Market of Freedom."

Judith Gough, the British ambassador to Kyiv, joined Waschuk in blasting the move, which she suggested was intolerant. "I couldn't agree more. C'mon Lviv oblast, you're better than this... (And I say this as a fan/student of both the Ukrainian and Russian languages) #tolerance #diversity."

The condemnation from Moscow was particularly fiery. A Russian State Duma deputy and the leader of the nationalist Rodina party, Aleksei Zhuravlev, called backers of the law "animals" and "Russophobes."

"Soon these reactionaries will start to tear out the tongues of their fellow citizens if they decide that a particular tongue is too Russian," he tweeted.

Sergei Tsekov, a member of the International Relations Committee in the Federation Council, Russia's upper house of parliament, claimed the Lviv motion "violates international law as well as the Ukrainian Constitution," according to Russia's state-run RT TV station.

'How Things Have Changed'

Despite the moratorium, it is unlikely that Russian books will disappear from store shelves or Russian films will be inaccessible, especially given their availability online.

The council's motion does not explain how it plans to enforce the moratorium.

The Lviv councilors who supported the measure called on other regions to take similar measures, adding that they planned to appeal to the Verkhovna Rada, Ukraine's parliament, to introduce a bill to ban Russian content across the country.

Ukraine has already banned popular Russian social networks and blocked the import of several Russian books.

It landed in hot water when a history of the Battle of Stalingrad authored by British historian and bestselling author Antony Beevor was discovered to be among them.

Lamenting the decision of the Lviv regional council and perhaps fearing a turning point in Ukraine, Yuliya Komska, the Ukrainian-born author of books about the Cold War and an associate professor of German at Dartmouth University, recalled a time when there was support for language diversity from west to east. It showed itself when a Yanukovych-era law allowing minorities to introduce their languages in regions where they represented more than 10 percent of the population looked set to be repealed in February 2014, she explained in a tweet.

"My hometown, Lviv, switched to Russian for a day, in protest. Donetsk, then unoccupied, to Ukrainian," she wrote. "Things couldn't be more different now."
The foreign ministers of archrivals India and Pakistan will hold a rare meeting on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in New York later this month, Indias Foreign Ministry said on September 20.

The announcement comes after Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan wrote to his Indian counterpart, Narendra Modi, seeking to resolve outstanding disputes between the two nuclear-armed neighbors, including the issue of the divided region of Kashmir.

Raveesh Kumar, Indias External Affairs Ministry spokesman, told reporters that diplomats from both countries will work out the details of the meeting between the foreign ministers.

Kumar said the meeting will take place at Pakistans request.

Khan wrote: "We owe it to our people, especially the future generations, to peacefully resolve all outstanding issues including the Jammu and Kashmir dispute.

He said Pakistan is ready to discuss the issue of terrorism, a top priority for India.

High-level talks between India and Pakistan are rare. India has long accused Pakistan of arming rebel groups in the disputed Himalayan region of Kashmir. It also blames Pakistan for financing the deadly 2008 terrorist attacks in Mumbai.

Pakistan and India have fought two of their three wars since independence in 1947 over Kashmir, divided between the two countries but sought by each in its entirety.

Based on reporting by AP, AFP
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, September 20)  Defense Secretary Delfin Lorenzana met with his United States counterpart on Monday to discuss the fight against terrorist networks, including ISIS.

U.S. Secretary of Defense James Mattis welcomed Lorenzana at the Pentagon

"The leaders discussed a broad range of defense issues, to include their commitment to fighting terrorism and reaffirmed U.S. military advisory support to assist the Philippines in combatting ISIS and other violent extremist networks," Pentagon Chief Spokesperson Dana White said in a readout.

The two defense officials also reaffirmed the defense relationship between the United States and the Philippines, White said.

She added Mattis also thanked Lorenzana for the Philippines' contribution to maritime security through its air and maritime patrols with Indonesia and Malaysia in the Sulu and Celebes Seas.

In July, U.S. Ambassador to the Philippines Sung Kim said their country will contribute 1.418 billion over the next two years to boost counterterrorism efforts for law enforcement agencies.

"Our joint efforts to confront shared threats to the peace and security of both of our countries is another powerful example of the depth and breadth of our relationship as friends, partners, and allies," it said.

The U.S. pledged nearly 1.4 billion for relief, recovery and rehabilitation efforts in Marawi  where ISIS-inspired Maute rebels attempted to take over in May 2017.
The chief of the Israeli Air Force is traveling to Moscow on September 20 for discussions after a Russian military surveillance plane was shot down over Syrias coast, killing 15 Russian service-members.

Russia has acknowledged that antiaircraft forces of its ally Syria inadvertently brought down the Il-20 plane, but it also blamed Israel for conducting a fighter-jet raid on Syrian forces around the same time.

Israel on September 18 said Syrian antiaircraft batteries "fired indiscriminately" and failed to ensure that no Russian planes were in the air during the incident on September 17.

Russia, along with Iran, has given Syrian President Bashar al-Assad support throughout the countrys seven-year civil war, which began with a government crackdown on protesters in March 2011.

Russian air support has been particularly crucial in allowing Assad to hold off Islamic insurgents and Western-backed rebels and maintain power.

The Israeli Army said Major General Amikam Norkin and other top officers will travel to Moscow to "present the situation report of the event regarding all aspects, including the pre-mission information and the findings of the [Israel Defense Forces] inquiry."

It added that the delegation would "present the continuous Iranian attempts to transfer strategic weapons to [Hizballah]...and to establish an Iranian military presence in Syria."

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu offered Russia "all necessary information" to investigate.

Russian President Vladimir Putin, who spoke to Netanyahu by phone on September 18, called it "a chain of tragic chance events."

But he added that Russia needed to "seriously get to the bottom of what happened" and said he accepted Israels offer to provide information and that his government would study the details.

The Israeli military said its jets had targeted a Syrian site that was in the process of transferring weapons to Iran-backed Hizballah militants. It added that Israeli planes were already in Israeli airspace when Syria fired the missiles that hit the Russian plane.

Israel insisted it warned Russian forces of its raid ahead of time in accordance with previous agreements.

Russias Defense Ministry said the Israeli warning came less than a minute before the strike, and it accused the Israeli military of using the Russian plane as a cover to dodge Syrian defense systems.

Meanwhile, U.S. officials expressed sorrow over the shootdown of the Russian plane and added that American forces were not involved in the incident.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo criticized Iran, which has reportedly shipped sophisticated weaponry to the Hizballah fighters in Lebanon.

President Donald Trump also expressed concern about the downed Russian plane, calling it a "very sad thing" and saying it was "not a good situation."

With reporting by AFP and AP
Russias Supreme Court has sharply narrowed when people can be charged under the countrys extremism laws, saying that simply liking or reposting material on social media does not alone constitute a crime.

The September 20 ruling follows a string of recent cases in which Russians have been charged for publishing materials, sometimes satirical, to social-media platforms such as VKontakte and Facebook.

Kremlin critics say that the cases are part of an ongoing government crackdown on online speech and that the authorities have used extremism laws to stifle dissent.

Vladimir Davydov, a deputy chairman of the court, told reporters on September 20 that merely reposting material on social media doesnt automatically mean its a crime.

Authorities must prove there was intent to foment hatred or ethnic hostility, he said.

Judgesshould check not the actual fact of publication, not the repost, not the like, but they should check the actual motives, he said.

He said the court would also review earlier convictions on extremism-related charges.

A growing number of Russians have been caught up by authorities strict -- and some say overly broad --interpretation of the countrys extremism laws.

Last year, a 27-year-old man in the city of Cheboksary was found guilty of "mass distribution of extremist materials" when he reposted a news item about his earlier conviction for reposting "extremist" content.

Authorities have also taken a dim view of satirical material and online publications, such as Internet memes, that poke fun at religious figures and beliefs.

In August, a 38-year-old man in the city of Barnaul was charged for a social-media posting that lampooned the head of the Russian Orthodox Church for wearing a pricey wristwatch.

With reporting by Current Time TV
Electoral authorities in Russia's Far Eastern Primorye region annulled the result of a disputed gubernatorial runoff vote, after the country's top election official said it was marred by "serious violations."

A total of 12 members of Primorye's election commission on September 20 voted in favor of the annulment of the result of the closely contested vote in the region, where the Communist Party cried foul after the Kremlin-backed incumbent surged ahead at the end of the ballot count. One election commission member voted against the proposal.

It is the first time a runoff has been annulled in Russia since 1996, according to media reports.

A new election is to be held within three months of the annulled September 16 vote.

The runoff was thrown into dispute in the final stages of the vote count early on September 17, triggering tension in the Far Eastern region.

In a last-minute reversal, the candidate from the Kremlin-controlled United Russia party, acting Governor Andrei Tarasenko, suddenly erased Communist rival Andrei Ishchenko's substantial lead and surged ahead.

"We believe that in the circumstances it is not possible to reliably understand the result of the will of the people, which means we can't declare either of the candidates elected," Primorye election commission head Tatyana Gladkikh said on September 20.

Tarasenko called the decision to have a rerun "fair," telling Russian media, "There have been too many complaints."

However, Ishchenko said he will appeal the decision in court, claiming he should be declared the winner of the original vote.

Communist Party chief Gennady Zyuganov has called for a criminal investigation and appealed to President Vladimir Putin to look into the situation. He also promised to hold a nationwide protest action on September 22 if there was no progress by then.

Hundreds of supporters already held a protest in Primorye's capital, Vladivostok, on September 17.

In Moscow, Central Election Commission (TsIK) chief Ella Pamfilova welcomed the decision of the regional election commission, saying that "there was no other way out in this situation."

On September 19, Pamfilova recommended that the commission annul the vote result, citing a number of violations, which included ballot-box stuffing, vote-buying, forcing people to vote, and altering records of the count.

She also said that culprits should be punished for fraud that "shocked" election officials.

Putin's spokesman Dmitry Peskov said the administration "certainly appreciates and supports the TsIK's position."

Kremlin critics consider the Communist Party a pliant part of Putin's ruling system, and it supports Putin's initiatives with some frequency, but the rivalry on the regional level is very real and any Communist victory is embarrassing for Putin and United Russia, which dominates politics nationwide.

Out of 21 Russian regions in which gubernatorial elections were held on September 9, Primorye was one of four where United Russia faced runoffs after failing to win 50 percent of the vote. The other three runoffs will be held on September 23.

With reporting by Reuters, AFP, Interfax, and RIA Novosti
Members of the Shiite minorities in Afghanistan and Pakistan have commemorated Ashura, the holiest celebration in their religious calendar, amid heightened security measures against possible sectarian attacks.

The festival making the seventh-century killing of Imam Hussein, a grandson of the Prophet Muhammad, this year fell on September 20.

In the Shi'ite neighborhoods of the Afghan capital, Kabul, armed volunteer groups stood guard at mosques and major intersections.

Large vehicles were also banned from streets where places of worship are located to prevent car-bomb attacks, according to Basir Mujahid, a spokesman for Kabul's police chief.

A series of deadly attacks on Afghanistans mainly ethnic Hazara Shiite minority in recent weeks had fueled fears of more violence during Ashura.

The Sunni extremist group Islamic State (IS), which considers Shia "apostates" who deserve death, claimed responsibility for those attacks.

In neighboring Pakistan, which has been hit by frequent sectarian violence, paramilitary troops and police officers fanned out to protect processions by Shiite mourners.

Mobile phone services were also cut in big cities holding commemorations for fear of bombings, and motorbikes were stopped from carrying multiple passengers to prevent drive-by shootings.

The Ashura day of mourning is marked with public rituals that involve men and women dressed in black parading through the streets slapping their chests and chanting.

Some Shiite men seek to emulate Husseins martyrdom at Karbala, in todays Iraq, by flagellating themselves with chains or cutting their foreheads.

With reporting by Reuters, AP, and the BBC
WASHINGTON -- The U.S. State Department said it was blacklisting nearly three dozen Russian people and companies with ties to military and intelligence agencies, in its latest effort to punish Moscow for malign activities.

Among those targeted by the effort, announced on September 20, were the 12 military intelligence officers who had been indicted by Special Counsel Robert Mueller earlier this year for alleged meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

Many of those named have also been sanctioned or blacklisted previously, under different designations, meaning that the new measures were unlikely to have any significant effect.

In all, 33 Russians and Russian companies were added to the blacklist, which also included Yevgeny Prigozhin, a Russian tycoon known colloquially as Putins chef for the catering contracts his company has with the Kremlin.

His catering companies and a private military company known as PMC Wagner, whose fighters have turned up in conflicts in Syria, Ukraine, and Africa, were also blacklisted.

Prigozhin and his companies were indicted by Mueller in February for alleged election meddling. He has repeatedly denied the U.S. accusations, responding to the February indictment by saying: "If they want to see the devil, let them."

The move was taken under the 2017 law known as CAASTA that was overwhelmingly passed by Congress over President Donald Trumps objections. The law was passed specifically to target Russia, along with several other countries, setting up a wider framework for punitive financial measures, while also making it harder for the White House to lift existing measures.

"The ultimate target of these sanctions is Russia," a State Department official told reporters. "They areaimed at imposing costs upon Russia in response to its malign activities."

Another, even harsher bill currently making its way through Congress aims to punish Russia by targeting its ability to issue sovereign debt, going after major energy companies like Gazprom and Rosneft, and other things.

The legislation, known by its acronym DETER, has bipartisan support, but its unclear whether it will come up for a vote before the November midterm elections in the United States.

State Department officials also named a Chinese military agency and its director for buying Russia fighter jets and an antiaircraft system.

Officials said the company, Equipment Development Department, and chief officer, Li Shangfu, engaged in "significant transactions" with Russias main arms exporter Rosoboroneksport.
Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko has warned that there is a risk of international sanctions imposed on Russia for its actions in Ukraine being eased.

In his annual address to parliament on Ukraine's domestic and foreign policy, Poroshenko warned on September 20 that making concessions to Russia before it had handed the Crimean Peninsula back to Ukraine would be a defeat for international law.

"We will consistently oppose attempts to ease the sanctions pressure on Russia," he told the Verkhovna Rada. "But know that there is a risk of softening [sanctions]."

Moscow's takeover of the Crimean Peninsula in March 2014 and its support for separatists in eastern Ukraine prompted the United States, the European Union, and others to impose sanctions on Russia.

Fighting between Ukrainian government forces and the Russia-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine has killed more than 10,300 since April 2014.

Peace accords signed in Belaruss capital, Minsk, in September 2014 and February 2015, have failed to put an end to the fighting.

Outside the parliament building on September 20, at least four people were injured in clashes between police officers and demonstrators calling for foreigners who take part in the conflict to be granted citizenship

Based on reporting by Reuters, Interfax, and RFE/RLs Ukrainian Service
Ukrainian lawmakers have voted to submit draft bills to the country's top court that would enshrine Ukraines course toward Euro-Atlantic integration in the constitution.

A total of 321 lawmakers voted on September 20 to appeal to the Constitutional Court to review the proposed amendments.

After the court issues its judgment, the draft bills will return to the Verkhovna Rada where they will need at least 300 votes to pass.

Earlier in the day, President Petro Poroshenko told lawmakers that Ukraine needs the constitutional amendments to make EU and NATO membership its long-term goal.

In his annual address to parliament on Ukraine's domestic and foreign policy, Poroshenko said the Ukrainian armed forces will meet the criteria for NATO membership by 2020.

The move comes amid continued fighting between Ukrainian government forces and Russia-backed separatists in a conflict that has killed more than 10,300 in eastern Ukraine since April 2014.

Peace accords signed in Belaruss capital, Minsk, in September 2014 and February 2015, have failed to put an end to the fighting.

Moscow's support for the separatists and its seizure of Ukraine's Crimean Peninsula in March 2014 prompted the United States, the European Union, and others to impose sanctions on Russia.

In his speech, Poroshenko warned that there was a risk of the international sanctions imposed on Russia for its actions in Ukraine being eased.

"We will consistently oppose attempts to ease the sanctions pressure on Russia," he said. "But know that there is a risk of softening [sanctions]."

Making concessions to Russia before it had handed the Crimean Peninsula back to Ukraine would be a defeat for international law, the president added.

As Poroshenko delivered his address, four people were reported injured in clashes between police officers and demonstrators outside the parliament building. At least one police officer was taken to hospital.



The demonstrators were calling for a relaxation of the rules on gaining Ukrainian citizenship for foreigners who have fought for Ukraine against the separatists in the countrys east.

With reporting by Reuters, Interfax, and AP
Ukraine says it will officially notify now-bitter rival Russia on September 21 that it will not extend its treaty of friendship, cooperation, and partnership with Moscow.

Ukrainian Foreign Minister Pavlo Klimkin said on September 19 that Kyiv will notify all relevant organizations, including the United Nations, about the move.

The 10-year treaty was originally signed on May 31, 1997, with a clause that set its automatic extension if the parties did not take action to end it. The treaty took effect on April 1, 1999.

Neither party notified the other of the wish to terminate before October 2008, thereby automatically prolonging it for another 10 years.

The treaty sets out the principle of strategic partnership, the inviolability of existing borders, respect for territorial integrity, and an obligation not to use one nation's territory to damage the others security.

"As friendly, equal, and sovereign states, the [parties] shall base their relations upon mutual respect and trust, strategic partnership, and cooperation," Article 1 of the treaty states.

Ukraine announced its independence from the Soviet Union on August 24, 1991, almost four months before the official dissolution of the Soviet Union.

Ties between Ukraine and Russia have worsened since Moscow illegally annexed Ukraine's Crimea region and instigated a conflict between pro-Kremlin separatists and Ukrainian armed forces in eastern Ukraine in 2014.

More than 10,300 people have been killed in the conflict.

The United States and the European Union condemned Russias actions in Ukraine and have slapped a series of sanctions against Moscow in reaction.

Based on reporting by The Kyiv Post, TASS, and Interfax
The U.S. ambassador to Germany has told Bloomberg News that automaker Volkswagen has agreed to comply with U.S. sanctions and suspend most of its operations in Iran.

"We are pleased with this decision because Iran diverts its economic resources away from its people to spread violence and instability across the globe," Ambassador Richard Grenell said on September 19.

Grenell said U.S. officials and Volkswagen finalized the details of the pullout on September 18 following weeks of talks.

The German automaker will still be allowed to conduct some business in Iran under a humanitarian exception, the ambassador added.

A spokesman for the Wolfsburg-based carmaker told the AFP news agency that it was sticking to its long-standing position that it "obeys all national and international laws as well as export regulations."



"We are also taking into account possible effects related to the reintroduction of U.S. sanctions," the spokesman also said.



AFP quoted a source familiar with the talks as saying that Volkswagen and the U.S. administration had not yet reached a final accord.



The White House has not commented.



Volkswagen announced last year that it planned to begin selling cars in Iran for the first time in 17 years.



But U.S. President Donald Trump in May withdrew from a 2015 nuclear deal that Iran signed with six world powers and last month began reimposing some of the sanctions that had been eased in return for curbs on Tehran's nuclear programs.

Trump complained that the deal did not do enough to prevent Iran from eventually developing the capacity to produce a nuclear weapon.

He also alleged that Iran was violating the spirit of the accord by financing militant activity in the region, an allegation Tehran has denied.

The reimposition of sanctions has weakened the Iranian economy, with the countrys currency, the rial, falling sharply against hard currencies in recent months.

Britain and France, along with other European nations, have said they want to protect European companies that continue doing business in Iran.

However, international companies including French oil firm Total, German carmaker Daimler, and Deutsche Telekom have pulled out of the country since the U.S. decision to withdraw from the nuclear deal, fearing they will be targeted by secondary sanctions.

With reporting by Bloomberg, AFP, and Reuters
Nabeel Kurshid

BARRISTERS defending two men accused of rape have claimed the alleged victim has wrongly identified the pair.

Nabeel Kurshid (34), of Weetwood Road, Rotherham, and Iqlak Yousaf (34), of Tooker Road, Rotherham, are accused of raping the girl between 2002 and 2003 when she was 14 or 15.

The prosecution say Yousaf was known as Iqqy and Kurshid as Nabby.

Another unidentified man, known as Shiraz, is also said to have been involved in the rape which allegedly occurred in a lay-by near Sherwood Forest.

After the incident, the woman became pregnant and had a termination.

The pair are on trial at Sheffield Crown Court alongside six other men who are accused of 28 child sexual exploitation offences against five girls.

The woman, now aged 31, said she was confident she had identified the right men.

Ms Julia Smart, defending Kurshid, who she said was also known as Nabeel Akhtar Kurshid, claims the complainant has wrongly identified her client after seeing his Facebook account, which was under the name Nabeel Akhtar.

The woman disputed this and said the Nabby from her teenage years and the Facebook Nabby are the same person, adding: I would never forget.

Mr David McGonigal, defending for Yousaf (pictured below), said to the woman: You told police that your memory had been affected by some drugs you had become addicted to and you took a lot of when you were 16 to 17  cannabis and amphetamine.

The woman replied: Specific little details, the main bits, I never forget.

It was just tiniest details  descriptions of body parts, scars, that were not coming back to me.

Mr McGonigal suggested she had met Yousaf in 2004  after the Sherwood Forest incident  while he was working as a taxi driver  which the woman denied.

Mr McGonigal said: Are you mixing him up?

She replied: Everything I am saying is correct.

Describing the Sherwood Forest incident, she said: I felt like they had gone through me like one after another. I was taken advantage of.

Mr McGonigal said: During this incident you said you hadnt had alcohol but had taken cannabis.

You were able to decide you were able to have sex with Nabby, able to get out the car.

You say he took you for a walk and then you knew what he wanted and you laid down and had sex.

The woman answered: Yes.

Mr McGonigal said: You were not so comatose you didnt know what was going on?

She said: Yes thats correct.

He said: The next person has laid down with you  you have not said you didnt want to have sex.

She replied: I didnt say anything.

He said: When you first spoke to police in 2017, you didnt really describe the incident as rape and you felt words were being put in your mouth.

She replied: I still dont describe it as rape. I still dont describe it as grooming.

The barrister added: You have made a mistake in relation to identifying Iqqy as the person you slept with and took you to Sherwood Forest.

She answered: I made no mistake. I am confident this is the person from the incident.

Re-examining the woman, prosecutor Ms Michelle Colborne, asked: How quickly after Nabby got off was the next man there?

She replied: Not even a minute.

Ms Colborne said: Did any of these men ask to have sex with you.

She replied: Not the second two, no.

The trial continues.
Some of the victims came from the same family. The accident occurred at a rail crossing. The crossing has warning lights and red-and-white barriers. The vehicle involved was an electric cargo bike, which has a large wooden or plastic box mounted to the frame in front of the rider. It belonged to a childrens day care center and was taking children to school. The two critically injured victims, a child and the woman operating the vehicle, were taken to a local hospital. The cause of the collision is under investigation. initial investigations suggested that the barriers at the crossing were working correctly at the time of the accident.



Cargo-bikes vehicles

Oss Mayor Wobine Buijs-Glaudemans offered condolences to the families, the school, the day care center and everybody else involved. The cargo vehicle can reach a top speed of 15mph and the box has space for up to ten small children. They are now very popular among Dutch parents for carrying young children. Earlier this year, the head of the Dutch national Road Safety organisation Veilig Verkeer Nederland [Safe Traffic Netherlands] branded the Stints dangerous, and said they should require a license.
At least 12 people were killed when a portion of the mountain collapsed and buried some 20 houses in the Naga City, Cebu, Philippines, early Thursday. Eight other people were reported injured while 64 others remain missing, authorities said. The houses buried under mounds of rocks and soil are located near a quarry site. Even four-story houses are buried, said a witness. Residents there were advised to evacuate from the area about 2 weeks ago after fissures were spotted in the ground. Rescuers from all over the province were deployed to the area.

Teams from the Bureau of Fire Protection, Philippine National Police, Provincial Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Office, Emergency Rescue Unit Foundation and the local government units of Argao, Cebu City, Mignlanilla and Mandaue are already at the landslide site. According to the Cebu provincial government, heavy equipment has also been ordered deployed to the area affected by the landslide. Food will also be provided to evacuees and survivors by the provinces Social Welfare and Development Office. Civil defence officials in the region said landslides are fairly rare on Cebu. Rains have lashed Cebu since typhoon Ompongs onslaught last weekend. More than 300 families were evacuated following the landslide.
Punjab CM Assures Afghan Ex-President Hamid Karzai of Greater Support

Punjab Chief Minister Captain Amarinder Singh has assured former Afghan President Hamid Karzai of greater strategic support and cooperation for the war-torn nation. The Chief Minister conveyed this to Karzai when the latter called on him at his official residence for a breakfast meeting. Karzai thanked the Chief Minister for inviting him to the Kisan Mela being held at PAU as Chief Guest. Afghanistan and Punjab shared close cultural ties and could benefit through mutual cooperation and exchange of technical knowhow in the fields of Agriculture and Horticulture, he said.

Karzai thanked the Chief Minister for inviting him to the Kisan Mela

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The visiting dignitary called for further cementing the traditional bonds of peace and brotherhood between Afghanistan and India, particularly Punjab. The Chief Minister said since Afghanistan and India shared warm and friendly historical relations, Punjab would be happy to provide all possible assistance in the development of Afghanistan.

Afghanistan and Punjab shared close cultural ties

The Chief Minister, who presented Karzai with a set of books authored by him and a shawl as token of love and affection, also invited him to visit Patiala on his next visit to see the rich heritage of the historic city. The former Afghanistan President was accompanied by ex-Foreign Minister Zarar Ahmad Osmani, his Education & Cultural Advisor Zalmani Hewadmai and Gautam Sabharwal.

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The former Afghanistan President was accompanied by ex-Foreign Minister Zarar Ahmad Osmani

Prominent amongst others who were present at the meeting were Cabinet Ministers Brahm Mohindra, Manpreet Singh Badal, Tript Rajinder Singh Bajwa, Sukhjinder Singh Randhawa and Chairman Punjab State Farmers Commission Ajaiveer Jakhar besides Chief Principal Secretary to CM Suresh Kumar, Additional Chief Secretary (Home) NS Kalsi, ACS Agriculture Viswajeet Khanna and DGP (Intelligence) Dinkar Gupta.
Punjab Govt Approves Rules For FRBM Act

The Punjab Cabinet on Thursday took a slew of vital decisions for the development of the state, including approval of the rules for implementation of Punjab Fiscal Responsibility and Budget Management (FRBM) Act, 2003. The move will help the state achieve specific fiscal targets within a stipulated time period to avail the benefit of the Centres Debt Consolidation & Relief Facility for states, an official spokesperson disclosed after the Cabinet meeting, chaired by Chief Minister Captain Amarinder Singh.

The Act was framed by the Government of India on the basis of the model draft bill circulated by the Reserve Bank of India, suitably amended from time to time. As per the recommendations of the 14th Finance Commission, each state is mandatorily required to enact a Fiscal Responsibility Legislation to realize the desired targets.

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The framing of these rules was also necessary as the state Government had entered an agreement with the Asian Development Bank, under which it would get a loan of USD 200 million (Rs. 1200 crore approximately). On fulfilment of the necessary conditions, the first tranche of USD 50 million (Rs. 316.92) and the 2nd tranche of USD 50 million (Rs. 337.06 crore) had already been received by the state, said the spokesperson.

As per the conditions of the agreement for release of 3rd tranche of USD 100 million, it was necessary for the state Government to make Fiscal Responsibility and Budget Management Rules. Meanwhile, in another decision, the cabinet gave nod to frame the Punjab Waqf Rules, 2018 under the Waqf Act, 1995 (Central Act 43 of 1995). As per sub-section (1) of the section 109 of the aforesaid act, the State Government has been authorized to make rules by notification in the official gazette to carry out the intended purposes of the Act.

Notably, the Waqf Act, 1995 has been enacted by the Parliament for providing better administration of Auqaf and for matters connected therewith or incidental thereto. The Cabinet has also approved the annual administrative reports for works executed by Soil and Water Conservation Department for the year 2014-15 and Cooperation Department for the year 2015-16.
SCHUYLERVILLE, N.Y.  Throughout the country Wednesday, arborists spent time beautifying national and state veterans cemeteries.

The fourth annual event provided an opportunity for people to give back. It also gave 15 Environmental Conservation and Forestry students an opportunity to learn from professionals.

Its great experience for the kids. They get to see what other companies are doing, said instructor Dennis Flynn. Ive got three or four students that are interested in arboriculture, so theyre seeing what it takes to be an arboriculturist.

It was the first time WSWHE BOCES sent Career and Technical Education students to Gerald B.H. Solomon Saratoga National Cemetery for the event. Flynn heard about the program through the New York Arbor Association.

Paul Gardner organized the project at the local level for the second straight year.

For me, its awesome to be involved with a national project like this, to be able to come here and help make this a safe and beautiful place for the families that have people who are buried here, said Gardner. Its great for our industry to be able to give back in that sense.

Last year about 30 professionals participated at Saratoga National Cemetery in the Saluting Branches Day of Service, which was founded by Rainbow Treecare, located in Minnetonka, Minn. This year over 60 participated at Saratoga National Cemetery, and its the only cemetery in New York State to have been beautified Wednesday. Gardner said he was excited to have high school students help.

In our industry there is such a shortage of guys coming into the field.  So Im hoping that these guys can come here, see how this works on a commercial operation and maybe spark some interest, said Gardner. Maybe theyll want to pursue a career in arboriculture.

Students learned from two professionals, both of National Grid, on Wednesday. Dylan Bruce, a senior at Cambridge High School, began his second year in the Environmental Conservation and Forestry program earlier this month. Bruce was tasked with using his skills with a chainsaw to cut down trees. He spoke about the benefit of working with experts in the field.

Most of it is experience, thats why its so nice to have a professional here, said Bruce. Its not just putting a wedge in and knocking it down. You have to take in wind, how many branches on each side and the lean of the tree.

Flynn echoed the importance of having professionals instructing students Wednesday.

Its great, because they are talking with students. Most of the trees we have here are marked in red, but there are three that werent, said Flynn. They made recommendations to the grounds here to take them down, and as they were making recommendations the students were actually able to hear why they should be taken down. Weve got one working with pruning and one working with felling, and theyre helping the kids out at both ends.

Since its inception, thousands in the industry have joined together to donate an estimated $4.5 million in services at veterans properties across the U.S.

We developed Saluting Branches as a green industry project to honor veterans and improve the environment through the science of tree care, said Deb Peterson, Saluting Branches coordinator in a release. This is an important event for the arborist community and allows us to give back to those who have served us.

Students learned a valuable experience Wednesday. Gavin Crawford, a senior at Galway High School, mentioned how students in the Environmental Conservation and Forestry program learn how to run bulldozers, sharpen and maintain chainsaws and handle log loaders. Crawford plans to work for a logging company after graduation, and hes enjoyed his time in the program.

Its been a great time. [Flynn] knows what hes talking about. You learn from a really great guy, said Crawford. He likes to have us learn hands-on, which is really good for people trying to get into this field.
This article was supported by The Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center.

[SINGAPORE] Joel Kaiser arrived in Nepal just after the deadliest disaster to hit the Himalayan country. It was late in April 2015; two major earthquakes had killed nearly 9,000 people and injured close to 17,000 more. Kaiser, a seasoned humanitarian and emergency response specialist, was trying to figure out how to get emergency supplies to villagers in a tiny hamlet high up in the mountains.

There was only one road, and it was very steep on either side, recalls Kaiser from WeRobotics, a not-for-profit organisation dedicated to providing humanitarian aid, social development, and environmental protection through the use of robotics. Relief distribution had to be done on that road, and the team was thinking ahead to the risks in case large crowds showed up. So we wanted to make a map of the village just in case we had some sort of security problem.

To make the map, Kaiser and his team from AidRobotics  a WeRobotics programme that focuses on disaster response  would use a small drone they had brought with them to Nepal. They needed roughly 20 minutes to fly the drone over the village to snap some pictures. But first, they needed the mayors permission.

Its important to reach out to the local community before flying unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) overhead, says Kaiser, even when time is of the essence.

Engaging the community is one guiding principle, along with 14 others, that form the Humanitarian UAV Code of Conduct  a set of guidelines established in 2014 that informs the safe, responsible, and effective use of drones in humanitarian settings.

The past five years have seen humanitarian organisations increasingly embrace UAV usage in their work. Because they are small, lightweight and can be remotely operated, drones have many useful applications. Most often, they are used to map out disaster-affected areas, providing aerial images that are much more detailed than those taken by satellites. Drones are also deployed to help with search and rescue efforts, for monitoring and surveillance, and to deliver food, medical supplies, and other small cargo.

Because laws in many countries around drones are uncertain or unstable, its still really unclear where drones used for emergency response purposes legally stand  how that pertains to property rights, licensing, and so on, Faine Greenwood

In late 2015, a survey of close to 200 humanitarian aid workers found that 60 per cent believed drones could help their work. However, 86 per cent felt clearer guidelines and rules were needed.

A code is born

A couple of years earlier, Patrick Meier found himself sharing the same sentiment. It was November 2013 and Meier, WeRobotics co-founder and an expert in humanitarian technologies, was in the Philippines aiding the UN relief effort following Typhoon Haiyan.

There, he encountered an unprecedented scenario. In no other disaster beforehand had there been any drone team that I had come across, let alone half a dozen in the space of a week, recalls Meier.

But I soon realised that the teams werent quite sure how to share imagery with governments, let alone humanitarians and the local community, he says. Wanting to help, Meier spent an evening Google-searching codes of conduct and best practices for drone use following a disaster. Much to my alarm, I didnt find anything. And I was very concerned because clearly this wasnt just going to be a one-off, says Meier.

When he got back home, he founded the Humanitarian UAViators Network as a platform to discuss best practices in the field  and drafting a code of conduct was the first order of business.

The code was officially launched in March 2014, and its website went live after a workshop Meier organised at the Rockefeller Foundation's Bellagio Center in Italy. Since then, it has been revised several times following consultation with humanitarian organisations such as the American Red Cross, Doctors Without Borders (MSF-Medicins Sans Frontieres), and the World Bank.

Among its recommendations, the code calls for drone operators to respect universal humanitarian principles such as impartiality, to prioritise safety above all else, to be sensitive to conflict, and to collect, use and store data responsibly. It also emphasises building trust with local communities by taking the time to explain projects and share flight plans with them.

I think a standardised code of conduct is absolutely essential because without one, basically anyone with a drone could call themselves a disaster responder, and thats really dangerous and problematic, says Faine Greenwood from the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, where she studies the use of UAVs and satellites in humanitarian situations.

Greenwood cites past incidences where well-meaning but untrained drone operators failed to coordinate with flight controllers, making it difficult for manned aircraft to fly. In some cases people on the ground were angered or frightened because they werent informed of what was going on beforehand.

Earlier this month, Amrita Lal, WeRobotics Pacific Flying Labs coordinator, was working with the Red Cross in Fiji to help survey damage to houses following Cyclone Keni. She avoided taking aerial shots of one village in particular because it was close to the airport and photographing it needed special permission from the airmen, and there just wasnt time to get it. The code is never far from her mind when she works. [It] makes sure that people are not doing whatever they want, Lal says.

Uttam Pudasaini saw this disregard for flying over restricted areas first hand. In the weeks following the 2015 earthquakes, Pudasaini, the coordinator of WeRobotics Nepal Flying Lab, witnessed how operators would fly their drones over the capitals seven World Heritage Sites without government permission.

The next frontiers

What he would like to see, however, is the code becoming better integrated with country-level regulations.

That is the number one challenge, agrees Harvards Greenwood. Because laws in many countries around drones are uncertain or unstable, its still really unclear where drones used for emergency response purposes legally stand  how that pertains to property rights, licensing, and so on.

Another pressing concern at the forefront of practitioners minds is data protection. Incorporated into the code in 2015, privacy guidelines currently recommend things like collecting informed consent where possible, having a data management plan, and using blurring and other technologies to protect those photographed.

But theres room to do more. Theres a whole range of things to consider, says Sanjana Hattotuwa, special advisor to the ICT4Peace Foundation  things like what imagery is being gathered, how it is used, who has access to it, how it is retained and for how long, he says.

Meier, the codes creator, is acutely aware of data privacy and protection issues. Hes made the topic a priority for next months meeting in Boston, where experts will gather to discuss how to update the code. Lets not wait for our Facebook moment, he says.

The next big frontier for the code is how to use drones in conflict environments, says Greenwood. Humanitarian law is really unclear on the context of telling small drones apart from one another in the air, she explains. This means you could have situations where a humanitarian, a reporter or a member of ISIS are all flying identical consumer drones.

Something else that needs to be worked into future versions is how to use machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) to process the large amount of data thats collected with drones.

Theres a certain inevitability to seeing more drones being used in humanitarian work as drone technology, both hardware and software, evolves in the coming years, says Kaiser. He hopes that more information means better decision-making and more lives saved. And he hopes that one day drones will become a go-to solution for a lot of humanitarian decision-makers.

This article was supported by The Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center. For nearly 60 years the Bellagio Center has supported individuals working to improve the lives of poor and vulnerable people globally through its conference and residency programs, and has served as a catalyst for transformative ideas, initiatives, and collaborations.

From November 5  December 3, 2018, the Bellagio Center will host a special thematic residency on Science for Development, with a cohort of up to 15 scholars, practitioners, and artists whose work is advancing, informing, communicating, or is inspired by the use or design of science and technology to address social and environmental challenges around the world.
Stiff microbial films often coat medical devices, household items and infrastructure such as the inside of water supply pipes, and can lead to dangerous infections. Researchers have developed a system that harnesses the power of bubbles to propel tiny particles through the surfaces of these tough films and deliver an antiseptic deathblow to the microbes living inside.

Biofilms are slimy colonies of microbes held together by internal scaffolds, clinging to anything they touch. About 80 percent of all medical infections originate from biofilms that invade the inner workings of hospital devices and implants inside patients. Eradication is difficult because traditional disinfectants and antibiotics cannot effectively penetrate a biofilm's tough surface, the researchers said.

In the journal Applied Materials and Interfaces, a team led by researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign describes how they used diatoms -- the tiny skeletons of algae -- loaded with an oxygen-generating chemical to destroy microbes.

"Most of us get those black or yellow spots in our showers at home," said co-author Hyunjoon Kong, a professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering and a Carle Illinois College of Medicine affiliate. "Those spots are biofilms and most of us know it takes a lot of energy to scrub them away. Imagine trying to do this inside the confined space of the tubing of a medical device or implant. It would be very difficult."

Looking to nature and basic mechanics for a solution, the researchers developed a system that uses naturally abundant diatoms along with hydrogen peroxide and tiny oxygen-generating sheets of the compound manganese oxide.

"We could have fabricated a particle using 3D printers, but luckily nature already provided us with a cheap and abundant option in diatoms," said co-author and postdoctoral researcher Yongbeom Seo. "The species of diatom we selected are hollow, highly porous and rod-shaped, providing a lot of surface area for the bubbles to form and a channel for the bubbles to escape."

The chemical reaction between the hydrogen peroxide and manganese oxide nanosheets takes place within the empty space inside the diatom. The result is a flourish of microbubbles that flow through the tiny channel, propelling the rigid diatoms forward with enough force to break up the surface and internal structure of the biofilms, the researchers said.

"We dope the particles with nanosheets of manganese oxide, then mix them with hydrogen peroxide and apply that to the surface of the biofilm," Kong said. "Once the diatoms break through to the internal structure of the biofilm, they continue to expel bubbles and facilitate the entry of hydrogen peroxide, which is an effective disinfectant against bacteria and fungus."

The researchers believe that their success is a result of a decision to focus on the mechanical aspects of biofilm destruction, not the chemical aspects of simply killing microbes.

"We have arrived at a mechanistic solution for this problem and the possibilities for this technology are endless," said co-author Simon Rogers, a professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering. "We are discussing our research with clinicians who have many exciting ideas of how to use this system that we did not even think of originally, such as the removal of dental plaque."

Video of the microbubblers in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LjK4QguW0wA&feature=youtu.be
A typical desk globe is designed to be a geometric sphere and to rotate smoothly when you spin it. Our actual planet is far less perfect -- in both shape and in rotation.

Earth is not a perfect sphere. When it rotates on its spin axis -- an imaginary line that passes through the North and South Poles -- it drifts and wobbles. These spin-axis movements are scientifically referred to as "polar motion." Measurements for the 20th century show that the spin axis drifted about 4 inches (10 centimeters) per year. Over the course of a century, that becomes more than 11 yards (10 meters).

Using observational and model-based data spanning the entire 20th century, NASA scientists have for the first time identified three broadly-categorized processes responsible for this drift -- contemporary mass loss primarily in Greenland, glacial rebound, and mantle convection.

"The traditional explanation is that one process, glacial rebound, is responsible for this motion of Earth's spin axis. But recently, many researchers have speculated that other processes could have potentially large effects on it as well," said first author Surendra Adhikari of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. "We assembled models for a suite of processes that are thought to be important for driving the motion of the spin axis. We identified not one but three sets of processes that are crucial -- and melting of the global cryosphere (especially Greenland) over the course of the 20th century is one of them."

In general, the redistribution of mass on and within Earth -- like changes to land, ice sheets, oceans and mantle flow -- affects the planet's rotation. As temperatures increased throughout the 20th century, Greenland's ice mass decreased. In fact, a total of about 7,500 gigatons -- the weight of more than 20 million Empire State Buildings -- of Greenland's ice melted into the ocean during this time period. This makes Greenland one of the top contributors of mass being transferred to the oceans, causing sea level to rise and, consequently, a drift in Earth's spin axis.

While ice melt is occurring in other places (like Antarctica), Greenland's location makes it a more significant contributor to polar motion.

"There is a geometrical effect that if you have a mass that is 45 degrees from the North Pole -- which Greenland is -- or from the South Pole (like Patagonian glaciers), it will have a bigger impact on shifting Earth's spin axis than a mass that is right near the Pole," said coauthor Eric Ivins, also of JPL.

Previous studies identified glacial rebound as the key contributor to long-term polar motion. And what is glacial rebound? During the last ice age, heavy glaciers depressed Earth's surface much like a mattress depresses when you sit on it. As that ice melts, or is removed, the land slowly rises back to its original position. In the new study, which relied heavily on a statistical analysis of such rebound, scientists figured out that glacial rebound is likely to be responsible for only about a third of the polar drift in the 20th century.

The authors argue that mantle convection makes up the final third. Mantle convection is responsible for the movement of tectonic plates on Earth's surface. It is basically the circulation of material in the mantle caused by heat from Earth's core. Ivins describes it as similar to a pot of soup placed on the stove. As the pot, or mantle, heats, the pieces of the soup begin to rise and fall, essentially forming a vertical circulation pattern -- just like the rocks moving through Earth's mantle.

With these three broad contributors identified, scientists can distinguish mass changes and polar motion caused by long-term Earth processes over which we have little control from those caused by climate change. They now know that if Greenland's ice loss accelerates, polar motion likely will, too. The paper was recently published in the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters.
A recent study of more than 100 years of river level records from the Amazon shows a significant increase in frequency and severity of floods. The scientists' analysis of the potential causes could contribute to more accurate flood prediction for the Amazon Basin.

Water levels of the Amazon River have been recorded daily in Port of Manaus, Brazil since the beginning of the last century. The team used 113 years of water level records and found extreme floods and droughts have become more frequent over the last two to three decades.

Their findings show that in the first part of the 20th century, severe floods with water levels exceeding 29 metres -- the benchmark for a state of emergency in Manaus City -- occurred roughly every 20 years. Now, extreme floods occur on average every four years.

Study lead author, Dr Jonathan Barichivich, from Universidad Austral de Chile and former Research Fellow from the University of Leeds, said: "Increases of severe droughts in the Amazon have received a lot of attention by researchers. However, what really stands out from this long-term river record is the increase in the frequency and severity of the floods. With a few minor exceptions, there have been extreme floods in the Amazon basin every year from 2009 to 2015."

According to the study, the increased flooding is linked to a strengthening of the Walker circulation -- an ocean-powered system of air circulation caused by differences in temperature and pressure over the tropical oceans. This system influences weather patterns and rainfall across the tropics and beyond.

Co-author Professor Manuel Gloor, from the School of Geography at Leeds, said: "This dramatic increase in floods is caused by changes in the surrounding seas, particularly the Pacific and Atlantic oceans and how they interact. Due to a strong warming of the Atlantic Ocean and cooling of the Pacific over the same period, we see changes in the so-called Walker circulation, which affects Amazon precipitation.

"The effect is more or less the opposite of what happens during an El Nino event. Instead of causing drought, it results in more convection and heavy rainfall in the central and northern parts of the Amazon basin."

The ultimate underlying cause for the warming of the Atlantic is not entirely clear. However, in addition to natural variability, global warming is at least partially responsible but in an unexpected and indirect way, according to the study.

As a result of greenhouse warming, wind belts in mid to high latitudes in the Southern hemisphere have shifted further south, opening a window for transport of warm Indian ocean waters around the tip of Africa, via the Agulhas current, towards the tropical Atlantic.

The changes to the Amazon Basin's water cycle have had severe consequences for people and livelihoods in Brazil, Peru, and other Amazonian nations.

Co-author Dr Jochen Schongart from the National Institute for Amazon Research in Manaus, has experienced Amazon River floods first-hand. He explained that these extreme flooding events last for many weeks and have disastrous consequences. Flooding can contaminate water supply and spread disease, as well as destroy homes and livelihoods. Economic activities in the floodplains such as agriculture a cattle ranching are strongly affected.

The research indicates that these floods are not over yet. The year 2017, which was not included in the study, again saw water levels rise to over 29 meters. As the tropical Atlantic is expected to continue warming faster than the tropical Pacific over the next few decades scientists expect more of these high water levels. The findings of this study could help predict the probability of flooding extremes in the Amazon in advance and help mitigate the impacts for urban and rural Amazonian populations.
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, September 20)  The Department of Justice (DOJ) on Wednesday recommended the filing of homicide charges against Ozamiz City police chief Jovie Espenido and his men over a June 2017 police operation which left nine dead.

The DOJ's recommendation stems from the complaint of Carmelita Manzano, who sought murder and arbitrary detention charges against C/Insp. Espenido, C/Insp. Glyndo Pujanes, SPO4 Renato Martir Jr., PO1 Sandra Nagdayag, and a few unidentified others.

Manzano was at their house during the celebration of her brother-in-law's birthday on the evening of June 1, 2017, when three Ozamiz City policemen stepped out of a van and killed some of her relatives.

She was then detained for seven days at the Ozamiz City Police Station.

While Espenido said the victims fired upon them first, the DOJ found probable cause to indict him and his men for the incident.

"Unfortunately for respondents, their admission of killing of the herein victims is, on its own, sufficient to establish probable cause for the crime of homicide," it said.

Espenido enjoys the support of President Rodrigo Duterte. The President previously said he will be willing to go to jail for him.

"If you do the country a favor, I will support you. And we all then we'll all go to jail, do not worry," he said during his speech at the Libingan ng mga Bayani on August 28, 2017. "Just follow the rules of engagement, the requirements of the performance of duty."

The controversial police chief was poised to head the Iloilo City police force, after Duterte claimed its mayor Jed Mabilog was tagged as a drug protector.

READ: Duterte ordered to cancel Espenido's assignment to Iloilo  PNP Chief

Two mayors also linked to the illegal drug trade were killed in police operations where he was chief of police.

Ozamiz City Mayor Reynaldo Parojinog and 14 others were killed in a July 30, 2017 shootout led by Espenido who was serving search warrants at the Parojinog's properties in Barangays Baybay San Roque and Baybay Santa Cruz.

READ: Ozamiz City Mayor, 14 others killed in police raids

Espenido was also the police chief of Albuera, Leyte when its mayor, Rolando Espinosa Sr., was killed in a November 2016 shootout as police were attempting to serve a search warrant in the city's jail.

READ: Albuera Mayor Espinosa, 1 other inmate killed in jail cell shootout - CIDG
Florida eighth graders still have time to enter AAAs Discovery Crew travel contest. The final day for submissions is Friday, Sept. 21.

Sixty students will win free round trip airfare to Amsterdam, travel insurance, money for passports, and a seven-night river cruise  including all meals and excursions  through the Netherlands and Belgium.

Students can enter for a chance to win at AAA.com/DiscoveryCrew.

To be eligible, students must be:

 Entering the 8th grade in good standing

 At least 13 years old

 Reside in Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Michigan, Nebraska, North Dakota, Tennessee, Wisconsin, or select areas of Illinois, Indiana, or Minnesota

 Students can confirm eligibility when visiting AAA.com/DiscoveryCrew

Entrants are not required to be AAA members.

Winners will be selected based on:

 A creative selfie, showcasing their love for travel

 Their answers to three essay questions:

 Why do you want to go on this trip?

 How do rivers affect the communities through which they run?

 During the trip, youll meet many people. In what ways do you expect the people you meet to be similar to and different from yourself and your friends and family?

Winners will be notified beginning in October. Winning students will bring one parent or legal guardian to serve as a chaperone. Each pair will share a stateroom while sailing on AmaWaterways AmaDante river cruise ship, from March 28 April 4, 2019.

This really is an amazing opportunity for young teens to experience other cultures, said Deborah Haas, vice president, Travel Products and Services, AAA The Auto Club Group. Very few people at this age have the opportunity to travel to Europe, and we are so excited to team with AmaWaterways and Allianz in making this dream a reality. There is still time to register, so we encourage young travel enthusiasts to visit our contest website before its too late.

Contest Rules

No purchase necessary. Legal residents of specific zip codes served by The Auto Club Group within the United States who are at least 13 years old and who are 8th grade students in good standing at their school at the time of entry. Void where prohibited. Contest ends 9/21/18. For official rules, prize descriptions, and eligible zip codes, visit AAA.com/DiscoveryCrew. Sponsors: The Auto Club Group, 1 Auto Club Drive, Dearborn, MI 48126. AmaWaterways, 26010 Mureau Road, Calabasas, CA 91302. Allianz Global Assistance (a brand of AGA Service Company), 9950 Mayland Drive, Richmond, VA 23233.

About AmaWaterways

A family-owned company celebrating 16 years on the river, AmaWaterways offers unforgettable river cruises with 23 ships that sail Europes Danube, Rhine, Moselle, Main, Rhone, Seine, Garonne, Dordogne, Dutch and Belgian Waterways and Douro rivers, Southeast Asias Mekong and Africas Chobe River. The company is renowned for its innovative stateroom design featuring unique twin balconies; its wide choice of included shore excursions featuring biking and hiking options for the active traveler; and its award-winning dining including The Chefs Table specialty restaurant. Modern, spacious and tastefully decorated, each ship carries less than 162 guests. AmaWaterways offers a variety of themed sailings and brand relationships, offering group or chartered sailings geared towards active travelers and families. Learn more at AmaWaterways.com

Source: AAA
On September 7, 2018, the Securities and Exchange Commission charged two brokers for recommending excessive levels of trading that were costly for retail customers but lucrative for the brokers.

In separate complaints filed in federal court in Manhattan on Friday, the SEC alleges that Florida resident Emil Botvinnik and New York resident Jovannie Aquino recommended frequent, short-term trades that generated large commissions for the brokers but were almost guaranteed to lose money for their customers. According to the SEC's complaints, Botvinnik's and Aquino's customers - a number of whom were at or near retirement age - lost approximately $3.6 million as a result of the trades while the brokers pocketed approximately $4.6 million in commissions.

The complaints also allege that both brokers engaged in unauthorized trading and concealed material information from their customers about the transaction costs associated with their recommendations, which were likely to outstrip any potential monetary gains in the accounts.

The SEC's complaints charge Botvinnik and Aquino with violations of antifraud provisions of Section 17(a) of the Securities Act of 1933, Section 10(b) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 and Rule 10b-5.

The SEC's investigation was conducted by Yael Berger, Jacqueline O'Reilly, Pamela Nolan, and Gregory Bockin, with assistance from Michael Fioribello. The litigation will be led by Mr. Bockin, Ms. Berger, Ms. O'Reilly, and Samantha Williams. The case is being supervised by Ms. Chion, Stacy Bogert, and Cheryl Crumpton.
The Securities and Exchange Commission filed a complaint today in U.S. District Court for the W.D. Louisiana against Lafayette, Louisiana-based World Tree Financial, LLC and its majority-owner and co-founder, Wesley Kyle Perkins, for operating a cherry-picking scheme that defrauded World Tree clients.

The complaint alleges that for more than four years, Perkins reaped substantial profits at his clients' expense by cherry-picking trades. Perkins allegedly traded securities in World Tree's omnibus account and delayed allocating the securities to specific client accounts until he had observed the securities' performance over the course of the day. He then allocated profitable trades to favored accounts, like his own, while allocating unprofitable trades to two accounts with substantial assets controlled by one person. The complaint also alleges that World Tree and Perkins misrepresented to clients that all trades would be allocated fairly and equitably. In addition, it is alleged that World Tree, Perkins and Priscilla Gilmore Perkins, Perkins' wife and the firm's co-founder and co-owner, falsely represented that they were not trading in the same securities as World Tree's clients.

The SEC's complaint charges World Tree and Perkins with violating the antifraud provisions of Section 10(b) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 and Rule 10b-5 thereunder, Sections 17(a)(1) and 17(a)(2) of the Securities Act of 1933, and Sections 206(1) and 206(2) of the Investment Advisers Act of 1940. It also alleges that Gilmore violated the antifraud provisions Section 10(b) of the Exchange Act and Rule 10b-5(b) thereunder, Section 17(a)(2) of the Securities Act, and aided and abetted World Tree's and Perkins' violations of Sections 206(1) and 206(2) of the Advisers Act.

This is the sixth action arising out of an enforcement initiative to combat cherry-picking led by the SEC's Los Angeles Regional Office and supported by the agency's Division of Economic and Risk Analysis (DERA). The SEC's investigation was conducted by David Rosen and supervised by Robert Conrrad, with assistance from Scott Walster and Raymond Wolff in the Division of Economic and Risk Analysis. The litigation will be led by Gary Leung.
On September 19, 2018, the Securities and Exchange Commission charged San Diego County, California resident Leroy "Lee" Young and his firm, Young Capital Management LLC (YCM), for conducting fraudulent sales of unregistered securities.

The SEC's complaint alleges that from January 2013 through December 2017, Young and YCM illegally raised at least $362,000 from at least 32 investors through false promises of high returns on their principal investment. According to the SEC's complaint, Young falsely represented that he would use the investors' money for fees associated with selling bonds or, alternately, for fees associated with launching a hedge fund. The complaint also alleges that Young falsely told investors that he would pay returns of ten times their principal investment in sixty days, generated from the proceeds of bond or hedge fund offerings. In reality, according to the complaint, Young spent the investors' money on personal expenses, and he has not paid returns to investors or repaid their principal investments.

Young and YCM admitted the allegations in the complaint and have consented to the entry of final judgments permanently enjoining them from future violations of the antifraud provisions of Section 17(a) of the Securities Act of 1933, Section 10(b) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, and Rule 10b-5, and the registration provisions of Section 5(a) and 5(c) of the Securities Act of 1933, and ordering Young to pay disgorgement of $336,450, prejudgment interest of $18,923, and a civil penalty of $336,450. The proposed settlement is subject to Court approval. Based on the anticipated entry of an injunction, Young has agreed to the issuance of an SEC order that permanently bars him from association with any broker, dealer, investment adviser, municipal securities dealer, transfer agent, or nationally recognized statistical rating organization, and from participating in an offering of a penny stock.

The SEC also brought settled administrative proceedings against Michael L. LaPenna and Kentucky-based lawyer Phillip R. Grogan. According to the SEC's orders, LaPenna recruited investors by making material misrepresentations about Young's investment program, and Grogan facilitated the transfer of investor funds through his trust account, giving investors the false and misleading impression that their principal was safely escrowed with an attorney. Without admitting or denying the SEC's findings, LaPenna agreed to the issuance of an order finding that he violated the antifraud provisions of the federal securities laws; imposing a cease-and-desist order; and requiring the payment of disgorgement of $22,500, prejudgment interest of $583, and a $22,500 civil penalty. Without admitting or denying the SEC's findings, Grogan agreed to the issuance of an order finding that he caused Young's antifraud violations; imposing a cease-and-desist order; and requiring the payment of disgorgement of $3,050, prejudgment interest of $248, and a $3,050 civil penalty.

The SEC's investigation was conducted by Emily Shea and supervised by Kevin Guerrero and Antonia Chion.
On September 13, 2018, Homero Joshua Garza, 33, was sentenced to 21 months of imprisonment in connection with a wire fraud charge brought by the U.S. Attorney for the District of Connecticut. His prison term will be followed by three years of supervised release, the first six months of which Garza must spend in home confinement. Garza, a defendant in a now-concluded, parallel SEC civil fraud action, admitted to running a virtual currency scam in which investors lost millions of dollars.

The SEC's case was resolved last year when the court entered final judgments in June and October 2017, respectively, against Connecticut-based GAW Miners and ZenMiner and their principal, Garza, for bilking investors. According to the SEC's December 1, 2015 complaint, at Garza's direction, GAW Miners and ZenMiner sold shares in a purported bitcoin mining operation; however, neither company had the capability to engage in large-scale mining. As a result, most investors paid for a share of computing power that never existed. Returns paid to some investors came, not from successful mining activity, but from proceeds generated by sales to other investors.

For further information, see Litigation Release Nos. 23960, 23885, 23852, 23415 and Press Release 2015-271.
More than 50 protesters confronted police outside of the Mission police station in San Francisco following the arrest of a Bay Area activist Wednesday who residents said was taken into custody for videoing police mistreatment of a black youth.

Ilyich Sato, a rapper also known as Equipto, and the youth were arrested after 6 p.m. on Valencia Street in a chaotic scene that was filled with tense confrontations between residents and police. Sato was released hours later, as protesters crowded outside the Mission station, shouting at police and accusing them of brutality and unfairness.

It all began, witnesses told The Chronicle, as members of the Black and Brown Social Club were meeting on Valencia Street to discuss police brutality against people of color. During the meeting, participants heard a thud outside and saw police arresting the youth across the street, in front of Everlane, a womens boutique.

Sato said he began videoing the police as they pinned the youth on the sidewalk.

Now Playing: Arrest sparks protest in Mission Video: San Francisco Chronicle

He was handcuffed on his back and he started slightly moving a little, Sato said of the black youth. Thats when Sato said police began getting aggressive with the youth, infuriating bystanders, who began shouting at officers and confronting them about their actions.

Tensions escalated when police arrested Sato and took him down on his stomach, he and witnesses said.

The more I said that I couldnt breathe, the more it was hurting, Sato said after he was released. They had me in a hog-tied position.

Officer Joseph Tomlinson, a public information officer with the San Francisco Police Department, could not say why Sato was arrested. Police did not release information on the arrest of the youth.

Outside the Mission station after his release, Sato told The Chronicle that arresting officers told him that he was detained for resisting arrest, but that officials declined to provide why he was originally placed under arrest.

Kevin Williams, a witness who had been attending the meeting, said he heard Sato say get your hands off of my mother before police arrested him.

Videos posted to social media show the confrontation between residents and multiple officers who were standing around a male who was face-down on the sidewalk on Valencia Street.

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Earlier in the night, as Sato was still detained by police, dozens of protesters swelled outside of the Mission station chanting power to the people.

When Sato walked out of the station, he embraced his mother and was welcomed by cheers.

At one point, police closed off Valencia Street in front of the station as the crowd outside grew, with people shouting, Who do you serve? Who do you protect?

Sato has led hunger strikes at the steps of San Francisco police stations in recent years in response to fatal officer-involved shootings and allegations of police brutality in the area.

He called for former San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee to fire then-San Francisco Police Chief Greg Suhr in 2016 after a number of officers were accused of sending racist, sexist homophobic and anti-Semitic text messages.

Gwendolyn Wu and Lauren Hernandez are San Francisco Chronicle staff writers. Email: gwendolyn.wu@sfchronicle.com; lauren.hernandez@sfchronicle.com
A state commission has accused a Contra Costa County judge of acting inappropriately toward women in his courtroom  regularly commenting on their looks, telling one lawyer she could get anything she wanted from him and telling another her parents did not spank her enough as a child.

The Commission on Judicial Performance accused Superior Court Judge John Laettner of willful misconduct in office and other violations of ethical standards for judges, dating back to 2007. The commission will hold a hearing and, if it decides the accusations are justified, could seek to reprimand Laettner or remove him from the bench.

Laettner was appointed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger in 2006 after more than 20 years as a prosecutor in Tulare County and with the U.S. attorneys office in Oakland. His courtroom is in Martinez.

His lawyer, James A. Murphy, said Laettner would contest the charges. He said most of the complaints came from the county public defenders office, which disliked Laettners decisions in setting monetary bail for defendants. The defenders office is at war with the bench, Murphy said.

The commission said Laettner repeatedly asked one deputy public defender whether she had a boyfriend and told her she could get anything she wanted from him. He compared another public defender to a British television actress and told a grand jury that a prosecutor was beautiful, the commission said.

Laettner also told a number of female defendants that they were pretty and that they should not drink and drive or they might get scars, the commission said. It said he also told a male defendant, who had just taken a yearlong educational course while on probation for domestic violence, that I can take judicial notice that women can drive you crazy.

In incidents involving another deputy public defender in 2016 and 2017, the commission said, Laettner winked at her during a hearing, and later scheduled probation hearings so that she would be the attorney appearing in his court. After he ruled against her in one proceeding, he invited her to his chambers and said he did not want things to be bad between them, the commission said.

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After he brought up one of their disagreements and the public defender tried to end the conversation, the commission said, Laettner told her she was a hard one and that her parents had not spanked her enough as a child.

The judges treatment of that attorney and others would reasonably be perceived as sexual harassment or sexual discrimination, the commission said.

Bob Egelko is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: begelko@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @BobEgelko
A media organization in the Bay Area sued the Trump administration Wednesday over its seizure of phone and email records of a New York Times reporter who, during a relationship with a Senate Intelligence Committee aide, unearthed a Russian attempt to recruit a future Trump campaign adviser.

The reporter, Ali Watkins, was working for other news outlets during her three-year relationship with Senate staffer James Wolfe, who was charged by the Justice Department in April with lying to the FBI when he denied giving classified information to reporters. He has pleaded not guilty.

The lawsuit, filed by the First Amendment Coalition in San Francisco federal court, seeks an explanation from the Justice Department for its failure to notify Watkins before obtaining six months of her phone records and up to two years of her emails from telecommunications providers. The seizure of the records was reported publicly in June.

Government acquisition of journalists personal, confidential records threatens the ability of reporters to carry out their mission, enshrined under the United States Constitution, to report on matters of public interest and to hold the government accountable, lawyers for the media organization, based in San Rafael, said in the suit.

They said it was the first reported seizure of journalists records by the Trump administration.

The Justice Department did not respond to a request for comment.

Watkins reported in April 2017, while working for the online media company BuzzFeed, that Carter Page, a foreign policy adviser to Donald Trumps presidential campaign, had provided documents in 2013 to a Russian intelligence agent, who tried to recruit Page to work with Russia. Special Counsel Robert Mueller has been looking into Pages contacts while investigating possible Russian interference in the 2016 election.

The Times hired Watkins last December, but later learned of her past relationship with Wolfe, a relationship that is at odds with conflict-of-interest standards followed by most news organizations. The newspaper reprimanded her and transferred her from Washington to New York, under a mentors supervision.

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Wednesdays lawsuit cited guidelines adopted by President Barack Obamas attorney general, Eric Holder, in 2015 after an uproar over the FBIs secret subpoena for phone records of Associated Press and Fox News reporters. The guidelines, later adopted as federal regulations, instructed the department to notify news organizations before seeking such records, and give them a chance to object, unless there were compelling reasons to act in secret.

The First Amendment Coalition said it contacted the Justice Department in June, under the Freedom of Information Act, asking why Watkins had not been contacted before her records were seized, and filed suit when there was no response.

David Snyder, the coalitions executive director, said the information would enable the public to understand when, how and why the (Justice Department) is collecting records of journalist communications  and if they are overreaching in doing so.

Bob Egelko is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: begelko@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @BobEgelko
California doctors who are on probation for sexual misconduct with a patient must begin disclosing the information to all their patients under legislation signed by Gov. Jerry Brown on Wednesday.

SB1448, authored by state Sen. Jerry Hill, D-San Mateo, requires licensed physicians to notify their patients if they are on probation for sexual misconduct, drug abuse that has or could harm patients, a criminal conviction involving harm to patients, or inappropriate prescribing resulting in patient harm.

The law applies to doctors who are placed on probation on or after July 1, 2019.

Of the roughly 140,000 doctors in California, a small percentage are put on probation by the California Medical Board for these four offenses, according to the state medical board. These doctors are allowed to keep practicing while on probation, which can last for many years. Probation is not an admission of guilt, and is a way a doctor can resolve complaints against him or her while continuing to practice medicine.

In 2016, the most recent year for which data were available, 68 doctors were put on probation for these four offenses. However, that number also includes instances where the offenses involved patients as well as other people. So the number of doctors who would have to begin issuing notifications under the new law will probably be fewer than the total put on probation.

The notification must be made in writing and given to patients before their first appointment. The patient must acknowledge receipt of the notification by signing the document.

Currently, doctors must notify their hospital employer and malpractice insurers if they have been placed on probation; the state medical board also discloses the information on its website. But patients dont always know this information exists. California is believed to be the first state to require doctors on probation for serious misconduct involving patient harm to notify their patients.

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Its a great day for Californians and the movement to increase consumer protections for patients and bring greater transparency to patient-doctor interactions, Hill said in a statement. Patients have the right to be notified of their doctors status so they can make informed decisions about their care.

Some medical associations opposed the measure, saying the notification process would cut into patient time and result in physicians effectively being suspended from practicing medicine. They also said it could lead to doctors requesting administrative hearings to avoid probation, which would increase enforcement costs to the medical board.

Catherine Ho is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: cho@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @Cat_Ho
Northern California is on high alert as red flag warnings fanned out across the region Wednesday, raising fears that a new round of forest fires loom less than two months since the Mendocino Complex became the largest blaze in state history.

The National Weather Service issued a red flag warning for mountainous areas of Napa, Sonoma and Marin counties from 11 p.m. Wednesday to 5 p.m. Thursday. The North Bay mountains, East Bay hills, Diablo Range and Santa Cruz Mountains are expected to experience the worst of the critical fire conditions, officials said.

Wind gusts between 20 to 35 mph gusts, along with 25 to 35 percent humidity, could exacerbate any wildfires that develop. The low humidity levels adversely affect brush, which Cal Fire spokesman Scott McLean said has not recouped necessary moisture.

This is typical for the time of year, said Steve Anderson, a forecaster with the National Weather Service. This is where we enter the highest fire danger for the Bay Area.

Officials warned residents to avoid outdoor burning, and a Sonoma County alert said that downed power lines may lead to new fires that spread rapidly.

State fire officials have blamed faulty Pacific Gas & Electric Company equipment for sparking some of the massive and deadly fires that broke out across wine country last October.

In June, PG&E Corp. announced it would pay $2.5 billion to cover expected losses from the wildfires. State fire officials have still not determined the cause of the Tubbs Fire, the worst of the blazes, which raced across Santa Rosa and resulted in 22 deaths and 5,636 structures destroyed.

Those incidents, in addition to the Thomas Fire in Santa Barbara and Ventura counties last December, underscore the states increasingly long and dangerous fire season.

If there are fires in Southern California around Christmastime, there could be fires in Northern California any time, McLean said.

On Wednesday morning, officials announced that the Ranch Fire, which along with the River Fire makes up the Mendocino Complex, was 100 percent contained.

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While the perimeter of the Ranch Fire is now fully under control, crews were working to completely extinguish the flames. Smoke may be visible from within fire lines.

Officials said that fire personnels task now turns to lessening the risk of erosion and repair the 22 miles of fire lines.

The Ranch and River Fires ravaged a combined 508,043 acres northeast of Ukiah this summer. The blazes destroyed 544 structures and killed a Utah firefighter working on suppression efforts. The River Fire was fully contained Aug. 13.

A previous version of this story misstated that faulty Pacific Gas & Electric Company equipment caused the Tubbs Fire. State fire officials have still not determined the cause.

Gwendolyn Wu is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: gwendolyn.wu@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @gwendolynawu
Denise Huskins has been through hell, again and again.

First she was kidnapped in the middle of the night from her Vallejo home and held for ransom. Then when she emerged from two days of captivity to say shed been raped and had made peace with her likely death, police dismissed her story as a hoax in front of the national media.

Now, days before her Sept. 29 wedding, Huskins and her fiance, Aaron Quinn, were subpoenaed Wednesday to testify in a preliminary hearing in Solano County, where they may be cross-examined by their attacker, Matthew Muller, who is representing himself in the case.

The right to confront accusers and the right to act as ones own attorney were established by the U.S. Constitution and the Supreme Court, respectively. Still, such courtroom encounters are rare in sexual assault cases, where the cross-examination of victims by defense lawyers is already fraught with tension.

In Huskins case, the ordeal may come as soon as Tuesday and would be the latest twist in a complex and agonizing legal saga that has played out since the kidnapping in March 2015.

Its particularly odious for Denise to suffer the indignity of having her rapist question her, her attorney, Doug Rappaport, said in an interview Wednesday. Like always, Denise and Aaron will do what they need to do. They will not shirk their responsibilities. Certainly, its terrible timing, but they are strong people, and they will deal with it.

When victims are cross-examined by their alleged abusers, the act usually happens during a jury trial. At preliminary hearings, in which judges hear evidence and decide whether to send cases to trial, prosecutors are not required to call victims, thanks to state Proposition 115, which allows hearsay evidence such as statements from witnesses to police.

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The district attorney should proceed via Prop. 115, Rappaport said, so Denise and Aaron wont be subject to the harassment of having Matthew Muller cross-examine them.

Officials at the Solano County district attorneys office did not return calls seeking comment on Wednesday after issuing subpoenas to Huskins and Quinn, who are both 33 and were physical therapists at the time Muller broke into Quinns home on Mare Island.

Muller, 41, pleaded not guilty Monday to two counts of rape as well as kidnapping for ransom, first-degree robbery, false imprisonment and burglary. Solano County Superior Court Commissioner Robert Warshawsky has found that Muller is competent to represent himself in the case.

The defendant, a Harvard-educated but now disbarred immigration lawyer and onetime Marine, pleaded guilty in federal court last year to kidnapping Huskins and was sentenced to 40 years in prison. In another twist in the case, he filed a motion this spring on his prison typewriter in Arizona seeking to have his conviction vacated due to, among other things, failings by his attorney.

The case began in the early-morning hours of March 23, 2015, when Muller allegedly sneaked into Quinns home as he and Huskins slept, tied them up and drugged them before vanishing with Huskins.

Hours later, Quinn called police and laid out the extraordinary details of the home invasion, which included the abductor setting up a camera to monitor him and demanding two payments of $8,500.

While teams of searchers fanned out on Mare Island, The Chronicle received a proof of life message from the kidnapper  an audio recording of Huskins recounting the days news and personal details only she would know.

The next day, Huskins showed up at the home of one of her parents in Huntington Beach. She told police there that she was sexually assaulted by her abductor before being set free.

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As coverage of the kidnapping captured national attention, Vallejo police Lt. Kenny Park stood before the media at a hastily called news conference, saying there was no evidence to support the claims this was a stranger abduction or an abduction at all. Park added, Given the facts that have been present thus far, this event appears to be an orchestrated event.

Investigators compared the case to the movie Gone Girl  in which the title character fakes her own kidnapping, the couples attorney said.

But over the ensuing days, The Chronicle received letters from the purported kidnapper, who insisted that the kidnapping was real. Muller was arrested months later after a similar home invasion in Dublin prompted investigators to locate a trove of evidence linking him to Huskins abduction. Police privately apologized to the couple, and the city of Vallejo this year settled a defamation lawsuit filed by the couple for $2.5 million.

While its unclear why prosecutors subpoenaed Huskins and Quinn, their testimony could plug potential holes in the case stemming from investigators initial missteps, Rappaport said. For instance, when police interrogated Quinn for hours the day of the abduction, they apparently disbelieved and disregarded statements they would later need.

The Solano County DA has stepped up to the plate, and I think its the right thing, said Quinns attorney, Dan Russo. You never want this guy out on the street.

But facing Muller, he said, is going to be a nightmare for the couple.

The truth is they are amazingly courageous people, Russo said. What they are doing is giving hope to other victims, saying, I can stand up and fight back.

Evan Sernoffsky is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: esernoffsky@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @EvanSernoffsky
A Daly City police officer accused in a civil lawsuit last week of unnecessarily tasing a handcuffed man who later died was investigated and cleared in the killing of another man five years ago.

On March 2, 2013, Officer Bruce Perdomo fired nine shots at an armed suspect in a chase that began in Daly City and ended in San Francisco, according to a letter San Francisco District Attorney George Gascon sent in 2014 to then-Police Chief Greg Suhr that described the findings of an investigation into the officer-involved shooting.

Perdomo and his partner joined the chase in San Francisco after Daly City officials called their officers off the pursuit, according to the DAs investigation. Gascons office found that at the end of a foot chase near Bayshore Boulevard, Perdomo shot Sawyer in self-defense and was in reasonable fear of his life and the lives of other officers at the scene.

It is our conclusion that Officer Perdomo acted lawfully, wrote Gascon.

Last week, Perdomo was sued along with two other officers in San Francisco federal court for his role in the death of Warren Ragudo, a 34-year-old Daly City man who died on Jan. 17, an hour after Perdomo tased him in the back as he lay on his stomach, weighed down by two other officers. The officers were called to Ragudos home by family members who said he was acting erratically and had mental and drug problems. The family said Perdomo barged into the house and tased Ragudo without warning when he was already handcuffed and subdued on the familys living room floor.

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In both fatalities, Perdomo was cleared of criminal wrongdoing  first by the San Francisco district attorney and then, in April, by the San Mateo County district attorneys office. Yet its unclear whether the officer adhered to departmental policies in both cases. The Daly City Police Department declined to comment for this story and Perdomo could not be reached for comment.

Our review did not examine such issues as compliance with the policies and procedures of the law enforcement agency, ways to improve training or tactics, or any issues related to civil liability, read Gascons letter to Suhr on May 21, 2014.

Gascons letter detailed the chase through San Francisco and the moments leading up to the fatal shooting in 2013.

Just after midnight on March 2, Daly City police officer Nicholas Ottoboni began chasing a stolen black Honda Civic onto northbound Interstate 280 into San Francisco. When speeds reached between 80 and 100 mph, Daly City officials ordered Ottoboni to end the chase because it became too dangerous.

Perdomo and his partner told investigators they had heard Ottobonis broadcast of the stolen car and had entered northbound I-280 to join the chase when they heard it called off. They said they decided to return to Daly City using Highway 101 and happened to see a black Honda abruptly exit at Paul Avenue  so they began pursuing it.

The pair told investigators that the Honda ran stop signs and reached 50 to 60 mph on San Bruno Avenue, where a San Francisco patrol car started chasing the Honda back onto southbound Highway 101. The San Francisco police officers were unaware of the Daly City pursuit, officials said.

Both Daly City and San Francisco police vehicles were tailing the Honda on Highway 101 until it exited on Bayshore Boulevard, where a foot chase began.

San Francisco police officers Gary Cheng and Rigoberto Haro told investigators they saw Sawyer with a gun just before he abandoned the Honda and ran off.

Perdomo and Cheng chased the armed Sawyer on foot, with Perdomo gaining ground on the suspect.

Sawyer was about 15 feet away from Perdomo when he allegedly lifted the gun and pointed it at Perdomo, the officers told investigators.

The two officers told investigators that Sawyer was standing sideways with his right hand across his chest when he pointed his gun at the officers. They said they ordered Sawyer to drop the gun but he refused, according to the letter.

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Im going to f... Sawyer said, trailing off, allegedly pointing the gun at Perdomo.

Perdomo fired nine shots at him.

Officers told investigators Sawyer dropped his hand, stumbled, dropped the gun and fell on his back. He died at the scene.

Seven of the nine bullets hit the back of Sawyers body, including two penetrating bullets to his mid-back, one penetrating bullet to his buttocks, two bullets to the back of each thigh, and one graze gunshot wound to his mid-lower back and one graze gunshot wound to his inner left thigh.

One civilian witness, who watched the incident from his balcony, told investigators that he saw police officers running and demanding an armed man to Stop. Stop. Stop running, and officers holding their weapons out before hearing gunshots in rapid succession.

Sawyers firearm, a .45-caliber pistol, was recovered at the scene. The pistol was not cocked and its chamber was empty. Its magazine was loaded with eight cartridges and its safety was off, officials said.

The San Francisco Police Department Major Accident Investigation team determined that the location of the ejected bullet casings from Perdomos firearm corroborated his description of the shooting.

Lauren Hernandez is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: lauren.hernandez@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @LaurenPorFavor
The funny and thought-provoking A Dolls House Part 2 was more than enough reason to cross the bay for opening night at Berkeley Rep on Thursday, Sept. 13. The production deserves all the praise that has been, and will be, heaped upon it (including kudos for Noras dress, as quietly radiant as pianist Yuja Wangs unquietly radiant gowns at the San Francisco Symphony last weekend).

And this, too: You buy a glass of wine at Berkeley Rep, and it comes in a cup with a lid, and you are allowed to carry it with you into the theater and enjoy it while youre watching the play.

Id attended a production in San Francisco the night before. There, if a playgoer wanted to carry a glass of wine from the lobby into the theater, there was a $7 additional charge for a plastic glass with cover. Oh, but its reusable, they said, for your next visit to the theater. The man who manages to jam that hard plastic glass  at least 3 inches tall  into his pants pocket will risk getting noticed for ... well, not for enthusiasm for the theater. Bravo to Berkeley Rep, commended herewith for drama and for beverage service, too.

Following up on the item about the Ruth Asawa retrospective in St. Louis, Bill Ryan wrote to say that next to the Rhine House at Beringer Winery in St. Helena is an Asawa commissioned by the winery years ago. Its open to the public.

In other news of art and wine, the Donum Estate in Sonoma, owners of which have been collecting major pieces of outdoor art since 2015, is officially launching its collection Saturday, Sept. 22. The collection includes include large-scale pieces by Ai Weiwei, Keith Haring and Louise Bourgeois, but in this case, they are viewable only by guests who sign up for the winerys private tasting experience, which is $80 a head.

In October 2015, when adman Gary Tobin bought the domain name fedupwithdonaldtrump.com, he also bought battleofthebillionaires.com. He was prescient. Its been reported this week and last that Michael Bloomberg, 76-year-old former mayor of New York, is preparing to run for president as a Democrat.

Tobin bought the site thinking that billionaire Bloomberg would be running in 2016 as a Republican or independent. At that time, he didnt see that Trump could win. The antipathy toward Don is apparent, he wrote after polling people about perceptions and responses to Trump and Bloomberg. Who am I to doubt the results?

There were lots of local angles to the three Emmys won by The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story, the limited series based on the book Vulgar Favors. An outstanding actor Emmy was won by San Francisco-born Darren Criss; journalist Maureen Orth, author of the book, was born in Berkeley and is a graduate of UC Berkeley. On Monday night, her 32-year-old son, Luke Russert, tweeted about the best limited series Emmy, and said, Mom is a world champion! Recognition from ones peers: gratifying. Praise from ones kids: priceless.

The centenary of Leonard Bernstein was marked with what the New Yorker called his more or less official birthday party, at the Tanglewood Festival. A centennial concert featured five conductors, wrote Alex Ross, but, For the most part, the performances fell short of the raw exuberance that Bernstein customarily elicited. Only when (Michael) Tilson Thomas was on the podium did the orchestra fully come alive.

Last weeks benefits for OneFairWage.com  which advocates for the minimum wage for restaurant workers  were headlined by Lily Tomlin and Jane Fonda. David Landis, who attended a benefit  one of three last Friday  at Piccino in Dogpatch, says that at the start of the program, Tomlin did an impromptu skit as a waitress. When she realized there was no mike stand, Fonda  still in shape and still flexible  came to the rescue, kneeling at Tomlins feet and holding the mike.

In Huntington Park while the climate conference was in full swing, Andrea Carla Michaels noticed a woman with a black dog and a man with a Corgi. Gov. Jerry Brown and Anne Gust Brown were walking their own dogs.

And at the Mill Valley Fall Arts Festival, Daniel Patrick overheard a womans response when she was told that no dogs were allowed. Its OK, she said. Shes a service dog. She was my dads before he died.

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Leah Garchik is open for business in San Francisco, 415-777-8426. Email: lgarchik@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @leahgarchik
Thanks to some unusual weather in the first three months of 2018, olive harvests are down by about 25 percent, according to the California Olive Oil Council, which represents 90 percent of olive oil production in California.

Last year, the councils members produced about 4 million gallons of extra virgin olive oil. This year, the number is expected to be about 2.8 million gallons, says Executive Director Patricia Darragh.

Olive trees are alternate bearing, so its not unusual to have lighter crops every other year, but in 2018, some olive growers saw no budbreak  the mark of the beginning of a growing season during which buds first appear on the trees, leading to flowers and eventually, fruit.

The situation has left many scrambling.

Weve all been scratching our heads since March over this, said Jeff Martin of Frantoio Grove in Gilroy. His farm has about 3,500 Frantoio varietal olive trees, and produces olive oil for Bay Area retailers like Bi-Rite Market, Draegers and Market Hall Foods . This year, his trees bore virtually no fruit.

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Its a similar story for Kathryn Tomajan and Robin Sloan, who lease about 2 acres of olive trees in Sunol for their olive oil brand, Fat Gold. After a bumper crop in 2017, this year they have seen practically nothing.

In a newsletter to consumers, Tomajan and Sloan described their situation as borderline catastrophic.

Both Martin and Tomajan believe that unusual weather this year, starting with a rare hot spell in February, is to blame.

The trees were truly fooled into thinking it was time to get their juices flowing, Martin said. The March freeze stopped that.

Darragh notes that while some members have seen a decrease in fruit  or in the case of Martin and Tomajan, virtually no fruit at all  other producers have held steady.

As for what that means for consumers, Darragh says that she hasnt heard any news about olive oil prices increasing. She also points out that extra virgin olive oil has a shelf life of two years, so the high production from the 2017 season could help carry some people through the coming winter and spring. And, given the typical ups and downs of farming and Mother Nature, Darragh sees no reason that California could not have a robust crop in 2019.

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Welcome to farming, Tomajan said.

Frantoio Groves Martin, who typically harvests his crop from October through December, says he has enough cases left  about 1,000  to get through the spring, when the company would normally release the next years harvest.

Fat Gold, however, produced just 200 gallons of oil last year and is almost sold out at this point. This means they will have to find other growers who can be a source for quality fruit, a step they had anticipated taking further down the line, once the company expanded.

We had this plan all along, (but) we didnt expect to implement it in the second year, Tomajan said.

Buying fruit from other growers comes with its own challenges  especially if other growers are short, too.

Its a little daunting if these people dont want to sell to me, says Martin. It takes the decision out of my hands.

Sarah Fritsche is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: sfritsche@sfchronicle.com Twitter/Instagram: @foodcentric
Russian River Brewing Co.s sprawling facility in Windsor is finally operational, though itll still be a few weeks before customers can sidle up to the bar for a Windsor-inspired porter.

The forthcoming brewery and restaurant sits on about 15 acres off Highway 101  four acres of which are unoccupied protected wetlands  spans roughly 85,000 square feet, and, most notably, is about $20 million over budget, according to co-owner Natalie Cilurzo.

"Yeah, we kind of blew our budget by a bit. We were hoping at first for this to cost about $30 or so. We're at $50 million now," she said. "Everything is just more expensive in California. It's not much that can be done about that."

If the situation seems daunting, then concern about the venture isn't palpable between Natalie and her husband/co-owner Vincent Cilurzo who earlier this week, brewed the first batch of Pliny Elder, the company's iconic IPA, at the facility.

The company also recently hosted a job fair. Around 129 people came out for it, Natalie said, but the facility is still in need of applicants to work in the roughly 1,000-square-foot kitchen of its planned restaurant. The menu will have a smattering of beer-friendly items like burgers and fries, fish and chips and schnitzel of various types.

RRBC

Natalie said the $50 million price tag is a result of both factors unique to their considerable project, and typical woes that seemingly befall all business owners in the region. First, there are rising construction costs mixed with some labor shortages. Then, more unique to the Windsor space, there was the fluctuation of the Euro exchange rate.

"We bought equipment from overseas and we budgeted for a much lower exchange rate," Natalie said. "Now it blew up and were paying more for our equipment. It's just another one of those things that you can't really predict happening.

Financial dilemmas aside, Natalie said the project remains on track for its mid-October opening. And as a business, the Cilurzos, who didn't take on any equity partners in the venture, remain within specified borrowing limits with the banks financing the venture, Natalie said.

Food Guide Top 25 Restaurants Where to eat in the Bay Area. Find spots near you, create a dining wishlist, and more.

In 2017, Russian River Brewing produced about 17,000 barrels. In 2019, Natalie said with the fully operational Windsor location, the numbers should climb to about 35,000 to 40,000 barrels, with the capacity to take production up to 60,000 barrels per year if they so chose.

"But we don't plan to go that high. We know what we can handle while keeping our quality high and focusing on retail," Natalie said. "With the industry the way it is, it isn't a good time right now to be pounding the pavement and trying to just go sell beer in every state."

Russian River Brewing has a cult following in the craft beer world, and according to many, its the best craft brewery in the country. Its Pliny the Younger has been named the best beer in America eight times in a survey that has only existed for 15 years. Last year, nearly 400,000 people visited Russian River's taproom in Santa Rosa.

"We're just ready to get out doors open," Natalie said of the Windsor location. "It's been a long process and sure, it takes some patience. But at this point we're just ready to get going."

Justin Phillips is a San Francusco Chronicle staff writer. Email: jphillips@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @JustMrPhillips
SACRAMENTO  Scooter riders can let the wind flow through their hair  at their own risk, of course  after Gov. Jerry Brown signed a bill Wednesday allowing adults to decide whether to wear a helmet.

Brown signed AB2989 by Assemblyman Heath Flora, R-Ripon (San Joaquin County), which brings motorized scooters under the same legal requirement as motorized bicycles  only riders age 17 and under are required to wear a helmet. The bill was backed by one of the leading scooter rental companies, Bird.

Besides lifting the helmet requirement for adults, the bill authorizes cities to allow scooters on streets that have a speed limit of 35 mph. At present, scooters can be operated only on streets where the speed limit is 25 mph or less.

The scooters themselves are still limited to a top speed of 15 mph, and are still banned from sidewalks.

The bill prompted concern from some safety advocates who said it could lead to more scooter-related injuries. Christopher Colwell, chief of emergency medicine at San Francisco General Hospital, told The Chronicle this month that the hospital has seen riders who have been hit by cars and arrived with potentially fatal cranial bleeding. On one recent night, he said, he treated two scooter riders who hadnt been wearing helmets and suffered concussions.

Flora, the bills author, said, For me, it all goes back to personal responsibility. He said motorized scooters were a tourist attraction for many cities and that some people who might otherwise use them would not if they had to wear a helmet.

San Francisco briefly banned scooters after startups Bird, Lime and Spin dropped hundreds of the rentals on city streets in late March, prompting complaints about abandoned scooters and unsafe riders. The city forced the scooters off the streets until the Municipal Transportation Agency could set up a permitting process.

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.

Last month the transit agency chose companies Scoot and Skip to receive permits to operate in the city under a one-year pilot program that starts in October.

Scoot and Skip will set up a total of 1,250 scooters that people can unlock with their phones in order to cruise around the city.

Melody Gutierrez is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: mgutierrez@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @MelodyGutierrez
The Bay Areas soaring housing costs are pushing poor people into neighborhoods where poverty and racial segregation are on the rise, a UC Berkeley study published Wednesday found.

As a result, the region's low-income families  particularly minority families  are increasingly cut off from relatives, their children may face worse health outcomes and parents commutes to work can dramatically lengthen.

UC Berkeley researchers tracked migratory patterns and demographic changes across the region from 2000 to 2015. They found that movements caused by housing costs are intensifying racial disparities among neighborhoods.

Many neighborhoods in San Francisco, Oakland, Berkeley and Richmond saw declines in black population while farther-out areas of the East Bay and beyond saw increases. Neighborhoods such as San Franciscos Bayview and Oaklands flatlands lost thousands of low-income black households; places like unincorporated Cherryland in Alameda County and eastern Contra Costa County saw influxes.

Neighborhoods with low pollution, high-quality schools and other resources have become increasingly inaccessible for African Americans, according to the report. The study was a project by UC Berkeleys Urban Displacement Project and the California Housing Partnership, a nonprofit that advocates expanding affordable housing.

The housing market today is operating in the context of an architecture of segregation and vulnerability that was baked into cities and regions over a period of many decades, said Dan Rinzler, a senior policy analyst with the group. Its more or less moving the pieces around to the detriment of people of color and low-income communities.

Living in areas that give residents a better chance at educational success, good health and upward mobility often comes down to race, not class, the study said.

For instance, by 2015 in San Francisco, a low-income white family was three times more likely to live in a high-resource area than a moderate- or high-income black family, the research found. In Alameda County, low-income white households were seven times more likely to live in such a neighborhood compared to a wealthier black family. And in Contra Costa County, a low-income white family was 14 times more likely to live in a better-off neighborhood than a black family with moderate or high income.

The disparities were shocking in some cases, Rinzler said.

Yalonda M. James / The Chronicle

Miriam Zuk, director of the Urban Displacement Project, said the research was undertaken to look at granular, neighborhood-level changes. She said it was also important to break out various racial groups, rather than compare all people of color to white people.

We talk about the reshuffling of people in spaces as if there are no consequences, Zuk said. Theres this trope of, Oh, everyone is free to move where they want and maybe moving from a low-income area of the city to the suburbs is a good thing. What we see is thats not happening. When people move, they are not necessarily moving to better-off places.

Families that moved needed to use a higher share of their income to pay rent in their new home, the study found.

The analysis showed that across the Bay Area, a 30 percent increase in median rent in a given neighborhood corresponded with a more than 20 percent decrease in the number of low-income African Americans, Latinos and Asians living there. The researchers found no significant relationship between rent increases and losses of low-income white households.

Yalonda M. James / The Chronicle

The research team drew from tract-level Census data, the annual American Community Survey and other sources. The study received funding from the San Francisco Foundation.

In three counties studied in the most detail  San Francisco, Alameda and Contra Costa  the researchers found significant and uneven shifts between 2000 and 2015 in the neighborhoods where low-income people of color lived. Demographic changes at the city level could be pinpointed to just a few neighborhoods where they were the most concentrated.

The Longfellow neighborhood in North Oakland, for instance, lost 400 low-income black households  more than any other in Alameda County  between 2000 and 2015, according to the study. Three East Oakland ZIP codes whose low-income Latino populations increased in that period saw the highest rates of child lead poisoning in the county.

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.

In San Francisco, although the low-income Asian and Latino populations grew on an aggregate level, they decreased in historical cultural hubs such as Chinatown and the Mission.

The researchers found that Contra Costa County households that moved in 2015 tended to stay within the county, while those displaced from San Francisco usually settled somewhere else in the Bay Area.

But a large proportion of low-income families that moved out of their Alameda County homes left the region altogether: Black families often went to Stockton and areas of Contra Costa County, while Latino families primarily went to Tracy, San Jose and cities in San Mateo County, and Asian families typically went to parts of Santa Clara and Solano counties.

The costs of displacement can be destabilizing and multigenerational, said Tony Roshan Samara of Urban Habitat, an Oakland nonprofit that advocates policies to help low-income people and people of color.

The research basically confirms what we suspected but couldnt really prove about household-level migratory patterns, said Samara, who wasnt involved in the study but worked on a similar paper that was published in 2016.

One of the riddles of displacement work is that its been near impossible to say, for instance, this person left the Mission and ended up in Antioch, he said.

Matt Schwartz, CEO of the California Housing Partnership, said one clear solution to combat the trend of resegregation would be increasing and preserving affordable housing units.

Its pretty obvious that unequal access to capital in the housing market has played a significant role here, Schwartz said. Ignoring the racial dynamics in the housing market is only going to result in a continued trend toward resegregation.

Kimberly Veklerov is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: kveklerov@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @kveklerov
Two years after being tormented in a chilling Vallejo home-invasion and kidnapping that put their attacker in prison for at least four decades, Denise Huskins and Aaron Quinn are engaged.

Huskins posted pictures on Facebook over the weekend of Quinn popping the question at an undisclosed vineyard.

The engagement comes as the young couple, both 31, begins to move on from the kidnapping nightmare and its horrific aftermath, in which the Vallejo police department publicly accused them of a hoax.

The very-real kidnapper, 39-year-old Matthew Muller, a former San Francisco immigration attorney and Harvard Law School graduate, was later caught, pleaded guilty, and on Thursday was sentenced to 40 years in federal prison for the crime.

Before Sacramento federal Judge Troy Nunley issued the sentence, Huskins and Quinn spoke for the first time publicly about the ordeal. The victims read emotional statements during which they broke down in tears as they each recounted their trauma.

I am so grateful for Aaron, standing by my side and giving me strength and support as I continue to struggle, Huskins said during the sentencing hearing. He knows exactly how to calm me, care for me, how to hold me in the midst of my nightmares. The thought of returning to his arms during those 48 hours helped get me through it, and I never want him to let me go. He gives me peace, love, laughter and hope in humanity.

Muller kidnapped Huskins on March 23, 2015. Dressed in makeshift tactical wear, he sneaked into Quinns Mare Island home armed with a plastic water pistol disguised as a laser-sighted firearm.

He drugged the couple, tied Quinn up and stuffed Huskins into the trunk of a car. Muller, who spent four years in the Marine Corps, took Huskins to his parents South Lake Tahoe vacation home where he held her  raping her twice over two days  before dropping her at her fathers home in Huntington Beach (Orange County).

Investigators in Vallejo, though, were allegedly more influenced by the plot of the movie Gone Girl  in which the title character fakes her own kidnapping  than the facts of their case.

A law enforcement official on the case told Huskinss attorney to watch Gone Girl to understand their investigation, attorney Kevin Clune wrote in a lawsuit filed by the couple against the city of Vallejo.

The same day Huskins turned up safe, Vallejo police Lt. Kenny Park called the episode a wild goose chase in front of dozens of television cameras that had amassed outside department headquarters following the sensational incident.

Today, there is no evidence to support the claims that this was a stranger abduction or an abduction at all, Park said at the time. Given the facts that have been presented thus far, this event appears to be an orchestrated event and not a kidnapping.

After being publicly disparaged for months - television commentator Nancy Grace pushed the Twitter hashtag #kidnappinghoax on her Headline News show - the couple was vindicated.

Muller was busted after breaking into a home in Dublin in a remarkably similar crime to the Vallejo case. The homeowner in that episode fought off Muller, who bolted from the house but left his cell phone behind.

Authorities tracked the phone back to the South Lake Tahoe hideout where they found Muller along with evidence from the Huskins abduction.

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.

Vallejo police have not publicly apologized for calling the kidnapping bogus. Police Chief Andrew Bidou, though, wrote private letters of apology to Huskins and Quinn upon Mullers capture.

It is now clear there was a kidnapping, Bidou wrote, adding that it was not a hoax or orchestrated event and conclusions by police were incorrect.

But in his apology, Bidou defended his officers, saying they took appropriate investigative steps with the information that was available at the time of the abduction.

Several local jurisdictions - including Solano County - are now considering filing charges against Muller related to the abduction.

Evan Sernoffsky is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: esernoffsky@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @EvanSernoffsky
The politics are getting thicker in the decision on what to do with Christine Blasey Fords allegation that Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh attempted to rape her when they were in high school. And Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., is in the midst of the controversy for her delay in bringing the allegation to the attention of her colleagues. Our editorial over the weekend suggested the timing of her announcement last Thursday that she was turning over information to the FBI was unfair to all, including her Democratic colleagues. Her Senate challenger, Kevin de Leon, called her handling a failure of leadership.

The Republicans are obviously in a rush to get Kavanaugh confirmed and have offered to let Ford show up at a hearing on Monday; the Democrats (and Ford) are asking for the FBI to first conduct an investigation. The stakes are high, with the midterms less than two months away. The Republicans are running a huge risk that confirming Kavanaugh without a full airing of this serious charge  or having a hearing in which the 10 GOP men on the Senate Judiciary Committee are seen as bullying or dismissive toward the accuser  could haunt them in November. Feinsteins actions may receive heightened criticism if Republicans roll ahead toward a vote and Senate Democrats are left wondering what might have happened if Feinstein had 1) given them a heads up about the confidential tip in July; or 2) questioned Kavanaugh about it when he visited her office. Feinstein could have done either without revealing the accusers name. Meanwhile, Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, has set a Friday morning deadline for Ford to decide if she plans to testify.

Let them debate

Feinstein has not debated a Senate challenger since Oct. 27, 2000, against Republican Tom Campbell. A few things have changed the world since then: 9/11, two U.S.-led invasions, the iPhone, the Great Recession, the financial crisis, the #MeToo reckoning. In other words: Shes overdue. Feinstein had told our Editorial Board in the spring that she will debate her general-election challenger. But will it happen? The offers are on the table (including one from L.A.s KTTV that includes The Chronicle and L.A. Times) and de Leon, has expressed an eagerness to debate her just about anywhere from El Centro to Yreka. So whats holding her back? Her campaign folks want to blame Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell for keeping the Senate in session, making it difficult if not impossible to nail down a time. But C-SPAN addicts know from their dark screens that United States senators are getting weekends off. It needs to happen.

What is this, 1956?

Gavin Newsom and John Cox made it official this week. They will debate ... but it will be on radio (KQED) at 10 a.m. on a Monday morning, Oct. 8. It is no disrespect to the superb news staff at KQED  or moderator Scott Shafer, who is as substantive as he is smooth  to declare that this is simply deficient in a state of nearly 40 million people and the worlds fifth largest economy. Shame on frontrunner Newsom for declining all offers for an evening televised debate with California journalists. Somewhat inexplicable is Coxs foiling of a CNN debate by insisting that it would need to stick to state issues. One would think the longest of longshot candidates would jump at any opportunity to share a stage with Newsom. Then again, Im just a news guy, not a political consultant.

Say what?

Now in my 23rd year as editorial page editor, having interviewed more candidates than I could count, I thought I had seen and heard it all. Then came Wednesdays session with the candidates to represent Board of Supervisors seat that covers San Franciscos Sunset District. The Sunset leans decidedly conservative by San Francisco standards, so it was no surprise when most candidates opposed putting a homeless navigation center in the neighborhood and opposed state Proposition 10 to give local governments the ability to expand rent control. What was a shocker was one of candidate Lou Ann Bassans solutions to homelessness and public safety. She called for an international boycott of San Francisco until the city tackles those issues. Ive heard plenty of San Francisco politicians demand boycotts of other cities, states or nations  but never, ever a boycott of our own tourism industry, which just happens to supply a good chunk of that funding to address, well, homelessness and public safety.

What were saying

Its high season for election endorsements. Our plan is to have all of them published by Monday, Oct. 8, for the general election. At that point, well have a Voter Guide on sfchronicle.com, with a mobile version you can take into the booth on Election Day.

GEOFF ROBINS;Geoff Robins / AFP / Getty Images

Here are our latest recommendations:

Sign up for the newsletter Want to get the latest San Francisco Chronicle Editorial Board opinions in your inbox? Subscribe to Opinion Central. See More Collapse

No on state Prop. 5: Its hard to describe how many different bad policies Proposition 5 would create or exacerbate.

Yes on state Prop. 2: It represents a modest slice of the revenue from the Mental Health Services Act, and it is entirely consistent with the vision California voters embraced 14 years ago.

No on state Prop. 7: Absent more compelling evidence of daylight savings disadvantages, the advantages of a national standard prevail.

No on state Prop. 10: More rent control  and more local government control  will probably further suppress the supply of housing and deepen the crisis.

Yes on state Prop. 1: Make no mistake: Public investment needs to be part of the (housing) equation.

Nick Josefowitz for S.F. Supervisor: Josefowitzs vision on housing is bold, it is regional  and it is needed at City Hall.

Where to follow us

We have a new Twitter channel, Opinion Central (@sfc_opinions). Please add it to your stream. Youll catch our editorials and opinion pieces, as well as our drive-by comments on assorted subjects in the news.

Also, please add our Opinion Central podcast to wherever you receive yours. This is the place for backstories and commentary with our opinion writers and special guests.

Letter of the Week

We always appreciate a strong stance that goes against the grain, such as this one from Ed Rose of San Francisco:

Regarding Blocked out sunlight (Letters, Sept. 15): I have a couple of comments. Although Im a San Franciscan, Ive spent a lot of time in Manhattan over the years, as recently as last week. People there seem to have no problem with busy streets, tall buildings casting shadows, or density. In my opinion, more taller, denser housing will only make the city more vibrant and energetic than it is now. If this is Manhattanization  bring it on. Im ready for it.

And please check out our other letters of the day responding to this and other matters. You can send us a letter via this form.

Just a reminder

The Chronicles editorials represent the collective judgment of our Editorial Board, which includes the publisher as well as the writers and editors from the opinion team. Our editors and reporters on the news side are not involved in those decisions (including election endorsements). They are charged with reporting fairly and objectively without regard to our editorial positions. It is one of the core values here at Fifth and Mission streets.

Opinion Central is a thrice-weekly newsletter from John Diaz, The Chronicles editorial page editor, and the rest of the Editorial Board. Follow along on Twitter: @sfc_opinions
Patrick Semansky / Associated Press

Perhaps the vain human desire to travel through time fuels governments endless efforts to adjust the clocks by fiat. Now California voters have a chance to weigh in on the timely topic.

Proposition 7 would repeal a 1949 initiative that essentially requires the state to follow the federal lead on daylight saving time, which puts clocks an hour ahead of standard time to produce sunnier evenings from March to November. The proposition would clear the way for the Legislature, by a two-thirds vote, to tinker with the time  either by sticking with standard time year round, as sun-soaked Arizona and Hawaii do, or by adopting full-time daylight saving, which would require congressional dispensation.
Catherine was smart, kind and sassy. From an early age, she learned to take risks, swinging upside down on a trapeze bar strung from the rafters of the shed at Cirkidz, a circus school for children, her blond hair waving like seaweed. She was a good student and a hard worker. At 16, she got up at 5 a.m. every weekday and bicycled for two hours delivering newspapers. After graduating from the Waldorf School, she took a break before going on to university and traveled to Melbourne, Australia. I didnt know she would try heroin there.

She was found unconscious on a concrete stairwell of a popular concert venue.

I am Catherines mother and she was my only child. For years, I ran my own successful business as a professional speaker and corporate trainer but nothing compared with being a mom. Never did I imagine one day I would stand in the morgue, frozen in disbelief, staring down at my baby, motionless on a gurney.

Twenty years have passed since that fateful day  20 years of struggling to forgive myself, 20 years of grappling to make sense of the war on drugs.

On Aug. 31, I attended an Overdose Awareness Day event in San Francisco. It was held in the Tenderloin National Forest, once a dead-end alley filled with dumpsters and now a peaceful space with trees, including a giant redwood, colorful wall murals and a mosaic floor. I placed my daughters photograph on a temporary altar overflowing with photographs of loved ones gone. I mingled with addicts and ex-addicts, people working in the field of harm reduction, and mothers, siblings, partners and friends of those deceased.

Then I walked two blocks down Ellis Street to Glide Memorial Church and viewed a model of a safe injection site proposed for San Francisco  if approved, the first such site in California and in the United States. As I sat in a chair before a mirror similar to one in a hairdressing salon and studied the paraphernalia an addict needs  swabs, needles, rubber tourniquet  my heart ached for Catherine. But I also felt a tingle of possibility. What if every city had a safe injection site? What if drug users were helped instead of punished? What if drugs were legalized, taking them out of the hands of criminals?

I understand the concerns: This will give the wrong message, encouraging children to shoot up heroin. I had the same concerns.

I understand the urge to punish drug users, too. I feel revulsion seeing addicts slumped on pavements, covered in their own vomit, and recognize the desire for a simple strategy to this complex issue: Eradicate illegal drugs and everyone will fall into line. But a drug war has been raging in the United States for 100 years and is failing miserably.

Today, some countries are approaching the problem not as a criminal justice situation but as a public health one, using money saved from not hunting down addicts for compassionate care and rehabilitation. (Its immeasurably cheaper to treat people than to jail them.) Portugal is one such country. To many peoples surprise, the things they were afraid might happen when drugs were decriminalized in 2001 havent happened. In his well-researched book, Chasing The Scream, published in 2015, Johann Hari writes, In the years since heroin was decriminalized in Portugal, its use has been halved there  while in the United States, where the drug war continues, it has been doubled.

I believe my daughter would be alive today if she hadnt gone to an isolated place to shoot up or if her boyfriend hadnt hesitated before calling for help, fearing an arrest. Its too late to save her, but its not too late to save other kids who will make stupid mistakes (as most of us have done). Lets win the war on drugs by ending it.

Kaye Cleave is a Bay Area writer and filmmaker. She co-leads grief and loss seminars at Laguna Writers in San Francisco. kaye-cleave.com
Upcoming political events in the Bay Area.

SUNDAY

Medicare for all: Peace Action of San Mateo hosts a strategy session for a nationwide campaign to enact single-payer health care on the federal level. 7 p.m., Unitarian Universalists of San Mateo, 300 East Santa Inez Ave. More information is here.

Christine Blasey Ford rally: Rally to support Christine Blasey Ford, who has accused Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of trying to rape her when they were high school students. 8 p.m., corner of El Camino Real and Embarcadero Road, Palo Alto. More information is here.

MONDAY

S.F. Politics 101: An introduction to the citys politics. Speakers include state Sen. Scott Wiener, Joel Engardio, Jessica Ho and David Latt. Sponsored by United Democratic Club. Free. 6-8 p.m., Ortega Branch Library, 3223 Ortega St., San Francisco. More information is here.

TUESDAY

Berkeley school board candidates: The League of Women Voters holds a forum for Berkeley school board candidates Ka'Dijah Brown, Julie Sinai, Ty Alper, Abdur Sikder, Dru Howard and Norma Harrison. 7:30-8:45 p.m., Berkeley City College, 2050 Center St. More information is here.

Lieutenant governor candidates: Eleni Kounalakis and Ed Hernandez, candidates for lieutenant governor, take part in a forum on higher education issues. The lieutenant governor is a University of California regent and California State University trustee. Free. 4:30-7 p.m., 110 Embarcadero, San Francisco. More information is here.

Oakland D4 candidates: Forum for City Council and school board candidates in Oaklands District Four. 6:30-8:30 p.m., Allendale Recreation Center, 3711 Suter St. More information is here.

Brisbane development: Brisbane Mayor Pro Tem Madison Davis and City Councilwoman Karen Cunningham take questions on Measure JJ, which would allow development of 2,000 housing units and commercial space and hotels in the Baylands area. 6-7:30 p.m., Madhouse Coffee, 402 Visitacion Ave., Brisbane. More information is here.

Get out the vote: Register to vote, learn about legislation affecting local communities and network with social justice advocates. Sponsored by Building Opportunities for Self-Sufficiency. 11 a.m.-2 p.m., Oakland City Hall, 1 Frank Ogawa Plaza. More information is here.

Progressive take on midterms: A look at midterm candidates and state ballot measures from the progressive perspective, with 48 Hills founder Tim Redmond and Bill Honigman, organizer for Progressive Democrats of America. 7-9 p.m., San Francisco Unitarian-Universalist Center chapel, 1187 Franklin St. More information is here.

Truth decay: RAND Corp. CEO Michael Rich discusses truth decay  the diminishing role of facts and analysis in American public life, at the Commonwealth Club. $35 nonmembers, $10 students. 6:30-7:30 p.m., 110 Embarcadero, San Francisco. More information is here.

WEDNESDAY

Berkeley rent board candidates: Candidates for Berkeley Rent Stabilization Board take part in a forum, sponsored by the League of Women Voters. 7-9 p.m., Berkeley City College, 2050 Center St. More information is here.

D6 supervisor candidates: Matt Haney, Christine Johnson and Sonja Trauss, candidates for San Francisco supervisor in District Six, take part in a forum in the race to lead the innovation district. Sponsored by sf.citi. 6-8:30 p.m. at Lyft, 185 Berry St. fifth floor. More information is here.

THURSDAY

Iran and Trump: Covering Iran in the age of Trump: a conversation with reporter Melissa Etehad of the Los Angeles Times, moderated by San Francisco State journalism Professor Venise Wagner. 12:30-2 p.m., Room 587 of the Humanities Building, San Francisco State University, 1600 Holloway Ave. More information is here.

FRIDAY

Speaker training: Non-Profit Housing Association sponsors speakers training for people who want to advocate for state Proposition 1, a $4 billion affordable housing bond measure, and Proposition 2, to increase allowable spending on housing homeless people. 2-4 p.m., San Francisco location to be announced. More information is here.

Federalism issues: Ed DuMont, solicitor general of California, and Lawrence VanDyke, solicitor general of Nevada, discuss cases before the Supreme Court and the federal courts that center on state vs. federal rights. Sponsored by Federalist Society. $15 for nonmembers, free for students. 6-7 p.m., Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher law firm, 555 Mission St., Suite 3000, San Francisco. More information is here.

SEPT. 29

Tech politics: Candidates for statewide and Bay Area offices invited to discuss issues of importance to Silicon Valley and the technology industry. Sponsored by Royce Law LLC. Noon-4 p.m., Mission Bay Conference Center at UCSF, 1675 Owens St., San Francisco. More information is here.

D6 supervisor candidates: Matt Haney, Christine Johnson and Sonja Trauss, candidates for San Francisco supervisor in District Six, take part in a forum moderated by Chronicle columnist Heather Knight. 9:30-11:30 a.m., Childrens Creativity Museum Theater, 221 Fourth St., San Francisco. More information is here.

SEPT. 30

Preventing nuclear war: Free forum marking 50th anniversary of Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty features ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern and anti-nuclear activists Jacqueline Cabasso and Marylia Kelley. Sponsored by San Francisco Public Library and Coalition for Nuclear Disarmament. 1 p.m., Main Public Librarys Koret Auditorium, 100 Larkin St., San Francisco. More information is here.

OCT. 2

Assembly candidates forum: Jovanka Beckles and Buffy Wicks, candidates in Assembly District 15 in the East Bay, participate in a League of Women Voters forum. 7-8:30 p.m., Berkeley City College, 2050 Center St. More information is here.

The Browns and California: Journalist Miriam Pawel, author of The Browns of California: The Family Dynasty That Transformed a State and Shaped a Nation, discusses Pat Brown, Jerry Brown and the modern history of the state, at the Commonwealth Club. $20 for nonmembers, $7 for students. 6-7:15 p.m., 110 Embarcadero, San Francisco. More information is here.

OCT. 4

State ballot measures: League of Women Voters hosts a pros-and-cons session on the measures on Californias November ballot. 6:30-9 p.m., Berkeley City College, 2050 Center St. More information is here.

Francis Fukuyama: Political scientist and author Francis Fukuyama discusses identity politics. Sponsored by the Commonwealth Club. $25 for nonmembers, $10 for students. 6:30-7:30 p.m., 110 Embarcadero, San Francisco. More information is here.

OCT. 5

Oakland mayoral forum: Ten candidates for Oakland mayor take part in a forum sponsored by the League of Women Voters. 7-8:30 p.m. in the City Council chambers, 1 Frank Ogawa Plaza, Oakland. More information is here.

Barbara Lee: Forum with Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Oakland, celebrating her 20th anniversary in Congress. Sponsored by the Commonwealth Club. $30 for nonmembers, $10 for students. 6:30-7:30 p.m., 110 Embarcadero, San Francisco. More information is here.

OCT. 5-6

Women and Spirit of the New Deal: Authors, scholars, historians and activists gather at UC Berkeley to examine womens contributions to the New Deal and their growing role in political leadership today. Full conference schedule is here. Registration and more information is here.

OCT. 9

Emeryville candidates: League of Women Voters hosts a forum for Emeryville City Council and school board candidates. 7-9 p.m., City Council chambers, 1333 Park Ave. More information is here.

OCT. 10

Pussy Riot: Nadya Tolokonnikova, founder of the Russian art collective Pussy Riot, discusses her new book Read & Riot: A Pussy Riot Guide to Activism. $12.50. 7 p.m., Kanbar Hall, Jewish Community Center, 3200 California St., San Francisco. More information is here.

Danica Roem: Virginia House of Delegates member Danica Roem, the first openly transgender member of a state legislature, discusses her career and life story. Sponsored by Jewish Community Center of San Francisco. $10. 7 p.m., 3200 California St., San Francisco. More information is here.

Left, Right and Center: A rollicking examination of national issues, with panelists Ana Marie Cox, host of With Friends Like These; Washington Post columnist Megan McArdle; and Business Insider senior editor Josh Barro. Sponsored by Inforum and NPR member station KCRW. $35, $10 for students. 7-8 p.m., 110 Embarcadero, San Francisco. More information is here.

Postcarding: A postcarding event encourage voters to turn out for progressive legislative candidates. 6-8 p.m., Richmond Republic Draught House, 642 Clement St., San Francisco. More information is here.

OCT. 14

D4 supervisor forum: Candidates for supervisor in San Francisco District Four take part in a forum sponsored by the Outer Sunset/Parkside Residents Association. 6-8:30 p.m., Lawton Alternative School, Lawton Street between 30th and 31st avenues, San Francisco. More information is here.

OCT. 16

D4 supervisor forum: Candidates for San Francisco supervisorial District Four participate in a forum sponsored by the Outer Sunset/Parkside Residents Association. 6-8:30 p.m., Ortega Branch Library, 3223 Ortega St., San Francisco. More information is here.

New radical majority: D.D. Guttenplan, editor at large for the Nation, and Rabbi Michael Lerner lead a discussion on the rise of a radical new majority in the U.S. $12 in advance, $15 at the door. 7:30 p.m., St. Johns Presbyterian Church, 2727 College Ave., Berkeley. More information is here.

OCT. 18

Hacking politics: Keynote address for weekend conference on how the political system is being hacked. Sponsored by UC Berkeley Center for New Media, SFMOMAs Public Knowledge Initiative, the UC Berkeley School of Journalism and Boalt School of Law. Free. 6 p.m., Phyllis Wattis Theater, SFMOMA, 151 Third St., San Francisco. More information is here. Symposium runs from 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Oct. 19 at 310 Banatao Auditorium, Sutardja Dai Hall, UC Berkeley. More information is here.

Berkeley voter information: UC Berkeleys Science Policy Group hosts a voter information night, focuses on state ballot initiatives. 5:30-8:30 p.m., Anthony Hall, UC Berkeley. More information is here.

OCT. 20

Race and politics: Panel discussion on the impact of race in politics. Sponsored by the African American Community Health Advisory Committee and the African American Library Advisory Committee. 2-4 p.m., San Mateo Public Library, 55 West Third Ave. More information is here.

OCT. 23

Women in leadership: Former U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer and University of California President Janet Napolitano discuss opportunities and challenges for women in leadership. Moderated by Politico California Playbook senior writer Carla Marinucci. Free. 4-5:30 p.m., Banatao Auditorium, UC Berkeley. Registration and more information are here.

Rick Wilson: Republican strategist and Daily Beast columnist discusses dark politics in the age of Trump. Sponsored by the Commonwealth Club. $30 for nonmembers, $10 for students. Noon-1 p.m., 110 Embarcadero, San Francisco. More information is here.

OCT. 25

Max Boot: Council on Foreign Relations senior fellow and Washington Post columnist discusses his book The Corrosion of Conservatism: Why I Left the Right at the Commonwealth Club. $25 for nonmembers, $10 for students. Noon-1 p.m., 110 Embarcadero, San Francisco. More information is here.

OCT. 26

Julian Castro: Former Housing and Urban Development secretary and former mayor of San Antonio, Texas, speaks at the Commonwealth Club. $30 for nonmembers, $10 for students. Noon-1 p.m., 110 Embarcadero, San Francisco. More information is here.

NOV. 7

Jeffrey Rosen: Scholar and author examines constitutional questions and the post-Anthony Kennedy Supreme Court. Sponsored by Commonwealth Club. $25 for nonmembers, $10 for students. 6:30-7:30 p.m., 110 Embarcadero, San Francisco. More information is here.

NOV. 8

Susan Rice: Former President Barack Obamas national security adviser and U.N. ambassador discusses U.S. foreign policy priorities and national security interests. Sponsored by the World Affairs Council. $40 for nonmembers, $10 for students. 6:30-7:30 p.m., Marines Memorial Theater, 609 Sutter St., San Francisco. More information is here.

To list an event, email Politics Editor Trapper Byrne at tbyrne@sfchronicle
SACRAMENTO  Gov. Jerry Brown says California needs to eliminate plastic that people use once and throw away, and on Thursday he took a step in that direction  signing a bill that makes the state the first in the U.S. to ban restaurants from handing out plastic straws unless a customer asks for one.

Brown and other supporters acknowledged that the law, which takes effect Jan. 1, is limited in its scope. It applies only to dine-in restaurants and exempts the biggest sources of straw pollution  fast-food restaurants, delicatessens, coffee stores and any other outlet that supplies takeout orders.

But in his signing message, the governor argued that the laws limited impact is a point in its favor  that it might spur Californians to limit their plastic consumption on their own, without the state having to mandate it.

It is a very small step to make a customer who wants a plastic straw ask for it, Brown said. And it might make them pause and think again about an alternative. But one thing is clear, we must find ways to reduce and eventually eliminate single-use plastic products.

Brown railed against the overuse of plastic, which was invented in the late 19th century and has become so ubiquitous it now pervades every aspect of our modern life.

It is even found in toothpaste, the governor said. Plastic has helped advance innovation in our society, but our infatuation with single-use convenience has led to disastrous consequences.

Now Playing: Starbucks it ditching its plastic straw habit. So are we, but we didn't know what kind to pick. We ended up trying a bunch. Here's what we thought. Video: Time

Plastic straws and stirrers are the sixth most common type of litter on state beaches, according to logs from the California Coastal Commissions annual coastal cleanup days. Conservation groups say the plastic trash that flows out of urban storm drains is threatening the habitat of 500 species of wildlife, including 23 endangered species, in San Francisco Bay alone. Marine biologists say fish and birds often ingest pieces of plastic that they mistake for food.

Brown pointed to reports of 80 plastic bags found in the stomach of a whale that died in Thailand.

Plastics, in all forms  straws, bottles, packaging, bags, etc.  are choking our planet, Brown wrote.

California banned single-use plastic bags in 2016. The groups that supported that law have now turned their attention to single-use plastic straws.

Plastic straws were first used in the early 1960s, and by the 70s they had largely replaced paper straws. The anti-straw lobby has pushed restaurants to switch back to paper or encourage customers to buy reusable straws made of stainless steel, glass or bamboo.

Some cities have already adopted restrictions on plastic straws, including San Francisco, Alameda, Oakland, Richmond, Berkeley, Carmel, San Luis Obispo and Davis.

Starbucks announced in July that it would remove plastic straws from all its stores  not just in California  by 2020.

Simply barring dine-in restaurants from giving straws to customers whether they ask for them or not wont cut litter significantly, according to a legislative analysis of the bill Brown signed, AB1884 by Assemblyman Ian Calderon, D-Whittier (Los Angeles County). The analysis also concluded that the bill is unlikely to change consumer behavior.

Many Republicans voted against the bill, calling it empty symbolism.

I just dont see how this is going to make that much of a difference in reducing the amount of straws in the waterways, Assemblywoman Melissa Melendez, R-Lake Elsinore (Riverside County), said before the bill passed the Legislature. I think an education campaign makes sense for sure, and I think an incentive-based program makes even more sense.

Environmental groups disagree, saying the law is a solid first step.

We want people to avoid creating plastic waste whenever possible, because its an epidemic in our cities and in the bay, said David Lewis, executive director of the conservation group Save the Bay. People who really need a straw can still get one.

The bill got off to a rocky start when it was introduced in January, because it called for waiters to face a maximum $1,000 fine and six months in jail for handing out straws without being asked. Those penalties were quickly removed from the bill and replaced with two warnings, followed by a $25-per-day fine to the restaurant, with a maximum of $300 a year.

After that, AB1884 received little opposition, with the plastic industry and restaurant associations both neutral on the bill.

Gwyneth Borden, executive director of the Golden Gate Restaurant Association, said that most restaurants and bars have already started to move in the direction of only offering plastic straws upon request, and some have only been offering paper straws.

The problem, she said, is that it is now hard to get paper straws because of the demand.

There is a massive shortage, Borden said. Obviously with a shortage of supply, paper straw prices are going to go up.

Borden said it would be nice if legislators went after manufacturers instead of restaurants.

Yes, this is a victory for the environment, she said. But why do they always go after the business and not manufacturers who have control over the cost? I think government leaders should be more creative on how they make the industry supply the product. When you make legislation that impacts the supply side, consumers and businesses end up paying more.

Mark Murray, executive director of Californians Against Waste, said that with the bills signing, Brown sent a message that the state will lead efforts to reduce plastic waste.

From eliminating nonrecyclable plastic food packaging at state facilities to reducing the proliferation of single-use plastic straws, California is putting the brakes on these unnecessary sources of plastic pollution, Murray said.

Melody Gutierrez and Peter Fimrite are San Francisco Chronicle staff writers. Email: mgutierrez@sfchronicle.com, pfimrite@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @MelodyGutierrez, @pfimrite
Christine Blasey Ford wants the world to know her concerns about Brett Kavanaugh being confirmed to the Supreme Court. But President Trump has made it clear he wont agree to her request that the FBI investigate her allegation that Kavanaugh tried to rape her at a party when they were teenagers  her condition for providing testimony that could derail the nomination.

Politically, that leaves the Palo Alto University psychology professor with one avenue if she wants to keep Kavanaugh off the court: testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee anyway. In a she said-he said situation  Kavanaugh strenuously denies her allegations  Fords hope would be that two Republicans in the Senate will join its 49 Democrats to defeat the nominee.

Two senators in particular  a pair of Republican women, Maines Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska  are on everybodys radar.

But Ford has to testify Monday or else forget it, say leaders of the Republican-led committee. Theyre prepared to vote  so prepared that Fords lawyers say they fear some of them have already made up their minds that Ford is mistaken. Republicans want Kavanaugh on the bench by the first Monday in October so they can tell midterm voters that the GOP has delivered two conservative justices since Trump took office.

At the same time, however, Republicans cant risk looking insensitive in a year where a record number of female candidates are running for office and suburban women are swing voters in key House districts. So they need to make it clear they want Ford to testify, even without an FBI probe.

I think its not fair for Judge Kavanaugh for her not to come forward and testify, Collins said Wednesday. Both of them need to testify under oath next Monday.

Its been 27 years since Anita Hill came forward with sexual harassment allegations against then-nominee Clarence Thomas, and the Senate still doesnt have a way to process these sorts of claims.

That puts Ford in an uncomfortable position in the middle of one of the nations biggest political fights. Over the next few days, she must decide whether the potential political gain of testifying is worth the personal pain it could inflict on her and her family.

In July, she wrote in her letter about the alleged attack that it is upsetting to discuss sexual assault and its repercussions, yet I felt guilty and compelled as a citizen about the idea of not saying anything.

The repercussions of coming forward, however, have already been horrifying. Ford and her family have been forced out of their home and hired private security because of death threats. Her lawyers say Fords email has been hacked and that shes been impersonated online.

Adama Iwu, the Sacramento lobbyist who started the We Said Enough campaign that led hundreds of women to call for an to end to the state Capitols pervasive sexual harassment culture, said Wednesday that no matter what happens to her going forward, she will be defined by this forever. And thats a very difficult thing.

Iwu decried the political weaponization of whats going on with Dr. Ford. Ultimately, she said, This isnt about Dr. Ford. Its about whether this person should sit on the United States Supreme Court.

But Supreme Court battles have become intensely political over the past three decades, which explains why anti-Kavanaugh activists have made Ford a centerpiece of their campaigns against him.

Dr. Christine Blasey Ford publicly shared her traumatic story of being sexual assaulted by Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh for the sake of our democracy. Show that youve got Christines back by wearing the I Believe (Dr. Christine Blasey Ford) button! reads an online campaign by NARAL Pro-Choice America.

The Progressive Change Campaign is placing ads in Murkowskis and Collins hometown newspapers reading, Do you believe Dr. Christine Blasey Ford?

While advocates are invoking Fords name to advance their political cause, theyre stopping short of urging her to testify before the committee. Some groups I contacted declined even to address the question of whether her testimony is vital to sinking Kavanaughs nomination.

My advice to Dr. Ford is, do what is most important and most powerful for you, said Amy Everitt, state director for NARAL Pro-Choice California, which has been at the forefront of the anti-Kavanaugh campaign.

Her defenders say Ford could decline to testify simply to avoid being grilled on what they believe was a traumatic experience for her.

Women come forward in public cases like this only extremely reluctantly, said Barbara Ziv, a forensic psychiatrist and Temple University professor who testified for the prosecution at Bill Cosbys indecent assault trial.

Shell be interviewed by a bunch of people who have no experience interviewing people who have been victims of sexual assault, Ziv said. This is the only crime where the victims appearance and character come into question.

The challenge for Republicans who want to shore up Kavanaughs denial is that its almost impossible to do so without trying to discredit Ford in public. Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, a Judiciary Committee member, hinted at one line of attack this week when told reporters that this woman, whoever she is, is mixed up.

Rep. Jackie Speier, the Hillsborough Democrat who sponsored a bill last year that sought to crack down on sexual harassment in Congress, said the danger for Ford is that a committee hearing could turn into a kangaroo court.

The rush to judgment is what is really concerning me here, Speier said. It allows the Republican majority the chance to check the box that says, Well, we gave her a chance to speak.

Voters on both sides will be paying close attention to how this plays out. Unlike when the nation cleaved over Hills charges against Thomas, midterm elections that will determine who runs Congress for the next two years are just weeks away.

How people conduct themselves in this moment, Everitt said, will be the reckoning.

Joe Garofoli is The San Francisco Chronicles senior political writer. Email: jgarofoli@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @joegarofoli
SACRAMENTO  Set the alarm clock. Teens will not be sleeping in, after Gov. Jerry Brown vetoed a bill Thursday that would have barred middle schools and high schools from starting before 8:30 a.m.

Brown, a proponent of local control for schools, wrote that the bill was a one-size-fits-all approach opposed by teachers and school boards.

Several schools have already moved to later start times, Brown wrote in his veto message. Others prefer beginning the day earlier. These are the types of decisions best handled in the local community.

Supporters had argued that research shows teenagers natural sleep patterns keep them up late and lead to sleep deprivation when schools have early start times. Teens do better in school, have lower rates of depression and anxiety and fewer car accidents when school start times start later, research shows.

Were disappointed that the governor vetoed the bill, said Carol Kocivar, an education advocate in San Francisco and past president of the California state PTA. The research and science is overwhelming that this is important for all children, regardless of what school district they live in or where they attend school. This is not an issue thats going away.

Dr. Rafael Pelayo, a sleep specialist and professor at Stanford who testified in support of the bill, said allowing teens to sleep more would be in their best interests.

Had Brown signed the bill, we wouldve been celebrating the triumph of science over special interest, Pelayo said. Were going to move forward. Theres some irony in that the governor was just involved in a climate change conference going against science deniers, and now hes going against science.

SB328 by Sen. Anthony Portantino, D-La Canada Flintridge (Los Angeles County), would have gone into effect in 2021 and would have exempted rural school districts.

The bill drew criticism from those who argued that the state should not tell locally elected school boards what is best for their communities. Opponents of the bill also argued that starting school later would make it difficult for working parents to drop off their kids at school and would affect extracurricular activities.

The California Teachers Association and California School Boards Association opposed the bill.

This is a matter that should be decided upon the local level with input from students, parents and school board leaders who are in the community and who know the needs of their students and families better than anyone else, said Claudia Briggs, spokeswoman for the California Teachers Association. While our members are not opposed to changing the start times, we do believe this is something that should be done at the local level.

Melody Gutierrez and Ashley McBride are San Francisco Chronicle staff writers. Email: mgutierrez@sfchronicle.com; ashley.mcbride@sfchronicle.com. Twitter: @MelodyGutierrez @ashleynmcb
Michael Macor / The Chronicle

SACRAMENTO  East Bay Democratic Rep. Eric Swalwell apologized Thursday for a stupid tweet sent in the early morning hours that mocked a Republican senator who said her office was receiving threats over the battle to confirm Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court.

Sen. Susan Collins, who is seen as a potential swing vote in the confirmation battle, told a radio station in her home state of Maine that her office has received some pretty ugly voice mails, threats, terrible things said to my staff. Collins made the remarks while discussing threats that both Kavanaugh and the woman accusing him of trying to rape her while they were in high school, Christine Blasey Ford, have received. Collins called the entire confirmation process very ugly.
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It is a tradition as hallowed as the winter ski trip or the Fourth of July lake bash: Jam the family into the car after a half-day of work on Friday, weather commuter traffic on the Bay Bridge, crawl across Interstate 80 through Davis, trickle through Sacramento, navigate hairpin turns through the western Sierra, and then, as the scent of pine begins to waft through the vents, hit the requisite 2-mile backup coming into the Lake Tahoe basin. Several hours of back sweat later, your vacation can almost begin.

As wondrous as Lake Tahoe is  and it is indeed spectacular  the journey to the lake can be draining. When the powder is fresh or a three-day weekend approaches, the normal three-hour drive can easily become five or six or even eight.

If only there were a way around this mess, right?

There is: fly.

Now Playing: Lake Tahoe is the second deepest lake in the United States and other things you might not have known about the Bay Area's favorite getaway. Video: Edited by Katie Wood / SFGATE

This summer, Blackbird Air, a startup that bills itself as a sort of Uber for small aircraft, caught attention when it offered a luxurious way to skip the hours of traffic with direct seaplane flights from Sausalito to the Ritz Carltons new Lake Club near Tahoe Vista. Flight time: 55 minutes. Ticket price: $2,200. Seats: 6. The bay-to-lake route was a complete luxury travel experience, the Ritz said in a press release at the time.

But Blackbird Air CEO Rudd Davis argues that getting to Tahoe in the air doesnt have to be a millionaires game.

We think flying is the new driving, Davis says. Traffic is not getting better  everyone knows this. The question we started with was: Is it possible to get the cost of flying down to the point where its on par with, if not cheaper than, driving?

So in addition to offering whole charter flights or seats on private planes, Blackbird works to bring down ticket costs by connecting potential fliers with small-aircraft pilots looking to share their short-haul journeys. Most days of the week, you can find a seat in a four-seater prop plane flying the hour-long route from the Bay Area to Truckee for around $85 one way. The price covers your share of fuel and hangar fees. (For reference, a weekend flight to Reno from the Bay Area on Southwest Airlines this fall will cost around $200 each way.)

Blackbird Air photos

All of the pilots on Blackbirds service  dubbed Hitch  are Federal Aviation Administration-certified, and Davis reckons that several thousand people used the flight-share feature last month.

We dont consider ourselves an aviation company. We think of ourselves as the next logical, evolutionary step in driving, Davis says. The price is so damn affordable.

But Davis has a special affinity for seaplanes, he says, and getting mere mortals on bay-to-Tahoe flights is in the cards for Blackbird, too. Next year, Davis says, the airline will start offering direct routes on amphibious planes from the waters right off San Francisco to Truckees small airport. At a planned $300 per seat one way, its pricey, but passengers will get the added benefit of skipping the security lines at the San Francisco or Oakland airports.

Tahoe has a long history of playing landing strip for seaplanes. The first one touched down on the lakes surface in 1919 (it had to be disassembled and carted away when it couldnt make the flight out of the basin), and Cal-Vada airline ran routes onto the lake for more than three decades. Davis hopes to bring some of that old approach back.

This rich history just went away, Davis says. And now we need these flights more than ever. Time can feel like our scarcest resource.

For more information, visit www.flyblackbird.com.

David Ferry is a freelance writer in Los Angeles. Email: travel@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @Ferryin280
Warriors guard Stephen Curry is teaming up with the Wizards John Wall and the Rockets Chris Paul to raise money for Hurricane Florence relief.

Curry, Wall and Paul  all of whom are North Carolina natives  have launched a fund aimed at raising $500,000 in donations. Within 30 minutes of Curry tweeting out a link to the donation page Wednesday evening, more than $50,000 had been raised.
Two men and a woman were rescued early Thursday, and one was in critical condition, after being trapped on rocks and in the water near Aquatic Park in San Francisco, officials said.

The incident was reported about 5:40 a.m., according to the San Francisco Fire Department, which sent crews to the scene.
Police found drug paraphernalia on a man who was bitten by a lion Wednesday night after breaking into the Fresno Chaffee Zoo, ABC 7 reports.

The unnamed man hopped a fence covered in barbed-wire and then traversed a bridge between the African Adventure Exhibit and a holding pen after 11 p.m.
A man accused in a violent San Francisco kidnapping that led to a fiery and fatal crash in Emeryville was ordered to stand trial on several charges, including murder, a judge ruled Thursday.

Michael Brown, 42, is facing charges including kidnapping, conspiracy, assault, pimping and murder. A second defendant accused of assisting in the abduction, 26-year-old Timothy Attaway, was held to answer for a kidnapping charge.

Judge Samuel Stevens decision comes after a dramatic preliminary hearing last month in which the kidnapping victim testified over two days about the June 10 ordeal.

The victim, a sex worker called Miss B to protect her identity, described an abusive relationship with Brown, who she said at first acted like her boyfriend and later turned into her violent pimp.

When she cut off the relationship and began seeing another man who began acting as her pimp, Brown set her up, prosecutors said.

Miss B said she was lured to San Franciscos Tenderloin on her birthday by Browns associate, 40-year-old Daphne Pink Bailey, who promised they would celebrate with cupcakes and cocaine.

When the two met on Leavenworth Street, Brown sneaked up from behind, and punched Miss B in the face, she said. He and Attaway then heaved her into the trunk of a nearby Dodge Challenger before Attaway walked off and Bailey got in the passenger seat, prosecutors said.

The attack was captured on a nearby security camera and played in court.

Miss B later found an emergency escape latch and got out of the trunk as witnesses followed the car calling 911 as it sped through city streets, prosecutors said.

When the Dodge headed over the Bay Bridge a few minutes later, a San Francisco police officer recognized the vehicle and began to follow it. Thats when the driver gunned it onto the West MacArthur Boulevard off-ramp and slammed into a pole on Peralta Street.

In harrowing footage captured on the officers body camera, bystanders are seen pulling Brown from the crumpled wreckage that had caught fire. The officer and others at the scene could not get Bailey out of the passengers seat before fire overtook the car.

Bailey was pronounced dead at the scene.

Stevens on Thursday ordered Brown to be held to answer for second-degree murder in Baileys death under the legal standard of implied malice. Prosecutors have also argued that the case is a first-degree murder under Californias felony murder rule, which classifies deaths that happen during the commission of certain felonies as murders.

Both defendants are being held without bail in San Francisco Jail.

Evan Sernoffsky is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: esernoffsky@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @EvanSernoffsky
Sfpd/San Francisco Police Department

The driver killed in his vehicle on Polk Street in San Francisco on Saturday was accidentally shot by a drunken friend who was swinging a loaded gun in the back seat of the car, according to a court filing by the San Francisco district attorneys office on Wednesday.

Victor Sosa, 23, was driving his friends around in his Toyota Corolla after leaving a local bar. Inside the car were two passengers: an unnamed woman in the front passenger seat and the defendant, Jose Beltran, 32, in the back drivers side seat. The three friends were looking for a place to buy more alcohol and ended up in the Tenderloin near Polk Street, according to the filing.
HARRISBURG, Pa.  The candidate had just chided the media minutes earlier for not being tougher on his opponent when the moderator asked him what might be his least favorite campaign question: Why wont you release your tax returns?

It wasnt a scene from the 2016 presidential race. Rather, it was from this years campaign for governor in Pennsylvania, where the Republican challenger who has made millions from his trash-hauling business has refused to release his tax returns.

How much I make or dont make is nobodys business, frankly, the candidate, Scott Wagner, responded during a question-and-answer forum.

The incumbent, Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf, released his tax return in what he said was a nod to transparency. The discrepancy between the two candidates and the ongoing dispute highlights a fact that was overlooked in the controversy over then-candidate Donald Trumps refusal to release his returns during the 2016 presidential race: The nations other executive branch leaders  state governors  also are not required to release their tax returns and often dont.

Its an issue that is playing out this year in several hotly contested races, including in Illinois, Iowa and New Mexico, to name a few.

With races for governor on the November general election ballot in 36 states this year, candidates in fewer than half of those states have released part or all of a tax return, according to a review by Associated Press statehouse reporters.

Only one state, Vermont, has a law that says candidates for governor and other statewide offices must release at least part of their tax returns. Its in use for the first time this year after being passed in 2017, but there are no penalties for ignoring it  as did one candidate who appeared on the states primary ballot in August.

Somewhat ironically, lawmakers in more than two dozen states introduced legislation last year that would have required presidential candidates to release their tax returns as a condition of getting on the ballot. None of those became law, in part because of constitutional concerns, and two were vetoed.

Even without a requirement, it has become customary in some states for the candidates for governor to release their tax returns, or at least partial returns, as it has been in U.S. presidential contests. Trumps refusal to release his broke four decades of precedent and has led to questions about his wealth, debts and, whether he has Russian financial ties.

Marc Levy is an Associated Press writer.
NATICK, Mass.  The U.S. military calls its combat field rations MREs, for Meals, Ready to Eat, since they require no cooking. But the troops long ago decided that those initials stood for Meals Refused by Everyone. The stuff may have been filling, but it sure wasnt appetizing.

Even the head of the Armys combat ration program acknowledged that the first few generations of MRE entrees were full of mystery meat and no-name casseroles, and that troops in the field quickly grew sick and tired of them.

Worried about morale, the Army set out on a long-term effort to upgrade the menu with items that the troops might actually like. And its food scientists have finally hit on what many say is the holy grail of field rations: the MRE pizza.

Now being shipped to military bases around the world, the newest of 24 current MRE options is a humble 3-by-5-inch Sicilian-style slice, scattered with melt-proof shreds of mozzarella and pebbles of mild pepperoni, sealed in a dun-colored laminate pouch.

It isnt much to look at, even by free-pizza standards. But this is no ordinary slice. To qualify for MRE duty, a food item has to be able to survive years of storage in a dank ships hold or a sun-baked shipping container, withstand Arctic freezes and tropical monsoons, stave off assaults by insects, and remain intact through a parachute airdrop or even a free fall from 100 feet.

Forget 30-minute delivery  Army regulations say it has to stay fresh for 36 months. And after all that, the pizza still has to be tasty enough to eat.

Its a tall order, and the Armys Combat Feeding Directorate, based at the Natick Soldier Systems Center in the suburbs of Boston, has been trying to fill it for more than 20 years. It took hundreds of failed attempts before the directorate finally came up with a workable version.

But the deployment of MRE pizza is not just a victory for food technologists. It is an indication of how much the military has been forced to change its culture since the draft effectively ended in 1973.

To recruit and retain the volunteers it needs, the military has built up an elaborate social support structure for troops and their families. It now offers child care and family counseling, continuing education benefits, improved base housing, and fitness centers that can rival those in luxury condo complexes. The core mission still includes service under spartan conditions in dangerous lands, but there has been a growing focus on delivering small comforts when possible.

Benefits that were once reserved for the career force were extended to even the lowest soldier, said Jennifer Mittelstadt, a professor of history at Rutgers University who has taught courses at the Army War College on the militarys changing social contract. There was a broad shift toward making life for the soldier more palatable, and pizza is part of that, she said.

MREs, introduced in the early 1980s to replace canned field rations, come in a tough plastic pouch and are meant to supply a complete 1,200-calorie meal, including snacks, dessert and instant coffee. All MREs also come with a flameless ration heater activated by adding water to a chemical pouch. The pouches also include items like toilet paper, matches and chewing gum that may be hard to come by in the field.

Soldiers have always groused about their chow, of course. Generations of generals have repeated the adage that armies march on their stomachs, but few ever mentioned taste buds. As U.S. military rations evolved from the salt pork and hardtack of the Civil War to Vietnam-era cans of ham and lima beans, the verdict of the troops remained reliably grim.

It was only during the first major field deployment of MREs, during the Gulf War in 1991, that military leaders realized the monotonous and largely brown rations could become a morale problem. After the war, Gen. Colin Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, summoned the head of the Combat Feeding Directorate and gave him a two-word order: Fix it.

The directorate responded by scrapping its top-down system of developing rations in favor of a strategy it called soldier requested, soldier tested, soldier approved.

Food scientists began following troops into the field, not just to ask them what they liked and disliked, but also to dig through the trash to see what the troops actually ate.

Soon the least popular offerings  including a ham and chicken loaf and a package of beef frankfurters that troops called the four fingers of death  got the hook. The directorate also got rid of the rainbow packs of Charms candies that were tucked in to some packets: the candies rated well in taste tests, but many Marines considered them bad luck and refused to eat them.

To accommodate an increasingly diverse force and to combat what the Army called menu fatigue, the directorate doubled the number of MRE varieties, adding entrees like Thai chicken and vegetarian tortellini.

But when the Army surveyed the troops about what they really wanted, the top answer was always the same.

They all wanted pizza and beer, said Michelle Richardson, one of the Armys senior food technologists. We couldnt give them beer. But pizza? I like a challenge.

As ubiquitous as pizza is in America, it proved very hard to perfect as a field ration. Make the crust too dry, and you end up with hardtack; too moist, and it molders in the pouch. It took years to develop a spongy, stable bread with just the right amount of moisture, trapped with a blend of gums, oils, sugars and a touch of glycerol.

Adding cheese, sauce and meat brought a barrage of new problems. Moisture would migrate from one ingredient to another, drying out the sauce and turning the crust to mush. Oxygen hiding in the hole structure of the bread turned the cheese brown and the pepperoni rancid. (The same issues ultimately sank the directorates attempt to make an MRE peanut butter and jelly sandwich.)

The food scientists kept tweaking the pizzas cheese, bread and sauce until they all had the same level of moisture and the same pH, so they would not interact and spoil. And to fight oxidation, the team added a small sachet of iron filings to the sealed pouch, which will bind any free oxygen.

When they had a slice that could remain stable for six months in storage at 100 degrees Fahrenheit, it was time for a taste test.

It scored pretty well, Richardson said. On our scale it got a seven. Nine is the highest. I think M&Ms get an eight.

The slice was put into production, and it will debut in the field this year as MRE No. 23, packed in a tan bag along with blueberry cobbler, a powdered chocolate protein drink, an oatmeal cookie, and Italian breadsticks with jalapeno cheese spread.

So how does the pizza taste, really?

Only a few troops have had a chance to try a slice yet, but it is already possible for civilians to obtain pizza MREs online, and a surprising number of military buffs and field-ration fanatics have posted YouTube videos of tastings. Their ratings average out to not bad, with several comparisons to school-cafeteria pizza.

You have to remember, these were designed to be eaten when you are wet, cold and hungry, said a spokesman for the Combat Feeding Directorate, David Accetta. They taste better then.

For an independent experts opinion, The New York Times turned to Jeff Pond, the chef at Area Four, one of the top rated artisanal pizzerias in Boston. In a kitchen where dough from a 14-year-old sourdough starter was being dressed with pistachio pesto and wilted Swiss chard, the field ration was presented to Pond on a plate.

There is a philosophy that no pizza is bad pizza, he said, eyeing the plastic pouch, but Im wondering what Ive gotten myself into.

He slid the slice out of its pouch and took a tentative bite, then a few chews.

You know, theyre not far off, he finally said. Its familiar. It reminds me of the frozen pizzas I had as a kid.

He took another bite. I actually like this, he said. Think about it  their job, designing a pizza that will last, is much harder than what I do. Its cool they would go through all that to deliver something like this for the average soldier.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times
BOSTON  The Armys abrupt discharges of immigrant recruits may not be over after all.

Faced with legal challenges from some of the recruits, who said they had been expelled unfairly on specious security grounds, the Army suspended the discharges over the summer and said it would re-examine its policy.

But an internal Army email message obtained by The New York Times suggests that the Army may be looking for different grounds for expelling the recruits that would sidestep the litigation.

The recruits had signed up for a program known as Military Accessions Vital to National Interests, or MAVNI, which offered legal immigrants with vital language or medical skills a fast track to citizenship in exchange for military service. About 11,000 troops have joined the armed forces through the program since MAVNI started in 2008.

More for you Two military members charged with trying to entice minors for sex

The Defense Department ended the program in 2016, citing security concerns, and imposed strict new screening on thousands of recruits who had already signed enlistment contracts for the program but had not yet begun basic training. The Army flagged many of them as security risks, even when other federal agencies had cleared them for more sensitive jobs in the civilian world.

One was Igor Gavrish, 24, a Russian immigrant who passed stringent background checks to work with deadly viruses in a laboratory where he must have his iris scanned twice to gain entry. He tried to join the Army Reserve, but the Army classified him as a major security risk.

Another immigrant from Russia, Pavel Astashkin, was classified as potentially too risky, even though he is an airline pilot who has passed several federal security checks and regularly flies over the White House and the Pentagon.

It makes no sense, said Gavrish, The Army recruits us for our foreign ties, then refuses to use us because of them.

Declassified counterintelligence reports show that the security threats the Army thought it saw in the recruits were often ordinary aspects of immigrant life, like sending money or regularly telephoning relatives overseas.

A group of recruits sued the Army this summer, saying they were being unfairly discharged. The Army suspended the discharges and said it planned to conduct a review of the administrative separation process.

The internal Army email suggests that the Army has been using the time since then to have military lawyers pore through the immigrant recruits records, looking for possible crimes that could be used to force them out.

The email, sent to lawyers in the Army Reserve in mid-August, asked for volunteers to search the recruits security files to determine whether the applicants admitted to or provided information about a crime. The email was forwarding a request from the 902nd Military Intelligence Group, the unit in charge of vetting MAVNI recruits.

The email did not say how the information would be used. But it noted that the recruits are currently suing the federal government claiming they were wrongfully discharged from the Army, and suggested that during security interviews, the recruits may have confessed to a crime.

Charging MAVNI recruits with crimes would allow the Army to force them out quickly regardless of the legal challenges over background checks.

This is alarming  they are just going on a fishing expedition, said Margret D. Stock, a lawyer and former Army Reserve lieutenant colonel who helped create the militarys immigrant recruit program. She now represents several MAVNI recruits. The Army got called on the carpet in court for doing arbitrary and irrational security screenings, and so it started looking for a new way to kick these guys out.

Allegations of illegal conduct could be used as grounds for discharge, even if formal charges are never filed, Stock said.

Lawyers from Fried Frank, the law firm representing the recruits who are suing the Army, declined to comment.

Asked about the email, a Defense Department spokeswoman denied that the purpose of the legal reviews of the recruits records was to force them out of the service. The spokeswoman, Maj. Carla Gleason of the Air Force, acknowledged that any recruits who were linked to crimes would be discharged, but she said the reviews were routine checks to ensure that reporting guidelines had been followed.

Any inference that this was an attempt to charge or discharge MAVNI candidates would be inaccurate, Gleason said.

The major said the legal reviews requested in the email were canceled a few days after the order went out.

Stock said she believed there had since been additional emails of a similar nature requesting legal reviews. Gleason said she was not aware of any additional emails.

The major said that stringent vetting of noncitizen recruits was vital, because some recruits in the MAVNI program had been linked to foreign intelligence agencies. But she declined to give any specifics, saying the information was classified.

Gleason said the Defense Department did not know of any soldiers in the program who had been publicly charged with offenses related to terrorism or espionage.

Most recruits in the MAVNI program came to the United States on student visas. Many have multiple graduate degrees, and they are, on average, better educated, better behaved and better preforming than the typical soldier, according to a 2017 RAND Corp. report. One MAVNI recruit was the Armys soldier of the year in 2012.

Though MAVNI recruits typically must enlist in low-level jobs that do not require a security clearance, they are put through all the background checks required for top-secret clearance, including a review of years of finances and travel and several lengthy interviews.

Ive been through so many screenings, they know me better than I know myself, said Astashkin, the pilot, who lives in Chicago.

Astashkin, 32, who has degrees in engineering and information technology and speaks Latvian and Russian, came to the United States in 2013 to go to flight school, and then became a flight instructor, training U.S. military pilots who were transitioning to civilian flying jobs. Many of those veterans became his friends, he said, and they inspired him to enlist in the Army in 2016. His enlistment has been in limbo ever since, stalled by a backlogged security vetting system.

In the meantime, he has been working as a commercial pilot for SkyWest Airlines, and said that he had Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York and his staff as passengers on a recent flight.

There is no security reason I cannot be a good soldier, but it is not up to me, it is all politics, he said.

He is worried that turmoil in the MAVNI program will drag on until his visa expires this winter. If that happens and he is deported back to Russia, he could be jailed there for trying to join the U.S. military.

They will treat it like a mercenary  it wont be tolerated at all, he said. For me it is a little scary.

Gavrish has the same fear. He came to the United States as a student in 2012, earned a degree in molecular biology and began working with drug-resistant tuberculosis at a high security virus lab at Boston University.

He enlisted in the Army in 2015, seeing it as an honorable way to earn his citizenship, and completed the required security screenings last year, but has not been called to start basic training.

He obtained copies of the Armys findings through the Freedom of Information Act and saw that he was listed as a major risk because of foreign ties in Russia and a criminal history.

But the report listed no criminal activities, and only one foreign tie, to his father, who owns a carwash in Vladivostok. Gavrish insisted that he had never been in trouble with the law.

Gavrish said he was now working a second job on weekends, saving money for a lawyer to apply for political asylum.

Many of the recruits now in limbo may be discharged and deported before the challenges now in federal court can be decided.

Biao Zou, 32, came from China to study business at the State University of New York in Buffalo and got perfect scores on the Army physical fitness test when he enlisted. But his files show that like Gavrish, he was red-flagged for foreign ties that turned out to be his parents.

They are not anything to do with the government, Zou said in an interview. They sell sweaters.

His student visa has expired. The Army arranged for a three-year grace period for recruits like him, but that, too, will run out soon.

The problems with the MAVNI program are costing the Army talent at a time when the service is falling short of its enlistment goals.

Tilak Poudel, a doctoral student at the University of Toledo, in Ohio, is helping to develop a more efficient way to produce hydrogen gas from water, using only solar power.

This would be an awesome technology for the Army, said Poudel, who is from Nepal. You can produce renewable fuel in the field, and the byproduct is clean water soldiers can drink.

He enlisted in 2015, but was never called for training, and learned this summer that he had been discharged over ties to the Nepalese government. Those ties turned out to be relatives in low-level jobs, most of them public-school teachers.

I will be able to continue with my research, maybe in another country, he said. But I love America. It gave me great opportunity. I chose to serve this country. It just didnt choose me.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, September 20)  Militant groups and administration critics gear up for numerous protests in Metro Manila on the 46th anniversary of martial law.

Mayor Joseph Estrada suspended classes in all levels in Manila on Friday as a security measure as the police expect demonstrations in the city to be "massive."

Several activist groups will join forces in the United People's Action, an anti-dictatorship rally, to be held at the Luneta Park at 4 p.m.

It will be lead by organizations such as Kilusang Mayo Uno, Movement Against Tyranny, and Bagong Alyansang Makabayan to protest against tyranny and the government's drug war.

Several student and human rights groups are also set to join.

READ: Duterte: Martial law 'not feasible'

The demonstration will protest the tax reform law or TRAIN, the Build, Build, Build infrastructure program, and the labor contractualization.

Day of Protest: Looking back at history

Presidential Spokesperson Harry Roque said President Rodrigo Duterte met with security officials and intelligence agencies two days before the September 21 rallies, assuring that the police would treat the protests with "maximum tolerance."

"Maximum tolerance po palagi ang nakasaad sa batas at yan naman po ang sinusunod ni Presidente whether or not there is a law," Roque said at a media briefing Thursday.

[Translation: Maximum tolerance is what was always stated in the law, and that's what the President follows, whether or not there is a law.]

The spokesman also shrugged off talk of threats to the administration.

"It's not anything that the State cannot deal with. Dream on to those who want to remove the President," he said.

READ: Duterte bares alleged plot to 'sabotage,' 'assassinate' him

Former President Ferdinand Marcos declared martial law in the country on September 21, 1972 and ruled for over 20 years amid accusations of human rights violations, corruption and accumulation of some $10 billion in ill-gotten wealth.

The strongman's daughter, Ilocos Norte Governor Imee Marcos, recently drew flak for saying that her family would never admit to these charges. Her brother, former Senator Bongbong Marcos, defended his sister.

In 2017, Malacanang issued a proclamation suspend working and classes on September 21 as part of a "National Day of Protest," but did not do it again this year.
Photo: Contributed

There are only a couple of days left until the 21st annual Father Daughter Ball in Vernon.

The event brings together fathers along with their daughters to enjoy a magical evening, all in support of a great cause.

The evening put on by the Vernon Silver Star Rotary Club is a massive fundraiser for the club. All proceeds support local children's charities.

The ball, being held this Friday, will feature dinner, dancing, door prizes, a silent auction, and last but certainly not least the crowning of a princess.

Registration for the popular event is now closed.

If you would like to know more about the Rotary Club, please visit SilverStarVernon.org or talk to one of their members about how you might join.
SANTA ROSA (BCN)



Santa Rosa police arrested two men and two juveniles and confiscated three loaded weapons in a school zone Wednesday afternoon, a police sergeant said.



Gang crime detectives stopped a BMW for a vehicle code violation near the Santa Rosa Charter School for the Arts at 756 Humboldt St. around 4:05 p.m., Sgt. Tommy Isachsen said.



Two of the four occupants of the BMW fled, but detectives detained the driver and right rear passenger at gunpoint.



The driver, Angel Rincon Gallardo, 26, of Santa Rosa, was arrested on suspicion of possession of a loaded handgun in a vehicle and was booked into Sonoma County Jail, Isachsen said.



The right rear passenger, a 17-year-old boy, was arrested for possession of a loaded firearm and being a participant in a street gang. He was booked in the Juvenile Justice Center, according to Isachsen.



The right front passenger, Eyvan Olvera, 25, of Santa Rosa, fled through the school grounds where children were playing. During a pursuit by detectives, Olvera allegedly threw something and detectives later found a loaded handgun in shrubs, Isachsen said.



Olvera was arrested and booked into Sonoma County Jail on suspicion of weapons and narcotics possession offenses with enhancements alleging he is an active gang participant, Isachsen said.



A 17-year-old boy who was sitting in the left rear of the BMW also fled but was arrested near Benton Street. He was arrested and cited for obstructing or resisting arrest and was released to a parent, according to Isachsen.





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SAN JOSE (BCN)



The Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors is planning to sign a short-term lease to provide land for a homeless encampment that hopes to be a model for temporary housing in the South Bay.



Hope Village, which originally cropped up in a parking lot on Ruff Drive near Mineta San Jose International Airport, shifted to the San Jose city-owned lot of the Service Employees International Union Local 1877 building on Monday after receiving a 72-hour vacate notice from the California Highway Patrol a week prior.



Hope Village organizer Peter Miron-Conk and others spoke with the CHP, local administrators and state officials to find a more permanent location for the camp, settling on the SEIU lot as a temporary fix.



The camp is clean, has solar power, offers showers three times a week and aims to provide shelter until its residents are able to afford permanent housing.



Santa Clara County Executive Jeff Smith requested to lease the SEIU lot from San Jose on Monday and City Manager David Sykes outlined the terms of a potential lease on Tuesday.



The county would pay $1 a month for a lease lasting a maximum of 180 days, according to Sykes' letter. Because the area is not zoned for residential use, Sykes said the location cannot be a permanent solution for Hope Village.



The Board of Supervisors will review the lease at their regular meeting next Tuesday. Supervisor Dave Cortese said today at the Hope Village site that the board is planning to move forward with the lease, but the camp will likely move before 180 days are up.



During that time, Cortese said he hopes the county will map and take inventory of 700 pieces of county-owned property that could sustain additional transitional "villages."



"It's just a years-old bureaucratic grind ... and the problem with that, in this situation is that people can't wait -- winter is coming," Cortese said. "Honestly, I think that's what [Hope Village] organizers did. They said, 'We're here, we picked out a site for you.'"



Cortese and Miron-Conk have been discussing moving the camp to a field between SEIU and Hope Village's original location at the parking lot of the state Employment Development Department.



About seven to 12 people currently live in tents on the field, according to Miron-Conk, and one person told him they have lived there for about seven years.



Residents at Hope Village cannot have substance abuse issues, serious mental health problems or a history of violent behavior, and the people who live in the field will be assessed to determine if they can join the camp or access other resources.



"But we're not in the position of sweeping people and cleaning out their stuff," Miron-Conk said. "That's not an acceptable alternative ... we're aware that it's not going to be easy."



In the future, Cortese said the county will have to start considering homeless individuals in segments by need, such as veterans, those with substance issues, and others, to address the problem effectively.



The city-county partnership with Hope Village might bring changes to the independence of the camp, including the presence of law enforcement, but Cortese said the county will negotiate with the camp to establish a system the residents are comfortable with. This would include limited police presence or a resource officer who works on specific issues.



"There has to be a lot of deference of the self-empowerment of the people in the Village. We want them to feel ... like they're enforcing the rules themselves," Cortese said. "That's a huge psychological stepping stone to living with a landlord, paying the rent on time ... it's also a continuum of empowering them to getting back on their feet."





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Fire Department crews are on the scene of an attempted rescue of three people at Aquatic Park in San Francisco early this morning, according to fire officials.



Fire dispatch confirmed a rescue was underway around 6 a.m. and involves two people stuck on a cliff and another person in the Bay water. Fire officials couldn't confirm if anyone was injured.



No further information is immediately available.





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PALO ALTO (BCN)



A Palo Alto University professor who brought sexual assault allegations against U.S. Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh on Sunday has been forced to leave her home due to death threats, the woman's attorneys said.





In a letter to Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley, attorneys Debra Katz and Lisa Banks said their client, Christine Blasey Ford, has been a victim of harassment, hacking and impersonation.



Ford's supporters set up a GoFundMe donation page Tuesday to pay for any security expenses stemming from the ongoing threats.



The page has since surpassed its goal of $175,000 by over $5,000, and organizers say the surplus will fund women's groups or additional security costs.
OAKLAND (BCN)



Jurors began their first full day of deliberations today in a case in which a defense attorney says an Oakland man fatally shot another man outside a bar two years ago while being blacked out at the time.



In his closing argument in the trial of 36-year-old Sophy Kong on Wednesday, defense lawyer James Reilly said Kong heard voices shortly before the fatal shooting of Sukia Jackson, 43, of Foster City, outside the Shooter's Bar in the 1500 block of unincorporated San Leandro at about 2 a.m. on June 4, 2016.



Reilly told jurors, "Make no mistake about it, it's clear that he (Kong) shot Mr. Jackson," who was a San Francisco Municipal Railway bus driver.



But Reilly said Kong should be found not guilty after he testified that he was blacked out and in an unconscious state when the shooting occurred and he doesn't remember anything about it.



Reilly said Kong, who was born in Cambodia and lived in Thailand for a time before he came to the U.S., bought a .45-caliber semi-automatic handgun because he felt he needed to protect his family after hallucinating and hearing threatening voices in his head.



The defense lawyer said Kong was "semi-homeless" at the time of the shooting and occasionally stayed with his mother, his sister and his girlfriend, with whom he had a child who is now 3 years old.



Kong is charged with murder for Jackson's death as well as two counts of attempted murder for allegedly shooting at two other men and wounding one of them. He's also charged with the special circumstance of lying in wait.



Kong pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity, which means that if jurors find him guilty as charged there will then be a separate sanity phase in his trial in which they will decide whether he was sane at the time of the shooting.



Prosecutor Danielle Hilton told jurors that Kong should be found guilty as charged.



Jurors deliberated for about an hour on Wednesday after getting legal instructions from Alameda County Superior Court Judge Trina Thompson and resumed their deliberations this morning.





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OAKLAND (BCN)



A 19-year-old Antioch man was sentenced at an emotional and lengthy hearing today to 15 years to life in state prison for fatally shooting two men in East Oakland three years ago.



Ishiah Stewart pleaded no contest on Aug. 9 to two counts of second-degree murder for the slayings of Robert Fields, 23, of San Leandro, and Avery Enoch, 27, of Oakland, who were fatally shot in the 2300 block of 88th Avenue at 10:06 p.m. on Sept. 9, 2015.



Authorities haven't disclosed a motive for the double murder.



When Stewart entered his plea, Alameda County Superior Court Judge Allen Hymer said Stewart potentially could have faced up to 100 years to life in state prison if he'd gone to trial and been convicted of two counts of first-degree murder and all of the other charges against him.



Stewart was arrested at his home in Antioch on June 3, 2016, after Oakland police said witnesses and physical evidence connected him to the fatal shootings of Fields and Enoch. The charges against him were filed on June 7, 2017.



At the sentencing hearing today, Fields' mother Cimphanie Stephens said, "Ishiah Stewart has murdered two young wonderful men."



Stephens said, "It's been hard to eat and sleep every day of my life since my son was killed but I haven't seen any remorse from Ishiah Stewart."



She said Fields "leaves behind a 6-year-old boy who still asks what happened to his father."



Fighting back tears, Stephens said her son "had a job, was moving on with his life for the better and had dreams."



Fields' father Robert Fields Sr. said Stewart was "judge, jury and executioner" for Fields and Enoch, who he said had been Stewart's friends.



He said, "I've had a lot of nights with no sleep" and said he also lost his daughter, Robesha Fields, 27, who died shortly after she was shot in the 10300 block of Edes Avenue in Oakland on Feb. 6.



Stewart's defense attorney Jared Winter asked to read aloud a letter that Stewart wrote to the families of Fields and Enoch, but Judge Hymer said some of the family members might not wish to hear it.



Hymer said family members who want to read Stewart's letter can get a copy from the court.



After the hearing, Winter declined to say what Stewart said in his letter.



Prosecutor Nick Homer said the sentencing hearing was "a very difficult day for the family members" of Fields and Enoch.



Hymer told the family members, "I appreciate the outpouring of emotion I heard and I want you to know I understand it."





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SAN FRANCISCO (BCN)



Dozens of African American San Francisco city employees and their supporters attended a hearing this morning at the Board of Supervisors' Government Audit and Oversight Committee meeting, alleging instances of racial discrimination across several city departments.



Ahead of the 10 a.m. hearing, several of the employees attended a rally outside of City Hall, donning shirts that read, "I am black and I matter."



"I've been with the city for 16 years and it's never been as worse as it is today," Theresa Rutherford, Service Employees International Union Local 1021 vice president of representation and a certified nursing assistant at Laguna Honda Hospital, said in a statement.



"People are being disciplined and passed for promotions for being black and that has to stop. We need legislation to deal with accountability for everyone, in every department," she said.



According to Supervisor Jane Kim, the hearing was requested by SEIU Local 1021 to express concerns about anecdotes that they've perceived to be racial discrimination in the workforce.



During the lengthy hearing in front of Supervisors Kim, Vallie Brown, and Sandra Lee Fewer dozens of city employees spoke out about unfair treatment, being passed-up for promotions, being retaliated against after filing complaints, and the disproportionate disciplining of African American workers.



Madelyn McMillan, who said she has worked with the San Francisco Police Department for 25 years, said she experienced retaliation within the department after she had taken time off work due to an accident.



During her absence, McMillan, a secretary, said she was replaced with a white female police officer.



"When I came back to work, she had taken over my whole desk, all my duties, she was now doing everything that I did," she said.



When McMillan asked for her duties back, no action was taken, McMillan said. "They kind of just brushed me under the rug, and told me they would investigate. Nothing happened."



Afterward, McMillan filed a complaint with the city's human resources department, but said the complaint was found to have no merit.



"Once the complaint went though, I got removed from my desk. I was moved into an isolated area, where no one was and I was isolated; all by myself. That was retaliation to me," she said.



Also during the hearing, James Harris, a 16-year city employee and former driver for a city health clinic spoke out about being forced to retire following a fatal incident.



Harris was found not guilty earlier this year of misdemeanor vehicular manslaughter for the 2016 death of a woman in a wheelchair, 38-year-old Thu Thi Phan.



Harris, who is African American, said, "I believe, because of my race, I was forced into early retirement, or be fired."



Following today's hearing, Mayor London Breed announced she had issued an executive directive that would create two full-time positions within the city's Department of Human Resources focused solely on recruiting diverse employees for all city departments.



The directive would also expand the human resources department's harassment prevention, implicit bias and cultural communications training. In addition, all city departments will have to report instances of disciplinary action to the human resources department in order to quickly identify and address problems.



Lastly, according to the directive, the human resources department would convene a group of stakeholders representing city departments, labor unions and stakeholders to further discuss ways to improve workplace diversity and equity within city departments.



"San Francisco's diversity is one of our biggest strengths and our city's workforce should reflect the numerous communities we serve," Breed said in a statement. "We have successfully instituted a number of important diversity initiatives including anti-bias training and a nationally-recognized conviction history program that have led to our workforce being more drivers than our local labor market, but there is still plenty of work to be done," she said.



According to Breed's office, the city currently lacks a centralized reporting and tracking system that would ensure that city departments are free of harassment, bias and discrimination.



"This Executive Directive will ensure that our city departments have clear, consistent standards for recruiting and retaining a qualified, diverse workforce," Breed said.



The executive directive goes into effect immediately, according to Breed's office.





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SAN FRANCISCO (BCN)



Fire department crews have rescued three people at Aquatic Park in San Francisco this morning, including one person who has suffered major injuries, according to fire officials.



Fire officials said the rescue was underway around 6 a.m. A person that was rescued from the water via a fireboat has been transported to a hospital in critical condition.



Two others who were rescued at the base of a cliff are in stable condition and also transported to a hospital.



No further information is immediately available.





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Photo: Google Street View

With back-to-school season well underway, the Penticton Public Library is also launching their fall educational programs, which you can get a sneak peek at this weekend.

The library has a focus on STEAM programming, which stands for Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Math. Chief librarian Heather Buzzell said this weekend's fall showcase will give potential parents a chance to see what's coming up in the next few months for their kids.

"It comes from a perceived need in Penticton, there's not a lot of opportunities for kids in that area for free," Buzzell said. "In general, our STEAM programming is about access and opportunity, that's our role in the community."

Some of the library's new tech will be on display, like their 3D printer, giving people a chance to test drive the gear they will be learning about in the fall programs.

"When we started doing some research into STEAM programming, we were looking at what other libraries were doing around Canada and the world, and it's a way that we can stay relevant in this constantly-changing world," Buzzell said.

She points to the relevance of STEAM education to school-aged kids of all ages.

"I think it's important for everybody. It's one of the areas that the new curriculum in B.C. is focused on, and this is just an opportunity after the bell," Buzzell said. "It allows parents who may not have access to that stuff at home be able to provide that. it's fun, and it's also learning while having fun."

The library will also be asking for feedback, hoping to find out what the public wants to see for future STEAM programming.

And it isn't just for kids, tweens and teens. There is adult programming as well, for those wishing to brush up on old skills or learn some new ones.

There will be coding-based programs, engineering and building programs, science and nature activities and opportunities to learn about cutting-edge technology.

"Come on out and see what's happening!" Buzzell said.

The free event showcasing all the fall programming runs Saturday, Sept. 22 from 10 a.m. to 11:30 at the library.
SANTA ROSA (BCN)



Santa Rosa police this afternoon said two vehicles may have been involved in a fatal hit-and-run collision with a pedestrian on Occidental Road Saturday night.



A witness came forward this afternoon and said the victim, Matthew Thomas Eck, 37, of Santa Rosa, was initially struck by a brown or maroon-colored sedan in the westbound lane of Occidental Road just west of Stony Point Road, police said.



The female driver stopped, got out of her vehicle then got back in the vehicle and pulled to the side of the road before leaving the area, police said.



The female driver was described as a white adult with brown or red hair and a medium to large build, police said.



According to the witness, several vehicles then drove around Eck's body before he was struck again by a white sedan and dragged to the entrance of the Round Table Pizza restaurant at 2065 Occidental Road, police said.



The driver of the white sedan also drove away, according to the witness.



This afternoon police released surveillance camera video and photos of the white vehicle. Police described it as a compact sedan, possibly with a spoiler, similar to a Honda Prelude. The vehicle may have major front damage, police said.



Officers responded to the hit-and-run collision around 9:20 p.m. Saturday. The collision closed Occidental Road until around 3:30 a.m. Sunday.



Police said Eck was found in the westbound lane in front of the Round Table Pizza restaurant. He was pronounced dead at the scene.



Anyone with information about the vehicles involved in the collision is asked to call police Sgt. Summer Gloeckner in the traffic division at (707) 543-4108.





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Whole Foods and two related entities will pay $1.64 million to settle a civil law enforcement action alleging that it violated California laws for the safe storage, handling and disposal of hazardous waste over a five-year period, prosecutors said today.



According to the complaint filed in Yolo County by Alameda County District Attorney Nancy O'Malley and 21 other district and city attorneys, Whole Foods Market California Inc., Mrs. Gooch's Natural Food Markets Inc. and WFM-WO Inc. unlawfully handled and disposed of various hazardous wastes and materials throughout the state over that period.



The prosecutors said the hazardous wastes and materials included batteries, electronic devices, ignitable liquids, aerosol products, cleaning agents and other flammable, reactive, toxic and corrosive materials.



"We remain ever vigilant in the protection of our natural resources and the proper disposal of hazardous waste is vitally important in safeguarding the environment from toxic pollutants that pose a threat to the health of humans, wildlife and plants," O'Malley said in a statement.



Prosecutors said the investigation of Whole Foods began when Yolo County regulators found the company's documentation of employee hazardous-waste training to be incomplete. They said a statewide check confirmed that those deficiencies were systemic.



Prosecutors said the judgment is designed to prevent Whole Foods stores from committing similar hazardous-waste violations in the future.



The judgment requires Whole Foods Market California Inc., Mrs. Gooch's Natural Food Markets Inc. and WFM-WO Inc. to properly label, package, and store hazardous waste to minimize the risk of exposure to employees and customers and to ensure that incompatible wastes do not combine to cause dangerous chemical reactions.



The judgment also requires the companies to properly document their hazardous waste and dispose of their hazardous waste at authorized disposal facilities.



The settlement calls for the Whole Foods entities to pay $1.2 million in civil penalties, $202,800 to reimburse the costs of the investigation and $237,900 to fund supplemental environmental projects.



In addition, the Whole Foods entities must improve the training of their staff and management in the handling of hazardous waste and hire an employee to strengthen their hazardous waste programs.



There are five Whole Foods markets in Alameda County and all five are subject to the terms of the civil settlement, O'Malley said.



Whole Foods didn't immediately respond to a request for comment on the settlement.



Contra Costa County District Attorney Diana Becton praised the company for reaching the settlement, saying in a statement, "I would like to mention that the Whole Foods companies were cooperative throughout our investigation and prosecution while we worked toward a fair resolution to their previous deficiencies."





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Photo: Contributed Les Bellamy, left, with past president Justin O'Connor

Kelownas Les Bellamy could not have picked a more action-packed time to slip into the presidents chair of the Canadian Home Builders Association-Central Okanagan chapter.

The speculation tax is almost here, there is a housing affordability issue in the region, and the government red tape required to build a home keeps getting thicker.

I will not be bored, Bellamy said Wednesday.

The Bellamy Homes owner became president last Friday during the CHBA-COs annual general meeting after spending two years as its vice-president. His two-year term as the boss promises to be an eventful one.

The most pressing issue right off the hop for Bellamy is the speculation tax, which he says has already caused more than $400 million in cancelled contracts for his members in the Central Okanagan alone.

Its just the speculation of the speculation tax, Bellamy said. And this is throughout the Central Okanagan, so its not just in the Kelowna and West Kelowna area. Were getting reports from builders in Vernon, builders in Lake Country, of the impact.

Consumers are scared. Theyre not sure whats going to happen.

For more on this story, visit Okanagan Edge.
Photo: Contributed

Pilots and spotters have spent over 20 hours on Wednesday searching a corridor along Highway 5 for a missing plane.

Wednesday marks the sixth day of searching for a missing single-engine, RV-6A aircraft that took off from Parkland Airport in Spruce Grove, Alta., and never arrived at its final destination in Chilliwack.

Civil Air Search and Rescue Association and Royal Canadian Air Force have been assigned to search for the plane and the two people onboard.

Sun and clear skies allowed for the perfect searching weather Wednesday. CASARA search coordinator Paul Monchamp said crews started early Wednesday morning and had already spent 18 flight hours as of 2:30 p.m.

We have been going from Kamloops up to Clearwater, he said. Same area as yesterday.

Crews finished scanning 1,000 feet above ground level so they will now drop down to search from 500 feet.

We are going over the same areas but in different directions and patterns so we get a different look, he said.

We are making excellent progress, said Monchamp. Working away at our areas.

Monchamp expects they will continue searching for two to three more days, if not more, with the JRCC.

The search has honed in on Blue River, just over 100 kilometres from Clearwater, based on the pilots flight plan, cell tower and radar information.

No details about the two people onboard the missing plane have been provided.
Photo: Mike Biden

An independent report ranked Penticton last in the Okanagan for municipal spending, but city staff say the report doesn't account for it supplying utilities, which almost every other city in B.C. doesn't do.

The Peach City was listed at 109 out of 152 B.C. municipalities in a study published by the Canadian Federation of Independent Business last week, which observed municipal spending between 2006 and 2016.

The report said Penticton increased its operational spending 28 per cent per capita in that timeframe, while the population only grew by one per cent.

In 2016, the operational spending per person in the city was $2,576  nearly $500 more per person than the next-highest Okanagan municipality (Summerland, $2,084).

But chief financial officer Jim Bauer pointed out Penticton is one of only four municipalities in the province that supplies electrical utilities, which the city profits from. He said in 2016, supplying electricity to all residences and businesses accounted for $30 million of the city's spending.

"That's going to drastically skew the numbers," Bauer said. "In fact, when we sort of crunched the per-capita spending, if we took the electrical expenses out, that would move our per capita [spending] from about $2,500 down to $1,500.

"It paints a very different picture of Penticton, so I think that is one of their shortcomings just with regards to their methodology."

The CFIB report only included operational spending of municipalities, which Bauer said accounts for day-to-day costs to "run a city," including salaries, maintenance, operating public facilities and utilities such as water, sewer and electricity.

Bauer added levels of amenities differ in each community, and in Penticton an amenity like the South Okanagan Events Centre will generally shift costs onto the city when other communities use it as well.

If youve got a lot of amenities, your costs are going to inherently be higher than some of the other smaller municipalities that might use those services but dont actually pay for them."

In terms of spending increases compared to population growth, the top-ranked Okanagan cities on the CFIB report were Armstrong (third in B.C.), Coldstream (13th) and Kelowna (19th).

"Certainly prudent spending of taxpayers' dollars is something of great importance to us. We heavily scrutinize, through our budget process, any increase we're seeing," Bauer added. "We're constantly looking at making sure that any increases are absolutely critical."
Photo: The Canadian Press Democratic Senate candidate Phil Bredesen speaks at a summit on the opioid crisis in Nashville, Tenn.

Democratic Senate candidate Phil Bredesen said that the woman accusing Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of sexual assault "has a very credible story." But he said the Judiciary Committee should consider proceeding with a vote if she does not testify under oath.

"She has put herself out there," Bredesen said Wednesday of Christine Blasey Ford, who accused Kavanaugh of assaulting her while they were both in high school. "If she decided at this point to not do something, I guess the committee has to go ahead and say, 'Well, we were willing to listen, but if she's not willing to talk, we need to go forward.'"

The Senate race in Tennessee, a reliably Republican state, is among the most competitive in the nation. Bredesen, the state's former governor, is running as a centrist against Republican U.S. Rep. Marsha Blackburn and keeping a distance from national Democrats. The seat is opening up with the retirement of Republican Sen. Bob Corker.

Bredesen has avoided saying whether he would vote to confirm Kavanaugh for the high court if he were in the Senate. In an interview with The Associated Press, he said the allegation against Kavanaugh, if true, is "close to being disqualifying, if not disqualifying."

But Bredesen said hearing directly from Ford would have significant sway over his decision.

"Even what she's done so far would impact my thinking, but not nearly as much as if she sat there and I had a chance to question her," Bredesen said.

The Judiciary Committee has invited both Ford and Kavanaugh to testify on Monday, though Ford's attendance is uncertain. She's said she wants the FBI to investigate her allegation before appearing in front of lawmakers  a stance that Democrats support but that President Donald Trump and Senate Republicans say won't happen.
Photo: The Canadian Press Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland arrives at the Office of the United States Trade Representative, Wednesday, Sept. 19, 2018, in Washington.

Chrystia Freeland and her U.S. trade counterpart are back at the NAFTA negotiating table today as time marches on towards a congressional deadline for a three-way deal before the end of the month.

But the foreign affairs minister insists she's not watching the clock.

Rather, she says Canada's negotiating team is focused on finding a compromise that meets the needs of all three countries as they work to modernize a trade agreement that governs $2-billion worth of trade every day.

It's been 13 months since the effort began  a time frame Freeland says is "absolutely normal," given the complex and multifaceted nature of North American trade.

Not everyone agrees: senior Republicans on Capitol Hill have been agitating, pressing Canada to hurry up and make a deal already.

Among the evidence that the finish line isn't far away: word from sources familiar with the negotiations that the U.S. backed off in recent weeks on its demands for lucrative procurement projects.

Freeland credits Mexico with making significant concessions in its deal with the U.S. on automobiles and for permitting large wage increases for Mexican auto workers  something Canada and the U.S. both wanted to stop the growing flow of automobile production into Mexico because of its cheap labour.

Despite talk of animosity between the two U.S. neighbours, Mexico made "very deep, very difficult" concessions on auto rules that have helped push talks forward, she says.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says Canada is nonetheless standing firm on its own demands, which include preserving the independent dispute resolution mechanism known as Chapter 19 and protecting the country's supply management system for dairy and poultry products.

"We've been very clear that we're interested in what could be a good deal for Canada, but we're going to need to see a certain amount of movement in order to get there," Trudeau said Wednesday.

Pressure is mounting on the federal government to get a deal done. Texas Republican Kevin Brady, head of the influential House Ways and Means committee, says the two sides are "close enough" and Canada needs to "step it up" and get on board by joining the agreement in principle between Mexico and the U.S.

And House of Representatives majority whip Steve Scalise (R-La.) has warned of "growing frustration" on Capitol Hill with what he calls Canada's "negotiating tactics."

Trade observers say it's likely that Canada intends to use every minute of time left on the clock before the Oct. 1 deadline, which is meant to give Congress time to quickly approve a deal before a new government with mixed feelings about the deal takes office in Mexico.
Photo: The Canadian Press Bennie Lee Sutton posing for a picture in Grifton, N.C.

Hurricane Florence was blowing across eastern North Carolina hours before making landfall, and Bennie Lee Sutton's hunting beagles were howling in their backyard kennel. So he was up in the middle of the night doing what he knew would quiet the pack of more than a dozen hounds: parking his pickup nearby and shining the headlights into their pen.

Sutton could be heard talking to someone, probably the dogs, shortly before dawn Friday as winds swirled 70 miles north of where the hurricane was about to make landfall near Wilmington, said his daughter, Tameria. But hours later when she and her mother looked outside for the avid hunter, he was gone and some of his dogs were outside their pens, roaming their small neighbourhood surrounded by croplands and open fields.

Tameria searched again, this time looking behind the kennels in the yard Sutton and his wife, Marian, owned for nearly half a century. There he was, on his back in a grassy field on the other side of his property line. Doctors chalked up his death as one of the 27 in North Carolina blamed on the storm.

"He was trying to go around and catch his dogs. We're thinking basically what happened is he slipped and he fell or something and he probably had a heart attack," Tameria Sutton said. "It was still raining real hard when we found him."

Bennie Lee Sutton was 77, a big man with a bad knee and a pacemaker who previously had double-bypass heart surgery, his family said.

There were no wounds, so no autopsy was performed to establish the cause of his death, something Marian Sutton accepts as logical.

He formerly worked on the production line at a local textile plant and then did tree removal, his wife said. The couple's son died falling out of a tree that he and his father were cutting down in 2008, said Marian Sutton, 68.

"He was just a big man, with a big heart, big emotion," Nicholson said.

It's not clear if any of the friends in his hunting club will take the dogs, Marian Sutton said, but at her age she's not able to care for such a large pack and plans to give them away.
Photo: CTV

Meghan Markle was joined by her mother Thursday to launch a cookbook aimed at raising money for the victims of London's Grenfell Tower fire.

Markle, who married Prince Harry and is now the Duchess of Sussex, hosted the reception at Kensington Palace beside her mother, Doria Ragland, to support the cookbook titled "Together."

The book celebrates the power of cooking to strengthen communities and bring people together.

Harry also attended the event. The book was inspired by a visit by the former American actress to the Hubb Community Kitchen in North Kensington, which could only open a few days a week for lack of funds.

The cookbook features recipes from women in the community who prepare food to help and heal. The dishes include coconut chicken curry, aubergine masala, caramelized plum upside-down cake and spiced mint tea.

The 2017 Grenfell Tower fire killed 72 people and prompted nationwide calls for tightening building codes and increasing firefighting capabilities for large apartment blocks.
Photo: CTV

The advocate for seniors in British Columbia says a quarter of people living in long-term care homes are receiving antipsychotic medication without a supporting diagnosis.

Isobel Mackenzie says unlike other provinces, B.C. has failed to deal with inappropriate use of the drugs even though figures show the elderly residents have lower rates of psychiatric and mood disorders compared with their counterparts elsewhere in the country.

She says that while long-term care residents in B.C. have slightly higher rates of dementia, their rates of moderate to severe dementia are lower so their use of antipsychotics is troubling.

Mackenzie says that in the last five years, B.C. has managed to reduce use of antipsychotics by 22 per cent for undiagnosed seniors but it hasn't made any gains in the last year.

She says Alberta, Manitoba and Ontario have all done better in decreasing misuse of the drugs and it's time for B.C. to take more action.

A report by the Canadian Institute for Health Information says residents of long-term care homes in B.C. appear to be healthier than the national average, with lower rates of depression, arthritis and heart and circulatory disease.
There are more Millennials in San Francisco than any other age group, and they tend to cluster in trendy San Francisco neighborhoods, according to a new study from RentCafe, an apartment listing site.

For the study, which ranks American cities by their Millennial populations, RentCafe economists analyzed data from the most recent U.S. Census Bureau's five-year population estimate in 2016, as well as 2011 for comparison.

FORGET SF: This California city is where Millennials are moving, study says

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the very hip Mission District has the largest population of Millennials in the city, with 30,501 (41 percent of the total neighborhood population), followed closely by Russian Hill, with 27,613 (49 percent). Both neighborhoods are popular among the younger set for nightlife, dining out and their proximity to downtown, where most workplaces are headquartered.

You'll pay a price for such amenities, however. The median home sale price for the Mission is $1.26 million, according to real estate listing site Trulia. In Russian Hill, it's $1.55 million. Perhaps a more appropriate metric to probe for this age group is monthly rent averages; the median rent payment in the Mission is $4,650, and $6,147 in Russian Hill, per Trulia. That goes for apartments and homes of all sizes.

See the most popular SF neighborhoods among Millennials in the above slideshow.

The high volume of young adults in these neighborhoods is easy to spy with the naked eye, simply by strolling down Valencia or Polk streets. One of the more interesting facets of the RentCafe study is its ranking of "top trending" hot-spots for Millennials.

MORE MILLENNIAL READING: More than 1 in 5 millennials in San Francisco, San Jose live with their parents

The Castro District ranked 9th on the list of top-20 national hotspots. Between 2011 and 2016, the population of Millennials in the historically LGBT neighborhood has increased by 37.4 percent. The sleepier Glen Park neighborhood also made the list, coming in at #14 with a 35.5 percent increase in Millennial residents.

The greater 20-something population in San Francisco is an outlier compared to the rest of the country in many ways. The median earnings for full-time Millennial workers in San Francisco is nearly $60,000, about double the national average for the age group, according to Census data. Nearly 74.5 percent of San Francisco Millennials are employed, compared to 65 percent of the national Millennial population.

Though they tend to earn decent wages, their salaries don't always make the cost of living in San Francisco tenable. This may explain why 1 in 5 Millennials in the city reported living with their parents in 2016.

Read Michelle Robertson's latest stories and send her news tips at mrobertson@sfchronicle.com.

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SEOUL  South Korea President Moon Jae In urged the United States on Thursday to declare an end to the Korean War as an incentive for North Korea to denuclearize, a call that could put the Trump administration in a bind as it tries to revive stalled talks with Kim Jong Un, the Norths leader.

Moon said that during his landmark three-day summit with Kim this week, the Norths leader had repeatedly expressed willingness to give up his nuclear weapons quickly and to build new relations with Washington.

He again and again reaffirmed his commitment to denuclearization, Moon said at a news conference in Seoul, the Souths capital, after returning from North Korea. He said he wanted to achieve complete denuclearization as soon as possible and focus on economic development.

To expedite denuclearization, Moon said, Kim also hopes to meet Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in Pyongyang, the capital of North Korea, and to hold a second meeting with President Trump as soon as possible.

One of the first steps Kim wants to take before moving toward denuclearization, Moon said, is to secure a joint statement declaring an end to the 1950-53 Korean War, which was halted only with an armistice.

U.S. and South Korean analysts express fear that such a declaration would give Kim reason to demand that the United States withdraw its 28,500 troops from the South while North Korea is still a nuclear-armed state. But Moon said it would be merely a political statement, and that it would not affect the status of U.S. troops in South Korea or his countrys alliance with the United States.

I confirmed with Chairman Kim that his concept of the end-of-war declaration is the same as mine, Moon said.

The South Korean leader said he would discuss making such a declaration by the end of the year when he meets with Trump in New York on Monday for the annual U.N. General Assembly session.

Earlier Thursday, Moon and Kim ascended Baekdusan, a still-active volcano near North Koreas border with China that reaches more than 9,000 feet and looms large in the history and imaginations of Koreans on both sides of the border.

Baekdusan, sometimes called Mount Paektu in English and known as Changbaishan in Chinese, is the mythical birthplace of the Korean people.

The visit there by the leaders of the divided peninsula punctuated their avowed intent to improve and normalize relations.

Choe Sang Hun is a New York Times writer.
SALZBURG, Austria  European Union leaders agreed Thursday to enter talks with Egypt to help stem the flow of migrants entering Europe from Africa, offering to step up economic cooperation and the prospect of a high-profile summit in Cairo as incentives.

Speaking to reporters after hosting talks between EU leaders in Salzburg, Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz said weve agreed on in-depth cooperation on issues such as migration, but also economic cooperation with Egypt.

Weve got to ensure that as few people as possible leave northern African countries for Europe. If they do, the situation should be dealt with as close to the African coast as possible, Kurz said.

Kurz, whose country currently holds the EUs rotating presidency, and EU Council President Donald Tusk visited Cairo over the weekend for talks with President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi, a top army general who took office in 2014. Both men have praised him for stopping people from leaving its coast bound for Europe.

Egypt is efficient. Egypt has served as an example when it comes to illegal migration and people smuggling, Kurtz added.

Tusk said he will meet with Sissi this weekend to take the talks forward, and confirmed that the leaders had agreed to take part in an EU-Arab League summit in Cairo in February. Migration talks with other north African countries will also be launched.

To cope with the migrant crisis, the EU has in the past few years been willing to part with billions to secure deals around the Mediterranean with leaders with autocratic leanings.

The bloc lauds a deal it struck with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan for slowing migrant arrivals to a trickle over the past two years, in exchange for up to $7 billion in aid for Syrian refugees there.

Italy alone paid billions to former Libyan dictator Muammar Khadafy to stop African people from leaving his countrys shores. Thousands were transported from Libyas coast to its southern border.

Beyond keeping tight control over Egypts coastline, Sissi could have important influence with the military and militias in lawless, neighboring Libya, a main departure point for migrants trying to enter Europe through Italy.

The decision to work with Egypt comes after Italys anti-migrant government drew headlines for closing its ports to NGO ships, and even its own coast guard, carrying people rescued at sea. Hundreds of migrants spent unnecessary days at sea or aboard boats while EU countries bickered over who should take them.

Lorne Cook is an Associated Press writer.
KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia  Former Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak pleaded not guilty Thursday to 25 new charges of abuse of power and money laundering over the multimillion-dollar looting of a state investment fund.

This brings the number of charges against Najib to 32 since his shocking election defeat in May 9 national polls.

Wearing a blue suit and tie, Najib was calm as he pleaded not guilty in a crowded courtroom to four counts of abusing his power to receive $556 million from 2011 to 2014. He will also stand trial on 21 other charges of receiving, using and transferring illicit funds linked to the 1MDB state fund.

He faces up to 20 years in prison for each count of abusing power under the anti-corruption law, and up to five years for each of the 21 charges under the anti-money laundering act.

A defiant Najib, who was detained Wednesday but released on bail after his court appearance, welcomed the chance to clear his name. He repeated his assertion that the money was largely a political donation from Saudi Arabias royal family ahead of 2013 national elections and that most was returned shortly after the polls.

In July and August, Najib was charged with seven counts of criminal breach of trust, corruption and money laundering related to $10.1 million that went into his bank accounts from a former 1MDB subsidiary. His trial is due to start next year.

Najib set up 1MDB when he took power in 2009 to promote economic development, but the fund amassed billions in debts and is being investigated in the U.S. and several other countries for alleged cross-border embezzlement and money laundering.

The scandal first broke in 2015 when leaked documents showed that $681 million was transferred into Najibs bank account, leading to massive street rallies calling on him to resign. Najib fired critics in his government, and muzzled the media to try to survive the fallout.

A new attorney-general cleared Najib in January 2016. But U.S investigators say Najibs associates stole and laundered $4.5 billion from the fund, including the money that landed in Najibs bank accounts.

Public anger over the scandal eventually led to the ouster of Najibs long-ruling coalition in May elections that ushered in the first change of power since Malaysias independence from Britain in 1957.

Eileen Ng is an Associated Press writer.
ISLAMABAD  Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan has written to his Indian counterpart Narendra Modi, seeking to resolve outstanding disputes between the two nuclear-armed nations, including the issue of the divided region of Kashmir, an official said Thursday.

Foreign Ministry spokesman Mohammad Faisal tweeted that Khans letter reciprocated Indian Premier Narendra Modis call earlier this month for meaningful and constructive engagement.

Khan conceded that relations between Pakistan and India are challenging but said issues must be resolved peacefully.

We owe it to our people, especially the future generations, to peacefully resolve all outstanding issues including the Jammu and Kashmir dispute, he wrote.

Khan said Pakistan is ready to discuss the issue of terrorism, a top priority for India. He also asked that the two countries foreign ministers meet on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly in New York later this month.

Raveesh Kumar, Indias External Affairs Ministry spokesman, said in his briefing Thursday that Indian and Pakistani diplomats will work out the details of the meeting between foreign ministers.

I can confirm that, at Pakistans request, we have decided that our foreign ministers will meet in New York on the sidelines of the UNGA, he said.

The development is an encouraging sign for restarting stalled talks between the two nuclear-armed South Asian neighbors. Pakistan and India have fought two of their three wars since independence in 1947 over the disputed Himalayan region of Kashmir, divided between the two countries but sought by each in its entirety.

Zarar Khan is an Associated Press writers.
Photo: Contributed Historic postcard of Trail B.C. and Teck smelter

The United States Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has upheld a $8.25M court ruling against Teck Metals, ordering the company to pay the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation for pollution of the Columbia River from its smelter in Trail, B.C.

The ruling this week affirmed that Vancouver-based Teck Metals should pay the Colville Tribes for costs related to the litigation ($4.9M) and expenses related to the investigative studies of the water ($3.4M).

From time immemorial, the Upper Columbia River has held great significance to the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation, Judge Ronald Gould said in his opinion. These tribes historically depended on the Rivers plentiful fish for their survival and gave the River a central role in their cultural traditions.

For nearly a century, however, the Upper Columbia River has been fouled by Teck Metals toxic waste, he continued, explaining the company had dumped 400 tons of slag directly into the river, daily, between 1930 and 1995.

The slag was washed into the river with contaminated effluent, which contributed to the 400,000 tons of heavy metals arsenic, cadmium, copper, lead, mercury, and zinc dumped into the river.

"It is inconceivable that Teck did not know that its waste was aimed at the state of Washington when Teck deposited it into the powerful Columbia River just miles upstream of the border," Gould continued.

Teck attempted to argue that the pollution in the river came from sources other than their Trail smelter, but tests commissioned by the Colville Tribes linked the waste to Tecks isotopic and geochemical fingerprint.

The court victory provides the Tribes solid ground in forcing Teck to pay for costs of future cleanup of the waste which remains today, primarily in Lake Roosevelt. Washington State also intervened in the case to try to force Teck to clean up the pollution.

The company actually reached a settlement with the EPA in 2016 to clean up 15 properties impacted by the waste in Washington State.

This is an unique case, not only because a Canadian mining company has been found liable under U.S. law, but because an Indian Tribe and a state have joined forces to protect a shared treasured resourcethe Columbia River, Colville Business Council Chairman Rodney Cawston said. Todays ruling means that - the polluter, not U.S. taxpayers, would pay the cost of remedial action.
STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- You read the headline correctly. I really did that.

In this episode of "The Most," our new recurring web series exploring extremes on Staten Island, I was lucky enough to try this traditional Italian recipe.

Yay.

Joe Scaravella, owner of Enoteca Maria, welcomed me into the famed St. George restaurant known for its rotation of grandmas cooking old-school meals from around the world.

This is where I was introduced to the "The Most Authentic Cuisine" on Staten Island: "capuzzelle," a seasoned, stuffed and baked lamb's head.

I'm not gonna lie, I almost ran out of the shoot. But I'm happy I stuck around.

I tasted a lamb's cheek. I chewed on some tasty brains. The eyeball was juicy.

All that said, it was delicious.

Don't believe me? I get it. But see for yourself on "The Most," where grammar doesn't matter, but extremes do.

New episodes will post every other week. Here's how to check them out:

Look for the show on

Like the

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Follow us on Instagram: @siadvance

Have a suggestion for a future episode? Let us know in the comments below or email Shane at sdimaio@siadvance.com.
STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- When Shpresa "Elssa" Duli, 39, worked for high-end retailers -- including Neiman Marcus, Berdorf Goodman, Harrods in London and Saks Fifth Avenue -- she'd listen to her makeup clients complain about their brows.

Seeking a solution for them, the native of Montenegro became intrigued by microblading, a technique that uses a small blade to add pigment to the skin. This led to her becoming a licensed permanent makeup artist.

When she first started performing microblading, she worked on a woman who had completely lost her eyebrows.

"When she saw her brows for the first time; she had tears coming down her face and she said, 'You have given me a face; you have given me everything I always wanted. Oh my God, I have brows and they are beautiful'," Duli recalled.

At that point, Duli said she knew she wanted to brand herself as a microblading expert.

Having performed microblading while living in Miami, she found a home for her company, IlUD BEAUTY at Beauty Suite New York in Richmond Valley last year.

THE FACE ARCHITECT



Today she calls herself "the face architect."

"I soon realized microblading isn't only for women. I have given brows to firefighters who have been burned in a fire, men with alopecia where brows don't grow, and to chefs who have lost brows to hot stoves. ...I also have worked with women whose eyebrows didn't grow back after chemotheraphy," said Duli, who began her career as a hairstylist and makeup artist in 1999 for high fashion runway shows and top fashion magazines.

"Being in the beauty industry for over 15 years, brows have always been my favorite part of the face. No matter how great the makeup and hair looked, if the brows weren't perfect, everything else didn't matter," she said.

Unlike tattooing, microblading only works on the surface of the skin, she said.

"These beautiful hair strokes are implanted slowly and painless under the surface of the skin. The reason why its painless is because the client's brow area is completely numb. The beauty about the way I do microblading is very different. Clients are never red or swollen after the procedure," said Duli, noting that microblading lasts one to two years.

In addition to microblading, the services Duli offers include: microshading (powder brows); permanent eyeliner; permanent lip liner; full permanent lip color; Eyelash Lyft (a procedure that curls and dyes lashes), and eyebrow tattoo removal.

"My goal it to educate everyone on microblading, which is very new to a lot of people today. I always say, 'It's your face, please don't go to someone you don't know or haven't seen his or her work on people you know just to save a dollar -- because it will cost you way more to fix what you don't like'," she said.

"It's very important for clients to feel comfortable with the artist. My favorite quote I say to everyone is 'it's not you, it's your brows'," she added.

IlUD BEAUTY AT A GLANCE

Address: The Beauty Suite New York at 245 Richmond Valley Rd.



Website: iludbeauty.com

Social Media: www.instagram.com/iludbeauty_brows



New Businesses in Focus is a weekly column that relates the stories of new Staten Island businesses owners.

If you have a new business on Staten Island, e-mail porpora@siadvance.com.

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MTA NYC Transit President Andy Byford at a recent Advance editorial board with the MTA. (Staten Island Advance/Steve Zaffarano)

STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- Major changes, including the addition of a new route, the discontinuation of two existing routes, additional service and extended schedule spans, are coming to the borough's newly redesigned express bus network on Sunday, Oct. 7.

Many of the new changes had been previously announced at an Editorial Board meeting of the Staten Island Advance with the MTA, borough president's office and ATU Local 726.

The MTA has since offered additional information regarding the changes, including how resources are being reallocated in order to optimize the network.

SIM5x, SIM6x

In order to offer additional service across multiple lines, the MTA has announced it will discontinue the SIM5x and SIM6x routes, beginning Oct. 7.

"We have always said that this redesign of the express bus network is a collaborative process where we're listening to the customers riding the buses every day and the bus operators who drive these routes," said MTA NYCT president Andy Byford.

The experimental single-stop route from the South Beach Park-and-Ride on Father Capodanno Boulevard had recently been extended to make two additional Hylan Boulevard stops, but still has not garnered enough ridership to justify the route.

"SIM5x and SIM6x customers can take the SIM5 and SIM6, which serve the same stops between Manhattan and Staten Island. The buses and personnel freed up by this change will be used on routes where additional service is in demand," said an MTA spokesperson.

SIM9

The MTA will implement a new route -- the SIM9 -- that will begin at Hylan Boulevard and Richmond Avenue, traveling down Hylan Boulevard and then turning right onto Midland Avenue. It will then travel along Father Capodanno Boulevard, stopping at the South Beach Park-and-Ride, before heading to the West Side of Manhattan. In Manhattan, the SIM9 will follow the same route as the SIM7 and SIM33.

This route will complement the existing SIM7 route, which runs exclusively along Hylan Boulevard before traveling to the West Side.

"Early in the process we had it (the SIM7) on Father Capodanno," said MTA planner Jonathan Hawkins. "After public outreach we modified it to move it back to Hylan, and now I think that what's become clear is that we got that a little wrong and it really needs both Hylan and Father Capodanno service."

EXTENDING SIM4/SIM4c

After previously announcing a late-night shuttle from the Eltingville Transit Center for South Shore commuters, the MTA has announced it will extend the SIM4/SIM4c route farther south and later into the night.

Once the changes are implemented, the SIM4/SIM4c route will be extended to Huguenot Avenue and Woodrow Road, running until 2:15 a.m.

"The shuttle bus was a temporary improvement to immediately deliver additional service south of Eltingville Transit Center, and this improvement is now being made permanent and more efficient," according to an MTA spokesperson.

SERVICE INCREASES TO MANHATTAN

The SIM1, SIM2, SIM7, SIM22, SIM31, SIM32 and SIM34 will receive increased service on Manhattan-bound trips.

SERVICE INCREASES TO SI

The SIM1, SIM2, SIM3, SIM4, SIM7, SIM22, SIM31, SIM33 and SIM34 will receive increased service on Staten Island-bound trips.

SPAN INCREASE

The SIM3c evening rush hour span has been extended to begin 95 minutes earlier, at 6:25 p.m.

The SIM7 evening rush hour span has been extended to end 30 minutes later, at 7:30 p.m.

ADDITIONAL SERVICE TO CSI

To accommodate riders traveling to the College of Staten Island, three morning trips have been added to the SIM4c, leaving Midtown at 8 a.m., 8:50 a.m. and 9:50 a.m.

REALIGNMENT OF SCHEDULES

Routes that won't be receiving increased service will have their schedules realigned to optimize existing resources.

For example, the SIM10 has experienced overcrowding during the early morning rush between 4 and 5 a.m. However, some SIM10 trips later in the day have been underutilized. As a result, the schedule will be reconfigured to address existing conditions.

"This redesigned network launched with 68 more trips each weekday, 62 more trips each Saturday, 60 more trips each Sunday than the network it replaced, and with these new schedule changes, we will add 38 more weekday trips since the launch as a result of customer feedback and observations on the ground," according to an MTA spokesperson.
The spa that was robbed has left the location on New Dorp Plaza. (Staten Island Advance)

STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- There have been no arrests in the violent robbery at a New Dorp business earlier this month, police said.

Police released surveillance images of two Asian men sought for questioning in connection to the incident at Adrina Spa on New Dorp Plaza at around 6 p.m. on Sept. 1, authorities said.

A female employee was assaulted and her hands and feet were zip-tied, police said.

The suspects removed the victim's cellphone, and took a DVR system and approximately $2,700 in cash from the business, according to a written statement from the NYPD's Deputy Commissioner of Public Information.

The spa has since moved from the location at 97 New Dorp Plaza, the Advance has learned. Construction crews at the scene Wednesday said they began clearing out the underground space on Monday.

The building is also occupied by another beauty business on the main floor. A worker at that salon declined to comment about the incident.

Other neighboring store owners said they were unaware of the robbery.

Attempts to reach the building owner were unsuccessful.

Anyone with information in regard to this incident is asked to call the NYPD's Crime Stoppers Hotline at 1-800-577-TIPS (8477) or for Spanish, 1-888-57-PISTA (74782). The public can also submit tips by logging onto the Crime Stoppers website at WWW.NYPDCRIMESTOPPERS.COM or by texting tips to 274637 (CRIMES) then entering TIP577.

All calls are kept strictly confidential.
STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- Double-parked cars and illegal U-turns are causing serious safety concerns as students arrive for class each morning at Myra Barnes Intermediate School (I.S. 24) in Great Kills.

A recent visit to the school showed many vehicles making illegal U-turns, despite the posted "No U-turn" signs.

It is illegal to make a U-turn in a school zone in New York State, according to the New York State Department of Motor Vehicles.

"They make a U-turn right where the ["No U-Turn"] sign is," said a crossing guard located at the intersection of Cleveland and Durant avenues. "I see about 15 illegal U-turns every day, and those are the ones I see. I'm sure there's more than that."

To make a dangerous situation even worse, some of the cars make U-turns to avoid school buses with flashing red lights and stop signs as students disembark.

Watch the video above to see the dangerous student drop-off process at the school.

In recent months, additional safety measures were added to the area around I.S. 24, including repainted lines on Durant Avenue, all-way stop signs at the intersection of Cleveland and Durant avenues, and a crossing guard at the same intersection.

According to a resident who lives on Durant Avenue, parents have always double-parked and made illegal U-turns on the block during arrival.

"I've complained for years, but it just becomes a part of life," she said. "The parents with kids don't care. They drop kids off where there's no crosswalk."

The Department of Transportation did not return a request for comment at the time of publication.

Are you concerned about traffic and student safety during drop-off and pick-up at your child's school? Let us know in the comment section.

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Photo: Contributed

The cover of darkness was not enough to hide a suspected thief.

Vernon RCMP Const. Kelly Brett said on Sept. 20, just before 1:30 a.m., police were alerted by a vehicle owner that his truck was being rummaged through by an unknown male in the 2700 block of Lakeshore Road.

Prior to the officers arrival, the male fled the area on foot and was not located. Extensive patrols were made for the suspect to which he was observed walking into dark pathways and between homes, in an effort to evade detection by police, said Brett.

Given the recent increase in theft from vehicles throughout the city, this particular call yielded a multi-unit response by RCMP officers to the area. Even though the suspect male had fled the area, officers were diligent in their search, which ultimately led to them locating the suspect in the area.

A 27-year-old Vernon man, who is known to police, was taken into custody without incident and is facing possible charges of possession of break in instruments, theft under $5,000, possession of stolen property and trespassing by night. He is scheduled to appear in court on todays date.

The Vernon North Okanagan RCMP would like to remind residents to clear any belongings out of their vehicles, including but not limited to: small change, cigarettes, clothing and other small or large valued items, said Brett.

Even the small valued items are attractants for thieves. If there is nothing left in the vehicle, the vehicle is less likely to be a target of theft from autos.
Ford Australia will sell its massive former manufacturing plants in Geelong and Broadmeadows, bringing to a close more than half a century of Australian motoring history and local car production.

The last Australian-made Ford, a blue XR6, rolled off the Broadmeadows assembly line in October two years ago and 600 workers lost their jobs as Ford closed its factory doors.

The last Falcon rolls off the assembly line.

The shutdown marked the end of the road, too, for an enduring motoring and cultural icon, the Ford Falcon.

A year later, workers at General Motors Holden witnessed the last Commodore, a red V8, being built at Holdens Elizabeth plant in South Australia and Toyota closed the doors on its Altona factory in Melbourne where it produced the Camry.
After Donald Trump was inaugurated, Washington speculated: Might we see from Bob Woodward, given the volcanic eruption of power and chaos that engulfed Trump from the moment he took the oath of office, the bookend to All The President's Men, his legendary collaboration with Carl Bernstein, both of The Washington Post, on the crimes and fall of Richard Nixon? That book re-defined the crafting of contemporaneous presidential histories. Fear is an even deeper forensic accumulation and sifting of events, facts, documents, records, interviews, all ultimately emerging as settled fact. Woodward has said, "The building blocks of journalism, of truth, are specific incidents". And that is what we have in stellar form in Fear.

Where Michael Wolff set off an IED with Fire and Fury  a book-length magazine article of racy anecdotes that scarred everyone with its shrapnel  Fear is a bunker-buster: a massive smart bomb that burrows under 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and blows open this White House's foundations, shaking its occupants to their core.

The breaking news from the publication of Fear has been the tales of the most senior Trump aides stealing documents from his desk in order to prevent catastrophic consequences from Trump's horrific infirmities: lack of knowledge of not only history, but contempt for the norms that make the American political system work. To stop Trump from signing a letter terminating the South Korea free trade agreement  a disaster when unity was needed to face the North Korean nuclear threat  they swiped it, counting on Trump's short-term attention span to forget about it. Woodward has the letter. On trade, Trump scribbled his distilled thinking on his speech notes: "TRADE IS BAD". Woodward has the scribble.

Woodward's big reveals about Trump's character are relentless. The essence of Trump's world view: "protectionism, isolationism and fervent American nationalism." Trump wants to withdraw from Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, South Korea, all trade deals, the Paris climate accords, the Iran nuclear agreement. There are vicious internal wars on trade, immigration, the Middle East, China, North Korea. Yes, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson calls Trump a moron. Yes, Chief of Staff John Kelly calls Trump an idiot. Both with expletives. "The president has zero psychological ability to recognise empathy or pity in any way," according to former chief of staff Reince Priebus.

Trump hates weakness and to be seen as weak. Hates to apologise. Twitter is, "Who I am  it's the reason that I'm successful". Trump does not listen. He does not read. He is impossible to brief. He has no extended focus. He is immovable on almost all issues. The language in the White House is disgusting, wholly unworthy of the office; the Trump West Wing's screenplay is by Puzo and Mamet.
The ACT government has revealed a major backdown on cuts to school bus services proposed under its new public transport network, following community backlash over student safety.

On Thursday, Transport Minister Meegan Fitzharris said at least half of the school bus routes it had planned to scrap would be restored, though the details are still to be ironed out.

Noah Sham, 10, and Elijah Sham, 7, of Brindabella Christian College would have had to get on a public bus and make multiple connections to get to school from the Woden bus interchange under the new network. Credit:Dion Georgopoulos

Since unveiling the new network in June, the government had been flooded with more than 13,000 responses in a "record consultation".

While many supported more services running into evenings and weekends, Ms Fitzharris said Canberrans had also voiced concerns about safety, particularly for students travelling more often through interchanges.
Canberra cybersecurity firm Penten was named the 2018 Telstra Australian Business of the Year in Melbourne on Thursday.

The company, just three years old and made of only 45 staff, helps defence and government agencies protect themselves against digital threats.

Penten also took home the Medium & Making Waves Award given to successful business with an annual turnover of over $3 million and with under 200 employees.

Canberra consultancy Think Place was awarded the Social Change Maker Award, given to businesses Telstra believes are making a positive social impact.
NSW Attorney-General Mark Speakman will apply for leave to appeal to the High Court after the Court of Criminal Appeal ruled last week that it would not overturn the acquittal of a man for the murders of two Aboriginal children.

The man, who cannot be named, faced separate trials for the murder of Evelyn Greenup, 4, and Clinton Speedy-Duroux, 16, who disappeared from Bowraville in northern NSW within months of each other in the early 1990s.

Evelyn Greenup, Colleen Walker and Clinton Speedy-Duroux.

He has never been charged over the murder of a third child, 16-year-old Colleen Walker, who disappeared about the same time and whose body has never been found.
"In the news, archaeologists believe they have identified the wreck of HMS Endeavour off Rhode Island," notes Brian Corben of Pendle Hill. "I hope they are not barque-ing up the wrong tree."

In an endeavour to keep those puns flowing, Al Wetten of Scarborough pipes up: "A bloke I knew tried stewed crow (C8). Hes been raven about it ever since." John Christie of Oatley assure us that he has "occasionally eaten crow, slow-roasted, with a side of humble pie". Joy Cooksey of Harrington adds that her grandmother, in common with earlier pioneers, also used the local fauna for food when more conventional sources were scarce. Joy remembers her grandmother saying that "no matter how carefully she prepared them, her attempts at pelican pies and black swan stew never did go down too well with the rest of the family".

"What if Bill Posters was walking his dog Spot (C8) one day?" asks Richard Hambly of Potts Point. "Would they be in danger of the double whammy?" A question from Ralph Davis of Wahroonga: "1950s cartoons aside, has anyone actually ever known of a dog called Fido?"

"Do Mongolians mutter 'grrr' when someone refers to a ger as a yurt (C8)?" wonders David Gordon of Cranebrook.

The mention of Bates Salve (C8) brought back many memories for Jim Elliott of Bradbury as his "uncle Vic Usher was responsible for manufacturing the stuff in Adelaide. Apparently it had a very high level of lead oxide in it, which probably was the reason manufacturing ceased". Jim agrees that "it had a wonderful smell when slathered hot on a bandage".
Police have warned people not to drink a bootleg liquor following the death of a middle-aged man from methanol poisoning.

A 57-year-old man was admitted to Liverpool Hospital on September 11 after he suffered a fall. The man's condition deteriorated, and he died a week later on Tuesday.

Police are warning people to stay away from home-brewed rakia following the death of a man in Sydney's south-west.

Health authorities told police the man had been suffering from acute methanol poisoning.

Police were told the man regularly drank alcohol, but not to excess. However, it's believed the alcohol he drank might have been illegally sourced.
A Sydney nursing assistant who repeatedly slapped an 85-year-old dementia patient and hit her in the face with her own bathroom rubbish has been spared jail.

Dana Maree Gray, 59, was in August sentenced to 17 months' imprisonment with a six-month non-parole period for assaulting the "entirely dependent" woman while working at The Poplars nursing home in North Epping in August 2017.

Nursing home employee Dana Maree Gray has been spared jail. Credit:AAP

Gray had worked in the dementia unit of the home since December 2013 when she walked into the "vulnerable" woman's bedroom and unleashed the "domestic violence" attack, magistrate Robyn Denes said.

Footage of the assault, tendered in court, was shot on a GoPro camera hidden by a colleague of Gray's who feared for the residents' safety.
Photo: Colton Davies Parks Canada project manager Sarah Boyle listening to a comment from Area D director Tom Siddon on Thursday.

A Parks Canada staff member said a preliminary park boundary will be ready in November regarding a proposed national park in the South Okanagan and Similkameen.

Project manager Sarah Boyle was before the regional district board on Thursday, where she said public consultation throughout the region will begin in November and last until January.

Boyle said Parks Canada will be hosting several public information sessions in that timeframe and that information on the park plan will be posted online in November  and will be taken down 90 days later, she added.

Exact dates and locations for public consultation sessions haven't yet been determined.

A memorandum of understanding is then expected to be signed in August of 2019, Boyle said, between Parks Canada, the B.C. government and the Okanagan Nation Alliance, to give the park plan a formal green light.

Parks Canada said in August park boundaries are currently focused on areas around Mount Kobau and the South Okanagan Grasslands protected area.

"Right now I'm working with our GIS folks in getting updates on property identification numbers," Boyle said Thursday. "I can't present that map and give you an idea until we get that figured out at the tripartite level, which will be coming shortly."

She said it's hoped the national park would be open by 2020 or 2021, but noted it would take 12 years after that for the park to be fully operational. A national park in the South Okanagan was first brought up at the federal level in the early 2000s.

"All parks take 12 years... to get processes in place, to get assets and infrastructure developed. So it's almost like a ramping-up phase."

The national park plan has long been divisive in the South and Okanagan and Similkameen, and several board members shared concerns that have commonly been heard.

"We're gunna lose our agricultural land. We have approximately 10,000 acres in the Agricultural Land Reserve... That's my biggest concern, we're losing agricultural land all over B.C.," Cawston director George Bush said.

"The other concern," Bush continued, "is that the local government is kind of being left out in the consultation, and that's where I'd like to be included."

In response, Boyle said the federal, provincial and First Nations governments are working on a strategy to ensure they can work with farmers, particularly cattle ranchers.

When asked by board chair Karla Kozakevich, Boyle asserted that existing cattle leases on Crown land would be honoured and that no expropriation of land would take place anywhere in the region if the national park goes ahead.
Furious locals living in streets cut in half by proposed Brisbane State High School catchment maps have blasted education chiefs for refusing to say which side of the divide they are on.

Maps were released earlier this month showing proposed changes to eligibility zones for the state's most popular public high school, set to kick in once the new high-rise school in Dutton Park opens in 2021.

Crown Street in South Brisbane is set to be cut in half by proposed Brisbane State High School catchment maps. Credit:Staff reporter

State Highs current catchment stretches through South Brisbane, West End and out to Dutton Park, but would be cut by 25 per cent under the new proposals.

Residents told Fairfax Media the new proposals were crude lines on a map that cut some streets in half and did not show the homes affected by the proposed changes.
A suspected bikie war brewing in Perth following a drive-by shooting and several suspicious tattoo parlour fires is about greed and power, police say.

Commissioner Chris Dawson said there were heightened concerns about tension between the Rebels and Comancheros following the shooting in Calista on Tuesday, which left a man aged in his 50s in hospital.

The feud is believed to be between rival Commancheros and Rebels bikie gangs. Credit:Kate Geraghty

Five tattoo shops were also firebombed between March and August.

"These bikie clubs are simply organised criminal gangs ... they peddle in drugs, they deal with extortion and threats, they're stand-over thugs," Mr Dawson told 6PR radio on Thursday.
Molotov cocktails, knuckle dusters, guns and drugs have been seized after police raided two properties south of Perth on Wednesday.

One of the guns which were found. Credit:WA Police

A man and woman will face court as a result of an investigation by Rockingham detectives.

Police first executed a search warrant at a home in Bertram on August 10 where it will be alleged they found over $70,000 in cash and approximately 33 grams of methamphetamine.

Further inquiries by detectives led them back to the Bertram home on Wednesday and another house in Wellard.
Parents of students at a Mandurah primary school say they are disappointed at not being notified of a 12-year-old being taken to hospital with a snake bite until two days later.

Zoe Da Silva was bitten while sitting outside her music classroom on Tuesday at Meadow Springs Primary School, which is surrounded by bushland.

The schoolgirl spent a day in hospital following the bite. Credit:9 News Perth

Her teachers were notified and she was taken to Peel Health Campus for treatment and kept overnight as a precaution.

It is unknown what species of snake bit Zoe, but parents at the school said they were concerned they were not notified.
Earlier this week, my colleague Tony Walker made a plea for a more civil, respectful public debate uncluttered by the slogans, epithets and abuse that are the currency of the culture wars.

As he observed, "political correctness", "identity politics" and "virtue signalling" are now mere terms of abuse. One could compile a book of such arid labels and insults which have become a substitute for argument. Their primary purpose now is to situate those who deploy them on the political spectrum. They are ostentatious displays of allegiance and belief. Befitting the lingua franca of the culture wars, they are designed to assault rather than enlighten, to silence rather than explain. They are a call to arms to rally fellow travellers rather than an argument to persuade the uncommitted or opponents.

Illustration: Simon Letch Credit:

Similarly, Labor MP Ed Husic explained his decision to leave Twitter. It is a sewer dominated by the unhinged, the anonymous, the cowardly and the strident. Normal Australians by and large do not randomly assail total strangers with abuse about their appearance, their sexuality, their race, their political views or their religion. Of course, it does happen in both the real and the virtual worlds, though with vastly more intensity and frequency in the latter. Our society would disintegrate if the rancid abuse of Twitter was the norm in civil society. This observation renders me a "snowflake" among the latter-day Voltaires who espouse untrammelled free speech.

The right-wing obsession with the Enlightenment and free speech is amusing. It is underpinned by shabby faux scholarship, which now sees freedom of religion and freedom of speech as inextricably linked. They are not. The first glimmers of the Enlightenment were a revolt against the obscurantism and despotism of the Catholic Church in Europe. Indeed, the modern nation state emerged from the carnage of religious wars among sects of Christianity in Europe which culminated in the Treaties of Westphalia.
The Morrison government will inject another $4.6 billion into private schools over the next 10 years in a bid to finally end the funding wars and resolve a political stoush with the aggrieved Catholic and independent school sectors.

The expenditure includes a new $1.2 billion "sector blind" fund from 2020 that can only be accessed by private schools and will support "government priorities for school education".

Altogether, private schools in both NSW and Victoria will receive an extra $1.46 billion by 2029.

For the first time, parental income tax records will be used to assess the socio-economic status of private schools, which in turn affects the funding they receive from the federal government.
Mr Morrison said the funding boost was not a repudiation of the model set up by Malcolm Turnbull and the previous education minister, Simon Birmingham, but: "When there are issues that need to be addressed, we'll address them." Government documents indicated the new $1.2 billion pot of money will be used for "government priorities for school education", including regional, rural, remote and drought-affected schools. But federal Education Minister Dan Tehan confirmed individual schools will not apply for money from the fund. Instead, it will be paid to the peak bodies in each state, and distribution "ultimately will be choices that each of the sectors will make" based on their own priorities. In particular, the Catholic sector has emphasised its desire to keep providing low-fee alternatives to public schools and independent schools, even in wealthier areas where parents could pay more. "They put a very strong argument that in some cases they do need to be able to offer low-fee offerings because otherwise choice will be taken away from parents," Mr Tehan said.

He said a "framework" would apply to the $1.2 billion fund, but details were yet to be finalised. But detailed modelling has been done behind the scenes on where the money will likely go. Sources in the Catholic and independent sectors told Fairfax Media about $718 million would flow to Catholic schools nationally, while about $485 million will go to independent schools. Prime Minister Scott Morrison and Education Minister Dan Tehan address the media on education funding. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen Labor's education spokeswoman Tanya Plibersek and former NSW education minister Adrian Piccoli, a National, both dubbed the pot of money a "slush fund". Mr Piccoli, now the director of the Gonski Institute for Education at UNSW, called the $4.6 billion package "pathetic".

"There is nothing fair about it," he said. "There is nothing Christian about it. Its throwing money at the powerful and well connected." Blaise Joseph, policy analyst at the right-leaning Centre for Independent Studies, described it as a "special deal" that undermined the Gonski 2.0 funding model. Mr Tehan conceded the $1.2 billion fund "sits outside the model to deal with those issues that no model is ever going to be able to deal with", and said it was a "wonderful initiative". There is nothing Christian about it. It's throwing money at the powerful and well connected. Adrian Piccoli, former NSW education minister The most expensive element of the policy announced Thursday is a transition fund to help schools move to a new method of assessing their socioeconomic status (SES) score and therefore funding.

Currently, a school's individual SES score is determined by census data from the surrounding area. Under the new model, it will be calculated based on the income tax returns of parents. It is made possible by improvements in the government's data-matching capability. Loading In total, private schools in both NSW and Victoria will receive an extra $1.46 billion by the time the transition is complete in 2029. Asked about the absence of any new money for public schools, Mr Morrison said public school funding was chiefly the responsibility of state governments. "I don't think parents will be cynical," he said. "They will note that we're funding public schools at record levels. And all parents want to have choices about how they educate their children."

The Catholic and independent school sectors cautiously welcomed Thursday's announcement, but left the door open to future arguments over funding. Ray Collins, acting executive director of the National Catholic Education Commission, said the new SES model was "fairer" and went "a long way to fixing problems caused by the model introduced in 2017", but it would need to be reviewed again. Michelle Green, chief executive of Independent Schools Victoria, said the deal created "potential" for a workable long-term solution. Ms Plibersek said Labor would go even further and restore all of the funding it promised under the original Gonski arrangements, which would mean more money for Catholic, independent and especially public schools. "We don't believe this restores all of the money that has been cut from Catholic and independent schools," she said.
The state's crime rate has dropped, for the fifth quarter in a row, with the latest annual figures showing a 7 per cent decrease in offending in the 12 months to June.

The state government says the latest data shows Victoria is getting safer but the opposition says it will continue to wage its law-and-order campaign right up until election day on November 24.

Victoria Police say they made 175,000 arrests, a record number, during the reporting period as the crime rate dropped to 5922 crimes per 100,000 people.

Crime is at its lowest out of the three full financial years that Labor has been has been in power, and the crime rate is at about the same level now as it was throughout the Brumby-Baillieu-Napthine governments.
Taipei: Taiwan is bracing for an onslaught of cyber attacks from mainland China ahead of local elections in November intended to undermine a president who has defied Beijing's efforts to bring the democratically ruled island under its control.

China is suspected of cyber attacks against Taiwan which it considers part of Chinese territory.

China, along with Russia and North Korea, is suspected of testing out cyber hacking techniques in Taiwan before using them against the US and other foreign powers, according to the Taiwanese government. The tests involve new malware tools mostly used to target government agencies including Taiwan's Foreign and Economy Ministries, said Howard Jyan, director general of its cyber security department.

"Based on matching patterns, sophistication and other characteristics it's likely that the majority of the cyber attacks come from groups supported by China," Jyan said. "We believe the number of cyber attacks will rise before the elections. Hackers and organisations will try to intervene."

Since taking office in May 2016, President Tsai Ing-wen and her Democratic Progressive Party have refused to recognise the Beijing government's claim to Taiwan. Beijing considers the island part of its territory, to be unified by force if necessary.
Wei Ming-jen, who converted a former Buddhist temple into a communist shrine, works on a laptop inside the shrine in Ershui, Taiwan. Credit:New York Times Wei's actions would have been considered treason a few decades ago, but Taiwan is now a thriving democracy with broad protections for freedom of expression. "Taiwan is a free country," said Akira Chen, the director of the Changhua county cultural affairs bureau. "We will not stop you just because you raise the Chinese flag." Still, a deep suspicion of the Chinese Communist Party has lingered on the island ever since the Communists defeated the Chinese Nationalists in a civil war in 1949, forcing them to flee from the mainland. Since then, Taiwan has been on high alert for any signs that China may be acting on its stated plan to eventually take back the island, which it sees as its rightful territory.

That is why Wei's "patriotic education base", as he calls it, has prompted concerns among some locals, who wonder if he is acting as a proxy for the mainland government even though there is no evidence of direct Beijing involvement in the shrine. Fuelling such suspicions are recent revelations about China's efforts to influence the domestic affairs of countries like Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Wei dismissed concerns about mainland meddling, saying that he alone came up with the idea to convert the temple and that he used his own money, amassed from a successful business as a contractor. Posters of Chinese communist leader Mao Zedong and Chinese President Xi Jinping at the temple. Credit:New York Times But the manner in which he took over Biyun Temple has added to the intrigue.

Several years after Wei was hired to build the addition, the contractor said the nuns owed him money. The nuns said they had paid Wei the full $4.4 million fee in multiple instalments. They also said he persuaded an elderly member of their order who has only a primary school education to sign documents she did not understand. They were promissory notes for additional debts the nuns said they did not owe him. "We have spent our whole lives in the temple, so we know very little about the real world," said Shi Fa-ming, 61, one of the nuns. A court ruled for Wei. After a public auction, he came into possession of the property; the nuns were evicted in 2012. A nun cooks inside a shed that houses Buddhist nuns evicted from their temple in Ershu. Credit:New York Times

Since then, they have been sleeping in shipping containers beside the property. Posted along the divider separating the temple and their encampment is a wall of receipts  proof, the nuns say, of their payments to Wei. Villagers are angry over the loss of the temple, which was built using donations from the community and had been a central place of worship for local rice and banana farmers for as long as anyone can remember. There is no choice now but to worship at a makeshift temple set up by the nuns at their encampment. Attendance has dwindled. "We just want the temple back," said Fa Ci, 70, another nun. "It was built with the people's money." Wei has held firm to the position that his actions were justified. "This is a society based on rule of law," he said. "I didn't receive the full payment, so the building became legally mine."

The nuns believe that even if the Chinese government was not involved, at the very least, Wei has deliberately aligned himself with the Chinese Communist Party to tap into growing nationalist sentiment in China and gain an advantage, financial or otherwise, in the protracted property dispute. "He is taking advantage of the Chinese flag to make money," Fa Ci said. "He said he would ask the People's Liberation Army to come fight us if we dared to provoke him." And there is no question that Wei is winning hearts in the mainland. Wei Ming-jen adjusts a flagpole during a ceremony at the former Buddhist temple. Credit:New York Times "The flag-raising ceremony organised by Wei Ming-jen and our other Taiwanese compatriots has deep historical significance," reads an article on Utopia, a popular Maoist website in China. "Their acts of righteousness will surely be written into the annals of Chinese history."

Officials have said the addition built by Wei will eventually be demolished because it does not meet safety standards. At the moment, however, Wei and his supporters appear energised. On a sultry afternoon, Wei and several others  ranging in age from toddlers to grandmothers  changed into combat fatigues and assumed positions for the twice-daily flag ceremony. When the triumphant opening bars of Communist China's national anthem began blaring over the loudspeakers, two older women started lowering the flags. As Wei and several others sang and saluted, his wife, Lee Pai-jan, captured the ritual on her phone to upload later to the internet. Posters of Chinese communist leader Mao Zedong and other Chinese leaders adorn the former temple. Credit:New York Times
Photo: Combat Camera/Flickr A CH-149 Cormorant helicopter sits at the Jarvis Lake Search and Rescue Training Facility.

UPDATE: 5:15 p.m.

The search for a missing small plane has been called off by the Joint Rescue Coordination Centre on Thursday afternoon.

As of 3 p.m., the JRCC has decided to suspend their search and transfer the case to the RCMP.

Royal Canadian Air Force and Civil Air Search and Rescue Association have flown 320 hours in challenging weather conditions and covered more than 14,000 square kilometres over the past seven days.

The search focused around the flight plan of the missing white Van RV-6A aircraft. Crews scoured up and down Highway 5 between Clearwater and Valemount. The pilot's flight plan, cell phone data and radar data allowed them to narrow their search to the Blue River area.

Our thoughts are with the families and loved ones of the missing pilot and passenger during this extremely difficult time, the JRCC said in a statement.

The JRCC thanks the support from CASARA over the past seven days.

RCMP will take over the investigation and it will now become a missing persons case.

ORIGINAL: 3 p.m.

Weather is hampering the search for a missing plane on Thursday near Blue River, B.C.

Search and rescue crews are in their seventh day of search up and down along Highway 5 from Clearwater to Valemount for a missing single-engine, white, Van RV-6A aircraft.

The two seater plane with two people on board took off from Parkland Airport in Spruce Grove, Alta., and was on route to Chilliwack, but never arrived.

The Joint Rescue Coordination Centre was alerted on September 14 at 2 p.m. about the overdue plane.

Royal Canadian Air Force and Civil Air Search and Rescue Association have dedicated multiple flight hours to searching the area over the past seven days.

On Thursday, a CC-115 Buffalo aircraft, CH-149 Cormorant helicopter, six CASARA aircraft and one RCMP helicopter are searching.

CASARA search coordinator Robert McLean says they are working the area as hard as they can.

Weather is deteriorating on us so we have been working as hard as we can but weather is holding us up, he said.

Rain is pushing search crews out of the northern section of the search area.

JRCC spokesperson Katelyn Moores said a weather pattern is expected to come through today bringing rain, snow and ice to higher elevations.

Our main focus is safety, said McLean. Weve actually pulled those guys out.

McLean said favourable weather on Wednesday allowed them to have a really good search day and have lots of coverage.

We are on a bit of a hold here with weather and once it smartens up we can get going again here, said McLean.
Seoul: North Korea's Kim Jong-un wants a second summit with US President Donald Trump soon to hasten denuclearisation, but a key goal is declaring an end this year to the 1950-53 Korean War, the South's President Moon Jae-in said on Thursday.

Moon said he and Kim spent most of a three-day summit discussing how to break an impasse and restart nuclear talks between Pyongyang and Washington, which are at odds over which should come first, denuclearisation or ending the war.

South Korean President Moon Jae-in, left, and North Koran leader Kim Jong-un stand at the headquarters of the Central Committee of the Workers' Party in Pyongyang, North Korea. Credit:AP

Kim, who recently proposed another summit with Trump after their unprecedented June talks in Singapore, said the North was willing to "permanently dismantle" key missile facilities in the presence of outside experts, and the Yongbyon main nuclear complex, if the US took corresponding action.

The joint statement from the summit stipulates his commitment to a "verifiable, irreversible dismantlement" of the nuclear programmes, and ending the war would be a first US reciprocal step, Moon said.
Aberdeen, Maryland: A woman armed with a handgun opened fire on Thursday at a Maryland distribution centre for the Rite Aid drugstore chain, killing three people and wounding three others before she took her own life, the Harford County sheriff said.

The shooting unfolded shortly after the suspect, a temporary employee at the facility, reported for work at about 9am, local time, at the warehouse in Perryman, Maryland, about 55 km northeast of Baltimore, Sheriff Jeffrey Gahler said at a news conference.

The sheriff's office identified the assailant only as a 26-year-old woman whose last known address was in Baltimore County.

The sheriff said investigators have not yet determined a motive, but a law enforcement source told Reuters the shooting was believed to have been sparked by a work-related grievance.
The un-scientific experiment is called the windshield test. Wilson recommends everyday people do it themselves to see. Baby Boomers will probably notice the difference, Tallamy said. Several scientists have conducted their own tests with windshields, car grilles and headlights, and most notice few squashed bugs. Researchers are quick to point out that such exercises aren't good scientific experiments, since they don't include control groups or make comparisons with past results. (Today's cars also are more aerodynamic, so bugs are more likely to slip past them and live to buzz about it.) Caterpillars at the Melbourne Zoo. Credit:Wayne Taylor Still, there are signs of decline. Research has shown dwindling individual species in specific places, including lightning bugs, moths and bumblebees. One study estimated a 14 per cent decline in ladybugs in the United States and Canada from 1987 to 2006. University of Florida urban entomologist Philip Koehler said he's seen a recent decrease in lovebugs - insects that fly connected and coated Florida's windshields in the 1970s and 1980s. This year, he said, "was kind of disappointing, I thought."

University of Nevada, Reno, researcher Lee Dyer and his colleagues have been looking at insects at the La Selva Biological Station in Costa Rica since 1991. There's a big insect trap sheet under black light that decades ago would be covered with bugs. Now, "there's no insects on that sheet," he said. But there's not much research looking at all flying insects in big areas. Last year, a study that found an 82 per cent mid-summer decline in the number and weight of bugs captured in traps in 63 nature preserves in Germany compared with 27 years earlier. It was one of the few, if only, broad studies. Scientists say similar comparisons can't be done elsewhere because similar bug counts weren't done decades ago. "We don't know how much we're losing if we don't know how much we have," said University of Hawaii entomologist Helen Spafford.

The lack of older data makes it "unclear to what degree we're experiencing an arthropocalypse," said University of Illinois entomologist May Berenbaum. Individual studies aren't convincing in themselves, "but the sheer accumulated weight of evidence seems to be shifting" to show a problem, she said. After the German study, countries started asking if they have similar problems, said ecologist Toke Thomas Hoye of Aarhus University in Denmark. He studied flies in a few spots in remote Greenland and noticed an 80 per cent drop in numbers since 1996. "It's clearly not a German thing," said University of Connecticut entomologist David Wagner, who has chronicled declines in moth populations in the northeastern United States. "We just need to find out how widespread the phenomenon is." Most scientists say lots of factors, not just one, caused the apparent decline in flying insects. Suspects include habitat loss, insecticide use, the killing of native weeds, single-crop agriculture, invasive species, light pollution, highway traffic and climate change.

"It's death by a thousand cuts, and that's really bad news," Wagner said. To Tallamy, two causes stand out: Humans' war on weeds and vast farmland planted with the same few crops. Weeds and native plants are what bugs eat and where they live, Tallamy said. Milkweeds, crucial to the beautiful monarch butterfly, are dwindling fast. Manicured lawns in the United States are so prevalent that, added together, they are as big as New England, he said. Those landscapes are "essentially dead zones," he said. Light pollution is another big problem for species such as moths and fireflies, bug experts said. Insects are attracted to brightness, where they become easy prey and expend energy they should be using to get food, Tallamy said.

Jesse Barber of Boise State is in the middle of a study of fireflies and other insects at Grand Teton National Park. He said he notices a distinct connection between light pollution and dwindling populations. "We're hitting insects during the day, we're hitting them at night," Tallamy said. "We're hitting them just about everywhere." Lawns, light pollution and bug-massacring highway traffic are associated where people congregate. But Danish scientist Hoye found a noticeable drop in muscid flies in Greenland 500 kilometres from civilisation. His studies linked declines to warmer temperatures. Other scientists say human-caused climate change may play a role, albeit small. Governments are trying to improve the situation. Maryland is in a three-year experiment to see if planting bee-friendly native wildflowers helps.

University of Maryland entomology researcher Lisa Kuder says the usual close-crop "turf is basically like a desert" that doesn't attract flying insects. She found an improvement - 70 different species and records for bees - in the areas where flowers are allowed to grow wild and natural alongside roads. The trouble is that it is so close to roadways that Tallamy fears that the plants become "ecological traps where you're drawing insects in and they're all squashed by cars." Still, Tallamy remains hopeful. In 2000, he moved into this rural area between Philadelphia and Baltimore and made his 10-acre patch all native plants, creating a playground for bugs. Now he has 861 species of moths and 54 species of breeding birds that feed on insects. Wagner, of the University of Connecticut, spends his summers teaching middle schoolers in a camp to look for insects, like he did decades ago. They have a hard time finding the cocoons he used to see regularly. "The kids I'm teaching right now are going to think that scarce insects are the rule," Wagner said. "They're not realising that there could be an ecological disaster on the horizon."
Wellington: Intelligence agents have reportedly searched for bugs in the office of a New Zealand academic who believes she's being targeted over her work into Chinese political interference.

University of Canterbury professor Anne-Marie Brady rose to prominence with a 2017 report into China's increasing influence in New Zealand.

University of Canterbury professor Anne-Marie Brady. Credit:U of Canterbury

In February this year, she told an Australian parliamentary committee there had been attempts by Chinese officials to silence her by placing pressure on organisations at home and abroad, and that both her office and home had been burgled.

She noted while laptops - including one used for her work - had been taken during a break-in, other valuables were untouched.
Sibanye-Stillwater announces the early tender results of the buy back of a portion of its outstanding High Yield Bond Notes

Posted by Publisher Internet

Sibanye-Stillwater (Tickers JSE: SGL and NYSE: SBGL  http://www.commodity-tv.net/c/search_adv/?v=298294) is pleased to announce the early tender results of its offer to repurchase up to US$350 million (including accrued interest) of the 6.125% Notes due 27 June 2022 (the 2022 Notes) and 7.125% Notes due 27 June 2025 (the 2025 Notes), issued by Stillwater Mining Company.?

Neal Froneman CEO of Sibanye-Stillwater commented: ?We are delighted to announce the results of the tender offers following the early tender time, pursuant to which both offers were fully subscribed. The repurchase of these instruments, which is scheduled to occur on the early settlement date of 19 September 2018, is consistent with delivery against our strategic goals of reducing our leverage, thereby creating immediate value. The repurchase of the High Yield Notes and the Convertible Bond repurchase announced last week, retires approximately 30% of our long term debt at a nominal value of approximately US$415 million, thereby expecting to reduce annual interest costs by approximately US$25 million?

The table below sets forth information with respect to the High Yield Notes that were validly tendered at or prior to 5:00 p.m., New York City time, on September 17, 2018 (the ?Early Tender Time?) and not withdrawn.

For more information and for full terms and conditions, please refer to https://www.sibanyestillwater.com/investors/documents-circulars/2018/item/360-high-yield-bond.

Contacts:

Email: ir@sibanyestillwater.com

James Wellsted

Head of Investor Relations

+27 (0) 83 453 4014

Sponsor: J.P. Morgan Equities South Africa Proprietary Limited

In Europe:

Swiss Resource Capital AG

Jochen Staiger

info@resource-capital.ch

www.resource-capital.ch

Advisors:

Linklaters LLP and ENSafrica are acting as legal advisors to Sibanye-Stillwater.

White & Case LLP are acting as legal advisors to the International Dealer Managers.

FORWARD LOOKING STATEMENTS

This announcement includes ?forward-looking statements? within the meaning of the ?safe harbor? provisions of the United States Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements may be identified by the use of words such as ?target?, ?will?, ?forecast?, ?expect?, ?potential?, ?intend?, ?estimate?, ?anticipate?, ?can? and other similar expressions that predict or indicate future events or trends or that are not statements of historical matters. The forward-looking statements set out in this announcement involve a number of known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors, many of which are difficult to predict and generally beyond the control of Sibanye-Stillwater, that could cause Sibanye-Stillwater?s actual results and outcomes to be materially different from historical results or from any future results expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements speak only as of the date of this announcement. Sibanye-Stillwater undertakes no obligation to update publicly or release any revisions to these forward-looking statements to reflect events or circumstances after the date of this announcement or to reflect the occurrence of unanticipated events, save as required by applicable law.

The results of the early tender process will allow Sibanye-Stillwater to repurchase Notes up to the Global Maximum Tender Cap on the Early Settlement Date on 19 September 2018.
TerraX purchases the Tom Mine and Sickle Properties

Posted by Publisher Internet

TerraX Minerals Inc. (TSX-V: TXR; Frankfurt: TX0; OTC Pink: TRXXF  http://www.commodity-tv.net/c/search_adv/?v=298245) is pleased to announce the purchase of a 100% interest in the Tom Mine (6 sq km)and Sickle (2 sq. km) properties from Altamira Gold Corp. These properties increase the area of the YCGP from 772 square kilometers to 780 square kilometers. A map of the property locations is available here.

As part of the agreement, TerraX will pay Altamira a total of $25,000 cash and 250,000 shares of TerraX. Altamira will retain a 2% NSR royalty. The agreement is subject to the approval of the TSX-V exchange and is expected to close by the end of September.

David Suda, the Chief Executive Officer and President of TerraX stated \While results from our summer exploration program continue to fill our pipeline of focused targets; our team continues to build the world class land package. We are pleased to have completed and amicable transaction with Altamira.\

The Tom Mine was a gold producer in the Yellowknife gold district from 1985-1997. The Tom and C vein systems were accessed by ramp to 122 vertical metres over 300 metres of strike length. The Tom Mine production was milled at the Ptarmigan Mine (January 12, 2018 press release) so separate production records for the Tom Mine are not available. The Tom Mine gold ore has the same characteristics as the Ptarmigan Mine which is free milling with reported recovery of 94%. When the mine closed in 1997 the veins were still open at depths below the current mine workings. (Source: The Operational History of Mines in the Northwest Territoies, R. Silke, 2009; and Treminco Resources Limited, Annual report 1990). The southern portion of the property is contiguous with the Ptarmigan Gold Mine property. TerraX has no liability for any remediation of the previous mine site.

The Sickle property is underlain by the Walsh Lake sediments, which are host to TerraX\-\-s Mispickle Zone (September 22, 2016, press release). Several historic gold showings occur on the property with gold values up to 4 g/t.

David Suda, the Chief Executive Officer and President of TerraX stated \While results from our summer exploration program continue to fill our pipeline of focused targets; our team continues to build the world class land package. We are pleased to have completed and amicable transaction with Altamira.\

Joseph Campbell, the Executive Chairman of the Board of TerraX, stated \The purchase of the Tom Mine property gives TerraX access to another gold bearing vein system similar to the past producing Ptarmigan Mine, which TerraX owns. The property is also near paved road access to Yellowknife and high-tension powerlines that are connected to the past producing Ptarmigan Gold Mine. The purchase of the Sickle property gives TerraX an additional 5 kilometers of strike length in the gold bearing Walsh Lake sediments.\

The technical information contained in this news release has been approved by Joseph Campbell, the Executive Chairman of the Board of TerraX, who is a Qualified Person as defined in \National Instrument 43-101, Standards of Disclosure for Mineral Projects.\

About the Yellowknife City Gold Project

The Yellowknife City Gold (\YCG\) project encompasses 780 sq km of contiguous land immediately north, south and east of the City of Yellowknife in the Northwest Territories. Through a series of acquisitions, TerraX controls one of the six major high-grade gold camps in Canada. Being within 10 km of the City of Yellowknife, the YCG is close to vital infrastructure, including all-season roads, air transportation, service providers, hydroelectric power and skilled tradespeople.

The YCG lies on the prolific Yellowknife greenstone belt, covering 70 km of strike length along the main mineralized break in the Yellowknife gold district, including the southern and northern extensions of the shear system that hosted the high-grade Con and Giant gold mines. The project area contains multiple shears that are the recognized hosts for gold deposits in the Yellowknife gold district, with innumerable gold showings and recent high-grade drill results that serve to indicate the project\-\-s potential as a world-class gold district.

For more information on the YCG project, please visit our web site at www.terraxminerals.com.

On behalf of the Board of Directors

\JOSEPH CAMPBELL\

Joe Campbell

Executive Chairman of the Board

For more information, please contact:

Samuel Vella

Manager of Corporate Communications

Phone: 604-689-1749

Toll-Free: 1-855-737-2684

svella@terraxminerals.com

Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

This news release contains forward-looking information, which involves known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause actual events to differ materially from current expectation. Important factors  including the availability of funds, the results of financing efforts, the completion of due diligence and the results of exploration activities  that could cause actual results to differ materially from the Company\-\-s expectations are disclosed in the Company\-\-s documents filed from time to time on SEDAR (see www.sedar.com). Readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, which speak only as of the date of this press release. The company disclaims any intention or obligation, except to the extent required by law, to update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, events or otherwise.
Copper Mountain completes Phase 2 drill program at New Ingerbelle with continued positive results

Posted by Publisher Internet

Copper Mountain Mining Corporation (TSX: CMMC | ASX:C6C) (the ?Company? or ?Copper Mountain?  http://www.commodity-tv.net/c/search_adv/?v=298551) is pleased to announce that is has completed Phase 2 of its 3-Phase drilling program at the New Ingerbelle property, and results continue to be positive.? New Ingerbelle is located adjacent to the present operations of the Copper Mountain Mine (See Appendix A for New Ingerbelle location map).

Highlights from the remaining set of 14 drill holes of phase 2 include:

?

Hole 18IG-24 returning 188 metres of 0.55% CuEq (0.38% Cu, 0.45 g/t Ag, 0.25g/t Au) which includes 114 metres of 0.71% CuEq (0.49% Cu, 0.51 g/t Ag, 0.32 Au g/t)

Hole 18IG-26 returning 135 metres of 0.71% CuEq (0.49% Cu, 0.97g/t Ag, 0.32g/t Au)

Hole 18IG-18 returning 339 metres of 0.37% CuEq (0.27% Cu, 0.53g/t Ag, 0.14g/t Au)

Hole 18IG-27 returning 96 metres of 0.55% CuEq (0.39% Cu, 0.69g/t Ag, 0.23g/t Au), and

Hole 18IG-28 returning 54 metres of 0.58% CuEq (0.42% Cu, 0.80g/t Ag, 0.23g/t Au) and 90 metres of 0.62% CuEq (0.46% Cu, 0.57g/t Ag, 0.23g/t Au)

Gil Clausen, Copper Mountain?s President and CEO stated, ?These drill results continue to demonstrate that New Ingerbelle has the potential to be of considerable size and significance to the Company. We have significantly extended mineralization below prior resource limits, expanded it laterally and filled in the resource as planned.? With the Phase 2 drilling program complete, we are now working on incorporating the results into an updated mineral resource for New Ingerbelle, which we expect to announce shortly. We believe New Ingerbelle will continue to increase in significance as a development project for the Company and will fit perfectly in our organic development pipeline of growth projects.?

Copper Mountain initiated a 3-Phase drilling program at the New Ingerbelle Mine last year with Phase 1, which was successful in validating and confirming historical data. Phase 2, which consists of 29 drill holes totalling approximately 10,000 metres, was designed to expand the New Ingerbelle resource area and convert Inferred Mineral Resources to the Measured and Indicated status. Having now completed the second phase, work is currently underway to update the Resource.? The updated Resource estimate is planned to be announced before the end of the third quarter of 2018. Significant intercepts from the remaining 14 holes that have not yet been announced from the Phase 2 drill program, are summarized in the table below.? A drill hole location map for the Phase 2 program and associated cross sections can be found in Appendix B, while a detailed listing of drill holes being reported can be found in Appendix C.

Competent Persons Statement

The information in this report that relates to Exploration Targets, Exploration Results, Mineral Resources or Ore Reserves is based on information compiled by Peter Holbek, B.SC (Hons), M.Sc. P. Geo. Mr. Holbek is a full time employee of the Company and has sufficient experience which is relevant to the style of mineralization and type of deposit under consideration and to the activity being undertaken to qualify as a Competent Person as defined in the 2012 Edition of the ?Australasian Code for Reporting of Exploration Results, Mineral Resources and Ore Reserves?. Mr. Holbek does consent to the inclusion in this news release of the matters based on their information in the form and context in which it appears.

Peter Holbek is a Qualified Person as defined by National Instrument 43-101 and has reviewed and approved the

technical content of this release.

About Copper Mountain Mining Corporation

Copper Mountain?s flagship asset is the 75% owned Copper Mountain mine located in southern British Columbia near the town of Princeton. The Copper Mountain mine produces about 90 million pounds of copper equivalent per year with a large resource that remains open laterally and at depth. Copper Mountain also has the permitted, development stage Eva Copper Project in Queensland, Australia and an extensive 379,000 hectare highly prospective land package in the Mount Isa area. Copper Mountain trades on the Toronto Stock Exchange under the symbol ?CMMC? and Australian Stock Exchange under the symbol ?C6C?.

Additional information is available on the Company?s web page at www.CuMtn.com.

On behalf of the Board of

COPPER MOUNTAIN MINING CORPORATION

?Gil Clausen?????

Gil Clausen, P.Eng.

Chief Executive Officer

In Europe:

Swiss Resource Capital AG

info@resource-capital.ch

www.resource-capital.ch

Website: www.CuMtn.com

Note:? This release contains forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties.? These statements may differ materially from actual future events or results.? Readers are referred to the documents, filed by the Company on SEDAR at www.sedar.com, specifically the most recent reports which identify important risk factors that could cause actual results to differ from those contained in the forward-looking statements.? The Company undertakes no obligation to review or confirm analysts? expectations or estimates or to release publicly any revisions to any forward-looking statement.

Diamond drilling, which runs 24/7, uses NQ2 diameter rods and bits and drill core is placed in wooden boxes which are delivered to the core logging area at the end of every shift.? Drill-hole collars are surveyed with differential GPS and down-hole surveys using a Reflex instrument are taken approximately every 30-80m depending on ground conditions and hole length.? The core is logged, and sample tags a stapled into the boxes where samples are to be taken and the core is photographed.? Core recovery is always at, or near, 100% except for fault zones.? All assay samples are 3m in length.? Core is split with a diamond saw, and samples are transported to the mine?s analytical laboratory by members of the exploration team.? Samples are sorted, weighed, dried and crushed prior to pulverizing to 75% passing -200mesh.? Cu and Ag are analyzed by XRF and samples with >0.4% Cu are re-analyzed by Atomic Absorption.? Sample pulps for all samples >0.1% Cu are delivered to a commercial lab for Au analysis by either fire assay or Aqua Regia digestion followed by AA analysis.??? Additionally, every tenth sample is analyzed by ICP-AES for a 35-element suite, which includes Cu and Ag providing checks on the mine-site laboratory, in addition to routine insertion of standards and blanks.? All pulps and coarse-reject material are retained.

Intercept grades are length-weighted averages using uncut grades.? For additional information on project land holdings, history, production data, geology and mineralization, the reader is directed to Canadian NI:43-101 reports which a filed under the company name on the SEDAR website.?
Openet Surpasses Over One Trillion Telecoms Events a Day Using Microsoft\-\-s Cloud

Posted by Publisher Networking

 Cloud is integral to ensure real-time data growth for 5G and IoT

 Openet ready to meet increased telecoms network demand for security, privacy, AI integration, and automation as smart connected devices will exceed 50 billion globally in five years

Openet today announced that its Openet Data Fabric (ODF) has processed over a trillion events per day on the Microsoft Azure cloud demonstrating increased efficiency, security, and readiness for real-time data growth for telecoms networks. An event includes anything from calls, texts to data and social use on smartphones, to any interaction between connected devices.

Openet\-\-s significant threshold for \cloud based\ event processing demonstrates that the cloud is fit for telecom network grade volumes of activity. Although deployed in containerised architecture in order to assess as near as possible the likely architecture for operator systems moving to cloud environments in the short term, the processing speeds were 11.5m events per second with a 20 node cluster in order to scale elegantly above the 1 Trillion Events per Day (TED) goal of the trial. Openet also expects that trials with ODF in cloud native architecture would in fact be even more efficient. This tremendous technology milestone is made possible by the Openet Data Fabric\-\-s modular design which is built with a micro-services approach, leveraging Openet\-\-s extensive telco grade data processing pedigree and Open Source technologies to ensure open data innovation.

Comparing to related performance tests from over a year ago on a private virtualised cloud environment, Openet demonstrated processing this trillion event per day goal, but also we were able to so with almost a third less hardware by tuning and running the solution on the Microsoft Azure cloud. The demonstration was focused on proving that Openet are ready for the real-time data growth that communications networks will require to efficiently manage 5G and IoT so that they meet the increased demand for security, privacy, assurance, AI integration, and automation. It also demonstrates that the cloud compute and store environment has matured to a point where telco-grade network traffic and applications can efficiently and safely rely on this environment.

\This is a monumental achievement by both teams. To put this achievement into perspective, Google processes approx. 3.5billion searches per day, which extrapolates to 1.2 trillion searches per year. As the number of connected devices continuously rises, the capability of the Openet Data Fabric and Microsoft Azure is key to secure a \cloud first\ strategy for our customers. One Trillion events per day is just the start for us, the next step is more extended trialling of the cloud-native optimisation features we have developed for our full suite of data solutions on Microsoft Azure,\ said Openet Global VP Technology and Support, Michael O\-\-Sullivan.

\Within 5 years, it is forecasted that the number of smart connected devices in the world will be more than 50 billion  all of which will create data that can be shared, collected and analysed  it is critical that networks can handle and process the exponentially growing levels of transactions necessary for today and the future. We are therefore delighted with the results of this test and the potential impact that Openet\-\-s innovation will deliver to the telecoms industry as a whole. It demonstrates the capability and scalability of the Microsoft Azure cloud required to support the challenges faced by telecoms operators. We look forward to working with Openet on this and other joint value propositions we can bring to market,\ said Ger Perdisatt, Microsoft Ireland Enterprise Director.
Star launches unique POS printer with 5 Interfaces and Multiple Peripheral Hub Functionality at Restaurant and Bar Tech Live 2018

High Wycombe, UK, 20 September 2018 At Restaurant and Bar Tech Live 2018 (25  26 September 2018, ExCel, London), international POS printer manufacturer Star Micronics will be demonstrating on Stand 2760 how it leads the field in POS innovation for hospitality with its latest launch of the first POS printer with 5 traditional and unique interfaces with multiple peripheral hub functionality. Star will be joined by a number of software and payment partners including AccentPOS, Emperium POS, iZettle and TouchBistro.

Ever mindful that hospitality venues are looking for sustainability, Star offers the unique mC-Print(TM) series with 80mm and 58mm print width models. This accompanies Star innovation in both traditional and tablet POS solutions with the first AirPrint POS printer as well as the first USB Lightning POS printer TSP143IIIU to provide direct communication and charging via the Apple-supplied lightning cable. For tablet POS with multiple USB peripheral control, Star\-\-s new and unique TSP654II CloudPRNT-POS(TM) printer effectively responds to provide a versatile and cost-effective solution.

Star\-\-s latest product launch fully demonstrates how it understands the needs of effective hardware in a challenging multichannel world. The mC-Print printers offer not only the unique functionality of 5 interfaces and multiple peripheral support but connectivity for the restaurateur\-\-s transitional journey from traditional EPOS to Cloud-based POS. They provide today\-\-s traditional interfaces, USB and Ethernet, as well as tomorrow\-\-s Cloud connectivity in order to meet the needs of a multichannel environment.

Essentially, Star offers the ability to communicate with tablets using traditional WiFi and Bluetooth and a new and more effective direct cable communication with iOS tablets via the Apple-supplied lightning cable  a unique feature to Star.

Star?s mC-Print2(TM) and mC-Print3(TM) seamlessly combine sophistication with high functionality, and aesthetically match the sleek, modern design of tomorrow\-\-s hospitality environment to provide feature-rich, front-feed compact printers. With a print speed up to 250mm/second, the printers can feature all of the following interfaces in one model: Ethernet LAN; Bluetooth (MFi); traditional USB; lightning USB (data and charge USB for iOS) and CloudPRNT(TM) as well as Hub functionality for more than one peripheral; scanner, customer display, etc.

Sustainability is key. Star fully understands this and has ensured the 58mm model is as intelligent as the 80mm model. Faced with the challenge of rising paper costs, Star\-\-s thin paper support and choice of print width with ECO tools help users to economise on paper usage and reduce environmental impact.

Star\-\-s aesthetic design is not only stylish but also offers high functionality for a variety of environments. In particular, the soft operating switches, \-\-protected\-\- control boards and IPX2 rating allow these printers to operate efficiently in demanding hospitality environments. And, with easy Ethernet setup / static IP address setup using the Star Utility (Native) via USB, installation costs are kept to a minimum. Incorporating Star\-\-s Cloud Services with digital receipting and Internet device management mC-Print offers operators the next generation of POS printer that boasts a wealth of onboard marketing and receipt tools for tomorrow\-\-s multichannel world.

Demonstrating Star\-\-s focus on connectivity, operators can today purchase a Star TSP654II with a traditional interface in the knowledge that it is future-proofed for whatever Cloud strategy the operator wants to adopt and provides an easy, affordable upgrade by simply replacing the traditional interface with the HI X interface. The interface can also be used with other Star printer models that offer 80/112mm label, ticket and receipt printing  TSP743II and TSP847II as well as SP700 matrix printer. Alternatively, the TSP654II HI X with CloudPRNT is ready for the Cloud as the interface is built in. Both solutions offer intelligent printing for modern Cloud applications and, in particular, online ordering.

Star\-\-s unique TSP654II CloudPRNT-POS(TM) solution allows operators to benefit from tablet POS with complete USB peripheral control from a web-based application on any device with a browser. While tablet POS offers the advantages of versatile Cloud-based software alongside compact, low cost hardware it has one disadvantage which is no connected peripheral control. Recognising this, Star has developed a solution that allows Cloud-based software to run on any tablet or smartphone (Windows, Android, Linux or iOS) with peripherals controlled through the printer to provide a complete POS transactional solution with all the advantages of tablet POS.

The solution can be used as a hub providing IP connectivity via wired Ethernet or WiFi with peripheral support, by means of 2 USB host ports with full status back. Star\-\-s SCD222 customer display, 1D / 2D (Symbol) barcode scanners and cash drawers are the preferred peripherals and can be purchased via Star?s distributors. Connecting the Star printer and device to the same network creates a complete and connected tablet POS application that is easily accessible across any Internet enabled device.

As Annette Tarlton, Marketing Director, Star Micronics EMEA, states, \Star\-\-s considerable experience and expertise has resulted in an in-depth knowledge and understanding of the hospitality landscape and the challenges faced in a multichannel world. Offering a range of unique traditional EPOS and tablet POS solutions that visitors to our stand at Restaurant and Bar Tech Live 2018 will experience being demonstrated by key software partners, Star is truly one of the most innovative POS printer manufacturers today.\
The National Investigation Agency (NIA) arrested Nashidul Hamzafar, an accused in the ISIS Kasargod case after he was deported to Delhi from Kabul.

Hamzafar, a native of Kerala's Kalpetta, was detained by Afghan Security Agencies last year for illegally entering the country to join his associates in the ISIS.

The case relates to the criminal conspiracy hatched by the accused persons from Kasaragod district of Kerala and their associates since Ramadan, 2015, with the intention of joining and furthering the objectives of the ISIS.

Pursuant to the conspiracy, 14 accused persons from Kasaragod district had left India or their workplaces in the Middle-East between mid-May and early-July, 2016, before travelling to Afghanistan, where they joined the ISIS.

Hamzafar had participated in the conspiracy through encrypted social media platforms with the other absconding accused persons in this case like Abdul Rashid Abdulla and Ashfak Majeed who were known to him through his college-mates Shihas, Firoz Khan and Bestin Vincent.

Pursuant to the criminal conspiracy hatched with fugitive ISIS activist Abdulla, besides Majeed and others, Hamzafar had left India on October 3, 2017, and travelled to Muscat before travelling to Iran and further reaching Kabul, Afghanistan, where he was detained.

The arrested accused was produced before the Special Court for NIA Cases, New Delhi, on Wednesday, and will now be taken to Kochi on transit remand for producing him before the Special NIA Court, Ernakulam, that had issued a non-boilable warrant against him.

-ANI
Ocean Highway southbound near Sandy Island Road in Pawleys Island flooded Sept. 17 after Hurricane Florence dumped heavy rains in the area. More flooding is expected to reach Georgetown County.
Michael D. Shaw is a biochemist and freelance writer. A graduate of the University of California, Los Angeles, and a protege of the late Willard Libby, winner of the 1960 Nobel Prize in chemistry, Shaw also did postgraduate work at MIT. Based in Virginia, he covers technology, health care and entrepreneurship, among other issues.

NASA's logo needs a refresh. The agency's official logo, the 59-year-old "meatball insignia," features a sphere to represent a planet, stars to represent space and a red chevron or "wing" to represent aeronautics, with white N-A-S-A lettering in the center. This logo looks like it belongs in a museum, commemorating the past, not celebrating the future. As NASA celebrates its 60th anniversary this year, this seems like a good time for the agency to update its antiquated logo.

A scene from the film adaptation of Tom Wolfe's "The Right Stuff" best demonstrates the importance of imagery to the success of the space program. When the astronauts of Project Mercury demand that their space capsule have a window, the engineers rebuff them, claiming that the astronauts won't need one because they don't actually get to pilot the fully automated spacecraft.

NASA astronaut John Glenn (played by Ed Harris) then points to the gaggle of reporters and photographers outside the hangar, and his fellow astronaut Gordon Cooper(Dennis Quaid) explains that good publicity is important, because "funding makes this bird go up." To wit, Virgil "Gus" Grissom (Fred Ward) says, "No bucks, no Buck Rogers."

Allow me to include the following addendum: "No logo, no liftoff." That is, NASA needs a new and improved logo that better illustrates the agency's current mission and visions for the future. The old meatball insignia looks more like a throwback to midcentury modern design than a symbol of 21st-century advancement.

I recognize how subjective this issue is. I also know that appearances matter, because I am a scientist whose research funding has depended both on the quality of my work as well as its face value. Feelings oftentime trump reason when a person's first impression is driven by superficial qualities rather than substance.

If NASA wants to increase its funding  and fuel interest in its projects  it needs to project an image commensurate with its ambitions. It needs to have a logo that reflects its goals and pays homage to its history, without looking like a relic of the past.

According to graphic designers at theParsons School of Design and the chief design officer at DesignMantic, NASA's logo does not represent its present-day mission. Designed by employee James Modarelli in 1959, it was appropriate for its time. It had the look and feel common to the Space Age or the Atomic Era.

NASA's "worm" logo was the agency's official insignia from 1975 to 1992. After the worm retired, NASA reverted to using the classic meatball logo again. (Image credit: NASA)

The meatball logo does not capture the dynamism of the agency's achievements on Mars or its exploration of the moons of Jupiter or the rings of Saturn. It does not capture the discovery of exoplanets or the search for extraterrestrial life.

The logo looks more vintage than victorious, according to the designers I interviewed. (Disclosure: None of the designers I spoke to works for, or has worked with, NASA. They are all experts, however, regarding branding campaigns for major public or private organizations.)

The logo is an anachronism.

A new logo should appeal to the entire nation, since NASA works with scientists and engineers throughout the United States and is funded by American taxpayers. It should show us where the agency intends to go, with our flag planted not in conquest but in camaraderie, with satellites among the stars and our spaceships as vessels of peace and goodwill.

If we want this bird to go up  if we want to"light this candle"  and if we want America's space agency to look like it has the "right stuff," then we had best ensure NASA has the right logo.

In a competition to win funding, and in a contest to win hearts and minds, symbols elicit a variety of emotions. While a well-crafted symbol can make a good impression, an unremarkable or out-of-date insignia may inadvertently convey the wrong message.

NASA must summon the best feelings, so it may do its best work. It must inspire Americans and be an icon throughout the world.

Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.
A Japanese spacecraft is just hours away from a historic attempt to land two tiny, hopping robots on the big asteroid Ryugu, and you can see near real-time photos of the spaceflight action.

The Hayabusa2 probe, which has been orbiting Ryugu since late June, is scheduled to deploy a pair of 2.4-lb. (1.1 kilograms) "rovers" between midnight and 12:30 a.m. EDT Friday (Sept. 21; 0400 to 0430 GMT).

The Hayabusa2 mother ship has already begun descending toward Ryugu in advance of the deployment, and the spacecraft is snapping photos of the asteroid for navigation purposes. And lucky us: The mission team and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) are posting these photos in near real time here: http://www.hayabusa2.jaxa.jp/en/galleries/onc/nav20180920/

At the moment, images are coming down to Earth every 29 minutes, according to the time stamps. Ryugu gets larger and larger in each successive photo as Hayabusa2 gets closer and closer to the 3,000-foot-wide (900 meters) space rock.

The asteroid Ryugu, as seen by Japan's Hayabusa2 spacecraft on June 26, 2018, just one day before its arrival at the space rock. (Image credit: JAXA, University of Tokyo, Kochi University, Rikkyo University, Nagoya University, Chiba Institute of Technology, Meiji University, University of Aizu, AIST)

The two little disk-shaped robots that will soon separate from the orbiter are called MINERVA-II1A and MINERVA-II1B. Each one measures 7 inches wide by 2.8 inches tall (18 by 7 centimeters) and is packed with scientific gear, including temperature and optical sensors and a suite of cameras. (There are seven cameras spread across both robots, JAXA officials have said.)

Though the Hayabusa2 team calls them rovers, these little guys will hop, rather than roll, from place to place on Ryugu's surface, gathering a variety of data along the way.

And more landings are coming soon. Hayabusa2 is scheduled to deploy a bigger lander called MASCOT in the first week of October and another small hopper, MINERVA-II2, sometime next year. The mother ship itself will also make several forays to the surface in 2019, to grab asteroid material that will be returned to Earth in December 2020.

"MINERVA" stands for "Micro Nano Experimental Robot Vehicle for Asteroid." And about that "II" business: A MINERVA hopper flew aboard the original Hayabusa mission, which arrived at the asteroid Itokawa in 2005. The original MINERVA did not succeed in its landing attempt.

Follow Mike Wall on Twitter @michaeldwall and Google+. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook or Google+. Originally published on Space.com.
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk (at left) introduced Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa as the first private passenger on SpaceX's BFR mission to the moon at a press conference held Monday, Sept. 17, 2018 at the company's headquarters in Hawthorne, California. Maezawa intends to select six to eight artists to fly with him on the lunar trip, which is targeted for launch in 2023.

HAWTHORNE, California  Yusaku Maezawa has always been fascinated with the moon.

A 42-year-old Japanese billionaire entrepreneur with a passion for collecting art, Maezawa wondered what masterpieces could have been created if only his favorite artists had had the opportunity to fly to the moon. Then he realized he had the ability to find out.

Maezawa is paying an undisclosed but substantial amount of money for SpaceX to fly him and six to eight artists of his choosing on a trip around the moon and back. The unprecedented mission is planned to launch on SpaceX's yet to be built BFR (or "Big Falcon Rocket") in 2023. [The BFR in Images: SpaceX's Giant Spaceship for Mars & Beyond]

"Ever since I was a kid, I have loved the moon. Just staring at the moon filled my imagination," said Maezawa during a press conference at SpaceX's headquarters in Hawthorne, California on Monday (Sep. 17). "That is why I could not pass up this opportunity to see the moon up close."

At the same time, he did not to keep the experience to himself.

"That would be a little lonely. I don't like being alone," said Maezawa. "So I wanted to share this experience with as many people as possible. That is why I choose to go to the moon, I choose to go to the moon... with artists!"

SpaceX's first private passenger for the BFR ("Big Falcon Rocket"), Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa, is underwriting a 2023 flight to the moon and back. (Image credit: collectSPACE.com)

Space for art... and artists

Maezawa, who runs his own fashion line and whose net worth has been reported to be upwards of $3 billion, said he sees art as a way to change the world.

"I thought long and hard about how valuable it would be to the first private passenger to go to the moon. At the same time, I thought about how I could give art to the world and how this could contribute to world peace. This is my lifelong dream," he explained.

Maezawa first approached SpaceX to fly him to the moon using the company's Falcon Heavy rocket and Dragon spacecraft, a mission that at one time had been targeted for launch later this year until SpaceX decided to pursue development of the BFR instead.

"With Falcon Heavy and Dragon, we would have had  especially for a trip around the moon  only room for two people," said Elon Musk, SpaceX's CEO and chief technology officer. "It is like the size of an SUV inside [Dragon]. If you have a five day journey in an SUV, you're going to be jam packed."

On the other hand, the BFR is enormous, said Musk. With a 30-foot (9-meter) diameter, the BFS ("Big Falcon Spaceship") has enough room to accommodate 100 people, though for this first mission, Musk suggested a smaller crew.

"We said maybe it is wise to have about a dozen people, or thereabouts, on the first trip into deep space," recalled Musk. "[Maezawa] very graciously offered to provide those seats to artists and cultural influencers."

Maezawa does not know yet the artists he will invite, but each will be asked to create something when they return to Earth "to inspire the dreamer within all of us."

"If possible, I would like to invite the top artists that represent our planet from various fields including painters, sculptors, photographers, musicians, film directors, fashion designers and architects," he said. "Luckily, we still have some time before 2023, so I hope to work very closely with the SpaceX team and reach out to each artist personally."

Maezawa is hopeful the artists will want to fly to the moon with him.

"By the way, if you should hear from me, please say 'yes' and accept my invitation. Please don't say no."

Artist's rendering of a violinist performing in weightlessness on board SpaceX's BFS while on a journey the moon. (Image credit: SpaceX)

Underwriting a spacefaring civilization

In addition to inspiring new works of art, Maezawa's "#dearMoon" mission will also provide SpaceX the funding it needs to further develop and build the BFR.

First introduced in 2016 as a solution for how to send humans to settle Mars, the BFR has undergone a series of design changes as SpaceX has sought to address the challenges associated with building a rocket capable of flying almost anywhere in the solar system. The latest version, revealed on Monday, incorporates actuated flaps or wings to control the vehicle as it flies through a wide range of atmospheric densities and velocities.

"The way it operates is more like a skydiver than an aircraft," said Musk. "Almost the entire time when it is reentering, it's just trying to brake. It is just trying to stop."

To date, SpaceX has completed the first cylinder section of the BFR prototype's main body and has test fired the Raptor engine that will power its launch. But there is a long way to go before a BFR will be ready to fly anyone to the moon and that work requires funding.

"Funding BFR is definitely a key question," said Musk. "We have got launching of satellites, we have got servicing the space station ... and next year we will start transporting astronauts to and from the station. We have got the Starlink global broadband that we are developing, which will be a useful source of revenue. And then private customers, or any customers for BFR, [who] are incredibly helpful in funding development of the rocket."

Maezawa is now the first of those private customers.

"[Maezawa] is paying a lot of money  we're not disclosing the amount, but he is paying a lot of money  that will help with the development of the ship and booster," Musk said, "and ultimately, this BFR system is intended to carry anyone to orbit, to the moon and to Mars. So he is ultimately helping pay for the average citizen to travel to other planets. It is a great thing."

Follow collectSPACE.com on Facebook and on Twitter at @collectSPACE. Copyright 2018 collectSPACE.com. All rights reserved.
Belmopan, Sept 19, 2018 (SPS) - The Saharawi Republic represented by ambassador, Suleiman Tieb Henan, was received on Tuesday upon his arrival at the Belize airport by a Secretary of State, as Special Envoy of the Saharawi Government, in the Official Celebration Acts of the 37th Anniversary of Independence of that brother country, scheduled to be from Sept 18 to 21.

Saharwi diplomat held a Bilateral Meeting with the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Belize, His Excellency Wilfred Elrington, to whom he transmitted a written message from the Saharawi President, Brahmin Gali addressed to the Prime Minister of Belize, S.E. Dean Barrow.

For his part, Chancellor of Belize reiterated to the Saharawi Envoy the firm position of his Government in supporting the struggle of the Saharawi people and the achievement of a solution based on self-determination and independence of the Saharawi people.

The Sahrawi Ambassador broached his interlocutors on the current situation of Western Sahara, expressing to the Minister his satisfaction with the work of the Personal Envoy of the Secretary General of the United Nations to revival the process of the negotiations between the parties.

In the following days, Ambassador Tieb Henan will participate in the State Receptions offered by the Governor and the Prime Minister of Belize, as well as in the other official acts of the Commemoration of Independence. SPS
India and Niger on Wednesday signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) for the implementation of Mahatma Gandhi International Convention Centre (MGICC) in Niamey, Niger with the Indian government's grant assistance.

The agreement was signed by Secretary (Economic Relations), Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) T.S. Tirumurti and Ambassador of Republic of Niger in India Ali Illiassou, in the presence of External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj and Minister and Special Adviser to the President of Republic of Niger, Saidil Moctar Mohamed, a statement from the MEA read.

Mohamed, who is currently in New Delhi, called on Swaraj and thanked India for providing grant assistance to build MGICC. The two ministers also discussed other issues of bilateral and regional interest, including combating terrorism, development partnership among others. Minister of State for External Affairs M.J. Akbar also hosted a lunch in honour of the visiting Niger minister.

The Convention Centre, which would be a spacious, modern and eco-friendly facility, is being established in the context of the African Union (AU) Summit that Niger is set to host next year, which would witness high-level and wide-ranging participation from AU member states, the statement added.

The centre honours the memory of Mahatma Gandhi, whose 150th birth anniversary is also being observed in 2019. The establishment of the centre is a landmark for Niger-India friendship and also a symbol of India's firm commitment towards Africa.

In response to growing request from countries in Africa, India has offered to establish Mahatma Gandhi convention centres in more than 20 countries in Africa, of which the project are being taken up in the immediate phase in nine countries.

"India and Niger enjoy close relations. The bilateral relations have expanded significantly since the opening of the Indian Resident Diplomatic Mission in Niamey in 2009. India has provided lines of credit worth USD 96.54 million for projects in transport, electrification, solar energy and potable drinking water. India's grant assistance for MGICC will further contribute towards enhancing of bilateral ties," the statement concluded.

-ANI
Many Connecticut businesses are in line for major savings on what they shell out annually for workers compensation insurance  a required cost of doing business  with carriers requesting state approval to cut a key rate calculation 16.8 percent next year on average.

The proposed rate schedule by the National Council on Compensation Insurance is subject to approval of the Connecticut Insurance Department, with NCCI representing workers compensation insurance underwriters.

It would mark a fifth straight year of declining workers compensation rates in Connecticut, with carriers getting approval last year for a 14 percent reduction in voluntary loss costs that capture the expenses carriers pay out in the form of claims for medical care and wage stipends, calculated under Connecticut law at 75 percent of regular pay. The voluntary loss cost formula excludes overhead costs and profit targets, and any offsetting investment income.

This year, underwriters are asking for even larger cuts in an insurance pool maintained for businesses that represent increased risk for worker injuries, requesting a 19.7 percent reduction on average after receiving approval last year for a 12.6 percent cut.

Under NCCIs proposed schedule, no Connecticut business would absorb a loss-cost hike of more than 4 percent on the actuarial calculations that feed into their final rates, with some seeing declines of nearly 40 percent and manufacturers and contractors seeing reductions roughly in line with those of office employers.

Carriers saw claims decline six straight years in Connecticut through 2016, with the average indemnity payment not having increased since 2011.

Speaking on a July conference call, the CEO of W.R. Berkley referenced continued pressure by state rating bureaus for workers compensation carriers to cut premiums in response to better results on medical costs. The Greenwich-based company reported continued positive results in 2017 for its lines of workers compensation insurance, with the NCCI not factoring last years results into its Connecticut rate request for 2019.

W.R. Berkley ranked 11th last year among workers compensation insurers with about 2.4 percent of the U.S. market as estimated by NCCI, with net premiums totaling $743 million from workers compensation policies in the first half of 2018. Travelers is the market leader with workers compensation premiums of $4.3 billion last year, followed by The Hartford Financial Services Group with $3.4 billion.

The trends still look very good from our perspective, said CEO Robert Berkley. Not across the board  you need to use a finer brush than that  but we still feel pretty good. ... Even though rates are getting more challenging in comp, were still finding opportunities to grow.

Alex.Soule@scni.com; 203-842-2545; @casoulman
STAMFORD  Ava Feminellis favorite part of working at Anchor Health is getting a glimpse of the faces of new patients after their appointment at the LGBTQ-friendly clinic.

Feminelli knows the feeling. As a transgender woman, she had a life-changing experience when she first met Dr. A.C. Demidont, head physician at Anchor. For Feminelli, the encounter was a far cry from previous interactions with physicians.

It was the first time that I really felt seen by a medical provider, she said from Anchors new Stamford offices at 30 Myano Lane. Feminelli works as a patient care associate at the clinic and remains one of Demidonts patients.

So, when Feminelli finally gets a look at new patients, shes expecting to see a facial expression akin to a huge sigh of relief.

One of the best parts of working in the front is seeing people walk in, shaky and nervous, and they walk out beaming like a pair of high beams, she said.

Such a reaction is why Anchor Health Initiative opened in the first place, according to Demidont and president Jean Doyen de Montaillou.

Its the only free-standing clinic in Stamford that focuses on gay, lesbian, transgender and gender non-conforming health services, and one of only two in the state. Circle Care Center in Norwalk offers similar services.

Anchor has another, smaller, location in New Haven.

The Stamford clinic has been open for just over a year, and already has about 1,000 patients, said Demidont. Half of them are transgender.

Filling a need

Demidont wasnt surprised that so many people flocked to the center, since one of the reasons she chose to open Anchor Health in Stamford was to provide care for what she described as the underserved LGBTQ community in the city and state.

There is a hole in the state medical system regarding LGBTQ healthcare in general, she said. This area was chosen because its a place where there arent enough providers.

Finding transgender medical care in Connecticut remains a burdensome and confusing process.

Janet Tarzia, the mother of Jessie Tarzia, a transgender woman and former Stamford High School student, said looking for medical care for her daughter about seven years ago was a major challenge. For starters, she had no idea where to begin her search, and didnt have much luck looking online for help.

The challenge was getting local information, she said. Where is the person who I go see to help us get through this?

Nick Tarzia, Jessies father, said it was like being thrown in the water to learn how to swim.

When searching for an endocrinologist to provide hormone therapy for their 11-year-old daughter, they found there were only two physicians who would see her in the entire state, and one had just retired.

The endocrinologist, located in New Haven, told the Tarzias they needed to have their daughter go to a New Haven therapist to get a recommendation for hormone therapy, which meant they had to make the roughly 50-minute drive on a weekly basis for six months.

Looking back, Janet Tarzia said having a local resource like Anchor Health Initiative would have facilitated so much.

Barriers to care

Demidont, a transgender woman herself, said the biggest barrier to health care for the transgender community remains bias against them, which oftentimes leads to poor and traumatic care from physicians.

Part of the reason why this organization was founded was because within medicine itself, the LGBTQ community is often very marginalized and there are huge consequences to that, she said.

A big part of Demidonts mission is to help LGBTQ patients find surgeons, therapists, and specialists who are accepting. For transgender patients, the list remains rather small, she said.

We have a very strict list of people that we refer to for any specialty, because we try really hard to make sure that the person that the patient is going to see is competent and trans-inclusive, because  believe me  not all providers are, she said.

Demidont, an assistant clinical professor of medicine at Quinnipiac Universitys Frank K. Netter School of Medicine, has practiced as a physician since 2006. Her resume includes St. Lukes Roosevelt Hospital and Callen Lorde Community Health Center, both in New York City.

The latter serves as the model for Anchor Health Initiative, she said.

The Stamford clinic offers a range of services, from general checkups, to HIV/AIDS care and sexual health care. While the center caters to the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender population, it is open to anyone looking for medical care.

Doyen de Montaillou has big plans for the fledgling clinic, hoping to open similar health centers around the country.

He said the Stamford clinic will eventually include an on-site pharmacy and, hopefully, a mental health program. In the short-term, the center is looking to hire case management professionals to work on HIV prevention, thanks to a three-year grant from the state.

Beyond providing services to the LGBTQ community, the clinic also serves to demystify transgender health care, which remains a little-studied topic in medical education.

Demidont said a traditional four-year medical college in the United States will spend less than 10 hours on LBGTQ issues.

Thats pretty low, so a lot of students are not prepared to work with the community when they come out, she said.

The inadequate training can lead to disastrous results.

Demidont remembers seeing a transgender patient in her 50s with acute shortness of breath and chest pain, who came in a day after being discharged from Norwalk Hospitals emergency room.

Whatever happened in the emergency room there, she didnt feel comfortable telling them that she was on estrogen, Demidont said.

Estrogen, a hormone commonly taken by transgender women, can increase the risk of developing blood clots.

Demidont saw the woman the next day and diagnosed her with a pulmonary embolism.

That could kill you, she told the patient, who eventually sought treatment at a Greenwich medical center and told the doctors her whole history.

While the miscommunication between the woman and the doctors seemed avoidable, the example illustrates the challenges of transgender healthcare, where mischaracterizing a patient or causing discomfort can lead to grave results.

Feminelli has had her own uncomfortable interactions with doctors.

As a transgender woman, I was really worried about medical care and if I was going to be treated with respect, she said.

Other doctors she encountered were cold and clinical, and would preface every appointment with a variation of I dont understand people like you, but Im going to do my best, she said.

For Demidont, hearing such stories from her patients underscores how much work needs to be done.

Im glad theyre here and Im glad that we exist and every day I wake up and Im glad that we are making a difference, she said. However, it makes me sad that they had to have that bad experience in medicine.

ignacio.laguarda@stamfordadvocate.com
NORWALK  Landscaping along the Merritt Parkway in Norwalk could come closer to the parkways original character as part of the overhaul of the Route 7 interchange.

That means more open views rather than a tunnel of trees that grew up and was removed in recent years to improve safety for motorists.

On Monday evening, the state Department of Transportation and planning consultant Stantec invited public input on the landscaping portion of the interchange-overhaul project.

The project goals and objective, according to the DOT, include preserving, enhancing and/or restoring surviving historic landscapes where practical or where the landscape has been significantly altered, creating a new landscape design that is consistent with the Parkways original design and character.

Alan Kibbe, a Norwalk Association of Silvermine Homeowners board member, found aesthetic and safety reasons to keep wide grass buffers with trees set back rather than have a tunnel of trees above the roadway.

That green grass is safety, Kibbe said. Until they took the trees down, if you had to go off the road there wasnt much choice other than hitting a tree.

More than a dozen people attended the landscape workshop at The Norwalk Inn & Conference Center on Monday. The workshop came as the DOT plans the overhaul of the Route 7/Main Avenue/Merritt Parkways interchanges.

But the project isnt only about improving the interchanges and traffic flow. The views and landscaping have always been integral to the Merritt Parkway, which was built during the 1930s and is now listed on the National Registrar of Historic Places.

Stantec Vice President Gary Sorge, a landscape architect, said one cannot talk about the Merritt Parkway without mentioning the word landscape. The parkway was designed with the intent of healing the scar that was created when the highway was built. That meant creating a transition between the built environment and the natural landscape, according to Sorge.

And to have it appear as if whats off in the distance is natural  its just a natural landscape and the parkway is just perfectly fit into that context, Sorge said. So youll see critical view corridors, youll have scenic vistas off into pastures. You have might have views that terminate into a forest.

Sorge asked workshop attendees to identify key views and features within the project area  a half mile east of Main Avenue and half mile west of the Route 7 Connector  and the most- and least-appealing landscapes and visual features.

While views along the parkway have changed over the years, so also has use of the parkway.

When the parkways were built, that was part of Robert Moses vision for taking people from the city out to the bucolic views of the country, said Bobbie Kinn, of Norwalk, referring to the mid-20th century builder of bridges and parkways in the New York region. And I dont think they ever envisioned 2018 where it is now a major commuter route.

The purpose of the interchange overhaul is to improve connections and mobility at Main Avenue and the Merritt Parkway, as well as at the Route 7 Connector and Merritt Parkway. At present, motorists traveling west on the Merritt Parkway cannot exit to either the north- or southbound Route 7 Connector. Motorists driving either north or south on the connector cannot exit to the eastbound parkway.

The interchange overhaul project was halted first by a lawsuit and later by an economic recession. Before the project paused in 2009 amid the recession, the DOT had arrived at Alternate 21C as its preferred design. The design, which emerged after numerous meetings with residents and other stakeholders, would rely upon ramps but not signals. The design would improve the existing connections and create the four missing connections between the parkway, Route 7 Connector and Main Avenue.

For more information about the project, visit http://7-15norwalk.com.
BERLIN - Poland is one of the few European countries where President Donald Trump is still not only welcome but indeed sought after. When Polish President Andrzej Duda visited the White House on Tuesday, he repeatedly praised the president and even floated the idea of naming a possible future U.S. military base in his country Fort Trump.

The Polish government did everything it could to turn Tuesday's visit into one of Trump's more enjoyable moments.

Yet, somehow, Trump managed to offend the Poles so deeply that the fallout was all over Polish news sites on Wednesday morning.

What happened? At the end of their meeting, the two leaders agreed to sign a strategic partnership pact to boost defense, energy, trade and security ties. But what could have been a peaceful moment for both presidents immediately took an awkward turn.

While signing the document, Trump sat comfortably in his chair while the Polish leader was forced to stand next to him and awkwardly reach over the table to sign. Poland's Duda still somehow managed to smile at the camera, as Trump looked on with a stern face. The scene was captured on camera by the White House and was tweeted out shortly after - much to the bewilderment of Polish journalists, politicians and researchers.

"It's nice of President Trump that he moved a bit, because otherwise our president would have had to sign the document on his knees," Polish radio correspondent Pawel Zuchowski sarcastically commented on Twitter.

In an interview with Polish news site Gazeta.pl, international diplomacy scholar Janusz Sibora called the incident an "offense."

The Polish news site compared the meeting of the two allies with Trump's ceremonial signing of an agreement with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in June, when both leaders sat at the same table.

"The message is clear: Americans do not respect Poles," Sibora told the Polish news outlet. "If we sign such an important document in that way, we should ask ourselves whether this wasn't detrimental to the honor of Poland."

There was no sign, however, that Duda himself was bothered by the photo, and there has been no statement about it from the government. In fact, much of the anger seems to be emanating from the opposition.

"Signing a Polish-American declaration at the desk of the American president, while he is sitting, and [the Polish president] is standing is a symbolic confirmation [of] @AndrzejDuda as a customer [of] @realDonaldTrump.We have never been so low," Pawel Zalewski of the opposition liberal-conservative party wrote on Twitter.

According to Polish tabloid Fakt, other politicians and former ministers described the picture as "unbelievable" and as a "humiliation."

"I'm ashamed," Roman Giertych, a former deputy prime minister, was quoted as saying by the paper. Many commentaries did not exclusively blame the Trump administration, however, but also their own government for refraining to raise objections to the White House.

On Facebook, an account associated with former centrist Polish president and Nobel Peace Prize winner Lech Walesa appeared to troll Duda with a photo of Walesa sitting with Trump standing next to him. The photo appeared to have been taken during a prior meeting of the two, but it was unclear where or when it happened. "You find difference," read the caption.

The angry responses following Duda's White House visit come as the Polish government is seeking closer ties to the Trump administration, despite opposition protests. After a number of controversial measures, Poland has been increasingly at odds with the European Union, of which it is a member state. After its critics accused Poland of infringing upon judicial independence, the country was suspended from the European Network of Councils for the Judiciary this week. The E.U. sanction was the latest in a string of attempts to rein in what critics say are undemocratic changes in the country.

But Poland's right-wing government hopes to have found a powerful ally in Trump, who shares some of the same political goals and has refrained from joining the chorus of critics lashing out at what it sees as a dismantling of democratic rights in the center of Europe.

For months, Warsaw has tried to persuade the United States to set up a permanent U.S. military presence in Poland, to bolster the country's defense against Russia. Poland appears to be willing to spend a substantial amount in exchange.

"If they're willing to do that, it's something we will certainly talk about," Trump said Tuesday. But to more-critical observers watching from Warsaw, the photo that was released only a short time later spoke a very different language.
The process of rapid denuclearisation of North Korea, which will be done by constant negotiations with the United States, will be completed by 2021, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said on Wednesday.

In a statement, Pompeo hoped that the nuclear talks between the two countries would lead to long-lasting peace and stability on the Korean Peninsula.

Congratulating North Korean leader Kim Jong-un and South Korean president Moon Jae-in on the "successful outcome" of the the meeting between them in Pyongyang, Pompeo said, "We welcome President Moon and Chairman Kim's reaffirmation of the Singapore joint statement of complete denuclearisation of the Korean Peninsula, including the permanent dismantlement of all facilities at Yongbyon in the presence of US and IAEA inspectors."

"We also welcome Chairman Kim's decision to complete the previously announced dismantlement of the Tongchang-ri site in the presence of U.S. and international inspectors as a step toward the final fully verified denuclearization of North Korea, as agreed by Chairman Kim at the Singapore summit with President Trump," he added.

The US Secretary of State further noted that Washington "is prepared to engage immediately in negotiations to transform relations between the two countries."

Furthermore, Pompeo extended an invitation to his North Korean counterpart Ri Yong Ho to meet in New York City next week during the United Nations General Assembly meeting. He also invited North Korean representatives to meet Special Representative of North Korea, Stephen Biegun, in Vienna at the earliest opportunity.

Earlier on Wednesday, North and South Korea signed a joint military agreement and a joint statement to heighten peace and denuclearisation talks.

Additionally, the two sides agreed to take "additional step" to achieve the process of denuclearisation.

President Moon and Kim also proclaimed the end of the state of war, a South Korean presidential spokesperson confirmed.

As a part of the agreement, the two Koreas agreed to cease large-scale artillery exercises and military flights near the demilitarized zone to prevent incidents from November 1.

Reacting to the meeting, US President Donald Trump lauded Kim's steps to shut down a nuclear testing site in the presence of international experts and dubbed the inter-Korean summit as "very exciting".

"Kim Jong Un has agreed to allow Nuclear inspections, subject to final negotiations, and to permanently dismantle a test site and launch pad in the presence of international experts. In the meantime there will be no Rocket or Nuclear testing. Hero remains to continue being.....returned home to the United States. Also, North and South Korea will file a joint bid to host the 2032 Olympics. Very exciting!" Trump wrote in his Twitter handle.

-ANI
W hen the number one insurance broker Marsh & McLellan decides to buy the number three broker in London, Jardine Lloyd Thompson, you know they are hurting.

It is not that JLT always said it was not for sale, though that was the message. Nor is it that Marsh Mac sees conventional opportunities in the business that JLT itself could not spot or could not capitalise on, though that is one supposed rationale.

It is certainly not that JLT has an army of dedicated staff who will slot in happily in Marsh Mac, because there are bound to be redundancies.

Rather it is that insurance is more competitive and the brokers are struggling  even the biggest of them  to seem relevant.

The nature of insurance is changing. The biggest corporate risks, the multinational corporations, used to think they could and should cover 90% of their assets.

But that was in the days when they did their manufacturing in-house, and fire and flood were natural hazards. People knew what the risks were, even if they did not know where they would strike.

These days it is different. Risk is much more abstract. Firms have to contend with cyber, with reputation, with rogue traders, with supply chains, with terrorism, with intellectual property.

They dont know what the risk is, and underwriters dont really know either. As a result underwriters fight shy of taking these risks on, and multinationals struggle to cover 30% of their exposures. Insurance has also been assailed by hedge funds and catastrophe bond providers, who cherry-pick.

Pension funds buy cat bonds which give a good return day to day but have to pay out if there is a disaster, just like insurance. Hedge funds have been adept at moving in when markets look like they are turning up and riding the upside.

Again, insurance provides a better yield than conventional assets  in the good times.

Then there are emerging risks, like driverless cars. Whereas now everybody has a car policy and the claims are manageable in the sense that they require straightening a bit a metal, or putting a person through rehab, it will be different in future.

There will be no accidents with driverless cars until some day when a software engineer screws up and the whole of London has a crash. An era of small steady claims suddenly becomes highly unlikely but potentially catastrophic.

Insurance is also bothered by fintech, or insure tech. There are several interesting models  like Lemonade in the United States which rebates premiums  and others where people only need cover if they are actually driving. In China at the airport you can bet on flight delays and with another app you take a selfie and that is enough information for life assurance.

So insurance is a business which is starved of premium, plagued with over- capacity, and unable or unwilling to provide the range and extent of products which customers want. This puts the brokers in a dilemma  and trying to take additional fees off underwriters, as they are, to compensate for strains elsewhere is not the way to solve it.

But some corporates have responded. The oil market for example, is exploring in ever more dangerous places.

Wells are sunk 30,000 feet deep  think of an aircraft at 30,000 feet and imagine what that is like underground  where the drill has only an eighth of an inch of free movement. Insurance brokers say these kinds of risk are just too complex  like BPs Deepwater Horizon Gulf spill  so rather than be confrontational, client and broker should collaborate. Both sides should agree what the risks are, rather than seek to get an edge over the other.

Broker expertise would be shared with the client and they would become customer-led rather than producer-led, meaning the client, not the insurance underwriter, would hold sway.

Brokers would seek to minimise what the risks were and use their expertise to help the client to make sure they were not made real.

They would stop taking on whatever risks the client identified in the hope that a gullible underwriter would sign up, because in reality those exposures are utterly catastrophic if they do materialise  in which case the underwriter is out of business.

The broker would get a fee from the client for his consultancy rather than brokerage from the underwriters for placing the business.
Eve Sleep has been in real trouble but it looks like the mattress company may be sorting itself out.

Today the company said today said 20 staff will lose their jobs as it leaves a string of European markets.

The retailers co-founder and boss Jas Bagniewski left in July after a bungled expansion.

Revenues were up 63% to 18.8 million from 11.5 million. It will pull out of 15 countries.

Losses widened, from 9 million to 12 million.
T en minutes to midnight. Thats when the other 27 EU leaders in Salzburg gave Theresa May the chance to make her case for her Chequers plan.

Its also a metaphor for the crisis facing her premiership. Ever since the referendum it has been clear that Conservatives face a choice: either keep the hard Brexiteers on board and pay the economic price, or strike a deal with the EU that minimises the damage of Brexit.

Mrs May wasted two years of her premiership pretending she could do both.

When finally forced this July to make the choice by the ticking countdown clock of Article 50 that she herself activated, she managed to choose neither.

There never was a Chequers agreement  it was a disagreement. She lost the support of hard Brexiteers such as Boris Johnson and David Davis but did not gain in exchange a negotiating position that the EU had the remotest chance of accepting.

That mistake has been cruelly exposed at this European summit.

Ignore the polite words from the EU leadership about wanting a deal and now having a starting point for talks (18 months after they began!).

The EU has always insisted that the Irish border remains open and that four freedoms are indivisible. So it rejected the Chequers plan when it was announced, and has done so again in Austria.

The Brexiteers, added to their number overnight by previous May supporters such as Tory MP Mike Penning, also reject the Chequers plan.

As has been the case for three decades, they would rather maintain their ideological purity than face the realities of the modern interconnected world. Dead as a dodo may be their description of Chequers; it is also what the Conservative Party will look like if they get their way.

Left in the middle are what remains of the loyal part of the Tory party, whove been marched up a pointless hill.

If Downing Street was going to ask Tory MPs to face-down angry hardliners in their local associations, they should have done so defending a Brexit approach that the EU could accept.

Instead, less than a fortnight before her conference, Mrs May will have to ask these mainstream Conservatives to swallow further humiliation.

Gone is even the pretence that no deal is better than a bad deal  the Chancellor says the former would unravel 10 years of hard work and take us back to the financial crash.

Meanwhile, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development reminds us today that Britain is already poorer than it would have been, whatever the form of Brexit. But any deal is now the British Governments sole objective.

Some continuity arrangement remains the most likely outcome, instead of the cliff edge that no one in Europe wants to go over.

But remember that both the hardline Brexiteers and those campaigning for a second referendum want a car crash; and a PM who, as we saw on Panorama this week , enjoys the epithet of being a bloody difficult woman will come back from the Alps knowing she has a long climbdown from Chequers to avoid one.

No excuse for late trains

Rail passengers dont really need a new report to tell them what the May timetable disaster was like: they were stuck at stations day after day. But what they do need to know is that the causes of the catastrophe are fixed.

So what does todays report from the rail regulator tell us? For a start, that blame goes everywhere  to the Department for Transport, to Network Rail and to the operators involved.

At the time, the department and ministers tried to duck responsibility, but they cant any more. And who should have taken action? Thats the problem. As the report says, no one took charge.

Whats the solution? Nationalisation? No  Network Rail and the DfT are already state-run and much of this is their fault.

Whats needed is an independent structure that allows decisions to be taken.

In the north of England, that means devolving control from Whitehall to Transport for the North.
A s Brexit talks go into a decisive phase and the Government plans future immigration laws, we must not forget about more than a million European Londoners who are yet to be guaranteed their right to stay after Brexit.

Over 818 mornings, afternoons and evenings since the referendum day in 2016, many of them have been continuously asking themselves a crucial question: are they still welcome in this city that so many call home?

Unlike their British friends, for many of the Europeans Brexit already happened  even if not legally  on the very morning of June 24, 2016, when they were put on notice and faced with the challenge of adapting to a whole new reality.

Since then many constantly micro-analyse their everyday decisions. They worry if they should sign a lease or a mobile phone contract that goes beyond the date of Brexit, or perhaps postpone their application for a mortgage to finally buy that flat they had been thinking about.

What if they make a commitment  be it legal, financial or emotional  that they will have to break, whether they like it or not, because of Brexit? What would the consequences be? Instead of being able to plan their future here as they like, they often focus on minimising the risks  and having a safe way out should things go wrong.

Jakub Krupa / ES Local Feed

After all, two years and three months after the referendum and with only 190 days until Brexit d-day, there are still no legally binding guarantees for EU nationals that would cover all outcomes of the negotiations, including a no-deal scenario. This hardly inspires confidence in the process.

I have seen first-hand how many of my closest friends  both fellow Poles and other Europeans living in London  have been affected by these two years of unprecedented uncertainty.

Dozens of them were looking for job opportunities outside the UK, and some indeed decided it was time to call it a day and moved away. Every couple of weeks an invitation to someones leaving do lands in my inbox.

Others  if eligible  are applying for British residence or even citizenship (the latter currently considered to be the best insurance policy against Brexit), spending endless hours compiling documentation for the rather humiliating process of having to prove their worth to this country.

Once the settled status-scheme system finally launches in March next year, all European Union nationals will have to go through a similar, even if simplified, ordeal.

While paying for both the application and some legal advice, they sigh heavily when being asked to confirm in writing  and I am not making this up  that they have never been involved in war crimes, genocide or terrorist activities, but instead contribute thousands of pounds in taxes every year and therefore deserve to be graciously allowed to stay.

Whatever their original reason was to settle in London  be it pure economics, the prospect of personal development, the hope of adventure or genuine love of the city  it is now not them but the immigration officials who will decide whether they are good enough to stay. This loss of ownership of the decision changes everything.

In the past few years of my work covering the Polish migration to the UK, one sentence would come back again and again in personal stories of people who moved here and invested their future in Britain. I came here for a week, a month, a year, and I am still here  several years later.

"Many may leave, not because they wanted to but because they decided to jump before they are pushed"

Over the years they occasionally questioned their decision but would draw some comfort from the knowledge that they could easily change their mind. The free movement of people always offered an easy way out  and back in, if ever needed.

This time it feels different, more permanent. They will still be able to move out, but potentially with no easy return. Particularly if  as hinted by the Prime Minister and the Home Secretary  the future EU migrants will be subject to the same migration law, including quotas and salary thresholds, as people from the rest of the world.

Now, probably for the first time  particularly for those who came after the EU enlargement of 2004, including some 250,000 Polish Londoners  they will have to make a potentially life-changing decision: to stay or go.

This lonely period of more than 800 days of uncertainty makes many of them think twice about the wider costs of migration, too  often extortionate, also emotionally  and possible alternatives to London.

What about the cost of separation and personal sacrifices they make when living so far away from their ageing parents or friends? Or what if they can move elsewhere, where they would feel more welcome and potentially get a nicer flat, too? Sure, they will be missing Londons buzz, but perhaps it is just easier?

As the Brexit deadline looms, the question of the future of EU nationals becomes increasingly urgent.

Will the European Londoners patiently wait for the outcome of the negotiations and until the much-heralded, but still not fully operational, settled status scheme next year, optimistically hoping that everything will be just fine?

Or alternatively, will they crack under this growing pressure and leave? Not because they wanted to but  as so many would see it  because they jumped before they were pushed?

These decisions are being taken by Europeans of all nationalities every day as we get closer to Brexit, perhaps even as you read these words  and they will most certainly shape the London of tomorrow.
E ver wondered what the rest of the UK really thinks of us Londoners? Probably not. With 83,635 takeaway options, 40 five-star shows and countless gym fads to choose from, weve got better things to do.

Well, theyve decided to tell us anyway, via a new YouGov survey commissioned by think-tank Centre for London. From a list of suggested words including dynamic and innovative, most respondents described the capital as expensive. You cant argue with that, nor the demographically undeniable diverse to describe Londons inhabitants. Its with the second-most popular choice, arrogant, that things start getting hurtful. Bit harsh, no?

To be fair, these out-of-towners probably have a point. If any common ground is to be found in a city this diverse, the notion that were all at least a little bit up ourselves seems plausible. After all, you need a healthy-sized ego just to elbow your way onto the Tube in the morning, never mind actually make it in the Big Smoke among the rest of the self-selected high-fliers. Its not that we Londoners think were better than people who live elsewhere, its that we dont think about them much at all. Instead, were most likely to be looking down on each other.

In the broadest terms, west Londoners think of east London as slightly grotty (youd rather saunter through pretty Portobello Market on a Sunday morning, surely?), and east Londoners scoff at west Londons attempts to be hip (I mean, theyre probably still drinking cocktails out of mason jars, right?). Drivers look down on bus riders and vice-versa, while cyclists are up there on their high horse  also known as a Brompton foldable  thinking theyre superior to everyone.

It seems ludicrous now but there was even a brief moment, in the immediate wake of the Brexit vote, when the idea of London seceding from the rest of the UK to form an EU member city-state was a subject of semi-serious discussion in the most stridently Remain boroughs. And on that point at least, the non-London perception seems to be in line with how London sees itself: the capital is so different and so distinct from the rest of the UK as to be hardly a part of it all. While 77 per cent of those polled felt London contributed either a lot or a fair amount to the UK, 68 per cent felt their local area had not been a beneficiary.

"You need a healthy-sized ego just to elbow your way onto the Tube, never mind actually make it in the Big Smoke"

Clearly, as Centre for London argues, we need to spread Londons prosperity more evenly around the country. Less clearly, we also need to spread the capitals prosperity more evenly around London. Think of this city as the popular girl at school with her swishy hair, enviable confidence and fawning suitors. Think of Dudley, Salford and Newport as the awkward, outcast kids, glowering unnoticed from the other side of the cafeteria. They claim to hate her, yet would jump at an invitation to the party if offered. But did they ever stop to think that London might have problems of her own?

Gags meet glamour: its a potent mix

Emmy-winning comedy The Marvellous Mrs Maisel and stand-up Katherine Ryan are notable for their glamour as well as their gags. But while Mrs Maisel (Rachel Brosnahan), the lone female comic in Sixties Manhattan, had to look shaggable merely to get on stage, Ryan dons her lipstick and heels in a very different context.

Katherine Ryan / Dave Benett

Recent interviews to promote her new show, Katherine Ryan: Glitter Room (at the Garrick until October 20), reveal a woman who, thrillingly, always does exactly as she pleases. Sometimes thats openly indulging her weird little hobby of Botox, sometimes its gossiping about Celine Dion, but its always done with humour and without apology.

In a comedy scene that now includes the very brilliant and very different talents of Josie Long, Rose Matafeo, Sarah Millican, Bridget Christie, Michaela Coel, Shappi Khorsandi, Jayde Adams, Lolly Adefope, Sara Pascoe, Mae Martin and Jo Brand  to name a few  there are almost as many ways to be a successful stand-up as there are to be a woman.

The big fat lie of just a few squares

From the secret of Tom Watsons svelte success to Cadburys new Dark Milk line, theres no doubt that choccie bars made up of 80 per cent cocoa and above are the indulgence of choice for health- conscious sophisticates.

Labours deputy leader has lost seven stone in a year by cutting carbs and even, he says, sometimes Ill have a little bit of dark chocolate. In fact, a few squares and Im done has become a celeb interview cliche to rival I just feel so blessed!.
Max Mara has a sixth sense for what a woman wants from her working wardrobe.

But for the brand best known for dressing Milans executive classes it seems an impeccably cut suit is no longer enough: next season, the clothes must tell a story too.

In a collection which sought to permeate the mind of its wearer - not just her wardrobe - the label namechecked a series of classic works of literature, recast by female authors to tell the story from a womans perspective.

From Emily Wilsons thought-provoking translation of The Odyssey to Margaret Atwoods The Penelopiad, which chronicles the untold tale of ancient mythologys Penelope, this was an offering which sought to dispel myth and put pragmatism at its core.

AP

As a result, practicality was a chief concern, with overcoats worn oversized, bucket bags cut to generous proportions and skirts cut below the knee. The palette too favoured the houses signature muted shades of camel, khaki and navy, save for a confident injection of colour in the form of zesty lemon yellow.

At odds with much of Milan Fashion Week, which largely counts skin and sex appeal as currency, this was all about power and protection with knotted headscarves and popper leg shields layered under city shorts providing an armour against the world.

Max Maras own fabled history also contributed to the story which played out on next seasons catwalk.
A s surely as youll find Le Creuset ironware and Nigel Slater cookbooks in bien-pensant middle-class homes, youll spot a few books by William Boyd, often vying for primacy with those of Sebastian Faulks. Like Faulks, Boyd has written more than a dozen novels, had his work adapted for screen and has that rare gift of being popular and literary at the same time. His 15th book will surely be complementing living rooms across the country soon.

Set in the late 1890s, its an international saga about love, music, missed opportunities and revenge. Scottish piano tuner Brodie Moncur is a twenty-something consumptive with dodgy eyesight but hes handsome, resourceful and blessed with perfect pitch.

After escaping his family of gloomy Presbyterians, he gets a job with piano maker Channon & Co in Edinburgh, where the boss is so impressed with his talents he sends him to the firms Parisian showroom. Brodies innovation is to sign pianist John Kilbarron (the Irish Liszt) as the face of the brand, bringing him into contact with his nasty manager-brother, Malachi.

After a slow build up, we meet the Russian soprano, Lika Blum. She is the maestros girlfriend, and we know she will drive the story, so its a pity she never takes life. We hear quite a bit about her appearance (a virginal vision in white cotton and lace), her breasts (small and heavy) and her lips (full). When Lika and Brodie begin an affair, we learn her preferred sexual position too (grabbing her knees). But theres not much else.

The action then shifts to pre-revolutionary Russia, where theres a deal made, an act of sabotage and (inevitably) a duel before the lovers flee across Europe with Malachi on their trail. Its carefully, even expertly, plotted. But beyond the use of fancy words such as nugatory and refulgent, the prose makes few emotional or intellectual demands. The cliched dialogue doesnt help. People say things like: Ah, Paris she can be a difficult mistress and He can put it in his pipe and smoke it.
A bookseller-turned-debut novelist is the youngest ever author shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize.

Daisy Johnson, 27, is one of six writers in the running for the 50,000 prize which will be awarded tonight at a ceremony at Guildhall.

Her book, Everything Under, is set in the waterways of Oxford where she lives, and traces a womans journey to be reunited with the mother who gave her away. It was hailed by judge Val McDermid as beautifully written and powered by the flow of myth and folklore.

Johnson, who once sold books at Blackwells in Oxford, has previously published a critically acclaimed short story collection called Fen.

The other contenders include Northern Irish novelist Anna Burns, shortlisted for Troubles-era tale Milkman, and previous nominee Esi Edugyan, whose Washington Black is the story of a child slave who accompanies his owner on a series of scientific expeditions.

Rachel Kushners prison novel, The Mars Room ; Richard Powerss The Overstory and Robin Robertsons The Long Take  the life story of a D-Day veteran told in verse  complete the list.

Among the novels that did not make the final cut is crime writer Belinda Bauers Snap. It caused controversy when it was longlisted for the prize, which is traditionally dominated by literary fiction.

Chair of the judges Kwame Anthony Appiah said the six books, three of which are by UK authors, with the others from North America, were miracles of stylistic invention. He said: In each of them the language takes centre stage. Yet in every other respect they are remarkably diverse, exploring a multitude of subjects ranging across space and time.

They inhabit worlds not everyone will have been to, but which we can all be enriched by getting to know. Each one explores the anatomy of pain  among the incarcerated and on a slave plantation, in a society fractured by sectarian violence, and even in the natural world. But there are also moments of hope.

The winner of the prize can expect a huge bump in sales  last years winner, Lincoln In The Bardo by George Saunders, sold nearly a quarter of a million copies, with almost two thirds of them coming after his win.

Below are the six shortlisted books nominated for the Man Booker Prize:

Everything Under by Daisy Johnson

At 27, the youngest-ever shortlisted author has swapped her day job as a bookseller for literary success. Has form in awards and was a student when she won the highly regarded AM Heath Prize. Judge Val McDermid compared her novel to Sophocles Oedipus.

The American novelist went behind bars in US prisons to research her tale of a former lap dancer serving a life sentence. Kushner, who lives in LA, is a critics favourite. Kwame Anthony Appiah hailed her books propulsive plot.

The Overstory by Richard Powers

Powers novel, set set in the forests of the Pacific Northwest, is inspired by his own rural home on the North Carolina-Tennessee border. Judge Leanne Shapton described his book as an eco-epic, with stirring, lyrical paragraphs.

Washington Black by Esi Edugyan

The Canadian writer lost out to Julian Barnes in 2011. Her new novel, about a child slave, is based on a true story. Judge Leo Robson said: It is a novel of ideas but also of the senses a history lesson in the form of a fairy tale.

The Long Take by Robin Robertson

London-based poet Robertson is the first to be shortlisted for the Booker with a verse novel. It follows a traumatised D-Day veteran through the US. Judge Jacqueline Rose said the story, influenced by film noir, was a pageant of loss.

Milkman by Anna Burns
U ntil recently Harriet Rosenstein was a footnote in the arcane world of Plath studies. In the Seventies, the American feminist scholar had embarked on an unauthorised biography of Sylvia Plath, the poet and author of The Bell Jar. Rosenstein set about gathering critical documents, including revealing letters written by Plath to her one-time therapist, Ruth Beuscher. But after Rosenstein reportedly came under pressure from the Plath literary estate, she decided to shelve the biography.

Nothing more was heard from Rosenstein until March last year when she put her research materials, including Plaths letters to Beuscher, up for sale, with a hefty price tag of $875,000. In these letters was evidence, it seemed, that Ted Hughes, Plaths husband and the father of her two children, was indeed the brute he had been made out to be. He was a wife beater, a monster who had struck Plath with such force that it had brought about a miscarriage. Hughes, who was having an affair, also told his wife that he wanted her dead.

When Plath and Hughess daughter, Frieda, heard of the existence of this correspondence she was appalled, as she writes in the foreword. After a legal case the documents were withdrawn from sale and ended up at Smith College, Plaths alma mater in Massachusetts, which duly sent copies to Frieda. The contents reduced Frieda to tears. I felt to be taking part in a breath-taking  albeit one-sided  race though the evolution and collapse of a powerful love affair, she writes.

And so does the reader of this volume as one experiences the tragic narrative of the Plath-Hughes marriage through Sylvias eyes, particularly the devastation when she learnt of Teds affair with Assia Wevill (whom Plath calls the Weavy Asshole). What appals me is the return of my madness, my paralysis  a mental hospital, lobotomies, Sylvia wrote to Beuscher on February 4, 1963 in the last letter published here. A week later, the 30-year-old writer was dead after placing her head in the gas oven at her London flat.

Frieda took the decision to include the Beuscher letters to make people aware of the context in which they were written. We now know that before Ted struck Sylvia, she had torn up some of his manuscripts. My mother had hit out at the thing they both knew was most precious  typescripts of their own work, writes Frieda.

The 14 Plath-Beuscher letters are illuminating, but it would be a shame to let them define this volume, as there is much else of interest here. There are the letters Sylvia wrote to her mother, Aurelia, many of which were censored when they were published in 1975. There are details about the inspiration for key works, and insight into Plaths state of mind when she was writing poems at the end of her life, later published as Ariel. I get up at 4 am when I wake, & it is black  she tells the poet Richard Murphy. It is like writing in a train tunnel, or Gods intestine.

You would have thought that with the publication of this final volume of letters the Plath story would be complete. But you would be wrong. Next year sees the release of a new biography and the tantalising possibility that one or both of Plaths missing or supposedly burnt journals might turn up, or even her near-mythical last letter.

It seems fitting that one of Plaths most famous poems was called Lady Lazarus; she simply refuses to die.

Andrew Wilson is the author of Mad Girls Love Song: Sylvia Plath and Life Before Ted (Simon & Schuster).
I f you happened to have been walking along Kutuzovsky Prospekt in Moscow one July evening in 1985, you might have noticed a middle-aged man standing in a doorway holding a Safeway bag. Possibly you might have wondered why anyone in Moscow would be carrying a Safeway bag when the nearest branch was several hundred miles away, but the chances are you would have noticed nothing unusual.

That, at least, was what the British Intelligence services were hoping. The man was Oleg Gordievsky, recently appointed Head of the KGB in London, and he had just sent a clear signal that he wanted to defect.

Never before had British Intelligence had a mole so deep within the KGB; never before had they attempted to smuggle anyone across the Russian border. If the escape went according to plan, MI6 would be handed its greatest-ever intelligence coup. If it failed, it would completely upend Anglo-Soviet relations.

One of the  many  things that makes this book so riveting is the extraordinary blend of precision planning and amateur dramatics in MI6s escape plan. Gordievsky knew that the British had spotted his signal when a man coming towards him bit very conspicuously into a Mars Bar.

By then he had read and memorised his instructions which had been printed on a cellophane sheet and hidden in an edition of Shakespeares sonnets. All he had to do was catch a train to the town of Vyborg close to the Finnish border, walk to a secluded layby on the Leningrad to Vyborg highway, hide in the undergrowth, and wait.

If Gordievsy was the Soviet Unions most high-profile defector, he was also its most unlikely. Born into a KGB family  his father had also been an agent  he grew up steeped in Stalinist dogma. As soon as he could, he too enrolled in the KGB. To begin with, it never occurred to him to question that he was on the right side of a great ideological battle between East and West.

First Gordievsky was sent to the Russian embassy in Copenhagen where he processed visa applications in the morning and went spying in the afternoon. But on his return to Moscow, he couldnt help noticing how drab everything looked compared with Copenhagen. How downtrodden and gloomy everyone seemed.

The worm of doubt had entered his soul. Slowly but surely it began to flex itself. Approached by the British, who had identified him as a possible recruit, Gordievsky agreed to provide them with information, albeit with certain provisos. He didnt want any money and  to begin with at least  he wouldnt identify any KGB agents.

So what did he want? Why did Gordievsky choose to risk everything  not just his career and his marriage, but also his life? In part, he was motivated by ideology and in part by love of adventure, but as Ben Macintyre makes plain, there was more to it than that. All spies need to feel they are loved, he writes, and Gordievskys need to be cosseted and appreciated was greater than most.

The British wrapped him in a protective cocoon, flattered his vanity and listened agog as the secrets spilled forth. The higher Gordievsky moved up the KGB ladder, the more valuable the information he fed them.

In the end  by an extraordinary irony  it was the British defector, Kim Philby, still doing some part-time work for the KGB, who first alerted the Russians to the fact there might be a mole in their midst.

Soon after being appointed Head of the KGB in London, Gordievsky was suddenly recalled to Moscow. There he found his apartment had been sprinkled with radioactive dust, so the KGB could monitor his movements. By now, not surprisingly, the pressure was starting to get to him. Friends noticed that Gordievsky was unusually touchy, knocking back booze with hectic abandon and chewing his fingernails.

Soon afterwards out came the Safeway bag. Picked up from the layby by two MI6 agents, Gordievsky was bundled into the boot of a car. At the Russian/Finnish border, the agents dropped cheese and onion crisps along with a dirty nappy to throw the sniffer dogs off his scent.

Within a few days of his escape, MI6 knew the names of every KGB officer in London. Sentenced to death in absentia, Gordievsky has spent the past 30 years living in a safe house in the Home Counties. He is one of the bravest people I have ever met, writes Macintyre, and one of the loneliest.

As he has often proved before, Macintyre does true-life espionage better than anyone else. He has a remarkable ability to construct a narrative that is as taut and urgent as it is carefully nuanced. Here the pace never slackens and the focus never drifts, while

Macintyres insight into his subjects tangle of contradictions never loses its sharpness. Its a tough call, but The Spy and the Traitor may well be his best book yet.

John Preston is the author of A Very English Scandal (Penguin, 8.99).
T he top three favourite military maxims of Field Marshal Montgomery were, allegedly: dont march on Moscow, never eat yellow snow and avoid making war in South East Asia.

For more than a third of the last century, America did make war in South East Asia, overtly and covertly, losing 36,516 military dead in the Korean war of 1950-53, and 58,209 in the much longer conflict in Vietnam from 196165.

Having written about Korea earlier, Sir Max Hastings, veteran journalist and historian, now tackles Vietnam. The two are complementary although the Vietnam story carries more resonance to this day. The sub-title calls it an epic tragedy although it might equally be termed an epic folly.

America committed more than three million military personnel in all to Vietnam. At its peak, the US effort numbered more than half a million. Yet they could not prevail against a less well-armed, less sophisticated and at times half-starving enemy, whether it was the insurrectionary guerrillas of the South, the Vietcong, or the forces of Communist Hanoi, the North Vietnamese Army, or NVA for short.

We have here not so much a portmanteau account of the campaigns in Vietnam, from the failed French colonial war against the Vietminh from 1945 to the culmination of the fall of Saigon in 1975, but a veritable Victorian steamer trunk, crammed with the facts and figures, of dead and maimed, villages wrecked and atrocities committed, and tonnage of ordnance discharged. It surely will be the last word on the tactical and military chronicle of the war, the main reference book for schools and universities for future generations.

The statistics and analysis roll at the reader like the sticks of bombs from the dreaded B-52 bombers. Most piquant is that as a result of the Rolling Thunder bombing campaigns, the US bombers inflicted about $300 million worth of damage for the loss of 922 aircraft  which had cost the Pentagon three times that sum.

America went to war in Vietnam on a false premise  the notorious domino theory espoused by Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson that if Vietnam fell to China-driven communism, so would its neighbours in South East Asia. Domino was largely discredited by the time of the big US build up in 1965. By then South Vietnam existed as an American supplicant or satrapy.

Once in the quagmire, nobody seemed to know how to get out. The path of folly was set from the Tet Offensive in 1968, which the US won tactically but the images and footage of the fighting in Hue and in Saigon said something else. America was losing, psychologically.

"It bothers me that we didnt learn a lot. If we had, we wouldnt have invaded Iraq."

The refrain of Hastings analysis is that however badly the Americans and their allies acted, from village massacres such as My Lai, to carpet bombing, and spraying the jungle with defoliant, the Communists were worse. The NVA and VC were cruder and more cruel, maybe, but America could not have won unless it was prepared to colonise all Vietnam, and a deal more of South East Asia.

Wider aspects of Vietnam and why it still has such impact are hardly explored at all. The culture of books, movies and journalism is largely skipped over, which is a pity. The legacy in science, from post traumatic stress disorder, which Vietnam veterans brought to the attention of the world, to the use of Agent Orange defoliant is almost brushed aside.

The author suggests that the Vietnamese did more damage to themselves with their use of hand-pumped herbicides on their crops than the millions of gallons sprayed from the air. The half-life of Dioxin and its long-term carcinogenic effect are not so lightly dismissed.

It bothers me that we didnt learn a lot. If we had, we wouldnt have invaded Iraq, says General Walt Boomer, a US marine veteran of Vietnam and Iraq at the end of the book. This should have opened a larger discussion of the disastrous legacy of Vietnam this century  and in this Hastings is almost too deferential to todays American intellectual generals.

The lesson of Vietnam was not to try to resolve a political conundrum by military means: firepower over strategy. The Americans went to a country of which they had little or no understanding of culture, language, ethnography, and tribal and political tradition.

And they did the same this century in Iraq and Afghanistan, this time round with British connivance. The consequence was the foundation of Isis in 2014 and the Karzai kleptocracy in Kabul.
I m just old enough to remember the scent of my grandfathers workshop, a mix of warm oil, Atco mowers and green leaded paint, against a backdrop of spanners in imperial inch measures. It was a relic from an age when people made things and fixed things and drove British cars fuelled by five-star petrol. It is the age captured by James Hamilton-Paterson in a book that is by turns engrossing and infuriating  a response to Brexit in mechanical form.

Hamilton-Paterson adores that seductive but misleading late burst of British confidence, the moment between the end of the Second World War and Suez, when our global swagger was supported by more than words. There was early nuclear power, the first computers, jet engines, fast fighter planes and big ships  all made here, and all advanced. It was an age when the Queen still looked young on newsreels and Prince Philip was fascinated by technical success. But six decades on, our domestic manufacturers are all but gone and Britain imports more than it exports. So what went wrong, he asks?

It is a good question, but one this book fails to answer. Reading it is a little like hearing an elderly relative insist the old days were better. You know some things were, but that there is another side to the story too. As Hamilton-Paterson puts it, a mix of bad managers, dodgy investors, foolish politicians and lazy, misled workers killed off one of the worlds leading manufacturing economies. Great names from Alvis to Avro went to the wall, to be replaced by city spivs doing who knows what for salaries they certainly dont deserve. For him, an economy that makes things is much more noble than one that does things for others.

Hes right, of course, that some of the losses were tragic. How, he asks, did our motorcycle industry die within the space of a decade as late as the 1970s? Why isnt Britain a leading builder of profitable cruise ships? Why did we let a diverse car industry merge itself to bankruptcy, so that Morris models competed with Austin ones from the same company, neither of them a match for French and German rivals?

All true. But Im not sure its right to blame the City of London for this. The government made huge strategic mistakes, backing too many types of fighter jets and diesel railway engines, for instance, or, in the end, nationalising our shipyards into one rusting disaster  a point he acknowledges. Bad luck counted too. Had windows on the the Comet 1 not cracked at the corners, the plane would have been a world beater.

Britains first place in the industrial revolution also meant that it was always likely to be overtaken: our ironworks were older, our shipyards smaller, our working practices more archaic, our industrial centres more congested. Germanys manufacturing march began a century ago.

In the end, though, what spoils Hamilton-Patersons book for me is the lack of recognition of the things that went well: the rescue of Rolls-Royce engines, the rise of JCB with its beautiful Staffordshire factory, our role making satellites and pharmaceuticals, the resurgence of the car industry.

Its not clear if he wants manufacturing in Britain, or British-owned manufacturers, or why that distinction matters. Moving in its recollection of the objects and firms that made up this lost age, the book is lessened by dubious and angry analysis. Read it for the former and ignore the latter.
Scarfes bar

Scarfes always packs out for good reason. From early difficult days, when it was a den of garishness, its become something magnificent, elegant, revered. This seemed to go to their head at the last list change, when they were charging 10 for a beer  a tenner!  but things have just been changed again and theyve wiped a little smugness off the prices. While there are still elements of the wrong crowd coming through the doors (lawyers are very hard to shake), mostly it is now a low-lit library of charm. The new menu is a marvel, Gerald Scarfes work still sharp and gorgeous to look at (and now for sale, after all the old lists got nicked). The mixes inspired by the drawings are even better to drink. See for yourself with the Naturalist, inspired by Sir David Attenborough: the back story is in the book, but a spirit made from soil burns cold in this twist on a Martini that is ice-white intense and blindingly strong in a way that puts Dukes Bar to shame.
J You would never know it from his relaxed, affable demeanour in front of camera, but ames Graham is arguably the most acclaimed and accomplished dramatist of his generation.

Since his 2012 breakout hit This House, the 36-year-old has enjoyed a run of successes with big, ambitious, funny plays and television dramas that have tackled politics (Coalition), internet surveillance (Privacy), the rise of tabloid journalism (Ink ) oh, and more politics with a forthcoming Channel 4 drama about Brexit starring Benedict Cumberbatch. He recently had both Ink, about the rise of Rupert Murdochs Sun, and Labour of Love , about the ideological battles within the Labour Party, playing only yards from each other in the West End.

I would have assumed that this double whammy would feel rather good, but Graham said his reaction was to feel shame and guilt and think, Should I stop writing now I have had my time in the spotlight? Should I move out of the way so other people can have an opportunity? In the end he resolved that rather than quitting he should exploit the opportunities coming his way to help others.

There is a very visible problem with what stories get told on British stages, Graham says. He wanted to do more than moan about it and virtue signal about it on social media. So when offered the opportunity to update Sketches by Boz, Charles Dickens chronicle of the multiplicity of stories in Victorian London, Graham suggested that rather than writing it himself he would collaborate with emerging writers from groups under-represented in the industry. From a submission list of 800 applicants, eight writers were selected and Graham worked with them as a mentor on his new play, Sketching. I do feel a duty and a responsibility as a writer to encourage other writers, he tells me, the way I was encouraged even though I did not come from a background that conventionally would see you writing plays.

Albert's Boy

One of three children, Graham was born in 1982, in the village of Annesley in Nottinghamshire. His father was a local council worker and his mother worked as barmaid. I remember what it felt like to grow up in a post-industrial town in the 1990s and feel voiceless, he says but I was very lucky because my family encouraged me to be creative. When I was a boy we would go on holiday to Skegness and in the two-hour car journey we would listen to The Goon Show. My dad bought me a tape recorder so I would do the silly voices. Graham went to what was at the time the largest comprehensive school in the country, with about 2,500 pupils. My school was determined that students, particularly lads, would do theatre, he recalls. We did Grease  I played Vince Fontaine and had to wiggle my hips  and Return to the Forbidden Planet.

That was enough to inspire him to study drama at Hull University in 2000 and after graduating he got himself a stage door job before landing his first commission in 2005. I was sleeping on the floor of my friends house because I didnt have a place to live, he says, and I remember going to the local garage to buy a newspaper to see a review of my play Alberts Boy in the national press for the first time, standing there thinking: how have I got away with this?

Coalition

Graham had moved to London in 2004 after applying for a job in a marketing agency. When I was growing up people had a sense of pride in saying they had never been to London, he says, but I always got unashamedly excited by the idea of living here. I do think its remarkable that a city of this size and scale works so well  that every day eight million residents and millions of commuters can arrive in the city and it can function and work, and people can be helpful and kind and generous to one another and live alongside each other. There are, Graham freely recognises, less rosy aspects to London  the increasing divisions between rich and poor and the housing crisis, to name but two  and part of the appeal of working on Sketching was to explore different faces of the city.

The template was Dickens, he says, and it was up to the writers to find the modern heroes and villains and the present-day version of orphanage managers and money lenders. We have a family drama set in a Polski sklep in Mitcham. Theres the story of a flusher finding a particularly shocking item down in the sewers, a tale of a physicist falling in love. We depict some zero-hours and agency workers going on strike and the daughter of a keycutter from Hackney who enters into an ancient secret society, and so on. But big characters, big heroes and villains and high stakes.

Ink / Elliott Franks /eyevine

Graham is single and lives alone in a recently bought house in Kennington. He is also terrifyingly productive. There was a time when, to prove that being a playwright was a proper job and something that should feel hard, I would get up stupidly early, he says. I had a rule that I would have to get up when it was dark. I would be at my desk by seven and would work through till one or two in the morning. And pausing just for food? Maybe food but not always, he says. I very frequently dont have food in the house, so I will get annoyed about having to go out. He notices my shocked expression. My mum had three jobs growing up and she still has two, he says. She does a night shift in a warehouse Monday to Friday after her day job in a school, so I think I should be working hard, shouldnt I?

His upbringing has shaped his entire approach to theatre. I cant bear any theatre that feels like it is an in-joke, or theatre for theatre people, he says. Most people in this country dont go to the theatre and that is the proportion of society I want to reach. So youre a populist, I say. Yeah but politicians and Nigel Farage and Arron Banks have ruined that word, he says.

With Mel Giedroyc at the 2018 Olivier Awards / Dave Benett/Getty Images

Mention of Farage leads our conversation towards Brexit and Grahams forthcoming TV drama. My town was one of the top 10 that voted to leave. The vast majority of my friends growing up would have voted leave and people in my family voted leave, he says. So I feel a sense of responsibility about not favouring one side over the other and not depicting heroes where there are none. Earlier this year a rough draft of Grahams script was stolen and leaked online, an experience he found embarrassing, exposing and annoying  you are mucking about in the privacy of your own home, and thinking maybe this and maybe that, then it gets pored over by journalists and real life people, which felt unfair.

Politics has been the central preoccupation of Grahams career, from Edens Empire (about Anthony Eden) to Tory Boyz (about Edward Heath), from Little Madam (about Margaret Thatchers youth) to This House and Labour of Love. I do sympathise with politicians and I dont envy them, he says. I feel sorry for them and yet the quality of political discourse is the worst it has ever been. Politics has been reduced to talking points and we have retreated into simplicity.

This House / Corbis via Getty Images

A contributing factor to this, he suggests, is that online platforms have replaced social spaces such as the town hall and the pub. Social media forums such as Twitter are not places that allow for nuance; they encourage total commitment to one particular and often simplistic point of view. But it is not just the platforms and technology, it is also us  there is a potential for these networks to introduce you to people and ideas and concepts that you would never have had access to before, so it is we who are failing by not embracing the potential of these platforms, instead behaving almost as the worst versions of ourselves.

Twitter leads us, inevitably, to Donald Trump. I dont know how we globally row back from a fictional character becoming the President of the United States, Graham says. If you look back at Donald Trump even 10 years ago, he played a different character: he was more reasonable, he was more liberal, his vocabulary was bigger, he had irony, self awareness, intelligence and a politics that have all vanished. The state of politics on both sides of the Atlantic clearly worries Graham but he is honest enough to admit to an upside. It saddens me that we live in a world that feels angry and dangerous and ungenerous, he says, but there is a narcissistic side to me that says this is the best time to be writing. Alongside Sketching and the Brexit drama, Graham is developing a feature film adaptation of 1984 with director Paul Greengrass as well as a screen version of Ink and a TV drama about the impact of the miners strike on his home town. The most exciting stories for me are personal struggles, he says, set against the backdrop of nation-changing events.

OLIVER SPENCER jacket,. AMI jeans, 150 (amiparis.com). ORleBAR BROWN T-shirt, 85 (orlebarbrown.co.uk). The Kooples shoes, 185 (thekooples.co.uk)

Which draws us back to the two life-changing events of 2016  the Brexit vote and Trumps election. Graham doesnt offer easy answers in his plays, but he believes the power of stories can help to heal the divisions these upheavals caused. If social networks and politics nudge us towards those who are like us, theatre and stories can, he suggests, take us inside other lives and that is why a project such as Sketching feels necessary and important. We all win as theatre-makers and audience members if we have a multiplicity of voices bringing different stories and different perspectives and styles onto the stage, he says. What art demands of you is understanding, tolerance and an openness to different people and different points of view. Empathy.

Sketching runs at Wiltons Music Hall, 26 Sep to 27 Oct (sketchingtheplay.com)
D ay two of our safari in Tanzanias Serengeti National Park and there they were: six lionesses dozing in the branches of a kigelia, or sausage tree.

Our brilliant guide, Dilbert, parked close enough for us to watch, hypnotised, their rapid panting the skitter of their restless muscles and the taut bellies that suggested that (phew) theyd recently fed. A little further down the track, on one of the vast volcanic boulders flung out from the lush Ngorongoro Crater when it was active, we found their mates. Three massive adult males, raw-boned and large-maned, basked in the sunshine on a rock as big as a hill.

You dont always strike it rich with game sightings on safari. In Tanzania we found an embarrassment of riches. Scores of hippos jostling, spouting and bellowing in the bend of a river (they might even have been mating, though its hard to tell with hippos). Hundreds of wildebeests and zebras nibbling grass on a vast plain, or strung out in thundering lines beneath the horizon. The bird life  the bright flash of lilac-breasted rollers and lovebirds, the arrogant unconcern of eagles wheeling above the treetops  was worth the trip alone. We became almost blase to the variety of deer we saw.

Getty Images/Lonely Planet Image

The abundance extended to Sanctuary Kichakani, where we were staying. Kichakani is a new mobile camp from Sanctuary Retreats that shifts location three times a year to follow the great migration of wildebeests and other herbivores from the south and east to the west of the Serengeti. If this sounds like we were roughing it, set your mind at rest. The stylishly outfitted tents are bigger than the average London one-bedroom flat, with polished wooden floors and modern furniture in metal and wood, laced with webbing and straps to evoke old-school caravanserai adventures. Best of all, there are plumbed-in basins and loos.

When we wanted a proper wash  and believe me, after an eight-hour game drive, you do  our tent steward, Rama, would warm up water and fill the outside tank connected to the bucket shower inside. Our front terrace had a view over a bend in a shallow river, home to another haw-haw-hawing hippo whom we heard at night, and also a shaving stand. It is a joyful pleasure to shave in the open air as the African sun sets over your shoulder.

Plain sight: views over the Serengeti stretch for miles / Alamy Stock Photo

Most meals were served in a vast dining tent adorned with chandeliers made of old aluminium torches, which we desperately wanted to take home. The fare was sophisticated despite the camps remoteness: chilled avocado soup, wonderful barbecued Tanzanian beef, jewelled salads, all washed down with refreshing local beer and surprisingly decent Tanzanian wine. But undoubtedly our favourite repast was a picnic next to a boulder called Gong Rock (it chimes when struck) on top of a volcanic hillock, the view stretching for miles. On the way back, Dilbert showed us rock paintings left by Masai warriors.

Our fellow guests, when they finally arrived at Kichakani, were cordial but circumspect. Everyone kept largely to themselves apart from the final night when we all clapped as the entire camp staff  apart from the guides, who remained slightly apart and aloof  danced through the dining room, singing. We also felt lucky that it was just me and my wife in our open-sided Toyota Land Cruiser with Dilbert, on the rare occasions we passed other, air-conditioned vehicles with several families packed up against the windows. Powerful insect repellent was a must, however, as Tanzanian tsetse flies can bite through denim, as are warm layers: the Serengeti at dawn is surprisingly cold. At one stage, we got a puncture next to a lake skimmed by flamingos. Once the low growl of the engine ceased, and before Dilbert started ratcheting the huge car up on its axle, the silence was profound.

Kichakanis luxury tents have every mod con

Ive never felt anything like the calm and stillness of being in this huge, open landscape and then suddenly seeing game up close. Serengeti means endless plains and it covers about 30,000km sq so the scenery varies widely between hills, plains, parched grassland and lush woods. There were so many unique encounters: a leopardess and her cub up a tree, a family of dwarf mongooses  mongeese?  crossing the road, the clack as rival okapis butted horns. We saw dozens of buffalos, scores of giraffes and elephants, even a distant rhino.

Dilbert kept apologising that he couldnt find me a cheetah. Never mind. Thats a good reason to go back.
T he winners of Bompas & Parr's ice cream design competition have been announced.

The design duo behind SCOOP: A Wonderful Ice Cream World at The British Museum of Food, invited creatives to submit 3D ice-cream mould designs for a competition to celebrate London Design Festival, which runs from September 15-23 this year.

A panel of judges selected the best three design submissions, which Bompas & Parr then used as inspiration to create experimental one-off ice cream moulds. They used these to create edible ice creams with some unusual and intriguing flavours. These iced treats went on sale today (September 20) at the exhibition.

First place in the competition was nabbed by Sally Reynolds Homage to the Breast (below). Inspired by classical sculptures of Roman origins, the design apparently plays on the power of the currency of women in the days of royalty and is a nod to the beauty of the female figure.

Sally Reynolds Homage to the Breast (Bompas & Parr) / Bompas & Parr

In the image below you can see the resulting sweet treat from Bompas & Parr's one-off mould. The flavour is Rose Masala Chai  a sensual Vanilla gelato with Rose Syrup & Chai spice.

Homage to the Breast (Bompas & Parr) / Bompas & Parr

Gonzalo Herrero Delicado, architecture curator of the Royal Academy, and competition judge said: "A state-of-the-art ice cream, a beautiful sculptural piece with a very thoughtful concept, that evokes the lavish and lustful days of Ancient Rome in every bite".

In second place is Estela Gless' 21st century experience, Mouth Toys: Ice Lollies, with its inspiration coming from a Mexican Paleta. It is supposed to reflect the physical and emotional sensations that ice cream has brought people throughout history and its ever-evolving presence.

Mouth Toys: Ice Lollies (Bompas& Parr) / Bompas & Parr

Bompas & Parr's resulting flavour is a Turkish-Dondurma-Elastic Cherry with candied ginger and poppy seeds.

Mouth Toys: Ice Lollies (Bompas & Parr) / Bompas & Parr

Fellow judge Rachele Caltagirone, senior project director of marketing at Argent said: "The slightly sticky and elastic nature of dondurma works perfectly with the shapes and eating this ice cream would make for a really enjoyable sensory experience."

In third place, Michele Menescardi presented Bubble-icious, a design of soap bars. People who buy this mould will be left with a plastic toy to play with soap bubbles.

Bubble-icious by Michele Menescardi (Bompas& Parr) / Bompas & Parr

The resulting flavour of this ice cream is Pineapple & Basil, inspired by a fruit salad and the ancient Arabic tradition of sweets and culinary art.

Bubble-icious (Bompas & Parr) / Bompas & Parr

Marcus Fairs, founder of Dezeen said: "Although gimmicky and paradoxical, it looks good, the flavours are interesting and I like the counter-intuitiveness of putting something that looks like a bar of soap in your mouth" .

The designer ice creams are on sale today (September 20) only at Conehenge at SCOOP. All profits will go to Maggies Centres, which supports people living with cancer, and their family and friends.
B uying lunch every day is a total waste of money. Estimates vary but financial experts say that forking out for ready-made meals and snacks every day can cost you anywhere from 1,300 to over 2,000 per year. Ouch.

Making your work lunches instead of spending a fiver at Pret every day is a no-brainer. It also feels like the boring option.

But lunch boxes have certainly evolved since we were kids, while the classic ham and cheese sandwich is certainly appealing, lunches that you can prep on Sunday afternoons and have ready to take with you on weekday mornings are the new go-to.

Anna Barnett, Evening Standard columnist and foodie, told said: An adult packed lunch is all about the preparation. By setting aside just half an hour over the weekend to prep will mean you can banish the limp cheese sandwiches for the week and enjoy homemade lunches with a difference.

Below, Anna gives her top tips for an exciting lunch box alongside food experts Rachel Khoo and Anna Jones.

Anna Barnett, cook and columnist

Its all about preparation

Invest in some good reusable jars and batch cook your grains, pastas and noodles. Also stock up on an abundance of fresh veg and pickles for an added health kick plus a serious injection of flavour.

Noodle-based dishes are the simple way to create exciting lunches

From the rice noodle spicy broth that you can simply add hot water too (using a sambal oelek is a great and simple way to add spice and depth of flavour) to the homemade falafel, pickles and pitta; lunches neednt be boring.

Any noodle dish, classic salad or bowl of grains can be given a new lease of life by using quality produce and a killer dressing or sauce. Store the dressing separately and add just before youre about to eat. This will ensure theres no soggy salad leaves or a lunch of mush when it comes to feeding time.

Annas top tip

Its all in the organisation. Failing that just cook a double dinner or take in cooked salmon and greens, pastas, meats and rice dishes which can easily be reheated or eaten cold.

Rachel Khoo, cook, writer and author of The Little Swedish Kitchen

Use quality ingredients for your sandwiches

If you're going to make a sandwich, don't skimp on the quality of the bread and filling. This is when you can set your sandwich apart from what you buy at the shop. There are some amazing bakeries in London (Bread ahead, E5 Bakehouse...) who do fantastic sourdough loaves or baguettes. Follow the French and make a classic jambon beurre but with the best roast ham you can find and a good salty flavoursome butter. It doesn't need to be complicated but simply use the best ingredients available.

Soups are the perfect meals to make in bulk

With the colder weather heading our way why not dust off your thermos flask. Soups make a fantastic nutritious lunch. From the classic leek and potato, tomato or spiced butternut squash. It's easy to make a big pot and either refrigerate the rest or pop portions into the freezer. When it comes to serving the soup don't keep it plain, pack a little container filled with some fresh herbs, croutons, freshly chopped chilli, roasted nuts or seeds.

I always think that during the colder months it's great to have a hot bowl of something and it doesn't have to stop with a soup. It's also possible to pack a wider neck thermos for stews or curries. All these kind of dishes can be made in advance and often taste better after a day or two when the flavours have melded together.

Variation is essential

Think about all those extra details. Head to a fancy deli and pick up a few things that will give your lunch box a little something. Making lunches in the long run saves you money so I always think there's nothing wrong with adding a little luxury to homemade packed lunch.

Anna Jones, cook, stylist and author of A Modern Way to Eat

Homemade dips make the perfect snack

Ill often make a big pot of some kind of dip - a beet borani or muhammara (a Levantine smoky walnut, paprika and red pepper dip) and pack it along with some crudites or crackers.

Look abroad for fresh ideas

When you need some inspiration, look to different nationalities and cuisines for new ideas. Try a rice-based bento box with tofu, sugar snaps, pea shoots, and radishes, or a bowl of noodles with a quick satay sauce, thinly sliced raw cabbage and tofu.

Leftovers are your friends

Use roasted roots from the night before, throw in an extra handful or two when youre doing the evening pasta, and save cold potatoes."

Grain-based dishes are the perfect meal prep

Hardy grain-based dishes are amazing for lunchboxes, as they travel well and dont need to live in the fridge. Start with a hearty base, add a veggie or two, and finish with some crunch from croutons, nuts or toasted seeds. I'll often pack a flavourful dressing separately and pour it on at the last minute.

Dont forget toppings and seasonings

It's all in the finishing touches. Include toppings, like peanuts or croutons (and make sure they stay crunchy by twisting them into clingfilm, or keeping them in jars, to keep them separate).

Remember your seasonings  maybe a bridge too far for some, but its not a bad idea to keep a little pot of salt and pepper on your desk, as it can make all the difference.
The Metropolitan Police announced the findings today after reports that a serial cat killer was behind the slaughter and mutilation of up to 500 pets across the UK.

For nearly three years, police and animal activists have been hunting for a culprit, also dubbed the M25 cat killer, who was suspected of bludgeoning animals to death before dissecting their corpses.

Today Scotland Yard announced that a review of all the evidence had found no trace of human involvement, with no CCTV sightings, no witnesses and no forensic leads.

Police concluded that cats were more likely to have been killed by foxes than a human attacker / Alamy

Here is a timeline of how the three-year police investigation unfolded.

Sept 2015

South Norwood Animal and Rescue Liberty (Snarl) raises concerns about Facebook reports of four mutilated cats in Addiscombe, near Croydon.

Oct 2015

Reports begin flooding in of more mutilated cats after local papers carry stories about the Cat Ripper of Croydon.

Nov 2015

Croydon police launch an investigation.

Jan 2016

Animal rights activists announce a 5,000 reward for capture of cat killer with reports of 30 cat deaths.

Feb 2016

Actor Martin Clunes emails then Met chief Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe urging him to step up the hunt for the cat killer.

April 2016

Details emerge of post-mortem findings which conclude cats were killed by blunt force then mutilated with a sharp instrument.

May 2016

Snarl claims Croydon cat killer is now operating across suburbs of London with more than 50 pets reported killed.

June 2016

Reports that the killer has struck 100 times.

Sept 2017

Bounty raised to 10,000 amid claims of 300 victims.

Dec 2017

Officer leading hunt warns of known links between human serial killers and people who harm animals.

Jan 2018

Reports that cat killer is snared when police in Northampton arrest 31-year-old truck driver in connection with local cat killings. Police play down links with Croydon.

Feb 2018

Team of 15 Met officers work on the case with reports of mutilated cat attacks as far afield as Manchester, Brighton and the Isle of Wight.

August 2018
M ore than 50 dealers have been convicted of running county lines drugs operations from London to provincial towns and cities so far this year, prosecutors revealed today.

Five gang members face sentencing today for running a network supplying Class A crack cocaine and heroin from Hackney to Peterborough and Huntingdon in Cambridgeshire.

They are among 49 people across 10 class A drugs networks in London who have either admitted or been found guilty of conspiracy to supply offences since January. Several more gang members from London have been arrested and convicted by county forces.

In June, Akeem Abiola, 20, of Hackney, was jailed at Basildon crown court after admitting two counts of being concerned in the supply of Class A drugs.

Officials say the convictions reflect the commitment to dismantle the networks. More than 1,000 county line gangs are thought to operate in Britain, with nearly 300 from London. In total they generate an estimated 1.8 billion annual profit.

Samuel Ayowera, 19, was one of five facing sentencing on Thursday

Gangs get calls from customers in seaside or county towns and use teenage couriers to ferry the drugs. The gangs use violence and intimidation, often taking over a vulnerable persons home to store and sell drugs.

Recent prosecutions include those of operations in Swansea, Brighton, Hastings, Oxford and Norwich.

Police found a piece of cardboard detailing around 10,600 worth of drug dealing activity over six days / CPS

Today five Hackney-based dealers who marketed and sold Class A drugs in Peterborough and Huntingdon were due to be sentenced at Snaresbrook crown court. Four admitted their roles and one was found guilty after trial. They used phone aliases Ricki and TJ to supply the lines. Police found a piece of cardboard detailing around 10,600 worth of drug dealing activity over six days.

Jodeci Ofulue, 24, was arrested after leaving a Peterborough property in November 2017 and approaching an abandoned vehicle. When police tried to stop him he attempted to run away, dropping car keys and the phone which controlled the Ricki drugs line. Police found 13,370 worth of crack cocaine and heroin, scales and used latex gloves in the car. Ofulue later pleaded guilty.

Jodeci Ofulue, 24, also faced sentencing at Snaresbrook Crown Court / CPS

Rashayne Hunter, 20, who was convicted after a trial, often visited the Peterborough address before November 2. Sherif Isiaka, 19, helped organise reloads  fresh supplies of heroin to be delivered to a Huntingdon address. Samuel Ayowera, 19, was linked through his role topping up phone credit for one of the drug lines.

Rashayne Hunter, 20, was also convicted after a trial

A 17-year-old street dealer was found with 286 wraps of crack cocaine and heroin, worth around 3,000, in his pockets when police raided another home in Huntingdon last November.

Elaine Cousins, senior crown prosecutor, said: The leaders made attempts to keep the dealing at arms length. But the prosecution was able to link each of the gang members to the dealing.
M ore than a million calls to the police non-emergency number in London were abandoned in the past 12 months because people were waiting too long for an answer, figures have revealed.

The statistics obtained by Conservative London Assembly member Tony Arbour showed that a total of 1,257,858 101 calls were aborted in the 12 months to July this year.

The number is 50 per cent higher than the previous 12 months, raising fears that people trying to report low-level crimes are giving up in frustration. Callers waited an average of 15 minutes to speak to an operator, Her Majestys Inspectorate of Constabulary found.

Mr Arbour said: The police inspectorate said in November that the Met was too inefficient, but this surge in waiting times indicates that the situation is getting worse, not better. He added: So many potential crimes are failing to be reported through 101, meaning that Londons crime epidemic could be even worse than the statistics show.

The figures reveal that the Met received 2,648,188 calls to the 101 number in the 12 months to July, when 57 per cent of callers failed to complete their call. In April 2016 the figure was only 3.6 per cent.

Mr Arbour urged the Mayor Sadiq Khan to divert more cash into the police saying he had splurged millions on increasing the culture budget and bolstering bureaucrats at City Hall.
A teenage girl was raped in broad daylight in an east London park, police have said.

The Met's child abuse and sexual offences command is investigating the attack, which happened in West Ham Park on Tuesday.

The female victim was attacked by a man close to the entrance opposite Fairland Road, Scotland Yard said.

It happened at about 4pm. No arrests have yet been made.

West Ham Park, which dates back to the 16th century, is run by the City of London Corporation. It is the largest green space in Newham.
W estminster attacker Khalid Masood had ties to banned terror group Al-Muhajiroun and may have been a radical Islamic extremist as far back as 2004, the inquest heard today.

The 52-year-old killed four people on Westminster Bridge and then stabbed Pc Keith Palmer to death in the grounds of Parliament.

Masood was jailed in 2003 for stabbing a man in the nose and is believed to have converted to Islam while in prison. In 2009, he was named as a person of interest to the security services, and after the Westminster attack in March last year police found evidence of long-term interest in extremist Islam.

Gareth Patterson QC, representing relatives of the victims who died on Westminster Bridge, told the inquest today that Masood had moved to Crawley after his release from prison in 2004, and had also lived in Birmingham and Luton. In recent years those three places have been stronghold of the Islamist group Al-Muhijaroun, he said.

Masood was seen smiling and joking with staff as he checked into a hotel on March 18 / Met Police

Mr Patterson said the group, shortened to ALM, has been linked to dozens of terror attacks. The barrister pointed to evidence of Masood hanging around with ALM members again and again and again, as he questioned Met counter terrorism officer Detective Chief Inspector Dan Brown. There is a wealth of material from the early stage of his conversation from 2004 that he was a radical Islamic extremist, he said.

Attacker: Khalid Masood / Metropolitan Police

Mr Brown said Masood, who had worked as a teacher, saw it as his duty to convert others to Islam, but there was no evidence of him radicalising others. He added that although Masood had attended the same Crawley mosque as members of the al Qaeda cell behind the 2004 fertiliser bomb plot, the police had not found any concrete ties to them.
A female pedestrian is fighting for life after being hit by a lorry in east London, police said.

Officers raced to the scene, on Stamford Hill, in Hackney, at about 4.25am on Thursday morning.

The woman has been rushed to hospital, officers said, and remains in a critical condition.

Police said the driver of the lorry stopped at the scene.

A spokesman for the Metropolitan Police confirmed there have been no arrests.
A large group of Uber Eats drivers blocked a road in east London today as they staged a protest over pay.

Protesters said it was a spontaneous show of action against the company, as drivers claimed rates for every delivery had been reduced without it being agreed first.

An Uber Eats spokesman said the firm has made changes to its payment structure in London in response to feedback from couriers.

"As we transition to the new system, we're introducing minimum payment guarantees of 9-11 an hour," the spokesman said.

Scores of Uber Eats drivers stage a protest over pay outside the company's offices in Aldgate East, London / PA

One driver said on Thursday some are facing a cut from 4.60 a drop to 2.80, which he described as totally unacceptable.

He added: No one has organised this, its just a spontaneous show of anger at what is happening.

The riders protested outside company offices in Aldgate East before going to Trafalgar Square, where they said that police made at least one arrest.

Jacqui Sweeney, 27, from Grays, Essex, was one of the first cars to be blocked by the protest.

"They were holding up signs calling Uber 'fat cats' and through the traffic we could see more motorbikes coming to join them," she said.

"We were talking to some of the protesters and they said they weren't happy with the money they were being paid."

Customers in London were left disappointed this afternoon as some orders were severely delayed or did not turn up.

One wrote: "We orders McDonalds to be delivered by Uber Eats and it never turned up! Tried contacting Uber Eats - almost impossible!

"Our food order was picked up, but Uber driver did not turn up. Not good! Hungry and disappointed."

An Uber Eats spokesman said: "In response to feedback from couriers we've made some changes to our payment structure in London, which brings it into line with other cities.

"The changes will help increase earnings during busy mealtimes and, as we transition to the new system, we're introducing minimum payment guarantees of 9-11 an hour.

"Making improvements in response to courier feedback is a top priority, such as the sickness, injury, maternity and paternity protections we recently introduced. Our door is always open for individual couriers to speak to us about any issues they're having."

Uber Eats has met with hundreds of couriers over the last few months, saying most prefered higher earnings during busy mealtime hours, even if that meant lower earnings during less busy periods.
K halid Masood made handwritten notes where he called his terror attack on Westminster Bridge an exciting opportunity days before the atrocity, an inquest has heard.

The 52-year-old, who was shot dead after his rampage which claimed the lives of five victims, scrawled the lines on a map of the UK.

This was found in a road atlas in the rented 4x4 he used in the incident on March 22, 2017.

Masood wrote "previous examples" followed by "this life right time" and "all outcomes are good so go ahead", in what are believed to be some of his final thoughts ahead of the tragedy.

He drew a hand-drawn line to the word "sheikh".

The map which Masood scrawled on ahead of the attack / Met Police

Dominic Adamson, representing the widows of murdered Pc Keith Palmer, 48, and American tourist Keith Cochran, 54, said: "Under that word, chillingly, 'exciting opportunity.

Two days prior to the attack, Masood searched for the driving capabilities of the Hyundai Tucson he had rented to carry out his crimes.

He wrote "drive mode=sport mode" followed by "between seats" and "lock doors".

These messages ended with the line "hatred motivation".

Mr Adamson said: "The notes we see on this page seem to correlate with events happening in the days prior to the attack."

Counter-terror officer Detective Inspector Dan Brown agreed: "I think so. He was noting down his own thoughts."

But he added: "We know he was still looking for jobs at that time so it could be interpreted in a number of ways."

The inquest also heard he searched for Isis online along with other terrorist material.

As well as this detail being revealed to the Old Bailey, images of a knife believed to have been bought by Masood was also shown as was documentation linked to the hire of the vehicle on Westminster Bridge.

An image of Masood, believed to have been taken in Mecca, was also displayed.

A knife which is similar to the one used by Masood / Met Police

Also shown was a CCTV still of the hire car stationed outside St Thomas' hospital, where Masood parked for a brief time on the day of the attack.

The court also heard from his mother, Janet Ajao, who gave evidence on Thursday from underneath the public gallery in the Old Bailey's Court One.

Her application for anonymity was refused by coroner Mark Lucraft QC, along with his wife, Rohey Hydara, before the start of the hearing.

Police secure the area on the south side of Westminster Bridge after the attack in March, 2017 / AP

She said in a witness statement that Masood was an "angry person who would get a look in his eyes".

"I think he's always been a fiery, angry personality," she told the inquest.

Referring to a specific incident she said he became like the Incredible Hulk when he once exploded while eating a chicken dinner with family.

A CCTV image shows Masood parked briefly outside a hospital on the day of the attack / Met Police

Masood's mother claimed she had no idea what her son had in mind when he previously told her: "They'll say I'm a terrorist. I'm not."

"I know it sounds ridiculous but it didn't enter my head," she said.

"I'm utterly ashamed. I'm ashamed he's done this."

Gareth Patterson QC, representing some of the victims' families, said: "By your failure to do anything to follow up on that comment a golden opportunity was missed to prevent that attack."

Mrs Ajao said: "With hindsight, yes, I can see it would have made a difference... but at the time it didn't occur to me that this was going to happen."

She insisted that had she believed he was going to carry out a terror attack she would have dialled 999.

Addressing the victims' families after her evidence, she said: "Please understand I continue to be deeply saddened by the hurt that my son has caused and want to offer my deepest sympathies and condolences."

Masood was shot dead by police after stabbing Pc Keith Palmer, 48, to death and ploughing into Kurt Cochran, 54, Leslie Rhodes, 75, Aysha Frade, 44, and Andreea Cristea, 31, on Westminster Bridge in a rented car.
L ess than half of Conservatives believe Theresa May can clinch a good Brexit deal, an exclusive poll revealed today.

Just 45 per cent of the partys supporters have faith in the Prime Minister to get a good deal for the country, Ipsos MORI found.

It also revealed that public optimism on the economy has slumped to its lowest level this year, with six in 10 saying they think things will get worse in the year ahead.

The results could overshadow Mrs Mays attempts to boost Tory morale at the party conference in two weeks.

She will be relieved, though, that Tory supporters also doubt that ex-foreign secretary Boris Johnson could get a good deal if he was PM. Only 47 per cent think he could. Among the general public, an overwhelming majority believe neither of the main political party leaders can deliver a favourable Brexit. Just 28 per cent feel confident that either the PM or Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn could do it. Some 70 per cent think Mrs May will fail, and 67 per cent say Mr Corbyn would fail.

Voters remain almost evenly split between the main parties, the poll confirmed, with 39 per cent backing the Tories and 37 per cent choosing Labour. The Lib Dems were up three points to 13.
E mmanuel Macron today led EU leaders in tearing apart Theresa Mays Chequers Brexit blueprint.

In an astonishing attack, the French president also lashed out at Leave campaigners as liars.

He stressed that all EU leaders at a summit in Salzburg, Austria, had agreed that the Chequers proposals in their current state are not acceptable, especially on the economic side of it.

He also torpedoed Mrs Mays attempts to present Chequers as the only option apart from the UK crashing out of the EU with no deal.

Under pressure on Brexit: Theresa May at the European Union leaders informal summit in Salzburg (REUTERS) / Reuters

Speaking after a meeting of EU leaders without the Prime Minister, Mr Macron said: The Chequers plan cannot be take it or leave it.

What is the Chequers Deal?

In a swipe at leading Brexiteers, he added: Those who explain that we can easily live without Europe, that everything is going to be alright, and that its going to bring a lot of money home are liars.

Its even more true since they left the day after so as not to have to deal with it, he said, referring to top Brexit proponents.

Theresa May speaks to the media at the conclusion of the summit of leaders of the EU / Getty Images

Amid signs that some other EU leaders may be ready to break rank from Brussels negotiating stance, Mr Macron appealed for unity to defend the clear principles regarding the integrity of the single market.

Theresa May stands by Brexit plan in Salzburg

The French leader said the Chequers plan, which Mrs May outlined to EU leaders late last night at a Wiener Schnitzel dinner, was a good and brave step by the prime minister but he was lacerating in condemning its contents and demanding more concessions.

European Council president Donald Tusk made clear that the EU would not accept the key plank of the Chequers proposal which is for the UK to continue with close ties in the trade on goods but not services.

Donald Tusk: No compromise on economic co-operation for Brexit

He said: Everybody shared the view that while there are positive elements in the Chequers proposal, the suggested framework for economic co-operation will not work, not least because it is undermining the single market.

He also demanded tough, clear and precise guarantees to resolve the dispute over the post-Brexit border between Ireland and Northern Ireland.

At a press conference afterwards Mrs May appeared to be angry and visibly shaking after the scathing EU response which led leading Brexiteer Jacob Rees-Mogg to tweet: Chequers goes pop #ChuckChequers.

The Prime Minister insisted that her Brexit plan is the only serious and credible proposal on the table, challenging EU leaders to come up with rival plans.

She said: Im negotiating and Im negotiating hard in the interest of the British people, and negotiating to deliver on what the British people voted for in the referendum.

Prime Minister Theresa May and French President Emmanuel Macron / REUTERS

She had a frank meeting with Mr Tusk and the Government will come up with fresh proposals to break the deadlock over the Northern Ireland border backstop arrangement being demanded by EU.

President of the European Commission Jean-Claude Juncker greets Britain's Prime Minister Theresa May prior to the start of a plenary ession at the Mozarteum University during the EU Informal Summit of Heads of State or Government in Salzburg / AFP/Getty Images

However, German Chancellor Angela Merkel stressed substantial progress was needed on the UKs withdrawal agreement by the next European Council meeting in October, in order to pave the way for it to be finalised at a special summit in November.

No-one can belong to the single market if they are not part of the single market, she said.

With a growing revolt at Westminster over the Chequers plan, after loyalist former minister Sir Mike Penning became the latest MP to lambast it, Mrs May appearing to be walking an increasingly precarious political tightrope.

Emmanuel Macron puts heat on Theresa May to give more ground on EU deal

Dutch premier Mark Rutte, who has been more positive towards the UK, stressed that the Brexit negotiations were a balancing act.

He added: My expectation is that we will not come to an agreement today but that we will prepare a landing ground for a Brexit agreement towards October/November  its still possible to get a good deal for both the EU and the UK.

The nationalist prime minister of Hungary, Viktor Orban, claimed there was a shift taking place towards a softer negotiating stance from the EU.

However, Irish premier Leo Varadkar piled pressure on Mrs May by stating that Dublin was preparing for the UK crashing out of the EU with no deal.

He described a meeting with her this morning as very good but said reaching agreement on the Irish border was difficult to do, adding: Time is running short.

With just six months to go before Britain quits the EU, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development warned that the UK will be stuck in the slow lane even if Mrs May gets a soft Brexit deal minimising trade disruption. The OECD also fears that if the UK crashes out of the EU with no deal, it risks wiping up to three per cent, around 60 billion, off GDP over two years in a worst case scenario.

The OECD cut its forecast for UK economic growth by 0.1 per cent for both this year and 2019 to just 1.3 per cent and 1.2 per cent respectively.

This would place the UK next year joint second from bottom with Japan among the G7 group of major economies, with only crisis-hit Italy doing worse at 1.1 per cent.
D emocratic Unionist MP Ian Paisley Jr has held onto his seat after Westminster's first ever recall petition fell short of the 10% of electorate signatures required to force a by-election.

The MP faced uncertainty as he waited to find out whether or not his constituents had chosen to unseat him.

Northern Ireland's Chief Electoral Officer Virginia McVea has announced on Thursday morning that Mr Paisleys seat was safe, after votes were counted.

A total of 7,099 constituents had signed a recall petition for Mr Paisley.

If 10% of his North Antrim electorate had signed the recall petition, 7,543 voters, Mr Paisley would have automatically lost his seat and a by-election would have been called.

Petition boxes are collected from Seven Towers leisure centre in Ballymena on the final day of a recall petition / PA

Three centres were opened in North Antrim for the last six weeks to give voters the opportunity to sign the petition. Constituents were also able to put their name to the petition via post.

The petition device, created following the Westminster expenses scandal, was triggered after Mr Paisley was banned from the House of Commons for 30 sitting days for failing to declare two 2013 family holidays paid for by the Sri Lankan government.

A parliamentary watchdog found in August that a year after the luxury holidays, Mr Paisley lobbied then Prime Minister David Cameron not to support a UN probe into alleged Sri Lankan human rights abuses.

Counting at the Electoral Office headquarters in Belfast began shortly after midnight.

Ms McVea communicated the outcome to Speaker John Bercow's office before announcing it in Belfast.

"The petition has not been successful," she said. The percentage of the electorate that signed the petition was 9.4%.

Mr Paisley, son of late DUP founder Rev Ian Paisley, is currently suspended from his party pending its own internal investigation into his conduct.

His Commons ban has left current Prime Minister Theresa May shorn of one of her 10 DUP MP confidence and supply allies during a period that could witness several crucial Brexit votes.

It has also given the DUP another headache at a time when the party is under intense scrutiny at public inquiry hearings in Northern Ireland examining its handling of the botched green energy scheme that brought down Stormont powersharing.

Mr Paisley did not attend the announcement. He was informed of the result by text message.

He thanked the voters in North Antrim for their "unwavering support" later that night.

Reacting to the outcome Mr Paisley said: "In July I apologised for a mistake made almost six years ago.

"The electorate was asked to pass judgment. 90.6% have accepted my apology.

"The electorate has clearly spoken.

"I would like to thank my true friends, family, the electorate who have stood by me with unwavering support. Hallelujah."


S ecurity chiefs today rebuked one of Jeremy Corbyns closest aides over his suggestion that the deep state is working to block a Labour government.

Security minister Ben Wallace dismissed the claim by Unite official Andrew Murray, saying British intelligence agencies would not waste their time on him.

Mr Murray suggested in an article that the deep state was behind newspaper reports that he had been barred from the Ukraine for three years over his alleged links to Vladimir Putins propaganda network.

He also questioned why his year-old application for a pass to enter Parliament had been met by a stoney silence.

But Mr Wallace tweeted: Oh dear. Sorry to pop the vanity of your own self importance Andrew but our spooks dont waste their time pumping out stories to the Mail on Sunday about someone no one has ever heard of. They are too busy trying to stop terrorism & Russian assassination attempts.

Mr Murray is chief of staff to Unite union boss Len McCluskey and was the founding chairman of the Stop the War Coalition, from 2001 and 2011.

In a New Statesman article yesterday headlined Is the deep state trying to undermine Corbyn? he denied any links to the Russian regime and wrote: Someone else is doing the hard work  possibly someone being paid by the taxpayer. I doubt if their job description is preventing the election of a Corbyn government, but who knows?

We are often told that the days of secret state political chicanery are long past and we must hope so. But sometimes you have to wonder  this curiously timed episode seems less rooted in a Kiev security scare than in a political stunt closer to home.
B arclays customers have been unable to log in to their accounts and get through on the phone after the bank suffered a major outage.

The issues have been affecting the Barclays website and telephone banking services on Thursday, though the bank said its mobile phone app was working as normal.

A spokeswoman for Barclays said they were working to fix the problems.

"We're currently experiencing some technical problems - customers are still able to use Barclays mobile banking app to check their balance, make and receive payments, she said.

Some of Barclays customers have vented their frustration on Twitter.

One user said: "It is driving me mad at the moment."

Another tweeted: "Their phone lines are down and online banking not working... thanks guys!"

The banking giants UK customers were greeted with the message: "5 - Sorry - Barclays Online Banking is currently unavailable".

Barclays has been responding to concerned customers on social media  acknowledging the issue and saying it hopes its systems will be up and running again soon.

A member of the banks social media team reassured one customer following a complaint, writing: Hey Zebre, we're experiencing some issues at the moment :( We're hoping to be back up and running very soon so that you can pay your rent.

A statement published to Twitter advised customers to use the mobile app to access their accounts.

"If you're unable to access Online Banking, Telephone Banking, or use some features in our app, we're sorry," the statement read.

"You can still make payments and check your balance in our Mobile Banking app as normal. We're looking into the problem now, and we'll update you here as soon as possible. Thanks for bearing with us."

Barclays website also noted issues with online baking, telephone banking and branches.

A status update for its telephone banking service read: "We're sorry, you won't be able to speak to us right now  we're working to fix a problem with this service."
C redit reference agency Equifax has been fined 500,000 for failing to protect peoples' personal information during a 2017 cyber attack.

Up to 15 million Brits had their personal information compromised in the attack but the company said the breach would not have put consumers at risk.

However, an investigation by the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) found that the company's UK arm failed to take appropriate steps to ensure US parent Equifax Inc, which was processing data on its behalf, was protecting the information.

What happened in 2017?

Between May 13 and July 30 2017, 146 million customers across the world were affected by a data breach.

Customers' personal information, such as names, dates of birth, addresses, passwords, driving licence and financial details, were lost or compromised by the attack.

Around 14.5 million Brits had their records - dating from 2011 to 2016 - breached, but the company said this information did not put consumers at risk.

The attack wasn't disclosed until September 7.

Customers' driving licences were affected by the breach / PA/John Stillwell

Why was Equifax fined?

The probe revealed multiple failures at the credit reference agency, which led to personal information being retained for longer than necessary and vulnerable to unauthorised access.

It also found measures that should have been in place to manage the information were inadequate, while investigators found significant problems with data retention, IT system patching and audit procedures.

The US Department of Homeland Security had warned Equifax Inc about a "critical vulnerability" as far back as March 2017.

The ICO's investigation was carried out in parallel with the Financial Conduct Authority under the Data Protection Act 1998 and the fine is the maximum allowed under the previous legislation.

Information commissioner Elizabeth Denham said: "Equifax Ltd received the fine because of the number of victims, the type of data at risk and because it has no excuse for failing to adhere to its own policies and controls as well as the law."

"Equifax Ltd showed a serious disregard for their customers and the personal information entrusted to them, and that led to today's fine."

An Equifax spokesman said: "We are disappointed in the findings and the penalty.

"Equifax has successfully implemented a broad range of measures to prevent the recurrence of such criminal incidents and it acknowledges the strengthened procedures which are now in effect.
C redit reference agency Equifax has been fined 500,000 for failing to protect the personal information of up to 15 million Brits during a 2017 cyber attack.

An investigation by the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) found that company's UK arm failed to take appropriate steps to ensure US parent Equifax Inc, which was processing data on its behalf, was protecting the information.

The ICO's probe, carried out in parallel with the Financial Conduct Authority, revealed multiple failures at the credit reference agency, which led to personal information being retained for longer than necessary and vulnerable to unauthorised access.

It found that measures that should have been in place to manage the personal information were inadequate and ineffective, while investigators found significant problems with data retention, IT system patching and audit procedures.

The investigation also found that the US Department of Homeland Security had warned Equifax Inc about a "critical vulnerability" as far back as March 2017.

The personal information lost or compromised during the incident ranged from names and dates of birth to addresses, passwords, driving licence and financial details.

The hack happened last year (Shutterstock ) / Shutterstock

The incident, which happened between May 13 and July 30, 2017 in the US affected 146 million customers globally.

The ICO's investigation was carried out under the Data Protection Act 1998 rather than the current General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), and the fine is the maximum allowed under the previous legislation.

Information commissioner Elizabeth Denham said: "The loss of personal information, particularly where there is the potential for financial fraud, is not only upsetting to customers, it undermines consumer trust in digital commerce.

"This is compounded when the company is a global firm whose business relies on personal data.

"We are determined to look after UK citizens' information wherever it is held. Equifax Ltd has received the highest fine possible under the 1998 legislation because of the number of victims, the type of data at risk and because it has no excuse for failing to adhere to its own policies and controls as well as the law."

She added: "Many of the people affected would not have been aware the company held their data; learning about the cyber attack would have been unexpected and is likely to have caused particular distress.

"Multinational data companies like Equifax must understand what personal data they hold and take robust steps to protect it. Their boards need to ensure that internal controls and systems work effectively to meet legal requirements and customers' expectations.

"Equifax Ltd showed a serious disregard for their customers and the personal information entrusted to them, and that led to today's fine."

An Equifax spokesman said: "Equifax has co-operated fully with the ICO throughout its investigation, and we are disappointed in the findings and the penalty.

"As the ICO makes clear in its report, Equifax has successfully implemented a broad range of measures to prevent the recurrence of such criminal incidents and it acknowledges the strengthened procedures which are now in effect.

"The criminal cyberattack against our US parent company last year was a pivotal moment for our company. We apologise again to any consumers who were put at risk.

"Data security and combating criminal digital activity is an ongoing battle for all organisations that requires continued innovation and attention. We have acted and continue to act to make things right for consumers. They will always be our priority."
H eavy rain and strong winds are set to batter parts of the British Isles again after Storm Ali wreaked havoc.

A new weather system moving in from the Atlantic has prompted a warning of possible flooding and further travel disruption after Storm Ali swept across Britain and Ireland.

Two people died after the storm hit the UK and Ireland on Wednesday.

A woman died after her caravan was blown off a cliff during high winds and has been named locally as Elvira Ferraii.

A tree which fell on to a car in Belfast / PA

A man also died after being hit by a falling tree as he worked in a country park in County Armagh.

While Northern Ireland and Scotland bore the brunt of the blustery conditions, the latest weather front is expected to bring downpours and gusts - albeit not as strong - to Wales and much of England on Thursday.

Storm Ali - In Pictures 1 /21 Storm Ali - In Pictures Police clear a tree as Storm Ali hits land on September 19, 2018 in Ardrossan, Scotland. Severe gales which are set to get up to as much as 80mph are causing road, rail and ferry travel disruption as Storm Ali hits parts of Scotland. Getty Images Workmen deal with a fallen tree on Finglass Road by Glasnevin Cemetary, Dublin as Storm Ali has made itself felt across the Republic of Ireland PA The scene in Claddaghduff, near Clifden in Co Galway where a woman died after her caravan was blown off a cliff in Storm Ali which has brought gusts of 91mph. PA An ambulance which crashed into a fallen tree in Newcastle as the Met Office has updated its amber wind warning for Storm Ali PA Strong winds blow sand across the seafront at Troon Beach in Ayrshire as Storm Ali has begun to make itself felt across Northern Ireland and parts of Scotland and England with 60mph winds. PA Wind surfers take advantage of Storm Ali hits land at Barassie beach on in Troon,Scotland. Getty Images People walk along Tynemouth Beach on the North East Coast, as the Met Office has updated its amber wind warning for Storm Al PA Photo taken with permission from the twitter feed of @cuthbert_church of a blown over tree in the ground of St Cuthbert's Church, Edinburgh as Storm Ali has hit the region. PA A tree which has fallen onto a car in Belfast as Storm Ali has begun to make itself felt across Northern Ireland and parts of Scotland and England with 91mph winds. PA A plane lands in strong cross winds at Leeds Bradford Airport as Storm Ali hits the UK. PA A plane lands in torrential rain at Leeds Bradford Airport as Storm Ali hits the UK. PA A fallen tree on part of the A75 in Dumfries and Galloway, near the Collin bypass, which blocked the road for about an hour on Wednesday, as Storm Ali causes major traffic disruption in Scotland. PA A member of the public walks her dogs on a beach ahead of Storm Ali on September 19, 2018 in Saltcoats, Scotland Getty Images Workmen deal with a fallen tree on Finglass Road by Glasnevin Cemetary, Dublin as Storm Ali has made itself felt across the Republic of Ireland. PA Strong winds blow sand across the seafront at Troon Beach in Ayrshire as Storm Ali has begun to make itself felt across Northern Ireland and parts of Scotland and England with 60mph winds. PA Members of the public struggle in the wind as Storm Ali hits land in Blackpool, England. Getty Images Members of the public struggle in the wind as Storm Ali hits land on September 19, 2018 in Blackpool, England Getty Images A man looks at debris at the scene in Claddaghduff, near Clifden in Co Galway where a woman died after her caravan was blown off a cliff in Storm Ali which has brought gusts of 91mph. PA Sand is blown in the wind as Storm Ali hits land on September 19, 2018 in Saltcoats, Scotland. Getty Images A man walks along Troon beach in Ayrshire as Storm Ali has begun to make itself felt across Northern Ireland and parts of Scotland and England with 60mph winds. PA Workmen deal with a fallen tree on Finglass Road by Glasnevin Cemetary, Dublin as Storm Ali has made itself felt across the Republic of Ireland. PA

The Met Office has warned of a "chance" of injuries and danger to life as high winds threaten to blow tiles from roofs and fell trees.

A yellow weather warning for rain across Wales and the north of England is in place for most of Thursday, while a warning for winds of up to 65mph kicks in from 6pm across much of the rest of England.

Up to 100mm of rain is forecast to fall across high ground in Wales and Cumbria.

Met Office meterologist Laura Paterson said: "Through Thursday another area of low pressure will develop and approach the UK from the south west, bringing rain and a second spell of strong winds later."

In London, forecasters have said Thursday is likely to be largely dry, but turning windy.

A dog walker in Troon in Ayrshire / PA

The Met Office said: A dry, and fine start, although one or two outbreaks of rain are possible across northern parts during the morning.

Some warm bright spells are likely through the day, however winds will also gradually strengthen, especially along English Channel coasts. Maximum temperature 22C.
F ootage shows an EasyJet pilot battling strong winds to safely land a plane as Storm Ali swept the UK with heavy rain and winds of up to 102mph.

The storm created hellish flying conditions for captains across the country as fierce crosswinds disrupted flights when Ali battered Britain on Wednesday.

One plane made a perfect landing at Manchester Airport despite the shaky conditions, rocking from side to side as it touched down.

The clip, published by Aviation Up Close, shows the EasyJet pilot bring the passengers on board to safety after what must have felt like a nail-biting descent.

The pilot brought the passengers on board to safety after a bumpy landing at Manchester Airport / YouTube

It emerged after distraught passengers on board a TUI flight vomited and cried during violent turbulence after Storm Ali hit a plane travelling to Glasgow from Ibiza.

Two people were killed when the brutal storm hit on Wednesday and caused travel disruption and damage to buildings.

A Swiss holidaymaker in her 50s was killed after the caravan she was in blew off a rocky incline in County Galway while a man in his 20s died after he was hit by a falling tree in County Galway.

Woman dead after caravan blown off cliff as Storm Ali strikes with 91mph gusts

Winds peaked at 102.2mph on the Tay Road Bridge in Dundee and the Met Office warned there was a danger to life.

Around 75 flights were cancelled from Dublin Airport while 10 flights were diverted due to strong winds, while around 20,000 homes and businesses, mainly in the south-west of Ireland, were left without power.

Travel disruption, power cuts and flying debris had been predicted as Storm Ali made landfall, with severe gales of up to 75mph and heavy rain forecast for a large part of the UK.
T esco has unveiled the first branches of its new cut price chain Jack's.

The no-frills stores will sell mostly British-made food and drink at 'the lowest possible prices'.

Named after Tesco's founder Jack Cohen, the chain will stock groceries and toiletries under the Jack label and a number of well-known brands.

But what is Jack's and why is Tesco launching it?

Goods go on sale at Tesco's Jack's store in Chatteris, Cambridgeshire / PA

Jack's is Tesco's take on a discount store format designed to rival German discounters Aldi and Lidl.

Around 1,800 products will be sold under the Jack's label, along with a small selection of well-known food brands, such as Marmite and Cadbury chocolate.

A range of general merchandise will be stocked under a "when it's gone, it's gone" basis.

Hundreds queue as Tesco opens first Jack's discount store

Tesco chief executive Dave Lewis said: "It's about being the cheapest in town. No other retail offer in the UK matches that proposition."

The brand is being seen as a challenger to Aldi and Lidl, which have eaten into the market share of Britain's so-called 'big four' supermarkets.

The two German-owned retailers have nearly doubled their market share of the grocery sector to 13.1 per cent since 2013, industry figures revealed on Tuesday.

Tesco chief executive Dave Lewis, at the new Jack's store in Chatteris, Cambridgeshire / PA

Tesco is still the number-one player with a 27.4 per cent market share  but this would change if a 14 billion merger between Sainsburys and Asda gets the go-ahead from the Competition and Markets Authority.

Jack's stores will have lower operating costs than Tesco outlets due to their smaller range of products, simplified design and 'no added extras'.

Mr Lewis said that thanks to the buying power of Tesco, Jack's should be able to undercut the discounters on prices.

They will carry 2,600 lines compared to tens of thousands in Tesco.

Will my town get a Jack's?

Over the next six months between 10 to 15 Jacks stores will be opened  the first two on Thursday in Chatteris, Cambridgeshire and Immingham, Lincolnshire.

Some will be new stores next to existing Tesco stores and a small number converted Tesco shops.

Tesco unveils new Jack's concept, at their site in Chatteris, Cambridgeshire / PA

While Tesco is keeping tight-lipped about exact of other stores, Tesco is recruiting for roles in a Jack's in St Helens, Merseyside, Middlewich in Cheshire, Edge Hill in Liverpool, Rubery, Worcestershire and Castle Bromwich in Solihull.

In the past the chain has also recruited in Wandsworth, south London.

How cheap is Jack's?

A 500g packet of 2 per cent turkey breast mince costs 3.35.

Four pints of semi-skimmed milk will set you back 1.09.

A six pack of Cox apple will cost 77p.

A tin of baked beans will be 29p, while a broccoli costs 48p.
R AF jets were today scrambled to the North Sea where they intercepted two Russian planes approaching UK airspace, the Ministry of Defence has said.

Military jets from the UK and France were sent to monitor the Russian Blackjacks long-range bombers on Thursday.

They were not talking to air traffic control, making them a hazard to all other aviation, a statement from the MoD said.

The Russian jets were monitored by the RAF and Nato partners as they passed through international airspace before being intercepted over the North Sea.

Subsequently, our fighters escorted the Russian Blackjacks north, out of the UKs area of interest. At no time did the Russian bombers enter UK sovereign airspace, the statement said.

Colonel Cyrille Duvivier, a spokesman for the French Air Force, told Reuters one or several Russian planes were detected and that the actions were not hostile.

"The usual response mechanisms were triggered: Rafale fighters took off in the late morning from the base of Saint-Dizier with a refuelling plane and positioned themselves for possible intervention," Duvivier said.

Defence Secretary Gavin Williams said the activity today is another reminder of the very serious military challenge that Russia poses us today.

"We will not hesitate to continually defend our skies from acts of aggression.
W orkers from JD Wetherspoon, McDonald's and TGI Fridays will coordinate strikes next month in a joint push for better wages.

The Bakers, Food and Allied Workers Union (BFAWU) said the action, to be staged by some staff from two Wetherspoons pubs, two TGI Friday's and four McDonald's restaurants, is set for October 4.

Chris Heppell, a 29-year-old employee at Wetherspoon's Post and Telegraph pub in Brighton, told the Huffington Post that workers face "physically and emotionally exhausting" conditions.

He said staff get "very little" compared with the money made by Wetherspoon, which posted a pre-tax profit of 54.3 million in the second half of 2017, "from our hard work".

Pay for bar staff over 18 starts at 8.05 an hour with kitchen staff receiving 8.25 an hour. After the completion of a probation period, the pay goes up by 10p.

Striking workers are asking for union recognition and a pay rise to 10 an hour, which they hope would lift them out of subsistence living conditions.

The strike is part of an international day of action by fast-food workers and wider efforts to increase union membership, a BFAWU spokesperson told the BBC.

Caroline Lucas, MP for the Green Party for Brighton Pavilion, wrote on Twitter: "All staff campaigning for the basic dignity of a living wage have my full support.

"Ive heard of constituents having to live in hostels, despite working incredibly long hours.

"It's time for big companies to reward employees for the massive contribution they make to profits."

The BFAWU, said in a statement posted on Facebook: "Work should enable people to live not just exist. Our members are showing their strength and determination to build a fairer society."

Wetherspoon spokesman Eddie Gershon said in a statement that the firm has been reviewing pay.

In the companys results announcement on Friday September 14, it announced that it had increased pay rates in the last financial year (to July 2018) by 20 million and would be increasing rates this year by 27 million, he said.

It also decided several months ago, that management will work a 40 hour week instead of the current 42.5 hours from April 2019.

We are also moving to the same rate for 18-21s as we already have for over 21s from November 5 2018. In addition we are putting up the rate of pay.

He added that pub employees had benefited from bonuses and other initiatives in recent years.

A spokesman for McDonald's said the strike action was not widespread.

He said: We are disappointed to confirm that we have been notified of industrial action in four of our restaurants - Cambridge, Crayford, Watford and Brixton on 4 October.

Any suggestion that this activity is widespread and growing is not accurate  we understand that fewer of our employees are involved in potential industrial action than last May, with the support from our people of the union diminishing.

The numbers also represent an extremely small proportion of our workforce - in Brixton, for example, just two of our employees have been balloted for strike out of a workforce of more than 100.
T he university professor who has accused Donald Trumps Supreme Court nominee of sexual assault says she needs more time to decide if she will testify in Congress  as his fate continues to hang in the balance.

Christine Blasey Ford says she has faced death threats and vicious harassment after making her allegation against Brett Kavanaugh . Republicans on the Senate judiciary committee have a set a deadline of 10am tomorrow for her to confirm whether she will appear on Monday  but a lawyer for Professor Ford said she should not be rushed.

Lisa Banks said: The rush to a hearing is unnecessary, and contrary to the committee discovering the truth. Dr Ford was reluctantly thrust into the public spotlight only two days ago. Fairness and respect for her situation dictate she should have time to deal with this.

She said plans to call just Mr Kavanaugh and her client as witnesses was not a fair or good-faith investigation and multiple witnesses should be called.

Donald Trump, pictured on Wednesday, nominated Kavanaugh for the Supreme Court / Alex Wong/Getty Images

Professor Ford claims the judge assaulted her at a house party in 1982 when she was 15 and he was 17. He calls the allegation completely false.

Now a psychology lecturer in California, she says she has had to leave her home after death threats. She wants the FBI to investigate the allegation before a hearing takes place.

But Mr Trump and Senate Republicans insist an FBI renewal of background checks on Mr Kavanaugh will not happen, saying an inquiry by committee staff is enough.

They are eager to push through the conservative judges nomination before Novembers mid-term elections.

Yesterday committee chairman Chuck Grassley wrote to Professor Fords lawyer giving her until 10am tomorrow to submit a biography and statement if she intends to testify on Monday.

Professor Ford, 51, claimed that at the party Mr Kavanaugh, now 53, pinned her to a bed and put his hand over her mouth to stop her screaming, before she broke free. Mr Trump stood by him yes-terday, saying it was very hard for me to imagine anything happened, adding: I want to see what she has to say.

He spoke after visiting the Carolinas where 37 people were killed when Hurricane Florence struck. He faced ridicule on social media for describing the storm as one of the wettest weve ever seen from the standpoint of water.

Visiting storm victims in New Bern, North Carolina, the president also made bizarre remarks to residents.
E mmanuel Macron today led European Union moves to force Theresa May to make fresh concessions on Brexit.

Amid signs that some other EU leaders could be ready to break away from Brussels negotiating stance, the French president appealed for unity to defend the clear principles regarding the integrity of the single market.

His call appeared to deal a fresh blow to Mrs Mays Chequers Brexit blueprint, which would keep close trading ties on goods but not services.

A senior French government official stated that the EU and UK had so far failed to find a landing point for a future trade deal.

A group photo at the EU Informal Summit of Heads of State or Government in Salzburg / AFP/Getty Images

Donald Tusk, president of the European Council, used Instagram to repeat warnings that Britain cannot cherry-pick from EU trade arrangements to get a favourable Brexit deal. Posting a picture of himself helping Mrs May to a cupcake at a buffet at the Salzburg EU summit, Mr Tusk commented: A piece of cake, perhaps? Sorry, no cherries.

Mr Macron also stood firm on the EUs demands over a backstop arrangement for the border between Ireland and Northern Ireland, which the Government and the Democratic Unionist Party have said is unacceptable.

Jean-Claude Juncker greets Theresa May in Salzburg / AFP/Getty Images

With a growing revolt at Westminster over the Chequers plan, after loyalist former minister Sir Mike Penning became the latest MP to lambast it, the Prime Minister appeared to be walking an increasingly precarious political tightrope. Dutch premier Mark Rutte, who has been more positive towards the UK, said the Brexit negotiations were a balancing act. Mr Macron dug in just hours after Mrs May sought to persuade EU leaders to shift position at a late-night dinner. The French president welcomed Mrs Mays proposals, adding: We have progress, but also laid out clear cross-Channel dividing lines.

We have very clear principles regarding the integrity of the single market and regarding precisely the Irish border, he said as he arrived for the second day of the informal talks.

We need a UK proposal precisely preserving this backstop in the framework of a withdrawal agreement. France, Germany and Brussels are believed to be taking the least flexible approach to breaking the Brexit deadlock, amid signs of splits emerging with other European capitals. Mr Rutte said: My expectation is that we will not come to an agreement today but that we will prepare a landing ground for a Brexit agreement towards October/November  its still possible to get a good deal for both the EU and the UK.

Austrian prime minister Sebastian Kurz said: Both sides are aware that they will only reach a solution if they move towards each other. The nationalist prime minister of Hungary, Viktor Orban, claimed there was a shift towards a softer negotiating stance from the EU. However, Irish premier Leo Varadkar piled pressure on Mrs May by stating that Dublin was preparing for no deal. He said reaching agreement on the Irish border was difficult to do and: Time is running short.
D onald Trump has been mocked after saying Hurricane Florence was one of the wettest the US has ever seen from the standpoint of water.

The president tweeted a thank you message to emergency services and authorities after Florence ravaged the Carolinas.

At least 36 people were killed by the storm since it landed on Friday.

In his message, Mr Trump said the hurricane was certainly not good.

He said: I just want to thank all the incredible men and women who have done such a great job in helping with Florence.

This is a tough hurricane, one of the wettest we have ever seen from the standpoint of water. Rarely have we had an experience like it and it is certainly not good.

Storm Florence: Residents flooded in North Carolina

But the people of North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia  all of the areas affected  youve been incredible. Theres been a loss of life and may God be with them and their families.

Its tough to understand but this has been a really difficult period of time for a lot of people.

Flooding in North Carolina after Florence hit / AFP/Getty Images

The president was mercilessly mocked for his standpoint of the water remark.

And Graham Taylor remarked: Is this one of the worst Presidents of the United States the world has ever seen, or the worst? From the standpoint of Presidents.

One user, @steelderic, said: Jesus Christ I lost a couple million brain cells listening to this.

Andrew Damito said: George Washington inaugural address: Between genuine maxims of an honest and magnanimous policy, and the solid rewards of public prosperity and felicity.

Donald Trump: Wettest we have ever seen from a water standpoint.

Another user, @bornmiserable, mocked: Swimming pools are tremendously wet from the standpoint of water, you can get very wet inside a swimming pool. WET!"

Tim Swain said: One of the wettest weve seen, from the standpoint of water. Thats the take you kept for the final version?

It came as Mr Trump warned South Carolina water is coming your way in the aftermath of Florence.

He made the comments while visiting Conway and speaking to people who were preparing to evacuate as rivers rose.

Over the next couple of days, it's going to get rough in South Carolina. Whatever you need from Washington, we are there

"Now it looks nice, but it's really the calm before the storm.
D onald Trump told Spain to deal with the Mediterranean migration crisis by building a giant wall across the Sahara desert, it has been revealed.

Foreign minister Josep Borrell said the US president shrugged off concerns about building a wall through 3,000 miles of desert, reportedly saying: The Sahara border cant be bigger than our border with Mexico.

Mr Borrell, a former president of the European Parliament, revealed details of the conversation at an event in Madrid this week which has been widely reported in the Spanish media.

The conversation is believed to have taken place in June when Mr Borrell travelled to Washington for the visit of Spains King and Queen, although he did not confirm this.

The Sahara desert stretches 3000 miles from east to west / AFP/Getty Images

Spain has found itself bearing the brunt of Europes refugee crisis, due to its close proximity with North Africa and the existence of its two enclaves on the Moroccan coast.

One of Mr Trumps flagship policies while campaigning for the 2016 presidential election was to build a wall along the USs southern border with Mexico to prevent illegal migration  with Mexico having to pay for it.

But progress has been hit by disputes over funding  Mexico has refused to pay for it  and opposition from Democrats in Congress.

Donald Trump tours Mexico border wall prototypes 1 /9 Donald Trump tours Mexico border wall prototypes REUTERS Getty Images AFP/Getty Images AFP/Getty Images REUTERS REUTERS REUTERS AFP/Getty Images REUTERS

The length of the US-Mexico border is less than 2,000 miles, while the Sahara runs for around 3,000 miles from east to west.
A t least 44 people are dead after a ferry capsized on Lake Victoria in Tanzania, officials said.

Government officials feared the final death toll could be more than 200, a senior local official told Reuters.

John Mongella, the commissioner of Mwanza, said 37 people have been rescued after the MV Nyerere ferry sank on Thursday.

"I cannot speculate" how many people had been on board, he said. "Right now our focus is on rescue."

Such ferries often carry hundreds of people and are overcrowded.

The Tanzania Electrical, Mechanical and Electronics Services Agency, in charge of servicing the vessels, urged patience in a statement as rescue efforts began.

The ferry was traveling between Ukara and Bugolora and capsized near the area of Mwanza, the agency said.

Rescue efforts have been suspended until daybreak on Friday.

Accidents are often reported on the large freshwater lake surrounded by Tanzania, Kenya and Uganda.

Some of the deadliest have occurred in Tanzania, where passenger boats are often said to be old and in poor condition.

In 1996, a ferry disaster on Lake Victoria in the same region killed at least 500 people.
F ormer UFC light heavyweight champion Jon Jones will be eligible to return to competition in October after completing a 15-month ban for a doping violation.

The MMA fighter tested positive for a banned substance in July 2017 and it has now been ruled he must see out the backdated ban to the day he was examined.

It was decided that he had taken steps to avoid consuming supplements which had any such ingredients and he had absolutely no intention of taking them.

Mr Jones had faced a potential four-year-ban but the United States Anti-Doping Agency ruling stated this was reduced by 30 months for his substantial assistance.

It was then decided to cut this by another three months.

The fighter could have been banned for four years / AP

The arbitrator in their ruling wrote: He [Mr Jones] has been humbled and humiliated by the experience but has learned from his misfortune. He needs the opportunity to rebuild his dignity and self-esteem.

The reduction in eligibility that will give him that kick start whilst still recognising his fault, is to reduce the sanction to a level that permits him to compete.

It determined 15-months was appropriate in consideration of all relevant circumstances.

The substance, which was discovered through a urine sample ahead of UFC 214, was described in the ruling as an M3 metabolite of a prohibited anabolic agent.

Mr Jones, whose ban will end on October 28, said: Comeback season begins now.

The two-time light heavyweight champion wrote on Instagram: Its difficult to express myself at this moment but I can definitely say my heart is filled with gratitude and appreciation. I want to thank all of you who have stood by me during the toughest stretch of my life.

It has meant the world to me and always will. But now is the time to shift the focus front and centre to the road ahead. Greatness is what Im chasing and the path to reclaiming my throne is now officially open.

The ruling means technically the 31-year-old, who won the light heavyweight crown, would be able to return for UFC 230 in New York on November 3, which is without a headliner as yet.

Though this appears to have been ruled out by the companys owner, Dana White.

In a statement, which was shared by a reporter for ESPN, Mr White said: The arbitrator found that Jones never intentionally or knowingly rook steroids and the result of the positive test was the result of a contaminated substance.

The science completely supports that finding.

The science doesnt lie so I look forward to getting him back early next year.

The next UFC main event will be UFC 229, which is will be at 3am on October 7 UK time, and sees the return of 'The Notorious' Conor McGregor to the sport.
A luxury fashion brand has been accused of glorifying poverty for selling 428 trainers designed to look worn out.

A leading anti-poverty charity branded the Golden Goose brand awful for the design which features a piece of tape purportedly holding the shoe in place.

The product description for the trainers reads: Crumply, hold-it-all-together tape details a distressed leather sneaker in a retro low profile with a signature sidewall star and a grungy rubber cupsole.

Critics accused Golden Goose of glorifying poverty and said that the design was peak capitalism.

The shoes have been priced at 428 / Nordstrom

And Val Huxley, founder of the People against Poverty charity, told the Standard: We work day in, day out, with poverty. Families are just existing. Its shocking that a fashion company can do a play on this and this its OK. They are awful.

I go to Romania on our projects and we tell our people to only give away clothes or shoes they themselves would wear, or give their own children to wear. If someone had picked these sneakers, they would have gone on the fire pit.

Of the price tag, she added: I would say give your 428 to charity instead, and if you want that look, stick tape around the trainers you already have.

The trainers are described as "crumply" and "grungy" / Nordstrom

Paul van Haver, a trustee of the charity, added: What tone does this set in the fashion industry? For people with no money, what does it make this part of society feel like? Thats OK for rich people to pay this money?

Something is really wrong.

American comedian Christine Sydelko led the condemnation of Golden Goose on social media. She tweeted: "There are people in the world wearing plastic bags as shoes because they cant afford any, but these HIDEOUS things are selling for $500, The fashion industry is truly so f****** stupid."

Another user, @brookedanielle, tweeted: "Okay maybe I'm being dramatic but I remember seeing kids getting harassed and made fun of endlessly in school for having shoes that looked like this. This is extremely distasteful."

Jacob Moore added: "I think peak capitalism is selling shoes characteristic of those who cant afford new ones for $530."

However, Claudia Dayani defended the brand, saying "the distressed look is Golden Gooses signature".
A woman opened fire at work in the US state of Maryland, killing three and injuring several others before turning a gun on herself, police said.

The suspect was a 26-year-old temporary employee at the Rite Aid distribution centre in Harford County, according to the Harford County sheriff's office.

The attacker, identified as Snochia Moseley of Baltimore County, died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. The motive for her attack is unclear.

It appears only one weapon was used - a 9 mm Glock handgun that was registered in Moseley's name - and no shots were fired by responding law enforcement officers, the sheriff said.

Multiple emergency services attended the scene / AP

People were urged to avoid the area following the incident, at the Rite Aid Distribution Center in Aberdeen, Harford County, shortly after 9am local time (2pm BST).

People were shot inside and outside the building where the incident occurred, near to Spesutia and Perryman Road.

At an earlier press briefing, Sheriff Gahler, of Harford County, said there were "multiple wounded and multiple fatalities", describing the incident as "another tragic event".

He said: "Many people have been affected by the events here this morning.

"There are a lot of families irreparably harmed."

Following this, he briefly explained the emergency response, from the call at 9.06am, to multiple agencies being on the scene around five minutes later.

He thanked those in the response and also sent messages of support to those affected by the tragedy.

"Keep the victims in your hearts and prayers.

"When something like this happens you can't have enough police and you can't have them fast enough," he said.

A Maryland State Police officer speaks with a motorist near the scene of the shooting / AP

There were no shots fired by authorities responding to the scene.

Following this, the Harford County county executive, Barry Glassman, spoke at the scene.

"Unfortunately, in today's world, we have active shooter drills.

"Every agency performed at the top of their profession," he said.

Incidents such as this were becoming an "all too often occurrence" in the county and across the USA, he said.

The FBI earlier described the Aberdeen incident as an "active shooter situation" and said its Baltimore field office was assisting.

Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) tactical agents responding to the situation / EPA

An earlier statement from the Harford County Sheriffs office said: We can confirm there was a shooting in the area of Spesutia Road and Perryman Road. Multiple victims.

"The situation is still fluid. Please avoid the area.

Harford County Fire and EMS stated it also assised.

A spokeswoman for Rite Aid said the incident took place at a support facility adjacent to a larger building.

Governer Larry Hogan of the state of Maryland said the situation was being monitored closely.

On Twitter, he said: We are closely monitoring the horrific shooting in Aberdeen. Our prayers are with all those impacted, including our first responders. The State stands ready to offer any support.

The Baltimore field division of the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives tweeted that its special agents also responded
N orth Korean leader Kim Jong-Un and South Korean President Moon Jae-in have concluded a three-day peace summit by clasping hands on top of a volcano considered sacred in North Korea.

Flanked by their wives, the two leaders posed hand-in-hand in front of the crater lake on Mount Paektu after the two countries forged a wide-ranging set of agreements, sealed with a 17-page accord to "cease all hostile acts against each other."

The final photo-op on Mount Paektu holds special significance as the volcano features in Korean mythology, and is mentioned in South Korea's national anthem and North Korean propaganda.

It comes after Mr Moon made history by speaking at the Mass Games in Pyongyang on Wednesday as part of the summit, becoming the first South Korean president to address the North Korean public.

Peace talks: South Korean President Moon Jae-in, centre, and North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un at the crater lake / AP

Mr Moon appealed for peace in the speech, saying: "I propose that we should completely end the past 70 years of hostility and take a big stride of peace to become one again."

The two leaders appear to have agreed on an ambitious programme to tackle soaring tensions last year that raised fears of war as the North tested a string of increasingly powerful weapons.

In the new accord, Mr Kim promised to accept "international experts" to monitor the closure of a key missile test site and launch pad.

Moon Jae-In and Kim Jong-Un at the Mass Games in Pyongyang / AFP/Getty Images

He also vowed to visit Seoul soon, while both leaders pledged to build more road and rail links between the North and South and launch a joint bid for the Summer Olympics in 2032.

This week's summit comes as Mr Moon falls under increasing pressure from the US to find a path forward in efforts to get Kim to completely abandon his nuclear arsenal.

But pundits have noted that North Korea placed a condition on the key issue of interest, its long-range precision missile programme.

Gymnasts perform a show at the Pyongyang Mass Games / AFP/Getty Images

Mr Kim stated that he would permanently dismantle North Korea's main nuclear facility only if the United States takes unspecified corresponding measures.

The joint statement by the two countries also appeared to lack some key steps Washington has been looking for, such as a commitment by Mr Kim to provide a list of North Korea's nuclear facilities or a concrete step-by-step timeline for closing them down

US president Donald Trump however told reporters Wednesday that the outcome of the summit was "very good news" and that "we're making tremendous progress" with North Korea.

The Mass Games had not been held for years previously / AFP/Getty Images

He didn't indicate in the brief remarks whether the US would be willing to take further steps to encourage North Korea's denuclearisation.

Declaring they had made a major step towards peace, Moon and Kim made a show of unity on Wednesday as they announced their agreement.

"We have agreed to make the Korean Peninsula a land of peace that is free from nuclear weapons and nuclear threat," said Mr Kim.

Trump says 'tremendous progress' being made with North Korea

"The road to our future will not always be smooth and we may face challenges and trials we can't anticipate.

"But we aren't afraid of headwinds because our strength will grow as we overcome each trial based on the strength of our nation."
L obsters are being sedated with marijuana before being cooked in an unconventional effort to make their deaths more humane.

Charlotte Gill, who runs a restaurant in the US state of Maine where cannabis was legalised in 2016, offers diners the choice of easing their suppers suffering.

In a trial on a lobster called Roscoe, she put the crustacean into a box with two inches of water and blew smoke through a hole in the bottom.

The owner of Charlottes Legendary Lobster Pound said Roscoe was calmer when returned to his tank. She insists the effects of the drug are not passed on to the diner.

'If were going to take a life we have a responsibility to do it as humanely as possible' / Robert F. Bukaty/AP

She told the Mount Desert Islander: "I feel bad that when lobsters come here there is no exit strategy.

Its a unique place and you get to do such unique things but at the expense of this little creature.

"Ive really been trying to figure out how to make it better.
C ary Joji Fukunaga has been revealed as the director of the latest James Bond film.

Producers Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson made the announcement via Twitter on Thursday.

We are delighted to be working with Cary, they said. His versatility and innovation make him an excellent choice for our next James Bond adventure.

For some, Fukunaga may seem like an unlikely choice to replace Danny Boyle. Up until now, the hot favourites to take on Bond were Bart Layton, director of American Animals, S.J. Clarkson, director of the next instalment of Star Trek, and Yann Demange, director of the upcoming flick White Boy Rick.

But with a host of critically acclaimed films under his belt, such as Beast of No Nation and Jane Eyre, the latest instalment of the 007 classic is set to be an exciting one.

Here's everything you need to know about director Cary Joju Fukunaga and the new James Bond film:

When will the New James Bond film be released?

The new film will be released worldwide on Feburary 14, 2020 with filming beginning on March 4, 2019.

The release date is a few months behind its original date of November 8 2019, thanks to Boyle's departure over apparent disputes with producers.

What films has Cary Joji Fukunaga directed?

Cary Joji Fukunaga recently directed the television series 'Maniac' starring Emma Stone. / Joel C Ryan/Invision/AP

Fukunaga was described as a "rising talent" when he debuted his film Sin Nombre, winning him the directing award at Sundance in 2009.

Already gaining critical acclaim, he went on to direct Jane Eyre starring Michael Fassbender and Mia Wasikowska, which was nominated for a BAFTA and an Academy Award.

He was also behind the screenplay for the adaption of Stephen King's horror It, starring Bill Skarsgard.

In his TV work, he directed the first season of True Detective, a project which earned him an Emmy award in 2014.

Most recently, he directed Maniac, a dark comedy for Netflix starring Emma Stone and Jonah Hill.

He also directed the 2015 graphic war film Beasts of No Nation starring Idris Elba.

Speaking about filming the violent scenes in the film, Fukunaga told TIME magazine: "I know inevitably there will be people who can't make it through the film. But I also couldn't diminish it so much that it didn't feel authentic."

Back when the James Bond gig was just a glint in Fukunaga's eye, he also said that Elba would make a great Bond - rejecting the author Anthony Horowitz's suggestion that the actor was "too street" for the role.

"If they wanted him to play Bond, he could do it," Fukunaga told The Telegraph. "He's suave, debonair, he can drive cars really well, he's a gear-head, and he can do the action."

Danny Boyle quits as James Bond director

Elba finally shut down claims that he was lined up to be the next Bond after teasing fans that he had accepted the 007 role.

Who will play Fukunaga's Bond?

Daniel Craig will be reprising his role for a fifth and final time in the new James Bond film / AP
G emma Collins left Lorraine Kelly screaming after she was frightened by the reality TV star looming over her.

Kelly was discussing Collins plans to get a Christmas number one when a photo of the TOWIE regular popped up on the screen behind her.

Terrified by the unsuspecting image, Kelly screamed: Shes looming over me!

The host was left laughing hysterically at the realisation that shed been frightened by the still photograph.

Kelly was then shown a reel of Collins preparing to record her Christmas single with a snippet showing her belting out Rozallas Everybodys Free.

After hearing a sample of Collins cover, the 58-year-old said: Do you know what? It's not as bad as I thought it'd be. I don't know if it's great.

"Better than the X Factor winner and maybe better than Elton John if he releases something?"

Chart-topper: Collins has set her sights on claiming the Xmas number one / ITV

It appeared Kelly was backing Collins by the end of the show, calling for her to make an appearance.

The Scottish host declared: We've got to get her in. She performs wherever she goes."

She recently headed off to Spain as part of a one-off television show called Diva Espana, but unsurprisingly she is keen to conquer the world.

She told the Daily Star: I really fancy going to India. I love the food and the outfits are always full of jewels.
P sychological thriller Maniac, adapted from the Norwegian series of the same name, is coming to Netflix this week.

Reuniting Superbad duo Emma Stone and Jonah Hill 11 years after the hit movie, Maniac tells the stories of Annie Landsberg (Stone) and Owen Milgrim (Hill) as their worlds collide in the late stages of a mystery pharmaceutical trial.

The 10-parter, directed by new James Bond director Cary Joji Fukunaga, is what is known as a limited series, meaning the predetermined number of episodes tell the story from start to finish.

Here is everything you need to know:

Reunited: Emma Stone and Jonah Hill star in the limited series / Michele K. Short / Netflix

What is Maniac about?

The series follows Annie and Owen as they take part in a groundbreaking drug trial, determined to repair their mind and have their lives turn out the way they want them to.

They - and 10 others  are drawn to the trial by Dr James K. Mantleray, who promises that the pill he has invented can help them achieve what they want to, with Annie wanting to escape her failed, broken and strained relationships and Owen, running from his schizophrenia diagnosis.

Cast: Oscar-winning actress Sally Field is Greta Mantleray / Michele K. Short / Netflix

Who stars in Maniac?

Superbad pals, Stone and Hill, who played Seth and Jules in the 2007 movie, portray the two central characters and take up the majority of the time on screen.

Justin Theroux stars as Dr Mantleray, the man promising perfection, while Sally Field is Greta Mantleray.

Girls star Jemima Kirke and actress Julia Garner are also among the cast.

How can I watch Maniac?
B y and large, weve just about had enough of those travel programmes in which faded celebrities or former politicians set off on a train or boat or bicycle journey, or in somebodys footsteps, or attempting some challenge or other  Across the Andes by Frog as it might be, that ripping yarn in which Michael Palin skewered the genre long before he ever went to the Poles, the Sahara and the Himalayas or around the world in 80 days himself.

These shows take the basic definition of television, letting us see things that are distant, a bit too literally. The format is knackered. Yet here comes Palin with another such programme (9pm, Channel 5)  and its terrific.

Almost nobody has been able to film openly in North Korea before  but, after two years of negotiations, Palin and his production team were able to visit for a fortnight just after the April inter-Korean summit, just before the Trump talks in June.

They were by no means able to film at will, being strictly monitored by half-a-dozen guards and escorted only to what the regime wanted them to see. So its hardly investigative reporting

Pictured: Michael Palin standing near Sino-Korean Friendship bridge that seperates North Korea and South Korea / Channel 5

Yet daily life in North Korea is so very odd, and has been so little seen before in the West, that even the most humdrum street scenes or repressively organised visits are riveting to watch  and there is no more likeable or trustworthy presenter than Michael Palin. His curiosity and humour make him the perfect intermediary, the ideal stand in for what we might feel were we there, a magic everyman.

In this first episode Palin goes to the capital, Pyongyang, a city completely reconstructed to the plans of Kim Il-sung, relatively prosperous compared with the poverty of the countryside.

Waking up in this weird city, its ugly blocks all painted bright colours to make them look more cheerful, he hears peculiar music emanating from all over the empty streets. Vaguely Brian Eno, its actually a propaganda song called Where are you, dear General? You cant avoid it, thats the thing, you cant avoid it, he reflects.

He visits the colossal statues of beaming Kim Il-Sung and Kim Jong-il and tries gently to ask one of his guides about them. She loyally tells him: We Korean people think they are still alive, theyre alive in our hearts even though they passed away. But evidently even this enquiry is reprimanded by his minders as crossing a line.

In a school classroom, Palin clowns about, blowing up an inflatable globe to see what the students know of the world. They throw it about between themselves as if keen not to be caught in possession of such an incriminating object. A girl nervously recites a patriotic poem.

Their teacher looks on with an extraordinary expression, not just worried but clearly frightened. You can see that she knows if this filming goes wrong, there might be terrible consequences for her. Its the face of a person living under a totalitarian dictatorship with no regard for human rights, that stricken face sometimes visible in photographs from the horror regimes of the last century but here captured a few months ago as part of a travel show.

Yet Palin finds pleasure in North Korea too: joining mass May Day celebrations in a park, miming being knocked out by strong drink, joining in the dancing even. These people might live under a repressive system thats hard to understand but theres a joy and humanity thats undimmed, he says. I cant wait to see what he finds when he heads out of Pyongyang next week.

Pick of the day

Insecure - Sky Atlantic, 10.45pm

Since it launched in 2016, Issa Raes everyday comedy of Los Angeles millennials has been compared to many things.

Some cite Curb Your Enthusiasm and Seinfeld, for the apparent plotlessness of the episodes, and the way that the comedy seems to stem from the unremarked quirks of everyday life.

Sex And The City is an obvious benchmark (and has itself been undergoing a bit of feminist reappraisal recently), because of its focus on the uncertainties and the black comedy of the dating game.

And a more obvious recent parallel is Donald Glovers playful Atlanta, a comedy that sometimes dares not to be funny, plays with the persona of its creator and makes its own rules.

Comedy: stars Issa Rae and Yvonne Orji / HBO

None of which really prepares you for the rapid-fire energy of Raes creation, which grew out of her web series Awkward Black Girl.

That explored the black late-twenties experience in an under-exposed part of LA.

Midway through season three, Issa finds she needs moral support; Issa and Kelly try to persuade Molly to date someone new; and the girls attend Tiffanys baby shower.

Screen time

The Mighty Redcar - BBC2, 9pm

Dan Dewsburys warm-hearted documentary about the hopes and dreams of a group of young people in Redcar, North Yorkshire, is so engaging and optimistic that its sometimes possible to forget the slim margins by which their futures are decided.

This week the show focuses on 15-year-old Safy, who has won a scholarship to a private school in York. She wants to become a top netball player but her mother Aicha must find 10 per cent of the fees, while still struggling to provide for Safys younger brother and two sisters. Meanwhile, Jesss apprenticeship is drawing to a close. Bean and Tom have tough choices. Jamess struggle to keep his life on the straight and narrow continues.

Blue Steel - London Live, 10pm

Soon, probably around October 31, Jamie Lee Curtis will be back on screen combating a faceless psychopath, a situation more comforting than this one, where her cop Megan Turner is seduced by psychopath Eugene Hunt (Ron Silver).

Unbeknown to her, Hunt has used her sidearm to commit several killings in this taut thriller.

London Go - Tomorrow, London Live, 7pm

Swanky gilded venues are the last place youll find Pop-Up Opera performing, this company taking the art to venues far removed from its often lofty surroundings  it would organise a Purcell up in a brewery to break new ground.

This week director John Wilkie and soprano Alice Privett from Pop-Up Opera will be with host Luke Blackall in the studio to discuss their new interpretation of Bizets La Tragedie de Carmen, which begins a run across London in unusual venues. Wilkies version is set at the end of the Spanish Civil War and this tour, chosen to bring opera to a wider audience, includes performances in Haymans Distillery in Balham, the Masonic temple in the Andaz Hotel, and the Asylum in Peckham.

Deep Dish

Quacks - BBC iPlayer

The national mourning will be brief but its a shame the BBC has decided not to recommission James Woods comedy on Victorian doctors. Wood wrote Rev, a comedy of understatement, but Quacks wore its quirks on the outside, and the cast included Rory Kinnear as a flashy surgeon and Rupert Everett, below, as the appalling principal of the medical school. Catch it before it falls from the iPlayer.

Catch Up

Reflections: The Prime Ministers We Never Had - BBC iPlayer

A new series of Steve Richardss unscripted political talks starts with this reflection on Michael Heseltine, who, Richards says, was seen through the lens of his own ambition. He flounced out of Mrs Thatchers Cabinet
T ech for good is a hot topic. The economic argument is clear: Accenture predicts tech focusing on solving societys problems will become a $12 trillion market opportunity by 2030.

Duly, the industrys biggest companies are sitting up. Take Google, whose latest Campus residency programme, which will run for four months, brings together six start-ups who want to make a positive impact.

So how does it work? From now until Christmas, the handpicked start-ups will receive office space in Campuss Old Street HQ, and workshops and mentoring from a team of Googlers.

The most important aspect of the programme is the community the start-ups are welcomed into. What we do here is recognise that its not just two guys in a garage but a community that creates great companies, says Amrit Dhir, acting head of Campus London.

The hope is that residencies will become a standard feature of Google Campuss offering. Our mission is to support start-ups and see how we can make an impact, he adds.

The six new start-ups are focusing on areas such as mental health, skin care and drug development (Google ) / Google

Meet the Campus cohort

Alice:

A blockchain platform that demonstrates exactly where charity donations go and how theyre having an impact. Alice wants to encourage social organisations to become more transparent and reassure people that their donation is having a positive effect on the world.

GTN:

Focusing on drug development, GTN is combining machine learning and quantum physics to speed up drug discovery. The start-up is led by Syrian-born Dr Noor Shaker and hopes to develop medicines targeting neurological diseases.

KareInn:

Part of a growing group of start-ups targeting social care, KareInn is a mobile app designed to coordinate care and ease the admin burden for carers, co-founded by Lloyds Banking Groups former head of digital product, Rachelle Mills.

Labstep:

Labstep is a free tool available for scientists and researchers to make their lab work more organised and effective. With a built-in timer, the ability to add images and connect devices, its like a digital notebook that can make reproducing research faster and easier.

SciApps:

Female-led company SciApps is the brains behind Skin Ninja, an app that wants to show you the truth about what's hiding in your skincare products, from allergens to carcinogens. The beauty industry needs to watch out.

Spill:
P odcasts have been making something of a comeback recently, and one of our all-time favourites, Serial, is returning for a third season.

Sticking with the same in-depth style of investigative journalism, the latest season will take a broad look at the criminal justice system in the US.

Debuting back in 2014, Serial became the fastest podcast ever to reach five million downloads.

So what twists and turns does this season hold for us? Here's everything you need to know.

When is the new season of Serial released?

The new season will debut on 20 September.

You can listen to Serial by streaming via their official website or downloading on the podcast app for Apple or Google Podcasts, RadioPublic or Stitcher for Android.

What will this season be about?

This season will look at the criminal justice systems in the US, using multiple court cases from Cleveland, Ohio to illustrate its successes and failures.

The series will examine a wide range of cases from the everyday to the more serious crimes such as murder.

The show's host, Sarah Koenig, revealed how she spent a year following individual cases.

She said: "I'd seen a litany of things that shouldn't be allowed. It was like a checklist of things reformers complain about: extra changes loaded on to a case, pressure to plead, shabby police work..."

What were the last two seasons about?

The first season followed the gripping story of Adnan Syed who was convicted in 2000 for murdering his ex-girlfriend, Hae Min Lee.

Using compelling evidence, Sarah takes listeners on a whirlwind journey trying to piece together what happened.
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Foreign Affairs Minister Teodor Melescanu on Wednesday welcomed the American-Romanian Business Council delegation (AMRO), paying a visit to Romania on the sixth annual mission on economy promotion, the Foreign Affairs Ministry (MAE) informs in a press release, according to Agerpres.

The AMRO delegation attended on Monday and Tuesday the Three Seas Initiative Summit and the Economic Forum organised on the sidelines of this event.

The Romanian chief diplomat reiterated the commitment of the authorities in Bucharest for consolidating the economic dimension of the Romania - US strategic partnership. Minister Melescanu stressed the role of the Three Seas Initiative as "a framework to implement some concrete projects with benefits in the economic area." At the same time, he highlighted the significant role AMRO has held over the recent years in increasing the volume of bilateral trade exchanges and the investments of the company members in Romania, the release reads.Minister Melescanu reconfirmed the interest of the Romanian authorities in increasing the US investments in Romania, as well as in the projects promoting Romanian companies in the US."The AMRO delegation thanked the Romanian chief diplomat for the constant support granted to the Council's initiatives and in conducting the dialogue with the Romanian institutions in the central administration. The representatives of the US companies management voiced satisfaction with the investment projects carried out in Romania, as well as the interest in further contributing to enhancing the Romanian-US economic exchanges," MAE points out.
The top priority is the finalisation of the Brexit agreement as soon as possible and the finding of solutions regarding the divergent aspects, on Ireland, in particular, President Klaus Iohannis said, during his participation in the European Council's informal meeting in Salzburg, Wednesday through Thursday.

President Klaus Iohannis reiterated the importance of maintaining the EU 27 unity and continuing the single voice negotiations with the purpose of closing a proper, equitable agreement with the United Kingdom. Romania's President also brought to mind the necessity to identify ways of continuing cooperation with the UK, considering that the latter and the European Union share joint objectives at international level, the Presidential Administration reads, in a release.

Klaus Iohannis added that the migration's external dimension, through the enhancement of cooperation with the third partner states, remains in our country's vision, as essential pillar that contributes to the implementation of durable solutions to answering the pressure determined by the illegal migration, the said release says.The President emphasised Romania's support for the measures aiming at the consolidation of the EU's external borders.As for the European asylum policy, President Iohannis reassured our country's support for the furthering of the talks regarding the Dublin system's reform, of a manner capable to reflect the principles of solidarity and responsibility for the benefit of all of the member states, yet maintaining the voluntary character of each relocation form.President Klaus Iohannis underlined the special attention Romania is giving to the cooperation inside the EU and with the international partners in cyber-security. Moreover, he stressed the significance of the actions at EU level in the direction of combating misinformation and the fake news, as well as of promoting an integrated approach at European level, of the nature to strengthen the EU citizens' confidence in the EU's security space.
Speeding up the process of reforming prison transfer procedures was among the topics discussed by Justice Minister Tudorel Toader and his Italian counterpart Alfonso Bonafede during his two-day visit to Rome, according to Agerpres.

According to a press statement released by the Romanian Ministry of Justice, Toader and senior official Marieta Safta paid a visit to Rome on Monday and Tuesday.

Bonafede displayed "full readiness" to provide the support of the Italian Justice Ministry to the Romanian presidency of the Council of the European Union in the first half of 2019."During the meeting, the two ministers reiterated their mutual commitment to speeding up the process of reforming prisoner transfer procedures, a long-standing theme on the Italian political agenda, as well as in the attention of the Romanian justice minister. Also discussed were relevant issues such as the protection of minors, the liaison magistrate's institution, the commissioning of the European Public Prosecutor's Office (EPPO), the extension of EPPO's jurisdiction to include terrorism as a transnational judicial response that is effective against this growing danger."The Romanian delegation on Monday toured the Rebibbia Penitentiary, where it was welcomed by senior official with the Italian Ministry of Justice Vittorio Ferraresi and the head of the Department of Penitentiary Administration Francesco Basentini.On the second day of the visit, the Romanian delegation had a meeting with professor Eugenio Gaudio, Rector of La Sapienza University."At the meeting - also attended by professor Bruno Botta, vice-rector responsible for international relations, Professor Paolo Ridola, dean of the Law Faculty and professor Antonello Biagini, president of the La Sapienza Foundation - the Romanian side presented a project for the great university in Rome to host an international colloquium on legal issues during the Romanian presidency of the Council of the European Union, with support from the Romanian Ministry of Justice, the Romanian Embassy in Italy, the Romanian Cultural Institute in Rome and the academia."According to the MJ, the importance of legal research and university collaboration was discussed, with emphasis on the role of law, co-operation and the approximation of legal systems in the consolidation of the European Union.
The Liberals uphold in the simple motion on Agriculture, tabled with the Deputies' Chamber and titled "After Caragea's plague, Romania hit by Daea's swine fever", that in the two years since being appointed minister, Petre Daea has proven to be incapable of measuring up to his office, disastrously handling the prevention, combat and eradication of the African swine fever in Romania.

"The so-called actions carried out by Minister Petre Daea, since the onset of the first African swine fever outbreak in Romania (July 2017) and until now, have demonstrated that he does not have the qualities, knowledge, dedication and responsibility necessary to a minister in office. The current simple motion comes to sanction the serious slippages in food security and combating of epizootic diseases, incumbent upon the minister in accordance with the Government Decision no. 830/2016. From the onset of the first African swine fever outbreak in Romania, we have heard from the current Agriculture Minister only apologies and excuses about how he cannot or why he cannot act, passing the entire responsibility either to the National Sanitary Veterinary and Food Safety Authority, either to veterinary medics, either to the National Committee for emergency situations, either to local centres for combating diseases, either to the prefects from the respective counties," the signatories of the motion specify.

The initiators of the motion mention that the map of the African swine fever evolution in Europe shows that Romania is the most affected country by this epidemic, over 70 percent of the number of outbreaks in the European Union being registered in Romania.The Liberals point out that the lack of action and vision of the Agriculture Minister has contributed significantly to the rapid spread of the epidemic, with 13 counties presently being affected country wide, and the number of localities exceeding 200.They state that the responsibility for this serious situation also belongs to Minister Petre Daea, who has lost control of the situation and has neglected the early warnings.The Liberals also say that the exact amount of compensation for the damages caused by African swine fever is not yet known and communicate to the minister that he will remain in the history of Romania as "the main artisan of the destruction of the pig breeding and the relevant industry in Romania."
The "convergence of interests and perspectives of Romania and India upon the regional and international matters, the excellent collaboration within the United Nations and the international bodies" were emphasised by the Romanian diplomacy's head, Teodor Melescanu, at an official lunch with the visiting Vice President of India, Venkaiah M. Naidu, a release by the Foreign Affairs Ministry (MAE) sent to AGERPRES informs.

The Romanian dignitary assured the Indian high official of Romania's support for the development of the EU-India dialogue, during the rotating Presidency of Romania to the EU Council in the first half of 2019.

The talks were focused on the main current aspects of the bilateral relations, the two dignitaries underlining the significant progress and the potential of strengthening the cooperation on the political dialogue, the economic relations in the investment and commercial plan, and the diversification of the bilateral judicial framework, the MAE release adds.Melescanu stressed the political significance of the high level visit, by which the joint interest to enhance the Extended Partnership between Romania and India, inked on 8 March 2013, is verified.
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, September 20)  Malacanang on Thursday dismissed an international tribunal ruling convicting President Rodrigo Duterte for human rights violation, calling the decision a "sham" and "useless piece of propaganda."

Reports said the International People's Tribunal (IPT) in Belgium has found Duterte guilty of violating human rights, on the back of testimonies from 31 peopleincluding embattled Australian nun Patricia Foxwho attested to the allegations against the President.

"It has no official sanction. The validity of the finding will depend on the credibility of the tribunals," Presidential Spokesperson Harry Roque said in a media briefing.

Roque said IPT's lawyers are just "leftists who happen to be white sympathetic to Philippine left."

"They appear to be a propaganda body of the left and therefore we set it aside as a useless piece of propaganda against the government," he said.

"Grabe po kasi talaga yung networking ng Philippine left with left groups as well, particularly in Europe," he added.

The case against Duterte was presented to the IPT by activist groups led by Bagong Alyansang Makabayan and Karapatan this week.

The verdict will be forwarded to the International Criminal Court where the President has pending cases also for purportedly violating people's rights.

IPT, according to its website, is convened by the International Coalition for Human Rights in the Philippines, International Association of Democratic Lawyers, National Lawyers Guild, IBON International.
The neoconservative vision of the world is a place where the United States can do what it wants because it is both better morally speaking and also more capable of enforcing desirable standards of behavior. Such a viewpoint just might perhaps be understandable if Washington were actually willing to operate in a disinterested leadership capacity to promote standards that are generally accepted by the international community, somewhat similar to what the United Nations is supposed to do, but it becomes repugnant when there is no sense that the US is actually willing to judge itself by the values that it claims to be upholding. This is why global opinion believes that Washington, not Russia or China, is the greatest threat to world peace and also why the United States ranks near the bottom in opinion polls assessing which countries are viewed favorably.

Every story has to begin somewhere and that is the neocon trick. You take a situation that you have framed from your own perspective and then use it as a starting point for developing additional arguments that favor the action you wanted to take in the first place. In the case of a country like Iran, you claim that the Iranians must be checked because (a) they are destabilizing the region (b) building a Shiite land bridge to the Mediterranean (c) supporting terrorism (d) secretly constructing a nuclear weapon and (e) developing ballistic missiles that will enable them to deliver the nuclear weapons. By establishing your premise of Iranian threat as the basis for the discussion, you completely avoid having to demonstrate that Iran is actually doing any of those things, which is a good thing because every single point is either palpably false or can be easily challenged.

The same goes for Syria, where the argument is framed that Syria is becoming an Iranian satrapy and that US troops are in the country to defeat terrorists. Actually, there is a legitimate government in Damascus that is independent of Iran and it is the American soldiers that are present completely illegally in support of some of the terrorists it is supposed to be fighting. But to admit either fact to be true would not be acceptable as it would ruin the discussion from the neocon point of view.

A recent New York Times Bret Stephens op-ed To Thwart Iran, Save Idlib on the situation in Syria illustrates just what is wrong with neocon thinking. Stephens is a card-carrying Zionist who has lived in Israel and was between 2002 and 2004 the Editor-in-Chief of the Jerusalem Post, at that time a right-wing English language newspaper. He still supports the invasion of Iraq and predictably has declared the now-dead nuclear pact with Iran to be worse than the 1938 Munich Agreement with Adolf Hitler. It is always 1938 in Munich for someone like Stephens.

In other words, Stephens, with his blinders firmly in place, is not a go-to person if you want to know what is actually happening in Syria or Iran. His op-ed asserts that the United States must act forcefully to prevent the Syrian governments attempt to retake its terrorist infested Idlib Province.

Why? Because Iran and Russia will be empowered otherwise and the US will appear weak. You see, Stephens believes the top priority in the Middle East is to thwart Irans nuclear and regional ambitions. He asks So why is [the Trump Administration] so reluctant to lift a finger against Tehrans most audacious gambit in Syria?

Stephens explains: By now, the strategic consequences should also be obvious. Iran will have succeeded in consolidating a Shiite crescent stretching from Bandar Abbas on the Persian Gulf to the Bekaa Valley in Lebanon. Russia will have succeeded in reasserting itself as a Mideast military victor and diplomatic power broker. Hezbollah, already the dominant political player in Lebanon, will further extend its influence in Syria. As for Assad, he will have shown that the community of civilized nations will, in fact, let you get away with murder.

What should be done by Washington and its allies? The US can destroy everything that remains of the Syrian Air Force and crater the runways If Assad continues to move, his presidential palaces should be next. After that, Assad himself. By then he will have been fairly warned. The larger goal is to establish that the US has the ability and will to achieve core foreign policy objectives at a relatively reasonable price.

There is a word in Italian pazzo. It means crazy, but actually has a somewhat stronger meaning, more like delusional, completely nuts. Stephens qualifies, particularly when he presumably includes the United States and Israel among the worlds community of civilized nations. Both have been bombing and shooting up Syria even though Damascus has neither threatened nor attacked them. And the Shiite crescent is a total fabrication, invented by Israel and repeated endlessly by suck-up American politicians and media talking heads like Stephens. Iraq is 60% Shiite to be sure, but the rest of its mostly Sunni population is well entrenched and has fought to maintain its autonomy. Syria is 75% Sunni and 9% Christian. Lebanon is 27% Sunni, 6% Druze, and 40% Christian. Do the math Bret!

And dont you just love the achieve core foreign policy objectives at a relatively reasonable price bit? Destroying the countrys air force and airports, blowing up its government buildings, and assassinating its head of state might be reasonable for armchair warriors in Washington, but it looks a lot different on the ground where most would consider it undeclared war of aggression. Thats a war crime.

And to get back to my original point, all the nonsense is designed to support a narrative of death and destruction that starts with the reader having to accept Stephens assertion that there is an actual threat out there even when there is none. Nice work Bret Stephens!
Although Iran has been aware of its serious deficiencies when it comes to air defense for over a decade, nothing it has done so far has made a major difference. Outsiders began to notice this effort in 2009 when the Iranian Supreme Leader separated most missile-based air defense systems from the air force and organized them into a separate air defense command. Despite vigorous efforts by the new Air Defense Force that did not produce air defenses that could keep up with the potential threats from the many enemies, Iran has acquired (especially the U.S., Israel plus the Arab oil states). Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has been described as visibly alarmed at the inability of Iran to defend itself against the many enemy aircraft and missiles that could be used in wartime, especially for a surprise attack. Iran has been promising to destroy Israel and the United States since the 1980s and is now trying to take control of Syria and further threaten Israel. In response to that Israel has been fighting back and Iran is uncomfortable about how this is playing out. In response, Khamenei replaced the commander of the air force in August, the fifth senior military commander replaced in the last year.

The current sense of urgency appears to have been caused by a late 2017 study of Iranian vulnerabilities to air attack. The study was published in an Iranian military journal so that everyone could see and this would generate useful suggestions for solutions. The list of vulnerabilities was basically a compilation of how Iran is generally defenseless against fifteen systems, including ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, smart bombs, ground penetrating bombs and other specialized air delivered guided weapons, like bombs that use lengths of carbon fibers (to short out electrical transmission lines) or monster bombs like MOAB or bombs that can create an EMP (electromagnetic pulse) that destroy electronics over large areas.

Then there are the specialized defensive and offensive electronic systems carried by many aircraft, UAVs and missiles. The Americans and Israelis have surveillance satellite systems that monitor Iranian activity and can assist in attacks on Iran. The United States and Israel have most of these scary systems but many of these advanced weapons have been obtained by the Arab Gulf states and since 2015 the Arabs have been proving in Yemen that they really have learned how to use them. That includes the Arab operated Patriot anti-missile systems which have intercepted over a hundred Iranian made ballistic missiles fired from Yemen into Saudi Arabia. The Supreme Leader apparently monitors Iranian progress, or lack of progress in this area and demanding that senior commanders come up with solutions. That has apparently not been happening and as long as more senior commanders get replaced it will indicate continued failure.

The Supreme Leader is also aware of the fact that many Iranian air defense systems are fake or press release systems that were announced but never got into production or developed to the point where they actually work. The Supreme Leader seems to have been upset over the recent IRGC press release about the new Iranian stealth fighter. You dont have to be an aviation engineer to understand the critiques of this new aircraft. These detailed descriptions of why the new stealth fighter wont (or actually cannot) work as described. Many of these critical reports have appeared in overseas Iranian language media and the Internet. These critiques are no secret, especially from the Supreme Leader.

On paper Iran has formidable air defense forces, in practice, most of this stuff is too old or too few to collectively make a big difference. Current Iranian air defenses consist of several hundred Cold War era warplanes in various states of readiness. None are seen as anything approaching a serious threat to aircraft the Americans, Israelis and Gulf Arabs possess. The Iranian ground-based air defense systems are not much better off.

The key Iranian air defense system is the Russian S-300 PMU2. Also known as the SA-20C, deliveries began in early 2016 and two years later the four S-300PMU2 batteries were declared operational. Shortly thereafter, in May 2018 Russia quietly let it be known that Russia was not going to deliver S-300 systems to anyone in Syria. Israel has been publicly and privately urging Russia to institute such a ban and Russia decided Israel was a more valued ally. Israel made it clear in Syria that the Israelis have the upper hand in terms of tech and military capabilities. Russia needed those demonstrations so they could maintain their good relationship with Iran while also refusing to deliver S-300 systems to Syria. This was something the Iranians wanted and were willing to pay for. But the Russians were not willing to lose the good relationship they had (since 1948) with Israel. Nor were the Russians willing to risk having the S-300 defeated by Israeli SEAD (Suppression of Enemy Air Defenses) tactics and equipment. The Iranians may be willing to underestimate the Israelis, but the Russians prefer to be more realistic.

The S-300 has impressive credentials. Each battery has a surveillance radar (range 300 kilometers) and command center plus four launcher vehicles, each carrying four missiles The S-300PMU missiles had a range of 200 kilometers and were considered somewhat similar to the American Patriot systems. Later models of the S-300 missiles had some capability to shoot down short range ballistic missiles but these SAMs only have a range of 40-120 kilometers. The SA-10/12 launcher vehicle also contains a guidance radar. The most recent version of S-300 (S-400) is supposed to be (according to Russia) superior to the American Patriot. But while the Patriot has over two decades of combat experience the S-300/400 has none.

Iran also bought four batteries of older (1980s) S-300PT SAMs from Belarus in 2008. These were being sold off by Belarus and replaced by more recent S-300 systems. The S-300PT has a max range of 75 kilometers. Before the S-300PSU systems were delivered Iran claimed to have cloned the S-300 tech and developed their own version, the Bavar-273. None of these have been seen and are apparently another press release system.

In 2011 Iran announced that it had test-fired U.S. made Hawk anti-aircraft missiles they had refurbished. Iran has been manufacturing its own copy of the Hawk missile, called Shahin and was also upgrading the Hawk fire control and radar systems. Iran, like many American allies, bought American Hawk anti-aircraft missile systems in the 1970s (the current religious government took over in 1979). Although 1950s technology, the Hawk, with a range of 25-45 kilometers, is reliable and quite effective against targets lacking a lot of countermeasures. The Iranians had the 1970 version, but further improvements were made in the 80s and 90s and Iran tried, with some success, to get some of those upgrades.

Before the 1979 revolution, Iran had bought 150 Hawk launchers, and nearly a thousand missiles and other gear, sufficient to equip 16 Hawk battalions. While much of the original equipment has died of old age and many of the missiles were used against Iraqi aircraft during the 1980s war, there have been ample opportunities to keep Iranian Hawks alive. That's because there are still several countries using Hawk. Over 40,000 missiles were manufactured since Hawk entered service in 1960, and the U.S. only stopped using it in 2002. Since the Cold War ended in 1991, a lot of Hawk equipment has been retired. While the U.S. tried to prevent Iran from getting the Cold War surplus stuff, they were not always successful. Moreover, while Hawk was cutting edge in the 1970s, that means the tech needed to keep Hawk batteries (each with six, three missile, launchers) operational today is easier to get or make locally. The big problem for Iran is obtaining the technology that enables Hawk to handle modern electronic-countermeasures. This was a frequent cause for Hawk upgrades since the 1970s. Iran, in the meantime, has developed ways to keep up. The Iranian upgrades to Hawk have not really been put to the test and Hawk remains the most numerous Iranian SAM (Surface to Air Missile) air defense system they have. Iran may also have some operational American SM-1 ship-based air defense systems converted to operate from land bases. Iran says it has reverse-engineered the SM-1 but not much has been seen of it lately. Since the 1970s the U.S. Navy has upgraded its air defense missiles to SM-2, SM-3 and the recently introduced SM-6.

In 2013 Iran announced it had built a factory to produce the Sayyad-2 anti-aircraft missile. This is an upgrade of the Sayyad-1, which was based on the old (1950s) Russian SA-2. Sayyad-1 entered service in 1999. Both Sayyad 1 and 2 copied much from the Chinese HQ-2, which is itself an upgrade of the Russian S-75/SA-2 system. Sayyad-2 appears to have incorporated technology from the American HAWK and SM-1 SAMs.

Sayyad-2 is a two ton, two stage anti-aircraft missile with a maximum range of 80 kilometers and max altitude of 20,000 meters (65,000 feet). The Sayyad-2 has better electronic countermeasures than Sayyad-1 but it is still dependent on the ground radar for guidance to a target and is vulnerable to electronic interference. Sayyad-2 is believed to have a more effective warhead. None of the Sayyad missiles has been in combat and test firings have not been impressive.

The Chinese HQ-2 has been in use since the late 1960s and has been upgraded several times with modern electronics, an improved warhead, better rocket motors, and more maneuverability and turned it into a much more effective HQ-2 early in the 21st century. Iran has been getting military technology from China since the 1980s. This apparently included the tech for the solid fuel rocket motors used by the Sayyad-2 and possibly some of the electronics. If an attacker does not have good electronic countermeasures the Sayyad-2 could be quite effective. China also has lots of S-300 and may have sold or leaked technical data on that system to Iran.

Iran claims to have kept a number of other older Russian SAM systems in working order. These include over a hundred launchers for SA-5 and SA-6 SAMS along with radars and fire control systems. These may exist in some usable form but appear to be more press release systems. The same applies to more than a dozen press release systems revealed since 2010 that seem to exist only as a few prototypes if that.

The army also has control of most of the short-range anti-aircraft gun systems. There are about 1,500 of these and comprise at least ten different systems with calibers ranging from 23mm to 57mm. Most are Cold War era Russian systems. These are effective against helicopters and any jets operating at low (under 2,000 meters) altitude. Iran also has thousands of MANPADS (man-portable air defense systems) similar to Russian models (or Chinese clones).

As impressive as all that appears to be the Iranian leaders, despite knowing that they are on a mission from God, do not believe that makes Iran immune from the other death from above.
Click the image above to watch the video

In today's forecast we are expecting a cloudy morning, then fine spells in the afternoon, but with a chance of a shower or two. Also light winds.

It's a two-clothing layer day today with a high of 20 and an overnight low of 12 degrees. Humidity is 82 per cent.

Low tide is at 8.50am and high tide is at 3.20pm (Tay Street times). There's a sea swell of 1.7m with a sea temperature of 15 degrees. Sunset tonight is at 6.06pm.

If you're going fishing the next best fish bite time is between 7.30pm and 9.30pm.

On this day in NZ history in 1954 the Mazengarb report was released. The Mazengarb inquiry into juvenile delinquency blamed the perceived promiscuity of the nations youth on working mothers, the ready availability of contraceptives, and young women enticing men to have sex.

In world history on this day in 1519 Ferdinand Magellan embarked from Spain on a voyage to circumnavigate the world. In 1830 the National Negro Convention convened in Philadelphia with the purpose of abolishing slavery.

In 1952 scientists confirmed that DNA holds hereditary data. In 1971 Hurricane Irene became the first hurricane known to cross from the Atlantic to the Pacific, where it was renamed Hurricane Olivia.

In 1977 the Socialist Republic of Vietnam was admitted to the United Nations. In 1985 Australia introduced a capital gains tax. In 2001 US President George W. Bush, addressing a joint session of Congress, declared a war on terror..

Today is the birthday of Lord James Dewar, a physician who invented the vacuum flask and cordite, the first smokeless powder. Born in 1842, he once said "Minds are like parachutes, they only function when they are open."

To check out events and activities that are happening around the Bay today, please go to our What's on page.

Have a great day!




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A Western Bay of Plenty family has lost close to everything after their home was engulfed in flames yesterday afternoon.

Emergency services were called to the private address on Arawa Road, in Pongakawa, around 4.45pm to find the single story dwelling alight.

Northern fire communications shift manager Scott Osmond says one household was involved in the fire.

About half an hour later the main body of the fire was knocked down.

A fire investigator was requested to attend.

Su Mars, who lives on Arawa Road, is calling on people to donate items to replace what was lost in the house fire.

Donations are wanted. Our lovely young neighbours house has gone up in flames.

They are all ok, but lost nearly everything due to fire and smoke damage.

Su says the couple has two little ones  a baby girl about four-months-old and a two-year-old boy.

If you have any baby clothes, toys, kitchenware, furniture etc you could donate please take them to Think Water in Te Puke, who will pass them on.

Habitat Humanity Bay of Plenty operations manager Lisa Pomare has also offered to help out the young family.

We just want to reach out and give them what they need, says Lisa.

Well load up a truck of stuff to take over. Were not just about putting people in houses, we also want to support people through this type of thing.

We have clothes and toys and we just want to get them back on their feet.

A GiveaLittle page has been set up for the family with more than $2000 already being donated.

If you wish to donate you can do so here.
The man who led a campaign for New Zealand to double the quota of refugees it accepts says he's delighted the total will be boosted.

The previous government lifted the quota from 750 a year to 1000 and yesterday Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announced it will rise to 1500 annually from 2020.

In the meantime, she said work on improving refugee resettlement and support services would continue, including an upgrade of the Mangere Centre.

Murdoch Stephens, who led the Double the Quota campaign, told Morning Report over the past few months things were a little unclear but he was happy with this result.

"I'm elated. It's been a really long campaign, it's been five years. [There's] been a couple of false moments, where Labour got the coalition government and we though okay it's in there. But then over the past couple of months it's been unclear."

He said he kept hope when Deputy Prime Minister Winston Peters rubbished the refugee quota idea a couple of weeks ago.

"I could sense he was leaving the path open in the way he was talking and I have had good conversations with Iain Lees-Galloway on this," Mr Stephens said.

"Labour's been pretty solid the entire way through so I kind of felt the most optimistic person when all the op-eds came in saying they weren't going to do it."

Reports from 2015 showed New Zealand's refugee intake stood at five times fewer per capita than Australia, and ranked 87th in the world for total refugee resettlement per capita.

While New Zealand was not a world leader on refugee intake, Mr Stephens said he would not be campaigning for another increase in the intake of refugees for now.

"I wanted this to be a good faith thing when I was talking to the immigration minister when it was Michael Woodhouse. I assured him this wasn't something... I was personally going to keep doubling on."

There was room for improvement, however, New Zealand also had its own problems to sort out before opening up the space for more refugees, Mr Stephens said.

"We've got so many problems in New Zealand that as a New Zealander I know we need to make sure that these people settle in well - that they have the houses, the education - all of this to make sure they have a good start."

Instead, he said he was looking closer on other issues such as making the refugee quota population-adjusted and depoliticising the issue.

"So if the New Zealand population grows by one percent the quota grows, so we don't have to politicise it. In the last couple of weeks it has been politicised and no-one's really cared that much about refugees."

Now that the emergency quota for Syria has ended about 100 refugees from the country would be taken in, compared with 300 Syrian refugees last year, Mr Stephens said.

"We really need to make sure the quota focuses on the most vulnerable people and as the United Nations says those are the people in Africa and the Middle East now."
Will we ever see the four-lane Tauranga Northern Link built between the city and Te Puna?

Construction should have been under way next month, says Tauranga MP and Leader of the Opposition Simon Bridges, but instead were getting roundabouts and median strips on the old State Highway.

This is not the four-lane highway we need. The safety issues are vital. This is the most dangerous, least forgiving stretch of road in the country. You can always deal with it with things like roundabouts to slow it down but the TNL is about much more than safety. Its also about congestion, efficiency and freight.

Transport Minister Phil Twyford was questioned in Parliament on Wednesday by National transport spokesman Jami-Lee Ross about whether he made the funding decision to reduce the state highway improvement budget, thereby shelving the TNL.

When the government came into office NZTA advised us that a 8.2c a litre excise increase would be needed to pay for the existing unfunded promises made by the former government, let alone the $10 billion of expressways that National had campaigned on.

This was not sustainable, especially as increased investment in safety, regional roads, and public transport is so badly needed. So the Transport Agency has decided to re-evaluate future expressway projects, including the Tauranga Northern Link, to ensure that they deliver value for money, he replied.

In 2016, as Nationals Minister of Transport, Simon announced an investment of $520 million to improve the safety and efficiency for the Waihi to Tauranga corridor. Among the five key packages of work was the $286 million TNL, due for construction in 2018.

He balks at suggestions the previous government had nine years to fix the road and did nothing.

Labour are telling fibs about this. Everything that needed to be done had been done by the previous National government. In fact, I approved half a billion dollars of funding and everything was in place for construction to start in October this year.

Simon says the commercial tender for the TNL went out to market earlier this year but was stopped by NZTA.

When Labour says we havent done anything, its just not true. A four-lane highway would have been happening in October and thats a fact.

But Jan Tinetti, Labour list MP for Tauranga, suggests we shouldnt listen to the opposition trying to make political capital out of SH2.

If the opposition was government they could only be doing what were doing. They couldnt do any more than what we are doing. We cant make decisions, we can only advocate for them.

One of the issues, she says, is when a new government comes in theres a new transport policy statement which gives NZTA direction on where it should apply its budget.

However the NZTA spend is quite independent from government. The Minister cant dictate where the money will be spent. Its like Pharmac  its a world renowned and proven system  they can take the governments goals and align them with projects.

It prevents pork barrel politics where spending benefits the constituents of a politician in return for political support. However its understandable some people dont see the bigger picture where some areas have a greater need like ours.

Jan says what is working is the governments number one priority on its transport policy statement is safety. So we have a good case for progress on SH2. Specific roads cant be a priority on the policy statement, but safety can.

The government last month confirmed immediate safety upgrades on SH2 between Waihi and Tauranga over the next five years, including $65 million for the SH2 Waihi to Omokoroa Safer Corridor project.

NZTA says safety along the existing state highway remains a top priority but a decision on further work is about four months away.

We are carefully reviewing plans to evaluate whether it aligns with the new vision for our transport network, according to NZTAs Parekawhia McLean.

Its very important work. Were not just looking at tweaks but are going back to first principles to establish what is the right way forward for these corridors.

The re-evaluation process for the safety work will also consider what else could be done to improve journeys along SH2, such as speed limit reductions and active speed warning signs.

Jan has her own suggestion. For a while, when we had similar issues on SH29 over the Kaimai Range, there was an increased presence of police and it had an immediate effect. Thats another discussion. Anything that will make SH2 safer I will ask for.

Jan also salutes people getting out and protesting. Because she has been there herself. Often thats how we get change in New Zealand  average people standing up and saying this is not okay.

See Wednesdays discussion on the TNL in Parliament here:
The Cheyenne County Chamber of Commerce Ambassadors welcomes The Growcery to the business community. Owner Jeanne Ogden cuts the ribbon during Tuesday's ceremony. The business offers fresh vegetables grown in a hydroponic grow tower, harvested as needed from the source. Ogden is also offering monthly memberships and renting a tower so a customer can grow his or her own vegetables. The Growercy, at 920 Tenth Ave., is open 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. Monday through Friday, and 8 a.m. to noon on Saturdays.
SIDNEY  The High Plains Arts Council (HPAC) recently announced it has been awarded a $5,096 grant from the Nebraska Arts Council to support the 2018-2019 season.

The High Plains Arts Council contributes a great deal to advancement of the arts in Sidney, said Nebraska Arts Council executive director Suzanne Wise. The Nebraska Arts Council (NAC), a a state agency, provides grants, services and special initiatives that help sustain and promote the arts throughout Nebraska. NAC is supported by the Nebraska Cultural Endowment, Nebraska Legislature and National Endowment for the Arts.

...
From the second such action in as many years, a large group of graphics professionals are uncertain of their future following a Wednesday afternoon announcement that Quad/Graphics would be closing its Sidney operation.

The announcement was another shock for many of the people working for the company, a good share of them who joined Quad/Graphics after Cabela's shut down its graphics operations early in 2016. That action was taken as Cabela's was working to streamline its operation, which was under corporate attack by Elliott Management.

To trim its overhead, Cabela's at the time entered int...
ITHACA, N.Y. -- The CEO at the Ithaca company slapped with a civil rights lawsuit this week said he fired the plant manager whose racism and sexism federal officials claimed ran rampant.

Porous Materials, Inc. CEO and founder Krishna Gupta said he was away in Europe for the entire period of time when the plant manager was allegedly sexually harassing female employees, openly using the N-word and telling immigrants to go back to their native countries.

The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is suing Gupta's company over the manager's alleged "ugly mix of sexism, racism and xenophobia."

According to the lawsuit, Gupta mishandled reports of the manager's behavior and fired a black female employee who complained. The EEOC says the owner and CEO used sexist, misogynistic language himself.

Gupta denied ever saying anything derogatory toward his employees. He said he fired the plant manager as soon as he became aware of the allegations. He said the female employee who complained was fired for poor performance.

An EEOC lawyer said she could not comment on the specifics of the investigation into Porous Materials, but stood by the claims raised in the lawsuit.

Attorney Nora Curtin said the company did not take immediate steps to protect its employees from "egregious harassment." Multiple employees were "subjected to a hostile work environment," she said, including directly by the CEO himself.

Plant manager fired

According to the EEOC lawsuit, the unnamed plant manager called female employees "b----es" and foreign-born employees "terrorists." The lawsuit claims:

He barred immigrant employees from speaking in their native languages and complained he was sick of immigrants stealing American jobs.

He commented on women's menstrual cycles, told women they could not perform "a man's job" and should only speak when spoken to, and invited a woman to "come over here and sexually harass me."

The incident that led to the EEOC investigation involved a black female employee who was born in France, according to the lawsuit. She was the only black employee at the time, the EEOC said.

According to the lawsuit, when the plant manager saw a photograph of the woman's husband, he said her husband "should have a rope put around his neck and be dragged through a cotton field." The woman complained, and he told her to drink Kool-Aid to calm down. He accused her of racism and said her face was "too mean."

The woman was subsequently fired.

But Gupta, the CEO, says he never once heard the plant manager be inappropriate. When he became aware of the complaints and the EEOC investigation, he fired the man, he said.

"I have no idea," as to the veracity of the complaints, Gupta said. "Even if they were true -- it's like a he said, she said. I have no way to say what is true."

Gupta said the plant manager was a former technician who he promoted based on good performance. Gupta said he felt the manager ran the plant well for about two to four months.

"Then I had to let him go because of this thing," Gupta said. "He was here for only a short time."

A job offer for complainant

According to Gupta, the woman who complained about the manager was not fired in retaliation, but because of poor job performance.

Yet, Gupta said she can have her job back if she can prove she is qualified.

"The reason she was fired? She was the worst employee I've ever had," Gupta said. "I'm more than willing to give her the job if she can do -- if she can prove even if she can do 10 percent of her job. I don't understand if she lied on her resume or what. It caused a lot of financial stress, by the way. I was not able to ship my products."

EEOC lawyer Curtin said the woman was performing well throughout her employment.

Gupta said he was not personally involved in her hiring but believes she lied on her resume. He said she was only at the company three to four months. He complained that she didn't know how to use simple machinery.

Personal accusations

According to the lawsuit, the sexism and inappropriate treatment of employees didn't stop with the floor manager: The lawsuit accuses Gupta personally, too.

It states: "The company owner, rather than putting a stop to this, behaved similarly: he called female employees 'dumb women,' complained that 'these women can't do anything,' and told a woman she would not be getting a raise because of her sex."

Gupta denies ever using derogatory language toward women or anyone.

"That's not true. That's a laughable statement. You can ask anybody," he said. He then cited as evidence his past hiring practices: four of 20 employees working for the company are women, and one woman has worked for him for 20 years, he said.

"I have not used any derogatory word even ever, to anybody," he said. "I don't even know how to say a bad word. In this country every time you hear -- I don't even know how it's allowed. I've been brought up to not say anything ever."

He denied ever deciding on a raise or promotion based on anything other than performance.

"I do not discriminate on any basis," he said. "The only thing I discriminate against is performance."

Gupta complained about the EEOC's handling of the case. He said he never talked directly to anyone from the EEOC.

He said he believed the EEOC tried unsuccessfully to contact his human resources manager, who he fired during the investigation for reasons unrelated to the case.

He said he isn't aware of any other employees the EEOC interviewed and said investigators never came to visit the plant when he was present.

He said he did see something in writing from the EEOC, gave it to his lawyer, and forgot about it. He acknowledged that his lawyer was in contact with the EEOC, but did not provide the name of his lawyer.

"Why was I not interviewed? They could have called me on the phone, sent an email... They decided on this whole thing without even talking to me."

EEOC lawyer Curtin said her ethical obligations as an attorney prevented her from discussing specific communications with the company.

She said the EEOC is required by statue to communicate with the company at certain stages of the investigation, including a "conciliation" period when they attempt to reach a resolution out of court.

"I can assure you that we did comply with all our responsibilities," Curtin said. "All I can tell you is he certainly had notice of the allegations, the investigation we conducted."

According to the lawsuit, most of the behavior alleged took place in the open, within earshot of a human resources manager.

"The conduct and the comments were outrageous," Curtin said. "There were racial comments. There were mysognistic comments, sexual harassment, anti-immigration comments made. As you can see from our complaint, we found that there were other women and other employees born outside the U.S. who were subjected to a hostile work environment."

Still, Gupta insists it would be impossible for him to know everything that goes on in the plant.

"I'm not even there," he said. "I wasn't in the country."

Public Affairs Reporter Julie McMahon covers courts, government and other issues affecting taxpayers. She can be reached anytime: Email | Twitter | 315-412-1992
WASHINGTON -- The U.S. Senate has approved spending $324.6 million for the Army to buy radars from Lockheed Martin's plant in suburban Syracuse that track incoming rocket, mortar and artillery fire.

The money was included in the Senate Defense Appropriations bill for the Army's fiscal 2019 budget, according to U.S. Sen. Charles Schumer, who pushed for its passage.

The House is expected to take up the bill next week before the end of the fiscal year on Sept. 30. Rep. John Katko, R-Camillus, has been advocating for the radar acquisition in the House bill.

The approval from Congress would set in motion the single largest contract in the history of Lockheed Martin's plant at Electronics Park in Salina.

The Army last year awarded Lockheed Martin a five-year contract worth up to $1.58 billion for production of its Q-53 radar.

The contract will allow Lockheed to begin full production of 127 radar systems, including 50 to "satisfy evolving foreign military sales and/or U.S. requirements," according to Schumer's office.

The truck-mounted mobile radar systems can detect enemy fire from any direction, predict where an incoming round will strike and indicate where the round originated. The Army has used the radars in battle in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Q-53 radars are manufactured at four Lockheed plants, and shipped for final assembly to the Lockheed plant in Salina.

Lockheed employs about 1,600 people in Salina. The company said the radar contract will help maintain the existing workforce. Lockheed has about 100 job openings at the local plant.

Contact Mark Weiner: Email | Twitter | Facebook | 571-970-3751
DEWITT, NY - DeWitt Police Chief John Anton said law enforcement agencies worked together immediately following the Chili's double homicide Saturday to help break the case and arrest five suspects.

He also said first responders played a large role and arrived at the scene within minutes to treat the surviving gunshot victim, who they tried valiantly to save, Anton said.

Kris Hicks, 29, and Stephen Gudknecht, 37, both died after they were shot in the restaurant.

William Wood Jr., 32, of Syracuse, was charged with two counts of first-degree murder and one count of first-degree robbery in connection with the deaths of Gudknecht and Hicks. Four others have been charged as accomplices.

Anton credited these people and agencies with breaking the case and aiding police:
DEWITT, NY - Just 24 hours after two Chili's restaurant workers were shot and killed, DeWitt police had located, arrested and charged a man with killing them.

William Wood Jr., 32, was charged Sunday morning with two counts of first-degree murder and one count of first-degree robbery. If convicted, he faces life in prison without parole.

Police say Wood killed Kris Hicks, 29, and Stephen Gudknecht, 37, shortly after 1 a.m. Saturday in the Erie Boulevard East restaurant during a robbery. Police said they believe he planned to kill all four workers in the restaurant but his gun jammed and two survived.

In the next two days, police also charged four other people for their roles in the double homicide - providing the gun, driving the getaway car and hindering the investigation.

How did DeWitt police - with the assistance of numerous other police agencies - put the pieces together and arrest the main suspect and his alleged accomplices so fast?

DeWitt Police Chief John Anton sat down with Syracuse.com | The Post-Standard Thursday to give the public a look into how investigators broke the case.

Immediately after the two men were killed in the restaurant, two Chili's workers who survived told police they believed the killer was Wood, a former worker at the restaurant.

Although Wood wore some type of mask, they told officers they recognized his voice and mannerisms, Anton said. Wood also called the workers by their first names, he said.

Stephen Gudknecht, left, and Kristopher Hicks were shot to death during a robbery early Saturday, Sept. 15, 2018, at Chili's in DeWitt.

With that information, police put out an APB (all points bulletin) on Wood to agencies, and released a description to the public, noting that he was armed and dangerous.

Anton said he was worried. As far as they knew, Wood had taken off on foot, still had a gun and no one knew where he was. Anton said he was afraid Wood would shoot any police officer - or someone from the public - who confronted him. They needed to find him quickly, he said.

More than 100 tips came in from the public - and with some of those police were able to figure out Wood had a getaway driver, Anton said. The Onondaga County Sheriff's Office Air One helicopter searched for Wood that night, with no luck.

Because it was the middle of the night and businesses along East Genesee Street and Erie Boulevard East were closed, police couldn't immediately get security camera images. The restaurant did not have cameras.

Instead, "with some triangulation work," police were able to track Wood's cell phone calls to others along with social media posts, and narrow his possible location down to two residences he was known to frequent, Anton said.

On Sunday, Anton said they executed two search warrants simultaneously - one in the city of Syracuse with the assistance of the Syracuse Police Department's SWAT team, and one in Fulton, with the New York State Police's SORT (Special Operations Response Team.)

"Lo and behold, the suspect was taken into custody at the Fulton address,'' he said.

Wood was found right in the main part of the house, and did not resist arrest, Anton said. There were probably four to five other people in the house that for some reason didn't alert police to Woods' presence, he said.

On Monday morning, investigators from DeWitt and the State Police began getting surveillance video from a host of businesses along East Genesee Street and Erie Boulevard East, Anton said.

They were able to find the car in the videos and get the license plate number. "It really started ramping up then,'' Anton said.

Investigators determined that after the crime was committed, Wood walked to a nearby parking lot and got into a getaway car, Anton said. They later determined the driver was Ronald Green, police said.

Green and Wood drove around Syracuse to a couple addresses, and at one point picked up Ryan Brown and they all headed to Fulton, Anton said.

That led them to Brown's mother, Tracey, and the other suspects, Anton said.

Five people have been charged in connection with a robbery and double homicide at Chili's in DeWitt on Saturday, Sept. 15, 2018. Top row, from left to right: William Wood Jr., accused shooter; Tracey Brown, accused of giving Wood the gun used in the shooting; and Ronald Green Jr., accused getaway driver. Bottom row, from left to right: Jerome C. Pinkard, accused of giving Brown the murder weapon; and Ryan Brown, accused of hindering prosecution.

Since Wood's arrest, four other people have been charged in connection with the crime:

Green,

Tracey L. Brown,

Ryan J. Brown,

Jerome C. Pinkard,

The police chief said the two surviving workers ability to identify Wood was a key to the police investigation

"...without the witnesses' help in identifying him, it would have been weeks or a month before we could have tracked him down," he said.

The police chief also credits numerous law enforcement agencies in the area for coming together and working cooperatively to catch the perpetrators.

"I hope we have given some closure to the families of Kris and Steve, and to the Chili's employees and staff, and to the public,'' Anton said.
SYRACUSE, N.Y. -- A local letterpress company continues to push the envelope, literally, in the wedding stationery and greeting card industry.

Boxcar Press will celebrate its 20th anniversary next month, on Oct. 21, 2018.

The Syracuse company manufactures high-end wedding invitations, bar/bat mitzvah announcements, birthday cards and more.

Boxcar has kept up with ever-changing stationery trends by using a mix of traditional letterpress and foil techniques, along with digital printing. Orders are placed online or through dealers, personalized and then shipped to customers around the world.

A variety of letterpress products by Smock Paper, the eco-stationery line of Boxcar Press in Syracuse. (Katrina Tulloch | ktulloch@syracuse.com)

Marketing manager Elizabeth McGuire says entering the press room "feels like going back in time."

Boxcar Press uses 15 Heidelberg Windmill presses, along with Heidelberg Cylinders, Vandercooks and Brandtjen & Kluge stamping presses for foil printing.

The Heidelberg Windmills date back to the 1960s and are no longer in production.

After the rise of digital correspondence, many letterpresses were sold off for spare parts, said Boxcar Press customer service manager Cathy Smith.

Saving and using old presses fits squarely with the company's mission to be environmentally responsible.

"We recycle as much as we possibly can," Smith said.

Boxcar Press has 90 employees and every printer has an individual station and press. They rotate printing, die-cutting, quality control and finishing duties.

Carrie Valenzuela, a Boxcar Press printer for 11 years, says she loves the tactile, precise quality of the work.

"I've always been a 'paper person,'" said Valenzuela. "When I get an email, I file it away. When I get a postcard in the mail, or beautiful letterpress...that sticks around. I put that on my bulletin board. I want to see it all the time."

She calls each printing press "an individual."

"It's like driving a car or riding a horse," Valenzuela said. "They [the presses] all have different quirks. I'm never bored, that's for sure...and of course I love working with my hands."

Prices for stationery packages can range from a few hundred dollars to several thousand dollars, depending on the customer's choices of color, paper, foil and designs.

Smock Paper, Boxcar's eco-friendly stationery line, specializes in gift wrap and playful invitation styles.

Bella Figura, the sister company of Boxcar Press, will open its second location in Brooklyn this fall. Its flagship store is located at 1031 Lexington Ave. in New York City.

Boxcar Press headquarters remain in Syracuse.

Upcoming events at Boxcar Press

509 West Fayette St., Studio 135

Teacher Paper Giveaway: Tuesday, October 16 from 3:30 to 4:30 p.m.

Open Studio: Friday, Nov. 9 from 5-8 p.m. and Saturday, Nov. 10 from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. This event features letterpress printing demonstrations with free takeaways, shop tours and refreshments.

Katrina Tulloch shoots videos and writes culture stories for Syracuse.com and The Post-Standard. Contact her: Email | Twitter | 518-810-5022
Schweinfurth Art Center is offering free admission to people holding downloadable free tickets on Saturday, Sept. 22, 2018, as part of the national Smithsonian Magazine Museum Day program.

The event draws hundreds of museums across the country, including nine in Central New York, to emulate the free admission policy at the Smithsonian Institution's Washington, DC-based museums.

"We are happy to participate in this program as part of our commitment to access, equity, and inclusion," said Schweinfurth Executive Director Donna Lamb. "We are constantly seeking ways to open the art center to the community."

This year's theme is Women Making History, which works well with the main exhibit at the Schweinfurth: Maya Textiles and Identity in Guatemala. The exhibit highlights the hand-woven textiles of different Guatemalan pueblos - mainly by women - and how they illustrate indigenous identity on various cultural and social levels.

Visitors who present a Museum Day ticket at the Schweinfurth will receive free admission for two on Sept. 22. Normal art center admission is $7 per person, with members and children 12 and under free. Download your ticket at

. Only one ticket is allowed per email address.

Last year, more than 250,000 people downloaded tickets, and Smithsonian expects more participants this year.
SYRACUSE, N.Y. -- Mayor Ben Walsh wants to talk about how we remember Christopher Columbus in Syracuse.

Walsh partnered recently with the non-for-profit InterFaith Works to convene a series of "dialog circles" about Columbus remembrance. City Hall and Interfaith will issue a joint report detailing the recommendations of those discussions next year.

Nationwide, communities have wrestled with how to celebrate Columbus, the Italian explorer who crossed the Atlantic and landed on several islands in the Caribbean in the 15th century. Columbus is typically credited with discovering America, though he never set foot on the American mainland.

In his exploits, Columbus enslaved indigenous people he encountered and punished disobedience with violence and death. His legacy has proven divisive as many communities reconsider whether he should be memorialized with statues and a holiday.

Beth Broadway, executive director of InterFaith, said Walsh reached out to her agency earlier this year and asked them to lead the conversations about Columbus. So far, no action or changes have been proposed. The conversations are an effort to inform any future decision about Columbus Day.

"In many cities and states where Columbus recognition is part of the public discourse, the decision-making has been bitter and divisive," Broadway said. "Columbus discussions have devolved into frustration, an us versus them mentality, winners and losers, and deeper divides and hurt within the communities. Mayor Walsh reached out to us earlier this year and asked InterFaith Works to help guide the conversation in Syracuse so that, through this deliberative dialogue, better decision-making can result."

In some cities, officials have replaced Columbus Day with other celebrations. In Los Angeles, for example, lawmakers voted last year to observe the second Monday in October as Indigenous Peoples Day. Oct. 12 was designated Italian American Heritage Day.

In Syracuse, a statue of Columbus towers over the public square in front of the old Onondaga County Courthouse. Beneath Columbus' feet are busts of Native Americans. That statue was erected in 1934 after a quarter-century of lobbying by local Italian-Americans.

The statue has been the site of protests in recent years. Last fall, members of the Onondaga Nation rallied in front of the statue and created a petition requesting Columbus Day be renamed Indigenous Peoples Day.

The Syracuse school board last year also considered a proposal to replace Columbus Day with Indigenous Peoples Day. After strong pushback from the community, the board scrapped the idea.

The purpose of the dialog circles is to engage people in a respectful, open discussion about the issue.

"Columbus recognition in Syracuse and across the country is all around us, from a government holiday and community observances to history books and local monuments," Walsh said. "With the help and experience of InterFaith Works, I'm hopeful we can come to a better understanding of each other's interests and concerns and find common ground to go forth together. This isn't a conversation we can conclude for this year's holiday, but we can get the process started."

The first dialog circle will convene after Columbus Day, which is Oct. 8 this year. Broadway said 30 people were invited and she expects 12 to 15 to participate. There will be additional circles held throughout the winter and spring.

Interfaith is a non-for-profit that promotes understanding among people of different beliefs. The agency has spent several years leading police-community dialogues to improve the relationship between cops and residents. More than 200 people have participated in those conversations.

The program is funded by private donations.
SYRACUSE, N.Y. - Two Onondaga County residents are recovering from West Nile virus, the first reported human cases in the county this year.

The county health department announced today two adults with the potentially deadly mosquito-borne infection were hospitalized earlier this month, discharged in stable condition and are recovering at home. The department did not identify the individuals or disclose where in the county they live.

The virus is spread by mosquitoes. The county has found many mosquitoes infected with West Nile in traps this summer. The first evidence of West Nile was found in July in mosquito traps in Onondaga Lake Park and Belle Isle Road in Geddes.

Twelve other human cases of West Nile virus have been reported this year in New York City, Albany, Rensselaer, Westchester and Suffolk counties.

Most people infected with West Nile do not develop any symptoms. People who get sick usually show symptoms three to 15 days after being bitten by an infected mosquito. People with mild cases may have a fever, headache, body ache, skin rash or swollen glands. People with severe cases have a sudden onset of headache, high fever, stiff neck, muscle weakness and altered mental status.

People over 60 and individuals with cancer, diabetes and other medical conditions are at higher risk of developing symptoms.

Onondaga County's first reported West Nile death, involving a 91-year-old Syracuse man, occurred in 2012.

The symptoms are very similar to those experienced by people with Eastern equine encephalitis, another mosquito-borne disease. But EEE is much more serious and more likely to result in death. There have been seven reported EEE deaths in Onondaga and Oswego counties since 1971.

There is no human vaccine available for either West Nile or EEE.

Dr. Indu Gupta, the county's health commissioner, said people need to continue protecting themselves from mosquito bites even though the mosquito population dwindles time of the year.

Here's how to protect yourself from mosquito bites:

Cover up: Mosquitoes are most likely to bite at dusk and dawn. If you spend time outdoors during these hours, wear long pants, a long-sleeved shirt, shoes and socks. Spray clothing and shoes with products containing permethrin.



Use repellent: Repellents containing DEET, Picaridin, IR3535 and some oil of lemon eucalyptus and para-menthane-diol products provide longer-lasting protection. Do not allow children to handle repellent. Use just enough to cover exposed skin. Do not spray repellent directly on your face, especially near the eyes or mouth. Apply repellent sparingly near the ears. After returning indoors, wash skin with soap and water.

Get rid of water: Mosquitoes breed in water. Get rid of any standing water around your home.

Contact James T. Mulder anytime: Email | Twitter | 315-470-2245
To the Editor:



The TV and airwaves are alive with the Judge Brett Kavanaugh story ("Brett Kavanaugh's accuser wants FBI probe before she testifies at hearing," Sept. 19, 2018). My reading of this story is as follows based on what I have heard on the TV and newspapers.



The event was supposed to have occurred approximately 35 years ago .



The accuser apparently is not really sure when or where the event occurred.



Sen. Dianne Feinstein received her letter from the accuser sometime in July, but never mentioned its contents until last week.



The accuser is resisting a confrontation with Senate Judiciary Committee and is setting her own conditions.



There are no credible witnesses to the supposed event.



The same senators who refused to hear evidence against Bill Clinton are pushing for delay of the confirmation.



The American people are not as stupid as the Democrats pushing this farce.



Robert J. Jones

Cleveland
Democratic congressional candidate Dana Balter says Rep. John Katko's campaign ads falsely portray her as a Connecticut college professor visiting Syracuse, while denigrating "the very idea of education."

Balter called Katko's TV ads that began airing this summer an example of "underhanded politics" intended to define her as an outsider who doesn't understand Central New Yorkers.

"He is trying to imply that I showed up yesterday, but it has no bearing on reality," Balter said Wednesday at an editorial board meeting of Syracuse.com and The Post-Standard.

"It's sad to me to see a man, who asks to be thought of as a leader, so actively engaged in rhetoric that is designed to minimize a woman who had the audacity to stand up to him and criticize him for not living up to his promises," Balter said.

A Katko campaign ad that began airing Aug. 21 on Syracuse TV stations begins with the voice of a woman who says, "Meet Dana Balter: The visiting assistant professor from Connecticut running for Congress. What would visiting professor Balter do to CNY families?"

The theme continued in the latest Katko TV ad, which began airing last week.

"Another lecture from Connecticut's Visiting Assistant Professor Dana Balter," an announcer says in the beginning of the ad. "This time, on how we will pay for her radical government takeover of healthcare."

Balter said she found the latest ad especially offensive and misleading.

"The first sentence of the ad mocks the position of professor and the very idea of education, and I think that is a horrible thing for someone who wants to be a leader in our community to do," she said of Katko.

Balter, who teaches at Syracuse University's Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, said the truth is that she is a full-time resident of Syracuse who co-owns a home with her mother on Lorraine Avenue.

"Visiting professor" is a job title used in academia for professors on short-term contracts who don't have tenure. Years ago, the title used to be reserved for distinguished professors visiting from other colleges and universities.

"I am not a Central New Yorker by accident of birth," Balter told the editorial board. "I chose to make this my home. I first moved to Syracuse in 2003. I fell in love with it here. I love the people of Central New York, I love the nature, I love the history of this place. I even love the winters here."

Balter said she lived in Syracuse from 2003 to 2007 and returned in 2012 after recovering from a severe concussion suffered when she fell after donating blood at a Red Cross event.

Asked what message she thought Katko was trying to send voters in the ads, Balter said: "The whole tone of the ad, it's derision. It is, 'She's just an assistant visiting professor.' It's actually sad to me to see somebody denigrate education, which is something that we should be working really hard to make sure is accessible to every child in this country."

Katko, R-Camillus, is seeking his third term representing the 24th Congressional District. The district covers all of Onondaga, Cayuga and Wayne counties, and the western half of Oswego County.

In his first campaign for Congress in 2014, the former federal prosecutor criticized former Rep. Dan Maffei for owning houses in both Syracuse and Alexandria, Va., a suburb of Washington, D.C.

Katko suggested throughout the campaign that Maffei had become a D.C. insider.

Balter said most voters that she meets understand that the ads portraying her as a visitor from Connecticut are misleading.

"Based on the response I get across the district, it's clear to me that people see through it and they understand what really matters," Balter said. "They are sick of underhanded politics as usual, and unfortunately that is what John Katko is giving them."

Contact Mark Weiner: Email | Twitter | Facebook | 571-970-3751
West Bradford Township, Pa. -- A Pennsylvania man shot at his ex-wife and then drove to a retirement community and killed his parents on Wednesday, authorities said.



Bruce Rogal, 59, died several hours later after a police chase.



The incident began Wednesday when Rogal's divorce from his wife was finalized, according to CNN. She was awarded the home they previously shared in West Bradford Township, outside Philadelphia.



Rogal drove to the home and shot at his ex-wife as she changed the oil in a car in the driveway, authorities said, according to CNN. The woman was not injured.



He then drove to the retirement community in East Goshen Township where his parents lived and shot them to death.



He fled the scene and led police on a chase, according to ABC 6 in Philadelphia. The chase ended when Rogal crashed his van into the side of the house where he had shot at his ex-wife, CNN said.



The woman was not at the home when the crash occurred.



"After he crashed into the house, a gunfire exchange happened with the pursuing troopers that were already on the scene following him," Pennsylvania State Trooper James Spencer said, according to ABC 6.



Police removed Rogal from his car and provided first aid after the gunfire, but he was pronounced dead at the scene, ABC 6 said. No one else was injured after the crash.



Rogal's divorce apparently set him off, District Attorney Tom Hogan said, according to Fox 29 in Philadelphia.



During the incident at his former home, Rogal fired six shots at his wife and although the bullets missed her, some did hit nearby homes.



Schools throughout the area were placed on lockdown after the shootings.

Contact Kevin Tampone anytime: Email | Twitter | Google + | 315-282-8598
At 22, I have had the privilege of having being raised with one foot in reality, the other in the fiction of social media. The monopoly on communication Facebook holds today hadnt fully set in during the years that shaped my pre-adolescent self. By 2014, it certainly had, and only now are traditional media outlets and legislators noticing and anxiously catching up in their fashionably late style. Legislators have realised that monopolies such as Facebook just might have an impact on political discourse and the outcome of democratic elections, notably after the internet allegedly created Donald Trump in 2016. Trump does not concern me. What does concern me is that well-meaning governments in the Anglosphere now feel justified in combatting the rise of those like him in a manner echoing more totalitarian approaches toward the Internet. Is our own trepidation silently ushering in the end of the internet, much as the Y2K millennium bug of 2000 was supposed to?

In the United Kingdom for example, Labour MP Lucy Powell put forward a motion for consideration of a bill banning private Facebook groups, something she considers a conduit to the rise of the far right, a recurring theme in the governments recent attempts to catch up with the potential for online political discourse. Across the channel, the European Parliament voted in favour of the Copyright Directive on September 12th, an act which even World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee claims could lead to the death of the internet by severely impeding the free flow of information. We should not forget that following the September 11th attacks of 2001 public appetite for a war on terror allowed organisations such as the American NSA and British GCHQ to carry out mass online-surveillance on the global public. An equally voracious appetite for a war on the so-called far right has the potential to further strip us of our civil liberties. We later regretted this the first time around, so it is certainly something of which we must remain mindful.

If one wishes to look for early examples of censorship of political extremes in action, one need not look further than Russia. In 2012, Russia introduced a single register which censored IPs, URLs, and Domain names which fell under into the Federal list of Extremist Activities. This is also a good example of political censorship gone awry; the list has been frequently abused to suppress alternative ideas, online representation of the LGBT community, and of course, outspoken criticism of the federal or local government (according to NGO Freedom House). China was 10 years ahead of its time in taking broad-brush moves against the political dangers of the internet like those suggested by Lucy Powell. The nation did not stop at private Facebook groups: it outright blocked Facebook nationally in 2009. This was a time before citizens in the Anglosphere were taking social media breaks or even knew how to pronounce meme, let alone suggest such things may well be responsible for electing president Trump.

So just why exactly are we attempting to emulate these illiberal schemes in the name of appearing woke to the threat of the right? Are governments in the Anglosphere remorseful for being on the wrong side of the Berlin Firewall? The European Union appears to be. Article 13 of its recently amended Copyright Directive effectively requires that all data uploaded to sites such as YouTube, Facebook, or Twitter in compliant countries must be scanned to stop users from sharing unlicensed copyrighted material, a notably Soviet approach to appeasing capitalistic license holders. Not only is this an incredible burden for smaller platforms and sites who lack the revenue to carry out this monumental task, but more worryingly, a mechanism easily applied to widespread censorship. Machine learning has already proved that highly specific information can be detected en masse when it comes to music licensed by WMG or Sony; compared to this, alleged incidences of political dissent or retroactively-identified hate speech from over ten years ago are easy pickings.

Article 11, on the other hand appears at first to be an example of beneficial policing of the internet. It attempts to hold the Mark Zuckerbergs of the world economically accountable, encouraging them to pay their way in the countries their service operates in. While this sounds appealing, Article 11 is effectively a compromise to the taxation deadlock the E.U. and Silicon Valley have been in for some years now. The rationale behind what critics have called the link tax is that if sites like Facebook wish to continue to avoid greater taxation in E.U. countries they must subsidise and distribute approved regional news-outlets as a preferable alternative. When looking at Articles 13 and 11 together, it appears the E.U. is not only diminishing the potential for the individual to express ideas, but is also effectively propping up floundering sources of information in a second-rate attempt to challenge Silicon Valleys unyielding monopoly on the online world.

While the E.U. attempts to champion an establishment comprised of copyright license holders and print-media to spite the online world, Labour MP Lucy Powell, writing in the Guardian, suggests that the ability for individuals to peacefully assemble online is the real problem. Powell states that private Facebook groups are online echo chambers are normalising and allowing extremist views to go viral unchallenged while in the real world, such extremist views would be challenged. Indeed, extremist views are challenged all the time, both online and not, by people like Powell and by many others; the question is, is this the role of the state, or the services on which these debates occur?

Powells belief that private Facebook groups contain dangerous elements is not only state-interventionist, but reminiscent of Blair and Bushs steadfast belief that Iraq contained weapons of mass destruction. The proposed bill cannot be justified on faith alone. In the spirit of Russia and Chinas approaches, Powell doesnt mean that radical views arent being challenged. What she means is that these views arent being punished. She may not say this in her Guardian piece, but her motion for consideration of the bill states that too few people have been prosecuted under the United Kingdoms Communications Act, which criminalises online hate speech. When the limits of a crime are as nebulously open to expansion as hate speech currently is, we must be cautious that such calls for prosecution of this order do not devolve into the prosecution of those merely uttering opinions that the government has officially declared hateful and off-limits.

Its not only governments who are weighing in on the problem of political pluralism online, but naturally, the sites themselves are too. In April 2018 the U.S. summoned Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to both the Senate and House for the sale of users data to third parties such as the (Trump ally) Steve Bannon-funded Cambridge Analytica; this, as is argued, made Facebook complicit in swinging an election. It isnt a new phenomenon however, but it only gained attention once its consequences pertained to the far right. A series of tweets by Carol Davidsen, director of media analytics for Obama for America in 2012, revealed that Facebook had done this previously, allowing the pro-Democrat organisation to suck out the whole social graph in order to add users to email chains. Davidsen even admitted that [Facebook] came to office in the days following election recruiting & were very candid that they allowed us to do things they wouldnt have allowed someone else to do because they were on our side.

It appears Facebook is relatively unconcerned with your use of their private groups, unless that group happens to contain a large enough number of people who enjoy a particular thing. After all, Facebooks business model is, and long has been, to harvest data on personal habits and sell it to advertisers; it is little wonder that political campaigns use this in the same manner as, for example, detergent companies, but with far greater consequences. While the focus here is on the CEOs who attempt to stick close to the ruling party, the issue remains the same: liberal-minded nation states are anxious to control the genie that is social media, and it has long escaped their bottle.

After almost 30 years of its existence, we are still adjusting to the nature of public discourse on the world wide web. The knee-jerk reaction of nation-states in the last ten years has been to strip the web of its world-wide status wherever possible, and then nationally control the information that is available. It is only now that we face not only limitation but the threat of punishment. Perhaps this will be the real Y2K: the internet, in its accessible form, is certainly due to shrink on account of the Copyright Directive if, as is likely, it passes a final vote in January 2019. To my mind, it is the right of everyone in an audience to listen and hear, should they want to. Upon silencing someone, you are denying yourself the right to hear something, perhaps this is something the West is forgetting. In all these cases, your right to be exposed to information is as much involved as is the right of the other to express their perhaps outrageous or appalling views. In the past, we have been complicit in eroding our civil liberties in the name of preventing terrorism following 9/11, and have regretted it. Once again, we are zealously repeating this pattern in an attempt to stop far-right threats, but, once again, we are unlikely to find any recognisable weapons of mass destruction other than, perhaps, the odd meme whose punchline didnt land.
Why it matters: Venture capitalists are throwing money at code repository companies like GitLab, after Microsoft's GitHub acquisition, as GitHub developers look for alternatives.

Recent events have seen GitLab, an underdog in the code repository war, acquire financing to the tune of $100 million, most of which from the company who manages Mark Zuckerberg's monies, Iconiq Capital. The firm now stands at a valuation of $1.1 billion, which is nothing to sneeze at. It also shores up GitLab's chances against Microsoft and its acquisition of much-larger rival GitHub. GitLab, like GitHub, offers a Git-based software development tool where developers store, share, collaborate and discuss their code development.

While $100 million is a good day for GitLab, the event is symptomatic of the newest trend in the wonderful world of software development. The code repository business has become Silicon Valley's hot ticket item in the months since Microsoft announced it would buy GitHub, and its 28-million developer base, in a stock-for-stock exchange valued at $7.5 billion.

Unfortunately, this also caused some backlash. Microsoft, due to its back history in open source development, colorful former executives (such as Steve Ballmer, who once dubbed open source as "a cancer") and corporate mindset, cuts against the grain of GitHub, despite the company being one of the repository's biggest contributors. Some developers have been quite vocal about their resistance to Microsoft, while Microsoft-appointed leadership even took to a reddit AMA to placate developers.

GitHub and its 28 million-strong developer base have been in a waiting pattern since the Microsoft announcement, and the developer community, which feels the deal goes against the spirit of open-source, have been slowly but steadily leaving and joining the competition - one of such being GitLab. The remaining developers on GitHub are anxious to understand what will happen to their projects. Their worst fear: that Microsoft will be allowed to gain insight on their code, which would result in an unfair advantage for the software giant. If a mass exodus ever occurs, GitLab could be the next big code repository, and investors' capital could be multiplied many times over.

The fact is, GitHub holds such sway over the business, right now, that the sheer volume of code and size of its user base has the EU Antitrust regulators looking at the deal. The EU regulators are expected to deliberate on the matter precisely a month from today. If the deal raises any eyebrows, an investigation may be ordered and the deal stalled.

Coming back to GitLab, shortly after the funding was completed, the company announced a recruitment drive, seeking out 10 new frontend developers to bolster its 350-strong team.

We are announcing @gitlab a $100 million investment @ 1 Billion Valuation in a Series D round funding led by ICONiQ Capital https://t.co/s5qJZ1ZvwD . Yes we are #hiring for #remote positions including #Frontend ! #waymoretocome #soomuchmoretobuild #partofafantasticteam  Tim Zallmann (@tpmtim) September 19, 2018
In brief: With the US/China trade war now in full swing, were starting to see more repercussions. Jack Ma, the founder and chairman of Chinese tech giant Alibaba, says the ongoing conflict means his company is no longer able to honor a pledge to create one million American jobs.

Speaking to Chinese publication Xinhua, Ma said his promise to create the jobs was made under the assumption that the US and China would continue to have a friendly partnership and rational trade relations.

The current situation has already ruined that. There is no way to complete the promise now, but we wont stop working hard to promote the healthy development of China-US trade, said Ma.

Ma first announced plans to create the US jobs during a meeting with Donald Trump in January 2017, before Trumps inauguration. Ma said Alibaba could create "1 million jobs over the next five years by enabling 1 million American small businesses and farmers to sell U.S. goods to China and Asian consumers on the Alibaba platform." But many analysts were skeptical.

On Monday, the Trump administration expanded tariffs on another $200 billion worth of Chinese imported goods. The 10 percent tariff is to be implemented by September 24, which will increase to 25 percent by the end of the year. On Tuesday, China hit back with tariffs on $60 billion worth of US goods.

Ma, who is set to retire as Alibaba chairman next year, said he expects the trade conflict to drag on for decades. Its going to last a long time, maybe 20 years. Its going to be a mess. Its not a trade war, its about competition between two countries.
Eleven men are pursuing sex abuse allegations in state court against a late St. Martin Parish priest, saying he used "alcohol and the power of God" to prey on them.

The plaintiffs initially filed their lawsuit last year in a Washington, D.C. district court, but the case was dismissed for lack of proper jurisdiction.

The claims against Kenneth Morvant span eight years, beginning in 1971. Plaintiffs claim Morvant preyed on them methodically, traumatizing them to the point they developed dissociative amnesia. They said they filed their initial lawsuit once they recovered their memories. They refiled it last week in the 16th Judicial District Court.

Morvant died in 2003. He is buried on the grounds of St. Martin de Tours Catholic Church, where he served as a priest 42 years.

One of the victims, Douglas Bienvenu, is named as a plaintiff, while the others are each identified as John Doe. The Lafayette Diocese and the St. Martin de Tours church are named as defendants.

Bienvenu told KATC last month he is upset that Morvant is buried on church grounds.

Hes buried here on a church that we trusted in that failed us. And its just not right, Bienvenu told KATC.

Bienvenu claims he was abused on at least 15 occasions over a two-year period, while he was age 8 and 9.

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The diocese said in a statement it would address the matter with full consideration of the facts and the duty to defend Fr. Morvants reputation as there have been no previous allegations involving him, adding that it would seek to have justice served regarding all parties involved.

The litigation requires that the diocese defend itself, and to protect the reputation of the priest, the statement says.

+8 Jesuit High sex abuse settlements kept quiet; 1 victim speaks out for first time Ricky Windmann wasnt nervous when he accompanied janitor Peter Modica to his ground-floor maintenance office at Jesuit High School on an othe

At the same time, the diocese continues to accept its commitment and responsibility to protect children to encourage anyone with information regarding abuse to report the matter to law enforcement authorities.

Most of the plaintiffs say Morvant abused them on multiple occasions, in some cases over several years. John Doe 8 claims Morvant abused him multiple times per month over a two-year period. Six plaintiffs say the abuse happened in the rectory.

The allegations, which vary in the level of detail, include physical touching, oral sex, sodomy and Morvant masturbating in front of the plaintiffs.

Morvant allegedly pursued his victims after choir practice, a youth dance and after one of the plaintiffs confirmation ceremony. In each case, the lawsuit says, the alleged abuse occurred after Morvant plied the victims with alcohol. John Doe 7 claims Morvant gave him tickets to purchase beer at the church bazaar when he was 14 years old.

John Doe 3 claims he was abused over a four-year period between his eighth-grade year and junior year of high school. At one point, Morvant allegedly told John Doe 3 that God put me here to serve people; God put you here to serve me, according to the lawsuit.
The rift among the factions on either side the Drag Queen Story Time controversy was laid bare this week, and it looks irreconcilable.

Drag queen reading event set to proceed at Lafayette library as board takes no action to stop it The Drag Queen Story Time event at the main branch of the Lafayette Public Library appears set to move forward, since the librarys board of c

For the moment, the event is set to proceed Oct. 6 at Lafayette Public Library's main branch, although opponents filed a federal lawsuit Tuesday to stop it. If nothing changes, a group of male University of Louisiana at Lafayette students dressed as women will read to children ages 3 to 6 for one hour on a Saturday afternoon.

The library board declined to place the item on its Monday meeting agenda or engage in any public discussion on it before allowing residents to comment. On Tuesday, the Lafayette City-Parish Council considered a resolution by Councilmen William Theriot and Jared Bellard to denounce the event, a symbolic gesture because the council does not have a say in library operations.

Lafayette library board president resigns amid controversy over drag queen event The Lafayette library board president submitted his resignation Monday as controversy continued over plans for male college students to read s

Councilwoman Nanette Cook voted with Theriot and Bellard, saying she felt the event was inappropriate for young children. Cook said her vote only reflected her opinion and not any desire to dictate what others can decide with regard to their own families.

The other six council members abstained, mostly without comment. Council Chairman Kevin Naquin was the only other elected official to speak on the subject, although he didnt exactly take a position. Naquin did echo some opponents of the event in questioning how the library administration and board could plan the event without engaging in public discussion.

+5 Lafayette library board president not planning to interfere with drag queen reading event The board that oversees Lafayettes public library system hasnt signaled its intentions concerning a Drag Queen Story Time for children tha

That amazes me, Naquin said, addressing the library director, Teresa Elberson. I would hope the library  would consider peoples thoughts.

Predicting how the event will unfold is difficult, assuming it moves forward. Its not clear if it will attract protesters or how the library plans to deal with them as well as media sure to cover the event. Elberson did not return a call or respond to an email message Wednesday.

Gene Mills, president of Louisiana Family Forum, said Wednesday his group will continue to seek corrective action from city-parish officials to stop the event but had not determined a course of action beyond that.

I have no interest in attending a sexually oriented event for 3-year-olds, Mills said when asked if his group would demonstrate at the event. I may have others who have eyes on that event just to make certain that it doesnt go south.

+6 Mayor wants Lafayette drag queen reading event for children at public library canceled Lafayette Mayor-President Joel Robideaux wants the public library to cancel Drag Queen Story Time, an event that stirred instant controversy o

Mills comment reflected the gap in thinking among supporters and opponents of the event. Supporters insisted it was not about sex or gender identity but about teaching tolerance to children.

Speakers on both sides refused to cede ground during more than six hours of public comment spread across two meetings, each accusing the other of pursuing a destructive agenda.

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Those preaching tolerance refused to accept that some people are uncomfortable with the event, while the event's opponents frequently claimed to have no prejudice before voicing anti-gay sentiments.

Linda Lanclos said at the council meeting her brother had died of AIDS, and therefore, no one can accuse me of being a homophobe. She then compared the librarys plans with allowing drug addicts to promote substance abuse.

I cant even imagine in my wildest dreams that an alcoholic or a drug addict might come and be allowed to come and promote their lifestyle, Lanclos said. Would you allow that? Of course, you wouldnt allow that. Yet you are allowing this dangerous lifestyle to be promoted.

Dylan Pontiff, who said he will be one of the drag queens reading to the children, complained of being called disgusting and then used that term to describe the behavior of the people in the audience who groaned disapprovingly at his comments.

In response, Theriot warned speakers to avoid name calling and to control yourselves, stay on topic, stay on point. He apologized to those in the audience who felt Pontiff had insulted them.

Theriot previously said the resolution being discussed was being limited to public dollars, drag queens and 3-year-olds.

He was silent after opponents such as Macklyn Guidroz and Bernard McLaughlin warned that Drag Queen Story Time could lead to pedophiles and jihadis organizing within library facilities.

Over the course of my lifetime, things that we have found to be morally reprehensible now become a matter of course in daily life, Guidroz said.

Timothy Miller, pastor of White Dove Church, struck a different note of criticism, arguing that the library was inappropriately aligning with one side in a culture war.

Im not pushing my religion on anybody. Im just asking that somebody elses belief not be pushed on me either, not in a tax-funded building, Miller said. Otherwise, lets have a Bible study at the library on Saturday. I cant do it because its not legal, and Im OK with that.

Matthew Humphrey spoke at the council meeting because, he said, he felt his story could illustrate the potential harmful consequences of failing to teach children to accept people who are different.

Humphrey said he grew up in a conservative religious household and that he knew he was different starting at 5 years old. Humphreys family taught him that homosexuality was wrong, he said, and he went to church nearly every day hoping that God would take away this different and wrong part of me.

Humphrey said he eventually accepted that he was unloved by God, by anyone really, and turned to drugs, alcohol and food to eliminate his misery. Nearing his 38th birthday, Humprey said he is only now learning to love himself.

The extent of my self destruction is something I hope that children that are different int his parish never face, Humphrey said.

Clarification: This article has been revised to clarify comments that Dylan Pontiff made at the council meeting.
Records show that the suspended band director at Denham Springs High School did not disclose on his job application that he quit a Texas job amid an investigation into his relationship with an underage female student and also didn't note the existence of a teaching credential bearing a sanction imposed after a superintendent told him he would have been fired for "misconduct and unprofessionalism."

But a lawyer for Vincent Fortado said Thursday the teacher was "100 percent forthcoming" while seeking the post from the Livingston Parish School Board. Baton Rouge lawyer Jill Craft said Fortado had nothing to hide and that no investigation revealed evidence of sexual conduct with any student.

"There has obviously been an awful lot of media coverage which has portrayed my client in a light as a sexual offender, which he absolutely is not. Not a single agency concluded that he was," Craft said.

Craft said the school principal found out about the Texas incident when he conducted a Google search of Fortado's name, and the band teacher discussed it with him fully in an interview. Applicants for jobs in Livingston Parish schools are asked to disclose by themselves whether they have left a job under questionable circumstances.

An attorney for the Livingston Parish School Board did not return an email seeking comment. School officials have repeatedly refused to answer questions on the matter, calling it a personnel matter.

Fortado has been under fire since a report earlier this month revealed Texas police in 2013 investigated his relationship with a student at Brazoswood High School. No charges were filed, but a minor student told police that he made inappropriate comments, including that he had "feelings for her," that seeing her in running clothes "makes (him) think things he shouldn't," and asking whether she had ever had sex.

+2 Denham Springs band director left job in Texas amid probe into relationship with underage student The new band director at Denham Springs High School left a job at a Texas school district five years ago while police investigated whether he had an inappropriate relationship with a student. Vincent Fortado was not charged with a crime. A police report said the band teacher admitted developing a close relationship with, and sending "flirty" text messages to, a high school student, and asked her to delete text messages, which she did. It wasn't clear whether Fortado quit or was fired.

The band teacher denied any inappropriate physical contact with the girl. He told investigators he sent "flirty" text messages but that he was only trying to help a troubled student.

Fortado was also the subject of a school investigation and its results were turned over to the Texas Education Agency, the state board that oversees schools there, according to public records.

In November 2013, that board issued Fortado an "inscribed reprimand" that was placed on his teaching license the next month. According to a copy of the consent decree provided by Craft, the state's investigation found he "exercised poor judgment in maintaining appropriate boundaries with students. Respondent overstepped these boundaries in an effort to help students with their personal problems."

"This was gone through over and over and over again, and at the end of the day, the conclusion was he did nothing more than try to help the students and, as a first-year teacher, probably didn't go about it the right way," Craft said.

The question of what Fortado told the school district is at the center of why the teacher is on unpaid administrative leave, according to Craft.

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An application packet for Fortado, obtained through a public records request, shows that Fortado answered "No" to a question about whether he was ever "discharged, failed to be rehired, been asked to resign a position, resigned to avoid termination or terminated from employment."

Fortado's personnel file from the Brazosport Independent School District shows he resigned April 8, 2013, citing "reasons of a personal nature." Then-Superintendent Karin Holacka wrote back in a response that Fortado would have been fired due to his "misconduct and unprofessionalism" relating to allegations of "inappropriate communications/inappropriate relationships with students."

"Prior to action by the Brazosport ISD Board of Trustees to terminate your contract with the school district, you elected to resign," Holacka wrote in her letter, which also prohibited him from returning to school property for a period of three years. Holacka declined an interview Thursday on what she referred to in an email as his "resignation in lieu of termination."

Fortado was also asked on the application about other state licenses he holds. He listed only a New Mexico license, and not the Texas license, which bears the reprimand.

When Fortado signed his Livingston Parish application, he acknowledged that "furnishing false information or omitting information in this application could disqualify me from consideration for employment or could lead to discharge from employment.

Craft maintains, however, that her client fully disclosed the situation to the school principal and an assistant principal during a phone interview when he was applying for the job and in emails and text messages surrounding the call.

She said the principal searched his name on Google after his first interview and came across a news item mentioning the investigation. She said Fortado then "fully" revealed information about the Texas investigations and the formal reprimand.

For the school district to take a position that it wants to impose disciplinary action based on the application is "flat wrong," she said.

"They 100 percent knew what happened in Texas at the time of hire," Craft said.

Craft said her client wants to return to his position as director of the Denham Springs High School Band and has received support from parents and students.
Without looking at the bids from two of the nations largest banks because of their corporate gun policies, the Louisiana Bond Commission approved Thursday hiring Wells Fargo and JP Morgan to underwrite financing for highway projects.

So how much extra will Louisiana taxpayers pay for the principled stand the Bond Commission took on the Second Amendment?

Louisiana commission blocks two banks from $600 million road plan because of gun sales policies The State Bond Commission barred two of the largest banks in the world from participating in efforts to fund some highway projects in Louisian

The full answer is complex. But the short answer is about $25,595 more in fees for a $90 million bond and $34,666 more in fees for a $125 million bond.

Lela Folse, the panels director, said that on orders of the Bond Commission, she and the graders of 11 proposals did not even look at the bids submitted by Citigroup Inc. and Bank of America Merrill Lynch.

A review of those disregarded bids shows that both bank sought less fees than the winning bidders.

It means when the treasurer and attorney general said there was no cost to state (for banning participation of the two banks), they either didnt know or were incorrect, said Matthew Block, the governors representative on the Bond Commission and an opponent to tying the contracts to politics.

Block said the differences are not that great between the fees of the winning bidders and the two banks whose proposals were not reviewed, Block said. That's because the work on GARVEE bonds is largely administrative. But come February, the state will be issuing more than $300 million worth of general obligation bonds where the costs are based on interest rates that taxpayers pay and the nations largest dealers in government financing instruments may not be able to participate again.

There are millions of dollars on the line, Block said after the meeting. Weve potentially tied one of our hands behind our back.

Will Louisiana taxpayers pay more after state blocks banks from $600 million road plan over gun policies? A special committee is grading bids from banks to handle $600 million worth of financing for highway improvements  but not from the nations 

Because Citigroup and Bank of America adopted policies that limited business relationships with sellers and manufacturers of firearms, a 7-6 Bond Commission excluded them from participating in financing a plan to widen Interstate 10 in Baton Rouge and improve access into the Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport, along with a project near Bossier City.

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"We have a very capable group of underwriters, and some of the biggest banks in America wanted to participate in this deal," Treasurer John Schroder tweeted after the Commission approved Wells Fargo and JP Morgan.

Twenty-six other states have used Grant Anticipation Revenue Vehicle, or GARVEE bonds, for road projects. This is Louisianas first time using the funding mechanism that raises up-front money for construction costs that is repaid over 12 years using annual federal transportation grants.

Wells Fargo & Co. and JP Morgan didn't have the lowest fees among the 11 bidders. But they scored one/two in categories such as experience, track record, marketing strategy, identification of specific transaction structuring issues and other criteria.

The 11 bids proposed fees from $126,360 to $293,400 for a $90 million bond that would fund construction on access directly from I-20 to Barksdale Air Force Base near Bossier City. Wells Fargo could do the work for $144,765. JP Morgan wants $155,070.

For a $125 million bond solicitation that would cover an I-10 interchange to serve the new terminal at the New Orleans airport, the fee bids ranged from $172,644 to $366,250. Wells Fargo wants $199,175 and JP Morgan wants $211,875.

Treasurer Schroder has said the final price will be negotiated.

According to its unread bid, Citigroup sought $129,475 for the work on the Barksdale access and $177,209 to handle the financing for the New Orleans airport access. Bank of America wanted $131,656 in fees for the $90 million bond and $178,904 for the $125 million bond.

The Bond Commission hasnt decided which bond  $90 million or $125 million  to sell first.

Another bond of about $360 million will be sold around June 2019 to cover adding another lane and upgrading ramps on I-10 between the Mississippi River bridge and the I-10/12 split in Baton Rouge.
Gov. John Bel Edwards said he does not know of any recent reports to state law enforcement regarding sex abuse in the Catholic church in Louisiana.

If such a complaint were to be lodged, "the state will do whatever it always does when it receives credible information that a crime has taken place -- it will be investigated," Edwards told reporters during a news conference Thursday.

A bombshell grand jury report that detailed the widespread abuse of more than 1,000 children over several decades in Pennsylvania has prompted other states to launch investigations into misconduct.

About one in four Louisiana residents is Catholic. The Advocate reported this week on abuse at Jesuit High School, where settlements were paid to abuse victims but were not publicly reported to the community. Earlier this month, The Advocate detailed abuse claims at another New Orleans school.

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Edwards, a Democrat who is Catholic, holds authority over the Louisiana State Police, the statewide law enforcement arm.

Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry, a Republican who is also Catholic, has said he does not plan to launch a statewide investigation into clergy abuse, as some of his counterparts in other states have done, because he doesn't believe he has the authority in state law. He has suggested that Edwards could direct State Police resources to the effort.

Landry also has said he's willing to help any local law enforcement agencies that looking into allegations of clergy misconduct  the extent to which he said he can legally address the growing national issue.

Attorneys general powers vary from state to state. The attorney general in Louisiana cannot legally convene a statewide grand jury, as Pennsylvania did.
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ExxonMobil's facility on Scenic Highway. Teachers and representatives from Together Baton Rouge have asked the East Baton Rouge Parish assessor to add several hundred million dollars worth of capital improvements to ExxonMobils property tax assessments, alleging the oil and gas giant is being under-assessed for its 2018 bill.
Lucky youre with AAMI, right?

Well not so much if you were one of the unlucky families who lost their home in the 2015 Christmas Day bushfires in the Victorian seaside hamlet of Wye River.

One of the countrys biggest insurance brands, Suncorps AAMI, has been accused at the banking royal commission of short-changing customers with policies that allow for the complete replacement of their home if it is damaged in a natural disaster.

The royal commission heard on Thursday that AAMI also sent renewal forms and charged insurance premiums to customers whose homes were destroyed and had already experienced lengthy delays in having their homes repaired.
Dubai's flagship airline Emirates is looking at taking over unprofitable neighbour Etihad, according to four people familiar with the matter, in a move that would create the world's biggest carrier by passenger traffic.

The talks, which are at a preliminary stage, would see Emirates acquire the main airline business of Abu Dhabi's Etihad, which would keep its maintenance arm, according to the people, who asked not to be named because the matter is confidential. The negotiations could yet fall through, they said.

Any deal would require the blessing of the rulers of the richest sheikhdoms in the United Arab Emirates. Credit:Bloomberg

Both airlines initially declined to comment, before later denying that any talks were underway. Were a transaction to go ahead the enlarged airline operation would be bigger than that of American Airlines, which has a market value of $US19.2 billion ($26.3 billion).

Any deal would require the blessing of the rulers of the richest sheikhdoms in the United Arab Emirates. For Abu Dhabi, which sits on 6 per cent of global oil reserves, it would advance a drive to overhaul state-controlled entities as it adapts to lower crude prices. The airlines have traditionally been arch rivals, with their hubs competing to attract the same transfer passengers making long-distance trips between Asia and the West.
That's it from me and the blog for this morning and this week. Thanks for following along.

Express will be back with you on Monday from 6am. Have a great weekend.
One of Australias most celebrated historians, who wrote on subjects as diverse as Rome, Ned Kelly and Australias first white Australians, has died aged 91.

John Molony was a former head of the Department of History at the Australian National University, where he began his academic career in the 1960s.

John Molony

Born in Melbourne in 1927, Professor Molony trained as a priest as a young man in Ballarat, and became one of the priesthoods rising stars in the 1940s, ordained at the Congregation of Propaganda Fide in Rome.

He completed his training in the Vatican, and undertook extensive post-graduate studies in Rome, where he was able to observe the realities of church life on poor communities.